The Eastland Disaster

The Eastland disaster was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in American history. And in this particular case, safety regulations actually made things worse.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We haven't
talked about a shipwreck in a while, Holly, it's been

(00:21):
a bit and they're definitely a listener favorite. So today
we are going to get into the Eastland Disaster, which
is one of the most requested episodes we have not
gotten to yet. We've gotten notes about it from Elaine, Jennifer,
Joe and Susan, Jamie, Sarah, Julia, Eleanor, Jeff Christian and
Courtney and I am sure other people like That is

(00:43):
a partial list of just the last couple of years.
Uh And, since whenever we talk about a disaster afterward
we typically get an influx of requests for another very
similar disaster, the General Slocum is already on the list,
the Sultana is already done. Uh So, the Eastland disaster

(01:06):
was a huge tragedy. It was one of the deadliest
disasters in Chicago history, also one of the deadliest maritime
disasters in American history overall, and a pretty consistent theme
in our disaster episodes is a lack of safety regulations
or maybe safety warnings that were not heated ahead of time,
it could have prevented the tragedy. And while there's definitely

(01:28):
some of that in today's show, we're also going to
talk about some safety regulations that in this case actually
made it worse. Before we talk about what happened on
the Eastland, we actually need to back up for just
a second and talk about the Titanic and the changing
safety standards that followed its sinking, because although there were
other issues at play as well, it was in a

(01:48):
cruel irony an increased number of lifeboats that played a
big part in the Eastland disaster and what maybe the
most famous maritime disaster in history. The Titanic struck an
iceberg during its maiden voyage on April fourteenth of nineteen twelve.
It famously did not have nearly enough lifeboats for everyone
on board, and that lack of lifeboats became the focus

(02:11):
of people's grief and outrage and the aftermath of the disaster.
It sparked the Boats for All movement that demanded that
ships have enough lifeboats or life rafts to accommodate every
single person on board. This outrage while completely understandable, was
a little bit misplaced. A number of factors, including the
speed and maneuverability of the ship itself, contributed to the

(02:34):
Titanic disaster, but the lack of lifeboats was fairly far
down on the list. While it is absolutely true that
the Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all of
its passengers by a wide margin, it did have far
more than were actually required at the time, and that
requirement was based on the simultaneously pragmatic and pessimistic idea

(02:55):
that in the event of a disaster massive enough to
sink a ship, it was extremely unlikely that every passenger
could successfully even get to a lifeboat. The recommended number
of lifeboats when the Titanic set sail was part of
a pretty grim equation. Some of the factors in this
equation how long would it take to determine that the

(03:16):
ship was likely to sink and give the order to evacuate,
ready the lifeboats, and then deploy them in such an event,
How many passengers and crew were likely to already be
dead before that order even came. How long would it
take the ship to list far enough to one side
that it would become impossible to deploy some or all
of the lifeboats, how quickly could civilian passengers reasonably be

(03:39):
expected to evacuate, And importantly, how many lifeboats did a
ship have room to safely carry. In the case of
the Titanic, the ship had enough lifeboats based to accommodate
one thousand, one seventy eight people, which, as we said,
was far fewer than the number of people aboard on
its first voyage, but only seven hundred and five survived,

(04:01):
leaving nearly five hundred available lifeboat spaces unfilled. And this
is because most of the lifeboats weren't anywhere close to
full when they actually launched. A lot of reasons have
been given for the partially full lifeboats, and they all
really boiled down to fear. Crew were afraid that completely
full lifeboats would break the lowering mechanisms. Both passengers and

(04:25):
crew were afraid that overcrowding would swamp the boats, and
that fear was behind everything from barring the gates to
the lower decks so that the people in steerage couldn't
get out, to refusing to row back to the ship
to pull survivors out of the water. Based on this
passenger and crew behavior, the Titanic really would have needed
half again as many lifeboats as passengers to actually rescue

(04:49):
everyone on board, not just one lifeboat space per person.
But the idea that more people would have survived if
only there had been enough lifeboats was far more immediate
and compelling than whether the ship had adequate rivets or
sophisticated enough steering and navigation system. Also, knowing that you
would definitely have a space reserved for you on a

