BUILDING FOR A LONG FUTURE:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
AND ITS DONORS, 1889-1930
PART FIVE: CULMINATION OF AN ERA
- Developing the Medical Center
- Institutional Donors
- Max Epstein
DEVELOPING THE MEDICAL CENTER
Thanks to the spirit of Ernest Burton's bold development campaign, the University's hospitals and clinics enjoyed ample funding after 1925. Given the importance of creating a nationally significant medical center and hospital complex in Chicago, donors and University officials emphasized the cause of medical research and quality health care. Such attention paid off, and by the late 1920s the first stages of the University's massive medical building program were reaching completion.The achievements of the later 1920s grew from the promising accomplishments of the preceding decade, most notably the commitment of the family of Albert Merritt Billings in 1916 to erect a large hospital building on the University campus. Albert Billings' son, C. K. G. Billings, was the family's principal donor, but his cousin Dr. Frank Billings (the Dean of Rush Medical College), brother-in-law Charles H. Ruddock, and nephew Albert M. B. Ruddock also participated in the plan. In all, members of the Billings family gave more than $1 million to found the University of Chicago Medical School and erect the Albert M. Billings Hospital. Yet, even with this substantial support, the University was not able to open Billings Hospital until 1927, due to the war and higher post-war construction costs.
The momentum created by the development campaign of 1924-26 energized other major donors to support the hospitals. Colonel and Mrs. John Roberts matched the Billings family's million-dollar donation and enabled the University to break ground for the Bobs Roberts Memorial Hospital for Children in 1927. John Roberts was a native of County Clare, Ireland, who had come to Chicago and made his fortune as the president, treasurer, and general manager of Roberts & Oake, a meat packing firm headquartered at Chicago's Union Stock Yards. Deeply saddened in 1917 by the death of their five-year-old son Charles Radnor, affectionately nicknamed Bobs, the Robertses pledged $1 million dollars to the University of Chicago for a new pediatric hospital. Their gift was enhanced by two contributions from the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board, one of $175,000 for the construction of the research laboratories of Bobs Roberts Hospital, and the other of $1 million as an endowment to support research and teaching in the Department of Pediatrics.
Affiliation agreements between city hospitals and the University also brought forth new donors. Contributions establishing the Elizabeth Spalding McElwee Memorial and Gertrude Dunn Hicks Memorial made possible two new hospital facilities in 1931, each offering a fifty-bed clinic operating under the auspices of the Chicago Home for Destitute and Crippled Children at 59th Street and Ellis Avenue. In addition, Dr. Joseph B. DeLee, the founder of Chicago Lying-In Hospital, together with Janet Ayer Fairbank of the Women's Board and the Mother's Aid Club, raised $1 million to erect a new hospital building. On April 29, 1931, a new, state-of-the-art facility for the Chicago Lying-In Hospital opened its doors at 58th Street and Maryland Avenue and assumed its place as a central element in the University's expanding medical complex.
The decision to move Chicago Lying-In Hospital to the campus of the University was due largely to the efforts of Joseph Bolivar DeLee. Dr. DeLee was a late-nineteenth century pioneer who devoted his life to providing socially responsible medical care to the women of Chicago. Trained at the Chicago Medical School, DeLee received his M.D. in 1891. Rather than devote himself to a lucrative private practice, DeLee decided in 1896 to establish a clinic to provide decent obstetrical care to poor pregnant women residing in the slums. Renting rooms on Maxwell Street on the city's West Side, he provided care for over 200 women (most of whom were poor or recent immigrants or both) and trained sixty-four students and physicians in practical obstetrics. Initial success on Maxwell Street gave DeLee the opportunity to transfer his practice in 1899 to a remodeled home on Ashland Avenue, where he increased his clinic's capacity to thirteen beds. This new venue remained a shoestring operation--after paying his first month's rent and purchasing necessary equipment, DeLee had sixty-one cents left to his name. DeLee's heroic commitment to his cause slowly gained the support of local Chicago patrons, however, and in 1914 he opened what was now officially named the Lying-In Hospital on a site at 51st Street and Vincennes Avenue (where Provident Hospital now stands). Here, the vast impact of his clinics immediately became clear--operating three free dispensaries, by 1927 De Lee and his associates had treated over 69,000 mothers and their babies, as well as 20,000 gynecological patients. In the same thirteen-year period, his hospital delivered 28,735 babies and cared for over 10,000 obstetrical and gynecological cases. In gaining affiliation with the University of Chicago in 1927 and making its final move to the campus of the University in 1930, Chicago Lying-In Hospital was now assured a distinguished and secure future.
