Uprising
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The Collier’s articles were careful to point out that neither man was ever charged with arson, and certainly no one was implying that they would have purposely started the 1911 fire with the factory full of workers—and with Blanck’s own daughters visiting on the tenth floor. But the insurance system was designed to reward big purchasers even if they were rotten risks. So factory owners in the fickle fashion business had economic incentives to make their factories more, not less, likely to catch fire. The ragman who normally carried off the fabric scraps from Triangle testified at the trial that he hadn’t been there since mid-January. So by the end of March there were two-and-a-half months’ worth of highly flammable scraps lying around; the factory was ready, perhaps, for another off-hours fire if the owners decided they could make more in insurance money than from selling their shirtwaists. If Harris and Blanck had installed sprinklers or any other fire-safety apparatus, that might have stopped their useful fires, as well as the potentially fatal ones. The Collier’s articles made it clear that the insurance system encouraged business owners to play with fire—and workers were the ones who got burned.
Because Harris and Blanck faced no direct punishment, the public clamored all the more for government action. Activists worried that politics as usual would kill the reform movement, as had happened so often before. But, under pressure, New York’s governor appointed a Factory Investigating Commission with unprecedented powers. Within two years there were laws about automatic sprinklers in high-rise buildings, mandatory fire drills in large businesses, requirements for doors being unlocked and swinging outward. And there were other protections for workers, especially women and children. The entire state Department of Labor was changed to enforce those protections.
One of the people involved in the Factory Investigating Commission was a young woman named Frances Perkins. Coincidentally, on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, she had been having tea at a friend’s home on Washington Square. Hearing fire alarms, they went to investigate. So Perkins saw everything firsthand: the smoke and flames, the falling bodies, the grieving families. Two decades later, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose her as his Secretary of Labor—making her the first female cabinet officer in American history—she carried the memories with her and made many of the reforms nationwide. As she put it, “The Triangle fire was the first day of the New Deal.”
From the distance of nearly a century, it is easy to feel smug, to believe that tragedies like the Triangle fire are safely in the past. We have other things to worry about now. But people forget. They still break laws and, weighing their risks, come down in favor of profits rather than lives. As recently as 1991, twenty-five people were killed in a fire at a chicken-processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina—killed, because their factory doors were locked. With recent political focus on illegal immigration, more and more stories are coming out about immigrants working in the United States in unbelievable circumstances, living like virtual slaves. And with increasing globalization, many of the products we use come from factories in countries without many worker protections. In 1993, at least one hundred eighty-eight workers were killed in a fire at a toy factory in Thailand; the exact death toll was never known, because many of the bodies were never found. In just one of a series of factory tragedies in Bangladesh, more than fifty people were killed in February 2006 in a textile mill fire where locked doors were once again an issue. Both the Thai and Bangladeshi factories were making products intended for the American market. Like the shirtwaist-wearing college girls in 1909, we have to ask ourselves what responsibility we bear for the people who make our clothes and other possessions.
The Triangle fire may have happened nearly a century ago, but its ghosts have reason to haunt us still.
If you are interested in learning more about the Triangle strike and/or fire, I would recommend reading three books in particular:
Von Drehle, David. Triangle: The Fire that Changed America.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003. Stein, Leon. The Triangle Fire. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1962. Dash, Joan. We Shall Not Be Moved: The Women’s Factory Strike of
1909. New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1996.
I found all of those books to be very useful while I was writing this one, and they, along with newspaper articles of the time, were the source of much of the information in this author’s note.
Many of the websites I found concerning the Triangle strike and fire were less useful, and often inaccurate. But an excellent site is http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/.
I won’t list all the other resources I used to write this book (it’s long enough already), but some of the other books I found especially helpful, and would recommend to anyone who’s really, really interested, include:
Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.
Flexner, Eleanor, and Fitzgerald, Ellen. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975.
Glenn, Susan. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Homberger, Eric. Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.
Hoobler, Dorothy. The Italian American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
How We Lived: a Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880-1930. Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, ed. New York: R. Marek Publishers, 1979.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Iorizzo, Luciano, and Mondello, Salvatore. The Italian Americans. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.
