Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Debline, a Chark reboarding, and I'm fair down. And
Speaker 1: chances are if you've ever worked outside of the home,
Speaker 1: you've probably been introduced to the idea of workplace safety
Speaker 1: at one time or another, whether it's been through one
Speaker 1: of those workplace safety videos that we all know and love,
Speaker 1: or a basic fire drill. We had one just last week.
Speaker 1: Yes we did, and we did very well, I think,
Speaker 1: I hope so yeah, me too. We're on the fifteenth
Speaker 1: floor here, so we need to know to be up
Speaker 1: on our fire safety. But it's not a perfect system.
Speaker 1: I think most people probably think that, and we saw
Speaker 1: that also in a food safety podcast that we did
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. But there's at least some
Speaker 1: emphasis on safety regulation at most reputable corporations. But that
Speaker 1: wasn't always the case, not at all. About a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, it wasn't really unusual at all for worker
Speaker 1: to die on the job. There's actually a stat you
Speaker 1: see a lot from that period that says that about
Speaker 1: one hundred u S workers on average used to die
Speaker 1: every single day in minds on ships, trains, and factories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so when you start to think about facts like that
Speaker 1: or statistics like that, it's not too difficult to see
Speaker 1: how a terrible event like the Triangle Shirtwat factory fire
Speaker 1: could occur. It was a fire that spread through three
Speaker 1: floors of New York's ash building in Washington Square, and
Speaker 1: it really stands out not just because it's a tragic
Speaker 1: event a lot of people died, it's one of the
Speaker 1: worst US workplace disasters, but also because it instigated a
Speaker 1: lot of reforms that were very much needed at the
Speaker 1: time in workplace safety standards and led to some real
Speaker 1: positive changes in labor unions and women's rights too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and especially since it's the one anniversary of the fire
Speaker 1: this year and a frequent listener request. Yeah, people have
Speaker 1: really been requesting this topic as long as I've worked
Speaker 1: on the podcast. We want to take a look at
Speaker 1: what happened on that fateful day Mars nineteen eleven, the
Speaker 1: trial that ensued, and the whole events after effects. What happened,
Speaker 1: How did it influence workplace safety? Yeah, definitely, But first
Speaker 1: we want to take a look at the conditions that
Speaker 1: made the fire possible and around this time in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, there were hundreds of blouse factories in
Speaker 1: New York City and they employed mostly immigrants, thousands of immigrants,
Speaker 1: and the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory was one of the
Speaker 1: largest of these garment operations that employed more than five
Speaker 1: hundred people, most of them were Jewish and Italian immigrants,
Speaker 1: and most were young women. And it took up the
Speaker 1: top three floors of a ten story building, the Ash Building,
Speaker 1: which was located on the corner of Green Street and
Speaker 1: Washington Place on the northern corner of Washington Square. So
Speaker 1: if you've visited that area today, it's now ny US
Speaker 1: Brown Building. Yeah. And they made, as we mentioned, shirt
Speaker 1: way s, which were women's blouses that were loosely based
Speaker 1: on a man's fitted shirt, and they were popularized by
Speaker 1: commercial artist Charles Dana Gibson. So he created this image
Speaker 1: of the Gibson girl, right, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: an iconic twentieth century woman, and she wore shortwaist, so
Speaker 1: stylish but practical at the same time, right, And this
Speaker 1: became all the rage. So it was big business at
Speaker 1: the time for the Triangle Factory owners Max Blanc and
Speaker 1: Isaac Harris, who were getting rich off the concept. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the conditions of the factory did not reflect the
Speaker 1: wealth in any way. There were long hours, there was
Speaker 1: low pay. They're pretty much no breaks for the workers.
Speaker 1: Lunch breaks were often shorted so you wouldn't even get
Speaker 1: paid for that. The female workers were followed to the
Speaker 1: bathroom and then sort of rushed back to work. And
Speaker 1: then the factory itself was just a terrible place to work.
Speaker 1: It was airless, it was crowded with people and supplies.
Speaker 1: Obviously it was the fire trap. There were open bands,
Speaker 1: piled of shirt scraps all around, and that's a really
Speaker 1: important thing to remember during this podcast. The whole workspace
Speaker 1: is filled with cotton scraps. Yeah, it was a full
Speaker 1: on sweatshop. And to make matters worse, Block Inhari stood
Speaker 1: a few things that weren't exactly up to fire code.
Speaker 1: Even at the time, they really feared their employees stealing
Speaker 1: from them, so they limited access to the exits and
Speaker 1: made the workers take a specific exited closing and that
Speaker 1: was the exit that was on the Green Street side
Speaker 1: of the building. So there they set up partitions so
Speaker 1: that they could funnel one worker through at a time
Speaker 1: and have her search for stolen tools, fabric, shirtwaists. So yeah,
Speaker 1: obviously this would create a problem if there were a
Speaker 1: lot of people trying to get out that one exit
Speaker 1: at one time. But there was another stairway. There was
Speaker 1: a passenger elevator too, or several passenger elevators on the
Speaker 1: other side of the building, but they were reserved for
Speaker 1: management and for the public. There was also a third
Speaker 1: stairway that was legally required by the city, but unfortunately,
Speaker 1: corrupt officials had let the owners count this flimsy fire
Speaker 1: escape on the back side of the building as the
Speaker 1: third set of stairs. It wasn't really a realistic escape route, right.
Speaker 1: So women finally unionized and they participated in a strike
Speaker 1: led by the Women's Trade Union League in late nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine. They were fed up with these conditions. They
Speaker 1: knew they weren't working in a safe environment, and so
Speaker 1: they wanted to fight back a little bit. The owners
Speaker 1: that were stubborn, they had the backing of Tammany Hall,
Speaker 1: and so they were able to get strike breakers from
Speaker 1: street gangs and they got thugs to break up the strike. Eventually, though,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ten, Blanc and Harris finally relented and they
Speaker 1: agreed to some minor concessions, higher wages, shorter hours, but
Speaker 1: still after that not really much changed. Factory conditions were
Speaker 1: still deplorable. Yeah, so they were still in a bad spot.
Speaker 1: And Saturday March nineteen eleven, a cutter on the eighth
Speaker 1: floor named Isidore abrama Witz noticed flames coming up from
Speaker 1: his scrap bin. And this was around four or forty
Speaker 1: at night, so it was right before closing. I think
Speaker 1: he mentioned earlier he had put on his coat when
Speaker 1: he he saw these flames. He was ready to go.
Speaker 1: He was ready to get out of there, but then
Speaker 1: he noticed this fire. And just as a side note,
Speaker 1: nobody really knows exactly how the fire started. He says
Speaker 1: he just noticed it spontaneously. It may have been a
Speaker 1: match or smoldering cigarette or cigar thrown into the bend,
Speaker 1: maybe by him, maybe by someone else, we don't know.
Speaker 1: But the fire marshal thought later that that was probably
Speaker 1: how it started, as from a cigarette. But yeah, but cotton,
Speaker 1: of course as very flammable, as we've already mentioned. So
Speaker 1: the fire, which seemed pretty small at first, was blazing
Speaker 1: within just a few seconds, and so bram Woods grabbed
Speaker 1: a red fire pail and dumped it on the flames,
Speaker 1: trying to quench this thing quickly, and others did the same,
Speaker 1: but it didn't do any good. The fire was just
Speaker 1: too strong already, and so the flames started to just
Speaker 1: spread all over the factory floor, and the factory manager,
Speaker 1: Samuel Bernstein, told the workers to get out the fire hoses.
Speaker 1: So they were still working on trying to contain this
Speaker 1: thing before abandoning ship. But that didn't help either, and
Speaker 1: that's because the hoses, which hadn't been inspected, turned out
Speaker 1: to just be completely useless. They didn't have any water pressure,
Speaker 1: so it was just wasted precious seconds in what turned
Speaker 1: out to be a really fast paced disaster. Right at
Speaker 1: that point, there was really nothing for them to do
Speaker 1: but try and find a way out, and people went
Speaker 1: about that in different ways, but basically a lot of
Speaker 1: it came down to luck of the draw. How close
Speaker 1: was your station to an exit, which direction did you
Speaker 1: choose to run in? It was all these split second
Speaker 1: decision There weren't second chances either, right, whatever you decided
Speaker 1: in that moment would determine your faith. So we're just
Speaker 1: going to go through a few different scenarios. Decisions that
Speaker 1: people made places they went to try to escape. So
Speaker 1: in a panic, many of the workers ran to the
Speaker 1: doors on the Washington Street side, but the doors were
Speaker 1: inward opening because the stairway landings were supposedly too narrow
Speaker 1: to accommodate outward opening doors. So with the mob pressing
Speaker 1: up against these swinging doors, they wouldn't open, and every
Speaker 1: one was just sort of crushing the people on the
Speaker 1: front because they were trying so frantically to get out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so other workers tried to get out on the Green
Speaker 1: Street side, and they were slowed down by that security
Speaker 1: check funneling partition that we mentioned earlier, And besides the
Speaker 1: stairway and the elevators were jammed, so not much luck
Speaker 1: there either. So some other people also tried to escape
Speaker 1: by the passenger elevators. According to an article by Charles
Speaker 1: Phillips in American History, elevator operators Joseph Cito and Gaspou
Speaker 1: Mortillo risked their lives by making trips to get some
Speaker 1: of the workers. But it's still unclear exactly which floors
Speaker 1: they visited and when they visited them. So what people
Speaker 1: have determined is that it's likely that they visited the
Speaker 1: eighth and the tenth floors. Zero later guessed that they
Speaker 1: went up to the tenth floor twice actually, but the
Speaker 1: second time they went up the floor was empty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the tenth floor is pretty key here too, because
Speaker 1: it's where management was working. So Blanc and a couple
Speaker 1: of his daughters and Harris were on the tenth floor
Speaker 1: at the time of the fire, and they and all
Speaker 1: of the seventy workers who were on that floor managed
Speaker 1: to escape, and some of them got out by the
Speaker 1: elevator and some took stairs to the roof and from
Speaker 1: there they were helped by n y U law students
Speaker 1: who extended ladders from adjacent buildings, which sounds absolutely terrifying
Speaker 1: climbing over ladders ten floors up between buildings. And some
Speaker 1: people also tried to take the fire escape, which is
Speaker 1: probably even more terrifying than that because it was so rickety,
Speaker 1: and then only went from the tenth floor to the
Speaker 1: second floor and stopped above a courtyard. At that point,
Speaker 1: it was so flimsy. Apparently the architect had promised to
Speaker 1: fix it previously but never did so when people tried
Speaker 1: to take it, it detached and fell I think exactly.
Speaker 1: I think too A few people fell down at first,
Speaker 1: and then finally the whole thing gave way and just
Speaker 1: kind of crumpled. But of all of the floors, the
Speaker 1: ninth floor definitely did the worst. The doors to the
Speaker 1: Washington Place stairwell were found to be locked, or at
Speaker 1: least we're going to talk about that a little more.
Speaker 1: Survivors claimed that several of the doors were locked, and
Speaker 1: that turned out to be pretty cruise in the after
Speaker 1: effects of this fire. But aside from the doors potentially
Speaker 1: being locked, the elevator was packed with those tenth floor folks,
Speaker 1: so it would come down to the ninth floor and open,
Speaker 1: but nobody else could get on, and then the Green
Speaker 1: Street exit was jammed, so there was just hardly any
Speaker 1: way out of the building if you were stuck on
Speaker 1: the ninth floor right. Some escaped by making it to
Speaker 1: the Green Street stairs and getting to the roof. A
Speaker 1: few others slid down elevator cables, some more successfully than others.
