The Triangle Fire (18 page)

Anne Morgan had rented the Metropolitan Opera House on behalf of the Women’s Trade Union League. When the meeting was called to order, the stage was filled with distinguished leaders of society, government, church, and charity, as well as some who spoke for labor.

The galleries filled first, with East Siders who came early and packed the upper part of the house.

Below them were those who arrived in Sunday finery, the men in high hats and plush-trimmed overcoats, the women trailing furs and feathers. Could the gap separating the boxes from the balconies be bridged? Could such a heterogeneous audience find a single common voice? This was the important issue. Never before had a similar attempt been made to find a formula for civic reform. Even at this meeting there was no agreement—only a beginning.

Governor Dix had been scheduled to preside. In a letter to Miss Morgan he regretted his inability to attend; he was attending the funeral of Samuel J. Abbott, an aged watchman who had lost his life in the fire which that week had destroyed a part of the State Capitol office. Important records and the sword presented by Frederick the Great to George Washington had been lost.

In opening the meeting, Jacob Schiff called upon former District Attorney Eugene A. Philbin to preside. Then he reported that the relief committee had already received donations totaling $75,000. He called it “the public’s conscience money.”

The balconies cheered. The speakers on the stage sensed the emotion in their applause, the dangerous impatience in their booing and hissing. Each in turn tried to define a position of extreme reform without crossing over to the area of revolutionary destructiveness. Before the end of the meeting, the call was to sound for forceful change.

The Charities Director of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, Monsignor White, warned that “we have allowed a contradiction to grow up between our economic and our spiritual ideals; we have put property rights above life.

“The workers have a right to life and it comes before our right to the ease and luxury that flow to the community through the production of the wage earners. But industrial salvation must come from the working class itself, through its labor unions.”

Bishop David H. Greer broadened the concept of sin to include failure to meet community responsibilities. “This calamity,” he declared, “causes racial differences to be forgotten for at least a little while and the whole community rises to one common brotherhood. One thing is sure. Hereafter the laws as to fire protection must be enforced not for a few weeks or a few months but for all time, faithfully, continuously, and effectively. If this is not done, the responsibility—the sin—is on the public, on us.”

At these ringing words, loud applause broke out. Rabbi Stephen Wise rushed forward on the stage holding up both arms in a signal that silenced the audience.

“Not that! not that!” he shouted. “This is not a day for applause but for contriteness and redeeming penitence.

“It is not the action of God but the inaction of man that is responsible. The disaster was not the deed of God but the greed of man. This was no inevitable disaster which could not be foreseen. Some of us foresaw it.

“We have laws,” Rabbi Wise continued, “that in a crisis we find are no laws and we have enforcement that when the hour of trial comes we find is no enforcement. Let us lift up the industrial standards until they will bear inspection. And when we go before the legislatures let us not allow them to put us off forever with the old answer, ‘We have no money.’ If we have no money for the necessary enforcement of the laws which safeguard the lives of workers it is because so much of our money is wasted and squandered and stolen.”

The applause which the rabbi had deprecated roared forth from orchestra and gallery alike. When he could be heard again, he told the audience that the purpose of the meeting was not to placate with charity but to find redress in justice, remedy in prevention.

The rising political temper of the meeting could be measured by the cheering that followed the statement of Professor E. R. A. Seligman, the noted economist from Columbia University: “We are weltering in a chaos in this city with a display of anarchy—of administrative impotence.”

But in the end those in charge of the meeting asked for the adoption of a resolution. It was a good resolution, calling for the creation of a Bureau of Fire Prevention, asking for more inspectors, demanding the creation of a system of workmen’s compensation.

But it was only a resolution. Many who heard it were tired of resolutions and had no faith in reform. Hisses sounded in the galleries. The loudest cheers were not for the reform program but for the dissenting speakers from the audience who said that citizens’ committees had never been able to accomplish anything, that there would be no improvement for the working classes until in class solidarity they demanded it at the polls and through committees of their own. Some called for political organization of the workers. Others asked that labor union officials be appointed as fire inspectors.

The shouts from the galleries grew louder as did the hissing of those who tried to counter from the orchestra and boxes. The meeting threatened to break up in disorder.

It would have, if not for a speaker who suddenly gripped the audience with her words and held it spellbound. She was slight Rose Schneiderman, her long braided hair showing in a huge bun under her hat. She had been a leader in the strike at Triangle. She had seen her girls beaten and jailed; now she had seen them burned and dead. She spoke hardly above a whisper.

“I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies,” she said, choking back her tears, “if I were to come here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public—and we have found you wanting.

“The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire.

“This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death.

“We have tried you, citizens! We are trying you now and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

“Public officials have only words of warning for us—warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back when we rise—back into the conditions that make life unbearable.

