The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's sending Sophie today's script because the episode it started, Sophie,
the episode is started. We can't stop it now, it's
all I We're going, We're this is all in the episode.
Hell yeah, I'm hitting record right now, recorded seconds ago.
You were the work, You are the war. Chris can

(00:21):
figure it out, man, this is how it's going. We're doing.
We're seconds into it. By you got catch the magic. Okay, magic,
you gotta catch it. Discrepancies happened, Thank you everybody. Um,
this is behind the bastards. The podcast that is introduced
like a piece of ship. Um, mother, don't say that.

(00:46):
Some some could say that introducing it listen so the whole.
Some could say that the producer don't come from my name. Listen.
But pieces of ship are produced effortlessly. It's actually quite
mad produced. They are saying that is true. Though, that
is true. Your body is magical, Pint. I would like, yeah,

(01:08):
I wasn't calling you a piece of ship, Sophie. I
was saying, my introduction was done like a piece of ship.
But well, your your your your, 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 into the theme of the episode. This

(01:30):
is behind the Bastards show about bad people, the worst
ones in all of history. Um, 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 words? We network, but we

(01:51):
are network buddies. You and I are now are now
co workers 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.

(02:11):
It's in writing now and broken by Yeah, being on
the same podcast network you want to talk about, Um,
well it's not your new show, it's your old show.
But but now it's on our network. Yeah, it's got
a got a jetpack in it, hood politics with problem
man Like, Yes, I'm so excited to bring this to
the team and have y'alls like input into like how

(02:34):
to make it as as as dope as possible. Yeah,
it's politics is gangbanging in nice suits. I think so
many times in the same way that like what this
pod 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,

(02:56):
I'm just look, they just speak a different language. They're
not smartyr than you. So I'm just here to not
give commentary but analysis so that you know what you're
looking at and that cannot by trick you into thinking
that this isn't something you don't already know and understands
that that's how politics. The Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode,

(03:17):
Oh yes, the Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode I
really have enjoyed in your show is how you explain
Mitch McConnell, because he really has to be explained in
like ganganging terms to really get how McConnell goes like.
It didn't make sense. It took me so long to

(03:37):
put a finger on it. Then I was like, oh,
you're just a hustler. Did all make sense? Mm hmm,
Well we're talking about we're actually gonna talk about some
gang ship. Today, We're going to talk about some um,
some horrible ship. We're gonna talk about the triangle shirtwaist fire.
Have you ever heard of this prop Nope? Okay, this

(03:59):
is uh moments, this is a good one. This is
a horrible industrial disaster in the United States, so properly
the idea that human beings would get their clothing almost
exclusively from stores, uh, and stores that were themselves stocked
by massive factories that produce clothing at scale. That's pretty new.

(04:21):
Didn't used to be that way for most of human history, right. Uh,
your ancient Romans, you know, your your, your, your, your Macedonians, Uh,
your Carthaginians, your han China, They're not not walking into
a department store and buying a bunch of like identical
pairs of shorts. Didn't work that way. No ancient Seers markets,

(04:43):
No ancient Seers markets. Um. There there is a free
people buried with the Library of Alexandria. But if that's
ever uncovered, a plague will will be unleashed upon the world.
That will lend all of society. Um. But yeah, not not.
Not a lot of mass produced clothing back in the
day in fact in the United States and sevente which

(05:05):
is not all that long ago, right, I've drinking bars
in Europe that are older than that. History's greatest monster,
Alexander Hamilton's 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 US was something that like a family member, Yeah,
Mama made it. Yeah, mama made its, sister made or

(05:27):
whatever grandma. Um. Now, that state of affairs didn't start
to change until the mid eighteen forties 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 you got
all these assholes wanted to keep doing a slavery. You've
got these guys who are generally less assholes want to

(05:49):
stop them, and they can script About two million men
the about two million men joined the Union Army over
the course of that war, and all those guys, Um,
all those guys need uniforms, right, um, and two million dudes,
you're not gonna hand sew all that ship, especially since
half these motherfucker's are dropping dead right out of that.
You know, how about we just make thirty of them
and when you die, we just take your pants, all yeah,

(06:11):
we just take your pants. Take a share. Um yeah.
So these guys uh need mass produced uniforms, and a
lot of them are a lot of them are immigrants, right.
That's one of the big things about the Union side
a ship. Some of these guys are Irish or German
because those are like where people are coming to the
United States from. Um. 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,

(06:34):
and it was stuff that like their family made and maintained.
Suddenly they joined the military and they get these mass
produced uniforms and standardized sizes. Um. Now, and this is
probably for most of them, the first mass produced clothing
on their body. And today you know, you you brag that, like,
oh this this shirt's handmade. Right, My pants were like
hands sown, and that's a that's a mark of higher

(06:55):
quality than like a factory made piece of clothing. Not
necessarily the case back then, right, because your clothing is
often made by mom or dad or grandma or siss
and they're not always good at it, you know. Yeah,
people aren't good at most things. So like, yeah, that's crazy.
You know what I think about, like just how culture

(07:16):
has just continues to evolve, like we you know, in
the fifties, we had to teach America to throw stuff away,
like you know, and and just the idea of recycling
and stuff like that. Like I thought about the Milkman
troupe 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

(07:43):
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 hearing this
is like reminds me of that. Yeah, I actually never
thought of that, Like my mom made this wetter. Yeah

(08:04):
I can tell maybe, yeah, I can see that. Um,
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

(08:25):
a real appreciation for manufactured clothing and a desire to
to own more of it. Um So in the eighteen seventies,
the cutter's knife revolutionized the garment industry again. This was
a mass produced utility knife, a kind of a box
cutter's type device, razor sharp, and it allowed skilled users
to cut out pieces that can then be sewn into

(08:45):
hundreds of identical garments. So we get the sewing machine.
The Civil War gives a lot of people a taste
for homemade clothing than in the eighteen seventies. They had
been a new kind of knife that lets you much
more quickly mass produce quality garments. By the eighteen eighties,
all of the necessary technology for a clothes making revolution
had been invented. The living missing was dirt, cheap, easily

(09:08):
replaceable labor, which, if you know anything about 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 sense, we could find people that we
don't gotta pay, that could do this all day for

(09:29):
good news. Right around that time, a shipload 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. UM. And the the Italians who
come in that flood the garment industry are are from
southern Italy. About one point two million of these people

(09:51):
immigrant to the United States net in the first decade
of the nineteen hundreds UM. And then you know the remainder,
about two million people are Jews from Eastern Europe, and
both groups of refugees would heavily dominate the new garment industry. UM.
These people were willing to work and able to work
for very cheap because they were completely destitute. They were
fleeing disasters, in different kinds of disasters. In the case

(10:13):
of the Italians, that disaster was a man made ecological
tragedy that will not sound familiar to anybody listening to
this podcast and will never happen again anywhere in the world, Like,
for example, the place where most Americans live. So I'm
gonna read a quote from a book by journalist Dave
von Drell quote. The end of feudalism and of the

(10:33):
papal states in the nineteenth 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. Top soil
washed into the rivers, ruining the farm economy. When the

(10:55):
silted rivers flooded in the wet winter months, they created low,
stagnant pools and swamps, which and turn bread mosquitoes, which
produced epidemics of malaria. Without trees to hold the top soil,
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

(11:16):
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 dest bowl ship that yeah yeah, um, and
they're a version of what's coming for California and a
sizeable chunk of Oregon like this summer. Yeah, it's it's

(11:39):
it's on its way, guys like this. Yeah 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. This is yeah, there's no cats destroying all
of the trees and leading the top soil to leach
into the rivers, creating stagnant death pits. Um. So yeah. Now,

(12:02):
obviously Italians are significant part of the growing garment industries workplace,
but they were vastly outnumbered by Russian Jews. Not just
well Jews from what was Russia, which included modern day
Ukraine in Poland. Um. 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 Czar's regime. Remember

(12:24):
this is a there's there's there's like there's an apartheid
system for Jewish people in Russia during this time. Um.
One of the few jobs that Jewish people were allowed
to do during this period was garment making. And so
that's part of why they came to dominate the US
garment industry, is they a lot of them, men and women,

(12:46):
learned how to sew, learned how to make garments, did
that for a living, and 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
they had that skill right as the garment industry exploded.
On Art eighteen eighty one, leftist revolutionaries in Russia killed
Czar Alexander the Second with a comically large bomb. Now

(13:07):
we mentioned a couple of times on the show because
it's important, um, but the Czar 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 Csar's death, they were instantly blamed for masterminding
the assassination. This is kind of the story of why

(13:29):
all of these Jewish people immigrate to the United States.
More than thirty 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
preceding mass destruction. Thousands killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, orphaned,

(13:52):
and rendered homeless. This was the legacy of pogroms. Now.
These programs were not ordered by anyone at the head
of the Russian state, but they were extremely popular. Many
programs were actively sponsored and organized by local Russian police.
It was not until late summer around August of eighteen
eighty one that the Czar's troops took action to halt

(14:12):
the violence, and their intervention did not achieve any lasting peace.
For the next three years after the Czar's assassination, every
spring would bring a new wave of programs. Journalist Dave
von Drell explains quote. The programs flared anew each spring
at Easter, when local priests reminded their flocks that the
Jews killed Christ just as they had killed the Tsar,

(14:32):
and rumors circulated afresh that the matzo of Passover was
seasoned with the blood of slain Christian children. Along with
the pagrams 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 not, it's still harder

(14:56):
hear you know all that, I know this story, I
know of billion times, just the whole Russian Revolution. Like
I don't think you understand the West Western civilization until
you really get your brain around that. And and I'm
still it's still hard to hear where you're just like
what the fund guys like, she's mane And then and

(15:19):
then so you you you're running this apartheid, you know system,
this cast system, apartheid and in and in 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 have
to hear it. It's not. I mean, it's one of

(15:41):
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. Um, there's China in
like kind of the last two centuries or so during
like that that they had a civil war that killed
more people in World War Two. Nobody ever talks about.
It's like the eighteen hundreds fucking wild. Um, there's obviously

(16:03):
indigenous American history, but fucking Russian history is up there.
Good god, it is wild. Some ship goes down in
Russia major and so this is the late eighteen hundreds
where this is all that these programs are trying to
ramp up. The eighteen eighties again, when when all of

(16:25):
the story, when everything sort of comes into place to
make the modern garment industry possible, is also when the
programs launch and things only get worse for Russian Jews.
In the early nineteen hundreds, bizarre State was in a
situation we might call the crumbles, which is a framing
a friend of mine uses to describe what we're what's
happening in the United States right now. It's the early

(16:45):
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. Zara Nicholas the second was a coward and
an idiot, and he had no idea how to write
the ship, but he was cunning enough to blame the

(17:05):
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 bess Rabbitts in
the city of Kashinev. And this is part of the
province of bess Arabia, which is why it's called miss Rabetts.
I'm sure I'm pronouncing everything wrong. Sorry, I'm not gonna

(17:27):
come on like um, if I'm not going to get England, right,
I'm certainly not getting Russian. Yeah. So bess are Betts
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

(17:50):
nineteen o three, a Christian girl who worked as a
domestic servant for a Jewish family in the city of
Kishenev committed suicide. Bess A Rabets 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 two thousand people rioting through the Jewish section of town.

(18:12):
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 yeah, like yeah, I
mean it's it's fucking bad. Yeah, dumb, that's where that
whole like, yeah, that's where that whole myth thoughts about

(18:32):
you know, Jews drinking blood for what the blood libel
and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean this is an
if that starts centuries earlier, right, Like that's old as hell, um,
But this was just I mean this there's God only
knows how many thousands of people get killed over that
myth over the course of like that that's like a
thousand years old, you know. But yeah, this is yet

(18:55):
another time when it erupted into violence. Goddamn. Kishenev was
followed by other programs around Russia, and everything kept escalating
in nineteen o four when Zar Nicholas the second decided
that going to war with Japan seemed like a good idea. Now,
if you know any you know about the Russian navy today,
nothing about the navy today, Well, the Russian Navy today

(19:19):
has exactly one aircraft carrier, the Admiral kuznets Off, which
has sunk itself a couple of times and runs off
of what is essentially like unfiltered, unprocessed diesel oil, something
called mizzoot, which is like the dirty like it keeps
catching on fire, it keeps killing its sailors. It's like
always burning. It has to be tugged everywhere it goes.

(19:41):
It's not a great navy today, is what I'm saying. Yeah,
I was like, yeah, yeah, they don't really need a
navy the way that you know other countries due to
in order to based on agraphy, I blame them based
on a geography, like there's there's not water for of
all time. If you know anything about Japan, pretty fucking

(20:04):
good at navies. This is this is what they do, Yeah,
especially the early nineteen hundreds. And so the worst navy
in Europe goes up against the best navy in Asia
and it it does not go very well for Russia.
Um and really the only people surprised our racists. But

(20:26):
obviously this is a huge political disaster. Russia loses a
huge chunk of their navy, a funckload of men, a
lot of prestige, and Zar Nicholas needs an excuse for
the disaster that follows. And of course he blames the
Jews even absolutely, how about those dudes as those guys,
those guys, that's why I picked a fight with the

(20:46):
people who are better at this than us. But it's
literally guys we've been killing for years that are responsible. Yeah,
you literally took the knife to a gunfight. This is
exactly that's where the saying comes. This is what y'all did. Yeah,
you too a knife to 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,

(21:10):
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 with anyway. They're they're they're
a bunch of assholes. They start murdering Jewish people to
punish them for what they and the Czar's press described
as conspiring with the enemy. The Black Hundreds openly stated

(21:33):
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 nineteen o five UM, but this
was still related to the war with Japan. Because the
defeat in nineteen o four UM leads to mass unrest
and protests and kind of a revolution, I mean a revolution,

(21:53):
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 broadly speaking, better than
I mean, they hadn't really had anything. Um. Now, this
enrages Russian monarchists who want the Czar to be an autocrat,
and a lot of these guys respond to the Czar

(22:14):
compromising with revolutionaries by carrying out programs, and in fact,
in November of nineteen o five, across the Russian Empire
there are six hundred different programs. That's twenty programs per
day for the entire month. Yeah. Um, So I'm doing
this to explain the fact that in like a ten
year period, two million euro Eastern European Jews moved to

(22:38):
the United States and this is why. Yeah. Yeah, a
lot of them are very like very accurately seeing what's
going to come in the nineteen forties and going, well, ship,
we gotta get the funk out of here. Yeah. The
Jewish like historical trauma, like the idea of just and

(22:59):
there antennas of knowing when like shipping to go bad,
like trust them like like they know so yeah, then
being like you know what, I think it's time. All right,
I'm a head out, you know what I'm saying. I
think it's time for us to roll. Like, you know,
there's a pretty there's a story like with with my
my wife and her siblings, like they when they were

(23:21):
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,
it's we need to go. It's time to leave now.
And they were like, no, let's just get one more thing,
more thing, and of course they both got caught, you know,
but the brother bounced because he got the antenna of like, yeah,

(23:43):
it's time, it's time for me to roll. And that's
it's crazy because it's like, that's actually one thing that's
important about your hood. Antenna's 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 a 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

(24:03):
life than having a good antenna. For like, I shouldn't
be here, Yes, yes, time for me to get the
funk out. I think it's time for me to get
out here. Yes, it's not gonna make a big deal
about it, not gonna say anything, but I shouldn't be here,
not gonna be in this room. I think I'm slide.
I think I'm gonna slide, bro. I see I let
you all later. Man. I think it's not for me
to slide. Ye, people should be prop Yo, drop a

(24:31):
load on them where they supposed to be, Robert. They're
supposed to be enjoying the products and services that support
this podcast. Yes they are, because the products and services
that support this podcast, and this is our only guarantee,
have never orchestrated a campaign of programs across the Russian Empire,
and not I think any of our supporters have done.

