Epidemic Read online

  THE EPIDEMIC

  Praise for David DeKok's Fire Underground:

  The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire

  “DeKok has not only reported and written a compelling first-hand account of how an underground fire destroyed Centralia, but he even gives us an anatomy of how the disaster happened and analyzes its implications for one community, and in a sense, for all of us. A thoughtful and thoroughly engrossing read!”

  —Lisa Scottoline, author of Dirty Blonde, a fictional story about Centralia

  THE EPIDEMIC

  A Collision of Power, Privilege, and Public Health

  DAVID DEKOK

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  Copyright © 2011 by David DeKok

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Maggie Peterson

  Project editor: Julie Marsh

  Layout: Kevin Mak

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-6008-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-8721-0

  To Lisa, Elizabeth, and Lydia

  CONTENTS

  Prelude: June 16, 1903

  Chapter 1: Ithaca and Its Kings

  Chapter 2: The Boys Club

  Chapter 3: Conflict of Interest

  Chapter 4: Newsmen

  Chapter 5: The Dam

  Chapter 6: Lives of the Students

  Chapter 7: The Valley of Death

  Chapter 8: Typhoid, and How the Epidemic Began

  Chapter 9: Denial

  Chapter 10: Apocalypse

  Chapter 11: The Fixer

  Chapter 12: Going Home

  Chapter 13: The Man Who Saved Ithacav

  Chapter 14: The Man Who Saved Cornell University

  Chapter 15: Retribution

  Epilogue: Getting Away with Murder

  Afterword: The Conquest of Typhoid

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  PRELUDE: JUNE 16, 1903

  Dark water slapped against the rowboat as it drifted on Cayuga Lake, a mile out from Ithaca. It was early in the afternoon, and the sky over upstate New York was clear. Far in the distance, on top of East Hill, a soaring clock tower that today is called McGraw Tower marked the location of Cornell University for anyone on the lake. From the observation deck near the top of the 173-foot spire could be seen Stimson Hall, the new medical school building and, of late, a makeshift hospital that was the scene of student suffering and death just a few weeks before. A little closer was Sage Chapel, where angry young men and women betrayed by their elders had met to demand action against the typhoid epidemic. Finally could be seen the home of embattled Ithaca Daily News publisher and Cornell oratory professor Duncan Campbell Lee, who had done his best to save the school and the town, and that of Andrew Dickson White, the elderly and distinguished cofounder and first president of the university. It is doubtful anyone, even in the tower, saw the flyspeck that was the empty rowboat in the middle of the magnificent lake, unless they had binoculars or extremely keen vision. Yet the boat and the university were inextricably linked that day by events born out of reckless ambition and criminal stupidity, a combination that has brought so much sorrow to the world.

  At Cornell it was Class Day of graduation week, but the students who gathered outside of former President White’s home had more than diplomas on their minds. All were survivors of the typhoid epidemic that had ravaged Ithaca during the first four months of 1903. The grave diggers had been busy. At least eighty-two people died, including twenty-nine Cornell students. Another 1,350 or so Ithaca residents, including more than 381 Cornell students, contracted typhoid but survived. The exact total will likely never be known thanks to poor record-keeping. Many young people in Ithaca suffered horribly, left exhausted and awash in medical bills that could be as much as $500, nearly a year’s wages for a workingman in 1903, a stiff price even for the middle class.1

  White had been the U.S. ambassador to Germany until late in November 1902, when he tendered his resignation to President Theodore Roosevelt. The last eighteen months of his tenure were full of sorrow. His only son, Frederick, after a lifetime of medical problems growing out of his own bout with typhoid as a Columbia University student years earlier, committed suicide in July 1901. The same month, his only daughter, Clara Newberry, split from her philandering husband in an ugly, very public divorce. After leaving Berlin, White traveled to his villa in Alassio on the Italian Riviera between Nice and Genoa and was there during the Ithaca epidemic. As a result, he probably saw little of the extensive local and national press coverage. The current Cornell president, Jacob Gould Schurman, and the chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, Samuel D. Halliday, had written to him with some of the details of the epidemic, as had his daughter and grandson.2 It was the press coverage, and the public anger it reflected, that had nearly killed Cornell. With only a touch of hyperbole, journalists had portrayed Ithaca as a charnel house. They raised pointed questions about the links between Cornell University and William T. Morris, who had purchased Ithaca Water Works in 1901. Water provided by the company had become contaminated with typhoid germs that past January. But White had been in Italy and so did not fully comprehend the shock in America that such a terrible epidemic could happen in a place like Ithaca, which had one of the country’s leading universities and more physicians per capita than any other municipality in New York.

  White stepped outside and assured the group of students that all was well, that Cornell would be stronger for having endured this catastrophe.3 It was the sort of thing old people always told young people at times like this, but he was wrong. The wounds had not healed, as the disturbing and concurrent events on Cayuga Lake and the Cornell campus that day made clear. Perhaps White was thinking hopefully of his own family troubles when he spoke.

