Chemical Education Today

www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 82 No. 12 December 2005 • Journal of Chemical Education 1765

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The ACS Prize Essay Contestby Richard E. Rice

edited byKathryn R. Williams

University of FloridaGainesville, FL 32611

In June 1923 Mr. and Mrs. Francis Garvan offered theACS $10,000 to organize a national essay contest for highschool students. Proposed as a memorial to their daughterPatricia, who had died at the age of five from rheumatic fever(1), the contest was intended to give “the youth of our coun-try … an intelligent appreciation of the vital relation of thedevelopment of chemistry to our national defense, to the in-tensification and purification of industry and agriculture andto the progress of medicine through the ‘Age of Chemistry’upon which we have entered” (2). The impetus for such a con-test had grown out of Garvan’s wartime activities.

Establishing the Chemical FoundationDuring World War I, Francis P. Garvan (3), a lawyer ex-

perienced in fraud cases, was director of the New York officeof the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. In that position he assistedthe Federal Government’s Alien Property Custodian in uncov-ering millions of dollars of property concealed in the U.S. bycompanies and individuals from enemy countries (4). Garvanhimself became the Alien Property Custodian in 1919, andone of his major tasks was the seizure of dye, pharmaceuti-cal, and other chemical patents held by German companies.Also that year he helped establish the Chemical Foundation,which bought the confiscated patents from the U.S. Gov-ernment and assigned them to American companies (5).

Like many other concerned citizens, Garvan had becomealarmed at the extent of American dependence on the Ger-man chemical industry. He saw the Chemical Foundation as avehicle for promoting the importance of chemistry to theAmerican economy and for increasing public awareness of thatimportance. At the same time, Garvan was willing to use hisposition and wealth to help improve both the state and statusof chemistry in early 20th century America.

Essay ContestThe Society’s response to the Garvans was an enthusias-

tic one, with ACS President E. C. Franklin appointing anadministrative committee to organize the essay contest (thefour authors in ref 2 ). One of their first jobs was to selectspecific topics that would address—in Garvan’s words—“theimportance of chemistry in our national life” (2). Eventu-ally, the committee decided to accept essays of up to 2500words from students in any U.S. high school on the follow-ing six topics:

• The Relation of Chemistry to Health and Disease

• The Relation of Chemistry to the Enrichment of Life

• The Relation of Chemistry to Agriculture and Forestry

• The Relation of Chemistry to National Defense

• The Relation of Chemistry to the Home

• The Relation of Chemistry to the Development of theIndustries and Resources of Your State

In accord with Garvan’s vision of the winners from statecontests entering a national competition, committees were setup in all 48 states and the District of Columbia. Each statecommittee promoted the contest to high school students, teach-ers, and administrators through personal contact, publiclectures, newspapers, and radio. For the first contest in 1923–1924, more than 100,000 booklets with the topics, rules, anda list of suggested reference books were sent to 14,798 schools,as well as hundreds of public and private libraries (2). Afterstate committees began receiving complaints that the suggestedreferences were often unavailable, the Chemical Foundationdistributed more than 20,000 sets of five books (6)—withoutcharge—to high schools, libraries, and individuals.

In every state and the District of Columbia the winnerfor each topic received a $20 gold piece and a certificate ofmerit, and the six winning essays from each state were enteredinto the national contest. Originally, the plan called for each ofthe six national winners to receive a four-year college scholar-ship to Yale or Vassar, but a change in the rules allowed thewinners to attend the college or university of their choice (7).As the contest caught the attention of educators around thecountry, at least 15 institutions of higher learning offered ad-ditional scholarships to state winners (8).

Goals of the Contest

The contest was promoted as a purely educational project.Its goal was to increase scientific literacy, particularly in con-nection with chemistry, but not necessarily to produce morechemists for the country. Thus, the contest was open to allstudents, not just those studying chemistry. Many Englishteachers offered the essay as a class assignment, which helpedimprove the quality of the essays submitted to the contest. Inthe original plan, each state committee would read all the en-tries from that state. However, according to surveys, some500,000 students throughout the U.S. worked on essays (2),with about 22,500 essays actually completed. The state com-mittees eventually received a total of 7344 essays (8), but eventhis number made it impossible for each committee to readall the entries from its own state. As a result, volunteers fromACS Local Sections and the ranks of chemistry teachers readthe essays and sent the best to the state committee, which selec-ted the six winning essays to forward to the national contest.

Contest Winners

From the 294 essays in the national contest a specialcommittee from the Division of Chemical Education selected18—three essays on each topic—to submit to the panel ofjudges who would choose the six national winners. This panelwas first headed by then Secretary of Commerce HerbertHoover and later by Secretary of the Interior Ray LymanWilbur. During the eight years of the contest (2, 9, 10), itincluded nearly 50 eminent Americans from many different

Chemical Education Today

1766 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 82 No. 12 December 2005 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org

walks of life in addition to academia and the chemical in-dustry. The six first-place essays from the 1923–1924 con-test appeared in the January 1925 issue of Journal of ChemicalEducation (11), following the administrative committee’s re-port on the first contest (8).