Speaker 1: If you see stories of some people who slid down
Speaker 1: the elevator cables and they made it, and some people
Speaker 1: when you mentioned a woman who woke up in the hospital, yeah,
Speaker 1: I read an article from that time of a woman
Speaker 1: recounting how she slid down the cables and she kind
Speaker 1: of lost consciousness around the sixth floor and woke up
Speaker 1: in the hospital. But she survived. That's amazing. But unfortunately,
Speaker 1: about eighty of the people who were stuck on that
Speaker 1: floor did the unthinkable, and they jumped out of the
Speaker 1: window onto the street. And logically, we can assume that
Speaker 1: the people who jumped didn't think that they were going
Speaker 1: to make it. They were just desperate to escape the
Speaker 1: burning building. But a lot of people by this time,
Speaker 1: we're down on the streets below watching it all happen, yea.
Speaker 1: And I mean, with our recent history in September eleventh,
Speaker 1: I think we don't have to try too hard to
Speaker 1: imagine how horrifying this was to watch. And some of
Speaker 1: the people who were watching from the street actually tried
Speaker 1: to prevent the workers, who were mostly young girls. As
Speaker 1: we mentioned, some of them were as young as fourteen
Speaker 1: years old. They tried to prevent them from jumping, telling them, hey, wait,
Speaker 1: the fire department's coming, don't jump. But even when the
Speaker 1: fire department got there, their ladders would only reach the
Speaker 1: sixth floor. Well in their nets didn't work either. They
Speaker 1: put up a safety net about a hundred feet below
Speaker 1: the windows, but the weight of the jumpers would just
Speaker 1: tear right through the net. And we also have to
Speaker 1: consider not all of these girls were actively choosing to jump.
Speaker 1: Some of them were just being pushed out by the
Speaker 1: masses of people struggling inside the building. Um, just to
Speaker 1: give you an idea of what this was like to
Speaker 1: watch from street, William Shephard, a United Press reporter, happened
Speaker 1: to be in the area, and he kind of described
Speaker 1: the horror of watching this. He said, the first ten
Speaker 1: shocked me. I looked up and saw that there were
Speaker 1: scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the
Speaker 1: floor below we're beating in their faces. Somehow I knew
Speaker 1: that they too must come down, and something within me,
Speaker 1: something I didn't know was there, stealed me. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: I think this is sort of the hardest part of
Speaker 1: this podcast to take. And all of this happened in
Speaker 1: only about fifteen minutes, which again that's just so you
Speaker 1: have one second to make a decision about what you're
Speaker 1: gonna do. That's a really scary part of this whole thing.
Speaker 1: And then it's all over by about four or fifty
Speaker 1: seven hundred and forty six of the five hundred Triangle
Speaker 1: Factory employees were dead, and almost immediately after people started
Speaker 1: looking for somebody to blame. If you have a tragedy
Speaker 1: of this magnitude, somebody's got to get down for it, it
Speaker 1: it seems. Yeah. One person who was really on the
Speaker 1: warpath about this was District Attorney Charles Whitman, and he
Speaker 1: was determined to find somebody to blame. He convinced a
Speaker 1: grand jury to eventually charge Block and Harris with manslaughter
Speaker 1: caused by willful negligence. And the trial of these two
Speaker 1: owners started about nine months or so after the fire,
Speaker 1: and it lasted for three weeks. Block and Harris were
Speaker 1: represented by a guy named Max Steyer. He was a
Speaker 1: renowned lawyer at the time. I think he was like
Speaker 1: the premier trial lawyer in New York. And there were
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty five witnesses involved in the case.
Speaker 1: So if you can imagine like all these survivors coming
Speaker 1: forth and recounting the stories of their escape and just
Speaker 1: the harring tale of what they had gone through so recently. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the whole case, the whole trial, hinged around whether
Speaker 1: or not the owners knew that that Washington Place door
Speaker 1: was locked, and they, of course, we're saying, no, it's
Speaker 1: not locked during working hours, but even a fire prevention
Speaker 1: expert testified to the contrary. So there were different opinions
Speaker 1: going on here. But the judge had instructed the jury
Speaker 1: that they must be convinced not only that the door
Speaker 1: was locked and that the owners knew it was, but
Speaker 1: the more people would have survived if it was unlocked,
Speaker 1: which is a really hard thing to do. So the
Speaker 1: jury acquitted the owners after less than two hours of
Speaker 1: deliberation and they went free. So the two owners didn't
Speaker 1: take the blame for the fire, but there were still
Speaker 1: some major reforms that came out of the whole thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a Factory Investigating Commission established and they looked
Speaker 1: into the Triangle factory and they realized that there were
Speaker 1: no sprinklers, no firewalls, no fire doors. Even though those
Speaker 1: things were available at the time, the owners had just
Speaker 1: chosen not to feature them in their own factory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but in their defense, I guess um or to at
Speaker 1: least give you the whole picture. Most factories didn't have them.