(05:10):
lifeboat gave the illusion of safety should something terrible occur
while traveling by water. It was like a century old
version of security theater. The post Titanic call for more
lifeboats wasn't just limited to passions or outcry, though we
are definitely not saying that lifeboats are bad, and there

(05:30):
were professional people also recommending more lifeboats. A conference was
convened in London in the fall of nineteen thirteens who
outline international recommendations for safety in maritime vessels, in part
to prevent another Titanic like disaster. The result was the
First International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea,

(05:51):
or SOULIS, which was signed in London on January nineteen fourteen.
Article forty of the convention began quote, at no moment
of its voyage, may a ship have on board a
total number of persons greater than that for whom accommodation
is provided in the lifeboats and the pontoon life rafts
on board. Article fifty four also designated a minimum total

(06:15):
number of certified lifeboatmen crew who were trained in all
the operations related to launching and handling lifeboats. So this
convention did leave room for individual nations to designate exemptions
to this rule, but overall it meant that one lifeboat
space needed to be available per person and that the
crew needed to be trained, just for example, not to

(06:38):
launch the lifeboats when they were only half full. Because
of World War One, many of the nations that had
participated in all of this didn't ratify the treaty, and
they put off implementing some or all of the recommendations
that had come out of the conference. But these recommendations
did influence other legislation in the United States. This was
the Siemens Act, signed by Woodrow Wilson on March fourth, nineteen.

(07:02):
The Semens Act was largely the result of lobbying on
behalf of the International Semens Union of America, and many
of its provisions were really about labor practices and workplace
safety as they related to sailors themselves. They were things
like collective bargaining rights and better living quarters on board
the ships. But because of the ongoing fewer about the

(07:24):
lack of lifeboats on the Titanic, safety regulations for passengers,
including lifeboat counts, were looped into this as well. So,
as often happens, the thing that had become the big
political hot button got looped into something that was originally
related to something else. So nearly half of this act
related to lifeboats in some way, although the final rule

(07:47):
was for lifeboats to cover seventy five of the passengers
rather than all of them. The Semens Act was also
signed in between two other maritime disasters that demonstrate how
lifeboats for all doesn't necessarily mean more lives saved. Both
the Empress of Ireland, which sank on May twenty ninth,
nineteen fourteen after colliding with a collier, and the Lusitania,

(08:10):
which sank on May seventh, nineteen fifteen after being torpedoed
by a German submarine, had far more lifeboat spaces than
people aboard. Both sank in under twenty minutes. Four hundred
and sixty five out of one thousand, four hundred seventy
seven people survived the Empress of Ireland sinking, and seven
hundred and sixty one of one thousand, nine hundred and

(08:32):
fifty nine people survived the Lusitania. So while today it's
definitely standard on a lot of large ships to have
a lifeboat space for everyone, these were examples of Now
that doesn't necessarily mean that you can get to want
to get off the boat safely. Also, the Siemens Act
encountered heavy resistance from ship operators who argued that its
terms were expensive and in some cases unsafe, and would

(08:54):
put them out of business. And not long after it
went into effect, the S S. East Land would actually
prove that some of these criticisms were at least in
part correct, and we will talk about exactly how after
a quick sponsor break. The S. S. Eastland, which was

(09:15):
nicknamed the speed Queen of the Great Lakes and the
Greyhound of the Lakes, was built in nineteen o two.
Its original purpose was to carry passengers from Chicago across
the lake to Michigan and then return with produce to
sell in Chicago markets. The two hundred and sixty five
ft eight one steamer was built by Jank Shipbuilding Company
and it launched on May six, o three. It had

(09:37):
an original capacity of two thousand passengers, with sleeping accommodations
for five hundred of those. There's at least one article
floating around that its original capacity was three hundred passengers,
but that seems to be an outlier and not accurate. Yeah,
it definitely had some retro fitting to carry more passengers,
but I could not find confirmation that the original passenger

