 141 Men and Girls Die in Waste Factory Fire From the New York Times, dated March 26, 1911, recorded for LibriVox.org by Leanne Howlett. 141 Men and Girls Die in Waste Factory Fire Trapped high up in Washington Place Building, street strewn with bodies, piles of dead inside. The flames spread with deadly rapidity through flimsy material used in the factory. 600 girls are hemmed in. When elevators stop, many jump to certain death, and others perish in fire-filled lofts. Students rescue some. Help them to roof of New York University Building, keeping the panic-stricken in check. One man taken out alive, plunged to bottom of elevator shaft and lived there mid-flames for four hours. Only one fire escape. Coroner declares building laws were not enforced, building modern, classed fireproof. Just ready to go home. Victims would have ended day's work in a few minutes. Pay envelopes identify many. Mob storms the morgue, seeking to learn fate of relatives employed by the Triangle Waste Company. Three stories of a ten-floor building at the corner of Green Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday. And while the fire was going on, 141 young men and women, at least 125 of them mere girls, were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below. The building was fireproof. It shows now hardly any signs of the disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever. So are the floors. Nothing is the worst for the fire except the furniture, and 141 of the 600 men and girls that were employed in its upper three stories. Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly on the pavements below. All over in half an hour. Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General's Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was confined to three floors, the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building, but it was the most murderous fire that New York has seen in many years. The victims who are now lying at the morgue waiting for someone to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls of from 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirt waste by the Triangle Waste Company, the principal owners of which are Isaac Harris and Max Blank. Most of them could barely speak English. Many of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hardworking families. There is just one fire escape in the building. That one is an interior fire escape. In Green Street, where the terrified unfortunates crowded before they began to make their mad leaps to death, the whole big front of the building is guiltless of one, nor is there a fire escape in the back. The building was fireproof and the owners had put their trust in that. In fact, after the flames had done their worst last night, the building hardly showed a sign. Only the stock within it and the girl employees were burned. A heap of corpses lay on the sidewalk for more than an hour. The firemen were too busy dealing with the fire to pay any attention to people whom they supposed, beyond their aid. When the excitement had subsided to such an extent that some of the firemen and policemen could pay attention to this mass of the supposedly dead, they found about halfway down in the pack a girl who was still breathing. She died two minutes after she was found. The Triangle Waste Company was the only sufferer by the disaster. There are other concerns in the building, but it was Saturday and the other companies had let their people go home. Meshura's Harris and Blank, however, were busy and their girls and some men stayed. Leaped out of the flames. At 4.40 o'clock, nearly five hours after the employees in the rest of the building had gone home, the fire broke out. The one little fire escape in the interior was never resorted to by any of the doomed victims. Some of them escaped by running down the stairs, but in a moment or two this avenue was cut off by flame. The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Green Street 100 feet below them. Then one poor little creature jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces. Then they all began to drop. The crowd yelled, don't jump, but it was jump or be burned, the proof of which is found in the fact that 50 burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone. They jumped, they crashed through broken glass, they crushed themselves to death on the sidewalk. Of those who stayed behind, it is better to say nothing except what a veteran policeman said as he gazed at a headless and charred trunk on the Green Street sidewalk hours after the worst cases had been taken out. I saw the Slocum disaster, but it was nothing to this. Is it a man or a woman? asked the reporter. It's human, that's all you can tell, answered the policeman. It was just a mass of ashes with blood congealed on what had probably been the neck. Mishir as Harris and Blank were in the building, but they escaped. They carried with them Mr. Blank's children and they fled over the roofs. Their employees did not know the way because they had been in the habit of using the two freight elevators and one of these elevators was not in service when the fire broke out. Found alive after the fire, the first living victim, Hyman Mechel, of 332 East 15th Street was taken from the ruins four hours after the fire was discovered. He was found paralyzed with fear and whimpering like a wounded animal in the basement, immersed in water to his neck, outstretched on the top of a cable drum and with his head just below the floor of the elevator. Meantime the remains of the dead, it is hardly possible to call them bodies because that word suggests something human and there was nothing human about most of these were being taken in a steady stream to the morgue for identification. First Avenue was lined with the usual curious East Side crowd. 26th Street was impassable, but in the morgue they received the charred remnants with no more emotion than they ever display over anything. In 26th Street there was another crowd. At midnight it had not decreased in the least. The police were holding it back to the fire lines and discussing the tragedy in a tone which those seasoned witnesses of death seldom use. It's the worst thing I ever saw, said one old policeman. Chief Crocker said it was an outrage. He spoke bitterly of the way in which the manufacturer's association had called a meeting in Wall Street to take measures against his proposal for enforcing better methods of protection for employees of the fire. No chance to save victims. Four alarms were rung in fifteen minutes. The first five girls who jumped did so before the first engine could respond. That fact may not convey much of a picture to the mind of an unimaginative man, but anybody who has ever seen a fire can get from it some idea of the terrific rapidity with which the flames spread. It may convey some idea too to say that thirty bodies clogged the elevator shafts. These dead were all girls. They made their rush there blindly when they discovered that there was no chance to get out by the fire escape. Then they found that the elevator was as hopeless as anything else, and they fell there in their tracks and died. The Triangle Waste Company employed about six hundred women and less than one hundred men. One of the saddest features of the thing is the fact that they had almost finished for the day. In five minutes more, if the fire had started then, probably not a life would have been lost. Last night, District Attorney Whitman not of this disaster alone, but of the whole condition which makes it possible for a fire trap of such a kind to exist. Mr. Whitman's intention is to find out if the present laws cover such cases and if they do not to frame laws that will. Girls jumped to sure death. Fire nets proved useless. Firemen helpless to save life. The fire, which was first discovered at four forty o'clock on the eighth floor of the ten-story building at the corner of Washington Place and Green Street, leaped through the three upper stories of the Triangle Waste Company with a sudden rush that left the fire department helpless. How the fire started, no one knows. On the three upper floors of the building were six hundred employees of the waste company, five hundred of whom were girls. The victims, mostly Italians, Russians, Hungarians and Germans, were girls and men who had been employed by the firm of Harrison Blank, owners of the Triangle Waste Company after the strike in which the Jewish girls, formerly employed, had become unionized and had demanded better working conditions. The building had experienced four recent fires and had been reported by the fire department to the building department as unsafe on account of the insufficiency of its exits. The building itself was of the modern construction and classed as fireproof. What burned so quickly and disastrously for the victims were shirt wastes, hanging on lines above tiers of workers, sewing machines placed so closely together that there was hardly aisle room for the girls between them, and shirt waste trimmings and cuttings and drawers above the eighth and ninth stories. Girls had begun leaping from the eighth-story windows before the firemen arrived. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position because of the bodies which strewed the pavement and sidewalks. While more bodies crashed down among them, they worked with desperation to run their ladders into position and to spread firenets. One fireman running ahead of a hose wagon, which halted to avoid running over a body, spread a firenet and two more seas hold of it. A girl's body, coming end over end, struck on the side of it, and there was hope for an instant that she would be the first one of the score who had already jumped to be saved. Thousands of people who had crushed in from Broadway and Washington Square and were screaming with horror at what they saw watched closely the work with the firenet. Three other girls who had leaped forward a moment after the first one struck it on top of her, and all four rolled out and lay still upon the pavement. Five girls who stood together at a window in the street corner held their places while a fire ladder was worked toward them but which stopped at its full length two stories lower down. They leaped together, clinging to each other with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses. They struck a glass sidewalk cover and crashed through it to the basement. There was no time to aid them. With water pouring in upon them from a dozen hose nozzles, the bodies lay for two hours where they struck as did the many others who leaped to their deaths. One girl who waved a handkerchief at the crowd leaped from a window adjoining the New York University building on the westward. Her dress caught on a wire and the crowd watched her hang there till her dress burned free and she came toppling down. Many jumped whom the firemen believed they could have saved. A girl who saw the glass roof of the sidewalk cover at the first story level of the New York University building leaped for it and her body crashed through to the sidewalk. On Green Street, running along the eastern face of the building, more people leaped to the pavement than on Washington Place to the south. Firenets proved just as useless to catch them and the ladders to reach them. None waited for the firemen to attempt to reach them with the scaling ladders. All would soon have been out. Strewed about as the firemen worked, the bodies indicated clearly the preponderance of women workers. Here and there was a man, but almost always they were women. One wore furs and a muff and had a purse hanging from her arm. Nearly all were dressed for the street. The fire had flashed through their workroom just as they were expecting the signal to leave the building. And ten minutes more, all would have been out as many had stopped working in advance of the signal and it started to put on their wraps. What happened inside, there were few who could tell with any definiteness. All that those who escaped seemed to remember was that there was a flash of flames leaping first among the girls in the southeast corner of the eighth floor and then suddenly over the entire room spreading through the linens and cottons with which the girls were working. There were, under the flames through the windows, up the stairway and up the elevator shaft. On the tenth floor, they got them a moment later, but most of those on that floor escaped by rushing to the roof and then onto the roof of the New York University building with the assistance of 100 university students who had been dismissed from a tenth-story classroom. There were, in the building, according to the estimates of Fire Chief Croker about 600 girls and 100 men. The bodies of those killed and burned to death were found principally on the ninth floor where over 50 perished in front of a closed doorway which they had jammed shut. In the two elevator shafts, 30 or more were piled up in the bottom after the elevator had ceased running. At the bottom of a single iron fire escape in the air shaft in the building's rear and on the fireproof stairways between the eighth and tenth stories, up which the fire from the burning sewing machines on the eighth floor went with a rush of air toward the roof. When the fire was discovered, Samuel Bernstein, the Waste Factory's foreman Alex Rothberg, his first assistant, were standing together on the eighth floor when the screams of girls attracted their attention to the southeast corner of the large room. They rang for the elevators of which two were in the south side of the building and Rothberg telephoned to the fire department and police departments. 200 girls were working on that floor. Most of them still at their machines in the narrow aisles that gave them hardly room to move about. Dynamos used to operate the sewing machines were in the corner from which the fire was spreading. They rushed it with buckets of water, feeling confident at first they would be able to put it out. In the meantime, the girls, screaming loudly and then a panic, rushed for the elevator shaft in the staircase where they encountered a closed door. Dora Miller of Tin Cannon Street got the door part way open, but it was jam shut again by the press of people behind her. She struck a glass panel in it with her flats until she had made the hole large enough to climb through and she escaped. Twenty others followed her before the flames reached them and most of those caught on the floor were only discernible as a mass of charred bones when the fire minute last worked their way up the staircase. Bernstein and Rothberg escaped by way of the elevator on its last trip to the floor. Factory owners escaped. The two partners, Harris and Blank, were both in the building, Harris being on the ninth floor and Blank on the eighth. With Blank, according to a statement of Joseph Zito, an elevator man, were his two daughters and a governess. Blank told Zito, the latter declares, to keep his elevator running and take out the women first. The two passenger elevators in charge of Zito and another operator named J. Gaspar made several trips but never went above the eighth floor as they found more than enough people surrounding the entrance on that floor each time they reached it. One of the men, which one was not made clear in the various versions of the affair offered, deserted his elevator and ran away crying, fire as he ran. Max Steinberg, a New York University law student, saw him running through Washington Place and at the same time saw a girl leap from an eighth-story window. He pulled a fire alarm box in Washington Square East and then ran to the building where he entered the deserted elevator and ran it for four more trips before the heating of the cables put it out of commission. Trapped on the ninth floor. On the ninth story, which like the eighth was filled with sewing machines that were worse than those on the floor below, they crowded about the elevator shaft but no cars responded to their frantic ringing of the bell. Time after time they saw the car's approach only to be filled at the eighth and go down again. Girls who rushed to the staircase were met with flames which bore them down before they could retreat. Those who reached the windows and waited there for firemen saw the ladders swing in against the building two stories below them. The one little iron fire escape emerged from this floor that most of those came who fell like paper dolls end over end to the pavement. There were about twenty men on the ninth floor calmer than the girls. They lined the southerly tier of windows first and tried to force the girls back to prevent them from jumping. Several girls were dragged back after they had reached the window sills and some they induced to lift themselves in again after they had climbed outside and were clinging only with their hands. Zito, the elevator man, was striking the roof of his car as women jumped from the ninth floor after giving up hope that he would reach them. He heard the rattle of silver from their pay envelopes as it came through the iron grating into the car. The loss on this floor was not known to the firemen and police until nearly seven o'clock when Deputy Fire Chief Benz reached it on the concrete stairway which remained perfectly solid and unharmed. Benz found the bodies of fifty or more women those who had not been burned beyond recognition seeming to be mere girls. They were lying in heaps upon the floor as if they had huddled together near the stairway in the elevator shaft and had been overtaken there by the flames. Money from the pay envelopes were strewn about close to them. The tenth floor was the only one on which men were employed in any numbers. On this floor was the packing room where the finished shortways were prepared for shipment and the showroom where customers were made welcome. Students saved some lives. The men and women on this floor rushed for the roof. One of those was seen by Professor F. Sumner who was teaching twenty-five young men the principles of the New Jersey Code on the tenth floor of the law school. Professor Sumner ordered his students to rush to the roof and lower ladders to the roof of the factory building. The New York University building is one story higher than the Waste Factory building. One ladder was procured and a student named Krimmer descended on it to the roof of the building on fire. Another student at the top of the ladder grasped the women as they climbed toward the top and the bottom rungs. Men, panic-stricken, fought with the women to get to the ladder but Krimmer shoved them away and let the women out of the danger zone first. Over one hundred women and twenty men escaped this way. Another hundred reached a building north of the burning one whose roof was only five feet higher and could be reached without a ladder. How many reached the streets to the stairways nobody knew as they were foreigners who spoke little English and fled for their homes in the lower east side where the police and firemen outside the building was hardly started before the fire had caused its full damage and loss of life. The three burned stories after it was all over and fire department searchlights played upon them were seen to be wholly intact except for their wooden window trim and wooden floor coverings. Red tiling flashed the searchlight glow back to the street below from all the ceilings and steel and concrete layers made the floors as firm to the tread of the firemen as if they had been newly built. Police and firemen arrive. After the police reached headquarters over the telephone in a brief message that said girls were jumping from the triangle waste company windows the police were familiar with the place as it had played a center role in the opening phases of the short waist strike. Headquarters from First Deputy Commissioner Driscoll and Chief Inspector Schmittberger to the last clerk and doorman emptied itself at Driscoll's orders into the fire zone. Inspector Daly and twelve captains reported to Schmittberger a few moments after he arrived. Captain Dominic Henry of the Mercer Street Station had preceded Driscoll and Schmittberger and was attempting to establish fire lines when they arrived. 