Epidemic
Page 18
In his comments to council and the public that night, Schurman ruled out artesian wells or Cayuga Lake as alternative sources of supply for Ithaca. He was not opposed to artesian wells, per se, but questioned whether they could provide the two million gallons per day the city needed. In any case, he doubted they could be ready by September 1, the deadline he imposed. As for Cayuga Lake, well, the lake was fed by streams running through the city, including Six Mile Creek, and was the receptacle of most of Ithaca’s untreated sewage. The eyes of the nation were upon Ithaca, Schurman said, waiting for an answer to the question, “Is it safe?”
And now that he had Morris boxed into a corner, Schurman unleashed his rhetoric, holding Ithaca Water Works and its management responsible for bringing the typhoid calamity to Ithaca. Not for nothing did he have national renown as a speaker. “I shall not discuss the cause of the present epidemic nor the parties who may be morally and legally responsible for this disaster,” Schurman said and then proceeded to do just that. “There is a general belief that it is caused by the water. I believe it is. It may not be possible to prove the water responsible, yet we believe it to be so. If it is, the officials of the water company are responsible.” It was a remarkable speech, but there was more. “So far as the company is concerned,” Schurman said, “we have no faith in their management. We insist, first, upon a representation on their board, to have the right to control the plant and patrol the watersheds.”
Whatever he said was enough, or perhaps the council members truly believed they had no choice. There was much grumbling, both on council and among members of the public, about an option that forced them to drink “filtered sewage.” They eventually focused on the part of the deal that gave them the right to take over Ithaca Water Works by eminent domain. They would fix this later. Council approved the deal that night and set a referendum on municipal water for March 2. Schurman praised the council action as “the salvation of the city” that would ensure that Cornell University would have a full complement of students in the fall.19
Schurman had not convinced the Ithaca Daily News that his way was the right way. Duke Lee did not abandon his support for moving the city to a supply of artesian water. He did not want filtration and believed most of the public was with him. As he wrote in his editorial the next day, “The point was also well brought out in last night’s meeting that, no matter if a hundred chemists or a hundred engineers say that a filtration plant will cleanse the water, it will be impossible to make the public look at the matter in that light. No one will send his boy to Cornell and force him to drink filtered sewage; no one will believe that Ithaca has good water.”20
Schurman’s troubles were far from over. As jubilant as he had a right to feel in fixing the deal for the filtration plant, he still had to win the battle of public perception. Yes, he could tell parents their children would have clean water by September 1, but the suffering and deaths among the students, let alone townspeople like Louise Zinck, had left a public stain not easily washed away. The sins of Ithaca were known to journalists up and down the East Coast, in every city and town that sent students to Cornell. Newspapers around the country were running wire stories about the epidemic. Calling the university to account for its sins was almost a reflexive act for the newspapers. Schurman complained that “among other things from which we have to suffer at the present time are the awfully sensational reports of the newspapers.” Most of them were not, but they hurt and the worst was yet to come. Weeks later, he would be railing against “the misrepresentations and lies circulated by a sensational press.” While the press made some mistakes, which is true of any big story, much of the coverage and editorials seemed to be accurate and fair.21
Schurman’s most immediate antagonist in the press was the Ithaca Daily News, edited by Gannett and published by Lee. Almost from the very beginning of the epidemic, Duke Lee ordered up aggressive coverage that Gannett was only too happy to provide. The Daily News had published casualty lists and patient updates and kept its reporters busy rooting out stories in an unrelenting effort that angered some of Ithaca’s downtown merchants. The newspaper even chastised its unnamed business critics (“What Matters the Ten-Cent Sale?”) for caring more about profits than the people who provided them. On another occasion, the newspaper issued what we might today call a Schindler-esque statement of regret that it did not do more, did not make the warnings stronger, and was “not able to save the lives of the unfortunate ones for whom today many mourn.” There were stories and hard-hitting editorials about the epidemic in the Daily News nearly every day. By the time the epidemic was over, daily circulation had climbed by 43 percent over 1902.22
