Speaker 1: Pushing Hey listeners, it's Khalil and Ben. We'll be back
Speaker 1: with a new episode next week, but today we want
Speaker 1: to share a story from another Pushkin podcast called The
Speaker 1: Last Archive. The show tells stories all about the history
Speaker 1: of truth in America, and the newest season is hosted
Speaker 1: by Ben nadof Haffrey Man.
Speaker 2: That is right, Khalil. This episode starts with Ella Fitzgerald,
Speaker 2: the famous jazz singer. You and I talked about her
Speaker 2: earlier in the season her friendship with Marilyn Monroe. But
Speaker 2: in the nineteen thirties, when Ella is a girl, she
Speaker 2: was sent to a woman's reformatory in upstate New York.
Speaker 1: At the reformatory, or what's really a kind of prison,
Speaker 1: a social scientist named Jay L. Moreno showed up. He
Speaker 1: studied the relationships between the girls and women there to
Speaker 1: prove his theory of social networks.
Speaker 2: That theory of social nets that works. It was revolutionary
Speaker 2: at that time. The way people are connected through friendships
Speaker 2: and how this affects how they behave had never really
Speaker 2: been studied in this way before.
Speaker 1: Yes, but he missed something happening at the same time
Speaker 1: at this reformatory, something to do with race. And segregation.
Speaker 2: Come on, you knew he was going to miss that.
Speaker 2: This episode is amazing. We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3: The last archive, A History of Truth.
Speaker 4: Ella Fitzgerald never much liked doing interviews, which was too
Speaker 4: bad because she did them all the time. Here's what
Speaker 4: she did in Dallas in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 5: Ella, welcome back to Dallas.
Speaker 6: I'm marvelous. Oh thank you, and it's a pleasure to
Speaker 6: be back here again.
Speaker 4: From the moment she'd become famous in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 4: everybody loved her, and from then and right on through
Speaker 4: to this interview in the nineteen eighties, people wanted to
Speaker 4: tell her that over and over and over again.
Speaker 7: You know, Ella, you really are.
Speaker 8: You're one of the national treasures.
Speaker 3: Do you realize that?
Speaker 6: I just realized that a lot of people love me,
Speaker 6: and I think that's the most important thing.
Speaker 4: One of the stories, the story really that Fitzgerald always
Speaker 4: got asked to tell, was the story of how she
Speaker 4: got famous the amateur Hour at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,
Speaker 4: when she was supposed to dance but got nervous and
Speaker 4: started to sing instead. It was the moment everyone realized
Speaker 4: she had an incredible voice, and it's a good story.
Speaker 4: So she's about to tell it again. But listen closely
Speaker 4: to what happens when she does.
Speaker 6: Ella, As you look back on your life, here was
Speaker 6: a child from an orphanage and now no, no, somebody
Speaker 6: wrote that up.
Speaker 3: Where did they get come by?
Speaker 6: Hit Well, that was a publicity thing long time ago.
Speaker 6: But I have family, and I had family been but
Speaker 6: my mother had died, and I guess that's why they
Speaker 6: used that. Mind that I was an awful but I
Speaker 6: had family.
Speaker 9: At what age were you when your mother died?
Speaker 6: I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
Speaker 6: to the amateur contest.
Speaker 4: That line about the orphanage. It's not strictly true, but
Speaker 4: it's not far off either, because Fitzgerald's not mentioning something
Speaker 4: else that happened right around the same time as that
Speaker 4: amateur night, A missing chapter in her story that must
Speaker 4: have been one of the hardest, most formative times of
Speaker 4: her life, a chapter that has a lot to do
Speaker 4: with that question about the orphanage. Welcome to Season four
Speaker 4: of The Last Archive, the show about how we know
Speaker 4: what we know and why it seems like we don't
Speaker 4: know anything at all anymore. I've been that this episode
Speaker 4: is not about Ella Fitzgerald, or not only about Ella Fitzgerald,
Speaker 4: but it is about the place where she spent that
Speaker 4: missing time. Because in Fitzgerald's a mission lies an experiment,
Speaker 4: a social science study that I believe she was a
Speaker 4: data point in one of the most important, overlooked experiments
Speaker 4: of the twentieth century. These days, we're all used to
Speaker 4: thinking of ourselves as part of social networks, chains of
Speaker 4: influence linking us all together. This episode is about where
Speaker 4: those ideas came from. Well, come back to Fitzgerald, I promise,
Speaker 4: but first I want you to meet the experimenter. In
Speaker 4: the nineteen teens, in Ocean Away in Austria, there was
Speaker 4: a young and rather mysterious medical student named Jacob Levy Moreno.
Speaker 6: I was born on the book The Black Seat, and
Speaker 6: I'll be priveling from one part of the world who
Speaker 6: to find myself.
Speaker 4: Moreno was hard to miss. He'd stride around campus in
Speaker 4: a green peasant's cloak, hatless with a long flowing beard.
Speaker 4: When he was a baby, or so the story goes,
Speaker 4: a woman on the street pointed at him and said,
Speaker 4: the day will come when this boy will become a
Speaker 4: very great man, people will come from all over the
Speaker 4: world to see him, and so Jacob Levy Moreno was
Speaker 4: always invested in his own sense of destiny. In medical school,
Speaker 4: he worked on the side as a tutor for young children,
Speaker 4: and this is where the seed of his big experiment
Speaker 4: was planted, the one that intersected with Ella Fitzgerald. The
Speaker 4: more he interacted with kids, the more interested he got
Speaker 4: in their fantasies. He'd walk through the public park and
Speaker 4: sit on a low hanging branch of a big tree
Speaker 4: and tell the kid's fairy tales and then watch them
Speaker 4: play together. What interested Morena about children was how easily
Speaker 4: they could take on new identities, play pretend, make up stories,
Speaker 4: believe in the unreal. That spontaneity revealed who they really were,
Speaker 4: but it also allowed them to recreate themselves together in
Speaker 4: a group. A spontaneous game of make believe is a
Speaker 4: kind of magic. How does everyone agree on a new
Speaker 4: reality together instinctively? Kids do it effortlessly, and he wanted
Speaker 4: to give that kind of freedom to everybody. So he
Speaker 4: watched the kids play, told his stories, and started a
Speaker 4: children's theater to think about groups and spontaneity. But this
Speaker 4: was in the lead up to the First World War
Speaker 4: and when it came to make believe came grinding to
Speaker 4: a hole. Mareno went to work at a refugee.
