Ellen Browning Scripps was an extremely savvy businesswoman, a left-leaning philanthropist, and a firebrand in her old age. One of the country's richest women, she refused to bow to the dictates of fashion, and did her own housework into her eighties. The money she earned and saved through decades of hard work and personal frugality was invested in a host of social and educational institutions in southern California, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Scripps College to a La Jolla playground. Molly McClain does an excellent job of capturing this complex and compelling figure.
Scripps was born in 1836, the granddaughter of a London publisher and the daughter of a dreamer who moved his family to the Illinois prairie after failing at bookbinding in London. Although he also failed at several get-rich-quick schemes in the US, his children were raised in a house full of books, and Ellen became a voracious reader. She went on to study at Rockville College, taught school in a one-room schoolhouse, and spent most of her youth caring for a growing array of siblings from her father's first and second marriages. She lost most of her teeth in childhood as a result of an overdose of calomel, wore dentures for most of her life, and never married. Although the family was relatively poor, Ellen gravitated toward philanthropy from an early age, including temperance, abolitionism and organizing a Civil War soldier's aid society that later became part of the Sanitary Commission.
Her life changed dramatically when she moved to Detroit in 1873 to help her brother James set up a working-class newspaper, which became the cornerstone of the family's newspaper empire. Ellen worked double shifts, copyediting and writing at the paper for twelve hours a day, then caring for James's children at night as a maiden aunt. And she saved, doling out loans to family members as they built the paper, and amassing a growing pile of stock that eventually made her rich. When James shortchanged her, she helped her younger brother E.W. build a national chain and UPI, an international news service. Eventually, the Scripps newspaper chain became one of the country's largest, making her an extraordinarily wealthy woman in her own right. By the time of her death in 1932, her fortune was pegged at $30 million.
Her second turning point came when she moved into E.W.’s California household to escape a family feud over the papers’ management, subsequently building a home of her own in La Jolla in 1894. In her fifties, she finally began to build a life of her own, on her own terms. She flirted with Theosophy and embraced socialism in her sixties and seventies, supported suffrage, and launched her philanthropic career with her first donations to the Scripps Institution in 1903. Over the next quarter-century, she spun off a small universe of institutions, culminating in Scripps College for women in 1926. When the mayor of La Jolla and local vigilante groups tried to quash free speech during the Mexican Revolution, she built a community center to ensure that every voice could still be heard.
Scripps is hard to place in the history of women's philanthropy because she is sui generis. Her socialist bent most certainly sets her apart, as did the army of institutions she created. She also had a much larger fortune than most businesswomen of the time, and because it was earned rather than inherited, she controlled it, which was also unusual. And she believed that inherited wealth was the path to aristocracy, so she had no intention of passing it down the family line.
One of the few things that would have made this fine book stronger is comparisons with California's other women philanthropists. Did they have more freedom than their counterparts in the East, and if so, why? The author's efforts to translate current into constant dollars is also somewhat jarring. McClain uses multipliers that are widely available on the Internet, but they seem too high. For example, the $5,000 that Scripps gave for the United War Work Parade in 1918 is pegged at $78,700 in 2016 dollars, which seems inordinately high for an event where most participants volunteer (177), as does the $41,700 valuation placed on her $1,500 gift to the Scripps Institution in 1903 (69). Comparisons with what other donors were giving for comparable ventures might have been more helpful.
However, these are minor criticisms of an important contribution to the small but growing literature on female philanthropists. We have far too few works on western philanthropists, and Molly McClain has done an excellent job of limning Scripps's persona and career.
