It's often said the tragedy was so gruesome that New Yorkers could not possibly look away and forget. But that underestimates the vast and awful store of history that humans have gladly forgotten. The real reason we remember the Triangle fire is its legacy, not its toll. The story remains a compelling study of political power - where it comes from, what it's for - as relevant today as it was in the angry aftermath of that inferno.
At the dawn of the 20th century, New York had been run for more than a generation by the corrupt Democratic political machine known as Tammany Hall. Boss Charles F. Murphy ruled the city from his private room at Delmonico's restaurant, quietly tending the gears that turned the votes of poor immigrants into power and profit for Tammany. But new waves of immigrants were filling the grim tenements of Manhattan, and many of them weren't content to do the Tammany ward heelers' bidding. Especially among the East European Jews who fled the oppression of the dying Russian empire, a spirit of independence led the new arrivals to organize their own institutions: newspapers, charities, labor unions.
They made their numbers known in the autumn of 1909, when more than 20,000 shirtwaist workers, most of them women, went on strike for better wages and union recognition. The following year, an even larger strike by the men of the cloakmakers' union created a model for modern industrial relations. Murphy had always taken the side of management - but his genius was the ability to count votes. He saw that the Triangle fire was a chance to win over the voters of this new generation.
Murphy created a powerful Factory Investigating Commission, led by two bright, young Tammany lawmakers: Robert F. Wagner and Alfred E. Smith. Over the next three years, the commission proposed and passed the most progressive agenda of workplace reforms the country had ever seen. Smith rode that agenda to four popular and effective terms as New York governor and in 1928 won his party's presidential nomination. Four years later, running on the same platform - and calling it the New Deal - Franklin D. Roosevelt reached the White House. FDR's right-hand man in the Senate was none other than Tammany's Bob Wagner.
