R. F. Cutting v. Cancer

Financier Robert Fulton Cutting modestly stayed away from last week's meeting of the American Society for the Control of Cancer in Manhattan, where President Emeritus George Emerson Brewer of the College of Physicians & Surgeons asserted again: "The most important present day problem in cancer control is publicity. Research work in cancer is making great strides and the great need is to teach the public to have the disease treated at an early stage of development. . . . If every case could be recognized in two weeks after cancer has set in, and then treated by surgery, there would be no more death rate from cancer." For such publicity the society is soliciting $1,000,000 to assure an annual income of $50,000. John D. Rockefeller Jr. has already given $125,000, Edward S. Harkness $100,000, and other rich men enough money to make up $536,000. Of this $100,000 had to be spent last year to pay the expenses of world cancer authorities who came to the International Symposium on Cancer Control at Lake Mohonk, N. Y., last September (TIME, Oct. 4) and to solicit more donations.

Contributions have been slow and from too few people. Financier Cutting knew that, but instead of coming to the cancer society meeting last week, he sent a letter. Financier Thomas W. Lament, who was there, read the letter aloud: "I write to say that I will contribute the last $250,000 of the $1,000,000 endowment fund which your society is endeavoring to raise, if the whole amount is subscribed by Oct. 1. When $750,000 is paid or subscribed, I will pay the $250,000 of my pledge."

After long social work, Robert Fulton Cutting, now 74, knows that the public must be bludgeoned into any unwonted activity; and he can bludgeon. At the beginning of this century, when Theodore Roosevelt was being hornswoggled out of New York politics into the obscurity of the U. S. Vice Presidency, the administration of New York City was noisome. Where Tammany Hall did not control, the gangs of Senator Thomas C. Platt (1833-1910) took graft. Mr. Cutting, then an obscure businessman in Manhattan's financial district, tried to fight the bosses, got little public aid. Obdurate, he took the presidency of the Citizens' Union and organized a "Fusion Ticket." An honest, upright man, he used the tactics of corrupt bosses, but with better intelligence. His followers won office, and ward heelers came to say of him: "He is the only boss in this town. He names the candidates, and when they write letters of acceptance, they write them to him." That was in 1903.

Another accomplishment of Mr. Cutting's, and from the medical aspect far more important, has been his City & Suburban Homes Co. He is its chairman, and for 30 years has been using its funds to build sanitary tenements that could be rented at low sums. His method of doing this is very simple. He gets his building money from rich men, who are more than glad to get 5% certain earnings on their investments. With this cheap construction money he puts up apartments that rent, on the average, for $2.53 a room a week. In the latest buildings each apartment has electric lights and private bath. In older constructions, lacking these conveniences, the average rent is $1.99 a room a week. The tenants pay their rent promptly. One year, when total rentals were $826,483, only $18 remained unpaid. During the generation that the City & Suburban Homes Co. has functioned, unpaid rents have averaged $30 a year. No other landlord has such prompt and complete rental payments. And the health of Mr. Cutting's tenants is several times better than that of the average resident of the five boroughs that make up New York City.* When the city death rate was 12.94 for each 1,000 persons, the death rate in his buildings was a third of that.

* Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Richmond.