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The Story of Wellesley [85]

By Root 1106 0
committees, and eight foreign countries,--Canada, Mexico, Porto Rico, South America, Europe, Turkey, India, and Persia. Every state in the Union was heard from, and contributions also came from clubs in Japan and China. The campaign actually circled the globe. By June, 1914, Miss Jenkins tells us, the appeals to the clubs and state committees had been sent out, and many had been heard from, but in order to make sure that no one escaped, the work was now taken up through committees from the thirty-six classes, from 1879 to 1914. In March, 1915, when Miss Jenkins's report was printed in the News, 3823 of Wellesley's daughters had contributed, and belated contributions were still coming in. In June, 1915, 3903, out of 4840, graduates had responded. Every member of the classes of '79, '80, '81, '84, '92, sent a contribution, and the class gift from '79, $520,161.00 was the largest from any class; that of '92, $208,453.92, being the next largest. The class gifts include not only direct contributions from alumnae, and from social members who did not graduate with the class, but gifts which alumnae and former students have secured from interested friends. Of the remaining classes, five show a contributing list of more than ninety per cent of the members; eleven show between eighty and ninety per cent; and fifteen between seventy and eighty per cent. Besides the alumnae, 1119 non-graduates had contributed. None of Wellesley's daughters have been more loyal and more helpful than the non-graduates.

An analysis of the amount, $1,267,230.53, given by and through Wellesley women between June, 1913, and June, 1915, shows four gifts of fifty thousand dollars and over, all of which came through Wellesley women, thirty gifts of from two thousand dollars to twenty-five thousand dollars, three quarters of which came from Wellesley women, and many gifts of less than two thousand dollars, "only a negligible quantity of which came from any one but alumnae and former students."

Throughout the nine months of the campaign, the Alumnae Committee and the trustees were working in close touch with each other. Doctor George Herbert Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard, was the chairman of the committee from the trustees, and he describes himself as chaperoned by alumnae at every point of the tour which he so successfully undertook in order to interview possible contributors. To him, to Bishop Lawrence, the President of the Board of Trustees, and to Mr. Lewis Kennedy Morse, the treasurer, the college owes a debt of gratitude which it can never repay. No knight of old ever succored distressed damsel more valiantly, more selflessly, than these three twentieth-century gentlemen succored and served the beggar maid, Wellesley, in the cause of higher education. Through the activities of the trustees were secured the provisional gifts of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation, and two hundred thousand dollars from the General Education Board, Mr. Andrew Carnegie's $95,446.27, to be applied to the extension of the library, and gifts from Mrs. Russell Sage, Mrs. David P. Kimball, and many others. Mrs. Lilian Horsford Farlow, a trustee, and the daughter of Prof. Eben N. Horsford, to whom Wellesley is already deeply indebted, gave ten thousand dollars toward the Fire Fund; and through Mrs. Louise McCoy North, trustee and alumna, an unknown benefactor has given the new building which stands on the hill above the lake. Because of the modesty of donors, it has been impossible to make public a complete list of the gifts.

From the four undergraduate classes, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, and from general undergraduate gifts and activities, came $60,572.04, raised in all sorts of ways,--from the presentation of "Beau Brummel" before a Boston audience, to the polishing of shoes at ten cents a shine. One 1917 girl earned ten dollars during the summer vacation by laughing at all her father's jokes, whether old or new, during that period of recreation. Other enterprising sophomores "swatted" flies at the
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