Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  For his part, Conant had “few illusions” about what lay ahead. Informing his sister Marjorie of his election to what he called “the most thankless job in the USA,” he was already bracing for the worst. “You had best enjoy the reflected light while it shines pleasantly,” he advised. “You’ll have plenty of years of hearing and reading many nasty things about me”:

  If the president does the right thing, he can count on an almost unanimous howl of disapproval from alumni and others. After all, how many people are there who really understand what a university is for and are interested in seeing things furthered? But that’s all part of the contract, and I’m prepared for it, I hope . . . It will be interesting and I hope satisfying but on the whole unpleasant and trying—a very, very lonely job. From May 8th until I retire, it will be very hard to find anyone who will speak absolutely frankly and fully to me about any Harvard matter. But all this is the price of “tyranny tempered by assassination,” as Mr. Lowell once described the Harvard system of administration.

  I have wept several times at leaving such a pleasant scientific life, but the challenge was simply not to be denied. I have no regrets, and I am sure I shall have none in the future as to the correctness of the decision.

  Conant added, “Pray for me, I shall need it.”

  He told his sister he planned on making no unnecessary enemies, but within days of the announcement of his surprise selection he discovered this would be impossible. Frankfurter was so irritated by Conant’s ascension that he told colleagues he wished he had bowed to Roosevelt’s request that he become solicitor general, and made up for it by becoming a one-man recruiting agency for FDR’s “brain trust.” There were grumblings from other graying Harvard eminences who shared Lowell’s suspicions of Conant as an outsider. To cap it all off, he received a strained letter of congratulations from Murdock, stating that after much introspection, he found himself “relieved at the outcome,” and formally tendering his resignation. Conant read the letter with dismay. He had no intention of letting Murdock go, yet he had a strong foreboding he had just lost the first of many friends.

  Within a week of his election, Conant left Cambridge. A family holiday in England and France had been moved forward so he could depart immediately after the announcement. The only problem was that his six-year-old son, Teddy, had just undergone a double mastoid operation at the Boston Children’s Hospital, and his wife, who was frantic with worry, refused to leave the boy’s side. It was decided that Conant would go ahead alone and spend a few weeks at Oxford and Cambridge studying the much anticipated house plan Lowell had adapted from England’s universities.

  Conant could not wait to get away. He wanted to avoid the advice of well-meaning colleagues almost as much as the disappointment of his scientific brethren, who believed he was forfeiting his claim to a Nobel. His mother-in-law had been a nightmare. She could not believe he was giving up the “serene mysteries of the laboratory” for what she disdainfully termed “the battlefield of administrative life.” In the end, Patty had spent untold hours trying to explain her husband’s midlife career change. “You idealize Jim’s chemistry,” she told her mother. “He wasn’t happy in it. He can’t be ‘happy’ in that sense; he is too restless.”

  Grateful to be making his escape, Conant wrote to his “wonderful wife” from his steamer cabin, thanking her for her fortitude during those last few weeks. “Without you I couldn’t possibly face all the troubles ahead!” he admitted. “On the other hand, but for you I should never be asked to face them!”

  If he was at all uneasy about leaving her to cope with a sick child, it never occurred to Conant to postpone his trip. Moreover, he fully expected his wife to join him in England as soon as their son was “out of danger.” As the new president of Harvard, he would be wined and dined by legions of distinguished dons, and he wanted his “better half” by his side. At his insistence, Patty agreed to leave at the end of the month, packing their oldest off to camp and entrusting the ailing Teddy, who would spend another month in the hospital, to his grandmother’s care. As he embarked on his “second life,” Conant wrote, it would require they all make some sacrifices. “I am very happy about the summer plans,” he concluded with remarkable self-absorption. “I think it will do both Jimmy and Teddy a lot of good. I am sure it will be hard for you at first, but I know you will be courageous and alright.”

  In the meantime, he discovered there were advantages to traveling alone. He had a lot of thinking to do and relished the time to himself. He realized that his new office demanded “a clear-cut social philosophy,” as he later told Henry James, one of the Overseers. One couldn’t “handle educational problems satisfactorily in the middle of the twentieth century” without a coherent set of principles and ideals. Unlike Lowell, however, he was not about to “declare war” on his predecessors’ policies—despite his rash outburst to Homans—so there was no pressing need to announce his own program for the future of Harvard in a major address. Moreover, as a self-described “cranky New Englander,” he was innately skeptical of overblown rhetoric, what he called “the magic of words and beautiful phrases.” Being both a scientist and a pragmatist, he preferred to test the soundness of his ideas by seeing what worked and measuring the results, suspending final judgment until all the facts were in. After all, he explained, “education is not something conducted in a vacuum but a social process.”

  Conant also knew he could not hope to compete with his predecessor’s oratory brilliance. At his 1909 inauguration, Lowell unveiled his plans for the college before an audience of some fourteen thousand spectators, an occasion that was marked by two days of festivities and concluded with fireworks. Conant had no desire to stage what amounted to a coronation. He was assuming office in the midst of great uncertainty, shadowed by a banking crisis and deepening Depression. On his return, he recommended dispensing with a formal inauguration. He still had only a vague sense of what he intended to do and was grateful to have “a good excuse” for not making a speech. The truth was he disliked splash, and just wanted the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.

