American History Hit - The Fire That Changed New York

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

On March 5 1911, 146 people died in a fire that lasted just 18 minutes. This event was to change the history of New York, and has an ongoing impact in each of our workplaces.Don is joined for this episode by David Conrad-Pérez to find out what made the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire so deadly, who is to credit for the changes made after it, and whether anyone ever faced justice for it.David is the author of ‘Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Charity’.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Coming around the corner, on the Washington Place, we can see smoke billowing out above the street. It is coming from the top floors of the building at the other end of the block, where a fire has just burnt out.

In less than a half hour, the street has gone from a run-of-the-mill scene, people finishing up their days and heading home, to a horror escape. The fire escapes from the building have warped and collapsed under the weight of escaping things. feet. Shutters and windows hang from their hinges. Firefighters' ladders sit abandoned. They were not up to the task of reaching the upper floors. On the pavement, some covered in blankets, some not, are the bodies of workers who chose the fall over the fire. A policeman walks between them, numbering them with tags on their wrists. The floods of water from firemen's hoses run into the gutter, stained red with blood. What happened here?

Let's find out. Hi, I'm Don Wilde, and welcome to American History Hip. Nowadays across the United States, workplace safety rules and regulations dictated by federal or state laws, all that red tape, is what most of us take for granted. Well, it wasn't always that way. In fact, it has been a long journey,

perilously punctuated by a number of truly awful disasters which starkly demonstrated the utter necessity of such measures. One tragedy in New York City, in the early years of the 20th century, had perhaps the greatest impact of all. It is known as the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory Fire. Today I'm joined by David Conrad Perez, author of Fire in the Heart of the City, the Triangle Shirtwaste Tragedy, and the origins of Modern Charity.

I want to find out how this fire came to pass, what and who caused it, and how it changed America. Hi, David. It's great to meet you. Don, thanks so much for having me on the show. Before we get into this, for those listeners unfamiliar with this seminal event, can you give us the briefest overview, just a general outline? What was the Triangle Shirtwaste Factory Fire? I think in a lot of ways, the fire is a story we think we know. So, I mean, we're talking about one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history. We're in 1911, New York.

were in a building, a 10-story building right next to Washington Square Park, the top three floors of which were home to the Triangle Waste Company. You had a factory where they were Jewish and Italian immigrant workers primarily who were working, fueling what was by then New York's biggest industry. You had a cigarette that was left in a trash can full of scraps that quickly ignited. And so the workers, especially those on the ninth floor, had nowhere to go because the doors were locked as they usually were by the factory bosses. So in less than half an hour, you had 146 workers killed,

some of them inside the building, some of them tragically jumping from the ninth floor as hundreds of New Yorkers gathered below. It was such a spectacle of suffering and such a disaster that, you know, all of New York came to a standstill, really. You had half a million people fill the streets of New York for a funeral march.

You had workers refusing the return to work. And the way the rest of the story goes, as you know, is that that led to a new generation of labor laws, a new sympathy for the worker of the Lower East Side. And in this book, I try the show that that's, you know, not even half the story. Thank you. I've started very generally because the details of this lead to very detailed effects and consequences, which is a really important part of this story. So let's dive down into the details. Now, March 25th, 1911 is the day we're talking about. That's a Saturday. It's near closing time. And fire, as you say, breaks out. The factory is called the triangle.

shirt waste factory. It's located on the eighth, ninth, and 10th floors of the ash building, a building that still stands today. If you go to Washington Square Park in New York City in Greenwich Village, it's 23 to 29 Washington Place Manhattan. Shirt wastes. What did this factory produce? Why is it called that? Yeah, so, I mean, the fires remembered as the shirt waste factory fire, but the company was the triangle waste company. And they made shirt waste, which were a popular women's blast of the era, came to be a symbol of women's independence. And the triangle factory made more shirt waste than anybody else. I mean, they're producing thousands a day. It was a million dollar industry. And the triangle factory was on top of that industry. Its owners were considered

the shirtwaste kings. They're convenient. They're fashionable. They're that look that we remember from the early, you know, if anybody looks in those pictures of early 20th century, those women are addressed. Kind of, it's sort of for the time, I'm sure, very mannish that this was sort of clinging to this, you know, it wasn't as fluffy and hoop skirty as we're used to from the 19th century for sure. And it spoke to women's needs for efficiency and what we now take for granted with ourselves. We just slip into something quick and go outside. It's ready made clothing industry. And it is booming, as you say. As a result, there are many of these factories in New York, right? Hundreds. Yeah, hundreds. I mean, this was, New York was producing 80% of the women's clothing across the country,

