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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 3, 1911
Louis Duchez on Murder of Shirtwaist Makers in New York City, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of May 1911:
THE MURDER OF THE SHIRT WAIST MAKERS
IN NEW YORK CITYBY LOUIS DUCHEZ
Photographs by American Press Ass’n.
[Part I of II.]
TRUTH is, indeed, stranger than fiction.
As I write this story of the bold, brutal and cold-blooded murder of one hundred and twenty-five [129] girls, averaging nineteen years of age, and twenty [17] men, here in New York, I wonder if what I have seen and heard and felt is real.
It was Saturday evening, March 25. Only five minutes more and the slaves at the sewing machines would be hurrying to their “homes,” carrying their starvation wages for the week. More than 500 of them were employed by the Triangle Waist Company, the non-union concern which led the fight on the shirt waist girls more than a year ago. The slave pen was located on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of a “fire proof” building in the very heart of the congested section of the city.
In some corner unknown on the eighth floor highly inflammable materials caught fire. Before anyone had time to look around big tongues of flame were licking up everything in the room.
A general rush was made for the elevators and stairways. The elevators did their best, but during the few minutes in which the tragedy occurred only fifty girls were lowered.
The stairways were the principal ways of escape—and the doors leading to these stairways were locked. For it was the custom of this firm, as it is the custom in other shirtwaist factories in New York, to lock the doors after work begins in the morning and to keep them locked all day, so that the employes may be searched before going home for pieces of goods, thread or buttons, and so that they may be prevented from going out and “stealing time” during the day.
Everywhere throughout the three floors silk and cotton goods hung from racks or were piled up on tables, and the little blaze which started in the unknown corner was like a spark in a powder magazine. In ten minutes the three floors were all afire. Huge clouds of flame belched from nearly every window.
Finding the doors locked to the stairways, the girls rushed to the windows. With their hair and clothes afire, they leaped from the eighth, ninth and tenth story windows. Some were seen climbing upon the sills and deliberately plunging to the pavement. Others, it is said, were pushed out by the pressure behind. In one instance two girls came down from the ninth story in each other‘s arms. Others were seen embracing and kissing each other before making the fatal leap.
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“Mother” Jones, for many years a labor leader of national repute, arrived in Grand Rapids Tuesday noon for her first visit to this city in 20 years. She was a guest at the Eagle hotel and lunched at noon with a group of local labor leaders and their wives. During the afternoon she spoke at Trades and Labor council hall on general labor conditions in the United States, being introduced to the Grand Rapids audience by D. B. Hovey. Tuesday evening she will give another address at the Railway Workers’ union.
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