The Hygienic Spectrum

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We used to enjoy making fun of people for being fat, unattractive, and poor. We used to live by the credo, “You can say funny things and be clever and all that, but if you want to be hilarious, someone has to get hurt.” We all thought that way, our parents and teachers did too, but somewhere in the late 20th Century and early 21st Century we decided to consider that unseemly. We used to insult and ridicule our friends, fellow students and coworkers, because it made us feel better about ourselves. It made us feel superior. “And it’s a good thing that we’re doing our best to end all that,” we say, and we’d be right in so many ways that we can’t imagine anyone saying but…

“But, we still crave definition,” they say. “We still need to know if we’re doing it right, and we learn that on the backs of others.” It’s a rather unpleasant way of saying that we still need to feel better about ourselves by declaring superiority on matters. When the American zeitgeist finished chipping away at all of the unseemly definitions of superiority, we almost accidentally sculpted out a monument for one of the few socially acceptable methods of bully we have left: hygienic excellence. The quest for hygienic excellence became a defining characteristic for us, and it became our new scoreboard. Thus, when those of us began scoring touchdowns in this arena, we weren’t afraid to do a celebratory dance in our opponent’s disgrace.  

When we spotted someone who failed to wash their hands after using the facilities, for example, we called them out for being unclean. We then considered it our civic duty to warn our friends and coworkers what this “pariah,” did. Did it end up ostracizing them, we didn’t care. We did it to protect our people. When this pariah spoke, he gesticulated wildly, and we warned our people to take a precautionary and proactive step back. We knew their Coxsackievirus, Hepatitis A, and Shigellosis did not have airborne qualities, but we figured it was better to be safe than sorry. 

We also knew members of the unclean who didn’t bother following the CDC’s guideline for the twenty-second wash. We saw them do it. They had no palm to palm, between fingers, back of hands, thumbs, and fingertips focus. Their wash was a symbolic act, intended to follow the basic social guidelines we considered mandatory. They didn’t take it as seriously as we did, and we all knew who they, the unclean, were, because we talked about them all the time. Even though none of us would enter their home, we wondered what we would see in there. Would they provide their guests soaps with antimicrobial quaternary ammonium compounds in their home, or the disposable paper towels that Mayo Clinic proceedings and the World Health Organization recommends as one of the greatest measures for removing bacteria from our microbiome?  

The Hygienic Spectrum

Our discussions were never intended to establish superiority over the unclean, or that wasn’t our primary goal. It just sort of happened over the course of numerous discussions. One guy agreed with our assessment of the pariah and threw an incident he witnessed in the pyre, and a woman added an, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but…” incident she witnessed. This dogpile reached a culmination of sorts when the pariah entered one of our discussions. He was our friend, and he had been in numerous break room chats before. When he entered our discussion, he had no idea how much the general sentiment shifted against him, yet when his smile faltered it was obvious to us that he recognized the tension in the air. 

“What’s a matter?” he asked us. He didn’t know it, but his status in our group was forever altered, and there was nothing he could do about it. He became our definition of the unclean.

Anytime a large group talks about abstract concepts as often as we did, such as the difference between clean and unclean, competition seeps in. Once we weeded out the “undesirables” an internecine, king-of-the-hill squabble ensued. Our conversations devolved into members of our group deciding that they were cleaner than other members, and the cleanest of the group. Even though we detested hierarchies of any sort, one began to develop among us. This resulted in so many subjective qualifiers that we realized the only viable alternative to qualifiers muddying the water was to quantify our differences. We decided to develop a Numeric Rating Scale for use in our Verbal Analog Scale. We used the pain scale as inspiration, as pain used to be a difficult concept to communicate to a doctor, until two doctors in the late 70s to early 80s developed the pain scale that we now follow. When we go the doctor now, we know to arrive equipped with a number to describe the severity of our pain, so the doctor can react accordingly. We thought our need to know how to act and react to the unclean and one another was as pressing as the doctor’s need to know how to diagnose pain, so we developed a Hygienic Spectrum (HS) to provide our peers a scoring model, from one to ten, to dictate how we should treat one another.

We needed to separate those who didn’t take this as seriously as we thought they should from the justifiably cautious, the very cautious, and the germaphobes. We deemed those who didn’t take it seriously enough to be between ones and threes, those who adhered to tenets of basic common decency were between fours and sixes, and those who overshot into sterility theater were between sevens and tens. No one actually sat down and drew up a chart. It was more of a series of round table discussions that involved everyone offering up suggestions for how we should define the difference between a one and a three, a four and a six, and so on, until some of us felt the need to personify the differences. “Stan has got to be a one,” Eric said. “Because I saw him leave the toilet, not the john, the toilet, without washing palm to palm, between fingers, back of hands, thumbs, and fingertips.”

Wayne Zhou told us that he used our Hygienic Spectrum to get himself out of a real pickle when Mark Gavin found out Wayne ostracized him. “I apologized and all that, but I told him that I was on the Hygienic Spectrum, and I worried that his failure to wash his hands properly might infect our microbiome.”

After developing this Hygienic Spectrum, we realized that most people we encounter are going to be around a five on the spectrum. Most people are conscientious individuals who want to do what they can to prevent the spread of germs and disease, but we didn’t think they took it seriously enough. In the midst of COVID, everyone took it seriously, but everyone just sort of let their guard down after it. When we talk about possible death due to an airborne virus, we thought everyone would start getting a lot more serious about trying to achieve their personal definition of hygienic excellence and stay that way.  

We also noticed that those in the upper tiers of the Hygienic Spectrum, the sevens to tens, rarely regress. Those in the middle tiers often go back and forth, depending on the information they learn and the crowd they’re in, but those in the bottom and top spheres, are there for their own reasons, and they rarely toggle back and forth. Very few in the upper tiers, wake up one day and think their fears were unfounded or silly and take a step back. The quest for hygienic excellence usually has a compounding effect that eventually leads us to believe the extreme, like avoiding a gesticulating talker who could emit germs that infect our space. If our friends declare such a notion unfounded or silly, we say, “Okay, but why would you want to take that chance?” We also believe that our quest is so informed that even if scientific research later declares our fears unfounded and silly, we won’t go back, because we will question the basis of that supposed science.

The quest for hygienic excellence also invites tribalism, and this is where notions and beliefs slip over into feelings of superiority, born through groupthink, and some unintended bullying. As we wrote in another article, like-minded friendships can develop through shared concerns. In the arena of groupthink, we could also draw some correlations to racism in the sense that racists seek comfort in the idea that their group is better than yours. “I might not have accomplished much in life,” the racist basically admits through their beliefs, “but at least I’m not one of you.” When those who are seven or higher on the Hygienic Spectrum encounter a three or lower, it can manifest into a level of intolerance that resembles other forms of group ranking that leads us to believe that our modern hygienic orthodoxy makes us cleaner, safer, and better than those lower on the spectrum. We grow so disgusted with those who don’t measure up to our cleanliness standard that we not only avoid being around them, but we want to do our civic duty by telling everyone we know to avoid them too. “They’re unclean,” we tell them.

