Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is best known as the site of a deadly fire that blazed for 18 minutes in the late afternoon of March 25, 1911. On the ninth floor of the Asch Building, which housed the factory just off Washington Square in New York City, hundreds of young women and girls were trapped by fire. Thirty or more workers jumped to their death on the pavement below, while more than 100 working girls burned on the factory floor. The resulting public outrage prompted the creation of the New York Factory Investigating Commission. This commission launched an era of remedial factory legislation.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries immigrant girls and women were recruited to work in the garment industry sweatshops. Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Slavic women worked long hours in these unventilated and minimally heated factories. Although female workers were actively recruited into the recently organized International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), the founders of the union believed that women had neither the ability nor the commitment to sustain leadership roles in the union.

The garment industry was thriving as working women became eager consumers of ready-made clothing. As profit opportunities grew for factory owners, they cut wages, put more workers in smaller spaces, and introduced strict workplace monitoring to reduce pilferage and wasted time. Firsthand accounts of life in the factories describe them as cramped and filthy. In November 1909, a mass meeting of factory workers convened in New York to demand better wages and improved working conditions. When the male leaders hesitated to commit to a plan, a 15-yearold Ukrainian-born girl stood up and called on her fellow workers to strike. The response to her call began the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand.

Within 2 days, 20,000 to 30,000 factory workers in New York went on strike. The walkout quickly spread to Philadelphia and became an important milestone in the women's labor movement. For 3 months the workers picketed in the cold, withstanding the hardships of weather and lost wages in hopes of improved conditions, hours, and wages in the sweatshops. In February 1910, an arbitrated settlement was reached with most of the factory owners, although some refused to sign the agreement. One of these was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where Clara Lemlich, the instigator of the Uprising, worked.

Triangle's ninth-floor factory rooms had inadequate fire escapes, no sprinklers, and exit doors locked from the outside to prevent worker theft of materials. When fire broke out, spreading quickly through hanging fabric and paper patterns, 500 women and girls were trapped inside. A few escaped by running to the roof, or getting the last run of the elevator downstairs, but many resorted to jumping out the windows, crashing to the ground as appalled observers watched. By night, 146 corpses were piled on the 26th Street pier.

In December 1911, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory went on trial for manslaughter. Despite enormous public outrage and grief, the all-male jury returned a verdict of not guilty, in response to the judge's insistence that the owners could only be found guilty if the jury believed that they knew the workshop exit door to the stairway was locked. However, over the subsequent 3 years, 36 new laws were enacted following the recommendations of the Factory Investigating Commission to reform the state labor code and mandate safer working conditions in factories. One commission member was Frances Perkins, who later became secretary of labor in the Roosevelt administration.

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