Alameda County CA Archives History - Books .....Chapter III Athens Of The West 1941
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Book Title: Berkeley The First Seventy-Five Years

1873-1903
III: "Athens of the West"

OPTIMISTIC, but somewhat premature, had been the boast of Governor Newton Booth
in 1873 when he announced that the university on July 16 had taken possession of
its permanent site in Berkeley: "As the Athens of the Pacific it looks down upon
a busy highway of nations and is kept cool and pure by the salt sea-breezes of a
limitless ocean." The town's 500-odd inhabitants—even its forward-looking
academic element—had no such grandiose conception of their village. Some had
moved here from San Francisco because they wanted to live in the country; they
had opposed the imposition of a municipal government on their property in 1878.
Others looked upon it as a pleasant retreat where learning and the good life
could be pursued without interference from the rampant commercialism of Oakland
and San Francisco. This attitude was shared by the Reverend Edward B. Payne,
pastor of the Congregational chapel at Dwight Way and Choate (Telegraph)
Avenue—Berkeley's first church. "We were hardly many enough then for factions
and cliques," he later recalled, "and the tracing of those occultly determined
lines which mark off social zones and temperatures. . .Berkeley. . . was then,
for the most part, about as God and Nature and the ploughings of a few ranchmen
had made it . . . The paths joining dwelling to dwelling were the worn ways of
an impartial good-neighborhood . . . And it was even true that for a
considerable time we had here but a single church, in which the variant faiths
forgot their divergencies ..."

  The natural beauty of Berkeley's site in the shelter of the Contra Costa
hills, the good society of the professors and their families, and the cultural
opportunities afforded by the university attracted a class of residents to whom
the atmosphere of books was congenial, so that by the time the Greek Theatre was
built, in 1903, Berkeley had justified the Governor's well-meant metaphor. It
was then the home not only of the Nation's second largest university, but of a
score of lesser public and private institutions of learning, and it had achieved
world renown as the abode of famous artists and writers.

  Apart from the university, Berkeley's best-known institution of learning was
the Deaf and Dumb and Blind Asylum, which had laid the foundations for its new
building in 1867, three years before the university started construction on its
new site. The inappropriateness of the institution's original name is indicated
by its list of graduates, bearing the names of such persons as sculptor Douglas
Tilden, whose prize-winning group, The Bear Hunt, now stands on the grounds of
his alma mater (others of his well-known works are The Football Players, on the
university campus, and two fountains on Market Street in San Francisco).The
institution was renamed the California Institution for the Deaf and Blind in
1905, and was divided into two separate schools in 1921.

  Proximity to the university made Berkeley attractive to proprietors of
preparatory schools; many such schools were established during the decades
immediately following 1873. Reflecting the current adulation in American
education of all things German, the Berkeley Gymnasium was opened on Dana Street
near Allston Way in 1877; it moved some years later to a building on Atherton
Street just south of the campus. Here Cambridge-educated George Bates offered
academic preparation while providing "a generous cuisine, a . . . feature . . .
considered absolutely essential to the well-being of studious and growing youth."

  In the eighties and nineties there were also Bowen's Academy, "a home school
for boys," on University below Shattuck; Boone's University School, on Durant
Avenue just below Shattuck, which continued on into the twentieth century
preparing boys for college; and St. Joseph's Academy, administered since 1878 by
the Sisters of the Presentation. The Harmon Seminary for young ladies flourished
in the middle eighties; and in 1887 Miss Anna Head established a school which
still functions at its original location on Channing Way.

  When the university first opened in Berkeley there was no local school to
which faculty members and townspeople could send their children. The nearest
public school was the Peralta School, on Alcatraz near Telegraph. This would
have been no more than a comfortable walking distance for college students, many
of whom hiked from Oakland to Berkeley on sunny days in vigorous disdain of the
horse-car, but it was inconvenient for grammar school pupils. To meet this
deficiency Mary Hyde, Maine-bred and missionary-minded, rented in 1876 a cottage
in what is now Faculty Glade, and established a small private school. Her
daughter, Constance Willis Camp, a present Berkeley resident, explains that Miss
Hyde had come West because "she thought that Indians were roaming around this
country neglected and ill treated and she wanted to come out and help them."
While finding no Indians, she did find some substitutes who responded well to
her teachings. Among her pupils were Joseph Nisbet LeConte, called "Little Joe"
because his father was the great Professor Joseph LeConte; Charles Ramm, who
became Monsignor Ramm, administrator of St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco
and a regent of the university; Juliet Wilbur Tompkins, who was to write a
series of popular domestic novels, and with whose family Mary Hyde boarded in
Oakland; and the children of several other faculty members and townspeople.
After the opening of the Berkeley Gymnasium, Mary Hyde went to teach there and
took her pupils along to the new school.

