Posted by nell March 25, 2007 in Human Rights, Labor
Photo: Triangle Factory Fire
Photo: Triangle Factory Fire
Sheila O’Malley reminds me that today marks the 96th anniversary of the Triangle Factory fire. Sheila has a link up to some pictures, or you can visit Cornell’s Triangle Fire web site.
Fortunately, nowadays workers are treated much better than the workers who died at Triangle, and even if they are not, at least it’s no longer happening on U.S. soil as much, and that is what matters.
27 Responses to “March 25, 1911”
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In many ways, we HAVE come a long way from Triangle. But unfortunately, we seem to be moving back towards it. With every appointment of industry shills and apologists to the governing/regulating boards, we mvoe backwards. Mine owner shills relaxing mine safety from OSHA. Chemical and Oil industry PR types in charge of EPA. I don’t have all the specifics but if these clowns have their way, we will soon be closer to Triangle than we were even in the fifties and sixties…
My $.02
“…even if they are not, at least it’s no longer happening on U.S. soil as much, and that is what matters.”
Am I missing something here, some sort of sarcasm or something? It might not be on our soil, but U.S. corporations are continuing to perpetuate Triangle-esque sweatshops in third-world countries, and I’d say that does matter. A lot. Further, it still matters, even if it’s not happening here, and even if it weren’t Americans who were responsible. People who work in miserable conditions matter, even if they don’t have the good fortune to be living on U.S. soil.
Shit. I did miss the sarcasm. I just read through the links more closely. Sorry for my self-righteous bloviating. Ever since the Hoyas won their game tonight, I can’t think straight.
Thanks for posting a memorial to the Triangle victims. It’s always a strange feeling when I pass the building where it happened. It’s still there, and part of New York University. I have stood on the very spot in the photograph.
One of my wife’s mother’s counsins-in-law — an old garment union organizer himself, and now dead — once told me his own mother had quit working for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company a couple of weeks earlier in March, 1911. Her sister stayed there, and did survive the fire.
Pinsky has a damn fine poem about that fire.
Ah yes, NYU’s Brown Building. Home of student chemistry labs… when I was chem major in the 1970s you could enter Brown Building only through the staircases from Main Building. I never realized that I was taking class/labs in the actual building of the Fire. It’s scary to realize it now. I don’t believe NYU has improved access to this day.
I once saw a documentary on the Fire… it had me in tears.
It’s still there, and part of New York University.
How ironic.
Yes, as I think of it I was actually in the Brown Building once, to get an ID, as unpaid adjunct faculty.
Okay, so where are our libertarian and misogynist trolls here? Don’t we need to understand how the victims were employees at will, didn’t have to work there, deserved it for being female, etc.?
If you haven’t read it yet, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David von Drehle is an extremely well-written account of the fire that does an excellent job of contextualizing it, both in terms of the labor movement and New York City politics.
“Shirt.” That’s the one Sheila posted at her place. I had never read it before–when it comes to poetry I am practically illiterate–but it is indeed damn fine.
Richard,
Labor needs PR. Constant PR that tackles every single profession, and extends beyond our borders. Really, PR to call attention to worker abuse and the need for oversight.
It is wonderful to realize how far this country has come in how it treats its citizen workers. I wonder how many close calls there are for those who are here working illegally? How many potential Triangle Factory Fires are narrowly averted and skim just beneath the surface of our media awareness?
Ms Kate, let’s just bookmark this thread and refer the trolls who show up eventually elsewhere here.
Now if we only had one about the Ludlow Massacre. Or the incident I’ve only seen mentioned in Lies My Teacher Told Me in Tulsa in 1919, wherein during a white riot against the particularly orderly and prosperous black “ghetto” there an airplane actually dropped dynamite bombs on the community.
Now that’s private initiative!
Mark
Now that’s private initiative!
Hey, nothing beats government initiative when it comes to killing people and screwing up their lives in vast numbers.
Ms. Kate
Mind if I pass on your troll bait?
Truly, you need to get out more.
Also, Michael Jackson performed the moonwalk for the first time in 1983.
Today in history: March 25, 1911…
Horrifying photos. Shirt - by Robert Pinsky The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking……
Most of my core classes were in the Waverly building, which was one-quarter of the block made up of Main (a full half the block), and Brown (Triangle). The buildings were connected by narrow corridors that jogged, pitched, etc. Brown itself is filled with doors marked with things like Biohazard and Radioactive.
Brown always fascinated me, not just because it was the site of a tragedy that had affected me so deeply when I’d learned about it in History class, but because it seemed that so many of my classmates were oblivious to what had happened there. Not only would they not know that Brown used to be the Triangle factory, they didn’t even know what the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was.
My senior year, I found myself early to my lit class along with a freshman. I asked her if she knew that the Triangle factory was just down the hall. She stared at me blankly, so I told her how a bunch of women had died horrible deaths in a sweatshop that had caught fire — that the doors had been locked to prevent them from unionizing, and that those that didn’t die in the fire died when they jumped from the windows because the firemen’s ladders didn’t reach high enough. Her eyes got really big and she asked if I thought there were ghosts in the building, which annoyed me but I just shrugged.
In the middle of that class, the fire alarms went off. I’d be lying if I said the look on her face wasn’t priceless.
I always found Stephen Jay Gould’s 1999 essay about his most moving.
Ilyka:
I went and reread at the link, as I should have when I saw the subject of the post.
