🦋 Labor history: something I'm wondering about
I read a lot this past week about the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist Factory -- and this is a piece of American history that I consider part of common knowledge, something that people (taking myself as an example) are likely to know about without their having any detailed familiarity with the history of the labor movement in the US. (And indeed I did not know a crucial bit of this piece of history until this week, namely that two years prior to the fire, the Triangle company had successfully broken an effort by its workers to unionize.) Of course it is dangerous to extrapolate from my own experience and knowledge to that of people around me. But I want to pursue this for a minute.
Lessie Jo Frazier talks in Salt in the Sand about the process of institutional memory in Chile, whereby the massacre at St. Mary's School of Iquique is remembered as a totem, as a way of forgetting similar repressive events in the history of Chile's labor movement. This is making me wonder if there's a similar process in place here in the US, whereby one factory fire stands in for a whole class of events, a whole period of history, and what memories are lost in this process, what distortions are introduced. I ultimately don't have much to say about this -- I am not a historian and as I say am extrapolating totally from my own experience -- but thought it might be useful to throw out there.
posted morning of Sunday, March 27th, 2011
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