NPR
Weekly Edition
March 13, 1999
NEAL CONAN: At the beginning of this century, America was
even more powerful a magnet than it is now. In those days, the
principal port of entry was Ellis Island, not LAX, but people
came for the same reasons: for work, for unheard-of opportunity,
for a new life. Many of these new immigrants stayed in New York
City, crowding into tenement apartments, and their playground
was a strip of beach in Brooklyn called Coney Island. Those people
and that place are the subjects of a new novel called "Dreamland."
On Coney Island, author Kevin Baker told NPR's Brooke Gladstone
about one of his main characters, a young woman named Esther Abramowitz.
Mr.
KEVIN BAKER (Novelist): Esther is a young woman who works
as a machine girl at the Triangle factory, has worked in a number
of different sweatshops and garment factories, scrapes by, lives
at home with her parents, sleeps in the kitchen on a bed made
out of chairs. Pretty common life for a lot of young women in
the Lower East Side at that point.
BROOKE
GLADSTONE reporting: And for a break, she'd come here.
Mr.
BAKER: And on the weekend, she comes to Coney Island occasionally
and gets mixed up with a guy called Kid Twist, who is a young
gangster, based somewhat on a real gangster by that name. And
that was one of the great things about Coney Island, you know,
in an era where women's skirts were supposed to go over their
ankles. You could really come here and meet members of the opposite
sex. And a lot of the rides were, in fact, set up around that,
to throw you together involuntarily.
GLADSTONE:
Her life was so bleak, it seemed like bleakness without end.
Mr.
BAKER: It was bleak. You know, she would be somebody who took
a lot of comfort from friends, these very intense friendships
of these women who worked in these factories, but it was a very
hard existence, a real kind of numbing, backbreaking work, you
know, hunched over a sewing machine, possibly being harassed by
the foreman. But, you know, out of these women, too, came the
fabrente mealock(ph), if my Yiddish ser-the fiery girls, the women
who really built some of the great labor unions of this country,
the ILGWU and Amalgamated. They're terrific speakers. They became
known as the fiery girls for these terrific, kind of street-corner
oratory, which inspired a lot of other young women from other
ethnic groups-Italians, Portuguese, Norwegians, women for whom
the words might not come through in Yiddish, but the spirit did.
CONAN:
Kevin Baker, the author of a new novel called "Dreamland," speaking
with Brooke Gladstone.
CONAN:
The Triangle factory, the bleak place where Esther Abramowitz
worked in the novel, was a real place. Bessie Cohen(ph) worked
there as a girl of 19. She was a seamstress and one of the very
few who escaped the ninth floor when the worst factory fire in
American history destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. A
hundred and forty-six of her co-workers died, most in the space
of15 minutes. For much of the rest of her life, Bessie Cohen was
active in the unions that rose in outrage to demand that people
never be forced to work in such conditions again. The Triangle
factory spurred other reforms as well. So many of those killed
were so young that the fire helped the passage of child labor
laws and firetrucks were equipped with new ladders to reach people
trapped on high floors.
Last
month, Bessie Cohen died in Los Angeles at the age of 107. Her
passing reminded us of a documentary first broadcast 15 years
ago on the women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory,
"The Golden Cradle," narrated by Mandy Bynam(ph) from the NPR
archives of 1984.
Unidentified
Woman #1: When I came to this country, I was 13 years old,
going on 14, and it really was beautiful in every way. I remember
we would walk through the streets at night and the streets were
crowded with people. People would come into the park and just
romantically speak about things, figuring a future, without any-trying
to overcome, just trying to reach, to reach.
Unidentified
Woman #2: Then I see the children go to school, all clean
and dressed in white. My mouth would water.
MANDY
BYNAM reporting: In the first decades of the 20th century,
wages were low-so low that it took the entire family to pull in
the minimum needed to survive. Husbands were seasonal factory
workers or day laborers; wives took in boarders, did janitorial
work in the neighborhood and maintained the home for the extra
wage earners; a massive army of children, so many of them girl
children. America was tapping its feet to a sweet and steady rhythm.
It was the music of mass production. All over the country, small
fingers were sorting, wrapping, pressing, stitching and folding
ostrich plumes, chocolates covered in silver paper, canned goods
with bright labels, hand-rolled cigars. Signs in the shop windows
advertised in Italian, Polish, Bohemian and Yiddish, 'Good pay.
Long season,' and an American shop, an anti-union euphemism. Labor
was just beginning to talk about the three 8s: 8 hours of work,
8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of sleep. Unidentified Woman #3: Childhood
life wasn't very good. We have to go to work and we walked to
work. Now we can't walk three blocks. It's too tired. Fancy ladies-like
my father said, `Fancy schmancy.'
