Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle, (2003), Atlantic Monthly Press, 340 pages.  ($17 new from Amazon.com)

The Triangle Fire by Leon Stein, (1962) J. B. Lippincott Company, 224 pages. Re-issued as a paperback by ILR Press (2001), 224 pages ($17 new from Amazon.com)

 

            I read Leon Stein’s 1962 book in the late Sixties, while attending college. It was one of those books that you start off slowly, get caught up in, and suddenly it is two a.m. and you still have a hundred pages to read. So you don‚t sleep that night. You go to work, attend night classes at City College of New York, hopefully getting some sleep on the long subway rides.

            Stein was a long time labor journalist, the editor of ‘Justice,’ the official publication of International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). He has a number of books to his credit, including being editor of ‘Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy.’

            It was difficult to imagine that the story could be told any better since Stein had actually interviewed survivors in the 1950s, something impossible for David Von Drehle to do 50 years later. Stein’s matter-of-fact journalistic style made it all the more poignant. He left emotions to the reader as he described the horrible choices workers at the Triangle Waist Company had to make: being burned alive, or jumping from the Asch Building’s upper floors (to the horror of onlookers, dozens jumped). The upper three floors of the ten story building were occupied by Triangle.

            It was a Saturday, March 25, 1911, just at closing time, when the fire started. Fifteen to twenty minutes later, 146 young immigrant women and girls (one victim was 14) were dead. Among these dead were also some men. Drehle had the good sense to credit Stein for original reporting, and to cover other areas of the background and story. He also brought in a matter-of-fact style (he’s a reporter by trade). He apparently made a conscious decision to complement Stein’s book, making the reading of both books very desirable.

            Despite my being 40 years older since first reading Stein’s account, my hands shook as I read the description written by Drehle. There was the same numbness I first experienced with Stein after reading this new account.

            Drehle’s book is divided into three basic sections. The first is a sympathetic history of immigration, assimilation, unionization and the politics of New York’s sweatshops before the fire. The second part is the fire itself, and the third is what happened afterwards. It has as complete a list of the victims as has been seen to date, and a useful index and bibliography. Stein’s book describes the fire in the first section, and the aftermath in the second. He weaves the larger background of immigrant life and early Twentieth Century union and politics within these two sections.

            In 1909, New York saw a massive strike by garment workers. Max Blank and Isaac Harris, ‘The Shirtwaist Kings,’ (shirtwaists were fancy women’s blouses) owners of the Triangle Waist Company, were leaders in opposing the unionization of garment workers. They paid bribes to Tammany Hall to arrange for arrests. The women were imprisoned in the notorious Tombs (called that for good reason), after being beaten by the police. They paid pimps and other criminals to beat union organizers.

            But the strike went on, drawing sympathy from suffragettes and even upper crust women who donated time and money, and insuring the strike had press coverage. The Pulitzer and Hearst papers, at their muckraking best, favored these immigrant women. The strike, lasting months, even won the grudging approval of Samuel Gompers, then head of the AFL (he believed only skilled workers, like cigar rollers, had a practical chance of organizing).

            Besides the physical abuse, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), which preceded the ILGWU (now called UNITE) had to contend with “race warfare” as it was then put. Italian and Jewish women didn’t always speak English. There was a cultural divide hard to understand today. The Jewish women were mostly literate (in Yiddish) and used to working outside the home, even in Eastern Europe, where most of them came from, whereas the Italian women were usually not literate and it was novel for them (but necessary in the New World) to work. It was a lot tougher to get the Italians not to cross a picket line. Some bosses, including Blank and Harris, got Italian priests from conservative Catholic parishes to come into the factories and lecture on the worker’s obligation to be obedient. Still, attempts to divide immigrants by the bosses ultimately failed since reality had these women sitting side by side in the sweatshops.

            Drehle’s rich description of where the immigrants came from, and what they found here is eye-opening reading even for someone who has read a lot of social and labor history. The removal of vast forest tracts in Italy, for instance, destroyed the top soil, causing floods that forced thousands off the farm and into poverty. It is the poor who immigrate. The Pogroms in Russia, mass killings and forced relocations of Jews, made immigration to America desirable. These young girls died together at the Triangle after a day making elaborate women's blouses.

