Last Survivor of 1911 Sweatshop Fire Dies

Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in New York that claimed 146 lives and raised the nation’s consciousness about workplace safety, died at her home in Beverly Hills on Thursday. She was 107.

Her memories of the industrial disaster that ultimately transformed working conditions for Americans remained sharp well past her 100th birthday. She lived independently until she became ill several months ago, amazing friends and family with her energy and an intellectual zest that had her studying Spanish, her seventh language, in her last years.

She supported the labor movement, speaking at a garment workers rally in Los Angeles when she was 104. In January she was featured in the first episode of a PBS television series on centenarians called “The Living Century.”

Freedman was born in Vienna in 1893 when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. At 15, she joined the wave of European immigrants to America, arriving in New York on the steamship Mauritania in 1909.

Although she had a comfortable life in Vienna, she regarded her arrival in the United States “like a miracle”--the first of several in a remarkable life.

The daughter of a businessman, she stayed home and tended house. But insulted when her sister said that housework was not really work, she decided to become like other American girls and get a job.

“I wanted to show that I’m [a] real American and I want to work like everybody else. And I went on my own, found a job,” she said in the PBS documentary. “And then, I almost paid with my life.”

She became one of more than 500 young women--mostly 16- to 23-year-old Italian and Jewish immigrants--who found work at Triangle Shirtwaist Co., which made a popular style of dresses. She was 16 and was hired to stitch buttons. The going wage was $3 for a six-day week.

Freedman was at work on March 25, 1911, when a fire alarm sounded at 4:43 p.m. The factory, which occupied the 10-story Asch Building off Washington Square in Lower Manhattan, had 700 employees, and nearly all were there on that Saturday. It was payday and close to quitting time.

On the eighth floor, a small fire smoldering in a rag bin had suddenly exploded, fed by oil from sewing machines and by the rows of tissue patterns hanging above the cutting tables. Workers surged to the fire doors, but the doors had been bolted to prevent the women from taking breaks or stealing. The factory had one fire escape, but when women piled on, it collapsed, plunging them to the pavement nine stories below.

Flames chased the workers, igniting their skirts and hair. Many felt they had no choice but to jump. Some aimed for firefighters’ nets, which did little good. A 13-year-old girl hanging by her fingertips for several minutes on a 10th-floor ledge fell into one of the nets, along with two other women, but it split apart on impact and all three died. A man was seen gallantly offering women his hand as they stepped one after another into the thin air, until finally he embraced one of them and dropped her before falling to his own death. “They hit the pavement like rain,” a fire chief sadly testified much later, after the sidewalks had been cleared of the broken bodies.

Within minutes, the fire bounded to the ninth floor, where Freedman worked.

“All of a sudden, you’ve got a terrible panic,” Freedman said. “Everybody was running to the door. It was locked.”

She worked just one floor below the executives. She wondered: Where were they?

She ran up to the 10th floor, but the bosses were gone. While terror reigned below them, they had fled to the roof.

“They saved themselves already,” she said.

Freedman pulled her dress over her head and rushed to the roof. Firemen hoisted her to the top of the adjacent building. She was exhausted, her faced was charred and her eyebrows singed, but she made it down several flights of stairs, sat on a stoop and cried.

The flames were extinguished in half an hour, but 126 women and 20 men were dead. Investigators later decided that a lit cigarette was the probable cause of the worst factory fire in New York history.

Horror followed the revelations of conditions inside the building: the locked doors, poor sanitation and crowding, and the employers’ disregard for the simplest precautions, such as fire drills. Public outrage intensified with the acquittals on manslaughter charges of the Triangle owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck.

The Triangle fire became a watershed in labor history, resulting in changes that profoundly affected the modern American workplace. Thirty-six laws were passed in three years, improving everything from building design and fire regulations to working hours for women and children.

Although the Triangle owners tried to buy Freedman’s silence, she refused to lie about the locked doors and did not participate in their trial. She left the garment business and went on to college but never forgot about the greed and exploitation that caused so much suffering and death.

“The executives with a couple steps could have opened the door. But they thought they were better than the working people,” Freedman said in the PBS show. “What good is a rich man and he hasn’t got a heart? I feel it. Still. I feel very bad about it.”

Surviving the fire was the first miracle in her life, Freedman said, and she often spoke of two more. The second came three years later, in 1914, when she returned to Austria for a visit and wound up saving a man’s life as World War I erupted around them.

A friend of her grandparents had rushed into their house one day and begged for shelter. He was a Russian Jew who had been spying for Austria. Now he was being pursued by the Cossacks, who were terrorizing the part of Austria where Freedman was staying. She hustled him to the basement and buried him in a bin of coal. When a Cossack showed up at the door moments later, Freedman--a tiny woman, barely 5 feet tall--explained that she and her family were visitors from America and asked him to leave.

The Cossack left, and the next morning, so did the spy. Several weeks later, Freedman found the man’s wife at the door, on her knees in thanks for saving the father of their five children.

Freedman said the third miracle was seeing two of her children recover from polio during the epidemic of 1942-43.

She was married for 25 years to Harry Freedman, who ran a typewriter business. After his death in 1952, she went to business school and at the age of 59 was hired by the Mark Cross pen company in New York. When she was 64, she left for a job in customer relations at Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., but lied about her age. Fifteen years later, when her employers thought she had finally reached pension age, she retired. She was 79.

She moved permanently to Los Angeles when she was in her 90s. She continued her lifelong passion for learning, taking classes and painting. At 100, she went to Mexico to study Spanish. She always dressed up in heels, had her hair done weekly and did her own shopping. She steadfastly spurned all invitations to move in with her children, explaining that “young people belong together and I have a life of my own.”

A year ago, she mesmerized Occidental College students when she spoke at a seminar on sweatshops. “There was a chain of history that Rose was a part of and that still threads through the 20th and 21st centuries, from New York to Los Angeles,” said Peter Dreier, the professor who organized the seminar. “It was so wonderful because she’s seen the worst and it didn’t make her cynical. She turned her anger into a positive force in her life.”

Her family said that although she never lost sight of the lessons of the Triangle fire, she was not obsessed by it. She took pride in her family, particularly the women, who have all pursued careers with her strong encouragement.

“She loved her career . . . and felt that added a dimension to her life,” said granddaughter Dana Walden, head of 20th Century Fox Television. “ . . . She believed quite fully in doing things that make you happy.’

Freedman, who was honored on International Women’s Day in 1998, is survived by a daughter, Arlene March of Los Angeles; two sons, Herbert, of Rye County, N.Y., and Robert, of Los Angeles; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.