25 patrol wagons from all the downtown precincts and 150 men came into the fire zone. They made one line on Washington Square East forcing the people to the west side of the street. Another line at Broadway and cross street lines at Waverly Place and on 4th Street. The second, third and fourth fire alarms were turned in before any apparatus had appeared on the receipt of information at fire headquarters and there were twenty or more dead on the sidewalks. Chief Crocker arrived in time to see his men spreading hopelessly their small and one or two large life nets and saw many jump to their deaths. Ambulances from Bellevue in New York and St. Vincent's Hospital, twenty or more in number, lined the street in Washington Square East and in Washington Place. Ten surgeons from Bellevue under Drs. Byrne, Reed and Kempf threaded their way among the firemen gathering up the dead. They worked at this task from six o'clock to seven and then policemen came to their assistance. The bodies found on Green Street were taken to the east sidewalk while those in Washington Place were laid in lines on both sidewalks. Tarpalins laid over them protected them somewhat from the deluge of water which pouring from the high pressure towers like a miniature Niagara flowed down the side of the building and into foot-deep flood along the pavement. The surgeons could offer little aid except to cover over the bodies of the dead. Here and there from nearby stores were injured and a few ambulances drove away with the east of the hospitals. Mostly all there was to do was to determine that life was extinct and the bodies on the pavement and cover them over. Deputy Police Commissioner Driscoll sent in an order at six thirty o'clock for seventy-five coffins and later another order for seventy-five more. It was not known to the firemen and policemen at first that the death roll would reach anything like its final proportions. How many died? A woman was killed by a man with her fingertips to the sill of tenth floor window. A tongue of flame lit at her fingers and she dropped to death. A girl threw her pocketbook, then her hat, then her furs from a tenth floor window. A moment later her body came whirling after them to death. At a ninth floor window a man and a woman appeared. The man embraced the woman and kissed her. Then he hurled her to the street and jumped. Both were killed. Five girls smashed a pane of glass, dropped in a struggling tangle of glass. A girl on the eighth floor leaped for a fireman's ladder which reached only to the sixth floor. She missed, struck the edge of a life-net and was picked up with her back broken. From one window a girl of about thirteen years, a man, a woman and two women with their arms about one another threw themselves to the ground in rapid succession. The little girl was whirled to the New York hospital in an ambulance. She screamed as the driver and a policeman lifted her into the hallway. A surgeon came out, took one look at her wrist. She is dead, he said. One girl jumped into a horse blanket held by firemen and policemen. The blanket ripped like cheesecloth and her body was mangled almost beyond recognition. Another dropped into a tarpaulin held by three men. Her weight tore from their grasp and she struck the street breaking almost every bone in her body. Almost at the same moment a man's somersaulted down upon the shoulder of a policeman holding the tarpaulin. He glanced off, struck the sidewalk and was picked up dead. Chief Crocker thought at first it would not go over twenty-five. Then he placed the number at sixty-five, the total on the streets and reported from the inside. At seven o'clock over two hours after the firemen had come, the dead on the ninth floor were found and those in the elevator shaft, each fine sending the total up beyond the largest estimates previously made. In getting out the bodies, the task proved so formidable that it was late in the night before it was reasonably complete. Taking the bodies away. Coroner's physician, O'Hanlon, with Coroners Holtzheiser and Lahane arrived at six forty-five o'clock along with District Attorney Whitman and several of his assistants. O'Hanlon explained that he had cared for the dead from the Slocum disaster on the recreation pier and it would be better to handle these in the same manner as the Morg would prove hopeless to the task of accommodating them. He said he had still some of the tags such as were used in the Slocum disaster and he proposed that each body be tagged exactly where it lay and that records be made by number. He was told by Coroner Holtzheiser to proceed in this manner and did so with the assistance of one hundred or more policemen. As fast as bodies had been looked over for identifications and tags fastened to them coffins were brought from a supply depot established in East Washington Place. In these rude wooden boxes, coverless the bodies were placed in patrol wagons and driven away. At seven forty-five o'clock, the searchlights from four fire department engines were playing in the upper windows and a glow came out of them and torches carried within by firemen. Suddenly a black shadow swung out of the ninth-story window and the creaking of pulleys and a rope and tackle began as the black mass descended speedily toward the ground. Firemen and windows on the lower floor guided the ropes. It was the beginning of the work of bringing out the bodies from the floor where the death roll was the largest. The pulley system worked for an hour each body being lowered after it had been wrapped in black cloth and tied securely until it resembled just such packages as go up and down the street. It was the beginning of the work of bringing out the bodies and the rope and pulleys and the business district rope and pulleys fashion. Coroner's statement. The scene was more than Coroner Holtzhauser could stand. Sobbing like a child, the Coroner who was first to open the fireplace where Ruth Willer's body was incinerated in the Walter Flat said that that scene was easy to stand compared with this. And only one miserable little fire escape he said. These poor girls who were carried up in the elevator to work in the morning now they come down on the end of a rope. That investigations from many centers would be started was early made apparent. Building department officials who arrived at 7.20 o'clock said they would begin one this morning. Fire Marshal Beers said he would begin another. The district attorney made a list of witnesses that he will question. Chief Croker's view. Fire Chief Croker after the fire had flickered down to a few embers still glowing here spoke vigorously against the men who have opposed his plans for better fire protection. Look around everywhere he said nowhere will you find fire escapes. They say they don't look sightly. I have tried to force their installation and only last Friday a manufacturer's association met in Wall Street to oppose my plan and to oppose the sprinkler system as well as the additional escapes. This is just a calamity I've been predicting said Chief Croker. There were no outside escapes on this building. I've been advocating and agitating that more fire escapes be put on factory buildings similar to this. The large loss of life is due to this neglect. He said that there was only one fire escape from the building. An old time perpendicular affair he said leading to the courtyard in the center of the block of buildings which would only allow one person's escape at a time. When he examined this escape he said he found on the upper rooms that it had become very loose and it was a dangerous matter to escape by that route. A repetition of this disaster is likely to happen at any time in similar buildings, he said. He advocated balcony fire escapes with a wide iron staircase. The staircases in the building the Chief said were the ordinary three feet six inches wide type, but he believed that if escape had been sought by that route the deathless would not have been so appalling. There were rumors that the fire started by a gasoline explosion, but the survivors said that they had heard no explosion. Fire commissioner R. Waldo being out of town yesterday, fire was in charge of Deputy Commissioner Arthur J. O'Keefe in charge of Brooklyn and Queens who was taking the commissioner's place. He and Coroner Holt Houser had a dispute concerning the cause of the fire at eleven twenty o'clock. Holt's Houser remarked that there was terrible responsibility for the fire department to meet. And for some other departments too O'Keefe replied. Commissioner Waldo to my certain knowledge had reported this place to the building department within the past three months as a building unsafe for use as a factory. Since there were no sufficient means of egress by stairways and there were not sufficient fire escape facilities. Oh, that makes a difference then, Holt's Houser concluded. Winfield R. Sheehan, commissioner Waldo's secretary joined the group at that juncture. He said that he personally had mulled the protest to the building department and knew of Commissioner Waldo's anxiety because of the unsafe condition of the building and his inability to force the making of changes. Alfred Ludwig of the department of superintendence of Superintendent Rudolph P. Miller who was out of town last night. The building which was burned, it was said by one of the members of the department who stands near to the commissioner but who refused to be quoted was one of several thousand which had been recommended by the fire department for additional fire escapes. These recommendations said the official were made several weeks ago after a thorough investigation by members of the fire department of all office, manufacturing and loft buildings in the five boroughs. The department had no control over the construction and means of escape on the many large factory buildings in the city. There was not one building in the city which escaped the eyes of the fire department, each place being investigated by the foreman of the engine company in the district in which it was situated. The investigation lasted weeks and after a report had been made to the commissioner it was forwarded to the building or the tenement house department. Many of the recommendations which were made by the commissioner were it once attended to but this one seems to have been neglected. Fire chiefs and others connected with the department seemed to believe that the large loss of life could have been avoided had the operators not become panic stricken. The work of the elevator men was spoken of by members of the department with praise who seemed to think had they not kept their heads the total loss of life might have been doubled. The building chief croaker said was all that could be wished for in the way of fire proof construction but it isn't the building of fire proof conditions croaker said to the dripping firemen and others crowded around him. The lesson of the fire is that a building is just as fire proof is the stuff within it. Fire proof walls, fire proof floors and fire proof stairways, then rooms packed with flimsy cloth and trimmings and run by electric dynamos about which waste and oil were allowed to accumulate. The Edison company strung lights between eight and nine o'clock through every floor in the building to aid the firemen in their search for bodies. The cloud spread