Review Of The Triangle Fire By Martha Bensley Bruere

Martha Bensley Bruere was a socialite, reformer, and a member of the Women’s Trade Union League, which helped establish new industrial safety regulations. Bruere wrote her essay The Triangle Fire in May, 1911 due to her being overwhelmed with grief while she watched the funeral. Bruere essay was specifically intended for the city officials to force them to make better industrial safety regulations for workers. During the time this essay was written the Progressive Era was in full effect. The Progressive Era was a time where many positive changes came to the U.S. industrial world. However there had to be many tragedies in the industrial world before we got to where we are today. To really understand this document readers will need to know how profit was more valuable than people lives. Also how the thought process was completely different than form today. Since the start of the industrial world it was all about making the most profit possible and making that profit didn’t come with having safety regulations for the workers such as fire alarms, escape routes, sanitary conditions, etc.

When reading the Triangle book and Bruere document they are ultimately talking about the same conditions before and after the fire. In the document Bruere wrote she states that “An order had gone out to install automatic sprinklers in factories but the manufactures had organized to fight it because it meant so great an expenditure.”(105) This is proving her argument that business owners only really cared for making money during this time period. Also that during the fire many lives could have been saved if there was an alarm system or sprinklers in place. The Triangle Book author backs up her argument by saying “....Dinah Lipschitz worked feverishly to alert the executives upstairs on the tenth floor.”(1944)

Another quote from the fire book is “Alter heard the telautograph signal and watched the pen on her end. But the pen never budged. Alter though nothing of it; she simply assumed that workers downstairs were playing with the gizmo as they passed the bookkeeper’s desk-common enough around closing time. She went back to typing.”(1944) Both of these quotes is letting readers know that there was not any major way to alerte the workers of a fire, only way the workers would have been able to tell is if they seen smoke or if someone told them. This led to many workers on the top floors not knowing what was going on below them causing it to be too late for them to escape which ultimately led to their deaths.

Bruere document reveals to us the thought process of many wealthy Americans during this time period. Also that everything was not as good as it was made out to be and we were still in the beginning stages or the industrial world. This document helps support our knowledge of this era that we had to endure many hardships before we received the correct industrial safety that we have today.