Bob Squillace

Exactly what happened at the Triangle Waist Company between 4:30 and 5:00 on the afternoon of March 25th, 1911 depended on the newspaper one read on the morning of the 26th. Only one journalist, William G. Shepherd of the United Press Agency, happened to be on the street outside the Asch building while the fire tore through the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors. (1) By the time any others arrived on the scene, almost everyone in the building had either escaped or died. Reports therefore depended on interviews with whichever witnesses happened to linger around the corner of Washington and Greene while the firemen subdued the last flames and the coroner's office began transporting remains to the Bellevue Hospital morgue and, when it proved inadequate to the number of dead, an adjoining pier. Even Shepherd's perspective was limited; no reporter was actually inside while the tragedy unfolded. Of course, there were no witnesses at all to the last moments of those who died after the final elevator run to those trapped on the ninth floor, whose bodies, according to Fire Chief Croker, were later found stacked to a height of nearly six feet. The discrepancies between the newspaper accounts are so numerous that to list them all would take pages; what's more, it is often impossible to distinguish between the accurately-recorded words of reliable witnesses, the fantasies or misperceptions of bystanders, and the inventions of the reporters themselves. Even when all the reporters were present at the same public interview, their accounts vary. The New York Tribune reported Coroner Holtzhauser’s observation on the tragic irony of the fire as, “It is awful to think that these poor girls went to work this morning, being carried up by the elevators, only to finish their work by being taken from the building dead and mutilated,” while the New York Times heard him to say, “ . . . these poor girls who were carried up in the elevator to work in the morning – now they come down on the end of a rope.” One suspects a bit of journalistic license may explain the neat parallelism of the construction in the Times (which also reported that the coroner was “sobbing like a child,” a detail not found in The Tribune or in most other sources), but in many other details, the Times seems more plausible than the Tribune (which included the tale of a “human bridge” from an 8th story window of the Asch Building across an alley on the Greene Street side that defies the laws of physical and anatomical probability). No one will ever know exactly what Coroner Holtzhauser said.

The role of the elevator operators - it would be some years before elevators that stopped automatically at one's floor came into general use - can serve to illustrate how greatly the papers diverged on even the most basic facts. Indeed, the New York Times contradicts itself within the space of a few columns, first stating that Triangle employees “had been in the habit of using the two freight elevators, and one of these elevators was not in service when the fire broke out,” but subsequently reporting the active use of both elevators with no further reference to either having experienced service problems. Particularly occluded are the details of how many trips the elevators made, about how many passengers they bore down on each trip and from what floor, and even who was running them – all despite the fact one of the

elevator operators, Joe (Giuseppe) Zito, gave widely-quoted interviews immediately after the fire. The New York Times, for instance, reports that Zito and the second operator (identified as “J. Gaspar”; later established to be Gaspap Mortillalo) “never went above the eighth floor” in their rescue missions; that “one of the men--which one was not made clear in the various versions of the affair offered--deserted his elevator”; and that an NYU law student named Max Steinberg, “entered the deserted elevator and ran it for four more trips.” According to the lead story in The New York Tribune, however, “one man . . . reached the [deserted] elevator and ran the car for ten more trips, saving nearly five hundred lives.” The reporter for the Trib seems to have been virtually innumerate; he claims that “Joseph Zitto" and “Joseph Gasper” each made 12 trips with as many as 50 women jammed into each elevator, while a man identified only as “Gregory – no one knows more about him than that” took over when the operators could no longer stand it and “made at least ten trips each time carrying down at least thirty girls.” Thus, presumably, about 1500 women were rescued from a building that contained only the 500 or so employees of the Triangle Waist Company at the time of the fire – and yet more than 140 also died jumping from the structure or by fire inside it. The Tribune also contends that it was Zitto [sic] who “after making half a dozen trips, was forced to leave his car on the first floor” (no further reason is given). It says nothing about the matter of what floors the elevators did and did not serve. But an interview with Zitto [sic] carried on page four of the same paper quotes him as saying that “twenty or more” women – a far cry from 50 - filled his elevator on “fifteen or twenty trips”; only about the last trip does he say explicitly that he “went only to the eighth floor.” There is no mention of any bystander leaping out of the crowd to run a deserted elevator. Papers further afield, which relied on wire service reports (most frequently from the Associated Press), differ from both New York accounts. The Chicago Sunday Tribune, for instance, claims that Zito and Gasper “made more than fifteen trips to

