What gems we find in our Newman Library Archives! (No, not this quaint Stereoscopic view of our Baruch neighborhood in 1925, which comes from the New York Public Library and is featured here just for atmosphere.)

I’m talking about this slender, black-covered book, “The Cost of Living in New York City, 1926”, that turns up — actually, it was turned up by our eagle-eyed associate Sarah Rappo — in the rich municipal collection bequeathed us long ago by the real estate dynast Seymour B. Durst.

What makes Durst’s copy of the book especially noteworthy is that it bears the stamp of the Bureau of Municipal Research, from whence sprang the urban reform movement and Luther Gulick’s pivotal Institute of Public Administration, as followers of this blog well know.

So what do we learn from the book’s look at housing, food, clothing and other prices in Gotham almost 100 years ago?

A lot, it turns out.

But let’s remember that the nickel fare dropped in subway turnstiles in 1926 was not the nickel of today, but more than 15 X as much, or about 78 cents, in today’s money. According to the United States Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 1926 dollar was equal to about $15.79 today. https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Still, when it comes to specific services and products, that’s only a rough conversion tool. Today’s regular transit fare is $2.75 — way above the inflation rate. By that, uh, token, New Yorkers of 1926 would have been paying almost 80 cents a ride. That to us would still be quite a bargain. But the nickel fare then was long sacrosanct since the first subway line opened in 1904.

Some other comparisons: the city’s population in 1926 was estimated at just under 6 million — today it’s about 8.2 million. But the entire United States population then was around 117 million — today it’s over 333 million. So New York City didn’t grow as fast as the rest of the country because it was pretty much already where the rest of the nation was headed.

In 1926, the book tells us, about one-third of New Yorkers, some 2 million people, were foreign-born, mostly from Russia, Lithuania, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Poland. Today it’s about 40 percent, over 3 million people, principally from the Dominican Republic, China and Mexico.  And following the great migration, the Black population rose from about 150,000 in 1926 to over 2 million today.

Child labor was common. At age 14, almost 7 percent of boys and almost 5 percent of girls were “gainfully employed.” For 16-year-olds, the numbers rose to over 65 percent of boys and 59 percent of girls. Over 40 percent of all males and almost 30 percent of all females — nearly a million employees — worked in New York City’s manufacturing and mechanical industries. Today manufacturing accounts for fewer than 80,000 jobs.

Then, as now, the city suffered from a housing shortage, reflected in high rents. A state study in 1925 found that the bulk of some 85,000 new units rented for upwards of $15 per room per month, so $237 in today’s money. The typical apartment for a family of moderate means then was between three and four rooms, so up to $950 a month in today’s money, perhaps a relative bargain to us, but more than double what an average family could then afford. Back then, the so-called white collar “element” — a salary of $2,000 a year, or $31,500 in today’s money — came with aspirations of living in the better neighborhoods, rendering you notably vulnerable to the apartment shortage, a 1924 city study found. But between 1914 and 1925, the rents of fancier apartment rose 60 percent, while cheaper places were up more sharply — 90 percent.

And what did these units look like? The better ones had private bathrooms — that is, not in the hall or outside to be shared with other families — but most lacked central heat and some were without hot water or electricity or both, or, for the taller buildings, elevators. A study of Manhattan families on relief found more than three-quarters living without a private bath or central heat. A year’s worth of coal for a stove cost about $700 in today’s money, or $1,168 when kindling and kerosene for lamps were included.

And what about food? Given the difficulty of pricing products in different parts of the city, the investigators for “The Cost of Living in New York City, 1926” relied on sampling and averages, figuring that a man in the “industrial worker type of family” required about 3,500 calories a day, a woman 3,150, and children (who often worked from a young age) about 2,800. Today, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with the decline of strenuous labor, men consume about 2,500 calories; women under 2,000; and boys and girls 6-11, just above or under 2,000.

The study found that a pound and a half of hamburger steak in 1926 cost 31 cents in Manhattan and 36 cents in Brooklyn, equivalent to about $4.90 and $5.68 — around today’s prices. A family’s weekly supply of milk — 14  quarts — was $2.13 in Manhattan — equal to $12.33 in today’s prices. Now that might cost at least $15. Three pounds of carrots went for about 24 cents — $3.79 in today’s prices — about what they would cost now.

