The Shirtwaist Strike and the Triangle Fire
John McClymer (Assumption College)

Ninth-floor work area of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory immediately after the fire. The factory occupied the eight, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building in lower Manhattan. Most of those who died worked on the ninth floor.

Introduction: The story of the fire and of its aftermath is the stuff of high drama. The cast of characters includes heroes, villains, noted political figures, and uncounted ordinary folk who participated in the extraordinary. In addition to being a tragedy, the fire was a turning point. New York adopted a series of laws designed to protect workers that numerous other states quickly copied. Even more importantly, perhaps, New York machine politicians and progressive reformers made common cause for the first time. The result was "urban liberalism," exemplified in the career of Al Smith as governor of New York, of Robert Wagner as U.S. Senator from New York, and of Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor and then as president. Frances Perkins, who directed the New York Factory Investigating Commission co--chaired by Smith and Wagner, served in Smith's administration, and was FDR's Secretary of Labor, embodied this new political partnership.

The goals of this workshop are to introduce some of the materials about the fire and to explore some of the ways students and teachers can use them. Perhaps the first step is to show students a shirtwaist. It was part of the standard daytime attire for women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, often portrayed his models wearing a shirtwaist. Here is his "The Debutante."

Two Eyewitnesses:

1. The following account is by a United Press Service reporter who chanced to be walking by when the Triangle Fire broke out. He telephoned in this account, which then appeared in hundreds of newspapers on March 26 and March 27, 1911.

Eyewitness at the Triangle
by William G. Shepherd

I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two thud—deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.

The first ten thud—deads shocked me. I looked up—saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me—something that I didn't know was there—steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh [actually ninth] floor. There was a living picture in each window—four screaming heads of girls waving their arms.

"Call the firemen," they screamed—scores of them. "Get a ladder," cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as were we who stood on the sidewalk. I couldn't help thinking of that. We cried to them not to jump. We heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance. The other sirens sounded from several directions.

"Here they come," we yelled. "Don't jump; stay there."

One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. I didn't notice whether those above watched her drop because I had turned away. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces.

The firemen began to raise a ladder. Others took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl's body flashed through it. The thuds were just as loud, it seemed, as if there had been no net there. It seemed to me that the thuds were so loud that they might have been heard all over the city.

I had counted ten. Then my dulled senses began to work automatically. I noticed things that it had not occurred to me before to notice. Little details that the first shock had blinded me to. I looked up to see whether those above watched those who fell. I noticed that they did; they watched them every inch of the way down and probably heard the roaring thuds that we heard.

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.

Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward—the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.

Thud—dead, thud—dead—together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best.

We found out later that, in the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to even help the girl he loved to a quicker death, after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity, but her thud—dead came first.

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and deaths.

I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking—flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire.

The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh [ninth] floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls. . . .

The floods of water from the firemen's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. 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.

2. John Sloan, the noted American painter and one of the founders of the "Ashcan School," was the art editor of the radical monthly, The Masses. He lived within blocks of the Asch Building and, like thousands of others, rushed to the scene. "The Real Triangle" is one of several cartoons he drew in response to the fire. He wrote in his diary on March 26, 1911: "After breakfast I got at a cartoon idea in regards to the frightful fire of last evening in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. A black triangle each side marked ('Rent,' 'Interest,' 'Profit') death on one side, a fat capitalist on the other and the charred body of a girl in the center." The previous evening he had noted: "Over one hundred and forty shirtwaist workers were burned to death in the Triangle Factory. These girls made the successful strike of the last year!"

The Strike and the Strikers:

The fire victims were not anonymous, even though few knew their names. They were the strikers, the workers who had gone out in the so-called "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand," the strike that led to the founding of the first industrial union with a predominantly female membership, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). The strike had dragged on for months. Most of the employers had settled with the union, but a few had successfully held out. These were the biggest firms and included Triangle. Workers in other factories had Saturday afternoons off as part of the new contract. Triangle workers put in a full day on Saturday, a fact that led many contemporaries to point out that, had Triangle recognized the union, no one would have been in the Asch Building that afternoon.

The strike had succeeded for the most part. Most of the shirtwaist industry was unionized. Tens of thousands of workers joined the union. Wages went up, even in non-union factories. Working conditions, by and large, did not improve. But many of the petty tyrannies bosses had exercised, such as fining workers for being late when the elevators were running slow, ended.

A key ingredient in this success was the support of assorted "Allies." Activists in the suffrage crusade, such as Mrs. Alva Belmont, reputedly the second wealthiest woman in America, offered financial support. J.P. Morgan's daughter Anne was another wealthy ally. The most important allies were members of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Mary and Margaret Dreier, daughters of a well-to-do Brooklyn merchant, founded the League as a way of combatting the "social evil," as prostitution was then routinely called. Most prostitutes, they pointed out, were driven to a life of sin by economic necessity. There were simply not enough jobs for women that paid a decent wage. Unions, the Dreiers concluded, were a major part of the answer. So they organized the WTUL. Most league members were upper and upper-middle class women longing to make a difference in the world. A few were working class activists.

When the "Uprising" began, the League found the opportunity it had been seeking. Local #25, the body that called the strike, had about 100 members and about $10 in its treasury. Suddenly tens of thousands of workers went on strike against hundreds of companies. How was the union to enroll all of these new members? How was it to negotiate contracts with hundreds of employers? How was it to rent halls to hold meetings? How was it to get its side of the story out to the public? League members proved invaluable in helping the union find the answers. They wrote press releases, leased halls, drew up contracts, kept track of membership, and advanced money. League members also went out on the picket lines where they got themselves arrested just like the strikers.

