Features

Myrlie in the Mirror

March 28, 2013 by Mary Schmich '75 Comments Off

photo by Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images

The widow of.

The phrase travels with her through life, as if it were part of her name.

“Widow of Medgar Evers to Deliver Inaugural Invocation,” said a recent headline in The New York Times.

“Widow of Medgar Evers to Deliver Invocation at Obama Inauguration,” said the Washington Post.

“Medgar Evers Widow Gives Inaugural Invocation,” says the YouTube video.

Fifty years have passed since the hot June night in Jackson, Miss., that she heard the crack of a gun then bolted out of her bedroom, followed by her three children, and fell to her knees next to her husband, who lay near the doorstep in a pool of blood.

Within an hour, she was the widow of.

Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 has tried to be the very best widow Medgar Evers could have hoped for. She has devoted herself to bringing his killer to justice, to keeping the cause of civil rights alive. But in the past half century, she also has maintained another struggle—to become fully realized and recognized as herself. Just Myrlie.

“I made a decision,” she said one balmy winter day when I went to visit her at her apartment in a senior community just outside of Claremont.

The decision she was announcing wasn’t on par with others she had made recently, like selling her big house in Bend, Ore., or squeezing into a tight red dress to play piano at Carnegie Hall with Pink Martini, or agreeing to stand next to the black president of the United States and deliver the inauguration prayer.

This was a smaller act of liberation.

“I’m going to keep my hair natural,” she said, with a deep laugh. “I don’t have time for blow drying and curling and styling. I prefer to let the personality of yours truly emerge.”

On that day in early January, Evers-Williams, a tall woman with a rich voice whose friendliness carries a dash of tartness, felt under siege. She was recovering from the flu. Her sunny one-bedroom apartment was stuffed with boxes and her days were packed with chores.

The inaugural staff kept calling, and she had preparations to make for a 50th anniversary commemoration of Medgar Evers’ assassination.

“I am juggling a life that is not mine,” she said. “You know, as I approach 80, I ask myself why, why are you doing this?”

OK, why?

She plunged her hands into the pockets of her jeans.

“It’s just me,” she said. “It’s the nature of Myrlie.”

A few days earlier, trying to get organized for her upcoming appearances, she had fished some old documents out of the boxes in her living room. She sat down, in one of her orange wing chairs, and began to read about the funeral of the man she had married at 18 and lost at 30.

She was freshly struck by what he meant, to American history and to her. It had been a long time since she wept over Medgar, but sitting there, alone in the clutter of the past, she cried.

This powerful photo of Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 (by Flip Schulke/Corbis) taken at a memorial service after her husbands assassination in June 1963 appears on the cover of our spring issue.

TO GRASP the improbable sweep of Myrlie Evers-Williams’ life, you have to understand the place she came from.

Mississippi in 1933 was poor, even by the standards of the Great Depression. In its small towns and out on the sharecroppers’ fields where blacks and whites alike struggled to eke a living from the land, the myth of white supremacy flourished as hardily as Delta cotton.

Like the rest of the Deep South, Mississippi abided by Jim Crow, a set of laws and customs that segregated blacks and whites in public places. Black people were shunted into separate schools and corralled in the backs of buses.They drank from water fountains marked “colored.” When they were allowed in “white” movie theaters, it was through a side door, then on up to “the buzzard’s roost” in the balcony far from the white patrons and the screen.

In that era, in the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg, lived a schoolteacher named Annie Beasley.

Beasley was one of the lucky few, a black woman who had gone to college for a while, and she believed that education was salvation. Shortly after her son and a 16-year-old girl gave birth to a child, she knew what she had to do.

She brought the baby, Myrlie, home.

Beasley owned her own house, a whitewashed place up the hill from the shacks where the poorest blacks lived. In her clean rooms, with the vegetable garden and fruit trees out back, she kept books. She listened to classical music and on Sundays wore white gloves to church.

Myrlie, named after an aunt who also helped raise her, called her grandmother “Mama.”

“Open your mouth and speak distinctly,” Mama instructed Myrlie.

“Baby,” Mama told her, “you may not have the money to travel, but as long as you can read, and books are accessible to you, you can travel anywhere in the world.”

“Baby, baby, get back here,” Mama would call if Myrlie left her nightly prayers too early. “You didn’t ask God to make you a blessing.”

Myrlie Beasley didn’t grow up feeling inferior or poor, and not until she was ready for college did she register how high and hard the wall of segregation was. When she applied for a state scholarship, hoping to study music at a college outside Mississippi, she was told that she could find everything she needed at a black school right there at home.

In 1950, she enrolled at Alcorn A&M College out in the woods of tiny Lorman, Miss.

“Stay away from the servicemen,” Mama and Aunt Myrlie warned.

On her first day at Alcorn, as she leaned against a lamppost, a football player approached. He was a few years older, one of the black Army veterans who had come home to Mississippi after World War II, having tasted the possibilities of the wider world. He was from the little Delta town of Decatur. His name was Medgar Evers.

They married the next year. She was 18.

Medgar Evers got a job selling insurance, and as he drove the Delta peddling his policies, he witnessed daily, in growing dismay, the black sharecroppers who lived barely better than slaves. He loved Mississippi, but in the nascent civil rights movement, he saw a chance to change it.

In 1954, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hired Evers as its first Mississippi field secretary. He roamed the state, documenting lynchings and other brutalities against black people, helping blacks register to vote, organizing boycotts and sit-ins. At one point, he handed out bumper stickers that read, “Don’t buy gas where you can’t use the restroom.”

Myrlie Evers worked as his secretary while she raised the children. They both grew tired, and scared. They argued, about money and safety. Civil rights was risky business.

In 1957, the Evers family moved up in the world, and into a small new house, with a mortgage, in a stable black neighborhood in Jackson. Some of their neighbors didn’t want them. Medgar Evers was stirring up trouble. Trouble was bound to follow him home.

On June 12, 1963, just past midnight, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway. He stepped out of the car, carrying T-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.” From a honeysuckle thicket across the street came a bullet. It pierced him in the back.

“His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause,” the historian Taylor Branch wrote in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Parting the Waters.

“. . .White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend.”

Not all white people.

A proudly racist and cockily unrepentant fertilizer salesman named Byron De La Beckwith was soon arrested, tried twice in 1964, and both times let go after the juries, composed entirely of white men, deadlocked.

THAT SUMMER Myrlie Evers packed up her life and headed for Claremont, Calif., about as far from Mississippi as a car and her imagination could take her.

“The kindness of people in Claremont was beyond belief,” Evers-Williams said, sitting in her apartment all these years later. “That was not what I wanted. I wanted the nastiness, the hatred. I wanted a fight. God, I wanted a fight so bad.”

Medgar had always told her that if they ever left Mississippi, he’d like to go to California, and in Kiplinger’s Magazine, she read a story on the country’s best small colleges. A name caught her eye: Pomona.

Then there she was, the famous widow of the newly famous Medgar Evers, living a continent away from friends and family, in a pruned and placid college town where blacks were almost as rare as snow.

She hadn’t comprehended how white her new hometown was. She had imagined it was more like the neighboring city of Pomona, and some of the black people there were miffed that she’d chosen insular, collegiate Claremont. Did she think she was too good for them?

Not only was she black in a land of whites, but as a 32-year-old student, she was old in the kingdom of youth.

She remembers her first day on campus, some professor addressing the freshmen about what an important time in life this was.

“Why am I sitting here?” she fumed to herself, “when I have three kids at home and I have no idea what they’re doing?”

Her arrival in Claremont made news. Look Magazine photographed her poring over her books. Ebony Magazine put her and the three kids on its cover, posed next to their big stone fireplace, all smiles, dressed like the era’s perfect white sitcom families, only without the dad. Inside is a story: “Why I Left Mississippi,” by Mrs. Medgar Evers.

Little by little, she softened to the kindness around her. Masago Armstrong, the Pomona College registrar, was among those who took a special interest.

“She and others were so powerful,” Evers-Williams said. “So powerful in their excellence, making me think about what I wanted to do.”

But the work was hard. Her grades weren’t good. She walked into a professor’s office one day—“Alvin?

Was that his name?”—and announced, “I quit.”

Go home, he said. Put your books away. Come back in a week. She came back in a week, ready to keep going.

When the Pomona College class of 1968 paraded across a stage to collect their diplomas, Myrlie Evers, sociology major, was there. The audience rose and cheered.

“Why did they stand up to applaud you?” her older son, Darrell, asked afterward. “You didn’t do anything different from the other graduates.”

“IS THAT the pool?” she said.

We were standing in front of Sumner Hall, out for a tour of the Pomona campus, where Evers-Williams rarely comes these days. She peered toward the blue shimmer in the distance. Pendleton Pool. She remembers that. Shivering in the water, clinging to the side, afraid, listening to the swimming instructor, Anne Bages, who finally, one day, said, “Myrlie, you must do this. Come on. If your child were on the other side drowning, what would you do? Envision it.”

She envisioned it and swam across the pool. “Her patience, her strength and determination to see I did what I had to do,” Evers-Williams said, “that speaks to my entire experience here.”

It was a sunny, warm day, and as we walked past Little Bridges, she remembered that old, elegant, mission-style building, too. She and her second husband, a longshoreman and union organizer named Walter Williams, were married there in 1975, before they set off for a life in Oregon.

“He was my dearest best friend,” she said. Williams died in 1995. “He was so good to me and my children.”

She walked on, slowly, wishing she’d brought her cane.

“God,” she said, “I’ve lived through so many changes. It’s amazing to walk on this campus and think of it. Mind if we sit?”

We sat on a bench on Marston Quad, looking toward Mount Baldy, past the trees that never seem to change. She thought back. Her eight years as an executive at Atlantic Richfield Company. Her run for Congress, unsuccessful but a decent showing. Her three years in the mid-1990s as head of the NAACP; she has some untold stories she’d love to tell about that. The writing, the speaking. The three children brought successfully to adulthood. “When I look at my bio,” she said. “I say, ‘wow.’”

Through it all, she never forgot that she was the widow of. She kept her eye on that cocky fertilizer salesman, Byron De La Beckwith. Her pressure helped persuade the state of Mississippi to retry him, and in 1994, a racially mixed jury of Mississippians declared him guilty of Medgar Evers’ murder.

There were many times after Medgar Evers died that his widow cursed and cried and wanted to dwell in hatred. She built a different life instead.

“And now?” she said. “Back in Mississippi after 50 years.”

Last February, while keeping her apartment near Claremont, she returned to Alcorn State University as a visiting scholar. “Come home,” she says the president of the college told her. “Come home and let us take care of you.”

So she went, and flew into Jackson-Medgar Wylie Evers International Airport.

In this half century, Evers-Williams has never ceased to be surprised.

Another surprise arrived after she gave a TEDx talk in Oregon a while back. She told the audience about how as a girl in Vicksburg, she sang and played the piano, and how her grandmother and aunt dreamed she would make it to Carnegie Hall. Out in the crowd that day sat Thomas Lauderdale, the founder of the pop orchestra Pink Martini. Afterward, he made her a proposition: Come perform with us. At Carnegie Hall. Crazy, she thought. Not with her arthritic fingers, and besides, she didn’t play much anymore. And, really, she was shy.

Then she thought of how Medgar used to say, “Trust yourself.”

She said “yes.”

One night last December, at the age of 79, she swept onto the New York stage in a form-fitting red dress— “long trumpet sleeves, just a little bit of cleavage and this gorgeous train”—tailored for her by the designer Ikram.

She sat down at the baby grand, so unlike the cold, out-of-tune piano at Alcorn that she’d been practicing on.

She played “Claire de Lune,” her grandmother’s favorite, followed by “The Man I Love.”

The audience gave her a standing ovation.

“As ‘the widow of,’” she said later, “I kept Medgar’s memory alive, and that’s what I was determined to do. But there is the Myrlie who at times finds herself saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve done these things too, on my own.’ That’s one reason I got such a kick out of Carnegie Hall.”

Soon after her Carnegie debut, she would be at the inauguration, standing next to the first black president of the United States, praying aloud for the nation, the personification of its past, its progress, its hope.

“People choose, I think, what they want to be,” she said that day in Claremont, closing her eyes for a moment, soaking up the sun. “I don’t believe in self pity forever.”

Her mind flitted back to her old friends, Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin, and Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X. She recalled a newspaper story a young woman once wrote about the three of them.

“The article was: these are just widows living off their husbands’ reputations,” she said. “Betty, Coretta and I talked, furious. Coretta said, in her calm, understanding way, ‘Oh, she’ll learn, she’ll learn.’”

