Real People—Real Ghosts
As Halloween is fast upon us, we thought it appropriate to write about what some might say are ghosts from past history but whom we want to spotlight as the real people who made history.
In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Deputy Opinion Editor and columnist David Von Drehle wrote about the ghosts of the Triangle Fire: “The challenge when writing history is to break the glass that separates us from the past. To connect somehow those who lived before us and turn them back into people—not flat abstractions in funny clothes.”
He continues to write about the tragic story of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 that played such a pivotal role in the politics of New York and later in the entire nation. What changed for Von Drehle was when he found out that “moments from death, some of the victims were singing a popular Broadway show tune.”
Here is how we tell the story in The Big Book of HR:
“On March 25, 1911, approximately 146 people, many in their teens, died or jumped to their deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. The fire engines at the scene did not have ladders that reached to the ninth floor where the blaze was raging. The fire escape, which did not reach to the street and was not built to accommodate more than a few people at a time, collapsed. The stairwell that led to the roof was burning. The one that led down to the street was padlocked from the outside so that the workers would be prevented from eluding inspection or making off with leftover scraps of cloth. Triangle’s owners rebuffed the union’s demand for sprinklers and unlocked stairwells. They were later tried for manslaughter but acquitted in the absence of any laws that set workplace safety standards.1 Now, over 100 years later, we not only have workplace safety standards, but we have safety included in organizations’ values.”
Among the neighbors who rallied to try to help the trapped workers that day was a young woman who had just started a job researching fire risks in loft buildings. Her name was Frances Perkins. You may remember her as the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet when she had the position of secretary of labor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After the Triangle Fire, Perkins changed fields to study how the keep workplaces and workers safe. From there she studied the needs of the American worker more generally. She once said, “The Triangle fire was the day the New Deal was born.” A remarkable way to look at a tragic loss of life that resulted in so many decisions and programs that, to this day, make our world a better place.
These 146 ghosts who perished in what was, until 9/11, the deadliest workplace disaster in city history were real people. They are finally being honored in the Triangle Fire Memorial near Washington Square. Something to ponder this Halloween and beyond.