by David DeKok
Decisions made at Cornell could seriously impact downtown businesses. In the fall of 1901, the Department of Military Science and Tactics changed the uniform color of the Cornell cadet corps—military drill was then a part of the curriculum for men—but only informed one of the half-dozen merchants who had sold uniforms to students for the past twenty years. The rest were stuck with old-style uniforms they could not sell and appealed to President Schurman to have the color change delayed for two years. Major William P. Van Ness, in his reply to Schurman, accused the merchants of providing poor-quality, ill-fitting uniforms that damaged corps morale, and argued that mail-order firms in Philadelphia and elsewhere had offered to provide quality, good-fitting uniforms if local merchants could not.15
Conflicts between the town and the university did arise. Boys from Ithaca playing baseball on the campus green on Saturday mornings greatly annoyed some of the professors. On May 3, 1902, a Saturday, Burt G. Wilder, professor of neurology, vertebrate zoology, and physiology, dashed off an angry letter to Emmons L. Williams, secretary-treasurer of the Board of Trustees Executive Committee, demanding that the university take action to stop the ballgames. He complained that games were played every Saturday and that one was going on even as he wrote. “I consider that my class, myself, and all others who are trying to perform their appropriate work in what is supposed to be an institution of learning are subjected to an outrage, and I earnestly recall your attention to it.”16
But on the whole, the two worlds coexisted peacefully. Students ate and drank in downtown bars and restaurants, especially Theodor Zinck’s Hotel Brunswick. Moviegoing was not part of student recreation, but that was about to change. The new “Edison moving pictures” were demonstrated at Library Hall on campus in December 1901 “for a large and well-pleased audience.” For group recreation, especially at the fraternity level, students might rent a tally-ho—a large, horse-drawn coach—at Cornell Livery on Tioga Street and take twenty friends on an outing to Rogue’s Harbor or Dryden. In winter, students rode toboggans or skated on Beebe Lake on campus or on the Cayuga Lake inlet. If the lake itself froze over, wrote Emily Barringer, ice boats would appear along with sharp-shoed horses pulling sleighs. Winter could be a magical time.17
Women students had been present at Cornell since 1874, six years after the first freshman class entered. Sage College was endowed by Henry W. Sage, Barringer’s great uncle, who believed Cornell should offer equal opportunity to women students. The cornerstone for the ornate, Second Empire–style building was laid on May 15, 1873. In the 1892–93 academic year, Cornell had 225 women students. Now, in 1902, the number had reached 400, still only one-eighth of the student body but more than enough to be noticed, not always favorably. The New York Herald reported in 1894 that Cornell women students were ostracized by fraternity men, who were put off by their high intelligence and earnest approach to their studies. Barringer both acknowledged and dismissed the problem, writing, “While the men students affected to frown, somewhat, upon the coeds, nevertheless we women managed to have a more than average worthwhile existence.” She thrilled to the memory of the men’s glee club serenading the women of Sage College one moonlit winter night, and of her arms filled with American Beauty roses at the Junior Prom in February, the social event of the winter.18
Sage College women loved basketball and tennis, especially the former. Three interclass games were played that year in the Armory. Male students were banned from the bleachers for propriety’s sake, but male faculty members were allowed. Women were permitted to invite men to their dances in the Sage gymnasium, provided that the warden, Margaret Harvey, or her assistant were present. The Sage College Dramatic Club put on an outdoor performance of Alfred Tennyson’s The Foresters, based on the Robin Hood and Maid Marian story and with music by Arthur Sullivan. It was first produced in New York in 1892 and remained popular in regional theater. Harvey wrote in her section of the 1902 annual report that the performance “delighted a large audience by its naturalness, its beauty, and its artistic fidelity.”
