Epidemic
Page 26
Three outside judges appointed by Tompkins County Supreme Court heard the case. Testimony began on May 25, 1905, and concluded on December 14, 1906. Thirteen days later, the Commission of Appraisal ruled that Morris was entitled to nearly all of the $660,000 he had demanded, minus only $2,000 for two vacant lots in downtown Ithaca that the company wanted to retain. With interest and court costs, the total amount came to $900,000. There was no nod to morality in the ruling, only the cold application of the law. That Morris killed more than eighty-two people with the water system was irrelevant. It was as if the epidemic had never happened. Even Mathews seemed surprised, calling it the most difficult case he had ever handled. He was amazed that the Commission of Appraisal had not cut the value assigned to Six Mile Creek. After all, the Water Board had introduced a valid, competing water source—the artesian wells—before the litigation began, and competition is supposed to drive down prices.9
The ruling shocked the Ithaca Water Board. “At first I think they were stunned and did not know what to do,” President Schurman wrote to Samuel D. Halliday, chairman of the Board of Trustees, who was vacationing in the south of France. “Now, however, they are unanimously in favor of appealing and, what is worse, their attorneys are urging them to do so.”10
Jared Treman Newman, who had resigned from the Board of Trustees in May 1903 and been elected mayor of Ithaca in November 1906, went to work with his famous “oil can” to broker a settlement that would avoid an appeal. He succeeded; after much negotiation, he got the Water Board to agree to drop its appeal in exchange for Ithaca Light & Water Company foregoing interest on the judgment and making certain other concessions. The final deal was for $663,570, with the Water Board agreeing to give back to Morris property around Enfield Falls and Buttermilk Falls plus the two vacant lots in downtown Ithaca. The waterfall properties later passed from Morris to his friend Robert H. Treman, who donated them to the State of New York in 1920 and 1923, respectively, and which today are Robert H. Treman State Park and Buttermilk Falls State Park. The Ithaca Water Board raised the money to pay Morris with a $666,000 bond issue.11
Newman and his business partner Charles H. Blood had worked closely with Morris since the day the dam was announced to obtain water service for their Cornell Heights real estate development. Water for Cornell Heights, as we have noted, may have been a contributing factor to the university Board of Trustees deciding in 1901 to loan Morris the money he needed to buy the water company. Blood’s correspondence shows him in talks with Morris in April 1903 over the purchase of new water mains to serve Cornell Heights. “I am anxious, of course, to do anything that you or Eb [Treman] want in the proposition,” Blood wrote on April 29. But that was as far as things got before Morris became absorbed in his fight with the Water Board.
On December 13, 1904, two weeks before the Water Board took over the system, Newman wrote to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees lamenting the time he expected it would take the Water Board to complete its plans for serving Cornell Heights after taking over the system. He asked whether his development could use any of the campus water, which now was filtered, but the board turned him down. Cornell Heights finally got a connection to the city water system in 1907 after Newman became mayor. Once it had a reliable water supply, lot sales took off and Cornell Heights became one of the premier neighborhoods of Ithaca, home to many Cornell professors.12
Many people weighed in with their thoughts on the Ithaca epidemic. One of the more devastating commentaries was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 28, 1903, even as students and townspeople were still dying. The magazine had sent the great Chicago bacteriologist Dr. Edwin O. Jordan to Ithaca to investigate and write about what was going on, and the editorial grew out of his reporting. It began:
There was a time when the epidemic of typhoid fever at Ithaca would have been looked on as a visitation of God; at the present time, it must be recognized as a failure on the part of some persons to do their duty.
