The Triangle Fire (19 page)

Following the empty hearse, the first marchers from the downtown contingent moved under the Washington Arch and headed up Fifth Avenue at 3:20
P.M.
They marched eight abreast.

“From that minute, until 6 o’clock, a steady stream of marchers passed under the arch and every moment of the time the rain fell with unrelenting steadiness,” said the
Herald
. “A few figures watched from the upper stories of the old brick mansions in Washington Square North and lower Fifth Avenue.”

As promised, there were neither bands nor banners in the line of march. Only one single streamer appeared, and it was carried in the division of the parade made up of women’s garment workers. It read: “We Demand Fire Protection.”

“Now and again,” said the
Herald
, “elderly women in the line gave vent to their feelings in a wailing chant to which marchers and spectators listened with awe and reverence. But the greater part of those in line moved along saturnine and silent. None fell out of line.”

Ambulances with attending doctors and internes had been stationed along the route of the march. No patients were treated. “I fear that pneumonia will claim more victims than the fire,” said one attendant stationed near the arch.

In the Evergreen Cemetery, they buried the nameless ones.

Hundreds had waited in the heavy rain at the entrance to the cemetery. With silence, bared heads, tears, they honored the dead as they passed. But once again, as at the morgue, there were the curious and the disorderly. As the hearses moved into the cemetery, “half-grown boys ran at top speed through the grounds, jumping over and on graves,” the
Tribune
reported.

A pit 15 feet long had been dug. The eight coffins were placed alongside of it. At the end of the pit a small tent had been erected.

The small group of city officials huddled in the rain in front of the tent. Commissioner Drummond expressed the sorrow of the city. Then Monsignor William J. White read the Catholic service over one body. Father William B. Farrell made the responses.

The Episcopal burial service was read by the Reverend Dr. William B. Morrison over another body.

After that, Rabbi Judah L. Magnus spoke ancient Hebrew words.

Architect Flanagan had drawn up a plan for the burial plot that would make future identifications possible. He stood over the pit and pointed out each place as the caskets were lowered:

No. 46

No. 50

No. 61

No. 95

No. 103

No. 115

No. 127

The eighth casket had neither name nor number. “It contained the dismembered fragments picked up at the fire by the police and unclaimed,” said the
Herald
.

When the last casket had been lowered, Peter J. Collins, Frank Corbett, John Lloyd Wilson, and James J. Byrne stepped out of the crowd. They comprised the quartet from Elks Brooklyn Lodge No. 22. They ended the service by singing “Abide with Me” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

The marchers continued up Fifth Avenue.

Rose Schneiderman, the slight, red-haired girl who had stirred the meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House, now stirred those watching the march of sorrow:

“Little Miss Schneiderman, hatless and without a raincoat, tried to trudge along in the dripping procession,” the
Times
wrote. “But long before it reached its uptown destination, she began to falter.” Help came from Mary Dreier, WTUL president, and Helen Marot, the League’s secretary. Seeing her plight, “each took her under an arm and the three leaned into the wind supporting each other.”

The leaders of the parade claimed it was “the largest demonstration ever made here by working people.” First official anticipations of the size of the demonstration, considering the rain, were low.

While the parade was in progress, the estimates were lifted from 100,000 to 120,000. The final police estimate was that about 400,000 had seen the parade and of these about one-third had marched in it.

At Thirty-third Street, the marchers turned east to Madison Avenue, then south to Madison Square Park, where they disbanded at the base of the Metropolitan tower. At the Square, a reporter asked Rose Schneiderman if she felt sick.

“Oh please do not speak of my feeling ill,” she replied. “We don’t know how sick the other girls were. This parade has been the only thing that will demonstrate to the people the enormous responsibility resting on them to see to it that fire protection is given these thousands and thousands of factory workers.

“As we marched up Fifth Avenue, there they were. Girls right at the top of hundreds of buildings, looking down on us. The structures were no different from the Asch building in a majority of cases with respect to the lack of protection against fire; many were in a far worse condition. There they were, leaning out of the upper windows, watching us. This, not the rain, is making me sick.”

