A City of Sorrow, a Voice of Fire — Edith Franklin Wyatt & the Eastland

A disaster can strike twice—first when it happens, and again in how it is remembered. Today, we bring back another “lost” voice of the Eastland Disaster history that has been silent for too long. 

Chicago writer and social critic Edith Franklin Wyatt visited Hawthorne soon after the Eastland capsized. She wrote about what she saw in the homes of families still waiting for answers.

In Wyatt’s “Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow,” she shares the details that make history feel real: closed shops, sleepless nights, photos clutched in trembling hands, and birthdays overshadowed by grief. Her reporting keeps the voices of working-class and immigrant residents of the Western Electric Hawthorne Works community alive, showing how mourning spreads through a neighborhood and changes everything.

Wyatt goes beyond heartbreak. She asks the questions that come after the shock: Who allowed an overcrowded, unstable ship to leave? What did government inspectors do, and what did they overlook? Her claim of an “absentee government” makes the Eastland disaster a lesson in public safety, accountability, and the conditions that let preventable tragedies happen again.

If you are interested in Chicago history, the Eastland disaster, genealogy, labor history, or investigative journalism, this story connects the dots clearly and respectfully. Subscribe or follow, and share this episode with anyone who loves hidden history.

Resources:

• Edith Franklin Wyatt, “Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow; Community Hushed by Death,” Chicago Examiner (Chicago, Illinois), July 26, 1915.
• History of Mary Queen of Heaven Church
• Clarke, Sue Ainslie, and Edith Franklin Wyatt. Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Accessed via Internet Archive.

• Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/
• Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/
• YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTube
• Medium: Natalie Zett – Medium
• The opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opus
• Other music. Artlist

Transcript

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Welcome To Flower In The River

Natalie Zett 0:08

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 168 of Flower in the River. How's it going? I hope you're doing well. Before we launch into today's episode, there's a lot to launch into, by the way, here.

Why These Lost Stories Matter

Natalie Zett 1:06

I want to pause and thank you for all of these downloads and for your interest and for caring about these people. I mean, I care about them, but I never expected that there would be this type of interest. So I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. And I hope that my work inspires you to take action, maybe with a piece of your own family history or with history in general that you feel called to or drawn to. Because after all, we've never had so many opportunities to find things online. We've never had so many opportunities to share those discoveries in a variety of ways, whether in images, in stories, in videos, and so on. So each one of us can play a part in caring for those stories of the past. Remember, those people have a lot to teach us. Each week, the number increases because there are so many that I continue to discover. Who knows where it will end? Just so you know, the majority of my podcast episodes, the past podcast episodes, they're about those people who were very much a part of the Eastland disaster history, but they were omitted. They are off the radar. And my goal is to put them back where they belong. And of course, finding all of these records and documentation doesn't do a whole lot of good unless it's shared, right? So that's what I do each week. I try to share one or two or more stories with you. And I do that to make sure that these people stay on the record and don't get lost again. And selfishly, I have to say, this is one of the most interesting projects that I have ever taken on. Looking back on the three years that I've been doing this podcast, there are a number of poets, such as Carl Sandberg and Agnes Lee, authors such as Luella Parsons, Jack Woodford, Dwight Boyer, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Mary Morris, and I'm probably forgetting some of them. But regardless, these were people who either witnessed the Eastland disaster or were alive when it took place and were influenced by it, or who had a relative that was in the Eastland disaster and wrote