Evers-Williams sighed.

“I miss those two ladies so much.”

At 80, there are many people for her to miss. Mama, Medgar, Walter, Aunt Myrlie, her mother and father, her son Darrell, who died nine years ago of cancer. She feels their absence but looks for the blessings.

Every morning when she gets up, she walks into the bathroom and before brushing her teeth or washing her face, she performs a ritual that shapes the day.

“Hi, beautiful,” she says to the mirror, and she smiles.

A Carefully Calculated Caper

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

John Irvine ’76 hoists the finished Zappa frieze from atop Bridges Auditorium in 1975.

Set in Styrofoam, not stone, Frank Zappa’s name and likeness appeared, seemingly overnight, high upon the face of Bridges Auditorium back in the carefree spring of 1975.

Snugly hung between Wagner and Beethoven, the phony frieze only remained in place for a few days. But the identities of the students who pulled off this high-profile prank—and the tale of how they did it—have stayed under wraps to all but a few Sagehens for nearly four decades. Now the original pranksters finally have come forward with the story of a caper that required a precarious climb, careful calculations and a touch of artistic flair.

Strange as this may seem, it was a Commencement speech given in May by the then-U.S. ambassador to Pakistan that finally shook loose their secret.

Speaking on Marston Quad with Big Bridges looming in the background, Cameron Munter, a veteran diplomat who served in Serbia and Iraq before the Pakistan post, recalled the last time he spoke here, some 40 years ago, as valedictorian of Claremont High School. That led into an anecdote about the epic prank that briefly placed Zappa amongst the iconic composers honored on the front of the auditorium. Munter’s memory, though, was a bit misty—the ambassador just may have had weightier matters on his mind—and he dated the Zappa caper to 1972, crediting high school students “who shall remain nameless” for carrying it out.

Next, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen dug deeper into the matter, pegging the date to three years later and straightening out a few other details. Still, the notion that the stunt was pulled off by local high-schoolers remained the operative story until a digital dossier laden with black and white photos and a complete account of the caper reached PCM via back channels. The material was pulled together by John Irvine and Greg Johnson, both math majors from Pomona’s class of 1976. After learning of Munter’s speech, the pair decided it was time to spill the beans.

They did it.

Irvine works on the Zappa frieze.

Irvine and Johnson weren’t huge Zappa fans at the time, even though the rocker lived in Claremont for part of his youth. The prank came to mind when Irvine and Johnson learned Zappa was coming to play Bridges in April of 1975. “We were looking up at the front of Big Bridges and said, ‘Well, gosh, he should have his name up there,’” recalls Irvine, who went on to get his Ph.D. and now works at a research laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.

This casual thought launched an intensive, two-week effort. The first big obstacle: How would they scale the imposing auditorium? It was Johnson, another future Ph.D., who figured out that they could get onto the roof of the adjacent old Renwick Gym (long since gone) to extend a ladder across a four-foot gap that separated the two structures, and climb onto the roof of Bridges. “Being young college students, we were stupid enough to do that,” says Irvine of the dangerous move. “I would never do that today.”

Once on the roof of Bridges, they lay down, reached down and measured the dimensions of the frieze, which, they note, was a surprisingly sizeable 15 feet by 5 feet.

Next: Security breach! While they were still atop Bridges, some friends passing by spotted them and asked the guys what they were doing. Irvine and Johnson waved them off, and lucky for them, their rooftop hijinx didn’t draw campus authorities.

The pair had decided it was Chopin whom they would cover up amongst the five composers commemorated on the face of Bridges. “I’m not big on the Romantics,” explains Irvine. “I would never cover up Beethoven or Bach.”

Onward to the design phase: phony frieze would have to be lightweight enough to hoist onto the roof, but sturdy enough to stay in place. Johnson settled on Styrofoam set on an aluminum frame. Irvine, meanwhile got to work on the two end pieces of the frieze, a papier mache bust of Zappa for one end and a marijuana leaf for the other. (The pair has gotten some blowback for the pot image, since Zappa was opposed to drugs. Their response boils down to: “Hey, we know, but it was the ’70s.”) The end pieces were small enough to work on in a dorm room, but to assemble the entire frieze, they set out for the Wash, where they had room to lay everything out.

After a late night that crept into early morning, they were just about done. Then it started to rain on their newly painted masterpiece. They rushed their work of art into the Mudd-Blaisdell trash room. More bad luck: trash pickup arrived that next morning, and Irvine was rousted by an early morning call to retrieve his “art project” which was blocking access to the garbage.

Greg Johnson ’76 makes the dangerous climb from the gym to the roof of Big Bridges.

The guys covered up the frieze and stashed it behind Big Bridges in preparation for the final stage. With the risk of getting caught by Campus Security patrols, the rooftop operation would require some assistance from their friends in the “Statpack,” a group of math and statistics students studying under Professor Donald Bentley. As Johnson and Irvine write in a summary of their caper provided in the dossier given to PCM:

“So, using the expertise in statistical analysis that they were developing under the tutelage of Professor Don Bentley, they modeled the frequency and regularity of the passage of Campus Security in the early hours of the morning. At between 2 and 3 in the morning, the frieze was surreptitiously installed on the front of the building.”

As Johnson recalls it, the Styrofoam had enough give to easily wedge into the notched, recessed space for Chopin’s frieze. They secured the replacement with heavy fishing line tied to various rooftop fixtures just in case it fell—even with the lightweight materials, the frieze’s sheer size meant it weighed 60 to 70 lbs.

Frank Zappa was now shoulder to shoulder with Beethoven and Bach on the campus’s most imposing edifice. Chopin had been shown up, and the two math majors had succeeded in pulling off a highly-visible prank.

The pair climbed down from Bridges, and kept their involvement on the lowdown. They couldn’t resist, however, showing off the stunt to their mentor, Professor Bentley. They got him to take a walk with them, making sure he noticed their handiwork, without explicitly claiming credit. Bentley, to the best of their knowledge, was the only campus official who knew they did it. While the professor didn’t know about the plan in advance, Johnson says Bentley indirectly played a key role in the caper by creating “the camaraderie, the closeness and the culture out of which this whole endeavor arose.”

Campus officials were quick to remove the faux frieze, and the pair never saw their creation again. That helps explain the alternative story from the Commencement speech. Former Ambassador Munter (since hired to teach in Pomona’s International Relations Program) told PCM that he had visited some Claremont High classmates back at the time of the prank, and in the garage of their home was the Zappa frieze. He asked them about it, and they then took the credit for the caper. Irvine and Johnson, meanwhile, largely kept mum over the years, hoping to maintain a mystique around the prank.

And even though the Zappa frieze only stayed up for a few days back in 1975, the Statpack relationships were built to last. “We are friends to this day,” says Johnson.

Postscript: The math guys’ mission did suffer from one miscalculation. Irvine and Johnson didn’t manage to get the phony frieze up until a week after the Zappa concert that had inspired the prank in the first place. “We kind of got an incomplete,” says Johnson. “We weren’t quite ready in time.”

Pomona in 47 Charts

November 14, 2012 by Elisabeth Fosslien '09 Comments Off

A mathematical economics major at Pomona and ad-agency analytics whiz in the real world, Elisabeth Fosslien ’09 spends her free time cooking up tart little pie charts on topics ranging from Chicago crime to getting a job to “14 ways an economist says I love you,” which drew praise from The Economist magazine, one of many nods she has earned for her minimalist musings. To no surprise, it was her online ode to her alma mater, “Pomona in 47 Charts,” that caught our eye. The facts, figures and feelings behind them are her own, derived from her perceptions of Pomona, but even if your data set is different, we think you’ll still find some laughs in her graphs.

The Man with a Plan

November 14, 2012 by Paul Sterman '84 Comments Off

flat bronze plate. It reads: “Allen F. Hawley, 1893-1978.”

In 1949, when Allen Hawley, Class of 1916, was a fundraising administrator at Pomona College, he answered a local group’s request for biographical information on himself. In a letter, Hawley highlighted the pertinent details of his youth and his career.

“It’s not much of a life story,” he summarized, “but it’s a thrilling life to me.”

Not much of a life story? Consider: The man grew up on a turn-of-the-century California ranch, was expelled at least once from high school, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona, then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Business until dropping out to volunteer as an ambulance driver in France serving the wounded during World War I. After the war he worked in Hollywood as an assistant director at the Fox movie studio.

And we haven’t even covered the best part. Hawley returned to his alma mater in 1938, and his contributions over the next 24 years played a key role in the College’s rise. Launching what would later come to be known as the Pomona Plan, Hawley pioneered a game-changing vehicle in the world of educational fundraising. At the heart of what he hatched was this: a new kind of charitable-giving program in which the College, in essence, manages a donor’s money in return for a financial gift released to Pomona after the donor dies; the contributor earns a tax break and regular payments for the rest of his or her life.

So years later, when it came time to put Pomona’s new fundraising plan out into the world, Hawley knew from experience the best way to spread the message—especially to those outside the Pomona family. (He had been instructed by the College not to solicit alumni or parents for such financial gifts for fear of simply diverting away more traditional annual donations.)

How Hawley marketed the fundraising plan is another unique part of his legacy. He turned to newspaper advertising—something viewed at the time as almost sacrilegious in academia.

Consider Hawley’s life story in this context: When he toiled in Tinseltown, working on Western serials, he helped craft fictional vehicles—but the Pomona College story is a real one, and Hawley is a central figure in its telling.

Scholarly and Stylish

Those who knew Allen Hawley described him as a quiet and modest man. He had a distinguished manner and enjoyed col- lecting first-edition books. He also liked to look good. The fundraising whiz wore a natty suit and tie to work, and donned a hat—indeed, a Borsalino, the stylish Italian brand.

However, Hawley, who died in 1978 at the age of 85, didn’t fit a predictable profile. The dignified, scholarly man had a weakness for tobacco and a salty sense of humor. He was shy and intensely private (almost nothing is known of his personal relationships beyond the fact that he married a woman in 1922 and the union apparently ended in divorce), yet he thrived on cold calls to potential donors and reached out so attentively to members of the Pomona community that a good friend referred to him as the “Mother Hen” to students and alumni.

“As with many unusual men, different people could see different sides to him,” the late Pomona Philosophy Professor Fred Sontag once said of Hawley, whose last 10 years at Pomona (1952 to 1962) coincided with Sontag’s first 10.

A Pioneer’s Roots

The Pomona Plan pioneer grew up on a ranch in rural El Cajon near San Diego. He graduated from San Diego High School, but “not without an expulsion or two,” as he later recalled (though he never gave a reason for such disciplinary actions). After high school came an education of another kind: Hawley’s father required him to work on the family ranch, performing grueling tasks at the discretion of the ranch foreman. The experience provided great motivation, Hawley wrote nearly 40 years later:

“After a year of this fate I decided anything would be better than ranching, and certainly the offer of going away to college was inviting.”

So the young man enrolled at Pomona. (“Fortunately, the entrance requirements were not very high in those days.”) Though shy, Hawley was a leader, elected as Pomona’s student body president his senior year. After his war service and three-year stint in Hollywood, he went into the newspaper business, joining the advertising staff of William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. The career move would prove critical to his later success at Pomona.

The Ad Man Flourishes

Hawley’s life story was chronicled by William B. Dunseth, who came to Pomona in 1959 to work for the fundraising maven. When Hawley retired in 1962, Dunseth became director of the Annuity and Life Income Program. For his 1994 book on his former boss, Dunseth interviewed many people who knew and worked with Hawley, including a former colleague at the Los Angeles Examiner. The man said Hawley had a real talent for the newspaper ad work, describing him as “a dynamic salesman” who wrote clever ads and had a knack for selling advertising space and nabbing new clients.

“I couldn’t resist using some of the [same] principles of advertising here as I did in the newspaper world,” Hawley said, according to Dunseth’s book.

It wouldn’t be easy, though. The idea of higher learning institutions advertising for financial contributions was viewed as unseemly. Thus, Hawley’s marketing method raised the hackles of the academic community, especially East Coast universities. (Dunseth wrote that a former fundraiser for just such a school told him, “It is uncouth for this little college out West to advertise for money.”)

Even Pomona’s “academicians resisted heartily” when Hawley initiated the newspaper concept, he recalled. Yet when the strategy proved lucrative, those objections suddenly didn’t seem so important.

“They melted when we started getting results,” Hawley said.

