BUILDING FOR A LONG FUTURE:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
AND ITS DONORS, 1889-1930
PART FOUR: EXPANDING UNIVERSITY RESOURCES
- The University Campaign of 1924-1926
- Shirley Farr
- Harold H. Swift and the Swift Family
- Frank R. and Frances Crane Lillie
THE UNIVERSITY CAMPAIGN OF 1924-1926
The University of Chicago's development campaign of 1924-26 was the brainchild of President Ernest DeWitt Burton. A long-time faculty member in the Divinity School, Burton had occupied various administrative leadership positions during the Harper and Judson presidencies, including the Directorship of the University Library. When Judson decided to retire in late 1922, and the pool of external candidates to succeed him proved unpromising, the Board of Trustees turned to Burton to become the third President of the University. Any notion that Burton's tenure would be merely "acting" soon disappeared. In the early months of his administration, demonstrating energetic leadership that had been woefully missing from the last five years of Judson's presidency, Burton began to conceive a broad-based fundraising effort to meet the University's financial needs.Burton's strong leadership was desperately needed, for the early 1920s were a time of great challenges and perplexing transitions for the University. Not only had John D. Rockefeller's largesse finally come to a close with receipt of the last installment of his Final Gift in January 1920, but Chicago was encountering serious competitive challenges from Harvard, Columbia, and other leading research universities in retaining distinguished senior faculty and in recruiting the most promising younger researchers. By the mid 1920s Columbia's top salary levels for its most distinguished full professors exceeded the University of Chicago's salary range by almost 20%. Similar disparities occurred in the ranks of associate and assistant professor. Chicago required serious new investments in faculty compensation, but it also needed substantial new funds to support faculty research. As the most senior faculty from the Harper and Judson eras began to retire, the University faced the need to recruit a new generation of distinguished researchers to Hyde Park. Moreover, a massive post-war surge in student enrollments (Chicago had 13,000 students in 1924, compared to 6,000 in 1910) had put heavy pressure on facilities and instructional resources alike. Additionally, the ambitious plans for the new Medical School, which had languished during World War I, now needed to be implemented.
During February and March of 1924, Burton and his associates conducted a detailed survey of current and future University needs and concluded that the University needed to double its endowment within the next ten to fifteen years, which meant adding $55 million in new capital resources, with at least $17.5 million of this money being raised within the next two years. Working closely with Board President Harold Swift, Burton also determined that a fundraising campaign of such magnitude and scope -- well beyond anything ever attempted in the Harper era -- compelled the University to seek the advice and managerial expertise of outside professionals. Hence, in May 1924 the Trustees commissioned the John Price Jones Corporation of New York to oversee the first professionally directed fundraising campaign in the University's history. The Trustees further agreed upon a two-year campaign goal of $6.5 million for new buildings and $11 million for additional endowment in support of faculty salaries, facilities, research, and student life. Burton's leadership was to be critical to the success or failure of the campaign. His elegant brochure, The University of Chicago in 1940, produced in 1925 to provide an overall vision for the campaign, was and remains one of the most ambitious and coherent fundraising visions ever articulated by a President of the University.
The campaign of 1924-26 was a remarkable effort. Under the tutelage of the Jones Corporation, University officials moved beyond the traditional range of donors relied upon in the past -- the members of the Board of Trustees and other selected major gift prospects -- to include the University's alumni and friends and even its faculty as potential donors. An extensive network of alumni groups based throughout the United States raised $1.9 million, based on contributions from no less than 11,300 alumni, a remarkable achievement for a university most of whose graduates were not yet in positions of wealth and influence. The Rockefeller-funded General Education Board added an additional $2 million, while the University's Trustees raised close to $1.7 million within their own ranks. Prominent Chicagoans also gave generously, both toward construction of new buildings such as Wieboldt Hall and to the creation of new endowments for research and teaching, including particularly the new Distinguished Service Professorships that were one of Burton's most treasured initiatives. The first such Professorship was funded by Martin Ryerson in 1925 with a gift of $200,000, and his generosity was matched in the next several years by Frank P. Hixon, Charles H. Swift, Sewell L. Avery, Charles F. Grey, Morton D. Hull, and others. In all, the University's development effort raised $7 million in a year and a half.
