July 19, 2023 • 50 mins
Here’s a special episode from another Pushkin show we love -- The Last Archive. In the 1930s, at a women's reformatory in upstate New York, an upstart social scientist made a study that launched the field of social network analysis. It was revolutionary, but missed something happening at the same time at the same school, something we know now in part from the story of the school's most famous inmate: Ella Fitzgerald.
To hear the rest of the season, visit The Last Archive show page on Apple Podcasts, at pushkin.fm, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing Hey listeners, it's Khalil and Ben. We'll be back
with a new episode next week, but today we want
to share a story from another Pushkin podcast called The
Last Archive. The show tells stories all about the history
of truth in America, and the newest season is hosted
(00:35):
by Ben nadof Haffrey Man.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
That is right, Khalil. This episode starts with Ella Fitzgerald,
the famous jazz singer. You and I talked about her
earlier in the season her friendship with Marilyn Monroe. But
in the nineteen thirties, when Ella is a girl, she
was sent to a woman's reformatory in upstate New York.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
At the reformatory, or what's really a kind of prison,
a social scientist named Jay L. Moreno showed up. He
studied the relationships between the girls and women there to
prove his theory of social networks.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
That theory of social nets that works. It was revolutionary
at that time. The way people are connected through friendships
and how this affects how they behave had never really
been studied in this way before.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yes, but he missed something happening at the same time
at this reformatory, something to do with race. And segregation.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Come on, you knew he was going to miss that.
This episode is amazing. We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
The last archive, A History of Truth.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Ella Fitzgerald never much liked doing interviews, which was too
bad because she did them all the time. Here's what
she did in Dallas in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Ella, welcome back to Dallas.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
I'm marvelous. Oh thank you, and it's a pleasure to
be back here again.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
From the moment she'd become famous in the nineteen thirties,
everybody loved her, and from then and right on through
to this interview in the nineteen eighties, people wanted to
tell her that over and over and over again.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
You know, Ella, you really are.
Speaker 8 (02:18):
You're one of the national treasures.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Do you realize that?
Speaker 6 (02:23):
I just realized that a lot of people love me,
and I think that's the most important thing.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
One of the stories, the story really that Fitzgerald always
got asked to tell, was the story of how she
got famous the amateur Hour at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,
when she was supposed to dance but got nervous and
started to sing instead. It was the moment everyone realized
she had an incredible voice, and it's a good story.
So she's about to tell it again. But listen closely
(02:52):
to what happens when she does.
Speaker 6 (02:55):
Ella, As you look back on your life, here was
a child from an orphanage and now no, no, somebody
wrote that up.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Where did they get come by?
Speaker 6 (03:06):
Hit Well, that was a publicity thing long time ago.
But I have family, and I had family been but
my mother had died, and I guess that's why they
used that. Mind that I was an awful but I
had family.
Speaker 9 (03:21):
At what age were you when your mother died?
Speaker 6 (03:24):
I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
to the amateur contest.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
That line about the orphanage. It's not strictly true, but
it's not far off either, because Fitzgerald's not mentioning something
else that happened right around the same time as that
amateur night, A missing chapter in her story that must
have been one of the hardest, most formative times of
her life, a chapter that has a lot to do
with that question about the orphanage. Welcome to Season four
(04:01):
of The Last Archive, the show about how we know
what we know and why it seems like we don't
know anything at all anymore. I've been that this episode
is not about Ella Fitzgerald, or not only about Ella Fitzgerald,
but it is about the place where she spent that
missing time. Because in Fitzgerald's a mission lies an experiment,
(04:23):
a social science study that I believe she was a
data point in one of the most important, overlooked experiments
of the twentieth century. These days, we're all used to
thinking of ourselves as part of social networks, chains of
influence linking us all together. This episode is about where
those ideas came from. Well, come back to Fitzgerald, I promise,
but first I want you to meet the experimenter. In
(04:50):
the nineteen teens, in Ocean Away in Austria, there was
a young and rather mysterious medical student named Jacob Levy Moreno.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
I was born on the book The Black Seat, and
I'll be priveling from one part of the world who
to find myself.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Moreno was hard to miss. He'd stride around campus in
a green peasant's cloak, hatless with a long flowing beard.
When he was a baby, or so the story goes,
a woman on the street pointed at him and said,
the day will come when this boy will become a
very great man, people will come from all over the
world to see him, and so Jacob Levy Moreno was
(05:34):
always invested in his own sense of destiny. In medical school,
he worked on the side as a tutor for young children,
and this is where the seed of his big experiment
was planted, the one that intersected with Ella Fitzgerald. The
more he interacted with kids, the more interested he got
in their fantasies. He'd walk through the public park and
(05:57):
sit on a low hanging branch of a big tree
and tell the kid's fairy tales and then watch them
play together. What interested Morena about children was how easily
they could take on new identities, play pretend, make up stories,
believe in the unreal. That spontaneity revealed who they really were,
but it also allowed them to recreate themselves together in
(06:18):
a group. A spontaneous game of make believe is a
kind of magic. How does everyone agree on a new
reality together instinctively? Kids do it effortlessly, and he wanted
to give that kind of freedom to everybody. So he
watched the kids play, told his stories, and started a
children's theater to think about groups and spontaneity. But this
(06:39):
was in the lead up to the First World War
and when it came to make believe came grinding to
a hole. Mareno went to work at a refugee.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
Camp and I was an officer of health in a
tan Yen.
Speaker 9 (06:57):
They were taken away and brought.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
Into this camp about ten thousand Italians, all presents sol Catholic,
and there I saw the community developing from stretch. This
fascinated Moreno. Watching these groups form was like trying to
figure out how those kids in the park created small communities.
Except in the camp there was no spontaneity and joy.
(07:21):
There was only pain.
Speaker 9 (07:22):
Immediately, I began to see attractions and repulsions, and indifferences
and jealousies and hate, which hinted the process of integration.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
As Marino saw it, The problem was the camp administration
didn't have a way of thinking of people as both
individuals and members of a group at the same time.
Social scientists often considered groups as a mass think averages, polls,
big static numbers, But Marino knew that the truth about
these people lay in their relationships as individuals within groups.
(07:53):
The people in the camp weren't just generically in the camp,
they were specific individuals in specific housing near specific other people.
He wanted to figure out a way to trace that
influence a full scientific picture of social reality. He later
claimed to have brought his ideas to the government administrators,
but they shot him down.
Speaker 7 (08:14):
It is said, it is impractical.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
I was, and I was greatly disillusion and so the
result was about I began then to study small groups.
That's how Mareno got through those hard years of war,
working in the camps and using his free time to
work on his ideas about groups. When the war was
over and Marino had finished his studies and gotten his
(08:39):
medical degree, he wanted to go out into the world
and explore his ideas about community as a practicing physician.
Problem was, these were the years of Freud and the
science of the self. You can imagine that classic scene,
lying on the couch in a psychoanalyst's office. You're Freudian
psychoanalyst asking you about your childhood, your relationship with your mother,
(09:01):
asking you about you. In particular, the function of that
couch in the office was to shut the rest of
the world away. To the group was a separate thing
that had almost nothing to do with the individual, and
everyone was obsessed with the individual, everyone except Moreno. It
really annoyed him. It was as if to this incredibly active,
(09:22):
dramatic man, the greatest sin was to lie down on
a couch alone and think about your problems. He used
to bring it up all the time in speeches to
big groups of people.
Speaker 9 (09:32):
Yes, did people who go on the college for six
eight Yes, spending twenty thousand dollars and so forth, and
then they come to us.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
The Moreno had bigger challenges than the fact that nobody
was interested in his research. Violence and persecution of Jews
was on the rise, and like so many other Jewish intellectuals,
Moreno fled Europe, sailing for New York in nineteen twenty five.
But New York wasn't the most welcoming place either.
Speaker 9 (09:57):
This was just after the Congress had passed legislation greatly
limiting immigration from Eastern Europe.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Jonathan Moreno is a bioethicist and historian at the University Pennsylvania,
also Jayale Moreno's son, and.
Speaker 9 (10:12):
It was especially aimed at Jews and Italians. It was
really a very clear effort to keep the white American
race as pure as possible by keeping the Jews and
Italians out.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
But Marenos slipped through. He lived in a hotel on
the cheap on the Upper West Side and tried to
figure out what to do. It was hard, but after
a couple of years he began to practice a little
as a physician again. He had a small group of accolytes,
and one of them married him for a time so
he could get citizenship. By this point, he'd started an
improv theater at Carnegie Hall as part of a long
(10:46):
running goal he had of reforming the theater, but he
was probably also thinking through his ideas about how groups
worked as he watched the cast perform different kinds of scenes.
How spontaneous were they, how quickly did they take on
new roles. A hallmark of his philosophy was the idea
that acting things out, taking on new roles could help
people work out their problems just on the stage, out
(11:08):
on a couch. Through the theater, he'd made contact with
a psychology graduate student named Helen Hall Jennings, who is
as interested in studying groups as he was. Together, they
began to work out a method of graphing the relationships
between people seeing them as individuals and members in the
group at the same time, but to get enough data
to test it out. They needed a big experiment, bigger
(11:31):
than an improv theater company.
Speaker 9 (11:33):
He gets his big break when he goes to the
American Psychiatric Association meetings in Toronto in nineteen thirty one, where,
for some reason, another little immigrant named Abe Brill asks
my father to comment on his paper about a psycho
analysis of Lincoln.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Brill was the president of the American Psychiatric Association. He
died in the Wolfreudian, and in a paper called Abraham
Lincoln as Humorist, he tore the president apart. He said
Lincoln's jokes were so morbid and sexual, the reveal he
was a schizoid syntonic personality, whatever that means. For instance,
when Lincoln's friend worried that Lincoln would be assassinated, Lincoln said,
(12:17):
if they kill me, I can't die another death. As
Brill explained to the press, a normal person ought to
have said, very well, I will be very careful. This
was hot stuff, and for some reason he asked Mareno
to respond.
Speaker 9 (12:31):
And now my dad is really trying to integrate himself
successfully with American culture, which you have to do as
an immigrant, and so he's a great fan of Lincoln.
Of course, it would be.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Mareno decided to psychoanalyze Brill in return in front of everybody,
to stand up for Lincoln, to humiliate Brill, and to
show everyone in the process how ridiculous psychoanalysis was.
Speaker 9 (12:55):
So he actually turned the tables on Brill. Why would Brill,
the little five foot Brill, need to psychoanalyze to take
down the great Abraham Lincoln, the six foot four or
six foot five Abraham. Well, Brial is furious right.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
Moreno had put his stake in the ground, and he
was the talk of the conference. His reputation was growing
all of a sudden. He was a person to pay
attention to, So when he gave a presentation on his
new way of understanding groups, people were very curious to
hear what he had to say. One woman in particular
was intrigued. Fanny French Morse. She ran a women's reformatory upstate,
(13:36):
the New York State Training School for Girls. She had
an idea that it might be the perfect place for
Moreno to make his biggest study yet. His fate was
on the epswing. But meanwhile, a teenage El FitzGeralds was
about to move in the opposite direction, because right around
the time of Moreno's big break, her mother got in
(13:57):
a serious car accident. We'll be right back. Ella Fitzgerald
was born in Virginia in nineteen seventeen. Her family moved
to New York in the early nineteen twenties to Yonkers,
(14:18):
a few years before jail Moreno immigrated from Austria. As
a girl, she loved to dance. She was an excellent
student too, but her real education was making the rounds
of the dance halls picking up new steps. In nineteen
thirty two, though, her life began to fall apart, to
fall apart in a way that very soon put her
in the path of jail Moreno. That was the year
(14:39):
Moreno was finally finding his footing his takedown of Abe Brill,
the Lincoln diagnosing psychoanalyst, and made him a minor celebrity.
Elaine was opening up for his new ideas about researching groups,
which is how he made contact with the progressive reformer
Fanny French Morse. She invited him to move out of
New York City and up the river to Hudson to
(15:02):
become the director of research at the Reformatory, where she
was the superintendent the New York State Training School for girls.
Moreno headed up to the school. There's a silent film
in his archives that was taken a bit later on,
so you can see what it was probably like when
he arrived. The reformatory was set high up on a
(15:24):
ridge in Hudson, New York, an old industrial and whaling town.
The campus sprawled across one hundred and twenty five acres,
dotted with neat brick cottages, latticework, white trim, blue shutters,
clean and tidy. The girls at the training school lived
in the cottages, each of which was presided over by
a house mother. Moreno would later write that there was
(15:44):
a chapel, a hospital, an industrial building, a steam laundry,
a store, an administration building, even a farm. It looked
well ordered and open, like a boarding school, tucked away
in the quiet Hudson Valley, hours from the city. Except
it wasn't a boarding school. A reporter once wrote, in
only one respect, what a visitor suspect that this was
(16:04):
not a junior college of the free world. The girls
refer to life as outside. The reformatory is the kind
of place that looms in the collective unconscious, like the
insane asylum. The woods at the edge of town, the
abandoned manor the island prison, the kind of dark gothic
corner of the mind where stories gather like in the
(16:26):
Spider's web. I think that's because there's an ambiguity to
it about the degree to which it's a school or
a prison.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I mean, I hate to call it a school.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Nina Bernstein longtime reporter at Newsday and The New York Times.
In the nineties, she began to investigate the history of
the New York State Training School for Girls for an
amazing book called The Lost Children of Wilder. She's the
kind of person who not only goes to the archive,
but once she's there, she turns every page.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
The New York State Training School for Girls actually began
as a house of refuge for women in eighteen eighty seven,
and it was the first I think it was the
first place that women were separately held, and it was
seen as a great reform. As I discovered when I
looked at the records, this was a place of solitary confinement,
(17:18):
very harsh punishments, and minute surveillance of behavior. Were they
did they speak in a low voice? Were they too boisterous?
Did they sit up straight? I mean you know that
kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
One of the biggest accomplishments of the progressive era was
the shift from trying children in adult courts to juvenile ones.
People were especially worried about putting kids in adult prisons
or even just leaving them in fast growing cities. The
Reformatory was meant to solve for that, but in its
first few decades it kept getting made and remade. Marino
(17:57):
was brought in as part of one of the most
dramatic pushes to reform, an effort to understand how the
girls functioned together as a group.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
I bring this up in part because you have then
another reformer, Fanny French Morse.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Morse had taken over the Hudson Reform School when it
had become basically a prison. When she took over, she
made a huge pile on the lawn of all the
prison uniforms and the strait jackets and the restraining sheets,
and then she lit them on fire. That was Fanny
Morse burning it all down to build it again. She'd
(18:35):
been born in Maine and widowed young. She'd run reformatories
all over the place and even worked on the national one.
She was glamorous, progressive, imposing at an old job. Her
coworkers remembered she had a fancy carriage that she never
drove herself. She wore small, rounded glasses, and she had
false teeth made of solid gold and painted white, and
(18:57):
they locked into her jawbone with a small gold key.
That's how I imagine Morse carriage waiting, metal jaw clenched, bonfire
glinting off her glasses, and gold old key in her pocket.
She was a type the progressive era reformer. If you
were an ambitious woman in those days, running a reform
(19:19):
school was one of the few clear pathways to real
political power, but it was political power at a cost.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
There was this idea at the time, you know, of
the woman is the guardian of the hearth, the angel
of the hearth, and the idea was you were going
to reprogram these women to be that and that otherwise
they were going to have these offspring who would be criminals,
and you know, you would essentially be decimating the race.
(19:49):
She is a reformer against that eugenics attitude that all
these girls are feeble minded, and she introduces art and
gardening and so on. There's there are these positive aspects,
but they are also these very negative aspects from our
person respective.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Morse was on a crusade. She moved into a run
down old colonial half a mile from the school. It
had once been a grand house, but more recently had
been used as a brothel. She had the girls from
the school fix it up, polished the curved mahogany balustrade,
restore the old antiques. She said she believed in giving
them an esthetic education, and she held herself up as
(20:31):
a model. At Christmas, she'd put a candle lit tree
in every room of the first floor and ost dinner
parties for her charges. In the summer, they'd come for
dinner on the porch. She remade the school in her
image too. The guardhouse became a teacher's cottage, and the
cottages began to fill up with old antiques that she'd
gathered for the girls to fix. She bought one hundred
(20:51):
and twenty acre farm for them to work. She got
rid of the uniforms and let them shop in town
with an escort. She was especially proud of her choir,
and she showed it off at every opportunity. The press
loved her, the revolutionary woman reforming the reformatory, who had
remade the school so entirely that girls were supposedly begging
to stay, but there were some ugly rumors. A former
(21:15):
employee of hers once said, Fanny Frenchmorse went through life
making decisions on the basis of what glorified her reputation.
She suggested Morse had spent money on cosmetic improvements while
her girls went without the essentials. And Morse had another
problem too. From her supposedly perfect utopian reformatory, the girls
(21:36):
kept running away. That's why she needed Jael Moreno. Why
the girls ran away was one of the first things
her new director of research was meant to study.
Speaker 9 (21:48):
So now he has, for the first time a big
institution with a completely free hand to exercise his ideas
about interpersonal relations and sociometrics.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Sociometry was what Moreno called his new science. He assembled
a team of research assistants. It seems that he lived
at the school and entirely closed were of about five
hundred and five people. Mareno could finally make his map
of what he began to think of as a social network.
The closed world of the school was perfect because there
were clear boundaries. Nobody got in or out without someone
(22:23):
knowing about it.
Speaker 9 (22:25):
The idea that you could walk into a community of
hundreds of kids basically, and staff and all the caretakers
and so forth, and just look around and see these people.
That's the visible world, right, But then there's this whole
invisible world, sort of like when you look at the
stars and you don't see constellations, you see little points
(22:47):
of light. So what you know, you need to be
a great astronomer. And so he saw himself doing that.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Moreno and his collaborator Jennings were also doing something morally complicated,
making a study of a vulnerable population who couldn't consent
to participate. It was true of all the girls at
the school roles under state control, but it was especially
true of the black girls. This white scientists studying black people.
(23:17):
It happened a lot in the progressive era in the
early nineteen thirties. That same year that Moreno arrived at Hudson,
the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment began, where hundreds of black men
with syphilis were told by the government that they were
being treated, when actually they were just being studied to
see what happened when syphilis went untreated. Knowledge but at
a cost of injustice that no one should ever have
(23:39):
to pay at Hudson. Moreno and Jennings gave the girls
blank forms on which they could rank their preferences for roommates,
as well as mark the people they didn't want to
live with. Moreno called these attractions and rejections, and they
were meant to show who was connected socially to whom.
Using the answers, they began to map the cottage communities.
(24:02):
Maybe the runaways all lived in cottages with higher rejection scores.
On the map, they drew the attractions as red lines
and the rejections is black. Until the school filled up
with all these threads spinning out from hundreds of girls.
Reading Moreno's extremely long and extremely dense account of this
work is like taping your eyes open and scanning through
(24:22):
a thousand lines of computer code, except then these heartbreaking
stories cut through all the scientific lingo.
