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The Yale Alumni of Cleveland is the second largest alumni association in the Nation. Our Yale Scholarship Fund provides financial support to Cleveland area students and is the nation's largest.
A History of Cleveland and Yale in Cleveland
================================================== The four-mile segment of Euclid Avenue that connects downtown Cleveland’s Public Square with University Circle to the east is a main traffic artery for the city. It always has been. What was originally the Lake Shore Trail of the Indians became known as Buffalo Road by 1815 because it was the major route to that city. Ten years later it was named Euclid for the small settlement east of Cleveland. Not until 1870 did the street gain official “avenue” status, and that is how it is known today.1
The one end of this segment is Public Square, the core of Cleveland’s office, retail, and government buildings. The other is University Circle, a cluster of major educational, service, and cultural institutions. Named for what is now Case Western Reserve University, the area is also home to University Hospital, a distinguished medical complex. The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra, are all located in this park between East 105th and East 108th Streets. These two hubs have been relatively constant since the late 1800s in serving these purposes.
What lies between them now, though, is still in redevelopment stages after great disintegration following World War II. Just east of Public Square is the Arcade, an architectural masterpiece of the 1880s. This skylight-covered shopping street quietly houses the memories of a once-bustling commercial center. Between East Eighteenth and East Thirtieth Streets, Euclid Avenue is occupied by Cleveland State University. Founded in 1965, this location was chosen in order to stimulate urban development. The next twenty-five blocks consist mostly of small office buildings from the 1970s. From East Fifty-Fifth Street to East Seventy-Fifth Street, the shells of early twentieth century industrial warehouses stand mostly unoccupied. The short stretch of about thirteen blocks that follows is a fascinating architectural mosaic. Among its features is the Cleveland Play House (established in 1916) whose current complex was designed in 1983 by Philip Johnson, a renowned modern architect.
Nearby is the True Holiness Temple (built in 1916), a classical domed structure with large Ionic columns at its façade. In addition, the Calvary Presbyterian Church (built in 1887), a fine example of the Victorian Romanesque style, is a dominant structure in the area.
The final section of Euclid Avenue before reaching University Circle is that which lies between East 88th Street and East 105th Street. As of 1986, most of the land (about 100 acres) has been swallowed up by the rapid expansion of the prestigious Cleveland Clinic Foundation, one of the largest privately-funded, non-profit medical centers in the world.
Today one would have difficulty believing that Euclid Avenue, now commercial and run-down, once rivalled New York City’s Fifth Avenue. “In the early days, elms arched the Avenue from Erie street [now East Ninth Street] to Case avenue and the palatial homes made Euclid famous as the ‘Most beautiful street in the world.’”2 That was the era of Euclid Avenue as Millionaire’s Row. At its height, from 1880-1910, Euclid Avenue was where Cleveland’s elite developed its own culture of social gatherings, business partnerships, and marriage connections that tightened its circle amidst the increasing number of immigrants. This upper-class was primarily born from the financial opportunities Cleveland provided for industrial entrepreneurs. With its new wealth, this group sought to distinguish itself from the rest of the city’s population and make Euclid Avenue the center and symbol of Cleveland culture. Many of the millionaires’ mansions were designed by Charles F. Schweinfurth, a local architect who had studied in and traveled throughout Europe. Their estates on the north side of the street dwarfed the smaller houses and lots on the south side.3 They used their New England ties to boost Cleveland into the national network of elites while legitimizing their high local status. Then they focused their attention on Cleveland in order to make it a self-sufficient producer of an elite society.
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Cleveland had its roots in New England. The city was formed within the territory of the Connecticut Land Company’s Western Reserve. In September 1795, a group of 35 Connecticut speculators negotiated the purchase of this land from the General Assembly of Hartford, and together with 22 other interested men, they formed the Connecticut Land Company to direct the transfer and sale of their stock. Under the direction of Moses Cleaveland, a surveying party was sent to the Western Reserve, and on July 22, 1796, they arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie “with a prophetic eye fixed upon it as the locality for a future great city.”4
While Cleaveland returned to his law practice in Canterbury, Connecticut, the surveyors plotted a Public Square to be the center of the town that they named in his honor.5 He actually never returned to his namesake city before he died in 1806. During its first years, Cleveland fared poorly, and by 1810, seven years after Ohio became a state, there were only 57 people living there.
“Every year, more people came, principally from Connecticut, though the great migration did not take place until after the War of 1812.”6 In fact, the steady flow of immigration from Connecticut to Ohio in 1817 “was one of the largest and most homogeneous mass migrations in American history.”7 The British had destroyed the coastal towns along the Long Island Sound in 1815 and 1816, devastating New Haven in particular.
With a desire to start over on their own land, many Connecticut men moved their families to the Western Reserve. To a certain extent then, Cleveland was almost a colony of Connecticut. Like other young American cities of the nineteenth century, Cleveland was an “island community” that was self-sufficient on a basic level, yet “the gathering families brought the same familiar habits and ways so that a continuity [with their New England roots] was scarcely disturbed.”8 Cleveland’s population rose steadily over the next half-century, and after the Civil War it increased dramatically.
