THE LOYAL ALUMNAE
I.
Ever since we became a nation, it has been our habit to congratulate
ourselves upon the democratic character of our American system of
education. In the early days, neither poverty nor social position
was a bar to the child who loved his books. The daughter of the
hired man "spelled down" the farmer's son in the district school;
the poor country boy and girl earned their board and tuition at
the academy by doing chores; American colleges made no distinctions
between "gentlemen commoners" and common folk; and as our public
school system developed its kindergartens, its primary, grammar, and
high schools, free to any child living in the United States,
irrespective of his father's health, social status, or citizenship,
we might well be excused for thinking that the last word in
democratic education had been spoken.
But since the beginning of the twentieth century, two new voices
have begun to be heard; at first sotto voce, they have risen
through a murmurous pianissimo to a decorous non troppo forte,
and they continue crescendo,--the voice of the teacher and the
voice of the graduate. And the burden of their message is that
no educational system is genuinely democratic which may ignore
with impunity the criticisms and suggestions of the teacher who is
expected to carry out the system and the graduate who is asked to
finance it.
The teachers' point of view is finding expression in the various
organizations of public school teachers in Chicago, New York,
and elsewhere, looking towards reform, both local and general;
and in the movement towards the formation of a National Association
of College Professors, started in the spring of 1913 by professors
of Columbia and Johns Hopkins. At a preliminary meeting at
Baltimore, in November, 1913, unofficial representatives from
Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Clark,
and Wisconsin were present, and a committee of twenty-five was
appointed, with Professor Dewey of Columbia as chairman, "to arrange
a plan of organization and draw up a constitution." President
Schurman, in a report to the trustees of Cornell, makes the situation
clear when he says:
"The university is an intellectual organization, composed essentially
of devotees of knowledge--some investigating, some communicating,
some acquiring--but all dedicated to the intellectual life.... The
Faculty is essentially the university; yet in the governing boards
of American universities the Faculty is without representation."
President Schurman has suggested that one third of the board
consist of faculty representatives. At Wellesley, since the
founder's death, the trustees have welcomed recommendations from
the faculty for departmental appointments and promotions, and this
practice now obtains at Yale and Princeton; the trustees of Princeton
have also voted voluntarily to confer on academic questions with
a committee elected by the faculty.
An admirable exposition of the teachers' case is found in an
article on "Academic Freedom" by Professor Howard Crosby Warren
of the Department of Psychology at Princeton, in the Atlantic Monthly
for November, 1914. Professor Warren says that "In point of fact,
the teacher to-day is not a free, responsible agent. His career is
practically under the control of laymen. Fully three quarters
of our scholars occupy academic positions; and in America, at
least, the teaching investigator, whatever professional standing
he may have attained, is subject to the direction of some body of
men outside his own craft. As investigator he may be quite
untrammeled, but as teacher, it has been said, he is half tyrant
and half slave....
"The scholar is dependent for opportunity to practice his calling,
as well as for material advancement, on a governing board which
is generally controlled by clergymen, financiers, or representatives
of the state....
"The absence of true professional responsibility, coupled with
traditional accountability to a group of men devoid of technical
training, narrows the outlook of the average college professor and
dwarfs his ideals. Any serious departure from existing educational
practice, such as the reconstruction of a course or the adoption
of a new study, must be justified by a group of laymen and their
executive agent....
"In determining the professional standing of a scholar and the
soundness of his teachings, surely the profession itself should be
the court of last appeal."
The point of view of the graduate has been defining itself slowly,
but with increasing clearness, ever since the governing boards of
the colleges made the very practical discovery that it was the duty
and privilege of the alumnus to raise funds for the support of
his Alma Mater. It was but natural that the graduates who banded
together, usually at the instigation of trustees or directors and
always with their blessing, to secure the conditional gifts
proffered to universities and colleges by American multimillionaires,
should quickly become sensitive to the fact that they had no power
to direct the spending of the money which they had so efficiently
and laboriously collected. An individual alumnus with sufficient
wealth to endow a chair or to erect a building could usually give
his gift on his own terms; but alumni as a body had no way of
influencing the policy of the institutions which they were helping
to support.
The result of this awakening has been what President Emeritus
William Jewett Tucker of Dartmouth has called the "Alumni Movement."
More than ten years ago, President Hadley of Yale was aware of
the stirrings of this movement, when he said, "The influence of
the public sentiment of the graduates is so overwhelming, that
wherever there is a chance for its organized cooperation, faculties
and students... are only too glad to follow it."
It would be incorrect, however, to give the impression that graduates
had had absolutely no share in the government of their respective
colleges before the Alumni Movement assumed its present proportions.
Representatives of the alumni have had a voice in the affairs of
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Self-perpetuating boards of trustees
have elected to their membership a certain number of mature alumni.
In some instances, as at Wellesley, the association of graduates
nominates the candidates for graduate vacancies on these boards.
