by David DeKok
As it sank in that Cornell University and Morris were winning, the editorials in the Ithaca Daily News became angry and bitter, even vituperative. In “An Insult to Public Intelligence” on April 29, the Daily News attacked its rival, the Ithaca Daily Journal, for not daring to print news about the epidemic “without the approval of a certain clique,” meaning the Tremans and Cornell University. The Journal, which was strongly in favor of the filtration plant, had attacked artesian water as dangerous. “The public understands the Journal’s motives,” the Daily News wrote. “Its object in talking in favor of filtered sewage is too evident to need comment. But it does disgust the people to see published such diabolical rot.”17
In “Will the Water Company Be Fair” on May 2, the Daily News criticized Ithaca Water Works for sending out bills demanding six months’ advance payment for water “which is still under the ban of the board of health and unfit for use.” It noted that the water company had violated the clause in its 1902 contract with the city of Ithaca requiring it to provide pure water and appealed to Morris not to squeeze Ithaca citizens to pay for water they could not use:
The water company has violated its sacred contract; it has shown the utmost indifference for the welfare of the people; it has shown no sympathy for the hundreds who have suffered from the fever, or for the hundreds who mourn the loss of dear ones; it has shown no desire to remedy existing conditions; it has shown no regard for the business welfare of the city. In short, it has done everything to arouse the indignation of a public which has been disgracefully wronged.18
When the water company persisted, sending second notices to the apparently large number of Ithaca residents who had not paid the first bill, the Daily News wrote on May 26 in “Water Company’s Unlimited Gall” that Six Mile Creek water was “dangerous and wholly unfit for use except for flushing closets [toilets].”
But it was the May 28 editorial, “Nothing Less Than an Outrage,” that finally triggered a libel suit. The editorial, most likely written by publisher Duncan Campbell Lee, but possibly by managing editor Frank E. Gannett, continued the newspaper’s campaign against the dam. It accused the contractor, Tucker & Vinton, of deliberately inflating the cost of the dam because it was paid on a percentage basis. Then it implied that the contractor was paying high prices for poor quality materials and that the concrete was not being properly mixed. And finally this:
Expert engineers say that the dam is not being built well. The fact that it is proposed to make the city pay an enormous price for the big piece of jobbery does not alter the case. The dam might cost a million dollars and still crumble away in six months time. The people will not trust the water company to build this dam to sell to the city. If we must have a dam we should have the right to build it ourselves. It is an outrage on the community to allow this company to proceed as it has been doing.19
Making a direct accusation or even implying that Tucker & Vinton might have been guilty of fraud, incompetence, and professional malfeasance might have triggered a libel suit even under today’s much more press-friendly libel laws. In 1903, it was seemingly a plaintiff lawyer’s dream, with truth being almost the only defense. “The general rule is that it is libelous per se to impute to a person in his official capacity, profession, trade or business any kind of fraud, dishonesty, misconduct, incapacity or unfitness.” Those words were written by Henry W. Sackett, a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees and longtime libel lawyer for the New York Tribune.20 As much as Lee might have believed what he wrote, he was in trouble if he did not have hard facts to back it up. He was writing in anger, writing in memory of the many new graves in Ithaca and the suffering all around him. He let his emotions get the better of him.
Tucker & Vinton sued for libel, naming Ithaca Publishing Company and Frank E. Gannett, managing editor as defendants. The contractor demanded $50,000 in damages for “false and malicious statements” and denied all the allegations in the May 28 editorial. Duncan Campbell Lee did not back down. “The News feels that it can do no better public service than to bring out before the courts expert evidence in the matter,” he wrote in a new editorial. “If there is not one way of stopping the dam, there may be another. And if we succeed in protecting the lives of Ithacans we will not regret the trouble and cost of a fifty-thousand-dollar libel suit.”21
Morris, meanwhile, hired Sackett as his own libel lawyer to pursue a case on behalf of himself and Ithaca Water Works against the Daily News. Morris sent Sackett clips of articles he found offensive; Sackett selected six for the water company libel complaint and four for that of Morris. “I have been careful to eliminate the publications that would raise issues of privilege or as to the quality of the water, leaving the question to be decided whether the defendants were justified in attacking the integrity and honesty of purpose of the plaintiffs,” Sackett wrote. “That I am satisfied is the issue for you to fight on.”
What Sackett hoped to do was convince a jury that Lee and the newspaper had made unjustified attacks on the reputation of Ithaca Water Works and Morris for honesty and fair dealing, while avoiding the question of whether Morris had provided contaminated water to his customers. Sackett seemed decidedly ambivalent about Morris’s case, telling Mynderse Van Cleef that perhaps Morris ought to reduce his demand for damages from $50,000 to $25,000 or “even less.” Nor did he seem to care in which county the case was filed, Tompkins around Ithaca or Chemung around Elmira. There was no telling what an Ithaca jury might do if Morris presented himself as a businessman of good reputation, unjustly libeled by the Daily News, because that jury would learn quickly enough who he was and what he had done.22
In the end, neither the Tucker & Vinton nor the Morris/Ithaca Water Works libel suits went forward. Those of Morris and the company did not even get to the complaint stage. While we do not know the exact reasons the lawsuits were not pursued, it seems likely that the builders of the dam and the deliverer of the epidemic were finally made to understand that their chances in front of an Ithaca jury were not promising.
