The Triangle Fire Trial

Lena paid the girl no attention. It was a strange joke, perhaps, but nineteen year old Lena just wanted to get home. It was Saturday, the end of her work week. A whole day of freedom awaited her, a day away from the clamor of the sewing machines, a day to rest her aching fingers and back. So she stayed in the dressing room, putting on her coat and picking up her pocket book. It was only when she emerged that she saw the smoke. The prankster had not been joking this time.

Lena was terrified. The smoke was already filling the factory floor, making it difficult to see, but she could make out flames shooting up outside the windows. Across the room. Her coworkers were clustered by the nearest exit, a door that led to the stairs down to Washington Place, trying to get it open. Some were screaming, crying out for their children. When Lena tried to make her way to the door, the crowd forced her back towards the dressing rooms. She

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

where she had been working only minutes before. She opened the first window she reached, thinking maybe she could jump out, but fell back in shock. The air outside was so hot that it had burned her knee. From the street below, she could hear people calling for her to jump, but she was afraid it was too high, a drop of nine stories, and the air itself had burned her. She needed a new plan. Near By were the freight elevators. Lena stumbled to them and knocked, praying that an operator

would bring the elevator up. She waited for two minutes, maybe three, but it felt more like hours. No one came. There was only one more way out now, the door to the Green Street stairs. But when she opened the door, the stairs were filled with flame. She could not go down. It was hopeless, But then an idea. What if she went up to the roof. It was risky, but so was staying put. She pushed forward and the stairs. The air was punishingly hot. The flames licked at her heels.

She ran. By the time she made it to the roof two stories up, Lena's hair was smoldering. She had burns on her arm, her neck, and her face, but she was alive. On the roof, she found men holding ladders that led to the roof of an adjacent building, and so she climbed off the roof and away from the burning remains of the factory. She worked at the Triangle Waste Company. Lena did not know it then, but she had gotten extraordinarily lucky. She had just survived one

of the worst workplace disasters in United States history. After the smoke cleared and the bodies were tallied, the horrified public would learn that a hundred and forty six people had died in the fire in a space of barely fifteen minutes. They had died on the fire escape when the rickety structure, burdened with too many bodies, had sheared off the side of the building and sent workers plunging to their deaths. They had died on the factory floor,

smothered by smoke, their bodies burned beyond recognition. They had died jumping on top of the elevator cars, desperate to make it out, And most horrifyingly, they had died by leaping from the building. Making the jump Lena had fortunately been too frightened to make. Dozens of men and women on the ninth floor had been hemmed in on all sides by the fire, pushed closer and closer towards the windows, until their only choice had been to burn or to jump on the street in the midst of a beautiful

sunny spring day. Just as Lena reached the roof, the bodies began to hit the sidewalk. Onlookers would never forget the sight or the sound. Fires had happened before. People had died in workplace accidents before. In fact, it happened all the time, but this fire, which came to be known as the Triangle Shirtwais Factory fire, was different, and these deaths were different too. They were very, very public. Hundreds of New Yorkers had seen these people, mostly poor

young women from Eastern Europe and Italy, die. They had seen the firemen uselessly try to extend their two short ladders to the people huddled on the ninth floor window sills. They had seen how the fire escape, even before it had broken, had been deficient the way its bottom rung hung above a basements skylight, making reaching the ground difficult,

if not impossible. And they had heard the rumors which began to spread in the days after the fire, that some factory had been locked from the outside, that the workers had died piled up by the Washington Polace door, unable to escape. One of the people who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the fire was New York District Attorney Charles Whitman, an ambitious reformer. Whitman had long wanted a

high profile case to make his name on. As he stood in front of the still smoldering building, he thought he might have found it. With this case, he could both raise his own profile and also get justice for the victims. He could prove his progressive bonafides, stand up for the working class, and punish greedy businessmen. He could use the system so often rigged against the powerless to make the powerful pay. But the system is not so easily changed, as Whitman would discover when he charged the

Triangle's owners, Max Blink and Isaac Harris with manslaughter. At their trial, a shrewd defense attorney and legal norms skewed towards business interests would guarantee that the prosecution was in for the fight of its life. Welcome to history on Trial. I'm your host, Mira Hayward. This Week New York v Isaac Harris and Max Blink. Max Blink and Isaac Harris

had both arrived in America in the eighteen eighties. Like hundreds of thousands of other Eastern European Jews in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Blank and Harris fled the anti Semitic persecution of the Old World for a chance at something new and exciting. Nearly half of all Jewish immigrants during this period entered the garment business. And Blank and Harris followed the crowd in the eighteen eighties. When Blank and Harris got their start, the business was

a dismal one. Most people worked out of tenement sweatshops, tiny dank rooms packed with employees, all struggling to stitch or iron or cut in the poor light. The average workweek was eighty four hours and pay was nearly nonexistent. Disease spread rapidly through the crowded spaces. These conditions killed many people. They also made a few people very rich, including Max Blank and Isaac Harris. Harris had gotten his start in a sweatshop. His needle skills and eye for

