Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

A Hell of a Job: Carl Sandburg's Eastland

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 171

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As the 111th anniversary of the Eastland disaster approaches, the podcast turns toward the writers, poets, artists, and witnesses who captured the tragedy in their own words. Their voices, once alive with urgency, have too often been pushed aside as the Eastland’s story has been retold, revised, and diluted over the years.

This episode focuses on Carl Sandburg: poet, journalist, musician, biographer of Lincoln, chronicler of working people, and one of the fiercest literary voices to respond to the Eastland disaster.

Sandburg responded to the tragedy with both prose and poetry. He wrote “The Eastland” in 1915, but it remained hidden until 1993, when it finally surfaced in Carl Sandburg: Billy Sunday and Other Poems, edited by George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick. The poem pulses with raw fury and unmistakable Sandburg grit. It does not simply mourn; it indicts.

In this episode, I recount my discovery of Sandburg’s long-buried Eastland poem in the 1990s. I also explore what its absence from most Eastland platforms says about the shifting tides of public memory when curiosity fades and research stops.

The episode also paints a fuller picture of Sandburg’s life: his Chicago years, his connection to Poetry magazine, his years as a socialist, his attention to labor and poverty, and his enduring fascination with death, democracy, and Abraham Lincoln.

Next, I read a modified version of Sandburg’s “The Eastland.” After that, you’ll hear Sandburg himself reading “Cool Tombs,” a poem where presidents, celebrities, workers, and everyday people all share the same fate.

The Eastland disaster was never just a number, especially since the full death toll may never be known with certainty. It was always about people with hopes, dreams, griefs, fears, and frustrations. Over time, the tragedy was commodified and branded. But before that, it was a catastrophe that ripped through families, neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and immigrant communities for years afterward. Sandburg saw this clearly.  His poem still smolders.

Resources:

Sandburg, Carl. “Looking ’Em Over.” The International Socialist Review 16, no. 3 (September 1915): 132–137.

Carl Sandburg, “Cool Tombs,” on Carl Sandburg Reads the Poems of Carl Sandburg, Decca Records, DL 9039, 1957, LP recording, Internet Archive, accessed June 17, 2026.

Sandburg, Carl. Billy Sunday and Other Poems. Edited and with an introduction by George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993

Poetry Foundation. “Carl Sandburg.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed June 17, 2026. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carl-sandburg.

Sandburg, Carl. “The Eastland.” c. 1915. IDEALS, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Modern American City Verse, 1905–1925, John Timberman Newcomb. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/30232.

Welcome to Flower in the River

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.

Writers Respond to the Eastland

Natalie Zett

Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 171 of Flower in the River. And I hope you're doing well. If you listened to the last three episodes, you know that they were about Edith Franklin Wyatt, the writer and poet, and her article about the Eastland disaster. And in a very real sense, Edith Franklin Wyatt has inspired the theme of the next few episodes. As we are approaching the 111th anniversary of the Eastland disaster, it made a lot of sense to feature the various writers, poets, authors, and even cartoonists who responded to the Eastland disaster via their art form. And I have devoted one or more episodes to each of these people previously, but because they're not mentioned any place else in conjunction with the Eastland disaster, I want to make sure that their legacies and their contributions are not lost.

Why Carl Sandburg Matters

Natalie Zett

Today I'm going to talk about a contemporary of Edith Franklin Wyatt, and that would be the poet, the author, the musician, Carl Sandburg. Here comes the synchronicity. Edith Wyatt was on the board of advisors for Poetry Magazine, and Carl Sandburg published in Poetry Magazine. And Carl Sandburg, like Edith Franklin Wyatt, responded to the Eastland disaster via an article that he wrote. I will not share that in this episode, but we'll save that for another episode. But he also wrote a poem, The Eastland, that was not published until decades after his death. We'll learn about that one in this episode. I just did a quick online check to see if anything had changed. But what I found online is that other than my book and my website, and at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign's website, there's no mention of Carl Sandburg's Eastland poem on any of the online Eastland disaster platforms. Even though I've mentioned Carl Sandburg in my book, and I have his poem and a brief biography on my website, I've never featured him exclusively in an episode. So I think this is the right time to do just that.

Finding the Lost Eastland Poem

Natalie Zett

In the late 90s, when I began searching for anything and everything about the Eastland disaster, I stumbled across this book by Carl Sandburg called Carl Sandburg, Billy Sunday, and other poems, unpublished, uncollected, and unexpirated works, edited by George and Willine Hendrick, both of whom were respected scholars in their fields, and sadly both of them have since passed away. They dedicated this book to Carl Sandburg's three daughters, Helga, Margaret, and Janet. In middle school and then later in high school, I had a number of teachers who practically worshipped Carl Sandburg. So needless to say, as students, we were exposed to a lot of his work, not just the poems, but some of his prose as well. But that Chicago poem I remember the first time I heard it, and it never left me. And the Chicago poem begins, hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stagger of wheat, player with railroads and the nation's freight handler, stormy, husky, brawling city of big shoulders. I carried this impression of Carl Sandburg, well the way I met him in high school, I mean through his work. And that impression would be Carl Sandburg, the later years, the white haired grandfather. His daughter, Margaret, edited a volume of them which she called Breathing Tokens in 1978, but still more of his strong poems remained. From his files, now housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Library, here is Sandburg once again fighting a religious fraud, arguing for economic, racial, and social justice, writing profiles and love poems and anti war poems, daydreaming and still speaking directly and forcefully to readers.

