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The Politics of Mourning: The Triangle Fire and Political Belonging

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Polity

Abstract

A politics of mourning invokes the deaths of everyday citizens to call for political change. For this to occur, a loss must be visible and provoke discussions about responsibility. Mourning gauges political standing and belonging; it is also a moment when these categories can be transformed. This article analyzes the Triangle Fire of 1911 as a site of political mourning, which ultimately provoked a mixed response to the political status quo. Mourning improved labor's position in relation to industry by opening formerly private spaces of employment to government regulation, but it did so by expanding the domain of whiteness rather than contesting the racialized construction of the polity. In doing so, the mourning contributed to the construction of a white body politic.

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Notes

  1. Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 8.

  2. Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 78–79.

  3. Olson, Abolition, xix.

  4. E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (Australia: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 1988), 34–35.

  5. Elsewhere, I have considered Emmett Till's murder as a moment of mourning that opposed the status quo and September 11 as a moment that affirmed it. To some degree, the larger political community's response to a particular loss depends on who dies (as well as the circumstances of those deaths), who constructs the most resonant story about responsibility, and what kinds of institutional change are proposed to address the threat. Heather Pool, “Mourning Emmett Till,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, Forthcoming.

  6. Rogers Smith, “Identities, Interests, and the Future of Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 2 (June 2004): 301.

  7. Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–50.

  8. Recent examples of authors who assert that we should reconsider political practices in light of universal mortality include John Seery, Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Ruth Miller, Law in Crisis: The Ecstatic Subject of Natural Disaster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Jacqueline Stevens, States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

  9. Examples of the vast literature on the politics of memory and collective memory include John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

  10. Francesca Polletta and James Jasper define collective identity as “an individual's cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity” (285) in “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 283–305.

  11. See, for example, Jeffrey Alexander, Roy Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

  12. John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston, MA: Longman Publishing, 2003), 94–100.

  13. Kingdon, Agendas, 98.

  14. Schattschneider, Semisovereign People, 7.

  15. Sharon Krause, Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 25.

  16. Krause, Civil Passions, 26.

  17. Mourning can be public without being political. A loss may be visible and a topic of extensive conversation or media coverage without that death being invoked as the basis for political change. For example, the deaths of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, or Kurt Cobain certainly led to public mourning, but these deaths were not invoked as the basis of political change.

  18. This claim is aligned with the work of Iris Marion Young, who argues that we should incorporate different ways of communicating (she specifies greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling) to realize a truly democratic politics. See “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in her Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60–74.

  19. Several scholarly works analyze the 1909 strike in terms of class, gender, and progressive politics. For an outstanding discussion of labor history and the resultant Progressive political order, see Richard Greenwald's The Triangle Fire, The Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005); see also Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003); and Jo Ann Argersinger, The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2009). Additional resources from a feminist perspective include Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and As Sisters: Feminism, The Labor Movement, and the Women's Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Susan Lehrer, Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense & A Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

  20. Intersectionality is an apt description for the type of analysis adopted in this study. But due to space constraints, I cannot fully address the complex intersections between race, class, and gender here. My point is not that these forces do not influence each other in complicated ways, but that other scholars have already discussed in detail the relationships between gender and class in the case of the Triangle Fire. However, scholars have not paid adequate attention to the role race played in constructing events before and after the fire. Thus this inquiry, while not truly intersectional, contributes to the literature on intersectionality by considering the role of a previously overlooked category in this case.

  21. Von Drehle, Triangle, 108.

  22. Women were the lowest-paid workers in the ladies’ garment industry. See Dye, As Equals, 19–20, 23.

  23. Ibid., 8.

  24. Ibid., 9–12.

  25. The AFL's exclusionary tendencies have been well-documented by David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How American's Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Dye, As Equals; and Greenwald, Protocols of Peace.

  26. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 91.

  27. For a discussion of the complex interplay between racial classification, immigration, political identity, and class politics in the United States at this time, see Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2009); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth ;Century America (New York: Verso, 2003).

