I'm not a fan of Cesar Chavez Day. I think it's one of those days that we celebrate to appease certain powerful minority and political lobbies and has no place being honored at Claremont McKenna. (We don't get a day off for Veterans' Day or Presidents' Day.)
Despite several days of hunting around, I still can't figure out what that is. Claremont McKenna's history is full of military heroes and professors who worked alongside the president, so you'd think we'd get the days off. Instead we're stuck with Chavez and his not-so-merry band of unionized fruit workers. (Chavez effectively unionized them out of a job and paved the way for the mechanization of the farm industry. Hey, maybe that is worth celebrating?)
I wondered how these traditions developed and if our founders would be pleased.
One founder and big time contributor, J.G. Boswell, whose family controls the biggest farming empire in America, would take especial umbrage that we take a day off to honor a socialist. A Cold warrior, Boswell believed that campuses were being hijacked by leftists.
According to the book, The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, Boswell connections to Claremont McKenna run thick and deep.
As the authors, Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman make clear, Boswell had a special affinity for Claremont McKenna. (See p. 221-222, bolding mine)
Although the book tries to make it seem like its a bad thing to have a free market philosophy and is riddled with untrue statements, I can find no reason to doubt some of the stories it tells about the relationship between then Claremont Men's President George Benson and J.G. Boswell.
As the 1940s would down and the era of McCarthyism dawned, the Colonel [J.G. Boswell] worried that the nation's academic institutions were at risk of being "contaminated" with faculty members promoting "Communism, socialism, and so forth." ...
No academy, though, was more in step with the Colonel's free-market thinking--and his concerns--than Claremont McKenna College, which was established in 1946... The school was led by George S. Benson, a former army officer and North Carolina University professor whose best-known book, The New Centralization, questioned the concentration of power in the federal government. Benson and the Colonel talked frequently about the need, as Boswell put it, to "clean out the 'pinkos'" from university lecture halls. And in 1948, the Colonel pledged to give Claremont McKenna $50,000 for a James G. Boswell Professorship of American Economic Institutions. The holder of the post was to be someone "in sympathy with the fundamental principles of the American system" of constitutional governance and capitalism. By 1950, Benson was revising the college curriculum so that all seniors would be required to take a course from the Boswell professor. "We are going to see that the graduates of one college in the country have a clear-cut conception of the values of American economic heritage," Benson told the Colonel.
..... An $85,000 gift funded a new dormitory -- Boswell Hall -- on the Claremont McKenna campus, though the Colonel agonized that having his name on the building might attract the one thing that the Boswells have always reflexively resisted: the public eye. Benson tried to calm him, informing the Colonel that the college publicity director who, conveniently, was "also the Times correspondent for Claremont ... feels we can carry out your desires to the letter. We will not announce the name of the dormitory when we announce construction ... We will then simply call it Boswell Hall in the fall when the students are assigned to it. The only paper which is likely to inquire closely as to who the Boswells are is the Claremont Courier, and I think they can be satisfied with a very brief story."
I guess when you have a college president that boasts her "international teaching" on her curriculum vitae you are more likely to get days off for Cesar Chavez than for the American presidents or the veterans.
It's a pity that our commitments change in so short a time span.
Exit question: Is Gann going to pull a Benson and announce the name of the dorm during the fall so as to hide the donors' name?
2 comments:
thank you Charles. I had actually heard of Boswell but didnt put two and two together that he was who Boswell hall was named for! Great post! on another note, many dorms at CMC started out as Claremont Hall (Auen I know for sure was even into the 1990s until the Auens got their name on it), so naming the new dorm Claremont might mean a suitable enough donor has not been found, or the school wants to "auction" it off, but thats pretty standard policy. They dont always have the big name donor ahead of time.
Jonathan speaks the truth. It's customary to name dorms Claremont Hall until someone wants to put up the dough for naming rights. Rumor has it that many expect Google Senior VP Jonathan Rosenberg '83 to put up the $5-7 million asking price.
Personally, I'd like to see CMC follow the lead of many sports organizations and pursue corporate naming rights. Something like "Wells Fargo Hall at Badgely Gardens."
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