Unidentified
Woman #3: We were young. We had fear. They didn't know our
age. My hair was curly and nice, and looked like 18 years old.
Because you had to get older because you wouldn't get a job if
you were so young.
Unidentified
Woman #4: I wasn't young. I was an old woman at 15, 16. The
only doll I ever wanted, never got, but they were giving out Hanukkah
dolls at the Jewish organization and, oh, I saw the most gorgeous
dolls there in-sitting in the chairs. And when it came my turn
to get a doll, they looked at me and they-`Oh, that-I guess she
looks too old.' So I got a pair of stockings, a box of candy and
an orange and something else. You know, I didn't touch that stuff
and I cried. Never had a doll. But I saw to it that the other
kids had dolls.
BYNAM:
The new industrial jobs for women were extensions of the work
they had always done at home. Irish girls worked in the industrial
steam laundries, Poles and Slavs in meat packing and food processing,
and Jews and Italians producing ready-made clothing. It was here
in the needle trades, more than anywhere else, that emerged what
was called, quite simply, the sweatshop. The sweatshop was based
on the contracting system, taking unfinished goods from a manufacturer
to be finished and returned at a fixed price. Work was paid by
the piece rather than by hourly wage. Money earned was based on
speed. The sweatshop was anywhere and everywhere a group of workers
and a row of sewing machines could be crowded together. Up the
flights of rickety tenement stairs, behind the closed doors, the
power sewing machines vibrated. And on top of that, there were
the bundles brought home to be finished at night. Some women never
went to the shop at all. Their bundles were brought to them. Day
after day and night after night, the work was swept from kitchen
table to bed, to table again, as life centered around the boxes
of work to be completed.
Unidentified
Woman #5: I made pockets for pants. I just made the pockets,
you see. And they would-I'd make a whole gang of them, one right
after another. The part-and then somebody else puts them in. You
made a bundle, you know, and they paid so much. They mark it down
how many bundles you brought in. You didn't get much money. It
was really slavery.
Unidentified
Woman #6: Some of them didn't even know how to say a word
of English. And they were, like, cutting threads. And remember,
they used to use those nice doilies and things, and call it embroidery?
In that time, there was no electric iron; they had to press them
with the iron on the stove, on the coal stove or whatever. And
they had small children. Those small children were helping the
mother cut the threads. Otherwise, they wouldn't have much to
eat. And those children did help, did fall asleep on the table,
didn't have their right rest because, really, that work was paid
so cheap. But I was lucky with my embroidery at home. I made enough
to put food on the table. The main thing is that I took my father
out of the coal mines. He was able to find a job with the trolleycar
company, but he worked only eight hours. I worked from 8 in the
morning until sometime 11 at night, by gaslight.
Unidentified Woman #7: So if you worked piecework, you
worked your goddamn guts out for an extra nickel. It don't make
any sense.
BYNAM:
Around the turn of the century, magazine illustrator Charles Dana
Gibson created a golden image of a graceful girl. The Gibson girl
came to symbolize a new identity for American women. She was confident
and independent. In fact, she might even play tennis or work in
an office, and she wore a pretty new man-tailored blouse with
celluloid collar and cuffs, called a shirtwaist. Everyone wanted
one, Yankee and greenhorn alike, and the demand for a new fashion
almost single-handedly brought an important change to clothing
manufacture.
Mr.
LEON STEIN (Historian Emeritus, ILGWU): The shirtwaist created
in the garment industry, for almost the first time, factory production.
BYNAM:
Leon Stein, historian emeritus of the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union.
Mr.
STEIN: People came out of the old dark, steamy sweatshops
and the tenement houses to work in factories. The great thing
about factories, if you can think of only one, is that it brings
people together. And, while you may be forbidden to speak on the
factory floor, there are the washrooms, the toilets, the staircase,
the street, and that's where you meet. And after a while, you
form a union and you organize your discontent, you formulate it
into demands and program, and you go on strike. And this was happening
1907, 1908, 1909. It sort of exploded in 1909, because in one
particular shop, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, there was overwhelming
dissatisfaction.
Ms.
PAULINE NEWMAN (Triangle Shirtwaist Company Employee): Triangle
Shirtwaist Company just loved to employ children at the age of
nine, 10.
BYNAM:
Pauline Newman worked at the Triangle when she was eight years
old. At 15, she was a full-time organizer for the ILGWU.
Ms.
