Early endowments for student scholarships, graduate fellowships, and faculty lectureships were essential in establishing the University's reputation as a place of lively scholarly inquiry accessible to the most gifted students and faculty. After the World War I, University administrators could look back at these first donations as worthy precursors to the major gifts raised for the support of academic and student-life programs that were at the heart of the development campaign of 1924-26.
University Trustees were among those making gifts for fellowships, scholarships, and research prizes. Charles L. Hutchinson, for example, established a fellowship fund to support teaching and research in Latin in 1893. Born in 1854, Hutchinson was still a child when his family moved to the frontier town of Chicago from their home in Lynn, Massachusetts. His father Benjamin ensured the financial success of his family by founding lucrative businesses in meatpacking, banking, and the grain trade, becoming a major figure in the Chicago business community of the 1870s and 1880s. When he reached maturity, the younger Hutchinson used his share of his father's fortune, along with the considerable resources generated from his work as president of the Corn Exchange Bank, to establish himself as one of the most influential and inspired leaders of cultural philanthropy in Chicago in the late nineteenth century.
Although he never attended college, Hutchinson was passionately interested in the fine arts, and in 1882, at the age of 28, he was tapped to be president of the Art Institute, serving until his death in 1924. In the fall of 1890 Hutchinson played a pivotal role in the successful founding of the new University by offering Frederick Gates and Thomas Goodspeed his personal support during their fundraising canvas among non-Baptist Chicago civic leaders. In the months that followed, Hutchinson's good name and solid reputation opened many doors that would have otherwise remained closed. Appropriately, Charles Hutchinson was named along with his close friend Martin Ryerson as a member of the first Board of Trustees of the new University of Chicago. He proved a dedicated supporter and found a special role as the chairman of the Trustees' Committee on Buildings and Grounds, which allowed him to exercise supervisory control over many of the most important construction projects in the first thirty years of University's history. In 1901 Hutchinson gave the University $60,000 for the construction of Hutchinson Commons, a central dining hall in the neo-Gothic Tower Group, whose design and planning gave great delight to the capitalist connoisseur.
Other Chicagoans soon followed Hutchinson by supporting research and teaching opportunities at the University. One such donor, Caroline Haskell, gave $40,000 in 1894 to endow two extraordinary programs-the Haskell and the Barrows Lectureships on Comparative Religion. Committed to Christianity's missionary spirit but also intensely curious about non-Christian religions as a result of having attended the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893, Haskell wanted her lectureships to encourage the interest that late-nineteenth-century Americans were beginning to show in Eastern religions. Haskell also prescribed that the Barrows Lectures were to be delivered in India, where her lecturers would present the "great questions of the truths of Christianity, its harmonies with the truths of other religions, its rightful claims, and the best methods of setting them forth," to the "scholarly and thoughtful people of India." Caroline Haskell's third and final donation of 1894 was a $100,000 gift to erect the Haskell Oriental Museum on the University campus. The cornerstone of this building, which now houses the Department of Anthropology, proclaims what might be considered one of Mrs. Haskell's fundamental ideals, Lux ex oriente, "Light from the East."
Like Caroline Haskell, Catherine Seipp leavened research-oriented contributions to the University with her own vision of Chicago's intellectual priorities. The wife of one of Chicago's best-known German-American brewers, Seipp was interested in calling attention to the issue of ethnic identity and the place it deserved in scholarly research. In 1904 she presented the University with $6,000 to establish the Conrad Seipp Memorial German Prizes. Named for her husband, the three one-time prizes honored the best monographs submitted on the topic, "The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence."
Less wealthy men and women did what they could to bolster the cause of higher education at the University of Chicago. Charles Smiley's gift demonstrated such a commitment in a remarkable way. An African-American who grew up in impoverished circumstances, Smiley rose into Chicago's lower middle class by operating a catering business on the city's South Side. According to his friend and University Trustee Jesse Baldwin, the popularity of this business enterprise brought Smiley financial prosperity. Of the entrepreneur's $11,000 estate at the time of his death in 1911, $3,000 was set aside to endow the Charles H. Smiley Scholarship at the University of Chicago, yielding $150 a year. Smiley's express wish was that the scholarship should be used to provide support for "poor but promising students, preferably of the colored race."
Staff members such as Horace Spencer Fiske also made gifts of prizes to the University. Seeking to recognize the artistic abilities of graduate and undergraduate students, Fiske gave a thousand-dollar bond to President Harry Pratt Judson in 1919 to establish the John Billings Fiske Prize in Poetry. He then doubled the fund in 1936. A onetime lecturer in the University Extension and retired editor of both the University Record and the University of Chicago Magazine, Fiske established the prize to honor his late father. While the prize fund's annual return was a rather modest fifty dollars, students were drawn by the chance to have the winning work published in the University Record. Marian Esther Manly, an undergraduate student who was the daughter of Methodist missionaries, received the first John Billings Fiske Prize in 1920 for her poem, "Li Sien."
