Turning Toward Charity at the Sight of Uncomfortable News
The ninth floor of the Asch Building after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, 1911. [Wikimedia Commons.]
For the uptown diners and dealmakers around Times Square, it was a terribly inconvenient moment for a tragedy to occur.
It all started a little before 5 pm on what was shaping up to be another comfortable Saturday of uncorked frivolity and champagne pours inside the lobster palace that patrons called “the new Shanley’s” on West 43rd Street (not to be confused with “the old one,” its slightly less gilded predecessor below 42nd Street). The uptown spot was a favorite for New York’s mayors, business magnates, and celebrities, and a frequent stop for visiting politicians and presidents. It had also become a social hall for the senior New York Times staff and executives who worked down the street. That’s why the Times’s senior editor Charles Willis Thompson was settling in for dinner with his wife, kids, and the families of other Times reporters, when restaurant manager Johnny Butler rushed toward him. Trying not to alarm the other guests, Butler directed him to the kitchen for an urgent call. A heartbeat later, Thompson burst back, shrugged into his coat, and told his wife to take the children home — now.
Further downtown, in the city’s garment district, a large group had gathered on the already busy street outside of the Asch Building, a towering ten-story high-rise of iron and steel. Young garment workers from neighboring factories stood paralyzed in disbelief as a blur of people rushed in from every direction to join the swelling crowd of New Yorkers staring up, their eyes fixed on the flames engulfing the tower’s top three floors, home to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.
The factory employed hundreds of immigrant women, mostly in their teens and early twenties, working long hours to make the clothes worn by the city’s upper class. Everyone in New York had heard at least something about their struggle: years of pickets and arrests, beatings and jail in their fight for a safer workplace. And everyone on the street understood, with a sick certainty, that they were still up there.
At the top of the building, a hundred feet in the sky, the crowd could see the young girls in painful clarity as they frantically paced near the ledge and shouted from the windows. With the factory floor doors locked to prevent the women from stealing fabric or taking unscheduled bathroom breaks, there was no way out. A young journalist named Bill Shepherd, who had just recently moved to New York from the Midwest, was among the first on the scene after spotting the smoke during his walk in the park.
In every window frame he could see young women, as alive as he was, waving their arms and screaming “Call the firemen!” and “Get a ladder!” After finding his voice, he joined others in pleading for the workers to “Stay there!” and “Don’t jump!” They assured the women that help was coming.
Before the first fire engine arrived, one young girl climbed onto the ledge, fought off those trying to hold her back, and stepped off. Shepherd turned away before she hit the ground, but he forgot to cover his ears. “I learned a new sound,” he would recall. “A more horrible sound than description can picture.” Realizing the enormity of what was taking place, and that no other journalist or city official had arrived yet, he began to write down everything he could see. The chaos and the order. He noted the way some women would watch their friends jump as they patiently waited for their turn. In one broken-out window, he could see a young man in a long coat and tan shoes, his hat still on his head, helping young women over the ledge, one at a time.
“He held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop,” he wrote.
Then came a second girl. And a third.
“They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar.” When the fourth girl stepped into the frame, she wrapped her arms around the man and gave him a kiss before he held her gently over the ledge and let go. Then, he was in the air after her.
There have been few moments in American history that can be so specifically pinpointed as forever changing the character of the nation. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire was one of those moments, but not only for the reason most think. The dominant histories of the fire focus on its role in inspiring some of the country’s first labor standards and protections, transforming the world of the American worker. The standard bearers — Leon Stein’s The Triangle Fire and David Von Drehle’s Triangle — tell that story with authority: a calamity that became a catalyst, law rising from smoke. What is less well known is that the fire also provided the definitive spark in the rise and industrialization of modern charity in the United States, a watershed moment that instantly recast a group of wealthy bankers and social elites as experts on social problems. And that long buried legacy — popularizing charity as a professionalized industry — has shaped the prevailing path through which the country meets issues of social crisis and poverty ever since, leading it away from the true drivers of its most persistent challenges. It’s a more complicated story, but, in our moment, as consequential.
