DATE OF LAUNCH: May 6, 1903
DATE AND LOCATION OF LOSS: July 24, 1915, Lake Michigan, at the south bank of the Chicago River, Chicago, Illinois
DATE LOCATED: July 24, 1915
SHIP DETAILS: The ship was commissioned during 1902 by the Michigan Steamship Company and built by the Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron, Michigan. The ship was named in May 1903, immediately before her inaugural voyage.
CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE LOSS: On July 24, 1915, Eastland and four other Great Lakes passenger steamers, Theodore Roosevelt, Petoskey, Racine and Rochester, were chartered to take employees from Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois to a picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. This was a major event in the lives of the workers, many of whom could not take holidays. Many of the passengers on Eastland were Czech immigrants from Cicero; of the Czech passengers, 220 of them perished.
During 1915, the new federal Seamen’s Act had been passed because of the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels. This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making it even more top-heavy. Some argued that other Great Lakes ships would suffer from the same problem. Nonetheless, it was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Eastland was already so top-heavy that it had special restrictions concerning the number of passengers that could be carried.
On the morning of July 24, passengers began boarding Eastland on the south bank of the Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets about 6:30 a.m., and by 7:10 a.m., the ship had reached its capacity of 2,572 passengers. The ship was packed, with many passengers standing on the open upper decks, and began to list slightly to the port side, away from the wharf. The crew attempted to stabilize the ship by admitting water to its ballast tanks, but to little avail. Sometime during the next 15 minutes, a number of passengers rushed to the port side, and at 7:28 a.m., Eastland lurched sharply to port, and then rolled completely onto its port side, coming to rest on the river bottom, which was only 20 feet below the surface; barely half the vessel was submerged. Many other passengers had already moved below decks on this relatively cool and damp morning to warm before the departure. Consequently, hundreds of people were trapped inside by the water and the sudden rollover; some were crushed by heavy furniture, including pianos, bookcases, and tables. Although the ship was only 20 feet from the wharf, and in spite of the quick response by the crew of a nearby vessel, Kenosha, which came alongside the hull to allow those stranded on the capsized vessel to leap to safety, a total of 844 passengers and four crew members died in the disaster.
DISCOVERY AND FINDINGS: A grand jury indicted the president and three other officers of the steamship company for manslaughter, and the ship’s captain and engineer for criminal carelessness, and found that the disaster was caused by “conditions of instability” caused by any or all of overloading of passengers, mishandling of water ballast, or the construction of the ship.
Federal extradition hearings were held to compel the six indicted men to come from Michigan to Illinois for trial. During the hearings, principal witness Sidney Jenks, president of the shipbuilding company that built Eastland, testified that her first owners wanted a fast ship to transport fruit, and he designed one capable of making 20 mph and carrying 500 passengers. Defense counsel Clarence Darrow asked whether he had ever worried about the conversion of the ship into a passenger steamer with a capacity of 2,500 or more passengers. Jenks replied, “I had no way of knowing the quantity of its business after it left our yards… No, I did not worry about the Eastland.” Jenks testified that an actual stability test of the ship never occurred, and stated that after tilting to an angle of 45° at launching, “it righted itself as straight as a church, satisfactorily demonstrating its stability.”
The court refused extradition, holding the evidence was too weak, with “barely a scintilla of proof” to establish probable cause to find the six guilty. The court reasoned that the four company officers were not aboard the ship, and that every act charged against the captain and engineer was done in the ordinary course of business, “more consistent with innocence than with guilt.” The court also reasoned that Eastland “was operated for years and carried thousands safely”, and that for this reason no one could say that the accused parties were unjustified in believing the ship seaworthy.
INTERESTING FACTS: After Eastland was raised on August 14, 1915, she was sold to the Illinois Naval Reserve and recommissioned as USS Wilmette stationed at Great Lakes Naval Base. During August 1943, Wilmette was given the honor of transporting 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.
On April 9, 1945, she was returned to full commission for a brief interval. Wilmette was decommissioned on November 28, 1945, and her name was deleted from the Navy list on December 19, 1945. During 1946, Wilmette was offered for sale. Finding no takers, on October 31, 1946, she was sold to the Hyman Michaels Company for scrapping, which was completed during 1947.
One of the people who was scheduled to be on Eastland was 20-year-old George Halas, an American football player, who was delayed leaving for the dock, and arrived after the ship had overturned. His name was listed on the list of deceased in newspapers, but when fraternity brothers visited his home to send their condolences, he was revealed to be unharmed. Halas would go on to become coach and owner of the Chicago Bears and a founding member of the National Football League. His friend and future Bears executive Ralph Brizzolara and his brother were on the Eastland when she capsized, though they escaped through portholes. Despite stories to the contrary, no reliable evidence indicates Jack Benny was aboard Eastland or scheduled to be on the excursion; possibly the basis for this report was that Eastland was a training vessel during World War I and Benny received his training in the Great Lakes naval base, where Eastland was stationed.
Marion Eichholz, the last known survivor of the Eastland disaster, died on November 24, 2014, at the age of 102.
The Eastland disaster represents the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
Principled Thoughts 