Rose Schneiderman remembers: “As we disbanded, we heard the bells of the Metropolitan Life tower. It was dark and raining so we couldn’t see the top of the tower. But we could hear the bells. That night we were certain they tolled for us.”

14. SHIRTWAIST

With the fist closed …

—
CANTO VII
:57

Isaac Harris, and Max Blanck, known to the trade as “the shirtwaist kings,” were indicted on charges of manslaughter, first and second degree, in mid-April.

They had moved their firm into the Asch building in 1902, occupying at first only the ninth floor. In one of the nation’s most competitive businesses, they had steadily risen toward the top. In 1906, they took over the eighth floor of the Asch building. In 1908, the volume of their production in shops in New York and in Philadelphia hit the million-dollar mark, and soon they established their general office on the tenth floor of the Asch building.

Both partners had imagination as well as ambition, and each was expert in the portion of company responsibilities undertaken by him. Harris, the inside man, knew all about garment production, machinery, how to keep the work flow going through the plant. He was of medium height, with a serious expression, and his daily task was to patrol the factory, moving impressively down its aisles, checking, questioning, directing.

Blanck, on the other hand, was the sporty type, and as he was the “outside man,” this was of considerable help in developing strong ties with the buyers for stores, who were always well entertained by Triangle. He, as well as Harris, owned a large automobile and used a chauffeur. Only a few days before the fire, Blanck had won a case against Sol Lichtenstein, identified as a bookmaker, to whom he had paid a check for $875 “for losses in the racing game,” the
Tribune
reported. Lichtenstein had endorsed the check and passed it on to someone else. In the meantime, Blanck had stopped payment on the check, leaving the bookmaker out on a limb. In City Court, the judge agreed with Blanck, who took the stand that the check was for a gambling debt and was therefore not collectible by court order.

Harris and Blanck showed the same kind of shrewdness during the strike that hit their factory late in 1909. For the faithful who stayed in the shop they installed a phonograph on the ninth floor. One who was there remembers that while the pickets on the street “were being beaten, we danced during lunch time. Mr. Blanck even used to give out prizes to those who were the best dancers. But once the strike was over—no more dancing, no more prizes, no more phonograph.”

Now, with the threat of punishment, perhaps even years of imprisonment, hanging over their heads, the Triangle partners sought to mend their tarnished public image. In the weeks after the fire they undertook their first advertising campaign in New York newspapers.

Between March 31 and July 13, they sent twenty-five contracts for advertising, for a total expenditure of $4,801.50 to the papers, including some foreign-language publications. A contract, with a check, was offered to the New York
Call
, which photographed the check, returned it, and then ran an account of the transaction in its columns. The
Sun
and the
Catholic News
also returned the checks; the
Morning Telegraph
said it had never run the advertising covered by the check.

Harris and Blanck had made their fortunes manufacturing shirtwaists for ladies. They were the largest firm in the business, and the garment they made was aimed at mass sales. It was of medium quality and sold for $16.50 to $18 a dozen—wholesale.

More than any other item of feminine apparel, the shirtwaist symbolized the American female’s new-found freedoms. It was a cool and efficient bodice garment, generally worn with a tailored skirt. Early in the new century it became standard attire for thousands of young ladies taking positions with industrial and commercial enterprises. The popular artist, Charles Dana Gibson, immortalized the shirtwaisted female. He pictured her as a bright-eyed, fast-moving young lady, her long tresses knotted in a bun atop her proud head, ready to challenge the male in sport, drawing room, and, if properly equipped with paper cuff covers, even in the office.

