Tomorrow, September 2nd is Labor Day in the United States. It’s kind of a boring holiday, to be honest, I mean you get a day off work if you’re a government employee or whatever but it’s not the most interesting topic for a podcast. The history of Labor Day… eh. So I did some digging to find a juicy story for you this week that relates to Labor Day and I came upon the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that happened in New York City in 1911. Now, I had heard of this event before but I’d never really looked into it. I didn’t know the details. And as soon as I started to dig in, my outrage just grew and grew and grew. My jaw literally dropped multiple times as I pored over survivor testimonies and newspaper articles. This story isn’t juicy… it’s horrific. A horrifying tragedy that was completely avoidable, brought on by greed and the exploitation of young immigrant women. Few topics I’ve covered so far have affected me this much. I mean this one took my breath away. And I don’t think many people know the first thing about it. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I have an unexpected doozy for you this week. For real, this story is not for the faint hearted. But it’s important. It’s really important that we know what happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and why. That we remember these events and learn from them so that the 146 victims of this tragedy did not die in vain. To forget this tragedy is to risk repeating it and it would be a complete injustice to those who so unfairly lost their lives.
As I mentioned in the opener, labor day is tomorrow. Labor Day became an official US holiday in 1894 with the signing of a congressional act by then President Grover Cleveland. The US Department of Labor says quote “Observed the first Monday in September, Labor Day is an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers. The holiday is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity, and well-being,” end quote. So it’s a day of recognition, right? Recognizing that the working class, the laborers, are basically what keep this country afloat. They are the cogs of this great machine. 1894. So that’s 17 years before the Triangle fire. People clearly understand the importance of laborers and recognize the need to respect workers and ensure that they are working under fair and safe conditions. There’s a whole holiday about it. But, unfortunately, change would come slowly for industry workers in the US. And just because there was a holiday didn’t mean that their working conditions were fair or safe. Because what we have here is a vast disparity between the business owners and the workers themselves. On one end we have these wealthy white men practically living in the clouds, far removed from the laborers themselves. And then on the other end we have extremely impoverished, very young, mostly non English speaking laborers forced to do whatever is asked of them to survive. And the more they do, the more money the man in the cloud makes. And he can’t even see them. He doesn’t care. He just collects his money and says more more more.
Take the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, for example. This was a business, part of the garment industry in Manhattan, New York City, that made shirtwaists. A shirtwaist, in case you didn’t know like me, is a type of women’s blouse that was popular at the turn of the century. It’s like a frilly white thing with long puffy sleeves and a high neck. So this factory made shirtwaist blouses. And it inhabited the top three floors, 8, 9, and 10, of the Asch building between Greene Street and Washington Square East in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It’s still there, by the way, it’s called the Brown building now and it’s part of NYU’s campus. The building itself was owned by a guy named Joseph J. Asch but he rented it out to businesses. And so the Triangle Factory had the top three floors. Other businesses were on floors one through seven. But the way that these industries worked at the time was through subcontractors. The Triangle Factory was owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. These are the rich white men in the clouds. Then they hired subcontractors to actually manage the factory for them so they could just collect the money and not have to worry about all the actual dirty work of running what was essentially a sweatshop. According to Cornell University which has a whole website dedicated to remembering this tragedy, quote “Subcontractors could pay the workers whatever rates they wanted, often extremely low. The owners supposedly never knew the rates paid to the workers, nor did they know exactly how many workers were employed at their factory at any given point. Such a system led to exploitation,” end quote.
The Triangle Factory employed around 500 people and the vast majority of workers were young immigrant women from mostly southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were Jewish who had escaped persecution in Europe. Quite a few were Italian who had come to the US seeking a better life. Most were between the ages of 14 and 23. So right there that’s a problem. We have a large group of young, immigrant women, many of whom did not even speak English. Who is looking out for them? No one cares about these women in 1911. The subcontractors serving as their bosses don’t care and the owners, Blanck and Harris, don’t even know who they are. They worked 12 hours a day every single day on the 8th and 9th floors of this building which were jam packed with long tables of sewing machines with barely enough room to walk between them.