design allowed him to rise through the ranks. Blank came to the business through the contracting stude, buying and selling cloth. The two men's paths crossed in the late eighteen nineties, likely through a family connection. Their wives were cousins, and decided to team up. In nineteen hundred, they founded the Triangle Wasist Company. Their backgrounds were complimentary and their business

steadily grew. By nineteen eleven, the two men owned multiple factories, all employed in making blouses or as they were known then, shirt waists or just waists. Blank and Harris were the shirtwaist kings. The Triangle Factory alone shipped two thousand blouses a day. The profits funded a lavish lifestyle, a far cry from the men's early days in New York. They lived with their families in neighboring townhouses on the Upper West Side and went to work in Chaufford cars. Max

Blank had five live in servants. Isaac Harris only had four the Peasant. As their wallets expanded, so too did their flagship factory's footprint. In nineteen o two, the Triangle Waste Company had moved into the Ash Building on the corner of Washington Place and Green Street in Lower Manhattan. The company had initially leased the nine thousand square foot

ninth floor. By nineteen oh nine they had taken over the eighth and tenth floors two At first glance, the factory facilities at the Ash Building seemed a far cry from the horrifying sweatshop conditions of earlier decades. The ceilings were twelve feet high, the sewing machines were powered by a centralized electric motor, not by foot pedals. There were windows. In many ways, it was true these new loft factories were much better than the sweatshops, but they were still

extremely difficult places to work. They were crowded and hot and noisy. The hours were very long, workers had few rights, and owners regularly exploited their employees, denying them breaks and short changing them in their pay. By the end of the first decade of the nineteen hundreds, garment workers had become fed up with their working conditions. An organized labor movement began to take shape. Blank and Harris did their

best to shut down unionization efforts in their factories. They made an in house union, staffed with their own relatives, and tried to convince workers to join it instead of an outside union. They fired anyone said to be associated with the labor movement, but Blank and Harris could not reverse the growing tide of discontent. In early October nineteen

oh nins nine Triangle workers decided to strike. Blank and Harris fought back, calling in favors with the police department, who promptly arrived and began beating up and arresting strikers. The two owners hired strike breakers too, men who were willing to violently attack the striking women. Strike leaders began to mysteriously get beaten up while walking home at night. But the violence did not scare the strikers off. If anything,

it only attracted more workers to their cause. Over the next two months, the call for a general strike of shirtwaist makers grew stronger and stronger. On November twenty second, nineteen oh nine, thousands of workers attended a meeting of the local twenty five chapter of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union and in enthusiastically agreed to a general strike. Picketing began on November twenty fourth. By the next day, more than twenty thousand workers filled the streets of the Lower

east Side, marching and chanting for change. It was a strike of nearly unbelievable size. Around five hundred garment producers were affected by the strike. Roughly one out of every seven of these shops surrendered in the first forty eight hours, agreeing to the striker's conditions of a pay raise, a fifty two hour work week, and union only shops. But these early surrenders were mainly the smaller factories, the ones who could not afford to stop business for long or

pay for new workers willing to cross picket lines. The largest factories refused to give in no one dug their heels in more than Isaac Harris and Max Blank. The two men proposed to their fellow factory owners that they form a manufacturer's association to help one another out during the strike. Nearly one hundred factories signed up for the association and signed a no surrender declaration. With the battle lines drawn, both sides settled in for a long, hard fight.

For months, neither side budged, but by February nineteen ten, things were reaching a breaking point for union leaders and owners alike. On February eighth, the Triangle Waste Company, one of the last holdouts, agreed to settle with the union. Blank and Harris agreed to higher wages and shorter hours for their returning workers, but they did not agree to the striker's demand for a closed shop a union only factory.

Though the workers had not gone everything they wanted, the strike was a milestone for the growing American labor movement. Twenty thousand young people had taken on their wealthy, powerful employers and one better conditions for themselves. Their actions would inspire workers all across the country to fight for their rights. The strike had another legacy. It forever tainted the Triangle

Waste Company and its owners. Nobody had fought harder or more violently against the strike than Max Blink and Isaac Harris. One labor newspaper writing after the strike had only contempt for the men and their company. The Triangle Company wrote the foreword with blood, this name will be written in the history of the American worker's movement. But it would not be in blood that the Triangle's name woulden history.