(09:58):
count was that low. The Eastland's gangways were relatively low
and many of its interior doors were not watertight, which
meant that it had the potential to take on water
if it listed very far to one side and those
gangways wound up dipping under the water surface. Exactly how
far it could list without capsizing, which is a concept

(10:21):
known as its mediciner, wasn't ever measured before it was
put into passenger service. But in spite of these potential
travel spots, at first, that Eastland didn't seem to have
any major problems with stability. Like all Great Lakes ships,
though the Eastland had a much shallower draft than an
ocean liner would. It was constructed with a series of

(10:42):
ballast tanks which could be emptied or filled based on
how deeply in the water the ship needed to ride
or to compensate for an unbalanced load, and these tanks
weren't metered, though, so it was up to the skill
and experience of the crew to estimate how full they
were versus howful they needed to be. Although it didn't
originally seem to have problems with stability, at least not

(11:03):
major ones, the Eastland also wasn't quite fast enough to
reasonably do what its owners wanted it to do, which
was to make two round trips a day, so soon
it underwent modifications to increase its passenger capacity try to
make it a little faster to make it more profitable.
It began to have problems almost immediately after the retrofitting.

(11:25):
On July seventeenth of nineteen o four, it nearly capsized.
It went into a serious list on August five of
nineteen o six. By the time it was sold to St.
Joseph Chicago Steamship Company in nineteen fourteen, it had a
reputation for being less than stable, and that was before
the Siemens Act and its lifeboat regulations and testimony after

(11:46):
the disaster, one of the people in the company who
had bought it was like, Yeah, I didn't actually know
much about the ship, but we did get it for
really cheap. During the negotiation of the Siemens Act, Detroit
and Cleveland Navigation Company General man your A. A. Shots
had pointed out that all these additional lifeboats and rafts
were going to add a lot of weight, specifically a

(12:07):
lot of weight to the upper decks of a ship.
Like a lifeboat is not going to do anybody any
good if it's stored weight down in the hold where
you can't get to it. When it came to Great
Lakes vessels, which already tended to be more top heavy
and shallower in the draft than an ocean liner, they
would quote turn turtle if you added that much weight
to their upper decks. He and others had advocated for

(12:28):
exceptions or adjusted guidelines for the Great Lakes passenger ships,
but this advice didn't make it into the final bill. Untily,
twod N the Eastland got its new supply of lifeboats
and equipment to bring it up to the standards outlined
in the Seamen's Act. It's number of lifeboats increased from
six to eleven. It also had thirty seven life rafts

(12:51):
and enough life jackets to fit a sold out passenger
load plus all of its crew that was about two thousand,
five hundred and seventy people. All of this additional gear
weighed somewhere between fourteen and fifteen tons, and it was
almost all stored in the upper decks, making an already
unbalanced chip even more top heavy. On July fifteen, the

(13:12):
Eastland was to make its first fully loaded crossing of
Lake Michigan after receiving all this additional equipment. It had
not been tested to see how it might maneuver under
all of this additional weight, and the safety inspections that
had received over the years had all taken place while
the ship was under way, not while it was docked.
That Saturday morning, the Eastland was one of five ships

(13:34):
chartered by Western Electric to carry its employees thirty eight
miles across Lake Michigan for a day long picnic at
Washington Park in Michigan City, Indiana. This picnic had become
an annual and much anticipated tradition among the company's factory workers.
These employees normally worked six day weeks, so this was
an extra day off, and for the many who were

(13:55):
young and unmarried, it was a good opportunity to socialize
and to meet other eligible people. The nineteen fifteen picnic
was to be the fifth one, and about seven thousand
people had bought tickets for the passage across the lake.
Encouraged to arrive early, passengers began arriving at the dock
at Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River at about
six thirty in the morning. Federal inspectors kept count of

(14:19):
how many boarded the Eastland, which was the first of
the five ships scheduled to depart. Because it was raining,
many of the passengers, especially women and children, went below
decks to stay out of the wet. The Eastland was
oriented so that it's starboard, or right side, was closest
to the wharf where people were boarding. About ten minutes
into loading passengers, the Eastland began to list to the starboard,

(14:42):
probably because the added weight of the people on that
side of the upper deck. The crew began adding water
to the ballast tanks to try to write the ship,
and it did briefly become level again, but soon it
started to tip in the other direction. Towards port. People
continued to board as the crew continued to adjust. They
are in the ballast tanks to try to study the ship.

