WEBVTT - Acting Out 0:00:16.115 --> 0:00:30.155 Pushkin The Last Archive, A History of Truth. 0:00:34.995 --> 0:00:38.235 Ella Fitzgerald never much liked doing interviews, which was too 0:00:38.235 --> 0:00:41.395 bad because she did them all the time. Here's what 0:00:41.555 --> 0:00:43.355 she did in Dallas in the nineteen eighties. 0:00:44.195 --> 0:00:47.795 Ella, welcome back to Dallas. How marvelous. Oh, thank you, 0:00:47.915 --> 0:00:49.755 and it's a pleasure to be back here here. 0:00:50.515 --> 0:00:53.115 From the moment she'd become famous in the nineteen thirties, 0:00:53.395 --> 0:00:56.315 everybody loved her, and from then right on through to 0:00:56.355 --> 0:00:59.115 this interview in the nineteen eighties, people wanted to tell 0:00:59.115 --> 0:01:01.675 her that over and over and over again. 0:01:02.235 --> 0:01:04.115 You know, Ella, you really are. 0:01:04.755 --> 0:01:06.435 You're one of the national treasures. 0:01:06.635 --> 0:01:07.595 Do you realize that? 0:01:08.915 --> 0:01:12.355 I realized that a lot of people loved me, and 0:01:12.395 --> 0:01:14.315 I think that's the most important thing. 0:01:15.115 --> 0:01:18.675 One of the stories, the story really that Fitzgerald always 0:01:18.715 --> 0:01:20.635 got asked to tell, was the story of how she 0:01:20.675 --> 0:01:24.435 got famous the Amateur Hour at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, 0:01:24.475 --> 0:01:27.315 when she was supposed to dance but got nervous and 0:01:27.395 --> 0:01:31.475 started to sing instead. It was the moment everyone realized 0:01:31.555 --> 0:01:34.875 she had an incredible voice. And it's a good story. 0:01:35.035 --> 0:01:38.435 So she's about to tell it again, but listen closely 0:01:38.515 --> 0:01:40.115 to what happens when she does. 0:01:41.595 --> 0:01:44.795 Ella, as you look back on your life, here was 0:01:44.835 --> 0:01:50.675 a child from an orphanage and now no, no, somebody 0:01:50.755 --> 0:01:51.555 wrote that up. 0:01:51.635 --> 0:01:52.795 Where did that get come? 0:01:52.955 --> 0:01:56.555 I well, that was a publicity thing a long time ago. 0:01:56.675 --> 0:01:59.875 But I have family, and I had family then, but 0:01:59.995 --> 0:02:03.955 my mother had died, and I guess that's why they 0:02:04.035 --> 0:02:07.115 used that. Mind that I was an orphan but I 0:02:07.155 --> 0:02:07.795 had family. 0:02:07.835 --> 0:02:09.635 At what age were you when your mother? 0:02:09.915 --> 0:02:12.195 I was fifteen? 0:02:12.795 --> 0:02:17.395 About fifteen, because from there we went to the amateur contest. 0:02:18.795 --> 0:02:22.675 That line about the orphanage. It's not strictly true, but 0:02:22.755 --> 0:02:26.515 it's not far off either, because Fitzgerald's not mentioning something 0:02:26.555 --> 0:02:28.635 else that happened right around the same time as that 0:02:28.715 --> 0:02:32.595 amateur night, a missing chapter in her story that must 0:02:32.595 --> 0:02:34.915 have been one of the hardest, most formative times of 0:02:34.915 --> 0:02:38.035 her life, a chapter that has a lot to do 0:02:38.115 --> 0:02:47.875 with that question about the orphanage. Welcome to Season four 0:02:47.915 --> 0:02:50.395 of The Last Archive, the show about how we know 0:02:50.435 --> 0:02:52.475 what we know and why it seems like we don't 0:02:52.515 --> 0:02:56.755 know anything at all anymore. I'm ben Matta Haffrey. This 0:02:56.875 --> 0:03:00.595 episode is not about Ela Fitzgerald, or not only about 0:03:00.635 --> 0:03:03.875 Ela Fitzgerald, but it is about the place where she 0:03:03.995 --> 0:03:08.155 spent that missing time, because in Fitzgerald's a Mission lies 0:03:08.195 --> 0:03:11.755 an experiment, social science study that I believe she was 0:03:11.795 --> 0:03:14.835 a data point in one of the most important, overlooked 0:03:14.835 --> 0:03:18.435 experiments of the twentieth century. These days, we're all used 0:03:18.475 --> 0:03:21.435 to thinking of ourselves as part of social networks, chains 0:03:21.435 --> 0:03:24.835 of influence linking us all together. This episode is about 0:03:24.835 --> 0:03:28.235 where those ideas came from. Well, come back to Fitzgerald, 0:03:28.275 --> 0:03:32.675 I promise, but first I want you to meet the experimenter. 