Epidemic

by David DeKok

  Whether the controversy damaged his reputation as a lawyer in Penn Yan or he simply decided he wanted to do something different is unknown. His finances appeared to improve with the probating of his father’s will in 1889, and Morris turned his attention to the gas industry. Not natural gas as we know it today, but the dirty, factory-made gas extracted from coal or oil and used for decades by Americans to light their homes and fuel their stoves. Electric lighting was making big inroads in some areas, but the market for gas in New York State was still significant and profitable.

  Morris made his first acquisition, his hometown Penn Yan Gas Light Company, in 1892. Further deals were put on hold by the economic panic of 1893, which culminated in a brutal stock market collapse. William McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896 seemed to spark a rally, so Morris resumed the hunt, buying gas companies in other small New York towns. But the economy slumped again in 1897 and did not fully recover until 1899 and the end of the Spanish-American War.8 Morris shut down the remainder of his law practice in 1898 to devote all of his time to buying gas companies. He bought and bought, believing the day of the small-town businessman who owned one or two utilities was over. It was a trend of the times.9 Men who bought the companies built by others and ran them as an empire would rule the business world in the new century. Of that Morris and many others were certain.

  He could have accomplished none of this, of course, without access to capital. Although he borrowed from many banks in the Finger Lakes region and on Wall Street, one of his regular and more important funding spigots was Ithaca Trust Company, where his Cornell classmate Mynderse Van Cleef was treasurer and counsel. Eben, Rob, and Charlie Treman sat on the board. Much of his correspondence with Van Cleef has survived, mostly handwritten in Morris’s distinctive Gothic, inky style. Van Cleef doesn’t seem to have turned him down very often, although the record shows that he and the bank were not complete pushovers. But the motto of Ithaca Trust Company seems mainly to have been: What are friends for?

  Morris certainly had legitimate business reasons for moving his base of operations to Ithaca. Banks in those days liked to have their big borrowers close by. The rail connections between Ithaca and the rest of the Northeast and Midwest (Morris acquired the Van Wert Gas Light Company in western Ohio in 1899) were better than those in Penn Yan thanks to Ezra Cornell. But there was a personal reason as well. Ithaca was where Eben lived. Morris never failed to visit when he was in town. In Treman’s own words, they were “very close.”10 The two had been friends since their days at Cornell in the late 1860s, although Treman was three years older than Morris. Both were members of the Chi Phi fraternity and were now officers of the Chi Phi House Association, a kind of alumni auxiliary that kept them in contact with Cornell students who joined the fraternity. Eben, Rob Treman, Morris, and several other local alumni had organized the house association in 1890. A photograph of the Chi Phi house, built in the English Tudor style, would be featured in Cosmopolitan magazine in March 1903, at a time when at least two students in the house lay prostrate with typhoid.

  The relationship between Morris and Eben Treman, which is the back story of the Ithaca disaster, might have been as simple as a strong, adult male friendship. Or perhaps it was more complex and intimate. We are forced to fall back on stereotypes to consider this question, but to ignore it seems detrimental to our understanding of how the epidemic occurred. Of the two, Morris seemed the more likely to have been gay. He was handsome, wealthy, and intelligent, sometimes went out with women in group situations, but never married. Indeed, on his alumni card at Cornell University, he wrote in a bold, defiant hand, “Unmarried,” when asked for his marital status. Morris’s interests leaned toward the traditionally feminine. He obsessed, for instance, about interior decoration, like the linoleum in his office in Penn Yan. Regarding the new offices for one of his acquisitions, the Seneca Falls & Waterloo Gas Light Company, he wrote to the landlord, who happened to be Mynderse Van Cleef: “Of course, I would like to have a little something to say in regard to the color paper that goes on the room.” The matter of the wallpaper preoccupied Morris for nearly two months, and he finally agreed to bear half the cost of replastering the walls so the wallpaper he wanted for the office—which he himself would only visit, not use on a daily basis—would lay smoothly and look its best.11