Speaker 10 (24:30):
Ge I want in my cottage because I feel towards her,
like she was my little sister I never had any,
and I like to take care of her. Mostly, she's
just a lonesome little child you just have to be
fond of.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
And then they'd write their reasons for rejecting others.
Speaker 10 (24:47):
It's only because she has a way of edging up
to you and standing so close when she talks to you.
There's something about her that is repulsive to me. I
felt this way about her even before I found out
about her having secret meetings most every day with colored girls.
She doesn't just go with her herself, but she tries
to get new girls to carry her notes so they'll
(25:08):
get interesting too.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Moreno and Jennings traced those connections and rejections between girls
of different races, but even with an eye towards rearranging
the community, race was an invisible wall they wouldn't cross.
If a white girl wanted to live with a black girl,
that was out of the question. Because there was something
else that no one mentioned in all the breathless news
coverage about the Reformed Reformatory. The school was segregated. This
(25:36):
was controversial even at the time. Just a few months
before Morse met Moreno and asked him up to Hudson,
the Attorney General of New York had found out that
a black girl was denied a spot at Morse's school
and issued an opinion about the segregation there, saying that
it should not be permitted because of the possibility of abuse,
but still Morse believed firmly that the school should stay segregated.
(26:01):
That was galling to black civil rights leaders.
Speaker 11 (26:04):
They're seeing black kids continued to be subject to the
horrific treatment that is supposed to be at this point
reserved only for adults.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Jeff Ward is a professor of African and African American
studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. I found
his work through the Prison Public Memory Project, which is
an amazing website devoted to the legacy of the training school.
Ward wrote a sweeping history called the Black Child Savers.
Speaker 11 (26:32):
You know they're seeing their kids deny the same prospects
of self realization that why kids are seemingly having access
to visa visa rebuilt dat of ideal.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Morse was trying to keep access to that ideal as
limited as possible to white girls. That dividing line and
everything else was observed in Moreno's study. The researchers watched
the girls talking in pairs while doing laundry, study them
as they made rugs together. Moreno and Jennings presented the
research as total, which of course it wasn't couldn't have been,
(27:03):
but every observation became a number, and those numbers helped
the researchers draw their lines between the girls, which ones
were friends, which ones were enemies, and how strongly they
felt about each other.
Speaker 9 (27:15):
And you could actually put a number on that, you
could calculate it right, So this was even better. One
cabin had forty five point seventy three mutual choices and
another cabin had eighty nine point six five mutual choices. Well,
what does that really mean. I don't know. It's surely
false precision. But in terms of the history of ideas,
(27:38):
that was really a breakthrough.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Moreno and Jennings were gathering an unprecedented amount of data,
watching the girls interact and beginning to sort it into
maps and charts, and that's when the Runaway chain began.
In the fall of nineteen thirty two, two girls named
Ruth and Marie ran away from cottage twelve. They were
(28:01):
both daughters of Italian immigrants. Ruth had once been forced
into prostitution. Marie's mother said she was incorrigible, and so
she was sent to Hudson. Moreno and Jennings already knew
about them because they ranked high on the list of
girls who were isolated in the community, very few lines
ran towards them. On Halloween night of that year, there
(28:24):
was a party, a friend of Ruth and Marie pretended
to faint, and while the house mother was distracted, they
slipped away. Then the next night five girls ran away.
Four days after that another four girls, and then three girls.
Fourteen girls ran away over a period of fourteen days.
(28:45):
Why runaways had always been a problem, but only ten
girls had run away in the seven months before. During
the same stretch the previous year, only three girls had
run away. And it wasn't just that these were the
loneliest girls. There were plenty of other isolated points on
Moreno and Jennings maps who hadn't run away. And it
wasn't just that these were the people who ran away,
(29:07):
because only two of them had ever tried it before.
It was a mystery. So Mareno and Jennings went to
Psychological Geography Map three and they began to trace the
lines connecting the runaways. This is why the mapping was important,
they said. They'd collected ten thousand pages of data and
they needed a way to visualize it all. What they
(29:29):
noticed was that even though Ruth and Marie were lonely kids.
There was an important line of friendship that ran from
them to the next girls who ran away, and then
from those girls to the next and so on. They
discovered attractions between them all, a pathway of influence that
ran from Cottage twelve unbroken to Cottage ten. Mareno wrote
(29:49):
that it was proof that networks exist.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
We're accustomed these days to thinking of social networks in
terms of epidemiology, right, And I think what he understood
was that there was an epidemiology to the influences of
ideas and patterns of ideas and social networks. How did
the girls stimulate each other to be rebels or to
(30:16):
be to accept the conditions of the school, which one
might well argue they shouldn't have accepted. I'd given a
deeper understanding of what those conditions probably were.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
It was a powerful piece of social science, arguably the
first time the spread of an idea had been traced
so closely. Moreno and Jennings used their maps to reorganize
the cottages, and the runaway numbers began to drop, until
Mareno claimed they were unprecedentedly low. Morse must have been
thrilled Moreno had seen the unseen. On April second, nineteen
(30:53):
thirty three, Morino showed those maps in public for the
first time at a medical conference at the Waldorf Astoria
hotel in Manhattan, one hundred miles away from the Reformatory.
Physicians and journalists peered at the webs of seven thousand
red and black lines spiraling out from hundreds of little circles,
some marked as white girls, some marked as black. Together
(31:13):
comprising the scientists said the entire psychology of the Hudson Reformatory.
The next day, The New York Times proclaimed emotions mapped
by new geography. Moreno said that the same kind of
invisible structure ran through all of society. He claimed the
study proved there were ten to fifteen million isolated people
in the country, and he said there were plans now
(31:36):
to make a complete psychological map of New York City.
That map never happened, or not as he planned it,
but the work on the walls of the hotel was
a forerunner of social network theory, a field that has
fundamentally shaped the way we think about policy, how ideas
and culture spread, and the way social media algorithms are built.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
The mere mapping of the networks is transformational. The recognition
that there are these elaborate you know, skinnes of human interactions,
you know, like where these people are interconnected.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
That's Nicholas Christaccus. He directs the Human Nature Lab at
Yale and he's done a number of groundbreaking studies on
social networks. When we talked, he pulled out an old
copy of a Moreno map.
Speaker 5 (32:20):
I have to be very delicate here, so it's not
to rip it. It's a sociometric geography of a community.
It says this image, it's a very famous image of
these are girls. Every dot is a girl, and the
lines between them are friendships. And they're in different dormitories
in the little circles. And look that you can just
immediately see that the ties within the dormitories are tighter.
(32:42):
That's like a really fundamental insight. That's that's so called
community structure within the within the dormitories. So there's a
there's a just a tremendous amount of insight in the book.
No matter the man's you know, manifest a weirdness, and
and he was weird.
Speaker 4 (32:59):
There was a tremendous amount of insight. But also as
Christocus and I talked about something missing, those runaway girls
were Moreno is proof that social networks existed, and that
was the basis of his new science. But they also
proved something else. We know what it was now, in
part because two weeks after that meeting, when Moreno and
(33:20):
his crew were back studying at Hudson, a new girl
showed up to the New York State Training School. She
was entered in the log book they wrote the date
April eighteenth, a number three nine eighty six, and her name,
Ella Fitzgerald, And then under a fence they wrote, ungovernable,
(33:42):
We'll be right back. When Ella Fitzgerald's mom got in
that car accident, her family life turned upside down. In
a great upcoming book, the historian Judith Tick writes that
she survived but was badly hurt. Her job had been
(34:04):
the family's main source of income, and it was the
Depression they were in trouble, So Fitzgerald started taking any
work she could find. At some point she ran numbers,
and she'd worked at a brothel, keeping a lookout for cops.
Then one day the police picked her up for truancy
and brought her before a judge, who sentenced her to
the training school up in Hudson. They checked her in
(34:26):
one week before her birthday. Her whole life, she'd avoid
speaking publicly about her time at the reformatory, and it
wasn't even public knowledge that she'd been there until Nina Bernstein,
that investigative reporter from the New York Times, was interviewing
someone from the school.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
And at some point in the interview, he tells me
that there had been an effort to bring back as
role models for girls. You know, at some time in
the history of the institution, there had been this effort
to bring role models back, and that the assistant superintendent,
Muriel Jenkins, had recounted him know that Fitzgerald wanted nothing
(35:08):
to do with her the institution.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
This was the first Bernstein heard of it. When we
talked about it, she got animated, like it was happening
all over.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Again, and of course I go, oh, my god.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Bernstein began to dig I.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Went back to the local historian and she was able
to give me several names and numbers of people who
had worked at the institution, including this woman in her
late eighties who had taught English, and she had been
Ella Fitzgerald's teacher, and she talked about what a great
(35:43):
student she was and what a perfectionist she was, and
her beautiful penmanship, she said, I can even visualize her handwriting.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
What's interesting to me is I don't think it was
the stigma that Fitzgerald was avoiding by refusing to talk
about her time at the training school. She spoke in
interviews about running numbers and working at the brothel. It
wasn't that she'd done something illegal. I'm not sure why
she didn't talk about it, but maybe it was just
too painful, because on top of all the other indignities
(36:14):
and abuses of life at a segregated reformatory, there was
one thing that must have hurt Fitzgerald, especially Morse's all
white choir wouldn't let her sing with them.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
I interviewed Beulah Crank, who had been a house mother
in the fifties and sixties, but who had been a
teenager who grew up in Hudson, and she told me
she vividly recalled Ella and some other black girls from
Hudson being invited to sing at her the local ame church,
(36:49):
and to some extent at least I came away with
a feeling from Beulah Crank that the church had invited
these girls to perform in part because they were excluded
from this white choir. That was a big deal at
the time that she had never forgotten that she said
(37:13):
that girl sang her heart out.