The Cookie, the Tongs, and the Floor

The relative differences between the habits of those striving for hygienic excellence, the clean and the unclean were illustrated in The Pickle Gambit episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David decided to take a cookie off a table in a hotel lobby. He carefully removed the cookie to avoid touching another one, with the hotel manager looking on, but Larry broke the hotel’s unspoken rule by failing to use the tongs that the hotel provided. The front desk manager watched Larry do this, scolded him for not using the tongs, and an argument between the two ensued in the hotel lobby. When the argument ended, the manager ordered those cookies to be removed and disposed of in the trash. The second scene of this ongoing argument ended with an employee accidentally dropping the hotel’s tongs on the floor, retrieving those tongs and putting them back on the table, near the hotel lobby’s cookies. David spotted the hypocrisy and called them out on it.

Those of us who encounter a tongs-on-the-floor incident and consider it unforgivable that an employee would put it back on the table, would probably be a five on the spectrum. We would’ve placed them much higher on the spectrum decades ago, but the volume of public outrage over such incidents has caused us all to recalibrate our thoughts of a scenario like this one.

If I saw that employee drop the set of tongs on the floor and place it back near the plate, I would then take those tongs and retrieve a cookie. Years ago, I would’ve ignored the tongs entirely, but outrage frequency has forced me to acclimate. Whether we know it or not we all recalibrate to pacify the screaming minority and prevent their outrage. I don’t care one way or another, but it’s just easier to accommodate those who do.

“What is on that floor?” we ask those in the screaming minority. “What do you fear might happen to you if you removed one of the cookies with the tongs after such an incident?” If those tongs fell behind the table into the dusty region, or in a colony of ants, we wouldn’t eat it, but these tongs fell onto what we consider a relatively clean hotel lobby floor. Yet, we know that the moment after we use those tongs to grab a cookie, someone from the screaming minority will scream, “One, he’s a one!” with an accusatory finger pointed our way. We understand that some people do so to fulfill what they consider their civic duty, but we also know such a public outcry is driven by the need we have to feel superior to others. Some also feel an almost biological duty to police those they believe are failing to follow societal directives. Both make the members of the screaming minority feel better about themselves. 

We can all relate to this scene, and the compulsions it describes, because we all want to eat clean cookies. When we watch a scene like the one from Curb Your Enthusiasm, some of us think about the waste involved. In this case, the hotel manager threw away a plate of perfectly good cookies over something so trivial. It leads us to wonder how much perfectly good and relatively clean food do we throw away in our pursuit of hygienic excellence?  

“How dare you call these matters trivial?!” you say, and we hear you. Whenever we talk about “vital, consequential, and life-altering matters!” such as these, we’re always going to encounter exclamation point responses, but how much time and life do we waste policing these micro-violations? At what does the proportion of caution and fear begin to outweigh the actual risk?

If we brought in a team of microbiologists and commissioned them to perform a thorough study of the cookies on the plate, the tongs, and the hotel lobby floor before and after Larry David’s argument with the hotel manager, my bet is they wouldn’t return with any noteworthy contamination findings. Even if one of Larry’s fingers grazed another cookie, I doubt we would find that he added a noteworthy amount of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa to any of the other cookies. They would probably find trace amounts of something, but they would deem the actual risk as minimal to no risk.

“So, what we’re doing here?” I would ask as the reporter on the scene, “is wasting everyone’s time energy, and money to try to achieve what? Better health? A longer life? I’m not sure if these extreme measures are going to get either for us.”

Better Health and a Longer Life 

My first experiences with the screaming minority occurred in my youth when I began my work life in the restaurant industry. My manager never screamed at me, but she was obsessed with an extra-level of cleanliness. I considered her obsessive demands, a power play. I thought she did it to make my life miserable.

“Can I go home now?” I would ask her when my shift was over.

“Once you clean the grill.”

“I already cleaned the grill,” I said.

“You didn’t clean the grill,” she said. “Follow me.” She then showed me how to “Properly clean a grill.” She followed that up by informing me that this would be how I would clean that grill going forward. She was the boss, and if I wanted to keep that job, I had to do it her way. Her way turned what was once a five-minute exercise into a ten-minute forearm intensive workout. I loathed her for a time, until I learned that she didn’t make these excessive and obsessive steps up. She was passing down to me what was passed down to her as the “Proper way to clean a grill.” She was excessively and obsessively demanding, because her boss was excessively and obsessively demanding, because his bosses, our customers, were excessively and obsessively demanding.     

They weren’t ordering me to be clean, in my personal estimation, because my five-minute exercise cleaned the grill. And if she wanted to test it, I informed her, she could lick the grates on my grill and come away with nothing on her tongue. They weren’t talking about cleaning the grill. They were talking about achieving a different level of clean, a hyper-vigilant, near-antiseptic level of clean they hoped would achieve hygienic excellence. I did it, I followed their steps, but I thought their steps to achieving hygienic purity were a little nutty, and I told them that. I was young and naive at the time, and I had yet to learn that the only reason they were nutty is because we’re nutty, or at least some of us are. And if you’re in the restaurant business, your job is to mollify those that are

Based on my experience in the industry, I once considered opening a restaurant of my own, until a friend of mine reminded me that I would have to deal with the screaming minority. She didn’t use that term, but she told me that there is always going to be a certain percentage that declares—insists—demands that I use different sponges and towels for every surface. “And if they catch one of your employees using a sponge on a dish, and they use that same sponge to clean a counter, you’ll be reported to the board of health. If you dismiss their complaint as silly or over the top, the health department will close you down.” Her warning led me to remember my manager, and her over-the-top complaints, and I realized that if I were to open my own restaurant now, I would probably have to be ten times as obsessive about cleanliness as she was. My experience with her occurred decades ago, and the screaming minority contingent has become ten times as nutty since.

“Is this level of caution and fear proportional to the actual risk?” I asked her.

“If you are the owner of this restaurant, I would expect you to not only follow these guidelines, but go overboard with them,” she said. “If I found out you weren’t, I wouldn’t eat at your restaurant.”

I argued a little more, but she shut down further discussion on this matter by cutting me off. 

“You opening a restaurant might be the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” she said. “I would not make for a good restauranteur, but you might be the worst I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t last a month.” She didn’t go into detail, but she called our friends over to join in on her fun.

One of the reasons I probably wouldn’t be a quality restauranteur is that I would demand cleanliness from my employees, but I consider this pursuit of perfect sterility a weird hill to die on. As a restauranteur, I would employ all of necessary techniques and measures required to avoid spreading bacteria and germs that could cause my customers to get sick, or worse, die, but I know we’re all going to get sick and die one day. Sometimes I wonder if the screaming minority knows that.

