Behind the Bastards - The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Robert is joined by Propaganda to discuss the Triangle Shirtwaist FireFootnotes: https://www.osha.gov/aboutosha/40-years/trianglefactoryfireaccount https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/uncovering-the-history-of-the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-124701842/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-the-triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-transformed-labor-laws-and-protected-workers-health https://www.famous-trials.com/trianglefire/971-trianglecodes http://projects.leadr.msu.edu/makingmodernus/exhibits/show/the-triangle-shirtwaist-factor/the-fire  https://www.assp.org/news-and-articles/2021/03/24/the-triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-an-american-tragedy  https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/triangle-shirtwaist-fire  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/shirtwaist-kings/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-means-for-workers-now/2011/03/15/ABVAFIs_story.html?utm_term=.a4304e16b22c https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2019/11/22/why-the-triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-still-burns-hot-today/?sh=34310fb3704a https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/the-great-arrival/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/1396423?seq=1 http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/english/36.html Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's sending Sophie today's script? It started Sophie, the episode is started. We can't stop it now. We're going. This is all in the episode. Hell yeah, I'm hitting record right now. I hit record 28 seconds ago. Chris can figure it out, man. This is how it's going.

We're 36 seconds into it by my count. You gotta catch the magic. You gotta catch it. Discrepancies happen. Thank you, everybody. This is behind the bastards, the podcast that is introduced like a piece of shit. I'm your producer, motherfucker. Don't fucking say that. Hey, some could say that. I'm the one introducing it.

Listen, some could say that. I'm not the producer. Don't come for my name. Listen, but pieces of shit are produced effortlessly. And it's actually quite magic produced. Oh, go ahead. That is true, though. Your body is magical. I wasn't calling you a piece of shit, Sophie.

I was saying my introduction was done like a piece of shit. That's all I was saying. Your competence is at war with my incompetence and generally edges it out by a slight margin, but not today. Today in competence wins, which is ties in to the theme of the episode. This is behind the bastards show about bad people, the worst ones in all of history. And some other stuff too, sometimes. Like today we're not talking, well, we are talking about some bad people,

but we're also talking about a bad thing that happened with our guest, Jason Petty, a.k.a. Prop. What's the word, y'all? We network buddies. Jason, we are network buddies. You and I are now are now coworkers, colleagues, which I think means if I understand corporate law, we can't be called upon to testify against one another. I wouldn't testify on you anyway, but now I'm glad that it's in.

I'm glad that it's in. It's in writing now. It's a long way in the world. Yeah, being on the same podcast network. You want to talk about, well, it's not your new show. It's your old show. Yeah. But but now it's on our network.

Yeah, it's got a got a jet pack in it. Who politics with prop, man? Like, yes, I'm so excited to bring this to the team and have y'all is like input into like how to make it as as dope as possible. Yeah, it's politics is gang banging in nice suits. I think so many times in the same way that like what this pot does, which is like brings everybody to the table so that now we all have shared information agreed upon about, you know, what's happening in the world and how we got there. I think it's the same with with politics, man.

I'm just look, they just speak a different language. They're not smarter than you. So I'm just here to not give commentary but analysis so that you know what you're looking at. And that kind of by trick you into thinking that this isn't something you don't already know and understand. So that's politics. I'm really looking forward to the Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode. Oh, yes, the Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode. So what I really have enjoyed in your show is how you explain Mitch McConnell. He really has to be explained in like gang banging terms to really get how McConnell goes.

It didn't make sense. It took me so long to put a finger on it. Then I was like, oh, you're just a hustler. It all made sense. Well, we're talking about we're actually going to talk about some gang shit today. We're going to talk about some some horrible shit. We're going to talk about the triangle shirt waste fire. You ever heard of this prop?

Nope. Okay, this is one of the rare moments. This is a good one. This is a horrible industrial disaster in the United States. So prop the idea that human beings would get their clothing almost exclusively from stores and stores that were themselves stocked by massive factories that produce clothing at scale. That's pretty new. Didn't used to be that way for most of human history, right? Yeah.

Your ancient Romans, your Macedonians, your Carthaginians, your Han China, they're not walking into a department store and buying a bunch of identical pairs of shorts. Didn't work that way. No ancient Sears markets. Yeah. No ancient Sears markets. There is a free people buried with the library of Alexandria. If that's ever uncovered, a plague will be unleashed upon the world that will end all of society.

But yeah, not a lot of mass produced clothing back in the day. In fact, in the United States in 1791, which is not all that long ago, right? I've drank in bars in Europe that are older than that. History's greatest monster, Alexander Hamilton, estimated that between two thirds and four fifths of all clothing in the new United States was homemade. So basically, everything's people had on their bodies in the early U.S. was something like a family member. Yeah. Mama made it.

Yeah. Mama made it, sister made it, whatever. Grandma. Grandma. Now, that state of affairs didn't start to change until the mid-1840s with the development of the modern sewing machine. But what really shifted matters in the United States, at least, was the Civil War. Because during the Civil War, right, you got all these assholes wanting to keep doing a slavery.

You got these guys who were generally less assholes wanting to stop them. And they conscript about two million men. Yeah. About two million men joined the Union Army over the course of that war. And all those guys, all those guys need uniforms, right? Mm-hmm. And two million dudes, you're not going to hand sew all that shit, especially since half these motherfuckers are dropping dead right out of that, you know?

How about we just make 30 of them, and when you die, we just take your pants off? Yeah, we just take your pants, take a shirt. Yeah, so these guys need mass-produced uniforms. And a lot of them are immigrants, right? That's one of the big things about the Union side. Shit, a ton of these guys are Irish or German, because those are like where people are coming to the United States from. Yeah.

And so most of these people had been dirt poor for most of their lives. They had like one or two sets of clothing that they owned, and it was stuff that like their family made and maintained. Suddenly, they joined the military, and they get these mass-produced uniforms in standardized sizes. Now, and this is probably for most of them, the first mass-produced clothing on their body. And today, you know, you brag that like, oh, this shirt's handmade, right? My pants were like hand sewn, and that's a mark of higher quality than like a factory-made piece of clothing.

Not necessarily the case back then, right? Because your clothing's often made by mom or dad or grandma or sis, and they're not always good at it, you know? Yeah. Man. Most people aren't good at most things, so like, yeah. That's crazy. You know, what I think about like just how culture is just continues to evolve.

Like we, you know, in the 50s, we had to teach America to throw stuff away. Like, you know, and just the idea of recycling and stuff like that. Like, I thought about the milkman trope, and I was like, dude, you had glass bottles, and a dude came to the house and refilled them. I'm like, yo, that's some like Silicon Valley like greenery. Fools are bragging about having their own chickens. You know, like that's like, I got chickens. I make eggs.

And I'm like, dog, this, this is not a flex. Do you know what I'm saying? Like this is what culture was for centuries. You know? So yeah. So here in this is like, it reminds me of that too. I actually never thought of that. Like my mom made this sweater.

Yeah, I can tell. Mom made this. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. I'm sure some of these clothes was, but for a lot of these soldiers, not only was this their first mass produced clothing, but it was the highest quality clothing they'd ever worn. And it was the best fitting clothing because it had been like specifically,

there were standardized sizes that were, you know, it was a lot of folks kind of left the military after the civil war with a real appreciation for manufactured clothing and a desire to own more of it. So in the 1870s, the cutter's knife revolutionized the garment industry again. This was a mass produced utility knife, a kind of a box cutter type device, razor sharp and it allowed skilled users to cut out pieces that could then be sewn into hundreds of identical garments. So we get the sewing machine, the civil war gives a lot of people a taste

for homemade clothing. Then in the 1870s, they invent a new kind of knife that lets you much more quickly mass produce quality garments. Okay. In the 1880s, all of the necessary technology for a clothesmaking revolution had been invented. The only thing missing was dirt cheap, easily replaceable labor, which if you know anything about how clothing is made today is a critical part

of cheap clothes. Truly nothing new. We needed, we've got everything but suffering poor immigrants to make the pants. What if we could find people that we don't got to pay that could do this all day for us? Good news. Right around that time, a shitload of new immigrants start coming into the United States. Now, when we're talking about the garment industry, it's about a third of these people are Italian, about two thirds of them are Jews from Eastern Europe.

And the Italians who come in that flood the garment industry are from southern Italy, about 1.2 million of these people immigrate to the United States net in the first decade of the 1900s. And then the remainder about 2 million people are Jews from Eastern Europe. And both groups of refugees would heavily dominate the new garment industry. These people were willing to work and able to work for very cheap because they were completely destitute. They were fleeing disasters and different kinds of disasters.

In the case of the Italians, that disaster was a manmade ecological tragedy that will not sound familiar to anybody listening to this podcast and will never happen again anywhere in the world. For example, the place where most Americans live. So I'm going to read a quote from a book by journalist Dave Vondrell. The end of feudalism and of the Papal States in the 19th century put millions of acres of Italian land in private hands. Nearly every new owner made the same decision to cut down the trees,

hoping to sell the lumber and expand the fields. The result was massive soil erosion along the hillsides of once beautiful southern provinces like Calabria, Basilicata, Apulia, and Campania. The topsoil washed into the rivers, ruining the farm economy. When the silted rivers flooded in the wet winter months, they created low stagnant pools and swamps, which in turn bred mosquitoes, which produced epidemics of malaria. Without trees to hold the topsoil, what had been a tenuously balanced ecology

became a strange and deadly combination of tropical disease and desert-like aridity. Conditions were worse on the island of Sicily, where, within sight of the blue sea, the grass is a lifeless brown and the road a powder of white. In many regions, it is necessary to go long distances to procure drinking water as one early writer on Italian immigration explained. It's a dust bowl shit. Yeah, I was going to say their version of the dust bowl. Yeah, yeah.

And their version of what's coming for California in a sizable chunk of Oregon like this summer. Yeah, it's on its way, guys. Yeah. So this is why, I think we've all watched Five Will Goes West, the famed documentary about Italian immigration into the United States. There's no cats in America, yeah. Yeah, there's no cats destroying all of the trees and leading the topsoil

to leech into the rivers, creating stagnant death pits. Yeah. So yeah, now, obviously, Italians are a significant part of the growing garment industry's workplace, but they were vastly outnumbered by Russian Jews. Not just, well, Jews from what was Russia, which included modern-day Ukraine and Poland. Most of these Jewish immigrants came from what was called the Pale of Settlement, which was within the Russian Empire, the limited swath of territory that Jews were allowed to inhabit under the Tsar's regime.