The Triangle's name would enter history in fire. On March twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, thirteen months after the garment workers strike ended, someone dropped a match or a cigarette butt into a scrap bin at the Triangle Waste Company. Isidore Abramovitz noticed the fire first. Abramovitz was a cutter. Cutters

trimmed fabric into the shape of the garment patterns. A good cutter organized the tissue paper pattern pieces carefully across the yards of fabric stretched across their table, minimizing waste. But even the most efficient cutter created scraps. These scraps were swept into bins under the tables and periodically emptied by rag traders. The Triangle's bins had last been emptied in January. By late March, there were hundreds of pounds

of scrap piled under Isidor Abramovitz's cutting table. Scrap fires weren't unknown. There were no smoking signs on every floor of the factory, but everyone ignored them, and all it took was a single spark to light up the highly flammable fabric and tissue paper waste. The factory kept fire pails on ledges around the cutting floor for just such incidents. Now Abramovitz grabbed a pail and splashed it on the flames to no avail. Other cutters saw him and join

in the effort, but the fire wasn't slowing. A gust of wind blew into the room from the elevator shaft and the workers saw the flames jump. Someone tried the fire hose, which was connected to a water tank on the roof, but no water came out. People began to panic. What happened next happened fast. The factory was a tinder box filled with flammable fabric and pattern paper, and an air shaft in the back corner of the building made the perfect vehicle for the fire to travel to higher floors.

The speed of the fire is a crucial part of the story. As David Vandreali says in his book Triangle, the Fire that Changed America, All the crucial things that happened inside the factory that awful afternoon, the heroics, the terror, the tragedy, the strokes of fortune, both saving and deadly, transpired in a handful of minutes and in the presence of a hideously voracious fire. Isidore Abramowitz first spotted the

fire around four forty pm. By four forty five, the fire fire had nearly consumed the eighth floor and had traveled to the ninth. There was no good way for workers on the different floors to communicate with each other. A telephone connected the eighth and ninth floors to the tenth floor, but the two lower floors could not communicate directly with each other. A bookkeeper on the eighth floor called up to the tenth floor shortly after the fire

began to spread. The phone operator on the tenth floor alerted the workers there, giving them a few crucial extra minutes to escape, but she panicked and did not call down to the ninth floor. It was only at four forty six pm, just as the fire was already reaching the ninth floor that someone on the eighth floor pulled the internal fire alarm, setting bells ringing on all three floors outside. A passerby saw the flames and ran for the nearest public fire alarm. Each factory floor had four exits.

There was a door leading to the stairs on the Washington Place side, there was a fire escape in the air shaft in the rear corner. On the Green Street side, there was a bank of elevators, and next to these elevators another door leading stairs. Many of those who survived the fire survived because of the heroic actions of two

elevator operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortilalo. Despite the overwhelming heat and the flames licking at the elevator doors, Zito and Mortillalo kept making return trips, rescuing close to one hundred and fifty people between them, nearly half of all the survivors. Some of those survivors had only made it onto the elevator cars by flinging themselves into the shaft and landing on top of the cars as they traveled down. Many of those who died died because they took the

fire escape. It is a cruel, terrible irony. The fire escape on the Ash Building was a death trap. City inspectors had allowed the developer to substitute a fire escape for the normally required third staircase. When the architects submitted the building's planned to the city, an inspector noticed that the fire escape ended over a skylight in the basement. There was no way for those evacuating to safely reach the ground. The architect promised to change the plans. He didn't.

On top of that, the fire escape was rickety and extremely narrow. As more and more people crowded onto the escape, the iron frame began to groan, and suddenly it collapsed, sending terrified people plummeting to their deaths. On the eighth and tenth floor, employees escaped via both sets of stairs. The Green Street doors were open. Employees were required to exit via these doors so that a security guard posted

there could inspect their bags for stolen items. The Washington Place doors were locked at closing time to keep workers from leaving that way. On the eighth floor, a man named Lewis Brown unlocked the Washington Place doors, allowing the workers to escape. By four forty seven. The eighth floor had completely evacuated. Workers on the tenth floor were also

able to take both sets of stairs. By the time they evacuated, the fire blocked their escape downwards, so they headed for the roof, where people in the adjoining buildings held ladders out for them to climb to safety. Things were different on the ninth floor. This is the floor where Lena Yall, the young woman whose story we followed in the prolog worked. The ninth floor was the last to hear about the fire, only learning of it nearly six minutes after the blaze started. By this time, the

fire had already reached them. Traveling via the air shaft, the floor quickly filled with smoke and flame. The four exit options dwindled. By four fifty one, the fire escape had collapsed, and by four fifty three the elevators could no longer travel through the superheated shaft. Some people were lucky enough and fast enough to reach the Green Street door, as Lena did, and make their way up to the roof. The remaining eighty or ninety workers were trapped on the

edges of the room. They could not get the locked Washington Place door open, and they could not travel through the growing flames to reach the Green Street door. The fire pushed them away until they were standing on the windowsills, praying for a way out outside. The fire department had arrived. They began to raise ladders, but their ladders only reached the sixth story, some thirty feet too short. Instead, the firefighters began to spread out nets because they had realized

what many of the workers huddled above had. The only way out was down. As David Vondrelei points out, many of the people working at the factory that day had survived pegroms in Russia organized massacres of Jews, where fire was often used as a weapon. They knew what fire could do. They wanted their relatives to be able to recognize their bodies. At four fifty, the first person jumped.

