The Triangle Fire Trial

In 1911, a devastating fire raged through the Triangle Waist Company, killing 146. It was one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. Many people blamed the factory's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, and wanted them to pay. But at Blanck and Harris's manslaughter trial, a shrewd defense attorney and weak worker protection laws ensured that the prosecutors were in for the fight of their life...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to History on Trial, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Listener Discretion advised. Lena Yawler was getting ready to leave
work when she heard a girl yell fire. Lena whipped

(00:25):
around and rolled her eyes. The girl who had shouted
was the factory's prankster. She was always telling her fellow
sewing machine operators that the boss was coming, making them
jump in their seats, only for no boss to appear.
Lena paid the girl no attention. It was a strange joke, perhaps,

(00:47):
but nineteen year old Lena just wanted to get home.
It was Saturday, the end of her work week. A
whole day of freedom awaited her, a day away from
the clamor of the sewing machines, a day to rest
her aching fingers and back. So she stayed in the
dressing room, putting on her coat and picking up her

(01:10):
pocket book. It was only when she emerged that she
saw the smoke. The prankster had not been joking this time.
Lena was terrified. The smoke was already filling the factory floor,
making it difficult to see, but she could make out
flames shooting up outside the windows. Across the room. Her

(01:33):
coworkers were clustered by the nearest exit, a door that
led to the stairs down to Washington Place, trying to
get it open. Some were screaming, crying out for their children.
When Lena tried to make her way to the door,
the crowd forced her back towards the dressing rooms. She
was trapped. Then she felt a breeze. A door was

(01:58):
opened somewhere she thought. The breeze seemed to be coming
for across the factory floor on the Green street side.
This was where Lena had seen the flames. But what
choice did she have. She knew she couldn't stay where
she was, so she set out, groping her way through
the smoke, tripping over fallen chairs, passing the burning tables

(02:22):
where she had been working only minutes before. She opened
the first window she reached, thinking maybe she could jump out,
but fell back in shock. The air outside was so
hot that it had burned her knee. From the street below,
she could hear people calling for her to jump, but
she was afraid it was too high, a drop of

(02:46):
nine stories, and the air itself had burned her. She
needed a new plan. Near By were the freight elevators.
Lena stumbled to them and knocked, praying that an operator
would bring the elevator up. She waited for two minutes,
maybe three, but it felt more like hours. No one came.

(03:11):
There was only one more way out now, the door
to the Green Street stairs. But when she opened the door,
the stairs were filled with flame. She could not go down.
It was hopeless, But then an idea. What if she
went up to the roof. It was risky, but so

(03:33):
was staying put. She pushed forward and the stairs. The
air was punishingly hot. The flames licked at her heels.
She ran. By the time she made it to the
roof two stories up, Lena's hair was smoldering. She had
burns on her arm, her neck, and her face, but

(03:57):
she was alive. On the roof, she found men holding
ladders that led to the roof of an adjacent building,
and so she climbed off the roof and away from
the burning remains of the factory. She worked at the
Triangle Waste Company. Lena did not know it then, but

(04:19):
she had gotten extraordinarily lucky. She had just survived one
of the worst workplace disasters in United States history. After
the smoke cleared and the bodies were tallied, the horrified
public would learn that a hundred and forty six people
had died in the fire in a space of barely

(04:42):
fifteen minutes. They had died on the fire escape when
the rickety structure, burdened with too many bodies, had sheared
off the side of the building and sent workers plunging
to their deaths. They had died on the factory floor,
smothered by smoke, their bodies burned beyond recognition. They had

(05:05):
died jumping on top of the elevator cars, desperate to
make it out, And most horrifyingly, they had died by
leaping from the building. Making the jump Lena had fortunately
been too frightened to make. Dozens of men and women
on the ninth floor had been hemmed in on all

(05:28):
sides by the fire, pushed closer and closer towards the windows,
until their only choice had been to burn or to
jump on the street in the midst of a beautiful
sunny spring day. Just as Lena reached the roof, the
bodies began to hit the sidewalk. Onlookers would never forget

(05:52):
the sight or the sound. Fires had happened before. People
had died in workplace accidents before. In fact, it happened
all the time, but this fire, which came to be
known as the Triangle Shirtwais Factory fire, was different, and

(06:15):
these deaths were different too. They were very, very public.
Hundreds of New Yorkers had seen these people, mostly poor
young women from Eastern Europe and Italy, die. They had
seen the firemen uselessly try to extend their two short
ladders to the people huddled on the ninth floor window sills.

(06:39):
They had seen how the fire escape, even before it
had broken, had been deficient the way its bottom rung
hung above a basements skylight, making reaching the ground difficult,
if not impossible. And they had heard the rumors which
began to spread in the days after the fire, that
some factory had been locked from the outside, that the

(07:04):
workers had died piled up by the Washington Polace door,
unable to escape. One of the people who witnessed the
immediate aftermath of the fire was New York District Attorney
Charles Whitman, an ambitious reformer. Whitman had long wanted a
high profile case to make his name on. As he

(07:27):
stood in front of the still smoldering building, he thought
he might have found it. With this case, he could
both raise his own profile and also get justice for
the victims. He could prove his progressive bonafides, stand up
for the working class, and punish greedy businessmen. He could

(07:48):
use the system so often rigged against the powerless to
make the powerful pay. But the system is not so
easily changed, as Whitman would discover when he charged the
Triangle's owners, Max Blink and Isaac Harris with manslaughter. At
their trial, a shrewd defense attorney and legal norms skewed

(08:11):
towards business interests would guarantee that the prosecution was in
for the fight of its life. Welcome to history on Trial.
I'm your host, Mira Hayward. This Week New York v
Isaac Harris and Max Blink. Max Blink and Isaac Harris

