The Triangle Fire (24 page)

The jury retired to deliberate at 2:55
P.M.
on December 27. It polled itself three times.

On the first count, the vote was eight to two, with two abstentions.

On the second, it was ten to two.

Afterwards, juror Victor Steinman, a shirt manufacturer, declared: “I know I have not done my duty toward the people. But let me tell you I could not do my duty toward them and obey the Judge’s charge at the same time, although I did vote once for conviction.

“I believed that the door was locked at the time of the fire. But we couldn’t find them guilty unless we believed they knew the door was locked. It would have been much easier for me if the state inspectors instead of Harris and Blanck had been on trial. There would have been no doubt in my mind then as to how to vote.”

On the other hand, juror H. Houston Hierst, importer, said his conscience was “perfectly at rest. I cannot see that anyone was responsible for the disaster. It seems to me to have been an act of the Almighty. I think that the Harris and Blanck factory was well managed. I paid great attention to the witnesses while they were on the stand. I think the girls who worked there were not as intelligent as those in other walks of life and were therefore the more susceptible to panic.”

At 4:45
P.M.
, after deliberating one hour and fifty minutes, the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty.

The two partners received the verdict composedly. They went from the courtroom to an anteroom where Mrs. Blanck threw her arms around her husband’s neck, sobbing with joy.

The two men tried to leave the courthouse as unobtrusively as possible. They were led through Judge Crain’s private chambers and out through a door opening on a far corridor. But some of the crowd had managed to seep back into the hallways.

“We waited,” Josephine Nicolosi remembers. “Then they came out. The people began to scream and cry, ‘Give me back my daughter! Give me back my son! Justice! Where is Justice?’ All the doors on that long hallway suddenly opened up and the judges stuck their heads out from their private chambers and they stood there in their black robes in the doorways, looking.”

The acquitted men hurried down a flight of stairs to the ground floor, surrounded now by five uniformed policemen and two detectives, their friends and relatives trailing after. They were rushed through a pen filled with prisoners who had been found guilty in the Magistrate’s Courts. They left the building through an exit on Leonard Street.

About 150 women, children, and men were waiting for them. For a minute there was silence. Then David Weiner, Katie’s brother, whose seventeen-year-old sister Rose had perished in the fire, broke from the crowd, ran directly to the two partners and, shaking his fist at them, cried shrilly and mockingly:

“Not guilty? Not guilty? It was murder! Murder!”

Others took up the cry.

The two partners ran to the nearest subway station at Lafayette Street. David Weiner led the crowd in pursuit. The
World
reported that he collapsed on the steps leading down to the subway station and kept shouting hysterically: “Not guilty? Murder! Murder!”

Justice, in the best way men know how to find it, had been rendered. The jury had been given the impossible task of determining whether Harris and Blanck knew the door was locked at a specific time.

There could be no doubt that the Washington Place staircase door was at times locked during the working day. That certainty was not due so much to the lock that Bostwick introduced as to the fact stressed by the defense itself that the key was at all times attached to the door. Its own best witness, May Levantini, admitted having to turn the key in the lock in order to open the door when she went out onto the landing.

Could Margaret Schwartz have survived had she been able to pass through that door? It seems certain that having been able to pass through it she could then have been able to descend to the eighth floor and further. No one who had entered that staircase from the eighth floor had suffered burns. It was only after the fire had progressed considerably that the eighth-floor door may have become impassable.

Was the door locked at the moment Margaret Schwartz sank down into the smoke that asphyxiated her?

It seems certain that if there were times when that ninth-floor door was kept unlocked, those periods occurred only during the workday when there wasn’t the slightest probability that a production worker or union member would go through it but when others, especially supervisors and foreladies, kept a steady traffic going between floors.

But when quitting time approached, when perhaps some worker would be tempted to take a quick detour down the Washington Place stairs, then the door was locked. For what other purpose was the key kept on a string tied to the door than to make certain that only those with authority to do so would dare to open it? That day, and on all other days, when work stopped the door was locked. There was only one way out for the workers: through the 30-inch opening in the Greene Street partition where the watchman stood to inspect pocketbooks.

Striving to impress the jury with the losses the firm had suffered through alleged pilfering by the girls in the shop, Steuer had brought into the court a large pocketbook of the kind that many of the workers carried.

“Just open it and see for yourself how big it is,” he said and without warning tossed the bag to Assistant District Attorney Rubin. Unsuspecting, Rubin opened the bag and drew out four shirtwaists. Bostwick immediately conceded that the pocketbooks were large enough for that purpose.

Steuer handed the four shirtwaists back to Blanck who caressingly folded each of the four waists and then piled them neatly one upon the other without any interruption of his attention to the proceedings.

Bostwick underlined the significance of the business with the pocketbook. “Never did the defendants themselves adduce such magnificent and convincing evidence to the jury as when Mr. Blanck, still thinking of the stealings, produced this bag in court with his shirtwaists,” he declared in his summation. “It had never left his mind, and it was the main defense in this court room: ‘I had a right to protect my property.’”

And on the witness stand, Isaac Harris had presented this astounding picture of the firm’s tireless batde to protect its property:

“We once locked up about six girls and we found in their room, the room of one girl, about two dozen waists, one girl about three dozen waists, and one girl had—er—in every house we found so many waists and we had detectives that went around there and we searched in every house and found from two dozen to three dozen waists that these girls had taken and there were six girls that we locked up in one night about three years ago.

“About eight months before the fire, one girl took two waists in her rat and it stuck out a little end of the string and one girl coming along behind that girl saw this little white string in her hair and said, ‘look here what is sticking out here,’ and when she started to pull, she pulled out the waists and they stopped that girl and they took that girl into the office and they took out the two waists and they asked her, ‘what do you want to do it for?’

“She said her mistress asked her to bring her two waists. So, of course, we didn’t want to make any trouble and we discharged her. All that we could do was that we could discharge her. We could not do any more because when we arrested a few of them and had them fined, a few of the girls sued us for damages. We found the best way was to discharge them and not to bother with them any more.”

Dismayed by this revealing confession by his client, Steuer interjected that the newspapers, he feared, would make capital and headlines out of Harris’ words and that as a result the firm would be driven out of business.

But undeterred, Bostwick continued, demanding to know from Harris, “How much in all the instances would you say was the value of all the goods that you found had been taken by these employees? You would say it was not over $25, wouldn’t you?”

To this, Harris replied: “No, it would not exceed that much.”

17. PHOENIX

Those citizens who afterwards rebuilt it
     Upon the ashes.

—
CANTO XIII
:148

March 30, 1911. Inspectors of the Building Department halted production at Harris and Blanck’s new plant at 7 University Place. The department’s notice of violations included the charge that in this nonfireproofed building in which Triangle had rented space to continue production despite the tragedy, the sewing machines had been so arranged as to block access to the fire escape.

December 18, 1911
. When Salvatore Maltese had marched round and round the boxes in the morgue, looking and looking, he had found first one daughter and then another. But not his wife Catherine. And in the days after they had emptied and cleaned the morgue and the last remaining charred things had been buried with numbers instead of names, his life became a pursuit of things dimly remembered. And he pawed the trinkets spread out before him by the patient police, the last links with identity, until, in the month of the Triangle acquittal, memory focused and he whispered, “This was hers.” They dug up the box in Evergreen Cemetery, they took off the number and replaced it with her name and carried her to where her two daughters were buried and Salvatore Maltese and his two sons watched as she was laid to rest among her own.

March 21, 1912
. Protests against the acquittal were still being heard when the District Attorney moved for a second trial. Almost a year after the fire, Harris and Blanck were again in court. When Steuer protested that his clients had already been placed in jeopardy on the basis of the evidence which would now be merely repeated, Bostwick answered that different persons had been named in each of the seven manslaughter indictments found against the defendants. This one was for the death of Jake Kline, once tossed out of Triangle and later rehired.

Judge Samuel Seabury, presiding in the Criminal Branch of the Supreme Court, ordered a special jury to be selected at once. This having been done, he then addressed the jurors, informing them that “the court has neither the right nor the power to proceed with the present trial. These men are to be tried for the same offense again and under our constitution and laws, this cannot be done. I charge you, gentlemen of the jury, to find a verdict for the defendants.”

The jury found as directed without leaving the box.

This time there were no victims, no survivors, no relatives, no crowds in the court. “We did all we could,” said District Attorney Charles S. Whitman. “The law was against us today. I will make no comment as to the first trial.”

Four days later, prayers in Hebrew and Latin rose in synagogue and church on the East Side where the old men, at sundown, lit the traditional memorial candles to mark the anniversary of the holocaust.

August 20, 1913
. Max Blanck was arraigned in General Sessions Court. At this time, Triangle occupied new quarters on the ninth floor of a building on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.

Max Blanck, being a free man and without guilt and fortified with the knowledge of what he could do to protect his property, applied the full lesson of his acquittal, as he saw it. In court, Inspector Walter Dugan of the newly created Bureau of Fire Prevention testified that in his recent inspection of the building, he had found one of the Triangle doors locked with a chain—during working hours and with 150 girls in the shop.

On September 19, Blanck produced the lock in court. He claimed that with this patented chain device it was easy to get out, hard to get into his shop. On the other hand, Inspector Dugan insisted that under conditions of panic the lock would become nonmanipulative and that with more pulling it would only become more firmly locked.

One week later, Chief Justice Russell, considering this Blanck’s first offense, levied the minimum fine of $20. He then spoke directly to Blanck—and apologized to him for having had to impose any fine at all. The State Labor Department and the factory inspectors, he said, should devise a lock which would be satisfactory to them and at the same time would protect factory proprietors from theft.

December 1, 1913
. Blanck was back in court, paying another $20 fine, for allowing Becky Katzman, a nineteen-year-old lace cutter, to work on Sunday, October 12, in violation of the labor law.

December 23, 1913
. Obsessed with the idea of a perfect lock, Max Blanck invited members of the Bureau of Fire Prevention to visit his plant two days before Christmas. The sole purpose of the visit was to have them witness an experiment with a new type of lock.

The new lock, the
Times
reported, “was meant to safeguard employers from the loss of goods through the departure of employees through fire exits instead of by way of elevators.” Chief Inspector John J. Kennedy, heading the party of visitors, had difficulty concentrating on the experiment. He found the lock completely unsatisfactory.

The Chief had been distracted by a pile of rubbish 6 feet high in one corner of the shop. He observed litter throughout the factory. He noted that wicker work baskets instead of metal boxes were still being used. Instead of winning approval, Blanck received a stern warning.

March 4, 1914
. The National Consumers League discovered that a counterfeit of its label, used to certify work done “under clean and healthful conditions,” was being used on shirtwaists traced to Triangle. In August, Justice Leonard A. Giegerich in the Supreme Court of New York County declared that the Triangle label was an illegal imitation and issued an injunction barring its use.

March 11, 1914
. Three years after the fire, twenty-three individual suits against the owner of the Asch building were settled at the rate of $75 per life lost.

“The claimants have been tired out,” said the
World
. “Their money and their patience have been exhausted. So far as personal guilt is concerned, the men whose methods made everything ready for the tragedy have gone free. So far as financial liability is concerned, the whole affair is in the hands of an insurance company and stricken families are not well equipped to carry on expensive litigations with corporations.”

The establishment of the Bureau of Fire Prevention with the passage of the Sullivan-Hoey law in October, 1911, was one of the first local results of the uneasiness that continued to be felt in New York City following the holocaust. The new law also expanded the powers and the duties of the Fire Commissioner and ended much of the division of responsibilities.

But the shock of the acquittal had created a widespread feeling that something more was needed than additional fire escapes. Indeed, Richard B. Morris points out that “it is doubtful whether the social consequences of the Triangle fire would have been as far-reaching had Steuer lost his case.”

At the first protest meeting, held at the headquarters of the Women’s Trade Union League on the day after the fire, Rabbi Wise had called for the creation of a committee of twenty-five to improve safety in working places—the task the parties and the politicians had so far failed to execute. In one week—by the time the great public protest meeting was held the following Sunday in the Metropolitan Opera House—the committee was established and functioning. Its membership cut across party and class lines and included such notables as Anne Morgan, Mary Dreier, Frances Perkins, George W. Perkins, John A. Kingsbury, Peter Brady, Amos Pinchot, Rabbi Wise, and a number of other clergymen. Its chairman was Henry L. Stimson, who was soon compelled to relinquish that post in order to assume the office of Secretary of War, and who was succeeded as chairman by Henry Morgenthau Sr.

The Committee on Safety, together with the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Consumers League, the Fifth Avenue Association, the unions and public-spirited individuals, maintained a steady clamor for remedial legislation. On June 30, 1911, the New York State Legislature created a special Factory Investigating Commission of nine members. Its chairman and vice chairman were two young men starting auspicious careers in American political life: Robert F. Wagner, Sr., and Alfred E. Smith.

Many who had perceived the possibility of tragedy even before it had happened were associated with the Commission, two as members of the Commission itself. They were Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, who had warned the shirtwaist manufacturers at the historic Cooper Union meeting and Mary Dreier, president of the Women’s Trade Union League, who had marched on the shirtwaist makers’ picket line and had been arrested.