The benefits of alumnae representation on the Board of Trustees
seem to have occurred to the alumnae and the trustees of Wellesley
almost simultaneously. As early as June, 1888, the Alumnae
Association of Wellesley appointed a committee to present to
the trustees a request for alumnae representation on the Board;
but as the Association met but once a year, results could not
be achieved rapidly, and in June, 1889, the committee reported
that it had not presented the petition as it had been informed
unofficially that the possibility of alumnae representation was
already under consideration by the trustees. In fact, the trustees,
at a meeting held the day before the meeting of the Alumnae
Association, this very June of 1889, had elected Mrs. Marian
Pelton Guild, of the class of 1880, a life member of the Board.
But the alumnae, although appreciating the honor done them by
the election of Mrs. Guild, still did not feel that the question
of representation had been adequately met, and in June, 1891,
a new committee was appointed with instructions to inform itself
thoroughly as to methods employed in other colleges to insure
the representation of the graduate body on governing boards, and
also to convey to the trustees the alumnae's strong desire for
representation of a specified character. And a second time the
trustees forestalled the committee and, in a letter addressed
to the Association and read at the annual meeting in June, 1892,
made known their desire "to avail themselves of the cooperation
of the Association" and to "cement more closely the bond" uniting
the alumnae to the college by granting them further representation
on the Board of Trustees. A committee from the Association was
then appointed to discuss methods with a committee from the Board,
and the results of their deliberations are given by Harriet Brewer
Sterling, Wellesley, '86, in an article in the Wellesley Magazine
for March, 1895. By the terms of a joint agreement between the
Board and the Association, the Association has the right to nominate
three members from its own number for membership on the Board.
These nominees must be graduates of seven years' standing, not
members of the college faculty. Graduates of less than three
years' standing are not qualified to vote for the nominees. The
nominations must be ratified by the Board of Trustees. The term
of service of these alumnae trustees is six years, but a nominee
is chosen every two years. In order to establish this method of
rotation, two of the three candidates first nominated served for
two and four years respectively, instead of six. The first election
was held in the spring of 1894, the nominations were confirmed
by the Board in November, and the three new trustees sat with
the Board for the first time at the February meeting of 1895.
But as graduate organizations have increased in size, and membership
has been scattered over a wider geographical area, it has become
correspondingly difficult to get at the consensus of graduate opinion
on college matters and to make sure that alumni, or alumnae,
representatives actually do represent their constituents and carry
out their wishes. And the Alumni Movement has arisen to meet
the need for "greater unity of organization in alumni bodies."
In an article on Graduate Councils, in the Wellesley College News
for April, 1914, Florence S. Marcy Crofut, Wellesley, '97, has
collected interesting evidence of the impetus and expansion of
this new factor in the college world. She writes, "More clearly
than generalization would show, proofs lie in actual organization
and accomplishments of the 'Alumni Movement' which has worked
itself out in what may be called the Graduate Council Movement....
Since the organization of the Graduate Council of Princeton
University in January, 1905, the Secretary, Mr. H. G. Murray,
to whom Wellesley is deeply indebted, has received requests from
twenty-nine colleges for information in regard to the work of
Princeton's Council."
Among these twenty-nine colleges was Wellesley, and the plan
for her Graduate Council, presented by the Executive Board of
the Alumnae Association to the business meeting of the Association
on June 21, 1911, and voted at that meeting, is a legitimate
outgrowth of the ideals which led to the formation of the Alumnae
Association in 1880. The preamble of the Association makes this
clear when it says:
"Remembering the benefits we have received from our alma mater,
we desire to extend the helpful associations of student life, and
to maintain such relations to the college that we may efficiently
aid in her upbuilding and strengthening, to the end that her
usefulness may continually increase."
In an article describing the formation of the Wellesley Graduate
Council, in the Wellesley College News for October 5, 1911, it
is explained that, "From the time since the 1910-12 Executive
Board (of the Alumnae Association) came into office, it has felt
that there was need for a bond between the alumnae and the college
administration; and it believes that this need will be met by a
small representative (i.e. geographical) definitely chosen graduate
body, which shall act as a clearing-house for the larger Alumnae
Association. The Executive Board recognized also as an additional
reason for organizing such a graduate body, that it was necessary
to do so if the Wellesley Alumnae Association is to keep abreast
of the activities in similar organizations." The purpose of the
Council, as stated in 1911, is a fitting expansion of the Association's
preamble of 1880:
"That, as our alumnae are increasing in large numbers and are
scattered more and more widely, it will be of advantage to them
and to the college that an organized, accredited group of alumnae
shall be chosen from different parts of the country to confer with
the college authorities on matters affecting both alumnae and
undergraduate interests, as well as to furnish the college, by
this group, the means of testing the sentiment of Wellesley women
throughout the country on any matter."
There are advantages in not being a pioneer, and Wellesley has
been able to profit by the experience of her predecessors in this
movement, particularly Princeton and Smith. Membership in the
Councils of Wellesley and Smith is essentially on the same
geographical basis, but Wellesley is unique among the Councils
in having a faculty representation. The relation between faculty
and alumnae at Wellesley has always been markedly cordial, and
in welcoming to the Council representatives of the faculty who
are not graduates of the college, the alumnae would seem to indicate
that their aims and ideals for their Alma Mater are at one with
those of the faculty.
