Flesh and Blood So Cheap

by Albert Marrin

  Firefighters at the scene. (pucture credit 6.1)

  “Time heals all wounds,” the saying goes. It does not. Fire survivors, and survivors of other life-threatening events such as wars and natural disasters, may not have visible wounds. Certain wounds do not bleed, nor can they be bandaged or treated with medicine. For they are wounds to the spirit, invisible scars carried for the rest of the survivors’ lives. They may constantly remember and relive the experience. Nightmares may jolt them awake, shaking, sweating, and screaming. Everyday noises—sirens, clanging bells, thunder—can make them panic.

  So it was with those who lived through the Triangle Fire. Two examples tell their story. “I couldn’t stop crying for hours, for days,” Rose Cohen recalled at the time. “Afterwards, I used to dream I was falling from a window, screaming. I remember I would holler to my mother in the dark, waking everybody up, ‘Mama! I just jumped out of a window!’ Then I would start crying and I couldn’t stop.” Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the fire, died peacefully at the age of 107 in the year 2001. The memory of the fire stayed with her to the end. “I have always tears in my eyes when I think” of it, she said. “I feel it. Still.”3

  After putting out the blaze, firefighters gathered the victims’ remains. That night, horse-drawn ambulances took them to a temporary morgue at “Misery Lane,” a large shed on a nearby East River pier. At midnight, police officers allowed the anxious crowd to file in slowly. “Everywhere,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “burst anguished cries for sister, mother, and wife, and a dozen pet names in Italian and Yiddish rising in shrill agony above the deeper moan of the throng.” Most bodies were too badly burned and broken for easy identification. Families found their own by recognizing a ring, a locket, the heel of a shoe. Esther Rosen touched the hair of a woman in a coffin. “It’s mamma’s hair. I braided it for her,” she said.4

  The fire sent ripples of misery in all directions. The greatest hurt, of course, was the loss of a loved one, a profound emotional shock. Yet that loved one had also played a practical role. Victims, usually daughters, had been family breadwinners. Often, too, they supported aged parents in Russia and Italy. How could these people live now?

  The temporary morgue at “Misery Lane,” where people searched for their loved ones. (pucture credit 6.2)

  In response to the tragedy, New Yorkers gave generously. The American Red Cross, the WTUL, the ILGWU, and many civic organizations took up collections. Individuals, rich and poor alike, opened their purses. Alva Belmont, Anne Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie gave on their own and got their friends to give. Donations arrived at newspaper offices. A letter from a young boy reached the New York Times with a ten-dollar bill. It came with instructions to “please give it to the right one to use it for somebody whose little girl jumped out of a window.” In all, some $150,000 was collected, worth about $3,411,000 in 2009 dollars.5

  During the week after the fire, funeral processions wound through the streets of the Lower East Side and Little Italy. On March 27, a reporter for the New York Evening Post wrote, “One could scarcely walk a distance of two blocks in certain … neighborhoods without coming upon a hearse.” In Little Italy, he added, “up narrow, twisting flights of stairs in many a tenement, one came upon [a] funeral in progress.” The Maltese family had three funerals: for Catherine, the mother, and her two daughters, Rosaria, fourteen, and Lucia, twenty.

  By the first week in April, all that remained was to bury seven unclaimed and unidentified bodies in a Brooklyn cemetery. As the day approached, sadness mixed with anger in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods. Morris Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet, expressed the mood in a poem that filled the entire front page of the Jewish Daily Forward. He damned “you golden princes,” you greedy factory owners, for making such a tragedy possible. A few lines:

  The March 28 New York Evening Journal with headlines about the fire. (pucture credit 6.3)

  An Italian American newspaper, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, ran front-page stories about the fire. (pucture credit 6.4)

  Over whom shall we weep first?

  Over the burned ones?

  Over those beyond recognition?

  Over those who have been crippled?

  Or driven senseless?

  Or smashed?

  I weep for them all.

  Let us light the holy candles

  And mark the sorrow.…

  This is our funeral,

  These our graves,

  Our children,

  The beautiful, beautiful flowers destroyed,

  Our lovely ones burned,

  Their ashes buried under a mountain of caskets.6

  April 5, 1911. Funeral procession moves up Fifth Avenue through Washington Arch, at the north end of Washington Square Park. (pucture credit 6.5)

  April 5, 1911. The day matched the mood. It dawned gray and rainy. New York had not seen anything like it since Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession almost forty-six years earlier that month. The route led from Washington Square, up Fifth Avenue, to a ferry dock on the East River. According to the police department, 400,000 people turned out, of whom no fewer than 120,000 joined the line of marchers, led by horse-drawn hearses draped in black. Despite the crowd’s size, the only sound was the pitter-patter of raindrops and rumbling of hearse wheels over cobblestones; otherwise, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

  Horse-drawn hearses lead a procession for unidentified victims of the fire. (pucture credit 6.6)

  Martha Bruere, a wealthy reformer, watched the procession go past her window for six hours. “Never have seen a military pageant or triumphant ovation so impressive,” she wrote in her diary. “It is dawning on these thousands on thousands that such things do not have to be!”7

  From time to time, gusts of windblown rain lashed the onlookers, the marchers, and the banners they carried. Some carried trade union banners, others black-bordered banners with the inscription WE MOURN OUR LOSS. A group of women garment workers carried a banner reading WE DEMAND FIRE PROTECTION.8

  Never Again!