Meet Writer Edith Franklin Wyatt

Natalie Zett 4:17

about it. And that provides the perfect segue. I want to introduce you to Edith Franklin Wyatt. Shortly after the Eastland capsized, Wyatt, a Chicago writer and social critic, interviewed several of the families and the various clergy of the churches that were located near the Hawthorne works. And before I read the article, I want you to know that the writer was very graphic in her description of what she saw, who she saw, and some of the exchanges that took place. I just want you to be aware of that. Edith Franklin Wyatt was born in 1873 in Toma, Wisconsin. Edith's father was Franklin O. Wyatt, who was a railroad and mining engineer, and her mother was Marion Lagrange Purdy Wyatt, a published poet. The family moved around quite a bit during Edith's early years, but they eventually settled in Chicago. In the early 1890s, Edith attended Brynmar College, which is an elite women's college and closely associated with early feminist and reform movements. Brynmar is about 10 miles from Philadelphia to put it in geographic perspective. And after she graduated, Edith taught at a girls' school, watching young women try to build lives within a narrow range of quote-unquote acceptable choices and even narrower economic possibilities. And that experience seems to have fed a lifelong preoccupation with how structures, not just personal character, determine what people, especially women, and even those in a general way of the working class, can actually do. By the turn of the 20th century, Wyatt was back in Chicago, publishing stories that took the city streets, factories, and boarding houses as their central subjects. She was an activist. She moved into the Hull House, and she was working and learning from social workers, labor activists, and other writers who believed that narrative could be a form of investigation and political pressure. Before we go further, I wonder if Hull House is familiar to you. Hull House is one of the most influential settlement houses in American history, and it was founded in Chicago in 1889 by Jane Adams and Ellen Gates Starr. It became a major center for social reform during Chicago's industrial era and was deeply connected to the lives of many immigrant communities. Back to Edith Franklin Wyatt, she was actually an extremely prolific writer, and her early books, like Everyone His Own Way and True Love, use fiction to probe unequal power relations and the moral compromises forced by poverty and gender. In 1911, she and Sue Ainsley Clark published Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls. This was a study that documented how low wages pushed young women into overcrowded, unsafe housing, and chronic precarity. If you want ethical outcomes, you must first create material conditions where ethics are possible. That structural way of thinking is exactly what Edith brought to her writing about the Eastland. The newspaper that she was writing for was the Chicago Examiner, and its tagline is the best newspaper for the best homes. The date is Monday, July 26,

Setting The Scene At Hawthorne

Natalie Zett 9:06

1915. The Eastland happened on Saturday, July 24, 1915. Two days afterward, this article was published. In this article, Hawthorne refers to the Western Electric Factory District centered around the massive Hawthorne complex in Cicero, Illinois. Headline Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow, Community Hushed by Death by Edith Franklin Wyatt, author of Everyone His Own Way, True Love, Making Both Ends Meet, Heroes of the Cherry Mine, and Numerous Other Stories.

Wyatt’s Reporting From A City Of Sorrow

Natalie Zett 9:59

The Saturday of july twenty fifth at Hawthorne was a day of great common grief. The quiet of the simplest mortal sympathy breathed in the air. Flags hung at half staff. The baseball fields were still. The picture shows were closed. On the fire stations, on a dyer's and cleaner's business house hung draperies of mourning. Flowers at the doorbells, and even footsteps of the bearers of stretchers. The groups of people everywhere on the streets, speaking in a manner so grave and yet so intent, by the side of the hollyhock yards and cottage grass plots, all tacitly expressed on every side the presence of grief and bereavement. A pale young girl in a fresh white dress and a flower-wreathed hat touched the bell of the parish house of Father Didera, priest of the parish of Mary, Queen of Heaven. They have found Martha's body too, she said simply. They found her this morning. They have just sent word. She walked away quietly. No, said Father Didera when he came back to talk with us. I have seen no hysteria. People are very calm. Some of them are stunned. Yesterday many of them spent praying in church. There was not much rest last night. Headline Little Sleep in Hawthorne. There had indeed been little sleep that night in the neighborhood most deeply affected by the calamity of the Eastland. At the Western Electric Company's offices at the parish of Father Didera, in the large Polish parish east of him, in the congregation of the Lutheran pastorate, in hundreds of Bohemian, Irish, German, and American houses, the watchers have seen the hopeless dawn. We were all together on the boat, said a young man, my sister and my brother-in-law and the two children. We were on the port side. We were thrown into the water under the boat. I jumped as we fell. We were all separated. My sister is living. She could hold up the little boy who was with her. He was saved. He had led us into the family sitting room. Here is my brother-in-law, he said. On a sheet covered bier, a young man lay starkly outlined in the nobility of death. His lovely little girl was stretched at his side, as though in sleep, her eyelids lightly closed. We were all thrown apart from each other, said the young man, gravely looking down at his dead. As he went out to the door with us again, he added, as though he had dwelt too long on his own grief. In the family next door there are people drowned, and in the house next to that too. Headline Woman loses three daughters. Oh, I am sorry for all for all. Oh I am sorry for all the other mothers here, sobbed a Bohemian woman, who had lost three daughters, employees of the Western Electric Company. I think they feel like me. She brought out the photograph of her daughters as little girls, sitting on her lap, photographs of them as pretty young women, one of them in a graceful white dress as a bridesmaid. Oh how I have worked for them. It has been ever since my husband died in Kansas. So hard. I want to show you my daughter's room. Not that it is so fashionable, but she kept it so nice. She took us to her daughter's room, with its pretty counterpane, its photographs of girlfriends and college banners. Here she broke down in the midst of its familiar mementos of her daughter and sank down sobbing on a little chair. Oh, I will stay here. No, no, mother, said her son in law gently. You must not stay here. You must come where it is cooler. He lifted her up and led her into another room. Today is her birthday, she cried bitterly. Maybe other mothers have had it better for them, but everybody who has been a mother will know how I feel. The greatest sorrow in the community is its loss of young life. Nearly all those drowned on Saturday were under forty years of age. Some of them were young, married people and their children. A white faced widower who has lost his wife and baby echoed the words of his Bohemian neighbors. Headline Shows Baby's Pictures. My baby's birthday was today. She would have been three years old. He held the baby's picture in her cunning little winter coat and hood. The little girl drowned with her mother and grandmother. Three generations. He showed us many Kodak photographs of their happy companionship. Everywhere one encountered family losses of young, unmarried women who had been employed in clerical work or in braiding cord in the Western Electric Company. In the Polish parish, Father Jupkowski said that of the twelve recorded bereavements in his church, all had been the deaths of girls between fifteen and seventeen. An Irish family led us to the side of one such girl in a freshly starched muslin dress with her dark hair beautifully brushed and smoothly rolled away from her temples. She had a fine face, but they said, Oh she looked much more lovely when she was alive. You would hardly know her. A whole department of young girls, said a mother bitterly, marched to the picnic in embroidered hats and silk parasols. And what did they march to? What did they march to? she asked fiercely. Headline to hold joint funeral. Tragic as the sight was of the girls of many nationalities who had come to their death here in our country, the deepest impression one had in the presence of the terrible gash their loss had left in the neighborhood was an impression of strong admiration for them. Throughout their households were the tokens of these young women's strength, their families' pride in them, their families' dependence on them. All through the morning their companions, the girls who had escaped, came into the houses and would go to a mother or an aunt or a sister, kiss her silently, and stand with an arm about the older woman, looking down at the lost companion's face, and in the living working girls, and in the dead one, felt the presence of the best stuff of which humans are made. Before the meeting no definite statement could be made, of course, as to its concluded arrangements. But it was hoped that if the weather were fair, there might be an open field service for all creeds and nationalities, men, women and children, at a date which could not be determined. The field is behind the Catholic Church on our level western prairie ground, edged with honeyed locust trees. It was very quiet and unpretentious as we looked at it. One thought of the dead girl's quiet courage and strength in their unpretentious ways, and the old words rose in one's mind. Quote, and may there be no moaning at the bar when I go out to sea.

