If you were absent yesterday, check pick up the handout about Horatio Alger and check the blog for the assignment. You are responsible for this material.
Due Friday, February 28: vocabulary quiz on "Poker Flat" ...handout Monday, copy on Monday's blog
We are continuing to explore Realism, both as a literary movement and how it impacted news writing, photography and art. Remember the qualities associated with Realism.
1. ideas of democracy, rather than a focus on the monarchical system of government; revolt against a genteel tradition.
2. voice of the common man is heard
3. in literary complex characters; their ethics are easily defined (think Poker Flat characters)
4. a desire (and a burgeoning sense of right) to control one's own destiny.
5. a focus on facts and details with an objective, non-judgmental eye
6. events and situations are plausible, and not distorted by imagination and feelings (think Romanticism)
In class: we are reading the New York Times news story on the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire, with an accompanying graphic organizer and paragraph assignment. DUE end of class on Wednesday, February 26. class handouts and copies below.
Who were the people who worked in the factory?
THE FIRE
141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire; Trapped High Up in Washington Place Building; Street Strewn with Bodies; Piles of Dead Inside
New York Times, March 26, 1911, p. 1.
Three stories of a ten-floor building at the corner of
Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire
was going on 141 young men and women at least 125 of them mere girls were
burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.
The building was fireproof. It shows now hardly any signs of
the disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever so are the floors,
nothing is the worse for the fire except the furniture and 141 of the 600 men
and girls that were employed in its upper three stories.
Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death
within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped
met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below.
All Over in Half an
Hour
Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning
of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It
was confined to three floors the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building. But
it was the most murderous fire that New York had seen in many years.
The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for someone
to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls
from 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirtwaist by the
Triangle Waist Company, the principal owners of which are Isaac Harris and Max
Blanck. Most of them could barely speak English. Many of them came from
Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working families.
There is just one fire escape in the building. That one is
an interior fire escape. In Greene Street, where the terrified unfortunates
crowded before they began to make their mad leaps to death, the whole big front
of the building is guiltless of one. Nor is there a fire escape in the back.
The building was fireproof and the owners had put their
trust in that. In fact, after the flames had done their worst last night, the
building hardly showed a sign. Only the stock within it and the girl employees
were burned.
A heap of corpses lay on the sidewalk for more than an hour.
The firemen were too busy dealing with the fire to pay any attention to people
whom they supposed beyond their aid. When the excitement had subsided to such
an extent that some of the firemen and policemen could pay attention to this
mass of the supposedly dead they found about half way down in the pack a girl
who was still breathing. She died two minutes after she was found.
The Triangle Waist Company was the only sufferer by the
disaster. There are other concerns in the building, but it was Saturday and the
other companies had let their people go home. Messrs. Harris and Blanck,
however, were busy and ?? their girls and some stayed.
Leaped Out of the
Flames
At 4:40 o'clock, nearly five hours after the employes in the
rest of the building had gone home, the fire broke out. The one little fire
escape in the interior was resorted to by any of the doomed victims. Some of
them escaped by running down the stairs, but in a moment or two this avenue was
cut off by flame. The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene
Street, 100 feet below them. Then one poor, little creature jumped. There was a
plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it,
wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces.
Then they all began to drop. The crowd yelled "Don't
jump!" but it was jump or be burned the proof of which is found in the
fact that fifty burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone.
They jumped, the crashed through broken glass, they crushed
themselves to death on the sidewalk. Of those who stayed behind it is better to
say nothing except what a veteran policeman said as he gazed at a headless and
charred trunk on the Greene Street sidewalk hours after the worst cases had
been taken out:
"I saw the Slocum disaster, but it was nothing to
this." "Is it a man or a woman?" asked the reporter. "It's
human, that's all you can tell," answered the policeman.
It was just a mass of ashes, with blood congealed on what
had probably been the neck.
Messrs. Harris and Blanck were in the building, but the
escaped. They carried with the Mr. Blanck's children and a governess, and they
fled over the roofs. Their employes did not know the way, because they had been
in the habit of using the two freight elevators, and one of these elevators was
not in service when the fire broke out.