A reporter on the Daily News staff, Lynn George Wright, who was a senior at Cornell, may also have been one of the stringers, perhaps the most important one, who fed stories about the typhoid epidemic to the Associated Press and to the various New York City dailies.23 It is not possible to state this with absolute certainty, but the available evidence points in that direction. Wright’s obituary in 1919 said he “earned money for his [Cornell] tuition by writing special articles for the city dailies.” As a reporter for the Daily News and a student to boot, he would have been in a position to know what was going on during the epidemic. Wright was a friend and classmate of George Jean Nathan, who was a reporter that year on the Cornell Daily Sun. He gave Nathan his first job as a Broadway critic in 1906 after both had graduated, starting him on a distinguished career. Nathan was then a reporter for the New York Herald and Wright the editor of Outing and Bohemian magazines.24
What Schurman seemed to find most unbearable about the Ithaca Daily News coverage, though, was that it was done under the editorship of Gannett. Schurman had been a mentor to Gannett when the young editor was a student at Cornell in the late 1890s and hired him as his personal secretary when he went to the Philippines for President McKinley in 1899. He took it as a personal affront that Gannett was running the day-to-day operations of the newspaper that would not let the epidemic story go. On the evening of February 14, he made a remarkable telephone call to Gannett to protest what he claimed to have heard was the plan of the Daily News to force the closing of Cornell University.
This sounds like idle bitching among Ithaca’s elite, but Schurman took it seriously. Gannett termed it slander and denied it in the strongest terms. After hanging up with Schurman, he gathered his reporters and made them sign a statement denying that they ever said the Daily News would “close down the university.” Gannett stewed about Schurman’s call into the following morning, when he heard the same rumor elsewhere. In his office, he typed out a long letter to Schurman, again denying any intent to close the university and defending, in a proud but wounded tone, the aggressive reporting of the epidemic by his newspaper. “Had we, like the Ithaca Journal, tried to cover up the epidemic, tried to make out that there was no great danger in our midst, and tried to defend the existing conditions, then we would have been open to censure, for neglecting our duty.” He mailed the letter and included the notarized affidavit from the reporters, signed by A. T. Seaman, whose wife was ill with typhoid, Watson W. Lewis, Lynn George Wright, and Charles A. Stevens.25
Looking back more than a century later, the epidemic coverage by the Ithaca Daily Journal does not seem quite as starkly one-sided as Gannett sought to portray it. The question of whether the Journal would have written the same volume of coverage in the absence of an aggressive competitor can never be answered, but apart from some glaring exceptions, most of the Journal coverage was acceptable, and some was first-rate. Those exceptions included the bogus story about the supposed typhoid case on Six Mile Creek and an article, “Fever Stories Exaggerated,” which claimed the real number of typhoid cases was less than half that reported by the Daily News. For that story, the newspaper had even tried to find physicians willing to debunk the idea that the typhoid came from the water, an effort that largely flopped. Dr. Alice Potter of Ithaca told the reporter that while some past epide
mics around the country were supposedly linked to stirring up filth by tearing up streets for paving or laying sewers, all indications here were that the typhoid came from the water. It is very true, however, that on the rare occasions when Morris wanted to say anything to the press, he turned to the Daily Journal as a friendly venue.
The Journal’s editorials were another matter. Again, they did not entirely ignore the reality of the epidemic but tended to be slanted sharply toward the interests of Ithaca Water Works, Cornell University, and the Treman family. They often stressed the personal responsibility of typhoid patients for their own misfortune, such as one written at the beginning of Lent that stated, “Our people are in grief; mourners go about the streets, we have reason to mourn for our sins of negligence and carelessness, and we know that we have.” The editorial was not talking about the Ten Commandments.
