Governor Alfred E. Smith. (pucture credit 6.12)
The new immigrants, however, outnumbered the Irish, upon whom Tammany Hall depended. During the meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, outraged workers insisted conditions would not improve until they united for change “at the polls.” At the polls! Voting! That was language a Tammany boss could understand. The fire affected Italian and Jewish immigrants, the very people Tammany needed to keep its power. Clearly, it must reach out to them, do something for them—something big. So, Silent Charlie Murphy gave his blessing to the creation of a factory-investigating commission.17
Reform
The New York Factory Investigating Commission began work on June 30, 1911, under the “Tammany Twins,” Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner. Like Smith, Wagner was a child of the East Side, the son of a German-born janitor. The youngest of six children, he alone went to public school, then put himself through law school. Like Smith, he caught the eye of Tammany bosses, who got him elected to the state legislature, where he became speaker of the Senate (and later a U.S. senator). Although Wagner chaired the commission, Smith, the vice chair, was its powerhouse. Smith insisted on taking control. “We can’t have mistakes here,” he said, “we can’t make any blunders and I am going to sit here myself, I am not going to turn this over to somebody else.”18
The legislature gave the commission great power. It was to carry out the state’s, if not the nation’s, most thorough study of worker safety and health done until then. Not only must it study fire hazards, but sweatshops, sanitary conditions, work-related diseases, and child labor in factories. Better yet, it could call witnesses and have them testify under oath. Lying at a commission hearing could bring a fine and a jail term.
Clara Lemlich’s Later Life
Blackballed after the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, Clara Lemlich could not get another job in the New York garment industry. Instead, she became what we call today a “community organizer.” She founded the Wage Earners’ League, a group devoted to winning the right to vote for women. In 1913, she married Joe Shavelson, a printer, and had three children with him. As a homemaker, she spent all her free time organizing other homemakers to demand tenants’ rights. In 1917, she led a boycott of butcher shops against high meat prices. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, she helped the wives of unemployed workers raise money for community kitchens and nursery schools. When landlords evicted tenants for failure to pay rent, she held rallies to prevent evictions. In the 1960s, she protested against the spread of nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. She also supported Sojourners for Truth, an African American civil rights group, named for Sojourner Truth, a former slave and the first black woman orator to denounce slavery. Meanwhile, she lost her husband and moved to California to be near her married children. There, the widow entered an old-age home. Always an organizer, she helped the orderlies form a union. She died in 1982, at the age of ninety-six.
A cartoon about culpability for the Triangle Fire by Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, published in the days following the disaster (pucture credit 6.13)
To avoid slipups, the commission planned to move in two stages. First, it would collect accurate, hard-hitting facts. After that, it would use these facts as a basis for drafting laws to solve the problems it found. Smith named Frances Perkins the chief investigator, charged with naming her assistants. She chose well. Her staff included women with wide labor-organizing and workplace experience: Mary Dreier, Rose Schneiderman, and Clara Lemlich, among others.
Perkins was the driving force behind the investigating team. A can’t-say-no-to sort of person, she insisted, she demanded, she ordered, she bullied. She got her way. On one inspection tour, she made Robert Wagner crawl through a tiny hole in a wall that led to an ice-covered “fire escape” ending twelve feet above the ground. Another time, she took Al Smith to see hundreds of women coming off an all-night shift in a rope-making factory.
