The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On a spring afternoon in March 1911, Frances Perkins joined friends for tea at a luxury townhouse on North Washington Square in Lower Manhattan. Shortly after she arrived, however, the sound of sirens and shouts of fire drew Perkins and her friends outside to find out what was happening. Across Washington Square Park they saw a fire raging on the top floors of the Asch Building, a “fireproof” 10-story high-rise that housed factories that made women’s blouses.

As Perkins got closer to the building, the full horror of the situation became apparent. Terrified factory workers, most of them young women, began jumping from the 9th floor of the building to escape the flames. Some of the victims were on fire when they jumped.

Perkins later described the awful scene:

“People had just begun to jump as we got there. They had been holding on until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. . . . They began to jump. The window was too crowded and they would jump and they hit the sidewalk. . . . [E]verybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”

Perkins and her friends had witnessed one of the worst workplace disasters in American history: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

Crimes That Changed the World

In a new book, Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, Paul and Sarah Robinson examine how over the course of history tragedies like the Triangle Fire have provoked “public outrage that in turn produces important reforms.” They explain that although reform often is the “result of hundreds or thousands of small steps of gradual improvement over time,” sometimes the “march of progress” results from “a quick turn or an unexpected lurch.” The first chapter, which addresses how the Triangle Factory fire transformed the regulation of building safety, is available on SSRN here.  

As the Robinsons point out, the Triangle disaster was more than a tragedy. It was a crime. New York law prohibited locking a factory door during working hours, but the Triangle Factory owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, bolt locked the doors anyway. In his excellent 2004 book on the disaster, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, David Von Drehle explained that the factory owners worried far more about maximizing profits than ensuring worker safety. Their policy of locked doors and limited exits not only prevented unauthorized work breaks and reduced theft, it also kept out the union activists who two years before had initiated a major labor strike at the Triangle factory. 

There is no doubt that Blanck and Harris fully understood the grave risk of fire in a high-rise workplace filled with highly flammable fabric. Their factories had a history of fire, often under circumstances strongly hinting of insurance fraud. At the Triangle factory, they refused to install fire alarms or sprinklers and did not even take basic precautions such as conducting fire drills. Ominously, the Asch building had only one fire escape, which was flimsy and poorly installed. 

All the conditions were in place for a historic disaster. When the fire began, it moved with stunning speed. The fire started on the 8th floor at precisely 4:40 p.m., near the end of the workday. An alert machinist with a door key just happened to be close enough to the 8th floor door to open it before fire engulfed the room. The machinist’s quick action saved more than one hundred lives. But the main exit door on the 9th floor, where 250 people worked, remained locked. At 4:45 p.m. the fire reached the 9th floor, filling it with lethal smoke and intense heat. Some workers managed to escape by two freight elevators and others raced to the roof. But by 4:51, the freight elevators stopped working and fire blocked the stairway to the roof. With the door to the main stairway locked, the lone remaining means of exit—the rickety fire escape along the side of the building—collapsed under the weight of those fleeing the fire.

As desperate 9th floor workers crowded onto the building’s window sills, the horrifying reality of their situation set in. With the fire bursting out of the 9th floor windows, dozens of terrified workers chose to make the doomed, 100-foot jump to the pavement below rather than perish in the flames.

At 5:15 p.m. the fire finally subsided, but only after 146 people had died. The great majority of the dead were Jewish and Italian immigrants, mostly young women in their teens or early 20s. 

The Acquittals

The tragedy rocked the city like no previous calamity. Prosecutors brought manslaughter charges against Blanck and Harris, alleging that the Triangle Factory supervisors locked the doors in accordance with company policy and at the owners’ direction. 

But Thomas Crain, the trial judge, was deeply hostile to the prosecution. As Von Drehle explains in his book, Judge Crain had once supervised the fire inspectors for the Tenement House Department, an experience that ironically made him deeply sympathetic to Blanck and Harris. In 1905 a fire at a Lower East Side tenement killed 20 people, including 10 children. Amid the ensuing public uproar, New York Mayor George McClellan Jr. (son of the Civil War general) forced Crain to resign after a coroner’s jury concluded that the incompetence of the department’s inspectors contributed directly to the loss of life. Embittered by his public villification, Crain saw himself as a victim of a rush to judgment. 

As the presiding judge in the Triangle fire case, Crain was anything but impartial. He consistently ruled in favor of the defense and barred the prosecution from bringing key evidence. As Von Drehle explains, Crain “drained the trial of the full horrific details of the Triangle disaster and issued jury instructions that essentially made it impossible to convict the owners.” For example, Judge Crain instructed the jurors they could find the defendants guilty only if the facts showed beyond a reasonable doubt that Harris and Blanck had specific knowledge that the 9th floor door was locked at the exact moment the fire reached the 9th floor. The prosecution lacked such incredibly specific evidence and the jury ultimately acquitted both defendants.    