  Well fixed with private schools, the town long neglected its public system.
The school board which was chosen in Berkeley's first election in 1878 included
two university professors: Willard Bradley Rising and Martin Kellogg (the latter
was made board president). At that time the only institution in the board's
jurisdiction was the Ocean View School in West Berkeley. One of the group's
first acts was to purchase five lots on the southwest corner of Center and
Oxford Streets and build what a contemporary newspaper called a "commodious
school-house" named the Kellogg School for the board president. A small
two-story frame building with high narrow windows, the school bulged with 300
pupils in its first year, and was further taxed by the addition of high-school
classes in 1882. But although the need for better schools had been one of the
chief arguments in favor of incorporation, the "Athens of the West" remained
parsimonious towards its public system. As late as 1895 one member of the board
of trustees declared that high schools were "luxuries" and should not be
supported by public funds. In 1896 the citizens failed to pass a bond issue for
much-needed new buildings, and the high school remained without an adequate home
until 1901.

  Besides acquiring prestige as a city of learning, Berkeley also achieved an
early reputation for devoutness. "The churches of Berkeley are, as a rule,
comely and cheerful edifices," stated the San Francisco Call on December 12,
1891, "and all of them well attended. Berkeley enjoys an immediate moral
atmosphere, because the law prohibits saloons within a mile of the State
University. The consequence is that the churches meet with little opposition and
the moral growth of the city is not retarded."

  Congregationalists had been foremost in founding and developing the College of
California, and were the first to hold regular religious services in Berkeley.
An appropriation of $100 a month for that purpose was made in June, 1874, by the
Congregational Home Missionary Society, and on the last Sunday of that month
regular services were instituted in a room in the new Berkeley Hotel, at Choate
Avenue (now Telegraph) and Bancroft Way, by the Reverend James H. Warren. In
December the First Congregational Church of Berkeley was organized, and—with the
assistance of members of the First Congregational Church of Oakland—a chapel was
erected at the corner of Dwight Way and Choate Avenue, where the first service
was held on March 22, 1875, by the Reverend Edward B. Payne. This chapel was
moved a few years later to the school grounds at Center and Oxford, to become an
annex to the Kellogg School, and the expanding church congregation moved into a
new building at Dana and Durant.

  Other denominations were not far behind the Congregational in establishing
themselves in Berkeley. Episcopalians dedicated churches in both East and West
Berkeley in 1878, and Presbyterians duplicated this accomplishment the next
year. The Methodists and Roman Catholics were giving regular services in 1879
(although the latter had met two years before in a barn owned by Michael
Curtis). In December of that year the San Francisco Chronicle was able to report
that "there are six church buildings, seven church organizations and eight
Sunday-schools in Berkeley." The city's church facilities kept pace with its
growth in population, so that by the turn of the century most of the
denominations were represented.

  But although the town as a whole was religiously inclined—deceased citizens as
late as 1898 were referred to (by W. C. Bartlett) as having "had a gentle
transition, as if going a little way at the break of day"—it found a cleavage
over the use and sale of intoxicating beverages. There was conflicting State
legislation about the distance from the campus at which bars might operate. A
law of 1876 merely prohibited the sale of vinous or alcoholic liquors within one
mile of the grounds of the University of California, with the result that by
1890 West Berkeley had twenty-eight bars, "many of them gambling dens" and beer
was sold within the mile limit.

  Moreover, although the evangelical churches were still predominant, there was
a relatively larger number of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians having less
rigid views about wine, card parties, and dancing, and it was said that a
university professor, a widely traveled member of the Seville Club of London,
held at times with A. E. Housman that

           "... malt does more than Milton can
              To justify God's ways to man."


Disciples, Benefactors, and Co-eds

ON JULY 16, 1873, while carpenters and brickmasons were still at work on the
first buildings—North and South Hall—twelve young men who had been studying for
four years in Oakland received diplomas from President Daniel Coit Gilman. He
informed them that, besides being artium haccalaurei, they were to be
"apostles." They were reminded that they were lineal descendants of those
present at the first American commencement in 1642: "From that day to this . . .
each harvest time has welcomed a new accession to the scholars' ranks, and we
are now repeating on the shores of the Pacific those academic usages. With these
external rites let us strive to perpetuate the old spirit of the scholar, the
spirit of labor and self-sacrifice, the love of learning and culture, the desire
to gather up the past for the benefit of the future."

