In his own memoirs, Arthur says not a single word about how he felt when his parents told him that the temporary move to Cambridge had now become permanent. “Liberal Boston and liberal Cambridge offered an environment into which my parents happily fitted and from which they drew continuing sustenance,” he wrote of their decision to move east. It was a sentiment that would hold true for Arthur during most of his childhood and young adult life too. His earliest letters show a cheerful, opinionated boy with a sense of humor and, surprisingly, a love of sports. Aged seven, recently arrived in Cambridge, he set out his ambition for life, one shared with boys throughout the country. “When I am a man I wish to be a fast-ball player,” he declared earnestly. “I would like to be a fastball player because I am interested in fast-ball, because it is a good sport and because it is fun.” Besides Harvard football and baseball games, his father took him to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox, the team still recovering from the loss of Babe Ruth to the Yankees. That interest would soon develop into a passion for keeping intricate books of statistics and listening to games on the radio with scorebook and pencil in hand.31
Attending games and talking about baseball was one of the ways that father and son began to develop their close relationship. Books were another. All the time, Arthur was reading, reading: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Moby Dick, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, and heroic tales about Sir Francis Drake defeating the Spanish Armada. In the division of labor in the Schlesinger house, each parent seems to have taken primary responsibility for one child, with Arthur going to his namesake. Perhaps that was because, in the older brother’s words in 1926, “Tommy [was] a little bit to [sic] frisky. He has become the ‘terror’ of the house.” When Elizabeth went back to Ohio for the summer that year, she took Tommy with her, while Arthur stayed behind with his father. The two ate out at the “Cheerful Chap” as much as they stayed at home. They took sightseeing trips and went out to the beach in the family’s first car, not always with successful results. “In driving out past Revere Beach, all my precautions of giving Arthur a soda mint pill in advance and having him chew gum proved of no avail,” Schlesinger wrote to Elizabeth of their queasy son. “Therefore we stopped along a street, and while a group of young fellows yelled ‘Atta-boy!’ Arthur surrendered his dinner.”32
Arthur seems to have been as happy outside the home as in it. Neighborhood boys came round to play to “Detectives and Smugglers.” At the parties he attended he would win not just “the prize in hunting for peanuts” but was also “the fastest runner.” When he went to summer camp in 1927, the camp director recorded that “Arthur is proving to be a good camper and his counselor reports him as a real boy. He is entering into things here with a very fine spirit.” In fact, his all-round good spirits and cheerfulness gave his father at least momentary pause that perhaps Arthur was not quite serious enough. While Arthur wrote a letter to his mother excitedly telling her about taking his father to see his “ten things hanging up” at the school Exhibition Day, Schlesinger added his own rather less enthusiastic account. “Arthur took me on a tour of all the rooms,” he reported, adding wryly that “In going through his grade I was humiliated to see on the board the caption ‘History’ and under it the names of Albert Maguire [one of the “detectives and smugglers”] and Arthur in that order. I haven’t dared to ask my son about it!”33
The Schlesingers had sent Arthur “as a matter of course” to the local public elementary school, Peabody, just five minutes’ walk around the corner from Gray Gardens East on Linnaean Street. “To Middle Westerners popular education was an article of faith,” Schlesinger wrote, “a necessary training ground in democratic ideas and associations.” But Schlesinger still wanted his son to get ahead, and that meant pushing him hard. And then pushing him harder. Arthur skipped second grade, and then fourth grade, leaving Peabody in 1929 at age 11 instead of 13.34
Before he started at his new school, Arthur’s mother took him on his first trip to New York and Washington, DC (while her husband, with Harvard commitments, stayed home with Tom). Arthur’s excitement as they set sail for New York from Boston’s India Wharf, traveling down the Cape Cod canal, was palpable. “SO FAR, SO GOOD,” he wrote excitedly in his diary, “Tomorrow New York!!!!!” There is a certain poignancy to him recording that “We walked up Wall Street,” with the cataclysm of the 1929 crash just months away. The highlight in New York was going to the top of the Woolworth Building, Cass Gilbert’s “Cathedral of Commerce” on Broadway, which at 792 feet and 1 inch was the tallest building in the world. “The only thing I am regretting,” Elizabeth wrote home, “is that you are not here to enjoy the revelation and appreciation of Arthur. He really is a joy and as he confided to me on the elevator in the Woolworth Building, ‘This is one of the things I’ve dreamed about doing.’ ” Around Washington, there were traditional tourist visits to Mt. Vernon, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument. Perhaps most telling of all, Arthur made his first visit to the White House, where, he proudly reported, “I met Dr. Joel Boone, Hoover’s physician” (and a war hero to boot). Even at eleven, Arthur had a knack for meeting important people.35
In the fall of 1929 Arthur started at the Cambridge High and Latin School on Broadway and Trowbridge Street. Although the two children did not know each other there, Arthur’s future wife, Marian Cannon, who attended the same institution, left a vivid picture. “It was a true melting pot of a school in those days,” she recalls; “from East Cambridge came first-generation Italian and Portuguese and Greek kids; there were bright Jewish boys and girls with heavy Yiddish accents, ‘lace curtain’ Irish from North Cambridge [where the Schlesingers lived] and Cambridgeport, a few blacks, and the sons and daughters of Protestant yankees.” Both Arthur and Marian were “part of a small contingent of academic offspring, most of our contemporaries having been hustled off to the ‘safety’ of private day or boarding schools.” All told, Cannon recollects, “it was a jolly mix. . . . We were all outsiders thrown together higgledy-piggledy and the rich melange of personality and cultures was an education in itself.”36
