the presser, the cutter, the wringer, the mangle, the needle, the union, the treadle, the bobbin, the bosses
— Katherine Weber, “Triangle Oratorio”, from her novel Triangle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.)
Besides food, there’s nothing more essential to daily survival than covering ourselves to keep warm. How often do we think about the clothing on our bodies – who operated the machines that spun the thread, wove the cloth, sewed the sleeves?
In many ways the story of garment manufacturing in America a century ago is all too familiar. It’s a story of exploitation, “contracting out”, child labor and disregard for worker safety. Most of all it’s a story of women and a story of immigrants. In other words, this is real American history.
[A note about sources: Most of the information and quotations below are from an absolutely superb book that I urge you to find in a library or bookstore: Triangle: the fire that changed America by David Von Drehle (Grove/Atlantic, 2003). For further research, there are useful bibliographies to start with on Wikipedia: see the articles on sweatshops and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.]
Women in the New World
Who were the women who led labor battles in the streets of New York at the opening of the last century?
They were immigrants.
When in 1902 in the streets of the Lower East Side, Jewish women led by a woman butcher protested the rising price of kosher meat, the New York Times called them “a dangerous class… very ignorant.”
They mostly speak a foreign language. They do not understand the duties or the rights of Americans. They have no inbred or acquired respect for law and order.
How should real Americans treat these dangerous foreigners?
The instant they take the law into their own hands… they should be handled in a way that they understand and cannot forget. … Let the blows fall instantly and effectively.
(“Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919” by Herbert G. Gutman in The American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (June 1973), p. 531-588.) (subscription required.)
Sound familiar?
Sweatshops
Until the early 19th century, clothes were made by hand-sewing.
There were in the United States numerous small workshops where a few tailors or seamstresses, gathered under one roof, laboriously sewed garments together, but the great bulk of the work, until the invention of the sewing machine, was done by the wives and daughters of farmers and sailors in the villages around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In these cities the garments were cut and sent out to the dwellings of the poor to be sewn. The wages of the laborers were notoriously inadequate, though probably better than in England.
Thomas Hood’s ballad The Song of the Shirt, published in 1843, depicts the hardships of the English woman who strove to keep body and soul together by means of the needle:
“With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread.”
— Holland Thompson, “The Age of Invention, A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest” (1921).
The Industrial Revolution and especially the advent of foot-powered sewing machines – first patented in the U.S. by Elias Howe in 1846 — brought the decline of hand-sewing in favor of mass-produced clothing. In 1850 Englishman Charles Kingsley wrote about the new “sweat”
system in a diatribe he titled Cheap Clothes and Nasty:
It appears that there are two distinct tailor trades: the ‘honourable’ trade, now almost confined to the West End, and rapidly dying out there, and the ‘dishonourable’ trade … For at the honourable shops, the master deals directly with his workmen;
while at the dishonourable ones, the greater part of the work, if not the whole, is let out to contractors, or middle men – “sweaters”, as their victims significantly call them – who, in their turn, let it out again, sometimes to the workmen, sometimes to fresh middlemen; so that out of the price paid for labour on each article, not only the workmen, but the sweater, and perhaps the sweater’s sweater, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, have to draw their profit.
The subcontractor system was well suited to the ebb and flow of retail demand for clothing dictated by ever-changing fashions. As explained in “Sweatshops – Definitions, History, and Morality” by Matt Zwolinski:
Weather, season and, most of all, changes in taste, can have a dramatic impact on the sorts of apparel demanded by consumers on any given day. … Not unexpectedly, most retailers react to this risk by trying to shift its cost to elsewhere in the production cycle. By placing orders for only as many clothes as they can reasonably expect to sell in a short time, retailers push the risk down to manufacturers. … Manufacturers thus limit their production to so-called “short-runs,” producing relatively few articles of clothing at a time. … Thus the risk is passed down from retailer to manufacturer, and likewise from manufacturer to contractor and subcontractor, until ultimately it is borne by the individual worker.
(an entry in James Ciment, ed., Social Issues in America: An Encyclopedia; Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe (2006)).
