History is not a collection of dry facts and dates in a hated textbook. History is not meant to be a school subject that is discarded the second a person graduates.
History is the story of you and me, and, properly told, it can prevent us from making the same mistakes again and again. History teaches, if only we listen.
Today is the 108th anniversary of a tragedy in Binghamton, New York, one that (in a way) mirrors a tragedy in New York City a couple of years before.
Descendants of those who died in Binghamton on July 22, 1913, still remember. Recently, one of them commented on an old post of my blog.
Fire is something that terrifies all of us. That fear is inborn but we will be facing fire more and more in the future. In recent years, wildfires have ravaged thousands and thousands of acres in the Western United States. It has caused millions to breathe smoke from those fires. Living thousands of miles away doesn't exempt anyone, either, as many people in New York State (including me) found out on Tuesday when we had air quality alerts caused by a fire two thousand miles away.
But, historically, fire has ravaged cities (London, Chicago, New York City, Portland, Maine and others). The hope is that, each time, we learn lessons. We build better. We learn to fight fires better. We abandon practices that cause death.
One of these fires was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. On March 25, 1911, some 600 workers, including many young immigrant women in their teens and 20's, were working in a clothing factory in lower Manhattan under sweatshop conditions. Many did not speak English. Their workday was 12 hours a day, every day.
Management had locked the exits to keep the workers in. A fire started in a rag bin. A foreman tried to put the fire out but the hose was rotted out, and the fire spread rapidly. The fire took 146 lives. Maybe some lessons were learned, but not enough lessons. More tragedy would follow, this time in the city where I worked for so many years before COVID-19 sent me and others home.
On July 22 1913 a fire broke out at the Binghamton Clothing Company factory on Wall Street in downtown Binghamton, New York. After the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, some safety procedures had been instituted including fire alarms and fire drills, but those didn't prevent the tragedy.
There was only one fire escape.
Of some 110 workers in the building, 31 died while a crowd estimated at some 1500 people outside the building watched, helpless to act. It is thought that many of the dead originally stayed at their stations because they were confused over whether the alarm was real or not. If they left their stations, they would have lost income because they were paid by the piece. And they needed every penny.
Here are some of my posts on the topic:
Forgotten History and the Binghamton Clothing Company Fire (note the comments on the post; they are most interesting).
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Binghamton
I am honored that some descendants of the Binghamton factory workers who died from that fire have chosen to comment on my blog posts, especially the first link above. One, Sharon, recently tried to help me find a monument to the fire victims (and some graves) at Spring Forest Cemetery in Binghamton. I had tried to find it last fall. I tried again after Sharon contacted me, but I'm sorry to say I didn't find it (once again). The directions she found online were clear. I must have passed it.
I'll try again one day.
Now, we face other fire tragedies, and must find our way forward in our rapidly changing world. Let us be armed by the lessons history teaches us. We'll need all the wisdom we can find.