Speaker 4 (37:15):
In Marino's study, the race of the girls is noted.
On some of the maps, you can see the ties
between black and white cottages. He'd written that though black
and white students lived separately in educational and social activities,
they mix freely. But from Fitzgerald's experience, it's clear that
that wasn't the case. Marino and Jennings had either totally
(37:37):
missed it or they'd chosen to ignore it based on
everything they'd observed. I don't think they could possibly have
missed what was really going on. And it wasn't just
segregation in the choir. In the basement of those white
trimmed cottages. There were beatings too.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
You know, this was a system in which the black
girls were in these black cottages were subjected to corporal
punishment by men, and you know, so beaten by men.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
It turned out that Fitzgerald had been kept in the
basement and, in the words of the superintendent Bernstein, spoke
to all but tortured. This was part of life at
the New York State Training School. Soon after, an investigation
of the school revealed the full extent of what girls
like Fitzgerald were subject to. There was never enough space
(38:29):
for black girls because they were only allowed in two
of the many cottages. White girls got to use Moreno's
sociometric system to choose their roommates, but not black girls
because there were so few options for where they could
live in the first place. Black girls were made to
do all the laundry for the white girls, because that's
the kind of job Morse thought they could get outside
the school. All that is why Bernstein hates to call
(38:52):
it a school, the reason it was always a prison.
Speaker 6 (38:59):
I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
to the amateur contest.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
There's no record of when elliphtz Gerald left the training school.
Based on the vague parole records and the fact that
she'd been sentenced to a few years. Bernstein thinks she
ran away, and I think so too. But she was
at Hudson when Moreno and Jennings were there the year
before they published their study. So I went back to
their account that dense text, and I can't know, but
(39:31):
I think that I found Ella Fitzgerald in it. On
page one hundred and ten of Moreno's book, he describes
a group of girls working on restoring a piece of furniture.
They worked with varnish and sandpaper to strip the old paint,
repair it, and paint it again. And in that group
there's a girl named Ella. Each girl was given a
two letter code. Moreno gave Ella the code GA. One
(39:56):
hundred pages later, there's another graph with thirty four red
circles for white girls and twenty three black ones for
black In the fourth black circle from the top, you
can see the letters GA. Moreno published his book in
nineteen thirty four with the title Who Shall Survive. The
(40:18):
book was enormously influential, including with the Roosevelt administration. Moreno's
science was used in the New Deal and also in
the internment camps. It led to an influential journal called Sociometry,
in which the principles of social network theory were formulated.
They published the paper that tested the six degrees of
separation rule. Social science legends like John Dewey, George Gallup,
(40:41):
and Margaret Meade were on the editorial staff. A History
of Social network analysis is dedicated to Moreno and says
that Without him, there would be no field of social
network analysis. Moreno had finally founded that field that was
all about seeing the group and the individual all at once,
but in the process he missed something crucial about these
(41:03):
particular individuals, and that same year Marino finally established himself
with his Hudson's study. Ella Fitzgerald entered a contest at
the Apollo Theater. When when you first started, you had
visions of not being a singer.
Speaker 7 (41:19):
You were going to be a dancer.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
Is that right right?
Speaker 9 (41:22):
Tell me, oh, you really want to hear that. Will
started back in.
Speaker 12 (41:27):
My hometown in Yonkers, and I was.
Speaker 8 (41:29):
What they call the you know.
Speaker 12 (41:31):
The greatest little dancer in Yonkers. And we used to
go down to the Apollo on amateur night, my girlfriends
and I and you know, like they always tell you
if you want to be an amateur, to sign and
drop your name in the box.
Speaker 6 (41:48):
And being from Youngers, we never thought anybody would send
a postcard to Youngkers, and uh, the three of us.
Speaker 11 (41:54):
We put our names in.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
She's on stage in the twilight of her career telling
that story Everybody Loves Again. What nobody knew was when
she was on the stage at the Apollo. She was
just out of the training.
Speaker 6 (42:07):
School and I was the one was chosen and I
made up. You know.
Speaker 11 (42:14):
They say, well, if you don't.
Speaker 6 (42:15):
Go, you're chicken. So we went and believe it or not,
I was the first amateur that they called. And there
were two sisters who were the dance and the sisters
in the world called the Edward Sisters, and they were
starring at the Pollo and they closed the show with
out And when I saw those ladies dance, I says,
(42:38):
no way, I'm going out there and try to dance,
because they stopped the show. I was the first one
was called, and when I got out there, somebody haullered
out in the.
Speaker 9 (42:48):
Audi is what is she going to do?
Speaker 4 (42:54):
Fitzgerald was on stage in front of a theater that
fits over a thousand people. She was rail thin, wearing
boots and a tatter dress.
Speaker 6 (43:03):
And my mother had a record of Miss Connie Boswell,
who I think was one of the greatest singers that
ever lived. And she used to play Object of My
Affection and Judy and I got so I had, you know,
used to sing it. So the man said sing something. Well,
I tried to sing Judy, and I think miss Connie Bosa,
(43:26):
because then I tried to sing like her, and I.
Speaker 12 (43:28):
Sang if a voyage ben break the hope of the broom.
Speaker 6 (43:33):
That's Judy, and everybody says, all that girl can sing,
and the people caught it so much. I sang Object
of my Affection that was the other side of the record.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And I won first prize.
Speaker 6 (43:47):
So then that made me feel like, you know, well,
I wanted to try to be a singer.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
She said that if she hadn't won that contest, she
probably wouldn't have tried to become a singer. Fitzgerald started
affronting for a band, Chick Web's Orchestra. Not long after that,
she had her first big hit, and then she became
one of the most famous singers of all time. But
what I kept thinking about is she didn't write the
(44:14):
song she sang. It's her voice, people love, and her
voice is something so singular, so beautiful, that all she
had to do was begin to sing, and everyone in
that room at the Apollo fell in love. And then
I thought about Fanny French Morse's all white choir and
how they couldn't hear her voice because all they could
see was her skin. That's what segregation does to a mind,
(44:39):
it's a prison and Ella Fitzgerald escaped in the summer
of nineteen thirty six, two years after Moreno's study came out.
As Fitzgerald was touring the country, a black doctor named
Emmy Ross wrote the governor of New York about the
conditions for black girls at the New York State Training School.
(45:01):
It led to an investigation. Morris tried to fight it.
She pressured a black member of her staff to quote
keep her mouth closed on this. Judges wrote letters to
the governor claiming that integrating the school would start a
race war. But still it went ahead, and in the end,
the investigation led to Fanny Frenchmorse stepping down from the
(45:22):
school and retiring from public life, and the broader movement
surrounding it led to an amendment that prohibited the funding
of a place like the Training School if it discriminated
by race. It was a groundbreaking piece of legislation, and
it led to all kinds of other civil rights laws,
like a big idea working its way through a network.
(45:49):
Decades later, an interviewer asked Fitzgerald what she'd have been
if she hadn't become a singer, and she said a teacher,
I love children.
Speaker 6 (45:57):
I guess put that in.
Speaker 8 (46:00):
I'm a I'm a lapper children. We sent thirteen thousand
children in South Carolina up and we did Old McDonald
and you should hear all of them sing in Ei eile.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
This is embarrassing to admit, but I started writing this
story because I found a bunch of undigitized tapes of
Morino in his archives doing his therapeutic theater thing, and
I thought, great, this will be fun and strange. But
then I learned about social network theory, and then the prison,
and finally Ella Fitzgerald, and the story rotated on its axis.
(46:41):
I felt like I walked into that place with a
set of ideas, and I walked out of it with her.
I came for the group, and I left with her voice.
Speaker 8 (46:51):
And I've always felt that it takes one person to
make the other person. We don't do anything more, so.
Speaker 6 (46:58):
I think if.
Speaker 8 (47:00):
We try to help each other. I like the field
now that a lot of the young people will say, well,
she did it, I.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
Can do it.
Speaker 8 (47:12):
You're a beautiful person. People are beautiful.
Speaker 9 (47:16):
Thanks Elms, though good to see.
Speaker 4 (47:18):
Any We live our lives in the intersecting webs of
social networks that Marino saw for better and for worse.
But the thrust of all that, why any of it
matters is because it means we owe each other. We're
not just individuals, we're not only groups. It's like Fitzgerald
said in that interview, we don't do anything ourselves. And
(47:43):
it takes one person to make another person.
Speaker 7 (47:56):
There's a saying who says, and love is blind. Still
we're often to seek and ye shall find. So I'm
going to seek. Here's a certain letter.
Speaker 10 (48:13):
In bud.
Speaker 4 (48:16):
The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nattafhaffrey.
It's produced by Me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
this episode by Arthur Comperts. Our foolproof player is Becca A.
Speaker 5 (48:31):
Lewis.
Speaker 4 (48:32):
Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive
producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour, thanks also to
Julia Barton, Pushkin's executive editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi
and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphon Met. Many of
our sound effects are from Harry Jannette Junior. In the
Star Geanette Foundation. Special thanks to Judith Tick for sharing
(48:54):
an advanced copy of her upcoming book, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald,
a biography that overturns many myths about Fitzgerald's life. Thanks
also to Becky Cooper, will Friedwald, Russa Marajan, Jessica Murphy,
and the New York State Archives. For a bibliography, further reading,
and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head
to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
(49:17):
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad
free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month.
Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our
newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more
(49:37):
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Mattafhaffrey.
Speaker 5 (49:47):
How some one to what.
Speaker 6 (49:58):
O me?
Speaker 2 (50:09):
The boy is Block
Pushing Hey listeners, it's Khalil and Ben. We'll be back
with a new episode next week, but today we want
to share a story from another Pushkin podcast called The
Last Archive. The show tells stories all about the history
of truth in America, and the newest season is hosted
(00:35):
by Ben nadof Haffrey Man.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
That is right, Khalil. This episode starts with Ella Fitzgerald,
the famous jazz singer. You and I talked about her
earlier in the season her friendship with Marilyn Monroe. But
in the nineteen thirties, when Ella is a girl, she
was sent to a woman's reformatory in upstate New York.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
At the reformatory, or what's really a kind of prison,
a social scientist named Jay L. Moreno showed up. He
studied the relationships between the girls and women there to
prove his theory of social networks.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
That theory of social nets that works. It was revolutionary
at that time. The way people are connected through friendships
and how this affects how they behave had never really
been studied in this way before.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yes, but he missed something happening at the same time
at this reformatory, something to do with race. And segregation.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Come on, you knew he was going to miss that.
This episode is amazing. We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
The last archive, A History of Truth.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Ella Fitzgerald never much liked doing interviews, which was too
bad because she did them all the time. Here's what
she did in Dallas in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Ella, welcome back to Dallas.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
I'm marvelous. Oh thank you, and it's a pleasure to
be back here again.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
From the moment she'd become famous in the nineteen thirties,
everybody loved her, and from then and right on through
to this interview in the nineteen eighties, people wanted to
tell her that over and over and over again.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
You know, Ella, you really are.
Speaker 8 (02:18):
You're one of the national treasures.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Do you realize that?
Speaker 6 (02:23):
I just realized that a lot of people love me,
and I think that's the most important thing.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
One of the stories, the story really that Fitzgerald always
got asked to tell, was the story of how she
got famous the amateur Hour at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,
when she was supposed to dance but got nervous and
started to sing instead. It was the moment everyone realized
she had an incredible voice, and it's a good story.
So she's about to tell it again. But listen closely
(02:52):
to what happens when she does.
Speaker 6 (02:55):
Ella, As you look back on your life, here was
a child from an orphanage and now no, no, somebody
wrote that up.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Where did they get come by?
Speaker 6 (03:06):
Hit Well, that was a publicity thing long time ago.
But I have family, and I had family been but
my mother had died, and I guess that's why they
used that. Mind that I was an awful but I
had family.
Speaker 9 (03:21):
At what age were you when your mother died?
Speaker 6 (03:24):
I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
to the amateur contest.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
That line about the orphanage. It's not strictly true, but
it's not far off either, because Fitzgerald's not mentioning something
else that happened right around the same time as that
amateur night, A missing chapter in her story that must
have been one of the hardest, most formative times of
her life, a chapter that has a lot to do
with that question about the orphanage. Welcome to Season four
(04:01):
of The Last Archive, the show about how we know
what we know and why it seems like we don't
know anything at all anymore. I've been that this episode
is not about Ella Fitzgerald, or not only about Ella Fitzgerald,
but it is about the place where she spent that
missing time. Because in Fitzgerald's a mission lies an experiment,
(04:23):
a social science study that I believe she was a
data point in one of the most important, overlooked experiments
of the twentieth century. These days, we're all used to
thinking of ourselves as part of social networks, chains of
influence linking us all together. This episode is about where
those ideas came from. Well, come back to Fitzgerald, I promise,
but first I want you to meet the experimenter. In
(04:50):
the nineteen teens, in Ocean Away in Austria, there was
a young and rather mysterious medical student named Jacob Levy Moreno.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
I was born on the book The Black Seat, and
I'll be priveling from one part of the world who
to find myself.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Moreno was hard to miss. He'd stride around campus in
a green peasant's cloak, hatless with a long flowing beard.
When he was a baby, or so the story goes,
a woman on the street pointed at him and said,
the day will come when this boy will become a
very great man, people will come from all over the
world to see him, and so Jacob Levy Moreno was
(05:34):
always invested in his own sense of destiny. In medical school,
he worked on the side as a tutor for young children,
and this is where the seed of his big experiment
was planted, the one that intersected with Ella Fitzgerald. The
more he interacted with kids, the more interested he got
in their fantasies. He'd walk through the public park and
(05:57):
sit on a low hanging branch of a big tree
and tell the kid's fairy tales and then watch them
play together. What interested Morena about children was how easily
they could take on new identities, play pretend, make up stories,
believe in the unreal. That spontaneity revealed who they really were,
but it also allowed them to recreate themselves together in
(06:18):
a group. A spontaneous game of make believe is a
kind of magic. How does everyone agree on a new
reality together instinctively? Kids do it effortlessly, and he wanted
to give that kind of freedom to everybody. So he
watched the kids play, told his stories, and started a
children's theater to think about groups and spontaneity. But this
(06:39):
was in the lead up to the First World War
and when it came to make believe came grinding to
a hole. Mareno went to work at a refugee.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
Camp and I was an officer of health in a
tan Yen.
Speaker 9 (06:57):
They were taken away and brought.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
Into this camp about ten thousand Italians, all presents sol Catholic,
and there I saw the community developing from stretch. This
fascinated Moreno. Watching these groups form was like trying to
figure out how those kids in the park created small communities.
Except in the camp there was no spontaneity and joy.
(07:21):
There was only pain.
Speaker 9 (07:22):
Immediately, I began to see attractions and repulsions, and indifferences
and jealousies and hate, which hinted the process of integration.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
As Marino saw it, The problem was the camp administration
didn't have a way of thinking of people as both
individuals and members of a group at the same time.
Social scientists often considered groups as a mass think averages, polls,
big static numbers, But Marino knew that the truth about
these people lay in their relationships as individuals within groups.
(07:53):
The people in the camp weren't just generically in the camp,
they were specific individuals in specific housing near specific other people.
He wanted to figure out a way to trace that
influence a full scientific picture of social reality. He later
claimed to have brought his ideas to the government administrators,
but they shot him down.
Speaker 7 (08:14):
It is said, it is impractical.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
I was, and I was greatly disillusion and so the
result was about I began then to study small groups.
That's how Mareno got through those hard years of war,
working in the camps and using his free time to
work on his ideas about groups. When the war was
over and Marino had finished his studies and gotten his
(08:39):
medical degree, he wanted to go out into the world
and explore his ideas about community as a practicing physician.
Problem was, these were the years of Freud and the
science of the self. You can imagine that classic scene,
lying on the couch in a psychoanalyst's office. You're Freudian
psychoanalyst asking you about your childhood, your relationship with your mother,
(09:01):
asking you about you. In particular, the function of that
couch in the office was to shut the rest of
the world away. To the group was a separate thing
that had almost nothing to do with the individual, and
everyone was obsessed with the individual, everyone except Moreno. It
really annoyed him. It was as if to this incredibly active,
(09:22):
dramatic man, the greatest sin was to lie down on
a couch alone and think about your problems. He used
to bring it up all the time in speeches to
big groups of people.
Speaker 9 (09:32):
Yes, did people who go on the college for six
eight Yes, spending twenty thousand dollars and so forth, and
then they come to us.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
The Moreno had bigger challenges than the fact that nobody
was interested in his research. Violence and persecution of Jews
was on the rise, and like so many other Jewish intellectuals,
Moreno fled Europe, sailing for New York in nineteen twenty five.
But New York wasn't the most welcoming place either.
Speaker 9 (09:57):
This was just after the Congress had passed legislation greatly
limiting immigration from Eastern Europe.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Jonathan Moreno is a bioethicist and historian at the University Pennsylvania,
also Jayale Moreno's son, and.
Speaker 9 (10:12):
It was especially aimed at Jews and Italians. It was
really a very clear effort to keep the white American
race as pure as possible by keeping the Jews and
Italians out.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
But Marenos slipped through. He lived in a hotel on
the cheap on the Upper West Side and tried to
figure out what to do. It was hard, but after
a couple of years he began to practice a little
as a physician again. He had a small group of accolytes,
and one of them married him for a time so
he could get citizenship. By this point, he'd started an
improv theater at Carnegie Hall as part of a long
(10:46):
running goal he had of reforming the theater, but he
was probably also thinking through his ideas about how groups
worked as he watched the cast perform different kinds of scenes.
How spontaneous were they, how quickly did they take on
new roles. A hallmark of his philosophy was the idea
that acting things out, taking on new roles could help
people work out their problems just on the stage, out
(11:08):
on a couch. Through the theater, he'd made contact with
a psychology graduate student named Helen Hall Jennings, who is
as interested in studying groups as he was. Together, they
began to work out a method of graphing the relationships
between people seeing them as individuals and members in the
group at the same time, but to get enough data
to test it out. They needed a big experiment, bigger
(11:31):
than an improv theater company.
Speaker 9 (11:33):
He gets his big break when he goes to the
American Psychiatric Association meetings in Toronto in nineteen thirty one, where,
for some reason, another little immigrant named Abe Brill asks
my father to comment on his paper about a psycho
analysis of Lincoln.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Brill was the president of the American Psychiatric Association. He
died in the Wolfreudian, and in a paper called Abraham
Lincoln as Humorist, he tore the president apart. He said
Lincoln's jokes were so morbid and sexual, the reveal he
was a schizoid syntonic personality, whatever that means. For instance,
when Lincoln's friend worried that Lincoln would be assassinated, Lincoln said,
(12:17):
if they kill me, I can't die another death. As
Brill explained to the press, a normal person ought to
have said, very well, I will be very careful. This
was hot stuff, and for some reason he asked Mareno
to respond.
