Triangle Factory fire

The Triangle Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was a major industrial disaster, causing the death of more than one hundred garment workers who either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.

The fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three floors of the Asch building, a ten-story building at the intersection of Greene Street and Washington Place in New York City. The company employed approximately 500 workers, mostly young female immigrants working fourteen-hour days, in the manufacture of clothing.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company had already become well-known outside the garment industry by 1911: the massive strike by women shirtwaist makers in 1909, known as the Uprising of 20,000, began with a spontaneous walkout at the Triangle Company. While the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement covering most of these striking workers at the end of a four month strike, Triangle Shirtwaist refused to sign the agreement.

The conditions of the factory were typical of the time. Flammable textiles were stored throughout the factory, smoking was widespread, illumination was provided by open gas lighting, and there was no fire extinguishing equipment.

On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire started on the eighth floor. The workers on the tenth floor were alerted and most of the employees on these two floors were able to evacuate. But the message did not reach the ninth floor in time.

The ninth floor had two doors leading to stairwells. One of these was already filling with smoke and flames by the time the workers realized there was a fire. The other door had been locked in order to prevent workers from leaving to take breaks or stealing materials. There was an exterior fire escape but it quickly collapsed under the weight of the women trying to escape. An elevator which serviced the floor stopped working, cutting off the last means of safe escape.

Realizing there was no better means of escape, some of the women broke out windows and jumped to the ground nine floors below. Others forced open the elevator shaft doors and jumped down the open shaft. Few survived either experience. The remainder stayed on the floor until the fire reached them. The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to fight the flames; they had no ladders that reached higher than the sixth floor. A single survivor was found trapped by rising water in an elevator shaft. The death toll was 146; 91 died in the fire and 54 died by jumping.

The aftermath of the fire

The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had fled to the building's roof when the fire began and survived. They were later acquitted in a criminal trial, at which 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 a single word. Steuer argued to the jury that Alterman and probably other witnesses had memorized their statements and may even have been told what to say by the prosecutors.

The jury acquitted the owners. They lost a subsequent civil suit in 1913.

The fire had more long-lasting effects. For some it radicalized them still further; as Rose Schneiderman, a prominent socialist and union activist, said in her speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the Women's Trade Union League, a group that had provided moral and financial support for the Uprising of 20,000:

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. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

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 drew a different lesson from events: working with local Tammany Hall officials, such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers, such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration who had witnessed the fire from the street below, they pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond.

The tragedy was the subject of a 1978 movie, The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal.

The Asch building survived the fire and was refurbished. Real estate speculator and philanthropist Frederick Brown later bought the building and subsequently donated the structure to New York University in 1929. NYU renamed it the Brown building. As of 2005, it still exists and is part of the NYU campus, where it is the main science building of the university [1] (http://www.nyunews.com/news/city/725.html).

Related articles

• History of the United States (1865-1918)
• International Women's Day

External links

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• Cornell University Library: Triangle Factory Fire (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/)
• Eyewitness account of the fire (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/texts/stein_ootss/ootss_wgs.html?location=Fire!)
• Famous Trials: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Trial (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/triangle/trianglefire.html)