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The fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building in New York City at the intersection of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square.
The company employed approximately 500 workers, mostly young female immigrants who worked fourteen-hour days, during a 60- to 72-hour workweek sewing clothes for a wage of 6 to 10 dollars per week.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company had already become well-known outside the garment industry by 1911: the massive strike by women's shirtwaist makers in 1909, known as the Uprising of 20,000, began with a spontaneous walkout at the Triangle Company.
While the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement covering most of those workers after a four month strike, Triangle Shirtwaist refused to sign the agreement.
The conditions of the factory were typical of the time. Flammable textiles were stored throughout the factory, smoking was common, illumination was provided by open gas lighting and there were no fire extinguishers. In the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire began on the eighth floor. The workers on the tenth floor were alerted and most on those two floors were able to evacuate. However word of the fire did not reach the ninth floor in time.
The ninth floor had only two doors leading out. One stairwell was already filling with smoke and flames by the time the seamstresses realized the building was ablaze. The other door had been locked, ostensibly to prevent workers from stealing materials or taking breaks, and to keep out work (union) organizers The single exterior fire escape soon collapsed under the weight of people trying to escape. The elevator also stopped working, cutting off that means of escape. Realizing there was no other way to avoid the flames, some of the women broke out windows and jumped to the ground nine floors below. Others pried open the elevator doors and tumbled down the elevator shaft. Few survived these falls. The remainder waited until smoke and fire overcame them. The fire department did arrive quickly but was unable to stop the flames as there were no ladders available that could reach beyond the sixth floor. A single survivor was found close to drowning in water collecting in the elevator shaft. The death toll was 146.
The aftermath of the fire
The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had fled to the building's roof when the fire began and survived. They were later put on criminal trial, at which Max Steuer, counsel for the defendants, managed to destroy the credibility of one of the survivors, Kate Alterman, by asking her to repeat her testimony a number of times — which she did, without altering a single word. Steuer argued to the jury that Alterman and probably other witnesses had memorized their statements and may even have been told what to say by the prosecutors. The jury acquitted the owners. The owners were also relieved of their culpability as the prosecution failed to prove that they knew the exit doors were locked at the time in question. They lost a subsequent civil suit in 1913.
The fire had more long-lasting effects. For some it radicalized them still further; as Rose Schneiderman, a prominent socialist and union activist, said in her speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the Women's Trade Union League, a group that had provided moral and financial support for the Uprising of 20,000:
- I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.
- This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.
- We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
- Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.
- I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.
Others in the community and in particular in the ILGWU drew a different lesson from events: working with local Tammany Hall officials, such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers, such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration who had witnessed the fire from the street below, they pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond.
The Asch building survived the fire and was refurbished. Real estate speculator and philanthropist Frederick Brown later bought the building and subsequently donated the structure to New York University in 1929, where it is now known as the Brown Building of science.
References in popular culture
- The tragedy was the subject of a 1978 movie, The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal.
- The tragedy has also inspired a musical, Rags.
- The band Rasputina wrote a song about the fire called "My Little Shirtwaist Fire".
- Lois Lowry wrote about the tragedy in her book 'The Silent Boy'.
See also
External links
- Cornell University Library: Triangle Factory Fire
- Eyewitness account of the fire
- Famous Trials: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Trial
- "Fire Trap: The Legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire" - Failure Magazine, November, 2003.
- "A Sabbath Rose" - The story of Rosie Goldstein, a young girl who had the courage to refuse to work on the Sabbath. By Goldy Rosenberg
Disasters in New York City | History of labor relations in the United States | Industrial disasters | Fire disasters in the United States | Fires | 1911 disasters
"Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire"