Seventy Years Of The Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Page 286

Institute treasurer to be held as a reserve. In 1919 the treasurer established a general reserve fund, setting aside $10,000 of surplus in other funds, and receipts from extra dividends.

Early in 1919 the Institute received a bequest of $4,500 from the estate of George M. Rice, Worcester inventor and chemist, to establish the George M. Rice scholarship fund, preference in grants from the income to be given to sons of members of the Masonic fraternity. A few months later it was announced that the Institute and Yale University were to share the estate of Elmer P. Howe, '71. This prospective acquisition promised to be the largest single benefaction ever made to the college, but for a period of five years the estate was to be involved in litigation. Its trustees agreed, however, to give the Institute the annual income in the interim, amounts ranging from $8,000 to $18,000 a year, the major portion of which was added to reserve. The sale of the Howe property on Harvard Street, in 1919, added about $9,000 to the endowment.

The Institute's war adventure ended with Commencement, 1919, though many of its sons were still standing reveille in France and Germany. War was not yet completely out of the atmosphere, for war guilt had to be established and the voraciousness of the victorious allies had to be satisfied by a treaty at Versailles, which was to be the seed of those future wars that this one was theoretically intended to forestall. America, however, had returned to the ways of peace, to a struggle for new wealth to replace the billions that it had wasted and the other billions that supposedly had been loaned to its Allies. President Hollis, seeking as Commencement speaker a wartime executive with a peacetime message, chose the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Mr. Roosevelt already possessed much of the charm and eloquence that were to carry him to the pinnacle of American politics. His address was brief, his subject, "The National Emergency of Peace Times." "Why," he asked, "should it be necessary to conduct a government in one way in war time and

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Last Modified: Fri Jul 30 11:15:25 EDT 1999