The Last Commencement: Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh
Jesse F. Millspaugh led the Los Angeles State Normal School from 1904 to 1917, the years it grew from rented rooms downtown into a ten-building campus on North Vermont Avenue. Within three years of the Summer Class of 1916, that campus became the Southern Branch of the University of California, the institution now known as UCLA.
The record of that class is a single folded program, the Exercises of Graduation, Summer Class of Nineteen Sixteen, held on June 22. The paper has softened along its crease and the ink has dimmed, and Millspaugh's name still stands at its head, printed as president.
The 1916 commencement program of the Los Angeles State Normal School, Summer Class of Nineteen Sixteen, folded along its original crease.
Who was Jesse F. Millspaugh, and what became of the Los Angeles State Normal School?
Millspaugh was a schoolman before he was a Californian. He was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in June 1855, trained first in medicine, then turned to education, serving as superintendent of schools in Salt Lake City through the 1890s and as president of the Winona State Normal School in Minnesota before he came west. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1904 to lead the State Normal School, a teacher-training college that had opened downtown at Fifth and Grand. Under him it outgrew those rooms, in a city that was multiplying: Los Angeles counted about 100,000 residents in 1900 and more than 575,000 by 1920, and it needed teachers faster than it could train them. The campus he campaigned for on North Vermont Avenue, twenty acres and ten buildings designed by the architects Allison and Allison, opened for the fall term of 1914, planned for 1,600 to 2,000 students and soon full.
What became of that school is the reason the program is worth keeping. Millspaugh resigned the active presidency in the spring of 1917 as his health failed, and stayed on as president emeritus. Two years later, on May 23, 1919, the state legislature turned the Los Angeles State Normal School into the Southern Branch of the University of California. The school was renamed the University of California, Los Angeles, moved to Westwood in 1929, and left the Vermont Avenue campus to what is now Los Angeles City College. The program belongs to the school's last years as an independent normal school, before that change.
The Program, and the Name It Kept
The program is a folded letterpress leaflet printed on tinted stock, the kind of document meant to be carried through one afternoon and then put in a drawer. Its pages set out the order of exercises, the faculty, and the graduating class of the summer session, with Millspaugh named at the head as president. The class reads as a cross-section of a young city, overwhelmingly women with a few men among them, trained to teach across kindergarten and the elementary grades, home economics, manual and fine arts, music, and physical education. A normal school existed to train teachers, and most of these graduates carried what they learned into classrooms across the county. Each name marked a beginning, and each one shaped a corner of early Los Angeles. One of the school's graduates, Frances Josephine Hadley, is followed in her own story.
Interior page of the 1916 program, listing the Summer Class exercises of the Los Angeles State Normal School, with Jesse F. Millspaugh named as president.
One of those names is my great-grandmother, listed with the summer class. She is the reason the program survived at all, and the reason it sits in the Acanthus archive rather than a library's: it came down through a family, folded and kept, rather than catalogued. Her own life is a story for a later journal. That is family memory rather than a citation, and the program is offered here as what it plainly is, a record a graduate carried home that remained with her family for more than a century.
Read as material culture, the program keeps these graduates under the names they carried that day. Their paths afterward varied: some married and passed into the record under their husbands' names, and others never did and kept the names printed here. For the ones whose names changed, this sheet can be the last place the name they graduated under survives. It was printed to be handed out and forgotten, and that is why it holds what steadier records let go.
Millspaugh's own words survive better than any summary of them. Addressing a Hollywood high school's graduating class in February 1916, he took national preparedness as his theme and turned it away from the war then gathering in Europe. True patriotism, he said, was civic courage, “courage at the election booth and not on the battlefield,” and “the greatest education need of our time is intellectual enthusiasm.” The main building on his own campus already carried his name, Millspaugh Hall, dedicated with the new buildings in 1914.
From Normal School to Southern Branch
The change of 1919 did not come from nowhere. As early as 1912, Millspaugh had proposed to the trustees that the Normal School be raised into a teachers college, and a bill to that end was carried to the state legislature, where it failed. What he could not win by statute the school became by another route seven years later, when it passed into the University of California. He was president emeritus by then, and he lived to serve as the new Southern Branch's dean before he died on December 12, 1919, in Los Angeles.
