Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Even when her isolation was over, Richards would not hear of Patty returning to school. His own vision was “defective,” and he was so convinced her eyes had been weakened by the fever that he insisted on keeping her home rather than risk further damage. For a serious little girl who devoured stories and poetry, it meant relinquishing what she loved best. It was hard, in such a cerebral family, to be so completely sidelined. Patty spent the remainder of that lonely winter confined to the house, seeing only her Greek tutor. “My long imprisonment has told on me,” she wrote in her diary, aware that the many months of solitude had made her overly sensitive and introspective. She felt increasingly suffocated and found herself becoming “cross, selfish, and quarrelsome.” After missing the better part of a year of school, she got glasses and was allowed to attend classes part-time at Miss May’s School in Boston. But Richards continued to fret about the dangers of eyestrain and “overstudy,” invaliding her to such an extent that this daughter of an outstanding intellectual family never completed high school and instead settled for a “Certificate of Honorable Dismissal.”

  After Richards won the Nobel, life became both easier and harder. The award, which included a sum roughly equivalent to today’s $1 million in prize money, provided the family with much-needed financial security. The accompanying fame also had an ameliorating effect. The public recognition allowed Miriam to finally realize her greatest ambition: to be universally recognized as the first lady of Cambridge, Harvard’s own queen bee. She made herself that much more imperious, if possible, and put on all sorts of airs. All the acclaim had a deleterious effect on her children, who would suffer from the weight of the almost impossible expectations placed upon them. The oldest boy, Bill, hailed as another scientific “genius,” was already showing signs of the strain that would mar his high promise.

  Meanwhile, Patty, caught between her father’s oversized achievements and her mother’s aspirations, became increasingly clenched, anxious, and fussy. After she was rejected by Radcliffe College for having too few credits, Richards encouraged her to follow in the footsteps of her famous grandfather, and aunt, Anna Richards Brewster, and become a painter. Patty enrolled in the school run by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, attending classes three mornings a week. Hungry for accomplishment, she dedicated herself to her drawing. On her days off, she stayed at home and spent hours in solitary effort, working in pencil or charcoal, trying to improve her technique. Life at Follen Street, she wrote in her diary, was a “narrow existence.”

  She came out socially in the spring of 1916, and her party at the Cambridge Boat House earned a mention in the society columns. She amused herself with serial crushes on the Harvard boys who frequented the house—“chiefly Papa’s advisees.” It was fully expected that she would find a husband within their tiny fraction of proper Cantabrigian society. But it all seemed fairly humdrum, and she could not look ahead at her narrow horizons without feeling some dismay. “Sometimes I feel as though I’d burst,” she wrote. “I’ve lived here all my life so far, and there’s every prospect of my living here till I get married, whenever that may be.” She envied her brother Billy and his friends, who were in the ROTC and spent their afternoons drilling and talking of going to fight overseas. Patty felt more “stuck” than ever. “And now, of all times, when such chances are open, and work of all sorts to be done,” she wrote. “Oh to get away! To see and do and know at first hand.”

  When Jim Conant had first turned up in January 1919 on leave, she had listened, wide-eyed and riveted, to his stories. With all the excitement and tumult of events leading up to the armistice, it was impossible not to get swept up in his exalted talk about the principles at stake in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and “all the ardor” that the war and peace seemed to inspire in him. His passionate arguments in favor of the League of Nations, and fury at Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s attempts to undermine it in Congress, highlighted his most compelling qualities—the fierce intelligence, moral integrity, and independent streak.

  She had met many of her father’s protégés, and was “wholly unimpressed by show-offs,” but Conant’s brilliance and charisma set him apart. In the beginning, she had not really thought of him as a serious suitor, but he gradually won her over. He was appealingly boyish and earnest—no poses, pretensions, or affectations. He made no bones about knowing anything about art, but seemed to “believe in it, look up to it, and enjoy it,” she wrote, “so few people do.” His admiration for her talent, and his sympathy with her struggles, were a “great comfort.” She liked his air of being extremely sure of himself, of knowing exactly what it was that he wanted and precisely how to go about getting it. Patty began to think marrying Jim Conant might be a way out of Follen Street.

