Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

by Andrew Milner

By David Von Drehle Atlantic Monthly, 340 pp., $25

On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died after a quick-spreading fire on the upper floors of a Greenwich Village building. Family members spent days identifying the corpses, some recognizable only by their jewelry or clothing. A mass funeral march for the victims drew 350,000 people.

In hindsight, the Triangle shop was a disaster waiting to happen. The workrooms were full of flammable paper and even more flammable cotton; the fire escape was, Von Drehle writes, badly conceived, badly designed and badly installed; and management regularly kept the doors locked, convinced employees might steal items.

Until Sept. 11, 2001, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York City history. Washington Post reporter David Von Drehle has resurrected the details of the tragedy into an articulate and moving story.

In 1909, Von Drehle informs us, Triangle employees went on strike with 40,000 New York garment workers seeking pay raises and a 52-hour workweek. However, Triangle's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were the last owners to give in to the demands; at one point their goons beat up Triangle union organizer Clara Lemlich. One labor newspaper wrote, With blood this [Triangle] name will be written in the history of the American workers' movement.

A year and a half later, apparently started by a cigarette or lit match thrown into a scrap bin, a fire gutted three floors of the Triangle plant within minutes. Von Drehle describes a scene of urban terror eerily anticipating 9/11. Eyewitnesses on the ground saw something large and dark fall from one of the windows. ¹Someone's in there, all right,' said a voice in the crowd. ¹He's trying to save his best cloth.' When the next bundle began falling, the onlookers realized that it was a human being. One journalist, having seen a mushroom of smoke from the skyscraper, would write, I learned a new sound, a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.

Von Drehle analyzes how the Triangle fire led to long-term reform; Tammany politicians Robert Wagner and Alfred E. Smith, assisted by future FDR labor secretary Frances Perkins, got over two dozen labor laws passed in 1913 alone. But Blanck and Harris were acquitted of manslaughter in just two hours, and in 1914 the pair was caught stitching phony consumer safety labels on their merchandise.

While Triangle is hardly the feel-good read of the year, it's hard not to get caught up in the stories of the doomed workers and their contemporaries. Von Drehle has brought an entire era -- both the nobility and the tragedy of it -- back to life.