The Pomona Plan Emerges

Hawley came to Pomona in 1938 as the school’s new public relations director. In the mid-’40s, uncertain about student enrollment in the war’s aftermath, Pomona intensified fundraising efforts to cover potential deficits in the next few years. Hawley became its go-to guy.

For years, friends and neighbors had been asking Hawley investment questions. “Allen was well known in the little town of Claremont not only as a man of great financial acumen but of great financial integrity,” says Kent Warner ’66, former director of Pomona’s Annuity and Trust Office (now called Trusts and Estates). Warner worked for many years with Howard C. Metzler, who preceded Warner as director of Annuities and Trusts. Warner says Metzler passed on many affectionate stories about Hawley, including one recounting a time Hawley was walking down the streets of Claremont and two widows approached him. Turns out they wanted him to manage the inheritances their late husbands had left them.

With the new fundraising plan Hawley conceived in the mid-’40s, the College would in effect provide free money management for individuals in exchange for their philanthropic contribution. The beneficiaries received income for the rest of their lives, and then upon their deaths the financial gift was re- leased to the College. This kind of agreement provides donors with sizable tax deductions while allowing them to feel good about contributing money toward the future of young people.

These elements represented the core concept of the much-imitated Pomona Plan. (Dunseth points out that Hawley actually developed the program with three other men who worked at or with Pomona, including prominent Los Angeles attorney William B. Himrod, Class of 1908; however, Hawley was the day-to-day driving force behind the plan’s emergence.) In 1946, the College received approval of its financing concept from the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS ruled the plan was acceptable—and Hawley was off and running, free now to start offering the “Life Income Plan” to prospective donors.

Frank Minton, a national expert on charitable giving, says Pomona was the first college to develop this kind of plan, where the school acts as a trustee and the donor gains tax benefits and life income.

“They were the first out the door,” says Minton, who established the planned-giving program at the University of Washington and co-authored what is widely regarded as the bible in his field, Charitable Gift Annuities: The Complete Resource Manual.

Advertising in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, Hawley played up the tax benefits, knowing that would be a key appeal to the Journal’s financially-savvy readers. Drawing these people into the plan expanded the College’s donor base. As the Chronicle of Philanthropy put it in 1989: “Throughout its life, the so-called Pomona Plan has followed a highly unusual marketing strategy: trying, through newspaper advertisements, to turn wealthy strangers into friends of the college. The logic has been that Pomona can offer older people the chance to support a good cause and to get paid for doing so.”

The promotional campaign, as Professor Sontag noted, “reached people this little college in the orange belt of the California desert would otherwise never have touched.”

(By the early ’50s, Pomona was hearing from colleges requesting brochures and tips, and a 1953 Time Magazine article on the topic mentioned the College.)

Hawley felt very strongly about the writing of the ads. He wouldn’t let anyone else pen them and was meticulous about all manner of details, including grammar and punctuation, according to Dunseth’s book. His exacting standards could make him an intimidating colleague, added the author—apparently drawing on firsthand experience.

“A visit to his office to explain an action of which he didn’t approve or to be handed a letter for re-writing was not to be anticipated with enthusiasm. He was exceptionally polite and seldom displayed anger, but his ‘righteous coolness’ on those occasions didn’t make the experience a happy one.”

Pomona’s Prosperity

Ultimately, Hawley’s efforts led to many millions of dollars coming Pomona’s way over the years, money that helped erect campus buildings and pay for world-class teachers, among other benefits to the College.

The Pomona Plan became a model for deferred-giving programs, which are now the norm at most institutions of higher education. Not only colleges benefitted: Many different charitable organizations use a form of what Hawley started.

“In the 1980s, many other charities adopted Allen Hawley’s outline, and now every charity you hear advertising or soliciting is benefitting from his inspiration,” says Robin Trozpek, the current director of the Pomona Plan.

Adds Minton: “Pomona had a lot of influence beyond its campus.”

Just how much has the Pomona Plan meant to Pomona? Financial figures tell part of the story. Since the fundraising plan was kicked off in the ’40s, Pomona has amassed a whopping $216 million in life-income agreements, and more than $172 million of those deferred funds have been released to the College, according to statistics from the Trusts and Estates Office. There’s another factor in the equation as well: the amount Pomona currently manages on behalf of beneficiaries.It’s about $140 million, which is significantly higher than the sum of $216 million minus $172 million; the number reflects how the assets on hand have appreciated.

Of course, the Pomona Plan has grown more sophisticated and elaborate since Hawley’s time. A Forbes magazine article this summer touted Pomona’s offerings: “Its payouts are so generous that half of the annuities it sells are to non-alumni.” The plan now has a number of different variations, and Howard Metzler, longtime director who died in 2012, is credited with playing a big role in its progress.

Still, Hawley’s lessons and methods carried on with his successors. At the top of the list: “The personal visit was the heart and soul of Hawley’s marketing program,” according to Kent Warner.

Hawley, who was Pomona’s vice president of development his last eight years working at the school, knew the best way to reach a potential donor was through conversation, in person. One reason is that it played to his strong suit—Hawley was a very persuasive salesman, say those who knew him. But selling Pomona was never about pitching product for him. He genuinely loved the school. In fact, Hawley maintained the primary goal of his ads was getting readers to visit the Pomona campus because he knew the school would sell itself.

After his death—in a nursing home in Hemet, Calif.—Allen Hawley was buried in Oak Park Cemetery in Claremont. The only marker at the gravesite, according to Dunseth, is a simple, flat bronze plate. It reads: “Allen F. Hawley, 1893-1978.” The bare-bones wording is in stark contrast to the streams of praise uttered about Hawley over the years. His influence on the enduring success of Pomona is profound.

Leave it to Fred Sontag, the longest-serving faculty member in Pomona’s history, to put Hawley’s achievements in the proper philosophical perspective. After Hawley died, Sontag paid tribute to his former colleague at a meeting of the Pomona faculty.

“As a teacher, I am bound to affirm that good colleges are made of teachers and talented students,” said Sontag, who taught in Pomona’s Philosophy Department from 1952 to 2009. “As a human being, I know in fact that all great colleges are built on the quantities of money needed to support what is exceptional.

“In that sense, Allen Hawley had as much or more to do with what Pomona is today as any faculty member. It is hard to exaggerate what he did to secure the college we currently enjoy.”

The Book Budget Bind

November 13, 2012 by Agustin Gurza Comments Off

For the past several years, veteran Pomona City Councilwoman Paula Lantz ’67 has found herself acquiescing to constant cutbacks to her hometown library, where she had spent so much of her youth. As city coffers shrank, library budgets were sliced, hours were slashed, staffing and special programs were squeezed.

Yet, as the library slouched toward insolvency, Lantz was surprised by the silence. No citizens storming the council chambers. No emails or phone calls. Not even a tap on the councilwoman’s shoulder from a fellow library lover in line at the grocery store.

It wasn’t until earlier this year, when the city announced that it would be forced to close the library for a full year, that supporters came forward in strength. They held rallies on the library steps, protested at council meetings, organized fundraisers and revived a dormant foundation for raising private funds to help keep the library afloat. That burst of activism, says Lantz, is the only silver lining in a budget crisis that threatened to give Pomona, the College’s birthplace and namesake city, the distinction of becoming one the largest municipalities in the country without a public library.

Under public pressure, the city found funds to keep the library open another year, albeit on a skeleton staff and a miserly annual budget of $400,000, less than 15 percent of its peak funding in 2007. The city council has also approved a ballot measure calling for a library tax of $38 per year on all Pomona properties. The tax, which requires two-thirds approval in November, is considered a long shot, but it may be the library’s only shot considering the city’s dismal long-term fiscal forecast.

Next year, without a new source of funds or a miracle, the library may be broke again. For now, the protesters succeeded in delaying the doomsday decision.

“It makes it a whole lot easier to make cuts if it’s just numbers on a page, rather than looking into people’s eyes,” says Lantz, who launched a community task force to save the library. “It took the drastic measure of closing the library to get everyone’s attention. But I wish it had happened four years ago.”

POMONA HAS PLENTY OF COMPANY in its biblio-budget battles. For more than a decade, libraries across the country, including the Library of Congress, have been forced to tighten their belts and cut back on service. And, as it turns out, the public’s reaction to the Pomona library’s plight—chronic unconcern before last-minute mobilizations—is also part of the national trend.

Budget cuts have crippled libraries from New York to Newport Beach, Calif., where a plan last year called for replacing librarians with videophones for patrons to call in their reference questions. Three years ago, only state intervention averted a radical plan that would have closed all 54 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The following year in Brooklyn, protestors staged a 24-hour read-in to stop the imminent closure of 40 library branches. Their slogan: “We will not be shushed.”

The library cutbacks are so widespread that the Huffington Post created a special section titled, “Libraries in Crisis.” Just perusing the headlines underscores the extent of the threat to these temples of knowledge:

–Children’s Laureate Warns ‘Society Will Pay’ For Library Closures
–Can a Protest Save a Library?
–After Branches Close, Students Set Up Outdoor Libraries

In his introduction to the series, HuffPo Books Editor Andrew Losowsky calls for a “national conversation” about the evolving nature and future of libraries. “If information is power,” he writes, “then libraries are the essence of democracy and freedom.”

NOBODY KNOWS THE budget ups and downs of the Pomona Public Library better than Greg Shapton ’71, the former director who retired last year after almost half a century as a library employee. Shapton started there as a part-time page, working with the library’s collection of 16-mm movies. It was 1967, the same year he enrolled as a freshman at Pomona College. Though he graduated with a degree in psychology, his major for a while was math. That training would come in handy as an administrator, juggling budgets and allocating ever-diminishing resources.

Now 63, Shapton looks back at his first decade as a golden era for the library, a modern architectural centerpiece of the civic center on Garey Avenue. But with the passage 34 years ago of Proposition 13, the state’s sweeping anti-tax measure, “the library was really gutted,” says Shapton, who was head of the reference desk at the time. “That began the downward slide, not just for the Pomona Library but for cities in general.”

In the immediate aftermath of the 1978 tax revolt, the library lost half its budget and half its staff, recalls Shapton. Exactly 30 years later, the library would be buffeted by yet another historic force, this time the worldwide financial collapse of 2008. Since then, the city’s general fund budget—which pays for essential services such as police and fire protection, as well as the library—has plunged by $20 million, or 22 percent of its high of almost $90 million. Pomona went from budget surpluses to annual deficits.

In fiscal 2007-08, the library budget had peaked at just over $3 million with 56 hours of operation. Three years later when Shapton finally retired, it was down to a tight but survivable $1.6 million and 26 hours.

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did. The budget was trimmed even further in the current fiscal year, down to $1.1 million and 20 positions. Then, the real calamity struck. Suddenly, there was a gaping new hole in the city’s operating fund.

This year, the city faced an unanticipated shortfall, due in part to the loss of $1.1 million in tax revenue tied up in a messy, drawn-out legal battle. The funds vanished in May as a result of a surprise appellate court ruling in a case involving the state Board of Equalization and several Southern California cities. The city was caught flat-footed when the court shot down a deal that cities had hammered out over how to share the disputed tax revenue.

In its scramble to make up for the loss, the city almost immediately announced it would be forced to close the library for a full year and lay off the entire library staff. In their defense, city administrators argue that Pomona has been hit disproportionately by hard times, leaving them with only painful options for cutting the budget. The city’s tax base, already weak in comparison to some wealthier neighbors, was crippled in recent years by the flight of major retailers. Car dealerships shut down. Big-box stores like Toys “R” Us left town. The result: Pomona’s sales tax per capita was $87 in fiscal 2010-11, compared to $316 for the nearby city of Ontario.

The paradox in this municipal numbers game is that the deeper the economic crisis, the more people need their free library. That is especially true, supporters say, in a poor, predominantly Latino city like Pomona where people may not have Internet access at home and rely on the library for school research, job searches and even adult literacy lessons.

“It’s tragic,” says Religious Studies Professor Erin Runions, who has lived in Pomona for four years. “The cities are being cut by the state, the state is being cut by the federal government. And who ends up paying for that? It’s people who can’t afford to buy books or computers. People who rely on the library as a source of education, a source of information, as a source of transformation. Those are the people who lose out.”

POMONA’S FIRST LIBRARY was founded in 1887, the year before the city itself was incorporated, by a small group of women who were members of a garden club. By 1890, the city officially took over library operations, promising under contract to keep it in good condition and add new books every year. Soon, the library was seeking a permanent building and turned to philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who saw free public libraries as essential to the development of communities and supported their construction throughout the country.