Public rites marking the death of pathologist Howard T. Ricketts in 1910 commemorated an extraordinary scholarly life, lived to the full. Foreign dignitaries moved by Ricketts' campaigns against disease placed honorary ribbons on his casket. Grieving members of the scientific community named both a taxonomic family (Rickettsiaceae) and an order (Rickettsiales) after him. But the most meaningful memorial to Ricketts may have been the student research prize his family established in his honor. While Ricketts's wife and children, like most faculty families, were unable to make a large donation owing to their rather modest means, they hoped to encourage the pursuit of new knowledge that had been the focus of Ricketts' scientific life. Howard Taylor Ricketts (1871-1910) was a native Midwesterner and a Northwestern University medical graduate. Fascinated by the study of disease but unwilling to restrict himself to traditional research methods, Ricketts sometimes injected himself with pathogens as a way of measuring their effects. This unorthodox approach, combined with his work on blastomycosis (a fungal infection that normally affects the skin), merited him a teaching offer in 1901 from the Department of Pathology and Bacteriology at the University of Chicago. Before he formally accepted the offer, Ricketts took time off to study at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Arriving in Chicago in 1902, he continued his study of blastomycosis and in 1904 was appointed assistant to John M. Dodson, the University's dean of medical students.
While at the University of Chicago, Ricketts planned an investigation of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and in 1906, with funding from the McCormick Memorial Institute, the State of Montana, the University, and the American Medical Association, he traveled to Montana to study the disease. For the next four years, Ricketts divided his life between campus-based laboratories and his research in the field. As part of his research, he contacted victims of the disease, collected and studied affected animals, and raised additional funds for his project. Not until the second year of his investigation, however, did Ricketts and his assistant J. J. Moore make a critical breakthrough by discovering that wood ticks were the primary carriers of the bacillus that caused the fever.
An outbreak of typhus in Mexico City caught Ricketts's attention, and taking advantage of a leave of absence from the University of Chicago and relying on the principles he had established in his Montana research, Ricketts went to Mexico in 1909 and plunged into his study of typhus. There he discovered that typhus closely resembled spotted fever, leading him to argue that insects spread both diseases. Unknown to Ricketts, this same conclusion had been reached by the French surgeon Jules Henri Nicolle, who identified lice as the culprits. Ricketts's final stint of research was cut short by a critical illness. Just days after isolating the microorganism he contended was the cause of typhus, Ricketts died on May 5, 1910, most likely from an infected insect's bite.
As a memorial to her husband, Myra Tubbs Ricketts in 1912 donated $5,000 to the University. She stipulated that the income from the endowment was to go to providing an annual prize-the Howard Taylor Ricketts Prize-for "the student presenting the best results of research in Pathology or Bacteriology." Others who were moved to memorialize Ricketts raised money to build a laboratory in his honor for the Department of Pathology, Hygiene, and Bacteriology. Named the Ricketts Laboratory, the building was erected in 1914 and stood on Ellis Avenue until its site was claimed more than seventy years later by the Kersten Physics Teaching Center and the gate to the Science Quadrangles.
According to campus folklore, Jesse L. Rosenberger was a generous recluse who walked Chicago's streets with a strange request, written on a small card, tucked inside his coat pocket. The card directed whomever might find Rosenberger's body to fulfill his last request, namely, that the University of Chicago must be notified immediately about his death. This puzzling dictum was all the more ironic in view of the fact that after the death of Rosenberger's wife in 1918, he avoided any personal contact with University officials.
Jesse L. (1860-1939) and Susan Colver Rosenberger (1859-1918) came from very different family backgrounds. A descendant of a long line of Baptist preachers, Susan was born a New England Yankee. Jesse, on the other hand, counted among his ancestors German Mennonites from Pennsylvania; he was so intrigued by his heritage that he published three books with the University of Chicago Press on the Pennsylvania Germans and the Colver and Rosenberger families. Yet the Rosenbergers' early lives did have powerful similarities as well, for each had been born to parents given to constant moves, and each learned to endure incessant displacement as a child. Both were teachers at some point in their lives, and they shared the distinction of attending the first University of Chicago. Although Jesse was forced to finish his education at the University of Rochester when the University of Chicago entered bankruptcy, Susan was able to complete her bachelor's (1882) and master's (1886) degrees at the Old University. Trained as a lawyer at the Chicago College of Law of Lake Forest University, Rosenberger set up a law practice in 1890 and eventually made a substantial fortune by publishing law and business journals.