“I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. And the only way is through a strong working-class movement.”

There had been no interruptions. Now there was no applause. She finished and turned and walked back in dignity and in sorrow to her seat in the front row on the stage.

The challenge was being formulated.

The meeting finally passed its resolution, appointed its committee, expressed its sorrow, resolved to act. But on the East Side where the loss was felt in blood and flesh, the sorrow stayed deep and silent.

One among them spoke for them. The Jewish workers called Morris Rosenfeld the poet laureate of the slum and the sweatshop. He put his tears and his anger into a dirge, and four days after the fire, the
Jewish Daily Forward
printed down the full length of its front page:

Neither battle nor fiendish pogrom

Fills this great city with sorrow;

Nor does the earth shudder or lightning rend the heavens,

No clouds darken, no cannon’s roar shatters the air.

Only hell’s fire engulfs these slave stalls

And Mammon devours our sons and daughters.

Wrapt in scarlet flames, they drop to death from his maw

And death receives them all.

Sisters mine, oh my sisters; brethren

Hear my sorrow:

See where the dead are hidden in dark corners,

Where life is choked from those who labor.

Oh, woe is me, and woe is to the world

On this Sabbath

When an avalanche of red blood and fire

Pours forth from the god of gold on high

As now my tears stream forth unceasingly.

Damned be the rich!

Damned be the system!

Damned be the world!

Over whom shall we weep first?

Over the burned ones?

Over those beyond recognition?

Over those who have been crippled?

Or driven senseless?

Or smashed?

I weep for them all.

Now let us light the holy candles

And mark the sorrow

Of Jewish masses in darkness and poverty.

This is our funeral,

These our graves,

Our children,

The beautiful, beautiful flowers destroyed,

Our lovely ones burned,

Their ashes buried under a mountain of caskets.

There will come a time

When your time will end, you golden princes.

Meanwhile,

Let this haunt your consciences:

Let the burning building, our daughters in flame

Be the nightmare that destroys your sleep,

The poison that embitters your fives,

The horror that kills your joy.

And in the midst of celebrations for your children,

May you be struck blind with fear over the

Memory of this red avalanche

Until time erases you.

13. DIRGE

… all together they withdrew,

Bitterly weeping.

—
CANTO III
:106

The week following the fire was filled with funerals. Long, wailing processions moved through the labyrinth of crowded, narrow East Side streets. “Every block in the section south of Tenth Street between Second Avenue and Avenue C seems to have lost some one,” said the
World
.

The crowds grew almost accustomed to the passing hearses. The bargaining at the pushcarts along the curbs stopped as they passed. In the silence, some men bared their heads.

One East Side undertaker established a record by conducting eight funerals simultaneously. On Wednesday, three funeral processions crossed. In the ensuing confusion some, for a time, followed the wrong hearse. The next day, an old Jewish sexton sat beside the driver of a hearse and dispelled confusion among the mourners by holding aloft a large cardboard sign hand-lettered: “This is the funeral of Yetta Goldstein.”

There were grand funerals and there were small, sorrowful departures.

Jennie Franco had been only fifteen years old. She was laid out in the small front room of her home at 342 East Eleventh Street, next to the room in which she had been born. One hundred men and women, girls and boys, together with a brass band preceded the hearse which was followed by sixty carriages. The girls were Jennie’s schoolmates. The twenty-five floral pieces were sent by friends and a carriageload of flowers came from the three societies of which her father was a member—St. Angelo di Brolo, Sons of Italy, and the St. Stephen Cammastra Order.

But those sent to their final resting places from union headquarters on Clinton Street went without bands and without flowers. From the union hall, Julia Rosen set out for her last journey followed by her three orphaned children and a group of weeping neighbors. Out of this place they carried the burned body of Essie Bernstein, and as the casket was placed in the hearse, a bearded Jew mounted to the top of a nearby stoop and intoned in the sad, angry voice and language of the Hebrew prophets: “Our poor children go to work in fire traps to avoid a life of shame. When they come home, they go to sleep in tenements which are also fire traps. By day and by night—they are condemned!”

Not all the dead went alone.

Rosalie Maltese and her sister, Lucia, went together, Bettina Miale and her sister, Frances, went together. So did Sara and Sarifine Saricino, sisters.

Sophie Salemi and Della Costello lived in neighboring houses on Cherry Street. They had worked at adjacent machines in Triangle. A score of carriages followed the two white hearses. The fifty girls who marched at the head of the procession were members of the Children of Mary Society. It was altogether fitting that they shared a funeral. These two had leaped from the ninth floor, their arms around each other.

When there were no more funerals and only the unidentified bodies in the morgue remained, the Women’s Trade Union League and Local 25, ILGWU, through its manager, Abraham Baroff, applied to Commissioner Drummond for permission to hold a funeral for the nameless ones—the unclaimed dead.

The Hebrew Free Burial Society opposed a public funeral; the sense of bereavement went so deep that such a move seemed out of place. Commissioner Drummond opposed it because he feared the hysteria it would arouse.

Nevertheless, plans for a public funeral went forward. At a meeting on March 29, the committee of the League and the garment workers’ union decided that only union banners draped in black were to be allowed. There were to be no other banners, no bands, no propaganda signs. The next day Morris Hillquit asked Coroner Holtzhauser to release the bodies. But the Coroner, hoping for additional identifications, insisted on holding the bodies for five days more.

On the same day, Mayor Gaynor announced he had been informed by Commissioner Drummond that the city owned a plot in the Evergreen Cemetery in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The city, he said, would inter the seven unidentified bodies in that cemetery on April 5. It would not release them for a public funeral.

The committee immediately issued a call for a funeral parade of the city’s workers on Wednesday, April 5, starting at one o’clock.

On the preceding Friday and Saturday, several hundred teen-aged youngsters, including about seventy-five members of the Young People’s Socialist League, distributed thousands of leaflets in the factory sections of the city. The tri-lingual handbills carried an appeal in English, Yiddish, and Italian for all workers to “join in rendering a last sad tribute of sympathy and affection.” For those unable to make the trip to Manhattan there was to be a separate parade in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

On the day of the funeral—April 5—“the skies wept,” said the
World
. All through the day, “rain, ever and again, descended in a drenching downpour.”

The committee had arranged for the parade to assemble and start simultaneously at two separate locations at 1:30
P.M.
The two sections, one moving out of Seward Park at the point where East Broadway and Canal Street meet in the heart of the East Side and the other heading south on Fourth Avenue from Twenty-second Street, were to meet in Washington Square and become a single line of march.

As early as nine o’clock in the morning, small groups began to assemble in Seward Park. By noon, the crowd had grown large enough to block traffic. There was a great deal of confusion until a little before one o’clock, when a single empty hearse, bedecked with flowers and drawn by six white horses covered with black nets, headed into the crowd. With a murmuring sound, the waiting people closed in around it.

Along each side of the double line of horses were eight girls in mourning dress. About four hundred relatives of victims and survivors took their positions behind the hearse. By 1:30
P.M.
the downtown contingent of the funeral was ready to march.

Uptown the crowd had begun to assemble at noon from Nineteenth to Twenty-second Streets on both sides of Fourth Avenue. This division consisted chiefly of girls from the shops and factories and women from the Suffragist and Trade Union League groups. The marshals were T. J. Curtis of the Central Federated Union, J. W. Roberts of the Bonnaz Embroidery Workers’ Union, Julius Gerber of the Socialist Party, and Arthur Carote, Italian organizer for the WTUL.

When the bells in the Metropolitan Life Insurance tower sounded 1:30 the first group marched out of Twenty-second Street onto Fourth Avenue. It headed south, first to Union Square, then down University Place to the northeast corner of Washington Square.

“The division was composed largely of women, most of whom, for some unexplained reason, did not wear hats or overshoes,” the
Tribune
reported. “They had been standing in the streets for an hour. Women held babies and watched from the curbstone. Most men and women in the procession wore a white badge on which was printed in black letters, ‘We mourn our loss.’ Inspector Sweeney was in charge of the police arrangements and the best order prevailed.”

The downtown contingent had also begun its march at 1:30. All four marshals of this contingent were from the Waist-makers’ Union, Local 25, ILGWU. They were B. Witashkin, S. Liebowitz, A. Miller, and Louis Schaeffer. They signaled the driver of the empty hearse to start his horses.

A massed line formed behind the flower-laden wagon; the crowd grew silent. A special detail of policemen had been assembled under the command of Inspector Schmittberger to keep order. “There was something ominous about the gathering,” said the
American
. “It was so silent and it was to march through a section of the East Side—the thickly populated foreign districts—where emotions are poignant and demonstrative. The police were plainly worried.”

Headed by the empty hearse, the procession moved silently, slowly on East Broadway. It turned north into Clinton Street then west again into Broome Street. In the canyon of tenements, windows were crowded with women, children, and old people. As the flower-loaded, empty coach came into view, many in the windows slowly waved handkerchiefs. As the hearse passed, the cries burst forth, moving along like a rolling wave in the same slow progress as the hearse.

Where it had passed, there was silence again and windows suddenly empty. Thousands came out of the dark hallways and into the rain and the line of march. The procession lengthened as it moved.

