Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire

Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire. On 25 March 1911, a sunny afternoon in lower Manhattan, fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company's factory.Sweeping through the building in minutes, it claimed the lives of 146 young workers, mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women. The garment shop, occupying the top three floors of a building in Greenwich Village, employed 800 workers and billed itself as a model operation far better than the stifling sweatshops where many immigrants labored. Yet the company employed children as young as seven years old to trim threads from finished garments. Teenagers and young women worked at sewing machines in crowded rows, the aisles blocked by piles of highly flammable grass linen, a popular fabric for making shirtwaist dresses. The doors to each floor were often kept bolted to prevent theft or “frivolous” bathroom breaks. The fire moved so fast that some women died at their sewing machines. Others collapsed of smoke inhalation, their bodies blocking the building's inner doors.

Thousands of New Yorkers heard the fire engines and gathered on the sidewalks below, watching in horror as the aging, rusted fire escape collapsed, plunging more young women to their deaths. Singly and in pairs, scores of young girls jumped from eight and nine stories up, their bodies striking the pavement with such force that the cement shattered. Alfred E. Smith, the future governor of New York, and Frances Perkins, the future secretary of labor, were among the eyewitnesses as grief‐stricken families pored over the remains to identify loved ones.

The Triangle Fire shocked the nation, seared the consciences of middle‐class reformers, and galvanized public support for effective factory‐safety legislation. Al Smith cited the tragedy as a motivating force behind the reforms he enacted as governor. Perkins would later write that her memories of Triangle fueled her life‐long commitment to strong regulation of wages, hours, and factory safety. As secretary of labor, Perkins collaborated with Senator Robert F. Wagner to pass the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, putting the force of federal law behind her conviction that government had a responsibility to make the workplace safe for all workers.
See also Child Labor; Immigrant Labor; Immigration; New Deal Era, The; New York City; Progressive Era; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Textile Industry; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Frances Perkins , The Roosevelt I Knew, 1946.
Leon Stein , The Triangle Fire, 1962.
Annelise Orleck , Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the U.S., 1995.

Annelise Orleck