Found Alive After the
Fire
The first living victims, Hyman Meshel of 322 East Fifteenth
Street, was taken from the ruins four hours after the fire was discovered. He
was found paralyzed with fear and whimpering like a wounded animal in the
basement, immersed in water to his neck, crouched on the top of a cable drum
and with his head just below the floor of the elevator.
Meantime the remains of the dead it is hardly possible to
call them bodies, because that would suggest something human, and there was
nothing human about most of these were being taken in a steady stream to the
Morgue for identification. First Avenue was lined with the usual curious east
side crowd. Twenty-sixth Street was impassable. But in the Morgue they received
the charred remnants with no more emotion than they ever display over anything.
Back in Greene Street there was another crowd. At midnight
it had not decreased in the least. The police were holding it back to the fire
lines, and discussing the tragedy in a tone which those seasoned witnesses of
death seldom use.
"It's the worst thing I ever saw," said one old
policeman.
Chief Croker said it was an outrage. He spoke bitterly of
the way in which the Manufacturers' Association had called a meeting in Wall
Street to take measures against his proposal for enforcing better methods of
protection for employes in cases of fire.
No Chance to Save
Victims
Four alarms were rung in fifteen minutes. The first five
girls who jumped did go before the first engine could respond. That fact may
not convey much of a picture to the mind of an unimaginative man, but anybody
who has ever seen a fire can get from it some idea of the terrific rapidity
with which the flames spread.
It may convey some idea too, to say that thirty bodies
clogged the elevator shaft. These dead were all girls. They had made their rush
their blindly when they discovered that there was no chance to get out by the
fire escape. Then they found that the elevator was as hopeless as anything
else, and they fell there in their tracks and died.
The Triangle Waist Company employed about 600 women and less
than 100 men. One of the saddest features of the thing is the fact that they
had almost finished for the day. In five minutes more, if the fire had started
then, probably not a life would have been lost.
Last night District Attorney Whitman started an
investigation not of this disaster alone but of the whole condition which makes
it possible for a firetrap of such a kind to exist. Mr. Whitman's intention is
to find out if the present laws cover such cases, and if they do not to frame
laws that will.
Girls Jump To Sure
Death
Fire Nets Prove Useless Firemen Helpless to Save Life. The
fire which was first discovered at 4:40 o'clock on the eighth floor of the
ten-story building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, leaped
through the three upper stories occupied by the Triangle Waist Company with a
sudden rush that left the Fire Department helpless.
How the fire started no one knows. On the three upper floors
of the building were 600 employes of the waist company, 500 of whom were girls.
The victims mostly Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and Germans were girls and
men who had been employed by the firm of Harris & Blanck, owners of the
Triangle Waist Company, after the strike in which the Jewish girls, formerly
employed, had been become unionized and had demanded better working conditions.
The building had experienced four recent fires and had been reported by the
Fire Department to the Building Department as unsafe in account of the insufficiency
of its exits.
The building itself was of the most modern construction and
classed as fireproof. What burned so quickly and disastrously for the victims
were shirtwaists, hanging on lines above tiers of workers, sewing machines
placed so closely together that there was hardly aisle room for the girls
between them, and shirtwaist trimmings and cuttings which littered the floors
above the eighth and ninth stories.
Girls had begun leaping from the eighth story windows before
firemen arrived. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position
because of the bodies which strewed the pavement and sidewalks. While more
bodies crashed down among them, they worked with desperation to run their
ladders into position and to spread firenets.
One fireman running ahead of a hose wagon, which halted to
avoid running over a body spread a firenet, and two more seized hold of it. A
girl's body, coming end over end, struck on the side of it, and there was hope
that she would be the first one of the score who had jumped to be saved.
Thousands of people who had crushed in from Broadway and
Washington Square and were screaming with horror at what they saw watched
closely the work with the firenet. Three other girls who had leaped for it a
moment after the first one, struck it on top of her, and all four rolled out
and lay still upon the pavement.
Five girls who stood together at a window close the Greene
Street corner held their place while a fire ladder was worked toward them, but
which stopped at its full length two stories lower down. They leaped together,
clinging to each other, with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses.
They struck a glass sidewalk cover and it to the basement. There was no time to
aid them. With water pouring in upon them from a dozen hose nozzles the bodies
lay for two hours where they struck, as did the many others who leaped to their
deaths.
