The Daily History Chronicle

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam collapsed above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing 2,209 people in one of the deadliest disasters in American history. The dam was privately owned by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and other Gilded Age industrialists who had modified it for a private fishing retreat and ignored a written engineering warning filed nine years before it failed. When the lawsuits came, the courts called it an act of God. Not one dollar of compensation was ever awarded. This episode asks what it means when the law is built to protect property, and the people who paid with their lives had no property to protect.