David Von Drehle

Overall, an interesting analysis of the Triangle fire, one of the deadliest workplace disasters in New York history, and it held the record for ninety years.

One of the witnesses was Frances Perkins, who witnessed many of the employees jumping from windows on the eighth and ninth stories, choosing to die in that way rather than be burned alive. Some of those who died in the fire were so badly burned that their dentists had to be consulted, and others identified only through their jewelry (in show more at least one case, a fiancé identified his fiancée because he recognized her engagement ring). After seeing this, Frances Perkins became especially interested in factory conditions and later became FDR’s secretary of labor and the first female cabinet member in US history.

I appreciated how the account of the fire was set in the broader political and social context of the time, which included not only the organization of unions and the labor strife which accompanied it, but also the increasing tide of feminism and the reform efforts that followed the fire. Not to mention New York City’s commercial arson industry; it was a common tactic to burn down an unprofitable factory (usually a factory that had made a product no longer in fashion) and allow the owners to profit from the insurance payout – and many owners carried fire insurance policies far in excess of the value of their factories for just this purpose. However, all evidence indicates that arson was not a factor in the Triangle fire.

As for the feminist movement, I found it especially interesting that the book pointed out that:

“…many of the tasks that were centralized and mechanized in America’s factories and mills were traditionally the work of women, once done at home: the sewing, the spinning, the making of sweets and pickles and soap. Legions of women followed this work out of the kitchen and into the shop…nearly a third of all factory workers in the state of New York at the that time were women.” (Pages 44-45).

It made sense, then, for women to become more concerned about having a voice in the conditions under which they worked and in the forefront of the movement for reform.

There was also a trial, in which the two owners of the factory were charged with manslaughter (mostly because one of the exits to the factory had been locked during working hours, and so a large number of workers could not escape the flames). The case is infamous in most evidence classes because of how the defendant’s attorney destroyed the credibility of one of the witnesses, Kate Alterman, who barely escaped the flames, and who had likely memorized a previously prepared statement; the defense attorney undermined the true testimony by repeatedly asking her to repeat her statements, which varied each time she did so. The question in evidence class was: how would you rehabilitate this witness on redirect? (In the actual trial, the prosecution somehow didn’t try). Given that almost all of the victims were immigrant teenagers, it was unlikely that English was their first language – and if Kate’s was not, it might explain why she would try to prepare an account beforehand and ask someone more familiar with English to help her – especially if, as is likely, it was her first time testifying in court; and asking questions to elicit such information on redirect probably would have helped. An “asked and answered” objection when the defense attorney asked Kate to repeat her testimony might also have been useful. The defense attorney also insisted on requiring all the witnesses to testify in English without an interpreter (the judge allowed interpreters in some cases), resulting in a lot of the prosecution’s witnesses testifying in broken English and helping to undermine their credibility with the jury – as difficulty speaking English was often considered an indication of stupidity at the time. And I do understand why a lot people dislike lawyers for tactics like this, which were successful in obtaining a verdict of not guilty. On top of that, the judge sympathized with the defendants, since he had also once been blamed for a deadly fire. By way of mitigation, I’ll point out that the law students in the building immediately adjacent were instrumental in saving multiple employees from the fire.

The epilogue pointed out that:

“Though the risk of death in the American workplace has been cut to one-thirtieth of what is was in 1911, there are still some shops and factories that would be instantly recognizable to Rosie Freedman and the rest of the Triangle dead. In 1991, in Hamlet, North Carolina, twenty-five workers died behind locked doors in a flash fire at a poultry plant. Conditions in poorer countries are far worse. A fire at a toy factory in Bangkok in 1993 left nearly two hundred workers dead. Factory owners had locked the doors to prevent theft of toys by their employees.”

Because the subject matter is both appalling and depressing, I would recommend alternating this with some lighter book in your favorite genre. show less

Excellent in research and writing

This book, while using the Triangle shirtwaist fire as an example, is mostly about power. The author demonstrates the macro power of money, government, life, and death to allow the reader to appreciate the key players' motives, how they resulted in the tragedy and what changes resulted from the fire and its aftermath.

The powerful owners of the late Gilded Age are easily recognized despite more than one hundred years elapsed between them. Nor have these show more industrialists changed their behavior toward those whose toil butters their bread. Instead, the resulting moguls of the information age are allowed to grow increasingly powerful and even less answerable for their crimes than those gilded forefathers.

