one 2-3 page essay (typed and double-spaced). Your essay should have a brief introduction followed by several paragraphs – one major point for each paragraph – and a short conclusion.  

Topic:  

Explicate this passage by Rose Schneiderman (it comes from Todd’s “Remembering the Unknowns”). You answer should include a brief discussion of Schneiderman, who she was and the context in which she was speaking. (You should find this information in the article and not on Wikipedia.) Who was she talking to when she made this speech? What does she mean when she says that public officials “have the workhouse just back of all their warnings”? Why does she say that she “can’t talk fellowship” with those who organized the meeting (and were sitting in the orchestra seats)? Your answer should include a discussion of social class. 

I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I were to come

here and talk good fellowship. . . . We have tried you citizens; we 

are trying you now and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing

mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every

time the workers come out in the only way they to protest against 

conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of law is allowed to 

press down heavily upon us. Public officials have only words of warning

or us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the

workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law

beats us back when we rise. . .. I can’t talk fellowship to you who are 

gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my 

experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. And the 

only way is through a strong working-class movement (Todd, 67).  

Remembering the Unknowns: The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire

Author(s): Ellen Wiley Todd

Source: American Art , Vol. 23, No. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 60-81

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art
Museum

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649776

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60 Fall 2009

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61 American Art Volume 23, Number 3 © 2009 Smithsonian Institution

Evelyn Beatrice Longman,
The Triangle Fire Memorial to
the Unknowns, 1912. Marble,
9 ft. 10 in. high including
pedestal. The Evergreens
Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
Photo,

Ellen Wiley Todd

On the afternoon of Saturday March 25,
1911, fire broke out at the Triangle Waist
Company. Located on the top three floors
of the ten-story Asch Building in New
York’s Greenwich Village, the factory,
which was the city’s largest producer of
the popular high-necked shirtwaist, had
been notorious for undermining garment
union attempts to improve working condi-
tions.1 Within twenty-five minutes after
sparks ignited oil-soaked cotton scraps,
146 young Jewish and Italian immigrant
workers, all but 13 of them young women,
perished in the massive blaze. Days later,
after hundreds of family members had
filed past coffins to claim the victims,
seven unidentified bodies remained at
the morgue. A committee representing
predominantly Jewish garment workers of
the International Ladies Garment Workers
Union (ILGWU) and the Women’s Trade
Union League requested that the bodies
be released for a public funeral proces-
sion, citing the long-standing custom of
the unions to provide a decent funeral
for every worker.2 City officials refused.
The coroner professed hopes that more
bodies would be identified in the future,
but Commissioner of Charities Michael
Drummond, responsible for orchestrating
New York’s recovery and relief efforts,
reportedly feared mass expressions of
outrage. Municipal leaders announced

that instead the bodies would be interred
on April 5 in a private ceremony at the
Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn, where
the city owned a plot. In response, the
union and its allies immediately pro-
claimed a memorial parade for all city
workers, also to take place on April 5.
Widely distributed handbills in English,
Yiddish, and Italian asked all workers to
“join in rendering a last sad tribute of
sympathy and affection.”3

These simultaneous memorials occurred
on a rainy day but under altogether dif-
ferent circumstances. In Manhattan the
funeral march (fig. 1), with almost four
hundred thousand people both march-
ing and watching, converged quietly on
Washington Square, proceeding north
from the Lower East Side and south from
Madison Square. Meanwhile, five male
city officials, headed by Commissioner
Drummond, moved in the opposite direc-
tion, ferrying caskets of the unknown
victims from the morgue across the East
River to the nondenominational cemetery
in Brooklyn. There a Roman Catholic
priest, an Episcopal minister, and a rabbi
read their respective burial services. The
memorial service concluded with a quartet
from the Elks Brooklyn lodge singing
“Abide with Me” and “Nearer My God to
Thee,” period favorites from the Protestant
repertoire of hymns.4 But these victims

Remembering the Unknowns
The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Ellen Wiley Todd
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62 Fall 2009

were laid to rest in an isolated field, at
the distant perimeter of the cemetery, far
from the mourning workers. Deliberately
separated from their communities of class,
occupation, ethnicity, and perhaps even
religion, they were bid farewell, not by the
young women with whom they shared
the labors of sewing, but by a group of
men only wishing to avoid the presumed
dangers of collective grief.

A year and eight months after the fire,
in January 1913, the official magazine of
the Red Cross pictured a monument that
had been erected over the site sometime
in the preceding month without any
public fanfare or apparently any unveiling
ceremony (fig. 2).5 The frontispiece to
this essay shows the monument as it exists
today, beautifully tended, with the once
empty field occupied by later graves. A
large vertical slab bears a relief of a half-
kneeling, half-crouching, mourning female
figure, carved in a quietly anguished pose
of internalized grief. Her arms encircle the
neck of a large Greek-style krater, and her
hands are clasped. Her head bows forward,
resting on a mass of draped cloth whose
classically inspired folds and forceful twists
feature prominently in the composition.
Drapery that rests across her lap loops
upward to frame the exposed left side of
her ample body. Coiling over her right

shoulder, it is gathered in the arc of her
hands around the urn. She weeps into
the substantial folds of material gathered
under her face, marking the loss of workers
whose hands will never again fashion cloth
into garments. The inscription beneath
the figure reads, “In sympathy and sorrow
citizens of New York raise this monument
over the graves of unidentified women and
children who with one hundred and thirty
nine others perished by fire in the Triangle
Shirtwaist factory Washington Place
March 25 1911.” On the reverse, a smaller
panel acknowledges that Mayor William J.
Gaynor’s relief fund, administered by the
Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee
of the Charity Organization Society of the
City of New York, left a “sufficient balance
to erect this monument.”6 The committee
was chaired by Robert W. de Forest, a
lawyer who had provided important politi-
cal support to the fledgling Municipal Art
Society’s City Beautiful activities, which
afforded him connections to the nation’s
elite sculptors. It was probably de Forest,
on behalf of the Emergency Relief
Committee, who commissioned Evelyn
Beatrice Longman, a protégé of prominent
sculptor Daniel Chester French, to design
the memorial’s relief.7

The impetus for the Longman monu-
ment, which has been unattributed until
now, arose from controversy over memorial
activities culminating in the public funeral
and the private interment of the unknown
victims. In the days after the fire, debates
about funeral arrangements and mourning
behavior were deeply embedded in the
ongoing politics of class, gender, and labor
in the aftermath of the 1909 Shirtwaist
strike, whose failures to provide safety
reform were seen by many constituen-
cies to have culminated in the Triangle
fire.8 More broadly, however, the funeral
procession and the monument operated
on relatively distinct memory principles
and launched forms of remembrance that
initially seemed oppositional but over time
have become more atuned to one another.

On the second anniversary of the fire,

1 Mourners gather alongside the
funeral procession route to
honor the Triangle Fire victims,
New York, April 5, 1911. Photo-
graph. UNITE Archives, Kheel
Center, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York

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63 American Art

in 1913, ILGWU labor leader Pauline
M. Newman argued for a living, activist
process of remembering. “The way to
honor the memory of the dead is to build
up a strong and powerful organization
that will prevent such disasters as that of
two years ago and serve as a monument to
the dead. Lest we forget!”9 She demanded
ongoing labor organizing and advocated
for improved working conditions, the
results of which, she claimed, would
constitute a perpetual memorial to fallen
workers.10 By contrast to this activist
agenda, the Longman monument appeared
unannounced and remained shrouded in
silence for years, allowing those whose
aesthetic and ideological interests it served
to move forward and forget, exactly what
Newman did not want to have happen.
Historian James Young has described this
type of forgetting, writing that “once we
assign monumental form to memory, we
have to some degree divested ourselves of
the obligation to remember. In shoulder-
ing the memory-work, monuments may
relieve viewers of their memory burden.”11

In their own ways, the memorial activities
and the monument secured the identities
and beliefs of their respective participants
and audiences.

The memorial parade took its form
from a twenty-year heritage of immigrant
Jewish public funeral processions, but it
downplayed religious signs to allow for a
multiethnic ceremony. As historian Arthur
Goren has shown, these public funerals
were both rituals of collective affirmation
and political declarations designed to reaf-
firm a way of life, the goals of the fallen,
and to enhance the Jewish self-image.
Organizers and participants performed
both for themselves and for Gentile observ-
ers with the aid of the press that regularly
covered these large-scale events.12 The
monument, although it served as a gesture
of atonement on the part of the upper-
middle-class elites who commissioned it,
should be read against a shifting class-based
discourse on urban social control and
moral order that pervaded the ideology
of the Charity Organization Society. As
outlined by historian Paul Boyer, this or-
ganization tried to provide gently coercive
examples of correct social behavior to
immigrant populations, in the hopes that
inculcating individual self-control and
self-improvement would result in a more
civilized populace. Greater cooperation
between classes toward shared ideals of civic
reform would bring about more “natural
relations” between classes.13 By the 1910s,
however, a new generation of social activists
and workers had embraced social theories
that focused on the practical environment,
proposing legislation for higher wages as
well as improvements in conditions at
work and at home. Instead of addressing
codes of public behavior around assembly,
protest, and mourning—as in the wake
of the fire—new alliances of progressives
sought workplace change and social justice.
Under this newer model, progressive elites
and advocates of industrial democracy
worked in common cause, as would
happen through corrective workplace
legislation in the wake of the fire. But it

2 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The
Triangle Fire Memorial to the
Unknowns. From American Red
Cross Bulletin 8 (January 1913), 42

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64 Fall 2009

was the older model of dignified mourning
behavior that appeared in the monument,
whose classical iconography and especially
its location largely failed to signify for the
communities it memorialized. Indeed,
unintended insult entered the equation in
the monument’s location for one potential
constituency of mourners; placed at the
cemetery’s edge, the grave occupied the
position that observant Jewish tradition
reserved for drifters and criminals.14 Only
when this section of the cemetery with its
accompanying plantings developed around
the monument did it assume the integrated
form it has today, in its honorific plot with
a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline
in the distance (fig. 3).

Relief, Outrage, and Mourning

In the immediate aftermath of the fire,
relief efforts came from two distinct
groups, union activists and allies
on the one hand, and the Charity
Organization Society on the other.

The first group, called the Joint Relief
Committee, included activists from
ILGWU Local 25, who were joined by
like-minded progressive organizations
that had supported its strike causes in
the past: the Women’s Trade Union
League, the Workmen’s Circle, and
the Jewish Daily Forward. The second
major group coalesced around the Red
Cross Emergency Relief Committee of
the Charity Organization Society—the
eventual source of funds for the memo-
rial. Spearheaded by Mayor Gaynor and
buttressed by high-society worthies,
the committee opened an office in the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on
Madison Square. The committee worked
with staff recruited from the United
Hebrew Charities and the Society of
St. Vincent de Paul, while the police
supplied victims’ names. Members of the
Joint Relief Committee, many of whom
spoke the languages of the bereaved,
accompanied trained Red Cross workers
during interviews with the survivors
and families to learn what kinds of help

3 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The
Triangle Fire Memorial to the
Unknowns, 1912 (distant view).
The Evergreens Cemetery,
Brooklyn, New York. Photo,
Ellen Wiley Todd

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65 American Art

were needed. As early as Wednesday,
March 28, most families on the police
list had been visited. The relief groups
also shared responsibility for distributing
funds. The union took charge of relief
for past and present union members,
while the Red Cross committee helped
non-union victims and provided aid to
families of immigrant workers who were
still living in Europe and dependent on
money sent to them. Throughout these
initial days, money poured in from
religious and educational communities
as well as from cultural and commercial

groups that donated proceeds from
theatrical events and daily receipts from
stores.15

But if these relief efforts crossed class,
cultural, and political boundaries, battle
lines were drawn in the daily newspapers
as public outrage about the fire generated
calls for the blame to be laid at someone’s
door as well as demands for safety legisla-
tion and for different forms of public
mourning, especially for the unknowns.
These sentiments escalated within the
newspapers owned by William Randolph
Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose stories
supported workers and often fueled the
kind of emotional content that city of-
ficials mistrusted. Indeed, most papers
deployed the discursive features of period
melodrama, as it has been described by
film scholar Ben Singer. The New York
American, for example, vastly inflated the
numbers of trapped employees (from 500
to 1,500) and elevated the body count to
175 (fig. 4). In the tragedy’s aftermath,
newspapers deployed melodramatic tropes
of overwrought emotion, moral polariza-
tion, and sensationalism that highlighted
suffering and difference, especially in class
and gender terms.16 In particular, news
accounts focused on female working-class
mourning behavior, emphasizing stories
of distraught workers. Hearst’s New York
American preyed on families, staging
pictures at the morgue before and after
bodies were identified. In one such set
(figs. 5, 6), six female workers confront
the camera “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek
Lost Relatives,” while in the photograph

4 Policemen and bystanders with
bodies of Triangle Fire victims on
Greene Street, New York Ameri-
can, March 26, 1911, 1. Photo,
courtesy of Joshua Brown

5 “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek Lost
Relatives,” New York American,
March 27, 1911, 2

6 “Grief Stricken Relatives Leaving
the Morgue,” New York American,
March 27, 1911, 3

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66 Fall 2009

documenting the later scene, relatives hold
handkerchiefs and one woman swoons,
supported by friends on the right. The
caption reports exaggerated responses
ranging from “hysterical to dumb with
despair.” Even the more staid New York
Times condemned “scores of women,
transformed by grief into unreasoning
furies, who resisted ordinary efforts to
check them. They rushed about moaning
and crying and tearing their hair. They
were hardly capable of making a thorough
examination of the bodies.”17 Connections
between female hysteria and irrationality,
typical of the period more broadly, were
linked to the Triangle Fire itself. A few
of the published descriptions attributed
greater loss of life to female panic. Such
readings failed, however, to account for
the locked doors and crowded conditions
on the site of the fire or the loss of daugh-
ters in their teens and early twenties.
These young women often provided the
sole support to families and served as their
only English speakers. Commentators also
ignored different cultural and religious
forms of mourning. Accounts of public
memorials in the Jewish Daily Forward,
for example, routinely cited physical lam-

entation and public outcry as typical and
acceptable.18

Class conflict over behavior—linked
both to mourning traditions and larger
mistrust between constituencies—also
suffused major memorial gatherings and
protest meetings around the city. The
sharpest distinction between class and be-
havior was drawn by Rose Schneiderman,
the tireless union activist who had partici-
pated in the Waistmakers strike and lost
friends in the fire (fig. 7). Schneiderman’s
now well-known remarks were made on
April 2 at an unprecedented cross-class
meeting at the Metropolitan Opera
House, a site rented by Ann Morgan,
suffrage activist, garment union supporter,
and daughter of the famous financier.
As Triangle Fire historian Leon Stein
described the setting, the upper galleries
were filled with Lower East Siders, and the
orchestra with women “trailing fur and
feathers.”19 The attempt to find common
ground in civic reform began when
those in charge of the meeting offered a
resolution asking for the establishment
of a Bureau of Fire Prevention, more
inspectors, and workmen’s compensa-
tion. Those in the balconies voiced their

distrust of citizen committees
that failed to include union
workers or union inspectors.
As the meeting deteriorated,
alternating between applause
and boos from the balcony,
Schneiderman intervened:

I would be a traitor to those
poor burned bodies if I were
to come here to talk good fel-
lowship. . . . We have tried you
citizens; we are trying you now
and you have a couple of dollars
for the sorrowing mothers and
brothers and sisters by way of a
charity gift. But every time the
workers come out in the only
way they know to protest against
conditions which are unbear-
able, the strong hand of the law

7 Speakers at mass meeting at the
Metropolitan Opera House. Rose
Schneiderman at upper right.
New York World, April 3, 1911, 3

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67 American Art

is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
Public officials have only words of warning
for us—warning that we must be intensely
orderly and must be intensely peaceable,
and they have the workhouse just back of all
their warnings. The strong hand of the law
beats us back when we rise. . . . I can’t talk
fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too
much blood has been spilled. I know from
my experience it is up to the working people
to save themselves. And the only way is
through a strong working-class movement.20

Schneiderman adopted the rhetoric of sep-
arate working-class activism that Pauline
Newman would two years later claim as a
memorializing process. For Schneiderman,
the civic ideal of controlled behavior
would never emerge from “natural rela-
tions” between classes but would only
be dictated from the top. And, finally, it
would not improve working lives.