Speaker 6: Camp and I was an officer of health in a
Speaker 6: tan Yen.
Speaker 9: They were taken away and brought.
Speaker 4: Into this camp about ten thousand Italians, all presents sol Catholic,
Speaker 4: and there I saw the community developing from stretch. This
Speaker 4: fascinated Moreno. Watching these groups form was like trying to
Speaker 4: figure out how those kids in the park created small communities.
Speaker 4: Except in the camp there was no spontaneity and joy.
Speaker 4: There was only pain.
Speaker 9: Immediately, I began to see attractions and repulsions, and indifferences
Speaker 9: and jealousies and hate, which hinted the process of integration.
Speaker 4: As Marino saw it, The problem was the camp administration
Speaker 4: didn't have a way of thinking of people as both
Speaker 4: individuals and members of a group at the same time.
Speaker 4: Social scientists often considered groups as a mass think averages, polls,
Speaker 4: big static numbers, But Marino knew that the truth about
Speaker 4: these people lay in their relationships as individuals within groups.
Speaker 4: The people in the camp weren't just generically in the camp,
Speaker 4: they were specific individuals in specific housing near specific other people.
Speaker 4: He wanted to figure out a way to trace that
Speaker 4: influence a full scientific picture of social reality. He later
Speaker 4: claimed to have brought his ideas to the government administrators,
Speaker 4: but they shot him down.
Speaker 7: It is said, it is impractical.
Speaker 4: I was, and I was greatly disillusion and so the
Speaker 4: result was about I began then to study small groups.
Speaker 4: That's how Mareno got through those hard years of war,
Speaker 4: working in the camps and using his free time to
Speaker 4: work on his ideas about groups. When the war was
Speaker 4: over and Marino had finished his studies and gotten his
Speaker 4: medical degree, he wanted to go out into the world
Speaker 4: and explore his ideas about community as a practicing physician.
Speaker 4: Problem was, these were the years of Freud and the
Speaker 4: science of the self. You can imagine that classic scene,
Speaker 4: lying on the couch in a psychoanalyst's office. You're Freudian
Speaker 4: psychoanalyst asking you about your childhood, your relationship with your mother,
Speaker 4: asking you about you. In particular, the function of that
Speaker 4: couch in the office was to shut the rest of
Speaker 4: the world away. To the group was a separate thing
Speaker 4: that had almost nothing to do with the individual, and
Speaker 4: everyone was obsessed with the individual, everyone except Moreno. It
Speaker 4: really annoyed him. It was as if to this incredibly active,
Speaker 4: dramatic man, the greatest sin was to lie down on
Speaker 4: a couch alone and think about your problems. He used
Speaker 4: to bring it up all the time in speeches to
Speaker 4: big groups of people.
Speaker 9: Yes, did people who go on the college for six
Speaker 9: eight Yes, spending twenty thousand dollars and so forth, and
Speaker 9: then they come to us.
Speaker 4: The Moreno had bigger challenges than the fact that nobody
Speaker 4: was interested in his research. Violence and persecution of Jews
Speaker 4: was on the rise, and like so many other Jewish intellectuals,
Speaker 4: Moreno fled Europe, sailing for New York in nineteen twenty five.
Speaker 4: But New York wasn't the most welcoming place either.
Speaker 9: This was just after the Congress had passed legislation greatly
Speaker 9: limiting immigration from Eastern Europe.
Speaker 4: Jonathan Moreno is a bioethicist and historian at the University Pennsylvania,
Speaker 4: also Jayale Moreno's son, and.
Speaker 9: It was especially aimed at Jews and Italians. It was
Speaker 9: really a very clear effort to keep the white American
Speaker 9: race as pure as possible by keeping the Jews and
Speaker 9: Italians out.
Speaker 4: But Marenos slipped through. He lived in a hotel on
Speaker 4: the cheap on the Upper West Side and tried to
Speaker 4: figure out what to do. It was hard, but after
Speaker 4: a couple of years he began to practice a little
Speaker 4: as a physician again. He had a small group of accolytes,
Speaker 4: and one of them married him for a time so
Speaker 4: he could get citizenship. By this point, he'd started an
Speaker 4: improv theater at Carnegie Hall as part of a long
Speaker 4: running goal he had of reforming the theater, but he
Speaker 4: was probably also thinking through his ideas about how groups
Speaker 4: worked as he watched the cast perform different kinds of scenes.
Speaker 4: How spontaneous were they, how quickly did they take on
Speaker 4: new roles. A hallmark of his philosophy was the idea
Speaker 4: that acting things out, taking on new roles could help
Speaker 4: people work out their problems just on the stage, out
Speaker 4: on a couch. Through the theater, he'd made contact with
Speaker 4: a psychology graduate student named Helen Hall Jennings, who is
Speaker 4: as interested in studying groups as he was. Together, they
Speaker 4: began to work out a method of graphing the relationships
Speaker 4: between people seeing them as individuals and members in the
Speaker 4: group at the same time, but to get enough data
Speaker 4: to test it out. They needed a big experiment, bigger
Speaker 4: than an improv theater company.
Speaker 9: He gets his big break when he goes to the
Speaker 9: American Psychiatric Association meetings in Toronto in nineteen thirty one, where,
Speaker 9: for some reason, another little immigrant named Abe Brill asks
Speaker 9: my father to comment on his paper about a psycho
Speaker 9: analysis of Lincoln.
Speaker 4: Brill was the president of the American Psychiatric Association. He
Speaker 4: died in the Wolfreudian, and in a paper called Abraham
Speaker 4: Lincoln as Humorist, he tore the president apart. He said
Speaker 4: Lincoln's jokes were so morbid and sexual, the reveal he
Speaker 4: was a schizoid syntonic personality, whatever that means. For instance,
Speaker 4: when Lincoln's friend worried that Lincoln would be assassinated, Lincoln said,
Speaker 4: if they kill me, I can't die another death. As
Speaker 4: Brill explained to the press, a normal person ought to
Speaker 4: have said, very well, I will be very careful. This
Speaker 4: was hot stuff, and for some reason he asked Mareno
Speaker 4: to respond.