Brainard G. Smith, the editor, had written this and other Journal editorials. He had been a reporter for Charles Dana’s New York Sun for nearly fifteen years. It was a good place to learn the trade, known as “the best school of journalism” and “the newspaper man’s newspaper.”26 There is no reason to doubt he was a good journalist, but he was working for two owners, George E. Priest and Charles M. Benjamin, who were close to the Treman family. Even when Benjamin’s wife contracted typhoid early in the epidemic, the Daily Journal’s slant did not noticeably change. That was especially true when the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, and the New York City newspapers began to harshly criticize Cornell University and its Board of Trustees for their mishandling of the epidemic. The Ithaca Daily Journal responded in righteous fury, defending Cornell University and the Tremans like a mother bear her cubs.
The anonymous “ALUMNUS” letter published in the student newspaper on February 18 was the first shot in a barrage of harsh criticism of the university. The letter writer, who is unknown, professed to be shocked to learn that Cornell University owned $100,000 worth of Ithaca Water Works bonds and suggested that that investment explained the university’s lackadaisical response to the epidemic.27
Schurman was livid. In a speech to students the next day in the Armory, he raged, “No statement has stung me more because none was more infinitely criminal.” He insisted that a bondholder had no control over a corporation’s policy, which was technically true but largely irrelevant given the size of Cornell’s debt holdings in Ithaca Water Works and the critical role the university played in making sure Morris had enough money to buy the company from the Treman family in 1901 (one half expects Schurman to grow a Pinocchio nose given the fact he had just used that very leverage to force Morris to build the filtration plant). The Ithaca Daily Journal attacked “ALUMNUS” in nearly as strong terms, accusing the letter writer of “foolish” and “silly” utterances and claiming that every educated person should know that a bondholder does not have any control over a corporation. The editorial offered a series of examples that were far removed from the close relationship that existed among the Executive Committee, the Treman family, and Morris.
In the same speech, Schurman partly conceded to the key student demand, saying that, if the students arranged to have artesian water delivered to their boardinghouses, the university would pay for it. He said that the Sage College gymnasium would be converted into a men’s dormitory for the duration of the epidemic and that as many as three hundred men could be accommodated there, far fewer than the potential need. And conceding to another student demand, Schurman waived all penalties for students who left campus until the epidemic was over, saying they could make up their classes in the summer.28
Now the ball was in the student court. Should they accept the filtration deal, or rather give it their approval? They held their own meeting with their own leaders a day later. The more radical of them, especially Manton M. Wyvell, a law student who had traveled with William Jennings Bryan when he campaigned for president against William McKinley in 1900, did not trust Ithaca Water Works. Wyvell called the water company “an interested party” and doubted that it would carry out its pledge to build a proper filtration plant. But moderation prevailed, and the students in the end voted unanimously to endorse Schurman’s plan for filtration. They did urge that the shanty and latrine used by the Italian workers at the dam site be burned but rejected the idea of doing it themselves.29
Schurman’s press woes were only beginning. The New York Sun printed a story on February 19, probably sent in by a student stringer in Ithaca, naming six members of the Cornell Board of Trustees who were “directly or indirectly interested in the Ithaca Water Works Company, which has been furnishing Ithaca with its polluted water.” The trustees named were Charles E. Treman, Robert H. Treman, Mynderse Van Cleef, George R. Williams, who was president of First National Bank of Ithaca and Duke Lee’s father-in-law, Roger B. Williams, and Charles H. Blood. Someone had been doing his homework.
The Ithaca Daily Journal blasted the Sun article in “A Dastardly Outrage,” and it said the six trustees named were “among the most public-spirited, enterprising, and reputable citizens of Ithaca.” Smith’s typewriter was on fire as he leveled accusations at his old newspaper. He could not imagine that someone from Ithaca, or even worse, from Cornell University was responsible for filing such a story with the Sun. No, it must have been scandal-mongering reporters from New York City who cooked up the story. “The good name of reputable citizens and the honor and reputation of the University are as nothing to such fellows,” Smith wrote. “Working in the dark, hiding behind the newspapers that are deceived by them, they do their dirty work and draw their dirty pay.”30 Smith may have had some issues with his old newspaper.
