Witnessing Piles of Dead Women on a New York Street

 

Police and bystanders watch helplessly as more victims jump to their deaths to escape the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the upper floors of the Asch Building.

It was a sunny but raw day in New York City, a late Saturday afternoon and the streets near Washington Square in the immigrant Greenwich Village neighborhood were teaming with traffic. Around 4:45, as the many garment industry sweatshops were preparing for their “early” Saturday closing, pedestrians began to notice smoke billowing from the upper floors of the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place. Crowds gathered to watch as horse drawn fire engines and ladder trucks pounded to the scene. Soon witnesses watched in horror as one after another young women leapt from the burning building to sure death on the pavement below—the Fire Department’s ladders were too short to reach the windows from which they jumped. It was March 25, 1911. The top three floors of the building, housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had turned into a roaring inferno. 

The Fire Department responded quickly but did not have ladders tall enough to reach the top three floors which were on fire and fire fighters could not get up stairways choked with the bodies of those trying to escape.  They could only use their most powerful pumpers to spay water from the outside.

About 500 workers were getting ready to leave when the fire started smoldering in the scrap bin under a cutting table, probably ignited by a carelessly discarded cigarette or cigar. When it was over 146 of them, mostly young Italian and Jewish women, perished. Many were piled against locked exit doors and died of asphyxiation. Sixty-two victims leaped to their death on the sidewalk or were killed when the sole fire escape collapsed. Others jumped down elevator shafts after the elevators, which managed to rescue several, stopped working when the fire’s heat twisted the rails on which they ran. At least 71 others were reported injured, although many more were probably tended at home, unable to afford medical care. 

It was not the first fire in such a factory. In fact, authorities had reported an epidemic of fires at shirtwaist factories. This was one, however, was made worse because of overcrowding on the shop floors, failure to clear flammable material—scrap bins had not been emptied in two months—and because stairways and exits were either blocked by bales of material or padlocked to prevent employee pilferage. 

The factory occupied floors 8, 9, and 10 of the building, all beyond the reach of ladders which could only reach the sixth floor at full extension. There was no alarm system and on the most crowded production floor, the 9th, the first warning was literally when flames erupted. By that time most office personnel, including the owners and their visiting children had already been able to evacuate from the higher floor to the safety of the roof. 

There had, of course, been awful industrial accidents and fires before. Mine collapses were commonplace. Many were killed in boiler explosions on steamships and riverboats, others died in railroad accidents. Fires had devastated lint-filled textile plants. But never had such a calamity played out so publicly on the streets of the nation’s premier city with the press—including photographers—on hand to record the horror. The fact that most of the victims were young women, girls in their teens mostly, added to the impact. Grimy men were expected to be expendable, girls were not. 

 The sewing floor of a typical shirtwaist factory and the young women who worked there.

Lurid headlines and gruesome photos spread across the country. Both the city and state governments launched investigations, which would lead eventually to the establishment of the nation’s strongest industrial workplace safety and labor laws in New York state. It spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and other needle trade unions which made safety a key issue.   Many years later the Federal government added its weight to worker safety with the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) under the Department of Labor. 

The labor movement commemorates the anniversary, but the hard-fought gains paid for by those dead shop girls are under attack from coast-to-coast. Under the guise of cost cutting, deregulation, and as a frank assault on the working class on behalf of an oligarchy, Trump and Musk’s DOGE dudes  attempted to slash jobs at the agency and across the Department of Labor and OSHA itself is on the chopping block while blocking in every possible way the rights of workers to defend themselves through unions or by suing for damages in the courts. The old battles have to be refought. Hopefully it will not take another tragedy of epic proportion to re-prick the public conscience. 

Protests like this large parade featuring a contingent of Jewish women workers from the United Hebrew Trades demanded enactment of factory safety laws and organized shops into powerful unions.

In 2012, after years of painstaking research, the last 10 victims of the fire were finally identified. Today the Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building, still stands. It is a designated landmark, as much, we are told, for its architectural significance as the site of a tragedy.

Frances Perkins Rose from Do Gooder to Real Power as Secretary of Labor

                                            Frances Perkins--Madam Secretary. 