Ironically, the memorial procession
to the fallen workers on April 5 served
as a decorous rebuke to the city elites
who were simultaneously on their way to
Brooklyn to inter the unidentified dead.
Where police had feared “the thickly
populated foreign districts—where emo-
tions are poignant and demonstrative,”
they found instead an ominous silence in
the gathering of four hundred thousand
who marched and lined the two parade
routes for six hours. Organizers called for
an end to class conflict, and the Morgen
Zhurnal urged, “Ideologies and politics
should be set aside, opponents and
enemies forgotten, and all should bow
their heads and grieve silently over the
victims of the horrendous misfortune.”
The Jewish Daily Forward described the
procession as demonstrating workers’
noble sense of duty as they proclaimed
the unity and strength of unions.21
The organizers banned all visual forms
of political protest and overt religious
expression, putting in their stead or-
ganization and union banners (fig. 8).
Instead of the plain pine box of observant
Jewish tradition—to symbolize the
fallen—they substituted a hearse covered
with flowers and drawn by white horses
covered in black netting—demonstrative
signs typical of Italian funerals (fig. 9).
Operating as a civic memorial, the pro-
cession deployed symbols that represented
the nameless victims who in turn stood
for all the dead. Silence, orderliness,
sorrow, and sobriety permeated a crowd
with a substantial female contingent who,
on a pouring rainy day and in deference
to their fallen sisters, marched without
hats, umbrellas, or overshoes.22

8 Mourners from the Ladies Waist
and Dressmakers Union Local 25
and the United Hebrew Trades
of New York march in the streets
after the Triangle Fire, 1911. Pho-
tograph. UNITE Archives, Kheel
Center, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York

9 Trade parade in memory of the
Triangle Fire victims, April 5,
1911. Bain News Service Photo-
graph. George Grantham Bain
Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

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68 Fall 2009

The Longman Memorial

In the Evergreens Cemetery memorial, the
same qualities of sorrow and dignified grief
characterized the design of Evelyn Beatrice
Longman’s sculpture as it was installed in
early December 1912. The monument’s
commission, its maker’s background, its
setting and iconography, and the cloak
of silence enveloping its completion
come together to reinforce the web of the
sometimes intersecting but more often
separate class, gender, and ethnic positions
on memorializing detailed above. Why was
Longman, a female sculptor, chosen for
this memorial? Under what circumstances
did she produce it, and what might have
been her thoughts on a commission so
fraught with controversy and grief? Why
did she never include the memorial in her
own records, and why was there no press
coverage when it appeared? While some of
what follows emerges from concrete docu-
mentation, other features of the interpreta-
tion are offered in the spirit of plausible
speculation.

By the time Longman (1874–1954)
received the commission for the Triangle
memorial’s relief sculpture sometime
in early 1912, she was fully embarked
on a successful career as a sculptor of
major public works, private memorials,
allegorical figures, and smaller portrait
busts. Longman (fig. 10) came of age at a
time when increasing numbers of women
were exhibiting and selling sculpture.
Unlike many of her female peers, who
specialized in small-scale genre works or
garden fountains, however, she sought her
reputation as a monumental public sculp-
tor. The field was dominated by men who
discouraged women’s attempts to compete
for these prize commissions. In 1912 her
position and achievements in the sculp-
tural profession, her integrity and ideals
in relation to the constituency represented
by the Emergency Relief Committee,
and her biography all contributed to her
being the logical choice in the view of that
committee.23

Longman’s training and professional
connections placed her at the heart of
the sculptural elite in New York City,
despite the fact that she was born in
Ohio and grew up in Chicago. She found
initial inspiration from visiting the 1893
World’s Columbian Exposition in her
hometown, where she saw dozens of
women receiving their first experience
making sculptural decoration. After
a two-year stint at Olivet College in
Michigan, from 1896 to 1898, she sub-
mitted a portfolio of drawings and was
accepted to study sculpture at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. There
she came under the tutelage of Beaux-
Arts sculptor Lorado Taft, who not
only encouraged promising women but
also held grand ambitions for America’s
civic sculptural movement, tied to City
Beautiful ideals. Already focused and
ambitious for herself, Longman found
Taft a strong mentor and completed
her four-year program in two years.
Recognizing that her best opportunities
for major commissions were on the East
Coast, she departed for New York City
in 1900. She was armed with letters of
introduction from Taft and from Art
Institute director William M. R. French
to his brother sculptor Daniel Chester
French as well as a return ticket provided
by skeptical friends.24 She would never
need it. French hired her as his first and
only female studio assistant and soon
wrote his brother that the strength of
Longman’s work “entirely vindicates your
recommendation.”25

Longman rented a studio at 11
East Fourteenth Street. Over the next
several years, until about 1906, she
combined labor in French’s nearby
Greenwich Village studio with her own
sculptural production.26 Longman
and French’s three-decade relationship,
which lasted until his death in 1931,
began with Longman very much the
student-assistant to the great teacher-
sculptor, twenty-five years her senior, and
the overworked French sent commissions

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69 American Art

her way. Before long it grew into a close
personal friendship extending to French’s
entire family. As evidenced in correspon-
dence between Longman and French and
with other sculptors, their association
was touched by the paternalistic or def-
erential age and gender dynamics typical
of the period and the sculptural vocation.
On balance, however, the relationship
evolved into one of mutual professional
dependence and abiding trust, with
French relying on Longman’s acute as-
sessments, and she on his.27

While some early commentators
focused on her beauty as a partial excuse
for her success—journalist Mitchell
Mannering described “dark eyes” and a

“wealth of dusky hair, which falls down
on both sides of her forehead, like that
of the Sistine Madonna”—others fol-
lowed French’s lead in offering her full
support.28 After Longman won the pres-
tigious commission for the U.S. Naval
Academy Chapel doors at Annapolis
(1906–8)—securing the commission
in a blind competition and almost
losing it when her gender and age were
revealed—she left for her first trip to
France and Italy, to acquire knowledge
and inspiration for her largest and most
important work to date. Already indicat-
ing his reliance on her, French wrote that
the trip to Europe was merited by her
“industrious apprenticeship,” and that
her maturity would allow her to profit
from learning the academic language
he had been too young to understand
when he went abroad. But the sculptor
also cautioned her against the lure of the
“foreign man,” opining, “I don’t believe
it would be good for your art and . . . it
would be well-nigh fatal to mine!” He
continued:

The fact is that I have come to lean on
you so hard, to trust your judgment about
my work so much and, more than all,
your high ideals and aspirations and your
buoyant enthusiasm are such an inspira-
tion to me that I—well!—that I hope
some other fellow will not deprive me of
them. . . [.] So please come back, content
to stay a few years, at least, in New York to
help me, as I will try to help you, up to the
top of Parnassus.29

Undoubtedly for her own reasons of am-
bition rather than his more self-interested
ones, Longman heeded this advice well
after 1906, the date of this letter, celebrat-
ing her marriage to Nathaniel Batchelder
only in late June 1920. By that time, at
forty-five, Longman had completed a
body of significant monumental public
sculpture, become the first female sculp-
tor elected to full membership in the
National Academy of Design (in 1919,

10 Evelyn Beatrice Longman working
on the Horsford Memorial
Bronze Doors for the Wellesley
College Library, 1911. Photo-
graph, Loomis Chaffee School
Archives, Windsor, Connecticut.
From Marilyn Rabetz and Walter
Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman
Batchelder (The Loomis Chaffee
School, 1993), title page

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70 Fall 2009

having been made an associate in 1909),
and won numerous awards. Though com-
mentators continued to refer to her as a
female sculptor rather than simply as a
sculptor, she had earned her credentials
and her reputation by adhering to codes
of strict professionalism—codes that
many historians of women artists now
recognize as the avenue to women’s accep-
tance in the arts.30 She was praised for her
extraordinary work ethic, her punctuality
in completing commissions, and her am-
bition coupled with a modest demeanor.
Fellow sculptors valued her candor and
fairness, and French commended her

business acumen coupled with integrity,
saying, “She has lots of common sense
and knows how to apply it, and any
Committee that has dealings with her can
be assured of having little trouble with
her in the carrying out of her contract.”31
These characteristics would have appealed
to the Emergency Relief Committee that
commissioned a memorial within months
of the Triangle tragedy and, after all the
controversy surrounding the unknown
victims, seemed to desire its timely, expe-
ditious, and quiet completion.

When the commission was announced
in the Red Cross Relief Report, Longman
was well known to sculptors, critics, and
the urban elites connected to those circles.
Her ties to French had helped to place
her well within a professional class and
bourgeois social register. In fact, her rela-
tion to Robert W. de Forest, chair of the
Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee,
may have already been established, and
I believe the request for the design was
offered directly to her rather than coming
through French. In addition to his legal
duties and intense involvement with
the art world, including the Municipal
Art Society and the National Sculpture
Society, de Forest had been president of
the Charity Organization Society of New
York City since 1888. In that capacity,
he came to be chair of the Red Cross
Emergency Relief Committee that dis-
persed the relief funds to Triangle victims
and set aside funds for the memorial.
Fittingly, the Charity Organization Society
was housed in the United Charities
Building, which had been financed by
public-minded philanthropist-banker
John S. Kennedy.32 Sometime after
Kennedy’s death in 1909, Longman
carved a portrait bust to be installed in
the building in his memory, completing it
in 1912, about the time she received the
Triangle Fire commission. De Forest, a
close associate of Kennedy’s and the eulo-
gist at his funeral, may well have chosen
Longman for the Kennedy bust. From
his knowledge of this work and several

11 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, Mr.
and Mrs. Robert W. de Forest,
1922. Bronze with gold leaf,
5 1/2 in. diameter. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Gift
of Mrs. Robert W. de Forest.
Photo © Metropolitan Museum
of Art

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71 American Art

other portraits of New York dignitaries,
de Forest would have known her abilities
as a sympathetic memorialist and seen
her as a logical choice for the Triangle
monument.33 Evidence for his continuing
respect for her work can be found in a
more personal work. In 1922 Longman
sculpted a bronze and gold-leaf portrait

medallion of de Forest and his wife, Emily
Johnston de Forest, on the occasion of
their fiftieth wedding anniversary (fig. 11).

The circumstances around the Triangle
commission become more complicated
when architect Henry Bacon (fig. 12) is
considered a possible additional maker.
In early 1912 a book-length report on
the disbursement of relief funds was pub-
lished. On the last page, a brief paragraph
announces the monument, suggesting that
the maker had already been decided when
the book was published:

After it was certain that not all the money
would be required for relief[,] an ap-
propriation was made at the suggestion of
the Commissioner of Public Charities for
erecting a monument on the graves of the

unidentified dead in Evergreen Cemetery,
at a cost of not over $2500.00. This will be
designed by Mr. Henry Bacon, in collabora-
tion with Miss Longman.34

French had introduced Longman to
Bacon, who later designed the Lincoln
Memorial, and all three were close friends
who eventually collaborated on that
monument. At the time of the Triangle
commission, Bacon and Longman had
completed their first major work together
and were just embarking on a second.35
De Forest, who was well informed
about sculptors and architects, may have
suggested a Longman-Bacon pairing.
Unfortunately, neither the Red Cross
files nor the Longman or Bacon archives
contain any records that elucidate the
details of the commission or the design
process, although it is likely that de Forest
corresponded with at least Longman
about the memorial for the fire victims.

We can also envision a scenario of
work both with and without Bacon, since
no record of his participation survives
beyond this initial mention. At the time
both Longman and Bacon were deeply
involved with more substantial and
lucrative commissions, since both were
arguably at the busiest and most produc-
tive times of their careers. Motivated by a
sense of civic responsibility and personal
obligation to de Forest and the compara-
tively small scale of the Triangle work,
both participants could have agreed to
execute the memorial. The simple ped-
estal with its slightly trapezoidal slab re-
quired little time; Bacon either sketched
it or advised Longman on the choice.
Longman’s task, executing the detailed
plaster relief of the mourning figure,
would have been more demanding. After
making the plaster, she hired Piccirilli
Brothers, the carvers, to produce the final
monument. Two handwritten letters in
December from Longman to Charles L.
Magee, secretary of the National Red
Cross, confirm her participation—the
only surviving archival record. Her

12 Henry Bacon, ca. 1900. From
Century Illustrated Monthly
Magazine 83 (1911–12): 369

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72 Fall 2009

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73 American Art

recitation reveals her attention to detail
and her professionalism. The first, dated
December 4, 1912, states:

I have intended writing to let you know that
I had not forgotten about the photograph
of the “Triangle Factory Fire” memorial or
delayed unavoidably. First, Piccirilli Bros,
who cut the marble, were weeks later in fin-
ishing it than they promised me; then when
my photographer went up to their studio, he
found that the marble was so placed that he
could not get his camera far enough away
from it; then we waited for the setting of the
monument; then for the planting to be done.
Almost immediately afterward the snow fell
and we had to wait for it to disappear.

