Essay

Remembering the Unknowns: The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Author(s): Ellen Wiley Todd

Source: American Art , Vol. 23, No. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 60-81

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649776

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60 Fall 2009

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61 American Art Volume 23, Number 3 © 2009 Smithsonian Institution

Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Triangle Fire Memorial to the Unknowns, 1912. Marble, 9 ft. 10 in. high including pedestal. The Evergreens Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

On the afternoon of Saturday March 25, 1911, fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company. Located on the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building in New York’s Greenwich Village, the factory, which was the city’s largest producer of the popular high-necked shirtwaist, had been notorious for undermining garment union attempts to improve working condi- tions.1 Within twenty-five minutes after sparks ignited oil-soaked cotton scraps, 146 young Jewish and Italian immigrant workers, all but 13 of them young women, perished in the massive blaze. Days later, after hundreds of family members had filed past coffins to claim the victims, seven unidentified bodies remained at the morgue. A committee representing predominantly Jewish garment workers of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Women’s Trade Union League requested that the bodies be released for a public funeral proces- sion, citing the long-standing custom of the unions to provide a decent funeral for every worker.2 City officials refused. The coroner professed hopes that more bodies would be identified in the future, but Commissioner of Charities Michael Drummond, responsible for orchestrating New York’s recovery and relief efforts, reportedly feared mass expressions of outrage. Municipal leaders announced

that instead the bodies would be interred on April 5 in a private ceremony at the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn, where the city owned a plot. In response, the union and its allies immediately pro- claimed a memorial parade for all city workers, also to take place on April 5. Widely distributed handbills in English, Yiddish, and Italian asked all workers to “join in rendering a last sad tribute of sympathy and affection.”3

These simultaneous memorials occurred on a rainy day but under altogether dif- ferent circumstances. In Manhattan the funeral march (fig. 1), with almost four hundred thousand people both march- ing and watching, converged quietly on Washington Square, proceeding north from the Lower East Side and south from Madison Square. Meanwhile, five male city officials, headed by Commissioner Drummond, moved in the opposite direc- tion, ferrying caskets of the unknown victims from the morgue across the East River to the nondenominational cemetery in Brooklyn. There a Roman Catholic priest, an Episcopal minister, and a rabbi read their respective burial services. The memorial service concluded with a quartet from the Elks Brooklyn lodge singing “Abide with Me” and “Nearer My God to Thee,” period favorites from the Protestant repertoire of hymns.4 But these victims

Remembering the Unknowns The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Ellen Wiley Todd

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62 Fall 2009

were laid to rest in an isolated field, at the distant perimeter of the cemetery, far from the mourning workers. Deliberately separated from their communities of class, occupation, ethnicity, and perhaps even religion, they were bid farewell, not by the young women with whom they shared the labors of sewing, but by a group of men only wishing to avoid the presumed dangers of collective grief.

A year and eight months after the fire, in January 1913, the official magazine of the Red Cross pictured a monument that had been erected over the site sometime in the preceding month without any public fanfare or apparently any unveiling ceremony (fig. 2).5 The frontispiece to this essay shows the monument as it exists today, beautifully tended, with the once empty field occupied by later graves. A large vertical slab bears a relief of a half- kneeling, half-crouching, mourning female figure, carved in a quietly anguished pose of internalized grief. Her arms encircle the neck of a large Greek-style krater, and her hands are clasped. Her head bows forward, resting on a mass of draped cloth whose classically inspired folds and forceful twists feature prominently in the composition. Drapery that rests across her lap loops upward to frame the exposed left side of her ample body. Coiling over her right

shoulder, it is gathered in the arc of her hands around the urn. She weeps into the substantial folds of material gathered under her face, marking the loss of workers whose hands will never again fashion cloth into garments. The inscription beneath the figure reads, “In sympathy and sorrow citizens of New York raise this monument over the graves of unidentified women and children who with one hundred and thirty nine others perished by fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory Washington Place March 25 1911.” On the reverse, a smaller panel acknowledges that Mayor William J. Gaynor’s relief fund, administered by the Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee of the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, left a “sufficient balance to erect this monument.”6 The committee was chaired by Robert W. de Forest, a lawyer who had provided important politi- cal support to the fledgling Municipal Art Society’s City Beautiful activities, which afforded him connections to the nation’s elite sculptors. It was probably de Forest, on behalf of the Emergency Relief Committee, who commissioned Evelyn Beatrice Longman, a protégé of prominent sculptor Daniel Chester French, to design the memorial’s relief.7

The impetus for the Longman monu- ment, which has been unattributed until now, arose from controversy over memorial activities culminating in the public funeral and the private interment of the unknown victims. In the days after the fire, debates about funeral arrangements and mourning behavior were deeply embedded in the ongoing politics of class, gender, and labor in the aftermath of the 1909 Shirtwaist strike, whose failures to provide safety reform were seen by many constituen- cies to have culminated in the Triangle fire.8 More broadly, however, the funeral procession and the monument operated on relatively distinct memory principles and launched forms of remembrance that initially seemed oppositional but over time have become more atuned to one another.

On the second anniversary of the fire,

1 Mourners gather alongside the funeral procession route to honor the Triangle Fire victims, New York, April 5, 1911. Photo- graph. UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

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63 American Art

in 1913, ILGWU labor leader Pauline M. Newman argued for a living, activist process of remembering. “The way to honor the memory of the dead is to build up a strong and powerful organization that will prevent such disasters as that of two years ago and serve as a monument to the dead. Lest we forget!”9 She demanded ongoing labor organizing and advocated for improved working conditions, the results of which, she claimed, would constitute a perpetual memorial to fallen workers.10 By contrast to this activist agenda, the Longman monument appeared unannounced and remained shrouded in silence for years, allowing those whose aesthetic and ideological interests it served to move forward and forget, exactly what Newman did not want to have happen. Historian James Young has described this type of forgetting, writing that “once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. In shoulder- ing the memory-work, monuments may relieve viewers of their memory burden.”11

In their own ways, the memorial activities and the monument secured the identities and beliefs of their respective participants and audiences.