Before the fire, support for workers, the poor, and marginalized communities in New York — and in the rest of the country — was typically exercised through religious institutions, union coalitions and acts of mutual aid, voluntary associations, municipal relief, and giving support directly to individuals and groups in need. There would be occasional campaigns in the newspapers for specific causes — like tuberculosis stamps, or in response to war and disaster — but they were always one-off efforts, centered on temporary emergency-relief goals. It wasn’t until the months after the fire that the attributes of modern charity as a profession were widely articulated to a large audience of Americans, through an unprecedented partnership between the city’s largest charities and the New York Times.
With the ire of the working class directly focused on a New York elite who had spent years ignoring their strikes and union efforts to create safer work environments, the city’s middle and upper classes desperately searched for a pathway to do something. Seeing the opportunity in front of them, Edward Devine, a key leader of New York’s largest charity, and the state’s other big charity bosses seized the moment, leveraging their connections to advance a new charity vision they had struggled to mainstream in the preceding years.
The Times got involved because it too was compelled by an urge to do something. In the years before the fire, the Times made its fortune as the polished voice of New York’s big business merchants and magnates — defending department stores and garment manufacturers with the same certainty it turned against the women and unions who marched for years beneath the Triangle’s windows calling for safer work conditions. The formula worked: ads swelled, circulation climbed, and the paper’s influence hardened into a loyal readership in the city’s wealthiest homes. The fire changed everything. Overnight, the Times found itself inside the story — derided in speeches and jeered on picket lines. As New Yorkers looked for culprits in the greatest industrial tragedy in the city’s history, the elite and their favorite newspaper were placed front and center. The Times responded with a pivot. It urged the city to put aside blame and give — to a small, hand-picked group of charities, the ones governed by the same families who filled its society pages.
Relief for the surviving families of the fire came first. And then a groundbreaking new campaign between the Times and the charities was announced: hundreds of stories and editorials aimed at convincing New Yorkers to support a completely new industry of “scientific charity.” Day after day, the Times urged readers that they could do more “good” if they refrained from giving money to the individuals and unions they found in the streets and instead gave to “professional” organizations — the city’s biggest charities — who, the newspaper proclaimed, had experts trained in helping those in need and solving their problems.
“The first kindly impulse” is to give directly to people in need, but “that would be what may be called ‘the old charity,’” attested the Times editorial board in 1912, “and it would doubtless have its reward, but modern philanthropy always distrusts and often denies the efficacy of such giving, and strongly inclines to the belief that it does more harm than good.” Instead, the Times instructed readers that they should direct their support to a select group of elite charity institutions — three organizations, to be exact — led by the city’s wealthiest bankers and society members. Rather than looking to the unions and community organizations that were starting to gain steam in America, the Times redirected the country’s attention to a more “scientific” and “efficient” approach. Modern charity, established the Times, “must be largely the work of salaried officials of various grades, specifically trained for it and devoting all their time to it.” In a decade marked by the creation of several powerful private foundations — including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, in 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1913 — along with new legislation, in 1917, that provided tax deductions for charitable giving for the first time, it was this partnership with the Times shortly after a fire in 1911 that was the most formative moment in the history of modern charity in America. The country was told that with enough donations, the city’s new charities would be able to fix the social and economic conditions responsible for the fire and the other inequities of life at the turn of the 20th century.
These unrealized assurances, like the fire, would soon be forgotten, but what remained at the core of the charities’ “new vision” was a generation of Americans who were taught to fear the extreme violence, sickness, and economic burden that the poor — primarily recently-arrived immigrant workers — posed to their way of life. While the “old” vision of charity favored poorhouses and models of direct giving, such as soup kitchens and outdoor relief efforts, its critics argued that it didn’t adequately target the systemic structures that contributed to poverty. For instance, many new charity proponents argued that the prevailing “old” forms of charity underestimated the impact of open immigration policies. Rather than taking bold moves to curb immigration and address the true causes of social ills, older models of giving were only adding to the number of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents” in the country, as one widely circulated New York charity pamphlet put it.