Photos were finally taken last Monday but
it was a gray, dull day that [illegible] they
did not come out well, and the photographer
also forgot my instructions to show the entire
planting in one of them. The photos must
be taken again on the first bright day after

tomorrow. I am sending you the ones received
from the photographer this afternoon, just
to prove I have not been idle, but I would
not wish them to be used in any way, as they
do not begin to do justice to the monument
which really looked beautiful.36

On December 23 Longman wrote again,
this time enclosing photographs that she
still found unsatisfactory but deemed
better than the previous ones. Nonetheless,
she assured Magee that “sunlight seems to
be needed to process a really fine picture
in this case—though the monument itself
looks well to the eye in every light.” When
the photograph (see fig. 2) appeared in the
American Red Cross Bulletin, the caption
repeated part of the inscription but made
no mention of the monument’s maker(s).
If Longman was indeed pleased with the
memorial, it seems unlikely she would
have asked that her name be excluded
from any description of it. But, unlike
other commissions, she left no drawings,
no plaster relief, and no photographs, ex-
amples of which appear in her archives for
many of her works. To date, this completes
what we know of the commission and its
production.

We find a clear precedent in Longman’s
earlier work that helps us interpret the
Triangle memorial. The 1906 Louisa M.
Wells Monument (fig. 13) in the Lowell,
Massachusetts, cemetery serves as a
partial prologue to the design of the main
Triangle figure (fig. 14) and the symbolic
features of its overall program. Ironically,
where the quality of Longman’s work,
her professionalism, and her experience
garnered her the Triangle monument
project, the earlier Lowell memorial
provided some contentious moments
for the sculptor in just these areas. This
memorial was completed close to twenty
years after Wells died (1815–1886). She
had worked for about a year as a weaver in
the Lawrence Manufacturing Company,
one of the famous Lowell mills that
provided early industrial employment to
legions of New England women, just as

13 Evelyn Beatrice Longman. The
Louisa M. Wells Memorial, 1906.
Marble, 13 feet high. Lowell
Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts.
Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

14 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The
Triangle Fire Memorial to the
Unknowns, 1912 (detail of relief ).
Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

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74 Fall 2009

the shirtwaist industry would provide jobs
for tens of thousands of immigrants at
the turn of the twentieth century. After a
short stay in her native Vermont, in 1866
Wells settled in Lowell, purchasing a lot
in the Lowell Cemetery in 1876 to share
with her mother. At her death, her will left
eight thousand dollars for a monument to
be placed on the Wells plot. The sum grew
more substantial as relatives litigated this
provision over the next two decades. When
the court ruled in favor of the Wells estate,
her executor hired Daniel Chester French
to design the monument, envisioning not
only a memorial to a mill girl but also one
to Lowell’s important place in the early
history of industrial labor.37

French quickly turned the substantial
commission over to Longman, who was
just striking out on her own, thinking
perhaps that the subject of the virtuous
female laborer might be appropriate for
the young sculptor. Seven years later, the
precedent of Longman having created a
memorial to a working girl may have been
another point in her favor when it came
time for the Triangle memorial. After
completing the relief plaster for the Wells
monument in 1905, she carved the over-
life-size relief on the thirteen-foot-high slab
of Tennessee marble, taking more than a
year to finish it. Writing in the cemetery
report of 1906, two trustees stated that
“Evelyn B. Longman, the actual creator
of the Louisa Wells memorial was a very
talented associate of Daniel Chester French
[who] was so popular at that time that he
became overloaded with commissions—
and (very reluctantly, as she was a woman!)
he allowed Miss Longman to join him as
an associate.” The parenthetical editorial-
izing was theirs since, as French’s letters
make clear, he employed Longman with
enthusiasm. In 1907 French felt compelled
to intercede with the cemetery, relaying
both Longman’s concern that plantings
remained incomplete and that she was
still owed $2,500 (the total sum for the
Triangle monument five years later). “You
understand that Miss Longman gets all

the credit pecuniarily and otherwise of this
monument. It has been a great pleasure
to me to do what I could to aid and abet
her,” French wrote.38 There may have
been some question about the original-
ity of her design and her responsibility
for carving it, a problem historically for
female sculptors. But Longman worked
alone, provided the finish for the work in
monuments carved by others (as would
be the case with the Triangle monument),
and always supervised the details of instal-
lation.39 The inability of cemetery officials
to acknowledge the professionalism of a
female sculptor made for some uncomfort-
able transactions, but it also contradicted
their own recognition of the monument’s
beauty, which, after all, was a result of her
skill. (They might also have been more
interested in claiming the involvement of a
famous sculptor than an obscure assistant,
regardless of gender.) Their description,
again from the 1906 report, reveals their
sense of its larger importance to Lowell
while providing a careful period account.40

This work, representing as it will in this city
of never ending toil, the quiet and peace-
ful ending of Labor, it must attract wide
attention. The artist, with wonderful skill,
shows a strong female figure, clothed in the
simplest possible manner, holding in her
hand, as an emblem of labor, the bobbin
used in weaving. Broken strands of cotton lie
across her lap. Her whole figure is completely
relaxed, though she has not quite succumbed
to the last sleep; her hand has fallen from her
lap and rests upon the rock on which she sits,
still holding the bobbin loosely. One strand
of cotton remains unbroken. Behind, but
advancing is a beautiful angel—the Angel
of Death. Her hand is outstretched, about to
gently touch the shoulder of her whom she has
been sent to call. The angel’s face is beautiful,
and upon her hair rests a wreath of poppies,
emblem of sleep or death. A halo encircles her
head in a token of her divine mission. . . .
The inscription, from the apocrypha, [reads]
. . . “out of the fiber of her daily tasks,
she wove the fabric of a useful life.”41

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75 American Art

In formal terms the figure of the
Triangle mourner reverses and partially
echoes the pose of the dying Wells
figure—full torsos, curved backs, bowed
heads. In both, the lowered right leg is
stabilized by a flexed foot. In the more
open pose of the dying Wells girl, the
bent left leg props up her left arm with
its tilted hand supporting her head. Her
right arm falls limply by her side, opening
up her torso, a temporal sign, along with
the angel’s touch, of her imminent demise.
In the Triangle monument, a different
configuration of the upper body and the
closed profile pose imply a circle of eternal
grieving. The raised stable leg supports
the left arm, which rises to meet the right
hand as it reaches from behind the figure
and moves around the krater to clutch the
drapery in her clasped hands.

While there is a clear programmatic
distinction between the quietly dying
mill worker and the anguished mourner
for lives cut short, Longman’s choice of a
partially similar pose connects both the
concept and the fact of female labor. Yet
where peace reigns in the pose and drapery
of the figure in Lowell, the corresponding
elements in the Triangle project suggest a
tension-filled grief. Drapery and thread fall
loosely around the Wells figure. Her pose
is languid, her body comfortably enclosed
by the space surrounding it, apart from
the flexed foot that drops below the step.
For the Triangle mourner, in contrast,
Longman created a constricted space with
the flexed foot and calf angled awkwardly
behind, the figure’s bent back held down
by the upper frame of the niche. The folds
of the drapery (especially in the 1913 Red
Cross Bulletin picture, see fig. 2), which
are more sharply defined, fall to expose
the vulnerable torso and then twist in a
tight coil around and above her shoulder.
Its thick but active ropelike design con-
straining the figure echoes the downward-
pressing niche of the relief. And, though
difficult to see, the fingers appear tightly
entwined with the cloth that—to
reverse the textual meaning in the Wells

monument—would never be woven into
the fabric of useful life. Indeed, shirtwaist
cloth was both the source of labor and,
when ignited, the probable cause of the
fire. This mourning figure’s confined pose
embodies the controversy surrounding the
trauma of the fire and its aftermath as well
as the struggles of laboring lives now lost.

In making these interpretive claims, I
expand the more straightforward argument
about the monument as an elite-commis-
sioned exemplar of dignified mourning
behavior. The carved mourner, though
steeped in the academic ideal of civic
virtue, whose classical drapery and urn lend
her an allegorical tone, could also be read
as a survivor weeping for lost comrades—
the solitary stand-in for the legions of
women who paraded through New York
City streets to grieve for fellow workers on
April 5, 1911. Though Longman typically
carved strong, full-bodied female figures,
the expanse of this one is coded as a power-
ful working-class body. A garment worker,
making the six- to seven-mile trip from the
Lower East Side by ferry and on foot to
the gravesite, may have found this story for
herself in the figure whose pose resembled
those bent over the bodies in the morgue
or a sewing machine or even resisting the
constraints of the niche to push up from
the powerfully flexed foot and continue her
struggle.42 I am suggesting that Longman
found a way in these subtle components of
her design, whether consciously or not, to
satisfy all the mandates of the commission
and still acknowledge the deeply conflicted
conditions surrounding the fire and its
victims, their lives and work, as well as to
make a space for different constituencies of
visitors to the monument.

Circumstances in Longman’s own
youthful biography lead me to suggest the
more sympathetic details of this interpreta-
tion. Longman was raised in poverty and
familial distress in Chicago and on farms
in Ontario, Canada. She was the fifth
child of English and Canadian immi-
grants, whose musician father inspired her
love of the arts but was unable to support

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76 Fall 2009

his family. When Longman was six, her
mother died, and her father dispatched the
children to different relatives in Canada.
After a year, she and her sister Louise,
along with one brother, returned to
Chicago, only to be shuttled off to Canada
when her father remarried a year later.
Several years after that, she fought her way
home again, to find the children turned
out of the house. At fourteen, Longman
was forced to leave school to work to sup-
plement the family income. For the next
six years, she worked at Wilson Brothers
dry goods store. During this time, she tried
to attend night classes at the Art Institute
of Chicago, but exhaustion forced her to
quit. Finally, she saved enough money to
return to Olivet College, and at that point
her career can be said to have begun. In
writing about her achievements, early
critics assigned ample space to her story
and to the substantial amounts of money
she received for commissions, demonstrat-
ing through a central trope of American
culture her female Horatio Alger–like rise
to success.43 Such an appealing biography,
with its tale of triumph over struggle, also
could have inspired Robert W. de Forest
and the Emergency Relief Committee.

Longman’s life before the 1912 Triangle
commission was sharply divided between
one of hardships similar to those suffered
by immigrant women—a separated family,
early toil, and struggle for education—
followed by an accelerating rags-to-riches
story in the society of a traditional cultural
elite. Its aesthetic ideology of moral uplift
and civic virtue embodied in academic
classical ideals became her mode of visual
communication. And yet, as biographer
Margaret Samu has argued, Longman
achieved success in her major commis-
sions by melding academic neoclassicism
with inventive symbolic detail, infusing a
timeless ideal with telling details about the
subject. In the Wells memorial it was the
bobbin and thread. In her most famous
work, the 1915 Genius of Electricity for
the Western Union Telegraph Building in
New York, she abandoned the expected

format of a seated Zeus with thunderbolts
to deploy a powerful standing male
nude sporting a contemporary hairstyle,
with electrical cable spinning in the air
around his hips and legs and looped over
one arm.44 More subtly in the Triangle
memorial, her mourner’s constrained pose
and active drapery may be read as both
traditional and carefully coded to recall
the circumstances of the tragedy.

Since neither Longman nor the news-
papers ever spoke about the memorial,
we have no record of her intention for it
or critical response to it. We know from
family members that Longman, in her
desire to be recognized as a sculptor rather
than as a woman sculptor, avoided all
gender politics, maintaining an ideal of
professionalism throughout her long career.
She never publicly campaigned for suffrage
or revealed her preferences even in private
correspondence. She never affiliated herself
with women-centered organizations or ad-
vocated for the many progressive-era causes
related to social justice and immigration
that surrounded her in New York—and
that were taken up by her sculptural peers,
most notably Abastenia St. Leger Eberle.45
We have no idea how the Triangle Fire
affected her—even though it took place
only eight blocks south of her studio and
the memorial parade filled her neighbor-
hood. She cannot have escaped the massive
coverage of these events, and appropriate
ways of mourning in art would surely have
been part of the discussion around the
monument. Longman found her way up
a social and professional ladder precisely
by exercising moderate, gracious, dignified
behavior rather than by espousing any
positions, such as the cause of working
women, that would endanger her own
status. It would not have helped her to
align her support with the shirtwaist strik-
ers of 1909 or agitators in the wake of the
fire. So when asked to do the memorial,
she responded by executing the design and
remained untainted by the controversy that
continued to surround the fire in 1912;
Longman received the commission around

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77 American Art

the time the owners of the factory were
acquitted for any wrongdoing, causing
outrage not only within the labor com-
munity but also among many progressives.
Undoubtedly for professional reasons she
avoided any involvement and did not
protest the silences surrounding the erec-
tion of the memorial. Unlike the monu-
ment to the individual mill girl who made
good and exercised cultural capital by
saving money for a family monument, the
Triangle memorial commemorated poor
working-class immigrants, many of whom
were seen as defying the cultural order in
their 1909 strike and memorial protests.
For Longman, there was nothing to do

but mourn in a dignified manner and to
show the figure in a guise acceptable to the
commission and the sculptor herself. This
was the overriding message of Longman’s
Evergreens Cemetery memorial even as she
may have provided sympathetic nuances to
complicate its terms and address multiple
audiences.

Afterlives

Class divisions continued in the memorial-
izing process at multiple levels of repre-
sentation. The Evergreens memorial relief
presents the model of calm, dignified, stoic
grief found in similar memorials lauded
throughout the newspapers and in the
pages of the Monumental News, the major
trade and critical journal for publishing
monuments nationwide. At this time, it
published at least three monuments to
disaster or labor in a similar iconographic
register. One commemorates the 259
victims of the 1909 Cherry Hill Mine
disaster in Cherry, Illinois. Commissioned
by the United Mine Workers and installed
on a site near the mine, the memorial
features a standing female mourner with
head bowed and knees bent, holding a
wreath, clothed in classical garb.46 Like
Longman’s memorial, it provides, to
reshape the words of Rose Schneiderman
to another purpose, the model of behavior
to which elites wished the working class to
conform—“intensely orderly, and intensely
peaceable.” Yet without celebration or
publication, the Longman monument
disappeared from view, its memorializing
and atoning purposes lost to a long period
of public memory. No New York paper re-
ported its installation or any accompanying
ceremony. Nor did it receive any mention
in the ILGWU publications over time. The
union archive contains only one image,
a closeup of the monument, indicating
awareness of its presence by midcentury.

