by David DeKok
We know who was with Morris at the dance from an article in the Ithaca Daily News listing the occupants of the boxes that ringed the dance floor.11 He sat in the Treman Box with his good friends Robert H. and Charles E. Treman, brothers who were members of the Cornell Board of Trustees, and their wives. Other guests included Charles H. Blood, who was a Cornell trustee, a real estate developer, and the part-time district attorney of Tompkins County, and Thomas F. “Teefy” Crane, dean of the university faculty at Cornell. Crane became acting head of the university in 1899 while Schurman was away in the Philippines at the behest of President William McKinley, assessing the native insurrection in America’s newest colony. Jervis Langdon of Elmira, a nephew by marriage of author Samuel Clemens, and Wilder D. Bancroft, a Cornell chemistry professor who sat on the Ithaca Country Club board of directors with Blood and Charlie Treman, were still other guests. They all danced, even as Zinck’s body drifted in the cold depths of Cayuga Lake, just as they had in February at the Junior Prom while the first student was dying of typhoid in the Cornell Infirmary just a few hundred yards away.
We don’t know what Morris told friends in private, but from his known actions we can imagine him expressing vocal anger over his negative press portrayal in the Ithaca Daily News, not remorse for the young people he killed. That was how he was. Narcissistic. The last victim of the epidemic was barely cold in the ground when Morris resumed an active and oblivious social life. In May, he invited friends to join him on his yacht to witness the annual Memorial Day rowing regatta on Cayuga Lake,12 sipping cocktails as the shells glided over the dark water, their oars slashing the lake in a rhythmic frenzy.
He was already plotting revenge. Thomas M. Vinton, his general contractor on the Six Mile Creek dam project that was the proximate cause of the epidemic, signed papers a day later for a libel suit in New York City against the Ithaca Daily News and its managing editor, Frank E. Gannett, over a single editorial, “Nothing Less Than an Outrage,” published on May 28, 1903.13 The editorial accused Vinton’s firm, Tucker & Vinton, of deliberate cost overruns and shoddy workmanship on the dam and probably did violate the much more plaintiff-friendly libel law of the day. Morris was pushing his own libel lawyer, Cornell University trustee Henry W. Sackett, who handled libel defense for the New York Tribune, to prepare a separate suit against the Daily News and its publisher, Duncan Campbell Lee. That few potential jurors in Tompkins County were likely to consider Morris an aggrieved victim of the press seemed beyond his comprehension.
Later on June 17, Cornell University took its own revenge against Lee, who was an associate professor of oratory and chairman of the department. The Board of Trustees voted to deny Lee a promotion to full professor, a humiliating end to a distinguished academic career. The axing seemed directly tied to anger over the Daily News stories and editorials about the university’s role in the epidemic. Among the trustees voting that day were three of Morris’s fellow revelers at the Senior Dance, the Treman brothers and Charles H. Blood. His principal banker, Mynderse Van Cleef, was also there, as was his libel lawyer, Sackett. They were all trustees. Conflicts of interest didn’t seem to bother them. They just didn’t want Lee pointing them out.
After two days passed, Emelie Zinck hired “Dynamite” Dan Maloney to drop explosive charges in the lake in an effort to bring up the body of her husband. For all the things about water that were not regulated in New York, using dynamite in lakes required a permit from a state game protector because of the potential to kill fish. That permit was obtained and on the afternoon of June 18, Maloney, accompanied by the game protector, set off four charges of twelve sticks of dynamite each. He would light the water fuse, drop the charge to the bottom of the lake, then row like hell to get a safe distance away. The Ithaca Daily Journal described the “dull rumble and roar” of the explosion followed by an eruption of water eight feet in diameter and forty to fifty feet in height. But nothing except dead fish and “sticks, stumps, and all manner of refuse” came up from the bottom. The blasts were continued on June 19 with equally unsatisfactory results, and a rumor took hold that Zinck was not really dead. Did they think that he was hiding in the trees on the shoreline, like Huck Finn, watching the effort to recover his body?