On March 4, 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day of his first inauguration, nominated Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor.  She was the first woman elevated to cabinet rank.  If anyone was expecting a docile figurehead, they were in for a big surprise.  Not only was she a key player in the New Deal and an indispensable backer of a wide range of labor reforms, she held down the job for twelve years through FDR’s first three terms despite efforts to unseat her.

Born into a respectable Republican and Congregationalist New England family in 1880, she was radicalized by exposure to the yawning class divide while attending Mt. Holyoke College where she read Jacob Riis’s expose of slum conditions and attended lectures by leading reformers and labor advocates, especially Florence Kelley of the National Consumer’s League.  Graduating in 1902 she tried her hand at teaching science in urban schools while volunteering at settlement houses. 

                                             Perkins as a student at Mt. Holyoke.

But by 1909 she was ready to give up teaching for a career in social services and advocacy.  She moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University then joined her mentor Florence Kelley by serving as Secretary for the New York State Consumer’s League where she successfully led lobbing efforts to get the Legislature to limit the work week for women and children to 54 hours.  She also took up active support of the Suffrage movement.

In 1911 she personally witnessed women leaping to their deaths from the upper floors of the building at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, an event that would steel her determination to guarantee safe working conditions.  Where she had previously relied on legislation alone, she increasingly saw the need for workers to organize in their own defense and supported the work of Ladies Garment Workers leader Rose Schneiderman and others.  She even joined the Socialist Party, where she advocated gradual reform rather than revolutionary action. 

                                                The young reformer and New York civil servant.

In 1912 she supported Woodrow Wilson over Eugene V. Debs believing that the Democrat would more effectively advance labor’s cause.  She was wrong, but in the long run was one of the people most responsible for seeing that the planks of the 1912 Socialist platform were finally enacted under another Democrat.

She briefly retired from public life to marry economist Paul Wilson and to give birth to a daughter.  But Wilson suffered a breakdown and Perkins returned to work as the family breadwinner.

In 1919 she joined the administration of New York Governor Al Smith as the first woman on the state Industrial Commission.  By 1926 she was Chair of the Commission.  In 1929 Governor Roosevelt appointed her to head the state Labor Department.  She pushed through another round of reduction of hours for women and children to 48, stepped up factory safety inspection, and lobbied for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.

Roosevelt took her with him to Washington.  As Labor Secretary she helped craft and get the Wagner Act through Congress, which finally guaranteed workers the right to organize labor unions on the job and engage in collective bargaining. 

Perkins, one of the chief architects, witnessed FDR sign the Social Security Act into law.

The Fair Labor Standards Act embodied her long-cherished dreams for a minimum wage and a standard 40-hour work week for both women and men.  She chaired the administration’s Committee on Economic Security which drafted the legislation embodied in the Social Security Act of 1935.

As the labor battles for representation in the basic industries intensified through the Depression, Perkins stood relentlessly on the side of working people to organize and resisted traditional calls to use Federal force and troops to suppress strikes.  She held firm against intervention in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

Conservatives and business interests put her in their cross hairs and in 1939 the House Un-American Activities Committee drew up a bill of impeachment against her for refusing to deport Harry Bridges, the Australian-born West Coast Longshoremen’s leader who was a key figure in the General Strike.  The impeachment attempt fizzled from lack of evidence and Perkins continued to serve until 1945 when she resigned to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization (ILO) conference in Paris.

                                         The Secretary of Labor on a coal mine safety inspection.

She concluded her public service when President Harry Truman appointed her to the Civil Service Commission.  With the return of Republicans to power in 1953 she took a professorship at Cornel University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Perkins died at age 85 in her beloved New York City in 1965.

Although revered by labor and feminists, Perkins remains a reviled figure on the right.  In 2011 hyper reactionary Maine Governor Paul LePage tried to have a labor mural featuring Frances Perkins (center panel) from the State Department of Labor because it is too pro-labor and offended some business owners.

The Labor Department Building war re-named for Perkins on April 10, 1980—the 100th anniversary of her birth with President Jimmy Carter presiding over the ceremony.  On the same day the Postal Service issued a new 15-cent stamp bearing her likeness.

