In the late 1880s, the first University of Chicago had hardly gone into bankruptcy when advocates of a new university, led by Thomas Goodspeed, began scouting for land in the Chicago area on which to build their campus. A location within the city itself was an obvious choice, but an offer of property in the suburb of Morgan Park from real estate developer George C. Walker (1835-1905) complicated their decision. A onetime trustee of the Old University, Walker offered the Baptists a thirty-acre site near the Baptist Union Theological Seminary at 111th Street and Hoyne Avenue, along with a building that was already standing on the property and twenty-five thousand dollars. Walker, as the developer, naturally expected to gain from the agreement, since the University's construction would likely attract more residents and businesses to Morgan Park. As it turned out, his proposal was declined in favor of a site donated by Marshall Field on Chicago's South Side in the newly annexed township of Hyde Park; but Walker's continued enthusiasm for the new institution earned him appointment as a member of the first Board of Trustees, positioning him to become one of the University's major early donors.
Walker's relationship to the second University of Chicago grew out of a longer family tradition of support for denominational education. Beginning with his father Charles, who garnered influence as a noteworthy businessman and two-time president of the Chicago Board of Trade, Walker and his family readily answered the call to help establish a Baptist college-the first University of Chicago-in the city. His father was even tapped as a Trustee and served as Vice President of the Old University's Board until his death in 1869. George then agreed to take his father's empty seat, despite the fact that he found the rationale for denominational education less persuasive than had his father. As a young man George Walker was educated at institutions with strong religious values--Chicago's Temple Academy, Beloit College, and Brown University--but a dispute with a congregational disciplinary committee in Chicago over dancing caused him to sever his ties with the city's Baptist establishment. Neither Goodspeed or Harper seem to have viewed Walker's break with his religious roots as a liability, however, and once elected to the Board of Trustees in 1890, he remained an active and thoughtful member until his death in 1905.
In fact, Walker flourished as a Trustee and worked extremely hard for the University. He used family connections to help secure Silas Cobb's pledge in 1892 to fund construction of the University's first classroom building (Cobb was the father-in-law of Walker's brother William), and he also convinced his good friend and fellow businessman Sidney Kent to give $235,000 to construct a new chemistry building. He then demonstrated his own support in June 1892 by promising $130,000 to finance the building of a geology museum and laboratory on campus. Completed in 1893, the Walker Museum was a source of anxiety for the Trustee-donor soon after its opening. Due to a lack of classroom and office space elsewhere on campus, several other academic departments had been moved into the building. As Walker saw it, having departments take up space in the museum interfered with the building's original mission, which was to advance knowledge of the geological sciences. "The housing of other departments has crowded out the original intention of a building," he complained to his fellow Trustees in 1902. He implored his colleagues to return the museum to its rightful purpose by making "suitable appropriations" in the budget "so that now the work can go forward as originally planned, and so that I can see more of the good results in my lifetime." After several years of strenuous lobbying, he eventually persuaded President Harper to restore Walker Museum to its intended scientific function.
Like his fellow capitalist George Walker, Martin A. Ryerson (1856-1932) also had long-standing personal connections to the city. His father Martin had moved to Chicago in 1851, where he soon made a fortune in the lumber trade, supplemented by shrewd investments in Chicago real estate, local banks, and the Elgin Watch Company. The younger Ryerson was to become one of the most important civic leaders in the first half century of the University's history, not only because of his extraordinary generosity as a donor, but also because of his distinguished leadership as President of the Board of Trustees from 1892 until 1922. Ryerson's initial appointment to the Board in 1890 proved to be a shrewd political move on the part of the new University's administrative leaders. Ryerson's lack of Baptist affiliation made him the perfect person to attract other non-Baptists to the cause, while his ability to command the respect of Chicago's elite gave him the personal credentials to serve as a key spokesman for the University.
Supported by his good friend and fellow Trustee Charles L. Hutchinson, Ryerson as President of the Board dealt admirably with an array of perplexing challenges, including the constant annual budget deficits run up by President William Rainey Harper. Calm, unflappable, patrician in his bearing, and having an unusually refined level of aesthetic sensibility, Ryerson easily reconciled his dual roles as administrative leader and major donor, while playing a decisive role in the planning of the campus and in defending its remarkable architectural unity and integrity.
