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