(24:52):
And and they will tell you when it's time to slide,
they will, they will flood fair enough. Yeah. If I
know anyone who I trust to tell me when to
get out of an area, it's the dick Pills guys,
or maybe Hello Fresh. Yeah, Okay, here's some ads. Ah,

(25:17):
we are back and um just having the best time
talking about the economic and environmental collapse of Italy and
waves of racism in Russia that allowed Americans to have
cheap shirts in the early nineteen hundreds. Let's go um. So,

(25:37):
like I said, all this violence in Russia leads a
lot of Eastern European Jews to decide, like we should
we should bounce um and yeah, more than two million
of them pick up their lives and flee to the
United States in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds. Now,
two of these desperate, hopeful Jewish immigrants were Isaac Harris
and Max Blanc. Both were born in Russia in the

(25:58):
late eighteen sixties. They fled their homes in the late
eighteen eighties when they were young men in their twenties,
after you know, all of those pagrams convinced them there
wasn't a whole lot of hope in Russia. By the
early eighteen nineties, 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 and he set up a shop in

(26:18):
the burgeoning garment industry. Max Blanc was an entrepreneur and
he got to work as a garment contractor. So this
is how a huge amount of the fabric industry worked
at the time then 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

(26:42):
who would themselves hire workers and then pay them out
of a lump sum they received from the manufacturer. Both
Blank and Harris got their start in the sweat shop
years of of the garment industry, and sweatshop as a
term we all hear um the way what we call
a sweatshop to a it's kind of the term for
like a giant factory with poor labor standards. Right, that's

(27:05):
not what it originally was. Um Like 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 von Drell. Quote. Today, the word sweatshop describes any

(27:26):
crowded factory of poorly paid workers. But in the late
eighteen hundreds, the meaning was more specific and more dismal.
Sweatshops were generally dim and claustrophobic. Tenement rooms were 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,

(27:47):
this is what we want you to make, and we'll
we'll contract you know, said 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,

(28:10):
low income apartment room. And that's a sweatshop, right, um,
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 him? Did he call him greenhorns? Yeah? Greenhorns.
These are immigrants who just got to the country. Okay,
that's the phrase. That's it. There's no there's no bottom

(28:34):
two slurs, is there? Yeah? Wait, because it's just I mean,
I guess I wouldn't didn't think about that. I mean,
I guess you could call it a slur. Maybe it's
not a slur. I don't know. It was meant is
just like they're new. They don't know how things work there,
don't like, yeah, they're there and they don't know. They

(28:58):
don't you know, they don't know enough to add vacate
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
sind 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,

(29:20):
or until they got sick and died. Because these filthy
apartments crammed full of people sewing, disease spreads pretty like
a shipload of people die from disease in these places. Um. 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 eight eighty hours at the low
end to more than a hundred hours of labor at

(29:42):
the high end. Some of these people made as little
as three dollars a week if they were new. Good
wages were kind of more like fifteen dollars a week. Um.
I think kind of a more common salary was like
seven to eight something like that. Um. Many of them
were promised good rates like fifteen dollars week, but found
out on pay day that the needle and thread they

(30:03):
used to make the garments was actually taken out of
their paychecks. So obviously these are because these are independent
contractors being hired by the big company. There's a bunch
of ways they can funk 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. Um, there's

(30:26):
nobody looking out for these people. Um. 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, um, and you don't
have to. One of the really big benefits is your
fact you may have hundreds of workers, but they work

(30:48):
in dozens of different sweatshops. None of them know each other.
How the hell they're going to unionize? You know they can't.
This is kind of smell like the gig economy. A
little bit like I'm kind of like a little uber
like you saying it's like you're you're a texting company
that don't own no cars. So and I gotta so
I gotta pay for all to upkeep from my car. Yes,

(31:11):
and so I'm paying for I'm paying for my gas,
I'm paying for all. Yeah, not original or new what
Uber and Lift and their fellow uh soulless monsters do.
Okay cool? I was like, what is this? Sounds so
familiar to me? Okay, h m hmmm. Um so yeah, yeah,
this is kind of a gig economy thing. Now. So

(31:32):
those are all the advantages of the sweatshop system, but
it has disadvantages to 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 addressed, 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. Um, it's
less efficient, right, which means you make less clothing over

(31:55):
a longer period of time. Um. 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 if you ever let someone's clothing on fire. Um,
But we're also talking about a shipload of cotton, like
process cotton, which is explosive. If you've ever gotten a

(32:18):
large amount of cotton and lit that ship, that fucking
that goes off like a bomb, yeah, very fast. And
there's a bunch of like basically um um um graph
paper tracing paper that you used to like cut out
the things, which is also incredibly flammable. So fire start
in these places all the time. Um. And to kind

(32:38):
of give more of a more detail about the conditions
of these early sweatshops, I want to read a description
of one in the eighteen nineties 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

(32:59):
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 sofa, several finishers
would be working well. 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.

(33:21):
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 then the term sweatshop clearly like
was they 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

(33:42):
the garment industry. Just get turp and turpentine, just acid
tone 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

(34:05):
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

(34:27):
she's kind of a mystery. She still doesn't really speak
English what she does. She just don't like to, So
she kind of a mystery to me. But her ability
to like, yeah, her craft craftsmanship of like being a
seamstress is still out of this world to me. And
my my wife still has stories of like I would
be embarrassed about it. But yeah, my mom's like holes

(34:49):
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, and it's certainly
not a nice job to have now, um, but at
least definitely less flammable. Yeah, less flammable people understand germ

(35:11):
theory better. There's upsides. Yeah, So this nightmare industry is
the one that Blank and Harris start in when they
moved to the United States. Now, Harris came up started
working in the US 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.
Block meanwhile made a small fortune as one of the

(35:33):
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 that we're doing the really difficult, the technical work,
the ship that not that many people can do. Um
And he's one of those guys. And the two men
meet through marriage in the late eighteen nineties. And I'm

(35:53):
gonna quote from a write up in PBS as American experience. Here,
Harris and Block were compatible, and they decided to interrupt
partnership that would capitalize on Block's business sense and Harris's
industry expertise. In nineteen hundred, they founded the Triangle Waste
Company and opened their first shop on Wooster Street. At
the turn of the century, the shirtwaist was a new
item styled after men'swear. Shirtwaists were looser and more liberating

(36:15):
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

(36:38):
faster than those run by a foot pedal. They priced
their shirtwaist modestly, averaging about three dollars each. And this
is all occurring at the same time as the women's
liberation movement is really 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 shirtwaist is is not just a
popular garment that's fashionable. It's a liberatory garment. Right. It's

(37:01):
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 course,
that's those massive dresses that you can't walk to the
doorway in, things that limit a woman's ability to move
around in the world. A shirtwaist doesn't. It's comfortable, you
can run in it, you can exert yourself in it,
um and it looks good. Um, so this is like

(37:23):
just all kind of happening at the big time. And
Blanc and Harris capitalized on this explosion in in in
because the shirtwaist is like a phenomenon in this period
of time. Yeah, kind of a 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.