0:03:37.195 --> 0:03:40.435 In the nineteen teens, an ocean away in Austria, there 0:03:40.475 --> 0:03:44.395 was a young and rather mysterious medical student named Jacob 0:03:44.675 --> 0:03:45.635 Levy Moreno. 0:03:47.435 --> 0:03:53.155 I was born on the book The Black Sea, and 0:03:53.195 --> 0:03:55.395 I'll be traveling from one part of the world to 0:03:55.595 --> 0:03:57.915 the others and to find myself. 0:03:58.715 --> 0:04:02.115 Moreno was hard to miss. He'd stride around campus in 0:04:02.155 --> 0:04:05.715 a green peasant's cloak, hatless with a long flowing beard. 0:04:06.315 --> 0:04:08.315 When he was a baby, or so the story goes, 0:04:08.595 --> 0:04:10.875 a woman on the street pointed out at him and said, 0:04:11.035 --> 0:04:13.675 the day will come when this boy will become a 0:04:13.835 --> 0:04:16.515 very great man. People will come from all over the 0:04:16.515 --> 0:04:20.875 world to see him. And so Jacob Levy Moreno was 0:04:20.955 --> 0:04:25.435 always invested in his own sense of destiny. In medical school, 0:04:25.515 --> 0:04:27.875 he worked on the side as a tutor for young children, 0:04:28.235 --> 0:04:30.635 and this is where the seed of his big experiment 0:04:30.755 --> 0:04:36.675 was planted, the one that intersected with Ela Fitzgerald. The 0:04:36.675 --> 0:04:39.635 more he interacted with kids, the more interested he got 0:04:39.715 --> 0:04:43.275 in their fantasies. He'd walk through the public park and 0:04:43.355 --> 0:04:45.555 sit on a low hanging branch of a big tree 0:04:45.835 --> 0:04:48.395 and tell the kid's fairy tales and then watch them 0:04:48.395 --> 0:04:52.795 play together. What interested moreno about children was how easily 0:04:52.795 --> 0:04:56.195 they could take on new identities, play pretend, make up stories, 0:04:56.395 --> 0:05:00.795 believe in the unreal. That spontaneity revealed who they really were, 0:05:01.155 --> 0:05:04.515 but it also allowed them to recreate themselves together in 0:05:04.555 --> 0:05:07.435 a group. A spontaneous game of make believe is a 0:05:07.515 --> 0:05:09.955 kind of magic. How does everyone agree on an new 0:05:10.035 --> 0:05:14.875 reality together instinctively? Kids do it effortlessly, and he wanted 0:05:14.875 --> 0:05:17.955 to give that kind of freedom to everybody. So he 0:05:18.035 --> 0:05:21.395 watched the kids play, told his stories, and started a 0:05:21.475 --> 0:05:25.915 children's theater to think about groups and spontaneity. But this 0:05:26.035 --> 0:05:27.795 was in the lead up to the First World War, 0:05:28.395 --> 0:05:31.315 and when it came to make believe came grinding to 0:05:31.395 --> 0:05:37.475 a halt. Moreno went to work at a refugee camp. 0:05:38.915 --> 0:05:42.915 And I was an officer of health in a camp 0:05:43.155 --> 0:05:46.715 near Vienna. They were taken away and brought into this 0:05:47.155 --> 0:05:51.755 camp about ten thousand Italians, all presents, all Catholic, and 0:05:51.795 --> 0:05:55.515 there I saw the community developing from scratch. 0:05:56.435 --> 0:06:00.035 This fascinated Moreno. Watching these groups form was like trying 0:06:00.035 --> 0:06:02.315 to figure out how those kids in the park created 0:06:02.355 --> 0:06:06.555 small communities. Except in the camp. There was no spontaneity 0:06:06.595 --> 0:06:08.515 in joy. There was only pain. 0:06:09.115 --> 0:06:12.755 Immediately Igan to see attractions and repulsions, and indifferences and 0:06:13.035 --> 0:06:17.675 jealousies and hate, which hinted the process of intubation. 0:06:18.435 --> 0:06:21.475 As Marino saw it, the problem was the camp administration 0:06:21.675 --> 0:06:23.755 didn't have a way of thinking of people as both 0:06:23.795 --> 0:06:26.675 individuals and members of a group at the same time. 0:06:27.435 --> 0:06:31.955 Social scientists often considered groups as a mass, think averages, polls, 0:06:32.155 --> 0:06:35.875 big static numbers. But Marino knew that the truth about 0:06:35.875 --> 0:06:39.475 these people lay in their relationships as individuals within groups. 