In a letter to Carnegie dated Dec. 3, 1901, a Pomona library board member made a pitch for funds. His letter included an appeal on behalf of students attending a fledgling college that had been established in the city the very same year as the library. “Pomona College, a young but growing institution of some 300 students, relies largely on the facilities offered by the Pomona Public Library,” the trustee wrote, “and greatly needs more assistance than we can now afford with the resources at our command.”

By then, the College had already moved to its new location in Claremont, which at first was considered temporary. But the letter to Carnegie underscores how closely intertwined were these two institutions at the start.

To mark its own 125th anniversary, Pomona College has established a theme of “community,” pledging to connect the campus with its neighbors, including the city of its birth. A handful of faculty members and students are looking for ways to put that theme into action by connecting with the Pomona Library in its time of need. They have met informally to discuss the issue, explored ways for the College to get involved, posted appeals for action on their Facebook pages and privately alerted college officials of their concern.

“We’ve been talking a lot recently about our interactions with the local community,” says History Professor April J. Mayes ’94. “To me, this is a perfect opportunity to bring Pomona College back into Pomona again.”

Mayes feels so strongly about the issue because, like many supporters, her whole life has been memorably intertwined with the library. As a child she spent hours in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Children’s Room, fascinated by the collection of memorabilia from the author of Little House on the Prairie. Later, while attending Pomona Catholic Girls High School, Mayes worked as a library page. And finally, while researching her senior thesis on local history at Pomona College, Mayes returned to her hometown library to make use of its special collections, consulting newspaper microfiche and first edition books written in the late 19th century.

“The special collections is pretty amazing,” she says. “It’s a pretty extensive gathering of great materials on the history of, not just the city of Pomona, but the entire region.” Professor Runions, the biblical scholar, moved to Pomona four years ago, looking for more diversity than Claremont had to offer. This summer, Runions got involved in the library task force and joined the opposition in another messy issue, the battle over a proposed new trash transfer facility she considers an example of “environmental racism.” She also is helping to campaign for passage of the library parcel tax.

As a transplant from British Columbia in 2005, Runions felt “somewhat like an outsider trying to make a home here.” She settled on Pomona and has not regretted it.

“We love it here,” says Runions, who lives in the city’s historic Lincoln Park area. “There’s a real sense of community in Pomona, and I think that’s what the library task force really shows, that there are citizens who are concerned about the well-being of this city. Deeply concerned. They’ve been here many years and they’re really willing to put in the time and the work. But they need some leadership.”

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP is precisely what’s lacking in Pomona, says Gwen Robinson ’60, head of Friends of Pomona Public Library, a volunteer group founded in 1955. Robinson, a retired school teacher, assails city leaders for consistently short-changing the library in favor of other city services. She fears if the tax plan doesn’t pass, the library will shut down for sure next year, and she blames the city council for letting it happen. “They don’t have a plan and they don’t want to look for any other cuts,” said Robinson, who attended Pomona College for two years as an undergraduate. “They just don’t want to deal with it any more.”

Robinson and other library supporters bristle at the suggestion that civic apathy permitted the library to become an easy target for the budget axe. Yet, a study by Public Agenda, a public opinion firm in New York, found a pattern of what it calls “benign neglect” has undermined libraries nationwide. Libraries enjoy broad public support, the 2006 study found, but even the most ardent library lovers are not aware of budget problems until there is a full-blown crisis. And cities don’t act until the public mobilizes.

Civic leaders surveyed echoed Councilwoman Lantz’ concerns about the public’s “impassive advocacy” in the face of repeated library cutbacks. But she adds that what appears to be apathy may be a matter of generational values instead.

Lantz, who majored in sociology and earned a master’s in education from Claremont Graduate School, uses her own four adult children as examples. They all have moved away, settling in cities from Nashville, Tenn., to Oakland, Calif. But they have one thing in common. Their 30-something generation has grown detached from civic life at a local level, even as they engage on a global level with communities on the web. They can’t name their mayor, don’t read a local paper, don’t know about redevelopment and, she adds, “they don’t care.”

Things were different in her day, says Lantz, now 66. She was born in Pomona, like her dad before her. His was a generation that put down roots in one place for a lifetime. Her mother, who’s 97, still lives in the home the family built when Lantz was attending Pomona High School. Her folks didn’t have money to buy books, so they took her as a child to the library, then in the old Carnegie building. That turn-of-the-century structure was torn down for a bank parking lot and replaced in 1965 by the current building. But no matter where the books are housed, Lantz’ mother still visits the library to this day.

Lantz is encouraged to see young people join the library task force. And she concedes the city shares the blame for failing to find a way to reach them, until it was almost too late.

“We don’t communicate with them in the way they communicate,” Lantz says.

LIKE LANTZ, Carla Maria Guerrero ’06 was also born and raised in Pomona. She hasn’t volunteered on the task force, but she’s following the library issue on Facebook. She says the threatened closure has “galvanized” library supporters on the Internet.

“It’s a little unfair to say the newer generations don’t care,” asserts Guerrero, 28. “In activist circles online, I would dare say people are upset. Many people might not be able to come out (for meetings), but we’re all still avidly following it.”

Guerrero is the daughter of immigrants who came from Mexico with limited schooling. But they always stressed education. Her father, Homero Guerrero, was a factory worker who, on his time off, was “always on the hunt for good Spanish books.” He built a respectable collection by scooping up the tomes discarded by libraries from Los Angeles to Riverside.

Even after earning her bachelors degree in Latin American studies and her masters in print journalism from USC, Carla still lived in Pomona, sharing the family home with her parents and her two younger sisters. She also still used her hometown library, but now to check out audio books for her three-hour daily commute to Los Angeles where she works. That’s how she discovered the library hours had been cut back. Then, after moving to L.A. last year, she found out about the planned shutdown from her sister, who saw it posted on Facebook.

“If the closure ever happens, it would be really sad,” she says. “The library is one of the few public institutions that stands for knowledge, not for profit. It’s something so pure, it’s actually there for the good of the people. It’s something that a city like Pomona, that is already pretty impoverished, cannot afford to lose.”

Update: The library parcel tax, Measure X, failed in the Nov. 6 election, receiving just over 60 percent approval, short of the two-thirds required.

Life in My ($135) Bargain Shorts

November 13, 2012 by Alexander Gelfand Comments Off

One drizzly afternoon in July, Abe Burmeister ’97 stood in a makeshift fitting room at the Brooklyn headquarters of Outlier, the apparel company he co-founded four years ago, holding a pair of Three Way Shorts in his hands.

Meant for summertime use as both active and leisure wear—“Run, swim or just straight up look good. Our Three Way Shorts can do all three,” reads the online marketing copy—the shorts were the second item that Burmeister and his partner, Tyler Clemens, designed when they formed the company. (The first was a pair of trousers that were meant to look like business- casual slacks but behave like cycling pants.)

The pair that Burmeister handed me, and which I intended to field test, were brick red. They were size 32. And they sold for $135—more than I had paid for my last suit. More, in fact, than I would consider spending on almost any item of clothing, given my penny-pinching ways.

“I’ll take good care of them,” I said, suddenly intimidated by the cash value of the merchandise I’d just received.

“No,” said Burmeister. “You should beat the hell out of them.”

Burmeister’s response might lack the poetic concision of his company’s motto (“tailored performance”) or the high-mindedness of its official philosophy (“we want to build the future of clothing”). But it gets at the essence of what Outlier does: construct hip, all-purpose clothing from the kind of high-tech fabrics normally reserved for outdoor apparel and sportswear.

In response to Burmeister’s injunction, I wore my new Three Way Shorts on a series of summer adventures, bicycling through the mean streets of NYC and swimming, sans undergarments, in the occasionally toxic waters of Lake Michigan while staying with my wife’s parents in Chicago. And while I hesitate to use underworld metaphors when describing a visit to my in-laws, I feel confident that, short of falling off a mountain or diving off a cliff, I gave those shorts as much of a workout as they’ll ever receive.

More of one, than perhaps even Burmeister had in mind when he first toyed with the idea of starting a clothing business back in the early aughts. At the time, Burmeister was partner in an animation studio in San Francisco, and spent much of his time flying back and forth between California and his native New York. Living out of a carry-on bag, he came to wonder if there might be money in making better clothes for business travelers.

That particular idea went nowhere. But several years later, after joining the ranks of New York City’s bicycle commuters, Burmeister was once again drawn to the needle trade. Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan by bike on a regular basis, he became frustrated by his inability to buy a pair of pants that would hold up to the abuse of hard cycling and inclement weather while looking nice enough to wear into a meeting. So he decided to create them himself.

A trip to the Fashion Center Information Kiosk at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 39th Street—essentially a fashion industry help desk with an enormous button sculpture positioned on top—yielded a list of factories in the garment district. And so it was that, with the help of a local patternmaker, Burmeister made his first pair of slacks using a durable, water repellent, stretchy material from Schoeller, a Swiss textile mill that produces a line of what garmentologists refer to as technical fabrics.

After wearing the pants for a year, Burmeister decided that he could use another pair. He also decided that it was time to start making more than one at a time.

Burmeister’s resume already was impressive in its variety: An anthropology major at Pomona, he worked briefly on the bond floor at Morgan Stanley; ran the aforementioned animation studio and web design firm; acquired a masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU; toiled as a freelance graphic designer; and developed data visualization tools for a Wall Street firm run by a couple of nuclear physicists. Along the way, he wrote a book, Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics, that explored alternative approaches to the “dismal science.”

Still, Burmeister knew he would need help jump-starting an apparel company.

Then one day, the barista at his neighborhood coffee shop introduced him to Clemens, a fellow urban cyclist who worked at a men’s shirt company and who was, in his spare time, trying to do for shirts what Burmeister was trying to do for pants. Within months, the two had founded Outlier.

(In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies beyond the norm; the company logo, a black swan inside a black ring, alludes to the rare but catastrophic “black swan events” that roil financial markets. But the term was also once applied to those who lived in outlying regions, apart from their places of work: “the original commuters,” as Burmeister says.)

Burmeister and Clemens initially set up shop in Clemens’ living room. They have since moved into a former wedding dress studio on the third floor of an old Brooklyn sewing factory; a pile of bicycles belonging to Outlier staff lies just outside the door, paying silent homage to the company’s roots.

Their offices comprise an open workspace limned by Apple computers; a small development room crammed with sewing machines, fabric swatches and a rack of reference garments (a Burberry trench coat, an early Gore-Tex jacket); and the fitting room where I tried on my shorts. Outlier’s public face, though, is almost entirely virtual, and the firm uses social media to reach the young, active urbanites who represent its target market.

The partners now employ a professional designer who previously worked at the upscale menswear company Thom Browne, and they have expanded their offerings to include a variety of pants, shorts, shirts and accessories. They continue, however, to seek the same grail: to produce clothing that acts like rugged outdoor gear but looks (and feels) like premium lifestyle apparel.

“They have a nice little niche, which I think will prove to be a very good business for them,” says David Parkes, a tex- tile developer and marketer whose New Jersey-based firm, Concept III, does business with Outlier.

Burmeister and Clemens are forever looking for technical fabrics that might be adapted to other uses, whether that means attending events like the biannual Outdoor Retailer tradeshow, which attracts major outdoor brands like Patagonia and Timberland, or investigating the materials used to make protective clothing for firefighters.

They have cultivated relationships with contract cutting and sewing factories in Manhattan’s garment district, giving them access to skilled workers who are willing to learn how to handle difficult materials.

And they have kept their sticker prices relatively low by selling almost exclusively online through their own website, thereby eliminating the traditional retailer’s mark-up that would miraculously transform my $135 pair of shorts into a $270 pair without improving them in any way.

“Our stuff is certainly not cheap, but it’s half the price it would be otherwise,” says Burmeister, who likens that particular achievement to going from an “incredibly niche price point” to a “semi-niche price point.”

Burmeister and Clemens have reached that point even though their business model diverges from the industry standard. Outlier does not follow the typical seasonal model. Instead, the pair experiment constantly with new designs. “It’s a very development-intensive process. Everything goes through multiple iterations,” Burmeister says.

That costs money: after testing an item in-house, Burmeister and Clemens typically produce a small run for initial release, like a bespoke beta version. “It’s more expensive to make a small amount like that, but it’s worth it to figure out if an item is successful. You don’t get the full range of feedback until you have customers in the wild putting it through all kinds of crazy situations,” says Burmeister.