Figure 1 Joseph Zito

the upper floors, mostly to the eighth” and “brought down from twelve to fifteen girls at each trip.” As to the floors from which women were rescued, the paper quotes Zito as saying, “Sometimes I would go to the ninth floor and sometimes to the tenth.” And in this paper, Zito is quoted as equivocally confirming the story of the heroic bystander: “I believe that after the first few [trips of the other elevator] a college student was running that car. But I didn’t have any time to watch what was going on anywhere but in my own elevator.” The Washington Post, relying on the same wire-service reports, includes many of the same details as the Chicago Sunday Tribune, but omits any mention of the heroic bystander. How many women, then, did Zito and Gasper/Gaspar save and from what floors? Did a heroic bystander commandeer an elevator, and if so, from whom and under what circumstances, and was his name Steinberg, Gregory, or something else? Did Zito actually see someone else enter the second elevator, or merely hear and accept second-hand reports after the fact – or was he quoted inaccurately about that detail in the first place? To determine the precise role of the elevator men in rescuing victims from the fire on the basis of the newspaper accounts is simply impossible. (2) Because the newspaper reports disagree so fundamentally with each other, historians of the fire, such as Leon Stein and David von Drehle, rely more heavily on the transcripts of the trial for first and second degree manslaughter of the company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, (and, in Stein's case, interviews with survivors) to reconstruct the fatal half hour. Only those actually on the scene testified; there is no chance that the misperception of a casual observer or the product of journalistic invention can be mistaken for truth. On the other hand, the trial was held almost seven months after the events, and, because it was a trial, it is often difficult to tell the extent to which a particular bit of testimony may have been colored by the desire of the witness to see the defendants convicted or acquitted. Further, the trial focused specifically on the matter of a door to the stairway the locking of which would have constituted a criminal act. Above all, memories of traumatic events are always unreliable; for instance, a study conducted by Kathy Pezdek on the way college students remembered September 11th showed that 73% claimed to have seen footage of the plane hitting the first tower on the day of the attack itself – but such footage did not actually air anywhere until the next day. (3) To pinpoint where and when the Triangle fire started, who was saved by whom on what route, and why one worker lived and another died was impossible five minutes after the event and remains so one hundred years later.

Figure 2 Max Blanck and Isaac Harris arrive at court

The mysteries occluding the actual events of the Triangle fire do not owe themselves to the peculiar circumstances of the disaster or defects in the journalistic conventions of the era. Rather, it is in the nature of disaster itself to frustrate accurate historical reconstruction. Things occur suddenly, unexpectedly, when no one is watching – incidents to which no one pays particular attention because no one can anticipate their consequences. If they could, they would act differently and prevent the disaster from occurring in the first place. Often, those closest to the crucial moments that cause the disaster are those who do not survive to establish what happened. Those who do live, overtaken by rapid and unanticipated events, acting under immense stress and often reverting to sheer instinct, invariably remember what they saw and experienced differently from each other, and, often, differently at different removes of time from the action. (4) Physical evidence can establish who lived, who died, and what the material constituents of the tragedy were, but it is in the nature of disaster that its crucial human moments forever remain indistinguishable, like a photo that pixillates when we try to blow it up to see fine details.

Narratives of disaster, however, whether immediate as a morning newspaper or reflective as a carefully researched piece of historical writing, rarely reflect the fundamental unknowability of the events they describe. From Stanley Lord's account of the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember (1955), to Erik Larson’s story of the Galveston hurricane of 1900 in Isaac's Storm (1999), to Douglas Brinkley's The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2007), tales of horrific disaster inevitably attempt, insofar as possible, to establish exactly

what happened and when it happened, often including detailed maps and elaborate timelines that collate events in a way that no one who lived through the event itself could have experienced. Depending on the author's responsibility to documented facts, such works may be extremely valuable for establishing culpability, for bringing home the human dimensions of suffering, and for recreating a time and place. But the very act of transforming the failures of observation and memory that compose the experience of a disaster into a coherent, linear narrative is a kind of fabrication – what "happened" during a disaster is, to many of its survivors, a set of disconnected impressions whose order is never clear to themselves, or it’s a blur, or it’s a blank. The experiences of the dead, of course, can never be known. It seems the very reason to write narratives of disaster – that is, connected stories with morals, main characters, and clear plotlines – is to impose upon them a compensatory order that balances the horror of the incomprehensibly swift and arbitrary course that disaster