Remember, there's an apartheid system for Jewish people in Russia during this time. One of the few jobs that Jewish people were allowed to do during this period was garment making. Part of why they came to dominate the U.S. garment industry is a lot of them, men and women, learned how to sew, learned how to make garments, did that for a living in kind of like small boutique senses of the word when they were in Russia, and then when they came to the United States, they had that skill, right, as the garment industry exploded.

On March 13th, 1881, leftist revolutionaries in Russia killed Tsar Alexander II with a comically large bomb. We mentioned this a couple of times on this show because it's important. But the Tsar had been a reformer. He's the guy who freed the serfs, and he'd been good to Russia's Jews, although good here is a term that means he didn't actively seek their extermination. Despite the fact that Russian Jews had probably the least to gain from this Tsar's death, they were instantly blamed for mastermining the assassination.

This is kind of the story of why all of these Jewish people immigrate to the United States. More than 30 cities erupted into anti-Semitic violence in the wake of the Tsar's assassination. Shlomo Lambrosa, writing in Modern Judaism magazine, notes that in the wake of the Tsar's murder, quote, Jews were beaten, killed, and burned out of their homes. Each attack was more brutal than the proceeding. Mass destruction, thousands killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, orphaned, and rendered homeless.

This was the legacy of pogroms. Now, these pogroms were not ordered by anyone at the head of the Russian state, but they were extremely popular. Many pogroms were actively sponsored and organized by local Russian police. It was not until late summer, around August of 1881, that the Tsar's troops took action to halt the violence, and their intervention did not achieve any lasting peace. For the next three years after the Tsar's assassination,

every spring would bring a new wave of pogroms. Journalist Dave Von Drell explains, quote, The pogroms flared anew each spring, at Easter, when local priests reminded their flocks that the Jews killed Christ just as they had killed the Tsar, and rumors circulated afresh that the matzo of Passover was seasoned with the blood of slain Christian children. Along with the pogroms came severe restrictions on Jewish liberties. Access to higher education and professional jobs was cut off.

The Russian heartland, including the capital, St. Petersburg, and the largest city, Moscow, was closed to Jews. Some were driven from the cities in chains. So, god damn, man. It's still hard to hear. I know this story. I know it a million times. The whole Russian revolution, I don't think you understand

the Western civilization until you really get your brain around that. And it's still hard to hear. Where you're just like, what the fuck, guys? Like, sheesh, man. Sheesh. And then, so you're running this apartheid system, this caste system apartheid, and then this Jewish community mess around, get good at it,

and now you think they got magical powers because they're good at it. And yeah, it just bothers me every time I hear it. It's not, I mean, it's one of those things. Russian history, there's a short list of, like, the darkest regions of the world when you study history, right? There's particularly Africa during colonialism. There's China in, like, kind of the last two centuries or so during, like, that they had a civil war

that killed more people than World War II. Nobody ever talks about it. It's like in the 1800s. Fucking wild. There's obviously indigenous American history, but fucking Russian history is up there. Dog. Like, good god. It is wild.

Like, some shit goes down in Russia. Yeah, major, yes. And so this is the late 1800s, where this is all that these pogroms are starting to ramp up the 1880s. Again, when everything sort of comes into place to make the modern garment industry possible, is also when the pogroms launch. And things only get worse for Russian Jews in the early 1900s.

The Tsarist state was in a situation we might call the crumbles, which is a framing a friend of mine uses to describe what's happening in the United States right now. It's the early stages of dissolution before the collapse of the government. Revolutionary sentiment was at an all-time high. There were constant protests against an incompetent and inefficient government, which many Russians rightly saw had left them decades behind the rest of the world. Tsar Nicholas II was a coward and an idiot,

and he had no idea how to write the ship. But he was cunning enough to blame the Jews for all of Russia's problems. His regime launched a massive propaganda campaign, which included producing the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and a number of anti-Semitic newspapers. One of the best known was called Bessarabets in the city of Kashinev. And this is part of the province of Bessarabia, which is why it's called Bessarabets.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing everything wrong. Sorry. Come on, man. Yeah, if I'm not going to get England right, I'm certainly not getting Russia right. So Bessarabets was the only daily newspaper in the entire province, which meant that it was, by default, the only thing most Russian Christians had a chance to read every day for the news, and it was focused around anti-Semitism.

In 1903, a Christian girl who worked as a domestic servant for a Jewish family in the city of Kashinev committed suicide. Bessarabets lost no time in claiming that she had been murdered, so her blood could be used to make matzo bread. Now, this all happened right before Easter Sunday, and it ended in a mob of 2,000 people rioting through the Jewish section of town. 45 people were murdered, some by having nails driven into their skulls. A baby, a live baby, was used to break windows on Jewish shops as like a...

What? Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, it's fucking bad. What? Yeah. God damn. It's real bad. That's where that whole, like, yeah, that's where that whole mythos about, you know,

Jews drinking blood for what, the blood libel and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, this is an, that starts centuries earlier, right? Oh. Like, that's old as hell. Yeah. But this was just, I mean, this, God only knows how many thousands of people get killed over that myth, over the course of, like, that's like a thousand years old, you know?

Oh, okay, yeah. But yeah, this is yet another time when it erupted into violence. God damn. Now, Kashinev was followed by other pogroms around Russia, and everything kept escalating in 1904 when Tsar Nicholas II decided that going to war with Japan seemed like a good idea. Now, if you know any, do you know anything about the Russian Navy today? Nothing about the Navy today.

Well, the Russian Navy today has exactly one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has sunk itself a couple of times and runs off of what is essentially like unfiltered, unprocessed diesel oil, something called Mizzout, which is like the dirty, like, it keeps catching on fire. It keeps killing its sailors. It's like always like burning. It has to be tugged everywhere it goes.

It's not a great Navy today is what I'm saying. Yeah. I was like, they focused on land power. Yeah. Yeah. They don't really need a Navy the way that, you know, other countries do, in order to, in order to project power. I don't blame them based on the geography.

Yeah. There's not water for a long time. If you know anything about Japan, pretty fucking good at navies. This is what they do. Yeah. They're real good at having a Navy. Especially the early 1900s. And so the worst Navy in Europe goes up against the best Navy in Asia

and it does not go very well for Russia. Yeah. Maybe the only people surprised our racists. But obviously this is a huge political disaster. Russia loses a huge chunk of their Navy, a fuckload of men, a lot of prestige. And Tsar Nicholas needs an excuse for the disaster that follows. And of course he blames the Jews, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with this. How about those dudes?

Those guys. Those guys. That's why. I picked a fight with the people who are better at this than us. But it's, you know, as we've been killing for years that are responsible. You literally took a knife to a gunfight. This is exactly, that's where the saying comes from. This is what y'all did.

Yeah. You took a knife for a gunfight to a gunfight and then you blamed the group of people you don't allow to own knives. You blame the cooks. Yeah. Yeah. A huge wave of anti-Jewish sentiment lights up in Russia. Again, these paramilitary groups called the Black Hundreds rise up.

And these guys are like pro-monarchist Russian fascist group. Well, fascist might be the wrong way. Anyway, they're a bunch of assholes. They start murdering Jewish people to punish them for what they and the czarist press described as conspiring with the enemy. The Black Hundreds openly stated that, quote, the extermination of the Jews was their goal. Now, the very worst campaigns of anti-Semitic violence broke out the next year in 1905. But this was still related to the war with Japan because the defeat in 1904 leads to mass

unrest and protests and kind of a revolution, I mean, a revolution. Yeah. And in order to kind of clamp down on it, the czar is forced to grant his people a constitution and not like a good constitution. Yeah. Yeah. Broadly speaking, better than, I mean, they hadn't really had anything. Now, this enrages Russian monarchists who want the czar to be an autocrat.

And a lot of these guys respond to the czar compromising with revolutionaries by carrying out pogroms. And in fact, in November of 1905, across the Russian Empire, there are 600 different pogroms. That's 20 pogroms per day for the entire month. Yeah. So I'm doing this to explain the fact that in like a 10-year period, two million Eastern European Jews moved to the United States. Yeah.

And this is why. Yeah. It was like, it's time to go because, yeah. A lot of them are very, like, very accurately seeing what's going to come in the 1940s and going, well, shit, we got to get the fuck out of here. Yeah. The Jewish, like, historical trauma, like the idea of just, and their antennas of knowing when like, shit finna go bad, like, trust them.

Like, they know. So, yeah. Them being like, you know what? I think it's time. All right. I'mma hear it out. Yo, Sam. I think it's time for us to roll.

You know, there's a story, like, with my wife and her siblings, like, they were trying to, like, you know, we're kids and they were trying to, like, you know, steal some makeup from the corner store or whatever, like, their brother was like, hey, we need to go. It's time to leave now. And they were like, now let's just get one more thing, one more thing. And of course, they both got caught, you know, but the brother bounced because he got the antenna of, like, yeah, it's time. It's time for me to roll.

And that's crazy because it's like, that's actually one thing that's important about your hood antennas, that when you at a party, you should be able to read the room to be like, all right, it's probably gonna go down pretty soon. I think it's time for me to slide. Yeah. I mean, there's just, I mean, this is a little off topic, but there's not a whole lot that's more important in life than having a good antenna for, like, I shouldn't be here. Yes.

Time for me to get the fuck out. I think it's time for me to get the fuck out of here. Yes. Not going to make a big deal about it. Not going to say anything, but I shouldn't be here. Not going to be in this room. Yeah. I think I'm a slide.

I think I'm a slide, bro. I see. I'll let y'all later, man. I think it's time for me to slide. Yup. You gotta know where people should be. Prop. Oh, this is gonna not well.

Drop a load on him. Where they supposed to be, Robert? They're supposed to be enjoying the products and services that support this podcast. Yes, they are. Mm-hmm, because the products and services that support this podcast, and this is our only guarantee, have never orchestrated a campaign of pogroms across the Russian Empire. All right. Not a thing any of our supporters have done.

Fair enough. And they will tell you when it's time to slide. They will. They will. They will. Fair enough. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

If I know anyone who I trust to tell me when to get out of an area, it's the dickpills guys or maybe Hello Fresh. Yeah. Okay. Here's some ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Welcome to Let's Start a Coup, on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like I said, all this violence in Russia leads a lot of Eastern European Jews to decide we should bounce and more than two million of them pick up their lives and flee to the United States in the late 1800s or the 1900s. Now two of these desperate hopeful Jewish immigrants were Isaac Harris and Max Blanc. Both were born in Russia in the late 1860s.

