A Young Mother Killed by the Libertarian Ideal


 
For decades, her image has intruded into occasional dreams on sometime restless nights. I wonder what life might have been for her and her child had she lived.

Someone was careless, a fire started, and the entire building was soon engulfed.

On the fifth floor, 19 year old Diana Bryant grabbed her 2 year old step-daughter and retreated to the fire escape. The heat became intense. They moved to the far end of the metal platform, away from the searing heat.

Rescue came by ladder and roof. The young mother tried to lift the infant girl to fireman Robert O’Neill on the precipice above, but she didn’t have the strength. The firefighter jumped to the fire escape as a fire ladder came close. Photos of the fire show him holding the mother with one arm as she grabs the child. With his other arm he reaches for the approaching ladder.

The fire escape collapsed. The fireman held onto the fire ladder, but the tenuous hold between him and Diana Bryant was not strong enough.

On the scene, Stanley Forman turned his back after taking his photos. He could not bear to see the bodies of mother and daughter hit the ground.

A year or so later I saw the one photo of the series that won photographer Forman a Pulitzer Prize. Diana Bryant is falling head-first, arms forward, face hidden. A few feet above her falls her little 2 year old girl. The little one’s arms and legs flail out as both she and her mother plunge five stories to the pavement below.

Fire escapes became a standard requirement pretty much everywhere in the country after a number of industrial fires. One, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan in 1911, killed 146 workers who could not get out of the building. Boston, along with most cities, instituted a requirement of fire escapes in all multi-floor apartment buildings. But Boston regulations did not require any more than the most shoddy materials or assembly.

There is in the human psyche an incapacity for mass human tragedy.
146 garment workers is an awful number, but it is still a number.

The photo of two humans, a mother and infant heading toward certain death, did not bring to us a number. This was personal.

I have become more conscious about my own age since I first saw that photo of falling mother and daughter those decades ago. Perhaps a younger outlook increased the impact. If so, then maybe the horror has been mitigated a little by time. Still, it doesn’t take much to bring much of it back.

And that impact was shared. The city wide shock brought additional reforms to Boston. Safety in materials and structure became required standards.

Libertarian theory holds that such regulation is unproductive at worst, and redundant at best. Corporations do not need to be ordered into safety standards by the heavy hand of government. Competition for renters will provide the incentive. If that incentive is not enough, the market rules. Lives lost will not have justified the cost of saving them.

Contemporary conservatism has largely been absorbed by the same philosophy.

The last federal Republican administration made food inspections voluntary. The Peanut Corporation of America sent out contaminated peanut butter to kids all over the nation. 8 people died. The Nestle Corporation turned away FDA safety inspectors under that same conservative voluntary program and 69 kids got sick from cookie dough.

Corporate executives make decisions based on profits, current and future. Human lives become data points, entries on a spreadsheet. Morbidity and mortality calculations are important only for their impact on the bottom line.

For me, and apparently much of Boston, a photo of a young mom and a little girl falling five stories made it personal.

Diana Bryant died on impact with the pavement. The two year old child was seriously injured, but somehow survived. That survival remains a miracle. The prevailing theory is that her fall was slightly cushioned by her step-mother’s body.

That cushion of blood and flesh was not provided by libertarian philosophy or by the incremental calculations of corporate profit.

Tragically, it also was not provided, as it ought to have been provided, by the construction codes of the time governing Boston, Massachusetts, and much of the country.


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