Mourn and Organize: The Triangle Fire at 100

Smithsimon: Triangle Fire at 100

MOVEMENTS FOR justice must sometimes savor bitter fruit. Labor history tells the story of company goons and attacks on workers that catalyzed movements for justice. May Day, for instance, recalls the bloody Haymarket affair. And each March 25 in Greenwich Village, in front of a building that now houses the New York University chemistry department, people remember the 146 deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and resolve to keep fighting.

There’s a tendency to recall tragedies like the Triangle fire in a way that suggests that good came from them. We should resist such simplifications. While our corporate Hollywood culture looks for happy endings, quick resolutions, and assurances that the good guys always win, the rest of us can recognize a harder, more clear-eyed reality. As the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle fire approaches this month, we can bear in mind what working-class movements have understood and Republicans continue to deny today: that working people, immigrants, and unions are the source of prosperity, growth, and stability, and that all of those are threatened by capitalists and retrograde political officials. Unlike the easy victories in a morality tale, looking back at the Triangle fire brings us face to face with more difficult truths.

THE TRIANGLE Shirtwaist Factory was a large garment shop on the top floors of a ten-story loft building. Just before closing time on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. It spread rapidly through the room piled high with fabric, scraps, and clothing and engulfed the ninth and tenth floors. Desperate workers tried to flee, but the owners had locked some doors to stop workers from getting out during the workday. The fire escape quickly collapsed. Others tried to escape on the elevator, but the heat soon warped the elevators tracks, rendering it unusable. Law students from the adjoining New York University building helped some fifty workers climb from the rooftop of the factory to theirs, but most workers were trapped. In little more than fifteen minutes, 146 people were killed. The victims were mainly immigrant women, many from Russian-Jewish families.

I remember being horrified, as a child visiting a museum exhibit about the fire, when I read this journalist’s description:

I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building…I learned a new sound—a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead…

The first two thud-deads shocked me. I looked up—saw there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floors below were beating in their faces…

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud—then a silent unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs…

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building, and let her drop…He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl…They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity.

Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms around him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward—the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.

The image of people jumping to their own deaths shocked me then, and I thought of it ninety years after the Triangle fire when people in the World Trade Center took the same gruesome step.

THE DIFFICULT truth of the Triangle fire is that while such events galvanize movements, they don’t promise cathartic victory.

Justice never reached the factory’s owners. Garment workers had gone on a citywide strike a year before the fire seeking union recognition and improved conditions, but had been defeated by the stubborn resistance (and the violent thugs) led by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the very men who owned the Triangle factory. At the time of the fire, it was already illegal to lock exits. But Blanck and Harris were acquitted of responsibility for the fire, inadequate fire escapes, and locked factory doors. Nor were they chastened by the deaths of so many of their employees; two years later, Blank was found guilty of once again locking fire doors in his new factory. The two fought every wrongful death lawsuit brought against them for the Triangle fire. And though they collected insurance payments totaling more than $400 per worker who died, they settled with twenty-three families for an average of only $75 for each victim. (For more information about the fire and the workers, as well as information on commemorations in New York City, visit the website of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.)

The fire catalyzed the growth of garment unions, but pressure to institute workplace safety regulations was stymied by business owners who made arguments, still familiar, that government should not (and cannot) regulate private industry. Just as we witness when crises strike today (whether the Arizona shooting or the budget crisis), even in extreme situations, opponents of labor movements (or gun control or corporate regulation) are not swayed. Movements convince some, but never convert everyone, and win only if they outmaneuver their opponents.

Often, the Triangle fire is presented as a starting point. Frances Perkins, a progressive New York activist, happened to witness the Triangle fire firsthand. Eventually, Perkins and a generation galvanized by the fire pushed the state to institute better workplace regulations. When she was named U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, reformers were able to introduce similar regulations nationwide.

But presenting the Triangle fire as a narrative of redemptive reform succumbs to the telescopic distortion of time that can occur in historical accounts. The fire happened in 1911. Perkins wasn’t appointed as secretary of labor until 1933. Although Perkins lobbied successfully for reform at the state level, locked fire exits had already been illegal. For twenty-two years after the fire, no real national action was taken.

Delays dilute the meaningfulness of reform. The Triangle deaths were emblematic of the dangers immigrant workers encountered in the rapidly industrializing American economy, but by the time those conditions were addressed, the historic wave of immigrants of which the Triangle seamstresses had been a part had been choked off. By 1927, increasing anti-immigrant sentiment had crystallized in a bill virtually ending immigration. (The borders’ closure would last until 1965.)

In remembering Triangle, I resist the temptation to take a long view of things. Nonetheless, the dim light in which the nadir of Triangle occurred—a period when Blanck and Harris could lock their workers in fire traps with impunity, hire thugs to beat down efforts to organize unions, and pay whatever pittance they could get away with—was indeed the dawn of improvements in labor conditions and unionization that have not been equaled in a long time.