0:06:40.035 --> 0:06:42.635 The people in the camp weren't just generically in the camp. 0:06:42.995 --> 0:06:47.635 They were specific individuals in specific housing near specific other people. 0:06:48.595 --> 0:06:50.555 He wanted to figure out a way to trace that 0:06:50.675 --> 0:06:55.955 influence a full scientific picture of social reality. He later 0:06:55.995 --> 0:06:58.595 claimed to have brought his ideas to the government administrators, 0:06:59.075 --> 0:07:00.035 but they shot him down. 0:07:01.075 --> 0:07:05.755 It is it is impractical. I was, and I was 0:07:05.875 --> 0:07:09.395 crazy his illusion, and so the result was that I 0:07:10.515 --> 0:07:12.675 began then to study small groups. 0:07:14.235 --> 0:07:16.595 That's how Moreno got through those hard years of war, 0:07:17.195 --> 0:07:19.795 working in the camps and using his free time to 0:07:19.835 --> 0:07:22.915 work on his ideas about groups. When the war was 0:07:22.955 --> 0:07:25.235 over and ma Reno had finished his studies and gotten 0:07:25.235 --> 0:07:27.835 his medical degree, he wanted to go out into the 0:07:27.835 --> 0:07:31.275 world and explore his ideas about community as a practicing physician. 0:07:31.995 --> 0:07:34.715 Problem was, these were the years of Freud and the 0:07:34.755 --> 0:07:38.995 science of the self. You can imagine that classic scene, 0:07:39.515 --> 0:07:43.275 lying on the couch in a psychoanalyst's office, your Freudian 0:07:43.315 --> 0:07:47.195 psychoanalyst asking you about your childhood, your relationship with your mother, 0:07:47.755 --> 0:07:51.315 asking you about you. In particular, the function of that 0:07:51.475 --> 0:07:54.075 couch in the office was to shut the rest of 0:07:54.075 --> 0:07:56.835 the world away. To them. The group was a separate 0:07:56.835 --> 0:07:59.275 thing that had almost nothing to do with the individual, 0:07:59.795 --> 0:08:04.755 and everyone was obsessed with the individual, everyone except Moreno. 0:08:05.395 --> 0:08:07.675 It really annoyed him. It was as if to this 0:08:07.755 --> 0:08:11.315 incredibly active, dramatic man, the greatest sin was to lie 0:08:11.315 --> 0:08:14.035 down on a couch alone and think about your problems. 0:08:14.555 --> 0:08:16.675 He used to bring it up all the time in 0:08:16.755 --> 0:08:18.355 speeches to big groups of people. 0:08:18.875 --> 0:08:21.115 Yes, did people who go on the college for six eights, 0:08:21.835 --> 0:08:24.795 spending twenty thousand dollars and so forth, and then they 0:08:24.835 --> 0:08:25.675 come to us. 0:08:26.115 --> 0:08:28.915 But Moreno had bigger challenges than the fact that nobody 0:08:28.995 --> 0:08:32.755 was interested in his research. Violence and persecution of Jews 0:08:32.795 --> 0:08:36.035 is on the rise, and like so many other Jewish intellectuals, 0:08:36.155 --> 0:08:39.475 Moreno fled Europe sailing for New York in nineteen twenty five. 0:08:39.995 --> 0:08:42.755 But New York wasn't the most welcoming place either. 0:08:43.795 --> 0:08:48.915 This was just after the Congress had passed legislation greatly 0:08:48.995 --> 0:08:51.475 limiting immigration from Eastern Europe. 0:08:51.795 --> 0:08:55.475 Jonathan Moreno is a bioethicist and historian at the University 0:08:55.475 --> 0:08:59.235 of Pennsylvania also Jayale Moreno's son, and. 0:08:59.235 --> 0:09:02.555 It was especially aimed at Jews and Italians. It was 0:09:02.635 --> 0:09:06.795 a really a very clear effort to keep the white 0:09:06.835 --> 0:09:10.195 American race as pure as possible by keeping the Jews 0:09:10.235 --> 0:09:11.595 and Italians out. 0:09:11.595 --> 0:09:14.995 But Marinos slipped through. He lived in a hotel on 0:09:15.035 --> 0:09:17.075 the cheap on the Upper West Side and tried to 0:09:17.075 --> 0:09:20.075 figure out what to do. It was