In honor of the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which took place on March 25, 1911, we’re sharing a chapter from our ne
Today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. This horrific event opens A HAUNTED HISTORY OF INVISIBLE WOMEN. Read the chapter Andrea Janes and & I wrote about the avoidable carnage. Child Labor & Union-Busting remain despicably timely these days and attacks on labor law are constantly in the news. Never forget. Please share and please advocate against child labor and ANY rollbacks of labor and building safety codes! Labor law saves lives!
More about A HAUNTED HISTORY OF INVISIBLE WOMEN here. Your support is greatly appreciated.
It was the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire yesterday (1911), and while I did make a post about it, I kept thinking about a scene in my “Defend” ‘verse that has been in my head for a very long time - when Sarah finds out about the Triangle fire.
A key thing to know is that Sarah is, at this point, close friends with Pauline Newman, who was a real person, a Jewish woman who worked at Triangle when she was a child. Newman knew many of the women who were killed, and she had been organizing women workers since the rent strike of 1907. Newman went on to be a national labor organizer and government consultant, and she spent her life with an economist named Frieda Miller; they raised Frieda’s daughter together.
This is not perfectly fact checked, as I just wrote it today, but it is true that Newman was in Philadelphia at the time of the fire. I’ve also made it as internally consistent as I can with what already exist of the Defend ‘verse, though once this makes it into a full story, it will probably be a little different. But here are 1200 words I did not have this morning.
The ringing of the telephone startled Sarah.
Their friends rarely called on the Sabbath, and especially this late in the day, knowing that the combined Jacobs-Kelly family would be ending the Sabbath, and so to hear the telephone peal was jarring. Sarah picked up the handset with trepidation.
“Hello?” she called down the line.
“Sarah? Sarah, are you there?” It was Elsa, sounding so distraught that Sarah felt a chill run down her back.
“I’m here, Elsa. What on earth is the matter?” Sarah said anxiously.
Even through the slightly hollow sound of the phone line, Sarah could hear Elsa’s sobs, and her worry only increased.
“Sarah,” Elsa said once she could speak again. “Sarah, it’s the Triangle factory. It’s burned. It’s gone.”
Sarah gripped the base of the phone hard, leaning forward as though she could get nearer to Elsa. “Gott in himmel. Elsa, what do you mean, gone? All of it?”
Elsa began to cry again, and Sarah felt her throat close. “All of it. All three floors. Oh, Sarah, girls were jumping from the windows to get away from the fire, and - and their clothes, their hair, everything was on fire. I was in the park with the boys, just across the way, when it started. There are so many bodies.”
Sarah felt tears start to fall down her face, and Elsa dissolved into sobs again. It took her a moment to get herself back under control. “They’re - they’re getting the bodies out and taking them to Charities Pier,” Elsa managed. “So their families can - can identify them. But I am sure we know - most of them. Would you -?”
“I’m on my way,” Sarah said, her hands cold and shaking but her mind working furiously. “Elsa, listen to me. It’s going to take me a little while to get there, and I want you and the boys to be safe. Can you get home, dear? I don’t want you to see anymore. You have already seen enough.”
“I can get home. Charlie is there,” Elsa said, and her voice was a little steadier. “I can take the boys home.”
“Good,” Sarah said gently. “I’ll meet you there, and we’ll go together. I have to let Mama know, and - oi gavult - I will have to stop and send a telegram to Pauline, in Philadelphia. But I will be there as soon as I can, Elsa, do you hear me? As soon as I can. I will come to you. Stay with Charlie and the boys, do you promise?”
“I promise. I will, Sarah,” Elsa said, and her voice was almost firm now. Sarah breathed an internal sigh of relief.
“All right. I will see you soon,” Sarah said firmly.
“Thank you, Sarah,” Elsa said in relief. “See you soon.”
Sarah hung up the phone, her hands still cold and tears still on her cheeks, and closed her eyes, saying a silent prayer for strength and a blessing for the girls who had died. She would need every ounce of strength she had, from the sound of it.
She went back to the kitchen, where her mother was waiting, and Esther’s face told Sarah that she was already expecting bad news.
“What has happened, dirast tokhter?” she asked, coming over to Sarah and holding her gently. Sarah rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, for just a moment sharing the weight of the news she was carrying.
“There has been a terrible fire,” Sarah said. “At the Triangle factory. That was Elsa, and she saw it happening. She said the entire factory is gone, and - it sounds like there are many dead, Mama.”
“Gotteniu,” Esther breathed.
Sarah felt more tears start to fall, and she buried her face into Esther’s shoulder and sobbed briefly. Only briefly, though; she knew there would be more time for tears, and she had work to do.