NEWMAN: And you worked seven days a week. If you didn't come
in on Sunday, you were fired on Monday. If you were caught talking
to the girls next to you, you were fired. The attitude of the
employers was that you are no human being, you just have two hands,
and your two hands, to them, weren't worth more than what they
paid. In other words, it was a damnable place to work, but there
was no alternative. The others were just as bad.
BYNAM:
In 1909, clothing manufacture was the largest industry in the
United States. Chicago was the center for the male clothing industry.
About 69 percent of all women's clothing was made in New York
City. In the East Side factories centering around Greene, Bleecker
and Canal streets worked over 30,000 ladies' waist- and dressmakers,
mostly young women between 16 and 25 years of age. In late September
of 1909, workers began to picket the Triangle Waist Company. Two
more companies, Leiserson's and the Diamond Waist Company, were
struck in the next months. And on November 22nd, 1909, the shirtwaist
makers of New York crowded into Cooper Union to talk about a general
strike in the trade. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation
of Labor was one of the scheduled speakers.
Mr.
STEIN: I think Gompers must have been astounded to stand up
on that platform and look into the auditorium, in the audience,
and see what he saw. He was accustomed to seeing railroad workers,
muscle, miners with muscle, Teamsters who knew how to throw horses
around. And he looked out into this audience, and when he began
to talk, he said, `My dear children, do you know what you are
going to do now?' He says, `They may kill you, they may beat you.
If you go out, don't come back without victory because you'll
never have this chance again.' And they took an oath from the
Psalms, `May my right hand wither. May the tongue in my mouth
cleave to the roof if I forsake'-well, in the Psalm, `the Jerusalem.'
But Jerusalem is every place, and this was the way they were building
Jerusalem in America.
Unidentified
Woman #8: They ran out without anyone calling them or telling
them to go. They just got so sick and tired of the long hours
and the low wages and said, `To hell with it. We're going out.
We're not gonna work for this anymore.'
BYNAM:
Only two days later, more than 20,000 workers were on strike,
picketing some 500 shops. Membership in the tiny nine-year-old
International Ladies Garment Workers Union swelled by the thousands
in a single week. For 13 weeks of a brutally cold winter, they
kept up the strike. Every day, dozens of picketers were arrested
and loaded into black marias(ph) bound for New York's Tombs and
Blackwell's Island. At the same time, New York's society women,
including the niece of J.P. Morgan, were raising money for bail
and strike benefits. The immigrant shirtwaist girls had captured
the public's imagination.
Unidentified
Woman #9: They used to picket and they used to (unintelligible)
us and beat us up and everything. And listen, when you worked,
the boss or the foreman over your back-you went through plenty.
So who had a little bit more sense? They went and the ...(unintelligible).
Mr.
STEIN: They dressed up to picket. People took pictures of
them being arrested. They're wearing these huge, plush coats and
these broad-brimmed hats with fruits and birds' nests on their
hair. You know, today we have pickets so people go make themselves
comfortable. They wear jeans and sweaters and-they dressed up
for a holiday. They dressed up for something sacred.
Unidentified
Woman #10: Considering the number of girls we had now, the
number of scabs were nothing. And finally several of them got,
I think, a 10-percent increase in their wages and a reduction
in hours; settled for 56 hours a week. And so we gained very little,
but it was the beginning of an organization.
BYNAM:
The general strike ended officially on February 15th. The Triangle
Waist Company had settled about two weeks before that.
Unidentified
Woman #11: So then we settled this. We settled it, so it still
was-it's a lot-you know, at so many years, it's a lot of things
to remember. But then when it was at Triangle the fire, then it
was terrible.
BYNAM:
The Triangle Waist Company was located just east of Washington
Square in the 10-story Asch building, a solid brick structure
completed in 1901 at the cost of $400,000. Today it's part of
the campus of New York University. In 1911, two years after the
shirtwaist makers' strike, the Triangle company, occupying the
top three floors of the building, was considered one of the city's
most modern factories. It had rows of sewing machines 75 feet
long, two passenger elevators and one freight elevator. The lofts
were well lit by a bank of windows facing Greene Street. Five
months earlier, it had passed a routine fire and safety inspection.
Unidentified
Woman #12: Of course, everybody knows that the windows and
doors were closed. There was no other way to get out.
Unidentified
Woman #13: The doors were locked because the employers thought
that you would steal some material or lace. You were watched really
strictly. BYNAM: In March 1911 there were 500 employees at the
Triangle, most of them Jewish and Italian teen-agers.
Ms.
JEAN BIALLER KRONENBERG (Former Factory Employee): I must
have been about14-13, 14 years old when I went to work there.
BYNAM:
Jean Bialler Kronenberg.
Ms.
KRONENBERG: And what can I tell you-how it is? It's hard labor.
We worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Worked a long week.
BYNAM:
Minnie Eisenberg Jacobsen(ph).
Ms.
MINNIE EISENBERG JACOBSEN (Former Factory Employee): I must
have been about 14 years already. Two of my cousins came to see
me and they told me they worked in the Triangle. So not saying
a word, one morning I got dressed and I went to the Triangle.
And I worked there a short while. Then, one day that I'll never
forget as long as I live, that fire broke out.
Mr.
STEIN: Saturday, March 25th, around 4:30 in the afternoon,
those few in that shop who had remained really religious were
not there, see, because that's the Sabbath. But America had taken
away the faith of many, and many had come here already with their
faith weakened, and they paid for it, in a sense, with this terrible
loss.
Ms.
KRONENBERG: Saturday was payday, and my friend and I, Eva,
we had opened the envelope; we were a quarter short. And when
you were short a quarter or a dime, you just nicely walked over
to the office and told them you're short, because that quarter
or the dime, that was your spending money. The rest, you give
it to your mother or to your rent, who you was with. We went upstairs,
5:00, my friend and I, to tell them that we were short. Then started
the whole business; we heard this screaming, yelling: `Fire! Fire!'
So I was supposed to be the brains, you know. I says to my friend,
Eva, `Let's run.' So she says, `No.' I says, `You come with me.'
So I took her by the hand and we ran.
BYNAM:
At 4:30 there was an explosion, followed by the sound of breaking
glass. As smoke billowed from the eighth floor, bystanders in
the neighborhood began to see bundles of dark cloth dropping from
the windows. Unfurled by the wind, the bundles were seen to be
girls. Bodies began thudding on the pavement below.
Ms.
KRONENBERG: When-the first time some girls wanted to jump
out the windows and just holler for help, it scared them. They
jumped out, and they were on the roof, on the back of the dress,
whoever they're with; some of them were dead. I didn't hear them
scream anymore. My dear friend, little girl—they were sweetheart,
hand in hand, embraced each other. They were on the ground, burned,
dead. How I sneaked in between the others—the elevator was
just loaded. There was never another elevator. That was the end
of it.
BYNAM:
The fire had started among the piles of rags and scraps under
the cutting tables. It spread so fast that, later, the bodies
of some workers would be found still seated at their machines.
By the time the fire wagons arrived, the windows were jammed with
trapped girls. In the next half-hour, it was discovered that the
city's tallest fire ladder only reached to the sixth floor. The
single fire escape reached only to the second floor and collapsed
under the weight of the girls who had managed to reach it. The
elevators, jammed beyond their capacity of 15 each, finally stopped
moving, blocked by the fallen bodies on top of them. And the doors
to the stairwells would not open.
One
hundred forty-six would die in less than an hour. The survivors
made their way home alone through the streets. The owners, Isaac
Harris and Max Blanck, eight months later, were acquitted of charges
of manslaughter by a court that saw no evidence of criminal liability.
Unidentified
Woman #14: They were fined $75 per person who died, entered
into the grace. They should have not only been fined millions,
they should have been sent to jail, too. No, it was not an accident,
and no one is going to convince me otherwise, judges or anybody
else. Oh...
Mr.
STEIN: Harris and Blanck, who owned that firm, in a matter
of weeks, I think two or three weeks, opened another shop on University
Place, stacked it up with workers and locked the doors again,
all over again-you know, `Let 'emburn.' I researched the insurance
aspect of it, and I think I calculated that they made $8,000 or
$10,000 on every corpse that they produced. But life was cheap
in general. The life of a worker was cheap then. We still have
to fight to show that it means something.
Unidentified
Woman #15: Then I rested; I had to go back to work. Those
days they depended on every dollar. I didn't go back to the Triangle,
see? I worked in other places, but I never went to the Triangle.
Ms.
KRONENBERG: We were young children. We were innocent. We didn't
know nothing about it. No matter how little we made, we were happy.
We learned to sing; this one sang a song, that one sang a song.
Were always saying, 'Well, come on, Jeannie, let's dance.' So
then when happened a tragedy like that, you can't sing. And many
times I wake up during the night and I cry, and I don't even know
why I'm crying. It just starts down me, and I want to forget it.
You can't forget it so fast, never. I'll never forget it.
Unidentified
Woman #16: I worked as hard as I could. I got paid as good
as they paid me, and I used it to good use, and that's all.
CONAN:
"The Golden Cradle" was narrated by Mandy Bynam, written and produced
by Deborah George and mixed by Linda Mack.
