The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Do you care about worker’s rights?  Do you believe that company owners have their employee’s best interests at heart?  If you answered yes to both of these questions then, boy do I have a story for you today.  Today on The Secret Sits, we are going to discuss the intersection of worker’s rights and company owners, who only have their own interests at heart.  And this intersection is found at The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

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Transcript

Do you care about worker’s rights?  Do you believe that company owners have their employee’s best interests at heart?  If you answered yes to both of these questions then, boy do I have a story for you today.  Today on The Secret Sits, we are going to discuss the intersection of worker’s rights and company owners, who only have their own interests at heart.  And this intersection is found at The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the 10-story Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. This was one of New York’s newest skyscrapers at just 10 stories tall.  Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as "shirtwaists". This style of women’s shirt was more a kin to a men’s button down shirt and they were extremely popular with women at the time as the shirtwaist symbolized in one small form, women’s independence.  The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, earning for their 52 hours of work between $7 and $12 a week, the equivalent of $191 to $327 a week in 2018 currency, or $3.67 to $6.29 per hour. 

Remember that there was no such thing as a minimum wage until 1938.

Low wages and crowded conditions had prompted many garment workers to organize unions in the years before the fire. Triangle Factory employees were among the tens of thousands who walked off the job in 1909. They stayed out for three months. The massive strike was known as the “Uprising of the 20,000.” Though they won higher wages and some improvements in working conditions, the painful events of just a year later showed just how vulnerable many of them remained.

During the strike in 1909, while demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris’ company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way.

The Triangle Factory, owned by Blank and Harris already had a suspicious fire related history.  In 1902 the factory had 2 fires and their Diamond waist factory had one fire as well.  The pair were suspected of starting the fires to collect on insurance money, which was a common practice for business owners at the time.  Also, Blank and Harris did not allow for any type of fire repression systems to be installed into their buildings. 

At approximately 4:40 p.m. on Saturday, March 25, 1911, as the workday was ending, a fire flared up in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the 8th floor. The first fire alarm was sent at 4:45 p.m. by a passerby on Washington Place who saw smoke coming from the 8th floor. Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon. The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in the scrap bin, which held two months' worth of accumulated cuttings by the time of the fire. Beneath the table in the wooden bin were hundreds of pounds of scraps left over from the several thousand shirtwaists that had been cut at that table. The scraps piled up from the last time the bin was emptied, coupled with the hanging fabrics that surrounded it; the steel trim was the only thing that was not highly flammable. Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection. And I do want to point out that we are not attempting to assign blame for this incident on the workers in the factory, this is just one possible cause. A New York Times article suggested that the fire may have been started by the engines running the sewing machines. A series of articles in Collier's noted a pattern of arson among certain sectors of the garment industry whenever their particular product fell out of fashion or had excess inventory in order to collect insurance. The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, observed that shirtwaists had recently fallen out of fashion, and that insurance for manufacturers of them was "fairly saturated with moral hazard." Although Blanck and Harris were known for having had four previous suspicious fires at their companies, arson was not suspected in this case. 

A bookkeeper on the 8th floor was able to warn employees on the 10th floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on the 9th floor. According to survivor Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the 9th floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself. Although the floor had a number of exits, including two freight elevators, a fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and Washington Place, flames prevented workers from descending the Greene Street stairway, and the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft by the workers; the locked doors allowed managers to check the women's purses. And this reminds me of the LuLu Lemon murders, when employees are so afraid of employee theft, it causes deaths.  The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route. Dozens of employees escaped the fire by going up the Greene Street stairway to the roof. Other survivors were able to jam themselves into the elevators while they continued to operate. 

People on the tenth floor made it to the roof, where they were rescued by a class of NYU law students in the building next door who stretched ladders across to let them climb to safety. But their colleagues on the ninth floor did not know the fire had started until it arrived. By then there were few options left.

Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape – which city officials had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third staircase a flimsy and poorly anchored iron structure that may have been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and collapsed from the heat and overload, spilling about 20 victims nearly 100 feet to their deaths on the concrete pavement below. The remainder waited until smoke and fire overcame them.

The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames, as their ladders were only long enough to reach as high as the 7th floor. The fallen bodies and falling victims also made it difficult for the fire department to approach the building.

Elevator operators Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillaro saved many lives by traveling three times up to the 9th floor for passengers, but Mortillaro was eventually forced to give up when the rails of his elevator buckled under the heat. Some victims pried the elevator doors open and jumped into the empty shaft, trying to slide down the cables or to land on top of the car. The weight and impacts of these bodies warped the elevator car and made it impossible for Zito to make another attempt. William Gunn Shepard, a reporter at the tragedy, would say that "I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture – the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk".

At first bystanders thought that they were watching bundles of cloth being thrown out of the windows.  And as a large crowd of bystanders gathered on the street, they actually witnessed 62 people jumping or falling to their deaths from the burning building. Some women and young girls held each other as they jumped, other women were seen holding their pocket books as they leapt from windows.  As the desperate women, men and children jumped they inadvertently landed on the fire department hoses making the task of fighting the fire even more difficult.  The fire department also unfurled a rescue blanket to catch the women as they jumped, but 3 women jumped at the exact same time and the force of all three ripped the rescue blanket in half rendering it unusable.

 Louis Waldman, later a New York Socialist state assemblyman, described the scene years later: 

One Saturday afternoon in March of that year—March 25, to be precise—I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library. … It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire.

A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames.

Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds—I among them—looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.

The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.

