One of the most amazing things about our historic collections in the Baruch College Library Archives is how they surprisingly intersect. Our distinguished namesake, financier Bernard Baruch,

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/2008/bernard/exhibit1.html

turned out to have worked with reformer extraordinaire Luther Gulick in FDR’s wartime councils. Bernard Baruch rubbed shoulders with Edward L. Bernays, the wily father of public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose extensive library and artifacts are on loan to the Archives as the Museum of Public Relations. (Bernays got BB, along with Clarence Darrow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Ida Tarbell, and  J. P. Morgan’s sister, among other luminaries, to attend a 1931 gala launch for muckraker Lincoln Steffens’s classic autobiography — how’s that for name-dropping?)

And now, we see, Bernays and Gulick worked hand in hand in 1960 to bring New York City a momentous modern zoning code. (Later they would collaborate to bring fluoridation to New York’s water.)

Gulick was present at the creation…of zoning. At age 24, a graduate student at Columbia and student at the Training School for Public Service, founded in 1911 by Mrs. E.H. Harriman, he was eyewitness to the 1916 debate in the Board of Estimate that gave New York — and America — their first zoning ordinance.

www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/about/city-planning-history.page

The revolutionary “zone resolution” (marking its centenary this year) did not rule out skyscrapers (yes the word was already in use in 1916) but limited their maximum height to two and a half times the width of the street they fronted, unless they were set back or covered less than their entire lot. Thus, the bulky twin-slabbed Equitable Building, which had already risen a massive 40 stories at 120 Broadway, throwing a swath of lower Manhattan into shadow, would only have been permitted to rise 18 stories. It was too late to alter that — and the impending restrictions brought a flood of plans by developers scrambling to get their outsize projects approved before the regulatory door slammed shut. But later towers like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings were able to soar and still let in the light, thanks to slenderer construction and setbacks.

http://untappedcities.com/2011/12/07/how-zoning-shaped-the-new-york-skyline/

The 1916 zoning ordinance had other features. It protected the stylish Fifth Avenue shopping district from encroachment by factories. And it created large “undetermined districts” along the waterfronts that were open to residential and business development (though not high office buildings) pending future restrictions. One dispute pitted J.P. Morgan, who wanted the area on Madison Avenue in the 30s near his mansion ruled free of business development, against William Waldorf Astor, who objected to the restriction. Morgan prevailed — at least for a time.

By 1940 with the creation of the City Planning Commission, some zoning amendments were adopted, But a decade later it was clear a more comprehensive revision was needed. For one thing, New York and its nearly 8 million people were being overrun by the automobile and in dire need of more parking than the streets would allow. For another thing, the 1916 code allowed for a city of more than 55 million people.

In 1950, Robert F. Wagner, then the planning chairman, commissioned a zoning study but nothing came of it until 1956 (three years after Wagner’s election as Mayor) when the Board of Estimate contracted with outside planners for a major new look at zoning.

It was released in 1959 and became the subject of heated debate at a series of hearings into 1960, with many elected officials and tycoons, fearing curbs on development, in opposition.

This time around, Luther Gulick — who had served as New York’s first City Administrator under Mayor Wagner — was co-chairman of the Committee for Modern Zoning, a stellar assemblage of the city’s highborn elite under planning commissioner James Felt.  As Gulick dramatically testified: “Forty-four years ago, I sat in this very room and heard the public and the Board of Estimate  and the experts debating  the New York Zoning Act of 1916.” (Leave it to Gulick to bridge two major municipal landmarks — in 1916 and 1960.) Some of the same fears of commercial damage were voiced then as now, he declared. “They were dead wrong in 1916 and they are dead wrong now.”

Among the innovations were provisions for more garages and new categories of residential districts, from single-family to high-density, and commercial districts set aside for downtown local shopping and outlying shopping centers; waterfront recreation; commercial amusement; and heavy services like manufacturing. Unsightly facilities like coalyards, junkyards, auto wreckers and billboards were to be phased out.

This time too, Gulick and the pro-zoning forces had a powerful ally — Edward Bernays.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/16/reviews/980816.16chernot.html

Bernays (whose library and other materials are on loan to the Baruch Archives by the Museum of Public Relations) boasted psychiatric royalty — his mother was Freud’s sister and his father’s sister was Freud’s wife. And he used his uncle’s discipline to shape history, employing the skills of mass psychology and propaganda on behalf of his clients to get women to smoke cigarettes and wear green (the better to go with Lucky Strike packs) and American families to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and fight cavities with fluoride (a by-product of his aluminum-manufacturing clients).

Like Gulick, Bernays was a survivor. In fact, they were contemporaries and would live to be fellow centenarians. Bernays, born in 1891 (two months before Gulick) lived to 103; Gulick died at nearly 101 in 1993. Both were born before the advent of the automobile, airplane, movies, radio, television, space travel and the Internet. Both began their public careers in the administration of Woodrow Wilson and both lived to see Bill Clinton elected President. And both would work together on the bitter 10-year fight from the mid-50’s to 60’s to fluoridate the city’s water. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2015/02/sinking-his-teet…nto-fluoridation/

Bernays quickly harnessed his publicity know-how to the task of rallying support for the 1960 zoning revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It worked!

In his 1965 autobiography, “Biography of an Idea,” Bernays recalled the victory with relish.

And now? New York is ripe for another look at zoning — in case you haven’t noticed the megatowers springing up in midtown Manhattan.

Let’s start with some Jewish cowboys. Why not?

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/januaryfebruary/statement/jewish-pioneers

We know how the West was won — by immigrants. Between 1880 and 1925, some 2.8 million Jews, the vast majority from Eastern Europe, fled poverty and persecution for the U.S., with many joining the settlers’ trek west.

But painful struggles lay ahead, as we learn from a fascinating 100-year-old report found in the archives of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. The 412-page study, “Report on the Problem of Combined Poverty and Tuberculosis Among Jews in Denver, Colorado,” highlights the extraordinarily eclectic and esoteric commissions of the BMR — and why our collection, now being digitized, is such a treasure for scholars.

This year 2016 alone marks the centenary of no fewer than 53 BMR reports, examining, among other subjects, New York City’s Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity; New York State park expenditures; prisons in Columbus, Ohio;  Detroit’s Departments of Public Works and Building; the government of San Francisco; the schools of Mobile, Alabama; North Carolina’s Department of Agriculture; and the street-cleaning vacuum machines of St Louis — covered in an earlier blogpost: https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2015/12/dirty-story/

Dirty Story

But back to the Jewish settlers.

For one particularly beleaguered minority-within-a-minority, the allure was more than freedom and wealth — it was health. A  fearsome lung contagion known as consumption, tuberculosis and the white plague (from the wasting effects of the disease) had become the world’s leading killer, taking a special toll among the poor and congested, including recent immigrants to America. Fresh mountain air was prescribed as a cure. For these unfortunate “lungers” (terrible word!), a refuge beckoned in the Western Rockies — Denver, the largest city in the West after San Francisco, with a population, according to the 1910 census, of 213,381.

The scourge, of course, was hardly confined to Jews (see: John Keats, Voltaire, Vivian Leigh, Chopin, La Bohème, etc.). But Jews had special reasons for concern. Anti-immigrant Nativists denounced the impoverished newcomers as germ-carriers, with pervasive anti-Semitism saddling Jews with a greater libel: tuberculosis was branded “the Jewish Disease.” And so many flocked to Denver in search of a cure.

By 1899, amid qualms over becoming a destination for the sick, a decade of fund-raising in the Denver Jewish community culminated in the opening of the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives. Within a few years, it was joined by a second charity, the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society. But the two groups and Jewish community soon fell to feuding over whether to attract outsiders and raise money around the country. “The poor that properly belong to Denver should be taken care of by our own community, and are now being properly cared for, and will be properly cared for in the future, and we would feel deeply humiliated  if outside communities assume obligations that are rightfully ours,” wrote a committee of philanthropists.

https://books.google.com/books?id=p2LgCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=american+jews+with+TB&source=bl&ots=x15dzU3Us9&sig=KJF8FkZMuN5Ea8fuQBV4a4qBOC4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJ-LGes4zNAhWGpx4KHR1DCu8Q6AEISTAG#v=onepage&q=american%20jews%20with%20TB&f=false

The hospital was wary of encouraging consumptive Jews to migrate to Denver. The Consumptives Relief Society welcomed all sufferers. While the two institutions avoided hostilities, they failed to join forces. The rivalry festered for more than a decade until a consortium of Jewish charities in 1916 engaged the Bureau of Municipal Research to conduct a comprehensive study of the problem. Which it proceeded to do, with typical thoroughness, analyzing the “migratory consumptives”, including the neediest cases: “the tuberculosis tramps” — transients “tramping from town to town, eking out an existence as best they can…”

Applying some questionable stereotypes, the BMR declared that “migration among Jewish consumptives is disproportionately heavy.” This was so because “the Jews are a race of wanderers.” (That Judaism is a religion, not a race, seems to have gone unnoticed.) Jews also took care of their own — “the well-known trait of family solicitude…characteristic of the race.” Finally, the BMR cited “the deep interest in his health that characterizes the Hebrew,” stating flatly, “A Jew thinks more about his health than does the non-Jew.” The basis of this sweeping assertion was not given.

The BMR was on firmer ground (though sometimes not much), when it came to facts and figures.

Nationally, it found, American Jews were contributing about $750,000 (worth $16.5 million today) to care for Jews with tuberculosis, but there was no distribution plan. The BMR called it “the Anarchy of Modern Anti-Tuberculosis Work” and urged a new Jewish bureau to coordinate funding nationwide.

“If any one definite thought emerges from a thorough-going consideration of the problem of combined poverty and tuberculosis among Jews in the west,” the report said, “it is that the problem is a national problem and must be administered by an organization nationally constituted.”

Denver was particularly hard hit. To come up with the Jewish population of the city, the BMR considered various sampling techniques, including “the Cohen method” — extrapolating from the number of people named “Cohen.” This proving unsatisfactory, the BMR fell back on a rough estimate of 4 to 5 percent, or 8,000 to 12,000 people.

It estimated the number of Jewish consumptives in Denver at 1,200 men, women, and children, not counting the up to 275 patients in the two sanatoria. Jews around America had raised $186,000 ($4 million in today’s dollars) to run the sanatoria. But for the care of the many other sick and impoverished souls at home, they raised only $20,000 (worth $439,000 today), less than that raised for the Jewish needy in Kansas City, Louisville and New Orleans which did not have Denver’s tuberculosis problem, and a third less than in New York.

Despite the insistence of Denver’s Jewish leaders that they could take care of their own, resources were “meager and inadequate,” the BMR found. Yes the climate was benign and the vistas spectacular. But the streets were mired in mud and the back yards littered with junk, garbage, ashes and dead chickens, “with a cow or two wallowing in their own dung” — one-cow dairies being commonplace and breeders of disease. Smallpox, typhoid fever, syphilis, gonorrhea and neonatal eye infections causing blindness were rampant and the vaccination ordinance was widely ignored.

Of 15 cities looked at, Denver had the highest infant mortality rate, 111.2 per thousand, well above New York’s 101.9.

The report’s case studies of “42 Denver Consumptives” make for harrowing reading. (The names were supposed to have been redacted but by mistake were included in the text.) Abraham Deitsch, 38, a butcher with consumption, came to Denver with his wife and three of their children, leaving four others with grandparents in Newark, N.J. Later the Jewish community paid for the four children to join the family in Denver. The father, peddling, unable to provide for the family; wife helped “until forced to stop by recurring hemorrhages. No charitable assistance.”

Wolf Cohen, 47, a peddler with pulmonary tuberculosis and cancer of the lip (recently operated), wife and ten children. Came from New York. Landlords unwilling to rent to such a large family. Living under cramped and unhygienic conditions.

Joseph Berman, 37, arrived with wife and three children from Tampa with advanced pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis; prognosis: “bad, could not be worse.” Died few months later. Daughter 8 1/2 with tuberculosis. Boy 12 1/2 sells newspapers. Widow peddles and works part time “in dangerous occupation of mending dust-laden second-hands sacks. Case receiving no charitable assistance or supervision.”

Could Denver care for its own poor? Yes, indeed, the BMR found. But there were the poor of Denver and the poor in Denver, the latter many times more numerous, thanks to waves of in-migration. That was a national problem.

Did the BMR report make an impact?

A century later, we would say yes.

https://www.nationaljewish.org/about/whynjh/?src=head

LBJ and FDR were renowned for their skill in navigating a hostile Congress, particularly the Senate. Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama not so much.

Here’s Luther Gulick’s indelible account of a meeting with his boss President Roosevelt in 1937, as Gulick was working on the Brownlow Committee to reorganize the executive branch — a momentous effort that, not incidentally, would prove critical to the Allied victory in World War II. It comes from Gulick’s insightful look back at the lessons of WWII, in a slender volume he published in 1948, collecting his series of postwar lectures.

Gulick found Roosevelt poring over a biography of Wilson. “You know,” he told Gulick, “Wilson made just one mistake: he failed to do the things that were required to bring the Senate along.”

Lyndon Johnson, another Roosevelt protege, learned that lesson well — perhaps the last President who did.

Why do we contribute payroll taxes for Social Security? Not because we need to — the money could come from other federal revenues.

Because… well — politics.

Who says?

FDR himself.

Here’s Luther Gulick’s eye-popping account in the online archives of the Social Security Administration as referenced by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Home and Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. We just came across it again while trolling other collections for information on Gulick.

Roosevelt wanted Americans to contribute specifically to Social Security so it would feel like their money and “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

Read Gulick’s full account here:

https://www.ssa.gov/history/Gulick.html

 

 

Believe it or not, Luther Halsey Gulick III could be a fun guy. OK, not a laugh a minute, but he could lighten up. Take the Regents’ Inquiry Into the Character and Cost of Public Education in the State of New York. Please.

Seriously, folks, who comes up with racy titles like that? Some people will do anything for attention.

Where were we? Oh right, wild and crazy Luther Gulick.

So, from  1935-39, the New York Board of Regents organized a sweeping study of education in the state “now in the midst of an emergency,” magnified by the Depression. School costs were rising dramatically, as hard-pressed districts cut support.

Calling Luther Gulick! Of course, he was named to direct it (just as, almost simultaneously, he was tapped by President Franklin Roosevelt to reorganize the executive branch.) https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/11/fdrs-ghostwriter/

The Regents had the Gaul to call it an Inquiry, maybe because it was divided into three parts: an examination of the “educational enterprise” of the state and its outcomes, methods and costs; a critical appraisal of existing conditions; and a formulation of solutions for the future.

By 1939 the effort, budgeted at $500,000 (equal to $8.5 million today), had yielded a torrent of scholarship, 15 volumes in all, including weighty reports like these:

It also sparked some controversy, as when a New York University Professor charged Gulick with presenting a distorted version of the findings. It made page one of The New York Times on April 23, 1939.

We had trouble understanding why Gulick would deliberately or inadvertently misrepresent the study that he headed — especially since the Times article contained no response from him, an egregious omission smacking of journalistic malpractice. Today we would call it a hit.

But wait — wasn’t this supposed to be about funny stuff?

Ahh, right.

The year the Inquiry was completed, Gulick and Rudolf Modley, founder of the Pictograph Corporation (you’ll recognize his icons when you see them) coauthored a spoof of the report packaged as a child’s reader, The New York Primer.

https://www.fulltable.com/iso/rm/rm.htm 

(For spotting this gem, we thank an eagle-eyed member of our crack digitizing team, Sarah Rappo, who is scanning early reports of the IPA Collection under our  Carnegie grant.)

As the text explains, what looks like clunky writing (“A Picture Book for The More Easy Attaining An Understanding of New York’s School Problems”) is a deft poke at the state’s first reader, in use until about 1839, “For the more easy attaining the true Reading of English.” (From this they learned English?)

Anyway, the Gulick/Modley version used the simple sentences and large type of a vintage grade-school reader to explain the Regents report in easy language. They highlighted words beginning with letters of the alphabet, A to Z, and they set it off with illustrative charts of charming yellow pictographs, like this:

and this

and this

That’s the light side of Luther Halsey Gulick III, from A to Z.