In the late 19th century, sweatshops increased rapidly in cities like New York where immigrants flocked to seek a better life for themselves and their families. Men from these immigrant families got jobs in big factories while others, especially women and children, took on employment in the garment industry.
Under the Czars of Russia, Jews had been limited in the occupations they could practice; one permitted job was altering secondhand clothes, so many Russian Jews could sew very well. They became garment workers in the New World, and their less-skilled relatives and friends followed them into the industry.
By the turn of the century, more New York immigrants worked in clothing factories than in any other business, and the industry was doubling in size every decade. Countless greenhorns arrived in Manhattan; clutching a scrap of paper bearing a simple name or address – their link to a job in the needle trades.
–David Von Drehle
As Ida Zinster, age 16 described the job-hunting process:
Your mother talks to her old friend from Minsk. Her old friend from Minsk has a cousin. He runs a sweatshop on Division Street with 15 men and 5 women. When they work. He’s a religious man. A man who knows your relatives, who asks after your aunt… a man whose hands keep wandering where they shouldn’t. He thinks you’ll keep quiet. It’s time to find a job again!
— Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl (DVD)
In the 1870’s the invention of the “cutter’s knife” meant that fabric could be stacked up and dozens of pieces could be slashed out quickly so that clothing production could happen even faster and more cheaply.
Between cutting and inspection, the garments travelled from sweatshop to sweatshop. Boys scarcely ten years old, bent double under huge bundles of fabric, were a common sight on the Lower East Side. They toted bundles from the manufacturer to some cramped little shop to be basted together, then to another contractor’s squalid room to be stitched, then on to another shop to be lined and decorated – and then back to the manufacturer. In other cases, all the work would be done in a single four-hundred-square-foot apartment. … Manufacturers loved this system because it saved them the trouble of dealing with workers.
According to one survey in the 1890s, the average workweek in these shops was eighty-four hours – twelve hours every day of the week, During a busy season, it was not unusual to find workers on stools or broken chair, bent over their sewing or hot irons, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., a hundred or more hours per week. Indeed, it was said that during the busy seasons the grinding hum of sewing machines never entirely ceased on the Lower East Side, day or night.
— David Von Drehle
As many as 20 or 30 garment workers could be crowded into a couple of tiny rooms with a few sewing machines and work tables. People would sleep and work in shifts in the same rooms. Tuberculosis spread so easily in the sweatshops that it was known as “the tailor’s disease” or “the Jewish disease”.
Many who survived were radicalized; they helped build the labor unions and newspapers and study groups that spread socialism through the Lower East Side … Some became shop owners themselves. And such men moved the garment industry into the new era of large factories and electric machines, a much better era for workers, in many ways, than the sweatshop era.
— David Von Drehle.
The sweatshop system with its shifting network of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors had helped the apparel industry to keep union organizing at bay. Moreover the new immigrants tended to keep their employment patterns of decentralized small shops. Production workers in scattered shops, never sure of steady work, paid a pittance and easily replaced, could not even identify their ultimate employer with whom they could bargain collectively for better conditions. it wasn’t until the industry moved into large modern factories that labor organizing became possible.
Modern Times
The women’s blouse, also known as a shirtwaist or just plain “waist”, became a fashion sensation in the 1890s. It was practical, versatile, and attractive. Shirtwaists attired the beauties of the day as defined by the extremely popular magazine illustrator Charles
Dana Gibson.
Shirtwaists were worn with skirts that now ended above the ankle to accommodate women’s increasingly active and outward-looking lives, out of their homes, into schools, shops, and factories. In 1910 there were over five million women in the U.S. workforce, out of a total population of 90 million. Nearly a third of factory workers in New York State were women. The shirtwaists and skirts most of them wore were made in factories too.
Nearly 800 skyscrapers rose in Manhattan between 1901 and 1911. The new steel-framed highrises let innovators take mass production in the clothing industry to an amazing new level. The large rooms could accommodate long rows of sewing machines attached to a motor with drive shafts and flywheels. Operations could be streamlined even more when a single building housed the entire sequence of garment making – cutting, sewing, inspecting, and shipping. Skyscrapers helped the industry grow hugely in the first decade of the 20th century, roughly tripling the amount of money spent by Americans every year to $1.3 billion.
