the attempt by the federal authorities and federal prosecutors to try to get at these guys who did this terrible thing. these children, the ropes, the morgue, someone should be responsible, and they were there to press the case. it is winter of 1916. the captain will weep on the stand. the prosecutors and defense teams bring in competing way models and try to argue why it tipped over. darrow hires divers to saw off suspicious looking columns. the prosecutors argue over everything, including whether the chicago river, the huge river that goes through the city, technically even exists.

in the courtroom, darrow and erickson are fighting to save their careers and lives. the last image i want to bring to your attention is -- i was lucky that there was a book fair in chicago about 10 years ago and those are wonderful things to go to. for historical research, you can get some great finds. there was, wrapped up in plastic, a from page copy of the eastland sinking in the chicago record herald. there is a wonderful cartoon that, to me, after all the research really brings it in a chilling fashion to light.

the cartoonist is blaming greed for the shipwrecked and shows a hand pulling the ship over. this is the spilling of people from the ship. the ship actually tipped the other way. his point was well made. that brings to a close the image portion of my presentations. i would be happy to take some questions, if you have them. i'm sure you do. a little bit after that, we have some books, if you'd like to purchase, and i would be happy to sign, as well. questions? they will bring a microphone. questioner: i was in chicago for a few days and i took an agricultural tour of the chicago river.

it is really surprising. it is smack in the middle of chicago. it is not like the east river. it is a small river. you would never suspect that you would have a massive disaster like this. also -- i get on my boat at south michigan. mccarthy: you were close. michigan would have been closer to the late and you are about three streets inland. yes? questioner: what happened in the trial? mccarthy: you have to read the

book. i will tell you. that is what the book jacket says. the prosecutors tried for a very difficult charge of conspiracy. they had to prove and they argued that the steamboat inspectors conspired with the owners, and the officers of the ship conspired together to knowingly send a ship to sea and left people in danger and they died. almost impossible to prove. it was a rotten way to try the case. the effect of that was, all the men, the six either guilty or innocent. erickson was innocent. he is one of the six. four were probably guilty. darrow, effectively, got everybody off.

we had bad prosecutors from washington and you had clarence darrow. he was to die for in the courtroom. his closing is amazing. he has the courtroom on their feet and he was unbeatable. he got his man off, which was good. joseph erickson never should have gone to jail. unfortunately, the others who were complicit in the disaster got off. questioner: [indiscernible] host: yeah, so, one week after the disaster, there was a grandmother who located him in the morgue. i do not know why it took so

long. she said, this is my grandson and it was a horrible scene. plowing through frozen corpses on the ground. she did the newspapers a photo of him and we have a picture of him. on the gangways, they are square openings used on all ships. they will put a plank to run passengers aboard or cargo. this means the ship carried. the ship had a tendency to tip. the gangways are above the waterline. it was another problem with the design of the ship. it is meant to elevate and drop.

if he gets too close, the water is going to gush in. and then, you are lost. you cannot recover. questioner: another thing, the ballast, when they pump it, they have a little oil. i was in cleveland and have the ocean liners with ballasts and they pump out oil. a sailor went out to have a smoke and he went to throw his cigarette over and the entire lake caught on fire. host: the steamship age was brief. it was a generation.

it was between railroads and the automobile. for many people, if you are a robberbaron, you went on a ship and the most fabulous rich people in the world traveled on steamship. people of working means loved the fact that they could go on a steamship. part of that was economics. the steamship is large and could take a lot of passengers. the machinery allowed for many people to go on. so, i was able to look at the culture around sailors and passengers and a thing of remembered was that the chicago river was so scummy, if you

remember upton sinclair, the jungle, the slaughterhouses are throwing carcasses and corpses. it bubbles up. it was not unusual for little blue flames to be dancing around. the eastland people are swimming in this. it is bad. he was one of two owners in the final ownership. it was owned by three companies and it came back to lake michigan. they only owned it about a year and a half. what is intriguing about that is, you talk about the thing where it almost tipped over and

it almost tipped over again in late erie. this is a world where information could disappear like that. the checkered past was not followed up. questioner: did you uncover any records of seesaw action or find things that were not reported before? host: yes. the 1903 episode was written up. there were passengers terrified. the man said, "turn the ship around." they squirted them with water hoses. when they arrived at the dock in chicago, they were wearing them. when the reporters asked, they had a great story.