through the parts of Manhattan. It rose straight in the air above the roof and then for a time between five and six o'clock tongues of flame allumed the darker mass above. The firemen could not reach it with their hose streams and even the high pressure towers had difficulty in throwing their streams above the ninth floor. No water went over the roof until firemen made their way up the staircase after the firefighting had become a matter of detail and small burning sections. It leaked across an open area way from a damaging two classrooms. Students carried many valuable books to safety out of the library and helped with buckets to wet down woodwork that was beginning to smoke in the intense heat. Nowhere in the building except on the three upper floors were people at work. The other concerns in the building had dismissed their forces at three o'clock and only the short waste makers were continuing at work. These were Meyer, Crows and Wallace, Clothiers on the sixth and seventh floors, Morris Blum, Clothiers on the fifth and fourth floors and the Hatter's Exchange and Martin Bates Jr. on the first and second floors. The superintendent of the building who refused to give his name or identify himself other than that he was employed by J.J. Ash of 735 Broadway, the owner said there were two freight elevators in the rear on which the owners had partly depended to get the short waste makers out in case of fire. Whether anyone had tried to use them or if anyone had come down on them he did not know. The building was roped off at 10 30 o'clock and the police lines withdrawn except for the streets immediately surrounding it. Relatives of the dead were not allowed to come near while the work of the fireman and surgeons was going on but were taken under police escort to the Mercia Street Station where a vast crowd congregated throughout the evening. Broadway at 11 o'clock in the vicinity of Washington Place was thronged with women walking up and down and wringing their hands while calling the names of their kinfolks whom they had lost. Scenes at the morgue men and women gather in a frantic throng in quest of loved ones. A few minutes after the first load of fire victims was received at the Bellevue Hospital morgue the streets were filled with a clamoring throng which struggled with the reserves stationed about the building in an effort to gain entrance to view the bodies of the dead in the hope of identifying loved ones. The frantic mob was reinforced as a hospital wagon brought more of the dead to the institution. The sobbing and shrieking mothers and wives and frantic fathers and husbands struggled with the police and tried to stop the wagon that was bearing the dead on its trips to the morgue. Mothers and wives ran frantically through the street in front of the hospital pulling their hair from their heads and calling the names of their dear ones. A few of the surging mob who viewed the situation in a calmer manner attempted to calm the excited ones but in vain. The police were abused because they would not allow the surging mob in the morgue and in many instances they were threatened and had to resort to the use of their nightsticks to keep the struggling mass from breaking in. Two members of the throng who succeeded in gaining entrance to the morgue were Mrs. Josephine Pannell of 49 Stanton Street and her son-in-law who came in search of her daughter, Mrs. Jane Piccolo, 18 years old. She was last seen struggling to get into the elevator on the 8th floor of the building. Mrs. Pannell walked up and down the aisle that was formed between the rows of the unidentified dead and looked in vain for her daughter. She was filled with hope however when an attendant announced that the wagon had just arrived with another load of the fire victims. The newly arriving dead were brought into the morgue and stretched out. Mrs. Pannell and her son-in-law ran frantically up and down the lines trying to find the one they sought. When the mother found that her search was in vain she ran shrieking to her son-in-law and began tearing out her hair. Piccolo stood as a man in a trance gazing at the rows of blackened bodies. Suddenly he reeled and fell to the floor. He was assisted to his feet by the attendants. Presently Mrs. Pannell became calmer and seeing that there was nobody among the dead and answered the description of her daughter. She grew more composed and thought it was probable that her daughter had escaped from the burning building alive. At the door of the morgue Mrs. Pannell met a reporter and told him of her miraculous escape from the burning building and the cause of her frantic search for the body of her daughter. According to her story she was in the reading room of the factory when the fire was discovered. She with others ran to the elevator shaft and when the car reached the eighth floor they fought to get into it. She said that she seized her daughter by the skirt in the cutting room and as she was being carried into the elevator by the frantic mob that was surging behind her, her hold on her daughter's dress was torn away and she remembers seeing the terrorized face of her daughter as the car was starting downward. She called to her daughter and thought that she saw her reel and fall to the floor as the car shot downward. Mrs. Pannell described graphically the surging throng that clamored in the hall of the eighth floor and the struggle of the employees to gain entrance to the elevator car. She told of the rush of the occupants of the car and reached the ground floor on its last trip. She said she had a dim recollection of persons being trampled under foot by the excited mob as they dashed from the car to the entrance of the building and that she believed many who were trampled upon perished in the bottom of the elevator car. She also said that when the car left the eighth floor some of the employees made a vain attempt to leap on the top of the car and that a few being pushed forward by the struggling mass behind them fell down the shaft to the open doorway of the shaft on the eighth floor and the death upon the roof of the car. Police worked desperately. A hundred policemen, most of them ashen and with trembling lips worked at the heart-rending task of keeping back without undue roughness the maddened thousands. For God's sake, one cry to a reporter who was wedging his way out of the mob, get me a drink. The poor blue coat needed it. Every few minutes a patrol wagon or a hastily improvised morgue wagon that had done duty as an auto truck earlier in the day appeared at the head of the mob at Avenue and 26th Street and the reserves of six precincts had to force open a narrow path through the crowd for it. As soon as the path was open in front, however, the crowd surged in behind it. At the side of the bodies the crowd broke into fresh weeping and screaming each seeming to see in the charred and often unrecognizable remains a loved one. Twelve patrol wagons from as many stations besides dozens of hastily impressed dispensary wagons of the police department and the department of public charities and a few auto trucks were used in transporting the dead from the fire to the morgue. The morgue itself became too crowded early in the evening for further storage of bodies and the charities department decided to throw open the long public dock of joining it. Here as night settled over the city the bodies were taken from the wagons and laid out side by side in double rows along either side of the long docks. Besides the 30 attendants regularly at the pier, 20 derelicts who had applied at the municipal lodging house in East 26th Street for a night's rest and a service for the ghastly work. In the narrow lane left between the double rows of the dead on the dark pier the patrol wagons and rude dead wagons crept solely to where the lines had freshly ended. They deposited their freight back slowly out and returned to the scene of the fire for more bodies. As fast as the dead were brought to the pier the grimy panhandlers and derelicts were set to work arranging them in rows and later putting them in the rough wooden boxes that serve as coffins nightly at the morgue. But the supply of boxes was soon exhausted and Commissioner Drummond of the Department of Charities was obliged to send over to the storage warehouse on Blackwell's Island for more. Presently there steamed up to the pier from the island a large double decked launch ringing stacked up on its deck 100 more boxes. Them boxes wasn't brought here since the slokum fire said one old attendant at the morgue amid a tense silence. Other attendants nodded reminiscently. Considerable confusion was caused on the pier and numbering the dead. The police of the various precincts had received from the Charities Department small colored tags bearing numbers to tag the different boxes as soon as the bodies were laid in them. There turned out to be three separate systems of numbers and the enumeration had to be done all over again. At 11.30 o'clock with the mobs still storming more and more outside the police had counted in the morgue and on the pier 136 bodies 13 men and 123 women. 