Dorothy Payne Whitney

Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887 to 1968) was an heiress of the Whitney family who helped found The New Republic with her first husband, Willard Straight, in 1914, and who was among the principal donors to the New School for Social Research in its first decade. With her second husband, Leonard Knight Elmhirst, she developed Dartington Hall in Devon as a progressive experiment that she continued to support until her death.¹

Youth and Marriage

She was the youngest child of Flora Payne and William C. Whitney, a financier and secretary of the Navy under President Grover Cleveland. By the age of seventeen her mother, stepmother and father had all died, leaving her a large inheritance. At the age of 20 she became president of the Junior League of New York (1907 to 1909), where she introduced formal training for members and was the driving force behind the Junior League Hotel, a new model of cooperative housing for women.¹² She married Willard Straight in 1911. Their son, Michael Whitney Straight, was born in 1916, the third and youngest of her children with Straight; the others were Whitney Straight and Beatrice Straight.³

Her papers at Cornell University (collection #3725, 10 cubic feet, dates 1887 to 1978, most of the material from 1887 to 1926) include notebooks from her school days, guardianship papers, newspaper clippings on her father's death, an inventory of the house at 1130 Fifth Avenue, and correspondence with Willard Straight on their courtship and on his service in France in 1917 and 1918. The finding aid lists her involvement with the New York State Food Commission, the Women's Liberty Loan Committee, the Social Unit Plan, the Junior League, the War Camp Service Committee, the Women's Emergency Committee of the European Relief Council, the New School for Social Research, the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children, the Pueblos Defense Committee and the Mayor's Committee of Women on National Defense, and states that she supported students at the Bordentown Military Academy and Hobart College.²

The New Republic

After reading Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life aloud during their honeymoon, the couple invited Croly to lunch. In the fall of 1914 the Straights and Croly founded The New Republic.¹ Alvin Johnson wrote that when Croly wanted a weekly, "I will find it," Dorothy Straight said simply.⁴ The Cornell finding aid lists correspondence and statements concerning The New Republic and Asia magazines among her papers.²

In 1922 the magazine was short of money, and its owners wanted the New School terminated so that Straight would provide the magazine with more support.⁵ A New Republic publisher interviewed by the FBI in 1969 said that her family's fund had founded the magazine in 1914 and had been used for its operation until 1954, when Gilbert A. Harrison bought a controlling interest; the editor of Antiques, a magazine owned by the Straight family since about 1930, said that it and The New Republic had shared the same office space in New York.⁶ Her son "enlisted new patrons" after "his mother's withdrawal of support of the magazine."³

The New School Pledges

As early as 1916 Dorothy Straight and Croly had discussed with Charles Austin Beard and James Harvey Robinson the possibility of an independent social science institute. When Beard and Robinson resigned from Columbia University in 1917, these discussions took on new meaning. Willard Straight, then serving in Europe, warned her away from the two men: "I'm getting a little restive and uncertain about some of these forward looking people."¹ Beard and Robinson "found sympathetic and resourceful patrons" in Croly and Dorothy Straight, and the "Heir to the Whitney fortune" saw in their school an opportunity.⁷

She did not heed the warning. She turned the school from a subject of discussion into a realizable dream "by pledging $10,000 a year to the project for ten years."¹ The school's early pledges were "ten-year pledges of support amounting to nearly $300,000, much of it from Dorothy Straight," and the townhouse the school renovated was "paid for largely by Dorothy Straight."⁸ In Alvin Johnson's Pioneer's Progress the founding circle consisted of Robinson, Beard, Thorstein Veblen, Croly, "Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Bacon, and other liberals," and a women's committee met at the apartment of Caroline Bacon: Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Haven Putnam, Mrs. Learned Hand, Mrs. Victor Sorchan, and "later Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont."⁹ Johnson wrote of her as "the most generous, Mrs. Straight," who "would leave us if the threatened secession from the board took place" in the crisis of 1922.¹⁰

When Johnson took over as director in April 1922 he wrote to her of the change, in a letter that includes the words "To put it baldly, I have usurped the"; the board members who stayed were Croly, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Caroline Bacon, Dorothy Straight and Emily Putnam.¹¹¹² She sat on the Board of Directors until 1930, after 1925 as Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst.¹³

Judith Friedlander uses a 1952 letter by Johnson to characterize Dorothy and other founders, including Learned Hand and Mary Harriman, as antisemites. Mastrelli, reviewing the book, writes: "For the record, I am not sure what kind of antisemite Dorothy would have been," and notes "accounts that she aided Johnson in the University in Exile."¹³ The records of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars include, in their philanthropic file series, a file titled "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935."¹⁴ The Cornell finding aid for her papers states that the New School was "begun with the backing of the Whitney Estate in 1919."²

William C. Whitney Foundation

After 1929 she continued to support the school for several years through the William C. Whitney Foundation; Mastrelli attributes this to the Dartington Hall Trust archives.¹³ In 1969 Milton C. Rose, senior partner of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, told the FBI that the foundation was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" and that her son Michael had been its president "since its inception in 1937."¹⁵ The FBI's summary describes it as a charitable organization that "concerns itself with the arts, having made many grants in the fields of music, dance, theater, and painting." Harriett K. Evison, who had been her social secretary, became assistant secretary-treasurer of the foundation.¹⁵ A December 1952 newspaper report on testimony before a House committee on tax-exempt foundations records that her son, as president, was questioned on $19,000 in grants.¹⁶

Dartington Hall

She married Leonard Knight Elmhirst in 1925.³ She met Elmhirst while working on the Willard Straight Hall project at Cornell, and the couple moved to Totnes in Devon, bought and restored a medieval property, and set about developing Dartington Hall as a laboratory of experiment for a "many sided life."¹ She and Elmhirst purchased Dartington Hall, reconstructed the fourteenth-century manor and founded a school on the property.² A second set of her papers from Dartington Hall (collection #3782, 4 cubic feet, 1890 to 1976) includes correspondence on Willard Straight Hall (1920 to 1967), lecture notes, diaries and travel journals, and an inventory of the records room at Dartington Hall.¹⁷ Her son Michael was educated at Dartington Hall.³

Willard Straight Hall

Willard Straight died of septic pneumonia while serving with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918, before the school opened.³ In his will he asked that Dorothy make Cornell a "more human place." She built Willard Straight Hall, one of the first models of a student union in the United States.¹ The Cornell finding aid for her papers gives his death as 1919; the finding aid for the Dartington Hall papers and the New York Times give 1918.²¹⁷

Death

She died in 1968.¹ The FBI's 1969 summary of her son's background lists her as deceased.¹⁵