Speaker 9: And now my dad is really trying to integrate himself
Speaker 9: successfully with American culture, which you have to do as
Speaker 9: an immigrant, and so he's a great fan of Lincoln.
Speaker 9: Of course, it would be.
Speaker 4: Mareno decided to psychoanalyze Brill in return in front of everybody,
Speaker 4: to stand up for Lincoln, to humiliate Brill, and to
Speaker 4: show everyone in the process how ridiculous psychoanalysis was.
Speaker 9: So he actually turned the tables on Brill. Why would Brill,
Speaker 9: the little five foot Brill, need to psychoanalyze to take
Speaker 9: down the great Abraham Lincoln, the six foot four or
Speaker 9: six foot five Abraham. Well, Brial is furious right.
Speaker 4: Moreno had put his stake in the ground, and he
Speaker 4: was the talk of the conference. His reputation was growing
Speaker 4: all of a sudden. He was a person to pay
Speaker 4: attention to, So when he gave a presentation on his
Speaker 4: new way of understanding groups, people were very curious to
Speaker 4: hear what he had to say. One woman in particular
Speaker 4: was intrigued. Fanny French Morse. She ran a women's reformatory upstate,
Speaker 4: the New York State Training School for Girls. She had
Speaker 4: an idea that it might be the perfect place for
Speaker 4: Moreno to make his biggest study yet. His fate was
Speaker 4: on the epswing. But meanwhile, a teenage El FitzGeralds was
Speaker 4: about to move in the opposite direction, because right around
Speaker 4: the time of Moreno's big break, her mother got in
Speaker 4: a serious car accident. We'll be right back. Ella Fitzgerald
Speaker 4: was born in Virginia in nineteen seventeen. Her family moved
Speaker 4: to New York in the early nineteen twenties to Yonkers,
Speaker 4: a few years before jail Moreno immigrated from Austria. As
Speaker 4: a girl, she loved to dance. She was an excellent
Speaker 4: student too, but her real education was making the rounds
Speaker 4: of the dance halls picking up new steps. In nineteen
Speaker 4: thirty two, though, her life began to fall apart, to
Speaker 4: fall apart in a way that very soon put her
Speaker 4: in the path of jail Moreno. That was the year
Speaker 4: Moreno was finally finding his footing his takedown of Abe Brill,
Speaker 4: the Lincoln diagnosing psychoanalyst, and made him a minor celebrity.
Speaker 4: Elaine was opening up for his new ideas about researching groups,
Speaker 4: which is how he made contact with the progressive reformer
Speaker 4: Fanny French Morse. She invited him to move out of
Speaker 4: New York City and up the river to Hudson to
Speaker 4: become the director of research at the Reformatory, where she
Speaker 4: was the superintendent the New York State Training School for girls.
Speaker 4: Moreno headed up to the school. There's a silent film
Speaker 4: in his archives that was taken a bit later on,
Speaker 4: so you can see what it was probably like when
Speaker 4: he arrived. The reformatory was set high up on a
Speaker 4: ridge in Hudson, New York, an old industrial and whaling town.
Speaker 4: The campus sprawled across one hundred and twenty five acres,
Speaker 4: dotted with neat brick cottages, latticework, white trim, blue shutters,
Speaker 4: clean and tidy. The girls at the training school lived
Speaker 4: in the cottages, each of which was presided over by
Speaker 4: a house mother. Moreno would later write that there was
Speaker 4: a chapel, a hospital, an industrial building, a steam laundry,
Speaker 4: a store, an administration building, even a farm. It looked
Speaker 4: well ordered and open, like a boarding school, tucked away
Speaker 4: in the quiet Hudson Valley, hours from the city. Except
Speaker 4: it wasn't a boarding school. A reporter once wrote, in
Speaker 4: only one respect, what a visitor suspect that this was
Speaker 4: not a junior college of the free world. The girls
Speaker 4: refer to life as outside. The reformatory is the kind
Speaker 4: of place that looms in the collective unconscious, like the
Speaker 4: insane asylum. The woods at the edge of town, the
Speaker 4: abandoned manor the island prison, the kind of dark gothic
Speaker 4: corner of the mind where stories gather like in the
Speaker 4: Spider's web. I think that's because there's an ambiguity to
Speaker 4: it about the degree to which it's a school or
Speaker 4: a prison.
Speaker 3: I mean, I hate to call it a school.
Speaker 4: Nina Bernstein longtime reporter at Newsday and The New York Times.
Speaker 4: In the nineties, she began to investigate the history of
Speaker 4: the New York State Training School for Girls for an
Speaker 4: amazing book called The Lost Children of Wilder. She's the
Speaker 4: kind of person who not only goes to the archive,
Speaker 4: but once she's there, she turns every page.
Speaker 3: The New York State Training School for Girls actually began
Speaker 3: as a house of refuge for women in eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 3: and it was the first I think it was the
Speaker 3: first place that women were separately held, and it was
Speaker 3: seen as a great reform. As I discovered when I
Speaker 3: looked at the records, this was a place of solitary confinement,
Speaker 3: very harsh punishments, and minute surveillance of behavior. Were they
Speaker 3: did they speak in a low voice? Were they too boisterous?
Speaker 3: Did they sit up straight? I mean you know that
Speaker 3: kind of thing.
Speaker 4: One of the biggest accomplishments of the progressive era was
Speaker 4: the shift from trying children in adult courts to juvenile ones.
Speaker 4: People were especially worried about putting kids in adult prisons
Speaker 4: or even just leaving them in fast growing cities. The
Speaker 4: Reformatory was meant to solve for that, but in its
Speaker 4: first few decades it kept getting made and remade. Marino
Speaker 4: was brought in as part of one of the most
Speaker 4: dramatic pushes to reform, an effort to understand how the
Speaker 4: girls functioned together as a group.
Speaker 3: I bring this up in part because you have then
Speaker 3: another reformer, Fanny French Morse.
