Uprising (36 page)

Mrs. Livingston is tempted to repeat her earlier answer:
I'm not a priest. I'm not a rabbi. Who am I to decide?
She has only an eighth-grade diploma, earned at night school, not a college degree. She was illiterate until she was sixteen; she grew up in a one-room hut and slept with goats and chickens. She is, still, nobody.

But she has stared directly into the face of Mr. Blanck's evil. Into the flames. She lost her two best friends, her
comari,
to his carelessness, to his devotion to the accumulation of money above all other goals, even the goal of keeping his own workers alive. Even now, she sometimes has nightmares
where she has a thousand shirtwaists to sew, and Signor Carlotti is breathing down her neck, and then the shirtwaists are on fire and the sewing machine is made out of skeletons and Signor Carlotti's face is burning, melting like a candle, and he's still screaming, “Faster! Sew faster! There are a hundred girls coming into Ellis Island right now who'll take your job if you can't do it right! They'd be willing to die for this job—why aren't you?”

Mrs. Livingston always wakes from those nightmares sobbing.

“Harriet,” she says in a ragged voice. “If you are asking me for forgiveness, or absolution—” She has forgotten that absolution is a Catholic concept, not a Jewish one.

“It would kill Papa if I spurned him,” Harriet says. “If I even told him that I disapprove of him . . . He's always been such a wonderful father, so loving and kind. He's always given us everything we ever wanted.”

Mrs. Livingston thinks of the landowners back in Italy who let the peasants die—their children probably thought they were wonderful too. But she keeps her mouth shut and waits for Harriet to go on.

“Anyhow,” Harriet says. “Nothing I can do could ever bring back Yetta and Jane.”

“That's not true,” Mrs. Livingston argues. “How you live, how you spend your money, the ways you honor their memory—all of that can bring them back. Their spirit, anyway.”

“That's not enough,” Harriet says.

It's not. Sometimes Mrs. Livingston feels like Yetta, with her perpetual yearning. It's not enough to have two lovely daughters, to have a handsome, loving husband, to have
charitable work and new friends and in-laws. Nothing can ever be enough when Mrs. Livingston has such gaping holes in her heart. But Mrs. Livingston has learned to live with that.

She sighs.

“Jane did not plan on dying when she was only seventeen,” she says. “She was like a work-in-progress, still figuring out what she believed, what that meant about how she wanted to live her life. For what it's worth, I think she would have forgiven her father eventually. Somehow.”

“And she would have gone to college,” Harriet says. “She would have become a famous teacher—she was really good at teaching, did you know that? And Yetta would have married Jacob; she would have become a famous union organizer. My father took all that away from both of them.”

“You can't give it back,” Mrs. Livingston says. “But there are other girls out there now, girls who are hungry and confused, eager and hopeful, but nobody's giving them a chance. . . .”

“So you're saying if I take my father's money, I have to be a do-gooder instead of a flapper?” Harriet asks. “Help others instead of just having fun?”

“You asked me,” Mrs. Livingston says.

Harriet sits there. Mrs. Livingston knows what others would see: a pretty girl with bobbed hair and a fringed dress. A surface kind of person, someone who's been groomed her whole life to look good entering a party on the arm of a wealthy man. But Mrs. Livingston sees a soul in turmoil, a young girl looking for the right answers, not just the easy ones.

“Mama?” It is little Yetta, standing at the top of the
stairs. “I woke up and you didn't come and get me.”

She pushes tangled curls out of her eyes and stares accusingly down at her mother.

“That's because I didn't know you were awake,” Mrs. Livingston says lightly. She pats the space beside her on the couch. “Come down here, Yetta, there's someone I'd like you to meet. A—a friend of mine.”

Harriet stiffens at the word “friend,” as if she understands what Mrs. Livingston is offering, what she is asking. This is like lions lying down with lambs, like swords being hammered into plowshares, like fires of bitterness and sorrow and grief finally being extinguished.