The memorial parade took its form from a twenty-year heritage of immigrant Jewish public funeral processions, but it downplayed religious signs to allow for a multiethnic ceremony. As historian Arthur Goren has shown, these public funerals were both rituals of collective affirmation and political declarations designed to reaf- firm a way of life, the goals of the fallen, and to enhance the Jewish self-image. Organizers and participants performed both for themselves and for Gentile observ- ers with the aid of the press that regularly covered these large-scale events.12 The monument, although it served as a gesture of atonement on the part of the upper- middle-class elites who commissioned it, should be read against a shifting class-based discourse on urban social control and moral order that pervaded the ideology of the Charity Organization Society. As outlined by historian Paul Boyer, this or- ganization tried to provide gently coercive examples of correct social behavior to immigrant populations, in the hopes that inculcating individual self-control and self-improvement would result in a more civilized populace. Greater cooperation between classes toward shared ideals of civic reform would bring about more “natural relations” between classes.13 By the 1910s, however, a new generation of social activists and workers had embraced social theories that focused on the practical environment, proposing legislation for higher wages as well as improvements in conditions at work and at home. Instead of addressing codes of public behavior around assembly, protest, and mourning—as in the wake of the fire—new alliances of progressives sought workplace change and social justice. Under this newer model, progressive elites and advocates of industrial democracy worked in common cause, as would happen through corrective workplace legislation in the wake of the fire. But it

2 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Triangle Fire Memorial to the Unknowns. From American Red Cross Bulletin 8 (January 1913), 42

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64 Fall 2009

was the older model of dignified mourning behavior that appeared in the monument, whose classical iconography and especially its location largely failed to signify for the communities it memorialized. Indeed, unintended insult entered the equation in the monument’s location for one potential constituency of mourners; placed at the cemetery’s edge, the grave occupied the position that observant Jewish tradition reserved for drifters and criminals.14 Only when this section of the cemetery with its accompanying plantings developed around the monument did it assume the integrated form it has today, in its honorific plot with a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline in the distance (fig. 3).

Relief, Outrage, and Mourning

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, relief efforts came from two distinct groups, union activists and allies on the one hand, and the Charity Organization Society on the other.

The first group, called the Joint Relief Committee, included activists from ILGWU Local 25, who were joined by like-minded progressive organizations that had supported its strike causes in the past: the Women’s Trade Union League, the Workmen’s Circle, and the Jewish Daily Forward. The second major group coalesced around the Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee of the Charity Organization Society—the eventual source of funds for the memo- rial. Spearheaded by Mayor Gaynor and buttressed by high-society worthies, the committee opened an office in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Madison Square. The committee worked with staff recruited from the United Hebrew Charities and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, while the police supplied victims’ names. Members of the Joint Relief Committee, many of whom spoke the languages of the bereaved, accompanied trained Red Cross workers during interviews with the survivors and families to learn what kinds of help

3 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Triangle Fire Memorial to the Unknowns, 1912 (distant view). The Evergreens Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

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65 American Art

were needed. As early as Wednesday, March 28, most families on the police list had been visited. The relief groups also shared responsibility for distributing funds. The union took charge of relief for past and present union members, while the Red Cross committee helped non-union victims and provided aid to families of immigrant workers who were still living in Europe and dependent on money sent to them. Throughout these initial days, money poured in from religious and educational communities as well as from cultural and commercial

groups that donated proceeds from theatrical events and daily receipts from stores.15

But if these relief efforts crossed class, cultural, and political boundaries, battle lines were drawn in the daily newspapers as public outrage about the fire generated calls for the blame to be laid at someone’s door as well as demands for safety legisla- tion and for different forms of public mourning, especially for the unknowns. These sentiments escalated within the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose stories supported workers and often fueled the kind of emotional content that city of- ficials mistrusted. Indeed, most papers deployed the discursive features of period melodrama, as it has been described by film scholar Ben Singer. The New York American, for example, vastly inflated the numbers of trapped employees (from 500 to 1,500) and elevated the body count to 175 (fig. 4). In the tragedy’s aftermath, newspapers deployed melodramatic tropes of overwrought emotion, moral polariza- tion, and sensationalism that highlighted suffering and difference, especially in class and gender terms.16 In particular, news accounts focused on female working-class mourning behavior, emphasizing stories of distraught workers. Hearst’s New York American preyed on families, staging pictures at the morgue before and after bodies were identified. In one such set (figs. 5, 6), six female workers confront the camera “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek Lost Relatives,” while in the photograph

4 Policemen and bystanders with bodies of Triangle Fire victims on Greene Street, New York Ameri- can, March 26, 1911, 1. Photo, courtesy of Joshua Brown

5 “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek Lost Relatives,” New York American, March 27, 1911, 2

6 “Grief Stricken Relatives Leaving the Morgue,” New York American, March 27, 1911, 3

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66 Fall 2009

documenting the later scene, relatives hold handkerchiefs and one woman swoons, supported by friends on the right. The caption reports exaggerated responses ranging from “hysterical to dumb with despair.” Even the more staid New York Times condemned “scores of women, transformed by grief into unreasoning furies, who resisted ordinary efforts to check them. They rushed about moaning and crying and tearing their hair. They were hardly capable of making a thorough examination of the bodies.”17 Connections between female hysteria and irrationality, typical of the period more broadly, were linked to the Triangle Fire itself. A few of the published descriptions attributed greater loss of life to female panic. Such readings failed, however, to account for the locked doors and crowded conditions on the site of the fire or the loss of daugh- ters in their teens and early twenties. These young women often provided the sole support to families and served as their only English speakers. Commentators also ignored different cultural and religious forms of mourning. Accounts of public memorials in the Jewish Daily Forward, for example, routinely cited physical lam-

entation and public outcry as typical and acceptable.18

Class conflict over behavior—linked both to mourning traditions and larger mistrust between constituencies—also suffused major memorial gatherings and protest meetings around the city. The sharpest distinction between class and be- havior was drawn by Rose Schneiderman, the tireless union activist who had partici- pated in the Waistmakers strike and lost friends in the fire (fig. 7). Schneiderman’s now well-known remarks were made on April 2 at an unprecedented cross-class meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, a site rented by Ann Morgan, suffrage activist, garment union supporter, and daughter of the famous financier. As Triangle Fire historian Leon Stein described the setting, the upper galleries were filled with Lower East Siders, and the orchestra with women “trailing fur and feathers.”19 The attempt to find common ground in civic reform began when those in charge of the meeting offered a resolution asking for the establishment of a Bureau of Fire Prevention, more inspectors, and workmen’s compensa- tion. Those in the balconies voiced their

distrust of citizen committees that failed to include union workers or union inspectors. As the meeting deteriorated, alternating between applause and boos from the balcony, Schneiderman intervened:

I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I were to come here to talk good fel- lowship. . . . We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbear- able, the strong hand of the law

7 Speakers at mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House. Rose Schneiderman at upper right. New York World, April 3, 1911, 3

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67 American Art

is allowed to press down heavily upon us. Public officials have only words of warning for us—warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back when we rise. . . . I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. And the only way is through a strong working-class movement.20

Schneiderman adopted the rhetoric of sep- arate working-class activism that Pauline Newman would two years later claim as a memorializing process. For Schneiderman, the civic ideal of controlled behavior would never emerge from “natural rela- tions” between classes but would only be dictated from the top. And, finally, it would not improve working lives.