Burton's untimely death on May 26, 1925, was a crushing blow to the campaign. As the final report on the campaign put it with quiet elegance, "Many alumni and citizens of Chicago believed in him and were willing to follow where he led." Inheriting a campaign that had temporarily lost its momentum, and uncomfortable with the strategies proposed by the professional fundraisers, the new President of the University, Max Mason, decided in January 1926 to conclude the University's contractual relationship with the John Price Jones Corporation and pursue institutional development in a less public manner. By 1928, Mason's "quiet" campaign had brought the total amount raised to $12 million of the original $17.5 million goal, including funds for the University endowment, new buildings on campus, and increases in salaries to retain key senior members of the faculty.
SHIRLEY FARR
"Giving [to the University] without blowing a trumpet [is] an injustice to the other alumnae of the University," University of Chicago alumna Shirley Farr wrote to Ernest DeWitt Burton in November, 1923. Upset that some men at the University sought to keep women off "important committee[s]," she regarded official silence about her own donations as a missed opportunity to show the community at large the valuable roles that women could and did play in supporting the University: "A good majority of the women and a considerable number of the men," Farr continued, "do know what a university is for, and with proper encouragement and leadership could be of real service to the University." But there still were those, especially "most of the men who attended the meetings of the Endowment Fund Committee or the Alumni Council," who "had very little idea of the purpose of any educational institution, or of the particular qualities of our own University." To increase the understanding of such donors in the future, the University would have to broaden the range of contributors (including more women) and educate them more effectively about the real needs and purposes of the University.Shirley Farr (1851-1957) had several strong and mutually reinforcing connections to the University--she was an alumna (Ph.B., 1904), a faculty instructor, and also a member of a prominent Chicago family. Her father, Albert Farr, was a native Vermonter whose lucrative business partnership with Norman Wait Harris, the founder of the Harris Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago, provided Shirley Farr with a comfortable and independent lifestyle. Following her graduation from college, Farr served as an associate professor of history and French at Ripon College, where she later accepted a position on the board of trustees and became a major donor. Returning to the University of Chicago, she held a position as Assistant in History from 1914 to 1917 and a half-time appointment as Instructor in History and departmental counselor from 1929 to 1934.
Shirley Farr's philanthropy was guided by the thematic emphasis on University programs prominently featured in President Burton's campaign. In 1924, she provided a gift of $1,000 annually for five years for the purchase of manuscripts for the Library under the direction of a faculty committee composed of English professor John Matthews Manly, Romance languages scholar William A. Nitze, and medieval historian James Westfall Thompson. By 1929, Farr's manuscript fund, which was established in honor of her father, had purchased twenty-five such manuscripts, including the illuminated fourteenth-century Le Jeu des échecs moralisé of Jacques de Cessoles, two beautiful fifteenth-century manuscripts of Boccaccio, Elegia di Madonna Fiametta and Teseida, and a fourteenth-century manuscript of Guido delle Colonne's Le Livre du gouvernement des rois et des princes.
Shirley Farr made other gifts reflecting her broad and thoughtful interest in programmatic support for the University. Beginning in 1929, Farr contributed gifts amounting to $14,500 to establish an endowment for the Cleo Hearon Fellowship in History, which was named after a fellow University alumna (Ph.B., 1903; Ph.M., 1909; Ph.D., 1913) and professor of history at Agnes Scott College in Georgia. In the same year, Farr provided the first of many gifts that would total $25,000 in support of the University's general development fund. She made other donations in support of causes as diverse as the William Rainey Harper Memorial Library Fund, the Medical School, the Quadrangle Club, the Institute of Sacred Literature, the School of Social Service Administration, and the Law School, where she contributed to the James Parker Hall Professorship endowment. By 1939, when the Board of Trustees took special note of her cumulative contributions, she had donated more than $62,000 to the University of Chicago.
Shirley Farr's gifts were not only committed to the academic units of the University. She also proved to be a loyal alumna for the University at large, serving as a member of the Board of Alumni Relations and contributing regularly to the alumni gift fund. From the time of her return to the campus just before World War I, she also became involved with the University of Chicago Settlement League, a voluntary association supporting the work of the University of Chicago Settlement in the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood. In 1923, Shirley Farr provided $3,000 for the purchase of land for what became Camp Farr, the League's fresh-air children's summer camp near Chesterton, Indiana. Later known as Camp Brueckner-Farr, this benefaction was a fitting expression of Farr's lifelong concern for the welfare of the University and the community of which it was a part.
