Triangle Day and the Impossibility of Remaining Intensely Peaceable

Today is the 114th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, a day I remember every year, because it also happens to be the 91st anniversary of Gloria Steinem’s birth, the 83rd anniversary of Aretha Franklin’s birth, and the 14th anniversary of my becoming a parent.

Because of the nature of my work, there are a couple of historical events that I have returned to again and again, as a reader and sometimes as a writer, that I understand as fulcrum moments, after which perspectives, and personal and political trajectories were never quite the same. Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony is one of those moments; the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is another.

via the Library of Congress

To understand what happened on March 25, 1911, it’s important to go back a couple of years earlier, to when the mostly young, mostly female, mostly immigrant workers in New York’s booming shirtwaist factories were organizing in response to low wages, inhumane hours, and terribly unsafe working conditions. During a November 1909 labor meeting at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, garment industry organizers, most of them men, spent a long evening debating the risks of a general strike, without getting to a vote on the matter. Frustrated by the hours of public dithering, 19-year-old Clara Lemlich, founder of Local 25, the relatively small union of Waist and Dressmakers Workers, grew impatient and took the podium: “I want to say a few words!” she said in what would become a famous call to action. “I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now.”

The next day, 15,000 workers walked off the job and their number soon grew to 20,000; the walk-out soon gained the support of wealthy suffragist backers. Strikers would be harassed and arrested throughout that winter, but by February of 1910, after eleven weeks, 85 percent of shirtwaist manufacturers in New York City had agreed to better (not perfect) terms, including wage hikes, 52 hour work weeks, and some safety provisions. But Triangle, the biggest and most anti-union manufacturer of them all, was a holdout, and when the strike ended, its employees were back at work without protections in place.

Instead, they were trapped on the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building, just a couple of blocks off of Washington Square Park. Doors were locked to keep the workers inside and to prevent further work stoppages. When, on March 25, 1911, someone dropped a match on a pile of fabric scraps, flames spread quickly through factory floors stuffed to the gills with flammable material and more than 500 workers. Some laborers on the 8th floor were able to leave down the stairs, some on the tenth floor managed to make it to the roof, but 146, most trapped on the 9th floor, were stuck inside. They either burned to death or leapt from windows to the sidewalk below, dying on impact in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. One hundred and twenty three of the dead were women, mostly in their teens and twenties.

The Triangle building in 2018

I was thinking about Triangle earlier this month while reading Aminatou’s International Women’s Day post on Clare Zetkin (which included at the end a link to that rare gem, a Triangle Shirtwaist/DOGE joke). The story of Zetkin, the originator of Working Women’s Day (as it was in the original socialist) made me think of Rose Schneiderman, the New York Women’s Trade Union League’s organizer who just a few days after the Triangle fire addressed an audience of mourners. The memorial was held at the Metropolitan Opera House, and it was was a pretty bougie crowd, including some of the wealthy suffragists who’d supported the 1909 uprising. But Schneiderman was having none of it. Here was part of what she said that night:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting…

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us--warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

It is a remarkable speech, but there’s a line that particularly leaps out at me in this period of tussling over how activists, universities, law firms, and Democratic party leadership should or could be behaving in response to threats of violence, imprisonment, and economic punishment: “Public officials have only words of warning to us—warning that me must be intensely peaceable.”

Schneiderman spent a lot of her life dedicated to not only strengthening labor protections, but to improving workplace safety conditions, sometimes aggressively colliding with those whose approach was more establishment than her own, sometimes working alongside those inside the institutions, including Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. Perkins had been a witness to the fire, had her own professional course altered by what she saw. Perkins once said of Schneiderman and the allies who refused admonitions to be peaceable: “These intelligent trade unionists made a great many things clear to Franklin Roosevelt that he could hardly have known any other way.”

These are old battles, friends. That can feel daunting. Yet I often find, in the deeply familiar grooves of history, a sense of responsibility and inspiration to keep pushing forward, in the spirit of the women who never permitted horror or regress or warnings from leadership to stop their own relentless drives toward a more just future.

The small plaque at the Brown (formerly Asch) building, site of the fire, in 2018.