Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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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

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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

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10 the Pacific Coast. Pomona College, he would later write, offered him an opportunity to build and pioneer in a bold new settingeyet under the aegis of the venerable Con- gregationalist tradition. Blaisdell assumed the presidency of a debt-ridden institution of some goo students, more than half of them doing preparatory work, with a faculty of thirty-eight teaching in some twenty-one departments of instruction. By 1919 Blais- dell had all but eliminated the college preparatory program, increased the college enrollment to 685 05 students short of the 7oo-student body he considered ideal for Pomonal, brought the debt under control, and quadrupled the resources of the in- stitution. Like all of Southern California, Pomona College entered the 19205 experie encing unprecedented growth. More than a million Americans were in the process of moving into the region the college considered its own. A $3-million construction and endowment campaign was launched. With the trustees having decided in 1920 to limit Pomona to 750 men and women, however, in an effort to sustain quality, the College found itself turning away two out of every three students applying for admission. In nearby Los Angeles, the University of Southern California would respond to equal pressures through growth, and the Re- gents of the University of California would soon be setting in motion the process lead- ing to the establishment of UCLA. Blaisdell and his trustees, however, believed that something precious would be lost if Pomona were deprived of its collegial intimacy. Blaisdellls answer to this dilemma was the Group Plan. Claremont, he argued, should support the growth of an OxfordlCambridgeestyle academic culture in which a Cluster of autonomous colleges would share certain central programs and facilities -library, business offices, health services, chaplaincies, science laboratories, ath- letic programsewhile maintaining their distinctive governance and identities. In the summer of 1922, Blaisdell sent his executive assistant, Robert Bernard, Pomona Class of 1917, to visit the University of Toronto where an Oxbridgevstyle cluster program, the only one of its kind in North America, had been implemented. Bernard returned with a most enthusiastic report. He became, indeed, 3 Timothy to Blaisdellls Paul in the twenty-year effort to implement what from the first was called the Group Plan. With Pauline zeal, Blaisdell spread the faith, especially among possible patrons. Southern California, Blaisdell wrote newspaper magnate Ellen Browning Scripps in 1923, would soon be needing a great suburban institution of higher education on the order of Stanford University in Palo Alto. illVIy own very deep hopef, Blaisdell cau- tioned Miss Scripps, then living in La Jolla, is that instead of one great, undifferenti- ated university, we might have a group of institutions divided into small collegese somewhat on the Oxford typeearound a library and other utilities which they would use in common. In this way I should hope to preserve the inestimable personal values of the small college while securing the facilities of the great university. Such 3 develop- ment would be a new and wonderful contribution to American education. Claremont McKenml College