EAGER TO OBLIGE, and initially skeptical about the technical specs of the clothing I’d been handed, I wore my Three Way Shorts for five days before washing them, bicycling through the steamy summer streets of Queens and subjecting them to the kind of abuse that only animals and small children can dole out: Within hours, my 3-year-old had turned them into a napkin, wiping the remains of dinner (steak marinated in red wine) off his face and onto my lap. Yet Schoeller’s Nanosphere finish, which binds to individual fibers and repels water, dirt and oil, kept them surprisingly clean.

Testing began in earnest the following week, when I lived in the shorts during the two-day drive from New York to Chicago; drenched them in sweat along the bike paths of Illinois and Wisconsin during a scorching Midwestern drought; and finally rinsed them off by diving into Lake Michigan just days after the authorities had posted a swim advisory due to the troublingly high E. coli count.

The internal drawstring—a second-iteration feature that replaced an earlier, and less effective, set of pull-tabs—kept me from accidentally mooning the attractive young female lifeguard, a face-saving feature that was probably worth a few bucks in and of itself. And as I waded back out onto the beach, the lake water drained rapidly from the mesh in the flow-through pockets. When I mounted my bike a few minutes later, the shorts were still moist, but they were already dry enough for me to cycle home without any awkward squishiness.

And marketing hype aside, the nylon-polyester-elastane blend did indeed prove to be both stretchy and durable. Just as important, the double-weave technique employed during milling pushed the tough, Cordura-grade nylon towards the outer surface while keeping the softer polyester threads on the inside. That comfortable inner surface also had a waffle-like texture that Burmeister claimed would prevent the fabric from sticking to my skin, rendering it more breathable and al- lowing moisture to escape.

I won’t argue with him, any more than I will argue with the steady stream of compliments I received on the appearance of the garment. Indeed, after a month of steady use, the shorts had become my go-to clothes—the ones that I found myself slipping into almost every morning. The $135 price tag still triggered my cheapskate reflex, but I don’t exactly belong to the company’s target demographic (i.e., people who have money and are willing to spend it). And as Mary Ann Ferro of the Fashion Institute of Technology pointed out, any fabric that repels dirt and therefore requires less laundering should save water and electricity in the long run. “So maybe,” she ventured, “it’s not so expensive when you think about it.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But even if I might still balk at buying a pair with my own money, I have come to appreciate the advantages of clothing that looks good, feels good—and is literally tougher than dirt.

BEHIND THE PRICE

Performance wear—a category that includes everything from bike shorts to mountaineering pants—is one of the fastest growing sectors in the textile industry. According to a 2011 report by the market research firm Global Industry Analysts, the worldwide market for sports and fitness clothing will exceed $126 billion by 2015.

That growth is helping to drive the development of technical fabrics that have been engineered to possess magical properties: some stretch, others repel water, a few can even kill the germs that make your sweatpants smell not-so-fresh after a workout.

Originating in the first water-repellant fabrics of the 19th century, today’s technical fabrics include synthetics like the finely spun polyester called microfiber; natural materials such as cotton and wool that have been treated with special finishes; and complex concoctions that incorporate a bit of this and a dash of that—perhaps a nylon-cotton blend for durability and comfort, with a bit of polyurethane-based elastane added for stretch and a water-repellent finish to protect against the rain.

Yet adapting technical fabrics designed for spe- cific performance contexts to more fashionable ends can be tricky. The people who design and assem- ble men’s and women’s wear are often unfamiliar with the materials, which do not behave like ordi- nary ones. “It takes skill to sew stretch fabric,” notes Mary Ann Ferro, an assistant professor at the Fash- ion Institute of Technology who formerly designed outdoor wear for London Fog.

And the fabrics themselves—often synthetic, often treated with special finishes—can be shiny, or noisy, or otherwise ill suited to places of work or leisure. “You don’t want to be that guy swishing through the office,” says Outlier’s Abe Burmeister ’97, musing on the loud crinkliness of nylon.

Finally, all of that performance comes at a cost. “The price,” Ferro says, “is a problem.”

Burmeister agrees. Fabric alone accounts for ap- proximately 60 percent of the expenditure involved in manufacturing a pair of Three Way Shorts—a figure that includes the 25 percent bump accruing from tariffs and shipping fees. (Most fabrics used in American garments, including ones that are assembled here in the United States, are made abroad.)

“The materials that The Gap uses cost nothing compared to what we use,” he says.

Can Zombies Do Math?

November 13, 2012 by Gizem Karaali Comments Off

Is there any reason for today’s academic institutions to encourage the pursuit of answers to seemingly frivolous questions? The opinionated business leader who does not give a darn about your typical liberal arts classes “because they do not prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s work force” might snicker knowingly here: Have you seen some of the ridiculous titles of the courses offered by the English/literature/history/(fill in the blank) studies department at the University of So-And-So? Why should any student take “Basket-weaving in the Andes during the Peloponnesian Wars”? What would anyone gain from such an experience?

Yes, the professor will probably claim that our common global ancestry and the dependence of today’s culture on the classical morals of the era will provide much food for thought and much room for growth for the 18-year-olds who will be sitting through three hours of ancient basket-weaving lectures a week. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the industrialist will say with a dismissive wave.

But if our impeccably dressed friend is honest, perhaps he will admit that what he is demanding from college educators is to create for him an army of docile and respectful workers, ones who come out of the factory of higher education in time to be immediately recruited by the factory that is the job market. Workers who are faceless in the midst of a sea of millions like themselves, workers who are cheap and obedient and dispensable. Workers who should NOT learn to ask questions. And especially stupid or frivolous questions—those are the worst!

In these kinds of debates our friend will often find support amidst the faculty teaching in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. It is not tough to find an engineering professor who smirks at the titles of courses offered by his humanities colleagues, nor is it uncommon for faculty in the pure science disciplines to consider themselves at the core of the curriculum and the foundation of a real education.

My own disciplinary colleagues, the mathematicians, are not completely innocent either. True, many of us view mathematics as a creative art, but many of us also have the illusion that mathe- matics is the only path to universal truth. (Now what does that even mean?)

Last year I took a different path. I volunteered to teach a first- year seminar. A strange path indeed for the rational, linear-think- ing mathematician who had taken a whopping two courses in humanities during her own undergraduate studies. The first-year seminar series at Pomona is a perfect foundation for a deep and engaged liberal arts education. The courses are writing-intensive; most are discussion-oriented seminars. Students are expected to engage with analytic readings, sophisticated writing experiments, creative arts and aesthetic sentiments. That’s absolutely mar-velous for a humanities scholar. How about me? What would I center my course around?

I followed the example of my most daring colleagues and chose a completely frivolous question to guide the semester’s activities: Can Zombies Do Math? The inclusion of zombies was a pragmatic move on my part. The Humans vs. Zombies game has been a hit on my campus for years now, so I knew that students would find the bloody stench and the gory manifestations of the living dead irresistibly appealing. However the central idea of the course had been simmering in my mind for several years before I even heard of the game.

Mathematics is undeniably a human endeavor, even though we mathematicians unfortunately do a poor job of sharing this fact with the rest of society. Mathematical practice gracefully integrates a certain comfort with ambiguity and a deep desire for elegant simplicity amidst complex patterns. I wanted to create a course where students, fresh out of the factory line that is the K–12 education system, would engage with ideas and experiences about the true nature of mathematics.

Throughout the course, my students and I read books, articles, essays, short stories and poems. We watched movies about zombies and mathematicians. Students reviewed novels they were individually assigned, and interviewed mathematicians to discover what motivated them. The main essays of the course focused on the two serious questions that were hidden under my frivolous one: What does it mean to be human? What is the true nature of mathematics? The culminating writing assignment was a narrative statement asking students to come back to the course title ques- tion and resolve for themselves the question that began the whole trip.

On the last class discussion of the semester, Kimberley, the student discussion leader, asked her classmates:

“Now that the course is coming to a close, how would you answer the question “Can zombies do math?” Would you answer it any differently than you would have at the beginning of the semester?”

There was consensus around the room that most of students had not changed their gut response to the question, but now they had a more crisp understanding of the path that led them to that answer. Along the way they tackled questions such as what makes us human, what we ostracize as subhuman, other, mon- strous, and what, if anything, is a soul. They also had the chance to explore ambiguous, wild patterns and strange, undetermined paths in the mathematical universe. But I think what mattered most in the end was summarized best by Kenny’s response to Kimberley’s question:

“Does the purple hippo that I just conceived like to brush his teeth? It depends.”

Yes, the course was centered around a frivolous question, but the point my students and I left the semester with was deep and nuanced: that the answer to any question we pose depends on what our basic assumptions are, what we are already inherently implying with our choice of words, tone of voice and turn of phrase, and what lies inside us as individuals who are reflecting over the question. The minor issue about what makes us human was, of course, a side attraction, which will hopefully allow these keen students of the liberal arts to proceed through the rest of their voyage in college with some carefully examined and deeply felt sentiments about their place in this universe.

Gizem Karaali is an associate professor of mathematics at Pomona College. This is an abridged and adapted version of a piece that originally appeared in Inside Higher Education.

Beyond the Wall

July 2, 2012 by Joel Newman, Will Perez, Joerg Knipprath and Conor Friedersdorf Comments Off

1) Open the Gates … Again

By Joel Newman ’89

Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, the self-described “toughest sheriff in America” whose deputies have targeted undocumented immigrants, has emphasized that his parents immigrated legally to the United States from Italy in the early 1900s, according to author and journalist Jeffrey Kaye in his book Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Migration. He differentiates his parents from 21^st-century immigrants who enter “illegally.” Arpaio may not realize that if the system under which his parents came to America still existed today, most of the immigrants he targets would not be “illegal.”

Bettmann/Corbis AP Images

That more open approach served America well. In fact, we should replace our current immigration system with one similar to the old system, which generally allowed a free flow of newcomers. A 21st-century version would allow us to end today’s debate over work authorization, border enforcement, deportation and labor exploitation due to immigration status.

The immigration laws that Arpaio’s parents encountered were very different from those that exist today. Restrictions on European, Mexican, Canadian and other Western Hemisphere immigrants were few. To immigrate, they did not have to prove that they had a relative who was a U.S. citizen or legal resident, nor did they need to show that they had particular skills or prove that they were fleeing persecution. There were no annual numerical limits on immigration. Documentation was not required to work. According to Mae Ngai of Columbia University in her book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, deportations were infrequent, and “it seemed unconscionable to expel immigrants after they had settled in the country and had begun to assimilate.”

There were provisions to exclude immigrants who arrived in the U.S. and were determined to be mentally challenged, criminals, polygamists or members of other groups, but Ngai notes that only 1 percent of the 25 million European immigrants from 1880 to World War I were excluded. This immigration system, which essentially had existed since colonial times (prior to the late 19th century, immigration had been controlled by states and colonies), ended in the 1920s with the enactment of annual numerical limits on European immigration and other immigration control features that continue to this day. This led to a dramatic reduction in European immigration levels.

A significant injustice with the older system was its ban on Chinese immigration (later to include other Asian immigrants). Notwithstanding this wrong and the concern many contemporary Americans had about the poverty, political orientation and ethnicity of many newcomers, few Americans today would claim that the much more lenient immigration system (at least toward Europeans) didn’t work. While many European immigrants suffered from horrible working conditions and nativist hostility, they were able to start new lives for themselves and their offspring. And the country immensely benefited economically and culturally. Implementing a revised version of this older system, allowing immigration from all countries and only excluding entrants for health or security reasons, would reap similar benefits today.

It’s also a matter of basic fairness. Most of today’s Americans are the beneficiaries of the relatively unfettered immigration policies for Europeans and Canadians before the 1920s. It is unjust for the majority of the public, who owe their American citizenship to the milder policies of the past, to deny today’s would-be immigrants the same opportunities. Had Arpaio’s parents faced today’s immigration laws, he likely wouldn’t be a U.S. citizen, let alone the “toughest sheriff in America.”

Joel Newman ’89 is an English as a Second Language teacher in Beaverton, Ore., working on a book advocating for open borders. He was a history major at Pomona.

2) Expand the Dream

By Will Perez ’97

Most of the efforts for immigration reform in recent years have focused on the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to legalization to approximately 800,000 young adults who meet the age, residency, college enrollment or military enlistment criteria. Many proponents of immigration reform still believe it is the most politically viable legislation. While I agree the DREAM Act is a much-needed step in the right direction—much of my academic work has focused on the issue of higher education access for undocumented immigrants—I would also make the case for a slightly wider starting point for reform, one that would improve the lives of millions of children and young adults, many of whom are already U.S. citizens.

