Near closing time on Saturday afternoon,
March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building
in the Triangle Waist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring
afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting
forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over, 146
workers were dead
Many of the Triangle factory workers were women, some as young as 14
years old. They were, for the most part, recent Italian and European
Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States. For these
workers, speaking out could end with the loss of desperately needed
jobs, a prospect that forced them to endure personal indignities and
severe exploitation.
They were paid between $12 dollars and $17 for a 52 hour work week.
They died when a fire escape collapsed. They died smashed against doors
their bosses had locked, afraid the women might steal a few pennies
worth of leftover cloth. They died leaping in desperation down elevator
shafts, after the cars they knew were not coming back. They died with
their dresses on fire, jumping from those ninth-story windows.
“I learned a new sound, a more horrible sound than description can
picture. It was the sound of a speeding, living body on a stone
sidewalk,” reported William Shepherd, a United Press writer who had just
happened upon the scoop of his life. “Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead.
Sixty-two thud-deads. I call them that because the sound and the thought
came to me at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch
them as they came down.”
While this flower-laden carriage was pulled
through crowded streets in silent funeral procession for the
unidentified victims of the fire, the remains of the seven unclaimed
victims were quietly taken from the morgue and buried in the City’s
Evergreens Cemetery plot. Private burial rites were conducted for
Jewish, Catholic, and Episcopal faiths.
When we hear politicians today rail against the sins of organized labor,
we should remember the Triangle factory fire. Perhaps no event in
American history better illustrated the need for unions—public as well
as private—and galvanized a generation of policymakers to protect
laborers. Frances Perkins, a young social worker visiting a friend in
the Village, ran to the fire bells and saw the women fall. She went on
to become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, America’s first
female cabinet member, and in that capacity would write much of the
Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. The day the
Triangle burned, Perkins would say, “was the day the New Deal began.”
We are told today that we don’t need any
of that and maybe never did. Unions in the American private sector have
been all but annihilated, and it’s not just the organized right or
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—the most visible example so far this
decade—waging war on public employee unions. Other governors and
legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, have enthusiastically
taken up this fight around the country. Some would gladly revoke public
unions’ right to organize, bargain, or speak out at all.
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