Even though it’s usually ranked No. 1, the Great Fire of 1871 was not Chicago’s greatest disaster in terms of human casualties. Far more costly was the sinking of the Eastland, a steamboat that capsized in the Chicago River on July 24, 1915, drowning nearly 850 passengers (more than twice the body count of the Chicago Fire).
This timely reminder, arriving 80 years after the Eastland “turned turtle” (as one historical observer put it), comes from a seemingly roundabout source: George W. Hilton, an emeritus professor of economics at UCLA, who’s the author of a new book about the Chicago tragedy, “Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic” (Stanford University Press).
Hilton is an economist, not a professional historian, but he has the right stuff for raising the Eastland. He taught courses on transportation regulation at UCLA, headed a task force on transportation policy during the Johnson administration, and has written books about trains, steamboats, cable cars and jitneys.
Equally relevant, Hilton is a native Chicagoan, who distinctly remembers “the chill that went up and down my back when I was 10 and my father pointed out the Eastland, riding anchor among the yachts across from Buckingham Fountain.” At the time, the infamous excursion boat had been salvaged, converted into a Navy Reserve training ship and rechristened the Wilmette.
Now 70, Hilton describes himself as a “South Sider all the way,” a graduate of Hyde Park High with a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, which also explains his name on another new book, from the same era and place (and publisher) but with a humorous spin. He’s the editor of “The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner 1914-1919,” 24 comic pieces that make up what Hilton calls “the masterpiece of baseball literature.”
Though Hilton migrated to California after getting his doctorate, he has frequently returned to Chicago over the last couple of decades to research the Eastland and Lardner books. And in recent months, he has been back to dig through newspaper files and historical archives for yet another book based on a Chicago masterpiece, an annotated edition of “The Front Page,” the milestone stage comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the merry pranksters of ’20s journalism.
After spending 20 years on his Eastland book, studying horrific accounts of mass drownings and the metacentrics of ship construction, Hilton needed Lardner and Hecht-MacArthur for comic relief. As the subtitle of the Eastland book indicates, he set out to draw a connection between the sinking of the Titanic, which struck an iceberg April 14, 1912, and sank in the North Atlantic, and the Eastland capsizing three years later.
As Hilton points out, more passengers died on the Eastland (841 by the most reliable estimate) than the Titanic (829). But the number of crew fatalities was far higher on the ocean liner: 694 vs. the two unfortunate crewmen–a ticket taker and a deckhand–who went down with the Eastland. (The toll included a hand on a nearby ship, the Petoskey, who drowned while rescuing Eastland survivors.)
Unlike the Titanic, the Eastland hadn’t even left port, but was still tied to its dock, on the south side of the river between Clark and LaSalle Streets, when it sank. The steamboat was preparing to take its full load of 2,500 passengers, most employees of Western Electric and their families, on a company picnic to Michigan City, Ind., when it flipped over into about 20 feet of water.
Because it was raining, most of the passengers were jammed into the lower decks, Hilton said, and those who weren’t lucky enough to be near a porthole, gangway or stairwell when the ship tipped over were “drowned like kittens in a sack. They had very few ways of getting out, especially if they were on the port side.”
For Hilton, the relatively few people on the top deck clearly disproved one enduring explanation for the disaster. It held that the passengers had caused the Eastland–already unstable because of its shallow draft and the steel plating high on its hull–to tip over when they rushed to the port rail to watch a passing launch. “There simply weren’t enough people on the top deck to have affected the physics of the ship,” maintained Hilton, who also disputed the presence of a passing launch.
Despite the various postmortems into the Eastland catastrophe, criminal and civil trials as well as newspaper investigations, the causes have been as grounded in legend, rumor and hearsay as reality, insisted Hilton, who cited “professional and scholarly neglect” as a chief reason for undertaking his book.
Rather than an anecdotal, narrative reconstruction of the disaster, modeled on Walter Lord’s account of the Titanic, “A Night to Remember,” Hilton said he approached the Eastland as if it were an “intellectual problem.” Though it contains vivid accounts of drownings and rescues, heroism and cowardice, Hilton’s book is highly, if not forbiddingly, technical, as the author traces the course of the Eastland from its construction in 1903 through the many modifications that contributed to its fatal instability.
In searching for definitive causes, Hilton turned to the Titanic, whose high death toll was blamed on a shortage of lifeboats. Among the post-Titanic reforms was a “boats-for-all” (passengers) movement, which led the operators of the Eastland to add three lifeboats and six rafts (for a total of 11 and 37) so they could boost the ship’s capacity to 2,500 passengers.
Already top-heavy, the Eastland couldn’t handle this extra burden on its top deck, Hilton said. “They loaded the ship to capacity for the first time, and it capsized before it even left the wharf. . . . I was looking for the logical connection between the Titanic and the Eastland disasters, and there it was.”
Intended as a safety measure, the lifeboats that were the Titanic’s legacy to the Eastland not only resulted in the lethal overload but in Chicago’s biggest disaster, Hilton concluded. Besides surpassing the death count from the Great Fire of 1871, the Eastland capsizing topped the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire, in the No. 2 spot with 606 casualties. It also had the unfortunate distinction, he added, of being “the worst ever to befall a ship that was still moored to her wharf.”