  Richards, however, took the position that his daughter was too young and unformed to contemplate marriage. In his view, Conant himself was also far from ready: he owed his current perch at Harvard largely to the war, and was under considerable pressure to prove that he was a good investment. He needed to get on with his experiments and publish some papers if he was serious about establishing his reputation as a research scientist.

  Conant wasted no time buckling down to work. He decided to focus on some of the reaction mechanisms he had first encountered at Midvale Steel. In a hurry for a good result, he started down what turned out to be a “blind alley” and had to start over again. It would take more than a year of “wallowing in the laboratory” before he hit “pay dirt.” Sensing he was finally making real progress, he wrote Patty that he had “so many irons in the chemical fire” that he was optimistic that he was in for an interesting year. That same winter, N. Henry Black, now an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard, asked him to collaborate on writing a basic high school textbook. Conant supplied the latest technical information and Black ordered the pedagogical structure of the volume. Eager to help his son’s career, Conant’s father prepared the photo engraving plates for the illustrations, tables, and charts accompanying the experiments. Practical Chemistry, published by Macmillan in the fall of 1920, became a classic in the field and, through successive editions, proved a steady earner for years to come.

  By summer, Conant was deeply in love and feverishly counting the days until his visit with the Richards family in Seal Harbor, Maine. He and another young chemistry instructor, Norris Hall, had been invited “down east” for a week’s holiday before the start of the busy fall term. Every chance he got, Conant found an excuse to go off alone with Patty, and on the last night confessed his love for her under an August moon. The time they spent together was so heavenly, he wrote giddily on his return, that it must have been “a mirage,” adding, “Do let a troubled mortal know, was it real?”

  He had thoroughly enjoyed their long talks, particularly the “shout” about politics. He loved to argue, and considered the ability to engage in civilized debate a prerequisite for any friendship. Conant was for Ohio governor James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt in the upcoming presidential election, and argued that the Democrats’ support for the League of Nations alone would be enough to defeat Senator Warren Harding, the Republican candidate, notwithstanding the editorials in the Boston Herald. “I still have a strong taint of Wilsonian about me,” he admitted, playfully warning Patty not to be “too much influenced by the aristocratic and plutocratic atmosphere of Seal Harbor which must be strongly Republican.”

  Aware that she regarded her sensibilities as more “fine-grained” and discriminating than his own, and that their different backgrounds and attitudes were a cause of concern, he constantly sought to reassure Patty that they were more alike than it might at first appear. “I realize only too well that I am not worthy of you,” he wrote. “But at the bottom of our hearts, I know we are in absolute accord on every vital point and furthermore in regard to the superficial affairs of everyday life I’m sure we speak the same language.” He returned again and again to the theme of mutual understanding, insisting they would never “clash” on important matters, and the only “possible diffe
rence” between them was their point of view on the “relative cheapness of certain people and acts—yours too precious, mine too cheap—but that’s such a detail of a detail.”

  As soon as Patty returned to Cambridge, he called on her at home and asked her to marry him. She was too agitated and indecisive to respond, and put him off, saying she cared for him only a little. Undeterred, he kept up his “paper offensive,” bombarding her with letters and begging her to forgive him for his “miserable performance” and allow him another chance to plead his case in person. A few weeks later, he took her canoeing in Concord, Massachusetts. At the end of a golden autumn afternoon, he proposed again. “Accepted him finally,” Patty confided to her diary on the evening of September 24. “I really couldn’t possibly do better. I glowed all night at the thought of him. He is dear and high-minded, and a joy to be with; and I think I am building my house upon a rock.”