The Quest for Balance

Louis Pasteur’s work with microorganisms, and his findings that they can cause disease, proved an enormous gift to the world. Yet, what have we done with that gift? We turned practical insight into an open-ended quest for an antiseptic world. Wouldn’t it be interesting to learn what Pasteur thinks of how we’ve treated his findings in the hundreds of years that followed? What would he think of the fact that his findings have ruined lives, as some have taken his findings to such extremes that they won’t associate with those who fail to follow the standard? What would he think of our development of a Hygienic Spectrum to quantify those who refuse to abide by our interpretation of his findings against those who exaggerate them to the point that some fear leaving the safe microbiome they’ve created in their homes.

What would Pasteur think of the research Dr. Erika von Mutius did in the 1990s, in Germany after their reunification. As the article discussing this states, “[Dr. Erika von Mutius’s] initial hypothesis was that East German children, who grew up in dirtier and generally less healthful conditions, would have more allergies and suffer more from asthma than their Western counterparts. However, her research found the opposite: children in the polluted areas of East Germany had lower allergic reactions and fewer cases of asthma than children in West Germany.”

Microbiologists still insist on high standards where they matter. Yet, many of them note that a completely sterile microbiome is not ideal. They state that some exposure appears to train the immune system. My guess is Pasteur would say, “Of course. I never called for a complete eradication of germs, and if even I did, that would be impossible. The only solution is to find a balance between trying to stop the spread of germs in every way we can and training our immune system to deal with those we can’t.” 

This article is about perfectly healthy people who fall prey to a notion that their hygienic standards are so much better than those who don’t meet that standard of excellence, but we’ve all met those with compromised immune systems. We might have quantified them as tens on the Hygienic Spectrum, but their paranoia is founded on substantiated fears. They seem to get sick every time they walk out their door, and we should provide them a special, sympathetic place for them on our spectrum. When we meet the perfectly healthy who develop an obsessive/compulsive disorder as a result of too much information, it’s so confusing to those of us who put the time in to try to understand our fellow man. The only thing we can come up with is their hygienic standard is the only socially acceptable form of bullying we have left to support our idea that we’re better than the great unwashed.

“Where are we going with all this?” I ask when I encounter the screaming minority in restaurants and hotels, calling for hygienic purity. “We keep getting more extreme. What’s the end game? Where is the line, the peak, or the point where we finally say, ‘Okay, now that is just plain silly’?” Way back when my mom said, “Don’t eat that [candy bar that just hit the ground], throw it away” that felt like an extremely irrational thought to me back then. In retrospect, that seems so quaint. Her warning was a simple word of caution warning, based on Pasteur’s findings. Has all of science, research, and information we’ve learned since made us healthier, happier, and better, or is it just more information? There is no end game and the extreme will just keep extending outward, because the little “Are you really, truly doing everything you can to be as clean as you can possibly be?” articles will keep popping up in our news feeds. Our friends, family, coworkers, and fellow shoppers will continue to call us out on our failures, until we’ll all recalibrate our definition of extreme until we acclimate. And those at the top of the Hygienic Spectrum will continue to climb higher and higher with the hope that they might eventually reach a peak that will provide them a clean, safe world in which they might never have to get sick and die like the great unwashed do.  

Surprise! You’re Dead!: The 1919 Molassacre

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“It was not an explosion,” a witness recalled. “It was more of a low, deep guttural roar. We thought it was the El. It sounded like the El anyway.” (The El was the elevated train that passed on the tracks surrounding the neighborhood in the image).  

“I heard a staccato rat-tat-tat, like a machine-gun-like sound,” other witnesses said to describe the sound of thousands of rivets being shot out of the steel plates of the storage unit, like projectiles. 

“And that was followed by this swish sound, a hiss, or rush of air/wind,” other witnesses said to describe the sound of the molasses rolling through town.  

The visitor’s bureau of tourism and travel love historical tragedies like these, because we love “how could they be so stupid?” tragicomedies. “I’m sorry, but it’s funny” we say on the walk-through tour of the failure that led to the destruction of infrastructure of a town/city that led to widespread death. Maybe the latter isn’t funny in the strict sense, but if tourism agencies can “schwing” this information in a sympathetic manner, with the perfect snarky tour guide, joking about maple syrup and pancakes, buttermilk, and The Blob, we might find some “behind a hand” comedy in it.

First, The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 didn’t involve maple syrup. It was molasses, and we’re not splitting hairs here. There’s a big difference, as we’ll explain later. There were also a whole bunch of Bostonians in 1919 who didn’t find this “molassacre” the least bit funny, but you know that, and you can’t stop giggling.

“All right,” a 1919 Bostonian might say, “If you still think this is all funny, hows about the next time you’re farting about town, you have a 15–25-foot tidal wave of 2.3 million—not thousand, million—gallons, or twenty-six million pounds of molasses, chase you through your neighborhood at speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour. My bet is that would put an end to your hee hee, haw haws.”

Good Guys vs. Bad Guys

No one knew what the loud sounds that occurred on January 15, 1919 at 12:40 p.m, at 529 Commercial Street in the North End of Boston, were, initially. Isaac Gonzales, who worked on the fifty-foot molasses storage unit on a daily basis as its maintenance man, would’ve known exactly what it was, but he quit the job in frustration when no one would heed his repeated warnings. William White, Gonzales’ immediate supervisor, probably had an idea, but only because Gonzales complained about the structure so often. Gonzales’ manager Arthur Percy Jell, the treasurer of Purity Distilling Company (PDC), a subsidiary of the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) probably had an idea what it was too.  

The historical record states that Jell knew all about Gonzales’ complaints. Gonzales complained about it so often, and was so frustrated at one point, that he went over his supervisor’s head and walked straight into Jell’s office without an appointment. He walked in prepared. He addressed his boss in the most respectful manner he could, and he spelled out the problem. Gonzales informed Jell that he thought the USIA storage unit was coming apart. He told Jell he thought it was due to structural issues. Arthur Jell likely took personal offense to that comment, since he oversaw that 1915 project, and a back and forth ensued.  

Isaac Gonzales had been working on this tank for months, and he knew its condition on that day better than anyone, including Arthur Jell. After Gonzales’ respectful approach failed to reach his manager, he reached into his coat pockets and dumped a bunch of its rust flakes on Jell’s desk to provide tangible evidence of the unit’s overall deterioration that he and his crew were witnessing on a daily basis.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Jell said. “The tank still stands.” 

