Chicago’s Disaster in Slow Motion—The Eastland Rolls Over

A stunned and grief stricken Chicago firefighter holds the body of a drown child.

It was a drizzling, cool morning in Chicago.  A wispy haze, not quite a fog, waited for the July sun to burn it off and reveal the blue, calm waters of Lake Michigan ahead.  Yet there was an air of almost giddy festivity as thousands came down to the slips along the Chicago River where a procession of excursion steamers were tied up and awaiting their arrival.  They came in their best summer clothes, whole families of them—Mothers in shirt waists, long flowing skirts, gleaming new shoes buttoned to a fare-thee-well over the ankles, and fine big hats almost as elegant as the grand dames who paraded down Michigan Avenue; hulking Fathers in too-tight suits and celluloid collars that bit into their thick necks, new straw skimmers clinging to their heads; daughters in pinafores with shiny ribbons in their cascading ringlets,  fine young lads in their knickers already eyeing opportunities for mischief.  They gaily babbled in half a dozen languages—English, of course, but Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, too—as they filed up the gangplanks onto the ships.

It was a big day in all of their lives.  They were off on a rare holiday, a single day out of a year of drabness and drudgery at the mammoth Western Electric Hawthorne complex in Cicero, just across the way from Chicago where most of the nation’s telephone and telegraph equipment was manufactured.  They would sail over the cool waters of the Lake that morning and dock at Michigan City, Indiana for a picnic and a day on the beaches with games and competitions, dances in pavilions, and plenty of cold beer for the grown-ups and ice cream for the kids for relief from the heat.  And that evening they would sail back, approaching Chicago in the gloaming as the city’s dazzling lights out shown the emerging stars.  They would clamor off the ships, sunburned and exhausted, carrying their children.  They would climb on board street cars or the L and make their way back to their cold water flats and rooming houses.  Or that was the plan. 

The SS Eastland was the largest and finest of the excursion ships lined up that day.  Its enticing brochure called her the Speed Queen of the Great Lakes.  She had been built in 1902 by the Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron, Michigan.  The 1,961 ton ship was 265 feet long, 28 ft. wide at the beam, and 19 ft. 6 inches when loaded.    She had gone through four owners, but had successfully plied the waters of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie for 13 years. 

The Eastland on a better day sails from her Chicago River dock under the State Street Bridge on the way to the open waters of Lake Michigan in a vintage 1908 postcard.

But she was known to be top heavy at least three times she had listed with a full passenger load to the point of beginning to take water, but each time the crew had managed to right her.  Officials did reduce her passenger capacity as a precaution.  The current owner and operator, the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company of St. Joseph, Michigan, was aware of the problem but believed that the crew had been adequately trained to deal with listing by adjusting ballast.

That early morning of Saturday, July 24, 1915 the Eastland was tied up in the river between Clark and LaSalle Streets.   More than 7000 tickets had been purchased for the excursion and by about 7:10 am the ship had reached its official capacity 2,752 passengers.  Many headed below to get out of the drizzle.  Many others excitedly jammed the open upper decks, hoping to watch the cast off and view the short trip down the river to the lake. 

A lot of those crowed the port side, away from the dock for a better view of the river.  Shortly, the ship began to list and the crew began shifting ballast.  Perhaps they were not fast enough, perhaps the tipping point was reached before the bilge pumps could do their work.  Original reports had it that there was a sudden rush of passengers to the port side after 7:25.  In fact what probably happened was that the list had become so pronounced that the passengers slipped toward the port rail.  At 7:20 the ship lurched softly and then began a slow roll until it was lying on its side and rapidly taking water below.  It quickly sank to the muddy bottom of the river, a depth of only 20 feet.  Half the ship lay exposed above water on its side.

There were many witnesses, including reporters from the newspapers, several of which had offices nearby.  Jack Woodford, a reporter for the Hearst owned Chicago Examiner, recalled in his autobiography:

…And then movement caught my eye. I looked across the river. As I watched in disoriented stupefaction a steamer large as an ocean liner slowly turned over on its side as though it were a whale going to take a nap. I didn’t believe a huge steamer had done this before my eyes, lashed to a dock, in perfectly calm water, in excellent weather, with no explosion, no fire, nothing. I thought I had gone crazy.

With hundreds of witnesses and in the heart of a busy city, help was on hand almost immediately.  The nearby ship Kenosha immediately pulled alongside and began to take on scores of passengers who scrambled from the decks to the side of the ship.  Lines were thrown to victims in the water from the ship and from shore.