Located at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie, it was at the center of the Great Lakes’ expanding shipping region. New Englanders with at least some capital had been attracted to Cleveland to invest in banking, commerce, and especially industry in the growing city. In general, these men were of the rural New England Protestant working-class, not of old-stock aristocratic origins in Boston or New York. They had decided to “go West” in search of economic opportunity, but their ties to their Eastern origins were evident. Cleveland became “a community with nearly every New England characteristic; in fact, the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, in an admiring series of articles on Cleveland in the early 1870’s, said that Cleveland was almost a replica of New Haven, Connecticut, only more beautiful.”9
The fact that Moses Cleaveland and many of the other early settlers of his town were graduates of Yale College in New Haven is not insignificant. He graduated in 1777, and such was the beginning of the connections that reached their height around the turn of the century. In those four decades, Cleveland was at its height economically, socially, and culturally, and the “sons of Eli” were at the foreground in each realm. As a result, Cleveland, Ohio, shared a uniquely strong bond with Yale University that persists today.10
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After the Civil War, westward expansion exploded. Ranchers and farmers began to settle the Great Plains while miners and prospectors continued searching for gold in the Rocky Mountains. Development of the 1.2 billion acres of land west of the Mississippi River was facilitated by the growing national network of railroads, which stimulated heavy industry in the East and agriculture in the West. Cleveland was a major Midwest stop between the East coast and the westward-moving frontier. It had already become an important city within the Great Lakes region during the canal era of the early nineteenth century. Such inland water transportation increasingly diverted business from rivers to the Great Lakes, thereby making Cleveland a prosperous port. By 1860, the city’s population was 43,417, a tremendous increase since 1830 when only 1,075 people lived there.11 With a firm commercial base already established, Cleveland’s economy thrived during the antebellum railroad expansion and industrial development. Its central location between Michigan’s iron ore and Pennsylvania’s coal made it a convenient midway point for the New York Central Railroad and the Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati-Indiana Railroad. Thus Cleveland became an important city in the national network. The rising industrialism of the late 1800s was very evident in Cleveland. As the following table shows, the composition of Cleveland’s labor force over the 65 years following the Civil War shifted toward manufacturing and finance and away from agriculture and services12
Economic Sector 1870 (%) 1900 (%) 1930 (%)
Agriculture 1.1 .6 .5
Mining --- .06 .01
Construction 10.8 7.5 6.5
Manufacturing 17.1 24.8 32.6
Transportation and Public Utilities 15.1 7.9 6.8
Wholesale 5.4 2.3 1.7
Retail 6.9 16.0 10.9
Finance . 7 2.1 3.0
Services 13 41.7 37.4 18.6
Public Administration 1.1 1.4 2.1
From 1870 to 1900, the national wealth quadrupled from $30,400 million to $126,700 million. By 1914, it doubled again to $254,000 million. With such astounding numbers in this industrial era, “it is no wonder that the production of pig iron rather than poetry, and the quest for status rather than salvation, now took hold of the minds of even the most patrician descendants of Puritan divines.”14
The resulting expansion of labor demands in the manufacturing sector caused immigrants to flock to Cleveland for settlement, especially between 1890 and 1914. Cleveland, like Chicago, Detroit, and other growing urban centers of the Midwest, readily accepted these new immigrants into the labor force. By 1910, more than a third of Cleveland’s population was foreign-born. The immigrants, mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, tended to settle in separate neighborhoods according to ethnicity. Their presence, especially in such large numbers, endowed Cleveland with a colorful mosaic of diverse cultural settlements, the remnants of which still survive.
While this huge influx of immigrants to the area completed Cleveland’s transformation from a commercial town to a manufacturing city, it also altered the city’s social base the industrial barons reaped the benefits of the immigrants’ labor thereby exaggerating the socioeconomic disparity between the two groups. The combination of an open market and available labor were essential to Cleveland’s industrial success, especially in petroleum, steel, and iron.
One of the world’s most recognizable corporations, the Standard Oil Company, was organized in Cleveland in 1870. As the headquarters for this future mammoth for about fifteen years, Cleveland benefited from John D. Rockefeller’s investment until he decided a move to New York would provide more profitable financial connections. Other industrial chemical manufacturers like Grasselli Chemicals, Sherwin-Williams, and Glidden Paints were among the large Cleveland corporations that helped build the city’s economy.15 In the steel industry, the American Wire Company and the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company were at the forefront in making Cleveland the wire center of the world. By 1901, though, the United States Steel Corporation was established, and it acquired these companies as subsidiaries.
A few of the iron-ore processors that were national leaders in the industry were Cleveland Iron Company; Iron Cliffs Mining Company; Pickands, Mather, and Company; and Oglebay-Norton Company. Those Clevelanders who had the foresight to get involved in the railroad, steel, iron, or oil industries from their earliest stages acquired great fortunes that propelled them into the upper-class of Cleveland.
