Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

A Beautiful Magazine and a Missing Hero - Selective History at Work

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 155

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A glossy company history can sparkle—and still leave a hole big enough to hide a tragedy. We open a 1981 Western Electric centennial magazine that celebrates a century of innovation yet steps neatly over 1915, the year the Eastland capsized by the Clark Street Bridge and more than 800 lives were lost, many from Western Electric's Hawthorne Works. That missing year isn’t just an editorial quirk; it’s a powerful example of narrative control, memory politics, and how brands shape the stories we inherit.

From there, we shift to a name that deserves to be known: Captain James Jacob Wagner, a Great Lakes navigator who volunteered as a diver for three days and recovered 105 bodies. We trace Wagner’s path from a Dutch immigrant family to licensed master on Lake Michigan, a veteran with a reputation for hard work who showed up when it mattered most. Along the way, we unpack the social world that anchored him—Chicago’s Knights Templar and civic fraternal networks that helped immigrant communities build belonging and purpose.

Together, we question the tidy myth that World War I overshadowed the Eastland story. Archival evidence shows robust coverage in U.S. and European papers, proving the problem wasn’t silence but selection. 

We talk about how to push past gatekeeping and restore what was cut: verifying sources, preserving rare images, and insisting on full, sourced complexity. If public history, company archives, genealogy, Great Lakes maritime history, or the Eastland disaster sounds compelling, then this conversation offers tools and names to carry forward.

