One of the things about writing a biography is knowing when to stop. I published Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty in 2020, but I keep learning things about Edward Dilworth Cumming.
Image by noriyuki yagi from Pixabay
George Miller Cumming (1854–1927) graduated from Harvard College in 1876. He studied at Harvard Law for a few months in the fall of 1876 but then switched to Columbia Law. From 1877-1879 he traveled and studied in England, France, and Germany, and he was admitted to the New York Bar in 1881.
I have just found that George's son, Edward — "Ned," born 1901 — once owned a book of children's poetry and stories in German, Schnaken & Schnurren, by Wilhelm Busch and published in München in the 1860s-1870s. Ned's name was written inside it, along with the place name "Irvington." Eventually, the collection ended up in the hands of Lincoln Kirstein, born 1907, and who donated it to the Morgan in 1979. It's still available to see at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City today.
I don't know if the two of them knew each other as children (though they were six years apart) and exchanged the book then, or if they did it later as adults, or if the two of them never knew each other at all and the book passed through a used bookseller — or, possibly, through their fathers.
The Cummings spent time at their Irvington home especially around 1915, though the home may have been in the family earlier than that. Ned may have been reading the children's poetry as a teenager to practice German.
Screenshot of the library catalog listing of Schnaken & Schnurren from the Morgan.
The question interests me because, while Cumming was a private person and I know nothing about his personal relationships, Kirstein was more prominent and knew famous people. While a Harvard undergraduate, Kirstein was a cofounder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, along with his fellow undergraduates Edward Warburg and John Walker and a twentysomething PhD candidate, Alfred Barr, a bisexual man who was already lecturing on modernist art at Wellesley College. (This detail on Kirstein comes from Bad Gays: A Homosexual History.)
Rachel Maddow wrote about Lincoln Kirstein in her 2023 book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Kirstein, she says, was "Harvard educated, independently wealthy thanks to his father, bisexual, an unflinching aesthete, and a budding arts impresario," just like his colleague Philip Johnson, who was "an almost exact contemporary." But Kirstein was Jewish, and Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer. Maddow writes:
"While at Harvard, Kirstein had founded the society for Contemporary Art on campus, as well as a literary magazine that published new poetry by e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and Ezra Pound — before Pound was revealed as a committed fascist himself. While Johnson spent the first years of his professional life introducing Europe's modern design and architecture to America, Kirstein was busy creating an American ballet troupe to rival the best in Europe."
This was the New York City ballet, co-founded with George Balanchine.
Kirstein's father, Louis E. Kirstein, was, according to Maddow, "close friends" with Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law who "spent the 1933–34 academic year at Oxford" and who wrote to FDR (they were friends) saying that England had a "sober" feeling like that which "preceded 1914." The younger Kirstein, Lincoln, "could sense ill winds blowing across the Atlantic and into the kinds of upper-class salons of Manhattan that welcomed rich, influential young men like him and Philip Johnson." And in New York at the end of 1934, Johnson "was losing sway at the Museum of Modern Art, where Lincoln Kirstein had started warning its key trustees, including Nelson Rockefeller and his mother, that the museum was in danger of being 'tarred with the Fascist brush.' Kirstein's whispered misgivings had also helped scuttle the Art, Inc., concessions at Rockefeller Center. Johnson's standing in New York was at a low, and he was working himself into a full-on snit about it."
There was an evening soiree in 1934 "at a stylish loft on East Fortieth Street," Maddow writes, with a "bohemian hostess," at which a drunk "wealthy socialite" guest told a Jewish guest that his people were corrupt and should be genocided. Though Kirstein wasn't there, the hostess reported to him the next day what had happened, explaining that she feared that antisemitism of the German intensity "might happen here in America."
In late 1934, Johnson and Alan Blackburn left New York for Louisiana to work for Huey Long. Maddow writes: "Kirstein had managed to keep his sense of humor about their weird fascist buccaneering," even when "Blackburn asked for Kirstein's latest address and then threatened to have him beaten up," but he always remembered "Johnson's nastiest remark to him." As he recalled in 1944 while serving in the Army: "He told me I was number one on his list for elimination in the coming revolution." However, as he continued in this letter, which was a character recommendation for Johnson, who was at risk of indictment for sedition: "Since being in the Army, I have seen Pvt Johnson frequently... I am convinced that he has sincerely repented of his former fascist beliefs, that he understands the nature of his mistake and is a loyal American." Maddow commented that this was "very generous," given that it would be "decades" before Johnson himself made "any statement of contrition."
In 1927, George Miller Cumming died, and around that time, his three surviving family members moved to the New York suburb of Scarsdale.
(The Weinbergs lived on 8 Reimer Rd. Sidney Weinberg was good friends with Paul Codman Cabot.)
Then, around 1937, when the owner of the house in which they lodged had a physical fight with the neighbors (political? we don't know), the three of them moved back to Manhattan. As I wrote in the book: "The Cumming family — Ned, his sister Emily, and their mother Lucy — had two apartments: West 116th Street and East 43rd Street. All three of them were associated with both addresses." I note the proximity of East 43rd Street to the party on East 40th Street where Kirstein's friends had gathered one night in 1934.