“I'm not really your mother's friend,” Harriet says. “Not yet. But I would like to be.”

She looks over at Mrs. Livingston hopefully.
This is why money is not God in America,
Mrs. Livingston thinks.
This is why, when they said on the boat, ‘Anythingis possible in America,' they were not just talking about striking it rich. This is how I finally escape the fire, by becoming friends with Harriet Blanck, who is trying to escape too.

Mrs. Livingston spreads her arms, and her daughter, little Yetta, races down the stairs and throws herself into her mother's embrace, so trustingly.
She'll never know,
Mrs. Livingston thinks. But no—she will someday. Someday Mrs. Livingston will tell her daughter the story of the Triangle fire, and she dares to hope that by then it will be hard for her daughter to believe, hard for her to even imagine a time when life meant so little, when tragedy came so easily, when the whole world needed to wake up. She dares to hope that she and her daughters and Harriet Blanck can play a role in
moving the world further and further away from that time.

Mrs. Livingston hugs little Yetta close and whispers into her daughter's hair, “We will not be stupid girls. We will not be powerless girls. We will not be useless girls.” And, for just a moment, she believes she can hear two other voices whispering along with her.

T
he shirtwaist strike of 1909-10 really happened.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, really happened.

Personally, when I've just read a historical novel that seemed completely real to me—as I hope this book seemed completely real to you—I hate to then read an author's note explaining, “Well, this was real, but this wasn't; this event didn't actually occur, but it could have; this character I completely made up.” Because then the story recedes back into distant history, and what seemed so alive and immediate and tangible is gone. So I won't tell you which parts of this book didn't really happen. Suffice it to say that I tried to stick to the historical facts as much as possible, unless I felt I had a really, really good reason not to. And if you feel you must distill the history from the fiction, then you are welcome to do research of your own. I'll even suggest ways to do that. (More about that later.)

If you just want to know more about the early 1900s and the strike and the fire and what they meant to history, read on.

In many ways, the early 1900s were not such a different time period from our own. Americans then were fascinated with the latest technology—although their “new” technology was airplanes and automobiles and up-to-date sewing machines, not computers and iPods and video cell phones. There were stunning disparities between the rich and the poor, and reformers were calling out for change. And, at a time when huge numbers of foreigners were
pouring into the United States looking for economic opportunity or religious freedom—or just a better chance of staying alive—Americans had mixed feelings about welcoming these newcomers.

For many Italians and Russian Jews, even a half-hearted welcome was far better than what they faced in their homelands. In southern Italy, peasants were starving. Without land of their own, with economic and governmental and agricultural systems that seemed to guarantee their starvation, many of them felt they had no choice but to leave for America or Argentina or some other country—anywhere they might have a chance. In most cases, the Italian immigrants intended to return home as soon as they'd saved up enough money. That often didn't go as planned. A common witticism was that Italians came to America expecting to see streets paved with gold—but when they got here, they discovered that not only were the streets not paved with gold, they weren't paved at all. And furthermore, the Italians were expected to do the paving!

The Russian Jews who came to America were fleeing not just poverty, but religious persecution as well. In Russia they faced severe limits on where they could live and what jobs they could hold. And repeatedly during the late 1800s and early 1900s, mobs of Russian peasants slaughtered whole communities of Jews, in pogroms that the government did little to stop and sometimes actively encouraged.

Girls like Bella and Yetta who came to America faced additional challenges because of their gender. Among those welcoming them to the United States were factory owners eager to exploit their desperation, ignorance, and subservience. As one factory owner bluntly put it, “I want no experienced girl, but only those greenhorns (new immigrants) . . . just come from the old country. And I let them work hard, like the devil, for less wages.” Girls weren't supposed to complain, they weren't supposed to speak out, they weren't supposed to think that they might have rights of their own.

