Critical Essay on Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, by David Von Drehle

Introduction

The book "Triangle: The Fire that Changed America" by David Von Drehle make an analysis of an industrial fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York on March 25th, 1911. During this industrial disaster, the thirty-minute fire blaze claimed the lives of 146people with more young women than men raced in the incidence. Triangle was the largest blouse factory then in New York. It was co-owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris with approximately 500 employees. Von Drehle draws his audience to a different sense of the book making a novelist narration of the ordeal than historical reporting. This book report will analyze Von Drehle's perspective when recounting the historical happening in the Triangle to justify his point of view.

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Von Drehle begins his text by giving personal accounts and describing the working situation and the factory conditions like the sidewalk section "Misery Lane" (3) where the bodies of the diseased bodies of the women were kept for identification by relatives. The factory was located at the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch building in New York's Greenwich Village. In the author's perspective, it was overcrowded with workers especially young women and highly flammable materials. The author vividly presents the pre-conditions of fire disaster preparedness when he says that the factory had only one unlocked exit door and the available firefighting equipment reached the sixth floor. Blending scholarly research techniques with lively narration, Von Drehle airs his investigative report on the fire incidence, lawsuit thereafter, as well as applying journalistic immediacy as an effective representation of the contemporary social and political perspectives of industrial siege.

Von Drehle grabs the attention of his readers when he reckons the contribution of the Triangle fire to American history with a sense of immediacy. The fire has since been overlooked for the inclusion of one among the significant events that contribute to American history because the pre-fire labor movement advocating for industrial workers' welfare and the fire events made a considerable contribution in transforming the political machinery of New York. Hooking his reader's attention he opens the narration with the ordeal between Lawrence Ferrone "Charles Rose" and Clara Lemlich. Miss Lemlich organized and led a successful strike and Ferrone was hired against the anti-labor regulations to beat up a young woman" (25). In his perception, the author feels that the working conditions of the young women in the Triangle before the fire were pathetic and when the fire happened it did on much justice to the workers. The irony of the fireproof business building where the factory was situated the Triangle Shirtwaist factory turned out to the most deadly workplace in New York. The majority of the victims who succumbed to the flames in Triangle Shirtwaist Company were young immigrant Jewish and Italian women.

Recounting on the fire incidence Von Drehle states that many workers on the eighth and tenth floors of the factory were able to escape but their counterparts in the ninth floor remained trapped behind a lock single exit door. The trapped workers either burned to death in the locked section of the building or jumped to their death on the "Misery Lane". Further, he explores the socio-political appeal in reference to the situation in the Triangle integrating the urge for industrial reforms in America and beyond. He describes the symbolic role of the sidewalk into a makeshift morgue where heaps of dead bodies were placed for identification. Following the manslaughter trial using the company's owners of the charges for lack of disaster preparedness and safeguarding their worker's safety, the author demonstrates the motifs of social justice and oppression when they get acquitted off all charges.

The working hours consisted of 52 hours a week means that the working hours in the factory took more than eight hours a day for the first six days of the week with the sewing machine running throughout until four thirty afternoons of Saturday. The mean employers valued their wealth over the wellbeing of their workers and had a daily routine of checking the employee's bags on a single exit route. Von Drehle mocks "They were rich men, and when they glanced into the faces of their workers they saw, with rare exceptions, anonymous cogs in a profit machine." Again, after the fire, they did not offer any post-disaster assistance to the victims and their families because victim identification was very had for the young women burnt beyond recognition because the relatives looked at jewelry and other clues to identify the bodies lying on the misery lane. Von Drehle speculates that the fire may probably have been caused by a tossed cigarette on a dry pile of cotton leavings.

Von Drehle eulogizes the victims as heroes of an industrial struggle because owing to their fallen battle the initial industrial reforms were initiated in America to prevent a similar situation in future. He also condemns the injustice perpetrated to the victims when the trial against the ruthless owners was dropped. Integrating his historian and scholastic expertise he is able to run the narration to and from the days the fire happened and catching his readers' attention with authorial intrusion presenting contemporary situations lamenting on the difference of scenarios if things were done differently by then in reference to current regulations. For instance, when the fire broke in the eighth floor the manager had locked the workers in and nobody had the key to free the trapped women, those who were lucky to jump to the exit stairs tried rickety collapsed to death, while the fire truck ladders were too short to do any justice to the trapped workers.

Reading through Von Drehle's work it catches my attention on how ruthless the working condition in the Triangle Shirtwaist company factory. Reporting on this deadly incidence signifies that it was not the only industrial company with workers under very pathetic conditions. I feel that this situation was aired only because of the fire incidence. When Von Drehle uses the title "The Fire that Changed America" the author's perspectives are indirectly referring to the industrial reforms which is an overstatement because this incidence of manslaughter does not attract much more attention to America beyond changing the working conditions of the workers in factories. In my perception, the contribution of this disaster to the American history was not just a humorous narrative that transverse through historian and journalist perspectives. In view of Von Drehle's representation of the motifs developed in the narration, the victims of industrial injustices deserved much more justice than just dropping the accused's charges. The fire incidence was a high violation of human rights and manslaughter contributing to industrial injustices served to poor immigrant and local women trying to feed for their families. The company had imported labor from Jewish and Italian countries promising greener pasture in Greenwich but offered an unjust and dehumanizing termination of existence. This story presents the human capital model of life to demonstrate the untold injustice and dangers posed to industrial workers.

References

Levy, Barry S. (2011). Book Reviews "Triangle: The Fire That Changed America". Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine: December 2005 - Volume 47 - Issue 12 - p 1317. doi: 10.1097/01.jom.0000184863.84587.95

Von Drehle, David. (2004). Triangle: The Fire that Changed America Business & Economics Grove Press, 340 pages.