The nets were futile. A body falling nine stories is moving so fast that a net can barely slow it down, and so many people began to jump so quickly that there was no chance of catching them all. Even if catching would help, There was nothing anyone on the street could do but watch, horrified as people began to fall. Those who went first jumped. Those who came later did not have the luxury of choice as the windowsills burned out from beneath them and sent them tumbling to their

deaths inside the ash building stairwells. Fire crews were battling the inferno by five point fifteen PM, only thirty five minutes after Isidore Abramovitz had first noticed a fire in his scrapin. They had the fire under control, but by then nearly one hundred and fifty people, more than twenty percent of the people in the Triangle factory that day, were dead. Most of those who died in the Triangle fire were young women, immigrants from either Eastern Europe or Italy.

Many of them had worked alongside their sisters or mothers, and many families lost more than one person that day. The sarah Chinos lost Tess and Sarah Fina. The Goldsteins lost Mary and Lena. The Brenmans lost Rosie and Circa, while their brother Joseph survived. One family. The Malteses lost two girls, Lucy aged twenty and Sarah, the youngest victim of the fire, only fourteen years old, and they lost Lucy and Sarah's mother, Catherine, two three family members gone

in the blink of an eye. Identified bodies were laid out in a large building on a pier in the East River, and friends and family members lined up to try to find their missing loved ones. The task was heart wrenching and gruesome. Many of the bodies were so badly damaged by the fall or by the fire that they had to be identified by jewelry, or hairstyles, or even the darns in their stockings. By the end of

the week, all but seven corpses were identified. On April fifth, a funeral procession for the Triangle victims traveled through Lower Manhattan. Some one hundred and twenty thousand people marched and another three hundred thousand lined the streets. It was a clear sign of the fire's impact on New York. The city was reeling. Writing about the procession for the Women's Trade Union League, Martha Bensley Breweer asked the question on the

lips of many New Yorkers. The fire is over. The girls are dead, she wrote, Now what is going to be done about it? Political leaders shied away from answering the question. New York Mayor William Gaynor directed reporters to the fire chief. The State Labor Commissioner directed reporters to the City Building Department. The building department head was on vacation and refused to return, but he did direct reporters

to the fire department. Conflicting information about the fire and the cause of the deaths filled newspapers and official statements. No one knew quite what to believe or who to blame, but everyone wanted to blame someone. New York District Attorney Charles Whitman was also struggling the question of what to do. Whitman had arrived at the scene of the fire shortly after five pm on the twenty fifth, after the last person had jumped, but before the bodies had been taken

away or the fire had been extinguished. The images of that terrible day stuck with him. As Whitman considered how to get justice for the fire victims, he faced a choice. Would his office pursue the city's Building Department and accuse them of Lack's oversight, or would he go after the factory's owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blank. He felt he could not pursue a case against one without weakening his

case against the other. For almost a week after the fire, he equivocated, encouraging his office to investigate both lines of inquiry. But on March thirty first, after William Randolph Hurst's newspaper ran an editorial accusing Whitman of moving to far too slowly, the DA made a decision he would pursue the factory owners. We can only speculate as to why he chose this path, but if I had to guess, Whitman may have felt

that this was the more straightforward case. Instead of tackling the systemic issues of worker protections and factory safety laws, Whitman could focus on proving the individual responsibility of Harris and Blank. The District Attorney's office organized a grand jury to look into the fire. The testimony Whitman heard at the grand jury convinced him that the Washington Place door on the ninth floor had been locked. Under New York law, quote, all doors leading in or to any factory shall not

be locked, bolted, or fastened during working hours. Violating this law against locked doors was a mist. Whitman and the two assistant district attorneys he had assigned to the case, Charles Bostwick and j. Robert Rubin, wanted a stronger charge, something that carried a larger penalty than just a fine. They wanted jail time for Harris and Blank. The locked door was the prosecution's way in. Although locking the doors was simply a misdemeanor, a misdemeanor that resulted in death

was manslaughter. On April twelfth, the grand jury indicted Isaac Harris and Max Blink on charges of manslaughter. The two men were arrested that same afternoon. Many felt that this was a good first step towards getting justice, but no one could predict what would happen in the courtroom. On December fifth, nineteen eleven, a crowd gathered outside Judge Thomas Crane's courtroom. It was the second day of jury selection

in the Triangle fire trial. When the defendants Isaac Harris and Max Blink arrived, someone in the crowd shouted, Oh, mamma, look here they come. Here are the murderers. The crowd began to yell and wail. People held up photographs of their deceased relatives, women tore out their hair. Max Stoyer, Harris and Blank's attorney, was unfazed. An immigrant, Stoyer had himself worked in sweatshops as a child before fighting his way to the top of New York's legal ladder. Not

much could trouble him. Stoyer pushed his way through the crowd, leading his clients into the courtroom. Nearly nine months after the Triangle fire, many people were still horrified and outraged. On the next day of the trial, when Harrison Blank went to lunch, relatives of the victims followed them and yelled at them from the sidewalk while they ate. Judge Craane ordered police protection for the defendants. That afternoon, Charles