By 1909 more people worked in the factories of Manhattan than in all the mills and plants of Massachusetts, and by far the largest number of them were making clothes.
— David Von Drehle.
As the new factories brought hundreds of workers together on a daily basis for more efficient production, labor organizers could also work more effectively. There was plenty to keep them busy. The contractor system continued inside the factories. Contractors were paid a lump sum based on the production of the assembly line workers they hired.
As in the sweatshops, the system was rigged for maximum exploitation and mininum paychecks. Workers made only three to twenty dollars per week, when they were working at all in an industry that was still seasonal with long periods of unemployment. Wildcat strikes aiming to pressure the owners into raising their prices were commonplace in the garment factories of the decade.
Uprising
Backed by the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization founded in 1903 and led by wealthy reformers, the ranks of low-paid seamstresses had begun to organize for better pay and working conditions. Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was formed in 1906. One Local 25 founder and key activist was Clara Lemlich. Three years earlier at the age of sixteen, Clara had arrived in America with her family from the Ukranian town of Gorodok, joining the flood of Eastern European Jews who sought to escape the poverty and oppression of shtetl life and make their way in the New World. Clara’s skill with a needle helped her find steady employment among the 40,000 workers in more than 500 waist factories in New York at that time.
Lemlich worked as a draper at Louis Leiserson’s waist factory. … Draping was a highly skilled job, almost like sculpting. Clara could translate the ideas of a blouse designer into actual garments by cutting and molding pieces on a tailor’s dummy. In a sense, her work and her activism were the same: both involved taking ideas and making them tangible. And the work paid well, by factory standards, but pay alone did not satisfy Clara. She found the routine humiliations of factory life almost unbearable. Workers in the waist factory, she once said, were trailed to the bathroom and hustled back to work; they were constantly shortchanged on their pay and mocked when they complained; the owners shaved minutes off each end of the lunch hour and even “fixed” the time clocks to stretch out the workday. “The hissing of the machines, the yelling of the foreman, made life unbearable,” Lemlich later recalled. And at the end of each day, the factory workers had to line up at a single unlocked exit to be “searched like thieves,” just to prevent pilferage of a blouse or a bit of lace.
–David Von Drehle
The going was slow for the fledgling union local. Men ran the ILGWU and thought women were unreliable union members who accepted low wages and would quit to get married. Some men viewed the women as competitors. And women who sought to organize were subject not only to beatings and imprisonment but sexual exploitation and intimidation.
In 1909 labor unrest among the garment workers came to a boiling point. August saw more than 1500 tailors walk out on strike. The men who ran the buttonhole machines walked out briefly. But it was the women who surprised everyone, including themselves.
Their first big win came in July 1909 when 200 workers in one of the biggest waist factories walked out. Though the owners hired thugs to attack the picket line and the workers were arrested when they fought back, the strikers held their line for a month and won
a 20% raise.
Then in August nearly 7000 neckwear workers walked out of 200 small shops asking for higher wages and an end to working in bedrooms and basements. The strikers were mostly teenage girls who made neckties and scarves in tenement sweatshops. They were desperately poor but refused to give up, and the strike spread.
On the evening of September 10, 1909, Clara Lemlich was attacked as she left the picket line at Leiserson’s, the third strike she had led in three years. Left bleeding on the sidewalk, Lemlich became a visible martyr. Her energy was only made stronger and she continued to agitate, making speeches on street corners and shoring up resolve on the picket lines, urging solidarity with the neckwear workers.
In late September, 150 Triangle Shirtwaist workers attended a secret meeting with Local 25 and the Women’s Trade Union League. In response to their organizing, the owners locked them out of the factory. The Triangle workers voted to strike. On the picket line on October 4 they were attacked by a gang of prostitutes the owners had hired to break up the strike. The strikers were arrested, but the tactic only seemed to encourage more young women to take their place on the picket line. Scores of workers were arrested over the next few weeks.