  Whether or not these twelve apostles strove "to perpetuate the old spirit of
the scholar," they became effective agents for the new university. Collectively
they supplied to society a congressman and governor, a university regent, two
university professors, three lawyers, two financiers, one minister, and two
State and Federal special appointees. In partial realization of their success
and of other early evidences of the university's high standards, Governor Will
Irwin said in his Biennial Message to the State Legislature in 1877:

  "The Biennial report of the Board of Regents bears gratifying testimony to the
progress the University has made. While its financial resources are not yet as
ample as could be desired, nor its arrangements for imparting instruction and
accommodating students as perfect as those of older institutions, it must be a
source of profound gratification to its friends, and to all friends of the cause
of sound learning in the State, that it has done so much to vindicate its
character as a University. Great institutions of learning are not built up in a
day. Time is an essential element in their growth and development. A foundation
has been laid on which, by patient, judicious, and persevering labor, a great
University may be reared. And in my judgment it ought not to be expected that
we, by any patent or hot-house process, will be able to accomplish in a few
years what it has taken other States and countries decades, or even centuries,
to achieve ..."

  Without benefit of a "patent or hot-house process" the university progressed
steadily, although the State was by no means generous in its support. In
addition to funds for the original North and South Halls, the Legislature voted
$40,000 for the Mechanic Arts Building in 1874, and in 1877 matched Henry
Douglass Bacon's $25,000 gift for a library and art gallery with a like sum; but
then for a quarter of a century—aside from erecting some wooden classroom
buildings—it left the university to depend chiefly on the generosity of private
donors.

  At his death in 1879, James Lick left $700,000 for the establishment of the
university's Lick Observatory. "He had no idea," Dr. Willey later observed in a
published article, "of a college or what it was worth, none whatever. He could
see the use of a flour mill, and of a fruit orchard, and of a hotel; but as to a
college, he knew nothing whatever about it, and I have always thought that his
providing in his will for the endowment of an astronomical observatory must have
been the idea of some one else, and not himself." To which the editor of the
Overland Monthly added a parenthetical note: "(The world has already been told
that this conjecture of Dr. Willey's is quite true, and that Mr. Lick's own
idea, from which he was dissuaded with difficulty, was to build a marble
pyramid, bigger than those of Egypt, in his memory.)"

  A fund of $75,000 to endow a chair of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and
Civil Polity was donated to the university by D. O. Mills in 1881. Two years
later the board of regents selected George Holmes Howison as the first Mills
Professor of Philosophy after an extensive search. Howison accepted reluctantly.
He had taught philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis and at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston; had lectured at Harvard and at
the University of Michigan; and had spent two years in Europe, mainly at the
University of Berlin. He acknowledged misgivings about this university in the
wilderness on the Pacific Coast, where hitherto philosophy never had been
formally recognized. Within a year after his arrival in Berkeley, however,
Howison expressed the opinion that the University of California was surpassed by
only four or five of the oldest and richest foundations in the country, and he
refused an appointment to the University of Michigan, which he had previously
considered superior to the Western school. The Philosophical Union, organized by
Howison in June, 1884, extended his teaching beyond the university. The Union
was not confined to the campus, but included many of the intellectuals of San
Francisco and the Bay region; some of the most eminent philosophical scholars in
the English-speaking world were brought to Berkeley as its guests.

  Bacon Hall, completed in 1881, and much admired for its Victorian Gothic
detail and pedimented clock-tower, housed the library—soon enriched by Michael
Reese's gift of a fund with which to purchase new books and the library of an
expatriated German liberal, the historian and political economist, Dr. Francis
Leiber. Bacon Hall also housed an art gallery including a number of works which,
unlike the collections in its library, are not now regarded as among the
university's treasures. These included sixty-five paintings, among them a "good"
Cimabue and an "undoubted" Rembrandt, and three pieces of statuary: a marble
copy of Johann Heinrich Dannecker's Ariadne on the Panther, and two groups by
Johann Halberg, Genius of America and Nymphs Bathing. So impressive was the
Teutonic weight of these sculptures that the authorities feared the floor would
not support them. "To test this point" observed a contributor to the Overland
Monthly, "a platoon of students, equal in weight to the statues, was told off
from the battalion and marched up to the gallery floor. The floor not bending
under the pressure, they were marched off again, and the statues in time
triumphantly set up. The principle, I suppose, was that the University could get
more students should an accident occur, while it could not replace the statues
if they were sacrificed instead."

  The furtherance of athletics, like the support of art, was made possible by a
private gift. A. K. P. Harmon, born in Maine but long a resident of Oakland,
erected on the bank of Strawberry Creek in 1878 a structure which because of its
odd octagonal shape and surmounting turret became known as the "ink bottle."
This was the Harmon Gymnasium, later enlarged and used by two generations of
students not only for athletic activities but for dances, graduation exercises,
and bi-weekly university meetings. Many noted visitors spoke at these meetings,
which were a link between "town and gown."

  The first athletic activities at Berkeley were the interclass baseball
contests, started in 1873. The underhand toss remained in vogue until the
"modern curve system" was introduced in 1881. Football first was played in 1882;
the opponent was the Phoenix Club of San Francisco, composed of former English
players and members of athletic clubs. Phoenix won by one goal of two tries;
Rugby Union rules were in force.