Other than sweeping aside recurrent myths about the Eastland sinking, Hilton said he hoped to fix the responsibility on the captain, Harry Pedersen, even though he was cleared of various charges, from “criminal conspiracy to operate an unsafe ship” to negligence, in the subsequent legal actions, which weren’t settled until 1928.
“The sinking finally got blamed on Erickson, the chief engineer. There are very few people who look decent in the Eastland disaster, and he was one of them. But he died of natural causes in 1919, and as is so often true, it’s easy to blame something on a guy who’s dead.”
As for Pedersen, Hilton said he was guilty not only of negligence and incompetence but perjury. “I hope I’ve taken care of that bastard’s reputation for all eternity. He was in a situation where he could have saved those lives if he’d recognized that he couldn’t stabilize the ship and just ordered everybody off. But he made an erroneous judgment, and by the time the ship was going over, it was too late to do anything. He killed them.”
Unlike the Titanic, which went down with John Jacob Astor IV and other prominent passengers, the Eastland carried mostly unskilled, poorly paid workers for Western Electric and their families, who came from Polish, Czech and Hungarian neighborhoods of Berwyn and Cicero. Among the victims were 22 entire families, Hilton said, the largest consisting of a husband, wife and their five children.
In the civil action, Pedersen was exonerated and the Eastland declared seaworthy when it capsized, which inflicted further injustice on the victims’ survivors, Hilton said. “Their heirs were entitled to the State of Illinois’ established compensation of $10,000 for wrongful death, from whoever was responsible. They should have gotten it, but the civil case was wrongly decided.”
Lardner out of storage
As he worked on his Eastland book, Hilton also was assembling and annotating the two dozen Lardner baseball stories, most published in national magazines while the author was a sportswriter for the Tribune and other Chicago papers. Half the stories in Hilton’s collection are “letters” written by Jack O’Keefe, a boozy, barely literate White Sox pitcher, to his hometown friend Al (six of which appeared in a famous book titled “You Know Me, Al”). Among the remaining dozen is at least one other classic, “Alibi Ike.”
Though the Eastland and the Lardner books arrived in stores almost simultaneously, the baseball collection has been finished since 1980, Hilton said, but he put it in storage until the copyright on the stories expired, last Dec. 31. “I had no desire to split the royalties with Ring Jr.,” Hilton explained. “And he probably wouldn’t have let me do it because he had an exclusive agreement with another publisher.”
If the Eastland tragedy was a touchstone of Hilton’s childhood, he can also remember discovering Lardner’s comic genius as a schoolboy. “I broke out laughing in the Woodlawn branch of the public library when I read that lead for `Alibi Ike,’ ” he said, chuckling as he recited it from memory: “His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the X stood for `Excuse me.’ Because he never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field, without apologizin’ for it.”
Written in the baseball slang of the era, early Stengelese, Lardner’s stories are in the mainstream of American humor, Hilton said, flowing directly out of the colloquial style that originated with Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” And Lardner’s practice of mixing real and fictional characters, he added, also made him a literary descendant of Anthony Trollope, who employed that technique in his tales of Victorian England.
It was Lardner’s calculated hodgepodge of fact and fiction that convinced Hilton that the stories needed clarifying for current readers. His footnotes identify forgotten players, such as Jakey Atz, Punch Knoll and Heinie Zimmerman; point out discrepancies in Lardner’s chronology and baseball history, deliberate or accidental; and explain antiquated language and humor.
The stories conclude in the middle of the 1919 season, before the World Series fix turned the White Sox into the Black Sox. By then Lardner had already left Chicago for a job in New York, Hilton said. “But the stories give great insight into the dynamics of the 1919 Sox. The incentives were such that they wanted to lose.”
Along with his introduction, illustrations and a Lardner bibliography, Hilton’s annotations made for a 4-pound volume of more than 600 pages. That didn’t put a strain on critics for the Tribune (“great rewards”) or The New York Times (“a gem”), but The Washington Post advised readers to seek out “something, anything by Lardner, as long as it lacks footnotes, can be lifted easily and read on the beach, and–oh, yes, laughed along with.”
But the Lardner book obviously wasn’t meant to be hauled to the beach, Hilton said. And if he hadn’t tracked the laughs for readers, most would have missed them. “The stories were dated, in certain respects, and a lot of the humor was lost.”
With his annotations for “The Front Page,” Hilton also intends to provide a similar context for the Hecht-MacArthur comedy by matching characters with their newsroom, courtroom or City Hall models. “Every character who takes the stage is an actual person,” he said, “with one definite exception. Peggy Grant, the romantic female lead, is fictional.”
In one case, Hecht and MacArthur mischievously gave a male journalist a sex change. “Mollie Malloy has the name of a Hearst reporter who they thought was a hypocrite. He frequented brothels but wrote puritanical pieces, so they attached his name to a prostitute.”
When it’s finished, Hilton’s “Front Page” will be a genuine oddity. Unlike the Lardner stories, it was written for the stage, not the page, which would severely limit the readership for an annotated version. “That’s what my publisher thinks,” Hilton said. “But a published edition that came after the play was produced in 1928 sold extremely well, and I think this one will too.”
Even if it’s destined only for curiosity shops, Hilton’s annotated “Front Page,” together with his Eastland and Lardner books, will further re-establish his ties to Chicago–not that they were ever broken. “Psychologically,” he said, “I never left home.”