  Two days later, she called off their engagement. Under her mother’s pointed questioning, Patty’s confidence faltered, and she filled her diary pages with “dark fears and timid doubts.” An objection had been raised having to do with his consumption of alcohol—Theodore Richards was abstemious—and on a recent social occasion, Conant had reportedly “passed the line of decorum.” His disgrace was being held up as proof of a tendency toward “cheapness” and “dissipation,” her parents’ Boston prejudice against his origins. The implication was clear: as a boy from the wilds of Dorchester, whose father was engaged in a grubby commercial enterprise, he did not know how to behave. Deeply shocked, Patty conceded that his conduct only added to her misgivings. Her parents, not persuaded she knew her own mind, decided it would be best if she went away. She was being sent to Washington to stay with close friends. Telling Conant not to worry, she explained she needed time to reflect before “going ahead.” He replied warily that he would respect her decision and promised to try to “conquer” his impatience, and not allow the disappointment and uncertainty to get the better of him.

  While he apologized for making what he called “a few false moves,” he defended himself roundly against the charges that his drinking—undertaken “in the spirit of joviality and blowing off steam”—was somehow evidence of immorality:

  The whole question of ethics and “good taste” (which is aesthetics, isn’t it?) is certainly very complex . . . You don’t believe, do you, that my judgment in spiritual, ethical, and practical matters is unsound—that I have a weak character? If you do, remove your affections for me, but be sure the evidence warrants it!!

  Judgments are largely the products of our past experience, traditions and immediate social pressure. They diffuse as we live and develop. May I hope that one who hasn’t made certain errors in judgment (perhaps because of greater social pressure) can still love with all her heart one who has?

  Just before Patty was due to leave, Conant persuaded her to meet him for a clandestine rendezvous in Fresh Pond Park. When he escorted her home after a two-hour interlude in the woods, all was forgiven. Resolved to brook no further opposition, he wrote to her the next day, “Let our love for each other shine out and together fight and win.”

  It would take a good deal of maneuvering on his part to prevail. A “stormy month” followed, in which Patty toured Washington’s museums and monuments, and listened while her mother enumerated the many reasons why she should not get married. Conant wrote almost daily, desperately importuning her to keep the faith. “It’s no use—I’ve got to keep on loving you until I get positive orders to stop,” he beseeched her on October 15. In the end, his persistence paid off. On October 22, after he dashed to Washington for a clandestine reunion, Patty made a single entry in her diary: “Engaged again for the final time.”

  For the next six months, Conant assiduously courted her, plying Patty with long, devoted letters, fervent notes, and valentines. He tried to improve himself in her eyes, nightly plowing through the volumes of poetry and Shakespearean sonnets that were dear to her. To help anchor her affections, he sprung for a diamond and sapphire engagement ring he could ill afford and would spend the next few years paying off at the rate of $10 a month. They set the date for the last week of May 1920, but he could not dispel the “vague fear” she might “vanish again.” He had hoped for a simple wedding, but Miriam Richards was intent on a large, formal affair, and the ensuing tension only made things more difficult. In mid-March, he dashed to Manhattan in an effort to ward off any last-minute jitters. “A heavenly hour alone together,” Patty wrote of seeing Bryant, as his family still called him. “B’s tenderness never-to-be-forgotten—in spite of my only half-convinced state.”

  There is no indication that Conant considered Patty hard work or ever lost patience with her chronic anxiety. She was the beautiful daughter of academic royalty, and he was blind to the family’s underlying frailties. Fluent in French and German, with all the taste and polish of her rich intellectual heritage, and many ties within the upper echelon of the scientific community, she would, he believed, prove an ideal partner for someone with his high aspirations. The delight he took in his “excellent match,” as his friend Norris Hall called it, is evident in the triumphant letters he penned in the weeks following the announcement of their engagement. After dining at the Harvard Club one night with Ken Murdock and other old friends, during which he came in for a good deal of ribbing for marrying the boss’s daughter, Conant crowed to Patty, “Why shouldn’t I be looking like a joyful prince? I certainly feel like one—and it’s all because of you, dearest!”

  According to Harvard historian John Fox Jr., while Conant may not have been so calculating as to court Richards’s daughter to advance his cause, there is no way he failed to appreciate what he gained by such an alliance. “There’s no question Richards looked out for his career,” said Fox. “He would have put in a good word here and there. The skids were definitely greased.” As one of Conant’s chemical colleagues remarked on hearing the news, “You’re certainly one lucky fellow—everything breaks right for you.”

