From Tragedy to Charity: Dr. David Conrad Pérez on Fire in the Heart of the City

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history, delivered to you and the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite-sized history. Welcome back, everyone. Those who've followed the show for a while know that I have a deep fascination with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. So when I saw earlier this year that a new book was analyzing the fire and offering a fresh perspective, I was immediately interested and hoped I would be lucky enough to chat with the historian behind the research. I am thrilled to say that Dr. Conrad Perez's Fire in the Heart of the City is a new, compelling look at a story we all thought we knew. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Welcome everyone. Joining me today is Dr. David Conrad Perez. He is a media historian and the research director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University, who recently wrote a book about the event that made me fall in love with history: Fire in the Heart of the City, The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy, and the Origins of Modern Charity, which will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome, Dr. Conrad Perez. Thanks so much. I'm so happy to be here. So I cannot wait to explore this book with you. So let's dive right on in. For those who might not know, what was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and what prompted your analysis into the rise of private charities in the aftermath of the fire?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

So the way I think about it is there's the fire, and then there's the story we tell about the fire. The fire itself is already a fairly well-known tragedy, I think, a well-known piece of history. But I describe it as a story we only think we know because there's a big part of this history that's been missing. And for me, it completely changed the meaning of this tragedy. So, you know, for more than a century, we have remembered it as one of the worst industrial disasters in American history, which it was, but we've also celebrated it as sparking a new age of labor reform. And, you know, the truth is that that's not the full story. But I mean, like, let's get to your question about what the fire was, like what happened. And it took place in the heart of New York City in the spring of 1911. And it's a hard thing to relive, but so you can picture it. We're talking about a garment factory in Lower Manhattan. It occupied the top three floors of a 10-story building. And then on a Saturday afternoon, a cigarette ignites a pile of discarded cloth. And within minutes, those top floors are engulfed in flames. You have hundreds of workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, who are running for the exits, only to find that those doors are locked. The owners escape to the roof, and so the workers are trapped. And in the end, 146 people are killed. It was such a tragic event, especially for those who witnessed it, that 400,000 New Yorkers filled the streets of New York for a funeral march a few days later. And then came the anger, because everyone knew that those women were the same ones who had been calling for a safer factory for years. And so the fire sparks this whole new age of worker safety legislation and led to an avalanche of new labor laws. And that, I would say, is a story most of us know about the fire. It's a story that I always knew about the fire. But it's only half the story. The other half is about how those most responsible actually gained greater power after it. Because a key detail often left out of this history is that the primary target of the anger was not only on the factory owners or the legislators. It was directed at the city's charities and its elite, and especially at their favorite newspaper, the New York Times. Because the Times had spent years vilifying the women of the Triangle Factory, saying their calls for safety were un-American and dangerously radical. And rather than admitting fault, these same institutions redirected the story to make themselves look like the good guys. And how they did it? They did it through this new thing called professional charity. So after the fire, the New York Times created a first of its kind campaign called the 100 Neediest Cases. It filled multiple pages and it featured 100 stories of the city's poorest immigrant families, so widows, people who suffered from severe illness and workplace injuries. And it asked New Yorkers to give generously to support them. The catch was that the paper wasn't asking them to donate directly to these people. That would be called old charity. Instead, it asked them to give to one of three big professional organizations, which claimed to house the city's best experts on issues of poverty. And that campaign helped readers to feel good about themselves. You know, it helped the factory owners to get some positive press and appear publicly benevolent. And it made the New York Times look compassionate. But the one thing it didn't do was allow people to ask questions about power and responsibility. You know, about what how what allowed the tragedy to happen in the first place. And that's the part of the story that pulled me in. Because once you follow the charity campaign, you realize that Triangle did not only produce a new generation of labor laws, it also helped launch an entirely new model of professional charity, one that gave a small group of powerful philanthropists enormous authority over how Americans understood issues of poverty, you know, of immigration and reform. And there are examples all around us today of how we are still living with the consequences of that legacy.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Yeah, and you, you know, you mentioned the New York Times and the story behind the rise of the New York Times actually kind of plays a surprisingly central role in your book. So can you share a little bit more about who Adolf Ox was, uh, how he transformed the Times into the institution that we recognize it today, and and why it mattered in the public response to the Triangle Fire?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, so Adolf Ox is a fascinating person, uh, and he really is at the heart of the story, as you say. He's also someone who I don't think many people know much about. I mean, even within journalism history circles, he's not as popular as a Pulitzer or Hearst. But I mean, you did a fantastic episode some time ago on Henry Raymond and George Jones, who were the first founding owners of the Times. And so they came in the 1850s, and Adolf Ox came right after them in 1896. And Ox is a person who made the paper really into the New York Times we recognize today. And he has quite the backstory. I mean, he arrived in New York at 38. He was a total outsider. And really, he had been an outsider for most of his life. I mean, he grew up in poverty, first in Ohio and then in a shock in Tennessee. And he was a bit haunted by the mistakes of his father, who was a very ambitious man, but he failed multiple times in trying to start his own businesses. He was also the oldest of seven siblings. And so from the time he was a kid, he was determined to be the one who changed his family's fortune, you know, to break the pattern of his father. And he believed that buying the New York Times was the way to do it. And at this point, you know, he was he was 38. He was already the publisher of the Chattanooga Times, which was a good Southern newspaper, but he was also massively in debt, half a million dollars in debt. And so he was desperate to make his bid for the New York Times work. And so the book takes you into his midnight scheming sessions with a disgruntled Times reporter who is trying to help him. It follows him as he hustles from bank to bank for loans. But the point is that he made it happen. You know, he ended up meeting the right people, especially a banker named Jacob Schiff, who becomes more important around the time of the fire. And he managed to buy the newspaper for $75,000, all loans, and without a single penny of his own money. And then, you know, what happened next was one of the greatest business turnarounds ever because the New York Times wasn't exactly a prize back then. The paper was getting crushed by Pulitzer and Hearst, and it was losing money every day. By circulation, it was just the 14th most popular newspaper in New York alone. And yet Ox turned it into a world leader within his lifetime. And his strategy was simple: you know, instead of chasing headlines, he chased credibility. He built a newspaper specifically for New York's wealthiest families, and he built its brand around being a newspaper of character, as he put it. He wanted it to be a clean paper that you could leave on the kitchen table for everyone to read. And he used this language to attract advertising money. He convinced department store owners like the Strauss family behind Macy's that the Times went to the homes that could afford to buy shirtwaists and nice clothing, that it was read by elite women and men alike. And then he made, you know, other changes that have continued to this day. He created, he created the New York Times book review. He came up with the slogan, All the News That's Fit to Print. He moved the Times building itself from Newspaper Row, which was at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, to the center of Manhattan. And in doing so, he created Times Square. Even the New Year's Eve ball drop, which we think of as quintessentially New York, was actually invented by Ox to celebrate the paper's move uptown. But because of Ox's allegiance to the city's elite families and to the bankers who helped him buy the paper, when the Triangle Fire happened, the Times wasn't just covering it from the outside. It was part of the story. The Times editorial board, which Ox directed, had spent years attacking the immigrant workers of Triangle and defending the reputations of the factory owners. And so when the fire happened, the big question became who was responsible? You know, who would lead change? And rather than letting that conversation play out, Ox hijacked the moment. He used the Megaphone of the Times to declare in front page headlines that there was blame on both sides. And he urged the city to turn their attention away from the workers, calling for reform in the streets, and to instead support a massive charity campaign led by the city's wealthiest philanthropists, who just so happened to be the same people who, of course, ox owed his fortune. And so Ox and the Times, who are usually left out of this history, are actually an important key to understanding that.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Yeah, that for me was uh a brand new kind of eye-opening piece of this story. And the triangle shortwaist factory fire is one of my loves of history. So I that was just an eye-opening piece. And just the influence alone. And so kind of diving a little bit into kind of the climate of the era, what was the political climate of the city on the eve of the fire? And how did this influence labor activists?