Figure 3 Sample of disaster narratives from the author's library

takes in the moment of its occurrence. The newspaper accounts of March 26th, 1911 are particularly notable for casting the terrible events into a pre-conceived template of gender behavior wherein men are active and gallant while women are passive victims who generally behave like helpless animals, thus bringing a kind of order to the disaster. This scaffolding tends to be more subtle in the out-of-town papers that cribbed heavily from the AP, being evidenced mainly by their selection of what incidents of the fire to report and whose actions to feature. Virtually all of the survivors who are named in the papers and whose stories are told in any detail are men – the heroic elevator operators (Joseph Zito, J. Gasper/Gaspar, the mysterious Gregory, Max Steinberg), the heroic NYU law students who set up ladders to rescue victims from the roof of the Asch Building (Chase Kremer, Elias Kanter), the bookkeeper (Mr. Lewine), even the owners of the company (Isaac Harris and Max Blanck). The women, meanwhile, are reduced to an anonymous herd of “panic-stricken girls,” as the Washington Post headline called them, “maddened hundreds,” “crazy with fright” who needed to be forcibly kept in order: “a man on the eighth floor stationed himself at the door of one of the elevators, and with a club kept back the girls who had stampeded to the wire cage.” It was equally common for the papers to eroticize the women who died, continually stressing bodies found nude or partially clothed. The New York papers, however, went much further in transforming the chaos of the fire into an object lesson in gendered behavior. In The New York Times, we read of “terrified unfortunates” who “make their mad leaps to death” led by “one poor, little creature” who makes the first jump. Horribly, the paper implies the women who leapt to their deaths to escape the flames bore some responsibility for their own ends; the paper claims, “Many jumped whom the firemen believe they could have saved.” How they might have been saved is not made entirely clear; apparently, they were supposed to have waited on a narrow ledge nine stories above earth in a heat so intense that it set women’s hair on fire until however long it took for firemen to reach them with scaling ladders (the ladders on the fire trucks reached only to the sixth floor). With the sole exception of one Dora Miller, who is described as breaking and crawling through the glass panel of a door on the eighth floor to descend a staircase to safety, all other positive activity is male, and men are the vast majority of characters in the story to be identified by name as individuals. At one point, the report claims of the men on the ninth floor that, “Calmer than the girls, they lined the southerly tier of windows first and forced the girls back to prevent them from jumping”; no witnesses of this incident are given, and how the comparative demeanor of the men and women on the ninth story could possibly have been discerned through smoke and flame by observers on the street, more than one hundred feet below, is never explained. From the attempt by Samuel Bernstein and Max Rothberg to douse the fire soon after it broke out while "the girls, screaming loudly and in a panic rushed for the elevator shaft and the staircase," to the exertions of Professor Sommer and his NYU Law students, the Times consistently writes the Triangle fire as a tale of male activity and female passivity.

The New York Tribune puts even the Times lead story to shame, transforming the calamity into almost a fable of heroic male action in the face of feminine hysteria. The Tribune article includes all the descriptions of "panicstricken," "maddened," "crazed," "wild," "insane" women found in the other next-day accounts, and goes the furthest of any of them in eroticizing the female victims, insisting of the women who fought to get into the elevators that "their clothing was torn from their bodies," that some jumpers were "aflame and others stripped of all clothing," and that the victims on the ninth floor were found with "[t]heir clothing torn into shreds." But the reversion to cliché in the face of chaos and horror reveals itself most strongly in the least well-attested details the article provides, those the reporter is most likely to have distorted or invented in accordance with his notions of what the event was supposed to mean. "The terror of the hundreds of helpless girls on that [the ninth] floor can only be imagined," he writes, only to insist immediately and on no authority that "[i]t is certain that many of the unfortunate creatures were killed not by fire, but in the mad trampling of many hundreds of feet." As the author develops his theme of female hysteria, ethnic stereotyping joins gender, the article attributing to the elevator men the perception that "young Italian girls, their eyes starting from their heads in terror, fought with insane strength and savagery to gain the elevators." One suspects Zito (the only operator interviewed on the night of the 25th) was far too busy running his machine through fire, smoke, and falling bodies to poll the passengers on his packed runs about their national origins. As the tale proceeds, the victims turn into a horde of Maenads, the fire to a mad Bacchanal: "Women would cling to the wire netting [of the elevator cage] with hands and even by their teeth, determined not to give way for those behind . . . dead and mutilated bodes were stretched about the entrance to the elevator shafts, not killed by fire but torn to pieces, almost, by frenzied human hands. It was a mad fight for life, and some of those who did manage to make their way to the elevators never lived to reach the first floor." There is no confirmation in any other source for deaths occurring by suffocation or by darker violence on the elevators themselves. It seems the Tribune reporter is intent on transferring the chaotic conditions of disaster onto the women themselves, consistently painting them as embodiments of disorder responsible for their own deaths. "Had those who stood in terror on the window ledges," he writes, "kept their heads some among them might have lived," claiming that the fire nets were ineffective only because the women irrationally jumped in clusters, rather than taking turns (one of the earliest socialization games children learn is to take turns). The Times article had also claimed many jumpers could have been saved, but gave an entirely different explanation, citing the women's inability to wait for firemen to scale the building to heights beyond the reach of the hook-and-ladder trucks. Thus, the wishful thinking of rescuers becomes a dark fairy tale of the destructive power of female irrationality. (5)

