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| Promotional Postcard for the 1910 Rotary Convention. Photo from the Rotary Club of Chicago Archives. |
An attorney named Paul Harris had come to Chicago from Vermont in 1896. On a walk around the North Side after dinner with his friend Bob Frank, also a local attorney, he noticed how well Frank seemed to know the proprietors of the businesses along their route. In the largest city in the Midwest, he was witnessing the kind of camaraderie that characterized his native small town in Vermont.
“The thought persisted that I was experiencing only what had happened to hundreds, perhaps thousands of others in the great city. I was sure that there must be many other young men who had come from farms and small villages to establish themselves in Chicago,” he would later recall. “Why not bring them together? If others were longing for fellowship as I was, something would come of it.”
Harris believed that professionals in different businesses could learn much from each other, sharing their ideas and experiences to lead to an overall improvement in the business climate and in their communities as a whole. The club could also be a force for good works in the community, bringing together many local leaders in support of humanitarian goals.
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| Photo from the Rotary Club of Chicago Archives. |
Because the venue for each of the first meetings rotated among the members’ offices, the group soon coined the term “rotary” to name their new organization. It stuck.
“Whatever Rotary may mean to us, to the world it will be known by the results it achieves,” Harris would later say.
The idea of businesses and civic leaders joining together over a meal for professional development and friendship (something future generations would call “networking”) soon caught on nationwide. In 1910 there were 16 Rotary clubs in the nation’s major cities, with more being formed every year.
That year the first national convention of Rotarians was held in Chicago. There the convention heard an address from Chicago businessman and publisher Arthur Frederick Sheldon who laid out the mission of Rotarians in their communities and around the world.
“Only the science of right conduct toward others pays,” Sheldon said. “Business is the science of human services. He profits most who serves his fellows best.”
Sheldon’s remarks led to the creation of one of Rotary’s two official mottoes, One Profits Most Who Serves Best. A year later at the second annual Rotary convention in Portland, Oregon, Harris joined club presidents from Seattle and Minneapolis in a discussion of what should be the central organizing principle of a newly-formed Rotary Club. Over the course of their conversation they developed a simple, yet clear motto which remains well-known to this day: “Service Above Self.”
In 1916, Herbert Coates, an English businessman visiting Cincinnati noticed how many of that city’s business leaders were engaged in preparing to host the upcoming Rotary convention. Curious about this civic club, he stopped by the local headquarters to learn more. He quickly became a convert to the cause and offered to help spread the Rotary message everywhere he went, beginning with an upcoming trip to Uruguay and Argentina. Herbert Coates thus became known as the “Father of Rotary in South America.”
By the early 1920s there were Rotary clubs on every continent except Antarctica. Harris would serve two terms at the helm and then be named president emeritus for another quarter century.
In its early days of organizing as an international entity, Rotary’s governing body decided that there would be no racial barriers to club membership and required all new clubs to adopt a statement of that nature into their organizing documents. However, Rotary club membership was restricted to men for many of the club’s early decades. A women’s auxiliary, the Inner Wheel, was founded in 1924 for wives of Rotarians, and these clubs pursued their own civic activities. It was not until the 1980s that Rotary fully opened its doors and its membership to women. In 1987 a Rotary club in California elected the first female club president.
As president of Rotary International, Paul Harris threw himself into the work of Rotary’s philanthropy, traveling the world to establish clubs of like-minded leaders and raising funds for its causes. When he died in 1947 Rotary International established the Paul Harris Memorial Fund to finance scholarships for study abroad programs.
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| Administering the polio vaccine. Photo from rotary.org |
Many clubs here in the United States have sister clubs in different countries in order to “form a long-term relationship to promote international understanding and good will.” As part of this effort the clubs offer an international Friendship Exchange program for Rotarians. Early in this century Rotary International partnered with eight major universities around the world to establish Rotary Centers for International Studies as a way of fostering peace and finding ways to resolve conflicts.
Closer to home, Rotary clubs continue their good works in local communities. Illinois Rotarians worked together to create a scholarship program for impoverished students. Others established “Interact Clubs” for middle and high school students to work together on service projects in their communities.
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| Rotary banners from around the world. Photo from rotary.org |
In all there are about 1.2 million Rotarians worldwide, a far-cry from the four businessmen who sat down in Gustavus Loehr’s office in Chicago back in 1905.