70% of men's clothing across the country. And the shirt waste was the symbol of sort of that revolution in a lot of ways. Yeah. So there was a tremendous need for labor, which was going for a lot of things in America in those days, hence the immigrant class that was getting employed in these jobs. Who worked at the Triangle Shirt Lakes factory and under what conditions? Yeah, so you had mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women who were working in that factory. And I mean, you had men who were the bosses. You had members of the factory owners' family who were executives. But the people doing the work were primarily newly arrived Jewish and Italian women. And, you know, in New York at this time was very much a city of a city of

immense poverty and wealth. And, you know, uptown, let's say, above 14th Street, you know, you had all these department stores that were selling the shirt waste. You had the Fifth Avenue mansions. You had the philanthropists and the newspapers. And then downtown below 14th Street, you had the workers of the Lower East Side who were running that industry. One stat that always gets me is that in the Lower East Side back in this time had 90% of people living in Manhattan, this little less than one square mile slice of the city. And they were the ones who were who were fueling the garment industry, which was the backbone of New York back then. I mean, they were doing so without any oversight.

You know, everybody's attention was uptown. And so they were really, I mean, there were workers there who were trying to get the city's attention about what they were going through. But for the most part, back then, they had no protections. Yeah, exactly. Well, this is a city of districts in those days, you know, still has that relic of an identity where you have the garment district and so forth. But this was definitely an area where all these factories existed, not like today, of course.

In fact, that building is now part of NYU. I mean, that's how different it is. But in those days, you would have had upwards of 500 employees working at the Triangle Shirtways factory, which was typical. The age could go as low as 15, probably lower, I would imagine, right? Yeah, lower. The Triangle Factory had something called the kindergarten corner, which were where workers, who were eight, nine, 10 years old would work.

And when inspectors would come by, which was always sort of a, you know, not really, they weren't really inspecting, but inspecting. but inspectors would come by and they would have this game where they would hide in bins of shirtwaste and in fabric and then they would come out afterwards. And so, yeah, there weren't child labor laws that were at least being enforced if existed. And it was young people, mainly in their teens in early 20s, but yeah, as young as eight. And they work seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Half hour lunch break. They're paid, I don't know, what, $6 a week or so, something like that? Even less. Yeah, even less in the Triangle Waste Company.

you'd have to work there many years to get to that. And one of the big tragedies within the tragedy is that most of the shops that had unionized by 1911 were closed by that time of the fire around just after 4 o'clock on the Saturday. And so if the factory had also unionized, they likely wouldn't have been there either. So all of this time frame is all about that. And we'll talk a lot more about unions and so forth. But the beginnings of a consciousness in America is only just beginning. You know, a child, if you go to Pennsylvania, you've got kids picking out coal on those, you know, gigantic conveyor belts, you know, there's all kinds of child labor in America at that time. This is when the country is still in that infancy of understanding it needs to change.

That's the powerful significance of this story. You know, there are other aspects of this, you know, of course, the timing of this isn't, there's no plumbing in those days. Women have to leave the building to use the bathroom, of course, which is probably a shack down on the bottom floor. and importantly, you have foremen, probably men, who are working these floors, dictating how these women can work and how they get their breaks, right? That's right. Yeah, that's right. They had, I mean, this was around the time where you have the rubber soles of shoes

that were invented, and so you could hear the clacking of the foremen going down the aisle. The women of the Triangle Factory, especially, were watched constantly. They were constantly being surveillance, so they couldn't take breaks. You know, there's a big controversy that played out in the courts as a lot. to whether or not the factory owners knew on that day that the doors were locked to that floor. And, but typical practice was that the doors were locked, especially to the ninth floor, so that they couldn't take bathroom breaks, that they couldn't go out or, you know, the thinking was that they were going to steal fabric where they were going to talk to a union that was outside.

But that was, you know, that was what happens. And that was how they were trapped in the day of the fire. And so, yeah, they were under immense surveillance. If anybody whispered about a union, they were fired. And they had to produce. they were paid by how much they produced. So it was a piece working industry. And so it wasn't, even though they were there for extreme hours, they had to work. Yeah. And underscore that for yourselves as you're listening to this, the foreman would lock the steel exit doors to prevent an

interruption of work or theft. The foreman had the only key to those doors. Okay. So David, the fire breaks out. And again, this is a Saturday, March 25th, 1911. How does that happen? I mean, it's probably the old, age old scrap in the corner, right? It was. It was a cigarette left in a waistbasket. There's still some disputes over who left the cigarette, but it seemed like it was one of the cutters who were mostly men. And when, you know, you can imagine there's fabric everywhere.