To know there is a poem is not much. Certainly not as much subjecting yourself to its flooding impressions, and when the flood has passed, as floods do, an altered landscape in your mind.
Libertarian,
A government is the executive committee of a ruling class, says Marx.
So all you are saying is that even capitalists find that government is more effective at carrying out their aims than they can in private competition with each other.
Which is the kind of observation that makes me a socialist. If we must have a ruling class, let it be the people, or at least accountable to all the people.
Nice of you to “pass.” We’ll assume it’s because you’ve got nothing.
Mark
Actually, I was thinking about Stalin, and some of the other wholesome communist/socialist gov’ts we’ve had. Our own isn’t doing a bad job either. Face it, governments are much better at this kind of thing than individuals.
I “passed” because the comment was too stupid to merit a response.
Her eyes got really big and she asked if I thought there were ghosts in the building, which annoyed me but I just shrugged.
When I started working last fall, I had a recurring dream about my office being full of closely-placed cots and nurses in early 20th century clothes wandering around.
I decided to do a little research on the building - it was the Navy Infirmiry. Along with Baltimore, Boston was ground zero for the 1918 Influenza epidemic in the US.
Weird.
p.s. Libertarian - you personally do not classify as “troll” (part of why you are still about). However, there are trolls about who do identify as being libertarian.
Oh, and Mark, I remember one of my roommates being upset over the Tieneman (sp?) Square incident in China and saying “that could never happen here”.
Me: “Oh, really? What about the Ludlow Mines?”
Him: “What?”
Me: “You are the one attending college on a union scholarship. Ludlow mines - go look it up!”
He was pretty shaken up when he did just that.
We have come a long way since Triangle Shirtwaist.
Of course we have. Who makes and who wears shirt-waists nowadays?
As the late-great Molly Ivins would say “‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, as we like to say in Texas”.
::ahem::
The Northern Mariana Islands are US soil.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/09/sex_greed_and_forced_abortions.php
::ahem::
Meredith had me right the second time.
“Too stupid,” eh? So what can someone who says that government is inherently worse than private initiative say when private interest creates situations like these?
Your problem, as a libertarian, is y’all have set up this Manichean, comic-book type structure, in which you pretend that the only possible avenue of tyranny is from someone wearing a hat that says they work for the guvmint. Actually, people are people, and some of them do abusive, manipulative, violent things whenever they are not checked by others. The question is, what social setup will minimize the abusive tendencies of people–either by discouraging the basic mindset, or by effectively constraining actions so that people treat others with consideration. It is all very well to say that people ought to behave nicely, which is the Libertarian’s beginning and ending point in social policy–when, that is, they aren’t ranting on about how good a thing it is to be downright ruthless and selfish. But in real life, nothing gets done without concrete forms of social organization, and the distinction between “public” and “private” is situational and variable as societies take on different forms. In fact, in many societies the distinction is completely meaningless. But the structural issues and the fact that people are individuals engaged, necessarily, in a complex net of collective bargaining situations, remain in various forms, in every possible society. Thus Libertarianism is a mythology, organized to uphold a particular phase of one society, and can do so only by massive bad faith and self-deception.
Ilyka posted on the Triangle fire to illustrate why it is we have the sorts of government institutions that people live Grover Norquist and Karl Rove say they’d like to see eliminated. Anyone who wants to eliminate those institutions must either say how they think that people like those factory workers who were trapped inside because management locked them in there will be protected from such abuses in the future, or admit they don’t give a flying damn about such people. Since safety regulations are exactly the kind of thing Libertarians denounce as foolish and insidious intrusions of “government” into private perogatives, I generally assume you either haven’t thought out the consequences of your half-baked notions (which makes the pretentions to superior mental ability and being a “Party of Principle” quite insufferable) or you are the kind of SOBs who don’t care.
Or maybe you can explain how it is supposed to work in your millenium. Only, I’m just going to laugh if you say something like “Well, those silly women shouldn’t have agreed to work there if they didn’t think it was safe.” That would of course be a perfect launching point for a discussion of how the capitalist class has monopolized means of production, and the working class has the guns of eviction, starvation, and police enforcement trained on it to compel “choices” that are merely between a range of equally bad options. Go ahead and say “well it would be otherwise if there weren’t a government to enable monopolies and give authority to police.” Sorry, the examples I brought up illustrate how in the USA at any rate the ruling, propertied classes often do forgo the usual procedure of delegating certain unpleasant aspects of their rule to their pet government and do it themselves. Government is generally more effective at accomplishing certain tasks, both technically and because it is seen as having a status that mere private interests do not, but in any situation where for some reason or other “government” is ruled out, “private” interests accomplish the same things in the same ways-especially in the USA. You can’t understand US history without factoring in vigilanteism; it is American style to have “private” actors such as lynch mobs or security companies do things that elsewhere are just about always done by “government,” which just illustrates the fluid continuity your Manichean divisions seek to obscure. “Public” or “private” are legally defined terms that don’t speak to either the virtue or vice of those so organized; you always have to look at the concrete cases and the actual social balances of power to understand why people act as they do.
So if you have more interesting and useful libertarian insights into better ways to prevent the abuse of workers by employers other than “government is always bad,” “people choose their situations so they must have been stupid,” or “tough shit,” we might learn something from them. But I am betting you’ve still got nothing and are the one standing stupid on this point, not Ilyka.