There is no evidence of Jell escalating Gonzales’ complaints, but the company did learn of them. They calculated the cost of fixing the leaks the maintenance men were spotting against leaving the structure as is. They decided that the record profits they were seeing were such that the company could withstand the cost of a few leaks. Gonzales complained that it wasn’t just the leaks, and that he thought the leaks were symptomatic of an unsound structure that could lead to a worst-case scenario. Jell responded to Gonzales’ complaints by recaulking the storage unit, and he eventually painted the storage unit a shade of brown that matched the color of molasses to cover the signs of leakage. When Gonzales continued to complain after all that, Jell informed him that if he continued to complain, he would no longer have a job at USIA. With the Boston economy being what it was, this proved a substantial threat, but Gonzales couldn’t take the ongoing stress of no one taking him seriously. He decided that his best course of action was to simply quit the company and join the Army. To presumably avoid seeing or hearing about what he knew was going to happen, Gonzales asked the Army to station him as far away from Boston as possible, and they stationed him in Columbus, Ohio. 

If we were to make a disaster movie called The Great Molasses Flood of 1919, or The Molassacre, Isaac Gonzales would be our good guy. He would be the whistle blower, trying to warn his immediate authority figures about the impending doom he foresaw. To uphold his good guy status, we would fail to mention that after Gonzales quit his job, he failed to report his evidence-rich findings to building inspectors, city officials, or the media. Gonzales defenders could say that this just wasn’t done in early 1900’s. Whistle blowers weren’t celebrated in the manner they are today. They were labeled troublemakers back then. Gonzales probably also thought that public disclosures would make life more difficult for his fellow maintenance men, his friends, going forward. Whatever the case is, Gonzales, our good guy, didn’t do everything he could do to save his fellow Bostonians from the impending doom he correctly forecast.   

Arthur P. Jell would be our bad guy in this disaster flick, and most filmmakers don’t waste their precious minutes characterizing their bad guys. If we were to call them out on this, they would probably say, “It’s a movie, not a trial.” Bad guys are often the countering force that do nothing more than make good guys look better. Most filmmakers want quick and superficial characterizations for their bad guys, so they instruct their casting agencies to find an overweight actor with noticeable jowls and ruddy skin that always looks a little too sweaty. With this in mind, we would seek a Sorrell Booke (Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard) type for this role. These characteristics would give the audience the impression that Arthur Jell was a guilt-ridden character. We would further characterize our bad guy as an arrogant, unsympathetic type by introducing him with an obnoxiously large cigar in his mouth and a glass of hard liquor on his over-sized desk. We would also include the rust flakes scene, and we would have our Arthur Jell character insult the Gonzales character as an exaggerator when he continued to complain, and we would include lines that had our bad guy reminding Gonzales about their respective positions in the company and their economic stations in life. The Arthur Jell would then command Gonzales to leave his office with a level of arrogance the audience might find almost criminal at the end of our film. Then the Jell character would collect the rust flakes Gonzales dropped on his desk and throw them at Gonzales, saying, “And take all this crap with you!”  

History has not been kind to Arthur Jell, and it’s entirely possible that he earned it. He could’ve been the awful person that history remembers. Yet, he could’ve been a regular fella who, prior to this episode, lived a relatively meager life. When his superiors picked him to head up the construction of a storage unit that was going to hold the lucrative molasses that the country desperately needed for military weapons, ammunition, and other munitions for their planned entry into World War I, Jell probably thought it was the greatest day of his life.  

Jell was informed that if he could get this storage unit built in a timely manner, and under budget, there might even be a promotion in it for him. Arthur Jell was nearing forty. He was not a failure, but his career wasn’t going the way he imagined. He was still living paycheck-to-paycheck, and then his superiors chose him to oversee the construction of a large molasses tank. Jell likely viewed this assignment as a way out of the paycheck-to-paycheck existence and a ticket a table he never thought he’d see.  

To quell any concerns Jell might have had about his complete lack of engineering or technical experience, his superiors eased his doubts by pointing to the regulatory loophole that a “receptacle” did not have to meet the same building codes or inspection requirements as an ordinary structure.

It probably relieved Jell that he wouldn’t have to know the building codes required for a permit, and he wouldn’t have to deal with bureaucrats in the process, but the “Why me?” questions still had to plague him. Yet, if we’re ever lucky enough to secure a job for which we’re unqualified, we don’t inform our bosses that we’re unqualified, or ask questions in that vein. We “fake it, till we make it.” We might think they see something in us that we don’t, and we try to live up to the belief and confidence they have in us. We, like an Arthur Jell, make it our life’s mission to live up to their belief in us.  

The construction of this fifty-foot storage unit was a job for Jell, as much as it was a job for everyone else involved. It helped him pay the bills, support his daughter, his wife, family, and live the life he dreamed of living while toiling away in the near-poverty existence he knew for most of his life. Thus, when things started to fall apart, Jell may have feared that if didn’t do everything he could to keep costs low and ignore Gonzales warnings, his bosses would find someone who would. As an unqualified man, he didn’t have a leg to stand on, and he probably felt a lot “fake it, till you make it” pressure, self-imposed and otherwise, to complete and sustain this large, expensive project for his superiors.  

Everyone Has a Boss 

An historical characterization of Arthur Jell has it that “[He] wanted to cut the costs of the project by reducing the thickness of the massive tank’s walls.” They further damn him by writing, “On the day the tank exploded, he worked safely in his Cambridge office.”

Further historical characterizations of the tank/storage unit suggest that the steel Jell used in its construction was 50% too thin, and the steel contained too little manganese, which made the steel brittle. Another historical fail attributed to Arthur Jell was the hydraulic capacity test. To properly test the unit, Jell should’ve ordered a near capacity test, to test its structural integrity. He ordered a test of six inches of water, or roughly 24,000 gallons on the bottom of the storage unit. This shortcut was taken to save time and expense and allowed Jell to declare the tank ready for use almost immediately. 

“Everyone has a boss,” I would say to the jury, if I were Arthur Jell’s personal attorney. “When a catastrophe like this happens, we want to find someone to blame. We want to find the bad guy. Yet, in a corporation like USIA there is a hierarchal structure in place that requires Mr. Isaac Gonzales to report to a Mr. William White, Mr. White’s boss was Arthur Jell, and Mr. Jell’s bosses were on the corporate board, a board chaired by Charles Edwards Adams. Mr. Adams’ bosses was accountable to the shareholders and other investors of USIA. Everyone has a boss, and those bosses want to see huge profit reports at the end of a quarter to justify their jobs, promotions, wages and salaries, and their investments and the inherent risk involved. So while the relentless drive to cut costs and maximize profit became this story’s ultimate villain, it is also the force that has enabled humanity to create the goods, enterprises, and infrastructure upon which modern economies depend.

“What happens when things go wrong?” I would ask the jury. “These hierarchies mysteriously collapse. Those at the bottom have no authority to act without approval, and those at the top insist they didn’t grant such approval. The blame, the bad publicity, and the historical infamy falls on the midlevel manager.”

