Crystal Eastman

by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

Coming across a name twice in one week is a good sign to dig a little deeper, and this is how I was introduced to Crystal Eastman. Turns out not only did this woman have connections to Elmira, women’s suffrage and Mark Twain, she was among the first American women to receive a law degree. She was the first woman appointed by a New York Governor to a state legal commission dealing with employment - a group she was later elected to lead – and she was co-founder of both the National Women’s Peace Party and the American Civil Liberties Union (commonly known as the ACLU). Amazingly, she accomplished all of this before her untimely death at the age of 48.

Crystal Eastman

Crystal Eastman was born in 1881, the second of four children to Samuel Eastman and Annis Ford Eastman. The Eastmans had married after meeting as students at Oberlin College. Samuel was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and his first assignment was to Canandaigua’s First Congregational Church.

Samuel and Annis Eastman

Samuel Eastman had served in the Civil War, and had suffered from terrible pneumonia. His health went on to bother him throughout his life. Soon health issues forced him to resign his Canandaigua ministry, and his wife Annis took up teaching to raise money for the growing family. They had four children. Annis soon discovered a talent for speaking and was asked and accepted offers to preach at various local churches. She became an early feminist and popular speaker. Notable speeches she gave were before the Congress of Women and the National Council of Women of the United States.

In 1892, Annis became the first woman Congregational minister, and was ordained by a council headed by the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira. The Eastmans and Beechers became lifelong friends and colleagues. When Reverend Beecher died in 1900, both Eastmans were appointed to take his place and they moved their family from Canandaigua to Elmira.

Revs. Thomas K. Beecher, Annis and Samuel Eastman

Other members of the progressive congregation included Samuel L. -also known as Mark Twain - and Livy Clemens. They knew the Eastmans so well that when Twain died, Reverend Annis Ford Eastman was asked to give the eulogy at his funeral. She wrote the eulogy, but her failing health prevented her from delivering it. Her husband spoke on her behalf.

The Eastman’s oldest child had died early from scarlet fever. Now there were three children and Crystal was their only daughter. She left Elmira to study at Vassar College, with plans to pursue advanced studies in NYC while her brother Max finished up at Williams College. 

Vassar College

The family’s financial plans required her to compromise. Her parents decided Crystal would pursue her master’s degree in sociology from Columbia, while Max took a year off. Crystal would then return to Elmira and work while Max finished his studies. Everyone agreed, and upon completing graduate school, Crystal returned to Elmira to teach high school English and history for two years.

In 1906, Crystal returned to New York City to enroll in law school at New York University. The program had recently began to admit women students, and she earned her degree in 1907. She was particularly interested in labor issues and worked on a project called the Pittsburgh Survey. This was an in-depth look at workplace injuries, employment, and unemployment issues. Her scholarship on the project brought her to the attention of the NY Governor. Governor Hughes appointed her to the New York State Commission of Employee’s Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor. Crystal became the first woman appointed to any state level commission in New York, and went on to be the elected Secretary of the commission. 

Following in her mother's footsteps, Crystal became active in the suffrage movement. Ironically her first contribution to the cause was to help her brother Max establish the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, and important organization that fought alongside and boosted women's rights.

Crystal married Wallace Benedict and they left New York for Milwaukee, his hometown. In Wisconsin, she campaigned for suffrage issues which went on to be soundly defeated. Within the year, she moved back alone to NYC. The couple divorced two years later.

By this time, World War I was looming. Crystal, along with other prominent activists, turned their attention away from women getting the vote to working on Peace and anti-Militarism campaigns. Concerned about the state of civil liberties for all citizens, she co-founded the National Woman’s Peace Party to defend free speech during wartime. Her advocacy work gained her international experience, and she traveled and lectured throughout Europe. She worked closely with prominent social reformers, activists and radicals of the day, including Walter Fuller who became her second husband. Walter was an Englishman, poet, anti-war activist, intellectual and editor, and together they had two children.

In 1920, when the US Government began to suppress free speech and freedom of the press, Crystal co-founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau later known as the American Civil Liberties Union. This was her most significant legacy.