At two o’clock, the empty hearse reached the corner of Broome and Mott Streets. Here the way was blocked by fire engines and a tangle of fire hoses. There was a fire in a tenement. All along the line, back into Clinton Street, the marchers halted. The rain fell more heavily.

The uptown division moved south at a faster pace.

The
Tribune
reported that the steady downpour did not divert the girls in the uptown contingent who were without umbrellas, hats, or overshoes from “their determination to show public honor to fellow workers who had perished.” They marched “with an apparent grim satisfaction that in a sense they could wear sackcloth and ashes in so good a cause.”

If the day had been filled with sunshine, the
Tribune
continued, “there would have been the chance to minimize the intensity of feeling existing among the marching members of the more than 60 sympathizing unions. Only a high devotion and sense of duty could be responsible for this protest.

“Low hanging clouds and fog shrouded the tops of buildings. The Metropolitan tower was invisible above its clock. There was the suggestion of smoke in the atmosphere. The streets were filled with puddles of water. Women in lamb’s wool coats, accustomed to ride in automobiles, were splashed by passing vehicles as they trudged along in the beating rain. Hundreds of thousands stood on the sidewalks, their umbrellas appropriately indicating an unbroken border of black. Policemen, mounted and afoot, wore regulation black raincoats.”

The
World
noted that “the street mud oozed through their thin shoes; they marched on silent, uncomplaining.” The
Tribune
added that “here and there an older woman would insist upon taking a thinly clad young girl under her umbrella, or, if clad in a wool coat, under her wing.”

The two contingents moved toward each other for the joining at Washington Square. The uptown division reached the park at two o’clock. For the next hour, it waited in the rain for the arrival of the downtown division. Shortly after three o’clock, the empty hearse heading that section came into view as it moved up Macdougal Street to the southwest corner of the Square. The two divisions of the city’s massed workers were now facing diagonally across the park.

Washington Place, from the Square to Mercer Street, was one solid gathering of people. When word spread that the two sections of the parade had arrived, the crowd somehow managed to open a narrow lane down the middle of the street, expecting the parade to file past the Asch building.

But Inspectors Schmittberger and Sweeney had misgivings. They feared an outburst of mass hysteria and after a short conference altered the route of the procession so that the downtown divisions, instead of joining the other for a march through Washington Place would meet it at Fifth Avenue and proceed uptown.

The change had been made because, as the
American
reported, “it was not until the marchers reached Washington Square and came in sight of the Asch building that the women gave vent to their sorrow.

“It was one long-drawn-out, heart-piercing cry, the mingling of thousands of voices, a sort of human thunder in the elemental storm—a cry that was perhaps the most impressive expression of human grief ever heard in this city.”

At almost the same moment the cry filled the air at Washington Square park a third procession started from the morgue. For an hour, eight black hearses, each drawn by a span of black horses and hung with white drapery, had been stationed in front of the morgue gate.

Inside, attendants had spent the morning preparing the unidentified bodies in white linen shrouds. Each was then placed in a casket of black broadcloth with silver handles. On the cover of each casket was a silver plate upon which was engraved: “This casket contains a victim of the Asch building fire. March 25, 1911.”

A silent crowd, standing in the steady drizzle, filled the sidewalks along First Avenue from East Twenty-sixth Street to East Twenty-third Street. A few minutes after three, they saw the eight hearses, led by a cordon of mounted police, go by.

Behind the policemen was an open carriage spilling over with flowers. Each casket, in its hearse, was covered by a wreath of roses entwined with orchids. The eight hearses were in two ranks of four.

Commissioner Drummond, his son Walter, First Deputy Commissioner Goodwin, Dr. Walter Conley, and William Flanagan, architect for the Charities Department, constituting the official party, brought up the rear in two automobiles. There were no carriages and no mourners following.

At the Twenty-third Street Ferry, the procession boarded the ferryboat
Joseph J. O’Donohue
, headed for Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Just as the gates were being lowered, more than a hundred mourners who had been in the waiting room more than an hour, rushed aboard. One in this group was Mrs. Carrie Lefkowitz. She was dressed in black.

She said: “I have lost my sister, Minnie Mayer. Every day, since the fire, I visited the morgue. Every day, I peered into those poor burned faces but my sister I cannot tell. I feel that one of those in the wagons is my sister. So I follow them to the cemetery.”

When they debarked from the ferryboat, some of the mourners boarded streetcars. Others stood studying the rain-filled sky. One reporter spotted a white-bearded patriarch leaning on the arm of a young girl. He heard her ask: “Shall we ride, father?”

He lifted his arms and his face as if to feel the rain on them and replied in a loud voice to the girl: “It is written that we shall follow our dead on foot, even unto the grave.”