Survivors and rescuers mingle on the side of the ship minutes after it rolled.

Police and Firefighters arrived on the scene in minutes and began frantic rescue efforts aided by many civilian volunteers.  They were supplemented by members of the Fire Insurance Patrol, coast guard, hard-hat divers, and heavy equipment operators.  Hundreds were rescued.  But before an hour was up official realized that it was too late for many, although a very few were rescued from air pockets on board when holes were cut in the hull.

Many of the dead were trapped below when the ship rolled and rapidly took water.  Some were crushed as heavy furnishing, appointments, and equipment tumbled on top of them.  Few of those who were thrown in the water could swim and women in particularly were weighed down by their voluminous skirts and heavy shoes.  Some were crushed between  the capsized ship and rescue boats bobbing in the water. 

In the end the bodies of 844 passengers and four crew members were taken near-by makeshift morgues then later consolidated at the Illinois National Guard 2nd Regiment Armory where they were laid out in neat rows for identification.  In gut wrenching scenes still wet survivors paced up and down the lines searching for loved ones from whom they had become separated.  Too often, they found them.  After a day or so and the opportunity of loved ones not on the ship to join in viewing the bodies, the vast majority were identified, although a handful never would be.  More than 280, most Czech immigrants, came from the village of Cicero in the immediate neighborhood of the Hawthorne plant.

Family members search for loved one laid out in a makeshift morgue at the 2nd Regiment Arsenal nearby.

The disaster, which is recognized as the greatest maritime loss of life on the Great Lakes despite having occurred in the River, dominated headlines for months with recriminations and charges flying.  A Federal investigation made one important, if ironic discovery.   Newly enacted legislation adopted in response to the sinking of the SS Titanic in 1912, required that the Eastland carry a full complement of life boats, which were dutifully hung around the upper decks.  But the heavy wooden boats further destabilized the already top-heavy ship and probably contributed to the roll.  None of the lifeboats could be launched to save passengers in the water because they were either caught below the hull or left high and dry on the exposed side.

At least 22 whole families perished and some of the unidentified bodies may have belonged to family units. 

A Cook County Grand Jury indicted three officers of the steamship company, the captain and executive officer.  All of the men refused to be voluntarily extradited from their homes in Michigan.  Clarence Darrow represented the men in extradition hearings.  He must have done a hell of a good job because the judge found that there was “barely a scintilla of proof” to establish probable cause to find the men guilty.

No civil action was ever successfully brought against any party by survivors or heirs meaning that they never received any damage payments for their losses.  A few families had life insurance—basically burial policies from ethnic benevolent societies—but most did not.  Although they sponsored the outing, Western Electric assumed no responsibility to its employees. Newspapers, churches, and fraternal orders raised money for burial services and some medical bills of survivors. 

The Eastland was re-floated and salvaged and became the Navy's U.S.S. Wilmette, a gun boat and training vessel in service on the Great Lakes until 1947.

As for the Eastland, the ship was re-floated and repaired.  Her association with the disaster, however, was too great for her ever to be returned to passenger service.  She was sold to the Navy which converted her to a gunboat and Training ship for Naval Reserve sailors based out of Great Lakes Naval Station.  She was re-christened the USS Wilmette.  During World War II she was used to train Navy armed guards that were to be stationed on Merchant Marine vessels during convoy operations.  She also took President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Admiral William D. Leahy, James F. Byrnes, and Harry Hopkins on a 10-day cruise to McGregor and Whitefish Bay to plan war strategies. 

In 1947 the Wilmette was decommissioned for the final time.  The next year she was sold and cut up for scrap.

Among the many reporters who covered the disaster was a young Carl Sandburg who was deeply moved by the event and the circus-like coverage it received.  In the pages of his employer’s paper, Sandburg had to be restrained.  But the militant Socialist and former Party organizer in Milwaukee found room to vent in the pages of the International Socialist Review.

He saw the Eastland disaster not as an accident or aberration but part and parcel with the day to day privation, injury, and death faced by the working class.  He held no punches in this powerful poem.

As a young reporter Carl Sandburg covered the disaster.  As a poet and a Socialist, he saw the disaster as part of a larger catastrophe suffered by the working class.

The Eastland

Let’s be honest now

For a couple of minutes

Even though we’re in Chicago.

Since you ask me about it,

I let you have it straight;

My guts ain’t ticklish about the Eastland.

It was a hell of a job, of course

To dump 2,500 people in their clean picnic clothes

All ready for a whole lot of real fun

Down into the dirty Chicago river without any warning.