Though Louis Kirstein (1867–1942), who was born in New York, dropped out of school at 13, he later received honorary degrees from Harvard University and Boston University, and he became associated with Harvard Business School. His friend, Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), who was born in Vienna, came to New York at age 12 and graduated first in his class from Harvard Law, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He began working for a law firm in 1906. That firm was Hornblower, Byrne, Miller & Potter; he was the firm's first Jewish lawyer, but he stayed there only briefly. (At that time, Lewis Bartholomew Woodruff, who had begun his law studies at Columbia in the 1890–1891 academic year, was a lawyer there; Woodruff had "full charge of preparation of railroad mortgages.")
George Miller Cumming, who served as the president of various railroads, was a law professor at Columbia from April 1891 to June 1897, so it's possible he encountered the young student Lewis Bartholomew Woodruff in 1891.
Ned Cumming died in 1940. Lincoln Kirstein died in 1996.
About these historical people
You can learn more about George and Ned Cumming in Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.
You can learn more about Kirstein in Lincoln Kirstein: The Published Writings 1922-1977. A First Bibliography and in Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
Maddow says: "In the 2014 film The Monuments Men, Bob Balaban's character, Preston Savitz, is modeled on Kirstein."
Who worked at the library
"Belle da Costa Greene...was appointed the director and inaugural librarian of the Morgan, which was founded by J. Pierpont Morgan — the American financier. * * * Greene’s mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener, separated from Belle’s father, Richard T. Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard College, in the 1890s. * * * Genevieve dropped the last letter of their family name and was lighter-skinned enough to pass as white, as were Greene’s siblings.
This opened doors for Belle da Costa Greene in segregated America, and she worked at Princeton before joining the research library. There she met a cousin of J. Pierpont Morgan, who at the time was looking for someone to organize his growing collection.
* * *
Being a woman librarian and director of a major institution was a big deal at the time. Greene was able to achieve what most women could not, especially during a time when they had just gotten the right to vote."
— The true story of a famed librarian and the secret she guarded closely, Jordan-Marie Smith, NPR, October 29, 2024
More about her:
Harriet S. Onderdonk, 1880
In 1880, Harriet S. Onderdonk became the first president of the Great Neck Library. It formally incorporated in 1889, and she remained on the board until 1904. One of her fellow library trustees at that time was Edward Morgan. (See this PDF from greatnecklibrary.org) "Great Neck," the document says, "inspired the creation of 'Gatsby' and 'West Egg'" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's imagination.
People paid a lot to belong, and they didn't stock just any book in the library.
Where the Cummings were living in 1900
In my book, Ten Past Noon, I said the Cummings — George, Lucy, and five-year-old Emily (Ned wasn't born yet), plus maidservants — were living on 113 East 35th Street because that is what the census appears to say.
Upon review, I now wonder if the 1900 census taker misrecorded the address. The house number may have been 123, which belonged to Harriet Onderdonk. If so, the Cummings would have been renting it, and they would have vacated within a year, as that address, along with 125 next door, was sold in 1901 to banker James F. D. Lanier II. He built a new house for himself there.
123
125
Result
At Harvard
See p. 158, Harvard Gazette for the end of May 1918.
No more emperors
"The concept of emperors, so firmly carved into the entirety of world history, collapsed over a few short years. The First World War began on 28 July 1914. By the time th war ended, on 11 November 1918, emperors were discredited beyond redemption. They were the way things always had been, but in a blink they were gone.
* * *
Empires were born when population growth caused egalitarian structures to break down. They ended when technology had grown to the point where warfare could no longer be tolerated. The imperial system, it turned out, was not the unarguable, unavoidable system of human organisation that it had been believed to be for most of history. It was a system that only functioned during a certain period of human and technological growth.
* * *
An absolute monarch was the omphalos around which the rest of society orientated itself. ... You knew what your role in the hierarchy was, and you orientated yourself accordingly. Without the omphalos of emperors, society was a jumble of different, relative, individual perspectives, all fighting for credibility and political power.
This is what was so remarkable about the changes that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. The sudden departure of emperors across huge swathes of the planet was the removal of single, absolute, fixed perspectives. This is a story we've already seen played out in different arenas. Art, physics and geopolitical structures all underwent similar revolutions around the same time, for seemingly unconnected reasons. Politicians were wrestling with the same challenges that faced Einstein, Picasso, Schoenberg and Joyce: how can we proceed, now that we understand there is no ultimate perspective that every other viewpoint is subservient to? How do we reconcile contradictory positions? When our previous ways of thinking are fundamentally flawed, how do we move forward?
* * *
Heisenberg's uncertianty principle...was discovered in 1927 when the German physicist Werner Heisenberg proved that knowing a particle's momentum made it impossible to know its position, and vice versa. The more accurate we are about one of a complementary pair of variables, the less it is possible to know about the other. ... it was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that was as shocking to physicists as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem had been to mathematicians. The problem was not that we didn't know the exact facts about physical reality, but that we couldn't know them.