There's fabric in these waste bins. There's fabric all over the floor. This was a factory that could have had sprinkler systems but didn't. It had refused principally almost to any kind of fire safety. protection. So all that was there were little bins of water that were kind of scattered throughout the floor. The fire hose were rusted shut from disuse. Fire exits, you know, were not, couldn't bear any weight. And so when the fire happened, there was no protection. There was just a few pails of water. Yeah. And this is March. So it's cold in New York still. So I'm sure the windows are closed. And here

it goes. This fire rages. Not that long, right? I mean, it's a brief fire, meaning about a half an hour, right? about a half an hour it all happens yeah i mean it was there's so many tragedies within this i mean the fire department arrives actually in time but their ladders aren't big enough to reach the women at the top they have you know blankets that they're trying to use but they don't do anything so you have this just this terrible scene of a city totally incapable of addressing this disaster as it's unfolding despite the real infuriating thing being that the the women inside had been protesting for years trying to get attention to this very situation, that there was, you know, that they had no protections. It was an industry of fire insurance policies where, you know, where company owners are

making millions of dollars by fires taking place. So there was no incentive for them also to really do anything or spend any money on protections. And so, so yeah, that was the tragic moment where there's two realities met. Key to this story is really the narrative of New York in those days. I mean, you had a very, very divided city, district-wise, as I've mentioned, but also the upper class doesn't pay attention to what's happening down here. And it's the scale of this story that really finally draws attention. But they'd ignored it for years, as you say, these people had been screaming about this for a long time. And suddenly this kind of thing happens and it finally grabs people with attention. 146 workers die of the 500 that were that were working in that building at the time.

the youngest victims as young as 14 years old, Kate Leone and Sarah Rosario Maltese, who are their names? It's a mix of men and women, but it's got to be chaos, of course. You've got the fire engine. Everybody's trying to put this thing out, but nothing's working out. Yes, so the fire starts on the eighth floor. So as a reminder, you know, the top three floors of this 10-story building are home to the triangle waste company. The fire starts on the eighth floor.

Everybody's running to the exits. You know, they're going to the elevator. They're going to the open, they have open-door exit. so they're running down the stairs. You have somebody on the eighth floor who calls up to the 10th floor, the switchboard operator and tells the 10th floor that there's a fire, that there's a smoke. At that point, everybody on the 10th floor leaves.

So at this moment, you had the actual short-waist kings, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, who have actually their family members there who were preparing for a Saturday evening out in the city. They hear warning of the fire. They escape to the roof. They actually ended up going to the neighboring building and had NYU law students and other people in the other building help them over. But nobody tells the ninth floor.

So the ninth floor doesn't find out until much later on. And at this point, the elevators aren't working. Their doors are already locked. They go to the fire escapes, but those collapse. And so you have this really tragic moment where people start breaking the windows. And men and women start jumping from the ninth floor. And this was something that, you know, there were, I write about in the book, some of the people who were witnesses there.

There was a reporter from the Midwest who was one of the first people there, and he was just counting the number of people who fell. Described it as a sound he had never heard of before in his life. You had people who were just trembling and water from the fire hoses that are working and doing nothing. You have Francis Perkins, who famously was actually having tea at one of her friend's houses, along Washington Square Park, had run over and she's a witness down there on the ground and references the fire is inspiring her later career in labor reform. So you had this terrible moment of people watching from the outside and people on the inside and one couldn't help the other.

I imagine fire in workplaces were fairly common in those days. But as you say, the preparations for fire in this factory were unusually bad even for that time. They were. They were. And that is why for years, the Triangle Shirtways Company was the target of the labor movement. They were the target of all of these strikes that had taken place, including the 1909, which we can talk about, which was the uprising of 20,000, which at that point was the largest movement of women in the country's history, the largest strike, general strike of women in the country's history, all with their attention squarely on the triangle shirt waste company, above all others, as the real leader and culprit in this entire industry of exploitation. And yet they survived those strikes and they never let their shop unionized. They never installed any kind of fire safety protections. And because of that, you know, you had this moment that that was totally preventable and yet happened anyways. It's, I think it's worth itemizing those things just to review what you had just said in describing that. Firefighters ladders, water hoses, not tall enough to reach the upper floors,

10-story building in this case, inadequate fire escapes, collapsing under the weight of workers, locked doors, the foreman would lock them during their shifts. The X-Earths. The X-Forman would lock them during their shifts. the exit to another street, Green Street, where the workers usually left and where all the pocket books were inspected to prevent stealing blocked by fire. The Washington Place exit, which would have been the front door, was tried by countless workers and did not work. The elevators carrying a few at a time, they stopped working. Everything broke down. What few protections were there were not going to work. How did this trigger the change that you're suggesting?

