Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City on March 25, 1911. One hundred and forty six people died, either from the fire or by jumping from the factory to their deaths trying to escape. Most were young women, almost entirely Jewish or Italian immigrants, many still in their teens, one just 14. It was from this incident that many of our contemporary worker safety laws originated.

Poet Chris Llewellyn’s collection Fragments From the Fire poignantly recalls the event:

‘I could see them falling,’
said Lena Goldman. ‘I was sweeping out
in front of my cafe. At first some thought
it was bolts of cloth – till they opened
with legs! I still see the day
it rained children’
(From the poem “March 25, 1911” by Chris Llewellyn)

The battles that arose in the wake of Triangle over worker safety, worker rights and whether government should regulate business are alive today. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson admirably traces this important history in his column this week titled The mind-set that survived the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. He writes:

In Triangle’s wake … Al Smith and state Senate President Robert Wagner … aided by Frances Perkins, a young social worker who was in Washington Square looking on in horror as the seamstresses jumped to their deaths … authored and enacted legislation that required certain workplaces to have sprinklers, open doors, fireproof stairwells and functioning fire escapes; limited women’s workweeks to 54 hours and banned children under 18 from certain hazardous jobs. …

Businesses reacted as if the revolution had arrived. The changes to the fire code, said a spokesman for the Associated Industries of New York, would lead to “the wiping out of industry in this state.” The regulations, wrote George Olvany, special counsel to the Real Estate Board of New York City, would force expenditures on precautions that were “absolutely needless and useless.” “The best government is the least possible government,” said Laurence McGuire, president of the Real Estate Board. “To my mind, this [the post-Triangle regulations] is all wrong.”

Such complaints, of course, are with us still. We hear them from mine operators after fatal explosions, from bankers after they’ve crashed the economy, from energy moguls after their rig explodes or their plant starts leaking radiation. We hear them from politicians who take their money. We hear them from Republican members of Congress and from some Democrats, too. A century after Triangle, greed encased in libertarianism remains a fixture of — and danger to — American life.

Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Jewish Labor Committee and president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (UFCW) notes the biblical mandate to support workers safety and their rights to secure safe working conditions — and especially ties the Triangle fire to labor union uprisings in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states.

“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that took place in New York City a century ago is now being memorialized in programs across the country. It took that fire on March 25, 1911, and the deaths of 146 innocent garment workers – mostly women, mostly Jewish, mostly immigrants – to bring about meaningful safety regulations, and to respect the call of workers struggling to secure the benefits of union membership. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents played a critical role in building a strong and vibrant labor movement with the hope that it would endure and remain a permanent feature of American life. Through their actions and their struggle, our lives and the lives of most Americans were made better. Today, those hard-fought gains are under threat in communities across the United States.

What has emerged in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and across America is an attack against working men and women in both the public and private sector. The targets are the public employees now, but their intention is to come after all unionized workers. … Many Jewish texts, from the Torah through the Talmud, deal specifically with the treatment of workers. The Torah urges “justice, justice, shall you pursue.” There is, then, a deeply moral, historical and theological basis for our efforts to close the widening gap between the rich and poor, and to prevent growing economic instability that will be detrimental for all Americans. This demands that we strengthen, not weaken, private and public sector unions to ensure that current and aspiring middle class Americans attain a decent standard of living and greater economic security.”

Traditional Catholic teaching on the rights of workers is pretty straightforward. Workers have the right to form and belong to unions and other associations. They have the obligation to address difficult problems with respect for the rights and needs of all. As the archbishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said recently, “hard times do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers.”

To learn more about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, see PBS’ American Experience Fire in the Sky. Also read David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire that Changed America

From The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Through Madison by Stuart Appelbaum

For more about Chris Llewellyn, read The Braided River of Language by Rose Marie Berger and read her collection of poems Fragments from the Fire

“Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs, and, given our history, we have an awful lot of songs,” quipped Irish singer Frank Harte.

On St. Patrick’s Day – when all the world “is Irish” – it seems fitting to lift up one of Ireland’s finest contemporary poets, Eavan Boland. Her poems rise from that sung suffering of the Irish.

Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 and published her first book of poetry,  New Territory, in 1967. Along with her prolific poetry, she also has consistently advocated for the rights of women, the voices of women, and promoted the power of women in Irish history. In a 2006 essay, Boland addresses the question: Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public? She writes:

Years ago my father saw the keen, or caoine. It was the 1920s; he was a student at Trinity College. On a trip one Easter, he went a hundred miles west and a whole century back to Connemara and the Atlantic coast of Ireland.

There, one morning, he saw the emigrant boat, about to leave for Liverpool. There was a small group of old women gathered on the pier. They were the keeners. They could be hired for a few pennies to come to a wake or a funeral or, as here, to a final emigrant farewell on the Galway docks. As the passengers disappeared on board and the boat drew out—or so my father told me—the old women put their shawls over their heads and began the keen. He remembered it as eerie, powerful, terrible.

What the Irish give the world – more than green beer or even the rich trove of poetry – is a the memory of public imagination. Irish verse carries in its DNA an ability to understand deep human emotions and yearnings that transcend cultures and time. The dangers of an over individualized culture, such as is heralded in the U.S. – is the loss of public imagination. We can’t see where we are going together. We can only strive for an uneasy balance of rules and regulations that protect me or mine. The keeners that Boland recalls act out a public liturgy that taps deep into Irish imagination.

“If poetry does not address public grief in some way,” writes Boland, “it runs the risk of abandoning one of its great roles and one of its great genres, which is elegy. The origins of elegy are not private: they are sacred and public.”

As we celebrate the day when all the world is Irish, let’s do it with poetry and public dancing, and remembering that the keeners who lamented the loss of Ireland’s daughters and sons a few generations earlier, now speak Spanish. The keeners are in Mexico, and El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Honduras. The mothers cover their heads and cry out to see their children go north.

Below, is Boland’s wonderful poem on what maps don’t tell us about lives lived in actual places.

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

– and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
–Eavan Boland