Triangle: The Fire That Changed America [NOOK Book]

Overview

On March 25, 1911, as workers were getting ready to leave for the day, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village. Within minutes it spread to consume the building’s upper three stories. Firemen who arrived at the scene were unable to rescue those trapped inside: their ladders simply weren’t tall enough. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The final toll was 146 people—123 of them women. It was the worst disaster in New York City history.

This harrowing yet compulsively readable book is both a chronicle of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and a vibrant portrait of an entire age. It follows the waves of Jewish and Italian immigration that inundated New York in the early years of the century, filling its slums and supplying its garment factories with cheap, mostly female labor. It portrays the Dickensian work conditions that led to a massive waist-worker’s strike in which an unlikely coalition of socialists, socialites, and suffragettes took on bosses, police, and magistrates. Von Drehle shows how popular revulsion at the Triangle catastrophe led to an unprecedented alliance between idealistic labor reformers and the supremely pragmatic politicians of the Tammany machine.

David Von Drehle orchestrates these events into a drama rich in suspense and filled with memorable characters: the tight-fisted “Shirtwaist kings” Max Blanck and Isaac Harris; Charles F. Murphy, the shrewd kingmaker of Tammany Hall; blue-blooded activists like Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan; reformers Frances W. Perkins and Al Smith. Most powerfully, he puts a human face on the men and women who died on March 25th. Triangle is a vibrant and immensely moving account of the hardships of New York City life in the early part of the twentieth century, and how this event transformed politics and gave rise to urban liberalism.

In large part it is a story of working women. Most of the victims of the fire were female immigrants; a majority from Russia and the Ukraine who worked to send their meager wages back home to support their families. In Russia, Jewish women prided themselves on being independent wage earners. Many were in the needle trade, so when they came to the new country their skills coincided with an explosion in the garment industry.

Clara Lemlich, born in the Ukraine, sailed to New York after the horrors of the Kishinev pogrom and became the sole supporter of her family. Grabbing the gavel away from leading male union leaders in a hall packed to the rafters—one-upping Samuel Gompers—she incited the first waist factory strike in 1909, a strike that would become 40,000 strong in a few months time and made up of mostly female workers.

The Triangle Factory was in a new building at Washington Place and Greene, and although it was an efficient, light-filled workplace filled with light, the owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanch, Jewish immigrant garment makers themselves who had made good, failed to follow the few safety codes then on the books. Their negligence, plus the fact that the new fire truck ladders only went up to the sixth floor short of the inferno on the eight and ninth floors, turned a lovely spring day in March, a Saturday just after closing, into a living hell. Many people were on the streets leaving work witnessed workers jumping to their deaths, bodies covering the fire trucks for an unprecedented carnage.

The trial that follows was one of the most sensational in New York history. Despite the community’s outrage, Manhattan’s flamboyant defense attorney, Max D. Steuer, the Johnny Cochrane of his day, won the owner’s innocence. They had locked the factory doors from the outside. One of the doorjambs—still firmly locked—was found in the rubble, but like Cochran’s blood stained glove, Steuer was able to hang a veil of doubt over the deadly lock, and win his case. He won his case despite massive evidence against the owners.

This is very much a woman’s story, and some of the women were at the very top of New York Society. Anne Morgan (J. P.’s daughter) and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, to name a few, took on the cause of the strikers. The shirtwaist worker possessed amazing spirit and endurance, but it’s doubtful they could have lasted much longer without Progressive money. At just this low point, though, Anne Morgan joined the cause, and one of the things they did was to give a lunch to raise money for the strike fund at the newly founded Colony Club with some of the workers as luncheon guests. A scene where immigrant girls unfamiliar with silver knives, forks, and other finery sat down with rich socialites—radical chic in the making.

Francis Perkins was nearby in Washington Square at the time of the fire, and witnessing the event changed her life. She began her working career as a Triangle Fire investigator and ended it as the first woman Cabinet member in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. She described the fire aaaaaas the beginning of the New Deal.