Cornish Was Very Nearly Burke College of the Arts
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| Banner outside the Burke Museum. Photo by LavaBaron, Creative Commons license. |
Today, students and faculty gather every year to teach and learn at Cornish College of the Arts. It could have been very different school under a very different name, had events of 1926 played out differently.
After the new Cornish School building, the present Kerry Hall, was built in 1921,
costs for running the structure, according to Nellie Cornish, were much more
than expected. "The expense of operating the new building was to be more
than double that of the Boothe Building," Cornish wrote, contrasting the
school's new home with its old, "and things began to look dangerous."
The new building was an oddball, built by public subscription and leased to
the school. Added to this, Seattle was suffering
from the
economic downtown
that followed the US coming off a war footing following World War I. Of the
school's 1,600 students at the time, over a third had been withdrawn. [both
citations: Miss Aunt Nelly, p. 124]
By the mid ’20s, debt was threatening
to close the school. In April of 1925, just as Nellie
Cornish was trying to put her budget into perspective
to hire the next year’s faculty, she received an
“ominous” letter from Mrs. Edgar Ames, president
of the board of trustees. “I believe we are facing
a serious crisis and that we cannot to continue to
operate longer without a very definite program and
the wherewithal to meet it. … We are in a class with
two or three outstanding institutions in the United
States, which are heavily endowed and whose standards
we are matching, and doing it without proper backing.
… Therefore, this suggestion, that this will probably
be the last year of the Cornish School in Seattle.
[Ames’ emphasis; Miss Aunt Nellie, p 161]
It’s not clear what Mrs. Ames hoped to accomplish in sending this letter to Nellie
Cornish. After all, there is nothing in it that would have been news to her,
other than Ames’s statement that the end was nigh. I would suggest that, though
the letter was addressed to Cornish, it was meant to alarm not her but the
board and other supporters. It’s dire prediction ratcheted up the stakes and
began what amounted to a game of “chicken,” with lots of desperate, end-times
talk.
A.S. Kerry, head of the family for which the building is now named, led an effort
in 1925 to clear the school of its debts and to provide a working endowment.
All in all, they hoped to raise $100,000. The series of letters delineating
this effort held at University of Washington's Special Collections Library
[Accession 2654-001, Box 2, Folder 1]. The letters are remarkable for two things.
First, its honest appraisal that the school meant nothing to the leading men
of Seattle, but only to “the women,” which in our times comes off with a dull,
sexist thud. The second is that the subscription promises to be the last the
recipients will get. Here is a bit from the solicitation letter of October
10, 1925, which went out to the top 160 families in Seattle.
It is the worst fundraising letter imaginable. However well-meaning the letter,
it was a horrible error to suggest that the current fix suggested would allow
all concerned to wash their hands of the Cornish School. Anyone in advancement
and fundraising would blanche to read it. The letter pumps up the national
reputation of the school, while simultaneously proclaiming it “women’s stuff,”
that is, not legitimate. The most charitible interpretation of the letter is
that its authors Kerry, Merrill, and Struve hoped to set an air of manly bonding
over the Cornish problem.
A few of the private letters sent out by Kerry mention
support that is about to be realized from Judge Thomas Burke, who he believed
would be giving in excess of $10,000. Clearly Kerry believed this mention of
the popular Burke would loosen the purses of the well-to-do. Sadly, it was
not to be; shortly after the letters went out, Judge Burke died, on December
4, 1925.
What followed was suspended in an air of panic as the cause took the hit of
losing the Burke money, it seems. Kerry first tries to get the Burke Memorial
Foundation to give to Cornish. As this effort deepened in the first days of
1926, things took a very serious turn. What follows is from the letter
written to J.D. Lowman of the Burke Foundation from A.S. Kerry on January 15.
If things had gone as Kerry proposed, the Cornish School Foundation would have
given the school and all its holdings into the care of the Burke Memorial Foundation,
and the institution would be “changed to that name.” Here the institution is
not the Cornish School Foundation, but the Cornish School itself. It goes without
saying that the prospective owners could keep the Cornish name if they chose,
but, as we shall see, that was not likely.
By February 20, 1926, the group headed by Kerry had expanded its
plan with a lengthy telegram to the Carnegie Foundation signed by D.E. Skinner.
The hope was that the foundation would provide funds. Two lines of text
confirm the proposed name change.
There is no question that students of the Cornish School could
have found themselves attending the Burke School by the start of the academic
year of 1926-27. Additionally, note in the Kerry letter that the head of the
institution is given as “Roy Ballard, president of the Cornish School.” It’s
pretty clear that Nellie was to be ignored in the process; the person in charge
is Ballard, not Cornish.
Nowhere in Nellie’s book does she mention the threat of being elbowed aside by the board in the lust for the Burke money, at least in the book as published. It is an open question whether this bit was edited out. Most likely, she never knew about the arrangement, and never saw the letter.
On the other hand, Nellie does include the following interesting bit in her book,
which bears on the affair obliquely. A few months after the telegram to Carnegie
Foundation, in the spring of 1926, famed entrepreneur, investment banker, and
noted philanthropist Otto Kahn visited Seattle. He had heard of the Cornish
School in New York, and he astonished his hosts, the Chamber of Commerce, by
spending the lion's share of his visit at the school. Later at the official
luncheon, Nellie Cornish reported, “Mr. Kahn spoke for twenty minutes, and
it wasn’t about the Youngstown iron works. He told his audience that if Seattle
had given them the opportunity to be prosperous, they owed it to Seattle to
be generous to all cultural activities. Then he praised the School and told
of his visit and what he had seen there.” M.A.N. p
174
She goes on to say that “The men on the committee looked a bit uncomfortable.”
Of their discomfort, there can be little doubt, since many of those sitting
through the speech were also privy to the machinations between Cornish's board
and the Burke Foundation, and it strains credulity to believe that the rumor
would not have spread further than the two groups.
The the final answer from the both the Burke and Carnegie foundations is not
recorded, but we can be sure the answer was no. So the Cornish School did not
become the Burke School, and its financial woes continued. No one was called
the “president” until the school became a college in 1977. The board of the
Burke Memorial Foundation decided to make their donations elsewhere. In 1932,
the money went to the Washington State Museum, a natural history museum on
the UW campus. A vital stipulation was that the museum change its name to honor
Thomas Burke; this would have been the fate of Cornish had the money come there.
Cornish dodged a bullet and Nellie's name remained above the door. Judge
Burke was memorialied in other ways. Today his name is blazoned on the
UW’s Burke Museum and for hikers and bikers on the Burke-Gilman Trail.
— MMB