            Because the fire was so quick, spreading from the boxes of leftover cuttings under each table on the Ninth floor, and so many things happened all at once, the reader would be well advised to read those sections all at once. Some survived because of the heroic behavior of individuals, including the same police who had beaten them up more than a year earlier. The elevator operators made at least three trips each and saved around 150 workers.

            Tom Grosch, past president of Local 8, Elevator Constructors, and now retired, explained to me that these operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillato, had to have nerves of steel, given the elevator technology of the time. These elevators required the active attention of the operator, who would turn a funnel-like device attached to the car and passing around a rod or cable. When turned it would not allow a car to proceed past an egg-shaped ball attached to the rod or cable by each floor. “Many an operator suffered finger damage between the funnel and a ball attached to the rope.” Ultimately, it was impossible for the elevators to operate and nineteen bodies were found in the elevator shaft. They jumped rather than be burned.

            Law students from the adjacent New York University saved dozens from the roof of the Asch Building. Many were saved by dumb luck. Could more have survived?

            Max Blank and Isaac Harris were tried for manslaughter after the fire. A door, the district attorney, Charles Seymour Whitman said, had been locked during working hours. Weak as the code was at the time, it was clear about this. But they got off. It was later learned that the judge had been biased for the defendants because of his political background, so he didn’t allow critical evidence to be admitted. Drehle says that, despite code, the owners ordered the door locked to “prevent theft.”

            There had been other serious fires in factories, and many disasters (including the sinking of the HMS Titanic a year later on April 15, 1912), but nothing quite fired public outrage like the Triangle fire.

            Tammany Hall under the leadership of Charles Francis Murphy had opposed basic labor legislation for decades and he was personally responsible for letting loose the police on the 1909 strikers. Suddenly, Murphy gave a free hand to Al Smith (1928 Democratic, and first credible Catholic, candidate to try for President) and Robert F. Wagner (famous for sponsorship of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, commonly called the Wagner Act). Murphy was a reluctant reformer to say the least (he liked receiving graft from manufacturers) but he saw the future of the Democratic Party in these new immigrants and simply couldn't say no to all those potential votes. Smith and Wagner, along with Francis Perkins (later to become FDR’s Labor Secretary and the first woman cabinet member), were the backbone of the newly-formed Factory Investigating Commission. The legislature, having heard the public outrage, meekly went along.

            The FIC re-wrote much of New York’s labor legislation and building codes, which in turn was the model for most other building codes in the US and some abroad. The Triangle Fire is credited with giving reformers much of the mandate they needed to transform the Democratic Party into the worker-friendly party it became, thus propelling Franklin D. Roosevelt from governor of New York to the White House in 1932.

Both books are well worth reading for anyone in labor or who is simply interested in de-mystifying American History. Immigration invigorated America, but it also gave us some villains. Blank and Harris were also immigrants.

            There are always those willing to re-write history for some political goal. One example is “The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America,” (1994) by Philip K. Howard (a well-known Republican lawyer on the New York scene). He advocates disposing of most regulation in favor of the “professional” judgement of those doing the job. While appealing on the surface, it should make everyone nervous.

            In a review of the book in 1996, I wrote, “For seven years, I was a construction worker, helping build and maintain elevators in the San Francisco Bay Area. We had our dealings with government, not all of them pleasant, but on the whole, businesslike. Howard talks about the tons of regulations no one understands. But for us, it was a building code manual about the size of a Stephen King novel, written in stilted English, to be sure, rather than the gothic prose of his thrillers, but manageable by one of our elevator mechanics with a modest education.”

            We understood our part of it as did other trades their part. To suggest that “professionals” should be the sole arbiters of what goes on when building a complex structure is inviting disaster. That “professional,” however clever or well meaning, is not going to have all of the history of his specialty in his head (like an enforceable code is likely to reflect). In addition, he is likely to be under pressure from the guy who signs his check. Some dull government bureaucrat who knows his stuff may not be someone you want to party with, but his insistence on a minutia of detailed compliance could easily save someone’s life.

            When I reviewed (“The Death of Common Sense"), I immediately thought of Leon Stein’s book, which I had read thirty years earlier. It is now ten years later, and David Von Drehle has done us a great service by reminding us of the necessity of having the strong enforcement arm of government code to help protect us.