Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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community in American undergraduate education which in the 19205 and 19305 had energized the creation of the undergraduate house system at Harvard and the under- graduate college system at Yale. Flattering references indeed-Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, Pomona, and Scrippsefor a school lacking classrooms, dormitories, libraries, and endowment; a school that, if the truth be told, was wingng it, flyng by the seat of its pants, as some of the Army Air Force veterans in the audi- ence might put it; a school barely able to make its quota of students on registration day, and with those who did show being of varied academic preparation and ability. Yet this was 1946, and great dreams were in the air, a war having been won and all America-Southern California especiallyebeckoning a returning generation, faculty and students alike, with the promise of recovered time and new beginnings. Certainly George Charles Sumner Benson, the hnal speaker that October morning, had sensed this moment, this Southern California opportunity. The one-time senior tutor of Lowell House at Harvard, formerly of the faculties of Chicago, Michigan, and Northwestern, a Claremont man, Pomona Class of 1928, the thirty-eight-year-old Benson had but a few months earlier been seen at the Claremont Inn in his lieutenant colonells uniform, reestablishing his Claremont contacts, discussing prospects, mull- ing over what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Now he had it in hand: the challenge of a lifetime, building a college that would bridge the world of learning, which he had chosen for his career, and the world of affairs, in which he had glimpsed an even more compelling identity. Those two worlds, Benson told the convocatione thought and action, liberal learning and administration, commerce and Civilizatione- would be brought into dynamic interaction at the Claremont College Undergraduate School for Men. Here management itself would become a liberal art; and business and economics would be linked to liberal studies. Here in a school that had no de- partments and few electives, but a carefully crafted program, students would be en- couraged to seek a new synthesis, to put aside that false sense of a necessary opposi- tion between business and government which seems to pervade much of American thought. Here would be put aside as well that false distinction between theory and practicen that had divided Americans into dreamers and doers. Our effort,N Benson concluded, His not to do away with theory but rather, Jfollowing scientific method, to secure better theory by lthel constant checking of our principles against the facts of the political and economic world.,, A mixture of sincere belief and boosterism, the notions emerging from the speeches delivered that opening day by Benson and the others were at best overly optimistic, even high-flown, and at the worst doomed for failure, given the practical and philoe sophical gulf yawning between theory and practice, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Bensonis assertion that the hastily recruited faculty of a hastily organized, 4 C laremont McKenna College

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earlier, James Blaisdell, then serving as president of Pomona College, had first envi- sioned and promoted the Group Plan calling for the development in the City of Clare- mont of an OxfordiCambridge-style cluster of independent colleges grouped around central facilities. In 1925 his executive assistant, Robert Bernard, had filed the incor- poration papers in Sacramento for such an institution. Most recently Bernard, in his capacity as managing director of Claremont College tas the central coordinating col- lege of the Group Plan was namedi, had borne the brunt of work and responsibility in organizing the School for Men, including the recruitment of George C. S. Benson, who would serve for the next twenty-three years as president of the School, soon to be upgraded into an autonomous college. As chairman of the Board of Fellows overseeing the development of the Group Plan, Harvey Mudd had authorized the School in its hectic, hurried first phase of organization. As provost of Claremont College, E. Wilson Lyon, concerned as to what impact the new School would have on Pomona College, had given his reluctant consent. Putting up the money for Bensons appointment, pledging himself to Jfurther funderaising, expressing confidence that it could be done, Donald McKenna had transformed the School from a dream and a plan to the living reality represented by the eighty-sixyoung men, the seven professors, the sparse staff, the trustees, and guests in attendance. N aturally, there were speeches following the organ prelude by William Blanchard, professor of music at Pomona College, and the invocation by Dr. Blaisdell, an or dained Congregationalist minister. Issued a few weeks later in pamphlet form, the brief and cogent speeches by Mudd, Hard, Lyon, and Benson stand up well under contemporary scrutiny. In their cumulative themes, in factethe history of the Group Plan, the appropriateness of the OxfordtCambridge tOxbridgei model to Southern California, the value of liberal learning as preparation for the active life, the art of management in both the public and private sector, the need in postwar America for vigorous men of ethics and liberal education to assume leadership roles in business and governmentethe speeches, like the men onstage, offered a prophetic reprise and paradigm of the energies and influences flowing into the School now gathered for its first convocation. Briefly, Chairman Mudd suggested the twenty years of planning and effort that had gone into this moment. President Hard of Scripps aligned the new School with both Scripps, founded in 1926, and the more venerable Pomona, which dated from 1887. Like these institutions, Hard noted, the new School would have its central identity as a liberal arts college poised midway between tradition and the fu- ture. In his remarks, Pomona President Lyon, 3 Rhodes scholar, put aside his ambivae lence toward what he feared might become a competitive enterprise and generously placed the new School in the context of the Group Plan. That dreameof the Citrus groves and stony helds of Claremont blossoming in clustered collegesecontained Lyonis own memories as a student at Oxford and his sense of that longing for federated Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 3

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underfunded school, teaching an academically uneven student body in spartan Cir- cumstances, might achieve an advance in the dialogue between theory and practice that would be the envy of more established, even venerable institutions, could be criti- cized as naive, even delusional. Yet this was Claremont, Southern California, in 1946; and otherwise cautious businessmen, ignoring all objections and reservations, had launched an enterprise whose primary selling point lalthough sales were as of yet sluggishl was the promise of a new kind of academic institution in a new part of the United States. Ever since the 18805, in fact, and certainly from the 19205 onward, men and women of higher education and others of uncertain academic lineageeYankees, New Englanders, Congregationalists, real estate salesmen, retired missionaries, cit- rus growers, college peopleehad been projecting onto the tabula rasa of Claremont the dreams and metaphors of heightened expectation. Like all of Southern California in comparison to Northern California, Claremont eindeed, the entire Pomona Valley-had not experienced signihcant development until the boom of the 18805. In pre-European times, a band of Serrano Indians, 3 Sho- shonean people belonging to the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family, pitched their circular domed structures, some two hundred strong, on a mesa watered by a nearby creek and artesian springs to the east. Later, in the Spanish and Mexican era, when the region became part of the vast and sprawling properties of Mission San Gabriel, its geograph- ical features acquired their enduring names. The creek was named San Antonio in honor of St. Anthony. The great mountain range to the northeast, dominated by the 10,064-foot Mount San Antonio, was named the Sierra Madre, the Mother Range, which the Americans would later designate the San Gabriel Mountains, just as they named the site of the Serrano village Indian Hill and nicknamed the stately Mount San Antonio Old Baldy. Geologically, the future city of Claremont would arise in the center of a serni-desert alluvial fan carved by the rush of ancient waters down from the SanGabriel Moun- tains. lThis ancient flow survived as the San Antonio Creek and upon occasion, as in 1938, it could regain its ancient fury and wash into oblivion the roads and streets of the cityj This alluvial fan extended from San Antonio Canyon into the Pomona Valley. To the south was another, smaller mountain range, later designated the hills of Chino and Puente. It was a dry semi-desert region riddled with stones and boulders washed ClOWn in ancient times, sparse in its coverage of sagebrush and intermittent oak, abun- dant in deer, jack rabbits, burrowing rodents, and other desert animals. After the establishment of the Pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781, the region became forever fixed to that settlement as an avenue of approach, a corridor of passage, whether across cattle, sheep, or wagon trails, or Via interurban electrics or freeways. In 1837 the Mexican government deeded the.region to the Rancho San Jose owned by Don Ricardo Vejar and anacio Palomares. Two generations of Mexican landowners Fommtlnt-ing and F ounding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 5