The controversy came to a head in the winter of 1934, when the Massachusetts legislature introduced a bill proposing a mandatory loyalty oath requiring teachers to swear allegiance to state and federal constitutions. Tired of being pestered to do something about the universities, and Harvard in particular, as “hot beds of radicalism,” Conant decided the issue had to be joined. He led the campaign to oppose the teacher’s oath bill and wrote to every college president in the state, requesting that they testify against the discriminatory and restrictive measure and help prevent its passage. In a stormy public committee hearing in April, he took to the floor, raising his reedy voice above the chorus of boos and hisses to criticize the assault on academic freedom, which he said was a menacing first step toward a totalitarian society.
In a speech at Amherst College that winter, Conant took aim at the critics. “It is being said that our higher education has no unity, that the influence of colleges and universities is purely negative, that real problems are avoided or listlessly discussed by disillusioned old men,” he stated. “But I for one will not admit for a moment that there is any lack of purpose, any lack of positive faith in the great undertaking in which we are embarked.” Declaring that he would “go down fighting” before giving in to the outside forces that threatened intellectual freedom, he called for colleges and universities to serve as “an arena for combat” for debate on the highly charged social, political, and economic issues of the day. And in a nod to the reactionaries on his own campus, he added that for the same reason, “We must also have our share of thoughtful rebels on our faculties,” for it was only in the “heat of battle” that new ideas and new values were forged.
The New York Times hailed the speech as a “kind of academic declaration of independence,” and the widespread coverage it received cemented his reputation as the nation’s “defender of free inquiry.” Caught up in the fervor of his cause, Conant made an impassioned plea for educators to be “more militant” than ever, raising expectations that he would carry the fight against the teacher’s oath bill to the courts. But after the Massachusetts legislature passed the oath bill in June 1935, he decided that further combat was “hopeless.” A semipublic institution like Harvard could not defy the state. Conant reluctantly informed the faculty members that they had no choice but to comply. A Times headline captured his typically blunt instructions: “Take Oath or Quit.”
Some professors were shocked at how quickly Conant folded his tent. When Harvard geologist Kirtley Mather—a descendant of the fiery Puritan minister Cotton Mather—refused to sign the oath, declaring the law unconstitutional and rallying a group of liberal professors to his side, Conant hurried back from a trip to set them straight. “It is out of the question for Harvard as an institution to consider not obeying the law,” he told them in no uncertain terms, calling the statute “unfortunate” but any ensuing legal controversy more so. Under pressure from Conant, Mather signed the oath, but he and his followers felt let down. They were dismayed, as one put it, to see their chief “dunking his promising defense in a tub of tepid water.”
Conant, however, had come a long way in understanding the latitude available to an astute leader. While compelled to obey the letter of the law, he quietly negotiated a compromise with the attorney general of Massachusetts, Paul Dever, who agreed that as long as the oaths were signed, he did not care what reservations the professors put down on paper. That spring, Conant joined the effort to repeal the “obnoxious law,” once more rallying the college presidents. Once more they made their arguments in vain.
Still disturbed by the “dangerous precedent” set by the loyalty oath, Conant did not let the matter rest. On March 20, 1936, in a speech in the old Sanders Theatre that was carried on national radio, he outlined the plans for Harvard’s three hundredth birthday—six months of public festivities drawing scholars from the world over, culminating in a grand three-day finale in September—and justified the elaborate celebration by underscoring the important role of the university in a democracy: “This is admittedly a time of trouble and depression,” he told his listeners, “but it is also a time of peril for the universities of the world.”
Pointing to what had happened in Germany, Conant connected the intolerance abroad with emerging fears at home, stating, “Liberty is the life blood of those who are in quest of the truth, and liberty has vanished.” In Russia, it had vanished nearly a generation ago. He went on to scold American politicians for taking the “first step in the same direction,” and attempting to curtail the universities’ independence and freedom of inquiry by enacting the teacher’s oath. “No issue of patriotism is here involved; the issue is between those who have confidence in the learned world and those who fail to understand it and hence distrust it, dislike it, and would eventually curb it.” While the oath law might seem innocuous, it was “the straw” that showed which way the wind was blowing—a warning of “the havoc of the gale in other lands.”
Conant spent the summer preparing for Harvard’s big birthday and playing host to thousands of renowned scientists and scholars from all over the world. But “black shadows surrounded all the gatherings,” he recalled. “The probability of still another European war was never far distant from our minds.” The papers were filled with reports of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s assault on Ethiopia, including stories of the use of poison gas against civilians. Hitler’s troops were consolidating their occupation of the Rhineland, a key industrial region in the west lost to France under the Treaty of Versailles, a sign they were preparing for further territorial aggression. Paralyzed by fear, Britain and France did nothing. Nevertheless, the hum of activity on Harvard’s campus, the exchange of ideas and renewal of intellectual ties, buoyed Conant’s spirits, making him savor what might be the last truly international academic reunion for years to come. Here, at least, was conclusive evidence that “this country prized triumphs of the mind for their own sake, as well as for their utility.”
