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Justice?
Eight months after the fire, a jury met to ear the case against
Max Blanck and Issac Harris, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory. Their job was to decide if the door was locked and if
the owners knew that the door was locked at the time of
fire.
Usually the only way out for the workers at quitting time was
through an opening on the Green Street side, where all purses
were inspected to prevent stealing. Worker after worker testified
to the jury that the Green Street stairs were completely engulfed
by flames and they were unable to open the doors to their only
escape route—the stairs to the Washington Place exit.
A juror, Victor Steinman, who was interviewed by a reporter from
the New York Evening Mail said, "I felt sure that
the door had been locked. I believed that piece of burned wood
and the lock with the shot bolt. But then I believed also that
the key was usually in the door and that it was tied to it with
a piece of string. So the thought in my mind was that during the
first rush for the door some girl might have turned the key to
open the door and accidentally locked it. And if that was so,
then Harris and Blanck could not have known of it."
The jury was out for one hour and forty-five minutes and returned
with a "not guilty" verdict.
The families of the victims and much of the public felt that
justice had not been done. "Justice!" they cried. "Where
is justice?"
Twenty-three individual civil suits were brought against Blanck
and Harris, the owners of Triangle Factory. On March 11, 1913,
three years after the fire, Harris and Blanck settled. They paid
$75 per life lost.
Adapted from http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/narrative6.html
"147 Dead, Nobody Guilty," Literary Digest,
January 1912.
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