Man of the Hour Read online

  It was from Roger’s youngest son, Lot, who fathered ten children, that James Conant’s ancestors descend. Of Lot’s five boys, Nathaniel, a cordwainer, or shoemaker, moved to Bridgewater, Massachusetts, making tiny Joppa Village the family base for the next two hundred years. His grandson, John, had three sons, all of whom served in the revolutionary army. The youngest, Jeremiah, took part in the siege of Boston, according to a dramatic 1883 account penned by his son, Thomas, James Conant’s grandfather. Thomas was a tanner and cobbler. He took a respectable part in local affairs, became a member of the school board, and was elected to the state legislature. He had three sons: John, Thomas, and James Scott, born in 1844. Two years later, his wife, Esther, died in childbirth. Thomas quickly remarried, but his new wife did not care for his children.

  Growing up, Conant’s father, James Scott, knew little in the way of warmth and affection. He talked sparingly, if at all, of the past. “The family was poor,” Conant wrote in his memoir, and his father’s early childhood was “not pleasant.” There had been “one bright spot” in his father’s life, one person who had been his refuge: “the grand but simple lady across the street, Jane Breed Bryant,” Conant recalled. “She had been so good to him as a boy that there was nothing my father would not do [for her.]” James Scott’s gratitude would extend to marrying one of the six Bryant girls, and later, making sure his beloved mother-in-law’s old age was as comfortable as possible.

  The Bryants were a leading Bridgewater family. They were from old Yankee stock and could trace their bloodline back to Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. Jane’s husband, Seth Bryant, was a successful shoe and boot manufacturer, and owned a large factory that employed many men in Joppa, including Thomas Conant. The firm of Mitchell & Bryant, which Seth established in 1824, was the largest wholesale shoe and leather manufacturing company in Boston. Though practically retired in 1861 when the Civil War broke out, he set off for Washington, DC, with samples of army boots almost before the guns of Fort Sumter were silent. He took immense pride in furnishing over two hundred thousand pairs of boots to the Union Army—more than $800,000 worth—each stamped with his name as warranty, and “Made on the Massachusetts South Shore.”

  By the time James Scott Conant proposed to Jennet Orr Bryant in 1880, he was thirty-six and prosperous enough to buy a house almost as big as her childhood home in Joppa. In a strange inversion, by then, Seth Bryant had been wiped out by the Financial Panic of 1873 and was in no position to provide dowries for his many daughters. Required to earn her keep, Jennie had embarked on a career as a teacher, following the example of Elizabeth Peabody, who had established the first kindergarten in Boston in 1870. Almost twenty-nine and on the brink of spinsterhood, Jennie accepted her former neighbor with alacrity. A rather plain brown wren in a large oil portrait, she was intelligent, well read, and exceptionally opinionated and outspoken for a woman of her day.

  Conant’s parents first met in church, and they were bonded in part by their “special faith.” Both from mill village families, they shared the significant distinction of belonging to the same small Protestant sect, the Swedenborgian, or New Jerusalem, Church. The teachings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had come to Boston in 1818 as part of the spiritual movement that swept the country, and soon became the center of religious life in Joppa, setting it apart from neighboring communities. Before he was a theologian, Swedenborg had been an accomplished scientist. Following a direct communication from God, he became convinced that his theory of the cosmos made religion compatible with modern scientific thought. Jane Breed Bryant, Conant’s grandmother, wholeheartedly embraced Swedenborg’s belief in the reality of an unseen world, telling her grandson, “Here was to be found the explanation of the universe.” She was such an enthusiastic convert that she renounced her Quaker faith and sent all her daughters away to be educated at the New Church School in Waltham, Massachusetts, that had been established under the auspices of Henry James Sr., the Harvard theologian, and father of William, a noted philosopher and psychologist, and the novelist Henry James. Seth Bryant was equally devout, and was a generous patron of the church’s building fund before his troubles.

  Compared with his voluble, charismatic father-in-law, James Scott was quiet, serious, and austere—a “massively silent” man in his son’s memory. Breaking with Conant family tradition, shoe making held no allure for him. He had a craftsman’s skill with his hands but dreamed of becoming a painter. With the Civil War under way, however, he inevitably got caught up in the action. When his older brothers enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Company of Massachusetts’ Volunteers, he tagged along as a captain’s boy. After he fell ill and was discharged, he joined the navy and served another year as a deckhand on a Union ship.

  On his return from the war, James Scott went to Paris and studied art. When he found he could not make a living as a portrait painter, he went to work as an illustrator and soon became known for the fine drawings he made on wood blocks for the Boston engravers. His work appeared regularly in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, Ballou’s Monthly, and Harper’s Weekly. He was one of the first to introduce wood engraving into the commercial field, and the firm of Bricher & Conant, which he helped found in 1870, was for many years the most famous of its kind in the country. A pioneer in his field, he continually experimented with new methods and techniques. Later, as the firm of James S. Conant & Co. expanded, he moved into the new industry of photo engraving. Though he carried on this profitable trade for more than thirty years, James Scott never had his father-in-law’s ease with money. All his life, he remained suspicious of prosperity, and the unspoken shame of the squandered Bryant fortune caused him to keep his family to a strict economy. Conant absorbed the lesson, and like his father, would always be extremely cautious when it came to money.

  It was only when he was much older that Conant understood what a sacrifice his father had made when he invited his impoverished in-laws into his home as “permanent guests”—especially as the old man’s loquaciousness nearly drove James Scott to despair. Always determined to have the last word, Grandpa Bryant penned a thirty-three-page pamphlet about his life and career in the shoe trade, published at his son-in-law’s expense. A man of strong opinions when it came to politics, he was a frequent contributor to the newspapers and a source of considerable controversy at home. “The sad fact was that in his declining years my grandfather had become a Democrat,” Conant noted in his memoir, a transgression that dated back to the first Grover Cleveland campaign, in 1884, and scandalized his father, who, like many New Englanders, still believed that the words Republican and patriotic were synonymous. An ardent supporter of William Jennings Bryan, his grandfather famously rose up from his sickbed in 1896 to cast a vote for free trade and free silver. With every passing year, the “heresy” of his grandfather, who died when Conant was five, only increased, which made living under the same roof difficult at times.

  Fortunately, the grand old mansion that James Scott bought Jennie on Bailey Street in the Ashmont section of Dorchester was big enough for them all. The large Federal-era house had an old-fashioned feel even then, with long front and back parlors separated by curtains, numerous annexes, and decaying stables. Situated on an airy knoll above the Neponset River, the front yard was shaded by great elms, the broad lawn running down to Dorchester Avenue. The house overlooked the Ashmont Station of the Old Colony Railway line, and the back of the property ran to open fields of considerable acreage. The couple became close friends with their neighbors, including Harold Murdock, president of the National Exchange Bank, and Dr. Edward Twitchell, a popular local physician, and their sons would become Conant’s best boyhood pals and Harvard contemporaries.

  * * *

  A late and much-longed-for son, born when his father was almost fifty, James Bryant Conant was a much-adored and coddled child. He was raised by “a regiment of women,” presided over by his grandmother Bryant, two sisters, three aunts, and innumerable female cousins. Th
ey all doted on the baby boy and read to him by the hour, so that he did not learn to read until he was almost seven. Listening at their knee, he picked up bits and pieces of family lore, as well as the smoldering disputes between his Republican father and Democratic Bryant relations. While his mother was usually gently spoken, he became aware that she, like her father, held strong views that occasionally led to “words of condemnation”—particularly when it came to those who fought under the Confederate Stars and Bars and failed to embrace the abolitionist cause. She and her sisters were also emphatic anti-imperialists. They often excoriated Republican foreign policy, their voices rising to a fevered pitch with Theodore Roosevelt’s ascension to the presidency in 1901.

  Conant’s mother was equally condemnatory of all “Trinitarian doctrines.” He could remember her angrily holding forth against a group of churchgoers whose interpretations of Swedenborg’s writings she took issue with—a schism that ultimately led to her leaving the church. She held to the basic Quaker tenets, though in later life became a Unitarian. When they were young, she had taken her children to the Swedenborgian church in Roxbury, but never attempted to indoctrinate them; rather, she succeeded in inculcating an early and lasting skepticism of all religion. Conant would usually characterize himself as a Unitarian, though that glossed over his fundamental agnosticism and Puritan hostility for ritual and creed. Whether it concerned politics or religion, however, it was his mother’s moral indignation that made a lasting impression.

  “What my mother approved and what she disapproved soon became quite clear in the course of conversation,” he wrote. “More often than not, the clear opinion which emerged was not that of the majority of our friends and acquaintances. Mother was basically a dissenter.” He was raised to believe “dissent was not only respectable but usually morally correct.”

  Conant’s parents, who called him “Bryant” as a child, sought to give him and his sisters every advantage. When it came to the all-important question of education, James Scott decided the overcrowded public school would not do. He joined together with other civic leaders to establish a new elementary school in their neighborhood. Conant began his education at the little Bailey Street School at the age of five, moving to the Henry L. Pierce Grammar School in the third grade. Except for a year he spent in a local private school—in hopes of boosting his reading and writing—all his early education was in public schools, where the rigid teaching methods held little appeal. He disliked the dull curriculum, which made no allowance for any interesting extracurricular activities, and the strict discipline, which consisted of rapping the hands of miscreants with a rattan switch, accompanied by “possible threats” of more severe forms of corporal punishment.

  For the most part, however, he enjoyed a happy, sheltered childhood. Ashmont’s shady streets were “built for bicycles,” he recalled, and in winter the new, mostly empty macadam-paved roads were ideal for sledding. In summer, the Conants journeyed with a number of neighboring families to a rustic vacation colony near Danbury, New Hampshire, making the last plodding leg of the trip from the train station by carriage. The new age of electricity had not yet reached this remote outpost, so he spent several months of every year transported back to the “horse-and-buggy age.”

  Conant credited his father with shaping his view of the future. James Scott perceived that the recently opened electric trolley line in Dorchester, which provided rapid access to downtown Boston, was an opportunity to be grasped. Anticipating that Dorchester’s empty pastures were inevitably going to make way for new suburbs, James Scott went into the construction business as a profitable sideline. His first project was to tear down the old stables on their property and erect a two-story wooden house. By the time little Bryant was in kindergarten, his father’s building activities were in “full swing,” and James Scott and his partners were aggressively developing the green hills, cutting them into lots along paved streets soon to be lined with two- and three-family housing units. It was only many years later that the once picturesque village, squeezed by masses of low-income construction on all sides, came to regard his father’s plain, rather unattractive structures as the “scourge of the community.”

  Even as a boy of four or five, Bryant had begun to form an understanding of the class tensions in his neighborhood. His best friend lived in the modern row house his father had built next door, and he would have been astonished to hear anyone say a word against it: “Our own homes were far from luxurious,” he recalled, “but on the whole represented a higher standard of living than those of the boys with whom we went to school but were not of our ‘bunch.’ We regarded ourselves as ‘top dogs’ in the neighborhood but were careful not to let this come to a physical showdown.”

  He would always remember the brisk fall afternoon his father took him along to inspect a construction site a short walk up the hill from their home. Seeing the new road being built not ten minutes from his back door, Conant suddenly understood that the future was close at hand. His father had told him stories about how the new efficient electric trolley cars had replaced the old horse cars shortly before he was born. Now there was a line that ran from the heart of Boston right through their neighborhood as far as Milton. A new line had just been added, reaching out even further, bringing the distant towns and villages of Plymouth County within reach.

  “I must have breathed in the optimistic spirit of the expanding suburb,” Conant wrote. Sensing amazing things would soon be possible, his imagination thrilled at the idea that the clang of the electric trolley, which could be heard the length and breadth of Dorchester, would eventually resound in every corner of the country. He could picture the fast trolley car that might one day speed them to their isolated farm in under twenty minutes: “Of this, I was quite certain. Such was progress, which the grownups liked to talk about. The twentieth century, they said, would certainly bring more streets and more electric cars—possibly things called automobiles as well, though I had never seen one.”

  He was entranced by electricity. Even in its simplest manifestations the spark of current was still something of a “marvel.” Few of the homes in Dorchester were wired for electricity. No one he knew had a telephone. The first electrical device he came into contact with on a regular basis was the doorbell, which was then becoming “standard equipment” in the modern homes his father was building. To a small boy, it was irresistible. As the old Ashmont house did not have a doorbell, James Scott brought home an electric buzzer and showed his son how the simple mechanism worked. Soon Conant was “monkeying” with electromagnets, dry and wet batteries, tiny motors, and lightbulbs.

  When he was a little older, Conant was allowed to accompany his father to his printing firm, where he watched him execute the complicated steps involved in preparing and developing the glass negatives and beautiful sharp prints. “It may be that my love of chemistry,” he later reflected, “resulted from my fascination with the mysterious changes in the plates which various chemicals brought forth.” Though his father had no formal training, the same initiative that helped him work his way up in the printing business enabled him to stay abreast of the technical advances in his field. He taught himself both commercial photography and the half-tone process and, for all practical purposes, became “an applied chemist.”

  A forward-looking man, James Scott encouraged his son’s scientific interests. He helped him set up a small shop in one of the downstairs closets, and furnished it with cast-off equipment from his own workbench. Conant’s first experiments often went awry. His mother recalled having to roust him in the middle of the night on more than one occasion to do something about the noxious fumes permeating the house. Still half-asleep, he would descend to his lab, dispose of the offending solution, replace the rubber stoppers in any bottles left open, and stagger back to bed. According to his youthful diary, he spent “cold winter afternoons working in the shop,” combining ingredients in test tubes. In no time Conant, billing himself a “Young Edison,” was putting on shows for all the neighborhood
children, who stood and watched in “silent and nose-holding awe” as he staged loud but harmless explosions, created great stinks, and used the nickel ticket fees to buy more equipment.

  The long hours Conant spent shut up in his makeshift laboratory worried his mother. While other boys were “out batting a baseball,” she recalled, “he printed a sign and stuck it on the door: ‘Only two persons allowable in shop at a time.’ ” Distressed at the idea that she might be raising a lonely “pedant,” she enticed him outdoors with rowdy Wild West shows and boisterous treasure hunts. James Scott shared his wife’s concern about their bookish son. A brief note from eleven-year-old Bryant begging his father to send his favorite “Sintific [sic] American” (Scientific American magazine) to the Danbury farm, where he was supposed to be enjoying such summer pursuits as swimming and fishing, revealed perhaps an unhealthy focus. In an effort to interest his son in sports, Conant’s father taught him to play tennis, chalking out a court on the Ashmont house’s expansive front lawn, much to the astonishment of his neighbors. While no athlete, Bryant was growing to be tall and wiry, and was a relentless competitor. Eventually the great lawn became home field for the neighborhood baseball and football games, with young Conant often as not serving as his team’s captain. A few years later, James Scott purchased a sailboat, hoping to foster in his son the sturdy qualities—courage, independence, and self-reliance—that had enabled their Puritan forebears to make a life by the sea.