Ship Wreck
A young woman travels from the nearby suburb of Cicero to the Clark Street Bridge which spans the Chicago River. She unwraps a water-soaked cloth and removes the rose she clipped from one of her rose bushes, caresses the petals, then drops the blossom into the cold, dark water. It is July, 1944, 29 years after her sister and hundreds of others drowned when the ferryboat Eastland capsized. Her story is told in The Rose Keeper, a 2021 historical novel.
https://www.amazon.com/Rose-Keeper-Jennifer-Lamont-Leo/dp/1733705872
For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-rose-keeper/
At 11:45 on July 24, 2024, descendants of the passengers who died on the Eastland gathered along Riverwalk at the corner of Clark Street and Wacker Drive under the Clark Street Bridge for a moment of silence and a ceremony on the 109th anniversary of the tragedy. The ceremony was led by the Eastland Historical Society, founded in 1998 by families of the survivors to create a lasting legacy for those affected by the tragedy—victims, heroes, and survivors. https://eastlanddisaster.org/
The sinking of the Eastland is considered the worst disaster in the history of the city of Chicago and the history of seafaring on the Great Lakes. A total of 844 people lost their lives, more than the 606 who perished in the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903 and the 300 to 400 who died during the great Chicago Fire in 1871. (George W. Hilton: Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic)
The tragedy killed more passengers than the sinking of the Titanic or the Lusitania. Of a total of 1523 lives were lost when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on April, 1912, 829 were passengers. Seven-hundred-eight-five of those who died when the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk on May 7, 1915, were passengers. Nearly all—841--of the people who died when the Eastland steamer sank on the Chicago River were passengers. (Legacy of the Titanic)
State and federal criminal trials seeking to assign blame and recover damages drew in famous names: Clarence Darrow, defence attorney in the landmark Scopes monkey trial as well as the prosecution of the notorious murder-for-sport trial of Leopold and Loeb, defended the Eastland’s chief engineer Joseph Erickson, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later commissioner of baseball, presided.
Yet the wreck of the Eastland has largely faded from memory, perhaps not surprisingly since two others events occurring at roughly the same time command attention—the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of the Lusitania.
Titanic and Lusitania
Both the Titanic and Lusitania were prestige ocean-going vessels that attracted and catered to the wealthy. On board Titanic were American millionaires Benjamin Guggenheim and John Jacob Aster as well as railroad magnate Charles M. Hays. Traveling on the Lusitania were less familiar but no less prominent names—Arthur Henry Adams, president of U. S. Rubber Co., and Anne Shymer, president of U. S. Chemical Co.
And both vessels had high profiles.
The loss of the Titanic was, of course, ironic because it had been called unsinkable. Shipbuilders decried the claim that the company had advertised the ship as unsinkable, blaming the “unsinkable” label on news articles that concluded the ship’s system of watertight compartments and electronically operated doors made the ship “practically unsinkable.” https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-titanic-why-did-people-believe-titanic-was-unsinkable
A publicity brochure produced by the White Star shipping line praised Titanic and sister ship Olympia as “vessels designed to be unsinkable.” The company insisted the ships had been designed to be unsinkable, not that they were. When first informed that the Titanic was in peril, a vice president from the company nevertheless was confident the ship would stay afloat, saying at the time: “We believe the ship is unsinkable.” (The ship sank in little more than two hours.) https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-titanic-why-did-people-believe-titanic-was-unsinkable
The attack on the Lusitania should not have come as a surprise. WW I had been raging across Europe since July, 1914, and German U-boats had been operating in the waters off England since August of that year.
Shipping lines had even been warned. On the day before the ship set sail from New York, the German embassy posted in newspapers: “vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction.” Lusitania nevertheless was considered to be too fast to be targeted by a U-boat commander and safe because it did not carry cargo but was a passenger liner. (It sank in 18 minutes.) https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/germany-gave-a-warning-so-why-was-lusitania-full/article_e8bc224e-d099-5b86-8894-ffb3ce2cb19b.html
https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2016/06/ss-eastland.html
By contrast, Eastland was a modest steamboat that provided round-trip service across Lake Michigan covering a 77-mile route between the ports of Chicago and South Haven, Michigan. It had its own claim to fame: it was known as the Speed Queen of the Great Lakes.
None of its passengers was famous or rich, however; every one of them worked for or was related to a worker for Western Electric Manufacturing, every one of them was on board for the trip across Lake Michigan to the company’s annual picnic in Michigan City, Indiana.
The ship also was considered to be safe. After all, ships had learned a lesson from Titanic—make sure there are enough life boats to accommodate the passenger load. But the added weight of the life boats made Eastland unstable. (It slipped over on its side trapping hundreds of passengers below deck in an hour.)
Sinking
George W. Hilton, author of Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, provides a minute-by-minute account.
Among them:
6:00--passengers being loading, then within six to ten minutes, the ship lists 10 degrees starboard.
6:48—the ship steadies as water is sent to ballast tanks.
6:51—the ship is at even keel.
7:16—the ship lists 10-15 degrees.
7:20—the ship lists to port taking water on the deck.
7:23—the list is so severe, passengers are ordered to move to the starboard side.
7:25—the list eases but resumes two minutes later.
7:28—the ship is listing at 45 degrees and below decks, dishes fall off shelves, a piano and refrigerator slide across the floor, trapping two women underneath.
7:30—the ship settles, its bow is in 20 feet of water, the stern is 37 feet above the water, the hurricane deck is 24 feet below the water line.
Rescue
The first alarm call was sent just as the Eastland was settling, getting police call boats and the Coast Guard alongside the ship within ten minutes. From the streets along the river, sellers in produce and poultry markets threw wooden cases and crates, chicken coops and egg crates into the water so flailing passengers could grab hold of something and keep afloat.
Nearby boats cast off lifeboats and lifelines, some vessels getting close enough for people on deck to climb onboard, and volunteers dove into the river and pulled people to safety. Some rescue efforts were delayed, however, because of fears that the ship’s boiler would explode. For that reason, a fireboat did not approach for more than ten minutes, and police did not climb onto the deck for about 30 minutes.
Bodies continued to be pulled from the wreckage for days, and the dead were laid out in the make-shift morgue at the Second Regiment Armory until the bodies could be identified. The last victim, a seven-year-old boy was identified on July 30. Bearing the tag 396 and a name given by police and morgue attendants—“Little Feller”—the boy was identified by a next door neighbour, another seven-year-old who had just recently attended the boy’s birthday party. Little Feller was Willie Novotny. He and the rest of his immediate family—father, mother, and sister—died on the Eastland. (Jay Bonansinga: The Sinking of the Eastland)
One of the deadliest shipwrecks in American history, the Eastland still is largely forgotten; according to some historians it’s because the ship capsized in only 20 feet of water. According to others, it’s been ignored because, unlike the Titanic and Lusitania, the dead were not among the wealthy class. Still others point to the lengthy legal battles that led to civil and criminal prosecutions that took years to decide in courts miles away from Chicago. (See the next Time Stamp.)
Sources
Jay Bonansiga: The Sinking of the Eastland, Citadel Press, 2004.
George W. Hilton: Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, Stanford University Press, 1995.
https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-titanic-why-did-people-believe-titanic-was-unsinkable