The Corporation had pressed Conant to take advantage of the tercentenary to present a full-length account of his ideas—“the equivalent of an inaugural address.” He spent months carefully crafting his speech. He believed that as president of Harvard, it was his responsibility to help lead the way through those dark days, when the world faced the rising threat of totalitarianism, and he began to reassess not only the role of the university in a democracy but also the uses to which he could put his own increasingly public voice.
Rain, the one detail about the final tercentenary day beyond Conant’s control, held off just long enough to allow him to deliver the most important speech of his career without getting thoroughly drenched. At nine thirty on the morning of Friday, September 18, a bugle sounded, and fifteen thousand alumni marched four abreast to the exposed and sopping seats in Harvard Yard, while President Roosevelt, in a silk hat and cutaway, leaning heavily on the arm of a military aide, led a procession of dignitaries across the stage, seating himself in a damp red velvet chair on Conant’s right. A crackle over the loudspeakers announced that Conant had consulted a meteorologist who’d forecast that the steady drizzle would last only a half hour. By the time they had gotten through all the dreary salutary orations and Morison’s “Early History of Harvard,” the rain had stopped, and the college’s forty-three-year-old president leapt to his feet. “Such a gathering as this,” Conant began, peering anxiously at the sky, “could come together only to commemorate an act of faith . . .”
Warning that a “wave of anti-intellectualism is passing around the world,” Conant went on to make a powerful case for Harvard and the liberal arts tradition as a means of ensuring the progress of American society. To bring “order out of chaos” was the educational mission of America’s universities, and in order to continue doing that in such a challenging time, he declared, “one condition is essential: absolute freedom of discussion, absolute unmolested inquiry. We must have a spirit of tolerance which allows the expression of all opinions, however heretical they might appear.” If his r
hetoric did not quite soar, his spirit of defiance more than carried the day, and the prolonged applause showed that the audience was with him.
Just as he finished, a fresh torrent began, and the final convocation was moved indoors to the Sanders Theatre. Relieved that apart from the storm there had been little turbulence, Conant was on tenterhooks waiting to see how FDR would handle the hostile crowd. Smiling broadly, the president purposefully omitted Lowell’s name in his opening greeting and immediately addressed his adversaries: a hundred years ago, when Harvard was celebrating its 200th anniversary, Andrew Jackson was president, and the alumni were “sorely troubled concerning the state of the nation,” he stated. Fifty years ago, when Harvard was celebrating its 250th anniversary, Grover Cleveland was president, and the “alumni were again sorely troubled,” he intoned even more emphatically. “Now on the three hundredth anniversary, I am president . . .” Roosevelt paused midsentence; his meaning clear. Disarmed by his audacity, the thousand loyal sons of Harvard filling the theater burst into laughter.
The soggy celebration was deemed a success. Time magazine put Harvard’s fledgling patriarch on the cover: “As proud as he might be of his university, which after 300 years has no US peer, many a Harvard man was prouder of the university’s new president. Son of a humble Dorchester photoengraver, James Bryant Conant, by his gracious and wise bearing, distinguished himself last week in the midst of a large body of social aristocrats, ably established his membership in the aristocracy of brains.”
* * *
Conant enjoyed his moment in the sun. But controversy was never absent at the college. He knew the accolades bought him only a temporary reprieve. In spite of Yale president James Angell’s gibe about the tercentenary deluge being “Conant’s way of soaking the rich,” the trustees were unimpressed with the paltry $3 million netted by his national scholarship fund-raising drive, which was well below expectations, inspiring fresh doubts about his sales pitch.
The faculty also took a jaundiced view of his elevated profile. Many tended to agree with the New Yorker magazine’s conclusion that the “president of Harvard is an autocrat.” In an exhaustive two-part examination of his character and career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Henry F. Pringle elucidated how Conant’s fame—and notoriety—now extended well beyond academic circles, and his influence stemmed not only from intellectual leadership but also from the very real exercise of power. In theory, Conant was accountable to both the Corporation and the Board of Overseers, but in practice he nearly always bent those bodies “to do his will.” He made himself chairman of the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Science, a representative body of sixty professors that was his “own innovation.” By creating a system of ad hoc committees over which he was always chairman, he had a say in naming every permanent member of the faculty—not even an associate professor of pediatrics was appointed without his approval.
What the article hinted at, but did not say outright, was that his imperious manner of imposing his authority needlessly antagonized colleagues. Instead of conferring with an entire department, he tended to consult a handful of figures individually—a strategy he called “polling the jury”—and then reached a decision independently. Early on, Conant alienated senior members of the faculty by flatly rejecting their recommendations. He seemed to take pleasure in flaunting the Harvard way of doing things, and they saw their former role eroding in favor of a central administration. The vigorous application of his “up or out” policy to weed out the deadwood and bring in promising new tenure prospects only added to their disquiet.
