Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

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Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

United States 1911

Synopsis

On 25 March 1911 the worst industrial fire in the history of American capitalism killed 146 employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Still listed in annual almanacs because of its ferocity, the fire breathed new life into labor organizations and crusades for greater industrial regulatory power, especially by the state. Factory owners did not face scrutiny alone as the city's politicians, business community, and bureaucrats also faced public condemnation for the lack of safety precautions to prevent such a disaster. Cries of "who will protect the working girl" had resounded for years under the protectionist ideal of the Progressive Era as young immigrant women flooded the city's industrial factories. The very use of the term "girl" conjured images of childish, immature people who needed the protection of a "stronger" entity. Functioning simultaneously in a capitalist and patriarchal state, labor laws allowed women to participate in the paid labor force while defining their primary function in familial terms as reproducers of the race. In the wake of the fire, the state legislature organized the New York Factory Investigating Committee (FIC) to guaranteeing safety standards in the city's factories. Commenting on the new powers assumed by the state, FIC member Frances Perkins commented, "The Triangle fire was the first day of the New Deal."

Timeline

1891: Construction of Trans-Siberian Railway begins. Meanwhile, crop failures across Russia lead to widespread starvation.
1896: First modern Olympic Games held in Athens.
1901: U.S. President William McKinley is assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes president.
1904: Beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, which lasts into 1905 and results in a resounding Japanese victory. In Russia the war is followed by the Revolution of 1905, which marks the beginning of the end of czarist rule; meanwhile, Japan is poised to become the first major non-Western power of modern times.
1911: Turkish-Italian War sees the first use of aircraft as an offensive weapon. Italian victory results in the annexation of Libya.
1911: In China revolutionary forces led by Sun Yat-sen bring an end to more than 2,100 years of imperial rule.
1911: Revolution in Mexico, begun the year before, continues with the replacement of the corrupt Porfirio Diaz, president since 1877, by Francisco Madero.
1911: Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester correctly posits that the atom contains a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. (Discovery of the protons that give the nucleus its positive charge, and of the neutrons that, along with protons, contribute to its mass, still lies in the future.)
1911: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team of four other Norwegians are the first men to reach the South Pole, on 14 December. A month later, a group of British explorers led by Robert F. Scott will reach the Pole, only to die of starvation soon afterward.
1915: A German submarine sinks the Lusitania, killing 1,195, including 128 U.S. citizens. Theretofore, many Americans had been sympathetic toward Germany, but the incident begins to turn the tide of U.S. sentiment toward the Allies.
1919: Formation of the Third International (Comintern), whereby the Bolshevik government of Russia establishes its control over communist movements worldwide.
1919: Treaty of Versailles signed by the Allies and Germany but rejected by the U.S. Senate. This is due in part to rancor between President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Senate leaders, and in part to concerns over Wilson's plan to commit the United States to the newly established League of Nations and other international duties. Not until 1921 will Congress formally end U.S. participation in the war, but it will never agree to join the league.

Event and Its Context

The Fire

The Asch building housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the top three floors of a 10-story building. Completed in 1901, the building billed itself as fireproof, although its height of 135 feet allowed it legally to contain wooden trim, window frames, and floors, which would have been required to be metal or concrete had the building been 15 feet taller. In 1910 H. F. J. Porter told the New York Times that "one man whom I advised to install a fire alarm replied to me. 'Let 'em burn. They're a lot of cattle, anyway.'" Factories often occupied buildings that had been intended originally for the display and storage of goods rather than their manufacture. Owners preferred upper stories (to save on lighting bills) and buildings with high ceilings, as state law required each worker to have 250 cubic feet of air. The Triangle Factory contained somewhere around 5 to 600 total workers that day, but the elevators held only 15 to 20 passengers at one time, and the fire escape opened into a closed court and dangled above the ground. During the course of the fire, the escape stairs warped and twisted into a tangled mess. Addressing the inadequate fire escape, Arthur MacFarlane wrote in McClure's Magazine, "Out of nearly six hundred, this 'good and sufficient means of egress' (to quote the Building Code again) saved fewer than twenty."