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah, I mean, so the climate was incredibly charged. New York was a city of enormous wealth and poverty, and those two worlds were living almost on top of each other. You know, uptown you had the financiers, the philanthropists, the mansions of Fifth Avenue, the grand department stores, and all the groups who believed they had a natural right to leave the city. And then downtown, let's say below 14th Street, you had the tenements and the new immigrants of the Lower East Side who fueled the garment industry, which was the backbone of New York's economy. And so with the world focused on the rising skyscrapers and the glamour of Uptown, these new immigrants were working without any oversight in horrific conditions. But what's important to remember, I think, and I try to center in the book, is that these workers were not passive. You know, they were resisting, they were organizing, they built unions, they formed some of the largest strikes in American history, they held mass meetings, and they were trying to force the city to pay attention. The problem, of course, was that the factory owners had all the power. They would fire any worker who whispered about unionizing, they would bring in strike breakers, private thugs to beat the women, and they would bribe police and courts to punish them, shipping them off to workhouses in Blackwells Island. And they had the most powerful ally in New York, which was the New York Times. And that piece of the story also surprised me. So the paper's editorials would routinely portray the workers as dangerous radicals and anarchists. It accused them of being un-American for daring to challenge big businessmen, all while defending the factory owners. And so the workers fought back the only way they could, you know, which was by going to the streets and striking and slowing production. And that's what I would say makes the political climate, as you say, before the fire so important, because it didn't happen in a vacuum. It came after many years of class conflict that was only intensifying over who had the right to shape New York's future.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

Yeah. And given that you focus on kind of the changes to charity, I, you know, curious as to what did charity look like during the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and how was it perceived before the events at Triangle?