  And what of Eben Treman? Despite his two marriages, was he also a closeted gay man or perhaps bisexual? As a young man, he seems to have had a more-than-usually troubled relationship with his father. Although L. L. Treman wanted Eben to become a businessman like himself, Eben was far more interested in music and the arts. In 1865, when Eben was fifteen, his father transferred him from an Episcopal boarding school in Vermont to the Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

  Eagleswood was founded in 1861 by two Quaker abolitionists, Marcus and Rebecca Spring. The idea of a Quaker military academy isn’t quite as odd as it sounds—Quaker meetings and their members during the Civil War became deeply divided over whether fighting the South to end slavery was a greater good than following the strict precept of their faith to shun participation in war.12 Rebecca Spring was a fervent supporter of the radical abolitionist John Brown. She ministered to him in prison before his execution for organizing and leading the abortive Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, which was intended to seize arms for a slave uprising. She even arranged to move the remains of two of Brown’s executed coconspirators to a cemetery near Eagleswood, where cadets training as officers for the Union Army could presumably venerate them.13

  Eben Treman cannot have found the school a congenial place. Eagleswood was modeled on West Point and enforced “strict military discipline” on all students, according to a course catalogue.14 Packing a teenage boy who loves music and the arts off to military school is rarely a sign of parental happiness. While no letters home from Treman about the school have surfaced, the record of another unhappy boy sent to the same school by an overbearing father leaves no doubt about the nature of Eagleswood or the motives of some fathers. Charles Tiffany, the renowned jeweler, considered his son, the future stained-glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, “careless, forgetful, and dreamy.” He was especially galled by Louis’s poor handwriting and spelling, and wanted Eagleswood to whip him into shape so he could eventually take over the family jewelry business.

  Louis Tiffany arrived at the school at age fourteen in the fall of 1862, three years prior to Treman. “Eagleswood was an infinite emotional distance from home,” wrote Michael J. Burlingham, one of the family biographers. “He [Tiffany] awoke to reveille, slept after taps, and spent the hours between 6:00 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. never far from misery. He suffered all the usual humiliations of the plebe; outranked, outflanked, and out of step, his every move was dictated by bugle blasts and flourishes of the snare drum.” Tiffany remained at Eagleswood for three years, graduating in 1865, and still told friends in middle age how much he hated the place.15

  Treman spent two years at Eagleswood. When the school closed for good at the end of the 1866–67 academic year,16 he returned to Vermont Episcopal for one more year and then was accepted into the first freshman class at Cornell University. He stayed for only the 1868–69 academic year. The reasons he dropped out are unknown. Eben went to work for his father but stayed active in the Chi Phi fraternity, where he met and befriended both Morris and Frank Thornburg, who was five years his junior. Thornburg spent two years at Cornell, leaving in 1876. He and Treman headed west to his hometown of Clinton, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, where they organized “Thornburg & Treman, lawyers and insurance.”17

  Both men took wives in 1884, and the partnership ended. Eben, who was thirty-four, married Eugenie MacMahan of nearby Lyons, Iowa, daughter of a former riverboat captain turned banker. After a honeymoon of several weeks, the couple settled back in Ithaca. She died in childbirth two years later and was buried with her newborn son in the Treman family plot in Ithaca City
Cemetery. Five years later, at age forty-one, Treman married Belle Norwood, adopted daughter of Miles L. Clinton, foreman of the Cornell University machine shop. They had no children, and after Treman died in 1915, Belle Treman departed Ithaca for New York City.

  It is unclear when Morris and Treman resumed their friendship. It could have been in 1884, when Treman returned to Ithaca with his first wife, or it could have been as late as 1889. In that year, J. Herbert Ballantine, nephew of the president of the Peter Ballantine & Sons Brewing Company of New Jersey, revived the Chi Phi fraternity’s Xi chapter at Cornell University, which had been inactive for ten years. Both men became active as alumni in the revived fraternity and the Chi Phi House Association, a sort of alumni auxiliary.

  As his father aged, Eben took over management of the gas and water companies. Whatever energies Treman devoted to business, his heart was in music and theater. He had a fine tenor voice and was choirmaster of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ithaca; president and patron of the Lyceum Theatre, an opera house in Ithaca that drew top talent and traveling theater productions; and president and founder of the famed Ithaca Band. He persuaded Patrick Conway—one of the band leaders immortalized by actor Robert Preston in his spoken introduction to “76 Trombones” in the film The Music Man—to come to Ithaca in 1895 to be the leader of his band. Treman’s library of music and books about music was said to be immense.

  It would not have been unusual at that time for Treman to lead a dual life. The closet was typical for nineteenth-century gay men, says Graham Robb, author of Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century. Marriages of convenience were common. “Nineteenth century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained. Most of them suffered, not from the cruel machinery of justice, but from the creeping sense of shame, the fear of losing friends, family and reputation, the painful incompatibility of religious belief and sexual desire, the social and mental isolation, and the strain of concealment. Loveless marriages caused more lasting grief than laws, and still do,” he wrote.18

  Whatever the nature of the relationship between Morris and Treman, there is no doubt that the bond between them was extraordinary and close and that one of the primary factors driving Morris to acquire the Ithaca Gas Light Company was so he could move his world to Ithaca.

  There were other members of the boys club. Charles H. Blood was the part-time district attorney of Tompkins County. Son of a well-to-do Ithaca haberdasher, banker, and New York National Guard general, he became a director of Ithaca Trust Company after his father’s death in 1898. Blood’s best friend was Charles E. Treman—they had been fraternity brothers at Cornell and served together on the board of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music—and he was nearly as close to Robert. A longtime bachelor, Blood lived with his mother and owned a club for bachelors called Umphville in a cottage along Cayuga Lake. Men had to be unmarried to belong, and young Cornell men were encouraged to visit. Many of the Umphville photographs in an album in the archives of the History Center of Tompkins County could have come straight from an edgy fashion shoot today. In 1905 at age thirty-nine, Blood married a young South Carolina woman who had been working as the assistant to the warden of Sage College, as the residence for women students at Cornell was known. He moved her into his mother’s house. A year into the marriage, Louise Blood ran home to South Carolina to her family and wouldn’t come back. Charles was discouraged from visiting. She eventually did return, however, and the couple continued to live with Blood’s mother until she died in 1912.19

  Finally there was Jared Treman Newman, a cousin of Rob and Charlie who was a lawyer and future mayor of Ithaca. He and Blood were real estate developers. They had their eyes on a tract of land adjoining Cornell University with nice views of Cayuga Lake. The development became known as Cornell Heights, and while it had nice views of water, it didn’t have much water for homebuyers to drink. They hoped to remedy that if they were successful in acquiring the land.

  L. L. Treman’s casket was flanked by sprays of flowers sent by community groups he supported, including the Ithaca Band and the Chi Phi fraternity, and by employees of Ithaca Gas Light and Ithaca Water Works. The white-robed choir of St. John’s Episcopal Church, which Eben directed on Sundays, sang “Abide With Me.” L. L. Treman was one of the parish’s more prominent members, serving as a vestryman for forty years. After the Episcopal priest read the service for the dead, the casket was carried out by the pallbearers, among them Treman’s old friend George E. Priest, copublisher of the Ithaca Daily Journal. They passed through the wisteria to a horse-drawn hearse. Eliza Treman and Eben boarded a carriage.

  The procession climbed slowly up the steep mile to Ithaca City Cemetery, led by fifty uniformed members of the St. Augustine Commandery, a Masonic organization to which L. L Treman belonged. Hundreds of people followed on foot. At the graveside, Treman’s granddaughter, grandnieces, and grandnephew scattered flowers on evergreen boughs that hid the dirt from the grave. The first quartet of the St. John’s choir sang, “Leave We Now Thy Servant Sleeping.” Then the mourners, among them Morris, drifted away.20 He wondered how best to approach the Treman family about selling Ithaca Gas Light Company.