56 of these were burned beyond all but human semblance and may never be identified. The thousands of clamors outside could not have identified them even if the police had let them swarm in on the pier. As the maddened throngs swarmed around the ghastly laden patrol wagons and improvised herces their misery rung even the hardened habitual handlers of the dead in the morgue making them frequently turn away from their work. There were hundreds scantily clad and shivering despite their raving in the cold night air. Many of them had no money. Their weak funds were in the pay envelope found in dozens on the scorched and unrecognizable bodies on the pier. One woman her head charred to a mere twisted blur of black carried in her stocking $600 in tightly crumpled bills. Dozens of the girls whose bodies were laid out on the pier were found to have carried their scant savings in this way. Clung together in death two girls charred beyond all hope of identification and found in the smoking ruins where their arms clasped around each other's necks were conveyed to the pier still together and placed in one box. Horrible cries had burst when the misery stricken mob outside when these two were carried through the narrow lane in the street and a few of the clamorous throng had forced their way to the wagon and lifted the dark tarpaulin. Everywhere burst anguished cries for sister, mother, and wife a dozen pet names in Italian and Yiddish rising in shrill agony above the deeper moan of the throng. Now and then a reporter the way clear before him by a broad white-faced policeman forced his way to the nearest telephone to send to his office a report of what was happening there. Each time a hundred faces were turned up to him imploringly and a hundred anguished voices begged of him tidings of those within. Had he seen a little girl with black hair and dark brown cheeks? Had he seen a tall, thin man with stooped shoulders? Could he describe any one of the many he had seen in there? The poor wretches were hunting for a story too. Pideously they pleaded with the policeman to let them, only them, pass so that they might see whether their lovelands were on the pier. They would only look around one short glance and come straight out. The policemen struggling with their own emotions more roughly than with the crowd could only put them off. Presently they said in a very little while now they would let them all in. When finally the pleadings and struggles of the anguished-rack multitude bade fair to drive them through all lines in a hungry swarm over the pier and into the morgue. Inspector Walsh, Captain Cray of the East 35th Street Station Commissioner Drummond, his deputy Frank J. Goodwin and coroner's physicians Weston and O'Hanlon held a hurried consultation behind the barred doors of the morgue. They decided to number each body anew to make sure of the count, to turn over the valuables or money found with the bodies to Lieutenant Sullivan for safekeeping and then to let the throng and small parties into the place. As soon as the body was identified they would place the lid on the coffin and remove it to one side. The mere announcement, spreading through the crowd outside that the police would let them through and open the doors at midnight through the mob was a joy. Several women had to be taken to Bellevue for treatment, laughing and crying and struggling all the way. Inside, as they heard the savage cries of the mob they sickened and paled at the thought of what would follow when the doors were opened. Fifty-six, muttered Inspector Walsh turning his face away. They called him smiling Dick Walsh but his averted face was not smiling. He meant the fifty-six bodies that were burnt or crushed beyond recognition. Fifty-six that would certainly be buried in unnamed graves. One of them had every stitch of clothing burned off them. One body, that of a young girl was headless and burned to a crisp. Commissioner Drummond realized that when the mad throng was let into the morgue and on the pier many of them already crazed by uncertainty concerning their loved ones might at the sight of the dead throw themselves into the river. He therefore ordered that every opening in the morgue building and on the covered pier be boarded up at once and that no space should be left which would permit the passage of a body. At midnight in order of Captain Gray the door of the morgue was open for a brief moment and the foremost of the surging mob outside to the number of fifteen was allowed to enter. The police squad at the doors could hardly keep the rest back with promises of letting them too presently enter in groups of fifteen. Each group shivering and clamoring and weeping was lined up at the door and allowed slowly to file between the rows of boxes. Two policemen accompanied each of them ready to support them if they should faint and more than half of them did. They sat down with an air of frightened bewilderment at the ghastly array of dead and then one by one looking down at the nearest box at their feet with a mangled body's lay with heads propped up on board for the light of the attendant beside the box they collapsed with cries of terror. Such were carried to one side revived by physicians from Bellevue and later warmed with coffee handed to them by attendants and panhandlers at the pier. Scores of men and women thought they saw on the ghastly bodies propped up in the boxes the relatives but could not identify them positively. Around several bodies gathered men and women in small knots each insisting pitifully that what was propped up there belonged to them and calling the unrecognizable mass with tender pet names. One man, William Mantis of 35 Second Avenue came there seeking for his sister Sarah aged fifteen his sister Lucy nineteen years and his mother all of whom had worked in the same shop. He couldn't find any of them and broke down completely. Another, Dominic Leon of 444 East 13th Street came to find three cousins and an niece who hadn't returned home. He did not find them. At 1 a.m. eight bodies had been identified by relatives and set aside in sealed boxes. The relatives filed into the improvised coroner's office in the morgue and tearfully stood in line for their slips permitting them to have the bodies removed. There was a competitive mob of undertakers with their wagons at the outskirts of the crowd ready to do that. End of article Recording by Leanne Howlett Typhoid Mary asked $50,000 from Citi From the New York Times dated December 3rd, 1911 recorded for LibriVox.org by Leanne Howlett Typhoid Mary asked $50,000 from Citi not a germ carrier and never had a contagious disease, she says. Her lawyer to file suit. Her standing as a cook has been injured by her three years imprisonment as a public danger. Typhoid Mary the cook who came by that nickname because of the cases of Typhoid fever that seemed to follow her around from family to family is about to sue the city and its health department for $50,000 damages for keeping her in confinement on North Brother Island for three years. Papers will be served within the next few days on Dr. Letterly, head of the health department and four physicians Dr. Darlington, Dr. Soper Dr. Park and Dr. Westmoreland Mary Mallon is the name on the complaint. She is 40 years old and says she has never had Typhoid fever or any other dangerous disease. She was released from the hospital last February and since that time she has been unable to follow her trade of cooking and her chances of making a living have been greatly reduced as she asserts. She will attempt to show that she was not the Typhoid germ carrier the city authorities have made her out. The lawyer who will prosecute Mary's case against the city is the same one who appeared for her before the Supreme Court in 1909 when her freedom was denied. He is George Francis O'Neill of Five Beekman Street and he is a specialist in medical legal questions. If the Board of Health he said yesterday is going to send every cook to jail who happens to come to a designation of germ carrier it won't be long before we have no cooks left and the domestic problem will be further complicated. What would the poor jokest myth do then for his stories about the cook who rules the house? The story of Typhoid Mary has been made the subject of a pamphlet by Dr. George A. Soeper who was mentioned in the complaint. The case goes back to 1906 when an alarming spread of Typhoid fever was experienced at Oyster Bay. Six out of a family of eleven had been stricken with Typhoid. The water of the well was naturally first suspected and it was made the subject of a careful analysis. Nothing was wrong with the water. Dr. Soeper examined the food supply of the family but here again he found nothing out of the way. He began to look for some peculiar situation and focus his suspicions on the fact that the family had changed cooks about three weeks before the fever began. Dr. Soeper then began to investigate the record of Mary Mallon. He found that in 1904 she had been employed at the home of Henry Gilsey at Sands Point Long Island. The family had eleven persons in it of whom seven were servants. Within a month, four of the servants were taken with Typhoid. In 1902 Mary was the cook for J. Coleman Drayden at Dark Harbor, Maine. Seven persons out of nine were taken ill within a short time. Three other instances are set forth where the fever followed within a short period after the employment of the cook. In all, he laid at her door twenty-six cases of Typhoid and he added that he had traced but fragments of her history during ten years. The physicians of the health department have never been able to discover that Mary herself ever had Typhoid. She is described as a robust woman and weighing about one hundred ninety pounds. The doctor suggested that she undergo an operation. To this she would not submit. In fact she always insisted that she never gave anybody but that the water was at fault. The case was the judge's one for confinement in March 1907 and Mary after a contest of physical strength with five policemen was taken to North Brother Island. In 1909 she was before the Supreme Court on a route of habeas corpus. Judge Geigerich sent her back to the hospital expressing sympathy for the woman but insisting that she was a menace to the community. At the time of her release, Dr. Letterly made a statement to the effect that Mary had been shut up long enough to learn precautions. She promised the department that she would not again take a place as a cook. End of article. This recording is in the public domain. The novel is doomed Will Harbin Thanks from the New York Times dated October 3, 1915 by Joyce Kilmer. Recorded for LibriVox.org by Leanne Howlett. The novel is doomed Will Harbin Thanks. Noted Georgia author says that automobile, moving picture and aeroplane are gradually weaning people away from reading fiction. The novel is doomed. If the automobile, the aeroplane and the moving picture continue to develop during the next ten years as they have developed during the last ten, people will cease almost entirely to take interest in fiction. It was not Henry Ford who told me this. Neither was it Mr. Wright nor Monshore Patay. The man who made this ominous prophecy about the novel is himself a successful novelist. He is Will in Harbin author of pole baker Ann Boyd The Desired Woman and many other widely read tales of life in rural Georgia. Although he is so closely associated with the southern scenes about which he is written Mr. Harbin spends most of his time in New York nowadays. He justifies this course interestingly but before I tell his views on this subject I will repeat what he had to say about this possible extinction of the novel. You have read, he said, of the tremendous vogue of Pickwick papers when it was first published. No work of fiction since that time has been received with such enthusiasm. In London at that time you would find statuettes