Epidemic

by David DeKok

  White lived on until 1918. Perhaps his greatest failure as Cornell president was allowing local alumni too much control over the business affairs of the university. They dominated the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, the committee that made day-to-day business decisions for Cornell. The arrangement may have made sense when the university was young, but had become ever less tenable, as the university became a realm apart from Ithaca, a wealthy institution recognized far and wide for its academic prowess. Students came from all over America and the world, and eminent guest lecturers graced the halls. Yet Cornell University was controlled by a small, often parochial group of Ithaca businessmen who were personal friends, or worse, had interlocking business interests they saw no harm in advancing through their membership on the board. White and his successors had no power to veto a decision of the Board of Trustees or Executive Committee. The president could vote or remonstrate against it, but in the end the majority ruled.9

  For all their achievements, the men who ran Cornell University seemed prone to gross errors of judgment. Consider the case of the University Library. Erected in 1891 and regarded as one of the two or three best in the United States, the library had 160,000 books and room for 500,000. The building was topped by a 173-foot spire that was among the last things Theodor Zinck saw from Cayuga Lake on June 16, 1903.10 At the top were chimes donated by Jennie McGraw Fiske. Yet the library was also a symbol of the fallibility of this great institution.

  McGraw’s tragic life could well have inspired Henry James and his 1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove, which concerns a doomed heiress and the people who try to grab her money. In 1877, Jennie McGraw inherited a lumber fortune from her father, John McGraw, a Cornell University benefactor and business partner of Henry W. Sage, then chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees. She immediately became a target for fortune hunters, despite or perhaps because of having an advanced case of tuberculosis. In fact, her health was in steep decline. Fearing the McGraw fortune would not come to Cornell, President White shamelessly pushed his good friend, Daniel Willard Fiske, the university librarian, to woo and wed Jennie. He provided money to Fiske in 1880 so he could travel to Italy in pursuit of his quarry. It is an astonishing story. White even paid for the engagement ring. She died a little over a year after the wedding, and as White hoped, left a large bequest to the university to build a magnificent new library for her beloved husband.

  But legal technicalities in the university charter delayed settlement of the estate. Fiske grew tired of waiting for his own bequest and professed to be angry over White’s conniving scheme, despite his central role. He sued to break the will. Nine years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. By then he was living in Florence, Italy, and working as a rare book dealer. Sage was angered by the litigation and donated money to allow the library to be built.11 Jennie McGraw Fiske was entombed in a sarcophagus in Sage Chapel on the campus, and Willard Fiske was entombed next to her after he died in 1904. That angered the Sage family, which resigned their seats on the Board of Trustees. Fiske left Cornell $400,000 in his will, and that trumped the Sages’ hurt feelings.

  The president of Cornell at the beginning of the twentieth century was Jacob Gould Schurman, a prominent intellectual of his day who looked out from his office in Morrill Hall to the nation, not down the hill to Ithaca. Trained as a philosopher, he wrote many books and was highly intelligent, almost scarily so. He was as much a king of Ithaca in 1900 as L. L. Treman. They simply ruled different realms.

  Schurman was the great-grandson of William Schurman, a slave-owning American Loyalist who was jailed for a time by the revolutionary government. In 1784, he fled the country with his family, first for Nova Scotia and then for Prince Edward Island, traveling in his own ship.12 Schurman acquired large land holdings on the island. He was in the shipping, cooperage, and lumber businesses and served in the provincial legislature and as a magistrate.13 But his wealth, spread among too many descendants, was mostly gone by the time Jacob was born in 1854.14 Young Schurman grew up in Freetown, Prince Edward Island, a tiny hamlet surrounded by potato fields that is seemingly as remote and rural in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth. His parents were solid, hard-working farmers but by no means wealthy. Nevertheless, they encouraged his education. He left home at age thirteen, his quest for learning taking him as far as London, Heidelberg, and Berlin. Much of the costs were covered by scholarships and fellowships. He was a bright, ambitious boy.

  Schurman was forty-six years old in 1900 and in his eighth year as Cornell president. A handsome man with princely features, he was a superstar intellectual of his day and much in demand for public lectures around the country. Of late, he devoted his speeches to his opposition to the U.S. takeover of the Philippines after the 1898 war with Spain and the bloody guerrilla war with Filipinos that followed, a subject on which he had firsthand knowledge after heading a presidential investigating commission in the islands. In this he matched the views of the wealthiest man on the Cornell Board of Trustees, steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

  Schurman rarely shied from controversy. Earlier in his career, he struggled to resolve the conflict between science and the traditional Protestant faith of his rural Canadian childhood.15 He took up the cause of evolution, controversial then and now, arguing that one did not have to choose between God and Darwin. Schurman said belief in God grew out of rational thought, not the turbulent and shaky roller-coaster of faith. That was far from his only controversial statement. He once even pronounced America commercially strong but intellectually weak because it had produced “no really great creative minds” such as Darwin or Shakespeare.16 Schurman longed for the national stage. It was a pleasant diversion from the little problems of Ithaca.

  He was austere in manner and difficult to approach, despite what we might now call a movie-star handsome face. Romeyn Berry wrote that Schurman’s “outward demeanor did not invite student intimacy.” Morris Bishop, another Cornell historian, recalled Schurman’s advice to students to “always study in a straight-backed, hard-bottomed chair.” Yet to students he was a popular lecturer during his four years as a philosophy professor before becoming president, and he was able to form warm mentor relationships with some of them.

  In winter, a traditional time for fun at Cornell, Schurman donned his Sutherland tweed jacket, strapped on his ice skates, and headed out onto frozen Beebe Lake, which Ezra Cornell had created in 1828 by damming Fall Creek. Then, wrote Berry, Schurman was “a different man. He was an expert skater and knew it. On the ice he was all smiles and ever the center of a circle of admiring undergraduates.” They did not care about his intellectual attainments, only that he skated better than any other university president they could imagine. Schurman cut a fine figure in his tweed jacket, “like a duke off for an afternoon’s tramp over the moors,” Berry wrote. Thomas F. “Teefy” Crane, the dean, skated reasonably well, but wore the same clothes he did in the office. Andrew D. White did not skate at all but would stand at the edge of the lake in his fur-lined overcoat and felt topper and smile at the happy scene before him.17

  Yet despite the different realms ruled by L. L. Treman and Jacob Gould Schurman, there was really no separating Cornell and Ithaca. The city’s bankers and businessmen dominated the Board of Trustees. Most students lived off-campus in rooming houses on East Hill. They may have taken their lessons atop East Hill and thought themselves a breed apart, but they came back down to eat and drink with the rest of Ithaca.

  For Treman, his pleasant, orderly world was not without problems. Ithaca Common Council was up in arms, as it always seemed to be, about low water pressure in the hill sections of the community. There had been a disastrous fraternity house fire in January 1900, made worse by a lack of water. The clamor for a better water system, preferably owned by the town, grew louder. But he had shrugged that off before and might well do so again. What could you do when the biggest source of water in the region,
Cayuga Lake, was too polluted to drink? All he could give them was water from two creeks, Six Mile and Buttermilk, and that wasn’t always very much. What came out of their taps could be muddy and disgusting, and more than 1,500 Ithaca residents still had private wells. Cornell freshmen often suffered stomach disorders, though rarely typhoid, until they adjusted to the water.

  Treman had family problems, too. The succession issue crept up on him as insidiously as the thick wisteria vine winding around the columns of his stately, thirty-room Greek Revival mansion near downtown Ithaca. He seemed always to fear the worst. Who would take over the Ithaca gas and water companies if his son passed from the scene? Eben, forty-nine years old, had no surviving children. His first wife, Eugenie, and their newborn son died a day apart in 1886. His second wife, Belle, was childless after nine years of marriage. L. L. Treman’s two daughters, Jeannie and Louisa, were not expected to have either the ability or inclination to take over the family business. What if sudden, accidental death took Eben just as it took his uncle Elias?

