The Marine Review counted, in the month after the Eastland went over, “four formal and several informal investigations” and complained that “five different and conflicting investigations have been started when one under competent supervision would be entirely sufficient. There is a clash of authority between state, city and federal officials.” That was the shipowners’ paper talking, but the count was right. The inquiries overlapped, obstructed one another, and between them reached every fact in the record and no verdict that stood. This piece follows them in order.
The coroner’s jury, 24 to 29 July 1915
Peter Hoffman, coroner of Cook County, opened his inquest on the body of Kate Austin “and all others lost” on the afternoon of the disaster, in the County Building, with six jurors headed by Dr W. A. Evans of the Tribune, and the state’s attorney, Maclay Hoyne, sitting with him. The transcript, 156 printed pages, is where most of the eyewitness evidence lives: the harbour master, the ticket-taker, the mate, the second assistant engineer, the oiler, the charterer, the company’s treasurer, and the naval architect William J. Wood, whom Hoffman engaged to examine the wreck. Captain Pedersen was sworn and warned of his rights, and the company’s lawyer stopped him: “As a lawyer, I don’t think he ought to testify.” Chief Engineer Erickson said he would testify “as near as I can remember every—all the fact, the truth,” and the same lawyer, who represented the company and not him, said he had advised him not to. Hoyne, who might prosecute him, agreed: “Someone must be punished for what has happened here. … I think you better not talk.” Both had given statements to Hoyne the night before, after midnight, and the coroner thought the jury should read them. Secretary Redfield appeared before the jury on 28 July and spoke at length in defence of his service.
The verdict, dated 28 July, found that the dead “came to their deaths on the 24th day of July, A. D. 1915, from asphyxiation by drowning,” and recommended that six men be held to the grand jury “on the charge of manslaughter and for such other offenses as the facts may warrant”: Hull, Pedersen, Erickson, Greenebaum, Reid and Eckliff. It reasoned from the absence of any other cause: no act of the passengers, no explosion, fire or collision, so the ship “was improperly constructed for the service employed, or … improperly loaded, operated or maintained,” and in the jury’s judgment both. It asked the state’s attorney to look into the corporation, the construction, and whether each seller of the ship had told the buyer what he knew of her instability. And it said what no federal officer had said: “There is not now, nor has there ever been an inspection service maintained by the Federal Government for the purpose of determining the stability of boats offered for passenger service.” As to Reid and Eckliff, the jury recognised “the possibility that the courts of Illinois may not have jurisdiction over them.”
Redfield’s board, 29 July to 5 August
The law required a local board of steamboat inspectors to investigate every accident with loss of life. Redfield reached Chicago on 27 July, chose the Milwaukee board because it had never inspected the ship, and sat with it himself, with his solicitor, with Uhler, two businessmen, the lieutenant governor Barratt O’Hara, a representative of the United States Chamber of Commerce and, later, Naval Constructor Ackerson and E. C. Gillette of the Lighthouse Service. The state’s attorney’s office, the corporation counsel, the public administrator and Congressman Sabath were invited to question witnesses and did. Reid and Eckliff, summoned from Grand Haven, were arrested on arrival by the Chicago police and once “brought in irons into our public hearing.” The press, O’Hara said, “has taken a very hostile attitude,” and the board voted to let it in.
The board took 336 printed pages of testimony: the counting of the passengers, the inspection correspondence of 1904 and 1915, the Cleveland years, the ballast system, Judson’s soundings of the river, the expert evidence of Ackerson and Gillette. What it could not do was reach the officers of the ship. On 31 July Judge Landis of the federal district court ordered that no witness subpoenaed before his grand jury be examined in any other proceeding, and the captain, the engineer and the owners were on his list. The board adjourned on 5 August “not … prepared at this time to express an opinion as to who is to blame,” and sent the President and Congress its recommendations instead: a board of naval architects in the Department of Commerce to approve the plans of every steam merchant vessel over a hundred tons before construction, no certificate until “its safety, seaworthiness, and stability shall have been demonstrated to the satisfaction of said board,” a right of appeal from the local inspectors, written approval by the supervising inspector of every increase in passengers, and approval of any alteration affecting stability. Pending legislation, two rules at once: increases only after personal inspection, with a written record; and inclining tests, under naval architects, on any vessel whose stability the inspectors had reason to question. Redfield told the President that instructions to carry the rules into effect had been given on 6 August.
The grand juries
The state grand jury returned its indictments on 10 August: George Arnold, William Hull, Walter Steele and Ray Davis of the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company for manslaughter, Pedersen and Erickson for criminal carelessness. Arnold, Hull and Davis lived in Michigan and said they would fight extradition. Landis’s federal grand jury reported on 22 September, “charging conspiracy and criminal carelessness in the operation of an unseaworthy boat” against Arnold, Hull, Steele, Greenebaum, Pedersen, Erickson, Reid, Eckliff and the two companies. The Associated Press that day put the dead at 812.
