The Triangle Fire (17 page)

The committee understood that it was dealing with lives that had been wrenched by a horror. If it happened in some cases, “that money given for business has been used for current living expenses, we do not feel that this necessarily proves that the relief should not have been given.

“A chance has at any rate been given the family—heretofore capable of managing its own affairs successfully. It is not impossible that the failure—on its own responsibility—has been as valuable an experience as carefully guarded and guided success would have been. There is such a thing as pauperizing by too much advice and guidance.”

The tragedy struck deep.

The wife of one of the two heroic elevator drivers who had stayed with his car to the end suffered a miscarriage on hearing of the fire. After that he himself suffered a decline in health. Their three-year-old child sickened. By April, they had been given a total of $400 but thereafter asked for no more. In October, husband and wife were still ailing.

In Case No. 89, the mother of a sixteen-year-old girl killed in the fire “was seriously affected by the shock and for a long time,” says the Red Cross report, “it was impossible to rouse her from her depression.

“The neurologist who examined her thought there was grave danger of suicide. She could not be induced to go to a hospital. An Italian woman who lived in the same house voluntarily assumed all responsibility for her: prepared meals for her and did not leave her alone a moment for many weeks.

“The mother’s mental condition slowly improved and she went back to work. When she began to get better she told about an illegitimate child, a baby girl, who was in an institution, and she became more and more determined to have this child with her. This was discouraged on account of her condition.

“But late in August she brought the child home. At first this seemed to have a bad effect on her mental condition. She called the child by the name of the dead girl and seemed even more depressed. Then she began to improve.”

Both the Red Cross and the union committee remembered that the fire had occurred on the eve of important holidays. Sums ranging from $25 to $50 were given to needy Jewish and Italian families for Passover and Easter expenses.

In a number of cases it was clear that the most effective aid that could be given to an individual survivor would be a period of rest or convalescence in the country. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor arranged for a number of these cases to be accommodated at its Hartsdale home. The Solomon and Betty Loeb Memorial Home gave them priority consideration. Other institutions made similar offers.

But it was difficult to persuade the girls to leave their homes. Only twelve of the Italian victims could be induced to go. The approach of Passover increased the reluctance of the Jewish girls. Finally, only three accepted the generous offer of the Loeb home.

Arrangements to take care of survivors were made in eighty cases, and for these a total of $61,571.05 was disbursed. Of this amount, $44,672.15 was for relatives in the United States and $16,898.90 for relatives in other lands. In some of these cases, dependence was slight, but in others it had been “absolute and inevitable,” the Red Cross declared.

The arithmetic of disaster was shattering. Several families were left helpless by the loss of a daughter upon whom they had relied for financial support and much more. Four men left widows with children. One young victim had been the sole support of his widowed mother and invalid middle-aged sister. In another family, two sisters were killed, one of them a widow with five children.

In five other instances, two sisters lost their lives; in another family two brothers. In the Rosen family, the death of their mother and older brother left three children without a natural relative. The Maltese family was cut in half by the death of the mother and two daughters; the father and his two sons, one nineteen and the other five years old, were left in utter despair and bewilderment.

In three of the eighty families, there were dependents both in the United States and elsewhere. One of these was the family of Daisy Lopez Fitze, who had, for two days, survived her leap to the sidewalk from the ninth floor. Aid was sent to her father in Jamaica. In Switzerland, where he had gone to start a small business in which his wife was soon to join him, Daisy Fitze’s husband mourned her but never sent word to the Red Cross.

In forty cases there were dependents in the United States only; thirty-seven involved people in other countries. In seven instances the Red Cross committee helped dependents return to Europe and these included four Italian families. But a youngster left stranded in Russia by the death of his sister in the New World was brought to the United States to join relatives in New York.

To small towns scattered throughout Europe, messages came telling of children who had been burned or who had fallen to their death. While they had lived, there had come from them a small stream of the Golden Land’s surplus, even the promise of future reunion in America. Both were ended.

Of the thirty-seven cases involving dependents abroad, only four were Italians, the committee noted, and pointed out that families in Italy were less likely to send daughters to the United States to start a new life than were the Jewish families in Russia and other east European countries where they faced prejudice as well as poverty.

The task of tracing the overseas families was undertaken by the Italian Consul General, the Jewish Colonization Bureau of Paris, and American Consuls General in Moscow, Vienna, and Bucharest.

Some who lost their lives had been recent newcomers to America who had used borrowed money and family savings to pay passage fare.

In one remote Russian village, a Jewish blacksmith who had borrowed money to send his oldest daughter to the New World was puzzled by a letter and 400 roubles ($206.20) from America. In the letter, he learned she was dead.

