The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of CommonHSense Causality |
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| Authors: | Arthur F McEvoy |
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| Institution: | Arthur F. McEvoy;is Professor of Law and History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research for the article was supported by the American Bar Foundation and by National Science Foundation Grant #9223512. Thanks for research assistance from Jared Orsi, Cynthia Poe, and Ricki Shine and for helpful hints from Ben Brown, Peter Carstensen, Lawrence Friedman, Linda Gordon, Michael Grossberg, Carol Heimer, Elizabeth Hovey, Jane Larson, Harry Scheiber, Peter Siegelman, Christopher Tomlins, and the Law and Social Inquiry reviewers. Earlier versions were presented to the Law and Society Association, the American Bar Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, and the University of Chicago Comparative Legal History Seminar. |
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| Abstract: | This article is part of a larger study on the history of industrial safety law in the United States, one that places particular emphasis on the development of competing attributions of the causes of industrial injury as that development relates to changes in technology, political economy, and culture. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, long noted as a catalyst for Progressive Era factory reform, evorked a change in the legal culture's "common sense" of why and how industrial injuries took place. By focusing on and making tangible causal theories that had been in circulation for some time but never embodied successfully in the law, the Triangle fire destroyed long-standing ideological barriers to factory legislation. It thus played a significant role in laying the epistemological foundation of the modern regulatory state. |
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