by David DeKok
After a hurricane destroyed Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, killing more than 8,000 people, Soper was sent by the Merchants Association and Chamber of Commerce of New York at their expense to take charge of the cleanup. Dead bodies lay everywhere on Galveston Island, and efforts to bury them at sea had resulted in them washing back on the shore. The fear of pestilence was great, and the Galveston Central Relief Committee asked for Soper’s help. In his first report to the committee, Soper said bluntly that the city was “very unsanitary.” He added much later that Galveston, in the first few weeks after the storm, was “in all probability the most unsanitary city in which the American people or others of the Anglo-Saxon race predominated.” He simply couldn’t help himself, proclaiming the superiority of the white upper classes and the inferiority of the poor and immigrant classes quite frequently, either directly or by implication.2
Surprising the relief committee, Soper said the greater danger to Galveston was pestilence arising among the living, not the dead. He urged the burning of debris at central locations and directed his workers to clear standing water from the streets, unclog sewers, and muck out latrines and stables. Human and animal remains were cremated upon discovery. Methodically, carefully, Soper cleaned up Galveston. The Texans loved him, and he appeared to love them, far more than he would the people of Ithaca, whom he viewed with his usual arrogant contempt. He was inordinately pleased to have been named an honorary member of the Galveston Central Relief Committee, boasting in a newspaper interview that he and Clara Barton of the American Red Cross were the only out-of-towners to be accorded such an honor.3 When Soper returned to New York, he was made sanitary engineer of the New York City Board of Health.4
On February 5, 1903, after the number of typhoid cases in Ithaca had swelled to several hundred, the New York State Department of Health in Albany sent one of its physicians, Dr. Frederick C. Curtis, to Ithaca to do a quick investigation of what was going on. Curtis was a Civil War veteran, although as a foot soldier rather than a physician, and maintained a medical practice in the Albany area when he was not working for the state Health Department. Curtis spent a day in Ithaca and reported back to the commissioner of health, Dr. Daniel Lewis, what he had observed and heard. To Curtis, there seemed little doubt that the typhoid had come from the excrement of one of the Italian workers, swept into Six Mile Creek and delivered to the faucets of Ithaca.5
Lewis, a surgeon and cancer specialist, was appointed to the state Board of Health in 1895 and served three terms as president. When the legislature abolished the Board of Health in 1901, replacing it with the Department of Health, Lewis became New York’s first commissioner of health.6 Although accomplished and well-meaning, Lewis did not have a public health background and made a significant error of judgment in Ithaca. During a meeting with President Schurman on February 24, during which Schurman laid out plans for the university to loan Morris $150,000 to build a water filtration plant, Lewis was persuaded to issue a statement that it was “perfectly safe” for students to return to classes at Cornell. Ten thousand copies of Lewis’s remarks, incorporated into a Cornell University press release, were quickly printed, rushed to the Post Office, and mailed out to parents, important prep schools, and prominent newspapers across the country. Here is the wording:
Dr. Daniel Lewis, the State Commissioner of Health, who is here today, after having studied the situation carefully from every side, makes the statement that the plans which are already in operation, and which this day are being extended by the city authorities, make it perfectly safe [emphasis added] for anyone to return to Ithaca who so desires.7
This was at a moment in the epidemic when, as Samuel Hopkins Adams would note in his muckraking article about typhoid fever and the Ithaca catastrophe in McClure’s Magazine, some four hundred to five hundred people in the city were suffering from typhoid and new cases were being reported every day. “Every weary and overworked physician in the place knew that never had the disease been under less control,” Adams wrote.8
Blindsided by Lewis’s statement, the Ithaca Board of Health was furious. They telegraphed the health commissioner informing him that his “perfectly safe” remark was subject to serious misinterpretation and asking him, with no little amount of sarcasm, if they should issue a statement urging Cornell students to return to Ithaca. The board could not see students safely returning unless they could obtain board and lodging somewhere that guaranteed that no unboiled city water was served. In addition, the board informed Lewis that it viewed secondary typhoid infections as “a new and serious source of danger,” given “the numerous cases of typhoid fever now in the city.”
Lewis immediately began walking back his remark, saying that students should not be urged to return unless all the “fever houses”—apparently by this he meant the boardinghouses where cases of typhoid had occurred—were regularly inspected and all physicians were reporting all their typhoid cases to the Board of Health. “I stated that in my judgment the worst of the epidemic was over,” Lewis said. “I also said, you may remember, that you still had to face the danger of secondary infection from neglect on the part of attendants and house owners where the sick are domiciled.”9
Schurman, at least for a day, believed that large numbers of students would return to Cornell in response to Dr. Lewis’s statement that it was “perfectly safe” to do so, and in truth some were coming back already. He notified the faculty to begin organizing special classes to enable the students who fled the epidemic to make up their missed course work and advised them to expect double duty for a time. He was certain they would not object in this time of emergency, welcoming an opportunity “of showing their interest in our students, their loyalty to the university, and their readiness to cooperate with the trustees in solving this unexpected educational problem.”10 The medical and veterinary faculties, however, quickly came out in opposition to Schurman’s optimistic view of conditions and he backed off, issuing this revised statement:
A few students are coming back each day, and letters are daily being received from others expressing a desire to come. But the university advises no students to return; each must decide for him-self in view of the facts of the case. All students returning must be careful to observe all the regulations prescribed by the board of health.11
Confused by the conflicting statements, only a few students actually returned. A survey taken on March 3 by the Ithaca Daily Journal found that of the estimated thousand students who had fled, only about 8 percent, or seventy-five students, had returned. Of the 440 Sibley College mechanical engineering students who had gone home, only fifteen were back. At the law school, fifteen out of 105 had returned. It was a similar story at the other Cornell schools.12
Probably realizing the mess he had made of things, Dr. Lewis announced that he was sending an expert from the New York City Board of Health to Ithaca to take charge of the cleanup of Ithaca.13 In a letter to Schurman on March 3, he said George A. Soper had been in charge of the cleanup of Galveston and “had handled the situation with great skill and success. I hope you will keep him there until all the sanitary work of the Board [of Health] is being thoroughly carried out.” Soper had an appointment from the state Department of Health so he could do his work without having to worry about arbitrary municipal boundaries, Lewis said, and was leaving for Ithaca that morning.
The letter strongly suggests that Lewis believed the worst of the epidemic was over and that he was sympathetic to Schurman’s desire for a return to normalcy on the Cornell campus. “I judge from the reports, as they have come to us from day to day, that the climax of the trouble was past before I visited Ithaca,” he wrote, which means he agreed with Schurman’s assessment of the situation when they spoke on February 24. There is also a troubling suggestion that Lewis had agreed not to look too hard at how the epidemic came about. “I am convinced that we should not waste any time or energy trying to attach blame to this party or that for the conditions which si
mply came upon Ithaca unawares, as has often been the case in other communities,” he wrote. Had Schurman pressed him to “move on” and not look backward? Schurman had to know that even a cursory examination of the events leading to the Ithaca catastrophe would eventually shine an unwelcome light on the Board of Trustees’s relationship with William T. Morris and the Tremans. Lewis wrote in closing that the epidemic would provide a good lesson to Ithaca to “ensure rigid care of the water supply in the future.” The effort to shift the fault for the epidemic from the guilty parties to the community had begun.14
Although Schurman believed the campus was safe, he remained distressed that six or more new typhoid cases were being reported every day among nonstudents. He looked at the data from a typhoid epidemic in 1901 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, noting that Yale’s epidemic began on March 20 and all but ended on April 15. “According to this showing,” he wrote to Dr. Lewis, “new cases in Ithaca should have ceased about the middle or 20th of February. Yet they go on.” Indeed they did. Part of the problem was that some Ithaca residents simply did not believe the water could harm them and continued to drink it. Soper came to believe there were as many as several thousand of such people. The New York Sun reported the story of an unnamed woman and her daughter who had just been admitted to City Hospital with symptoms of typhoid after defying the ban against drinking city water.15
The other part of the problem, of course, was secondary infections. The Board of Health had hired two nurses from New York City to work as district nurses, going from house to house instructing families of typhoid patients in the proper and safe methods of caring for their loved ones. But it still came down to common sense, and even some nurses working in Ithaca seemed to lack it. Dr. Edward Hitchcock Jr., the city health officer, told a story about a trained nurse who prepared broth for an Ithaca typhoid patient. Because it was too hot to eat, she ran a little cold water from the city water faucet into the broth to cool it, potentially turning the broth into typhoid soup. Fortunately for the patient, someone in the house saw the nurse do it, grabbed the broth, and threw it away before it could be served.16
The striking thing about Soper’s arrival in Ithaca on March 3 was how immediately he was accepted by the public and assumed control. No one seems to have disputed much, if anything, he told them, because it all made perfect sense. He answered questions ranging from the proper chemical disinfectants to use (lime chloride or mercury chloride) to whether carp or bullheads caught in Cayuga Lake should be eaten (no, because they are bottom feeders who might have ingested pollution). Ithaca needed an authority figure willing to wade in and take charge, and Soper filled that role with vigor. It was in his blood.
From the start, Soper raced to disinfect Ithaca before the end of the bitter New York winter and the arrival of a new crop of houseflies, which would greatly complicate efforts to stamp out the typhoid. He charged into his work the very evening he arrived, meeting with Dr. Hitchcock and two other employees of the Board of Health to go over a map showing the locations of typhoid cases. The next day, he and Hitchcock toured the city and parts of the Six Mile Creek, Buttermilk Creek, and Fall Creek watersheds, paying special attention to homes in the city and, of course, the personal hygiene of their inhabitants. Soper told the press his work “dealt only with present conditions and not with the past,” suggesting that he and Dr. Lewis had chatted about the parameters for his efforts. The Ithaca Daily News noted that Soper disregarded “the cause of the epidemic” at the Board of Health meeting the next night. “I understand that the popularly accepted cause is the water,” he said, waving away the question. “Upon that point I am not now prepared to exercise an opinion.” Then he launched into a stern lecture about how improper care of typhoid patients could keep the fever in Ithaca indefinitely, which was certainly true.
Soper’s goal was to break the cycle of infection, which meant that certain unsanitary practices simply could not continue. If contaminated excrement was thrown into an outhouse or an open field, for example, houseflies, once they arrived in late spring, would inevitably alight on the excrement. Just as inevitably, provided a kitchen window was close by, the flies would touch down upon food sitting out on the family table. Another human would be infected and the typhoid victimization cycle would go on for more months, unless firm measures were taken.
Aggressive disinfection was the key, especially with so many hundreds of typhoid patients scattered around Ithaca. Everything contaminated with typhoid bacilli, from excrement to urine to clothing to sheets to dishes to hands, needed to be made safe again. Soper recommended hiring a team of twenty workers to distribute two potent disinfectants, milk of lime and bichloride of mercury, by horse and wagon to any resident who needed them. Milk of lime, a.k.a. the “White Fluid,” was a suspension of calcium hydroxide and water. Soper said it was to be used for disinfecting excrement and urine from typhoid patients. Bichloride of mercury, a.k.a. the “Blue Fluid,” was to be used for disinfecting hands, dishes, clothing, and bedsheets. It was toxic, and hand washing with soap and hot water was recommended after immersion in the “Blue Fluid.”17
He specified the use of real, full-strength milk of lime, not the weak-sister variety sometimes made with ingredients sold in local stores. The Board of Health bought its own supplies of calcium hydroxide from reliable vendors, had it tested in the laboratories of Cornell University to be sure, mixed it with water to create milk of lime, and distributed it to the public at no cost. Sanitarians loved their lime compounds. The basic one was calcium oxide, also known as quicklime, which became calcium hydroxide, or slaked lime or milk of lime, after it was mixed with water. Unlike carbolic acid, another popular disinfectant of the day, chloride of lime had no strong smell. It was inexpensive, readily available, and could be used to disinfect excrement, urine, sputum, or entire outhouses.
All of this cost money, lots of money, and Soper asked the Board of Health to fund a proper cleanup. He envisioned almost a military campaign with himself as general. The board authorized no more than $50 a day, still a substantial amount in 1903, but Common Council removed the spending ceiling entirely, so eager was it to give Soper what he needed. If it took the city’s entire budget and entire credit to wipe out the plague, council was willing to do it.18
Soper was also investigating the condition of the Fall Creek watershed that provided drinking water for the Cornell campus. Despite repeated boasts by the university that no one who drank Fall Creek water had become ill with typhoid, Gardner S. Williams had warned President Schurman that the creek’s water was a bacteriological time bomb that would eventually claim victims, if not from typhoid then from other intestinal disorders. A crew of workers sent out by the university to “purify” the Fall Creek watershed found seven or eight outhouses right at the water’s edge. When called to Soper’s attention, he arranged for one of his assistants—the infamous Shirley Clarke Hulse—to take four Italian workers and a team of horses and clean out and disinfect the outhouses.19
Hulse was the young assistant to Gardner S. Williams whose negligence had allowed the Italian workers at the Six Mile Creek dam construction site to foul Ithaca’s drinking water. One almost wonders if this new assignment was a punishment of sorts for his earlier negligence. Hulse was later put in charge of collecting water samples for Soper in Cayuga Lake to determine if the lake water was safe to drink. Cottagers—Charles H. Blood and Umphville come to mind—had concerns, given that summer was approaching and Six Mile Creek had certainly dumped some of the typhoid bacilli into the big lake after flowing through Ithaca. A bigger problem, and one that did not begin in 1903, was that Ithaca’s sewage pipes emptied into the lake. Hulse collected water samples in the lake for Soper until September 1903.20 Perhaps he fished, too. It was as if Williams and Soper didn’t know what to do with him and wanted to keep him on the payroll and quiet, given the injunction from Dr. Lewis against delving too deeply into the real causes of the epidemic.
Even four
decades later, Hulse offered no regrets about his negligence in Ithaca, at least none he was willing to talk about publicly. Pressed, he could only recall the personal risks he had faced while working on the Ithaca cleanup. Writing his reminiscences for Civil Engineering magazine in 1944, by which time he was primarily a banker in Bedford, Pennsylvania, Hulse quipped that “my personal high spot was the evening I learned that a tap I drank from regularly in the Ithaca Hotel supplied raw water instead of sterilized as I had thought. Anyhow, it didn’t take.”21 Everything was a joke to him, even if the typhoid germs did “take” for so many other people in Ithaca.
On March 7, news came that Cornell would build a separate, small filtration plant for its campus water supply costing $18,000 to $20,000 in 1903 money. Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest men in the world and a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees, wrote to the board from his sister-in-law’s mansion, Dungeness, on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia on March 13. He asked for the privilege of paying for the campus filtration plant, and did.22
There were a million things to do to make Ithaca clean again. Testing private wells was one of them. Soper was convinced, as had been Professor Emile M. Chamot, that too many were polluted with high bacteria counts. These were not typhoid, at least not typically, but rather other intestinal bacteria that could make people miserably ill though usually did not kill them. Soper found sections of the city where all the wells were polluted, while in other sections they all were good. The good wells, he found, were in clay, the bad ones in fissured rock. In all, he tested 946 private wells during the cleanup and found that 30 percent of them were bad.