  Not until 1895, when its track team of twelve men invaded the East, did the
university achieve widespread athletic recognition. Within three months the
Berkeley team won the Western Intercollegiate in Chicago; defeated Princeton,
Union College, the University of Illinois, and the Denver Athletic Club; and
tied the score in competition with the University of Pennsylvania. It lost only
to the Chicago Athletic Club.

  As elsewhere in American schools and colleges, all sports were innocent of
twentieth-century organization and efficiency, although a training table was
inaugurated in the nineties: "a light breakfast about 8, meat and baked
potatoes, milk for the light men, and oat meal for the heavyweights; for lunch
at 2:30, fried meat, poached egg, and toast; for dinner soup, roast beef and
thick juicy steaks and fruit; no coffee or tea, no smoking, or drinking nor
profane language in playing allowed." Despite such restrictions, said the
Advocate, "the boys are much pleased with the training table ... at Mrs.
Fitzgerald's on Dana Street and endure their enforced diet without a murmur." It
was doubtless such Spartan endurance that enabled the football teams of 1898 and
1899 to defeat Stanford by 22 to o and 30 to o respectively.

  The Vrooman Act, which the State Legislature passed in 1887, by providing an
annual tax of .01 per cent on all taxable property in the State for the support
of the university, made possible new departments and better salaries. Also
forthcoming were other generous private gifts. A part of the estate of the
Nevada millionaire James Flood greatly strengthened the College of Commerce.
Phoebe Apperson Hearst, widow of George Hearst, millionaire mining man and
United States Senator, established a number of scholarships and gave Hearst Hall
to the university. This gymnasium and social center for women students was built
from plans drawn by a brilliant young architect, Bernard R. Maybeck. The
structure was a large shingled building having at either end two huge wooden
pointed arches rising from the ground to the apex of the roof. On the second
floor was a large hall (140 by 54 feet) with an open pointed arched roof, each
bay having a shallow alcove furnished with Gobelin tapestries and rugs. The
women students at last had come into their own.

  In theory, coeds since 1870 had been entitled to all the privileges extended
to men. In practice, instructors and male students at first had looked on them
with distrust, fearing that their admission would "lower the tone of the
institution." "But fear not, brethren, women are not our equals," an
undergraduate comforted his male classmates in a satirical article, "Views of an
Ecclesiastic About Lady Students." in The University Echo for May, 1873. He went
on to give several hints on proper masculine conduct:

  "First.—No matter if your female class-mate—who has had the audacity to choose
the same college as yourself—is cleverer than you; no matter if she is, by
natural talent and inclination, better fitted for the profession which you will
both follow —prejudice, tradition and precedent are against her. But never mind,
snub the girl, who, in the face of all, has dared to enter the University.
Remember that she has a nobler ambition than to be married, that she has other
longings than to be pretty and engaging. Remember this and snub her.

  "Second.—Stare at her every time she passes you.

  "Third.—Don't for the world, salute her courteously as a fellow-student,
though she has been your class-mate for a year.

  "Fourth.—Let her see that you think her in the wrong box.

  "Fifth.—Don't ask her to join your societies. It's a bore to have girls there
any way, for you can't say just precisely what you would like.

  "Sixth.—Don't believe that earnest, pure-minded girls would have a good
influence on you or your society.

  "Seventh.—Think it manly to speak contemptuously of all such nonsense and
bitterly oppose the co-education of the sexes.

  "Eighth.—Sink the gentleman in the student.

  "Ninth.—And last—Don't confess that the sight of a petticoat makes your gawky
heart quake, and conceal from the world that, like an old bachelor or a baby,
you secretly fear every woman but your mother."

  The women students were neither intimidated nor fooled, and soon established
their right to enter the halls of higher learning. A former undergraduate,
Francis E. Sheldon, wrote in 1886: "Today the admission of female students is no
longer an experiment. It is an established and successful fact. They rank as
high as their masculine co-workers in the college studies, and by their good
qualities and tact have shown conclusively that there is no danger, either to
them or to the boys, in the mingling of the sexes while in class."

  Though North Hall early provided "a sitting-room for the young ladies" as late
as 1891 no provision had been made for the physical education of women students.
At length a group of the more resolute young women called upon the gymnasium
instructor. He reluctantly agreed to give them one hour's instruction a
week—after the boys had gone home-but quickly added that he could not admit
anyone without a medical examination, for which no money was provided. Male
obstinacy seemed to have won out, but at this point a young woman physician, Dr.
Mary Bennett Ritter, saved the day by offering to give physical examinations
without fee. Such was the belated beginning of physical education for women at
the university. Construction of Hearst Hall was a grand climax to their triumph.

