• 2 • Chronology

• 2 • CHRONOLOGY 1922 April 26: John Simon Guggenheim died of pneumonia and mastoiditis at the age of seventeen, while attending Phillips Exeter Academy. He was the elder of two sons of Olga Hirsh Guggenheim (1877–1970) and Simon Guggenheim (1867–1941). His grandfather was Meyer Guggenheim, who had made a fortune in mining, and his father was one of seven brothers who had come to control a mining and smelting em- pire in North and South America (his father was also, for six years, 1907– 13, a Senator from Colorado, where many of the Guggenheims’ mining operations took place). 1924 February 25: Carroll A. Wilson (general counsel of Guggenheim Broth- ers, a former Rhodes Scholar, and a scholarly bibliophile) wrote to Frank Aydelotte (President of Swarthmore College, and not only a former Rhodes Scholar but also the American Secretary to the Rhodes Trust- ees), asking his advice about a plan that was developing in Simon Guggenheim’s mind for an appropriate memorial to his son John Simon. According to Wilson (who had perhaps pointed out that Cecil John Rhodes’s benefaction in Britain was based on a mining fortune), the Senator was “interested in forming a foundation or trust for the general purpose of transmarine education.” About eighty percent of the annual budget would be used to allow young men and women from the United States to pursue their work in Europe, and the other twenty percent would be used to bring South Americans to the United States. Wilson said, “I gather from my talk with him that so far as the 80 per cent is concerned, he is interested first in extending the benefits of his gift to persons of musical and artistic ability, or along other lines more remote from pure scholarship, and second, that he wishes these benefits to be applied wherever in Europe proves to be best suited to the particular beneficiary, rather than to have them confined to a single country or specific institution.” Aydelotte, recognizing what a grand scheme this expansion of the Rhodes idea was, replied that he would be delighted to help. Chronology 29 April 10: Wilson sent Guggenheim a memorandum outlining the con- siderations that must be faced in organizing the proposed foundation and in establishing its aims. He advocated a breadth that would make it distinctive from the Rhodes, and he stressed the importance of finding an “organizing secretary” to set the foundation on a proper course. Af- ter Guggenheim had talked with Aydelotte several times, he asked Wil- son to offer Aydelotte the job; but Aydelotte felt he could not leave Swarthmore at that time. May 9: Wilson advised Guggenheim to engage Aydelotte as “respon- sible head of enterprise,” leaving it to him to find an assistant to set up the New York office; the assistant, Wilson said, should give “promise of developing into the active working head of the enterprise after the ex- tremely difficult questions of policy, which arise only at the start and in the first years, have been determined upon.” Wilson also envisioned the first public announcement coming early in 1925, with the first Fel- lows appointed by the fall of that year. June 30: Guggenheim asked Aydelotte to serve as “Educational Adviser to put the plan into successful operation,” at an annual salary of $10,000. After cautioning Guggenheim that much trial and error would be involved, Aydelotte accepted, with the approval of the Swarthmore trustees. August 19: Aydelotte wrote to Wilson that he thought Henry Allen Moe would be the right person to take charge of the Foundation’s office. Moe, thirty years old, had just returned from Oxford, where he had been a Rhodes Scholar at Brasenose (1920–23, receiving a B.A. in jurisprudence in 1922 and a Bachelor of Civil Law in 1923) and a Lecturer in Law at Brasenose and Oriel (1923–24); he had also studied at the Inns of Court and had been admitted to the bar of England in 1924. Both Aydelotte and Wilson were already acquainted with Moe because they had served on the Rhodes committee that recommended him as a Scholar-at-Large; indeed, Wilson had conducted the interview when Moe was still in his hospital bed following the serious injuries he had received while in com- mand of a Navy destroyer during World War I. August 22 - September 26: Henry Allen Moe, at the request of Aydelotte, toured the country interviewing the presidents of twelve colleges and universities: Ohio State, Butler, Wabash, Carleton, Minnesota, Hamline, Northwestern, Chicago, Indiana, Oberlin, Western Reserve, and Buf- falo. Aydelotte had explained to Guggenheim the two reasons for this 30 Guggenheim Foundation Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Record “trial trip” to visit educational administrators: “first, the obvious one that some of them would be able to contribute suggestions of value, and