  Elias died in a carriage accident in 1898 on his way to his summer cottage on the western shore of Cayuga Lake. His driver whipped a snake to keep it from scaring the horse, but the horse was scared by the whip and bucked, tipping the carriage and breaking Elias’s neck. He lingered for almost four months, but complications from paralysis finally killed him. At least he had two sons, Robert H. and Charles E. Treman, ready to take over the hardware business. And Rob already had a son in line to take over from him. Even Elias’s daughter, Elizabeth, was taken care of—she was married to Mynderse Van Cleef, general counsel for Cornell University and a prominent local banker.

  That friend of his son, William T. Morris of Penn Yan, inquired more than once about purchasing the gas company, but L. L. Treman brushed him off. He wanted his family business to continue down the generations and had no interest in selling to Morris. And why should he? When L. L. Treman walked from his mansion to his office, he was still a king of Ithaca. Men in suits would offer respectful greetings, and women in long dresses and broad hats would tell their children, there goes Mr. Treman. But even kings grow old and die, and now on April 27, 1900, that had happened and nothing would be the same for his family, his community, and scores of people he would never know.

  Chapter 2

  The Boys Club

  Stepping through the opening in the giant wisteria vine that wrapped around the columns, William T. Morris found himself at the front door of the L. L. Treman mansion at 210 N. Geneva St. in Ithaca. The porch was crowded with mourners here for the funeral of the patriarch, who had lived here for half a century. Morris came for that reason, too, but he looked for Eben Treman, the only son of the man in the coffin. Eben grew up in this house, and Morris had visited many times. They had become friends through the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University in the late 1860s but developed a deeper friendship after Eben returned to Ithaca from the Midwest in 1884 after many years away.

  Entering the parlor, where the coffin lay on a bier, Morris spotted Eben with his mother, Eliza A. Treman, and his sisters, Jeannie Waterman and Louisa Treman. Nearby were Eben’s cousins, Robert H. Treman and his younger brother, Charles E. Treman. Rob was about to succeed L. L. Treman as president of Tompkins County National Bank in Ithaca and would be a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1916 to 1929. Charlie was president of the board of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, today Ithaca College. Mynderse Van Cleef, who was married to their sister, Elizabeth, was also there. Morris knew the trio nearly as well as he knew Eben. Indeed, many of the important people in his life were here in the parlor. It was a nice little boys club Morris had joined. They helped him, protected him, and followed him into hell. But none of them was closer to him than Ebenezer Mack Treman.

  The Tremans in 1900 were a wealthy and accomplished family, and the patriarch’s grand funeral reflected as much. They “epitomized the enterprising upward mobility of the American population,” wrote Carol U. Sisler, an Ithaca historian, in Enterprising Families, Ithaca, New York. “They were well educated, they were well mannered, they were cultured with interest in music, the arts, and the theater, and by Ithaca standards, they were wealthy.”1 Indeed, Rob and Charlie Treman and Mynderse Van Cleef were about to begin construction of adjoining mansions on East Hill, overlooking the city and lake, to celebrate their ascendancy to Ithaca’s ruling elite. Rob Treman and Van Cleef sat on the Board of Trustees of Cornell University, and Charlie would join them in June 1902. Van Cleef also did important legal work for the university. He was treasurer and a director of Ithaca Trust Company and had even probated Ezra Cornell’s will, no easy task.

  Morris was an unmarried, darkly handsome, forty-six-year-old lawyer and gas company owner from Penn Yan, a small town about fifty miles northwest of Ithaca on Keuka Lake, another of the Finger Lakes. Known to his friends as Will, or even, when quite old, as Billy, Morris moved through life with a sense of entitlement found in certain people who have inherited their good fortune. His father was a U.S. congressman, and young Will received a grand start in life from his father’s wealth. He seemed to have little ability to appreciate the impact of his actions on people outside the boys club. It was all business to him. Narcissistic and intelligent, his fatal flaw was a reckless willingness to cut corners to get what he wanted. What he wanted now was to live closer to Eben.

  By the spring of 1900, Morris had acquired nine small-town gas companies, including four in just the previous six months. He was looking to buy more. The economy was booming. Now that L. L. Treman was dead, Morris intended to make Ithaca Gas Light Company the crown jewel in his empire. He had long dreamed of moving his headquarters from Penn Yan to Ithaca, a far more convenient, cosmopolitan, and interesting place for a man like himself, who was wealthy but had no wife or children to occupy his time. He had been rebuffed in previous attempts to buy the company and knew better than to bring up the subject today. But his mind was calculating. He walked over to the Treman family and offered his condolences.

  Morris was born in 1853 and spent his youth in the village of Rushville at the northern end of Yates County, where the buckwheat fields came up to the edge of town. The Senecas who first settled this land were long gone. His father, Daniel Morris, served as the Yates County district attorney from 1847 to 1850, then was elected as a Republican to the New York State Assembly. In 1860, he moved his law practice to Penn Yan, perhaps so his son could enroll in Penn Yan Academy, a private school.2 Daniel Morris served two terms in Congress during and immediately after the Civil War. In December 1865, he added his “D. Morris” signature to the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery.3 He was a Lincoln man through and through.

  Young Will showed early promise, doing well at Penn Yan Academy and passing an entrance examination to Cornell University in the spring of 1869, when he was only sixteen years old. That fall he joined the second class of freshmen to enter the new school.4 Morris was drawn to athletics, playing third base for the Cornell baseball team as a junior and senior and rowing second position in the number two crew for eight-oared barge. He had a flair for the arts, too, serving as treasurer of the Adelphi Literary Association and playing B-flat cornet in the Geneva Street Cornet Band. He didn’t join the Chi Phi fraternity until his senior year, but once he did, his fraternity brothers became the most important people in his life. He would turn to them again and again over the years.5

  After graduation in 1873, Morris read law, which in the parlance of the time meant he studied case law in the office of a practicing attorney. When he had studied enough, he took the bar exam to prove he had mastered the profession. That was how most lawyers trained prior to the early twentieth century, when law schools became ascendant. Morris studied first with his father and then with the Foster & Thomson law firm at 69 Wall St. in New York. A prominent firm specializing in corporate and railroad law, Foster & Thomson first appeared in the New York city directory in 1852 and was still li
sted as late as 1934. Little about Morris’s early law career has survived. He was admitted to the bar in Brooklyn on February 17, 1876, but stayed with Foster & Thomson one more year as managing clerk.6 Morris returned to Penn Yan in the fall of 1877 and briefly joined his father’s law firm. In 1879, he moved out and became junior partner in the new firm of Wood, Butler, and Morris.

  This star-crossed law firm had a short life, just four years. The reason seems silly, an upturning of common sense, but here is what happened: On February 28, 1883, J. P. Farmer, a client, turned over a $500 note drawn on Baldwin’s Bank of Penn Yan to Ralph T. Wood, one of Morris’s partners, in payment for legal services. It was supposed to be payable only to Farmer’s company, but he signed it over to the law firm and Wood endorsed it in the name of the law firm. He then took it to the bank, cashed it, and placed the proceeds in the law firm’s account. Morris, who was in charge of office accounts, immediately spent the money on new linoleum floor covering and other office expenses. The Penn Yan bank’s correspondent bank in Brooklyn rejected the note because Morris’s law firm had cashed it and Baldwin’s Bank was left holding the bag.

  Each partner refused to return the money, about $11,000 in present value. Butler and Morris said Wood had no legal authority to endorse and cash the $500 note and claimed that shielded them from responsibility. But the law said that if the partners knew and acquiesced in spending the money, which the record showed they had, they were just as guilty as Wood, who resigned from the firm on March 3, 1883. Butler stayed on until June 1884, when he left to grow wine grapes. Morris continued as a solo practitioner and for the next seven years refused pleas from the bank to pay back the money. Baldwin’s finally went to court in 1889, winning an embarrassing judgment from a jury in Yates County that stood up on appeal in 1892.7 It was a high price to pay for new linoleum, but Morris seemed too stubborn to care.