hard, but after 0:09:20.115 --> 0:09:22.235 a couple of years he began to practice a little 0:09:22.275 --> 0:09:25.355 as a physician again. He had a small group of accolytes, 0:09:25.475 --> 0:09:27.155 and one of them married him for a time so 0:09:27.195 --> 0:09:30.315 he could get citizenship. By this point, he'd started an 0:09:30.315 --> 0:09:32.635 improv theater at Carnegie Hall as part of a long 0:09:32.715 --> 0:09:35.275 running goal he had of reforming the theater, but he 0:09:35.355 --> 0:09:38.275 was probably also thinking through his ideas about how groups 0:09:38.275 --> 0:09:41.075 worked as he watched the cast perform different kinds of scenes. 0:09:42.115 --> 0:09:44.875 How spontaneous were they, how quickly did they take on 0:09:44.995 --> 0:09:48.395 new roles. A hallmark of his philosophy was the idea 0:09:48.475 --> 0:09:51.435 that acting things out, taking on new roles could help 0:09:51.475 --> 0:09:54.395 people work out their problems, just on the stage, not 0:09:54.555 --> 0:09:58.075 on a couch. Through the theater, he'd made contact with 0:09:58.115 --> 0:10:01.515 a psychology graduate student named Helen Hall Jennings who was 0:10:01.555 --> 0:10:05.315 as interested in studying groups as he was. Together they 0:10:05.355 --> 0:10:08.275 began to work out a method of graphing the relationships 0:10:08.315 --> 0:10:11.715 between people seeing as individuals and members in a group 0:10:11.755 --> 0:10:14.395 at the same time. But to get enough data to 0:10:14.475 --> 0:10:18.355 test it out, they needed a big experiment, bigger than 0:10:18.395 --> 0:10:19.755 an improv theater company. 0:10:20.275 --> 0:10:23.435 He gets his big break when he goes to the 0:10:23.475 --> 0:10:29.195 American Psychiatric Association meetings in Toronto in nineteen thirty one, where, 0:10:29.315 --> 0:10:35.075 for some reason, another little immigrant named Abe Brill asks 0:10:36.075 --> 0:10:39.275 my father to comment on his paper about a psycho 0:10:39.315 --> 0:10:40.395 analysis of Lincoln. 0:10:41.355 --> 0:10:45.035 Brill was the president of the American Psychiatric Association. He 0:10:45.435 --> 0:10:48.515 died in the Wolfreudian, and in a paper called Abraham 0:10:48.555 --> 0:10:52.195 Lincoln as Humorist, he tore the president apart. He said 0:10:52.235 --> 0:10:55.595 Lincoln's jokes were so morbid and sexual they revealed he 0:10:55.715 --> 0:11:00.155 was a schizoid syntonic personality, whatever that means. For instance, 0:11:00.475 --> 0:11:04.035 when Lincoln's friend worried that Lincoln would be assassinated, Lincoln said, 0:11:04.195 --> 0:11:07.275 if they kill me, I can't die another death. As 0:11:07.355 --> 0:11:10.035 Brill explained to the press, a normal person I ought 0:11:10.075 --> 0:11:12.595 to have said very well, I will be very careful. 0:11:13.275 --> 0:11:16.315 This was hot stuff, and for some reason he asked 0:11:16.355 --> 0:11:17.675 Marino to respond. 0:11:18.075 --> 0:11:21.435 And now my dad is really trying to integrate himself 0:11:21.515 --> 0:11:25.435 successfully with American culture, which you have to do as 0:11:25.475 --> 0:11:29.355 an immigrant, and so he's a great fan of Lincoln. 0:11:29.795 --> 0:11:30.235 Of course it. 0:11:30.235 --> 0:11:34.515 Would be Moreno decided to psychoanalyze Brill in return in 0:11:34.555 --> 0:11:37.515 front of everybody, to stand up for Lincoln, to humiliate 0:11:37.555 --> 0:11:40.435 Brill and to show everyone in the process how ridiculous 0:11:40.435 --> 0:11:41.595 psychoanalysis was. 0:11:42.235 --> 0:11:45.555 So he actually turned the tables on Brill. Why would Brill, 0:11:45.955 --> 0:11:50.075 the little five foot Brill, need to psychoanalyze to take 0:11:50.195 --> 0:11:54.075 down the great Abraham Lincoln, the six foot pot four 0:11:54.115 --> 0:11:57.475 or six foot five Abraham Lincoln. Right, well, Brill is furious. 0:11:57.635 --> 0:12:03.195 Right, Moreno had put his stake in the ground, and 0:12:03.235 --> 0:12:06.395 he was the talk of the conference. His reputation was growing. 