Women and kids, wet hair and scared faces,

The coroner hauling truckloads of the dripping dead

To the Second Regiment armory where doctors waited

With useless pulmotors and the eight hundred motionless stiff

Lay ready for their relatives to pick them out on the floor

And take them home and call up the undertaker. . .

Well I was saying

My guts ain’t ticklish about it.

I got imagination: I see a pile of three thousand dead people

Killed by the con, tuberculosis, too much work

and not enough fresh air and green groceries . . .

A lot of cheap roughnecks and the women and children of wops,

and hardly any bankers and corporation lawyers or their kids,

die from the con three thousand a year in Chicago

and a hundred and fifty thousand a year in the United States

all from the con and not enough fresh air and green groceries...

If you want to see excitement, more noise and crying than you ever heard

in one of these big disasters the newsboys clean up on,

Go and stack in a high pile all the babies that die in Christian Philadelphia,

New York, Boston, and Chicago in one year

before aforesaid babies haven’t had enough good milk;

On top the pile put all the little early babies pulled from mothers

willing to be torn with abortions

rather than bring more children into the world—

Jesus, that would make a front page picture for the Sunday papers

And you could write under it:

Morning glories

Born from the soil of love,

Yet now perished.

Have you ever stood and watched the kids going to work of a morning?

White faces, skinny legs and arms, slouching along

rubbing the sleep out of their eyes on the go to hold their jobs?

Can you imagine a procession of all the whores of a big town,

marching and marching with painted faces and mocking struts,

all the women who sleep in faded hotels and furnished rooms

with any man coming along with a dollar or five dollars?

Or all the structural iron workers, railroad men and factory hands

in mass formation with stubs of arms and stumps of legs,

bodies broken and hacked while bosses yelled,

“Speed-no slack-go to it!”?

Or two by two all the girls and women

who go to the hind doors of restaurants

and through the alleys and on the market street

digging into the garbage barrels

to get scraps of stuff to eat?

By the living Christ, these would make disaster pictures to paste on

the front pages of the newspapers.

Yes, the Eastland was a dirty bloody job—bah!

I see a dozen Eastlands

Every morning on my way to work

And a dozen more going home at night.

—Carl  Sandburg

1915

1995 Chicago Heat Wave—Victims of Racism and Late Casualties of the ’68 Democratic Convention Protests

1995 headlines tell the shocking story of the heat wave disaster that hit Chicago in July.

My Columbia College writing teacher John Schulz penned one of the earliest and best accounts of the demonstrations and street confrontations around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  He called it No One Was Killed.  Perhaps he was premature in that judgement by 27 years.

It has been a much hotter than usual summer and another blast of steamy heat is expected Friday and over the weekend.  That and the 25th anniversary have caused the Chicago media to recall July of 1995 when more than 700 people died as the city baked in temperatures that hovered around 100° complete with grainy but graphic archival footage of Chicagoans sweltering and the inconvenient bodies piled up in refrigerator trailers at the overwhelmed Cook County Medical Examiner’s offices and buried unceremoniously in slit trenches.

There had been other notable heatwaves in the city, especially in the mid-1930’s when the city was struck with the same blasting heat that created the Dust Bowl.  But none produced anything like the same mortality rates.  Several factors including humidity levels, a heat inversion that trapped polluted air over the city, and frequent spot power outages and brownouts contributed to the toll.  So did the city’s deeply ingrained racism. 

By 1995 many Chicagoans enjoyed air conditioning.  But not so much in the city’s poorest wards and neighborhoods.  Massive high-rise public housing developments like Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side and Cabrini Green on the Near North Side as well as Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) mid-rise senior buildings were un-air-conditioned.  And unlike the city’s traditional housing stock of two and three flats, court yard apartments, brick bungalows and other single-family homes, those buildings did not have good cross ventilation to cool them at nights.  Instead they were virtual brick ovens that retained the day’s suffocating heat.

There are many easily found press photos of the heat wave like this one of paramedics loading an elderly victim into an ambulance.  But almost none show Black victims.  Back then newspapers and television seldom covered news in the Black community unless there was a riot.  That included Black murder and other crime victims or positive community news.  Systematic racism erased Blacks from the colective memory of the disaster for years.

Even when public housing residents or other poor folks could install window air-conditioning units, many could not afford to run them due to the high cost of electricity.  Some were even reluctant to use fans.  Moreover and aggressive campaign by Commonwealth Edison to disconnect power to those with outstanding electric bills who they were barred by law from stopping service to during freezing winter months, left many poor folks in the stifling dark.  In addition, during the heart of the five day heat wave that year record electrical usage sparked wide-spread spot power outages and brown-outs.