©
1999 National Public Radio ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
INTERVIEW
BY ALDEN MUDGE
(from Bookpage)
On
Coney Island with Kevin Baker, in search of the American Dream
"'Gyp the Blood' was a real person who actually used to break
men's backs on a two-dollar bet!" says historian Kevin Baker about
the most malevolent character in his novel, Dreamland. "He was
eventually electrocuted for his role in the murder of 'Beansie'
Rosenthal."
So
far as we know, however, "Gyp the Blood" was not whacked on the
head with a shovel by "Kid Twist" just as he was about to break
"Trick the Dwarf"'s back in a dingy dive in lower Manhattan (thus
setting the well-oiled wheels of our story in motion). Nor did
he have a sister named Esther who worked at the infamous sweatshop,
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Esther organized the women of
the needle trades and fell in love with "Kid Twist" at Dreamland,
the fantastical Coney Island amusement park that burned to the
ground in 1911. No, the exhilarating loops and turns of plot that
make Kevin Baker's historical novel so entertaining are inventions
of the author's own imagination. "
One
of the interesting dilemmas of historical fiction," Baker says
during a call to his home in New York, "is how much room a writer
has to make things up. I think you can create composite characters
and change chronologies just as long as you get the essence of
the thing right. That's pretty much the trick in any kind of fiction-to
reach for that greater truth." One of the truths Baker reaches
for in Dreamland is the emotional complexity of the immigrant
experience in America. "We have this image now that everybody
came here and suffered a little but worked hard and became great
successes. In fact, this was a generations-long struggle. Even
when immigrants were successful, it often meant separating themselves
not only from their old culture and language, but from their families
as well."
Baker
portrays the anger and anguish of this struggle perfectly in his
depiction of Esther's head-strong rebellion against her old-world
father, a character readers will both pity and despise.
"Esther's
father," Baker says, "is a luftmensch, which is a wonderful term
that literally means 'a man of the air.' In part because Jews
were banned from taking part in many professions and businesses
in Russia and Eastern Europe, a large emphasis was placed on learning
in that culture. Eventually this proved to be very important for
success in America, but in the meantime you had all these people
who were raised to be scholars of the Torah and the Talmud. They
came over here and found that they had to go to work. It was tremendously
difficult for them, both to find work and to actually work. So
you'd have mothers and daughters going out to a job and these
frustrated scholars and rabbis sitting at home. It produced a
tremendous number of very independent, hard-working women, but
it also led to ongoing conflict. America seemed unnatural to these
pious old men, who were used to a village structure. It seemed
to them that their children were getting away from them and getting
into all these sinful ways."
And,
oh, what sinful ways! Baker fleshes out his tale of labor and
love with wonderful characters from New York's turn-of-the-century
underworld-prostitutes and gamblers, opium addicts and heartless
sweatshop owners, corrupt politicians and Coney Island con-artists.
Some of these characters are imaginary, but just as many are real,
rediscovered and brought back to life by Baker's prodigious historical
research. Herman "Beansie" Rosenthal, for instance, was so notorious
in his day and his murder was so scandalous that his story made
its way into F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.Who
besides Baker knows Rosenthal's story today?
Baker,
who was chief historical researcher for Harold Evans's recently
published bestseller, The American Century,and has just
been hired to write the History in the News column for American
Heritage magazine, is a wonderful researcher. Somehow he finds
exactly the right, unexpected detail to add life and authenticity
to his narrative. Dreamland hums with the lyrics of the era, and
is filled with the smells and sounds of New York at the beginning
of the century. Baker also has a good bit of fun with his details,
sneaking "real, unnamed, historical personalities" into his story
and naming one of his composite characters after his brother-in-law.
The
most surprising real-life characters to appear in Dreamland are
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, passing through the story on their
way to Worcester, Massachusetts, to deliver the famous Clark University
lectures on psychology. "Most of their story is based quite closely
on real life," Baker says. "Freud actually did faint when he saw
a column of German troops in Bremen. Jung's dream is actually
the dream that Jung had. The dialogue is almost verbatim."
In
Dreamland nearly everyone ends up at Coney Island. "Coney Island
had all these extraordinary rides and exhibits-the Steeplechase
ride, the All Dwarf City, tableaux of all the great disasters
of the time. You could see an earthquake in Martinique or the
Johnstown Flood. I was really inspired by Ric Burns's great documentary
on Coney Island. . . . I saw that Coney Island was a key part
of the assimilation process, a sort of blank sheet on which these
people projected their greatest hopes and worst fears about life
in America. Coney Island was a sort of pageant of their lives."
And so is Kevin Baker's Dreamland.
Alden
Mudge is on the staff of the California Council for the Humanities.
© 1999 ProMotion, Inc.