JAMA let no party escape censure for their conduct and performance during the epidemic, not Ithaca Water Works, not Ithaca city officials, and most certainly not Cornell University. It demolished one of the excuses proffered by the university to absolve itself, namely that it had no more control over the water supply in Ithaca than Columbia University did in New York City or the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia:
It cannot be said that the responsibility of a university in a great city is at all in the same category with the responsibility of a university in a small town, which it can largely influence or even, if necessary, dominate.13
Even before the epidemic was over, Cornell University sought to spin what had happened, to subtly shift attention from what the university had not done to the actions of the students themselves. This largely successful effort has affected some local beliefs about the epidemic to the present day. An important component of this spin, repeated endlessly, was what we will call the “Fall Creek Fallacy,” namely that no student who drank only the campus water from Fall Creek became ill with typhoid. Schurman said it many times, including in an official statement on February 14 and in his annual report to the Board of Trustees for the 1902–03 school year. “Fortunately, Fall Creek, which supplies the university, is all right; that is to say, not a single case of typhoid has been found among persons using this water exclusively,” he wrote. Professor Waterman T. Hewett, in his 1905 book, Cornell University: A History, called it “a striking fact.” It is heard on rare occasions at the university even today.
As a defense, the Fall Creek Fallacy made no sense. The problem, which Schurman of course knew, was that the vast majority of Cornell students lived off-campus in Ithaca and drank the city water because that was what was available in their boardinghouses. Was that their fault? Many were exposed even before the first “boil notice” went out or were at the mercy of careless landladies. Schurman and the Board of Trustees seemed determined to impose rugged individualism and personal responsibility on young men and women whose parents expected and demanded a far higher standard of care.
Another person critical to shaping public perception of the Ithaca epidemic was George A. Soper. A year after his energetic and critical cleanup work in Ithaca wiped out the last vestiges of typhoid, he wrote, “The Epidemic of Typhoid Fever at Ithaca, N.Y.,” for the Journal of the New England Water Works Association. The article was accurate in many respects but woefully wrong in others. The wrong parts reflected the fact that Soper had not yet discovered or come to terms with the findings of German bacteriologist Robert Koch and his associates. Put simply, Soper believed that typhoid carriers existed but could only spread their deadly bacilli via urination, not defecation. Because of that, he totally missed the significance of the filth along the banks of Six Mile Creek observed by at least five witnesses during the dam construction work in the fall of 1902. When you match that with his class-based assumptions and personal arrogance, it does not make for entirely enlightening reading.
Soper airily dismissed the possibility that the typhoid had originated with one or more of the Italian workers at the dam site, on the grounds that there was no record of any of them being ill with typhoid while doing hard physical construction work, an unlikely possibility in any case. Nor did he have any truck with the assertion of witnesses that the valley around the dam was a sanitary nightmare, because professional engineers like himself simply would not allow that to happen. “The work was in charge of professional engineers of high standing, and precautions were apparently taken to prevent any polluting matter from entering the stream. A young man [Shirley Clarke Hulse] who had recently graduated in engineering at Cornell was especially detailed to look after this matter.” Case closed. He blamed bad feelings between the citizens and the water company over the dam “for the mental attitude of some citizens on this point.”
Then Soper pulled out his trump cards, “Toothless Ben” and “Dirty Baker,” two country
characters who seemed to encompass all of his worst nightmares about the unwashed and dangerous working class. Toothless Ben was part of “a gang of laborers of mixed nationality but common bad character” who were building a railroad culvert over a tributary of Six Mile Creek about three miles from the Ithaca Water Works intake pipe. He supposedly developed typhoid and went home to be nursed. Soper says there was human filth along the stream banks at the work site but admits not knowing whether Ben contaminated the stream. The culvert project was carried out in the late summer and early fall, and Olin Landreth’s observations on the ability of the ground to absorb rain-dissolved feces during the warm months have been previously noted.14 And if Toothless Ben’s feces were contaminated and had managed to reach the stream during that time period, the epidemic would have broken out months earlier, not in January.
Dirty Baker, who posed for a photograph for Soper in all his ragged glory, looked like Gabby Johnson, the loony frontiersman in the film comedy Blazing Saddles. He lived in a ramshackle dwelling in the Buttermilk Creek drainage area, which had no typhoid in its waters, thus excluding him as a possible source of the epidemic. Soper’s inclusion of these men in his report seems to have been intended less to enlighten the public than to horrify his fellow engineers and divert attention from the pathetic state and inadequate supervision of the Tucker & Vinton work camp.15
It remained for McClure’s Magazine, a prominent muckraking journal of the time, to bring the nation’s attention back to the dark side of the epidemic, including the university’s punishment of Duncan Campbell Lee. The writer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, sent an advance typescript of the Cornell section of his article—it was about typhoid in general, not just the Ithaca epidemic—to President Schurman on April 1, 1905, asking for suggestions or corrections. His letter received a frosty reply from Emmons L. Williams, the secretary/treasurer of the Board of Trustees, who said that Schurman was out of the country and the university would have no comment. But then he added:
We will simply say that we regard the article as inaccurate, partisan, and unjust. The university will not under any circumstances permit itself to be drawn into a controversy and we say this much solely because we do not wish it to be understood or inferred that by silence we in any way acquiesce in the accuracy of the facts stated in that article or in the fairness and justness of its conclusions.16
Perhaps understandably, Cornell professors, students, and graduate students shied away from exploring the darker aspects of the epidemic, at least in depth, for many decades. Word gets around, and after what happened to Duncan Campbell Lee, any faculty member looking for advancement or graduate student wanting an advanced degree might think twice about antagonizing the Cornell administration. Waterman T. Hewett did write a brief account in his book, Cornell University: A History, also published in 1905, mentioning the suffering and deaths but dwelling upon the Fall Creek Fallacy and in general being uncritical of the university where he was a professor. Romeyn Berry, a member of the Class of 1904 who, like Hewitt, had lived through the epidemic, wrote briefly and passionately about it in his book, Behind the Ivy, published in 1950. Twelve years later, Morris Bishop offered a brief, bland, and pro-university snapshot of the epidemic in his book, A History of Cornell. The first known student paper was written by David L. Schiller for an undergraduate history class at Cornell in 1973. Schiller’s paper, “The Social History of the 1903 Ithaca Typhoid Fever Epidemic: A Study of Anger and Action,” uses the Soper photo of the mythical typhoid villain Dirty Baker as a frontispiece. Overall, though, his is a passionate, if somewhat muddled account of the epidemic that went further into the dark side than any article yet published.17
William T. Morris never spoke publicly about the epidemic, looking only to the future of his business. On March 17, 1906, while the water litigation was still under way, he incorporated a holding company for his utilities in part for the efficiencies this sort of arrangement provided. He called it Associated Gas & Electric Company, a name he had begun using for his utility business since 1903, after he purchased the Brush-Swan Electric Light Company of Ithaca for $100,000. The Brush Electric Company of Cleveland sold the soon-to-be-obsolete Brush-Swan technology for incandescent lighting to local power companies around the United States.
This was how it worked—the electric line to a customer’s house charged storage batteries during the day, and those batteries powered incandescent lamps in the house for several hours at night. In a day before plug-in electric appliances, it made a certain amount of sense as a business model. Local companies that bought into the technology were not franchises but were allowed to incorporate “Brush-Swan” into their names as a form of marketing. This acquisition by Morris of his first real electric company—as opposed to the ludicrous Niagara Falls sewer-electric scheme—started his company down a long road that, surprisingly, ended in the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. We will get back to that later.18
There was another reason for incorporating Associated Gas & Electric. Morris had to have been aware of the rise of Charles Evans Hughes, a lawyer and dedicated utility reformer from New York City. Hughes was on a sleigh-ride to the Republican nomination for governor of New York. At the time he formally incorporated Associated Gas & Electric Company on March 17, 1906, Morris obviously did not know the details of Hughes’s reform plan, only that, if elected, he planned to pursue reform with a vengeance. Much of the talk in New York about utility reform centered on control of capital, namely requiring approval by a state utility regulatory commission of any plan by a monopoly utility to issue stocks and bonds or to purchase or sell other utility companies.
Associated Gas & Electric’s charter gave it authority to do just about anything, but for a year it remained an empty vessel, not holding any of Morris’s local utility companies such as Ithaca Gas Light. The headquarters were in Penn Yan, on the second floor of a downtown building, and Morris, Eben Treman, and Thomas W. Summers were the shareholders.19
Hughes won the election, defeating newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, in large part because of his vows to reform the utility industry, including the railroads. From January to May 1907, he campaigned hard for a law that would do just that, making speeches at forty dinners and debates.20 The public was with him—oh, were they with him—but the utility industry fought him every step of the way. He encountered similarly tough sledding in the utility-dominated New York State Legislature, not broken until President Theodore Roosevelt met with legislative leaders and urged them to pass the bill. Resistance ended and the bill passed overwhelmingly on May 22, 1907.21
A week earlier, Associated Gas & Electric Company, at the direction of Morris, had issued $400,000 in common stock and $600,000 in preferred stock to buy out his stock holdings in the fifteen local utility companies he owned. All the new stock went to him, along with an additional $200,000 promissory note. It was unclear at the time whether the new New York Public Service Commission had the authority to regulate stock purchases by a utility holding company, as opposed to a local operating company. Morris, however, was taking no chances.22
On one level, things seemed to be going well for Morris in the spring of 1907. Despite the epidemic, he was not by any means a social pariah. Later in May, he received a letter from President Schurman of Cornell thanking him profusely for loaning his personal automobile to the university to transport visiting members of the Association of New York State Colleges and Universities. Despite having killed twenty-nine Cornell students in 1903, he was anything but persona non grata on campus.23
But on a deeper, more profound level, his business, like every other American business, was feeling the effects of a sharply declining economy that year. The stock market crashed on March 14, conditions worsened during the summer, and events culminated that fall in a severe banking crisis that became known as the Panic of 1907. Morris had started going farther afield for loans, including a visit in 1906 to a Philadelphia ban
king firm, probably Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler, whose partners he derided as “Quaker Jews” in a letter to Mynderse Van Cleef written from the posh Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. Their sin was apparently imposing stiff terms for a $100,000 loan Morris needed. Another, bigger problem was that some of the companies he owned had been in sad shape when he acquired them and had not gotten any better with time. Remarkably, Ebenezer M. Treman revealed as much to Charles H. Blood when Blood inquired about the investment prospects of Associated Gas & Electric on behalf of another old friend.24
Morris might have hung on, but the newly minted New York Public Service Commission in 1909 took a dim view of a plan to float new bond issues for the underlying companies that made up Associated Gas & Electric. The commission objected to some of the proceeds going to Morris and not to the companies in whose name they were taken. It imposed stiff restrictions on how the proceeds could be used. So in the fall of 1909, Morris sold Associated Gas & Electric to Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler, a.k.a., the “Quaker Jews”; William S. Barstow, a former associate of Thomas A. Edison who ran a utility empire of his own; and a third investor, P. Chauncey Anderson. The price? Just $354,000, two-thirds less than the value of the underlying stocks Morris had sold to the company in 1907.25
Duncan Campbell Lee’s life spiraled downward after he was cut loose from Cornell University. His newspaper continued to publish, of course, and the libel suits threatened by Tucker & Vinton and Morris never amounted to anything. An advertising boycott alluded to by Samuel Hopkins Adams is hard to quantify. No doubt some advertisers pulled their ads because of unhappiness with the newspaper’s reporting of the epidemic, but not all or even most of them did. But Lee seemed to be cut off from his moorings, willing to throw the old journalism verities out the window. He began thinking of commercial printing as a new source of income—many newspapers did and still do this—but the client he envisioned was the State Democratic Committee. The annual printing contract for the Democratic Party was worth $200,000 a year, and Lee decided he would build a new, larger printing plant behind his current shop so he could get that contract. He and Frank E. Gannett parted ways in 1905 over this issue, if Gannett’s biography is to be believed. Gannett thought such a move compromised the newspaper’s objectivity, a strange complaint given that Lee never made any secret of his Democratic proclivities. Perhaps there was more to it than met the eye.26