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

justice done for the victims. Bostwick's opening was straightforward. He talked to jurors through the layout of the ninth floor of the Triangle factory, pointing out the various exits as he spoke. He mentioned the elevators and the fire escape and the Green Street door. Then he began to speak about the Washington Place door. One of the employees that ran to the Washington Place door, Bostwick said, was a woman named Margaret Schwartz, and Margaret Schwartz was now dead.

The District Attorney's office had filed manslaughter charges against Harris and Blank for the deaths of seven different people. In this trial, they were only focusing on the death of one of those people, Margaret Schwartz. The DA's strategy was to hold on to the other manslaughter charges in case

something went wrong in this trial. Margaret Schwartz, Bostwick said, had tried to escape via the ninth floor Washington Place door, but like everyone else who tried to do so, he failed because, Bostwick argued, the door had illegally been kept locked. The factory owners had kept this door locked so that employees would have to exit through the other door, where a security guards sat to inspect their bags for stolen goods.

The illegal act of keeping the door locked had caused Margaret Schwartz's death, Bostwick said, making Harris and Blank guilty of manslaughter. Bostwick's first witnesses helped establish both the layout of the factory, as well as Margaret Schwartz's cause of death, asphyxiation. Several witnesses also testified about the conditions at the factory, including a rag trader named Louis Levy, who testified that he had last cleared out the scrappins on January fifteenth,

more than two months before the fire. On Monday, December eleventh, the try Angle fire victims began to testify. Bostwick led them through their recollections of the fire. Each witness described their actions that day, including their desperate attempts to escape. One after another, witnesses testified to their fear and anger

at finding the Washington Place door impassable. As they spoke, Bostwick asked the witnesses to rise from the witness stand and go to the courtroom door to demonstrate how they had tried to get the Washington Place door open. I took hold of the handle and I turned and pulled it, Mary Buccelli said as she yanked on the courtroom door. Sam Bernstein recalled, I tried with both hands to open it. There where the lock was. I wanted to tear it open. Lillian Weener said, I tried to turn the handle and

it would not bend. It was locked. Over and over, jurors watched the young men and women re enact some of the worst moments of their lives. Over and over, the jury heard that the Washington Place door had been locked. It was powerful, compelling testimony, but even as it occurred, defense lawyer Max Steyer was doing everything he could to

reduce the impact of the witness's words. One of Stoyer's main arguments was that the Triangle fire victims had been doomed not by any action of Harris and Blank, but by their own, panicked, irrational choices during the fire. Whenever he could, Stoyer worked to undermine the credibility and intelligence

of the survivors who were testifying. He picked up small inconsistencies in their stories and used these inconsistencies to imply the witness was either lying on the prosecution's behalf, or did not speak English well enough to understand what they were saying, or was not clear headed enough during the fire to properly remember what happened during worker yetto Lubberts's cross examination, for example, Stoyer implied that Lubets did not know what a square was, that she thought that doors

could stop fires, that she had answered the prosecution's questions without understanding them, and that she was lying about her testimony rubbing salt in the wound. In the midst of making these accusations, Stoyer chided Lubberts, don't get upset. Stoyer had two other approaches for tripping up the prosecution's witnesses. The first was questioning their motives. On cross examination, he questioned witnesses about lawsuits they had filed against Harris and Blank.

Many of the survivors, as well as relatives of the victims, were pursuing claims against the triangle's owners. Steyer framed these lawsuits as conflicts of interest. Steyer's second plan to damage the prosecution witnesses was raising the theory that their stories were coached. He planted the idea that many of the witnesses had attended union meetings, where he implied they had learned what to say on the stand. He devised a cunning way of supporting this theory on several cross examinations.

