| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.3

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

The Fire and the Forgotten Protocols that Changed America

GREENWALD, RICHARD A. The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. xii + 332 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes. $64.50 (cloth), ISBN 1-59213-174-3; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 1-59213-175-1.
Richard Greenwald has written a fine, much-needed study. Shockingly, no one has written a scholarly account of the pivotal New York City garment strikes of 1909 and 1910, nor is there a modern scholarly history of the notorious Triangle Fire of 1911 or of the powerful International Ladies' Garment Worker Union (ILGWU). Greenwald connects these three important subjects and contends that the private sector's Protocols of Peace that emerged after the strikes and the public sector's Factory Investigation Commission (FIC) created after the fire were two sides of the same coin. According to Greenwald, these moments established a new standard for industrial relations (IR), first in the city's garment industry, then in most New York state workplaces, and, in the 1930s, throughout the entire nation.	1
Although it seeks to highlight the agency of garment workers and their communities, Greenwald's book is not a thick description of immigrant and working class life in early twentieth century New York City. Nor is it a history of the powerful ILGWU forged largely by Jewish and Italian laborers. Instead, Greenwald examines the Protocols of Peace, a landmark industry-wide agreement negotiated by the famed jurist Louis Brandeis.	2
In an industry with ferociously anti-union employers, the Protocol established an unprecedented agreement between one labor union and literally hundreds of garment manufacturers in NYC and beyond. The agreement set standards for wages, hours, job conditions, even hiring and firing. The Protocol established a complex, multi-tiered, tripartite (labor, management, and "public") bureaucracy to mediate disputes that inevitably arose; the state was explicitly not one of the signatories.	. . .

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