HAROLD H. SWIFT AND THE SWIFT FAMILY
Few early donors to the University of Chicago gave so consistently and yet so quietly as Harold Swift. An alumnus (Ph.B., 1907) and longtime member and President and Chairman of the Board of Trustees (the latter role from 1922 to 1949), Swift was deeply devoted to "his school," a commitment he demonstrated time and again and often by means of anonymous contributions. His donation of the Swift Prize in Civil Government in 1909 launched what was to become a distinguished career of philanthropy at the University Chicago. Harold Swift was also a family gadfly, mobilizing members of his family on behalf of the University. Swift money, channeled through Harold, subsidized the Library as well as numerous departments, research projects, student prize funds, lectureships, and endowed professorships.A life-long bachelor, Harold Swift (1885-1965) seemed so consumed by his work that he failed to develop deep social relationships beyond his family. Rather, he dedicated his life to the University, manifesting, according to historian Dorothy V. Jones, a powerful sense of proprietorship toward the institution. A businessman willingly swallowed up within a community of articulate and opinionated scholars, he occasionally seemed like a fish out of water. But Swift valiantly defended "his" community against its enemies, seen and unseen. When various forces in the 1930s sought to characterize the University of Chicago as a hotbed of radicalism, he responded briskly with countervailing evidence. As Chairman of the Board, he had the responsibility, he believed, to "understand and interpret the institution to the public."
A large share of Swift's personal donations (along with thousands of his books) went to strengthen the Library, though he occasionally directed funds elsewhere. The "best expenditure of funds" for educational purposes, he declared, "is to make the best places better." Thus, he established the William Vaughn Moody Lectures in 1917 with a pledge of $1,500 a year for five years to bring eminent scholars to campus. He also provided part of the funds needed to acquire the Morton Collection of Drama in 1928, a comprehensive collection of published and unpublished play scripts.
One of Swift's most effective contributions was the $5,000 he gave to help poet and editor Harriet Monroe continue the publication of Poetry magazine. In return, Monroe agreed to bequeath her personal papers and editorial files to the University (along with the residue of the $5,000 gift). Monroe's Poetry manuscript files, received by the Library in 1936, and the funds to continue acquiring contemporary poetry, became the core of the University's impressive holdings in modern poetry and literature. Swift also supported the work of the Department of Music and the University Opera Association, and he gave a large donation in 1920s to an alumni committee organized to buy manuscripts for the Library. He even gave animals raised on his Michigan summer estate property to the Department of Medicine for scientific research.
Nor was Swift's generosity limited to his own gifts. He also encouraged the members of his family to support the University. The Swifts dominated giving in the 1920s, favoring especially the kinds of programmatic donations that the development campaign of 1924-26 encouraged. Harold's older brother Charles, along with his mother Ann, contributed heavily to building and research funds. After establishing the Gustavus F. Swift Fellowship in Chemistry in 1908, Ann Swift quickly eclipsed this initial donation with an array of contributions to medical research (a total of $100,000 to match the $200,000 Harold and Charles gave jointly), other research endowments, and the construction of Swift Hall as the new home for the Divinity School (completed in 1926). Charles continued his mother's example by establishing one of President Burton's new endowed professorships, the Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professorship, in 1926. He also donated to a variety of other campus causes, including faculty travel grants and departmental research funds. In 1929, with an initial transfer of Swift and Company stock worth $50,500, Charles created the nucleus of a special fund to which he added regular increments of $15,000 or more amounting to a total of $130,000 within the following two years. Dedicated initially to endowing the Distinguished Professorship named in his honor, the Charles H. Swift fund continued to grow with additional gifts in the years that followed and still serves as a major support for undergraduate education.
Harold also encouraged sisters Ruth Swift Maguire and Helen Swift-Neilson to donate to the University. Ruth's discretionary fund bought the University's first cyclotron, funded Arthur Compton's cosmic ray research, established the school's Institute of Statistics, and funded publication of the second volume of the Dictionary of American English. She also gave toward the purchase of John M. Manly's personal library and helped the University acquire the Grant Collection of English Bibles in the 1940s.