INSTITUTIONAL DONORS
Not all gifts of substance to the University of Chicago came from individual donors. Institutional donors and foundations had supported the work of the new University from its very inception. In 1889-90 the American Baptist Education Society acted as the conduit through which John D. Rockefeller made his initial contributions to the University. Although John D. Rockefeller's Final Gift to the University occurred in December, 1910, the various charitable foundations he established helped to sustain the Rockefeller family's relationship with Chicago into the 1930s. The first of these foundations, the General Education Board (GEB), was created in 1903 to support improvements in education for African-American communities in the South. Under the terms of its federal charter the GEB expanded its orbit to "the promotion of education within the United States without distinction of race, sex, or creed," guaranteeing that the Board would support private research institutions like the University of Chicago. The Board began funding medical education at the University in 1916, and it enlarged its philanthropic impact in 1925, when it gave two substantial gifts to the University totaling over $1 million each for research in the sciences and humanities.Other Rockefeller-funded foundations supported medical education, social work, and research in the social sciences. The Rockefeller Foundation, which was created in 1909 and chartered in 1913, began its charitable work by campaigning to cure hookworm in the American South and overseas. The Foundation moved on to support research on malaria and yellow fever, and it funded the establishment of the Peking Union Medical College in China. With support from Rockefeller Foundation grants totaling more than $2.75 million by 1930, the University of Chicago was able to launch its Medical School, develop its first Department of Psychiatry, strengthen advanced programs in the humanities, and expand professional training in the School of Social Service Administration. Another Rockefeller philanthropy, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, provided essential support for the University's Local Community Research Committee and Social Science Research Committee and funded the erection of the Social Science Research Building in 1929; the Memorial's grants amounted to more than $3 million by the end of the decade.
A series of grants from other sources in the 1920s created important programs in medical research and expanded the range of the University's work. In 1921, the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute entered into a special affiliation with the University of Chicago; for twenty-three years, until reverting to its status as an independent corporation in 1944, all of the income from its endowment was committed exclusively to medical research at the University. The Lasker Foundation for Medical Research, established in 1928 by a gift of $1 million to the University of Chicago from Albert D. and Flora W. Lasker, devoted all of its income to research on degenerative diseases conducted at the University; after 1939, at the decision of Mr. Lasker, the scope of its support for medical research was broadened to include investigations of other diseases.
Scientific research of a different kind was initiated by the Institute of American Meat Packers, the Chicago-based trade and research association of more than 300 American meat packing companies. In 1923, under the auspices of the Institute, Arthur Lowenstein, vice-president of Chicago meat packer Wilson & Company, provided $7,500 over three years for a fellowship at the University of Chicago supporting research on scientific problems related to the meat packing industry. This gift was followed the next year by a gift from meat-packing executive Thomas E. Wilson of $15,000 over three years to establish a research laboratory of the Institute of American Meat Packers on the University of Chicago campus. Opened in 1925 in a newly erected building at 939 East 57th Street under a cooperative agreement with the University, the Institute's research laboratory investigated problems such as the chemistry of sterilizing agents, stabilization of pigmentation, and improved chemical processes for curing.
Scientists in University laboratories were not alone in benefiting from the largesse of the new private foundations and institutional donors. In May 1926, Frederick P. Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation, informed University President Max Mason that his foundation was committing $1,385,000 for the establishment of a graduate library school at the University of Chicago. The Carnegie grant was designed to take advantage of the University's rich interdisciplinary research tradition and provide students considering library careers "the opportunity for the broadest possible professional education." The Carnegie grant assured the formation of the nation's first graduate library institution, the Graduate Library School, and launched the University's distinguished contributions to the development of library and information studies.