(15:02):
At seven ten in the morning, the ship reached its
capacity of passengers and the crew began trying to more
evenly disperse the crowd. With the list to port becoming
even more pronounced, the crew opened the valves to two
starboard ballast tanks, although they didn't begin filling for several minutes.
At seven twenty, with the ship momentarily righted, the crew

(15:23):
brought in the gangway and started making preparations to depart.
They continued trying to distribute the passenger load more evenly,
but at this point the upper decks were soaked with
rain and the ship was swaying back and forth, so
this proved to be really difficult. The deck was too
slick to really walk on well, and a lot of
people either didn't want to move or they couldn't. At

(15:45):
seven seven, the Eastland began to list dramatically. The port
side gangways dipped below the surface, causing the ship to
take on water, and the crew began trying to scramble
out of the engine room as it started to submerge.
At seven eight the ship listed a terrifying forty five degrees. Dishes, furniture,

(16:05):
a piano, and a refrigerator in the ship all started
to slide towards port, in some cases crushing passengers or
trapping them against walls. Passengers and crew who had made
it to the ship's upper decks started leaping onto the wharf.
By seven thirty, the Eastland was completely on its side
next to the dock in about twenty ft that's approximately

(16:26):
six meters of water. This capsize had happened so quickly
that none of the newly added lifeboats or life jackets
had been deployed. We're going to talk more about the
disaster and the response to it after we first paused
for a little sponsor break. The area around the Eastland

(16:47):
was extremely busy on the day it capsized, with at
least two other ships that were bound for the Western
Electric Picnic in the process of boarding their passengers, so
a huge number of people were already on hand to
try to help at the rescue. This was both a
help and a hindrance, since the wharf quickly became too
crowded for people to effectively maneuver. Some of those who

(17:08):
managed to scramble up onto the now horizontal starboard side
of the ship were able to jump to the wharf
to safety. Captain John o'marra was at the helm of
the tug Kenosha, which had been scheduled to tow the
Eastland down the Chicago River to Lake Michigan. After it
cap sized, he ordered the tug to be secured to
the wharf to be used as a bridge to the Eastland.

(17:30):
Many of those on the upper deck had not been
able to climb to safety, though the ship tipped quickly
enough that a lot of them were thrown into the
water bystanders began throwing anything that might float into the
water to try to give survivors something to cling to.
A lot of people at that time just didn't know
how to swim, so people from the docks started throwing

(17:50):
boards and oars and crates and other things that were
mostly made of wood. Some of this debris, though, hit
the very people they were trying to help, locking them
unconscious and causing them to drown. Tugs and other small
boats on the scene also became part of this rescue.
Bridge tender Lawrence Frank Northrop, witnessing the cap size, got
in a lifeboat and road to the scene, where he

(18:12):
was able to pull twenty three people to safety. People
were still alive inside the half submerged Eastland at this point,
and some of them were badly injured. Welders cut through
the exposed hull of the ship so that they could
pull out as many people as possible, and then from
there the same holes were used to accommodate divers to
try to pull bodies out from the submerged parts of

(18:33):
the ship. Multiple accounts of the day reference horrible, deafening
screaming both as the boat capsized and afterward. Helen Reppa,
Western Electric nurse, was on her way to the dock
when the Eastland capsized, and she became a huge part
of the rescue effort, sending people to nearby businesses for
blankets and soup, flagging down passing cars to carry people

(18:56):
who were either uninjured or only had scrapes and bruises
so that they could at home. There weren't enough available ambulances,
so American Express loaned its trucks for the purpose. Later on,
there would not be enough horses to accommodate all the funerals,
so Marshall Field and Company, better known as Marshall Fields,
donated the use of its trucks for the purpose. By