Ironically, the memorial procession to the fallen workers on April 5 served as a decorous rebuke to the city elites who were simultaneously on their way to Brooklyn to inter the unidentified dead. Where police had feared “the thickly populated foreign districts—where emo- tions are poignant and demonstrative,” they found instead an ominous silence in the gathering of four hundred thousand who marched and lined the two parade routes for six hours. Organizers called for an end to class conflict, and the Morgen Zhurnal urged, “Ideologies and politics should be set aside, opponents and enemies forgotten, and all should bow their heads and grieve silently over the victims of the horrendous misfortune.” The Jewish Daily Forward described the procession as demonstrating workers’ noble sense of duty as they proclaimed the unity and strength of unions.21 The organizers banned all visual forms of political protest and overt religious expression, putting in their stead or- ganization and union banners (fig. 8). Instead of the plain pine box of observant Jewish tradition—to symbolize the fallen—they substituted a hearse covered with flowers and drawn by white horses covered in black netting—demonstrative signs typical of Italian funerals (fig. 9). Operating as a civic memorial, the pro- cession deployed symbols that represented the nameless victims who in turn stood for all the dead. Silence, orderliness, sorrow, and sobriety permeated a crowd with a substantial female contingent who, on a pouring rainy day and in deference to their fallen sisters, marched without hats, umbrellas, or overshoes.22

8 Mourners from the Ladies Waist and Dressmakers Union Local 25 and the United Hebrew Trades of New York march in the streets after the Triangle Fire, 1911. Pho- tograph. UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

9 Trade parade in memory of the Triangle Fire victims, April 5, 1911. Bain News Service Photo- graph. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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The Longman Memorial

In the Evergreens Cemetery memorial, the same qualities of sorrow and dignified grief characterized the design of Evelyn Beatrice Longman’s sculpture as it was installed in early December 1912. The monument’s commission, its maker’s background, its setting and iconography, and the cloak of silence enveloping its completion come together to reinforce the web of the sometimes intersecting but more often separate class, gender, and ethnic positions on memorializing detailed above. Why was Longman, a female sculptor, chosen for this memorial? Under what circumstances did she produce it, and what might have been her thoughts on a commission so fraught with controversy and grief? Why did she never include the memorial in her own records, and why was there no press coverage when it appeared? While some of what follows emerges from concrete docu- mentation, other features of the interpreta- tion are offered in the spirit of plausible speculation.

By the time Longman (1874–1954) received the commission for the Triangle memorial’s relief sculpture sometime in early 1912, she was fully embarked on a successful career as a sculptor of major public works, private memorials, allegorical figures, and smaller portrait busts. Longman (fig. 10) came of age at a time when increasing numbers of women were exhibiting and selling sculpture. Unlike many of her female peers, who specialized in small-scale genre works or garden fountains, however, she sought her reputation as a monumental public sculp- tor. The field was dominated by men who discouraged women’s attempts to compete for these prize commissions. In 1912 her position and achievements in the sculp- tural profession, her integrity and ideals in relation to the constituency represented by the Emergency Relief Committee, and her biography all contributed to her being the logical choice in the view of that committee.23

Longman’s training and professional connections placed her at the heart of the sculptural elite in New York City, despite the fact that she was born in Ohio and grew up in Chicago. She found initial inspiration from visiting the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in her hometown, where she saw dozens of women receiving their first experience making sculptural decoration. After a two-year stint at Olivet College in Michigan, from 1896 to 1898, she sub- mitted a portfolio of drawings and was accepted to study sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There she came under the tutelage of Beaux- Arts sculptor Lorado Taft, who not only encouraged promising women but also held grand ambitions for America’s civic sculptural movement, tied to City Beautiful ideals. Already focused and ambitious for herself, Longman found Taft a strong mentor and completed her four-year program in two years. Recognizing that her best opportunities for major commissions were on the East Coast, she departed for New York City in 1900. She was armed with letters of introduction from Taft and from Art Institute director William M. R. French to his brother sculptor Daniel Chester French as well as a return ticket provided by skeptical friends.24 She would never need it. French hired her as his first and only female studio assistant and soon wrote his brother that the strength of Longman’s work “entirely vindicates your recommendation.”25

Longman rented a studio at 11 East Fourteenth Street. Over the next several years, until about 1906, she combined labor in French’s nearby Greenwich Village studio with her own sculptural production.26 Longman and French’s three-decade relationship, which lasted until his death in 1931, began with Longman very much the student-assistant to the great teacher- sculptor, twenty-five years her senior, and the overworked French sent commissions

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69 American Art

her way. Before long it grew into a close personal friendship extending to French’s entire family. As evidenced in correspon- dence between Longman and French and with other sculptors, their association was touched by the paternalistic or def- erential age and gender dynamics typical of the period and the sculptural vocation. On balance, however, the relationship evolved into one of mutual professional dependence and abiding trust, with French relying on Longman’s acute as- sessments, and she on his.27

While some early commentators focused on her beauty as a partial excuse for her success—journalist Mitchell Mannering described “dark eyes” and a

“wealth of dusky hair, which falls down on both sides of her forehead, like that of the Sistine Madonna”—others fol- lowed French’s lead in offering her full support.28 After Longman won the pres- tigious commission for the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel doors at Annapolis (1906–8)—securing the commission in a blind competition and almost losing it when her gender and age were revealed—she left for her first trip to France and Italy, to acquire knowledge and inspiration for her largest and most important work to date. Already indicat- ing his reliance on her, French wrote that the trip to Europe was merited by her “industrious apprenticeship,” and that her maturity would allow her to profit from learning the academic language he had been too young to understand when he went abroad. But the sculptor also cautioned her against the lure of the “foreign man,” opining, “I don’t believe it would be good for your art and . . . it would be well-nigh fatal to mine!” He continued:

The fact is that I have come to lean on you so hard, to trust your judgment about my work so much and, more than all, your high ideals and aspirations and your buoyant enthusiasm are such an inspira- tion to me that I—well!—that I hope some other fellow will not deprive me of them. . . [.] So please come back, content to stay a few years, at least, in New York to help me, as I will try to help you, up to the top of Parnassus.29

Undoubtedly for her own reasons of am- bition rather than his more self-interested ones, Longman heeded this advice well after 1906, the date of this letter, celebrat- ing her marriage to Nathaniel Batchelder only in late June 1920. By that time, at forty-five, Longman had completed a body of significant monumental public sculpture, become the first female sculp- tor elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design (in 1919,

10 Evelyn Beatrice Longman working on the Horsford Memorial Bronze Doors for the Wellesley College Library, 1911. Photo- graph, Loomis Chaffee School Archives, Windsor, Connecticut. From Marilyn Rabetz and Walter Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder (The Loomis Chaffee School, 1993), title page

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70 Fall 2009

having been made an associate in 1909), and won numerous awards. Though com- mentators continued to refer to her as a female sculptor rather than simply as a sculptor, she had earned her credentials and her reputation by adhering to codes of strict professionalism—codes that many historians of women artists now recognize as the avenue to women’s accep- tance in the arts.30 She was praised for her extraordinary work ethic, her punctuality in completing commissions, and her am- bition coupled with a modest demeanor. Fellow sculptors valued her candor and fairness, and French commended her

business acumen coupled with integrity, saying, “She has lots of common sense and knows how to apply it, and any Committee that has dealings with her can be assured of having little trouble with her in the carrying out of her contract.”31 These characteristics would have appealed to the Emergency Relief Committee that commissioned a memorial within months of the Triangle tragedy and, after all the controversy surrounding the unknown victims, seemed to desire its timely, expe- ditious, and quiet completion.

When the commission was announced in the Red Cross Relief Report, Longman was well known to sculptors, critics, and the urban elites connected to those circles. Her ties to French had helped to place her well within a professional class and bourgeois social register. In fact, her rela- tion to Robert W. de Forest, chair of the Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee, may have already been established, and I believe the request for the design was offered directly to her rather than coming through French. In addition to his legal duties and intense involvement with the art world, including the Municipal Art Society and the National Sculpture Society, de Forest had been president of the Charity Organization Society of New York City since 1888. In that capacity, he came to be chair of the Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee that dis- persed the relief funds to Triangle victims and set aside funds for the memorial. Fittingly, the Charity Organization Society was housed in the United Charities Building, which had been financed by public-minded philanthropist-banker John S. Kennedy.32 Sometime after Kennedy’s death in 1909, Longman carved a portrait bust to be installed in the building in his memory, completing it in 1912, about the time she received the Triangle Fire commission. De Forest, a close associate of Kennedy’s and the eulo- gist at his funeral, may well have chosen Longman for the Kennedy bust. From his knowledge of this work and several

11 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. de Forest, 1922. Bronze with gold leaf, 5 1/2 in. diameter. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Robert W. de Forest. Photo © Metropolitan Museum of Art

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71 American Art

other portraits of New York dignitaries, de Forest would have known her abilities as a sympathetic memorialist and seen her as a logical choice for the Triangle monument.33 Evidence for his continuing respect for her work can be found in a more personal work. In 1922 Longman sculpted a bronze and gold-leaf portrait

medallion of de Forest and his wife, Emily Johnston de Forest, on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary (fig. 11).

The circumstances around the Triangle commission become more complicated when architect Henry Bacon (fig. 12) is considered a possible additional maker. In early 1912 a book-length report on the disbursement of relief funds was pub- lished. On the last page, a brief paragraph announces the monument, suggesting that the maker had already been decided when the book was published:

After it was certain that not all the money would be required for relief[,] an ap- propriation was made at the suggestion of the Commissioner of Public Charities for erecting a monument on the graves of the

unidentified dead in Evergreen Cemetery, at a cost of not over $2500.00. This will be designed by Mr. Henry Bacon, in collabora- tion with Miss Longman.34

French had introduced Longman to Bacon, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial, and all three were close friends who eventually collaborated on that monument. At the time of the Triangle commission, Bacon and Longman had completed their first major work together and were just embarking on a second.35 De Forest, who was well informed about sculptors and architects, may have suggested a Longman-Bacon pairing. Unfortunately, neither the Red Cross files nor the Longman or Bacon archives contain any records that elucidate the details of the commission or the design process, although it is likely that de Forest corresponded with at least Longman about the memorial for the fire victims.

We can also envision a scenario of work both with and without Bacon, since no record of his participation survives beyond this initial mention. At the time both Longman and Bacon were deeply involved with more substantial and lucrative commissions, since both were arguably at the busiest and most produc- tive times of their careers. Motivated by a sense of civic responsibility and personal obligation to de Forest and the compara- tively small scale of the Triangle work, both participants could have agreed to execute the memorial. The simple ped- estal with its slightly trapezoidal slab re- quired little time; Bacon either sketched it or advised Longman on the choice. Longman’s task, executing the detailed plaster relief of the mourning figure, would have been more demanding. After making the plaster, she hired Piccirilli Brothers, the carvers, to produce the final monument. Two handwritten letters in December from Longman to Charles L. Magee, secretary of the National Red Cross, confirm her participation—the only surviving archival record. Her

12 Henry Bacon, ca. 1900. From Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 83 (1911–12): 369

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recitation reveals her attention to detail and her professionalism. The first, dated December 4, 1912, states:

I have intended writing to let you know that I had not forgotten about the photograph of the “Triangle Factory Fire” memorial or delayed unavoidably. First, Piccirilli Bros, who cut the marble, were weeks later in fin- ishing it than they promised me; then when my photographer went up to their studio, he found that the marble was so placed that he could not get his camera far enough away from it; then we waited for the setting of the monument; then for the planting to be done. Almost immediately afterward the snow fell and we had to wait for it to disappear.