Just before this, in 1909, the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union organized a strike demanding higher pay and shorter working hours. 1910 saw the cloakmakers strike that led to the development of a grievance system in the garment industry. Unfortunately, Blanck and Harris resisted this reform. They hired police to imprison any women who went on strike at the Triangle Factory and paid off politicians to turn a blind eye. They completely disregarded these pleas for worker’s rights and safer working conditions. And, let me tell you, the conditions at their factory were anything but safe. Now, supposedly the building was fireproof. You see this over and over again in the sources. The Asch building was built just 10 years before in 1901 and it was fireproof according to the standards of the time. And I mean the building still stands, it’s still there so, yeah it was fireproof. What was not fireproof were the rows and rows of cotton blouses hanging above the tables where the workers sewed and all of the cotton fabric scraps littering the floor which could be piled multiple feet high by the end of a shift. Also not fireproof, the people inside the Asch building. But, because the building itself was technically fireproof, Blanck and Harris completely disregarded all fire safety regulations. They set this thing up for disaster. I mean, gross negligence is an understatement.
According to a History.com article quote “there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances,” end quote. And that fire escape quickly bent and then collapsed when it was used. So aside from that one elevator, the workers really were basically trapped in this building. Why, you may ask? Well the owners were worried that they were going to steal things, supplies, fabric, whatever. And so the exit door at the bottom the stairs that they were allowed to use, because they weren’t allowed to exit out the front of the building they had to go down the back service stairs. And that door stayed locked. So when it was time to leave, there would be a guard stationed at the door searching the women’s purses to make sure they hadn’t stolen anything before he let them out of the building. Which is just so disgusting because it just reeks of class discrimination. Yes these women are poor but they’re only poor because you don’t pay them a fair wage. And then you’re going to accuse them of stealing just because they’re poor which is your fault to begin with. Dude, they don’t want your crappy rusty scissors or whatever. Go back to the clouds and count your stacks of money you greedy jerk. Don’t lock 500 people in a building. But they did. They were essentially locked in except for that one functional elevator which could hold around 12 people at a time.
That History.com article makes an interesting accusation that I didn’t see in other sources, so, you know, grain of salt, but they may be onto something, writing quote “Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again,” end quote.
So, like I said, gross negligence is really an understatement here. They basically set up this disaster, created a tender box, and stuffed it full of people they could care less about. Just before closing time, like 5 minutes before everyone was about to leave anyway, on March 25th, 1911, a fire broke out on the 8th floor of the Asch building. Remember the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors are the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The 8th and 9th floors are sweatshops, rows and rows of tables with sewing machines. The 10th floor was more like admin, the bosses were up there. Blanck and Harris were actually up there that day. And yes of course they survived, we’ll come back to that. It’s not totally certain what caused the fire. Some say a lit match, some say an improperly disposed of cigarette. Some accounts say it started in a wastepaper basket AKA a trash can, others a rag bin. At least one survivor account mentions a barrel of oil. What is certain is that it started on the 8th floor and it spread very fast, almost immediately consuming that entire floor of the building. The workers on the 8th floor tried to flee immediately. They rushed to the elevator which only managed to make 4 trips before it broke down, and remember it only held 12 people. Many ran down the stairwell where they were met with a locked door. Some tried the fire escape which collapsed pretty immediately. And many were forced to jump out of the windows rather than burn alive and fell to their deaths on the sidewalk below. It wasn’t any better on the 9th floor. It may actually have been worse because they had less warning. They didn’t see the fire start. They just saw black smoke barreling up from the elevator shaft and stairwell and flames climbing up outside the window from the floor below. By the time they even knew there was a fire, the 8th floor was completely consumed. Now, the 10th floor, where the big whigs were, where Blanck and Harris themselves were, they knew of other ways out that the workers had not been privy to. They escaped to the roof and were able to climb across to the neighboring roof of an New York University building with the help of NYU students, actually, who rushed to their aid.
But the workers on the 8th and 9th floors struggled to escape and this is honestly hard to even retell because it is truly so horrific. So this would be where I say skip ahead however many seconds but it's really just the whole rest of the episode so, yeah, heads up. So we have those that rushed to the only working elevator. Some made it to safety that way. Many others, around 30 I think was the body count there, fell to their deaths in the empty elevator shaft after it went down. Many were burned alive waiting for the elevator in that narrow hallway. Many were burned alive upon reaching the locked door at the bottom of the stairwell. Those who waited for rescue near the windows were met with dismay when they learned that the fire truck ladders only reached to the 6th floor. Not the 8th and certainly not the 9th. And at this point it’s stand here and catch on fire, or jump. And so many jumped out of the 8th and 9th floor windows, plunging to the sidewalk below. And this was so bad, just body after body falling and landing, unmoving, broken, that it actually delayed the firetrucks from reaching the building, they didn’t want to run over the bodies. A New York Times article that ran the next day says quote “Girls had begun leaping from the eighth story windows before firemen arrived. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position because of the bodies which strewed the pavement and sidewalks. While more bodies crashed down among them, they worked with desperation to run their ladders into position and to spread firenets,” end quote. And those nets, they didn’t work. They had nets they spread out to catch people who were jumping but they just ripped immediately, like tissue paper. And people on the sidewalk are being hit with falling bodies. You guys, it’s… I cannot imagine. And there are people on the street, just going about their day, strolling by, witnessing this horrifying scene.
