The Triangle Fire

THE TRIANGLE FIRE

Centennial Edition

BY LEON STEIN

FOREWORD BY MICHAEL HIRSCH

INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM GREIDER

ILR PRESS

An imprint of

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

FOREWORD TO THE CENTENNIAL EDITION

It has been nearly fifty years since Leon Stein’s classic work,
The Triangle Fire
, first appeared in bookstores. Through vivid prose and a gripping narrative, readers were introduced to a long-forgotten piece of history whose significance, in 1962, had still not been fully appreciated or understood. Leon Stein endeavored to change that. In cinematic style, he dramatically tells the tale of the horrific 1911 fire that took the lives of 146 immigrant garment workers near the end of America’s Gilded Age. It would remain the worst workplace disaster in New York State history until September 11, 2001. Like the World Trade Center attack, the event was witnessed by scores of New Yorkers, who in 1911 were enjoying the end of a beautiful early spring day. For nearly all who were there the sights and sounds of that Saturday afternoon would remain burned on their retinas and consciousness until the end of their lives. That was certainly the case for many of the seasoned firefighters and street-hardened policemen who watched helplessly through tears as scores of women, some as young as fourteen years of age, jumped and fell from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building to violent deaths on the stone pavements of Washington Place and Green Street below.

The Triangle fire would also be remembered by a generation of social reformers and progressives who marked the day as the turning point in a decades-long struggle to bring desperately needed reforms to the American workplace and even to government itself. For one of these people in particular, who was among those who stood frozen with horror as the scene unfolded that afternoon, the fire signified the very moment when the New Deal began. In one of those wonderful coincidences that often make the study of history so memorable, Frances Perkins—who would one day become the first woman U.S. secretary of labor and a chief architect of that New Deal—was there to see it all.

Unfortunately, we Americans have a tendency to be concerned only with the here and now at the expense of almost everything else. Remembering our history, our ancestors, and the sacrifices of those who came before has often not been a priority. It should come then as no surprise that by the early 1950s the Triangle fire had been all but forgotten by the vast majority of the public who had not been so intimately and painfully associated with the events of that terrible March day.

As a matter of fact, much of what we know today about this history would have likely been lost forever had it not been for the intersection of two events: the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the appointment of a new editor for their official publication, Leon Stein. Born in 1912 to politically progressive immigrant Jewish parents from Russia, Stein’s life prior to his joining ILGWU’s
Justice
seems to have been preparation for writing this book. As a young man of sixteen, he worked as a cloth stretcher in a Brooklyn garment factory and in 1928 first joined the ILGWU. According to his daughter, Stein would remain a passionate and committed union member until the day he died. After graduating from City College in 1932 he returned to the garment industry as a cutter and union organizer. As a man of both letters and craft Stein was operating in the very same tradition as that of his Eastern European forefathers, educated men whose only hope for work in a land where the streets were supposedly paved with gold was to labor seven long days a week over piecework in an urban sweatshop. But Stein was passionate about something other than his craft and trade unionism. He loved the study of history. His longtime friend and colleague Gus Tyler remembered him as a man who looked toward the future but always relied on the past as his guide.

It was with this background that Stein first began to research the story of the Triangle fire for a master’s thesis at New York University. But what started as a project for school soon turned into something far more ambitious. Working with the skill and precision of a cutter, Stein painstakingly assembled the pieces of this history, year after year seeking out the lost, the hidden, and the forgotten. For over a decade Stein scoured archives and libraries. With the skill of a detective and genealogist he tracked down survivors, witnesses, newspapermen, editors, policemen, firefighters, labor leaders, and the families of many who had lost loved ones in the fire. In the process, he preserved stories that these families did not or would not preserve for themselves. New to this edition of the book is a list of the people who died in the Triangle fire, including seven victims whose names were still unknown when the book was first published in 1962. You will find this list at the back of the book.

The result of his meticulous work is a book that still stands as the definitive account of one of the nation’s most important tragedies. But it is special for another reason.
The Triangle Fire
was the first book to place this terrible event in the context of the historic labor struggles that preceded it and the unprecedented workplace and governmental reforms that followed.

Perhaps most important, because of Leon Stein’s work, Americans would know what the country was like at the turn of the last century and how much the Triangle fire had been responsible for the vast changes that were to come.

