The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe found it impossible to get to know many of the Gold Coast men. They kept to themselves and their clubs. Their motto was “Three Cs and a D, and keep out of the newspapers.” “Our friendships are made in our rooms, with men who appreciate a good cigar much more than a Greek pun,” one of them wrote, dismissing the tedious world beyond Mount Auburn Street.

  For a young man who aspired to great wealth, it was natural that Joe gravitated toward the Harvard upper crust. Everywhere Joe looked, he saw irrefutable evidence that money and class were the same. The names of over half the millionaires in Boston were listed in the Social Register. About two-thirds of the Bostonians who were officers and trustees of major American businesses came from the upper class. They sent their sons to a Harvard that those young men largely dominated.

  By the time Joe entered Harvard, he was disgorging anything that might mark his Irish immigrant heritage. He did not drink, sidestepping one stereotype: the bulbous, blustering, belligerent Irish drunk. He had been born and brought up in an East Boston known as an immigrant enclave. During his Harvard years, the family moved to the prestigious seaside suburb of Winthrop.

  Joe could change his accent, dress, and home address. He could not change the fact that his grandmother had been a servant, as had most of the Irish immigrant women of the famine generation, and that his ancestors had been peasants. His grandmother’s name, Bridget, had been so ubiquitous that the Brahmin ladies referred to female servants as “their Bridgets,” and the now-debased name had largely disappeared with the next generation.

  For the most part Joe’s professors felt nothing but contempt for the immigrant onslaught that they believed had so besmirched the pristine reaches of their Boston. One of them, Barrett Wendell, reflected that almost everyone of his class had contemplated suicide because of the immigrants.

  Joe was not one to query his teachers and challenge their ideas or expose his background by rubbing against the wrong kind of ideas or people. As at Boston Latin School, he was no student. Joe took no pleasure in the bounty of courses set before him. In his freshman year he barely managed a “gentleman’s C.” That was prime evidence that he had not been infected by the contagion of academe, losing his manhood by sitting too long in class and library. The very mediocrity of his grades suggested that the professors and their arid pedantries had not produced what Teddy Roosevelt called another “over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues.”

  The Brahmin world that Joe wanted so desperately to enter was more than a charade of social rituals and endless disdain for the vulgar masses. Harvard gentlemen bravely shed their blood in their country’s wars. For Joe and the other students, the martyred dead were not simply names on monuments that they breezed by on their way to class. There were Harvard men still living who had fought in the Civil War and were the living testament to noble acts. When the students entered Memorial Hall, dedicated to the memory of the Civil War dead, they doffed their hats; those who neglected this modest gesture of respect were greeted by the sound of hundreds of students drumming silverware on their water tumblers.

  Harvard took itself seriously as an incubator of courage, considering its classrooms and playing fields as the highest training grounds for a true manhood that would have its final test on the fields of battle. Even William James, the celebrated Harvard psychology and philosophy professor, thought that war was the natural arena for young men to prove themselves. “Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us,” he wrote in a famous essay attempting to create some “moral equivalent to war.” “So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals and of hardiness, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible.”

  The Brahmin elite had more modest sacrifices to make in peacetime too. Joe could hardly aspire to be part of the Brahmin world without realizing the extent to which the New England Protestant elite, more than any other group in America, developed the idea that great charity is the natural concomitant of great wealth. If Joe was ever to stand with the elite, he too must be seen as a man of beneficence. America was not a land in which a life of the senses, be it of Epicurean indulgence or of cultural pursuit, was a worthy goal. The vigorous pursuit of wealth was a manly endeavor, but the mere spending of that wealth an heir’s pallid pleasure.

