Faces of the victims of the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 workers perished. Mostly young women and girls. the largely Jewish and Italian immigrants working there were burned to death or died from smoke inhalation attempting to flee the building only to find the exits locked by management seeking to prevent unauthorized breaks. The outrage gave great impetus to the organizing of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The building itself survived and still stands at 23-29 Washington Pl. of Washington Square Park in New York City.

Forṿerṭs⁩ ⁨פארװערטס⁩⁩ (New York City). Vol. 14 No. 4687. March 27, 1911.

Forverts (New York) began in1897 in New York City and took its name from the paper of the German Social Democratic Party, Vorwärts. Its origins politically were in Yiddish-speaking dissidents of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party led by Louis Miller and Abraham Cahan who joined Debs’ Social Democratic Party of America at its inception. Eventually it became a national paper, aligned with the Socialist Party’s Constructivist wing with a circulation of 120,000 by 1912. The paper played a significant in the birth and life of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union with Benjamin Schlesinger, a former president of the ILGWU, becoming its general manager in 1923. The paper remained loyal to the SP throughout the 1920’s but became a mainstream liberal paper, albeit with social democratic appeals, by the late 1930s. It is was one of the most important left wing publications in US history, and was more widely read than the Socialist Party’s largest English language papers for many years.

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