The membership of the Wellesley Graduate Council is composed
of the president and dean of the college, ex officio; ten members
of the Academic Council, chosen by that body, no more than two
of whom may be alumnae; the three alumnae trustees; the members
of the Executive Board of the Alumnae Association; and the councilors
from the Wellesley clubs. As there were more than fifty Wellesley
clubs already in existence in 1915, and every club of from twenty-five
to one hundred members is allowed one councilor, and every club of
more than one hundred members is allowed one councilor for each
additional hundred, while neighboring clubs of less than twenty-five
members may unite and be represented jointly by one councilor,
it will be seen that the Council is a large and constantly growing
body. Clubs such as the Boston Wellesley Club, and the New York
Wellesley Club, which already had a large membership, received
a tremendous impetus to increase their numbers after the formation
of the Council. All members of the Council, with the exception of
the president of the college and the dean, who are permanent,
serve for two years.
The officers of the Graduate Council are the corresponding officers
of the Alumnae Association, and also serve for two years. The
Executive Committee of five members includes the president and
secretary of the Council, an alumna trustee chosen annually from
their own number by the three alumnae trustees, and two members
at large.
The Council meets twice during the academic year, at the college;
in February, for a period of three days or less, following the
mid-year examinations, and in June, when the annual meeting is
held at some time previous to the annual meeting of the Alumnae
Association. In this respect the Wellesley Council again differs
from that of Smith, whose committee of five makes but one official
annual visit to the college,--in January. The "Vassar Provisional
Alumnae Council", like the Wellesley Graduate Council, must hold
at least two yearly meetings at the college, but unlike Wellesley,
it elects a chairman who may not be at the same time the President
of the Vassar Associate Alumnae. Bryn Mawr, we are told by
Miss Crofut, has no Graduate Council corresponding exactly to
the Councils of other colleges; but her academic committee of seven
members meets "at least once a year with the President of the College
and a committee of the faculty to discuss academic affairs."
The possibilities which lie before the Wellesley Council may be
better understood if we enumerate a few of the activities undertaken
by the Councils of other colleges. At Princeton, since 1905, more
than two million five hundred thousand dollars has been raised
by the Council's efforts. The Preceptorial System has been
inaugurated and is being slowly developed. The university has been
brought more prominently before preparatory schools. All the
colleges are feeling the need of keeping in touch with the
preparatory schools, not for the sake of mere numbers, but to
secure the best students. Doctor Tucker has suggested that
Dartmouth alumni endow outright, "substantial scholarships in
high schools with which it is desirable to establish relations,"
and the suggestion is well worth the consideration of Wellesley
women. The Yale Alumni Advisory Board has distributed to the
"so-called Yale Preparatory Schools" and to schoolboys in many
cities, a pamphlet on "Life at Yale." And Yale has also turned its
attention to tuition charges, "academic-Sheffield relations", the
future of the Yale Medical School, the Graduate Employment Bureau.
All of these Councils are concerned with the intellectual and moral
tone of the undergraduates. Wellesley's Graduate Council has
a Publicity Committee, one of whose functions is to prevent wrong
reports of college matters from getting into the press. Mrs. Helene
Buhlert Magee, Wellesley, '03, who was made Chairman of the
Intercollegiate Committee on Press Bureaus, in 1914, and was at
that time also the Manager of the Wellesley Press Board, reminds
us that Wellesley is the only college trying to regulate its
publicity through its alumnae clubs in different parts of the
country, and gives us reason to hope that in time we shall have
publicity agents trained in good methods, "since the members of
each year's College Press Board, as they go forth, naturally become
the press representatives of their respective clubs."
The Council has also a Committee on Undergraduate Activities,
whose duty it is to "obtain information regarding the interests
of the undergraduates and from time to time to make suggestions
concerning the conduct of the same as they affect the alumnae or
bring the college before the general public." This committee
proposes a Rally Day and a Freshman Forum, to be conducted each
year by a representative alumna equipped to set forth the ideals
and principles held by the alumnae.
A third committee, bearing a direct relation to the undergraduate,
is one on Vocational Guidance. In order to help students "to find
their way to work other than teaching," and to "present a survey
of all the possibilities open to women in the field of industry
to-day," this committee welcomes the cooperation of Miss Florence
Jackson, a graduate of Smith and for some years a member of the
Department of Chemistry at Wellesley, who is now at the head of
the Appointment Bureau of the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union of Boston. Miss Jackson's practical knowledge of students,
her wide acquaintance with vocational opportunities other than
teaching, and her belief in the "value of the cultural course as
a sound general foundation most valuable for providing the sense
of proportion and vision necessary for the college woman who is
to be a useful citizen," make her an ideal director of this branch
of the Council's activities, and the college gladly promotes her
work among the students; the seniors especially welcome her
expert guidance.
In framing a model constitution for the use of alumnae classes,
the Council has done a piece of work which should arouse the
gratitude of all future historians of Wellesley, for the model
constitution contains an article requiring each class to keep a
record which shall contain brief information as to the members of the
class and shall be published in the autumn following each reunion.
lf these records are accurately kept, and if copies are placed on
file in the College Library, accessible to investigators, the next
historian of Wellesley will be spared the baffling paucity of
information concerning the alumnae which has hampered her predecessor.
With ten members of the Academic Council on the Graduate Council,
and with the president of the college herself an alumna, the
relation between the faculty and the Graduate Council is intimate
and helpful to both, in the best sense. Relations with the
trustees, as a body, were slower in forming. President Pendleton,
at the Council's fifth session,--in the third year of its
existence,--reported the trustees as much interested in its formation.
At the sixth session of the Council, in June, 1914, when the campaign
for the Fire Fund was in full swing, Mr. Lewis Kennedy Morse,
the able and devoted treasurer of the college, and member of
the Board of Trustees, addressed the members upon "The Business
Side of College Administration",--a talk as interesting as it was
frank and friendly. In December, 1914, when the first of the new
buildings was already going up on the site of old College Hall,
the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees invited a joint
committee from the faculty and the alumnae to meet with them to
discuss the architectural plans and possibilities for the "new
Wellesley." The Alumnae Committee consisted of eleven members
and included representatives "from '83 to 1913, and from Colorado
on the west to Massachusetts on the east." Its chairman was
Candace C. Stimson, Wellesley, '92, whose name will always ring
through Wellesley history as the Chairman of the Alumnae Committee
for Restoration and Endowment,--the committee that conducted the
great nine months' campaign for the Fire Fund. The Faculty
Committee, of five members, chose as its chairman, Professor
Alice V.V. Brown, the head of the Department of Art.
Miss Stimson's report to the Graduate Council of this meeting of
the joint committee with the Executive Board, indicates a "strong
sense of good understanding and a feeling of great harmony and
desire for cooperation on the part of Trustees toward the alumnae."
The Faculty Committee and Alumnae Committee were invited to continue
and to hold further conferences with the Trustees' Committee
"as occasion might offer." The episode is prophetic of the future
relations of these three bodies with one another. President Nichols
of Dartmouth is reported as saying that Dartmouth, founded as
the ideal of an individual and governed at first by one man, has
grown to the point where it is no longer to be controlled as
a monarchy or an empire, but as a republic. Such an utterance
does not fail of its effect upon other colleges.
II.
The women who constitute the Wellesley College Alumnae Association,
numbered in 1914-1915 five thousand and thirty-five. The members
are all those who have received the Baccalaureate degree from
Wellesley, and all those who have received the Master's degree and
have applied for membership. But only dues-paying members receive
notices of meetings and have the right to vote. Non-graduates who
pay the annual dues receive the Alumnae Register, and the notices
and publications of the alumnae, but do not vote.
Authoritative statistics concerning the occupations of Wellesley
women are not available. About forty per cent of the alumnae
are married. The exact proportion of teachers is not known, but
it is of course large. The Wellesley College Christian Association
is of great assistance to the alumnae recorder in keeping in touch
with Wellesley missionaries, but even the Christian Association
disclaims infallibility in questions of numbers. An article in
the News for February, 1912, by Professor Kendrick, the head
of the Department of Bible Study, states that no record is kept
of missionaries at work in our own country, but there were then
missionaries from Wellesley in Mexico and Brazil, as well as those
who were doing city missionary work in the United States. The
missionary record for 1915 would seem to indicate that there were
then about one hundred Wellesley women at mission stations in
foreign countries, including Japan, China, Korea, India, Ceylon,
Persia, Turkey, Africa, Europe, Mexico, South America, Alaska,
and the Philippines.
From time to time, the alumnae section of the News publishes an
article on the occupations and professions of Wellesley graduates,
with incomplete lists of the names of those who are engaged in
Law, Medicine, Social Work, Journalism, Teaching, Business, and
all the other departments of life into which women are penetrating;
and from this all too meager material, the historian is able to
glean a few general facts, but no trustworthy statistics.
In 1914, the list of Wellesley women, most of whom were alumnae,
at the head of private schools, included the principals of the
National Cathedral School at Washington, D.C.; of Abbot Academy,
Andover, Walnut Hill School, Natick, Dana Hall, the Weston School,
the Longwood School, all in Massachusetts, and two preparatory
schools in Boston; Buffalo Seminary; Kent Place School, and a
coeducational school, both in Summit, New Jersey; Hosmer Hall, in
St. Louis; Ingleside School, Taconic School and the Catherine
Aiken School, in Connecticut; Science Hill, at Shelbyville, Kentucky;
Ferry Hall, at Lake Forest, Illinois; the El Paso School for Girls;
the Lincoln School, in Providence, Rhode Island; Wyoming Seminary,
another coeducational school; as well as schools for American girls
in Germany, France, and Italy. This does not take into account
the many Wellesley graduates holding positions of importance in
colleges, in high schools, and in the grammar and primary schools
throughout the country.