Instead of trying to poke holes in the stories of witnesses, he simply asked them to repeat their stories again over and over as they repeated their stories, The witnesses inevitably repeated certain phrases, making their stories sound rehearsed. This tactic was particularly damaging to one of the star prosecution witnesses. Kate Alterman, had been a friend of Margaret Schwartz, the woman whose death Harris and Blink were accused of causing. On the stand, Altman broke down crying as she told

the story of her last moments with Schwartz. The two friends had tried to open the Washington Place door. Alterman re counted, but could not. As they frantically tried to force the door, Schwartz suddenly collapsed. Altman tried to rouse her, but Schwartz would not wake up. Altman had no option but to leave her friend behind to save her own life. As she ran across the room, she looked back and saw Schwartz on the floor, the hem of her dress and the ends of her hair beginning to burn. The

jury was stunned more so than any other witness. Altman had transported them into that burning building and confronted to them with the horror of being trapped by a locked door. Steyer had to control the damage. He had noticed that Alterman's testimony contained a number of distinct evocative phrases. She didn't call the fire simply fire, for example, but described it as a quote red curtain of fire. Steyer thought

these phrases sounded rehearsed. On cross examination, Stoyer had Alterman go through her testimony four times, pausing to highlight the specific she repeatedly mentioned. In between. He asked her if she had ever told this story before or studied her words. Alterman denied it. As David Vondrelli points out, Altman was probably lying about whether she had ever told her story before. Her testimony was so well organized that it's hard to

imagine she never practiced it allowed. However, a rehearse story does not imply an untruthful one. It is extremely common for attorneys to prepare witnesses for trial by having them practice their testimony. Kate Alterman's story was consistent and its details aligned with both the physical evidence and the testimony of other witnesses, but Stoyer had gotten her to repeat herself so frequently that her words began to seem artificial

to the jury. After raising questions about the prosecution witnesses credibility, Stoyer tried to bolster the reputations of the defendants by having Harris and Blank testify. Both men had been at the factory on the day of the fire, Blank had actually had two of his young daughters there with him, and both had had harrowing experiences. It was a risk to put the defendants on the stand. Stoyer hoped that their testimony would humanize them and make them appear to

be victims like all the other survivors. In some ways this strategy worked. Isaac Harris had behaved heroically during the fire, climbing from the rooftop of the ash building to an adjacent rooftop and badly injuring his hand by breaking a skylight to get help. But in other ways having the owners testify backfired. On cross examination, Bostwick pressed Harris on

the issue of employee theft. Theft was the owner's justification for locking the Washington Place door, but Bostwick pushed Harris on the specifics and got him to admit that the total value of employee theft in the year before the fire had only been twenty five dollars. Steyer also found ways to question the narrative of the locked door from

the prosecution witnesses. The jury had heard over and over again that the Washington placetoor was kept locked, but now Stowyer produced defense witnesses who made the jury question if this central claim was true. These witnesses, mainly Triangle employees and contractors, described how they had regularly used the Washington

playstairs during the course of their business. The Triangle factory had been set up with different functions on different floors, cutting on the eighth, sewing on the ninth, packing and shipping on the tenth, and people needed away to carry goods from floor to floor. It would seem to be inefficient and therefore unlikely that the Washington Place store was always locked. That being said, a number of witnesses also testified that keys were kept attached to the Washington Place door.

The keys were hung from thin strips of fabric that regularly broke and were also very flammable, explaining why the workers may not have been able to find them during the fire. Why were keys needed if the door was kept unlocked. The prosecution also had one more compelling piece of evidence to support their claim of a locked door,

a smoking lock, so to speak. During the grand jury proceedings, the DA's office had sent an investigator to the Ash Building to search for the ninth floor Washington Place door lock, and the investigator had succeeded. Stoyer had fought hard to keep the lock from being admitted into evidence, questioning its provenance and claiming that it was unbelievable that the lock had been found more than two weeks after the fire.

Bostwick was prepared for this argument. The District Attorney's investigators had shored up the discovery by tracing the lock in every step of its journey from fact to installation. They knew where the lock had been made, what store had sold it, who had bought it, and finally, who had installed it on the Washington Place door. Judge Crane allowed

the lock to be admitted. The lock seemed damning. The heavy bolt was undamaged, while the visible part of the lock, which would have been exposed to the fire, was discolored. The prosecution suggested that this meant that the bolt had been protected by the door frame, something that only would have been possible if the door was locked. Of course,

Stoyer had an explanation for this too. He brought in a lock expert of his own, who testified that the lock should have entirely melted in the fire if it had really been there. The expert also claimed that the lock was easy to tamper with. For every point the prosecution had made, Stoyer had a quick rebuttal. But would his clever lawyering be enough to counteract the powerful testimony

of the survivors. On December twenty seventh, after nearly three weeks of testimony and more than one hundred and fifty witnesses, the case was handed over to the jury. In his instructions to the jurors, Judge Crane explained the charges in the same way that the prosecutors had It was against New York law for a factory door to be locked during working hours, and if someone had died because a

door had been locked, then that was manslaughter. But he added another point, one that was favorable to the defense. He told jurors that to find Harris and Blink guilty, the jury must find that the men knew the door was locked at the time of the fire. If these men were charged with a misdemeanor, Crane explained, I might charge that they need have no so knowledge that the

door was locked. But I think that in this case it is proper for me to charge that they must have had personal knowledge of the fact that it was locked. With that, the jury was sent out to deliberate. Two hours later, they returned with a verdict on the charges of manslaughter in the death of Triangle employee Margaret Schwartz. Max Blank, and Isaac Harris were found not guilty. Immediately after the not guilty verdict, reporters went looking for explanations.