  Three days earlier (April 2), civic and religious leaders, progressive reformers, members of the Mink Coat Brigade, and workers had attended a mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House. Anne Morgan had rented the building for the Women’s Trade Union League to discuss action on fire safety in the workplace. Speakers called for a resolution asking the city to create a Bureau of Fire Prevention. Suddenly shouts came from the upper galleries, filled with workers. For this, 146 young people had died! No, they wanted something stronger than a scrap of paper that officials tied to Tammany Hall would pretend to welcome, then ignore. The meeting seemed about to break up in anger and disgust when a woman sitting onstage near Frances Perkins stood to have her say.9

  Rose Schneiderman, twenty-nine, stepped forward. Nicknamed Little Rose, she stood four feet eight inches and had flaming-red hair. The daughter of a widowed Polish immigrant mother, she went to work at thirteen and quickly got involved in union organizing. During the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, she led the workers out of the Triangle factory. A forceful speaker, she was never at a loss for words.

  A 1911 gathering of union workers and sympathizers to mourn those lost in the fire and to protest dangerous working conditions. (pucture credit 6.7)

  Schneiderman now gave a speech that became an American classic. Here is some of what she said:

  I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old [Spanish] 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 on fire.… 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 146 of us are burned to death.…
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  We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift.… Public officials have only words of warning to us—warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, 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 my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves.10

  Little Rose’s emotional speech changed the tone of the meeting. Catcalls from the galleries stopped. Those onstage pledged to form a blue-ribbon citizens’ committee to demand reforms from the New York State legislature. Anne Morgan and Mary Dreier of the WTUL were among its members. Frances Perkins joined as committee secretary and contact person with the lawmakers. Her job was to persuade them to pass the laws the committee asked for statewide. She would soon learn how things were done in politics.

  Enter Al Smith

  In Albany, the state capital, lawmakers listened to Perkins’s ideas, nodded agreement, smiled, and did nothing. She was getting nowhere—fast. Then she met Al Smith, “the gorgeous knight of the brown derby and the cocked cigar.”11

  (pucture credit 6.8)

  Bread and Roses

  Little Rose Schneiderman continued her efforts to improve the lives of working people. In the August 1912 issue of the WTUL magazine Life and Labor, she wrote: “What the woman who labors wants is to live, not simply exist—the right to life as the rich woman has it, the right to life, and the sun, and music, and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.”

  Bread and roses! By “bread,” Schneiderman meant material things: higher wages, shorter hours, safer workplaces, health care. “Roses” stood for the things of the spirit: educational opportunities, recreation, the chance to develop one’s mind to the fullest extent possible—in short, the right to become a complete person.

  In that same year, 1912, women led a massive strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the largest cloth-manufacturing town on earth. “We must have bread—and roses too,” was their rallying cry.

  Schneiderman became president of the New York chapter of the WTUL and head of the New York State Department of Labor. She also became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. When Eleanor’s husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, became president in 1933, Little Rose helped shape major laws. The Social Security Act provided pensions for the elderly. The National Labor Relations Act guaranteed workers the right to organize unions. The Fair Labor Standards Act set the national minimum wage, required overtime pay after forty hours a week, and forbid child labor and factory work at home—that is, in sweatshops.

  Schneiderman died in 1972, at the age of eighty-eight.

  Alfred E. Smith was a child of the Lower East Side. “Al,” as everyone called him, stood five feet seven inches and had a pink face and a large “pickle” nose. Born to an Irish mother and Italian-German father, he identified most with his Irish heritage. Growing up in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, he, like other boys, pitched pennies, played stickball, and, in summer, dove off piers into the East River. That took a strong stomach, as an old-timer explained: “The only recreation was to go down to the East River where the barges were. The people would swim in it, but they also moved their bowels there.” Al spoke in the accent of the streets. “Woids” like “woik,” “foist,” “poisonally,” and “avenoo” tumbled off his tongue as he strolled the “sidewauks” of “Noo Yawk.” And he talked with food in his mouth, spraying bystanders.12

  Forced to quit school and find a job after his father’s death, the eighth-grade dropout boasted that he held degrees, with honors, from two of the world’s finest schools: the Fulton Fish Market and the College of Hard Knocks. Starting as a shlepper in the Fulton Fish Market, no place for sissies, Al graduated to running errands for local Tammany Hall bigwigs. They liked the brash teenager, who told hilarious jokes and spat on the floor between puffs of a huge cigar that seemed glued to the corner of his mouth. Yet he was also a go-getter, an organizer with a gift for making friends.