The tentative list of Wellesley women holding positions of importance
in social work, in 1914, is equally impressive. The head workers
at Denison House,--the Boston College Settlement,--at the Baltimore
Settlement, at Friendly House, Brooklyn, and Hartley House, New York,
are all graduates of Wellesley. Probation officers, settlement
residents, Associated Charity workers, Consumers' League secretaries,
promoters of Social Welfare Work, leaders of Working Girls' Clubs,
members of Trade-union Leagues and the Suffrage League, show many
Wellesley names among their numbers. A Wellesley woman is working
at the Hindman School in Kentucky, among the poor whites; another
is General Superintendent of the Massachusetts Commission for
the Blind; another is Associate Field Secretary of the New York
Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation;
another is Head Investigator for the Massachusetts Babies' Hospital.
The Superintendent of the State Reformatory for Girls at Lancaster,
Massachusetts, is a Wellesley graduate who is doing work of unusual
distinction in this field. Mary K. Conyngton, Wellesley, '94,
took part in the Federal investigation into the condition of woman
and child wage earners, ordered by Congress in 1907, and has
made a study of the relations between the occupations, and the
criminality, of women. Her book "How to Help", published by
The Macmillan Company, embodies the results of her experience
in organized charities, investigations for improved housing, and
other industrial and municipal reforms. In 1909, Miss Conyngton
received a permanent appointment in the Bureau of Labor at
Washington, D.C.
Wellesley has her lawyers and doctors, her architects, her
journalists, her scholars; every year their tribes increase.
Among her many journalists are Caroline Maddocks, 1892, and
Agnes Edwards Rothery, 1909.
Of her poets, novelists, short story writers, and essayists, the
names of Katharine Lee Bates, Estelle M. Hurll, Abbie Carter
Goodloe, Margarita Spalding Gerry, Florence Wilkinson Evans,
Florence Converse, Martha Hale Shackford, Annie Kimball Tuell,
Jeannette Marks, are familiar to the readers of the Atlantic,
the Century, Scribner's and other magazines; and the more technical
publications of Gertrude Schopperle, Laura A. Hibbard, Eleanor
A. McC. Gamble, Lucy J. Freeman, Eloise Robinson, and Flora Isabel
McKinnon, have won the suffrages of scholars.
Her most noted woman of letters is Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley,
'80, the beloved head of the Department of English Literature.
Miss Bates's beautiful hymn, "America", has achieved the distinction
of a national reputation; it has been adopted as one of America's
own songs and is sung by school children all over our country.
The list of her books includes, besides her collected poems,
"America the Beautiful and Other Poems", published by the Thomas
Y. Crowell Company, volumes on English and Spanish travel, on the
English Religious Drama, a Chaucer for children, an edition of
the works of Hawthorne, and a forthcoming edition of the Elizabethan
dramatist, Heywood. Since her undergraduate days, when she wrote
the poems for Wellesley's earliest festivals, down all the years
in which she has been building up her Department of English
Literature, this loyal daughter has given herself without stint to
her Alma Mater. In Wellesley's roll call of alumnae, there is no
name more loved and honored than that of Katharine Lee Bates.
III.
"Hear the dollars dropping,
Listen as they fall.
All for restoration
Of our College Hall."
These words of a college song fitly express the breathless attitude
of the alumnae between March 17, 1914, and January 1, 1915, the
nine months and a half during which the campaign was being carried
on to raise the fund for restoration and endowment, after the fire.
And they did more than listen; they shook the trees on which the
dollars grew, and as the dollars fell, caught them with nimble
fingers. They fell "thick as leaves in Vallombrosa."
Between June, 1913, and June, 1915, $1,267,230.53 was raised by
and through Wellesley women.
In 1913, a campaign for a Million Dollar Endowment Fund had been
started, to provide means for increasing the salaries of the
teachers. Salaries at Wellesley were at that time lower than
those paid in every other woman's college, but one, in New England.
The fund had been started with an anonymous gift of one hundred
thousand dollars, and the committee, with Candace C. Stimson as
chairman, planned to secure the one million dollars in two years.
By March, 1914, a second anonymous gift of one hundred thousand
dollars had been received, the General Education Board had pledged
two hundred thousand dollars conditioned on the raising of the
whole amount, Wellesley women had given fifteen thousand dollars,
and there had been a few other gifts from outsiders. The amount
still to be raised on the Million Dollar Fund at the time of the
fire was five hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
President Pendleton, in a letter to Wellesley friends, printed
in the News on March 28, 1914, ten days after the fire, writes:
"Our Campaign for the Million Dollar Endowment Fund must not be
dropped... we have between five and six hundred thousand dollars
still to raise. All the new buildings must be equipped and
maintained. The sum that our Alma Mater requires for immediate
needs is two million dollars. But this is not all. Another million
will soon be needed, properly to house our departments of Botany
and Chemistry, and to provide a Student-Alumnae building, and
sufficient dormitories to house on the campus the more than five
hundred students now living in the village. We are facing a
great crisis in the history of the College. The future of our
Alma Mater is in our hands. Crippled by this loss, Wellesley
cannot continue to hold in the future its place in the front rank
of colleges, unless the response is generous and immediate.
"To sum up, Alma Mater needs three million dollars, two million
of which must be raised immediately. Shall we be daunted by
this sum? We are justly proud of the courage and self-control
of those dwellers in College Hall, both Faculty and Students.