Again, there have been years of this going on. 1909 owners are pressed for more working hours. There's a lot of history of unionizing and struggle before this, right? And then this is what supercharges it. In a lot of ways, yes. I would say that this was a moment that did awaken some groups within New York to what these women and the labor unions have been saying for a very long time. It led to a philanthropist, R. Full and Cutting, donating about $10,000,

which was used by a fire investigating commission to investigate factories throughout the city and throughout the state, which was led by Francis Perkins and other workers like Roche Schneiderman, who actually brought awareness to that this was an industry-wide problem and led to some of the very first labor protections we've ever had in this country's history, including, you know, you can credit, if you have a fire exit in your building, you can credit that to this moment. But 40 other laws, you know, around child labor,

around, you know, labor protections and fire safety all came from this moment. And so that is a, I would also say that that's a story that we've told a lot and it provides a sense of closure, I think, to the struggle. But there's no closure to this struggle because in a lot of ways, justice did not follow that fire. You know, these, the factory owners were acquitted. They opened up another factory just a few blocks away days later. And they advertised, you know, calls for more workers in the local newspapers that ran that call. Yeah. They, some of the other big culprits, you know, I mean, the New York Times that had been delegitimizing.

the workers calling them radical and un-American and socialist for years, came in and sort of hijacked the moment to, by creating this charity campaign that raised more awareness for what they were doing, but didn't take any recognition of their role in delegitimizing these workers' calls before the fire. And so you had a lot of the people who were most responsible gained greater power after it as well. You have to understand. This is a time when anti-labor is a norm in this country. You've got, you know, Pinkerton men beaten up on co-workers out there with Andrew Carnegie's blessing. You've got a whole, you know, prejudice basically against this immigrant class, first of all.

And then their demands for better working conditions are ignored and despised even by the American public in many quarters. And so that's really at the heart of the matter here that the changes that had already been asked for or demanded really struck for, you know, years before had already been ignored. at this point. The 20,000 worker strike that you're talking about is, is what year is that? This, we're talking, the end of 1909, heading into 1910. So right in the, you know, the middle of the winter in New York. Oh, okay, good. But also there's, you know, never mind, there's other cities that are Philadelphia is as big as New York as in those days. And they have a big strike. 15,000 shirtweights makers in Philadelphia will go on strike. You know, but the key is nowadays, we see strikes and we go, go guys, get your better thing.

You know, there's a, we're in favor of this kind of thing, many of us anyway. And in those days, that would have triggered an immediate negative response. And therefore, politicians would not be paying attention. That's right. That's right. I mean, another thing that really, I think a detail that sometimes gets lost is just how hard it is to also, you know, actually organize a general strike.

I know there's been very few in American history. I mean, today you see, you know, people try to call for a general strike. general strike in social media and realize you can't do it. It doesn't happen overnight. And this was a general strike across 500 factories, mostly led by teenage and women who were teenagers are in the early 20s. And they were working across different languages. They were working across Yiddish and Italian and English. They were, you know, making alliances with, with wealthier New Yorkers who were sympathetic to their cause to raise money to sustain the strikes. You know, they had, in the book, I write about the union halls that were so like electric spaces. I mean, it's where they had

blackboards where they were tracking shops that were settling. They were organizing translators. They were trying to figure out which people needed food. And they were actually creating the very methods of organizing and picketing that we take for granted today. They were telling, you know, women how to do this in a way that would hopefully allow them not to get arrested or beaten by police, even though, as you mentioned, that was happening. The factory owners would bribe local police, they would bribe prostitutes and boxers to come and, you know, abuse the women. At that time, they would bribe judges so that when they were arrested, they would be sent off to Blackwell's Island and other workhouses. And so you had, you know, these local unions who were

trying to prepare workers for, you know, what they could face. And they distributed pamphlets about how to organize peacefully. You know, picketing in that time, we forget, was actually completely legal. So there was actually no law against picketing. It was the only mechanism. It was the only mechanism that these workers had to raise awareness. And that's true in other cities as well. And so, you know, they were using their, they're working within the law to try and raise awareness. And they were, you know, repeatedly knocked down for doing so. Sure. And importantly, this triangle factory went on strike during that whole period. And they made these demands that management, of course, did not pay attention to. And so when they go back to work,

still we're talking about unlocked doors in the factory, fire escapes that don't function. And sure enough, March 25th, the inevitable, I suppose, in some factory happens. 1911, 146 lives lost the cruelest of scenes. This is what finally brings this idea to public attention. Sad but true. A big part of this was the coverage, wasn't it? The fact that we had photographs of this that were happening. Never mind, everyone's seeing these bodies literally piling up on the streets of New York City.