(08:39):
had both arrived in America in the eighteen eighties. Like
hundreds of thousands of other Eastern European Jews in the
last decades of the nineteenth century, Blank and Harris fled
the anti Semitic persecution of the Old World for a
chance at something new and exciting. Nearly half of all

(09:00):
Jewish immigrants during this period entered the garment business. And
Blank and Harris followed the crowd in the eighteen eighties.
When Blank and Harris got their start, the business was
a dismal one. Most people worked out of tenement sweatshops,
tiny dank rooms packed with employees, all struggling to stitch

(09:23):
or iron or cut in the poor light. The average
workweek was eighty four hours and pay was nearly nonexistent.
Disease spread rapidly through the crowded spaces. These conditions killed
many people. They also made a few people very rich,

(09:45):
including Max Blank and Isaac Harris. Harris had gotten his
start in a sweatshop. His needle skills and eye for
design allowed him to rise through the ranks. Blank came
to the business through the contracting stude, buying and selling cloth.
The two men's paths crossed in the late eighteen nineties,

(10:07):
likely through a family connection. Their wives were cousins, and
decided to team up. In nineteen hundred, they founded the
Triangle Wasist Company. Their backgrounds were complimentary and their business
steadily grew. By nineteen eleven, the two men owned multiple factories,
all employed in making blouses or as they were known then,

(10:31):
shirt waists or just waists. Blank and Harris were the
shirtwaist kings. The Triangle Factory alone shipped two thousand blouses
a day. The profits funded a lavish lifestyle, a far
cry from the men's early days in New York. They

(10:53):
lived with their families in neighboring townhouses on the Upper
West Side and went to work in Chaufford cars. Max
Blank had five live in servants. Isaac Harris only had
four the Peasant. As their wallets expanded, so too did
their flagship factory's footprint. In nineteen o two, the Triangle

(11:16):
Waste Company had moved into the Ash Building on the
corner of Washington Place and Green Street in Lower Manhattan.
The company had initially leased the nine thousand square foot
ninth floor. By nineteen oh nine they had taken over
the eighth and tenth floors two At first glance, the

(11:37):
factory facilities at the Ash Building seemed a far cry
from the horrifying sweatshop conditions of earlier decades. The ceilings
were twelve feet high, the sewing machines were powered by
a centralized electric motor, not by foot pedals. There were windows.
In many ways, it was true these new loft factories

(11:59):
were much better than the sweatshops, but they were still
extremely difficult places to work. They were crowded and hot
and noisy. The hours were very long, workers had few rights,
and owners regularly exploited their employees, denying them breaks and
short changing them in their pay. By the end of

(12:22):
the first decade of the nineteen hundreds, garment workers had
become fed up with their working conditions. An organized labor
movement began to take shape. Blank and Harris did their
best to shut down unionization efforts in their factories. They
made an in house union, staffed with their own relatives,

(12:43):
and tried to convince workers to join it instead of
an outside union. They fired anyone said to be associated
with the labor movement, but Blank and Harris could not
reverse the growing tide of discontent. In early October nineteen
oh nins nine Triangle workers decided to strike. Blank and

(13:06):
Harris fought back, calling in favors with the police department,
who promptly arrived and began beating up and arresting strikers.
The two owners hired strike breakers too, men who were
willing to violently attack the striking women. Strike leaders began
to mysteriously get beaten up while walking home at night.

(13:30):
But the violence did not scare the strikers off. If anything,
it only attracted more workers to their cause. Over the
next two months, the call for a general strike of
shirtwaist makers grew stronger and stronger. On November twenty second,

(13:50):
nineteen oh nine, thousands of workers attended a meeting of
the local twenty five chapter of the International Ladies Garment Workers'
Union and in enthusiastically agreed to a general strike. Picketing
began on November twenty fourth. By the next day, more
than twenty thousand workers filled the streets of the Lower

(14:13):
east Side, marching and chanting for change. It was a
strike of nearly unbelievable size. Around five hundred garment producers
were affected by the strike. Roughly one out of every
seven of these shops surrendered in the first forty eight hours,

(14:33):
agreeing to the striker's conditions of a pay raise, a
fifty two hour work week, and union only shops. But
these early surrenders were mainly the smaller factories, the ones
who could not afford to stop business for long or
pay for new workers willing to cross picket lines. The

(14:53):
largest factories refused to give in no one dug their
heels in more than Isaac Harris and Max Blank. The
two men proposed to their fellow factory owners that they
form a manufacturer's association to help one another out during
the strike. Nearly one hundred factories signed up for the

(15:14):
association and signed a no surrender declaration. With the battle
lines drawn, both sides settled in for a long, hard fight.
For months, neither side budged, but by February nineteen ten,
things were reaching a breaking point for union leaders and

(15:35):
owners alike. On February eighth, the Triangle Waste Company, one
of the last holdouts, agreed to settle with the union.
Blank and Harris agreed to higher wages and shorter hours
for their returning workers, but they did not agree to
the striker's demand for a closed shop a union only factory.

(15:58):
Though the workers had not gone everything they wanted, the
strike was a milestone for the growing American labor movement.
Twenty thousand young people had taken on their wealthy, powerful
employers and one better conditions for themselves. Their actions would
inspire workers all across the country to fight for their rights.

(16:22):
The strike had another legacy. It forever tainted the Triangle
Waste Company and its owners. Nobody had fought harder or
more violently against the strike than Max Blink and Isaac Harris.
One labor newspaper writing after the strike had only contempt

(16:43):
for the men and their company. The Triangle Company wrote
the foreword with blood, this name will be written in
the history of the American worker's movement. But it would
not be in blood that the Triangle's name woulden history.
The Triangle's name would enter history in fire. On March

(17:10):
twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, thirteen months after the garment workers
strike ended, someone dropped a match or a cigarette butt
into a scrap bin at the Triangle Waste Company. Isidore
Abramovitz noticed the fire first. Abramovitz was a cutter. Cutters

(17:32):
trimmed fabric into the shape of the garment patterns. A
good cutter organized the tissue paper pattern pieces carefully across
the yards of fabric stretched across their table, minimizing waste.
But even the most efficient cutter created scraps. These scraps
were swept into bins under the tables and periodically emptied

(17:54):
by rag traders. The Triangle's bins had last been emptied
in January. By late March, there were hundreds of pounds
of scrap piled under Isidor Abramovitz's cutting table. Scrap fires
weren't unknown. There were no smoking signs on every floor
of the factory, but everyone ignored them, and all it

(18:18):
took was a single spark to light up the highly
flammable fabric and tissue paper waste. The factory kept fire
pails on ledges around the cutting floor for just such incidents.
Now Abramovitz grabbed a pail and splashed it on the
flames to no avail. Other cutters saw him and join

(18:40):
in the effort, but the fire wasn't slowing. A gust
of wind blew into the room from the elevator shaft
and the workers saw the flames jump. Someone tried the
fire hose, which was connected to a water tank on
the roof, but no water came out. People began to panic.

(19:01):
What happened next happened fast. The factory was a tinder
box filled with flammable fabric and pattern paper, and an
air shaft in the back corner of the building made
the perfect vehicle for the fire to travel to higher floors.
The speed of the fire is a crucial part of

(19:21):
the story. As David Vandreali says in his book Triangle,
the Fire that Changed America, All the crucial things that
happened inside the factory that awful afternoon, the heroics, the terror,
the tragedy, the strokes of fortune, both saving and deadly,

(19:43):
transpired in a handful of minutes and in the presence
of a hideously voracious fire. Isidore Abramowitz first spotted the
fire around four forty pm. By four forty five, the
fire fire had nearly consumed the eighth floor and had
traveled to the ninth. There was no good way for

(20:07):
workers on the different floors to communicate with each other.
A telephone connected the eighth and ninth floors to the
tenth floor, but the two lower floors could not communicate
directly with each other. A bookkeeper on the eighth floor
called up to the tenth floor shortly after the fire
began to spread. The phone operator on the tenth floor

(20:30):
alerted the workers there, giving them a few crucial extra
minutes to escape, but she panicked and did not call
down to the ninth floor. It was only at four
forty six pm, just as the fire was already reaching
the ninth floor that someone on the eighth floor pulled
the internal fire alarm, setting bells ringing on all three

(20:53):
floors outside. A passerby saw the flames and ran for
the nearest public fire alarm. Each factory floor had four exits.
There was a door leading to the stairs on the
Washington Place side, there was a fire escape in the
air shaft in the rear corner. On the Green Street side,

(21:16):
there was a bank of elevators, and next to these
elevators another door leading stairs. Many of those who survived
the fire survived because of the heroic actions of two
elevator operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortilalo. Despite the overwhelming

(21:36):
heat and the flames licking at the elevator doors, Zito
and Mortillalo kept making return trips, rescuing close to one
hundred and fifty people between them, nearly half of all
the survivors. Some of those survivors had only made it
onto the elevator cars by flinging themselves into the shaft

(21:57):
and landing on top of the cars as they traveled down.
Many of those who died died because they took the
fire escape. It is a cruel, terrible irony. The fire
escape on the Ash Building was a death trap. City
inspectors had allowed the developer to substitute a fire escape

(22:21):
for the normally required third staircase. When the architects submitted
the building's planned to the city, an inspector noticed that
the fire escape ended over a skylight in the basement.
There was no way for those evacuating to safely reach
the ground. The architect promised to change the plans. He didn't.

(22:43):
On top of that, the fire escape was rickety and
extremely narrow. As more and more people crowded onto the escape,
the iron frame began to groan, and suddenly it collapsed,
sending terrified people plummeting to their deaths. On the eighth
and tenth floor, employees escaped via both sets of stairs.

(23:07):
The Green Street doors were open. Employees were required to
exit via these doors so that a security guard posted
there could inspect their bags for stolen items. The Washington
Place doors were locked at closing time to keep workers
from leaving that way. On the eighth floor, a man

(23:27):
named Lewis Brown unlocked the Washington Place doors, allowing the
workers to escape. By four forty seven. The eighth floor
had completely evacuated. Workers on the tenth floor were also
able to take both sets of stairs. By the time
they evacuated, the fire blocked their escape downwards, so they

(23:48):
headed for the roof, where people in the adjoining buildings
held ladders out for them to climb to safety. Things
were different on the ninth floor. This is the floor
where Lena Yall, the young woman whose story we followed
in the prolog worked. The ninth floor was the last
to hear about the fire, only learning of it nearly

(24:10):
six minutes after the blaze started. By this time, the
fire had already reached them. Traveling via the air shaft,
the floor quickly filled with smoke and flame. The four
exit options dwindled. By four fifty one, the fire escape
had collapsed, and by four fifty three the elevators could

(24:31):
no longer travel through the superheated shaft. Some people were
lucky enough and fast enough to reach the Green Street door,
as Lena did, and make their way up to the roof.
The remaining eighty or ninety workers were trapped on the

(24:53):
edges of the room. They could not get the locked
Washington Place door open, and they could not travel through
the growing flames to reach the Green Street door. The
fire pushed them away until they were standing on the windowsills,
praying for a way out outside. The fire department had arrived.

