46 pages • 1 hour read
David Von DrehleTriangle: The Fire That Changed America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Role of Immigrant Labor in American Economic Development
Through the lens of a single catastrophe, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America explores the role of immigrant labor in American economic development. Early in the 20th century, millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrived in the US just as industrialization created an insatiable demand for workers. Many of these immigrants brought valuable skills in manufacturing, and collectively, they played an important role in shaping American economic development. In Chapter 2, Von Drehle provides a biographical sketch of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, owners of the Triangle Waist Company, and explains that their rise to the very top “coincided precisely with the maturing of the garment industry” (47). He adds that “between the time they entered the business and their arrival at the top, the amount spent each year by Americans on ready-to-wear clothing roughly tripled, to $1.3 billion (equal to about $23 billion today)” (47).
Just as industrialization made mass production a reality and the garment industry began to boom, waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy began arriving in the United States. These immigrants not only provided cheap and abundant labor for the garment industry, but in the case of Jews from the Russian Empire, they brought skills and experience that were invaluable to the trade. Von Drehle explains:
[U]nder the czars, Jews were strictly limited in the occupations they could pursue. One approved business was refurbishing and altering secondhand clothes; as a result, a large portion of Russian Jews were skilled with needle and thread. When these tailors and their families began fleeing Eastern Europe in the early 1880s, they formed a ready and inexpensive supply of garment workers (39).
Von Drehle explores the tensions that arose as this wave of immigrants confronted the economic pressures of life in the US, where the American Dream often tacitly meant success and acceptance for a few at the expense of others. Blanck and Harris begin their careers as Jewish garment workers much like those they later employed at the Triangle factory, but by the time they reach the pinnacle of the industry, their drive to maximize profit leads them to disregard the lives of those they might once have seen as their community.
The first wave of immigration from Eastern Europe began in the 1880s, but it slowed substantially with an American economic depression at the end of the Gilded Age. A second wave—what Von Drehle describes as “the greatest surge of immigrants the United States had ever seen”—began taking place in the first decade of the 20th century, as Jews from across Eastern Europe began fleeing oppression and violent pogroms (95). In 1907 alone, 1 million Eastern Europeans arrived in America, but the wave of immigrants coming from Italy during this time was perhaps even larger. According to Von Drehle, more than 2 million Italians entered the United States between 1900 and 1910. Although 60% of the workers at the Triangle Waist Factory were Eastern European Jews, “most of the rest came from Italy” (108). As workers began to organize in the Uprising of the 20,000, owners and managers sought to pit these ethnic groups against each other, but Von Drehle shows how shared economic conditions proved more powerful than cultural differences.
The Impact of Industrialization on Labor Conditions
The impact of industrialization on labor conditions is another primary theme running throughout Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. The boom in the garment industry in New York around the turn of the 20th century was just one part of the larger Second Industrial Revolution taking place around the same time. In the Prologue to his work, Von Drehle explains that while the 146 deaths from the Triangle fire were tragic and sensational, “they were not unusual” (3). He argues that “death was an almost routine workplace hazard in those days,” pointing out that by one estimate “one hundred or more Americans died on the job every day in the booming industrial years around 1911” (3). As America transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial one, the ways in which a person could be killed while working increased dramatically. Everyone knew the dangers associated with mining, locomotives, and various trades dealing with heavy machinery, but fires at factories had become a threat as well. Only a few months before the Triangle fire, a similar fire in a Newark garment factory left 25 workers dead. Despite these dangers, “workplace safety was scarcely regulated, and workers’ compensation was considered newfangled or even socialist” (3).
Two key developments that helped to usher in the era of mass production in the garment industry were the lock-stitch sewing machine in the 1840s and the cutter’s knife in the 1870s. Von Drehle argues that with these developments, “the industry’s capacity to produce clothes quickly and cheaply rose exponentially” (39). This also helped the garment industry transform from one based on sweatshop production to one in which manufacturing was consolidated in large factories. According to Von Drehle:
[T]he sweatshops represented a nadir of the Industrial Revolution, a dark age of chaos between the eruption of manufacturing and the arrival of various forces—such as labor unions, more efficient management, government regulation, and improved technology—to impose a new order (38).
Sweatshop production was so common by the end of the 19th century that most mass-produced clothing was done almost entirely by independent contractors rather than by manufacturers. Independent contractors would cram workers into tiny tenement rooms to accomplish only one step of the manufacturing process, then garments would be transported to another sweatshop for the next step. When modern factories became more common—often located in lofts of new skyscraper buildings—it meant that owners could legally cram more workers together to complete the process under one roof. While the new process might have been slightly more sanitary, it was exponentially more dangerous. Far more workers were now crammed together in lofts of skyscrapers, working in a fire-prone industry higher than the fire department’s ladders could even reach.
The Relationship Between Tragedy and Social Reform
Another important theme present throughout Von Drehle’s work is the relationship between tragedy and social reform. Chapter 7 includes an anecdote about the General Slocum, a riverboat that caught fire in 1904 while taking 1,400 passengers up the East River. More than 1,000 of the passengers died, most from drowning when they jumped from the boat. Seven years after the General Slocum tragedy, the Titanic was being constructed in Ireland and it would eventually carry lifesaving equipment for no more than half of its passengers (173). Von Drehle argues that “many times before, a disaster was followed by a predictable train of consequences: shock, then outrage, then resolve, all leading to lip service dwindling into forgetfulness” (172). After the 1911 Triangle fire, the deadliest workplace disaster in American history to that point, many labor activists, progressives, and socialists in New York expected the same train of consequences. They suspected that there would be an investigation, and many even expected laws to be passed, but very few believed that the laws would be enforced.
The tragic Triangle fire took place only four months after a similar fire swept through a garment factory in Newark, trapping and killing 25 young women, yet the very few fire safety regulations in place were ignored by Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. New York Fire Chief Edward Croker even went on record after the Newark fire, predicting a disaster such as the Triangle, because “these buildings were too tall and too many people worked in them, with scant provision for their safety” (179). Despite the warnings, serious reforms did not take place. The Triangle fire stands out among many similar disasters, Von Drehle argues, because “it was more than just a horrific half-hour; it was the crucial moment in a potent chain of events—a chain that ultimately forced fundamental reforms from the political machinery of New York, and, after New York, the whole nation” (3).
Barely a week after the Triangle fire, the same progressives and socialists who were skeptical that reform would take place held a mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, expressing the sort of outrage that mandates reform. In Chapter 8, Von Drehle examines the meeting and the collective outrage that turned out to be the impetus for true reform. He explains that “what happened at the Triangle was outrageous—this was undeniable and beyond politics. It was preventable, but it happened anyway because of complacency and greed” (208). The fired-up crowd that night voted to form a committee on safety to send to Albany and demand change (208). With the surprising help of Charlie Murphy’s Tammany Hall men, Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, the committee morphed into the Factory Investigating Commission in the state legislature. Ultimately, the FIC was responsible for 25 bills that entirely reshaped the state’s labor laws and forced workplace safety reforms.
