We Heard the Screams

"I happened to have been visiting a friend in the park on the other side of the park, and we heard the engines, and we heard the screams and rushed out and rushed over where we could see the trouble was. We could see this building from Washington Square, and the people had just begun to jump when we got there. They had been holding off until that time, standing in the windowsills, crowding, being crowded by others behind them, and the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer."

"Finally, the men were trying to put up — trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net, to catch people if they do jump. And they were trying to get that out, and they couldn’t wait any longer. I mean, they began to jump. This is when the window was too crowded, and they were jumping. They hit the sidewalk. The net broke. It was a terrible distance, and the weight of the bodies was so great at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. And every one of them was killed. Everybody who jumped was killed. And it was a horrifying spectacle."

So said Frances Perkins in a recorded interview rebroadcast on Democracy Now, and featured as part of an interview with Kirstin Downey, author of a biography of Perkins, and a guest author at UAlbany this coming Friday 11/18.

Frances Perkins was the pioneering female author of New York and U. S. labor laws drafted in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and the unsung architect of FDR's New Deal. Read or hear more of the radio program here.