What I Am Reading: "When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle Disaster and Its Deadly Wake" by Brian Hicks

I read a book partially about the Hindenburg within my first few months in New Jersey, so it is fitting perhaps that the last book to check off my New Jersey reading list is about the state’s other famous transportation disaster: the burning of the ocean liner Morro Castle in 1934.

The Morro Castle is a bit of an also-ran when it comes to doomed ocean liner, for two reasons: it was a cruise ship to Cuba, not a transatlantic behemoth; and the disaster was a fire, not a sinking, thus leaving behind only a temporary shipwreck on a beach before that was before long towed away for scrap. However, it is an important piece of New Jersey history, of “Jerseyana” perhaps: while still smoldering, the ship snapped its tow cables and washed up at Asbury Park, whereupon the storied beach town immediately set about commercializing the attraction that had arrived just at the close of the normal summer season, providing some tasteless, even ghoulish rubbernecking just when Depression-hit amusement merchants needed it. It is famous imagery, and the author, a journalist, embarked upon this book after viewing one of the old photographs.

Only half of this book is about the fire, though. After the disaster, the story turns into a true crime tale. Officially, the reason for the fire that consumed the Morro Castle is unknown, but in the opinions of this author (and many others) the culprit was radio chief George White Rogers. There is no direct evidence of this, but plenty of circumstantial evidence; a recurring theme of Rogers’ criminal career.

The Morro Castle was built in 1930 and owned by the Ward Line; it was built largely with government money and sailed to Cuba on a federal mail contract. It was a smaller liner than the more famous transatlantic ships of the generation prior, only 480 feet long and 11,520 gross registered tons to, for example, the R.M.S. Mauretania’s 790 feet and almost 32,000 gross registered tons; or the 936 feet and 49,746 gross registered tons of the more contemporary transatlantic liner Europa. Most of the Ward Line’s profit came from the mail contract and the cargo hauls. Passengers were accommodated as a bonus, but the cruises in the depths of the Depression kept a robust schedule of amusements on offer in order to remain competitive.

The summer season of 1934 was odd, foreboding in retrospect. The garrulous, personable Captain Robert Willmott became moodier, withdrawn, and paranoid as his health declined. There was a fire in the hold. Odd messages and insinuations of wrongdoing (or blackmail alleging it) led to the resignation of Stanley Ferson, the chief radio operator. Havana was becoming more violent as various revolutions and reactions cycled into power. One of the assistant radio operators, George Alagna, was one of the main malcontents (or “whiners,” according to some) on a floating powder keg of labor grievances, relating to low pay, overwork, and poor treatment. He was not fired, even after he used communications union rules to delay the ship’s precise departure. He was not promoted either, though, and the other junior radio operator, George Rogers, became the new chief upon Ferson’s resignation.

On the ship’s final voyage in September, the Captain scarcely appeared to passengers and seemed withdrawn to his loyal crew. On the final night of the journey, after he felt too ill to appear at the Captain’s Ball, he was found dead in his room. He had complained of heart troubles during the voyage, and this was the final of several apparent heart attacks.

The ship was thus under the command of Chief Officer William Warms, an old salt with a long record of experience who had never quite managed to show the leadership potential to be placed in command; though Chief Engineer Eban Abbot had higher seniority. It was the early hours of the morning. The Morro Castle was trying to outrun a tropical storm coming behind it from the south and make it into New York before that storm merged with a nor’easter meeting it from the north. Warms, who had been up straight for an entire day, pushed the ship ahead at 20 knots into a 20-knot wind. At that point, a passenger, milling about after the last parties had broken up, alerted a crew member to a fire in a locker in the Writing Room.

The situation quickly passed the point of no return. The fire, which the crewman who first viewed it analyzed as chemical in origin, burned quickly through the wooden Writing Room and spread athwart the entire ship. Smoke was spotted by the crew on the bridge (coming out of one of the ship’s vents) but information was relayed slowly and confusingly, and the bridge crew was initially unaware of the fire’s extent. The ship’s interior was largely built of wood, and the ship was cooled by extensive ventilation ducts meant to cycle cool sea air. Fueled by these, the fire spread quickly.

In less than an hour, the portside lifeboats had been cut off by the flames. The crew, having been sufficiently alerted and having found no success in battling the blaze, set about awakening the passengers. Many of them were pushed or organically gravitated toward the stern; here they had been cut off from the starboard life boats, as these were only accessible from the upper A and B decks, and the stairwells were quickly rendered impassible.

The bridge was paralyzed with indecision. Only the captain could order a distress signal, but when Alagna went through the smoke several times to urge this, it is possible that Warms did not understand who he was or what he was suggesting. Other ships clearly saw the fire and discussed it over the wireless, though Rogers maintained radio silence. Eventually, though, a bit after 3 AM, the order was given for a distress call, and Warms gave up on reaching New York and ordered the ship turned toward shore to reduce the airflow over the fire and provide for a safer evacuation.

