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NYC Book Club Conversation With David Von Drehle

On January 28, 2004, Gotham Gazette held an online chat with David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.


Gotham Gazette
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for coming to Gotham Gazette's NYC Book Club chat. Today, we are chatting with David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, a new book about a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The fire on March 25, 1911, killed 146 people, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrants. 123 were women. It was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York City until September 11, 2001.

Gotham Gazette
Good afternoon, Mr. Von Drehle

David Von Drehle
Hi. Thanks for having me.

FROM 1911 TO SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

Gotham Gazette
Personally, how did you get interested in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire?

David Von Drehle
I was a reporter in New York City, first for the Miami Herald and then for The Washington Post. And I lived in the Village a block from the site of the fire. The building is still there, at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street--the Brown Building of NYU. I noticed the historical marker on the building and grew more curious over the years as I walked past, looked up and wondered what exactly had happened there.

My question was: Why, out of all the horrible workplace disasters in that era -- railroad accidents, mine collapses, ship sinkings, etc. -- did the Triangle fire lead to genuine reforms. Answering that question took me into the powerful political and social currents that were swirling through New York in the months and years before the fire.

Gotham Gazette
Were you living in New York when you began work on the book?

David Von Drehle
No, by then I had moved to Washington, taken a detour into management, returned to reporting, had a bunch of kids. It was early 2001 before I seriously started work.

Gotham Gazette
So you were writing during the attacks on September 11?

David Von Drehle
Yes. I was deep into research. For about a month I wondered if there was any book left. Why, I wondered, would anyone care about a fire in 1911 that killed 146 people on the ninth floor?

Gotham Gazette
What made you decide to continue writing?

David Von Drehle
After all, thousands had died in the destruction of two 100-story towers. But I came to believe that the message of resilience, and the discovery of meaning and power in the ashes of the Triangle fire, could still have relevance.

Gotham Gazette
Were there any tangible changes to your book that came because of September 11?

David Von Drehle
I thought about writing a preface that would take September 11 into account but ultimately chose not to. September 11 is such an enormity -- and it was important to me NOT to appear to be taking advantage of it. But one feature of my book WAS influenced by it: I was struck, as many people were, by the New York Times sketches of the lives destroyed in the attacks. So I made an enormous effort to put together the first-ever complete list of the Triangle fire victims. To restore their names to history.

Gotham Gazette
Describe how you compiled that list.

David Von Drehle
The victim list was compliled by sorting through hundreds of pages of microfilmed newsprint, anguishing over dozens of misspellings and botches of various kinds, then sifting and resifting until my list matched the number of identified victims -- 140 of the 146 dead.

Michael McCall
It's interesting to see the contrast with the way the dead of September 11th were compiled -- and then modified over the past few years. Do you trust that account?

David Von Drehle
I think reporters and authorities made their best effort under incredibly difficult conditions. What is different is that this time, they TRIED. In 1911 there was surprisingly little interest in the lives--even the names--of dead workers.

LABOR AND FEMINISM

Gotham Gazette
How had the labor movement in the city begun to change the lack of interest in individual workers by the time of the fire?

David Von Drehle
In the shirtwaist industry -- that's women's blouses -- there was a dramatic strike in 1909-1910. I tell the story in Triangle. It helped to awaken the city to the lives of working women and girls. But it was still a dawning awareness at the time of the fire.

Gotham Gazette
How did feminism play into this movement?

David Von Drehle
In this same period, upper-class and educated women were leading the campaign for suffrage--the right to vote. The suffrage leaders joined the leaders of the strike--to promote the cause of women of all social strata. As a result, the New York World newspaper called the shirtwaist strike "The Lexington and Concord of women's rights in America."

Gotham Gazette
Was there any tension between the labor and suffrage movements?

David Von Drehle
Eventually. The strike leaders were mostly Socialists. The suffrage leaders tended not to be. So after about a month of the strike the two factions split over the aims of the strike.

Gotham Gazette
What happened then?

David Von Drehle
What the fire did was it rejoined those two political forces -- the Lower East Side radicals and the upper-class Progressives -- into a political force that demanded change from the Tammany Hall democratic machine.

Gotham Gazette
How were the labor and feminist movements in New York different than in other parts of the country before and after the fire?