“I have to go,” she said. “We know - we know so many of the girls who work there, and I promised Elsa I would come to her. I have to cable Pauline on my way - she’s going to be devastated, but I know she’ll want to be here. Mama, can you - can you and Papa look after the children, until Jack and David get home?”
“They will turn around and leave again - they will want to be with you,” Esther said. “And Katherine is there already, if I know her at all. Go, Sarah. Your father and I will watch the children, and I will call the rail yard and let the boys know where to find you.”
“Elsa said that the bodies are being taken to Charities Pier,” Sarah said. “That’s where we’ll be - or at least, where Kath and I will be. I’m going to try to persuade Elsa to stay home; she sounded terrible. I can’t imagine what she must have seen, witnessing that horror.”
Esther kissed her forehead. “Be safe. Be careful. Give my love to Elsa.”
“I will. I love you, Mama,” Sarah said, kissing her mother’s cheek and hugging her, hard.
She put on her coat, hat, and gloves, and made sure to put extra change and handkerchiefs in her purse. She then went to the living room, where the children were busily engaged in drawing with crayons. She kissed all three of them tenderly, her daughter and son and her nephew, and promised them that she would be back soon.
****
When Sarah finally reached Greenwich Village, she stopped at the nearest Western Union office she could find, sending a brief and urgent message to Pauline Newman, at her hotel in Philadelphia, where she was doing union campaigning.
New York March 25 1911
Terrible fire at Triangle. Many dead but no names yet. Please come home, dearest Pauline.
Sarah Jacobs 645 PM
She kept her composure in front of the clerk, but felt herself choking up again as she made her way toward Elsa and Charlie’s building. She had to pass the Asch Building to get there, and as she came in sight of it she stopped and stared, horror seizing her at the awfulness of it.
The entire top three floors of the building were charred to almost nothing, the outer shell of the building clearly the only thing that had stayed standing. The single fire escape was broken and twisted, dangling off the building with more pieces on the sidewalk below. The windows were broken, jagged and ugly in the evening light. The sidewalk below was damaged in many places, and Sarah’s stomach lurched as she saw that firefighters were still lifting some bodies into coffins, for transportation to the pier. She pressed a hand to her mouth as she caught sight of one being moved, charred clothing and twisted limbs clearly visible.
She shut her eyes and hurried away, forcing her eyes away from the building until she could no longer see it. Part of her desperately wanted to go into the crowd and find Katherine, but she had made Elsa a promise. She would either go back and find Kath, or find her at the pier. She made her way almost instinctively to the Morris’ apartment, some part of her registering weeping and painful cries of mourning as she ascended the stairs of their tenement building.
I’ve had a few days to think about what’s going on, and I feel like I need to speak up. I want to talk about protests and riots; those things that are being condemned right now to such an extent that not only are national guardsman being sicced on them, now we’re seeing unidentified mercenaries also being brought into the situation. I’m probably going to piss some people off by saying this, and to that I can only say that we will have to agree to disagree; I know that I can’t change minds that aren’t interested in being changed.
In 1909, the women of the New York shirtwaist factories led a general strike that would come to be known as the Uprising of the 20,000. They sought shorter hours, better pay, and the right to form unions. In response, the owners of the companies they were working for paid prostitutes and thugs to attack the strikers; at best, the police allowed these abuses and did nothing. At worst, they assisted in the attacks. One year later, the failure to improve working conditions for these women would end in the tragedy of the Triangle Fire, a blaze that killed 146 of the women working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. This tragedy, and the legacy of the Uprising of the 20,000, would see the enactment of sweeping reforms to New York’s labor laws, laws that would be enacted on a national level when reform leader Francis Perkins became FDR’s secretary of labor- the first woman to serve on the cabinet.