The America of 1911 was a place where the rights of business interests and property owners were sacrosanct and where workers were viewed as a disposable and easily replaceable commodity. It was a country whose government, courts, and people believed it was somehow un-American to impose regulation on business of any kind; a country where workers did not have the right to strike; where the families of those injured on the job had to place their children in orphanages to survive; where those too old or sick to work had to enter an almshouse or even commit suicide so as not to burden their families or starve to death in the streets.

This was Gilded Age America, a place of nearly pure and absolutely cruel laissez-faire capitalism. For years it had been the dream of social reformers and good government progressives to temper this system, and although they had some success in the areas of housing and public health, workplace reforms remained a distant dream. Then came the Triangle fire, and the dam against reform began to break.

This book was written in part to recognize and celebrate the ultimate victory of those reformers, but it also celebrates the historic success of the American labor movement and its extraordinary contribution to the creation of America’s postwar middle class.

At the first publication of this book a half-century ago, the American middle class was at its zenith, boasting a standard of living that was for decades the envy of the world. Sadly, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of an event that ultimately triggered significant government reforms, working Americans once again find themselves under siege by forces seemingly hell-bent on turning the clock back to a time when the business of government in America was business and when any kind of regulation or taxation was un-American.

I’m sure if Leon Stein could return to our world for a moment and offer us advice on what to do and how to fight back, I do not doubt for a moment that he would say, let the past be your guide. Let this book be your guide. Let it be a timeless reminder of the place from whence we came and do not want to return to again.

M
ICHAEL
H
IRSCH

[email protected]

New York

August 2010

INTRODUCTION

“Who Will Protect the Working Girl?”

WILLIAM GREIDER

You are about to read a harrowing story of human struggle from America’s past. With suspenseful intimacy, this book recounts a great tragedy that occurred nearly one hundred years ago yet lingers in the national memory—the deaths of 146 young women in a disastrous garment-factory fire in New York City. The Triangle fire in 1911 still gets a mention in annual editions of the U.S. almanac because it is the worst industrial factory fire in the history of American capitalism.

Leon Stein tells this story in brilliant cinematic fashion, with quick jump-cuts in the action, moving from one scene to the next without the interruption of commentary. You see the events directly, as if you were standing on the street outside the burning factory. The experience is a little like watching a well-made horror film—you want to know what happens next but are afraid to find out. Only this story is terribly real and involves actual human beings who suffer and die. You will feel a quickening anxiety as the story unfolds, then anger as you begin to grasp what killed those working girls.

As we learn more about these young women, we see that they were victims of extraordinary callousness and dereliction on the part of important and powerful people. The factory owners, of course, but also the city’s business community, the elected officials of New York, and the various bureaucracies responsible for enforcing public safety and health standards—all could be blamed, in one way or another, for the unseen dangers women faced at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, where they manufactured the shirtwaist blouses that were the reigning fashion in the early twentieth century. But, in a larger sense, New Yorkers as a whole were also culpable—as was the nation—because for many years people had generally ignored the cries of protest from these “girls” and from the millions of other industrial workers laboring in similarly deplorable circumstances.

Many of these workers were immigrants, typically trapped in miserable and dangerous working conditions, struggling for a meager livelihood in their new country. Americans, meanwhile, kept their distance. They viewed the newcomers as dirty and dangerous, peculiar foreigners who spoke strange languages and lived in congestions of squalid housing (then and now often called ghettoes). The jobs the immigrants performed were vital to America’s booming manufacturing, yet most Americans barely knew these people existed. Those who did were often wary and contemptuous.

Does this sound familiar? The very same conditions have returned in our own time, both within the United States and around the world. Sweatshops are back in Manhattan, operating illegally with new immigrant workers and within blocks of the site of the old Triangle factory. Sweatshops are operating across the nation in sectors from food processing to apparel. At the same time, the young “working girls” of Asia, Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere are now manufacturing the goods we buy, from expensive name-brand sports shoes to designer jeans to toys and high-end electronics. They are often paid pitiful wages and subjected to degrading, sometimes dangerous, working conditions. Aside from the modern technologies, the main differences in American sweatshops today are the names and faces of the new immigrants. A century ago, they were overwhelmingly European—Italian, Irish, Polish, or, like the Triangle workers, Jews who had fled Russia or the Ukraine for the promise of freedom in American life. Today, the immigrant workers are mainly from Mexico and other Latin countries, or the rim of Asia, from Cambodia and Vietnam to Korea and China. Joined by a multitude of U.S. citizens, especially Afro-Americans, these foreign-born workers do the dirty, low-wage jobs necessary to the economic system. And they are, likewise, ignored or despised.