One of Cleveland’s most prominent citizens, Samuel Livingston Mather (1817-1890), was the leader in his field of iron ore processing. Although his origins were in the New England aristocracy, he worked to achieve his own prosperity. His noteworthy lineage included Cotton Mather, who secured the large financial gift to the Collegiate School from Elihu Yale, as well as an original shareholder of the Connecticut Land Company. His ancestors had originally made their wealth in maritime commerce, then in iron mining and manufacturing.16
Samuel Livingston Mather settled in Cleveland in 1843, and he soon founded the Cleveland Iron Mining Company which was among the major iron ore processors in at least the Great Lakes region. In a letter to his son who was traveling overseas he wrote, “I am exceedingly busy at the office and really have no time to spare for anything-- am so glad to have got rid of the Boiler Plate Mill, for I have plenty to do without it. We are moving ore and pig iron as fast as we can, and hope to make a good thing out of them this year.”17 Despite the economic hardships presented by the Panic of 1873, the Cleveland Iron Mining Company succeeded, and it continued to be a long-standing Cleveland company.18 The next generation of Mathers continued this involvement in iron. The oldest son, Samuel Mather (1851-1931), founded a rival iron ore manufacturing company with partners Jay Morse of Chicago and Colonel James Pickands of Marquette, Michigan, in 1883. This quickly grew to be the second largest producer of iron ore in the United States. This company, too, was a stable fixture in Cleveland for a long time. Pickands, Mather and Company continued to grow rapidly and acquired mines all over the Great Lakes region, even in Canada. From it were born a couple of subsidiaries to facilitate and accommodate this expansion the Interstate Steamship Company, which became the second largest fleet on the Great Lakes, and the Interstate Iron Corporation. Although the company shared in the financial difficulties of the Depression, demand skyrocketed during World War II and Pickands, Mather and Company returned to its steady success. In 1973, though, it became part of the Moore McCormack Resources, Inc., shipping company.19
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A few of those who were leaders in their industries came from the city’s old merchant families, but many were new arrivals to Cleveland who endeavored to be successful Gilded Age entrepreneurs. Once these industrialists made their fortunes they decided to move to more spacious properties away from the increasingly commercial and cluttered downtown area. Euclid Avenue was the selected locale for their luxurious mansions. As they monopolized this main thoroughfare, they became more noticeably distinct from the rest of the growing immigrant population. In those four miles extending from Public Square, the upper-class created a “neighborhood of families” to which the ticket for admission was “affluence, rather than aristocratic origins.”20 The friendships, the business alliances, and the marriages that were born from this neighborhood proved to tighten the network of industrial elites. As members of the upper class, these Clevelanders were among the “fittest” in Social Darwinist terms. William Graham Sumner argued, “Millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirements of certain work to be done. . . . It is because they are thus selected that wealth-- both their own and that entrusted to them-- aggregates under their hands. . . . They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society for certain work.”21 Although they had won national attention for their industrial fortunes, they were not content with simply being the social elite on the local level. They sought to propel their kind into the ranks of the national elite. While the American social structure became more urban and corporate following the Civil War, social status became less based on family standing within the community and more reflective of the associational affiliations of national prestige. So those Clevelanders who were eligible followed the pattern of prerequisites for inclusion in this nationally-emerging culture that C. Wright Mills describes in The Power Elite they “have attended the same or similar private and exclusive schools, preferably one of the Episcopal boarding schools of New England. Their men have been to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. . . and now they frequent the clubs of these schools, as well as leading clubs in their own city, and as often as not, also a club or two in other metropolitan centers.”22 As the elite of Cleveland, the residents of “Millionaire’s Row” had a powerful hand in the formation of Cleveland’s history. The combination of social power and rising social prestige of this nouveau riche is a typical example of what E. Digby Baltzell calls the “Establishment.” This privileged sector of society is based on two variables of stratification social power (power in politics, business, and religion) and social status (family social position and prestige). The Establishment, then, consists of “those leaders within the elite [individuals at the top of the social power hierarchy] whose families also belong, or are in the process of belonging, to the upper class [families at the top of the social-status hierarchy].”23 Nicholas Lemann considers this same group in a slightly different light. He calls it the “Episcopacy,” as based on its predominant religion.24 It is a “resolution. . . between two rival elites the old preindustrial New England-based upper class, with its high-minded, non-urban mores, and the big, rough New York-based Gilded Age rich.”25 Whether one considers them the Establishment or the Episcopacy, Cleveland’s elite fit the criteria. They held leadership positions across a broad range of public organizations that touched nearly every aspect of Cleveland life. In an analysis of the Protestants’ influence in Cleveland, Michael J. McTighe looks at the city’s public culture, which he defines as “the widest possible variety of forces and influences that contribute to shaping values, attitudes, and institutions. . . where power. . . is elaborated and made authoritative.”26 He concludes that although their power began to fade after 1860, Cleveland’s Protestants had already shaped the city’s public culture to their own advantage as the wealthy, well-connected elite. In fact, the city could not escape the influence of the culture that this elite circle established for itself, especially because of the extravagant entertainments and large financial donations to cultural and philanthropic entities that bore the names of its later members. Cleveland was an example of the trend that was sweeping the nation-- the Protestant Establishment’s domination of the largest business corporations and firms and branches of the federal government. In the era of corporate consolidations and trusts, it is not surprising that the focus on national status was the craze. Baltzell comments, “It is interesting in connection with the growth of a national upper class, that the founding of many prominent schools coincided with the ‘trust-founding’ and ‘trust-busting’ era.”27 In fact, boarding schools saw their most rapid growth in the half-century after 1880. They were the most important agency for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes and regulating the admission of new wealth and talent.28 As Robert Wiebe noted in The Search for Order, “In order to demarcate this national upper class new modes of identification such as a common educational experience in an exclusive boarding school and then in one of a select set of Eastern colleges assumed far greater importance [than the lineages of the old aristocratic families].”29 Mills agreed and noted that “[t]he one deep experience that distinguishes the social rich from the merely rich and those below is their schooling, and with it, all the associations, the sense and sensibility, to which this educational routine leads throughout their lives. . . . the private school is a unifying influence, a force for the nationalization of the upper classes.”30 This is why, then, “[t]he sons of the new and old rich” congregated from all over the country in the private halls of boarding schools-- to prepare to attend the elite colleges that would practically ensure them a spot in the national aristocracy.31 From these boarding schools the boys went on to the prestigious Eastern colleges. Around the turn of the century, Yale especially was the trend-setter for the elite of the nation. Students went to Yale “to prepare for entrance into the business community, especially that part of it concerned with big business and finance. And it was the sons of big business, finance, and corporation law who dominated the life of the campus in the older Eastern colleges.”32 In fact, the atmosphere of the college campus was suitable for the “needs of an industrialized, get-rich-quick society. It educated specifically for the harsh competitions of capitalism,” as historian Henry Seidel Canby noted.33 This is why Yale tended to be particularly attractive for the Gilded Age youth. In Campus Life, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz observed, “In the archetypal Yale story, a poor, brawny, and likable Westerner makes friends with the prep school son of a successful businessman. After a difficult trial in which the fundamentally decent fellow from the West proves himself, personally and on the gridiron, he is welcomed into the chosen circle. And after he graduates, he enters his wealthy friend’s family business.”34 Indeed, “[h]e sloughed off his provincialisms and learned an ease of manner and a style designed to ensure his acceptance in society.”35 Yale at the turn of the century appears to have been not so much a facility for academic education as it was a determinant of social success that led to future opportunities. The connections that were formed at Yale through athletics, fraternities, clubs and societies were the foundation for many business and familial relations that tightened the circle of business elites. Entrance into these exclusive circles was often influenced by family and boarding school backgrounds; for, as Mills comments in The Power Elite, “the clubs and cliques of college are usually composed of carry-overs of association and name made in the lower levels at the proper schools.”36 After the Yale administration eliminated the system of ranking its students by their social status in the early part of the nineteenth century, the undergraduate attitude became very anti-intellectual. In 1846, professors responded to this administrative change by dividing classes based on academic ability. This demonstrated that “the old homogeneity and purpose of the college,” which was to classically train gentlemen, “began to break down.”37 The faculty themselves were beginning to specialize in their studies, setting an atmosphere for a more diverse curriculum that would emerge by the twentieth century. Yale’s first professional school (Law) was founded in 1800, but not until 1886 did it officially change its name to Yale University.38 The administration, though, “typically tried to preserve the old collegiate model at the undergraduate level, while confining the new professionalism to graduate studies.”39 In addition, the founding of the Sheffield Science School in 1854 segregated those who sought vocational training from those who desired the gentlemanly polish of a liberal arts education. Undergraduate life at Yale College, then, by the end of the century had become anti-professional and anti-intellectual. Paula Fass, in a study of American youth of the 1920s, cited a comment that appeared in The Green Onion, Michigan State College’s humor magazine “Think as few original thoughts as possible. It’s collegiate to bull the professor into a “B” when you rated a “D”. It’s collegiate to sleep in lectures, crib in exams, copy themes, and get by. . . . Ah, by all means, let’s be collegiate.”40 Although this appeared in 1925, it was indicative of the attitude at Yale about thirty years earlier. Even professors succumbed to this attitude upon request for extra reading from a student in the class of 1879, one professor replied, “Young man, if you think you came to Yale with the idea of reading you will find out your mistake very soon.”41 As enrollment at Yale increased and became more heterogeneous toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, societies and clubs were formed within the Yale community establishing yet a smaller circle of elites. “It didn’t matter who you were or how much money you had. Each had to prove himself to his class and the college.”42 The popularity of the literary societies like Linonia (1753) and Phi Beta Kappa (1780) dwindled as the secret senior societies rushed to the foreground behind Skull and Bones (1832). Selection for these newer societies was based on leadership and merit, rather than on academic status. Between 1861 and 1894, 26 of the 34 valedictorians were tapped for societies, but in the next 8 years, none of them was tapped. Indeed, “to be a high-standing man [was] a disadvantage rather than otherwise. . . . In fact, hard study ha[d] become unfashionable at Yale.”43 Even as late as 1922, “a majority of students unreservedly indicated that they preferred winning an athletic letter to earning a Phi Beta Kappa key.”44 The connections made as an undergraduate at Yale exposed the young men to others from around the nation with a similar background-- namely that of the nouveau riche. “The campus mores were, of course, modeled after the adult world which the students in the Gilded Age were preparing to face. For the large corporations, banks and powerful law firms-- in the big-city centers of national power-- increasingly began to select their future leaders, not on the basis of ability alone, but largely on the basis of their fashionable university and club or fraternity affiliations.” As Baltzell put it, “[w]hen the gilded youths at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton finally left the protected world of the ‘Gold Coast’ to seek their fortunes in the Wall streets