One girl, who waved a handkerchief at the crowd, leaped from
a window adjoining the New York University Building on the westward. Her dress
caught on a wire, and the crowd watched her hang there till her dress burned
free and she came toppling down.
Many jumped whom the firemen believe they could have saved.
A girl who saw the glass roof of a sidewalk cover at the first-story level of
the New York University Building leaped for it, and her body crashed through to
the sidewalk.
On Greene Street, running along the eastern face of the
building more people leaped to the pavement than on Washington Place to the
south. Fire nets proved just as useless to catch them and the ladders to reach
them. None waited for the firemen to attempt to reach them with the scaling
ladders.
All Would Soon Have
Been Out
Strewn about as the firemen worked, the bodies indicated
clearly the preponderance of women workers. Here and there was a man, but
almost always they were women. One wore furs and a muss, and had a purse
hanging from her arm. Nearly all were dressed for the street. The fire had
flashed through their workroom just as they were expecting the signal to leave
the building. In ten minutes more all would have been out, as many had stopped
work in advance of the signal and had started to put on their wraps.
What happened inside there were few who could tell with any
definiteness. All that those escaped seemed to remember was that there was a
flash of flames, leaping first among the girls in the southeast corner of the
eighth floor and then suddenly over the entire room, spreading through the
linens and cottons with which the girls were working. The girls on the ninth
floor caught sight of the flames through the window up the stairway, and up the
elevator shaft.
On the tenth floor they got them a moment later, but most of
those on that floor escaped by rushing to the roof and then on to the roof of
the New York University Building, with the assistance of 100 university
students who had been dismissed from a tenth story classroom.
There were in the building, according to the estimate of
Fire Chief Croker, about 600 girls and 100 men.
GRAPHIC ORGANIZER
GRAPHIC ORGANIZER
Name_________________________________________________
Triangle Shirt Waist
Fire accompanying questions. The first 10 questions are worth 5 points each.
You must use textual evidence to get credit. On the back is a writing
assignment that is worth 50 points. Use
must incorporate textual evidence in the response to receive full credit.
Please write the paragraph on lined paper, using an MLA heading.
1.
In journalism, the first sentence is knows as a
lead (pronounced leed). A well-written
lead sums up the whole article, the details of which one finds when continuing
to read. What the lead contains is the who, what, when where and how, also
referred to as the four W’s and H. This is analogous to the thesis statements
in your essays. If you have a clear thesis statement, your audience will be
able to anticipate the major points that you will write about.
Read the lead the sentence and write out
the four W’s and H.
Who
________________________________________-
What________________________________________________________________________________
When
_______________________________________________________________________________
Where
_______________________________________________________________________________
How__________________________________________________________________________________
1.
Using textual evidence, how did the deaths
occur?
____________________________________________________________________________________________
2.
Using textual evidence, how were the victims
identified?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
3.
Why was the Triangle Waist Company the “only
sufferer by the disaster”. (Use text)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
4.
How did the owners, Messrs. Harris and Blanck
escape? (text)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
5.
Where were thirsdy of the bodies found?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
6.
What was the saddest feature of the day? (text)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
7.
How did the fire start?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
8.
Why did it burn so quickly?
______________________________________________________________________________________________
9.
Why were the five girls “who stood together at
the window close to the Greene Street corner unable to be saved? (use text)
____________________________________________________________________________________________
10.
What happened to the girl who “leaped from a window adjoining the New
York University Building on the westward?”
(use text)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Writing response (50 points) Use must incorporate text in
your response. The New York Times news article is a record of the facts of the
fire, albeit, as a reflection of the time period, some of the diction is
sensationalized. However, there is another story beneath the facts; that is
what life was like to work at the Triangle Shirt Waist factory for the girls.
Reread the article, underlining clues that indicate who these employees were
and their work environment. Then write a well-written, text incorporated
paragraph of no fewer than 200 words that describes the how the fire is a reflection of the attitudes of the society of the time.. To help construct the paragraph, use the organizer
below. See example.
Organizer
Text
why
this is important, what does this signify
“some fought their way to the windows”
|
The girls did not die passively; they were determined to find a way
to escape.” There were no emergency
escape plans or leadership to help them
|
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