(25:14):
They began to raise ladders, but their ladders only reached
the sixth story, some thirty feet too short. Instead, the
firefighters began to spread out nets because they had realized
what many of the workers huddled above had. The only
way out was down. As David Vondrelei points out, many

(25:38):
of the people working at the factory that day had
survived pegroms in Russia organized massacres of Jews, where fire
was often used as a weapon. They knew what fire
could do. They wanted their relatives to be able to
recognize their bodies. At four fifty, the first person jumped.

(26:02):
The nets were futile. A body falling nine stories is
moving so fast that a net can barely slow it down,
and so many people began to jump so quickly that
there was no chance of catching them all. Even if
catching would help, There was nothing anyone on the street

(26:22):
could do but watch, horrified as people began to fall.
Those who went first jumped. Those who came later did
not have the luxury of choice as the windowsills burned
out from beneath them and sent them tumbling to their
deaths inside the ash building stairwells. Fire crews were battling

(26:44):
the inferno by five point fifteen PM, only thirty five
minutes after Isidore Abramovitz had first noticed a fire in
his scrapin. They had the fire under control, but by
then nearly one hundred and fifty people, more than twenty
percent of the people in the Triangle factory that day,

(27:05):
were dead. Most of those who died in the Triangle
fire were young women, immigrants from either Eastern Europe or Italy.
Many of them had worked alongside their sisters or mothers,
and many families lost more than one person that day.

(27:25):
The sarah Chinos lost Tess and Sarah Fina. The Goldsteins
lost Mary and Lena. The Brenmans lost Rosie and Circa,
while their brother Joseph survived. One family. The Malteses lost
two girls, Lucy aged twenty and Sarah, the youngest victim

(27:47):
of the fire, only fourteen years old, and they lost
Lucy and Sarah's mother, Catherine, two three family members gone
in the blink of an eye. Identified bodies were laid
out in a large building on a pier in the
East River, and friends and family members lined up to

(28:09):
try to find their missing loved ones. The task was
heart wrenching and gruesome. Many of the bodies were so
badly damaged by the fall or by the fire that
they had to be identified by jewelry, or hairstyles, or
even the darns in their stockings. By the end of

(28:29):
the week, all but seven corpses were identified. On April fifth,
a funeral procession for the Triangle victims traveled through Lower Manhattan.
Some one hundred and twenty thousand people marched and another
three hundred thousand lined the streets. It was a clear

(28:49):
sign of the fire's impact on New York. The city
was reeling. Writing about the procession for the Women's Trade
Union League, Martha Bensley Breweer asked the question on the
lips of many New Yorkers. The fire is over. The
girls are dead, she wrote, Now what is going to

(29:12):
be done about it? Political leaders shied away from answering
the question. New York Mayor William Gaynor directed reporters to
the fire chief. The State Labor Commissioner directed reporters to
the City Building Department. The building department head was on
vacation and refused to return, but he did direct reporters

(29:34):
to the fire department. Conflicting information about the fire and
the cause of the deaths filled newspapers and official statements.
No one knew quite what to believe or who to blame,
but everyone wanted to blame someone. New York District Attorney

(29:57):
Charles Whitman was also struggling the question of what to do.
Whitman had arrived at the scene of the fire shortly
after five pm on the twenty fifth, after the last
person had jumped, but before the bodies had been taken
away or the fire had been extinguished. The images of
that terrible day stuck with him. As Whitman considered how

(30:22):
to get justice for the fire victims, he faced a choice.
Would his office pursue the city's Building Department and accuse
them of Lack's oversight, or would he go after the
factory's owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blank. He felt he
could not pursue a case against one without weakening his

(30:43):
case against the other. For almost a week after the fire,
he equivocated, encouraging his office to investigate both lines of inquiry.
But on March thirty first, after William Randolph Hurst's newspaper
ran an editorial accusing Whitman of moving to far too slowly,
the DA made a decision he would pursue the factory owners.

(31:07):
We can only speculate as to why he chose this path,
but if I had to guess, Whitman may have felt
that this was the more straightforward case. Instead of tackling
the systemic issues of worker protections and factory safety laws,
Whitman could focus on proving the individual responsibility of Harris

(31:28):
and Blank. The District Attorney's office organized a grand jury
to look into the fire. The testimony Whitman heard at
the grand jury convinced him that the Washington Place door
on the ninth floor had been locked. Under New York law, quote,
all doors leading in or to any factory shall not

(31:52):
be locked, bolted, or fastened during working hours. Violating this
law against locked doors was a mist. Whitman and the
two assistant district attorneys he had assigned to the case,
Charles Bostwick and j. Robert Rubin, wanted a stronger charge,

(32:12):
something that carried a larger penalty than just a fine.
They wanted jail time for Harris and Blank. The locked
door was the prosecution's way in. Although locking the doors
was simply a misdemeanor, a misdemeanor that resulted in death
was manslaughter. On April twelfth, the grand jury indicted Isaac

(32:35):
Harris and Max Blink on charges of manslaughter. The two
men were arrested that same afternoon. Many felt that this
was a good first step towards getting justice, but no
one could predict what would happen in the courtroom. On

(32:57):
December fifth, nineteen eleven, a crowd gathered outside Judge Thomas
Crane's courtroom. It was the second day of jury selection
in the Triangle fire trial. When the defendants Isaac Harris
and Max Blink arrived, someone in the crowd shouted, Oh, mamma,

(33:18):
look here they come. Here are the murderers. The crowd
began to yell and wail. People held up photographs of
their deceased relatives, women tore out their hair. Max Stoyer,
Harris and Blank's attorney, was unfazed. An immigrant, Stoyer had

(33:38):
himself worked in sweatshops as a child before fighting his
way to the top of New York's legal ladder. Not
much could trouble him. Stoyer pushed his way through the crowd,
leading his clients into the courtroom. Nearly nine months after
the Triangle fire, many people were still horrified and outraged.

