America's Deadliest Shipwreck Happened in a River. 20 Feet From the Dock.

On July 24, 1915, 844 passengers died on a sluggish urban river, 20 feet from the dock. Not the Atlantic. Not in a storm. In the Chicago River, before the ship had even departed. If you have never heard of the SS Eastland, you are in very good company, and that is precisely the problem.

Despite cool, damp weather, 2,573 passengers and crew crowded aboard the Eastland that morning, bound for a Western Electric company picnic. At 7:28 a.m., the ship listed to a 45-degree angle. The piano on the promenade deck rolled to the port wall; a refrigerator slid to port, pinning a woman beneath it. Water poured into open portholes in the cabins below. The whole thing was over in minutes.

Just 10 weeks earlier, the Lusitania had been torpedoed and sunk, killing 785 passengers. In 1912, 829 passengers died aboard the Titanic. The Eastland exceeded both. Seventy percent of those who died were under the age of 25.

There is an additional cruelty buried in the engineering. The Titanic's sinking sparked a lifeboats-for-all movement among international marine safety officials. Congress passed a bill requiring lifeboats to accommodate 75 percent of a vessel's passengers, and in March 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed the LaFollette Seaman's Act into law. Historian Hilton concluded that the Eastland's real culprit was a poorly designed hull rendered top-heavy by those post-Titanic safety requirements. The lifeboats meant to save people helped sink the ship.

All criminal charges were dropped and the owners avoided any legal finding of negligence. As Ted Wachholz of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society put it: "There wasn't anyone rich or famous onboard."

The Titanic carried the Astors. The Eastland carried the Hawthorne Works factory shift.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, October 27, 2014

Hot Take: The Titanic gets the film, the museum exhibitions, the centennial commemorations, and it killed fewer passengers. History has always had a preference for disasters that happen to people with last names worth remembering, and the Eastland is the clearest possible proof of that.