(37:44):
I'm wearing something that I can work in, I can
exert myself, and I can dance in. I can you know,
live an independent life, not needing to be carried around
because my clothing stops me from breathing, you know, yo.
Because whoever's idea was pret is to like to tie
another like some just umbrellas around your waist to make

(38:05):
you a trust bigger was just whose idea with this?
This is ridiculous? Yeah. Um. Now, part of making the
garment production cost effective was consolidating for for Blank 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

(38:27):
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 machines,
so it's not some contractor buying the cheapest foot pump

(38:48):
sewing machines with modern electric ones and rows. So they
they start to get factories. And Harrison Blanc are two
early guys who get massive garment factories to make these shirtwaists. Um.
In nineteen o two they start the Triangle Factory out
of the ash building in Greenwich Village and this is
the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which is you know what the

(39:10):
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 because it's it's
it's cleaner, it's nicer, it's bigger, there's room. Um. It

(39:32):
had been built in nineteen o one, so the year
before they open 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 thinking, yeah, there is building that can down. Yeah. Yeah,

(39:53):
I guess if every other building is basically paper mache,
you're gonna be like, yeah, this one. At least this
is metal. So I could see the cased the confidence.
But bro man, can't ever let that come out of
your mouth. That's teach you. Yeah, you call something uh
unburned downable and it's gone burned down. That's just how Yeah,

(40:15):
that's why I always advertise everything I make is very
flammable and dangerous. This is dangerous. To be careful, I
do so. Shirtwaist 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 um

(40:36):
that are kind of like tossed aside as you're making
shirtwaists um. 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

(41:00):
directly like ten ft or something above a basement skylight.
So like we're falling into when they when they build
this thing, like the city is like, hey, this fire
escape is an up to code, and the architect is like,
don't worry, we'll fix it asap, and then nothing happens. Right, Um,
it looked pretty on this side. And look when you

(41:20):
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's lovely. Yeah. Now, 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

(41:42):
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, problem playing on the edge, bro, Yeah, Now,
I just I noted earlier the Triangle Factory was in

(42:04):
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

(42:26):
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. Oh unions. Now, the striking at

(42:48):
the Triangle Factory actually predated any kind of garment union
existing there. Their first strike in nineteen o eight was
what's called a wildcat strike, which is when workers just
go on strike without having a union, right, and it's
actually a big fight because like one of the so
they we'll talk about that a minute. So there's this
big wildcat strike in nineteen o eight, and and this

(43:08):
kind of feeds into a broader trend in the city
of New York, which is the center of US garment manufacturing,
and a lot of garment makers are going on strikes, wildcats, strikes.
They're starting to form unions nineteen o eight, nineteen o nine, UM,
because they're realizing they're making a small number of people
a shipload of money and they're getting treated terribly. Um.

(43:29):
These people had, you know, because they were now inside
you know, these factories that weren't strike proof. Um, they
could uh, they could organize like this. UM. And one
of the problems of this is that like the bigger
when you have these huge factories, um, that are the
entire operating profit of these corporations, that actually makes them

(43:51):
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. Um so the fact that this could
obviously the bosses consider any kind of strike to be

(44:11):
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, right, But people find a way

(44:34):
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 like the contractor system that the sweatshops
operated under, with the strength of the factory. Management would
give would basically rent space on the assembly floor to

(44:57):
a contractor who they paid a lumps to make clothing,
and that contractor would hire line workers, which he then
paid out of the lump sum. So right, it's a
it's it's it's the same basic idea. If we separate
these workers from the corporation UM, 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

(45:19):
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 UM considered themselves to be workers rather
than management, and they were as liable to go on
strike as the workers. See, So I still think. I
still think man like, I try not to be too
reductive for very vastly Like you don't want to oversimplify

(45:41):
the complicated, and then at the same time, you don't
want to overcomplicate the simple, you know, So I know
both of those things are important. That said, I'm like,
you're doing everything except for just just pay pay to
workers and treat them will like if you really want
to stop, you in like, it's just if you just

(46:02):
want us to Like, 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 their 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.

(46:24):
This is what we can afford. Now, are y'all? You
know what I'm saying, Like, we're gonna 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 you can handle, you should you show
me that's what you can handle. Okay, work, But you're
talking about you offer some free apps? Is I can
get you know what I'm saying, I can get the

(46:46):
hot wings. I'm like, well, or you could just just
pay better? And I just so yeah, when I'm like,
you're coming up with all these schemes and ways to
yea redesign the whole floor, so y'all don't talk or
it's like a company all we're going to have a
holiday party, or we're gonna have pizza today. It's like,
or you could pay us. Yeah, it's like, you know,

(47:08):
casual Friday's Like, I'm like, or or or heear me
out health insurance. That's good. Yeah, you could maybe maybe
just a dental plan. It's the edit button on Twitter.
I'm like, you're doing it always works? Yeah, would we
be doing great with an edit button on Twitter? I'm

(47:30):
just like, what the hell are these stories you're going
so so now you're putting all this ship 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 the race with this particular that particular example,
but I could say for a lot of years, that's
all we've been asking a Twitter. All the other stuff

(47:51):
you're doing is great, but just I don't know, man,
seems simple anyway, you know what all system? Yeah, it
could products time for the services that support this podcast.
What's happening. I'm just thinking about the way the corporate

(48:15):
system works and how we're all kind of with this
engine of death. Yeah, anyway, here's ads. Ah, we're back
and we're having a good time, just to just not

(48:37):
thinking about the modern day implications of the things you're
talking about here, UM, just a good way to do it. UM.
So the owners we just talked about kind of these
they have a couple of different strategies they used to
try to stop workers from unionizing UM, and they're not
very successful at this because it's really hard to stop

(48:58):
people from not idea offying with each other more than
the bosses who are exploiting their excess productivity for profit.
So the owners of the Triangle company next decided to
create a fake union, the Triangle Employees Benevolent Association, which
is actually kind of what happens to cops before police
unions were a thing, right, That's what Police Benevolent Association

(49:19):
start as, is like fake unions because cops can't unionize. Obviously,
they get the ability to unionize, and it's a horrible problem.
But the Triangle owners try the same thing. They they
can employee Benevolent Association, and their hope is that they
can use that to siphon off this energy that's going
into the union movement UM and kind of push it
somewhere that can't harm their bottom line. But since the

(49:42):
union was run by relatives of Blank 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,
Blanc 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 nineteen o eight,
which is the modern equivalent of thirty million dollars. Both

(50:04):
men were extremely comfortable. They both owned mansions on the
West Side. Harris had four family servants, Blanc had five.
They both had chauffeurd cars delivered them to work every day.
And this is when like just having a car means
you're doing pretty good. You know, yeah, where you go
for Sunday drives? Yes, because you got yeah. Yeah. And

(50:25):
these guys not only have cars, they have cars and
they have drivers. Um. 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 ship. It's the same thing with like McDonald's
today or whatever. They're not clamping down on employee organizing

(50:48):
the SAMI 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 uh 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 three dollars a week for more than eighty hours

(51:09):
of painstaking labor. And I'm gonna quote from PBS again,
Harrison Blocks Factory was competing with over eleven thousand other
textile manufacturers in New York City. In order to retain
their high profit level, they had to produce the cheapest
shirtwaist 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

(51:30):
four man 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 Blanc
ordered the secondary exit door to be locked. So I
think episode on the Quabolgno supermarket fire. Yes, super flammable
workspace always has a locked exit. Yeah, that's gonna come

(51:54):
into play. Yeah. What is that term called a secure
like a secure pinch? Like I forget what that term is?
A choke point, a choke point. Yeah, you created a
choke point because you're worried about these ladies stealing needles
and thread. All right, got it, But air my life
and day. Yeah, now everyone's endangered. Yeah, but they're not

(52:17):
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 the thought has
not a safety conscious period. Yeah, the thought has Yeah
I had you, dude, what an important context wrinkle is?

