Ashes Under Water

Chicago. A 1915 shipwreck. Fugitives. Clarence Darrow.

It was the summer that broke America's heart.

In 1915, Chicago commuters were horrified to see the SS Eastland, a massive Lake Michigan steamship, flip over while tied to its dock. More than eight hundred poor factory workers and their children drowned. Twenty-two whole families perished. The nation cried out for justice. Drawing on previously unpublished evidence from the National Archives, Ashes Under Water is the untold story of a mysterious industrial atrocity and how the prosperous, guilty Eastland owners tried to shift the blame to the whistleblower and one true hero on the ship, an immigrant, Engineer Joseph Erickson. Against all odds, an attorney down on his luck at the time then stepped in to save him: Clarence Darrow, the future legal star. A national tragedy, Chicago politics, corrupt businessmen, a courtroom drama-all woven into one spellbinding narrative.