Ep 10: Live Working or Die Fighting

On Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in New York City. The exit doors were locked. One hundred and forty-six workers died in eighteen minutes. A woman on the street watched in horror. She spent the rest of her life making sure it counted for something.

This is Part 2 of a three-episode documentary special, built on sixteen archival sources from eight archives. It picks up in 1900 where Episode 9 left off and follows the thread of textile resistance through two world wars, the suffragette movement, the deadliest garment factory fire in American history, Gandhi's spinning wheel, and the women who proved that their labour was essential and then had to prove it again.

The episode features the voices of people who were there: Aunt Phoebe Boyd and Mrs. Laura Smalley from the Library of Congress "Voices Remembering Slavery" collection, Frances Perkins recorded fifty-three years after the Triangle fire, the only surviving audio of any Pankhurst, and Alice Paul remembering the night that changed her life.

"Who's archiving this history of resistance that artists have already done, right? To know that you are part of this lineage of resistance and to have a space where that exists, like, this is why books get burned, right? This is why queers are new. They were not new. We've just been erased in these parts and where are we mending those parts of our quilt?"

Kimmie Dearest, Illustrator and Community Organizer

The Voices Were Always There

The recording of Aunt Phoebe Boyd talking about cotton and quilts in a single breath exists because linguists Archibald A. Hill and Guy Sumner Lowman showed up in Dunnsville, Virginia in 1935 with a disc recorder. Mrs. Laura Smalley's testimony exists because a young Texas folklorist named John Henry Faulk drove to Hempstead in 1941 on a Rosenwald Fellowship and pressed record.

FDR's Labour Secretary Frances Perkins describing the Triangle fire, her voice shaking fifty-three years later, exists because Professor Maurice Neufeld at Cornell's ILR School kept inviting her back to lecture until someone thought to preserve the tapes. Alice Paul's account of first hearing Christabel Pankhurst speak in 1907 exists because oral historian Amelia R. Fry sat with Paul in her Connecticut home the Monday before Thanksgiving 1972, when Paul was in her late eighties. And the only surviving audio of any Pankhurst exists because the Gramophone Company put a microphone in front of Christabel hours after she walked out of Holloway Prison in December 1908.

Every one of those decisions is why you can hear these voices in this episode. Without them, it's just Shawn and me talking over music.

A Note on the "Voices Remembering Slavery" Recordings

The "Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories" collection at the US Library of Congress contains recordings of twenty-three people born into slavery between 1823 and the early 1860s. These are testimonies given by elderly Black Americans, often to white interviewers, during Jim Crow, under conditions where self-censorship was a survival strategy. We use the language "people who were enslaved" and "born into slavery" rather than "slaves," following the guidance of P. Gabrielle Foreman's community-sourced style guide and the National Park Service, because no one was born a slave. They were born into a system that enslaved them. We use full names and honorifics as listed in the collection.

Clara Lemlich, Triangle, and Frances Perkins (1909–1911)

On November 22, 1909, a twenty-three-year-old garment worker named Clara Lemlich stood up at Cooper Union Great Hall and said, in Yiddish: "I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I have no further patience for talk. I move that we go on a general strike." Twenty thousand garment workers walked out the next morning. But one factory refused to settle: the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Eighteen months later, the owners locked their doors, and a fire started.

Frances Perkins watched from the street. She went on to become FDR's Secretary of Labor, the first woman in a presidential cabinet, and the architect of Social Security, the minimum wage, the forty-hour work week, and the prohibition of child labour. All of that traces back to a locked door in a garment factory.

"When you learn how to make that stitch finally, or you learn how to make that drawing in just the way that you want it to, it feels good, but also that is a part of you. No one can take it from you. And it's actually a form of power, right?"

Gavin Mueller, Author, Breaking Things at Work

The Suffragettes and the Needle (1907–1920)

The women who sewed the shirtwaists at Triangle and the women who sewed the suffrage banners in London were connected by the same organizations. Frances Perkins was a suffragist. Clara Lemlich was a suffragist. The needle trades and the vote were the same fight, because the women locked in garment factories couldn't vote to change the laws that locked them in.

Alice Paul heard Christabel Pankhurst speak in 1907, joined the WSPU, was arrested, was force-fed in Holloway, and brought those tactics back to America. There's a photograph in the Library of Congress that shows her sitting on a balcony at the National Woman's Party headquarters, sewing a star onto a flag. Every time a state ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, she sewed another star.

Mother Jones, Bread and Roses, and Houston 1977

Mary Harris Jones lost her husband and four children to yellow fever in 1867, then lost her dressmaking shop in the Great Chicago Fire. She became Mother Jones, "the most dangerous woman in America." In 1903, she marched children with missing fingers ninety-two miles from Philadelphia to President Roosevelt's summer home. Pennsylvania passed a child labor law the following year.

