Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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moreover, Ellen Browning Scripps was not afraid to take a Chance. In early 1924 she made a gift to the trustees of Pomona College of funds sufficient for the purchase of 250 acres around the Indian Hill mesa in Claremont. This property, she decreed, together with other land purchases and exchanges in the immediate Vicinity, should be retained for future growth along the Group Plan model being so compellingly ad vanced by President Blaisdell. Already, in 1924, at Blaisdellls urging, the board of trustees of Pomona College had appointed a committee of two trustees, mining engineer Colonel Seeley Mudd and real estate developer Llewellyn Bixby, and two faculty members, Ernest Jaqua, dean of the faculty, and George Burgess, professor of government, to investigate iithe future expansion of Pomona College in relation to the possibility of developing other coordi- nated institutions? Blaisdell set the agenda for this committee by submitting to them on 15 March 1925 a document entitled iiPreliminary Statement Submitted for Conside eration by the Committee on Future Organization, which was in effect the founding manifesto of the Group Plan. In this document Blaisdell called for the eventual estab- lishment of multiple colleges enrolling between 150 and 300 students, each with its own board of trustees and faculty, together with the establishment of a central college for graduate work, summer schools, extension, library operations, and similar activie ties. Only two features of Blaisdellls proposal-namely, that, as in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, individual colleges would grant one common degree; and that the leader of the institution be named Head Fellow in lieu of the more corporate term Presidenteproved impractical in subsequent years. Meanwhile, thanks to Blaisdell's iPreliminary Statement and the ongoing deliber- ations of the Committee on Future Organization, the fundamental Vision behind the Group Plan began to take hold. In his Pomona commencement speech that year, for example, delivered in the Greek Theater on 15 June 1925, William Bennett Munro, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Government at Harvard, then serving as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology, positioned the debate on the future currently under way at Pomona in the most flattering terms by associating discussion of the Group Plan to comparable transitions in the ancient world; to the rise of the university in the Middle Ages at Padua and Paris, then across the Channel at Oxford and Cambridge; to the migration of Oxford and Cambridge to the New World through the founders of Harvard and Yale and the other colleges of colonial America; and then, in the late nineteenth century, to the establishment of Pomona itself, which was now seeking to stimulate the founding of other institutions. KiIt is your task, Munro urged, iito determine, now that you have arrived at the parting of the ways, whether you will do just as all other colleges have done and are doing, or whether you will do something new, different and manifestly superior. That very same month, the Firm of Jamieson and Spearl of St. Louis, specialists in 12 Claremont MeKemw College

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What Blaisdell did not say was what only time and history would reveal: the power of the OxfordwCarnbridge metaphor. Beginning with the boom of the 18805 and con- tinuing with the second boom that began in 1919 and continued through the 19205, Anglo America was staking Southern California for its owneand not always subcon- sciously. Southern California Business, for example, the magazine of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, made frequent references to Los Angeles as the last great English-speaking metropolis to be founded. The downside of this AngloAmerican triumphalism, so evident everywhere in the decade, was the near-apartheid quality of social and cultural life in Southern California: the restricted covenants in its housing, its attitude of nolo tangere toward the Jewish community, its suspicion of Catholics, its rejection of other races and peoples. Yet Southern California cannot be cited as an exclusive instance of these attitudes. In many ways, the heart of Anglo America was hardening across the nation in the first decades of the twentieth century in the matter of exclusivity. The good news was the willingness of Southern Californians to re-create or to found brand-new cultural institutions-Whittier and Occidental Colleges, the Uni- versity of Southern California, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the Mount Wilson Observatory, the California Institute of Technologyevividly expressive of AngIo-American Civilization. It was to this impulse that Dr. Blaisdellis Group Plan addressed itself. If Anglo America was in the process of rapidly building up English- speaking Protestant civilization in Southern California, did not the Oxford or Came bridge model then offer in the language of academic polity a most comforting meta- phor for culture and institutional development in the Southland? Had not these insti- tutions, after all, been at the core of English-speaking civilization since the thirteenth century? And why should not a comparable presence be re-created through sheer force of will in this sunny southern clime? Born in England in 1837, educated at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, after her family emigrated to the United States, eighty-six-year-old Ellen Browning Scripps was the perfect person to comprehend Blaisdells dream and make an effective re- sponse. She was, First of all, a very wealthy woman who was approaching the end of her life with no direct heirs. Second, she prized education and had been generous to her alma mater, Knox College, which had awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1911. But of equal importance, Ellen Browning Scripps neither inherited nor married her wealth. She had made it the hard way. She had earned it. She and her brothers had built their fifty-plus newspaper chain on their own, paper by paper, and Miss Scripps twho never marriedi had been crucial to the enterprise as eopyeditor, columnist, re- porter, and, later, business manager. Her support of Knox College and her cofounding along with her brother of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in Lajolla testified to her interest in education and research and to her generosity. As a self-made woman, Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926e1946 11

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college architecture, after a thorough study of the plans of Oxford and Cambridge, released a full-color rendering showing the three hundred acres extending from P0- mona College on the south to the Indian Hill mesa and surrounding property north of Foothill Boulevard gloriously arrayed in linked college clusters, elegantly landscaped and served by a library, a menis and a womenis athletic helds, a gymnasium, a univer- sity church, and other central facilities. The Group Plan now possessed its rationaliza- tion from Blaisdell and the Committee on Future Organization, its encouragement from Professor Munro and others, its illustrative imagery from Jamieson and Spearl, and its property from Ellen Browning Scripps. Most important, Pomona College enjoyed a board of trustees who were unafraid to act in a bold and decisive manner. Uniiied in Class, ethnic and cultural background, and, in most instances, graduation from Pomona or a similar institution, the trustees shared a common Vision and purpose. Successful in the worlds of investment, engi- neering, real estate development, law and government affairs, citrus growing, and reli- gion tthe Protestant Episcopal bishop of Southern California served as Vice chairman of the board, and four other trustees were Congregationalist ministers holding large pastoratesi, the Pomona trustees reflected and exercised the strength of the Southern California oligarchy then in the process of directing the economic development of an entire region and shaping its politics and culture. Trustee chairman George Marston of San Diego, for example, was the very model of the oligarch as progressive reformer. To this department store owner, the largest private-sector employer in San Diego, must be given the major credit for the preservation and development of Balboa Park and the commissioning of the Nolen Plan that guided San Diego into its unfolding urban identity. Other trusteeseCOIonel Seeley Mudd, William Honnold, Llewellyn Bixby, Frank Harwood, Marston himselfewere among the most wealthy and influ- ential oligarchs in Southern California. Accustomed to act, flattered by the grand associations of the Group Plan, their imaginations especially stimulated by the full-color rendering that was in its own dis- tinctive way a real estate development prospectus of great force, the trustees met on 17 September 1925 and, in rapid order, named President Blaisdell, Colonel Mudd, and Jacob Harper tthe attorney for Miss Scrippsi the nucleus of the board of trustees ofa new corporation, the Claremont Colleges. Nine trustees signed the articles of incor- poration. On 13 October 1925 Robert Bernard, the young executive assistant to Blais- dell, took the overnight train to Sacramento. The next day, on the thirty-eighth anni- versary of the founding of Pomona College, Bernard filed the Articles of Incorporation of Claremont Colleges with the secretary of state. The Board of Fellows met at Clare- mont on 9 December 1925, adopted by-laws, and elected President Blaisdell the head fellow, Colonel Seeley Mudd Chairman, and William Honnold vice chairman. Bere nard was elected secretary. The Board of Fellows took direct responsibility for a new Fornmlating and F ounding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 '3