Jews, unity, and the Triangle Factory Fire
Louis Waldman was one of many witnesses to the horror unfolding on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory at 23-29 Washington Place in Manhattan.
One Saturday afternoon in March of that year — March 25, to be precise — I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library… It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire.
A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames.
Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle [Shirtwaist] Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.
The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.
Rose Indursky was a 16-year-old sleeve setter on the 9th floor of the building.
When I went out into the hall staircase I bent down and looked downstairs and I could see the fire come up. In the shop the girls were running around with their hair burning.
First I ran into the dressing room with the machinist and some of the others. Then the walls in the dressing room began to smoke. The machinist had a wild look in his eye. We ran back into the shop; girls were lying on the floor, fainted, and people were stepping on them. Some of the other girls were trying to climb over the machines. I remember the machinist ran to the window and he smashed it to let the smoke that was choking us go out. Instead, the flames rushed in. I stood at the window; across the street people were hollering "don't jump, don't jump." I turned around and ran to the hall staircase door. My hair was smoldering — my clothes were torn. I put my two hands on my smoldering hair and ran up the stairs. I went into the 10th floor. Nobody was there except one man, [a] bookkeeper. He was picking up papers and he hollered to me, can you come to the roof, can you come to the roof. By that time, all the windows on the 10th floor were burning. My life was saved on account of the bookkeeper. I didn't know that the next floor was the roof. I think if not for him I would have stayed on the 10th floor and maybe had been killed.
I was only afraid that somebody would tell my mother what had happened — she was still in Bialistok.
The fire started shortly before 5 p.m. Within 18 minutes, 146 workers — mostly Jewish girls and women, and mostly immigrants — were dead. The fire department stood by helplessly (their ladders reached only to the 7th floor) as 62 people fell or hurled themselves from the inferno. “I learned a new sound that day,” a reporter recalled, “a sound more horrible than description can picture — the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.”
A subsequent investigation found that one of the reasons for the high death count was that “doors to the stairwells and exits were locked — a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft.” The factory owners “preferred hiring immigrant women over men, because they would work for less, and were less likely to unionize against them. These women were often poor, young, had little to no education and barely spoke English.”
Many, if not most garment factory owners were Jewish. The owners of the Triangle factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were themselves Jewish immigrants. They survived.
The accounts I reviewed did not single out the ethnicity of the owners, which is understandable: workers of all nationalities have died and continue to die in workplaces owned by bosses of all nationalities. But that the owners were Jewish is important here because, at the very least, it calls into question the Zionist argument that Jewish unity in support of Israel takes precedence over unity with non-Jews around issues that all of us confront under the Trump onslaught.
When my mother was about 20 years old, the Communist Party, USA dissolved itself in the belief that the war-time cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States made class struggle unnecessary. Earl Browder, the Party’s general secretary, said as much:
If J.P. Morgan supports this coalition and goes down the line for it, I as a Communist am prepared to clasp his hand on that and join with him to realize it. Class divisions or political groupings have no significance now except as they reflect one side or the other of this issue.
Mom was explaining the reasoning to her mom and her mom’s friend. “You mean I’m going to be friends with my boss?” Grandma sneered when Mom tried to explain this new era of cooperation. By that time, Grandma had been a garment worker for more than 20 years. Her hands were crippled with arthritis, her knuckles swollen and painful, the skin stretched and shiny.
Zionism, the ideology of the Israeli ruling class, is premised on the belief that support for a Jewish supremacist state is the essence of being a Jew; those who don’t support such a state — especially Palestinians — are antisemitic and are, therefore, enemies of the Jewish people. The purpose of this argument is to convince Jews not to have anything to do with non-Jews (and anti-Zionist Jews) who don’t support Israel.
This argument also flattens the differences that have always existed in the Jewish community. The Triangle fire, and my grandmother’s sneering reaction, are reminders that “the Jewish people” includes capitalists and workers, the poor and the profligate, the hungry and the hoarders, the exploited and the exploiters. Jewish workers at the Triangle factory certainly had a lot in common with their non-Jewish coworkers, and recognition of that commonality was the basis for the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the decades following that horrible fire. Recognition of that commonality — which we call solidarity — is needed now more than ever.
Two documentaries to watch
“Naila and the Uprising” looks at the First Intifada (1987-1993), a non-violent Palestinian uprising, from the point of view of the women who led it, and especially from the perspective of Naila Ayesh, one of the leaders of the grassroots committees that defied the Israeli occupation forces and security services. The women also talk about the pushback by the Palestinian male political leadership to undermine and sideline them. The film was produced by Just Vision. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes.
“Kids Under Fire,” produced by Al Jazeera Fault Lines, is a devastating expose of the killing and wounding of Palestinian children (as young as 4 months) by Israeli snipers in Gaza. The documentary interviews Palestinian fathers and mothers of the victims, as well as U.S. doctors who treated the victims, and who were forced to conclude that the pattern of violence they saw every day was systematic, not random. Warning: the film includes graphic images. Running time: 25 minutes.