“The legend lives on,” begins Gordon Lightfoot’s enduring 1976 ballad of a 1975 shipwreck, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” 50 years later his words sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although the doomed freighter, whose demise the song chronicles, was indeed, at one time, “the pride of the American side” in shipping circles, its legend may have faded from all but local lore a half-century later if not for Lightfoot’s indelible song.
Two new books, John U. Bacon’s The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and Thomas M. Nelson’s Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy, make clear (in dramatically divergent ways) that the Edmund Fitzgerald’s 17-year run as a commercial vessel, its sinking, and the events surrounding it are well worth remembering. The wreck’s aftershocks still resonate around the Great Lakes and the American industrial economy the “Fitz” once helped keep afloat, and its echoes reverberate even outside of oldies radio playlists where they’re buoyed by Lightfoot’s sonorous baritone.
The “legend” Lightfoot sang about refers not to the ship but to the massive inland sea known today as Lake Superior, and its seemingly endless appetite for ships and sailors caught in late-season storms: “Superior, it is said, never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early.”
Like numerous investigators, shipwreck buffs, documentarians, and most famously folk-rock balladeer Lightfoot before him, Bacon sets out to unravel the enduring mystery of how a 729-foot freighter and its 29-man crew became a “bone to be chewed” by a roiled lake in a violent storm, breaking in half and coming to rest 520 feet below the surface of Lake Superior on the tempestuous night of November 10, 1975.
But Bacon aims to do more than chart the ferocious weather fronts that collided in the path of the “Mighty Fitz,” or reconstruct the tortuous moments and fateful decisions that sent the ship and its crew to their watery grave (though the book does that with mesmerizing power and precision).
Much like the Fitzgerald’s operator, ore mining company Oglebay Norton, which routinely packed the ship’s midsection with 58 million pounds of pelleted iron ore on each of its 748 trips across the lakes between 1958 and 1975, Bacon recognizes the Great Lakes first and foremost as the planet’s most vital working waterway during the heyday of American industry. The Fitzgerald, along with the many other freighters in its class that preceded it and competed with it annually for the Lakes’ long-ton crown, “were built to haul record quantities of grain, coal, limestone, raw iron ore, and cement—the building blocks for a productive society.” No overland or airborne transportation method could have come close to these ships’ capacity.
Bacon makes the case for the Great Lakes as the circulation system of American manufacturing at its most productive and robust, from the World War II-era “Arsenal of Democracy” to the high watermarks of Detroit’s automobile industry (which native Michigander Bacon evokes in the book’s early chapters with as much vigor and conviction as David Maraniss’ Once in a Great City). He also captures the tremendous threats heavy storms posed to maxed-out cargo ships navigating its water.
Bacon reports that in the century preceding the Fitzgerald wreck, the Great Lakes claimed somewhere between 6,000 and 25,000 ships, accounting for one to four shipwrecks per week for 100 years. “On the Great Lakes there’s no salt to hold down the waves,” he writes, “so they rise more sharply and travel closer together, like jagged mountains of water coming at you in rapid succession.”
Bacon also recounts how the Fitzgerald’s fame long preceded its dramatic demise, in part because of how hard its captains drove it, breaking records year after year for the tonnage of taconite ore transported. What’s more, this formidable profit-making enterprise, launched in 1958 by insurance juggernaut Northwestern Mutual Life (and named for its then-president), boasted two magnificent staterooms, which were often used for enviable executive ridealongs during the summer months when the lakes were calmer.
Bacon’s book is at its most captivating when he’s recounting the night of the wreck, minute by agonizing minute. He tells much of that story from the perspective of Jesse “Bernie” Cooper, captain of the Great Lakes freighter Arthur Anderson, who sailed into the same storm as the Fitzgerald—though proceeding with considerably more caution—and remained in radio contact with Fitzgerald captain Ernest McSorley for several hours. Arriving safely at Saulte Ste. Marie’s Soo Locks (also the Fitz’s intended next stop) shortly after the other ship sank, Cooper reluctantly agreed to turn around his massive ship and sail back into the storm in search of Fitzgerald survivors. While McSorley made the fateful decision to try to outrun the storm and get to the Locks first, a retired engineer from the Anderson tells Bacon that Cooper would have done the same if the engine room hadn’t ignored his persistent demands for more speed. “The captain gets what the engineer gives him,” Bacon writes. Riveting stuff.
The Gales of November also tells the story of the men who went down with it and “the wives and the sons and the daughters” Lightfoot references in his song, the people left behind by the Fitzgerald’s crew, many of whom the author interviewed. Bacon beautifully evokes the wreck’s human dimension, breathing life into many of its characters, even those 50 years dead. He accomplishes a similar feat in his earlier account of a maritime disaster, The Great Halifax Explosion, which is also awash in memorable character studies.
