For several weeks I had
planned to write this article about the terrible “Triangle fire” that occurred
105 years today. Then earlier
this month I had the privilege of hearing a talk by David Von Drehle, an editor-at-large for Time
magazine. (Some of you may have seen his cover story about Donald Trump in the
March 14 issue of Time.)
Von Drehle (b.
1961), I learned then, is also the
author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed
America (2003). It is an engrossing book about the Triangle Waist Company fire
in New York City on March 25,
1911, a fire that tragically took the lives of 146 people.
Last week June and I
also watched “Triangle Fire,” a DVD that was originally a PBS program produced
in 2011 as part of the centennial remembrance of what they call “the tragedy
that forever changed labor and industry.”
Von Drehle’s first chapter
tells about the beginning and growth of the waist factories in Manhattan during
the first decade of the 20th century. That was when waists and
skirts first became popular wearing apparel for women in this country. (At that
time, women’s blouses were known as “shirtwaists,” or simply as “waists.”)
Hundreds of factories sprang
up in New York City to produce the popular new garment. The great majority of
the workers in those factories were women who were new immigrants, mostly Italians
and East European Jews. The working conditions, as well as the living conditions,
for most of those factory workers were terrible.
Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were the owners of
the Triangle Waist Company. According to Von Drehle, “They were rich men, and
when they glanced into the faces of their workers they saw, with rare
exceptions, anonymous cogs in a profit machine” (p.
36).
Those were still the days of
“robber barons,” men who became wealthy through the exploitation of the people
who out of financial necessity had to work for them with very low wages, long
hours, and dangerous working conditions.
The fire right at closing
time on that March afternoon in Manhattan drew huge crowds, as did the funeral
march for the Triangle dead four days later. From 350,000 to 400,000 people
participated in what one newspaper called one of the “most impressive
spectacles of sorrow New York has ever known.”
As Von Drehle emphasizes,
though, “the plight of the shirtwaist workers brought together the forces of
change” (p. 193). Eight new
workplace safety laws were created in 1912, including the law that women and
boys could not work more than 54 hours a week. The next year, 25 more new laws
were passed to protect factory workers.
The Triangle fire also
resulted in political changes in New York and eventually in the nation. For
many years up until 1911, New York was controlled by the Democratic Party’s
corrupt political machine known as Tammany Hall.
However, it was Tammany
Hall that pushed through the new labor laws of 1913, and it was evident in that
year’s elections that it had become “a true friend of the working class” (Von
Drehle, p. 217).
Later, “Tammany’s Al
Smith, bearing the legacy of the Triangle fire, grew into the dominant
political figure in New York from 1918 to 1928” (p. 259). Smith, then, became the Democrat’s
candidate for President in 1928.
Von Drehle concludes,
“In the generation after the Triangle fire, urban Democrats became America’s
working-class, progressive party” (p. 260). And that is still true today.
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