Levi, Carlo. Christ Stopped at Eboli: the Story of a Year. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963.
Malkiel, Theresa S. The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1910.
McClymer, John F. The Triangle Strike and Fire. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.
A Bintel Brief Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, Isaac Metzker, ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.
Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy. Leon Stein, ed. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1977.
Stuart, Amanda Mackenzie. Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
I am very grateful to live in a community with an excellent library system; that gratitude multiplied exponentially while I was researching this book. At one point I came across a mention of a book published in 1919 called The Italian Emigration of Our Times. I thought it sounded exactly like what I needed, but assumed it’d be hard to locate. And then I found it on the shelf at the Columbus Metropolitan Library. So was another helpful gem, Women’s Suffrage, Arguments, and Results, 1910-1911, a collection of brochures actually from 1910-11. Perfect!
I also plagued the librarians at the Worthington Libraries for pesky details, and they were always gracious and helpful and patient. I particularly appreciated Ann Badger, of the Northwest Library, calling upon her physics expert brother, Chris, to solve a rather grisly science problem for me to make sure that what I was writing was accurate. And the library’s virtual reference room was invaluable.
I owe thanks to many people for this book. I’m very grateful to my editor, David Gale, for suggesting that I write about the Triangle fire in the first place. He, associate editor Alexandra Cooper, and my agent, Tracey Adams, all gave me insightful advice on early drafts. I’m also grateful to my family for putting up with me while I was mentally living in another century,
and particularly to my children for serving as research assistants on a couple occasions. Dr. Paul Glasser, associate dean of the Max Weinreich Center of the YIVO Institute, very kindly helped me with Yiddish translations. My friend Rosie Azzaro helped me with the Italian and told me about her own family emigrating from Italy to Canada. I owe additional thanks to Christopher James, public affairs officer at New York University, for giving me a tour of the building where the Triangle fire occurred. (It is still standing and is now part of NYU—structurally, it actually was fireproof.) Though the building has been renovated and is very different from the Asch Building of 1911, I was able to look out the windows where the Triangle workers jumped or fell, and see exactly how far down it was to the street. Then it was very eerie to climb to the roof and hear about how NYU employees had stood in that same spot on September 11, 2001, watching as people fell from the World Trade Center. At that moment, the Triangle fire didn’t seem very long ago at all.
• ALSO BY MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX •
Just Ella
Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey
Leaving Fishers
Turnabout
Takeoffs and Landings
Escape from Memory
Palace of Mirrors
Claim to Fame
Running Out of Time
House on the Gulf
Double Identity
The Shadow Children Series
Among the Hidden
Among the Impostors
Among the Betrayed
Among the Barons
Among the Brave
Among the Enemy
Among the Free
The Missing Series
Found
Sent
Sabotaged
The Girl with 500 Middle Names
Because of Anya
Say What?
Dexter the Tough
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com. This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. . Copyright © 2007 by Margaret Peterson Haddix . All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. . The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com . Also available in a hardcover edition . Book design by Alicia Mikles . The text for this book is set in MBell. . Manufactured in the United States of America . First paperback edition February 2011 . 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 .The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Haddix, Margaret Peterson. . Uprising / Margaret Peterson Haddix. . 1st ed. . Summary: In 1927, at the urging of twenty-one-year-old Harriet, Mrs. Livingston reluctantly recalls her experiences at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, including miserable working conditions that led to a strike, then the fire that took the lives of her two best friends, when Harriet, the boss’s daughter, was only five years old. Includes historical notes. . ISBN 978-1-4169-1171-5 (hc).
1. Triangle Shirtwaist Company—Juvenile fiction. [1. Triangle Shirtwaist Company—Fiction.
2. Immigrants—New York (NY.)—Fiction. 3. Factories—Fiction. 4. Labor disputes—Fiction. 5. Strikes and lockouts—Fiction. 6. Triangle Shirtwaist Company—Fire, 1911—Fiction. 7. New York (NY.)—History—1898-1951—Fiction. I. Title. . PZ7.H1164 Upr 2007 . [Fic]—dc22 . 2006034870 . ISBN 978-1-4169-1172-2 (pbk) . ISBN 978-1-4424-1956-8 (eBook)