In another Russian city a father, six months before the fire, had grown tired of trying to support five children and a wife on the rouble a day he earned in a match factory. So he borrowed 100 roubles and sent his sixteen-year-old daughter on her way along a relay of relatives stretching across Europe to America. When she died she had been in the United States less than three months. Not a single rouble had as yet come back from her. Her steamship ticket had not been fully paid for. The Red Cross committee paid the balance due on the ticket, and sent 500 roubles to the father.

Some, at first, required no financial aid. For instance, there was Case No. 50. Two brothers had died. Their parents lived on a farm in Austria, purchased with $500 the boys had sent from America. The parents were self-supporting. The boys had planned a visit home for Passover. In October, the Red Cross learned that the death of her two sons had driven the mother insane, that as a result the father faced destitution. A grant of 2,500 kronen ($506.25) was dispatched.

Some didn’t know where to turn. This is the committee’s report on Case No. 120:

“A man, thirty years old, was killed, leaving a wife and two children, four and two years of age. They had been in this country only three months. The woman spoke no English and had no trade and had no near relatives in this country, except a sister who had come over with her and was almost as helpless.

“After the fire she went to a poor cousin whose family was seriously incommoded by the addition of four people. She wished to return to Russia where she had a brother and a sister. Her passage was engaged, passport and other official papers were secured, arrangements were made for having her looked after at all points in Russia where she would change cars, and for paying her a lump sum of money with which to establish a business.

“Three days before she was to sail, however, she received a letter from her brother telling her on no account to return as there were rumors of pogroms and war. This so frightened her that she was not willing to go.

“A few days later she again changed her mind and wished to go home. Arrangements were again made for her return and again a day or two before the date of sailing she refused to go. The United Hebrew Charities was then requested to take charge of the family, $1,050 altogether has been placed with that society to be used in current expenses and in carrying out some plan for making the woman self-supporting; and $4,000 to be kept as a trust fund for the two little children.”

The compassion of the gentle people on the committee breaks through the official language. They had dealt lovingly and patiently with a lost, lonely heart.

In the depth of their sorrow, some harbored pride and a different kind of need. A Red Cross investigator told of the girl in the New York Hospital who, when asked whether she needed anything, replied:

“Bring me a copy of Shakespeare and another of Tolstoy, in Yiddish.”

12. PROTEST

The clangor of a sound fraught with terror.

—
CANTO IX
:65

In the city churches and synagogues, the day after the fire resounded with prayers for the dead and admonitions for the living. On this first, confusing day, the conscience of the city stirred and began to find a questioning voice in the pulpits.

At the Calvary Baptist Church, the Reverend Dr. R. S. MacArthur intoned:

“Merciful God, teach employers of labor the duties which they owe to those under their care in the proper construction of factories, in making proper exits and in all other ways caring for the comforts and especially the lives of those in their employ. If the law has been violated, may punishment swift and sure and just be speedily inflicted.”

At Grace Church, on Broadway and Eleventh Street, only a few blocks from the scene of the fire, the rector, Rev. Dr. Charles L. Slattery, probed deeper. He told his parishioners that there was no need to grieve for those who had died. “Their troubles were quickly over and God will care for them.” It was the survivors who merited sympathy. “One of the hard facts that will confront these bereaved,” he continued, “is that it will probably be explained that the death of their loved ones was needless. It will perhaps be discovered that someone was too eager to make money out of human energy to provide the proper safeguards and protections.” He hoped that the workers had not died in vain, that the tragedy “would make New York stop to think whether it was not allowing men to go too madly and disastrously and selfishly in pursuit of money.”

In the week following the fire, this kind of soul-searching was repeated many times. Public-spirited citizens, community organizations, and institutions met to seek the causes of the tragedy and to determine whether each, even if only in a minor fashion, shared responsibility for it. Special meetings were held by:

The Public Safety Committee of the Federation of Women’s Clubs

The Chamber of Commerce of New York

The executive committee of the Architectural League

The committee on city affairs, insurance and fire regulations of the New York Board of Trade

The board of directors of the United Cloak, Suit and Skirt Manufacturers of New York

The Merchants’ Association

The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor

The employers’ welfare section of the National Civic Federation

The sense of public guilt made itself felt at all the meetings. At the National Civic Federation session, Assemblyman C. W. Phillips nailed it down when he told the businessmen that the great industrial state of New York, with its many thousands of factories, “has 75 game protectors in its Department of Game but only 50 human protectors in its Department of Labor.”

The first protest meeting was held the day after the fire at 43 East Twenty-second Street, headquarters of the Women’s Trade Union League. Representatives of twenty labor and civic organizations met there at the League’s invitation.