Often forgotten in the debates about immigration reform are the 4.5 million children and adolescents who are U.S.-born citizens growing up with undocumented parents. Overall, an estimated 14.6 million people are living in some sort of mixed-status home where at least one member of the family is an undocumented immigrant. One in 10 children living in the United States is growing up in such a household. Within these mixed-status households are a range of citizenship and legal residence patterns involving siblings: some born in the U.S. with birthright citizenship, some in the process of attempting to obtain legal status and some fully undocumented.

Piotr Redlinski/Corbis / AP Images

The lack of immigration reform and absence of clear immigration policies results in negative consequences for the well-being of both U.S.-born and foreign-born youth growing up in households headed by undocumented immigrants. Children and youth in households with undocumented members live in fear of being separated from parents or other family members. More than 100,000 citizen children have experienced their parents’ deportation in the last decade. A recent survey of undocumented Latino parents found that 58 percent had a plan for the care of their children in case they were detained or deported and 40 percent had discussed that plan with their children.

Above and beyond the disadvantages faced by undocumented parents due to lower levels of education, they also are excluded from obtaining resources to help their children’s development. The threat of deportation results in lower levels of enrollment of citizen-children in programs they are eligible for, including childcare subsidies, public preschool and food stamps. It also leads to lowered interactions with public institutions such as schools. Without recourse to unions or labor law protections, these parents endure work conditions that are not only poor but chronically so. The resulting economic hardship and psychological distress bring harmful effects on children’s development. Among second-generation Latino children, those with undocumented parents fare worse on emergent reading and math skills assessments at school entry than those whose parents have legal resident status. Moreover, such disparities are evident at as early as 24 months.

Because parents’ socioeconomic status has enormous effects on children’s education, the negative influence of undocumented status may well persist into later generations. Children of undocumented immigrants have lower educational attainment compared to those whose parents are legal residents. But once undocumented immigrants find ways to legalize their status, their children’s educational levels increase substantially.

Higher education poses another set of hurdles for undocumented youth. The rare few who are able to attend college have limited access to financial support to pay for their education. Most must pay their own way, so they have to take on extra jobs and work long hours, leaving little time for studying or forcing them to take time off from school to save money. Many aim to be public servants because their lived experiences have created a desire to give back to their communities. They aspire to be doctors, lawyers and teachers, all professions for which bilingual and culturally representative candidates are greatly needed.

The DREAM Act, as proposed, would certainly benefit many undocumented young people, allowing them to attain legal status. But the undocumented status of their parents and other family members would still continue to have a negative effect on their emotional and academic well-being. Nearly 14 million individuals who live in mixed-status families would continue to suffer the devastating negative effects of undocumented status. Among them, millions of U.S.-born and foreign-born children and adolescents would still face the hardships that harm their development. Unless criteria is expanded to include all undocumented youth, their parents and the undocumented parents of U.S.-born children, the DREAM Act will fall far short of its promise to allow hardworking individuals the possibility to become fully integrated into American society so that they can fully contribute to our economic and civic vitality.

Will Perez ’97, associate professor of education at Claremont Graduate University, is author of Americans by Heart: Undocumented Latino Students and the Promise of Higher Education.

3) Secure the Border First

By Joerg Knipprath ’73

Contrary to multiculturalist and globalist dogmas fashionable among the opinion elite, Americans as a whole embrace the notion that the United States is a distinct cultural and political entity. The public understands that preserving that distinctness requires controlling immigration to promote assimilation of immigrants culturally and economically. Securing the borders becomes one means to that end, as well as being a matter of national security. It is not surprising that opinion polls show significant public support for control over illegal immigration, even for the demonized Arizona law whose supposedly controversial provision over determining some individuals’ legal residency matches long-time federal law and the laws of California and many other states.

AP Photo / Gregory Bull

As a matter of political efficacy (as well as common sense), securing the border becomes the foundational task. The principal constitutional authority lies in the federal government. Once public confidence in the government’s willingness to control the border has been restored, normalization of the status of those here for a long time or who are here illegally due to no fault of theirs would become politically more acceptable. However, the Obama administration, like its predecessors, has shown little appetite for a concerted push to control illegal migration. By default, some of the states most affected by this laxity have found it necessary to act.

They have the Constitution on their side. That compact specifically obliges the United States to protect the states against invasion. While that language preeminently applies to military invasion, it is not so limited. Incursions by pirates were a recognized threat to Americans of the late-18th century. Today’s conditions of insecurity in person and property that make the southern border area so dangerous and have taken the lives of innocent citizens are analogous to pirate depredations in earlier years. The federal government’s breach of the constitutional compact justifies the reactions of states like Arizona, from increased apprehension of illegal entrants to sending the National Guard to patrol the state’s southern border. As James Madison rightly observed in Federalist No. 41, “It is in vain tooppose constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation.”

As a (legal) immigrant and son of (legal) immigrants, I very much sympathize with the desires of those who come to the United States seeking a better life. Though I was still a child then, I vividly remember the process of obtaining the right to enter and the joy that came with knowing that our family would have that opportunity. However, that experience also turns me unsympathetic to those who crash the party and make others, who obey the immigration laws, look like saps.

There is no perfect defense, and we must avoid Maginot Line thinking. But as homeowners recognize, walls, fences (both physical and virtual) and patrols can do much to advance security. Lest anyone bring up a canard about the Berlin Wall, every rational being knows the difference between a wall or fence intended to keep people in and one intended to keep interlopers out. Think Great Wall of China versus Berlin Wall; think a fence around a residence versus one around a prison. After the border has been secured, other matters can be addressed in due course.

While the current economic doldrums seem to be discouraging many illegal entrants, one hopes that economic malaise will not be the new norm. Looking to the return of more vigorous economic times, a controlled, limited guest worker program, combined with the emerging regime of employer sanctions, would help lower the incentives to enter the U.S. illegally. At the same time, the unconstitutional practice of cities designating themselves as “sanctuary cities” must be brought to an end—these cities blatantly undermine federal immigration policy.

Military service would be another way to show a civic commitment that merits a path to citizenship. Whatever the approach, there must be no cutting in line for illegal entrants over law-abiding applicants for immigration. A final step would be to end the current policy under which any child born in the U.S.—even to parents here illegally—automatically receives citizenship, opening a path for the family to stay as well. Whether this would require a constitutional amendment or might be done through a reconsideration of the current interpretation of the citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment is a complex topic going beyond the political decision to do so. As often is the case, the devil is in the details. But Americans are not eager to see a long-term subculture of metics as in ancient Athens or to embark on a “deport-’em-all” quest. Nor is there today the cultural inclination to adopt robust laws like Mexico’s regarding illegal entrants. A sustained, comprehensive and multilayered effort is needed. The support among the people is there. What is in doubt is the political will of our leaders.

Joerg Knipprath ’73 is a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, where he teaches constitutional law, legal history and business law courses.

4) Avoid the Guest Worker Trap

By Conor Friedersdorf ’02

Urgent as it is to reform America’s immigration system, so that those here illegally can live better lives and newcomers can more easily become lawful residents, one sort of immigration reform is best avoided: the large-scale guest worker program. That may seem counterintuitive. During the Bush administration, the Republican Party was divided between restrictionists, who sought tougher enforcement of immigration laws; and moderates, who wanted to permit foreigners six-year stints as temporary workers before requiring that they return to their country of origin. Many liberals and libertarians decided that the latter approach improved on the status quo, even if they’d go farther given their druthers.

But the “guest worker” compromise isn’t just a means of permitting more people to improve their lives by working in America. It is the fraught codification of their status as economic inputs, as opposed to humans on their way to being civic equals. Inequality under the law is a foolish thing to create. It is contrary to America’s founding ideals. And its unintended consequences are likely to be abuse, resentment and strife, as has been the case in some European countries where guest workers were brought in to alleviate labor shortages in the years after World War II.

AP Photo/ The Charlotte Observer, Patrick Schneider

The Europeans discovered that so-called guest workers often stay. Being people, they form local attachments, marry, conceive children and accumulate stuff. In America, they’d presumably do so in neighborhoods substantially made up of other guest workers. Unable to vote, they wouldn’t get their say in how these enclaves were governed. Their legal status would be predicated upon their employment, making them more vulnerable to abuse by employers, for whom they’d be a depreciating asset with a six-year life, rather than human capital in which to invest. These inegalitarian features ought to be enough to sour liberals on the policy.

Conservatives should be wary too. For guest workers who reproduce, the result is a child who cannot be socialized by his or her noncitizen parents in civic participation. And if there is wisdom in sticking to long-held custom and tradition, it is surely worth noting that guest worker programs are a radical departure from what has been a fantastically successful model of immigration in the U.S.: When we’ve welcomed immigrants as citizens, the result has been a rapidly assimilating population that spawns generations of loyal, productive Americans.

We’ve experimented very little with guest workers. What happens if we fill low-wage jobs with temporary residents whose only loyalty to America springs from the paycheck they collect? Might it produce second class noncitizens who become understandably disaffected with a nation that never granted their equality?

Fortunately, millions of people would like to seek citizenship and become Americans. Why would we purposefully entrench a system that instead favored noncitizen guest workers, marginalizing a whole segment of the population while ensuring that, at best, they cannot become fully invested in our country’s future?

One answer is that they’d be cheaper labor than permanent residents or citizens. That’s why the business wing of the Republican Party embraced a guest worker program. For people whose intent is to increase the number of immigrants who can come here legally, the guest worker temptation should be avoided, for its short-term benefits do not justify its major cost: changing how we see immigrants from equals whose future is wrapped up with ours to temporary labor for doing jobs that are beneath us.

Conor Friedersdorf ’02 is a staff writer at The Atlantic and founding editor of The Best of Journalism.

Orozco at the Border

July 2, 2012 by Agustin Gurza Comments Off

Crossing the border can be a cruel social leveler. For José Clemente Orozco, as for many Mexican immigrants, entering the United States proved a harsh and humiliating experience. But unlike most of his compatriots, the renowned muralist endured immigrant indignities at opposite ends of the map, on both the southern and northern edges of the U.S.

Orozco’s first and most famous frontier passage came in 1917, more than a decade before creating his heroic Prometheus at Pomona College. U.S. customs agents at Laredo, Texas, confiscated and destroyed most of the paintings he was carrying, claiming that they were somehow obscene. It was a bitter first impression of the country he had looked to for new artistic horizons. Instead, he found at first a vexing sort of censorship that would worry him for many years to come.

The second border incident is less notorious in art circles, though Orozco himself mentions it in his autobiography. This time, the brush with authorities didn’t involve his art. But it left a personal wound that might feel familiar to many fellow immigrants, regardless of profession, fame or social class.oro

During that same trip, Orozco made a tourist stop at Niagara Falls. At one point, he crossed into Canada to get a better view of the binational natural wonder. World War I was raging and authorities feared an assassination attempt on England’s Prince of Wales, who happened to be visiting at the same time. Adding to a climate of international tension, Orozco recalls, newspapers blared “in enormous red headlines” an account by a “yellow journalist” about Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries assaulting a train in Sonora and allegedly violating all the women on board.

“I had been there a couple of hours when a policeman detected something suspicious in my countenance and asked for my passport,” Orozco writes of his aborted Canadian sojourn. “On seeing that I was a Mexican he literally gave a jump and expelled me on the spot, himself conducting me back to the American side. ‘Mexican’ and ‘bandit’ were synonymous.”

In either incident, those border agents could not have imagined that they were deporting—or destroying the work of—an artist who was to become, in the words of Art Professor Victor Sorell, “the Michelangelo of the 20th Century.” Although somewhat overshadowed by the other two members of the esteemed troika of Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco has gained increasing attention and respectability in the United States, especially in the past decade. He was the subject of a 2007 PBS documentary, Orozco: Man of Fire, and of a 2002 traveling exhibition, José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, site of the last of three murals the artist created during that seven-year stay in this country.

In written essays and interviews, experts paint a portrait of an artist whose life and labor were deeply and permanently influenced by his binational lifestyle. Of Mexico’s big three muralists— Los Tres Grandes—Orozco was the one who spent the most time in the United States, a total of 10 years during four separate stays—in 1917-19, 1927-34, 1940 and 1945-46. His visits coincided with the most convulsive global events of the 20th century, including both world wars. Orozco was living in New York the day the stock market crashed in 1929, becoming an artistic eyewitness who documented its aftermath in grim urban tableaus during the first years of the Great Depression. One of those paintings, 1931’s Los Muertos, depicts skyscrapers collapsing in a jagged jumble, an image that would be used 70 years later by a Mexican magazine to illustrate the tragedy of 9/11.

