We have been thinking about disasters, about Hurricane Helene and North Carolina, about Milton and Florida. It sent me back to the great classic on American disaster, “The Johnstown Flood” by David McCullough, published in 1968. I hadn’t remembered it contains information pertinent to the current moment.
Johnstown, Pa., in the western part of the state and the heart of the Allegheny Mountains, was a growing, thriving steel-mill and factory town in 1889, one of a string of such towns in a deep valley that McCullough likened to “an enormous hole in the Alleghenies.” The Cambria Iron Co. had giant converters going there, making steel for rails and plowshares. The place was alive.
Twenty-three thousand people lived in the valley, 15,000 of them in Johnstown, of all types, sorts and classes—doctors and lawyers, laborers and factory workers, small-business men and steel executives. There was just about every ethnicity too—Italians, Poles, Hungarians and Russians, though the majority of the population were Irish, Scots-Irish, German and Welsh. There were blacks—Johnstown had been a stop on the Underground Railroad—and Jewish merchants.
The mood of the town was the mood of the country, aspirational. There was a busy library and an opera house, and people worked hard, “not only because that was how life was then, but because people had the feeling they were getting somewhere. The country seemed hell bent for a glorious new age.”
Johnstown was built at the confluence of two rivers. Above the town was a reservoir, whose formal name was Lake Conemaugh but which everyone called the South Fork Dam. There had long been worries about that dam. It was controlled by a powerful trust whose leaders hadn’t always been interested in warnings from townspeople that it wasn’t sturdy enough or maintained. The lake was about 2 miles long, a mile wide, and in some places 10 feet deep. It was a fearsome body of water to have up there on a mountain over a town.
There had been heavy rains through the spring of 1889, and on Memorial Day more storms came in. The rivers ran high. The lake rose. On Friday the dam was breached. Then its center collapsed, and the lake fell down into the valley, and Johnstown was drowned.
Within days, McCullough writes, the Johnstown flood was the greatest story since the death of Lincoln. Newspaper reporters from Pittsburgh, New York and Philadelphia struggled to the scene, taking trains until the tracks washed out, then horses and mules, and finally slogging through seas of mud.
One by one they got there and saw: devastation.
The heart of the town was empty spaces, “an unbroken swath of destruction.” Landmarks were gone. Huge trees, whole houses, dead livestock and barns had been plunged into a huge wall of water. When the water came into sight, an eyewitness said, “It just seemed like a mountain coming.” Most of the people of Johnstown never saw it coming, “they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing as it rushed on them.” It was a deep, steady rumble, a roar like thunder, like the rush of an oncoming train.
The drowning of the city took about 10 minutes. Well over 2,000 were killed, but hundreds unaccounted for would never be found. The flood killed just about 1 person in 10 in the valley, 1 in 9 in Johnstown.
Word of what had happened electrified the nation and ignited the biggest humanitarian response America had ever seen. Within days food, water, clothing and blankets poured in. Even Clara Barton came with her newly organized group, the Red Cross. It was their first real disaster. Barton vowed, as she threw up hospital tents, to be “the last to leave the field.” She stayed five months, never left once, and when she departed the people of Johnstown cheered with tears in their eyes and gave her a golden locket. Johnstown made the Red Cross.
Newsmen spread other stories, too. Within days of the flood came reports that bands of “Hunkies”—local Hungarian laborers—were robbing, raping and pillaging. It wasn’t true but caused plenty of trouble, and it turned out the rumors were started by a local lawyer who’d lost his wife and children and gone off his head.
There were true tales of heroism. Seventeen-year-old Bill Heppenstall was at the water’s edge when a small house in the swift current lodged, for a moment, in a clump of trees. He heard a baby crying, but the house was too far to reach. He got a bell cord from a railcar, tied it around his waist, swam to the house, and came back with the child. Witnesses cheered. He’d seen a mother in the house and went back for her too, and as they reached shore together the house was torn from the trees and spun madly downstream.
Also, unbelievably, survivors organized almost immediately. They formed citizen committees to establish morgues, improvise housing, see to unclaimed children. They appointed policemen, who cut tin stars from tomato cans found in the wreckage.
The inventive rigged up rope bridges; the brave crossed them to find survivors.
What are our thoughts from this?
In great disasters rumors spread quick as fire. When you’re in one you must take this into account.
When you’ve got a feeling about something, when your mind keeps going to it, unbidden—I don’t trust that dam—listen to it, even if you don’t understand it. Act on it. Premonitions have to be followed by action or they’re just something that keeps you up at night.
We have always been a clever people but in the past we were clever not only with our heads but our hands. We made things, knew how to work wood and metal, and in a physical crisis we knew how to rig up the rope ladder and build a raft, quickly. When we lost the mills and factories we lost jobs, yes, but we also saw the lessening of a capability, a broad ability to handle the physical world when that world turns dark. We need to pay more attention to this.
History reminds us: America is and always has been a freak show. We should accept this in ourselves more, that it is in our nature as a people. When the floodwaters receded and camp towns sprang up, the region’s prostitutes came in, followed by the ladies of the Christian Temperance Union. We are cantankerous. When strangers who had survived overnight in an attic saw that a stone church next door had broken the wall of water, someone said, “The Methodist church saved us.” Within seconds a voice shot out: “Only the Catholic Church can save!”
We did something nobody ever tried before, to fill a continent with people from every country in the world, and ask them to come, build something, get along, and invent an arrangement of rules and rights by which they could operate together. It produced a dazzling, strange and gifted nation, a freak show, and a fabulous one.
To read our history is to say, “We got through that.”
We’ve got through a lot. Whatever’s coming, immediately and further out, we’ll likely get through that, too.