Although the cause of the fire remains unknown, byproduct material from making shirtwaists littered the factory's floors. These rags, which were collected six times a year, had last been removed two months earlier and had weighed over a ton at that point. Alongside these remnants stood barrels containing oil to lubricate the sewing machines. At the time of the fire, workers found that the window openings to the fire escape had rusted shut. A fire drill had never been performed in the building. Doors in the building opened inward. As firefighters arrived, the water from their fire hoses reached only the seventh floor and thus proved useless to those trapped in the factory on the upper floors. Aerial ladders also reached only to the area between the sixth and seventh floors. As the fire grew, dozens jumped to their deaths as flames engulfed them. The ninth floor door was locked as the owners often locked doors to prevent workers from taking breaks during work hours and to prevent them from stealing. Firefighters found 19 bodies melted against this particular door. Because it was fireproof, the building itself suffered little damage, and the fire department had the fire under control within 20 minutes of its outbreak. The day after the fire, a writer for the New York Times commented, "The building was fireproof. It shows hardly any signs of the disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever, as are the floors: nothing is worse for the fire except the furniture and 141 [sic] of the 600 men and girls that were employed in its upper three stories."

History of the Shirtwaist Workers

The history of the Shirtwaist workers perhaps makes the huge death toll of the fire even more damning. Shirtwaists, paired with tailored skirts, had become the standard fashion for women in the early twentieth century, and Triangle owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck owned the largest firm in the business. They hired operators who then contracted out for factory workers. There was no fixed rate of pay for workers, and the company itself dealt only with its contractors. Despite this arrangement, gathering workers under the same roof had proved conducive to collective action by workers. Eighteen months before the fire, a spontaneous walkout by 400 garment employees led to the "uprising of the 20,000" in New York City. For three months, tens of thousands of women participated in this general strike. In the end, the strikers gained shorter work hours and higher wages along with some safety reforms, but industry owners refused to recognize their union. At the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, for example, workers gained a 52-hour work week and a 12 to 15 percent increase in wages, but the union remained the key to assuring lasting reform. Rose Schneiderman played a central role in organizing this strike, giving a riveting speech insisting that workers needed both bread and roses. She continued to organize women workers throughout the 1910s at the grassroots level. In 1919 half of all women's garment workers participated in trade unions. Over the next two decades, Schneiderman increasingly focused on lobbying for and shaping labor legislation. In 1926 she served as president of both the national and New York Women's Trade Union League. Although not a middle-class reformer herself, she met Frances Perkins while working with the Factory Investigating Commission that was established after the fire, and in the 1930s Perkins, herself the first woman to become secretary of labor, helped secure Schneiderman a high-level government appointment.

Victims of the fire included members of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. Their Local 25 had frequently rallied against the very working conditions that led to the fire.

Aftermath of the Fire

Following the fire, the Sun described the bodies as "charred and dripping." The city set up temporary morgues to house them. Many of these working women, mainly recent Italian and Jewish immigrants, had been their family's breadwinners. As outrage brewed, the workers and their supporters began looking for people to blame. The Women's Trade Union League organized the first protest meeting following the fire. Its meeting the day after the fire included representatives from 20 leading labor and civic organizations. A week later, the city held a funeral procession for the unclaimed dead. Over 120,000 people participated. On 2 May a mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House protested factory conditions, and its participants included New York Governor John Dix. Rose Schneiderman again made a fiery speech that compared factory conditions to torture devices of the Inquisition. She lamented, "The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred." The fire solidified her role as a highly effective labor leader for decades to come. Suffrage meetings began to stress self-protection in industry and argued that the vote would protect workers against factory owners who locked doors and against complacent voters, be they male or nonindustrial workers.

In the fire's aftermath, the "shirtwaist kings" and owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, were indicted on manslaughter charges. The judge charged the jury that they could not find the defendants guilty unless the jurors believed the proprietors knew that the ninth floor door was locked. In December, despite parading through a group of 300 women chanting "murderers," the jury acquitted the two owners of any criminal wrongdoing. One member of the all-male jury commented to a newspaper reporter that many of the women probably panicked and thereby caused their own deaths. Twenty-three families later sued Harris and Blanck in a civil suit; and the families eventually received $75 each in 1913. That same year, a general sessions court fined Blanck $20 for keeping a door in another factory locked. The Triangle owners themselves eventually collected around $200,000 in insurance in the fire's aftermath.

The fire pushed issues of unsafe factories and immigrant exploitation into the public consciousness for quite possibly the first time. The Triangle fire exposed the deplorable conditions of New York factories. Investigators found 14 with no fire escapes, 65 with only a ladder, and nearly 500 with a sole fire escape as the only available fire exit. The fire also destroyed the traditional barriers against factory legislation. The commissions established and legislation passed in the fire's wake laid the groundwork for a welfare state with the state itself wielding wide authority to regulate and patrol industrial practices. Arthur McEvoy has argued that although the owners were not convicted at trial because the public did not connect the owners' control of the workplace with the victims' death, the fire began to change the public's mind over time. This prompted the eventual evolution of a mindset that held factory owners responsible for industrial safety. In such a climate, the public increasingly viewed "accidents" at work as a social problem worthy of both public redress and state intervention. Such a change in attitude is particularly important in the garment industry, which had a reputation as nonhazardous because it was seen as domestic work done mainly by women as an extension of the home. The role of labor organizations such as the International League of Garment Workers' Union cannot be overstated as they led the public battle for labor reform and kept those issues in the public eye long enough to be politically effective.

