James Doyle is a Boston lawyer and author who has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, USA Today, Governing and The Crime Report.  

Frances Perkins, who as FDR’s secretary of labor became the first female Cabinet member, was born in Massachusetts, but always considered her family’s saltwater farm near Newcastle on the Damariscotta her home.

In March 1911, Perkins lunched with a friend in Greenwich Village. A crowd was gathering at a disturbance nearby, and Perkins, curious, went to the scene — the Triangle Shirtwaist factory near Washington Square. That day, 146 workers, most of them young women, were killed there in a fire. There were no sprinklers; doors had been locked from the outside to prevent unauthorized breaks; fire escapes buckled; the fire department’s ladders did not extend to the windows. Many of the dead chose to jump to their deaths to escape the flames. It was over in 18 minutes. 

Later, Frances Perkins argued that the day of the Triangle Fire was the day the New Deal was born. It was born because Frances Perkins, an austere model of Yankee rectitude, led other “good government” reformers into a surprising alliance with another witness to the trauma.  

Perkins’ new ally, Tammany Hall’s Al Smith, drew many of the same attacks, launched by many of the same people, driven by many of the same motivations, and having the same impact, as those launched in a tsunami of hostile anecdote, rumor and commentary against Graham Platner is this year’s Maine Senate campaign.  

Smith was assailed as crude, alcoholic, religiously subversive and culturally corrupt. But after Triangle, Smith and Tammany joined with blood enemies like Perkins and generated laws improving worker safety, women’s pension rights and work hours. FDR said later that “Practically all of the things we’ve done in the federal government are the things Al Smith did first as governor of New York.”  

Those are exactly the things that Platner’s assailants and their funders are trying to undo. Susan Collins stands in Herbert Hoover’s place and enjoys their support; Platner stands in Smith’s. 

The Triangle victims were not members of the generations of Irish immigrants who provided the core of Tammany Hall’s political power; they arrived in later waves of Italians and Eastern European Jews. That makes the  response of Tammany’s first-wave immigrants to the Triangle fire striking today, as contemporary Republicans terrify workers 1,000 miles from the borders with the specter of cat-eating newcomers taking their jobs.

Tammany did not “pull up the ladder.” Frances Perkins later remembered that Al Smith “did the most natural and humane thing.” Smith went to visit the victims’ survivors. Perkins said, “It was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”

The aftermath of the Triangle fire said something drowned out by the cacophony of Trump era news — in the end, even very gritty practical politics can be reshaped by a shared vision of what a just American society must offer its members. 

Al Smith and his diverse allies understood that the Triangle tragedy must not be seen through the lens of any immigrant’s particular identity as Irish or Italian, Catholic or Jew, man or woman — that what mattered was their shared identity as workers, vulnerable to danger and exploitation in a world of extractive capitalism that operated very much like Elon Musk’s. They had jobs; they had children; they had elderly parents. 

Smith’s battlefield was not defined by horizontal skirmishes between left/center/right, or Irish/Italian/Jew. Smith’s line of attack was vertical:  have-not/have-some/have-too-much. That seems to be Platner’s focus, too. 

The deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire had called the question: “Do we, in this society, owe each other some minimum care?” 

In the decades following the Triangle tragedy, Americans made their answer to the question clear — it is the question that the landslide of personal attacks on Platner threatens to bury. Many Mainers now wearing MAGA caps might agree to the basic vision that was mobilized after the Triangle holocaust. 

People wanted a society in which children were nurtured, workers were safe, the sick were treated and the elderly lived with dignity. President Donald Trump and Sen. Susan Collins haven’t provided their alternative vision in answer to this question yet. Then again, no one has really asked them to.  

Mainers can make them tell us. What kind of society do you think we should want to live in?