To focus New Yorkers’ attention on the plight of the striking garment workers, the well-to-do, outspoken progressives, college graduates and veteran suffragists of the Women’s Trade Union League joined the picket line.
The key confrontation… came when WTUL president Mary Dreier visited the Triangle picket line at quitting time on November 4, 1909. As the factory emptied onto Greene Street, one of the firm’s managers overheard Dreier talking to a “scab”, presumably urging the worker to join the union cause. “You are a dirty liar!” the manager shouted. “You are a dirty liar!”
Drier turned to [a police officer named Cantilion] and demanded: “You heard the language that man addressed to me? Am I not entitled to your protection?”
“How do I know that you are not a dirty liar?” Cantilion replied. And then he arrested Dreier for threatening to assault a worker.
The arrest of Mary Dreier was front-page news in the mainstream papers: Pulitzer’s World, Sulzberger’s Times, Hearst’s American, and others.
— David Von Drehle
The upshot of all this activity was that on November 22, 1909, thousands of waist makers met at Cooper Union Hall, four blocks east of the Triangle Waist Company, to discuss a general strike. The speechifying went on for hours as speaker after speaker, including the head of the AFL Samuel Gompers, praised the waistworkers cause but urged caution. Finally Clara Lemlich had had enough. She made her way down the aisle, shouting in Yiddish “I want to say a few words!” Taking the podium, she declared:
“I have listened to all the speakers. I have no further patience for talk, as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike.”
The crowd went crazy, Lemlich’s motion was seconded and thousands of hands went up as the audience recited: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.”
An estimated fifteen thousand waist makers walked off their jobs the next morning. They wanted a 52-hour work week, abolishment of sub-contractors, a 20 percent pay raise and recognition of the union as bargaining agent on behalf of all waist workers. It took a while to get organized, but the strike spread.
At the time Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe made up more than two-thirds of shirtwaist workers. Most of the rest were immigrants from Italy. Unlike the Jewish immigrants escaping Eastern Europe’s religious and political oppression, “most Italians immigrated for strictly economic reasons. The south of their country, stripped of lumber and poorly irrigated, had become an ecological disaster area; drought and disease ravaged their lives. They came to America to make money – not to make a new social order.” (Von Drehle)
The Italian girls tended to be more conservative and obedient than the Jews. Women played different roles in their traditional cultures. Many Jewish women were used to supporting themselves and their families economically, as men in the old country had been encouraged to spend their days studying Torah. The Italian women workers on the other hand were subjected to Italian priests brought in to the factory to preach the obligation to obey their bosses. On the picket line this cultural difference was feared. One WTUI executive pointed out: “The strikebreakers are all Italians and the strikers Jewesses.” Ultimately however, Italian women made up six to ten percent of the strikers.
Eventually close to 30,000 waistworkers at 500 shops went on strike in New York City. About seventy, smaller shopowners capitulated within two days to the strikers’ demands. By February 1910, more than 300 companies settled with the union. But the biggest companies held out. The owners of 100 firms signed a “no surrender” declaration. The picket lines turned more violent.
Outside the Bijou factory one day, Rose Perr and her comrades watched incredulously as replacement workers came and went from the curb in automobiles. … She intended to “ask them why they work, and tell them we are not going to harm them at all.” But as Perr and her friend moved forward, a tall man escorting the strikebreakers punched Albert in the chest. She sank to the ground, gasping for breath. Perr yelled for a policeman. When he arrived, the officer immediately arrested both strikers.
— David Von Drehle
Found guilty of assaulting the man who had punched Albert and sentenced to the workhouse, sixteen-year-old Perr and her friend served five days at hard labor on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island.) When the boat took them back to Manhattan they were amazed to find that they and their fellow inmates were heroes, the “brave girl strikers,” and the strike had become “the Lexington and Bunker Hill of woman’s revolution for her rights” according to the World of Joseph Pulitzer.
But the big shops, including the Triangle, still held out. They hired more thugs, cemented alliances with the cops, bribed their workers with lunchtime dances and tea. Both sides in the dispute were wearing out. Finally in February, 1910 the shops took back the workers, who had won higher wages and shorter hours but not the closed shop they had sought. The “Uprising of 20,000” was over.
