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| Sunday, 18 September 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Famous Trials that shook
the world - Trial of the Triangle Company fire by Lionel Wijesiri
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three floors of their own ten-storey building in New York City. The company employed approximately 500 workers, mostly young female immigrants working fourteen-hour days, in the manufacture of clothing. The Company had already become well-known outside the garment industry by 1911: the massive strike by women shirtwaist makers in 1909, known as the Uprising of 20,000, began with a spontaneous walkout at the Triangle Company. While the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement covering most of these striking workers at the end of a four month strike, Triangle Shirtwaist refused to sign the agreement. The conditions of the factory were typical of the time. Flammable textiles were stored throughout the factory, smoking was widespread, illumination was provided by open gas lighting, and there was no fire extinguishing equipment. The tragedy began to unfold near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911. Somebody on the eighth floor shouted, "Fire!" Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot floor. Employees grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out. As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor. In the thickening smoke, the fire spread everywhere - to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the partitions, the ceiling. Terrified and screaming girls climbed through and streamed down the narrow fire escape and stairway or jammed into the single passenger elevator. Fifteen feet above the building roof, Professor Frank Sommer was teaching his class at the New York University Law School when he saw dozens of hysterical Shirtwaist workers stumbling around on the roof below. Sommer and his students found ladders left by painters and placed them so as to allow the escaping employees to climb to the school roof. The last tenth-floor worker saved was an unconscious girl with smouldering hair who was dragged up the ladder. Of the approximately seventy workers on the tenth floor, all but one survived. In the hall of the ninth-floor, 145 employees, mostly young women, would die. Those that acted quickly made it through the stairs, climbed down a rickety fire escape before it collapsed. For those left on the ninth floor, forced to choose between an advancing inferno and jumping to the sidewalks below, many would jump. Others, according to survivor Ethel Monick, became "frozen with fear" and "never moved." It took only eighteen minutes to bring the fire under control, and in ten minutes more it was practically "all over." Water soaked a pile of thirty or more bodies on the street sidewalk. Police tried desperately to keep crowds of hysterical relatives from overrunning the disaster scene. Firemen searched the burned-out floors of the building, hoping to find survivors. What they mostly found were, according to Chief of Police, "bodies burned to bare bones, skeletons bending over sewing machines." Four hours after the fire, workers discovered a lone survivor trapped in rising water at the bottom of the elevator shaft. By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died. The survivors were left to live and relive those agonising moments. The families of the victims, the people passing by who witnessed the desperate leaps from ninth floor windows and the City of New York would never be the same. Workers later recounted their helpless efforts to open the ninth floor doors to the stairs. They believed those were deliberately locked - owners had frequently locked the exit doors in the past, claiming that workers stole materials. For all practical purposes, the ninth floor fire escape led nowhere, certainly not to safety. Others waited at the windows for the rescue workers only to discover that the fire-fighters' ladders were several storeys too short and the water from the hoses could not reach the top floors. In the weeks that followed, the grieving city identified the dead, sorted out their belongings, and reeled in numbed grief at the atrocity that could have been averted with a few precautions. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union proposed an official day of mourning. The grief-stricken city gathered in churches, synagogues, and finally, in the streets. Workers flocked to union quarters to offer testimonies, support mobilisation, and demand that Triangle owners Harris and Blanck be brought to trial. The trial of Harris and Blanck began on December 4, 1911. Harris and Blanck were defended by a giant of the New York legal establishment. The defence presented witnesses designed to show that the ninth floor deaths resulted from fire blocking the stairwell, even though the door was actually open. Various salesmen, shipping clerks, watchmen, painters, and other building engineers told of their passage through the disputed ninth floor door - though, of course, none had attempted to exit through the door at the time of the fire. After deliberating for just under two hours, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. After the verdict, one juror, Victor Steinman declared, "I believed that the door was locked at the time of the fire, but we couldn't find them guilty unless we believed they knew the door was locked." Surrounded by five policemen, the two owners hurried through the judge's private exit to the Street. Those in the crowd that saw the men yelled, "Justice! Where is justice?" The defendants ran to the nearest subway station, the crowd in pursuit. Twenty-three individual civil suits were brought against the owners. On March 11, 1913, three years after the fire, the owners agreed to settle. They paid 75 dollars per life lost, totalling to $10,950. However, an insurance company gave the owners $64,925 for property damage. The tragedy shocked and outraged the nation, and out of the crucible of the Triangle Fire a strong working class movement grew. It pushed politicians to accept a new notion of the responsibilities of government. The extensive work done by the commission set up to investigate the fire ultimately resulted in this passage of thirty-six new labour laws and the foundation of the United States Industrial code. The tragedy was the subject of a 1978 movie, "The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal". The building survived the fire and was refurbished. As of 2005, it still exists and is part of the NYU campus, where the main science building of the university is. |
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