Shall we be outdone by them in facing a crisis? Shall we be less
courageous, less resourceful? The public press has described
the fire as a triumph, not a disaster. Shall we continue the
triumph, and make our College in equipment what it has proved
itself in spirit--The College Beautiful? We can and we must."
The response of the alumnae to this stirring appeal was instant
and ardent. The committee for the Million Dollar Endowment Fund,
with its valiant chairman, Miss Stimson, shouldered the new
responsibility. "It is a big contract," they said, "it comes at
a season of business depression, and the daughters of Wellesley
are not rich in this world's goods. All this we know, but we know,
too, that the greater the need the more eagerly will love and
loyalty respond."
Then came the offer of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
by the Rockefeller Foundation, if the college would raise an
additional million and a quarter by January 1, 1915. The intrepid
Committee of Alumnae added to its numbers, merged the two funds,
and adopted the new name of Alumnae Committee for Restoration
and Endowment.
Mary B. Jenkins, Wellesley, '03, the committee's devoted secretary,
has described the plan of the campaign in the News for March, 1915.
As the Wellesley clubs present the best chance of reaching both
graduate and non-graduate members, a chairman for each club was
appointed, and made responsible for reaching all the Wellesley women
in her geographical section, whether they were members of the club
or not. In states where there were no clubs, state committees
rounded up the scattered alumnae and non-graduates. Fifty-three
clubs appear in the report, twenty-four state committees, and eight
foreign countries,--Canada, Mexico, Porto Rico, South America,
Europe, Turkey, India, and Persia. Every state in the Union was
heard from, and contributions also came from clubs in Japan and
China. The campaign actually circled the globe. By June, 1914,
Miss Jenkins tells us, the appeals to the clubs and state committees
had been sent out, and many had been heard from, but in order
to make sure that no one escaped, the work was now taken up through
committees from the thirty-six classes, from 1879 to 1914. In
March, 1915, when Miss Jenkins's report was printed in the News,
3823 of Wellesley's daughters had contributed, and belated
contributions were still coming in. In June, 1915, 3903, out of
4840, graduates had responded. Every member of the classes of
'79, '80, '81, '84, '92, sent a contribution, and the class gift from '79,
$520,161.00 was the largest from any class; that of '92, $208,453.92,
being the next largest. The class gifts include not only direct
contributions from alumnae, and from social members who did not
graduate with the class, but gifts which alumnae and former students
have secured from interested friends. Of the remaining classes,
five show a contributing list of more than ninety per cent of the
members; eleven show between eighty and ninety per cent; and
fifteen between seventy and eighty per cent. Besides the alumnae,
1119 non-graduates had contributed. None of Wellesley's daughters
have been more loyal and more helpful than the non-graduates.
An analysis of the amount, $1,267,230.53, given by and through
Wellesley women between June, 1913, and June, 1915, shows four
gifts of fifty thousand dollars and over, all of which came through
Wellesley women, thirty gifts of from two thousand dollars to
twenty-five thousand dollars, three quarters of which came from
Wellesley women, and many gifts of less than two thousand dollars,
"only a negligible quantity of which came from any one but alumnae
and former students."
Throughout the nine months of the campaign, the Alumnae Committee
and the trustees were working in close touch with each other.
Doctor George Herbert Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
Harvard, was the chairman of the committee from the trustees, and
he describes himself as chaperoned by alumnae at every point of
the tour which he so successfully undertook in order to interview
possible contributors. To him, to Bishop Lawrence, the President
of the Board of Trustees, and to Mr. Lewis Kennedy Morse, the
treasurer, the college owes a debt of gratitude which it can never
repay. No knight of old ever succored distressed damsel more
valiantly, more selflessly, than these three twentieth-century
gentlemen succored and served the beggar maid, Wellesley, in the
cause of higher education. Through the activities of the trustees
were secured the provisional gifts of seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation, and two hundred
thousand dollars from the General Education Board, Mr. Andrew
Carnegie's $95,446.27, to be applied to the extension of the library,
and gifts from Mrs. Russell Sage, Mrs. David P. Kimball, and many
others. Mrs. Lilian Horsford Farlow, a trustee, and the daughter
of Prof. Eben N. Horsford, to whom Wellesley is already deeply
indebted, gave ten thousand dollars toward the Fire Fund; and
through Mrs. Louise McCoy North, trustee and alumna, an unknown
benefactor has given the new building which stands on the hill
above the lake. Because of the modesty of donors, it has been
impossible to make public a complete list of the gifts.
From the four undergraduate classes, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, and
from general undergraduate gifts and activities, came $60,572.04,
raised in all sorts of ways,--from the presentation of "Beau
Brummel" before a Boston audience, to the polishing of shoes
at ten cents a shine. One 1917 girl earned ten dollars during
the summer vacation by laughing at all her father's jokes, whether
old or new, during that period of recreation. Other enterprising
sophomores "swatted" flies at the rate of one cent for two, darned
stockings for five cents a hole, shampooed, mended, raked leaves.
