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Harry Morehouse Gage was the president of Coe
during the Depression of the thirties. "Dr. Gage and his business
manager, S. N. Harris, adopted heroic measures to reduce expenses and
pay salaries." In 1930 they faced a horrendous deficit of $44,000. The
faculty helped in fund raising efforts. In 1931, for example, when the
average professor earned less than $3,000 a year, the faculty
subscribed almost $11,000 to help pay running expenses. In 1933, when
Coe faced a cash deficit of $89,000 the faculty produced $46,000 in
loans to the college and in gifts from their already small salaries.
The rest of the budget was met with gifts from trustees and Cedar
Rapids businessmen. The chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1933 on
was businessman Arthur Poe who like many others gave his own money to
help the college.
Life was grim in the early thirties for
students at Coe. Scholarly achievement was high because it didn't cost
anything to study and no one had money enough to do anything else. The
Depression-ridden student paper was allowed for the first time to
accept lucrative ads showing women smoking. By 1988 students owed the
college $19,000, but no students were dismissed because they couldn't
make payments.
President Gage obviously had the faith to
back his students. On June 6, 1930, in "A Message to the Graduating
Class," President Gage stated "the important thing is the effect of
your possibly forgotten learning and knowledge on your attitude toward
the government of the United States and the present problems of the
American people." President Gage was acknowledging the plight of the
American Depression while pushing college graduates to embrace uplifted
spirits in any attempt to make use of their college years.
How did Coe keep students enrolling
throughout the Depression? For starters, the college acknowledged there
was an economic dilemma. A Coe Courier pamphlet entitled "Going to
College?" from Aug 1931 read: "It may be that the best thing a high
school graduate can do in hard times is to take the chance, or make the
chance, to go to college." In a recruiting letter from August 1932,
President H. M. Gage explains to high school graduates "Sometimes money
is scarce and times are hard. At such times, governments occasionally
print paper money without having 'hard money'--real gold--to back it up
on demand. This is called inflation. No matter how much you may have of
a fully inflated currency, you cannot buy what you want with it."
Although students may not have had enough
money, Coe presented the "if there's a will, there's a way" philosophy
throughout the Great Depression. President Gage went on to say in his
concluding paragraph, "A righteous and honorable ambition is worthy of
any conceivable sacrifice." For Coe students facing the Depression,
attaining their college education was that ambition.
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