Even in 1902, women students worried about crime. That year, professor of Greek George P. Bristol wrote to Schurman “to protest most seriously the dark condition of the campus walks . . . I am not speaking on my own behalf but for the women, some of whom have told me that they feel very timid about going around the campus evenings on account of the darkness.” The electric arc street lamps that lined the campus roads were often turned off, Bristol said.19
Cornell’s male students, at least in the freshman and sophomore classes, were caught up in serious rivalry and high jinks in the winter of 1902. Members of the sophomore class kidnapped William P. Allen, a future federal prosecutor who was to be the toastmaster at the freshman banquet. They held him for several days before he was freed by seven freshmen who forced their way into the house where he was being held, overpowered his guards, and spirited him to freedom at the Chi Phi fraternity house. President Schurman issued a stern warning to stop the nonsense. “What you look upon as a huge joke is in reality doing great harm to the university every hour that it proceeds. The disorders must cease at once.”20 It was probably a speech every college president delivered at some point.
Schurman had to step in again on March 1 when the freshman class finally held its banquet at the Lyceum Theatre in downtown Ithaca. Sophomores kidnapped freshmen and painted their faces half black and half red, with the number “’04” written on their foreheads. Some were dressed in women’s clothing. Sophomores threw rocks at the caterer attempting to bring the food through the back door of the theater until they were driven away with a water hose. After three sophomores were arrested, Schurman called a “council of war” and ordered the attacks to cease, and they did. The banquet was held in peace, and some 260 freshmen attended.21
Famous people came to Ithaca. Students and town residents alike filled the Lyceum Theatre on the evening of March 6, 1902, to hear a long speech by William Jennings Bryan, who had been the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1896 and 1900, losing both elections to William McKinley. He denounced tax evasion by rich Americans and corporations that forced the poor and working classes to pay more, sounded a warning about “the danger caused by the combination of great financial interests unrestrained by law,” and infused all of it with his own devout brand of Biblical morality. The next morning, Bryan had lunch with a group that included Manton M. Wyvell, a student who had worked on his campaign in 1900 and who would work for him again as private secretary when Bryan became President Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state in 1913; Frank E. Gannett, managing editor of the Ithaca Daily News, who was running the paper that spring in the absence of Duncan Campbell Lee; and Charles E. Treman and others. The next day, Gannett wrote an editorial attacking the Ithaca Daily Journal in angry terms over its coverage of Bryan’s visit. The Daily Journal was Ithaca’s Republican newspaper.22
Winter and spring sports for male students were as popular at Cornell as anywhere else. Basketball was new, having just been recognized as an intercollegiate sport by the Athletic Council. Baseball had been played almost since the university’s founding in 1868. The track team had triumphed at the Inter-Collegiate Games held in conjunction with the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. But more popular than any of these (excepting football, a fall sport) was the sport of crew. The rowers had a most formidable coach, Charles E. Courtney.
Courtney was the type of coach who today we would call old-school. Despotic, a disciplinarian, he tolerated no dissent from any of the rowers, but delivered a winning program. In June 1897, he kicked five students off the team before the all-important Poughkeepsie Regatta for violating his ban on eating strawberry shortcake. He replaced them with benchwarmers and still emerged victorious. In 1901, one of his crews achieved a record time in the four-mile Hudson River course at Poughkeepsie: 18 minutes, 53.2 seconds, which stood until 1928. Now, on June 21, 1902, Cornell would defend its title against crews from Wisconsin, Columbia, Syr
acuse, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown.23