Clothing? A man’s suit could be had for $19.73 in Manhattan — about $312 in today’s money. You could find a discount suit for that now, though hardly with a designer label. A woman’s sweater in Manhattan went for $3.30 — about $52 in today’s money. That would be more difficult to match now.

And lifestyles? Almost impossible to compare. “Men will smoke and children will have their candy,” the 1926 account vouchsafed, figuring the adult tobacco ration at two packs a week, and the sweets budget…incalculable.

*(Hat tip to barber/crooner Perry Cuomo and his “Letters” song…)

Today, Luther Halsey Gulick 3d would undoubtedly be firing off emails and posting on Facebook, Instagram — maybe even dancing on TikTok. But in his heyday, Gulick (who, remember, died in 1993 at almost 101) had only his trusty typewriter and telephone. He was especially devoted to writing end-of-the-year letters to far-flung family members, recounting his good-government adventures as an FDR insider, wartime planner, and urban strategist, and sharing his lively assessments of contemporary politicians and the often sorry state of the world.

The collection looked like this when we got it from IPA — with files, letters and diary pages all mixed up.

Our Baruch Library Archives’s collection of his papers and records of his Institute of Public Administration include reams of this correspondence, recently augmented by copies of newsy family letters gifted by his nephew Denny Gulick, son of Luther’s brother Sidney. A granddaughter, Lisa Gulick, recently emptied Luther’s longtime vacation retreat in Greensboro Vt., yielding more files and memorabilia we hope to get a look at shortly.

Meanwhile, the family letters from Denny shed a revealing light on how this public administration visionary viewed and shaped his world.

Take this only faintly readable missive of April 4, 1943 from Luther to his father, Sidney Lewis Gulick, a noted Congregationalist missionary then celebrating his 83d birthday, with copies to Luther’s siblings Ethel and Sidney. (Blame the illegibility on a wartime shortage of carbon paper, or Luther’s admission in a 1944 letter “I had the carbons all in backwards.”)

In the second and third paragraphs, Gulick refers to his work on a government relief program that, in the midst of war, struggled to feed, clothe and house some half-billion refugees. A month’s emergency food allotment was put at close to a million tons. By August 1943 — see below, “When America Fed (and Led) the World” — the monthly global need was put at more than 3.5 million tons. (No need to belabor the obvious — that aiding today’s Afghan, Syrian, Haitian, Latin American, Uyghur and other desperate displaced persons seems absolutely doable by comparison.)

When America Fed (and Led) the World…

This one is easier to read…

Here’s a great find!! (Didn’t we tell you Gulick was an avid collector?)

By the way, we’re still looking for that stamp.

Let’s sign off for now this with this historic gem — Gulick’s tribute to the fallen chief he had served and counseled over decades from Albany to Washington.

The Supreme Court that President Roosevelt failed to pack with 6 additions in 1937, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, center front. It was FDR’s worst defeat but he salvaged a victory when the Court started upholding New Deal programs.

On Friday, Sept. 17, 2021, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., sponsored a virtual forum on FDR and the Supreme Court, notably the court-packing fiasco, with Prof. John Q. Barrett of St. John’s Law School, and me, representing Baruch and our Newman Library Archives collection on Luther Gulick and his Institute of Public Administration.

You can watch it here:

So where do we — Baruch College — fit in?

Well, here:

In the machinations behind the court fight, one of the conservative Justices, Willis  Van Devanter, a Taft appointee, retired after 26 years on June 2, 1937, opening the way for a Roosevelt pick. Roosevelt was pressed to name his loyal ally, Arkansas Senator and Democratic Majority Leader Joseph Taylor Robinson (here with the First Couple enroute to the first term Inauguration, 1933).

Wikipedia

But Roosevelt dragged his feet on the appointment, partly out of fear that, given a lifetime appointment, the Southerner might join the conservative bloc and turn against the New Deal. Yet Robinson had worked himself literally to death for the President’s court bill — collapsing and dying on July 14, 1937, a week before the ill-fated legislation he was championing.

And then who was there in Little Rock to escort Robinson’s body off the funeral train but one of his two closest friends — Bernard Baruch!

