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

Abstract

Richard A. Greenwald argues that the New York Factory Investigating Commission (fic) created in the wake of the Triangle Fire “became the embodiment of Protocolism” (p. 217). More specifically, the fic drew on the ideas, ideals, and personnel of the Protocols of Peace proposed by Louis Brandeis and others as a means to bring both peace and rationality to the garment trades following the great strikes of 1909 and 1910. The claim is well worth exploring. The fic not only transformed working conditions in New York, it invented urban liberalism and forged the first working alliance between middle-class experts and reformers and machine politicians. Reformers such as Henry Moskowitz and Belle Moskowitz had helped hammer out and implement the Protocols and then worked closely with Al Smith and Robert Wagner. Unsurprisingly, as Greenwald shows, those reformers brought similar ideas to both projects and a similar vision of a rationalized market in which profits flowed from efficiencies rather than from naked exploitation of workers.