I’m going to share some survivor testimonies with you because I think it’s really the best way to get a sense of how this all went down and what it was like for these workers. The Cornell University website that I mentioned has a ton of survivor testimonies and that’s of course linked in the description if you want to do more digging. You can honestly get lost there. They have a map of the layout of the 9th floor and all kinds of stuff. The website explains quote “Leon Stein … was a writer and editor for Justice, the publication of the International Ladie's Garment Workers' Union, during the 1930's, 40's and 50's. In preparation for the 50th anniversary, Stein placed notices in local papers soliciting contributions of reminiscences about the fire. Initially he planned to write an extended article for Justice but due to the large number of responses he received, he decided to write a full length book instead. 19 of the interviews he conducted are available here,” end quote.
Here’s part of Stein’s interview with a worker named Josphine Nicolosi who was a blouse maker on the 8th floor, where the fire started. She later testified in court that the exit doors had been locked and claims that owner Max Blanck offered her $1,000 to change her testimony but she refused. I’m starting with Josephine because it seems she actually saw the fire start. And it’s kind of strange. Here’s her account of that day quote “I worked on the 8th floor and I made a whole blouse. I worked about 18 months before the fire. I was sitting and working. The pay envelopes were given out. The bell was ringing to go home and I was getting up. I worked near the cutting table facing the tables. A little match was burning on the table and Sal Marchesi, a cutter, he hollered to me "Is a fire" - he used to joke all the time so I said, "You are always fooling, it is only a little bit of a match." But he took a pail, one of the red pails of water and threw it on the match. All of a sudden, as he threw the water, the flames shot up like an explosion. Right away the place was filled with fire and smoke and everybody was running around. I ran to the window and I was about to jump but I had not enough courage. The girls were standing there hollering and crying and many of them said we can jump, they will catch us down there. I went back from the windows to the door. Leo Brown, the machinist was by the door and he hollered to the girls, "Get on the side, I got a key." I came up in back of him and held him from the back and when he opened the door, I went through with him. There was one girl, Vincenza Bellanti. She was engaged to marry my cousin Frank. I don't know how she had the nerve to do it. They thought they would catch us. That is why so many opened the windows and jumped. When we came downstairs, the firemen were not there yet but the first thing we saw were girls lying on the sidewalk. We thought they had fainted and one of my girl friends said, "Thank God we are not like them, we're alright. She went over to one of the girls lying on the sidewalk and bent over her and she was hit by another falling body and killed,” end quote.
Sylvia Kimeldorf worked on the 8th floor with Josephine. She said in her interview quote, “I remember the day of the fire very well. I was a tucker and I worked on the 8th floor where they had a number of special machines set up and I had just finished my work earlier in the day and I got my pay. I was always in a hurry as a youngster so I ran to the dressing room. I can remember as if it were yesterday that I had just put on my skirt and blouse and that I had my hat on, and that I put my jacket and pocketbook under my arm. At that moment I heard a commotion in back of me in the shop. I heard loud screaming coming from the other end of the shop. I turned around and I could see the flames at the other end of the shop. I had a very dear girl friend by the name of Feibush and we worked together. She ran into the dressing room and grabbed me and began to pull me to the windows all the time while the fire was spreading quickly through the shop. At the windows I saw how men grabbed chairs and began to break windows up in front. Somebody was trying to break the glass that was the top half of the door. My friend was screaming all the time while she pulled me to the window. The place was filling up with heavy black smoke and we were all choking. I think that the big barrel of oil in the corner was burning. I was scared and she was pulling me to the window and suddenly I felt I was going in the wrong direction. I think the thing that saved me was that I always had, even as a child, a great fear of height and I was afraid to go to the windows for that reason. Even now I don't like high places. In the crush I was separated from my friend. She jumped to her death. I guess what really saved my life was my impatience because I wanted to get out a little earlier, and my fear of height. I ran back to the stairway on the Greene St. Side. Just as I got there with two others, Brown, the machinist, opened the door. The door opened inside and had a snap lock. Somebody grabbed me and another girl and pushed us through the door and hollered that we should run down and not to stop. I think that the girl right in back of me had her hair singed by flames -- that's how close the fire was to us. I don't remember how I got down that narrow staircase but I was cold, wet and hysterical. I was screaming all the time. When we came to the bottom I could not get out of the building. The firemen held us back in the doorway. The bodies were falling all around us and they were afraid to let us go out because we would be killed by the falling bodies. I stood there with the other girls screaming until the men saw a chance for us to get across and I remember they let me across the street and took me into a Chinese importing house where they tried to quiet me down and gave me milk to drink. I could see through the window how the bodies were still falling and would hit the sidewalk with a bounce,” end quote.
