As I stood witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire centennial commemoration at the corner of Washington Place and Green Street on Friday, March 25, I was surprised and impressed by the size of the crowd, but the most unexpected moment of the day came when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped to the microphone.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of America’s most horrific industrial accidents, happened 100 years ago today, on March 11, 1911. Though New York City’s fire department arrived on the scene within two minutes of the call, the fire at this “modern” high rise at the corner of Washington Pl. and Greene St. still claimed the lives of 146 people, most of them young women and teenage girls. Some were burned, some died of smoke inhalation, some were crushed pushing for the exits, some fell from a faulty fire escape, and some jumped nine stories in an attempt to escape the flames.

It was a catastrophic, once-in-a-lifetime failure of what were considered more than ample emergency response systems. No one could have possibly anticipated. . . .

It ain’t John Ashcroft ordering the coverup of Lady Justice’s bare breast, but it’s close. The Tea Party-backed Governor of Maine, Paul LePage, has ordered his state’s Department of Labor to remove a mural depicting moments in labor history from its walls. LePage also demanded the state rename the Labor Department’s conference rooms, currently honoring labor icons like Frances Perkins and Cesar Chavez.

When Philip Dray came by to discuss his book project on the entire sweep of American labor history, I thought he was out of his mind. I knew that he was an accomplished author who had written an award winning-book on lynchings (“At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America”).