Posted inLabor / Politics / Social / ToMl

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

It was the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history and a seminal moment for American labor. On March 25th, 1911, nearly 150 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, died after a fire broke out at the Triangle Factory near Washington Square Park.
Only a year before the lethal fire, the garment workers of the city had protested for shorter hours, better pay, safer work conditions and the right to unionize. Tired of toiling for 13 hours a day for as little as 13 cents an hour, the workers called for a strike, emerging as leaders in what became the largest women’s labor walkout in American history. The factory owners hired thugs to suppress their action, but in the 11th week of the strike, the owners finally agreed to higher wages and shorter hours. They drew the line, however, at a union. Denied any collective bargaining rights, the Triangle workers were powerless to change the abysmal conditions in their factory: inadequate ventilation, lack of safety precautions and fire drills—and locked doors.
When a lit cigarette or match ignited a fire on the eighth floor of the building, flames spread quickly and trapped the women in a deadly inferno. When the women realized the building was on fire, some rushed toward the open stairwell, but smoke and flames obscured their path. Hundreds of horrified onlookers watched as desperate factory workers leaped from the ninth floor windows, engulfed by flames. A new documentary Triangle Fire that aired on PBS’s American Experience. It features dramatic readings of eyewitnesses of the fire.
Steve Fraser talking:
There was a huge and important strike of thousands of garment workers, largely women, that really had a major impact, and then several of the—and the Shirtwaist Factory fire workers were part of that movement.
that’s known—was known then, and has been known since, as “the Uprising of the 20,000.” And in fact there were probably well more than 20,000 garment workers, largely women garment workers, involved in that strike, which broke out in 1909. And actually, the 1909 strike is itself the culmination of a chronic series of strikes in the garment industry stemming way back into the 1890s, in protest against the miserable conditions of work, the low wages, child labor, the lack of any sanitary or health protections. Fires were common. They had occurred in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory before the tragedy of 1911.
And so, there was an ongoing process of trying to organize the industry, unionize the industry, which comes to a head in 1909, and enlists the sympathies of a broad spectrum of middle-class New Yorkers, as well, particularly the Women’s Trade Union League, the Consumers League, women from the suffrage movement, who become involved in assisting the strikers, appearing on the picket lines, bailing them out of jail, trying to bring publicity to what’s going on as the police attack the strikers, judges throw them in jail and so on. And so, it’s a monumental movement, and a partly successful one, successful insofar as the industry is compelled to improve some of the conditions of work, but not a victory insofar as there’s no blanket recognition of the union emerging out of that strike.
the fire—there’s a straight line, really, that runs from the fire right through to the New Deal, the labor legislation reform of that era, the welfare state, and the creation of industrial unionism and the right to organize in the 1930s. And there’s a line that runs from that period to our current moment, which is determined, in part, by an assault on all of those democratic achievements that we see going on in Madison, Wisconsin, throughout the industrial Midwest, even bizarrely in Maine, where the governor of Maine has actually proposed erasing that history by obliterating the names of some of the heroines that organized the garment industry and were present at the fire—Rose Schneiderman, particularly, who was a key militant, a member of the Women’s Trade Union League, and of course Frances Perkins, who became—who was a witness to the fire and became Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. There are conference rooms in Augusta named after those two women, who the current Republican governor proposes to remove, because he considers those names not neutral enough. So there’s a—we’re living that history even today.
Annelise Orleck talking:
the owners of the Triangle company, Harris and Blanck, claimed that they a problem with theft, and so they locked the door out of which most of the workers left to prevent—supposedly to prevent them from taking fabric and stealing from the company. Afterwards, when it came to trial, the owners admitted that the most they might possibly have lost was $15, $20 a year. So, that’s the number that ultimately cost all of those workers’ lives.
There were “no smoking” signs in the factory, but the cutters, who were kind of the elite in the shop, were known to ignore that, and perhaps one of them did. It’s not clear exactly what happened. But someone flicked an ash, and it caught in what was probably more than a ton of fabric scraps. There had been more than 100,000 shirtwaists made since the last time the manufacturers had cleaned scraps out of the shop. And the young women—it’s worth picking up on what Steve said—had been warning about those scraps. They had been warning about them for months. There were hundreds of complaints on file at the Women’s Trade Union League about the dangers of these factories and the likelihood that fire would start. And indeed, there had been a lethal fire in Newark, just a few months before the Triangle fire, that killed 26 young women and injured many others. So they were aware of this danger.
And what happened was even worse than they could have predicted. The fire spread through the grass linen out of which the fabric—out of which the shirtwaists were made. It was very flammable. And it spread so quickly and so horribly and with so much heat that there were actually skeletons of young women at their sewing machines, who were discovered after the fire. So some never made it away from their desks.
Others tried to leave. There were two doors to the factory. One was blocked by flames, the other one was probably locked. And that was the reason that so many were left with the horrible choice of either being—of perishing in fire or jumping out the window. Some of them rushed out onto the fire escape, about 25 of them. There were already people from the eighth floor on the fire escape. It collapsed. And that was the first terrible scene of death that New Yorkers witnessed from below.
But in a way, even more awful, if—you can’t judge these things, but—was this revelation that Frances Perkins later described, that what at first appeared to be fabric that the manufacturers were throwing out the window—people thought they were trying to save their good fabric—people soon realized were workers, young women, a few young men. And within a half-hour, many hundreds, if not thousands, on the street below had watched this carnage and really vividly experienced the terror.