  As the wedding day approached, Miriam Richards retreated to her sickbed. Owing to her illness, and inability to carry on with the preparations, the elaborate nuptials she had insisted on were canceled. In the end, the couple was married on a gray, rain-soaked Sunday morning, on April 17, 1920, several weeks earlier than planned, in a small ceremony in Harvard’s Appleton Chapel. Only two dozen people were in attendance, all of them family save for Conant’s best man, Ken Murdock. “It didn’t seem dreary in the least, as people had threatened a tiny church wedding would be,” Miriam reported to her sister, Edith Henderson. Everyone agreed the bride looked enchanting, her shimmering white satin lace dress simple and elegant, with a veil that swept the ground and a diaphanous cap with a single wreath of orange blossoms that formed “a sort of halo” above her head. The groom, in spite of his “goggles,” was dignified. “It was all most lovely,” Miriam acknowledged grudgingly, “and without any struggles on my part at all.” The newlyweds departed for their honeymoon on June 1, taking the night train to Montreal. A week later, they sailed for the Continent.

  The trip abroad, a wedding gift from Richards, was Conant’s chance to belatedly make his European tour, considered an indispensable part of a gentleman’s education. For Patty, it meant retracing a journey she had taken with her family in the summer of 1911, when Richards had collected honorary degrees and silks from the Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester universities, as well as the Faraday Medal from the Royal Society. With his regal wife by his side, and an armload of letters of introduction from his illustrious father-in-law, Conant would be visiting Britain’s great university laboratories, and paying call on some of the leading names in chemistry: Harold Dixon and Arthur Lapworth at Manchester, Jocelyn Thorpe at Cheltenham, William Henry Perkin Jr. at Oxford, and Norman Haworth at Newcastle. In London, they would be hosted by no less than Lady Rayleigh, the widow of the 3rd Baron of Rayleigh, John William Strutt, the internationally famous physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for the discovery,
with William Ramsay, of argon.

  Conant was on his way, in more ways than one. In her engagement diary, tucked between marital advice from her mother—“always dress attractively, keep an attitude of repose—and snippets of romantic verse, Patty recorded her husband-to-be’s bravura visions of the future, which she blithely dubbed “Jim’s air-castles.” Looking ahead to grand vistas of success, he told her he was bent on achieving three goals in his lifetime: “1. To be the greatest organic chemist in America; 2. President of Harvard; 3. A public servant in some Cabinet position such as Sec. of the Interior.” They were a young man’s pipe dreams, but Patty wrote them down, preserving them for posterity, she mused, “out of curiosity to see how much will come true!”

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  The Specialist

  Gambling on the stock market is really a quiet life compared with this research business—all ups and downs and ten downs to one up.

  —JBC to his wife

  Conant returned from Europe in the fall of 1921 with a new outlook and new enthusiasm for his work. Travel, the pilgrimage to scientific shrines, and the chance to rub elbows with many of his chemical contemporaries at an international conference in Brussels, Belgium, had opened his mind and set a rush of ideas in motion. Although he was thrilled to be among the American representatives to the important postwar gathering, he was invited only “with the more or less explicit understanding my name was on the list because of Professor Richards’s fame.” Nevertheless, Conant, who had a passion for first-rate minds, found himself in his element.

  He had a “delightful time” going to all the sessions at the Palais des Academies in Brussels. Patty’s fluent French and social connections put them “on the wave at all the parties,” and he enjoyed himself immensely despite having to put up with “a good deal of kidding” about his terrible accent and excellent “beau-père.” He met with the many distinguished delegates from the victorious Allied nations—including his British contact on the mustard gas project, William Pope, who had been knighted for his services—though Conant was disappointed that the Germans and the Austrians had been excluded on the grounds that they were “tainted by war guilt.” He came away encouraged by the interest in him shown by some of the older professors and even managed to “slip in” a little personal business, eagerly flogging a copy of his new journal, Organic Syntheses, which he founded and edited with a group of top young chemists he’d worked with during the war. Never having allowed himself such an extended vacation, by August, he was itching to get back to the laboratory.