Rose Hauser worked on the 9th floor, above where the fire started. In her interview she says quote: “On the floor a gong used to ring when the day was over. About five minutes before quitting time I sneaked into the dressing room. There were a few girls in the dressing room. I used to sing a lot in the shop, some of the girls asked me to sing a song while we were getting dressed. They asked me to sing -- I still remember the name of the song -- "Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of Its Own". They insisted that I sing so I did my little act in the dressing room. As soon as I finished the song I heard the bell ring but it seemed to me that it was a little bit too soon. We were never allowed to go down the front way -- either by elevator or staircase. We always went by the freight which was in the back. When I got out of the dressing room I looked toward the freight elevator and I saw smoke pouring up. The smoke was also coming out of the staircase. I ran with some of the other girls to the front door. I put my hand on the knob and tried to open it and I stood there screaming that the door was locked. I tried to force it open with all my strength but it would not move. I looked around and I saw the flames coming in all the windows. The fire was in the shop and was coming toward us. There was a fire escape at the windows near the freight side. The fire escapes had iron doors and shutters. Everybody was running and hollering and people were choking from the heavy smoke. I took my muff and put it over my head. I ran back to the front elevator and there was no chance there. I kept my muff on my head and ran toward the freight side again. I found that the door to the back staircase was open and that is how I got out. Before I went down the staircase I looked to the fire escape. I saw one woman climb on there and fall right over the rail. When I began to go down to the 8th floor, I was choking. The fire was in the hall on the 8th floor. I put my muff around my head tightly and I ran right through the fire. The fur caught on fire. When we got down stairs they kept us in the hall and they wouldn't let us go into the street because the bodies were falling down. The firemen finally came and took us out across the street and we stood numb in the doorway of a Chinese import store. I saw one woman jump and get caught on a hook on the 6th floor and watched how a fireman saved her... I wasn't hysterical and I was just numb,” end quote.
Dora Skalka, a blouse maker on the 8th floor, remembers the bodies on the sidewalk too in her interview, and how the firemen wouldn’t let them out of the building at first for fear they would be struck with a falling victim, saying quote “When I finally came downstairs in the lobby they were crying and hysterical but they would not let us out. There were maybe 20 or 30 people in the lobby… When we finally got out of the lobby into the street I could see why - because there, smashed on the sidewalk, were the beautiful faces of those who were my neighbors at the machines,” end quote.
Celia Walker Friedman worked as an examiner on the 9th floor. She says in her interview quote “When I worked in the Triangle shop all the other girls looked on me like I was a real "yankee". When we came to this country I was only 5 years old and by the time I went to work in the shop I spoke with a real American accent. In the Triangle Co. I am sure that the girls thought I was American born. I worked on the 9th floor as an examiner. My job was to look over the work to see that it was made correctly - if it wasn't correct I got it back to the Operators for fixing. I worked at the last table on the floor. In front of me were the rows of machines running in the same direction as my table. I could see clear across the shop. Way down in the front were the windows. I don't know if it was Washington or Greene Sts. To my left on the other wall were the windows to the other street. On the day of the fire I had gotten my clothes. I stood at my table ready to leave. I looked across the shop. In front of me I saw flames on the outside of the windows shooting up. The flames were climbing up from the 8th floor. I was scared and it seemed to me that even before I could move, everybody in the shop started to scream and holler. The girls at the machines began to climb up on the machine tables maybe because it was that they were frightened or maybe they thought they could run to the elevator doors on top of the machines. The aisles were narrow and blocked by the chairs and baskets. They began to fall in the fire. I know now that there was a fire escape in back of me but I ran to the elevator because that was the only place to run to. NOTE: Mrs. Friedman learned, apparently for the first time, from Stein [the interviewer], of the tragedy on the fire escape. She goes on: The door to the stairway was completely blocked by the big crates of blouses and goods. The fire crept closer to us and we were crowded at the elevator door banging and hollering for the elevator. The first time it came up, the girls rushed in and it was crowded in a half a second. The elevator driver struggled with the door and finally closed it and went down with the screaming girls. I was left with those who didn't make the first trip. Then the elevator came up a second time. The girls were all squeezing against the door and the minute it was opened they rushed again. This time I was sure I would be lucky and get in. I rushed with the other girls but just as I came to the door of the elevator it dropped down right in front of me. I could hear it rush down and I was left standing on the edge trying to hold myself back from falling into the