They fled their homes in the late 1880s when they were young men in their 20s. After all of those pogroms convinced them, there wasn't a whole lot of hope in Russia. By the early 1890s, they both made it through Ellis Island and settled in New York. Harris had trained as a tailor back in the old country, so he knew how to make garments. He set up a shop in the burgeoning garment industry. Max Blanc was an entrepreneur and he got to work as a garment contractor. This is how a huge amount of the fabric industry worked at the time. It is now, factories had to obey more rules with regular employees than they did with

contract workers. And it also costs money to operate a big factory. So a lot of garment makers would hire independent contractors who would themselves hire workers and then pay them out of a lump sum they received from the manufacturer. Both Blanc and Harris got their start in the sweatshop years of the garment industry. Sweatshop is a term we all hear the way what we call a sweatshop today. It's kind of the term for like a giant factory with poor labor standards, right? Yeah.

That's not what it originally was. The factories that we would consider today sweatshops were actually a reaction to sweatshops that were significantly less horrible than sweatshops. And to explain what the original sweatshop was, I'm going to quote from the book Triangle, The Fire That Changed America by Dave Vondrell. So today the word sweatshop describes any crowded factory of poorly paid workers. But in the late 1800s, the meaning was more specific and more dismal. Sweatshops were generally dim and claustrophobic tenement rooms where independent contractors

sweated greenhorns. That is the newest immigrants by working them more and more hours for less and less pay. So you have these big garment companies that have like, okay, this is what we want you to make and we'll contract, you know, say we have a dress, right? And there's two or three pieces of the dress that are sewn together. You hire two or three different independent contractors with their own teams of seamstresses and they will each produce a part and then you'll have it put together, you know, by somebody else.

And each of these independent contractors just packs as many laborers as possible into a tiny low income apartment room. And that's a sweatshop, right? And you're basically trying to like get these people to do as much work as possible for as little money as possible. And when they complain, you replace them. Yeah. Did y'all call them, did you call them greenhorns?

Yeah. Greenhorns. These are immigrants who just got to the country. Okay. That's the phrase. Wow. That's it. Wow.

Yeah. There's no, there's no bottom to slurs. Is there? Yeah. Wait. Cause it's just, I mean, I guess I wouldn't, I didn't think about that. I mean, I'm, I guess you could call it a slur. Maybe it's not a slur.

I don't know. Greenhorn. Yeah. It was meant as just like, they're new. They don't know how things work. They're. Oh, so it's like green. Like, yeah.

Yeah. They're inexperienced. Okay. And they don't know, they don't, you know, they don't know enough to advocate for themselves. They don't speak the language. They don't have connections so you can take advantage of them. And when they start to realize they're being taken advantage of, if they're not worth paying more money, you fire them and you go, basically there were these like big market areas where

you would find people who had just gotten off the boat and you would just hire them up and mass, throw them into sweatshops, work them until they couldn't handle it anymore, until they got sick and died because these filthy apartments crammed full of people sowing. Disease spreads pretty like a shitload of people die from disease in these places. Yeah. Now, sweatshop work was miserable, but it was also inconsistent. Most weeks when there was a busy season, workers would be on for at least 80 hours at the low end to more than 100 hours of labor at the high end.

Some of these people made as little as $3 a week if they were new. Good wages were kind of more like $15 a week. I think kind of a more common salary was like seven to eight, something like that. Many of them were promised good rates like $15 a week, but found out on payday that the needle and thread they used to make the garments was actually taken out of their paycheck. So obviously these are because these are independent contractors, they're hired by the big company. There's a bunch of ways they can fuck over the little guy and there's no, there's no labor board.

There's no way for people who aren't rich to get justice. I mean, there's not really a lot of ways to do that now. Like back then, you had even less options. There's nobody looking out for these people. Now the downside, so the upside of the sweatshop system is that it allows manufacturers to do their jobs for a lot cheaper. You don't have to rent a big factory. You don't have to deal with labor problems.

And you don't have to, one of the really big benefits is your fact, you may have hundreds of workers, but they work in dozens of different sweatshops. None of them know each other, how the hell they're going to unionize, you know? Does this kind of smell like the gig economy a little bit? Like I'm kind of like, it smells a little Uber like, you know what I'm saying? It's like, oh, you're a taxi company that don't own no cars. So I got to pay for all the upkeep for my car and so I'm paying for, I'm paying for my gas.

I'm paying for all. Okay. Yeah. Not original or new. What Uber and Lyft and their fellow soulless monsters do. Okay. Cool. I was like, why does this sound so familiar to me?

Okay. So, yeah, yeah, this is kind of a gig economy thing. Now, so those are all the advantages of the sweatshop system, but it has disadvantages too. One of them is that because you're splitting it up, you're having all these different teams do parts of the, whatever garment you're assembling, say it's a dress, right? You have four different teams each doing a part. You have to transport all of the different parts they're making to one area and have

them put together. It's less efficient, right? Which means you make less clothing over a longer period of time. And yeah, the other issue is that like it's dangerous. Conditions are incredibly cramped, nasty and very flammable, right? We're talking fabric, which burns pretty well. Have you ever lit someone's clothing on fire? But we're also talking about a shitload of cotton, like processed cotton, which is explosive.

If you've ever like gotten a large amount of cotton and lit that shit, that fucking, that goes off like a bomb. Yeah. Yeah. Very fast. And there's a bunch of like basically graph paper, tracing paper that you use to like cut out the things, which is also incredibly flammable. So fires start in these places all the time.

And to kind of give more of a more detail about the conditions of these early sweatshops, I want to read a description of one in the 1890s by a union leader named Bernard Weinstein. Quote, the boss of the shop lived there with his entire family. The front room and kitchen were used as workrooms. The whole family would sleep in one dark bedroom. The sewing machines for the operators were near the windows of the front door. The basters would sit on stools near the walls at the center of the room amid the dirt and dust were heaped great piles of materials.

On top of the sofas, several finishers would be working while the older workers would keep the irons hot and press the finished garments on special boards. So these are dangerous places and whenever there's a fire or something or whenever you lose workers, you also lose productivity. So that's the main issue here is it's inefficient. It's cheap. It seems so efficient. Yeah.

It seems so. I'm just musty and steamy as in the term sweatshop clearly like was there were they dying fabric too, so was there like a lot of like chemicals around some of these? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of like, again, not long lives in the garment industry. Yeah.

Just a bucket of turpentine, just acetone right there in the corner. It's probably fair to say that few people in this country today outside of maybe the agricultural industry work a more dangerous or less healthy gig than sweatshop workers in this period. It's a bad business. My mother-in-law in the downtown like garment district for before she retired, that's what she did. It wasn't a sweat.

We could say, we could say definitively it wasn't a sweatshop, you know, but she was definitely a seamstress in downtown and they paid her pennies and but her ability, like now like her ability to make things and to fix them. Like I still marvel. Like she's kind of a mystery. She still doesn't really speak English. Well, she does. She just don't like to.

She's still kind of a mystery to me. But her ability to like, yeah, her craft craftsmanship of like of being a seamstress is still out of this world to me. And my wife still has stories of like, I would be embarrassed about it. But yeah, my mom's like holes in our clothes didn't matter. But she would never like let us let them see her work environment because it was so awful. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

I mean, it's certainly not a nice job to have now. Yeah. But at least as a general rule, it's definitely less flammable. Yeah. Yes. Less flammable. People understand germ theory better. Yes.

There's other sides. So this nightmare industry is the one that Blanc and Harris start in when they moved to the United States. Now Harris came up, started working in the U.S. in sweatshops filled with other immigrants and he paid careful attention to the popular fashions of the day and to the different methods of mass production. Blanc, meanwhile, made a small fortune as one of the most successful contractors in the city.

So Blanc is running sweatshops and Harris is like a highly paid, like, because some of these people do make good money, right? The ones who are doing the really difficult, the technical work, the shit that not that many people can do. Yeah. And he's one of those guys and the two men meet through marriage in the late 1890s. And I'm going to quote from a write up in PBS's American experience here. Harris and Blanc were compatible and they decided to enter a partnership that would

capitalize on Blanc's business sense and Harris's industry expertise. In 1900, they founded the Triangle Waste Company and opened their first shop on Worcester Street. At the turn of the century, the shirt waste was a new item, styled after menswear, shirt wastes were looser and more liberating than Victorian style bodices and they were becoming popular with the burgeoning population of female workers in New York City. Harris knew the details of garment production and the machinery involved in making a cost effective and worthy product. Blanc was the salesman constantly meeting with potential buyers and traveling to stores

that carried their product. They took advantage of new technology, installing mechanical sewing machines, which were five times faster than those run by a foot pedal. They priced their shirt waste modestly, averaging about $3 each. And this is all occurring at the same time as the women's liberation movement is really up, right? This is the period. Women don't have the right to vote yet, but they're agitating for it.

Women are starting to join the workplace in larger numbers. And the shirt waste is not just a popular garment that's fashionable. It's a liberatory garment, right? It's like a blouse. It's like a sundress kind of in some ways, but it is a lot. If you look at the old Victorian fashion, there's like whale bone corsets, those massive dresses that you can't walk your doorway in, things that limit a woman's ability to move around in the world.

A shirt waste doesn't. It's comfortable. You can run in it. You can exert yourself in it and it looks good. So this is like all kind of happening at the big time and Blanc and Harris capitalize on this explosion in the shirt because the shirt waste is like a phenomenon in this period of time. Yeah.

Kind of a justice issue. That's crazy that it becomes like a symbol of freedom. That's crazy. Okay. Yeah. This is getting complicated. All right. I'm wearing something that I can work in.

I can exert myself in. I can dance in. I can live an independent life, not needing to be carried around because my clothing stops me from breathing. You know? Yo. Yeah. Because whoever's idea was predest to tie another like some just umbrellas around your

waist to make your dress bigger was just who's idea with this? This is ridiculous. Yeah. Now, part of making the garment production cost effective was consolidating for Blanc and Harris and some other guys who were kind of like similar thinkers to them, like big wigs, people who are emerging to be major leaders in the garment industry. They start to realize the sweatshop isn't the way to go if we're really going to scale this up, right?

It has some benefits. It makes some things easier on us, but we can't make clothing at the same quality and at the same scale that we could if we had large centralized factories where we're paying for the sewing machine, so it's not some contractor buying the cheapest foot pump sewing machine, we've got modern electric ones and rows. So they start to get factories and Harris and Blanc are too early guys who get massive garment factories to make these shirt wastes. In 1902, they start the triangle factory out of the ash building in Greenwich Village.

