Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

Page 24 text:

groves carpeting the Pomona Valley had brought into being one of the most beautiful, indeed Virgilian, agricultural landscapes in North America. The Pomona Valley, including Claremont, was at the very heart of this citrus culture. In 1892-93 eleven Claremont growers organized the Claremont Fruitgrowers Association, to which was added at a later date the El Camino Citrus Association, the College Heights Orange and Lemon Association, and the Indian Hill Citrus Association. By1915these cooper- atives were shipping more than $2.1 million of citrus a year in boxes adorned with the colorful labelseCollegiate, Valley View, Morning Gloryedepicting Claremont, Po- mona College, and vicinity. Naturally, this being Claremont, growers took a scholarly approach to citrus. In 1894 a circle of Claremont growers organized the Pomological Club, under the presidency of A. J. Cook, professor of horticulture at Pomona Col- lege. Charles Sumner was also a member. By the 19205, then, Claremont, California, a college town in the New England man- ner, had come into its own. It was a refined and seIf-respecting community of some 3,000 residents, its daily life reported by a full-size, four-page weekly, the Courier, founded in 1911; its population lived in charming Victorian, Edwardian, Craftsman, and Spanish Revival homes. Already, two generations of tree planting had taken ef- fect, and Claremont, a semi-arid desert in earlierphotographs, had verymuch become an arboreal garden suggestive of the best possibilities of horticulture and landscape architecture in Southern California. Also suggestive of the larger Southern California, this time in human terms, were two Mexican-American communities, one on the southeast and the other on the southwest edge of the town. Separated from Anglo Claremont by ethnicity and reli- gion, barrio Claremont showed the same tendencies toward propriety and communal life. The men and women of barrio Claremont, first of all, had jobSein citrus and construction tespecially stone crafti, as gardeners and other staff at Pomona and the secondary schools-and they equally prized family life and religion, centered on the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart tbuilt, in part, from donations from the congregation at the Claremont Churchi. The families of the barrio Enriquez, Hermosilla, Gutierrez, Serna, Rubio, Torres, Contreras, and Sevillaewere likewise proud of their ancestry, traced in their case back to Mexico and Spain. Like their A11- glo counterparts, they valued education, albeit their children were kept in segregated schools, up to the fourth grade, until the mid-194os. Barrio Claremont showed an equally characteristic taste for social organization and the arts. While Anglo Claremont supported the Claremont Community Players, which mounted productions in the indoor-outdoor Padua Hills Theater complex, bar- rio Claremont also produced programs there of traditional Mexican songs and dances linked by storytelling and spontaneous recitation. The parallel nature of these pre- sentations tperformed in tandem with English-language drama for a largely English 8 C laremont M cKemm College

Page 23 text:

Hotel off its hands in such a way as to preserve land value, and Henry Palmer was at the center of both the company and the college. The result: an agreement signed on 21 October 1888 transferring the Hotel Claremont t0 Pomona College, together with the block of land on which the hotel stood and 260 additional lots. Under the agreement, the College was authorized to sell these lots, returning half the proceeds to the four principals of the Pacific Land and Improvement Company. A New England Congregationalist college had now become the prime developer of Claremont, Cali- fornia, Fixing the identity of the proposed City for the century to come. With Pomona College as its founding institution, its DNA code, Claremont was destined to develop as and remain a college town. In January 1890 college-level and preparatory classes commenced in the erstwhile Hotel Claremont, now renamed Claremont Hall. Until the arrival that year of the Rev- erend Cyrus Grandison Baldwin, the first president, one of the founders of Pomona College, the Reverend Charles Sumner tGeorge C. S. Bensonis grandfather; hence the initials C. S. insistently inserted between his first and family namesi, served as chief Financial ofhcer, faculty dean, secretary to the board of trustees, and de facto president of the fledgling institution. In later years Reverend Sumner, white haired and white bearded, dignified in his vested suit and old-fashioned upright collar, sur- vived as the beloved patriarch of the Old Guard, as the founding faculty of Pomona eventually became known: the men and one woman tPhebe Estelle Spalding, the First female faculty member at Pomona Collegei who had brought New England values and the New England way of life to the city of Claremont. Over the next thirty years, Claremont Village, as the City was informally called, developed as an enclave of New England in Southern California. It centered on Pomona College, from which so many derived their income; the Webb School, the Norton School for Boys, and Girls Colle- giate, three private preparatory institutions; the Claremont Church, where the ma- jority of the city worshipped; the first-rate public grammar and high school, where children prepared for college; and the Village itself, its stores lining streets named Harvard and Yale, with no saloons allowed. College, prep schools, church: Claremont was an enclave of Anglo-Arnerican Protestant value paradigmatic of the demograph- ics of Southern California in the pre-World War II era, only more New England than Midwestern, like Pasadena and Whittier, in origins and orientation. Unified by college, school, religion, lifestyle, and ethnic identity, Claremont was a cohesive township. In the summertime, there were communal picnics and camp-outs in Bear Canyon. The Pomona College glee club gave public performances; and the College opened many of its circles and organizationsethe Rembrandt Club, for ex- ampleeto townspeople. There was a Claremont String Quartet, another town-ande gown enterprise. Even citrus, the primary local industry outside of education, sus- tained this tone of refinement and gentility. By the early 19005 the orange and lemon Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 7

Page 25 text:

speaking audiencei, like the segregated Mexican K-4 grammar school, signaled a society whose Anglo and Latino elements were at once convergentethe middle- class elegance of the Mexican troupe players, the scrubbed and starched Mexican American Children in the barrio school, the seIf-respect so evident in photographs of Mexican-American families, the taste for good architecture and landscaping, the identification with education and citrus as sources of employmenteand yet regard- ing each other across barriers of religion and ethnicity. Given its predominantly Anglo-American Protestant tone and its DNA code as a cole Iege town, it is perhaps not too surprising that Claremont, California, operating in this instance in the person of Dr. James Arnold BIaisdeII, president of Pomona College from 1910 to 1928, would soon be envisioning its future on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. James Blaisdell was the very model of a Congregationalist college presi- dent. Born and raised in Beloit, Wisconsin, across the street from Beloit College where his father taught philosophy, Blaisdell graduated from Beloit in 1890, then went on to the Hartford Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1892, in prepa- ration for ordination as a Congregationalist minister and a call to his first pastorate in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In 1903 Blaisdell was recalled to his alma mater as university chaplain, librarian, and professor of biblical literature and ancient Oriental history. Again and again in reminiscences and other forms of testimony, those who knew BIaisdell, either in parishes in Wisconsin or Michigan, at Beloit or later in Pomona, testihed to his superb speaking voice and magnetic presence. Learned, eloquent, charismatic, committed to both the pulpit and the classroom, Blaisdell embodied the tone, the style, the value, and the organizational approach of American Congregationalism, a tradition that had been at the founding of Harvard and Yale as well as Amherst, Oberlin, Carleton, GrinneII, Beloit, Colorado College, and the College of California, forerunner of the state university. In matters of polity and organization, Congregationalism, by its very definition, favored the autonomy of the local unit, whether church or college. This social and psychological disposition in BIaisdeII, a preeminent Congregationalist pastor-educator, disposed him in the direc- tion of smaller or reasonably sized colleges, like his beloved Beloit, over the encom- passing mega-university that was implicit in the Germanic model brought to the United States with the founding ofJohns Hopkins in 1867. That model was even then, in the early 19005, propelling most of the Ivy League twith the exception of Dart- mouthi and the newly established Land Grant universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, in the direction of encompassing programs and expanding campuses. In 1910, at the age of forty-three, Blaisdell was called to the presidency of Pomona College, Claremont, the premier collegiate expression of Congregationalist value on Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 9