Speaker 1: So over the next few years, there were many new
Speaker 1: laws concerning the labor environment and labor protection for women
Speaker 1: and children that came into play. Yeah, and reforms like
Speaker 1: these also became a major part of the platform for
Speaker 1: a lot of progressive politicians, including Francis Perkins, who later
Speaker 1: famously went on to become the first female cabinet member
Speaker 1: UM under FDR. And she actually had seen the fire firsthand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she was there in the neighborhood with a friend having
Speaker 1: tea or something, I think, and she saw it and
Speaker 1: she later pointed to that day as the birth of
Speaker 1: the New Deal. So it's interesting, I think to see
Speaker 1: kind of how her story played out after having seen
Speaker 1: the fire Phoenix situation, I guess. And throughout the years,
Speaker 1: people have continued to follow the stories of people who
Speaker 1: were there, people who witnessed the fire, and people who
Speaker 1: were a part of it, who were part of that
Speaker 1: terrible experience. Rose Friedman, the last living survivor, died in
Speaker 1: two thousand one at the age of one seven, and
Speaker 1: there were a lot of stories about her at the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, her account is really interesting to read to
Speaker 1: and it kind of gives you a sense of what
Speaker 1: we were discussing earlier, that you had that one split
Speaker 1: second decision to make. She had she knew the management
Speaker 1: was going to get out, or that they had the
Speaker 1: best chances, and had decided to go up instead of down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she went up to the tenth floor and it turned
Speaker 1: out to be a great choice. She went up to
Speaker 1: the roof and she survived. Unfortunately, not everyone did, as
Speaker 1: we know, and a lot of the people who died
Speaker 1: were identified by their family members. Later. They set up
Speaker 1: this temporary morgue and family members would come by and
Speaker 1: identify their kin and that's how they came up with
Speaker 1: this long list of the deceased. But there were six
Speaker 1: people who weren't identified um in those years immediately following
Speaker 1: and just this year, researcher Michael Hirsch finally identified those
Speaker 1: six unclaimed people who were burned so badly that they
Speaker 1: couldn't be recognized after the fire. So at the centennial
Speaker 1: commemoration outside of the building this year on March, the
Speaker 1: names of all one forty six people were read for
Speaker 1: the first time. So it's I guess it's good that
Speaker 1: they're finally all recognized and can be memorialized. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you can still find out a lot about them and
Speaker 1: kind of read about their stories. There are lots of
Speaker 1: articles out there, I think that you can look into
Speaker 1: and we didn't get to go too much into them today,
Speaker 1: which I know I was kind of complaining about that
Speaker 1: to say earlier, I was like, I wish we had
Speaker 1: tons and tons of time to just talk about some
Speaker 1: of these personal stories and you know, not just the victims,
Speaker 1: but the survivors and how they got out and um
Speaker 1: lifts a tale to tale and all this influence the
Speaker 1: rest of their lives too. Yeah. And so I guess
Speaker 1: if you guys have any stories out there that you
Speaker 1: know of the Triangle Fire or some of the survivors
Speaker 1: that you want to share with us, UM, maybe a
Speaker 1: personal connection or a little known story that's not really
Speaker 1: out there, please send it to us. You can write
Speaker 1: us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can hit us up on Facebook or on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Myston History. Yeah. And if you want to
Speaker 1: learn a little bit more about labor unions, we have
Speaker 1: an article on that. You can find it by going
Speaker 1: to our homepage and searching for labor unions at www
Speaker 1: dot com, step works dot com, m h H. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
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