Isaac Harris and Max Blanck built the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory as a modern steel structure, yet their collusion with insurance brokers to ignore sprinklers and intentionally set fires created a deadly trap. When a cigarette ignited flammable fabrics on March 25, 1911, locked exits and broken escapes caused 146 deaths, while Blanck and Harris profited $400 per victim from payouts despite manslaughter acquittals. This tragedy exposed systemic corruption, forcing Frances Perkins to establish safety regulations that eventually evolved into OSHA, fundamentally transforming labor laws to prevent future industrial massacres. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:05:16
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's Sendon Sophie?
Today's script.
Because the episode, it started, Sophie.
The episode is started.
We can't stop it now.
It's all, we're going.
This is all in the episode.
Hell yeah.
I'm hitting record right now.
I hit record 28 seconds ago.
You are the work.
You are the worst.
Chris can figure it out, man.
This is how it's going.
We're 36 seconds into it by Michael.
22 seconds.
You got to catch the magic.
Okay, you got to catch the magic.
You got to catch it.
Discrepancies happen.
Thank you, everybody.
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is introduced like a piece of shit.
I'm the producer, motherfucker.
Don't fucking say that.
Some could say that introducing it.
Yeah, I listen.
Yeah, so the whole producer.
Don't come from my name.
Listen.
But pieces of shit are produced effortlessly.
And it's actually quite magic.
Oh, go ahead.
That is true, though.
That is true.
Your body is magical.
I would like a coffee.
Yeah, no, I wasn't calling you a piece of shit, Sophie.
I was saying my introduction was dogs.
I don't like it.
I'm like a piece of shit.
Yeah.
Well, your competence is at war with my incompetence and generally edges it out by a slight margin, but not today.
Today incompetence wins, which ties in to the theme of the episode.
This is Behind the Bastards show about bad people, the worst ones in all of history.
And some other stuff too, sometimes.
Like today, we're not talking, well, we are talking about some bad people, but we're also talking about a bad thing that happened with our guest, Jason Petty, aka prop.
What's the word, y'all?
We network buddies, Jason.
We are network buddies.
You and I 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 it's in writing now.
It's a long way in the world.
Yeah.
Being on the same podcast network.
You want to talk about, well, it's not your new show.
It's your old show.
But now it's on our network.
Yeah, it's got a got a jetpack in it.
Hood politics with prop, man.
Like, yes, I'm so excited to bring this to the team and have y'all's like input into like how to make it 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 politics, man.
I'm just look, they just speak a different language.
Legacy of Pogroms00:15:58
They're not smarter than you.
So I'm just here to not give commentary, but analysis so that you know what you're looking at and that can't nobody trick you into thinking that this isn't something you don't already know and understand.
So that's hood politics.
I'm really listening to the Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode.
Oh, yes.
The Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode.
See, what I really have enjoyed in your show is how you explain Mitch McConnell.
Oh, yes.
He really has to be explained in like gangbanging terms to really get how McConnell goes.
It didn't make sense.
It took me so long to put a finger on it.
Then I was like, oh, you're just a hustler.
It all made sense.
Well, we're talking about, we're actually going to talk about some gang shit today.
We're going to talk about some horrible shit.
We're going to talk about the triangle shirtwaist fire.
You ever heard of this, prop?
Nope.
Okay.
This is one of the things.
This is one of the rare moments.
This is a good one.
This is a horrible industrial disaster in the United States.
So, prop, the idea that human beings would get their clothing almost exclusively from stores and stores that were themselves stocked by massive factories that produce clothing at scale, that's pretty new.
Didn't used to be that way for most of human history, right?
Yeah.
Your ancient Romans, you know, your Macedonians, your Carthaginians, your Han, China, they're not walking into a department store and buying a bunch of identical pairs of shorts.
Didn't work that way.
No ancient Sears markets.
Yeah.
No ancient Sears markets.
There is a free people buried with the Library of Alexandria, but if that's ever uncovered, a plague will be unleashed upon the world that will end all of society.
But yeah, not a lot of mass-produced clothing back in the day.
In fact, in the United States in 1791, which is not all that long ago, right?
I've drank at bars in Europe that are older than that.
History's greatest monster, Alexander Hamilton, estimated that between two-thirds and four-fifths of all clothing in the new United States was homemade.
So basically, everything people had on their bodies in the early U.S. was something that like a family member has.
Yeah, yeah, mama made it.
Yeah, mama made it, sister made it, whatever.
Grandma.
Now, that state of affairs didn't start to change until the mid-1840s with the development of the modern sewing machine.
But what really shifted matters in the United States, at least, was the Civil War.
Because during the Civil War, right, you got all these assholes wanting to keep doing a slavery.
You got these guys who are generally less assholes wanting to stop them.
And they conscript about 2 million men.
About 2 million men joined the Union Army over the course of that war.
And all those guys need uniforms, right?
And 2 million dudes, you're not going to hand sew all that shit, especially since half these motherfuckers are dropping dead right after that, you know?
How about we just make 30 of them?
And when you die, we just take your pants off.
Yeah, we just take your pants, take your shirt.
Yeah, so these guys 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.
Shit, 10 of these guys are Irish or German because those are like where people are coming to the United States from.
And so most of these people had been dirt poor for most of their lives.
They'd had like one or two sets of clothing that they owned, and it was stuff that like their family made and maintained.
Suddenly they joined the military and they get these mass-produced uniforms in standardized sizes.
Now, and this is probably for most of them, the first mass-produced clothing on their body.
And today, you know, you brag that like, oh, this shirt's handmade, right?
My pants were like hand-sewn.
And that's a mark of higher quality than like a factory-made piece of clothing.
Not necessarily the case back then, right?
Because your clothing's often made by mom or dad or grandma or sis, and they're not always good at it, you know?
Yeah.
Most people aren't good at most things.
So like, yeah.
That's crazy.
You know, what I think about like just how culture has just continues to evolve, like we, you know, in the 50s, we had to teach America to throw stuff away.
Like, you know, and just the idea of recycling and stuff like that.
Like, I thought about the Milkman trope and I was like, dude, you had glass bottles and a dude came to the house and refilled them.
I'm like, yo, that's some like Silicon Valley like greenery fools are bragging about having their own chickens.
You know, like that's like, I got chickens, I make eggs in the bathroom.
I'm like, dog, 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, it reminds me of that too.
Yeah, I'd actually never thought of that.
Like, my mom made this sweater.
Yeah, I can tell.
My mom made this sweater.
Yeah, I can see that.
I'm sure some of these clothes was, but for a lot of these soldiers, not only was this their first mass-produced clothing, but it was the highest quality clothing they'd ever worn.
And it was the best fitting clothing because it had been like specifically, there were standardized sizes that were, you know, it was a lot of folks kind of left the military after the Civil War with a real appreciation for manufactured clothing and a desire to own more of it.
So in the 1870s, the cutter's knife revolutionized the garment industry again.
This was a mass-produced utility knife, a kind of a box cutters type device, razor sharp, and it allowed skilled users to cut out pieces that could then be sewn into hundreds of identical garments.
So we get the sewing machine.
The Civil War gives a lot of people a taste for homemade clothing.
Then in the 1870s, they invent a new kind of knife that lets you much more quickly mass produce quality garments.
By the 1880s, all of the necessary technology for a clothesmaking revolution had been invented.
The only thing missing was dirt cheap, easily replaceable labor, which, if you know anything about how clothing is made today, is a critical part of cheap clothes.
Truly nothing new.
We needed, we've got everything but suffering poor immigrants to make pants.
I wonder where we could find people that we don't got to pay that could do this all day for us.
Good news.
Right around that time, a shitload of new immigrants start coming into the United States.
Now, when we're talking about the garment industry, it's about a third of these people are Italian.
About two-thirds of them are Jews from Eastern Europe.
And the Italians who come in that flood the garment industry are from southern Italy.
About 1.2 million of these people immigrate to the United States net in the first decade of the 1900s.
And then, you know, the remainder, about 2 million people, are Jews from Eastern Europe.
And both groups of refugees would heavily dominate the new garment industry.
These people were willing to work and able to work for very cheap because they were completely destitute.
They were fleeing disasters and different kinds of disasters.
In the case of the Italians, that disaster was a 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 going to read a quote from a book by journalist Dave Vondrell.
Quote, The end of feudalism and of the Papal States in the 19th century put millions of acres of Italian land in private hands.
Nearly every new owner made the same decision to cut down the trees, hoping to sell the lumber and expand the fields.
The result was massive soil erosion along the hillsides of once beautiful southern provinces like Calabria, Basilicata, Apuelia, and Campania.
Topsoil washed into the rivers, ruining the farm economy.
When the silted rivers flooded in the wet winter months, they created low, stagnant pools and swamps, which in turn bred mosquitoes, which produced epidemics of malaria.
Without trees to hold the topsoil, what had been a tenuously balanced ecology became a strange and deadly combination of tropical disease and desert-like aridity.
Conditions were worse on the island of Sicily, where, within sight of the blue sea, the grass is a lifeless brown and the road a powder of white.
In many regions, it is necessary to go long distances to procure drinking water, as one early writer on Italian immigration explained.
It's the dust bullshit.
Yeah, I was going to say their version of the dustbull.
Yeah, yeah.
And their version of what's coming for California and a sizable chunk of Oregon, like this summer.
Yeah, it's on its way, guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is why I think we've all watched Fifel Goes West, the famed documentary about Italian immigration into the United States.
This is why.
Cats in America, yeah.
Yeah, there's no cats destroying all of the trees and leading the topsoil to leach into the rivers, creating stagnant death pits.
So yeah, now, obviously, Italians are a significant part of the growing garment industry's workplace, but they were vastly outnumbered by Russian Jews.
Not just Jews, well, Jews from what was Russia, which included modern-day Ukraine and Poland.
Most of these Jewish immigrants came from what was called the Pale of Settlement, which was within the Russian Empire, the limited swath of territory that Jews were allowed to inhabit under the Tsar's regime.
Remember, this is a this 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 U.S. garment industry.
Is they a lot of them, men and women, learned how to sew, learned how to make garments, did that for a living in kind of like small boutique senses of the word when they were in Russia.
And then when they came to the United States, they had they had that skill, right, as the garment industry exploded.
On March 13th, 1881, leftist revolutionaries in Russia killed Tsar Alexander II with a comically large bomb.
Now, we mentioned this a couple of times on the show because it's important.
But the Tsar had been a reformer.
He's the guy who freed the serfs, and he'd been good to Russia's Jews.
Although good here is a term that means he didn't actively seek their extermination.
Despite the fact that Russian Jews had probably the least to gain from this Tsar's death, they were instantly blamed for masterminding the assassination.
This is kind of the story of why all of these Jewish people immigrate to the United States.
More than 30 cities erupted into anti-Semitic violence in the wake of the Tsar's assassination.
Shlomo Lambroza, 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, and rendered homeless.
This was the legacy of pogroms.
Now, these pogroms were not ordered by anyone at the head of the Russian state, but they were extremely popular.
Many pogroms were actively sponsored and organized by local Russian police.
It was not until late summer, around August of 1881, that the Tsar's troops took action to halt the violence, and their intervention did not achieve any lasting peace.
For the next three years after the Tsar's assassination, every spring would bring a new wave of pogroms.
Journalist Dave Vondrell explains, quote, the pogroms flared anew each spring at Easter when local priests reminded their flocks that the Jews killed Christ just as they had killed the Tsar.
And rumors circulated afresh that the matzo of Passover was seasoned with the blood of slain Christian children.
Along with the pogroms came severe restrictions on Jewish liberties.
Access to higher education and professional jobs was cut off.
The Russian heartland, including the capital, St. Petersburg, and the largest city, Moscow, was closed to Jews.
Some were driven from the cities in chains.
So, God damn, man.
It's still hard to hear.
Like, I know this story.
I know a million 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 I'm still, it's still hard to hear where you're just like, what the fuck, guys?
Like, sheesh, man.
Sheesh.
And then, and then, so you, you, you're running this apartheid, you know, system, this caste system apartheid.
And then, and then this Jewish community mess around, get good at it.
And now you think they got magical powers because they're good at it.
And yeah, this, it just bothers me every time I hear it.
It's not, I mean, it's one of those things.
Russian history, there's a short list of like the darkest regions of the world when you study history, right?
There's particularly Africa during colonialism.
Yeah.
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 than World War II.
Nobody ever talks about it.
It's like in the 1800s.
Fucking wild.
There's obviously indigenous American history, but fucking Russian history is up there.
Like, good God.
It is wild.
Like some shit goes down in Russia.
Yeah.
Major.
Yes.
And so this is the late 1800s where this is all that these pogroms are starting to ramp up the 1880s.
Again, when everything sort of comes into place to make the modern garment industry possible is also when the pogroms launch.
And things only get worse for Russian Jews in the early 1900s.
The Tsarist state was in a situation we might call the crumbles, which is a framing a friend of mine uses to describe what's happening in the United States right now.
It's the early stages of dissolution before the collapse of the government.
Revolutionary sentiment was at an all-time high.
There were constant protests against an incompetent and inefficient government, which many Russians rightly saw had left them decades behind the rest of the world.
Tsar Nicholas II was a coward and an idiot, and he had no idea how to write the ship, but he was cunning enough to blame the Jews for all of Russia's problems.
His regime launched a massive propaganda campaign, which included producing the protocols of the elders of Zion and a number of anti-Semitic newspapers.
One of the best known was called Bessarabets in the city of Kushinev.
And this is part of the province of Bessarabia, which is why it's called Bessarabets.
I'm sure I'm pronouncing everything wrong.
Sorry.
I'm not going to.
Come on, man.
Yeah.
If I'm not going to get England right, I'm certainly not getting Russia right.
Yeah, That's fine.
So, Bessarabets was the only daily newspaper in the entire province, which meant that it was by default the only thing most Russian Christians had a chance to read every day for the news.
And it was focused around anti-Semitism.
In 1903, a Christian girl who worked as a domestic servant for a Jewish family in the city of Kishinev committed suicide.
Bessarabets lost no time in claiming that she had been murdered so her blood could be used to make matzo bread.
Now, this all happened right before Easter Sunday, and it ended in a mob of 2,000 people rioting through the Jewish section of town.
45 people were murdered, some by having nails driven into their skulls.
A baby, a live baby, was used to break windows on Jewish shops as like a yeah, like yeah, I mean, it's it's fucking bad, yeah, god dumb.
Um, is that whole like, yeah, that's where that whole mythos about you know, Jews drinking blood for what the blood libel and all that stuff.
Yeah, I mean, this is a, and it 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's like a thousand years old, you know?
Oh, yeah, but yeah, this is yet another time when it erupted into violence.
God damn it.
Violence Erupts Again00:03:18
Now, Kishinev was followed by other pogroms around Russia, and everything kept escalating in 1904 when Tsar Nicholas II decided that going to war with Japan seemed like a good idea.
Now, if you know any, do you know anything about the Russian Navy today?
Nothing about the Navy today.
Well, the Russian Navy today has exactly one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has sunk itself a couple of times and runs off of what is essentially like unfiltered, unprocessed diesel oil, something called mazut, 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.
It's not a great navy today, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, I was like, yeah, they don't really need a navy the way that you know other countries do to in order to based on agiography.
I don't blame them based on their geography.
Like, there's there's not water for a long time.
If you know anything about Japan, pretty fucking good at navies.
This is what they do.
Yeah, I was saying we're covering Japan, this is what we do, especially the early 1900s.
And so the worst navy in Europe goes up against the best navy in Asia, and it does not go very well for Russia.
And really, the only people surprised are racists.
But obviously, this is a huge political disaster.
Russia loses a huge chunk of their navy, a fuckload of men, a lot of prestige.
And Tsar Nicholas needs an excuse for the disaster that follows.
And of course, he blames the Jews, even though absolutely nothing to do with this.
How about those dudes?
It's those guys.
Those guys.
That's why.
I picked a fight with the people who are better at this than us, but it's the guys we've been killing for years that are responsible.
Yeah, you literally took a knife to a gunfight.
This is exactly that's where the saying comes from.
This is what y'all did.
Yeah.
You took a knife for a gunfight to a gunfight, and then you blamed the group of people you don't allow to own knives.
You blame the cooks.
Yeah.
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 groups.
Well, fascist might be the wrong way.
Anyway, they're a bunch of assholes.
They start murdering Jewish people to punish them for what they and the Tsar's press described as conspiring with the enemy.
The black hundreds openly stated that, quote, the extermination of the Jews was their goal.
Now, the very worst campaigns of anti-Semitic violence broke out the next year in 1905.
But this was still related to the war with Japan because the defeat in 1904 leads to mass unrest and protests and kind of a revolution.
I mean, a revolution.
And in order to kind of clamp down on it, the Tsar is forced to grant his people a constitution and not like a good constitution.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Broadly speaking, better than, I mean, they hadn't really had anything.
Now, this enrages Russian monarchists who want the Tsar to be an autocrat.
And a lot of these guys respond to the Tsar compromising with revolutionaries by carrying out pogroms.
Time to Slide Away00:02:21
And in fact, in November of 1905, across the Russian Empire, there are 600 different pogroms.
That's 20 pogroms per day for the entire month.
Yeah.
So I'm doing this to explain the fact that in like a 10-year period, 2 million Eastern European Jews moved to the United States.
And this is why.
Yeah.
It was like, it's time to go.
Cause a lot of them are very, like, very accurately seeing what's going to come in the 1940s and going, well, shit, we got to get the fuck out of here.
Yeah.
The Jewish like historical trauma, like the idea of just, and their antennas of knowing when like shit finna go bad, like trust them.
Like, like they know.
So yeah, them 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 my wife and her siblings.
Like they, when they were trying to like, you know, we're kids and they were trying to like, you know, steal some makeup from the corner store or whatever.
Like their brother was like, hey, we need to go.
It's time to leave now.
And they were like, no, let's just get one more thing, one more thing.
And of course they both got caught, you know, but the brother bounced because he got the antenna of like, yeah, it's time.
It's time for me to roll.
And it's crazy because it's like, that's actually one thing that's important about your hood antennas.
That when you at a party, you should be able to read the room to be like, all right, it's probably going to go down pretty soon.
I think it's time for me to slide.
Yeah.
I mean, there's just, I mean, this is a little off topic, but there's not a whole lot that's more important in life than having a good antenna for like, I shouldn't be here.
Yes.
Yes.
Time for me to get the fuck out.
I think it's time for me to get the fuck out of here.
Yes.
Not going to make a big deal about it.
Not going to say anything, but I shouldn't be here.
Not going to be in this room.
Yeah, I think I'm going to slide.
I think I'm going to slide, bro.
I see how I holler at y'all later, man.
I think it's time for me to slide.
Yup.
You got to know when it's time to go.
Should be prop.
Oh, this is going to be a lot of fun.
Yo.
Drop a load on them.
Where are they supposed to be, Robert?
They're supposed to be enjoying the products and services that support this podcast.
Read the Room00:04:36
Yes, they are.
Because the products and services that support this podcast, and this is our only guarantee, have never orchestrated a campaign of pogroms across the Russian Empire.
All right.
Not a thing any of our supporters have done.
And they will tell you when it's time to slide.
And they will tell you that they will.
They will.
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 HelloFresh.
Okay.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
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Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
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What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
Sweatshop Realities00:15:42
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we are back and 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 1900s.
Let's go.
So, like I said, all this violence in Russia leads a lot of Eastern European Jews to decide like we should bounce.
And yeah, more than 2 million of them pick up their lives and flee to the United States in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
Now, two of these desperate, hopeful Jewish immigrants were Isaac Harris and Max Blanc.
Both were born in Russia in the late 1860s.
They fled their homes in the late 1880s when they were young men in their 20s after, you know, all of those pogroms convinced them there wasn't a whole lot of hope in Russia.
By the early 1890s, they'd 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 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 as now, factories had to obey more rules with regular employees than they did with contract workers.
And it also costs money to operate a big factory.
So a lot of garment makers would hire independent contractors who would themselves hire workers and then pay them out of a lump sum they received from the manufacturer.
Both Blanc and Harris got their start in the sweatshop years of the garment industry.
And sweatshop is a term we all hear.
The way what we call a sweatshop today, it's kind of the term for like a giant factory with poor labor standards, right?
Yeah.
That's not what it originally was.
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 Vondrell.
Quote, today the word sweatshop describes any crowded factory of poorly paid workers.
But in the late 1800s, the meaning was more specific and more dismal.
Sweatshops were generally dim and claustrophobic tenement rooms where independent contractors sweated greenhorns, that is, the newest immigrants, by working them more and more hours for less and less pay.
So you have these big garment companies that have like, okay, this is what we want you to make.
And we'll, we'll contract, you know, say we have a dress, right?
And there's two or three pieces of the dress that are sewn together.
You hire two or three different independent contractors with their own teams of seamstresses and they will each produce a part and then you'll have it put together, you know, by somebody else.
Yeah.
And each of these independent contractors just packs as many laborers as possible into a tiny low-income apartment room.
And that's a sweatshop, right?
And you're basically trying to like get these people to do as much work as possible for as little money as possible.
And when they complain, you replace them.
Yeah.
Did y'all call them, did he call them greenhorns?
Yeah, greenhorns.
These are immigrants who just got to the country.
Okay, that's the phrase.
Wow, that's it.
Wow.
There's no, there's no bottom to slurs, is there?
Yeah.
Wait.
I mean, I guess I wouldn'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 as just like, they're new.
They don't know how things work.
They're green.
Like, yeah, they're not racist.
Okay.
And they don't know, they don't, you know, they don't know enough to advocate for themselves.
They don't speak the language.
They don't have connections.
So you can take advantage of them.
And when they start to realize they're being taken advantage of, if they're not worth paying more money, you fire them and you go.
Basically, there were these like big market areas where you would find people who had just gotten off the boat and you would just hire them up en masse, throw them into sweatshops, work them until they couldn't handle it anymore or until they got sick and died because these filthy apartments crammed full of people sewing, disease spreads pretty like a shitload of people die from disease in these places.
Now, sweatshop work was miserable, but it was also inconsistent.
Most weeks when there was a busy season, workers would be on for at least 80 hours at the low end to more than 100 hours of labor at the high end.
Some of these people made as little as $3 a week if they were new.
Good wages were kind of more like $15 a week.
I think kind of a more common salary was like $7 to $8, something like that.
Many of them were promised good rates, like $15 a week, but found out on payday that the needle and thread they used to make the garments was actually taken out of their paycheck.
So obviously, these are, because these are independent contractors, they're being hired by the big company.
There's a bunch of ways they can fuck over the little guy.
And there's no labor board.
There's no way for people who aren't rich to get justice.
I mean, there's not really a lot of ways to do that now.
Like back then, you had even less options.
There's nobody looking out for these people.
Now, the downside, so the upside of the sweatshop system is that it allows manufacturers to do their jobs for a lot cheaper.
You don't have to rent a big factory.
You don't have to deal with labor problems.
And you don't have to.
One of the really big benefits is you may have hundreds of workers, but they work in dozens of different sweatshops.
None of them know each other.
How the hell are they going to unionize?
You know, they can't.
Does this kind of smell like the gig economy a little bit?
Like, I'm kind of like, smells a little Uber-like.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like, oh, you're, you're a taxi company that don't own no cars.
So, and I gotta, so I gotta pay for all the upkeep for my car.
And so I'm paying for it.
I'm paying for my gas.
I'm paying for all.
Okay.
Yeah.
Not original or new, what Uber and Lyft and their fellow soulless monsters do.
Okay, cool.
I was like, why does this sound so familiar to me?
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
So yeah, this is kind of a gig economy thing.
Now, so those are all the advantages of the sweatshop system, but it has disadvantages too.
One of them is that because you're splitting it up, you're having all these different teams do parts of the whatever garment you're assembling.
Say it's a dress, right?
You have four different teams each doing a part.
You have to transport all of the different parts they're making to one area and have them put together.
It's less efficient, right?
Which means you make less clothing over a longer period of time.
And yeah, the other issue is that like it's dangerous.
Conditions are incredibly cramped, nasty, and very flammable, right?
We're talking fabric, which burns pretty well if you ever lit someone's clothing on fire.
But we're also talking about a shitload of cotton, like processed cotton, which is explosive.
If you've ever like gotten a large amount of cotton and lit that shit, that fucking, that goes off like a boss.
Yeah.
Yeah, very fast.
And there's a bunch of like basically graph paper, tracing paper that you use to like cut out the things, which is also incredibly flammable.
So fires start in these places all the time.
And to kind of give more of a more detail about the conditions of these early sweatshops, I want to read a description of one in the 1890s by a union leader named Bernard Weinstein.
Quote, the boss of the shop lived there with his entire family.
The front room and kitchen were used as workrooms.
The whole family would sleep in one dark bedroom.
The sewing machines for the operators were near the windows of the front door.
The basters would sit on stools near the walls at the center of the room amid the dirt and dust were heaped great piles of materials.
On top of the sofas, several finishers would be working, while the older workers would keep the irons hot and press the finished garments on special boards.
So these are dangerous places.
And whenever there's a fire or something, or whenever you lose workers, you also lose productivity.
So that's the main issue here: it's inefficient.
It's cheap.
It seems so efficient.
Yeah, it seems so, I'm just musty and steamy.
Then the term sweatshop clearly, like, was there, were they dying fabric too?
So was there like a lot of like chemicals around?
Some of these, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of like, again, not long lives in the garment industry.
Yeah, just a bucket of turpentine, just acetone right there in the corner.
Yeah.
It's probably fair to say that few people in this country today, outside of maybe the agricultural industry, work a more dangerous or less healthy gig than sweatshop workers in this period.
It's a bad business.
My mother-in-law in the downtown like garment district for before she retired, that's what she did.
It wasn't a sweat.
We could say definitively it wasn't a sweatshop, you know, but she was definitely a seamstress in downtown and they paid her pennies.
And but her ability, like now, like her ability to make things and to fix them, like I still marvel.
Like she's kind of a mystery.
She still doesn't really speak English.
Well, she does.
She just doesn't like to.
So she's still kind of a mystery to me.
But her ability to like, yeah, her craft, craftsmanship of like, of being a seamstress is still out of this world to me.
And my, my wife still has stories of like, I would be embarrassed about it, but yeah, my mom's like holes in our clothes didn't matter.
But she would never like let us let them see her work environment because it was so awful.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's certainly not a nice job to have now.
Yeah.
But at least it's less flammable.
Yeah.
Yes.
Less flammable.
People understand germ theory better.
There's upsides.
Yes.
So this nightmare industry is the one that Blanc and Harris start in when they move to the United States.
Now, Harris came up, started working in the U.S. in sweatshops filled with other immigrants, and he paid careful attention to the popular fashions of the day and to the different methods of mass production.
Blanc, meanwhile, made a small fortune as one of the most successful contractors in the city.
So Blanc is running sweatshops.
And Harris is like a highly paid, like, because some of these people do make good money, right?
The ones who are doing the really difficult, the technical work, the shit that not that many people can do.
Yeah.
And he's one of those guys.
And the two men meet through marriage in the late 1890s.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in PBS's American Experience here.
Harris and Blanc were compatible, and they decided to enter a partnership that would capitalize on Blanc's business sense and Harris's industry expertise.
In 1900, they founded the Triangle Waste Company and opened their first shop on Wooster Street.
At the turn of the century, the shirtwaist was a new item.
Styled after menswear, shirtwaists were looser and more liberating than Victorian-style bodices, and they were becoming popular with the burgeoning population of female workers in New York City.
Harris knew the details of garment production and the machinery involved in making a cost-effective and worthy product.
Blanc was the salesman, constantly meeting with potential buyers and traveling to stores that carried their product.
They took advantage of new technology, installing mechanical sewing machines, which were five times faster than those run by a foot pedal.
They priced their shirt waists modestly, averaging about $3 each.
And this is all occurring at the same time as the women's liberation movement is really big, right?
This is the period women don't have the right to vote yet, but they're agitating for it.
Women are starting to join the workplace in larger numbers.
And the shirt waist is not just a popular garment that's fashionable.
It's a liberatory garment, right?
It's like a blouse.
It's like a sundress, kind of in some ways, but it is a lot.
If you look at the old Victorian fashion, those like whale bone corsets, those massive dresses that you can't walk through a doorway in, things that limit a woman's ability to move around in the world.
A shirt waist doesn't.
It's comfortable.
You can run in it.
You can exert yourself in it.
And it looks good.
So this is like all kind of happening at the big time.
And Blanc and Harris capitalize on this explosion because the shirt waist 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.
I'm wearing something that I can work in.
I can exert myself in.
I can dance in.
I can live an independent life, not needing to be carried around because my clothing stops me from breathing.
Yo, because whoever's idea was pre this to like to tie another, like some just umbrellas around your waist to make your dress bigger was just who's idea with this?
This is ridiculous.
Yeah.
Now, part of making the garment production cost effective was consolidating for Blank and Harris and some other guys who were kind of like similar thinkers to them, like bigwigs, people who are emerging to be major leaders in the garment industry.
They start to realize the sweatshop isn't the way to go if we're really going to scale this up, right?
It has some benefits.
It makes some things easier on us, but we can't make clothing at the same quality and at the same scale that we could if we had large centralized factories where we're paying for the sewing machine.
So it's not some contractor buying the cheapest foot pump sewing machines.
We've got modern electric ones and rows.
So they start to get factories.
And Harris and Blanc are two early guys who get massive garment factories to make these shirt waists.
In 1902, 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 story we're talking about today is like the classic American story of like what we would now call a sweatshop going up in flames and killing a bunch of people.
It's important to understand that when this factory is started, it is a massive improvement over the original sweatshops and is considered an ultra-modern facility, right?
Wow.
Because it's cleaner, it's nicer, it's bigger, there's room.
It had been built in 1901, so the year before they opened the factory.
Unlike tenements, which are often made out of just like wood and kind of like low-quality materials, this building is mostly made out of steel and iron.
It's advertised as being fireproof by its architects, which is some titanic thinking.
There it is.
Thanks.
It's a building that can burn down.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess if every other building is basically paper-mâché, you're going to be like, yeah, this one, at least this is metal.
So I could see the confidence, but bro, man, can't ever let that come out your mouth.
That's what history teaches you.
Yeah.
You call something unburned downable and it's going to burn down.
That's just how you're going to.
You're asking for it.
Yeah.
That's why I always advertise everything I make as very flammable and dangerous.
You do.
Yes.
This is dangerous.
Be careful.
I do.
So 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 that are kind of like tossed aside as you're making shirt waists.
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.
Wildcat Strike Begins00:06:42
It had poor ventilation.
It was badly lit.
It had incredibly narrow stairwells and it had no functional fire escape.
It had a fire escape, but the fire escape on the building ended directly like 10 feet or something above a basement skylight.
So like we're falling into when they when they build this thing, like the city is like, hey, this fire escape isn't up to code.
And the architect is like, don't worry, we'll fix it, ASAP.
And then nothing happens, right?
It looked pretty on this side.
And look, when you look down from the fire escape, you see that beautiful light coming up.
I'm telling you, it's amazing.
It's an aesthetic choice.
Just like the Titanic.
It's lovely.
Yeah.
Now, the most dangerous thing about the factory may have been that it was tall.
Harris and Blanc rented out the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors.
Now, the reason this is dangerous is that the New York City Fire Department could, their ladders only reached six floors up.
So you can't get water to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, and you can't evacuate people using fire engines from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, right?
Pretty clear problem.
You're playing on the edge, bro.
Yeah.
Now, I just, I noted earlier, the triangle factory was in a lot of ways a huge advancement in terms of just like quality of life for the people working there.
And I don't want to pretend like it's not.
This would have been a significant improvement in a lot of people's eyes.
But that doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of problems outside of being super flammable.
And there was a lot of the fact that now Harris and Blanc and people like them are putting all these workers together in factories.
The benefit of that is they're more productive.
The downside of that for a manager's perspective is now all these guys are talking and they're talking about how much they're getting paid and they're talking about how much the boss is fucking them and they're developing a sense of solidarity.
And what do you get when that happens?
You get motherfucking strikes.
Yep.
Uh-oh.
Unions.
Now, the striking at the Triangle Factory actually predated any kind of garment union existing there.
Their first strike in 1908 was what's called a wildcat strike, which is when workers just go on strike without having a union, right?
And it's actually a big fight because like one of the, so they, we'll talk about that in a minute.
So there's this big wildcat strike in 1908.
And this kind of feeds into a broader trend in the city of New York, which is the center of U.S. garment manufacturing.
And a lot of garment makers are going on strikes, wildcat strikes.
They're starting to form unions 1908, 1909, because they're realizing they're making a small number of people a shitload of money and they're getting treated terribly.
These people had, you know, because they were now inside, you know, these factories that weren't strike proof, they could organize like this.
And one of the problems of this is that like the bigger, when you have these huge factories that are the entire operating profit of these corporations, that actually makes them more vulnerable to strikes because they're paying rent on this massive space.
They're paying for all this electricity.
They're paying every day, even when the workers don't come in.
So the longer you're able to keep workers on strike, the more money you cost the bosses, which provides extra pressure to the bosses.
So the fact that this could, obviously, the bosses consider any kind of strike to be like an existential threat, which leads them to embrace a bunch of union busting tactics.
Now, the most basic tactic involved just the layout of the facility itself.
And in the case of the triangle factory, Harris had designed the layout of the sewing floor specifically to make it hard for workers to have conversations.
That's the first way you try to stop this.
Make it difficult for them to talk to each other, right?
Yeah.
But people find a way to talk to each other.
It's something people are always going to do.
This doesn't work for long.
And as time goes on, the bosses need to develop more advanced tactics to bust unions.
One of them was what's called the inside contractor system.
This was an attempt to merge the benefits of 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 a contractor who they paid a lump sum to make clothing.
And that contractor would hire line workers, which he then paid out of the lump sum.
So, right?
It's an idea.
It's the same basic idea.
If we separate these workers from the corporation, then they're going to be focused on, if they're angry, on this independent contractor who hired them.
And also, he's going to side with us because he's going to be employing these people.
But that's actually not how it worked out.
As a general rule, these inside contractors considered themselves to be workers rather than management.
And they were as liable to go on strike as the workers.
See, I still think, I still think, man, like, I try not to be too reductive for very vastly like, you don't want to oversimplify 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, y'all doing everything except for just pay the workers and treat them well.
Like, if you really want to stop a union, like it's just, if you just 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, this is how much the building costs.
This how much the electricity costs.
This will afford.
Now, are y'all, you know what I'm saying?
Like, we're going to treat you as best as we can.
This is what we got.
Like, anybody reasonable would be like, all right, well, let me make an educated decision and be like, all right, cool.
If that's what y'all can handle, you see, you showed me that's what you can handle.
Okay, work.
But you're talking about you're going to offer some free apps.
I can get, you know what I'm saying?
I can get the hot wings.
I'm like, well, or you could just pay better.
And I just, so, yeah, when I'm like, you coming up with all these schemes and ways to, yeah, redesign the whole floor so y'all don't talk.
Or it's like when a company is, oh, we're going to have a holiday party or we're going to have pizza today.
It's like, or you could pay us.
Yeah, it's like, you know, casual Fridays.
Like, I'm like, or, or, hear me out.
Health insurance.
That's good.
Yeah.
You could just pay as well.
Or a dental plan.
Yeah.
Or maybe, maybe just a dental plan.
It's the edit button on Twitter.
I'm like, you're doing all this stuff.
That shit always works.
Yeah.
Would we be doing great with an edit button on Twitter?
The Edit Button00:04:34
I'm just like, what the hell are these stories?
You going so now you putting all this shit on the thing.
And I'm like, I feel like we've all just been asking for an edit button.
Now, not that I have no horse in the race with this particular example, but I could say for a lot of years, that's all we've been asking of Twitter.
And all this other stuff you're doing is great.
But just, I don't know, man.
Seems simple.
Anyway.
You know what?
Also, simple.
Yeah, it could.
I'm setting you up.
Other products and time for that.
Services that support this podcast.
I'm so sad about it.
What's happening?
You love products.
I mean, I'm just thinking about the way the corporate system works and how we're all kind of a bummer with this engine of death.
Yep.
Yeah.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Strategies Against Unionizing00:15:55
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
And we're having a good time just to just not think about the modern day implications of the things we're talking about here.
Just a good way to do it.
So the owners, we just talked about kind of these, they have a couple of different strategies they use to try to stop workers from unionizing.
And they're not very successful at this because it's really hard to stop people from not identifying 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 associations start as is like fake unions because cops can't unionize.
Obviously, they get the ability to unionize and it's a horrible problem.
But the triangle owners try the same thing.
They make an employee benevolent association, and their hope is that they can use that to siphon off this energy that's going into the union movement and kind of push it somewhere that can't harm their bottom line.
But since the union was run by relatives of Blanc 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 1908, which is the modern equivalent of $30 million.
Both men were extremely comfortable.
They both owned mansions on the west side.
Harris had four family servants.
Blanc had five.
They both had chauffeured 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.
Yeah.
Where you go for Sunday drives.
Yes.
Because you got one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And these guys not only have cars, they have cars and they have drivers.
And the Triangle 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 doing this shit.
It's the same thing with like McDonald's today or whatever.
They're not clamping down on employee organizing.
Same with McDonald's.
They're not clamping down on salaries because it's the only way to be profitable.
They're doing it because they want to have fortunes.
Now, what was happening to the Triangle factory was emblematic of an explosion across the garment industry.
A handful of tycoons were becoming unfathomably wealthy, where thousands of workers made as little as $3 a week for more than 80 hours of painstaking labor.
And I'm going to quote from PBS again.
Harrison Blanc's factory was competing with over 11,000 other textile manufacturers in New York City.
In order to retain their high profit level, they had to produce the cheapest shirt waist 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 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, oh my gosh, I think back to our episode on the Yucca Bolano supermarket fire.
Yes, super flammable workspace always has a locked exit.
Yeah.
That's got to come into play.
Yeah.
What is that term called a secure, like a secure pinch?
Like, I forget what that term is.
A choke point.
Yeah.
A choke point.
Yeah.
You created a choke point because you worried about these ladies stealing needles and thread.
All right.
Got it.
Put everybody life in danger.
So, yeah, now everyone's endangered.
Yay.
But they're not thinking about that.
And to be fair, one of the things I should note here: we're talking about all of this unionizing, and 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 to be a lot of fun.
It's not a safety conscious period.
Yeah.
The thought hasn't crossed.
Yeah.
I had, I, you, dude, what an important context wrinkle.
Yeah.
Is like safety's not on anyone's mind.
That's crazy.
Like, I forgot about that.
Like, that ain't even crossed their mind.
I mean, there are, I'm not going to say it's not on anyone's mind because there are, there are garment fires.
Like the month before the triangle shirt waste fire, there's a horrible fire that kills like 26 people.
And I'm sure there are individuals who are like, we need to, but, but when you're talking about the broader union movement, safety is not one of the things they're pushing for in a big way.
Yeah.
And this, again, this is the point at which a work week is 80 to like 110 hours.
So they like their concern is like, it's a relief if I die on the job because I don't have to do another week, you know?
Like, because I ain't got to be here for another 17 hours.
God dumb.
Yeah.
So that's not really the focus of the, when we're talking about the complaints the workers have, poor safety isn't really one of them.
I'm guessing if your other option is like, okay, I could either stay here in New York and do this 80-hour week in this building or I could go down to Virginia and dig in a coal mine.
That seem a lot more dangerous than this.
So I guess if you're talking relatively, it's like, well, I'm not working with dynamite.
Dang.
Yeah.
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's slammable, but nobody's actively trying to beat me to death with my own baby.
Yes.
Yes.
You're not beat.
Yes.
Yeah.
In a cut.
Yeah.
And Russia was so late to the game to modernize 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.
Life was just.
The 1900s was dangerous.
This is a fucked up time.
Yeah.
It's just dangerous.
Yes.
So in the fall of 1909, a new union had gotten started among New York garment workers, headed by a bold young woman named Clara Lemlick.
Over the course of the year, Lemlick had unionized garment workers from other factories, large and small, and successfully brought many of them, many of their employers to the table to increase wages.
The big thing Limlich and her fellow unionists were fighting for was a 52-hour work week.
So that's the like, again, eventually this feeds into the this massive nationwide fight for the 40-hour work week.
At the time, they're like, the work week is 80 plus hours.
They're like 52.
That sounds relaxing.
Damn, a 52-hour workweek being a break.
Let's go.
Yeah, 40% more than a standard work week for an American today was like, woo, this will be nice.
This is great.
Although a lot of Americans work, you know, that much these days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not to minimize that.
But at the time, the idea that you would only have to work 52 hours was like something worth fighting for.
And they were also fighting for more regular and fairer pay scales, right?
They wanted to know exactly what they were getting and not have these surprise, like, oh, you've got to pay for the thread.
Like they were fighting for all of this shit.
And yeah, they were fighting for a survivable wage.
The minimum wage isn't really a big buzzword at this time, but that's kind of, they're fighting for within their industry, that kind of an idea.
Now, Blanc and Harris first fought back against this by threatening to fire any employees who joined the union that Limlich had created because their justification was that it was competing with their fake in-house union.
They followed through on the promise, shuttering their factory and publicly soliciting new employees in local papers when the union drive started.
The triangle workers decided to strike in response.
This meant that the workers who had been there, Limlich and them are like, okay, don't come to work.
We'll hire new workers.
Fuck you.
And the workers are like, well, we'll surround the factory and we won't let these new employees in.
We'll block them off so the scabs can't enter.
Like, that's what a strike is in this period.
It's not just not working, it's stopping the factory from being able to work.
Now, this happened a number of times in like 1909 through 1910.
And in a number of cases, these kind of attempts to blockade the factory ended with these horrific street battles.
And that happened with the Triangle Factory.
This is happening in other factories too, right?
This is a broad trend across New York.
The Triangle Factory is particularly large.
And so what happens there is particularly significant.
Now, you got to remember: almost all of the strikers here are young women.
And Block and Harris countered them.
So you've got all these young female strikers blocking the factory to stop scabs from going in.
So Block and Harris hire a bunch of scabs, but in order to get the scabs in, they need to fight their way through these women blockading the factory.
And the way they do that is by hiring a phalanx of pimps and prostitutes to act as the tip of the spear and assault these team workers.
Oh my God.
That is heartless.
Wow.
Well, because they're like, you're talking, if you're talking about a prostitute in 1909 New York, you're talking about a hard lady.
Yes, you're talking about a woman who carries a couple of knives on her and she hates him, you know?
Yeah, that lady's scary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's that's why they hire them.
And they are scary and they beat the shit out of these striking workers.
It's really ugly.
And the police show up and basically fight alongside the prostitutes and pimps and arrest a bunch of the striking workers while turning a blind eye.
Because this is, we're not going to get into this a lot.
And Dave Vondreu does a good job in his book Triangle of talking about Tammany Hall, the big corrupt political situation.
At this point in time, you could argue it's not all that different now.
The gangsters, the pimps, the prostitutes, and the cops can all be on the same side a lot of the time because they're all part of this incredibly corrupt criminal government of New York City that can just as easily call up gangsters as it can cops because they're the same thing, you know?
Yes, yeah, same seeds.
Yeah.
This is such a rad time.
Just wild, wild west.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, yeah.
You just as much, yeah, you know, Joey Toofingers is just as much going to get a call from the governor as he is from his mom.
You know what I'm saying?
To be like, yeah, let's do, let's just run down.
This is crazy.
What a time to live in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We've got to get the squad on the street.
We got to help these prostitutes beat up a bunch of garment workers.
That's just the way things work.
Working moms.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
They're all working moms, probably.
Yeah, for sure.
This is a huge street fight between a bunch of working women.
Now, Blanc and Harris were not the only factory owners who hired cops or gangsters to attack strikers, but they were among the most brutal and committed.
Now, during this period, a shitload of smaller manufacturers are willing to negotiate just a few days into the strike.
They don't have the kind of financial resources Triangle does.
They can see that, like, okay, they're not really asking.
Like, it's not going to stop us from being profitable.
Let's just give in and we can get back to making clothing and shit.
The triangle owners, Blanc and Harris, hold their ground.
Obviously, they hire police to beat up strikers on a bunch of occasions, but that starts to backfire because, again, these laborers are all young women and you have these cops just beating them bloody in the street and arresting them.
And that doesn't look good.
Like that shit 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 for a while.
Know they never entirely stop, 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 lady 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 a wealthy woman movement, like these 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 them.
Yes, um, a number of them are really wealthy widows, um, and they start getting together and raising funds.
Um, and part of what some of the funds are to help these women pay their rent, pay buy 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 J.P. 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.
Yeah, there are some, there's this one woman in particular who would show up every night after the arrests to bail these women out when they got their bail set.
And one night, because so many women got arrested, she runs out of cash and she mortgages her mansion in order to bail these ladies out.
Damn.
So, there is some pretty rad solidarity happening too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, and so Blanc knows, like these Blanc and Harris, they're not dumb.
They know that things are starting to go against them.
Public opinion's going against them at this point.
And the only way to get public opinion back on your side is with a 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 the side of the bosses in this period.
And we could argue today.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
Here we go.
So, Blanc succeeds in getting a New York Times reporter to feature him in a story that shows his factory full of workers despite the strike.
And these guys, no, see, they're happy.
It's just some bad.
And in the article, this won't sound familiar to anybody, but Blanc through the New York Times basically says, Look at how happy all of my workers are.
The only reason these poor, deluded women are striking is because of outside agitators who have both there.
He did a few bad apples and out.
Yeah, damn.
Man, the never changed.
The playbook, the playbook is undefeated.
We pull it from the same playbook in 1901, fool.
Dang, yeah, it's very funny.
Yeah.
And yeah, and so they have put out this New York Times article.
They do this press blitz, and they also start to try to organize with their fellow business owners.
And right around this period of time, they write a letter to a group of their fellow factory owners.
Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation.
Wait, actually, I'm going to use my old Tommy voice.
Yeah, old Tommy.
Gentlemen, come on.
You are aware of the agitation that is now going on in our shops.
Our satisfied workers are being molested and interfered with.
The so-called union is now preparing to call a general strike.
In order to prevent this irresponsible union from gaining the upper hand, let us know as soon as you possibly can if you would be willing to form and join an employers' mutual protection association.
Fracturing Union Movement00:09:50
So they make a union for the bosses in order to fight the union of the workers.
Which is not dumb.
We got a union too.
To give up the old looks like unionizing works.
Yeah.
Now, this still exists today.
We call it the federal government, but that's a story for another day.
Yo, you slid that one in.
That's the smoothest slide in.
Yeah, you slid that one in good.
Man.
So, Blanc and Harris, yeah, respond to this unionization effort by basically making their own union for rich assholes.
And part of their rage at their workers' efforts to unionize comes from the fact that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was, as I've said, by most standards, a very progressive and safe factory.
It's considered that in its time.
Blanc and Harris also, these guys were not born rich.
Again, these are dirt poor Jewish immigrants who come to the U.S. fucking desperate.
They know what it is to be poor, and they don't have any kind of class solidarity, obviously, but they consider it a personal attack that their employees unionize against them, right?
So they don't have any solidarity for their workers as former workers, but they're offended that their workers don't treat them like fellow workers and treat them.
Damn, like, hey, come on, come on, I'm one of the guys.
I'm one of the girls.
Got a car.
You're dying of typhus.
We're the same.
Come on, man.
As poor too.
You got to work hard.
Fuck up, man.
I'm on.
Yeah, nah, I'm good, bro.
So that's crazy.
What?
What?
What do we miss?
I'm laughing at Prop.
I'm good, bro.
I'm good, bro.
I'm good.
Yeah.
It's like, because that's the way I would feel about it.
Cause I, it's funny to me that, like it messed with they, it messed with their identity and they pride where 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, y'all not happy with our, y'all not happy with our building.
Like nah fam nah, you're not.
That's that.
That's crazy.
Yeah nah, i'm good, yep.
So, in addition to hiring cops and gang members to beat strikers, Blanc and Harris, who the the the, the term they're known by the name, they're known by this period is the shirtwaist kings, because they're, like the, the biggest shirtwaist dudes in the city.
In 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 idea is, it's the colonialism thing right?
It's what Britain did in Africa.
You got, you have this population united against you.
You got to split them along ethnic lines or religious lines, and they try to do both.
It doesn't work.
In this period, the Italians and the Jews stick together to the bosses um, which is a nice tale, um.
