“We heard an explosion, through the shattering glass
We looked up at the Asch building
A bundle of cloth came flying out the window
On the way down it opened up in the wind
It was a girl, it was girl.”
Today is May Day, “el Dia del Trabajo,” a day in which work and workers are honored around the globe. Today in particular, five weeks after the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, we remember the 146 immigrant workers, most Jewish and Italian girls, who died trying to escape flames that roared through the upper floors of the Asch building, a garment factory near Washington Square. Trapped behind locked doors, many never had the chance to escape. Others jumped out the windows, some hand-in-hand, their hair and clothes aflame.
Saturday, March 25, 1911 was a clear, early spring day. Crowds of New Yorkers strolled in Washington Square and on the streets of the lower East Side. Suddenly at 4:45, many looked up and saw smoke billowing from a ten story building on Green Street and Washington Place. Hundreds rushed to the scene. One observer said he thought the factory owner was trying to save his best cloth by throwing bundles of fabric from the ninth floor. He and so many others realized in horror that they were seeing not bundles of cloth falling from the windows but girls — girls in flame, girls who were landing in broken heaps on the sidewalk in front of them. The fire which lasted less than half an hour, made these invisible immigrant workers suddenly starkly visible. Photographs of the mangled bodies were printed in the morning newspapers but still thousands came to view the open coffins lined up in rows on ‘Misery Lane,’ the makeshift morgue set up on the peer at 26th Street. Some were family and friends desperately searching for missing loved ones but most wanted to just see the dead with their own eyes. Ocular proof.
New Yorkers felt that they knew these shirtwaist makers. They were the girls who dared to strike, the girls dared to stand up for themselves by standing in the streets through the bitter winter of 1909/1910 to advocate for better working conditions. Everyone in the city felt implicated and responsible for these preventable deaths at Triangle. One in ten New Yorkers lined the streets of Manhattan to watch the procession of the horse drawn caskets with the last unknown victims on a rainy April morning.
There are so many tragedies, so many workers die everyday, why remember this one event from 100 years ago? We remember the tragedy at Triangle because it directly followed the Uprising of the 20,000, the first significant strike by women in history. Many of the girls who died at Triangle were the same teenagers who took to the streets of Manhattan. They had the same simple demands as workers in Chicago who filled Haymarket Square in 1886 on May Day, calling for a 52 hour work week and decent wages. And both of these viral, impromptu strikes continue to be echoed in the current uprising by young people in the Middle East, young people who have nothing to lose, who simply know they have the human right to seek equity and justice. We remember Triangle because the people of the City of New York, many of whom saw the tragedy unfold in front of their own eyes, said this can never happen again here, and they passed laws in the state legislature, which created real labor and health and safety reforms. Public outrage over the event galvanized the progressive movement and women’s suffrage, and went on to instigate many of the most important reforms of the New Deal. There’s so much inherent injustice that we all know needs to change, and we need to keep examining moments when the gears of history actually shift. What’s inherent in the story of Triangle is that every individual human life is more important than anything we can produce. It’s a story that needs to be told again and again, and one that every generation encounters in its own way.
In honor of the centennial of Triangle, I had the privilege of creating a new performance piece called, FROM THE FIRE, with the wonderful composer, Elizabeth Swados, the poet, Paula Finn, and set designer, Bonnie Roche. A century later, workers continue to face perilous conditions in an unregulated global market place, and our hope was not to romanticize the tragedy but to again honor and celebrate the lives of these very ordinary, working women and men who instigated so much change. The piece, which performed at Judson Church in March and will be featured today on WNET Channel 13’s Sunday Arts Program at noon. (It can also be seen online here.) And it will travel to the Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival in August, though we’ve been asked, ‘Why Scotland? This should go to Wisconsin!’
For more information see trianglefromthefire.com
Very thoughtful. It is an important reminder. I was also impressed with trianglefromthefire.com
I happened to catch the show on channel 13 last Sunday. That and this post are elegant, but sad reminders of a horrible event, made sadder by the fact, pointed to here, of the erosion of workers’ rights led by a number of Governors around the country. I read that Maine’s Governor LePage has proposed expanding the number of hours children can work, and lowering their pay. He’s tried to erase the memory of the passage of child labor laws protecting children by removing the murals that depicted this legislation and now wants to move in the opposite direction. Also, now there’s another call for “ocular proof.” This time to appease the doubters that Osama bin Laden is dead. I’m glad Obama decided not to release the grizzly photo, though it’s likely that the desire for proof will eventually lead to it getting out. I, for one, hope to never see it.
I was moved by this piece in part because it brought to my attention my own ignorance. I have learned the history of my country largely as an adult—- I did not learn much about Malcolm or Martin growing up, or the Women’s Movement, not until I was in college. And I know so little about the struggle for worker’s rights here in the US. What I know as an adult is that we got rich the same way every country gets rich— by exploiting workers, from slavery to child labor to underpaid migrant labor. We are not as rich as we once were but we are certainly going about making a profit the same way— we are just doing it by outsourcing jobs oversees, and this is perhaps more insidious because we don’t see it— if there is a fire in a factory in Mexico, we don’t see it, or even here on our borders with Mexico, we don’t read or hear about how corporations and small businesses use cheap Mexican labor to make a real profit and to keep the Mexicans in line, police raid the workplace from time to time, arrest a few and everyone else is quiet. This is an example from California—
The question that comes to mind here in terms of art and politics is not about exploitation— it is a different, more philosophical question- — what makes the FROM THE FIRE a work of art and not a political intervention? What makes it (perhaps) both? When we use art to make a political statement, how is it different from pure political statement? The responses to the post are not about the work of art, they are about the politics of labor. I do not really have the answer— but the question itself merits some attention and some reflection. I think there are some good shots at answers out there and I wonder how they apply to this piece.
If a work of art aims to make a political statement, I think, personally, that it has to have something else, or something more to call it art— it has to have what Marcuse called an aesthetic dimension, or the capacity to rock our world, destabilize us and make us see the injustice within our system. Even then, I am not sure we would not just call that good politics.
Just some thoughts.
Just wish to clarify: there is no “Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival”; there is only “Edinburgh Festival Fringe.”