Epidemic
Page 27
Lee built the printing plant, and the newspaper’s finances and his own went to hell. Whether the contract wasn’t as lucrative as he believed, or his costs were higher than expected, is impossible to determine. But whatever the reason it happened, U.S. Comptroller of the Currency reports for the First National Bank of Ithaca, where his father-in-law, George R. Williams, was the president, and the records of court judgments filed against Lee and his wife, Elizabeth, tell an agonizing tale of financial collapse. On August 29, 1905, a federal bank examiner reported that a note of $14,610 owed by Lee and Ithaca Publishing Company was “doubtful” and one for $4,198 was a “loss,” and “worthless,” but was endorsed by George R. Williams. “Much of this past-due paper has been carried along,” the examiner wrote. “Duncan C. Lee is a son-in-law of Pres. G.R. Williams; Mr. Williams is said to be good.” Individuals and banks sued Lee or his wife for hundreds or thousands of dollars, huge amounts in that day. Even Gannett filed a lawsuit against him for nearly $400.27
Perhaps the most disturbing thing of all were the demands of country newspaper owners in New York for payments they claimed they were owed for “booming,” or promoting the candidacy of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, William Randolph Hearst. They began harassing Lee for payment early in 1907 in his capacity as chairman of the Democratic State Editorial Association. Lee told them Hearst owed the payments, which totaled $4,800. His degradation was nearly complete, and the finale came when he put Ithaca Publishing Company into bankruptcy in the spring of 1907.28
Neither Lee nor his wife, Elizabeth, saw any future for the family in Ithaca. One suspects that George R. Williams took care of their personal debts, and the business debts would disappear into the maw of bankruptcy court. Lee does not strike one as someone who would casually walk away from his debts, but he harbored a great deal of anger and guilt from the events of the past five years and wanted a fresh start. Sometime in 1908, Lee gathered up his family at the age of thirty-nine and sailed to Italy to begin a new life. He became secretary of the International Agricultural Institute in Rome. Edward Fitch, one of his Hamilton College classmates, ran into him on the Spanish Steps in 1909. Lee stayed in Rome for a little over a year, then moved the family to England, settling in Norwich. He had decided to become a British lawyer, which he did after an appropriate course of study.
“He was very, very happy living in England,” said his daughter, Nancy Lee Gluck, who was interviewed in her nineties. “He was proud of what he accomplished. He liked the history and dignity that British law gave him.”29
Her mother never wanted to live in Ithaca again or even visit there, Gluck recalled. She and the children did go back to see family every three years but stayed in the Williams family cottage on Cayuga Lake in Sheldrake, New York. Elizabeth Lee spoke often to her children about the terrible Ithaca water. Duncan Campbell Lee returned to America on business from time to time but never went back to Ithaca or even to Sheldrake. He lived in England until his death in 1943. His last wish was to have his body buried in Norwich, but his heart removed and interred in the Hamilton College Cemetery in Clinton, New York. The burial in the walled, tree-shaded cemetery at Hamilton was carried out by four of his college classmates on August 7, 1945. His brother, Rev. Dr. John Park Lee, officiated. “He was very religious on account of his father,” Gluck said of her father. “He always tried to do the right thing.”30
Morris could not live without buying things, without spending. It is not always possible to figure out where he got the money, but Mynderse Van Cleef seems to have rarely turned off the spigot. Instead of easing into a sensible retirement after he sold Associated Gas & Electric, Morris seemed to want nothing but to add luxuries to his life.
Not that he waited until the sale was complete. In 1908, he purchased the Abraham Van Wagener mansion on Bluff Point, which jutted into Keuka Lake south of Penn Yan, where he retreated after his Ithaca dream died. The Greek Revival mansion sat on 181 acres and was surrounded on three sides by open fields and forests. The porch offered a view up and down the lake. Built in 1833, it was badly in need of restoration. He told the local newspaper he would bring in a prominent architect from Philadelphia and a landscape gardener from Boston to carry out his plans, and did.31
Nor was Morris finished buying places to live. On October 1, 1909, just four days after he sold Associated Gas & Electric, Morris purchased the Mary E. Wagener mansion on Main Street in Penn Yan as his primary residence. Seven weeks later, he purchased the Severn Wine Cellar property on Seneca Lake near Himrod, New York, for $10,575 at a foreclosure sale. The property came with one hundred acres of grape vines. In 1911, he spent $20,000 to renovate his Main Street mansion. The description of the planned renovations takes one’s breath away. It was a Palace of Versailles for a single man and his servants. At the end of the summer of 1911, Morris purchased a forty-foot motor yacht with a half-inch-thick mahogany deck and hull. It was said to be the fastest boat on the Finger Lakes. He bought an office building in downtown Penn Yan for the Penn Yan Gas Light Company, which had not been part of the sale two years earlier, and the additional utility companies he was continuing to acquire for his new holding company, United States Gas & Electric. He was the president and his nephew, Morris Tracy, son of his sister Emma, was the manager. In 1912, William T. Morris commissioned an oil painting of himself in a lord of the manor pose. And on and on it went, even as Duncan Campbell Lee struggled to make a new life for himself and his family in England.
Morris’s luck did not last. He tried to get into the shoe manufacturing business in 1912 and again in 1916, but both ventures failed. Morris went into decline during the war years, financially, physically, and eventually, mentally. The crisis seems to have come in 1918. Robert H. Treman wrote to Van Cleef in the spring of that year, telling a disturbing story about how “Billy Morris” had come to see him to try to collect some money. Morris then spoke of borrowing money to build up his farm, apparently the vineyard on Seneca Lake. “I should think the best thing for him would be to devote himself entirely to his farms and build himself up by outdoor living during the summer as he is almost a wreck. If his sister can secure us, I should be inclined to help him to a small necessary amount.” But that did not happen. Emma’s children, Morris and Lucy Tracy, objected to mortgaging their mother’s house as security for the loan. Instead, Morris Tracy began to sell off some of his uncle’s assets. Late in the year, he wrote to Van Cleef to tell him he had sold his uncle’s forty-foot yacht, the Lucy T., and the boathouse on Cayuga Lake that he had purchased from Van Cleef only a year earlier.32
He continued to spiral downward. At some point, Morris received a small sinecure, a position on the Willard State Hospital Board of Managers that he kept until his death. Properties were sold, and at the end he was living with relatives in Geneva, New York. The one thing that did not decline in him, however, was his devotion to Cornell University. When he died on November 4, 1928, the obituary in the Ithaca Journal-News (Gannett had acquired his old newspaper and merged it with the Journal) referred to him in the headline as “noted C.U. alumnus.” The Associated Press story noted that he had never missed a commencement since his own graduation in 1873. None of the obituaries mentioned his role in the 1903 typhoid epidemic. No one seemed to remember.
The legacy of William Torrey Morris was the company he created, Associated Gas & Electric. In 1922, the same people who had bought the company from Morris in 1909 sold it to John I. Mange and Howard Colwell Hopson. Mange was the president of the company but was largely a figurehead. Hopson was the brains and the id of Associated Gas & Electric. Born on a farm in Wisconsin, he was a whip-smart boy who excelled at the University of Wisconsin and at George Washington University. He was one of the first employees of the New York Public Service Commission, where he learned the tricks corporations used to deceive regulators and wondered if he could do better.
Hopson set out to build the utility empire that Morris could only have dreamed about.
Using every means fair or foul, legal or illegal, including the bribing of public officials, Hopson spent the Roaring Twenties acquiring company after company. Associated Gas & Electric, which began life in 1906 with assets of $1,200,000, had upped that number to $641,820,000 by 1929, according to the Federal Trade Commission. By the time it all ended in 1940, Hopson and Mange owned companies in twenty-six states and two foreign countries.
Unfortunately for Hopson, he made an enemy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, tangling with Roosevelt repeatedly when he was governor of New York from 1929 to 1932. After he became president in 1933, Roosevelt took an almost personal interest in seeing Hopson brought to justice, even speaking about him at news conferences, and Hopson seemed to relish slapping back at the president. By this time, Hopson had descended into almost pure criminality, stealing from his shareholders, customers, even his employees. He was smart, and not until the Democratic Congress had passed the necessary laws was it possible for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to bring him down. That happened in 1940. Associated Gas & Electric was forced into bankruptcy and Hopson, insane or nearly so from the effects of tertiary syphilis, went to federal prison.
The bankruptcy lasted through World War II. Under SEC direction, the trustees gradually spun off most of the companies Hopson had acquired. In the end, all that was left was Metropolitan Edison Company and Pennsylvania Electric Company in Pennsylvania, and Jersey Central Power & Light Company in New Jersey, plus Manila Electric Company in the Philippines, which was not sold until the Kennedy administration. Under SEC rules designed to prevent another Hopson, owning more than one utility system was discouraged, and on the rare occasion when it was allowed, the utilities had to be contiguous, or border each other.
Emerging from bankruptcy in 1946 as General Public Utilities Corporation, the company soon turned its focus to an exciting new technology, atomic energy. Under the leadership of Edward W. Morehouse, GPU took the first step down a very rocky path that ended on March 28, 1979, when the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant of Metropolitan Edison Company had a core meltdown. More than one hundred thousand people fled the region around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, racing to escape the invisible radiation drifting whichever way the wind blew.
Afterword
The Conquest of Typhoid
George A. Soper, the man who saved both Galveston, Texas, and Ithaca, New York, is fated never to be remembered for those achievements as much as he is for identifying and capturing the woman who came to be known as Typhoid Mary.
Mary Mallon was a typhoid carrier, little different from other typhoid carriers except that she refused to limit her opportunities to infect other people. Mary was a cook, quite a good one according to legend, and was employed in fine homes up and down the Eastern Seaboard, especially in the New York metropolitan area. Soper was hired in 1906 by George Thompson, who owned a summer rental house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where six people in the household of eleven had become ill with typhoid. Worried that he would never be able to rent it again, Thompson asked Soper to investigate the causes of the outbreak.
In a 1939 letter to the British Medical Journal in London, Soper said that the techniques he used to identify and find Typhoid Mary were “an outcome of my work for the control of the epidemic of over 1,300 cases of typhoid at Ithaca, N.Y., in 1903, where I had seen typhoid spread from person to person and initiated energetic measures to prevent it.” Once he learned that the hiring of Mary Mallon as the cook for the house coincided with the start of the epidemic, he began following her trail. “It was a difficult investigation, partly because I was not called for more than six months after the outbreak and the people had become separated and the house vacated. The cook (Miss Mallon) could not be found for some months and then proved most refractory.”1 One definition of that last word is “obstinately resistant to authority or control.” Mary was all that and more.
Other authors have explored the Typhoid Mary story in great depth, so we need not replicate their work here. Her importance is as an advertisement for the danger of typhoid carriers. While few people in America knew exactly what a typhoid carrier was before her detention (among them Soper, who thought that only the carrier’s urine could spread the disease), through the magic of newspapers, the reality of typhoid carriers who spread their germs through both urine and feces became known.
The odd thing about Typhoid Mary is that she came to be widely blamed for the Ithaca epidemic even though she had absolutely nothing to do with it. This belief got started because there appeared to be a gap in her work history around the time of the Ithaca tragedy. But the only way Mary could have triggered the epidemic was if she had traveled to Ithaca and for some reason walked out into the bush to defecate on the banks of Six Mile Creek. The chances of that having happened seem decidedly remote. Even if for some reason she had decided to stop cooking in fine homes or institutions to sling hash in a rough immigrant work camp, the worst she could have done would be to infect some of the workers. Chances are the sick workers would have been sent away before they could take their own trip to the bank of the stream.
Yet this zombie story has made its way through the entire twentieth century and into the twenty-first, even finding its way into medical textbooks. Recitations of this myth can be found in the Bismarck Tribune of North Dakota on March 20, 1925, the Fresno Bee of Nov. 7, 1960, and the Van Nuys News of California on June 29, 1961. The newspapers can often blame syndicated columns and wire stories that they use without rechecking the information, but how about medical book publishers? The Mary Myth is found in Dr. Charles E. Simon’s Human Infection Carriers: Their Significance, Recognition and Management, published in 1919; R. L. Huckstep’s Typhoid Fever and Other Salmonella Infections, published in 1962; and Microbiology for Surgical Technologists by Paul Price and Kevin B. Frey, published in 2003. There are undoubtedly other examples. It is more comical than serious, perhaps only to be stamped out with better editing.
The greatest advances against typhoid early in the twentieth century came from better sanitation and cleaner water, especially after chlorine began to be used to kill germs in drinking water around 1909. The first usage, a dramatic success, was in Jersey City, New Jersey, and it spread rapidly after that. In the last years prior to chlorine, the average typhoid death rate in the United States was about 25 per 100,000, similar to the death rate from motor vehicle accidents now. By 1920, the death rate was down to about 8 per 100,000, and by 1948, to an almost imperceptible level.2
That was good, but still no cure for typhoid existed once you caught the disease. And outside of the developed world, typhoid remained endemic. In 1948, Paul Burkholder, a Yale University scientist, discovered a mold-like organism called an actinomycete in a soil sample that arrived from Venezuela. He was being funded by Parke, Davis & Company of Detroit, Michigan, to search for new antibiotics in soil samples from around the world. Actinomycete, later renamed chloramphenicol, proved effective against typhus, scrub typhus, and typhoid fever itself. Dr. Eugene Payne of Parke, Davis took a small amount with him on a trip to Bolivia and working with two Bolivian physicians, tried it on sixteen patients who were near death from typhus. All recovered.3 At the end of 1948, Dr. Perrin Long, professor of preventive medicine at Johns Hopkins University, disclosed that chloramphenicol, now carrying the trade name of chloromycetin, had brought dramatic cures to ten typhoid patients at the University of Maryland Hospital.
Tests conducted by a team led by Theodore E. Woodward found that typical typhoid patients showed dramatic improvement beginning on the third or fourth day of treatment. Fever declined, the classic rose spots disappeared, and headaches became less painful. In one dramatic case, where perforation and bleeding had begun, chloromycetin eventually saved the man’s life without doctors having to resort to surgery. The body healed the perforation.
The next step was to synthesize chloromycetin so it did not have to be made directly from the actinomycete organism. That was achieved by Dr.
Mildred Rebstock, a twenty-eight-year-old chemist on the Parke, Davis staff. The final step was to produce the synthesized drug in industrial quantities of consistent quality, and Parke, Davis assigned that task to its production facility in Holland, Michigan.4 The author’s father, who was a young chemist working on the project, described it as complex, difficult work, but ultimately successful. “We essentially had to trick nature,” Paul W. DeKok remembered. It was a heady time to be a chemist.
Chloromycetin became a big seller for Parke, Davis & Company but eventually fell out of favor because of potentially serious side effects, including deafness or even death. Other drugs, including ciprofloxacin, are more common treatments for typhoid now. There are no outbreaks in America anymore like the one in Ithaca in 1903. Typhoid is worrisome only for those Americans who travel to Third World countries, but even then they have the comfort of knowing that their chances for a quick recovery are high if they are so unlucky as to catch the disease.