“American standards,” wrote Devine, one of New York’s most influential supporters of a new charity industry and co-founder of the field of social work, “are gravely imperiled by the annual addition of an unsifted million of newcomers whose standards are different from ours.” In an effort to raise public urgency and funding for new charity interventions, Devine and the new charity bosses led the country in drumming up fake science and alarming narratives about how the scores of new immigrants arriving in unprecedented numbers to New York were somehow more prone to disease, crime, and poverty than native New Yorkers. It should be an urgent duty of all who care about America, Devine implored in a February 1911 issue of the New York charity sector’s most popular newsletter, to protect the country from the threat that the new arrivals posed to the heritage and well-being of the nation:
We do have a right to assert vigorously the value of our national heritage, and, though it may seem old-fashioned to say it, we do have a sacred duty to transmit it unimpaired — which is not to say unchanged — to our posterity. To some extent this heritage is one of race. Its creators gave it to us with their blood. It has been enriched by many crossings of races, but biologists tell us that mingling within limits is beneficial, beyond those limits productive only of a mongrel and degenerate breed. Let no one read into this expression of national responsibility for American standards a shred of bigotry or prejudice against any of the peoples of the earth. Modern social ideals are neither provincial nor sectarian. It is precisely because of a passionate attachment to the true interests of humanity that social workers may look with profound distrust upon the demand for cheap immigrant labor. Genuine humane sentiment is not inconsistent with the maintenance of community and national standards.
Convincing lawmakers, religious leaders, politicians, and the wider public that the well-being of the country was fundamentally linked to its ability to control the types of immigrants who were allowed entry, the charities popularized the 20th-century specter of the dangerous immigrant and fostered a climate of deep concern over the harm that new arrivals were causing to the stability of the nation. The charities funded and championed the early work of eugenicists, lobbied for the administration of the country’s first literacy, psychological, and intelligence exams at its ports of entry, advanced the country’s first immigrant quota legislation, and led all public actors in supporting the forced institutionalization and sterilization of those new arrivals and other lower-class individuals deemed “feeble-minded” or otherwise harmful to the heritage and safety of the country. In so doing, their influence extended far beyond New York — shaping federal and state legislation and campaigns that resulted in the forced sterilization, removal, and institutionalization of untold thousands.
It’s difficult to underestimate the “new charity” bosses’ role in shaping the thinking and policies of their era and the last century of American life. The ideas and racist science they fostered and mainstreamed served as the underpinning for the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts, the most restrictive immigration laws in the country’s history, as well as the mass deportation campaigns of President Herbert Hoover in the 1920s and ’30s and the forced removal and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, through McCarthyism in the 1950s, and they still echo in the 21st-century rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump’s first and second presidential campaigns and terms.
Modern charity in America was never intended to serve as a separate entity from the city’s ruling power brokers; it was always an extension of their influence. Despite its roots in a progressive movement, the move toward “new charity” intentionally silenced the ideas of labor organizers, social reformers, and unions who confronted the charity kings after the fire and who tried to turn the tragedy into a moment of accountability and new rights for immigrant workers and families.
At the center of the erasure of labor leaders and the rise of the immigrant-fear-mongering charity organizations was New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, who brought the paper from the brink of bankruptcy to global prominence. Few people have heard of the man who created the Times. Even in historian circles, he plays more of a cameo role in books on journalism. More often, it’s the sensationalism-driven battles between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst that chapter this period for most readers of media history. There are no movies about Adolph Ochs starring Humphrey Bogart or Robert Redford, and he wasn’t a big enough blip on the national radar to catch the eye of an Orson Welles. This isn’t because Ochs was less interesting; rather, he was a master at the art of deflection, always working to direct attention away from himself and to the arrangements and matters he wanted people to see.
During the years of Pulitzer and Hearst, it was Ochs who created an institution that became the gold standard for journalism around the world, putting the star newspapers of both titans out of business within his own lifetime. In a personal letter, Walter Lippmann, one of the 20th century’s most influential writers on journalism and public opinion, told Ochs late in his life that he considered him alone as “the greatest” journalist in history and “the Times newspaper as the most constructive achievement in the journalism of the whole world.” Ochs is considered by many historians to be the father of journalistic objectivity, and every publisher of the Times since the 1890s has been a direct descendant or relative of his.
And yet, despite all his achievements, there is nothing that brought the publisher more pride than the alliance he built between the Times and the country’s largest charities after the fire; an arrangement which helped both industries climb to heights that only Ochs could have imagined. While the promise, of using charitable donations to solve poverty, made by Ochs and the charity kings, has long since evaporated, the reflex they ingrained in Americans — to uncritically turn toward charity at the sight of uncomfortable news — remains one of the most misunderstood and consequential legacies in the country’s history.
Excerpted from Fire in the Heart of the City by David Conrad-Pérez. Copyright © 2026 by David Conrad-Pérez. Used by permission of the publisher, New York University Press.