and executive suites of the nation, they usually joined one or another exclusive men’s club. Here they dined with others of their kind, helped each other to secure jobs and promotions, and made friends with the influential older members. . . . Proper club affiliation was, after all, the final and most important stage in an exclusive socializing process.”45 Canby agrees, “If he could once place himself in the right college group, his own would take care of him, provided that he did not too egregiously disappoint them in his later career. From henceforth he would be not Jones of Columbus, but Jones of ‘Bones’ or some other tight-ringed fraternity. . . . If there was a good job in a brokerage firm he would get it, because of his connections.”46 ***** This pattern of attendance at prestigious boarding schools and colleges was what Cleveland’s upper-class wanted to follow in order to become part of the national network of aristocratic circles.47 Although “a college degree was a rare credential”48 among the first generation of Euclid Avenue’s elite, they worked to send their sons to the proper schools. Since they were generally not of old New England aristocratic stock, they were attempting to boost their social status by being part of the rising ‘meritocracy’-- a natural aristocracy based on virtue and talent. Since “[m]erit was gained by conduct rather than one’s specific business or patriarchal bonds,”49 they started to send their sons to the Eastern boarding schools, as that was where the path to national elite connections began. Soon Cleveland’s elite desired a local prep school to which they could send their sons for an education comparable to that of the Eastern boarding schools. Hence, the University School (US) opened on June 12, 1890, on a nine-acre lot at Giddings Avenue (now East Seventy-First Street). It was established as a non-sectarian, nondenominational prep school for the elite New England colleges. However, its Protestant founders included prayer and scripture readings in the daily program. The idea was that “boys of promise could be systematically educated to the standard of the nation’s finest universities without having to leave home to board in one of the elite college preparatory academies.”50 In addition, the school was considered an educational novelty because the founders believed that “manual training and applied technology could combine with classical scholarship to produce young men especially fit to take their place in an increasingly industrial and commercial culture.”51 The school’s first headmaster, Newton Mitchell Anderson, was the son of a prosperous manufacturer and had studied applied science at Ohio State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.52 He taught at Central High School, Cleveland’s first and best public high school, then he started his own institution, the Cleveland Manual Training School in 1886. Anderson, then, was an ideal candidate to guide US along a path that would fulfill the desires of its founders. The original Members of the Corporation were themselves among that emerging industrial-commercial culture Mather, Bingham, Pickands, Wade, Chisholm, Blossom, Sherman, Norton, Holden, Hanna, Herrick, Squire, Rockefeller, Oglebay, Dempsey, and Perry. Most of them had some association with Yale, whether it was their own alma mater or they wanted to send their sons there. Right from the beginning, then, there was a connection between US and Yale. The school’s four principles even reflected Yale’s plan for mental discipline as articulated in the Yale Report of 182853 •To develop the greatest possible dexterity of mind and body •To impart to him as much useful knowledge as possible •To teach him healthful and manly habits •To aid him in forming an earnest and upright character After ten years as headmaster, Anderson was replaced by George Pettee, a Yale graduate of 1887 who held that post from 1900-08. Before going to University School, though, he was a teacher and registrar at Andover, so he was familiar with the connections between Yale and its feeder schools, Andover probably being one of the most significant. In 1908, Harry Peters (Yale 1902) became US’s third headmaster rather accidentally. He was a student at the Yale Law School when Pettee came to offer his roommate a teaching position at US. The roommate was out and already had a job for the next year, so Peters took the teaching job and later became headmaster. Mirroring the national trend for colleges and professional circles, clubs had become “epidemic” at U.S. by the early 1890s.54 Various theatre, literary, musical, and sporting clubs formed, the most popular of which was football, perhaps for the aspiring Yalies. After all, Yale had been the “scourge of Ivy League Football,” outscoring its opponents 3863-89 in its seven seasons between 1884 and 1891.55 Following the goings-on of Yale was practically an obsession for these boys who might well have adopted for their own the popular campus slogan at Yale “We toil not, neither do we agitate, but we play football.”56 Since “the aspirations of the average American boy were being molded by proper Protestant heroes of sport,” athletics were apparently an important factor in their decisions of what college to attend. The University of Michigan, for example, did not have a gym for its student body of 2000. As the U.S. Alumni Book of 1908 shows, only 9 students in the school’s first 18 years went to Michigan while 63 attended Yale College and 45 attended the Sheffield Science School.57 With so many Preppers (as the US boys are called) attending Yale, University School soon had a “University School Club” whose picture in the yearbook was set among the likes of the Andover, Exeter, and Groton Clubs. This gave the Cleveland boys from US a bit of an advantage in the exclusive social circles at Yale. They looked out for each other, as Philip Richard Mather (1916) assured his father “All the University School boys in upper classes have been very nice to me, inviting me to call on them sometime, and Edward Taymond even took us to supper one night at a fashionable restaurant where freshman are not allowed unaccompanied.”58 ***** “All these friendships formed at Yale continued through life, as we say in one of the verses of ‘Here’s to Dear Old Yale,’”59 Charles Augustus Otis wrote in 1951, 61 years after he graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School. In the case of the Clevelanders at Yale, most of whom had grown up together on Euclid Avenue, their return to their home town was not surprising, given the steady economic conditions and their already-established connections. They had grown up together on Euclid Avenue, and they maintained their ties to one another through years of education and marriages and business partnerships that followed. Despite their Yale-associated entrance to a wider set of affiliations, they chose to return to Cleveland to continue, or even expand, the businesses that provided their fathers with millions of dollars. Living in their home town once again, they wanted to continue their social ties with one another while maintaining their exclusionary circle. Consequently, they were the ones who founded most of Cleveland’s social clubs.60 The Yale degree associated with their names legitimized their authority to create such a culture for themselves as set apart from the rest of Cleveland’s working-class and immigrant population. In Cleveland, the trend began with the founding of the Union Club in September 1872. According to an article in the Leader on September 24 of that year “It should be clearly understood that this Cleveland club is to be by no means a mere hall of conviviality where gentlemen may unite to eat, drink, play billiards, and escape from the quieter enjoyments of home. It should be and we are certain it will be a place where cultured gentlemen will meet to read and discuss the topics of the day and entertain each other and their friends from abroad. Properly conducted, such a club becomes the social and intellectual force of a community, the stimulant of a broader culture and a worthier growth.”61 One of the oldest members of the club, Charles Otis commented in his 1951 book Here I Am that the Union Club was “a businessman’s organization for good food and good drinks, nice friendships and acquaintances.”62 It was the first of many social clubs that marked elite status among Clevelanders, and none that followed achieved the prestige that the Union Club did. The organization actually traces its roots to the Civil War when a league of farmers on the South and West sides of the city rallied to stop horse and cattle thieves. This was one example of the “patriotic-propaganda clubs” of Lincoln supporters during that period. It soon evolved into a marker of elite status even though “members of the club would be among the first to hoot at the notion that work-a-day Cleveland had an aristocracy, but, if some snob wished to try to delineate one, he might inspect the Union Club’s hundred years of members as a start. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that social acceptance over three or four generations has some value for admission.”63 Mills agrees, “To the outsider, the club to which the upper class man or woman belongs is a badge of certification of his status; to the insider, the club provides a more intimate or clan-like set of exclusive groupings which places and characterizes a man.”64 In practice, membership at the Union Club was, and for a long time continued to be, a foundation for prestige. In a centennial history of the club, the author boasts that the club’s members had included United States Presidents, Senators, Representatives, influential businessmen, and “four Yale football captains. . . . Probably more than a score of the first hundred members were college graduates, a respectable percentage for that day. Seven of them were Yale grads.”65 Over the years, the club’s presidents included four Dempseys, three generations of Hoyts, two Browns, and two Mathers as part of its Yale contingent. In 1893, another exclusive club opened in Cleveland-- the Tavern Club. It was essentially a drinking club that was started by eight Clevelanders, all of whom, but one, recently graduated from Yale. They were Charles Augustus Otis (Sheff1890), Harry K. Devereux (1883), S. Louis Smith (1889), William Castle Rhodes (1891), Perry Williams Harvey (1891), Edwin Victor “Ned” Hale (1891), Addison Hills Hough (1890), and Harry R. Edwards (Harvard 1883).66 “The basis of the Club was always friendship and congeniality, and no one was taken in without the approval of every member, and this maintains until the present time [1951].”67 Again, nationalizing these new affiliations, the Tavern Club enjoyed a friendly rivalry with the similarly-organized Onondaga Club in Detroit. As “the physiological and physical ugliness of the city streets gradually drove those who could afford it back to nature and the wide-open spaces,” the country club became a vital part of the American upper-class way of life, beginning with the founding of The Country Club at Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1882.68 The number of country clubs expanded around the nation, especially in the 1920s, and Cleveland was one of the pace-setters for the craze.69 For the socially prominent Clevelanders of the East side, particularly Euclid Avenue residents, a carriage could easily take them to a retreat area in Glenville. This club in the country was a perfect place for them to picnic and host parties while overlooking Lake Erie. In 1889, it was known as the Bit and Bridle Club for a group of eight men, three of whom were Yale graduates. They soon decided to expand its membership with a limit of one hundred, and it became The Country Club. Croquet was probably the favored sport, but after Samuel Mather returned from a trip to the East coast where he was introduced to golf, he easily convinced Cleveland’s elite that a golf club was necessary. On March 23, 1895, the membership decided to organize a golf club with Mather serving as its first President. He and two other men loaned money to the club to ensure its survival, and they acquired land in nearby Bratenahl from Charles Coit to set up a nine-hole golf course. The Cleveland Golf Club’s membership was also limited to one hundred at the start. It was considered a subsidiary of The Country Club because only its members were eligible for membership at the new club, so it was an elite segment of the elite crowd. The Leader reported of the club’s opening that “it was neither too cold for the fashionable feature of the occasion nor too warm for the sporting feature, which was, by the way, the less important of the two.”70 The fact that “they take quite seriously their appearances in these associations” is an appropriate observation for Baltzell’s claim that “the real function of the American country club was not sport but social exclusion.”71 However, “the newly prosperous residents of booming Cleveland, into which dollars were pouring from the copper country of Northern Michigan, the Iron Range of Minnesota and the oil fields of Pennsylvania, needed more than one country club of social standing. By late 1900, work was well underway on the Euclid Club at the top of Cedar Hill,” even farther out in the country.72 Its incorporators included a number of men who were already members of the Golf Club. Unfortunately, the Euclid Club had a short life because it was located right in the path of the eastward expansion of the suburbs. Its legacy did not die, though. Not long after the golf course opened in 1901, three factions divided its membership. One was a group of the loyal members, but the other two segments eventually formed two new golf clubs, Mayfield Country Club and Shaker Heights Country Club. With the help of Orris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen, developers of the east suburbs, the latter was incorporated in 1913, and on May 29, 1915, five hundred of Cleveland’s social elite attended the opening of the clubhouse.73 Just down the street, Canterbury Golf Club opened in 1922, almost a year and a half after its incorporation. It was named for the Connecticut birthplace of Moses Cleaveland, and at an elevation of 600 feet, Lake Erie and downtown could be seen ten miles away.74 Seventeen years earlier, “a group of [Jewish] friends and business associates saw the time was near for the establishment of a club, away from the rush and noise of the city, far enough in the country where they could relax and play golf.”75 On September 10, 1906, the first nine holes of the Oakwood Club opened, and it did not add a second nine until nine years later. It is interesting to note that this trend of golf clubs was strong enough that the Jews were able to open their own course despite their generally lesser status in Cleveland’s social circles. It is precisely for this reason, the downward spread of country clubs into the non-elite social circles, that “the gentleman’s club, an exclusive male organization. . . [was] socially most important.”76 ***** These social clubs were basically a formality considering the amount of entertaining that occurred in the Euclid Avenue mansions anyway. From winter sleigh rides to coming-out parties in the summer, the families of Euclid Avenue often shared the great moments of their lives within the bounds of their linear neighborhood. “All the leading families in Cleveland seemed to be in very close relationship,” Charles Otis reflected. “[T]hey were all connected in friendship, and, in fact, their very lives were joined.”77 In fact, “[m]arriages among the families were the strongest link in the Euclid Avenue chain of social bonds.”78 Some of these unions developed from childhood friendships while others ensued after reacquaintances through college or business associations. Either way, the alliances among friends, classmates, and business associates cemented the neighborhood.79 Charles Otis and his wife Lucia Edwards “had been brought up from early childhood together. . . When I was a bad boy. . . my mother would always say, ‘You go down and play with Lucia for the day,’ and this was certainly loaning me out for punishment! Mother and Mrs. Edwards were very intimate and our families were close and devoted.”80 Otis recalls that his “wife, then Lucia Edwards, came down to the [Yale Junior] Prom as the guest of Ash Newell, who is now the uncle of my three grandsons-- the Newell boys-- his nephew, Jack, having married my daughter Queenie.81 From age two until he was married in 1894, Otis lived close to downtown at 295 Euclid Avenue. He and Lucia then purchased a house farther out from the city on Euclid Avenue where 36th Street is now. “The first house East was Bob Clark’s, next Bill Boardman’s, next Dr. Corlett’s, and next Bill Harkness’, so we really moved back in the neighborhood of my boyhood.”82 Among the most intimate friends of the Otises were the Hales, Ned (Class of 1891) and Florence and their three children. After William Edwards Otis graduated from Yale, he married Connie Hale in 1923. They divorced 1929 after she had born two children. Queenie Otis married Jack Newell and had three sons. After they divorced, she married Dan Hanna Jr., the son of her father’s “very good friend.”83 On another branch of the Euclid Avenue genealogy were the Binghams and Paynes. As neighbors, Charles W. Bingham (Class of 1868) and his wife Mary Perry Payne grew up with close connections. Charles, memorialized by Bingham Hall on Yale’s Old Campus, was the son of William Bingham, founder of the W. Bingham Company for industrial hardware. Mary’s brother Henry Willson Payne was a year ahead of Charles at Yale, and another brother, Oliver Hazard Payne, left his Yale class of 1863 to serve in the Civil War. One of their sons graduated from Yale in 1910, and their two daughters married other families of the Avenue’s elite. Elizabeth Beardsley Bingham married Dudley Stuart Blossom Sr. (Class of 1901) who was the grandson of Henry C. Blossom, her grandfather William’s business partner. Her older sister Frances Payne Bingham married Chester Bolton, grandson of one-time Cleveland mayor William B. Castle, who had connections to the Newell/Otis clan. Chester’s brother Julian married Fanny Hanna, the daughter of Howard Melville Hanna Jr (Sheff 1901). One of Howard’s nephews was Daniel Rhodes Hanna, Charles Otis’ partner in the newspaper business. ***** The millionaires of Euclid Avenue spent a lot of their money on their lavish mansions and extravagant parties, but they donated significant portions of their wealth to a number of charitable institutions.84 “The image of the ‘Christian business man’ had arisen to allure men of talents to their finest statures. A combination of the nineteenth century Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Quaker approved doctrines held that a man should, under God, realize his potential, including making money; with the provision that if he did, he would invest some of his wealth in religious, public, and human good.”85 Cigliano notes, “Their lavish ways might have appeared products of self-indulgent upbringings, yet the values of most families were quite conventional, born out of a self-made New England austerity that seemed genuine.”86 The Protestant churches and their members promoted an extensive network of voluntary organizations. Jan Cigliano cites 12 philanthropic and 31 cultural institutions that were founded by Euclid Avenue’s elite.87 As Nathaniel R. Howard wrote of the city’s social elite in a history of the Union Club, “It was that a majority of Cleveland’s humane and cultural institutions of today stem from that small group of men who liked each other’s company and organized a club to cultivate it.”88 While they contributed to the city’s economic development, the city government supported their benevolent institutions. One of the institutions that was most commonly the object of much charity was Western Reserve University (WRU). It was originally a small college in Hudson, Ohio, founded by David Hudson in 1826, and it was “conducted by Yale men who had come out to the wilderness of New Connecticut. It was long known as the ‘Yale of the West.’”89 The Cleveland Medical College, a subsidiary of Western Reserve University, was established in Cleveland in 1843. They operated rather independently, especially because of the approximately 20 miles separating them. In 1880, though, Amasa Stone donated over $500,000 to move the school from Hudson to Cleveland on property adjacent to Leonard Case Jr.’s recently founded Case School of Applied Science.90 Having received a classical education in law at Yale, Case established this technical school to prepare young men for the increasingly industrial society. WRU then named its men’s college Adelbert College in honor of Amasa’s son who drowned in the Connecticut River in 1866 while a student at Yale. The school continued to grow in size and in prestige with help from donations like that of the widow of Franklin T. Backus (Class of 1834) to the endowment for the Law School that was established in 1892. The College for Women was renamed Mather College in 1932 for Flora Stone Mather who was responsible for the donations to erect three of the seven buildings. By the 1950s, though, Western Reserve University was struggling financially while Case established itself as one of the top schools in the nation. In 1953, Adelbert, Mather, and Cleveland Colleges merged and moved to University Circle, the former recreational land that was donated to the city by Jephtha H. Wade (grandfather of Jephtha Homer Wade II, Sheff 1901). At its new location across Euclid Avenue from Case, Western Reserve University began to flourish once again until 1967 when the two schools merged to form Case Western Reserve University. Although most of the Euclid Avenue millionaires were great philanthropists, there are a couple who are worthy of specific mention for their particularly profound impact on Cleveland’s growth as a cultural center of its own. Samuel Mather, known as “Cleveland’s First Citizen,” was the wealthiest man in Cleveland as a result of his success first with his father’s company, the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, then with his own firm, Pickands, Mather, and Company. Ella Grant Wilson observed of him admiringly, “At no time during an active career of more than 50 years did Samuel Mather figure as the son and inheritor of great wealth. Instead, the following tribute of a friend summed up his life of activity ‘His individual ability and great energy would have carved him a high place in business affairs had he never inherited anything from his worthy ancestors beyond their solid character and integrity.’”91 Mather contributed to the Hiram Settlement House, the Goodrich Social Settlement, and many of Cleveland’s hospitals and museums. In addition, he was very active in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and other community service programs. His grants to Western Reserve University alone were in excess of $4,000,000. Such noteworthy offerings to the city of Cleveland caused many to consider Mather a “[p]hilanthropist and humanitarian, first; capitalist and industrialist, second.”92 Another great Cleveland philanthropist was Dudley Stuart Blossom Sr. (Class of 1901). He and his wife Elizabeth Beardsley Bingham, also donated to many of the same institutions as did Mather. In addition, they founded the Blossom Hill School in 1914. It was a “juvenile rehabilitation center that emphasized work away from home and continued secondary education as necessary steps in changing behavior and creating a more secure social setting.”93 They were also benefactors of the arts. They provided a large portion of the funds for the 1930 construction of Severance Hall, the permanent home of the Cleveland Orchestra. The Blossom name is better known today, though, for Blossom Music Center, an outdoor concert amphitheater that was constructed in 1968. ***** “When Cowell and Hubbard moved their jewelry store from Superior Street way up on Euclid avenue, they were much ridiculed by many people for thinking that Euclid avenue would ever become a business street. Years later, they had the laugh on their old friends.”94 By the late 1890s, the Public Square area could no longer accommodate the amount of business Cleveland’s economy sustained. Commerce crawled east up Euclid Avenue, and the residents continued to maintain their distance by moving even farther east. With the invasion of the streetcar in 1915, transportation from their homes to downtown became much more convenient. Originally, the section of Euclid Avenue that was Millionaire’s Row was free from this modern convenience. Before 1900, the streetcars from Public Square turned south at East Ninth Street, went up Prospect to East Ninetieth, then turned back to Euclid to go out to the suburbs. By 1932, though, the wide avenue succumbed to the force of commerce, and the streetcar line ran continuously all the way up Euclid Avenue. The “Heights,” Cleveland’s east suburbs so named for the sharp increase in elevation over downtown, supplied ample space and seclusion for the desires of the upper-class. The Van Sweringen brothers had purchased the land from the Shakers in 1905 when their following dwindled. The “Vans” practically single-handedly changed the composition of the city by their intense development of the suburbs. They built a Rapid Transit just south of Euclid Avenue from downtown to Shaker Heights. To begin development of the area, they subsidized the founding of Hawken School, a prep school for the Eastern boarding schools, in 1915. University School moved there in 1926, and two girls schools soon followed Hathaway Brown in 1927 and Laurel School in 1928. In addition, Cleveland University (now John Carroll University) and Notre Dame Academy were also started in the same area. By luring a number of social and country clubs to the area too, the Van Sweringen brothers definitely made the Heights an attractive place for the relocation of the upper-class. Whereas almost 260 houses had lined the four-mile processional between East Ninth and Ninetieth Streets in the late 1890s, only half of them still stood in 1921, and by 1937, only seven were left.95 Today the lone mansion that still exists is the old Beckwith home. It is now the University Club. The extravagant mansions were simply too expensive to maintain. Perhaps the best example was the home of Samuel Andrews, known affectionately as “Andrews’ Folly.” The hand-carved staircases, stained glass windows, and skylit court were costly to construct and inefficient to service. “The overhead was too much even for a Standard Oil magnate and at last the family shut up the home.”96 The suburban movement had already begun at the turn of the century when “the Protestant upper class first began to flee the ugliness of the urban melting pot.”97 In effect, they were escaping that which they had created ethnic slums, industrial pollution in the city, mansions too expensive to maintain, and a widening commercial radius. This was a common event around the nation as many suffered after the Depression and the automobile helped to blur socioeconomic lines. Still, these changes that the upper-class induced throughout the industrial era were the force behind Cleveland’s tremendous growth and success. Although there is very little extant physical proof that Millionaire’s Row did exist, the legacy of Cleveland’s elite remains in the highly-developed cultural institutions that they founded. With a very active Yale Alumni Association, Cleveland is still a Yale town. Even though Cleveland was able to prosper on its own after some help from its New England origins, its ties were never completely severed. One can stand in the center of Gates Mills, Chagrin Falls, Hudson, or a number of other suburbs, and look at the Congregational Church, simple homes, and antique stores, reminiscent of colonial New England, only to forget that downtown Cleveland is a short drive away. If Cleveland still does have an “Establishment,” it is very much in the background of the city’s politics and culture. It emerged at one time as part of the national elite, but it has more or less melted back into the local mainstream population.
"The Emergence of a National Elite: A Glimpse of Euclid Avenue Through the Lens of Yale, 1880-1920,"
by Ilona Paulin-Emmerth
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