  28. This process calls to mind the recent works of Claire Jean Kim on racial triangulation, such as Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Kim demonstrates how conflicts between non-whites results from white privilege rather than their own inherent differences. White power constructs clashes between non-whites as “natural” without disturbing the racial hierarchy that keeps whites on top.

  29. The litany of factory abuses is long. Argersinger offers a relatively concise discussion in Brief History, 8–9 and 56–57 (excerpting Clara Lemlich, “Life in the Shop,” New York Evening Journal, 26 November 1909).

  30. One study showed that 99 percent of all suit-and-coat shops were defective in terms of safety. Another factory fire, the High Street Fire in Newark in late 1910, provided a grim foreshadowing of the Triangle Fire, with six girls burned to death while nineteen leapt to their deaths. But the High Street Fire prompted no institutional change. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 26–27.

  31. Von Drehle, Triangle, 52.

  32. For a good overview of the grim conditions workers faced as well as workers’ goals, see Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, 26–48.

  33. Argersinger, Brief History, 12.

  34. Argersinger, Brief History, 14.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Von Drehle, Triangle, 52.

  37. For proposals about how advocates might better deal with these social cleavages by addressing them head-on, see Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sharon Kurtz, Workplace Justice: Organizing Multi-identity Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Dara Strolovitch, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). All of these authors discuss how cross-cutting identities can trouble advocacy efforts when they are not explicitly addressed.

  38. See Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 72–78.

  39. “Girl Strikers Tell the Rich Their Woes,” The New York Times, 16 December 1909.

  40. Von Drehle, Triangle, 60.

  41. Ibid., 61. While some Italian immigrant and native-born workers joined with the primarily Jewish strikers, the numbers did not entirely match the percentages of employees. This is another indication that perceptions about race played a significant role in the strike.

  42. “Girl Strikers Tell the Rich Their Woes.”

  43. It is remarkably difficult to discern what, precisely, the strikers demanded. Greenwald reports that at the meeting before the big walkout in November, Samuel Gompers (who, as head of the AFL, supported unionism in general, but was reluctant to support strikes, particularly by these workers) suggested that strikers limit their focus to a 10 percent wage increase, union recognition, and an end to police violence against strikers (Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, 32). During the Uprising of 20,000, the ILGWU settled with several shops for “union recognition; shop-committee arbitration for piece-rates; a union shop, or at least union preferences when hiring; and an end to charges for thread, needles, and electricity” (Protocols of Peace, 33). The quote in the text is from the caption for Image 5780pb32f27d in “Photos and Illustrations: Shirtwaist Strike and Other Strikes,” Remembering the Triangle Fire, Cornell University's ILR School, http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/primary/photosIllustrations/slideshow.html?image_id=852&sec_id=12#screen, accessed 7 July 2011.

  44. Argersinger, Brief History, 14.

  45. Elizabeth Mensch, “The History of Mainstream Legal Thought,” in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique (3rd ed.), ed. David Karys (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 32.

  46. Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, 15–16.

  47. This follows from Michael Frazer's argument that sympathy with particular others, rather than generalized sympathy, helps generate justice. See The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 110–11.

  48. In her introduction to a Chicago Sunday Tribune story about the fire, Argersinger writes: “According to newspapers in small towns and large cities, popular interest in the fire was unusually intense, and readers pored over every detail of the tragedy.” See Argersinger, Brief History, 76.

  49. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 73.

  50. “Fireproof” meant that the building itself would not be destroyed by fire. But this had nothing to do with whether the building was safe for those inside should a fire break out. See Stein, The Triangle Fire, 22–23.

  51. See William Shepherd, “Eyewitness at the Triangle,” Remembering the Triangle Fire (Cornell University's ILR School) http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/primary/testimonials/ootss_WilliamShepherd.html, accessed March 2010.

  52. Von Drehle, Triangle, 1.

  53. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 107–08.

