The Ship That Won't (Culturally) Stay Sunk: Part 2
We continue our series about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by examining reasons why the ship found a place from midwestern collective consciousness to Instagram reel fame in November 2025
Reasons for the Resonation of the Edmund Fitzgerald
It’s November 7. Before 2025, this didn’t mean much to me - but through a series of seemingly unrelated events you can read about in Part 1, we’re closing in on November 10th - and also the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Maybe you’ve managed to miss the Gales of November — the onslaught of memes and reels centering around the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, particularly on Instagram — but if you look at the likes, shares, and views on those reels, they are clearly speaking to an audience.
Sure, we can blame the algorithm. But for those of us in the Northeast or Midwest — especially those raised near or in the Rust Belt, mining towns, or the Great Lakes — this song is muscle memory. When we hear the opening chords of Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, we don’t just think of a shipwreck. We think of someone we know: a cousin, a grandfather, a friend who worked steel, paper mill, rail, trucking, coal, or river barges - even a spouse who is currently working in this industry. Dangerous work has always had names and faces where we’re from.
This is partly why the ballad resonates so deeply. It’s not just about a ship. It’s about blue-collar identity, risk, pride, and grief — the kind we’ve inherited.
After I posted Part 1, my cousin Jim Nagle messaged me to emphasize that for people around the Great Lakes, the Fitzgerald never really left cultural consciousness.
“Know this, if you are from Michigan it is always somewhere lurking just below the surface. When you go to Detroit and pass by the Old Mariners church you start singing the song. If you go to the U.P. your thoughts immediately gravitate to Whitefish Point. Our thoughts don’t resurface. They are always there, waiting.” - Jim Nagle
And sure enough, when I look at who is liking all the Fitzgerald reels currently nuking my For You Page, it’s almost always my Midwestern and Rust Belt friends — first, fastest, and with the most enthusiasm.
But why do we feel so strongly about this?
Is there a collective memory operating here — something shared by proximity and history — that keeps pulling this shipwreck back into the cultural foreground?
Where I live, I am literally on the edge of the Rust Belt. Part of my daily life dips in and out of towns built on steel furnaces and shift whistles. Places shaped by blue-collar work, and by the understanding that putting food on the table has always carried risk — physical, economic, emotional.
And here’s where history folds back on itself:
How Blue-Collar Work Receded
Thanks to Reagan-era economic policy, the blue-collar world that the Fitzgerald belonged to began to disappear. The shift started in the late 60s and 70s, but the acceleration came fast in the early 80s.
To stop runaway inflation, Reagan supported Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker in raising interest rates extremely high.
This had consequences:
Loans became too expensive for factories to modernize
Steel mills and auto plants couldn’t keep up with global competition
Manufacturing jobs evaporated at a pace that felt like the floor falling out
And where were those jobs concentrated?
The Great Lakes.
The very region the Edmund Fitzgerald hauled iron ore for.
Factories that once hired generations of families closed almost overnight. Entire towns shifted from boom to Rust Belt status in a single decade.
At the same time, Reagan-era rhetoric idealized:
White-collar professionalism
Corporate culture
Finance and “self-made suburbia”
Trade work was reframed as something you were supposed to escape by going to college.
Blue-collar work — once the backbone of American identity — got labeled:
“Unskilled”
“For people who didn’t make it”
“Less than”
Which was never true.
So Why the Meme Revival Now?
Because we are living in a moment where white-collar stability is collapsing.
AI is automating what office workers were promised would be “safe” careers.
Meanwhile:
Trades offer stability again
Wages for skilled labor are competitive or higher than tech starter salaries
People want work that means something
Young men on the Fitzgerald made three to four times the income of inland workers. They could support families, buy homes, live with dignity. This documentary shared on YouTube shares much of the reality shaped by the work provided by the Edmund Fitzgerald:
So the question practically writes itself:
Are we drawn to the Fitzgerald because we miss the American Dream — or because we’re starting to believe it might return in a different form?
The Fitzgerald isn’t only a symbol of loss — it’s a reminder of what work used to mean, and what people want it to mean again.
Maybe we’re not just watching shipwreck memes, perhaps in the midst of disillusionment of economic policies from presidents that didn’t have to bear the brunt of economic fallout for the past fifty years, we’re longing for a time that we could have reliable work. By learning of the lives of those who earned an honest living on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and joining those who have been mourning their loss for fifty years, we may also watching a cultural ship turn.
When young men don’t have reliable work, they don’t just lose a paycheck — they lose identity, purpose, direction, and belonging. The Fitzgerald memes are taking off now because the same economic and cultural wound that began in the late 70s and accelerated under Reagan is still open.
We’ve examined where we’ve been with the algorithmic popularity of the Edmund Fitzgerald, where it has never left us and where it has resurfaced - but what might it say about who we are now in the Rust Belt and adjacent communities, economically and culturally, and where are we going from here? Stay tuned for part 3 to find out!