In January 1912, Polish women at the Everett Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts opened their pay envelopes and saw the cut. Within a week, twenty thousand workers from fifty-one nationalities had joined them. Their banner read: "We want bread, and roses too." Sixty-five years later, twenty thousand women gathered in Houston for the National Women's Conference, and the song they chose was "Bread and Roses."

Ella May Wiggins and the Great Textile Strike (1929–1934)

Ella May Wiggins worked at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, earning nine dollars a week. Four of her nine children had died of whooping cough because she couldn't stay home from the mill. She wrote labor ballads and recruited Black workers into the union across racial lines. On September 14, 1929, she was shot in the chest riding to a union rally. Her five killers were acquitted in under thirty minutes.

Five years later, four hundred thousand textile workers walked out in the largest strike in American history. At Honea Path, South Carolina, the mill superintendent mounted a machine gun on the roof. Seven workers were killed, most shot in the back. A memorial wasn't erected for sixty-one years. It is still not taught in local schools.

Gandhi, Lancashire, and the Spinning Wheel

The Swadeshi movement in Bengal started the fight in 1905. Gandhi built on sixteen years of that organizing. What he understood was that you didn't need guns to fight an empire that ran on cotton. You needed a spinning wheel. When Gandhi visited the Lancashire mill towns in 1931, the workers cheered him, even as his boycott was destroying their livelihoods, because they understood that the same empire that had destroyed India's looms had now abandoned their own.

"I see a history, I see a connection to my ancestors, I see potential for art. And I think that is something to me that the power of quilts is because we can put all these meanings on them."

AJ Young, Quilter and Fiber Artist

Stephen Towns: Under Attack

Stephen Towns is a quilter and painter in Baltimore who recorded this in September 2025: "Current circumstances that are going on in this country make it very difficult for artists like me to express ourselves. I'm attacked by my being, being a Black gay man. I'm attacked by being an artist who makes work about Black American history. And I think here in America, crafters are being attacked by these tariffs." The attacks change form, but the structure is the same: the Calico Acts become tariffs, the locked factory door becomes a subscription wall, and the machine gun on the roof becomes an algorithm.

Your Phone Is Enough

Every voice in this episode exists because someone showed up with a recorder and pressed record. You can do the same thing. Record the quilter in your guild who's been making since the 1960s. The retired garment worker in your neighbourhood. The elder in your community who remembers the factory. Sit with them. Ask what they made with their hands. Press record.

The StoryCorps app is free. It walks you through the whole thing: questions, recording, upload. Your recording goes to the StoryCorps archive and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. They also have StoryCorps Connect for remote interviews.

Your library might lend you a recording kit. The Boston Public Library lends "Oral History Backpacks" with recorders and guides in ten languages. Libraries at Virginia Tech, Duke, CUNY, and Washington University in St. Louis do the same. Ask yours.

If you're using your phone: record in airplane mode, set it on a stable surface, do a 30-second test first, and sit somewhere with soft furnishings. The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide by Marjorie Hunt is the best free how-to. The Oral History Association's best practices are the field standard.

Always get consent first. A simple release form before you start. Templates from Columbia University, Claremont Colleges, and the Smithsonian are all free.

Then archive it somewhere it'll last. Besides StoryCorps, you can upload to the Internet Archive with a free account. The Library of Congress Veterans History Project accepts community submissions.

Community Archives

Black communities: Schomburg Center (NYPL), Amistad Research Center (Tulane), Moorland-Spingarn (Howard), Auburn Avenue Research Library (Atlanta). In Canada, Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling holds the Voices of Little Burgundy collection and the Montreal Life Stories project.

Indigenous communities: Mukurtu CMS is a free, open-source platform built by and for Indigenous communities with cultural protocols that let communities control who sees what.

LGBTQ+ communities: ONE Archives (USC), Lesbian Herstory Archives (Brooklyn), Digital Transgender Archive, Invisible Histories Project (U.S. South), The ArQuives (Toronto).

Latinx communities: Voces Oral History Center (UT Austin). Asian American communities: Densho (Japanese American incarceration), South Asian American Digital Archive.

Labour history: Kheel Center (Cornell), Walter P. Reuther Library (Wayne State), Tamiment Library (NYU). Textile and craft: Quilt Alliance "Save Our Stories", International Quilt Museum (University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

Canada: Library and Archives Canada, COHDS at Concordia (a global leader in oral history research), Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (Simon Fraser University). United Kingdom: The Oral History Society, the British Library Sound Archive, and the People's History Museum in Manchester. Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: The National Library of Australia and the Alexander Turnbull Library.

"But current circumstances that are going on in this country make it very difficult for artists like me to express ourselves. And though I wanted to tackle this work, it feels like I'm being continually attacked. I'm attacked by my being, being a Black gay man. I'm attacked by being an artist who makes work about Black American history."

Stephen Towns, Quilter and Painter, Baltimore (Ep 3)

Next: Episode 11, "The Loom and the Algorithm." The final part of the documentary. 1945 to today.