Members of the class of 1916 sold lead pencils and jelly, scrubbed
floors, baked angel cake, counted knot holes in the roof of a
summer camp. Besides "Beau Brummel", 1915 gave dancing lessons
and sold vacuum cleaners. One student who was living in College Hall
at the time of the fire is said to have made ten dollars by charging
ten cents for every time that she told of her escape from the
building. The class of 1918, entering as freshmen in September,
after the fire, raised $5,540.60 for the fund when they had been
organized only a few weeks.
The methods of the alumnae were no less varied and amusing.
The Southern California Club started a College Hall Fund, and
notices were sent out all over the country requesting every alumna
to give a dollar for every year that she had lived in College Hall.
Seven hundred and fifty dollars came in. There were thes dansants,
musicales, concerts, of which the Sousa concert in Boston was
the most important, operettas, masques, garden parties, costume
parties, salad demonstrations, candy sales, bridge parties; a
moving-picture film of Wellesley went the rounds of many clubs,
from city to city, through New England and the Middle West.
An alumna of the class of 1896 "took in" $949.20 for subscriptions
to magazines, with a profit of $175.75 for the fund. She comments
on Wellesley taste in magazines by revealing the fact that the
Atlantic Monthly "received by far the largest number of subscriptions."
One girl in Colorado baked bread, "but forsook it to give dancing
lessons, as paying even better!" In New York, Chicago, and other
cities, the tickets for theatrical performances were bought up
and sold again at advanced prices. A book of Wellesley recipes
was compiled and sold. An alumna of '92 made a charming etching
of College Hall and sold it on a post card; another, also of '92,
wrote and sold a poem of lament on the loss of the dear old building.
The Cincinnati Wellesley Club held a Wellesley market for three
Saturdays in May, 1914, and netted somewhat over seventy-five
dollars a day for the three days. One Wellesley club charged ten
cents for the privilege of shaking hands with its "fire-heroine."
On Easter Monday, 1914, when the college had just come back to
work, after the fire, the "Freeman Fowls" arranged an egg hunt,
with egg-shaped tickets at ten cents, for the fund. The students
from Freeman Cottage, dressed as roosters, very scarlet as to
topknot and wattles, very feather dustery as to tail, waylaid
the unwary on campus paths and lured them to buy these tickets
and to hunt for the hundreds of brightly colored eggs which these
commercially canny fowls had hidden on the Art Building Hill.
After the hunt was successfully over, the hunters came down to
the front of the new, very new, administration building, already
called the Wellesley Hencoop, where they were greeted by the
ghosts and wraiths and other astral presentments of the vanished
statues of College Hall, and where the roosters burst into an
antiphonal chant:
"Come see the Wellesley Chicken-coop, the
Chicken-coop, the Chicken-coop.
Come see the Wellesley Chicken-coop,
(It isn't far from Chapel!)
Come get your tickets for a roost, and give
Your chicken-hearts a boost,
Come see our Wellesley Chicken-roost,
(It isn't far from Chapel!)
"Just see our brand new Collegette, it's
College yet, it's College yet,
With sixty-six new rooms to let,
(They're practicing in Billings).
The Collegette is very tall,
It isn't far from Music Hall,
Our neighbors can't be heard at all
(They learn to sing at Billings).
"Oh, statues dear from College Hall, from
College Hall, from College Hall,
Don't hesitate to come and call
On Hen-House day at Wellesley.
Niobe sad, and Harriet, and Polly Hym and Dian's pet
On Hen-House day,--on Hen-House day,
O! Hen-House day at Wellesley.
Come walk right through the big front door,
Each hour we love you more and more,
There's fire-escapes from every floor
Of the new Hen-house at Wellesley."
Having thus formally adopted the new building, whose windows and
doors were already wreathed in vines and crimson (paper) roses
which had sprung up and blossomed over night, the college now
hastened to the top of College Hall Hill, whence, at the crowing
of Chanticleer, the egg-rolling began. The Nest Egg for the fund,
achieved by these enterprising "Freeman Fowls", was about
fifty-two dollars.
Far off in Honolulu there were "College Capers" in which eight
Wellesley alumnae, helped by graduates of Harvard, Cornell,
Bryn Mawr, and other colleges, earned three hundred dollars.
The News has published a number of letters whose simple revelation
of feeling witnesses to the loyalty and love of the Wellesley
alumnae. One writes:
"A month ago, because of obligations and a very small salary,
I thought I could give nothing to the Endowment Plan. By Saturday
morning (after the fire) I had decided I must give a dollar a month.
By night I had received a slight increase in salary, therefore l
shall send two dollars a month as long as I am able. I wish it
were millions, my admiration and sympathy are so unbounded."
Another says: "Perhaps you may know that when I was a Senior
I received a scholarship of (I think) $350. It has long been my
wish and dream to return that money with large interest, in return
for all I received from my Alma Mater, and in acknowledgment of
the success I have since had in my work because of her. I have
never been able to lay aside the sum I had wished to give, but
now that the need has come I can wait no longer, I am therefore
sending you my check for $500, hoping that even this sum, so small
in the face of the immense loss, may aid a little because it comes
at the right moment. It goes with the wish that it were many,
many times the amount, and with the sincerest acknowledgment of
my indebtedness to Wellesley."
