Uprising

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  The Russian Jews who came to America were fleeing not just poverty, but religious persecution as well. In Russia they faced severe limits on where they could live and what jobs they could hold. And repeatedly during the late 1800s and early 1900s, mobs of Russian peasants slaughtered whole communities of Jews, in pogroms that the government did little to stop and sometimes actively encouraged.

  Girls like Bella and Yetta who came to America faced additional challenges because of their gender. Among those welcoming them to the United States were factory owners eager to exploit their desperation, ignorance, and subservience. As one factory owner bluntly put it, “I want no experienced girl, but only those greenhorns (new immigrants) . . . just come from the old country. And I let them work hard, like the devil, for less wages.” Girls weren’t supposed to complain, they weren’t supposed to speak out, they weren’t supposed to think that they might have rights of their own.

  Those attitudes make the story of the shirtwaist strike all the more amazing. Although both males and females participated in the strike, it quickly became known as an uprising of girls. The Triangle workers were among the first shirtwaist makers to go on strike in the fall of 1909, after the owners resorted to locking out their own employees in an attempt to kill the fledgling union. Like Rahel, some of their workers had had union experience in the old country, but most of the strikers were leaping into the unknown when they picked up their first picket sign. The broader union the Triangle workers were part of Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, had just been formed in 1906 and had only one hundred members by 1909. So male labor leaders could perhaps be excused for thinking that girls wouldn’t make good strikers.

  How wrong they were.

  At the huge Local 25 union meeting at the Cooper Union on November 22, 1909, it was indeed a female, Clara Lemlich, who made the call for a general strike. At least twenty thousand workers—perhaps even more than forty thousand—from hundreds of New York City shops walked off the job within the next week. Most of the smaller manufacturers were forced to settle quickly, agreeing to closed shops, better hours, higher wages, and similar demands. But the Triangle owners and several other large manufacturers dug in their heels. At several times during the strike, they hired thugs and prostitutes to beat the strikers. They also bribed the police to look the other way, join in the beatings, and/or to arrest the strikers whether they’d broken any laws or not. (I found it a bizarre juxtaposition that the date of Wilbur Wright’s historic flight up the Hudson River—October 4, 1909— was also apparently the date of the first beatings of the Triangle strikers. The two events give such opposite perspectives on human progress.)

  Meanwhile, the new hires and the other employees who crossed the picket line and continued working—the “scabs,” as the strikers called them—found a much more pleasant environment than usual. Besides special foods, music, and dancing at lunchtime, some workers even got taxi service, and were picked up and dropped off each day by automobile. For poor immigrant girls in 1909, that must have seemed like the ultimate in luxury.

  At the other extreme, workers at some factories told of priests coming in during their lunch hour, and telling them that they would go to hell if they joined the strike. Similarly, one judge told a worker, “You are on strike against God.”

  Still, the strikers persisted, even as weeks passed and the arrests and beatings continued and autumn faded into a brutally cold winter. But they weren’t alone. The manufacturers must have been horrified to hear about the suffragists, society women, and college girls rallying to the cause. (And I have to believe that there must have been many wealthy businessmen, like Jane’s father, who were shocked by their wives’ and daughters’ latest charitable endeavor.)

  The New York Times of December 19, 1909, mocked the wealthy females’ interest in the strike as springing from a “‘you-a-girl-and-me-a-girl’ spirit . . . The factory girl makes shirtwaists and the college girl wears them.” But the wealthy women and girls really did seem to feel a bond of sisterhood that crossed economic lines. And suffragists saw the call for female workers’ rights as being very closely related to their own longing for the right to vote.

  The American suffrage movement was at a low point in its history before the shirtwaist strike. Women in a few other countries—New Zealand, Australia, Finland—had already won the right to vote; in England, militant suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst were constantly making headlines by smashing windows, chaining themselves to railings, and staging hunger strikes in jail. But the American movement was floundering after its strongest leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, died in 1902 and 1906, respectively.