The shirtwaist was topped at the neck by a recognizable variant of an open or buttoned mannish collar. In sharp contrast to the masculine stringency thus achieved, it descended in a broad expanse across the bosom, then by means of tucks, darts, or pleats tapered dramatically to a fitted waistline. The secret of its perennial popularity was in its lines and the fabric of which it was generally made. Crisp, clean, translucent—and more combustible than paper—the sheer cotton fabrics produced opposite but pleasing effects. The
bouffant
quality of the fabric enhanced the figure it enfolded. At the same time its sheerness piquantly revealed the dainty shape beneath.

At the start of the new century the garment industry began a move out of the slum workshops and railroad flats in which entire families labored over bundles of cut garments farmed out to them by jobbers. By 1903, Ernest Poole, later winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was able to report that in New York, 70 per cent of coat production was done in factories in contrast to the old farming-out system. Poole pointed out that the factory meant “endless saving, dividing, narrowing of labor. The worker’s strength is no longer wasted in pushing a treadle; the machine is run by power. Each worker does one minute part swiftly, with exact precision.”

The advantages of locating in one of the new towering loft buildings were described by Arthur E. McFarlane as including “cheaper insurance because loft buildings were fireproof. The installation of motors and shaftings allowed manufacturers to use electricity instead of the old gasoline engines and electricity was cheaper. There was daylight until 5 o’clock, even in winter, which meant a saving of gaslight.”

But the more important advantage arose from the New York factory law requirement that each worker be provided with 250 cubic feet of air. In the new buildings, the ceilings were higher than in the old with the result that more workers could be crowded into a given area. In terms of square feet per worker, the new factories provided less, not more space for each employee.

Because of this, firms like Triangle could, in effect, draw together under one roof the scores of homework units and sweatshops they would have had to utilize under the old farming-out system. Instead, these now became self-organized teams of workers.

Triangle would hire a good machine operator and allocate to him half a dozen machines out of the 240 on the ninth floor. In turn, this operator, in reality a contractor for the firm, would hire the young girls, immigrants and women from his home town across the sea, as learners. He would teach them how to make the separate parts of the garment which he, as master craftsman, would join together.

Mary Leventhal kept the record of cut work distributed and the finished waists returned by the leader. Only he knew the value of the work done by his team because only he had bargained with the company for the rate on each style.

“The girls never knew,” says Joseph Flecher. “For them there was no fixed rate. They got whatever the contractor wanted to pay as a start. In two or three weeks they knew how to sew very well. Never mind. For a long time they still got the same low pay. Triangle and the inside contractor got the difference.”

The company dealt only with its contractors. It felt no responsibility for the girls. Its payroll listed only the contractors. It never knew the exact total of its workers.

On Saturdays, it was the inside contractor who paid the girls. In each case he took into account the skill and speed, the family relationships or the defenselessness of the individual worker. She, in turn, showed her appreciation by being docile and uncomplaining.

But the gathering of the workers under one roof created a new circumstance which, as Poole pointed out, “is a help to the workers. In a system of small, scattered shops, the union had no chance.” Gathered together, workers found it easier to organize and remain united. They could see the real employer beyond the contractor with whom they dealt. “The workmen are learning to strike it together,” Poole said. So, too, were the working women.

For in time dissatisfaction grew among the girls which resulted in pressure on the contractors. But unless the contractors received more pay from the employers, they could not pass on more pay to their own teams. The Triangle partners sensed the increasing uneasiness.

Bernard Baum remembers the first serious flare-up that eventually led to the strike at Triangle. About a year and a half before that walkout, he says, Jake Kline and Morris Elzufin, “two soft-spoken group leaders, found they had little left from their pay for themselves after paying of! their teams. They got a curt answer when they went to appeal to Bernstein, the manager. He ended up telling them to get back to their machines, finish their work, and get out.

“Five minutes later, one of Bernstein’s deputies—Morris Goldfarb, the toughie—and a few others of his kind approached the two men at their machines, broke the threads of their cotton spools—Bernstein’s orders, they said—and told the two men to go.”

Kline refused. He protested he had work to finish, that he wouldn’t get paid if he left it unfinished.

