This date in 1911, March 25, is one of those special dark days that should be taught in public schools but isn’t, and wasn’t when I was kid either. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned down, killing 146 workers in little more than 30 minutes. Owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory was located in the top three floors of the 10-story building in downtown Manhattan, and was truly a sweatshop literally and figuratively. Poor, lower class workers, mostly immigrants, were stuffed into a hot, suffocatingly cramped space. The majority were teenage women who spoke no English. There were four elevators, but only one was worked properly and it held only 12 people at a time. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside; the other opened inward only. The fire escape was crumbling, and couldn’t support the weight of more than a few women at a time.
Blanck and Harris had a nasty habit of deliberately torching their workplaces before business hours to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they had purchased. Because of this proclivity, the owners refused to install sprinkler systems and take other anti-fire measures in case they needed another arson job. The 1911 fire wasn’t intentional, but it might as well have been.
The endangered employees were worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and received just 15 dollars for such a week. there were 600 of them on the job when a fire broke out in a rag bin on the eighth floor. The manager tried to turned a fire hose on it, but the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. There was a factory-wide panic. The only functioning elevator broke down after four trips; frenzied employees, trapped, began jumping down the shaft. Some picked the blocked set of stairs and burned alive. Women trapped on the eighth floor began jumping out of the windows. Meanwhile, the falling bodies impeded firefighters, whose ladders only went as high as the seventh floor, Their nets were not strong enough to catch the women from such a height, especially since they were jumping in groups.
The guilty owners escaped by climbing up to the roof and jumping over to an adjoining building.
A union march on April 5 was attended by 80,000 people, protesting the horrible conditions that led to the disaster. Blanck and Harris managed to escape criminal penalties, but the fire became a classic example of how terrible events often have beneficial consequences. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire led to major fire prevention laws and factory safety regulations, and it galvanized unions an pro-labor activists, which were already ascending in political power.
It also began the journey of the Democratic Party, which had only elected a single President since the Civil War, into its role as a reform party and the party of the disenfranchised. [Pointer: James Hodgson]
2. This was, of course, inevitable. Thanks to a recently passed “Equity and Diversity” law affecting educational training, Washington schools are, in some districts, adopting “race-based discipline,” which is exactly what it sounds like, as well as illegal.
The Clover Park School Board, for example, adopted a revised student discipline policy at its March 14 meeting. The new policy holds that disruptive students may face “exclusionary as well as positive and supportive forms of discipline.” The focus is to keep students in the classroom and provide “equitable educational opportunities.” The policy must meet “individual student needs in a culturally responsive manner” via “culturally responsive discipline,’ with “culturally responsive” defines as “knowledge of student cultural histories and contexts, as well as family norms and values in different cultures; knowledge and skills in accessing community resources and community and parent outreach; and skills in adapting instruction to students’ experiences and identifying cultural contexts for individual students.”
In other words, Authentic Frontier Gibberish. Continue reading →
