Stephen Puleo > Quotes

“Wobblies favored a Socialist form of government while anarchists believed in no government—their”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“There is only one way to deal with anarchy and that is to crush it, not with a slap on the wrist, but a broad-axe on the neck.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“pay raise had brought him up to $1,400 per year,”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“By developing new, often revolutionary products, by moving the country forward, Big Business believed it was doing more than making money; it was doing something virtuous. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple—the man who works there worships there,” Calvin Coolidge said.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“molasses is something over 26 million pounds … thirteen thousand tons. One of our big Mogul locomotive engines weighs about a hundred tons. So that this steel reservoir contained on the day of the accident a weight of molasses equal to 130 hundred-ton locomotive engines … or thirteen thousand Ford automobiles, which weigh about a ton each.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“the weight of the molasses in the tank. “When we speak of 2.3 million gallons of molasses, it is impossible for the mind to work readily to conceive what that means,” he said, “and so I want to just use one or two illustrations to show the weight of molasses in that reservoir at the time this thing occurred. Two million, three-hundred”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“The event had been organized by the International Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies,” who had engaged in protests across America, sweeping eastward from the Rocky Mountain states,”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“their goals was to organize workers into one giant union that would one day topple capitalism, a mission that suited anarchists just fine. The”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“When we talk about property, State, masters, government, laws, courts, and police, we say only that we don’t want any of them.” William”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“wrote,”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“This dark-brown viscous liquid, a by-product in the processing of sugar cane, played a major role in some of the biggest events in American history: in the colonial discontent that led directly to the Revolution; in the introduction of slavery to the New World and, thus, the Civil War; in the growth of rum and liquor distilleries throughout the United States, and the resulting Prohibition movement; and in ensuring the superiority of Allied firepower that would eventually lead to victory in the First World War. It all started in Boston and New England.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“America built roads, schools, and factories. Electrification of those factories and modern assembly-line methods created a boom in manufacturing production. Capital became plentiful as banks loosened the reins on credit to keep up with the growth. The stock market shot up. New money in the marketplace, coupled with a white-hot economy, spurred innovation and consumer spending. Wages of working Americans grew, and the onset of installment buying allowed them to purchase more for their families. The 1920s marked a consumer goods revolution—electric toasters, irons, phonographs, radios, plumbing fixtures, and automobiles.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“Historian Francis Russell noted that inadequate working conditions and rising prices both frightened and galvanized workers. “Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike,” he said. “To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 percent, clothes, 114 percent. For the average American family, the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes, from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“History is to record us,” he warned his colleagues at the time. “Is it to record that when the destruction of the Union was imminent … we stood quarreling?”
― Stephen Puleo, Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission

“forty cents an hour, and the $4 he earned for today’s long labor seemed especially meager. Worse, the railroad had already announced it would be cutting back the shifts to eight hours, meaning Giuseppe’s”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“Authority meant nothing to these people, White thought, nor did the spirit of the season. If they were capable of sneaking a bomb into a police station and exploding the device during the holiest season of the year, they were capable of most anything. Now”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“Laws are cheap of passage, costly of enforcement. They do not execute themselves.”
― Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919