Epidemic

by David DeKok

  If there was no valid investment reason to buy the bonds of Ithaca Light & Water Company, we must assume that the Cornell University Board of Trustees, and more to the point, its Executive Committee, did so for other, less savory reasons—namely to help out the Treman family and their good friend, William T. Morris. The chairman of both the Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee in 1902 was Samuel D. Halliday, a local attorney who had been a classmate of Morris’s during the 1869–70 academic year at Cornell. Who pushed the investment? The record doesn’t provide an answer but gives enough clues to allow conclusions to be drawn.

  The investment in the water company took place in late October or early November of 1901, after Morris incorporated Ithaca Light & Water Company on October 24. When we look at the attendance rosters for the Executive Committee during that period, they include the names of several men with an interest in seeing the sale of the gas and water companies to Morris go forward. Among those attending the Executive Committee meeting of October 29 were Mynderse Van Cleef, who chaired the meeting; Franklin C. Cornell, president of Ithaca Trust; Robert H. Treman; and Jared Treman Newman, whose significance will be discussed momentarily.

  If there was any local bank with close ties to the university, it was Ithaca Trust Company. Besides the people already mentioned, the bank board included Francis Miles Finch, revered dean of the Cornell Law School; Emmons L. Williams, secretary-treasurer of the Cornell Board of Trustees; and Ebenezer M. Treman. Van Cleef and the two Tremans were Morris’s closest friends. All the elements were present for a classic conflict of interest. Is this what happened? Often the most likely explanation is the correct one.

  There is an alternate, or perhaps complementary, road map to follow to the university investment, and it involves valuable real estate. On October 23, a day before Morris incorporated Ithaca Light & Water Company, Jared Treman Newman and Charles H. Blood, both core members of the Executive Committee, bought into and took over the Cornell Heights Land Company that had been incorporated in 1897 by Herman Bergholtz, who had built Ithaca’s streetcar line, and Edward G. Wyckhoff. Cornell Heights was then a mostly undeveloped tract of land adjacent to the campus, immediately north of the Fall Creek gorge with stunning views of Cayuga Lake. Newman and Blood envisioned a planned, parklike subdivision of thirty acres with curving streets that would appeal to Cornell professors and other upscale professionals.32

  Cornell Heights was not presently served by Ithaca Water Works and would face the same water pressure problems as East Hill if the current mains were simply extended without any other measures being done to increase the water supply and water pressure. The fact that Blood and Newman were close friends of Morris’s and signed their land deal a day before he incorporated Ithaca Light & Water suggests that they may have had a promise from Morris to provide them with all the water their homebuyers would need. An article about the new subdivision in the Ithaca Daily News on November 20 made much of the planners’ work to ensure good streetcar connections for Cornell Heights residents. It makes no sense that they would have ignored the water issue. It would not have been prudent to move ahead with so large a development unless the water issue had been resolved.33

  Did Blood and Newman prevail on the rest of the Executive Committee to invest $100,000 to make certain Morris was able to buy Ithaca Water Works? This scenario, at least, offered some legitimate attraction to the university, as its professors would be able to buy nice new houses within walking distance of campus.

  In the end, for whatever reason, Cornell University did invest $100,000 in the bonds of Ithaca Light & Water Company. In the late autumn of 1901, Morris’s deal went through and the Treman family was very happy. “I am so glad on the Elias Treman family account as it will put them in good shape,” wrote John Bush to Van Cleef on November 13, referring to the family of Rob and Charlie Treman and Van Cleef’s wife, Elizabeth. “It will also be very acceptable for Kate. Kate has $7,000 of the [1891] water bonds and as I understand they have sold around 110. She may be inclined to sell them.”34 Bush wrote to Van Cleef again on December 2 saying that his wife had received payment for her Ithaca Water Works capital stock, “and I feel so glad for her and for the L. L. Treman family. I have never understood how anyone could pay par for the stock.”35

  Morris had paid too much for the water company and would need to find a way to recoup his investment. Cornell University was now inextricably tied to Morris and Ithaca Water Works, for without its investment the deal would have collapsed. Today such a deal to acquire a public utility would be subjected to careful scrutiny by a state public utility commission, but those did not yet exist and so the public could only hope that bankers and businessmen would rise above their pocketbook interests to make sure the public interest was protected as well. It was a fleeting hope.