shaft. I held on to the two sides of the open door. Behind me the girls were screaming and I could feel them pushing me more and more. I knew that in a few seconds I would be pushed into the shaft and I made a quick decision. Maybe through panic or maybe through instinct I saw the center cable of the elevator in front of me. I jumped and grabbed the cable. That is all I remember. My next thing I knew was when I opened my eyes and I was lying on my back and I looked up into the faces of a priest and a nun who were trying to help me. I was in St. Vincent's Hospital. Everybody thought I was going to die. They found me at the bottom of the shaft. I had saved myself by my jumping. Others had fallen down the shaft on top of me and I suppose I was found by the firemen when they were removing the dead. I have often wondered how I was saved. I was very lucky. By sliding down the cable I was far enough away from where most of the bodies landed on top of the elevator cage as they fell down the shaft. My head was injured and I had a broken arm and a broken finger. I had a large searing scar down the middle of my body, burned by the friction of the cable which had cut through my clothing. In the hospital, later, I was shown a large ripped piece of fur and fabric. One of the nurses said she thought it was wonderful that I had enough presence of mind when I jumped to wrap something around my hands in order to save them and to be able to hold on to the cable. I know it was not presence of mind or courage. I think the right word is vanity. This was a new muff that I had bought after saving for it many weeks and fire or no fire, something in me made me hold on to it even while I jumped to save my life. I don't know how long I stayed in St. Vincent's but when I was well the Red Cross came with my clothing which they got from my family and took me straight to the mountains for a rest. At the same time, the Red Cross paid my family $10 a week for 10 weeks. I never got a dime's worth of help from the company,” end quote.
And there are more, there are many more testimonies like these, each has haunting as the last. But I wanted to end with Celias because, first of all, it's insane. It’s insane that she fireman poled down a 9 story elevator shaft and was buried in dead bodies and later dug out by rescue workers and survived. But another crazy thing about it is the very last line, “I never got a dime’s worth of help from the company.” Which is part of what makes this story so infuriating. What happened? What happened to Blanck and Harris? Well, based on many many reports that the exit doors had been locked, Blanck and Harris were indicted a couple weeks later on 7 counts of manslaughter based on section 80 of the labor code which said that doors should not be locked during working hours. I’m really not sure why only 7 counts since 146 workers died in the fire. But those were the charges. On December 27th of that year, 23 days after the trial had started, a jury acquitted Blanck and Harris of any wrongdoing. It all came down to those locked doors. That’s all they were really being accused of, locking the doors, violating section 80. Cornell University says quote “Worker after worker testified to their inability to open the doors to their only viable escape route, the stairs to the Washington Place exit, because the Greene Street side stairs were completely engulfed by fire. More testimony supported this fact. Yet the brilliant defense attorney Max Steuer planted enough doubt in the jurors' minds to win a not-guilty verdict,” end quote. Rose Hauser said in her interview quote “I was one of the first witnesses called. Steuer certainly made me sweat. He put words in my mouth. He confused me and tried to prove I was lying. I said one word and he twisted it to mean its opposite. He prodded me and while I answered him I could see in front of me, the bodies of the girls falling through the air but he was trying to make me look like a fool. At one point I screamed out at him, "I am not lying, I am telling the truth. For god sakes I could see the whole thing in front of me."I could have killed him. I could have scratched his eyes out,” end quote.
And so they were let go. Not guilty. So much for justice. 23 civil suits were brought against them, however, and they eventually settled, agreeing to pay $75 per life lost. Now this is nothing compared to the $400 in insurance money that they got for each life lost. Dudes actually made money off of this you guys. And they didn’t even learn from it. They continued right on with their greedy negligent ways. Just a few days after the fire, they had set up another factory somewhere else cause I guess they expected these traumatized survivors to just hop right behind their sewing machines and the new makeshift factory inspected and found to not have fire escapes or adequate exits. In 1913, Blanck was charged yet again with locking a factory door during working hours, brought to court, fined $20, and according to Cornell University, quote “the judge apologized to him for the imposition,” end quote. A few months after that, the interior of Blanck’s factory, the same one he was fined $20 for, was found to be littered with quote “rubbish piled six feet high, with scraps kept in non-regulation, flammable wicker baskets. This time, instead of a court appearance and a fine, he was served a stern warning,” end quote. These guys literally did not care that their negligence had caused the deaths of 146 people, 123 of them being women. They did not care. They pocketed the insurance money and carried on stuffing buildings full of kindling and locking people inside. The absolute disregard for human life is despicable.