Many others on the faculty felt slighted by Conant’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for their academic fields. More than once he had questioned if the unverifiable disciplines of psychology, government, and sociology merited the same resources as the natural sciences, disparaging them as “the modern equivalents of astrology.” The eminent poet Robert Frost, who had knocked heads with Conant over politics, did not think the chemist could see beyond his precise, quantifiable facts and provable hypotheses to any larger truths. “I told Conant once that it was mighty little he knew about humanities, or about poetry, or even about philosophy—with his nose stuck in a test tube,” he recalled. “That’s the trouble with scientists. They discount and discredit everything not reducible to an algebraic equation.”
There was a growing faction within the college that agreed with Frost’s appraisal, even though, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the poet was “full of petty malice.” The discontented regarded Conant as so aloof and calculating in his methods they took to calling him a “slide-rule administrator.” The feeling was that he was applying scientific methods to problems that were essentially human, and the people under him were paying the price. His cold-blooded approach, reported the New Yorker, has “waves of criticism beating against the doors of the president’s office in University Hall,” but the man in charge “does not appear to be greatly disturbed.” Like Cromwell, Conant regarded reform as a “cruel necessity” and was too preoccupied with achieving his ambitious agenda for Harvard—and himself—to pay any heed to the simmering resentment among the rank and file. In his absolute determination to implement his ideas, he was demonstrating the ruthlessness common to all idealists in the act of realizing their vision.
* * *
I. Conant would later laud the refugees’ role in American academic life, to say nothing of the important services they rendered in the atomic field, and other weapons projects, that were a “significant contribution” to victory.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
The Acid Test
A laboratory is not the ideal training field for dealing with complex human relationships.
—Boston Globe editorial about JBC
Like most Americans, Conant lapsed into complacency in the summer of 1937. Europe’s troubles seemed a long way off. With the Harvard tercentenary finally behind him, he was ready to take a break. Since the first year of his presidency, he had found that the only way he could relax was to get away from Cambridge—the farther the better.
In July he and his family traveled by train to California, where he had rented a cottage on Fallen Leaf Lake, not far from Lake Tahoe. He planned to do some fly-fishing, a sport he had recently taken up, and make several short hiking excursions in the nearby mountains. The trip was suggested in part as a “sop” to his wife’s feeling of frustration that she and the boys saw so little of him. His sons, ages eleven and fourteen, had sprouted into gangly, unruly adolescents and needed their father to take them in hand. Patty continued to be plagued by jags of depression and worried she had not been enough of a presence in the children’s lives that winter, having followed doctor’s orders to concentrate on getting well. Conant gave no sign of being particularly bothered on either account. There was nothing wrong that could not be put right with plenty of fresh air and exercise. In an effort to restore domestic harmony, he promised that this would not be a working vacation. He dutifully informed his friends and colleagues at Berkeley and Caltech that he would not be attending any meetings, declined all invitations, and retreated from public life.
The first day of their holiday, Teddy came down with measles. A week later, his brother was covered in spots. With his disappointed wife consigned to nursemaid duty, Conant was trying to “make the best of a bad prospect” when he received an unexpected visitor. Francis P. Farquhar, a member of the class of 1909 and an experienced alpinist, had heard Harvard’s president was fond of “walking uphill.” He proposed that Conant join him on a pack trip in the High Sierra. When he casually mentioned that they might try to scale a peak, Conant immediately protested he was not that kind of climber. But after being assured they would not attempt anything too difficult or dangerous, he agreed to go along.
On August 12 he joined Farquhar and a party of three other men at Parchers Camp, twenty miles from the tiny town of Bishop. The supplies were loaded on a packhorse, and they had a spare animal for the benefit of anyone who could not keep
up—presumably the spindly academic. It was rugged terrain, cutting through canyons of granite and black volcanic rock. After reaching the top of Bishop Pass, they slowly traversed a route that ran to the west of the highest peaks, camping every other night in a different spot. By the fourth day, Conant was feeling quite pleased with himself. He was in “excellent condition” and showed no signs of tiring, despite having been laid up for several weeks in March after fracturing his left collarbone in a skiing accident. His confidence quickly faded, however, when Farquhar revealed his true objective. Pointing at the North Palisade, an immense rocky peak 14,254 feet high that loomed in the east, he explained that they could easily capture the summit if they roped up together. It would be a pity, he goaded his important guest, to let such an opportunity pass.
On the first day, Conant felt on familiar ground as they painstakingly negotiated the loose rock and shale. But when it came time to begin the real climb, inching up what looked like a sheer vertical cliff, he struggled to keep his nerve. In theory, he was protected from a serious fall by the belaying rope, but his skepticism about the amount of security afforded by the thin manila cord was equaled only by his mounting terror. As he approached the top, however, he was surprised to discover that not only was he winning his “internal wrestling match with incipient panic,” but he was actually beginning to enjoy the effort to conquer his fear. The route down was even more hair-raising, but the moment his foot hit terra firma, all his doubts were forgotten. In the rush of triumph, Conant found himself agreeing without reservation to an ice climb in the Canadian Rockies the following summer. “The twenty-four hours which had just passed marked a quantum leap in my psyche,” he recalled. “I was ready to become an irrationally enthusiastic mountain climber.”
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