David Von Drehle
I can't claim to be an expert on these movements nationwide. What I can say is that the reforms that began after the fire in New York spread steadily. The Tammany Hall leaders who were pushed into reform by this coalition eventually rose to influence the entire country when New Yorker Franklin D. Roosevelt reached the White House in 1932.

Roosevelt ran on an agenda pioneered by Tammany's Alfred E. Smith, whose political breakthrough came when he pushed the post-Triangle reform agenda. Smith's Tammany colleague Robert F. Wagner reached the U.S. Senate and wrote much of the new Deal.

Another Triangle reformer, Frances Perkins, was FDR's Secretary of Labor. She was actually an eyewitness to the fire. She saw the tangles of victims falling from the windows. Late in life, Perkins said the Triangle fire was the birth of the New Deal -- and we can trace not just workplace safety reforms to that root, but also such laws, written by Wagner, as the Social Security Act, the unemployment insurance program, the public housing program, and the right to unionize.

Gotham Gazette
In the book, you mention that Tammany Hall, the dominant political force in New York, was under pressure from all sides to reform at the time of the fire. Is it possible that the change now credited to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire would have come about from the political atmosphere in New York?

David Von Drehle
Sure. Everything is possible. All I can say is how things actually happened. I don't have a backward-looking crystal ball.

IMMIGRATION

Gotham Gazette
Another thing pressuring Tammany Hall at the time was the waves of European immigration in New York City. How did these immigrants affect New York City differently than other parts of the country?

David Von Drehle
A huge percentage of these immigrants -- most of them from Eastern Europe and Southern Italy -- settled in New York. They did not have the same loyalties to Tammany that the earlier immigrants, mostly Irish and German, had felt. Many, especially the Europeans Jews fleeing oppression, had a well-developed, often radical, politcal outlook. So they were able to put pressure in a concentrated way on the political machine of New York. In a way, this story is about the importance of organizing and voting. Those immigrants did, and they helped change America.

Gotham Gazette
New York City is in the middle of its biggest wave of immigration since the time of your book. Do you see any parallels?

David Von Drehle
Sure. One parallel is simply the vibrance that immigrants have brought and continue to bring to New York. I found the period around 1910 to be such a tremendously exciting period -- I loved spending time in that great city in my mind -- just as I love to spend time in New York now. And obviously, the new immigrants are once again shaping the city's politics -- although they could have more impact if they would vote in larger numbers.

Dnice
Have you any idea what the levels of voter turnout in the early part of the century were?

David Von Drehle
The numbers varied widely. In the best-organized Tammany wards you sometimes had near 100 percent turnout. If someone didn't show up to vote, Tammany workers would go find them -- or cast a vote in their name. But in less-organized wards, especially heavily Italian neighborhoods, turnout was dismal -- below 10 percent. There is an excellent (though hard to find) book called Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants that contains lots of ward-by-ward numbers if you are really interested. Try the New York Public Library.

A LASTING LEGACY?

Gotham Gazette
In his review of your book, New York historian Mike Wallace wrote that "The only problematic part of Triangle is the assumption, nestled in its title, that the catastrophe wrought a permanent transformation in the American workplace...Sweatshops that exploit vulnerable and unorganized immigrant workers are again alive and malignantly well in New York City." How much has the legacy that the fire had on public policy eroded?

David Von Drehle
That is a complicated question. Workers today are about thirty times less likely (one-thirtieth as likely?) to die on the job as workers were in 1910. That is a very real and important change. On the other hand, it is true that the issue safety and the need to organize workers did not vanish. Labor unions are losing numbers and losing influence. The Triangle fire and its legacy DID change America. But that doesn't mean that the issues involved went away forever. People who want to push ahead in this area can learn a lot, I think, by reading about the struggles of their forebears.

Gotham Gazette
Thank you very much for being with us, Mr. Von Drehle.

David Von Drehle
Thank you. If anyone has other questions I can try to asnwer them at vondrehled@washpost.com

Gotham Gazette
We have been chatting with David Von Drehle about his book Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. Continue this discussion on our NYC Books message board.

Our next book is Dreamland, by Kevin Baker. On February 25 at 6 PM we will be discussing the book in person with its author at Borders Book shop at 100 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Thanks for coming.


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