  Statistically, the typhoid epidemic in Ithaca was one of the worst in American history and one of the last of note, arriving even as better sanitation was beginning to reduce typhoid’s awful toll. At least that was true in Europe. But not here. Not yet. It was still a time in America when a businessman like William T. Morris could decide, for financial reasons, against building a water filtration plant for Ithaca and there was no arm of government to force his hand, no one to make him do things right. America in 1903 was on the cusp of the modern age.4 The Wright Brothers flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, the very first feature film, The Great Train Robbery, astounded audiences, and Ithaca began to seriously use long-distance telephone service, all in 1903. But corporations still had the upper hand, and American public health lagged far behind that in Britain, France, and Germany. Citizens could do little about either.

  Back on the lake, one oar of the drifting rowboat dangled in the water, moving the lock and making it creak. A breeze coming from the north gentled the boat toward a cluster of other small craft anchored over the Hog Hole, a popular place to fish in the lake’s southwest corner. As the boat drifted closer, a gentleman’s derby hat could be seen on the rear seat. That spooked the fishermen, who chattered nervously across the water.

  One of them, Walter L. Head, who taught blacksmithing at Cornell, rowed over and set the
trailing oar back inside. His wife looked into the boat and gasped. Next to the hat lay a fancy metal matchbox and a folded pocketknife, the accoutrement of a middle-class businessman. It was as if the owner had laid them neatly on his dresser and lain down to take a nap. But where was he? Who was he? There was water in the bottom of the boat, as if it had somehow tilted to let in the lake. But there had been no storm or heavy waves today. The name “Van Order” was stenciled on the boat. Head knew Sylvester Van Order rented boats from a livery on Cascadilla Creek, off the Cayuga Lake inlet that served as Ithaca’s harbor. Assuming that one of the boatman’s customers had fallen into the lake and drowned, Head tied the empty craft to his own and began the long row back to town.5

  When the couple arrived at Van Order’s, another fisherman was already there. Charles A. Zeek said he was sure the missing man was Theodor A. Zinck, proprietor of the Hotel Brunswick, the most popular student bar in Ithaca. That morning, Zeek had seen Zinck rowing down the inlet past the lighthouse at the end of the State Pier and onto Cayuga Lake. The odd thing, he said, was that the tavern keeper stopped several times to stare back at Ithaca. Ultimately he could not say what had happened to Zinck, because he had not seen him go into the water. Nor did he hear a splash or a cry for help. Zeek had averted his eyes around 12:30 p.m. to attend to his fishing. Later, glancing back, he could see no one in the boat.

  Van Order’s office had a telephone, which were increasingly common in Ithaca in 1903. He raised the operator, who connected his call to the city police. It was a slow day: The police blotter showed only three arrests, one for drunkenness, one for fighting, and someone picked up on a bench warrant. Officer Alvin Sincebaugh responded. He examined the coat and vest that Zinck had left with Van Order that morning. A watch and Masonic fob were still attached to the vest, and the coat pocket held a few letters and a bank book. But there was no suicide note, nothing to explain why Zinck had decided to be his own Charon. Not that anyone in Ithaca really needed to ask. They all knew his sorrow.

  Emotionally, Zinck had been dead for months, ever since his beloved daughter and only child, Louise, called Lula and aged twenty-four years, had died horribly of typhoid at the height of the epidemic. Bloody sheets were all that remained after the undertaker removed her body. Zinck had taken all of Ithaca’s sorrow on himself, it seemed, and slipped into the dark water of Cayuga Lake. Officer Sincebaugh understood; two of his own children had been deathly ill during the epidemic but survived. Ninety percent of typhoid patients survived, albeit after an awful ordeal. The unlucky 10 percent, like Lula Zinck, were often young and otherwise healthy. The unfairness of it drove Zinck to despair.

  He had emigrated to America in 1876, five years after his native Alsace and Lorraine were taken as prizes by Germany at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. The Zinck family, despite its German name, mainly cast its lot with France. A sister stayed in the ancestral home in the village of Gambsheim, not to become French again until after World War I, but the rest of the family settled in and around Paris. Zinck himself landed in Rochester, New York, where he worked in a cousin’s butcher shop for two years, saving his money. In the spring of 1878, with his brother Phillip, he moved to Ithaca and opened the Hotel Brunswick and Lager Bar at 108-110 N. Aurora St. in the downtown business district.

  Every Cornell student knew Zinck’s. His bar became one of the more popular places to drink, smoke cigars, and socialize during one’s time in Ithaca. Zinck, a large man with a handlebar mustache, welcomed students, professors, and townspeople alike, offering them good food and properly cooled Bartholomay’s lager beer—cellar cold, not ice cold—with Gemütlichkeit thrown in at no additional charge. Although most people knew it as Zinck’s, the Cornell intelligentsia insisted on calling the bar, “Theodore’s, and in no other manner.” So wrote Romeyn Berry, who lived through the epidemic, in his 1950 book, Behind the Ivy.

  Among the students one might have spotted there in the months before typhoid struck was George Jean Nathan, writer for the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, and later a renowned theater critic, cofounder of American Mercury magazine with H. L. Mencken, and bon vivant in New York City. Nathan was among the few students in any given year that Zinck knew by name, but he was always “Mr. Nathan.” Zinck was formal in the German manner, not prone to easy intimacy. Yet he remembered faces and would recognize old customers returning twenty years later for a class reunion. And being German, or whatever an Alsatian might choose to call himself, Zinck loved choral singing. The Cornell Glee Club would repair to his bar on Wednesday nights after practice and serenade him with one of its current favorites.6

  The world he built for himself in Ithaca fell apart when Lula died. Nothing could bring him out of his deep depression. Two weeks after his daughter was buried in Lake View Cemetery, Zinck went to his lawyer and wrote out a will.7 When students who fled the epidemic began drifting back to Ithaca and the Hotel Brunswick in late spring, Zinck had to relive Lula’s death whenever one of them offered condolences. They were young and alive, and she was not. He told worried friends that he would stay strong for his wife, Emelie, but in the quiet of his home, the downward spiral accelerated.

  On the morning of June 16, Zinck seemed in better spirits, but that is often remembered of suicides. He walked to the Hotel Brunswick at 8 a.m. and went over the books with Daniel Kelly, one of his three bartenders. Zinck seemed normal to Kelly, who took little notice when his boss left for a walk at 10:30 a.m. Through much of the spring, Zinck had taken long, intensely private morning walks up to Renwick Park along the lake. Today he walked quickly down Aurora Street to Buffalo, turning left and walking to DeWitt Park. Here Zinck followed the diagonal sidewalk that still runs across the park, where he encountered Frank J. H. “Senator” Murphy, another of his bartenders, walking in the opposite direction. Zinck took out his pocket watch and reproved Senator for being late to work. Then he continued through the park and down Cayuga Street, reaching the Van Order boatyard at 11:10 a.m.

  He explained to the proprietor that he wanted to go for a row but that his own boat, which he had not taken out in a year or two, was dirty. After climbing into the boat Van Order offered, Zinck handed back his coat and vest and asked that they be kept in the office until he returned. That was hardly unusual on a warm summer day, and Van Order thought nothing of it. When he last saw Zinck, still wearing his derby, he was rowing away from the dock, pulling toward Cayuga Lake.

  All the dead young men and women in Ithaca, and especially at Cornell University, set this epidemic apart. The Ithaca catastrophe riveted America’s attention during February and March of 1903. Articles about it can be found in newspapers all over the country. Other college presidents sent letters of sympathy to Jacob Gould Schurman. Typhoid touched 522 homes in Ithaca, and in 150 of those, two or more people came down with the disease.8

  Yet it had been less an epidemic, which suggests chance, than a crime, a completely preventable catastrophe brought on by the grandiosity, greed, and stupidity of men. Morris was the principal actor, but he was aided and abetted by his wealthy Ithaca friends who sat on the boards of local banks and Cornell University. Blinded by class and personal loyalties, they arranged critical financing from the university that unintentionally set the deadly events in motion and then protected Morris against a day of reckoning. What happened in Ithaca was not simply bad luck or God’s will. When a water company owner ignores the competent and well-grounded advice of his engineer for economic reasons, and suffering and death result, it is not hyperbole to label it a crime.

  American sanitarians of the early twentieth century raged over the continuing death toll from typhoid. Public health doctors knew they could prevent outbreaks of the disease by keeping drinking water clean and pure. They couldn’t cure typhoid—that would not come until 1949 and the discovery of the antibiotic chloromycetin. What stymied them in 1903 was the human factor, the reckless or ignorant businessman or public official who insisted on doing th
ings his way, as if no one mattered but himself. That was still beyond their control in this era of no regulation, and it made them crazy.

  In the Atlantic Monthly of January 1903, still in homes even as young people began dying in Ithaca, Professor Charles-Edward Amory Winslow of Yale University offered up a modest proposal. He said that for every case of typhoid, someone ought to be hanged.9 He was far from alone in this sentiment. The great sanitarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, William T. Sedgwick, referred to the hanging suggestion as “a striking saying and worth remembering, because it puts the responsibility for this disease where it belongs, namely on mankind, and not upon fate or the gods.”10

  A typhoid epidemic was like a war, senselessly reaping the lives of young people who should have lived for many decades. A typhoid epidemic cut across all social classes, because all social classes drank water. Again as in war, there was no escape except, maybe, by being old. The old were more likely to have picked up immunity to typhoid at some point during their lives and were far less likely to contract the disease.

  Morris was tone-deaf to the public anger in Ithaca. He awoke the morning of June 16 thinking ahead to the Senior Dance scheduled that night in the Armory at Cornell—one of several annual social events on campus that were almost as much for the social elite of Ithaca as for students. There was no move to cancel the dance out of respect for the dead, unlike at Stanford University that spring, where the Class of 1903 had voted to cancel its Senior Dance and donate the money to the student organization that had helped contain a typhoid epidemic that broke out in Palo Alto just as the one in Ithaca was ending.