Ryerson was educated in a fashion befitting his father's wealth, attending private schools in Paris and Geneva and graduating from Harvard Law School in 1878. After his father's unexpected death in 1887, when he was thirty-four, Ryerson became his father's sole heir and was free to devote much of his time to the establishment of the University of Chicago. Indeed, by the early 1890s, Ryerson retired from active business altogether in order to dedicate himself fully to his various philanthropic interests and his passion for art collecting. Martin Ryerson also shared his administrative talents and fortune with several of Chicago's other noteworthy cultural institutions. A trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1890, Ryerson's knowledge of art was on the level of a connoisseur, and upon his death in 1932 the Art Institute was bequeathed a breathtaking collection of French Impressionists--including five paintings by Renoir and sixteen paintings by Monet-and an extraordinary group of Old Master paintings as well, all of which originally hung in the Ryerson mansion at 4851 South Drexel Boulevard. In 1894 Ryerson was also appointed Vice President of the Field Columbian Museum, where he succeeded in rescuing a number of exhibits left after the World's Columbian Exposition closed in 1892.
Ryerson's financial gifts to the University were extensions of his work as a University Trustee and his life as a cultural philanthropist. Perhaps his most significant gift was $350,000 toward the construction and subsequent renovation of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory. He also played a key role in creating the new University's Library, for Ryerson was the primary figure in President Harper's successful campaign to acquire the Berlin Collection in 1891, providing almost half of the money that was secured to purchase the collection. Overnight this collection transformed the University's fledgling library into a major research collection, giving Chicago the second largest university library collection in the United States by 1896. Ryerson's interest in rare books and manuscripts found continued expression in his support for the acquisition of the famous Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of early English manuscripts in 1924 and his funding the purchase of a mid-fifteenth-century codex (the "McCormick Manuscript") of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in 1930, both acquired on the basis of personal interventions with Ryerson by Professor John Matthews Manly of the Department of English.
When John D. Rockefeller offered a major pledge in 1906 to build the Harper Memorial Library, Ryerson also promised $25,000 to the same cause. To these gifts Ryerson added a major endowment to create the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professorship in 1925. At the time of his death in 1932, Martin A. Ryerson's total contributions to the University of Chicago exceeded $2 million, not including part of a $6-million-dollar bequest that was evenly divided among the Art Institute, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the University of Chicago.
One of the University's most pressing obligations in its first years was to provide adequate housing for its students. A successful college experience, President Harper believed, required adequate on-campus living quarters, although University officials conceded that they were not in a position to provide every student with housing. Residential opportunities for women students were particularly problematic, since plans for women's residence halls were still incomplete even after the University opened its doors in 1892. Rooms in boarding houses and apartments scattered around Hyde Park served as a temporary solution to the housing problem. In addition, administrators in 1893 temporarily reassigned female students to Snell Hall, a men's residence hall funded by a $60,000 gift from Henrietta Snell. Yet officials knew that relocating students to different locations on the campus was only a short-term solution and that sufficient housing would have to be built quickly to respond to the needs of the University's women students.
Deans of Women Alice Freeman Palmer and Marion Talbot made forceful cases to compel the University to provide suitable residences for women. Under their leadership and with the support of other University administrators, especially William Rainey Harper, major donors for women's housing were soon identified. Elizabeth Kelly, among the most important of them, had been married twice-first to Carlo Hull of Lower Sandusky, Ohio, and then Hiram Kelly of Sacramento, California. When Hiram died in 1889, he left Elizabeth a considerable fortune, which she used to support philanthropies including the University of Chicago. Elizabeth Kelly not only gave $62,000 dollars to build Kelly Hall in 1893, she also contributed an additional $70,000 six years later for Green Hall, named in honor of her parents. In a final act of great generosity, Kelly left $150,000 in her will to build the Classics Building, designated the "Hiram Kelly Memorial," which was completed in 1915.
Other donors readily matched Kelly's enthusiasm. The same year that Kelly Hall was built, Mary Beecher and Nancy S. Foster each gave $50,000 to build two additional residence halls. Beecher Hall (named after the donor's late husband, Jerome) cost only a few thousand dollars more than the amount originally budgeted. Foster Hall, however, was both larger and more expensive than Kelly, Green, and Beecher Halls immediately to its north. Nancy Foster was born to a Scots-Irish family from New Hampshire and came to Chicago in 1840 as the wife of Dr. John H. Foster; she took up residence with her daughter after her husband's death in 1874. A Unitarian for much of her life, Foster's could have distanced herself from the early Baptist orientation of the University of Chicago, but she gave to the University freely without any direct solicitation. After the initial planning for Foster Hall was finished, University officials found that the building could not be erected for the amount donated. On instructions from Nancy Foster, however, her daughter assured the Board of Trustees that if the University built the residence hall, the family would pay the entire construction cost. Moreover, when the University decided to enlarge the building in 1900, Nancy Foster again agreed to pay the costs of expansion. In all, she gave more than $83,000 toward the building. Because of ill health, Foster was able to see the completed building only once before her death in 1901.