Schurman began to push back and scored an early success. The New York Tribune, which the Cornell president considered “staid and conservative,” wrote an editorial on February 20 saying that someone in Ithaca was responsible for the epidemic, because “seldom, if ever in the history of this nation has there been a more inexcusable outbreak of pestilence than that which is now decimating the student body of Cornell University.” It took the university to task for failing to use all the knowledge possessed by its faculty to head off the calamity. Finally, misreading the New York Sun story, the Tribune mistakenly called Cornell University “a large and influential stockholder in the water company which has been supplying the polluted and deadly water” and thus handed Schurman a tool to divert attention from the facts of the situation. Had the Tribune termed Cornell “a large and influential investor,” the description would have been accurate.31
Who made the first call is unknown, but Schurman met with a Tribune reporter later that day and managed to persuade him that the Executive Committee’s rejection of the student demand for artesian water for their boardinghouses had nothing to do with the university’s ties to Ithaca Water Works. “Dr. Schurman’s statements sweep away a flood of misleading dispatches and give cheerful assurance for the future,” the Tribune wrote the following day in what can only be considered a retraction of the editorial.32
Schurman persuaded the Board of Trustees at the February 21 meeting to issue a statement to the media containing the points he made to the Tribune reporter. It went more or less like this: 1) no one on the board is a stockholder in Ithaca Water Works; 2) no student who drank only the campus water drawn from Fall Creek developed typhoid; 3) we have provided clean artesian water on campus. Students just need to come and get it, or they can drink city water in their boardinghouses that the proprietors have promised to boil; and 4) students in the infirmary are cared for by fifty professional nurses, and we update parents daily by letter on their conditions.33
There was no mention 1) of the $100,000 in bonds of Ithaca Water Works held by the university, or Cornell’s critical role in financing Morris’s acquisition of the company in 1901; 2) that no one was saying Fall Creek was the source of the typhoid and that only a tiny fraction of students used it as their primary water source; 3) that students didn’t trust the boardinghouse landlo
rds and landladies to honor their pledges to boil all water; and 4) that many of the nurses working in the infirmary, according to Dr. Luzerne Coville, were not well-trained professionals.34 Interestingly, the university in its official statement did not claim the students in the infirmary were getting good care, although that claim was made unofficially. Dr. Coville ultimately resigned from the medical school faculty over his differences with the university regarding the management of the infirmary.35
At a Cornell University alumni banquet in Buffalo that night, Dean Thomas F. Crane spoke of the “cruel falsehoods and slanders” circulated by the East Coast press. Crew coach Charles Courtney, who had kicked five students off his team in 1897 before the all-important Poughkeepsie Regatta for eating strawberry shortcake, raged that it was the duty of every friend of Cornell to defend the university from the “scandalous attacks” made upon it, especially by a student stringer he did not identify. He called the student leaders who had pushed for the artesian water deliveries “hair-brained,” reserving his greatest scorn for “this hair-brained student [Manton M. Wyvell] who went kiting around the country two years ago with the Democratic candidate for president and his head was swollen out of all proportion to his ability.” Courtney’s rant only stopped when the alumni “jumped to their feet, waved napkins, and cheered themselves hoarse.”36
That day, Henry R. Ickelheimer, a prominent German-Jewish investment banker in New York City and a member of the Cornell Board of Trustees, telegraphed Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and asked him to give the board’s statement on the epidemic a good spot in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. Ochs, who had owned the newspaper for only seven years since buying it out of bankruptcy for $75,000, was at a dinner and did not receive the telegram until late Saturday night. According to Ickelheimer’s account, Ochs immediately telephoned his newspaper, spoke to the editor in charge, possibly the night editor Carr Van Anda, and arranged for the statement to be run on page one of the second section, guaranteeing it would be seen and read by many.37 The statement also appeared in many other newspapers around the country, from the Baltimore Morning Sun to the Fort Wayne Morning Journal-Gazette.