The day the New Deal was born

On March 25, 1911, a 30-year-old social worker named Frances Perkins was walking through Greenwich Village to visit a friend. A commotion arose and within minutes she witnessed one of the most horrid industrial disasters in American history. A fire had broken out on the eighth floor of a nearby building and the updraft sent the flames to the stories above. A passerby named Joe Zito ran into the building and took control of its creaky elevator, managing to withstand the smoke and heat to make five runs to the eighth floor, saving 125 lives. But 146 young women and girls, mostly of Italian and Jewish immigrant stock weren't so lucky and were either burned alive or leaped to their deaths. Their bodies were later neatly arranged on the street so their kin could identify their dead.

Public mourning turned to public outrage when it was learned the girls had died in vain, the victims of the criminal indifference of Isaac Harris and Max Blank, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. It was bad enough that Harris and Blank paid slave wages, fined the girls for losing needles and charged them rent if they needed a chair. Efficiency had suffered because some of the girls were taking smoke breaks on the balcony, and others were suspected of tossing blouses out the windows to fencing accomplices. So Blank and Harris had the windows that led to the fire escapes nailed shut. The girls kept on smoking though: in a linen factory.

Only 23 lawsuits were even threatened and The Triangle Shirtwaist Company settled them for an average of $75 each. Harris and Blank collected $64,925 in fire insurance, or $445 per life. The public wanted blood and Charles Whitman, an ambitious district attorney with his eye on the governorship, vowed vengeance.

But Harris and Blank hired Max Steuer, a Tammany-connected super lawyer, who had successfully defended Broadway actor and silent film star Raymond Hitchcock, charged with seducing underage girls. Steuer convinced the jury Hitchcock was set up by shakedown artists. Steuer would later work his magic for sports promoter Tex Ricard, and Charles Mitchell, president of what is now Citibank. In that case, Steuer would prevail despite a mountain of evidence compiled by a young assistant U.S. attorney named Thomas E. Dewey.

Whitman's star witness was a survivor of the blaze, Katie Alterman, who walked the jury step by step through her memories of hell. Then Steuer played a hunch and conducted a subtle, yet devastating cross-examination. Katie, who spoke only Yiddish at home, had made it a point to rehearse her testimony in English carefully. Steuer asked "Katie, have you forgotten a word?" She replied "Yes sir. I left out a word." So Steuer asked her "Well tell the story again and put the word in." She repeated her testimony word for word. We'll never know if Steuer's exposure of her rehearsed testimony did the trick. The judge, Tammany hack Thomas Crain, owed his job to Steuer's pal, district captain "Big Tim" Sullivan, and practically instructed the jury to acquit. Acquit it did, after only two hours' deliberation. A contingent of cops was at hand to escort Steuer, Blank and Harris through the angry mob that circled the courthouse.

Sullivan's boss, Sachem Charles Murphy, actually had what passed for a conscience (he died with a paltry fortune of only $2 million stashed in his pillow) and the New York legislature appointed a special State Factories Commission. Its co-chairs were up and comers Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner. The staff secretary they hired to run the investigation was Frances Perkins. The commission recommended, and the legislature passed, the most progressive package of labor reforms in the country and it served as a model other states followed.

Steuer died a rich man. He was once awarded a $75,000 fee for winning a $45,000 case. He never wrote a memoir. Al Smith became governor of New York and was nominated for president by the Democrats in 1928. Robert Wagner became one of the most prolific liberal senators of the 20th century. The Wagner Act created the National Labor Relations Board and his fingerprints are all over the Social Security Act and the G.I. Bill. Frances Perkins was the first woman appointed to a president's cabinet when FDR made her Secretary of Labor. Her name is on the department's building. She later claimed that March 25, 1911, was "the day the New Deal was born." FDR once deflected criticism of the idealistic lawyers of "the Jew Deal" by crediting them with "contempt for the Max Steuers." The building still stands and is part of the campus at NYU. Nowhere is there even a plaque in honor of Joe Zito.