From Frank Lloyd Wright to FDR, Camp David and a “Strong” recommendation on integrating Maryland schools way back in 1912 — who knows what we’ll find in the Newman Library’s IPA Collection?
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-school-integration-20160123-story.html
But first…
If this architectural drawing looks familiar, it should. Does the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum ring a bell? Frank Lloyd Wright took the design for his iconic spiral museum from an auto road tourist attraction he designed in 1924 for the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain in Frederick County, Md.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/flw/flw02.html
http://www.jstor.org/stable/989974?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
The project was rejected — luckily, perhaps, considering its consequential later reincarnation on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile.
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/an-auto-destination-almost-by-frank-lloyd-wright/?_r=0
And the point is…?
Wright’s futuristic design had been commissioned by Gordon Strong, a wealthy Chicago builder with extensive property on and around Sugar Loaf, a onetime Civil War battleground, today an easy hour’s drive northwest of Washington, D.C. (FDR’s White House later coveted the quartzite outcropping 1,282 feet above sea level for a Presidential retreat, but Strong, a Republican, instead directed the President nearby to what became Camp David.) http://www.patc.us/hiking/destinations/sug_loaf.html
In 1912 (and now we’re getting to the point), Strong, a generous contributor of student scholarships, hired the new Training School for Public Service of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research to make a field study of the rural schools around his vast estate at Dickerson, Md., with an eye to possible consolidation — even perhaps, racial integration.
Needless to say, from the continuing references to “colored” schools and teachers in the archived minutes of the Frederick County Board of School Commissioners, that didn’t happen, although the handwritten minutes seem silent on the consolidation plan. http://www.boarddocs.com/mabe/fcps/Board.nsf/Public
Yet for the report even to broach the idea of racially mixed education at the time would have been courageous and visionary, if not incendiary.
The Training School had been established the year before (1911) by the widow of E.H. Harriman with a gift of $40,000 (today, about $1 million).
https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/?s=training+school
The Training School saw the consolidation of the Maryland schools — eight white, and one, at Sugar Loaf, “colored” — as potentially historic.
“We are of the opinion that a right solution of the problem at Dickerson will be of immense importance to Maryland and the south, as object lessons in the first stages of educational reorganization south of the Mason and Dixon’s [sic] line will have the attractive power which attaches to all first steps.”
It’s unclear whether the Training School was actually recommending integration. It appears so, but it was never spelled out. The report offered arguments for and against consolidation and found reasons “Why a union high school for the eight districts in connection with the present rural school at Sugar Loaf would not be a satisfactory solution.” These included too few prospective students and lack of public support for a separate new high school, but mixing the races was not one of the considerations cited.
Still, the report found strong reasons for consolidating elementary and high school education in a modern one-story building with the latest equipment including labs and “flush closets and urinals.” The curriculum would include music, vocational training and hygiene, including “the beginnings of sex hygiene.”
Grade school would have no more than 45 students per teacher, the high school, 25.
Not surprisingly, given the era, the recommendations were undeniably sexist, with “kitchen gardening for the girls” and “elementary agriculture for the boys.” High school courses would include bookkeeping and stenography and “practical experience” for pay on the construction sites and offices of Gordon Strong.
In any case, the study’s findings of existing conditions — which reveal a lot about the sorry state of education in America a century ago — were not expected.
The black school came out better — or more precisely, less bad. “This building was more attractive in architecture than any of the white schools,” the report found. “The children were under excellent discipline; but were not suppressed as in some of the white schools.”
As for the black teacher, the visitors observed: “She has better address, maintains better poise in the presence of visitors, shows more evidence of the gift of leadership and more maturity of character than the white teachers visited.”
To be sure, this was a statistically meaningless sample, perhaps an aberration, in a border state. Clearly, black students long suffered egregious educational discrimination across the south (and north) before (and after) the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling. But the findings are nonetheless striking and might spur scholarly research into historic school conditions, which often were so poor for both white and black children that distinctions blurred.
