Triangle

The Fire That Changed America

By David Von Drehle

Illustrated

Atlantic Monthly Press

340 pages

 

Before Sept. 11, the most infamous disaster in the history of New York was the Triangle Waist Company fire, which killed 146 garment workers on the afternoon of March 25, 1911. The toll at the Triangle was much lower than at the World Trade Center towers, of course, but the wound was a deeper one because it was largely self-inflicted. As David Von Drehle makes clear in his outstanding history,  Triangle, the overwhelmingly young, female victims of the fire—at least 123 were women, and of these at least 64 were 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 $7 were immolated because their bosses kept stairway doors locked to prevent theft. In a city that had added nearly 800 skyscrapers over the past 10 years, the fire department had no ladders that reached above the sixth story and pumps that could spray only a ”gentle rainfall” on the fire that raged through the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch building in Greenwich Village. 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 25 years a determination to expiate that feeling would bring about seismic changes in American life.

Von Drehle, a reporter at The Washington Post, has written what is sure to become the definitive account of the fire. Previously, that distinction belonged to the labor historian Leon Stein’s fine work,  The Triangle Fire (1962). But Stein’s account focused primarily on the fire itself;  Triangle is social history at its best, a magnificent portrayal not only of the catastrophe 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 20,000,” 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 unionists flummoxed this strategy for a while by winning the sympathy of WASP social reformers like 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 it could not 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—four of them, between 1902 and 1910, at three different locations, and each one just happened to break out in the early morning hours, 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 25, but as Von Drehle points out, the need to burn off excess stock periodically meant that no fire precautions had been taken—no sprinklers, no fire drills. The stairway door was locked to prevent annual worker theft that Harris later estimated as ”$10 or $15 or $12 or $8, 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 department nets.

The fire lasted only 15 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 from the fire—more than $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, subtly began to shift their weight to the side of the workers. Perkins made common cause with Al Smith and Robert Wagner, two members of the machine who ran the state legislature but who had grown up in immigrant slums themselves. In recent years, some right-wing commentators have challenged 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 and Wagner would go on to play key roles in the New Deal and the founding of the American welfare state.

Always, though, Von Drehle keeps his eye on the factory workers. He is at his elegiac best in describing what these young women 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.