“When Bernstein heard Jake’s hollering, he came running, grabbed him by the back of the neck and started to drag him to the door, slapping him left and right. Goldfarb grabbed Elzufin.”

With his shirt torn and his glasses broken, Jake managed to twist free for a moment and shouted into the shop, where all work had stopped: “People … workers … look what they are doing to us … get up from your machines!”

They did. The wheels kept turning, but no work passed under them. Only scattered groups remained when the turmoil stopped. Most of the operators had gone to the street, where they gathered around Jake and Morris.

Some went directly to the headquarters of ILGWU Local 25 to ask for help. But far from being able to help, the garment union was in need of help itself. It had only 400 devoted members, and virtually no funds. Reluctantly, it advised conciliation.

After the Triangle workers returned to their machines, management sought ways in which to undercut or block the rising resentment. It hit on the idea of forming a company union.

This became an exclusive group in the factory, enrolling only one of every six workers. But instead of dampening the discontent, it fed the anger of those excluded from its ranks, who began to call in small groups at union headquarters for help.

Survey
magazine reported that “discontent grew even among the members of the company society,” so that when a meeting of Triangle workers was held at Clinton Hall in September, 1909, all but seven members of the company union were present. Word got back to the firm, and on Friday, September 24, the day after the meeting, “the employers called the girls together and expostulated with them more in sorrow than in anger. Terms were once more arranged between a delegation of operators and the firm and the next day everyone went back to work as usual.

“On Monday, however,” the magazine report continued, “when the girls reported for work the shop was found closed. The next day it was once more open. But no union girls were taken back so, within 36 hours, through the agency of the society whose dwindling membership then numbered exactly seven—all of them sisters, cousins and aunts of the members of the firm—the lockout began.”

Local 25 immediately declared a strike against Triangle. The walkout surprised the city because few had expected immigrant Jewish and Italian girls to strike as effectively as these did. Triangle was hard pressed for production. On October 29, it wrote to other blouse manufacturers urging them to join in the formation of an employers’ protective association to combat the spreading evil of unionism.

The picket line held firm and defectors were only those who found employment in other shops. In its November 13 issue
Survey
magazine reported that the strike of two hundred women employees at Triangle was being conducted according to approved strike methods.

“The management of the company has tried to protect its rights against the girls by calling into commission a regiment of police, plainclothes detectives and other burly men who, the girls declare, are nothing more than neighborhood thugs, sufficient in number to handle a general industrial disturbance, willing to strike women and to hustle them off to court on flimsy pretexts.

“The girls have been entirely orderly but police interference has made them appear otherwise,” the magazine report continued. “The officers break in upon any who are talking together; men loafing about in the employ of the company have insulted the girls; and the least refusal to answer the officers is made excuse for prompt arrest. Unfair treatment has not stopped there for in court the judges railroaded through a whole batch of girls at a time without as much as a hearing.”

Triangle had allies—at a price. Joseph Flecher recalls that “you could get a man on the beat to look away by giving him a box of cigars with a $100 bill in it. Then the hoodlums hired by the company could do their work without interference. They couldn’t hit women, even on the picket line. So they brought their lady friends—prostitutes. They knew how to start fights.”

The Triangle strikers also had friends but of a very different kind. Chief among these was the group of wealthy women who, in 1904, had formed the Women’s Trade Union League in order to work with their less fortunate sisters in the shops and the factories for a fair deal as workers and as women. They helped “man” the picket line at Triangle. Their intervention on behalf of the girls drew public attention to the industrial conflict. In groups, they formed voluntary patrols, marching with the strikers early in the morning and late in the evening and accompanying those arrested to court to testify to their innocence.

The peak of strike publicity was reached with the arrest of Mary Dreier, WTUL president.
Survey
magazine reported that “Miss Dreier was discharged upon arrival at the nearest station house and the police attitude toward the women was deliciously revealed when the officer in charge upbraided her for not having told him she was ‘the working girls’ rich friend,’ had he known which, of course, he would not have arrested her.”