On July 24, 1915, a large steamer named the Eastland tipped over in the Chicago River downtown, sending more than 800 people to their deaths. It was a tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions, the great loss of life calling to mind the sinking of the Titanic only three years before.
Yet to date, no one has proposed spending $200 million, or even $200, making a movie called “Eastland.”
On the other hand, the Hindenburg disaster may be the next historic tragedy to make the silver screen in the wake of “Titanic.” Jan De Bont, veteran director of such action films as “Twister” and “Speed,” reportedly has agreed to direct a film on the 1937 airship tragedy that killed a mere 36 passengers in a fireball of burning hydrogen at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
It would seem that some disasters remain vivid in the public memory long after the fact. But others, like the Eastland, do not. The Chicago Fire and the Johnstown Flood fall somewhere in the middle, with familiar names and few details.
What is it about particular tragedies that makes their stories memorable?
At least part of the answer may be as simple as this: Disasters that generate film get remembered.
The Hindenburg was captured on newsreel and radio recording. And as Margaret Drain, executive producer of the PBS series “The American Experience,” points out: “Shortly after (the sinking of the Titanic), there was a film made about (it), and I think that helped memorialize the disaster.”
Drain is right–the first Titanic movie appeared a month after the 1912 disaster and starred Dorothy Gibson, who actually survived the sinking.
Also, notes, Steven Biel, author of “Down With the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster,” “The Titanic takes place in one night,” which makes for relatively concise storytelling about heroism and cowardice. And yet it doesn’t occur quickly.
“With a plane crash or the Challenger disaster, they happen instantaneously,” explains Biel, an historian who lectures in American Studies at Brandeis University. “Yes, there are lives lost and nobody wants to minimize that. But with that kind of disaster, you can’t really show this range of behavior.”
Film producer Chana Gazit, who produced “Surviving the Dust Bowl” in March for “The American Experience,” agrees that story-telling drives the way in which disasters are presented: “The best history films take facts and sequences of events and turn them into novels.
“We think about dramatic structure, we are totally driven by it. We think in terms of three acts. There’s a level of narrative that is extremely important to us in order to make what we believe will be an effective and moving film.”
But not necessarily an accurate one. With “Titanic,” Biel says, director James Cameron tells a story “about self-realization and actualization” centering on Kate Winslet. Biel calls it “the first time that I’ve seen the Titanic (sinking) presented as a kind of therapy.”
Drama can overwhelm fact just as good documentary footage can dominate–and distort–a disaster story.
Despite the absence of film at the time, the Chicago Fire would seem to be memorable. The disaster occurred in a particular place over a short period of time. A fire that raged across four square miles and left as many as 300 dead had to generate its share of stories.
And did. Northwestern University English professor Carl Smith details them in his book, “Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.” The Fire was treated in personal accounts, histories and novels. Readers could choose their heroes and villains.
As with the Titanic and other modern disasters, public understanding of the Fire was indeed shaped by the media. Newspaper editors in those days used a now-quaint headline, “NEWS BY TELEGRAPH,” to advertise their use of state-of-the-art communications technology for gathering information.
Perry Duis, a Chicago historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, points out that Chicago was invaded by an “army of newspaper writers from cities and places across the country.”
The Johnstown Flood occurred 17 years after the Fire. Claiming 2,209 lives in the south-central Pennsylvania town, it was yet another “media event,” in the words of flood museum curator Dan Ingram, in Johnstown.
There were slides, histories and photographs to show the devastation. A book came out within a week of the tragedy. “I found it ironic during the O.J. Simpson trial that people were talking about how quickly the first paperback books were out about it,” says Ingram. “Apparently, that’s an American tradition.”
Disasters endure through music as well as movies. For instance, the folk singer Leadbelly penned a song about the Titanic sinking as a result of black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson being refused passage. Woody Guthrie achieved fame in the 1930s as the balladeer of the Dust Bowl. The loss of the iron-ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in November 1975 may be remembered solely because of Gordon Lightfoot’s poignant lyrics.
There were songs about the Chicago Fire and Johnstown Flood too, though they may be more notable for their quantity than quality.
Popular culture keeps disaster stories alive in other ways as well. The Chicago Fire is perpetuated through Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. Vaudeville and an animated cartoon did the same for the Johnstown Flood.
