Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

Through the lens of a single catastrophe, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America explores the role of immigrant labor in American economic development. Early in the 20th century, millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrived in the US just as industrialization created an insatiable demand for workers. Many of these immigrants brought valuable skills in manufacturing, and collectively, they played an important role in shaping American economic development. In Chapter 2, Von Drehle provides a biographical sketch of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, owners of the Triangle Waist Company, and explains that their rise to the very top “coincided precisely with the maturing of the garment industry” (47). He adds that “between the time they entered the business and their arrival at the top, the amount spent each year by Americans on ready-to-wear clothing roughly tripled, to $1.3 billion (equal to about $23 billion today)” (47).

Just as industrialization made mass production a reality and the garment industry began to boom, waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy began arriving in the United States. These immigrants not only provided cheap and abundant labor for the garment industry, but in the case of Jews from the Russian Empire, they brought skills and experience that were invaluable to the trade.