Famous Givers and Their Gifts

The bank grew in patrons, in reputation, and in wealth; and when Francis Drexel died, June 5, 1863, he had long been a millionnaire, had retired from business, and left the bank to the management of his sons.

Besides the bank in Philadelphia, branch houses were formed in New York, Paris, and London. "As a man of affairs," wrote his very intimate friend, George W. Childs, "no one has ever spoken ill of Anthony J. Drexel; and he spoke ill of no one. He did not drive sharp bargains; he did not profit by the hard necessities of others; he did not exact from those in his employ excessive tasks and give them inadequate pay. He was a lenient, patient, liberal creditor, a generous employer, considerate of and sympathetic with every one who worked for him…

"He was a devoted husband, a loving parent, a true friend, a generous host, and in all his domestic relations considerate, just, and kind. His manners were finely courteous, manly, gentle, and refined. His mind was as pure as a child's; and during all the years of our close companionship I never knew him to speak a word that he might not have freely spoken in the presence of his own children. His religion was as deep as his nature, and rested upon the enduring foundations of faith, hope, and charity.

"He observed always a strict simplicity of living; he walked daily to and from his place of business, which was nearly three miles distant from his home. I was his companion for the greater part of the way every morning in these long walks; and as he passed up and down Chestnut Street, he was wont to salute in his cordial, pleasant, friendly manner, large numbers of all sorts and conditions of people. His smile was especially bright and attractive, and his voice low and sweet."

Mr. Drexel inherited his father's artistic tastes, and in his home at West Philadelphia, and at his country place, "Runnymede," near Lansdowne, he had many beautiful works of art, statuary, books, paintings, bronzes, and the like. He was also especially fond of music.

He was a great friend of General Grant, and Dec. 19, 1879, gave him and Mrs. Grant a notable reception with about seven hundred prominent guests. He was one of the pall-bearers at Grant's funeral in 1885.

Mr. Drexel was always a generous giver. He was a large contributor to the University of Pennsylvania, to hospitals, to churches of all denominations, and to asylums. With Mr. Childs and others he built an Episcopal church at Elberon, Long Branch, where he usually went in the summer.

His largest and best gift, for which he will be remembered, is that of about three million dollars to found and endow Drexel Institute, erected in his lifetime. He wished to fit young men and women to earn their living; and after making a careful examination of Cooper Institute, New York, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and sending abroad to learn the best methods and plan of buildings for such industrial education, he began his own admirable Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry in West Philadelphia. He erected the handsome building of light buff brick with terra-cotta trimmings, at the corner of Thirty-second and Chestnut Streets, at a cost of $550,000, and then gave an endowment of $1,000,000. At various times he gave to the library, museum, etc., over $600,000.

The Institute was dedicated on the afternoon of Dec. 17, 1891, Chauncey M. Depew making the dedication address, and was opened to students Jan. 4, 1892. James MacAlister, LL.D., superintendent of the public schools of Philadelphia, a man of fine scholarship, great energy, and enthusiastic love for the work of education, was chosen as the president.

From the first the school has been filled with eager students in the various departments. The art department gives instruction in painting, modelling, architecture, design and decoration, wood-carving, etc.; the department of science and technology, courses in mathematics, chemistry, physics, machine construction, and electrical engineering; the department of mechanic arts, shopwork in wood and iron with essential English branches; the business department, commercial law, stenography, and typewriting, etc.; the department of domestic science and arts gives courses in cooking, dressmaking, and millinery. There are also courses in physical training, in music, library work, and evening classes open five nights in the week from October to April.

The Institute was attended by more than 2,700 students in 1893-1894; and 35,000 persons attended the free public lectures in art, science, technology, etc., and free concerts, chiefly organ recitals, weekly, during the winter months.

The Institute has been fortunate in its gifts from friends. Mr. George W. Childs gave to it his rare and valuable collection of manuscripts and autographs, fine engravings, ivories, books on art, etc.; Mrs. John R. Fell, a daughter of Mr. Drexel, a collection of ancient jewellery and rare old clocks; Mrs. James W. Paul, another daughter of Mr. Drexel, $10,000 as a memorial of her mother, to be used in the purchase of articles for the museum; while other members of the family have given bronzes, metal-work, and unique and useful gifts.

Mr. Drexel lived to see his Institute doing its noble work. So interested was he that he stopped daily as he went to the bank to see the young people at their duties. He was greatly interested in the evening classes. "This part of the work," says Dr. MacAlister, "he watched with great eagerness, and he was specially desirous that young people who were compelled to work through the day should have opportunities in the evening equal to those who took the regular daily work of the Institution."