I thought about Triangle—without forgetting that it was too little, too late—when listening to a colleague at a union meeting, fresh back from the front lines of the Wisconsin sit-in to defend labor rights. To me the event had been so depressing I could barely watch. Like a serial killer stalking through the house, corporate power had first strangled private sector unions, and now had turned to throttle the life out of public sector unions. I was nominated to the slate of my own union’s progressive caucus, only half-jesting that I wanted to be involved with a union while they still existed. Yet as people came back from Wisconsin, their reports were qualitatively different. It felt like a beginning. It was inspiring. It felt powerful.

I would take little comfort from the two-decade march from Triangle to reform were the current situation not so grim. Rather than representing the end, the current assault could be another nadir. Activists in Wisconsin have inspired many of us, just as the women who went to work March 25, 1911 motivated a generation. Despite a lifetime of pervasive anti-union propaganda, the largely non-unionized public remains on the side of unionized public workers. Labor activists have known for years that we desperately need to increase union membership, not just for the unions themselves, but for the broad benefits a society gains from high rates of membership in democratic workplace organizations with a commitment to the conditions of working-class people.

TRIANGLE HAD had stood for decades as the worst industrial fire in history. But that distinction was erased in the era of recent globalization. The most direct analogies to the Triangle fire today most often occur in Asia and are largely ignored in the United States. In 1991 more than eighty people were killed in a fire in Dongguan, China. In 1993, sixty women died in a fire in Fuzhou Province; many suffocated in their dormitory beds from the fumes of burning textiles. To these deaths were added those from the Kader toy factory fire in Thailand on May 10, 1993. Kader’s death toll surpassed Triangle: 188 people were killed, largely young women who had migrated to the industrial area. Once again exit doors were locked. There were calls for improved fire regulation, and despair that little change would result. The brutality continued unabated. Six months after the Kader fire, eighty-four women were killed in a toy factory fire in Shenzhen, China.

I’ve often thought the full text of the famous aphorism should be, Never again, and again, and again. On February 25, 2010, twenty-one workers were killed in the Garib & Garib Sweater Factory fire in the Dhaka region of Bangladesh. The workers sewed clothes for H&M and other retailers. Workers perished in the smoke from huge heaps of fabric because, as at the Triangle Factory, doors were locked. Families of the victims were paid $2,800—shamefully consistent with the payments made to families of Triangle victims (which would total about $2,000 in current dollars). Something to think about the next time you marvel at how H&M can sell such stylish clothes for such low prices.

Just this past December, twenty-six workers were killed and over 100 injured in the Ha-Meem factory fire in Bangladesh. In yet more echoes of the Triangle fire, the blaze began on the ninth floor and quickly spread to the tenth. Witnesses said four of the seven exits were locked. Workers couldn’t make it down the crowded stairways. The heat and flames drove all but three of those who died to jump from the windows.

The Triangle fire was never extinguished. It continues to burn just as destructively today. The fire spreads each time garment factories move to a new low-wage location. Despite the dangers to workers in Bangladesh, more factories are rushing in. Difficult as it is to believe in an era when everything seems to be made in China, the latest reports are that manufacturers are leaving China for lower-wage locations. Coach, for example, the manufacturer of women’s luxury handbags, recently announced plans to shift some production from China to India. The second-largest women’s clothing company in Germany is shifting production to Vietnam, Bangladesh, and North Korea. While workers in southern China make a scant $235 per month, an article in the business press enticed its readers with reports that workers in Jakarta, Indonesia make only $148. Those in Vietnam’s capital are paid only $100. Workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, site of the Garib & Garib fire, earn an average of only $47 per month. Workers at the Triangle Factory earned between $.50 and $3 per day. Incredible as it sounds, that means that garment workers today are paid less than women who perished at the Triangle fire—not after accounting for a hundred years of inflation, but in the actual, nominal dollar value they see on their pay stubs.

With attacks against the U.S. unions that have made workplaces here safer, and with conditions in other countries that reproduce the conditions at the Triangle Factory with numbing fidelity, the difficult truth is that a century after the fire, labor still has no sure footing. And so we have fought—not because we’re going to win, but because of what capitalists and their political cronies have done to us already, and will continue to do to us if we don’t fight. If the arc of the universe tilts toward justice, it is only because we bend it that way.

A DESCRIPTION of the conditions at Triangle that persist even today would be shameful if it provided no way to help improve those conditions. Readers may consider donations to the National Labor Committee. Donations flagged for Bangladesh will be given to the National Alliance for the Protection of Garment Workers in Bangladesh, a coalition of unions that is campaigning to increase the minimum wage. The fire and recent large-scale labor activism in Bangladesh have been widely overlooked in the United States. The National Labor Committee’s video Triangle Returns, released this week, provides some of the only video coverage of those events.

Greg Smithsimon is assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His book, September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero, is due out on the tenth anniversary of September 11. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces.

Top image: the damage on the ninth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after the fire; Bottom image: the Ha-Meen Garment Factory fire in December.