League President Mary Dreier presided. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise immediately called for the formation of a citizens’ committee of twenty-five to begin the gathering of facts about the tragedy and thus provide a basis for the drafting of proposed remedial legislation. “We don’t want an outburst of charity for those who have suffered only to have the whole thing forgotten in short order,” the rabbi said.

Some declared that the usual kind of official investigation would not do. Others urged proceeding with caution. Leonora O’Reilly of Local 25, ILGWU, and an officer of the WTUL, replied that it was easy enough to talk of orderly, judicial procedures. “But there is little comfort in that for the thousands of women and girls who have to start work tomorrow morning in factories that are no safer—and most of them worse—than the Triangle shop.

“We cannot be calm in the face of such a frightful loss of life when it is clearly the result of the negligence of our lawmakers in the first place for making inadequate laws, and in the second place the officials for their failure to force compliance even with these,” she added.

During the session, a committee composed of Mary Beard, Ida Rauh, Mrs. Stephen Wise, and Mrs. Ollesheimer drew up a questionnaire to be handed out to workers who would be told that all replies were to be held in confidence. The questions asked were:

In your shop or factory, are the doors locked? Are there any bars on the windows? Are the freight elevator doors closed during the day? Are there fire escapes on all floors and is there free access to the fire escapes? Are there any scraps left near the motor or engine?

On Wednesday evening, thousands of relatives and friends of the victims crowded into Grand Central Palace for a memorial meeting called by ILGWU Local 25. Most of them were women.

The tenseness that gripped the audience from the start reached the breaking point during the speech by Abraham Cahan, the editor of the
Jewish Daily Forward
who had made that paper the guide and educator of the immigrant Jewish masses. Cahan began by praising Mayor Gaynor for heading the contributions to the relief fund.

But many of the workers in his audience did not share Cahan’s faith in the power of a free society to persuade or curb the arrogance of wealth and they were disillusioned with men of good will who somehow were unable to affect the basic issues of poverty. At the mention of the Mayor’s name, hisses broke out in all parts of the hall. He was part of the system that protected vested interests of wealth and tolerated the conditions that had caused the death of their comrades. Cahan strove to make himself heard.

He told of an excited, wild-eyed worker who had come marching into his office full of anger and protest over the tragic fire. Deprecatingly, Cahan declared: “He told me that only the placing of a few bombs in the camp of the capitalists would bring redress to the working classes.”

The immediate effect was far from what Cahan had wanted, for now, according to the
Times
, the hall filled with shouts: “Throw a bomb under City Hall!” “Blow the place up!”

The meeting threatened to get out of hand. Chairman Jacob Panken rapped forcefully for order. Finally he managed, with excellent judgment, to ask for a moment of silent prayer for the dead. A low, confused murmur filled the hall.

Then a girl’s voice broke in a deep sob. A woman further back in the hall sobbed, too, and sounds of convulsive weeping spread throughout the hall. A woman screamed.

Instantly, the tension snapped. Cry after cry rang out. Men and women, wailing, sprang to their feet.

The chairman could be seen speaking but he could not be heard. Many survivors were seated on the stage, and they, too, began loudly crying, calling out the names of departed co-workers. The hall resounded with a single, mass shriek of despair.

Women fell fainting on the floor.

Captain O’Connor of the East Twenty-second Street Police Station had expected trouble, and for that reason he had stationed sixty of his men in the hall. He led them down the aisles and through the rows of seats, trying to calm the throng and carrying those who had fainted out of the area where they might be trampled if the panic increased.

A police alarm had brought doctors and ambulances from Flower Hospital, and these set up emergency equipment in the lobby. More than fifty women were treated, but only one had to be taken directly to the hospital.

When quiet was again restored, Leonora O’Reilly was introduced as the next speaker. As she spoke of the “martyrs who died that we might live,” the hysteria threatened to erupt once more.

A girl who had survived the fire but had succumbed to the panic at the meeting tried to force her way back into the hall, screaming and tearing her hair. The
Times
reported that several girls in the back rows tried to restrain her. Policemen ran toward her. “In the struggle, the girl’s shirtwaist was torn from her back and she was carried screaming out of earshot,” the paper said.

Now the audience had purged itself of its own hysteria. It listened in silence and in sorrow to the speakers. One of the last was A. M. Simons, editor of a Chicago Socialist publication. He declared that only labor could take care of its own safety.

“We have the votes. Why should we not have the power?” Simons asked. “Your future lies in unionism. Your union should have the right to decide questions which are of most concern to working people and it can get this right only by organizing. These deaths resulted because capital begrudged the price of another fire escape.”