So yeah uh, the triangle bosses also tried to bribe their remaining employees, the ones who refused to strike, with good times they would start holding dance parties during lunch and give out food and prizes.
So they do also try to treat the workers who don't strike better in order to like, stop them from striking.
But that's kind of a minimum aspect of what they're actually trying in this period.
So yeah, obviously none of this stops the strike.
The violence in the streets continues uh, and peace would kind of.
You know, you would have this this period where like, peace would return after a bad skirmish and then, a few days later, strikebreakers would be sent into crackheads and the cycle would start again.
Um yeah uh, at one point the judges get angry that the, the rich ladies who'd banded together to back this union um, were bailing everyone out.
So they start sending arrested strikers to do weeks of hard labor in a penal colony and the strikers start like making badges and awards to give women who do time in the penal colony for the movement and stuff.
It's kind of a way to you got to reward people who go through this, let's go.
Yeah, that's kind of do it.
Yeah, yeah Now, as time wears on, Blanc and Harris decided, like, they do get beaten down by this to a degree, and they decided they're willing to come to the table and grant their workers most of their demands.
So they're willing to give into the 52-hour work week.
They're willing to raise wages.
The only thing they're not willing to do is give in to the union's key demands.
So this, the W, the WTUL, which is the union these women form all across New York City for garment workers, one of the things they're trying to get is an agreement from all of these shops to be union-only shops.
In other words, they won't hire anyone who isn't a part of the union, which obviously makes the union more powerful.
And that's the one thing.
Eventually, even Blanc and Harris are willing to come to the table on everything else.
And because Blanc and Harris have a union of factory owners, they're able to get a lot of other big factories to resist this push to make it a union-only shop.
What's called a closed shop.
Now, meanwhile, the fact that all of these owners had been willing to grant the other demands, this starts to upset the wealthy liberal ladies who had adopted the garment workers' strike as a cause.
And they're like, well, why do you need it to be a union-only shop, right?
Haven't you gotten enough?
Isn't it time for this to be over?
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
So that's a factor to it.
And 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 gotten enough?
There's also a lot of anger from the extreme leftist organizers in the movement because they're really unhappy as soon as these rich kind of liberal ladies show up and start throwing their money around.
And they're like, well, hey, this is supposed to be a class movement against the rich.
Like, why are we celebrating these rich 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.
And in addition to all of that, there's frustration among more moderate union organizers because a lot of union organizers in this period are not socialists.
There's a lot of socialists in the movement, but like Samuel Gompers, who's the head of the AFL, the American Federation, he's the biggest union head, is anti-socialist, but he's a union man.
So there's a lot there.
And the union organizers who aren't socialists are angry because a lot of the more radical socialists, who are some of the best and most dedicated organizers, want to make this strike more than just 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 achieve most of its goals.
They get the 52-hour work week.
They get wages raised.
They get a couple of other things, but it also fractures before they get everything that they want, which is usually how things go, right?
Yeah, I mean, that's what's 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 that, again, is also, wow, that's not familiar.
Of like.
No, never happened before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It 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 toddl, my, my five-year-old is like, hey, can someone watch, you know, TV with me?
And I'm like, I'll watch TV with you.
She's like, not you.
And I'm like, wait, what?
She's like, I want mommy to watch TV with me.
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, you only the disrespect.
I do not have nobody's a daddy's girl in my house.
It's the worst.
But the idea of being like, just the complication of like whose movement is this?
I say, I'll just say, like, whose movement is this?
And that's where when the whole like the play of the outside agitator play, that's where you're like, well, well, crap, dude.
Like, you kind of got a point there because y'all outside of this are saying this is your cause.
And so you got this bigger cause.
In the meantime, these ladies who are actually doing the work are like, I don't know what all y'all arguing about.
We just, I don't want to work for 80 hours.
And like, that's what I'm here for.
And I see how, and we really can use your money.
I don't care how much dope that you got money for us.
Like, yeah, thank you.
You know what I'm saying?
And you saying, wait, so you're saying we shouldn't take their money?
So I'm like, 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, well, crap, dude.
Like, fuck, well, none of y'all work here.
Like, you know, like, we actually work.
It's so the color of that.
Yeah.
And, you know, everybody's got a point, right?
Everybody, everyone's got a point.
Yeah, the point, you know, these rich ladies, they do have a point when they're like, you guys have gotten a lot.
Like, maybe, and people haven't been working for months that people keep getting arrested and beaten.
Maybe it's time to just take what you can get.
The socialists have a point where they're like, but this doesn't fix nearly everything.
And you don't really, it's not really your place to say when we should settle because you're never going to have to settle.
You're rich.
And then the kind of more moderate laborers are right when they're have a point when they're like, well, we don't want this to be a big, this isn't about socialism for us.
This is about not working 80 hours a week.
And like, that's kind of where my interest in it ends.
Insurance Broker Policies00:16:08
Yeah.
You know, I'm some 19 year old who just got here and I just want my life to be less miserable.
And nobody, I'm not trying.
I'm trying.
I hope I'm not portraying anyone as right or wrong here.
This is just what happens, you know?
Yeah, that's my point.
Along these lines.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's my point of like the color of life, where it's like, it's like, like, history's in living color.
And that's what it is, where it's like, you got all these different positions and you can't, you can't look at it and be like, they're right, they're wrong, they're right, they're wrong.
It's just so complicated.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
It's just, yeah, it's just how things happen.
Now, this kind of peters out.
They get more or less a win in early 1910.
And for the next 13 months or so, life returns to kind of a semblance of normal in the garment industry at the, and especially at the triangle shirt waste factory.
Production resumes.
People get back to work with more reasonable hours and more money.
Some things had changed.
There'd been significant wins.
But obviously, as I noted, nobody was fighting for improved safety here because they thought the factory was pretty safe, or at least compared to what they had been used to.
And another thing that didn't really change was the greed of Blanc and Harris and their fellow bosses.
Now, we've talked a lot about how flammable garment factories are.
And one of the things that had been done by Harris, who said because he was a great, he knew how to tailor and stuff, had set out the layout of this factory is he had designed the floor of the factory so that the cutters, and these are the people who are like cutting out the different sort of like scraps that get sewn together.
These are the people who produce the most waste scrap and waste paper.
So these guys all do their work on these enormous tables.
And one of Harris's innovations is to put trash waste baskets underneath the table.
So you can just sweep your waste right into the right under the table.
Very efficient.
This also means that you get hundreds of pounds of cotton and tracing paper and cloth crammed together loosely so that there's air in between all of them underneath these tables, which basically makes them fuel air bombs.
Yeah.
I was like, wait.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So everyone knew these were horrific fire hazards.
The Triangle Factory had two noteworthy accidental fires, and I'm specifying accidental.
I'll explain why here.
Prior to 1911, one of which was put out by Harris himself.
Buckets of water were stationed around the factory floor.
A hose that was supposed to work was kept near the cutting table, although it had been allowed to rust shut.
Most significantly, though, the building did not have a sprinkler system, and the workers did not participate in fire drills.
Now, neither of these things were required in garment factories under New York law in 1911, but sprinklers were widely available.
In fact, starting in the 1880s, they'd become required in New England cotton mills alongside firewalls and fireproof doors to create safe zones for employees in the event of a blaze.
Cotton mills, as we've said, cotton's explosive, basically, very dangerous places.
In the 1880s, all of these things come to cotton mills, and cotton mills suddenly become pretty safe places to work by comparison.
But this doesn't get required in garment factories, even though they're dealing with a lot of the same materials.
Now, part of the reason why these weren't put in the factories has to do with greed, and not the kind of greed you think.
A lot of times, people 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, colluded together because these guys make their money when you sell a policy as an insurance broker, you get a percentage of the value of that sale.
That's how you make your money.
So, you make more money if you sell more policies, which means you don't want to be denying anybody policies.
And normally, the way you'd think about an insurance policy, the safer your building is, the more safety measures like sprinklers you have in your building, the lower insurance premiums are.
But if your insurance premiums are lower, that means the broker gets less money.
So, the broker doesn't want to give you, they want to have a lot of insurance policies for dangerous buildings.
They don't want safety measures in because that means they get less money.
So, I'm going to quote again from the book Triangle, the Fire That Changed America here.
I know it's pretty fucked.
The hustle everywhere.
Damn.
Yeah, yeah.
And one of the things, so these brokers are all colluding together.
And the brokers are not the insurance companies, right?
The brokers work for the companies, but the insurance company is the ones on the line.
The broker doesn't pay when there's a fire.
And one of the ways in which the brokers kind of get over the fact that what they're doing should be in the worst interest of the insurance company is they get, they basically split up the risk for each of these insurance policies among multiple insurance companies.
So that if a factory has a horrible fire that destroys a bunch of stuff, every company only pays a little bit of money and the brokers get as much money still because they're selling as many.
So they're sharing the risk because none of them have to work in these factories.
They don't give a shit how many people die.
They just care that they keep selling policies.
So I'm going to quote from Triangle, the fire that changed America here.
Blanc and Harris were perfect examples of this skewed system.
Few factory owners paid higher rates than they did.
And as a result, they commanded the loyalty of the most powerful brokerage in town.
The triangle owners were so-called rotten risks in insurance parlance because they kept having fires and not just little ones that could be put out by hand.
They were repeaters, having collected on several substantial claims.
And yet they had little difficulty buying all the insurance they wanted.
Some of these repeat fires were likely deliberate.
In April of 1902, Blanc and Harris called the fire department about a fire.
The NYFD arrived a little too late to save the inventory of the factory, which burnt in its entirety.
Thankfully, no workers were present at the time.
Blanc and Harris collected a hefty insurance payment.
Six months later, they had another fire, also early enough in the morning that no workers were present.
Blanc and Harris collected $32,000 in damage from both fires.
Both blazes occurred at the end of the busy season, which was the part of the year in which factory owners who had overestimated demand for their product tended to wind up with a bunch of extra inventory they couldn't sell.
So these very convenient fires happened right at the time when they needed to get rid of excess inventory.
In 1907, there were two more fires at another factory that they owned, and they followed the same pattern.
So these guys are starting fires to destroy their excess inventory and collecting the insurance on stuff they can't sell.
That's part of how they stay profitable.
And then you and if you split the insurance among multiple guests, like everybody's happy.
Everybody's happy.
Except for the people that'll 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 because the brokers collect a bounty on each new policy.
Now, some the insurance companies aren't always happy about this because this does cost them money, but the brokers are fine with this shit.
And garment factory owners are like this becomes a crucial part of their business.
It protects them from the kind of fickle whims of the industry.
Because, you know, then, as I think now, the fashion industry hinges on what happens in Paris that year.
So if you are geared up to make a bunch of top hats or coattails or whatever, and then some fucker in Paris decides that's not the hot item, you have a bunch of shit you can't sell and you got to light it on fire.
Yeah, you can.
Yeah.
It's the trucker hat.
Sophie and I do the same thing with podcasts we can't air.
Yeah.
You just got to light it on fire.
Yeah.
You got to light it on fire.
Remember the trucker hat craze?
Dude.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm like, what about the guy that like sitting on a box of trucker hats?
Too bad you can't.
The Von Dutch joints.
Yeah, you got to burn them things, dog.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of Von Dutch hats going around in Iraq or someplace now.
It's like with all of the old shirts from political candidates that wind up in Ecuador someplace.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, um, Blanc and Harris, again, not the only business owners who do this.
This is the norm in the industry.
But the fact that such a practice is the norm means that factory owners, like insurance brokers, have a vested interest in avoiding fire prevention measures.
Sprinklers can't discriminate between a safe, intentional fire meant to create an insurance payment or an accidental fire.
And if you disable your sprinklers before you carry out an intentional fire, that looks suspicious and you'll get in trouble with the cops.
Yeah.
Now it's arson.
Yeah.
Now it's arson.
So you don't want to have sprinklers because you rely on being able to start fires.
Now, as it happened, 1911 was the year that Paris turned on the shirtwaist.
Demand dropped and so many manufacturers were burning their wares that one large insurance company had to cancel their policies with all shirtwaist makers.
Blanc and Harris stayed insured though.
And in fact, they were overinsured.
They were paying enormous rates to carry more insurance than the actual value of the content of the factory.
Why they did this?
Because this costs them a lot of money.
Up until you get the payout, you're spending a lot of money.
Dave Vondrell, who wrote the book Triangles, a very good journalist.
The reason he suspects both of these men did this is that they were planning, because again, these guys own a bunch of factories, right?
They have multiple companies making 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, put it in the triangle factory, and light it on fire for an insurance payment with several million modern dollars.
Yeah.
Hence, Vondrell 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 suspiciously conscious of the issue.
So they're not even willing to do fire drills because it might make it look like they're expecting a fire because they're absolutely planning to burn this fucker down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What a strange interrogation, though, to where it was like, hey, why were y'all doing fire drills?
It's like, just in case there was a, I mean, there might have been a fire.
I don't understand why this was like, nobody else, they didn't do no fire drills.
It's fine over there.
It's interesting you started doing fire drills right before your house.
Thank caught on fire.
Like, why wouldn't you play it cool enough to be like, yeah, and thank God we did it.
Like, you know, we saved a lot of lives.
We saved a lot of lives while we did it.
You know, man, yeah.
When you got a hustle, though, when you, when you working on, trying to hit a lick, man, you got to think 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 a disaster happened because it's not a disaster.
It's a plan.
Yep.
Was it one of those, like, like you said, everybody was doing it?
Was this one of those like, yeah, like worst kept secrets in the city?
Like, everybody knew everybody else set their own thing.
Yeah.
People, the journalists write about it.
Everyone knows this goes down.
Right.
This is not like, obviously, none of these rich guys are admitting it, but it's not.
Nobody is.
Yeah.
Nobody thinks this isn't happening.
So this brings us to the fire.
All right.
On March 25th, 1911, there were roughly 600 workers in the triangle factory in the late afternoon when closing time came for the workday.
The fire started at one of the cutting tables.
Remember how I described these tables?
These are basically giant fuel air bombs that people work at.
The table had been prepped for the next day of work, which meant it had 120 layers of tissue paper and fabric on top of it, and then hundreds of pounds of scraps in the waste bin beneath it.
Now, for obvious reasons, smoking was banned in the factory.
Yes, yes.
But these cutters, remember, the cutters are the most important part of the whole operation.
These are some of the only men working there.
They're the most highly paid workers.
They're irreplaceable, right?
Because number one, the guys who were cutting from the big fabric swaths to make the things that people sew together, if they're good at their job, they waste less fabric, which saves you money.
If they're good at their job, they put out more stuff faster, which allows you to make more.
So these guys, it's in no the owners ban smoking in the factory, but also nobody wants to make these guys unhappy because they don't have to work here.
They can go elsewhere, right?
They can get money anywhere.
So as best as we can tell, one of them was smoking.
One of them smoked a cigarette or a cigar.
We don't really know, but he's, he snuck a smoke, which was very common.
It had caused some minor fires before.
And they either tossed, they either put out their match and tossed it in the wastebasket, which is filled with hundreds of pounds of cotton, fabric, and paper, or they toss their cigarette button.
And they probably put it out first, but all it would take is a single ember, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it may have just been that.
It may have been somebody put it out.
They thought they were being careful.
They toss it in.
And there's one little red ember the size of a fucking hair follicle.
And that's what starts all this.
And whatever it is, it catches.
And it fucking goes up like a, like a, it is a firebomb, basically.
Yeah.
Now, workers rush 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 initially attempts to stop the blaze and then helps rescue dozens of people.
It's possible, as heroic as he was, that he got people killed because he tried to stop the fire rather than immediately focusing on evacuation.
Because by the time this thing starts, it's fucked.
The only thing to do.
And again, a lot of lives, and I'm not blaming that guy, but a lot of lives would have been saved if they practiced evacuations because that's the only thing that you can't put this fucker out once it starts.
They don't have the equipment.
Workers grab pails of water to try to put out the blaze.
Some of them are empty, you'll hear.
But even if they hadn't been, I don't think it would have helped.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in history.com here.
The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut.
As the fire grew, panic ensued, and the hose might have helped.
The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator, but it could hold only 12 people, and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amidst the heat and flames.
In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths.
The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises.
When they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive.
They find dozens of bodies next to this door, just like bumped together.
Within 18 minutes, it was all over.
49 workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke.
36 were dead in the elevator shaft, and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks, with two more later dying from their injuries.
A total of 146 people were killed by the fire.
Oh.
Now, Dave Von Drell goes into much more detail about the fire and the heroism of the people.
Like these elevator attendants are incredibly brave because they're riding an elevator up into flames, licking at their heads to try and save as many people as they possibly can.
Yeah, when you tell me we did four trips.
They were stuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They could have gotten stuck on any one of those and burned.
Incredibly brave people.
There's a lot of very brave people.
Now, again, a big part of why so many people die is that Blanc and Harris had locked the main exit so that because their employees were getting ready to leave, they wanted to search them before they left to make sure nobody was stealing shit.
But maybe the bigger problem was the fire escape, which we'd already talked about didn't really work.
So people 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 my God.
Brave People After Fire00:02:44
And, you know, it's just horrible.
In the weeks that followed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, workers' safety suddenly became a matter of paramount concern for union organizers and for the local government.
There is an outrage against this.
Like 100,000 people take to the streets.
There's mass demonstrations against this.
People demand new fire safety codes and more fire inspectors.
In October of 1911, just months after the disaster, the United Association of Safety Engineers was founded.
A fire prevention law was passed that same month, which required all factories in New York City to install sprinkler systems in their buildings.
Now, one of the people who had been passing by on the street at the time and who watched, didn't just see the fire, watched dozens of women leap to their deaths and splatter on the fucking pavement.
One of the people who sees this is a woman named Frances Perkins.
Frances Perkins, 20 years later or so, becomes the U.S. Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Wow.
Now, shook her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Perkins mentions the Triangle fire constantly in the speeches she gives when she's made Secretary of Labor and repeatedly recalls the moment when she watches these women leap to their deaths to avoid burning alive.
Quote from Francis, they couldn't hold on any longer.
There was no place to go.
The fire was between them and any means of exit.
It's that awful choice people talk of.
What kind of choice to make?
I shall never forget the frozen horror that came across as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing there was no help.
So this becomes, this is like her, she makes it her life quest to never be that helpless in the face of a disaster like this again.
And as Secretary of Labor, Perkins establishes the Factory Investigating Commission, which lobbies for stronger safety measures and makes sure factories are meeting certain minimum safety standards.
She serves for 12 years, during which she is key in forming and implementing not just reforms of safety, she helps push the Social Security Act through.
She helps to create unemployment insurance.
She pushes for the establishment of the minimum wage, and she legislates the guarantee for the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain.
Perkins also establishes the Labor Standards Bureau, which is focused on ensuring employees meet certain employers meet certain minimum safety standards.
In 1970, the Labor Standards Bureau becomes OSHA.
Whoa.
So that was just pivotal for her.
Yeah, I mean, this is the defining moment of her life in some ways.
Obviously, how could you watch this and have it not be, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it could have gone the opposite way where she could have, but for it to turn into activism is like, man, that's amazing.
Cheaper to Pay Fines00:05:50
So, of course, the sheer level of outrage around the fire ensured that there were immediate calls to charge Blanc and Harris for manslaughter.
Both tycoons immediately poured money into an advertising campaign dedicated to buffing their image as a safe and reliable garment manufacturer.
Reporters from the New York Times met with Harris in his home and dutifully reported his defense of his actions and claims that he had taken proper precautions.
