The Fraught Legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

‘‘Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Charity’By David Conrad-Perez NYU Press, 336 pagesMarch 25 never quite had the same resonance as September 11. But generations of New Yorkers grew up knowing about that terrible Spring day in 1911, when a fast-moving fire devoured the Triangle Shirtwaist factory just east of Washington Square Park. More than 100 young women — many of them 14-, 15-, or 16-year-old immigrants — perished in the flames.“Passing through the hysterics of the sirens and the crowd outside,” a survivor named Rose Cohen “walked through the blood-stained pools of water” with her “hair still smoldering…until she found her Lower East Side tenement [and] … cried herself to sleep,” writes David Conrad-Perez in this timely book that nevertheless raises more questions than it answers.The basic narrative of “Fire in the Heart of the City” is compelling, if familiar. As noted by Mr. Conrad-Perez — a journalist who serves as Research Director at American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact — the fire has been chronicled by the likes of David von Drehle in his 2004 book “Triangle,” as well as been featured in biographies, general histories, and several powerful historical novels.But “Fire in the Heart of the City” has a specific critical focus. This tragedy initiated “the rise…of modern charity in the United States, a watershed moment that instantly recast a group of wealthy bankers and social elites as experts on social problems,” the book notes. This has shaped how “the country meets issues of social crisis and poverty ever since, leading it away from the true drivers of its most persistent challenges,” that is “the systemic structures that contribute to poverty.”And so, a book about terrible events from 115 years ago also poses questions raging across the political spectrum right now: Who is best equipped to confront “social problems”? Why? How? That Mr. Conrad-Perez alludes confidently to certain “true drivers” of these “persistent challenges” hints at some of the assumptions that buttress “Fire in the Heart of the City.”“Within just a few years of the fire,” elite New York City charities became “some of the most formidable public institutions in the country,” Mr. Conrad-Perez writes, “particularly in addressing the challenges of poverty, crime, and immigration which the charities treated as one in the same.”The charities “popularized the twentieth-century spectre of the dangerous immigrant,” ultimately fueling the “most restrictive immigration laws in the country’s history.”This is already a lot to consider. Yet Mr. Conrad-Perez takes an even bigger swing, suggesting that this legacy can be traced through Japanese internment and McCarthyism, all the way up to “the 21st-century rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump.” Perhaps. But if we’re taking big swings then Mr. Conrad-Perez should also note that MAGA is not the only contemporary movement with a relevant nativist streak.It’s certainly true that the activists profiled in “Fire in the Heart of the City” — Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Clara Lemlich — should be more widely known. The same can be said about the shadowy underworld that turns cheap labor into cheap goods, whether in 1911 and 2026. Nor should today’s work-safety regulations be taken for granted.They can, at times, seem excessive or absurd. Still, noisy progressives and conservatives alike should read more books like this to gain a little bit of perspective about what is and is not worth shouting about.That being said, “Fire in the Heart of the City” illustrates persistent problems with certain kinds of American history books. Mr. Conrad-Perez’s critique of charities in general — and the New York Times’ “Neediest Cases” in particular — is thought-provoking. These were generally staffed by experts from “elite universities,” whose opportunities and ideas were, Mr. Conrad-Perez writes, “based more on elite connections than a proven track record of achievements.”Which only goes to show that – then and now – folks who spend their days with idealistic students and in faculty meetings deconstructing arcane theories should, but rarely do, have some humility about how, or even if, their abstract ideas might apply in the real world.A fair number of which have critiqued peasant immigrants — cops from Ireland, Zionists from Russia, shop owners from Italy — as little more than “settler colonizers” who “became white,” thus reinforcing elite “systemic structures.”To his credit, Mr. Conrad-Perez avoids such harsh generalizations, instead suggesting that activist 20th-Century immigrants could and would have effectively tackled structural inequities.But which immigrant “social reformers” and “union organizers” are we talking about? By the 1910s, they ranged from Italian anarchist (literal) bomb throwers to crooked Tammany Hall ward heelers. The Triangle factory owners themselves were, as Mr. Conrad-Perez notes, born abroad.Which simply reminds us that immigrants are not necessarily more (or less) uniformly benevolent than elite charity workers. None of which changes the fact that we should honor the 146 women who died on March 25, 1911, whose legacies include “a slew of new rights that transformed the lives of workers,” as Mr. Conrad-Perez notes.A powerful Triangle Shirtwaist memorial was “unveiled in the Fall of 2023,” Mr. Conrad-Perez writes, “with translations in English, Yiddish and Italian,” at the site of the tragedy — Manhattan’s Greene Street and Washington Place.It represents “an important step in…acknowledging and understanding the implications of what happened there.” The former factory building is now owned by NYU.

The Fraught Legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

The Fraught Legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

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