sec- ondly, the psychological one, that when your plans are put into operation, they, having been in on the ground floor, will be the more interested and will therefore be the more certain to give their valuable support.” Aydelotte furnished Moe with a memorandum outlining four possible types of support for him to discuss with the people he visited, and all four figured in the Foundation’s program as finally established: grants to supplement sabbatical salaries, research fellowships for advanced scholars, renewals of such awards for recipients who needed more time, and publication subsidies for work produced on the fellowships. (These ideas came from Aydelotte’s own experience twelve years earlier, when as Associate Professor of English at Indiana Univer- sity he had received sabbatical leave simultaneously with a special Rhodes grant and had proceeded to publish the resulting book in a Clarendon Press subsidized series.) Moe sent Aydelotte two reports on his trip, not only summarizing the comments of the persons he interviewed but also expressing his own view that behind the plan there must be “a big, states- manlike idea, an idea . that strikes the imagination, is easy to grasp and to hold” and that, once this was established, “The selection’s the thing”— once outstanding individuals are located, “the thing is accomplished.” October 20: Guggenheim wrote to Moe offering him the job of running the New York office (temporarily to be housed in the Guggenheim Broth- ers headquarters on the thirty-fourth floor of 120 Broadway) for $5000 a year, under the supervision of Aydelotte; Moe accepted. October-November: Aydelotte wrote a 36–page memorandum entitled “Endowments for Foreign Study: A Report on Systems of Scholarships Now in Operation and on the Field Which Might Usefully Be Occupied by a New Foundation.” In the section outlining his idea of offering fellowships for advanced work, Aydelotte said, “Such a system of fellowships would at once take high rank in the educational world. By setting the standards of qualifications up to the highest possible point, the Foun- dation would necessarily designate its Fellows as being superior men and women. The fact of having held such a Fellowship would come to be a very hall-mark of excellence. and it is not inconceivable that the time might come when the number of ex-Fellows on the teaching staff of an institution could afford a very good index of its calibre.” Aydelotte also recommended an administrative structure (the one subsequently adopted, in fact) in which the function of the Board of Trustees would Chronology 31 be “to care for the funds of the Foundation and to direct its broad poli- cies,” and the choice of Fellows would be made by a small “Committee of Selection” drawn from a larger advisory board and assisted by that board and other “experts in particular lines.” While Guggenheim thought about the contents of this memorandum, Aydelotte and Moe made a trip to New England colleges and universities for more interviews, in the process lining up distinguished scholars to serve on the Foundation’s Educational Advisory Board. Moe also wrote to the heads of various universities abroad, asking for their cooperation if the Foundation appointed Fellows who wished to undertake research at their institutions. After further discussion with Guggenheim, Aydelotte revised the proposal portion of his memorandum with advice from Nicholas Murray Butler and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge of Columbia and from Abbott Lawrence Lowell and Charles Homer Haskins of Harvard; the result was the “Out- line of Purposes” that was soon to be publicly distributed, containing the statement that the plan “embodies the results of the best educational thought in the country.” 1925 January 23: The final draft of a “General Plan” was agreed on, outlining the administrative structure of the Foundation (as previously worked out by Frank Aydelotte), the contents of a public announcement, and the general procedural rules to govern the relationship between the Foun- dation and its Fellows. February 23: The public relations firm of Ivy L. Lee & Associates distributed, for release on this date, a news story entitled “John Simon Guggenheim Memorial to Supplement Rhodes Scholarships,” announc- ing Senator Guggenheim’s gift of three million dollars to endow a new foundation and quoting him as follows: “I want to supplement the great Rhodes Foundation by providing a similar opportunity for older students of proved ability, and for women as well as men. Furthermore, I want to make it possible for these persons to carry on their studies in any country in the world where they can work most profitably.” Along with the press release an eight-page Outline of Purposes was sent to newspapers. On its front cover was

Load more