  Chapter 4

  Newsmen

  Word of the Morris-Treman deal leaked to the local press. Ithaca in 1901 had two modern, competing daily newspapers. If the Ithaca Daily Journal didn’t report something, chances were the Ithaca Daily News would. Both papers had good, sometimes uncommonly good editors and reporters. The difference was their publishers. No matter how talented a newspaper staff, a newspaper publisher plays a critical role in determining how well the news is reported. Publishers have their own interests, prejudices, and friends. Sometimes that influences the articles they allow or don’t allow into their newspapers, for better or for worse. It certainly did in Ithaca.

  The upstart Ithaca Daily News, founded only in 1895, had been owned for the past two years by Cornell University oratory professor Duncan Campbell Lee, who was also editor-in-chief. An unrepentant Anglophile, Lee had gone on sabbatical to England for the 1901–1902 academic year. Frank E. Gannett, the Daily News managing editor and a future giant of American newspaper publishing, was in charge when reporters learned of the deal. He broke the story on October 31, 1901. Today’s journalist would judge the story to be a good, workmanlike effort to flesh out a rumor the newspaper believed to be true. The Daily News reported that at least one of the purchasers was believed to be from Penn Yan but did not identify Morris. It even had Eben Treman swatting away a pesky reporter with an over-the-shoulder remark that he would issue a statement when he had anything definite to announce. Some things never change.1

  Journalists stalk the no-man’s-land between insiders and outsiders. They hope to explain to their readers what the insiders are doing and try to keep the door cracked open, hoping to see or hear a little of what is going on. If that is impossible, or if the door is slammed shut, they instinctively seek out relevant facts wherever they can find them. They publish what they know, even partial stories, fully expecting that the complete story will be coming soon. This may infuriate the more controlling members of the insider camp but is standard practice and arguably what most newspaper readers expect.

  Two days after that first article, the Daily News reported, “Local Water and Gas Plants Sold,” saying that “despite the denials” by Eben Treman, the sale of the plants took place on October 31. Citing “a special dispatch to the News from Penn Yan,” the newspaper identified Morris as the buyer and Thomas W. Summers as his general superintendent. The article provides such a detailed account of Morris’s plans and background that we suspect Morris or Summers was the unidentified source. President Treman “refused to be interviewed regarding the sale” when a Daily News reporter came to see him, the newspaper noted. Several days later, Treman issued a statement denying the companies had been sold, at which point the Daily News revealed that Morris indeed was its source for the previous story.

  The Ithaca Daily Journal was the establishment newspaper with long and close ties to the Treman family. Founded in 1816 by Ebenezer Mack, the father-in-law of L. L. Treman, it had changed hands a number of times during the nineteenth century but was still friendly to the Tremans. George E. Priest, one of the Journal’s two publishers (Charles M. Benjamin was the other), had even been a pallb
earer for L. L. Treman. The Journal remained silent on the sale of the gas and water companies until November 12, when it was forced to acknowledge the obvious. The Journal heaped scorn on its competition, which it did not deign to name, alleging that “much that has been said [by the Daily News] was news to members of the company,” meaning it wasn’t news until the Tremans said it was news. “No authentic information had been given out by the company until this morning when the deal was consummated, and then only to a reporter of the Journal, who was called in to interview E. M. Treman, of this city, and W. T. Morris, of Penn Yan,” the Journal huffed. It then proceeded to reprise much of what the Daily News had already reported, adding a few details of its own.2

  Crusading newspaper editors are the stuff of legend, but they really did exist. Duke Lee, editor and publisher of the Ithaca Daily News, was one of them. If this story were a Western movie, Lee would be the brave small-town editor or sheriff taking on the corrupt businessmen and politicians who were hurting the public. He was intelligent, athletic, dashing, and willing to put himself on the line for his beliefs. He would probably find twenty-first century journalism and its rules puzzling, because he drew few distinctions between journalism and politics. Like many publishers of his day, Lee was openly active in party politics, in his case the Democratic Party. Yet he was no party hack. Lee was dedicated to the truth, and in the end that destroyed him.