Photos were finally taken last Monday but it was a gray, dull day that [illegible] they did not come out well, and the photographer also forgot my instructions to show the entire planting in one of them. The photos must be taken again on the first bright day after

tomorrow. I am sending you the ones received from the photographer this afternoon, just to prove I have not been idle, but I would not wish them to be used in any way, as they do not begin to do justice to the monument which really looked beautiful.36

On December 23 Longman wrote again, this time enclosing photographs that she still found unsatisfactory but deemed better than the previous ones. Nonetheless, she assured Magee that “sunlight seems to be needed to process a really fine picture in this case—though the monument itself looks well to the eye in every light.” When the photograph (see fig. 2) appeared in the American Red Cross Bulletin, the caption repeated part of the inscription but made no mention of the monument’s maker(s). If Longman was indeed pleased with the memorial, it seems unlikely she would have asked that her name be excluded from any description of it. But, unlike other commissions, she left no drawings, no plaster relief, and no photographs, ex- amples of which appear in her archives for many of her works. To date, this completes what we know of the commission and its production.

We find a clear precedent in Longman’s earlier work that helps us interpret the Triangle memorial. The 1906 Louisa M. Wells Monument (fig. 13) in the Lowell, Massachusetts, cemetery serves as a partial prologue to the design of the main Triangle figure (fig. 14) and the symbolic features of its overall program. Ironically, where the quality of Longman’s work, her professionalism, and her experience garnered her the Triangle monument project, the earlier Lowell memorial provided some contentious moments for the sculptor in just these areas. This memorial was completed close to twenty years after Wells died (1815–1886). She had worked for about a year as a weaver in the Lawrence Manufacturing Company, one of the famous Lowell mills that provided early industrial employment to legions of New England women, just as

13 Evelyn Beatrice Longman. The Louisa M. Wells Memorial, 1906. Marble, 13 feet high. Lowell Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts. Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

14 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Triangle Fire Memorial to the Unknowns, 1912 (detail of relief ). Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

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the shirtwaist industry would provide jobs for tens of thousands of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. After a short stay in her native Vermont, in 1866 Wells settled in Lowell, purchasing a lot in the Lowell Cemetery in 1876 to share with her mother. At her death, her will left eight thousand dollars for a monument to be placed on the Wells plot. The sum grew more substantial as relatives litigated this provision over the next two decades. When the court ruled in favor of the Wells estate, her executor hired Daniel Chester French to design the monument, envisioning not only a memorial to a mill girl but also one to Lowell’s important place in the early history of industrial labor.37

French quickly turned the substantial commission over to Longman, who was just striking out on her own, thinking perhaps that the subject of the virtuous female laborer might be appropriate for the young sculptor. Seven years later, the precedent of Longman having created a memorial to a working girl may have been another point in her favor when it came time for the Triangle memorial. After completing the relief plaster for the Wells monument in 1905, she carved the over- life-size relief on the thirteen-foot-high slab of Tennessee marble, taking more than a year to finish it. Writing in the cemetery report of 1906, two trustees stated that “Evelyn B. Longman, the actual creator of the Louisa Wells memorial was a very talented associate of Daniel Chester French [who] was so popular at that time that he became overloaded with commissions— and (very reluctantly, as she was a woman!) he allowed Miss Longman to join him as an associate.” The parenthetical editorial- izing was theirs since, as French’s letters make clear, he employed Longman with enthusiasm. In 1907 French felt compelled to intercede with the cemetery, relaying both Longman’s concern that plantings remained incomplete and that she was still owed $2,500 (the total sum for the Triangle monument five years later). “You understand that Miss Longman gets all

the credit pecuniarily and otherwise of this monument. It has been a great pleasure to me to do what I could to aid and abet her,” French wrote.38 There may have been some question about the original- ity of her design and her responsibility for carving it, a problem historically for female sculptors. But Longman worked alone, provided the finish for the work in monuments carved by others (as would be the case with the Triangle monument), and always supervised the details of instal- lation.39 The inability of cemetery officials to acknowledge the professionalism of a female sculptor made for some uncomfort- able transactions, but it also contradicted their own recognition of the monument’s beauty, which, after all, was a result of her skill. (They might also have been more interested in claiming the involvement of a famous sculptor than an obscure assistant, regardless of gender.) Their description, again from the 1906 report, reveals their sense of its larger importance to Lowell while providing a careful period account.40

This work, representing as it will in this city of never ending toil, the quiet and peace- ful ending of Labor, it must attract wide attention. The artist, with wonderful skill, shows a strong female figure, clothed in the simplest possible manner, holding in her hand, as an emblem of labor, the bobbin used in weaving. Broken strands of cotton lie across her lap. Her whole figure is completely relaxed, though she has not quite succumbed to the last sleep; her hand has fallen from her lap and rests upon the rock on which she sits, still holding the bobbin loosely. One strand of cotton remains unbroken. Behind, but advancing is a beautiful angel—the Angel of Death. Her hand is outstretched, about to gently touch the shoulder of her whom she has been sent to call. The angel’s face is beautiful, and upon her hair rests a wreath of poppies, emblem of sleep or death. A halo encircles her head in a token of her divine mission. . . . The inscription, from the apocrypha, [reads] . . . “out of the fiber of her daily tasks, she wove the fabric of a useful life.”41

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In formal terms the figure of the Triangle mourner reverses and partially echoes the pose of the dying Wells figure—full torsos, curved backs, bowed heads. In both, the lowered right leg is stabilized by a flexed foot. In the more open pose of the dying Wells girl, the bent left leg props up her left arm with its tilted hand supporting her head. Her right arm falls limply by her side, opening up her torso, a temporal sign, along with the angel’s touch, of her imminent demise. In the Triangle monument, a different configuration of the upper body and the closed profile pose imply a circle of eternal grieving. The raised stable leg supports the left arm, which rises to meet the right hand as it reaches from behind the figure and moves around the krater to clutch the drapery in her clasped hands.

While there is a clear programmatic distinction between the quietly dying mill worker and the anguished mourner for lives cut short, Longman’s choice of a partially similar pose connects both the concept and the fact of female labor. Yet where peace reigns in the pose and drapery of the figure in Lowell, the corresponding elements in the Triangle project suggest a tension-filled grief. Drapery and thread fall loosely around the Wells figure. Her pose is languid, her body comfortably enclosed by the space surrounding it, apart from the flexed foot that drops below the step. For the Triangle mourner, in contrast, Longman created a constricted space with the flexed foot and calf angled awkwardly behind, the figure’s bent back held down by the upper frame of the niche. The folds of the drapery (especially in the 1913 Red Cross Bulletin picture, see fig. 2), which are more sharply defined, fall to expose the vulnerable torso and then twist in a tight coil around and above her shoulder. Its thick but active ropelike design con- straining the figure echoes the downward- pressing niche of the relief. And, though difficult to see, the fingers appear tightly entwined with the cloth that—to reverse the textual meaning in the Wells

monument—would never be woven into the fabric of useful life. Indeed, shirtwaist cloth was both the source of labor and, when ignited, the probable cause of the fire. This mourning figure’s confined pose embodies the controversy surrounding the trauma of the fire and its aftermath as well as the struggles of laboring lives now lost.

