The next up was Hamilton Fish III, a Republican congressman from New York, who delivered a furious isolationist diatribe against all those in favor of repealing the arms embargo. “The paramount issue before the country,” he declared, “is to prevent America from being ‘eased into war.’ ” He accused the interventionists of being “smear artists and purveyors of hate,” for whom any peace-loving citizen was fair game in their “campaign of hysteria, emotionalism, hatred, untruth, and poisonous propaganda.” Worse, those who wanted to sell arms to the Allies had the basest of motives: “blood-smeared dollars.”
To rebut this assault, and help overcome the strong isolationist and neutrality sentiment in the public, the administration needed its own “silver-tongued orators” to do battle on the same ground as the demagogues. It enlisted the support of such prominent Republicans as Henry L. Stimson, President Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, and Frank Knox, the Republican nominee for vice president under Alf Landon. Compton informed the White House that Conant would also be willing to make a statement. He had already given a number of speeches at Harvard decrying the war hysteria and atmosphere of invective and unreason. He believed fear of being labeled a warmonger had cast a “blanket of censorship” on public debate, and the danger was that it could paralyze the democratic process. If he penned a public letter to Landon, the titular head of the party, making a rational argument for modifying the neutrality law to permit the sale of weapons to England and France, it would be sure to garner national attention.
Finally resolved to speak out, Conant wrote to Landon on September 26 proposing what he termed a “one-man minor operation” to make Americans see that if France and Britain were defeated by a totalitarian power “the hope of free institutions as a basis of modern civilization will be jeopardized.” He went on to explain that he was not writing primarily about the debate before Congress. “What concerns me most,” he continued, was the need for a “clear-headed, realistic discussion” of the “advantages and disadvantages from our own selfish point of view of every aspect of foreign policy.” Americans could not allow acrimony and emotionalism to divide the country or dictate decisions. They had to trust that “a democracy can make a rational choice on matters of war and peace as on other phases of national policy.” If not, “War has already defeated democracy on this continent. This is to me,” he stressed, “the vital point.”
Conant had carefully calibrated his approach, critiquing the isolationists’ argument while not directly attacking them, but at the same time never going so far as to advocate intervention. He went far enough, however, to receive a flood of angry responses after his letter was reprinted in the national papers. The Crimson slammed him for “earning an unenviable place in the road gang which is trying to build for the United States a superhighway straight to Armageddon.” Enough of the alumni endorsed his position that Conant felt confident he had done the right thing, but he was not ready to urge a belligerent status for the United States and continued to cling to his uncomfortable perch on the fence.
That fall, when a group of internationalists led by Clark Eichelberger, director of the League of Nations Association, formed an emergency nonpartisan committee to lobby Congress and mobilize public opinion to counteract the isolationists, Conant declined to get involved. The spokesman for their campaign was William Allen White, the venerable seventy-one-year-old editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, whose homely editorials and no-nonsense analysis had made him a popular and influential voice for the grass roots of the nation. A staunch Republican, he had reversed his position on the Neutrality Act after Germany attacked Poland, and now backed Roosevelt’s efforts to supply Britain and France with arms. White’s embryonic organization, the Nonpartisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Law, quickly recruited several hundred important Americans for the cause. Conant was one of the few holdouts. Although he was “strongly in favor of repeal,” he wired in reply, it was his “general policy” not to join committees. The name they wanted on their letterhead was not his but Harvard’s, and he could not be profligate in lending it out.
On November 4, after three weeks of harsh and bruising debate, the arms embargo was repealed. The new Neutrality Act that Roosevelt signed into law authorized the sale of arms to belligerents on a “cash-and-carry” basis. Almost immediately, tensions dissipated in Congress and elsewhere. The crisis had passed, and Americans seemed convinced there was no conceivable danger that would warrant their fighting. To Conant’s surprise, Hitler did not unleash the Luftwaffe on the Allies. Instead, a stalemate settled over Europe. Having discharged their duty to Poland, France and Britain seemed to have “pulled their punches” on the Western Front, leading Senator Borah to dub the pause in activity a “phony war.” He believed it might even presage a peace settlement. Conant was not convinced. “Nobody could be sure another Munich was not in the offing,” he wrote. “The strong probability that the phony war would someday become a real war was in everybody’s mind.” But after his brief foray into politics, he did not trumpet his views. He had to tread carefully. The truth was, by the fall of 1939, he was too busy fighting an offensive on his own turf to devote much attention to events abroad.
* * *
While the hostilities in Europe had ceased, at Harvard the battle over tenure that had been brewing since Conant became president erupted with an “almost revolutionary force,” as he later acknowledged, nearly blowing him out of office. According to the October 1939 issue of the Harvard Progressive, “Resignations are threatened. Rumor and suspicion, bickering and ill-will are rampant throughout the entire faculty.” The leftist student monthly was given to exaggeration, but there was no denying his staff was in a murderous mood. “I feel quite as though war has come to Cambridge!” he wrote a friend.
