Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 67locked. When fire trucks arrived, their hoses could only shoot water as far as
the seventh floor, below the areas where the girls were trapped. By day’s end,
146 were dead from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The workshop’s owners were
found not guilty of negligence, and families that sued them for the deaths of
loved ones were granted only $75 apiece, while the owners received $60,000
from their insurance company. Some laws were put into effect after the fire,
but industrial work remained quite dangerous. [In fact, as bad as the tenement
fire was, tenement house dangers could not compare with work on the rail-
roads, where, in the 1880s, about 30,000 workers a year might lose their lives].
Shortly later, on January 1st, 1912 a new law went into effect in
Massachusetts lowering the number of hours women and children could work,
and the bosses at Lawrence textile mills lowered the wages of the workers
there as a result. A strike then began “like a spark of electricity,” as one
scholar put it. The reduction in wages was about 30 cents a week, but that
could make the difference between having food or being hungry or able to
pay rent. Workers at the Everett Cotton Mill, mostly women, went on strike
immediately, and within a week over 10,000 workers joined them. Thus began
the “Bread and Roses” strike. Socialists, Anarchists, and representative of the
FIGuRE 2-2 Triangular Shirtwaist Company building ablaze