The world of solid matter had turned out to be resting upon a bedrock as incomprehensible as the unconscious. Just as our conscious minds were only a bubble of rationality in a larger unconscious mind that we were usually unable to observe or understand, so the physical world of solid matter and comprehensible cause and effect was just a hiccup in a larger reality, produced by the quirk of a human-scale perspective. Mind and matter had both initially seemed understandable, but when we drilled down to find out what they rested on we found not firm foundations, but the unknowable and the incomprehensible. There was nothing down there that might conceivably come to act as our much needed new omphalos. Our world, both mind and matter, was a small bubble of coherence inside something so alien we haven't even been able to find adequate metaphors to describe it."
— John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, 2015
While we're here... related to the end of empires:
sahibzada mayed posted to LinkedIn on Nov 18, 2025: The word "polycrisis" sounds like "a sudden entanglement of isolated emergencies that make collapse seem accidental rather than convergence of centuries of colonial/imperial violence, domination, and extraction. ... What we call 'crisis' is also the unravelling of narratives that justify and legitimize harm: endless growth, human supremacy, resource extraction, militarized borders, and engineered scarcity." Try seeing this moment as "one of the many afterlives of empire."
Caspar Whitney
In 1920, Caspar Whitney became the president of the Audubon Society of Irvington-on-Hudson. (Bird lore v.24(1922), p. 433) Ned Cumming's mother attended an annual meeting on behalf of the chapter, so she may have known Caspar Whitney.
As of this 4 May 1923 Irvington Gazette article, Caspar Whitney was still president.
In 1930, Caspar Whitney wrote a biography of his wife (Florence Canfield)'s father, Charles Adelbert Canfield, an oil prospector in California who co-founded Beverly Hills.
Ned's mother, Lucy (Kittredge) Cumming, was also related to a Canfield family by marriage. Her sister, Sarah, had married George Folger Canfield. However, I don't see a shared ancestor between Charles Adelbert Canfield and George Folger Canfield.
FindAGrave:
Charles Adelbert Canfield (1848–1913), son of Orville Sillick Canfield (1816–1891), son of Sillick Canfield (1791–1865), son of Jonathan Canfield (1765–1851), son of Jonathan Canfield (1742–1829), son of Timothy Canfield (1700–1754), son of
Ebenezer Canfield (1670–1716), son of Samuel Canfield (1645–1690), son of Matthew Canfield (1604–1673), who was born in England and came to Connecticut in midlife. Find a Grave: "He came over after his father Gregory's death in 1635."
George Folger Canfield (1854–1933), son of Albert Warren Canfield (1815–1879), son of James Canfield (1786–1841), son of David Canfield (1757–1804), son of Thomas Canfield (1717–1791), son of
Israel Canfield (1684–1744), son of Thomas Canfield (1654–1689), son of Thomas Canfield Jr (1623–1689), who was born in England and came to Connecticut where he married and had children. Find a Grave: "He was born in Tring, England, the son of Thomas & Agnes Canfield of Hertfordshire, England."
Emily died at age 82 in mid-1977 in Peekskill — in a nursing home, as I recall reading somewhere. Looks like it was Field Home on Catherine Street in Shrub Oak, and apparently she'd lived there many years.
Field Home
"Field Home Raises $743 At Bazaar," Patent Trader, 24 November 1963:
"Corsages made for Westfield," Patent Trader, 15 December 1963:
The person named as Hermine Leger by Patent Trader may have been a medium. See p. 17 of this PDF. (January 25, 1951)
Psychic Observer, Jan 25, 1953, p. 15
Rev. Leger was still listed there as of 1955 and still in 1958.
Ancestry has a Hermine Leger who lived in New York and died in 1975.
Patent Trader unfortunately isn't digitized after 1974, so Emily's 1977 obituary (if it's in that paper) wouldn't be online.
Shrub Oak is an unincorporated place within Yorktown. The Yorktowner newspaper (1966-1978) would likely have carried her 1977 obituary. Try it on microfilm.
About me
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.
![Schnaken & Schnurren / von Wilhelm Busch ; eine Sammlung humoristischer kleiner Erzählungen in Bildern. I. Teil. Author: Busch, Wilhelm, 1832-1908. Published: München: Verlag von Braun & Schneider, [189-?] Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1979. E. Mühlthalers Buch- und Kunstdruckerei A.G., München--verso of lower cover. Edward Dilworth Cumming, Irvington--inscription in black ink on recto of fly-leaf. Dyrsen & Pfeiffer. New York. 16 West 33rd Street--bookseller's label inside upper cover. Binding: Publisher's pictorial cream colored paper boards, printed in black, blue, red, yellow, and green. Provenance: Edward Dilworth Cumming, inscription; from the library of Lincoln Kirstein.](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg44XBP9yFcPgOPgbyK7EWUKu57HnjcN1207s9azNV9O9h3FQV9mNMuXwTgm97_N10FWvlf1t_NPthZNzIyqAnp8z2DPi5g1vfGMLW7qodwfwJzA1YsOi_Aly_sTHYoJxoDs9GB0AuxIjHI5LD22NFuVA5apaM_1NrIz5U_NsUjaVxkm-H0A71adc5t=s600)