Her work to protect citizens’ civil rights targeted her, and she and her husband were blacklisted by the government. Unable to find work, they fled the country to work in London, England.

In 1927, Walter had a stroke and died. Crystal returned to the US only to die six months later from inflammation of the kidneys. She was 48 years old. Crystal Eastman is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Canandaigua, NY.

Flu Season

By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

On October 1, 1918, the Weinstein family of Elmira was notified that their son, Jacob, was sick at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago. Spanish Flu had reached epidemic proportions at the base, and one Elmira man had already died there. Jacob, a Pharmacists Mate, had been tending the sick when he fell ill. His brother David boarded the first available train to Chicago. By the time he arrived at 4pm Chicago time, Jacob was already dead.

The Spanish Flu epidemic was the second deadliest epidemic in history. There are no definite numbers due to poor record keeping, but somewhere between 20 and 100 million people died of it worldwide. Nationwide, over a quarter of the population was infected while approximately 600,000 died. While most flus only kill the very young, the very old, and the sickly, the Spanish Flu’s main victims were healthy young adults. Young people in the armed services dropped like flies. 

During World War I, approximately 5,000 Chemung County residents joined the armed services. 138 of them never came home alive. Of those, nearly 2 dozen died of the flu or related complications. 

In many ways, the war created the perfect storm for the epidemic. Soldiers traveling across the country in crowded troop trains infected each other and people in the towns they passed. Here in Elmira, the local chapter of the Red Cross had a canteen at the railroad station to provide refreshments to men on the troop trains. During 1918, they served 126,798 troops. In late October, Red Cross canteen workers discovered 12 Oklahoma men sick with a flu on a passing troop train. The men were removed to Arnot-Ogden Hospital where they all eventually recovered. Who knows how many men they had already infected by then? 

Red Cross canteen at the Erie Railroad station

Conditions at the training camps were terrible as men from all over the country infected each other. The camps were very crowded with as many as 25,000 to 55,000 men. The flu first struck in Boston in late August and, within ten days, thousands of recruits at the nearby Camp Devens were sick. Seemingly healthy soldiers were transferred out to other camps, spreading the disease with them. Rates of infection at the camps varied wildly from just 10% at Camp Lewis, Washington, to 63% at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana. The average were somewhere between 25 to 40%, with approximately 2% of the infected dying. 

Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina, where Elmira's Company L trained.

Training camps were woefully unprepared to deal with the epidemic. Not only were individual camps slow to initiate quarantines which might have prevented the spread of the illness outside the camps, they failed to institute internal quarantines as well. Men were turned away from sick call unless they were running a fever of over 101 degrees and the military’s insistence that training continue meant that those who did not yet qualify for sick call could infect their classmates and instructors. Camp medical personnel often lacked necessary supplies to treat the sick. At the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, only 96 out of 674 hospital workers were issued masks. Over 25 nurses and hospital corpsmen, including Jacob Weinstein, died as a result. 

Check out Spanish Flu to see the effects of the flu on Chemung County. 

GET A FLU SHOT!

Putting a Name to a Face

by Erin Doane, Curator

On March 9, 1919, the Elmira Jewish Welfare Board hosted a banquet at the Hebrew Social Center on High Street to honor Jewish veterans of World War I. There is a photograph of this event in the archival collection of Congregation Kol Ami. Along with the photograph, CKA has a hand-drawn key to the people in the photograph. While not everyone in the photo is identified, the key provides far more information than we sometimes see with historic images. Too often, photos are left unlabeled and those who remember the people and places within the photos pass away with that knowledge.

There were 104 Jewish soldiers and sailors from Elmira who served in the Great War, six of whom died in service. 35 veterans and their guests, as well as eight women who served in the American Red Cross Canteen Service attended the banquet. Seeing all the men and women gathered to celebrate the end of the war made me wonder if I could find some information about them. So, I turned to the city directories, our archives, and the internet to satisfy my curiosity. I was able to learn a little about the lives of some who attended the banquet nearly 100 years ago.

Nate and Franklin Bimberg

Nate Bimberg served as toastmaster of the event. His son Frank was one of the veterans being honored. Nate was a local businessman, having opened Joseph Bimberg & Son storage at 316 Hathaway Street in 1915. He also served as school commissioner for District No. 1 for 18 years. He was a strong advocate for creating an athletic field at the Elmira Free Academy in 1916.

Franklin Bimberg was 19 years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1917 as a member of the medical corps. He had worked as office boy at the Star-Gazette before that. After receiving training in Norfolk, Virginia, he was sent overseas where he was stationed in the Mediterranean aboard the Surveyor, a U.S. Destroyer. The Surveyor is credited with capturing the German submarine that sank the Lusitania. Franklin served in the navy until 1921. He enlisted in the army medical corps in 1923, was honorably discharged in 1926, and reenlisted in 1928.

Charles Epstein

Another soldier present that evening was Charles Epstein. He was working as the manager of Jacob Epstein, Estate on East Water Street when the U.S. joined the war. He also volunteered as ward captain of Ward 2 District 3 for a Liberty Loan campaign and was involved in the sale of Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps. In August 1918, he was sent to San Antonio, Texas as an Army draftee for training. A month later, he wrote home saying that his time as a boy scout “surely helps a boy in the Army.”

Jacob Epstein, Estate advertisement, Star-Gazette, August 27, 1919

The Siegel Brothers

Star-Gazette, July 11, 1918

Mr. and Mrs. David Siegel had three sons in the military in 1918. Louis and Garris, who were twins, and Sol. Their younger brother Barney was also contemplating joining up at that time, though I never found out if he actually did. The three brothers were all at the celebratory banquet in 1919, but Sol is not among those labeled in the photograph.

Garris (left) and Louis (right) Siegel at the banquet

Just before the war, Garris worked as road representative for the works manager of the American-LaFrance Manufacturing Company. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1918. Louis was a graduate of the University of Buffalo as a pharmacist. He worked at the Spillan Drug Store on Lake and Clinton Streets in Elmira before enlisting in the Naval Reserves.

Henry Radin

In 1917, Henry Radin was among the most eligible bachelors in the city. When the Mozart Theater presented a showing of “Nearly Married,” the management offered free box seats to dozens of men they thought would benefit from the show and Henry was on that list. The young man was also involved in theater himself. He was a “tenor extraordinaire” who performed at Young Men’s Hebrew Association (Y.M.H.A.) minstrel shows. In August 1918 he enlisted in the cavalry.

Julius Berger

Julius Berger was a veteran, just not of World War I. He served in the U.S. army in the Philippines, New Mexico and Arizona years before the Great War. In 1915, he and Henry Radin opened Berger & Radin, a men’s clothing store, at 137 East Water Street. It was the only exclusive men’s hat and haberdashery store in Elmira offering “the nattiest, nobbiest and newest at sane prices.” He and Henry continued to operate the business for years after the war.

Berger & Radin storefront, 137 East Water Street, Elmira

The soldiers and sailors at the banquet were not the only ones who had contributed to the war effort. The ladies of the American Red Cross helped out from home. They raised money for soldier’s families, sold war bonds, collected supplies like bandages and warm socks to send overseas, and operated the Elmira Canteen, located at the railroad station. The Canteen provided soldiers on passing troop trains with food, drink, and basic medical care. After the Red Cross volunteers served dinner at the celebratory banquet, those present offered their thanks to the “canteen girls.”

Edith Fidelman

Edith Fidelman graduated as an honor student from Elmira Free Academy in 1916. Over the next few years, her name appeared frequently in the social column as she attended parties and traveled. In 1918, she joined the Red Cross and became involved in the Liberty Loan Committee of the Y.W.H.A. In 1919, she was appointed as an election inspector by the Republican party for the first district in the city’s fourth ward.

Beatrice Spiegel Perling

Beatrice Spiegel was a 1914 graduate of Elmira College. She went on to get her Master of Philosophy degree from Wisconsin University a year later. She became involved in the war effort in 1917 when she enrolled in the Red Cross. She also took the State Civil Service exam and was appointed as bookkeeper at the State Women’s Relief Corps Home. Just over a month after attending the Elmira Jewish Welfare Board banquet, she married Joseph Perling of New York City. She continued serving the community in Elmira through the Second World War.