What caused the Eastland disaster?
One hundred years ago on July 24, the steamship SS Eastland capsized while it was still tied up at a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and four crew were killed in the worst shipwreck on the Great Lakes. The Eastland had been chartered to carry workers and their families of Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works outside Chicago on a trip across Lake Michigan for a company picnic in Indiana. The poorly designed boat was filled beyond capacity and began lurching from side to side before it left the dock, eventually tipping over and trapping hundreds of men, women and children.
is celebrated as a writer and poet, but fewer people know about his career as a socialist journalist. From roughly 1915 to 1918, he was a regular contributor to the International Socialist Review, a Chicago-based monthly magazine and the leading voice of the left wing of the Socialist Party. Legend has it that Sandburg helped fill the pages of some issues of the Review with multiple articles written under several pseudonyms. Sandburg wrote a regular column called "Looking 'Em Over" under his own name. In September 1915, he wrote a bitter polemic about the not-so-natural causes of the Eastland disaster.
IN THE second-largest city in America, a passenger steamship, tied to the dock, loaded with 2,500 working people dressed in their picnic clothes, topples slowly and sinks to the river bottom like a dead jungle monster shot through the heart. Over 1,000 men, women and children, trapped like rats in a cellar, are drowned.
The foregoing piece of news sent out to American cities one Saturday was at first not believed. It was the ghastliest commentary on American efficiency so far written into national history. No one fact among all those uncovered in the days following stood out more sinisterly than that the head of the United Stated Department of Commerce, under which steamboat inspection is carried on, is perhaps the foremost figure in the American efficiency movement.
William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce, since the death of Frederick C. Taylor, is the most widely quoted authority on efficiency...In the Redfield efficiency gospel, organization, business and factory organization, the coordination of many human units into one rapid and perfect machine, is the ideal.
Why didn't this ideal work out in the bureau of steamboat inspection service directly responsible to Redfield? Why didn't Redfield coordinate the human units, the high salaried bureau heads under him, so as to stop a cranky, unstable ancient hoodoo tub like the Eastland from going loaded with 2,500 human lives? There's one answer. Business required it.
The Redfield ideal is business. The business interests who run the Great Lakes and the coast and the oversea steamship lines told Redfield everything was all right with the inspection service and there was no danger. So he, like a faithful bureaucrat, considering himself responsible only to business, lifted no finger to change the inspection service. Warning after warning came to his hands.
Secretary Ed Nockels of the Chicago Federation of Labor wrote a letter to Edwin Sweet, first assistant to Redfield, predicting that unless a genuine instead of a bunk inspection was started, a boat would go to the bottom someday in the Chicago River while "tied to the dock."
Fathead Redfield sat in his easy chair in Washington, chatted with businessmen on the beauties of efficiency, his ears deaf to Andy Furuseth of the Coast Seamen's Union, and his ears deaf to Victor Olaner of the Lake Seamen's Union, and his ears deaf to every plea for more human safety and more social efficiency on the lake steamships. The efficiency of Fathead Redfield is a business efficiency not a social efficiency. And that is one prime explanation of why the Eastland became a coffin boat from which truckloads of dead working people were hauled away one Saturday.
BEHIND THE thousand working class dead of the Eastland is the story of the why they started on a picnic the day of their deaths. They went because they were afraid of their jobs. Of course, they didn't know they were going to die on the Eastland. The Western Electric Company for which they worked didn't know they were off on a death harvest instead of a lake and woods outing. But what the Western Electric workers know and what the officers of the Western Electric know is this terrible fact:
There was no choice for the wage slaves of that corporation. The foremen came to the employees with tickets. The employees bought tickets and went to the picnic because it was part of their jobs.
The Western Electric is an auxiliary of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, the wire communication trust. Photographs of the Western Electric workers, thousands of them marching in white hats and white shoes make good advertising for the Bell 'phone monopoly. All arrangements had been made beforehand for those who sank with the Eastland to parade on the streets of Benton Harbor. Pictures were to be made.
Did the Western Electric offer the workers white hats and white shoes free for this parade? It did not. It told the workers they would be expected to have white shoes and so each paid from a dollar to two dollars out of their slim pay envelopes. And the white hats were outrightly forced on each one at a price of thirty cents apiece.
Grim industrial feudalism stands with dripping and red hands behind the whole Eastland affair.
