Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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14 C laremont McKenna College entity, Claremont University Center, which would coordinate graduate education and all centralized administrative functions. While remaining president of Pomona Col- lege until 1928, Blaisdell, ably assisted by Bernard, bore the primary responsibility for directing this fledgling entity. With incorporation and the founding organization ac- complished, Blaisdell embarked upon a yearlong sabbatical 0n the East Coast, the Continent, and England, which he spent Visiting Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other East Coast institutions, a number of great universities of Europe, and Oxford and Cambridge, gathering associations and ideas relevant to his own Group Plan. The Hl'steand stunningleachievement 0f the newly established Board of Fellows of the Claremont Colleges was the founding of Scripps College for Women. Indeed, the rapidity of this event might very well have augured for an equally rapid founding ofanew menls college, had not the stock market crashed in October 1929. While Blais- dell was in the East and in Europe, Dr. Ernest Jaqua, acting head of Pomona College, continued preparation and plans for the new venture, which Miss Scripps had already energized with gifts of land and money. On 15 June 1926 Jaqua reported to the Board of Fellows that ten men and ten women had accepted appointment to the Scripps Board of Trustees and that Articles of Incorporation had been Hled in Sacramento three days earlier. Miss Scrippss attorney, Jacob Harper of La Jolla, agreed to serve as chairman of the board. The equal ratio of men and women trustees, very unusual for the time, eventually yielded to a preponderance of women trustees. Among these womenemainly college graduates, linked by birth or marriage to many of the leading families of the region-were Ellen Browning Scripps herself and Sarah Bixby Smith of Claremont. Sarah Bixby Smith was a Wellesley graduate, a member of the pioneer ranching family Bixby-Flint, and the recent author ofAdolae Days 0925i, an account of her girlhood on the San Justo, Los Cerritos, and Los Alamitos ranchos at Long Beach, destined to survive as one of the finest memoirs ofits kind in the literature of Califor- nia. Professor Munro of Harvard, soon to transfer his flag to Cal Tech, was also on the board, as was Ernest Jaqua, whom the board soon designated president of the new institution. In materializing Scripps College forWomen, the trustees of this second undergrad- uate college in the Group Plan spared no expense. The decade of the 19205 was in general characterized by distinguished architecture, especially in the public sphere. Nowhere was this more true than in Southern California. To design Scripps College for Women, its board of trustees selected two of the best talents of a most talented region and era. Architect Gordon Kaufmann of Los Angeles envisioned and designed the new institution as a Spanish Renaissance Cloister, with courtyards and connecting arcades, resplendent in creamy concrete surfaces, red tile roofs, decorated windows, doors, columns, tile porticos, and iron grills. Landscape architect Edward Huntsman Trout complemented Kaufmannls shimmering Spanish Cloisters with a central mall

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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

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and attendant walks, lawns, trees, and shrubs perfectly harmonizing with Kaufmannls Mediterranean metaphor. On the sunny afternoon of14 October 1927, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Pomona College, Ernest Jaqua was inaugurated as president of Scripps in the Greek Theater of Pomona College. The previous month, a freshman class of fifty stu- dents had arrived. Posing for the camera along one of Kaufmannis newly completed arcades, a number of them in riding attire, all of them in the bobbed hair of the period, these elegant young women, redolent of the regional privilege from which they came, signaled the almost-ovemight arrival of Scripps College for Women as an institution in dialogue with the Seven Sisters in the East and Mills College to the north. Not only did the Group Plan have its second college, Southern California now had a most suitable institution to which it could send its daughters: Daisy Buchanans who might mesmerize the Gatsbys of Southern California, the seIf-made men, or marry success- fully within their own class upon finishing the Scripps course in humanities and fine arts, and move to places like La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, Palos Verdes, Pasadena, Bel Air, Brentwood, or Santa Barbara. There they might start families, play tennis and golf, serve at the center of a thousand community efforts, or perhaps, the most innova- tive of them, acquire further credentials and enter business, the professions, higher education, and,afte11941, serve as commissioned officers in the WAVES, the WAGS, the WRENS, the SPARS, or the Red Cross. It now became time to plan and to found a third collegiate institution, a merfs college balancing Scripps. Blaisdell himself frequently remarked during this period, the late 19205, that the system of collegiate federalism embodied in the Group Plan would re- quire at least three colleges to prove itself. Further impetus to immediate expansion came from a million-dollar unrestricted bequest to the Claremont Colleges from the estate of Colonel Seeley Mudd following his death on 24 May 1926. Born in a sub- urb of St. Louis in 1861, Mudd had graduated in 1883 from the mining department of the School of Engineering of Washington University in St. Louis and had made his fortune as a mining engineer in Colorado and a Los Angeles-based mining consul- tant associated with Guggenheim interests. A member of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, Mudd attained the rank of colonel of engineers during the First World War and became active at Pomona College following his release from the service. In and of itself, the colonels backgroundeengineering in the Far West; e11- trepreneurial investment in gold, copper, and sulfur in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Texas; a lifelong love oflearning and education; a fierce loyalty to the Congregational- ist Churcheepitomizecl and reprised the types of trustees and the nature of the ener- gies flowing into the Claremont Colleges at the time of incorporation. Seeleyls unre- stricted gift of one million dollars was as munificent as Southern California itself. Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 15