One Hundred Years Ago Today

Greene Street and Washington Place... Men and women, escaping the fire in the only way they thought possible, jumped from the windows to their deaths while people in the street below pleaded with them to wait for help.
Photographer: unknown, March 25, 1911; Kheel Center

It happened on an afternoon in Manhattan, as a shocked crowd watched.

It spurred safety and labor reforms in New York, and later, nationally.

In our time of renewed attacks on labor, the history is a reminder that the fight never ends—and how we again live in a gilded age of wealth and power unaccountable for its crimes.

Sam Seder's Kevin Baker interview has a good summary of the historical context in 1911, a time of "continuous class warfare in the workplace"—

• From 1885-1905, there were 37,000 strikes nationally, which were usually ended brutally, by hired goons, militia, and/or local police.
• By 1911 unsafe workplaces around the country caused an estimated one hundred deaths a day.
• Joining across ethnic lines, 20,000 sweatshop workers had held a strike a year earlier. They were attacked by police, along with the pimps and prostitutes they controlled. The International Ladies Garment Union grew from the strike, and won some improvements.

The Triangle factory was one place where the strike had made no difference, although the factory had been considered a modern improvement over sweatshops. The building itself was fireproofed, but the cloth inventory was highly flammable—the owners had run a good sideline insuring inventory and collecting settlements after "mysterious fires."

This time, the fire wasn't intentional. But as on all work days, women were locked in the shop—so their pocketbooks could be inspected for pilfered scraps before they were allowed to go home.

The factory owners had worked their way up to owning a factory and exploiting workers, like they had once been. They were chauffeured to and from their homes on Park Avenue, while their employees lived miserably, in crowded tenements. Post-fire, the owners paid token restitution to victims' families—and profited on the insurance settlement. Then, they started over: opening a new factory, where the same fire violations found a few months later.

When the fire broke out that March afternoon, passersby first thought those were burning bundles of cloth inventory being thrown out windows—as young women plunged to horrible deaths.

Reformer Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, became a key figure behind progressive legislation passed in New York, and was later FDR's Secretary of Labor and a major force in the New Deal.

The Kheel Center archives include heartbreaking photos. The Wiki entry is a good summary, and this week I've seen some pieces—like this and this—which make the point about how embattled labor is, a century later. Driftglass adds this, on modern anti-regulation ideologues.

This 1979 TV movie may have been a badly fictionalized version of events, but once upon a time, something relating to labor history was broadcast on network TV.

I didn't see it, but remember that the next morning, a receptionist at work told me how she was still feeling shaken by the movie.

At the time, I took it as another example of how Americans are receptive to their history if someone ever bothers letting them know about it—which is usually when some simulacrum gets on TV. (Roots in 1977 was probably the first big example of this).

1979 was still before Reagan—and would soon be followed by thirty years of history rewrites and voter willingness to vote against their interests, over and over and over.

Now it seems that in more than one state, voters are finding the shine is off their new governors, in record time.

Frances Perkins was born into a family from Maine—one of those states with a new Republican governor. Since taking office, his priorities have included undoing child labor laws, and spending money to remove labor history murals from an obscure conference room.

LePage's cleansing of the same building includes having "...eight conference rooms named after labor leaders — including Cesar Chavez — be renamed 'after mountains, counties or something.'"

Among the disappeared will be Frances Perkins, as well as "William Looney, a 19th-century lawmaker who sponsored a 10-hour workday law."