Four of the white schools visited (by buggy) over nearly four days in November 1912 were in Montgomery County, Md., and another four were in Frederick County, along with the black school. All were within five miles of Sugar Loaf.
According to the report — which our Benjamin Long found among BMR records being digitized for public access — the white schools suffered from substandard lighting and ventilation and were sometimes overheated by wood and coal stoves. Open water pails for drinking and shared cups left every school “open to the danger of contagion.” No desks or seats were adjustable, an absence of cloak rooms meant wet clothes never dried, and no playgrounds contained any recreation equipment. Students met their toilet needs in outhouses. Schools lacked libraries, blackboard space, maps and globes and science apparatus.
As for the teachers in the white schools, only one had graduated from a teacher training school. They were ill-prepared and “in the three R’s a great deal of poor work was being done.”
On one visit, it was found, “One of the teachers had so little grip of herself or was so immature that she was practically deprived of the power of speech for the time being –a mental state which was quickly communicated to the children.”
As for “The Colored School” at Sugar Loaf: the ratio of window area to floor space — i.e., lighting –was 1:7.5 — higher than in the white schools. Each child had an individual drinking cup, as was not the case in the white schools. The seats and desks came in various sizes and were newer and “in better condition than in any of the white schools.” The two cloak rooms were apart from the classrooms and allowed wet clothes to dry. And there was an excellent organ.
The teacher (evidently only one) had taken courses in pedagogy and been trained by her father, also a teacher. And, as noted, she showed more poise, leadership and maturity than her white counterparts in the other schools. Plus “this building was the only one visited where a really clean floor was found” and the grounds and buildings were in better shape than at the white schools.
Overall, the black children were doing better than the white. Was the Training School suggesting there was little to fear from integration?
Still, the report found, both white and black schools had a long way to go.
In the Montgomery County schools studied, 63 percent of the boys and 53 percent of the girls were not promoted in June. Eighty-six percent of the boys and 73 percent of the girls were overage for their grades — by as much as nine years. One-third of the children attended school less than half the time.
Some of the problems could be corrected without consolidation, the report concluded. But far more, with.
Alas, for many years it was not to be.
If 2015 was, sadly, the Year of the Migrant and Refugee, it’s worth pausing to remember the epic era of immigration some 100 years ago, and a shameful if long-forgotten history captured in the Baruch Library Archives. We’re talking about the Ellis Island Investigating Commission and a scandal within a scandal, as revealed by a chance encounter with some yellowing scrapbook pages…
Preying on victims of war and poverty, we see, long predates the modern-day evils of human trafficking. Indeed, Ellis Island, a onetime naval arsenal and ammunition dump in New York Harbor, had barely been reconfigured as an immigration reception center in the 1890s and rebuilt in 1900 after a fire when the scandals proliferated. “The management of the Ellis Island business has been rotten,” complained President Theodore Roosevelt, shortly after the assassination of William McKinley thrust him into the White House in 1901, according to a lavishly illustrated album, “Ellis Island” with archival photographs assembled by Wilton Tifft and text by Thomas Dunne (W.W Norton, 1971) in the Baruch Library’s Seymour Durst Collection.
New arrivals were robbed in the halls, shortchanged at the currency-exchange windows, and overcharged in the restaurant and railroad ticket booths. Agents took bribes to let the unfit pass or avoid questioning. Dishes weren’t washed between meals and the floors were littered with bones and food debris.
To set things right, Roosevelt appointed a young Wall Street lawyer and veteran of the Spanish-American War, William Williams.
Williams, who ended up serving from 1902 to to 1905 and again 1909 to 1913, proved a worthy reformer, posting notices that began: “Immigrants must be treated with kindness and consideration…” But he also ran afoul of anti-immigrant lobbies and endemic abuses, according to another history in the Durst Collection, “Ellis Island: A Pictorial History” by Barbara Benton (Facts on File, 1985).
And another scandal was brewing.
We came across it by chance while examining old scrapbook pages in the Library’s IPA Collection, specifically the part dealing with the forerunner of the Institute of Public Administration, the Bureau of Municipal Research.