Garment workers made two different
kinds of memorials over time. The first
(fig. 15) can be found in the Jewish Mt.

15 Memorial to fourteen victims
of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Mt. Zion Cemetery, Maspeth
(Queens), New York. Photo,
Ellen Wiley Todd

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78 Fall 2009

16 Fiftieth anniversary commemora-
tion, March 1961, at The Triangle
Fire Memorial to the Unknowns,
The Evergreens Cemetery,
Brooklyn. Photograph. UNITE
Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York

17 Fiftieth anniversary memorial
event on the site of the Trian-
gle Fire at Washington Place and
Greene Street, New York, March
25, 1961. Photograph. UNITE
Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York

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79 American Art

Zion cemetery in Queens. It marks the
site originally proposed by the union
for the grave and memorial for the
unknowns. After the city rejected this
idea, the union agreed to the nonsectar-
ian site in the Evergreens Cemetery.47
In Mt. Zion a simple post-and-lintel
memorial with a carved eternal flame in
the center rises over fourteen graves of
identified shirtwaist workers. The names
of these victims were originally in raised
lettering but have eroded away; they
now reside only in cemetery records. On
the lintel, a carved inscription states,
“Erected November 1911 by their sisters
and brothers Members of the Ladies
Waist and Dressmakers Union Local No.
25.” Built quickly, it appeared a full year
before the city’s memorial by Longman.48

The Longman memorial came back
into public view on the occasion of the
fiftieth anniversary of the fire in 1961, as
mourners and survivors again gathered
around it (fig. 16). This was a year before
Leon Stein’s book on the Triangle Fire

was published, recalling the sharp divi-
sions over mourning, demonstrating,
and the disposition of bodies. Now the
monument sits in its peaceful cemetery
setting, far removed from the site of
the fire, which has become the second
and living memorial through an annual
commemoration there—which also
began at the fiftieth anniversary (fig. 17).
This performative memorial varies from
year to year, reciting gains and losses
in labor’s ongoing attempts to organize
and improve working conditions. It
regularly includes the reading of victims’
names by garment workers, now in the
accents of languages from all over the
world.49 With the recitation of each
name, participants lay a flower at the
base of the building where their prede-
cessors perished, gestures perhaps more
meaningful to today’s assembled laborers
than the carved moral exemplum of stoic
grief—beautiful, yet isolated from the
worlds in which they continue to work
and struggle.

Notes

I would like to thank my research assistant
Maureen Guignon for patiently tracking the
Longman file in the Red Cross Archives;
Berrie Moos and Ingrid Mueller in the
Longman Archives, and Karen Parsons, his-
torian, all at the Loomis-Chaffee School in
Windsor, Connecticut; Donato Daddario,
historian at the Evergreens Cemetery; and
Melissa Dabakis, Erika Doss, and Martin
Donougho for listening and reading.

1 A waist is an older term for a separate
blouse, specifically the high-collared,
long-sleeved version that was the most
fashionable and versatile female garment
for women of all classes from the 1890s
until World War I. A shirtwaist, made
popular by the Gibson Girl, working
women, and suffragists, technically
referred to the man-tailored version of a
waist with buttons down the front, while
a fancy waist buttoned down the back
and was embellished with lace, ribbon,
pleats, or other decorative features. The
Triangle Waist company made moder-

ately priced versions of these blouses, and
the tragedy has come to be called the Tri-
angle Shirtwaist Fire.

2 New York Times, March 31, 1911, 2.

3 Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (1962;
New York: Carroll and Graf Publish-
ers, 1985), 148–49. Stein’s classic study,
which draws from newspaper and sur-
vivor accounts, provides the most in-
depth synthesis of information about
the fire and the events of several weeks
afterward. Another important source
is David Von Drehle, Triangle: The
Fire That Changed America (New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

4 Stein, Triangle Fire, 153–55.

5 American Red Cross Bulletin 8 (January
1913): 42.

6 The full text of the inscription reads,
in somewhat ungrammatical prose,

“The plot and burial were provided by
the department of public charities the
relief fund contributed largely through
Mayor William J. Gaynor Mayor of
New York and administered by the
Red Cross Emergency Relief Commit-
tee of the Charity Organization Society
left a sufficient balance to erect this
monument.”

7 On de Forest, see Michele H. Bogart.
Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in
New York City, 1890 –1930 (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1997), 60.

8 Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle
Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Indus-
trial Democracy in Progressive Era New
York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press,
2005). For a documentary history of
the relation between the strike and fire,
see John F. McClymer, The Triangle
Strike and Fire (New York: Harcourt
Brace and Company, 1998).

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80 Fall 2009

9 Pauline M. Newman, “Lest We Forget!”
Ladies Garment Worker 4 (April 1913): 23.

10 The performative practice of memori-
alization through organizing and dem-
onstrating was enacted in the funeral
parade and continues today in an annual
on-site ritual, staged on the anniversary
of the fire.

11 James Young, The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 5.

12 Arthur Aryeh Goren, “Sacred and
Secular: The Place of Public Funerals in
the Immigrant Life of American Jews,”
Jewish History 8 (1994): 270.

13 For a general discussion of these work-
ings of the Charity Organization Society,
see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral
Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1978), 151–61.

14 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 271.

15 Stein, Triangle Fire, 122–27.

16 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity:
Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001),
41–53.

17 New York American, March 27, 1911, 2;
New York Times, March 27, 1911, 2.

18 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 275.

19 Stein, Triangle Fire, 141.

20 “Mass Meeting Calls for New Fire Laws,”
New York Times, April 3, 1911.

21 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 285.

22 Stein, Triangle Fire, 151. I have been
unable to identify the source of the news-
paper quote about “thickly populated
foreign districts.”

23 The most comprehensive recent
sources for Longman’s work are
Marilyn Rabetz and Walter Rabetz,
Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder
(Windsor, Conn.: Loomis Chaffee
School, 1993); and Margaret Samu,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman: Establishing
a Career in Public Sculpture,” Women’s
Art Journal 25 (Fall 2004–Winter 2005):
8–15. Samu’s honors thesis, “Establish-
ing a Career in Public Sculpture: Evelyn
Beatrice Longman” (Wellesley College,

2001), provides additional detail and
analysis. At forty-five, Longman married
Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, headmaster
of the Loomis School in Windsor, Con-
necticut. While still known profession-
ally as Evelyn Beatrice Longman, she was
Mrs. Batchelder or, affectionately, Mrs.
“B” at the school.

24 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 8;
Samu, “Establishing a Career,” 14.

25 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 8.
French hired Longman in part to com-
plete lettering for the Boston Public
Library doors, a task he disliked and
one at which (along with ornament) she
excelled. She worked on lettering later for
the Lincoln Memorial with French and
architect Henry Bacon. Daniel Chester
French to William Merchant French,
December 30, 1900, Daniel Chester
French Papers, Library of Congress (here-
after, French Papers). For additional dis-
cussion of their meeting, see Margaret
French Cresson, Journey into Fame: The
Life of Daniel Chester French (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), 210.

26 Longman gained independence with
her first major public piece, the 1903
male Victory, a twenty-five-foot-high
work that was given the place of honor
atop the Festival Hall on the grounds
of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposi-
tion, known informally as the St. Louis
World’s Fair. Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn
Beatrice Longman Batchelder,” in Rabetz
and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman
Batchelder, 4; Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice
Longman,” 9.

27 For an extended discussion of the cor-
respondence related to Longman, see
Michael Richman, “The French-Long-
man Connection,” in Rabetz and Rabetz,
Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder.

28 Mitchell Mannering, “The Memorial to
Senator Allison,” National Magazine 38
(August 1913): 760–63. Full citation for
clipping in Longman Vertical File, Smith-
sonian American Art Museum found at
www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/t991.
htm#A21589 cited in Marilyn Rabetz,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder.”

29 French to Longman, June 17, 1906,
French Papers.

30 For discussions of female professionalism,
see Kirsten Swinth, Painting Profession-
als: Women Artists and the Development
of Modern American Art, 1870–1930

(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Caro-
lina Press, 2000); Laura Prieto, At Home
in the Studio: The Professionalization of
Women Artists in America (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); and
Melissa Dabakis, “Feminist Interventions:
Some Thoughts on Recent Scholarship
about Women Artists,” American Art 18
(Spring 2004): 2–9.

31 For these general insights into her char-
acter, see Adeline Adams, “Evelyn Bea-
trice Longman,” American Magazine
of Art (May 1928): 237–50; and Jona-
than A. Rawson Jr., “Evelyn Beatrice
Longman, Feminine Sculptor,” Inter-
national Studio (February 1912): xcix–
ciii. For French’s quote, see Daniel
Chester French to muralist H. Siddons
Mowbray, July 23, 1922, French Papers;
though this is a later letter, French
would have been well aware of her deal-
ings with works commissioned by com-
mittee in 1912.

32 For discussion of de Forest’s role in the
Charity Organization Society, see Lilian
Brandt, Charity Organization Society of
the City of New York, 1882–1907 (New
York: B. H. Tyrell, 1907), 27. On the
building, see Brandt, 20, and “A Building
for Charity: John S. Kennedy’s Liberal
and Public-Spirited Project,” New York
Times, March 10, 1891, 8, and www.
preserve2.org/gramercy/proposes/ext/
ension/105e22.htm (accessed July 1,
2009).

33 Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice
Longman Batchelder, 38. In the years
before Kennedy’s memorial, Longman
created the Storey Memorial (1905)
and the Wells Memorial (1906), both
in the Lowell Cemetery, and the Mary
Elizabeth Ryle Memorial in Patterson,
N.J. (1907). She carved the figure of
Memory in the Benson Family Memo-
rial in Titusville, Pa. (1907), and created
the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity
for the Foster Mausoleum in Middle-
burgh, N.Y. (1911), and a portrait relief
of Senator Henry Clark Corbin (1911).
“Speak in Praise of John S. Kennedy:
Memorial Meeting for Philanthropist
Participated in by Men Who Knew His
Work,” New York Times, November 23,
1909, 7.

34 Emergency Relief after the Washington Place
Fire, New York, March 25, 1911: Report
of the Red Cross Emergency Relief Commit-
tee of the Charity Organization Society of
the City of New York (New York: Charity
Organization Society, 1912), 67.

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81 American Art

35 Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice
Longman Batchelder, 38; and Joel
Rosenkranz and Janis Conner, “Evelyn
Longman in Context,” in ibid., 17.
Bacon and Longman first collaborated
in 1910–11 on the Foster family mau-
soleum in Middleburgh, New York.
In 1912 Longman won a public com-
mission through a blind jury process
for the monument to Senator William
Boyd Allison to be installed on the state
capitol grounds in Des Moines, Iowa;
Bacon designed the massive pedestal.

36 Both Longman letters may be found in
RG 200 National Archives Gift Collec-
tion, Records of the American National
Red Cross, 1881–1916, Box #57; File
848: New York (Washington Place) Fire,
Triangle Shirtwaist Co. 3/25/1911.

37 For the story of Louisa Wells and the
Lowell Cemetery, see Catherine L.
Goodwin. Mourning Glory: The Story
of Lowell Cemetery, rev. ed. (Lowell,
Mass.: Lowell Historical Society, 2003),
16. More specific information on
Wells and the commission is found in
“Louisa Wells: The Story of Her Monu-
ment in the Lowell Cemetery,” type-
script, Lowell Cemetery Archive, Lowell,
Mass., n.p. An excerpt from the 1905
Lowell Cemetery trustees report of 1905
describes Wells as “this good woman, a
woman of religious inclination . . . left
quite a tidy sum of money, the accumu-
lation of years of toil”; quoted in ibid.

38 French to George F. Richardson, January
4, 1907, French Papers.

39 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 9,
shows that Longman’s contemporary

critics also noted her professionalism
and meticulous attention to detail.

40 “Louisa Wells: The Story of Her Monu-
ment in the Lowell Cemetery”; quote
from the trustees report of 1906,
signed by Harry C. Dinmore, Lewis
Karabatsos, n.p.

41 Ibid.

42 I thank Melissa Dabakis for her help in
thinking about the bodies of working
women in sculpture. For an under-
standing of how working-class women
might make stories through “high” art,
see Katharine Martinez, “At Home with
Mona Lisa: Consumers and Commer-
cial Visual Culture, 1880–1920,” in
Seeing High and Low: Representing Social
Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed.
Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 2006), 160–76.

43 See Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn Bea-
trice Longman Batchelder,” 1–3. On
critics’ references to her early history,
see Rawson, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman:
Feminine Sculptor”; and Samu,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 10.

44 James Spencer Dickerson, “Evelyn B.
Longman: A Western Girl Who Has
Become a National Figure in Sculpture,”
World Today, May 1908, 529; Samu,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 11–12.

45 See Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,”
13. Samu refers to correspondence and
interviews with Longman’s stepson,
N. H. Batchelder Jr., in October and
November 2000. For St. Leger Eberle,
see Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor
in American Sculpture: Monuments,

Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–
1935 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge
Studies in American Visual Culture,
1999), 149–58.

46 Karen Tintori, Trapped: The 1909 Cherry
Mine Disaster (New York: Atria Books,
2002).

47 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 284.
Originally the union also proposed a
massive procession to accompany the
unknowns to Mt. Zion. The distance
to both Mt. Zion Cemetery and the
Evergreens Cemetery is about 6 1/2 miles
from the Lower East Side.

48 Today, it lies in proximity to two more
recent granite markers and was pic-
tured first when accessing “Triangle
Fire Memorial” in Internet searches
in August 2009. The Evergreens site
mentioned the Triangle Fire memo-
rial with no picture. For the Workman’s
Circle Memorials, see www.flickr.com/
photos/23021987@N06/2730823420/;
for the Evergreens Cemetery, see www.
theevergreenscemetery.com/ (both
accessed July 1, 2009).