One juror explained that he believed that the victim's panic, not the locked door, was to blame for her death. I think the girls, who undoubtedly have not as much intelligence as others might have in other walks of life, were inclined to fly into a panic, he said. Stowyer's tactics had clearly worked. Another juror stated that it was Crane's instructions that had sealed the decision for him. I believed that the door was locked at the time of

the fire, the juror said. But we couldn't find them guilty unless we believed they knew the door was locked. Crane's instructions had raised concerns when they were issued. Lawyers speaking to The New York Times were surprised that Crane's instructions had not mentioned the large number of lives lost at the factory, or the fact that several of the defense witnesses had made sworn statements to the da that the door had been locked, but then testified to the

opposite on the stand. Some felt that Crane's conduct throughout the trial had favored the defense. He had been strict about what the prosecution was allowed to mention about the fire, excluding, for instance, any testimony about victims jumping from the building, on the basis that it was irrelevant. Crane may very well have been biased. He had, it turns out, a

shockingly relevant past experience. Six years earlier, in March nineteen o five, a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan had gone up in flames, killing twenty people. Many of the deaths were due to the unsafe conditions of the building, which had a blocked fire escape. At

the time. The tenement house commissioner was Thomas Crane. Crane claimed that his inspectors had done everything they could to keep the building safe and blamed the residence of the building for the fire, but the city government blamed Crane. He lost his job and was maligned in the press. Crane, a man who felt he had been unfairly blamed for a fire related tragedy, was the judge for a trial of two men who were being blamed for a fire

related tragedy. He should have recused himself. But while Crane's bias did no doubt cause issues for the prosecution, the verdict was in many ways the District attorney's own fault. An editorial in The New York Times on December twenty ninth opined that Whitman's office had mischarged Blank and Harris, saying the acquittal does not mean that nobody was to blame for this hideous disaster. What the verdict really means is that Harris and Blank were not guilty as charged.

Between this and not guilty at all, there is much more than a technical difference. The DA, the editorial continued, should have simply Chown charged Harris and Blank with violating factory laws, something they unequivocally did. That way quote, either they would have been sent to jail or heavily fined, or else the inadequacy of those laws to serve their intended purpose would have been so plainly demonstrated as to have brought about an immediate reform. This last point is

the key one. The law at the time was inadequate to address a tragedy like the Triangle Fire. There were very very few worker protections in existence in nineteen eleven. There were very few ways for the legal system to hold employers liable for harm done in the workplace. After the Triangle Fire and the acquittal of Blank and Harris, many realized that in order for justice to be done, the law would have to check. And it's here that we see the true legacy of the Triangle tragedy play out.

For months after the Triangle Fire, people were skeptical that workplace safety reform would happen. After all, industrial accidents were extremely common. Thousands of workers died due to workplace accidents every year, and thousands more were injured. Injured workers had little legal recourse. Judicial precedent stood firmly on the side

of employers. In a key case called Farewell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled in essence that when employees took a job, they assumed the risk for workplace injuries. Following this eighteen forty two decision, it became very difficult for workers to prove that their employers were legally rect responsible for workplace injuries or for workers to receive compensation for such injuries. This common law

environment matched public opinion. Many people believed that workplace injuries were mainly caused by the inattention or negligence of individual workers, but in the early twentieth century, labor reformers began conducting surveys about the actual causes of workplace accidents. One seminal study run by Crystal Eastman for the New York State Employer's Liability Commission and published in nineteen ten, revealed that many workplace injuries were caused not by worker negligence, but

were instead attributable to systemic issues caused by employer mismanagement. Eastman, who went on to co found the American Civil Liberties Union, had collected heaps of data to support her conclusions. Raw data alone was not enough to change public sentiment or the law. People needed something more visible, something more visceral,

to convince them of the need for change. The Triangle Fire was just such an event, as the legal scholar Arthur F. McAvoy writes, quote, so graphic were the Triangle deaths and so clear their systemic causes that the law could no longer contain them within the category accident. The Triangle Fire inscribed the law of turn of the century labor relations on its victims' bodies, so that its meaning

at last became clear. At the same time as the need for reform was becoming evident, politicians were taking note of the voting power of the people who most needed workplace protectives. In New York, the powerful political machine known as Tammany Hall, which had usually sided with wealthy industrialists in opposing workplace reform, realized that their new path to electoral victory was courting the votes of the working class.

