The Western Electric Company's annual employee picnic was one of Chicago's biggest summer events. In 1915, the company chartered five steamships to carry 7,000 workers and their families from downtown Chicago to a park in Michigan City, Indiana. The Eastland was scheduled to be the first to depart.

The workers who boarded that morning were mostly young - immigrant families from Bohemia, Poland, and elsewhere who had found work at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works. They wore their Sunday best. They carried picnic baskets. They crowded the decks to wave goodbye to friends and family on the dock.

The Eastland had a troubled history with stability. It was top-heavy by design, and over the years modifications had made it worse. In 1904, on its maiden voyage, it had listed alarmingly. Complaints about its tendency to roll had been ignored.

As passengers boarded on July 24, the ship began listing to port - toward the dock. Water ballast was shifted to correct the list. Then passengers moved to the starboard side to wave to people on shore, and the ship listed to starboard. At 7:28 AM, the list became irreversible. The Eastland rolled over onto its side in a matter of seconds. Passengers standing on deck were thrown into the water. Those below decks were trapped.

The real horror was below decks. When the ship rolled, hundreds of passengers were in enclosed spaces - the cabin decks, the gangways, the holds. Water rushed in through open portholes. The exits were suddenly on the ceiling or underwater. In the darkness, people scrambled over each other trying to find air.

Some passengers were trapped in air pockets inside the overturned hull, screaming and pounding on the steel plates. Rescuers on the dock could hear them but couldn't reach them. Cutting torches were brought in, but the rescuers had to work carefully - a wrong cut could flood the air pockets and drown those still alive. Some were saved. Many were not.

844 people died in the Eastland disaster - more Americans than died on the Titanic. Twenty-two entire families were wiped out. 220 of the dead were children. The victims were laid out in the Second Regiment Armory, where families searched through rows of bodies trying to find their loved ones.

The Bohemian community of Cicero was devastated - the neighborhood had lost many of its young people in a single morning. Western Electric's Hawthorne Works was in mourning for months. A mass funeral was held, but the grief was too overwhelming for any ceremony to contain.

The Eastland disaster should have been one of the defining tragedies of American history. But it happened in 1915, when the First World War dominated the headlines. The victims were working-class immigrants, not Gilded Age celebrities. The cause was a stability problem, not a romantic iceberg. The disaster slipped from national memory.

No one was ever held criminally responsible. The ship's owners were acquitted. The federal inspectors who had certified the Eastland as safe were not charged. The ship itself was raised, renamed the USS Wilmette, and served the Navy until 1945. Today, a small memorial on the Chicago Riverwalk marks where 844 people died within sight of downtown skyscrapers. Most Chicagoans walk past without knowing what happened there.