49 The most recent activist memorial is the
Chalk Project, organized by New York
filmmaker Ruth Sergel. Each year on the
anniversary of the fire, volunteers write
the names and ages of victims outside
their former residences. See Michael
Molyneux, “Memorials in Chalk,” New
York Times, April 3, 2005. For a theoret-
ical discussion of how these more recent
memorials do memory work, see Alison
Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Trans-
formation of American Remembrance
in the Age of Mass Culture (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 2004).

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Remembering the Unknowns: The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire

Author(s): Ellen Wiley Todd

Source: American Art , Vol. 23, No. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 60-81

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art
Museum

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649776

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60 Fall 2009

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61 American Art Volume 23, Number 3 © 2009 Smithsonian Institution

Evelyn Beatrice Longman,
The Triangle Fire Memorial to
the Unknowns, 1912. Marble,
9 ft. 10 in. high including
pedestal. The Evergreens
Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
Photo,

Ellen Wiley Todd

On the afternoon of Saturday March 25,
1911, fire broke out at the Triangle Waist
Company. Located on the top three floors
of the ten-story Asch Building in New
York’s Greenwich Village, the factory,
which was the city’s largest producer of
the popular high-necked shirtwaist, had
been notorious for undermining garment
union attempts to improve working condi-
tions.1 Within twenty-five minutes after
sparks ignited oil-soaked cotton scraps,
146 young Jewish and Italian immigrant
workers, all but 13 of them young women,
perished in the massive blaze. Days later,
after hundreds of family members had
filed past coffins to claim the victims,
seven unidentified bodies remained at
the morgue. A committee representing
predominantly Jewish garment workers of
the International Ladies Garment Workers
Union (ILGWU) and the Women’s Trade
Union League requested that the bodies
be released for a public funeral proces-
sion, citing the long-standing custom of
the unions to provide a decent funeral
for every worker.2 City officials refused.
The coroner professed hopes that more
bodies would be identified in the future,
but Commissioner of Charities Michael
Drummond, responsible for orchestrating
New York’s recovery and relief efforts,
reportedly feared mass expressions of
outrage. Municipal leaders announced

that instead the bodies would be interred
on April 5 in a private ceremony at the
Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn, where
the city owned a plot. In response, the
union and its allies immediately pro-
claimed a memorial parade for all city
workers, also to take place on April 5.
Widely distributed handbills in English,
Yiddish, and Italian asked all workers to
“join in rendering a last sad tribute of
sympathy and affection.”3

These simultaneous memorials occurred
on a rainy day but under altogether dif-
ferent circumstances. In Manhattan the
funeral march (fig. 1), with almost four
hundred thousand people both march-
ing and watching, converged quietly on
Washington Square, proceeding north
from the Lower East Side and south from
Madison Square. Meanwhile, five male
city officials, headed by Commissioner
Drummond, moved in the opposite direc-
tion, ferrying caskets of the unknown
victims from the morgue across the East
River to the nondenominational cemetery
in Brooklyn. There a Roman Catholic
priest, an Episcopal minister, and a rabbi
read their respective burial services. The
memorial service concluded with a quartet
from the Elks Brooklyn lodge singing
“Abide with Me” and “Nearer My God to
Thee,” period favorites from the Protestant
repertoire of hymns.4 But these victims

Remembering the Unknowns
The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Ellen Wiley Todd
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62 Fall 2009

were laid to rest in an isolated field, at
the distant perimeter of the cemetery, far
from the mourning workers. Deliberately
separated from their communities of class,
occupation, ethnicity, and perhaps even
religion, they were bid farewell, not by the
young women with whom they shared
the labors of sewing, but by a group of
men only wishing to avoid the presumed
dangers of collective grief.

A year and eight months after the fire,
in January 1913, the official magazine of
the Red Cross pictured a monument that
had been erected over the site sometime
in the preceding month without any
public fanfare or apparently any unveiling
ceremony (fig. 2).5 The frontispiece to
this essay shows the monument as it exists
today, beautifully tended, with the once
empty field occupied by later graves. A
large vertical slab bears a relief of a half-
kneeling, half-crouching, mourning female
figure, carved in a quietly anguished pose
of internalized grief. Her arms encircle the
neck of a large Greek-style krater, and her
hands are clasped. Her head bows forward,
resting on a mass of draped cloth whose
classically inspired folds and forceful twists
feature prominently in the composition.
Drapery that rests across her lap loops
upward to frame the exposed left side of
her ample body. Coiling over her right

shoulder, it is gathered in the arc of her
hands around the urn. She weeps into
the substantial folds of material gathered
under her face, marking the loss of workers
whose hands will never again fashion cloth
into garments. The inscription beneath
the figure reads, “In sympathy and sorrow
citizens of New York raise this monument
over the graves of unidentified women and
children who with one hundred and thirty
nine others perished by fire in the Triangle
Shirtwaist factory Washington Place
March 25 1911.” On the reverse, a smaller
panel acknowledges that Mayor William J.
Gaynor’s relief fund, administered by the
Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee
of the Charity Organization Society of the
City of New York, left a “sufficient balance
to erect this monument.”6 The committee
was chaired by Robert W. de Forest, a
lawyer who had provided important politi-
cal support to the fledgling Municipal Art
Society’s City Beautiful activities, which
afforded him connections to the nation’s
elite sculptors. It was probably de Forest,
on behalf of the Emergency Relief
Committee, who commissioned Evelyn
Beatrice Longman, a protégé of prominent
sculptor Daniel Chester French, to design
the memorial’s relief.7

The impetus for the Longman monu-
ment, which has been unattributed until
now, arose from controversy over memorial
activities culminating in the public funeral
and the private interment of the unknown
victims. In the days after the fire, debates
about funeral arrangements and mourning
behavior were deeply embedded in the
ongoing politics of class, gender, and labor
in the aftermath of the 1909 Shirtwaist
strike, whose failures to provide safety
reform were seen by many constituen-
cies to have culminated in the Triangle
fire.8 More broadly, however, the funeral
procession and the monument operated
on relatively distinct memory principles
and launched forms of remembrance that
initially seemed oppositional but over time
have become more atuned to one another.

On the second anniversary of the fire,

1 Mourners gather alongside the
funeral procession route to
honor the Triangle Fire victims,
New York, April 5, 1911. Photo-
graph. UNITE Archives, Kheel
Center, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York

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63 American Art

in 1913, ILGWU labor leader Pauline
M. Newman argued for a living, activist
process of remembering. “The way to
honor the memory of the dead is to build
up a strong and powerful organization
that will prevent such disasters as that of
two years ago and serve as a monument to
the dead. Lest we forget!”9 She demanded
ongoing labor organizing and advocated
for improved working conditions, the
results of which, she claimed, would
constitute a perpetual memorial to fallen
workers.10 By contrast to this activist
agenda, the Longman monument appeared
unannounced and remained shrouded in
silence for years, allowing those whose
aesthetic and ideological interests it served
to move forward and forget, exactly what
Newman did not want to have happen.
Historian James Young has described this
type of forgetting, writing that “once we
assign monumental form to memory, we
have to some degree divested ourselves of
the obligation to remember. In shoulder-
ing the memory-work, monuments may
relieve viewers of their memory burden.”11

In their own ways, the memorial activities
and the monument secured the identities
and beliefs of their respective participants
and audiences.

The memorial parade took its form
from a twenty-year heritage of immigrant
Jewish public funeral processions, but it
downplayed religious signs to allow for a
multiethnic ceremony. As historian Arthur
Goren has shown, these public funerals
were both rituals of collective affirmation
and political declarations designed to reaf-
firm a way of life, the goals of the fallen,
and to enhance the Jewish self-image.
Organizers and participants performed
both for themselves and for Gentile observ-
ers with the aid of the press that regularly
covered these large-scale events.12 The
monument, although it served as a gesture
of atonement on the part of the upper-
middle-class elites who commissioned it,
should be read against a shifting class-based
discourse on urban social control and
moral order that pervaded the ideology
of the Charity Organization Society. As
outlined by historian Paul Boyer, this or-
ganization tried to provide gently coercive
examples of correct social behavior to
immigrant populations, in the hopes that
inculcating individual self-control and
self-improvement would result in a more
civilized populace. Greater cooperation
between classes toward shared ideals of civic
reform would bring about more “natural
relations” between classes.13 By the 1910s,
however, a new generation of social activists
and workers had embraced social theories
that focused on the practical environment,
proposing legislation for higher wages as
well as improvements in conditions at
work and at home. Instead of addressing
codes of public behavior around assembly,
protest, and mourning—as in the wake
of the fire—new alliances of progressives
sought workplace change and social justice.
Under this newer model, progressive elites
and advocates of industrial democracy
worked in common cause, as would
happen through corrective workplace
legislation in the wake of the fire. But it

2 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The
Triangle Fire Memorial to the
Unknowns. From American Red
Cross Bulletin 8 (January 1913), 42

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64 Fall 2009

was the older model of dignified mourning
behavior that appeared in the monument,
whose classical iconography and especially
its location largely failed to signify for the
communities it memorialized. Indeed,
unintended insult entered the equation in
the monument’s location for one potential
constituency of mourners; placed at the
cemetery’s edge, the grave occupied the
position that observant Jewish tradition
reserved for drifters and criminals.14 Only
when this section of the cemetery with its
accompanying plantings developed around
the monument did it assume the integrated
form it has today, in its honorific plot with
a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline
in the distance (fig. 3).

Relief, Outrage, and Mourning

In the immediate aftermath of the fire,
relief efforts came from two distinct
groups, union activists and allies
on the one hand, and the Charity
Organization Society on the other.

The first group, called the Joint Relief
Committee, included activists from
ILGWU Local 25, who were joined by
like-minded progressive organizations
that had supported its strike causes in
the past: the Women’s Trade Union
League, the Workmen’s Circle, and
the Jewish Daily Forward. The second
major group coalesced around the Red
Cross Emergency Relief Committee of
the Charity Organization Society—the
eventual source of funds for the memo-
rial. Spearheaded by Mayor Gaynor and
buttressed by high-society worthies,
the committee opened an office in the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on
Madison Square. The committee worked
with staff recruited from the United
Hebrew Charities and the Society of
St. Vincent de Paul, while the police
supplied victims’ names. Members of the
Joint Relief Committee, many of whom
spoke the languages of the bereaved,
accompanied trained Red Cross workers
during interviews with the survivors
and families to learn what kinds of help

3 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The
Triangle Fire Memorial to the
Unknowns, 1912 (distant view).
The Evergreens Cemetery,
Brooklyn, New York. Photo,
Ellen Wiley Todd

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65 American Art

were needed. As early as Wednesday,
March 28, most families on the police
list had been visited. The relief groups
also shared responsibility for distributing
funds. The union took charge of relief
for past and present union members,
while the Red Cross committee helped
non-union victims and provided aid to
families of immigrant workers who were
still living in Europe and dependent on
money sent to them. Throughout these
initial days, money poured in from
religious and educational communities
as well as from cultural and commercial

groups that donated proceeds from
theatrical events and daily receipts from
stores.15

But if these relief efforts crossed class,
cultural, and political boundaries, battle
lines were drawn in the daily newspapers
as public outrage about the fire generated
calls for the blame to be laid at someone’s
door as well as demands for safety legisla-
tion and for different forms of public
mourning, especially for the unknowns.
These sentiments escalated within the
newspapers owned by William Randolph
Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose stories
supported workers and often fueled the
kind of emotional content that city of-
ficials mistrusted. Indeed, most papers
deployed the discursive features of period
melodrama, as it has been described by
film scholar Ben Singer. The New York
American, for example, vastly inflated the
numbers of trapped employees (from 500
to 1,500) and elevated the body count to
175 (fig. 4). In the tragedy’s aftermath,
newspapers deployed melodramatic tropes
of overwrought emotion, moral polariza-
tion, and sensationalism that highlighted
suffering and difference, especially in class
and gender terms.16 In particular, news
accounts focused on female working-class
mourning behavior, emphasizing stories
of distraught workers. Hearst’s New York
American preyed on families, staging
pictures at the morgue before and after
bodies were identified. In one such set
(figs. 5, 6), six female workers confront
the camera “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek
Lost Relatives,” while in the photograph

4 Policemen and bystanders with
bodies of Triangle Fire victims on
Greene Street, New York Ameri-
can, March 26, 1911, 1. Photo,
courtesy of Joshua Brown

5 “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek Lost
Relatives,” New York American,
March 27, 1911, 2

6 “Grief Stricken Relatives Leaving
the Morgue,” New York American,
March 27, 1911, 3

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66 Fall 2009

documenting the later scene, relatives hold
handkerchiefs and one woman swoons,
supported by friends on the right. The
caption reports exaggerated responses
ranging from “hysterical to dumb with
despair.” Even the more staid New York
Times condemned “scores of women,
transformed by grief into unreasoning
furies, who resisted ordinary efforts to
check them. They rushed about moaning
and crying and tearing their hair. They
were hardly capable of making a thorough
examination of the bodies.”17 Connections
between female hysteria and irrationality,
typical of the period more broadly, were
linked to the Triangle Fire itself. A few
of the published descriptions attributed
greater loss of life to female panic. Such
readings failed, however, to account for
the locked doors and crowded conditions
on the site of the fire or the loss of daugh-
ters in their teens and early twenties.
These young women often provided the
sole support to families and served as their
only English speakers. Commentators also
ignored different cultural and religious
forms of mourning. Accounts of public
memorials in the Jewish Daily Forward,
for example, routinely cited physical lam-

entation and public outcry as typical and
acceptable.18

Class conflict over behavior—linked
both to mourning traditions and larger
mistrust between constituencies—also
suffused major memorial gatherings and
protest meetings around the city. The
sharpest distinction between class and be-
havior was drawn by Rose Schneiderman,
the tireless union activist who had partici-
pated in the Waistmakers strike and lost
friends in the fire (fig. 7). Schneiderman’s
now well-known remarks were made on
April 2 at an unprecedented cross-class
meeting at the Metropolitan Opera
House, a site rented by Ann Morgan,
suffrage activist, garment union supporter,
and daughter of the famous financier.
As Triangle Fire historian Leon Stein
described the setting, the upper galleries
were filled with Lower East Siders, and the
orchestra with women “trailing fur and
feathers.”19 The attempt to find common
ground in civic reform began when
those in charge of the meeting offered a
resolution asking for the establishment
of a Bureau of Fire Prevention, more
inspectors, and workmen’s compensa-
tion. Those in the balconies voiced their

distrust of citizen committees
that failed to include union
workers or union inspectors.
As the meeting deteriorated,
alternating between applause
and boos from the balcony,
Schneiderman intervened:

I would be a traitor to those
poor burned bodies if I were
to come here to talk good fel-
lowship. . . . We have tried you
citizens; we are trying you now
and you have a couple of dollars
for the sorrowing mothers and
brothers and sisters by way of a
charity gift. But every time the
workers come out in the only
way they know to protest against
conditions which are unbear-
able, the strong hand of the law

7 Speakers at mass meeting at the
Metropolitan Opera House. Rose
Schneiderman at upper right.
New York World, April 3, 1911, 3

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67 American Art

is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
Public officials have only words of warning
for us—warning that we must be intensely
orderly and must be intensely peaceable,
and they have the workhouse just back of all
their warnings. The strong hand of the law
beats us back when we rise. . . . I can’t talk
fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too
much blood has been spilled. I know from
my experience it is up to the working people
to save themselves. And the only way is
through a strong working-class movement.20

Schneiderman adopted the rhetoric of sep-
arate working-class activism that Pauline
Newman would two years later claim as a
memorializing process. For Schneiderman,
the civic ideal of controlled behavior
would never emerge from “natural rela-
tions” between classes but would only
be dictated from the top. And, finally, it
would not improve working lives.