In 1911, shirtwaist workers were stripped of their dignity by locked doors and a twisted need to control their employees' lives. The prosecution revealed in his investigation that the owners paid investigators and muscle men hundreds of dollars to recover losses of less than $25. The result was to blame workers for making the excessive expenditure necessary.

The same kind of behavior, refusing breaks and crushing unions, happens all the time even today. Amazon refuses to provide for its workers' health and safety despite the fact that those worker's dedication earned billions of dollars for their bosses during the pandemic.

The author demonstrates the necessary data collection that bolsters the Labor Department's regulations and led to the New Deal Era and reminds us what our representatives have failed to protect.

The abuse of workers reduces the future ability for the US to earn money. Millions are driven onto disability because we fail to protect our greatest asset. Other countries realize that their workforce is their future. They force owners to treat their workers well. But in the US, we hand over the most precious part of the economy to anyone regardless of their history of abuse.

The fact that the owners of the shirtwaist factory made millions more from insurance than the factory was worth was barely noticed and quickly forgotten by the business community. These two wealthy men, tricked out in diamonds, locked others into their workplaces even AFTER the Triangle fire. Those men should never have been allowed to hire a cab again, much less another factory.

The author's meticulous research showed the long view of the tragedy. By following the careers defined by that tragedy, he shows that change resulted from the cooperation of unions, government and the labor researchers who gathered and analyzed the data to verify the new laws actually helped protect this country's investment in workers.

Once the government began to protect workers and enforced their rights to unionize. The US entered the longest period of growth ever seen in the world.

The fire, while tragic, wasn't particularly horrifying as commercial accidents go even today. The importance of that fire and its tragic loss of life is key because it began a period in which the government, armed with data, and workers armed with unions, finally gained power over the owners armed with money. They recognized that no fortune is made without employees and the better educated and healthier that workforce is, the more successful the entire country is. Then they wrote and enacted laws to defend workers from predation.

Our workforce is the greatest asset of the United States and the reforms made to protect workers raised our economy to heights that made owners so powerful that they can flout laws made to protect their workers.

After reading this book no one should be too surprised that the people who hoped and acted to end our country were company owners indistinguishable from the two men who locked the doors on the women at the Triangle factory. Even after nearly losing their own lives in the fire, their factory doors remained locked.

Indistinguishable. show less

This is one of the best history books I've read in quite a while. To understand the importance of the Triangle Waist Company fire in labor history, it is also important to understand the context in which it occurred. I hadn't realized how the rise and fall of Tammany Hall was so intimately tied in with a business and political climate that would permit a situation in which such a deadly fire could occur, and also with the reformist aftermath, which was instrumental in leading to New Deal show more policies. The story of the trial, and the political maneuvering leading up to it, was fascinating.

Von Drehle is a fine writer. The most moving chapter must be the one he calls, "Three Minutes", referring to the fact that had the alarm been sounded three minutes sooner, many lives might have been saved. His descriptions of how many of the workers died had me in tears. While it is very easy to pile horror on horror, von Drehle shows you the people, both the survivors and the lost. There is one extraordinary section of this chapter in which, after telling of the people standing in the windows "cry[ing] 'fire!' because what else was there to say?", and the fire ladders not tall enough, and the watchers below "their tiny hands . . . up, as if a gesture could hold the doomed workers forever in the mouth of a furnace" he then describes the view from the windows. "[T]he cool, clear air beyond the furnace; the gray-brown tracery of bare trees quilting Washington Square (faintly washed with the first whisper of new green) . . .the birds starting from nearby eaves and wheeling through the sky; the elegant campanile of the church on the square, and the pleasing aesthetic echoes of it in the two orange brick loft building that faced the Asch Building . . .one of the least decorated in the neighborhood, [it] featured miniature terra-cotta columns, fluted in the classical style, as dividers between the upper-floor windows. Workers were clinging to these decorations now."

In 1913, two years after the fire, the New York State legislature passed a series of fire safety laws, including requiring automatic sprinklers in high-rises, and unlocked doors. in the fall of 2003, 6 people died in a high-rise office building in Chicago. There were no automatic sprinklers, and the victims were trapped in a stairwell because the fire doors were locked. show less

Von Drehle argues that 1862 was the most important year in the history of our nation, and he does so quite persuasively.