Commissioners also saw laundry workers standing ankle-deep in filthy water, bakery workers covered with body lice, candy makers wearing dresses smeared with chocolate, with gobs of chocolate hanging from their hair. They found child cannery workers—five-, six-, seven-year-olds—shelling peas at 4 a.m., their bleeding fingers bound with bits of rag. “We made sure that they saw the machinery that would scalp a girl or cut off a man’s arm. Hours so long that both men and women were depleted and exhausted became realities to them through seeing for themselves the dirty little factories,” said Perkins. Visiting a sweatshop, they asked a boy how long he had worked at hand-rolling cigarettes. The little fellow answered, “Ever since I was.”19
Garment factories seemed almost heavenly compared to chemical plants. Every day, all day, workers handled poisons such as lead, arsenic, phosphorus, and mercury, used in making paint and matches. Plants lacked ventilating systems, so workers inhaled chemical fumes and dust. Wherever one turned, there was danger. In a plant near Niagara Falls, a world-famous vacation resort, inspectors saw a worker “in a dark corner passing under an iron trough clumsily supported on wooden blocks and filled with hot caustic soda, every drop of which … would produce a painful and permanent injury.” Falling into such a trough from an overhead catwalk would dissolve a person in seconds, leaving only a few bones.20
(pucture credit 6.14)
The Fate of Tammany Hall
Reformers constantly battled Tammany Hall. In 1933, it suffered a stunning defeat when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, helped Fiorello La Guardia, a Republican, become mayor; he served from 1934 to 1945. Born to a Jewish mother and an Italian father, “the Little Flower,” the translation of his Italian first name, spoke three languages fluently. La Guardia would begin a speech in English, switch to perfect Italian, switch again to flawless Yiddish, ending in English. A crusader against corruption, he was bold and fearless against Tammany Hall. “It makes no difference if I burn my bridges behind me—I never retreat,” he said. True to his word, the Little Flower stripped the bosses of their power to award government contracts and give jobs to supporters. He cleared slums, built parks, and weeded corruption out of the police department. Corrupt bosses went to jail. Tammany never recovered. In 1943, it sold its East Seventeenth Street headquarters—to the ILGWU.
Factory visits upset the commissioners, as Perkins intended they should, particularly Al Smith. But there is nothing like seeing things for oneself. Those visits, she said, changed Smith’s “life, his outlook, the whole direction of his career.” They made him more of a mensch than ever before.21
During hearings, he left no doubt about where his sympathies lay. Once, a lawyer for building owners challenged the right of Perkins, only “a girl,” to testify. Al declared her an expert on real estate, winked, and whispered, “Now give ’em the best you’ve got.” Another time, a witness argued that night work for women was not so bad. That did it! Al bit down on his cigar and hissed, “You can’t tell me. I’ve seen these women. I’ve seen their faces. I’ve seen them.”22
The commission served four years, from 1911 to 1915. During that time, it investigated 3,385 workplaces, questioned 472 witnesses—owners, managers, workers—and took over 7,000 pages of testimony. Its findings advanced a new idea about the role of government in American life. The Founding Fathers had wanted government to keep out of people’s affairs as much as possible. As Thomas Jefferson said, “That government is best which governs least.” This was because the founders, having fought a revolution against British oppression, feared that a too-powerful, too-active government might lead to tyranny.