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Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well, and we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 155 of Flower in the River. And I hope you're doing well. This week I've got something slightly different for you. Besides a long-lost biography, I also have a magazine review of sorts. You'll hear about that as well. So let's jump in because there's a lot to cover. Before we get into today's episode, I need to share some history, and it will have more meaning as we go along here. We're going to talk about the relationship between the Bell Telephone Company, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, ATT, and Western Electric. It does get confusing, and I'll do my best to smooth things out here. Of course, Western Electric was the company in Cicero, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, that sponsored the ill-fated July 24, 1915 company picnic that turned tragic when the Eastland, a ship that was chartered for the picnic, capsized in the Chicago River. Let's talk about these various organizations. In the late 1800s, Alexander Graham Bell held several patents, and they led to the founding of the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. That company evolved and reorganized, and by 1885, the American Telephone and Telegraph ATT was created, initially as a long-distance subsidiary. And then in 1899, AT ⁇ T essentially flipped the structure and became the parent holding company of the entire Bell system. Bell became a brand and a system and not just a single company. And where Western Electric fits into all this, Western Electric in Cicero was the manufacturing arm. It had been around since 1869, originally making telegraph equipment, and ATT acquired it in 1882, before ATT even became the parent company. From that point forward, Western Electric was the exclusive manufacturer for the entire Bell system. If a Bell telephone company needed equipment, switchboards, handsets, cables, or wire, Western Electric made it. It was essentially a captive supplier, which was enormously profitable and also enormously controversial. Antitrust regulators kept eyeing it. So AT ⁇ T was the brain, the regional bell operating companies were the nervous system reaching customers, and Western Electric was the hands that built everything. And during its heyday, Western Electric in Cicero employed around 45,000 people. It was like a city within a city. And I had so many relatives that worked there before, during, and after the Eastland disaster that I did hear quite a few stories about the place. So I want to share with you something that I've been holding on to, and I found it on the Internet Archive. I've wanted to share this with you for a while, but it just takes a while to get to all the artifacts that I have located during my various online searches. There is so much information, so many stories, so much detail missing from the modern retellings of the Eastland disaster. I had no idea when I started this podcast how much had been left out. The earliest records having to do with the Eastland disaster are nearly 111 years old. The majority of them are in the public domain, and of course, I'm not talking about families' personal histories or photos, etc. That belongs to them. But the overall information about the Eastland disaster and the many, many individuals who were involved with it one way or the other, there is so much that is available, and there's no reason that it should not have been collected and curated and shared by now. Speaking of sharing, I want to tell you about this most fascinating document that I found on the Internet Archive. This is a special commemorative issue of the Western Electric Magazine, and it was published in 1981, 66 years after the Eastland disaster. The subhead reads, Special Issue, 100 years in the Bell System. I have to say they did a beautiful, beautiful job. On the cover you've got photos from the late 1800s and early 1900s, photos from the 1940s, and then photos from their current time, the 1980s. Some of these photos are just gorgeous, and I've never seen them elsewhere, so they are one of a kind. For sure I will share those with you. And whoever did the layout, kudos to them. Great job. And on the second page they featured a vintage page from Scientific America from 1884. Some really remarkable images there as well. If you love history, you've got to look at this document. And on the third page, they included a map identifying who and what appears on the cover. Then you start moving through the entire history of Western Electric from June 30th, 1881 to 1981. 100 years. I won't go through all of it, but it might be worth covering in a future episode. But the editorial office at that point was in New York City, not Chicago, though, of course, Chicago figures prominently in Western Electric's history. And based on the photographs and the background information that they did share in this issue, they either were in contact with people from Chicago, or they had a very good handle on the history of Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero. They meticulously documented the company's history, and this is a collector's item. The magazine is organized by decade, which you would expect with a company history. When they get to the new century, and that would be 1900, you can feel the excitement. They were so looking forward to a brand new millennium. They include photos from the Hawthorne plant from 1914, so that is one year before the Eastland disaster. And I turned to the next page expecting to see 1915 and coverage of the Eastland disaster. But no, I'm not kidding. They jump from 1914 directly to the Great War, World War I. The page opens with a line about how long before America entered the war to end all wars and the Western Electric News was filled with stories about employees in their foreign plants joining up. The focus shifts entirely to the war. But what happened in 1915? If you look at this magazine and take it on face value, nothing. Within this issue, they did include a two-page spread dedicated specifically to disasters. They mention an 1881 blizzard, a 1913 flood, but not the Eastland disaster. Having worked for various newspapers and magazines myself, I know that stories get vetoed a lot of times by upper management for any number of reasons. And that very well may have been the case here. Whoever assembled this publication, though, was very historically astute. They knew what they were doing. So it's entirely possible that they had the story and it was pulled for reasons that we'll never probably know. The other theory, one that I've heard many, many times, is that the Eastland disaster was effectively buried by World War I. The argument goes that the Great War overshadowed everything else, and the Eastland story simply got lost in the noise. It's a very tidy explanation and it sounds convincing. I believed it when I was doing my initial Eastland research over 25 years ago, but my later research tells a very different story. The Eastland disaster received a lot of coverage, not just in American newspapers, but in publications across Poland, England, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, and beyond. That coverage took place alongside coverage of the Great War. So that explanation does not hold up. And this is exactly the challenge that I want to name directly. These oversimplifications, well, they don't hold water because we know history and people are very complicated, and there are many, many reasons. And we cannot use those reasons to explain away the difficulties that we don't want to wrestle with because we do have to wrestle with this information. And we do know that in the 1980s and even the 1990s, survivors and families of those who survived or died on the Eastland, they were still sharing their stories in newspapers and other publications. I know this because I have featured so many of them on this podcast. And most of these stories were only published once, and they were never picked up and never carried down the line. I always had this thought that the coverage of historical events would improve and progress as time passes, and that certainly has not been the case with the Eastland disaster. The nice thing is that so much of this history is being recovered, restored, and retold with proper source citations and attributions. People are becoming much more sophisticated. They're asking the right questions, such as where did this information come from? Oh, really, how about you prove it? And they're learning to apply thinking skills, critical thinking skills, but I would just call it thinking skills. And they're no longer simply accepting something as truth just because someone who sounds authoritative says it's true. In other words, we are moving away from the gatekeeper model, which really has not served this history very well. So encountering this magazine, it was a wake-up call. We can't get into a time machine, but we can refuse to accept reductive retellings. We can do the hard work of recovering what was omitted, documenting the evidence, and insisting on the full complexity of what happened. I want us to understand what it is we are looking at here when