Speaker 4: Morse had taken over the Hudson Reform School when it
Speaker 4: had become basically a prison. When she took over, she
Speaker 4: made a huge pile on the lawn of all the
Speaker 4: prison uniforms and the strait jackets and the restraining sheets,
Speaker 4: and then she lit them on fire. That was Fanny
Speaker 4: Morse burning it all down to build it again. She'd
Speaker 4: been born in Maine and widowed young. She'd run reformatories
Speaker 4: all over the place and even worked on the national one.
Speaker 4: She was glamorous, progressive, imposing at an old job. Her
Speaker 4: coworkers remembered she had a fancy carriage that she never
Speaker 4: drove herself. She wore small, rounded glasses, and she had
Speaker 4: false teeth made of solid gold and painted white, and
Speaker 4: they locked into her jawbone with a small gold key.
Speaker 4: That's how I imagine Morse carriage waiting, metal jaw clenched, bonfire
Speaker 4: glinting off her glasses, and gold old key in her pocket.
Speaker 4: She was a type the progressive era reformer. If you
Speaker 4: were an ambitious woman in those days, running a reform
Speaker 4: school was one of the few clear pathways to real
Speaker 4: political power, but it was political power at a cost.
Speaker 3: There was this idea at the time, you know, of
Speaker 3: the woman is the guardian of the hearth, the angel
Speaker 3: of the hearth, and the idea was you were going
Speaker 3: to reprogram these women to be that and that otherwise
Speaker 3: they were going to have these offspring who would be criminals,
Speaker 3: and you know, you would essentially be decimating the race.
Speaker 3: She is a reformer against that eugenics attitude that all
Speaker 3: these girls are feeble minded, and she introduces art and
Speaker 3: gardening and so on. There's there are these positive aspects,
Speaker 3: but they are also these very negative aspects from our
Speaker 3: person respective.
Speaker 4: Morse was on a crusade. She moved into a run
Speaker 4: down old colonial half a mile from the school. It
Speaker 4: had once been a grand house, but more recently had
Speaker 4: been used as a brothel. She had the girls from
Speaker 4: the school fix it up, polished the curved mahogany balustrade,
Speaker 4: restore the old antiques. She said she believed in giving
Speaker 4: them an esthetic education, and she held herself up as
Speaker 4: a model. At Christmas, she'd put a candle lit tree
Speaker 4: in every room of the first floor and ost dinner
Speaker 4: parties for her charges. In the summer, they'd come for
Speaker 4: dinner on the porch. She remade the school in her
Speaker 4: image too. The guardhouse became a teacher's cottage, and the
Speaker 4: cottages began to fill up with old antiques that she'd
Speaker 4: gathered for the girls to fix. She bought one hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty acre farm for them to work. She got
Speaker 4: rid of the uniforms and let them shop in town
Speaker 4: with an escort. She was especially proud of her choir,
Speaker 4: and she showed it off at every opportunity. The press
Speaker 4: loved her, the revolutionary woman reforming the reformatory, who had
Speaker 4: remade the school so entirely that girls were supposedly begging
Speaker 4: to stay, but there were some ugly rumors. A former
Speaker 4: employee of hers once said, Fanny Frenchmorse went through life
Speaker 4: making decisions on the basis of what glorified her reputation.
Speaker 4: She suggested Morse had spent money on cosmetic improvements while
Speaker 4: her girls went without the essentials. And Morse had another
Speaker 4: problem too. From her supposedly perfect utopian reformatory, the girls
Speaker 4: kept running away. That's why she needed Jael Moreno. Why
Speaker 4: the girls ran away was one of the first things
Speaker 4: her new director of research was meant to study.
Speaker 9: So now he has, for the first time a big
Speaker 9: institution with a completely free hand to exercise his ideas
Speaker 9: about interpersonal relations and sociometrics.
Speaker 4: Sociometry was what Moreno called his new science. He assembled
Speaker 4: a team of research assistants. It seems that he lived
Speaker 4: at the school and entirely closed were of about five
Speaker 4: hundred and five people. Mareno could finally make his map
Speaker 4: of what he began to think of as a social network.
Speaker 4: The closed world of the school was perfect because there
Speaker 4: were clear boundaries. Nobody got in or out without someone
Speaker 4: knowing about it.
Speaker 9: The idea that you could walk into a community of
Speaker 9: hundreds of kids basically, and staff and all the caretakers
Speaker 9: and so forth, and just look around and see these people.
Speaker 9: That's the visible world, right, But then there's this whole
Speaker 9: invisible world, sort of like when you look at the
Speaker 9: stars and you don't see constellations, you see little points
Speaker 9: of light. So what you know, you need to be
Speaker 9: a great astronomer. And so he saw himself doing that.
Speaker 4: Moreno and his collaborator Jennings were also doing something morally complicated,
Speaker 4: making a study of a vulnerable population who couldn't consent
Speaker 4: to participate. It was true of all the girls at
Speaker 4: the school roles under state control, but it was especially
Speaker 4: true of the black girls. This white scientists studying black people.
Speaker 4: It happened a lot in the progressive era in the
Speaker 4: early nineteen thirties. That same year that Moreno arrived at Hudson,
Speaker 4: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment began, where hundreds of black men
Speaker 4: with syphilis were told by the government that they were
Speaker 4: being treated, when actually they were just being studied to
Speaker 4: see what happened when syphilis went untreated. Knowledge but at
Speaker 4: a cost of injustice that no one should ever have
Speaker 4: to pay at Hudson. Moreno and Jennings gave the girls
Speaker 4: blank forms on which they could rank their preferences for roommates,
Speaker 4: as well as mark the people they didn't want to
Speaker 4: live with. Moreno called these attractions and rejections, and they
Speaker 4: were meant to show who was connected socially to whom.
Speaker 4: Using the answers, they began to map the cottage communities.
Speaker 4: Maybe the runaways all lived in cottages with higher rejection scores.
Speaker 4: On the map, they drew the attractions as red lines
Speaker 4: and the rejections is black. Until the school filled up
Speaker 4: with all these threads spinning out from hundreds of girls.
Speaker 4: Reading Moreno's extremely long and extremely dense account of this
Speaker 4: work is like taping your eyes open and scanning through
Speaker 4: a thousand lines of computer code, except then these heartbreaking
Speaker 4: stories cut through all the scientific lingo.