Al Smith and his fellow commissioners saw things differently. Government, they believed, could be a force for good. Safe, healthy working conditions were basic human rights that society should guarantee through government and laws. America was a democracy, though women could not yet vote. Even so, it was the duty of the people’s government to look after their well-being. “How is it wrong for the State to intervene with regard to the working conditions of people who work in the factories and mills?” Smi
th asked. “What did we set up the government for?”23
Information collected by the commission led to the drafting of laws. In all, the legislature passed thirty-four laws based on its findings. Those laws changed how we live today, in ways we seldom realize, because they seem so sensible. All you need do to see their results is to look around any factory, workshop, office building, school, or theater. New laws ordered lifesaving measures like fire drills, fire extinguishers, and automatic sprinklers. Doors must swing outward and stay unlocked during the workday. To prevent pileups, exit doors must have panic bars that open them outward with a hand or shoulder blow. Doors and windows leading to fire escapes have to be painted bright red and marked EXIT in large letters; a red light must be placed over all exits. To avoid overcrowding, room capacities are limited to a certain number of people per square foot.24
Other laws ordered safety guards and automatic shutoff devices on machinery, suitable lighting, and ventilation in factories. Proper sanitary conditions, such as toilets and washing facilities, became the rule. A compensation scheme paid benefits to workers injured or disabled on the job. Laws applying to women limited work hours (fifty-two hours a week), abolished night shifts, and banned working for a month after giving birth to a child. Children under fourteen were barred from working in canneries and tenements—that is, sweatshops. To enforce the laws, the state hired 123 full-time inspectors. Silent Charlie Murphy supported these laws; they helped Tammany Hall. “It is my observation,” he told Frances Perkins, that a certain law “made us many votes. I will tell the boys to give all the help they can.” If women ever won the right to vote, he added, “I hope you will remember that you would make a good Democrat.”25
While working for the commission, Frances Perkins met a young state senator named Franklin D. Roosevelt. No Tammany man, “FDR,” as friends called him, came from a different background than Al Smith. Born into a wealthy family, and a relative of former president Theodore Roosevelt, FDR got his education at a private high school and Harvard College. Yet, like the knight of the brown derby and the cocked cigar, he was a reformer. Perkins and FDR respected each other, becoming allies in the cause of reform. When FDR was elected governor in 1929, he made Perkins state commissioner of industry. He became president in 1933, during the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in American history. Upon taking office, he named Perkins secretary of labor and the first woman to serve in a cabinet post.
Frances Perkins as secretary of labor in the 1930s, the first female cabinet member in U.S. history. (pucture credit 6.15)
Names of the victims of the Triangle Fire are inscribed in chalk each year in front of their homes. (pucture credit 6.16)
Perkins had come a long way since death cast its shadow over that bright spring afternoon in 1911. The Triangle Fire set her on a path she would follow the rest of her life. From then on, she devoted her talents to bettering the lives of working people and children. Thanks to her efforts, the reforms that followed the Triangle Fire became models for national policies.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the fire, in 1961, Perkins dedicated a plaque in memory of the Triangle victims. New York University had bought the Asch Building years before for science classes, renaming it the Brown Building. Other than that, the building had changed little since the fire; today, it is a National Historic Landmark. The victims’ ordeal, she said, had ignited a movement for reform that benefited future generations. “They did not die in vain and we will never forget them.”26
She was right. On each anniversary of the fire, people gather at the Brown Building to pay their respects. Groups from neighborhood elementary schools wear red plastic firefighters’ hats. A fire truck raises its ladder in tribute, but not fully, to remind visitors of those who jumped to their deaths. In 2009, filmmaker Ruth Sergel formed a group called Chalk. On March 25, group members visit the places fire victims once lived. At each place, they chalk the person’s name on the sidewalk. “It’s not permanent,” said Sergel. “It washes away, but you know what? It’s going to come back next year.”27
VII
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.… Only by continual oversight can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
—Wendell Phillips, Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1853)
Of Rags and Gangsters
Nothing in this world stays the same forever. Sure as day follows night, time brings change. Generation follows generation. People age and pass from the scene, making way for others. New problems arise, calling for new solutions. The only way to preserve past gains is by eternal vigilance and the good sense to make needed changes in time. To understand what this means, we must look beyond the Triangle Fire and the reforms that followed it.
In the 1920s, workers who made clothing for both men and women split into two opposing camps. Each New York garment union fought its own civil war. Radical workers, favoring drastic changes, felt that past gains were no longer enough. Wage increases had failed to keep up with rising prices for food, clothing, and housing. Nor had factory owners yet made all the safety improvements required by law. To win further gains, radicals favored a general strike. Moderates, however, were cautious, not inclined to take unnecessary risks.
In June 1926, radicals gained the upper hand, shutting down the entire New York garment industry. For twenty-six weeks, fifty thousand strikers walked picket lines. The unions’ joint strike committee spent $3.5 million, a huge sum, equal to over $420 million in 2009 dollars. Lost sales cost manufacturers millions more. The settlement left both sides broke.
