In these days of cellphones and Skype, FaceTime, GoToMeeting and other virtual gatherings, it’s nostalgic to remember a time when people actually met face-to-face to transact business and socialize. So it was in 1921 when the Bureau of Municipal Research was ferreting out corruption and teaching New York and cities around the country how to govern effectively. To do this it needed to meet which meant coordinating the schedules of a dozen or more very busy men (and they all were men back then). So the decidedly low tech-solution of the day was to give trustees pre-addressed penny (!) postcards with the date and time of the next meeting typed in. All the respondents had to do was cross out “can” or “cannot” and sign their names.

Some opted to add a note of explanation. For the meeting of Jan. 21, 1921, as the Bureau was transitioning to the National Institute of Public Administration (later just the IPA), Henry Bruère, one of the BMR’s legendary “ABC” founders, wrote in that I “hope to” attend. “But I shall be later as it is too early for me,” he scrawled in pen. He had another meeting at 4:30. (See how busy?)

Sam A. Lewisohn, lawyer and philanthropist and son of Adolph Lewisohn who donated the money for City College’s Lewisohn Stadium (built in 1915, demolished in 1973) wrote I “will try to” attend. R. Fulton Cutting wrote he would simply attend.

What would they have made of today’s online calendars?

l

Inventing a Science of Government

The “Father” of the Research Bureau

You all know what this is, right?

Of course, it’s a New York City subway Fare Decoder Circuit,– Heavy Duty Type, circa 1952. Don’t feel bad if you can’t make much sense of it — we can’t either.

So what’s the point?

Bear with us.

The diagram comes from a 65-year-old report of the Mayor’s Committee on Management Survey, that mouthful of a municipal reform effort that consumed New York through the early 1950’s and was instrumental in reshaping the city for the modern era.  You’ll remember, no doubt, that the executive director was Luther Gulick. Of course. We’ve written about the MCOMS before. It began under Mayor William O’Dwyer (who resigned in a police corruption scandal), continued under Mayor Vincent Impellitteri, and concluded under Mayor Robert Wagner.

Road Rage, 1952: An Overnight Parking Tax

The Rich Blue Line: NYPD, 1952

Gotham Gridlock — Then and Now

The management survey examined every aspect of the city’s operations, including its vital transit lifelines. Then (as now) the subway and bus system was in crisis. Subways in particular were jammed, (or let’s say rapid transit because the Third Avenue El was running until 1955 in Manhattan, the elevated lines on Second, Sixth and Ninth Avenues having previously been torn down). One plan was to extend the length of trains from the usual seven cars to as many as fourteen.  (Most now run eight to eleven cars). That would have required a lengthening of some stations. Or a complicated system of stopping only some cars (front or back) at certain stations. Planners considered skip-stop service, by-passing certain emptier stations at rush hour. Some of the innovations were adopted over the years.

But what caught our eye (and why we were moved to write this) was a little notation in the decoder circuit diagram — did you catch it?

Change Dispenser.

Yes, the train turnstiles actually provided change! The fare was a nickel from 1904 to 1948 — a nickel in 1904 was equivalent to about $1.33 — and doubled to a dime in 1948 ($1 today), rising to 15 cents in 1953 ($1.34).

But you got change for, say, a quarter. How cool was that! Bus drivers made change until 1969, when you had to start dropping in the exact fare — 20 cents.

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/when-bus-drivers-stopped-giving-change/

How quaint. How civilized.

Perhaps the end of the era came in 1953 with the arrival of the subway token — and a disgusting practice. Scam artists would stuff the turnstile slots with paper and later suck out the trapped token. To stymie them, cops would sometimes sprinkle the slots with chili powder.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/nyregion/tunnel-vision-kiss-desperation-disgusting-practice-vanishes-with-token.html

That all ended with the arrival of the MetroCard in 2003. But ahh for the days of the change-dispensers.

Say what you want about Luther Gulick, just don’t joke about his faults — those on the tennis court, anyway. Newsweek tried it light-heartedly in a wartime profile, and found itself…well, shall we say, ill-served? Here’s how it started, (with thanks to our intrepid digitizer-in-chief, Sarah Rappo, who spotted the material in a catch-all alphabetical file, “N” for Newsweek):

You’ll notice, by the way, that Gulick helped Governor (not yet Prez) Calvin Cooledge straighten out the Massachusetts budget. Also that among the triumvirate who reorganized the executive branch for FDR, Louis Brownlow was the idea man, Charles Merriam was the brakes, and Gulick was the one who ran around doing the hard work — the leg man.

Anyway, back to tennis.

In its profile of Gulick on July, 13, 1942, Newsweek mentioned he “hates publicity” — prompting the indecipherable friend of Gulick’s who saw the article to scribble in the margin in red pencil But not doing so bad.

The piece went on to note that Gulick was the father of two boys, a lover of modern music and painting, and a rather bad tennis player…

The wielder of the red pencil was moved to scrawl, I’d sue ’em.

Gulick went him one better. He challenged all editors of Newsweek, male or female, within ten years of his age (which was then 50) to a deadly duel. “Weapons: Tennis raquets [sic] and so-called Victory balls.”

Gulick also took modest issue with the magazine’s characterization of his role in reorganizing the Army’s Services of Supply division. In truth, Gulick protested, he played a “very, very minor part.”

The tennis challenge left Newsweek officially quaking but actually unfazed, replied Managing Editor Chet Shaw.  The 40-to 60-year-old staffers in Gulick’s bracket either didn’t play the game “or else would collapse after a few minute of exercise.”

Advantage, Gulick.

Remember our post from April 7, “When America Fed (and Led) the World”? (Here’s a reminder: There was a time, believe it or not, when America’s leaders and the rest of the free world cared about the hungry and homeless. It was called World War II. While engaged in a life and death struggle against intractable enemies on two fronts on opposite sides of the globe, the U.S. still mobilized a colossal rescue effort to feed, clothe and shelter some half a billion people from Spain to North Africa to China. In history’s darkest time, it was truly humanity’s finest hour…)

When America Fed (and Led) the World…

Well, from the World War II library of Luther Gulick comes this chilling counterpart, which we’ll call “When Nazi Germany Starved the World.”

While the U.S. and its allies were performing Herculean feats to save humanity, Hitler’s armies were systematically looting Europe of food to feed the Reich, consigning millions of conquered people to slow death by starvation. The grim tale is told in this 110-page book, published in 1943 by The Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. The authorship is interesting — Boris Shub, a prolific anti-Fascist and anti-Communist writer and radio broadcaster, and Z. Warhaftig, who appears to have been Zerach Warhaftig, a prominent Zionist leader and signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

http://www.jta.org/1965/04/22/archive/boris-shub-prominent-american-jewish-writer-dies-in-new-york-was-52

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-choice-by-boris-shub/

Nearly four years into the war, “Germany eats by the sweat and toil of millions of subjugated Europeans,” the book declares. Even before the invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi bullying of its neighbors was already filling the larders of the Reich, thanks to rigged trade deals that the Germans had no intention of honoring. With the fighting, the plunder soared. From one Polish province alone, Germany took up to 800,000 tons of grain a year, more than twice all of Poland’s 1938 grain exports. In its first week of occupying Holland, German troops seized 90 percent of the country’s butter, and in 1941 more vegetables than pre-war Germany imported annually from the whole world. From Ukraine, twenty trainloads carried 10,000 tons of food to Germany daily. Local officials, farmers and tradesmen who resisted faced execution while vast populations went hungry.

Lest there be any doubt, The New York Times of Oct. 5, 1942 quoted Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering boasting: “The whole German army is fed from conquered countries.”

With evil cynicism, Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels declared in 1940: “The German people as the pivot and leader of Europe’s new era must avoid the temptation to devote their energies to the good of others.”

They succeeded.

But at home and abroad, Aryan Germans ate well.  The main Krakow newspaper of Sept. 6, 1942 carried two pages of ads for fancy dining and entertainment — by Germans, for Germans in German establishments.

Others suffered, to varying degrees. Compared to Germans, the Dutch made do with more than a quarter less meat, the French with barely half. The Jews got zero.

In the town of Avenza, Italy, in 1942, two young girls were hospitalized with poisoning after cooking and eating a long-dead cat.

By 1943, Germans were still enjoying 93 percent of their pre-war diets. Their victims, declining percentages from Czechs (83%), Belgians (66%), Norwegians (54%) and Jews (20%).

Subjugated populations survived on portions of the caloric intake afforded Germans.

Clearly, the Nazi starvation policies targeted Jews with special venom — another means of extermination. On pain of arrest, Jews were only allowed to line up for rationed food at certain hours, often when supplies had run out. Germany and Poland forbade Jews from buying meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, vegetables, flour, bread and fruit.  Many food stores were closed to Jews altogether. As an ultimate insult, Germany specifically barred the sale of pork to Jews, saying it was against their religious laws.

Using official Polish mortality statistics for 1941, the book puts the death toll of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto that year at 47,428, or one out of ten. With skeletal victims piling up, a Nazi writer scoffed, “The callousness of the Jews goes so far that they throw the bodies of their dead into the streets during the night.”

The 1943 book is necessarily incomplete. “What has happened since is cloaked in darkness and horror,” it  concludes, noting that Hitler’s SS Minister of Food and Agriculture, Herbert Backe, had come up with “the Hunger Plan” to exterminate entire subject populations. “How far that process has already progressed only the German government knows.” Now we too know. It was only the beginning.