Statistically Insignificant

The victims of the Triangle fire were not anonymous. They were the workers who had gone out in the so-called “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” a few months before, the strike that led to the founding of the first industrial union with a predominantly female membership, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). When the Triangle women walked out, activists in the suffrage crusade – including some obscenely wealthy women, J.P. Morgans and Vanderbilts- the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) – which was made up of progressive, upper-middle class white women –  joined them, helping them picket, post bail and ward off hired thugs. It was a rare moment of sorority, where women rich and poor, WASP and immigrant, Jew and gentile, Republicans, Democrats and Socialists, United. Most of the employers settled with the ILGWU. A few of the biggest firms held out, including Triangle. Triangle Factory owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck would not sign. Part of the new contract in other factories was for workers to have Saturday afternoons off. Triangle workers put in a full day on Saturday.

On a Saturday a few months later, this happened: (WARNING: May cause trauma to those with feelings). 

On a quiet Saturday in March in 1911, the Triangle factory was readying to close for the week. On the 8th floor, a small fire was spotted in a wastebasket. Workers unraveled a hose from a stairwell fixture, but no water came out. As workers frantically struggled with pails of water, the fire hopscotched to other waste bins and within seconds began to race across the 100-foot-long loft, snaring the paper patterns hanging from strings overhead. In an instant, the still Spring afternoon descended into madness. Workers scrambled to the one of two elevators, where heroic elevator operators made trips up and down, bringing workers to safety. The workers that were unable to cram into the elevator attempted to slide down the cable or they jumped down the shaft to their deaths. Soon, the elevators, weighed down by the crush of bodies and could no longer rise. Workers who made it to a second elevator, pried open the doors only to tumble down the shaft to their death. Those who made it to the ninth floor fire escape didn’t fair better as – for all practical purposes – the fire escape led nowhere. The girls that scrambled out onto it were killed when the fire escape bent under their weight and collapsed. Workers who pressed onto a second “fire escape” in a rear air shaft found their way blocked by swinging metal shutters and they died there (had they made it all the way down, they would have found that it ended treacherously, a full floor above a basement skylight). And those who actually made it to the exit doors died there, as when they frantically grabbed at the door knob, they found it was locked. The exit doors had been deliberately locked by the factory owners. “To prevent theft”. “(a worker-survivor said afterwards: “What are we gonna do, steal a shirtwaist? Who wanted a shirtwaist?”).

Hundreds of New Yorkers passing by that afternoon watched from 9 floors below on Washington Place and Greene Street, as young women hung out of windows and climbed onto ledges, hoping to be rescued by fire trucks that had responded quickly. They waited only to watch the ladders and hoses stretch to the sixth floor and stop – they were too short to reach them. In the end, when flames began to singe their hair and lick at their skirts, they chose to jump, rather than burn alive. In twos and threes they jumped, hand in hand—  embracing before leaping to the sidewalk, 54 of them altogether. The eyewitness accounts are many and harrowing.

One traumatized eyewitness said:

“The last workers were trapped against the blackened windows, burning to death before our very eyes. The glass they were pressed against shattered. Down came the bodies in the shower, burning, smoking, flaming bodies with disheveled hair trailing upward”.

Socialist Louis Waldman, later a New York state assemblyman, described the grim scene in his memoirs published in 1944:

“…..Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies. The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.”

William G. Shepard, was walking by chance and a gave this harrowing account (excerpted)

…I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud–then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.

. . . . I looked up to the seventh [actually ninth] floor. There was a living picture in each window—four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. “Call the firemen,” they screamed—scores of them. “Get a ladder,” cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as were we who stood on the sidewalk. I couldn’t help thinking of that. We cried to them not to jump. We heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance. The other sirens sounded from several directions. “Here they come,” we yelled. “Don’t jump; stay there.”

One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. I didn’t notice whether those above watched her drop because I had turned away. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces.

The firemen began to raise a ladder. Others took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl’s body flashed through it. The thuds were just as loud, it seemed, as if there had been no net there. It seemed to me that the thuds were so loud that they might have been heard all over the city. I had counted ten. Then my dulled senses began to work automatically. I noticed things that it had not occurred to me before to notice. Little details that the first shock had blinded me to. I looked up to see whether those above watched those who fell. I noticed that they did; they watched them every inch of the way down and probably heard the roaring thuds that we heard.

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.

Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward—the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud—dead, thud—dead—together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best.

We found out later that, in the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to even help the girl he loved to a quicker death, after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity, but her thud—dead came first.

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and deaths.

I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking—flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire.

The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.. . .The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.