We're also seeing it in the papers. That's right. You actually had photographs. And, you know, depending on the newspaper you read, you know, there might be a different level of rage following that fire. But they all had the pictures. They all had the pictures. And you're right. And that was something that was also new, that spectacle of being able to see not just, you know, death, but people who were about to die. I mean, you saw pictures of people jumping. You saw the grates on the ground that were destroyed. And you had pictures of those from bodies that had fallen from the 19. floor. So you had all these images showing, you know, what it happened and in the moments afterwards and all of the bodies and that you couldn't turn away from. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Thousands attend the funerals, the memorials. There is a mass procession of more than 120,000 people organized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. I LGWU. I grew up with those commercials, You know, those women singing on the commercial.

All of this really takes root at this point. It highlights these marches how dangerous these workplaces had become. A hundred workers die every day in 1911 America. Extraordinary. That's true. I didn't actually realize that number, but that sounds completely right. And you know, one interesting thing about the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union,

is that we have a statute to them actually today in New York. It's on 7th Avenue. And despite being the fact that this was, you know, an organization where women led some of its most famous strikes, some of its most, you know, resounding influence, that statue is of an unnamed man on 7th Avenue. And so many of the workers who were, you know, part of this struggle still haven't gotten there. I think the attention that they both deserve and that I would say is in the interest of these unions to also help feature. Yeah. It's just another chapter in a podcast series of its own that the greatest. just advances in workers' rights and never mind citizens' rights come from women, standing up

and saying, excuse us, we're going to get the vote and we're going to change things. And in this case, the ladies garment workers' union gets out there and they're the ones that make the difference. It's an old story. And in that regard, tell me about a woman named Rose Schneiderman. You've mentioned her already. What's her role in this? Yeah, so Rose represents that working immigrant lowry cider.

So like so many other people from that time, she came over to the U.S. when she was eight, fleeing from what was then Poland, fleeing Jewish oppression in Eastern Europe. Her father passes away when she's young, and so she has to drop out of school and work in the Lower East Side. I mean, she starts working at some of the shops that are there and eventually finds her way like everybody does into the garment factories. And she's somebody who actually created one of the very first women-led unions. Some people call it the first of catmakers when she was just 21 in the Lower East Side. She's the first woman elected to national representation of a union in the U.S.

So she's a woman of many firsts, and she was right there, you know, at the center of everything, all the things we've talked about. She was at the front of the funeral march. She was one of the key organizers of the 1909 uprising. And she was somebody who, you know, was a bridge to so many different worlds. I mean, she spoke Yiddish and English.

So she was a bridge between those communities. She was the person who, Ann Morgan, who was the daughter of J.P. Morgan, took an interest in her. had heard her speak and decided to invite her to her colony club, which was an elite women's club in the city, for, you know, sessions of tea and fine dining for her to talk about what it was like to live in the Lower East Side. This is before the fire. And so she was a bridge between that world, which they would say called the Mink Brigade, because they often, the women would come

with, you know, their minks and fancy hats. And they were critical in some ways to these strikes because they provided, you know, money, they provided funding. They provided some protection when they were with them picketing. Police, you know, violence was a little bit less likely. And Rose was one of the key people in, you know, bringing them in, and helping to translate what it was like to live in the Lower East Side for these wealthier classes. And so she also becomes the person who after the fire challenges them. You know, there's this big meeting that I write about in the book at the old Met where everybody's trying to decide what are we going to do after this fire. Where should we put our, you know, our guilt, our anger? And so many people were calling

for charity. And she was the one person who stood up and said, no, that you've promised this charity in the past and it's done nothing. You know, this is a, this is a moment where the workers need to help themselves. So, you know, what this is about is giving more power. And she was really at the, the front of all of that. It's an exciting scene here. April 2nd, 1911. She's talking to people with money, this mink crowd you're talking about. And this is a quote from her, I would be a traitor to these Poor burned bodies. If I came here to talk about good fellowship, we have tried you good people of the public, and we have found you wanting. They did not want to hear that in many, many quarters. But that's how America is turning, realizing, you know, we've been talking about this for a while with Theodore Roosevelt and the progressive era during this period of time, the recognition of poverty. Sooner or later, the vote to women. All this period of time is really about staring down the barrel of what's really the injustice going on around. us. As a result of really directly from these events, labor unions gain strength like they'd never had before, am I right? At least in the city. That's right in some ways eventually. In the immediate