From China came the message: "In an indefinite way I had intended
to send five or ten dollars some time this year (to the Endowment
Fund), but the loss of College Hall makes me realize afresh what
Wellesley has meant to me, and I want to give till I feel the pinch.
I am writing (the treasurer of the Mission Board) to send you
five dollars a month for ten months."
From nearer home: "My sister and I intend to go without spring
suits this year in order to give twenty-five dollars each toward
the fund; this surely will not be sacrifice, but a great privilege.
Then we intend to add more each time we receive our salary....
I cannot say that I was so brave as the girls at the college, who
did not shed a tear as College Hall burned--I could not speak,
my voice was so choked with tears, and that night I went supperless
to bed. But though it seems impossible to believe that College Hall
is a thing of the past, yet one cannot but feel that from this
so great calamity great good will come--a broader, higher spirit
will be manifested; we shall cease to think in classes, but all
unite in great loving thought for the good and the upbuilding--in
more senses than one--of our Alma Mater."
And the messages and money from friends of the college were no
less touching. The children of the Wellesley Kindergarten, which
is connected with the Department of Education in the college,
held a sale of their own little handicrafts and made fifty dollars
for the fund.
One who signed himself, "Very respectfully, A Working Man," wrote:
"The results of your college's work show that it is of the best.
The Student Government is one of the finest things in American
education. The spirit shown at the fire and since is superb."
Another man, who wished that he "had a daughter to go to Wellesley,
the college of high ideals," said, "I should be ashamed even to
ride by in the train without contributing this mite to your
Rebuilding Fund."
A woman in Tasmania sent a dollar, "for you are setting a great
ideal for the broad education of women.... We (in Australia) have
much to thank the higher democratic education of America for."
From many little children money came: from little girls who hoped
to come to Wellesley some day, and from the sons and daughters
of Wellesley students.
The business men of Wellesley town subscribed generously. Many
men as well as women have expressed their admiration of the college
in a tangible way.
And from Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Barnard,
Wells, Simmons, and Sweet Briar, contributions came pouring in
unsolicited. Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts, and others had
already loaned equipment and material for the impoverished
laboratories, and direct contributions to the fund came from the
University of Idaho, the Musical Clubs of Dartmouth and the
Institute of Technology; from Hobart College, in cooperation with
Wellesley alumnae, in Geneva, New York; from the Emerson College
of Oratory, the College Club of Tucson, Arizona, the Boston and
Connecticut branches of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae,
the Fitchburg Smith College Club, and the Cornell Woman's Club
of New York City. To Smith College, which had so lately raised
its million, Wellesley was also indebted for helpful suggestions
in planning the campaign.
When the great war broke out in August, 1914, wise unbelievers
shook their heads and commiserated Wellesley; but the dauntless
Chairman of the Alumnae Restoration and Endowment Committee
continued to press on with her campaign--to draw dilatory clubs
into line, to prod sluggish classes into activity, to remind
individuals of their opportunity.
The pledges for the last forty thousand dollars of the fund came
snowing in during Christmas week, and eleven o'clock of the evening
of December 31, 1914, found Miss Stimson's committee in New York
counting at top speed the sheaves of checks and pledges which had
been arriving all day. The remarkable thing about the campaign was
the great number of small amounts which came in, and the number
of alumnae--not the wealthy ones--who doubled their pledges at
the last minute. It was the one dollar and the five-dollar pledges
which really saved the day and made it possible for the college
to secure the large conditional gifts. On the morning of January 1,
1915, the amount was complete.
IV.
With 1915, Wellesley enters upon the second phase of her history,
but the early, formative years will always shine through the fire,
a memory and an inspiration. Nothing that was vital perished in
those flames. Yet already the Wellesley that looks back upon
her old self is a different Wellesley. All her repressed desires,
spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, are suddenly set free. Her
lovers and her daughters feel the very campus kindle and quicken
beneath their feet to new responsibilities.
"The New Wellesley!"
No one knows what that shall be, but the words are vision-filled:
prophetic of an ordered beauty of architecture, a harmony of
taste, that the old Wellesley, on the far side of the fire, strove
after but never knew; prophetic of a pinnacled and aspiring
scholarship whose solid foundations were laid forty years deep
in Christian trust and patience; prophetic of a questing spirit
freed from the old reproach of provincialism; of a ministering
spirit in which the virtue of true courtesy is fulfilled.
The end of her first half century will see the campus flowering
with the outward and visible signs of the new Wellesley; and even
as the old fire-hallowed bricks have made beautiful the new walls,
so the beauty of the old dreams shall shine in the new vision.
"Pageant of fretted roofs that cluster*
On hill and knoll in the branches green,
Ye are but shadows, and not the luster,
Garment, ye, of a grace unseen.
"All our life is confused with fable,
Ever the fact as the phantasy seems:
Yet the world of spirit lies sure and stable,
Under the shows of the world of dreams.
"Not an idle and false derision
The rocks that crumble, the stars that fail;
Meaning caskets within the vision,
Shaping the folds of the woven veil."
* Katharine Lee Bates: from a poem, "The College Beautiful," 1886.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of Wellesley, by Florence Converse