It was a thoughtful audience, rid of its earlier excitement, that filed out of the Grand Central Palace when the meeting ended. As they left, they were handed leaflets announcing a debate on the following Sunday at the Rand School on the subject: How can the Socialist victory in Milwaukee be duplicated in New York?

There was anger and determination, not hysteria, at the rally sponsored on Friday evening by the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League and held at Cooper Union, where in February, 1860, Lincoln had campaigned against another kind of slavery. A flaring banner, stretched across the historic platform, proclaimed: “Votes for women. Locked doors, overcrowding, inadequate fire escapes. The women could not, the voters did not, alter these conditions. We demand for all women the right to protect themselves.”

The three main speakers of the evening were Meyer London, who had been counsel for the striking shirtwaist makers the year before; Morris Hillquit, the famous Socialist lawyer; and Dr. Anna Shaw, the noted suffragist.

“As I read the terrible story of the fire,” she told the audience, “I asked, ‘am I my sister’s keeper?’ For the Lord said to me, ‘where is thy sister?’ And I bowed my head and said, ‘I am responsible.’ Yes, every man and woman in this city is responsible. Don’t try to lay it on someone else. Don’t try to lay it on some official.

“We are responsible!

“You men—forget not that you are responsible! As voters it was your business and you should have been about your business. If you are incompetent, then in the name of Heaven, stand aside and let us try!

“There was a time when a woman worked in the home with her weaving, her sewing, her candlemaking. All that has been changed. Now she can no longer regulate her own conditions, her own hours of labor.

“She has been driven into the market with no voice in the laws and powerless to defend herself. The most cowardly thing that men ever did was when they tied woman’s hands and left her to be food for the flames.”

Then Dr. Shaw turned to a consideration of the recent ruling by the Court of Appeals declaring unconstitutional a proposed employer’s liability law.

“Something’s got to be done to the law,” she warned. “And if it is not constitutional to protect the lives of workers then we’ve got to smash the constitution! It’s our ‘instrument,’ and if it doesn’t work, we’ve got to get a new one!”

The audience cheered.

Hillquit, declaring that sympathy was useless although he could understand it, argued for social change. “Punishment as revenge is also natural—but useless,” he declared. “I do not believe in jail as a remedy for social evils.

“The girls who went on strike last year were trying to readjust the conditions under which they were obliged to work. I wonder if there is not some connection between the fire and that strike. I wonder if the magistrates who sent to jail the girls who did picket duty in front of the Triangle shop realized last Sunday that some of the responsibility may be theirs. Had the strike been successful, these girls might have been alive today and the citizenry of New York would have less of a burden upon its conscience.”

Hillquit then told the audience that more than 50,000 workers were losing their lives every year in industrial accidents—more than 1,000 a week. Then he turned on the owners of Triangle.

“Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck were there at the time the fire broke out. They escaped. We congratulate them. My friends,” Hillquit concluded, “what a tremendous difference between the captains of ships and the captains of industry!”

Meyer London recounted the story of the 1909 shirtwaist makers’ strike with special attention to the part played in it by the girls who worked at Triangle. “Now,” he said, “we will get an investigation that will result in a law being referred to a committee that will report in 1913 and by 1915 a law will be passed and after that our grafting officials will not enforce it.”

A fourth speaker—Fire Chief Croker—had been scheduled to address the meeting. Instead, he pleaded that the press of official business made it impossible for him to do so and that he would be pleased to send a statement, which was read to the audience. It concluded as follows:

“It would be my advice to the girls employed in lofts and factories to refuse to work when they find the doors locked.

“It all comes right down to dollars and cents against life. That is at the bottom of the entire thing. Mr. Owner will come and say to the Fire Department: ‘If you compel us to do this or that we will have to close the factory; we cannot afford to do it. I only get so much interest.’

“And if we say to the builders: ‘You will have to put in a fire tower,’ Mr. Builder will answer, ‘It is impossible.’ He is going to invest $15,000 in this building and he hopes to get so much a square foot and if so many square feet are cut off, he cannot build.

“It comes right down to dollars and cents against human lives no matter how you look at it.”

Two memorial meetings were held on Sunday April 2, a week and a day after the fire. Early in the afternoon, the cloak-makers gathered at Grand Central Palace and under the chairmanship of Benjamin Schlesinger, who served as president of the ILGWU, marked their sorrow and their anger. But it was the second meeting, starting at three in the afternoon, that the city watched most closely. It was not a meeting of garment workers. It was not an indignation meeting of a political party. It was the first gathering together in public assembly of persons in all strata of the community who felt that a sense of outrage was meaningless unless turned into a force for reform.