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By Root 1519 0

about ten times, pulling someone out each time. “I was afraid. I don’t want to die, just like most people,” Bailey says. “Maybe I was stupid.” The smoke started burning his throat, so he began holding his breath on each trip back in. He had a high level of confidence in his lungs. “I was on the swim team in high school,” he explains. “I could swim almost two lengths of the pool without taking a breath.” On one trip, he made it all the way back to the Cabaret Room door. The voices in the blackness, moaning for help, seemed to be coming from all directions. As he groped into the smoke, he realized he was feeling a pile of bodies, jammed in the doorway. His lungs bursting, he grabbed whomever he could find lying on the perimeter of the pile. “I remember pulling one guy by his necktie. That’s the only thing I could get.”

Outside, Bailey decided to recruit more help. Several other men—mostly employees—were already helping, but the number of casualties was overwhelming. Rows of bodies were lined up on the grass. The victims had died from smoke inhalation, not fire, so their bodies looked strangely untouched, lying peacefully in their best dresses and suits. All around, guests who had become separated from their parties were searching for their loved ones, crying out the names of the missing like so many wretched ghosts.

Bailey ran up to the hillside, where several hundred patrons had gathered, and called out: “Can anyone help us? We need some help at that exit!” The guests, who had been comforting one another and staring at the fire, watched him. No one volunteered. They were guests, and guests aren’t generally expected to go back into burning buildings. “I just figured I’d get a bunch of big guys,” he says. “But no. They just looked at me.”

So Bailey ran back to the club alone. Each time he went into the smoke, the voices were quieter. “You could tell people were dying in there. People were breathing heavy. They were reaching out from the pile. I remember thinking, ‘These people are going to grab me, and I’m going to get stuck in here and die.’” On one trip in, Bailey didn’t hear any voices at all. After that, he didn’t go back inside anymore. He wandered around outside, placing napkins over the faces of corpses, before finally getting a ride home, where his mother was sitting in the kitchen waiting in dread for news of her son the busboy.

After the fire, Bailey did a handful of media interviews. But then he withdrew and refused to talk about the fire for decades. Like a lot of survivors, he felt shadowed by guilt. “I’m a perfectionist,” he explains. “It was ripping me apart, having all those people dead. I thought a lot of people had died because I didn’t do a good job.” Thirty years after the fire, he agreed to be interviewed for this book, partly, he says, because so much time had gone by.

The Submissive Crowd

If disasters breed groups, then groups need leaders. In a study of three mine fires published by the U.S. government in 2000, the eight groups that escaped each had a leader. The leaders had some things in common. They did not bully their way into power, but they got respect because they seemed calm and credible. They were, like Bailey, knowledgeable, aware of details, and decisive. They were also open to other opinions; in many of the escape groups, a sort of second lieutenant emerged to help the leader.

But what about the followers? Why did so many people abandon expensive seats in order to follow a teenager in a gold smock? Again, we see the same tendencies in our primate ancestors. Chimpanzees always follow an elaborate hierarchy, with an alpha male on top. When facing an enemy, they become even more militaristic. They have a better chance of surviving if they obey without hesitation, says chimp expert Frans de Waal. A strong leader can make decisions fast, which is what you need in a crisis. “Hierarchy,” says de Waal, “is more efficient than democracy.”

Jim Cline, a retired New York City Fire Department captain, remembers when he discovered the human herd instinct himself. It was a bright Friday afternoon