Jesse and Susan first became acquainted through the professional association of their fathers, but their relationship blossomed on the University campus. The couple wed in 1912, but their marital bliss was short-lived. Susan began suffering from periodic nervous exhaustion and rheumatism soon after their wedding, forcing Jesse to close his law and publishing offices so they could travel to more congenial climates in an effort to improve her health. In 1918 the Rosenbergers returned to Chicago, only to learn that Susan had developed a brain tumor. She died on November 19, 1918, from complications associated with surgery.
Loyal alumnae of the Old University, the Rosenbergers were no less staunch champions of its successor. Over the course of 23 years, they gave $55,000 to the University, beginning with the transfer in 1915 of an old homestead owned by Susan's grandfather, Nathaniel Colver. The sale of this property created the Nathaniel Colver Lectureship and Publication Fund. Two months later, the couple gave an additional gift to establish the Colver-Rosenberger Lecture Fund, and continued to make substantial gifts for fellowships, scholarships, and other forms of student aid over the next several years. In 1917 they made a gift of $3,000 to fund a University-wide prize, the Rosenberger Medal. Created to honor outstanding scholarly and artistic efforts, the Medal constitutes one of the highest honors the University can bestow. Over the years the University has awarded the Rosenberger Medal to such distinguished individuals as author Toni Morrison, conductors Sir Georg Solti and Pierre Boulez, and Frederick Grant Banting, the discoverer of insulin.
Jesse Rosenberger continued to give generously to the University in memory of his late wife. As late as 1938, just a year before his death, he gave thousands of dollars to endow two permanent funds known as the Susan Colver Rosenberger Aid Fund and the Susan Colver Rosenberger Educational Prize. The Aid Fund financed gifts or loans to students -- especially women -- who were preparing to teach or enter the field of social work, while the Prize funded awards for superior dissertation research in education.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, American rare book and manuscript collecting became a fashionable pursuit that offered intellectual and cultural satisfactions as well as the camaraderie of fellow devotees. Chicago's Caxton Club, founded in 1895, along with informal social gatherings, provided an opportunity for bibliophiles to share their love of books. A group of collectors who regularly haunted the rare book section of Alexander C. McClurg's bookstore were dubbed "Saints and Sinners" by humorist Eugene Field, one of the regulars. Among the clerical members of the group was Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus (1856-1921), who was perhaps the most notable Chicago collector to contribute rare books, manuscripts, and autographs to the early University of Chicago.
Born in Chesterville, Ohio, Gunsaulus came to prominence as the minister of the socially prestigious Plymouth Congregational Church of Chicago. Gunsaulus extended his reputation as a powerful preacher and earned extra money to support his book and manuscript collecting by conducting summer lecture tours across the country. Influenced by deep religious principles, Gunsaulus, like other culturally conservative reformers in America and in Europe, hoped that a robust program of philanthropy could alleviate, if not eliminate, the worst aspects of modern life. One outlet for Gunsaulus's cultural and social revisionism was his own personal crusade to create new, more egalitarian educational institutions. In an address to his Plymouth Church parishioners, he proposed founding an institute of technology that would be open to all qualified students seeking technical training. Inspired by Gunsaulus's idea, meatpacking magnate Philip D. Armour put up the needed money to launch the Armour Institute of Technology in 1893, an institution Gunsaulus served for the rest of his life as president (and which later became the Illinois Institute of Technology). Gunsaulus assumed a second academic position in 1912, when he was appointed Professorial Lecturer on Practical Theology in the University of Chicago Divinity School.
For Gunsaulus, collecting and reading antiquarian books and manuscripts was another way to escape the materialism and immorality of modernity. Eugene Field's story, "The Temptation of Friar Gonsol," written in 1889, recounts how Friar Gonsol (Gunsaulus) and Friar Francis (Frank W. Bristol) were tempted by a rare book. Gunsaulus believed that, confronted with the power and aesthetic appeal of texts from the past, readers would naturally be encouraged to renew themselves intellectually and spiritually. The aged pages of a manuscript had an almost magical power to recall a world where values such as chivalric honor were still meaningful. Nor was this journey back in time to be the privilege of a wealthy few. Gunsaulus saw it as his personal mission to provide manuscripts and rare books to the University of Chicago, so it could become a present-day repository of the creative achievements of past centuries. Visitors to the University Library, "weary of vulgar and soul-destroying success" and pining for a return to "knightly devotion to what often seem lost causes in politics, society, church, and state," would gain enlightenment from viewing his gifts.
Despite his loyalty to the Armour Institute, Gunsaulus reserved his most valuable gifts for the University of Chicago, prompting library administrator J.C.M. Hanson to dub him "the patron saint of the University Libraries." In 1910 Gunsaulus gave the Library a large number of early American manuscripts, letters, and autographs (eventually known as the Butler-Gunsaulus Collection). Two years later, he began to donate medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and early printed books, his most significant donations coming between 1915 and 1917. In these two years, Gunsaulus presented a manuscript of Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum gentilium (1385-87), and early printed editions of Augustine's De civitate dei (1470) and Cicero's De officiis (1470). Gunsaulus also donated a copy of the St. Albans Chronicle (1481), still regarded as one of the finest specimens of early English typography in the United States. Gunsaulus concluded his gifts to the University in 1917 and 1919 with additional fifteenth-century books and the proof sheets for Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah, annotated by the composer.
