III.
"Hear the dollars dropping,
Listen as they fall.
All for restoration
Of our College Hall."
These words of a college song fitly express the breathless attitude of the alumnae between March 17, 1914, and January 1, 1915, the nine months and a half during which the campaign was being carried on to raise the fund for restoration and endowment, after the fire. And they did more than listen; they shook the trees on which the dollars grew, and as the dollars fell, caught them with nimble fingers. They fell "thick as leaves in Vallombrosa."
Between June, 1913, and June, 1915, $1,267,230.53 was raised by and through Wellesley women.
In 1913, a campaign for a Million Dollar Endowment Fund had been started, to provide means for increasing the salaries of the teachers. Salaries at Wellesley were at that time lower than those paid in every other woman's college, but one, in New England. The fund had been started with an anonymous gift of one hundred thousand dollars, and the committee, with Candace C. Stimson as chairman, planned to secure the one million dollars in two years. By March, 1914, a second anonymous gift of one hundred thousand dollars had been received, the General Education Board had pledged two hundred thousand dollars conditioned on the raising of the whole amount, Wellesley women had given fifteen thousand dollars, and there had been a few other gifts from outsiders. The amount still to be raised on the Million Dollar Fund at the time of the fire was five hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
President Pendleton, in a letter to Wellesley friends, printed in the News on March 28, 1914, ten days after the fire, writes: "Our Campaign for the Million Dollar Endowment Fund must not be dropped... we have between five and six hundred thousand dollars still to raise. All the new buildings must be equipped and maintained. The sum that our Alma Mater requires for immediate needs is two million dollars. But this is not all. Another million will soon be needed, properly to house our departments of Botany and Chemistry, and to provide a Student-Alumnae building, and sufficient dormitories to house on the campus the more than five hundred students now living in the village. We are facing a great crisis in the history of the College. The future of our Alma Mater is in our hands. Crippled by this loss, Wellesley cannot continue to hold in the future its place in the front rank of colleges, unless the response is generous and immediate.
"To sum up, Alma Mater needs three million dollars, two million of which must be raised immediately. Shall we be daunted by this sum? We are justly proud of the courage and self-control of those dwellers in College Hall, both Faculty and Students. Shall we be outdone by them in facing a crisis? Shall we be less courageous, less resourceful? The public press has described the fire as a triumph, not a disaster. Shall we continue the triumph, and make our College in equipment what it has proved itself in spirit—The College Beautiful? We can and we must."
The response of the alumnae to this stirring appeal was instant and ardent. The committee for the Million Dollar Endowment Fund, with its valiant chairman, Miss Stimson, shouldered the new responsibility. "It is a big contract," they said, "it comes at a season of business depression, and the daughters of Wellesley are not rich in this world's goods. All this we know, but we know, too, that the greater the need the more eagerly will love and loyalty respond."
Then came the offer of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars by the Rockefeller Foundation, if the college would raise an additional million and a quarter by January 1, 1915. The intrepid Committee of Alumnae added to its numbers, merged the two funds, and adopted the new name of Alumnae Committee for Restoration and Endowment.
Mary B. Jenkins, Wellesley, '03, the committee's devoted secretary, has described the plan of the campaign in the News for March, 1915. As the Wellesley clubs present the best chance of reaching both graduate and non-graduate members, a chairman for each club was appointed, and made responsible for reaching all the Wellesley women in her geographical section, whether they were members of the club or not. In states where there were no clubs, state committees rounded up the scattered alumnae and non-graduates. Fifty-three clubs appear in the report, twenty-four state 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.