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While
we are on the subject of evil... HISTORICAL
EVIL:
"The Triangle Fire," by Leon Stein with a new introduction
by William Greider. (Cornell University Press, 2001.)
EVIL
IN THE RAG TRADE:
"NO SWEAT: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment
Workers," edited by Andrew Ross. (Verso Press 1997.)
BORDERLINE
EVIL:
"Border Witness," by Maureen Casey and Brian Casey. (The New
York State Labor-Religion Coalition, 2002).
COSMIC
EVIL:
"Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,"
by Susan Neiman. (Princeton U. Press, 2002.)
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> NO SWEAT NEWS >
NEWS ARCHIVE
"I Would be a Traitor to those Poor Burned Bodies..."
The Triangle Fire of 1911
by Pat Sherman
At approximately 4:45 p.m. on March 25, 1911, the streets just east
of
New York's Washington Square Park shook with a muffled explosion.
Looking up, people could see smoke pouring from the upper
floors of the ten story Asch Building on the corner of Washington
Place and Green Street.
Factory fires were all too familiar to the garment workers of the
Lower East Side. A random spark from a sewing machine or a carelessly
dropped ash from a foreman's cigar could turn a factory into an
inferno in minutes. Only a year before, in the winter of 1910, thousands
of young women had gone out on strike demanding, among other things,
fire protection. But in this respect the strike had failed. The
employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, many only in their
early teens, had returned to a workplace with one rickety fire escape,
two small elevators and exit doors that opened inward, and were
often locked.
Factory fires were all too familiar to the garment workers of the
Lower East Side. A random spark from a sewing machine or a carelessly
dropped ash from a foreman's cigar could turn a factory into an
inferno in minutes. Only a year before, in the winter of 1910,
thousands of young women had gone out on strike demanding, among
other things, fire protection. But in this respect the strike had
failed. The employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, many only
in
their early teens, had returned to a workplace with one rickety
fire
escape, two small elevators and exit doors that opened inward, and
were often locked.
The fire reputedly started in a scrap bin on the eighth floor where
pattern cutters had been working with sheer lawn, a notoriously
light
and flammable fabric. Flames spread rapidly down the row of cutting
tables. Even motes of cotton dust floating in the air seemed to
ignite. The heat became so intense that the whole floor shuddered.
As a bundle of cloth descended from a window, someone on the street
remarked that the manufacturer must be trying to save his goods.
Then
the bundle began to scream and flail. It was a girl. Another
followed. And another. William Shepherd, a reporter for United Press,
happened to be passing through Washington Square when the fire broke
out. Racing to the scene, he heard "a new sound--a more horrible
sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding,
living
body on a stone sidewalk ...There was plenty of chance to watch
them
as they came down."
When the horse-drawn fire-engine rounded the corner, the horses
bucked and reared, panicked by the shrieks and smell of blood. Firemen
ran the last half-block to spread their nets. Bystanders grabbed
blankets, coats, canvas tarps, anything that might break a fall.
Among the horror-stricken spectators was Frances Perkins, who later
became Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. "They came
down in twos and threes," she recalled. "The life nets
were broken. The
firemen kept yelling to them not to jump. But they had no choice.
The
flames were right behind them."
On the ninth floor, girls crowded the windows, leaning outward,
watching with feverish hope as the firemen began to raise their
ladders. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the eighth through
tenth floors of the building, but the ladders only reached as high
as
the sixth story. One girl leapt for a ladder and missed. Another
simply stepped off the window sill, as if descending from a streetcar.
Three younger ones held hands as they jumped, like children at a
playground. The impact of their fall literally cracked the paving
stones below.
Along the north side of the building, a line of desperate workers
inched down the narrow fire escape. Abe Gordon, one of the few men
at
Triangle, felt the railing give just as he reached the ground. "I
still had one foot on the fire escape when I heard a loud noise
and looked back up. The people were falling all around me...The
fire escape was collapsing."
Trapped inside, machine operators started to hurl themselves into
the
elevator shafts. Celia Walker grabbed the steel cable, using her
new
fur muff to cushion her hands. Sarah Friedman and May Levantini
slid
down barehanded. The cable tore through their skin, but they survived
as flaming bodies fell around them.
Rose Cohen, a teen-aged sleeve setter, felt certain she was gone.