Town and Gown

GROWTH of both university and town was slow during the early years. The
university enrollment of 514 in 1878-79 rose to only 611 in 1888-89, and the
town just passed the 5,000 mark in the census of 1890. In 1892, however, when
the Reverend Edward B. Payne, who had been pastor of the First Congregational
Church when it opened in 1875, returned to Berkeley with a changed faith as
pastor of the Unitarian Church, he found that no longer were the streets "only
country roads." As early as 1886 the Blue and Gold boasted that the town had
grown: "The howl of the coyote is seldom heard by the belated student; in its
place he hears perhaps the Berkeley Choral Society as it rehearses one of its
delightful concerts."

  This was a change indeed from the primitive days when there were wildcats and
coyotes on the campus and when certain members of the faculty passed by a
footbridge over Strawberry Creek (where Sather Gate now stands) and crossed
Allston Way to Merrill's Drug Store (which was also the post office) to
foregather in a back room with nonacademic informality. No one then ventured out
on dark nights without his lantern, and the well-bred young man always lighted
the lantern of the young lady he escorted home from choir practice.

  It was assumed, however, that Berkeley would always be a "place of magnificent
distances": the hills and canyons in back of the town were depicted by
naturalist John Muir as "a region virtually untrodden by man save an occasional
botanist, geologist or sportsman." From their abode of plain living and high
thinking the town's residents all "enjoyed an unobstructed view of the bay and
the opening into the Pacific seemed so wide and ample that every resident . . .
claimed for his own house the distinction of being 'exactly opposite the Golden
Gate.' " Though on clear days they could easily discern the Palace Hotel being
built across the Ray in that luxury-loving city they distrusted, access to and
from the rest of the Bay area was difficult enough to assure them a pleasant
isolation, well suited to the New England reserve of many of the town's leading
citizens.

  Proximity of "the City" was not without its baneful influence on the
undergraduates, however. The very advertisements in the student magazine, The
Occident (which started in 1881 as a gossipy chronicle of campus news), were a
lure to Babylon, directing young men to "Brink's nobby hats," young women to
"Dickey's famous creme de lis for the complexion." and both to a performance of
H.M.S. Pinafore at the Tivoli Beer Gardens. The early worldliness of the
students was indicated by an editorial which attempted to dismiss as unwarranted
the attacks of the Occident's town contemporary, the Advocate, on the 1881
freshman-sophomore rush and the beer-drinking which followed.

  The townspeople were hard pressed to combat the undergraduate flights from
boredom. In 1882 a free reading room was established but soon closed for lack of
funds. Ten years later Dr. J. Edson Kelsey and attorney William H. Waste,
observing that boys and young men frequented a billiard room in which there were
both drinking and gambling, decided that there should be some place where youths
could spend their evenings "reading or in an innocent game or in singing." The
Advocate by its editorials, the Women's Christian Temperance Union by a donation
of 250 books, and the university's assistant librarian, Joseph D. Layman, by a
gift of a set of the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, succeeded in establishing
in the Shattuck Block what (at Layman's suggestion) they called the Holmes
Public Library. Besides the library proper, there was a room with a Brussels
carpet known as the "Fireside," where patrons could play checkers. The library
was augmented at "book socials." where everyone attending donated a book; new
volumes included, besides such standard works as Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott,
the novels of the currently popular and eminently ethical Lew Wallace and E. E
Roe. The upper story of the building at the northwest corner of Allston Way and
Shattuck Avenue served as the home of the library until a Carnegie grant
provided for a new building in 1905.

  Students were brought into direct contact with townsmen by at least two
cultural organizations. The Berkeley Choral Society was established in 1885 by
residents of Berkeley "primarily for their own musical culture through the study
of choral music of the highest class," said the Blue and Gold, and added that
"the interest expressed by friends of the society in its progress soon made it
evident that choral concerts given by the society would be highly appreciated
and it has now become the policy of the organization to give such concerts
whenever they are prepared."

  The student yearbook went on to explain that "the society has . . . the duty
of promoting and gratifying the musical taste of this community by means of
instrumental concerts and musically illustrated lectures ... It is intended that
these instrumental concerts shall be of the highest class so that the best
musicians of the Coast shall feel desirous of participating in them; while the
musical lectures will be such as to draw intelligent music lovers from all the
region around the Bay.

  "The Society is formally affiliated with the University, its executive control
always remaining in the hands of members of the University. Rehearsals, concerts
and lectures are held in University halls."

  There also had been established in 1883 the Longfellow Memorial Society, "to
provide new and even larger opportunities for the increase of literary culture
and at the same time to aid in the development of social life within the limits
of an organization including both University students and town residents," the
Blue and Gold explained.

  Francis Sheldon added a further note on the Longfellow Society for readers of
the Overland Monthly: "Its membership is limited, because of the necessity of
keeping it from out-growing the parlors of the ladies of Berkeley that entertain
it. At its meeting a professor or other person of ability reads a paper on some
literary topic, which is afterwards discussed in the most informal and often in
the most delightful fashion. Nobody that has heard Professor Joseph LeConte and
Professor Howison measure words in debate of some deep question is ever likely
to forget it. These exercises are lightened by singing and followed by social
chat."