Triangle
On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, some 500 mostly young and female immigrants got ready to end their workday in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building on Greene Street and Washington Place. Strong men operated cutting machines on the eighth floor where more than a hundred layers of light cotton “lawn” fabric, separated by sheets of tissue paper, were stretched on tables over which patterns hung from wires. Careful cutting saved fabric and cutters were well paid and well treated. They openly flaunted Triangle’s no-smoking policy and their cigarette butts sometimes landed in the big bins under the tables where scraps of highly flammable fabric were piled high. Above them on the ninth floor, 278 sewing machines on both sides of eight long tables stretched in rows. The tenth floor held the pressing, packing, and shipping departments, as well as offices.
There were no fire alarms, fire doors, fire walls or stairs, no automatic sprinklers. Though these had become standard in factories in other cities, for some reason they didn’t exist in Manhattan. To make matters worse, the fire department’s ladders didn’t reach above the seventh floor of the city’s highrises. You could say what happened was inevitable.
I don’t want to write much about the fire. It was fast moving and horrible and the fatalities were preventable. Most of the people on the eighth floor, where it started in a scrap bin, and on the tenth floor, where workers were alerted by phone, escaped. But more than half of the ninth floor workers didn’t get the word in time. Flames and smoke engulfed and blinded them, one of the two exits was locked to prevent theft and the panicked crowd blocked the other exit. Some people made their way up the Greene Street stairs and up to the roof where students on the roof of a neighboring NYU building lowered ladders and brought them to safety. Others in desperation jumped into the elevator shaft and fell to their deaths. Many went out the windows. 146 people died, all but 23 of them women. I can’t write any more about it. Ninety-two years later, David Von Drehle painstakingly researched and listed 140 names of the dead in his book.
On April 4, 1911:
some 350,000 people participated in a funeral march for the Triangle dead. About a hundred thousand of them walked solemnly through the streets of the city as a relentless, depressing rain fell. A quarter of a million more lined the route and watched in silence. The whole city was muffled in black: black bunting on hundreds of buildings; multitudes in black dresses and suits and hats and coats; black umbrellas covering them all under a lumpy quilt. It was, the American noted, “one of [the] most impressive spectacles of sorrow New York has ever known.”
What the Uprising of 20,000 had begun, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire continued to some extent. Safety improvements were implemented fairly quickly and many workers were radicalized for a long haul of further union organizing campaigns in the garment industry over the next decade. Frances Perkins, who went on to play a leading role in the New Deal as FDR’s Secretary of Labor for 12 years, had witnessed the fire from the street and it galvanized her to step up her efforts in improving working conditions in all kinds of factories all over New York State. She got herself named to the state’s newly formed Factory Investigating Commission and pushed through a series of reforms covering fire safety, inspections, hours and wages, and sanitation.
The Triangle Shirtwaist owners were put on trial for manslaughter. In spite of the dramatic find of a blackened fragment of door with a bolt sticking out of it near the Washington Place exit, they had a good lawyer and were acquitted. The Asch Building still stands on Greene Street and Washington Place, now occupied by NYU.
Postscript
By 1934 over 2/3 of the garment industry’s 600,000 workers were unionized and Life magazine declared sweatshops to be extinct in 1938. But as we know globalization and other late twentieth century economic forces have brought sweatshops back with a vengeance. That is a tale that should be told, and maybe I’ll do a followup. If I do I’ll use this book: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820-Present by Peter Liebhold and Harry R. Rubenstein (UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1999).
But this is long and I should close here.
As you can tell from the length and lateness of this entry, I have a hard time pulling away from this story. Why does it compel me so? My own forebears escaped Europe to settle in Chicago and the Midwest in the merchant class. I’ve never been to New York. But when I go, I know I’ll stand in front of the Asch building and imagine brave women carrying picket signs and burning bodies silently falling. We are their heirs.
Working Together Part I
Working Together Part II
Working Together Part III
Working Together Part IV
Working Together Part V