The new University of Chicago was fortunate in assembling a host of major donors much more rapidly than its predecessor. The Trustees of the Old University had raised slightly more than $100,000 to launch the construction of their rather modest campus at 35th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in 1857, but these funds were hardly sufficient to cover the full building costs or ongoing operating expenses.
The financial situation enjoyed by the second University was very different. The safety net created by John D. Rockefeller's largesse, always given with careful deliberation, was both supportive and prescriptive, supportive in the sense that his gifts underwrote current academic operations and provided for long-term endowment, but prescriptive because Rockefeller insisted that his money should not be used to erect buildings. This strategy compelled University leaders to find other donors-such as Silas Cobb, Adolphus Clay Bartlett, and Leon Mandel-who were willing to pay for the costs of building construction.
Silas Cobb's gift, which was used for the construction of the University's first building, was especially significant, not only because it provided a centrally located building on the early Quadrangles, but even more because Goodspeed and Harper managed to obtain it late in the spring of 1892, when the deadline for matching a pledge of $100,000 from Marshall Field was fast approaching. The son of a Vermont tanner and papermaker, Silas Cobb arrived in Chicago in 1833 with modest education and little money, but through shrewd business dealings in the saddle and harness industry he assembled a considerable fortune, including lucrative real estate holdings. Cobb made substantial investments in public utilities in Chicago and became a director of the Chicago Gas, Light and Coke Company. Later he secured positions on the boards of directors of two railroads, the Galena and Chicago Union and the Beloit and Madison, which were later combined to become the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. Cobb was also appointed the president of the Chicago City Railway Company and was responsible for introducing cable cars to the city. A potential donor to the University of Chicago because of his business success, Cobb was also drawn to the new institution's cause by overlapping family connections. His wife was the sister of Mrs. Jerome Beecher, and after Mrs. Cobb's death he lived with his daughter and her husband, the brother of George C. Walker. Urged on by George Walker and visited in person by William Rainey Harper, Cobb agreed in June 1892 to give $150,000 to the University of Chicago, a donation that paid the construction costs of the central lecture hall already under construction.
Also salutary for the University was the offer by Adolphus Clay Bartlett in 1900 to provide $125,000 for the erection of a gymnasium on campus, galvanizing as it did the University's early emphasis on athleticism and competitive sports. Bartlett's primary personal concern in life, however, was not physical culture, on or off campus, but rather the advance of his business interests. Beginning as a lowly clerk, Bartlett was able to take advantage of generous profit-sharing measures supported by his employer, Tuttle, Hubbard and Company, so that by 1871 he had risen to become a partner in the large Chicago dry goods firm. Reflecting his new status as a city business leader, Bartlett was appointed a member of the Chicago Board of Education in 1878, and he served on the boards of several corporations (including the powerful Northern Trust Company). Bartlett also aided in the establishment of several of the city's cultural organizations, including the Art Institute and the Chicago Historical Society, and he provided funds for the World's Parliament of Religions of 1893. In 1900, he was made a Trustee of the University, a responsibility that inspired him to supplement his initial gift to the University with $25,000 to cover additional costs incurred during the gymnasium's construction.
Leon Mandel, another prominent Chicago merchant who made a vital donation to the University of Chicago, contributed $85,000 for the construction of a much-needed assembly hall as part of the Tower Group at 57th Street and University Avenue. The son of a German Jewish dry goods retailer, Mandel was born in Kertzenheim, Germany, in 1841 and emigrated to America in 1852, where he eventually joined his brothers in Chicago to establish a department store, Mandel Brothers. A member of Chicago's Sinai Congregation, as well as a chief contributor to both the Jewish Training School and the Associated Jewish Charities of Chicago, Mandel was always alert to ways to support religious, educational, and charitable causes. He gave several thousand dollars toward the construction of Harper Memorial Library and Michael Reese Hospital, and he made provision in his will for $100,000 to be divided among a number of the city's charities upon his death.