  This was verging on heavyweight entertainment for the undergraduates, most of
whom felt more at home in their own off-campus organizations, which became
numerous in the nineties. Zeta Psi and Phi Gamma Delta, the first two national
Greek-letter societies to have chapters in Berkeley, were followed by a number
of others, including those soon to be called sororities. In 1893 there was
erected at Allston Way and Dana Street, in memory of Anson G. Stiles, a pioneer
founder of the university, a large brick and shingled building, Stiles Hall.
Here a variety of social organizations—Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., glee clubs, and
debating societies-engaged in extracurricular activities. Still another
"activity" was started in 1896: on February 29 of that year Labor Day was
inaugurated as an academic holiday on which once in four years all men students
were to turn out to build new roads or grade the campus grounds.

  The faculty had its own special avenues of contact with the townspeople. One
of the most respected and exclusive of these was the Berkeley Club, founded in
1873 with twenty charter members selected from among professors and the town's
leading intellectuals. Its program was maintained "with great tenacity" in the
same pattern for a quarter century, said William C. Bartlett, in a historical
review of the club in 1898. "There was to be a plain dinner as a rallying point
for social communion, then a paper, followed by a discussion, during which every
member could speak without reserve—freeing his mind as far as possible in seven
minutes . . .

  "This confidential relation . . . stimulated freedom of thought and speech . .
. The sparks have sometimes been struck off and the electric bells freely rung .
. . There has been no limit to the range of subjects brought under discussion.
Philosophy, history, political economy, physics, biography, government, law,
ethics, higher education, finance, literature, the culture of manhood, and the
culture of a rose, the evolution of an eye, the transit of Venus, the
occultation of Mars and the underworld which the microscope reveals . . ."

  Not to be outdone by the masculine element among Berkeley's intellectuals, the
feminine members of the Ebell Society, using the Berkeley Club as their model,
managed to subordinate, wrote Bartlett, "all social ambitions to a love of
letters, research and study befitting the earnest and thinking women of the day."

  Less formal centers of social life were those homes of well-to-do Berkeley
residents where the university's professors were entertained. The "Belle Rose"
of Judge and Mrs. John Garber was among the most hospitable. Built in 1888 near
the present location of the Claremont Hotel, this stately home with its spacious
library, its dining room with a sixteen-foot ceiling, and its walnut staircase
held open house to the brothers LeConte, Josiah Royce, and others; and here to
converse with them and to taste the Judge's excellent wines came William T.
Coleman, Dr. Paolo De Vecchia, and many another eminent California pioneer.

  Another gathering place was the home of William Keith, who found inspiration
for many of his landscapes in the Berkeley hills. Though Keith was chiefly
interested in his work, his wife made their home a hospitable rendezvous for
such intimate friends as the LeContes, Charles Warren Stoddard, Edward Rowland
Sill, John Muir, Charles Lummis, George Wharton James, Ina Coolbrith, the
Reverend Joseph Worcester, and Charles Keeler.

  Mrs. Keith, nee Mary McHenry, first woman graduate of the university's
Hastings Law School, was active in the Berkeley Political Equality Society, an
organization fostering women's rights. Still living in Berkeley, she recalls
entertaining Susan B. Anthony, Sarah B. Cooper, Elizabeth Yates, and other
prominent "suffragettes" who came from the East to the Woman's Congress in 1895.
To an evening session of the congress, Professor Joseph LeConte was invited to
speak; a polite but firm opponent of the suffrage movement, he amazed the
delegates by talking for two hours on the subject of evolution.

  In addition to the clubs and social groups with a definite university tinge,
the town had its chapters of the fraternal organizations common to all American
towns: Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Foresters, and other lodges with
their feminine auxiliary organizations. Somewhat unusual among California
communities was the relatively large number of women wearing the white ribbon of
the Women's Christian Temperance Union (it was their influence which gave the
name of Frances E. Willard to one of Berkeley's public schools). Less dogmatic
but distinctly Berkeleyan was the women's Town and Gown Club, organized in 1898
to unite the town and university elements: with a membership equally divided
between the two, the club's three sections were concerned respectively with the
Bible, current events, and reading.

  Besides lectures, polite social activities, and "highbrow" conversation,
Berkeley's culture-hungry citizens as early as 1880 were demanding music.
Clarence S. Merrill, son of the postmaster, helped assemble an orchestra. Old
Woolworth Hall, seating 700, became thrice yearly the scene of concerts played
by business men and professional men turned musicians; and before this orchestra
was disbanded in 1895 its original dozen members had been augmented, by the
addition of student musicians from high school and university, to forty or fifty
players. In 1885, Merrill organized Berkeley's first band, which performed at
civic functions and at celebrations of national holidays; and for a short time
he managed to maintain a University Band of which California's future Governor
George Cooper Pardee was the drum major.

  The townspeople also joined with the university contingent in watching and
performing in plays, staged in Shattuck Hall, on Shattuck Avenue between Center
Street and Allston Way. Here also Berkeley heard Anna Shaw and Susan B. Anthony
campaign for women's rights; here Carrie Nation waved her hatchet and Caruso
sang. More informal was the skating rink on Bancroft Way just above Shattuck
Avenue. Besides being a gathering place for skaters, the rink was headquarters
for church "socials," political meetings, athletic clubs, and dancing schools.

  The high academic level which the university maintained from the start was
indicated by many activities of its professors outside the classroom. The
Berkeley Quarterly, which began publication in 1880, reflected the interests of
some notable members of the faculty: Bernard Moses, educated at Harvard and
Heidelberg, wrote on the communism of early Christianity; Josiah Royce, an early
graduate of the university who, after studying Kant and Hegel at Gottingen, had
returned to California, discussed "natural rights" and Spinoza's essay on
liberty; Joseph LeConte dealt with the effect of the mixture of races on human
progress. And Yale graduate Edward Rowland Sill, between busy days instructing
the undergraduates in English and writing chastely classical verse, contributed
an article on literary Utopias.

  In 1889 Charles Mills Gayley came to fill the chair of English language and
literature and to broaden the influence of the university by opening his popular
lectures to the general public. Lecturing on great books and the scholarly
editing of high-school texts were only a few of Gayley's contributions. Eugene
W. Hilgard was carrying on research which later would be of great value to
California agriculture. Hilgard was credited with an astonishing faculty: it was
popularly rumored that he could tell the source of any spoonful of soil brought
in for his inspection, even if it came from outside California.

  The undergraduates, like the faculty, had publications in which to express
their views. The Berkeleyan was created in December, 1873, by consolidation of
two campus publications, the University Echo and the Neolaean Review. Early
student periodicals were published at the university printing office, concerning
which Francis E. Sheldon in 1886 reported: "The presses and material belong to
the students, and the University provides a foreman, whose duty it is to teach
any and all students applying the mysteries of the art preservative. Two weekly
papers are issued from this press, the work on them, financially, mechanically
and editorially being performed by the students alone . . . [The student]
receives instruction gratis, either in press work or at the case, and as soon as
he is fitted to do work on the papers that can be utilized, he is paid for that
work at current rates. Thus, after a few weeks' practice, the student's leisure
hours become a source of income, which has enabled more than one aspirant to
hold on until his sheepskin was safely in his grasp. And, further, the technical
training is such that, when the graduate gets out into the world, he has a trade
he can depend on for a living, while working off his conviction that he is
fitted to begin at the top of business life."

  It was the Berkeleyan which, on June 1, 1874, contained the following reverent
report: "Few incidents in our college life at Berkeley have given more pleasure
to the college circle, teachers and scholars alike, than the recent visit of Mr.
Charles Kingsley. It was not as Canon of Westminster, nor as Professor of
History in the University of Cambridge that we greeted him; but as the poet, the
novelist, the essayist and the scholar; as the man who is ever ready to advocate
the truth, ever quick to encourage progress, ever ready to utter the best
aspirations of the human soul."

  Berkeley attracted many other celebrities to awe and inspire the students.
Charles Keeler, a nature poet, was long a resident and a local publisher. Dr.
Frederick L. Hosmer, best known as a writer of hymns, was pastor of the
Unitarian Church. Joaquin Miller's "Abbey" in Oakland was near enough to enable
him to be a frequent visitor after declaring that "the poets must and shall be
educated here." With an extensive knowledge of the Oakland waterfront, oyster
piracy, and opium smuggling. Jack London, aged twenty, enrolled at the
university as a freshman; but he and Berkeley soon found each other
incompatible. London had been preceded by Frank Norris, who remained at the
university for two years, reading more of Emile Zola (of whose naturalism Norris
was to become a distinguished exponent) than of the classics assigned by his
instructors, before his failure in mathematics compelled him to leave without a
degree.

Plans for the Future

EARLY in the development of the Berkeley campus the need for an adequate
architectural plan for the future had become obvious. In October, 1896, Phoebe
Apperson Hearst offered to contribute funds "to obtain, by international
competition, plans for the architectural improvement of the University grounds."
Her offer was accepted by the regents, to whom $5,000,000 was available for
construction, and the resultant contest brought the name of Berkeley into
prominence throughout the world.

  "It is the desire of those who have charge of this enterprise," said the
prospectus issued to contestants and to the press, "to treat the grounds and the
buildings together, landscape gardening and architecture forming one
composition, which will never need to be architecturally changed in all the
future history of the University." Of the buildings contemplated, there were to
be "at least twenty-eight, all mutually related, and, at the same time, entirely
cut off from anything that could mar the effect of the picture. In fact, it is a
city to be created,—a City of Learning,—in which there is to be no sordid or
inharmonious feature. There are to be no definite limitations of cost, materials
or style. All is to be left to the unfettered discretion of the designer . . .
There will doubtless be development of science in the future that will impose
new duties on the University, and require alterations in the detailed
arrangement of its buildings, but it is believed to be possible to secure a
comprehensive plan so in harmony with the universal principles of architectural
art, that there will be no more necessity of remodeling its broad outlines a
thousand years hence than there would be of remodeling the Parthenon, had it
come down to us complete and uninjured."

  First prize of $10,000 was won by Henri Jean Emile Benard of Paris, whose plan
provided an admirable group of buildings in the Beaux Arts tradition, extending
by a series of courts, terraces, formal walks and drives, and flights of steps
up the hill where the Big C now lies. The estimated cost was $80,000,000.
Following his appointment as professor of architecture, John Galen Howard of New
York modified the Benard plan. (The later buildings on the campus were nearly
all designed by Howard, whose firm won fourth prize in the competition.) Ground
was broken for the President's House, first of the Benard Plan buildings, in
1900; and the cornerstone of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building was laid in
1902. The women's gymnasium, donated by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, was erected in
1903.

  Though the enrollment at the university had grown to 2,660 by the turn of the
century, Berkeley was becoming less predominantly a college town. Many of the
new shingled houses designed in the manner of large Swiss chalets or Elizabethan
cottages were the residences of business-men who commuted each day to San
Francisco by train and ferry. Berkeley's residents included such architects as
Bernard Maybeck, Clinton Day, and Walter H. Ratcliff; such landscape gardeners
as John W Gregg and George Hansen. There were men retired from military service,
such as Naval Commander Henry Glass and General Charles R. Greenleaf (who had
been chief surgeon of the Army in the field during the Spanish-American War).
Here Walter Handel Thornley was composing for piano and organ; Warren Cheney,
who had been editor of the Overland Monthly, was selling real estate and
continuing his literary interests; and Duncan McDuffie, also a realtor, found
time to serve as president of the Civic Art Commission. Friend William
Richardson was editing the Gazette; Eleanor Gates (Mrs. Richard Walton Tully),
though still a journalist, was on her way to becoming a popular novelist; and
Aurelia Henry (not yet Mrs. Reinhardt) was editing Elizabethan dramas and the
Monarchia of Dante.

  "Society" was becoming a bit more sophisticated. Formal evening attire had
been almost unknown in the seventies and eighties, but now the world was
informed that "Berkeley women display the best of taste, always wearing the
proper gown for the occasion."

  One may assume, therefore, that not only were the right things said but that
the proper clothes were worn on that day in late October, 1899, when some five
thousand people assembled for the inauguration of a new university president,
Benjamin Ide Wheeler. The regents had followed tradition in their choice: a New
Englander, the son of a clergyman, a graduate of Brown University, who had done
graduate work in Germany and had been professor of Greek at Cornell. The setting
was the bleachers of the cinder track at the western end of the university
campus. A fine grove of eucalypti set out a generation before towered well above
the native oaks and sheltered the academic procession from the warmth of the
Indian-summer sun. The presence of President David Starr Jordan of Stanford was
a reminder that the University of California now had a local rival, in
scholarship as well as in athletics. In the procession also was former President
Gilman, now of Johns Hopkins University, who could remember the pioneering days
a quarter of a century earlier when Henry George had talked of the iniquity of
taxing the people to educate at the State's expense "a few rich men's sons."
"Then support of the University was grudgingly given. Now it [was] given proudly
and gladly."

  Such was the attitude which inspired the gift by William Randolph Hearst of
the Greek Theatre, erected in 1903 in the hollow of a eucalyptus grove toward
the eastern end of the campus—the first Greek Theatre to be built in modern
times. The hollow, known previously as Ben Weed's Amphitheater in honor of a
student of that name who had discovered its adaptability for theatrical
productions, had been used for many university events before President Benjamin
Ide Wheeler conceived the idea of building a Greek Theatre there. The theater
was used for the first time—before the structure was completed —when President
Theodore Roosevelt delivered the commencement address at exercises held on May
16, 1903. It was formally dedicated September 24 of that same year.

  Early in the new century Berkeley was looking forward confidently to a future
in which it would be, if not the "Athens of the West;' at least the cultural
repository of American civilization on the Pacific Coast.



Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

BERKELEY
THE FIRST SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

COMPILED BY WORKERS OF THE WRITERS' PROGRAM OF THE WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION
IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA 

CO-SPONSORS: 
CITY OF BERKELEY  
BERKELEY FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION 

PUBLISHED BY THE GILLICK PRESS -BERKELEY- CALIFORNIA MCMXLI



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