(52:41):
Like safety is not on anyone's mind. That's crazy, Like
I forgot about that, Like that ain't even cross their mind.
I mean there are I'm not gonna say it's not
on anyone's mind, because there are. There are garment fires
like the month before the Triangle shirtwaist fire. There's a
horrible fire that kills like twenty six people. And I'm
sure there are individuals who are like, we need to

(53:03):
but 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. And and this is again, this
is the point in which a work week is eighty
to like a hundred and ten hours. So they like
they're concerned, 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 gotta be here for another

(53:23):
seventeen hours. Yeah. Um, yeah, So that that's not really
the focus of the When we were talking about the
complaints the workers have, poor safety isn't really one of them.
I'm guessing if your other option is like, Okay, I
could either stay here in New York and do this
eighty hour week in this building, or I could go
down to Virginia and dig in a coal mine that

(53:44):
seems a lot more dangerous than this, So I guess
you're talking relatively. It's like, well, I'm not working with dynamite, dang. Yeah. Well,
and you're also thinking, again, these are all two thirds
of these people are refuge Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe
who are like, yeah, the building slam a double, but
nobody's actively trying to beat me to death with my
own baby. Yes, yes, you're not beat yes yeah, yeah,

(54:10):
yeah yeah. Anyway, yeah. 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, like the average working
class person on the street today, because life was just
more dangerous in a lot of ways. Dangerous. This is

(54:34):
it was sucked up time. Yeah, dangerous. Yes. So, in
the fall of nineteen o nine, a new union had
gotten started among New York garment workers, headed by a
bold young woman named Clara Lemlick. Over the course of
the year, Limlick could 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

(54:58):
big thing Limlick and her fellow union this we're fighting
for was a fifty two hour work week. So that's
the like again. Eventually, this list feeds into the this
massive nationwide fight for the forty hour work week at
the time, they're like, the work week is a d
plus hours. They're like, fifty two that it's relaxing, being

(55:18):
a break, let's go. Yeah, more than a standard work
week for an American today is was like, whoa, this
will be nice. A lot of Americans work, you know
that much these days? Yeah, not to minimize that, but
at the time, the idea that you would only have
to work fifty two hours was like something worth fighting for. Um.

(55:39):
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 ship um. 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 now.

(56:00):
Blanc and Harris first fought back against this by threatening
to fire any employees who joined the union that Limlick
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

(56:24):
the workers who had been there limlock and they were like, Okay,
don't come to work, we'll hire new workers, fuck you.
And the workers are like, well, will surround the factory
and we won't let these new employees in, will 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 nineteen o

(56:46):
nine through nineteen ten, 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 to right. This is
a broad trend across New York. Um. The Triangle factories
particularly large, and so what happens there is particularly significant. Now,
you gotta remember almost all of the strikers here are

(57:08):
young women. Um 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 blockading the factory. And the way they do
that is by hiring a fa lenx of Pimpson prostitutes

(57:28):
to act as the tip of the spear and the
solid Oh my god, that is heartless, wow, because they're like,
you're talking, You're you're talking. If you're talking about a
prostitute in nine nine New York, you're talking about a
hard lady. She's talking about a woman who carries a

(57:49):
couple of knives on her and you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And that's that's why they hire them. And they are scary,
and they beat the ship out of these striking work
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

(58:09):
this is we're not gonna get into this a lot.
And and Dave von Dreau 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.

(58:31):
That is can can just as easily call up gangsters
as it can cops because they're the same thing. You know. Yeah,
yeah that this is such a rad time, just wild,
wild West, like yeah, yeah, like, yeah, yeah, you just
as much. Yeah, you know, Joey two fingers is just

(58:51):
as much gonna get a call from the 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 s that's this is crazy, what a what a
time to live in. Yeah, yeah, we gotta uh get
the squad on the street. We gotta help these prostitutes
beat up a bunch of garment workers. That's just the

(59:13):
way things working moms, they're all working moms, probably, Yeah, sure,
a huge street fight between a bunch of working women. Um. Now,
blanch 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,

(59:36):
a shipload 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. Um. There there 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 ship. Um. The Triangle owners Blanket
Hairs hold their ground. Obviously, they hire police to beat

(59:59):
up strikers in 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.
Like that ship makes the news and people start to
get really angry about what's happening, and so they and
that makes the NYPD look bad. They have to stop

(01:00:20):
for a while. You know, 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.
Um And the sympathy that starts to build for these
ladies strikers, because again at this time you also have
the Suffragette movement, and the Suffragette movement is not a
just a poor working class and in fact it's largely

(01:00:42):
a wealthy woman movement like the 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 this. Um. A number of them are
really wealthy widows UM. And they start getting together and

(01:01:04):
raising funds UM. And part of what some of the
funds are to help these women pay their rent paid
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 you'll hear about like JP Morgan's wife I think
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 are some There's this one woman in particular

(01:01:25):
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 happen to Yeah, yeah, um, And

(01:01:47):
so Blanc knows like these block and harass. They're not dumb.
They know that things are starting to go against them,
public opinions going against them at this point, and the
only way to get public opinion back on your side
is with the media 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

(01:02:09):
the side of the bosses in this period. And we
could argue today, 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 Blank through the New York

(01:02:31):
Time 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 are Yeah, baby,
he did both. There a few bad apples. And man,

(01:02:56):
the playbook, the playbook is undefeated. We put it from
the same playbook in ninety oh one. Yeah, it's it's
very funny. Um yea and yeah. And so they have
to 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. Um. And right around

(01:03:18):
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 gonna use my old
Tommy boys. Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation that
is now going on in our shops. Are 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.

(01:03:42):
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,
but in order to fight the union of the workers.
Got a union too, looks like unizing works. Now this

(01:04:04):
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 smooth yea down here, good man. So Blanc
and Harris, Yeah, respond to this unionization effort by basically
making their own union for rich assholes. And part of

(01:04:26):
their rage at their workers efforts to unionize comes from
the fact that the Triangle Shirt waste factory was, as
I've said, by most standards, a very progressive and safe factory.
It's considered that in its time, um 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.

(01:04:46):
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 that Like, so they don't have any solidarity for
their workers as former workers, but they're offended that they're
workers don't treat them like fellow workers and treating them
like hey, I'm come on, come on, I'm on the guys,

(01:05:09):
I'm one of the girls. It's got a car you're
dying of Typhus were the same. Come on, man, ask
more to you, gotta work hard, suck up man, I'm
on yeah. Nah, I'm good, bro. So that's what what
what do we miss? I'm laughing problem, I'm good, bro,

(01:05:30):
I'm good. Yeah. It's like because that's that's the way
I would feel about because it's funny to me that
like it messed with they, It messed with the identity
and a 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 nah, man,

(01:05:54):
no you're not. That's crazy. Yeah nah 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 shirtwaist Kings,
because they're like the biggest shirtwaist dudes in the city.