  Al Smith’s tenement neighborhood, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge (drawing circa 1909). (pucture credit 6.9)

  Smith rose through Tammany’s ranks. A shrewd political operator, he became majority leader in the New York State Assembly. (Eventually, he would serve four terms as governor.) Unlike corrupt bosses, however, he had real sympathy for the poor. Al understood how doctors’ bills could burn up a family’s savings, forcing it deeper into poverty, and how children became adults without ever having a pair of new shoes. Immigrant Jews called him “ein Irisher mensch,” literally “an Irish man.” But mensch means more than “man” in Yiddish; it also means “real man,” a “good guy,” with a heart of gold. When, for example, he saw bullies throw rocks at a peddler, Al said nothing. Instead, he put his arm around the old fellow as if he were a brother. That was a signal to the bullies: Leave him alone, or Tammany will “fix” you.13

  Tragedy brought out the best in Al Smith. Many Triangle Fire victims lived in his district. That night, he told Frances Perkins, he visited the tenements where they had lived to tell their families “of his sympathy and grief.” Toward midnight, he went to the morgue to help grieving relatives identify their loved ones’ remains. “It was a human, natural, decent thing to do,” Perkins recalled, “and it was a sight he never forgot.” He did not want to go through such an ordeal ever again.14

  Smith gave Perkins some advice. Bringing about reform requires more than fine speeches by well-meaning people. It requires politics. And that means getting the state legislature to set up its own commission. “If the legislature does it,” he said, “the legislature will be proud of it, the legislature will listen to their report, and the legislature will do something about it.” Otherwise, reform will just get “the cold shoulder.”15

  Although eager to set up a commission, Smith could do nothing without the consent of Tammany Hall. And that meant winning over “Silent Charlie” Murphy. Nothing important happened in New York City or New York State government without the approval of Charles F. Murphy, Tammany’s supreme boss of bosses. An unsmiling, quiet man, he believed it better to say nothing than risk saying too much. True to his belief, he spoke little, sometimes waiting minutes between sentences, then saying “Maybe.” Murphy was a political calculating machine. For him, any problem boiled down to two questions: What is in it for Tammany Hall? How can we get votes at election time?

  Until the Triangle Fire, Tammany Hall had been a largely Irish affair. Although “the Hall” originated in the 1790s, it really gained power in the 1850s. In the 1840s, the potato crop, Ireland’s chief food, failed for several years running. Tens of thousands starved to death; entire villages lay deserted, their roofs collapsed and their streets covered with weeds. As the famine spread, a tidal wave of Irish immigrants headed for America aboard “coffin ships,” poorly built, dangerous sailing vessels that offered cheap fares. Many settled in Boston and many others in parts of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and West Side, in a section called Hell’s Kitchen. There they met with discrimination; employers refused to hire the newcomers simply because they were Irish. “No Irish need apply” was a popular slogan at the time. Yet Irish people had an important thing going for them in America: the right for men to vote. They put that right to good use, electing their own political leaders to help them get housing and jobs.

  “Silent Charlie” Murphy, the Tammany chief, circa 1924. (pucture credit 6.10)

  (pucture credit 6.11)

  Fate of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris

  On March 30, 1911, five days after the fire, the partners reopened their business at another location near Washington Place. They began an advertising campaign to restore the Triangle name’s image. It failed; nothing could clear its name, or theirs,

  On April 11,
the Manhattan district attorney indicted them for manslaughter—that is, the unintended but unlawful killing of a person. The charge grew out of survivors’ testimony about the locked door on the ninth floor. In December, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. It reasoned that, while Blanck and Harris had locked the door in the past, no one could prove they had done so on the day of the fire. If it was locked, someone may have done it without the owners’ knowledge or consent. When the judge read the verdict, victims’ family members in court fainted. “Murderers!” a young man cried. “Murderers! Not guilty! Not guilty? Where is the justice?” The title of a magazine article said it all: “147 Dead, Nobody Guilty.”16 (There were slight discrepancies in numbers due to early reporting.)

  Blanck and Harris filed insurance claims larger than their losses. Their insurance company decided not to fight; it paid two hundred thousand dollars, or sixty thousand dollars above the proven value of the partners’ losses. Seen another way, the settlement was a profit of $410.95 for each fire victim. Eventually, the partners paid victims’ families seventy-five dollars for each life lost. The Triangle Waist Company soon fell on hard times. Competitors took away customers. Styles changed. In 1914, Blanck and Harris were caught faking union labels, proof that a garment was made under decent conditions. The company disappeared around the year 1918.