Entertainment

Trial by ‘Fire’

Victims jumped to streets to escape the blaze.

One hundred years ago on March 25, 1911, the worst workplace fire in the history of NYC broke out killing 146 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. It took just 18 minutes for the fire to consume the entire factory building, which was, ironically and tragically enough, named the “Ash Building.”

There are two documentaries commemorating the disaster. The first is tonight on PBS and the other airs next month on HBO. While both cover the horror of the fire, PBS’s “Triangle Fire” focuses on the remarkable fact that the workers at Triangle were pioneers in the American unionization of factory workers, using their actual words in voiceover. HBO’s “Triangle: Remembering the Fire” focuses on the history, using interviews with victims’ descendents.

What we learn is that Triangle’s female workers, under the leadership of a 22-year-old factory worker named Clara Lemlich, had, two years before, risen up against the conditions imposed by their employers, Max Blanck and Issac Harris.

The garment workers went on an extended strike demanding better working conditions, fair wages and unionization of Triangle Shirtwaist. Shortly thereafter, workers at almost all of the 500 other shirtwaist factories in NYC — along with rich women — joined in walking the picket lines. Lemlich was quoted as saying, “This isn’t a strike, it’s an uprising.”

Harris and Blanck, two Russian immigrants who had become millionaire schmata manufacturers, hired thugs, hookers and pimps to crash the picket lines and beat up strikers. Eventually, a settlement, but one without unionization, was agreed upon, and the workers returned to work.

Harris and Blanck continued to pack the primarily Italian and Jewish female workers into crowded spaces where they hardly had elbow room between sewing machines. The owners ordered all exits but one locked so that the women’s bags could be inspected as they left to prevent them from stealing scraps of fabric and thread. When the fire broke out, they couldn’t get out and were trapped behind the locked door to be burned to death.

Tonight’s “American Experience” account uses voiceover text from the surviving workers’ newspaper interviews, as well as testimony from the manslaughter trial of Harris and Blanck, who had escaped to the roof without unlocking the factory exit door below or even informing workers that the place was on fire!

The all-male jury acquitted both men — who, then, collected a huge insurance settlement and restarted their business. Some things never change.