The Book That Preserved It

Natalie Zett

These unpublished or uncollected or unexpurgated poems are arranged in twelve sections. This introduction provides a brief literary, historical or social context for a better understanding and appreciation of the poems in each of the twelve sections of the book. The second section is devoted to Sandburg's poetic meditation on the sinking of the steamship the Eastland, loaded with about 2,500 workers and their families, who were being quote unquote treated to accompany picnic by their employer, the ship sank in the Chicago River on july twenty fourth, nineteen fifteen, drowning more than 800 people. Sandburg wrote an angry prose piece for the september nineteen fifteen issue of the International Socialist Review, charging that William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce, had been derelict in his duties. Why didn't Redfield coordinate the human units? The high salaried bureau heads under him, so as to stop a cranky, unstable, ancient hoodoo tub like the Eastland from going loaded with twenty five hundred lives. There's one answer. Business required it. He said that the workers on board the Eastland, headed for the picnic in Michigan City, had been forced to purchase tickets for the excursion, and that they were to wear white shoes and purchase white hats so that a photograph of the thousands of workers would show up well in advertising copy for the company. In Sandburg's estimation, quote, grim industrial feudalism stands with the dripping and red hands behind the whole Eastland affair. The Eastland poem contains some of Sandburg's most powerful images of the human misery he saw daily in the lives of working people in industrialized Chicago he knew so well. Obviously too raw, too radical for publication when it was written. The Eastland poem appears here for the first time. In this poem, Sandburg was quite clearly, as the Western comrade called him, the rising poet of the revolution. This is from Poetry Foundation. Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg said a friend of the poet, is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black and white snapshot. His range of interests were enumerated by his close friend, Harry Golden, who, in his study of the poet, called Carl Sandburg the one American writer who distinguished himself in five fields poetry, history, biography, and music.

Sandburg’s Life and Chicago Context

Natalie Zett

As you can see, there's no shortage of information about Carl Sandburg, and poets.org gives us some insight into Carl Sandburg's early years. Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. His parents, August and Clara Johnson, had immigrated to America from the north of Sweden. After encountering several August Johnsons in his job for the railroad, the Sandburgs' father renamed the family. The Sandburgs were very poor. Carl left school at the age of 13 to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing to help support his family. At 17, he traveled west to Kansas as a hobo. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. While serving, Sandburg met a student at Lombard College, the small school located in Sandburg's hometown. The young man convinced Sandburg to enroll in Lombard after his return from the war. Sandburg worked his way through school where he attracted the attention of Professor Philip Green Wright, who not only encouraged Sandburg's writing, but paid for the publication of his first volume of poetry, a pamphlet called In Reckless Ecstasy. Osgard Press, 1904. While Sandburg attended Lombard for four years, he never received a diploma. He would later receive honorary degrees from Lombard, Knox College, and Northwestern University. After college, Sandburg moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and a newspaper reporter. While there, he met and married Lillian Steichen, whom he called Paula, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen, a socialist sympathizer at that point in his life. Sandburg then worked for the Social Democrat Party in Wisconsin and later acted as secretary to the first socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. The Sandburgs soon moved to Chicago, where Carl became an editorial editor for the Chicago Daily News. Harriet Munro had just started Poetry, a magazine of verse, and began publishing Sandburg's poems, encouraging him to continue writing in the free verse Whitman-like style he had cultivated in college. Munro liked the poem's homely speech, which distinguished Sandburg from his predecessors. It was during this period that Sandburg was recognized as a member of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, which included Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. He established his reputation with Chicago Poems, published nineteen sixteen, and then Cornhuskers, published nineteen eighteen, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen nineteen. Soon after the publication of these volumes, Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel, published nineteen twenty, his first prolonged attempt to find beauty in modern industrialism. With these three volumes, Sandburg became known for his free verse poems that portrayed industrial America. In the twenties, he started some of his most ambitious projects, including his study of Abraham Lincoln. From childhood, Sandburg loved and admired the legacy of President Lincoln. For thirty years he sought out and collected material and gradually began the writing of the six-volume definitive biography of the former president. The twenties also saw Sandburg's collection of American folklore, the ballads in The American Songbook, 1927, and New American Songbook, 1950, and books for children. These later volumes contained pieces collected from brief tours across America, which Sandburg took each year, playing his banjo or guitar, singing folk songs, and reciting poems. In the 1930s, Sandburg continued his celebration of America with Mary Lincoln, wife and widow, 1932. The People, yes, 1936, and the second part of his Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, 1939, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for his complete poems in 1950. His final volumes of verse were Harvest Poems, 1910 to 1960, and Honey and Salt, 1963. Carl Sandburg died on july twenty second, nineteen sixty seven. Sandburg was inducted in the American Poet's Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York in 2018.