Ironically, the memorial procession
to the fallen workers on April 5 served
as a decorous rebuke to the city elites
who were simultaneously on their way to
Brooklyn to inter the unidentified dead.
Where police had feared “the thickly
populated foreign districts—where emo-
tions are poignant and demonstrative,”
they found instead an ominous silence in
the gathering of four hundred thousand
who marched and lined the two parade
routes for six hours. Organizers called for
an end to class conflict, and the Morgen
Zhurnal urged, “Ideologies and politics
should be set aside, opponents and
enemies forgotten, and all should bow
their heads and grieve silently over the
victims of the horrendous misfortune.”
The Jewish Daily Forward described the
procession as demonstrating workers’
noble sense of duty as they proclaimed
the unity and strength of unions.21
The organizers banned all visual forms
of political protest and overt religious
expression, putting in their stead or-
ganization and union banners (fig. 8).
Instead of the plain pine box of observant
Jewish tradition—to symbolize the
fallen—they substituted a hearse covered
with flowers and drawn by white horses
covered in black netting—demonstrative
signs typical of Italian funerals (fig. 9).
Operating as a civic memorial, the pro-
cession deployed symbols that represented
the nameless victims who in turn stood
for all the dead. Silence, orderliness,
sorrow, and sobriety permeated a crowd
with a substantial female contingent who,
on a pouring rainy day and in deference
to their fallen sisters, marched without
hats, umbrellas, or overshoes.22

8 Mourners from the Ladies Waist
and Dressmakers Union Local 25
and the United Hebrew Trades
of New York march in the streets
after the Triangle Fire, 1911. Pho-
tograph. UNITE Archives, Kheel
Center, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York

9 Trade parade in memory of the
Triangle Fire victims, April 5,
1911. Bain News Service Photo-
graph. George Grantham Bain
Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

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68 Fall 2009

The Longman Memorial

In the Evergreens Cemetery memorial, the
same qualities of sorrow and dignified grief
characterized the design of Evelyn Beatrice
Longman’s sculpture as it was installed in
early December 1912. The monument’s
commission, its maker’s background, its
setting and iconography, and the cloak
of silence enveloping its completion
come together to reinforce the web of the
sometimes intersecting but more often
separate class, gender, and ethnic positions
on memorializing detailed above. Why was
Longman, a female sculptor, chosen for
this memorial? Under what circumstances
did she produce it, and what might have
been her thoughts on a commission so
fraught with controversy and grief? Why
did she never include the memorial in her
own records, and why was there no press
coverage when it appeared? While some of
what follows emerges from concrete docu-
mentation, other features of the interpreta-
tion are offered in the spirit of plausible
speculation.

By the time Longman (1874–1954)
received the commission for the Triangle
memorial’s relief sculpture sometime
in early 1912, she was fully embarked
on a successful career as a sculptor of
major public works, private memorials,
allegorical figures, and smaller portrait
busts. Longman (fig. 10) came of age at a
time when increasing numbers of women
were exhibiting and selling sculpture.
Unlike many of her female peers, who
specialized in small-scale genre works or
garden fountains, however, she sought her
reputation as a monumental public sculp-
tor. The field was dominated by men who
discouraged women’s attempts to compete
for these prize commissions. In 1912 her
position and achievements in the sculp-
tural profession, her integrity and ideals
in relation to the constituency represented
by the Emergency Relief Committee,
and her biography all contributed to her
being the logical choice in the view of that
committee.23

Longman’s training and professional
connections placed her at the heart of
the sculptural elite in New York City,
despite the fact that she was born in
Ohio and grew up in Chicago. She found
initial inspiration from visiting the 1893
World’s Columbian Exposition in her
hometown, where she saw dozens of
women receiving their first experience
making sculptural decoration. After
a two-year stint at Olivet College in
Michigan, from 1896 to 1898, she sub-
mitted a portfolio of drawings and was
accepted to study sculpture at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. There
she came under the tutelage of Beaux-
Arts sculptor Lorado Taft, who not
only encouraged promising women but
also held grand ambitions for America’s
civic sculptural movement, tied to City
Beautiful ideals. Already focused and
ambitious for herself, Longman found
Taft a strong mentor and completed
her four-year program in two years.
Recognizing that her best opportunities
for major commissions were on the East
Coast, she departed for New York City
in 1900. She was armed with letters of
introduction from Taft and from Art
Institute director William M. R. French
to his brother sculptor Daniel Chester
French as well as a return ticket provided
by skeptical friends.24 She would never
need it. French hired her as his first and
only female studio assistant and soon
wrote his brother that the strength of
Longman’s work “entirely vindicates your
recommendation.”25

Longman rented a studio at 11
East Fourteenth Street. Over the next
several years, until about 1906, she
combined labor in French’s nearby
Greenwich Village studio with her own
sculptural production.26 Longman
and French’s three-decade relationship,
which lasted until his death in 1931,
began with Longman very much the
student-assistant to the great teacher-
sculptor, twenty-five years her senior, and
the overworked French sent commissions

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69 American Art

her way. Before long it grew into a close
personal friendship extending to French’s
entire family. As evidenced in correspon-
dence between Longman and French and
with other sculptors, their association
was touched by the paternalistic or def-
erential age and gender dynamics typical
of the period and the sculptural vocation.
On balance, however, the relationship
evolved into one of mutual professional
dependence and abiding trust, with
French relying on Longman’s acute as-
sessments, and she on his.27

While some early commentators
focused on her beauty as a partial excuse
for her success—journalist Mitchell
Mannering described “dark eyes” and a

“wealth of dusky hair, which falls down
on both sides of her forehead, like that
of the Sistine Madonna”—others fol-
lowed French’s lead in offering her full
support.28 After Longman won the pres-
tigious commission for the U.S. Naval
Academy Chapel doors at Annapolis
(1906–8)—securing the commission
in a blind competition and almost
losing it when her gender and age were
revealed—she left for her first trip to
France and Italy, to acquire knowledge
and inspiration for her largest and most
important work to date. Already indicat-
ing his reliance on her, French wrote that
the trip to Europe was merited by her
“industrious apprenticeship,” and that
her maturity would allow her to profit
from learning the academic language
he had been too young to understand
when he went abroad. But the sculptor
also cautioned her against the lure of the
“foreign man,” opining, “I don’t believe
it would be good for your art and . . . it
would be well-nigh fatal to mine!” He
continued:

The fact is that I have come to lean on
you so hard, to trust your judgment about
my work so much and, more than all,
your high ideals and aspirations and your
buoyant enthusiasm are such an inspira-
tion to me that I—well!—that I hope
some other fellow will not deprive me of
them. . . [.] So please come back, content
to stay a few years, at least, in New York to
help me, as I will try to help you, up to the
top of Parnassus.29

Undoubtedly for her own reasons of am-
bition rather than his more self-interested
ones, Longman heeded this advice well
after 1906, the date of this letter, celebrat-
ing her marriage to Nathaniel Batchelder
only in late June 1920. By that time, at
forty-five, Longman had completed a
body of significant monumental public
sculpture, become the first female sculp-
tor elected to full membership in the
National Academy of Design (in 1919,

10 Evelyn Beatrice Longman working
on the Horsford Memorial
Bronze Doors for the Wellesley
College Library, 1911. Photo-
graph, Loomis Chaffee School
Archives, Windsor, Connecticut.
From Marilyn Rabetz and Walter
Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman
Batchelder (The Loomis Chaffee
School, 1993), title page

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70 Fall 2009

having been made an associate in 1909),
and won numerous awards. Though com-
mentators continued to refer to her as a
female sculptor rather than simply as a
sculptor, she had earned her credentials
and her reputation by adhering to codes
of strict professionalism—codes that
many historians of women artists now
recognize as the avenue to women’s accep-
tance in the arts.30 She was praised for her
extraordinary work ethic, her punctuality
in completing commissions, and her am-
bition coupled with a modest demeanor.
Fellow sculptors valued her candor and
fairness, and French commended her

business acumen coupled with integrity,
saying, “She has lots of common sense
and knows how to apply it, and any
Committee that has dealings with her can
be assured of having little trouble with
her in the carrying out of her contract.”31
These characteristics would have appealed
to the Emergency Relief Committee that
commissioned a memorial within months
of the Triangle tragedy and, after all the
controversy surrounding the unknown
victims, seemed to desire its timely, expe-
ditious, and quiet completion.

When the commission was announced
in the Red Cross Relief Report, Longman
was well known to sculptors, critics, and
the urban elites connected to those circles.
Her ties to French had helped to place
her well within a professional class and
bourgeois social register. In fact, her rela-
tion to Robert W. de Forest, chair of the
Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee,
may have already been established, and
I believe the request for the design was
offered directly to her rather than coming
through French. In addition to his legal
duties and intense involvement with
the art world, including the Municipal
Art Society and the National Sculpture
Society, de Forest had been president of
the Charity Organization Society of New
York City since 1888. In that capacity,
he came to be chair of the Red Cross
Emergency Relief Committee that dis-
persed the relief funds to Triangle victims
and set aside funds for the memorial.
Fittingly, the Charity Organization Society
was housed in the United Charities
Building, which had been financed by
public-minded philanthropist-banker
John S. Kennedy.32 Sometime after
Kennedy’s death in 1909, Longman
carved a portrait bust to be installed in
the building in his memory, completing it
in 1912, about the time she received the
Triangle Fire commission. De Forest, a
close associate of Kennedy’s and the eulo-
gist at his funeral, may well have chosen
Longman for the Kennedy bust. From
his knowledge of this work and several

11 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, Mr.
and Mrs. Robert W. de Forest,
1922. Bronze with gold leaf,
5 1/2 in. diameter. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Gift
of Mrs. Robert W. de Forest.
Photo © Metropolitan Museum
of Art

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71 American Art

other portraits of New York dignitaries,
de Forest would have known her abilities
as a sympathetic memorialist and seen
her as a logical choice for the Triangle
monument.33 Evidence for his continuing
respect for her work can be found in a
more personal work. In 1922 Longman
sculpted a bronze and gold-leaf portrait

medallion of de Forest and his wife, Emily
Johnston de Forest, on the occasion of
their fiftieth wedding anniversary (fig. 11).

The circumstances around the Triangle
commission become more complicated
when architect Henry Bacon (fig. 12) is
considered a possible additional maker.
In early 1912 a book-length report on
the disbursement of relief funds was pub-
lished. On the last page, a brief paragraph
announces the monument, suggesting that
the maker had already been decided when
the book was published:

After it was certain that not all the money
would be required for relief[,] an ap-
propriation was made at the suggestion of
the Commissioner of Public Charities for
erecting a monument on the graves of the

unidentified dead in Evergreen Cemetery,
at a cost of not over $2500.00. This will be
designed by Mr. Henry Bacon, in collabora-
tion with Miss Longman.34

French had introduced Longman to
Bacon, who later designed the Lincoln
Memorial, and all three were close friends
who eventually collaborated on that
monument. At the time of the Triangle
commission, Bacon and Longman had
completed their first major work together
and were just embarking on a second.35
De Forest, who was well informed
about sculptors and architects, may have
suggested a Longman-Bacon pairing.
Unfortunately, neither the Red Cross
files nor the Longman or Bacon archives
contain any records that elucidate the
details of the commission or the design
process, although it is likely that de Forest
corresponded with at least Longman
about the memorial for the fire victims.

We can also envision a scenario of
work both with and without Bacon, since
no record of his participation survives
beyond this initial mention. At the time
both Longman and Bacon were deeply
involved with more substantial and
lucrative commissions, since both were
arguably at the busiest and most produc-
tive times of their careers. Motivated by a
sense of civic responsibility and personal
obligation to de Forest and the compara-
tively small scale of the Triangle work,
both participants could have agreed to
execute the memorial. The simple ped-
estal with its slightly trapezoidal slab re-
quired little time; Bacon either sketched
it or advised Longman on the choice.
Longman’s task, executing the detailed
plaster relief of the mourning figure,
would have been more demanding. After
making the plaster, she hired Piccirilli
Brothers, the carvers, to produce the final
monument. Two handwritten letters in
December from Longman to Charles L.
Magee, secretary of the National Red
Cross, confirm her participation—the
only surviving archival record. Her

12 Henry Bacon, ca. 1900. From
Century Illustrated Monthly
Magazine 83 (1911–12): 369

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72 Fall 2009

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73 American Art

recitation reveals her attention to detail
and her professionalism. The first, dated
December 4, 1912, states:

I have intended writing to let you know that
I had not forgotten about the photograph
of the “Triangle Factory Fire” memorial or
delayed unavoidably. First, Piccirilli Bros,
who cut the marble, were weeks later in fin-
ishing it than they promised me; then when
my photographer went up to their studio, he
found that the marble was so placed that he
could not get his camera far enough away
from it; then we waited for the setting of the
monument; then for the planting to be done.
Almost immediately afterward the snow fell
and we had to wait for it to disappear.