In the aftermath, they experienced a different kind of terror, which was that the bodies of the young workers lay on the streets for several days as New Yorkers came by to try to identify their loved ones. And that makeshift morgue almost made the whole city feel like a makeshift morgue. Eventually it was moved to the 26th Street Pier. And again, for days, New Yorkers were treated to images of family members grieving, collapsing, coming out from having tried to identify their lost loved ones.
These women were the strikers of 1909, 1910, and they had gotten a lot of coverage in the press. And they had been quoted, sometimes 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girls talking about their constitutional rights and their rights to picket without being beaten and marching on City Hall with banners in Yiddish and Italian and English, saying, “We are not slaves” and “Abolish slavery.”
And they were saucy. The management had attempted to put prostitutes on the line to sully the reputations of these girls. And instead of them saying, “Oh, no, no, no. We’re not prostitutes. Don’t mistake us,” they said, “Better to be a streetwalker than a scab. It’s an honest profession.”
So they had attracted the attention and the affection of the city. And as Steve pointed out, many people who had not previously been sympathetic to labor began to shift their views. Even the New York Times, which had been staunchly anti-labor, began to cover the strikers with a little bit more sympathy. Partly it was the violence that was leveled against them. The leader of the strike, Clara Lemlich, had six ribs broken by clubs during the course of the strike. There were girls who were dragged off with bloodied heads in bandages. And at first that didn’t win sympathy. One judge, when a girl was dragged before him with a head covered in blood, said, “You are on strike against God and nature, and women shouldn’t be out parading themselves like this.”
Isaac Harris and Max Blanck are the owners of the factory. They were German Jews. They had been in the country a little while longer than the workers, which was typical of these garment shops, although this one was bigger. They certainly had more capital to invest than, you know, the owners of little sweatshops, which were kind of fly by night, rented by the week. But that said, they still had family working in the shops. They lost family in the shops, and they lost family in the fire. So, they were not completely removed from the garment trade themselves. Nevertheless, they hired a very flashy New York attorney, Max Stoyer, who was one of these celebrity defense attorneys.
he accused them of perjury. You know, he soft-pedaled it. He said they couldn’t remember, maybe. They were so hysterical that they couldn’t remember what had happened to them. He brought on a wave of witnesses who had worked with the company at different times and said they had seen the door open—not that day, but that they had come in and out of the door. And one juror later said they believed the door was locked, but the defense attorney had introduced enough reasonable doubt. And interestingly enough, even the prosecutor called the girls less intelligent than the norm.
Kirstin Downey talking:
About Frances Perkins.
I was very taken by the fact that this young woman—she was only 30 years old when she saw the fire—witnessed a terrible spectacle. Now, thousands of people were dying in workplace fires all over the country at that time, but this particular fire is viewed by a lot of New Yorkers, but it’s also viewed by this very dynamic young woman. She decides—it galvanizes her. She says this has to change.
She’s a descendant of Revolutionary War patriots. She has a great sense of moral responsibility for the country being the kind of place that it should be. And she thinks that what’s happening to these factory workers is just wrong.
Teddy Roosevelt selects her to be executive director of the—executive secretary of the Committee on Safety. And I found that in documents at the Library of Congress. Even a lot of Teddy Roosevelt scholars didn’t know that. And she leads the charge. She does it in her characteristic way of making alliances with unlikely partners. You see her, of course, gathering all the idealists together, all the people that she describes as looking in shock and terror, but she also finds ways to reach out to the insurance companies to convince them that fire hazards are something that they should be considering a financial issue. She gets insurance company executives to talk to real estate owners.
And she is instrumental in creating a legislative committee in the state of New York that holds fact-finding hearings all around the state to discuss hazards of all kinds. Out of that comes much legislation and things that have had effects on all of us today: occupancy limitations, fire exits, even removing trash, flammable trash, every night from workplaces. These all came from Frances Perkins’s work in New York at that time.
Steve Fraser talking:
Frances Perkins is probably the greatest Secretary of Labor we’ve ever had, and she deserves a great deal of the credit. And the inspiration comes from these women who died that day.
But I must say that there would be no New Deal legislation, there wouldn’t be a Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938, establishing minimum wages and maximum hours, abolishing child labor, there wouldn’t have been a Wagner Act, ensuring the right to collective bargaining, there wouldn’t have been Social Security and unemployment insurance and welfare, had not the garment unions emerged out of this fire and strike and produced what was called, in the 1920s, the New Unionism, which prefigured all of the New Deal, a unionism which fought for health insurance, unemployment insurance, low-cost cooperative housing, built a multi-ethnic, multi-religious industrial union. And without the industrial unions of the 1930s, the CIO, it’s hard to conceive that Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, despite their good intentions and indefatigable labors, would have achieved what they had achieved. And that’s why I think today we need to commemorate, but also celebrate, in an odd sort of way, these women. They died, and they died—and, by dying, achieved this kind of industrial democracy, which, without what they had been involved in, wouldn’t have happened.
Discussion:
Charles Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (formerly the National Labor Committee).
Annelise Orleck, professor at Darmouth College and author of the book Common Sense and a Little Fire: Working Class Women’s Activism in the 20th Century U.S.
Steve Fraser, author, editor and labor historian. His many publications include the award-winning book Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. The book won the Philip Taft Prize for the best book in labor history. Fraser currently teaches at New York University.
– from democracynow.org

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