Author: Myrna

Myrna Curtis
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Tragedy, March 25, 1911
	In the early twentieth century there weren’t many labor laws in our nation to protect the hard working laborers. Working conditions were atrocious; there was nothing regulating how many hours you worked, the conditions you worked in, safety, or even the working ages. Immigrants coming over to the United States looking for a better life for them and their families found living conditions almost as bad as what they left behind. Most workers wouldn’t complain within earshot of their supervisors for fear of losing their jobs. There were injuries but nothing that brought attention to the safety risks like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. This paper will be about one photograph from the Cornell University Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Collection.
	Out of the images from the Cornell University Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Collection, I chose “Image 11” to review and the reason I chose this image is because it tells the story of a life taken way before it’s time. Two things in this image really stood out to me. One is the body of a young boy who is lying on his back with his head turned to the side. Even though there is a person there tagging him as being deceased, the look on his face looks like a grimace of pain, not one of peace like most people have when they pass on. The second thing that stood out to me is there is one gentleman in the image who is looking at the camera man with a look of disgust. I can almost hear him saying, “Don’t you have any respect for these poor people?”
	To learn more about the event and possibly how eyewitnesses felt I turned to Cornell University’s Triangle Factory Fire site and found an article of an eyewitness account that had been published in the Milwaukee Journal, March 27, 1911.  William Shepherd states in this article “I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. 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. ….On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring.” (Eyewitness at the Triangle, William Shepherd, 1911)  This article tells us why the bodies were on the sidewalk and why they were being tagged.
	Alan Brinkley’s The Unfinished Nation, 6^th ed. tells us little about the tragic event other than “….a terrible fire swept through the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York; 146 workers died…Many of them had been trapped inside the burning building because management had locked the emergency exits to prevent malingering.” (Brinkley, 2010, 532) The image and other resources mentioned shows us that not only did people get trapped inside the building, but there were some that jumped to their deaths.
	This tragic event tells us of the government’s negligence to the hard working Americans that tried to voice their concerns about safety in the work place. As a matter of fact there was a strike that had taken place only a couple of years before the fire. If the government and employers had only taken the concerns of the workers more seriously this would have been prevented. Since the fire “…a series of pioneering labor laws were passed that imposed strict regulations on factory owners and established effective mechanisms for enforcement.” (Brinkley, 2010, 532) It is so unfortunate that it took a tragic event such as this to transform the labor laws. As we go to work each day we should keep in mind those 146 lives that were lost, and thank the government for finally stepping up and insuring us that we don’t have to work ourselves to “death” to try and make a living.