March 25, 1911 was the date of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. We marked the centennial a few years ago here on Travalanche, along with the fact that there was an off-Broadway play up about it at the time. This year we have timely and terrifying reason to bring it up again.
It’s not a complicated story. The place was a garment factory, located on the top three floors of a ten story building a block east of Washington Square. Shirtwaists are women’s blouses. Picture a sea of inflammable fabric and hundreds of workers, most of them women and young girls, Jewish and Italian immigrants, attired in the female fashions of the Edwardian Era (long skirts). It was near the end of the work day. No one ever figured out what caused the blaze, an electrical spark, a match, an errant cigarette (those were naturally forbidden but people have been known to break the rules).
But we do know what caused the deaths. There were no sprinklers. Some exits had been locked to prevent theft, unauthorized breaks, and visits by labor organizers. A key stairwell was blocked by fire. The single exterior fire escape twisted and fell to the street when overloaded by fleeing workers. Firemen were not equipped for a blaze at the top of what was then considered a skyscraper. Their ladders didn’t reach the upper floors. They had a few fire nets to catch jumpers, but that is a slow and tricky task when the floor is so high up anyhow. The worst is that a fire of this type is so rapid. Most of the devastation had occurred before the firemen even arrived. When they got there, they had a hard time getting their apparatus to the site because the way was blocked by the bodies of the dozens who had jumped.
There had been around 600 people in the factory at the time of the fire, 500 women, 100 men. Some managed to escape by elevators before the heat warped the track, making them inoperable. Some managed to make it to the roof, and some managed to make it down to the ground in the early seconds. But nearly a quarter were not so lucky. 143 died of smoke inhalation, burns, or blunt force trauma from jumping. 123 were women, 23 were men. They were between the ages of 14 and 42 years old.
I first heard of this terrible disaster in 2000 when I reviewed Ain Gordon’s play Birdseed Bundles starring Lola Pashalinski. I was working at the New-York Historical Society at the time, and had cause to learn more about it there — particularly when September 11 happened, assaulting us with sights even more horrible than, yet, reminiscent of, those that had happened in 1911. Astoundingly, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire died at the age of 107 in February 2001, long enough to have witnessed both events. ‘
My mom did piecework on an assembly line, so I think of her and her friends when I contemplate this event. And it’s surprisingly easy to connect it to the core content that launched this blog. Working class girls of immigrant stock attended vaudeville for entertainment. (Recommended reading: Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, by Kathy Peiss). Some of the girls, wishing to avoid the drudgery (and danger) of factory work, became vaudeville performers themselves. It’s the same people. My people, your people.
My friend Curtis Eller, who writes songs about everything, has written a song about the event, called “Sweatshop Fire”. There are surprisingly few movies. One was a fictionized telling by the Edison company made one year after the tragedy. There was an informational film made for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1950 called With These Hands, directed by Jack Arnold, and featuring Sam Levene, Louis Sorin, Joseph Wiseman, Arlene Francis, and Alexander Scourby. In 1979 there was a TV movie called The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal written by Mel and Ethel Brez that featured Tovah Feldshuh, Janet Margolin, Stephanie Zimablist, Charlotte Rae, David Dukes, Tom Bosley, and Ted Wass.
To date there has been no blockbuster masterpiece about the disaster made by Hollywood. I’ll go out on a limb and and venture to guess that the decision makers consider the topic too left wing and (forgive me) inflammatory. The supposedly leftist film industry knows what side its bread is buttered on, and very rarely tells stories whose unavoidable lessons dictate mass action, organization, and legislation. Which brings us to the reason that I said that we had a timely and terrifying reason for observing this disaster today.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire galvanized all kinds of change in New York City and elsewhere throughout the nation, from the unionization of workers for better conditions, to a long list of fire safety regulations. For a time anyway, for a few decades, the tide of change was in the direction of improving the lives of all Americans, including the ones at the bottom. The culture of that is now being dismantled from the very top with awe-inspiring swiftness. Let’s not talk about “becoming”. We’re already there. America is now a nation that cares only for the life, liberty and happiness of its bosses. The apparatus that was painfully built over the past century or more that was designed to keep us (relatively) safe and healthy is being gleefully dismantled by cold and cruel marauders who care nothing for this country or the people in it. An uncountable number of people will suffer and die as a result of this, it’s already happening. It’s shaping up to be a world where people lock the safety exits again, where no provision is made for the welfare of workers, and anyone who complains is sacked — that is, if they aren’t killed. Don’t sit still for it.