This is the triangle shirt waste fire, which is what the story we're talking about today, is like the classic American story of like what we would now call a sweatshop going up in flames and killing a bunch of people. It's important to understand that when this factory is started, it is a massive improvement over the original sweatshops and is considered an ultra modern facility, right? Wow. Because it's cleaner, it's nicer, it's bigger, there's room. It had been built in 1901, so the year before they opened the factory, unlike tenements which

are often made out of just like wood and kind of like low quality materials, this building is mostly made out of steel and iron. It's advertised as being fireproof by its architects, which is titanic thinking. There it is. Yeah, there it is. Thanks. It's the building that can't burn down. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess if every other building is basically paper mache, you gonna be like, yeah, this one, at least this is metal. So I could see the confidence, but bro, man, can't ever let that come out your mouth. That's what it's going to teach you. Yeah. This is something unburned downable and it's going burned down. That's just how things go.

Yeah, you're asking for it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's why I always advertise everything I make as very flammable and dangerous. You do. Yes. This is dangerous. Be careful.

I do. So shirt waste manufacturing involved a lot of, again, flammable things. There's a great deal of thin paper cutouts for tracing. There's thousands of pounds because you're making in such volume. There's thousands of pounds of dry fabric and cotton that are kind of like tossed aside as you're making shirt wastes. Now, the fact that this factory is not made out of wood like tenements is a huge plus, but the ash building was far from safe.

It had poor ventilation. It was badly lit. It had incredibly narrow stairwells and it had no functional fire escape. It had a fire escape, but the fire escape on the building ended directly like 10 feet or something above a basement skylight. That's cool. So, like, we're falling into it. Yeah.

And when they build this thing, like, the city is like, hey, this fire escape isn't up to code. And the architect is like, don't worry, we'll fix it ASAP. And then nothing happens, right? It looked pretty on this side. And look, when you look down from the fire escape, you see that beautiful light coming up. I'm telling you, it's amazing.

It's an aesthetic choice, just like the Titanic. It's lovely. Yeah. Yeah. But the most dangerous thing about the factory may have been that it was tall. Harrison Blanc rented out the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. Now, the reason this is dangerous is that the New York City Fire Department could, their ladders only reached six floors up.

So you can't get water to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors and you can't evacuate people using fire engines from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, right? Pretty clear problem. You're playing on the edge, bro. Yeah. Well, I just noted earlier, the Triangle Factory was in a lot of ways a huge advancement in terms of just like quality of life for the people working there. And I don't want to pretend like it's not.

This would have been a significant improvement in a lot of people's eyes. But that doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of problems outside of being super flammable. And there was a lot of the fact that now Harrison Blanc and people like them are putting all these workers together in factories. The benefit of that is they're more productive. The downside of that for a manager's perspective is now all these guys are talking and they're talking about how much they're getting paid and they're talking about how much the boss is fucking them and they're developing a sense of solidarity.

And what do you get when that happens? You get motherfucking strikes. Yup. Yup. Unions. Now, the striking at the Triangle Factory actually predated any kind of garment union existing there. Their first strike in 1908 was what's called a Wildcat strike, which is when workers

just go on strike without having a union. Right? Okay. And it's actually a big fight because like one of the... So they... We'll talk about that in a minute. So there's this big Wildcat strike in 1908. And this kind of feeds into a broader trend in the city of New York, which is the center

of U.S. garment manufacturing. And a lot of garment makers are going on strikes, Wildcat strikes. They're starting to form unions, 1908, 1909, because they're realizing they're making a small number of people a shitload of money and they're getting treated terribly. These people had... Because they were now inside these factories that weren't strike-proof, they could organize like this. And one of the problems of this is that the bigger...

When you have these huge factories that are the entire operating profit of these corporations, that actually makes them more vulnerable to strikes because they're paying rent on this massive space. They're paying for all this electricity. They're paying every day even when the workers don't come in. So the longer you're able to keep workers on strike, the more money you cost the bosses, which provides extra pressure to the bosses. So the fact that this...

Obviously the bosses consider any kind of strike to be like an existential threat, which leads them to embrace a bunch of union-busting tactics. Now, the most basic tactic involved just the layout of the facility itself. And in the case of the triangle factory, Harris had designed the layout of the sewing floor specifically to make it hard for workers to have conversations. That's the first way you try to stop this, make it difficult for them to talk to each other. But people find a way to talk to each other.

It's something people are always going to do. This doesn't work for long. And as time goes on, the bosses need to develop more advanced tactics to bust unions. One of them was what's called the inside contractor system. This was an attempt to merge the benefits of the contractor system that the sweatshops operated under with the strength of the factory. Management would basically rent space on the assembly floor to a contractor who they paid a lump sum to make clothing.

And that contractor would hire line workers, which he then paid out of the lump sum. So it's the same basic idea. If we separate these workers from the corporation, then they're going to be focused on if they're angry on this independent contractor who hired them. And also, he's going to side with us because he's going to be employing these people. But that's actually not how it worked out. As a general rule, these inside contractors considered themselves to be workers rather than management.

And they were as liable to go on strike as the workers. See, I still think, man, I try not to be too reductive or very vastly, like you don't want to oversimplify the complicated. And at the same time, you don't want to overcomplicate the simple. So I know both of those things are important. That said, I'm like, y'all doing everything except for just pay the workers and treat them well. Like if you really want to stop a union, I think about that all the time.

I don't know if y'all saw the story about Applebee's offering free appetizers if you come interview for a job and I'm like, you get a free app with an interview. I'm like, or you could just pay more. Like if you just paid more or just have some transparency, even if it's as simple as like, look, dude, there's how much the building costs, there's how much the electricity costs. This what we can afford. Now, y'all, you know what I'm saying, like, we're going to treat you as best as we can. This is what we got.

Like anybody reasonable would be like, all right, well, let me make an educated decision to be like, all right, cool. If that's what y'all can handle, you show me that's what you can handle. Okay. Word. But you talking about you offer some free apps is I can get, you know what I'm saying, I can get the hot wings. I'm like, well, or you could just, just pay better.

And I just so yeah, when I'm like, you coming up with all these schemes and ways to redesign the whole floor so y'all don't talk or like when a company like, oh, we're going to have a holiday party or we're going to have pizza today. It's like, or you could pass. Yeah, it's like, you know, casual Fridays, like, I'm like, or, or, hear me out. Health insurance. That's good. Yeah.

You could just pay as well. Or a dental plan. Yeah. Maybe, maybe just a dental plan. It's the edit button on Twitter. I'm like, you doing all this stuff always works. Yeah. Who would we be doing great with an edit button on Twitter?

I'm just like, what the hell are these stories? You go, so, so now you put all this shit on the thing. And I'm like, I feel like we've all just been asking for an edit button. Now, not that I have no horse in a race with this particular, with that particular example, but I could say for a lot of years, that's all we've been asking a Twitter, the oddest other stuff you doing is great. But just, I don't know, man, seems simple. Yeah.

Anyway. You know what else is simple? Yeah, it could. Oh, I'm setting you up. The products. It's time for it. It's time for that thing. Services that support this podcast.

It's not bad. It's not sad about it. What's happening? You love products and services. I mean, I'm just thinking about the way the corporate system works, and how we're all a part of this. It's kind of a bummer with this engine of death. Yep.

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Benevolent Association, which is actually what happens to cops before police unions were a thing. That's what police benevolent associations start as, is like fake unions because cops can't unionize, obviously they get the ability to unionize and it's a horrible problem. The Triangle owners try the same thing, they can employ benevolent association and their hope is that they can use that to siphon off this energy that's going into the union movement and kind of push it somewhere that can't harm their bottom line. But since the union was run by relatives of Blunk and Harris, it was obvious to the workers

what was going on. They're never as dumb as the bosses think they are. Ever. So Blunk and Harris justified their attempts to stop unionization by claiming they had a competitive need to keep prices low. The reality was that their business was bringing in more than a million dollars a year by 1908, which is the modern equivalent of 30 million dollars. Both men were extremely comfortable.

They both owned mansions on the west side. Harris had four family servants. Blunk had five. They both had chauffeured cars, delivered them to work every day. And this is when just having a car means you're doing pretty good, you know? Yeah. Yeah, where you go for Sunday drives because you got one. And these guys not only have cars, they have cars and they have drivers.

And the Triangle family factory isn't their only factory. They have factories in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They own a couple of different companies making garments. These guys are very well off. So they're not they're not doing this shit just the same thing with like McDonald's today or whatever. They're not clamping down on employee organizing the same thing with McDonald's. They're not clamping down on salaries because it's the only way to be profitable.

They're doing it because they want to have fortunes. Now what was happening to the Triangle factory was emblematic of an explosion across the garment industry. A handful of tycoons were becoming unfathomably wealthy, where thousands of workers made as little as $3 a week for more than 80 hours of painstaking labor. And I'm going to quote from PBS again. Harrison Blonk's factory was competing with over 11,000 other textile manufacturers in New York City.

In order to retain their high profit level, they had to produce the cheapest shirt waste in the largest quantity. They demanded greater efficiency from their production team, which meant working long hours for little pay. And the owners kept scrupulous inventory of their supplies. A foreman monitored the largely female immigrant workforce during the day and inspected the women's bags as they left for the night. As an additional safeguard against theft, Max Blonk ordered the secondary exit door

to be locked. So I think back to our episode on the Yquabilaño supermarket fire. Super flammable workspace always has a locked exit. Yeah. That's got to come into play. Yeah. What is that term called? It's like a secure pinch.

I forget what that term is. A choke point. Yeah. A choke point. Yeah. Because you worry about these ladies stealing needles and thread. All right. Got it.

Put everybody life in danger. Yeah. Now everyone's endangered. Yeah. Yeah. But they're not thinking about that. And to be fair, one of the things I should note here, we're talking about all of this unionizing.

Workers are angry. They're agitating for better conditions. The unions aren't agitating for better safety conditions. That's not really on anyone's mind right now, right? This is not a safety conscious period. Yeah. It hasn't crossed. Yeah.

