Man of the Hour Read online

  Ironically, after all the elaborate, drawn-out negotiations with Harvard’s Chemistry Department, Black had been forced to write Richards that Conant would not be available to take the final exam in introductory chemistry, given to Harvard students on the morning of June 16. Unfortunately, the date coincided with Roxbury Latin’s closing exercises, and as the “star boy” in his class, he was expected to take part. Noting apologetically that it was “a good deal to ask” that the date of the exam be changed at such short notice, Black nevertheless tried to have it rescheduled. This last request for special treatment was denied, and Conant ended up taking a makeup exam in Chem 1 the following autumn. He got an A.

  Black was jubilant. Conant’s exceptional results meant that he would enter Harvard with special advanced standing, almost halfway through the four-year-degree program. He could finish up his first degree quickly and plunge ahead with his training as a chemist. Conant’s mother, however, was ambivalent about the plan. It worried her that Black’s ambitions for his prodigy meant her son would not enjoy the full benefit of a liberal arts education. Jim’s two opinionated older sisters, who were both studying painting, shared her “misgivings” about his premature specialization, and narrowing of perspective at such an early age. It was a lingering doubt about his cultivation that never ceased to amuse Conant. “The enjoyment with which I studied chemistry and only chemistry was regarded as a bad omen,” he recalled. “Was I going to be nothing but a narrow-minded chemist?”

  * * *

  I. JBC was the first male member of the Conant family to graduate from any college. On his mother’s side of the family, however, JBC had an uncle, George Bernard Bryant, who was a graduate of Harvard, as were his two sons, Richard and Philip.

  II. While only Christopher’s name is listed as a passenger, it seems probable that he was accompanied by Roger and his wife, Sarah Horton, and their son Caleb, though some accounts speculate that they made the journey on a small trading vessel.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  A Harvard Man

  There was nothing more undesirable back at Harvard than to be someone who “sucked up.” You did not have to do it if you were the right sort of person.

  —John P. Marquand, H. M. Pulham, Esquire

  When Conant crossed the river from Dorchester to Cambridge in the autumn of 1910, he entered a daunting world of wealth and inherited privilege. Harvard, founded in 1636, was a miniature version of an English university, a highly stratified kingdom of rich men’s sons, where all the “Grottlesexers”—graduates of Groton, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, St. George’s, Middlesex, and the other elite Episcopal Church schools—were admitted without question, private and public school boys knew exactly who was who, and everyone knew his place. In its formative years, the college was as academically inbred as Boston society was biologically, and while it stopped ranking incoming students according to their family pedigree in 1759, a half century later, Harvard president John Kirkland still found it helpful to keep a list of his students “other than alphabetically.”

  Although they paid lip service to the ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom of choice, Harvard’s leaders were always conscious of their obligation to uphold the college’s social tone. It was the “heart’s desire” of fussy old Josiah Quincy III (president from 1829 to 1845), his son wrote, to make the college “a nursery of high-minded, high-principled, well-taught, well-conducted, well-bred gentlemen.” Even Charles W. Eliot (1869–1909), a man with unshakeable faith in science and progress, who did his best during his forty-year reign to transform Harvard from a provincial New England college into a national institution, acknowledged that the school owed much of its distinctive character to the “aristocracy to which the sons of Harvard belonged,” those who brought “from refined homes good breeding, gentle tastes, and a manly delicacy.” By the time A. Lawrence Lowell took over in 1909, Harvard was so notorious for its snobbishness that he made it clear in his inaugural address that he was going to make some drastic changes, beginning with restoring the “solidarity . . . earnestness of purpose and intellectual enthusiasm” that ought to lie at the basis of university life.