Mr. Drexel died suddenly, June 30, 1893, about two years after the building of the Institute, from apoplexy, at Carlsbad, Germany. He had gone to Europe for his health, as was his custom yearly, and seemed about as well as usual until the stroke came. Two weeks before he had had a mild attack of pleurisy, but would not permit his family to be told of it, thinking that he would fully recover.

Mr. Drexel left behind him the memory of a modest, unassuming man; so able a financier that he was asked to accept the position of Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, but declined; so generous a giver, that he built his monument before his death in his elegant and helpful Institute, an honor to his native city, Philadelphia, and an honor to his family.

PHILIP D. ARMOUR

AND HIS INSTITUTE

Philip D. Armour was born in Stockbridge, Madison County, N.Y., and spent his early life on a farm. In 1852, when he was twenty years of age, he went to California, and finally settled in Chicago, where he has become very wealthy by dealing in packed meat, which is sent to almost every corner of the earth.

"He pays six or seven millions of dollars yearly in wages," writes Arthur Warren in an interesting article in McClure's Magazine, February, 1894, "owns four thousand railway cars, which are used in transporting his goods, and has seven or eight hundred horses to haul his wagons. Fifty or sixty thousand persons receive direct support from the wages paid in his meatpacking business alone, if we estimate families on the census basis. He is a larger owner of grain-elevators than any other individual in either hemisphere; he is the proprietor of a glue factory, which turns out a product of seven millions of tons a year; and he is actively interested in an important railway enterprise."

He manages his business with great system, and knows from his heads of departments, some of whom he pays a salary of $25,000 yearly, what takes place from day to day in his various works. He is a quiet, self-centred man, a good listener, has excellent judgment, and possesses untiring energy.

"All my life," he says, "I have been up with the sun. The habit is as easy at sixty-one as it was at sixteen; perhaps easier, because I am hardened to it. I have my breakfast at half-past five or six; I walk down town to my office, and am there by seven, and I know what is going on in the world without having to wait for others to come and tell me. At noon I have a simple luncheon of bread and milk, and after that, usually, a short nap, which freshens me again for the afternoon's work. I am in bed again at nine o'clock every night."

Mr. Armour thinks there are as great and as many opportunities for men to succeed in life as there ever have been. He said to Mr. Warren: "There was never a better time than the present, and the future will bring even greater opportunities than the past. Wealth, capital, can do nothing without brains to direct it. It will be as true in the future as it is in the present that brains make capital – capital does not make brains. The world does not stand still. Changes come quicker now than they ever did, and they will come quicker and quicker. New ideas, new inventions, new methods of manufacture, of transportation, new ways to do almost everything, will be found as the world grows older; and the men who anticipate them, and who are ready for them, will find advantages as great as any their fathers or grandfathers have had."

Mr. Frank G. Carpenter, the well-known journalist, relates this incident of Mr. Armour: —

"He is a good judge of men, and he usually puts the right man in the right place. I am told that he never discharges a man if he can help it. If the man is not efficient he gives instructions to have him put in some other department, but to keep him if possible. There are certain things, however, which he will not tolerate; and among these are laziness, intemperance, and getting into debt. As to the last, he says he believes in good wages, and that he pays the best. He tells his men that if they are not able to live on the wages he pays them he does not want them to work for him. Not long ago he met a policeman in his office.

"'What are you doing here, sir?' he asked.

"'I am here to serve a paper,' was the reply.

"'What kind of a paper?' asked Mr. Armour.

"'I want to garnishee one of your men's wages for debt,' said the policeman.

"'Indeed,' replied Mr. Armour; 'and who is the man?' He thereupon asked the policeman into his private office, and ordered the debtor to come in. He then asked the clerk how long he had been in debt. The man replied that for twenty years he had been behind, and that he could not catch up.

"'But you get a good salary,' said Mr. Armour, 'don't you?'

"'Yes,' said the clerk; 'but I can't get out of debt. My life is such that somehow or other I can't get out.'

"'But you must get out,' said Mr. Armour, 'or you must leave here. How much do you owe?'

"The clerk then gave the amount. It was less than $1,000. Mr. Armour took his check-book, and wrote out an order for the amount. 'There,' he said, as he handed the clerk the check, 'there is enough to pay all your debts. Now I want you to keep out of debt, and if I hear of your getting into debt again you will have to leave.'