Dude, what an important context wrinkle is like safety's not on anyone's mind. That's crazy. I forgot about that. That ain't even crossed their mind. I'm not going to say it's not on anyone's mind because there are garment fires like the month before the Triangle Shirt Waste Fire. There's a horrible fire that kills like 26 people. And I'm sure there are individuals who are like, we need to, but when you're talking

about the broader union movement, safety is not one of the things they're pushing for in a big way. Yeah. And again, this is the point at which a work week is 80 to like 110 hours. So they like their concern is like, it's a relief if I die on the job because I don't have to do another week, you know, like, because I got to be here for another 17 hours. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's not really the focus of the, when we're talking about the complaints the workers have, poor safety isn't really one of them in an organization's way. I'm guessing if your other option is like, okay, I could either stay here in New York and do this 80 hour week in this building, or I could go down to Virginia and dig in a coal mine. That seemed a lot more dangerous than this. So I guess if you're talking relatively, it's like, well, I'm not working with dynamite. Dang.

Yeah. So we're also thinking, again, these are all, two thirds of these people are Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who are like, yeah, the building's slammable, but nobody's actively trying to beat me to death with my own baby. Yes. Yes. You not beat me. Yes.

Yeah. In a clutch. Yeah. Yeah. And Russia was so late to the game to modernize anyway. When you're trying to get in people's heads in this period, you have to acknowledge even the very wealthy and comfortable have a higher acceptance of danger threshold than the average person, the average working class person on the street today, because life was just more

dangerous in a lot of ways. Life was just, 1900s was dangerous. It was a fucked up time. Yeah. Dangerous. Yes. So in the fall of 1909, a new union had gotten started among New York garment workers headed by a bold young woman named Clara Lemlic.

Over the course of the year, Lemlic had unionized garment workers from other factories, large and small, and successfully brought many of them, many of their employers to the table to increase wages. The big thing Lemlic and her fellow unionists were fighting for was a 52-hour work week. So that's the, like, again, eventually this feeds into the, this massive nationwide fight for the 40-hour work week. At the time, they're like, the work week is 80 plus hours. They're like 52.

52. That sounds relaxing. Yeah. But 52-hour work week being a break. Let's go. Yeah. 40% more than a standard work week for an American today is was like, whoa, this will be nice.

This is great guys. Although a lot of Americans work, you know, that much of these days. Yeah. Yeah. Not to minimize that. But at the time, the idea that you would only have to work 52 hours was like something worth fighting for. And they were also fighting for more regular and fairer pay scales, right?

They wanted to know exactly what they were getting and not have these surprise like, oh, you've got to pay for the thread. Like they were fighting for all of this shit. And yeah, they were fighting for a survivable wage. The minimum wage isn't really a big buzzword at this time, but that's kind of, they're fighting for within their industry, that kind of an idea. Now Blanc and Harris first fought back against this by threatening to fire any employees who joined the union that Lemlic had created because, and their justification was that it

was competing with their fake in-house union. They followed through on the promise, shuttering their factory and publicly soliciting new employees in local papers when the union drive started. The triangle workers decided to strike in response. This meant that the workers who had been there, Lemlic and them are like, okay, don't come to work. We'll hire new workers. Fuck you.

And the workers are like, well, we'll surround the factory and we won't let these new employees in. We'll block them off so the scabs can't enter. Like that's what a strike is in this period. It's not just not working. It's stopping the factory from being able to work. Now this happened a number of times in like 1909 through 1910. And in a number of cases, these kind of attempts to blockade the factory ended with these horrific

street battles. And that happened with the triangle factory. This is happening in other factories too, right? This is a broad trend across New York. The triangle factory is particularly large. And so what happens there is particularly significant. Now you got to remember, almost all of the strikers here are young women. And Block and Harris countered them.

So you've got all these young female strikers blocking the factory to stop scabs from going in. So Block and Harris hire a bunch of scabs. But in order to get the scabs in, they need to fight their way through these women blockhating the factory. And the way they do that is by hiring a phalanx of pimps and prostitutes to act as the tip of the spear and assault the union workers. Oh my God.

That is heartless. Wow. Because they're like, you're talking, you're talking, if you're talking about a prostitute in 1909 in New York, you're talking about a hard lady. Yes. You're talking about a woman who carries a couple of knives on her, you know? Yeah. That lady's scary.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's why they hire them. And they are scary. And they beat the shit out of these striking workers. It's really ugly. And the police show up and basically fight alongside the prostitutes and pimps and arrest a bunch of the striking workers while turning a blind eye.

Because this is, we're not going to get into this a lot. And Dave Vendrell does a good job in his book Triangle of Talking about Tammany Hall, the big corrupt political situation. At this point in time, you could argue it's not all that different now, the gangsters, the pimps, the prostitutes and the cops can all be on the same side a lot of the time because they're all part of this incredibly corrupt criminal government of New York City that can just as easily call up gangsters as it can cops because they're the same thing, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Same seeds. Yeah. This is such a rad time, just wild wild west like, yeah, like, yeah, yeah, you just as much. Yeah. You know, Joey Two-Fingers is just as much going to get a call from the governor as he

is from his mom. You know what I'm saying? To be like, yeah, let's do, let's just run down as, as this is crazy, what a, what a time to live in. Yeah. Yeah. Get the squad on the street. We got to help these prostitutes beat up a bunch of garment workers.

That's just the way things work. Working moms. Yeah. Yeah. They're all working moms, probably. Yeah, for sure. For sure. This is a huge street fight between a bunch of working women.

Now, Blanc and Harris were not the only factory owners who hired cops or gangsters to attack strikers, but they were among the most brutal and committed. Now during this period, a shitload of smaller manufacturers are willing to negotiate just a few days into the strike. They don't have the kind of financial resources Triangle does. They can see that like, okay, they're not really asking like, it's not going to stop us from being profitable. Let's just give in and we can get back to making, you know, clothing and shit.

The Triangle owners, Blanc and Harris, hold their ground. Obviously, they hire police to beat up strikers on a bunch of occasions, but that starts to backfire because again, these laborers are all young women and you have these cops just beating them bloody in the street and arresting them and that doesn't look good. That shit makes the news and people start to get really angry about what's happening. That makes the NYPD look bad. They have to stop for a while. They never entirely stopped, but like there's this kind of ebb and flow of how brutal can

we be before we have to stop because we don't want to like piss people off too much. The sympathy that starts to build for these lady strikers, because again, at this time, you also have the Suffragette movement and the Suffragette movement is not just a poor working class. And in fact, it's largely a wealthy woman movement, like this upper class ladies and they get on board behind these poor garment workers and see this as part of this broader fight for women's rights. So all of these and some of these people are like the wife of JP Morgan, like women with

some fucking funds behind it. A number of them are really wealthy widows. And they start getting together and raising funds. And part of what some of the funds are to help these women pay their rent, pay by food and stuff because they're not working during the strike. Some of it, a number of these women, some of them are just kind of getting in on it. Like you'll hear about like JP Morgan's wife and gives like a hundred dollars, which is more money back then, but it's clearly just like, oh, I'll donate to this cause.

There's this one woman in particular who would show up every night after the arrests to bail these women out when they got their bail set. And one night, because so many women got arrested, she runs out of cash and she mortgages her mansion in order to bail these ladies out. So there is some, some pretty rad solidarity happening too. Yeah. Yeah. And so Blanc knows like these Blanc and Harris, they're not dumb.

They know that things are starting to go against them, public opinions going against them at this point. The only way to get public opinion back on your side is with immediate blitz of your own. Now, I just said a lot of newspapers were very sympathetic to the strikers. One that was not was the biggest newspaper in town, the New York Times, which was always on the side of the bosses in this period. And we could argue today.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Here we go. So Blanc succeeds in getting a New York Times reporter to feature him in a story that shows his factory full of workers despite the strike and these guys, no, see, they're happy. It's just some bad. And in the article, this won't sound familiar to anybody, but Blanc through the New York Times basically says, look at how happy all of my workers are.

The only reason these poor, deluded women are striking is because of outside agitators who have. There they are. There it is. There it is. Yeah, baby. Oh, man. He did both there.

He did a few bad apples. Yeah. Damn. Man, the shit never changes the card, the playbook, the playbook is undefeated. We pull it from the same playbook in 1901, fool. Damn. Yeah. It's it's very funny.

Yeah. And yeah. And so they have put out this New York Times article. They do this press blitz and they also start to try to organize with their fellow business owners. And right around this period of time, they write a letter to a group of their fellow factory owners. Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation.

Wait, I'm actually going to use my old Tommy boys. Yeah. Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation that is now going on in our shops. Our satisfied workers are being molested and interfered with. The so-called union is now preparing to call a general strike in order to prevent this irresponsible union from gaining the upper hand. Let us know as soon as you possibly can, if you would be willing to form and join an employer's mutual protection association.

So they make a union for the bosses. Yeah. In order to fight the union of the workers, which is not done, we got a union to give them the old. It looks like unionizing works. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this still exists today.

We call it the federal government, but that's a story for another day. Yo, you slid down in. That's the smoothest slide in. Yeah, you slid down in good, man. So Blanc and Harris, yeah, respond to this unionization effort by basically making their own union for rich assholes. And part of their rage at their workers' efforts to unionize comes from the fact that the Triangle Shirtways factory was, as I've said, by most standards, a very progressive and safe factory.

It's considered that in its time. Blanc and Harris also, these guys were not born rich. They, again, these are dirt poor Jewish immigrants who come to the US fucking desperate. They know what it is to be poor, and they don't have any kind of class solidarity, obviously, but they consider it a personal attack that their employees unionize against them, right? So they don't have any solidarity for their workers as former workers, but they're offended that their workers don't treat them like fellow workers and treat them like bosses. Damn.

Come on. Come on. I'm one of the guys. I'm one of the girls. I've got a car. Go to Memphis. We're the same. Come on, man.

We're ass-poor-too. You've got to work hard. Fuck up, man. I'm one of the, yeah, nah. I'm good, bro. So that's crazy. What? Dude, this is very funny.

I'm laughing at problems. I'm good, bro. I'm good, bro. Yeah. It's like, because that's the way I feel about it because like. Like it's funny to me that it mess with the identity and the pride, when it was like, Wait, wait. So we're we're not. We're not one of the we're not one of the squad no more.

You're not happy with our you're not happy with our building. Like, no, fan. No, you're not. That's that. That's crazy. Yeah. No, good. Yep. So in addition to hiring cops and gang members to beat strikers, Blanc and Harris, who the term they're known by the name they're known by this period is the shirt waste kings because they're like the biggest shirt waste dudes in the city. Yeah, they also hit upon what's kind of a brilliant plan.

They start bribing Italian priests from conservative Catholic parishes to give lectures to their Italian factory workers on company time, explaining that laborers have a duty to be obedient to their bosses. Because again, the whole labor force is basically Jewish immigrants and Italian immigrants. So a big part of their ideas, it's the colonialism thing, right? It's what Britain did in Africa. You got you have this population united against you. You got to split them along ethnic lines or religious lines.