Morris suffered a blow on May 18 when the luxurious, four-story Chi Phi fraternity house at 107 Edgemoor Lane caught fire from a carelessly discarded cigarette and was extensively damaged. Morris, who was an alumni member of Chi Phi, happened to be visiting the house at the time, a fact reported by the Ithaca Daily News but not the Daily Journal. He and one of the young fraternity members discovered the blaze and called in the alarm while two other students tried without success to beat down the flames with a portable extinguisher. Firemen arrived in their horse-drawn equipment but had little success against the fire, in part because of low water pressure but also because it was burning mainly in the attic. They had trouble directing water to the flames. Finally the roof caved in and gave them access. Students threw personal belongings from windows and carried out much of the furniture, but some of the more expensive pieces in the dining room were ruined by water.23 The following day, Chi Phi alumni met at Morris’s office at Ithaca Water Works and vowed to rebuild the house by September 1. The fraternity brothers were greatly inconvenienced, forced to abandon an elaborate reception that was to be held in the house during Senior Week, the last week of school. Morris, though, provided temporary lodging for many of them at his home on Green Street until the end of the school year. When he cared about something, he could move heaven and earth to make it happen.24
Morris had resumed an active social life, refusing to be held down by the depression and gloom in the city from the epidemic. After bringing his yacht from Penn Yan to Ithaca via the interconnected Finger Lakes, he invited Charlie, Rob, and Eben Treman and their wives, Mynderse Van Cleef and his wife, and the bachelor Charles H. Blood to join him to watch the Memorial Day regatta on Cayuga Lake. They partied on the dark water as they sipped cocktails and watched Cornell emerge victorious over rowers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.25
The Cornell University Board of Trustees had a score to settle now that the
epidemic was over. Duncan Campbell Lee, who had turned the oratory and debate program at Cornell into one of America’s best, and who, by the by, published the muckraking Ithaca Daily News, applied to the Board of Trustees on May 12 seeking promotion to the full professorship that was his due. And at its June meeting, without comment, the board rejected his application. It was a humiliating and career-ending action, and we can assume the board intended it to be so. A year later, Lee resigned from the Cornell faculty.
No documents explaining the board’s action have ever been unearthed. We know who was there that day but not how they voted. Among those present were President Schurman, Charles H. Blood, Samuel D. Halliday, Jared Treman Newman, Henry W. Sackett, Rob Treman, Charlie Treman, Franklin C. Cornell, and Mynderse Van Cleef. They all had reasons to stick a knife in Lee. His father-in-law, George R. Williams, was absent from the meeting.26
Samuel Hopkins Adams revealed in McClure’s Magazine in 1905 that Lee had been warned he was jeopardizing his teaching position (this was before universities had tenure policies) by having his newspaper aggressively report and comment on the typhoid epidemic. Lee told university officials, according to Adams, that the policy of his newspaper was “to tell the truth as it appeared.” Adams wrote:
After the scourge had passed, this man found himself persona non grata with the controlling interests of the institution. Owing to the unusual success of his department he was in line for a full professorship. Now he learned that as long as he remained at the head of the department, it would continue to be merely an assistant professor’s department.27
Adams lamented that Lee, a fellow muckraker, was punished for telling the truth but that Morris was not punished for poisoning the water.
Under the university’s governing structure, President Schurman had no veto over board actions. Punishing Lee violated everything he stood for. In 1898, Schurman wrote that if universities are to do their work well, “the teacher must be absolutely free. Knowledge is a thing which cannot be commanded. The truth of propositions cannot be established by councils or tyrants.” He wrote again in 1905, “The university is an organ of truth and knowledge. It must be free and unhampered, or it is useless if not pernicious. University authorities must guard jealously the right of freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech.” But at Cornell, that did not happen. The Board of Trustees trampled on academic freedom in its zeal to punish a critic.28
On the morning of June 16, as he set out on his final walk to Van Order’s boatyard, did Theodor Zinck comprehend the full injustice of what he and the other parents of dead children had endured? As he rowed out onto the dark water, as he placed his derby hat, pocketknife, and matchbox on the seat in front of him, did he forgive Lula’s killers? Zinck stood up, steadied himself, and looked back at Ithaca. The thought of cold water and drowning may have given him pause, but his beloved daughter was calling to him from the hillside. There was a splash and he was gone, sinking to the bottom of Cayuga Lake.
Epilogue
Getting Away with Murder
The surprise was how quickly Cornell University returned to normal that fall and put the epidemic behind it. Enrollment actually showed a healthy increase. In the issues of the Cornell Daily Sun from the autumn of 1903, only one brief mention of the epidemic occurs, in a story about President Schurman’s opening address to students on September 25. Then it slipped down the memory hole, and the Sun resumed its regular diet of sports and campus activities. A student mass meeting called for October 6 turned out to be an urgent appeal for greater support of the football team. We will never know what the survivors held in their hearts, but it seems to have been a private grief, confided only to friends.1
Dormitories, or “Halls of Residence” as Schurman insisted upon calling them, for male students were authorized at the April 18 meeting of the Board of Trustees. No longer would students be forced to live in substandard boardinghouses on East Hill. Schurman insisted the new lodgings all be “plain, substantial, and convenient” and offer the exact same accommodations to rich students as to poor. “It is unnatural to disturb the free and generous intercourse of youth by reminders of artificial distinction; and it is little less than criminal for a university to encourage or permit the classification of students according to their money,” he wrote.2 The former Prince Edward Island farm boy who had gone through university on scholarship no doubt knew what those classifications meant to students of modest means. Construction of the first dormitory for men, Sheldon Court, began in the summer of 1903.
As promised, students had clean water to drink on campus and off. Andrew Carnegie’s filtration plant for the campus water supply drawn from Fall Creek was completed and put into service in May 1903, even before the academic year ended. Built on the site of an old reservoir, it could handle forty-two thousand gallons of water at a time. Raw water flowed into the first tank and was mixed with an aluminum sulfate solution. That chemical reacted with natural lime and magnesium in the water to magically form a gel that entangled 50 percent of the fine particles and bacteria in the water. Much of this gel sank to the bottom of the first tank, and the rest was captured when the water was moved into the second tank for traditional sand filtration. The water percolated through the sand and emerged “clear and colorless and practically free from bacteria.”3
The water treatment plant that Morris built for the rest of Ithaca went into service on August 23, 1903. It was much larger than the Carnegie plant, able to process three million gallons of water per day, but worked by the same process. Residents noticed the change immediately, the New York Tribune reported. They looked at the water and for once it was clear, not dirty. Tests taken by Professor Emile M. Chamot for Ithaca Water Works in the fall revealed that the filters were working with greater than 99 percent efficiency. Tests of the raw water inevitably showed the presence of fecal bacteria; tests of the filtered water found none. People returned the handles to faucets they had removed in February to keep children from drinking the contaminated water. Warning signs came down. Life returned to normal.4
Yet the dream of providing clean, unfiltered, artesian water to Ithaca died hard. The Water Board drilled thirteen wells (average depth: three hundred feet) along West Clinton Street near the Cayuga Lake Inlet in 1904, of which nine yielded water, and built a new pumping station. The work was done under the supervision of the engineer hired by the Committee of 100, Cornelius C. Vermeule. On the day the Water Board took over the water system by condemnation, on December 31, 1904, it shut down the filtration plant and diverted artesian water from the nine wells into the mains instead. The proponents of artesian water had won, or so they thought. The wells yielded two million gallons per day but eventually began pulling water from nearby private wells. Litigation resulted, and in 1907, the Water Board sealed the artesian wells and went back to filtering Six Mile Creek water for the city’s use. It was surely a bitter blow for those, like Duncan Campbell Lee, who had dreamed of clean artesian water for Ithaca. Six Mile Creek water is used in Ithaca to this day.5
But Morris’s last laugh was still to come. The Water Board, even though it took over the Ithaca Water Works system, had been unable to come to terms with Morris over the price it would pay. He demanded $660,000, and the board would not pay a dime more than $436,000, less than the company’s bonded indebtedness of about $600,000. Morris told Mynderse Van Cleef he would not give any consideration to the offer. “Evidently, the Water Board do not care to be fair and decent in the matter, and it is apparent to me that the only thing there is left to do is to prepare for a good, strong fight,” he wrote. Morris vowed to protect his bondholders, telling the Water Board that they “are largely your own fellow citizens,” but his protests fell on deaf ears. The Water Board had no sympathy for Morris or his bondholders. The two sides plunged into lengthy and costly litigation that lasted through 1905 and 1906.6
Morris’s lawyers were led by Nathan Mathews Jr., a prominent real estate a
ttorney from an aristocratic Yankee family in Massachusetts, who had been the Democratic mayor of Boston from 1891 to 1895. Mathews knew winning would be difficult. The $600,000 in bonded indebtedness was far more than Morris paid for Ithaca Water Works, and no estimate of the reproduction cost of the company could be made to exceed $550,000. Moreover, the net income of Ithaca Water Works had never topped about $20,000. Only if the lawyers and expert witnesses could make a plausible case for a doubling of net income in the near future, and for assigning a higher value to the company’s water sources, was there any hope of a valuation above $600,000.7 The litigation cost Morris a fortune in up-front money; by the time it was over, he had outstanding loans of more than $41,000 from Tompkins County National Bank, of which his friend Robert H. Treman was the president. The loans drew the skeptical attention of a federal bank examiner, who was assured by Treman that most of them were made in connection with the water litigation and that Morris would pay them back when he won.8