Why is this happening again? Weren’t sweatshop conditions banned by law generations ago? What is the economic necessity of repeating old inhumanities in these modern times of great abundance? You should be asking these questions, among others, while reading this book. The grim fact is that young workers in Asia are once again dying needlessly in burning factories and for approximately the same reasons the young women died in the Triangle fire. Most of these workers are young women. Some are mere children. And American consumers have hardly noticed.

This introduction provides a context for understanding what happened at the Triangle disaster and why it became a pivotal event in American politics. But my more pressing point is that this long-ago story is savagely relevant today. We may avert our gaze and ignore the realities, just as many people did in the past, but the injustices are not going to go away on their own. Sooner or later, events will compel us to face them, just as Americans had to when they were shocked and embarrassed by the Triangle fire.

While we focus our sympathies on the victims in this story, we must not reduce them to inert, hapless objects of pity. Certainly, their lives were hard, but the young women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were like other young adults new to the big city, joyfully soaking up its excitement and absorbed in their own ambitions. A contemporary artist who sketched young workers on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side described them as “a bevy of boisterous girls with plenty of energy left after a hard day’s work.” Their wages were meager, but the “working girls,” as they were called in those days, typically brought home income that was essential to their family’s survival. Despite the hardships, it was a promising time for them, and they knew it.

This was the era of America’s great industrial advancement, 1900 to 1920, when new manufacturing giants in steel, automobiles, and electrical generation rose to preeminence, producing marvelous, new conveniences like cars, telephones, refrigerators, and indoor plumbing. It was also a time of intense conflict on social and political fronts, because the rising tides that would lead eventually to modern prosperity also generated bitter contests between the haves and have-nots, between workers and companies. At the same time consumers were enjoying dazzling comforts, reformers were campaigning against child labor and unsafe factories, and communities were defending themselves against slums and slumlords and other damaging social consequences of industrialization.

The young women employed at Triangle and other garment factories concentrated in New York City did not need to be told they were being exploited. They knew it from their wages and working conditions. A couple of years before the tragedy occurred, these same young immigrant women mobilized themselves and staged an audacious demonstration of their grievances—a general, industry-wide strike against their employers. Their protest became known as “The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” and, at the time, it was the largest strike ever organized by working women anywhere in the world. Consider for a moment the courage that required of them.

Their situation demanded collective action. The supply of willing workers was so abundant that whenever any individual worker made complaints, she was easily fired and replaced. Their general strike in 1909 was a sensational event—actually an intriguing novelty in an era when labor unions were weak or nonexistent for men in industrial jobs, even more so for women workers who had not even won the right to vote. And the collective withdrawal of their labor won some partial victories. Many employers, especially the smaller operators, were compelled to agree to better terms of employment or to accept a union to represent the workers. Many other employers, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, did not yield.

Their uprising occurred at the birth of the Ladies International Garment Workers Union, which survives today incorporated in UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (the author of this book was for many years editor of
Justice
, ILGWU’s magazine). The efforts of industrial workers to gain a voice and a fair share of the returns from their labor produced many similar confrontations, stretching across decades. By its nature, it was a long and tortuous struggle and indeed continues in our time. UNITE and a number of other unions are now waging a difficult fight to organize new immigrants wherever they work, from dangerous jobs in meatpacking houses in the Midwest to the modern high-rise office buildings, from New York to Los Angeles, where the janitors who mop and clean at night also need collective action to win decent wages.

A century ago, against this background of social protest and labor’s demands, the Triangle fire became a galvanizing moment in American history. It provoked nationwide shock and anger but also a humiliating sense of guilt among many citizens who had previously ignored labor’s grievances. “Who will protect the working girl?” became the popular rallying demand, and it spawned a great social movement, stirred political action on many fronts, and eventually led to genuine reforms. The labor movement itself was energized and became more aggressive. Middle-class reformers were emboldened in their demands for reform laws on health, safety, and the scandal of children working in the mills and mines. Along with organized labor, reformers aroused public concern across a broad spectrum of Americans. And some leading politicians bravely took up the cause, enacting ordinances and statutes in city councils and state legislatures, especially New York’s.

