Flak Magazine: Review of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, 10.01.03

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the eighth floor of the Asch Building on Washington Square in New York. Within half an hour, 146 people lay dead, mostly immigrant workers at the Triangle Shirt-Waist Company. In an era of emerging unionization, an exploding immigrant population and growing calls for reform in the workplace, the accident was the last straw for an American population fed up with the status quo. Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt, once said that the real start of the New Deal was that bleak March afternoon when the Triangle burned.

The Triangle Fire's popular epistemology, however, paints a simpler and more melodramatic picture than is truly warranted. Popular myth creates a story of hard-up immigrant workers toiling under cruel taskmasters under unspeakable conditions, wherein a freak accident consigns them to a fiery end. The worst culprit is Ric Burns, the creator of "New York," an eight-part documentary about the history of the city. His melodramatic account of the fire creates an almost cartoonish struggle between oppressor and oppressed, combined with a bone-chilling account of the fire, sound effects included.

"Triangle" by David Von Drehle, a Washington Post reporter, creates a detailed, nuanced account of the tragic events of 1911. It is one in which the evil — the factory owners, the moneyed interests, the corruption of Tammany Hall — appears a bit less than sinister, while the good — the union organizers, the society matrons, the political reformers, and the workers themselves — teems with the natural divisions and tensions that make the story less a melodrama and a much more human tale.

From the beginning, Von Drehle commits to a truthful story that can be jarring to those who know the popular tales of the incident. For example, the introduction of Clara Lemlich, the battered striking worker who courageously calls for a general strike in the Cooper Union in 1910, does not portray a sweet defenseless girl from Russia who was savaged by strikebreaking goons. Rather, we see a much cloudier image — a Russian immigrant steeped in Marx and Engels, a committed socialist (and future communist) whose profession is to sow dissent in every shop where she is hired. Seen in that context, and under more callous lenses, Lemlich had it coming. Though a beating is usually not welcome nor just, it looks less surprising in Von Drehle's complete journalistic canvas.

The society matrons interested in the workers' plight — with such names as Morgan, Astor, Vanderbilt and Belmont — receive much the same treatment. As high-minded as these ladies seemed in collecting funds and picketing alongside immigrant workers — immigrant workers who probably couldn't work as servants in their mansions — there existed bitter resentment among the rich ladies, the radical workers, the moderate workers, leading the author to ask "Whose strike is it anyway? Did it belong to the genteel humanitarians? To the suffragists? To Karl Marx? To feminism?"

The same could be said for the greatly vilified antagonists — the owners of the Triangle Waist Co., Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. The two greedy, indifferent owners are explored through their background. Hardly nabobs of the Fifth Avenue set, Harris and Blanck were two Russian Jews who, like so many of their brethren, ended up in the sweatshops of the garment industry in the Lower East Side. Through advances in technology in the garment industry, the two "Shirtwaist Kings" became industry titans, although, according to Von Drehle, "only a few years, a few strokes of fortune, maybe a little more drive or a few less scruples, separated Blanck and Harris from the ranks of the workers."

Von Drehle's best work involves describing the human tensions and internal hypocrises of the major players and major events — besides those mentioned, there are the capricious ways in which Tammany Hall co-opted the worker's struggle for their ends, and the political machinations to get the necessary codes passed. The journalistic second-guessing about the popular players in the tragedy is definitely the strong point. Beyond that, the waters get murky.

He casts both a wider net and a narrower one, creating a work that is ultimately quite informative, but contains both unnecessary detail and broad overlays of background. His description of individual victims of the fire is heart-wrenching, to be sure, but altogether out of place next to the sweeping pace of machinations between unions and political machines. This with the description of the fire itself would have sufficed for a smaller work.

Conversely, the story behind the attempts at reform following the fire seem quite rushed. The 1912-1913 Factory Commission, created to study workplaces in New York, should have been dealt with in much more detail. First-hand reports from the commission on factory conditions create a much more harrowing picture of the horrors of the unregulated workplace than any background vignettes on immigrant workers.

Much of the first chapter, that which describes the Progressive era of 1911, is too vast and too broad; it jars the tempo of the work. Unions, politicians, bosses, fires, workers — this story has a human pace, and the background of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton celebrations fits badly amongst the descriptions of human actors. A deeper analysis of Tammany Hall and its antagonists, the garment union, would have been more in the spirit of the piece as a whole.

Von Drehle's work, flawed as it may be, is the best stab at an accurate portrait of the 1911 Triangle Fire. What ultimately saves this work from total irrelevance is the reporter's objective lens. Drehle's straightforward, journalistic prose enables the reader to see past the faults to the much meatier issue — how the struggle between all-too-human actors enabled working America to rise from an all-too-terrible catastrophe.

— Luciano D'Orazio (loudogs1@aol.com)

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