  On his return to Cambridge in August, he slipped quietly into his new role, eager to attract as little notice as possible. He plunged at once into a busy round of meetings that kept him tethered to his desk throughout the day. He worked at such a ferocious pace, his new colleagues despaired. A reporter from the Boston Herald, nosing around campus, heard that Conant tackled the waiting mound of correspondence on his desk with such vigor and tenacity—imparting hours of uninterrupted flowing dictation—that he nearly drove his poor secretary into the ground. When the exhausted girl asked if she could “have a minute” to break for lunch, Conant, glancing at his watch and seeing that it was after three o’clock, assented. “But behind the intimated apology lay a note of impatience at human weakness,” wrote the journalist, “and his bowed head, buried again in the welter of work confronting him, was her dismissal.” While acknowledging the tale had probably been exaggerated in countless retellings, the Herald’s scribe had a point: “The first impression was of a man who spared neither himself or others.”

  Unlike Roosevelt, who during his first hundred days in office moved with unprecedented dispatch to address the national crisis, Conant assured everyone he met with that he did not have any drastic reforms in mind. He promised not to do anything hasty that would result in unnecessary upheaval at Harvard, where many of the conservative alumni reviled the emergency measures Congress was hurriedly writing into law. But Conant’s mild exterior belied an iron will. He had no intention of being the Board of Overseers’s tame chemist. He was biding his time, and it would not be long before he began to implement reforms and innovations every bit as controversial as what was being done in Washington.

  Harvard got its first clue of what the new era held in store on the morning of September 23, when the new president addressed the freshman class, appearing on the platform of the New Lecture Hall for the first time since his election. Twenty-three years
after the determined boy from Dorchester first passed through the college gates, Conant spoke eloquently of his enduring faith in education as a means of advancement—and, above all, as a way to enhance the store of human knowledge. “Today more than ever, it seems to me, the universities are the custodians of the great spiritual values which the human race has so laboriously won in art, literature, philosophy, and science,” he told them. “When you enter a university, you walk on hallowed ground.”

  Speaking directly to the students, he pointed out that they were embarking on new Harvard careers at the same moment. “You and I are both facing unfamiliar conditions and heavy responsibilities,” he said, urging them to make the most of the “free and vigorous intellectual atmosphere,” and warning them against the snobbishness, clannishness, and narrowness of outlook that had blighted his school days. “May I suggest that your college career is an excellent time to cultivate a tolerant, skeptical spirit? No one need worry lest he have too few prejudices.”

  Conant’s formal induction on October 9 was almost a nonevent. Only 150 people were invited to see the twenty-third president of Harvard sworn in, and the whole procedure was over in less than fifteen minutes. Before a handpicked audience, standing shoulder to shoulder in the small faculty room in University Hall, Conant, wearing the unadorned black gown of the president, accepted the ancient insignia of the office: the charter, seal, and silver keys to the college. At his request, the modest rites harkened back to Colonial days, when John Leverett was installed as president of the college in 1708. Instead of the traditional sumptuous feast, guests were served what Harvard historian Samuel Morison described with disgust as a “wretched temperance punch.” The papers noted that the ceremony, like the man, was unpretentious in the extreme. “No Pomp,” they reported a trifle regretfully, while acknowledging that the lack of pageantry was in keeping with the mood of the country.

  * * *

  From the moment he took office, Conant was acutely aware that everyone would be watching to see how he fared. In September he and his family moved into the president’s house at 17 Quincy Street, a sumptuous brick mansion Lowell had built for himself and generously bequeathed to the college. Along with it came a large staff, a formidable head housekeeper in the person of Mrs. Beach—who had firm ideas on the subject of etiquette, seating arrangements, menus, and so forth—and the expectation that they play host and hostess to an endless parade of faculty, famous alumni, and visiting dignitaries. The prospect of maintaining the palatial home, and entertaining on such a grand scale, was so daunting to Conant that after some discussion Harvard agreed for the first time in its history to assume the full cost of running the president’s house.

  Unused to public life, Conant found the social demands onerous. He was not the hearty type. He had little small talk and loathed receiving lines. When bored, or out of his element, he hid behind a chilly exterior that made him seem emotionally detached and, at times, dismissive. More than one old gent was heard to complain that they had got themselves another “cold-fish chemist.” He tried his best to fulfill the backslapping, glad-handing duties that came with the job, telling his sister that in “even the most collegiate and football-mad of our alumni there is a spark of intellectual interest,” but the effort it took “to fan”—and “not water”—that spark was a strain. His discomfort at a gathering of banking swells aboard the yacht of J. P. Morgan chairman Thomas Lamont was ill-concealed. As one Harvard chronicler noted, “Politically and intellectually, he preferred the yeomanry to the nabobs.”

