It was America’s Middle West that gave the world the three strongest international service clubs: Rotary was founded in Chicago in 1905, Kiwanis in 1915 in Detroit, and the Lions in Chicago in 1917.
As Rotary International celebrates its 100th anniversary, the limelight has rightly fallen upon Paul Harris who pioneered the idea of a secular organization devoted to social interaction and volunteer public service. Paul was born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1868. Raised by his paternal grandparents in Vermont, he graduated in 1891 from the University of Iowa law school. In his senior year, Paul heard a graduate student suggest to his class: “Go to a small town, make a fool of yourself for five years, then go to the big city!”
Taking a clue from this unusual advice, Paul spent the next five years, from 1891 to 1896, getting to know his fellow men in a great variety of endeavors such as working as a manual laborer, teaching at a business college, testing his skills as an actor and a newspaper reporter, and selling marble granite overseas.
When in 1896 he announced that he was going to Chicago to practice law, his employer told him: "Whatever the advantages of settling in Chicago may be, I am satisfied you will make more money if you remain with me." To which Paul replied: "I am sure you are right but I am not going to Chicago for the purpose of making money; I am going to the purpose of living a life."
One day four years later, in 1900, after Paul had dined with a lawyer friend in Chicago’s Rogers Park, he joined him as he was visiting friends at neighborhood businesses. Paul began wondering how he, too, could develop some of his business associations into social friendships. Gradually, he came to the conclusion that, on a broader scale, business and professional men could best develop profitable ties
in an organization devoted to that purpose. By 1905, he knew what he wanted.
He talked his ideas over with two of his law clients, Silvester Schiele, a coal merchant, and Gustavus Loehr, a mining engineer. Loehr provided his office on the 7th floor of the Unity Building at 127 Dearborn Street for their first meeting on February 23, 1905. He also invited Hiram Shoney, a merchant tailor. The four agreed that they should form a club and meet, in rotation, in the members’ places of business. So Paul proposed to name the club “Rotary.”
By the time Paul Harris became president of the Chicago club in its third year, he was anxious to extend Rotary to other communities in the United States and soon to other countries. By August 1910, sixteen clubs existed and Rotary was ready to hold its first national convention in Chicago. At the next convention in Portland in 1911, Rotary adopted the motto “Service, not Self,” later to be altered to “Service above Self, as well as the now famous slogan, “He profits most who serves best.”
By the time Paul Harris passed away in 1947, Rotary had grown from four to 300,000 members in 6,000 clubs in 75 countries. Since then, the movement he conceived has quadrupled: 1.2 million members in almost 32,000 clubs in 167 countries.
While membership numbers may be impressive, the social impact of service clubs can only be measured by the benefits they provide for the community at large. In 1907, the Chicago Rotarians launched their first service project: the building of a “public comfort station” near city hall. In 1917, Rotary established its first endowment fund for charitable and educational projects, in 1947 its first eighteen Rotary Foundation scholarships. By 1963, the first international group study exchange programs started. In 1985 the organization launched its most ambitious project yet: its worldwide “PolioPlus” program to provide immunization for all children who needed it. Nine years later, the western world at least was declared polio-free.