Luckily, there were people who cared. Together the American Red Cross, the Ladies Waist and Dress Makers Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish Daily Forward, and the United Hebrew Trades raised and distributed around $30,000 in relief aid to the victims and their families. A lot of that money was sent to Russia or Italy, to the families of girls who had died in the fire. Workers unions set up a march on April 5, so 10 days after the fire, on New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire which was attended by 80,000 people. Osha reports quote “Frances Perkins, who became the Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, witnessed the horror from Washington Park, recalling later that what she saw convinced her that quote ‘…something must be done. We've got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action.’” end quote. This public outrage, with Frances’ help, led to the formation of a Factory Investigating Commission that inspected factories and interviewed workers. According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “The commission’s findings ultimately led to the passage of more than 30 health and safety laws, including factory fire codes and child labour restrictions, and helped shape future labour laws across the country,” end quote.
And yet, according to Cornell University, quote “Even today, sweatshops have not disappeared in the United States. They keep attracting workers in desperate need of employment and undocumented immigrants, who may be anxious to avoid involvement with governmental agencies. Recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor found that 67% of Los Angeles garment factories and 63% of New York garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Ninety-eight percent of Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death,” end quote. And this is why I say there is a threat of this history repeating itself if we forget it too soon and why it’s important that we remember every horrifying gruesome detail of what the Triangle Factory workers went through that day.
The New York Times article from the next day sums it up quote “At 4:40 o'clock, nearly five hours after the employees in the rest of the building had gone home, the fire broke out… Some of them escaped by running down the stairs, but in a moment or two this avenue was cut off by flame. The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street, 100 feet below them. Then one poor, little creature jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces. Then they all began to drop. The crowd yelled "Don't jump!" but it was jump or be burned, the proof of which is found in the fact that fifty burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone. They jumped, they crashed through broken glass, they crushed themselves to death on the sidewalk. Of those who stayed behind it is better to say nothing except what a veteran policeman said as he gazed at a headless and charred trunk on the Greene Street sidewalk hours after the worst cases had been taken out: "I saw the Slocum disaster [which was a passenger steamboat that caught on fire a few years before], but it was nothing to this." "Is it a man or a woman?" asked the reporter. "It's human, that's all you can tell," answered the policeman. It was just a mass of ashes, with blood congealed on what had probably been the neck,” end quote.
It’s human. That’s the important thing. These girls were human, just as valuable as Max Blanck and Isaac Harris and yet no one was looking out for them. No one cared. I think of Rose Hauser singing for the other girls in the dressing room just before many of them met their fate. So many of the survivor testimonies talked about their friends, their girl friends they called them. That’s what so many of them remembered, talking and joking with their girl friends, looking out for one another. They recalled those tender moments right before all hell broke loose and in an instant, their friends were just gone. And while justice was never served, many many lives have likely been saved by the laws that were passed in response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Those 123 women and 23 men did not die in vain. As long as we remember them, they were martyrs to the cause.
Okay wait, popping back in after the fact with a theory. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about that barrel of oil in the corner that Sylvia Kimeldorf mentioned in her interview. And I was all, why is there a random barrel of oil in the corner. So I did more digging into that and I learned that the oil in the barrel would have been used to lubricate the sewing machines. And then I kept thinking about Jospehine Nicolosi’s interview where she talks about her coworker Sal Marchesi throwing that red bucket of water on what she thought was a lit match and the flames quote “shot up like an explosion.” Maybe that red bucket didn’t actually have water in it. Maybe it had oil in it. And that would explain why the fire got out of control so quickly. That and all the cotton fabric and the barrels and apparently buckets of oil, the sewing machines and even the floorboards coated in oil. So much for fireproof. It explains why the whole ordeal, from that first spark to the bitter end, fire extinguished and 146 dead, only took 18 minutes. Just a theory, but it felt worth adding. Okay back to the outro.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from Cornell University, the New York Times, History.com, OSHA, the US Department of Labor, and Encyclopedia Britannica. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.