The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  At four o’clock on Friday afternoon, November 24, 1911, Wilson and House met alone in the swanky Gotham Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. Wilson was fifty-five years old, and House was fifty-three. New Jersey’s governor had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, stood half a head taller than Colonel House, wore pince-nez that made his long face look even longer, and had a pointed chin. Despite the flinty features of his clean-shaven face, Wilson broke into a crisp smile when he chose to turn on the charm. His laugh revealed horsy teeth. Virginia-born Wilson spoke in a mellow tenor voice with overtones of a Southern drawl. Colonel House was a meek-looking fellow with sloping shoulders, a receding chin, big ears, and a mustache. His catlike eyes peered in cool calculation over high Mongolian cheekbones. He spoke slowly and huskily. Wilson, when alone with his family, was given to high jinks and did an amusing imitation of a drunk. Colonel House, even in private, was far more reserved than Wilson, indulging only in a thin smile or, at most, a half chuckle.

  Here were two men who wanted parallel things. Wilson wanted to become President of the United States. House wanted to serve the man he thought best qualified for the Presidency. For all of the colonel’s political cunning he was a progressive, a man of high principle; if Wilson’s ideals had not matched his own, he would not have lifted a finger to help. According to one personality study of Wilson, he had a compulsive need for love and adoration, his perfectionist father having left him with a subconscious feeling of inadequacy. House was quick to praise Wilson, who glowed. By a kind of chemical affinity Wilson and House fell into friendship. As John Dos Passos described it: “This pair of middleaged politicians, family men both, were as excited about each other as two schoolgirls developing a crush.” Colonel House later said of this first meeting:

  We talked and talked. We knew each other for congenial souls from the very beginning. . . . We exchanged our ideas about the democracies of the world, contrasted the European democracies with the United States, discussed where they differed, which was best in some respects and which in others. . . . I remember we were very urbane. Each gave the other the chance to have his say. . . . The hour flew away. It seemed no time when it was over.

  Then Wilson had to leave because he had a date to meet a California Senator. He and House agreed to dine together within a couple of days. Only a few weeks later House said to Wilson, “Governor, isn’t it strange that two men who never knew each other before, should think so much alike?” Baring his teeth in a horsy grin, Wilson replied, “My dear fellow, we have known each other all of our lives.” Later, in response to a question from a politician, Wilson said, “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”

  Wilson won the Democratic nomination and in 1912 was elected President. The selection of Cabinet members began in Colonel House’s New York apartment on November 2. Besides picking most of the men Wilson ultimately appointed to the Cabinet, House’s influence also counted heavily in Wilson’s selection of ambassadors. Wilson was in and out of House’s apartment several times between his election and inauguration. After the President-elect awakened at 8 A.M., House personally served him cereal and 2 raw eggs, into which orange or lemon juice was squeezed. In the evening, after dining in the seclusion of Colonel House’s apartment, the telephone lifted off the hook to avoid interruptions, Wilson sometimes read aloud from the works of Keats, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold.

  The Murray Hill section of Manhattan became the mecca of everyone wanting anything from Woodrow Wilson. They realized not only that House could put them in touch with the President-elect, but that House’s recommendations carried great weight. The burgeoning friendship between Wilson and House disturbed some professional politicians. When Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma was asked what he thought of the colonel, he replied, “Take my word for it, he can walk on dead leaves and make no more noise than a tiger.”

  After Wilson was sworn in as President, a direct telephone line was set up between the White House and 145 East Thirty-fifth Street in Manhattan. To guarantee the utmost secrecy, Wilson and House communicated in code. The phone would ring in New York. Picking up the receiver, House would hear the President of the United States say, “This is Ajax.” Over the phone Wilson called House any of three names—Beverly, Roland, or Bush. The President and his adviser also referred to Cabinet members by aliases plucked from Greek and Roman mythology. Only rarely did Wilson dictate letters to House; most of the time he pecked them out on his own typewriter. And nearly always the President signed himself “Affectionately yours.”