(34:03):
On the next day of the trial, when Harrison Blank
went to lunch, relatives of the victims followed them and
yelled at them from the sidewalk while they ate. Judge
Craane ordered police protection for the defendants. That afternoon, Charles
Bostwick delivered the prosecution's opening statement. In his forties, Bostwick

(34:26):
was a veteran lawyer with a brushy mustache and a
dignified manner. His co counsul was J. Robert Rubin, a
young attorney who had been on the scene of the
Triangle fire. The horrible things Reuben had seen that day
had motivated him as he prepared for the trial. Now
he hoped that his and Bostwick's hard work would see

(34:48):
justice done for the victims. Bostwick's opening was straightforward. He
talked to jurors through the layout of the ninth floor
of the Triangle factory, pointing out the various exits as
he spoke. He mentioned the elevators and the fire escape
and the Green Street door. Then he began to speak

(35:10):
about the Washington Place door. One of the employees that
ran to the Washington Place door, Bostwick said, was a
woman named Margaret Schwartz, and Margaret Schwartz was now dead.
The District Attorney's office had filed manslaughter charges against Harris
and Blank for the deaths of seven different people. In

(35:34):
this trial, they were only focusing on the death of
one of those people, Margaret Schwartz. The DA's strategy was
to hold on to the other manslaughter charges in case
something went wrong in this trial. Margaret Schwartz, Bostwick said,
had tried to escape via the ninth floor Washington Place door,

(35:56):
but like everyone else who tried to do so, he
failed because, Bostwick argued, the door had illegally been kept locked.
The factory owners had kept this door locked so that
employees would have to exit through the other door, where
a security guards sat to inspect their bags for stolen goods.

(36:19):
The illegal act of keeping the door locked had caused
Margaret Schwartz's death, Bostwick said, making Harris and Blank guilty
of manslaughter. Bostwick's first witnesses helped establish both the layout
of the factory, as well as Margaret Schwartz's cause of death, asphyxiation.

(36:39):
Several witnesses also testified about the conditions at the factory,
including a rag trader named Louis Levy, who testified that
he had last cleared out the scrappins on January fifteenth,
more than two months before the fire. On Monday, December eleventh,
the try Angle fire victims began to testify. Bostwick led

(37:04):
them through their recollections of the fire. Each witness described
their actions that day, including their desperate attempts to escape.
One after another, witnesses testified to their fear and anger
at finding the Washington Place door impassable. As they spoke,
Bostwick asked the witnesses to rise from the witness stand

(37:27):
and go to the courtroom door to demonstrate how they
had tried to get the Washington Place door open. I
took hold of the handle and I turned and pulled it,
Mary Buccelli said as she yanked on the courtroom door.
Sam Bernstein recalled, I tried with both hands to open it.
There where the lock was. I wanted to tear it open.

(37:51):
Lillian Weener said, I tried to turn the handle and
it would not bend. It was locked. Over and over,
jurors watched the young men and women re enact some
of the worst moments of their lives. Over and over,
the jury heard that the Washington Place door had been locked.

(38:15):
It was powerful, compelling testimony, but even as it occurred,
defense lawyer Max Steyer was doing everything he could to
reduce the impact of the witness's words. One of Stoyer's
main arguments was that the Triangle fire victims had been
doomed not by any action of Harris and Blank, but

(38:39):
by their own, panicked, irrational choices during the fire. Whenever
he could, Stoyer worked to undermine the credibility and intelligence
of the survivors who were testifying. He picked up small
inconsistencies in their stories and used these inconsistencies to imply

(38:59):
the witness was either lying on the prosecution's behalf, or
did not speak English well enough to understand what they
were saying, or was not clear headed enough during the
fire to properly remember what happened during worker yetto Lubberts's
cross examination, for example, Stoyer implied that Lubets did not

(39:20):
know what a square was, that she thought that doors
could stop fires, that she had answered the prosecution's questions
without understanding them, and that she was lying about her
testimony rubbing salt in the wound. In the midst of
making these accusations, Stoyer chided Lubberts, don't get upset. Stoyer

(39:41):
had two other approaches for tripping up the prosecution's witnesses.
The first was questioning their motives. On cross examination, he
questioned witnesses about lawsuits they had filed against Harris and Blank.
Many of the survivors, as well as relatives of the victims,
were pursuing claims against the triangle's owners. Steyer framed these

(40:05):
lawsuits as conflicts of interest. Steyer's second plan to damage
the prosecution witnesses was raising the theory that their stories
were coached. He planted the idea that many of the
witnesses had attended union meetings, where he implied they had
learned what to say on the stand. He devised a

(40:26):
cunning way of supporting this theory on several cross examinations.
Instead of trying to poke holes in the stories of witnesses,
he simply asked them to repeat their stories again over
and over as they repeated their stories, The witnesses inevitably
repeated certain phrases, making their stories sound rehearsed. This tactic

(40:52):
was particularly damaging to one of the star prosecution witnesses.
Kate Alterman, had been a friend of Margaret Schwartz, the
woman whose death Harris and Blink were accused of causing.
On the stand, Altman broke down crying as she told
the story of her last moments with Schwartz. The two

(41:14):
friends had tried to open the Washington Place door. Alterman
re counted, but could not. As they frantically tried to
force the door, Schwartz suddenly collapsed. Altman tried to rouse her,
but Schwartz would not wake up. Altman had no option
but to leave her friend behind to save her own life.