The anecdote is aired in a masterful contemporaneous (1938) account of the court battle, “The 168 Days” by Turner Catledge and Joseph Alsop.

Catledge was the Times correspondent covering the court controversy (and managing editor when I joined the paper in 1964.) Alsop was a staff reporter at the New York Herald Tribune, magazine journalist and syndicated columnist and, with his brother, Stewart, related to the Roosevelt family — their mother, Corinne Robinson Alsop, was a first cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s niece Eleanor, Franklin’s wife.

Baruch College also crops up in the court saga via the Gulick Papers in our Library Archives.

The packing controversy blew up just as Gulick and his two colleagues Louis Brownlow and Charles Merriam were struggling to reorganize the executive branch in the biggest restructuring of the federal government since 1787, producing the potent modern presidency.

The Secret Science of Government Reform

The court battle distracted Roosevelt, so the White House reorganization — roundly opposed by Congress already up in arms over the packing uproar — didn’t go through until 1939. (We have a ceremonial signing pen FDR presented Gulick.)

The New York Times was deeply interested in the executive reorganization, as evidenced by this letter from John H. Crider, an assistant to Washington Correspondent Arthur Krock, to Gulick on July 21, 1937 (a day before the court bill was ignominiously sent packing, back to committee and oblivion).

In his “strictly personal and confidential” reply to Crider a week later, Gulick confessed to some pessimism over the reorganization effort, in part because of the court fight.

Crider (who went on to a distinguished career at The Boston Herald where he won a 1949 Pulitzer Prize for editorials on international economics) agreed with Gulick that Congress was so shell-shocked by the court fight that there was little hope of advancing the executive reorganization.

What do we draw from this foray into history?

Maybe this.

President Biden, lacking FDR’s 1936 landslide victory and more cautious by nature, may also feel thwarted by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, but he is not about to repeat his predecessor’s doomed crusade.

Carl Spielvogel, 1928-2021

After a long Covid interruption, we resume with this salute to a sturdy son of City College and Baruch, my friend Carl Spielvogel, who left us on April 21, 2021. Spielvogel, New York Timesman, prototype of advertising’s swashbuckling Mad Men (“It’s Miller Time”), diplomat, and philanthropist, died in a Manhattan hospital at 92.

I don’t know if he ever met Luther Gulick, that other adventurer in democracy chronicled in this blog, but both men shared a love of humanitarian causes and responsive government. Spielvogel was a lot better at making money. And he had an adman’s special way with words, like his description of a corporate bungle: “Ready. Fire. Aim.”

A 1952 graduate of the pioneering free-tuition business school originally known as “City, downtown” — a year before it was named for the eminent financier, FDR-advisor, philanthropist, and 1889 alum Bernard Baruch — Spielvogel had a long relationship with Baruch College, spun off as a separate unit of the City University of New York in 1968.

He served as president of the board of trustees of the Baruch College Fund, and in 1990 received the Baruch College Distinguished Alumnus Award for Outstanding Career Accomplishment. In September 1992, the college inaugurated an annual lecture series on global marketing communications in Spielvogel’s honor, and in 1998, he was elected to the City College Communications Hall of Fame. In 2008, to celebrate another distinguished City College graduate, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Spielvogel funded “The Colin Powell Fellows,” that each year sent two summer interns to the U.S. Department of State, where Spielvogel himself had served as the Clinton-appointed Ambassador to Slovakia in 2000-01, a diplomatic title he gloried in forever after. He also was a trustee of the State University of New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, the Asia Society, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the New York State Democratic Party, along with many other institutions to which he also generously contributed. He was married for 40 years to the urban preservationist and author Barbaralee Diamondstein-Spielvogel.

His Times obit Carl Spielvogel, a Longtime Power in Advertising, covered a lot of ground but didn’t mention how he got his job at the World’s Greatest Newspaper, the time he met Hemingway, or some of the other great stories he shared with me over long lunches at the Asia Society, conveniently close to his opulent Park Avenue apartment. He loved to reminisce and given our shared Times history (he left in 1960, four years before I arrived, and was on the board of Lincoln Center in the 1990s when I covered culture for the paper), we always had a lot to gossip about, especially since I had also attended City College (uptown), and we had both started our journalism careers at the very bottom, as copy boys.

