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Disaster Transbian episode 30
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00:00.
00:30Amen.
01:00Amen.
01:30Amen.
02:00Amen.
02:01Amen.
02:02Amen.
02:03Amen.
02:04Amen.
02:05Amen.
02:06Amen.
02:07Amen.
02:08Amen.
02:09Amen.
02:10Amen.
02:11Amen.
02:12Amen.
02:13Amen.
02:14Amen.
02:15Boisterous, rowdy Chicago, for the first time in its history, prepared to welcome the New
02:20Year in silence.
02:21On the morning of December 31st, those who had not heard the newsboys' cries of,
02:26Extra, the previous evening, or learned of the tragedy by word of mouth, awoke to stunning
02:32banner headlines and long and incomplete lists of the identifiable dead and injured.
02:38The news was as incredible to the citizenry as it would seem nearly 100 years later when
02:44the World Trade Center towers collapsed in New York.
02:47The Tribune spread across its entire front page a list of the dead, along with 200 names
02:53of the injured people, some of whom were not expected to live.
02:57It ran also a box identifying 13 morgues holding remains.
03:02Never before had the city received a blow so instantaneously shocking.
03:07There was scarcely a neighborhood that was not touched in some way by the tragedy.
03:11Instead of the usual sounds of celebration ushering in the New Year of 1904, the predominating
03:16sounds in Chicago were the tolling of church bells and the soft patter and empty streets of
03:22horses' hooves muffled by new fallen snow.
03:25Wheeled traffic seemed devoted to the transportation of flowers to homes with black crepe on the doors.
03:32Black crepe seemed to be everywhere.
03:35Mayor Harrison hurried home by train from a trip to Oklahoma and declared a week of official mourning,
03:42banning all unnecessary noise including band music, the tooting of horns, and train, boat, and factory whistles.
03:49Flags were flown at half-mast.
03:51The Board of Education announced a delay in the start of the new semester out of respect for the more than 40 teachers and principals who had perished in the fire.
04:01The frightful thing was over before the city knew what had happened.
04:06The news left paralysis behind, said the Tribune.
04:09Chicago, reported the New York Clipper, enters upon the New Year silently,
04:14dumb with the shock of disaster and speechless with the anguish of sudden and awful calamity.
04:20Lives sacrificed to someone's carelessness.
04:23Thousands of Americans had drowned that year and died in railroad accidents.
04:31But the 600 or so who had lost their lives and the hundreds of others who were injured in a place of amusement touched a nerve in America and throughout much of the world.
04:41Of those who attended the matinee performance, 150 of the dead were men.
04:46Three times that number were women.
04:48And most heartbreaking of all, 150 were children.
04:52Other than the terrible natural disaster of the Galveston Hurricane in 1900,
04:58nothing in the new century came close to the Iroquois catastrophe in the continental United States.
05:05The horror cut across class lines.
05:08Bankers and railroad executives searched morgues along with clerks and domestic servants,
05:14among them the few black people who had been in the theater that day.
05:17Some children made it home by themselves.
05:20Two frightened little Aurora girls, aged 12 and 14, walked into the offices of a manufacturing company not far from the theater.
05:29They said they were staying with an adult family friend and had been allowed to attend the performance on their own.
05:36Somehow they escaped from the theater.
05:38They were so shaken they didn't know what to do.
05:41Their story touched an employee who took them to a train station and bought them two tickets to Aurora.
05:48They were among the fortunate ones.
05:50Theodore Chabad, 12, had gone to the show with his 14-year-old sister Myrtle.
05:55Though he was badly injured, Theodore somehow fought his way out of the theater and staggered eight city blocks in the bitter cold to the office of his father, attorney Henry Chabad.
06:07Once inside, he collapsed and never regained consciousness.
06:11Myrtle was found dead in the theater.
06:13Jesus fucking Christ.
06:15Dr. D. W. Alexander's son Boyer was found decapitated.
06:20He was identified by a pocket watch in his clothing.
06:24The watch had been a birthday gift from his father.
06:27John Dryden returned home after identifying his wife's body.
06:34On the parlor piano was a sheet of music she had been playing just before leaving for the theater.
06:40The title of the piece was Absence.
06:44The community of Kenosha, Wisconsin was staggered.
06:47The members of the prominent Henry Van Ingen family became separated as they tried to escape.
06:53The parents survived with burns, but their five children, Grace, Edward, John, Margaret, and Elizabeth, all died in the fire.
07:02The wealthy real estate man and his wife eventually recovered from their physical injuries, but were psychologically shattered.
07:10They never returned to their home, but moved to Tarrytown, New York, where they lived for the rest of their lives.
07:17The popular Cooper brothers of Kenosha decided to remain in their seats rather than risk the stampede for the exits.
07:24Their bodies were found near each other.
07:26Both had been asphyxiated.
07:28More than 24 hours after the disaster, a haggard man boarded a Cottage Grove Avenue cable car.
07:36In his arms, partially wrapped in a piece of canvas, was the body of a little girl with blonde curls.
