How a 1912 Millbrook Survey

Helped Shape Perceptions of the Italian Immigrant Community

By Robert McHugh

In April of 1912, Reverend J. E. Lyall, the long-serving pastor of Millbrook’s Reformed congregation, invited members of the community to an “undenominational banquet” in his church’s parlor to discuss the “social, moral, and religious welfare” of the village.[1] Reverend Lyall had an agenda: he urged those in attendance to lend their support to the creation of a sociological study – The Millbrook Survey, or, as it is more commonly known today, The Lyall Report – detailing the conditions that existed in Millbrook and the surrounding Town of Washington in the early years of the new century. The report that emerged 11 months after this initial meeting, a 241-page document now in the archives of the Millbrook Historical Society, is a tremendously rich source of information about life in a small Dutchess County village at the apogee of the Progressive Era.

The survey comprises data on nearly every aspect of life imaginable: church attendance, water quality, education levels, occupations, arrests; whether people rented or owned their homes; what types of books they checked out from the library; and how and where they disposed of their sewage. Its author[2] then analyzed the information and made recommendations –26 of them – for how Millbrook could be reformed, how life in the community could be improved. In many ways the Lyall Report reflected the ambitions, the preoccupations, but also the prejudices and limitations of the Progressive Era. The following is an attempt to contextualize it within that pivotal period in American history.

The Progressive Era

“It is a progressive move, a step in advance, but we are living in a progressive age.” — The Lyall Report

Nineteen-twelve represented the peak of the Progressive Era. The presidential election that took place seven months after that initial meeting in Reverend Lyall’s church parlor pitted three major candidates, each seeking to outdo the others with his Progressive bona fides and aggressive plans for reform. The incumbent president, William Howard Taft, had used his time in office to accelerate the trustbusting that his predecessor – and now rival – Theodore Roosevelt had begun. The race’s ultimate winner, Woodrow Wilson[3], proposed dramatically empowering the federal government to curtail the excesses and ills of industrial capitalism. A fourth candidate, the socialist Eugene Debs, while not a Progressive in line with Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilson, advocated the most radical set of changes to the American economy. In short, there was not a conservative in the running. No one was arguing in favor of the status quo; all were eager to reform the country, often in significant ways.

Figures 1 and 2: These graphs (2 of 44) present survey information. Top: relative frequency of home ownership by profession. Inset: 50 percent of the community’s inhabitants are members of one of the churches.

This was the country’s mood at the moment when the Lyall Report was proposed, drafted, and presented to the community. And it is impossible to understand the Lyall Report – its heavily moralistic tone, its urgent calls for reform, but also its desire to forestall more radical change, the kind of change represented at the national level by the socialist policies of Debs or in the local arena by political power falling into the hands of Millbrook’s Italian immigrant community – outside of this context. In fact, the report’s author situated it squarely within this milieu. “It is a progressive move, a step in advance,” the report announces. “[B] ut we are living in a progressive age.”[4]

Many of the hallmarks of the Progressive Era are abundantly present in the Lyall Report. There is the strong reform impulse, the desire for positive – but not radical – change, and also, and perhaps most frequent of all, the obsession with data and quantification. At the core of the Progressive Movement was a desire by reformers to study the world around them, to collect as much information as possible; this was a golden age for sociologists and statisticians. The historian Richard Hofstadter described the typical Progressive as hungry for knowledge – and eager to use that knowledge to impel change. “It is hardly an exaggeration,” he wrote in the 1950s, “to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind…Before there could be action, there must be information and exhortation.”[5]

The Progressive need to collect[6] and quantify information is demonstrated by a few statistics related to the Lyall Report: there are in its 241 pages 54 tables of data and 44 graphs;[7] nearly one for every other page of text. Some of these tables and graphs present the information collected through the survey in a manner that makes it easier to digest; some seem more a reflection of the Progressive mania for data.

The Report also includes 22 photographs that show scenes from around the community, typically as a way to dramatically highlight problems like unsanitary living conditions or a lack of clean drinking water. This too was a common tactic of Progressive reformers. Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, published 23 years before the Lyall Report, was the first major work to effectively use photography to shock its readers into action by depicting the horrors of poverty. While the setting of the Lyall Report was very different from 1880s Manhattan, the technique was similar.

