Their coverage is damaging long-term relations. Do they really think the British minded paying for her funeral from our taxes? Do they really believe she was leader of some club for white colonialists? Yet the NYT in its coverage got it so badly wrong. Everybody was there, everyone chatting away. These people, prepared to walk slowly for at least 8 hours just to pay their respects were a sample of humanity. The respect in which she was held is universal. I walked beside the seven mile long queue to see her lying in State. Take one example: the death last month of Her Majesty. I was educated in the States, have many friends there, but I am heartily sick of their media’s ridiculous, ill-informed UK coverage. The downside for New York, and for America, is that the British are beginning to dislike Americans. There is money to be made in sanctimonious drivel, as you say. I now realise – thanks to your article (Why the World’s Worst Newspaper Hates Britain so much, Sept 12 2022) – that they would not dream of responding. I have written regularly to the The New York Times to express my disgust at their coverage of the UK, and still await their response. You can email your letters to for consideration. They were able to escape by climbing onto the roof and hopping to an adjoining building.Welcome to the first Reaction letters page for subscribers. Also, the firefighters’ ladders stretched only as high as the seventh floor, and their safety nets were not strong enough to catch the women, who were jumping three at a time.īlanck and Harris were on the building’s top floor with some workers when the fire broke out. Other women trapped on the eighth floor began jumping out the windows, which created a problem for the firefighters whose hoses were crushed by falling bodies. Those who fled down the wrong set of stairs were trapped inside and burned alive. The elevator broke down after only four trips, and women began jumping down the shaft to their deaths. Panic ensued as the workers fled to every exit. The manager turned the fire hose on it, but the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire broke out in a rag bin on the eighth floor. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris’ company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way. Their employees were paid a mere $15 a week, despite working 12 hours a day, every day. READ MORE: How the Horrific Tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Led to Workplace Safety LawsĪdded to this delinquency were Blanck and Harris’ notorious anti-worker policies. The fire escape, as all would come to see, was shoddily constructed, and could not support the weight of more than a few women at a time. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent theft by the workers and the other opened inward only. At the time of the fire, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and it could hold only 12 people at a time. It was a sweatshop in every sense of the word: a cramped space lined with workstations and packed with poor immigrant workers, mostly teenage women who did not speak English. The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the 10-story Asch Building in downtown Manhattan. The tragedy led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of factory workers. In one of the darkest moments of America’s industrial history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burns, killing 146 workers, on March 25, 1911.
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