(19:17):
eight am, only half an hour after the ship capsized,
nearly all of the survivors had been rescued, but the
efforts to bring up the bodies of those who were
killed took hours, especially from the submerged portside cabins. At
least eight hundred forty four people died. It's the official count,
but as we're gonna talk about in about some of that,

(19:39):
it's a little hard to pin down. Most of them
were factory workers. Twenty two entire families were killed. Seventy
of the victims were under the age of Because there
were five boats chartered for this picnic, there was no
passenger manifest and no easy way to determine exactly who

(19:59):
had been on board. Word The Second Regiment Armory was
used as a temporary morgue, with bodies laid out in
rows of eighty five families were admitted to try to
find their loved ones at around midnight on the twenty five. Unfortunately,
they were also looky lose and thieves who came along
as well with some of the victim's personal belongings. Stolen

(20:19):
from the bodies. Nearly seven hundred funerals took place on
July nineteen fifteen. By July twenty nine, all but one
of the bodies had been claimed. The last one left
was a little boy who had been nicknamed Little Feller.
He was eventually sent to a funeral home where two
children identified him as their friend, willing of Botany. His

(20:40):
body hadn't been claimed because his parents and his sister
had also been killed. His grandmother eventually made the identification
based on his pants, which were part of the new
suit that he had worn to the picnic. When he
and the rest of his family were buried on July one,
more than five thousand people attended the funeral. This whole

(21:00):
incident was devastating on so many levels, with hundreds of
Western Electric employees losing coworkers and neighborhoods where those employees
lived struck with a huge loss of life. Many of
those who were killed were immigrants from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland,
which meant that the neighborhoods were these families were clustered
were hit particularly hard. In addition to providing aid at

(21:22):
the scene, the American Red Cross Churches and civic organizations
helped families to make funeral arrangements. About a hundred nurses
from the Chicago Department of Health visited more than five
hundred families afterward to look for and treat signs of
health problems from having been submerged in the Chicago River,
which was both very dirty and very cold. Immediately after

(21:45):
the incident, Eastland Captain Harry Peterson, Chief Engineer Joseph Ericsson,
and other members of the crew were taken into custody
in part to protect them from people who were distraught
or outraged in the wake of the disaster. Because the
incident happened on a navigable waterway at a city wharf,
different aspects of it fell under federal, state, city, and

(22:06):
county jurisdictions. There were seven separate inquiries and twenty four
years of litigation, including federal proceedings that were overseen by
Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who would later become famous as the
first Commissioner of Baseball after the Black Sox scandal. Taking
most of the blame at the time was Chief Engineer Ericsson,
because he would have been the person giving the orders

(22:29):
about how to handle the ballast tanks. He was represented
by Clarence Darrow, who has come up on the show
a lot lately. But Ericsson died of heart disease in
nineteen nineteen before the investigations and legal proceedings concluded. Indictments
for manslaughter were handed down for several of the officers
in the company that owned the ship, as well as

(22:50):
the captain and chief engineer. Charges of fraud were brought
against government inspectors as well, which were eventually changed to
a charge of conspiracy to operate an unsafe ship. The
manslaughter charges were ultimately dropped in February of nineteen sixteen.
Judge Clarance Sessions of the District Court of Grand Rapids, Michigan,
delivered a verdict of not guilty in the conspiracy charge

(23:12):
because there was no probable cause a civil suit and
the wrongful deaths of the Eastland's passengers dragged on until
nineteen thirty three. It's terms limited the payout to the
value of the Eastlands salvage sale, which was fifty thousand dollars,
but deducted from that total was the thirty five thousand

(23:32):
dollars it cost to raise the wrecked Eastland from the river,
so virtually no compensation was ever paid to any of
the victims families. Even though Ericson's management of the ballast
tanks became a scapegoat of the disaster, the addition of
the lifeboats was already noted as a problem. In nineteen fifteen,
in an article called Problems Growing out of the Titanic Disaster,

(23:55):
Thomas I. Parkinson wrote, quote, the Eastland turned turtle at
her off in Chicago. It has even been suggested that
her lifeboat equipment tended to make the boat top heavy.
Parkinson then went on to criticize the overall trend of
basing new safety regulations on the latest tragedy rather than
taking a holistic approach, saying quote, Following the burning of

(24:18):
the Slocum, there was agitation for more careful inspection and
a better supply of life belts. Following the Titanic, the
need of better lifeboat equipment was emphasized, and now following
the Eastland, it is reported that the Department of Commerce
has framed a bill to give the federal government control
of the construction of vessels of more than one hundred tons.