The tenure controversy first broke out in April 1937 with Conant’s dismissal of two economics instructors, John Raymond Walsh and Alan R. Sweezy. (Actually, they were served notice that this was their final three-year appointment, and there were no prospects for promotion.) After years of painful budget cuts and aborted appointments, the faculty finally cried foul and banded together to protest. The resentment ran deep. One after another, young teachers had been fired. The lower ranks were completely demoralized. Many saw it as a harbinger of their own fate. Sooner or later they would all be sacrificed to Conant’s cost-cutting imperative: “up or out.” The students in turn complained they were being cheated. Conant’s economizing was depriving them of inspired lecturers in favor of a few big-name scholars with fancy salaries. He was more interested in “crack research men” than in the quality of their education. By the 1939 Easter recess, with the two popular young professors on their way out, the students began issuing news releases, circulating leaflets, and rallying their confreres. The local papers played up the political angle, focusing on the Marxist bent of the terminated economists, both well-known union agitators. Overnight, Walsh and Sweezy became political martyrs, with Harvard’s president in the role of high executioner.
Conant issued a hasty press release stating that the decision had been made “solely on grounds of teaching capacity and scholarly ability.” The announcement immediately backfired, with most of the Harvard community taking umbrage at the suggestion that the two young men had been dropped because they were bad teachers. Conant quickly apologized, but the protests grew louder. The charge was leveled that the two men were victims of their liberal politics and their academic freedom had been violated. The Harvard Teachers Union signed a petition requesting that a panel of respected senior professors conduct a thorough inquiry into what had become known as the Walsh-Sweezy case.
To quell the faculty rebellion, Conant felt he had “no choice” but to agree to the review and vow to abide by its findings. But his back was up. He did not like being second-guessed. Adding to his annoyance, more than one of the panelists had a bone to pick. Chief among them was Kenneth Murdock, who, aided and abetted by a group of followers known as “the Leverett House gang,
” saw the inquiry as an opportunity to exact revenge for losing the presidency. Emboldened by the angry clamor, he began plotting with other left-wing dissidents to unseat his old rival and seize the throne that rightfully should have been his.
In early 1938, following an exhaustive review of Walsh’s and Sweezy’s dismissals, the investigating group, known as the Committee of Eight, exonerated Conant and the Economics Department of any political or personal favoritism, but the president was faulted for poor management. Walsh and Sweezy had been treated badly, and the recommendation was that the case be reopened with an eye to having the pair reinstated. Conant flatly refused. He saw no reason to reverse his decision and rehire them. His adamantine rejection of the committee’s opinion further antagonized the faculty. Conant’s “stubborn streak,” which one Harvard chronicler noted had been “so appealing in defense of unpopular causes and their champions,” now only reinforced their impression of him as arbitrary and autocratic.
In March 1939, after spending a year canvassing the grievances of younger instructors, the Committee of Eight released its final report. In response to the 165-page document detailing the flaws in the existing tenure system, Conant agreed to implement a long list of proposed reforms. As far as he was concerned, by endorsing its Magna Charta as a guide to future policy, he was more than doing his part. He would amend his flawed policies and exercise greater “flexibility” in implementing any new rules. But instead of following through on those promises, Conant compounded his earlier blunder by refusing to allow the faculty to weigh in on the report. His invitation to have those with objections write to him was a classic dodge and greeted with the skepticism it deserved. Meanwhile, the faculty’s suspicions were confirmed when within ten days of adopting Harvard’s Magna Charta, Conant fired ten popular assistant professors. A huge hue and cry followed.
By fall, the entire campus was in an uproar. The faculty, now in full revolt, began holding emergency sessions behind closed doors to debate the affair. There were rumors of challenges to Conant’s regime and murmurs of Murdock’s triumphant return. In a series of stormy meetings, Conant was assailed over and over again for proceeding hastily and callously, and failing to keep his staff informed. They demanded a reversal of his spring termination of the doomed “ten.”
All of the undergraduate publications entered the fray, attacking Conant’s disregard for what amounted to a presidential dictatorship. The Lampoon published a full-page caricature of Harvard’s president dressed as a witch, peering into a crystal ball and cackling, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, on whom next shall the axe fall?” The Boston Globe was merciless in its editorial comment: “A laboratory is not the ideal training field for dealing with complex human relationships. It is more concerned with test tubes than with retorts. The retorts are coming all the time.”
The climax came in a dramatic meeting held in University Hall on the afternoon of November 7, a large crowd of Harvard professors and nobles packing the chamber. The faculty was out for blood. Their first move was to abolish Conant’s small delegated council. The vote, an overwhelming 140 to 6, was a “slap in the face.” Next on the agenda was a hostile motion to reexamine the whole role of the faculty in the governance of the university. At stake was no less than his mandate—the presidency itself. The atmosphere was so strained, recalled Corporation member Thomas Perkins, “you could have heard a pin drop.”
Rising to his feet, Conant, new lines etched in his face, and gray at the temples, solemnly laid out the consequences to the motion before them. Instead of coming out swinging as expected, he admitted to the nonplussed members that he had made errors that were largely responsible for the current tensions. He pleaded with them not to punish Harvard for his mistakes, noting that any precipitous step on their part now might adversely affect the university for years to come.