The turn of the twentieth century was a time of significant expansion and change in scientific research. Great strides were being made in the campaign to discover the causes of disease. Beginning in 1901, a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded annually to honor the world's leading scientists for biological research, including studies of widespread diseases such as diphtheria, malaria, lupus, and tuberculosis. Many scientific researchers were pursuing valuable work at the nation's institutions of higher learning, including the University of Chicago. But the new University's ambition was constrained by its lack of research facilities. By the mid-1890s the University had a number of distinguished scientists of its faculty, but it lacked the facilities to provide them with supportive laboratory environments. To secure its place at the forefront of scientific research in the United States, Chicago desperately needed the resources provided by donors like Helen Culver.
While she was still rather young, Helen Culver (1832-1925) moved from her home in upstate New York to the Illinois prairie in the hopes of establishing herself as a teacher, but quickly gave up a career in education to respond to a plea for help from her cousin Charles J. Hull. Hull's wife had died in 1860, leaving him with two young children in need of a surrogate mother. Constrained by domestic expectations and feelings of familial duty, Helen took on the responsibility of raising the youngsters until their premature deaths in 1866 and 1874.
Several years later, Charles Hull also died-leaving his fortune to Helen. Over the years Helen Culver became a business associate of Hull and was partially responsible for the growth of his real estate empire. She opted not to spend her fortune on herself but rather to give it away to worthy local institutions. She was particularly interested in Jane Addams' social reform work on the city's West Side. Learning that Addams and her colleagues needed a base of operations, she generously gave them the title to the Hull family home on Halsted Street. The reformers gratefully named their institution Hull House and made Culver one of the settlement's trustees. An advocate of efficient government and education, the reform-minded philanthropist also financed an inquiry into municipal revenues and funded University of Chicago professor W. I. Thomas's research with Florian Znaniecki on the life of Polish peasants in Europe and their immigration to America.
Perhaps the greatest example of Culver's philanthropy were her donations totaling $1.1 million to the University of Chicago. Beginning in 1895, she contributed steadily to a fund dedicated to the construction of four scientific research laboratories for zoological, botanical, anatomical, and physiological investigation. Known as the Hull Biological Laboratories, the buildings were finished in 1897 and were a symbol of Culver's personal interest in advancing research and teaching in the natural sciences. In comments at the buildings' dedicatory ceremonies, she expressed her desire to support "those forms of inquiry which explore the Creator's will as expressed in the laws of life" and to be the "means of making lives more sound and wholesome."
The Hull Court buildings did not end Culver's relationship with the University of Chicago. When reports began to circulate that the University administration was considering plans to segregate male and female students, she wrote a strongly worded letter to President William Rainey Harper in July 1902. She was prompted, she said, not "by outside influence, but by my own desire that women should have an equal chance with men for education." Gender segregation of any kind at the University of Chicago, Helen Culver believed, was absolutely unwarranted. While the University began to implement segregation for the first two years of undergraduate education, faculty and alumnae opposition to the plan was immediate and overwhelming, and the experiment was soon abandoned. Culver's generosity found final expression in a provision of her will bequeathing $600,000 from her estate to the University of Chicago.
The University of Chicago has long accorded John D. Rockefeller the official designation of "Founder," and that accolade may offer some historical compensation to Rockefeller's more conventional and hostile sobriquet of "robber baron." Simply put, Rockefeller's enormous contributions, totaling almost $35 million between 1892 and 1910, made possible the creation of a world-renowned research university within the short space of two decades. Although Rockefeller took great pride in the new University, he visited its campus on only two occasions-at the 1896 Quinquennial Celebration and 1901 Decennial Celebration-and each time he kept a very low profile. This modesty was in keeping with his resolute conviction that others -- especially the President and the Trustees -- needed to accept and to exercise responsibility for the new University. As Rockefeller's confidant and sometime advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, put it to William Rainey Harper in 1892, "He would prefer in general not to take active part in the counsels of the management. He prefers to rest the whole weight of the management on the shoulders of the proper officers."
Rockefeller was a devoted and pious Baptist. His Christian convictions pushed him to give unstintingly to his fellow human beings, even as it tempered his giving by emphasizing the need for self-sufficiency and good work habits among those who desired his help. Born in Richford, New York, but raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Rockefeller worked his way up from clerk and bookkeeper to multimillionaire and head of the Standard Oil Company. Investments and company profits gave him an immense personal fortune, estimated by biographer Ron Chernow to be worth $200 million by 1897, but they did not bring him peace of mind, nor did they bring him admiration or respect from many Americans. If anything, his wealth became a liability; only charity, he came to believe, could put him right with God and his fellow human beings.
