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Featured · Politics · Regulation

The Eastland And The Titanic

Eastland DisasterOn July 24, 1915 the cruise ship Eastland capsized in the Chicago River between LaSalle and Clark streets. The Eastland was about to take Western Electric employees on a day trip to the Indiana Dunes. It was the worst disaster ever to hit Chicago with 844 lives lost.

Newspaper coverage then and now, typically fail to mention the important connection between the Eastland disaster in 1915 and the Titanic sinking in 1912, which was the subject of George Hilton’s 1995 book Eastland; Legacy of the Titanic.

The popular misperception that persists even today, was the supposed lack of lifeboat capacity on the Titanic. While that was true, it was also true that one-third of the Titanic’s life boat capacity was unused because there was not enough time after the Titanic struck the iceberg to fill the boats to full capacity. The presumed lack of lifeboat capacity led to a world-wide political movement called “lifeboats for all.” In the United States the cause was taken up by Wisconsin Republican Sen. Robert La Follette as a way to increase the jobs for the seamen’s union on board U.S. ships, according to an editorial in The New York Times of January 13, 1914.

In compliance with the La Follette Seamen’s Act of 1915 extra lifeboats and life rafts were installed on the Eastland just before the July 24 excursion. This made the already top heavy ship completely unstable with a full load of passengers. The irony was that the capsizing of the Eastland happened so fast there was no time to use the extra lifeboats or life rafts.

Thus, we had a government “solution” to a nonexistent problem that caused a subsequent disaster. Does that ever happen today? Think global warming, health care “reform” and economic stimulus.

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Jim Johnston

— Jim Johnston

Jim Johnston is The Heartland Institute's senior fellow for energy and regulatory policy and a member of its Board of Directors. He retired in January 1993 from his position as senior economist at Amoco Corporation, whose Economics Department he joined in 1975. His primary responsibilities while at Amoco included the economic analysis of public policy issues and the hedging of corporate risk. Prior to his employment at Amoco, Mr. Johnston served as an economist with the RAND Corporation, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and the Secretary's Office of the U.S. Treasury. He served on the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Mr. Johnston's current research has focused on electric utility deregulation in Illinois and other states; pollution trading under the climate change treaty, Clean Air Act, and the RECLAIM system for the South Coast Air District; and a general theory of regulation, published in the Cato Institute's Regulation magazine.