(41:38):
As she ran across the room, she looked back and
saw Schwartz on the floor, the hem of her dress
and the ends of her hair beginning to burn. The
jury was stunned more so than any other witness. Altman
had transported them into that burning building and confronted to

(42:00):
them with the horror of being trapped by a locked door.
Steyer had to control the damage. He had noticed that
Alterman's testimony contained a number of distinct evocative phrases. She
didn't call the fire simply fire, for example, but described

(42:20):
it as a quote red curtain of fire. Steyer thought
these phrases sounded rehearsed. On cross examination, Stoyer had Alterman
go through her testimony four times, pausing to highlight the
specific she repeatedly mentioned. In between. He asked her if
she had ever told this story before or studied her words.

(42:44):
Alterman denied it. As David Vondrelli points out, Altman was
probably lying about whether she had ever told her story before.
Her testimony was so well organized that it's hard to
imagine she never practiced it allowed. However, a rehearse story
does not imply an untruthful one. It is extremely common

(43:08):
for attorneys to prepare witnesses for trial by having them
practice their testimony. Kate Alterman's story was consistent and its
details aligned with both the physical evidence and the testimony
of other witnesses, but Stoyer had gotten her to repeat
herself so frequently that her words began to seem artificial

(43:31):
to the jury. After raising questions about the prosecution witnesses credibility,
Stoyer tried to bolster the reputations of the defendants by
having Harris and Blank testify. Both men had been at
the factory on the day of the fire, Blank had
actually had two of his young daughters there with him,

(43:53):
and both had had harrowing experiences. It was a risk
to put the defendants on the stand. Stoyer hoped that
their testimony would humanize them and make them appear to
be victims like all the other survivors. In some ways
this strategy worked. Isaac Harris had behaved heroically during the fire,

(44:14):
climbing from the rooftop of the ash building to an
adjacent rooftop and badly injuring his hand by breaking a
skylight to get help. But in other ways having the
owners testify backfired. On cross examination, Bostwick pressed Harris on
the issue of employee theft. Theft was the owner's justification

(44:36):
for locking the Washington Place door, but Bostwick pushed Harris
on the specifics and got him to admit that the
total value of employee theft in the year before the
fire had only been twenty five dollars. Steyer also found

(44:56):
ways to question the narrative of the locked door from
the prosecution witnesses. The jury had heard over and over
again that the Washington placetoor was kept locked, but now
Stowyer produced defense witnesses who made the jury question if
this central claim was true. These witnesses, mainly Triangle employees

(45:19):
and contractors, described how they had regularly used the Washington
playstairs during the course of their business. The Triangle factory
had been set up with different functions on different floors,
cutting on the eighth, sewing on the ninth, packing and
shipping on the tenth, and people needed away to carry
goods from floor to floor. It would seem to be

(45:42):
inefficient and therefore unlikely that the Washington Place store was
always locked. That being said, a number of witnesses also
testified that keys were kept attached to the Washington Place door.
The keys were hung from thin strips of fabric that
regularly broke and were also very flammable, explaining why the

(46:04):
workers may not have been able to find them during
the fire. Why were keys needed if the door was
kept unlocked. The prosecution also had one more compelling piece
of evidence to support their claim of a locked door,
a smoking lock, so to speak. During the grand jury proceedings,

(46:25):
the DA's office had sent an investigator to the Ash
Building to search for the ninth floor Washington Place door lock,
and the investigator had succeeded. Stoyer had fought hard to
keep the lock from being admitted into evidence, questioning its
provenance and claiming that it was unbelievable that the lock

(46:45):
had been found more than two weeks after the fire.
Bostwick was prepared for this argument. The District Attorney's investigators
had shored up the discovery by tracing the lock in
every step of its journey from fact to installation. They
knew where the lock had been made, what store had
sold it, who had bought it, and finally, who had

(47:08):
installed it on the Washington Place door. Judge Crane allowed
the lock to be admitted. The lock seemed damning. The
heavy bolt was undamaged, while the visible part of the lock,
which would have been exposed to the fire, was discolored.
The prosecution suggested that this meant that the bolt had

(47:30):
been protected by the door frame, something that only would
have been possible if the door was locked. Of course,
Stoyer had an explanation for this too. He brought in
a lock expert of his own, who testified that the
lock should have entirely melted in the fire if it
had really been there. The expert also claimed that the

(47:51):
lock was easy to tamper with. For every point the
prosecution had made, Stoyer had a quick rebuttal. But would
his clever lawyering be enough to counteract the powerful testimony
of the survivors. On December twenty seventh, after nearly three

(48:12):
weeks of testimony and more than one hundred and fifty witnesses,
the case was handed over to the jury. In his
instructions to the jurors, Judge Crane explained the charges in
the same way that the prosecutors had It was against
New York law for a factory door to be locked
during working hours, and if someone had died because a

(48:34):
door had been locked, then that was manslaughter. But he
added another point, one that was favorable to the defense.
He told jurors that to find Harris and Blink guilty,
the jury must find that the men knew the door
was locked at the time of the fire. If these

(48:54):
men were charged with a misdemeanor, Crane explained, I might
charge that they need have no so knowledge that the
door was locked. But I think that in this case
it is proper for me to charge that they must
have had personal knowledge of the fact that it was locked.
With that, the jury was sent out to deliberate. Two

(49:15):
hours later, they returned with a verdict on the charges
of manslaughter in the death of Triangle employee Margaret Schwartz.
Max Blank, and Isaac Harris were found not guilty. Immediately

(49:36):
after the not guilty verdict, reporters went looking for explanations.
One juror explained that he believed that the victim's panic,
not the locked door, was to blame for her death.
I think the girls, who undoubtedly have not as much
intelligence as others might have in other walks of life,

(49:58):
were inclined to fly into a panic, he said. Stowyer's
tactics had clearly worked. Another juror stated that it was
Crane's instructions that had sealed the decision for him. I
believed that the door was locked at the time of
the fire, the juror said. But we couldn't find them
guilty unless we believed they knew the door was locked.