Photos were finally taken last Monday but
it was a gray, dull day that [illegible] they
did not come out well, and the photographer
also forgot my instructions to show the entire
planting in one of them. The photos must
be taken again on the first bright day after

tomorrow. I am sending you the ones received
from the photographer this afternoon, just
to prove I have not been idle, but I would
not wish them to be used in any way, as they
do not begin to do justice to the monument
which really looked beautiful.36

On December 23 Longman wrote again,
this time enclosing photographs that she
still found unsatisfactory but deemed
better than the previous ones. Nonetheless,
she assured Magee that “sunlight seems to
be needed to process a really fine picture
in this case—though the monument itself
looks well to the eye in every light.” When
the photograph (see fig. 2) appeared in the
American Red Cross Bulletin, the caption
repeated part of the inscription but made
no mention of the monument’s maker(s).
If Longman was indeed pleased with the
memorial, it seems unlikely she would
have asked that her name be excluded
from any description of it. But, unlike
other commissions, she left no drawings,
no plaster relief, and no photographs, ex-
amples of which appear in her archives for
many of her works. To date, this completes
what we know of the commission and its
production.

We find a clear precedent in Longman’s
earlier work that helps us interpret the
Triangle memorial. The 1906 Louisa M.
Wells Monument (fig. 13) in the Lowell,
Massachusetts, cemetery serves as a
partial prologue to the design of the main
Triangle figure (fig. 14) and the symbolic
features of its overall program. Ironically,
where the quality of Longman’s work,
her professionalism, and her experience
garnered her the Triangle monument
project, the earlier Lowell memorial
provided some contentious moments
for the sculptor in just these areas. This
memorial was completed close to twenty
years after Wells died (1815–1886). She
had worked for about a year as a weaver in
the Lawrence Manufacturing Company,
one of the famous Lowell mills that
provided early industrial employment to
legions of New England women, just as

13 Evelyn Beatrice Longman. The
Louisa M. Wells Memorial, 1906.
Marble, 13 feet high. Lowell
Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts.
Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

14 Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The
Triangle Fire Memorial to the
Unknowns, 1912 (detail of relief ).
Photo, Ellen Wiley Todd

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74 Fall 2009

the shirtwaist industry would provide jobs
for tens of thousands of immigrants at
the turn of the twentieth century. After a
short stay in her native Vermont, in 1866
Wells settled in Lowell, purchasing a lot
in the Lowell Cemetery in 1876 to share
with her mother. At her death, her will left
eight thousand dollars for a monument to
be placed on the Wells plot. The sum grew
more substantial as relatives litigated this
provision over the next two decades. When
the court ruled in favor of the Wells estate,
her executor hired Daniel Chester French
to design the monument, envisioning not
only a memorial to a mill girl but also one
to Lowell’s important place in the early
history of industrial labor.37

French quickly turned the substantial
commission over to Longman, who was
just striking out on her own, thinking
perhaps that the subject of the virtuous
female laborer might be appropriate for
the young sculptor. Seven years later, the
precedent of Longman having created a
memorial to a working girl may have been
another point in her favor when it came
time for the Triangle memorial. After
completing the relief plaster for the Wells
monument in 1905, she carved the over-
life-size relief on the thirteen-foot-high slab
of Tennessee marble, taking more than a
year to finish it. Writing in the cemetery
report of 1906, two trustees stated that
“Evelyn B. Longman, the actual creator
of the Louisa Wells memorial was a very
talented associate of Daniel Chester French
[who] was so popular at that time that he
became overloaded with commissions—
and (very reluctantly, as she was a woman!)
he allowed Miss Longman to join him as
an associate.” The parenthetical editorial-
izing was theirs since, as French’s letters
make clear, he employed Longman with
enthusiasm. In 1907 French felt compelled
to intercede with the cemetery, relaying
both Longman’s concern that plantings
remained incomplete and that she was
still owed $2,500 (the total sum for the
Triangle monument five years later). “You
understand that Miss Longman gets all

the credit pecuniarily and otherwise of this
monument. It has been a great pleasure
to me to do what I could to aid and abet
her,” French wrote.38 There may have
been some question about the original-
ity of her design and her responsibility
for carving it, a problem historically for
female sculptors. But Longman worked
alone, provided the finish for the work in
monuments carved by others (as would
be the case with the Triangle monument),
and always supervised the details of instal-
lation.39 The inability of cemetery officials
to acknowledge the professionalism of a
female sculptor made for some uncomfort-
able transactions, but it also contradicted
their own recognition of the monument’s
beauty, which, after all, was a result of her
skill. (They might also have been more
interested in claiming the involvement of a
famous sculptor than an obscure assistant,
regardless of gender.) Their description,
again from the 1906 report, reveals their
sense of its larger importance to Lowell
while providing a careful period account.40

This work, representing as it will in this city
of never ending toil, the quiet and peace-
ful ending of Labor, it must attract wide
attention. The artist, with wonderful skill,
shows a strong female figure, clothed in the
simplest possible manner, holding in her
hand, as an emblem of labor, the bobbin
used in weaving. Broken strands of cotton lie
across her lap. Her whole figure is completely
relaxed, though she has not quite succumbed
to the last sleep; her hand has fallen from her
lap and rests upon the rock on which she sits,
still holding the bobbin loosely. One strand
of cotton remains unbroken. Behind, but
advancing is a beautiful angel—the Angel
of Death. Her hand is outstretched, about to
gently touch the shoulder of her whom she has
been sent to call. The angel’s face is beautiful,
and upon her hair rests a wreath of poppies,
emblem of sleep or death. A halo encircles her
head in a token of her divine mission. . . .
The inscription, from the apocrypha, [reads]
. . . “out of the fiber of her daily tasks,
she wove the fabric of a useful life.”41

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75 American Art

In formal terms the figure of the
Triangle mourner reverses and partially
echoes the pose of the dying Wells
figure—full torsos, curved backs, bowed
heads. In both, the lowered right leg is
stabilized by a flexed foot. In the more
open pose of the dying Wells girl, the
bent left leg props up her left arm with
its tilted hand supporting her head. Her
right arm falls limply by her side, opening
up her torso, a temporal sign, along with
the angel’s touch, of her imminent demise.
In the Triangle monument, a different
configuration of the upper body and the
closed profile pose imply a circle of eternal
grieving. The raised stable leg supports
the left arm, which rises to meet the right
hand as it reaches from behind the figure
and moves around the krater to clutch the
drapery in her clasped hands.

While there is a clear programmatic
distinction between the quietly dying
mill worker and the anguished mourner
for lives cut short, Longman’s choice of a
partially similar pose connects both the
concept and the fact of female labor. Yet
where peace reigns in the pose and drapery
of the figure in Lowell, the corresponding
elements in the Triangle project suggest a
tension-filled grief. Drapery and thread fall
loosely around the Wells figure. Her pose
is languid, her body comfortably enclosed
by the space surrounding it, apart from
the flexed foot that drops below the step.
For the Triangle mourner, in contrast,
Longman created a constricted space with
the flexed foot and calf angled awkwardly
behind, the figure’s bent back held down
by the upper frame of the niche. The folds
of the drapery (especially in the 1913 Red
Cross Bulletin picture, see fig. 2), which
are more sharply defined, fall to expose
the vulnerable torso and then twist in a
tight coil around and above her shoulder.
Its thick but active ropelike design con-
straining the figure echoes the downward-
pressing niche of the relief. And, though
difficult to see, the fingers appear tightly
entwined with the cloth that—to
reverse the textual meaning in the Wells

monument—would never be woven into
the fabric of useful life. Indeed, shirtwaist
cloth was both the source of labor and,
when ignited, the probable cause of the
fire. This mourning figure’s confined pose
embodies the controversy surrounding the
trauma of the fire and its aftermath as well
as the struggles of laboring lives now lost.

In making these interpretive claims, I
expand the more straightforward argument
about the monument as an elite-commis-
sioned exemplar of dignified mourning
behavior. The carved mourner, though
steeped in the academic ideal of civic
virtue, whose classical drapery and urn lend
her an allegorical tone, could also be read
as a survivor weeping for lost comrades—
the solitary stand-in for the legions of
women who paraded through New York
City streets to grieve for fellow workers on
April 5, 1911. Though Longman typically
carved strong, full-bodied female figures,
the expanse of this one is coded as a power-
ful working-class body. A garment worker,
making the six- to seven-mile trip from the
Lower East Side by ferry and on foot to
the gravesite, may have found this story for
herself in the figure whose pose resembled
those bent over the bodies in the morgue
or a sewing machine or even resisting the
constraints of the niche to push up from
the powerfully flexed foot and continue her
struggle.42 I am suggesting that Longman
found a way in these subtle components of
her design, whether consciously or not, to
satisfy all the mandates of the commission
and still acknowledge the deeply conflicted
conditions surrounding the fire and its
victims, their lives and work, as well as to
make a space for different constituencies of
visitors to the monument.

Circumstances in Longman’s own
youthful biography lead me to suggest the
more sympathetic details of this interpreta-
tion. Longman was raised in poverty and
familial distress in Chicago and on farms
in Ontario, Canada. She was the fifth
child of English and Canadian immi-
grants, whose musician father inspired her
love of the arts but was unable to support

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76 Fall 2009

his family. When Longman was six, her
mother died, and her father dispatched the
children to different relatives in Canada.
After a year, she and her sister Louise,
along with one brother, returned to
Chicago, only to be shuttled off to Canada
when her father remarried a year later.
Several years after that, she fought her way
home again, to find the children turned
out of the house. At fourteen, Longman
was forced to leave school to work to sup-
plement the family income. For the next
six years, she worked at Wilson Brothers
dry goods store. During this time, she tried
to attend night classes at the Art Institute
of Chicago, but exhaustion forced her to
quit. Finally, she saved enough money to
return to Olivet College, and at that point
her career can be said to have begun. In
writing about her achievements, early
critics assigned ample space to her story
and to the substantial amounts of money
she received for commissions, demonstrat-
ing through a central trope of American
culture her female Horatio Alger–like rise
to success.43 Such an appealing biography,
with its tale of triumph over struggle, also
could have inspired Robert W. de Forest
and the Emergency Relief Committee.

Longman’s life before the 1912 Triangle
commission was sharply divided between
one of hardships similar to those suffered
by immigrant women—a separated family,
early toil, and struggle for education—
followed by an accelerating rags-to-riches
story in the society of a traditional cultural
elite. Its aesthetic ideology of moral uplift
and civic virtue embodied in academic
classical ideals became her mode of visual
communication. And yet, as biographer
Margaret Samu has argued, Longman
achieved success in her major commis-
sions by melding academic neoclassicism
with inventive symbolic detail, infusing a
timeless ideal with telling details about the
subject. In the Wells memorial it was the
bobbin and thread. In her most famous
work, the 1915 Genius of Electricity for
the Western Union Telegraph Building in
New York, she abandoned the expected

format of a seated Zeus with thunderbolts
to deploy a powerful standing male
nude sporting a contemporary hairstyle,
with electrical cable spinning in the air
around his hips and legs and looped over
one arm.44 More subtly in the Triangle
memorial, her mourner’s constrained pose
and active drapery may be read as both
traditional and carefully coded to recall
the circumstances of the tragedy.

Since neither Longman nor the news-
papers ever spoke about the memorial,
we have no record of her intention for it
or critical response to it. We know from
family members that Longman, in her
desire to be recognized as a sculptor rather
than as a woman sculptor, avoided all
gender politics, maintaining an ideal of
professionalism throughout her long career.
She never publicly campaigned for suffrage
or revealed her preferences even in private
correspondence. She never affiliated herself
with women-centered organizations or ad-
vocated for the many progressive-era causes
related to social justice and immigration
that surrounded her in New York—and
that were taken up by her sculptural peers,
most notably Abastenia St. Leger Eberle.45
We have no idea how the Triangle Fire
affected her—even though it took place
only eight blocks south of her studio and
the memorial parade filled her neighbor-
hood. She cannot have escaped the massive
coverage of these events, and appropriate
ways of mourning in art would surely have
been part of the discussion around the
monument. Longman found her way up
a social and professional ladder precisely
by exercising moderate, gracious, dignified
behavior rather than by espousing any
positions, such as the cause of working
women, that would endanger her own
status. It would not have helped her to
align her support with the shirtwaist strik-
ers of 1909 or agitators in the wake of the
fire. So when asked to do the memorial,
she responded by executing the design and
remained untainted by the controversy that
continued to surround the fire in 1912;
Longman received the commission around

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77 American Art

the time the owners of the factory were
acquitted for any wrongdoing, causing
outrage not only within the labor com-
munity but also among many progressives.
Undoubtedly for professional reasons she
avoided any involvement and did not
protest the silences surrounding the erec-
tion of the memorial. Unlike the monu-
ment to the individual mill girl who made
good and exercised cultural capital by
saving money for a family monument, the
Triangle memorial commemorated poor
working-class immigrants, many of whom
were seen as defying the cultural order in
their 1909 strike and memorial protests.
For Longman, there was nothing to do

but mourn in a dignified manner and to
show the figure in a guise acceptable to the
commission and the sculptor herself. This
was the overriding message of Longman’s
Evergreens Cemetery memorial even as she
may have provided sympathetic nuances to
complicate its terms and address multiple
audiences.

Afterlives

Class divisions continued in the memorial-
izing process at multiple levels of repre-
sentation. The Evergreens memorial relief
presents the model of calm, dignified, stoic
grief found in similar memorials lauded
throughout the newspapers and in the
pages of the Monumental News, the major
trade and critical journal for publishing
monuments nationwide. At this time, it
published at least three monuments to
disaster or labor in a similar iconographic
register. One commemorates the 259
victims of the 1909 Cherry Hill Mine
disaster in Cherry, Illinois. Commissioned
by the United Mine Workers and installed
on a site near the mine, the memorial
features a standing female mourner with
head bowed and knees bent, holding a
wreath, clothed in classical garb.46 Like
Longman’s memorial, it provides, to
reshape the words of Rose Schneiderman
to another purpose, the model of behavior
to which elites wished the working class to
conform—“intensely orderly, and intensely
peaceable.” Yet without celebration or
publication, the Longman monument
disappeared from view, its memorializing
and atoning purposes lost to a long period
of public memory. No New York paper re-
ported its installation or any accompanying
ceremony. Nor did it receive any mention
in the ILGWU publications over time. The
union archive contains only one image,
a closeup of the monument, indicating
awareness of its presence by midcentury.

