Bill:	Request to Place a Statue of Harriet Tubman in the U.S. Capitol and for Commemorative Days to be set.
Synopsis:	The main bill provides for authorizing legislation to place in the U.S Capitol a statue of Harriet Tubman, one of Maryland’s all time great American heroes. Tubman’s statue would be at no cost to the state of Maryland, as the funding will be provided by nonprofit groups and individual donors. Additional legislation requests declaration of state and national Harriet Tubman Days.
4)	Request by the Maryland Legislature to the U.S. President for a Declaration of a National Harriet Tubman Day on March 10, 2013 (HJ10/SJ 4).
Last year a broad coalition worked to get authorization for a Harriet Tubman statue to replace one of the two official Maryland statues in the U.S. Capitol. (Congressional legislation in 2000 authorized states to update their images with replacement of founders.) The legislation was amended in the Senate, and resulting legislation was unlikely to result in an official Harriet Tubman statue anytime soon. Thus the coalition recommended that the legislation be pulled before it could be similarly amended and passed in the House of Delegates.
The current legislation would not authorize a replacement; this would be an additional statue, and at no cost to the state of Maryland, as the funding will be provided by nonprofit groups and individual donors. Del. Susan Lee and Sen. Catherine Pugh are the lead sponsors again this year. Two groups initiated the 2011 effort: Equal Visibility Everywhere [EVE] and Maryland NOW [National Organization for Women – Maryland], which is again coordinating the communications and group support.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a sweatshop where hundreds of young women, most of them immigrants, slaved over sewing machines and work tables to make the popular blouses known as shirtwaists. When the fire started the women couldn’t get out, since the sweatshop owner had locked the doors. Fire hoses were too short to reach the highest floors where the fire raged. The trapped employees crowded onto a flimsy fire escape, which then collapsed under the weight. Desperately, with the wall of flames behind them, women started leaping to their deaths. A total of 146 garment workers died that day, most of them young women.
The Triangle fire was a watershed event. Labor laws, the women’s movement, public safety—all were transformed by the disaster.
Cornell University has an excellent resource site about the fire: Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire. It includes a photo archive (with graphic images, so be warned).
The Triangle fire had a galvanizing effect on Frances Perkins, who went on to become the first female Secretary of Labor (and the first female Cabinet member, period). Perkins was the architect of much of the New Deal, including Social Security.
It is ironic that the proponents of this idea, such as Maryland Senator Mike Miller, cast themselves as the guardians of truth, conscientiously defending the past from revisionists who want to “rewrite history.” Ironic because their version of John Hanson is a myth.
The real story goes like this: John Hanson was a delegate from Maryland to the Continental Congress in the early 1780s. As you no doubt recall from high school history class, the Continental Congress was the convention of representatives from the thirteen colonies (later states) which served as a very loose government from 1774 to 1789. This was before the Constitution was adopted, before our republic was actually founded.