And they try to do both. It doesn't work in this period. The Italians and the Jews stick together to fuck the bosses, which is a nice tale. So, yeah, the triangle bosses also tried to bribe their remaining employees, the ones who refused to strike with good times. They would start holding dance parties during lunch and give out food and prizes. So they do also try to treat the workers who don't strike better

in order to like stop them from striking. But that's kind of a minimum aspect of what they're actually trying this period. So, yeah, obviously, none of this stops the strike. The violence in the streets continues. And peace would kind of, you know, you would have this this period where like peace would return after a bad skirmish. And then a few days later, strike breakers would be sent into crackheads and the cycle would start again.

Yeah. At one point, the judges get angry that the rich ladies who'd banded together to back this union were bailing everyone out. So they start sending arrested strikers to do weeks of hard labor in a penal colony. And the strikers start like making badges and awards to give women who do time in the penal colony for the movement and stuff. It's kind of a way to you got to reward people who go through this shit. Let's go. Yeah.

That's kind of dope. Yeah. Yeah. Now, as time war wears on, Blanc and Harris decided like they do get beaten down by this to a degree. And they decided they're willing to come to the table and grant their workers most of their demands so they're willing to give into the 52 hour work week. They're willing to raise wages. The only thing they're not willing to do is give in to the union's key demand. So this the WTUL, which is the union, these these women form

all across New York City for garment workers. One of the things they're trying to get is an agreement from all of these shops to be union only shops. In other words, they won't hire anyone who isn't a part of the union, which obviously makes the union more powerful. And that's the one thing. Eventually, even Blanc and Harris are willing to come to the table on everything else. And because Blanc and Harris have a union of factory owners,

they're able to get a lot of other big factories to resist this push to make it a union only shop, what's called a closed shop. Now, meanwhile, the fact that all of these owners had been willing to grant the other demands, this starts to upset the wealthy liberal ladies who had adopted the garment workers strike as a cause. And they're like, well, why do you need it to be a union only shop? Right. I haven't you gotten enough. Isn't it time for this to be over? Oh, oh, oh, so that's a factor to it.

And this this is kind of the start of the union movement fracturing. And there's more to it than just the rich ladies being like, haven't you got it gotten enough? There's also a lot of anger from the extreme leftist organizers in the movement because they're really unhappy as soon as these rich kind of liberal ladies show up and start throwing their money around. And they're like, well, hey, this is supposed to be a class movement against the rich.

Like, why are we celebrating? No matter how much they donate, are still never going to suffer as a result of it. And so they get angry at the rich ladies who do play a key role in this union being to survive. The rich ladies are like, you guys are asking for too much. Why do you need this? You know, because they don't actually know what it's like to be that desperate. And in addition to all of that, there's frustration among more moderate union

organizers, because a lot of union organizers in this period are not socialists. There's a lot of socialists in the movement. But like Samuel Gompers, who's the head of the AFL, the American Fed, he's the biggest union head is anti socialist, but he's a union man. So there's a lot there. And the union organizers who aren't socialists are angry because a lot of the more radical socialists who are some of the best and most dedicated organizers want to make this strike more than just

to strike for better conditions for garment workers. They're kind of trying to push for a broader feminist revolt. They're adding demands for suffrage to the list of demands the garment workers are making, and this frustrates the more moderate strikers who are like, well, we just want a more equitable deal. We're not really fighting for women's liberation. So the the the strike movement, it does achieve most of its goals. They get the 52 hour work week.

They get wages raised. They get a couple of other things. But it also fractures before they get everything that they want, which is, you know, usually how things go, right? Yeah, I mean, that's what failure. Yeah. Yeah, that's what a negotiation is. Like you get, you know, a piece here, a piece there. Yeah, the color that this adds of that, again, is also,

well, that's not familiar of, like, no, never who you want. Yeah, yeah, never happened before to where it's like, you only want a certain person to help. And if it's wrong, like, I think of, like, when my my top, my five year old is like, hey, can someone watch, you know, TV with me? And I'm like, I'll watch TV with you. She's like, not you. And I'm like, wait, what? She's like, I want mommy to watch TV with me.

I'm like, mommy's working right now. And then she'll be like, what about my sister? And I'm like, your sister can't either, because she's on punishment. I could watch it with you. I'm not doing anything. Well, no, I don't want to watch TV anymore. And it's just like, the disrespect I do not have. Nobody's a daddy's girl in my house. It's the worst. But the idea of being like, just the the the complication of, like,

whose movement is this? I say, I'll just say, like, whose movement is this? And that's where when the whole, like, the play of the outside agitator play, that's where you're like, well, well, crap, dude, like, you kind of got a point there because y'all outside of this are saying, this is your cause. And so you got this bigger cause. In the meantime, these ladies who are actually doing the work are like,

I don't know what y'all are arguing about. We just, I don't want to work for 80 hours. And like, that's what I'm here for. And I see how and we really can use your money. I don't care how much that you got money for us. Like, yeah, thank you, you know what I'm saying? And you saying, wait, so you're saying we shouldn't take their money. So I'm like, OK, well, do you got money for us?

Oh, you ain't got no money for us. Because you mad at them. Is it just like, well, well, crap, dude, like, fuck, well, none of y'all work here. But like, you know, like we actually work is so the color of that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, everybody's got a point, right? Everybody's got a point. Yeah. Yeah. The point, you know, the these rich ladies, they do have a point

and they're like, you guys have gotten a lot. Like maybe and people haven't been working for months that people keep getting arrested and beaten. Maybe it's time to just take what you can get. The socialists have a point where they're like, but this doesn't fix nearly everything. And you don't really it's not really your place to say when we should settle because you're never going to have to settle.

You're rich and then the kind of more moderate laborers are right. When they have a point when they're like, well, we don't want this to be a big this isn't about socialism for us. This is about not working 80 hours a week. And like that's kind of where my interest in it ends. You know, I'm some 19 year old who just got here and I just want my life to be less miserable and nobody. I'm not trying to try. I hope I'm not portraying anyone as right or wrong here.

This is just what happens, you know? Yeah, that's my point here is along these lines. Yeah. Yeah, that's my point of like the color of life where it's like that's like like histories and living color. And that's what it is where it's like you got all these different positions and you can't you can't look at it and be like, they're right, they're wrong. They're right, they're wrong. It's just so complicated. That's crazy. Yeah, it's just yeah, it's just how things happen.

Now, this kind of Peters out. They get more or less a win in early 1910. And for the next 13 months or so, life returns to kind of a semblance of normal in the garment industry at the end, especially at the triangle shirt waste factory, production resumes. People get back to work with more reasonable hours and more money. Some things had changed. There had been significant wins.

But obviously, as I noted, nobody was fighting for improved safety here because they thought the factory was pretty safe or at least compared to what they had been used to. And another thing that didn't really change was the greed of Blanc and Harris and their fellow bosses. Now, we've talked a lot about how flammable garment factories are. And one of the things that had been done by Harris, who set because he was a great, he knew how to tailor and stuff,

had set out the layout of this factory is he had designed the floor of the factory so that the cutters and these are the people who are like cutting out the different sort of like scraps that get sewn together. These are the people who produce the most waste scrap and waste paper. So these guys all do their work on these enormous tables. And one of Harris's innovations is to put trash waste baskets underneath the table so you can just sweep your waste right into the right under the table. Very efficient.

This also means that you get hundreds of pounds of cotton and tracing paper and cloth crammed together loosely so that there's air in between all of them underneath these tables, which basically makes them fuel air bombs. Yeah, I was like, wait. Yeah. Yeah. So everyone knew these were horrific fire hazards. The Triangle Factory had two noteworthy accidental fires. And I'm specifying accidental.

I'll explain why here prior to 1911, one of which was put out by Harris himself. Buckets of water were stationed around the factory floor. A hose that was supposed to work was kept near the cutting table, although it had been allowed to rust shut. Most significantly, though, the building did not have a sprinkler system and the workers did not participate in fire drills. Now, neither of these things were required in garment factories under New York law in 1911, but sprinklers were widely available.

In fact, starting in the 1880s, they'd become required in New England cotton mills alongside firewalls and fireproof doors to create safe zones for employees in the event of a blaze. Cotton mills, as we've said, cotton's explosive, basically. Very dangerous places. In the 1880s, all of these things come to cotton mills and cotton mills suddenly become pretty safe places to work by comparison.

But this doesn't get required in garment factories, even though they're dealing with a lot of the same materials. Now, part of the reason why these weren't put in the factories has to do with greed and not the kind of greed you think. A lot of times people will say, well, they didn't put in sprinklers because sprinkler systems were expensive. That's not really the reason. The real explanation for why there were no sprinklers in the triangle factory

starts with the way insurance worked in Manhattan during this period. So all of the insurance brokers, the guys who are selling insurance to companies, colluded together because these guys make their money when you sell a policy as an insurance broker. You get a percentage of the value of that sale. That's how you make your money. So you make more money if you sell more policies, which means you don't want to be denying anybody policies.

And yeah, normally the way you'd think about an insurance policy, the safer your building is, the more safety measures like sprinklers you have in your building, the lower insurance premiums are. But if your insurance premiums are lower, that means the broker gets less money. So the broker doesn't want to give you. They want to have a lot of insurance policies for dangerous buildings. They don't want safety measures in because that means they get less money. So I'm going to quote again from the book, trying to change to Merrick here.

I know it's pretty fucked. There's a hustle everywhere. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things. So these brokers are all colluding together and the brokers are not the insurance companies, right? The brokers work for the companies, but the insurance companies, the ones on the line, the broker doesn't pay when there's a fire. And one of the ways in which the brokers kind of get over the fact that what they're doing should be in the worst interest of the insurance company

is they get, they basically split up the risk for each of these insurance policies among multiple insurance companies. So that if a factory has a horrible fire that destroys a bunch of stuff, every company only pays a little bit of money. And the brokers get as much money still because they're selling as many. So they're sharing the risk because none of them have to work in these factories. They don't give a shit how many people die. They just absolutely selling policies.

So I'm going to quote from Triangle, the fire that changed America here. Blanc and Harris were perfect examples of the skewed system. Few factory owners paid higher rates than they did. And as a result, they commanded the loyalty of the most powerful brokerage in town. The Triangle owners were so-called rotten risks in insurance parlance because they kept having fires and not just little ones that could be put out by hand. They were repeaters, having collected on several substantial claims. And yet they had little difficulty buying all the insurance they wanted.

