They Did Not Die in Vain

...Von Drehle's account of the Tammany transformation is a real contribution to a much neglected chapter of American history...

...Nor did the Twins stop there...

...It was their belief that the exploitation of women would end with women's suffrage...

...Although progressive legislation in New York, and later across the country, was spurred by the fire, the immediate popular reaction was to demand that the ruthless antiunion Triangle employers, Max Planck and Irving Harris, be made to pay with their lives for the lives their practices had destroyed...

...If Planck and Harris had been found guilty and sent to the electric chair, would the conditions they fostered have been so vigorously and successfully challenged...

...Despite the rift, women like Morgan maintained their association with the workers...

...In the aftermath of the Triangle fire, she and her friends organized a rally at the Metropolitan Opera House to demand action in fire safety...

...Charley Rose, who was hired on September 10, 1909, to beat up Clara Lemlich, an eloquent, fearless garment worker leading a strike at a blouse factory...

...Rose and a few of his buddies inflicted a savage beating on the five-foot, baby-faced Clara...

...She had arrived from a Ukraine shtetl six years earlier, acquired skills as a draper, and joined the fledgling International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union...

...And the author shows how the activist workers in the garment sweatshops of Manhattan were as crucial to the progress of the period as the intellectuals who moved into Federal offices in Washington, D.C...

...Stein, in the journalistic style of his day, focused on the garment industry, the sweatshop, the antiunion stance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, and the immediate personal and political consequences of the fire...

...They also caught the attention of the press, a critical factor in the battle with Tammany Hall...

...Anne Morgan had founded the Colony Club, an exclusive women-only rival to the all-male Metropolitan and Union clubs...

...But 41 years later Washington Post reporter David Von Drehle adds dimensions to the story of the deadly blaze that tum his new book about it into a dramatic description of a changing America...

...Thus in 1910 Robert F. Wagner—himself a German immigrant—became the leader of the State Senate at the age of 33, while Alfred E. Smith—of Irish, Italian and German descent—became the majority leader of the State Assembly at age 3 8. Known as "the Tammany Twins," they had grown up poor and sympathized with working people, and soon the 54-hour workweek became the law...

...The settlement, though, proved only a partial victory...

...That precipitated the "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand," and within three months the union won higher wages, shorter hours, and official recognition from its opponents...

...Von Drehle's chapter on the trial masterfully replicates Steuer's gift for persuasion...

...The police stood by, reckoning such assaults business as usual...

...Lemlich returned to the picket lines within days, brandishing the bruises on her ribs to spark the outrage of her fellow workers...

...Until now, Leon Stein's The Triangle Fire (1962) stood as the last word on the worst workplace tragedy to befall New York City in the 20th century...

...Von Drehle's contemporary wide-angle approach allows him to portray the social, economic and political dynamics of pre-World War I New York...

...Panicked, many jumped from the windows to their deaths...

...But perhaps inevitably, before long envy and ideological differences took their toll on this spirit of sisterhood...

...To pass almost any legislation in Albany back then it was necessary to get the approval of Tammany Hall—or, more specifically, Big Tim Sullivan, "the boss...

...Planck was notorious for checking to make sure the doors of the factory that opened onto Washington Place were sealed at all times...

...By the end of the meal, club members were throwing their hats into a collection for the strikers...

...a few even picketed and were jailed...

...Her organization used consumer buying power as an instrument to pressure employers into respecting the physical and social needs of their employees...

...They were well-educated, well-heeled feminists who could identify with the plight of women garment workers because, at that time, they all lacked the right to vote...

...While the Triangle fire was a turning point for Tammany Hall, the movement for social and economic reform in the United States was well under way earlier...

...A number of women from some of the wealthiest families of the Gilded Age magnanimously supported the strikers...

...the story of the fire only begins to emerge halfway through his book...

...Exits were locked, and the narrow fire escapes were inadequate...

...Indeed, Von Drehle finds that Steuer accomplished more by indirection than by straight argumentation...

...Frances Perkins went on to become the first woman ever to serve in a President's Cabinet when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her Secretary of Labor...

...In the first chapter, "Spirit of the Age," we are typically spared lofty theories about the class struggle and its interplay with the burgeoning feminist movement...

...The fix was already in with Tammany Hall, the clique of neighborhood Democratic Party bosses who ran the city and the state...

...Assistant District Attorney Charles Bostwick prosecuted the case superbly, but he lost...

...They were both brought to trial on charges of murder...

...The Triangle Tragedy, by heightening the public's reaction to working conditions in factories, lent voting-booth muscle to Perkins' project...

...It is difficult to say...

...In November, she burst onstage during a meeting at the Cooper Union Grand Hall to call for a general strike of the city's ladies' garment workers...

...During the 1909 general strike, she invited Lemlich and other workers to lunch to tell their stories...

...They created the New York State Factory Commission, an agency charged with inspecting factories across the state to insure the maintenance of standards that would prevent another Triangle fire...

...Instead, we watch these forces at work on the streets of the Lower East Side as Von Drehle zooms in on a common criminal, Lawrence Ferrone, a.k.a...

...The idea was to project an image of the Democratic Party as the party of "the people...

...The flames were under control in less than a half hour, but 146 people perished, 123 ofthem women...

...When the 1909 general strike broke out, the garment workers found themselves with unexpected allies...

...But such objectives had to be accomplished through City Hall and the State House in Albany...

...In large part this was due to the genius of the defendants' attorney, Max Steuer, one of the nation's top trial lawyers...

...Without commanding votes, Tammany had nothing to offer factory owners in return for their "gifts...

...Speaking at the 50th commemoration of the Triangle Fire, Perkins credited it with giving birth to the New Deal: "It was based really on the experience that we had had in New York State and upon the sacrifices of those who died in the terrible fire on March 25,1911...

...Perkins needed him, but since times were changing and his Irish and German constituencies were moving up and out, he needed the votes of the Italian, East European and Jewish factory workers whose hopes she voiced...

...Still, these women provided the garment workers with an infusion of cash...

...it would require several years of struggle, including the Triangle disaster, to effect Tammany Hall's transition from bribe-soaked capitalist organ to champion of the proletariat...

...A pivotal person in the effort to bring that about, Von Drehle shows, was Frances Perkins, Secretary of the Consumers League, who had witnessed the fire from across Washington Square...

...She had been lobbying for years to obtain passage of a state law limiting the workweek in New York to 54 hours— nine hours a day, six days a week...

...By eliciting rote answers with repetitive questioning, and concluding his examinations with not-so-innocent innuendo, Steuer caused the jury to suspect that the prosecution's witnesses had been coached...

...They didnot die in vain...

...Radicals like Morris Hillquit and Leonora O'Reilly, who viewed Morgan and her set as dabblers in a cause to which they had devoted their lives, alienated the society ladies with what Morgan termed the "fanatical doctrines of socialism" after a divisive Camegie Hall rally...

...But those who worked hardest for change did not stop after the fire, and they did not stop with New York...

...The first decades of the 20th century are commonly referred to as the Progressive Era...

...Clara Lemlich was among its first inspectors...

...They paid fines and put up their mansions as collateral for bail...

...In the spirit of the times, Sullivan had in fact already begun to replace Tammany's old guard with young lawmakers possessing a common touch, charisma and good loud voices...

...former assistant president, ILGWU The afternoon of March 25,1911,a fire broke out on the top three floors of the 10-floor Asch Building, a block east of Manhattan's Washington Square, where 500 mostly young immigrant girls were producing shirts for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company...

...They had names like Vanderbilt, Belmont and Morgan (yes, Anne, the daughter of J.P...

...Enter Tammany...