There’s a good reason most cities now ban fireworks on the annual celebration of America’s birth. A page from the country’s history, dated July 4, 1908, suggests the wisdom of removing pyrotechnics from the hands of the untrained. From coast to coast, the irresponsible use of fireworks spread death and destruction, a true Grim Reaper’s celebration.
Americans deserve a chief executive who can deliver both moral and practical leadership to the country. Theodore Roosevelt felt he had a duty to set an example for the people who had elected him to the nation’s highest office. Presidents should instruct their constituents, fathers should counsel their children. No surprise then that on the morning of July 4, 1908, the president took his two youngest sons, Archie (14) and Quentin (11), out on the porch of his Sagamore Hill home for a training session on the proper use of fireworks. The President imparted valuable lessons about handling “firecrackers and torpedoes,” training his boys to discharge them safely. According to Edith Roosevelt, her husband remained on the porch most of the morning, trying to pretend that he took less delight in this teaching session than he actually did.
Twelve hours later, the skies around the president’s country retreat blazed with streamers of incandescent fire. No injuries were recorded.
If only the President had visited every American porch.
In 1899, concerned about the dangers of unregulated fireworks, the Chicago Tribune began an annual series that compiled reports of deaths and injuries that arrived over the news wire from every corner of the country. In 1908, the newspaper recorded 56 deaths and 1,899 serious injuries. Clearly Roosevelt’s safety lesson hadn’t spread beyond Sagamore Hill.
Proper training, for example, might have stopped an unnamed young girl from placing a “cannon cracker” between her lips and lighting the fuse. She wasn’t expected to survive.
A lecture on the dangers of gunpowder might have checked the foolishness of eleven year old Chester Gannon. As his brother and cousin watched, the boy emptied gunpowder out of his stash of firecrackers into the socket of a jack base. With the receptacle filled, he decided to pack the loose powder with a “bomb cane.” The boy had forgotten that one end of the cane contained a detonating cap.
A tamp, a flash, and the cache of gunpowder exploded. The cast iron jack stand blew apart. The force of the blast tore off Chester’s head. Deadly iron shrapnel swept the abandoned lot, striking a five year old girl, Lucille Wolf. Fortunately, she survived her injuries.
Lacerations, flash burns, amputations of fingers and hands—gunpowder turned the country into a battlefield.
The explosions proved intoxicating for many. The blasts rattled teenage brains, leading the youth to engage in ever more risky behaviors. A group of young men heaved firecrackers into the open windows of Chicago’s Southside Elevated train. Commuters panicked as explosions detonated in the passenger cars.
No one was hurt, but the same could not be said of a later bout of youthful hijinks. Herman Atterberh and two friends decided to shoot “torpedoes” down the length of Fifty-third street shortly after midnight. At the approach of police officer Fred Recker, the three young men fled. Recker shouted for them to stop and fired two warning shots into the air. When that failed to check their flight, Recker—obviously a little overexcited after a night of firecracker festivities—lowered his pistol and sent two bullets in pursuit of the miscreants. Herman Atterberh crumpled to the street, bullets lodged in his left leg and right arm.
He survived the encounter.
One night, two pages of casualties. The editors of the Chicago Tribune summed up their tabulation: “The full ghastliness of the insane Fourth of 1908 has not been revealed. But if the whole story had been told in yesterday’s paper, it should be sufficient to arouse the people to a full sense of the wickedness in which they have been participating or to which they have consented. If the country had got into a war and the first battle had been fought with a loss in killed and wounded equal to the loss in Saturday’s encounters with fireworks and other hazardous articles, the United States would have been convulsed with excitement and sympathy.”
With the passage of time, most US cities and municipalities took legislative action to ban fireworks and pyrotechnics. Nevertheless, illicit fireworks still kill. In 2023, eight deaths were reported nationally with an additional 9,700 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for fireworks related injuries.
The moral of the story? Be safe, be sensible, and shun the gunpowder torpedo.
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