  *From The Gentleman and the Tiger, The Autobiography of George B. McClellan, Jr., edited by Harold C. Syrett. Copyright © 1956 by The New-York Historical Society; copyright © 1956 by Harold C. Syrett. Published by J. B. Lippincott Company.

  Chapter 40

  THE TRIANGLE FIRE

  CONDITIONS were scandalous in New York’s garment industry. Men, women, and children toiled day and night in smelly dingy factories and tenements. State labor laws were inadequate and seldom enforced. Factory inspection was a farce. Liberals fretted especially about working women and children. An 1899 law banning nightwork for women was declared unconstitutional by the New York court of appeals in 1907. The court held that the law deprived women of their “liberty” to work in factories all night or as long as they liked. Mayor Gaynor sputtered that “to such a use indeed did they (the judges) stretch this sacred word liberty.” Although the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (I.L.G.W.U.) had been organized in 1900, most bosses tried to keep the labor movement as weak as possible.

  One of the city’s largest and most reactionary garment-manufacturing firms was the Triangle Waist Company. It was owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the very prototype of sweatshop bosses. They billed their female employees for needles and other supplies, taxed them for the chairs on which they sat, charged for their clothing lockers, and imposed fines treble the value of goods accidentally spoiled by the girls.

  In 1908 Blanck and Harris tried to quell their workers’ complaints by setting up a company union. Some rebellious employees, scorning paternalism, considered joining a real union. Behind locked doors and lowered shades about 100 Triangle workers met with officers of the I.L.G.W.U. and of the United Hebrew Trades. A few days later the Triangle company fired several employees suspected of trying to join a bona fide union. Although management claimed that it was compelled to cut the staff because of poor business, it quickly advertised for more employees.

  Local 25 of die I.L.G.W.U. then called a strike against the firm for locking out its workers. Blanck and Harris hired thugs to beat up male pickets and employed prostitutes to mingle with female workers on the picket line. The police and courts sided with the Triangle owners. In sentencing one picket, a magistrate cried, “You are on strike against God!” The Women’s Trade Union League cabled this remark to George Bernard Shaw, who cabled back: “DELIGHTFUL! MEDIEVAL AMERICA ALWAYS IN THE INTIMATE PERSONAL CONFIDENCE OF THE ALMIGHTY.” After rich New York women and socially conscious pastors came out publicly on the side of the strikers, a compromise was reached. But this left the Triangle Waist Company a non-union shop, and many employees still felt bitter toward their bosses.

  On March 25, 1911, the weather was raw. It was a Saturday afternoon, and although other shirtwaist plants were closed, the Triangle shop was working full blast. It occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building, a brick loft at 22 Washington Place near Greene Street, one block east of Washington Square. On the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors more than 600 employees were squeezed back to back and elbow to elbow at sewing machines. Most of them were girls between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three, Jewesses and Italians who lived on the Lower East Side.

  At 5 P.M. a bell rang. The girls cut off their machines, ran to the dirty washroom, snatched coats out of lockers, and scurried for the elevators. Just then a mysterious fire broke out in the southeastern corner of the eighth floor. Perhaps it was caused b
y a burning match or cigarette thoughtlessly tossed into the ankle-deep litter near a sewing machine. With a whoosh and crackle the flame gushed into a flash fire. An updraft of air drew the flames and smoke from the eighth floor toward the roof. In a matter of seconds the upper three floors roared like a funeral pyre.

  An immigrant youth, named Louis Waldman, later a Socialist candidate for governor of New York, was reading in the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street three blocks to the east. Roused from his book by the sound of fire engines, Waldman bolted out the door and ran toward the burning building. At the same time strollers from Washington Square swiveled their heads in the direction of the jangling fire bells and then scurried to the scene.