  With brutal clarity, a scholarship boy came to realize his first days on campus that Harvard did not make even the slightest pretense to the “collegiate way of living” its Puritan founders had envisioned. One look at the baronial magnificence of Beck Hall was all it took. Built in 1876 by a wealthy law student unhappy with the available lodging in Harvard Yard, the Italian renaissance building was legendary for its lavish furnishings and décor, where upper-crust undergraduate tenants such as Theodore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, and John Jacob Astor IV lived in private apartments, attended by butlers and maids. As Samuel Eliot Morison noted in his 1936 book Three Centuries of Harvard, “King’s ‘Guide to Cambridge’ grows lyrical over the high ceilings, ash trim, handsome chandeliers, steam-heating apparatus, and marble mantels of Beck,” adding that the less fortunate were consigned to the Yard, or to “sundry run-down dwellings and three-deckers in the neighborhood, which were remodeled and let-out at land-office prices.”

  Acting with “mistaken laissez-faire,” Charles Eliot had happily allowed the college’s enrollment to expand—the student body soared from fewer than six hundred in 1869 to nearly two thousand by 1909—along with the country’s new prosperity, and private capital to address the housing shortage. By Conant’s day, the stretch of Mount Auburn Street that was home to the biggest and most expensive of the new private residences, some of which boasted their own swimming pools and squash courts, was known as the “Gold Coast.” As George Santayana, the philosopher and essayist, who was both a student and a professor in his three decades as a member of the university, observed, “Divisions of wealth and breeding are not made conspicuous at Yale as at Harvard by the neighborhood of a city with well-marked social sets, the most fashionable of which sends all its boys to the College.”

  The writer John Reed, who graduated just before Conant arrived, described a college devoid of any sense of community or cohesiveness, in which “the aristocrats controlled the places of pride and power,” filled the clubs and societies, and “dominated” the campus. Reed, a moderately well-off doctor’s son from Portland, Oregon, had not realized that achieving admission to the highly selective institution in no way guaranteed him acceptance into its superior realms. The college was so stratified, he wrote, it was almost as if those “splendid youths” went to a different Harvard altogether. “They were so exclusive that most of the real life went on outside their ranks—and all the intellectual life of the student body.”

  Conant’s own address at 5 Linden Street, within steps of the Yard, reflected both his lack of means and lowly status. In need of cheap accommodations, he had to make do with a shabby boardinghouse, gray and forlorn, known as Mrs. Mooney’s for the aged proprietress who had run the place for more than a quarter century. Students, who paid $100 a year for bare rooms with coal-grate fires and oil lamps, dubbed the establishment “Mrs. Mooney’s Pleasure Palace” for its laughable absence of amenities. For those who could pony up an extra $50, she provided hot water and janitor service. If you wanted a bath, an expedition to the Hemenway Gymnasium was recommended. Conant, who was used to roughing it on the family farm, took the Spartan digs in stride, though he was grateful when the building was wired for electricity that first winter. His $200 scholarship paid his tuition fees and covered the cost of his room, if not his board. His father supplemented this with an allowance for books, meals, club fees, clothes, and other expenses, so while not residing in the lap of luxury he was comfortable, and saved from the burden of working his way through school.

  Still, the cleavage between the haves and the have-nots was such that Conant could not ignore the social chasm. Only at Harvard could a boy raised in what Boston historian Douglass Shand-Tucci called the “easeful world” of Ashmont be made to feel underprivileged. In a detailed monograph of the college, Harvard dean John Fox faults Conant for what he c
onsiders his contrived myth of disadvantage, his “pose as that of an outsider, as someone who had to battle his way to the top from a starting place that was modest, even humble.” Yet it is clear that being ushered into adulthood in such an unabashedly patrician city and college, Conant read his experience as that of an uncouth scholarship boy rising up from a common background. He had earned his place at Harvard on merit, not claimed it as a birthright. He took pride in his ability to cope with the challenges of the demanding, at times disorienting, new world his talent had opened up for him. But the inequity between the aristocrats, heedless young men from proper families who only occasionally deigned to open a book, and the scholars, students of proven ability intent on graduate school, rankled. His first encounter with the college’s skewed social slide rule was a rude awakening and roused his social conscience. Those early disillusionments, deliberate slights and snubs at Harvard, and the resentments he later harbored, would inform every aspect of his life and career, not only his drive to succeed, but his intense desire to make the education system, and above all American society, more truly democratic.

