Pushkin The Last Archive, A History of Truth.
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.
Ella, welcome back to Dallas. How marvelous. Oh, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be back here here.
From the moment she'd become famous in the nineteen thirties, everybody loved her, and from then right on through to this interview in the nineteen eighties, people wanted to tell her that over and over and over again.
You know, Ella, you really are.
You're one of the national treasures.
Do you realize that?
I realized that a lot of people loved me, and I think that's the most important thing.
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 to what happens when she does.
Ella, as you look back on your life, here was a child from an orphanage and now no, no, somebody wrote that up.
Where did that get come?
I well, that was a publicity thing a long time ago. But I have family, and I had family then, but my mother had died, and I guess that's why they used that. Mind that I was an orphan but I had family.
At what age were you when your mother?
I was fifteen?
About fifteen, because from there we went to the amateur contest.
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 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'm ben Matta Haffrey. This episode is not about Ela Fitzgerald, or not only about Ela Fitzgerald, but it is about the place where she spent that missing time, because in Fitzgerald's a Mission lies an experiment, 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 the nineteen teens, an ocean away in Austria, there was a young and rather mysterious medical student named Jacob Levy Moreno.
I was born on the book The Black Sea, and I'll be traveling from one part of the world to the others and to find myself.
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 out 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
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 Ela Fitzgerald. The more he interacted with kids, the more interested he got in their fantasies. He'd walk through the public park and 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 moreno 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 a group. A spontaneous game of make believe is a kind of magic. How does everyone agree on an 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 was in the lead up to the First World War, and when it came to make believe came grinding to a halt. Moreno went to work at a refugee camp.
And I was an officer of health in a camp near Vienna. They were taken away and brought into this camp about ten thousand Italians, all presents, all Catholic, and there I saw the community developing from scratch.
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 in joy. There was only pain.
Immediately Igan to see attractions and repulsions, and indifferences and jealousies and hate, which hinted the process of intubation.
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. 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.
It is it is impractical. I was, and I was crazy his illusion, and so the result was that I began then to study small groups.
That's how Moreno 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 ma Reno had finished his studies and gotten his 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, your Freudian psychoanalyst asking you about your childhood, your relationship with your mother, asking you about you. In particular, the function of that couch in the office was to shut the rest of the world away. To them. 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, 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.
Yes, did people who go on the college for six eights, spending twenty thousand dollars and so forth, and then they come to us.
But Moreno had bigger challenges than the fact that nobody was interested in his research. Violence and persecution of Jews is 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.
This was just after the Congress had passed legislation greatly limiting immigration from Eastern Europe.
Jonathan Moreno is a bioethicist and historian at the University of Pennsylvania also Jayale Moreno's son, and.
It was especially aimed at Jews and Italians. It was a really a very clear effort to keep the white American race as pure as possible by keeping the Jews and Italians out.
But Marinos 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 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, not on a couch. Through the theater, he'd made contact with a psychology graduate student named Helen Hall Jennings who was as interested in studying groups as he was. Together they began to work out a method of graphing the relationships between people seeing as individuals and members in a group
at the same time. But to get enough data to test it out, they needed a big experiment, bigger than an improv theater company.
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.
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 they revealed he was a schizoid syntonic personality, whatever that means. For instance, when Lincoln's friend worried that Lincoln would be assassinated, Lincoln said,
if they kill me, I can't die another death. As Brill explained to the press, a normal person I ought to have said very well, I will be very careful. This was hot stuff, and for some reason he asked Marino to respond.
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 Moreno 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.
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 pot four or six foot five Abraham Lincoln. Right, well, Brill is furious.
Right, 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. 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, 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 upswing. But meanwhile, a teenage Ela Fitzgerald's was about to move in the opposite direction, because right around the time of Moreno's big break, her mother got in 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, 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 Moreno was finally finding his footing. His takedown of Abril, 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 Moorse. She invited him to move out of New York City and up the river to Hudson to 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 eye up on a 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 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 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 god thick corner of the mind where stories gather like in the 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.
I mean, I hate to call.
It a school.
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.
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, very harsh punishments, and minute survey 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.
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 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.
I bring this up in part because you have then another reformer, Fanny French Morse.
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 uniforms and the straight 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 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 they locked into her a jawbone with a small gold key. That's how I imagine morse carriage waiting, metal jaw clenched, bonfire glinting off her glasses, and gold key in her pocket.
She was a type the progressive arrow reformer. If you were an ambitious woman in those days, running a reform school was one of the few clear pathways to real political power. But it was political power at a cost.
There was this idea at the time, you know, of the woman as 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. 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 are these positive aspects, but
they are also these very negative aspects. From our perspective.
Morse was on a crusade. She moved into a Rundown 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, polish the curve mahogany balustrade, restore the old antiques. She said she believed in giving them an esthetic education, and she held herself up as a model. At Christmas, she'd put a candle lit tree in every room of the first floor, and nost 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 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 employee of hers once said, Fanny Frenchmores went through life making decisions on the basis of what glorified her reputation. D jested 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 kept running away. That's why she needed Jael Moreno. While the girls ran away was one of the first things her new director of research was meant to study.
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.