  Inside the flaming building, horror was being piled on horror. Like many lofts, this one had no sprinkler system. There was a stand-pipe hose; but the working girls panicked, and the hose was never used. Eighth-floor windows blew out, sprinkling glass slivers onto the sidewalk. Sheets of flame now licked out of glassless windows, only to be sucked into other windows two floors above. A fireman said that the flames almost seemed drawn back inside by a magnet. One terrified elevator man darted out of his car and clattered down a stairway to safety. A passerby, named Joseph Zito, ran inside and took charge of the abandoned elevator. Five times he rammed through a gauntlet of flames to the ninth floor, bringing down twenty-five to thirty girls each trip.

  Girls on the eighth floor ran to the stairway exit on the Washington Place side, but the door was locked. Fences of flame cut them off from the elevators. Screaming, praying, coughing, and clawing, they stampeded to windows, leaned out, and tried to gulp fresh air. Other girls, unable to reach the windows and suffocated by smoke, collapsed on sewing machines and burned to death. When the inferno became unbearable, young women at the windows started jumping.

  Firemen had responded quickly to the four-alarm fire and cordoned off the block, keeping back ashen-faced spectators, who gazed helplessly toward the torch in the sky. The firemen were equally helpless. Their extension ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Their hoses threw streams of water only as high as the seventh floor.

  Girls were jumping in groups of three, four, and five. The firemen quickly pulled out rope nets, but as a battalion chief later sighed, “Life nets? What good were life nets? The little ones went right through the life nets and the pavement, too. Nobody could hold a life net when those girls from the ninth floor came down.” A trio of girls landed on one net, it broke, and the firemen holding its edges were jerked in on the mangled bodies. The sky seemed to rain flesh. Spectators winced at the sound of bodies hitting the ground. Now fire trucks dared not move closer for fear of running over the dying. People standing on the sidewalk twisted damp fingers together as they watched the death of a pair of lovers. Suddenly silhouetted against the glare in a ninth-story window stood a man and a girl. Their clothing was stitched with flames. They kissed. Then, entwining their arms about each other, they stepped into eternity.

  In only 10 minutes the holocaust was all over. A total of 141 workers died in the Triangle fire, and of this number, 125 were girls.

  Sorrow ran like a river through the Lower East Side and gathered in guilty pools elsewhere in the city. Even in the mansions of the mighty, tenderhearted men and women wept as they read their newspapers. Jewish labor organizations collected a fund for the injured, and most of the city’s workmen donated one day’s pay to honor the dead. City officials prohibited any public demonstration, but the bereaved made a silent display of their grief by holding a mass funeral. Rain fell the day of the funeral and for more than 5 hours more than 100,000 persons splashed speechlessly through wet streets, following hearses to a common grave in the Mount Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens.

  Two days after the fire—and two days too late—the city building department posted a sign on the Asch Building proclaiming it unsafe. About a week after that a protest meeting was held in the Metropolitan Opera House. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise declared “the life of the lowliest worker . . . sacred and inviolable” and urged instant action to avert this kind of tragedy. Redheaded Rose Schneiderman, an organizer in the needle trades, made an inflammatory speech. From all sides of the opera house came shouts of “Down with the capitalistic legislature!” and “Why can’t workingmen have their own legislators?” A committee of safety was organized. Henry Moskowitz, a settlement-house worker, introduced a resolution calling on the state legislature to make a thorough investigation of safety conditions in factories and to pass new and more stringent laws.

  Nine months after the fire Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried on charges of manslaughter. The case was heard in the Tombs, a brownstone monstrosity occupying two blocks just north of Foley Square. The attorney for the proprietors was Max D. Steuer, a soft-voiced Tammany brave, who later served a long list of notorious clients. On the bench sat Justice Thomas Crain, another Tammany stalwart. In effect, he directed a verdict of acquittal, and the jurors took only 100 minutes to pronounce the defendants not guilty. On December 28, 1911, a New York Evening Mail columnist, named Franklin P. Adams, wrote in his diary: “Reading that Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck are not to suffer at all for their so dreadful negligence I am grieved, and at odds with them that did acquit them, albeit my heart is soft as any melon.”

  Less melonlike was the reaction of working families that had lost loved ones. The day the verdict was handed down, hundreds of grieving relatives gathered outside the Tombs. Blanck and Harris, guarded by five cops, tried to sneak out of the building by the Leonard Street exit. They were spotted. A howl of fury smashed through the air. David Weiner, a young man whose seventeen-year-old sister had perished in the fire, charged her bosses, shaking his fist and shrilling, “Not guilty? Not guilty? It was murder! Murder!” He screamed and wept and finally collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital. One clothing worker wrote in his autobiography: “For half a year I was unable to enjoy the taste of food. Through those days and nights, I had no rest neither in the shop nor at home. Day and night I saw their forms, living and dead.”

  On March 29, 1911, the State Capitol Building at Albany caught fire and caused more than $5,000,000 damages. It was one thing for upstate lawmakers to read what had happened in New York City four days earlier. It was quite another thing to see for themselves the angry glare of flames. A state factory investigating commission was organized. It consisted of two state senators, three assemblymen, and four citizens appointed by the state government. The commission was granted broad powers of investigation, and it sat for sixteen months. State Senator Robert F. Wagner, father of the city’s later mayor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was elected chairman. State Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith was named vice-chairman. Like-minded in their liberal outlook, the German immigrant and the Irish boy who grew up on the streets of New York tackled the problem fearlessly and effectively.

  Monumental reforms flowed from the Triangle fire. New York State’s entire labor code was rewritten, becoming the best of any state in the nation. Labor unions, so long ignored and repressed, began to come into their own. Some historians pinpoint this tragedy and its consequences as the genesis of the New Deal.

  At the turn of the century New York’s public libraries did not compare with those of Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Cincinnati. However, the city fathers were remedying this situation.

  At the urging of Andrew H. Green and others, in 1895 three private libraries were consolidated—on paper. One was the Astor Library, bequeathed by John Jacob Astor, who had died in 1848. Another was the Lenox Library, put together by a book collector and philanthropist, named James Lenox, who had died in 1880. The third was the Tilden Library, established by Samuel J. Tilden, a corporation lawyer, governor of New York and Democratic Presidential candidate, who had died in 1886.

  To bring the three collections together under one roof, it was decided to erect a huge new library building on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second streets. At the time the reservoir still occupied the site, which in 1884
had been named Bryant Park in honor of poet William Cullen Bryant. The city agreed to provide the land, to build and equip the new library, and to maintain it. On the other hand, trustees of the newly created New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations—its full name—promised to establish a free circulating branch and a public library and reading room. Andrew Carnegie donated $5,000,000 to the project.

  The reservoir was torn down, and construction of the new building began in 1902. The architects were John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings. They built an enormous marble palace, costing more than $9,000,000. Incorporated into the structure was marble from Vermont, Tennessee, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium. According to present-day architects, the building probably comes nearer than any other in America to the realization of Beaux-Arts design at its best, and they call it a joyous creation.

  The wonderful new library was dedicated on May 23, 1911. Library directors and trustees, together with civic dignitaries, marched, two by two, past 600 invited guests to a platform erected in the central portico of the library’s Fifth Avenue entrance. Bringing up the rear were William Howard Taft, the portly President of the United States, and ninety-three-year-old John Bigelow, editor, author, diplomat, and president of the library’s board of trustees. Bigelow had fretted that he wouldn’t live long enough to take part in this ceremony, and when he spoke, his voice was so weak that he couldn’t be heard more than two feet away. President Taft summed up the occasion best of all when he said, “This day crowns a work of national importance.”

  Indeed it did. Apart from the 80 branch libraries later developed, the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue became the most widely used research library in the Western world, visited by 3,000,000 persons a year. It contains the world’s largest reading room. With its 4,500,000 volumes and bound pamphlets, it ranks third in the nation, exceeded only by the Library of Congress and Harvard University. Its 80 miles of bookshelves contain data in 3,000 languages and about 50 centuries of human wisdom and folly. Its 800-member staff answers 10,000 questions a day.