A historians’ debate has broken out over the way history has treated the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory

In a crowded New York City courtroom 107 years ago this month, two wealthy immigrant entrepreneurs, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, stood trial on a single count of manslaughter. Earlier that year, March 25, 1911, a fire at their factory, the Triangle Waist Co. , left 146 workers dead. Because the penalty for one count was the same as the penalty for all of them, the Manhattan district attorney filed only his strongest case.

After a three-week trial, including testimony from more than 100 witnesses, Harris and Blanck were acquitted. Courthouse veterans chalked up the surprise verdict to a strongly pro-defense jury instruction from Judge Thomas Crain. No doubt it helped that the jurors were businessmen, too; there were no peers of the dead garment workers on the panel.

Sneaking from the courthouse by a side door to avoid an angry crowd, the factory owners were accosted in the street by David Weiner, whose sister Rose had suffocated and burned behind a locked factory door. “Murderers!” Weiner cried as he raced toward them. “Not guilty? Where is the justice?” Before collapsing on the cobblestone street, the young man vowed: “We will get you yet.”

In a sense, he was right. Historians of the Triangle fire — a catalyst for major changes in workplace safety laws— have not been kind to Harris and Blanck. That includes me. In the course of writing “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” I got to know the pair pretty well. I judge them to have been tough men, unsympathetic to their workers, careless about fire and indifferent to safety. So count me in Weiner’s camp.

But two recent essays make the case that the Triangle owners have gotten a raw deal. A profile in the New York Review of Books of Michael Hirsch, the skilled researcher whose dogged work finally, in 2011, attached a name to every victim of the fire, quoted Hirsch’s view that they are “two of the most wrongfully vilified people in American history.” The article did not detail his reasoning. More recently, in Smithsonian magazine, curator Peter Liebhold offered an essay titled, “Was History Fair to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Owners?” Although Liebhold does not offer any new details or discoveries, he contends that the story of the fire has been “trafficked in service to one agenda or another” at the expense of the owners’ reputations.

I can’t speak for every historian, but my only agenda in writing about the fire was to examine why — in an era when workplace deaths were appallingly common and quickly forgotten — the Triangle disaster led to dramatic and lasting reforms. ...