Speaker 10: Ge I want in my cottage because I feel towards her,
Speaker 10: like she was my little sister I never had any,
Speaker 10: and I like to take care of her. Mostly, she's
Speaker 10: just a lonesome little child you just have to be
Speaker 10: fond of.
Speaker 4: And then they'd write their reasons for rejecting others.
Speaker 10: It's only because she has a way of edging up
Speaker 10: to you and standing so close when she talks to you.
Speaker 10: There's something about her that is repulsive to me. I
Speaker 10: felt this way about her even before I found out
Speaker 10: about her having secret meetings most every day with colored girls.
Speaker 10: She doesn't just go with her herself, but she tries
Speaker 10: to get new girls to carry her notes so they'll
Speaker 10: get interesting too.
Speaker 4: Moreno and Jennings traced those connections and rejections between girls
Speaker 4: of different races, but even with an eye towards rearranging
Speaker 4: the community, race was an invisible wall they wouldn't cross.
Speaker 4: If a white girl wanted to live with a black girl,
Speaker 4: that was out of the question. Because there was something
Speaker 4: else that no one mentioned in all the breathless news
Speaker 4: coverage about the Reformed Reformatory. The school was segregated. This
Speaker 4: was controversial even at the time. Just a few months
Speaker 4: before Morse met Moreno and asked him up to Hudson,
Speaker 4: the Attorney General of New York had found out that
Speaker 4: a black girl was denied a spot at Morse's school
Speaker 4: and issued an opinion about the segregation there, saying that
Speaker 4: it should not be permitted because of the possibility of abuse,
Speaker 4: but still Morse believed firmly that the school should stay segregated.
Speaker 4: That was galling to black civil rights leaders.
Speaker 11: They're seeing black kids continued to be subject to the
Speaker 11: horrific treatment that is supposed to be at this point
Speaker 11: reserved only for adults.
Speaker 4: Jeff Ward is a professor of African and African American
Speaker 4: studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. I found
Speaker 4: his work through the Prison Public Memory Project, which is
Speaker 4: an amazing website devoted to the legacy of the training school.
Speaker 4: Ward wrote a sweeping history called the Black Child Savers.
Speaker 11: You know they're seeing their kids deny the same prospects
Speaker 11: of self realization that why kids are seemingly having access
Speaker 11: to visa visa rebuilt dat of ideal.
Speaker 4: Morse was trying to keep access to that ideal as
Speaker 4: limited as possible to white girls. That dividing line and
Speaker 4: everything else was observed in Moreno's study. The researchers watched
Speaker 4: the girls talking in pairs while doing laundry, study them
Speaker 4: as they made rugs together. Moreno and Jennings presented the
Speaker 4: research as total, which of course it wasn't couldn't have been,
Speaker 4: but every observation became a number, and those numbers helped
Speaker 4: the researchers draw their lines between the girls, which ones
Speaker 4: were friends, which ones were enemies, and how strongly they
Speaker 4: felt about each other.
Speaker 9: And you could actually put a number on that, you
Speaker 9: could calculate it right, So this was even better. One
Speaker 9: cabin had forty five point seventy three mutual choices and
Speaker 9: another cabin had eighty nine point six five mutual choices. Well,
Speaker 9: what does that really mean. I don't know. It's surely
Speaker 9: false precision. But in terms of the history of ideas,
Speaker 9: that was really a breakthrough.
Speaker 4: Moreno and Jennings were gathering an unprecedented amount of data,
Speaker 4: watching the girls interact and beginning to sort it into
Speaker 4: maps and charts, and that's when the Runaway chain began.
Speaker 4: In the fall of nineteen thirty two, two girls named
Speaker 4: Ruth and Marie ran away from cottage twelve. They were
Speaker 4: both daughters of Italian immigrants. Ruth had once been forced
Speaker 4: into prostitution. Marie's mother said she was incorrigible, and so
Speaker 4: she was sent to Hudson. Moreno and Jennings already knew
Speaker 4: about them because they ranked high on the list of
Speaker 4: girls who were isolated in the community, very few lines
Speaker 4: ran towards them. On Halloween night of that year, there
Speaker 4: was a party, a friend of Ruth and Marie pretended
Speaker 4: to faint, and while the house mother was distracted, they
Speaker 4: slipped away. Then the next night five girls ran away.
Speaker 4: Four days after that another four girls, and then three girls.
Speaker 4: Fourteen girls ran away over a period of fourteen days.
Speaker 4: Why runaways had always been a problem, but only ten
Speaker 4: girls had run away in the seven months before. During
Speaker 4: the same stretch the previous year, only three girls had
Speaker 4: run away. And it wasn't just that these were the
Speaker 4: loneliest girls. There were plenty of other isolated points on
Speaker 4: Moreno and Jennings maps who hadn't run away. And it
Speaker 4: wasn't just that these were the people who ran away,
Speaker 4: because only two of them had ever tried it before.
Speaker 4: It was a mystery. So Mareno and Jennings went to
Speaker 4: Psychological Geography Map three and they began to trace the
Speaker 4: lines connecting the runaways. This is why the mapping was important,
Speaker 4: they said. They'd collected ten thousand pages of data and
Speaker 4: they needed a way to visualize it all. What they
Speaker 4: noticed was that even though Ruth and Marie were lonely kids.
Speaker 4: There was an important line of friendship that ran from
Speaker 4: them to the next girls who ran away, and then
Speaker 4: from those girls to the next and so on. They
Speaker 4: discovered attractions between them all, a pathway of influence that
Speaker 4: ran from Cottage twelve unbroken to Cottage ten. Mareno wrote
Speaker 4: that it was proof that networks exist.
Speaker 9: We're accustomed these days to thinking of social networks in
Speaker 9: terms of epidemiology, right, And I think what he understood
Speaker 9: was that there was an epidemiology to the influences of
Speaker 9: ideas and patterns of ideas and social networks. How did
Speaker 9: the girls stimulate each other to be rebels or to
Speaker 9: be to accept the conditions of the school, which one
Speaker 9: might well argue they shouldn't have accepted. I'd given a
Speaker 9: deeper understanding of what those conditions probably were.