As recounted in numerous earlier posts, the Bureau was chartered in 1907 by a trio of Progressive Era reformers to constrain the bossist sway of Tammany Hall by inventing a new science of efficient, effective, honest and accountable government, administered by trained professionals. Its quick first success was the ouster of the patronage-dispensing wastrel Manhattan Borough President, John F. Ahearn.
https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/12/how-it-all-began-with-a-scandal-of-course/
What caught our eye in two boxes of files from old BMR scrapbooks was this brochure from 1913 in which the Bureau appeared to be objecting to some kind of coverup of food conditions by the Ellis Island Investigating Commission. The tipoff was the reference to an attempted whitewash of Ahearn in 1907. We know how that came out.
With the help of archived articles in The New York Times, we reconstructed the sequence of events.
The government had dealt with the scandalous conditions at Ellis Island by bidding out food service, currency-exchange and baggage handling to private contractors. Until 1908, when the contracts came up for re-bidding, the food contractor, Harry Balfe, was paid by the steamship lines, 24 cents a day to feed each person at Ellis Island. Currency conversions to today’s dollars are imperfect but it might represent about $6.31 today. For those traveling out, he sold boxes of food for 50 cents or $1 ($13.16 and $26.32, respectively, today).
The new contractor was Fritz Brodt who was paid per person per meal, 6 cents for breakfast and supper (or $1.50 today) and 10 cents for dinner ($2.50). But in 1910 Brodt was accused of not living up to his contract; after trial, it was annulled and ordered rebid. One of the new low bidders was the former secretary of Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham (notorious for declaring that half the city’s criminals were Jews.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_A._Bingham
Hmmm, anyone smell a rat?
It got worse. Food scandals at Ellis Island proliferated. By 1913 an immigration inspector was testifying to having withheld evidence of fraud and the Bureau of Municipal Research had taken an investigative interest. The Ellis Island Investigating Commission was taking testimony about impure milk destined for the immigrants.
But when the Commission ruled the charges of fraud unfounded, the Bureau was withering in its criticism, saying the inquiry “never found the facts anywhere about anything.”
In 1916 the food contracts were rebid again, with the low bidder asking 20 cents a day for steerage passengers (about $4.44 today) and 30 cents for cabin passengers ($6.67). The steamship companies, which would have to pay, protested it was too high.
Instead, the contract went to J.J. Lussier, operator of the Yates Hotel and restaurant at 43d Street on Times Square, (just up the street, as it happens, from The New York Times’s new annex headquarters at 229 West 43d Street). Instead of a fixed price per immigrant, Lussier agreed to cater all meals for cost plus a 10 percent contractor’s markup.
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Remember the Way-Cleanse Company of Sandusky, OH?
Neither did we.
But there was a time 100 years ago when the vacuum sanitation upstart was, uh, cleaning up, pledging to rid America of what it called “the Menace of Fine Street Dust.” As the company explained in its brochure:
“Way means Highway
Cleanse means cleaner than clean
Hence the name WAYCLEANSE”
The story is told in a fascinating report spotted recently by an eagle-eyed member of the Baruch Library Archives’s digitization team, Benjamin Long, engaged in preserving and promulgating records of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (which became the hugely influential Institute of Public Administration).
The report documents the Way-Cleanse Company’s 60 days of street cleaning tests by “suction street sweepers” in St. Louis beginning June 1, 1916. You could say it dishes the dirt on a nation waking up to the hazards of pollution at a time when coal fires were filling the air with ash dust, and horses — not yet supplanted by the smoke-spewing engines of the automobile — were leaving their own odiferous imprint on America’s streets and roadways.
Everyone knew the problem of street litter, the company said. But few knew that “The chief danger to public health from street litter is in the fine, flour-like dust.”
“IT IS THIS DUST THAT CARRIES THE DEADLY GERMS.“
One scientific sample of street sweepings, according to Way-Cleanse, “contained 5,600,000 Bacteria per Gram.”