None of this succeeded in assuaging public rage.
On April 11th, both men were indicted for manslaughter.
Since most of the safety features their factory lacked were not mandated by law, the case came down to the question of whether or not they had legally locked the exits.
From a write-up in Forbes, quote, Max Stewart, one of the top defense attorneys of his day, poked holes in the witness's testimony and made it appear that a key witness's story had been rehearsed.
On December 27th, the all-male jury returned a verdict of not guilty after less than two hours of deliberation.
Isaac Harris and Max Blanc dropped limply into their chairs as their wives began sobbing quietly just behind them, writes Vondrell 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.
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?
The brand has been poisoned.
Yeah, your brand's burnt, bro.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Harris and Blanc struggled financially as all of the funds they did make had to go straight to the debt they had to their lawyer.
They were sued in 1912 over their failure to pay a $206 water bill.
However, the tough times did not last long.
Late in 1912, they get the insurance payout from the Triangle shirtwaist fire.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
They collect a total of $60,000, which is a fuckload of money in 1912 and is more than the fire had cost them in damages.
Now, they have to pay restitution to the families of the dead, but they just have to pay a week's salary, which is like 10 or 15 bucks at most for most of these women.
So they walk away from the fire because of the insurance payout.
They profit about $400 per victim.
Oh, oh, man.
To say it like that.
We made like four bucks per dead person.
Damn.
Yeah.
God, it's just the empire strikes back always.
Yeah, baby.
Bro, you know, a 100% avoidable disaster ends up making you money.
And these guys don't learn a goddamn thing.
Of course.
In 1913, the next year after they get their payment, Blanc, who's running another factory, is issued a warning from an inspector because now there's inspectors.
So an inspector checks out this new triangle factory and it finds that he's locked the door of the factory again during work hours.
The thing that he successfully got off on in court, he's caught doing again.
The same thing.
So the triangle factory burned.
Now he got the parallelogram factory and he locked the door again because, I mean, I did.
It's like, it kind of sucked for a little bit, but we kind of made some money, guys.
He does get fined $20 for this.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, you know.
Yeah.
And a couple months after that, he's, he's fined again when another factory inspector finds that he's he's lined the walls with scrap baskets that basically make the whole thing a death trap.
Cause the bomb.
So yeah.
Yeah, that causes it.
He does it again.
He does it again.
What's that thing with Ford?
The car we everybody used to make fun of.
Oh, the pinto.
Yeah, the pinto that like when they where they put the gas, where they put the gas tank was means like it's going to become a bomb.
And Ford decided it's just cheaper to just pay whatever fines if people die rather than reclaim them and remake them all.
I forget what that was called, but there's a term for it.
But that's what this reminds me of where it's like, I mean, it's cheaper to just pay the fine than to like make the factory safe.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's wild, God.
It's pretty great.
It's pretty great.
In 1914, both Harris and Blanc were fined when they were caught sewing fake Consumers League labels into their garments.
Now, these labels were a legacy of the Triangle Fire.
They were meant to certify that a factory had safe conditions for its laborers.
So obviously everyone gets horrified by unsafe work conditions.
They develop this way to show that like your factory is safe.
And these guys fake having that label so they can pretend they're a safe.
Yeah, yeah.
There is nothing new, dude.
Like how many times you picked up something?
Like, is this organic?
Is this grass-fed?
Yeah, look, it's the same right here on the label.
Yeah.
Yep.
Now, in 1918, though, they do finally shut down the triangle company.
It just never makes as much money as it had before for obvious reasons.
Yeah.
Isaac Harris goes back to working as a tailor and Blanc continues to own other garment factories.
Neither of them pay anything that we would reasonably call a price for what they've done.
Piece of shit.
Wow.
Cheaters Prosper Always00:07:21
So good times, huh, buddy.
Hey, I think the lesson here is that cheating, cheaters prosper.
That's the lesson.
Cheaters do fucking great.
Cheaters make out like gangbusters.
Cheaters win.
So, you know, if you want to learn anything useful from this, just remember to lock the factory door in the fire hazard of a garment factory in your life.
Whatever that is for you.
Lock that door.
Make sure the fire escape isn't functional, you know?
Yeah.
Just make sure to show that you're trying because if you show that you're trying, that means you're cheating.
Yeah.
If you're trying, you're guilty.
Yes.
Got it.
This is a disaster.
And that's my motto.
Don't try because trying means you're guilty.
Well, prop, that's going to do it for us at Behind the Bastards today.
How are you?
How are you doing?
I am that same sinking feeling that every guest has at the end of a show to where you're like, man, I'm glad I got through that.
Now I have to think about this for the next until I go to bed.
Oh, I was like, wait, are we going to an ad break at the end?
No, no, okay.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Hood politics with prop, man.
Man, I like, I'm so excited about being able to like have a consistent like flow of content that like now I'm getting so far ahead of myself.
So like some of the stuff I'm talking about.
I have like 10 episodes.
I'm going to come out until three weeks from now.
So I'm like, well, crap, dude.
How do I stay hot?
But man, hood politics with prop got some great episodes in the can.
We're covering everything.
Like Joe Biden's from Long Beach.
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 podcast.
You're welcome.
Yeah.
Yes, it is weekly podcast.
It's a podcast as regular as Garment Fires in early 1900s New York.
And old tiny guys that always make it out on top.
Yeah.
Always, always handle it.
And hiring gangsters and prostitutes to beat up workers.
Yeah.
It's the American way.
I do want that TV show.
I was going to say that has to be, that has to be a show.
Yeah.
There has to be some character in that, like, where the lady was getting, getting her ass beat by this prostitute.
And she comes up with the idea of like, maybe I should just, maybe I should quit this factory thing and become a prostitute.
Like, and she just like switches sides because she's like, she'll.
Well, we, uh, I wrote a book.
It's called After the Revolution.
You can find the podcast version of that book with sound effects by our own Daniel if you type After the Revolution into whatever fucking thing your podcasts come the fuck from.
It's really good.
That's recommended.
You'll be able to.
Lovely.
I'm excited about that, man.
It's really, I mean, the book, it's really good, and the podcast is really good.
And Robert's really good.
So should be excited.
You can also find the E-Pub version.
Yeah.
You can find the E-Pub for free online.
Okay.
This is so much fun.
This guy breaks into a yawn.
I was about to like, let me tell you something, dad, because, you know, I'm publishing a book too.
And like, as good as you are, like, I thought about, man, just like the way that you guys, as well as y'all write, and the way that y'all tore up 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 writing this thing.
Now, granted, it's definitely not as bad as that.
There's all, every book anyone's ever written has draggable things.
But I think what really makes you draggable is being Ben Shapiro.
Yeah.
He kind of, you kind of came with it.
And probably you are not Ben Shapiro, thankfully.
Yeah, very notable.
To the best of my knowledge.
You always buy two boards when you go to the Home Depot.
That's the funniest thing I've seen in the rock.
I'm going to support him.
I was like, fam, you spent $1.50.
Yeah, that's like, that's like, you would have given them more money if you'd bought a Diet Coke.
Like, come on, buddy.
Bro, this is your point.
Yeah.
Also, you're a millionaire.
Get like an angle grinder or a fucking circular saw or something.
Buy a power dip.
He doesn't deserve it.
He doesn't, but like, you're trying to pretend to be cool.
What are you doing?
That was just so funny.
Cause I'm like, you making this huge political statement and you showed me that little ass bag in your hands.
And I was like, wait, is that what he bought?
I thought, I thought I'm like, are you making fun of yourself?
Like, do you, yeah, are you in on the joke?
Like, are you in on the joke?
A lot of times.
Because your whole thing is supposed to be like, we're the party of the honest working man.
That's who I represent.
It's like, I've spent a lot of time in Home Depots.
Like, you know, I've spent a shitload of time.
I'm not particularly handy, but people very close to me do that shit for a living.
I've spent a lot of time doing runs for like functioning farms and stuff.
Nobody who's a serious working class person who needs to go there walks out with a paper bat with a plastic bag and a single piece of wood.
Like, you're a millionaire.
Buy a power tool and at least like try to pretend like you're cool.
You're like, yeah, I got a giant saw.
Like, go get a fucking Husk Varna or something.
Yeah, tell me a story.
Spinning story at my uncle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My uncle's been using the same saw for the third, you know, 50 years.
I'm going to buy him a brand new saw.
I'm going to go to Home Depot.
I just put me and my brother-in-law just put in a new sink in my office.
And like, speaking of going to the store, I'm like, first of all, you're going to go at least four times.
At least four times.
Because some at least four times.
There's no one trip to Home Depot.
No one makes one trip.
Like, damn, this don't work.
Oh my God, now this is leaking.
This is the wrong fucking size.
Like, you're going to make four trips.
And I did.
And I'm like, putting in the sink, I'm like, I know I spent just on return trips $100.
You know what I'm saying?
So I'm like, don't tell, bro.
That was so hilarious.
It's like, there's an easy way.
Leaking Secrets Now00:03:18
You're Ben Shapiro, right?
Your big thing is denying climate change.
Be like, or saying it's not a problem.
Be like, well, there's fires.
And since I'm not a weak liberal, I'm just going to fireproof my house and I'm going to go cut down the tree in my yard so it can't catch because that's what real conservative men do.
And then go buy a giant 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 is pretend?
At least pretend.
What are we talking about?
This has been a fun digression about Ben Shapiro after an hour and 40 minutes of talking about the triangle shirtwaist fire.
Anyway, listen to Hood Point.
After the revolution, listen to Hood politics.
Yeah.
We'll see you fools later.
Don't listen to Ben Shapiro, although this episode is dropping the same week as the last of the Ben's books episodes.
So I guess it fits.
Fuck it.
Oh, man, that sucks.
This is a great plug for Thursday's app.
Nailed it.
All right.
Peace.
Oh, my God.
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