The Triangle Fire (21 page)

The proprietors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company collected in indemnity $64,925 in excess of any claim for which they could furnish legal or convincing proof of loss, according to McFarlane.

The rate: $445 clear per Triangle worker killed.

16. JUSTICE

Such sin unto such punishment condemns him.

—
CANTO XVIII
:95

On April 10, at the request of Assistant District Attorney J. Robert Rubin, Samuel Bernstein and Louis Brown were ejected from the Criminal Courts building where the Grand Jury was hearing witnesses. The
Times
declared, “it had been intimated that they were attempting to tamper with Grand Jury witnesses.” Italian Consul Giacommo Farabonni, to whom many of the young Italian workers had turned for help after the fire, reported that seven girls had made affidavits declaring they had been approached.

The next day the indictment of Harris and Blanck was handed up to Judge O’Sullivan in the Court of General Sessions.

But it was more than eight months later—on December 4—that the trial began with the selection of a jury. Judge Thomas C. T. Crain, small-featured, gray-haired dean of the General Sessions bench, presided. As their counsel, Harris and Blanck took the noted lawyer Max D. Steuer, who, although only forty-one years old, already enjoyed a towering reputation for shrewdness and resourcefulness in the court room. The people were represented by Assistant District Attorneys Rubin and Charles S. Bostwick.

Eight months after the fire, public indignation had blunted considerably. Only in the hearts of the families of the dead did the sense of loss continue to cut with undulled sharpness. But even for them the demands of daily living had forced adjustments to grief and loss, and for many the single consolation was the vague hope that their longing for justice would somehow be fulfilled.

By the end of the first day six jurors were selected. Steuer had challenged seven talesmen, the prosecution ten. Steuer asked each talesman if he was in any way connected with a labor union, whether he read the New York
Call
or any other paper that had strongly condemned the Triangle partners. He inquired from each if he would be influenced by the presence in the court and the corridors of people dressed in mourning who might even burst into tears.

The courtroom and the corridors were, in fact, crowded by friends and relatives of Triangle victims. They made the first days of the trial a nightmare for Blanck and for Harris. On Tuesday morning, December 5, as the two partners stepped out of the elevator on the second floor of the Criminal Courts building with Steuer, a shrieking mob of women who had been waiting in the corridor came running toward them.

“Murderers! murderers!” the women screamed. “Make them suffer for killing our children!”

Policemen and court attendants rushed to the rescue. Mad with sorrow, the women fought them off. Then the officers surrounded Harris and Blanck and elbowed them into a smaller corridor leading directly to the courtroom.

Three women fought their way through and when they reached the defendants pushed photographs up close to their faces and yelled: “These are our children! Give us back our children!”

Throughout the morning, the crowd grew larger. When, during a recess, Bostwick and Rubin came into the corridor, they were immediately surrounded. Shouts rose in several languages. When the two partners also emerged, the crowd again became menacing and the hall had to be cleared.

The following day a full police guard patrolled the court house. The corridors were kept cleared. But when Harris, Blanck, and Steuer left the building during the lunch recess, they were spotted walking toward Broadway. A crowd began to follow them, growing as it moved closer. Detectives came to the rescue by pushing the three men into a restaurant on Franklin Street and then standing guard in the doorway. The ordeal was repeated as the three made their way back to the court building.

The jury consisted of Leo Abraham, real estate; Anton Scheuerman, cigars; William E. Ryan, salesman; Harry R. Roeder, painter; Morris Baum, salesman; Charles Vetter, buyer; Abraham Wechsler, secretary; Joseph L. Jacobson, salesman; William O. Akerstrom, clerk; Arlington S. Boyce, superintendent; Victor Steinman, shirts; H. Houston Hierst, importer.

In opening, Bostwick’s task seemed simpler than the one confronting the defense. Gently and courteously, he announced he would question his witnesses who would set the scene of the tragedy and establish the physical and temporal framework of the events. Thereafter, he would call those who might substantiate the alleged fact that a door on the ninth floor, through which many who had perished could have escaped, was locked at the time of the fire. More particularly, he would then show that because of the illegally locked door, Margaret Schwartz, in whose horrible death was gathered up the deaths of her co-workers for the purpose of rendering justice, had been unable to escape and had perished in the flames.