One of the first things we learn as midlevel managers for a corporation with a substantial hierarchy in place, is that our job is to make everyone happy. We’re required to make our superiors happy, and we’re required to make the employees on our team happy too. When things go wrong, we learn that the dung rolls uphill and downhill at us. As the Spanish proverb states, “Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.”  

When a catastrophe like this one happens, and structures are demolished, and one hundred and fifty people are injured, and twenty-one people die, a whole bunch of someones want to find someone to blame. We want a name and a face to plaster on the masthead of our newspapers, and we want a name to scream at in bars and at funerals. Gonzales couldn’t have done anything without approval from his hierarchy, but either could William White, or Arthur Jell. The problem for the inexperienced Arthur Jell was that he was the man who gave the thumbs ups, signed the authorizations, and became the face of the project, the failure, and the court case that followed. The questions that Jell answered in the trial, and all of investigation records that preceded it and have followed since, suggest that Arthur Jell was actually granted very little genuine autonomy in the construction and ongoing maintenance of the molasses storage tank. His role was that of a midlevel manager operating within strict corporate control, as opposed to an independent engineer or decision‑maker.  

Arthur Jell was, himself, a cost-cutting measure, as the corporate board at PDC and USIA, and their chairman Charles Edwards Adams could’ve sought out a proper engineer to complete the project. They could’ve hired third-party inspection teams, or some sort of oversight to see to it that Arthur Jell put proper safety measures were put in place. They didn’t because they sought to appease their bosses, shareholders and other investors by capitalizing on the explosion of need for industrials and munitions before and during WWI at the lowest costs possible.  

The Molassacre

Construction of the fifty-foot-tall storage tank was finished in 1915, and it collapsed in 1919. So, Bostonians from the north end heard their impending doom for four years, but the groaning and rumbling sounds emanating from the tank just sort of blended in with all of the other sounds of the city. The average Bostonian, from the North end, heard the daily sounds of freight trains, the sounds emanating from factories, and all of the other industrial sounds of a bustling city’s activities on a daily basis. Most of those who lived around 529 Commercial Street probably heard these sounds so often that they probably couldn’t sleep without them after a time, and they heard them so often that they didn’t even hear them anymore. Those of us in a city grow so accustomed to sights, smells, and sounds that we acclimate to them. We acclimate to them so well, over time, that when a visitor hears them, they say something like, “How can you stand all of that?” We shrug and say, “I don’t even notice it anymore.”

On January 15, 1919 at 12:40 p.m, they heard it, everyone in the area did. Some reports state that citizens living three miles away heard it. If people from three miles away heard it, imagine what it must have sounded like to those who lived right next it. The storage unit was fifty-foot high, and to put fifty feet in perspective, the average two-story house is between 18-25 feet.

The collapse released the 2.3 million –not thousand, million— gallons of this sticky, icky molasses into the neighborhoods and the business district at speeds of up to 35 mph. Reports state that at its peak, this tidal wave reached a height of 15-25 feet, again the size of the average two-story house. The molasses leveled buildings buckled elevated railway supports, crushed vehicles and people, and flooded streets several blocks deep (initially waist-deep or more in places). Twenty-one people were killed (many by drowning/suffocation or crushing under debris) and about 150 were injured; dozens of horses also died.

When those of us who are generally uninformed on the matter hear the word molasses, we think of maple syrup. Yet, if we were to pour three bottles together, one holding water, another with maple syrup, and the third holding molasses, we would see three remarkably different flows. The measurement of these flows is called viscosity, or the measure of how much fluid resists flowing. We could get into exact measurements of viscosity, but our common sense dictates that water is easy to stir, maple syrup is a little tougher, and molasses is even more difficult. Depending on the temperature, water flows freely, maple syrup flows at a viscosity similar to a light honey, and molasses often drips slowly and may leave a trail. Maple syrup will drip slowly off the spoon when you’re done stirring, but molasses might end up sticking to the utensil with very little of it dripping off until the weight of it becomes too great. If we held water on a spoon, at a ninety-degree-angle, all of it would fall off with precious few remnants remaining, a more substantial amount of maple syrup would remain on the spoon, all conditions being equal, but depending on the weight on that spoon, a majority of molasses would remain stuck to the spoon, like a soft tar, until we have to physically scrape most of it off.  

In the Boston flood, the molasses didn’t flow like soft tar, as it would have if we held it on a spoon at a ninety-degree angle, as the sheer weight of the 2.3 million gallons increased its viscosity. Another factor that played a role in this disaster were the varying temperatures inside the tank and that which occurred in the outside Boston air. The day before the incident, January 14, 1919, a fresh shipment arrived, and it was artificially warmed to increase his viscosity. This warmed shipment was mixed in with the molasses that was already in the storage unit, and that latter molasses was substantially cooled by a roughly two-degree temperature in the air in Boston on January 14th. On January 15th, the outside air of Boston increased to the mid-forties. Some suggest that thermal expansion, cause by the temperature fluctuations inside the tank combined with those outside it, likely exacerbated the inevitable collapse of the unsound structure.

After the collapse, the heated molasses hit the cooler air. It cooled and congealed, and it hit the North End of the city a far cry from the warm honey flow we associate with maple syrup. When we combine the temperature of the air in Boston with the force of the weight of 2.3 million pounds, the molasses hit the city of Boston with the force of concrete. It did not splash around structures in the manner we might associate with water or warm honey; it crushed structures, people, and everything else in its path.  

The question that hounds us regards the 2.3 million gallons in the structure. That’s a bunch of molasses to just leave sitting there. Apparently, the soaring demand for molasses was just that great, because the United States was preparing for entry into World War I. (They entered in 1917.) The defense department needed to prepare for entry by stockpiling weapons, ammunition, explosives, and other military equipment. Those munitions required Molasses, or industrial alcohol, in their creation. Coupled with these preparations was the speculation that The Prohibition movement in the U.S. was gaining steam, and that alcohol would soon be prohibited for sale in the U.S. Molasses was used in the production of rum and other alcoholic beverages. There has been speculation that companies wanted to stockpile molasses before Prohibition took effect. (The molasses storage unit fell apart on January 15, 1919, and Prohibition was ratified on January 16, 1919, though it would not be fully implemented until January 1920.) Research suggests that this speculation is spot on and timely, but the production of molasses for alcohol was viewed as little more than another revenue stream, as opposed to the primary one. The primary reason the storage unit was constructed so hastily, and the reason 2.3 million gallons of molasses were stored in Boston was World War I.