She
had reached the Green Street staircase, but her descent was blocked
by searing smoke. Suddenly she heard someone shouting: "Come
to the roof! Come to the roof!" As an ordinary worker she had
never been to the executive offices on the tenth floor and hadn't
known about the
special exit available to those who worked above her. When she reached
the roof she discovered that students from the NYU law library next
door had laid a board, bridging the alley between the two buildings.
"This way," they called. As she crawled over to safety,
she remembered her parents telling her, "In America they don't
let you
burn."
By 5:10, less than a half hour after it had started, the fire was
over. Searching the building, the firemen found bodies "burned
down to
the bare skeleton," many of them huddled by the main staircase
door on the ninth floor. The door was still closed.
For once, the Italian and Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East
Side
were united in the common language of grief. 146 people had died
in
the fire, most of them women and girls.
"I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I were
to come
here and talk good fellowship," declared Rose Schneiderman,
one of the strike leaders of 1910. "We have tried you good
people of the
public--and we have found you wanting," she harangued the crowd
at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House "This
is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city.
..Every year
thousands of us are maimed... I know by experience it is up to working
class people to save themselves. And the only way to do it is through
a strong working class movement."
The "good people of the public" heard her voice. In October
1911, New
York established a Joint Commission on Factory Inspection headed
by
progressives Robert Wagner and Alfred E. Smith. This commission
inaugurated what some historians refer to as New York's "Golden
Age"
of labor reform. Within five years the legislature had passed over
thirty-five bills covering not just fire protection but all aspects
of
health and safety.
But laws are only as powerful as those who enforce them. On March
19, 1958, almost forty-seven years to the day after the Triangle
Fire, Josephine Nicolosi, one the the survivors, looked out her
tenement window and saw smoke rising from a nearby building. She
reached the corner of Houston and Broadway just in time to see bodies
being lowered in baskets. A fire on the third floor of a textile
finishing company had caused the upper floor to collapse. Twenty-four
workers plunged to their deaths in the flames. "What good have been
all the years," she cried. "The fire still burns."
Yet another twenty-five years later, on May 10, 1993, Lampan Taptim
heard someone yell "fire." "My sister who worked on the fourth floor
pulled me away," she recalled. The girls worked at the Kader Industrial
Toy Company of Thailand, which made toys for American companies
such as Hasbro, Price-Fisher, Toys-R-Us and J.C. Penny's. Finding
the stairway blocked, Lampan and her sister ran to the windows.
"The smoke was thick and I picked the best place to jump in a pile
of boxes. My sister jumped too. She died." 188 people perished in
the world's deadliest factory fire to date, nearly all of them women
and teen-aged girls. Later investigations revealed that the exit
doors had been locked.
The "poor, burned bodies" of the Triangle continue to haunt us.
On November 25, 2000, fire broke out in the Chowdhury Knitwear and
Garment Factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Chowdhury
had just geared up for its busy season, during which employees were
expected to log eighteen hour shifts. "When we'd complain, they'd
lock the gates so we couldn't get out," Aleya Begum told New York
Times reporter Barry Bearak. Women and girls threw themselves from
the fourth story of the burning building or stampeded down the stairways,
pressing futilely against the chained gates. Fifty-one died, among
them eight children under the age of fourteen.
Each year hundreds of similar, though undocumented, fires break
out in the factories of China, Mexico, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, any
country where workers labor under sweatshop conditions. "Every day
we work in temperatures that can get over 100 degrees," a Chinese
teenager told investigators from the National Labor Committee, a
U.S. based advocacy group. "The molding machines are noisy and hot.
The air is filled with a strong chemical smell."
In response to the Kader and Chowdhury fires, numerous non-governmental
organizations have increased their demands for safe conditions and
regular factory inspections. Yet the means to enforce those demands
remains elusive. In the words of Rose Schneiderman, we, the public,
are still being tried and we are still found wanting by the women,
children and men who make the tee shirts and toys we are so eager
to buy.
Resources
Comprehensive history of
the fire and its aftermath including links to related labor history
sites.
Updated information on the anti-sweatshop
campaign in Thailand and other countries.
National Labor Committee reports on sweatshop
conditions by country available online or by mail.
"Made in Thailand" Videotape by Eve-Laure Moros and Linzy Emery, 1999,
30 min., Color. Documentary on the Kader Toy Factory fire, includes
interviews with three survivors. Distributed by: Women Make Movies
462 Broadway, 5th Fl. NY, NY 10013 tel (212) 925-0606 fax (212) 925-2052
E-mail: info@wmm.com Web site: www.wmm.com
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