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah, so that's a great question. And I'd say charity in the Gilded Age and in the beginning of the Progressive Era was a world in transition. You know, for generations it had been personal and local. You gave through your church, your synagogue, your union, maybe, to mutual aid societies, uh maybe even neighborhood groups. And for the most part, you knew the people you were helping. But then a new idea arrived at the turn of the 20th century, which was called scientific charity. And the premise sounded simple. I mean, when it comes to charitable giving and social reform, don't trust your emotions, trust the experts. The idea of the proponents of scientific charity was that the field should be professionalized and investigative. These people argued in favor of a, I guess, a three-step process that involved first studying poor families, determining their needs, and distinguishing the worthy from the unworthy poor. In doing so, they promised that donations wouldn't be wasted, they would be put to the most efficient work. And to many middle and upper class Americans, you know, that sounded great. It seemed modern and it fit the spirit of the age, which was already excited about claims of expertise and science and more efficient institutions. But for many working families, especially those immigrants living in the Lower East Side, it felt very different. It meant strangers walking into your home, asking deeply personal questions, and then judging whether you're worthy of help. For instance, if you were found to be a child born out of wedlock, your family was often considered undeserving of any charity. And with this transition, poverty stopped being seen as a result of low wages, you know, or discriminatory hiring practices, or dangerous factories. It became something to diagnose. And that's the tension at the heart of this story. Because before the fire, these professional charities were struggling to win public trust. Many were backed by some of the richest men in New York, and many wondered, you know, why are these organizations led by millionaires in need of our money? Then the fire came along and changed everything. Suddenly the city above 14th Street felt deep guilt and they wanted to, you know, do something. And the question became who should receive that generosity? Would it go directly to the unions and the families of the workers? Or would it go to these new professional charities that the the Times promoted as the best option and which promised to manage the crisis in an efficient way? And so the fire didn't create modern charity, but it gave this new model its biggest stage and it helped tip the balance. It taught millions of Americans that the best response to suffering was not necessarily to stand with the people most affected and who are demanding change. It was to hand their money to large elite institutions and to trust them to decide what justice should look like. And that I think we're still living with that legacy today.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Yeah. Well, and one of the organizations that you talk about is the charity organization society. So I wanted to ask you, what was the charity organization society and how did it remake New York Charity?

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Yeah. And so this is where charity stopped being just about compassion and started becoming a tool for something else. So the New York Charity Organization Society was the most influential group behind what people called scientific charity. And I say New York because other cities had charity organization societies, but the New York City branch was widely considered the most powerful. And it was founded in the 1880s by a woman named Josephine Shaw Lowell, who was a wealthy reformer from the Boston area. And she believed that the country's charities had become too scattered and too emotional. And she wanted something different, something centralized, professional, and organized. And she helped surround the organization with power. Its board included men like JP Morgan, Jacob Schiff, and Charles Fairchild. Fairchild was the former New York Attorney General and was soon to be the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. And they all believed that experts, not neighbors or local community organizations, should decide who receives help. And they gave this idea home through the New York Charity Organization Society and also through the construction of a new building called the United Charities Building, which was this impressive tower on the corner of Park Avenue. It was made of limestone and had this big arch over its front doors with these grand marble stairways. And I guess I'm talking past tents, but actually the building is still there today. It's in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. The last time I checked, I think there's a fancy steakhouse there now. But the point is that this building wasn't just an office, you know, it was a statement and a symbol of what the scientific charity movement was trying to become, which was something modern and authoritative. And it was saying that charity is no longer happening in the gilded living rooms of socialites. You know, it had become a serious institution. And in promoting this work, they used words like science and scientific to emphasize the seriousness of it. But the truth is that, you know, its leaders had no actual experience with science. These were wealthy businessmen and economics majors. The two men who Josephine placed in charge of the charity are great examples of this. The first was Robert DeForest, who Josephine installed as the president. And he was the powerful lawyer of Russell Sage. And he came from a legacy of influence. His grandfather was the first president of the New York Stock Exchange, and his wife's grandfather was one of the original founders of New York University. And while DeForest had a reputation for helping to guide family estates towards philanthropy, he had no actual experience in working with the poor. And so that's who was in charge. And then there was Edward Devine, who was hired by DeForest at the age of 29 to be his right-hand man. But Devine also had no experience working with the poor in New York. He had grown up in a farm in Iowa that spent most of his life in academia. He had an economics PhD from UPenn. And in charity, he found a field ripe for intellectual engagement, a way for great men to experiment with grand ideas about social reform. And DeForest gave him all the power he needed to do so. He installed him as the founding professor of the country's first school for social work, which was first housed in the United Charities building before moving with Devine to Columbia University. And since he was at the bleeding edge of a new field, Devine was able to basically create the curriculum as he went, you know? So neither man had lived in poverty. They couldn't speak Italian or Yiddish or any of the languages of the Lower East Side. And they had no idea what it was like to be a new immigrant working in the garment industry. But together they advanced their charity as the foremost experts over that very community. And that authority, it became something like it became incredibly important after the fire when New Yorkers wanted to do something, you know, because their message was simple. They said, don't give directly to the workers, don't give to the unions, give to us. We are professionals. We have the experts, we have the system in the school, we know how to help in a way that makes your money go the furthest. And the New York Times amplified that message. So the bones of a major industry were already there. It just lacked public trust, uh, legitimacy in a bigger stage, which is what the fire in the New York Times provided them.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Aaron Powell Well, and speaking of the New York Times again, can you talk a little bit about the collaboration between the New York Times and the infamous owners of the Triangle shirtwaist factory, Max Blank and Isaac Harris.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