(01:06:14):
This period, 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

(01:06:36):
what Britain did in Africa. You got you have this
population united against you. You've 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 funk the bosses, um, which is
a nice tale um. So yeah, the Triangle bosses also

(01:06:56):
tried to bribe the 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 obviously none of this stops
the strike. The violence in the streets continues, uh, and

(01:07:19):
peace would kind of you know, you would have this
this period where peace would return after a bad skirmish,
and then a few days later strikebreakers would be sent
into crackheads and the cycle would start again. Um. Yeah.
At one point, the judges get angry that the rich
ladies who had banded together to back this union, um,
we're bailing everyone out. So they start sending arrested strikers

(01:07:40):
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 and the penal colony for
the movement and stuff. It's kind of a way to
you gotta reward people who go through this ship. Let go. Yeah,
that's kind don't do it. Yeah, now it's time ward.
Where on, Blanc and Harris decided, like they do get

(01:08:02):
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 fifty two hour work week, they're willing to
work to raise wages. The only thing they're not willing
to do is given to the union's key demand. So
this the w the w t U L, which is
the union these these women form all across New York
City for garment workers. One of the things they're trying

(01:08:24):
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. Um. 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

(01:08:46):
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,
I do you need it to be a union only shop? Right?
Haven't you gotten enough? Isn't it time for this to
be over? Um? So that's a factor to it, And

(01:09:08):
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 they're really unhappy as
soon as these rich kind of liberal ladies show up
and start throwing their money around um, and they're like, well, hey,
this is supposed to be a class movement against the rich,

(01:09:29):
Like why are we celebrating which women who, 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 able 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 um. And
in addition to all of that, there's frustration among more

(01:09:52):
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 Samue Gompers, who's the head
of the a f l UM the American FED, he's
the biggest union head, is anti socialist, but he's a
union man. UM. So there's there's a lot there and
the the union organizers who aren't socialists are angry because

(01:10:13):
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 a 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 strike movement, it does

(01:10:37):
achieve most of its goals. They get the fifty two
hour workweek, 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. The color that this
adds of at again is also, wow, that's not familiar

(01:11:02):
of like who you want? 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 tad. My my five year old, is like, hey,
can someone watch you know, TV with me? And I'm like,

(01:11:24):
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 only the disrespect I do not have. Nobody's a

(01:11:48):
daddy's girl in my house. It's the worst. But the
idea of being like just the complication of like whose
movement is this? I say, I would 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,

(01:12:09):
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 all y'all arguing about
we just I don't want to work for eighty hours
and like that's what I'm here for. And I I

(01:12:32):
see how and we really can use your money. I
don't care how much of us don'te that you got
money for us? Like yeah, thank you, you know what
I'm saying. And you're saying, wait, so you're saying we
shouldn't take their money. So I'm like, okay, well do
you got money for us? Oh? You ain't got no
money for us? Because you mad at them. It's just like,
well crap, dude, like like, well none of you'all work here,

(01:12:54):
like like we actually work. It's so the color of that. Yeah,
you know if anybody's got a point, right, everybody, and
everyone's got a point, yeah, the point you know, these
rich ladies they do have a point where they're like,
you guys have gotten a lot, like maybe and and
people haven't been working for months, that people keep getting
arrested and beaten. Maybe it's time to just take what

(01:13:15):
you can get. The socialists have a point where they're like,
but this doesn't fix nearly everything. Um, 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 force. This is about not working eighty hours

(01:13:37):
a week, and like that's kind of where my interest
in it ends. You know, I'm some nineteen year old
who just got here and I just want my life
to be less miserable, and nobody I'm not trying to trying,
I hope. I'm not portraying anyone is right or wrong here.
This is just what happens, you know. Yeah, that's my
pointures along these lines. Yeah, yeah, that's my point of
like the color of life, where it's like it's like
like histories and living color, and that's what it is.

(01:13:58):
Where it's like you've got all these different issues and
you can't you can't look at it and be like
they're right there wrong, they're right there wrong. It's just
so complicated. That's crazy. It's just yeah, that's just how
things happen. Now, this kind of Peter's out. They get
more or less a win in early nineteen ten, and
for the next thirteen months or so, life returns to

(01:14:18):
kind of a semblance of normal in the garment industry
at the especially at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, production resumes, uh.
People get back to work with more reasonable hours and
more money. Some things had changed, there'd been significant winds,
but obviously, as I noted, nobody was fighting for improved
safety here because they thought the factory was pretty safe

(01:14:40):
um or at least compared to what they would had
been used to. And another thing they 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 um 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 up

(01:15:01):
down 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 produced the most waiste scrap
and waste paper. So these guys all do their's work
on these enormous tables. And one of Harris's innovations is
to put trash waste baskets underneath the table, so you

(01:15:21):
can just sweep your waist 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

(01:15:45):
everyone knew these were horrific fire hazards. The Triangle factory
had to note where the accidental fires and I'm specifying accidental.
I'll explain why here. Prior to nineteen eleven, 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 cut kept near the cutting table,
although it had been allowed to rust shut. Most significantly, though,

(01:16:09):
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 nineteen eleven, but sprinklers were widely available in
fact starting in the eighteen eighties. They've become required in
New England cotton mills, alongside firewalls and fireproof doors to

(01:16:31):
create safe zones for employees in the event of ablaze.
Cotton mills, as we've said, cotton's explosive, basically very dangerous places.
In the eighteen eighties, 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. Um Now, part of the reason why

(01:16:54):
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 like 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,

(01:17:18):
colluded together because these guys make their money. When you
sell a policies an insurance broker, you get a percentage
of the value of that sale. That's where 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 normally the way you think about

(01:17:38):
an insurance policy, the safer your building is, the more
safety measures like 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

(01:18:00):
less money. So I'm gonna quote again from the book
Try Changed America here. I know it's pretty fucked. The
hustle everywhere, damn and 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 are the ones on the line
the broker doesn't pay when there's a fire. And one

(01:18:23):
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 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

(01:18:45):
the brokers get as much money still because they're selling
as many so they they're they're sharing the risk because
none of them have to work in these factories. They
don't give a ship how many people die. They just
care that they keep selling policies. Um, so I'm gonna
quote from Trying Goal the fire that changed America here.
Blanck and Harris were perfect examples of this skewed system.

(01:19:05):
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

(01:19:26):
they wanted. Some of these repeat fires were likely deliberate.
In April of nineteen o two, Blanck and Harris called
the fire department about a fire. The n y f
D 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. Blanck and Harris collected
a hefty insurance payment. Six months later, they had another fire,

(01:19:46):
also early enough in the morning that no workers were present.
Block and Harris collected thirty two thousand dollars 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 overrest made a demand
for their product tended to wind up wind up with
a bunch of extra inventory they couldn't sell. So this,
these very convenient fires happened right at the time when

(01:20:09):
they needed to get rid of excess inventory. Um in
nineteen oh seven, there were two more fires and another
factory that they owned, and they followed the same pattern.
So these guys are starting fires to destroy their excess
to inventory and collecting the insurance on stuff they can't sell.
That's part of how they stay profitable. And then you
and if you split the insurance among multiple guests, everybody's happy.

