Dehron McMillian History 1302 Dr. Adkins-Weathersby 28 September 2014 Triangle Shirtwaist Company March 25, 1911 identified as the day of the dead, is the deadliest disaster in the industry during the Gilded Age. Over forty-six bodies lie on the street, meanwhile hundred bodies lie inside of the building. The factory took up the top three floors of a ten-story building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York. The workers were mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant’s women along with children, sewing blouses, to earn an income as little as three dollars a week. The labor and women’s movements challenged the nineteenth century meanings of American Freedom. The tragedy received widespread attention to dangerous conditions of the factories …show more content…
Triangle Shirtwaist Company was a main manufacturer who did not take kindly of the strike. They used police officers, to imprison the female workers on strike, while they paid the government officials to take the other girls away. On March, 25, while the workers worked, a fire began to start in the rag bin. A manager tried to put the fire out, but the fire spread rapidly and the hose did not work, due to the holes punched in the sides(Stein). As the fire escalated, the young women began to panic, and as the young women tried to escape on the elevator, they realized that the elevator could only hold 12 people, and the elevator broke down in the heat and flames. While they would wait for the elevator, they realized it’s not going to come back up, a lot of the workers jumped down and died quickly. While some tried to run down the stairwells, the doors were locked at the bottom and they were burned alive. Some of the workers, along with the owners escaped to the roof, and jumped from roof to roof to escape the fire. As firefighters began to show up, they started to witness a horrible scene. The women, who did not make it to the stairs or to the elevator, began to jump out of the window. Some of the women bodies fell on top of the fire hoses, strangling the firefighter’s duty to fight the fire. When the firefighters tried to put the fire out, they
This article presents the events of the fire like a story and exposes injustices surrounding the fire to spark outrage among readers. Even the title creates interest in the subject matter, and the article includes eye-catching subtitles such as, “The day it rained children” and “The waning flames of morality” (Pence et al. 406-412). “Working Women and the Triangle Fire” has some organizational issues, while “And All Who Jumped Died” has a clear, readable flow. Finally, the conclusion of “Working Women and the Triangle Fire” was somewhat weak, while “And All Who Jumped Died” concluded with a strong call to action for
Trapped Inside the Blaze On “March 25, 1911 one of the deadliest industrial disasters” in US history took place in New York City (Wiki paragraph 1). The fire caused 146 deaths and many more injuries of the workers in the Asch building. It took place on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. Many of the workers who couldn’t escape the blaze decided to jump of the building to their deaths so their bodies could be recognized.
Elaine, the man’s pregnant wife, was up next to take on the torture. He tried to rape her, and the attack resulted in Elaine going into labor. She gave birth to a girl and then Sells beat them both to death with a bat. He later penetrated her with the bat, tucked the family into bed, and left the home
Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.” More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze.
After a long standoff a fight took off and over the course of an hour seven strikers and three plinkertons were killed. During the aftermath Henry was the victim of an attempted assassination. Which changed public opinion away from the strikers to the company (New World
One day while the kids were at school and Velma went to the laundromat , she returned to find her house on fire and Thomas died from smoke inhalation . Velma’s suffering appeared short after another misfortune continued. A few months after Thomas died another fire broke out this time destroying the home. Later Velma and her children fled to Velma’s parents and waited for the insurance check.
Nancy A. Hewitt said in “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a ‘Master’ Narrative of U.S. Women’s History” that, “In recent years, historical studies have revealed the multifaceted movements that constituted woman 's rights campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet one narrative continues to dominate understandings of the period” (15). This is a perfect example of an alternative histories, which is when important events are so underreported that we are left with one side of history, that doesn’t allow most to know the full history of the women’s rights
The 1920s was a time of great change. From fashion to politics, this period is known as one of the most explosive decades in American history. After WWI, America became one of the world’s most formidable superpowers. The rise to power prompted the 1920s to become a decade of evolution for women’s rights, African American’s rights, and consumerism. In the early twentieth century, women’s status in society was continuously evolving.
It is a difficult task to challenge the social and economic policies of a country, especially one as patriotic as the United States during the post wartime Red scare era of the 1920 's. labor unions could account for this as they saw their membership fall from a high of 5 million in the 1920s to a mere 3.6 million by 1923(Rosenzweig 353). A combination of Supreme court decisions, Employer pressures and in many cases a lack of a strong leadership seen in previous individuals like Samuel Gompers contributed to this. Yet this trend surprisingly didn’t remain consistent as the great depression emerged around the 1930s. In fact they tripled there membership during the 1930s(Rosenzweig 429).They opened up, recruiting millions of women in their causes
This freedom for women was shocking to all of the traditionalist thinkers at the time; they were unable to allow women to have all the liberty that they had, so in turn, “...rumors, taken as truth, that women were being forced into prostitution... The plague of "white slavery" was on everyone 's minds. Muckraking journalists fueled the hysteria with sensationalized stories of innocent girls kidnapped off the streets by foreigners, drugged, smuggled across the country and forced to work in brothels” (The Long, Colorful History of the Mann
Women finally got the freedom to have a choice as well as options on things in their lives. “The best-remembered antebellum reforms was a women’s rights movement, its arrival signaled by a stirring “Declaration of Sentiments” issued in 1848 by a convention in Seneca
While in "Gilded Age", all levels of government had corruption, graft public money for their own. One of the most notorious New York City Boss Tweed William M. Tweed, his wealth has more than $25 million in 1871, all was dirty money. During the period he served as mayor of New York, the city requires all public officials to report false, false ratio as high as 85%. He presided over the construction of the New York county government office buildings, 40 chairs and 3 tables then discount about $179000, but a thermometer was quoted $7500. According to statistics, in 1860 ~ 1900, American municipal debt by $200 million soared to $1.4 billion, most of them are the City boss and partisans pocketed.
On the evening of March 25, 1911, the work day was coming to an end, but four small fires broke out on the eighth floor of the “Fireproof” Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, and located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on Greene Street and Washington Place in Manhattan (Timeline). Despite the ‘no smoking’ rules, workers and managers often did so in the factory: when one of them lit scraps of cloth, the heaps of garments caught fire - it spread rapidly through the building (1911). It started fires in the waste bins full of garnet scraps as well as the paper patterns on the ceiling. Workers fruitlessly used pails of water in an attempt to put it out (Drehle). The doors that would free the six-hundred workers were locked shut.
Could the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory have been prevented? I am not going to answer that question just yet. Without assessing all of the information to prevent the making of unfounded accusations. First things first you may be asking yourself what a Triangle Shirtwaist is. A triangle shirtwaist is a type of blouse that many women wore in the early 1900's.
The front doors of the factory would always be locked because the owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck thought one of the employees might steal something from the factory. When they tried to go downstairs, the flames of the fire burned them that prevented them to try leave the building. The factory owners were charged for manslaughter after the fire. A few years later they were acquitted and let out of