WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD AND ROSE SCHNEIDERMAN

The following excerpts are from documents about the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, written by two contemporaries who played a part in both the catastrophe and the reform initiatives that emerged during its aftermath.

William G. Shepherd, Reporter

William G. Shepherd’s eyewitness account appeared in newspapers across the country. Working for the United Press, Shepherd phoned the story to his editor as he watched the unfolding tragedy.

I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from a factory building caught my eye. …

I looked up — saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me — something I didn’t know was there — steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud — then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs. …

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wire 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. …

The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.

Rose Schneiderman, Trade Unionist

At age thirteen, Rose Schneiderman had gone to work in a garment factory like Triangle Shirtwaist’s and, under the tutelage of the Women’s Trade Union League, had become a labor organizer. The strike she mentions in this speech at a memorial meeting held a week after the fire was popularly known as the Uprising of the 30,000, a nearly spontaneous walkout in 1909 that launched the union movement in the women’s garment trades.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. … Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers, and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us … [and] beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

SOURCE : Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1977), 188–198.