Epidemic
Page 7
Seeking to dampen opposition to the Philippine annexation, McKinley decided to appoint a fact-finding commission to go to the islands, which were so far away that getting to Manila required a three-week sea voyage from California. Secretary of State John Hay summoned President Schurman of Cornell to a meeting with McKinley in January 1899. Carnegie had become a member of the Cornell Board of Trustees in 1890, two years before Schurman became president, so they knew each other well and were on the same page when it came to the Philippines. Schurman had used his speech to students at the start of the 1898–99 school year to condemn the war. Nevertheless, McKinley asked him to lead a Philippine study commission that would examine every aspect of life in the islands. When Schurman protested that the Philippines should be returned to Spain in exchange for U.S. Navy bases in the islands, McKinley hastened to assure him that he himself had not really wanted to keep the islands but had found no alternative.16
Leaving the White House, Schurman sent a telegram to a young Cornell graduate he knew well, Frank E. Gannett, asking him to come along to the Philippines as his personal secretary. Gannett would found a media empire that today includes the national newspaper USA Today. But in 1899, he was just a poor, striving young reporter.
Son of a failed innkeeper, Gannett moved with his family from town to town in upstate New York before winning a scholarship to Cornell and enrolling in the fall of 1894. From the start, he wanted to be a journalist. He met and impressed the notoriously distant Schurman, who opened up to him and became a mentor, if also an imperious father figure. Rarely lacking an opinion on matters academic, Schurman sat Gannett down and told him to take more Greek and Latin, more literature, more history, and plenty of science if he wanted to be a journalist. And he should also study political science, economics, law, statistics, and public speaking.17 Gannett apparently followed that advice. To master the craft of journalism, he wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun and then became a reporter for the Ithaca Daily Journal. Summers, he worked for the Syracuse Herald. After graduating in 1898, Gannett continued reporting for the Journal, worked as a stringer for other newspapers, and contemplated a master’s degree. But in early January 1899, he set all that aside after receiving the telegram from Schurman asking him to work for the Philippine Commission as his private secretary.
Schurman and Gannett traveled through the Philippines and even made a side trip to the island of Borneo, today divided between Malaysia and Indonesia, to compare British and Dutch colonial rule. Ever the demanding mentor, Schurman instructed Gannett on what to do in just about every waking hour of every day. Schurman returned to America in time for the start of the fall term at Cornell, leaving Gannett in Manila in charge of the commission’s office there.
Early in 1900, he cabled Gannett and directed him to return home. Gannett sailed back by way of the Suez Canal and Paris, where he received another cable from Schurman informing him that President McKinley had appointed a Second Philippine Commission. This one was headed by Judge William Howard Taft, who had been appointed governor-general of the Philippines. Taft wanted Gannett to return to Manila in the same job as he had before. Gannett, unsure of what to do, continued on to Ithaca, where Schurman, as always ready with advice, told him that remaining a civil servant was not in his best interests. He should find a job at a newspaper if he hoped to be a journalist. Gannett complied but added the episode to a growing store of resentments against his mentor.18
The story Gannett told his biographer was that, after he left the telegraph office in Ithaca, where he had cabled Taft to decline the offer, he started up the hill toward campus. He planned to spend the night in a friend’s room.19 Almost immediately, he ran into Professor Lee on the street. Duke Lee was looking for a managing editor for his newly acquired newspaper. Gannett, whom he knew from his work for the Ithaca Daily Journal to be an “enterprising, reliable reporter of news,” was Lee’s first choice for the job. They talked on the sidewalk, and Lee persuaded him to take the job. “I shall write the editorials,” Lee supposedly said. “I have employed a reporter. But I need a city editor to boss the reporter. What about it?” They were not that far apart in age. Lee was thirty and Gannett just twenty-three, but Lee seemed much older, as mature and successful men often do.
He was pleased with Gannett, whose title on the masthead was actually managing editor, almost from the start. The Daily News expanded from a four-page newspaper into an eight-page edition that was “newsy,” in journalistic parlance. Circulation nearly doubled in the first year of his tenure, from 900 to 1,884, and reached 2,929 by the beginning of 1902, exceeding that of the rival Ithaca Daily Journal. “Mr. Gannett has been the largest factor,” Lee wrote in a job reference for him in 1903. “He has been the active head of the City Department and has written nearly all the editorials. He has proved himself to be the best newspaper man the city has had. His English is particularly strong and racy [lively]. He can weigh news and determine its value more quickly and with better judgment than any young man I know. He moves among men; is a member of F. and A.M. [the Masons] and B.P.O.E. [the Elks] and is socially popular. He is also absolutely temperate, regular, and reliable.”20
Duke Lee had one foot in the world of upstart journalism and the other in the Ithaca establishment. And he was handsome. The New York Tribune described him as five feet, ten inches tall, weighing about 165 pounds, with dark-brown wavy hair and blue eyes. He married Elizabeth Williams, whose aunt was married to Jared Treman Newman, a member of the boys club surrounding Morris. His father-in-law was George R. Williams, the wealthy president of First National Bank of Ithaca and a member since 1883 of the Cornell University Board of Trustees. The wedding took place on July 8, 1899, in the ornate and Gothic Sage Chapel on the Cornell campus. The couple lived in a house in the heart of campus at 23 East Ave., near the chapel, and he found ways to balance his teaching, newspaper work, and family. Lee did much of his editorial work between five and eight o’clock in the morning before heading back uphill to teach his classes.21
He was a Democrat and made no bones about it, just as the publishers of the Ithaca Daily Journal were unabashed Republicans. Charles M. Benjamin was the Tompkins County treasurer and George E. Priest chairman of the state Board of Tax Commissioners. Neither job was available to someone who was not popular with the party in power. Nor was it likely Lee could have been president of the William Jennings Bryan Club in Tompkins County if he only stood back and commented editorially. We cringe today at the idea of newspaper publishers directly involved in politics, and rightfully so, but at least in Lee’s day they were open in their support of one party or the other. You rarely had to guess whom they supported by analyzing the sort of news they reported or suppressed. And when they did participate in politics, no one batted an eye. If you didn’t like their politics, there was often as not a newspaper to buy that supported the party you liked. Unless of course there wasn’t.
Lee caused a sensation on September 11, 1900, when he introduced a resolution at the New York State Democratic Convention in Saratoga Springs denouncing the Ice Trust.22 It was a perfect example of his idealism and public spirit. The Ice Trust had raised prices beyond what poor New Yorkers could pay, and the threat of children dying from spoiled food was real. Charles W. Morse, president of the American Ice Company, achieved monopoly control of the market in New York City beginning in April 1899. These were not the bags of ice cubes we purchase today at gas stations and convenience stores, but rather large blocks of ice cut in the winter from the Hudson River around Manhattan or as far away as Maine. The ice was stored in icehouses and delivered daily by icemen to New York apartments for placement in iceboxes to cool perishable food. Ice was a critical public health commodity. Deny it, or price it beyond the reach of the poor, and doctors could almost chart the food poisoning and infant mortality that would occur as milk warmed and spoiled.23
Morse and his Ice Trust were able to maintain their monopoly through a corrupt partnership with Richard Croker
’s Tammany Hall Democratic organization, which controlled New York City government. City employees helped eliminate Morse’s few remaining competitors by revoking their docking privileges on the Hudson or wrecking their ice. Morse finally took advantage of his monopoly in April 1900, when he remorselessly doubled the price of ice, cut deliveries from daily to three times a week, and eliminated the nickel and dime chunks that were more affordable to the poor. Public outrage erupted, but with no government regulation of the ice industry, little could be done. Then, in June, 1900, a list emerged of stockholders in the American Ice Company, and the public was shocked to learn that the mayor of New York was a stockholder, as were several city judges, one of Boss Croker’s top deputies, and the two city dock commissioners who held the power of life and death over competing ice companies.24
Lee waved a piece of paper in his hand and told the state convention that he had a resolution he would like to have read and referred to committee, not saying what it contained. A messenger brought it to the clerk, who started to read it and then stopped. He looked nervously at the party chairman, who shook his head. The resolution was never read and never adopted either, but Lee gave copies to the press and it made front page news. He had written:
Resolved: that we especially condemn and denounce that illegal corporate combination known as the Ice Trust, which particularly oppresses the poor and arbitrarily raises the prices for one of the necessities of life, and we demand that the Republican attorney general of this state proceed with diligence for the legal destruction of said trust.25
Lee’s bravery was not so much in criticizing the Ice Trust, which many had done, but in bearding the beast in its lair, daring to publicly humiliate Croker and his Tammany organization at their very own state convention. His bravery contributed to Tammany mayor Robert Van Wyck’s defeat for reelection as mayor of New York in November 1901. Van Wyck lost to former Columbia University president Seth Low, who ran on the Republican/Citizen Action ticket. Boss Croker resigned as Tammany chairman in the wake of the defeat.26
But mainly Lee crusaded on local Ithaca issues, especially water. He wanted good clean water to drink and a plentiful supply for fighting fires in the hill neighborhoods. When Lee went on sabbatical to England, Gannett carried on the crusade in the publisher’s absence.
Chapter 5
The Dam
Emile M. Chamot had been concerned about Ithaca’s water almost since his first days as a student in the chemistry laboratories of Cornell University. He was thirty-three years old, short, quiet, and friendly. In a photo from the period, Chamot sported a thick mustache, a tweed jacket and a pince-nez, looking a bit callow yet still professorial. He did not look like an activist, but a fire to save the city from a health catastrophe burned within him.
Chamot graduated from Cornell in 1891 and stayed to finish his PhD in 1897. Then he went to Europe for a year to polish his education, as many American scholars did in the late nineteenth century. After studies in France and the Netherlands, he returned as an assistant professor on the Cornell chemistry faculty and became a recognized expert in use of the microscope, which he employed for chemical analysis and for studying the “little beasties” in Ithaca’s drinking water. That was how the great Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek referred to bacteria after observing them for the first time in the seventeenth century. Like Duncan Campbell Lee, Chamot yearned to make an impact outside academia. In 1899, he proved that most wallpaper sold in America contained dangerous levels of arsenic. In 1902, his examination of organs from an exhumed corpse helped the Syracuse police convict a seventeen-year-old girl of murdering her late husband’s brother with strychnine after he spurned her advances.
But his passion was safe drinking water. Chamot followed the testing protocols of the American Public Health Association, drawn up by a committee of leading American and Canadian bacteriologists, including Dr. Veranus A. Moore of Cornell University, between 1894 and 1897 in an effort to bring order to a chaotic science. The protocols covered all aspects of water testing, from turbidity to the biological, and were as specific as requiring that glass stoppers rather than corks be used on sterilized water-sample collection bottles.1 Chamot mapped the location of private wells in Ithaca, tested well and creek water samples in his laboratory in Morse Hall, and worried that the city was heading toward disaster.2
Students in each new freshman class at Cornell became ill with intestinal disturbances from drinking the water during their first months in Ithaca, seemingly no matter which of four sources it came from.3 If they drank water from a tap or fountain at the university, it came from Fall Creek, which ran through campus. Downtown, or in their boardinghouses, it was either Ithaca Water Works water, coming from Six Mile Creek or Buttermilk Creek, or from a private well. Illnesses were often blamed on “a change of water.” This was an old folk belief, heard even today, that water drunk in a different place can make you ill merely by having different mineral content from the water you are used to. In fact, Chamot said, it was polluted water that made freshmen rush to the lavatory with diarrhea or nausea.
The Ithaca Water Works deal both worried and intrigued him. Would William T. Morris do what needed to be done? After years of private well testing, continuing work begun by the Cornell chemistry department in 1880, Chamot was convinced that the wells were an abomination and that the Treman-owned water company provided “far superior” water. Sometimes it was a little better, sometimes a lot. But so far, the city had made no move to condemn the wells and require all residents to be customers of Ithaca Water Works. For one thing, the system did not reach all Ithaca homes, and even hooking up everyone in reach of the present mains might overwhelm the system. Profound improvements were needed, and Chamot had reason to hope they were coming. A company source told the Ithaca Daily News on November 16, 1901, that Morris was planning “many elaborate improvements” to provide purer water and more water pressure, especially on East Hill.
Chamot decided it was now or never, so he made plans to address the November 26 meeting of the Ithaca Board of Health. Water was on everyone’s mind. The Board of Health, which had been given new powers when the state legislature reformed the state sanitary code that summer, was concerned about a few recent cases of typhoid and whether contaminated residential wells might be to blame. In October, the board ordered an end to the use of outhouses in a major portion of the city by May 1, 1902, which meant those homes that had them would need to connect to the public sewer lines running under their streets. It also asked the Board of Sewer Commissioners to extend sewer lines to more of the city. Yet the city had no sewage treatment plant and ultimately discharged untreated wastes into Cayuga Lake, supposedly “a safe distance” from Ithaca. There was talk of building a second discharge pipe once the rest of the city was connected to the system.4
Unlike some in academia, Chamot had little difficulty talking at a level average people could understand. An account in the Ithaca Daily News reported that he held the rapt attention of the Board of Heath and a score of citizens for nearly two and a half hours while keeping his lecture mostly free of technical and scientific jargon. That was a stamp of approval from the reporter who wrote the story. Reporters, even well-educated ones, rarely had science degrees then or now. At the end of the night, the board chairman commended Chamot “for the very entertaining evening,” even though what he had to say was doubtless unpleasant to hear.
Chamot told the board that all wells in Ithaca less than one hundred feet deep ought to be condemned because nearly all of them were contaminated with sewage from homes not connected to the public system. Those in the East Hill neighborhoods, where many students lived, tended to be the worst. Effluent from toilets and latrines, instead of sinking deep into the ground, tended to flow downhill beneath the surface until it entered and polluted somebody’s well, the Daily News reported. A home owner would sometimes insist his well was in fine condition, arguing that his family had drunk the water without inci
dent for forty years. That might well be, Chamot said, but only because they gradually became immune to the bacteria. Newly arrived Cornell freshmen did not have that immunity.
When he spoke of bacteria and disease, Chamot was referring to E. coli bacteria originating in the intestines of humans and animals. Some strains are harmless, but others can cause nasty intestinal upsets of the type experienced by travelers in Third World countries. Victims without access to antibiotics are typically prostrate for two or three days with intense stomach pain, weakness, and diarrhea. That is not to minimize this sort of ailment in any way, but only rarely does it kill otherwise healthy young adults, as typhoid could and did in 1901. Despite the Board of Health’s recent concern, Ithaca had relatively few typhoid cases, just a handful each year, and some of those may well have been misdiagnosed given the varying skills of local physicians.5 Chamot worried about typhoid being brought to Ithaca from elsewhere. What would happen, he wondered aloud, if an epidemic broke out in a distant farming community along Six Mile Creek, the main source of the drinking water provided by Ithaca Water Works?