Figure 4 Bacchantes tear apart the body of Pentheus, from a Greek red-figure vase, c 520-510BCE, manner of Euphronios

The construction of disaster as the expression of male gallantry in the face of female weakness perhaps reaches its fullest expression in what may be the most iconic tale of the fire, repeated in almost every extended account or depiction from the morning of the 26th to the present. Unlike many of the other incidents adduced by imaginative reporters to create an image of social gender regulations enduring under even the most extreme circumstances, this one is based on the eyewitness testimony of William G. Shepherd:

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he

was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward—the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud—dead, thud—dead—together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best. (6)

The passage perfectly illustrates the interplay of incident and ideology in the disaster narratives of a period when unprecedented and largely unregulated industrial power led to many such tragedies. The actions of the young man may have been precisely as Shepherd described them and as admirable under the circumstances as they appear, but to construe them as a tale of "terrible chivalry" where what defines a "real man" is his taking charge of helpless women subsumes the individual moment into a gender narrative that imposes the assumptions and values of the observer on the incident he observed. When, just over a year after the Triangle fire, the Titanic sank in perhaps the most famous disaster in history, nearly every paper's headline included some variation on the theme "Women and Children First." Many of those on board did, in fact, act in accordance with the rules of chivalry when filling the inadequate supply of life boats, and yet the truth that male crew members survived in far higher percentages than women in third class berths escaped report for a long time (nor is there any evidence that women panicked in greater numbers than men as the ship went down). Accounts focused on those elements of the disaster that confirmed the prevailing ideology of gender (and, for that matter, class) while overlooking those that did not. Little wonder that in the extended evocation of the period that forms the first section of Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Lily Briscoe reflects that it is the woman's duty to draw out men in conversation "as it is indeed their duty . . . to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley [the man with whom she must make conversation, though she finds him unpleasant in his hostility to the idea a woman can be an artist] to get me out. But how would it be . . . if neither of us did either of these things?" (7). Perhaps the expectation of gallant behavior might belong to both sexes and the expectation of irrational panic to neither.

Figure 5 Gallant Victims and Helpless Men

Sources Articles quoted from The New York Times, New York Tribune, Chicago Sunday Tribune, and Washington Post of March 26th, 1911 are all available from ProQuest Historical Newspapers (note that versions of the Times and Chicago Sunday Tribune on Cornell Unviersity's Traingle Factory Fire site (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/ ) are incomplete). Article titles are: "141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire" (New York Times, p 1) "148 Leap to Death or Perish in Flames" (Washington Post, p 1) "Elevators Save Scores" (New York Tribune, p 4) "Human Bridge Breaks" (New York Tribune, p 1) "More than 140 Die as Flames Sweep through Three Stories of Factory Building" (New York Tribune, p 1) "New York Fire Kills 148" (Chicago Sunday Tribune, p 1) (1) For the account Shepherd published of his eyewitness testimony (as opposed to the amalgam of first-hand experience, interviews, and speculation he provided his wire service), see “Eyewitness at the Triangle” [http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/texts/stein_ootss/ootss_wgs.html ] (2) This is to say nothing of the bizarre incidents that are reported with no attribution to any specific witness, such as the almost certainly fictitious wire report that "skeletons bending over sewing machines" were found on the upper floors (found, among other places, in the Chicago Sunday Tribune; convincingly refuted by Leon Stein in The Triangle Fire (Philadelphia: J B Lippincott Company, 1962). (3) "Event memory and autobiographical memory for the events of September

11, 2001," Applied Cognitive Psychology, Volume 17, Issue 9, pages 1033–1045, November/December 2003 [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.984/abstract ] (4) The neuroscientist Karim Nader has in fact proposed a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle of memory – that the very act of recounting an event alters our recollection of it. See Smithsonian (May, 2010) for a brief, popular account of his work and for a more technical account, see Hardt, O., Einarsson, E. & Nader, K. (2010), "A bridge over troubled water: Reconsolidation as a link between cognitive and neuroscienctific memory research traditions," Annual Review of Psychology, 61:141-67. A video podcast of Dr. Nader talking about the formation of memory is available at http://podcasts.mcgill.ca/scienceandtechnology/page/4/ (5) See Von Drehle, David, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York: Grove Press, 2003), pp 156-57. (6) See paragraphs 11-13 of "Eyewitness at the Triangle" [http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/texts/stein_ootss/ootss_wgs.html ] (7) Woolf, Virginia, To The Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927; renewed, Leonard Woolf, 1955; Harvest edition, 1989), p 91.