The graduate listing from the 1916 program, Los Angeles State Normal School, Summer Class of Nineteen Sixteen.
The hall raised in his name is gone. The Vermont Avenue building was demolished, and the ground is now part of Los Angeles City College. What has lasted is the thing that looked least likely to: a folded leaflet meant to be used once and set aside. The monument fell, and the paper stayed.
A program holds its history the way furniture does, in the marks left by use rather than in what it says. The crease keeps the pressure of the hands that opened it, the tint records the light it sat in, and the softened corners record the drawer that held it, the same way a chair arm keeps the record of a returning hand. This is the same close reading that wear and patina invite on antique furniture, applied to paper. To preserve either is to make one narrow judgment: keep what carries the evidence, and renew only what has failed at its work. A nineteenth-century settee can be brought back to use in a modern room without erasing that record, and a century-old program stays legible for the same reason, because it was kept rather than corrected.
This program, printed near the end of Millspaugh's presidency, sits at a hinge in the history of Los Angeles learning, the close of a normal school and the beginning of a university. It does not announce that. It holds his name, printed as president, above a list of graduates who would go on to teach the city, on paper that has outlasted the hall. To keep it is to keep them legible too, a whole generation held in a single folded sheet. Most of those names are strangers now; one of them is my great-grandmother, and this sheet is how I know she was there.
Object in This Journal
Exercises of Graduation, Summer Class of Nineteen Sixteen, Los Angeles State Normal School.
A folded letterpress program from June 22, 1916, naming Jesse F. Millspaugh as president. This object remains in the Acanthus archive.
From the Collection: The Vantelle Settee, a nineteenth-century settee restored to use with its record intact.
See more of the collection's restored antique seating.
Related Reading
Thoughtfully Collected. Quietly Shared.
SOURCES AND NOTES
Biography (born Battle Creek, Michigan, June 1855; superintendent of schools in Salt Lake City in the 1890s; president of the Winona, Minnesota, State Normal School to 1904; president of the Los Angeles State Normal School from 1904; died December 12, 1919): Finding Aid for the Jesse Fonda Millspaugh Papers, Online Archive of California; and “Dr. Millspaugh, Noted Educator, Dies Suddenly,” Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, December 19, 1919.
The school's downtown origin at Fifth and Grand, on the block now occupied by the Los Angeles Central Library: Los Angeles Conservancy; PBS SoCal, “When UCLA Was a Downtown Teaching College.”
The Vermont Avenue campus, twenty acres and ten buildings by the architects Allison and Allison, opened for the fall 1914 term: Homestead Museum, “Getting Schooled with The Normal Outlook” (1915); his 1919 obituary credits the ten-building campus to his years of campaigning.
Los Angeles population in 1900, 1910, and 1920 (102,479; 319,198; 576,673): United States Census. The campus was planned for 1,600 to 2,000 students and was full by the 1915 to 1916 year: Homestead Museum, “The Normal Outlook” (1915).
The 1916 exercises were held in the auditorium of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 536 to 558 South Hope Street, a building of 1915 to 1916 (architects Walker and Vawter) whose four-thousand-seat hall was demolished in 1988: Pacific Coast Architecture Database.
His words on national preparedness (“courage at the election booth and not on the battlefield”; “the greatest education need of our time is intellectual enthusiasm”): “Preparedness Is Graduation Theme,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1916, reporting a Hollywood high school commencement address.
Millspaugh Hall dedicated with the new campus in 1914; his resignation as active president effective April 1, 1917, and his continuation as president emeritus; his 1912 proposal for a teachers college and the legislative bill that failed: “Dr. Moore to Head Normal School,” Los Angeles Evening Express, March 6, 1917, which reports that he would become president emeritus. The emeritus title is also in the Online Archive of California finding aid.
The school became the Southern Branch of the University of California on May 23, 1919, was renamed and moved to Westwood in 1929, and left the Vermont Avenue site to what is now Los Angeles City College; Millspaugh served as the Southern Branch's dean in 1919: Online Archive of California finding aid; Calisphere; UCLA history.
The program and the family connection are from the Acanthus archive; the class composition and the graduates' schools are taken from the program's own listings.