  Still, the suffrage movement had recently gained the support of the wealthy but controversial Alva Belmont, and she quickly latched on to the shirtwaist strike as one of her pet causes. If you wanted publicity, money, or daring ideas in 1909, Alva Belmont was a good person to have on your side. A consummate social climber, she’d married a Vanderbilt, married off her daughter to the ninth Duke of Marlborough, divorced her husband, and married another wealthy man who seemed to be the true love of her life. In 1909 she was a new widow, emerging from mourning and eager to find an outlet for her money, energies, and skill. She sat for hours at night court and put up her own house to bail out shirtwaist girls (its $400,000 value then being equivalent to about $8.6 million today). She rented the Hippodrome amphitheater in early December, drawing seven thousand people to listen to strikers, socialists, suffragists, and assorted other speakers. She organized the automobile parade in mid-December that brought even greater attention to the strike.

  Meanwhile, Anne Morgan, daughter of financier John Pierpont Morgan—who was so wealthy and powerful, he’d once saved the United States government from bankruptcy—got involved in the strike too, through the Women’s Trade Union League. Anne Morgan organized a fund-raiser at the exclusive Colony Club, bringing strikers who barely had enough money to eat, to tell their stories to the wives and daughters of millionaires. With college girls and new college graduates like Violet Pike and Inez Milholland donating their time and money as well, the strikers had some very fervent, wealthy, and powerful allies.

  Unfortunately, the alliance with the so-called “Mink Brigade” began falling apart almost as quickly as it formed. Anne Morgan and many other wealthy strike supporters were horrified by the Carnegie Hall rally on January 2; it was as if they’d suddenly discovered that they’d been—gasp!—associating with socialists. Morgan patronizingly chose to believe that the socialists were taking advantage of the poor, innocent, ignorant shirtwaist girls; socialists responded that the shirtwaist girls were in greater danger from the “pretended friendship” of the rich. Some of the shirtwaist strikers did come to resent the wealthy women, particularly when they seemed to be getting all of the attention. They also wondered if the suffragists really cared about them at all, or if they were just using the strike to further their own cause.

  By January, only a small number of workers were still on strike—estimates range from five hundred to about three thousand. Some wealthy women and college girls continued their support to the very end, along with many on the Lower East Side who’d helped all along: landlords who stopped collecting rent and even provided bail money; grocery store owners who extended credit; theater owners who gave benefit plays; even strikers from settled shops who donated part of their wages back to the cause. But resources were strained. No matter how brave and fervent they were, the shirtwaist strikers could not continue forever living on two dollars a week from the strike fund.

  The strike limped to an end in February. Labor leaders tried to portray the final outcome as a victory—and included Triangle on their published list of settled shops—but the Triangle workers saw few improvements, and never received their longed-for union recognition. Even some of the shops that had settled early were already breaking their promises. Still, the strike did show very dramatically that the female garment workers could organize and strike, a
nd it paved the way for later union victories and workplace reforms. The strike is also often credited with reviving the suffrage movement (though it took another decade, until 1920, for women to win the vote nationwide).

  The Triangle fire occurred just thirteen months after the strike ended. Eyewitnesses immediately made the connection between the burning, falling workers and the brave strikers. As William Gunn Shepherd, a news reporter who happened to be walking through Washington Square just as the fire broke out, put it:

  “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.”

  A total of one hundred forty-six workers—one hundred twenty-three females and twenty-three males—were killed in the Triangle fire. Workplace deaths were all too common in the early 1900s; worker safety was a priority for very few factory owners at the time. But so many died in the Triangle fire that it stood as the worst workplace disaster in New York City for the next ninety years, until September 11, 2001.

  The fire is believed to have started with a match or cigarette butt in the overflowing scrap bin under a cutter’s table on the eighth floor. Smokers had caused fires at Triangle before, so even though no one enforced the posted signs forbidding smoking, they did keep water buckets on shelves along the walls. (That caution didn’t extend to making sure that the firehoses in the stairwells worked.) All the other smoking-related fires had been quickly doused; on March 25, 1911, the workers weren’t so lucky.

  The conditions on the eighth floor of the Triangle factory that day could hardly have been more ideal for helping a fire spread quickly. The wind blew up the elevator shaft and sped the flames along, drawing them from the scrap bin full of thin, highly flammable fabric, to the cutters’ tables spread with layers and layers of the same fabric, to the flimsy paper patterns hanging overhead. And then the flames leaped to the rows of sewing machines, with all their piles of shirtwaists and shirtwaist pieces, their crowds of terrified workers.

  The Triangle workers had never had a fire drill. It’s likely that many of them didn’t realize there was a fire escape, didn’t even know that there was any exit except the elevators behind the Greene Street partition—close to where the ever-growing fire was now burning. The conditions at Triangle were ideal for panic as well as fire.

  But as bad as the situation was on the eighth floor, workers there had a big advantage over their fellow employees on the ninth and tenth floors: on the eighth floor, they knew right away that the fire had started.

  Bookkeeper Dinah Lipschitz, the factory manager’s cousin, did try to send a message from her desk on the eighth floor to the tenth floor. Oddly, the first method she tried was the telautograph, which was sort of a bad, early-1900s version of a fax machine. It didn’t work right, and Mary Alter, sitting at her desk on the tenth floor, decided to ignore it. When Lipschitz finally thought to use the telephone instead—a few, dangerously wasted moments later—Alter left her desk to notify others on the tenth floor rather than calling anyone on the ninth. So the ninth-floor workers had no warning until the waves of flame and smoke began rolling in through their windows.

  It’s no surprise that most of the dead came from the ninth floor. Maybe the biggest surprise is that so many of them survived.

  Some did manage to scramble down the substandard, inadequate fire escape—at least down to a lower floor the flames hadn’t reached. But the fire escape was quickly blocked by the warped eighth-floor shutters, causing a logjam of panicked workers pushing and shoving and desperate to get out. Under their weight, the whole fire escape collapsed, sending about two dozen people plunging to their death at the bottom of the smoky airshaft.

  Other ninth-floor workers managed to make it to the Greene Street stairs before the flames cut off that exit. If they knew to go up to the roof with the tenth-floor workers, they had a good chance of surviving. But the ones who staked their fate on the Washington Place stairs were doomed. At the eighth-floor door onto that stairway, workers told of a machinist named Louis Brown turning a key in the lock, pulling the door open, and letting them escape. No one showed up with a key at the ninth-floor door.

  Oddly, many of the workers who survived took an escape route that should have seemed insanely risky: the elevators. Two elevator operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo, showed immense bravery, returning again and again to the scene of the fire, carrying down a dozen or more workers with each trip. Descending from the ninth and tenth floors meant passing the eighth-floor flames, already licking into the elevator shaft. Still, many workers who couldn’t fit into the elevators threw themselves onto the roofs of the elevator cars or tried to slide down the elevator cables. Some of them survived too, although nineteen bodies were recovered from the elevator shaft after the fire. Altogether, Zito and Mortillalo are credited with rescuing more than one hundred fifty workers, about half of all the survivors.

  Once the elevators stopped running, the Greene Street stairs were blocked, and the fire escape had collapsed, the ninth-floor workers who hadn’t escaped were down to two choices: jump or burn.

  The fire department received the first report of the fire at 4:45 p.m., and had people on the scene by 4:47 p.m. New York City prided itself on its up-to-date, modern fire department. Even the immigrants knew this: Eastern European Jews assured newcomers who’d witnessed pogroms in the old country, “In America, they don’t let you burn.” But in a city already packed with skyscrapers, the fire department had no ladders that reached above the level of about a sixth or seventh floor. The firemen did have nets, and that must have given some small sense of hope to the workers shoving their way out the windows, desperate to escape the flames. But it was false hope. Even, say, a hundred-pound teenaged girl tumbling down from a ninth-floor window would have hit the net with a force of more than a ton. The firemen put their nets away after a few moments, but the bodies kept falling. News reporter William Gunn Shepherd counted sixty-two people who died hitting the ground.

  The firemen had the fire under control by 5:15 p.m., barely a half an hour after it started. That was when they began discovering the charred bodies on the ninth floor: some fifty corpses crammed near the Washington Place door, huddled in the cloakroom, or scattered elsewhere in the room.

  The Triangle fire was horrific and appalling, with a few moments of heroic bravery and miraculous rescue. The workers and executives who escaped to the roof were fortunate that the building next door was being painted, so New York University law students were easily able to find ladders to lower down to the Triangle building roof. One student reportedly carried an unconscious worker up the ladder by her hair—which must have been terrifying ten stories above the ground, in the midst of smoke and flames. On the other side of the roof, Triangle co-owner Isaac Harris managed to climb up the brick wall of another adjoining building, break a skylight with his bare hands, and find a janitor to get a ladder to lower down there, as well. Factory manager Samuel Bernstein—who was anything but a beloved boss under normal circumstances—seems to have been practically an action-movie hero during the fire, saving lives on both the eighth and tenth floors, and on the roof.

  Harris’s and Bernstein’s courage made co-owner Max Blanck look even more cowardly. Blanck had his two daughters there to worry about, and he did manage to snatch his screaming, terrified five-year-old out of the elevator when the panicked crowd swept her out of his reach. But after that, he mostly just let others guide him and his daughters to safety.

  The most incredible thing about the Triangle fire, though, is not the fire itself, or the deaths or the amazing rescues. It is what followed: The fire changed history. By twenty-first-century standards, the conditions that led to so many of the deaths at Triangle are hard to believe. But the Triangle fire is a big part of the reason that we have a lot of those twenty-first-century standards.

  The outcry a
gainst the fire and the factory owners was practically instantaneous, even in a world without CNN and internet updates and twenty-four-hour news. Many who’d united in support of the strike came together again to mourn and protest. An estimated four hundred thousand people showed up for the funeral parade for seven victims of the fire who were never identified or claimed.

  New York City newspapers were relentless in their coverage of the tragedy. Politically ambitious publisher William Randolph Hearst used his paper, The American, to blame city officials; he set up his own commission to suggest new laws for safer factories. Others weren’t so sure about who deserved the blame. The Evening Journal published a drawing of a gallows on its front page, labeled, “This Ought to Fit Somebody; Who Is He?”

  In mid-April, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were arrested and charged with manslaughter. By the time of the trial eight months later, the district attorney’s office had narrowed the case to focus on only one death: that of a worker, Margaret Schwartz, who’d died near the Washington Place door on the ninth floor. The plan was to show a direct link between Schwartz’s death and the Triangle owners’ policy of keeping that door locked.

  But the defense attorney, Max Steuer, skillfully managed to throw doubt on workers’ testimony about the locked door, on Schwartz’s chances of survival even if she’d made it through the door, and on the authenticity of the lock itself, when the prosecution produced it. Both men were acquitted.

  Yet several suspicious details weren’t fully explored in the trial. Two years later, a series of articles in Collier’s magazine looked at a different aspect of the Triangle owners’ potential guilt: their previously cozy relationship with fire. Harris and Blanck had collected hefty insurance payments for fires at Triangle and another of their factories, the Diamond Waist Company, five times in the decade leading up to 1911. Conveniently, all those fires occurred outside of work hours, at the end of busy seasons (usually in April), when the companies were saddled with a potentially crippling amount of extra inventory. From two fires in 1902 alone, Harris and Blanck collected more than $32,000, equivalent today to about $726,000. At the time of the 1911 fire, the two men were carrying $200,000 in insurance on their factory, estimated to be about $80,000 more than the factory was worth.