The trial was to last for little more than three weeks. But in its eighteen working days, 155 witnesses were called. The people called 103; the defense 52.

Steuer came from the same East Side whose slums and tenements were the living quarters of most of the witnesses called by the people. He knew them well, spoke their language, sensed their fears and their resentments, and his first cases in the practice of law involved broken contracts, unpaid bills, and other ethical and legal dislocations in those lower depths. All this gave him many advantages over Bostwick.

As the trial progressed, the shop girls, dressed in their holiday best, followed one another to the witness chair. Awed by the majesty of the law, sometimes adding fright to the inexperience of youth, often struggling with a language not always clear even in translation, they replied in low tones until the moment when memory rekindled the horror.

Bostwick was their soft, sympathetic champion; Steuer, their dangerously prodding inquisitor.

At times, Steuer seemed to enjoy the contest. When sixteen-year-old Ethel Monick refused to be cowed, he said to her, “You do like to argue some, don’t you, little girl?”

He asked her why she had never spoken to Mr. Harris about the Washington Place door. He was not satisfied with her answer— “I used to be afraid of him”—and registered disbelief. Whereupon Ethel Monick added she hadn’t exactly meant afraid, “But, you know, I was like nothing to them because I was only a working girl.”

He asked Celia Walker to describe how she had made her way across the shop, and she told the court she jumped across the aisles from machine table to machine table. Steuer questioned, “Was your skirt about as tight as the skirt you’ve got on now?”

The young lady answered, “No,” but added that she used to practice jumping. A stickler for detail, Steuer queried, “Did you find out how broad a jump you could make?”

For a time, as burning death had come closer, Kate Gartman had considered leaping from a ninth-floor window and in that time, she told the court, “I was cool and nice and calm.”

“Sure, now when you are nice and cool and calm that way, you got to the window?” Steuer questioned.

“I was as cool and calm as you are here,” Kate Gartman replied.

“Now, I’m not half as cool as you think I am,” was Steuer’s comeback.

Kate Gartman’s forwardness was less the result of courage than of inability to comprehend. She ended the spirited exchange by stating: “I could not understand what you meant by talking because I don’t think I am so excellent in the English language to understand it all. Therefore you have to excuse me if I made a mistake.”

Bostwick described the witnesses he called as “of tender years—most of them not able to speak the language, not of great intelligence … working at their machines, working and working with no time to look up.”

But for Steuer they were merely people whose motives and honesty he suspected, “people who came here—most of them with law suits. Many of them, because they lost their dearest relatives, are not telling the truth.”

Except for technicians and members of the Fire Department, the people’s side called only Triangle employees to the stand. On the other hand, of those called by the defense only a half-dozen were production workers with no family connection with one or the other partner. The rest were either supervisory or nonproduction employees, salesmen, buyers, or others who entered the premises from time to time but did not work at Triangle.

Throughout the trial and especially in his summation to the jury, Steuer continued to voice doubt about the ability, and even the willingness, of the people’s witnesses to tell the truth. At the same time, doubtless with the composition of the jury in mind, he made frequent references to the salesmen who had appeared as defense witnesses. Could such upstanding persons, he asked several times, commit perjury?

The defense argued that the great loss of life was due to the failure of the workers on the ninth floor to turn to the Greene Street exit. It claimed the Washington Place door on that floor was actually open; however, escape by way of the staircase on that side had been impossible because the fire penetrated into the stairwell.

Why had the girls on the ninth floor jammed up in front of the Washington Place elevators, Steuer asked? Why had they acted against all previous practice? Why had they not gone to the only exit they claimed was the one they were allowed to use? Why, instead, had they ended up in front of a door which they themselves said they had never used before, which they themselves said they had always considered to be locked, and which, at the tragic moment, they said they found to be locked? Steuer pressed these questions with vigor, attempting to show that the girls knew the best and proper way of making a quick exit from the ninth floor, but that moved by fear and panic they were trapped by their own irrational behavior.

