The Triangle Fire and the Face of Labor

Detail, History of the Needlecraft Industry (1938), by Ernest Fiene

Ernest Fiene, detail from History of the Needlecraft Industry, 1938

Suddenly everyone is interested in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and not only because tomorrow is the tragedy’s 100th anniversary. As the Wisconsin state legislature rolls back the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, questions of worker protection are once again in headlines.

The best poem I know that mentions the fire is “Shirt,” by former national poet laureate Robert Pinsky. It’s a marvelous poem because it takes a simple everyday object and relates a complex history. Shirt details, different tasks and machines, shirt designs and their history (including 18th-century fantasies of a mystical Highland past attributed to the fabricated Gaelic bard Ossian), and incidents from the history of textiles are woven together like “lapped seams, the nearly invisible stiches along the collar.”  The labor history includes American slaves, British mill owners and their Scottish workers, industrial catastrophes like the Triangle fire, overseas sweat shop laborers, transport workers, and a descendant of slaves, Irma Herbert, who inspects shirts for quality control. (Pinsky imagines that Irma is somehow linked, either metaphorically or literally, to 17th century British poet George Herbert.)

By the time Pinsky reaches the end of the poem, the shirt is no longer separated from the hands that made it. When we put it on, we are donning an entire set of human and industrial relations: “The presser, the cutter,/The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,/The treadle, the bobbin. The Code.” Note how “the union” is part and parcel of the process and not separated out.

The “Code,” meanwhile, triggers memories of a factory owned by men whose thugs assaulted strikers and who failed to follow fire codes.  There were no sprinklers in the Triangle factory, fire exits were locked to prevent theft, and the fire escapes were too few and  failed to reach the ground.

Then, after Pinsky shows us horrific images of people escaping from the fire by throwing themselves off the building (148 immigrant women died), he abruptly switches back to the beauty of the shirt.  In his cutting back and forth, Pinsky is making a point similar to that of social and  cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin, who writes that “there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Barbarism doesn’t outweigh culture and beauty, but it’s inextricably bound up with them and shouldn’t be ignored.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

The Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader.

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Wisconsin teachers and municipal workers may not be making something as tangible as shirts, but the educations and services we receive from them are similarly complex affairs with many more dimensions than those we see.  Pinsky tries to capture a multifaceted reality in his poem, and once we’re aware that the world around us can’t be fit into neat ideological pigeonholes, we increase our potential for real problem solving.

Incidentally, out of the Triangle fire came some good. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson explains:

In Triangle’s wake, and facing the prospect of losing New York’s Jewish community to an ascending Socialist Party, Charlie Murphy, who ran Tammany Hall and controlled the state’s Democratic Party, told two young protégés — Assembly Speaker Al Smith and state Senate President Robert Wagner — to make some changes to New York’s industrial order. Aided by Frances Perkins, a young social worker who was in Washington Square looking on in horror as the seamstresses jumped to their deaths, Smith and Wagner visited hundreds of factories and sweatshops. Over time, they authored and enacted legislation that required certain workplaces to have sprinklers, open doors, fireproof stairwells and functioning fire escapes; limited women’s workweeks to 54 hours and banned children under 18 from certain hazardous jobs. (Years later, Wagner, by then a U.S. senator, authored — with help from Perkins, who had become labor secretary — the legislation establishing Social Security; he also wrote the bill legalizing collective bargaining.)

Meyerson then proceeds to describe business’s response, which (as he intends) may remind you of contemporary attacks on that “socialist” Barack Obama:

Businesses reacted as if the revolution had arrived. The changes to the fire code, said a spokesman for the Associated Industries of New York, would lead to “the wiping out of industry in this state.” The regulations, wrote George Olvany, special counsel to the Real Estate Board of New York City, would force expenditures on precautions that were “absolutely needless and useless.”

“The best government is the least possible government,” said Laurence McGuire, president of the Real Estate Board. “To my mind, this [the post-Triangle regulations] is all wrong.”

Such complaints, of course, are with us still. We hear them from mine operators after fatal explosions, from bankers after they’ve crashed the economy, from energy moguls after their rig explodes or their plant starts leaking radiation. We hear them from politicians who take their money. We hear them from Republican members of Congress and from some Democrats, too. A century after Triangle, greed encased in libertarianism remains a fixture of — and danger to — American life.

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