(50:21):
Crane's instructions had raised concerns when they were issued. Lawyers
speaking to The New York Times were surprised that Crane's
instructions had not mentioned the large number of lives lost
at the factory, or the fact that several of the
defense witnesses had made sworn statements to the da that

(50:43):
the door had been locked, but then testified to the
opposite on the stand. Some felt that Crane's conduct throughout
the trial had favored the defense. He had been strict
about what the prosecution was allowed to mention about the fire, excluding,
for instance, any testimony about victims jumping from the building,

(51:05):
on the basis that it was irrelevant. Crane may very
well have been biased. He had, it turns out, a
shockingly relevant past experience. Six years earlier, in March nineteen
o five, a tenement building on the Lower East Side
of Manhattan had gone up in flames, killing twenty people.

(51:30):
Many of the deaths were due to the unsafe conditions
of the building, which had a blocked fire escape. At
the time. The tenement house commissioner was Thomas Crane. Crane
claimed that his inspectors had done everything they could to
keep the building safe and blamed the residence of the
building for the fire, but the city government blamed Crane.

(51:54):
He lost his job and was maligned in the press. Crane,
a man who felt he had been unfairly blamed for
a fire related tragedy, was the judge for a trial
of two men who were being blamed for a fire
related tragedy. He should have recused himself. But while Crane's

(52:17):
bias did no doubt cause issues for the prosecution, the
verdict was in many ways the District attorney's own fault.
An editorial in The New York Times on December twenty
ninth opined that Whitman's office had mischarged Blank and Harris,
saying the acquittal does not mean that nobody was to

(52:39):
blame for this hideous disaster. What the verdict really means
is that Harris and Blank were not guilty as charged.
Between this and not guilty at all, there is much
more than a technical difference. The DA, the editorial continued,
should have simply Chown charged Harris and Blank with violating

(53:02):
factory laws, something they unequivocally did. That way quote, either
they would have been sent to jail or heavily fined,
or else the inadequacy of those laws to serve their
intended purpose would have been so plainly demonstrated as to
have brought about an immediate reform. This last point is

(53:28):
the key one. The law at the time was inadequate
to address a tragedy like the Triangle Fire. There were
very very few worker protections in existence in nineteen eleven.
There were very few ways for the legal system to
hold employers liable for harm done in the workplace. After

(53:50):
the Triangle Fire and the acquittal of Blank and Harris,
many realized that in order for justice to be done,
the law would have to check. And it's here that
we see the true legacy of the Triangle tragedy play out.
For months after the Triangle Fire, people were skeptical that

(54:13):
workplace safety reform would happen. After all, industrial accidents were
extremely common. Thousands of workers died due to workplace accidents
every year, and thousands more were injured. Injured workers had
little legal recourse. Judicial precedent stood firmly on the side

(54:35):
of employers. In a key case called Farewell v. Boston
and Worcester Railroad, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled in
essence that when employees took a job, they assumed the
risk for workplace injuries. Following this eighteen forty two decision,
it became very difficult for workers to prove that their

(54:58):
employers were legally rect responsible for workplace injuries or for
workers to receive compensation for such injuries. This common law
environment matched public opinion. Many people believed that workplace injuries
were mainly caused by the inattention or negligence of individual workers,

(55:20):
but in the early twentieth century, labor reformers began conducting
surveys about the actual causes of workplace accidents. One seminal
study run by Crystal Eastman for the New York State
Employer's Liability Commission and published in nineteen ten, revealed that
many workplace injuries were caused not by worker negligence, but

(55:44):
were instead attributable to systemic issues caused by employer mismanagement. Eastman,
who went on to co found the American Civil Liberties Union,
had collected heaps of data to support her conclusions. Raw
data alone was not enough to change public sentiment or

(56:04):
the law. People needed something more visible, something more visceral,
to convince them of the need for change. The Triangle
Fire was just such an event, as the legal scholar
Arthur F. McAvoy writes, quote, so graphic were the Triangle

(56:26):
deaths and so clear their systemic causes that the law
could no longer contain them within the category accident. The
Triangle Fire inscribed the law of turn of the century
labor relations on its victims' bodies, so that its meaning
at last became clear. At the same time as the

(56:51):
need for reform was becoming evident, politicians were taking note
of the voting power of the people who most needed
workplace protectives. In New York, the powerful political machine known
as Tammany Hall, which had usually sided with wealthy industrialists
in opposing workplace reform, realized that their new path to

(57:13):
electoral victory was courting the votes of the working class.
The combination of popular pressure and political will finally combined
in the months after the Triangle Fire to create real change.
On June thirtieth, nineteen eleven, New York Governor John Dix

(57:34):
signed a law creating the Factory Investigating Commission. The Commission's
members worked tirelessly collecting data, touring factories, and holding frequent
public hearings. Soon the Commission began proposing reforms, many of
which the New York State Legislature enacted as law. Over

(57:57):
the next four years. The Commission's work in spired dozens
of workplace safety and worker protection laws. These laws included
crucial reforms such as the banning of child labor and
the requirement that employers provide workers with clean drinking water
and bathrooms. Other laws focused on fire prevention and protection measures,