(24:40):
This activity to remedy specific defects immediately after each accident
tends to prove, as in the law of negligence, that
the failure to act prior to accident involves some lack
of care. The gradual patching of our laws may ultimately
make them more satisfactory than they are now, but we

(25:00):
cannot hope to avoid disasters on the water until our
rules and regulations, and the laws on which they are based,
are revised to meet modern developments in the building and
operation of ships. After careful study of the whole problem
in all its many ramifications, the Eastland was raised from

(25:21):
the riverbed on August fourteenth, nineteen fifteen, and sold to
the U. S. Navy on November twenty one of nineteen seventeen.
It was re outfitted and operated as the U. S.
S will Met until nineteen. It was sold for scrap
on October thirty one, nineteen forty six. As a total
side note, the armory that was the temporary morgue after

(25:43):
the disaster, used to be home to Oprah winfreyes Harpo Studios,
UH has since been torn down to make room for
McDonald's new headquarters, with many reports that it was quite
haunted because of having been home to all of those
bodies that was my next question. Uh, yeah, I have
a haunting legacy story. Yeah, so this is we we

(26:06):
very frequently talked about disasters that they happened, and then
afterward new legislation was passed to prevent that same disaster
from happening again. I think this is the only time
that we've told a story where a disaster had happened
and new laws were passed, and then those laws turned
out to have unintended negative consequences. Yeah. Yeah, like when

(26:27):
we talk about theater fires, like the need for clear
egress for everyone has not caused, to the best of
my knowledge, similar issues other safety regulations that have arisen
from disasters. I can't think of a one that's had
sort of this impact that did not go the way
that they were hoping. It is very interesting to me
that in nineteen fifteen, at least one person was already saying,

(26:52):
we need to look at this whole problem and figure
out the best way to approach it, rather than having
this p smeal response to each disaster, which I think
it's in some industries, that is a pattern that still
exists today. I'm thinking about every time I go to
the airport, uh, and they're like, there are a series

(27:17):
of steps that you have to take up to board
an airplane that are based on either a prior incident
or a prior threat rather than a systemic review of
the whole security picture to make a recommendation. Yeah, do
you have a listener? Mail? That's hopefully a hair morn
chipper more chipper. Uh. It is also pretty short because

(27:38):
I felt like this episode was a little longer and
weightier than is often the case. This is from Curtis,
who also sent lots of topic suggestions and also a
note that Lake Erie is still quite dirty in spite
of years of clean up, which is definitely true, and
Curtis says, I am from one of the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio,

(27:58):
and regularly dry. I've over and hang out by the river.
There's been a large part of my whole life, and
my family has been here for generations on my mom's side,
so naturally I was excited to listen to your episode,
and let me tell you, it was an emotional experience
for me. I never realized that the fire was partially
or indirectly the reason for our poor image. The sense

(28:20):
of shame has always weighed on me, and gaining a
handle on how it came about actually brought me to tears.
I really appreciated your treatment of it. We were very kind.
Cleveland is actually a really lovely place in some areas,
although we do, of course, as you said, have our problems,
So thank you. I just want to say thanks, Curtis. Yeah.
I often when we do an episode that is in

(28:43):
some way critical of a place that we don't live,
I I am hopeful that people who live there are
not going to be personally hurt by what we have said.
So it was very nice to hear from someone local
that that was not the case. So thank you so much, Curtis.
If you would like to write to us about this
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(29:04):
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(29:26):
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(29:53):
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