Speaker 9 (12:31):
And now my dad is really trying to integrate himself
successfully with American culture, which you have to do as
an immigrant, and so he's a great fan of Lincoln.
Of course, it would be.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Mareno decided to psychoanalyze Brill in return in front of everybody,
to stand up for Lincoln, to humiliate Brill, and to
show everyone in the process how ridiculous psychoanalysis was.
Speaker 9 (12:55):
So he actually turned the tables on Brill. Why would Brill,
the little five foot Brill, need to psychoanalyze to take
down the great Abraham Lincoln, the six foot four or
six foot five Abraham. Well, Brial is furious right.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
Moreno had put his stake in the ground, and he
was the talk of the conference. His reputation was growing
all of a sudden. He was a person to pay
attention to, So when he gave a presentation on his
new way of understanding groups, people were very curious to
hear what he had to say. One woman in particular
was intrigued. Fanny French Morse. She ran a women's reformatory upstate,
(13:36):
the New York State Training School for Girls. She had
an idea that it might be the perfect place for
Moreno to make his biggest study yet. His fate was
on the epswing. But meanwhile, a teenage El FitzGeralds was
about to move in the opposite direction, because right around
the time of Moreno's big break, her mother got in
(13:57):
a serious car accident. We'll be right back. Ella Fitzgerald
was born in Virginia in nineteen seventeen. Her family moved
to New York in the early nineteen twenties to Yonkers,
(14:18):
a few years before jail Moreno immigrated from Austria. As
a girl, she loved to dance. She was an excellent
student too, but her real education was making the rounds
of the dance halls picking up new steps. In nineteen
thirty two, though, her life began to fall apart, to
fall apart in a way that very soon put her
in the path of jail Moreno. That was the year
(14:39):
Moreno was finally finding his footing his takedown of Abe Brill,
the Lincoln diagnosing psychoanalyst, and made him a minor celebrity.
Elaine was opening up for his new ideas about researching groups,
which is how he made contact with the progressive reformer
Fanny French Morse. She invited him to move out of
New York City and up the river to Hudson to
(15:02):
become the director of research at the Reformatory, where she
was the superintendent the New York State Training School for girls.
Moreno headed up to the school. There's a silent film
in his archives that was taken a bit later on,
so you can see what it was probably like when
he arrived. The reformatory was set high up on a
(15:24):
ridge in Hudson, New York, an old industrial and whaling town.
The campus sprawled across one hundred and twenty five acres,
dotted with neat brick cottages, latticework, white trim, blue shutters,
clean and tidy. The girls at the training school lived
in the cottages, each of which was presided over by
a house mother. Moreno would later write that there was
(15:44):
a chapel, a hospital, an industrial building, a steam laundry,
a store, an administration building, even a farm. It looked
well ordered and open, like a boarding school, tucked away
in the quiet Hudson Valley, hours from the city. Except
it wasn't a boarding school. A reporter once wrote, in
only one respect, what a visitor suspect that this was
(16:04):
not a junior college of the free world. The girls
refer to life as outside. The reformatory is the kind
of place that looms in the collective unconscious, like the
insane asylum. The woods at the edge of town, the
abandoned manor the island prison, the kind of dark gothic
corner of the mind where stories gather like in the
(16:26):
Spider's web. I think that's because there's an ambiguity to
it about the degree to which it's a school or
a prison.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I mean, I hate to call it a school.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Nina Bernstein longtime reporter at Newsday and The New York Times.
In the nineties, she began to investigate the history of
the New York State Training School for Girls for an
amazing book called The Lost Children of Wilder. She's the
kind of person who not only goes to the archive,
but once she's there, she turns every page.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
The New York State Training School for Girls actually began
as a house of refuge for women in eighteen eighty seven,
and it was the first I think it was the
first place that women were separately held, and it was
seen as a great reform. As I discovered when I
looked at the records, this was a place of solitary confinement,
(17:18):
very harsh punishments, and minute surveillance of behavior. Were they
did they speak in a low voice? Were they too boisterous?
Did they sit up straight? I mean you know that
kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
One of the biggest accomplishments of the progressive era was
the shift from trying children in adult courts to juvenile ones.
People were especially worried about putting kids in adult prisons
or even just leaving them in fast growing cities. The
Reformatory was meant to solve for that, but in its
first few decades it kept getting made and remade. Marino
(17:57):
was brought in as part of one of the most
dramatic pushes to reform, an effort to understand how the
girls functioned together as a group.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
I bring this up in part because you have then
another reformer, Fanny French Morse.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Morse had taken over the Hudson Reform School when it
had become basically a prison. When she took over, she
made a huge pile on the lawn of all the
prison uniforms and the strait jackets and the restraining sheets,
and then she lit them on fire. That was Fanny
Morse burning it all down to build it again. She'd
(18:35):
been born in Maine and widowed young. She'd run reformatories
all over the place and even worked on the national one.
She was glamorous, progressive, imposing at an old job. Her
coworkers remembered she had a fancy carriage that she never
drove herself. She wore small, rounded glasses, and she had
false teeth made of solid gold and painted white, and
(18:57):
they locked into her jawbone with a small gold key.
That's how I imagine Morse carriage waiting, metal jaw clenched, bonfire
glinting off her glasses, and gold old key in her pocket.
She was a type the progressive era reformer. If you
were an ambitious woman in those days, running a reform
(19:19):
school was one of the few clear pathways to real
political power, but it was political power at a cost.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
There was this idea at the time, you know, of
the woman is the guardian of the hearth, the angel
of the hearth, and the idea was you were going
to reprogram these women to be that and that otherwise
they were going to have these offspring who would be criminals,
and you know, you would essentially be decimating the race.
(19:49):
She is a reformer against that eugenics attitude that all
these girls are feeble minded, and she introduces art and
gardening and so on. There's there are these positive aspects,
but they are also these very negative aspects from our
person respective.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Morse was on a crusade. She moved into a run
down old colonial half a mile from the school. It
had once been a grand house, but more recently had
been used as a brothel. She had the girls from
the school fix it up, polished the curved mahogany balustrade,
restore the old antiques. She said she believed in giving
them an esthetic education, and she held herself up as
(20:31):
a model. At Christmas, she'd put a candle lit tree
in every room of the first floor and ost dinner
parties for her charges. In the summer, they'd come for
dinner on the porch. She remade the school in her
image too. The guardhouse became a teacher's cottage, and the
cottages began to fill up with old antiques that she'd
gathered for the girls to fix. She bought one hundred
(20:51):
and twenty acre farm for them to work. She got
rid of the uniforms and let them shop in town
with an escort. She was especially proud of her choir,
and she showed it off at every opportunity. The press
loved her, the revolutionary woman reforming the reformatory, who had
remade the school so entirely that girls were supposedly begging
to stay, but there were some ugly rumors. A former
(21:15):
employee of hers once said, Fanny Frenchmorse went through life
making decisions on the basis of what glorified her reputation.
She suggested Morse had spent money on cosmetic improvements while
her girls went without the essentials. And Morse had another
problem too. From her supposedly perfect utopian reformatory, the girls
(21:36):
kept running away. That's why she needed Jael Moreno. Why
the girls ran away was one of the first things
her new director of research was meant to study.
Speaker 9 (21:48):
So now he has, for the first time a big
institution with a completely free hand to exercise his ideas
about interpersonal relations and sociometrics.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Sociometry was what Moreno called his new science. He assembled
a team of research assistants. It seems that he lived
at the school and entirely closed were of about five
hundred and five people. Mareno could finally make his map
of what he began to think of as a social network.
The closed world of the school was perfect because there
were clear boundaries. Nobody got in or out without someone
(22:23):
knowing about it.
Speaker 9 (22:25):
The idea that you could walk into a community of
hundreds of kids basically, and staff and all the caretakers
and so forth, and just look around and see these people.
That's the visible world, right, But then there's this whole
invisible world, sort of like when you look at the
stars and you don't see constellations, you see little points
(22:47):
of light. So what you know, you need to be
a great astronomer. And so he saw himself doing that.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Moreno and his collaborator Jennings were also doing something morally complicated,
making a study of a vulnerable population who couldn't consent
to participate. It was true of all the girls at
the school roles under state control, but it was especially
true of the black girls. This white scientists studying black people.
(23:17):
It happened a lot in the progressive era in the
early nineteen thirties. That same year that Moreno arrived at Hudson,
the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment began, where hundreds of black men
with syphilis were told by the government that they were
being treated, when actually they were just being studied to
see what happened when syphilis went untreated. Knowledge but at
a cost of injustice that no one should ever have
(23:39):
to pay at Hudson. Moreno and Jennings gave the girls
blank forms on which they could rank their preferences for roommates,
as well as mark the people they didn't want to
live with. Moreno called these attractions and rejections, and they
were meant to show who was connected socially to whom.
Using the answers, they began to map the cottage communities.
(24:02):
Maybe the runaways all lived in cottages with higher rejection scores.
On the map, they drew the attractions as red lines
and the rejections is black. Until the school filled up
with all these threads spinning out from hundreds of girls.
Reading Moreno's extremely long and extremely dense account of this
work is like taping your eyes open and scanning through
(24:22):
a thousand lines of computer code, except then these heartbreaking
stories cut through all the scientific lingo.
Speaker 10 (24:30):
Ge I want in my cottage because I feel towards her,
like she was my little sister I never had any,
and I like to take care of her. Mostly, she's
just a lonesome little child you just have to be
fond of.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
And then they'd write their reasons for rejecting others.