That evacuation, however, never came. The few lifeboats that did launch carried mostly crew members, including Chief Engineer Abbot, who had ordered his engine room crew to shut down operations in the face of the smoke (it was later thought that another fire may have come to life in the cargo area belowdecks). As lifeboats were either launched by these few crewmen or consumed by fire, passengers decided in increasing numbers to jump. Some jumped before the engines were turned off (which also, of course, killed steering), and were likely killed by the propellers. Others jumped and were knocked unconscious and drowned by the impact from their cork life vests. Eventually, a few other ships rallied and put their lifeboats into the dangerous water, but it was difficult to find or to rescue people.

Almost everyone eventually had to jump, mostly the passengers off the stern. The bridge crew, joined by Alagna and Rogers, retreated to the forecastle, where they signaled rescuers including a Coast Guard cutter. Rogers was acting strangely: seemingly overcome by smoke in the radio room, he recovered enough to dash around performing dubious heroics; the best example is how he made a show of preparing to jump into the water to save an unconscious passenger, only to be beat to the punch when another crewman went in first. The bridge crew made mistakes even at this point, neglecting to signal a Coast Guard rescue ship that people were in the water as they maneuvered over to the windward side for towing; the horrified Coast Guard captain later realized that he could have had his lifeboats in the water looking for survivors two hours earlier than he did.

The tides took many onto the beach, dead and alive. The lifeboats of the larger ships pulled people from the water, as did volunteers from the shore in fishing boats (with the latter accounting for an outsized share). The state’s Governor, A. Harry Moore, was nearby when the news came over and commandeered a plane to help spot survivors; this may have been grandstanding, but he did lead some rescue ships to people in the water. The ship itself was off Sea Girt, but the survivors and wreckage were spread across miles of coastline that morning. Warms, as Acting Captain, was the last man off the ship, after the bridge crew had to ignominiously hack through the anchor chain so that the ship could be towed by the tugboats and Coast Guard.

The Titanic, though with tales of desperation abovedeck and below, was a famously orderly shipwreck until the final moments. The Lusitania was chaos, but only eighteen minutes’ worth before one was either in the water or under it. It is writing like this, or like William Langewiesche on the M.S. Estonia, that reminds us how gruesome shipwrecks can be; when one can survive, in theory, but not without a lot of luck. A jump, a storm, a current. Of the 549 people aboard, 137 died in the fire or in the water.

Later that morning, the ship, as it was being towed to New York, broke its cables and came ashore at Asbury Park, right on the beach. As noted, the local tourist economy was quick to capitalize. The ship would remain there for eight months, considered as a permanent exhibit before the town eventually got tired of it. Any good American Studies topic like this produces ephemera, and postcards, photographs, toys, and the like ended up all over the country. Hopefully a case study somewhere in disaster tourism.

The Ward Line immediately went into CYA mode, and attempted to sequester the crew and passengers in its large NYC office building; though many had already spoken to the press about the ship’s lax safety protocols and the crew’s callousness. There was an internal Ward Line investigation, an insurance investigation, a Commerce Department investigation (overseen by J. Edgard Hoover’s brother Dickerson), and an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office. Suspicion initially fell on Alagna, stoked perhaps by some of Rogers’ testimony and some leaks by the Ward Line about the suspicion he was held in; but Alagna managed a good hearing during his own testimony and assuaged official concerns, even in the face of Dickerson Hoover’s brother’s conspiratorial worries about Communists. Within the next few years, the bridge officers were stripped of their licenses by the Coast Guard and were convicted in a criminal trial in 1936, though they were later acquitted and later worked in other minor nautical and naval capacities. Alagna was blacklisted, and struggled through alcoholism and suicide attempts until the 1990s.

The most interesting follow-up, though, is that on George Rogers. For his alleged tireless work sending distress calls before being overcome by smoke, he was lauded in the press as a hero of the disaster. He was able to capitalize at least with a limited engagement telling the story before Broadway audiences as the opener to another show, among other ways. Rogers was a very competent, even brilliant, radio technician, though (unbeknownst to many) he had a history of business failings, petty crime, and academic disciplinary violations behind him. Others in the radio community in Bayonne, where he lived and set up his new business, thought him a teller of tall tales, but he managed to flip one of these critics: Vincent J. Doyle. This man worked for the police department in the city and was well-respected for having arranged the country’s first two-way law enforcement radio system (i.e. put radios in squad cars). Doyle struck up a close relationship with Rogers, and brought the local radio hero on board as his number-two man in the police department’s radio operations. They swapped gadgets and caught fish for each other, among other wholesome ‘30s kinds of things. Doyle, however, took note of occasions when Rogers would act weird, or unstable, or would fly into a rage over minor slights or inconveniences. Once, Rogers asserted to Doyle that the Morro Castle fire was caused by a bomb and detailed the precise workings of that bomb, and when Doyle pressed he seemingly admitted to having set the bomb.