Yeah, so I'd say it was more an alignment of interests, but without question, the Times and the factory bosses of Triangle needed each other. And what's interesting is that they both took off at almost exactly the same moment. So just four days after Ox became the official owner of the Times, Blake and Harris opened their first factory, a little startup on Wooster Street. And within just a few years, they both catapulted from relative obscurity, you know, to becoming industry leaders. Blank and Harris were known as the shirtwaist kings, and they both had come to America as immigrants from Eastern Europe with almost nothing. And yet they created a business that by the time of the fire was producing 2,000 garments a day and making a million dollars a year, which would be somewhere around $35 million today. But of course, that success came at an enormous cost. I mean, they hired workers as young as 12 into a section of the factory called the kindergarten. They paid next to nothing. They locked doors so workers couldn't take breaks or go to the bathroom. The women were forced to work 80 or more hours a week. They physically assaulted and harassed them. And of course, they refused to recognize any sort of union. And since they were among the worst offenders in an industry of, you know, many bad offenders, they were also the biggest target of the women's labor movement. And this is precisely where the New York Times comes in. There's one moment in the book that I think is uh particularly revealing. So in 1909, there was a massive labor strike at Triangle, and the women were actually on the verge of forcing Blank and Harris to recognize some of their demands around fire safety. Until that is, the Times bailed them out. So sensing that the strike was tilting public opinion against them, uh, Blank and Harris invited a Times reporter into the factory for a carefully arranged tour, which was part of a coordinated effort with the newspaper to turn the public against the striking women. The bosses lined it up, you know, a handful of American workers and American workers is how the Times article described them, to tell the reporter that they enjoyed working at the factory and that the only time they ever felt unsafe was when the radical immigrant women outside threw potatoes at them for breaking the strike lines. And as you can imagine back then, the image of a potato, a staple of the Lower East Side immigrant diet being thrown at a young American girl was just the narrative that Blink and Harris wanted the times to print. So this article was then followed by. By a parade of Times editorials, condemning the women outside of Triangle, calling their activities dangerous, criminal, and unamerican. And this all despite the fact that picketing was actually totally legal at the time. And so that's the sort of collaboration that the factory owners frequently enjoyed. And here's the thing: what I think is so important about this story is that it tells us what kind of institution the Times was becoming under Adolf Ox. So it was not the sensationalist press of Pulitzer Hearst, but it had politics. And reflected Ox's alliances and his view of the city. Without getting too far off track, you know, Ox held deeply sexist views that went far beyond his peers in his era. He refused to hire women as editors or reporters, only secretaries. He was against a woman's right to vote for the entirety of his life. And he even refused to allow his only child, his daughter, to succeed him as publisher because she was a woman. He instead installed her husband. So it was a relationship of shared interests, I'd say. Blank and Harris needed a newspaper that would take them more seriously, and the Times needed to preserve its vision of a city led by respectable men, keyword here, I guess being men, and orderly institutions. And of course, the triangle fire exposed the cost of that arrangement.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Well, and you you mentioned the strike in in your last answer. And I did want to ask you about that because you do. You include the story of what is known as the uprising of the 20,000. And so for those who might not know, wondering if you might want to touch on it a little bit briefly, what was it and how does it ultimately tie into your analysis?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yes. So the uprising of 20,000 was that massive general strike I mentioned earlier, which pushed the triangle bosses to the brink of major reform before the fire. It was the largest strike of women in American history up to that point. And it shows how these young these young workers were not passive before the fire. You know, they were extremely skilled organizers and they were calling for greater attention. I mean, it's incredible when you think about it. There have been very few general strikes in American history. And by general strike, you know, I mean a strike across a city or an industry, not just a single shop. And the reason they've there's been so few is because they're very hard to organize. And this one was organized by teenagers and women in the early 20s. And yet they coordinated with workers across more than 500 factories. They understood how to hold big meetings, how to recruit, how to keep picket lines going, and how to speak to the press. One of the most iconic moments from this uprising, I think, came at a mass meeting in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, which is a giant room just a few blocks east of the Triangle Building. Because in order to kick off a general industry-wide strike, you know, they first needed all the city's big government unions to vote in favor of it. So they convened all the big national union leaders and invited workers from across the city to join. And because the union's national representatives were all men, you could imagine the stage was lined wall to wall with union men who all spoke one after the other in solidarity with the women, but always falling short of calling for a general strike, or always short of calling for a vote. And this went on for hours until finally this young woman named Clara Lemlik had enough. She was a worker who had immigrated from what we would now call Ukraine, and she had just survived a vicious beating days earlier on the picket line. And so as she pushed her way to the stage, people could see all these cuts on her face. She was limping from multiple broken bones. And after she got to the stage, she said something like, and this is translated because she was speaking in Yiddish. But she said, I have listened to all the speakers and I have no further patience for talk. I move that we strike. It was a mic drop moment. You know, the crowd cheered and a vote was finally taken. And the strike ultimately lasted about 11 weeks, going through some of the coldest months of the year from November of 1909 until January of 1910. So we're talking about a year before the fire. And it ended with mixed results. I mean, the women actually won contracts in more than 350 shops, which allowed for increased pay and shorter hours. But they fell short of achieving their two main goals, which were forcing shops to recognize unions because more than 150 shops settled without it, and getting fire safety protections. And of course, the Triangle Factory was one of those shops that settled without either. But one of the important lessons of that strike was that it shows how tactically sophisticated these women were.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