aftermath, it was a very different story. So the Mink Brigade, you know, and the members of the New York Women's Trade Union League, which they represented, were furious with Rose after that speech at the Opera House. She was kicked out of the union, you know, Rose, Pauline Newman, another person, Claire Lemlich, a lot of these figures who had received some attention for their role in the previous strikes were all blacklisted already from factory owners. And they basically became blacklisted from some of the unions because, or at least the league, which was the one that was heavily influenced and led by some of the wealthier women of the city. Because they, you know, it became very clear after the fire that there was a difference between sympathizing with these

workers and providing, you know, charitable gifts and actually allowing for a change in power. Do you actually allow them to have, you know, greater influence in the decisions of their lives. And that was the line that many in the Mink Brigade decided they didn't want to cross. And so Rose was actually kicked out of that league. She comes back, you know, eventually some years later to become the president for many decades. But in the immediate aftermath, there was a lot of anger at, you know, how dare these people challenge us in our reputations in this moment. Yep. But three months later, New York's governor signs a law that creates the factory investigating commission.

that's major. That's a big step in New York, given what's going on still and we'll continue to go on. Yes, it was unprecedented. It was something that this was the committee that was led by Francis Perkins, which led to over 40 new laws. This was, you know, she recruited the help of the Tammany Hall twins, especially Al Smith, to help, you know, push forward this new legislation. They traveled to factories across the state documenting what was happening. She did this with Roe Schneiderman, who was often a helpful interpreter between the workers and Francis. And it was incredible what that group did. But, you know, another piece of this history that's often missing is the fact that after that, after they did all this incredible work over just a period of, you know, three years,

really, after this period of work that was only really about three years, Francis went for more funding. She wanted to continue this investigating commission. and she went back to the financier to charity boss, who was Robert Fulton cutting. And she asked for another few thousand dollars to continue this work for another five years. And she brought hundreds of pages of all the accomplishments of this committee

in which, you know, noted all of these new laws, noted all of the evidence of their investigation. And they ultimately decided not to go forward and to rehire Francis because there was a lot of resistance from real estate unions. And the charity felt like what she was doing wasn't actually, you know, in their interest, that they weren't actually about reform, which is a big irony because a lot of their, a lot of their legacy was reform around immigration. But they said that was a different kind of work. And so even after all that success,

Francis ultimately can't get the investigating commission refunded. And so that work ended there, but it's accomplishments where, you know, were incredible and led to, you know, shaping new deal laws and everything else. Yeah. And again, right out of the triangle shirtwakes factory, this happens, it's important to underscore how this commission really changed things. 1911 and 1914, as you say, three years, 30 new labor laws are passed in New York, things like mandatory fire drills, sprinkler systems and factories, improve fireproofing, construction standards, ozes that will actually reach the top of buildings, laws that limit the hours and conditions under which women and children can work, a requirement to have unlocked exits and

accessible fire escapes, all of these things. come out of this commission, these three years. But it's on the state level. That's really important to remember here. And the name of this woman is also important, Francis Perkins, who is working side by side with Roche Schneiderman in this thing. Francis Perkins is going to become the name as we go on in this story. And this is pre-World War I, pre-Depression. I mean, there's a lot of what's going to happen down the road here. But this is pretty early days for this, and it's as a result of this tragedy. The U.S. Department of Labor is eventually created in 1913. I mean, that takes worker safety and moves it from the state level up to the federal.

Changes are yet to come. This isn't going to fix the world at that moment, but it's extraordinarily important to realize this. And who's at the front of this but a woman named, we've mentioned her, Francis Perkins, who is a New Yorker at that point, importantly working with Franklin Roosevelt, who had been governor of New York. So this is all a New York thing that's coming out. of the Triangle Shirtways Factory Fire. That's right.

It really is an incredible story. I mean, there's also one of the things that I found really interesting is that Francis Perkins would actually have had such a close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. And that through that, you know, she introduced Eleanor Roosevelt to Roche Schneiderman. And they would actually go on trips up to Hyde Park. This is before FDR was elected to talk about, you know, what it was like to work in the lower side and what in all the union work that they were doing. And even at that time, it wasn't, Roche and I'd even really couldn't get office with FDR.

So what they would do is they would sort of, you know, be around the places where FDR would pass by. And whenever FDR was coming, they would turn their conversation to labor. And from that, Eleanor's idea was, you know, he's going to soak up some of this language that will become useful later on. And Francis Perkins really credits those moments that teaching FDR really everything that he knew about labor and to be able to campaign and talk about labor as if he was, you know, right there on the picket lines. And all of that came from Rose and these other workers of the Lower East side that Eleanor and Francis brought in close proximity to him. But you could still see that separation of power, though, where there was still, you know, there was still class separations even then. Well, surely do an episode on Francis Perkins in the future because it's a really big story later on for sure. But I want to know, David, was justice ever served for this fire, were the men who owned the factory ever held responsible for what they had created?