Speaker 4: It was a powerful piece of social science, arguably the
Speaker 4: first time the spread of an idea had been traced
Speaker 4: so closely. Moreno and Jennings used their maps to reorganize
Speaker 4: the cottages, and the runaway numbers began to drop, until
Speaker 4: Mareno claimed they were unprecedentedly low. Morse must have been
Speaker 4: thrilled Moreno had seen the unseen. On April second, nineteen
Speaker 4: thirty three, Morino showed those maps in public for the
Speaker 4: first time at a medical conference at the Waldorf Astoria
Speaker 4: hotel in Manhattan, one hundred miles away from the Reformatory.
Speaker 4: Physicians and journalists peered at the webs of seven thousand
Speaker 4: red and black lines spiraling out from hundreds of little circles,
Speaker 4: some marked as white girls, some marked as black. Together
Speaker 4: comprising the scientists said the entire psychology of the Hudson Reformatory.
Speaker 4: The next day, The New York Times proclaimed emotions mapped
Speaker 4: by new geography. Moreno said that the same kind of
Speaker 4: invisible structure ran through all of society. He claimed the
Speaker 4: study proved there were ten to fifteen million isolated people
Speaker 4: in the country, and he said there were plans now
Speaker 4: to make a complete psychological map of New York City.
Speaker 4: That map never happened, or not as he planned it,
Speaker 4: but the work on the walls of the hotel was
Speaker 4: a forerunner of social network theory, a field that has
Speaker 4: fundamentally shaped the way we think about policy, how ideas
Speaker 4: and culture spread, and the way social media algorithms are built.
Speaker 5: The mere mapping of the networks is transformational. The recognition
Speaker 5: that there are these elaborate you know, skinnes of human interactions,
Speaker 5: you know, like where these people are interconnected.
Speaker 4: That's Nicholas Christaccus. He directs the Human Nature Lab at
Speaker 4: Yale and he's done a number of groundbreaking studies on
Speaker 4: social networks. When we talked, he pulled out an old
Speaker 4: copy of a Moreno map.
Speaker 5: I have to be very delicate here, so it's not
Speaker 5: to rip it. It's a sociometric geography of a community.
Speaker 5: It says this image, it's a very famous image of
Speaker 5: these are girls. Every dot is a girl, and the
Speaker 5: lines between them are friendships. And they're in different dormitories
Speaker 5: in the little circles. And look that you can just
Speaker 5: immediately see that the ties within the dormitories are tighter.
Speaker 5: That's like a really fundamental insight. That's that's so called
Speaker 5: community structure within the within the dormitories. So there's a
Speaker 5: there's a just a tremendous amount of insight in the book.
Speaker 5: No matter the man's you know, manifest a weirdness, and
Speaker 5: and he was weird.
Speaker 4: There was a tremendous amount of insight. But also as
Speaker 4: Christocus and I talked about something missing, those runaway girls
Speaker 4: were Moreno is proof that social networks existed, and that
Speaker 4: was the basis of his new science. But they also
Speaker 4: proved something else. We know what it was now, in
Speaker 4: part because two weeks after that meeting, when Moreno and
Speaker 4: his crew were back studying at Hudson, a new girl
Speaker 4: showed up to the New York State Training School. She
Speaker 4: was entered in the log book they wrote the date
Speaker 4: April eighteenth, a number three nine eighty six, and her name,
Speaker 4: Ella Fitzgerald, And then under a fence they wrote, ungovernable,
Speaker 4: We'll be right back. When Ella Fitzgerald's mom got in
Speaker 4: that car accident, her family life turned upside down. In
Speaker 4: a great upcoming book, the historian Judith Tick writes that
Speaker 4: she survived but was badly hurt. Her job had been
Speaker 4: the family's main source of income, and it was the
Speaker 4: Depression they were in trouble, So Fitzgerald started taking any
Speaker 4: work she could find. At some point she ran numbers,
Speaker 4: and she'd worked at a brothel, keeping a lookout for cops.
Speaker 4: Then one day the police picked her up for truancy
Speaker 4: and brought her before a judge, who sentenced her to
Speaker 4: the training school up in Hudson. They checked her in
Speaker 4: one week before her birthday. Her whole life, she'd avoid
Speaker 4: speaking publicly about her time at the reformatory, and it
Speaker 4: wasn't even public knowledge that she'd been there until Nina Bernstein,
Speaker 4: that investigative reporter from the New York Times, was interviewing
Speaker 4: someone from the school.
Speaker 3: And at some point in the interview, he tells me
Speaker 3: that there had been an effort to bring back as
Speaker 3: role models for girls. You know, at some time in
Speaker 3: the history of the institution, there had been this effort
Speaker 3: to bring role models back, and that the assistant superintendent,
Speaker 3: Muriel Jenkins, had recounted him know that Fitzgerald wanted nothing
Speaker 3: to do with her the institution.
Speaker 4: This was the first Bernstein heard of it. When we
Speaker 4: talked about it, she got animated, like it was happening
Speaker 4: all over.
Speaker 3: Again, and of course I go, oh, my god.
Speaker 4: Bernstein began to dig I.
Speaker 3: Went back to the local historian and she was able
Speaker 3: to give me several names and numbers of people who
Speaker 3: had worked at the institution, including this woman in her
Speaker 3: late eighties who had taught English, and she had been
Speaker 3: Ella Fitzgerald's teacher, and she talked about what a great
Speaker 3: student she was and what a perfectionist she was, and
Speaker 3: her beautiful penmanship, she said, I can even visualize her handwriting.
Speaker 4: What's interesting to me is I don't think it was
Speaker 4: the stigma that Fitzgerald was avoiding by refusing to talk
Speaker 4: about her time at the training school. She spoke in
Speaker 4: interviews about running numbers and working at the brothel. It
Speaker 4: wasn't that she'd done something illegal. I'm not sure why
Speaker 4: she didn't talk about it, but maybe it was just
Speaker 4: too painful, because on top of all the other indignities
Speaker 4: and abuses of life at a segregated reformatory, there was
Speaker 4: one thing that must have hurt Fitzgerald, especially Morse's all
Speaker 4: white choir wouldn't let her sing with them.