Death, Labor, and Public Memory

Natalie Zett

Before I share Carl Sandburg's Eastland poem, I wanted to offer a little context, maybe a little insight that I didn't have early on. What I noticed as I've been getting reacquainted with Carl Sandburg's work is that death was a recurring theme before, during, and after the Eastland disaster, but not in a sentimental way. Sandburg wrote about workers, immigrants, families, soldiers, and ordinary people whose lives rarely appeared in official records or public commemorations. And later, of course, he became deeply absorbed in the life and death of Abraham Lincoln, a figure who seemed to hold together many of Sandburg's lifelong concerns democracy, grief, war, labor, memory, and the unfinished work of America. So for Sandburg, death was not simply a private tragedy. It revealed something about the world people lived in, and the forces that shaped their lives. When he wrote the Eastland poem, the disaster was not yet history. It was still a fresh wound in Chicago. The deaths were not statistics, frozen numbers, or marketing opportunities. They were neighbors, co-workers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives and friends. Carl Sandburg's poem about the Eastland disaster is one of the most raw and powerful responses to the tragedy ever written. And because it contains language that reflects the unfiltered vernacular of 1915, I'm sharing it with you here in a modified form, and that's out of respect for the platform guidelines. If you'd like to read the complete unedited poem, and I highly encourage you to do this, it's available through the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign's Digital Library, and I will put the link to it in the show notes. Yes, Carl Sandburg wrote it 111 years ago, and it's about the Eastland disaster, but it's about more than that. He's very graphic, he's very angry, justifiably so, I must say, and he does not mince words. Also, before I read it, there's a term that he uses, the con. What he's talking about is consumption or tuberculosis.

Reading Sandburg’s “The Eastland”

Natalie Zett

The Eastland by Carl Sandburg, written in 1915, but the Eastland poem did not see the light of day until 1993, when it was published in the book Carl Sandburg, Billy Sunday, and other poems, edited by George Hendrick and Willine Hendrick The Eastland by Carl Sandburg Let's be honest now for a couple of minutes, even though we're in Chicago. Since you asked me about it, I will let you have it straight. My guts ain't ticklish about the Eastland. It was a hell of a job, of course, to dump twenty five hundred people in their clean picnic clothes, already for a whole lot of real fun, down into the dirty Chicago River without any warning, women and kids, wet hair, and scared faces. The coroner hauling truckloads of the dripping dead to the second regiment armory, where doctors waited with useless pull motors, and the eight hundred motionless stiff lay ready for their relatives to pick them out on the floor, and take them home and call up an undertaker. Well Well I was saying my guts ain't ticklish about it. I got imagination. I see a pile of three thousand dead people killed by the con, tuberculosis, too much work, and not enough fresh air and green groceries. A lot of cheap roughnecks and the women and children, and hardly any bankers and corporation lawyers or their kids die from the con. Three thousand a year in Chicago, a hundred and fifty thousand a year in the United States, all from the con. And not enough fresh air and green groceries. If you want to see excitement, more noise and crying than you ever heard in one of those big disasters the newsboys clean up on, go and stack in a high pile all the babies that die in Christian Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago in one year, because Afford said babies haven't had enough good milk. Jesus, that would make a front page picture for the Sunday papers. Have you ever stood and watched the kids going to work of a morning? White faces, skinny legs and arms, slouching along, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes on the go to hold their jobs? Can you imagine a procession of all of the women of the streets of a big town marching and marching with painted faces and mocking struts, all of the women who sleep in faded hotels and furnished rooms with any man coming along with a dollar or five dollars? Or all the structural iron workers, railroad men and factory hands in mass formation with stubs of arms and stumps of legs, bodies broken and hacked, while bosses yelled, speed, no slack go to it or two by two all the girls and women who go to the hind doors of restaurants and through the alleys and on the market street digging into the garbage barrels to get scraps of stuff to eat. By the living Christ, these would make disaster pictures to paste on the front pages of the newspapers. Yes, the Eastland was a dirty, bloody job. Bah I see a dozen Eastlands every morning on my way to work, and a dozen more going home at night. End of poem by Carl Sandburg written in 1915. I won't comment on Carl Sandburg's Eastland poem because really, what can you say? I do hope, though, that you will take a look at it in its original format. And I thought I would close with one of Carl Sandburg's more well-known poem.

“The Cool Tombs” and Closing

Natalie Zett

It's called The Cool Tombs. And what's so nice about this is this is actually Carl Sandburg reading his own work. In Cool Tombs, Sandburg reflects on one of the themes that runs through much of his work Death as the Great Equalizer. Kings, celebrities, workers, and ordinary citizens all arrive at the same destination. This poem is not sentimental. Instead, Sandburg asks us to look squarely at mortality and consider what remains when power, fame, and status are stripped away.

Speaker 1

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copper heads and the assassin in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of Conman and Wall Street. Cash and collateral turned ashes. In the dust, in the cool tombs. Pocahontas body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May. Did she wonder, does she remember in the dust, in the cool tombs? Take any street full of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns. Tell me if the lovers are losers. Tell me if any get more than the lovers. In the dust, in the cool tombs.

Natalie Zett

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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