  While later in life Conant suppressed the impulse to write about his undergraduate ordeal, his housemate John P. Marquand was eloquent on the subject. His many short stories and books, including his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel-cum-memoir, The Late George Apley, are steeped in the social agony of his college days. For Marquand, a public school boy who won a scholarship to Harvard, and moved into the room above Conant’s in the fall of 1911, the gulf between the Yard and the “Gold Coast” was humiliating. The poor relation of a well-off family, Marquand was acutely sensitive to the way class differences colored everything at the college. Freshmen entered in obscurity, and those who lived outside the genteel pale were doomed to remain there. A young man with social ambition needed to be on the “Gold Coast”; without that entrée, he did not have a ghost of a chance of being accepted into Boston society, invited to the best soirees, or asked to join the top clubs.

  Harvard’s governors and faculty turned a blind eye to the college’s increasing social problems, which further diversity in the form of the pioneer representatives of Boston’s Irish Catholic, Italian, and Jewish populations only exacerbated. “In vain are freshmen tossed onto the same heap,” acknowledged Morison. “Freshmen fellowship, brisk enough in the opening days of College and the first elections of committees, blows away in a whiff of invitations to dances and week-end house parties.”

  Left out in the cold, Marquand felt ostracized. He was a nobody—“a greaseball,” like Jeffrey Wilson, the principal character of his 1943 novel So Little Time:

  He was part of that grim and underprivileged group that appeared in the Yard each morning with small leather bags containing books and papers. He was one of the boys who wore celluloid collars which you could wash off in your room, and who used the reading room in the Library as a resting place because there was no other place to go, and who ate a sandwich there for lunch, and to whom no one spoke unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Unlike Marquand, Conant did not endure a miserable freshman year. He was fortunate in his roommate, Charlie Crombie—the most popular boy in his class at Roxbury Latin—who from the moment he arrived on campus seemed to belong. Big, easygoing, and a gifted athlete, Crombie promptly made freshman crew, one of the surest routes to acceptability. It also helped that Conant entered college with a cluster of close friends from school, and was later joined by Ken Murdock and Roger Twitchell, members of his old Ashmont gang. They may not have mingled with the gilded youth of the Gold Coast or the swaggering Grottlesexers, but their tight circle was a shield against the isolation and anonymity of college life. Despite their limited pocket money, he and his housemates had plenty of fun at the Pleasure Palace.

  Conant was the resident prankster. Invariably most of the gags and hijinks revolved around alcohol and Conant demonstrated an early expertise. There was the “morning-after party,” only dimly remembered by Crombie, who awoke to find a rubber tube in his mouth and the other end in a nearby punch bowl—basic physics, courtesy of the house chemist. Conant also won accolades for once fielding a baseball while balanced on a beer barrel. But his real claim to fame was for inventing an elaborate drinking game, the Two-Beer Dash, which required them to leave their rooms at staggered intervals, travel by subway to the Holland Wine Company on Essex Street in downtown Boston, knock back two quick ones, and return to Mrs. Mooney’s as rapidly as possible. The winner was the one who made the round-trip the fastest. The contest presented myriad challenges, not the least of which was getting served one’s drink quotient given the age limit, and they would stay up late into the night arguing the pros and cons of different routes and strategies.

  Always feisty and in good form, Conant had “a grand sense of humor,” recalled Crombie, who joined the staff of the Harvard Lampoon, and enjoyed jousting with his roommate, who was “funnier than most of the fellows” on the humor magazine. He had such a deadpan delivery that his jokes did not always land right away, but when they did, they were lethal. “He would say things that made you laugh when you thought of them later.”

  Coming from Roxbury Latin, which welcomed a cross section of students, Conant was not prepared for the clannishness that pervaded Harvard. Almost all aspects of college life outside the lecture hall were determined along class lines, including eligibility for the ten so-called final clubs that were the center of Harvard’s social existence. The club system was ruthlessly exclusive. The Porcellian and A.D., the top of the heap, recruited their members according to ancestry and affluence, drawing from generations of Cabots, Lowells, Adamses, Saltonstalls, and Lodges. The Hasty Pudding, which had the finest clubhouse though was not technically a club, and whose spring theatrical was one of the most popular social events of the season, had its own fearsome vetting process.