Rockefeller's initial philanthropic relations with the new University of Chicago were forged in 1889, when he pledged $600,000 to help launch the new university, provided that its Chicago supporters raise an additional $400,000 within a year's time. Initially, Rockefeller expected and wanted the University to be a liberal-arts college, not the research university that William Rainey Harper so strongly promoted. Moreover, he never ceased to worry that his own vast fortune would tempt his friends and compatriots in Chicago to look to him to support permanently the entire financial edifice of the University. Hence, Rockefeller was especially sensitive to the need of gaining and retaining substantial support among the members of the Chicago civic elite. In a personal meeting with Rockefeller in April 1891, Gates had found him "troubled and depressed. He has begun to feel that Chicago is lying down on him."
The great generosity soon displayed by early Chicago donors like Martin Ryerson, George Walker, Sidney Kent, Marshall Field, and others between 1891 and 1896 temporarily resolved such doubts in Rockefeller's mind, but the issue of the proper extent of his role in supporting the University continued to plague his relationships with Harper and the Board of Trustees. Moreover, Rockefeller's initial worries in 1891 and 1892 over the state of the University's finances escalated over the next decade. In his desire to attract the most distinguished research faculty to Chicago, Harper promised salaries and departmental research funds that the fledgling University could not afford. Soon, Rockefeller found himself having to cover huge operating deficits, amounting to almost 30 per cent of the annual operating budgets between 1893 and 1904, even as Harper urged him to provide additional major gifts to the University's endowment.
After years of complaints and pleas for greater budgetary discipline, Rockefeller and his advisers in New York seemed determined to bring Harper under control. In late 1903 Rockefeller sent Starr J. Murphy to Chicago on an investigative mission to undertake an "exhaustive inquiry" into the University's operations and especially its finances. A no-nonsense lawyer with a sharp pen and a keen eye for the foibles of institutional budgeting, Murphy produced a long, detailed, and insightful report in early 1904 that was generally complimentary but also commented on Harper's almost charismatic power over his Trustees: "The President is a man of great persuasiveness, and it is easy for him to present to his Trustees, in a very convincing way, the importance and necessity of the things which he desires to see accomplished. Being subjected as they are to this pressure, and realizing the value and the need of the various things recommended, it is not surprising that the Trustees should be disposed to acquiesce in his plans, so far as the resources of the institution will permit; and to be optimistic with regard to the possibility of increasing those resources."
This situation, Murphy continued, must not be allowed to continue, and he left no doubt who was responsible: "The existing financial situation, and the course of financial administration for the past few years is intolerable and must be altered. While it is desirable and necessary that the Trustees should be men of broad intellectual sympathy and of keen appreciation of educational needs and possibilities, it is also necessary that they should be men of iron resolution, capable, notwithstanding their full appreciation of these things, of appreciating, with equal force, the limitations imposed by financial considerations. This is where they have proved themselves lacking, and it is in this direction that a change must be sought."
As the deficit continued to trouble Rockefeller and his advisers, Starr Murphy submitted a second, more negative report in February 1905, laying the blame on the officers of the University for the "constant and alarming increase in the budget deficits." For Murphy, the University's budget estimates were characterized by "utter worthlessness" which offered Rockefeller "no protection whatever." Indeed, they were "purely a matter of form, as the University authorities do not consider themselves in any way bound by them." The outraged reactions of Goodspeed and several other Trustees protesting against what Goodspeed called Murphy's "offensive expressions" could not mask the fact that Murphy had dared to express openly what others had only been willing to ponder silently for many years.
Starr Murphy's two reports left little doubt about the origins or the consequences of William Rainey Harper's expansionist fiscal policies, but the University was not able to curb its habits of chronic deficit spending until well after Harper's death in January 1906. Under President Harry Pratt Judson's leadership, the University finally began to exercise restraint in incurring new obligations, a change of policy that Rockefeller certainly welcomed. In the end, nevertheless, it was Rockefeller who had to resolve the deficit problem with several massive additional gifts to the endowment between 1906 and 1910, concluding with Rockefeller's Final Gift of $10 million in December 1910, his last personal University benefaction. These gifts essentially capitalized the structural deficit and allowed the University to bring order to its financial affairs without compromising its scholarly reputation or educational quality.
BUILDING FOR A LONG FUTURE:
The University of Chicago and Its Donors, 1889-1930