Weeping for the Piles of Dead Women on a New York Street

Police and bystanders watch helplessly as more victims jump to their deaths to escape the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the upper floors of the Asch Building.

It was a sunny but raw day in New York City, a late Saturday afternoon and the streets near Washington Square in the immigrant Greenwich Village neighborhood were teaming with traffic. Around 4:45, as the many garment industry sweatshops were preparing for their “early” Saturday closing, pedestrians began to notice smoke billowing from the upper floors of the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place. Crowds gathered to watch as horse drawn fire engines and ladder trucks pounded to the scene. Soon witnesses watched in horror as one after another young women leapt from the burning building to sure death on the pavement below—the Fire Department’s ladders were too short to reach the windows from which they jumped. It was March 25, 1911. The top three floors of the building, housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had turned into a roaring inferno. 

The Fire Department responded quickly but did not have ladders tall enough to reach the top three floors which were on fire and fire fighters could not get up stairways choked with the bodies of those trying to escape.  They could only use their most powerful pumpers to spay water from the outside.

About 500 workers were getting ready to leave when the fire started smoldering in the scrap bin under a cutting table, probably ignited by a carelessly discarded cigarette or cigar. Before it was over 146 of them, mostly young Italian and Jewish women, would perish. Many would be piled against locked exit doors to die of asphyxiation. Sixty-two victims leaped to their death on the sidewalk or were killed when the sole fire escape collapsed. Others jumped down elevator shafts after the elevators, which managed to rescue several, stopped working when the fire’s heat twisted the rails on which they ran. At least 71 others were reported injured, although many more were probably tended at home, unable to afford medical care. 

It was not the first fire in such a factory. In fact, authorities had reported an epidemic of fires at shirtwaist factories. This was one, however, was made worse because of overcrowding on the shop floors, failure to clear flammable material—scrap bins had not been emptied in two months—and because stairways and exits were either blocked by bales of material or padlocked to prevent employee pilferage. 

The factory occupied floors 8, 9, and 10  of the building, all beyond the reach of ladders which could only reach the sixth floor at full extension. There was no alarm system and on the most crowded production floor, the 9th, the first warning was literally when flames erupted. By that time most office personnel, including the owners and their visiting children had already been able to evacuate from the higher floor to the safety of the roof. 

There had, of course, been awful industrial accidents and fires before. Mine collapses were commonplace. Many were killed in boiler explosions on steamships and riverboats, others died in railroad accidents. Fires had devastated lint-filled textile plants. But never had such a calamity played out so publicly on the streets of the nation’s premier city with the press—including photographers—on hand to record the horror. The fact that most of the victims were young women, girls in their teens mostly, added to the impact. Grimy men were expected to be expendable, girls were not. 

 The sewing floor of a typical shirtwaist factory and the young women who worked there.

Lurid headlines and gruesome photos spread across the country. Both the city and state governments launched investigations, which would lead eventually to the establishment of the nation’s strongest industrial workplace safety and labor laws in New York state. It spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and other needle trade unions which made safety a key issue.   Many years later the Federal government added its weight to worker safety with the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) under the Department of Labor. 

The labor movement commemorates the anniversary, but the hard fought gains paid for by those dead shop girls are under attack from coast-to-coast. Under the guise of cost cutting, deregulation, and as a frank assault on the working class on behalf of an oligarchy, Trump and Musk’s DOGE dudes have attempted to slash jobs at the agency and across the Department of Labor and OSHA itself is on the chopping block while blocking in every possible way the rights of workers to defend themselves through unions or by suing for damages in the courts. The old battles have to be refought. Hopefully it will not take another tragedy of epic proportion to re-prick the public conscience. 

Protests like this large parade featuring a contingent of Jewish women workers from the United Hebrew Trades demanded enactment of factory safety laws and organized shops into powerful unions.

In 2012, after years of painstaking research, the last 10 victims of the fire were finally identified. Today the Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building, still stands. It is a designated landmark, as much, we are told, for its architectural significance as the site of a tragedy.

Reformer Frances Perkins Stepped to Real Power as Secretary of Labor

 

                            Frances Perkins--Madam Secretary.

