The Fire Last Time

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 is one of the more inassimilable disaster stories of the past hundred years, killing 146 workers (mostly women) who couldn’t flee the manufacturing space on the top floors of a ten-story building just off Washington Square because the doors were locked to prevent pilferage. In “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” Washington Post journalist David von Drehle sandwiches his detailed and thoroughly harrowing account of the thirty-minute conflagration between the stories of two beatings.

The first beating was of a draper and International Ladies Garment Workers Union organizer, Clara Lemlich, by a couple of toughs. They’d been hired to put a dent in Lemlich’s leadership of a 1909 strike against the socialist-leaning factory owner Louis Leiserson, who had reneged on a promise to hire only union help. As von Drehle tells it, the garment industry’s entrenched resistance to workplace and labor reform was led by Triangle Shirtwaist owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. The two had a history of harsh dealing with uppity employees and a record of timely fires on insured goods.

Faced with striking seamstresses, Blanck and Harris brought muscled strikebreakers and corrupt judges to the fight–when things took a dramatic turn. Judges tossing striking teenage seamstresses into jail cells with common criminals drew the attention of the popular press and of the fabulous and wealthy Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, whose upper-class Women’s Trade Union League undertook to support and fund the waistmakers’ strike. The garment workers’ genteel allies were operating from social contempt for the garment manufacturers, while the workers, of course, mostly needed to survive.

AND MANY DID SURVIVE, if not on the day of the fire. Von Drehle attaches a name and where possible a story to every one of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory’s victims. The biographical summaries provide the occasion for a reimagination of everyday life in the immigrants’ Lower East Side tenements. In this account, their lives were difficult and uncomfortable, but far from wretched or benighted.

Blanck and Harris may be the villains of the piece, but they rose out of the same circumstances as their workers. They built a successful garment factory on family loyalties, low wages, and long hours for their employees, and the fickle favor of fashion. When public outrage brought them to trial for keeping the exit doors locked, they were defended by another up-from-the-shtetl immigrant named Max Steuer. In the courtroom drama that frames the fire, Steuer the super-lawyer flummoxed judge and jury into granting an acquittal, despite the evidence. That was the second beating.

But the result, curiously, was the reverse of a victory for the manufacturers. The failure of the justice system to satisfy the public ended up politicizing the immigrants. Their votes delivered Tammany Hall from the manufacturers into the hands of the unions. In von Drehle’s reading, from the Triangle fire’s ashes arose twentieth-century progressive politics, including labor reform, women’s rights, and workplace safety.

Four years ago, the contrarian columnist John Tierney provoked a historians’ clash when he complained, in a New York Times television review, about a recent documentary that had depicted immigrants as “brave souls who crossed an ocean–only to become ‘hapless employees’ unable to resist ‘nightmarish’ exploitation in ‘brutal, dehumanizing’ garment factories.” Tierney argued that the truth ran in the other direction: New York’s garment industry was dynamic, and a worker could always “walk across the street to a competing company.”

Tierney’s case was rebutted, in turn, by Mike Wallace, coauthor of “Gotham,” and the whole discussion makes fascinating reading. But the least satisfying aspect of von Drehle’s “Triangle” is that it reads like a PBS documentary script: vignettes and still photographs the video camera pans across while voiceovers read contemporary documents and historians interpolate from the study. A few bars on the upright piano. Another vignette and photograph.

THOUGH VON DREHLE’S HEART is clearly on the side of the workers, he makes it plain that the labor troubles, the garment industry, the tragedy, and the trial were in a very real sense a family affair. Almost everyone involved came from the same neighborhood, most were Jewish, and everyone involved possessed some strength. The bosses had money and all that could buy; the workers had personal courage and communal strength; the lawyers had their wits; the politicians their grasp of opportunity; and the press sold papers. The clash of interests is never a clash of the weak.

I read the Triangle fire story another way. Innumerable legends–and the self-image of American progressivism–have sprung from the ashes of that fire. And legend smiles, the Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik once wrote, while the law frowns. But frowning law can distill the wisdom of a lot of living.

Here, all the safety rules and labor reforms instituted in the aftermath of the Triangle catastrophe can be compressed to a single sentence: Don’t lock the workroom doors.

Laurance Wieder’s latest book is “Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms.”