of Pickwick, Mr. Winkle and Sam Weller in the shop windows. There were Pickwick punch ladles Pickwick teaspoons, Pickwick souvenirs of all sorts. Now when you walk down Broadway do you find any reminders of the popular novels of the day? You do not except of course in the book shops but you do find things that remind you of contemporary taste. In the windows of the stationers and druggists you find statuettes not of characters in the fiction of the day but of Charlie Chaplin. Of course the moving pictures has not supplanted the novel but people all over the country are less and less interested in fiction. The time which many people formerly gave to the latest novel they now give to the latest film. And the moving picture is by no means the only thing which is weaning us away from the novel. The automobile is a powerful influence in this direction. Take for instance the town from which I come, Dalton, Georgia. There are the people who used to read novels spend the time which they used to give to that entertainment riding around in automobiles. Sometimes they go on long trips sometimes they go to visit their friends in nearby towns. But automobiling is the way in which they nowadays are accustomed to spend their leisure. Naturally this has its effect on their attitude toward novels. Years ago when Dalton had a population of about three thousand it had too well patronized book shops. Now it has a population of about seven thousand and no book shops at all. I suppose one of the reasons is that people live their adventures by means of the automobile and therefore don't care so much about getting adventures from the printed page. But the chief reason is one of time. The fact is that people more and more prefer automobiling to reading. Now if the aeroplane were to be perfected as we have every reason to believe it will be so that we could travel in it as we now do in the automobile what possible interest will we have in reading dry novels? It seems likely that in a hundred years we will be able to see clearly the surface of Mars. Do you think that people will want to see this wonderful new world as before their eyes? The authors themselves are beginning to realize this. They are becoming more and more nervous. They are not the plastic creatures that they were in Sir Walter Scott's day. They feel that people are not as interested in them and their works as they used to be. I doubt very much if any publisher today would be interested for example in an author who produced a novel as long as David Copperfield and of the same excellence. But do you think I asked the public, haven't the authors changed too? I think that the authors have changed, said Mr. Harbin reflectively. The authors do not live as they used to live. The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write. Instead they live with other authors. Nowadays an author achieves success by writing we will say about the people of his home in the far west. Then he comes to New York. And instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives with artists that must have its effect upon his work. But is not that what you yourself did? I asked. A New York apartment house is certainly the last place in the world in which to look for the historian of Pole Baker. Mr. Harbin smiled. But I don't live with artists, he said. I try to live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts of human beings with people who didn't know or care whether or not I was a writer. So I have for my friends and acquaintances scholars, merchants, people of all sorts of professions and trade, and people of that sort, people who make no pretensions to be artists, are the best company for a writer for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to write about humanity by living with humanity instead of with other people who are trying to write about humanity. But at any rate you have left the part of the country about which you write, I said, and wasn't that one of the things for which you condemned our hypothetical not necessarily, said Mr. Harbin. It sometimes happens that an author can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away from them. I know that this is true of myself. It's in line with the old saws about distance lens enchantment and emotion remembered in tranquility, you know. I believe that Dumarier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it. You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years, and in New York I can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it. Then I said, you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to write a story about life in a New York apartment. Mr. Harbin thought for a moment. No, he said slowly, I don't think that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel about New York must be written in New York while a novel about Dalton, Georgia must be written away from Dalton, Georgia. Mr. Harbin, for one thing, there is something bracing about New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here. Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton I simply couldn't do it. And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb. New York hasn't the puzzles Everybody knows about apartment houses and skyscrapers and subways and elevators and dumb-waiters. There's nothing new to say about them. I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New York City. And their novels are all of one pattern, necessarily, because life in New York City is all of one pattern. In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr. Howell's novels about New York City were about a community in which people lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days, life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures. It was not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern. What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of their stories are laid. I think that's what's been done if he had gone away. But wasn't that because his Negro folktales were a sort of glorified reporting rather than creative work, I asked? No, said Mr. Harbin. They were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the Negro had told them to him and he developed them imaginatively. That was creative work. And he did most of his writing and the best of his writing was the view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York life, I suggested. I suppose that in your opinion the great American novel will not be written about New York. What do you mean by the great American novel, asked Mr. Harbin? So far as I know, there is no great English novel or great Russian novel. I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the national literature, I said. You cannot think of English literature as no American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as that novel is of English life. Well said Mr. Harbin, it is difficult to think of American literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William Dean Howells. But the great American novel to use that term would be less likely to come into being than the great English novel. You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may be said, is England. It has all the characteristics of England and all England may be met there. Mr. Harbin is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern realists. The trouble with the average realist, he said, is that he doesn't believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatest source of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about. Let's see if he's crime and punishment, for example. In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern realists, Mr. Harbin believes strongly in the importance of one realistic dogma that which has to do with detailed description. Why is it that PEPAS's diary is interesting to us, he asked? It is because of its detail. But if PEPAS had been a house, if he had been as careful in describing great things as he was in describing small things, then his diary would be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so Howell's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand years from now to get an idea of how we live. That is, Howell's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the years that are to come. Perhaps they will not be reading novels or anything else. For all we know, thought transference may become as common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass, nobody will read. End of article. This recording is in the public domain. Anarchists Demand Strike to End War. From the New York Times, dated May 19, 1917. Recorded for LibriVox.org by Leanne Howlett. Anarchists Demand Strike to End War. Great gathering of IWW and other agitators rails against selective draft. Germans in the audience. Emma Goldman urges workers to follow Russia's lead. They take notes but make no arrests. The Harlem River Casino, at 126th Street and 2nd Avenue, was the scene last night of a wild anti-conscription demonstration in the course of which the government of the United States was denounced and referred to as a tool of the capitalist classes. Young men liable to military service under the Selective Draft Act were urged to defy the government and refused to serve if called to the colors. On the part of all working people as a protest against the entry of the country into the European War and a nationwide campaign to frustrate the efforts of the government to raise armies for the defense of the country's rights would be among the things the future has in store for the country if those who packed the casino had their way. An appeal to the working men to follow the example of the Russians and form a working men's committee to run the country was also urged. The meeting was addressed by anarchists, dictators and persons who styled themselves socialists. Emma Goldman was one of them. Alexander Berkman who served a term in the penitentiary for attempting to assassinate Henry C. Frick was another. Leonard D. Abbott well known as an IWW sympathizer was another. Harry Weisberger who says no power on earth can make him fight was another. Also present and among the talkers was Leonora O'Reilly while among those listed but who did not speak was Carlo Tresca the Italian IWW leader and Jacob Pankin. Outside the building and inside were about 100 policemen who had been instructed to preserve order. They made no arrests although rumors flew about the hall that an arrest was impending especially while Emma Goldman was talking. She was the one who predicted a