In addition to the use of graphs and photographs, the Lyall Report also routinely employs the moralistic tone common among many Progressive Era reformers. A sense of highminded, often paternalistic, judgement runs through much of the document. Several examples will serve to demonstrate this:

•On farm management: “The management of very few farms in the community is on an efficient basis. The large estates are managed to quite an extent by well trained men, but most of the other farms are not worked by men who know their business.”[8]

•On living conditions: “[T]here may be found many wretched hovels, some of which are unfit even for the shelter of beasts.”[9]

•On the village’s two pool rooms: “They are open on Sunday and there is not the slightest doubt but that gambling is carried on. The room on Church Street has an evening patronage of about fifty, nearly all American young men. The best that can be said of the rooms is that they are dens of vice where foul language is customary and fistic encounters not infrequent.”[10]

•In the caption under a photograph showing a Black family in a buggy: “Sometimes the thrifty-looking are shiftless.”[11]

The Men and Religion Forward Movement

If the Progressive Era is the broader context for the Lyall Report, there is also a narrower one. Very nearly the first words of the Report explain the project’s specific origins: “The Millbrook Survey was an outgrowth of the Men and Religion Forward Movement.”[12] This movement, which reached its peak in April 1912 at the very moment members of the community gathered in Reverend Lyall’s church parlor, proposed to reform Protestant Christianity. At its core was the conviction that Protestantism had become overly feminized by the early years of the twentieth century and that it needed to change if it were going to remain relevant to American men – and retain their allegiance. There were already, according to the movement’s leaders, three million men “missing” from the country’s churches.[13]

Though the Men and Religion Forward Movement had begun in earnest only the previous year, it reflected longer term worries about the growing conflict between the emotionalism prevalent in Protestant churches and the manly ideal of the pragmatic, hardheaded businessman so common in American culture in the early 1900s. The movement was deeply misogynistic, predicated as it was on the belief of separate spheres for men and women and a future where one’s gender defined one’s character and potential. Fred Smith, the campaign’s most prominent public spokesperson, reflected this misogyny:

In greatest numbers the conspicuous poets, musicians, artists, politicians, merchants, generals, have been men. This seems to have been the wisdom of God, for about every departure from this rule has caused unhappy friction. I could write a volume upon the tragedies with which I am familiar concerning the homes of women who have felt it necessary to assume masculine functions… Whatever may be true in exceptional cases, the general fact remains that in a very real sense this is a man’s world.[14]

In spite, or perhaps because, of these attitudes, the Men and Religion Forward Movement was immensely popular. More than a million American men took part in at least one event associated with the movement in 1911 and 1912. A culminating rally filled Carnegie Hall in April 1912. Lending credibility to the campaign, some of the country’s most prominent political and business leaders publicly supported and funded it, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan.[15] Its leaders put up electric signs along Broadway and in Madison Square in New York City with the movement’s slogan, “Religion for Men. Men for Religion.” And they advertised on the sports pages of newspapers across the country, hoping there to reach a predominantly male audience.[16]

The Men and Religion Forward Movement had significant strength in Dutchess County. A number of meetings were held in Poughkeepsie, including one that drew nearly 400 men to the city’s YMCA hall in February 1912. In the event’s keynote address, a Professor M. A. Honline, described as a “Bible Study expert,” castigated card-playing Sunday school teachers and asserted that movies do more to undermine morality than even alcohol, the Progressive Era’s favorite target.[17] “Say what you want about saloons,” he opined, “I believe the cheap theatres do more to corrupt youth than all the saloons combined.”[18]

While the movement’s agenda was far-reaching, and included a renewed commitment to evangelism and Bible study, it also specifically highlighted the importance of social work. Many local branches of the campaign formed Social Service Committees with the express intent of “conduct[ing] extensive surveys of local conditions”[19] in order to identify the areas where their energies should be focused. One Social Service Committee in South Bend, Indiana, undertook an investigation into the number of saloons, dance halls, theatres, burlesque shows, and their character; arrests and convictions of men, women, and children, for what causes under what conditions; detailed, definite statements as to water supply, sewerage, taxation; condition of bakeries and meat markets; the sanitary conditions of tenements, factories, restaurants, and hotels; an exhaustive inquiry concerning public schools, playgrounds, libraries…

With the exception of burlesque shows, which Millbrook sadly lacked in 1913, this could be a fairly accurate summation of the information collected in the Lyall Report. Millbrook was not alone in undertaking such a thoroughgoing examination of life in the community. It was perhaps unusual in such a small village, but the Report fits squarely into the larger national efforts of the Men and Religion Forward Movement.

The Italian Community

The Lyall Report includes frequent examples of the prejudices of its era. The mania with moralism that denigrated harmless activities like pool playing as evidence of a lack of Christian virtue and the conviction that the capabilities and talents of men and women were fundamentally different have already been addressed. Most disturbing of all was the pseudo-scientific belief in the natural superiority of some races and ethnicities and the inherent inferiority of others.

Throughout the Report, statistics are often broken down by racial category, of which there are three: white or American, Negro or colored, and Italian. It explicitly states that even those who immigrated from Italy and have since become American citizens will be classified as Italian – not American – for the purposes of the study. Although Italians represented only 15 percent of the community’s population in 1912[20], roughly one in seven inhabitants, much of the report dwells on their role in village.[21] While the language used in the report is careful and mostly avoids employing the worst ethnic and racial slurs of the era, the subtext for the survey’s decided interest in the Italian residents is unmistakable: white residents of Millbrook were concerned, perhaps even panicked, about how their community was being changed by the arrival of these newcomers.

Some of these fears revolved around a potential loss of power or control to the Italians. For example:

· In a discussion about the higher birthrates for Italian families: “[I]t is rapidly becoming a question of Americanizing the Italian, or we shall become Italianized.”[22]

· Expressing similar concerns about the relative size of Italian and “white” families: “It is only a question of time, apparently, when the Italians will control the village.”[23]

These attitudes were, of course, not unique to Millbrook; they reflect a common strain of thought in Progressive Era America. Although seemingly odd to modern sensibilities, it was typical in the early twentieth century to look upon immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as nonwhite, as members of separate racial categories. They were viewed not only with suspicion, but with disdain. This was the height of the eugenics movement in the United States and the belief that one’s character and intellectual capacity were determined by one’s race or ethnicity represented conventional thinking. Italians were seen as inferior to northern Europeans, who were sometimes referred to as Teutonic or Nordic. [24]

Figure 6: This graph shows the number of Italian children living in each house. Note that there is one house with 17 children in it. This information reflected the fears among native born residents that the higher birthrates among Italian families would lead to them losing control of the village.

Sociologist Edward Ross, who had introduced the term “race suicide” into debates over immigration policy in an attempt to convince native born Americans to keep less desirable groups out, lest they dilute the nation’s Anglo-Saxon stock, wrote a series of works highly critical of Italian immigration. “That the Mediterranean people are morally below the races of northern Europe,” Ross asserted, “is as certain as any social fact.

Immigrants from southern Italy, “lack the conveniences for thinking.” Those from Naples[25] were “a degenerate class… infected with spiritual hookworm [who display] a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, and backless heads.”[26] The attitude represented by Ross was, if not universally accepted, at least common, especially among Progressives who relied heavily on pseudoscientific, eugenics-inspired writings in forming their opinions of immigrants. This attitude is manifestly present in one seemingly odd statement in the Lyall Report that sums up its careful straddling of the line between the outright prejudice of the era and the desire to preserve a neighborly relationship with the Italians living in Millbrook: “Above the average Italian socially and intellectually, [the village’s Italians] have striven to keep undesirable fellow-countrymen away from Millbrook.”[27]

With few exceptions, Millbrook’s Italian residents lived on a single street, Alden Place. The Lyall Report has much to say about life there: the homes and apartments are crowded, sanitation is poor, children play in the street because of a lack of playgrounds. One of the more telling passages in the survey attempts to explain why Alden Place is home to so many of the village’s Italians and not merely describe the conditions there:

A considerable number [of Italians] would like to buy property in the village, but even when they offer cash, the Americans will rarely sell, for they are afraid that the Italians “will spoil that section of the town.” Most of the village property is thus barred from them by an unwritten law forbidding the sale of property to an Italian.[28]

Note the tone here, which acknowledges this reality, but seems slightly disapproving of it. The Report goes on to provide an explanation for why the village’s potential for growth has been checked.[29] It was not a product of happenstance:

Influenced to some extent by the Thorne family, who held land near Millbrook, other wealthy New Yorkers have purchased land near the village, until today it is almost completely surrounded by their holdings. Much of the incorporated village is also owned by them. Furthermore, at present all the available land within the village is owned by the realty company, which consists of these same wealthy estate holders. This company has fixed a limit as to whom land shall be sold, excluding all so-called “undesirable parties,” such as Italians and Americans who are not wanted. Restrictions have been made regarding size of lot, forcing a buyer to purchase a large lot without the privilege of breaking it up later; and buyers have also been compelled to build a house of not less than a certain value…The growth of the town in this way is being choked. It is said quietly that this “bottling” has been slyly and purposely done by the New York men, in order to “keep Millbrook always a pretty little country village, for their especial enjoyment, just as they have made an artificial pond or a game preserve.”[30] map showing the “Bottling” of Millbrook. This effect was created by the large estates surrounding the village that prevented its natural expansion and contributed to the overcrowding in areas like Alden Pace, where the Italian community was centered. The heart of the village is the area between the Golf Links and the Dietrich Estate, where Timothy Leary would spend time a few decades later.

Figure 7: A

Next to this, in the margin of Reverend Lyall’s personal copy of the report, the one in the archives of the Millbrook Historical Society, is a handwritten note: “This paragraph is not with my permission, nor was I aware of its presence in the notes before the volume was bound. J. E. Lyall”. [31] Clearly this conclusion, penned by an outsider hired to draft the report, went beyond what the Reverend was comfortable attaching his imprimatur to.

Conclusion

The Lyall Report concludes with 26 specific recommendations for improving life in the community. Some of these proposals would likely be the same if a similar project were undertaken today in Millbrook:

“Improvement of…sidewalks within the village”

“Preservation of places of scenic beauty”

“Development of a recreational program”

Some are more reflective of the concerns of 1912:

“Sanitary control of manure piles in the village”[32]

“Campaign against the use of liquor by education and by the ballot”

“Sanitary regulation of the village’s milk supply”[33]

While these recommendations are listed in a form similar to what appears above, the question of what to do about the Italian community earns a more thorough analysis:

The survey emphasizes the growing importance on the Italians within the community. The Italians have hitherto been ignored, scorned and maligned, as a rule. Yet they are apparently to become a very powerful body, if not the controlling force in the village. Here presents a problem nothing less than the assimilation of the Italian population. There should be a carefully worked out plan, definite, simple, yet comprehensive, made with the help of the Italians themselves, for the development of the Italians of the community. This plan will embrace social, educational and religious features.[34]

One hundred and nine years after the Lyall Report, Millbrook is still home to many descendants of the Italian families referenced, but not named in it – Sepe, Ciferri, Velletri, Manzi, among others – but vanishingly few of the descendants of the large estate owners who had been so concerned with the newcomers’ arrival and what it would mean for their community.

[1] Lyall Report, 2.

[2] F. E. Shapleigh. He was the YMCA County Secretary of Eastern Delaware County.

[3] Wilson’s inaugural address is quoted in the report: “This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try?” Ibid, 191.

[4] Ibid, 188

[5] Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 186-187.

[6] Volunteers were recruited to administer multi-page questionnaires to members of the community, asking them all sorts of things: what magazines they read; what Church, if any, they belonged to; what level of education they had attained; where they acquired their drinking water. Although men were in charge of the committee that oversaw the report, the data collectors included both male and female volunteers and the Report includes this wonderfully telling line: “Eighteen men and two women were engaged in the survey in the open country, besides several wives of the men, in some cases doing the most of the work.”

[7] It is not without a sense of irony that I present these statistics; it is precisely what the committee responsible for the Lyall Report would have wanted in a report on the Report. Although perhaps creating a bar graph to present the statistics would be more in keeping with its preferences.

[8] Lyall Report, 20.

[9] Ibid, 39.

[10] Ibid, 175.

[11] Ibid, 83.

[12] Lyall Report, 2.

[13] Gail Bederman. “’The Women have had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism.” American Quarterly, (Sept. 1989), pp 432-435.

[14] Idib., 451.

[15] Ibid, 434.

[16] Ibid, 443-444.

[17] And a favorite target of the Lyall Report. Statistics cited in the report attribute most of the crimes that had occurred in recent years in the community to, at root, alcohol.

[18] “Opening Gun of Men and Religion Forward Movement 8-Day Campaign,” Poughkeepsie Eagle, February 27, 1912. Interestingly, the Lyall Report was not quite as harsh when it came to the moral suitability of films: “The motion picture theatre furnishes most of the theatrical entertainment of the community. It has an average patronage of 400 per week. The hall is fairly good. The films are of an average character.”

[19] Bederman, 449.

[20] Blacks represented a mere 4 percent and whites 81 percent.

[21] Forty-one percent of the village’s Italians were under age 10, but only 16 percent of whites were.

[22] Lyall Report, 33.

[23] Ibid, 48.

[24] Eugenicists explained away great figures from Italian history like Dante, Galileo, and Leonardo by saying that they were actually Nordic.

[25] Most Italians who had come to Millbrook were from Fondi, a town 76 miles northwest of Naples.

[26] Okrent, Daniel. The Guarded Gate. (New York, Scribner, 2019), pp. 188.

[27] Lyall Report 43.

[28] Ibid, 50.

[29] The village’s population hasn’t exceeded 1500 nor fallen below 1100 at any point in the past 100 years; it has been remarkably consistent. Rhinebeck’s population, by comparison, has varied from roughly 1400 to 3100 over that time.

[30] Lyall Report, 41, 43.

[31] Ibid, 43.

[32] Although there are a number of signs today discouraging dog owners from allowing their pets to defecate on lawns.

[33] Lyall Report, 210-211.

[34] Ibid, 196.