  Ithaca had a considerable number of journalists for so small a town. Besides the newspapers already mentioned, there was the weekly Ithaca Democrat, founded in 1874 and near the end of its life, and the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, founded in 1882 and given over mostly to reports of campus sports and social events. That would change. Cornell students with an itch for real journalism worked as stringers for the big New York City dailies, including the Times, Tribune, Sun, and Evening World. Anything of interest that happened in Ithaca quickly made its way via these student stringers or the Associated Press bureau in the Daily Journal building to the outside world.

  Lee, though, was in a class by himself. Born in 1869 in rural Bovina Center, New York, his father was Rev. Dr. James B. Lee, a minister in the Presbyterian Church, at that time as dour and conservative a denomination as there ever was. Two of his brothers, Rev. J. Beveridge Lee and Rev. John Park Lee, became Presbyterian clergy. At age fifteen, Duke Lee found work as a telegraph operator for the Bankers and Merchants Telegraph Company in New York City.

  He wanted an education and gained admission to Delaware Academy, a college-preparatory school near his hometown, graduating as valedictorian in 1887. Next stop was Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he excelled as an orator and in Latin and Greek, winning several prizes at a college renowned for its oratory program. On the playing fields, he captained the football team and was named the college’s best all-around athlete. Lee graduated from Hamilton as salutatorian of his class in 1891.

  Like many college graduates, he wanted to stay near his friends, so he turned down a college teaching job in the West that fall to become vice principal of the Cascadilla School, a college-preparatory academy in Ithaca. Popular with students, Lee drew the attention of faculty at Cornell. When Professor Brainard G. Smith, chairman of the Department of Elocution and Oratory, resigned to accept a similar position back at Hamilton College, he recommended the twenty-four-year-old Lee to replace him as department chairman. President Jacob Gould Schurman and the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees approved, and Lee was hired for the fall term in 1893.3

  Lee and Smith had oddly parallel careers and one can only wonder if there was a rivalry between them. Both were Hamilton graduates. Smith was a reporter and editor for fifteen years at the New York Sun, where he worked closely with Charles A. Dana, the Sun’s legendary editor. He left in 1887 when Andrew D. White hired him to build up a department of public speaking at Cornell and, abortively, a journalism school. Although his former colleagues at the Sun thought it a good idea, most newspapers across the United States hooted at the “College of Journalism,” not believing their craft could be taught in the classroom. Twenty-five students enrolled, but the Cornell Board of Trustees, upset with the laughter, placed such severe restrictions on Smith’s journalism program that he ended it. Returning to Hamilton in 1893, he taught oratory for five years. But journalism ran in his veins, and he left Hamilton in 1898 to become editor of the Utica Herald-Dispatch, followed by a six-year stint beginning in 1899 as editor of the Ithaca Daily Journal. That was the same year Lee acquired the Ithaca Daily News.4

  Duke Lee revived Cornell University’s intramural debate clubs and turned the intercollegiate debate team from a persistent loser into a regular winner. It captured four out of five annual contests beginning in 1896. In the classroom, he taught his students the principles of analysis, the nature of evidence, and the writing of briefs and oral delivery, “until today it is safe to say that no college or university in the country surpasses Cornell in thorough and systematic training in the art of debate,” Lee wrote in a letter to President Schurman of Cornell. His system of arranging and preparing arguments for a debate was dubbed the “Cornell system of debating” by a writer for another university.5 The syllabus for his extemporaneous speaking course during the 1897–98 academic year promised to “awaken deeper interest in American institutions through study and research; to give training and practice in logical and forceful arrangement of thought; to develop accuracy, fluency and grace in speaking the English tongue; and to enlarge the vocabulary.” One longs for a course like that today.6