In making these interpretive claims, I expand the more straightforward argument about the monument as an elite-commis- sioned exemplar of dignified mourning behavior. The carved mourner, though steeped in the academic ideal of civic virtue, whose classical drapery and urn lend her an allegorical tone, could also be read as a survivor weeping for lost comrades— the solitary stand-in for the legions of women who paraded through New York City streets to grieve for fellow workers on April 5, 1911. Though Longman typically carved strong, full-bodied female figures, the expanse of this one is coded as a power- ful working-class body. A garment worker, making the six- to seven-mile trip from the Lower East Side by ferry and on foot to the gravesite, may have found this story for herself in the figure whose pose resembled those bent over the bodies in the morgue or a sewing machine or even resisting the constraints of the niche to push up from the powerfully flexed foot and continue her struggle.42 I am suggesting that Longman found a way in these subtle components of her design, whether consciously or not, to satisfy all the mandates of the commission and still acknowledge the deeply conflicted conditions surrounding the fire and its victims, their lives and work, as well as to make a space for different constituencies of visitors to the monument.

Circumstances in Longman’s own youthful biography lead me to suggest the more sympathetic details of this interpreta- tion. Longman was raised in poverty and familial distress in Chicago and on farms in Ontario, Canada. She was the fifth child of English and Canadian immi- grants, whose musician father inspired her love of the arts but was unable to support

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his family. When Longman was six, her mother died, and her father dispatched the children to different relatives in Canada. After a year, she and her sister Louise, along with one brother, returned to Chicago, only to be shuttled off to Canada when her father remarried a year later. Several years after that, she fought her way home again, to find the children turned out of the house. At fourteen, Longman was forced to leave school to work to sup- plement the family income. For the next six years, she worked at Wilson Brothers dry goods store. During this time, she tried to attend night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, but exhaustion forced her to quit. Finally, she saved enough money to return to Olivet College, and at that point her career can be said to have begun. In writing about her achievements, early critics assigned ample space to her story and to the substantial amounts of money she received for commissions, demonstrat- ing through a central trope of American culture her female Horatio Alger–like rise to success.43 Such an appealing biography, with its tale of triumph over struggle, also could have inspired Robert W. de Forest and the Emergency Relief Committee.

Longman’s life before the 1912 Triangle commission was sharply divided between one of hardships similar to those suffered by immigrant women—a separated family, early toil, and struggle for education— followed by an accelerating rags-to-riches story in the society of a traditional cultural elite. Its aesthetic ideology of moral uplift and civic virtue embodied in academic classical ideals became her mode of visual communication. And yet, as biographer Margaret Samu has argued, Longman achieved success in her major commis- sions by melding academic neoclassicism with inventive symbolic detail, infusing a timeless ideal with telling details about the subject. In the Wells memorial it was the bobbin and thread. In her most famous work, the 1915 Genius of Electricity for the Western Union Telegraph Building in New York, she abandoned the expected

format of a seated Zeus with thunderbolts to deploy a powerful standing male nude sporting a contemporary hairstyle, with electrical cable spinning in the air around his hips and legs and looped over one arm.44 More subtly in the Triangle memorial, her mourner’s constrained pose and active drapery may be read as both traditional and carefully coded to recall the circumstances of the tragedy.

Since neither Longman nor the news- papers ever spoke about the memorial, we have no record of her intention for it or critical response to it. We know from family members that Longman, in her desire to be recognized as a sculptor rather than as a woman sculptor, avoided all gender politics, maintaining an ideal of professionalism throughout her long career. She never publicly campaigned for suffrage or revealed her preferences even in private correspondence. She never affiliated herself with women-centered organizations or ad- vocated for the many progressive-era causes related to social justice and immigration that surrounded her in New York—and that were taken up by her sculptural peers, most notably Abastenia St. Leger Eberle.45 We have no idea how the Triangle Fire affected her—even though it took place only eight blocks south of her studio and the memorial parade filled her neighbor- hood. She cannot have escaped the massive coverage of these events, and appropriate ways of mourning in art would surely have been part of the discussion around the monument. Longman found her way up a social and professional ladder precisely by exercising moderate, gracious, dignified behavior rather than by espousing any positions, such as the cause of working women, that would endanger her own status. It would not have helped her to align her support with the shirtwaist strik- ers of 1909 or agitators in the wake of the fire. So when asked to do the memorial, she responded by executing the design and remained untainted by the controversy that continued to surround the fire in 1912; Longman received the commission around

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the time the owners of the factory were acquitted for any wrongdoing, causing outrage not only within the labor com- munity but also among many progressives. Undoubtedly for professional reasons she avoided any involvement and did not protest the silences surrounding the erec- tion of the memorial. Unlike the monu- ment to the individual mill girl who made good and exercised cultural capital by saving money for a family monument, the Triangle memorial commemorated poor working-class immigrants, many of whom were seen as defying the cultural order in their 1909 strike and memorial protests. For Longman, there was nothing to do

but mourn in a dignified manner and to show the figure in a guise acceptable to the commission and the sculptor herself. This was the overriding message of Longman’s Evergreens Cemetery memorial even as she may have provided sympathetic nuances to complicate its terms and address multiple audiences.

Afterlives

Class divisions continued in the memorial- izing process at multiple levels of repre- sentation. The Evergreens memorial relief presents the model of calm, dignified, stoic grief found in similar memorials lauded throughout the newspapers and in the pages of the Monumental News, the major trade and critical journal for publishing monuments nationwide. At this time, it published at least three monuments to disaster or labor in a similar iconographic register. One commemorates the 259 victims of the 1909 Cherry Hill Mine disaster in Cherry, Illinois. Commissioned by the United Mine Workers and installed on a site near the mine, the memorial features a standing female mourner with head bowed and knees bent, holding a wreath, clothed in classical garb.46 Like Longman’s memorial, it provides, to reshape the words of Rose Schneiderman to another purpose, the model of behavior to which elites wished the working class to conform—“intensely orderly, and intensely peaceable.” Yet without celebration or publication, the Longman monument disappeared from view, its memorializing and atoning purposes lost to a long period of public memory. No New York paper re- ported its installation or any accompanying ceremony. Nor did it receive any mention in the ILGWU publications over time. The union archive contains only one image, a closeup of the monument, indicating awareness of its presence by midcentury.

