0.5 Chapter three: professionalization and postwar expansion, 192  (Page 11/13)

The performance of the markets had an extremely positive impact on the endowment, the Society's primary revenue source (see Figure 3.3). Between 1947 and 1959, the nominal market value of the endowment grew at an average rate of 7 percent per year and an average real rate of 4.5 percent per year.

Because of the Society's improving financial prospects, decisions regarding what services the Society would provide no longer represented a zero-sum game. The library, the museum, and the education program could all benefit from this improving environment. The periodic pressures to narrow the focus of the Soci­ety's acquisitions policy faded in this climate. In a review of gifts received in 1952, Vail thanked the public for "current materials" and expressed gratitude "to those with a strong sense of the swift march of time, who gave us, for preservation here, the ephemeral productions of today." Furthermore, in the librarian's report of 1953, Dorothy Barck wrote: "The library continues to procure, preserve and make usable records relating to varied phases of the history of New York and of the U.S. in general, and of the whole continent." She continued, "Interesting and varied additions were made in 1953 to all of these categories... and their use by students ... justifies the Founders' wisdom in establishing the library on a very broad foun­dation." The Society was reasserting its broad mission, not only in terms of its will­ingness to accept materials from across the continent but also in its desire not to restrict its collections to any specific time period. Together with the notion that its constituency was more than just the researchers who used its library and now included "new and old citizens of New York," the Society's inclusive acquisitions policy constituted a real expansion of its mission that would require a growing rev­enue base to sustain.

The extraordinary and consistent performance of the markets in the early 1950s offered Society management the financial resources necessary to fulfill its promises. In addition, it was management's good fortune that the Society's im­proved prospects coincided with its 150th anniversary, a development that made the Sesquicentennial a real cause for celebration. At the celebratory dinner in May 1954, Fenwick Beekman, the Society's president, delivered the keynote address. In it, Beekman expressed the Society's renewed self-confidence: "After 150 years of vicissitudes, I can report that the Society is in fortunate circumstances: owning a fine building and with land on which to expand, sufficient endowment to pro­vide for a modest education program, a fine museum collection illustrating life in early America and especially in New York City . . . Contributions to the en­dowment have allowed the Society to carry on its functions without making special appeals to the public or calling on the city for aid. We hope this can be con­tinued." Speaking of the Society's challenge to expand its level of service, Beekman remarked, "Greater stress is now laid upon educating the public . . . The museum has been expanded and rearranged so that it is more efficient in illus­trating the story that is to be told. . . . The Society's storerooms are bursting once more with contents, for our friends have been generous with their gifts, await­ing the day when the building can be enlarged."