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The General Slocum
🕑 Added 2023-08-08 10:15:00 +0000 UTCWhile the sinking of the General Slocum never received as much attention as the sinking of the Titanic a few years later, it was nonetheless a huge event at the time. News of the tragedy reached around the world.
The classic novel Ulysses by James Joyce is set the day after the sinking, and there are several references to the disaster scattered throughout the book. Mentions of a “dreadful catastrophe in New York" are displayed on newsboards in some scenes, and elsewhere one character remarks:
“Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst.”
The story of the General Slocum is so relatively little-known that I wonder how many people reading Ulysses realise that it was a real event, and that the descriptions the characters give of it are pretty on the mark!
Comments
Fascinating Horror
Have added it to my playlist. I've really enjoyed This American Life in the past!
Elizabeth Finkler Hanasaki
I just listened to the “This American Life” podcast about the General Slocum, which was first broadcast soon after the September 11 attacks. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/194/before-and-after
Fascinating Horror
I had to look up this song, but I enjoyed listening when I found it. It references quite a few different maritime disasters
Eric Southard
"General Slocum's wheels of wood, caught ablaze but they never should. Floats of cork filled with weights instead, sent families off to the riverbed. They're down, downed and drowned, downed and drowned and never found." The Longest Johns
