Boston has always been a city that valued education, and few people did as much to improve our educational system as Horace Mann. He started from modest means, living out the one-liner in Good Will Hunting about getting a $150,000 education for $1.50 in late fees at the library. Mann served as a tutor and a librarian before being elected to the Massachusetts legislature. It was, however, as the Commonwealth’s first Secretary of Education that Horace Mann transformed education in Massachusetts by fundamentally reforming how our teachers are trained. His method would eventually be adopted by much of the country. You’re welcome!
Horace Mann, Education Innovator
- Massachusetts has had compulsory education since the Old Deluder Satan Act was passed in 1647.
- Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States, BA Hinton
- Lectures and Annual Reports on Education, Horace Mann
- A Few Thoughts for a Young Man, Horace Mann
Boston Book Club
The 100th anniversary of Boston’s Great Molasses Flood falls on Tuesday, January 15, making this the perfect time to feature Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo.
As a refresher, the Molasses Flood occurred on January 15, 1919 in the North End when a large molasses storage tank burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph, killing 21 and injuring 150. We discussed the event in detail in episode 73.
The next day, the Boston Post carried a graphic account. “The sight that greeted the first of the rescuers on the scene is almost indescribable in words. Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was… Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.”
Puleo’s Dark Tide is a must read for Bostonians. From the book’s cover:
Shortly after noon on January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed on Boston’s waterfront, disgorging its contents in a fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses that traveled at thirty-five miles per hour. When the tide receded, a section of the city’s North End had been transformed into a war zone. The Great Boston Molasses Flood claimed the lives of twenty-one people and scores of animals, injured more than a hundred, and caused widespread destruction.
There had been warnings. Isaac Gonzales, the “general man” who worked at the tank, had heard its rumblings and saw the molasses that leaked through its seams and streamed down its sides. He had even seen children use pails to scoop up the molasses that pooled at its base. His nightmares about the tank collapsing were vivid enough to send him running through the streets of Boston in the middle of the night during the summer of 1918 to make sure that the tank was still standing. But this wasn’t what Arthur P. Jell, U.S. Industrial Alcohol’s assistant treasurer, who had overseen the entire project—from leasing a site for the tank in a crowded Italian-American residential neighborhood to seeing that the tank was built in record time—wanted or needed to hear. USIA was distilling most of the molasses stored in the tank into industrial alcohol used to produce munitions during World War I, and Jell needed to meet ever-growing production quotas without interference.
For the first time, the story of the molasses flood is told here in its full historical context. Tracing the era from the tank’s construction in 1915 through the multiyear lawsuit that followed the disaster, and drawing from long-lost court documents, fire department records, and newspaper accounts, Stephen Puleo uses the gripping drama of the molasses flood to examine the sweeping changes brought about by World War I, Prohibition, the anarchist movement, immigration, and the expanding role of big business in society. It’s also a chronicle of the courage of ordinary people, from the firemen caught in an unimaginable catastrophe to Judge Hugh Ogden, the soldier-lawyer who presided over the lawsuit against USIA with heroic impartiality.
Upcoming Event
This week’s event is an author talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society on February 18. Washington Post Associate Editor Steve Luxenberg will be giving a lecture titled “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson & America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation.”
Steve Luxenberg presents a myth-shattering narrative of how a nation embraced “separation” and its pernicious consequences. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with “separate but equal,” created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the nineteenth century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the twenty-first.
The event begins at 6pm, with a reception at 5:30. Admission is $10 (no charge for MHS fellows and EBT card holders), and registration is required.