Atypically for such reports in our collection, this one is silent on sponsorship and, in fact, nowhere names the Bureau of Municipal Research as its source. Verifying that took a little detective work. The slender report — illustrated with stunningly clear black and white photographs pasted in, along with a company brochure — bore only the signature of one R.W. Parlin. But through the wonders of the Internet, we were soon able to identify him as the Bureau’s chief engineer.
In the test, two gasoline-driven machines were deployed nightly, sweeping 200,000 square yards of St. Louis streets. One machine cleaned the gutters, the other the center of the street. The machines each cost as much as $10,000 then — more than $217,000 in current dollars. Both consisted of a tractor with the cleaning apparatus — a mechanical broom and a suction device — and a trailer that collected the dust and dirt. The street machine took two men: an operator and a collector who picked up or loosened the larger pieces of rubbish. The gutter machine often required a third crew member to help with the picking up.
The gutter machine covered 17 miles in 7 to 9 hours, picking up from 2.5 to 5 cubic yards per shift; the street machine moved somewhat faster and collected between 2 and 3 cubic yards per shift.
No one would call it it glamorous work: “Whenever horse manure stuck to the pavement, it was necessary to send a man ahead with a scraper to loosen it; otherwise the machine broom was unable to remove it.” Another caveat: while the machines removed dust from smooth streets, it missed the dust in grooves in the pavement, manhole covers and trolley tracks.
Also on the day operations were observed, an accident disrupted the tests: “the gutter machine having been run into by a street car, one of the countershafts had been so bent that it caused the heating of a bearing, and after about 45 minutes this machine was forced to stop work.”
The Bureau’s verdict: except for the quibbles noted, “the work of the machine was very effective and the streets over which they [sic] had operated presented a very good appearance…”
So whatever happened to Way-Cleanse? Hard to say. The New York Times only mentioned the company once, in a brief list of Delaware charters on Nov. 22, 1917.
Google the name today and you get a list of products to clean out your digestive system.
It will come as little surprise to students of municipal corruption and Jersey City, New Jersey — but I repeat myself…
Which is to say that for well over a century, the two have been entwined in infamy. Jerramiah T. Healy, the last mayor of Jersey City, the Hudson County seat and New Jersey’s second-largest metropolis after Newark, was once photographed passed out nude on his stoop, insisting later that three young Hispanic girls had pulled his towel off and “started doing other stuff”…and — huh, what towel? Oh, never mind!
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/nyregion/22HEALY.html
Does it mean anything that Healy was mayor in 2005 when Donald Trump unveiled his $415 million condo project in Jersey City, the tallest residential development in New Jersey? Given the city’s history, who knows? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/nyregion/latest-trump-venture-is-in-jersey-city.html
On the subject, the first name that comes to mind, of course, is Healy’s notorious predecessor, Mayor Frank Hague (1917-1947) and we’ll get to him.
The point is, scandal has a long history in the Garden State, particularly this corner of the garden called Jersey’s gateway to New York.
We’re not even talking Bridgegate.
The great muckraker Lincoln Steffens nailed it as far back as 1906 in his book “The Struggle for Self Government” http://www.amazon.com/struggle-self-government-American-political-corruption/dp/B00ADM24LS/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449676737&sr=1-3&keywords=The+struggle+for+self+government
He devoted two pungent chapters to what he called “New Jersey: A Traitor State.” Why traitor? Others states were crooked, too, Steffens wrote. But “New Jersey is selling out the rest of us.” It was chartering the trusts that were raping America. While Teddy Roosevelt was struggling to curb the monopolists, New Jersey was licensing corporations “to do in those other States what those States would not license; she licensed them to to do in those other States what she would not let them do in Jersey.” Translation: “New Jersey sold us out for money.”
Researching his iconic “Shame of the Cities,” Steffens went on, he found that most big cities had benighted satellite towns where the vicious could retreat to wait out periods of reform. St. Louis had East St. Louis, Philadelphia had Camden, and New York had Jersey City (as well as Hoboken, Greenwich and…Brooklyn?). It went way back to Alexander Hamilton, who chose Jersey Heights for his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, and enshrined the business class in the state.