In the wake of the fire, New York passed the Sullivan-Hoey law in October 1911. This law established the Bureau of Fire Prevention and expanded both the power and the duties of the fire commissioner. It charged the bureau with ridding factories of fire hazards, and these measures mandated that doors must open outward, required that doors be unlocked during working hours, made sprinklers mandatory for businesses employing more than 25 people above the ground floor, and made fire drills mandatory in buildings without sprinklers. The state conducted five years of hearings on these matters and created a five-member Industrial Board, which was abolished in 1915 in favor of a newly structured Industrial Commission over the New York State Department of Labor. The commission had the authority to administer labor laws, workmen's compensation, and the state insurance fund. The state gave a newly created Building Department city-wide jurisdiction to mandate the removal and condemnation of unsafe buildings. The commission also established a system of penalties for department employees accepted bribes or performed inadequately.

The Factory Investigating Commission

In the summer following the fire, the New York legislature created the nine-member Factory Investigating Commission (FIC). The FIC consisted of two state senators, three Assembly members, and four governor-appointees and included Senator Robert Wagner, Al Smith, Samuel Gompers (president of the American Federation of Labor), and Mary Dreier (the New York Women's Trade Union League president). Established to investigate the city's sweatshop conditions, it ultimately produced 25 new laws. Between 10 October and 21 December 1911, the FIC collected over 3000 pages of testimony from more than 200 witnesses. The FIC helped to establish legislation for factory fire control, sanitation conditions, and regulations regarding child and female employment. New York's state codes became some of the most advanced in the nation in the 1910s. Leon Stein, in a retrospective look at the FIC's legacy decades after the fire, maintained that these laws overhauled the state Department of Labor and turned its attention to hazards beyond fire, such as reducing the work week for women and children, applying industrial laws to canneries for the first time, and restricting the work of women immediately after childbirth.

The FIC also gathered vast amounts of data, which confirmed the consistent low wages paid to women workers. Only a few years earlier, in a 1908 ruling on Muller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court empowered states to use their police power to restrict the number of hours women worked in industry. Previously, state legislatures had continually struck down both maximum hour and minimum wage laws as denying workers' property rights and interfering with their individual liberty. The Consumers' League first began the minimum wage movement in hopes that merchants would voluntarily establish minimum wages for women in the 1890s. By 1913, however, nine states had passed minimum wage legislation. The FIC's data itself has been cited as the most formidable array of facts ever gathered by a minimum wage inquiry. Its inquiries and public hearings also helped fuel the state's campaign to regulate working conditions. Their figures showed that over half of all women employed in shirt manufacturing and over 60 percent of women in retail trades made less than $400 per year in a city whose subsistence-level standard of living was simultaneously calculated at just under $500 per year. These calculations were made for individuals, and many of these women's wages supported their entire family. The investigation concluded that productivity and profits did not significantly determine wages and noted that native female workers consistently received higher wages than immigrant women.

Businessmen adamantly opposed minimum wage legislation and argued that they would lead to higher unemployment, price increases, and relocations of businesses to other states in which no such legislation was in effect. They also argued that established minimums would become maximums in practice and would leave workers with no incentive to increase production.

Social workers and civic leaders usually favored minimum wage legislation, arguing chiefly that minimum standards would not only guarantee a certain standard of living but that it would also regularize employment. Progressives used the push for the minimum wage to illustrate how it could expand participatory democracy. They argued that wage boards would be established to set the minimum wages; the boards would consist of a variety of interested people, ranging from employer and employee representatives to representatives of the public interest. Some tagged such proposals as socialism intent on abolishing private industry and employment. Labor leaders themselves often divided over the issue of minimum wages. Samuel Gompers, for example, consistently opposed minimum wages, arguing both that minimums would become maximums and that the lack of enforcement would render the legislation useless. He eventually resigned from the FIC because of his opposition to the minimum wage.