The Poughkeepsie Regatta was hugely popular, drawing a large number of spectators from the closer schools and surrounding region. Some stood at the river’s edge while an estimated three thousand others packed an excursion train—adorned with the flags of the six schools—that moved along the east side of the Hudson. Others still were in a small flotilla of steam yachts anchored offshore to watch the rowers as they rhythmically powered their shells toward the finish line. Cornell spectators on the shoreline let loose with the Cornell Yell just as students on campus had done for Lord Kelvin. They stayed despite the weather. Rain clouds hung over the Hudson Valley for much of the day, and for a time that morning, rain pelted the race course. Umbrellas popped up, and both the “young women in their light summer gowns” and young male collegians put on their rain gear, the New York Times reported. When Cornell’s boat crossed the finish line to win each of the three events, “day fireworks” erupted from the Poughkeepsie Bridge and cannons fired from yachts.24
Back in Ithaca, the scene was no less frenzied. By 3 p.m., a large crowd gathered around the bulletin board outside the telegraph office where race results wired throughout the day from Poughkeepsie were posted. Even as races were in progress, word sped over the wire to Ithaca reporting who was in the lead. Young men with megaphones shouted the news to the assembled fans, who responded with loud cheers. The New York Times reported:
Every heart beat warmly for “Old Man” Courtney. He and his crews were cheered until all throats were hoarse. Cornell flags and red and white bunting decorations of all kinds were in evidence on all residences, and parading and noise-making were kept up until nearly midnight.25
This was the student life at Cornell University in the last happy year before the great epidemic.To many, whether students or not, life in Ithaca was something just this side of paradise. As Frank E. Gannett wrote in an editorial, “An Ideal City,” in the Daily News one day that spring, Ithaca was nearly free of both serious crime and “the pestiferous tramp,” meaning a stranger bearing a contagious disease. But Gannett could not contain his enthusiasm for his adopted city, and wrote on:
If a person is looking for an ideal place to reside where he can enjoy all the beauties of nature, breathe the atmosphere of intellectual refinement, have nearly all the pleasures that can be bought in the largest cities and at the same time be freed from the disagreeable sights of the poor and suffering such is everywhere in evidence in large centers of population—if a person cares for all of this he should come to Ithaca.26
Perhaps Gannett should have headlined his editorial, “Tempting Fate.”
Chapter 7
The Valley of Death
Looking back at the tragedy more than a century later, we want to shout to the people of Ithaca and the students of Cornell, you are in grave danger! But all we can do in the twenty-first century is watch the tragedy play out.
On August 25, 1902, with construction of the dam and reservoir on Six Mile Creek about to commence, William T. Morris and Mayor William R. Gunderman of Ithaca signed a contract requiring Ithaca Water Works to provide more fire hydrants, meet very specific targets for increased water pressure for firefighting, and cut the high water rates that Ithaca residents were paying. The city was quite satisfied with the deal.
But there was more. Ithaca Water Works in the contract “covenants and agrees that the water supplied shall be clear, pure and wholesome [and] shall be at all times free from disease producing organisms.” Given that Morris had rejected Gardner Williams’s proposal to build a water filtration plant for the city, and given that Williams believed the Six Mile Creek water to be filthy and full of bacteria, the mendacity of Morris in signing that contract was breathtaking. He simply didn’t care. The purity clause, no doubt insisted upon by the city of Ithaca, could be neutralized with the lie that Six Mile Creek was clean now and would be in the future. Did he never think it would come back to haunt him?1
Six weeks after Morris signed the contract, Williams told the Ithaca Daily News that Six Mile Creek “is unquestionably pure.” Morris even approached his friends on the Cornell Board of Trustees in June about switching the campus water supply from Fall Creek to Ithaca Water Works once the reservoir on Six Mile Creek and a new pumping station were completed. He was hoping the board was ready to make the switch. The more one thinks about the willingness of Morris and Williams to tell these blatant lies, the more criminal what happened becomes.2
In early September, Williams collected bids from six construction companies that wanted to build the dam. The low bidder was Tucker & Vinton of New York City at $34,224, or $969,000 in current dollars. It edged out a well-known and established Ithaca firm, Driscoll Brothers & Company, which bid $35,360.3 Thomas M. Vinton was the latest member of Chi Phi to be pulled into Morris’s world, although he joined at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rather than Cornell. He probably knew Morris through Chi Phi events at the national level.
