by David DeKok
They had reason to believe, though, that their longtime complaints about the poor quality of the water would finally be addressed. Less than a week after the referendum, the Ithaca Daily News published an article—clearly based on an interview with Professor Williams—that discussed Ithaca Water Works’s plans for improving its system. “It is also announced that a sand filtration plant will be constructed for the purpose of purifying the water. The plans for the filter have not been completed, but it is said the much needed improvement will cost nearly $100,000,” the newspaper reported. Judge Finch’s comment that Ithaca Water Works would build a filtration plant if Common Council stopped its harassment seemed to be coming true. Finally Ithaca would have water purified with the same technology that had been keeping London’s water clean for more than seventy years.
But it was all a lie, perhaps not that day but quickly enough. Morris soon rejected filtration, and in doing so doomed many in Ithaca to death by typhoid. Anyone inclined to excuse his behavior as innocent ignorance should consider another incident from the winter of 1901–02 that goes to his cavalier attitude toward customers and the kind of businessman he was. Morris could not be trusted to do the right thing if it cost him more money than doing the wrong thing.
Pressed by Ithaca Common Council to do something now about the fire problem, Morris agreed to install additional badly needed hydrants. But instead of purchasing new ones, he paid $5,000 to the city of Canandaigua, New York, for seventy-three used hydrants as well as some old water mains that had to be dug out of the ground. Morris charged Ithaca Water Works $15 each for the hydrants, even though the man doing the repairs was charging him only $4. Similarly, he sold the used water mains to the company for $20 a ton, the price of new. Some of the mains that Ithaca Water Works couldn’t use were resold, but for only $11 a ton.28
In court testimony in 1905, Williams started to explain Morris’s decision not to build the filtration plant but was brought up short by objections. We know not from which side, but it is not hard to imagine. Nor is it difficult to guess why Morris did not want to build a filtration plant. Like the businessmen of Allen Hazen’s acquaintance, he clearly saw it as a needless expense, an investment that would bring no return on equity. This was the classic rationale of polluters in any age and is why government laws and regulations to control pollution are necessary.
And even if he had wanted to build the filtration plant for Ithaca, Morris was out of money. He had paid the Treman family too much for the water company, and now had to build a ninety-foot dam that would cost him an estimated $150,000, or about $3.8 million in present value. Something had to give, and the first expense to be discarded was the $100,000 filtration plant.29
None of this was known at the time. Williams did not go public with his concerns—his first loyalty was to Morris, his client—but he may have complained privately to some of his students. One of them, Herbert E. Fraleigh, wrote a concluding paragraph to his June 1902 thesis on municipal water supplies that seemed out of step with the rest of the text, almost an editorial comment. “In past years the design and control of the public water supplies has, in very many instances, been left to politicians and business men with no technical training or skill,” Fraleigh wrote. “But, with the enormous and complicated systems of the present, the services of a skilled engineer are indispensable.” Williams could only wish.30
On May 2, 1902, Morris and Sheppard escorted Laura Hosie Treman, wife of Rob Treman, and Mary Bott Treman, wife of Charlie, to a ceremony honoring the eminent Scottish physicist Sir William Thomson, a.k.a., Lord Kelvin, in the Armory on the Cornell campus. Sheppard found the ceremony “an interesting occasion.” President Schurman welcomed the white-bearded scientist to the platform, where several members of the Board of Trustees, including Rob Treman and Mynderse Van Cleef, were seated. Charlie Treman, not to be elected to the board for another month, was elsewhere, probably chaperoning the Ithaca Conservatory of Music orchestra, which performed at the ceremony. He was president of the board of that school.
Lord Kelvin was renowned for his work in electricity and thermodynamics and had been a scientific adviser to the corporation that laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866. Schurman and members of the Cornell faculty laid on the praise, basking in the glory the eminent scientist had bestowed upon the university and its science programs by agreeing to visit. The dream of Ezra Cornell and Andrew D. White had been for a university where science was cherished and nurtured as much as the classics, and there was no doubt that dream had been fulfilled. Indeed, without the first-rate scientists on the Cornell faculty, the people of Ithaca would have fared even worse than they did in the coming epidemic.