0:12:06.715 --> 0:12:08.155 All of a sudden, he was a person to pay 0:12:08.155 --> 0:12:11.555 attention to. He gave a presentation on his new way 0:12:11.595 --> 0:12:14.355 of understanding groups. People were very curious to hear what 0:12:14.395 --> 0:12:18.755 he had to say. One woman in particular was intrigued. 0:12:19.315 --> 0:12:23.355 Fanny French Morse. She ran a women's reformatory upstate, the 0:12:23.395 --> 0:12:26.475 New York State Training School for Girls. She had an 0:12:26.475 --> 0:12:28.915 idea that it might be the perfect place for Moreno 0:12:28.995 --> 0:12:32.715 to make his biggest study. Yet his fate was on 0:12:32.755 --> 0:12:38.035 the upswing. But meanwhile, a teenage Ela Fitzgerald's was about 0:12:38.075 --> 0:12:41.235 to move in the opposite direction, because right around the 0:12:41.235 --> 0:12:44.355 time of Moreno's big break, her mother got in a 0:12:44.395 --> 0:12:57.555 serious car accident. We'll be right back Ella Fitzgerald was 0:12:57.595 --> 0:13:01.555 born in Virginia in nineteen seventeen. Her family moved to 0:13:01.595 --> 0:13:04.435 New York in the early nineteen twenties to Yonkers, a 0:13:04.435 --> 0:13:08.515 few years before jail Moreno immigrated from Austria. As a girl, 0:13:08.635 --> 0:13:11.515 she loved to dance. She was an excellent student too, 0:13:11.675 --> 0:13:14.435 but her real education was making the rounds of the 0:13:14.515 --> 0:13:18.235 dance halls picking up new steps. In nineteen thirty two, though, 0:13:18.515 --> 0:13:21.835 her life began to fall apart, to fall apart in 0:13:21.875 --> 0:13:23.955 a way that very soon put her in the path 0:13:23.995 --> 0:13:27.355 of jail Moreno. That was the year Moreno was finally 0:13:27.395 --> 0:13:30.995 finding his footing. His takedown of Abril, the Lincoln diagnosing 0:13:30.995 --> 0:13:34.795 psychoanalyst and made him a minor celebrity. Elaine was opening 0:13:34.875 --> 0:13:38.155 up for his new ideas about researching groups, which is 0:13:38.155 --> 0:13:42.275 how he made contact with the progressive reformer Fanny French Moorse. 0:13:43.715 --> 0:13:45.955 She invited him to move out of New York City 0:13:46.235 --> 0:13:49.275 and up the river to Hudson to become the director 0:13:49.315 --> 0:13:52.715 of research at the Reformatory where she was the superintendent 0:13:53.395 --> 0:13:59.235 the New York State Training School for Girls. Moreno headed 0:13:59.315 --> 0:14:02.115 up to the school. There's a silent film in his 0:14:02.235 --> 0:14:04.555 archives that was taken a bit later on, so you 0:14:04.595 --> 0:14:07.275 can see what it was probably like when he arrived. 0:14:08.195 --> 0:14:10.675 The reformatory was set high eye up on a ridge 0:14:10.675 --> 0:14:13.875 in Hudson, New York, an old industrial and whaling town. 0:14:14.035 --> 0:14:16.835 The campus sprawled across one hundred and twenty five acres, 0:14:16.955 --> 0:14:21.595 dotted with neat brick cottages, latticework, white trim, blue shutters, 0:14:21.875 --> 0:14:25.035 clean and tidy. The girls at the training school lived 0:14:25.035 --> 0:14:27.715 in the cottages, each of which was presided over by 0:14:27.715 --> 0:14:30.875 a house mother. Moreno would later write that there was 0:14:30.915 --> 0:14:34.475 a chapel, a hospital, an industrial building, a steam laundry, 0:14:34.555 --> 0:14:38.675 a store, an administration building, even a farm. It looked 0:14:38.675 --> 0:14:41.675 well ordered and open, like a boarding school, tucked away 0:14:41.675 --> 0:14:44.955 in the quiet Hudson Valley, hours from the city. Except 0:14:45.035 --> 0:14:48.595 it wasn't a boarding school. A reporter once wrote, in 0:14:48.675 --> 0:14:51.275 only one respect, what a visitor suspect that this was 0:14:51.315 --> 0:14:54.315 not a junior college of the free world. The girls 0:14:54.315 --> 0:15:00.795 refer to life as outside. The reformatory is the kind 0:15:00.835 --> 0:15:03.635 of place that looms in the collective unconscious, like the 0:15:03.635 --> 0:15:06.195 insane asylum, the woods at the edge of town, the 0:15:06.235 --> 0:15:09.755 abandoned manor the island prison, the kind of dark god 0:15:09.915 --> 0:15:12.355 thick corner of the mind where stories gather like in 0:15:12.395 --> 0:15:15.955 the spider's web. I think that's because there's an ambiguity 0:15:15.995 --> 0:15:18.315 to it about the degree to which it's a school 0:15:18.515 --> 0:15:19.075 or a prison. 