MILL MOTHERS: field notes: April 2011

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Triangle Fire, 100 years later

Workers from as far away as California gathered in New York on March 25 to observe the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A stirring experience, being in that crowd. We had sunshine; we had commemorative shirts and hats and buttons and signs; we had solemn, earnest speakers; we had a sense of purpose. What we were missing was music. This country desperately needs some new union songs.

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The Villager

Volume 80, Number 42 | March 17 - 23, 2011
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933

Thousands will mark Triangle factory fire 100th anniversary

By Albert Amateau

On Saturday afternoon near closing time on March 25, 1911, a fire flared up in a scrap bin on the eighth floor of the Asch Building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory employed about 500 young workers on the top three floors.

Within a half-hour, the fire raged through the lint-laden eighth, ninth and 10th floors where 146 workers, mostly Jewish and Italian girls from immigrant families, lost their lives either in the fire or on the pavement below where 62 of them jumped to escape the inferno.

The door to the Washington Place stairway was locked; the single exterior fire escape soon collapsed from heat and excess weight, spilling victims to the pavement 100 feet below. The Fire Department’s ladder reached only to the sixth floor.

The owners of Triangle Shirtwaist, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were in their factory with their young sons when the fire broke out but they were able to reach the building’s roof and survived. The two owners stood trial for negligent homicide but they were acquitted when their lawyer, Max Steuer, suggested that the surviving victims’ testimony was staged and that prosecutors failed to prove the owners knew that any exit doors were locked at the time of the fire.

However, the owners lost a civil suit in 1913 and had to pay the plaintiffs compensation of $75 for each deceased victim. Nevertheless, Blanck and Harris collected insurance of about $60,000 more than their reported losses, or about $400 per casualty, according to the Web site of the Kheel Archives of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

On Fri., March 25, 2011, the 100th anniversary of the fire, Washington Place between Washington Square East and Broadway will be crowded with an expected 10,000 people commemorating the tragedy that sparked epochal changes in laws regarding safety and working conditions.

Organized by the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, along with Workers United — the labor union that evolved from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union — a procession will begin at 9:30 a.m. at Union Square.

film & photo collage: Kim Church

Mill Mothers' Song, a novel in progress by Kim Church

Mill Mothers’ Song is set during the Gastonia textile strike of 1929, a seminal struggle in labor history, yet one that is little talked about.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the textile industry was booming in the South. Mill jobs were abundant; mill towns offered creature comforts and social amenities that attracted families looking to escape the poverty and hardship of farm life.

The end of World War I brought an end to the textile boom. Demand for cotton goods plummeted; prices fell. Mill owners intent on maintaining wartime profits began to implement the "stretch-out," a system of management that cut jobs, imposed stringent production quotas on the workers who remained, and paid them less. Workers were almost literally stretched to their breaking point. The mills, many now owned by absentee companies that had no personal relationships with workers, became fertile ground for unions.

In 1929, the Communist-affiliated National Textile Workers Union set out to organize the Loray Mill in Gastonia, then the largest cotton mill in "the fine combed cotton capital of the world." That April, 1,800 Loray workers walked out on strike, sparking a violent backlash among Gastonia's ruling class.

Mill Mothers’ Song tells the story of Lena Sparks and Rae Pruitt, born on the same day in the same valley in Burke County, North Carolina, and raised as sisters. They leave the mountains to work in cotton mills. At the time of the strike, both are young mothers, both fueled by a sense of duty, though with very different notions of what their duty entails.

The strike is met with a brutality that tests the mettle of workers on both sides of the picket line, and tests the sisterly bond between Lena and Rae.

About Kim Church

My debut novel, Byrd (Dzanc Books, 2014), is the fragmented family history of a child secretly given up for adoption. The book won the Crook's Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the South and the Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal for literary fiction. It was a Chautauqua Prize finalist, a Balcones Prize finalist, and was long-listed for the SIBA Book Award and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.

My short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere.

I have received fiction fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. For more information please visit my website.

Mill Mothers' Song was inspired by my grandmother, who worked all her life in cotton mills.