Baker's Stewart

Last week George Fisher Baker, near-billionaire chairman of Manhattan's First National Bank, gave away another million dollars and again marked himself on the public mind as a highly individualistic giver. The Rockefellers, the Harknesses and Andrew Carnegie have given their hundreds of millions. Milton Hershey (chocolates, sugar, orphans), Augustus Juilliard (commission merchant, music), Julius Rosenwald (mailorder, Jews, Negroes), James B. Duke (tobacco, waterpower, his university, preachers), Mrs. Russell Sage (railroads, surveys) have given their scores of millions. All these have given largely and chiefly to found institutions and movements they have initiated.

Mr. Baker too has given his score million--in goodly chunks to fill specific needs. Harvard, which graduated George Fisher Baker Jr. in 1899, wanted a graduate school of business. Mr. Baker handed it a grand $5,000,000. Harvard wanted more money for the business school; he gave it another $1,000,000. The late great Henry Pomeroy Davison needed money for Red Cross work during the War; Mr. Baker gave $2,000,000. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted Regault's painting "Salome"; Mr. Baker presented it. It wanted money; he gave $1,000,000. Cornell University asked for dormitories and chemical laboratories, and got $2,000,000 from Mr. Baker. And thus it has gone: $750,000 to New York Hospital, $100,000 to Johns Hopkins Eye Clinic, $250,000 to New England Deaconess Association, $250,000 to Manhattan's Natural History Museum.

Last week's $1,000,000 was in the same vein. New York University wishes a public health centre, to emulate Columbia University with its new (Harkness-bolstered) medical centre. And to Mr. Baker the faculty turned. Picking him was shrewd, for the professor of surgery at Bellevue Hospital, one of the units of the proposed centre, has long been Dr. George David Stewart. And Dr. Stewart has almost as long been Mr. Baker's doctor and friend. Hence sentiment made the ready Baker hand more ready, and a little insistent. The $1,000,000 was, he stipulated, to be an endowment and the endowment must be called the George David Stewart Endowment. Dr. Stewart must be its administrator.

Dr. Stewart, who had known that the endowment was forthcoming, announced last week that he would use it to pay professors and instructors of surgery for half time work, to increase New York University's faculty.

More notable in its way was another octogenarian's hospital gift last week. Chicago's Mrs. Adeline Wheeler, 88, wife of the late Charles W. Wheeler (grain), gave $2,000,000 to Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital. The gift comprised almost every dollar she had. It was her bequest. She died last week, having lived in Chicago's Congress Hotel since the 1893 World's Fair.