On March 4, 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day of his first inauguration, nominated Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor.  She was the first woman elevated to cabinet rank.  If anyone was expecting a docile figurehead, they were in for a big surprise.  Not only was she a key player in the New Deal and an indispensable backer of a wide range of labor reforms, she held down the job for twelve years through FDR’s first three terms despite efforts to unseat her.

Born into a respectable Republican and Congregationalist New England family in 1880, she was radicalized by exposure to the yawning class divide while attending Mt. Holyoke College where she read Jacob Riis’s expose of slum conditions and attended lectures by leading reformers and labor advocates, especially Florence Kelley of the National Consumer’s League.  Graduating in 1902 she tried her hand at teaching science in urban schools while volunteering at settlement houses. 

                                Perkins as a student at Mt. Holyoke.

But by 1909 she was ready to give up teaching for a career in social services and advocacy.  She moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University then joined her mentor Florence Kelley by serving as Secretary for the New York State Consumer’s League where she successfully led lobbing efforts to get the Legislature to limit the work week for women and children to 54 hours.  She also took up active support of the Suffrage movement.

In 1911 she personally witnessed women leaping to their deaths from the upper floors of the building at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, an event that would steel her determination to guarantee safe working conditions.  Where she had previously relied on legislation alone, she increasingly saw the need for workers to organize in their own defense and supported the work of Ladies Garment Workers leader Rose Schneiderman and others.  She even joined the Socialist Party, though she advocated gradual reform rather than revolutionary action. 

                                              The young reformer and New York civil servant.

In 1912 she supported Woodrow Wilson over Eugene V. Debs believing that the Democrat would more effectively advance labor’s cause.  She was wrong, but in the long run was one of the people most responsible for seeing that the planks of the 1912 Socialist platform were finally enacted under another Democrat.

She briefly retired from public life to marry economist Paul Wilson and to give birth to a daughter.  But Wilson suffered a breakdown and Perkins returned to work as the family breadwinner.

In 1919 she joined the administration of New York Governor Al Smith as the first woman on the state Industrial Commission.  By 1926 she was Chair of the Commission.  In 1929 Governor Roosevelt appointed her to head the state Labor Department.  She pushed through another round of reduction of hours for women and children to 48, stepped up factory safety inspection, and lobbied for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.

Roosevelt took her with him to Washington.  As Labor Secretary she helped craft and get the Wagner Act through Congress, which finally guaranteed workers the right to organize labor unions on the job and engage in collective bargaining. 

Perkins, one of the chief architects, witnessed FDR sign the Social Security Act into law.

The Fair Labor Standards Act embodied her long cherished dreams for a minimum wage and a standard 40 hour work week for both women and men.  She chaired the administration’s Committee on Economic Security which drafted the legislation embodied in the Social Security Act of 1935.

As the labor battles for representation in the basic industries intensified through the Depression, Perkins stood relentlessly on the side of working people to organize and resisted traditional calls to use Federal force and troops to suppress strikes.  She held firm against intervention in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

Conservatives and business interests put her in their cross hairs and in 1939 the House Un-American Activities Committee drew up a bill of impeachment against her for refusing to deport Harry Bridges, the Australian born West Coast Longshoremen’s leader who had been a key figure in the General Strike.  The impeachment attempt fizzled from lack of evidence and Perkins continued to serve until 1945 when she resigned to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization (ILO) conference in Paris.

                            The Secretary of Labor on a coal mine safety inspection.

She concluded her public service when President Harry Truman appointed her to the Civil Service Commission.  With the return of Republicans to power in 1953 she took a professorship at Cornel University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Perkins died at age 85 in her beloved New York City in 1965.

Although revered by labor and feminists Perkins remains a reviled figure on the right.  In 2011 hyper reactionary Maine Governor Paul LePage tried to have a labor mural featuring Frances Perkins (center panel) from the State Department of Labor because it is too pro-labor and offended some business owners.

The Labor Department Building war re-named for Perkins on April 10, 1980—the 100th anniversary of her birth with President Jimmy Carter presiding over the ceremony.  On the same day the Postal Service issued a new 15-cent stamp bearing her likeness.