Women of the Eastland Disaster

The Eastland Women

Kate Lyons, an Irish lion, lost her husband and son in the
capsize while saving herself and her two small daughters.
Awaiting death calmly, she held up Mary and Winefred for a
half an hour by clinging to the ship and its flotsam even as
they were threatened by the fighting crowd. Then she heard
a man call to her, "Hang on until I get a rope," and she kept
on for ten or twelve minutes more. She saw Winefred lifted
out first while she put a loop of rope under her own
shoulders and was lifted out holding Mary in her arms. They
were treated at the Iroquois Hospital and then taken home.
Kate's only consolation at the loss of her husband and son
was that the two of them had such a strong tie between
them--and they went gone to their deaths together. Before
getting further medical aid she accompanied the bodies
back to their former home in Massachusetts.
Thus ends the news coverage, but from legal papers we
learn more of the impact of the disaster on her life. She
suffered from heart trouble, rheumatism, soreness of eyes,
headaches, loss of sleep, and general emotional stress--all
common aftereffects of the Eastland survivors. Mrs. Lyons
accepted the offer of Public Administrator James F. Bishop
to sue on her behalf against the steamship company, but
this and other suits were denied after a twenty year span in
court. By the end of her legal process Kate would be
fifty-four years old. Bishop sued on behalf of her, and other
victims, for a share in Eastland's salvage sale of $46,000,
but Chicago Judge John P. Barnes ruled that the bill from
the Great Lakes Towing Company for raising the hull, twenty
years ago, took precedence. This was for $34,500 for
divers and tug, with $3,000 in court costs. Bishop had first
sued the Western Electric Company but soon failed in that
unprecedented effort. Bishop's last appeal was denied on
August 7th, 1935. At that time the owner of a ship was not
considered liable for errors of employees, and Judge
Barnes cited the Titanic and other fatal shipwrecks as
precedents.
At about this time, during the early reforms of the New Deal,
another liability case was tried in New York City that was
very similar to Bishop's quiet crusade. In September of
1934 the passenger liner Morro Castle was turned into a
floating inferno off the New Jersey coast by a psychotic
ship's officer. The ship owners settled with the survivors out
of court, at the insistence of the insurers who wanted to
avoid lengthy litigation. There were important differences
between the two disasters. The luxurious Morro Castle
carried more influential passengers, and its owners had
deeper pockets than the small investors of the Michigan
shore. But then too, perhaps the New Jersey survivors were
aided by the sustained publicity that the media focused on
the mysteries of Morro Castle. There was the Cuban
gun-runnning, there was a communist connection, and the
captain died mysteriously before the fire--all the elements of
a good sea story.
The rest of Kate's story is in the Red Cross report, which this
researcher believes to show that Kate was granted $1,418
from the Eastland Fund and that Western Electric paid her
$1,321. The Morro Castle settlement was a breakthrough in
corporate liability cases, but it did not help Kate Lyons and
others, who were forgotten by Chicago after that mad
summer.   Without her husband's foreman's salary of $32 a
week the new widow planned to take in boarders, because,
as she told the Red Cross worker, housework was all that
she could do. The Red Cross paid her $300 outright and
placed the remainder in trust to be paid at $50 per month.
Experience in previous disasters had shown that windfall
payments to survivors would not steer them away from future
public aid. Mayor William Hale Thompson, eager to wrap up
the Eastland situation, at first wanted one-time payments by
simple division of the total, but he had to accept the
recommendation of his blue-ribbon men, the Mayor's
Committee, that the Red Cross administer the funds
according to their experience in disaster relief.
The Eastland disaster led the Red Cross to work out a
system of awards based upon family need which called for a
careful surveying of the condition of each case and
balancing the number of dependents with their real estate
holdings and insurance awards. This system was called the
Eastland Disaster Method of Equalizing Grants and was
used in many later Red Cross actions. The Red Cross'
published report, of four years after the wreck, tells about the
long-term suffering of the victims--which the summer news
could not do. Many people who came out of that steel hull
were never to recover, as in this encoded entry called case
726 in the report: The wife suffered complete nervous
breakdown after the disaster. The Red Cross had her cared
for in the Hinsdale Sanitarium for a while, but she was finally
adjudged insane and sent to an asylum.
The volunteer social workers doing the house-to-house work
for the Red Cross met some very hard cases, such as:
The eldest son, the only wage earner, was killed. The wife
was in the insane asylum, and the husband was insane but
had escaped from the asylum four years before, and was
living with his son and caring for the house. The youngest
three children were in the Bohemian orphanage and the
eldest daughter lived with an aunt.
The Red Cross worker had the aunt made legal guardian of
the children, who left the orphanage in her care. Then the
money from the Eastland Fund was set up in trust so that the
aunt could use it to raise and educate them. The fate of the
insane house caretaker was not reported.
The Red Cross report shows many cases of what the
Chicago Tribune called, "girl fathers." Many teen-aged
Western women had been heads of families, as in case
number 162:
A daughter was drowned. The husband was a wage
earner, but squandered most of his money in drink, and the
wages of the daughter were largely depended on to keep
the family going. The daughter was paying for new furniture
and a piano, and still owed $150 at the time of the disaster.