"The man took the check. He did pay his debts, and remodelled his life on a cash basis. About a year after the above incident happened he came to Mr. Armour, and told him that he had had a place offered him at a higher salary, and that he was going to leave. He thanked Mr. Armour, and told him that his last year had been the happiest of his life, and that getting out of debt had made a new man of him."

When Mr. Armour was asked by Mr. Carpenter to what he attributed his great success, he replied: —

"I think that thrift and economy have had much to do with it. I owe much to my mother's training, and to a good line of Scotch ancestors, who have always been thrifty and economical."

Mr. Armour has not been content to spend his life in amassing wealth only. After the late Joseph Armour bequeathed a fund to establish Armour Mission, Philip D. Armour doubled the fund, or more than doubled it; and now the Mission has nearly two thousand children in its Sunday-school, with free kindergarten and free dispensary. Mr. Armour goes to the Mission every Sunday afternoon, and finds great happiness among the children.

To yield a revenue yearly for the Mission, Mr. Armour built "Armour Flats," a great building adjoining the Mission, with a large grass-plot in the centre, where in two hundred and thirteen flats, having each from six to seven rooms, families can find clean and attractive homes, with a rental of from seventeen to thirty-five dollars a month.

"There is an endowed work," says Mr. Armour, "that cannot be altered by death, or by misunderstandings among trustees, or by bickerings of any kind. Besides, a man can do something to carry out his ideas while he lives, but he can't do so after he is in the grave. Build pleasant homes for people of small incomes, and they will leave their ugly surroundings, and lead brighter lives."

Mr. Armour, aside from many private charities, has given over a million and a half dollars to the Armour Institute of Technology. The five-story fire-proof building of red brick trimmed with brown stone was finished Dec. 6, 1892, on the corner of Thirty-third Street and Armour Avenue; and the keys were put in the hands of the able and eloquent preacher, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, "to formulate," says the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 15, 1893, "more exactly than Mr. Armour had done the lines on which this work was to go forward. Dr. Gunsaulus had long ago reached the conclusion that the best way to prepare men for a home in heaven is to make it decently comfortable for them here."

Dr. Gunsaulus put his heart and energy into this noble work. The academic department prepares students to enter any college in the country; the technical department gives courses in mechanical engineering, electricity, and electrical engineering, mining engineering, and metallurgy. The department of domestic arts offers instruction in cooking, dressmaking, millinery, etc.; the department of commerce fits persons for a business life, wisely combining with its course in shorthand and typewriting such a knowledge of the English language, history, and some modern languages, as will make the students do intelligent work for authors, lawyers, and educated people in general.

Special attention has been given to the gymnasium, that health may be fully attended to. Mr. Armour has spared neither pains nor expense to provide the best machinery, especially for electrical work. "In a few years," he says, "we shall be doing everything by electricity. Before long our steam-engines will be as old-fashioned as the windmills are now."

Dr. Gunsaulus has taken great pleasure in gathering books, prints, etc., for the library, which already has a choice collection of works on the early history of printing.

The Institute was opened in September, 1893, with six hundred pupils, and has been most useful and successful from the first.

LEONARD CASE

AND THE SCHOOL OF APPLIED SCIENCE

Technological schools are springing up so rapidly all over our country that it would be impossible to name them all. The Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken, N.J., was organized in 1871, with a gift of $650,000; the Towne Scientific School, Philadelphia, 1872, $1,000,000; the Miller School, Batesville, Va., 1878, $1,000,000; the Rose Polytechnic, Terre Haute, Ind., 1883, over $500,000; the Case School of Applied Science of Cleveland, Ohio, 1881, over $2,000,000.

Leonard Case, the giver of the Case School and the Case Library, born June 27, 1820, was a quiet, scholarly man, who gave wisely the wealth amassed by his father. The family on the paternal side came from Holland; on the maternal side from Germany. Mr. James D. Cleveland, in a recent sketch of the founder of Case School, gives an interesting account of the ancestors of Mr. Case.

The great-grandfather of Leonard Case, Leonard Eckstein, when a youth, had a quarrel with the Catholic clergy in Nuremberg, near which city he was born, and was in consequence thrown into prison, where he nearly starved. One day his sister brought him a cake which contained a slender silk cord baked in it. This cord was let down from his cell window to a friend, who fastened it to a rope which, when drawn up, enabled the young man to slide down a wall eighty feet above the ground.

After his escape, the youth of nineteen came to America, and landed in Philadelphia without a cent of money. Later he married and moved to Western Pennsylvania; and his daughter Magdalene married Meshach Case, the grandfather of Leonard Case.