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.

Read More......

Blowing the Whistle on Risky Mortgages

Journalist Kirstin Downey, who visits Friday afternoon 11/18 to talk about her new book on Frances Perkins, was writing in the Washington Post about risky mortgages as early as 2005, well before they were getting much coverage in other media outlets....

"The loans are attractive because their initial monthly payments are tantalizingly low -- about $1,367 a month for a $320,000 mortgage, compared with about $1,842 a month for a traditional 30-year, fixed-rate loan. If home prices fall, though, borrowers could lose big.

"It's a game of musical chairs," said Allen J. Fishbein, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America. "Somebody is going to have the chair pulled out from under them when they find prices have leveled out and they try to sell, only to find they can't sell for what they paid for it." More.

Read More......

Kirstin Downey, Newly Added to Schedule 11/18

Kirstin Downey, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, will make an appearance Friday, November 18 at 4:00 p.m. at the 2011 Researching New York Conference to discuss her 2009 biography of Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.

The nation’s first female cabinet secretary, Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was one of FDR’s chief advisors, and the principal architect of the most important social welfare legislation in U.S. history.

Named one of the best nonfiction books of 2009 by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, the book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Downey provides not only a superb rendering of history but also a large dose of inspiration drawn from Perkins’s clearheaded, decisive work with FDR to solve urgent problems and to succeed in the face of insurmountable odds.”

Sponsored by UAlbany’s Department of History and the NYS Writers Institute. For additional information on the Researching New York Conference click here.

Read More......