This family was awarded $176 from Western Electric and
$420 from the Eastland Fund.
In case number 47 two Western workers were lost in one
family:
Two daughters, both of whom were wage-earners, were
killed. In addition, the family suffered a shock in the loss of
the wife's brother, and of her niece and the niece's two
children. Husband and wife were both prostrated, and     the
husband had to stop work for a time. The older son was
taken on by the Western Electric Company, where the
younger was already employed. Later the husband was
able to return to work and the wife resumed the
responsibilities of the household.
They got a benefit of $180 by the Western Electric Company
and an Eastland Fund gift of $368.
Not all of the Eastland women were pillars of family life; the
demimonde was represented by Ella Orbst, a sixteen year
old cabaret singer. The Juvenile Protective Association
said of this profession: "The majority of the girls who go into
this kind of work are young girls from the country who feel
that they are making easy money...their songs are
suggestive, and their managers often urge them to, 'make it
tougher.'"
The disaster revealed the secret life of a man who had told
his friends that he was single but was sending money to his
aged mother in Russia. The U. S. State Department found
his mother and also reported that his wife and child. "sent
love." The Red Cross asked for more information, but
before anything could be done Russian and German armies
had fought back and forth over the province.
Ironically, most of the Eastland victims were from Central
Europe, while most of the crew was from Northern
Europe--the same ethnic division that was represented by
the warring factions in the daily war news, where "Slavs" and
"Teutons" were often in the headlines.
The Eastland sailors mostly escaped from the capsize,
except for James Stenson, the assistant purser and
ticket-taker, The crew's survival, so soon after Titanic,
"Where manhood perished not," made them the visible
scapegoats of public wrath. But several concession workers
died, among them Lulu Wolf, in charge of the women's
room. Her husband, holder of the restroom concession,
Charles Wolf, was mentioned in a social worker's report as,
"...having a reputation for disipation." Three weeks after the
event he became a missing witness, when, according to
State's Attorney Hoyne, he made, "...serious charges
concerning the handling of the boat." Then he disappeared.

A woman concession worker saved the life of Captain
Pedersen, by his own sworn account:
...I looked around then and I found a piece of line, and him
and I was pulled out by three or four ladies with the line, And
one of those ladies was, I think, if I remember right, was one
of the colored girls that was in our ladies         department.
This was slender Eva Braxton., perhaps the last person
admitted to the departing ship, who escaped through a
porthole, according to the Chicago Defender. But when the
captain retold the story, again under oath, he had himself
pulling out four ladies with the line.
An unnamed concession worker, perhaps Eric Kreuger, was
the subject of a news item describing his home wake. His
daughter was interviewed by a social worker next to his
open coffin in the living room:
Was he employed by the Western Electric Company?
He was a street musician. He sometimes played on boats.
He had just come in from one trip on the lake when he found
he could work on the Eastland.
You all work?
Yes, I make $6 a week. My sisters do not make so much.
Do you own the house?
Yes. There is a mortgage on it. We have to pay $60
interest next month.
Have you any money on hand?
Enough for now. We aren't beggars.
The captain of the boat is arrested.
He ought to have a stone tied to his neck and be thrown in
the water by his boat.
This news account does not match any of the cases
encoded in the Red Cross Report--one of seventeen
omissions that this researcher has found thus far, where
obits and news accounts cannot be matched in the Report. .
In an age of aggressive, so-called "yellow" journalism the
Eastland wives were still spared the indignity of the close
pursuit that the Eastland men were subject to. We know little
or nothing about Mrs. Robert Reid or Mrs. Joseph Erickson
or Mrs. E. A. Graham. There were other women victims, on
the farther shores of Michigan, spouses of the steamship
crew and spouses of the company officers, whose lives
must have been capsized.