  There is no question Conant would have liked very much to be tapped for the Pudding, but it was not to be, and he was far too stoic to indulge in any self-pity in the pages of his diary. It was accepted fact that the number of Harvard students who were “club material” was always 25 percent to 50 percent greater than there were places for them, so the clubs reigned as the ultimate “sophomore sifters.” Upper-class spotters kept a watchful eye on aspiring freshmen, who were expected to strictly observe all of the social taboos, which included either too shabby or too fastidious dress, undue athletic exertion, serious literary endeavor, and grades above a C. Of the most presentable models of prep school aristocracy, only a small fraction would then be chosen for one of the “waiting clubs,” a steppingstone to the final clubs. Marquand, who was never accepted by a single club, joined the staff of the Lampoon instead and later took vengeful pleasure in satirizing his classmates. Conant fared better. “He was brilliant without being grubby,” recalled Marquand, who envied his “ability to learn everything without the slightest damage to his poise and popularity.”

  Much as he appreciated Marquand’s droll humor, Conant did not have the same contempt for his peers, though he shared some of the same instincts as a social critic. He viewed the college’s elitist club society as an antiquated caste system designed to prop up the sons of Boston’s magistrates and merchant barons, irrespective of their intellect or ability. As much as he personally disliked any system based on unfair advantage, however, he was not prepared to turn his back on it. Conant was not a rebel. Nor was he, like Marquand, a “nose thumber at settled authority.” He had too strong a sense of his own self-worth and even a stronger sense of his priorities. Moreover, as Harvard had only ten, he saw the clubs as an important proving ground. Conant cared about being club caliber—making the grade mattered to him. He did not want to end up a “runt”: someone who failed to make even the first rung of clubdom and missed out on the life that distinguished the true “Harvard man” from those who merely “went to Harvard.”

  His freshman diary reveals a self-conscious, self-directed young man bent on bettering himself. While hardly a country rube, he disliked
being a gauche Dorchester boy, and worked to smooth his rough edges. At seventeen, he was five foot nine, lean and lanky, with a mass of sandy hair that hung carelessly across his forehead, alert blue eyes, and a wide, sensitive mouth. Though not conventionally handsome, there was an attractive gentleness in both his appearance and manner, and a sympathetic laugh that endeared him to his fellow students. He tried to fit the club mold: he kept his locks neatly trimmed above his collar, purchased his suits from the correct old-line Cambridge tailors, and even worked to lighten his “outer gravity” to an easy affability. An early diary entry includes the emphatic reminder “Smile, damn it, smile!”

  Whenever he had applied himself in the past, he had succeeded, and he set about scaling Harvard’s academic and social peaks with the same determination. He looked at the best attributes of his classmates and aimed for an agreeable conformity, but only so long as it did not impinge on his basic integrity. He made friends easily and found a way to get along with a diverse array of acquaintances, developing what a colleague described later as a talent for “handling” people and controversy well. When opinions diverged and testosterone flared, Conant tended to “demur and go his own way,” demonstrating a cool rationality combined with an innate prudence. He never needed to raise his voice in argument or prove himself right and others wrong. It was a quiet confidence in his own judgment that was to become his most distinctive trait and earn him a reputation for arrogance, which he once lamented as the “fate of more than one shy person whose aloofness is attributed to pride.”

  * * *

  Eager to get on, Conant plunged into the fray. He joined the Boylston Club, a group for students interested in the sciences. His cousin Philip Bryant, a junior, took him under his wing and urged extracurricular activities as a way to expand his outlook and associations beyond the confines of the Chemistry Department. At his suggestion, Conant decided to “go out” for the Crimson, the college paper, which wielded considerable influence and was itself a select group. Had it not been for the extra leeway afforded by his advanced standing, the “time-consuming operation” of competing for a spot on the Crimson would have been out of the question. Although he made a noble attempt to juggle his studies and story assignments, it eventually got to be too much. On April 7, 1911, Conant’s diary entry reads: “FINIS! got fired from the Crimson with one other Freshman, last to go! Worked hard in the lab making up back work.”