Many of Lincoln’s tasks after the onset of the Civil War involved appeasement: he had to make sure the touchy border states remained in the Union [ergo he could not speak out too forcefully for emancipation]; he had to make sure Britain and France did not join the war on the side of the South [thus his capitulation on the so-called “Trent Affair”) and he had to ensure show more that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney (author of the notorious Dred Scott decision declaring that African Americans could never be considered U.S. citizens) did not thwart his military plans to protect the North by using what could be considered extra-Constitutional actions. Moreover, the Army, which numbered only 16,000 men before the war (and these men were spread out all over the continent), had been rapidly increased to nearly five times that number. But none of them knew how to fight! Nor did most of the men picked to lead them. Somehow Lincoln had to figure out which of these novices had the makings of generals who could lead the North to victory.

Needless to say, it took Lincoln a while to accomplish this last, especially since he had to take great care not to alienate all the supporters (among whom numbered many soldiers) of the infuriating and perhaps even treasonous George McClellan. But Lincoln was one of the few men in a leadership position at the time who was willing and able to take the long view, and to keep his eye on the prize, which was preservation of the Union.

Why was this so important? Lincoln believed the American nation, with its bestowal of power upon ordinary people to elect its government (i.e., the doctrine of self government), was “absolutely and eternally right.” Furthermore, he could conceive of no government more noble than one “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He could find no moral right in the despotism of men not only governing themselves but governing other men. But he knew a critical factor determining the success of this experiment was assurance to the citizenry that losing voters would not and could not destroy the system just because they lost. Like a marriage, any union won’t work when the parties say “I’m getting a divorce” every time something doesn’t go their way. Compromise is the key to maintaining any union worth having, and Lincoln believed firmly that the United States – this great experiment – should not perish from the earth.

[And yes, there was a slight problem with the reality of the nation as it was then constituted not living up to the promise, since some men were more equal than other men, and certainly more equal than women.] Lincoln begged his audience, in an 1858 debate against Stephen Douglas:

"Now, my countrymen . . . if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. … I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity—the Declaration of American Independence.”

Lincoln intended to help the nation “heed these sacred principles.” But he could not do it unless the “nation so conceived and so dedicated” were still in existence. This concern dictated all of his strategy, all of his decisions, all of his tactics, and it is this long-term vision that so many others in the government were unable to realize.

They also were not nearly as savvy as Lincoln about realpolitik. Lincoln felt he couldn’t just get rid of Simon Cameron, his corrupt and incompetent Secretary of War, or he would create a dangerous enemy and hopelessly alienate Pennsylvanians; nor could he just get rid of Samuel Chase, whose over-the-top politicking for Lincoln’s job outraged everyone but Lincoln – he needed Chase’s financial prowess to raise the money to fight the war. Nor could Lincoln satisfy Congress by firing George McClellan, the do-nothing general who consistently snubbed, insulted, and disrespected Lincoln. McClellan was far too popular among the troops; Lincoln knew better than to lose the loyalty of the army. He could not even appease the abolitionists by outlawing slavery just yet – the preservation of the union had to take precedence.

Again and again, Lincoln was able to push aside and rise above personal snubs, Congressional pressure, embarrassment over his wife’s questionable friendships with Confederates, and all the rest, to save the Union. Lincoln said:

“Perhaps I have too little [resentment], but I never thought it paid.”

This remarkable man had a remarkable year in 1862. As Drehle writes:

"…when the first day of January [1863] came around again, Lincoln’s greatness was no longer raw. Even as he had redefined American society, he had invented the modern presidency. He had steered himself and the nation from its darkest New Year’s Day to its proudest, and in the process Lincoln had become the towering leader who forever looms over the rebirth of the American experiment.”

Evaluation: You have to admire the author for undertaking this book. As he observed in his Note on Sources, “the sheer volume of material, both primary and secondary… is so vast that dropping into the subject as a writer is like falling into the sea.” Yet he succeeds admirably, providing a month-by-month account of Lincoln’s life in 1862 that puts us right into the thick of the times with a welcome lack of turgidity and tedium. Obviously the author could not include everything; new students of Lincoln may want to start with a more comprehensive biography. But for those who know even the bare outlines of Lincoln’s life and the politics surrounding it, this book provides a lively and always-interesting focused look at one of the most important years in America’s history. show less