Bacon also mentions how poorly the Fitzgerald’s surviving family members were compensated in the aftermath of the tragedy. He notes that the family of each victim settled with Oglebay Norton for $35,000 (a little more than a year’s wages for a deckhand) within a year of the wreck in exchange for their silence—a silence reciprocated by the ship’s owners.
In The Great Halifax Explosion, Bacon argues that the December 1917 collision that blew up the munitions ship Mont-Blanc played a pivotal role in resolving a century of unstable relations between the U.S. and Canada. Although Bacon regards the Mighty Fitz as an exemplar of America’s former industrial might and the Great Lakes’ integral role in supporting it, he stops short of treating the ship’s career or its demise as symptoms or inflection points the country’s or the region’s manufacturing decline.
Thomas Nelson sees it differently. To Bacon, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was first and foremost a tragedy; to Nelson it was a crime. For starters, Nelson reports a much more contentious battle over the settlements. Most families settled quietly, according to Nelson, while others fought harder and won significantly bigger damages. Where Bacon attributes the wreck to bad decision-making and reliance on outdated maps, Nelson portrays a disaster both avoidable and many years in the making. For Nelson, the rot and mismanagement that plagued the Fitz for years signify as bellwethers of creeping systemic corrosion in America’s industrial edifice.
Nelson, a county executive from Wisconsin’s paper-making Fox River Valley, recognizes the essential role that ships like the Fitzgerald played in propelling America’s mid-20th Century industrial peak: “The Fitz wasn’t just any old ship; she served as a vehicle—literally and figuratively—that drove the American manufacturing economy of that era and supported millions of jobs and working families all throughout the Midwest and beyond.”
Both Bacon and Nelson regard Ernest McSorley, who piloted the Fitzgerald for its last four years, as a formidable seaman who ran a generally tight ship. But whereas Bacon portrays him as a macho inland-seas cowboy recklessly racing to the Soo Locks on the night of the wreck, Nelson sees him as a “quintessential company man” who each year took home substantial bonuses “for making more runs with heavier payloads beyond his quota.”
Nelson also focuses on two interviews with George “Red” Burgner, who spent a decade as both the Fitzgerald’s popular chef and off-season shipkeeper. A bleeding ulcer sidelined him in October 1975, three weeks before the wreck. Burgner knew the ship as well as anyone. As Nelson writes—both of Burgner’s interview in a 1994 documentary and his statements to survivors’ attorneys in 1977 when deposed by a St. Paul law firm in the year after the sinking:
“Red was happy to spill the beans on [Oglebay] Norton Corporation. The Fitzgerald was not seaworthy and had been neglected for years. And the negligence went straight to the top. He had taken the president of [Oglebay] Norton Corporation, Rennie Thompson, on a tour of the ship itself in the winter of 1973–74 when the keel was crumbling apart and mounds of lake water dirt and sludge had accumulated in the ballast tank, rotting out the hull.”
After Burgner reported in his deposition that the ship’s keel was cracked and sloppily tack-welded back together, he was not invited to testify before the Marine Board of Inquiry during its investigation of the wreck. While spending the winter of 1977 hunting in Texas, he received a disturbing call from Oglebay Norton attorney Robert Kratzert, who came on like a B-movie mob enforcer when warning Burgner not to come back to Michigan to testify in any lawsuits against the company. “We don’t want you up here,” Kratzert told him. “We don’t even want your name mentioned … It’s a good place for you down in Texas.”
Fittingly for a book subtitled The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy, Wrecked frames the Fitzgerald’s demise in an overarching argument about decades of American disinvestment in domestic heavy industry that precipitated the steep decline of U.S. manufacturing and productivity. “The story of the wreck of the Fitzgerald,” Nelson insists, “begins not on the fateful afternoon of November 9, 1975, in Superior, Wisconsin, but as soon as the guns fell silent in Asia and the South Pacific after World War II.”
The pivotal years of American industrial retrenchment and decline align well with the tenure of the Mighty Fitz (1958–75), particularly the decade before the wreck in which the Johnson and Nixon presidential administrations egregiously overspent on the war in Vietnam while starving Great Society programs and hurtling toward stagflation.
Nelson concludes his book with an impassioned argument for how the United States could reverse course, reinvest in workforce development for its once-thriving manufacturing industries, and resurrect the productive economy that boomed in the middle of the last century, with Great Lakes its bloodstream and the mines and factories of the upper midwest its beating heart. He cites 2022’s CHIPS and Science Act as a guidepost of the way forward. Nelson’s prescription may well have seemed more plausible when the author signed off on the book’s galleys in 2024.
Wrapping up his narrative, Nelson writes, “Perhaps the last chapter of the legacy of the Fitzgerald has not yet been written. It falls to all of us to remember those who served and died on it and do right by their memories.” On this final point, Nelson and Bacon clearly agree, even if the gulf that separates their assessments of the disaster and its causes suggests that neither author can claim the final word.
NONFICTION
by John U. Bacon
Liveright Publishing Corporation
Published on October 7, 2025