Seen through the prism of his immigrant experience, Orozco’s story will feel familiar even to those far from the rarefied art circles he inhabited. The Niagara Falls fiasco raises issues of xenophobia and racial profiling that still resonate to this day, almost 100 years later. Beyond that, all immigrants can relate to elements of the artist’s cross-border existence—the struggle to navigate the culture gap, to carve out a space where they’re not always welcome, to build a new life from scratch, to move forward despite crippling setbacks. In Orozco’s case, that included periods of poverty and isolation, epic failures as an artist and early public scorn for his work. Not to mention the loss of one hand in a fireworks accident as a young man, a disability that would have sidelined most aspiring muralists, since it is such a physically challenging art form.

“He certainly represents that [immigrant] spirit of gumption and upward battle,” says Laurie Coyle, who wrote, directed and produced the vivid Orozco documentary along with collaborator Rick Tejada-Flores.

The incident in Laredo came as a culture shock for Orozco. Though no records of the destroyed paintings exist, experts believe they were part of a series of watercolors called House of Tears, depicting brothel scenes. They were studies in the human psyche, not sexuality. They may have been grim and hopeless, but not titillating. “The pictures were far from immoral,” writes Orozco in his autobiography. “There was nothing shameless about them. There weren’t even any nudes.”

His reaction: Just keep moving. “At first, I was too dumbfounded to utter a word, but then when I did protest furiously, it was of no avail,” he writes, “and I sadly continued on my way to San Francisco.”

Though barely mentioned again, the border incident created a sort of philosophical angst for the artist, with long-term effects, according to Renato González Mello, professor of contemporary art at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and the foremost expert on Orozco. The encounter represents a historic clash that flares when Latin Catholic culture meets Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, he explains. Aesthetically speaking, that clash hinges on traditional distinctions between high and low art, a dichotomy that was of particular concern to Orozco and other Mexican artists of the revolutionary era who brashly worked to breach it.

“The incident makes him see that the distinction between high and low is subject to legal definitions,” González says in a bilingual phone interview from Mexico City. “What in Mexico would be a problem of good taste or bad taste, or simply a problem of class, in the United States becomes a matter of law enforcement… This is like a completely different planet for Orozco, and he sees it as incredibly strange and irrational.”

Getting used to new rules would take time. For the two years he spent in the United States on that first visit, Orozco did not produce any art works of note. Instead, he painted movie posters and Kewpie dolls for subsistence. “I still believed that there was some law against art in the United States,” the artist is quoted saying in the documentary, “and I wasn’t taking any more chances.”

Orozco returned to Mexico in 1919, on the cusp of the country’s public mural movement. But Orozco’s first major commission in 1924 was soon plunged into chaos when angry conservative students defaced his murals at the capital’s National Preparatory School, because they considered them seditious and sacrilegious. Orozco recalls that he and Siqueiros were both “thrown out into the streets like mad dogs.”

Orozco (front row, fifth from right) with an unidentified group in Frary Hall, where he would paint his Prometheus. Photo courtesy of Honnold-Mudd Library.

The muralists managed to finish the work two years later, to great acclaim. But soon, government support for the mural movement dried up, and with it the hope for new commissions. With that discouraging backdrop, noting that “there was little to hold me in Mexico,” Orozco decided to set out once again for El Norte, arriving in New York in the winter of 1927.

“It was December and very cold,” he writes. “I knew nobody and proposed to begin all over.”

For six months, Orozco lived in virtual anonymity, until hemet American journalist Alma Reed, who was to become his agent and chief cheerleader. She had been referred to the artist by another writer, Anita Brenner, daughter of Jewish emigrants to Mexico who was familiar with his work and expressed concern for his “sad and lonely and neglected” condition. But she warned Reed that Orozco could be difficult, a man “tortured by hypersensitive nerves” who was “easily hurt.”

In her own book about Orozco, Reed recounts going to meet the artist for the first time at his basement apartment in Manhattan. Instead of a temperamental grouch, Reed found “a gentle host” with a “cordial smile” and a “vague touch of the debonair.” She was incensed by the way her fellow Americans were ignoring him, a snub she called “a breach of international courtesy.”

“Not one of our very wealthy and socially prominent art patrons or subsidized cultural institutions had made the slightest gesture of welcome to this renowned master of the long-lost technique of true fresco …,” writes Reed. Impelled by a “nebulous desire to make amends,” she vowed to “let him know that one ‘Norteamericana’ felt honored to welcome him, though somewhat belatedly, to Babylon-on-Hudson and had come to wish him all the success and happiness he so richly deserved.”

In the next few years, Reed did much to make that success happen. She would be instrumental, in fact, in helping the painter land his three mural jobs, at Pomona and Dartmouth colleges and in New York at the New School for Social Research. And she helped introduce Orozco to a diverse and stimulating set of new contacts through the Delphic Circle, an intellectual and literary salon founded by Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos around a vision of universal brotherhood. The group, which had staged the ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound in Delphi the same year Orozco arrived in New York, would be extremely influential in his work.

“I think the adoration that Alma Reed demonstrated toward him, the attention he received in New York at the ashram of the Delphic Circle, that kind of deified him in the same way that Rivera had been deified,” says Sorell, university distinguished professor emeritus at Chicago State University. “His confidence must have grown exponentially.”

Orozco spent more than two years in New York before landing his first mural commission at Pomona. Meanwhile, he survived partly by catering—or caving—to the trendy demand for Mexican art that developed in the United States and Europe during the 1920s and 30s. He made paintings of what writer and curator Diane Miliotes describes as “landscapes that verge on the folkloric … with these stock images of a pueblo, or an indigenous woman and her child, and maybe a maguey plant or two.”

In an essay for the companion book to the Dartmouth exhibition, Timothy Rub notes that “Orozco developed a keen if somewhat cynical awareness of what American patrons expected of Mexican painters.” In the same book, González Mello puts it more bluntly: “The first thing Orozco does upon his arrival (in New York) is become a professional Mexican.”

Personally, the artist found the whole thing distasteful. Even in Mexico, he was harshly critical of revolutionary artists who pandered to the folkloric, glorified the indigenous or idealized the concept of nationality, or Mexicanidad, all of which had been the bread and butter of the mural movement.

In the United States, he had to deal with the market on its own terms, at least to some extent.

“He’s dealing with an audience that doesn’t know anything about Mexico, except that it’s exotic and exciting and violent,” says Miliotes, who served as in-house curator for the Hood Museum exhibition. “And there’s this wonderful vogue for it that he’s trying to take advantage of, but it forces him to try to navigate that craze without feeling that he’s totally selling himself out.”

Those concerns would soon fade. In 1930, Orozco put himself firmly on the map as a world-class artist with his own daring identity when he painted Prometheus, the first fresco by a Mexican artist in the United States. The commission for the space above the fireplace in Frary Hall was pushed along by Catalan art historian José Pijoán, who was then teaching at Pomona.

At first, he considered calling on Orozco’s rival, Diego Rivera. But it was Pijoán’s colleague, artist Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, who steered the project to Orozco. Crespo de la Serna, then teaching at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, was a friend of Orozco and would become his assistant on Prometheus. “… The beauty of it is that a few kids and a few penniless professors had the faith and the courage to institute the proceedings and went ahead without committees, boards, or rubber stamps,” Pijoan wrote in the Los Angeles Times shortly after the work was completed.

The landmark work would become “the first major modern fresco in this country and thus epochal in the history of the medium,” according to the late art historian David W. Scott, former chair of the Art Department at Scripps College.

Yet, as bold as the fresco was, Orozco at first avoided painting a penis on Prometheus, the heroic nude that towers over diners at Frary. While more lofty artistic considerations about classic representations of the male physique may also have been at play, the artist was certainly well aware of his local critics and the risk of offending puritanical community standards. “Absolutely, I think he was hesitant (to add the penis) because there was disapproval that he was painting a very large naked male figure on the wall,” says Coyle, the documentarian. “He was reading the press and some of these critical articles were actually appearing while he was working on the mural.”

Orozco didn’t have to check the newspapers to find condemnation. He embarked on the project, he writes, “to the disgust of the trustees who would grumble as they made their way through the refectory and eye the scaffoldings askance, disposed to fall upon me at the first mis-step.”

A penis was appended later to the fresco when Orozco returned for a visit months later, but it didn’t adhere properly because the wall had dried. Since then, of course, the missing member has been the subject of student jokes and pranks. The genital shortcomings didn’t deter artist Jackson Pollock, an Orozco admirer, from famously declaring Prometheus “the greatest painting in North America.”

Despite the controversy, the Pomona campus community, especially faculty and students, defended the artist’s right to express himself. The following year, in the face of yet another public outcry, administrators of the New School defended his depiction of Lenin and Stalin in his series of five frescoes with sociopolitical themes. The support in both cases must have been reassuring since he had seen how vicious public censorship could be, on both sides of the border. Later, the Dartmouth community also would stand up for his artistic freedom at a time when murals by Rivera in New York and Siqueiros in Los Angeles were being whitewashed or destroyed for political reasons.

Orozco returned to Mexico in triumph in 1934 and proceeded to create astonishing works of art that mark the pinnacle of his career. He completed his masterwork at Guadalajara’s Hospicio Cabañas, crowned by the soaring image of The Man of Fire in the cupola of the colonial structure, dubbed the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. In 1940, hailed as a celebrity, he returned to New York and created the anti-war mural, Dive Bomber and Tank, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. Orozco wrote his final chapter in the United States in 1945-46, near the end of his life. This time, the trip was primarily personal. He came to this country for the last time out of love. And he left with a broken heart.

Earlier, the aging artist had fallen head over heels for the young and beautiful lead dancer for the Mexico City Ballet, Gloria Campobello. But when his mistress gave him an ultimatum and his wife Margarita refused to give him a divorce, the stage was set for a midlife crisis that ripped open the man’s hermetic heart.

Orozco left his family and moved to New York to be with Campobello. But she soon abandoned him and returned to Mexico, ignoring his pathetic, pining letters. The artist found himself alone in Manhattan once again, just as he had started. Now all he wanted was to go back home and he begged his wife to take him back: “I know that I have behaved very badly with you and I have paid dearly with my remorse,” he wrote. “I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t want any of it. Or even to see it again. My only thought is to return to you if you will take me back.”

And she did. He returned to Mexico City, with only three more years to live. His final works evinced a premonition of death. When it finally came, on Sept. 7, 1949, it caught him in the midst of a new project, painting a public housing mural.

Orozco had come to this country as an unknown, and left as an artist of global stature. Far from leveling him, immigration had vaulted him to new heights.

“I really think his experience in the United States inspired him to speak to people across borders,” says Coyle, the documentary filmmaker. “He did not want to be seen as a national artist or a Mexican artist. He really kind of chafed at those boundaries and divisions that people used to define themselves and what they were doing.”

To Shine in the West

July 2, 2012 by Vanessa Hua Comments Off

On a summer day in 1922, as the strains of opera music and applause from the commencement audience faded away, President James Blaisdell presented a doctor of laws to Fong Foo Sec, the College’s first Chinese immigrant student. It was only the third LL.D awarded since the College’s founding 35 years earlier, and the story of a peasant laborer turned goodwill ambassador receiving an honorary degree attracted coverage from as far afield as the New York Times.

Fong had become the chief English editor of the Commercial Press, China’s first modern publisher. At Commencement, he was praised as an “heir by birth to the wisdom of an ancient and wonderful people; scholar as well of Western learning; holding all these combined riches in the services of a great heart; internationalist, educator, modest Christian gentleman.”

The pomp could not have been more different than Fong’s arrival four decades earlier, when his improbable journey to Pomona began under the cover of twilight. After his steamship docked in San Francisco in 1882, the scrawny 13-year-old boy hid in a baggage cart, while his fellow passengers banded together to fend off attackers along the waterfront, in case the immigrants were discovered before reaching the sanctuary of Chinatown.

“I was received with bricks and kicks,” Fong said, describing his reception in a magazine interview and in his memoirs decades later. “Some rude Americans, seeing Chinese laborers flock in and finding no way to stop them, threw street litter at us to vent their fury.”

Fong’s immigrant tale is both emblematic and exceptional: emblematic in the peasant roots, the struggles and dream of prosperity he shared with Chinese laborers of that era. Exceptional in the fact that Fong, though he came as a laborer, was able to get a college education in the U.S. and seize the opportunities it brought. He arrived at a time when formal immigration restrictions were scant, but also to a land gripped by anti-Chinese hysteria, just before a new law that, in the words of historian Erika Lee, “forever changed America’s relationship to immigration.”