(58:23):
such as mandatory fire drills, automatic sprinklers, fireproof stairways, and
fire escapes. Unfortunately, these laws came too late to protect
the Triangle workers. In the years after the trial, the
fire's survivors and its victims relatives struggled to get justice

(58:43):
or even compensation for what they'd endured. Max Steyer represented
Blank and Harris in the civil suits against them, all
of which seemed to have failed or fizzled out. The
only suits that succeeded were those filed against the app
USh building's owner. In early nineteen fourteen, twenty three relatives

(59:05):
of victims received a measly seventy five dollars each in
a settlement of these suits. Even more disturbing, that paltry
sum paled in comparison to the amount that Blank and
Harris earned from the fire. The two men had received
a two hundred thousand dollars payout from their insurance companies

(59:29):
in the wake of the disaster, But in nineteen thirteen,
investigation by Arthur McFarlane for Collier's Magazine revealed that Blank
and Harris had only been able to document one hundred
and thirty four thousand and seventy five dollars in losses,
meaning that they were for some reason overpaid by more

(59:50):
than sixty thousand dollars. Despite this windfall, the Triangle company
did not survive much longer. The DA's office had tried
to pursue additional manslaughter cases against Harris and Blank, but
a judge ruled that this would be unconstitutional double jeopardy.

(01:00:11):
Harris and Blank continued their partnership for nine years, operating
shirtwaist manufacturers across New York City, before eventually going their
separate ways in nineteen twenty. The men do not seem
to have learned any lessons from the nineteen eleven tragedy.
In nineteen thirteen, Max Blank was arrested for locking doors

(01:00:34):
at one of his factories. At his trial, he defended
himself by saying that his employees would rob him if
he didn't lock the doors, the same argument he had
used at the Triangle trial. He was found guilty and
fined twenty dollars. The legacy of the Triangle Fires victims

(01:00:58):
with long outline. Blank and Harris the reform work that
New York did in the wake of the fire would
become a national model for workplace regulation. Worker protection reforms
continued throughout the twentieth century. Nearly sixty years after the
Triangle Fire, in nineteen seventy, Congress passed the Occupational Safety

(01:01:22):
and Health Act, which, among other things, created the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, an agency that can
set and enforce workplace safety standards. Though workplace safety standards
and worker protections are not perfect, they are fathoms beyond
what they were on March twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, the

(01:01:45):
day that a fire blazed the Triangle Factory and changed
our understanding of workplace safety forever. That's the story of
New York via Isaac Harris and Max Blanky with Me
after the Break to learn about how the Triangle Fire
led to the breaking of a political glass ceiling. Today,

(01:02:13):
the site of the Triangle Fire, the Ash Building, is
known as the Brown Building and houses New York University's
Biology and chemistry departments. The building was designated as a
National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety one, eighty years after
the fire. Thirty years before this designation, on the fire's

(01:02:36):
fiftieth anniversary, a plaque was placed on the building to
memorialize the victims. A woman named Francis Perkins was invited
to give the dedication. On the day of the Triangle fire,
Francis Perkins was having tea at a friend's hoone nearby
when they heard the sirens. Perkins and her friend follow

(01:03:00):
the sound to the sight of the fire. They arrived
just as people began to jump. Perkins, then thirty years old,
was horrified by what she saw, but not entirely surprised.
She worked for the Consumers League, a nonprofit focused on
documenting and improving workplace conditions, and she was intimately familiar

(01:03:24):
with the many ways that people could be harmed in
the workplace. Still, what she saw on March twenty fifth,
nineteen eleven, haunted her. After the fire, Perkins doubled down
on her commitment to protecting workers. She became the primary
investigator for the New York Factory Investigating Commission and was

(01:03:48):
crucial in shaping the reform laws that the Commission proposed.
Over the next two decades, Perkins served in increasingly prominent
statewide organizations, including the Count's on Immigrant Education and the
New York State Industrial Board. Along the way, she became
allies and good friends with a politician named Franklin and Roosevelt.

(01:04:13):
In nineteen thirty three, now President Roosevelt appointed Perkins to
her biggest job yet, United States Secretary of Labor. She
was the first woman to ever serve in a presidential cabinet.
Francis Perkins was the Secretary of Labor for twelve years.

(01:04:35):
During that time, she helped the country recover from the
Great Depression and guided the passage of laws that still
shape American life today, including the Social Security Act and
the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the rights to
a minimum wage and overtime pay. Her impact is hard
to overstate. Perkins never forgot the Triangle Fire about the

(01:05:00):
events of that day. In nineteen sixty four, fifty three
years after the fire and a year before her death,
Perkins told the audience that her reform work could be
seen as a type of atonement. The progress made, she said,
seems in some way to have paid the debt society

(01:05:20):
owe to those children, those young people who lost their
lives in the Triangle Fire. Thank you for listening to
History on Trial. My main sources for this episode were
the trial transcript, David von Dreley's book Triangle, The Fire
That Changed America, and Arthur F. McAvoy's article The Triangle

(01:05:44):
Shirtwaist Factory Fire of nineteen eleven, Social change, Industrial accidents,
and the evolution of common sense causality. For a full bibliography,
as well as a transcript of this episode with citations,
please visit our website History on Trial podcast dot com.

(01:06:06):
History on Trial is written and hosted by me Mira Hayward.
The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with
supervising producer Trevor Young and executive producers Dana Schwartz, Alexander Williams,
Matt Frederick, and Mira Hayward. Learn more about the show
at History on Trial podcast dot com and follow us

(01:06:28):
on Instagram at History on Trial and on Twitter at
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