The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is to this day the deadliest industrial fire in the history of New York City, killing 146 workers. The doors that should have opened up to the stairwells and exits were locked in order to prevent the workers from taking breaks. As a result, many chose to jump from the windows. In the photo presented here, police officers are looking up as workers descend to their deaths.
Morris Rosenfeld had already firmly established himself as the voice of the proletariat and the face of the sweatshop poets by March 25, 1911, the day of the fire. It was therefore in his line of duty to publish a poem (accompanied by an article) just a few days later on the front page of Forverts, mourning the loss of the many workers, protesting the evil of the deadly "locked door," and ultimately, calling on his comrades to break it open.
One is inclined to read the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld as overdramatized proletariat verse--it is bitter, angry, and overwhelmingly sad--but to do so would be an unjust offense to not only his poetry but to Rosenfeld himself, who personally experienced nearly every misfortune and hardship he writes of. Since his first visit to America in 1882, he was wedded to poverty. After fully immigrating to America in 1886, he worked in the Lower East Side sweatshops as a presser. He became ill from the wretched work conditions, ultimately becoming paralyzed in half his body. He buried several children, including his only son at fifteen years of age.
Morris Rosenfeld was born in 1862 in Boksze in Russian Poland. He received a traditional Jewish education. At fifteen, he began writing Yiddish poetry. Around the age of twenty, as a tailor in London, he began writing labor poems. At twenty-four, in the U.S. he began writing socialist poems as well. He became famous both in an out of the Jewish realm--in 1898 a Harvard professor translated a book of his poems into English. Over ten thousand people attended the funeral of the "Sweatshop Poet" in 1923.