The Rise of the State

As the commission worked on labor legislation, it increasingly lobbied for the state to assume the responsibility to protect workers. During the FIC's existence from 1911 to 1915, historian Thomas Kerr has argued, the FIC established a trajectory for state protection and labor legislation that continued to influence the minimum wage movement through the 1930s on both a state and, ultimately, a national level. Although the FIC was unsuccessful in securing wage laws during its existence, its wage investigation helped fuel the growing minimum wage debates throughout the nation. In 1933 a minimum wage law passed under the National Industrial Recovery Act, only to be struck down a few years later when the Supreme Court ruled against it. In response, however, the United States Congress passed the Fair Labors Standard Act in 1938, which established a flat minimum wage rate of 25 cents an hour in certain industries, to be increased to 40 cents within seven years. The FIC and its extensive wage study injected labor reformers' arguments concerning minimum wage into the public debate, and in the 1930s it continued to influence the debate as those who had once served on the commission moved into national politics and applied their ideas nationally under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration.

The Legacy

The FIC ultimately rewrote New York's labor and factory codes in 13 volumes of reports between 1911 and 1915. New York's codes became a model for all other states until the New Deal, when Roosevelt enacted similar national legislation. The FIC and state regulatory power thus began as a very specific response by the state to a popular movement, yet it eventually gained national predominance by the time of the New Deal. During the 1930s the federal government's workplace safety measures and organizations served as the forerunners for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in operation today.

Historian William Greider, however, has suggested that little has changed in urban industrial work for immigrant women and that the main differences in modern sweatshops are simply the names and the faces of new immigrants. In a 1990s study of New York and Los Angeles garment factories, over 60 percent violated minimum wage or overtime laws. In 1991 a fire engulfed an Imperial Food Products factory in North Carolina. Most of its workers were both women and immigrants. The factory lacked sprinklers, fire alarms, and marked fire exits. The fire injured over 50 people and killed 25. Investigators found most of the dead piled against locked doors. Although the conditions resembled the Triangle fire, the immediate aftermath did not. The company faced charges on 54 instances of "willful" safety violations, and owner Emmet Roe received a 20-year prison sentence. The company went bankrupt.

Key Players

Dix, John (1860-1928): Governor of New York at the time of the Shirtwaist Factory fire, Democrat Dix served in the state's highest office between 1911 and 1913.

Dreier, Mary (1875-1963): A social reformer and activist, Dreier helped form the Women's Trade Union League and served as an FIC member.

Gompers, Samuel (1850-1924): Gompers served as the American Federation of Labor's first president and, with the exception of a single year, retained the office until his death. He was the leading spokesman for the labor movement in the early twentieth century.

Perkins, Frances (1882-1965): Perkins worked at Hull House and served as the executive secretary of the New York Consumers' League. In 1929 then-New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her the industrial commissioner of New York to direct the enforcement of factory and labor laws. In 1933 Roosevelt appointed her secretary of labor, the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet.

Schneiderman, Rose (1884-1972): A Polish immigrant, Schneiderman initially worked in a factory stitching linings into caps. She became a prominent labor organizer and served as the WTUL's sole organizer on the East Coast during the 1910s. In the 1930s she served as a National Recovery Administration official and was a member of Roosevelt's brain trust.

Bibliography

Books

Baker, Elizabeth. Protective Labor Legislation. New York:Columbia University Press, 1925.

Downey, Fairfax. "Burnt Sacrifice: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York 1911." In Fairfax Downey, Disaster Fighters. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1938.

Jensen, Frances. The Triangle Fire and the Limits of Progressivism. Ph.D. Diss. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1996.

Lehrer, Susan. Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905-1925. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

McClymer, John. The Triangle Strike and Fire. Orlando, FL:Harcourt Brace, 1998.

McEvoy, Arthur F. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of Commonsense Causality. Chicago: American Bar Association, 1994.

Mitelman, Bonnie. "Rose Schneiderman and the Triangle Fire." In The Way We Lived: Essays and Documents in American Social History, edited by Frederick Binder and David Reimers. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1988.

Orleck, Annelise. Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-class Politics in the U.S., 1900-1965.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Perry, Elizabeth. Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred Smith. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Stein, Leon. The Triangle Fire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962.

Periodicals

Kerr, Thomas. "The New York Factory Investigating Commission and the Minimum Wage Movement." Labor History 12, no. 3 (1971): 373-391.

Other

Rosa, Paul. "The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire." The History Buff Library page [cited 17 August 2002]. <www.historybuff.com/library/refshirtwaist.html>.

The Triangle Factory Fire. Kheel Center at the Cornell University Library, in collaboration with UNITE! 2002 [cited 17 August 2002]. <www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire>.

Yaz, Gregg. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. "Leap for Life, Leap of Death." California State University, Northridge. 2002 [cited 17 August 2002].

<www.csun.edu/~ghy7463/mw2.html>.