The 1911 Triangle Fire
For those of you who are interested in mill history and factory history, please do not overlook the circumstances and results of the fire that occurred in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911. As on the 9-11-2001 day that has lived in infamy, workers could be seen jumping out of the building to their deaths … better than being burned alive?
David Von Drehle wrote a book titled, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. This book will reverberate with any reader who has immigrant factory workers in their family or who just loves the details of labor history and/or accounts with a human edge.
In all, 146 people lost their lives. You see, their workplace was on an upper level of a building, so high that the ladders of New York’s fire engines could not reach. Moreover, the workers had been “locked in” without knowing it.
Large mills in the U.S. seem to have waivered between a paternalistic attitude, initially, and a punitive one in light of labor disputes and strikes. The bottom line for any “agent” was to maximize profit for the mill owners. It was not until someone with a camera, Lewis Hines, began taking photos of children at work, and exhibiting them publicly, was awareness of the evils of child labor even noticed.
Children were a commodity on the farm … in the workplace. No matter that they died on a regular basis from emphysema, pneumonia, and cancer, after breathing in cotton linters in a completely enclosed, sealed work environment, like Slater Mill, the first industrialized cotton spinning center, set up by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The pretty yellow building on a fast-flowing river is deceptively appealing, not belying the human devastation wreaked within the walls of the mill.
Mill settings picked the most needy of society for their workers, those without a voice: children, women and immigrants. Not much changed from the earliest mill to the shirtwaist factory tragedy of the twentieth century as you shall readily see, if you read Von Drehle’s riveting account. I read this book when it was first published in 2003 and can recommend it, without reservation.
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