Six of the accused were in Michigan, and a federal indictment found in Illinois could only be tried there if a federal judge in Michigan issued a warrant of removal. That is why the only trial of the evidence took place in Grand Rapids. The hearing opened on 20 January 1916 before Judge Clarence Sessions, with Clarence Darrow among the defence counsel. On 22 January the court itself called Sidney Jenks, head of the yard that had built her, who “had practically refused to appear as a witness for either side.” The ship, he said, had been designed for a fast fruit boat “to make twenty miles an hour and capable of carrying 500 passengers.” Darrow asked whether he had ever worried about her being turned into an excursion steamer for 2,500. “I had no way of knowing the quantity of its business after it left our yards. No, I did not worry about the Eastland.” Had he thought her safe for the uses to which she was put? “I considered the boat safe for all uses to which it was put which were in my knowledge.” The government’s lawyers asked about tests, and he said “there never was an actual stability test for the Eastland after its launching in his yards,” and then described the launching: she slid in on her side, tilted the other way to forty-five degrees, “then righted itself as straight as a church, satisfactorily demonstrating its stability.” The first survivor to testify, Frederick Willard of Western Electric, had gone aboard at a quarter past seven and noticed the list ten minutes later.
On 18 February 1916 Sessions denied the application for a warrant of removal. “His decision means that the six Michigan men indicted in connection with the Eastland disaster will not have to go to Chicago for trial and are freed as far as the case in federal court is concerned.” He “emphatically stated that the government failed to make out a case against the six defendants.” The state’s indictments against the Michigan men could not be tried without them. No one was ever convicted.
The limitation case, 1915 to 1935
Three days after the disaster, on 27 July 1915, the owners contracted with the Great Lakes Towing Company to raise the ship “righted and pumped out … for the sum of $34,500, no cure no pay.” The work began on 4 August and the Eastland was handed back to her owners on 16 August. The next day the company filed a petition in the federal court at Chicago under the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851, which provides that an owner’s liability for any loss “done, occasioned, or incurred without the privity, or knowledge of such owner” shall not exceed “the amount or value of the interest of such owner in such vessel, and her freight then pending.” The ship was conveyed to a trustee, a monition went out calling in all claims, and on 15 December 1915 the trustee sold her at auction for $46,000. That sum was the fund.
The first contest was over who should have it. The towing company claimed its $34,500 as a preferred lien; the district court refused it priority over the dead in 1916; the Seventh Circuit reversed in July 1918 and ordered it paid, “since it affirmatively appears that appellant’s claim is the only one of the preferred class.” Then, in March 1919, a group of men who had rescued people from the river on 24, 25 and 26 July asked, under the Salvage Act of 1912, for “a fair share of the remuneration awarded to the salvors of the vessel.” Judge Carpenter’s opinion of 23 December 1919 refused them, on the ground that the statute presupposed salvors with a choice between saving goods and saving lives, and these had none; and then said what he thought of the question. “What they did was inspired by the spirit which since Christendom has been the foundation of the great brotherhood of mankind. Their work was done, and well done. Their reward they have; it never can be taken from them, and it is measured by a standard greater than money.”
The claims of the dead went to a special commissioner, Lewis F. Mason, appointed at the end of the 1920s; answers for 353 estates had been filed in December 1927. The appellate court remarked later that “there is no showing in the record why the disposition of the case was not pushed by the parties for a period of ten or twelve years.” The commissioner heard the witnesses, received eighty-six objections to his report, overruled them, and was confirmed; the district court’s final decree was filed on 21 December 1933. The findings were five. The Eastland tipped over “through the negligence of the engineer in charge of the operation of her water ballast tanks.” Martin Flatow, the Chicago agent, sold tickets and “was not in any sense a managing officer.” The ship on that morning “was seaworthy in every respect, properly equipped and manned and fit for the carriage of passengers if properly handled.” The negligence was not within the owner’s privity and knowledge. The owner was entitled to limit its liability to its interest in the ship.
On appeal the public administrator of Cook County, James Bishop, who appeared for many of the estates, argued that the owner’s duty of seaworthiness was a personal contract outside the Act, that a ship unstable before she left the dock was unseaworthy at the start of her voyage, that the findings contradicted each other, and that the claimants had been denied a jury. The Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Fitzhenry on 7 August 1935, rejected each point. The Limitation Act, unlike the Harter Act, did not condition its protection on due diligence to make the ship seaworthy; negligence of the crew before the voyage began was still the crew’s; a limitation proceeding was a statutory proceeding with no jury; and the findings of a commissioner who had seen the witnesses, confirmed by the trial judge, were conclusive where there was evidence to support them. The decree was affirmed. The opinion opens by saying that 835 passengers drowned and, quoting the commissioner on the fund, that “This fund is now exhausted.”
What the inquiries measured
Each inquiry had an instrument, and each instrument fixed what it could find. The coroner’s jury could find cause of death and name men for a grand jury, and it did, and then it said the thing outside its remit about the inspection service. Redfield’s board could take testimony on anything and find on nothing, once Landis had taken its witnesses, and so it wrote law instead. The grand juries could indict, and did, twice. The removal hearing could only ask whether there was a case to send to Chicago, and a Michigan judge, hearing a Michigan builder, found there was not. The limitation court could ask only one question that mattered, whether the owner was privy to the negligence, and twenty years of evidence came down to the man at the valve. Nobody in any of them was ever asked to measure the ship.