(01:20:33):
Everybody's happy. The people that will die. Yeah. Yeah. So
the fact that it works this way means insurance brokers
don't really want to confront this abuse of their policies. Um,
because the brokers collect the bounty and 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 ship um, and garment factory owners are like,

(01:20:57):
this becomes a crucial part of their business. It protects
them from the kind of thickle whims of the industry.
Um 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 coat tails or whatever, and then
some fucker in Paris decides that's not the hot item,

(01:21:17):
you have a bunch of ship you can't sell, and
you gotta light it on fire. Yeah, Sophie and I
do the same thing with podcasts we can't air. Um. Yeah,
you just gotta light it on fire. You gotta light
it on fire. Remember them, 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?

(01:21:40):
Too bad? You can't the Von Dutch joints. Yeah, you
gotta burn them things. Yeah. I think there's a lot
of Von Dutch hats going around in a rack or someplace. Now.
It's like with all of the old shirts from political
candidates that wind up in Ecuador someplace. Yeah yeah, yeah.
So um Block and Harris again not the only business

(01:22:02):
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 create an insurance payment,
or an accidental fire. And if you disable your sprinklers

(01:22:24):
before you carry out an intentional fire, that looks suspicious
and you'll get in trouble with the cops. 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, nineteen eleven was the year that Paris turned
on the short waist demand dropped in so many manufacturers

(01:22:47):
were burning their wares that one large insurance company had
to cancel their policies with all shirtwaist makers. Block and
Harris stayed insured though and in fact they were over insured.
They were paying enormous ray. It's to carry more insurance
than the actual value of the content of the factory.
Why they did this because this costs them a lot

(01:23:07):
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 journalists. 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 shirtwaists. 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,

(01:23:28):
put it in the Triangle factory and lighted on fire
for an insurance payment with several million modern dollars. Hints
von Drell writes, quote, they could not put sprinklers in
their factory if they thought it might need to burn sometime,
and they might think that instituting fire drills in a
world where few factories had them would make them look

(01:23:48):
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 sucker down. Yeah. Yeah, What a strange interrogation though,
to where it was like, hey, why are y'all doing
fire drills? It's like it just in case there was
there might have been fired. I don't understand why this

(01:24:10):
was Like, no, nobody else they didn't do no fire
drills buying over there. It's interesting you started doing fire
drills right before you have to think on on fire,
Like why wouldn't you play it cool enough to be like, yeah,
thank god, we did it, like, you know, we saved
a lot of lives. We saved a lot of lives.
Why we did it, you know? Man? Yeah, when you
when you gotta hustle, though, when you when you're working
on trying to hit a lick, man, you gotta think

(01:24:31):
of every angle, and that was one of the angles
he thought of, like, look, man, we can't look like
we might have been prepared just in case of 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
the people that journalists right about it. Everyone knows this

(01:24:55):
goes down because it's 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. On March nineteen eleven, there were roughly six
hundred workers in the Triangle factory in the late afternoon

(01:25:16):
when closing time came for the work day. The fire
started at one of the cutting tables. Remember how I
described these tables are basically giant fuel air bombs that
people work at. Um the table had been prepped for
the next day of work, which meanted it had a
hundred and twenty layers of tissue, paper and fabric on
top of it, and then hundreds of pounds of scraps
in the waist bin beneath it. Now, for obvious reasons,

(01:25:38):
smoking was banned in the factory, but these cutters, remember
the cutters are the most important part of the whole operation.
These are some the only men working. They're they're the
most highly paid workers. They're irreplaceable, right because Number one,
the guys who were cutting from the big fabric swashed
to make the things that people sew together. If they're
good at their job, they waste less fabric, which saves

(01:26:00):
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
band smoking in the factory. But also nobody wants to
make these guys unhappy because they don't have to work here,
then go elsewhere, right, they get that they can get
money anywhere. Um So, as best as we can tell,

(01:26:20):
so one of them was smoking. One of them smoked
a cigaretteitor cigar, we don't really know, but he snuck
a smoke, which was very common. It had caused some
minor fires before, um and they either tossed They either
put out their match and tossed it in in the
waste basket which is filled with hundreds of pounds of
Coston backing and paper, or they tossed their cigarette button

(01:26:42):
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 um and the what ever it is,
it catches um and it fucking goes up like a

(01:27:05):
like it is a fire bomb, basically um. Now workers
rushed to grab pails of water to put out the blaze,
and honestly, like one of the big heroes of this
is a guy who's 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

(01:27:26):
focusing on a vactimation. 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 thing that you can't put
this funker 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 um.

(01:27:48):
But even if they hadn't been, I don't think it
would have helped. Um. I'm gonna quote from a write
up and history dot 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 did shut.
As the fire grew, panic and suit and the hose
might have helped. The young workers tried to exit the
building by the elevator, but it could hold only twelve

(01:28:08):
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

(01:28:28):
burned alive. They find dozens of bodies next to this door,
just lay on, blumped together. Within eighteen minutes, it was
all over forty nine workers had burned to death or
been suffocated by smoke. Thirty six were dead in the
elevator shaft, and fifty eight died from jumping to the sidewalks,
with two more later dying from their injuries. A total
of a hundred and forty six people were killed by

(01:28:50):
the fire. Now Dave von Drelle goes into much more
detail about the fire and the heroism of the people,
Like these elevator attendants are incredibly brave because they're they're
writing an elevator up into flames, licking at their heads
to try and save as many people as they possibly
they get stuck, Yeah, they could have gotten stuck on

(01:29:13):
any one of those in burn Incredibly brave people. Um.
There's a lot of very brave people. Um. Now, again,
a big part of why so many people die is
that Blanc and Harris had locked the main exit. UM,
so that because they their employees were getting ready to leave,
they wanted to search them before they left to make
sure nobody steaming ship. But maybe the bigger problem was

(01:29:34):
the fire escape, which we've already talked about, didn't really work.
So people flood 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 god,
and you know, it's it's just horrible. In the weeks
that followed the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire workers safety suddenly

(01:29:55):
became a matter of paramount concern for union organizers and
for the local government. They're is an outrage against this,
Like a hundred thousand people take to the streets. There's
mass demonstrations against this. People demand new fire safety codes
and more fire inspectors. In October of nineteen eleven, just
months after the disaster, the United Association of Safety Engineers
was founded. A fire prevention law was passed that same

(01:30:17):
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 have 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, twenty

(01:30:37):
years later or so, becomes the U S Secretary of
Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yeah. Perkins mentions the Triangle
Fire constantly and 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

(01:31:00):
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 site,
knowing there was no help. So this becomes this, This
is this is like her. She makes it her life

(01:31:22):
quest to never be that helpless in the face of
it as aster 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 twelve years, during which she
is key informing and implementing not just reforms of safety,

(01:31:43):
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

(01:32:05):
nineteen seventy, the Labor Standards Bureau becomes Osha whoa. So
that was just pivotal for her. Yeah, that, 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

(01:32:28):
to turn into activism is like many 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

(01:32:50):
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 a for eleventh, 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

(01:33:12):
exits from a right up. In Forbes quote, Max Stewart,
one of them top defense attorneys of his day, poked
holes in the witnesses testimony and made it appear that
a key witness's story had been rehearsed. On December, the
all male jury returned a verdict of not guilty after
less than two hours of deliberation. Isaac Harris and Max
Block dropped limply into their chairs as their wives began

(01:33:33):
sobbing quietly just behind them, writes von Drelle in Triangle.
Now the shirtwaist 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, which you could argue is accurate. Yeah.