there was a picnic and they had a ship like this. one of the witnesses of this was on the eastland and came in michigan. this is where darrow is operating, and so forth. he tells the court that he was so frightened that he got off and took the train back. so, we know that there are a couple of well-documented problems. the first year the new owners have the ship, walter steele and the partner, for some reason, we do not know why, right around july 4, a chiller week when everyone is traveling.

the ship is traveling, the ship had an accident. a propeller is damaged. the rod on the propeller is 10 inches thick. it somehow split. something really wrong happened and the crude never would tell newspapers what happened. i am convinced that they had an incident that caused the propeller to break. that is when walter steele started talking with his new engineer about ways to better handle the ship. i do not have it pinned down. it is a strong hunch i have, looking at the research. in retrospect, i have 100 years hindsight to work with and a lot

of time to think it through. questioner: was the fellow who designed the ship ever held accountable? host: he was an awful architect. it was malpractice, the way he looked this. there is a part in the book when i talk about one of the real problems. the ballast system existed. they were better than this. what happened was, the eastland was told and it was kind of the standard. later, they added better facilities and the eastland never upgraded to the improved systems.

on top of that, while the worst things they did, he designed 12 cargo ships, one passenger ship, one more cargo ship, and he was out. he was not competent. one of the things he did, the piping that runs from the seacock to the manifold, it is almost like octopus tentacles. the standard size of pipe was seven inches and he thought that six would be sufficient and save a little money. it would probably be ok for a smaller ship. he cut one inch of pipe out. it means that water cannot gush

and he constrained water's ability to move quickly. he was really, the moment the ship left the yard, it was a disaster. i will tell you a subtle point. i have never talked about it. there is a tradition on the lakes. when a ship is launched, the time the ship is out, you refer to it as a feminine. when a ship has a shipwreck, you refer to it as an it. they no longer refer to it as a she. i refer to the eastland as she until they put the machinery in.

every subsequent reference, i call it it. the eastland was in front of her. i never called the eastland a she. from my mind, the moment machinery went in, it was a questioner: [inaudible] mr. mccarthy: great question. i deal with it in the book. the aftermath is, as soon as they raise it, the navy takes over come they inspect the ship, they decide that it seems like a good ship. what if we cut a deck, fix the ballast system, put another seacock and do all the things walter steele was talking about. the navy does it and it operates fine. they used to to train soldiers and they were preparing to send

it to world war ii. world war ii ended before it made it out there. but, importantly, they made the changes to the ballast system and they made the ship safe. it sailed without incident again. this is a great detail that, as a writer, you love. i look over the naval inspection report at the national archives in washington, d.c. it is a naval inspector report and they are concerned that this is the ship that killed 800. are the sailors ok with this? very dry engineer speak. he says that there was concern

that shifting of water from tank tank was a problem, but the navy asked the problem. still, the sailors who sailed the eastland, now called the willamette. they renamed it. no one wants to be a cursed ship. the sailors always keep the ballast tanks full. they were over-cautious. they keep them full the whole time. detail i remember is that they had been full so long, they were red. another great detail is, when walter steele was called remember, he is the villain. when he was called before chicago prosecutors, he was asked about if he had had a

conversation with ericsson about it. he denies it. he denies having been on the ship, though there are pictures of him on it. and, steele makes plants, after the ship sank, to raise it and take it to a different port. he decides to take it elsewhere. questioner: considering the magnitude of this, i have never heard of it. why do you think a disaster of this magnitude was such a scope of humanitarian failure? why is this so trumped by the titanic? mr. mccarthy: that is a great

question. i have a couple of thoughts. none of the passengers were well-to-do. them a royalty -- none of them are royalty. these are poor working people. for a long time, we did not have anybody to blame. it seemed to just have tipped over. that didn't work for me. i didn't believe it. someone did something wrong. never ever found it. that was part of the problem. finally, and importantly, the country moved on. right after the eastland sank, world war i happened and that eclipsed everything. i was just remembering a detail about walter steele. you saw the dapper suit and his hat. he would go to the chicago athletics club. the day he spoke with joseph ericson about making repairs one of the most fascinating things, to me, was that ericson told the police chief in his office that steele was wearing overalls.

