Honoring the Dead 100 Years Later: The Triangle Factory Tragedy

This date has significance, as today marks the centennial of the day a group of 146 garment workers -- most of them young women, the youngest of whom was 14 -- perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The factory was near Washington Square, which, coincidentally, was also the first place I called home, when my parents brought me to their apartment at 2 Washington Square Village, Apartment 8-H, the day after I was born.

Those girls and women must have gone to work that day as they did on any other. Maybe they walked; maybe they rode the trolley. Perhaps it was warm for late March, promising Spring, or rainy, or chilly. They probably thought nothing of it, as they made their way into the building and up the elevator to the ninth floor.

Who knows what the morning was like for those girls and women? They were the hardest-working of the working poor -- Jewish and Italian mostly, many of whom had recently arrived in America, hoping for something better. If not better for themselves, then they hoped for a better life for their children, real or imagined in the future.

There are some good oral histories from that infamous day one hundred years ago -- most notably in Howard Zinn's seminal A People's History of the United States, as well as in the library of the American Social History Project in New York City.

The reason I know about the ASHP, which some may think of as somewhat obscure, I admit, is because I had the good fortune to work with one of the best Social Studies teachers/historians in David Silberberg.

David and I worked together at Satellite Academy High School from 1992 to 2004. He still teaches Social Studies there -- the only one left from that Dream Team of a teaching staff from the late-1980's and early nineties. (Happily, I can say they've brought on great teachers consistently since then, and there have been many new Dream Teams in the intervening years.)

We talked about team teaching quite a bit, as David and I shared an office in that wonderful, run-down building across from the Tweed Courthouse. The American Social History Project had developed a powerful interdisciplinary curriculum that was meant to be taught by a Social Studies and English teacher together, so that students would learn about events through first-hand oral histories, while developing their writing and literacy skills. It was perfect, and I loved every minute of teaching that class.

In addition to examining the stories from that horrible incident, David and I worked with our students to understand images, like the one above. Television obviously hadn't been invented yet, but photography had, and the images of all those girls and women falling, jumping from the ninth floor to their deaths, became a rallying cry for the labor movement. Management had apparently blocked off and locked doors to prevent workers from stealing scraps of fabric. They had also chosen to forgo fire drills, because, they said, it hampered productivity.

I thank people like Howard Zinn and David Silberberg who keep telling the story. Organizations like the American Social History Project and HBO, who produced an excellent and heartbreaking documentary about the fire deserve our collective gratitude, as well.