Conant was sticking to the script presented to him by Wallace B. Donham, dean of the business school and one of several close advisors who were convinced that if their combative president went into the meeting girded for a “knockdown fight,” as he had confided to friends, he would jeopardize more than just his job. Donham put the facts to him plainly. He had lost the support of the faculty. If he allowed a vote of no confidence to threaten the historic relationship between the faculty and governing boards, he would do Harvard a great and possibly permanent disservice. The only thing to do was offer a sincere mea culpa. Conant shrank from the idea. “I had no stomach for apologizing,” he recalled, “particularly when I was under violent attack.” But he knew he had miscalculated badly. In the end, after “considerable soul-searching,” he swallowed his pride and did what needed to be done.
Conant’s frank apology extinguished the opposition. The anger in the room drained away. In the lull that followed, someone moved to table the motion, and it was quickly carried by a vote. Much to Conant’s relief, it “sounded unanimous.” There was nothing Murdock and his coconspirators could do but look on in mutinous silence.
Conant survived the challenge to his authority, but it had been a close-run thing. His enemies had turned out in force. The mood of the faculty that day, he would bitterly recall, was “close to being vindictive.” The episode exposed the political treachery that lurked in Harvard’s ivied halls, and underscored the enormous antipathy various factions still bore him for his unlikely ascendance. Although he had saved his job, he would never see Harvard in the same light again.
While Conant appeared to most to be coldly unemotional, he felt things deeply and was, if anything, too thin-skinned. His pride was a form of defensiveness, an almost impenetrable barrier he erected to protect a painful sensitivity. The Walsh-Sweezy debacle wounded him to the core. It was the low point of his career and he brooded over it for years afterward. In later life, he chastised himself for his lapses in judgment, confessing to family members that he had brought all the trouble on himself—he had been too arrogant, inexperienced, and bullheaded. Conant had reacted to the challenge to his authority by becoming even more overbearing. “An accumulation of prejudices” had precluded him from considering that the faculty might be allowed more of a voice, he admitted in his memoir, his adherence to tradition “so dogmatic as to be almost blind.”
* * *
Conant was too preoccupied during this period to notice that his two sons were busy staging their own rebellion. As they entered adolescence, both Jim and Teddy came to regard their father as increasingly unyielding and oppressive. They held him in awe but at arm’s length—his frequent absences and carefully titrated emotions ensured that a certain awkwardness and stiff formality characterized their relations. “We saw so little of him, really,” recalled his youngest, “we were sort of strangers living under the same roof.” Never a patient man, Conant was often exasperated by his sons’ obstreperousness and did not hesitate to use corporal punishment. Far more than his wrath, however, they dreaded his disappointment. Having concluded early on that they were not quite up to the standard that their father expected, each boy felt slighted and acted out in his own way. “When we didn’t measure up,” observed Ted with a defeated shrug, “he wrote us off.”
For his part, Conant found his sons oddly feckless and recalcitrant, and altogether too “soft”—at one point confiscating their stuffed teddy bears because he thought they had clung to them too long. They were always ill or nursing colds and unable to participate in the athletic pastimes he pursued with such vigor. He preferred to go on climbing and skiing outings with his hardy graduate students and colleagues, sending his wife and children on “soothing holidays” by the sea. Given their sons’ inability to please him, Patty generally found it better to enforce the old dictum that “children should be seen and not heard.” At the president’s mansion at 17 Quincy Street, she banished them to the third-floor nursery. It became her practice to send the “little savages” away as much as possible, packing them off to their grandmother’s or aunt’s on weekends and school holidays with little or no compunction, blithely telling Conant’s sister Ma
rjorie, “I seem to have to ask people to help me with my young, but that’s the way it is.”
The ease and frequency with which they were dispatched eventually succeeded in causing hurt. Jimmy, “a Goody Two-shoes” in his younger brother’s estimation, who for years had desperately sought his father’s approval, now alternated between biting sarcasm and sullen silences. Patty thought he seemed dejected and “extremely repressed.” On his fifteenth birthday on May 17, 1938, she mourned the changes in his demeanor. His old spontaneity was gone, and he was “reserved, conscientious, no longer straight from the shoulder, beginning to be torturous in order to conceal his real self, in self-defense.” Boarding school was the obvious answer. Plans were made for Jimmy to go to Phillips Exeter Academy.
Their ill-starred youngest son, however, was a problem of a different order. After a “disastrous” fall at Shady Hill, Teddy had left the school by mutual agreement. He was kept home all that winter due to another round of infections and a subsequent operation on his ears. A fresh start at his brother’s old school, Browne & Nichols, was a dismal failure. His father had hoped that rowing crew would toughen him up, but instead he contracted pneumonia and fell even further behind in his studies. “Ted is so far from any scholarly proficiency that I regard it as quite out of the picture for years!” Patty confided to Marjorie. “He is a rather difficult though interesting personality. Plenty of temperament (and intelligence, too, I think) if it can somehow coordinate itself. Unregenerate no end.”
Man of the Hour Page 23