Speaker 10 (24:47):
It's only because she has a way of edging up
to you and standing so close when she talks to you.
There's something about her that is repulsive to me. I
felt this way about her even before I found out
about her having secret meetings most every day with colored girls.
She doesn't just go with her herself, but she tries
to get new girls to carry her notes so they'll
(25:08):
get interesting too.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Moreno and Jennings traced those connections and rejections between girls
of different races, but even with an eye towards rearranging
the community, race was an invisible wall they wouldn't cross.
If a white girl wanted to live with a black girl,
that was out of the question. Because there was something
else that no one mentioned in all the breathless news
coverage about the Reformed Reformatory. The school was segregated. This
(25:36):
was controversial even at the time. Just a few months
before Morse met Moreno and asked him up to Hudson,
the Attorney General of New York had found out that
a black girl was denied a spot at Morse's school
and issued an opinion about the segregation there, saying that
it should not be permitted because of the possibility of abuse,
but still Morse believed firmly that the school should stay segregated.
(26:01):
That was galling to black civil rights leaders.
Speaker 11 (26:04):
They're seeing black kids continued to be subject to the
horrific treatment that is supposed to be at this point
reserved only for adults.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Jeff Ward is a professor of African and African American
studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. I found
his work through the Prison Public Memory Project, which is
an amazing website devoted to the legacy of the training school.
Ward wrote a sweeping history called the Black Child Savers.
Speaker 11 (26:32):
You know they're seeing their kids deny the same prospects
of self realization that why kids are seemingly having access
to visa visa rebuilt dat of ideal.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Morse was trying to keep access to that ideal as
limited as possible to white girls. That dividing line and
everything else was observed in Moreno's study. The researchers watched
the girls talking in pairs while doing laundry, study them
as they made rugs together. Moreno and Jennings presented the
research as total, which of course it wasn't couldn't have been,
(27:03):
but every observation became a number, and those numbers helped
the researchers draw their lines between the girls, which ones
were friends, which ones were enemies, and how strongly they
felt about each other.
Speaker 9 (27:15):
And you could actually put a number on that, you
could calculate it right, So this was even better. One
cabin had forty five point seventy three mutual choices and
another cabin had eighty nine point six five mutual choices. Well,
what does that really mean. I don't know. It's surely
false precision. But in terms of the history of ideas,
(27:38):
that was really a breakthrough.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Moreno and Jennings were gathering an unprecedented amount of data,
watching the girls interact and beginning to sort it into
maps and charts, and that's when the Runaway chain began.
In the fall of nineteen thirty two, two girls named
Ruth and Marie ran away from cottage twelve. They were
(28:01):
both daughters of Italian immigrants. Ruth had once been forced
into prostitution. Marie's mother said she was incorrigible, and so
she was sent to Hudson. Moreno and Jennings already knew
about them because they ranked high on the list of
girls who were isolated in the community, very few lines
ran towards them. On Halloween night of that year, there
(28:24):
was a party, a friend of Ruth and Marie pretended
to faint, and while the house mother was distracted, they
slipped away. Then the next night five girls ran away.
Four days after that another four girls, and then three girls.
Fourteen girls ran away over a period of fourteen days.
(28:45):
Why runaways had always been a problem, but only ten
girls had run away in the seven months before. During
the same stretch the previous year, only three girls had
run away. And it wasn't just that these were the
loneliest girls. There were plenty of other isolated points on
Moreno and Jennings maps who hadn't run away. And it
wasn't just that these were the people who ran away,
(29:07):
because only two of them had ever tried it before.
It was a mystery. So Mareno and Jennings went to
Psychological Geography Map three and they began to trace the
lines connecting the runaways. This is why the mapping was important,
they said. They'd collected ten thousand pages of data and
they needed a way to visualize it all. What they
(29:29):
noticed was that even though Ruth and Marie were lonely kids.
There was an important line of friendship that ran from
them to the next girls who ran away, and then
from those girls to the next and so on. They
discovered attractions between them all, a pathway of influence that
ran from Cottage twelve unbroken to Cottage ten. Mareno wrote
(29:49):
that it was proof that networks exist.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
We're accustomed these days to thinking of social networks in
terms of epidemiology, right, And I think what he understood
was that there was an epidemiology to the influences of
ideas and patterns of ideas and social networks. How did
the girls stimulate each other to be rebels or to
(30:16):
be to accept the conditions of the school, which one
might well argue they shouldn't have accepted. I'd given a
deeper understanding of what those conditions probably were.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
It was a powerful piece of social science, arguably the
first time the spread of an idea had been traced
so closely. Moreno and Jennings used their maps to reorganize
the cottages, and the runaway numbers began to drop, until
Mareno claimed they were unprecedentedly low. Morse must have been
thrilled Moreno had seen the unseen. On April second, nineteen
(30:53):
thirty three, Morino showed those maps in public for the
first time at a medical conference at the Waldorf Astoria
hotel in Manhattan, one hundred miles away from the Reformatory.
Physicians and journalists peered at the webs of seven thousand
red and black lines spiraling out from hundreds of little circles,
some marked as white girls, some marked as black. Together
(31:13):
comprising the scientists said the entire psychology of the Hudson Reformatory.
The next day, The New York Times proclaimed emotions mapped
by new geography. Moreno said that the same kind of
invisible structure ran through all of society. He claimed the
study proved there were ten to fifteen million isolated people
in the country, and he said there were plans now
(31:36):
to make a complete psychological map of New York City.
That map never happened, or not as he planned it,
but the work on the walls of the hotel was
a forerunner of social network theory, a field that has
fundamentally shaped the way we think about policy, how ideas
and culture spread, and the way social media algorithms are built.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
The mere mapping of the networks is transformational. The recognition
that there are these elaborate you know, skinnes of human interactions,
you know, like where these people are interconnected.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
That's Nicholas Christaccus. He directs the Human Nature Lab at
Yale and he's done a number of groundbreaking studies on
social networks. When we talked, he pulled out an old
copy of a Moreno map.
Speaker 5 (32:20):
I have to be very delicate here, so it's not
to rip it. It's a sociometric geography of a community.
It says this image, it's a very famous image of
these are girls. Every dot is a girl, and the
lines between them are friendships. And they're in different dormitories
in the little circles. And look that you can just
immediately see that the ties within the dormitories are tighter.
(32:42):
That's like a really fundamental insight. That's that's so called
community structure within the within the dormitories. So there's a
there's a just a tremendous amount of insight in the book.
No matter the man's you know, manifest a weirdness, and
and he was weird.
Speaker 4 (32:59):
There was a tremendous amount of insight. But also as
Christocus and I talked about something missing, those runaway girls
were Moreno is proof that social networks existed, and that
was the basis of his new science. But they also
proved something else. We know what it was now, in
part because two weeks after that meeting, when Moreno and
(33:20):
his crew were back studying at Hudson, a new girl
showed up to the New York State Training School. She
was entered in the log book they wrote the date
April eighteenth, a number three nine eighty six, and her name,
Ella Fitzgerald, And then under a fence they wrote, ungovernable,
(33:42):
We'll be right back. When Ella Fitzgerald's mom got in
that car accident, her family life turned upside down. In
a great upcoming book, the historian Judith Tick writes that
she survived but was badly hurt. Her job had been
(34:04):
the family's main source of income, and it was the
Depression they were in trouble, So Fitzgerald started taking any
work she could find. At some point she ran numbers,
and she'd worked at a brothel, keeping a lookout for cops.
Then one day the police picked her up for truancy
and brought her before a judge, who sentenced her to
the training school up in Hudson. They checked her in
(34:26):
one week before her birthday. Her whole life, she'd avoid
speaking publicly about her time at the reformatory, and it
wasn't even public knowledge that she'd been there until Nina Bernstein,
that investigative reporter from the New York Times, was interviewing
someone from the school.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
And at some point in the interview, he tells me
that there had been an effort to bring back as
role models for girls. You know, at some time in
the history of the institution, there had been this effort
to bring role models back, and that the assistant superintendent,
Muriel Jenkins, had recounted him know that Fitzgerald wanted nothing
(35:08):
to do with her the institution.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
This was the first Bernstein heard of it. When we
talked about it, she got animated, like it was happening
all over.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Again, and of course I go, oh, my god.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Bernstein began to dig I.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Went back to the local historian and she was able
to give me several names and numbers of people who
had worked at the institution, including this woman in her
late eighties who had taught English, and she had been
Ella Fitzgerald's teacher, and she talked about what a great
(35:43):
student she was and what a perfectionist she was, and
her beautiful penmanship, she said, I can even visualize her handwriting.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
What's interesting to me is I don't think it was
the stigma that Fitzgerald was avoiding by refusing to talk
about her time at the training school. She spoke in
interviews about running numbers and working at the brothel. It
wasn't that she'd done something illegal. I'm not sure why
she didn't talk about it, but maybe it was just
too painful, because on top of all the other indignities
(36:14):
and abuses of life at a segregated reformatory, there was
one thing that must have hurt Fitzgerald, especially Morse's all
white choir wouldn't let her sing with them.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
I interviewed Beulah Crank, who had been a house mother
in the fifties and sixties, but who had been a
teenager who grew up in Hudson, and she told me
she vividly recalled Ella and some other black girls from
Hudson being invited to sing at her the local ame church,
(36:49):
and to some extent at least I came away with
a feeling from Beulah Crank that the church had invited
these girls to perform in part because they were excluded
from this white choir. That was a big deal at
the time that she had never forgotten that she said
(37:13):
that girl sang her heart out.