So can you talk about some of the challenges that the women faced, both from their, you know, their quote-unquote enemies and those who were supposed to be on their side?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yeah, I mean, it was unbelievable what these women were dealing with. I think, I think there are three levels or so of struggle that are painted in the book. The first was obviously the manufacturer. I mean, they had enormous power without any accountability. But the second was over public opinion, you know, which was not some abstract thing. It was a real challenge they faced on the sidewalks outside the factory door, in courtrooms, in newspapers, and in the way the city frequently decided that their version of events wasn't as credible as the factory owners. And these women were very aware that the only way that they could pressure factory bosses to improve their conditions was by winning public support. And to do so, they had to convince New Yorkers that they were not radical socialists or ungrateful immigrants as the Times repeatedly portrayed them. They were workers making reasonable demands, shorter hours, safer factories, better wages, and a recognition of their union, just as the unions of men in other industries had been recognized. That is the one reason their organizing was so impressive. They understood messaging and coalition building. You know, in the book, I described the life of these union halls, which were like command centers, places where organizers used scratchy blackboards to track which shops had settled and which hadn't. It was where they coordinated translators in English, Yiddish, and Italian, where they handled arrests, divided money to cover rent and food for striking families. And it's where they taught workers how to pick it. There's one flyer that I share in the book, which actually instructed women on how to strike and what to do if arrested. Is it okay if I read just a section of it?

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Thank you. So I'll go, I'll go quick. So it says don't walk in groups of more than two or three. Don't get excited and shout when you're talking. Don't put your hand on the person you're speaking to. Don't touch his sleeve or button. Don't call anyone a scab or use abusive language of any kind. Plead, persuade, appeal, but do not threaten. If a policeman arrests you and you are sure that you have committed no offense, take down his number and give it to your union officers. So they really were inventing the very practices of picketing that we now think as are commonplace today. But as you say, they also face challenges from people who are supposed to be on their side. You know, the broader labor movement at the national level was not at all eager to support women workers. So they got little to no support from national union leaders. And then there were the wealthy socialites, the suffragists and the social reformers who joined the cause through the Women's Trade Union League. And I'd say this is a third big level of struggle for them. So many workers called these wealthy women the Mink Brigade because of the big furry mink coats that they would wear. And in many ways, they were essential. You know, they brought money to pay bail and sustain wages for striking workers. They brought publicity. And that alliance came also with attention, though, because they wanted to help the workers, but they didn't always trust them to lead. And they had reputations to maintain. So they hated being the focus of bad press from the times. So the workers had to navigate a very delicate politics. You know, they had to accept help without giving up control. They had to soften their approach when they were talking to the Mink Brigade over tea and social dances often, while also showing the fight and the anger that the working women needed to see in order to believe that the union women represented their interests. And that is what makes, I think, their organizing so sophisticated. They found ways to move through all of those worlds at once without ever losing sight of what they wanted.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Well, and I also love your exploration of the class tensions and how that impacts the relationship between the garment workers and their allies. So can you talk a little bit about that, especially in the aftermath of the fire?