we see this 1981 Western Electric Company magazine. It is beautiful, it really is. But it also serves as an example of narrative control. And narrative control can look very different depending on the time, the publication, etc. But by leaving out the Eastland Disaster, a significant part of Western Electric's history, of Western Electric's Hawthorne Works history, and it's not as if the Eastland Disaster was a minor footnote in the history of that organization. It of course was massive. Over 800 people died. The majority of them were Western Electric employees. That's a huge oversight, to say the very least. I have to say that if I had been aware of the Eastland disaster's effect on my family growing up, and then years later saw this publication and saw that the history of the Eastland disaster was left out, I would feel not too happy about that. I would feel slighted, to say the least. And I would wonder why they would do such a thing when this event affected my family, affected so many families. Why would they not at least just honor those people? Now let's move on to the next portion of the podcast. That 1981 magazine tells us a lot about memory, about who or what gets commemorated. And that leads us to the next story. This is another story of someone who was there, who assisted during the Eastland disaster, and whose story was only told a couple of times and never carried forward into the modern retellings of the Eastland disaster. This person is one of many, so let's get to know him. I want to open with an obituary. It ran in the Buffalo Courier Express on Tuesday, June eleventh, nineteen forty. And nineteen forty is just twenty-five years after the Eastland disaster. Headline Hero of Chicago ship disaster dies at 72. Chicago, Illinois, Captain James J. Wagner, Great Lakes navigator and diver and hero of the Eastland disaster, was buried today in Acacia Park Cemetery. Captain Wagner died Thursday at the age of 72 years after sailing grain boats on the lakes for a score of years. Captain Wagner became a diver, an underwater blaster, when in July 1915, the Eastland, an excursion boat, capsized in the Chicago River near the Clark Street Bridge, Captain Wagner, working for three days as a volunteer diver, recovered one hundred and five bodies. Let's say that again, one hundred and five bodies. Three days as a volunteer. Now James's story was not just mentioned in one single obituary, there were other variations of this obituary, and James is also acknowledged as a hero of the Eastland disaster on his profile on Find a Grave. So that's at least three places where the story is told. And despite that, the story was never picked up in any modern retellings of the Eastland Disaster story. We'll come back to that, but I just wanted to make sure that you keep that in mind. Who was James Jacob Wagner? Captain James Jacob Wagner was born on June 5, 1868. His father, Hendrik, was 31 years old, and his mother, Katharina, was 27. Both of his parents were immigrants from Holland, part of the great wave of Dutch families who put down roots in the upper Midwest in the mid-19th century. Where James was born is a question the records haven't fully settled. Some sources say Three Oaks, Michigan. His find a grave profile gives Cedar Grove in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. Now, Sheboygan County had a substantial Dutch immigrant community, so that tracks. But the discrepancy is one of those mysteries that genealogists know way too well. I'll keep working on that one. What we do know is that James came of age in the era of the Great Lakes trade. By the time he married, when he was in his early 30s, his occupation was listed as captain on the lake. That was actually quite an accomplishment for that time period. Captains on Lake Michigan specifically in the late 1800s, early 1900s were licensed masters who combined local pilotage knowledge, command responsibility for ship and cargo, and employer-style authority over a largely working class, ethnically mixed crew within an increasingly corporatized, schedule-driven freight and passenger system. The captain, who was usually titled as a master, had ultimate legal responsibility for the vessel's navigation, safety, and commercial performance, including compliance with federal navigation laws and lighthouse aid to navigation systems being expanded on the Great Lakes during that period. So not too much pressure, right? People like Captain Wagner really had to know what they were doing to be in the position that they were in. Captain Wagner was a man of the water from an early age, sailing grain boats across the Great Lakes for decades. He also was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He seemed to be someone who showed up when there was a job to be done and kept going until that job was finished. On November 27, 1902, James married Julia Viedenheft in North Prairie, Wisconsin. Julia had been born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and the two of them would make their home in Chicago. James and Julia did not appear to have any children. By the time of his death, they were living at 5353 Evergreen Avenue in Chicago, and James died just one day after his 71st birthday. I was thinking about James' particular form of heroism. Obviously, he didn't talk much about it afterward, but he was a volunteer. He didn't have to be there, and we don't know how he ended up being informed that the ship had capsized. But nonetheless, he was there and And he worked for three days straight, recovering the dead. 105 bodies. That alone should have secured his place in the history of the disaster. James Wagner's profile on Find a Grave also has additional information about his life that adds yet another dimension to him. I often refer people to Find a Grave because that's where you're most likely to find biographies about people who were part of the Eastland disaster, specifically victims. Now, heroes don't have their own section, but maybe it's something we should consider creating for Find a Grave. His funeral was held at 1820 South Michigan Avenue and conducted under the auspices of the Saint Bernard Commandery No. 35 of the Knights Templar. The Knights Templar. A detail worth explaining because the name means something very different today than it did in 1940. So the Saint Bernard Commander No. 35 was a long-standing Chicago Knights Templar chapter. It was chartered in 1870. And they were best known for their elite drill corps and their prominent role in Masonic Templar life in the city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now, I know the phrase Knights Templar carries a lot of baggage in popular culture today, but I want to be clear what that organization actually was in the early 20th century Chicago. The Knights Templar at that time were a chivalric branch of the York Wright Freemasonry, a very public, very respectable Christian fraternal organization centered on pageantry, charity, service work, and fraternal networking. To belong to this organization, a man, and yes it was a man, had to be a master mason. And then complete the royal arch and cryptic degrees before being admitted to the Templar Orders. Oh, doesn't that sound intriguing? Chicago had multiple commanderies meeting in substantial temple buildings throughout the city. It was the kind of institution that anchored people into the fabric of their city. And since 2023, when I opened up this podcast to start talking about people of the Eastland disaster, I have a number of episodes pertaining to people who were part of these various lodges, men and women. They were part of the social fabric of that era, particularly among immigrant communities finding their footing in this new country. Captain James Jacob Wagner, son of Dutch immigrants, Great Lakes Navigator, Spanish American veteran, husband of Julia, member of the Saint Bernard Commander, volunteered to spend three days of his life in the Chicago River, recovering those who died on the Eastland. Who knows? Perhaps he was the person who recovered the body of my great aunt. It's way past time that James Jacob Wagner gets acknowledged as a hero of the Eastland disaster. He did exemplary service, and who knows how many families he brought closure to during that time. So we want to honor him. Well, that's it for this week's episode, and thank you so much for joining me on this journey. And I want to give a special shout out to the new listeners from the Poznan area in Poland. I have deep ancestry in that location, so that really shocked me in a good way when I saw that statistic. So Dzinkuevam Friaciella. Thank you, friends. So next week we will continue with more stories, most of which have never been told. And as I say on my website, these people have waited long enough. Time to tell their stories. And in the meantime, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and please stay safe. I'll talk to you next week. Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerinthher.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money, and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of nineteen fifteen. Goodbye for now.

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Natalie Zett

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