  Joe, first of all, had to be accepted among the elite. Three-quarters of the former prep school students made the final clubs, and except for an occasional athlete, almost none of the public school men gained entry. As a public school graduate and an Irish-American Catholic, Joe had no chance of making a final club unless he made his name widely and positively known on campus. Joe was not the populist sort who enjoyed mixing with a broad range of humanity, but he understood the value of getting his name out there. He joined the finance committee of the Freshman Smoker, the one event where most of the class socialized together. He also was one of the fifteen ushers for the class dinner, a position that involved signing up twenty fellow freshmen for his table. Both of these positions involved raising money, typically the least desired and thus the most accessible entry point to an organization.

  Athletics was the arena for attracting attention to one’s name, and here the Gold Coast men confronted Joe. As much as Joe loved sports, these prep school youths had gone to schools where athletics was far more important than at Boston Latin and other public schools. Prep school graduates were generally bigger, taller, heavier, and stronger than the public school men. In 1912 the Harvard Crimson noted that a study by Dt. D. A. Sergent of the Harvard Hemenway Gymnasium of roughly one thousand freshmen concluded that “the private school men were in every way superior physically to public school men.”

  The prep schools dominated the varsity sports. They made up nearly the entire first-string Harvard football team; in one typical year, 1911, all but one of the twenty-three football letters went to prep school men. So did most of the crew and track letters. Only baseball, a sport that many thought plebeian and not quite gentlemanly, had a more balanced mix of public and private school alumni. Even here, eight of the fifteen lettermen came from prep schools.

  The Harvard obsession with masculine sport was in part a class struggle, a way to maintain supremacy in a rude and brutal new industrial world. This idea that scholarship and athletics were natural halves of an education resonated deeply within Joe. The veritable machine of legend, the field of manhood, was the Harvard football team. As much as Joe desired athletic fame, however, and as large and strong as he was, he simply did not like the bruising physical demands of the game.

  The Harvard man’s spirit was unleashed on the football field in a torrent during the annual Harvard-Yale game. In Joe’s sophomore year the undefeated Harvard Crimson lost to the undefeated, unscored-upon Yale Blue, with Vice President James Sherman in the Cambridge stands. An observer, a former Army coach, pronounced the line play “the most magnificent sight I ever saw. Every lineman’s face was dripping with blood.”

  The nearest Joe could safely get to the hallowed playing field was to have prominent football players as two of his closest friends. Robert Fisher was a guard of such ability that he became an all-American. Fisher had the prep school credentials of a year at Andover, even if he had gone there on a scholarship. He was so poor that he had to commute from Dorchester. Joe invited the star athlete to live with him free in his room at Perkins Hall, one of the Harvard dorms. In one neat move, at no extra cost to himself, he had defined himself as a generous friend while attaching himself to the man who would become one of the Harvard sports heroes of his time. Tom Campbell, his other new friend, was a star halfback and a graduate of Worcester Academy. Campbell’s primary social demerit was that he was a Catholic, and he did not bring Joe the cachet gained from walking home to his dorm with his roommate, the celebrated Bob Fisher.

  During his freshm
an baseball practice Joe made his third close friend at Harvard, Robert Sturgis Potter. Here Joe had found a student who struck every social high note. Potter came from an old Philadelphia family. He was a graduate of St. Mark’s, the crème de la crème of prep schools, and lived in Randolph Hall, one of the most desired residences on the Gold Coast.

  Joe was not a cynical arriviste who befriended these men only because they might advance him. He enjoyed them, and it marked not simply his social ambition but his confidence that he dared to reach out to make such friends. In Potter and Fisher, Joe had made brilliant friendships, for Fisher was class president their sophomore year, with Potter succeeding him their junior year.

  Although Joe did not fancy himself a football player, he knew that on the baseball field he could show that he had the true stuff. Joe’s name might be carried far beyond the reaches of the playing field. Spectators came to watch by the thousands. Not only other Harvard men but also the public considered these young men heroes as much as a later generation would celebrate professional athletes.

  “Important fall baseball practice will commence Monday,” the Harvard Crimson announced on the front page on October 1, 1908. “Every man who is eligible for the University nine and cannot be of service to the football team is requested to report for this practice.”

