General Slocum? for Her Passen- Wrenching Laments
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AMERICAN LUTHERAN HISTORY LUTHERANS IN PERIL ON THE SEA Rebekah Curtis he category “Lutheran immigrant maritime disasters” are better understood in relation to the sharper angles in Tis mercifully small, but the category is a limited method the past that built us, by both deep losses and providential of accounting. Three shipwrecks could mean some miss- heights. ing timber or a thousand lives, pathetic mishaps or tragic crimes, inspiration or smothering sadness, goofy hijinks or ho can speak of the General Slocum? For her passen- wrenching laments. In the category at hand, we find some Wgers were cut out of the land of the living in an of each. ineffable horror. The facts are easy to come by, having been Three shipwrecks stand out in the history of Lutheran of recent interest to The New Yorker, the History Channel, immigration to the United States: those of the Famous Dove Smithsonian, and The New York Times. On June 15, 1904, an in 1831, the Amalia in 1838, and the General Slocum in 1904. unknowable number of human beings boarded the General Formal historians have dealt with them in understand- Slocum for a Sunday School excursion hosted by St. Mark’s able proportion to their human impact. The loss of the Lutheran Church, a congregation of the General Council. General Slocum was catastrophic and occurred on the broad The boarders were mostly immigrants to the U.S. from Ger- stage of New York many who lived in City, so it received lower Manhattan’s wide coverage in Kleindeutschland the press. There neighborhood. was also a resur- They were also gence of attention mostly moms and after the events kids looking for of September 11, a day of dancing 2001—which took and fun on the East the General Slocum’s River, since it was a place as the great- Wednesday and the est human trag- dads were at work. edy to strike New The “unknowable” York—and at the Engraving of the General Slocum by Samuel Ward Stanton (1895) number of passen- hundredth anniver- gers is due to the sary of the disaster. The Amalia is of more specific interest: fact that the General Slocum was, like a crate of bananas, this smallest ship in the fleet of the Saxon migration sank packed by weight rather than unit. Children were reckoned in the Atlantic without witnesses and left a smaller group to tickets by twos or maybe more, depending on their size. of stricken families and neighbors. The Famous Dove also Not long into the river trip, the General Slocum ignited sank, but her passengers did not. This story of rescue and below decks and the fire grew out of control. By the official providence has been remembered on mostly a parochial or count, 1,021 people died by fire or water. The life jackets familial basis rather than a public one. were full of crumbling, rotten cork that soaked up water; Familiarity with each of these events is worthwhile in lifeboats that were supposed to be freely suspended from itself, but their spiritual heirs naturally have a greater inher- ropes were instead painted and wired to the wooden ship; itance to claim. While history is concerned with facts and untested canvas hoses blew out when water was pumped causes, we who share an affinity of belief have an interest in through them. People were trapped by the fire, trampled by how our predecessors responded to the history they lived. panicking neighbors, forced to choose between the fire and Additionally, the contours of contemporary Lutheranism the water, or drowned by desperate people falling or hang- LUTHERAN FORUM 15 still holds German-language services ship Amalia, whose end we can scarcely and events). doubt.”4 Günther published the Ama- But the impact went beyond lia’s manifest by heads of household. St. Mark’s. Business Insider recently He accounts for fifty-eight passengers, invoked the General Slocum to explain identified as cabinetmakers, carpen- “The crazy story of why there are ters, millers, farmers, shoemakers, almost no Germans in New York’s widows, teachers, and seminarians or East Village anymore.”2 This is prob- candidates. There were also fifteen ably overstating the case a bit. Klein- children. deutschland was indeed where many Walter O. Forster cites passengers German immigrants landed, but it’s of the Amalia as the migration’s great- not where most of them stayed once est numerical loss.5 Additionally: they became financially stable. Those The vessel had carried 3,000 who wanted to remain in New York thaler specie, the baggage of favored the Upper East Side, while some of the immigrants, who Zion-St. Mark’s Lutheran Church many others headed for the American were on other ships, and much on Manhattan’s Upper East Side lost a West. Nevertheless, it’s a rare con- of the most valuable equipment thousand parishioners on the General Slocum gregation, immigrant group, or local purchased by the Gesellschaft, community that makes a full recov- such as the entire musical equip- ing on them in the river. If there were ery from the loss of over a thousand ment, which alone was valued at ever a reason for wanting a divine people. 