Even so, the struggle for reform was difficult and slow, with many political setbacks. New York and a few other progressive states enacted landmark laws establishing new social standards and regulatory rules for industrial enterprise (some of which were initially nullified by the Supreme Court as improper intrusions on private business). But it was twenty-five years before the federal government acted. The rights of workers to organize and other great social reforms were finally consecrated in national law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the era known as the New Deal. FDR’s secretary of labor, a reformer from New York named Frances Perkins (the first woman cabinet officer in U.S. history), remarked at the time: “The Triangle fire was the first day of the New Deal.”

New York City was terribly divided in that earlier period of industrial conflict—divided between the well-to-do and the impoverished, between labor and industrialists. But the city was also bitterly divided by its multiplicity of hostile ethnic groups—immigrants against immigrants. The Triangle catastrophe pulled these different people closer together and helped them recognize their common humanity. A friend from New York once explained to me how that happened. “The Irish cops were picking up the bodies of the Jewish girls,” he said, “and that changed New York politics forever.”

Fast-forward to May 10, 1993. A huge toy factory with three thousand workers is destroyed by fire in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand—188 workers killed and 469 severely injured. The actual toll was higher because the four-story building swiftly collapsed, and many bodies were incinerated in the intense flames, some never to be found. All but fourteen of the dead were women, most quite young and some as young as thirteen years old. The mammoth factory had been poorly designed and cheaply built, with inadequate stairways and structure, and no fire-prevention equipment whatsoever. Managers at the Kadar Industrial Toy Company had kept exit doors locked to prevent workers from pilfering the stuffed toys and plastic dolls that they manufactured. Hundreds of workers were trapped on the upper floors, forced to jump to their deaths or to survive with broken backs and limbs. Nine months after the fire, I visited Thailand while working on a book about the global economy and found that physical evidence of the disaster was gone—the factory site had been scraped clean, the company’s toy production moved to a quickly-built factory in a remote rural location.

The toy factory fire in Thailand was the worst in the history of capitalism—surpassing even the Triangle fire—yet the rest of the world barely noticed. It was reported on page twenty-five of the
Washington Post
. The
Wall Street Journal
followed a day late with a brief account on page eleven. The
New York Times
also put the story inside, though it did print a chilling photo on the front page—rows of small, shrouded bodies lying on bamboo pallets, with dazed rescue workers standing amid the corpses. Catastrophes in distant foreign countries are simply not considered big news for Americans unless hundreds of thousands have died.

What the news stories failed to mention was that these Thai workers assembled toys for American children—the most popular items such as Bart Simpson, the Muppets, Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters, Playskool “Water Pets,” Bugs Bunny, and Santa Claus dolls. The factory, jointly owned by Thailand’s leading conglomerate and a major Taiwanese manufacturer, supplied the products sold by the biggest names in American toys—Fisher-Price, Hasbro, Tyco, Kenner, Toys “R” Us, J. C. Penny, and others. The U.S. companies easily distanced themselves from any responsibility. Their customers remained largely ignorant of the tragic callousness that lurked behind the toys they bought for their children.

In my reporting, I talked to some of the workers who had witnessed the event and had searched among the bodies for friends and relatives, attending to the maimed survivors. I also interviewed Thai labor leaders and sympathetic university professors who had helped the workers organize protests afterwards, demanding just compensation for the victims’ children and families. These people were under the impression that a worldwide boycott of Kadar’s products was occurring on their behalf. Public opinion in America, they assumed, was demanding reforms that would compel global companies to adhere to elementary standards for safe factories by installing modern fire-prevention equipment in well-constructed buildings. I had to inform them there was no boycott. I did not have the heart to tell them that most Americans had never even heard of their tragedy.

The details of how the Thai women at the Kadar Industrial Toy Company died are hauntingly similar to the Triangle fire deaths eight decades earlier in New York City. Let us listen to the testament from just one of the survivors, a young woman named Lampan Taptim: