by David DeKok
Morris also hired a real physician, Dr. John B. Hawes, to debunk the idea that Six Mile Creek water was responsible for the epidemic and to reassure the populace that the search for the real killer continued. Hawes, an Ithaca physician who also claimed to be able to cure diabetes by running electric current along a patient’s spine, asserted that the typhoid epidemic sprang from unsanitary conditions in Ithaca remaining from a flood in December 1901. He made that claim even though, as a letter writer to the Ithaca Daily News soon pointed out, people had become ill with typhoid and died in a particular city neighborhood untouched by the flood.
Hawes’s claim that the typhoid arose from dirt and filth derived from the “miasma” theory of disease, already discredited by many physicians in 1903 but still tenaciously clung to by others and easy for the public to misunderstand. In a letter to the Daily Journal, Hawes asserted there was no proof that typhoid germs were in the city water and suggested that Ithaca’s epidemic was part of “a great wave of typhoid extending through a large section of Eastern states.” Carried on the wind, perhaps? He offered no proof of that hypothesis but then again didn’t need to. Hawes was hiding behind a weakness of 1903 science, namely that it was very difficult to prove a water sample contained typhoid germs, even if it obviously did, judging by the awful results of drinking it. It was not so hard to find typhoid in blood, and Dr. Veranus A. Moore already had through the Widal Reaction, but water was different.5
Dr. James Law of the Cornell Veterinary College, a Scot who was one of the professors President Andrew D. White recruited in Europe early in the university’s history, tried to debunk the idea that “filth,” which typically meant horse droppings, or flood mud in the streets was responsible for the typhoid. Horse manure in the streets was a serious public health problem for every American city and town in the pre-automobile years of the early twentieth century, and while the manure from thousands of horses could make life unpleasant and spread a number of diseases, typhoid was not one of them.6 Yet it was hard to convince the public of that, conditioned by the miasma theorists for years to believe otherwise.
The discovery of a dead horse near Six Mile Creek by William Couch, who had two children suffering at home with typhoid, caused enormous concern. It was easy to believe, commonsensical really, that diseases like typhoid sprang from the foul decay of horses or their droppings or from odiferous mud carried in by a freshet. Weren’t those nasty and foul-smelling things? That it was simply not true was yet a radical notion in 1903, as radical as some in our own century find the notion of global warming to be on days when the mercury plunges and the snow piles against the door. Certain parts of science are easy to slander. The Ithaca Board of Health believed Morris was willing to spend $10,000 to prove the epidemic was not caused by the water, and that made them angry and nervous.7
Ithaca Water Works even planted a false story in the Ithaca Daily Journal as part of its disinformation effort. The newspaper reported on February 23 that inspector Conover had found an active typhoid case along Six Mile Creek above the water company’s intake pipe. Worse, the patient’s outhouse stood directly along the creek and emptied directly into it. Case closed. The next day, the Ithaca Daily News called the story “a deliberate falsification,” noting that Conover had not yet patrolled Six Mile Creek for active typhoid cases and so had made no report to the Board of Health. According to the Daily News, the Daily Journal reporter was told the story was false, yet wrote it anyway. The Ithaca Daily Journal published a retraction the next day, saying it had now learned from the Health Department that, apart from having a somewhat messy house, the patient, a woman, was suffering from nothing more than a bad cold. A finger was pointed at Ithaca Water Works, which the Daily Journal said had first reported the supposed typhoid case to the Health Department.8
Morris and Summers continued to push “filth in the city” as their explanation for the typhoid epidemic. Margaret Sheehy of 110 Osmun Place found that out when she went to the water company office at Green and Cayuga Streets to pay her bill. Ithaca Water Works had continued to send out advance billings for water during the epidemic, including to people like Edwin Besemer, who had already died of typhoid.9 She spotted Summers and protested having to pay in advance for water that was unfit to drink. He told her the water was perfectly safe to drink without boiling, that no one had been able to find any germs in it, and that he and his family drank it unboiled in their own home.
Sheehy stormed out in a fury and went to the Board of Health to swear out an affidavit. Summers was hauled before an emergency meeting of the board, where he denied telling Sheehy that the city water was pure or that he and his family drank it unboiled, then admitted he might have said so in “a joking manner.” The board was not amused, especially when Summers insisted that while people might assume the water was contaminated with typhoid, no one had proven it. At least partly in response to the incident, the Board of Health passed an ordinance making it illegal to drink unboiled city water or serve it to others. Violations carried a stiff (for 1903) $50 fine or fifty days in jail.10
The kicker was that Summers’s own son, Richard, lay ill with typhoid in the family home at 122 W. Buffalo St. Perhaps it was corporate policy for him to tell Mrs. Sheehy that he and his family drank the water unboiled. If his family ever truly did that, we can assume or at least hope that they stopped after their son contracted typhoid. Richard Summers was not the only child or close relative of someone in Morris’s inner circle to fall ill during the epidemic. Robert H. Treman’s four-year-old son, Allen, was ill with typhoid. Charles E. Treman, Rob’s brother, fled Ithaca for Europe when the epidemic took hold and did not return until it was over. Presumably his wife, Mary, and two-year-old son, Arthur, went with him. Another typhoid patient was Louisa M. Waterman, fifteen-year-old niece of Ebenezer M. Treman. Her uncle had arranged the sale of Ithaca Water Works to Morris at a price that was good for the Treman family but bad for Ithaca. Louisa lived with her mother, Jeannie Treman Waterman, and grandmother, Eliza Treman, in the latter’s mansion at 210 N. Geneva St. Eliza was the widow of Lafayette L. Treman, whose death in 1900 was the first step on the road to the epidemic. All three children recovered. Thomas W. Summers would not endure the exquisite agony of having a son die young of disease until 1923, when Richard, then twenty-eight, contracted polio on a camping trip in Maryland and died a few days later.11
Morris tried to stay in the shadows during the epidemic and operate through Summers, his trusted superintendent. His utility business took some hard knocks apart from the epidemic. Summers was injured and temporarily sidelined in a bizarre accident that occurred while he was standing on the train platform in Canastota, New York, waiting for his Ithaca connection. A large pouch of mail was thrown from a passing train and struck Summers in the head, knocking him to the ground and leaving him with cuts on his face and swollen eyes. Three days later, an explosion rocked Morris’s Hornellsville Gas Light Company in Hornellsville, New York. One worker was seriously injured. But these were only temporary distractions. There was no sense that Morris harbored guilt or remorse over what he had done or that he saw any need to spend his own funds, which were depleted in any case, to help Ithaca recover. The typhoid epidemic, like Summers’s accident or the Hornellsville explosion, was an inconvenience. It is probably safe to say that Morris wanted it all to go away so he could have his life back because that was the course he seemed to follow.12
President Jacob Gould Schurman, that remaining king of Ithaca, found himself in a dilemma that was Homeric in its scope and complexity. A typhoid epidemic was killing his students. The students still on campus (nearly a third, about a thousand, had fled) were increasingly restive and angry, demanding remedies, such as free artesian water delivered to their boardinghouses, that his Board of Trustees and especially the governing Executive Committee were not willing to provide. The Executive Committee was dominated by friends of Morris and in 1901 had arranged for Cornell University to invest $100,000 in Ithaca
Water Works bonds so their friend could buy the water company. They showed no signs of backing away from him. And what about the fate of the university itself? Each student death was publicized around the country, and Ithaca was portrayed as a pestilential hellhole. Would any parent ever again agree to send his son or daughter to Cornell?
Schurman needed someone to make an intelligent investigation of how the epidemic came to be if he was to craft a way out of this mess. He wanted to know the present condition of the campus water supply, which came from Fall Creek, and how the campus and city supplies might be kept pure in the future. The Cornell president quietly asked Professors Veranus A. Moore and Emile M. Chamot to carry out the work, which they did forthwith, returning to him a week later with a cogent report that examined all realistic sources of the epidemic.
The two professors believed Six Mile Creek was the source of the epidemic and had been contaminated by the Italian workers on the dam. But they admitted that with the workers gone since mid-November, there was no way to prove the hypothesis conclusively. “The rocks and woods at and near the edge of the stream are reported to have been thickly sprinkled with human excrement and . . . the stream itself received directly much of their excreta. This condition was witnessed by one of us (Chamot) in the fall. At the time of our visit, February 12th, there was still evidence of such a condition.” They received a letter from Holmes Hollister, an Ithaca businessman, describing what he saw the previous fall, and collected statements from three Cornell botanists who saw the foul condition of the construction site during plant-collecting hikes along Six Mile Creek around the same time.
They warned Schurman that Fall Creek, which provided the campus water supply, also passed through farming territory and was nearly as dirty as Six Mile Creek. Drinking it unfiltered was a disaster waiting to happen. The thing to do, the professors recommended, was to build a filtration plant for the water from one creek or the other, or to draw all water from artesian wells. Schurman released their findings to the public a few days later.13
Earlier in the month, Schurman had directed all professors, assistant professors, instructors, and assistants to read a notice to their students informing them that the typhoid came from the city water but that boiling could make it safe. “President Schurman would ask every student in the university to take this simple precaution and see that it is enforced in his boarding house (emphasis added).” Outright class issues are not common in this story, but this is one of them, summoning the image of an eighteen-year-old upper-class student giving a stern lecture to a middle-age, working-class landlady—and she meekly obeying. Just as odd is the assumption of Cornell University that telling landladies to boil water was sufficient to ensure that students did not get sick. As everyone quickly learned, neither wishing nor issuing orders would make it so.
On February 10, Schurman addressed a student meeting that filled Sage Chapel. He tried to minimize the typhoid epidemic, pointing out—as the university would for the next century—that no student who only drank the campus water from Fall Creek had become ill, as if that would make students who mostly lived off campus feel better. He praised coeds who resisted the pleas of their parents to come home and suggested that many students who had left Cornell since the epidemic began did so because they had flunked out or simply wanted some time off. The president, beginning his war against the newspapers, criticized “grossly exaggerated” claims in the press about the number of ill students. He insisted that students were as safe in Ithaca as they would be at home, provided that the water in their boardinghouse was first boiled to kill the typhoid bacillus. Schurman called it “a simple remedy.”14
Despite the supposed safety of the Fall Creek water, the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees decided on February 16 to supply artesian well water for drinking to all university buildings. This was done without much explanation, but the reason appears to be a letter Schurman had received from Gardner S. Williams three days earlier warning him that new tests of Fall Creek water showed it had nearly twice the bacteria count as Six Mile Creek. This did not mean typhoid was in the campus water, but it was hardly a clean bill of health. None of this was disclosed at the time. Students living off-campus—all of the men and some of the women—could either come on campus and carry artesian water back to their lodgings in jugs or make sure that their landladies boiled the water at the houses. To that end, the Executive Committee sent two of its members, Emmons L. Williams and Robert H. Treman, to exact signed pledges from the boardinghouse operators not to serve or use unboiled water on pain of being reported to the Board of Health and their student tenants moving elsewhere, assuming they could. Morris attended the meeting, which the Ithaca Daily Journal said involved a long discussion of whether Cornell University ought to be closed. The committee ultimately decided that if even one student stayed, the university would remain open, according to the newspaper.15
On the following day, unnerved and angered by the continuing illnesses and deaths, the senior class held an emergency gathering in Library Hall to make certain demands of the administration and Board of Trustees. High on their list was getting the same artesian water deal for their boardinghouses that the university had just given itself.
Leading the meeting was class president Floyd L. Carlisle, a debate champion who would go on to head one of New York’s largest electric and gas utilities, Niagara Hudson, and be a leading, though principled opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s utility reform legislation in 1935. Scores of Cornell students had become ill with typhoid and eight had died since the start of the epidemic, including two, Henry A. Schoenborn of Hackensack, New Jersey, and Otto W. Kohls of Rochester, New York, that very morning. A ninth student, Charles J. Schlenker of Batavia, New York, died in the infirmary even as the meeting got under way. Schlenker was a twenty-one-year-old engineering student who had been class president and captain of the football and track teams at his high school. All of Batavia mourned that night.16
In their petition, the students painted a grim picture of the apocalypse around them. Alarmed parents had summoned many of their fellow students home, and those remaining in Ithaca were “in a demoralized state.” The petition dismissed the university plan to have students enforce the boiling of water in the boardinghouses as an impossible task and demanded that the university supply, at its own expense, artesian water to each of the student boardinghouses. They wanted enough for drinking, washing food and dishes, and brushing teeth. In addition, the students demanded the right to leave the university without penalty until water delivery was under way.
They typed the petition hastily—the version in the Cornell Archives has overstrikes—to get it to Schurman before he left for the day, as they hoped he would bring it to the Executive Committee meeting that night. They might as well have mailed it. The Executive Committee, which that night included Schurman, Samuel Halliday, Burt Lord, Roger B. Williams, Franklin C. Cornell, and Robert H. Treman, thanked the students for their concern, proclaimed that the university was doing its utmost to help them, and then voted it down. In a written response, the trustees said delivering water to student boardinghouses scattered across the city “seems to us well nigh impracticable.” They also feared it would cause other, unspecified difficulties, “that would greatly embarrass us in the relief measures we are now pursuing,” the meaning of which would become clear a day later. Much faith was placed in the boil-water pledges signed by the boardinghouse keepers.17
In an angry report to their fellow students, Carlisle and the other members of the senior class committee said the boardinghouse keepers “could not be trusted with the disinfection of water polluted with virulent disease germs.” They said the university policy put student lives at the mercy of their landlords and landladies. “Every student who has lived in a boardinghouse or seen a student eating house kitchen knows the utter folly of expecting careful disinfection of the water, even if the university officials from time to time inspect the conditions.”1
8
There had been much more to the February 16 meeting of the Executive Committee than a general discussion of whether the university ought to stay open. What had been hashed out was a plan for Ithaca Water Works, which was nearly broke, to build a filtration plant for the city using a $150,000 loan from the university. The city of Ithaca would need to approve higher water rates—they were already among the highest in the state—to pay for the filtration plant, but would be free to hold another referendum on the city taking over the water system or moving to artesian wells, as many, especially Ithaca Daily News publisher Duncan Campbell Lee, had advocated. Loaning more money to Morris seemed to some on the Executive Committee like throwing good money after bad, but Schurman believed there was no other choice if he was to be able to tell students and their parents that clean water would be available by the start of the fall semester.
Morris, whose people were still telling citizens that the city water was fine to drink, had agreed to the deal, in large part because Schurman used the $100,000 in Ithaca Water Works bonds held by the university as leverage to force him to go along. But the quid pro quo seems to have been that the university would not deliver artesian water to the student boardinghouses. If we go back to one of the reasons given by the Executive Committee in rejecting the student petition, that [it] would greatly embarrass us in the relief measures we are now pursuing, the logical conclusion is that the committee members denied clean artesian water to the students out of fear of antagonizing Morris, the monster they themselves created.
The Cornell president made a dramatic appearance before Ithaca Common Council on February 18 to announce the deal, more or less as a fait accompli. Council would have to accept the deal, Schurman believed. What other choice did it have? Because otherwise, Cornell University and all the economic benefit it brought to the city would be doomed.