  54. Argersinger, Brief History, 22–23.

  55. Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, 141–45. Eight caskets were buried that day: seven with unidentified bodies and an eighth with remains that could not be matched to bodies: see Stein, The Triangle Fire, 155. Only recently were the final victims identified. See Joseph Berger, “100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire is Complete,” The New York Times, 20 February 2011.

  56. Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, 138–41; Stein, The Triangle Fire, 148.

  57. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 151.

  58. “120,000 Pay Tribute.”

  59. There is no consensus regarding how many people watched or participated in the ILGWU procession, but the figure of 400,000 seems reasonable. Argersinger writes that 350,000 people participated (Brief History, 87–88); Stein writes that “the final police estimate was that about 400,000 had seen the parade and of these about one-third had marched in it” (The Triangle Fire, 156); von Drehle notes that “some 350,000 people participated in a funeral march for the Triangle dead” (Triangle, 193). Other processions with thousands in attendance accompanied the bodies from the Manhattan morgue to Cypress Hills Cemetery (“120,000 Pay Tribute”).

  60. “120,000 Pay Tribute.”

  61. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 154.

  62. See Argersinger, Brief History, cover (credited as “Mourners from the Ladies Waist and Dressmakers Union Local 25 and the United Hebrew Trades of New York March in the Streets after the Triangle Fire.” UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901). See also Stein, The Triangle Fire, 150.

  63. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 149–57.

  64. Ibid., 152–53.

  65. Krause, Civil Passions, 3.

  66. Argersinger, Brief History, 39–42, excerpting Arthur McFarlane, “Fire and the Skyscraper: The Problem of Protecting Workers in New York's Tower Factories,” McClure's Magazine XXXVII (September 1911): 466–72.

  67. Ken Kersch argues that analogizing business owners to criminals was a common tactic used by Progressive reformers to gain access to “private” business records. See “The Reconstruction of Constitutional Privacy Rights and the New American State,” Studies in American Political Development 16 (Spring 2002): 61–87.

  68. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 121.

  69. It is worth asking if Blanck and Harris's status as Jewish immigrants mattered. Both emigrated in the late 1880s and, after working their way up from sweatshops, came to own several successful factories along the east coast (von Drehle, Triangle, 48–54). Having arrived in the United States with nothing 30 years before the fire, their identities were surely complicated. They were emblematically “American” in terms of their success in business. Still, it is likely that the wider public viewed them as “foreign.” The New York Times, which had supported owners during the 1909 strike, interviewed Blanck after the fire and described him as “an average type of successful business man—short, stocky, and unemotional” (Argersinger, Short History, 79, excerpting “Partners’ Account of the Disaster,” The New York Times, 26 March, 1911). While the indictment may have been linked to their “foreign-ness,” the acquittal may have been linked to their American-ness and to the stark contrast between their material success and the poverty of the more recent, poorer immigrants testifying against them. All twelve men of the jury were “from business and the trades,” and many appear to have been immigrants, too. See von Drehle, Triangle, 254.

  70. For a discussion of how contemporary legal understandings prevented the conviction of Blanck and Harris, see Arthur McEvoy, “The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and The Evolution of Common-sense Causality,” Law & Social Inquiry 20 (Spring 1995): 621–51.

  71. See Argersinger, Brief History, 110–11, excerpting “147 Dead, Nobody Guilty,” The Literary Digest, 6 January 1912.

  72. Stein, The Triangle Fire, 135.

  73. Ibid., 39, emphasis added.

  74. Smith was a New York street kid who, at 38, became the leader of the New York State Assembly thanks to his Tammany Hall connections. Smith was also an adept politician who cared about the working class, and the Triangle Factory was in his district. He visited families of the deceased, and accompanied some families to the morgue to identify their kin. According to Frances Perkins, Smith transformed the reformist-but-ineffective Committee of Safety into an effective legislative committee. See von Drehle, 200–18.

  75. Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, 171. The committee received not only “public’” support, but support from the influential Tammany Hall machine. See von Drehle, Triangle, 213.