(01:33:55):
Now both guys immediately go on to try to rebuild
the Triangle Shirtwaist company. Since even today a lot of
people know the term Triangle Shirtwaist fire, even if they
don't know what it was. This was kind of a
lost cause, right Yea, the brand has been poisoned. Brands burned.
Bro Yeah. Yeah. Harris and Blanc struggled financially as all

(01:34:17):
of the funds they did make had to go straight
to the debt they had to their lawyer. Uh. They
were sued in nineteen twelve over their failure to pay
a two d and six dollar water bill. However, the
tough times did not last long. Late in nineteen twelve,
they get the insurance pay out from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Yeah,

(01:34:39):
they collect a total of sixty thou dollars, which is
a funkload of money in nineteen twelve 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 week salary, which
is like ten or fifteen bucks at most for most
of these women. So they walk away from the fire

(01:35:02):
because of the insurance pay out, they profit about four
hundred dollars per victim. Oh oh, man, just say it
like that. We made like four bucks per dead person.
It's just the Empire strikes back always. Yeah, baby, bro,
you know it was avoidable disaster mhm ends up making

(01:35:31):
you money, and these guys don't learn a goddamn thing.
Of course, in nineteen, 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

(01:35:53):
work hours. Now the thing that he successfully got off
on in court, he's caught doing again the same thing.
So the Triangle factory burned. Now you 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 make spinning guys. It doesn't find

(01:36:17):
twenty dollars for this, so yeah, yeah, it's like yeah,
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 traffic because the bomb.
So yeah, yeah that does it again? Does it again?

(01:36:39):
What's that thing with Ford? The uh the the car
everybody used to make fun of. Uh, But yeah, the
Pento that like when they where they put the gas
where they put the gas tank was means like it's
gonna become a bomb. And the FOD decided it's just
cheaper to just pay whatever fine lines if people die,

(01:37:01):
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, guy,
it's pretty great. It's pretty great. In nineteen fourteen, both

(01:37:25):
Harris and Blanc were fined when they were caught sewing
fake Consumers League labels into their garments. Now, these legal
labels where 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

(01:37:47):
they can't pretend there say yeah, yeah, there is nothing dude,
like how many times you picked up something like is
this organic? Is this grassbit? Yeah? Look it's on the label. Yeah.
And now in nineteen eighteen, though they do finally shut
down the Triangle Company, it just never makes as much
money as it had before for obvious reasons. Isaac Harris

(01:38:09):
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. Show so good time, somebody, Hey, I
think the lesson here is that cheating cheaters prosper. That's

(01:38:32):
the lesson. Cheaters do fucking great, cheaters make out like Gangbusters. Cheaters. Uh. 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

(01:38:55):
is for you, lock that door, make sure the fire
escape isn't function and all you know, yeah, to make
no efforts 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, you

(01:39:19):
got it. This is a disaster. And that's my motto.
M hmm. Don't try because trying means you're guilty. Well, prop,
that's gonna do it for us behind the bastards today.
How are you? How are you doing? I am that

(01:39:41):
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. Mm hmm. It is a whole mess. Welcome,

(01:40:02):
there's got to be you know, it's not a mess.
Prop You're not doing. There's no ad right now. It's
not a mess. Is your podcast politics? Oh? I was like, wait,
are we going to an ad break at the end? Yeah?
Club politics were 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

(01:40:24):
ahead of myself. So like some of the stuff I'm
talking about right now ain't gonna come out until, uh,
you know, three weeks from now. So I'm like, crap, dude,
how do I stay hot? You know? But man Hood
Politics were prop got some great episodes in the can Um.
We're covering everything like Joe Biden's from Long Beach, uh,

(01:40:46):
the Israel and Palestine, 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 as You're welcome,
Yes it is. It's a podcast as regular as garment
fires in early nineteen hundreds of New York and old

(01:41:10):
tiny guys that always make it out on top. Yeah,
always always handle it, and hiring gangsters and prostitutes to
beat up workers. American way. I do want that TV show.
I was gonna say, that has to be that has
to be a show. Yeah, there has to be some
character in that that like where the lady was getting

(01:41:31):
getting her ass beat by its 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
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 danial Uh.

(01:41:54):
If you if you type after the Revolution into whatever
fucking thing your podcast come the funk from um. That's
really good. I'm excited about that, man's yeh. I mean
the book it's really good, and the podcast is really
good and Robert's really good, so should be exciting. You

(01:42:17):
can also find you can find the pub for free online. Okay,
just got breaks into a yawn. I was about I
was about to, like, let me tell you something, man,
because you know I'm I'm publishing a book too, and
like as good as you are, Like I thought about, man,

(01:42:38):
just like the way that you guys as well as
y'all right, and the way that y'all tore up Ben
Shapiro's book. I was thinking about that as I was
writing my own and be like, let me make sure
I don't get dragged by the homies for me right
in the state. Now. Granted, I mean definitely not as
bad as that, but there's all every book anyone's if

(01:43:00):
written has dragon ball things. But I think it really
makes you dragon bles being been Shapiro. Yeah yeah, yeah,
you kind of you kind of came with you, thankfully,
very not to the best of my knowledge. Um, you
always buy two boards when you go to the home depot.

(01:43:22):
That's the funniest thing I've seen. I'm gonna support him.
I was like, Bam, you spent a dollar fit. 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 is your point. Like, yeah, also,
you're a millionaire, get like an angle grinder or a

(01:43:43):
fucking circular saw or something by a power. 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're making this huge political statement and you show me
that little lass bag in your hands, and I was like, wait,

(01:44:04):
is that what he bought? I thought? I thought, I'm like,
are you making fun of yourself? Like do you are
you in on the joke? Like are you in on
the joke? Because your whole thing is supposed to be
like we're the party of the honest working man. That's
who I represents. Like I've spent a lot of time
in home depots, Like you know, I've spent a shipload
of time. I'm not particularly handy, but people very close

(01:44:26):
to me do that ship for a living. I've spent
a lot of time doing runs for like like functioning
farms and stuff. Nobody who's a serious, working class person
who needs to go there walks out with a paper back,
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 cool, like yeah, I

(01:44:49):
got a giant saw, Like go get a go get
a fucking Husk Varner or something, and yeah, yeah, yeah,
my uncle's been you in the same saw for the
for you know, fifty years. I'm gonna buy him a
brand new so I'm gonna go to home depot. I
just put him. Me and my brother in law just
put in a new sink in my office. Uh. And like,

(01:45:12):
speaking of going to the store, I'm like, first of all,
you're gonna go at least four times, because at least
there's no one trip to home depot. You know what
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 gonna make four trips and I did, and
I'm like putting in the sink. I'm like, I know,

(01:45:35):
I spent just on return trips, hunts, 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've been Shapiro, right,
Your your big thing is dying climate change. Be like
we're saying it's not a problem. Be like, well, there's fires,
and since I'm not a weak liberal, I'm just gonna
fire proof my house and I'm gonna go cut down

(01:45:56):
the tree in my yard so it can't catch, because
that's what real conservative meant do. And then go buy
a giant chainsaw, put it in your fucking garage, forget
about it, and hire someone else to do the work.
You're Ben Shapiro, You're a millionaire, Like what ye pretend?
At least this has been a fun digression about Ben Shapiro.
After an hour and forty minutes of talking about the

(01:46:18):
triangle shirtwaist fire anyway politics, yea, it will see you
pull later don't listen to Ben Shapiro. Although this episode
is dropping the same week as the last of the
Ben's Books episode, so I guess it fits. Fuck it

(01:46:38):
a great plug for Thursdays. That nailed it all right, Peace,
Oh my god.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire