The Ice Man from Maine: Why New York City’s mayor took refuge in Bath

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By Paul Mills

It’s a time of year when ice is a reigning inconvenience. You can’t walk down the sidewalk without slipping on it or drive down the street without skidding on it. For much of our history, however, ice was no nuisance. It was a necessity. For before the advent of electric refrigeration, ice was a cornerstone of our survival: few foods, beverages, or medicines could be preserved without it.

C.W. Morse

The American monarch of this once indispensable commodity was a man from Maine, Charles Morse. Born in Bath, in 1856, Morse first showed promise as a conniving entrepreneur during his years at Bowdoin College. Hired at $1,500 a year to keep the books for his father’s shipping company, Morse farmed out the work to a classmate for $500 and pocketed the difference. While still an undergrad, Morse had gone out on his own to capture contracts in the ice shipping business. Through various maneuvers, Morse managed by the time of his graduation in 1877 to reap nearly a half million.

It didn’t take long for someone with such boundless ambition to make his way to New York. Within a few years Morse had put together 26 ice companies into a single conglomerate, American Ice Company, worth $60 million. It was described by one financial writer as one of the most “over-capitalized promotions in the annals of the American trust movement.” It was difficult for anyone in any east coast American city to buy ice without going through Morse’s company.

In the spring of 1900, Morse announced that the cost of ice in New York City, which had ranged from 25 to 30-cents, would be boosted to 60 cents per hundred pounds. Feeling the barrel of Morse’s gun to their economic head were the middle class and poor of America’s largest city. Subsequent revelations showed that the proposed hike was made possible in part by decisions of city docking commissioners who had given Morse’s company rights so partisan as to preempt competition from others.

Newspapers trying to get to the bottom of the sudden spike in price had trouble tracking down the city’s mayor, Robert Van Wyck. By the time of the ice crisis his office told reporters that the mayor was unavailable for comment. He had left the city to visit Morse at his Bath summer home. Fourth estate investigators and a lawsuit eventually uncovered more than just a social association between the mayor and Morse.

It turns out that the mayor, whose salary was a mere $15,000, had somehow gotten his hands on $680,000 worth of stock in American Ice. How? First, by a loan from Morse. Secondly, by paying only half the market price of what the stock was worth.

Even before details of Van Wyck’s nefarious connection to Morse had been revealed, the public outcry was so deafening that Morse reversed his price hike decision. Sensing that the days of the over-capitalized American Ice might soon be numbered, Morse managed also to bail out of it for a tidy $12 million, just before it collapsed. It left in its wake many rank and file investors who lacked Morse’s inside knowledge of its imminent demise.

The next year, Morse, a widower with four children, remarried a Clemence Dodge, the divorced wife of a Pullman car conductor. Within two years, 1903, his children went to Court to try to have the marriage annulled. This was based on a challenge to the technical sufficiency of her divorce from her previous husband Charles Dodge. Attention surrounding the case created another publicity glare for Morse, though Clemence remained by his side until her own death in 1926.

By 1907, Morse had turned his considerable entrepreneurial zeal to shipping and banking. His stranglehold on coastal shipping from Maine to Texas won him the title of “Admiral of the Atlantic Coast.” As with the ice company episode, however, Morse’s methods did not withstand ethical scrutiny. Financing for his shipping ventures had occurred through capturing control of some of the nation’s largest banks and exploiting them to benefit his ventures. By 1908, a New York based federal prosecutor convinced a jury that Morse had indeed gone too far and won a conviction for making false entries in one of the bank’s books and misusing its funds.

A 15-year sentence was cut short within two years by a pardon from President Taft. The pardon was based on the diagnosis of a team of military doctors that Morse was so seriously ill he didn’t have long to live. After the pardon was granted, however, it turned out that Morse had temporarily provoked the symptoms of a serious kidney ailment by drinking soapsuds and other chemicals.

Instead, Morse bounced back for another 20 years. Re-emerging as a major force in international shipping in World War I, the government eventually won an $11.5 million verdict against Morse for pocketing too much of the government’s money and only delivering 22 of the 36 ships it had ordered from him.

Some good did come of Morse’s financial philandering. In 1903, the same year as the annulment proceedings, Morse purchased the land and provided most of the financing for a new high school in his home town. He did this in honor of his mother, Anna E. J. Rodbird Morse, a long-time Sunday School teacher. The building burned in 1928 but proceeds from the insurance helped build a new one on the same site Morse furnished. Today, Morse High is the secondary school for Maine’s RSU 1, serving Bath and five surrounding communities.

In the 1920s, Morse returned full time to his Bath family home. By 1933, at age 76, his health became like that of the slowly shrinking ice in the rivers of Maine which had once furnished the impetus for his sensationally triumphant early career. It slowly melted away.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net

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7 Comments

  1. Thank you. By far, the most interesting non-fiction I’ve read in a long time! Where’s the book?

  2. Has anyone read The House of Morgans? It relates the tales and triumphs of the powerful banking dynasties; railroads, overseas commerce and impact of that day. History sure does repeat itself!

  3. What a wonderful story of Maine history. I love biographies. Thank you, Paul. Might this be from a Book? I’d love to hear from you.

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