MAX EPSTEIN
Max Epstein (1875-1954) was a farsighted businessman and philanthropist whose most generous pledge was made just as the international business collapse of 1929 dramatically constricted nearly all giving to institutions. Born in Cincinnati , Epstein briefly attended City College in New York before moving to Chicago in 1891. Thereafter, he set out to make a considerable fortune. A leading local industrialist -- he was the chairman of the General American Tank Car Company - Epstein was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1930 to 1953. A lifelong collector of Old Masters, Epstein's bequest of twenty-five early European paintings in 1954 was a notable addition to the Art Institute's collections. Max Epstein's connections to the University began in 1917, when he gave the first of a series of gifts to the hospitals. The Max Epstein Clinic at 59th Street and Maryland Avenue was incorporated as a wing of the Chicago Lying-In Hospital.In many ways Max Epstein stood at the end of the classic era of private philanthropy at the University of Chicago, for his most significant gift - an unrealized institute of the fine arts -- was conceived in the context of the goals of President Burton's campaign of 1924-26. Under Burton's successor Max Mason, the University was able to secure major gifts from George H. Jones in 1926 to build a second chemistry building, from Bernard A. Eckhart in 1927 for a mathematics building, from Albert D. Lasker in 1928 for the Medical School, and from Bernard E. Sunny in 1928 for the Laboratory School's gymnasium, all of which seemed to confirm hopes for additional major donations. The stock market crash of 1929 swept away these expectations, and the harsh economic environment of the 1930s made Burton's lofty goals seem sadly illusory. The fate of Max Epstein's gift was an early sign of the grave financial and fundraising challenges that lay ahead.
Max Epstein was inspired by Ernest Burton's suggestion that the University needed a first-rate center for research and teaching in the fine arts. In The University of Chicago in 1940, Burton had argued "[i]t is to be hoped that long before the year 1940 comes around, the University will have erected at least one beautiful building devoted wholly to the fine arts, and established in it skilled interpreters of these arts to the University community." Burton's dream seemed closer to reality when the University secured a million-dollar pledge from Epstein to support the creation of an Institute of Fine Arts, to be housed in a building with classrooms and galleries located adjacent to a planned undergraduate residential quadrangle on 60th Street between Kimbark and Woodlawn. In his letter of gift for the art building, Max Epstein wrote, "I believe that the University of Chicago should offer to the young men and women who are its students and to the public at large the opportunity of learning the significance of Art, both as a history of the life of the past and as a living and inspiring force in the present. The creation of an art center at the University will bring together a body of teachers and students of Art and will result in the spreading of a sincere and informed appreciation of art."
Unfortunately, Epstein made his pledge on August 30, 1929, only a few weeks before the Great Crash. The University initiated a planning effort for the new building, even obtaining preliminary drawings by the noted architect of Beaux-Arts classicism, Paul P. Cret. But in January 1931, when the preliminary design process was completed, Epstein's initial gift of $15,000 for the art building was shifted, with his consent, to the Hospitals, and the University decided not to pursue the construction of the Institute of Fine Arts. President Robert Hutchins laconically and somewhat ambiguously reported to the Board of Trustees in 1935 that "[i]n 1929 we had hopes of the Art Department, for a new chairman was found for it and a donor pledged a million dollars to provide quarters for it. On account of the Depression neither the chairman nor the donor has been able to realize his ambitions for the Department." Other generous University donors were also disappointed by these frustrated hopes. In 1929 and 1930, Mrs. Frances Crane Lillie had given the University two ornamental doors by artist Alfeo Faggi, the Dante Door and the Door of St. Francis, with the intention that they be mounted in the entrance to a University art museum. But with the dwindling of the University's ambitions for an art building, the doors were returned to the donor in 1939.
In the end, an Institute of Fine Arts was never built, and with the exception of a few buildings finished in 1931 and 1932 such as International House and the Field House, construction on the campus of the University of Chicago ceased for more than a decade. And three decades would pass before the next fundraising campaign, when generous and civic-minded donors, strong presidential leadership, and a strong economic climate coalesced to create a powerful new vision for the educational future of the University of Chicago.
BUILDING FOR A LONG FUTURE:
The University of Chicago and Its Donors, 1889-1930