Although early references of the death toll ranged from 141 to 148, almost all modern references agree that 146 people died as a result of the fire: 123 women and girls and 23 men.  Most victims died of burns, asphyxiation, blunt impact injuries, or a combination of the three. 

The first person to jump was a man, and another man was seen kissing a young woman at the window before they both jumped to their deaths.   The scene was so overwhelming that the City Coroner sobbed as he went over the bodies at the scene and life long  firefighters and police officers had to step away from the scene as well.

Bodies of the victims were taken to Charities Pier, located at 26th street and the East River, for identification by friends and relatives. So, all of the victims who they could not immediately identify were taken to the water front and hundreds of people came and examined each body in an attempt to identify their missing loved ones.  One victim was identified only by her mother’s stitching on her stockings and another was identified by her own daughter, by the braid she had braided into her mother’s hair that morning.  Victims were interred in 16 different cemeteries. 22 victims of the fire were buried by the Hebrew Free Burial Association in a special section at Mount Richmond Cemetery. In some instances, their tombstones refer to the fire. Six victims remained unidentified until Michael Hirsch, a historian, completed four years of researching newspaper articles and other sources for missing persons and was able to identify each of them by name. Those six victims were buried together in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. Originally interred elsewhere on the grounds, their remains now lie beneath a monument to the tragedy, a large marble slab featuring a kneeling woman.

The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris – both Jewish immigrants – who survived the fire by fleeing to the building's roof when it began, were indicted on charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter in mid-April; the pair's trial began on December 4, 1911. Max Steuer, counsel for the defendants, managed to destroy the credibility of one of the survivors, Kate Alterman, by asking her to repeat her testimony a number of times, which she did without altering key phrases. Steuer argued to the jury that Alterman and possibly other witnesses had memorized their statements, and might even have been told what to say by the prosecutors. The prosecution charged that the owners knew the exit doors were locked at the time in question. The investigation found that the locks were intended to be locked during working hours based on the findings from the fire, but the defense stressed that the prosecution failed to prove that the owners knew that. The jury acquitted the two men of first- and second-degree manslaughter, but they were found liable of wrongful death during a subsequent civil suit in 1913 in which plaintiffs were awarded compensation in the amount of $75 per deceased victim. This would be around $2,000 today.  So yes, be upset because a human life is damn sure worth more than $2,000.  The insurance company paid Blanck and Harris about $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. This means that these two men made $325 MORE than the deceased’s family, off of their loved one’s death.

In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in one of his factories during working hours. He was fined $20 which was the minimum amount the fine could be. And the judge apologized to Blanck for the inconvenience of having to go to court, what an asshole.

Rose Schneiderman, a prominent socialist and union activist, gave a speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the members of the Women's Trade Union League. She used the fire as an argument for factory workers to organize: 

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting… We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers, and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us-warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement. 

Others in the community, and in particular in the ILGWU, believed that political reform could help. In New York City, a Committee on Public Safety was formed, headed by eyewitness Frances Perkins– who 22 years later would be appointed United States Secretary of Labor – to identify specific problems and lobby for new legislation, such as the bill to grant workers shorter hours in a work week, known as the "54-hour Bill". The committee's representatives in Albany obtained the backing of Tammany Hall's Al Smith, the Majority Leader of the Assembly, and Robert F. Wagner, the Majority Leader of the Senate, and this collaboration of machine politicians and reformers – also known as "do-gooders" or "goo-goos" – got results, especially since Tammany's chief, Charles F. Murphy, realized the goodwill to be had as champion of the downtrodden. 

The New York State Legislature then created the Factory Investigating Commission to "investigate factory conditions in this and other cities and to report remedial measures of legislation to prevent hazard or loss of life among employees through fire, unsanitary conditions, and occupational diseases." The Commission was chaired by Wagner and co-chaired by Al Smith. They held a series of widely publicized investigations around the state, interviewing 222 witnesses and taking 3,500 pages of testimony. They hired field agents to do on-site inspections of factories. They started with the issue of fire safety and moved on to broader issues of the risks of injury in the factory environment. Their findings led to thirty-eight new laws regulating labor in New York state, and gave them a reputation as leading progressive reformers working on behalf of the working class. In the process, they changed Tammany's reputation from mere corruption to progressive endeavors to help the workers. New York City's Fire Chief John Kenlon told the investigators that his department had identified more than 200 factories where conditions made a fire like that at the Triangle Factory possible. The State Commissions's reports helped modernize the state's labor laws, making New York State "one of the most progressive states in terms of labor reform." New laws mandated better building access and egress, fireproofing requirements, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of alarm systems and automatic sprinklers, better eating and toilet facilities for workers, and limited the number of hours that women and children could work. In the years from 1911 to 1913, sixty of the sixty-four new laws recommended by the Commission were legislated with the support of Governor William Sulzer. 

As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Professionals was founded in New York City on October 14, 1911. 

The last living survivor of the fire was Rose Freedman, who died in Beverly Hills, California, on February 15, 2001, at the age of 107. She was two days away from her 18th birthday at the time of the fire, which she survived by following the company's executives and being rescued from the roof of the building. As a result of her experience, she became a lifelong supporter of unions. 

Today’s story is from over 100 years ago, and we have come far as a society to improve some of the conditions that led to this terrible accident.  But until greedy business owners no longer own Politicians, judges and others, stories like this will continue to happen.  I will be open about the fact that I have been a Union member for many years and that is because I know that we are stronger together, then apart.  I’m John Dodson and this has been The Secret Sits.  Audio engineering by Gabriel Dodson.  Original artwork provided by Tony Ley.