Some of these repeat fires were likely deliberate. In April of 1902, Blanc and Harris called the fire department about a fire. The NYFD arrived a little too late to save the inventory of the factory, which burnt in its entirety. Thankfully, no workers were present at the time. Blanc and Harris collected a hefty insurance payment. Six months later, they had another fire, also early enough in the morning that no workers were present.

Blanc and Harris collected $32,000 in damage from both fires. Both blazes occurred at the end of the busy season, which was the part of the year in which factory owners who had overestimated demand for their product tended to wind up with a bunch of extra inventory they couldn't sell. So these very convenient fires happened right at the time when they needed to get rid of excess inventory. In 1907, there were two more fires at another factory that they owned

and they followed the same pattern. So these guys are starting fires to destroy their excess inventory and collecting the insurance on stuff they can't sell. That's part of how they stay profitable. And if you split the insurance among multiple gas, it seems like everybody's happy. Everybody's happy for now. Except for the people that will die. So the fact that it works this way means insurance brokers don't really want

to confront this abuse of their policies, because the brokers collect a bounty on each new policy. Now, some of the insurance companies aren't always happy about this because this does cost the money, but the brokers are fine with this shit. And garment factory owners are like this becomes a crucial part of their business. It protects them from the kind of fickle whims of the industry. Because, you know, then as I think now the fashion industry hinges on what happens in Paris that year.

So if you are geared up to make a bunch of top hats or coattails or whatever and then some fucker in Paris decides that's not the hot item, you have a bunch of shit you can't sell and you got to light it on fire. Yeah, you're dead. Yeah, it's the trucker. Sophie and I do the same thing with podcasts. We can't air. Yeah, you just got to light it on fire.

Yeah, you got to light it on fire. Remember the remember the remember the trucker hat craze, dude. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, so I'm like, what about the guy that like sitting on a box of trucker hats? Too bad you can't. The Von Dutch joints. Yeah, you got to burn them things down. Yeah, I think there's a lot of Von Dutch hats going around in Iraq or some place

now with all the old shirts from political candidates that wind up in Ecuador some place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Blanc and Harris again, not the only business owners to do this. This is the norm in the industry. But the fact that such a practice is the norm means that factory owners like insurance brokers have a vested interest in avoiding fire prevention measures. Sprinklers can't discriminate between a safe intentional fire meant to create an insurance payment or an accidental fire.

And if you disable your sprinklers before you carry out an intentional fire, that looks suspicious and you'll get in trouble with the cops. Yeah. Yeah, what's ours? Now, yeah, now it's arson. So you don't want to have sprinklers because you rely on being able to start fires. Now, as it happened, 1911 was the year that Paris turned on the short waste demand dropped and so many manufacturers were burning their wares that one large

insurance company had to cancel their policies with all shirt waste makers. Blanc and Harris stayed insured, though. And in fact, they were overinsured. They were paying enormous rates to carry more insurance than the actual value of the content of the factory. Why they did this? Because this costs them a lot of money up until you get the payout. You're spending a lot of money.

Dave Von Drell, who wrote the book Triangles, a very good journalist. The reason he suspects both of these men did this is that they were planning because again, these guys own a bunch of factories, right? They have multiple companies making shirt waste. They have a bunch of excess inventory. He suspects at the end of the year, they were going to take all of their excess inventory, put it in the triangle factory and light it on fire for an insurance payment with several million modern dollars.

Yeah, yeah. Hence Von Drell writes, quote, they could not put sprinklers in their factory if they thought it might need to burn some time. And they might think that instituting fire drills in a world where few factories had them would make them look suspiciously conscious of the issue. So they're not even willing to do fire drills because it might make it look like they're expecting a fire because they're absolutely planning to burn this fucker down.

Yeah. Yeah. What a strange interrogation, though, to where it was like, hey, why are we all doing fire drills? It's like, just in case there was a, I mean, there might have been a fire. I don't understand why this was like nobody else. They didn't do no fire drills. Fine over here. It's interesting.

You started doing fire drills right before your house. They caught on fire. Like, why wouldn't you play it cool enough to be like, yeah, and thank God we did it. Like, you know, we saved a lot of lives. We saved a lot of lives while we did it. You know, man. Yeah, when you when you got a hustle, though, when you when you working on trying to hit a lick, man, you got to think of every angle.

And I was one of the angles he thought of. Like, look, man, we can't look like we might have been prepared just in case a disaster happened because it's not a disaster. It's a plan. Yep. Was it one of those like, like you said, everybody was doing it. Was this one of those like, yeah, like worst kept secrets in the city? Like everybody knew everybody. Yes. That they don't think of people that journalists write about it.

Everyone knows this goes down. Right. This is not like, obviously, none of these rich guys are admitting it, but it's not nobody. Nobody is. Yeah. Nobody thinks this isn't happening. So this brings us to the fire. All right. On March 25th, 1911, there were roughly 600 workers in the triangle factory in the late afternoon when closing time came for the work day.

The fire started at one of the cutting tables. Remember how I described these tables? They're basically giant fuel air bombs that people work at. The table had been prepped for the next day of work, which meant it had 120 layers of tissue paper and fabric on top of it, and then hundreds of pounds of scraps in the waste bin beneath it. Now, for obvious reasons, smoking was banned in the factory. Yes. Yes.

But these cutters, remember, the cutters are the most important part of the whole operation. These are some of the only men working there. They're the most highly paid workers. They're irreplaceable, right? Because, number one, the guys who were cutting from the big fabric swaths to make the things that people sew together, if they're good at their job, they waste less fabric, which saves you money. If they're good at their job, they put out more stuff faster,

which allows you to make more, which is... So these guys, it's in no... The owners banned smoking in the factory, but also nobody wants to make these guys unhappy, because they don't have to work here. They can go elsewhere, right? They can get money anywhere. So, as best as we can tell, one of them was smoking.

One of them smoked a cigarette or a cigar. We don't really know, but he snuck a smoke, which was very common. It had caused some minor fires before. And they either tossed... They either put out their match and tossed it in the waste basket, which is filled with hundreds of pounds of cotton fabric and paper, or they tossed their cigarette butt in. And they probably put it out first, but not...

All it would take is a single ember, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It may have just been that. It may have been somebody put it out. They thought they were being careful. They tossed it in, and there's one little red ember the size of a fucking hair follicle.

And that's what starts all this. And whatever it is, it catches. And it fucking goes up like a... Like a... It is a fire bomb, basically. Yeah. Now, workers rush to grab pails of water to put out the blaze. And honestly, one of the big heroes of this is a guy

who's initially attempts to stop the blaze and then helps rescue dozens of people. It's possible, as heroic as he was, that he got people killed because he tried to stop the fire rather than immediately focusing on evacuation. Because by the time this thing starts, it's fucked. The only thing to do. And again, a lot of lives...

And I'm not blaming that guy, but a lot of lives would have been saved if they practiced evacuations because that's the only thing to do. You can't put this fucker out once it starts. They don't have the equipment. Workers grab pails of water to try to put out the blaze. Some of them are empty, you'll hear. But even if they hadn't been, I don't think it would have helped. I'm going to quote from a write-up in history.com here.

The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. As the fire grew, panic ensued, and the hose might have helped. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator, but it could hold only 12 people. And the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amidst the heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire,

the girls left behind, waiting for the elevator, plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises. When they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive. They find dozens of bodies next to this door, just like a lump together. Within 18 minutes, it was all over. 49 workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke.

36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks with two more later dying from their injuries. A total of 146 people were killed by the fire. Oh. Now, Dave Vendrell goes into much more detail about the fire and the heroism of the people like these elevator attendants are incredibly brave because they're writing an elevator up into flames, licking at their heads to try and save as many people as they possibly could.

Yeah, when you tell me you did four trips. They could get stuck. Yeah. They could have gotten stuck on any one of those and burned incredibly brave people. There's a lot of very brave people. Now, again, a big part of why so many people die is that Blanc and Harris had locked the main exit so that because their employees were getting ready to leave,

they wanted to search them before they left to make sure nobody was stealing shit. But maybe the bigger problem was the fire escape, which we'd already talked about, didn't really work. So people fled to the fire escape, which is tiny and poorly constructed and eventually it collapses and people fall to their doom. A lot of people get impaled. Oh, my God.

And, you know, it's just horrible. In the weeks that followed the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory fire, worker safety suddenly became a matter of paramount concern for union organizers and for the local government. There is an outrage against this. Like 100,000 people take to the streets. There's mass demonstrations against this. People demand new fire safety codes and more fire inspectors.

In October of 1911, just months after the disaster, the United Association of Safety Engineers was founded. A fire prevention law was passed that same month, which required all factories in New York City to install sprinkler systems in their buildings. Now, one of the people who had been passing by on the street at the time and had watched, didn't just see the fire, watched dozens of women leap to their deaths and splatter on the fucking payment.

One of the people who sees this is a woman named Francis Perkins. Francis Perkins, 20 years later or so, becomes the U.S. Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wow. Now, sugar. Yeah. Yeah. Perkins mentions the Triangle Fire constantly in the speeches she gives when she's made Secretary of Labor and repeatedly recalls the moment when she watches these women leap to their deaths to avoid burning alive.

Quote from Francis. They couldn't hold on any longer. There was no place to go. The fire was between them and any means of exit. It's that awful choice people talk of. What kind of choice to make? I shall never forget the frozen horror that came across as we stood with our hands on our throats,

watching that horrible sight, knowing there was no help. So this becomes this. This is like her. She makes it her life quest to never be that helpless in the face of a disaster like this again. And as Secretary of Labor, Perkins establishes the Factory Investigating Commission,

which lobbies for stronger safety measures and makes your factories are meeting certain minimum safety standards. She serves for 12 years during which she is key in forming and implementing not just reforms of safety. She helps push the Social Security Act through. She helps to create unemployment insurance. She pushes for the establishment of the minimum wage

and she legislates the guarantee for the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain. Perkins also establishes the Labor Standards Bureau, which is focused on ensuring employees meet certain employers meet certain minimum safety standards. In 1970, the Labor Standards Bureau becomes OSHA. Whoa. So that was just pivotal for her.

Yeah, I mean, this is the defining moment of her life in some ways. Obviously, how could you watch this and have it not be, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it could have went the opposite way where she could have, but for it to turn into activism is like, man, yeah, that's amazing.

So of course, the sheer level of outrage around the fire ensured that there were immediate calls to charge Blanc and Harris for manslaughter. Both tycoons immediately poured money into an advertising campaign dedicated to buffing their image as a safe and reliable garment manufacturer. Reporters from the New York Times met with Harris in his home and dutifully reported his defense of his actions and

claims that he had taken proper precautions. None of this succeeded in assuaging public rage. On April 11th, both men were indicted for manslaughter. Since most of the safety features their factory lacked were not mandated by law, the case came down to the question of whether or not they had legally locked the exits. From a write-up in Forbes, quote, Max Stewart, one of the top defense attorneys of his day,

poked holes in the witness's testimony and made it appear that a key witness's story had been rehearsed. On December 27th, the all-male jury returned to verdict of not guilty after less than two hours of deliberation. Isaac Harris and Max Blanc dropped limply into their chairs as their wives began sobbing quietly just behind them, writes Von Drell in Triangle. Now, the shirt-waist kings had to like because these,

this, you know, is such an unpopular verdict, they have to sneak out of the courthouse to their limousine and they get confronted by a young guy whose sister had died in the fire, who screams at them, basically yells at them that they're murderers. Yeah, murderer. You could argue is accurate. Yeah.

Now, both guys immediately go on to try to rebuild the Triangle shirt-waist company. Since even today, a lot of people know the term Triangle shirt-waist fire, even if they don't know what it was. This was kind of a lost cause, right? Yeah. The brand has been poisoned.

Yeah, your brand's burned, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Harris and Blanc struggled financially as all of the funds they did make had to go straight to the debt they had to their lawyer. They were sued in 1912 over their failure to pay a $206 water bill.

However, the tough times did not last long. Late in 1912, they get the insurance payout from the Triangle shirt-waist fire. Whoa, I got about the insurance. Yeah. That's crazy. They collect a total of $60,000, which is a fuckload of money in 1912 and is more than the fire had cost them

in damages. Now, they have to pay restitution to the families of the dead, but they just have to pay a weak salary, which is like 10 or 15 bucks at most for most of these women. So they walk away from the fire because of the insurance payout. They profit about $400 per victim.

Oh, man, to say it like that, we made like four bucks for a dead person, you know. Yeah. God, it's just the empire strikes back always. Yeah, baby. Bro, you know, a 100% avoidable disaster ends up making you money. And these guys don't learn a goddamn thing.

Of course. In 1913, the next year after they get their payment, Blanc, who's running another factory, is issued a warning from an inspector because now there's inspectors. So an inspector checks out this new Triangle factory and it finds that he's locked the door of the factory again during work hours. So now the thing that he successfully got off on

court, he's caught doing again. The same thing. So the Triangle factory burned. Now he got the Parallelogram factory and he locked the door again because, I mean, I did. It's like it kind of sucks for a little bit, but we kind of made some money, guys. Kind of worked out.

He does get fined $20 for this. So yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, yeah. And a couple of months after that, he's, he's fined again when another factory inspector finds that he's, he's lined the walls with scrap baskets that basically make the whole thing a death trap again. That caused the bomb. So yeah.

Yeah, that call. He does it again. He does it again. What's that thing with Ford? The, uh, the, the, the, the car we, everybody used to make fun of, uh, but the Pinto. Yeah. The Pinto that like when they, where they put the gas, where

they put the gas tank was means like it's going to become a bomb and the Ford decided it's just cheaper to just pay whatever finds if people die rather than reclaim them and remake them all. I forget what that was called, but there's a term for it, but that's what this reminds me of where it's like, I mean, it's cheaper to just pay the fine than to like make the factory safe.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's wild. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. In 1914, both Harris and Blanc were fined when they were caught sewing fake consumers league labels into their garments.

Now these label labels were a legacy of the triangle fire. They were meant to certify that a factory had safe conditions for its laborers. So obviously everyone gets horrified by unsafe work conditions. They developed this way to show that like your factory is safe and these guys fake having that label. So they don't pretend they're a safe.

Yeah. Yeah. There is nothing new, dude. Like how many times you picked up something like is this organic? Is this grass-fed? Yeah. Look, it's set right here on the label.

Yeah. Yep. Now, in 1918, though, they do finally shut down the triangle company. It just never makes as much money as it had before for obvious reasons. Yeah. Isaac Harris goes back to working as a tailor and Blanc

continues to own other garment factories. Neither of them pay anything that we could we would reasonably call a price for what they've done. Wow. So good time. So buddy. Hey, I think the lesson here is that cheating cheaters prosper.

That's the lesson. Cheaters do fucking great. Cheaters make out like gangbusters. Cheaters win. So, you know, if you want to learn anything useful from this, just remember to lock the factory door in the fire hazard of a garment factory in your life, whatever that is for you.

Lock that door. Make sure the fire escape isn't functional, you know. Yeah. Just do that your own life. Make no efforts to show that you're trying because because if you show that you're trying, that means you're cheating. Yeah. If you're trying, you're guilty.

Yes. Got it. This is a disaster. And that's my motto. Don't try because trying means you're guilty. Well, prop. That's going to do it for us at behind the bastards today. How are you?

How are you doing? I am that same sinking feeling that every guest has at the end of a show to where you're like, man, I'm glad I got through that. Now I have to think about this for the next until I go to bed that like this is true. But I had a great time hanging, which all it's just it's kind of it's it's a whole mess, man.

It is a whole mess. Welcome to my. There's got to be you know, it's not a mess prop. You're not doing a bad. There's no ad right now. What's not a mess is your podcast, hood politics. Oh, I was like, wait, are we going to a break at the end? No, no, no, no.

No, yeah, hood politics with prop, man. Man, I like I'm so excited about being able to like have a consistent like flow of content that like now I'm getting so far ahead of myself. So like some of the stuff I'm talking about right now ain't going to come out until you know, three weeks from now. So I'm like, well, crap, dude, how do I stay hot? You know, but man, hood politics with prop got some great

episodes in the can. Um, we're covering everything like Joe Biden's from Long Beach. Uh, the Israel and Palestine, uh, Armenian genocide, like what it means for to be a foreign ally, like everything. It's all coming. So check it out. It's a weekly podcast. You're welcome.

Yeah. Yes, it is. It's a podcast as regular as garment fires in early 1900s New York to an old tiny guys that always make it out on top. Yeah. No, he's always handle it and hiring gangsters and prostitutes to beat up workers. Yeah.

Mm hmm. It's the American way. I do want that TV show. I was gonna say that has to be that has to be a show. Yeah. Right. There has to be some character in that that like where the lady was getting getting her ass beat by this prostitute and

she comes up with the idea of like, maybe I should just maybe I should quit this factory thing and become a prostitute. Like, and she just like switches sides because she's like, mm hmm. So. Well, we, uh, I wrote a book. It's called After the Revolution. You can find the podcast version of that book with sound effects

by our own Daniel. Uh, if you, if you type after the revolution into whatever fucking thing your podcasts come the fuck from, um, so that's great. And you'll be able to lovely. I'm excited about that, man. Mm hmm. Yeah.

I mean, the book, it's really good and the podcast is really good and Robert's really good. So should be excited. You can also find Robert. You can find the e-pub for free online at okay. This guy breaks into a yawn. I was about to, I was about to like, let me tell you something man, cause you know, I'm, I'm publishing a book too.

And like as good as you are, like I thought about man, just like the way that you guys as well as y'all write and the way that y'all tore up a Ben Shapiro's book, I was thinking about that as I was writing my own to be like, let me make sure I don't get dragged by the homies from you right in the state. Now, granted, it's definitely not as bad as that, but there's all every book.

Anyone's ever written has draggable things, but I think truly makes you draggable is being Ben Shapiro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He kind of, he kind of came with the problem. You are not very not to the best of my knowledge. Yeah.

You always buy two boards when you go to the Home Depot. Yeah, that's the funniest thing I've seen. I'm going to support him. I was like, fam, you spent $1.50. Yeah. That's like, that's like, you could, you would have given them more money if you'd bought a Diet Coke. Like, come on, buddy, bro, this your point.

Like, yeah. This is also you're a millionaire. Get like an angle grinder or a fucking circular saw or something by a power to deserve it. I he doesn't, but like, you're trying to pretend to be cool. What are you doing? It was just so funny because I'm like, you making this huge political statement and you showed me that little ass bag

in your hands. And I was like, wait, is that what he bought? I thought, I thought, I'm like, are you making fun of yourself? Like, are you in on the joke? Like, are you in on the joke? A lot of times because your whole thing is supposed to be like, we're the party of the honest working man. That's who I represent.

It's like, I've spent a lot of time in home depots. Like, you know, I've spent a shitload of time. I'm not particularly handy, but people very close to me do that shit for a living. I've spent a lot of time doing runs for like, like functioning farms and stuff. Yeah. Nobody who's a serious working class person who needs to go

there walks out with a paper bag with a plastic bag and a single piece of work, like you're a millionaire, buy a power tool, and at least like try to pretend like you're cool. Yeah. Like, yeah, I got a giant saw. Like go get a go get a fucking Husqvarna or something. And yeah, tell me a story. Spin bought a red ass saw.

Yeah. Yeah. My uncle's been using the same saw for the bird, you know, 50 years. I'm going to buy him a brand new saw. I'm going to go to Home Depot. I just put in my, me and my brother-in-law just put in a new sink in my office and like speaking to going to the

store. I'm like, first of all, you, you're going to go at least four times because some at least there's no one trip to Home Depot. No one makes one trip like, damn, this don't work. Oh my God. Now this is leaking. This is the wrong fucking size.

Like you're going to make four trips and I did. And I'm like putting in the sink. I'm like, I know I spent just on return trips. A hundred dollars. You know what I'm saying? So I'm like, don't tell bro. That's so hilarious. It's like, there's an easy way.

You're been Shapiro, right? Your, your big thing is dying climate change. Be like, or saying it's not a problem. Be like, well, there's fires and since I'm not a weak liberal, I'm just going to fireproof my house and I'm going to go cut down the tree in my yard so it can't catch because that's what real conservative men do and then go buy a giant chain saw, put it in your fucking garage, forget about it and hire

someone else to do the work. You're been Shapiro. You're a millionaire. Like what is, pretend at least pretend. Well, yeah. What are we talking about? This has been a fun digression about Ben Shapiro after an hour and 40 minutes of talking about the triangle shirt waste fire.

Anyway, this is a hood politics. Yes. It will see you fools later. Don't listen to Ben Shapiro, although this episode is dropping the same week as the last of the Ben's books episodes. So I guess it fits. Fuck it. Oh, God, that's so exciting.

This is a great plug for Thursday's app. Nailed it. All right. Peace. Oh my God. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.