Garment workers made two different kinds of memorials over time. The first (fig. 15) can be found in the Jewish Mt.

15 Memorial to fourteen victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Mt. Zion Cemetery, Maspeth (Queens), New York. Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

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16 Fiftieth anniversary commemora- tion, March 1961, at The Triangle Fire Memorial to the Unknowns, The Evergreens Cemetery, Brooklyn. Photograph. UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

17 Fiftieth anniversary memorial event on the site of the Trian- gle Fire at Washington Place and Greene Street, New York, March 25, 1961. Photograph. UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

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Zion cemetery in Queens. It marks the site originally proposed by the union for the grave and memorial for the unknowns. After the city rejected this idea, the union agreed to the nonsectar- ian site in the Evergreens Cemetery.47 In Mt. Zion a simple post-and-lintel memorial with a carved eternal flame in the center rises over fourteen graves of identified shirtwaist workers. The names of these victims were originally in raised lettering but have eroded away; they now reside only in cemetery records. On the lintel, a carved inscription states, “Erected November 1911 by their sisters and brothers Members of the Ladies Waist and Dressmakers Union Local No. 25.” Built quickly, it appeared a full year before the city’s memorial by Longman.48

The Longman memorial came back into public view on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the fire in 1961, as mourners and survivors again gathered around it (fig. 16). This was a year before Leon Stein’s book on the Triangle Fire

was published, recalling the sharp divi- sions over mourning, demonstrating, and the disposition of bodies. Now the monument sits in its peaceful cemetery setting, far removed from the site of the fire, which has become the second and living memorial through an annual commemoration there—which also began at the fiftieth anniversary (fig. 17). This performative memorial varies from year to year, reciting gains and losses in labor’s ongoing attempts to organize and improve working conditions. It regularly includes the reading of victims’ names by garment workers, now in the accents of languages from all over the world.49 With the recitation of each name, participants lay a flower at the base of the building where their prede- cessors perished, gestures perhaps more meaningful to today’s assembled laborers than the carved moral exemplum of stoic grief—beautiful, yet isolated from the worlds in which they continue to work and struggle.

Notes

I would like to thank my research assistant Maureen Guignon for patiently tracking the Longman file in the Red Cross Archives; Berrie Moos and Ingrid Mueller in the Longman Archives, and Karen Parsons, his- torian, all at the Loomis-Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut; Donato Daddario, historian at the Evergreens Cemetery; and Melissa Dabakis, Erika Doss, and Martin Donougho for listening and reading.

1 A waist is an older term for a separate blouse, specifically the high-collared, long-sleeved version that was the most fashionable and versatile female garment for women of all classes from the 1890s until World War I. A shirtwaist, made popular by the Gibson Girl, working women, and suffragists, technically referred to the man-tailored version of a waist with buttons down the front, while a fancy waist buttoned down the back and was embellished with lace, ribbon, pleats, or other decorative features. The Triangle Waist company made moder-

ately priced versions of these blouses, and the tragedy has come to be called the Tri- angle Shirtwaist Fire.

2 New York Times, March 31, 1911, 2.

3 Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (1962; New York: Carroll and Graf Publish- ers, 1985), 148–49. Stein’s classic study, which draws from newspaper and sur- vivor accounts, provides the most in- depth synthesis of information about the fire and the events of several weeks afterward. Another important source is David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

4 Stein, Triangle Fire, 153–55.

5 American Red Cross Bulletin 8 (January 1913): 42.

6 The full text of the inscription reads, in somewhat ungrammatical prose,

“The plot and burial were provided by the department of public charities the relief fund contributed largely through Mayor William J. Gaynor Mayor of New York and administered by the Red Cross Emergency Relief Commit- tee of the Charity Organization Society left a sufficient balance to erect this monument.”

7 On de Forest, see Michele H. Bogart. Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890 –1930 (Washing- ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 60.

8 Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Indus- trial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2005). For a documentary history of the relation between the strike and fire, see John F. McClymer, The Triangle Strike and Fire (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1998).

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9 Pauline M. Newman, “Lest We Forget!” Ladies Garment Worker 4 (April 1913): 23.

10 The performative practice of memori- alization through organizing and dem- onstrating was enacted in the funeral parade and continues today in an annual on-site ritual, staged on the anniversary of the fire.

11 James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 5.

12 Arthur Aryeh Goren, “Sacred and Secular: The Place of Public Funerals in the Immigrant Life of American Jews,” Jewish History 8 (1994): 270.

13 For a general discussion of these work- ings of the Charity Organization Society, see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), 151–61.

14 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 271.

15 Stein, Triangle Fire, 122–27.

16 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001), 41–53.

17 New York American, March 27, 1911, 2; New York Times, March 27, 1911, 2.

18 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 275.

19 Stein, Triangle Fire, 141.

20 “Mass Meeting Calls for New Fire Laws,” New York Times, April 3, 1911.

21 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 285.

22 Stein, Triangle Fire, 151. I have been unable to identify the source of the news- paper quote about “thickly populated foreign districts.”

23 The most comprehensive recent sources for Longman’s work are Marilyn Rabetz and Walter Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder (Windsor, Conn.: Loomis Chaffee School, 1993); and Margaret Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman: Establishing a Career in Public Sculpture,” Women’s Art Journal 25 (Fall 2004–Winter 2005): 8–15. Samu’s honors thesis, “Establish- ing a Career in Public Sculpture: Evelyn Beatrice Longman” (Wellesley College,

2001), provides additional detail and analysis. At forty-five, Longman married Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, headmaster of the Loomis School in Windsor, Con- necticut. While still known profession- ally as Evelyn Beatrice Longman, she was Mrs. Batchelder or, affectionately, Mrs. “B” at the school.

24 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 8; Samu, “Establishing a Career,” 14.

25 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 8. French hired Longman in part to com- plete lettering for the Boston Public Library doors, a task he disliked and one at which (along with ornament) she excelled. She worked on lettering later for the Lincoln Memorial with French and architect Henry Bacon. Daniel Chester French to William Merchant French, December 30, 1900, Daniel Chester French Papers, Library of Congress (here- after, French Papers). For additional dis- cussion of their meeting, see Margaret French Cresson, Journey into Fame: The Life of Daniel Chester French (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), 210.