  76. See Greenwald, Protocols of Peace, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 for a discussion of the FIC's expanding mandate. Also see Stein, The Triangle Fire, 207–10; von Drehle, Triangle, 212–18, 259, 267; Argersinger, Brief History, 31–33.

  77. Hundreds of African-American bodies were reportedly dumped in unmarked graves, but these have not been located. “A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,” Oklahoma Historical Society, http://www.okhistory.org/trrc/freport.htm, accessed December 2009: 9, 110–22, 144–49, 177.

  78. Charles J. Ogletree, “Tulsa Reparations: The Survivors’ Story,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 24 (2004): 17.

  79. For example, an editorial calling for a lynching was removed from the Tulsa Tribune's master archive. See Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma History Society, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/T/TU013.html, accessed 2 December 2009.

  80. See Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001); James Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); Alfred Brophy and Randall Kennedy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Race Reparation, and Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  81. The Oklahoma Legislature ordered a Committee to investigate the Tulsa Race Riot in 1997, and the Commission recommended reparations. See “A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.”

  82. Arthur McEvoy argues that the trial of Triangle's owners led to a new distinction between public and private space. As a result, what been seen as solely a private contracting situation became subject to government regulation. See McEvoy, “Shirtwaist Fire.”

  83. Greenwald argues that Triangle contributed to the institutionalization and bureaucratization of government oversight of industry, which ended the push toward participation that previously had characterized industrial labor unions. See Greenwald, Protocols of Peace.

  84. In The Color of Race in America 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), Matthew Guterl analyzes the shift from fear of immigrants to “Negrophobia.” He argues that fears in the United States about race were very different in 1900 than they were in 1940. Guterl traces this shift through discursive analysis of several leading commentators, including nativist Madison Grant and African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois. For another discussion about how racial discourse in America shifted over time and increasingly focused on the poles of white and black, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  85. Argersinger, Brief History, 15; Orleck, Common Sense, 58.

  86. Von Drehle, Triangle, 193; Argersinger, Brief History, 24.

  87. Cited in Stein, The Triangle Fire, x.

  88. Roediger, for one, argues that it is important to preserve an awareness of the “messiness” of intra-white contests about race as this contributes to our awareness of how whiteness is also a social construction. His project is aligned with this article, as I am trying to expose how intra-white conflict was erased from the history of Triangle. See Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, Chapter 2.

  89. See Guterl, Color of Race, 11–12; 122. According to census data, the population of African Americans in New York City had stayed remarkably stable between 1810 and 1870 (hovering between 10,000 and 12,000) and then increased rapidly. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of African Americans in New York City tripled (from 19,663 to 60,666), and the African-American population increased considerably each year thereafter—to 91,709 in 1910 (1.9 percent) and 152,467 by 1920 (2.7 percent). See United States Census Bureau, “Table 33: New York—Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Large Cities and Other Places: Earliest Census to 1990,” http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/NYtab.pdf, accessed 25 March 2010.

  90. McEvoy, “Shirtwaist Fire,” 644.

  91. Judith Butler explores the important question—“what makes a grievable life?”—in Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Routledge: New York, 2004); and Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  92. See, for example, Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

  93. Janet Abu-Lughod agrees that while the Triangle Fire achieved significant gains for white workers, it did not benefit African-Americans, who were and continue to be excluded from the garment trades. See Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16 and 36, n. 38.

  94. See Butler, Undoing Gender, 17–39.

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    Heather Pool

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Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2010 meetings of the Western Political Science Association and the Law & Society Association, and I thank the panelists and audience for their comments. I am grateful to the Political Science Department at the University of Washington for its continued support, especially the Peter May Graduate Research Grant, which has provided crucial financial assistance. I also thank the scholars who generously read and commented on previous drafts, including Jack Turner, Naomi Murakawa, Michael McCann, Christine Di Stefano, Simon Stow, Lisa Clarke, Allison Rank, and three anonymous reviewers for Polity.

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Pool, H. The Politics of Mourning: The Triangle Fire and Political Belonging. Polity 44, 182–211 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2011.23

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