Harris and Blanck won another victory when they collected a huge payout from the insurance policies they took out before the fire. Far exceeding the owners’ actual losses, the insurance proceeds amounted to about $400 per dead worker. Adding insult to injury, Blanck continued to direct that the factory doors be locked. In fact, two years after the Triangle fire, he received a $20 fine when inspectors discovered a locked door at his factory on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

The Reforms  

Although it would provide little solace to the victims’ families, the 146 people who perished in the Triangle fire did not die in vain. A blue-ribbon panel (which included among its members future Governor Al Smith and future U.S. Senator Robert Wagner) established to investigate the fire recommended sweeping reforms—including automatic sprinklers, fire walls, and fire doors—that became commonplace in factories not just in New York but across the country. As Paul and Sarah Robinson note:

“The fire-safety reforms sparked by the Triangle Factory fire have indeed changed our world. At the time of the 1911 fire, workers died at a rate of about 1,000 per week in the United States, while the nation’s population stood at 94 million. One hundred years later, the U.S. population is 322 million, yet the weekly on-the-job death toll is down to 90, less than a tenth of what it was, even though the population is now more than three times larger. The numbers are compelling: the odds of dying on the job in 1911 were 1 in 1,800; the odds that a given worker will be killed this year are 1 in 69,000. As a point of comparison, it is more likely that today’s worker will be killed crossing the street, a chance of 1 in 54,538.29.”

The fire also changed the direction of Frances Perkins’ life. As the columnist David Brooks has observed, the Triangle “fire and its aftershocks left a deep mark on Frances Perkins. . . . She became impatient with the way genteel progressives went about serving the poor. . . . She threw herself into the rough and tumble of politics” and was even willing to negotiate with “corrupt officials if it would produce results” in order to prevent another disaster like the Triangle fire.

Perkins played a key role in establishing New York’s Factory Investigating Committee and she developed strong political alliances and deep friendships with Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt. After drafting New York’s Fire Code, she received national acclaim as a leader in fire prevention. In 1933 FDR appointed her Secretary of Labor, making Perkins the first female Cabinet member in history. As the Labor Secretary, she was a driving force behind both the Social Security Act and the federal minimum wage law. 

On March 25, 1961, at age 80, Perkins unveiled a memorial plaque at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Triangle Factory fire. 

The Brown Building

The Asch Building, located at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, still stands in Lower Manhattan. In 1929 the building owner, Frederick Brown, donated it to New York University, which renamed it in his honor. Today the Brown Building houses the Silver Center of Arts and Sciences, including a chemistry lab at the exact location where the fire began. 

The Robinsons' book is available here on Amazon.

Comments

[Betsy DeVos Save our Kids Foundation]

I am so happy that Real Estate Salesman Donald Trump is rolling back regulations to goose the economy. Who needs OSHA and all these lawyers?

[Ellen Wertheimer]

The Triangle Fire certainly caused more stringent regulations to be adopted. Perhaps even more importantly, it provided an additional impetus to unionization, especially in the clothing trades. Blank and Harris had resisted unionization with thugs; the women who were working on March 25, a Saturday, were in the factory because Blank and Harris, in their anti-union violence and resistance, had been successful.

Especially in these anti-union times, we all need to remember the role that unions played in forcing manufacturers to adopt safer workplace practices and living wages.

[Anthony Gaughan]

That is a great point, Ellen. Unions played an absolutely critical role in ushering in the modern age of workplace regulations. The role of unions in the Progressive and New Deal eras is also a good reminder that reforms don't just spontaneously happen on their own. It takes both organization and mobilization to make lasting change.

[Henry T.]

Interesting angle Ellen, Unions are critical to ensure that certain standards are followed in markets and to make sure labor rights are protected. But sadly anti-unionists still exist today.

[Betsy DeVos Save our Kids Foundation]

^^^^I disagree regarding worker safety and unions. I believes unions are necessary to ensure fair wages only, TODAY. Unions started when tort and PI law was in its nascent and undeveloped stages. Today, business and insurance companies are challenged by thousands and thousands of hungry PI lawyers scouring the landscape for sick, sore and disabled clients. They know my PI buddies will ponce at any hint of harm or injury. I may sound fatuous here, but its true. Every business and corporation is afraid of a big payout by some jury that has no sympathy for Explores that roll over. Us lawyers are the deterrent, not the unions.

[Anthony Gaughan]

Betsy Devos Save our Kids Foundation, I agree with you about the importance of attorneys. I am also not a fan of tort reform. Corporations, insurance companies, and health care providers are fully capable of defending themselves from personal injury lawsuits. Legislatures should not be putting a thumb on the scale in favor of politically-influential defendants. I am also a critic of mandatory arbitration provisions in consumer contracts, but that is a story for another day.

[Anon]

Thanks for responding to me. I know I can be pithy and irreverent. You fell into the insurance company trap of using their term "tort reform." What needs to be reformed? What does it really mean? Denying access to the civil justice system. Might as well say the name Stella Liebeck and shout it out. Like saying Hillary and Bengazi. Insurance companies like State Farm want "tort reform" so they don't have to pay out claims. State Farm just settled a conspiracy lawsuit for interfering in the election for an Illinois Supreme Court justice for a quarter billion dollars.