Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America by Michael McCarthy

Author:Michael McCarthy [McCarthy, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Nonfiction, Retail, Shipwreck
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

In his City Hall office, Maclay Hoyne, the Illinois state prosecutor, slammed down his phone. Police Chief Healey told him he had just turned over the revealing fifteen-page typewritten transcript from his interview with Erickson to federal investigators. State and federal prosecutors had fought each other for days to develop charges in the Eastland disaster. They each convened competing grand juries. And now the feds had custody of Erickson’s signed statement, evidence so hot it burned through its thin pages.

The coroner’s jury came to a verdict at 1:00 a.m. on Thursday, July 29, after twenty-five hours of hearings and questioning nearly two dozen witnesses. It recommended that six men be brought before a grand jury on the charge of manslaughter: Hull, Pedersen, and Erickson from the steamship company; Walter Greenebaum, who chartered the Eastland for Western Electric; and the two federal steamboat inspectors in whose district the Eastland operated, Robert Reid and Charles Eckliff.

Cocooned at his home in St. Joseph since the Eastland rolled over, Hull hired armed guards to resist any attempt to extradite him to Chicago to face charges.

His first visitor was George Arnold, a well-known shipping man from Mackinaw City, Michigan, who was nominally the president of the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company. Arnold partnered with Steele and Hull to build a formidable legal team. Four days after the disaster, the two company executives met at Hull’s home with Barbour, who was Steele’s lawyer, and an even more high-powered attorney, Charles Edward Kremer.

The sixty-six-year-old Kremer, nicknamed “The Admiral,” was one of the world’s top experts on admiralty law and a lecturer at the University of Chicago. He had founded the Chicago Yacht Club in 1875 and routinely regaled audiences in his Irish brogue with salty old tales of the Great Lakes.

Behind guarded doors, the two executives and two lawyers discussed details of the tragedy, how to protect the company’s interests amid the investigations, and the company’s future. They also had to strategize over testifying: Hull had just been summoned before the grand jury in Chicago. Arnold would surely be called too.

After their meeting, Hull had Kremer issue a statement to the press. Kremer faulted improper water ballast for the accident and laid the blame squarely on Pedersen.

“The captain is an autocrat,” Kremer’s statement said. “He could throw the President of the United States off his boat if he tried to boss the job. I cannot imagine any reason in the world why the ship should not have been ballasted that day.”

In hanging the ballast, of course, the owners also put the noose firmly around Joseph Erickson’s neck.

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