Speaker 3: I interviewed Beulah Crank, who had been a house mother
Speaker 3: in the fifties and sixties, but who had been a
Speaker 3: teenager who grew up in Hudson, and she told me
Speaker 3: she vividly recalled Ella and some other black girls from
Speaker 3: Hudson being invited to sing at her the local ame church,
Speaker 3: and to some extent at least I came away with
Speaker 3: a feeling from Beulah Crank that the church had invited
Speaker 3: these girls to perform in part because they were excluded
Speaker 3: from this white choir. That was a big deal at
Speaker 3: the time that she had never forgotten that she said
Speaker 3: that girl sang her heart out.
Speaker 4: In Marino's study, the race of the girls is noted.
Speaker 4: On some of the maps, you can see the ties
Speaker 4: between black and white cottages. He'd written that though black
Speaker 4: and white students lived separately in educational and social activities,
Speaker 4: they mix freely. But from Fitzgerald's experience, it's clear that
Speaker 4: that wasn't the case. Marino and Jennings had either totally
Speaker 4: missed it or they'd chosen to ignore it based on
Speaker 4: everything they'd observed. I don't think they could possibly have
Speaker 4: missed what was really going on. And it wasn't just
Speaker 4: segregation in the choir. In the basement of those white
Speaker 4: trimmed cottages. There were beatings too.
Speaker 3: You know, this was a system in which the black
Speaker 3: girls were in these black cottages were subjected to corporal
Speaker 3: punishment by men, and you know, so beaten by men.
Speaker 4: It turned out that Fitzgerald had been kept in the
Speaker 4: basement and, in the words of the superintendent Bernstein, spoke
Speaker 4: to all but tortured. This was part of life at
Speaker 4: the New York State Training School. Soon after, an investigation
Speaker 4: of the school revealed the full extent of what girls
Speaker 4: like Fitzgerald were subject to. There was never enough space
Speaker 4: for black girls because they were only allowed in two
Speaker 4: of the many cottages. White girls got to use Moreno's
Speaker 4: sociometric system to choose their roommates, but not black girls
Speaker 4: because there were so few options for where they could
Speaker 4: live in the first place. Black girls were made to
Speaker 4: do all the laundry for the white girls, because that's
Speaker 4: the kind of job Morse thought they could get outside
Speaker 4: the school. All that is why Bernstein hates to call
Speaker 4: it a school, the reason it was always a prison.
Speaker 6: I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
Speaker 6: to the amateur contest.
Speaker 4: There's no record of when elliphtz Gerald left the training school.
Speaker 4: Based on the vague parole records and the fact that
Speaker 4: she'd been sentenced to a few years. Bernstein thinks she
Speaker 4: ran away, and I think so too. But she was
Speaker 4: at Hudson when Moreno and Jennings were there the year
Speaker 4: before they published their study. So I went back to
Speaker 4: their account that dense text, and I can't know, but
Speaker 4: I think that I found Ella Fitzgerald in it. On
Speaker 4: page one hundred and ten of Moreno's book, he describes
Speaker 4: a group of girls working on restoring a piece of furniture.
Speaker 4: They worked with varnish and sandpaper to strip the old paint,
Speaker 4: repair it, and paint it again. And in that group
Speaker 4: there's a girl named Ella. Each girl was given a
Speaker 4: two letter code. Moreno gave Ella the code GA. One
Speaker 4: hundred pages later, there's another graph with thirty four red
Speaker 4: circles for white girls and twenty three black ones for
Speaker 4: black In the fourth black circle from the top, you
Speaker 4: can see the letters GA. Moreno published his book in
Speaker 4: nineteen thirty four with the title Who Shall Survive. The
Speaker 4: book was enormously influential, including with the Roosevelt administration. Moreno's
Speaker 4: science was used in the New Deal and also in
Speaker 4: the internment camps. It led to an influential journal called Sociometry,
Speaker 4: in which the principles of social network theory were formulated.
Speaker 4: They published the paper that tested the six degrees of
Speaker 4: separation rule. Social science legends like John Dewey, George Gallup,
Speaker 4: and Margaret Meade were on the editorial staff. A History
Speaker 4: of Social network analysis is dedicated to Moreno and says
Speaker 4: that Without him, there would be no field of social
Speaker 4: network analysis. Moreno had finally founded that field that was
Speaker 4: all about seeing the group and the individual all at once,
Speaker 4: but in the process he missed something crucial about these
Speaker 4: particular individuals, and that same year Marino finally established himself
Speaker 4: with his Hudson's study. Ella Fitzgerald entered a contest at
Speaker 4: the Apollo Theater. When when you first started, you had
Speaker 4: visions of not being a singer.
Speaker 7: You were going to be a dancer.
Speaker 5: Is that right right?
Speaker 9: Tell me, oh, you really want to hear that. Will
Speaker 9: started back in.
Speaker 12: My hometown in Yonkers, and I was.
Speaker 8: What they call the you know.
Speaker 12: The greatest little dancer in Yonkers. And we used to
Speaker 12: go down to the Apollo on amateur night, my girlfriends
Speaker 12: and I and you know, like they always tell you
Speaker 12: if you want to be an amateur, to sign and
Speaker 12: drop your name in the box.
Speaker 6: And being from Youngers, we never thought anybody would send
Speaker 6: a postcard to Youngkers, and uh, the three of us.
Speaker 11: We put our names in.
Speaker 4: She's on stage in the twilight of her career telling
Speaker 4: that story Everybody Loves Again. What nobody knew was when
Speaker 4: she was on the stage at the Apollo. She was
Speaker 4: just out of the training.
Speaker 6: School and I was the one was chosen and I
Speaker 6: made up. You know.
Speaker 11: They say, well, if you don't.
Speaker 6: Go, you're chicken. So we went and believe it or not,
Speaker 6: I was the first amateur that they called. And there
Speaker 6: were two sisters who were the dance and the sisters
Speaker 6: in the world called the Edward Sisters, and they were
Speaker 6: starring at the Pollo and they closed the show with
Speaker 6: out And when I saw those ladies dance, I says,
Speaker 6: no way, I'm going out there and try to dance,
Speaker 6: because they stopped the show. I was the first one
Speaker 6: was called, and when I got out there, somebody haullered
Speaker 6: out in the.
Speaker 9: Audi is what is she going to do?
Speaker 4: Fitzgerald was on stage in front of a theater that
Speaker 4: fits over a thousand people. She was rail thin, wearing
Speaker 4: boots and a tatter dress.
Speaker 6: And my mother had a record of Miss Connie Boswell,
Speaker 6: who I think was one of the greatest singers that
Speaker 6: ever lived. And she used to play Object of My
Speaker 6: Affection and Judy and I got so I had, you know,
Speaker 6: used to sing it. So the man said sing something. Well,
Speaker 6: I tried to sing Judy, and I think miss Connie Bosa,
Speaker 6: because then I tried to sing like her, and I.
Speaker 12: Sang if a voyage ben break the hope of the broom.
Speaker 6: That's Judy, and everybody says, all that girl can sing,
Speaker 6: and the people caught it so much. I sang Object
Speaker 6: of my Affection that was the other side of the record.
Speaker 3: And I won first prize.
Speaker 6: So then that made me feel like, you know, well,
Speaker 6: I wanted to try to be a singer.
Speaker 4: She said that if she hadn't won that contest, she
Speaker 4: probably wouldn't have tried to become a singer. Fitzgerald started
Speaker 4: affronting for a band, Chick Web's Orchestra. Not long after that,
Speaker 4: she had her first big hit, and then she became
Speaker 4: one of the most famous singers of all time. But
Speaker 4: what I kept thinking about is she didn't write the
Speaker 4: song she sang. It's her voice, people love, and her
Speaker 4: voice is something so singular, so beautiful, that all she
Speaker 4: had to do was begin to sing, and everyone in
Speaker 4: that room at the Apollo fell in love. And then
Speaker 4: I thought about Fanny French Morse's all white choir and
Speaker 4: how they couldn't hear her voice because all they could
Speaker 4: see was her skin. That's what segregation does to a mind,
Speaker 4: it's a prison and Ella Fitzgerald escaped in the summer
Speaker 4: of nineteen thirty six, two years after Moreno's study came out.
Speaker 4: As Fitzgerald was touring the country, a black doctor named
Speaker 4: Emmy Ross wrote the governor of New York about the
Speaker 4: conditions for black girls at the New York State Training School.
Speaker 4: It led to an investigation. Morris tried to fight it.
Speaker 4: She pressured a black member of her staff to quote
Speaker 4: keep her mouth closed on this. Judges wrote letters to
Speaker 4: the governor claiming that integrating the school would start a
Speaker 4: race war. But still it went ahead, and in the end,
Speaker 4: the investigation led to Fanny Frenchmorse stepping down from the
Speaker 4: school and retiring from public life, and the broader movement
Speaker 4: surrounding it led to an amendment that prohibited the funding
Speaker 4: of a place like the Training School if it discriminated
Speaker 4: by race. It was a groundbreaking piece of legislation, and
Speaker 4: it led to all kinds of other civil rights laws,
Speaker 4: like a big idea working its way through a network.
Speaker 4: Decades later, an interviewer asked Fitzgerald what she'd have been
Speaker 4: if she hadn't become a singer, and she said a teacher,
Speaker 4: I love children.
Speaker 6: I guess put that in.
Speaker 8: I'm a I'm a lapper children. We sent thirteen thousand
Speaker 8: children in South Carolina up and we did Old McDonald
Speaker 8: and you should hear all of them sing in Ei eile.
Speaker 4: This is embarrassing to admit, but I started writing this
Speaker 4: story because I found a bunch of undigitized tapes of
Speaker 4: Morino in his archives doing his therapeutic theater thing, and
Speaker 4: I thought, great, this will be fun and strange. But
Speaker 4: then I learned about social network theory, and then the prison,
Speaker 4: and finally Ella Fitzgerald, and the story rotated on its axis.
Speaker 4: I felt like I walked into that place with a
Speaker 4: set of ideas, and I walked out of it with her.
Speaker 4: I came for the group, and I left with her voice.
Speaker 8: And I've always felt that it takes one person to
Speaker 8: make the other person. We don't do anything more, so.
Speaker 6: I think if.
Speaker 8: We try to help each other. I like the field
Speaker 8: now that a lot of the young people will say, well,
Speaker 8: she did it, I.
Speaker 3: Can do it.
Speaker 8: You're a beautiful person. People are beautiful.
Speaker 9: Thanks Elms, though good to see.
Speaker 4: Any We live our lives in the intersecting webs of
Speaker 4: social networks that Marino saw for better and for worse.
Speaker 4: But the thrust of all that, why any of it
Speaker 4: matters is because it means we owe each other. We're
Speaker 4: not just individuals, we're not only groups. It's like Fitzgerald
Speaker 4: said in that interview, we don't do anything ourselves. And
Speaker 4: it takes one person to make another person.
Speaker 7: There's a saying who says, and love is blind. Still
Speaker 7: we're often to seek and ye shall find. So I'm
Speaker 7: going to seek. Here's a certain letter.
Speaker 10: In bud.
Speaker 4: The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nattafhaffrey.
Speaker 4: It's produced by Me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Speaker 4: Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
Speaker 4: this episode by Arthur Comperts. Our foolproof player is Becca A.
Speaker 5: Lewis.
Speaker 4: Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive
Speaker 4: producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour, thanks also to
Speaker 4: Julia Barton, Pushkin's executive editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi
Speaker 4: and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphon Met. Many of
Speaker 4: our sound effects are from Harry Jannette Junior. In the
Speaker 4: Star Geanette Foundation. Special thanks to Judith Tick for sharing
Speaker 4: an advanced copy of her upcoming book, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald,
Speaker 4: a biography that overturns many myths about Fitzgerald's life. Thanks
Speaker 4: also to Becky Cooper, will Friedwald, Russa Marajan, Jessica Murphy,
Speaker 4: and the New York State Archives. For a bibliography, further reading,
Speaker 4: and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head
Speaker 4: to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
Speaker 4: a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
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Speaker 4: Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
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Speaker 4: newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more
Speaker 4: Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 4: wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Mattafhaffrey.
Speaker 5: How some one to what.
Speaker 6: O me?
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