For the following year, organizers expanded the contestto include “the extra-territorial possessions of the United States”(Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico) and established asecond division for college and university students (7). Be-ginning with the fourth contest in 1926–1927, the topicsand rules for college students were changed—only first-yearstudents could enter the contest—and a third division forstudents in normal schools and teachers’ colleges was added.In the annual college and normal-school contests, each of the12 national winners received a prize of $1000 (9).

The practice of publishing the winning high school es-says in JCE continued through the 1928–1929 contest. Thewinning college essays were also published in JCE from 1926to 1929, while the winning normal-school essays were pub-lished only in 1929. For the final two years of the contests(1929–1930 and 1930–1931), however, just the names ofthe winners and their essay titles appeared in JCE.

Impact of the Contest

The final report of the administrative committee in 1931offered an overview of the contest (9). About a quarter of amillion dollars had been awarded to the 48 national high schoolwinners (26 young men and 22 young women) from 31 states,and another $48,960 was distributed in $20 gold pieces tothe state winners. In the college and normal school contests,the national winners had received a total of $72,000.

Committee members harbored no doubt that the contesthad dramatically increased public awareness of chemistry. “Thehigh-school essay contest … has been conspicuously success-ful. That our country generally is today alive to the impor-tance of chemistry is apparent on every hand. The awakeningis shown in the growth of the chemical industry here, the in-crease in chemical literature and the prominence given to chem-istry by our daily newspapers. The administrative committee isof the opinion that much of this awakening in every quarterof the United States had its origin in the interest in chemistryaroused by the high-school essay contest” (9).

The contest generated interest in chemistry well beyondthe participants themselves, who “brought the contest into theirhomes and aroused the interest of their families and friends.”In some cases, it motivated public officials to increase spend-ing on science education and laboratories. The committeeclaimed that the contest had even transformed one “promi-nent college president [with] a distinct aversion to chemis-try” from “a tolerator of chemistry to one of its best friends[who] in his public addresses … invariably takes the oppor-tunity to point out to his audience how vitally each is af-fected by chemistry” (9).

A monumental national undertaking, the ACS PrizeEssay Contest involved hundreds of thousands of studentsand more than 40,000 volunteers. It ended in 1931 after theChemical Foundation and Francis Garvan himself sufferedfinancial setbacks from the stock market crash of 1929 thatcaused the country to enter the Great Depression of the1930s. For eight years, however, the contest had been a pow-erful and successful engine in promoting scientific literacyand increasing appreciation for chemistry throughout thecountry.

Now, some 75 years later, American science is once againin need of greater understanding among both students andthe general public. What would constitute a national under-taking today comparable to the ACS Prize Essay Contest?

Literature Cited

1. Borth, Christy. Modern Chemists and Their Work; New HomeLibrary: New York, 1943; pp 143–144.

2. Howe, H. E.; Herty, Charles H.; Bancroft, Wilder D.; Will-iams, Alexander, Jr. J. Chem. Educ. 1924, 1, 161–167.

3. Stillinger, Elizabeth. Francis Patrick Garvan. In AmericanNational Biography; Garraty, J. A., Carnes, M. C., Eds.; Ox-ford: New York, 1999; Vol. 8, pp 769–770; Tempest, Ronald.Chem. Heritage 1998, 16 (2), 15; Benfey, Theodor. J. Chem.Educ. 2003, 80, 651–657.

4. Alien Property Custodian Report: A Detailed Report by the AlienProperty Custodian of All Proceedings Had by Him under theTrading with the Enemy Act during the Calendar Year 1918and to the Close of Business on February 15, 1919, rpt; ArnoPress: New York, 1977.

5. Rhees, David J. Bull. Hist. Chem. 1992–93, No. 13–14, 40–47; and Steen, Kathryn. Isis 2001, 92, 91–122.

6. (1) Vallery-Radot, René. The Life of Pasteur; Doubleday, Page:Garden City, NY, 1923. (2) Gregory, Sir Richard. Discovery;or, The Spirit and Service of Science; Macmillan: New York,1923. (3) Slosson, Edwin E. Creative Chemistry; Descriptive ofRecent Achievements in the Chemical Industries; Century: NewYork, 1919. (4) Lefebure, Victor. The Riddle of the Rhine:Chemical Strategy in Peace and War; Dutton: New York, 1923.(5) Abel, John J.; Herty, Charles H. The Future Independenceand Progress of American Medicine in the Age of Chemistry;Chemical Foundation: New York, 1923.

7. Howe, H. E.; Bancroft, W. D.; Herty, Chas. H. J. Chem.Educ. 1925, 2, 1099–1101.

8. Bancroft, W. D.; Herty, C. H.; Howe, H. E.; Williams,Alexander, Jr. J. Chem. Educ. 1925, 2, 3–11.

9. Gordon, Neil E.; Newell, Lyman C.; Herty, Chas. H.; Smith,Paul. J. Chem. Educ. 1931, 8, 2031–2039.

10. Ind. Eng. Chem. 1924, 16, 863.11. J. Chem. Educ. 1925, 2, 11–41.

Richard E. Rice may be contacted at P. O. Box 1210,Florence, MT 59833-1210; charrice@juno.com

From Past Issues