Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant

What fire, Chuck? I'm talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Manhattan, sort of near Washington Square Park in Greenwich, right next to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.

It is, and I tried to pinpoint if that was the building where I actually had my film classes. Was it? I don't know. I can't quite tell. We got to know, Chuck. I'll see if I can find out. But a shirtwaist was a woman's blouse is what they called it at the time. And this was a factory that made women's blouses. If you worked there, you were probably a young woman. You might be an immigrant.

You would work about 52 hours a week. Oh, I saw 12 hours a day, seven days a week. What does that math turn out to?

Well, let's say between 52 and 80 hours a week.

Right. So I saw 52. Either way, they made between $7 and $12 a week making these blouses for women.

Yeah, it wasn't good. And because this was a factory in New York in 1911, they had the doors locked. They had the staircases locked. They thought it prevented theft.

If you remember what happened to locked doors and stairwells in our hotel fire episode, the same thing happened here on March 25th, 1911, when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire started because they think of a match or a cigarette butt thrown into a waste bin. And it just, you know, everything in there was flammable practically that wasn't metal. Right.

because of all these fabrics, like highly flammable. It went up really quick. It's one of the deadliest U.S. workplace disasters of all time to this day. 146 workers died, 123 of which were women and girls between the ages of generally between 14 and 23. The oldest was 43, but that was kind of an outlier. Mm-hmm.

And 62 of those people jumped to their death in front of full view of New York City, including Frances Perkins.

Yeah, I mean, she was already kind of headed down this road anyway. She was already part of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission. And because of this fire, which she – I don't think we said she was just having tea across the park there, ran over and saw this.

One of the things she saw at one point, there were 20 people that had managed to get out a window onto a fire escape, one of those tiny little flimsy New York fire escapes. And all 20 of those people, the thing collapsed and they all fell to their 100 feet to their death right in front of her face.

Yeah, absolutely. But this was sort of just the way it was. I mean, not absolving them, but she saw this as part of the bigger problem. Not like these two owners are responsible, but she was like it was an indictment of the system.

No, but what was average was the fact that they didn't have fire codes. And she's the person that brought that in. By the time she was in her early 30s, she had called for and successfully called for exit signs, occupancy limits, sprinklers, fire escapes, unlocked doors and stairwells, how wide the doorways had to be depending on your factory floor, like all these sort of common sense things.

Like a lot of people saw this stuff happen. and saw this incident that day and were horrified. But Frances Perkins said, nope, I'm going to change it. I'm a woman in 1911 and I'm in my early 30s, but I'm going to make this happen. And she did.

Yeah, and she ingratiated herself to these male politicians a couple of different important times in her life. And the first one was Alfred E. Smith, like you were saying. So she rose along with him because he knew. He was like, man, I don't care if she's a woman or not. She works harder than anyone I know. And she gets the job done. So I'm just going to bring her along with me.

Well, yeah. I mean, I talked about her very large brain. And her higher education, she was super, super smart. Like I said, she majored in chemistry and physics, even though her real love was econ. So it's like, are you kidding me?

No, it's very much true.

Yeah. So when he came into his governorship, she had already been named and was the chairperson, called it a chairman back then, in 1926 of the State Industrial Board. She was doing a great job there. And then in 1929, FDR appointed her as the industrial commissioner of the state of New York. And what happens? The stock market crashes. The Great Depression hits America like a punch in the face.

And she was the one who stepped in and got in his ear and said, you know what? Like, I know that we have to feed people right now. We have really immediate needs. But like you mentioned earlier in the episode, she thought about the big picture and long-term goals. She said, we need to really take swift action here. So with her help, they created a Committee on Employment.

He appointed her the head of that. And then when he was elected president in 1933, he said, you know what? I'm going to appoint you to be my secretary of labor. That was huge. I've been working with you for 20 years. I trust you, and you're going to do a great job. And the public roundly said, what? A woman in the cabinet?