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Yeah, I'd say before the fire, there were already cracks in the alliance. And then after it, those cracks split wide open. So there was a big meeting that I write about in the book. And out of all the moments after the fire, I think this was probably the most important. So the meeting was held at the Metropolitan Opera House, you know, about a week after the fire. And everyone with power showed up. Ann Morgan, the daughter of JP Morgan, rented the space, and the banker Jacob Schiff was appointed by the New York State governor to chair the meeting. The stage was filled wall to wall with the city's religious and charity leaders, including Edward Devine, Alva Belmont was there, and even a young but still unknown Francis Perkins was sitting in the crowd watching everything happen. And the class division there played out almost theatrically. I mean, on one side you you had the city's elites. They arrived in chauffeured cars, women in plush fur coats, men in top hats, and they sat in the well-guarded reserve sections of the orchestra, and then the high grand piers of the opera house. And this side, of course, owned the shirtwaist companies. They ran the big banks and the major department stores. And they were admitted at a special side entrance that opened 30 minutes before the other doors. And with Schiff leading the meeting, he started by telling everyone what this side wanted to hear, that they shouldn't waste their time looking for who it was to blame. You know, instead they should focus on providing immediate charitable relief to those who were left behind. And the other side were the immigrant garment workers, you know, they arrived by foot after walking from the tenements, and they filled every spare seat and inch of standing room in that theater. And just like in the Cooper Union gathering, Schiff's call for charity was followed by a parade of other elite men seconding his motion. No one was calling for responsibility. Until that is, Rose Schneiderman got up to the podium to speak. So Rose was 29, I believe, at this time, and she was one of the lead organizers of the uprising of 20,000, and so many of the other strikes. And she was by all accounts the shortest person on the stage at about four six, and she had this famous red hair, and she delivered a speech that completely changed the atmosphere of the city. You know, standing next to Schiff, the mink brigade and the charities, she basically declared them useless. In her words, she said, and I'll quote some of her speech here. I would be a traitor to those burned bodies if I came here to talk philanthropy and good fellowship. We have tried you, good people of the public, and we have found you wanting, she said. This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. We have tried you then, and we are trying you now, but you have just a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. It was a short but absolutely devastating speech because it said the simple thing directly that the workers did not need another expression of sympathy from the people who had ignored them. They needed power and accountability and some kind of enforceable change. And in that moment, you know, everything changed. The Meek Brigade was furious, and so Rose and the other labor leaders were pushed out of the Women's Trade Union League completely. They were also blacklisted from the city's garment factories. And the Times, of course, publicly criticized Rose for speaking so violently against the good men and women of the city. You know, in time, years later, this would all change, and Rose would come back to become president of the Women's Trade Union League. But in the aftermath of the fire, there was a strong split.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Well, and we've talked about the 100 DDS cases. It was one of the things you mentioned in the opening. And so kind of coming back to that, what were the circumstances that prompted its creation and how did it reinforce perhaps some of the negative stereotypes about immigrants?

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Yes, and I really appreciate this question because I know I think the Wandranida's case is kind of a niche thing, but it really gets to the heart of the book. So after that Opera House meeting, the Times put its full support behind Jacob Shift and his call for charity after the fire. In fact, they directed readers to write checks directly to Schiff as the organizer of the entire effort. And while a large portion of those donations never actually made it to the victims' families, because the charities determined that many of them couldn't be trusted to spend the money responsibly, the campaign was nevertheless celebrated by the Times as a grand success, which they said helped the 99 neediest families affected by the fire. But then months later that same year, in late December of 1911, the Triangle Factory owners, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, were acquitted of all charges by an all-mail jury. And so the Lower East Side is again consumed by anger. And it's at this moment that Ox reaches back out to the city's charity bosses and asks whether they would be interested in joining him for a more permanent campaign. And that arrangement was launched under the name the 100 Neadiest Cases. And it involved a full-page display of 100 short narrative vignettes of suffering, about a paragraph long or so, of what it called the city's most needy and deserving poor, alongside a call for readers to support one of the three charities to help them, headlined by the charity organization society that we talked about. And these stories taught readers how to see poverty, especially immigrant poverty, because again and again, the campaign associated immigrant families with illness, dependency, disability, mental deficiency, often describing them as feeble-minded and as being helpless. And these were not neutral descriptions. They used the language of eugenics and scientific charity because the charity organization society was the country's lead advocate of eugenics and scientific charity. So even if the stories were intended to inspire compassion, they also reinforced, you know, a very dark view of immigrants as burdens on the city's resources, as sick, dependent, defective, you know, in need of institutionalization and supervision by experts. And that's the paradox, I guess I'd say, at the heart of the campaign, because it raised money for people in need, but it also taught readers that the new immigrants of the Lower East Side were problems to be managed. And it simplified things. And instead of asking why workers were poor or why are the factories so dangerous, readers were invited to ask a simpler question: where should I send my donation? And because you ask about stereotyping, there's one more thing I have to share. So during my research, I found this document called The Guide to Disguising, which was a guidance document that the Times sent to the charities each year, instructing them how to anonymize the case studies. And the charities were encouraged to fluff up some of the key facts in order to protect the identity of the needy person and to enhance the emotional draw, as they put it of the story. And this meant changing how many siblings or kids they had, you know, sometimes their gender and even the severity of the disease in whatever way would maximize reader's sympathy. But there was one detail that the Times said the charities should never change, and that was ethnicity. In this guide to disguise, the charities were told to keep the quote ethnic flavor, as the Times put it, of the person being featured. If they were Italian or Jewish, then that detail must remain part of the story. So they made sure there'd be no mistaking, you know, which community was bringing so much disease and distress to the city of New York? Because stereotyping wasn't some sort of implicit thing. It was part of the design of the campaign from the start.