Speaker 4 (37:15):
In Marino's study, the race of the girls is noted.
On some of the maps, you can see the ties
between black and white cottages. He'd written that though black
and white students lived separately in educational and social activities,
they mix freely. But from Fitzgerald's experience, it's clear that
that wasn't the case. Marino and Jennings had either totally
(37:37):
missed it or they'd chosen to ignore it based on
everything they'd observed. I don't think they could possibly have
missed what was really going on. And it wasn't just
segregation in the choir. In the basement of those white
trimmed cottages. There were beatings too.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
You know, this was a system in which the black
girls were in these black cottages were subjected to corporal
punishment by men, and you know, so beaten by men.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
It turned out that Fitzgerald had been kept in the
basement and, in the words of the superintendent Bernstein, spoke
to all but tortured. This was part of life at
the New York State Training School. Soon after, an investigation
of the school revealed the full extent of what girls
like Fitzgerald were subject to. There was never enough space
(38:29):
for black girls because they were only allowed in two
of the many cottages. White girls got to use Moreno's
sociometric system to choose their roommates, but not black girls
because there were so few options for where they could
live in the first place. Black girls were made to
do all the laundry for the white girls, because that's
the kind of job Morse thought they could get outside
the school. All that is why Bernstein hates to call
(38:52):
it a school, the reason it was always a prison.
Speaker 6 (38:59):
I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
to the amateur contest.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
There's no record of when elliphtz Gerald left the training school.
Based on the vague parole records and the fact that
she'd been sentenced to a few years. Bernstein thinks she
ran away, and I think so too. But she was
at Hudson when Moreno and Jennings were there the year
before they published their study. So I went back to
their account that dense text, and I can't know, but
(39:31):
I think that I found Ella Fitzgerald in it. On
page one hundred and ten of Moreno's book, he describes
a group of girls working on restoring a piece of furniture.
They worked with varnish and sandpaper to strip the old paint,
repair it, and paint it again. And in that group
there's a girl named Ella. Each girl was given a
two letter code. Moreno gave Ella the code GA. One
(39:56):
hundred pages later, there's another graph with thirty four red
circles for white girls and twenty three black ones for
black In the fourth black circle from the top, you
can see the letters GA. Moreno published his book in
nineteen thirty four with the title Who Shall Survive. The
(40:18):
book was enormously influential, including with the Roosevelt administration. Moreno's
science was used in the New Deal and also in
the internment camps. It led to an influential journal called Sociometry,
in which the principles of social network theory were formulated.
They published the paper that tested the six degrees of
separation rule. Social science legends like John Dewey, George Gallup,
(40:41):
and Margaret Meade were on the editorial staff. A History
of Social network analysis is dedicated to Moreno and says
that Without him, there would be no field of social
network analysis. Moreno had finally founded that field that was
all about seeing the group and the individual all at once,
but in the process he missed something crucial about these
(41:03):
particular individuals, and that same year Marino finally established himself
with his Hudson's study. Ella Fitzgerald entered a contest at
the Apollo Theater. When when you first started, you had
visions of not being a singer.
Speaker 7 (41:19):
You were going to be a dancer.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
Is that right right?
Speaker 9 (41:22):
Tell me, oh, you really want to hear that. Will
started back in.
Speaker 12 (41:27):
My hometown in Yonkers, and I was.
Speaker 8 (41:29):
What they call the you know.
Speaker 12 (41:31):
The greatest little dancer in Yonkers. And we used to
go down to the Apollo on amateur night, my girlfriends
and I and you know, like they always tell you
if you want to be an amateur, to sign and
drop your name in the box.
Speaker 6 (41:48):
And being from Youngers, we never thought anybody would send
a postcard to Youngkers, and uh, the three of us.
Speaker 11 (41:54):
We put our names in.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
She's on stage in the twilight of her career telling
that story Everybody Loves Again. What nobody knew was when
she was on the stage at the Apollo. She was
just out of the training.
Speaker 6 (42:07):
School and I was the one was chosen and I
made up. You know.
Speaker 11 (42:14):
They say, well, if you don't.
Speaker 6 (42:15):
Go, you're chicken. So we went and believe it or not,
I was the first amateur that they called. And there
were two sisters who were the dance and the sisters
in the world called the Edward Sisters, and they were
starring at the Pollo and they closed the show with
out And when I saw those ladies dance, I says,
(42:38):
no way, I'm going out there and try to dance,
because they stopped the show. I was the first one
was called, and when I got out there, somebody haullered
out in the.
Speaker 9 (42:48):
Audi is what is she going to do?
Speaker 4 (42:54):
Fitzgerald was on stage in front of a theater that
fits over a thousand people. She was rail thin, wearing
boots and a tatter dress.
Speaker 6 (43:03):
And my mother had a record of Miss Connie Boswell,
who I think was one of the greatest singers that
ever lived. And she used to play Object of My
Affection and Judy and I got so I had, you know,
used to sing it. So the man said sing something. Well,
I tried to sing Judy, and I think miss Connie Bosa,
(43:26):
because then I tried to sing like her, and I.
Speaker 12 (43:28):
Sang if a voyage ben break the hope of the broom.
Speaker 6 (43:33):
That's Judy, and everybody says, all that girl can sing,
and the people caught it so much. I sang Object
of my Affection that was the other side of the record.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And I won first prize.
Speaker 6 (43:47):
So then that made me feel like, you know, well,
I wanted to try to be a singer.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
She said that if she hadn't won that contest, she
probably wouldn't have tried to become a singer. Fitzgerald started
affronting for a band, Chick Web's Orchestra. Not long after that,
she had her first big hit, and then she became
one of the most famous singers of all time. But
what I kept thinking about is she didn't write the
(44:14):
song she sang. It's her voice, people love, and her
voice is something so singular, so beautiful, that all she
had to do was begin to sing, and everyone in
that room at the Apollo fell in love. And then
I thought about Fanny French Morse's all white choir and
how they couldn't hear her voice because all they could
see was her skin. That's what segregation does to a mind,
(44:39):
it's a prison and Ella Fitzgerald escaped in the summer
of nineteen thirty six, two years after Moreno's study came out.
As Fitzgerald was touring the country, a black doctor named
Emmy Ross wrote the governor of New York about the
conditions for black girls at the New York State Training School.
(45:01):
It led to an investigation. Morris tried to fight it.
She pressured a black member of her staff to quote
keep her mouth closed on this. Judges wrote letters to
the governor claiming that integrating the school would start a
race war. But still it went ahead, and in the end,
the investigation led to Fanny Frenchmorse stepping down from the
(45:22):
school and retiring from public life, and the broader movement
surrounding it led to an amendment that prohibited the funding
of a place like the Training School if it discriminated
by race. It was a groundbreaking piece of legislation, and
it led to all kinds of other civil rights laws,
like a big idea working its way through a network.
(45:49):
Decades later, an interviewer asked Fitzgerald what she'd have been
if she hadn't become a singer, and she said a teacher,
I love children.
Speaker 6 (45:57):
I guess put that in.
Speaker 8 (46:00):
I'm a I'm a lapper children. We sent thirteen thousand
children in South Carolina up and we did Old McDonald
and you should hear all of them sing in Ei eile.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
This is embarrassing to admit, but I started writing this
story because I found a bunch of undigitized tapes of
Morino in his archives doing his therapeutic theater thing, and
I thought, great, this will be fun and strange. But
then I learned about social network theory, and then the prison,
and finally Ella Fitzgerald, and the story rotated on its axis.
(46:41):
I felt like I walked into that place with a
set of ideas, and I walked out of it with her.
I came for the group, and I left with her voice.
Speaker 8 (46:51):
And I've always felt that it takes one person to
make the other person. We don't do anything more, so.
Speaker 6 (46:58):
I think if.
Speaker 8 (47:00):
We try to help each other. I like the field
now that a lot of the young people will say, well,
she did it, I.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
Can do it.
Speaker 8 (47:12):
You're a beautiful person. People are beautiful.
Speaker 9 (47:16):
Thanks Elms, though good to see.
Speaker 4 (47:18):
Any We live our lives in the intersecting webs of
social networks that Marino saw for better and for worse.
But the thrust of all that, why any of it
matters is because it means we owe each other. We're
not just individuals, we're not only groups. It's like Fitzgerald
said in that interview, we don't do anything ourselves. And
(47:43):
it takes one person to make another person.
Speaker 7 (47:56):
There's a saying who says, and love is blind. Still
we're often to seek and ye shall find. So I'm
going to seek. Here's a certain letter.
Speaker 10 (48:13):
In bud.
Speaker 4 (48:16):
The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nattafhaffrey.
It's produced by Me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
this episode by Arthur Comperts. Our foolproof player is Becca A.
Speaker 5 (48:31):
Lewis.
Speaker 4 (48:32):
Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive
producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour, thanks also to
Julia Barton, Pushkin's executive editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi
and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphon Met. Many of
our sound effects are from Harry Jannette Junior. In the
Star Geanette Foundation. Special thanks to Judith Tick for sharing
(48:54):
an advanced copy of her upcoming book, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald,
a biography that overturns many myths about Fitzgerald's life. Thanks
also to Becky Cooper, will Friedwald, Russa Marajan, Jessica Murphy,
and the New York State Archives. For a bibliography, further reading,
and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head
to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
(49:17):
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad
free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month.
Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our
newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more
(49:37):
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Mattafhaffrey.
Speaker 5 (49:47):
How some one to what.
Speaker 6 (49:58):
O me?
Speaker 2 (50:09):
The boy is Block
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