“In the days of vaudeville there were comedians who used the line, `Head for the hills, the dam’s burst,’ ” recounts Don Ingram. Years later, “Mighty Mouse saves the mice of Johnstown by blowing the waters back to the dam.”
Theaters also tried to curtail at least one bad habit of audiences with slides that read, “Don’t spit on the floor. Remember the Johnstown Flood.”
But many people do not. In part, flood and fire are largely forgotten because they have happy endings–Johnstown and Chicago were rebuilt. That kind of resolution, Carl Smith says, “shows the triumph of Christianity, of character, of democracy, things the Fire seemed to threaten.”
Perry Duis also thinks a national characteristic of the American public affects memory. “As an event, the Fire is overshadowed by things like World War I,” Duis says. “The Fire is a calamity, but other calamities, even the Titanic, overshadow it as a big, horrible event. Until recently, we’ve been a society impressed by bigness.”
Other factors can affect how a disaster is perceived. With the Titanic, the issue of class is a key, if misunderstood, element of the story. Steven Biel writes that 60 percent of all first-class passengers survived, versus 25 percent in steerage. An accurate film would have stressed the suffering of the poor. But the agonies of the rich, particularly rich villains, make for better movie-making than drowning peasants.
Class also matters in the Johnstown Flood. The dam that broke belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose membership included steel magnates Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. The club contributed to the tragedy by discounting at least one warning that the dam was suffering from improper maintenance.
But Americans today get uncomfortable with the notion of class conflict. Says Ingram, “You don’t learn about the Johnstown Flood in history text books because they generally stay away from issues of class.”
Stories like that of the Lusitania or the Dust Bowl tend to get lost in bigger disasters, military or economic. Chana Gazit sees the Dust Bowl as “the greatest environmental disaster this country has known,” and a part of the Great Depression that is often overlooked.
“One tends to remember the Depression by the urban suffering, the bread lines.”
As in the case of the Johnstown Flood, Gazit sees elements in the story of the Dust Bowl that work against the process of remembering. “Survivors went on to rebuild their lives and not think much about it, saying, `We survived it, so what?’ “
In 1987, a group of students at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora were shocked to find how far the Eastland disaster had slipped from public memory. When the lake steamer rolled over at its mooring, 812 people died. Yet the tragedy is not even mentioned in something like Emmett Dedmon’s popular history, “Fabulous Chicago.”
The students managed to have a commemorative plaque placed at the site of the disaster. They could just as easily have devoted themselves to commemorating Chicago’s Iroquois Theater Fire, which killed 602 people–mostly women and children–in December 1903.
How to explain the general neglect of these two local disasters? Ralph Pugh, public historian at the Chicago Historical Society, sees them as humiliating blows to civic pride.
Pugh notes that, in retrospect at least, the Fire emerged as almost “the disaster worth having because it permitted the city to be reborn” while the Titanic was “the disaster with a moral. It also happened in international waters so no one was going to be particularly embarrassed by it.”
With the Eastland, “it’s a city embarrassment. Plus, it was (only) 10 to 20 years from the disappearance of lake passenger excursions, so the tragedy wasn’t any sort of turning point in a new and glorious chapter on lake safety because that was already an industry in gradual decline.”
Pugh also sees the loss of so many children’s lives in the Iroquois catastrophe as a profound embarrassment to the city. The easiest response over time may have been to forget.
Steven Biel says, “We keep coming back to the Titanic because we’ve made it the quintessential disaster and every other one pales in comparison.” There is another possibility. Disasters, like people, may have only a few degrees of separation between them.
A new theory on the Eastland seems to acknowledge as much. Author George Hilton argues that tightened safety regulations after April 1912 led to additional life boats and rafts on the lake steamer. It was a move, Hilton believes, that made the poorly designed Eastland dangerously unstable. The title of his 1995 book is, appropriately, “Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic.”
In the same vein, Ralph Pugh has written an on-line essay for the historical society about Ida Hippach and Arthur Ryerson. Hippach lost two sons in the Iroquois Theatre Fire. As a boy in 1871, Ryerson saw his home destroyed by the Chicago Fire.
Both Hippach and Ryerson booked passage on the Titanic. Ryerson survived one great disaster only to perish in another.
