Communication Currents

On March 25, 1911, 146 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Just as factory employees were preparing to go home, an oil-soaked rag caught fire and flames spread rapidly through the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch building where employees toiled. The majority of the workers were immigrant women who soon discovered that doors they might have used for escape were locked (a measure the owners took to control stealing), the single fire escape was impassable, the elevators were filled to capacity, and the flames were upon them. Workers on the tenth floor fled to the roof and were transported via ladder to a neighboring building, but many workers on the other floors were not so lucky. Some jumped to their deaths, while others burned or died from smoke inhalation. 

This horrific tragedy has since been recognized as an important catalyst for the subsequent passing of a number of fire safety and labor laws.  News coverage of the event was especially effective at paving the way for these laws because the emergence of photojournalism enabled the publication of photographs featuring the aftermath of the fire.  In the two days directly following the fire, the New York Times published 17 articles on the topic and featured 17 different photographs.  In these cases, the text came together with the photographs to create vivid metaphors (i.e., rhetorical figures that reference and thereby compare multiple thoughts with one word or phrase) of social reform, metaphors that were especially potent because they were put forth during a time of historical instability and unrest. 

Two clear metaphors emerged in Times coverage of the fire.  For one, articles covering the fire repeatedly equated factory workers and their bodies with consumer goods.  This metaphor may, in a logical sense, seem to encourage readers to objectify workers rather than to sympathize with them and call for change. However, the combination of image and text invited readers to consider the inhumanity of positioning humans as products. For example, textual descriptions about how workers entered the Asch building in the morning, signed in, and began to work, were coupled with photographs featuring the burned workrooms littered with enough rubble to fill a much larger space.  This coverage emphasized employees’ cramped, inhumane working conditions and highlighted the fact that the fire did not discriminate between workers and shirtwaists. 

Times coverage implied that workers’ bodies would inevitably be used up, just as any consumer product is eventually consumed. This transition from bodies as productive humans to consumed products was communicated, in one instance, in a photograph captioned, “Hole in side walk made by a falling body.”  The photograph featured policemen, rescue workers, and officials staring down—as if in prayer—toward the sidewalk at a deep coffin-like hole, which probably still contained the body of the worker who fell there. Terrified workers like this one had realized “it was jump or be burned.”  Not long after the fire began, bodies (i.e., products or, at this point, waste) started coming down “end over end” and breaking “into a thousand pieces.” 

In these cases, journalists were already describing factory employees as objects before they hit the ground. Photographs of bodies sprawled on the sidewalk accompanied explanations about how “life was extinct in the bodies on the pavement.” One image featured two firemen carrying a limp, lifeless body away from the street while a stoic policeman looked on. The caption read, “Fireman carrying the body of a woman who jumped from the ninth floor.” The woman’s hand was dragging on the ground, and the firemen look as if they might be hauling a sack of potatoes. 

The second metaphor evident in Times coverage of the fire equated industry with a deathtrap. Coverage implied that, under the current system, workers were destined to die in the Asch building because the promise of factory work as economically viable was deceptive and the experience of such work was one of a slow death with no hope for survival. For example, the Times repeatedly covered the fire in ways that equated the factory itself with a trick or ruse. Photographs of the building juxtaposed its seemingly impenetrable exterior and the weakness of its interior. One article featured a series of photographs labeled “Scenes during and after the Washington Place fire.” The central, and largest, photograph was of one corner of the Asch building. The camera had been positioned below the building and angled upward to display the impressive height of the structure. The photograph displayed fire marshals blasting the building with water. Very little damage was observable from the outside of the building. In fact, if it was not for the surrounding chaos, an observer might not know that a fire had occurred there. One could reasonably enter the building, even after the fire had transpired, without a sense of the potential dangers lurking within. 

Surrounding this central photograph were shots of the post-fire interior. The strength and organization of the building’s exterior contrasted drastically with the disarray evident inside. In a photograph featuring the “9^th floor freight elevator doors where many lost their lives when [the] elevator stopped,” firemen were shown attempting to clear the room of debris. Everything inside the room had been burned and the walls and ceiling were bare and blackened. It was clear from this image that no one who was in this room during the fire survived. No matter how strong or safe the building might have seemed to employees when they entered, the structure offered them no protection when a fire inevitably broke loose. The “flimsy material used in the factory,” “pitiably inadequate” fire escape, and “crowded workrooms in such a condition that a slight outbreak of fire can convert them into furnaces,” put workers in a consistently dangerous position. 

In retrospect, Times coverage of the 1911 factory fire demonstrates not only the persuasive power of photojournalism but also the role that carefully constructed news coverage can play in transforming tragedy into opportunity. Those interested in covering and promoting the interests of social justice initiatives such as Occupy Wall Street should consider drawing from fresh, photo-textual metaphors.  For instance, a textual metaphor equating economic corruption with a painful, societal blinding agent—paired with photographs and/or video footage of protestors reacting to being hit by pepper spray—may provide audiences with a symbolically potent tool for catalyzing reform. In an era when the future of journalism is uncertain, it is important to remind ourselves of instances in which news coverage has been (and can be) central to the creation and maintenance of a healthy and equitable society.