Bostwick, in turn, argued that the fire, which had started on the cutting tables at the Greene Street side of the eighth floor, had first lapped in through the windows of the ninth floor on the same Greene Street side and had soon cut off escape through the Greene Street door. In contrast, there were no windows near the doors on the west wall and therefore there could not have been fire in the Washington Place stairwell, which, he insisted, could not be used by the ninth-floor girls only because the door was locked.

If there had been fire in the Washington Place stairwell, Bostwick continued, it would have had to come out of the eighth-floor door early in the emergency. Eventually, the fire did burn through. But not before the eighth-floor girls had come through the doorway. Nor had there been any suction to pull the eighth-floor flames up the staircase even if they were in the stairwell; the ninth- and tenth-floor doors were closed, and the skylight on the roof over the well was unbroken.

It was not true, said Bostwick, that all the girls had immediately made a dash for the Washington Place side. Some had escaped through the Greene Street door. Others were diverted from doing so. Rose Mayer saw girls running toward the Washington Place side, so “I ran toward there, too,” she said. Somehow, Ethel Monick had thought she heard the elevators on the Greene Street side crash, so she turned in the opposite direction. But others had run across the shop because they had seen flames in the Greene Street stairwell. Some were trapped because they had planned to use the Greene Street exit but had first gone to the dressing room to get their coats and hats.

The defense in turn relied heavily on the fact that State Labor Department inspectors had never reported finding the Triangle doors locked. The Commissioner of Labor, called as a defense witness, “swore before you,” Steuer stressed in summing up, “that no notice is given to the people whose factories they are about to inspect.” Which, he asked, were to be believed: those still suffering the hurt and the loss caused by the fire, or this “disinterested person working for the State of New York whose duty it is to see that the law is absolutely complied with?”

But State Labor Commissioner Williams actually provided little help for the defense. Under cross-questioning by Bostwick, he was unable to read correctly a report by one of his inspectors. The report form contained one question about doors: “Open out practical?” The inspector had put a pencil check above and between the words “out” and “practical.” Did this mean that particular door opened outward? Or did it mean the door opened inward but that it was practical to make it open outward? The Commissioner couldn’t say.

Bostwick then pointed out that the inspector had to note on each report filed the identity of the “person in authority” who was questioned during the inspection. Commissioner Williams insisted this had to be a person of superior position in the firm. Bostwick then showed him an inspection report on Triangle. The report had been accepted as proper. The “person in authority” was named Edna Barry.

Did the Commissioner know what superior position she held? He did not. She was, said Bostwick, one most suitably situated to signal the arrival of an inspector throughout the factory, for she was the Triangle telephone switchboard operator who had been absent on the day of the fire.

Midway through the trial, Bostwick had a large package brought into the courtroom. When it was unwrapped, it turned out to be a velvet-lined box with a framed-glass lid, a large container of the kind in which table silverware is generally kept. He had kept it locked in one of his own rooms at home, and his children had been warned to resist curiosity and to keep away from the box. In that box was the lock of the Washington Place staircase door, still attached to a piece of wood panel, its bolt still sticking out.

Two workmen, Giuseppi Saveno and Pietro Torchin, cleaning the rubble on the ninth floor, had found it in the debris on April 10. Detective Francis Flynn had seen them pick it up from a pile of rubbish about 11½ feet from the doorway. Unfortunately, he had made no memorandum of this in his notebook, at that time.

Steuer fought bitterly against having the court receive the exhibit in evidence. In an angry onslaught he addressed the court:

“On March 25th a fire occurred and on March 26th all the conscience of the city is stirred by the terrible catastrophe. And on the 27th of March the theory of the locked door is already made public. Hundreds upon hundreds of people go into the debris and seek the bodies. The Fire Department makes a conclusive and minute and detailed search into the debris. The whole question that is being agitated in the press day after day is locks, locks, locks. Nothing is found.