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Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy In The Industry During The Gilded Age

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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

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