  Joe had already taken the full measure of the other freshman players. That first day, walking over to take batting practice, Joe said to his friend Arthur Kelly: “We’re the two best damn ballplayers on the team!”

  Joe became the first-string first baseman, and one of the outstanding players on the freshman team. One of the best batters, he was also flawless on the field. The team lost only one game all season and tied another in which his absence due to a knee injury was noted. At the end of the season the Harvard Crimson described Joe as the most likely prospect to move up to a starting position on the varsity. “It is expected that this year’s successful Freshman team will also contribute valuable material,” the paper noted. “J. P. Kennedy is a likely man for first-base.”

  That summer Joe was riding on a bus when the driver mentioned that the vehicle was for sale. This gave Joe the idea of buying the contraption and turning it into a tourist bus. He lined up Joe Donovan, a fellow Harvard man, as his partner. They painted the wagon a glorious cream and blue and with neat lettering along the sides christened the bus “The Mayflower.” In a story crafted by Horatio Alger, the two young Irish-American entrepreneurs would have set off along Boston’s hallowed streets picking up passengers. The reality was that most of the prospective customers arrived at South Station, and another company had the right to park there.

  Joe was not one to nibble around the edges of this new business. He went to see Mayor Fitzgerald. As much as the politician disliked his daughter’s boyfriend, Fitzgerald could at least appreciate Joe’s initiative. Within a few days the man at South Station learned that his buses could no longer park there, and the new possessor of the coveted space maneuvered the Mayflower into the vacated spot. For a short while Joe worked as the guide, wearing a black and white cap and shouting through the megaphone. Such plebeian endeavors, however, were not for him, especially when he could cheaply hire others. For three summers, Joe and his friend ran the service, netting more than five thousand dollars, an enormous sum for summer labors. Joe had seen again that initiative alone was a fool’s parlay and fairness a loser’s gambit. No matter how good your idea, it was equally who you knew and how you used them that mattered.

  On the baseball diamond Joe had defined himself as one of the better-known members of his class, a student athlete who had every prospect of becoming one of the stars of the Harvard team. In the classroom he had established himself as proudly mediocre, displaying contempt for scholarly endeavor worthy of the elite. His friendships with Fisher and Potter had elevated him into the company of the most revered men of Harvard. He had not let matters rest there but had gotten his name on various committees, further advertisements for himself.

  Joe had done everything to ensure his election to one of the esteemed private clubs. The selection process for the ten final clubs was arbitrary in its means, and final in its judgments. The members of the Institute of 1770, the first step in the process, were chosen ten at a time, a social plebiscite brutal in its finality. Joe’s confidence and shrewd social maneuvering paid off. In the fall of his sophomore year, Joe and his three friends were chosen together by the inner club, the Dickey. For Joe his selection may have appeared inevitable, but it was a measure of the gauntlet he had passed that in a typical year, out of the 116 men chosen for the Institute of 1770, 112 were Gold Coast men, and only 4 roomed elsewhere, including 2 Harvard lettermen.

  If Joe had been brashly overconfident in assuming that his election to the Institute of 1770 was a foregone conclusion, he had every right to think he would now be chosen as a member of one of the ten final clubs. After all, he was a Dickey, already in an honored special circle. It was not a question of whether Joe would make a club, but which club would choose him. That was a matter of ample debate among his friends as the day finally arrived. Would it be Porcellian? Or perhaps the gentlemen from AD would cherish his company? Then again, what of Fly or Spee, or, God forbid, one of the lesser clubs—Phoenix, DU, or Iroquois?

  On a gray day in the late winter, Joe and Fisher were waiting in their room at Holyoke for the expected knock. As they paced anxiously, the clubmen spread out across the campus with the cherished invitations in their hands, knocking at the doors along the Gold Coast, though occasionally entering the dormitories in Harvard Yard. After handing out the precious letter, they took their newest member with them and moved on to the next person on their list. As the afternoon wore on, the groups grew larger—three, then five, and finally ten new members, along with the older clubmen, off in their world, beyond and above the public universe of Harvard. It was a moment of euphoria, leading finally to the clubhouse and inevitably to an evening of dinner, drinks, cigars, and manly conversation.