  Both Conant and his wife dreaded the frequent embarrassing mentions in the newspapers, and felt enormous pressure not to put a foot wrong. Lowell had been childless, and they hoped the presence of a young family would help “humanize” the imposing official residence. But not long after they moved in, Conant was showing someone through the house and, pointing to his sons’ sprawling miniature electric train set on the floor, quipped, “That’s what all ballrooms should be used for.” The remark was immediately picked up by the press as an example of Conant’s unassuming, down-to-earth style—and seized on by critics as both unpresidential and more than a little undignified. “The hard reality is only too apparent,” Patty wrote Marjorie of their new life. “It is so ‘solemn,’ as you say, and sometimes appalling.” It was very trying always being watched, living under a proverbial microscope. “The hardest thing for me,” she added, “will be to see people continually that I shall enjoy talking to, and yet talk to them without saying anything indiscreet.”

  In the early months, she slipped up once too often, not quite able to repress the unconscious insolence in her quips and catty asides to friends. Her clever repartee, which amused her dinner companions no end, frequently shocked the other guests and faculty members who happened to be within earshot, until her husband finally had to take her to task. He was horrified that his patrician wife was becoming known for her hauteur and peremptory tone with underlings, especially secretaries and assistants. “Remember! You can never afford to be flip or frank,” she wrote in her diary after a stern lecture. “You must not admit the comic side of anyone to whom you have an official relation. You haven’t got imagination enough to realize how unguarded remarks can travel. You must remember that you have not got a personal life anymore. Read this over, grit your teeth, & do not forget it!”

  Patty realized she would not be able to count on her husband to come to her rescue as before. She had grown far too dependent on him and worried she was losing her already fragile sense of herself. “I have been a good deal parasitic mentally—leaning on Jim’s perceptions and living in his mind. That has made us very close, but I think it has led me to shirk a little being a complete person.” Now that he was “loaded down with cares,” she would have to learn to fend for herself. “I see more and more that I am going to need all the resources I can call up in myself,” she worried to her diary. “He can’t hold my hand anymore.”

  Unfortunately, Patty’s maiden efforts to assert herself as the president’s wife usually succeeded in offending one constituency or another. After it got back to Conant that at an advisory board meeting of the Society of Harvard Dames she had held forth on the “Negro question,” priggishly siding with the ladies with the most “exaggerated prejudices” rather than “standing up as a champion of tolerance,” he was beside himself. “Jim says you were gunning for easy popularity,” she wrote contritely after another lecture. “You were making conversation without regard to the responsibility of your position. You tried to draw them out by causal remarks without considering that everything you say indicates the attitude of the Powers That Be . . . The vital essential part of your doing a good job is taking pains conscientiously to be humble and stand for the difficult right thing, rather than to slide along on the surface of charming fatuous popularity (a la Roosevelt!), trading on your position instead of trying to be worthy of it.”

  Doing the “difficult right thing” was second nature to her husband, whose instincts never led him astray. “Jim has all this that I haven’t—the single-minded integrity, fearless humility, common sense and humor,” she lamented in her diary, feeling more inadequate than ever. “He always rings true.”

  Conant cautioned his wife against the corrupting influence of fame, and confusing the deference of Cambridge society with genuine respect and admiration. “The only way to keep a sense of proportion is to keep your feet as near the ground as possible,” she chastised herself, admitting that she had a tendency to “soar too high” and become intoxicated with her own nobility. “This Mt. Olympus life is bad for you because it erects barriers around your only-too-isolated self.”

  * * *

  As the autumn progressed, Conant demonstrated a taste for change and an eagerness to experiment that inspired both optimism and apprehension. One of his first acts was to end the seven o’clock bell, originally instituted in 1760 to announce morning prayers. With unerring logic, he announced that he had “looked into the matter and found no good reason for continuing i
t,” and abolished the antiquated practice. The move was hailed by enthusiastic freshmen as a “New Deal in Harvard’s administration.” Doing away with such a sacred and venerated custom rankled the old guard, especially when it emerged that Conant’s attendance at prayers of any sort was spotty at best. On his first visit to the new Memorial Church, which replaced Appleton Chapel, he reportedly told Willard Sperry, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, that if he ever saw a cross or candles on the communion table, he would “never set foot in the place again.”

  In the eyes of some, he committed an even graver heresy when he did away with the Latin requirement for the AB (bachelor of arts) degree. Not long afterward, Conant attended the annual dinner of the Signet Society, and the toastmaster, E K. Rand of the Latin Department, made a point of introducing their honored guest in the dying language, and then painstakingly translated his remarks in what was intended as a scholarly rebuke of their uncultured new president. Conant, skilled at this kind of academic sparring, got the better of the Latin professor: “I thought we had come to praise the Signet, not to bury Caesar,” he replied with the hallmark asperity that would characterize his approach to Harvard skepticism.

  Conant was also the first president to recognize that the lowly day students deserved to have their lot improved, and set aside the ground floor of Dudley Hall so that all the Irish, Italian, and Jewish boys who commuted from Greater Boston would have somewhere to eat their brown-paper-bag lunches. The journalist Theodore White, who was one of them, remembered being grateful for the comfortable chairs now available to lounge in between classes. Conant wanted to make Harvard “something more than a New England school.” White was excited by the young president’s desire to effect change: “Excellence was his goal as he began shaking up both faculty and student body.”