Sociometry was what Moreno called his new science. He assembled a team of research assistants. It seems that he lived at the school, an entirely closed world of about five hundred and five people. Moreno 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 knowing about it.
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. You don't see constellations, you see little points of light. So what you need to be a great astronomer, And so he saw himself doing that.
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, poor girls under state control, but it was especially true of the black girls. This white scientist studying black people. 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 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. Maybe the runaways all lived in cottages with
higher rejection scores. On the map, they drew the attractions as red lines and the rejections as 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 a thousand lines of computer code, except then these heartbreaking stories got through all the scientific lingo.
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.
And then they'd write their reasons for rejecting others.
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 get interested too.
Moreno and Jennings trace 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 love 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
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. That was galling to black civil rights leaders.
They're seeing black kids continue to be subject to the horrific treatment that is supposed to be at this point reserved only for adults.
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.
You know they're seeing their kids deny the same prospects of self realization that why kids are seemingly having access to visa via rebuilt dat of ideal.
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, 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.
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, that was really a breakthrough.
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 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 of that year, there was a party a friend of Ruth and Marie's 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. 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, because only two of them had ever tried it before. Who 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 died ten thousand pages of data and they needed a way to visualize it all. What they 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. Marino wrote that it was proof that networks exist.
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. So how did the girls stimulate each other to be rebels right? Or to 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.
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 Moreno claimed they were unprecedentedly low. Morse must have been
thrilled Moreno had seen the unseen. On April second, nineteen thirty three, Marino 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 comprising the scientists said the entire psychology of the Hudson Reformatory. The next day, the New York Times proclaimed emotions mapped by new geograph. 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 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.
The mere mapping of the networks is transformational. The recognition that there are these elaborate, you know, skins of human interactions, you know, like where these people are interconnected.
That's Nicholas Kristacus. 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 Mareno map.
I have to be very delicate here, so it's not to rip it. It's so geometric 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 at you can just immediately see that the ties within the dormitories are tighter. 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.
There was a tremendous amount of insight. But also, as Christokus 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 his crew were back studying in 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, 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 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
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.
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 to do with the institution.
This was the first Bernstein heard of it. When we talked about it, she got animated, like it was happening all.
Over again, and of course I go, oh, my god.
Bernstein began to dig I.
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 student she was, and what a perfectionist she was, and her beautiful penmanship. She said, I can even visualize her handwriting.
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 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.
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, and to some extent at least I came away with the 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, and that she had never forgotten that she said that girl sang her heart out.
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 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.
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.
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 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 it a school, the reason it was always a prison.
I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went to the amateur contest.
There's no record of when Ella Fitzgerald 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
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 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 book was enormously influential, including with the Roosevelt administration. 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, 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 particular individuals. In that same year, Marino finally established himself with his Hudson study. Ella Fitzgerald entered a contest at the Apollo Theater. When you first started, you had visions of not being a singer.
You were going to be a dancer, all right, right, tell me about that.
Oh you really want to hear that? Will and started back in my hometown in Yonkers, and I was what they call the you know.
The greatest little dancer in Yonkers. And we used to go down to the Pollo 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. And being from young because we never thought anybody would send a postcard to young Kers, and the three of us.
We put our names in.
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 school.
And I was the one who was chosen and I made up you know, they say, well, if you don't.
Go, your chicken right.
So we went, and I believe it or not, I was the first amateur that they called. And there were two sisters who were to dance, and his sisters in the world called it Edward Sisters and they were starring at Apollo, and they closed the show with out and I when I saw those ladies dance, I says, no way, I'm going out there and trying to dance, because they stopped the show. I was the first one was called. And when I got out there, somebody hollered out, no adice.
What is she going to do?
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.
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 because then I tried to sing like her and I sang if a, well, it's ben brut We hope of the broom.
That's Judy, and.
Everybody says all I grew up and sing and the people plauted so much. I sang Object of my Affection. That was the other side of the record, and I won first prize. So then that made me feel like, you know, well, I wanted to try to be a singer.
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 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 see 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.
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. It led to an investigation. Morse 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 French Morse stepping down from the school, tiring 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. 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.
I guess put that in.
I'm a I'm a slopper children we sent thirteen thousand children in South Carolina and we did Old MacDonald and you should hear all of them sing in Ei eio.
This is embarrassing to admit, but I started writing this story because I found a bunch of undigitized tapes of Morino and his archives doing this 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 Elia Fitzgerald, and the story rotated on its axis. 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.
And I've always felt that if it takes one person to make the other person, we don't do anything more ourselves. I think if we try to help each other. I like the feel now that a lot of the young people will say, well, she did it, I can do it. You're a beautiful person.
People are beautiful.
Thanks good to see.
We live our lives in the intersecting web of social networks that Mareno 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 it takes one person to make another person.
There's a saying who says and love is blind. Still, we're often told seek and ye shall find. So I'm going to seek a certain lad I've had in mind.
The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nadaaffrey. 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 Comferts. Our foolproof player is Becca A. Lewis. 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 Janette Junior in the Star Ganette Foundation Special. Thanks to Judith Tick for sharing an advanced copy of aur 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 a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bo honess 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 Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Mattafaffrey.
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