962 thaler. The insurance was sanction on prayers for the dead, the far from adequate to cover the General Slocum is it. f the General Slocum was mass carnage, financial loss sustained, and the St. Mark’s had a pastor who was the Amalia was a secret miscarriage: I conflicting claims of the Gesell- not above showing up for a Sunday an ordinary but happy expectation schaft, of individuals whose prop- School boat trip packed with ladies known as a loss only after the fact, ter- erty had been on the Amalia, and and babies. As a result, George C. F. rible to the injured but injurious only the heirs of those who had per- Haas felt his own body fed upon by to a few. The Saxons launched their ished in its sinking created a seri- the fire, watched his beloved parish- fifth ship pointed toward American ous problem.6 ioners consumed by it or the water shores with dutiful hope. Edward T. below, and lost his wife and daughter O’Donnell notes that “most Ger- Forster also notes that “most of the in the East River. His share in the hor- mans arrived with the two things that unnecessary supplies bought in Ger- ror and loss was equal to that endured distinguished them from the Irish: many, many of which were for the ben- by his congregation, and never was a capital and skills.”3 The manifest of pastor better and worse suited to shep- the Amalia reflects this, and thus the Manifest of the fifty-eight lost when the herd his flock in the days and years loss was both a human tragedy and a Amalia disappeared in a storm off the coast that followed. huge blow to the viability of the entire of France, printed in “The Destinies and The idea of a thousand people migrant group. Adventures of the Stephanists Who from a single parish showing up for The Saxon emigration of 1838– Emigrated from Saxony to America” a Sunday School event held on a 1839 was infamously characterized by Wednesday is well removed from the nearly as much “trainwreck” as ship- contemporary Lutheran experience. wreck, due to the failed episcopacy of By Lutheran standards, St. Mark’s was its leader, Martin Stephan. Gotthold a megachurch. Families at St. Mark’s Günther’s firsthand account of the were large until that tragic day, when emigration addresses both aspects of a host of men found themselves wid- the wreckage in evocative detail. He owed and bereft of some or all of their concludes his bitter history by describ- children. “To see one streamer [of ing the defrauded immigrants living crape, the symbol of mourning] was under trees, incapable of perform- uncommon; on most of the houses ing the necessary work for settlement. appeared four or five.”1 The gutted Finally, he reports a “sad duty to congregation eventually joined Zion inform the reader of the worst tragedy Lutheran Church on the Upper East of this entire disasterous [sic] enter- Side (which parish, Zion-St. Mark’s, prise. It is the unfortunate fate of the 16 WINTER 2016 efit of ‘the church,’ had been loaded on the Amalia, and these became a total loss.”7 The impact of these losses was a tremendous tax on morale, skill, physical assets, and public worship for the founders of the Missouri Synod. The Saxons made it, even after the devastation of losing their dear ones and otherwise dear things on the Amalia. Günther wrote out of largely righteous anger, especially large and righteous because his sister Louise was both the material and the effi- cient cause of Stephan’s ousting. But this anger also blinded him to the pain felt by his story’s villains, the pastors. C. F. W. Walther, in whom doctrine and emotion showed the same spi- ritual rigor, wrote in an oft-quoted let- ter to his brother Otto Herman that he felt himself “a murderer of those The Johann Georg, the ship that carried C. F. W. Walther to America, buried at sea.”8 O. H. Walther’s own similar to the ill-fated Amalia, as painted by George H. Hilmer (1937) preoccupation with the tragedy came out in a poem, presented as a dialogue websites. Not a story of lost humanity, the emigrants were helped to shore by between the grieving and the Lord. it has remained the story of a family, people who saw them from the beach.