Once he was on firm footing in the laboratory, Conant felt free to widen his scope. He had learned the trick of doing “the minimum amount of work necessary” to get As and satisfy the conditions of his scholarship. He sampled courses in sociology, zoology, and French, but was underwhelmed by some of his professors. He complained that one lecturer wasted the first fifty minutes and got down to business only at the end, so he made it a point to “only be awake the last ten minutes of the hour.” He was more impressed with an economics course taught by Frank Taussig, and one in history with the great Frederick Jackson Turner, whose Midwestern American values resonated with Conant’s own egalitarian attitudes and firm belief in the Jeffersonian ideal of a classless society.
Conant was also intrigued by the introduction to philosophy he took with George Herbert Palmer. This was the Golden Age of the Harvard Philosophy Department, still basking in the glory of William James, whose great work Pragmatism had been published shortly before his death in the summer of 1910. Conant was inspired to seek out George Santayana, one of the most brilliant professors of his day, whose incisive mind, caustic wit, and compelling presence mesmerized students. He was struck by Santayana’s doctrine that the function of reason is to dominate experience, and insistence that the goal of man’s existence was the struggle for excellence. His ideas made a profound impression, and Conant would continue to be intrigued by metaphysical problems and returned to the subject again and again the rest of his life. But apart from these brief excursions into the humanities, the bulk of his classes were devoted to chemistry and its ally, physics. Conant managed to completely bypass the riches of an English Department that included George Lyman Kittredge, Charles Townsend Copeland, Bliss Perry, and Barrett Wendell, to say nothing of E. K. Rand in the classics and Irving Babbitt in French literature. Despite the expressed wishes of his mother and two sisters, an introductory course in the “Art and Culture of Italy” did not a Renaissance man make.
Having come so close to getting “punched” for the Crimson, Conant was not about to give up. He made a second run at the paper his sophomore year, and got so caught up with his deadlines that he “nearly wrecked a half-year of work.” In mid-January 1912 he received word from the Crimson that he had made the cut, and recorded the hard-won victory in his diary in red ink: “Big Punch! AN EDITOR AT LAST.” He enjoyed slaving for “The Crime,” as it was known to students, and the following year was promoted to assistant managing editor. His success at the Crimson gave him entrée to other esoteric circles. He was tapped for Delta Upsilon, a fraternity populated by brainy scholarship boys, the otherwise unclubbable intelligentsia. While the DU carried no social prestige—it rated near the bottom in the club hierarchy and was regarded by Marquand as “beneath consideration”—it had the distinction of having more than its share of members in Phi Beta Kappa. While none of the stray young men who took refuge in the DU’s gloomy rooms were typical Harvard clubmen, they were an impressive group of self-starters, including Joseph P. Kennedy, an outspoken Irish Catholic and Democrat, who would go on to become ambassador to England and father of a president; Robert Benchley, who earned fame as a Vanity Fair and New Yorker humorist and member of the Algonquin Round Table; and authors J. Gordon Gilkey, Robert Duncan, and Clarence Randall. They formed unlikely friendships, wrote and performed plays, and indulged in late-night bull sessions. “Not one of us was genuinely solvent,” recalled Randall, “and most of us were on the Harvard dole.”
Conant was also invited to join the Signet, the well-established Harvard literary society. Limited to admitting only twenty-one handpicked juniors, the Signet, Conant confided in his memoir, made “all the effort worthwhile.” It was there, in the society’s handsome clubhouse, gathered around the lunch table with other able students and erudite faculty, that he received the “general education” his mother had wanted for him. Those discussions, which seemed so wonderfully “sophisticated” at the time, did more to broaden his horizons than any of his formal courses in the humanities. He developed a taste for worldly friends and worldly interests, and discovered there were fascinating things going on in the world outside the laboratory. They talked about existentialism, pluralism, ethics, metaphysics, and the meaning of life, and argued campus politics and the issues of the day. Their lively give-and-take was as natural to him as the dinner table debates at Ashmont, and he knew he had finally found his own kind and an intellectual home.
Looking back, Conant always maintained that the most important part of his liberal education occurred outside the classroom. The atmosphere on campus was full of ferment, with students whose idealism—and in some cases, burgeoning Socialism—made them eager to remake the world, starting with the university itself. When the Crimson’s editorial board decided to champion President Lowell’s new House Plan to end the “class segregation” created by the gulf between the Yard and the “Gold Coast”—declaring in a January 12, 1912, editorial that the distinction had done “more than anything else to harm Harvard in the eyes of the outside world”—Conant felt they had struck a victory in the name of social justice. And when the paper took aim at the most self-centered defenders of gentility and homogeneity, he took a certain satisfaction in seeing the snobs shot down.
Lowell stopped short of moving against the final clubs, stating that he had no intention of wrecking his presidency “like [Woodrow] Wilson did down at Princeton.” But change was coming to Harvard’s campus. New clubs were springing up that were devoted to more than just drinking beer. There was the Speakers’ Club, which gave the future statesman Adolf A. Berle Jr. his first political forum; the Diplomatic Club and its offshoot, the International Polity Club, to discuss international affairs; the Cosmopolitan Club, to bring together students of different nationalities and races; and the Socialist Club, organized by Walter Lippmann and a handful of associates, which invited prominent radicals to Cambridge to lecture. There was even a Harvard Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, and Conant, whose mother was a supporter of women’s right to vote, marched in a parade in Boston.
For the most part, however, he remained detached from the political and social movements of that progressive decade. The upwardly mobile son of a self-made businessman, Conant had no argument with capitalism. And as an aspiring chemist, he had no desire to rail against the growth of industrialism that was already profiting his profession. While he had little truck with the student agitators, he read their publications, and he would be sufficiently interested in the New Republic, a political journal Lippmann helped launch in 1914, to volunteer to sell subscriptions for the fledgling magazine. All the fervor had a liberating influence. Even Conant could not resist what John Reed called “the modern spirit” sweeping the campus, and he took advantage of the new sense of freedom to test his wings and experiment intellectually—to open his mind to new ideas, embrace skepticism, and reject dogma.
* * *
Conant had less time for these activities than he might have liked because he was still focused on early graduation. Before he had registered for his first class at Harvard, Black had mapped out his “whole collegiate future,” a detailed plan of study in which he would complete the requisite sixteen credits in three years. College may have exposed him to new ideas, interests, and professors, but his high school mentor was still very much a part of his life and a guiding influence. All the more so since Conant now saw his parents only on fleeting visits. His father had retired from business the same year he entered college, selling his business to the Suffolk Engraving Company, and trading the old Ashmont house for a cottage in the fashionable seaside town of Duxbury. While they kept a toehold in Boston—a townhouse on Newbury Street—it was chiefly for the benefit of his older sisters. Conant’s diary makes almost no reference to his parents—nothing in the way of fatherly advice or instructions—but the pages are peppered with the initials N.H.B. They often met for dinner and long talks, or mucked about in the laboratory, “fixing up the oscillograp,” their relationship evolving into that of friends and, alrea
dy in his teacher’s mind, future partners.
Black had drawn up his blueprint for Conant’s undergraduate training based on Harvard’s “free-elective system” that President Eliot had implemented in 1886 in the firm belief that students should have the liberty to pursue their own interests rather than be forced to take groups of required courses. “Groups are like ready-made clothing, cut in regular sizes; they never fit any concrete individual,” Eliot had argued with the rarefied logic of a gentleman reformer. “Spontaneous diversity of choice” would allow every man to custom tailor his own curriculum. Of course, there was a method to his madness, and the elective system gave Eliot the cover he needed to introduce a whole array of new courses on science, modern foreign languages, and history, hire new faculty, and vastly increase the intellectual resources of the university. Unfortunately, as with all liberties, abuses were inevitable. “C is the gentleman’s grade” became a slogan of the Eliot era, with the most boorish athletes and party boys—exemplified by Rodney “Bo-Jo” Brown in Marquand’s H. M. Pulham, Esq.—exploiting the system by taking only elementary courses. On the other end of the spectrum were ambitious students like Conant, who instead of availing themselves of four years of enlightenment sought to shorten its duration, speeding along a narrow track with the aim of obtaining a professional degree as quickly as possible.
Lowell was determined to raise the bar. “The college,” he declared, “ought to produce, not defective specialists, but men intellectually well rounded, of wide sympathies and unfettered judgment.” The faculty had already seen the writing on the wall, and by the end of Lowell’s first year the elective system was replaced by a plan of “concentration and distributions.” Under Lowell’s framework, six of the sixteen courses had to be “concentrated” in one field, and another half dozen had to be “distributed” elsewhere among three general groups of courses. The class of 1914 was the first that had to conform to Lowell’s requirements, but despite pressure from his dean, Conant held to Black’s focused “three-year plan.”
Conant’s preparation as a chemist, however, did not quite proceed as planned. Black had intended him to train under Richards, who had been Conant’s early champion, and become a physical chemist. A professor since 1889, and chair of the department since 1903, Richards was one of Harvard’s brightest lights. While still in his twenties, he had earned worldwide renown for his precise determinations of atomic weights, and was sought after by universities. An offer from Germany ’s University of Göttingen in 1901 established his reputation, and secured his position at Harvard, where he agreed to remain in exchange for a reduced teaching load. Regarded as an American experimentalist of genius, the forty-three-year-old Richards was at the pinnacle of his career, and still pressing to extend his influence on the developing framework of physical chemistry. Wealthy admirers raised funds to endow a great new facility dedicated to furthering his work, and the Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory was planned and constructed.
Conant found Richards, with his love for research, and passion for the “grand strategy” of advancing science, awe inspiring, and felt privileged to be able to do his PhD under his direction. Richards believed atomic weights were one of the “primal mysteries of the universe.” He was convinced that every one of his research undertakings into atomic weights had fundamental theoretical significance, and exhorted his students to devote themselves to making a lasting contribution. “Unless one aimed at a degree of fame which placed an investigator in the same class as [Michael] Faraday,” Conant recalled Richards repeatedly telling them, “one would have set one’s sights too low.”
