New York, NY —

A century ago today, around 10 am, the steamship General Slocum caught fire in the East River and ran aground one of the small islands off Manhattan, killing one-thousand-twenty-one people. Now largely forgotten, it was the city's deadliest disaster, prior to September 11th. WNYC's Fred Mogul looks at the General Slocum's place in New York's cultural and collective memory.

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FM: In the opening scene of Manhattan Melodrama, German immigrants from a Lower East Side Lutheran church revel on board the General Slocum, until a passenger bursts from below shouting, "Fire!" Within minutes, the steamship is engulfed in flames. People are trampled, asphyxiated and drowned. Rescuers have little luck reaching survivors, and volunteers scour the shoreline for bodies. But if movie buffs remember the 1934 Clark Gable film at all, it's not because it contains the only General Slocum scene in cinematic history - it's because the gangster John Dillinger went to see the movie at a Chicago theater, and was shot outside afterwards by the Feds. The General Slocum story was always overtaken by other events, says Edward O'Donnell, author of Ship Ablaze.

EO: I think that pretty much everyone who was touched by the tragedy would have agreed that no one would ever forget this terrible, terrible event, because of the scale of the suffering and the number of deaths and so on. But amazingly, it was a tragedy that was pretty much forgotten by the public within a decade of its occurrence.

Composer Charles Ives was so moved by the shipwreck he sat down and wrote an orchestral piece about it - probably one of the few classical works ever, devoted to a single, brief, historic event. Ives, however, never finished the musical arrangement. The score was completed only in 1970, and only one professional recording seems to have been made, a live 1983 New England Conservatory concert. James Sinclair conducts the New England Symphony and is director of the Charles Ives Society.

JS: It was a sad affair. It made him feel better about going through the exercise of writing the piece - an artist's way of coping. It's an experiment...to get an explosion in, to set a scene that would picture various activity going on on the deck and that kind of thing. It's not a profile piece that is in and of itself entertaining. And what about General Slocum would really be called entertainment?

FM: James Joyce's epic Ulysses takes place entirely on June 16, 1904. In one scene, a character who has read the morning paper muses about the previous day's catastrophe.

JC: Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible. Terrible. A thousand casualties. And heart rending 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 fire house all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that .

Columbia University English Professor Michael Seidel says Joyce sprinkles hundreds of subtle nautical references throughout Ulysses -- to subliminally evoke Homer's Odyssey, and the idea of the dangerous, heroic voyage home.

MS: These people did not return home safe. The greatest risk in a navigational epic is shipwreck, and this gives Joyce a chance to put in a devastating shipwreck that happened in real-life time. The idea of a massive shipwreck like the General Slocum is just too easily applicable to a navigational disaster epic like the Odyssey for Joyce to make anything more of it than a casual reference I mean, he's not gonna say, Here's the Odyssey, here's my Ulysses, here's a point of comparison.' He likes to slip these things in naturally.

FM: And that's pretty much it. A paragraph in a fabulous but famously difficult novel; an obscure, dissonant classical piece, almost never performed or recorded; an opening scene in a forgotten movie. Lots of disasters have done better than that - and that's not even getting into the Titanic. So would the General Slocum fire and its victims be more deeply etched into our historical memory, if they just had a really impressive book, movie or tune - like Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning, well, Wasn't that a mighty storm ? Again, historian Edward O'Donnell.

EO: Had there been a popular song, or a drama, maybe something staged on Broadway that then traveled around the country -- something to have immortalized it a little bit more, or, as in the case of the Titanic, there had been a few more famous people involved, or perhaps a more sensational trial that involved not a nameless, faceless owner of a steamboat company, but an industrial titan of some sort - that might have given it more staying power.

FM: In one sense, it was bad luck that the General Slocum didn't get the right song-writer or film-maker. Then again, it didn't attract them either. Even with its horrible scale, the disaster lacked some mythic, melodramatic ingredients to capture and keep the imagination.

EO: The cultural aftermath of the Slocum does not compare to the Titanic or the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire It just doesn't have that power. Most historical events, even of great magnitude are forgotten. It's a way societies have of dealing with tragedies is in some ways to forget it and move on.

FM: Especially, O'Donnell says, the progress-obsessed, future-driven society of New York.

Ship Ablaze: www.general-slocum.com.