For Arthur that education was a difficult one. In the intelligence tests he took before entering the school, he demonstrated an IQ of 151 and the mental age of eighteen years and one month. The headmaster, L. L. Cleveland, reported that only one child scored higher “by the narrow margin of a single point.” Yet in terms of maturity Arthur was far from eighteen. Plunged into the “higgledy-piggledy” world of the High and Latin, he struggled both personally and academically. At the end of the first term, Cleveland wrote to Schlesinger to tell him that Arthur, while “pretty good” considering that other boys in the class were older, was in fact failing.37
Arthur’s parents may have had sound reasons for accelerating his progress through the grades, but once he got to the High and Latin that decision began to take its toll. From being a sociable, sporty, outgoing boy in first grade at elementary school, Arthur had been transformed into the class “runt,” too small to excel in sports and too emotionally immature to be an equal among his cohort. He was already physically short for his age and, to make matters worse for him, he now wore glasses for myopia and astigmatism. “I was a ‘four-eyes’ in the school slang of the period,” he recalled. In those more rarefied school environments attended by many fashionable Harvard faculty children, such as Shady Hill or Boston Latin, this may not have mattered. In the rough and tumble world of the High and Latin, it made him inward-looking and, in the words of a camp counselor at the end of his first year, “a little highly strung.” Acceleration had transformed Arthur into a nerd. That could mean “taunts, threats, occasionally being surrounded or chased, once or twice even hit.” He found it difficult to make friends and fit in. “It is always a problem to get adjusted to new conditions, to learn new ways and make new friends,” his father advised him that summer. “You are going through that process now. It is an important part of life, and you will have to do it over and over again in the future.”38
Schlesinger conclude
d his letter to Arthur with the rallying cry, “I am betting on you.” In truth, he was not. It’s easy to imagine the anxiety Arthur’s emotional disintegration caused in the Schlesinger household. But what to do? Public education was, after all, an “article of faith, a necessary training ground” for these midwestern parents. To a large degree they had brought the problem on themselves by accelerating his progress through the system. The High and Latin was a first-rate public school that produced alumni around this time such as the poet E. E. Cummings, the Marxist historian and mathematician D. D. Kosambi, and sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. Later its successor school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, would find Hollywood celebrity status as the alma mater of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Yet in 1929 it was a very big school for such a little boy, a place, Cannon wrote, that was “challenging and exhilarating” but where “it was easy” to get lost in “the crowd.”
After two unhappy years, the Schlesingers made the decision to pull him out. Family legend would say that the turning point came when Arthur, taught by blockheads, returned home saying the inhabitants of Albania were albinos. In reality, the Schlesingers surely concocted the story to help cover their embarrassment over the abandonment of their principles. They had raised a bright but precious child too young to be in the environment in which he found himself. Phillips Exeter Academy, where Schlesinger knew one of the senior masters, Corning Benton, might provide a more sheltered setting. The school had recently been given a hefty endowment by the oil magnate Edward Harkness to encourage a Socratic seminar style of teaching. Schlesinger hoped it might provide a climate in which his son would flourish rather than getting lost in the crowd. “This sacrifice of principle did not come easily,” he wrote, “but appeared unavoidable if [Arthur was] to have proper intellectual advantages.” And, as the pragmatic and ambitious Schlesinger Sr. knew, the switch put his son into an elite WASP environment that took him one further step away from his Jewish background.39
For Arthur the social problems created by acceleration were not easily overcome. In September 1931 he made the journey forty miles north to Exeter, New Hampshire, to start life as a boarder. “I cannot truthfully say that my two years at Exeter were the happiest of my life,” he admitted later. The essential problem was his now perennial one. “I was two years younger than the rest of my class,” he noted in a sad self-portrait, “shy, stammering, bespectacled and with a case of acne that . . . was demoralizing, especially when I was in the company of girls.” Letters home to his parents show him to be lonely, overworked, and often ill. “Of course it’s silly that I should send you a postcard each day,” he told his mother. To his father, he reported that “I have to wear my glasses all the time now for when I take them off my eyes are awfully strained. I don’t know whether it’s because I don’t get enough sleep. . . . You can see from this that I feel rotten.” Even the food was terrible. “In getting over 100 in the infirmary,” he reported home, “we beat the record set . . . a couple of weeks ago when they served putrefied chicken and got 71 with ptomaine poisoning.” No wonder he would later conclude, “adolescence is an unhappy time.”40