It's a great question, and I would say pretty emphatically no. So, you know, this was a group that, I mean, they were acquitted by an all-male jury in December later that year. They opened up another factory just blocks away from the triangle waste company, the building by Washington Square Park. They made thousands of money, what we'd consider millions today in fire insurance victories after that fire. And so, you know, financially, I think there was no, you know, no justice. There was certainly no justice in terms of, you know, people who were to blame, admitting blame. And there's also a bigger legacy that I think that's core to the book, which is around the fact that if you follow the donation money after the fire, you realize that more than labor laws came from this. An entire new field of scientific professional charity or we just consider charity today really has its roots in this moment after the fire.

fire because they were, you know, today there's millions of charities that we consider professional charities. Back then, there were hundreds. And really, there were three that were, that were really big ones. And these ones were kind of on the brink of popularity. They were led by some of the wealthiest people in the city. But New Yorkers didn't really know why they needed their money. You know, these were because they were led by these wealthy financiers. After the fire really provided that, that bigger stage that it needed, because it showed New Yorkers who were really uncomfortable with the growing inequities of the city, that they could do this thing of donating to these groups and they could feel like they were doing something.

And the legacy of those charities, I think, too, is something that we haven't really fully grappled with today. And justice hasn't been served for the work that they made possible either. I want to name these guys, Max Blank and Isaac Harris. Those are the men who put on trial for the factory fires. And they had previously collected insurance on their damaged properties. I mean, these guys are really low life. would say. They're tried for manslaughter based on the reports of the doors being locked. Both are

acquitted after a 23-day trial. Many in the city must have been shocked by that, I imagine. 23 individual civil suits are brought by the victim's families, resulting in minimal compensation of about $75 per loss of life. And that doesn't happen until 1914, three years later. They had claimed in the trial, these two guys, that the building was fireproof. How the heck would they have claimed that? they had a celebrity lawyer at the time who was, you know, very good at shifting the conversation. I mean, I think the building itself was fireproof in the sense of the walls, but that doesn't, in terms of practice, it wasn't a fireproof building. Really, it kept the flames inside in a lot of ways.

And so without other protections, it was just an inferno. And, you know, these Blank and Harris, they were people who were, in some ways at the beginning were part of the American story. You know, they were, they also came over to the U.S. as immigrants fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe. They came with nothing. They built a business from scratch, first on Wooster Street, and then they moved to the building along Washington Square Park. And from nothing, they created this big industry. But the reality is that they did it through corruption. They did it through these terrible practices of exploiting women. And they really showed no care when it came to that. And so it's hard for me to also provide, you know, forgiveness for that, even trying to look back on this, or on them charitably.

And they escaped, yes, they escaped justice through a lot of loopholes. And through a lawyer who could shift the conversation. And, you know, they were in the newspapers afterwards, some of the jurors were actually really uncomfortable with even how they voted. They felt like the conversation very much came down to, did they know on that day that the door to the ninth floor was locked? And that was something that some of the jurors felt like they couldn't know for sure. therefore not guilty. And it was something that there was still a lot of unresolved, you know,

feelings, even among the jurors after the, after the trial. Sure. Well, there would have been a bias anyway, you know, against those immigrant workers and they're complaining. But take this into consideration. August of 1913, Max Blank is charged with locking one of the doors of another factory during working hours. And he is fined $20. And the judge apologizes to him for the imposition. That's how extreme the bias is. That's right. And that's, I mean, that's weeks after the fire, too, I believe. That's, that was very recently afterwards. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. December 1913, the interior of his factory is found to be littered with rubbish piled six feet high, with scraps kept in non-regulation, flammable wicker baskets.

He is served with a stern warning. Finally, the triangle shirt waste factory does cease operations in 1918. I want to talk about one aspect of this. We touched on the media already, but there's the New York Times to talk about Adolf Oakes, still the name in charge of the New York Times. Let's talk about how the media worked through him. Yeah, so the New York Times is a piece to this story that usually isn't part of the conversation. But it really, I think, is the key to understanding its legacy beyond the labor laws. And to understand the New York Times, yes, you have to understand Adolf Oaks. I mean, he was, he's somebody who, there's statues to him, you know, in the building today. And I think a lot of reporters don't really know much about him.