The gifts of Helen Swift Neilson and Charles Swift transformed the Library's American literature holdings into nationally renowned collections, especially in the field of drama. In 1917, Percy Boynton in the English Department recognized that "the time was ripe for a more extensive and systematic study of American literature." Boynton set out to establish a program of courses and encourage graduate students to pursue research in this field. To accomplish his goal library resources were needed, and these -- readily available at Eastern institutions -- were sorely lacking at Chicago. With the support of John Manly and President Judson, Boynton explained the situation to Harold Swift and his sister, Helen Swift-Neilson (then Mrs. Edward Morris). Beginning with an initial gift and continuing by creating an endowed fund, Mrs. Neilson established what was later designated the William Vaughn Moody collection after the prominent author and University faculty member. By the early 1940s the collection numbered approximately 15,000 volumes and included works by famous and obscure authors, many in first and early editions.
In 1925 Charles Swift supported the acquisition of a literature collection formed by F. W. Atkinson of Brooklyn. The collection included several thousand early American plays and was considered stronger in this area than Harvard's, then the most comprehensive. A group of 73 early American novels was purchased from Atkinson with support from Mrs. Neilson in 1931; and during the 1930s, Charles Swift supported the purchase of additional theatrical resources and a large collection of motion picture "stills." By the time of Harold's death in 1965 he could look back with great pride on his family's extraordinary philanthropy in support of Chicago. Harold Swift was a worthy successor to those heroic early donors, like Rockefeller, Ryerson, and Hutchinson, who had the determination and courage to launch the new University.
FRANK R. AND FRANCES CRANE LILLIE
The charitable work of Frank R. and Frances Crane Lillie was deeply informed by a balance of religious conviction and intellectual commitment. A confirmed rationalist, Frank Lillie took great satisfaction in supporting scientific research at the University of Chicago, while his wife found no greater pleasure than in distributing religious articles and books to friends and acquaintances. Considered separately, they represented opposing poles in their philanthropic values, but together they provided a matchless example of farsighted giving.Frances Crane (1869-1958) was the daughter of Richard Teller Crane, a Chicago capitalist and manufacturer who created a huge national business empire built on metal and ceramic products such as lightning rods, railroad equipment, valves, and plumbing fixtures. His great fortune catapulted his family into the city's upper echelons and made his daughter Frances Crane a wealthy woman. Frances's political radicalism and her unorthodox religious beliefs, however, embarrassed her father and made her the black sheep of the family. Her participation in the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union strike of 1915 outraged the other Cranes (with the exception of her older brother Charles), as did her adoption of a mystical Catholicism, tinged later in life with elements of Zen Buddhism.
However embarrassing her family found such behavior, it proved attractive to Frank Lillie (1870-1947), a student of Charles O. Whitman, the eminent University of Chicago zoologist and director of the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 1896, Frank Lillie and Frances Crane were married. After initial academic appointments at the University of Michigan and Vassar, the Lillies moved to Chicago in 1900 when Frank was offered an assistant professor position in the Department of Zoology. When Whitman died in 1910, his protigi Lillie replaced him as chair of the department, a position that he held until he was appointed the first Dean of the Division of Biological Sciences in 1931.
Frank and Frances Lillie divided their gifts along the fault line of their personal priorities--Frank supported scientific research on campus, while Frances's gifts to the University typically went to the Library. When asked by Library officials if she knew anyone who would buy a collection of books relating to English religious history for the Library, Mrs. Lillie gladly donated the necessary funds. Continuing an interest begun during the Harper administration, her older brother Charles Crane also made numerous contributions to the University, with the bulk of his donations designated for programs in Russian and Slavic studies.
As Chairman of the Department of Zoology, Frank R. Lillie was responsible for the couple's most conspicuous donation to the University of Chicago, the construction of the Whitman Laboratory of Experimental Biology. According to a budgetary analysis done in 1925, the Lillies' initial donation of $60,000 in 1924 was insufficient to meet the full costs. Undeterred, the couple added more than $30,000 to their pledge, $4,000 of which went toward equipping the building. To this very substantial gift, the Lillies then added others. Beginning in 1907, they contributed funds for research trips and projects of faculty colleagues. Their final gift to the University, presented by Mrs. Lillie in 1938, was Crane and Company stock worth $10,000 to be used as the basis of an endowment in support of a cooperative nursery on campus.
BUILDING FOR A LONG FUTURE:
The University of Chicago and Its Donors, 1889-1930