Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

And we are back with part two of our look at the triangle shirtwaist fire. It is late March

1911. As we described last episode, a horrific fire starting on the eighth floor, spreading to the

ninth and tenth floor.

Hundreds of people have died.

Now let's talk about the aftermath, both in the immediate moment and in the many decades and

centuries since.

Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter

Jackson of Wesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. I want to get to Francis Perkins,

who we have said is one of the big reformers who actually witnessed this fire. Before we get to

know her and talk about how she was impacted by this, you know, in the immediate days, we talked about how makeshift morgue is set up and how people

are identifying bodies and starting to do investigations.

No surprise, there is a huge blame game that happens about who is responsible for this fire,

what actually led to it, who's actually going to face, you know, any criminal or civil charges?

How does that start to play out?

Well, first of all, people look at the owners of the factory.

Yes.

But they're like, was this factory not diligent enough when it came to worker safety,

it came to building safety, it was a time when there had been all of these innovations in fire safety. So

firewalls and fire doors and fire stairs and automatic sprinklers, all of those theoretically

existed. It's just that factories by and large, almost entirely, had just not been fitted

with them. It was an extra expense. It was new technologies. So they weren't there. And it didn't

...