As he left the building, Lord Kelvin was treated to the rousing Cornell Yell from students lucky enough to get inside to hear him, probably a far more excited response than he would receive that August, when he was among the small group of notables receiving honors on the occasion of the coronation of King Edward VII. They had sacrificed a pleasant spring afternoon for the opportunity to see and hear a hero of world science. Their cry, Cornell! I yell! yell yell! Cornell! shook the rafters of the Armory.31 The students were bright, enthusiastic, and full of life. One of them, junior Elsie Hirsch, even cut out Lord Kelvin’s picture from a local newspaper and pasted it into her Cornell scrapbook. They were typical college students of their era—and the unlikeliest of victims.32
Chapter 6
Lives of the Students
Nearly everyone arrived at Cornell University by train in 1902. Students who traveled via New York City could choose between the Lehigh Valley or the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western. Both railroads chugged west through the Pocono Mountains and anthracite coal country of Pennsylvania before turning north to Owego, New York, in the case of the DL&W, or the border town of Sayre, Pennsylvania, a major hub for the Lehigh Valley. At either location, Ithaca-bound students changed to one of the spur lines on which Ezra Cornell had spent the remainder of his Western Union fortune in the early 1870s. The line from Owego passed through the poetic towns of Catatonk, Candor, Willseyville, and Caroline before arriving in Ithaca, inspiring a later Cornell student, the writer E. B. White, to admit, “There is no use minimizing the magic of this particular journey.”1
Of the 3,300 students who made the journey to Cornell in that last year before the typhoid epidemic, many were sons or daughters of middle- or even working-class parents, the first in their families to attend college. Among these were Floyd L. Carlisle, son of a sewing machine factory mechanic and politician from Watertown, New York.2 He was junior class president and a member of the debate team. Oliver G. Shumard, the bright, overachieving son of a farmer in Bethany, Missouri, came to Cornell for graduate study in philosophy. He had won a $300 scholarship to Cornell upon graduation with honors from the University of Missouri, where he was senior class president.3
The Clark family—Zella Marie and Annie Sophia and their brothers, John Artemas and Judson—were devout Baptists who, like President Jacob Gould Schurman, hailed from Prince Edward Island. Their father was a farmer near Bay View on the island’s beautiful north shore, and they lived near and doubtless knew the young schoolteacher Lucy Maud Montgomery of Cavendish, who wrote Anne of Green Gables in 1908. The two sisters and John Artemas were allowed to share an apartment in a university-owned building at 603 E. Seneca St.; Judson, who was married and an assistant professor of forestry at Cornell, lived across the street with his wife. Zella was here for premed studies and intended to become a physician and medical missionary.4
George A. Wessman had grown up in poverty in New York City after his father died at a young age. He was at Cornell studying mechanical engineering on a four-year Pulitzer Scholarship, awarded by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer to a dozen or so New York City boys each year who did well on a competitive exam. Skeptics, notably U.S. Senator Chauncey Depew (R-NY), the former president of the New York Central Railroad, called Pulitzer a fool, pro
claiming that poor boys couldn’t be turned into scholars and would end up as paupers on the street. Pulitzer proved him wrong. Wessman was now a senior at Cornell and on track for a good job in a large engineering firm. His mother and siblings had finally been able to move out of the city to suburban Passaic, New Jersey.5
Ezra Cornell had this kind of student in mind when he founded the university in 1868. The university awarded a full merit scholarship to a deserving student in each of New York’s legislative districts. James Francis McEvoy, son of a widowed mother with five other children, won from Wyoming County in 1901. He was now an active debater at Cornell, well known to Duncan Campbell Lee, the oratory professor and publisher of the Ithaca Daily News. George Hill of Gouverneur, New York, also had parents of modest means and had likewise won the Cornell scholarship. Like McEvoy, he was active in debate. Addison P. Lord, raised in an orphanage—the Masonic Home in Utica—was another winner. For students like these, four years in Ithaca was the apex of their dreams.