he was wearing overalls. the man never would have worn overalls. there was something about that detail that rang true to me. he was concerned about the ship and ended up deciding to postpone the work. when erickson talked about the conversation, he remembers that he was wearing overalls. it is that kind of concrete particular that makes you really believe that it was true. ericson never wavered. he could have been found liable for not taking more steps into looking into the safety of the ship. i'll come to you next.

questioner: what happened to erickson? >> his life was short, unfortunately. he was drafted into the army corps of engineers. he was a brave and able runner of men. he ran engine rooms that took american troops over to the european theater. he died an untimely death. later, i touch on this at the very end of the book in the epilogue, the owners of the company are charged in a civil litigation for death. the families stood to make $10,000 apiece to be paid by the

insurers. ericson had died by the time of that trial. by the time a came to the testimony phase, erickson was dead and the owners blamed him for the entire accident. they twisted the evidence and made him the fall guy. they ended up not having to pay the civil charges. they continued to make erickson their scapegoat and he, being dead, had no way to defend himself. it is a good question. sorry for the answer. yes. up here.

questioner: in the trial, no one was held responsible, but they lost the ship. >> what do you mean? the governor took the ship away from them and said, "you no longer own the eastland." what ended up happening was that there was an admiral in a town and he made a bid to purchase it for the navy and the navy took it over. it was built in 1902 and it was about 12 years old. >> [inaudible] mr. mccarthy: it was built in

1902 and it was about 12 years old. yeah. yes, sir. questioner: do the model eastlands bill for the trial exist? >> if only they did! neither of the model survived. a lot of the exhibits were lost. the columns of wood that clarence darrow brought in are not there. the original blueprint for the ship is lost. we do not know exactly what happened. the suspicion is, when the criminal trial failed to bring any convictions, the keeping of evidence didn't seem important and there was no appeal, obviously. we think that somebody trashed some of these things. yeah, i would love to see -- it's funny, they reference in

the judge and the attorneys standing around metal tanks and tipping the, trying to show this is why it happened. questioner: they made a movie called "the poseidon adventure." [indiscernible] >> i never saw a connection. i'm not sure. i don't know. i remember the movie. yeah. i remember the movie. questioner: was it inspired by this? mr. mccarthy: was it inspired by -- it could've been. are we wrapped up? okay, thank you so much. [applause]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> you're watching american history tv, 48 hours of american history scroll in on c-span 3. follow us on twitter to keep up with the latest history news. each week, american history tv's "reel america" brings you archival films that help will the story of the 20th century. president johnson: i have ordered two vietnam forces that will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately. additional forces will be needed later and they will be sent as requested. this will make it necessary to increase our active fighting horses by raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 over a period of time to 35000 per

month and first to step up our campaign for voluntary illness since -- voluntary enlistments. >> talk about a timetable in reference to vietnam. he said today that the united states will not be defeated and not grow tired. donald johnson went over to vietnam in the spring and later called on you. he told the reporters that he could imagine the war they're going on for 5, 6, or seven years. have you thought of that possibility, sir, and do you think the american people ought to think of that possibility? president johnson: yes, i think he american people ought to understand that there is no quick solution to the problem that we face there.

i do not would prophesies whether it will be a matter of months or weeks or decades. i don't know that we have any accurate timetable on how long it will take to obtain victory. i don't think if anyone knew it was going to be two years or four years or six years to meet success in world war ii. i do think our cause is just. i do think our purposes and objectives are beyond any question. i do believe that america will stand united hide her men that are there, and i plan, as long as i am president, to see that our forces are strong enough to protect our national interests and our right hand constantly protecting that interested their military and our diplomatic and political negotiations are constantly attempting to find some solution that would substitute words for bombs.

as i have had so many times, if anyone questions are good faith i would ask them to meet us and find us in the appointed place and appointed chair. >> "history bookshelf" errors on "american historytv". next author alan huffman is featured with his book "sultana: surviving the civil war, prison, and the worst maritime disaster in american history." alan huffman