[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to a somber special post on our current crops of horrific wildfires.]
On a justifiably
famous context for the airship disaster, and a more ambiguous but equally
compelling one.
Eighty years
ago, the German
passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire while docking in Manchester
Township, New Jersey, a horrific, tragic accident that produced thirty-six
fatalities among passengers and crew. Much like the Titanic a couple decades earlier, the Hindenburg was a famous, groundbreaking
vehicle that had left Europe to a great deal of fanfare, on the first of
what were to be ten round-trip transatlantic flights that year; its scheduled return
trip to Germany was already sold out. Yet while the Titanic’s disaster did not (as I understand it) lead to any
immediate or significant change in the popularity of nautical travel, the Hindenburg crash marked the beginning
of the end of the brief dominance of airships as a preferred option for
passenger travel. Partly that striking effect was due to the particularly
horrific idea of being caught on an airship in flight when it catches fire, of
course; but I would argue that even more significant was the fact that for
potential passengers all over the United States and the world, the Hindenburg fire was far more than just
an idea: it was a series of infamous, viral images, videos, and radio
broadcasts.
A still image, photographer
Sam Shere’s shot of an inflamed and crashing Hindenburg behind the mooring mast, became the defining depiction
of the disaster. But it was through the newer video and audio technologies that
the story of the crash truly went viral. Four different American and
international organizations (Pathé News, Movietone News, Hearst News of the Day,
and Paramount News)
had representatives present for the landing and captured extensive newsreel
footage, allowing viewers around the world to watch clips of an unfolding
disaster for the first time in history (although, as those hyperlinks reflect,
the clips were part of thoroughly produced and narrated pieces). But most
striking of all was Herbert
Morrison’s eyewitness radio report, recorded live and broadcast on
Chicago’s WLS station the following day. Morrison was already a
prominent figure in the industry (and would go on to become one in early
television news as well), but his visceral reaction to witnessing the
crash—epitomized by the phrase
“Oh, the humanity!”—both propelled him to international fame and became
inextricably linked with images and stories of the Hindenburg. If we’re now entirely accustomed to associating disasters
with the media
coverage of them, that link began with the Hindenburg.
Far less famous
than that media context, and far more ambiguous to be sure, were the
connections between the Hindenburg crash and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi
regime. The airship itself was entirely linked to Hitler, as its first
public flight, alongside another airship the Graf Zeppelin in March 1936, served
as propaganda for the regime; the two airships traveled around Germany
broadcasting pro-Hitler messages and helped sway German public opinion in favor
of reoccupying the Rhineland ahead of a referendum
on the question. Most of the numerous, never proven theories
of sabotage as the cause of the Hindenburg
fire were based on various permutations of these Nazi ties: from A.A.
Hoehling’s book Who
Destroyed the Hindenburg? (1962), which named crew
member Erich Spehl the saboteur in part because his girlfriend was a
communist with anti-Nazi contacts; to more outlandish theories such as one that
names Hitler himself as the culprit, in order to punish the German airship pioneer Hugo Eckener
for his failure
to support the regime. Historians and scientists have largely countered all
of these theories; but even if the Hindenburg
crash was simply an accident, it seems important to me to remember that the
airship had prominent swastikas
on its tailfins. The Hindenburg
might have become a symbol of disasters for a new media age, that is, but it
also embodied the relationship (at least as of 1937) between Nazi Germany and
the United States.
The Chicago fire
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?
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