The Turn Toward Blame And Systems

Natalie Zett 19:35

What caused it all? Many people asked us of their loss. This is the question the community has to answer in the serious spirit of a great common sympathy in calamity. Such a spirit filled the streets of Hawthorne yesterday. Headline. Company not blamed. Do you hear the Western Electric Company blamed? We asked of several observing people. No, was the thoughtful answer. The nearest approach to disparaging criticism was a rumor that some of the girls and men had not cared to go to the picnic, but had feared a refusal would seem disobliging and affect their positions. Whether this fear was justified remained unascertainable. Do you hear the steamboat owners or the company blamed? No. In Hawthorne, Morton Park, and Cicero, apparently, there was none of the manhunting and mobbing spirit that turned on Captain Pederson on the downtown streets on Saturday. Apparently there was a sober realization that not simply one man, not even any one company, had caused the widespread horror of the disaster, but some great, prevalent wrong condition. What I hear said, said the German Lutheran pastor Dr. Miles, is this. Why did the government let this happen? This boat, they said, was discredited at other times and places. The spirit of Hawthorne repeats the word that may be found in a ten years protest of the officers of the Siemens Union against failure of the national government to investigate the accidents on the Great Lakes, to make public the results of the investigations, and to form rulings to prevent the overloading of vessels, the presence of hatches and gangways difficult to close quickly, the light balancing of vessels licensed to carry great living weights, rulings to prevent the many bad conditions which have caused the loss or danger of other vessels than the fated Eastland. Headline An absentee government. The government which should safeguard human life on the Great Lakes has been, as far as they were concerned, an absentee government, not interested in our disasters far away from Washington. In the correspondence of the Seaman's Union on these points, there is a well-witnessed tale of a vessel permitted to leave port by Great Lakes inspectors, with the water awash on her decks from the weight of steel rails she was carrying. The inspectors were obliged to wear boots and to wait on deck in order to make the inspection by which they permitted her to leave. This is not a new but an old record of overloading on Great Lakes vessels. The disasters of the Great Lakes vessels are among the most spectacular and sensational in our country's chronicles. But they have not roused Washington to safeguard life on the Great Lakes. Within our recent recollections, Père Marquette has foundered with all her crew. The Atlanta has burned off Sheboygan, being in such a condition in regard to safety from fire that within half an hour after the discovery of the fire, her crew had to abandon her. The city of Cleveland has taken fire and burned so rapidly she had to be sunk at her docks. Last September, here in Chicago, a steamer taking fire at the crib was saved only by the fact that her captain rammed her with terrific force 15 feet against the life-saving pier. Headline Too many people on boat. Many people who attended the Eastland outing and escaped said, I think there were too many people on the boat. They say there were no more than the law allows, but it seemed too many. The government's absentee indifference to safety on the Great Lakes may be evidenced by the fact that it not only permits passenger ships to leave port with life-saving provisions for only 30% of her passengers' capacity, but that of this 30% provision, three fourths may be life rafts and not need be lifeboats. This was permitted because of the representation in Washington that there was not room for lifeboats. But if permission were not given to overcrowd lake vessels with passengers, there would be sufficient lifeboat room to make everyone on board safe. Keeping everyone on board lake steamers safe should be the aim of any government worthy to rule the men and women whom we heard speak of their grief at Hawthorne today. The aim of any government assuming to be honestly democratic and inspired by a common mortal responsibility. End of article.