Low bids, even from fraternity brothers, can have consequences. Tucker & Vinton quickly ran into problems hiring local workmen to build the dam for the low wages the bid and contract dictated. The company offered only $1.50 for a ten-hour day ($390 a year assuming full-time employment), with wages docked for downtime during rainstorms. That might have worked during economic hard times, but it failed miserably during a boom when construction work was available all over the region. The City of Ithaca, for example, paid $1.50 for an eight-hour day, or 25 percent more per hour.4
So Tucker & Vinton made the fateful decision to hire immigrant labor to build the dam. Perhaps that was the plan all along, despite the statement made by a supporter of Morris’s during the referendum campaign that the water company did not hire “Dago contractors, or do its work on a cheap-John plan.”5 The order went out for sixty “sons of Caesar,” as the Ithaca Daily News put it. There has always been some question about the real ethnicity of the dam workers, with the news coverage referring to them as either “Italians” or “Hungarians.” “Italians” were generally Italians, but sometimes Greeks, and “Hungarian” was a catchall term for immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which then included all of what became the separate countries of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia after World War I. The immigrants working on the Six Mile Creek dam were most frequently referred to as “Italians,” so it seems more likely they were part of the vast influx of poor Italians who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century.
From 1880 to 1924 “there was a virtual hemorrhaging of people from Italy to America,” Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale wrote in La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. Indeed, between 1900 and 1910, more than two million Italians, many from backward and impoverished southern Italy, entered America. They were too late for much of the free land given to immigrants of other nationalities in the nineteenth century, so they tended to stay in or near the cities where they came ashore. Cheap, unskilled labor was in great demand in urban factories and on big infrastructure projects. More than three-quarters of Italian immigrants ended up in the Northeast industrial states like New York. They built the Brooklyn Bridge and burrowed the Lexington Avenue subway tunnel in New York City. Many traveled back and forth between America and their villages in Italy, especially during the winter here, when construction work was suspended. Immigration officers in America called them “birds of passage.”6
Ithaca was no stranger to xenophobia. Much of New York State in April 1900 had been subjected to hysterical newspaper headlines during a strike by seven hundred Italian laborers at the New Croton Dam construction site four miles north of Sing Sing (now Ossining), New York. The strikers were universally identified as “Italians,” although almost none of their names made it into the articles. They went on strike after the contractor refused to pay the local prevailing wage for public projects required by a new state law. Governor Theodore Roose
velt, soon to become President William McKinley’s running mate in the 1900 election, made matters worse by sending National Guard troops to break up the strike. One soldier was killed by gunfire. The Italian strikers were widely portrayed in the press as sinister and foreign, and it was little surprise that the Ithaca public was suspicious of them when they came to work on the Six Mile Creek dam.7
But Ithaca’s citizens were far more scared of the dam itself. Until a story appeared in the Ithaca Daily Journal on September 11, 1902, they had no idea it would be ninety feet high and, thanks to Williams’s radical design, a bare wisp of a thing. The dam would be just eight feet thick at the base, a few inches less in the middle, and two feet thick at the top, and it would hold back a mile-long reservoir with enough water to wipe out Ithaca if it all came raging down the valley. Williams planned to use brilliant engineering and reinforced concrete—then a relatively new material that was a Tucker & Vinton specialty—to safely reduce the bulk of the dam, but the public was having none of it. Their imaginations went wild. All they could think of was the terrible Johnstown Flood of 1889. Thirteen years was not long enough to forget.
The Johnstown disaster in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, killed 2,209 people, including ninety-nine entire families, after an earthen dam burst and a thirty-foot wall of water swept down the narrow Conemaugh Valley to Johnstown. The poorly maintained dam held back a private fishing lake owned by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose members were wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. A screen placed in the dam’s outflow pipe to prevent escape of game fish had allowed dangerous accumulations of sediment behind the dam, and the spillway, or waste weir, was too small, the result of lowering the dam’s height by several feet to allow the road across its top to accommodate the larger and more luxurious carriages of its members. Six to eight inches of rain fell on May 30 and 31, 1889, and the dam could not hold back the rise in the lake. Late in the morning of May 31, water began to spill over the top, which should never have happened. Just before 3 p.m. that afternoon, a huge piece—four hundred feet long and forty feet deep—broke away, and the catastrophe began. The Johnstown Flood was arguably the biggest news event in America between the Lincoln assassination and the sinking of the Titanic, and it left many Americans skeptical about dams and the people who built them.
