Triangle
The Fire That Changed America
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- USD 19.99
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- USD 19.99
Descripción editorial
This "outstanding history" of the 1911 disaster that changed the course of 20th-century politics and labor relations "is social history at its best" (Kevin Baker, The New York Times Book Review).
New York City, 1911. As the workday was about to end, a fire broke out in the Triangle shirtwaist factory of Greenwich Village. Within minutes it consumed the building's upper three stories. Firemen were powerless to rescue those trapped inside: their ladders simply weren't tall enough. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their deaths.
Triangle is both a harrowing chronicle of the Triangle shirtwaist fire and a vibrant portrait of an era. It follows the waves of Jewish and Italian immigration that supplied New York City's garment factories with cheap, mostly female labor. It portrays the Dickensian work conditions that led to a massive waist-worker's strike in which an unlikely coalition of socialists, socialites, and suffragettes took on bosses, police, and magistrates. And it shows how a public outcry over the fire led to an unprecedented alliance between labor reformers and Tammany Hall politicians.
With a memorable cast of characters, including J.P. Morgan's blue-blooded activist daughter Anne, and political king maker Charles F. Murphy, as well as the many workers who lost their lives in the fire, Triangle presents a dramatic account of early 20th century New York and the events that gave rise to urban liberalism.
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It was a profitable business in a modern fireproof building heralded as a model of efficiency. Yet the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City became the deadliest workplace in American history when fire broke out on the premises on March 25, 1911. Within about 15 minutes the blaze killed 146 workers most of them immigrant Jewish and Italian women in their teens and early 20s. Though most workers on the eighth and 10th floors escaped, those on the ninth floor were trapped behind a locked exit door. As the inferno spread, the trapped workers either burned to death inside the building or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Journalist Von Drehle (Lowest of the Dead: Inside Death Row and Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election) recounts the disaster the worst in New York City until September 11, 2001 in passionate detail. He explains the sociopolitical context in which the fire occurred and the subsequent successful push for industry reforms, but is at his best in his moment-by-moment account of the fire. He describes heaps of bodies on the sidewalk, rows of coffins at the makeshift morgue where relatives identified charred bodies by jewelry or other items, and the scandalous manslaughter trial at which the Triangle owners were acquitted of all charges stemming from the deaths. Von Drehle's engrossing account, which emphasizes the humanity of the victims and the theme of social justice, brings one of the pivotal and most shocking episodes of American labor history to life. Photos not seen by PW.