nationwide strike to embarrass the government and denounce the authorities in Washington as being on a par with the old powers in Russia. She begged the audience to make no hostile demonstration should anybody try to create disorder by waving the American flag. Two police stenographers sitting in the gallery took down every word said by the speakers. These notes will be gone over today and if a digest of the speeches seems to warrant it action against the speakers may be taken either by the police or by the federal authorities. As each person entered the hall he or she was presented with two circulars. In one captioned No Conscription the No Conscription League of 20 East 125th Street exhorted young men to resist the enforcement of the selective draft. The other was an appeal to the workers of the country to follow the example of Russia and form a council of workers to act with the council of workmen and soldiers delegates of Russia against the war. According to the public announcement of Emma Goldman the meeting was not financed by German money. The Kaiser she shouted was not put up a cent for the cause. However there were many Germans in the audience. An interesting onlooker was former Coroner Gustav Scholler. Dr. Scholler had a seat in the wings of the stage out of the view of the audience. When Elihu Root's name as head of the American Commission to Russia was mentioned by Emma Goldman hisses came from every part of the hall. Weisberger who talked first spoke until he became so hoarse he had to quit. He introduced as a socialist of nationwide prominence. He said the motto of all the people should from this on be they shall not conscript. He referred to the Wilson administration as the government of the classes which is introducing into this country a system of government which among other things seeks to destroy individual liberty and expression of thought. Frana said the war was not a war for democracy but a war to protect the war profits of the ruling classes. He spoke somebody shouted that it was a dastardly lie to say that the United States went to war to save democracy whereupon everybody it seemed shouted his or her approval. The documents circulated among those in the audience calling for a workman's council in America in part red. Fellow workers of the United States why don't you do the same thing here that your brother workers are doing in Russia? Why shouldn't the same wonderful and heartening things happening in Russia begin to happen right here? Are we workers of America going to let the workers and soldiers of Russia do the only wonderful and heartening things that are being done? President Wilson has said that America stands supremely for peace and yet today the only place in Christendom where a single step is being taken toward peace is Russia. War has come to a standstill in Russia. The Russian workers are seeking for peace in this world. Workers of America what are you going to do? It isn't enough for you to refuse to fight to resist conscription to denounce the government. It is the business of American workers to do what their Russian brothers have done. The only enemies American workers have or in America are the men who have taken the land who are taking enormous profits from their toil and who have them imprisoned or shot when they rebel as has been done in West Virginia and Colorado and California and Massachusetts and thousands of places where the workers have rebelled against slavery and injustice. Let the workers of the United States at once follow the heartening example of their Russian brothers and form a nationwide council of workers which shall work hand in hand with the council of workmen and soldiers in Russia against a war that cripples or kills millions of working people and enriches a few capitalists and inaugurate here as in Russia the reign of freedom, justice and peace. The purposes of the no conscription league were set forth in its circular in part as follows we oppose conscription because we are internationalists, anti-militarists and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments we will fight for what we choose to fight for we will never fight simply because we are ordered to fight we believe that the militarization of America is an evil that far outweighs in its anti-social and anti-libertarian effects any good that may come from America's participation in the war we will resist conscription by every means in our power and we will sustain those who for similar reasons refuse to be conscripted resist conscription, organize meetings, join our league send us money, help us to give assistance to those who come in conflict with the government help us to publish literature against militarism and against conscription other meetings similar to that of last night will be held in other parts of the city shortly it was announced end of article this recording is in the public domain the story of Harry Houdini from the New York Times dated January 13th 1918 recorded for LibriVox.org by Leanne Howlett the story of Harry Houdini whatever the trick or tricks by which Harry Houdini has been deceiving the world at large for the last 35 years his career stamps him as one of the greatest showmen of modern times in his field Houdini stands alone with a few minor exceptions he has invented one and all of the countless tricks and illusions of which he has master and he has done his job so well that not even his fellow conjurers are certain of his methods there are of course certain well-established principles upon which rest the performance of a majority of the tricks but Houdini has invented principles of his own the result is that he has no imitators some of his feats of extrication of course or attributable to the fact that he is a contortionist and an acrobat and these naturally can be duplicated by others of equal physical dexterity his more subtle effects however are known only to himself his trick of vanishing an elephant which he performed at the hippodrome for the first time on Monday he declares to be based upon an entirely new principle and not merely an enlargement of the familiar cabinet trick the management of the hippodrome has no idea how the trick has worked even the stage hands who draw out the cabinet have so far failed to get a clue with Houdini however are four men of his own men whom he carries with him in season and out and these men know something but not everything of his methods not even the keeper who disappears with the elephant declares Houdini knows how it is done the elephant and the keeper are done away with by different methods both of which are so complicated still according to Houdini that the elephant has just as good a chance of understanding it as the keeper for his second hippodrome stunt Houdini escapes from a packing box a box tightly locked and bound which is thrown into the hippodrome tank which owing to space limitations he never has been able to perform before on a stage but it is similar in principle to several other of his escapes all of these things together with his handcuff work etc. Houdini attributes to an inborn mechanical genius which began to manifest itself long before he knew what it was it is this genius which coupled with his instinct for showmanship has given him his present undisputed position in the amusement world his ability to do what he wanted with locks Houdini traces back to the age of five when the family preserve closet located in Appleton in Wisconsin gave way readily before his very touch Houdini incidentally was not his name at the time he adopted it legally about 30 years ago his first name was Eric his second for certain reasons may not be here divulge he was born in Appleton as a fore said on April 6th 1874 he cannot remember the time when he was not an acrobat and a contortionist at the age of 7 he observed a traveling showman walk a tightrope in the main street of the town varying this feat by hanging by his teeth from the cable not knowing that a special mouthfitting contrivance is required for this trick Houdini tried it in the backyard the same afternoon and lost five teeth a year later at the age of eight he joined his life since circus which was showing in Appleton at this time he was probably the mental equal of the average youth of 15 or 18 his first name Eric fitted a circus career so well that he retained it calling himself Eric Prince of the air his act incidentally he called the dead man's drop at this time it must be remembered he was a contortionist acrobat, wire walker and sleight of hand performer who developed any of his other abilities professionally one of his tricks at this time was a variant of the contortionistic trick of bending backward and picking up an article with his mouth Houdini went the rest several better by picking up a pen with his eye at nine he joined a traveling circus and toured the state as contortionist and trapeze performer the world famous Davenport brothers Ira Arastas and John Henry Harrison were then at the height of their fame doing the first alleged spiritualistic work that the country had seen one of their specialties was to ring bells inside a cabinet while they were bound hand and foot they also contracted to effect an escape no matter how tightly they were bound Houdini hearing of their work decided that anyone physically deft could do something of the same sort and he accordingly began to do rope escapes standing in the center of the ring he would invite anyone in the audience to bind him and would then free himself from the cabinet when he began this work he was about eleven in the ring at Coffeeville, Kansas one night it happened to be a sheriff who tied him and as he did so he pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket if I put these on you you couldn't get loose he remarked Houdini remembering his early experiments at home told him to go ahead and put them on the sheriff did so Houdini freed himself and his work as a handcuff expert from 1885 to 1900 he played in museums music halls, circuses and medicine shows all over the country gradually improving his work and slowly discarding his purely contortionistic and acrobatic achievements during the latter portion of this period he played many times in New York but never attracted any particular attention in fact he never attracted any in 1900 he made his first trip abroad purely on speculation to interest Dundas Slater then manager of the Alhambra he gave a demonstration of escape from handcuffs at Scotland Yard and succeeded in baffling the police so