Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

Page 21 text:

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

Page 20 text:

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

Page 22 text:

lived pastoral lives on this sprawling property, supporting themselves from cattle and subsistence agriculture. In the 18705 Americans began to arrive, spearheaded by Wil- liam Martin, who settled on some 156 acres centered 011 Eleventh Street and Indian Hill Boulevard, and Stephen Gale, who ran some 2,000 Angora goats from a home- stead near Pomello Avenue. It was the boom of the 18805 that Americanized the Pomona Valley and created the town of Claremont: a boom made possible by the overland arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railroad, which reached San Bernardino in 1883 and Los Angeles in 1885, thereby giving Southern California its own direct railroad connection to the East. From the beginning, Claremont had strong New England origins and con- tinuing orientation. Its first developer, the Pacific Land and Improvement Company, was based in Boston; and it was in Boston that the name Claremont was chosen, the town site organized, the Claremont Hotel financed, and settlers were recruited. By January 1888, however, as the boom of the eighties began to go bust, auction sales of town sites dwindled into negligibility, and the sprawling gingerbread gothic Hotel Claremont on Fourth Street stood Virtually empty, having failed to attract visi- tors from the East. The failure of the hotel was especially worrisome; in the develop- ment of Southern California during this era, a resort hotel tthe Del Coronado in San Diego, the Virginia in Long Beach, the Mission Inn in Riverside, the Maryland in Pas- adena, the Wentworth in Santa Barbara, and, later, the Beverly Hills and the Brent- woodi anchored a proposed development, gave it identity, and recruited prospective settlers as first-time tourists who might decide to stay. Abusy hotel was a city in minia- ture, utopian in its amenities and service, foreshadowing the city that might be, once lot sites were auctioned and construction begun. An empty hotel, conversely, more than any Other factor, bespoke the fear that a surveyed town site might forever remain a phantom city. What to do? How best to reenergize the stalled town? Astutely, the Pacific Land and Improvement Company substituted a college for the hotel. Already, in September 1888, the board of trustees of Pomona College, a Congregationalist institution, had been attempting to build a structure in the Piedmont district on Scanlon Mesa. The president of the board of trustees was Henry Palmer, a principal in the Pacific Land and Improvement Company and a prime promoter of both the Piedmont and the Claremont developments. In Los Angeles, in 1880, equally interested developers had donated property to the Methodist church for the establishment of the University of Southern California in an effort to boost land values south of the downtown. Palmer . had a similar scheme in mind, but he and his Pomona College trustees were having no luck whatsoever raising funds now that the boom had begun to wane. By the fall of 1888, then, the trustees of Pomona College were looking for a building, and the Pacific Land and Improvement Company was looking for someone to take the Claremont 6 Claremont McKemrm College