He told me how he had once taken a train down to Florida to find Hemingway. A great fan, young Carl made his way to Key West to seek out his idol. He knocked on Hemingway’s door and the writer actually answered. Nervously, Carl babbled on about how much he worshipped the great man, had read all his books and wanted to be a writer just like him. Hemingway listened impassively and finally said. “You want to write?” Oh, yes! Carl said, going on and on about his dream of becoming a writer. “Then write,” Hemingway said. “Don’t talk!”

Spielvogel realized his dream, in a fashion, at The Times. He had been hired in 1950, he told me, thanks to Herbert Mitgang, another Times stalwart, who had joined the staff after service as a combat journalist in World War II. Mitgang (1920-2013) was eight years older than Spielvogel and came from Manhattan whereas Spielvogel grew up in Brooklyn but somehow they had met and Spielvogel envied Mitgang’s job at The Times. Mitgang asked if Spielvogel would like to work there. “I would mop the floors at The Times!” Spielvogel remembered gushing. Mitgang got him hired, barely a rung above janitor but blessedly in the cacophonous news room where he fetched coffee for star reporters and ferried paragraphs from their smoking typewriters to the copy desks of grizzled editors in green eye shades and sleeve garters.

After a stint in the Army, he returned to the paper as a business news reporter. One day the financial editor pulled him aside. “You know anything about advertising?” “Oh sure,” Spielviogel bluffed. He spent the weekend in the public library reading everything he could find about advertising. Which is how he became the paper’s first advertising and marketing columnist, writing six days a week.

He wasn’t the only Timesman to find allure in advertising. Ernie Tidyman, a dashing copy editor on the soc-obit (society news and obituaries) desk from 1960 to 1966, wrote ad copy in his spare time, enabling him to afford a converted red barn as a chic weekend getaway in Connecticut. He did especially well after he wrote the bestseller crime series “Shaft” and the screenplay for “The French Connection.”

Spielvogel quit The Times in 1960, lured away to apply his expertise far more lucratively as a publicist for the advertising giant McCann-Erickson and eventually vice chairman of its parent company, Interpublic. But when he was passed over for the top job after 20 years, he left in 1979 to found, with his former McCann-Erickson colleague Bill Backer, their new partnership Backer & Spielvogel. Backer was legendary for having scribbled on an envelope during a forced layover at Shannon Airport in 1971, the anthem “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.”

By 1987, with clients wooed away from competitors, B&S, a subsidiary of Saatchi & Saatchi, was billing $550 million a year. That year it merged with another Saatchi subsidiary, Ted Bates Worldwide, to form an even huger conglomerate with 104 offices in 46 countries and annual billings of $2.7 billion.

Among their clients was the upstart South Korean carmaker Hyundai. As Spielvogel told me, their strategy capitalized on the fact, little known to car buyers, that Hyundai was the world’s largest shipbuilder and oldest steelmaker in South Korea.

Their campaign noted this, Spielvogel said, with the irresistible tagline, “Think we can build a car?” They could. Hyundai became one of the hottest new brands.

After I became a Distinguished Lecturer in the Newman Library in 2010, Spielvogel told me one day over lunch that he was seeking a home for his voluminous papers spanning his advertising years and diplomatic career. I begged him to consider the Baruch College Archives which housed some of Bernard Baruch’s books and memorabilia and other important collections like the Gulick papers and the Institute of Public Administration history. Alas it never worked out. His archives, and Barbaralee’s, ended up at the Duke University Libraries.

We last booked a lunch before the pandemic at his favorite French brasserie in the East 70’s. As 1 o’clock came and went, I sat alone. My phone finally rang. He was stuck downtown in horrendous traffic. “Order anything you want,” he told me. “Champagne, caviar.” I settled for a beer. He arrived half an hour later. We ate and talked late into the afternoon, pushing away from the table as evening diners were beginning to trickle in. I watched him cross Lexington Avenue and waved goodbye.

How New Yorkers reacted to the Typhoid Epidemics of 1911 and 1913 — and what we can learn today from their mistakes.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-new-yorks-badly-learned-epidemic-lesson-led-to-a-second-lethal-outbreak