During the Civil War, Steffens wrote, New Jersey alone in the north leaned south and didn’t let its soldiers vote in the field, so its electoral vote in 1864 went against Lincoln, for McClellan. By the 1870’s, Steffens wrote, the state government ended up representing not the people but the railroads, and New Jersey became “the State of Camden and Amboy”, ushering in a period he called “the most disgraceful in the history of the commercial corruption of American politics.”
The Republicans gerrymandered the Democrats out of Jersey City, creating a horseshoe-shaped district to contain the Democrats while allowing a Republican minority to elect the Legislature, which essentially turned the state over to the Pennsylvania Railroad. But the Democrats were just as bad. The cynical press asked: “Do the Pennsylvania people own the Legislature, or must they buy it?” Answer: they owned it but the corruption was such that they had to buy it over and over again.
It got so brazen that a lawmaker once rose, waving five $100 bills that he declared was a bribe for his vote. The House adjourned, a committee was appointed to investigate and reported back that it was all a joke. The laugh, alas, was on the people.
So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.
As the 19th century neared a close, one-quarter of the state’s property was exempt from county and local taxation –property owned by the railroads and totaling what today would be in excess of $6 billion. As the twentieth century dawned, Jersey City’s Republican Mayor Mark Fagan tried his best at reform, Steffens found, but he was up against the Legislature. http://www.kean.edu/~NJHPP/proRef/muckrakers/pdf/muckrakersDoc3.pdf
Which is all to say that once again the Baruch Archives’s IPA Collection has important scholarly light to shed here too. Specifically, a 1913 report by the Bureau of Municipal Research on “the books of Jersey City, New Jersey.”
Pause for knowing laughter.
The study was undertaken at the behest of the city’s Board of Commissioners and mayor Henry Otto Wittpenn, who also seemed a good sort. He married an heiress to the Stevens fortune and was not particularly tainted by scandal. https://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/pages/W_Pages/Wittpenn_H_Otto.htm
But the city of 270,000 people was a mess, as the Bureau’s 1913 report set forth.
“The books of account contained so many errors of every kind that it was impossible for a staff of ten trained accountants, working constantly from ten to twelve hours a day for 17 days, to produce a statement in which the figures could be considered reliable.”
In fact, the report went on: “The accounts were so kept that the financial condition of Jersey City is not now and never has been accurately known.”
“As far as is known, the books have never been in balance.”
The city comptroller had last examined the books five years earlier when the accounts were found to be the equivalent today of $75 million out of balance.
Consequently, city officials were doing business with no idea of what the city owed or what funds were available. To redeem so-called sinking funds they were also keeping on hand the equivalent today of more than $15 million above what was needed — excess cash that increased the tax burden and invited misuse.
There were uncollected state and county property taxes of another more than $12 million in today’s dollars, just for 1906, 1907 and 1908.
Another part of the report dealt with Jersey City’s Street Cleaning Department, 1912.
Another pause for hilarity.
As illustrated by a remarkably clear set of black and white photographs, the stonework paving had no waterproof foundation or tarred or waterproof joints, investigators found. Hence the joints were being perpetually washed out “giving the street the appearance of a sea of billowy waves.”
The sweeping staff lacked uniforms and badges, making it impossible to know who was on the job when. Sweeping crews were deployed in wasteful fashion and the rickety horse-drawn wagons, bumping along the ill-kept streets, left “a tell-tale trail of litter”…
Alas, the report did not usher in an enlightened new chapter in Jersey City’s tarnished history. Frank “I am the law” Hague took over City Hall in 1917, holding it for an astounding 30 years, hitching himself to FDR and becoming a byword for big city bossism while skirting prosecution. http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/H_Pages/Hague_Frank.htm
For one family’s embodiment of Jersey City’s rollicking renegade past, see Helene Stapinski’s best-selling memoir, “Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History,” now being filmed for a big-screen documentary. /jersey_city_familys_unvarnished_history_headed_to_film_di_ionno.html