The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York

America searched for an answer to \u0022The Labor Question\u0022 during the Progressive Era in an effort to avoid the unrest and violence that flared so often in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the ladies' garment industry, a unique experiment in industrial democracy brought together labor, management, and the public. As Richard Greenwald explains, it was an attempt to \u0022square free market capitalism with ideals of democracy to provide a fair and just workplace.\u0022 Led by Louis Brandeis, this group negotiated the \u0022Protocols of Peace.\u0022 But in the midst of this experiment, 146 mostly young, immigrant women died in the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. As a result of the fire, a second, interrelated experiment, New York's Factory Investigating Commission (FIC)—led by Robert Wagner and Al Smith—created one of the largest reform successes of the period. The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York uses these linked episodes to show the increasing interdependence of labor, industry, and the state. Greenwald explains how the Protocols and the FIC best illustrate the transformation of industrial democracy and the struggle for political and economic justice.

Richard A. Greenwald is Director of the Business, Society, & Culture Program and Associate Professor of History at Drew University, Madison, NJ. He is co-editor of Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective and serves on the editorial board of the journal Working USA.

"Greenwald offers a fresh approach to this oft-traveled terrain..[He] meticulously details the many semantic and political shifts that characterized [the protocols].highly recommended." WorkingUSA "Law and Order in Industry is packed with interesting historical facts, based on the author's examination of an impressive volume of primary and secondary resources." Jonathan Cutler, author of Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism "Greenwald's study of industrial democracy is still an ambitious effort that offers new insight into industrial relations in the Progressive era and suggests the ambiguous legacy of workplace reform for both the agency of workers and the possibility for genuine industrial democracy." The American Historical Review "Greenwald offers a detailed, well-researched account that eschews simple characterizations...Greenwald's monograph makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Progressive Era...This fine case study offers thought-provoking insights into the intersection of work, class, gender, urban politics, and reform. At minimum, it should be of interest to urban, gender, business, labor and Progressive Era historians as well as to scholars of industrial relations and labor studies." H-Net "Greenwald offers a highly readable, albeit detailed, account of an important era in labor and industrial relations history. In it readers will notice similarities to contemporary union concerns: tensions between rank and file activism and bureaucratic structuring in both unions and industrial relations, the challenges of organizing an entire industry, the limits to state labor reform, and the fragility of political alliances...Careful readers will see the relevance in high relief." Labor Studies Journal