What Wyatt’s Article Reveals Today

Natalie Zett 25:15

Okay, what did you think about this article by Edith Franklin Wyatt? Right after the Eastland capsized, Wyatt went to Hawthorne and she listened and then she wrote, Her article, Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow, Community Hushed by Death, paints a picture of a neighborhood where everyday life has completely stopped. She talks about the quiet streets, the closed windows, sleeping houses turned into visual rooms. She's not there as a just the facts kind of reporter. She really is talking to the people, she's noticing the small details, she's holding their grief, she's listening to their stories, and she creates this atmospheric peace that makes you feel as if you are stepping into those living rooms, into those homes. There's a real intimacy that she creates in this article. But Edith doesn't stop at grief. And this is what I really enjoyed about that article. She records the questions people in Hawthorne are asking about cause and responsibility, whether the company is to blame, whether government inspectors did their jobs, and why such an overcrowded, unstable vessel was ever allowed to sail. Edith gets her opinions in there too, and she sharpens those questions into a critique of a quote unquote absent government that had the duty to safeguard life on the Great Lakes, but effectively looked the other way, allowing preventable disasters to recur. The article is not that long, but Edith is a consummate writer and she packs a lot into it. She manages to do several things at once. She documents the emotional landscape of a mourning community, and she preserves working class voices that question corporate and governmental power, and insists that the Eastland was a structural failure, not a random twist of fate. It's an early example of disaster writing that ties memory and mourning directly into accountability. The way that I often think about the people of the Eastland disaster and the way that their history has been handled in the 21st century is that it's kind of like a disaster within a disaster. So the disaster happened, and yet, despite the availability and accessibility of so many articles like the one you just heard, they've not been brought forward into the 21st century until now. And I think that perhaps Edith would say that this is also part of accountability, making sure that all of that history, everyone's story, is brought forward as time passes.

New Research Leads And Unlisted Names

Natalie Zett 28:45

So what happened to Edith Franklin Wyatt after the Eastland disaster? Well, as you can imagine, she kept busy. She continued writing poetry, and she served as one of three members of Poetry Magazine's first advisory committee, but she was best known for her prose. Edith, who was dedicated to social causes, became known as a social commentator and progressive activist, writing about labor inequities and other socio-political issues she observed in Chicago. She died in Chicago in 1958. Additional searches revealed that Edith traveled all over the world. It appeared that she stayed active, that she stayed engaged until the end of her days. I would say this is a life very well lived, and she deserves to be recognized for her contributions, not just to the Eastland disaster history, but to the world of poetry and literature. We are not done yet because Edith unknowingly gave us some additional homework assignments. She mentioned this church, Mary Queen of Heaven, and it's not listed anywhere in any Eastland accounts that I have seen, so we need to do some further research about that. She also talked about a couple of priests, one of whom was named Father Didera. He too is mentioned in an article that I found on Our Lady the Mystical Rose website. And get this, they also talk about that church's experience of the Eastland disaster. As far as I know, this too has been ignored, omitted from the retellings of the Eastland Disaster's history. And I have a feeling that Edith herself is guiding this one just a bit. Remember that I talked about those 200 plus people that I have located in the last three years who are omitted from any Eastland disaster retellings. Well, I predict that as I follow this particular path that's laid out here for me, that I will find even more to add to that tally. And of course, I will keep you updated because these people, they deserve to be part of the Eastland disaster history because, well, they were part of it. Why they've been left out, why so many have been left out, I don't know. But I'm committed to getting them back in there because they always belonged there. Goodbye for now. Please remember to take care of yourselves and take care of each other and stay safe, and I will talk to you soon.

Closing Thanks And Ways To Support

Natalie Zett 31:50

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 1915. Goodbye for now.