You know, even within journalism history conferences, you know, he's not necessarily somebody that people talk about, even from this era. It's usually the Hearst and the Pulitzer stories that get a lot of the attention. And some of that's because the family, it's still a family newspaper. You know, right now that the publisher in New York Times is his great-great-grandson have portrayed him a little one-dimensionally. but he was really an interesting person. He was somebody who, you know, grew up in poverty, first in Ohio and then in Tennessee. He's somebody who, in a lot of ways, I think, you know, was living in the shadows of his father, who was very ambitious man, but who failed in his businesses multiple times.

And Ox, who was the oldest of eight siblings, you know, felt like he wanted to be the one who broke that family pattern, that he was going to be the person who broke the family's run of misfortune and bankruptcy. and he thought the New York Times was a way to do that. And so he came to the city in 1896, which is where the book starts. And he had already had a successful newspaper in the Chattanooga Times, which is a good Southern newspaper, but he was also half a million dollars in debt. And back then, you know, a half a million dollars was a lot, was a lot.

And today we would be, you know, this is tens of millions of dollars in debt. And he came to the city, and the book goes into his, you know, sort of the late night scheming sessions that he does with a disgruntled report. and how he hustles from bank to bank for loans. But the fact is that he bought the New York Times for $75,000, not a penny of which was his own money. It was all loaned. And he did it by forming relationships with some of the most powerful financial figures in

the city, including a man, Jacob Schiff, who was the man calling for charity at that Met Media we were talking about. And he does one of the great business turnarounds in American history after that. You know, he takes the New York Times from the 14th most popular newspaper in New York to becoming a world leader. He creates all the things that we now associate with the Times, you know, all the news that's fit to print slogan. He moves the times from the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge

up to Times Square, and the result creates Times Square. Even the ball drop that we think of as quintessentially New York was actually a celebration of the Times move uptown. And so, you know, Ox was really behind all of these institutional features and really, you know, defining features of New York. But he's often missed out of this history. And the key to, you know, Ox's success was that he looked at a newspaper landscape in 1896, and he decided that he couldn't compete with the circulation of Pulitzer or the circulation of Hearst.

So he decided to compete with their character. He wanted to create a newspaper that you could leave on your kitchen table, that anybody in the family could read. And he would tell department store owners, you know, that that was who his readership was, that they were the people who could afford shirtways. They were the people who could afford nice clothing. he told the railway companies, these were the people who could afford vacations. And he used that as an advertising strategy that brought the paper enormous revenue and really launched it to the success that it had.

And as part of that, you know, as part of that alliance, he also delegitimize the pickets and the strikes that were happening in the years before the triangle fire. Because it didn't match his vision of the city. And so he, you know, he called their strikes an American, that they were socialist, that they were radical. he did features on Blake and Harris, the shirtwaist kings, that helped show their side of the story, both before and after the fire. And they were really, you know, central to, in so many ways, I think, to this history. And yet they're so often left out. And I think they're the key to which

we can actually better understand the broader legacy here, I think. To add insult to injury, six victims of the Triangle Shirtweiss factory remain anonymous until 2011, when DNA identification and finally allows this to happen. David, the triangle stands out, of course, because it was so terrifying and visceral and because it was New York City and so visible, but there were so many more workplace tragedies of this period that built the wave that happens. How are the resulting reforms? When do they become permanent? Are we talking about the New Deal? Is that when things really take hold? Well, I would say the New Deal has been referenced as being born very much from the ideas and the laws and the experiences that came after the fire.

And, but, you know, a lot of these laws are still under challenge today. A lot of the, even the child labor laws that came out of this in addition to all those fire safety laws are still under dispute. So none of these, you know, none of these protections were, were in stone and are very much still, you know, active work being done to try and protect some of them. And so, yeah, so we could celebrate the link from the new deal to some of these things that we enjoy today, but it's still very much a struggle and process. Right. And central to this, as we just storytelling wise, is Francis Perkins. You know, that name who so many do not know these

days is the central woman or the central figure really in the establishment of workplace safety laws eventually instated by the federal government and looked out over. We joke about it now, OSHA and all the rest of it. You know, everybody rolls their eyes, but that's why people aren't dying 100 workers a day anymore. It really is. It's a different world. As a really. It's a result. Thank you so much, David. David Conrad Perez is historian of the media. His book Fire in the Heart of the City, the Triangle Shirt Waste Tragedy, and the Origins of Modern Charity is available wherever you buy your books. And look for David's bylines in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Colombian Journalism Review. David, where can people keep track of your work? I think probably my website

is the best place. That's David Conradperez.com. I have a contact page there, and I'd love to hear from anybody interested in the fire, interested in this history, and talking more about it. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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