The Commission, in turn, used the services of many experts, and these, too, included a number who had warned against callousness in dealing with industrial dangers. Dr. George M. Price, whose report for the Joint Board of Sanitary Control had spelled out the danger in New York’s garment shops only days before the fire, was named the Commission’s expert on sanitation; H. F. J. Porter, whose plea to Triangle to institute fire drills had not even received the courtesy of a reply, became its expert on fire problems. Its corps of inspectors included Rose Schneiderman, who had said at the Metropolitan Opera House meeting that pity was not enough, and Frances Perkins, destined to become, twenty years later, the Secretary of Labor as Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal.

The puny sum of $10,000 was appropriated for the work of the Commission, which, from the start, had set its sights on a much larger target than the fire hazard. In its preliminary report the Commission declared that a “superficial examination revealed conditions in factories and manufacturing establishments that constituted a daily menace to the lives of thousands of working men, women and children. The need for a thorough and extensive investigation into the general conditions of factory life was clearly recognized.”

Wagner and Smith went to see Henry Morgenthau soon after the Commission was named. They told him that $10,000 would barely be enough to pay a good attorney for doing the essential legal work of the Commission. When they had finished, Morgenthau said he would get the best possible lawyer for the special task and that he would work without fee.

Within two hours after the interview, arrangements were completed for Abram I. Elkus to serve as chief counsel; Bernard L. Shientag joined as assistant counsel. Both men served without fee; both later became distinguished judges.

The Commission held its first session in New York City on October 14, 1911. It exercised fully its power to compel attendance of witnesses and the production of books and papers and in its first year heard 222 witnesses and inspected 1,836 industrial establishments in various cities in the state.

It heard New York Fire Chief John Kenlon estimate the cost of installing sprinklers in the Asch building at $5,000. Kenlon added that in his opinion not a life would have been lost if there had been sprinklers there on March 25.

The Chief was asked to give the addresses of the several hundred other buildings in which “another Asch building fire is likely to occur.” He refused, saying, “I think it unwise to do that,” and the Commission let it stand.

It heard the Commissioner of Labor declare that there was no automatic, legally required record of establishments and that only through search and patrol by his men was it possible to “ascertain where factories are located, their kind and nature and the number of employees therein.”

It listened to a State Labor Department inspector tell how he started his inspection of the Triangle shop on February 27, 1911, less than a month before the fire, by first going to the company’s office and introducing himself.

“You see,” Counsel Elkus commented, “what we are trying to point out, Mr. Harmon, is that these conditions which exist in factories are not discovered because the inspectors inform somebody in authority that they are there and the persons in authority know what you are looking for so that they had plenty of time to remedy temporarily any defects that existed while you were there.”

The Commission sent its investigators creeping, crawling, climbing, prying into the dark and hidden corners of cellars and shops, factories and tenement houses. Shocking testimony was heard about toilets, dust-filled workshops, dirty factories, unguarded but crippling machinery, working children, working women, night shifts, lead poisoning, diseased workers, lack of ventilation, poor lighting. “Establishments manufacturing foodstuffs were the dirtiest of all. The conditions of the toilets in most of these factories was very bad. The flush was usually found to be inadequate.”

The four-year term of the Commission marks the beginning of what is generally recognized as “the golden era in remedial factory legislation,” in the state of New York. Its first year of work resulted in the addition of eight new laws to the labor code; it produced twenty-five new laws the following year and three in 1914.

These laws completely overhauled the State Department of Labor and provided for a staff sufficient to carry out the many new duties assigned to it. The Commission’s work had been touched off by the fire hazard but, while it dealt effectively with this danger, it also turned to other hazards, and among its new laws in one area alone were those limiting the hours of labor of women and children, abolishing night shifts for them, bringing canneries under the labor law, providing seats with backs for women workers, and prohibiting the employment of women immediately after childbirth.

On the first day of the Commission’s public hearings Chief Counsel Elkus outlined a new purpose in American life—one which twenty years later would be at the heart of a program through which the entire nation would seek to lift itself out of a disaster far greater in scope than the Triangle fire.

“A man may be killed by a tenement house as truly as by a club or gun,” Elkus declared at the opening hearing. “A man may be killed by a factory and the unsanitary conditions in it as surely as he may be killed by a fire.

“It is not less true that the slaughter of men and women workers by the slow process of unsanitary and unhealthful conditions is not only immoral and anti-social, but the state is beginning to declare that it is legally indefensible and therefore must, through carefully considered legislation, be made virtually impossible. That their industrial efficiency may be unimpaired is of prime economic importance to the state.