Speaker 1: What's sending Sophie today's script because the episode it started, Sophie,
Speaker 1: the episode is started. We can't stop it now, it's
Speaker 1: all I We're going, We're this is all in the episode.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, I'm hitting record right now, recorded seconds ago.
Speaker 1: You were the work, You are the war. Chris can
Speaker 1: figure it out, man, this is how it's going. We're doing.
Speaker 1: We're seconds into it. By you got catch the magic. Okay, magic,
Speaker 1: you gotta catch it. Discrepancies happened, Thank you everybody. Um,
Speaker 1: this is behind the bastards. The podcast that is introduced
Speaker 1: like a piece of ship. Um, mother, don't say that.
Speaker 1: Some some could say that introducing it listen so the whole.
Speaker 1: Some could say that the producer don't come from my name. Listen.
Speaker 1: But pieces of ship are produced effortlessly. It's actually quite
Speaker 1: mad produced. They are saying that is true. Though, that
Speaker 1: is true. Your body is magical, Pint. I would like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wasn't calling you a piece of ship, Sophie. I
Speaker 1: was saying, my introduction was done like a piece of ship.
Speaker 1: But well, your your your your, your competence is at
Speaker 1: war with my incompetence and generally edges it out by
Speaker 1: a slight margin, but not today. Today in competence wins,
Speaker 1: which is ties into the theme of the episode. This
Speaker 1: is behind the Bastards show about bad people, the worst
Speaker 1: ones in all of history. Um, and some other stuff too.
Speaker 1: Sometimes like today we're not talking well, we are talking
Speaker 1: about some bad people, but we're also talking about a
Speaker 1: bad thing that happened with our guest Jason Petty a
Speaker 1: k A prop what's the words? We network, but we
Speaker 1: are network buddies. You and I are now are now
Speaker 1: co workers colleagues, which I think means, if I understand
Speaker 1: corporate law, we can't be called upon to testify against
Speaker 1: one another. I wouldn't testify on you anyway. But now
Speaker 1: I'm glad that it's in. I'm glad that it's in.
Speaker 1: It's in writing now and broken by Yeah, being on
Speaker 1: the same podcast network you want to talk about, Um,
Speaker 1: well it's not your new show, it's your old show.
Speaker 1: But but now it's on our network. Yeah, it's got
Speaker 1: a got a jetpack in it, hood politics with problem
Speaker 1: man Like, Yes, I'm so excited to bring this to
Speaker 1: the team and have y'alls like input into like how
Speaker 1: to make it as as as dope as possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's politics is gangbanging in nice suits. I think so
Speaker 1: many times in the same way that like what this
Speaker 1: pod does, which is like brings everybody to the table
Speaker 1: so that now we all have shared information agreed upon
Speaker 1: about you know, what's happening in the world and how
Speaker 1: we got there. I think it's the same with with politics. Man,
Speaker 1: I'm just look, they just speak a different language. They're
Speaker 1: not smartyr than you. So I'm just here to not
Speaker 1: give commentary but analysis so that you know what you're
Speaker 1: looking at and that cannot by trick you into thinking
Speaker 1: that this isn't something you don't already know and understands
Speaker 1: that that's how politics. The Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode,
Speaker 1: Oh yes, the Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode I
Speaker 1: really have enjoyed in your show is how you explain
Speaker 1: Mitch McConnell, because he really has to be explained in
Speaker 1: like ganganging terms to really get how McConnell goes like.
Speaker 1: It didn't make sense. It took me so long to
Speaker 1: put a finger on it. Then I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're just a hustler. Did all make sense? Mm hmm,
Speaker 1: Well we're talking about we're actually gonna talk about some
Speaker 1: gang ship. Today, We're going to talk about some um,
Speaker 1: some horrible ship. We're gonna talk about the triangle shirtwaist fire.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of this prop Nope? Okay, this
Speaker 1: is uh moments, this is a good one. This is
Speaker 1: a horrible industrial disaster in the United States, so properly
Speaker 1: the idea that human beings would get their clothing almost
Speaker 1: exclusively from stores, uh, and stores that were themselves stocked
Speaker 1: by massive factories that produce clothing at scale. That's pretty new.
Speaker 1: Didn't used to be that way for most of human history, right. Uh,
Speaker 1: your ancient Romans, you know, your your, your, your, your Macedonians, Uh,
Speaker 1: your Carthaginians, your han China, They're not not walking into
Speaker 1: a department store and buying a bunch of like identical
Speaker 1: pairs of shorts. Didn't work that way. No ancient Seers markets,
Speaker 1: No ancient Seers markets. Um. There there is a free
Speaker 1: people buried with the Library of Alexandria. But if that's
Speaker 1: ever uncovered, a plague will will be unleashed upon the world.
Speaker 1: That will lend all of society. Um. But yeah, not not.
Speaker 1: Not a lot of mass produced clothing back in the
Speaker 1: day in fact in the United States and sevente which
Speaker 1: is not all that long ago, right, I've drinking bars
Speaker 1: in Europe that are older than that. History's greatest monster,
Speaker 1: Alexander Hamilton's estimated that between two thirds and four fifths
Speaker 1: of all clothing in the new United States was homemade.
Speaker 1: So basically everything's people had on their bodies in the
Speaker 1: early US was something that like a family member, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Mama made it. Yeah, mama made its, sister made or
Speaker 1: whatever grandma. Um. Now, that state of affairs didn't start
Speaker 1: to change until the mid eighteen forties with the development
Speaker 1: of the modern sewing machine. But what really shifted matters
Speaker 1: in the United States, at least was the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Because during the Civil War, right, you got you got
Speaker 1: all these assholes wanted to keep doing a slavery. You've
Speaker 1: got these guys who are generally less assholes want to
Speaker 1: stop them, and they can script About two million men
Speaker 1: the about two million men joined the Union Army over
Speaker 1: the course of that war, and all those guys, Um,
Speaker 1: all those guys need uniforms, right, um, and two million dudes,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna hand sew all that ship, especially since
Speaker 1: half these motherfucker's are dropping dead right out of that.
Speaker 1: You know, how about we just make thirty of them
Speaker 1: and when you die, we just take your pants, all yeah,
Speaker 1: we just take your pants. Take a share. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: So these guys uh need mass produced uniforms, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them are a lot of them are immigrants, right.
Speaker 1: That's one of the big things about the Union side
Speaker 1: a ship. Some of these guys are Irish or German
Speaker 1: because those are like where people are coming to the
Speaker 1: United States from. Um. And so most of these people
Speaker 1: had been dirt poor for most of their lives. They
Speaker 1: had like one or two sets of clothing that they owned,
Speaker 1: and it was stuff that like their family made and maintained.
Speaker 1: Suddenly they joined the military and they get these mass
Speaker 1: produced uniforms and standardized sizes. Um. Now, and this is
Speaker 1: probably for most of them, the first mass produced clothing
Speaker 1: on their body. And today you know, you you brag that, like,
Speaker 1: oh this this shirt's handmade. Right, My pants were like
Speaker 1: hands sown, and that's a that's a mark of higher
Speaker 1: quality than like a factory made piece of clothing. Not
Speaker 1: necessarily the case back then, right, because your clothing is
Speaker 1: often made by mom or dad or grandma or siss
Speaker 1: and they're not always good at it, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people aren't good at most things. So like, yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: You know what I think about, like just how culture
Speaker 1: has just continues to evolve, like we you know, in
Speaker 1: the fifties, we had to teach America to throw stuff away,
Speaker 1: like you know, and and just the idea of recycling
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Like I thought about the Milkman
Speaker 1: troupe and I was like, dude, you had glass bottles
Speaker 1: and a dude came to the house and refilled them.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yo, that's some like Silicon Valley like greenery
Speaker 1: fools are bragging about having their own chickens, you know,
Speaker 1: Like that's like I got chickens, I make eggs. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, dog, this this is not a flex do
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying? Like this is what culture
Speaker 1: was for centuries, you know. So yeah, so hearing this
Speaker 1: is like reminds me of that. Yeah, I actually never
Speaker 1: thought of that, Like my mom made this wetter. Yeah
Speaker 1: I can tell maybe, yeah, I can see that. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm sure some of these clothes was but for a
Speaker 1: lot of these soldiers, not only was this their first
Speaker 1: mass produced clothing, but it was the highest quality clothing
Speaker 1: they'd ever worn, and it was the best fitting clothing
Speaker 1: because it had been like specifically, there were standardized sizes
Speaker 1: that were you know, it was a lot of folks
Speaker 1: kind of left the military after the Civil War with
Speaker 1: a real appreciation for manufactured clothing and a desire to
Speaker 1: to own more of it. Um So in the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the cutter's knife revolutionized the garment industry again. This was
Speaker 1: a mass produced utility knife, a kind of a box
Speaker 1: cutter's type device, razor sharp, and it allowed skilled users
Speaker 1: to cut out pieces that can then be sewn into
Speaker 1: hundreds of identical garments. So we get the sewing machine.
Speaker 1: The Civil War gives a lot of people a taste
Speaker 1: for homemade clothing than in the eighteen seventies. They had
Speaker 1: been a new kind of knife that lets you much
Speaker 1: more quickly mass produce quality garments. By the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: all of the necessary technology for a clothes making revolution
Speaker 1: had been invented. The living missing was dirt, cheap, easily
Speaker 1: replaceable labor, which, if you know anything about clothing is
Speaker 1: made today, is a critical part of cheap clothes. Truly,
Speaker 1: nothing new we needed. We've got everything but suffering poor
Speaker 1: immigrants to make sense, we could find people that we
Speaker 1: don't gotta pay, that could do this all day for
Speaker 1: good news. Right around that time, a shipload of new
Speaker 1: immigrants start coming into the United States. Now when we're
Speaker 1: talking about the garment industry, it's about a third of
Speaker 1: these people are Italian. About two thirds of them are
Speaker 1: Jews from Eastern Europe. UM. And the the Italians who
Speaker 1: come in that flood the garment industry are are from
Speaker 1: southern Italy. About one point two million of these people
Speaker 1: immigrant to the United States net in the first decade
Speaker 1: of the nineteen hundreds UM. And then you know the remainder,
Speaker 1: about two million people are Jews from Eastern Europe, and
Speaker 1: both groups of refugees would heavily dominate the new garment industry. UM.
Speaker 1: These people were willing to work and able to work
Speaker 1: for very cheap because they were completely destitute. They were
Speaker 1: fleeing disasters, in different kinds of disasters. In the case
Speaker 1: of the Italians, that disaster was a man made ecological
Speaker 1: tragedy that will not sound familiar to anybody listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast and will never happen again anywhere in the world, Like,
Speaker 1: for example, the place where most Americans live. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read a quote from a book by journalist Dave
Speaker 1: von Drell quote. The end of feudalism and of the
Speaker 1: papal states in the nineteenth century put millions of acres
Speaker 1: of Italian land in private hands. Nearly every new owner
Speaker 1: made the same decision to cut down the trees, hoping
Speaker 1: to sell the lumber and expand the fields. The result
Speaker 1: was massive soil erosion along the hillsides of once beautiful
Speaker 1: southern provinces like Calabria, Basilicata, Apulia, and Campania. Top soil
Speaker 1: washed into the rivers, ruining the farm economy. When the
Speaker 1: silted rivers flooded in the wet winter months, they created low,
Speaker 1: stagnant pools and swamps, which and turn bread mosquitoes, which
Speaker 1: produced epidemics of malaria. Without trees to hold the top soil,
Speaker 1: what had been a tenuously balanced ecology became a strange
Speaker 1: and deadly combination of tropical disease and desert like aridity.
Speaker 1: Conditions were worse on the island of Sicily, where within
Speaker 1: sight of the Blue Sea, the grass is a lifeless
Speaker 1: brown and the road a powder of white. In many
Speaker 1: regions it is necessary to go long distances to procure
Speaker 1: drinking water. As one early writer on Italian immigration explained,
Speaker 1: it's a dest bowl ship that yeah yeah, um, and
Speaker 1: they're a version of what's coming for California and a
Speaker 1: sizeable chunk of Oregon like this summer. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's on its way, guys like this. Yeah yeah. So
Speaker 1: this is why I think we've all watched Five Will
Speaker 1: Goes West, the famed documentary about Italian immigration into the
Speaker 1: United States. This is yeah, there's no cats destroying all
Speaker 1: of the trees and leading the top soil to leach
Speaker 1: into the rivers, creating stagnant death pits. Um. So yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously Italians are significant part of the growing garment industries workplace,
Speaker 1: but they were vastly outnumbered by Russian Jews. Not just
Speaker 1: well Jews from what was Russia, which included modern day
Speaker 1: Ukraine in Poland. Um. Most of these Jewish immigrants came
Speaker 1: from what was called the Pale of Settlement, which was
Speaker 1: within the Russian Empire, the limited swath of territory that
Speaker 1: Jews were allowed to inhabit under the Czar's regime. Remember
Speaker 1: this is a there's there's there's like there's an apartheid
Speaker 1: system for Jewish people in Russia during this time. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the few jobs that Jewish people were allowed
Speaker 1: to do during this period was garment making. And so
Speaker 1: that's part of why they came to dominate the US
Speaker 1: garment industry, is they a lot of them, men and women,
Speaker 1: learned how to sew, learned how to make garments, did
Speaker 1: that for a living, and kind of like small boutique
Speaker 1: senses of the word when they were in Russia, and
Speaker 1: then when they came to the United States, they had
Speaker 1: they had that skill right as the garment industry exploded.
Speaker 1: On Art eighteen eighty one, leftist revolutionaries in Russia killed
Speaker 1: Czar Alexander the Second with a comically large bomb. Now
Speaker 1: we mentioned a couple of times on the show because
Speaker 1: it's important, um, but the Czar had been a reformer,
Speaker 1: He's the guy who freed the serfs, and he'd been
Speaker 1: good to Russia's Jews, although good here is a term
Speaker 1: that means he didn't actively seek their extermination. Despite the
Speaker 1: fact that Russian Jews had probably the least to gain
Speaker 1: from this Csar's death, they were instantly blamed for masterminding
Speaker 1: the assassination. This is kind of the story of why
Speaker 1: all of these Jewish people immigrate to the United States.