In 18 minutes – a brief, harrowing moment in time – it was over. It happened so fast that some women were found – as skeletons – still hunched over their sewing machines, the fire having incinerated them before they had the time to stand up. The 146 corpses were transported to the Charities Pier on 26th Street and lined up in plain wooden coffins for relatives to identify. Among there were 14 year old Kate Leone who lived on east 11th street; 15 year old Ida Brodsky who had emigrated from Russia just 9 months before the fire; Concetta Prestifillippo, 22, born in Italy and lived on Cornelia Street; 22 year old Violet Schochet from Austria and Jenne Franco, 16, Kate’s neighbor on East 11th street. The victims, their families, the passers by who witnessed the desperate leaps from windows, all had those odious images of pain, terror and death seared in their mind’s eye, reeling in numbed grief at the atrocity that could have been so easily averted. They gathered in churches, synagogues, and in the streets, conservatives and progressive and union press alike, demanding restitution, justice, action to safeguard the vulnerable and the oppressed. At trial, the Triangle slum lords were not found guilty any wrongdoing and individual civil suits brought against Harris and Blanck netted an insurance payout at about $400 per lost life. Of that $400, Harris and Blanck paid out $75 dollars per life, a profit of $375 per dead employee. Just a few days after the fire, their factory was already up and operating in a new facility, that was not fireproof, had no fire escapes or emergency exits, that was buried under 6 feet of rubbish, with highly flammable scraps kept in non-regulation, flammable wicker baskets, with locked exit doors. For these infractions it was fined 20 dollars. The 146 victims are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed. A full list of the victims

Out of the ashes of the tragedy of the Triangle fire came historic and important reforms for workers, American labor policy and workplace safety laws that laid the groundwork for FDR’s New Deal. These are the same reforms that today’s fake politicians – installed in governors mansions across the country by soulless billionaires – are dismantling right now. Do you think with today’s modernity and moral compass that the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire could not happen today? That those were “different times”? On December 14, 2010, workers at a pants factory in Bangladesh were forced to leap to their deaths out of 9th floor windows when a fire broke out and the exit doors were locked to prevent “theft” of “goods” (pants).  The Hameem factory fire claimed the lives of 29 poor people, mostly women, working for staggeringly low wages. It also destroyed 400,000 pairs of GAP’s children’s denim shorts. That’s because The Hameem factory makes the pants for GAP Kids.

The Hameem workers made $27 per month OR roughly the same wage that the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company made in 1911. 100 years ago. Even factoring in the differences in the economies, the Triangle workers were far better off. The people who make your kid’s pants earn so little they have trouble getting enough caloric intake to keep working without passing out from exhaustion. And they are so statistically insignificant that the fact that they were burned to death making GAP crap was virtually unreported in the US media. Triangle Fire comparisons to 21st century factory working conditions in Bangladesh. In 1911, Americans didn’t  stand for it. They fought – not in their own self interest – but for the rights of strangers, and they won decency rights for the most vulnerable people that have since help shape our nation. For 100 years we have benefited from the Triangle workers horrific deaths. They stood as a symbol of what the country “once was”.

The head of the Hameem pants factory is a skinny fiend named AK Mr. Azad, who, despite 29 dead, has his place in the global economy secure, his status unthreatened as a champion of the expanding global place of Bangladesh as a source for American pants manufacturing. He is also head of the Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce. A preposterous conflict of interest, you say? America’s own Azad, Don Blankenship, the right-wing activist thug who runs the country’s largest coal company (Massey), also sits on the boards of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association. He used Massey’s ties to the industry-dominated Bush administration to paper over his own egregious environmental health and safety violations, then rewarded Repugs with massive donations after the company avoided paying billions in fines for the 2000 Martin County coal slurry disaster. In 2006, a fire broke out in the Aracoma Alma mine, burning two men alive. Blankenship branded the fire “statistically insignificant.” Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co. agreed to plead guilty to 10 criminal charges and paid a paltry $2 million “fine”. Then, in what’s become a grim Appalachian ritual, the Upper Big Branch mine exploded, killing 29 human Americans, the country’s worst mine disaster in four decades. The U.S. Department of Labor reports ninety-eight percent of Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death.

I guess it’s a new Gilded Age, where parodic tycoons like the “Koch Brothers” and the government at both the state and national level are gleeful co-conspirators in crime. Where reptiles like Scott Walker slink from the primordial ooze and into public office with wrecking-ball policies. Without flinching, Walker threatens his own good citizens, illegally brings in the National Guard to bar the doors of the Statehouse from his own people, seeks to strip the civil rights of hard-working Americans, ignoring both the will of his people and the interpretation of the agency he is trying to use to circumvent the courts. Bazen and dictatorial, governing as though there is no judicial system in this country, literally aiming to create a state without judges, public services, or workers’ rights, all in the name of “Liberty”. Over at the Maine Dept. of Servitude and Impoverishment, Maine Governor Paul LePage chose to honor the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire by removing a mural depicting 100 years of Maine workers, and by “renaming” a conference room named after American hero Frances Perkins (one of the most important figures in US history period. Male or Female. After actually witnessing the Triangle fire as a young woman – “seared on my mind as well as my heart – a never to be forgotten reminder of why I had to spend my life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy” – she devoted her life to the cause of workers, was the first woman to hold a presidential cabinet post, and helped lead the US out of the Great Depression and into the New Deal). It will now be referred to as the  Grover Norquist Drown’em in the Bathtub Room.