The two Leonard brothers snagged the body with dragging hooks around 8:30 a.m. on June 22 in a section of Cayuga Lake not targeted by Dynamite Dan. The cold water at the bottom had slowed decomposition, and the body was not bloated. Zinck’s face looked “perfectly natural” other than an extreme whiteness, the Ithaca Daily Journal reported. Believing the body would turn black if exposed to air for very long, the brothers tied a rope around Zinck’s waist and attached a rock to keep him underwater. They rowed back to Ithaca, turned the corpse over to the police and undertakers, and collected a $100 reward from Mrs. Zinck. It was all in a day’s work.
A Masonic funeral was held at Zinck’s home the next afternoon, and he was laid to rest in Lake View Cemetery next to his daughter. Emelie would not join them until 1928, the same year Morris died. When Zinck’s will was probated after his funeral, he was shown to be a prosperous businessman. There had been no reason for his suicide beyond despair over the death of Lula and the near death of his nephew, Edmond Zinck.
Given the horror of what happened in Ithaca in 1903, it is surprising that grief did not send more citizens to the bottom of that cold and dark lake. There was no justice here. The new century had not begun well. Morris was the archetype of a business executive we know all too well today, to whom profit and personal aggrandizement is everything and the public interest is a joke.
The Ithaca epidemic, too, marked the birth of a corporation that would long outlive its founder, challenging the public interest in America for nearly a century. In 1906, Morris organized his utilities into a holding company called Associated Gas & Electric Company. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the leadership of Howard C. Hopson, AG&E set records for corporate fraud and looting that stood for more than half a century. Many, many lives were ruined. President Franklin D. Roosevelt fought an oddly personal battle with Hopson through much of his career, and in 1940 succeeded in imprisoning Hopson, who by then was insane from syphilis. Associated Gas & Electric went bankrupt the same year and was succeeded in 1946 by General Public Utilities Corporation.
In 1949, GPU became enamored of atomic energy and set off down a road that ended thirty years later with the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and meltdown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. More than one hundred thousand people fled their homes, far more than in Ithaca, but unless a late wave of fatal radiation cancers breaks in central Pennsylvania, the Ithaca typhoid epidemic had by far the greater death toll. Some might argue the company was cursed, but historians and journalists rightly shy away from the supernatural and we will not go there.
We too often worship our free enterprise system in America as a fetish, taking its supposed goodness on faith. The story of this company may shake that faith. If nothing else, it drives home the need for strong regulation of those corporations with the ability to hurt the public through inept or criminal behavior. If we ignore that lesson, we risk embracing the old saw about insanity, that it involves doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. William T. Morris did not spring from nowhere, nor did the Ithaca catastrophe. Like so many disasters, in retrospect we can see it coming from a long distance away, finally arriving as a runaway train.
Chapter 1
Ithaca and Its Kings
Lafayette L. Treman was one of those men, so common in nineteenth-century America, who built up a family business and kept on adding other businesses until he could be said, in a sense, to rule his town. The last of three brothers who came to Ithaca, New York, in the 1840s, Treman basked in the glow of respect from all who knew him, but he worried with good reason about the future of his family and his empire. Ithaca was a beautiful small town that dreamed of greatness, but which, like the Treman family itself, was beautiful
and damned.
Treman and his brothers, Leonard and Elias, grew up in Mecklenburg, New York, a frontier outpost twelve miles west of Ithaca where their father operated a gristmill and where the brutal wars against the Seneca tribes were still a living memory. When their friends moved west, following the frontier into new lands, they moved east, back toward civilization. After arriving in Ithaca, the Treman brothers went into the hardware business. Treman, King & Co. evolved from a small shop into a regional hardware emporium that lasted nearly a century, closing only in 1938. Their letterhead, midway through that long reign, proclaimed themselves jobbers, or wholesalers, “of hardware, glass, paints, etc.” Elias gradually became CEO of the hardware business, while L.L., as Lafayette L. Treman preferred to be known, split off into banking and Leonard into the utility business, namely Ithaca Gas Light Company and Ithaca Water Works. But they all had their hands in each other’s businesses, if only as silent partners.1
L.L.’s story might have come from a handbook for American success, so classic was its upward trajectory. The frontier boy turned business entrepreneur became secretary of the new Ithaca & Athens Railroad in 1871, chosen for his business skills and personal appeal.2 He became president of Tompkins County National Bank in 1873 and was a founding board member of the Ithaca Trust Company in 1891. Even the town’s leading newspaper, the Ithaca Daily Journal, founded by his late father-in-law, state senator Ebenezer Mack, was in his camp. Mack, who had declined to be secretary of state in President Martin Van Buren’s cabinet,3 helped and inspired Treman. He repaid his father-in-law by naming his firstborn child and only son Ebenezer Mack Treman.
Over the years, L. L. Treman took over Ithaca Gas Light and Ithaca Water Works from his brothers. Elias sold his shares early on. When Leonard died of illness in 1888, his interest passed to his only child, Kate, married to John W. Bush, a lawyer in Buffalo. There was no question in that day of her running the company, so management passed to L. L. Treman and his son, who went by Eben. Kate eventually sold most of her interest to L. L. Treman, and by the turn of the twentieth century, he owned nearly all of the company.4 Treman put Eben in charge and stuck to banking. Running the utilities was not what Eben Treman really wanted to do with his life—he should have been a musician or an impresario—but his father’s word was law. He could be a bit of an autocrat to his only son.
The city of their success, Ithaca, had 13,136 people in 1900. It lay at the head of Cayuga Lake, second largest of the eleven Finger Lakes in central New York. Dark blue, fiercely cold, and framed by steep hills, Cayuga is forty miles long, one to three miles wide, and as deep as 435 feet. Pleasure boating was common and so were drownings—the Leonard brothers, fishermen who had a cottage and boathouse along the lake, operated a grim side business of finding the drowned. They had recovered nearly a half-dozen waterlogged bodies with dragging hooks in recent years.
Geography was everything to Ithaca, both a bane and a blessing. Creeks plunged down the steep hills to the lake, creating spectacular gorges and waterfalls. Visitors marveled at the abundance of water. After a canal opened in 1828 connecting Cayuga and Seneca Lakes to the newly dug Erie Canal, and thence to the outside world, Ithaca became a major inland port. Railroads hauled anthracite coal from Pennsylvania to the upper town, where cars were shifted to an inclined plane and lowered to the docks, their cargo transferred to barges. At night, long tows of barges would depart for the north end of the lake and the canal. When they returned, they carried New York wheat—the Empire State was then the wheat capital of America—and other commodities. Ithaca’s economy grew steadily, apart from the occasional national financial panic, and the Tremans and their businesses prospered accordingly.
Ithaca’s first white settlers built homes on two square miles of marshy clay flats along the lake. Builders at first believed that the three hills of Ithaca were too steep for housing and insisted the city must expand to the south.5 But by 1900, Ithaca had climbed the hills, known simply as East, South and West. It was less a problem putting the houses up than keeping fires from burning them down. Getting enough water to the fire hydrants in the upper reaches of Ithaca was a constant challenge for Ithaca Water Works, but that did not stop the growth of the city. Fires or no fires, Ithaca grew and the Tremans continued to prosper, especially after the advent of Cornell University. The brothers sent their sons to Cornell to be educated but not their daughters, even though the university was a pioneer from the start in the coeducation of young women.
The university opened in 1868 atop East Hill, looming over Ithaca and Cayuga Lake like a fortified Tuscan hill town. Andrew Dickson White was the first president. Cornell University was built on what had been the three-hundred-acre farm of its founder and benefactor, Ezra Cornell, who endowed the university in 1865 with his land and a sizable portion of his Western Union fortune. He had discovered a better way to run the telegraph wires, and at the peak of his wealth owned one-sixth of Western Union’s immensely valuable stock.
One of the first philanthropists to come out of the phenomenal American industrial boom in the nineteenth century, Cornell believed that because his fortune came as much from opportunity—the Civil War and its carnage—as hard work, he had an obligation to use it to help the public. The magnificent public library Cornell built for Ithaca in 1863 (it was demolished in 1960 and replaced by a useful, if decidedly modern structure) was an inspiration to Andrew Carnegie, who as a young man was a telegraph operator for Western Union. After he prospered in the steel industry, Carnegie went Ezra Cornell several times better and built scores of public libraries in towns large and small across the land. He joined the Cornell University Board of Trustees in 1890. But as Cornell well knew, libraries were not the only thing communities needed to grow and prosper. Trained, talented people were just as critical, and not only from the upper classes.
Cornell and White, the cofounders of the university, became acquainted in 1864 as members of the New York State Senate. Cornell was fifty-seven years old, self-educated, and at heart a farmer and mechanic. White was thirty-one years old, a college professor educated at Geneva College (today called Hobart and William Smith College) in Geneva, New York, the Sorbonne, and Yale, who had been deemed too slight to carry a rifle in the Civil War. But they stood as one in their desire to create a large, modern university open to students of all social classes, offering a wide range of courses of study, financial aid, and freedom from control by a religious denomination. They built an educational utopia atop East Hill in Ithaca and threw open the doors to the nation and the world.
White wanted to protect his university from pedants and philistines. He wrote in his autobiography, “I took pains to guard the institution from those who, in the higher education, substitute dates for history, gerund-grinding for literature, and formulas for science; as to the latter, I sought to guard it from the men to whom ‘Gain is God, and Gunnybags his Prophet.’”6
White aimed to spare his new university from the Greco-Roman classicism that dominated American higher education before the Civil War and had largely become a system for turning out new clerics and schoolmasters. After four years of brutal and bloody war, that approach to higher education seemed quaintly inadequate to Americans eager to get on with building a modern industrial nation. White did not abandon Greek and Latin but made them optional and added courses in science, engineering, agriculture, and modern European languages. He and Ezra Cornell suffered merciless attacks from traditionalists who were horrified at the idea of mixing science and the classics and from clergy convinced the university was “Godless” because it had no church affiliation and taught the works of liberal thinkers condemned by conservative churchmen.
But other people showered Ithaca and the university with praise. What better place to acquire knowledge, they enthused, than this earthly paradise? A letter written to the New York Times in 1872 rhapsodized that in Ithaca, “the man or woman with soul to appreciate the work of nature can commune with nature’s Go
d—can drink and be full.” The writer—seemingly a man, but not identified beyond his initials—climbed up Fall Creek Gorge during his visit. After passing the 150-foot Ithaca Falls, “higher than the American Fall at Niagara,” the writer scrambled up a one-hundred-foot cliff and came upon the sixty-foot Forest Falls, “a perfect gem of a waterfall, set, as it is, in a framework of rocks and evergreens.” After climbing past Rocky Falls, Foaming Falls, Thune Falls, Beebe Falls, and finally Triphammer Falls, the writer emerged from the gorge into the Cornell campus, rejoicing, “That young literary giant, the pride of the state, and justly so. Four years in bringing a faculty of about 40 and 700 students, and with endowment, buildings, library and cabinets that other institutions have been generations in trying to acquire, and where the lover of science can drink to repletion.”7
The two founders persevered in the face of their critics. White sailed to Europe to hire leading professors and to purchase scientific equipment that Cornell University needed to realize his vision.8 Ezra Cornell never wavered from his financial commitment to the university that bore his name, even after criticism of his motives—detractors said he wanted merely to line his own pockets—became slanderous.
He lost much of his remaining Western Union fortune when economic panic swept the land in 1873. Cornell invested a huge sum—$2 million, or the equivalent of about $36 million today—in the construction of four short-line railroads intended to give Ithaca better connections to the outside world. The most important was the Ithaca & Athens, which connected to the Lehigh Valley Railroad at Athens, Pennsylvania, and thence to the rest of the East Coast. In this venture he was a partner with, among others, L. L. Treman, who seems to have emerged relatively unscathed. The railroads were finished but carried Ezra Cornell to the brink of bankruptcy. He was forced to sell the rest of his Western Union stock to ensure the final driving of the spikes and died in December 1874, shattered by his losses. His eldest son, Franklin C. Cornell, managed to salvage $560,000 by selling his father’s interest in two of the connections to the Lehigh Valley Railroad.