unknown 37:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

Well, and how did the Needy's Cases list come to represent what you call a vital cornerstone to a new century of charity work?

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Aaron Powell Well, it's a cornerstone because it legitimated a scientific charity movement that likely would have evaporated, or at the very least, have remained marginal without the support of the Times. And I mean to be blunt, it raised more money than these charities initially had ideas to spend it on. To provide an example of the scale we're talking about, one of the three charities had become accustomed to sending out more than 50,000 Christmas card appeals and more than 15,000 personal letters to families across the city as part of its, you know, its main annual fundraising appeal. And these efforts would return about $2,000 a year, which is a pretty good amount of money for a long time. But the Times campaign immediately exceeded that, bringing them more than $25,000 a year within the decade. And the same was true for the other two charities. The charity organization Society, for instance, went from having a net deficit in general work spending to quickly building a surplus of more than $2 million today. And the money got to be so much that Ox's son-in-law, Arthur Hayes Salzberger, who would succeed him as publisher, was actually starting to get nervous. He wrote a private letter to Ox telling him that the Times was single-handedly funding nearly all of the relief work that the charities were doing. So to spread the money around, Salzberger suggested widening the number of organizations beyond the big three. But of course, Ox pushed forward, you know, emphasizing that exclusivity was the key. So the fundraising part of all this was, you know, nothing less than transformational. But even bigger picture, the campaign transformed how people thought about charity. Before this, the newspaper charity campaigns were temporary. You know, they responded to a disaster or war or some immediate emergency. They didn't help fund organizations to fix poverty or solve public problems. So we live in the world that this c this charity campaign created. The neediest case has made it normal for people to give to big professional relief charities and less normal for people to give to local unions, you know, or mutual aid groups, for instance. And this is what made the campaign so important, you know, to Divine and the other charity bosses. And every year in a series of letters, they would write to Ox, they would praise the educational value of the Times campaign. In the words of one charity boss, it taught New York how to give. And it helped the charities become full-fledged public authorities because the Times gave them something they couldn't earn themselves, which was public trust. If the Times said a family was needy, readers believed it. If the Times said the charities knew how to help, readers believed that too. So the neediest cases became a cornerstone because it worked. It narrowed the public imagination, it raised money, it built donor trust, and I'd say it gave journalism along with the charities a moral authority in the city.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Now, I think you kind of touched on this in your in your opening about, you know, what drew you to this research. But I do want to give you another opportunity in case you wanted to expand on it. You know, how does this research kind of reframe what we know about the legacy and impact of the triangle shirtwaist factory fire?

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Yeah, so I think the answer to this question is also the answer to the question, what do we miss when we tell this triangle story as a labor history?