effectively that he was booked at the Alhambra for six months it was at about this time that in accordance with the custom of the times Houdini began to call himself the handcuff king a phrase which afterward became world famous today in a less gaudy age it has become a phrase which he is desperately trying to live down Houdini toured England and the continent for six years during which time he escaped from dozens of famous prisons cell breaking incidentally had been made compulsory with him one day when he lost the gate to his hotel room and was unable to open the door the ridicule which this happening drew down upon him led him to make a thorough study of this form of lock with the result that he can now open practically any door with but little effort in 1902 one of his tricks having been doubted by the police of Cologne he demanded an apology and remained in Cologne an entire year to fight the case in the courts he felt at the time that his career was ruined unless he obtained the apology and eventually he got it in the name of the Kaiser in 1901 he received a challenge from the working men of the Krupp plant at Essen and freed himself from specially constructed shackles before 70,000 people he returned to America in 1905 bringing with him innumerable certificates and sworn statements from authorities all over Europe he found America amusement America a vastly different country from the America that he had left vaudeville had been organized and was under a single head and Houdini who had previously worked one week out of three and received $30 for it came into his own at last in this country he continued his cell escapes in January of 1906 breaking out of cell two in the United States jail at Washington the cell in which Gattu had been confined in 1908 he dropped the handcuff escapes for more dangerous feats including an escape from an airtight galvanized vessel filled with water which had been locked into an iron bound chest he also invented the so called torture cell in which he was bound and suspended head downward in a receptacle filled with water this trick he still does upon occasions by this time he was sufficiently skilled to do many of his escapes without any concealing device and began to make his straight jacket escape in the open air hanging head down from the roof of a building this public display of course was designed merely to stimulate interest in his vaudeville appearances during this period he issued a challenge to all who might think that they could invent devices to hold him and as a result escaped from a series of plate glass boxes riveted iron boilers paper bags zinc lined piano boxes packing cases padded cells, straight jackets insane cribs, willow hampers iron cages burglar proof safes and a United States leather mail pouch in 1912 he first performed the submarine trick now used at the hippodrome manacled and nailed in a wooden packing case which was afterward burdened with iron weights and fastened with iron clamps he was thrown into New York harbor just off sandy hook it is more or less needless to add that he escaped of his quartet of confidential retainers one of them has been with him ten years and two of the others for eight years another a German had been in his employ 14 years and a parting was in necessitated by this country's entrance into the war all of his helpers are men whom he has picked up in machine shops and trained and reviewed his needs since returning to America Houdini has made countless trips abroad and has given shows and demonstrations in every part of Europe, Asia and Africa in 1910 while in Australia he learned that the grave of John Henry Harrison Davenport who had died in Australia was badly kept he saw to it's rehabilitation and upon his return to this country he was sought out by the surviving Davenport Ira Erastus who in return gave him the secrets of their various rope tricks some of which were still unknown to Houdini we started it he told the younger man now you finish it end of article this recording is in the public domain the progress of the film from the Guardian Unlimited dated August 29th 1919 recorded for LibriVox.org by Leanne Howlett the progress of the film Happy Endings a curious light is thrown in the psychology of picture house audiences by the fact that only recently has the first screen tragedy been completed it is a Griffith production called Broken Blossoms and is found that on Thomas Burke's Lime House story The Chink and the Child that excellent actress Lillian Gish takes the leading part in it the definition of a tragedy a drama with an unhappy ending a play or film may be submerged in sorrow right from the beginning and yet if it can manage to raise its head at the last minute it is saved from being designated a tragedy and from consequent unpopularity nowadays it is not necessary for a book to end on a note of jubilation with the wedding march thumping close by people like to read novels that mirror life and in life the summits of ecstasy do not often lead to a finni on the stage two an unhappy ending is suffered though not very gladly the Kenema has no place at all for it this is the more strange because the Kenema of all forms of entertainment leaves the most fleeting impression behind it the finish of a book is not immediately overlapped by the beginning of another one leaves a theater after the final curtain drops and many days may elapse before some other play rubs the stern lines of the tragedy from one's memory in the ordinary picture house program the main item is wedged between a boisterous farce and the many ewed interests of current events under such conditions no production however effective and lovely can hope to leave unspoiled impressions but at all costs those impressions distorted and smudgy and faint must be happy ones it is the ending that matters tragedy often very beautiful and poignant is found in the middle of dozens hearts of the world the new fox version of blim is a rob cabiria maslova and that gruesome production the knife all work through more or less piercing crescendo of agony the honor system a clever propagandist film dealing with arizona gales has many tragic episodes in it innumerable society and domestic dramas plunge their characters into deep and bitter waters but none of these productions is a ongoing tragedy in the very beginning of each one there is a loophole through which one can see happiness beyond the foreground shadow your real tragedy never admits of that until broken blossoms is shown there is no kinema production of use as illustration but the stage offers plenty that hamlet for instance from the first words and that wonderful first scene the most insensitive audience is made away that no glimmer of happiness will be found until the ending as the play goes on tragedy after tragedy wraps it round as inevitably as petals round a closing flower and nothing but a brutal and philistine disregard for nature and art could alter its doomed progress up to the present the kinema has left hamlet alone with an act of giving sudden upward twist to down going paths is one of its proudest accomplishments it made its reputation by its last minute averting of tragedy as the old scene where the heroine dashes up in the nick of time to shoot through the rope which is about to suspend the hero by his comely neck to a stout elm tree something of the same idea is used in intolerance when an automobile reaches the scaffold just as the four executioners raise their knives to sever the cords which American fashion work the trap in gentler stories heart failure or train accident serves to clear the path of happiness for the deserving of his sins are forgiven and apparently forgotten a jury is sentimental a will is found artificial respiration revives Ophelia and hamlet and she ruled Denmark in peace and well-being the kinema is perfectly at liberty to insist on cheerful endings if the subject is its own possession to alter the conclusion of plays or novels adapted for the screen is pure vandalism and impertinence a flaring example of this was the film version of justice Paul's worthy's play falder flings himself down a staircase and is killed in the film he goes back to prison and eventually sinks to the lowest grade of human life the imitation is only less subtly tragic and is entirely inartistic another sufferer is Hendel Wakes in no sense is this a tragedy it ends reasonably and on just the right note of balance and logic presumably to make it more popular and less true to life the kinema brings in a sweetheart for Fanny and the inevitable wedding bells in the distance the thoroughly bad screen version of temple Thurston's novel Sally Bishop added the sin of an altered ending to its other transgressions in the book the heroine commits suicide the film makes the amount of poison she has swallowed insufficient to kill her and she is brought to life and married to the hero or villain according to how one regards that easy moral gentleman it will be very interesting to see how much favor broken blossoms is received end of article this recording is in the public domain an entirely arid desert as far as alcoholics are concerned any drinkable containing more than half of one percent alcohol being forbidden excessive fines and dungeon keeps yawn for transgressors of this drastic federal law even persons returning home with small flasks of stimulants in their pockets would be amenable to the law the provisions of the 18th amendment to the constitution of the country really became effective at midnight yesterday but in order that there should be no dispute the federal authorities delayed their operation until tonight at midnight as a result of which the demon rum as it is facetiously termed held full sway yesterday evening many of the most popular restaurants here and throughout the country last evening ceremoniously waked the demise of alcohol some giving the diners free portions of whiskey brandy and wine but charging goodly proportions over the usual tariffs for food and good service at other places plenty of clients were willing to pay for the privilege of wedding their thirsts at twenty to thirty dollars for a bottle of champagne or a dollar to two dollars for a drink of whiskey at several places coffins were carried throughout the rows of diners to the accompaniment of dirges at some restaurants the walls and ceilings were hung with crepe several famous restaurants had placards bearing the words exit booze doors close on saturday end of article this recording is in the public domain