The combination of popular pressure and political will finally combined in the months after the Triangle Fire to create real change. On June thirtieth, nineteen eleven, New York Governor John Dix signed a law creating the Factory Investigating Commission. The Commission's members worked tirelessly collecting data, touring factories, and holding frequent public hearings. Soon the Commission began proposing reforms, many of which the New York State Legislature enacted as law. Over

the next four years. The Commission's work in spired dozens of workplace safety and worker protection laws. These laws included crucial reforms such as the banning of child labor and the requirement that employers provide workers with clean drinking water and bathrooms. Other laws focused on fire prevention and protection measures, such as mandatory fire drills, automatic sprinklers, fireproof stairways, and fire escapes. Unfortunately, these laws came too late to protect

the Triangle workers. In the years after the trial, the fire's survivors and its victims relatives struggled to get justice or even compensation for what they'd endured. Max Steyer represented Blank and Harris in the civil suits against them, all of which seemed to have failed or fizzled out. The only suits that succeeded were those filed against the app USh building's owner. In early nineteen fourteen, twenty three relatives of victims received a measly seventy five dollars each in

a settlement of these suits. Even more disturbing, that paltry sum paled in comparison to the amount that Blank and

Harris earned from the fire. The two men had received a two hundred thousand dollars payout from their insurance companies in the wake of the disaster, But in nineteen thirteen, investigation by Arthur McFarlane for Collier's Magazine revealed that Blank and Harris had only been able to document one hundred and thirty four thousand and seventy five dollars in losses, meaning that they were for some reason overpaid by more than sixty thousand dollars. Despite this windfall, the Triangle company

did not survive much longer. The DA's office had tried to pursue additional manslaughter cases against Harris and Blank, but a judge ruled that this would be unconstitutional double jeopardy. Harris and Blank continued their partnership for nine years, operating shirtwaist manufacturers across New York City, before eventually going their separate ways in nineteen twenty. The men do not seem to have learned any lessons from the nineteen eleven tragedy.

In nineteen thirteen, Max Blank was arrested for locking doors at one of his factories. At his trial, he defended himself by saying that his employees would rob him if he didn't lock the doors, the same argument he had used at the Triangle trial. He was found guilty and fined twenty dollars. The legacy of the Triangle Fires victims with long outline. Blank and Harris the reform work that New York did in the wake of the fire would

become a national model for workplace regulation. Worker protection reforms continued throughout the twentieth century. Nearly sixty years after the Triangle Fire, in nineteen seventy, Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which, among other things, created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, an agency that can

set and enforce workplace safety standards. Though workplace safety standards and worker protections are not perfect, they are fathoms beyond what they were on March twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, the day that a fire blazed the Triangle Factory and changed our understanding of workplace safety forever. That's the story of New York via Isaac Harris and Max Blanky with Me after the Break to learn about how the Triangle Fire

led to the breaking of a political glass ceiling. Today, the site of the Triangle Fire, the Ash Building, is known as the Brown Building and houses New York University's Biology and chemistry departments. The building was designated as a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety one, eighty years after the fire. Thirty years before this designation, on the fire's fiftieth anniversary, a plaque was placed on the building to memorialize the victims. A woman named Francis Perkins was invited

to give the dedication. On the day of the Triangle fire, Francis Perkins was having tea at a friend's hoone nearby when they heard the sirens. Perkins and her friend follow the sound to the sight of the fire. They arrived just as people began to jump. Perkins, then thirty years old, was horrified by what she saw, but not entirely surprised.

She worked for the Consumers League, a nonprofit focused on documenting and improving workplace conditions, and she was intimately familiar with the many ways that people could be harmed in the workplace. Still, what she saw on March twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, haunted her. After the fire, Perkins doubled down

on her commitment to protecting workers. She became the primary investigator for the New York Factory Investigating Commission and was crucial in shaping the reform laws that the Commission proposed. Over the next two decades, Perkins served in increasingly prominent statewide organizations, including the Count's on Immigrant Education and the New York State Industrial Board. Along the way, she became allies and good friends with a politician named Franklin and Roosevelt.

In nineteen thirty three, now President Roosevelt appointed Perkins to her biggest job yet, United States Secretary of Labor. She was the first woman to ever serve in a presidential cabinet. Francis Perkins was the Secretary of Labor for twelve years. During that time, she helped the country recover from the Great Depression and guided the passage of laws that still shape American life today, including the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the rights to

a minimum wage and overtime pay. Her impact is hard to overstate. Perkins never forgot the Triangle Fire about the events of that day. In nineteen sixty four, fifty three years after the fire and a year before her death, Perkins told the audience that her reform work could be seen as a type of atonement. The progress made, she said, seems in some way to have paid the debt society owe to those children, those young people who lost their lives in the Triangle Fire. Thank you for listening to

History on Trial. My main sources for this episode were the trial transcript, David von Dreley's book Triangle, The Fire That Changed America, and Arthur F. McAvoy's article The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of nineteen eleven, Social change, Industrial accidents, and the evolution of common sense causality. For a full bibliography, as well as a transcript of this episode with citations, please visit our website History on Trial podcast dot com.

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

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