IF FONG, IN HIS TINY VILLAGE in Guangdong province in southern China, had heard of such threats against his countrymen, he remained undeterred in his quest to go to Gold Mountain, a name California had picked up during the Gold Rush era. Fong’s childhood nicknames, Kuang Yaoxi, “to shine in the West” and Kuang Jingxi “to respect the West” are revealing. “He was expected, or perhaps destined, to become associated with the Western world and Western culture,” says Leung Yuen Sang, chairman of the History Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has conducted research on Fong.

Born in 1869, Fong tended his family’s water buffalo and planted rice, taro and sweet potatoes, but did not begin school until he was 8. Often hungry, he went barefoot and wore patched clothes, reserving his shoes for festival days, Fong wrote in his memoirs. But his father saw a way out for Fong. From the start of the 19th century, his clansmen, driven by bandits, floods, war and rebellion, went abroad to seek their fortunes. After seeing villagers travel to America and return with “their pockets full,” his father asked Fong if he’d like to go too.

To pay for his ticket, the family borrowed money from relatives and friends, a common practice for would-be travelers. In January 1882, accompanied by his neighbor, Fong left for Hong Kong where he stayed before sailing for San Francisco on the S.S. China. In the crowded hold, amid stormy weather and high waves, he learned his first words of English and picked up advice. Fong’s steamship was one of scores jammed with thousands of his compatriots who began rushing over while the U.S. Congress debated a moratorium on most immigration from China.

According to his memoirs, Fong arrived sometime after the passage, on May 6, 1882, of what became known as the Exclusion Act, but before it took effect 90 days later. The San Francisco Chronicle published the arrivals and passenger load of steamships from the Orient, noting in March of that year, “It is a matter of some interest to know just how many Chinese are likely to be pressed upon our shores.”

The Chronicle also wrote of crowded, unclean conditions aboard steamers, which were anchored on quarantine grounds and fumigated to prevent the spread of smallpox. In headline after headline, the newspaper created the sense of a city besieged: “More Chinese: Another Thousand Arrive in This Port,” “And Still They Come … Two Thousand Others on the Way,” “Another Chinese Cargo: Eighty Thousand Heathen Awaiting Shipment to This City.”

ANTI-CHINESE SENTIMENT had been building for decades on the West Coast. During economic downturns, the immigrants, with their cheap labor, became scapegoats. Mob violence flared against them, and in San Francisco, in 1877, thousands of rioters attacked Chinese laundries and the wharves of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the chief transpacific carriers of the laborers.

California had already passed its own anti-Chinese measures, and after years of pressure, particularly from the West Coast, Congress took unprecedented federal action in the form of 1882’s Exclusion Act. The 10-year ban on Chinese laborers would be the first federal moratorium barring immigration based upon race and class. Only merchants, teachers, students and their servants would be permitted to enter thereafter.

At first, confusion reigned. When the Exclusion Act took effect, a Chronicle headline proclaimed that the arrival of the “last cargo” of Chinese in San Francisco was “A Scene that Will Become Historical.” Still, the Chinese continued arriving as enforcement in the beginning remained haphazard. The act represented the U.S. government’s first attempts to process immigrants, and officials at the ports weren’t sure how to handle Chinese laborers under the new regulations, says Erika Lee, director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. But in time the law succeeded in reducing Chinese immigration, which plummeted from 39,579 in 1882 to only 10 people, five years later. The Chinese population in the West shrank, as immigrants moved east to work and open small businesses. In the months and years to come, restrictions would tighten, with Chinese required to carry certificates of registration verifying legal entry. Later on, the right to re-enter the U.S. would be rescinded, and the act would be renewed.

“Beginning in 1882, the United States stopped being a nation of immigrants that welcomed foreigners without restrictions,” Lee argues in her book, At America’s Gates. “For the first time in its history, the United States began to exert federal control over immigrants at its gates and within its borders, thereby setting standards, by race, class, and gender for who was to be welcomed into this country.”

AFTER ARRIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO, Fong was forced to hide in a basement his first few days in Chinatown, a neighborhood of narrow alleys and cramped tenements, but also of temples and gaily-painted balconies. Laws targeting Chinese—their tight living quarters and their use of poles to carry loads on sidewalks— reflected the simmering resentment. “The city authorities, because they had not been able to prevent their coming, tried to make it difficult for [the Chinese] to settle down here,” Fong wrote.

Like many immigrants, Fong turned to kinsmen for help. He left for Sacramento to live with an uncle, a vegetable dealer, who found him a job as a cook to a wealthy family. He earned $1 a week, along with the occasional gift of a dime, which he treasured “as gold.” He—like many Chinese immigrants—sent money back to cover the debt incurred to cover his passage to America and pay for family expenses.

At his uncle’s urging, Fong studied English at a night school set up by the Congregational Church in Sacramento’s Chinatown, but he started gambling and stopped going to class. Scolded by his uncle, he returned to school and a new teacher, Rev. Chin Toy, became his mentor.

Fong found himself debating whether to convert to Christianity. Among his parents, relatives, and friends, not a single one was Christian, and he hesitated giving up the idols his ancestors had worshipped for generations. “If Christianity turns out to be unreliable, I will lose heavily,” he wrote in his memoirs.

After a fire gutted the heart of Sacramento’s Chinatown and destroyed his few possessions, Fong had to move into a dark basement room, thick with his uncle’s opium smoke. Fong then asked if he could stay in the mission church, and Rev. Chin consented to the unprecedented request. From age 15 to 17, Fong lived in the mission, where he learned Chinese, the Bible, English, elementary science, and read books such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Travels in Africa. Six months later, he was baptized, but it took the Salvation Army to stoke his religious passion.

Drawn by the sound of the bugle one night, coming home from his cook’s job, Fong watched the preachers in the street, fervent despite a jeering crowd. Their zeal led him to question his faith and whether his sins had been forgiven. Struck by a vision of Christ’s breast streaming with blood, he knelt during a church service and repented.

His conversion was unusual—missionaries in those days did not make deep inroads among Chinese immigrants, who “did not seem to see the efficacy of a god who sacrificed his son on a cross,” says Madeline Hsu, director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “Until there was a better sense of community and utility in attending church, missionaries seemed largely ineffectual.”

The Salvation Army, unable to proselytize among the Chinese until Fong joined up, sent him to their San Francisco headquarters in 1889 for six months of training. As a preacher, Fong became the object of “laughter, bullying, and insults. As a Chinese, I suffered more than any Westerner,” he wrote. Still, for more than a year, Fong evangelized in California, Oregon and Washington.

One night, a brawny man in the street started beating Fong, who could not defend himself, and the teenager escaped after a woman intervened. Another time, while Fong passed a football field, boys swarmed around him, spitting and assaulting him until he found refuge in a nearby house.

After a labor meeting to discuss measures against the Chinese, boys began following Fong, who brandished a paper knife to ward them off. He might have found his greatest peril in Tacoma, Wash., where mobs in November 1885 drove out every Chinese, part of a wave of xenophobic violence sweeping the West. During an evening meeting sometime after the anti-Chinese riots, Fong’s friends heard voices outside and urged him to change out of his Salvation Army uniform, hide in a friend’s house and then aboard a ship anchored in the harbor where he spent the night. “Later, it came to light several hundred people had gathered outside the door of the meeting place, ready to seize me,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Fong endured. After taking typing and shorthand in night school, he became a clerk at the Salvation Army, and then was promoted to secretary to a major, the organization’s ranking leader on the Pacific Coast. The next few years had “significant bearing” on his future, he wrote, because he associated with people of “superior class” who spoke fluent English. On his own, he studied history, archeology and literature, and honed his public speaking and debate skills.

BUT FONG HAD AMBITIONS that would lead him to Pomona—and, eventually, back to China. “If I could obtain higher learning, I could go back and be of service to society,” he wrote in his memoirs.“To spend my whole life in a foreign country did not seem to me the most ideal solution.”

In 1897, Fong met Pasadena businessman Samuel Hahn, whose son, Edwin, attended Pomona. Fong shared his dreams with them. Edwin Hahn, in turn, told Cyrus Baldwin, Pomona’s first president. Not long after, President Baldwin called upon Fong in San Francisco at the Salvation Army headquarters, urging him to come at once. Fong’s $300 savings, and his pledge to work part-time, would cover his tuition, the president assured him. Years later, Fong would name his first-born son Baldwin in gratitude.

Fong entered Pomona’s prep school, cleaning houses, waiting on tables, typewriting, picking apples and cooking to cover his expenses. Like some students, Fong built a wood shack to save on rent and prepared his own meals, harvesting vegetables from a friend’s garden, according to classmate Charles L. Boynton, who contributed to a memorial volume after Fong’s death. Rev. Boynton would become a missionary in Shanghai. (With the College’s Congregationalist roots, a good number of Pomona students went on to become missionaries in the early days.)

As a student, Fong helped bridge the gulf between cultures and countries, a role that would become his life’s work. He was seen as an expert on his homeland. Under the headline “The Views of a Bright Chinese Student,” the Los Angeles Times printed the transcript of a lengthy address Fong had given in Los Angeles regarding current events in China. And Boynton asked Fong—known as “Sec” or “Mr. Sec”—to speak with students planning to become missionaries in China, to share what he knew of the country and to make a personal appeal for evangelization. Fong also began his decades-long involvement with the YMCA during this time, after hearing about a fellow student’s account of young people surrendering their lives to Christ at a gathering on the hillside overlooking the ocean at sunset in Pacific Grove.

He interrupted his studies at Pomona twice: first, shortly after enrolling to accompany General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, on a tour of the United States, and for a second time, in 1899, after he contracted tuberculosis and a physician ordered him to recuperate in a mountain camp for a year. “I was under the impression there was no cure for the disease and that it was a matter of a few months before my life, with its hopes crushed and work undone, would come to an end,” Fong later wrote in a letter.

A friend reasoned with him, helping restore his enthusiasm, and he looked fondly upon his time at Pomona. “Five years in college and all the assistance from friends—these I cannot forget.” After four years in Pomona’s prep school followed by a year of regular collegiate enrollment, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated with honors with a bachelor of letters in 1905. He then headed east to Columbia, where he earned dual master’s degrees in English literature and education—fulfilling a prophecy. A generation ago, a fortune teller told Fong’s grandfather that an offspring would be awarded high academic honors.

FONG RETURNED TO CHINA in 1906 after a quarter-century absence. “The people are my people, and it doesn’t take long for me to forget that I had seen life—lived, struggled—in the West, and I was one of them once more,” he wrote.

He taught English and landed an appointment at the Ministry of Communications before taking his post at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, which published textbooks and translations. Such work contributed much to the educational development of China, which he considered vital to ensuring the country’s survival. Fong believed Chinese students also had to understand sciences, art, history, law and the government of Western countries.

In the decades ahead, Fong would become a prominent volunteer leader in Rotary International and the YMCA, and travel to Europe, Australia and the United States. And yet, despite his degrees, despite his accolades, under the Exclusion Act, he was not unlike the lowliest Chinese laborer who returned to his village after spending years in Gold Mountain.

America, it seemed, wasn’t ready for them. Permanent settlement in the U.S. was not an attractive option, because Chinese were prohibited from becoming naturalized citizens and faced a limited set of economic and social options. Many Chinese Americans were barred from certain professions, such as practicing law, even if they were college graduates. “It is notable that he ‘made his mark’ in China, not the U.S,” says Lee. During this time, the U.S. system for dealing with immigrants was becoming more and more formalized. Only a few years after Fong returned to China, an immigration station for detaining new and some returning Chinese immigrants opened on Angel Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. By then, the Exclusion Act had set into motion new modes of immigration regulation that would give rise to U.S. passports, green cards, a trained force of government officials and interpreters, and a bureaucracy to enforce the law.

When Fong died in 1938, the Exclusion Act was still in effect. It wasn’t until five years later, when China and the United States became allies during World War II, that Congress repealed it. Large-scale Chinese immigration wasn’t allowed until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act two decades after the war’s end.

But throughout his life, Fong had remained optimistic about the power of education to alter American attitudes toward the Chinese, even if the laws hadn’t caught up to reflect that change. He exuded that spirit in an interview with a YMCA magazine, Association Men, in 1922, the same year he returned to the U.S. to receive his honorary degree from Pomona.

“The presence of several thousand Chinese students in your colleges and universities has given you a truer conception of us, than you get from the Chinese laundrymen,” Fong said. “The change which has come over the American is truly remarkable … you receive me with cordiality and friendliness. I am hailed as an equal.”

«‹21 222324 25 ›»