Speaker 1: More than thirty cities erupted into anti Semitic violence in
Speaker 1: the wake of the Tsar's assassination. Shlomo Lambrosa, writing in
Speaker 1: Modern Judaism magazine, notes that in the wake of the
Speaker 1: Tsar's murder quote, Jews were beaten, killed, and burned out
Speaker 1: of their homes. Each attack was more brutal than the
Speaker 1: preceding mass destruction. Thousands killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, orphaned,
Speaker 1: and rendered homeless. This was the legacy of pogroms. Now.
Speaker 1: These programs were not ordered by anyone at the head
Speaker 1: of the Russian state, but they were extremely popular. Many
Speaker 1: programs were actively sponsored and organized by local Russian police.
Speaker 1: It was not until late summer around August of eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty one that the Czar's troops took action to halt
Speaker 1: the violence, and their intervention did not achieve any lasting peace.
Speaker 1: For the next three years after the Czar's assassination, every
Speaker 1: spring would bring a new wave of programs. Journalist Dave
Speaker 1: von Drell explains quote. The programs flared anew each spring
Speaker 1: at Easter, when local priests reminded their flocks that the
Speaker 1: Jews killed Christ just as they had killed the Tsar,
Speaker 1: and rumors circulated afresh that the matzo of Passover was
Speaker 1: seasoned with the blood of slain Christian children. Along with
Speaker 1: the pagrams came severe restrictions on Jewish liberties. Access to
Speaker 1: higher education and professional jobs was cut off. The Russian heartland,
Speaker 1: including the capital St. Petersburg and the largest city, Moscow,
Speaker 1: was closed to Jews. Some were driven from the cities
Speaker 1: in chains. So God damn man not, it's still harder
Speaker 1: hear you know all that, I know this story, I
Speaker 1: know of billion times, just the whole Russian Revolution. Like
Speaker 1: I don't think you understand the West Western civilization until
Speaker 1: you really get your brain around that. And and I'm
Speaker 1: still it's still hard to hear where you're just like
Speaker 1: what the fund guys like, she's mane And then and
Speaker 1: then so you you you're running this apartheid, you know system,
Speaker 1: this cast system, apartheid and in and in this Jewish
Speaker 1: community mess around, get good at it, and now you
Speaker 1: think they got magical powers because they're good at it.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it just bothers me every time I have
Speaker 1: to hear it. It's not. I mean, it's one of
Speaker 1: those things. Russian history. There's a short list of like
Speaker 1: the darkest regions of the world when you study history,
Speaker 1: right there's particularly Africa during colonialism. Um, there's China in
Speaker 1: like kind of the last two centuries or so during
Speaker 1: like that that they had a civil war that killed
Speaker 1: more people in World War Two. Nobody ever talks about.
Speaker 1: It's like the eighteen hundreds fucking wild. Um, there's obviously
Speaker 1: indigenous American history, but fucking Russian history is up there.
Speaker 1: Good god, it is wild. Some ship goes down in
Speaker 1: Russia major and so this is the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: where this is all that these programs are trying to
Speaker 1: ramp up. The eighteen eighties again, when when all of
Speaker 1: the story, when everything sort of comes into place to
Speaker 1: make the modern garment industry possible, is also when the
Speaker 1: programs launch and things only get worse for Russian Jews.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen hundreds, bizarre State was in a
Speaker 1: situation we might call the crumbles, which is a framing
Speaker 1: a friend of mine uses to describe what we're what's
Speaker 1: happening in the United States right now. It's the early
Speaker 1: stages of dissolution. Before the collapse of the government, revolutionary
Speaker 1: sentiment was at an all time high. There were constant
Speaker 1: protests against an incompetent and inefficient government, which many Russians
Speaker 1: rightly saw had left them decades behind the rest of
Speaker 1: the world. Zara Nicholas the second was a coward and
Speaker 1: an idiot, and he had no idea how to write
Speaker 1: the ship, but he was cunning enough to blame the
Speaker 1: Jews for all of Russia's problems. His regime launched a
Speaker 1: massive propaganda campaign, which included producing the Protocols of the
Speaker 1: Elders of Zion and a number of anti Semitic newspapers.
Speaker 1: One of the best known was called bess Rabbitts in
Speaker 1: the city of Kashinev. And this is part of the
Speaker 1: province of bess Arabia, which is why it's called miss Rabetts.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I'm pronouncing everything wrong. Sorry, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: come on like um, if I'm not going to get England, right,
Speaker 1: I'm certainly not getting Russian. Yeah. So bess are Betts
Speaker 1: was the only daily newspaper in the entire province, which
Speaker 1: meant that it was by default the only thing most
Speaker 1: Russian Christians had a chance to read every day for
Speaker 1: the news, and it was focused around anti Semitism. In
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, a Christian girl who worked as a
Speaker 1: domestic servant for a Jewish family in the city of
Speaker 1: Kishenev committed suicide. Bess A Rabets lost no time in
Speaker 1: claiming that she had been murdered so her blood could
Speaker 1: be used to make matzo bread. Now, this all happened
Speaker 1: right before Easter Sunday, and it ended in a mob
Speaker 1: of two thousand people rioting through the Jewish section of town.
Speaker 1: People were murdered, some by having nails driven into their skulls.
Speaker 1: A baby, a live baby, was used to break windows
Speaker 1: on Jewish shops as like a yeah, like yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's fucking bad. Yeah, dumb, that's where that
Speaker 1: whole like, yeah, that's where that whole myth thoughts about
Speaker 1: you know, Jews drinking blood for what the blood libel
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean this is an
Speaker 1: if that starts centuries earlier, right, Like that's old as hell, um,
Speaker 1: But this was just I mean this there's God only
Speaker 1: knows how many thousands of people get killed over that
Speaker 1: myth over the course of like that that's like a
Speaker 1: thousand years old, you know. But yeah, this is yet
Speaker 1: another time when it erupted into violence. Goddamn. Kishenev was
Speaker 1: followed by other programs around Russia, and everything kept escalating
Speaker 1: in nineteen o four when Zar Nicholas the second decided
Speaker 1: that going to war with Japan seemed like a good idea. Now,
Speaker 1: if you know any you know about the Russian navy today,
Speaker 1: nothing about the navy today, Well, the Russian Navy today
Speaker 1: has exactly one aircraft carrier, the Admiral kuznets Off, which
Speaker 1: has sunk itself a couple of times and runs off
Speaker 1: of what is essentially like unfiltered, unprocessed diesel oil, something
Speaker 1: called mizzoot, which is like the dirty like it keeps
Speaker 1: catching on fire, it keeps killing its sailors. It's like
Speaker 1: always burning. It has to be tugged everywhere it goes.
Speaker 1: It's not a great navy today, is what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, yeah, they don't really need a
Speaker 1: navy the way that you know other countries due to
Speaker 1: in order to based on agraphy, I blame them based
Speaker 1: on a geography, like there's there's not water for of
Speaker 1: all time. If you know anything about Japan, pretty fucking
Speaker 1: good at navies. This is this is what they do, Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially the early nineteen hundreds. And so the worst navy
Speaker 1: in Europe goes up against the best navy in Asia
Speaker 1: and it it does not go very well for Russia.
Speaker 1: Um and really the only people surprised our racists. But
Speaker 1: obviously this is a huge political disaster. Russia loses a
Speaker 1: huge chunk of their navy, a funckload of men, a
Speaker 1: lot of prestige, and Zar Nicholas needs an excuse for
Speaker 1: the disaster that follows. And of course he blames the
Speaker 1: Jews even absolutely, how about those dudes as those guys,
Speaker 1: those guys, that's why I picked a fight with the
Speaker 1: people who are better at this than us. But it's
Speaker 1: literally guys we've been killing for years that are responsible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you literally took the knife to a gunfight. This is
Speaker 1: exactly that's where the saying comes. This is what y'all did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you too a knife to for a gunfight, to a gunfight.
Speaker 1: And then you blamed the group of people you don't
Speaker 1: allow to own knives. You blame the cooks. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a huge wave of anti Jewish sentiment lights up in
Speaker 1: Russia again. These paramilitary groups called the Black Hundreds rise up.
Speaker 1: And these guys are like pro monarchist Russian fascist group. Well,
Speaker 1: fascist might be the wrong with anyway. They're they're they're
Speaker 1: a bunch of assholes. They start murdering Jewish people to
Speaker 1: punish them for what they and the Czar's press described
Speaker 1: as conspiring with the enemy. The Black Hundreds openly stated
Speaker 1: that quote the extermination of the Jews was their goal. Now,
Speaker 1: the very worst campaigns of anti Semitic violence broke out
Speaker 1: the next year, in nineteen o five UM, but this
Speaker 1: was still related to the war with Japan. Because the
Speaker 1: defeat in nineteen o four UM leads to mass unrest
Speaker 1: and protests and kind of a revolution, I mean a revolution,
Speaker 1: and in order to kind of clamp down on it,
Speaker 1: the Czar is forced to grant his people a constitution,
Speaker 1: and not like a good constitution broadly speaking, better than
Speaker 1: I mean, they hadn't really had anything. Um. Now, this
Speaker 1: enrages Russian monarchists who want the Czar to be an autocrat,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these guys respond to the Czar
Speaker 1: compromising with revolutionaries by carrying out programs, and in fact,
Speaker 1: in November of nineteen o five, across the Russian Empire
Speaker 1: there are six hundred different programs. That's twenty programs per
Speaker 1: day for the entire month. Yeah. Um, So I'm doing
Speaker 1: this to explain the fact that in like a ten
Speaker 1: year period, two million euro Eastern European Jews moved to
Speaker 1: the United States and this is why. Yeah. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of them are very like very accurately seeing what's
Speaker 1: going to come in the nineteen forties and going, well, ship,
Speaker 1: we gotta get the funk out of here. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: Jewish like historical trauma, like the idea of just and
Speaker 1: there antennas of knowing when like shipping to go bad,
Speaker 1: like trust them like like they know so yeah, then
Speaker 1: being like you know what, I think it's time. All right,
Speaker 1: I'm a head out, you know what I'm saying. I
Speaker 1: think it's time for us to roll. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a pretty there's a story like with with my
Speaker 1: my wife and her siblings, like they when they were
Speaker 1: trying to like you know, we're kids and they were
Speaker 1: trying to like you know, steal some makeup from the
Speaker 1: corner store or whatever. Like their brother was like, hey,
Speaker 1: it's we need to go. It's time to leave now.
Speaker 1: And they were like, no, let's just get one more thing,
Speaker 1: more thing, and of course they both got caught, you know,
Speaker 1: but the brother bounced because he got the antenna of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's time, it's time for me to roll. And that's
Speaker 1: it's crazy because it's like, that's actually one thing that's
Speaker 1: important about your hood. Antenna's that when you at a party,
Speaker 1: you should be able to read the room to be like,
Speaker 1: all right, it's probably gonna go down pretty soon. I
Speaker 1: think it's time for me a slide. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: there's just I mean, this is a little off topic,
Speaker 1: but there's not a whole lot that's more important in
Speaker 1: life than having a good antenna. For like, I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be here, Yes, yes, time for me to get the
Speaker 1: funk out. I think it's time for me to get
Speaker 1: out here. Yes, it's not gonna make a big deal
Speaker 1: about it, not gonna say anything, but I shouldn't be here,
Speaker 1: not gonna be in this room. I think I'm slide.
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna slide, bro. I see I let
Speaker 1: you all later. Man. I think it's not for me
Speaker 1: to slide. Ye, people should be prop Yo, drop a
Speaker 1: load on them where they supposed to be, Robert. They're
Speaker 1: supposed to be enjoying the products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast. Yes they are, because the products and services
Speaker 1: that support this podcast, and this is our only guarantee,
Speaker 1: have never orchestrated a campaign of programs across the Russian Empire,
Speaker 1: and not I think any of our supporters have done.
Speaker 1: And and they will tell you when it's time to slide,
Speaker 1: they will, they will flood fair enough. Yeah. If I
Speaker 1: know anyone who I trust to tell me when to
Speaker 1: get out of an area, it's the dick Pills guys,
Speaker 1: or maybe Hello Fresh. Yeah, Okay, here's some ads. Ah,
Speaker 1: we are back and um just having the best time
Speaker 1: talking about the economic and environmental collapse of Italy and
Speaker 1: waves of racism in Russia that allowed Americans to have
Speaker 1: cheap shirts in the early nineteen hundreds. Let's go um. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, all this violence in Russia leads a
Speaker 1: lot of Eastern European Jews to decide, like we should
Speaker 1: we should bounce um and yeah, more than two million
Speaker 1: of them pick up their lives and flee to the
Speaker 1: United States in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds. Now,
Speaker 1: two of these desperate, hopeful Jewish immigrants were Isaac Harris
Speaker 1: and Max Blanc. Both were born in Russia in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen sixties. They fled their homes in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties when they were young men in their twenties,
Speaker 1: after you know, all of those pagrams convinced them there
Speaker 1: wasn't a whole lot of hope in Russia. By the
Speaker 1: early eighteen nineties, they both made it through Ellis Island
Speaker 1: and settled in New York. Harris had trained as a
Speaker 1: tailor back in the Old Country, so he knew how
Speaker 1: to make garments and he set up a shop in
Speaker 1: the burgeoning garment industry. Max Blanc was an entrepreneur and
Speaker 1: he got to work as a garment contractor. So this
Speaker 1: is how a huge amount of the fabric industry worked
Speaker 1: at the time then is now. Factories had to obey
Speaker 1: more rules with regular employees than they did with contract workers,
Speaker 1: and it also costs money to operate a big factory,
Speaker 1: so a lot of garment makers would hire independent contractors
Speaker 1: who would themselves hire workers and then pay them out
Speaker 1: of a lump sum they received from the manufacturer. Both
Speaker 1: Blank and Harris got their start in the sweat shop
Speaker 1: years of of the garment industry, and sweatshop as a
Speaker 1: term we all hear um the way what we call
Speaker 1: a sweatshop to a it's kind of the term for
Speaker 1: like a giant factory with poor labor standards. Right, that's
Speaker 1: not what it originally was. Um Like the factories that
Speaker 1: we would consider today, sweatshops were actually a reaction to
Speaker 1: sweatshops that were significantly less horrible than sweatshops. And to
Speaker 1: explain what the original sweatshop was, I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from the book Triangle, The Fire that Changed America by
Speaker 1: Dave von Drell. Quote. Today, the word sweatshop describes any
Speaker 1: crowded factory of poorly paid workers. But in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, the meaning was more specific and more dismal.
Speaker 1: Sweatshops were generally dim and claustrophobic. Tenement rooms were independent
Speaker 1: contractors sweated greenhorns, that is the newest immigrants by working
Speaker 1: them more and more hours for less and less pay.
Speaker 1: So you have these big garment companies that have like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is what we want you to make, and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll contract you know, said we have a dress, right
Speaker 1: and there's two or three pieces of the dress that
Speaker 1: are sewn together. You hire two or three different independent
Speaker 1: contractors with their own teams of seamstresses, and they will
Speaker 1: each produce a part and then you'll have it put together,
Speaker 1: you know, by somebody else. And each of these independent
Speaker 1: contractors just packs as many laborers as possible into a tiny,
Speaker 1: low income apartment room. And that's a sweatshop, right, um,
Speaker 1: And you're basically trying to like get these people to
Speaker 1: do as much work as possible for as little money
Speaker 1: as possible, and when they complain, you replace them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did y'all call him? Did he call him greenhorns? Yeah? Greenhorns.
Speaker 1: These are immigrants who just got to the country. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the phrase. That's it. There's no there's no bottom
Speaker 1: two slurs, is there? Yeah? Wait, because it's just I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I wouldn't didn't think about that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess you could call it a slur. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: not a slur. I don't know. It was meant is
Speaker 1: just like they're new. They don't know how things work there,
Speaker 1: don't like, yeah, they're there and they don't know. They
Speaker 1: don't you know, they don't know enough to add vacate
Speaker 1: for themselves. They don't speak the language, they don't have connections,
Speaker 1: so you can take advantage of them. And when they
Speaker 1: start to realize they're being taken advantage of, if they're
Speaker 1: not worth paying more money, you fire them and you go. Basically,
Speaker 1: there were these like big market areas where you would
Speaker 1: sind people who had just gotten off the boat and
Speaker 1: you would just hire them up and mass throw them
Speaker 1: into sweatshops, work them until they couldn't handle it anymore,
Speaker 1: or until they got sick and died. Because these filthy
Speaker 1: apartments crammed full of people sewing, disease spreads pretty like
Speaker 1: a shipload of people die from disease in these places. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: sweatshop work was miserable, but it was also inconsistent. Most
Speaker 1: weeks when there was a busy season, workers would be
Speaker 1: on for at least eight eighty hours at the low
Speaker 1: end to more than a hundred hours of labor at
Speaker 1: the high end. Some of these people made as little
Speaker 1: as three dollars a week if they were new. Good
Speaker 1: wages were kind of more like fifteen dollars a week. Um.
Speaker 1: I think kind of a more common salary was like
Speaker 1: seven to eight something like that. Um. Many of them
Speaker 1: were promised good rates like fifteen dollars week, but found
Speaker 1: out on pay day that the needle and thread they
Speaker 1: used to make the garments was actually taken out of
Speaker 1: their paychecks. So obviously these are because these are independent
Speaker 1: contractors being hired by the big company. There's a bunch
Speaker 1: of ways they can funk over the little guy, and
Speaker 1: there's no there's no labor board, there's no way for
Speaker 1: people who aren't rich to get justice. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: not really a lot of ways to do that now
Speaker 1: like back then you had even less options. Um, there's
Speaker 1: nobody looking out for these people. Um. Now the downside,
Speaker 1: So the upside of the sweatshop system is that it
Speaker 1: allows manufacturers to do their jobs for a lot cheaper.
Speaker 1: You don't have to rent a big factory, you don't
Speaker 1: have to deal with labor problems, um, and you don't
Speaker 1: have to. One of the really big benefits is your
Speaker 1: fact you may have hundreds of workers, but they work
Speaker 1: in dozens of different sweatshops. None of them know each other.
Speaker 1: How the hell they're going to unionize? You know they can't.
Speaker 1: This is kind of smell like the gig economy. A
Speaker 1: little bit like I'm kind of like a little uber
Speaker 1: like you saying it's like you're you're a texting company
Speaker 1: that don't own no cars. So and I gotta so
Speaker 1: I gotta pay for all to upkeep from my car. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so I'm paying for I'm paying for my gas,
Speaker 1: I'm paying for all. Yeah, not original or new what
Speaker 1: Uber and Lift and their fellow uh soulless monsters do.
Speaker 1: Okay cool? I was like, what is this? Sounds so
Speaker 1: familiar to me? Okay, h m hmmm. Um so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is kind of a gig economy thing. Now. So
Speaker 1: those are all the advantages of the sweatshop system, but
Speaker 1: it has disadvantages to One of them is that because
Speaker 1: you're splitting it up, you're having all these different teams
Speaker 1: do parts of the whatever garment you're assembling. Say it's addressed, right,
Speaker 1: You have four different teams each doing a part. You
Speaker 1: have to transport all of the different parts they're making
Speaker 1: to one area and have them put together. Um, it's
Speaker 1: less efficient, right, which means you make less clothing over
Speaker 1: a longer period of time. Um. And yeah. The other
Speaker 1: issue is that, like it's dangerous, conditions are incredibly cramped, nasty,
Speaker 1: and very flammable. Right, we're talking fabric, which burns pretty
Speaker 1: well if you ever let someone's clothing on fire. Um,
Speaker 1: But we're also talking about a shipload of cotton, like
Speaker 1: process cotton, which is explosive. If you've ever gotten a
Speaker 1: large amount of cotton and lit that ship, that fucking
Speaker 1: that goes off like a bomb, yeah, very fast. And
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of like basically um um um graph
Speaker 1: paper tracing paper that you used to like cut out
Speaker 1: the things, which is also incredibly flammable. So fire start
Speaker 1: in these places all the time. Um. And to kind
Speaker 1: of give more of a more detail about the conditions
Speaker 1: of these early sweatshops, I want to read a description
Speaker 1: of one in the eighteen nineties by a union leader
Speaker 1: named Bernard Weinstein. Quote. The boss of the shop lived
Speaker 1: there with his entire family. The front room and kitchen
Speaker 1: were used as workrooms. The whole family would sleep in
Speaker 1: one dark bedroom. The sewing machines for the operators were
Speaker 1: near the windows of the front door. The basters would
Speaker 1: sit on stools near the walls at the center of
Speaker 1: the room. Amid the dirt and dust were heaped great
Speaker 1: piles of materials on top of the sofa, several finishers
Speaker 1: would be working well. The older workers would keep the
Speaker 1: irons hot and press the finished garments on special boards.
Speaker 1: So these are dangerous places, and whenever there's a fire
Speaker 1: or something, or whenever you lose workers, you also lose productivity.
Speaker 1: So that's the main issue here is it's inefficient, it's cheap.
Speaker 1: It seems so efficient. Yeah, it seems so. I'm just
Speaker 1: musty and steamy as then the term sweatshop clearly like
Speaker 1: was they were they dying fabric too? So was there
Speaker 1: like a lot of like chemicals around some of these Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like Again, not long lives in
Speaker 1: the garment industry. Just get turp and turpentine, just acid
Speaker 1: tone right there in the corner. It's probably fair to
Speaker 1: say that few people in this country today, outside of
Speaker 1: maybe the agricultural industry, work a more dangerous or less
Speaker 1: healthy gig than sweatshop workers in this period. It's a
Speaker 1: bad business. My mother in law in the downtown like
Speaker 1: garment district for before she retired, that's what she did.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a sweat we could say, we could say definitively,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a sweatshop, you know. But she was definitely
Speaker 1: a seamstress in downtown and they paid her pennies. And
Speaker 1: but her ability like now, like her ability to make
Speaker 1: things and to fix them, like I still marvel, Like
Speaker 1: she's kind of a mystery. She still doesn't really speak
Speaker 1: English what she does. She just don't like to, So
Speaker 1: she kind of a mystery to me. But her ability
Speaker 1: to like, yeah, her craft craftsmanship of like being a
Speaker 1: seamstress is still out of this world to me. And
Speaker 1: my my wife still has stories of like I would
Speaker 1: be embarrassed about it. But yeah, my mom's like holes
Speaker 1: in our clothes didn't matter. But she would never like
Speaker 1: let us let them see her work environment because it
Speaker 1: was so awful. Yeah, I mean yeah, and it's certainly
Speaker 1: not a nice job to have now, um, but at
Speaker 1: least definitely less flammable. Yeah, less flammable people understand germ
Speaker 1: theory better. There's upsides. Yeah, So this nightmare industry is
Speaker 1: the one that Blank and Harris start in when they
Speaker 1: moved to the United States. Now, Harris came up started
Speaker 1: working in the US in sweatshops filled with other immigrants,
Speaker 1: and he paid careful attention to the popular fashions of
Speaker 1: the day and to the different methods of mass production.
Speaker 1: Block meanwhile made a small fortune as one of the
Speaker 1: most successful contractors in the city. So Blanc is running
Speaker 1: sweatshops and Harris is like a highly paid like because
Speaker 1: some of these people do make good money, right, the
Speaker 1: ones that we're doing the really difficult, the technical work,
Speaker 1: the ship that not that many people can do. Um
Speaker 1: And he's one of those guys. And the two men
Speaker 1: meet through marriage in the late eighteen nineties. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a write up in PBS as American experience. Here,
Speaker 1: Harris and Block were compatible, and they decided to interrupt
Speaker 1: partnership that would capitalize on Block's business sense and Harris's
Speaker 1: industry expertise. In nineteen hundred, they founded the Triangle Waste
Speaker 1: Company and opened their first shop on Wooster Street. At
Speaker 1: the turn of the century, the shirtwaist was a new
Speaker 1: item styled after men'swear. Shirtwaists were looser and more liberating
Speaker 1: than Victorian style bodices, and they were becoming popular with
Speaker 1: the burgeoning population of female workers in New York City.
Speaker 1: Harris knew the details of garment production and the machinery
Speaker 1: involved in making a cost effective and worthy product. Blanc
Speaker 1: was the salesman, constantly meeting with potential buyers and traveling
Speaker 1: to stores that carried their product. They took advantage of
Speaker 1: new technology, installing mechanical sewing machines which were five times
Speaker 1: faster than those run by a foot pedal. They priced
Speaker 1: their shirtwaist modestly, averaging about three dollars each. And this
Speaker 1: is all occurring at the same time as the women's
Speaker 1: liberation movement is really right. This is the period women
Speaker 1: don't have the right to vote yet, but they're agitating
Speaker 1: for it. Women are starting to join the workplace in
Speaker 1: larger numbers. And the shirtwaist is is not just a
Speaker 1: popular garment that's fashionable. It's a liberatory garment. Right. It's
Speaker 1: like a blouse, it's like a sundress kind of in
Speaker 1: some ways. But it is a lot. If you look
Speaker 1: at the old Victorian fashion, there's like whale bone course,
Speaker 1: that's those massive dresses that you can't walk to the
Speaker 1: doorway in, things that limit a woman's ability to move
Speaker 1: around in the world. A shirtwaist doesn't. It's comfortable, you
Speaker 1: can run in it, you can exert yourself in it,
Speaker 1: um and it looks good. Um, so this is like
Speaker 1: just all kind of happening at the big time. And
Speaker 1: Blanc and Harris capitalized on this explosion in in in
Speaker 1: because the shirtwaist is like a phenomenon in this period
Speaker 1: of time. Yeah, kind of a kind of a justice issue.
Speaker 1: That's crazy that it becomes like a symbol of freedom.
Speaker 1: That's crazy. Okay, Yeah, this is getting complicated. All right.
Speaker 1: I'm wearing something that I can work in, I can
Speaker 1: exert myself, and I can dance in. I can you know,
Speaker 1: live an independent life, not needing to be carried around
Speaker 1: because my clothing stops me from breathing, you know, yo.
Speaker 1: Because whoever's idea was pret is to like to tie
Speaker 1: another like some just umbrellas around your waist to make
Speaker 1: you a trust bigger was just whose idea with this?
Speaker 1: This is ridiculous? Yeah. Um. Now, part of making the
Speaker 1: garment production cost effective was consolidating for for Blank and
Speaker 1: Harris and some other guys who were kind of like
Speaker 1: similar thinkers to them, like big wigs, people who are
Speaker 1: emerging to be major leaders in the garment industry. They
Speaker 1: start to realize the sweatshop isn't the way to go.
Speaker 1: If we're really going to scale this up right. It
Speaker 1: has some benefits, it makes some things easier on us,
Speaker 1: but we can't make clothing at the same quality and
Speaker 1: at the same scale that we could if we had
Speaker 1: large centralized factories where we're paying for the sewing machines,
Speaker 1: so it's not some contractor buying the cheapest foot pump
Speaker 1: sewing machines with modern electric ones and rows. So they
Speaker 1: they start to get factories. And Harrison Blanc are two
Speaker 1: early guys who get massive garment factories to make these shirtwaists. Um.
Speaker 1: In nineteen o two they start the Triangle Factory out
Speaker 1: of the ash building in Greenwich Village and this is
Speaker 1: the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which is you know what the
Speaker 1: story we're talking about today is like the classic American
Speaker 1: story of like what we would now call a sweatshop
Speaker 1: going up in flames and killing a bunch of people.
Speaker 1: It's important to understand that when this factory is started,
Speaker 1: it is a massive improvement over the original sweatshops and
Speaker 1: is considered an ultra modern facility right because it's it's
Speaker 1: it's cleaner, it's nicer, it's bigger, there's room. Um. It
Speaker 1: had been built in nineteen o one, so the year
Speaker 1: before they open the factory. Unlike tenements, which are often
Speaker 1: made out of just like wood and kind of like
Speaker 1: low quality materials, this building is mostly made out of
Speaker 1: steel and iron. It's advertised as being fireproof by its architects,
Speaker 1: which is thinking, yeah, there is building that can down. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess if every other building is basically paper mache,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be like, yeah, this one. At least this
Speaker 1: is metal. So I could see the cased the confidence.
Speaker 1: But bro man, can't ever let that come out of
Speaker 1: your mouth. That's teach you. Yeah, you call something uh
Speaker 1: unburned downable and it's gone burned down. That's just how Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why I always advertise everything I make is very
Speaker 1: flammable and dangerous. This is dangerous. To be careful, I
Speaker 1: do so. Shirtwaist manufacturing involved a lot of again flammable things.
Speaker 1: There's a great deal of thin paper cutouts for tracing.
Speaker 1: There's thousands of pounds because you're making in such volume,
Speaker 1: there's thousands of pounds of dry fabric and cotton um
Speaker 1: that are kind of like tossed aside as you're making
Speaker 1: shirtwaists um. Now, the fact that this factory is not
Speaker 1: made out of wood like tenements, is a huge plus.
Speaker 1: But the ash building was far from safe. It had
Speaker 1: poor ventilation, it was badly lit, It had incredibly narrow stairwells,
Speaker 1: and it had no functional fire escape. It had a
Speaker 1: fire escape, but the fire escape on the building ended
Speaker 1: directly like ten ft or something above a basement skylight.
Speaker 1: So like we're falling into when they when they build
Speaker 1: this thing, like the city is like, hey, this fire
Speaker 1: escape is an up to code, and the architect is like,
Speaker 1: don't worry, we'll fix it asap, and then nothing happens. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: it looked pretty on this side. And look when you
Speaker 1: look down from the fire escape, you see that beautiful
Speaker 1: light coming up. I'm telling you, it's amazing. It's an
Speaker 1: aesthetic choice, just like the Titanic's lovely. Yeah. Now, the
Speaker 1: most dangerous thing about the factory may have been that
Speaker 1: it was tall. Harrison Blanc rented out the eighth, ninth,
Speaker 1: and tenth floors. Now, the reason this is dangerous is
Speaker 1: that the New York City Fire Department could Their ladders
Speaker 1: only reached six floors up, so you can't get water
Speaker 1: to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors and you can't
Speaker 1: evacuate people using fire engines from the eighth, ninth, and
Speaker 1: tenth floors, right, problem playing on the edge, bro, Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: I just I noted earlier the Triangle Factory was in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways a huge advancement in terms of
Speaker 1: just like quality of life for the people working there.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to pretend like it's not. This
Speaker 1: would have been a significant improvement in a lot of
Speaker 1: people's eyes. But that doesn't mean it didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of problems outside of being super flammable, and there
Speaker 1: was a lot of the fact that now Harrison Blanc
Speaker 1: and people like them are putting all these workers together
Speaker 1: in factories. The benefit of that is they're more productive.
Speaker 1: The downside of that, for a manager's perspective is, now
Speaker 1: all these guys are talking and they're talking about how
Speaker 1: much they're getting paid, and they're talking about how much
Speaker 1: the boss is fucking them, and they're developing a sense
Speaker 1: of solidarity. And what do you get when that happens.
Speaker 1: You get motherfucking strikes. Oh unions. Now, the striking at
Speaker 1: the Triangle Factory actually predated any kind of garment union
Speaker 1: existing there. Their first strike in nineteen o eight was
Speaker 1: what's called a wildcat strike, which is when workers just
Speaker 1: go on strike without having a union, right, and it's
Speaker 1: actually a big fight because like one of the so
Speaker 1: they we'll talk about that a minute. So there's this
Speaker 1: big wildcat strike in nineteen o eight, and and this
Speaker 1: kind of feeds into a broader trend in the city
Speaker 1: of New York, which is the center of US garment manufacturing,
Speaker 1: and a lot of garment makers are going on strikes, wildcats, strikes.
Speaker 1: They're starting to form unions nineteen o eight, nineteen o nine, UM,
Speaker 1: because they're realizing they're making a small number of people
Speaker 1: a shipload of money and they're getting treated terribly. Um.
Speaker 1: These people had, you know, because they were now inside
Speaker 1: you know, these factories that weren't strike proof. Um, they
Speaker 1: could uh, they could organize like this. UM. And one
Speaker 1: of the problems of this is that like the bigger
Speaker 1: when you have these huge factories, um, that are the
Speaker 1: entire operating profit of these corporations, that actually makes them
Speaker 1: more vulnerable to strikes because they're paying rent on this
Speaker 1: massive space, they're paying for all this electricity, they're paying
Speaker 1: every day even when the workers don't come in so
Speaker 1: the longer you're able to keep workers on strike, the
Speaker 1: more money you cost the bosses, which provides extra pressure
Speaker 1: to the bosses. Um so the fact that this could
Speaker 1: obviously the bosses consider any kind of strike to be
Speaker 1: like an existential threat, which leads them to embrace a
Speaker 1: bunch of union busting tactics. Now, the most basic tactic
Speaker 1: involved just the layout of the facility itself, and in
Speaker 1: the case of the Triangle factory, Harris had designed the
Speaker 1: layout of the sewing floor specifically to make it hard
Speaker 1: for workers to have conversations. That's the first way you
Speaker 1: try to stop this. Make it difficult for them to
Speaker 1: talk to each other, right, But people find a way
Speaker 1: to talk to each other. It's something people are always
Speaker 1: going to do. This doesn't work for long, and as
Speaker 1: time goes on, the bosses need to develop more advanced
Speaker 1: tactics to bust unions. One of them was what's called
Speaker 1: the inside contractor system. This was an attempt to merge
Speaker 1: the benefits of like the contractor system that the sweatshops
Speaker 1: operated under, with the strength of the factory. Management would
Speaker 1: give would basically rent space on the assembly floor to
Speaker 1: a contractor who they paid a lumps to make clothing,
Speaker 1: and that contractor would hire line workers, which he then
Speaker 1: paid out of the lump sum. So right, it's a
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the same basic idea. If we separate
Speaker 1: these workers from the corporation UM, then they're going to
Speaker 1: be focused on if they're angry on this independent contractor
Speaker 1: who hired them, and also he's going to side with
Speaker 1: us because he's going to be employing these people. But
Speaker 1: that's actually not how it worked out. As a general rule,
Speaker 1: these inside contractors UM considered themselves to be workers rather
Speaker 1: than management, and they were as liable to go on
Speaker 1: strike as the workers. See, So I still think. I
Speaker 1: still think man like, I try not to be too
Speaker 1: reductive for very vastly Like you don't want to oversimplify
Speaker 1: the complicated, and then at the same time, you don't
Speaker 1: want to overcomplicate the simple, you know, So I know
Speaker 1: both of those things are important. That said, I'm like,
Speaker 1: you're doing everything except for just just pay pay to
Speaker 1: workers and treat them will like if you really want
Speaker 1: to stop, you in like, it's just if you just
Speaker 1: want us to Like, I think about that all the time.
Speaker 1: I don't know if y'all saw the story about Applebee's
Speaker 1: offering free appetizers if you come interview for their job,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you get a free app with an interview.
Speaker 1: I'm like, or you could just pay more, Like if
Speaker 1: you just paid more, or just have some transparency, even
Speaker 1: if it's as simple as like, look, dude, there's how
Speaker 1: much the building costs. There's how much the electricity costs.
Speaker 1: This is what we can afford. Now, are y'all? You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, Like, we're gonna treat you as
Speaker 1: best as we can. This is what we got. Like
Speaker 1: anybody reasonable would be like, all right, well, let me
Speaker 1: make an educated decision to be like, all right, cool.
Speaker 1: If that's what you can handle, you should you show
Speaker 1: me that's what you can handle. Okay, work, But you're
Speaker 1: talking about you offer some free apps? Is I can
Speaker 1: get you know what I'm saying, I can get the
Speaker 1: hot wings. I'm like, well, or you could just just
Speaker 1: pay better? And I just so yeah, when I'm like,
Speaker 1: you're coming up with all these schemes and ways to
Speaker 1: yea redesign the whole floor, so y'all don't talk or
Speaker 1: it's like a company all we're going to have a
Speaker 1: holiday party, or we're gonna have pizza today. It's like,
Speaker 1: or you could pay us. Yeah, it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: casual Friday's Like, I'm like, or or or heear me
Speaker 1: out health insurance. That's good. Yeah, you could maybe maybe
Speaker 1: just a dental plan. It's the edit button on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you're doing it always works? Yeah, would we
Speaker 1: be doing great with an edit button on Twitter? I'm
Speaker 1: just like, what the hell are these stories you're going
Speaker 1: so so now you're putting all this ship on the thing,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I feel like we've all just been
Speaker 1: asking for an edit button now. Not that I have
Speaker 1: no horse in the race with this particular that particular example,
Speaker 1: but I could say for a lot of years, that's
Speaker 1: all we've been asking a Twitter. All the other stuff
Speaker 1: you're doing is great, but just I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: seems simple anyway, you know what all system? Yeah, it
Speaker 1: could products time for the services that support this podcast.
Speaker 1: What's happening. I'm just thinking about the way the corporate
Speaker 1: system works and how we're all kind of with this
Speaker 1: engine of death. Yeah, anyway, here's ads. Ah, we're back
Speaker 1: and we're having a good time, just to just not
Speaker 1: thinking about the modern day implications of the things you're
Speaker 1: talking about here, UM, just a good way to do it. UM.
Speaker 1: So the owners we just talked about kind of these
Speaker 1: they have a couple of different strategies they used to
Speaker 1: try to stop workers from unionizing UM, and they're not
Speaker 1: very successful at this because it's really hard to stop
Speaker 1: people from not idea offying with each other more than
Speaker 1: the bosses who are exploiting their excess productivity for profit.
Speaker 1: So the owners of the Triangle company next decided to
Speaker 1: create a fake union, the Triangle Employees Benevolent Association, which
Speaker 1: is actually kind of what happens to cops before police
Speaker 1: unions were a thing, right, That's what Police Benevolent Association
Speaker 1: start as, is like fake unions because cops can't unionize. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they get the ability to unionize, and it's a horrible problem.
Speaker 1: But the Triangle owners try the same thing. They they
Speaker 1: can employee Benevolent Association, and their hope is that they
Speaker 1: can use that to siphon off this energy that's going
Speaker 1: into the union movement UM and kind of push it
Speaker 1: somewhere that can't harm their bottom line. But since the
Speaker 1: union was run by relatives of Blank and Harris, it
Speaker 1: was obvious to the workers what was going on. They're
Speaker 1: never as dumb as the bosses think they are. Ever so,
Speaker 1: Blanc and Harris justified their attempts to stop unionization by
Speaker 1: claiming they had a competitive need to keep prices low.
Speaker 1: The reality was that their business was bringing in more
Speaker 1: than a million dollars a year by nineteen o eight,
Speaker 1: which is the modern equivalent of thirty million dollars. Both
Speaker 1: men were extremely comfortable. They both owned mansions on the
Speaker 1: West Side. Harris had four family servants, Blanc had five.
Speaker 1: They both had chauffeurd cars delivered them to work every day.
Speaker 1: And this is when like just having a car means
Speaker 1: you're doing pretty good. You know, yeah, where you go
Speaker 1: for Sunday drives? Yes, because you got yeah. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: these guys not only have cars, they have cars and
Speaker 1: they have drivers. Um. And the Triangle Family Factory isn't
Speaker 1: their only factory. They have factories in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: They own a couple of different companies making garments. These
Speaker 1: guys are very well off, so they're not they're not
Speaker 1: doing this ship. It's the same thing with like McDonald's
Speaker 1: today or whatever. They're not clamping down on employee organizing
Speaker 1: the SAMI with McDonald's. They're not clamping down on salaries
Speaker 1: because it's the only way to be profitable. They're doing
Speaker 1: it because they want to have uh fortunes. Now, what
Speaker 1: was happening to the Triangle Factory was emblematic of an
Speaker 1: explosion across the garment industry. A handful of tycoons were
Speaker 1: becoming unfathomably wealthy, where thousands of workers made as little
Speaker 1: as three dollars a week for more than eighty hours
Speaker 1: of painstaking labor. And I'm gonna quote from PBS again,
Speaker 1: Harrison Blocks Factory was competing with over eleven thousand other
Speaker 1: textile manufacturers in New York City. In order to retain
Speaker 1: their high profit level, they had to produce the cheapest
Speaker 1: shirtwaist in the largest quantity. They demanded greater efficiency from
Speaker 1: their production team, which meant working long hours for little pay,
Speaker 1: and the owners kept scrupulous inventory of their supplies. A
Speaker 1: four man monitored the largely female immigrant workforce during the
Speaker 1: day and inspected the women's bags as they left for
Speaker 1: the night. As an additional safeguard against theft, Max Blanc
Speaker 1: ordered the secondary exit door to be locked. So I
Speaker 1: think episode on the Quabolgno supermarket fire. Yes, super flammable
Speaker 1: workspace always has a locked exit. Yeah, that's gonna come
Speaker 1: into play. Yeah. What is that term called a secure
Speaker 1: like a secure pinch? Like I forget what that term is?
Speaker 1: A choke point, a choke point. Yeah, you created a
Speaker 1: choke point because you're worried about these ladies stealing needles
Speaker 1: and thread. All right, got it, But air my life
Speaker 1: and day. Yeah, now everyone's endangered. Yeah, but they're not
Speaker 1: thinking about that. And to be fair, one of the
Speaker 1: things I should note here we're talking about all of
Speaker 1: this unionizing workers are angry, they're agitating for better conditions.
Speaker 1: The unions aren't agitating for better safety conditions. That's not
Speaker 1: really on anyone's mind right now, right the thought has
Speaker 1: not a safety conscious period. Yeah, the thought has Yeah
Speaker 1: I had you, dude, what an important context wrinkle is?
Speaker 1: Like safety is not on anyone's mind. That's crazy, Like
Speaker 1: I forgot about that, Like that ain't even cross their mind.
Speaker 1: I mean there are I'm not gonna say it's not
Speaker 1: on anyone's mind, because there are. There are garment fires
Speaker 1: like the month before the Triangle shirtwaist fire. There's a
Speaker 1: horrible fire that kills like twenty six people. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are individuals who are like, we need to
Speaker 1: but but when you're talking about the broader union movement,
Speaker 1: safety is not one of the things they're pushing for
Speaker 1: in a big way. And and this is again, this
Speaker 1: is the point in which a work week is eighty
Speaker 1: to like a hundred and ten hours. So they like
Speaker 1: they're concerned, is like, it's a relief if I die
Speaker 1: on the job because I don't have to do another week,
Speaker 1: you know, like because I gotta be here for another
Speaker 1: seventeen hours. Yeah. Um, yeah, So that that's not really
Speaker 1: the focus of the When we were talking about the
Speaker 1: complaints the workers have, poor safety isn't really one of them.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing if your other option is like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: could either stay here in New York and do this
Speaker 1: eighty hour week in this building, or I could go
Speaker 1: down to Virginia and dig in a coal mine that
Speaker 1: seems a lot more dangerous than this, So I guess
Speaker 1: you're talking relatively. It's like, well, I'm not working with dynamite, dang. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and you're also thinking, again, these are all two thirds
Speaker 1: of these people are refuge Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: who are like, yeah, the building slam a double, but
Speaker 1: nobody's actively trying to beat me to death with my
Speaker 1: own baby. Yes, yes, you're not beat yes yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Anyway, yeah. When you're trying to get in
Speaker 1: people's heads in this period, you have to acknowledge even
Speaker 1: the very wealthy and comfortable have a higher acceptance of
Speaker 1: danger threshold than the average person, like the average working
Speaker 1: class person on the street today, because life was just
Speaker 1: more dangerous in a lot of ways. Dangerous. This is
Speaker 1: it was sucked up time. Yeah, dangerous. Yes. So, in
Speaker 1: the fall of nineteen o nine, a new union had
Speaker 1: gotten started among New York garment workers, headed by a
Speaker 1: bold young woman named Clara Lemlick. Over the course of
Speaker 1: the year, Limlick could unionized garment workers from other factories
Speaker 1: large and small, and successfully brought many of them many
Speaker 1: of their employers to the table to increase wages. The
Speaker 1: big thing Limlick and her fellow union this we're fighting
Speaker 1: for was a fifty two hour work week. So that's
Speaker 1: the like again. Eventually, this list feeds into the this
Speaker 1: massive nationwide fight for the forty hour work week at
Speaker 1: the time, they're like, the work week is a d
Speaker 1: plus hours. They're like, fifty two that it's relaxing, being
Speaker 1: a break, let's go. Yeah, more than a standard work
Speaker 1: week for an American today is was like, whoa, this
Speaker 1: will be nice. A lot of Americans work, you know
Speaker 1: that much these days? Yeah, not to minimize that, but
Speaker 1: at the time, the idea that you would only have
Speaker 1: to work fifty two hours was like something worth fighting for. Um.
Speaker 1: And they were also fighting for more regular and fairer
Speaker 1: pay scales, right. They wanted to know exactly what they
Speaker 1: were getting and not have these surprise like, oh, you've
Speaker 1: got to pay for the thread, Like they were fighting
Speaker 1: for all of this ship um. And yeah, they were
Speaker 1: fighting for a survivable wage. The minimum wage isn't really
Speaker 1: a big buzzword at this time, but that's kind of
Speaker 1: they're fighting for within their industry that kind of now.
Speaker 1: Blanc and Harris first fought back against this by threatening
Speaker 1: to fire any employees who joined the union that Limlick
Speaker 1: had created because and their justification was that it was
Speaker 1: competing with their fake in house union. They followed through
Speaker 1: on the promise, shuttering their factory and publicly soliciting new
Speaker 1: employees in local papers. When the union drive started, the
Speaker 1: Triangle workers decided to strike in response. This meant that
Speaker 1: the workers who had been there limlock and they were like, Okay,
Speaker 1: don't come to work, we'll hire new workers, fuck you.
Speaker 1: And the workers are like, well, will surround the factory
Speaker 1: and we won't let these new employees in, will block
Speaker 1: them off so the scabs can't enter. Like, that's what
Speaker 1: a strike is in this period, it's not just not working,
Speaker 1: it's stopping the factory from being able to work. Now,
Speaker 1: this happened a number of times in like nineteen o
Speaker 1: nine through nineteen ten, and in a number of cases
Speaker 1: these kind of attempts to blockade the factory ended with
Speaker 1: these horrific street battles. And that happened with the Triangle factory.
Speaker 1: This is happening in other factories to right. This is
Speaker 1: a broad trend across New York. Um. The Triangle factories
Speaker 1: particularly large, and so what happens there is particularly significant. Now,
Speaker 1: you gotta remember almost all of the strikers here are
Speaker 1: young women. Um and block and Harris countered them. So
Speaker 1: you've got all these young female strikers blocking the factory
Speaker 1: to stop scabs from going in, so block and Harris
Speaker 1: hire a bunch of scabs. But in order to get
Speaker 1: the scabs in, they need to fight their way through
Speaker 1: these women blockading the factory. And the way they do
Speaker 1: that is by hiring a fa lenx of Pimpson prostitutes
Speaker 1: to act as the tip of the spear and the
Speaker 1: solid Oh my god, that is heartless, wow, because they're like,
Speaker 1: you're talking, You're you're talking. If you're talking about a
Speaker 1: prostitute in nine nine New York, you're talking about a
Speaker 1: hard lady. She's talking about a woman who carries a
Speaker 1: couple of knives on her and you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's that's why they hire them. And they are scary,
Speaker 1: and they beat the ship out of these striking work
Speaker 1: it's really ugly. And the police show up and basically
Speaker 1: fight alongside the prostitutes and pimps and arrest a bunch
Speaker 1: of the striking workers while turning a blind eye because
Speaker 1: this is we're not gonna get into this a lot.
Speaker 1: And and Dave von Dreau does a good job in
Speaker 1: his book Triangle of talking about Tammany Hall, the big
Speaker 1: corrupt political situation at this point in time. You could argue,
Speaker 1: it's not all that different. Now. The gangsters, the pimps,
Speaker 1: the prostitutes, and the cops can all be on the
Speaker 1: same side a lot of the time because they're all
Speaker 1: part of this incredibly corrupt criminal government of New York City.
Speaker 1: That is can can just as easily call up gangsters
Speaker 1: as it can cops because they're the same thing. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah that this is such a rad time, just wild,
Speaker 1: wild West, like yeah, yeah, like, yeah, yeah, you just
Speaker 1: as much. Yeah, you know, Joey two fingers is just
Speaker 1: as much gonna get a call from the the governor
Speaker 1: as he is from his mom. You know what I'm
Speaker 1: saying to be like, Yeah, let's do let's just run
Speaker 1: down s that's this is crazy, what a what a
Speaker 1: time to live in. Yeah, yeah, we gotta uh get
Speaker 1: the squad on the street. We gotta help these prostitutes
Speaker 1: beat up a bunch of garment workers. That's just the
Speaker 1: way things working moms, they're all working moms, probably, Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: a huge street fight between a bunch of working women. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: blanch and Harris were not the only factory owners who
Speaker 1: hired cops or gangsters to attack strikers, but they were
Speaker 1: among the most brutal and committed. Now during this period,
Speaker 1: a shipload of smaller manufacturers are willing to negotiate just
Speaker 1: a few days into the strike. They don't have the
Speaker 1: kind of financial resources Triangle does. Um. There there they
Speaker 1: can see that like, okay, they're not really asking, Like
Speaker 1: it's not going to stop us from being profitable. Let's
Speaker 1: just give in and we can get back to making
Speaker 1: you know, clothing and ship. Um. The Triangle owners Blanket
Speaker 1: Hairs hold their ground. Obviously, they hire police to beat
Speaker 1: up strikers in a bunch of occasions, but that starts
Speaker 1: to backfire because again, these laborers are all young women
Speaker 1: and you have these cops just beating them bloody in
Speaker 1: the street and arresting them. And that doesn't look good.
Speaker 1: Like that ship makes the news and people start to
Speaker 1: get really angry about what's happening, and so they and
Speaker 1: that makes the NYPD look bad. They have to stop
Speaker 1: for a while. You know, they never entirely stopped, but
Speaker 1: like there's this kind of ebb and flow of how
Speaker 1: brutal can we be before we have to stop because
Speaker 1: we don't want to like piss people off too much.
Speaker 1: Um And the sympathy that starts to build for these
Speaker 1: ladies strikers, because again at this time you also have
Speaker 1: the Suffragette movement, and the Suffragette movement is not a
Speaker 1: just a poor working class and in fact it's largely
Speaker 1: a wealthy woman movement like the upper class ladies, and
Speaker 1: they get on board behind these poor garment workers and
Speaker 1: see this as part of this broader fight for women's rights.
Speaker 1: So all of these and some of these people are
Speaker 1: like the wife of JP Morgan, like women with some
Speaker 1: fucking funds behind this. Um. A number of them are
Speaker 1: really wealthy widows UM. And they start getting together and
Speaker 1: raising funds UM. And part of what some of the
Speaker 1: funds are to help these women pay their rent paid
Speaker 1: by food and stuff because they're not working during the strike.
Speaker 1: Some of it. A number of these women, some of
Speaker 1: them are just kind of getting in on it, like
Speaker 1: you'll you'll hear about like JP Morgan's wife I think
Speaker 1: gives like a hundred dollars, which is more money back then,
Speaker 1: but it's clearly just like, oh, I'll donate to this
Speaker 1: cause there are some There's this one woman in particular
Speaker 1: who would show up every night after the arrests to
Speaker 1: bail these women out when they got their bail set.
Speaker 1: And one night, because so many women got arrested, she
Speaker 1: runs out of cash and she mortgages her mansion in
Speaker 1: order to bail these ladies out. So there is some
Speaker 1: some pretty rad solidarity happen to Yeah, yeah, um, And
Speaker 1: so Blanc knows like these block and harass. They're not dumb.
Speaker 1: They know that things are starting to go against them,
Speaker 1: public opinions going against them at this point, and the
Speaker 1: only way to get public opinion back on your side
Speaker 1: is with the media blitz of your own. Now, I
Speaker 1: just said a lot of newspapers were very sympathetic to
Speaker 1: the strikers. One that was not was the biggest newspaper
Speaker 1: in town, the New York Times, which was always on
Speaker 1: the side of the bosses in this period. And we
Speaker 1: could argue today, oh, here we go. So Blanc succeeds
Speaker 1: in getting a New York Times reporter to feature him
Speaker 1: in a story that shows his factory full of workers
Speaker 1: despite the strike. And these guys, no, see, they're happy,
Speaker 1: it's just some bad And in the article this won't
Speaker 1: sound familiar to anybody, but Blank through the New York
Speaker 1: Time basically says, look at how happy all of my
Speaker 1: workers are the only reason these poor deluded women are
Speaker 1: striking is because of outside agitators who have there are Yeah, baby,
Speaker 1: he did both. There a few bad apples. And man,
Speaker 1: the playbook, the playbook is undefeated. We put it from
Speaker 1: the same playbook in ninety oh one. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: very funny. Um yea and yeah. And so they have
Speaker 1: to put out this New York Times article. They do
Speaker 1: this press blitz, and they also start to try to
Speaker 1: organize with their fellow business owners. Um. And right around
Speaker 1: this period of time, they write a letter to a
Speaker 1: group of their fellow factory owners. Gentlemen, you are aware
Speaker 1: of the agitation. Wait, I'm actually gonna use my old
Speaker 1: Tommy boys. Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation that
Speaker 1: is now going on in our shops. Are satisfied workers
Speaker 1: are being molested and interfered with. The so called union
Speaker 1: is now preparing to call a general strike in order
Speaker 1: to prevent this irresponsible union from gaining the upper hand.
Speaker 1: Let us know as soon as you possibly can, if
Speaker 1: you would be willing to form and join an employer's
Speaker 1: mutual protection association. So they make a union for the bosses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but in order to fight the union of the workers.
Speaker 1: Got a union too, looks like unizing works. Now this
Speaker 1: still exists today, we call it the federal government. But
Speaker 1: that's a story for another day. Yo, you slid down in.
Speaker 1: That's the smooth yea down here, good man. So Blanc
Speaker 1: and Harris, Yeah, respond to this unionization effort by basically
Speaker 1: making their own union for rich assholes. And part of
Speaker 1: their rage at their workers efforts to unionize comes from
Speaker 1: the fact that the Triangle Shirt waste factory was, as
Speaker 1: I've said, by most standards, a very progressive and safe factory.
Speaker 1: It's considered that in its time, um Blanc and Harris also,
Speaker 1: these guys were not born rich. They again, these are
Speaker 1: dirt poor Jewish immigrants who come to the US fucking desperate.
Speaker 1: They know what it is to be poor, and they
Speaker 1: don't have any kind of class solidarity obviously, but they
Speaker 1: consider it a personal attack that their employees unionize against them,
Speaker 1: right that Like, so they don't have any solidarity for
Speaker 1: their workers as former workers, but they're offended that they're
Speaker 1: workers don't treat them like fellow workers and treating them
Speaker 1: like hey, I'm come on, come on, I'm on the guys,
Speaker 1: I'm one of the girls. It's got a car you're
Speaker 1: dying of Typhus were the same. Come on, man, ask
Speaker 1: more to you, gotta work hard, suck up man, I'm
Speaker 1: on yeah. Nah, I'm good, bro. So that's what what
Speaker 1: what do we miss? I'm laughing problem, I'm good, bro,
Speaker 1: I'm good. Yeah. It's like because that's that's the way
Speaker 1: I would feel about because it's funny to me that
Speaker 1: like it messed with they, It messed with the identity
Speaker 1: and a pride when it was like wait, wait, so
Speaker 1: we're we're not We're not one of the We're not
Speaker 1: one of the squad. No more, you're not happy with
Speaker 1: our you're not happy with our building? Like nah, man,
Speaker 1: no you're not. That's crazy. Yeah nah good yep. So,
Speaker 1: in addition to hiring cops and gang members to beat strikers,
Speaker 1: Blanc and Harris who the term they're known by the
Speaker 1: name they're known by this period is the shirtwaist Kings,
Speaker 1: because they're like the biggest shirtwaist dudes in the city.
Speaker 1: This period, they also hit upon what's kind of a
Speaker 1: brilliant plan. They start bribing Italian priests from conservative Catholic
Speaker 1: parishes to give lectures to their Italian factory workers on
Speaker 1: company time, explaining that laborers have a duty to be
Speaker 1: obedient to their bosses because again, the whole labor force
Speaker 1: is basically Jewish immigrants and Italian immigrants, so a big
Speaker 1: part of their ideas. It's the colonialism thing, right, It's
Speaker 1: what Britain did in Africa. You got you have this
Speaker 1: population united against you. You've got to split them along
Speaker 1: ethnic lines or religious lines, and they try to do both.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work. In this period. The Italians and the
Speaker 1: Jews stick together to funk the bosses, um, which is
Speaker 1: a nice tale um. So yeah, the Triangle bosses also
Speaker 1: tried to bribe the remaining employees, the ones who refused
Speaker 1: to strike with good times. They would start holding dance
Speaker 1: parties during lunch and give out food and prizes. So
Speaker 1: they do also try to treat the workers who don't
Speaker 1: strike better in order to like stop them from striking.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of a minimum aspect of what they're
Speaker 1: actually trying this period. So obviously none of this stops
Speaker 1: the strike. The violence in the streets continues, uh, and
Speaker 1: peace would kind of you know, you would have this
Speaker 1: this period where peace would return after a bad skirmish,
Speaker 1: and then a few days later strikebreakers would be sent
Speaker 1: into crackheads and the cycle would start again. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At one point, the judges get angry that the rich
Speaker 1: ladies who had banded together to back this union, um,
Speaker 1: we're bailing everyone out. So they start sending arrested strikers
Speaker 1: to do weeks of hard labor in a penal colony.
Speaker 1: And the strikers start like making badges and awards to
Speaker 1: give women who do time and the penal colony for
Speaker 1: the movement and stuff. It's kind of a way to
Speaker 1: you gotta reward people who go through this ship. Let go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind don't do it. Yeah, now it's time ward.
Speaker 1: Where on, Blanc and Harris decided, like they do get
Speaker 1: beaten down by this to a degree, and they decided
Speaker 1: they're willing to come to the table and grant their
Speaker 1: workers most of their demands. So they're willing to give
Speaker 1: into the fifty two hour work week, they're willing to
Speaker 1: work to raise wages. The only thing they're not willing
Speaker 1: to do is given to the union's key demand. So
Speaker 1: this the w the w t U L, which is
Speaker 1: the union these these women form all across New York
Speaker 1: City for garment workers. One of the things they're trying
Speaker 1: to get is an agreement from all of these shops
Speaker 1: to be union only shops. In other words, they won't
Speaker 1: hire anyone who isn't a part of the union, which
Speaker 1: obviously makes the union more powerful. And that's the one thing. Eventually,
Speaker 1: even Blanc and Harris are willing to come to the
Speaker 1: table on everything else. Um. And because Blanc and Harris
Speaker 1: have a union of factory owners, they're able to get
Speaker 1: a lot of other big factories to resist this push
Speaker 1: to make it a union only shop what's called a
Speaker 1: closed shop. Now. Meanwhile, the fact that all of these
Speaker 1: owners had been willing to grant the other demands, this
Speaker 1: starts to upset the wealthy liberal ladies who had adopted
Speaker 1: the garment workers strike as a cause, And they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I do you need it to be a union only shop? Right?
Speaker 1: Haven't you gotten enough? Isn't it time for this to
Speaker 1: be over? Um? So that's a factor to it, And
Speaker 1: this this is kind of the start of the union
Speaker 1: movement fracturing. And there's more to it than just the
Speaker 1: rich ladies being like, haven't you got it gotten enough?
Speaker 1: There's also a lot of anger from the extreme leftist
Speaker 1: organizers in the movement because they they're really unhappy as
Speaker 1: soon as these rich kind of liberal ladies show up
Speaker 1: and start throwing their money around um, and they're like, well, hey,
Speaker 1: this is supposed to be a class movement against the rich,
Speaker 1: Like why are we celebrating which women who, no matter
Speaker 1: how much they donate, are still never going to suffer
Speaker 1: as a result of it. And so they get angry
Speaker 1: at the rich ladies who do play a key role
Speaker 1: in this union being able to survive. The rich ladies
Speaker 1: are like, you guys are asking for too much. Why
Speaker 1: do you need this? You know, because they don't actually
Speaker 1: know what it's like to be that desperate um. And
Speaker 1: in addition to all of that, there's frustration among more
Speaker 1: moderate union organizers because a lot of union organizers in
Speaker 1: this period are not socialists. There's a lot of socialists
Speaker 1: in the movement, but like Samue Gompers, who's the head
Speaker 1: of the a f l UM the American FED, he's
Speaker 1: the biggest union head, is anti socialist, but he's a
Speaker 1: union man. UM. So there's there's a lot there and
Speaker 1: the the union organizers who aren't socialists are angry because
Speaker 1: a lot of the more radical socialists, who are some
Speaker 1: of the best and most dedicated organizers, want to make
Speaker 1: this strike more than just a strike for better conditions
Speaker 1: for garment workers. They're kind of trying to push for
Speaker 1: a broader feminist revolt. They're adding demands for suffrage to
Speaker 1: the list of demands the garment workers are making, and
Speaker 1: this frustrates the more moderate strikers who are like, well,
Speaker 1: we just want a more equitable deal. We're not really
Speaker 1: fighting for women's liberation. So the strike movement, it does
Speaker 1: achieve most of its goals. They get the fifty two
Speaker 1: hour workweek, they get wages raised, they get a couple
Speaker 1: of other things, but it also fractures before they get
Speaker 1: everything that they want, which is you know, usually how
Speaker 1: things go right. Yeah, I mean that's what failure. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what a negotiation is. Like you get you know,
Speaker 1: a piece here, a piece there. The color that this
Speaker 1: adds of at again is also, wow, that's not familiar
Speaker 1: of like who you want? Yeah, never happened before to
Speaker 1: where it's like you only want a certain person to
Speaker 1: help and if it's wrong, like I think of like
Speaker 1: when my my tad. My my five year old, is like, hey,
Speaker 1: can someone watch you know, TV with me? And I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'll watch TV with you. She's like, not you, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, wait what. She's like, I want mommy to
Speaker 1: watch TV with me. I'm like, mommy's working right now.
Speaker 1: And then she'll be like what about my sister? And
Speaker 1: I'm like, your sister can't either because she's on punishment.
Speaker 1: I could watch it with you. I'm not doing anything. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to watch TV anymore. And it's just
Speaker 1: like only the disrespect I do not have. Nobody's a
Speaker 1: daddy's girl in my house. It's the worst. But the
Speaker 1: idea of being like just the complication of like whose
Speaker 1: movement is this? I say, I would say, like whose
Speaker 1: movement is this? And that's where when the whole like
Speaker 1: the play of the outside agitator play, that's where you're like, well,
Speaker 1: well crap, dude, Like you kind of got a point
Speaker 1: there because y'all outside of this are saying this is
Speaker 1: your cause and so you got this bigger cause. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, these ladies who are actually doing the work
Speaker 1: are like, I don't know what all y'all arguing about
Speaker 1: we just I don't want to work for eighty hours
Speaker 1: and like that's what I'm here for. And I I
Speaker 1: see how and we really can use your money. I
Speaker 1: don't care how much of us don'te that you got
Speaker 1: money for us? Like yeah, thank you, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. And you're saying, wait, so you're saying we
Speaker 1: shouldn't take their money. So I'm like, okay, well do
Speaker 1: you got money for us? Oh? You ain't got no
Speaker 1: money for us? Because you mad at them. It's just like,
Speaker 1: well crap, dude, like like, well none of you'all work here,
Speaker 1: like like we actually work. It's so the color of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know if anybody's got a point, right, everybody, and
Speaker 1: everyone's got a point, yeah, the point you know, these
Speaker 1: rich ladies they do have a point where they're like,
Speaker 1: you guys have gotten a lot, like maybe and and
Speaker 1: people haven't been working for months, that people keep getting
Speaker 1: arrested and beaten. Maybe it's time to just take what
Speaker 1: you can get. The socialists have a point where they're like,
Speaker 1: but this doesn't fix nearly everything. Um, and you don't.
Speaker 1: Really it's not really your place to say when we
Speaker 1: should settle, because you're never going to have to settle
Speaker 1: you're rich. And then the kind of more moderate laborers
Speaker 1: are right when they have a point, when they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we don't want this to be a big this isn't
Speaker 1: about socialism force. This is about not working eighty hours
Speaker 1: a week, and like that's kind of where my interest
Speaker 1: in it ends. You know, I'm some nineteen year old
Speaker 1: who just got here and I just want my life
Speaker 1: to be less miserable, and nobody I'm not trying to trying,
Speaker 1: I hope. I'm not portraying anyone is right or wrong here.
Speaker 1: This is just what happens, you know. Yeah, that's my
Speaker 1: pointures along these lines. Yeah, yeah, that's my point of
Speaker 1: like the color of life, where it's like it's like
Speaker 1: like histories and living color, and that's what it is.
Speaker 1: Where it's like you've got all these different issues and
Speaker 1: you can't you can't look at it and be like
Speaker 1: they're right there wrong, they're right there wrong. It's just
Speaker 1: so complicated. That's crazy. It's just yeah, that's just how
Speaker 1: things happen. Now, this kind of Peter's out. They get
Speaker 1: more or less a win in early nineteen ten, and
Speaker 1: for the next thirteen months or so, life returns to
Speaker 1: kind of a semblance of normal in the garment industry
Speaker 1: at the especially at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, production resumes, uh.
Speaker 1: People get back to work with more reasonable hours and
Speaker 1: more money. Some things had changed, there'd been significant winds,
Speaker 1: but obviously, as I noted, nobody was fighting for improved
Speaker 1: safety here because they thought the factory was pretty safe
Speaker 1: um or at least compared to what they would had
Speaker 1: been used to. And another thing they didn't really change
Speaker 1: was the greed of Blanc and Harris and their fellow bosses.
Speaker 1: Now we've talked a lot about how flammable garment factories
Speaker 1: are um and one of the things that had been
Speaker 1: done by Harris, who set because he was a great
Speaker 1: he knew how to tailor and stuff, had set up
Speaker 1: down out the layout of this factory is he had
Speaker 1: designed the floor of the factory so that the cutters
Speaker 1: and these are the people who are like cutting out
Speaker 1: the different sort of like scraps that get sewn together.
Speaker 1: These are the people who produced the most waiste scrap
Speaker 1: and waste paper. So these guys all do their's work
Speaker 1: on these enormous tables. And one of Harris's innovations is
Speaker 1: to put trash waste baskets underneath the table, so you
Speaker 1: can just sweep your waist right into the right under
Speaker 1: the table, very efficient. This also means that you get
Speaker 1: hundreds of pounds of cotton and tracing paper and cloth
Speaker 1: crammed together loosely so that there's air in between all
Speaker 1: of them underneath these tables, which basically makes them fuel
Speaker 1: air bombs. Yeah, I was like, wait, yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: everyone knew these were horrific fire hazards. The Triangle factory
Speaker 1: had to note where the accidental fires and I'm specifying accidental.
Speaker 1: I'll explain why here. Prior to nineteen eleven, one of
Speaker 1: which was put out by Harris himself. Buckets of water
Speaker 1: were stationed around the factory floor. A hose that was
Speaker 1: supposed to work was cut kept near the cutting table,
Speaker 1: although it had been allowed to rust shut. Most significantly, though,
Speaker 1: the building did not have a sprinkler system and the
Speaker 1: workers did not participate in fire drills. Now, neither of
Speaker 1: these things were required in garment factories under New York
Speaker 1: law in nineteen eleven, but sprinklers were widely available in
Speaker 1: fact starting in the eighteen eighties. They've become required in
Speaker 1: New England cotton mills, alongside firewalls and fireproof doors to
Speaker 1: create safe zones for employees in the event of ablaze.
Speaker 1: Cotton mills, as we've said, cotton's explosive, basically very dangerous places.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen eighties, all of these things come to
Speaker 1: cotton mills, and cotton mills suddenly become pretty safe places
Speaker 1: to work by comparison. But this doesn't get required in
Speaker 1: garment factories, even though they're dealing with a lot of
Speaker 1: the same materials. Um Now, part of the reason why
Speaker 1: these weren't put in the factories has to do with greed,
Speaker 1: and not the kind of greed you think. A lot
Speaker 1: of times people like will say, well, they didn't put
Speaker 1: in sprinklers because sprinkler systems were expensive. That's not really
Speaker 1: the reason. The real explanation for why there were no
Speaker 1: sprinklers in the Triangle factory starts with the way insurance
Speaker 1: worked in Manhattan during this period. So all of the
Speaker 1: insurance brokers, the guys who are selling insurance to companies,
Speaker 1: colluded together because these guys make their money. When you
Speaker 1: sell a policies an insurance broker, you get a percentage
Speaker 1: of the value of that sale. That's where how you
Speaker 1: make your money. So you make more money if you
Speaker 1: sell more policies, which means you don't want to be
Speaker 1: denying anybody policies. And normally the way you think about
Speaker 1: an insurance policy, the safer your building is, the more
Speaker 1: safety measures like like sprinklers you have in your building,
Speaker 1: the lower insurance premiums are. But if your insurance premiums
Speaker 1: are lower, that means the broker gets less money. So
Speaker 1: the broker doesn't want to give you They want to
Speaker 1: have a lot of insurance policies for dangerous buildings. They
Speaker 1: don't want safety measures in because that means they get
Speaker 1: less money. So I'm gonna quote again from the book
Speaker 1: Try Changed America here. I know it's pretty fucked. The
Speaker 1: hustle everywhere, damn and and one of the things, so
Speaker 1: these brokers are all colluding together. And the brokers are
Speaker 1: not the insurance companies, right. The brokers work for the companies,
Speaker 1: but the insurance companies are the ones on the line
Speaker 1: the broker doesn't pay when there's a fire. And one
Speaker 1: of the ways in which the brokers kind of get
Speaker 1: over the fact that what they're doing should be in
Speaker 1: the worst interest of the insurance company, is they they get.
Speaker 1: They basically split up the risk for each of these
Speaker 1: insurance policies among multiple insurance companies, so that if a
Speaker 1: factory has a horrible fire that destroys a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 1: every company only pays a little bit of money, and
Speaker 1: the brokers get as much money still because they're selling
Speaker 1: as many so they they're they're sharing the risk because
Speaker 1: none of them have to work in these factories. They
Speaker 1: don't give a ship how many people die. They just
Speaker 1: care that they keep selling policies. Um, so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from Trying Goal the fire that changed America here.
Speaker 1: Blanck and Harris were perfect examples of this skewed system.
Speaker 1: Few factory owners paid higher rates than they did, and
Speaker 1: as a result, they commanded the loyalty of the most
Speaker 1: powerful brokerage in town. The Triangle owners were so called
Speaker 1: rotten risks in insurance parlance because they kept having fires,
Speaker 1: and not just little ones that could be put out
Speaker 1: by hand. They were repeaters, having collected on several substantial claims,
Speaker 1: and yet they had little difficulty buying all the insurance
Speaker 1: they wanted. Some of these repeat fires were likely deliberate.
