Resumo de Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Triangle:
The Fire that Changed America

It was a Saturday, March 25, 1911, just at closing time, when the fire started. Fifteen to twenty minutes later, 146 young immigrant women and girls (one victim was 14) were dead. Among these dead were also some men. The deaths of almost 150 workers, mostly poor immigrant women, eventually led to improvements in the lives of millions of working people. The Triangle Fire started on an upper floor of the high-rise factory building in Greenwich Village on a Saturday afternoon in March 1911. As quitting time neared, employees brushed their scraps of cotton off the table and into large bins.
In 1909, New York saw a massive strike by garment workers. Max Blank and Isaac Harris, ?The Shirtwaist Kings,? owners of the Triangle Waist Company, were leaders in opposing the unionization of garment workers. They paid bribes to Tammany Hall to arrange for arrests. The women were imprisoned in the notorious Tombs, after being beaten by the police. They paid pimps and other criminals to beat union organizers.
But the strike went on, drawing sympathy from suffragettes and even upper crust women who donated time and money, and insuring the strike had press coverage. The Pulitzer and Hearst papers, at their muckraking best, favored these immigrant women.
Besides the physical abuse, the Women?s Trade Union League (WTUL) had to contend with race warfare as it was then put. Italian and Jewish women didn?t always speak English. There was a cultural divide hard to understand today. The Jewish women were mostly literate (in Yiddish) and used to working outside the home, even in Eastern Europe, where most of them came from, whereas the Italian women were usually not literate and it was novel for them to work. It was a lot tougher to get the Italians not to cross a picket line. Some bosses, including Blank and Harris, got Italian priests from conservative Catholic parishes to come into the factories and lecture on the worker?s obligation to be obedient. Still, attempts to divide immigrants by the bosses ultimately failed since reality had these women sitting side by side in the sweatshops.
The removal of vast forest tracts in Italy, for instance, destroyed the topsoil, causing floods that forced thousands off the farm and into poverty. It is the poor who immigrate. The Pogroms in Russia, mass killings and forced relocations of Jews, made immigration to America desirable. These young girls died together at the Triangle after a day making elaborate women's blouses.
Max Blank is the big burly guy with the overcoat over his arm, and Isaac Harris, his partner. They were the owners of the Triangle Waist Company, the shirtwaist kings, as they were known. They were not related themselves, but they were married to two cousins. And they, like the workers, many of the workers at the factory, were themselves Russian Jewish immigrants. They had come over in the early 1890s, 10 or 15 years before the people who died, and so they were that much farther up the road of advancement into American society. Very successful businessmen, but they started out with nothing and ultimately were ruined by the fire.
New York City was run at that time by Tammany Hall, the famous, infamous, notorious Democratic Party machine, which was led by a fascinating character named Charles F. Murphy, silent Charlie Murphy, who never spoke but ran the city from a dining ram at Del Monico`s restaurant, all his spies reporting in on what was going on and his orders going back out about how they were to conduct the business of the city.
Tammany Hall under the leadership of Charles Francis Murphy had opposed basic labor legislation for decades and he was personally responsible for letting loose the police on the 1909 strikers. Suddenly, Murphy gave a free hand to Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner (famous for sponsorship of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, commonly called the Wagner Act). Murphy was a reluctant reformerto say the least but he saw the future of the Democratic Party in these new immigrants and simply couldn't say no to all those potential votes. Smith and Wagner, along with Francis Perkins (later to become FDR?s Labor Secretary and the first woman cabinet member), were the backbone of the newly formed Factory Investigating Commission. The legislature, having heard the public outrage, meekly went along.
Shortly after the incident, the governor of New York appointed the Factory Investigating Commission. Over the next three years, the commission held dozens of hearings, resulting in the passage of the most sweeping set of workplace labor reforms in America.
The Tammany Hall leaders who were pushed into reform by unions eventually rose to influence the entire country when New Yorker Franklin D. Roosevelt reached the White House in 1932.
Roosevelt ran on an agenda pioneered by Tammany's Alfred E. Smith, whose political breakthrough came when he pushed the post-Triangle reform agenda. Smith's Tammany colleague Robert F. Wagner reached the U.S. Senate and wrote much of the new Deal.
Triangle fire was the birth of the New Deal -- and can be traced not just workplace safety reforms to that root, but also such laws, written by Wagner, as the Social Security Act, the unemployment insurance program, the public housing program, and the right to unionize.

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