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A Voice for the Workers

A Voice for the Workers

After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a memorial meeting held at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House attracted uneducated workers, middle-class reformers, and social leaders. Discord among the various factions was evident until Polish immigrant Rose Schneiderman touched the crowd with these words:

I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies, if I were to come here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public—and we have found you wanting.

The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death.

We have tried you, citizens! We are trying you now and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning for us—warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back when we rise—back into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. And the only way is through a strong working-class movement.

Source: Quoted in Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1962).


See Also

Encyclopedia of American Immigration

Triangle Shirtwaist fire

by Kathryn A. Cochran

The Event: Industrial disaster resulting in the deaths of about 146 workers, many of whom were young female immigrants

Date: March 25, 1911

Location: New York, New York

Significance: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. The disaster exposed the horrible working conditions of many immigrants and helped spur union organization and occupational safety laws.

Located in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a typical turn-of-the-century sweatshop. Many of the employees were young female immigrants, primarily Russian Jews, Italians, Hungarians, and Germans. They worked long hours in dangerous working conditions for low wages. Shortly before the 4:45 p.m. closing time on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the ten-story Asch Building where they worked. The company occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors.

The fire rapidly spread throughout the building, and most of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape; many on the tenth floor made it safely to the roof, where they made their way to an ajoining building. Employees on the ninth floor, however, discovered that one of the two exits had been locked—a routine precaution management felt was necessary to keep employees from stealing from the company. The single fire escape quickly buckled and collapsed under the weight of the workers. One of the two elevators in the building was not operating, and the other elevator shaft was later found clogged with the bodies of thirty girls who had unsuccessfully tried to escape. Some workers waited for rescue workers, but the ladders and water hoses that were brought were too short to reach the upper floors. In desperation, some workers leapt from the ninth floor to their deaths. By time the fire was extinguished, about half an hour after it had started, an estimated 146 of the nearly 600 employees had died. Many had burned to death.

Following the tragedy, there was public outcry for reform of fire safety laws and working conditions. The fire led to increased support for labor unions, including the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, of which some Triangle Shirtwaist employees were members. At the end of April that year, the governor of New York appointed a Factory Investigating Commission to collect information and conduct hearings, resulting in important factory safety legislation.

The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Both men were in the building at the time the fire started but escaped. Blanck, his children, and his governess fled the area when the fire broke out. Although the building had experienced four fires before the 1911 disaster and had been reported by the city fire department as an unsafe workplace with insufficient exits, Blanck and Harris were acquitted of any wrongdoing in the disaster. Twenty-three families then filed civil suits against the owners. Two years after the fire, in March of 1913, Harris and Blanck settled the suits by paying settlements of only seventy-five dollars for each employee who had been killed.

Further Reading

1 

De Angelis, Gina. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001.

2 

Sherrow, Victoria. The Triangle Factory Fire. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1995.

3 

Von Drehle, David. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Cochran, Kathryn A. "Triangle Shirtwaist Fire." Encyclopedia of American Immigration, edited by Carl L. Bankston, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AmIm_1495.
APA 7th
Cochran, K. A. (2010). Triangle Shirtwaist fire. In C. L. Bankston (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American Immigration. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Cochran, Kathryn A. "Triangle Shirtwaist Fire." Edited by Carl L. Bankston. Encyclopedia of American Immigration. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.