  Chapter 3

  Conflict of Interest

  The situation of 1901 was one which turned men’s heads. The country seemed to have reached a pinnacle of prosperity from which nothing could dislodge it. The profits of our incorporated enterprises seemed to have no assignable limit. American capital pressed upon every avenue of investment. The most reckless and foolish speculation was apt to achieve success.

  —Alexander Dana Noyes,

  Forty Years of American Finance, 19091

  William T. Morris bided his time for nearly a year, but in the summer of 1901, more than a year after L. L. Treman’s death, he began serious negotiations with Eben Treman and his extended family about acquiring Ithaca Gas Light Company.

  The time was ripe. America had won its brief and boisterous war with Spain in 1898. President William McKinley, Republican and pro-business, sat in the White House. New York financier J. P. Morgan created U.S. Steel early in 1901, causing the Wall Street bulls to run wild and making Andrew Carnegie, who sold his steel company to Morgan, one of the wealthiest men in the world. And thanks to rising gold production around the world, notably in the Alaskan and Canadian Yukon region, the money supply had risen dramatically. Plenty of money was available to finance speculative deals. Even though the most frenzied period of postwar financial speculation was over by the summer of 1901, the underlying causes and general market excitement were still there.

  Morris had just concluded his part in a six-investor deal to create the Inter-Ocean Telephone and Telegraph Company, capitalized at $2 million, or more than $51 million in today’s money. The company planned to provide long-distance telephone service among more than three dozen cities, mainly in New York but also in Ohio and New Jersey.2 With that out of the way, Morris was ready to realize his Ithaca dream. He already owned manufactured-gas companies in Penn Yan, Hornellsville, Canisteo, Cortland, Seneca Falls, Waverly, and Newark in New York, as well as in Van Wert in Ohio and Sayre in Pennsylvania. Half had been acquired during the postwar boom. Investors were acquiring the small companies of the nineteenth century and merging and improving them for the new century.3 Bigger was better. Investors were particularly enamored of energy producers. American manufacturing seemed unstoppable, just as the Internet and the companies that profited from it seemed to promise endless earnings a century later.

  For Eben Treman, the decision to begin negotiations came down to family. What may have changed his mind was the final illness and death on July 14, 1901, of his aunt, Elizabeth Lovejoy Treman. She was the mother of Rob and Charlie Treman and the mother-in-law of Mynderse Van Cleef. Her death seems to have fanned fears in Treman about his own mortality. As he testified in 1906, Ithaca Gas Light Company and Ithaca Water Works were “good paying” companies, so there was no pressing need to unload t
hem. But as the only man in his immediate family, there would be no one to look after the investments for his mother and sisters if he were to die suddenly.4 Needless to say, it was an era of different expectations for women.

  Treman invited Morris to his private office for negotiations. The office was at the rear of the Ithaca Gas Light Company headquarters in a four-story brick building on the corner of Green and Cayuga Streets. Once it had been the site of the foundry for the neighboring Treman, King & Company hardware emporium.5 Eben was not simply negotiating on behalf of his mother, sisters, and himself, but also for the extended Treman family, many of whose members stood to gain or lose financially depending on how the deal turned out. His mother, Eliza A. Treman, and sisters, Jeannie M. Waterman and A. Louisa Treman, owned nearly as much of the gas company stock as he did and a slight majority of the water company stock. His cousin, Kate Bush, also owned some of the gas stock, the remainder of the legacy from her father, Leonard Treman. The children of Elias Treman, namely Rob and Charlie and their sister, Elizabeth Van Cleef, may also have owned stock in Ithaca Water Works. As did Kate Bush, they definitely owned water company bonds. Treman had little room to maneuver. Any deal he cut had to keep his family happy. Morris, his good friend, would get no special favors. If anything, Eben extracted top dollar. Perhaps all that military drill at Eagleswood had left him with some backbone.