TRIANGLE
THE FIRE THAT CHANGED AMERICA
By David Von Drehle
321 pages. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press. $26
By
Kevin Baker
Before
September 11, the most infamous disaster in the history of New
York City was the Triangle Waist Company fire, which killed 146
garment workers on the afternoon of March 25, 1911. There were
eerie parallels between the two tragedies. Both left their victims
trapped between a terrible fire and a leap from a fatal height,
while crowds of their fellow New Yorkers watched from below, helpless
to do anything for them. Even the accounts of how they leapt were
remarkably similar, with men and women reportedly embracing, and
clasping hands on the ledges outside the Triangle factory—just
as they would in the Twin Towers—before plunging to their
deaths.
The
toll at the Triangle was much lower than at the World Trade Center
towers, of course, but if anything the wound was a deeper one
because it was largely self-inflicted. As David Von Drehle makes
clear in his outstanding new history, Triangle, The Fire That
Changed America, the overwhelmingly young, female victims
of fire—at least 123 were women, and of these at least 64
were still teenagers—were betrayed by the greed of their
employers, by the indifference of the city’s political bosses;
by an entire matrix of civic neglect and corruption.
Girls
who routinely worked 84 hours a week for as little as seven dollars
were immolated because their bosses kept stairway doors locked
to prevent theft. In a city that had added more than 800 skyscrapers
over the past ten years, the fire department had no ladders that
reached above the sixth story, and pumps that could spray only
a “light rain” on the fire that raged through the
eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of Greenwich Village’s Asch
Building. The social reformer Frances Perkins remembered the mood
in New York afterwards as one of guilt, “as though we had
all done something wrong.” Over the next twenty-five years
a determination to expiate that feeling would bring about seismic
changes in American life.
Von
Drehle, a Washington Post reporter and the author of
a previous work about death row, has written what is sure to become
the definitive account of the fire. Previously, that distinction
belonged to labor historian Leon Stein’s fine, 1962 work,
The Triangle Fire. But while Stein’s account focused
primarily on the fire itself, Von Drehle’s Triangle is social
history at its best, a magnificent portrayal not only of the tragedy,
but also of the time and the turbulent city in which it took place.
The
fire followed close on the heels of “The Uprising of the
Twenty Thousand,” an epic, four-month strike led by the
fabrente maydlakh, the “fiery girls” of the
fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union—young,
predominantly Jewish women who thrilled themselves and their fellow
workers with their fervent, street-corner oratory. The shop owners
tried to crush them by hiring pimps and prostitutes to attack
their picket lines, as “a way of saying that the strikers
were no better than whores themselves.” The police, controlled
by the owners’ allies in Tammany Hall, then arrested the
strikers for disturbing the peace, roughed them up and hauled
them before Tammany magistrates, who fined and jailed them.
The
fiery girls flummoxed this strategy for awhile by winning the
sympathy of WASP social reformers such as Perkins and a bevy of
society women too powerful for even Tammany to lay hands on. Class
differences eventually proved greater than gender solidarity,
but not before the union was able to gain a real foothold in many
shops for the first time.
One
of the factories they couldn’t penetrate was the Triangle,
whose owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had led the resistance
to the strike. Like many of the owners, Blanck and Harris were
immigrants themselves, who had worked their way up from the bottom
and now churned out thousands of shirtwaists—an early form
of women’s blouse that was a highly popular item in the
booming new business of “ready-to-wear” clothes. By
1909 it was a $1.3 billion industry ($23 billion in today’s
dollars), but a fickle one, which turned on the smallest efficiencies
and on “sweating” every cent out of labor costs.
One
of these efficiencies was arson. Everywhere that Blanck and Harris
went, fire seemed to follow—three of them, between 1902
and 1907, at three different locations, and each one just happened
to break out at about five in the morning, when the factory was
deserted, and at the end of a season, when the heavily insured
partners needed to unload tons of unfashionable inventory.
They
did not start the fatal blaze that March 25th—but as Von
Drehle points out, the need to periodically burn off excess stock
meant that no fire precautions had been taken—no sprinklers,
no fire drills; the stairway door locked to prevent annual
worker theft that Harris later estimated as “Ten dollars
or fifteen dollars or twelve dollar or eight dollars, something
like that.”
The
fire was probably started by another of Harris’s efficiencies,
the enormous scrap bins beneath the long factory work tables that
provided as much as a ton of kindling for a stray cigarette butt.
Within six minutes, the fire had consumed some 9,000 square feet
of factory floor, trapping most of the workers on the ninth floor.
The 18-inch wide fire escape collapsed, spilling two dozen women
down onto the glass skylight and an iron picket fence below. Dozens
more were simply consumed by the fire, or leapt down the elevator
shaft, or from the window ledges, falling so hard they ripped
right through the fire departments nets and even the sidewalk
deadlights.
The
fire took only fifteen minutes, but it would never be over. Blanck
and Harris managed to beat a manslaughter rap with the help of
a smart lawyer and a tainted judge. They made $60,000 off the
fire—over $400 per dead worker—and two years later
were caught locking another stairwell door, in yet another firetrap
factory. The families of the dead had to settle for $75 each.
But
the Tammany sachems, no doubt influenced by the 350,000 people
who turned out for the funeral procession four days after the
fire, began to subtly shifted their weight to the side of the
workers. Perkins made common cause with the two scions of the
machine who ran the New York state legislature but who had grown
up in immigrant slums themselves, Al Smith and Robert Wagner.
Their partnership would change everything. In recent years, right-wing
pundits such as John Tierney have derided the significance of
the Triangle Fire, attributing subsequent improvements in working
conditions and wages to voluntary, market-based decisions. Von
Drehle puts paid to this frivolous bit of revisionism, showing
how revulsion over the fire led directly to legislation “that
was unmatched to that time in American history…entirely
recasting the labor law of the nation’s largest state.”
Perkins, Wagner, and Smith would all go on to play key roles in
the coming of the New Deal, and the founding of the American welfare
state.
Always,
though, Von Drehle keeps his eye on the fiery girls. He is at
his elegiac best in describing what they must have seen as they
clung to life on the window ledges, looking out over Washington
Square Park on a gorgeous, sunlit spring day:
“This,
then, was their universe: panic and fire behind them, horror and
helplessness on the faces far, far below—and something cool,
something beautiful, just out of reach beyond the heat
waves and the blinding smoke.” Almost a hundred years later,
it is still enough to bring tears of rage and sorrow.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel, Paradise Alley.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