As a result, the strike was a rare moment of sorority. Rich women and poor, WASP and immigrant, Jew and gentile, Republicans and Democrats and Socialists, all joined hands. Nothing like it had ever happened before.

One approach to understanding the impact of the fire requires is understanding something of the strike.

The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand

There are several good contemporary accounts of the strike, by sympathetic women journalists and others, available on line.

  1. Constance D. Leupp, "THE SHIRTWAIST MAKERS' STRIKE," The Survey December 18, 1909 — one of the fullest accounts and one of the most accurate (available via AC subscription; may not work off-campus)
  2. A Yiddish View of the Strike, at Women and Social Movements, Alexander Street Press (available via AC subscription; may not work off-campus)
  3. Mary Van Kleeck, "The Shirtwaist Strike and Its Significance," unpublished lecture, 1910, Mary Van Kleeck Papers, Box 29, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. — most analytical account; surveys overall conditions in the industry, course of the strike, and its larger significance

There are also some contemporary newspaper accounts available. These are not always as sympathetic and contain information sympathetic women often left out of their accounts.

  1. "Waist Strike On; 18,000 Women Out," New York Times, Nov. 24, 1909
  2. "Girl Strikers Riot; Quelled By Police," New York Times, Nov. 27, 1909
  3. "Girl Strikers Go To The City Hall," New York Times, Dec. 4, 1909
  4. "Waist Strike Pickets Parade Through Shop District in Autos," New York Call, Dec. 22, 1909 [This was the socialist paper.]

Two Working Girls in Their Own Words

  1. Sadie Frowne — "The Story of a Sweatshop Girl," Independent 54 (Sept. 25, 1902); Sadie was almost seventeen when this article appeared. My students, especially the women, identify with her quite strongly. She was studious, hard-working, and brave. She was also very interested in clothes, loved dancing, had a steady boyfriend, went to night school, belonged to a union, and was determined to have some "pleasure." If you want to pursue the "demotic" culture of dance halls, amusement parks, and movies emerging in the early 1900s, see my "What Sadie Knew: The Immigrant 'Working Girl' and the Emerging Demotic Culture," an on-line version of a chapter from my The Birth of Modern Americaa (2005).
  2. Rose Schneiderman — "A Cap Maker's Story," Independent 58 (March 20, 1905); like Sadie Frowne, Rose Schneiderman was born in Czarist Russia, in 1882. My students deeply admire her but find her harder to identify with. She too was studious, hard-working, and brave. She was not interested in fashion, dancing, boyfriends, or pleasure. She lived for unionism and for, at this point in her life, socialism. In 1905 she joined the Women's Trade Union League, became a full-time union organizer, raised money for the shirtwaist strike, played a major role in the aftermath of the Fire, joined Al Smith's and then FDR's administrations and, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, taught her everything she knew about trade unionism.

Some Contemporary Images

John Sloan's "The Return from Toil" occasioned some criticism among his fellow radicals who complained that he made his working girls too happy. Socialist realism called for them to be miserable as befit their exploited station in life. Sloan was a fervent radical but no ideologue. He described his subjects as "a bevy of boisterous girls with plenty of energy left after a hard day's work." (John Sloan, New York Etchings (Dover, 1978)). Sloan later turned the drawing into an etching. It shows even more young women, all with arms locked, about to cross a street as a policeman tries to get them to allow other pedestrians to pass. Sloan's work reminds us, as does Sadie Frowne's autobiographical account, that young working women wanted some enjoyment out of life.

Strikingly different is Jacob Epstein's "Intensely Serious." It is one of the illustrations he did, at age twenty-two, for Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902). Hapgood was one of several WASPs who attempted to explain the Jewish community of the Lower East Side of New York to so-called Old Stock Americans. Hapgood was impressed not only with the poverty, overcrowding, and squalor he encountered but also with the intellectual seriousness, artistic vitality, and ambition of the community's residents. Epstein, a native New Yorker whose parents were Polish Jews, took his earnings and went off to Paris to study. In 1905 he moved to London and became a British citizen as well as one of the leading sculptors of the first half of the twentieth century. He ultimately became Sir Jacob Epstein. His "Working Girls Returning Home," also done for The Spirit of the Ghetto, is more along the lines that Sloan's radical comrades had in mind.

It is tempting to imagine "Intensely Serious" as a portrait of Rose Schneiderman and to imagine Sadie Frowne as one of Sloan's "bevy of boisterous girls." Fortunately, there is a portrait of Schneiderman at work at a sewing machine. In it she does not look too intensely serious. A portrait of Clara Lemlich, one of the union leaders, on the other hand, does present us with someone very serious indeed.

The Fire

One major resource is the Triangle Factory Fire site at the Kheel Center, Cornell University. This offers a good narrative of the fire, including descriptions of working conditions, and of its aftermath. It also includes a rich array of relevant documents including newspaper stories, first-hand accounts of the fire, excerpts from the New York Factory Investigating Commission Reports, and the transcript of the trial for manslaughter of the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. This site affords several ways of approaching the fire.

Douglas Linder's Famous Trials site at the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law includes the Triangle Fire Trial. There is an introductory essay by Linder, excerpts from the trial, and news accounts among other resources.

There is a collection of photographs at the New Deal Network, taken from the Franklin Roosevelt Library. I have reproduced several below. The first shows a policeman looking up as he stands among several bodies of victims who jumped from the ninth floor ledge. The other two were taken at the improvised morgue set up on an empty pier. The large number of dead made it impossible to use the regular morgue. A huge crowd rushed to the pier, all trying to view the bodies. Police managed to maintain order and allowed small numbers at a time to view the remains for the purpose of identifying the dead.

Here is the New York Times account of the fire. Especially chilling is the section labeled "Scenes at the Morgue."

What the site at Cornell fails to capture is the anguish and outrage occasioned by the fire.