Many residents in high crime areas were afraid to leave their windows open at night.

As the oppressive heat and high humidity settled over the city, trapped smog became a further health hazard for the elderly and those with respiratory ailments. 

The city government was slow to respond to the growing emergency even as bodies began piling up at the morgue.  The city did not declare a heat emergency and open cooling centers until the fourth day of the crisis.   There was as yet no system for the emergency distribution of fans or to provide bottled water to the most adversely affected residents.

Eric Klinenberg, author of the 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, has noted that the map of heat-related deaths in Chicago mirrored the map of poverty.  Most adversely affected were the elderly and isolated—those without family or community support.  Old men with chronic illnesses fared far worse than elderly women, who tended to have more social connections to look after them.

The exact number of deaths in Cook County may never be known for sure.  Mortality tables show that 739 additional people died in that week above the usual average.  Blacks suffered significantly higher death rates than whites or Hispanics.

A body being loaded in to an emergency refrigerated trailer outside the Cook County Medical Examiner's office.

Seven refrigerator trailers had to be used to handle the bodies.  Many of the elderly victims lived and died alone.  When it was all over, 41 of the victims were either not identified or had no family to claim the bodies.  They were buried in plywood caskets in a slit trench in a suburban Homewood cemetery.

A priest reads prayers over the caskets of 41 unclaimed victims of the 1995 heat wave before they were covered by a bulldozer.

Some of the deaths were a direct result of Mayor Richard J. Dailey’s decision to close the parks, especially the lakefront parks to overnight sleeping to prevent them from being used by Yippies and other demonstrator from using them during the ‘68 Convention protests.

Chicagoans had been seeking relief from the heat at night on the shores of Lake Michigan as far back as the 19th Century.  On October 8, 1877 a rare hot, dry blanket covered the city and much of the Midwest on both sides of the Lake. Despite the fact that railroad tracks, lumber yards, tanneries and other industrial buildings, warehouses, and busy wharves and piers blocked easy access to the lakefront in many areas, hundreds, maybe thousands, were sleeping where they could including the cemetery that is now Lincoln Park when the Great Chicago Fire broke out.  They would soon be joined by tens of thousands more fleeing the rapidly spreading conflagration.

Chicagoans sleeping in the park on a hot night in the 1950's

After Daniel Burnham’s great plan led to the creation of a string of lakefront parks and public beaches and Chicago’s extensive street car systems made them easily accessible to residents far from the shores, the custom of whole families camping out on blankets under the stars was well established.  In the major heatwaves from the ‘30’s through the ‘60’s the press reported the custom.

That ended after Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin announced plans for a Yippie! Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic National Convention to protest the War in Vietnam.  The call to the Festival invited the youth of America come to the city and camp in the lakefront parks.  Hysterical press coverage imagined thousands of drug and sex crazed radicals descending of the city and creating “anarchy in the streets.”  For their part the Yippies relished the free publicity.

Alarmed, Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the Chicago Park District to enact an ordinance closing all parks at 11 pm and prohibiting any sleeping or camping.   First to feel the effects of the ordinance were surprised troops of Boy Scouts and veteran’s organizations who had regularly used the parks for camping.  During a relatively mild heat snap in July families seeking to sleep out were first turned away.

Chicago Police mass in Lincoln Park before violently pushing Yippies and other protestors out of the park after the new curfew.

The battles to clear Lincoln Park of Yippies and other demonstrators during the Conventions were bloody affairs with Chicago Police Department baton charges and heavy use of tear gas that spilled into nearby Old Town Streets.

Almost everyone expected that things would go back to normal after it was all over, that either the ordinance would simply be unenforced in future years against ordinary Chicagoans or that it would be explicitly repealed. But Dailey was terrified the parks could once again be used by radicals and by rumors that the city restive and angry West and Southside Black residents would swarm the parks and threaten Loop businesses and the swanky Gold Coast.  His lawyers also advised him that if the camping bans were lifted, the Courts might rule that they had been imposed strictly to limit the rights of assembly and free speech and not, as had been claimed, for general public safety and protection of park land and facilities from damage.

Year after year, the sleeping ban stayed and was vigorously enforced, mostly against the homeless who still sought secluded spots to comfortably rest.  By the 1990’s the old custom of seeking relief at night Lake was a more than half forgotten quaint memory.

How many of these victims might have survived if they still had access to the air conditioner by the Lake?  No one can say for sure, but probably dozens or scores.

They were the late casualties of the Democratic Convention.