70 JL 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988 



projects. Supporting the MBL seemed within their purview. But Whitman 

 and others did not want to give up the independence of the laboratory and 

 felt that Carnegie money would mean Carnegie control. The MBL trustees 

 did not accept the Carnegie offer, though they did receive three years' worth 

 of support in meeting expenses from the Carnegie people. 



Whitman retired as MBL director in 1908, in part because it was too 

 much trouble to haul the pigeons that he had begun to study back and forth 

 from Chicago to the Cape each summer, in part because there was no 

 longer any pressing reason to go to Woods Hole, and in part because he had 

 tired of all the battles. His personally trained assistant, F. R. Lillie, took over. 

 Whitman had directed Lillie's dissertation, which was begun at Clark Uni- 

 versity and completed at the University of Chicago. Then he had exerted 

 considerable effort to hire Lillie at Chicago. Though not successful at first, 

 he eventually managed to attract Lillie to Chicago from Vassar. Lillie became 

 assistant director at the MBL and assistant chair at Chicago, in many ways 

 simply taking over control when Whitman no longer wished to have it. 



Lillie had money, and Lillie attracted money to the MBL. In fact, the 

 MBL owes much to Lillie cind to the new booming business of indoor 

 plumbing. Lillie's brother-in-law was Cheirles R. Crane, a wealthy business- 

 man associated with plumbing and porcelain fixtures. From 1904 to 

 1923, Crane helped to make up the MBL's deficit, amounting to roughly 

 $20,000 per year in the 1920s. 



In fact, the MBL began really only in the 1920s to attract any major 

 endowanent and financial assistance, well after Whitman's death in 1910. 

 During that period, it gained sufficient support both to enlarge the 

 facilities and offerings and to secure what was then a substantial endow- 

 ment. The National Research Council (with many MBL researchers as 

 members) supported work at the MBL and called for financial invest- 

 ment by others. The Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. 

 personally, and the Carnegie Institution all made liberal contributions, with 

 various conditions for support to be provided by the MBL itself. That 

 indispensable benefactor Charles R. Crane met these conditions brilliantly 

 and thus put the MBL on a 'high plateau of security." 



The successes of the 1920s took the MBL from one original wooden 

 building to a physical plant worth $1.5 million, with an endowment of over 

 $1 million. Even that magnificent sum proved insufficient to do much more 

 than desperately fread water during the Depression, when annual income 

 fell and attendance dropped drastically from 1931 to 1935, but it did keep 

 the MBL afloat. Then came the great period of government funding (but not 

 government control) with the strengthening of the National Research Coun- 

 cil, then the advent of the National Science Foundation and National Insti- 

 tutes of Health to replace the private Crane, Carnegie, and Rockefeller 

 support. 