0:15:19.875 --> 0:15:20.715 I mean, I hate to call. 0:15:20.635 --> 0:15:21.195 It a school. 0:15:21.915 --> 0:15:25.955 Nina Bernstein longtime reporter at Newsday and The New York Times. 0:15:26.355 --> 0:15:28.915 In the nineties, she began to investigate the history of 0:15:28.955 --> 0:15:31.195 the New York State Training School for Girls for an 0:15:31.235 --> 0:15:34.955 amazing book called The Lost Children of Wilder. She's the 0:15:35.035 --> 0:15:37.315 kind of person who not only goes to the archive, 0:15:37.675 --> 0:15:40.355 but once she's there, she turns every page. 0:15:40.555 --> 0:15:43.195 The New York State Training School for Girls actually began 0:15:43.635 --> 0:15:47.635 as a house of refuge for women in eighteen eighty seven, 0:15:48.595 --> 0:15:50.915 and it was the first I think it was the 0:15:50.915 --> 0:15:55.835 first place that women were separately held, and it was 0:15:55.835 --> 0:15:58.835 seen as a great reform. As I discovered when I 0:15:58.835 --> 0:16:04.595 looked at the records, this was a place of solitary confinement, 0:16:05.115 --> 0:16:13.275 very harsh punishments, and minute survey of behavior. Were they 0:16:13.475 --> 0:16:17.715 did they speak in a low voice? Were they too boisterous? 0:16:18.795 --> 0:16:20.915 Did they sit up straight? I mean, you know that 0:16:21.075 --> 0:16:21.635 kind of thing. 0:16:22.475 --> 0:16:24.995 One of the biggest accomplishments of the progressive era was 0:16:25.035 --> 0:16:28.315 the shift from trying children in adult courts to juvenile ones. 0:16:29.235 --> 0:16:32.635 People were especially worried about putting kids in adult prisons 0:16:33.035 --> 0:16:35.635 or even just leaving them in fast growing cities. The 0:16:35.715 --> 0:16:38.995 reformatory was meant to solve for that, but in its 0:16:38.995 --> 0:16:43.235 first few decades it kept getting made and remade. Marino 0:16:43.355 --> 0:16:44.955 was brought in as part of one of the most 0:16:44.995 --> 0:16:48.475 dramatic pushes to reform, an effort to understand how the 0:16:48.515 --> 0:16:50.475 girls functioned together as a group. 0:16:51.555 --> 0:16:55.235 I bring this up in part because you have then 0:16:55.675 --> 0:16:58.955 another reformer, Fanny French Morse. 0:17:00.835 --> 0:17:03.475 Morse had taken over the Hudson Reform School when it 0:17:03.515 --> 0:17:07.075 had become basically a prison. When she took over, she 0:17:07.195 --> 0:17:09.515 made a huge pile on the lawn of all the 0:17:10.035 --> 0:17:13.995 uniforms and the straight jackets and the restraining sheets, and 0:17:14.035 --> 0:17:18.395 then she lit them on fire. That was Fanny Morse, 0:17:18.955 --> 0:17:22.115 burning it all down to build it again. She'd been 0:17:22.155 --> 0:17:25.875 born in Maine and widowed young. She'd run reformatories all 0:17:25.915 --> 0:17:28.955 over the place, and even worked on the national one. 0:17:28.995 --> 0:17:32.635 She was glamorous, progressive, imposing. At an old job, her 0:17:32.635 --> 0:17:35.395 coworkers remembered she had a fancy carriage that She never 0:17:35.515 --> 0:17:39.995 drove herself. She wore small, rounded glasses, and she had 0:17:40.115 --> 0:17:43.515 false teeth made of solid gold and painted white, and 0:17:43.555 --> 0:17:46.515 they locked into her a jawbone with a small gold key. 0:17:47.555 --> 0:17:52.155 That's how I imagine morse carriage waiting, metal jaw clenched, 0:17:52.595 --> 0:17:58.355 bonfire glinting off her glasses, and gold key in her pocket. 0:17:58.675 --> 0:18:02.475 She was a type the progressive arrow reformer. If you 0:18:02.515 --> 0:18:05.435 were an ambitious woman in those days, running a reform 0:18:05.475 --> 0:18:08.435 school was one of the few clear pathways to real 0:18:08.435 --> 0:18:13.075 political power. But it was political power at a cost. 0:18:13.675 --> 0:18:15.355 There was this idea at the time, you know, of 0:18:15.435 --> 0:18:18.875 the woman as the guardian of the hearth, the angel 0:18:18.875 --> 0:18:21.995 of the hearth, and the idea was you were going 0:18:22.035 --> 0:18:25.515 to reprogram these women to be that and that otherwise 0:18:25.995 --> 0:18:30.755 they were going to have these offspring who would be criminals, 0:18:30.755 --> 0:18:35.315 and you know, you would essentially be decimating the race. 0:18:35.795 --> 0:18:42.035 She is a reformer against that eugenics attitude that all 0:18:42.035 --> 0:18:46.955 these girls are feeble minded, and she introduces art and 0:18:47.115 --> 0:18:51.155 gardening and so on. There are these positive aspects, but 0:18:51.555 --> 0:18:55.875 they are also these very negative aspects. From our perspective. 0:18:56.435 --> 0:18:59.635 Morse was on a crusade. She moved into a Rundown 0:18:59.635 --> 0:19:02.555 Old Colonial, half a mile from the school. It had 0:19:02.595 --> 0:19:05.195 once been a grand house, but more recently had been 0:19:05.275 --> 0:19:07.835 used as a brothel. She had the girls from the 0:19:07.835 --> 0:19:11.675 school fix it up, polish the curve mahogany balustrade, restore 0:19:11.755 --> 0:19:14.635 the old antiques. She said she believed in giving them 0:19:14.675 --> 0:19:17.995 an esthetic education, and she held herself up as a model. 0:19:18.635 --> 0:19:20.915 At Christmas, she'd put a candle lit tree in every 0:19:20.995 --> 0:19:23.355 room of the first floor, and nost dinner parties for 0:19:23.395 --> 0:19:26.315 her charges. In the summer, they'd come for dinner on 0:19:26.355 --> 0:19:29.715 the porch. She remade the school in her image too. 0:19:29.835 --> 0:19:33.275 The guardhouse became a teacher's cottage, and the cottages began 0:19:33.315 --> 0:19:35.435 to fill up with old antiques that she'd gathered for 0:19:35.435 --> 0:19:38.355 the girls to fix. She bought one hundred and twenty 0:19:38.355 --> 0:19:40.635 acre farm for them to work. She got rid of 0:19:40.675 --> 0:19:43.115 the uniforms and let them shop in town with an escort. 0:19:43.635 --> 0:19:46.315 She was especially proud of her choir, and she showed 0:19:46.355 --> 0:19:50.395 it off at every opportunity. The press loved her, the 0:19:50.435 --> 0:19:54.355 revolutionary woman, reforming the reformatory, who had remade the school 0:19:54.555 --> 0:19:58.595 so entirely that girls were supposedly begging to stay. But 0:19:59.195 --> 0:20:02.715 there were some ugly rumors. A former employee of hers 0:20:02.755 --> 0:20:06.635 once said, Fanny Frenchmores went through life making decisions on 0:20:06.675 --> 0:20:10.515 the basis of what glorified her reputation. D jested Morse 0:20:10.555 --> 0:20:13.635 had spent money on cosmetic improvements while her girls went 0:20:13.675 --> 0:20:18.195 without the essentials. And Morse had another problem too, from 0:20:18.235 --> 0:20:23.515 her supposedly perfect utopian reformatory. The girls kept running away. 0:20:24.875 --> 0:20:28.195 That's why she needed Jael Moreno. While the girls ran 0:20:28.235 --> 0:20:30.555 away was one of the first things her new director 0:20:30.555 --> 0:20:31.995 of research was meant to study. 0:20:34.675 --> 0:20:37.515 So now he has for the first time a big 0:20:37.515 --> 0:20:42.915 institution with a completely free hand to exercise his ideas 0:20:43.035 --> 0:20:46.075 about interpersonal relations and sociometrics. 0:20:46.595 --> 0:20:50.435 Sociometry was what Moreno called his new science. He assembled 0:20:50.435 --> 0:20:53.315 a team of research assistants. It seems that he lived 0:20:53.355 --> 0:20:56.195 at the school, an entirely closed world of about five 0:20:56.275 --> 0:21:00.155 hundred and five people. Moreno could finally make his map 0:21:00.275 --> 0:21:02.635 of what he began to think of as a social network. 0:21:03.195 --> 0:21:05.755 The closed world of the school was perfect because there 0:21:05.795 --> 0:21:09.595 were clear boundaries. Nobody got in or out without someone 0:21:09.675 --> 0:21:10.475 knowing about it. 0:21:11.395 --> 0:21:13.995 The idea that you could walk into a community of 0:21:14.075 --> 0:21:18.875 hundreds of kids basically and staff and all the caretakers 0:21:18.915 --> 0:21:21.075 and so forth, and just look around and see these people. 0:21:22.195 --> 0:21:24.675 That's the visible world, right, But then there's this whole 0:21:24.995 --> 0:21:29.355 invisible world, sort of like when you look at the stars. 0:21:30.595 --> 0:21:34.195 You don't see constellations, you see little points of light. 0:21:35.155 --> 0:21:39.995 So what you need to be a great astronomer, And 0:21:40.075 --> 0:21:41.555 so he saw himself doing that. 0:21:43.115 --> 0:21:47.675 Moreno and his collaborator Jennings were also doing something morally complicated, 0:21:47.915 --> 0:21:51.035 making a study of a vulnerable population who couldn't consent 0:21:51.075 --> 0:21:54.075 to participate. It was true of all the girls at 0:21:54.115 --> 0:21:57.835 the school, poor girls under state control, but it was 0:21:57.955 --> 0:22:02.475 especially true of the black girls. This white scientist studying 0:22:02.515 --> 0:22:05.275 black people. It happened a lot in the progressive era 0:22:05.355 --> 0:22:08.515 in the early nineteen thirties. That same year that Moreno 0:22:08.595 --> 0:22:12.875 arrived at Hudson, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment began, where hundreds 0:22:12.875 --> 0:22:15.555 of black men with syphilis were told by the government 0:22:15.595 --> 0:22:17.995 that they were being treated, when actually they were just 0:22:18.075 --> 0:22:22.755 being studied to see what happened when syphilis went untreated. Knowledge, 0:22:23.195 --> 0:22:25.355 but at a cost of injustice that no one should 0:22:25.355 --> 0:22:30.555 ever have to pay. At Hudson, Moreno and Jennings gave 0:22:30.595 --> 0:22:32.875 the girls blank forms on which they could rank their 0:22:32.915 --> 0:22:35.875 preferences for roommates as well as mark the people they 0:22:35.875 --> 0:22:39.955 didn't want to live with. Moreno called these attractions and rejections, 0:22:40.115 --> 0:22:42.515 and they were meant to show who was connected socially 0:22:42.595 --> 0:22:46.955 to whom. Using the answers, they began to map the 0:22:46.995 --> 0:22:50.795 cottage communities. Maybe the runaways all lived in cottages with 0:22:50.915 --> 0:22:55.195 higher rejection scores. On the map, they drew the attractions 0:22:55.275 --> 0:22:58.555 as red lines and the rejections as black until the 0:22:58.595 --> 0:23:01.275 school filled up with all these threads spinning out from 0:23:01.355 --> 0:23:06.035 hundreds of girls. Reading Moreno's extremely long and extremely dense 0:23:06.075 --> 0:23:08.395 account of this work is like taping your eyes open 0:23:08.435 --> 0:23:11.795 and scanning through a thousand lines of computer code, except 0:23:12.435 --> 0:23:15.715 then these heartbreaking stories got through all the scientific lingo. 0:23:16.635 --> 0:23:19.635 Ge I want in my cottage because I feel towards her, 0:23:19.755 --> 0:23:23.075 like she was my little sister I never had any, 0:23:23.315 --> 0:23:26.275 and I like to take care of her. Mostly, she's 0:23:26.355 --> 0:23:28.555 just a lonesome little child you just. 0:23:28.475 --> 0:23:29.315 Have to be fond of. 0:23:30.315 --> 0:23:33.595 And then they'd write their reasons for rejecting others. 0:23:33.875 --> 0:23:36.315 It's only because she has a way of edging up 0:23:36.315 --> 0:23:39.235 to you and standing so close when she talks to you. 0:23:39.875 --> 0:23:43.075 There's something about her that is repulsive to me. I 0:23:43.075 --> 0:23:45.435 felt this way about her even before I found out 0:23:45.475 --> 0:23:49.515 about her having secret meetings most every day with colored girls. 0:23:50.155 --> 0:23:52.675