  The tap on Joe’s door came, as he knew it would. It was the gentlemen of Digammas, but they were coming for Fisher, not for Joe. And so he sat in the room and waited while outside the singing and the shouts grew louder. And he waited and he waited, and as the short winter sun descended across the Cambridge sky, he was still waiting.

  For Joe to have traveled so far up this road only to be turned back meant that he had been ostracized, pointedly thrown back into the common ground of the greater Harvard. He was as marked now as if he had been made a Porcellian man.

  Being passed over for club membership was only part of what Joe considered the terrible unfairness of that year. That spring Joe did not move up to a starting position on the Harvard varsity but sat on the bench watching players whom he believed he could outperform. As frustrating as it was to sit and watch, Joe’s identity at Harvard was based largely on being a varsity ballplayer, and he could not possibly leave the team. He knew that he still could be chosen for one of the final clubs. He was on eternal probation, his conduct monitored, his gestures noted. He continued his sagacious assault on the social world by joining the Junior Dance committee, which included a Frothingham, a Lowell, and his dear friend Potter. The event was held in the Union, which was festooned with potted palms, laurels, Japanese lanterns, and frosted bulbs. “Everywhere was to be seen evidence of the activity and good taste of the committee in charge,” the Harvard Crimson noted.

  Joe’s Brahmin friends had assumed that his Irish uncouthness would eventually work its way to the surface, but on the committee he had appeared an arbiter of good taste. Joe’s only disappointment was that Rose had been unable to be his date. She had returned to Boston after her year studying at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Blumenthal, Holland, and another year at the Sacred Heart boarding school at Manhattanville in New York City, an exquisite rendering of Catholic womanhood. For all his social ambition, Joe had no intention of marrying anyone but a Catholic, and there was no Catholic woman in all of Boston like Rose Fitz
gerald. Her mother had retreated into her private life, and Rose had largely become her father’s hostess. Mayor Fitzgerald ruled over his family with a narrow severity that he did not attempt over Boston; he insisted that Rose accompany him for a vacation in Palm Beach, Florida, rather than attend the Junior Dance.

  Joe had kept up his romance with Rose over the years and over the distance, and despite her father’s attempts to dangle other suitable young men before his beloved eldest daughter. Honey Fitz might not like Joe, but his daughter’s innocence was safe with Joe. There was no greater taboo than to touch the sweet maiden whom he hoped might one day be his wife.

  The ideal of manhood at Harvard had nothing to do with sex. Passion was for the football field, not the boudoir. Teddy Roosevelt was proud that his mother had taught him that he should be as pure as the woman he married. Joe’s generation of educated young men learned not only that there were good women and bad women, but also that the bad women were either prostitutes or amoral seductresses who preyed on vulnerable young men.

  If Joe should partake of their fatal charms or chance on an unknown working-class woman at a public dance hall, he risked horrors beyond measure. Even these seemingly innocent young girls might already be infected with syphilis that had progressed to the stage when the victim has “a peculiar kind of sore throat with white mucous patches [and] … the moisture from the lips is as venomous as the poison of a rattlesnake.”

  Such warnings were enough to keep many young men in the library and the club, preferring Quaker oats to wild oats. Joe, however, was not to be dissuaded. He headed to Boston, where he attended musicals and squired around young actresses and showgirls. This dangerous world lay far beneath the carefully prescribed pathways of society and morals. Here he was, as his friend Arthur Goldsmith remembered him, “a ladies’ man.” On one occasion he and Goldsmith went out with a couple of charmers from the chorus line of The Pink Lady. Joe was arm in arm with a young lady, whirling her around a roller rink, when he came upon Rose skating by herself. “He talked himself out of that one,” Goldsmith said, impressed at Joe’s ability to excuse the inexcusable.