Garment workers made two different
kinds of memorials over time. The first
(fig. 15) can be found in the Jewish Mt.

15 Memorial to fourteen victims
of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Mt. Zion Cemetery, Maspeth
(Queens), New York. Photo,
Ellen Wiley Todd

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78 Fall 2009

16 Fiftieth anniversary commemora-
tion, March 1961, at The Triangle
Fire Memorial to the Unknowns,
The Evergreens Cemetery,
Brooklyn. Photograph. UNITE
Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York

17 Fiftieth anniversary memorial
event on the site of the Trian-
gle Fire at Washington Place and
Greene Street, New York, March
25, 1961. Photograph. UNITE
Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York

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79 American Art

Zion cemetery in Queens. It marks the
site originally proposed by the union
for the grave and memorial for the
unknowns. After the city rejected this
idea, the union agreed to the nonsectar-
ian site in the Evergreens Cemetery.47
In Mt. Zion a simple post-and-lintel
memorial with a carved eternal flame in
the center rises over fourteen graves of
identified shirtwaist workers. The names
of these victims were originally in raised
lettering but have eroded away; they
now reside only in cemetery records. On
the lintel, a carved inscription states,
“Erected November 1911 by their sisters
and brothers Members of the Ladies
Waist and Dressmakers Union Local No.
25.” Built quickly, it appeared a full year
before the city’s memorial by Longman.48

The Longman memorial came back
into public view on the occasion of the
fiftieth anniversary of the fire in 1961, as
mourners and survivors again gathered
around it (fig. 16). This was a year before
Leon Stein’s book on the Triangle Fire

was published, recalling the sharp divi-
sions over mourning, demonstrating,
and the disposition of bodies. Now the
monument sits in its peaceful cemetery
setting, far removed from the site of
the fire, which has become the second
and living memorial through an annual
commemoration there—which also
began at the fiftieth anniversary (fig. 17).
This performative memorial varies from
year to year, reciting gains and losses
in labor’s ongoing attempts to organize
and improve working conditions. It
regularly includes the reading of victims’
names by garment workers, now in the
accents of languages from all over the
world.49 With the recitation of each
name, participants lay a flower at the
base of the building where their prede-
cessors perished, gestures perhaps more
meaningful to today’s assembled laborers
than the carved moral exemplum of stoic
grief—beautiful, yet isolated from the
worlds in which they continue to work
and struggle.

Notes

I would like to thank my research assistant
Maureen Guignon for patiently tracking the
Longman file in the Red Cross Archives;
Berrie Moos and Ingrid Mueller in the
Longman Archives, and Karen Parsons, his-
torian, all at the Loomis-Chaffee School in
Windsor, Connecticut; Donato Daddario,
historian at the Evergreens Cemetery; and
Melissa Dabakis, Erika Doss, and Martin
Donougho for listening and reading.

1 A waist is an older term for a separate
blouse, specifically the high-collared,
long-sleeved version that was the most
fashionable and versatile female garment
for women of all classes from the 1890s
until World War I. A shirtwaist, made
popular by the Gibson Girl, working
women, and suffragists, technically
referred to the man-tailored version of a
waist with buttons down the front, while
a fancy waist buttoned down the back
and was embellished with lace, ribbon,
pleats, or other decorative features. The
Triangle Waist company made moder-

ately priced versions of these blouses, and
the tragedy has come to be called the Tri-
angle Shirtwaist Fire.

2 New York Times, March 31, 1911, 2.

3 Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (1962;
New York: Carroll and Graf Publish-
ers, 1985), 148–49. Stein’s classic study,
which draws from newspaper and sur-
vivor accounts, provides the most in-
depth synthesis of information about
the fire and the events of several weeks
afterward. Another important source
is David Von Drehle, Triangle: The
Fire That Changed America (New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

4 Stein, Triangle Fire, 153–55.

5 American Red Cross Bulletin 8 (January
1913): 42.

6 The full text of the inscription reads,
in somewhat ungrammatical prose,

“The plot and burial were provided by
the department of public charities the
relief fund contributed largely through
Mayor William J. Gaynor Mayor of
New York and administered by the
Red Cross Emergency Relief Commit-
tee of the Charity Organization Society
left a sufficient balance to erect this
monument.”

7 On de Forest, see Michele H. Bogart.
Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in
New York City, 1890 –1930 (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1997), 60.

8 Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle
Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Indus-
trial Democracy in Progressive Era New
York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press,
2005). For a documentary history of
the relation between the strike and fire,
see John F. McClymer, The Triangle
Strike and Fire (New York: Harcourt
Brace and Company, 1998).

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80 Fall 2009

9 Pauline M. Newman, “Lest We Forget!”
Ladies Garment Worker 4 (April 1913): 23.

10 The performative practice of memori-
alization through organizing and dem-
onstrating was enacted in the funeral
parade and continues today in an annual
on-site ritual, staged on the anniversary
of the fire.

11 James Young, The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 5.

12 Arthur Aryeh Goren, “Sacred and
Secular: The Place of Public Funerals in
the Immigrant Life of American Jews,”
Jewish History 8 (1994): 270.

13 For a general discussion of these work-
ings of the Charity Organization Society,
see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral
Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1978), 151–61.

14 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 271.

15 Stein, Triangle Fire, 122–27.

16 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity:
Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001),
41–53.

17 New York American, March 27, 1911, 2;
New York Times, March 27, 1911, 2.

18 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 275.

19 Stein, Triangle Fire, 141.

20 “Mass Meeting Calls for New Fire Laws,”
New York Times, April 3, 1911.

21 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 285.

22 Stein, Triangle Fire, 151. I have been
unable to identify the source of the news-
paper quote about “thickly populated
foreign districts.”

23 The most comprehensive recent
sources for Longman’s work are
Marilyn Rabetz and Walter Rabetz,
Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder
(Windsor, Conn.: Loomis Chaffee
School, 1993); and Margaret Samu,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman: Establishing
a Career in Public Sculpture,” Women’s
Art Journal 25 (Fall 2004–Winter 2005):
8–15. Samu’s honors thesis, “Establish-
ing a Career in Public Sculpture: Evelyn
Beatrice Longman” (Wellesley College,

2001), provides additional detail and
analysis. At forty-five, Longman married
Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, headmaster
of the Loomis School in Windsor, Con-
necticut. While still known profession-
ally as Evelyn Beatrice Longman, she was
Mrs. Batchelder or, affectionately, Mrs.
“B” at the school.

24 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 8;
Samu, “Establishing a Career,” 14.

25 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 8.
French hired Longman in part to com-
plete lettering for the Boston Public
Library doors, a task he disliked and
one at which (along with ornament) she
excelled. She worked on lettering later for
the Lincoln Memorial with French and
architect Henry Bacon. Daniel Chester
French to William Merchant French,
December 30, 1900, Daniel Chester
French Papers, Library of Congress (here-
after, French Papers). For additional dis-
cussion of their meeting, see Margaret
French Cresson, Journey into Fame: The
Life of Daniel Chester French (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), 210.

26 Longman gained independence with
her first major public piece, the 1903
male Victory, a twenty-five-foot-high
work that was given the place of honor
atop the Festival Hall on the grounds
of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposi-
tion, known informally as the St. Louis
World’s Fair. Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn
Beatrice Longman Batchelder,” in Rabetz
and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice Longman
Batchelder, 4; Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice
Longman,” 9.

27 For an extended discussion of the cor-
respondence related to Longman, see
Michael Richman, “The French-Long-
man Connection,” in Rabetz and Rabetz,
Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder.

28 Mitchell Mannering, “The Memorial to
Senator Allison,” National Magazine 38
(August 1913): 760–63. Full citation for
clipping in Longman Vertical File, Smith-
sonian American Art Museum found at
www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/t991.
htm#A21589 cited in Marilyn Rabetz,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder.”

29 French to Longman, June 17, 1906,
French Papers.

30 For discussions of female professionalism,
see Kirsten Swinth, Painting Profession-
als: Women Artists and the Development
of Modern American Art, 1870–1930

(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Caro-
lina Press, 2000); Laura Prieto, At Home
in the Studio: The Professionalization of
Women Artists in America (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); and
Melissa Dabakis, “Feminist Interventions:
Some Thoughts on Recent Scholarship
about Women Artists,” American Art 18
(Spring 2004): 2–9.

31 For these general insights into her char-
acter, see Adeline Adams, “Evelyn Bea-
trice Longman,” American Magazine
of Art (May 1928): 237–50; and Jona-
than A. Rawson Jr., “Evelyn Beatrice
Longman, Feminine Sculptor,” Inter-
national Studio (February 1912): xcix–
ciii. For French’s quote, see Daniel
Chester French to muralist H. Siddons
Mowbray, July 23, 1922, French Papers;
though this is a later letter, French
would have been well aware of her deal-
ings with works commissioned by com-
mittee in 1912.

32 For discussion of de Forest’s role in the
Charity Organization Society, see Lilian
Brandt, Charity Organization Society of
the City of New York, 1882–1907 (New
York: B. H. Tyrell, 1907), 27. On the
building, see Brandt, 20, and “A Building
for Charity: John S. Kennedy’s Liberal
and Public-Spirited Project,” New York
Times, March 10, 1891, 8, and www.
preserve2.org/gramercy/proposes/ext/
ension/105e22.htm (accessed July 1,
2009).

33 Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice
Longman Batchelder, 38. In the years
before Kennedy’s memorial, Longman
created the Storey Memorial (1905)
and the Wells Memorial (1906), both
in the Lowell Cemetery, and the Mary
Elizabeth Ryle Memorial in Patterson,
N.J. (1907). She carved the figure of
Memory in the Benson Family Memo-
rial in Titusville, Pa. (1907), and created
the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity
for the Foster Mausoleum in Middle-
burgh, N.Y. (1911), and a portrait relief
of Senator Henry Clark Corbin (1911).
“Speak in Praise of John S. Kennedy:
Memorial Meeting for Philanthropist
Participated in by Men Who Knew His
Work,” New York Times, November 23,
1909, 7.

34 Emergency Relief after the Washington Place
Fire, New York, March 25, 1911: Report
of the Red Cross Emergency Relief Commit-
tee of the Charity Organization Society of
the City of New York (New York: Charity
Organization Society, 1912), 67.

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81 American Art

35 Rabetz and Rabetz, Evelyn Beatrice
Longman Batchelder, 38; and Joel
Rosenkranz and Janis Conner, “Evelyn
Longman in Context,” in ibid., 17.
Bacon and Longman first collaborated
in 1910–11 on the Foster family mau-
soleum in Middleburgh, New York.
In 1912 Longman won a public com-
mission through a blind jury process
for the monument to Senator William
Boyd Allison to be installed on the state
capitol grounds in Des Moines, Iowa;
Bacon designed the massive pedestal.

36 Both Longman letters may be found in
RG 200 National Archives Gift Collec-
tion, Records of the American National
Red Cross, 1881–1916, Box #57; File
848: New York (Washington Place) Fire,
Triangle Shirtwaist Co. 3/25/1911.

37 For the story of Louisa Wells and the
Lowell Cemetery, see Catherine L.
Goodwin. Mourning Glory: The Story
of Lowell Cemetery, rev. ed. (Lowell,
Mass.: Lowell Historical Society, 2003),
16. More specific information on
Wells and the commission is found in
“Louisa Wells: The Story of Her Monu-
ment in the Lowell Cemetery,” type-
script, Lowell Cemetery Archive, Lowell,
Mass., n.p. An excerpt from the 1905
Lowell Cemetery trustees report of 1905
describes Wells as “this good woman, a
woman of religious inclination . . . left
quite a tidy sum of money, the accumu-
lation of years of toil”; quoted in ibid.

38 French to George F. Richardson, January
4, 1907, French Papers.

39 Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 9,
shows that Longman’s contemporary

critics also noted her professionalism
and meticulous attention to detail.

40 “Louisa Wells: The Story of Her Monu-
ment in the Lowell Cemetery”; quote
from the trustees report of 1906,
signed by Harry C. Dinmore, Lewis
Karabatsos, n.p.

41 Ibid.

42 I thank Melissa Dabakis for her help in
thinking about the bodies of working
women in sculpture. For an under-
standing of how working-class women
might make stories through “high” art,
see Katharine Martinez, “At Home with
Mona Lisa: Consumers and Commer-
cial Visual Culture, 1880–1920,” in
Seeing High and Low: Representing Social
Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed.
Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 2006), 160–76.

43 See Marilyn Rabetz, “Evelyn Bea-
trice Longman Batchelder,” 1–3. On
critics’ references to her early history,
see Rawson, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman:
Feminine Sculptor”; and Samu,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 10.

44 James Spencer Dickerson, “Evelyn B.
Longman: A Western Girl Who Has
Become a National Figure in Sculpture,”
World Today, May 1908, 529; Samu,
“Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” 11–12.

45 See Samu, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,”
13. Samu refers to correspondence and
interviews with Longman’s stepson,
N. H. Batchelder Jr., in October and
November 2000. For St. Leger Eberle,
see Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor
in American Sculpture: Monuments,

Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–
1935 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge
Studies in American Visual Culture,
1999), 149–58.

46 Karen Tintori, Trapped: The 1909 Cherry
Mine Disaster (New York: Atria Books,
2002).

47 Goren, “Sacred and Secular,” 284.
Originally the union also proposed a
massive procession to accompany the
unknowns to Mt. Zion. The distance
to both Mt. Zion Cemetery and the
Evergreens Cemetery is about 6 1/2 miles
from the Lower East Side.

48 Today, it lies in proximity to two more
recent granite markers and was pic-
tured first when accessing “Triangle
Fire Memorial” in Internet searches
in August 2009. The Evergreens site
mentioned the Triangle Fire memo-
rial with no picture. For the Workman’s
Circle Memorials, see www.flickr.com/
photos/23021987@N06/2730823420/;
for the Evergreens Cemetery, see www.
theevergreenscemetery.com/ (both
accessed July 1, 2009).

49 The most recent activist memorial is the
Chalk Project, organized by New York
filmmaker Ruth Sergel. Each year on the
anniversary of the fire, volunteers write
the names and ages of victims outside
their former residences. See Michael
Molyneux, “Memorials in Chalk,” New
York Times, April 3, 2005. For a theoret-
ical discussion of how these more recent
memorials do memory work, see Alison
Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Trans-
formation of American Remembrance
in the Age of Mass Culture (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 2004).

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