ABSTRACT
Shortly after the founding of IALA in Spring 1924, the Reverend Edward P. Foster of Waverly, West Virginia reported in his monthly newsletter Roia ‘news …from Switzerland’ that ‘Mrs. Dave H.Morris (nee Alice Vanderbilt [sic]) of New York City, has established a fund of $2,500,000 for the solution to the world language problem’ (No. 13, p. 5 [October 1924]). There is no evidence to corroborate this figure, and Foster, who had been working on his own created language Ro since 1904, may have been more hopeful than accurate in his announcement. But in an odd coincidence, the $310,000 that can be documented as IALA’s expenditures for the period 1924 through 1941 is roughly equivalent to $2,500,000 in 1990s currency, and much of that money did come from Alice and Dave Morris. Exactly how much is very difficult to determine.