Although Richards was a fine lecturer, his character and interests were remote from the contemporary scene. As time passed, Conant could not help finding the genteel, high-minded chemist, with his trim mustache and pince-nez, a trifle old school. At the Sunday afternoon teas Richards hosted for small groups of students at his home on 15 Follen Street, he exalted the German intellectual tradition and made it clear he expected his family—and by extension, his pupils—to be similarly “dedicated to things of the mind and the spirit.” For him, the embrace of literature, art, and music was essential to a virtuous life.
His view of scientific inquiry had the same elevated, immaterial quality. As a young man, Richards had studied with Walther Nernst in Göttingen and Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig, and was committed to “pure” research, far removed from human affairs. This, too, was part of the “German tradition.” While he never criticized those who accepted outside consulting jobs, he left no one in doubt that such prosaic distractions, not to mention working for a paycheck, lowered them in his eyes. His polite reserve brooked no argument. Richards “abhorred disagreement,” and his students soon came to realize that he could not stomach even the mildest form of debate.
While there was much to learn from the stringent investigator, Conant found his attitude disappointing, particularly as the chemistry profession was in the midst of profound change. In an era of growing industrial prosperity, big companies were beginning to fund experiments to improve the state of knowledge in emerging fields, opening up new and exciting opportunities for research. Willis Whitney, the founder of General Electric’s industrial research facility, had recently given a stimulating lecture at Harvard on the importance of developing commercial applications for new principles, arguing that while GE’s trained scientists were trying to perfect the incandescent lightbulb, they were doing original work in chemistry and physics. Already Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was responding to the changing environment and making great strides in applying the principles of physical chemistry to industrial processes. But Richards would not hear of it. “To him, the advancement of the science of chemistry was an all-absorbing occupation,” Conant concluded. “He had no time to give to problems in the area of applied science, which was beginning to assume importance in the first decade of this century.”
At the beginning of Conant’s third year, another professor turned his head. Elmer P. Kohler arrived at Harvard to teach freshman chemistry, along with a more advanced course in his own field, organic chemistry. At forty-seven, Kohler, who had spent two decades at Bryn Mawr College, was known to be a teacher of great gusto and rigor, with an enthusiasm for his subject that he instilled in his students. Conant was immediately attracted to his straightforward manner and zest for experimentation. Although his résumé did not boast a long list of awards and publications, he had few equals in the laboratory and quickly won Conant’s admiration and loyalty. “Only those who have seen him in his shirt sleeves, crystallizing and recrystallizing his precious materials on his own workbench, have known the man,” he wrote in defense of the newcomer.
When he first arrived, Kohler had few graduate students of his own, and was not only warmly receptive to the eager young chemistry student who approached him about doing an independent research project, but gave generously of his time and attention. With his help, Conant began working with carbon compounds, and in a few months succeeded in preparing a new organic compound. He was enormously impressed with the results of the experimental undertaking, and even more impressed with his supervisor, in whose skilled hands many complicated mixtures could be separated into pure substances. Kohler was interested in the mechanism of organic reactions, and presented the problems to his students as “a series of scientific adventures” so that it was impossible not to want to tag along. Here was the joy of investigation that had originally drawn Conant to chemistry. Although his entire academic trajectory had been tied to Richards since his days at Roxbury Latin, Conant suddenly began to have doubts. He was no longer sure he “wanted to be a physical chemist after all.”
Richards and Kohler could not have been more different, both as scientists and men. If Richards was a “strategist” who sought information that would affect basic theory in a significant way, Kohler was a “tactician” who focused on specific problems and their solutions, and rarely took the time to stand back and consider if they were worth solving. The contrast betw
een the two men’s personalities was just as marked. Where Richards saw himself as part of an international fraternity of learned scientists, Kohler was a loner who had few friends among his colleagues. While Richards gave celebrated lectures and published with an eye to ensuring his place on the permanent roll of outstanding contributors, Kohler was indifferent to fame, and almost pathologically afraid of public speaking. But Conant, who sympathized with Kohler’s shyness, liked his “solidity” and “commonsense judgments on human problems.” He and Kohler also shared a love of mountain climbing, and Conant compared him to the “Swiss guide” who tries to inculcate in novices that “mastery of technique” essential before tackling the ice or rock alone. In terms of who he thought would be a better advisor, both personally and professionally, while he was still learning the ropes as a young chemist, there was no contest.
So when Kohler asked if he was interested in being his lab assistant in the fall of 1912, Conant accepted his offer and became his eager young apprentice. In doing so, he was not simply switching mentors, he was altering the direction of his career. “What was intended as an exploration of a neighboring field,” he recalled with wonder, “turned out to be an introduction to my lifework as a chemist.”
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