Unlike donors who provide funds for buildings, scholarships, and the purchase of library materials, private individuals who present books and manuscripts to an institution have personal as well as philanthropic goals. Collectors who have acquired materials with purpose and passion often wish to preserve the integrity of their collection and see that it serves educational and scholarly uses.
One gift to the University of Chicago Library, made at the suggestion of Charles L. Hutchinson, was the only book collection to have survived the Chicago fire and be preserved under one roof. The Ebenezer Lane Library was started by lawyer and judge Ebenezer Lane (1793-1866), who arrived in Chicago in 1856 from Ohio and served as counsel and resident director of the Illinois Central Railroad. His son, Ebenezer S. Lane (1819-1892), graduated from Kenyon College and then studied medicine at the Ohio Medical School and in Paris. He left the practice of medicine to work in the railroad, real estate and loan business; and he also followed his father's interest in collecting books, manuscripts and autographs. The Lane collection totaled about 10,000 volumes when his children, the third Ebenezer Lane and his daughter, Fannie G. Lane, began discussions about presenting it to the University of Chicago, along with family papers. The collection, now dispersed throughout Special Collections and the Library's circulating stacks, brought important works in history, travel, topography, science, art, architecture, and literature to the University at a time when faculty interests were expanding into new areas of concentration.
Because collectors often constitute a closely knit community, decisions about the disposition of a collection can influence others in the circle. Few Library donors did more than Gunsaulus to extend their own contributions by persuading their friends to contribute. Knowing of the strong tradition of biblical study at the University, Chicago collector Emma B. Hodge made a series of gifts between 1912 and 1920 of early printed books and manuscripts of the Renaissance and Reformation period, so that they would be available to students and scholars. Her gifts included works written or containing commentary by Erasmus, Luther, and Philip Melancthon. Scholarship has concluded that marginal commentary in two books previously believed to have been owned and annotated by Melancthon are more likely to have been written by members of the Grynaeus family of humanists, illustrating the way that books in the Hodge collection continue to stimulate research and investigation.
Also at Gunsaulus's suggestion, Mrs. Erskine M. Phelps donated her late husband's Napoleon collection to the University in 1910. Phelps's husband had been passionate about collecting everything and anything associated with Napoleon. By the end of his life he had acquired seventy-five objets d'art, ninety-five books, three autograph documents, an assortment of objects including Napoleon's spectacles, and a lock of the general's hair.
Gifts to the University Library from Chicago collectors demonstrated confidence in the University's progress and a desire to support its educational and research program. In 1916, Mrs. George M. Eckels presented to the University the collection of books and other materials relating to Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Commonwealth formed by her late husband, Chicago lawyer George M. Eckels. The collection, consisting of over 500 books, pamphlets, engravings and other materials, was considered to be the most complete at that time for the study of this turbulent period in English history. In her letter to President Judson, Mrs. Eckels explained that "While Mr. Eckels had no official connection with the University, he followed its development with enthusiastic interest, and I feel that placing this material at the disposal of students of the Unviersity engaged in broad and thorough research is an expression, in concrete form, of that interest, and the best of memorials to him."
New Testament scholarship at the University resulted in a number of dramatic manuscript acquisitions to support the textual, iconographic, linguistic and historical research of Edgar J. Goodspeed and others. In 1932 Goodspeed discovered a complete thirteenth-century Byzantine New Testament manuscript in a Paris antique shop that was acquired by Goodspeed's colleague Harold R. Willoughby for Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick and loaned to the Department of New Testament for study. The Rockefeller McCormick New Testament was purchased by Elizabeth Day McCormick, daughter of Anita McCormick Blaine's cousin Robert, from her cousin's estate in 1942 and donated to the University. Elizabeth Day McCormick also acquired a unique illustrated manuscript of Revelation in Greek, dated ca. 1600. She made the manuscript available to University scholars and in 1937 presented the Elizabeth Day McCormick Apocalpyse to the University. Not all Library donors were wealthy members of the city's establishment. A young Polish-American post office employee, Stansilaw Jan Figura, also sought to emulate the example of earlier benefactors. Starting with a few Polish-language pamphlets in 1934, Figura donated more than 200 books to the University Library over the next twenty-five years, purchasing them on his meager U.S. postal clerk's salary.
BUILDING FOR A LONG FUTURE:
The University of Chicago and Its Donors, 1889-1930