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. would give his historic I Have a Dream speech during the March on Washington. This gathering of an estimated 300,000 people on the Washington Mall was precipitated by the cruel Jim Crow Laws and the “separate but equal” Plessy VS. Ferguson supreme court ruling that permitted segregation of facilities on the basis of race. This led to such egregious situations as having two separate water fountains in one place, one labelled for whites and one labelled for blacks. Though the Jim Crow laws would be repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in response to the March on Washington, this act was poorly enforced and black citizens were often obstructed from being able to act on their new rights by discriminatory state laws or groups of white supremacists taking matters into their own hands. Two years later, the Selma to Montgomery marches would push the movement still further… but not without significant pushback. On March 7, 1965, police attacked the unarmed marchers with tear gas and billy clubs, an event that would come to be known as Bloody Sunday. The night after a second march, civil rights activist and minister James Reeb was beaten and murdered by a group of whites. This murder and the events of Bloody Sunday spurred multiple riots and demands for protection of the protesters and an answer to their calls for enforcement of their rights. This would ultimately lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. Though paid off by the mafia who owned the bar to only raid during off-peak times, this particular night they showed up when it was full of people. Homosexuality was illegal at the time, and the police would force everyone to leave during these raids, and anyone who was dressed as a woman was brought by a female officer into the restrooms to check their genitalia, and if they were perceived as male, they were arrested. Physical violence against those who failed to comply or didn’t comply fast enough was common. That night, the patrons of the bar resisted the police, unifying together in an event that would come to be known as the Stonewall Riots- throwing bricks and bottles at the police, ripping out a parking meter as a makeshift battering ram when the police barricaded themselves inside the bar, and chasing them in circles around the narrow streets of Greenwich Village while drag queens formed a jeering rockettes kick-line. One year later, participants in the riot led what would become the very first Gay Pride March, and today Pride Parades are still held on the anniversary of the riots.
And this is just a small sampling. Like it or not, protest is baked into our identity as Americans- and sometimes, protests become riots, because as we’ve seen over and over again, police brutality is also baked into America’s identity. When completely peaceful protesters are shot with pepper spray, gassed, shot with rubber bullets, have flash bangs thrown at them, and are physically beaten with riot shields, truncheons, and in the case of at least one Australian newsman, the officer’s fist, what do you expect is going to happen? Everyone, no matter how peaceable at the best of times, has a breaking point. It is entirely reasonable for people to fight back when they are being threatened.
Instead of condemning people for doing what millions before them have done, for being understandably angry that the men and women who are supposed to protect the peace and uphold justice are reenacting the same violence that we learn to condemn in our history lessons in school, let’s try for a little empathy. Let’s try to help champion the cause for which they fight. Stand behind them in opposing police brutality and advocating against systemic racism. It’s thanks to people much like them that you have a great many of the rights we now take for granted.
Hear My Sorrow, by Deborah Hopkinson. This was the last diary published in the original run of the series, and it’s one of my favorites. I have long been fascinated by the Triangle Fire and this story is unique in that it really focuses on Italian workers.
The plot fast-forwards quite a bit between the general strike and the fire. I do question Angela’s choice for a husband in the epilogue. The historical note has an unnecessary subheading and goes into a little first-person writing, and the reference section is formatted a little differently from the other diaries. Hopkinson could have been a little more clear as it was just briefly implied that there were male victims of the fire (in reality about 23 of the 146).
The “Uprising of the 20,000″ in 1909 was a strike of shirtwaist factory workers who mostly consisted of teenage girls and young women, many were Jewish immigrants. The strike was organized to improve working conditions including safety standards in the workplace as well as worker’s rights. The young workers faced violence and harassment during the strike but ultimately would see all but a few shirtwaist companies agree to at least some of their demands. Unfortunately one of the few employers to resist their demands was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company where two years later 146 workers (still consisting largely of young women and girls) were killed in the Triangle Fire and even more injured.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in the heart of New York City, a lethal fire broke out on the factory floor, located at the top of the ten-story Asch Building near Washington Square East. Trapping many of the textile workers inside, the fire claimed the lives of one in four employees: more than one hundred women and two dozen men, many of them young, recent immigrants and non-English speakers, perished in the blaze or while jumping from windows to escape. The dangerous working conditions responsible for the fire and its casualties were typical for urban factories, often known as sweatshops, of this period. The largely preventable tragedy and its aftermath helped to galvanize a series of reforms in the working conditions of laborers that continued through the twentieth century.
We turn the show over to The Bowery Boys who talk about the tragic event and the women's protests surrounding it. With Valerie Paley, Co-Cur
It is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire today, and it is hard to overstate the importance of this tragedy to the workplace safety and workers' rights movements.
From the podcast page: "We have been talking with our friends Greg Young and Tom Meyers, The Bowery Boys, for years about doing a project together. This isn’t that, but it is a subject that a lot (A LOT) of people have requested of us. Because it’s a bit out of our focus, we thought there’s no one better than Greg and Tom, experts in New York City history, to tell you about the city’s early 1900s women’s protest movements and how they are tragically tied to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
And, bonus! They interviewed Valery Paley, co-curator and director of New York’s Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History!"
The Bowery Boys also have their own page on this tragedy, just put up yesterday, one that includes a map of where the 146 victims lived (mostly young, Jewish and Italian women immigrants). Two of their podcasts are also included, one on the Triangle Fire itself and one on the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike.
