(thunder rumbling)
♪ ♪
(horse hooves clomping)
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: On April 5, 1911,
400,000 people lined the rain- drenched sidewalks of New York
as an empty horse-drawn hearse
crept from the dank, narrow streets of the Lower East Side
toward the skyscrapers towering over Madison Square.
(thunder rumbling)
New Yorkers from all walks of life had come to pay tribute
to the unidentified victims of the Triangle Fire,
the deadliest workplace accident in the city's history.
(thunder rumbles)
A few weeks earlier, the workers had been forgotten cogs
in America's immense industrial machine.
Now, one in ten New Yorkers were there to claim them
as their own.
JO ANN ARGERSINGER: Public conscience thought they had failed these young women.
They had somehow not protected them.
DAVID VON DREHLE: There was a recognition-- "Wait, these girls can't die in vain."
That was said over and over and over again,
as if the city had somehow turned its back on them.
RICHARD GREENWALD: If there weren't massive funerals,
it would have been very easy for the city
and the city officials to say,
"Well, this is just... it's sort of a natural disaster.
"It's a terrible thing,
but there's nothing anyone could do about it."
ANNELISE ORLECK: If you ask the average American,
"Is it okay for workers to work in a shop
"where the conditions are so dangerous
"that it could cost them their lives
and not have government intervene?"
Most people would say no -- there's a line.
The Triangle Fire drew that line.
It burned that line, really, into the nation's conscience.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Every morning, six days a week,
more than a hundred thousand people poured out
onto the streets of the Lower East Side,
headed toward another day's work in the city's garment factories.
Many were young women in their teens;
some were girls as young as ten.
They were immigrants:
Italians who had fled natural disaster,
Jews who had escaped persecution in Russia, Ukraine, Poland.
Their families had chosen America
for its promise of a better future.
But even the youngest daughters had come to understand
that their precarious hold on the American dream
depended on their willingness to work.
GIRL (dramatized): Father had to take me to the shop
and not be late for his own work.
I was eager to begin life on my own responsibility,
but was also afraid.
"Don't look so frightened," he said.
ORLECK: These young girls weren't just
earning money for their own clothes
or to, you know, to go out to a dance hall or to Coney Island.
They were earning money to support the family.
GREENWALD: Economic security was the American dream
for many of them --
making enough money
to be able to put food on the table,
not worry about making rent for the week.
NARRATOR: As the throng disappeared into sweatshops
in tenement apartments,
several hundred workers veered off
toward the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,
in the heart of Greenwich Village.
At the base of the Asch Building,
men and women stepped into wooden freight elevators
to ascend to the Triangle factory
on the eighth and ninth floors.
Workers like Michela Marciano,
who managed to send a few dollars
to her family in Italy every month.
Or Julia Rosen, whose 17-year-old son
worked alongside her to help support three younger children.
Or Catherine Maltese,
whose 13-year-old daughter wasn't too young to join her
on the factory floor.
(door squeaks and closes)
ORLECK: Getting a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
was a pretty desired position
because they were working
in a much more modern factory environment.
High ceilings, big windows.
Compared to the coal-stove-heated, dusty,
hugely crowded sweatshop rooms, Triangle was a plum.
NARRATOR: But even at the Triangle,
sewing machine operators faced a 14-hour workday
for two dollars a day at most.
And that was before bosses docked their pay
for the needles, the thread, the electricity they used.
WOMAN (dramatized): Sometimes you work at a big machine
and it's not working right.
One of the needles skips and you get blamed for mistakes.
The same machines.
The same surrounding.
Shirtwaists, shirtwaists, and more shirtwaists.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: On the tenth floor,
the Triangle owners could feel their vast machine
shuddering below.
Max Blanck and Isaac Harris
had made Triangle a million-dollar-a-year behemoth,
mass-producing the garment every modern woman must have:
the shirtwaist.
Harris and Blanck were known as "The Shirtwaist Kings,"
but their empire, as they saw it, was under constant siege.
After 20 years, the shirtwaist was getting stale.
Fashion editors began to showcase colorful dresses
for the modern woman
and turned up their noses at the bourgeois waist.
No matter how much silk embroidery Harris added
to their designs,
the Triangle's sales charts sloped down.
Material and shipping costs seemed always to be rising.
Profit margins matched this year's fashion --
"teasingly sheer."
VON DREHLE: For Max and Isaac,
there was this constant awareness
that they were, as successful and as rich as they were,
they were one bad season away from being broke.
The competition was enormously fierce--
500 blouse makers on the island of Manhattan alone.
GREENWALD: While they're getting the orders from the department stores,
there's some small shop half a mile away
that's willing to beat them by half.
So it's all about continuous production
to get as much cloth turned into a product as possible
at the lowest possible price.
That summer there was a growing new threat.
All over the city, garment workers were agitating
for shorter hours, better pay, safer shops--
unions.
Harris and Blanck saw it in the papers every day
and on the streets below.
Workers were walking off the job by the tens...
scores...
hundreds.
The partners even suspected talk of union
on their own shop floor.
ARGERSINGER: Unionization was the single largest fear
for most of these employers.
They were terrified that unions would come in
because that would diminish their authority
over the workplace.
NARRATOR: The right to control their own factory
was an article of faith for Harris and Blanck
as for hundreds of business owners just like them.