The Victims

When a tragedy such as this happens, we read the statistics, and as shocking as some statistics can be, they have a way of desensitizing us. “It says this horrible catastrophe killed twenty-one and injured 150,” we say when our wife enters the room. “What a horrible tragedy,” she says shaking her head. Statistics and numbers almost accidentally permit us to avoid getting to the heart of lives taken, damaged, and ruined in the aftermath. We don’t have to think of the trauma a John Barry went through when he was pinned face-down under debris with molasses filling his nose and mouth. He used his free arm to keep an air pocket clear and survived, though his dark hair reportedly turned white overnight from the trauma. A statistical presentation also helps us avoid learning the details of what Patrick Breen went through when he was hurled into Boston Harbor by the wave. Sailors from the USS Nantucket rescued him, but he later died from pneumonia and infection stemming from fractured ribs and a leg injury. Or, a wagon driver named Cesare Nicolo. Mr. Nicolo was declared missing, and no one could find him for months, until someone randomly discovered his body floating under a wharf nearly four months later. When we read the story in periodicals, Mr. Barry, Nicolo and Bream are collected into a number that barely registers. As horrific as their stories are, they don’t compare to what happened to the Cloughertys and the Iantoscas.

Ten-year-old Pasquale Iantosca and his siblings Antonio and Maria di Stasio (ages roughly 8 and 10), were playing near the storage unit, gathering firewood and scooping the molasses that leaked from the storage unit with their sticks, as they always did during their lunch break from school. The exact timing of Pasquale’s father, Giuseppe, going to his apartment window is unknown, regarding whether he was watching his kids the whole time, or if he just happened to check in on them at the worst possible moment, but when Giuseppe looked out his apartment window, he did so in time to witness the 15-25 tidal wave of molasses swallow his three children.

Giuseppe raced from his apartment to help them, but this catastrophe happened so fast that by the time he reached his front door, his entire neighborhood was gone. Everyone he knew and loved was either gone or stuck in whatever this brown gook was. This nightmare had to be so confusing and alarming that Giuseppe probably spent a moment trying to orient himself to the idea that this was real as opposed to a nightmare. When the reality of the situation hit home, he entered into the molasses without considering his own safety. He had to do so without thinking about the sounds of destruction and screams he heard from those who had been injured by the tidal wave. His children had been swept away by whatever this thing was, and he had to find them. The problem was, he had no idea where to run or where to look. He decided to simply follow the flow. Based on vague descriptions, it sounds like he found his beloved daughter Maria’s dead body relatively quickly, as she had been suffocated by the molasses. We don’t know how much time he spent trying to revive her, but we can guess he ran with her body, trying to revive her, while trying to find his other two children. Whatever the case is, we wouldn’t include this unspeakably tragic, Sophie’s Choice dilemma in our disaster movie, as we would deem it too horrific for our audience. Giuseppe couldn’t find his son Antonio, but a firefighter did. The firefighter informed Giuseppe that Antonio had been flung against a lamppost by the explosive force of the molasses, and that he managed to pull Antonio free from its sucking force. The firefighter informed Giuseppe that Antonio suffered a severe head injury (fractured skull and concussion). Giuseppe, we can only guess, was out of his mind with concern for Antonio, but he also had another child, Pasquale, that he couldn’t find. When Pasquale’s body was later found, Giuseppe learned that his son was killed after being struck by a railroad car that was swept into him by the flood.

When Mary Musco heard the deep rumble of the storage unit collapsing, she went to her window to see what that incredibly loud clatter was, and she looked out just in time to watch the Clougherty’s house “fly into the air” before disappearing under the elevated tracks into a chaos of thrashing people, horses, and wreckage. Mary ran from her house hysterically screaming that everyone in the Clougherty house “were all dead”. She said that she became more hysterical when she saw the absolute carnage occurring in her neighborhood, as her neighbors were running around, screaming and crying, covered in molasses.

The Cloughertys lived in a three-story wooden house at 6 Copp’s Hill Terrace, right along Commercial Street and overlooking the massive molasses tank. Martin Clougherty was asleep on the third floor when the tank ruptured just after 12:40 p.m. Teresa, his sister, came to wake him. As she turned toward the window, she saw something terrible happening near the harbor and cried out, “Something awful has happened to the tank!” Almost immediately the house began shaking violently.

The 25-foot-high wave of molasses slammed into their house, tore it completely off its foundation, and hurled it into the elevated railway trestle. The Cloughertys house split and collapsed. Martin later told the Boston Globe:

“I was in bed on the third floor of my house when I heard a deep rumble. I was asleep and the rumble did not wake me thoroughly. The first impression I had that something unusual had happened was when I awoke in several feet of molasses. It didn’t dawn on me that it was molasses I was in. I thought I was overboard.”

Martin Clougherty felt himself being sucked under and nearly drowned in the thick, sticky flood. Fighting the suction, he managed to surface and then climbed onto his own floating bed frame, which became a makeshift raft for him. When he saw his sister Teresa choking on the molasses and struggling to get free, he instinctually pulled her up onto the bed frame with him, saving her life.

Their mother, Bridget, was crushed under the debris and timber of the collapsed house. She was pulled from the wreckage but died about an hour later from her injuries. The force of the collapsing house and the flood hurled Stephen, Bridget’s other son, out into the street, and he was pulled from molasses by sailors from USS Enterprise. The cuts and bruises he suffered were considered minor by the staff at Boston City Hospital where he was eventually transferred. After a while, Stephen began displaying severe behavioral and psychological symptoms that included panic attacks, hallucinations, and violent outbursts, or what we might now call PTSD. The record specifically attributes these changes to the trauma caused by the Molasses Flood and the death of his mother. The shocking trauma of such a traumatic moment can sometimes dissipate with time, counseling, and the love and support of remaining family members and friends. Stephen’s didn’t. Stephen declined rapidly. He was placed in an asylum three months later, where he died eight months later after that. Historians regard Stephen Clougherty as an indirect victim of the disaster because the trauma of losing his mother appears to have triggered a rapid decline from which he never recovered.

Whenever we read “hysterical moments of history” articles, the 1919 Molasses Flood is often included. Yet, to keep these articles in the funny, infotainment genre, the author(s) depersonalizes them with statistics and succinct good guy v. bad guy characterizations. They don’t dig deep into the personal stories involved, they don’t bother trying to understand what could’ve motivated the “bad guys”. Who cares why they did what they did, they imply, they messed up. Arthur Jell messed up, there are no qualifiers that can dispute that general fact. Was he a bad guy though? He could’ve been a good person who just happened to mess up, due to circumstances beyond his control. If we could talk to those with intimate knowledge of this situation, would they characterize Arthur Jell as a relatively naive man who took over the project of building a storage unit with no idea how to do it? (In the multi-year civil trial that followed, Arthur Jell was exposed for having no engineering experience. The record states that he spent entire professional career, before this catastrophe, as a financial administrator/clerk. It also states that he had so little engineering experience that he could not even read building plans or specifications (blueprints), and that he had so little technical experience that he couldn’t judge whether the construction work was done properly or whether the tank was strong enough.)

