Eastland Disaster - July 24, 1915

The Eastland Disaster occurred in Chicago on this day in 1915.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in History class. It's July today.
In nineteen fifteen, the S S. Eastland capsized in Chicago,
and it killed more than eight hundred people. Here's the story.
The Eastland was built in nineteen o two and it
was meant to be a fast ship. Had nicknames like
the speed Queen of the Great Lakes and the Greyhound

(00:26):
of the Lakes. Its purpose originally was to carry passengers
from Chicago across Lake Michigan and then come back to
Chicago with produce to sell. It could carry about two
thousand people, with sleeping accommodations for about five people. And
it was a fast ship, like I said earlier, but
not quite fast enough to do two round trips a day,
which is what its owners wanted to do to be

(00:47):
able to make enough money off of it. So it
underwent some retrofitting, both to make it faster and to
provide more passenger capacity. It hadn't really been reported to
have problems before the retro fit, but after word it
had some issues with stability. On July sevent nineteen o four,
it almost capsized with almost three thousand people on board.

(01:07):
It also developed a serious list to one side on
August five of that year. The Joseph Chicago Steamship Company
bought it in nineteen fourteen, and at that point it
had a reputation for being somewhat less than stable. It
was not about people really trusted at that point. Then,
in nineteen fifteen, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation known as

(01:28):
the Siemens Act. This act had a lot of provisions
that affected lots of different aspects of marine work. A
lot of it was the result of lobbying by the
International Siemens Union of America. It had to do with
things like workplace conditions and working hours and that sort
of a thing. But another huge influence on this legislation
was the sinking of the Titanic and the perception that

(01:52):
a lot more people would have survived if only there
had been enough lifeboats. This is actually a much more
complicated West sin, but even so, the general public was
demanding that boats and ships have more lifeboats and more
life rafts and more ways to get people safely off
of a sinking ship. So the Siemens Act mandated that

(02:15):
there had to be lifeboats for seventy five of people
aboard the ships. Now, people who worked with Lake vessels
like the Eastland that were meant to go across relatively shallow,
stable bodies of water like lakes. We're worried about this legislation.
They were afraid all of this extra life saving equipment
was going to make ships that already had a little
bit of a tendency to be unstable a lot more

(02:38):
top heavy. It was gonna make them a lot more dangerous.
But in the end those concerns weren't really factored into
the final legislation. On July two of nineteen fifteen, the
Eastland got its new supply of lifeboats and equipment, and
on July nine, fifteen, it was scheduled to make its
first fully loaded trip with all of that new equipment installed.

(02:59):
It was one of five vessels that were chartered by
Western Electric to take employees to a picnic at Washington
Park in Michigan City, Indiana, across the other side of
the lake from Chicago, but it never left the dock
on the Chicago River. It started to tilt as people
were boarding, and the crew was not able to compensate
by changing the ballast tanks and the levels of water

(03:21):
in them. The boat reached capacity at seven ten in
the morning, and then, after alarmingly swaying back and forth
several times over the next eighteen minutes, it rolled completely
onto its side at seven. None of the life jackets
or life rafts that had been added to the boat
had been deployed. There had been no time for any
of that. Some people were able to jump onto the

(03:43):
dock from the boat, or to scramble up the side
as that side was exposed from the water, but a
lot of people who were thrown into the river didn't
know how to swim and drowned. Almost everybody who was
below decks when the cap size happened wasn't able to
make it out alive. Most of the at least eight
hundred forty four people who died were factory workers. Twenty

(04:06):
two entire families were killed. The Second Regiment Armory had
to be used as a temporary morgue, and there were
so many people killed that almost seven hundred funerals took
place on the same day, which was July. The American
Red Cross churches civic organizations all gave aid at the scene,
and they helped families make funeral arrangements. There are also

(04:29):
court proceedings that went on for years afterwards, but none
of them led to any convictions. A civil suit dragged
on until nineteen thirty three, but its terms limited the
payout to the salvage value of the Eastland minus the
cost to raise it up from the river, so the
families of the deceased wound up receiving almost no compensation

(04:50):
for this disaster. The U. S. Navy purchased and salvaged
the Eastland and then it operated as the U. S. S.
Willamette until You can learn more about this magedy in
the June episode of Stuffy Miss and History Class, and
you can subscribe to This Day in History Class on
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and whatever else you get your podcasts.

(05:11):
Next time, we will have a nineteenth century invasion during
the Spanish American War.