Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Drehle

Author:David Drehle [Drehle, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, New York, Cities
ISBN: 9780802195258
Google: Zj5WVl0qoxkC
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
Published: 2004-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

7

FALLOUT

“We will get an investigation,” Meyer London predicted at a protest rally a week after the Triangle fire. The Great Hall of the Cooper Union was full to the bursting point, just as it had been on the night sixteen months earlier when Clara Lemlich rallied the waist makers to their historic general strike. “We will get an investigation that will result in a law being referred to a committee that will report in 1913,” London sneered. “And by 1915 a law will be passed—and after that our grafting officials will not enforce it!”

The disaster at the Triangle confirmed, in the eyes of socialists like London, that no one would protect the workers but the workers themselves. Shirtwaist strikers had shivered and starved and done hard time; they marched on the mayor and lunched at the Colony Club and charmed J. P. Morgan’s clerks. Their sacrifice had attracted enormous sympathy and support. Yet the strike had not even guaranteed basic safety. If that was true—if the historic uprising in the waist factories had not forced lasting change—what reason was there to believe that even something as shocking as the Triangle catastrophe would make a difference?

But the reality was more complicated. By organizing themselves and asserting their strength, the workers were beginning to make progress. In the months since Lemlich’s catalyzing speech, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union had grown from an insignificant few members to tens of thousands—the leading edge of an unprecedented surge in overall union membership in the city. Between 1909 and 1913, the total number of unionized workers in New York City grew eightfold, from thirty thousand to a quarter of a million. The ILGWU, for which Meyer London was a stalwart and eloquent lawyer, was now battle-tested by two of the most important strikes in urban labor history—the uprising of the shirtwaist workers and the subsequent victory by the mostly male cloak makers in 1910. The cloak makers’ revolt was, Samuel Gompers said afterward, “more than a strike”; it was “an industrial revolution.” The strike ended in a pioneering settlement, drafted largely by Louis Brandeis, which established a system for improving conditions and resolving grievances short of strikes. The “Protocol of Peace,” as it was called, was a first step toward a place at the table for labor. In less than two years, the garment workers had moved from the back row to the vanguard of the American labor movement.

New York socialists and their sympathizers, meanwhile, were growing in strength with every election. In 1910, Meyer London ran for Congress from the Lower East Side and won 33 percent of the vote in a multicandidate race. He would be elected in 1914.

Still, no one could blame London or his audience for feeling cynical about the prospects for genuine reform. Many times before, a disaster was followed by a predictable train of consequences: shock, then outrage, then resolve, all leading to lip service dwindling into forgetfulness. Certainly, the fire at the Triangle was a sensational variation on

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