07:43As he took a seat, the conductor eyed him suspiciously, approached, and tapped him on the shoulder.
07:49I'm sorry, he said, but the rules of the company do not permit the carrying of bodies in this manner. I must ask you to leave the car.
07:57Without the slightest change of expression, the exhausted man slowly rose, cradling the child in one arm.
08:04With his free hand, he pulled a large revolver from his pocket, pointed it in the conductor's face, and said with little emotion,
08:11This is my daughter. I have looked for her all last night, and all of today, I have not been able to get a cab or a carriage.
08:19I am taking my baby home to her mother, and I intend to take her on this car. Now go on.
08:24The car proceeded on its way.
08:31Forty-three-year-old Mayor Harrison issued a string of edicts, closing first all theaters and places of public amusement with the exception of the Chicago Auditorium, which had a steel fire curtain,
08:45and then extending the closure to dime museums, dance halls, and other public buildings.
08:51Even hospitals were not spared. Some were told to stop admitting patients until the building department could make safety inspections.
08:59Thousands of people were affected.
09:02A coroner's inquest was launched to determine the exact cause of the fire,
09:07and a special blue ribbon committee of architects and builders was appointed to interview survivors and report directly to the mayor.
09:15But despite these quick responses, despite his assurances of immediate improvements in public safety,
09:21and his personal and obviously genuine solicitude for the bereaved,
09:25Carter Henry Harrison, Jr., a reformed Democrat, the city's 30th mayor, and the first to be born in Chicago,
09:33would quickly find himself in the center of a controversy that would continue into 1904,
09:39and, at least for some of the victims' families, to the end of his political career.
09:44In the wake of the Iroquois disaster, the mayor accused Alderman of not acting fast enough on the critical study submitted by building Commissioner George Williams two months before the tragedy.
09:57Harrison declared that if anyone was to blame for the fire they were because they had suspended action on a new city theater ordinance,
10:05saying that it needed further examination.
10:08Theater owners Davison Powers rushed to provide an implausible excuse in a statement issued to Chicago Papers.
10:16When the blaze first broke out, they said, the house firemen threw the contents of the kill fire,
10:21which would have been more than enough, if the product had been effective, to have extinguished the flame at once,
10:28but for some cause inherent in the tube of kill fire it had no effect.
10:34Then they blamed the victims. The audience was promptly admonished and importuned by persons on the stage and in the auditorium to be calm and avoid any rush.
10:46They added that the exits and facilities for emptying the theater were ample to enable them all to get out without confusion.
10:54They concluded the specious statement, saying that no expense or precaution was omitted to make the theater as fireproof as it could be made.
11:04There being nothing combustible in the construction of the house except the trimmings and furnishings of the stage,
11:11and in building the theater we sacrificed more space to aisles and exits than any theater in America.
11:19In an exemplary example of poor timing, to say nothing of bad taste,
11:24Will Davis' wife, the actress and singer Jessie Bartlett Davis, joined the fray from Philadelphia where she was performing.
11:32She too blamed the theater victims for the disaster, claiming that it was the actors whose lives were regularly in danger,
11:40It is the fault of the public that such things occur. In these swift days, the public is not satisfied with good, quiet shows, she declared.
11:50They must have lots of excitement, color and lights, with the result that every actor takes his life in his hands when he goes before the footlights.
12:01She added,
12:03I do not understand how the asbestos curtain failed to work.
12:07Mr. Davis drilled his men every day in the use of the apparatus, and in the dropping of the curtain.
12:13Never before was there any hitch.
12:16The claim that the kill fire had failed to work was immediately challenged by one alderman who said the theater's management had been explicitly warned about the inadequacy of the product after a member of his staff, a former veteran city fireman, had visited the theater.
12:33One day before the tragedy, said the alderman, a member of the theater's management was warned by the former firefighter that the fire apparatus you have here would do no more good than a bucket of water in a sawmill.
12:48But the fireman was told to mind his own business. He was not running the theater.
12:52Powers was accused of buying cheap, inferior material for the asbestos curtain in order to save money.
12:59The local manager of the Johns Manville Company said that a pure asbestos curtain would have stood the test of the Iroquois fire.
13:07If it had been woven properly, it would have sufficient tensile strength to withstand any wind pressure, provided it was properly supported at the top and sides.
13:18Johns Manville wasted no time distancing itself from the episode, taking out a prominent ad in at least one theatrical paper.
13:27Asbestos curtains that stop fires are pure asbestos interwoven with brass wire.
13:33The Iroquois theater curtain was not one of ours.
13:37Alright, let's do this. One, two, three.
13:41The press, not just in Chicago, was unanimous in its condemnation of the theater owners in the city administration.
13:50Harrison's closings of Chicago theaters was criticized as too little and too late.
13:55One day after the fire, the Tribune reflected the anger, shock, and disbelief of the city, if not the nation.
14:02The theater had just been built and inspected.
14:05It had been built by artisans whom, in our moments of national pride, we call the cleverest in the world.
14:12It had been inspected by officials whom recent public indignation was supposed to have awakened to some sense of public duty.
14:20It was a modern building, constructed with modern requirements.
