in you which you explain what you think was the goal of the author of this article.
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- Your Assignment Is To Read The Following Newspaper Article And Write A 1 2 Page Paper In You Which You Explain What You 1 (77.12 KiB) Viewed 74 times
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MARCH 26, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York World In 1911. a deadly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York shocked the public into the realization that immigrant workers, many of them young women, were daily risking their lives in the city's tenement factories and sweatshops. The public learned of the horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in their public newspapers the next morning. The following excerpt is from Joseph Pulitzer's New Work World At 4:35 o'clock yesterday afternoon fire ater fire in Chicago. Every available ambu- springing from a source that may never be lance in Manhattan was called upon to cart positively identified was discovered in the the dead to the morgue-bodies charred to rear of the eighth floor of the ten-story unrecognizable blackness or reddened to a building at the northwest corner of Wash- sickly hue-as was to be seen by shoulders ington Place and Greene Street, the first of or limbs protruding through flame-eaten three floors occupied as a factory of the Tri clothing. Men and women, boys and girls angle Shirtwaist Company. were of the dead that littered the street; that At 11:30 o'clock Chief Croker made this is actually the condition—the streets were statement: littered "Everybody has been removed. The The fire began in the eighth story. The number taken out, which includes those who flames licked and shot their way up through jumped from windows, is 141... the other two stories. All three floors were At 2 o'clock this morning Chief Cro occupied by the Triangle Waist Company, ker estimated the total dead as one hun- The estimate of the number of employees dred and fifty-four. He said further, "I ex- at work is made by Chief Croker at about pect something of this kind to happen in 1,000. The proprietors of the company say these so-called fire-proof buildings, which 700 men and girls were in their place.... are without adequate protection as far as Before smoke or flame gave signs from fire-escapes are concerned." the windows, the loss of life was fully un- More than a third of those who lost their der way. The first signs that persons in the lives did so in jumping from windows. The street knew that these three top stories had firemen who answered the first of the four turned into red furnaces in which human alarms turned in found 30 bodies on the creatures were being caught and incinerated pavements of Washington Place and Greene was when screaming men and women and Street. Almost all of these were girls, as were boys and girls crowded out on the many win- the great majority of them all.... dow ledges and threw themselves into the Inspection by Acting Superintendent of streets far below. Buildings Ludwig will be made the basis They jumped with their clothing ablaze. for charges of criminal negligence on the The hair of some of the girls streamed ground that the fire-proof doors leading to up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud one of the inclosed tower stairways were sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly locked...." fact that on both the Greene Street and It was the most appalling horror since Washington Place sides of the building there the Slocum disaster and the Iroquois The grew mounds of the dead and dying,
And the worst horror of all was that in men, as they fell, tore the nets from the this heap of the dead now and then there grasp of the holders, and the bodies struck stirred a limb or sounded a moan. the sidewalks and lay just as they fell. Some Within the three flaming floors it was of the bodies ripped big holes through the as frightful. There flames enveloped many life-nets.... so that they died instantly. When Fire Chief Concentrated, the fire burned within. Croker could make his way into these three The flames caught all the flimsy lace stuff floors, he found sights that utterly staggered and linens that go into the making of spring him, that sent him, a man used to viewing and summer shirtwaists and fed eagerly horrors, back and down into the street with upon the rolls of silk. quivering lips. The cutting room was laden with the The floors were black with smoke. And stuff on long tables. The employees were then he saw as the smoke drifted away bod- toiling over such material at the rows and ies burned to bare bones. There were skele rows of machines. Sinisterly the spring day tons bending over sewing machines. gave aid to the fire. Many of the window The elevator boys saved hundreds. They panes facing south and east were drawn each made twenty trips from the time of the down. Draughts had full play. alarm until twenty minutes later when they The experts say that the three floors could do no more. Fire was streaming into must each have become a whirlpool of fire. the shaft, flames biting at the cables. They Whichever way the entrapped creatures fled fled for their own lives. they met a curving sweep of flame. Many Some, about seventy, chose a successful swooned and died. Others fought their way avenue of escape. They cambered up a lad- to the windows or the elevator or fell fight- der to the roof. A few remembered the fire ing for a chance at the fire escape, the single escape. Many may have thought of it but fire escape leading into the blind court that only as they uttered cries of dismay. was to be reached from the upper floors by Wretchedly inadequate was this fire ciambering over a window sillt escape-a lone ladder running down to a On all of the three floors, at a narrow rear narrow court, which was smoke filled as window, a crowd met death trying to get out the fire raged, one narrow door giving ac to that one slender fire escape ladder. cess to the ladder. By the score they fought It was a fireproof building in which this and struggled and breathed fire and died enormous tragedy occurred. Save for the trying to make that needle-eye road to self- three stories of blackened windows at the preservation.... top, you would scarcely have been able to Shivering at the chasm below them, tell where the fire had happened. The walls scorched by the fire behind, there were stood firmly. A thin tongue of flame now some that still held positions on the window and then licked around a window sash.... sills when the first squad of firemen arrived. The nets were spread below with all QUESTIONS promptness. Citizens were commandeered into service, as the firemen necessarily gave 1. Why did so many factory workers die in this their attention to the one engine and hose fire? How could they have been saved? of the force that first arrived. 2. Why did this particular industrial accident so capture the imagination of the public? Why The catapult force that the bodies gath- did it, as your text reports, spur reform and ered in the long plunges made the nets labor groups...to agitate for government ac- utterly without avail. Screaming girls and tion to improve conditions in the sweatshops?