Early on a Saturday morning in 1915, thousands of workers and family members from Western Electric Co. gathered on the Chicago River for a lake excursion and an employee picnic.
But what was supposed to be a jovial celebration swiftly turned catastrophic as the SS Eastland — the first of five vessels scheduled to shuttle passengers to the Michigan City, Ind., outing — rocked alarmingly and capsized in the 20-foot-deep waterway between Clark and LaSalle streets, killing 844 people and wiping out nearly two dozen entire families.
The horrific scenes July 24 marked the worst disaster in Chicago’s history, but nobody was held responsible. As the Eastland tragedy marks its centennial, historians and legal experts are staging a trial to keep relevant the memory of the disaster and illuminate the issues that never saw the inside of a Chicago courtroom.
“History isn’t something we want to force into textbooks and force students to learn,” said Ted Wachholz, executive director of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, which is hosting the Thursday fundraiser with John Marshall Law School. “Our approach always has been to find a targeted audience and find a way to get Eastland in front of that audience.”
“There’s no real redress for some things,” said Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, who will preside over the trial. “We don’t pay enough attention to what happened in history. That’s why these kinds of things are important: to remember the evolution of how society and the law evolved.”
While there is no definitive cause for the capsizing, the dominant belief is that the ship had many structural flaws: It was overloaded with extra lifeboats added because of the Titanic disaster three years earlier, it had no keel and the ballast system was faulty, the Chicago Tribune reported at the time. That morning, as many as 2,500 people had crammed aboard.
Wachholz helped provide research of the disaster and its aftermath, leaning heavily on details from the recent Michael McCarthy book “Ashes Under Water.” Four attorneys from the law school teamed up to analyze the information from a modern legal perspective.
Among the challenges in applying 2015 laws to a 100-year-old case is deciding what kind of trial there should be.
“To use modern civil law would have been very complicated,” said R. Dennis Smith, staff attorney with John Marshall. “Today you would have gone after Western Electric. But they didn’t sponsor the boat ride, it was an employee who arranged it. There would have been a lot of debate, and it would have dragged on forever. But those rules didn’t exist in 1915.”
Instead, Smith said, the case details best fit with a charge of involuntary manslaughter for the Eastland owners.
Someone commits involuntary manslaughter if he unintentionally kills someone by doing something “likely to cause death or great bodily harm to some individual,” according to Illinois statute. Attorney Bob Clifford said he will argue that the owners knew the ship was ill-prepared for its voyage but did not rectify the situation.
“The elephant in the room is the federal government certified this ship as seaworthy,” Clifford said. “I’m trying to persuade the jury that notwithstanding the certification, this boat was known to be unstable and they knew this before the event occurred. On that day, despite it being certified, they operated it recklessly.”
Six jurors will decide the case, and audience members also will be able to vote on the outcome. Whatever comes out of the mock trial, it likely will be more conclusive than what unfolded a century ago.
The ship’s captain and engineer and four company executives were charged with manslaughter and criminal carelessness in August 1915. All in the group were accused of loading the boat “greatly in excess of the number of persons the boat could carry with safety,” according to Chicago Tribune reports. Authorities also accused the company officials of operating the ship despite knowing it was in substandard condition, and of hiring an incompetent engineer.
Capt. Harry Pedersen additionally was accused of not following proper procedures and failing “to warn the passengers to leave the Eastland when it became apparent to him that she was about to overturn,” according to archived news reports. Engineer Joseph Erickson faced similar charges.
The defendants were tried in federal court in Michigan, where the company was located, and U.S. District Judge Clarence Sessions cleared the men, reasoning that there was not enough evidence to prove the group knew of and ignored problems with the ship, according to a news report.
“The dead cannot be restored to life,” Sessions wrote in his ruling. “The sorrows of the living cannot be lessened by claiming other victims.”
In the end, no one was found criminally liable. Lawsuits seeking millions took an additional two decades to unfold. Law at the time limited damages to the value of the ship — around $46,000 — all of which went to pay claims from the companies that provided coal to the ship and that towed the Eastland out of the river, Wachholz said. Families received next to nothing.
“It does happen that great injustices occur and no one was held accountable,” said attorney Dan Webb, who will represent the owners in the retrial. “The company never pays a dime, no one goes to jail and 844 people die.”
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