Not that the sons and daughters of the better-off families of the Gilded Age ignored Cornell. Arthur Garfield Dove, named (in reverse order) for the Republican presidential ticket of 1880, was the son of a prominent builder and brick maker in Geneva, New York. He arrived at Cornell after two years at Hobart College, also in Geneva, mainly because his father wanted him to study law. Instead, Dove took art courses. He drew illustrations for the Cornellian, the university yearbook, that bore scant resemblance to the style he developed a few years beyond the university. He traveled to Paris late in the decade, was influenced by the Fauvists, and was transformed. Around 1909, he became a protégé of photographer and art gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and has good claim to be the first American modernist painter, the first to embrace abstract, nonrepresentational art.6
Graham B. Wood arrived at Cornell in the fall of 1902 to study civil engineering, accompanied by his good friend, Charles Worthington Nichols Jr. Both boys grew up in Camden, New Jersey, at a time when that city was still a fine place to live. Wood was the only son of a Philadelphia advertising executive who had done well for himself. The father, Jarvis A. Wood, rose from modest origins. He arrived in Philadelphia from New York at age twenty-two in 1876 to attend the Centennial Exposition and decided to stay. In 1888, Wood was hired by N. W. Ayer & Son, a pioneering advertising agency in downtown Philadelphia, and moved up to be head of the copy department and assistant to F. W. Ayer, the founder’s son. Executives and coworkers liked him, calling him “genial, friendly, and gifted with a ready flow of words.” They paid tribute to his “tact and fatherly manner.” He made partner in 1898—by then Ayer was the largest ad agency in America—and could afford to send Graham to Cornell when he came of age in 1902. It was a point of pride for him. Wood did not consider himself a rich man and scrimped on other expenses to pay the tuition, room, and board bills. He was pleased that his son was keeping his part of the bargain by holding down his living costs and studying hard.7
Edna Huestis, whose father owned a shirt and collar factory in Troy, New York, was a party girl with a weakness for chocolate sundaes—invented in Ithaca at the Platt & Colt Pharmacy in 1892. But she was also a talented artist, drew illustrations for the Cornellian, and would become a leading American miniature painter.8
Andrew White Newberry seemed twice privileged. His father was Spencer B. Newberry, a former Cornell chemistry professor who became a prominent cement manufacturer in Sandusky, Ohio. That was no small matter. Spencer Newberry helped to break the European stranglehold on the engineering-quality cement market, producing Portland cement as good as that imported from Germany. Young Andrew was also the grandson of Andrew Dickson White, cofounder of Cornell University and its first president. He was now the U.S. ambassador to Germany. His mother, Clara, was White’s only daughter, and his uncle, Frederick, had been the ambassador’s only son.
Yet it was a profoundly troubled family. Andrew Newberry spent several weeks during the summer of 1901, his last before entering Cornell, with his grandfather in Berlin while his parents went through an ugly, very public divorce. His father had been carrying on an affair with Nellie Francis, his pretty stenographer. In the midst of this, Frederick White shot himself to death in the depths of depression said to have been brought on by chronic health problems he had suffered since nearly dying of typhoid while a student at Columbia Law School in 1883. Transatlantic travel being what it was in 1901, Ambassador White did not attend the funeral and was not able to return to settle his son’s affairs until the fall.9
Then there were the Vonneguts of Indianapolis, Walter, ’04, Anton, ’05, and Arthur, ’06. Vonnegut Hardware Company was as much an institution in Indianapolis as Treman, King & Company was in Ithaca. Apart from Anton, who was elected junior class president in the fall of 1903, we know very little about them. But their grandnephew, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who came from the architecture side of the family, followed them to Cornell in 1940 before joining the Army in 1943. In 1945, as a young prisoner-of-war in Germany, he set out from the ruins of fire-bombed Dresden on a road that led to literary immortality.10
Perhaps the most notorious of the upper-class students of that era were Richard Croker Jr. and his brother Herbert, sons of the fabulously wealthy Tammany Hall political boss Richard Croker Sr. The Croker brothers were legendary; one oft-repeated story was that they brought a stable of horses, and Richard Jr., his Westminster champion bulldogs, to Ithaca to keep themselves amused during their college days. One of the dogs, Rodney Stone, was valued at $5,000 and the other at $4,000, more than ten times the average annual salary of a workingman at the time. The brothers quit Cornell in the fall of 1901, supposedly weary of being hounded by the press and pestered by country folk who wanted to see the dogs. In truth, their father suffered a mortal blow in 1901 when the incumbent Tammany mayor of New York, Robert A. Van Wyck, lost to the reform candidate Seth Low, former president of Columbia University. Professor Duncan Campbell Lee’s denunciation of the Ice Trust at the 1900 Democratic State Convention in Saratoga Springs helped bring down the Tammany machine.
The Croker boys were on a course to somewhere else. In February 1903, at a time when his former Cornell classmates were dying of typhoid, Richard suffered the humiliation of seeing Rodney Stone lose first place in the bulldog category at Westminster to Chibiabos, a bulldog owned by Harry Billings. Four years later, Herbert was found dead on a train, victim of an opium and alcohol overdose. Richard spent much of the rest of his life battling his remaining siblings over their father’s estate after he died in exile in Ireland, the land of his birth, in 1922.11
No matter if you were a student or townie in Ithaca, Cornell University was like a shining city on the hill, looking out over the world. It was literally true. With few exceptions, no matter where you lived in Ithaca, you looked upward to Cornell and climbed up Buffalo or other steep streets, or one of the various footpaths, to get to classes if you could not afford the streetcar. Young men and women arriving for their freshman year in September were met at the station by students in white felt hats bearing a red “S,” meaning they worked for the Student Agencies. The new arrivals were bundled into carriages and driven around to the approximately twenty-five student rooming houses on East Hill. Cornell had but two dormitories in 1902, housing about 235 women students of Sage College, which despite its name was a dormitory for women students at Cornell, not a separate, degree-granting institution like the position Radcliffe once occupied in the orbit of Harvard. Not all the women students could be accommodated in Sage. The remaining 165 or so women and all of the men lived and ate off campus in rooming houses or one of twenty-four fraternities that had their own houses. Hendrik Van Loon of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, arrived in Ithaca on the night train in the summer of 1902. He recalled being driven by carriage up to the Cornell campus, where he marveled at the starry sky and students burning the midnight oil in the brightly lit library under the clock tower.12
Most students lived on East Hill, altho
ugh a few found rooms in the first two blocks of the “Flats,” as the non-hilly part of Ithaca bordering Cayuga Lake, including the downtown, was known. The housing situation would have warmed the heart of a free marketeer. Morris Bishop, in his history of Cornell University, recalled how landladies boasted of the particular comforts of their boardinghouses, such as bathrooms on every floor or steam radiators, when he made the carriage tour that day he first arrived in Ithaca. The university made no attempt to regulate or certify boardinghouses or the food or water they served. It was all up to the student, who had little but first impressions on which to base a decision.
Without the imposed equality of the dormitory and dining hall, the gap between rich and poor students at Cornell was evident. A survey taken during the 1896–97 school year, and cited by Bishop, found that 16.8 percent of male students paid a dollar or less per week for their rooms, the author commenting that these “were surely very wretched, cold and bare.” At the other end of the scale were the sumptuous fraternities for upper-class students, which resembled clubs for wealthy men in New York and other large cities. Chi Psi’s quarters in the mansion built for Jennie McGraw Fiske were the best, at least until the Alpha Delta Phi lodge opened in 1903. Poor students got by on a dollar or less per week for food, while the upper crust ate well at $4.50 per week, according to the 1896–97 survey. Those same poor students might be their waiters. President Jacob Gould Schurman longed for more democratic treatment of all students and pushed for building dormitories—only about a third of male students joined fraternities—but the Board of Trustees would not agree.13
Cornell University, despite its location atop East Hill, could not help but have deeply entwined relationships with the city of Ithaca. The university was a major part of the Ithaca economy, employing local residents as both professors and staff and purchasing goods and services. Students acquired room and board from local landlords and bought much of their clothing in downtown Ithaca. Berry wrote that “it took a score of merchant tailors to provide the distinctive garments of Cornell at the turn of the century.” Bishop wrote that students tended to be well-dressed in class, with males in tailored jackets, stand-up collars, and cravats, and women in the wide hats of the day and gloves.14