One day not long after that, Rogers was around Doyle’s house as various other cops came and went on their business. He pointed out that someone had left a package for Doyle. He asked about the package. He eventually got up and retrieved the package, and handed it to Doyle. Inside was a rod-shaped contraption and a note that someone hoped Doyle, a techie-about-town, could look at this “fish tank heater” for them. Rogers encouraged him to plug it in, and left the room as he did. The “fish tank heater” exploded, blowing off several of Doyle’s fingers and breaking his leg. He wasn’t expected to survive, initially, but pulled through.

Rogers hadn’t covered his tracks very well, and Doyle told investigators from his not-quite-deathbed how Rogers had been acting before the explosion. He took the note and some other components and hid them around Doyle’s room before the other officers shooed him out. The long story short is that, despite no smoking gun tying him to the bomb’s construction, Rogers was the obvious suspect who stood to gain in rank and pay in Doyle’s absence, who had the technical know-how, and who had access to similar, missing parts as those used in the bomb’s construction. Doyle was convicted.

This was quite the turnaround for the hero of the Morro Castle. People turned their thoughts to the ship fire a few years earlier. The Commerce Department had not declared a cause of the fire; the FBI investigation, though moribund, was still closed. J. Edgar, seeking publicity even in the absence of Communist agitators, inquired with the U.S. Attorney about investigating Rogers’ possible involvement. The U.S. Attorney declined, however; Rogers was already in jail anyway.

He did not stay there forever. After war was declared in 1941, New Jersey offered parole to technical specialists who were first-time offenders and would be willing to volunteer for the war effort. Rogers was one of the couple dozen who left jail as a result of this program, and served briefly and with no distinction (and possibly with some strife) in the merchant marine on a Liberty Ship in the Pacific. After that, he found work in a factory in New Jersey, and the owners eventually took a chance on him and made him a supervisor. Here he engaged in a cringeworthy pursuit of a much younger woman, and reacted violently enough to scare her off when he found out she was engaged. Later, he himself was let go after a water cooler in the office was found to be poisoned, and he was acting strangely enough and knew enough about it to be the only reasonable culprit, despite a lack of direct evidence. A large proportion of the factory’s workers had become sick as a result of this incident.

In the early ‘50s, Rogers was back in Bayonne, failing to make a living as a radio technician. He had no storefront, but worked out of his home and van. He was, understandably, not well-regarded in town; but his one friend was an older technical enthusiast who loaned him an increasing total of cash to buy technical parts for the two of them to play with or sell, which would then be “held up” in shipping and necessitate endless, fruitless wrangling by Rogers to finally acquire. It had gotten to the point where the friend, William Hummell, was owed almost eight thousand dollars (or perhaps more) and wanted out of Bayonne to retire to Florida. That was when he disappeared.

Rogers admitted he had seen him on the last day that anyone else had, and he mentioned Hummell’s disappearance long before it had been confirmed by anyone else. When the body of Hummell and his daughter were discovered, Rogers had not needed to be told that they were dead, despite it not being general knowledge yet. Having effectively told on himself yet again, he was arrested. Again, there wasn’t any direct evidence of Rogers’ perpetration of the grisly murder, but there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence. He was not executed, but was sentenced to life in prison after a bench trial. He died there within a few years, having teased but never confirmed further involvement in the Morro Castle disaster.

The thesis of the book, obviously, is that Rogers did it, and moreover that Rogers was a textbook psychopath. Other possibilities than arson are mentioned as having been proposed at the time, but are not explored further. It is an interesting historical case, though, and this prosecution seems to turn up plenty of circumstantial evidence of its own. Hicks was the first to access the considerable FBI file on the Morro Castle and on Rogers detailing the investigators’ suspicions at the time and their background work on Rogers. The harrowing details of the shipwreck itself were provided by Hicks’ interviews with one of the last surviving crewmen, Thomas Torreson, Jr., a 17-year old purser (clerk, essentially) on the ship that summer who was the son of one of the Ward Line’s executives; and who came to shore in a life jacket, carrying a young boy part of the way until the latter’s death. Torreson spent the rest of his life defending the crew against charges of malfeasance and incompetence, despite high-profile counterexamples such as the Chief Engineer, Abbot, who had left the ship in an underloaded lifeboat early in the crisis. Hicks also had the use of Doyle’s unpublished book on Rogers, and was the first to print Doyle’s notes on Rogers’ confession to him.

The book is an interesting and, at first blush, fairly persuasive glimpse into a historical mystery, and an event that was culturally important in its day but has since faded from memory somewhat. Hicks was fortunate enough to catch the story while it was still living history, and renders the Morro Castle fire as, really, one of the most interesting maritime disasters of all.