Speaker 1: In April of nineteen o two, Blanck and Harris called
Speaker 1: the fire department about a fire. The n y f
Speaker 1: D arrived a little too late to save the inventory
Speaker 1: of the factory, which burnt in its entirety. Thankfully, no
Speaker 1: workers were present at the time. Blanck and Harris collected
Speaker 1: a hefty insurance payment. Six months later, they had another fire,
Speaker 1: also early enough in the morning that no workers were present.
Speaker 1: Block and Harris collected thirty two thousand dollars in damage
Speaker 1: from both fires. Both blazes occurred at the end of
Speaker 1: the busy season, which was the part of the year
Speaker 1: in which factory owners who had overrest made a demand
Speaker 1: for their product tended to wind up wind up with
Speaker 1: a bunch of extra inventory they couldn't sell. So this,
Speaker 1: these very convenient fires happened right at the time when
Speaker 1: they needed to get rid of excess inventory. Um in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven, there were two more fires and another
Speaker 1: factory that they owned, and they followed the same pattern.
Speaker 1: So these guys are starting fires to destroy their excess
Speaker 1: to inventory and collecting the insurance on stuff they can't sell.
Speaker 1: That's part of how they stay profitable. And then you
Speaker 1: and if you split the insurance among multiple guests, everybody's happy.
Speaker 1: Everybody's happy. The people that will die. Yeah. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the fact that it works this way means insurance brokers
Speaker 1: don't really want to confront this abuse of their policies. Um,
Speaker 1: because the brokers collect the bounty and each new policy. Now,
Speaker 1: some of the insurance companies aren't always happy about this
Speaker 1: because this does cost the money, but the brokers are
Speaker 1: fine with this ship um, and garment factory owners are like,
Speaker 1: this becomes a crucial part of their business. It protects
Speaker 1: them from the kind of thickle whims of the industry.
Speaker 1: Um because you know, then, as I think now, the
Speaker 1: fashion industry hinges on what happens in Paris that year.
Speaker 1: So if you are geared up to make a bunch
Speaker 1: of top hats or coat tails or whatever, and then
Speaker 1: some fucker in Paris decides that's not the hot item,
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of ship you can't sell, and
Speaker 1: you gotta light it on fire. Yeah, Sophie and I
Speaker 1: do the same thing with podcasts we can't air. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just gotta light it on fire. You gotta light
Speaker 1: it on fire. Remember them, Remember the trucker hat craze dude.
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah yeah. So I'm like, what about the
Speaker 1: guy that like sitting on a box of trucker hats?
Speaker 1: Too bad? You can't the Von Dutch joints. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: gotta burn them things. Yeah. I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of Von Dutch hats going around in a rack or someplace. Now.
Speaker 1: It's like with all of the old shirts from political
Speaker 1: candidates that wind up in Ecuador someplace. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So um Block and Harris again not the only business
Speaker 1: owners to do this. This is the norm in the industry.
Speaker 1: But the fact that such a practice is the norm
Speaker 1: means that factory owners, like insurance brokers, have a vested
Speaker 1: interest in avoiding fire prevention measures. Sprinklers can't discriminate between
Speaker 1: a safe, intentional fire meant to create create an insurance payment,
Speaker 1: or an accidental fire. And if you disable your sprinklers
Speaker 1: before you carry out an intentional fire, that looks suspicious
Speaker 1: and you'll get in trouble with the cops. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: it's arson. So you don't want to have sprinklers because
Speaker 1: you rely on being able to start fires. Now, as
Speaker 1: it happened, nineteen eleven was the year that Paris turned
Speaker 1: on the short waist demand dropped in so many manufacturers
Speaker 1: were burning their wares that one large insurance company had
Speaker 1: to cancel their policies with all shirtwaist makers. Block and
Speaker 1: Harris stayed insured though and in fact they were over insured.
Speaker 1: They were paying enormous ray. It's to carry more insurance
Speaker 1: than the actual value of the content of the factory.
Speaker 1: Why they did this because this costs them a lot
Speaker 1: of money. Up until you get the payout, you're spending
Speaker 1: a lot of money. Dave von Drell, who wrote the
Speaker 1: book Triangles, a very good journalists. The reason he suspects
Speaker 1: both of these men did this is that they were
Speaker 1: planning because again, these guys own a bunch of factories, right,
Speaker 1: they have multiple companies making shirtwaists. They have a bunch
Speaker 1: of excess inventory. He suspects at the end of the year,
Speaker 1: they were going to take all of their excess inventory,
Speaker 1: put it in the Triangle factory and lighted on fire
Speaker 1: for an insurance payment with several million modern dollars. Hints
Speaker 1: von Drell writes, quote, they could not put sprinklers in
Speaker 1: their factory if they thought it might need to burn sometime,
Speaker 1: and they might think that instituting fire drills in a
Speaker 1: world where few factories had them would make them look
Speaker 1: suspiciously conscious of the issue. So they're not even willing
Speaker 1: to do fire drills because it might make it look
Speaker 1: like they're expecting a fire, because they're absolutely planning to
Speaker 1: burn this sucker down. Yeah. Yeah, What a strange interrogation though,
Speaker 1: to where it was like, hey, why are y'all doing
Speaker 1: fire drills? It's like it just in case there was
Speaker 1: there might have been fired. I don't understand why this
Speaker 1: was Like, no, nobody else they didn't do no fire
Speaker 1: drills buying over there. It's interesting you started doing fire
Speaker 1: drills right before you have to think on on fire,
Speaker 1: Like why wouldn't you play it cool enough to be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: thank god, we did it, like, you know, we saved
Speaker 1: a lot of lives. We saved a lot of lives.
Speaker 1: Why we did it, you know? Man? Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: when you gotta hustle, though, when you when you're working
Speaker 1: on trying to hit a lick, man, you gotta think
Speaker 1: of every angle, and that was one of the angles
Speaker 1: he thought of, like, look, man, we can't look like
Speaker 1: we might have been prepared just in case of disaster happened,
Speaker 1: because it's not a disaster, it's a plan. Yep. Was
Speaker 1: it one of those like like you said everybody was
Speaker 1: doing it? Was this one of those like yeah, like
Speaker 1: worst kept secrets in the city, Like everybody knew, everybody
Speaker 1: the people that journalists right about it. Everyone knows this
Speaker 1: goes down because it's not like obviously none of these
Speaker 1: rich guys are admitting it, but it's not. Nobody. Nobody is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nobody thinks this isn't happening. So this brings us to
Speaker 1: the fire. On March nineteen eleven, there were roughly six
Speaker 1: hundred workers in the Triangle factory in the late afternoon
Speaker 1: when closing time came for the work day. The fire
Speaker 1: started at one of the cutting tables. Remember how I
Speaker 1: described these tables are basically giant fuel air bombs that
Speaker 1: people work at. Um the table had been prepped for
Speaker 1: the next day of work, which meanted it had a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty layers of tissue, paper and fabric on
Speaker 1: top of it, and then hundreds of pounds of scraps
Speaker 1: in the waist bin beneath it. Now, for obvious reasons,
Speaker 1: smoking was banned in the factory, but these cutters, remember
Speaker 1: the cutters are the most important part of the whole operation.
Speaker 1: These are some the only men working. They're they're the
Speaker 1: most highly paid workers. They're irreplaceable, right because Number one,
Speaker 1: the guys who were cutting from the big fabric swashed
Speaker 1: to make the things that people sew together. If they're
Speaker 1: good at their job, they waste less fabric, which saves
Speaker 1: you money. If they're good at their job, they put
Speaker 1: out more stuff faster, which allows you to make more,
Speaker 1: which is so these guys. It's in no the owners
Speaker 1: band smoking in the factory. But also nobody wants to
Speaker 1: make these guys unhappy because they don't have to work here,
Speaker 1: then go elsewhere, right, they get that they can get
Speaker 1: money anywhere. Um So, as best as we can tell,
Speaker 1: so one of them was smoking. One of them smoked
Speaker 1: a cigaretteitor cigar, we don't really know, but he snuck
Speaker 1: a smoke, which was very common. It had caused some
Speaker 1: minor fires before, um and they either tossed They either
Speaker 1: put out their match and tossed it in in the
Speaker 1: waste basket which is filled with hundreds of pounds of
Speaker 1: Coston backing and paper, or they tossed their cigarette button
Speaker 1: and they probably put it out first, but not all
Speaker 1: it would take is a single ember, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it may have just been that. It may have been
Speaker 1: somebody put it out. They thought they were being careful,
Speaker 1: they tossed it in, and there's one little red ember
Speaker 1: the size of a fucking hair follicle, and that's what
Speaker 1: starts all this um and the what ever it is,
Speaker 1: it catches um and it fucking goes up like a
Speaker 1: like it is a fire bomb, basically um. Now workers
Speaker 1: rushed to grab pails of water to put out the blaze,
Speaker 1: and honestly, like one of the big heroes of this
Speaker 1: is a guy who's who's initially attempts to stop the
Speaker 1: blaze and then helps rescue dozens of people, it's possible,
Speaker 1: as heroic as he was, that he got people killed
Speaker 1: because he tried to stop the fire rather than immediately
Speaker 1: focusing on a vactimation. Because by the time this thing starts,
Speaker 1: it's fucked the only thing to do. And again, a
Speaker 1: lot of lives and I'm not blaming that guy, but
Speaker 1: a lot of lives would have been saved if they
Speaker 1: practiced evacuations, because that's the thing that you can't put
Speaker 1: this funker out once it starts. They don't have the equipment.
Speaker 1: Workers grab pails of water to try to put out
Speaker 1: the blaze. Some of them are empty, you'll hear um.
Speaker 1: But even if they hadn't been, I don't think it
Speaker 1: would have helped. Um. I'm gonna quote from a write
Speaker 1: up and history dot Com here. The manager attempted to
Speaker 1: use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful
Speaker 1: as the hose was rotted and its valve was did shut.
Speaker 1: As the fire grew, panic and suit and the hose
Speaker 1: might have helped. The young workers tried to exit the
Speaker 1: building by the elevator, but it could hold only twelve
Speaker 1: people and the operator was able to make just four
Speaker 1: trips back and forth before it broke down amidst the
Speaker 1: heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire,
Speaker 1: the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down
Speaker 1: the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via
Speaker 1: the stairwells also met awful demises when they found a
Speaker 1: locked door at the bottom of the stairs. Many were
Speaker 1: burned alive. They find dozens of bodies next to this door,
Speaker 1: just lay on, blumped together. Within eighteen minutes, it was
Speaker 1: all over forty nine workers had burned to death or
Speaker 1: been suffocated by smoke. Thirty six were dead in the
Speaker 1: elevator shaft, and fifty eight died from jumping to the sidewalks,
Speaker 1: with two more later dying from their injuries. A total
Speaker 1: of a hundred and forty six people were killed by
Speaker 1: the fire. Now Dave von Drelle goes into much more
Speaker 1: detail about the fire and the heroism of the people,
Speaker 1: Like these elevator attendants are incredibly brave because they're they're
Speaker 1: writing an elevator up into flames, licking at their heads
Speaker 1: to try and save as many people as they possibly
Speaker 1: they get stuck, Yeah, they could have gotten stuck on
Speaker 1: any one of those in burn Incredibly brave people. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of very brave people. Um. Now, again,
Speaker 1: a big part of why so many people die is
Speaker 1: that Blanc and Harris had locked the main exit. UM,
Speaker 1: so that because they their employees were getting ready to leave,
Speaker 1: they wanted to search them before they left to make
Speaker 1: sure nobody steaming ship. But maybe the bigger problem was
Speaker 1: the fire escape, which we've already talked about, didn't really work.
Speaker 1: So people flood to the fire escape, which is tiny
Speaker 1: and poorly constructed, and eventually it collapses and people fall
Speaker 1: to their doom. A lot of people get impaled. Oh god,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's it's just horrible. In the weeks
Speaker 1: that followed the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire workers safety suddenly
Speaker 1: became a matter of paramount concern for union organizers and
Speaker 1: for the local government. They're is an outrage against this,
Speaker 1: Like a hundred thousand people take to the streets. There's
Speaker 1: mass demonstrations against this. People demand new fire safety codes
Speaker 1: and more fire inspectors. In October of nineteen eleven, just
Speaker 1: months after the disaster, the United Association of Safety Engineers
Speaker 1: was founded. A fire prevention law was passed that same
Speaker 1: month which required all factories in New York City to
Speaker 1: install sprinkler systems in their buildings. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: people who had been passing by on the street at
Speaker 1: the time and have watched, didn't just see the fire,
Speaker 1: watched dozens of women leap to their deaths and splatter
Speaker 1: on the fucking payment. One of the people who sees
Speaker 1: this is a woman named Francis Perkins. Francis Perkins, twenty
Speaker 1: years later or so, becomes the U S Secretary of
Speaker 1: Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yeah. Perkins mentions the Triangle
Speaker 1: Fire constantly and the speeches she gives when she's made
Speaker 1: Secretary of Labor and repeatedly recalls the moment when she
Speaker 1: watches these women leap to their deaths to avoid burning alive.
Speaker 1: Quote from Francis, they couldn't hold on any longer. There
Speaker 1: was no place to go. The fire was between them
Speaker 1: and any means of exit. It's that awful choice people
Speaker 1: talk of, what kind of choice to make. I shall
Speaker 1: never forget the frozen horror that came across as we
Speaker 1: stood with our hands on our throats, watching that horrible site,
Speaker 1: knowing there was no help. So this becomes this, This
Speaker 1: is this is like her. She makes it her life
Speaker 1: quest to never be that helpless in the face of
Speaker 1: it as aster like this again, and as Secretary of Labor,
Speaker 1: Perkins establishes the Factory Investigating Commission, which lobbies for stronger
Speaker 1: safety measures and makes your factories are meeting certain minimum
Speaker 1: safety standards. She serves for twelve years, during which she
Speaker 1: is key informing and implementing not just reforms of safety,
Speaker 1: she helps push the Social Security Act through She helps
Speaker 1: to create unemployment insurance. She pushes for the establishment of
Speaker 1: the minimum wage, and she legislates the Guarantee for the
Speaker 1: right of workers to organize and collectively bargain. Perkins also
Speaker 1: establishes the Labor Standards Bureau, which is focused on ensuring
Speaker 1: employees meet certain employers meet certain minimum safety standards. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, the Labor Standards Bureau becomes Osha whoa. So
Speaker 1: that was just pivotal for her. Yeah, that, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the defining moment of her life in some ways. Obviously,
Speaker 1: how could you watch this and have it not be
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, yeah, I mean it could have went
Speaker 1: the opposite way where she could have, but for it
Speaker 1: to turn into activism is like many that's amazing. So
Speaker 1: of course, the sheer level of outrage around the fire
Speaker 1: ensured that there were immediate calls to charge Blanc and
Speaker 1: Harris for manslaughter. Both tycoons immediately poured money into an
Speaker 1: advertising campaign dedicated to buffing their image as a safe
Speaker 1: and reliable garment manufacturer. Reporters from The New York Times
Speaker 1: met with Harris in his home and dutifully reported his
Speaker 1: defense of his actions and claims that he had taken
Speaker 1: proper precautions. None of this succeeded in assuaging public rage.