If I were his lawyer in the six-year trial that followed, I would provide this closing argument to the jury, “We’re here to blame Mr. Arthur Percy Jell for what happened on Boston on January 15, 1919, because his name is all over the paperwork we have for the construction of this storage unit, but Mr. Jell is just a patsy that they decided to push into the klieg lights for us to scorn.” 

Was Arthur Jell nothing more than a patsy who took all the blame, because his name was all over the paperwork? We will never know the answer to this question, because all we have is the paperwork, and the trial that followed the tragedy. Aside from his testimony, Arthur Percy Jell, the man, never gave intimate details of his side of the story. We could speculate that Jell silently went along with all of the defense team’s pre-trial motions, including the motion that the tragedy was a result of anarchist sabotage, until they all failed. When he took the stand, however, Jell testified to the fact that he was hired to manage the construction of the storage unit with no engineering, architectural, or technical training, which proved to be troubling testimony for his bosses at USIA and the defense team. As awful as Jell’s testimony was for USIA and its defense team was, they were devastated by the series of admissions he made about the numerous, systemic shortcuts that were taken in building and testing of the tank. Jell’s testimony was so devastating that USIA’s concerns probably switched from whether or not they would be found liable for the tank’s failure to some form of criminal guilt. A grand jury found the evidence insufficient for manslaughter charges, and the civil case resulted in USIA paying $628,000 ($10-11 million in modern dollars) to settle the 119 separate claims filed against it. So, the higher corporate figures did not escape scrutiny, as Auditor Hugh W. Ogden’s 1925 report assigned liability to the company primarily on structural and construction negligence grounds. Yet, neither Jell, nor any of those deemed the ultimate authority figures of USIA were ever charged criminally. So, we could interpret this to mean that the various jurors, be they grand juries and otherwise, deemed the actions of USIA, in the construction and maintenance of the storage unit, guilty of misfeasance as opposed to malfeasance.  

Those who sit on proverbial juries of history have not been as kind to Arthur Percy Jell as the jury of his peers were. Go to any of the modern websites, videos, and podcasts that cover this story, and Jell is characterized as the greedy man who took shortcuts in safety procedures required to build a storage unit. A deeper look suggests that he was a midlevel manager who was subject to the direction and authority of his superiors. Yet, if we are going to hold Isaac Gonzales accountable for not doing everything we think he should’ve done to prevent this tragedy, we must also hold Arthur Jell accountable for not doing everything he could’ve done to prevent this from happening.

To attempt to historically convict or vindicate Arthur Jell, we might look at what happened to him after this incident and the trial that followed. After the trial, Jell was promoted/transferred to New York, and he decided to keep a low public profile. He later served as a vice president of the American Solvents and Chemical Association (a trade body in the industrial alcohol/solvents field in which USIA and related companies operated). We could use this information to suggest that Jell may have received some form of quid pro quo, payoff, or reward for his favorable testimony. Yet, the promotion and continued employment are consistent with a company man who decided to stay within the industrial alcohol sector after a high-profile liability loss. The problem with the conspiracy related to the quid pro quo idea is that Jell’s testimony proved harmful to USIA, and they knew it would. USIA and its defense team resisted putting Jell on the stand because they knew what answers he would give, presumably through pre-trial depositions, and they knew it would hurt their case. When Auditor Hugh W. Ogden issued his 1925 report’s findings, findings that damned the actions of USIA, Jell’s testimony proved instrumental in that report. So, why would anyone in the industry reward him with a promotion? None of that matters to the various incarnations of the modern historian, as they don’t have the time or space to devote to a deep dive into the 1919 tragedy. “It’s a podcast, not a trial,” they might argue, “and Arthur Percy Jell was the bad guy.” Arthur Jell never tried to publicly rebut these characterizations, as he lived in obscurity from that point forward and died quietly in 1963, at eighty-four-years-old, in Annapolis, Maryland.

A Mean Case of the Giggles

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“Laughter is the best medicine,” is something we say when everyone starts taking things far too seriously. Laughter can cure what ails us, but what happens when there is medicine or cure for laughter? 

“Stop it!” we say when we see someone yawn an infectious yawn. “Stop it!” we say when we hear someone laugh an infectious laugh. What is an infectious laugh? Is it about quantity or quality? We know it when we hear it.  “I love your laugh,” we say when we hear it. A genuine, full-on belly laugh cannot be faked, and when we hear someone who appears to be having one hell of a good time, we want in. 

If we’re the ones who have come down with a case of the giggles, our friends might laugh with us in the beginning, without knowing why. If we keep going, they start giving us looks. “Okay, it wasn’t that funny,” is something they might say to punctuate their confusion. That’s often our cue to stop, but we can’t, and we don’t know why. We can’t even remember why we started laughing in the first place. That’s a mean case of the giggles. 

A mean case of the giggles starts when someone says or does something relatively funny, and relative is the key word, because some funnies aren’t as funny to anyone else but us. “That’s not hysterical?” we ask our other friends. “All right, well I guess you had to be there.” Those funnies have a time-and-place situational element to them.  

“Yeah, be careful with those giggles,” a researcher in Psychiatry and Behavioral Science might caution us. “It is possible, if you don’t get control of yourself, that you could start a Mass Psychogenic Illness (an MPI), or a Mass Sociogenic Illness (MSI).” That warning alone could be so confusing that it might be an excellent cure for a case of the giggles, because what does that mean?

What causes the giggles? I’m not talking about a laugh, because we all have a laugh occasionally, but we can usually source it. A mean case of the giggles is usually irrational, and it often contains a time and place element to it. If it’s deemed inappropriate for us to laugh—let’s say in church, at a funeral, or a wedding—a mean case of the giggles can creep up in us. “Yeah, be careful with that too,” that researcher in Psychiatry and Behavioral Science cautions. “A mean case of the giggles can lead to involuntary complete bladder emptying, called giggle incontinence, or in some extreme cases gelastic seizures that medical researchers link to a benign brain tumor near the hypothalamus that is called a Hypothalamic hamartoma. They can also be caused by lesions in the frontal or parietal lobes, so if you start laughing so uncontrollably that it concerns you, you might want to consider getting yourself checked out by a neurologist.”

Those warnings could be so serious that they could kill our laughter, or they could be so confusing that they ignite it. 

Point-blank, a mean case of the giggles makes no sense, but that’s what makes it funny. Most giggles start out that way—funny, or relatively funny—but very few of us have heard or witnessed something so funny that our authority figures aren’t able to stop us with a stern glare, or a few choice words sent our way.

I’ve been in that situation. “Okay, that’s enough,” my dad said, and it was, but I couldn’t stop. We’ve all been there, but we haven’t had such an uncontrollable case of the giggles that our immediate authority figures had to call the local authorities in. We’ve never had such a mean case of the giggle that those local authority figures decided that our case of the giggles was so infectious and contagious that they should probably close our school, and the surrounding schools, to implement a desperate measure to keep our uncontrollable giggles from spreading any further.

No one knows what triggered it, but on January 30, 1962, three girls from the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), near the border with Uganda, began laughing at something, and they couldn’t stop. We don’t know if the pupils in that class knew what the girls were laughing at and joined in, or if they simply caught the infectious case of the giggles that eventually led to an outbreak of mass hysteria that we now call The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962.

That laughter began spreading to other schools in neighboring villages, notably Nshamba, and other schools after Kashasha closed its doors, roughly three months later, on March 18, 1962. Those schools sent their pupils home too. A second wave of the giggles hit when Kashasha reopened in May, forcing another closure. In total, the whole outbreak affected around 1,000 people (mostly young people, especially girls and young women), and it ended up closing fourteen schools. The school officials and other local leaders eventually managed to isolate it and keep it confined to an area of about 100 miles of the town of Bukoba.

The desperate school and local officials called Doctors A.M. Rankin, P. J. Philip, and others in to investigate. They were able to rule out infections of any sort, toxins, or neurological disease. They interviewed and worked with several victims and found that the symptoms included uncontrollable laughing and crying, restlessness, pain, fainting, and sometimes rashes or breathing difficulty. Some of the victims stated that their mean case of the giggles lasted a few hours, but other more extreme cases involved sufferers being unable to stop laughing for up to sixteen days. By the time they were done interviewing the sufferers, the medical researchers found that the average time for sufferers, in general, was about a week, often characterized by recurrences. The medical community on scene were also surprised to discover that the teaching staff of the schools were generally unaffected.

Historical researchers were also fascinated by this case of mass hysteria and/or mass sociogenic illness. After ruling several factors out, they focused on the time and place, situational element. These girls were pupils in a very strict mission school that focused on providing their students with the best climate for success. This is the goal of just about every school, of course, but the citizens of Tanganyika were experiencing freedom for the first time, as they just gained independence from Britain. Freedom is a great thing, of course, but it can also be a little scary in the beginning for those who have never known it.

“You will now have opportunities we never did,” is probably something the girls of Kashasha heard so often from their parents and the other adults in their sphere of influence that they grew tired of hearing it. They were twelve- to eighteen-year-olds, and they probably felt a lot of pressure to take advantage of the freedoms the previous generation secured for them. Being that young, they probably couldn’t completely grasp the particulars of the change, but their parents could. Their parents and the adults in the community around them informed them that if they studied and succeeded in school, they could be anything they wanted to be. They were probably told that they could provide for the family, save communities, and the country if they learned how to succeed. That could be viewed as a beautiful thing, but it could also be a little overwhelming too.

What happened after one of these girls received a 100% on a very difficult, advanced math test? She studied her tail off for that test, and she just earned the best possible grade she could get. Is that a cause for celebration? Of course it is, and she enjoyed that moment for what it meant, in the moment. We could characterize this an annoying human trait, but the next question we ask someone who accomplishes celebratory achievements is, “Can you do it again?” “Who cares for now?” we want to ask. “Let’s celebrate this for another day.” It doesn’t happen. In the moments after our celebratory achievement, we feel the pressure build, and we can guess that these three girls felt more pressure than we’ve ever known. They probably thought they even though they weren’t capable of doing this long-term. They were thirteen- to eighteen-year-old girls. They were insecure about their ability to succeed beyond her parents’ wildest dreams. Those notions can be beautiful and scary at the same time. The pressure probably built with each new test, until they needed to hit a release valve of some sort.

Again, no one knows what incident triggered their giggles. Seeing how the various officials involved interviewed all of the subjects, they probably focused in on one girl, the girl who started it all. And she didn’t know how or why her mean case of the giggles started either. She probably felt so much pressure that anything could’ve started it. She probably reached a point where she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry due to the pressure she felt. When she and her two friends started giggling, their immediate authority figures probably let it go for a while, until the girls wouldn’t stop. “Ok, that’s enough!” they probably said. At this point, the girls wanted to stop, but they couldn’t. The situation escalated, and their confusing inability to stop followed suit. We’ve all been there to a much lesser level, but when we cannot stop, it’s not always about rebellion. Were the newly independent girls expressing a level of previously unknown freedom by rebelling against their authority figures by laughing harder? We don’t know, but my guess is that “laugh or cry” confusion intensified with the intense calls for them to stop. This relationship between the teachers and the administration’s frustration, in the early stages, probably only made this matter worse. We cannot blame the teachers and the administration, because who witnesses such a thing and thinks, “This could break out into a mass psychogenic illness, mass hysteria, or mass sociogenic illness?”

The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 lasted for eighteen months, but it eventually died out by mid-to-late 1963, and everyone recovered with no lasting physical or neurological effects. The historical record suggests that school closures temporarily interrupted local clusters, but it inadvertently helped the laughter spread by dispersing the affected students. There was no single “end date” or official all-clear—just a quiet subsidence as the social conditions that sustained the contagion eased.

There were no physical or neurological effects, but what about the long-term psychological effects? Imagine being one of the three girls at the center of it all. She started an epidemic that affected 95 of her classmates. She was probably afraid to even start laughing years, and maybe for the rest of her life, based on what happened during her young, formative years.

We’ve all heard someone with infectious laughter say, “You don’t even want to get me started.” Yet when we say infectious or contagious laughter, we’re usually talking about affecting a round bar table of four. These girls set off an outbreak that caused 95 of their school’s pupils to laugh so hard that at least one individual couldn’t stop for sixteen days. Then it spread to other schools in neighboring villages and a 1,000 young girls in total, until it formed a mass psychogenic illness that we still don’t totally understand. (To this day, we have not identified a single biological cause. Scientists generally consider it more of a psychological illness.)

This had to be so confusing and scary to these girls that the next time a family member or friend starts in on a joke, they said, “Stop, don’t, I don’t want to hear it.” It had to be so confusing and scary that they avoided watching situational comedies for the rest of their lives. When they decided to date, “finding someone funny” wasn’t in the top 100 bullet point characteristics they sought in a prospective mate. When they had a selection of books before them, they probably chose sad, tragic dramas, adventure books, and anything and everything but comedies, because they didn’t want to get started.

Laughter is so irrational that it’s often inexplicable. We again go to the “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry” reaction we have to many otherwise confusing situations. If laughter is our go-to, imagine if we had a mean case of the giggles that lasted sixteen days. We might never want to laugh again, and it might be something we fear so much that we spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid hearing or seeing anything and everything that could be funny.

Laughter is the medicine we all need, is something we say when everyone starts taking things too seriously. It can cure what ails us, but what happens when there is no medicine, and no cure, for our laughter?