Sending Arthur to boarding school had been hard enough for his parents. “We said goodbyes,” his mother wrote after dropping him off, “and you walked to the window . . . never turning and we drove silently away. It was a wrench for the three of us.” Yet they must have despaired on realizing that their son had failed to make a fresh start at his new school, especially when his initial grades were poor. “I just learned my marks,” Arthur told them mournfully. “They are awful. I am sure I will do better next term. I will not tell you them as you will hear them too soon.” His parents must have tried to relieve the pressure somewhat, as in reply Arthur confirmed that “Yes, it said in the Exonian [school paper] that marks are usually very poor in the first month.”41
The fact that he was much less wealthy than his classmates did not help. That detail affected not just his social standing but also everyday decisions. “I’d like to go out for football,” he complained to his parents, “but you have to buy shoes, football uniform, etc, so I think I shall go out for track, probably the cheapest sport.” He asked them to send his sweatshirt from home and to buy him a pair of running shoes. “I shall need more money, too,” he pleaded. The contrast to Adolph Coors III, classmate and heir to the Coors beer empire, was stark.42
There was no doubt that Arthur in the 1931–1932 academic year was at a personal crossroads. It is easy to see how, being unhappy, strapped for cash, and struggling academically, he might have slipped through the cracks. That he did not is a testament to his own determination to make the most of himself. It was not that he suddenly changed personality, becoming the school wit, jock, or lothario; his social pleasures were restricted to reading the newspaper in the library, listening to baseball, and, in what would become an enduring enthusiasm, watching movies. No, it was that Arthur Schlesinger, looking around for something at which to excel, turned to the closest example on offer to him and decided that academic study was his only viable option. It was an obvious and entirely logical choice. He loved and admired his father. Schlesinger was proof that you didn’t need to be physically intimidating or have a loud, showy personality in order to succeed. From modest beginnings, Schlesinger had become a distinguished professor at the most famous university in the United States. That was the model to which Arthur now fully subscribed, increasingly from this time onwards identifying himself to the world as Professor Arthur Schlesinger’s son.
Sitting at his desk, Arthur wrote out in his own hand and kept “How to be a student,” by John Brewer, director of vocational guidance at Harvard, which included the following stern injunctions:
Learn to do well in each subject; develop pride in doing work in each subject.
Learn how to fit new ideas into other activities by applying what is learned into other activities at home, at play, in health, in religion.
Learn promptness, regularity, initiative, thoroughness, and other desirable qualities.
Learn to speak clearly and effectively before class.
Learn to work toward definite goals such as examinations, promotions and life work.
Secure the necessary preparation to handle wisely important decisions.
Learn to solve new and difficult problems: 1. First days in strange places. 2. Work under pressure of noise, headache, injustice or anger.
Learn to use important tools, typewriting, encyclopedias, abstracts, and briefs.
Learn to think of school as an opportunity for future advancement.43
Looking back, Arthur’s discovery of Brewer’s vocational guidance seems revelatory. This manual of self-instruction amounted to a commitment to a life of the mind, but it also applied to the world outside the classroom. Everything pointed towards the primacy of thought. From the material conditions in which it could be conducted, the emotional and physical distress that he would need to overcome, the process of writing and thinking itself, refining his ability to communicate ideas both orally and on the page, and perhaps most imaginatively of all, the conscious application of ideas into all realms of everyday life. In short, this was a blueprint for the self-invention of Arthur not just as an intellectual in the model of his father, but with a pathway for the action-intellectual to come.
In one way, Exeter helped Arthur in his progress. As his father had hoped, the new Harkness method of teaching through seminar discussion gave the boy room to develop both his ideas and his confidence. The Harkness money brought with it new masters and better facilities. “Most of the new classrooms are great with conference tables,” Arthur reported enthusiastically to his parents. Now committed to his academic studies, Arthur’s performance and grades began to improve dramatically. By the end of his second and final year at the school in 1933, he had caught up and overtaken the older boys. “Last Friday night was Prize Night,” he wrote home in a letter to which his mother added, “This was your last letter from Exeter.” Arthur proudly reported that he “won two prizes�
� in Latin, including one for “the exam on the political career of Cicero.” To cap off a fine night, he had then watched “Scarface, a gang picture.”44
The contrast with the timid boy who had entered the school in 1931 could hardly have been sharper. Writing a final reference, Exeter headmaster, Lewis Perry, found Arthur to be “a boy with a face illumined by intelligence and adolescent joys.” Although he was only fifteen, “his scholastic standing has been very high, and throughout his two years of attendance steadily improving.” He was a member of Cum Laude, “excels in everything,” ranked in the top quarter of his class of 229 boys, and was particularly outstanding in Latin, history, and English. Perhaps most pertinently of all, Perry found him “earnest and devoted to his studies, with genuine intellectual interests going beyond the limits of the classroom.” It had been a remarkable turnaround. Arthur Schlesinger at the age of fifteen had transformed into the person that he himself had found in “How to be a student.” Arthur’s reward for his hard work followed shortly afterwards. On July 17, 1933, his father received an informal note from the Harvard Entrance Board. “The young man has a handsome record,” the letter said, “and I am glad to tell you that he will be sent a certificate of admission a little later in the week.”45
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