Those attitudes make the story of the shirtwaist strike all the more amazing. Although
both males and females participated in the strike, it quickly became known as an uprising of girls. The Triangle workers were among the first shirtwaist makers to go on strike in the fall of 1909, after the owners resorted to locking out their own employees in an attempt to kill the fledgling union. Like Rahel, some of their workers had had union experience in the old country, but most of the strikers were leaping into the unknown when they picked up their first picket sign. The broader union the Triangle workers were part of Local 25 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, had just been formed in 1906 and had only one hundred members by 1909. So male labor leaders could perhaps be excused for thinking that girls wouldn't make good strikers.

How wrong they were.

At the huge Local 25 union meeting at the Cooper Union on November 22, 1909, it was indeed a female, Clara Lemlich, who made the call for a general strike. At least twenty thousand workers—perhaps even more than forty thousand—from hundreds of New York City shops walked off the job within the next week. Most of the smaller manufacturers were forced to settle quickly, agreeing to closed shops, better hours, higher wages, and similar demands. But the Triangle owners and several other large manufacturers dug in their heels. At several times during the strike, they hired thugs and prostitutes to beat the strikers. They also bribed the police to look the other way, join in the beatings, and/or to arrest the strikers whether they'd broken any laws or not. (I found it a bizarre juxtaposition that the date of Wilbur Wright's historic flight up the Hudson River—October 4, 1909— was also apparently the date of the first beatings of the Triangle strikers. The two events give such opposite perspectives on human progress.)

Meanwhile, the new hires and the other employees who crossed the picket line and continued working—the “scabs,” as the strikers called them—found a much more pleasant environment than usual. Besides special foods, music, and dancing at lunchtime, some workers even got taxi service, and were picked up and dropped off each
day by automobile. For poor immigrant girls in 1909, that must have seemed like the ultimate in luxury.

At the other extreme, workers at some factories told of priests coming in during their lunch hour, and telling them that they would go to hell if they joined the strike. Similarly, one judge told a worker, “You are on strike against God.”

Still, the strikers persisted, even as weeks passed and the arrests and beatings continued and autumn faded into a brutally cold winter. But they weren't alone. The manufacturers must have been horrified to hear about the suffragists, society women, and college girls rallying to the cause. (And I have to believe that there must have been many wealthy businessmen, like Jane's father, who were shocked by their wives' and daughters' latest charitable endeavor.)

The
New York Times
of December 19, 1909, mocked the wealthy females' interest in the strike as springing from a “‘you-a-girl-and-me-a-girl' spirit . . . The factory girl makes shirtwaists and the college girl wears them.” But the wealthy women and girls really did seem to feel a bond of sisterhood that crossed economic lines. And suffragists saw the call for female workers' rights as being very closely related to their own longing for the right to vote.

The American suffrage movement was at a low point in its history before the shirtwaist strike. Women in a few other countries—New Zealand, Australia, Finland—had already won the right to vote; in England, militant suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst were constantly making headlines by smashing windows, chaining themselves to railings, and staging hunger strikes in jail. But the American movement was floundering after its strongest leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, died in 1902 and 1906, respectively.

Still, the suffrage movement had recently gained the support of the wealthy but controversial Alva Belmont, and she quickly latched on to the shirtwaist strike as one of her pet causes. If you wanted publicity, money, or daring ideas in 1909, Alva Belmont was a good person to have on your side. A consummate social climber, she'd married a Vanderbilt, married off her daughter to the ninth Duke of Marlborough,
divorced her husband, and married another wealthy man who seemed to be the true love of her life. In 1909 she was a new widow, emerging from mourning and eager to find an outlet for her money, energies, and skill. She sat for hours at night court and put up her own house to bail out shirtwaist girls (its $400,000 value then being equivalent to about $8.6 million today). She rented the Hippodrome amphitheater in early December, drawing seven thousand people to listen to strikers, socialists, suffragists, and assorted other speakers. She organized the automobile parade in mid-December that brought even greater attention to the strike.