More on the Triangle Centennial

Time for a round-up of some of the coverage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Centennial:

NPR's On the Media interviews David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, about the newspaper coverage of the fire and how he role of journalism in carrying forward the reforms the event spawned:



The New York Times has nice collection of stories related to the anniversary including a feature which will let you browse newspaper coverage from 1911.

You can watch last week's program from the New York Triangle Fire Centennial at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition site.  The speakers start about 20 minutes in to Part 2.  They include Secretary of Labor (and my former Congresswoman) Hilda Solis, Senator Charles Schumer, Mayor Bloomberg, Danny Glover, assorted union leaders, a descendant of one of the victims of the fire and a firefighter salute.  As a fan of street theater, I loved the "shirtwaist" banners flying over the heads of the attendees.

WNYC also has a report on the memorial program and a number of other stories, many featuring descendants of those who were killed or survived the fire. My favorite is their audio archive collection which features sound clips of a survivor, a WPA dramatization of the fire from 1938, and excerpts from the 50th anniversary in 1961 where Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor and fire eyewitness Frances Perkins spoke.

From the Fire

I can't resist sharing some more of the creative commemorations of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire centennial.  A choral piece called "From the Fire" has been commissioned and is premiering in New York this weekend. The New Yorker has the details and a little insight from the creators,

“In writing the music, I was thinking of crowd noises, the noise of family, the tenements, and the noise of the factory itself—everyone was packed so closely together—and then the sounds of the fire and the panic it caused.” [composter Elizabeth] Swados, who had worn a somewhat spacey expression while listening to her collaborators’ dialogue, became focused now that it was her turn to talk. “The pushing, crushing, and then the fire,” she went on. “How to do that, to convey that terrifying moment when the fire breaks out, vocally. There aren’t English words for it.

Promo video below. More music and photos at this tumblr: From the Fire
 

FROM THE FIRE - Promo from Jaime Lebrija on Vimeo.

March Centennials: Women's Day and the Triangle Fire

This March 8, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.  For more on the history of this day honoring women see this timeline.  I've had labor unions on the brain, and was trying to think if we had read any books about unions and labor rights in the past and of course what immediately came to mind was David Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America which tells the story of the fire that took 146 lives, mostly of young immigrant women workers, and galvanized a movement for social justice.  As it happens, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire also happened in 1911, the same year, in fact just a week after, the first Women's Day. Learning more about the Triangle fire and the labor and women's rights movement associated with it, would be a great way to remember Women's Day this year.

As part of the commemoration of the Triangle tragedy, two documentaries about the fire are worth checking out.  The LAT recommends you watch both.  PBS American Experience offers Triangle Fire which has already aired and can be viewed online (or via Netflix streaming). Author David Von Drehle appears in the film. The PBS website features a map, photo gallery, biographies and other primary resources great for teachers and an excellent list of web resources for more information. (This Cornell site and Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition are especially worthy of exploration).  HBO's documentary is airing later this month. Here's the trailer:



Don't forget to check in with Amnesty's Human Rights Now blog this week for action suggestions to honor International Women's Day and visit the IWD website to learn more about other events celebrating the day.

Triangle Anniversary and Child Labor Today

Rights Readers who enjoyed David Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire that Changed America will appreciate this opinon piece, "The Factories of Lost Children", in the NYT on the recent anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The author, Katherine Weber, (who has written a forthcoming novel on the fire Triangle), makes the connection between child labor then and now:

But we will also never know how many children were among the dead on May 10, 1993, in Thailand when the factory of the Kader Industrial Toy Company (a supplier to Hasbro and Fisher-Price) went up in flames. Most of the 188 workers who died were described as teenage girls.

We will never know with any certainty how many children died on Nov. 25, 2000, in a fire at the Chowdhury Knitwear and Garment factory near Dhaka, Bangladesh (most of the garments made in Bangladesh are contracted by American retailers, including Wal-Mart and the Gap), where at least 10 of the 52 trapped in the flames by locked doors and windows were 10 to 14 years old.

And we will never know how many children died just last month, on Feb. 23, in the KTS Composite Textile factory fire in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The official death toll has climbed into the 50's, but other sources report that at least 84 workers lost their lives. It's a familiar story: crowded and unsafe conditions, locked exits, hundreds of undocumented female workers as young as 12, a deadly fire. There may never be another tragic factory fire in America that takes the lives of children. We don't lock them into sweatshops any more. There are child labor laws, fire codes.

But as long as we don't question the source of the inexpensive clothing we wear, as long as we don't wonder about the children in those third world factories who make the inexpensive toys we buy for our own children, those fires will occur and young girls an d boys will continue to die. They won't die because of natural catastrophes like monsoons and earthquakes; they will die because it has become our national habit to outsource, and these days we outsource our tragedies, too.