Gangster “Legs” Diamond (far right), alongside his two attorneys, 1931. (picture credit 7.1)
The strike was nothing like the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand in 1909. This time it was total war. There was nothing noble about it, no uplifting speeches, no heroes defying brutal police officers and corrupt Tammany judges. Both sides turned to the underworld for help. Employers hired Jack “Legs” Diamond and his goons to protect them and their scabs, and beat up strikers and union leaders. The unions paid the “king of the East Side gunmen,” Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen, and his thugs to protect picketers and union leaders, and batter employers and scabs.1
As the violence grew, union leaders came to Abraham Rothstein for advice. Called “Abe the Just” by Governor Al Smith, he was a highly respected textile dealer who gave generously to charity. Although he could not help the union leaders, he sent them to an unnamed garment manufacturer he knew. This man said they had gone to the wrong Rothstein. They should speak to Abe the Just’s disgraced son, Arnold, otherwise known as the “Great Brain.”2
Arnold Rothstein had not crossed the Atlantic Ocean in steerage or gone through Ellis Island. American-born, he grew up in a town house on the Upper East Side. In his early teens, the thrills of the Bowery drew him downtown like a magnet; it was only a short ride on the elevated railway. He began to visit pool halls and gambling dens. “Big Tim” Sullivan, Tammany’s boss of the Lower East Side, liked the scrawny kid. “Rothstein’s a good boy, and smart,” he said. Closely tied to gangsters, the boss had an eye for criminal talent.3
Big Tim helped Rothstein, advising and opening doors for him. Like any gangster, the youngster believed that people were either hunters or prey, jerks or wiseguys, and thought himself better than “crumbs,” who worked for a living. Starting as a gambler, he expanded his activities into loan-sharking (lending money at high interest rates) and the narcotics trade. Rothstein sent agents to Europe and Asia to buy and smuggle opium into the United States. After being refined into heroin, a highly addictive drug, raw opium that cost Rothstein $1,000 a pound brought a profit of $150,000. Always a “gentleman,” he never soiled his hands, never beat or shot anyone, but paid others to do his dirty work. By 1926, he had become the father of organized crime, large-scale criminal activities by groups of gangsters, in America. In effect, the Great Brain was the first “godfather.”4
&n
bsp; Rothstein made two telephone calls. As if by magic, Legs Diamond and Little Augie Orgen withdrew their thugs. What did he tell them? Surely not “Be nice, fellows, and don’t hurt anyone.” Most likely, he told them not to pass up the chance of a lifetime. Although they had withdrawn before the strike ended, they still had their contacts with union leaders and manufacturers. With the end of the strike, they could use these contacts to worm their way into the industry. Hiring them in the first place, therefore, was the worst mistake each side could have made. For it bears out the proverb “He needs a long spoon who sups with the devil.” Translation: Do not get too close to certain people, as keeping bad company will get you into trouble. Not only the garment industry, but every industry that called in gangsters to settle labor disputes eventually found itself in deep trouble. For, after the strike, the gangsters could keep their hooks buried in the unions and the manufacturers. So, while a gunman killed the Great Brain over a gambling debt in 1928, he had guaranteed that the garment industry would have no peace.
Arnold Rothstein, aka the “Great Brain” of the New York underworld, in 1928. (picture credit 7.2)
In the decade after the Triangle Fire, the industry began to leave the Lower East Side. It found quarters in modern, low-rent buildings in the Garment District on the West Side of Manhattan, from Thirty-Fourth Street to Fortieth Street, between Broadway and Ninth Avenue. The Garment District was hard hit during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, in 1941, after Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, the country entered the Second World War. With vast armies to supply, the United States needed mountains of uniforms, underwear, socks, backpacks, tents, parachutes, and other cloth items. High-paying jobs became plentiful. These boom-time conditions lasted throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, however, signs of serious trouble appeared in the garment industry.
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