14:24It was said, and it was supposed to be the fact, that the building was not only a fireproof one,
14:30but that every device which human ingenuity, spurred by a desire to guard human life, could think of, had been installed,
14:38that abundant precautions were taken, and that the theater at last was safe.
14:43Yet, that is the theater which has gained a terrible celebrity.
14:48The dead cannot be called to life, but the other theaters of Chicago can be inspected in light of the dread illumination of the Iroquois fire.
14:57The New York Herald took the historic view, not since the burning of the Ring Theater in Vienna in 1881
15:04has any disaster occurred in its magnitude and horror with the destruction of the Iroquois.
15:10It is necessary to turn to the greatest cataclysms in nature, like the eruption of Montpellier,
15:16which overwhelmed Martinique for anything to match it for sudden and wholesale dealing of death.
15:23Carter Harrison quickly moved to tamp down criticism of his administration and the theater management
15:29by choosing certain aldermen to make speeches urging public calm and moderation at the first city council meeting since the fire.
15:39The interocean, for one, noted the tactic, describing Harrison's precautions as puerile, futile, and craven.
15:48Those are all $5 words.
15:49As the days passed, the Chicago Tribune expressed mounting indignation.
15:54In all justice, it must be said that the chief responsibility rests upon the city administration, which either through carelessness, sloth, or ignorance,
16:05or because it had incapable and corrupt servants, or from a mistaken sense of security, chose to let those theaters run themselves as they saw fit,
16:15without any reference to any measures for the protection of human life.
16:19Police made the first of many arrests, starting with 20 carpenters, stagehands, and even members of the Pale Moonlight Double Octet,
16:28some of whom were charged with involuntary manslaughter.
16:31The entertainers were actually held on a technicality so they might serve as witnesses.
16:36The same involuntary manslaughter charge was brought against the theater's co-owners, Davis and Powers,
16:43and Building Commissioner Williams, all of whom were placed under arrest.
16:47The arrest warrants were issued by Justice George Underwood at the insistence of Arthur Hull,
16:53the Chicago businessman who had lost his wife and three children in the tragedy,
16:57and whose wrenching comments were wired to every corner of the globe.
17:02It is too terrible to contemplate, Hull said.
17:05I can never go to my home again.
17:07To look at playthings left by the children, just the way they put them.
17:11To see how my dear, dead wife arranged the details of her home so carefully.
17:16The very walls ring with the names of my dear, dead ones.
17:20I can never go there again.
17:22My wife and my children, all I ever had to live for, are gone.
17:25All that remains is for me to try to make someone pay for this carelessness.
17:29A few carpenters and stagehands have been arrested.
17:32Men who sang in the chorus are in jail.
17:35Such an investigation is a cruel mockery.
17:38The men who are responsible are allowed to walk the street, untouched,
17:42while a few laborers are punished.
17:45The authorities must understand that those who have suffered will not wait for them to dally along.
17:51There must be no politics or favoritism in this investigation.
17:55A national magazine, The Independent, formerly Harper's Weekly, put it succinctly.
18:01It would appear as if there has been a conspiracy of catastrophe in the case of the Iroquois Theater.
18:06It was against this backdrop of fear, grief, rage, charge, and counter charge, accusation, denial, innuendo, contradiction, and confusion,
18:17that the city of Chicago would witness one of the longest, strangest, most emotional and dramatic legal battles in its history.
18:25The Dartmouth School of Photography
18:35At nine o'clock on the night of December 30th, 1903,
18:41At 9 o'clock on the night of December 30th, 1903, as police and firemen probed the smoking
18:57ruins of the theater, the Chicago Daily News hit the streets with a 9 p.m. extra containing
19:03the first details of the great tragedy.
19:05A news editor had obviously selected secondary filler material to close up the empty space,
19:12the news hole in the pages of the paper where the Iroquois coverage ended.
19:17He randomly chose pieces from the AP wire, which included financial briefs from around
19:22the U.S. and abroad.
19:24Given Chicago's extraordinary disaster story, these items probably received little or no
19:30attention from readers.
19:32Somewhere in the middle of the paper, at the bottom of one column, appearing just above
19:36an advertisement for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, was one paragraph from London dated
19:42December 30th, reporting that a steamship company had that day ordered a new vessel for its Atlantic
19:49fleet that would be larger than anything than a float, and that construction would begin
19:54immediately at Belfast, Ireland.
19:57The vessel, christened the Adriatic, was completed in 1907 and served as the company's proud flagship.
20:04Under her owners, the White Star Line announced construction of a more state-of-the-art fleet of
20:11transatlantic steamers, which it called its Olympic class.
20:15The Adriatic, whose birth announcement was made public on the day the Iroquois died, was the
20:21immediate predecessor to the company's newest, safest, most technically advanced flagship,
20:27a greater, even more luxurious vessel that would, not unlike the Iroquois theater, symbolize
20:33the technical superiority of the new modern century.
20:37Just as the Iroquois was called absolutely fireproof, this floating palace was termed unsinkable.
20:44She was the Titanic.
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