Speaker 1: On a for eleventh, both men were indicted for manslaughter.
Speaker 1: Since most of the safety features their factory lacked were
Speaker 1: not mandated by law, the case came down to the
Speaker 1: question of whether or not they had legally locked the
Speaker 1: exits from a right up. In Forbes quote, Max Stewart,
Speaker 1: one of them top defense attorneys of his day, poked
Speaker 1: holes in the witnesses testimony and made it appear that
Speaker 1: a key witness's story had been rehearsed. On December, the
Speaker 1: all male jury returned a verdict of not guilty after
Speaker 1: less than two hours of deliberation. Isaac Harris and Max
Speaker 1: Block dropped limply into their chairs as their wives began
Speaker 1: sobbing quietly just behind them, writes von Drelle in Triangle.
Speaker 1: Now the shirtwaist Kings had to like because these this,
Speaker 1: you know, is such an unpopular verdict. They have to
Speaker 1: sneak out of the courthouse to their limousine, and they
Speaker 1: get confronted by a young guy whose sister had died
Speaker 1: in the fire, who screams at them, basically yells at
Speaker 1: them that they're murderers, which you could argue is accurate. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now both guys immediately go on to try to rebuild
Speaker 1: the Triangle Shirtwaist company. Since even today a lot of
Speaker 1: people know the term Triangle Shirtwaist fire, even if they
Speaker 1: don't know what it was. This was kind of a
Speaker 1: lost cause, right Yea, the brand has been poisoned. Brands burned.
Speaker 1: Bro Yeah. Yeah. Harris and Blanc struggled financially as all
Speaker 1: of the funds they did make had to go straight
Speaker 1: to the debt they had to their lawyer. Uh. They
Speaker 1: were sued in nineteen twelve over their failure to pay
Speaker 1: a two d and six dollar water bill. However, the
Speaker 1: tough times did not last long. Late in nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: they get the insurance pay out from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they collect a total of sixty thou dollars, which is
Speaker 1: a funkload of money in nineteen twelve and is more
Speaker 1: than the fire had cost them in damages. Now they
Speaker 1: have to pay restitution to the families of the dead,
Speaker 1: but they just have to pay a week salary, which
Speaker 1: is like ten or fifteen bucks at most for most
Speaker 1: of these women. So they walk away from the fire
Speaker 1: because of the insurance pay out, they profit about four
Speaker 1: hundred dollars per victim. Oh oh, man, just say it
Speaker 1: like that. We made like four bucks per dead person.
Speaker 1: It's just the Empire strikes back always. Yeah, baby, bro,
Speaker 1: you know it was avoidable disaster mhm ends up making
Speaker 1: you money, and these guys don't learn a goddamn thing.
Speaker 1: Of course, in nineteen, the next year, after they get
Speaker 1: their payment, Blanc, who's running another factory, is issued a
Speaker 1: warning from an inspector. Because now there's inspectors. So an
Speaker 1: inspector checks out this new Triangle factory and it finds
Speaker 1: that he's locked the door of the factory again during
Speaker 1: work hours. Now the thing that he successfully got off
Speaker 1: on in court, he's caught doing again the same thing.
Speaker 1: So the Triangle factory burned. Now you got the Parallelogram factory,
Speaker 1: and he locked the door again because I mean I did.
Speaker 1: It's like it kind of sucks for a little bit,
Speaker 1: but we kind of make spinning guys. It doesn't find
Speaker 1: twenty dollars for this, so yeah, yeah, it's like yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, And a couple of months after that
Speaker 1: he's he's fined again when another factory inspector finds that
Speaker 1: he's he's lined the walls with scrap baskets that basically
Speaker 1: make the whole thing a death traffic because the bomb.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah that does it again? Does it again?
Speaker 1: What's that thing with Ford? The uh the the car
Speaker 1: everybody used to make fun of. Uh, But yeah, the
Speaker 1: Pento that like when they where they put the gas
Speaker 1: where they put the gas tank was means like it's
Speaker 1: gonna become a bomb. And the FOD decided it's just
Speaker 1: cheaper to just pay whatever fine lines if people die,
Speaker 1: rather than reclaim them and remake them all. I forget
Speaker 1: what that was called, but there's a term for it.
Speaker 1: But that's what this reminds me of. Where it's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's cheaper to just pay the fine than
Speaker 1: to like make the factory safe. Absolutely, yeah, that's wild, guy,
Speaker 1: it's pretty great. It's pretty great. In nineteen fourteen, both
Speaker 1: Harris and Blanc were fined when they were caught sewing
Speaker 1: fake Consumers League labels into their garments. Now, these legal
Speaker 1: labels where a legacy of the Triangle Fire. They were
Speaker 1: meant to certify that a factory had safe conditions for
Speaker 1: its laborers. So obviously everyone gets horrified by unsafe work conditions.
Speaker 1: They developed this way to show that, like, your factory
Speaker 1: is safe, and these guys fake having that label so
Speaker 1: they can't pretend there say yeah, yeah, there is nothing dude,
Speaker 1: like how many times you picked up something like is
Speaker 1: this organic? Is this grassbit? Yeah? Look it's on the label. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And now in nineteen eighteen, though they do finally shut
Speaker 1: down the Triangle Company, it just never makes as much
Speaker 1: money as it had before for obvious reasons. Isaac Harris
Speaker 1: goes back to working as a tailor and Blanc continues
Speaker 1: to own other garment factories. Neither of them pay anything
Speaker 1: that we could we would reasonably call a price for
Speaker 1: what they've done. Show so good time, somebody, Hey, I
Speaker 1: think the lesson here is that cheating cheaters prosper. That's
Speaker 1: the lesson. Cheaters do fucking great, cheaters make out like Gangbusters. Cheaters. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: you know, if you want to learn anything useful from this,
Speaker 1: just remember to lock the factory door in the fire
Speaker 1: hazard of a garment factory in your life, whatever that
Speaker 1: is for you, lock that door, make sure the fire
Speaker 1: escape isn't function and all you know, yeah, to make
Speaker 1: no efforts make no efforts to show that you're trying,
Speaker 1: because because if you show that you're trying, that means
Speaker 1: you're cheating. Yeah, if you're trying, you're guilty. Yes, you
Speaker 1: got it. This is a disaster. And that's my motto.
Speaker 1: M hmm. Don't try because trying means you're guilty. Well, prop,
Speaker 1: that's gonna do it for us behind the bastards today.
Speaker 1: How are you? How are you doing? I am that
Speaker 1: same sinking feeling that every guest has at the end
Speaker 1: of a show to where you're like, man, I'm glad
Speaker 1: I got through that. Now I have to think about
Speaker 1: this for the next until I go to bed that like,
Speaker 1: this is true, but I had a great time hanging
Speaker 1: which all it's just it's kind of it's it's a
Speaker 1: whole mess, man. Mm hmm. It is a whole mess. Welcome,
Speaker 1: there's got to be you know, it's not a mess.
Speaker 1: Prop You're not doing. There's no ad right now. It's
Speaker 1: not a mess. Is your podcast politics? Oh? I was like, wait,
Speaker 1: are we going to an ad break at the end? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Club politics were prop man. Man, I like, I'm so
Speaker 1: excited about being able to like have a consistent, like
Speaker 1: flow of content that like now, I'm getting so far
Speaker 1: ahead of myself. So like some of the stuff I'm
Speaker 1: talking about right now ain't gonna come out until, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, three weeks from now. So I'm like, crap, dude,
Speaker 1: how do I stay hot? You know? But man Hood
Speaker 1: Politics were prop got some great episodes in the can Um.
Speaker 1: We're covering everything like Joe Biden's from Long Beach, uh,
Speaker 1: the Israel and Palestine, Armenian genocide, like what it means
Speaker 1: for to be a foreign ally, like everything. It's all coming.
Speaker 1: So check it out. It's a weekly as You're welcome,
Speaker 1: Yes it is. It's a podcast as regular as garment
Speaker 1: fires in early nineteen hundreds of New York and old
Speaker 1: tiny guys that always make it out on top. Yeah,
Speaker 1: always always handle it, and hiring gangsters and prostitutes to
Speaker 1: beat up workers. American way. I do want that TV show.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, that has to be that has
Speaker 1: to be a show. Yeah, there has to be some
Speaker 1: character in that that like where the lady was getting
Speaker 1: getting her ass beat by its prostitute and she comes
Speaker 1: up with the idea of like maybe I should just
Speaker 1: maybe I should quit this factory thing and become a prostitute,
Speaker 1: like and she just like switches sides because she's like
Speaker 1: so well, we uh. I wrote a book. It's called
Speaker 1: After the Revolution. You can find the podcast version of
Speaker 1: that book with sound effects by our own danial Uh.
Speaker 1: If you if you type after the Revolution into whatever
Speaker 1: fucking thing your podcast come the funk from um. That's
Speaker 1: really good. I'm excited about that, man's yeh. I mean
Speaker 1: the book it's really good, and the podcast is really
Speaker 1: good and Robert's really good, so should be exciting. You
Speaker 1: can also find you can find the pub for free online. Okay,
Speaker 1: just got breaks into a yawn. I was about I
Speaker 1: was about to, like, let me tell you something, man,
Speaker 1: because you know I'm I'm publishing a book too, and
Speaker 1: like as good as you are, Like I thought about, man,
Speaker 1: just like the way that you guys as well as
Speaker 1: y'all right, and the way that y'all tore up Ben
Speaker 1: Shapiro's book. I was thinking about that as I was
Speaker 1: writing my own and be like, let me make sure
Speaker 1: I don't get dragged by the homies for me right
Speaker 1: in the state. Now. Granted, I mean definitely not as
Speaker 1: bad as that, but there's all every book anyone's if
Speaker 1: written has dragon ball things. But I think it really
Speaker 1: makes you dragon bles being been Shapiro. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you kind of you kind of came with you, thankfully,
Speaker 1: very not to the best of my knowledge. Um, you
Speaker 1: always buy two boards when you go to the home depot.
Speaker 1: That's the funniest thing I've seen. I'm gonna support him.
Speaker 1: I was like, Bam, you spent a dollar fit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like that's like you could. You would have given
Speaker 1: them more money if you'd bought a diet coke, Like,
Speaker 1: come on, buddy, bro, this is your point. Like, yeah, also,
Speaker 1: you're a millionaire, get like an angle grinder or a
Speaker 1: fucking circular saw or something by a power. He doesn't,
Speaker 1: but like you're trying to pretend to be cool. What
Speaker 1: are you doing? It was just so funny because I'm like,
Speaker 1: you're making this huge political statement and you show me
Speaker 1: that little lass bag in your hands, and I was like, wait,
Speaker 1: is that what he bought? I thought? I thought, I'm like,
Speaker 1: are you making fun of yourself? Like do you are
Speaker 1: you in on the joke? Like are you in on
Speaker 1: the joke? Because your whole thing is supposed to be
Speaker 1: like we're the party of the honest working man. That's
Speaker 1: who I represents. Like I've spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in home depots, Like you know, I've spent a shipload
Speaker 1: of time. I'm not particularly handy, but people very close
Speaker 1: to me do that ship for a living. I've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time doing runs for like like functioning
Speaker 1: farms and stuff. Nobody who's a serious, working class person
Speaker 1: who needs to go there walks out with a paper back,
Speaker 1: with a plastic bag and a single piece of work,
Speaker 1: Like you're a millionaire, buy a power tool and at
Speaker 1: least like try to pretend like cool, like yeah, I
Speaker 1: got a giant saw, Like go get a go get
Speaker 1: a fucking Husk Varner or something, and yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: my uncle's been you in the same saw for the
Speaker 1: for you know, fifty years. I'm gonna buy him a
Speaker 1: brand new so I'm gonna go to home depot. I
Speaker 1: just put him. Me and my brother in law just
Speaker 1: put in a new sink in my office. Uh. And like,
Speaker 1: speaking of going to the store, I'm like, first of all,
Speaker 1: you're gonna go at least four times, because at least
Speaker 1: there's no one trip to home depot. You know what
Speaker 1: makes one trip like, damn, this don't work. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: now this is leaking. This is the wrong fucking size.
Speaker 1: Like you're gonna make four trips and I did, and
Speaker 1: I'm like putting in the sink. I'm like, I know,
Speaker 1: I spent just on return trips, hunts, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. So I'm like, don't tell bro, that's so hilarious.
Speaker 1: It's like, there's an easy way. You've been Shapiro, right,
Speaker 1: Your your big thing is dying climate change. Be like
Speaker 1: we're saying it's not a problem. Be like, well, there's fires,
Speaker 1: and since I'm not a weak liberal, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: fire proof my house and I'm gonna go cut down
Speaker 1: the tree in my yard so it can't catch, because
Speaker 1: that's what real conservative meant do. And then go buy
Speaker 1: a giant chainsaw, put it in your fucking garage, forget
Speaker 1: about it, and hire someone else to do the work.
Speaker 1: You're Ben Shapiro, You're a millionaire, Like what ye pretend?
Speaker 1: At least this has been a fun digression about Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 1: After an hour and forty minutes of talking about the
Speaker 1: triangle shirtwaist fire anyway politics, yea, it will see you
Speaker 1: pull later don't listen to Ben Shapiro. Although this episode
Speaker 1: is dropping the same week as the last of the
Speaker 1: Ben's Books episode, so I guess it fits. Fuck it
Speaker 1: a great plug for Thursdays. That nailed it all right, Peace,
Speaker 1: Oh my god.