An Alton Disaster Brings Out a Young Reporter’s Talents
One [January 21, 1893] afternoon [Theodore Dreiser] was idling at the Globe-Democrat office when a man burst in and told him excitedly that a passenger train had run through an open switch and crashed into some tanker cars filled with oil on a spur track three miles from Alton, Illinois. None of the editors were in at the time, so Theodore hurried to the scene on his own initiative, planning to telegraph his copy from the station.
Shortly after he arrived there was a tremendous explosion. Flames burning around the tanks had caused two unruptured tanks to heat up, turning them into huge bombs which hurled a fiendish shrapnel – jagged chunks of white-hot metal and scalding goblets of oil – onto the crowd of bystanders: “Many forms were instantly transformed into blazing, screaming, running, rolling bodies, crying loudly for mercy and aid. These tortured souls threw themselves to the ground and rolled about on the earth. They threw their burning hands to tortured, flame-lit faces…They clawed and bit the earth, and then, with an agonizing gasp, sunk, faint and dying, into a deadly stillness.”
Goyaesque scenes of horror passed before his eyes; he tore off his coat and tried to beat out the flames on one shrieking human torch, to no avail.
All the while his mind was recording the carnage, thinking how to describe it. When a train bringing doctors and nurses arrived from Alton, he hurried to the depot where the dead and dying were taken. He watched physicians bend briefly over the charred figures on the litters. Most of them were beyond help. He automatically recorded the name of each doctor and other details. An “accommodation” (local) train was commandeered and the victims were placed aboard. Theodore came along and rode to Alton, where waiting wagons carried the sufferers to St. Joseph’s Hospital. He saw dirty, oil-soaked rags being cut away from bodies, laying bare scorched skin, swollen lips and noses, and “eyes that were either burned out or were flame-eaten and encrusted with blood and dust.”
A throng of relatives wandered about vainly seeking a recognizable face among the seared masks, whispering comforting words in their ears when they found a loved one. A group of parents, whose children had gone to the site of the wreck, milled in the hall asking for information. Theodore decided to act. He went from stretcher to stretcher, asking the occupant his or her name and address, telling those who protested, “Someone will want to know about you.”
“To those inquiring the list was read, and as the last name was spoken, and ‘that’s all’ ejaculated a score of sighs were heard, for many an anxious heart knew that a loved one was not in the list.”
Later in the afternoon a train arrived bearing more victims. Some begged the doctors to kill them. “I’m blind,” moaned one. “Oh, to be without eyes, to have the light shut out forever, that is too much. I want to die! I want to die!” Then, “a loving mother bowed low over the moaning form and buried her tear-stained face and misery-convulsed form in the clothing that shielded her son.”
By then Dick Wood had arrived to sketch the scene, but he was in a state of shock and kept muttering, “It’s hell, I tell you.” Theodore sent him to gather additional details and returned to the explosion site to interview eyewitnesses, who told of narrow escapes or of futility trying to assist agonized victims. A man aiding one human torch cut away the man’s clothes; in pulling off the sleeve of his coat, the skin of the victim’s hand stuck to it and came off like a glove. “I tried …to console him in his awful plight…He recognized my voice, and, with his burned and sightless eyes turned toward me, he managed to inform me that he was my old friend, James Murray.”
Finally, the city desk ordered Theodore to return and write up his story. When he arrived at the newsroom, reporters who had already read his brief telegraphed dispatches were talking excitedly. He went straight to his desk; as he finished each page, a boy would snatch it away and run to the copy desk. A knot of reporters gathered around him. At last it was done, and the next day’s front-page headlines proclaimed:
The next day Theodore went out again to compile further grisly details and to cover the coroner’s investigation, which was in progress. The two accounts add up to a remarkable job of reporting – long, vivid, gruesome (in the style of the times), yet ballasted with facts. Such was Theodore’s lack of confidence in himself, however, that in the aftermath he was seized by a fear that he had been wrong to chase after the story without getting permission. Mitchell (his boss in the city room), who disliked him, might think he had a swelled head; perhaps he would be fired. He was so late returning from his second trip that he missed his daily assignment, so when Mitchell told him that McCullagh wanted to see him right away, his heart sank.
“You called for me, Mr. McCullagh?” Theodore asked timidly.
“Mmm, yuss, yuss!” the editor replied, not looking at him. “I wanted to say that I liked that story you wrote, very much indeed. A fine piece of work, a fine piece of work!” He reached into his pocket, extracted a thick roll, and peeled off a twenty dollar bill. “I like to recognize a good piece of work when I see it. I have raised your salary five dollars, and I would like to give you this.”
Theodore took the bill, muttered his thanks, and stumbled out the door a reporter.
(From Theodore Dreiser – At the Gates of the City Volume 1 by Robert Lingeman, Putnam, 1986)