unknown 41:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Because that is largely how the fire has been remembered for more than a century, I think. And of course, the labor story is true. Triangle did help lead to major workplace reforms across the country that are incredible. But the labor story is not the whole story, and it overlooks an injustice that I think has never really been confronted. You know, the Times tried to rewrite history by creating this campaign and by recasting itself as the heroes. And what's incredible is that after the fire, the Triangle boss has actually reopened another factory, blocks away from the Triangle building, still without union recognition or fire safety protections. And the newspapers printed its call for more employees. And so, and this was days after the fire. So that shows just how much of a distraction I think the charity campaign was. And, you know, what's covered more in the book is that the consequences of providing legitimacy and funding to the scientific charity movement were profound. Because when you follow these institutions after the fire, the story becomes even darker. These same charities, led by Edward Devine and others, went on to become the country's lead advocates in championing eugenics and immigration restriction and in funding intelligence testing at Ellis Island. They also led the cause for the forced institutionalization and sterilization of thousands of new immigrants who were deemed unfit. They shared information of their tenement investigations with government deportation officers. And the list goes on. And through all of this, you know, they were receiving a windfall of funding from the Times campaign. So the story doesn't end with benevolent reform. It extends into some of the most, I think, coercive social policies of the 20th century. Because in many ways, charity was just a vehicle to something bigger, to realizing some of the dangerous visions of a handful of city elites. And that's part of the reframing I hope the book offers. That triangle did not simply expose the brutality of the sweatshop. It exposed a struggle over who gets to define justice and reform. You know, the people most affected by the harm or the institutions that claim to speak on their behalf. And that's a struggle I think we're still very much having today.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

And what do you hope readers take away from your book?

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Well, I hope readers come away first with a deeper respect for the workers themselves, you know, how they lived, not how they died. One of the most meaningful parts of this book has been the conversations I've had with the great niece of Rose Schneiderman, who was doing her own historical work to keep the legacy of her great aunt alive. And one tragic reality is that because many of the women in the labor movement had romantic, often lifelong relationships with other women, many of their letters have been destroyed by family members. But these women were the architects of so many of the rights we have today. And you know, there are two things that I think indicate how far we still have to go. Recognizing the full story of the fire? First, there is a statue in honor of the ILGWU in New York, which is the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which is the local union that led all these historic strikes. And the statue is on Seventh Avenue in the Garment District, and it's of a man. There are actually no statues for Rose or any of the women garment workers or union organizers behind the 1909 general strike, which was by far the ILGW's most famous strike. So that's, I mean, that always gets me. Um, another interesting thing is that the building where the fire, the triangle fire took place, it used to be called the Ash Building, but it's now called the Brown Building, which was named after a millionaire real estate investor named Frederick Brown. And this is after he bought the building and donated it to NYU. So the name of the building itself honors and preserves it as a symbol of charity. So I think there's a lot we still have to learn from the fire. And I hope readers will come away with a more complicated understanding of charity. I don't want people to read the book and think charity is meaningless or, you know, inherently evil, but I do think it can become dangerous when it allows us to feel compassionate without asking deeper questions about power. Because that to me is one of the central lessons of triangle. If readers come away seeing the fire not only as a tragedy from the past, but as a warning that sympathy is not the same as justice, then I think the book will have done what it I hoped it would do, or at least it will have done what it did for me.

unknown 45:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:25

And where should people go to find out more about you and the work that you do?

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Well, I think the best place is probably my website, which is davidconradperez.com, which has more about the book and the research behind it. And there is a page where people can write to me on the site because I'd love to connect with anyone who might be interested in this work.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Fantastic. And then before I let you go, um I know we've kind of uh poured through this book a lot, but is there anything that we haven't covered that you want to make sure that future readers know?

SPEAKER_01 45:58

Well, you know, I think, yeah, I think we've covered a lot. Um, I guess I'd say, you know, the journey of writing this book was a long one. It took more than a decade. And I think one of the things that kept me going was the fact that I could see so many echoes in the world today. You know, of seeing immigrants getting blamed for problems that aren't their fault. I've seen my friends and neighbors almost paralyzed in denial in the face of a deportation campaign that's happening right now against undocumented immigrants in this country. And it's seeing how many local movements are doing the difficult work of trying to advocate for justice and reform while too many people are looking elsewhere. I mean, to give an obvious example, so I've I've started to notice just how popular it is to advocate for donations to a food bank, for instance, and how rare it is to see a newspaper or big institution advocating for people to support movement organizations or local community groups that are directly working towards reform. I think we've been trained to see unions and movements and local charity groups as political, whereas many people think that a relief organization, a private foundation, or a big charity bake is somehow apolitical. And I think the triangle story shows us how wrong that thinking is. So my hope is that, you know, by better understanding the fire and the reflexes it put in place, we can unlearn some things and maybe even take more responsibility over what is happening all around us.

SPEAKER_00 47:20

Well, to the listeners out there, please make sure to pick up a copy of Fire in the Heart of the City. It offers new insights and breathes fresh air into one of labor history's most critical moments, and you will not be able to put it down. Thank you again, Dr. Conrad Perez. Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure. My thanks again to Dr. Conrad Perez for spending his time with me. Fire in the Heart of the City is out today. So if you have any interest in triangle, labor history, the rise of charity, or social welfare, make sure to add this book to your shopping cart. Thanks, peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explore this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.