100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN
Wednesday, June 26, 1918. Canvassers for the War Savings Stamp campaign scramble to cover all of Saratoga Springs today as organizers express disappointment at yesterday’s pledge totals.
The Spa City has been given a quota of $240,000 to raise through War Savings Stamp sales by Friday, June 28. People don’t have to pay immediately, but must make a pledge when visited by local canvassers or appear personally to pledge at Convention Hall on the 28th.
The Saratogian reports that residents pledged $34,276 yesterday. While canvassers “worked very hard yesterday,” they “found that it was impossible to cover their districts in a day, as they had hoped.”
Yesterday’s total “is considerable of a disappointment, as it is evident that Saratoga Springs in no way will approach its quota in this specific war work on any such basis.” The main problem, a reporter suggests, is that people aren’t spending as much on War Savings Stamps as they have on Liberty Bonds. Organizers invite those who’ve already pledged to pledge additional money by calling campaign headquarters at the Grand Union Hotel.
R.P.I. Scholarship Gift
Mr. and Mrs. L. H. Cramer have created a scholarship fund that will send one Saratoga Springs High School graduate each year to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy.
Schuyler Peck is the first winner of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Scholarship, which “not only includes the tuition of the student at the institute for four years, but also buys the books and instruments which he needs and maintains the student for his four years in the college,” The Saratogian reports, “This is the most valuable prize ever awarded to a student of the Saratoga Springs High School.”
Marion Elizabeth Vines is this year’s valedictorian. “So many calls are being made upon the American public to assemble during these days of stress, that we are more than grateful to our good friends who have come together tonight to witness this great event our our lives,” she says.
Vines’s subject is “The True Culture.” While Germany tries to impose its supposedly superior “kultur” on the world by force, “Progressive America and other progressive nations of the world see nothing pure, nothing noble, nothing glorious in this kind of culture. Nor do they adhere to the old belief that the man who is familiar with the classics, who can read Greek and Latin … is the cultured person of the day.”
Noting that Princeton has abolished its Greek and Latin requirements, Vines claims that true culture bestows “the power to see, the power to think and the power to act intelligently with reference to the problems of his own time and place.”