Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

In Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, author David Von Drehle traces the symbiotic relationship between industrial growth, social change, and progressive reform. New York’s garment industry underwent explosive growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Chapter 2, Von Drehle points out that in the very late 18th century, as much as 75-80 % of all clothing in America was homemade, but the ratio was completely reversed by the mid-19th century (39). Two innovations that led to this reversal were the lock-stitch sewing machine in the 1840s and the cutter’s knife in the 1870s. With these two innovations, the garment industry’s capacity “to produce clothes quickly and cheaply rose exponentially” (39).

Another aspect of industrial growth that affected the garment industry concerns where the clothing was manufactured. In the late 1800s, very few manufacturers assembled their own garments. Instead, they farmed out their work to independent contractors, who typically crammed workers into tiny tenement rooms to complete only one aspect of the production process. The garments would then be moved to another sweatshop for the next step. Von Drehle argues that “manufacturers loved this system because it saved them the trouble of dealing with workers,” and contractors accepted the system because the association with well-known brands granted them greater economic stability (41). However, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, remade the industry when they designed a modern factory high above the crowded streets, “worlds removed from the sweatshop hovels of their recent past” (46).

According to Von Drehle, “[T]he coming of the steel-framed high-rise suddenly and completely changed the economics of New York manufacturing” (46-47). For owners like Blanck and Harris, the obvious advantage of a factory in a loft of a skyscraper was room—more room for more workers to make more garments. The disadvantages of such factories hundreds of feet in the air were twofold: For workers, the disadvantage was a loss of safety, because they were laboring higher than the city fire department’s ladders could reach. For owners, the primary disadvantage was that they were “no longer insulated from labor strife and strong unions” now that their workers were all together under one roof (48). While the garment industry was experiencing such rapid growth because of industrialization, two related aspects of social change were taking place simultaneously: mass immigration and the rise of organized labor.

The United States experienced a large wave of immigration in the 1880s as Eastern European Jews began fleeing oppression and antisemitic violence throughout the Russian Empire. As violence against Jews in Russia grew even worse after the turn of the 20th century, a second wave of immigration began, leading to “the greatest surge of immigrants the United States had ever seen” (95). At roughly the same time, Italian immigrants began fleeing an environmental disaster and arriving in the United States as part of a migration “even larger than the Jewish exodus” (108). These immigrants, newly arrived in New York, provided a cheap and abundant labor source for the garment industry. Young Jewish women who had already experienced such upheaval and violence also provided a fresh perspective as they explored political activism and labor organizing.

In Chapter 1, Von Drehle argues that these young immigrant women achieved something profound in that they were “a catalyst for the forces of change: the drive for women’s rights (and other civil rights), the rise of unions, and the use of activist government to address social problems” (12). When 20,000 waist makers went out on strike across the garment district in 1909, young immigrant, unionized working women joined forces with radical socialists and educated, wealthy progressive women to form a broad coalition that would define urban liberalism and become a base for the political left. One of the most important aspects of this new urban liberalism was the push for reform. Among the earliest and most significant reforms brought about by this new coalition were the reforms in workplace safety and labor laws that came in the aftermath of the 1911 Triangle fire.