26
ghoul2September 8, 2022
Wrote a paper about this fire and the labor movement when i was 17. It was so formative for me to do that research. People talk about Upton Sinclair and the impact that the Jungle had on meatpacking but people do not often enough talk about the impact that the Triangle fire had on industrial safety and the labor movement! Thanks for posting this.
I mention both to my students all the time, as well as the Chicago World's Fair. The Jungle is the only book I have ever had to walk away from. It just kept getting worse and worse... I'm Canadian so it is kind of weird for me to interject with American History all of the time but I do it nonetheless. I worked at an Orthodox Jewish school and for once my knowledge of Triangle was deeply appreciated by parents.
JeSoPazza [OP]September 8, 2022
Excellent that you knew about this so young. I didn't until I was much older than that (though I grew up in the UK). Events like this should be taught in schools, to remind people of what happens when you don't have a strong, organised labour force supporting workers' rights. I wonder, if school kids learned about what it's like to work in a meat-processing plant nowadays, whether the teachers would be accused of being socialists?
areteSeptember 8, 2022
An opera has been written about the fire: https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2018/03/25/596505187/morning-star-opera-sheds-new-light-on-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-of-1911
I teach about this in all of my English classes and how the women fighting for workers rights around this time were part of why we have workplace safety.
Good to hear. People need to know what working conditions were like–and are like now, in other places. Even the US Marianas apparently.