26 Longman gained independence with her first major public piece, the 1903 male Victory, a twenty-five-foot-high work that was given the place of honor atop the Festival Hall on the grounds of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposi- tion, known informally as the St. Louis World’s Fair. Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder,” in Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder, 4; Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 9.

27 For an extended discussion of the cor- respondence related to Longman, see Michael Richman, “The French-Long- man Connection,” in Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder.

28 Mitchell Mannering, “The Memorial to Senator Allison,” National Magazine 38 (August 1913): 760–63. Full citation for clipping in Longman Vertical File, Smith- sonian American Art Museum found at www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/t991. htm#A21589 cited in Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder.”

29 French to Longman, June 17, 1906, French Papers.

30 For discussions of female professionalism, see Kirsten Swinth, Painting Profession- als: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930

(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Caro- lina Press, 2000); Laura Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); and Melissa Dabakis, “Feminist Interventions: Some Thoughts on Recent Scholarship about Women Artists,” American Art 18 (Spring 2004): 2–9.

31 For these general insights into her char- acter, see Adeline Adams, “Evelyn Bea- trice Longman,” American Magazine of Art (May 1928): 237–50; and Jona- than A. Rawson Jr., “Evelyn Beatrice Longman, Feminine Sculptor,” Inter- national Studio (February 1912): xcix– ciii. For French’s quote, see Daniel Chester French to muralist H. Siddons Mowbray, July 23, 1922, French Papers; though this is a later letter, French would have been well aware of her deal- ings with works commissioned by com- mittee in 1912.

32 For discussion of de Forest’s role in the Charity Organization Society, see Lilian Brandt, Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, 1882–1907 (New York: B. H. Tyrell, 1907), 27. On the building, see Brandt, 20, and “A Building for Charity: John S. Kennedy’s Liberal and Public-Spirited Project,” New York Times, March 10, 1891, 8, and www. preserve2.org/gramercy/proposes/ext/ ension/105e22.htm (accessed July 1, 2009).

33 Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder, 38. In the years before Kennedy’s memorial, Longman created the Storey Memorial (1905) and the Wells Memorial (1906), both in the Lowell Cemetery, and the Mary Elizabeth Ryle Memorial in Patterson, N.J. (1907). She carved the figure of Memory in the Benson Family Memo- rial in Titusville, Pa. (1907), and created the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity for the Foster Mausoleum in Middle- burgh, N.Y. (1911), and a portrait relief of Senator Henry Clark Corbin (1911). “Speak in Praise of John S. Kennedy: Memorial Meeting for Philanthropist Participated in by Men Who Knew His Work,” New York Times, November 23, 1909, 7.

34 Emergency Relief after the Washington Place Fire, New York, March 25, 1911: Report of the Red Cross Emergency Relief Commit- tee of the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York (New York: Charity Organization Society, 1912), 67.

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35 Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder, 38; and Joel Rosenkranz and Janis Conner, “Evelyn Longman in Context,” in ibid., 17. Bacon and Longman first collaborated in 1910–11 on the Foster family mau- soleum in Middleburgh, New York. In 1912 Longman won a public com- mission through a blind jury process for the monument to Senator William Boyd Allison to be installed on the state capitol grounds in Des Moines, Iowa; Bacon designed the massive pedestal.

36 Both Longman letters may be found in RG 200 National Archives Gift Collec- tion, Records of the American National Red Cross, 1881–1916, Box #57; File 848: New York (Washington Place) Fire, Triangle Shirtwaist Co. 3/25/1911.

37 For the story of Louisa Wells and the Lowell Cemetery, see Catherine L. Goodwin. Mourning Glory: The Story of Lowell Cemetery, rev. ed. (Lowell, Mass.: Lowell Historical Society, 2003), 16. More specific information on Wells and the commission is found in “Louisa Wells: The Story of Her Monu- ment in the Lowell Cemetery,” type- script, Lowell Cemetery Archive, Lowell, Mass., n.p. An excerpt from the 1905 Lowell Cemetery trustees report of 1905 describes Wells as “this good woman, a woman of religious inclination . . . left quite a tidy sum of money, the accumu- lation of years of toil”; quoted in ibid.

38 French to George F. Richardson, January 4, 1907, French Papers.

39 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 9, shows that Longman’s contemporary

critics also noted her professionalism and meticulous attention to detail.

40 “Louisa Wells: The Story of Her Monu- ment in the Lowell Cemetery”; quote from the trustees report of 1906, signed by Harry C. Dinmore, Lewis Karabatsos, n.p.

41 Ibid.

42 I thank Melissa Dabakis for her help in thinking about the bodies of working women in sculpture. For an under- standing of how working-class women might make stories through “high” art, see Katharine Martinez, “At Home with Mona Lisa: Consumers and Commer- cial Visual Culture, 1880–1920,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006), 160–76.

43 See Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn Bea- trice Longman Batchelder,” 1–3. On critics’ references to her early history, see Rawson, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman: Feminine Sculptor”; and Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 10.

44 James Spencer Dickerson, “Evelyn B. Longman: A Western Girl Who Has Become a National Figure in Sculpture,” World Today, May 1908, 529; Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 11–12.

45 See Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 13. Samu refers to correspondence and interviews with Longman’s stepson, N. H. Batchelder Jr., in October and November 2000. For St. Leger Eberle, see Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments,

Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880– 1935 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture, 1999), 149–58.

46 Karen Tintori, Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster (New York: Atria Books, 2002).

47 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 284. Originally the union also proposed a massive procession to accompany the unknowns to Mt. Zion. The distance to both Mt. Zion Cemetery and the Evergreens Cemetery is about 6 1/2 miles from the Lower East Side.

48 Today, it lies in proximity to two more recent granite markers and was pic- tured first when accessing “Triangle Fire Memorial” in Internet searches in August 2009. The Evergreens site mentioned the Triangle Fire memo- rial with no picture. For the Workman’s Circle Memorials, see www.flickr.com/ photos/23021987@N06/2730823420/; for the Evergreens Cemetery, see www. theevergreenscemetery.com/ (both accessed July 1, 2009).

49 The most recent activist memorial is the Chalk Project, organized by New York filmmaker Ruth Sergel. Each year on the anniversary of the fire, volunteers write the names and ages of victims outside their former residences. See Michael Molyneux, “Memorials in Chalk,” New York Times, April 3, 2005. For a theoret- ical discussion of how these more recent memorials do memory work, see Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Trans- formation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004).

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