  But Lee had grown restless in academic life and longed to pursue his ideals out in the world. After Congress declared war on Spain on April 22, 1898, he volunteered for two years of Army service. In all likelihood, he charged into the war with the noble aim of helping to free Cubans from Spanish colonial oppression. President Schurman granted him a leave of absence, and he enlisted as a sergeant in Company M, 203rd Regiment, New York Volunteers, later moving to Company C. The idea of a college professor enlisting in the Army to fight in the war caught the fancy of the New York Times, which ran a small story about him.7

  It was a much different war from what he expected. Lee traveled with the 203rd New York Regiment from Syracuse to Camp Black on Long Island in late July. They drilled and trained, and Lee was promoted to second lieutenant. Fighting in Cuba was over by late summer, but the Puerto Rico campaign was under way and the occupation of the Philippines was just beginning. The 203rd departed on September 11 by train for Camp Meade near Middletown, Pennsylvania, and again by train for Camp Weatherill near Greenville, South Carolina, on November 11. There the regiment stayed until mustered out on March 25, 1899.8

  Yet despite seeing no action, the regiment waged a losing war against an unseen enemy, typhoid, that killed at least eleven soldiers and possibly as many as eighteen if common misdiagnoses of other diseases such as pneumonia or malaria were, in fact, manifestations of bacterium typhosa.9

  Most of the deaths occurred during the two months in Pennsylvania. Sanitation in all the Army camps was appalling, and Army medical investigators found that volunteer soldiers unaccustomed to Army life were the worst offenders. The latrines, or sinks, quickly filled up. To avoid the horrible stench, men defecated anywhere they could find a little privacy. It was a deadly situation, even if the consequences were not understood at the time.

  Major Victor C. Vaughan, who served with Major Walter Reed and Major Edward O. Shakespeare on the Surgeon General’s Typhoid Commission, wrote: “We were able to show that in 1898 typhoid fever was so widely distributed in this country that in the assembling of a volunteer regiment, about 1,300 men, there would be from one to four men already bearing the infection. These brought the infection into the camp.”10 And this was four years before the concept of typhoid carriers—seemingly healthy people who unknowingly spread the disease through defecation—was even understood, and then only in Germany. Physicians knew only that typhoid lurked everywhere, wa
iting for the recklessness of man to unleash its fury.

  Duke Lee’s Company C was especially hard hit, losing four soldiers to typhoid in October while the regiment was in Camp Meade. Since 10 percent of typhoid patients typically died, we can assume that as many as thirty-six other soldiers in Lee’s company contracted the disease but survived. Lee was discharged from the Army on October 21, 1898, the same day as one of the Company C deaths and a day after another.11 Was this because he was ill with typhoid? While that would be a fair assumption, it appears that the conclusion of the Cuba campaign and the freeing of the Cuban people had dampened Lee’s appetite for war. He was opposed to the bloody new war in the Philippines against native insurrectionists and refused a posting there.12 He was also trying to get out early to ease the burden on Cornell University caused by his absence.13

  Lee returned to Ithaca with a healthy respect for the damage typhoid could do and laughed off the ribbing he took from students in the yearbook about going off to war and never coming under fire.14 There were many ways to die in war, and bullets were only one. Although he quickly resumed the professorial life, it was not enough for him. He wanted to be a voice in Ithaca, his adopted hometown, and vowed to find a way to do that.

  On November 22, 1898, Andrew Carnegie traveled by train to call on President McKinley at the White House. Carnegie had opposed the war with Spain. He remonstrated with the president not to annex any of Spain’s former colonies, especially the Philippines. Carnegie was opposed to America becoming a colonial power in the manner of Britain, France, or Germany. Writing in the August issue of the North American Review, Carnegie said becoming a colonial power would force America to build a navy equal to that of Britain or France and divert dollars from real needs, such as a Central American canal or what, fifty years later, would be called the St. Lawrence Seaway. Nor should America trample on the moral rights of the Philippine people for independence. McKinley did not agree, and a furious Carnegie, who had supported McKinley over William Jennings Bryan for election in 1896, now spoke out publicly against him. Because Carnegie was one of the world’s richest men, the press paid attention.15