by Kai Bird
McCloy believed Peddie had given him a superior education. Private-school graduates, he said, “had the poise, the balance, the instincts, the training out of which leaders came in the largest proportions.” As evidence, he cited a statistic that 65 percent of those listed in Who’s Who were educated in private schools.44 The son of a hairdresser, McCloy was grateful that Peddie had given him opportunities beyond his origins, beyond Philadelphia’s Chinese Wall. He now had one of the requisites for membership in the Eastern Establishment: a prep-school credential.
CHAPTER 2
Amherst Years: 1912–16
“I firmly believe that there are times when a man must fight, I believe it as firmly as I believe in loving my mother.”
JOHN J. MCCLOY, 1915
Soon after arriving at Amherst, McCloy and his classmates clambered up to the balcony of College Hall to witness the inauguration of the college’s new president, Alexander Meiklejohn. It was October 16, 1912, a brisk and bright autumn day; the trees blanketing the campus were awash with orange, red, and yellow foliage. Scores of students were kept standing outside, waiting to squeeze into the packed hall. Inside, everyone sat impatiently in anticipation of seeing a new era begin. The last such inaugural had been seventeen years before, and the relatively young man about to speak to them represented a break with the past. Meiklejohn, forty, had a certain flair for the dramatic, a talent that did not fail him on this occasion.
From his perch in the balcony, McCloy looked down on the new college president, a short, gaunt man with a dimple on his chin and wire-rim spectacles balanced atop a long, thin Roman nose. Physically, he was not an impressive-looking figure; only his blue-gray eyes betrayed the man’s forceful personality. As he began to speak, the audience realized this was not to be just another college sermon. Meiklejohn intended to criticize the college and its faculty. They had just heard their retiring president, George Harris, tell them, “The aim of a college is not to make scholars. The aim is to make broad, cultivated men . . . socially refined, and gentlemanly . . . with sane, simple religion, all in proportion. . . .”1 Meiklejohn, in contrast, declared, “The college is primarily not a place of the body, nor of the feelings, nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a place of the mind. . . . To be liberal a college must be essentially intellectual.” Ideas and a freewheeling questioning of everything, even religion, were to take precedence over the athletics department, or fine arts, or Bible study. Meiklejohn announced that his function, like that of other faculty members, was to “stand before his pupils and before the community at large as the intellectual leader of his time. If he is not able to take this leadership, he is not worthy of his calling.”2
One of McCloy’s classmates, Scott Buchanan, who later became a noted philosopher and the principal architect of the “Great Books” curriculum of Saint John’s College, remembered the scene vividly: “At the end of the address I didn’t know exactly what had happened nor exactly what had been said. The air had been tense, many people were puzzled, and some people were ready to be angry.”
In that first year, the “Prexy,” as Meiklejohn was nicknamed by the students, disrupted a number of Amherst traditions. At compulsory daily chapel, he replaced the regular Bible readings with quotations from his favorite philosophers, such as Epictetus, or poets, such as Robert Burns. Several old professors were forcibly retired, and young men filled with brash talk of socialism and agnosticism took their place. Meiklejohn’s tenure at Amherst was stormy; he was fired by the trustees in 1923. But it turned him into a seminal figure in the history of liberal-arts colleges in America. And his essential liberalism—a blend of idealism and cold, analytical thought—influenced McCloy all his life.
McCloy took Meiklejohn’s course in logic, which met in a dingy chemistry-lecture hall adorned with periodic-table charts. One hundred students sat on wooden benches while “Prexy” held forth. “He would begin,” recalled Julius Seelye Bixler, a McCloy classmate, “with a selection from the Euthypro or perhaps the Phaedrus. Then, eyes flashing, and voice trembling with excitement, he would carry the battle to us, testing our comprehension of what had been said, summoning us to debate, challenging us to criticize his thought and our own. There was nothing namby-pamby about his use of the discussion method. . . . On occasions, before the closing bell, a kind of incandescence would descend on us, and the embers of the argument would burst into blazing flame. Afterward we realized that the experience had touched us where we lived.”3
Bixler, Buchanan, Lewis W. Douglas—later McCloy’s brother-in-law—became lifelong “Meiklejohn men.” Not everyone, however, was so moved by the president’s magnetism. Intellectually and temperamentally, Meiklejohn had the same moral certitude as another college president, Woodrow Wilson, who that November had just been elected president of the United States. He could be tactless with his critics.
McCloy’s attitude toward the man was one of qualified respect.4 He was entertained by Meiklejohn’s unorthodox ideas and respected the president’s willingness to debate vigorously both sides of any question: “. . . one came prepared for some new thought or some new personality every morning we climbed up the hill. I do not suggest that the entire student body was stirred every bleak week-day morning to a high level of intellectual speculation by the manner in which Meiklejohn conducted the Chapel services, but most of the students were intrigued and for a few minutes, at least, they had a new thought or an unusual point of view on which to ponder as they went off to their first classes. [He] had a way of stirring your thoughts on every contact you had with him.”5
But the constant intellectual banter made McCloy uncomfortable. “To me, he never seemed relaxed and you found it difficult to relax in his presence simply because he made you keep on your toes when you talked to him.”6 Despite his nonathletic appearance, Meiklejohn played cricket, soccer, and an excellent game of tennis. McCloy, who had joined the tennis team soon after arriving on campus, became a regular on the court with Meiklejohn. The college president played to win. “To my great chagrin,” McCloy recalled, “he once licked me, and he never let me forget it.”7 Intellectually, Meiklejohn never let up; even on the tennis court he was always turning the conversation to such weighty subjects as “What is justice? What is friendship? What is truth?”8
Such unrelenting intellectual stimulation had its effect; McCloy got into the habit of staging “reading debates” for himself, whereby he read books on similar topics with widely divergent points of view.9 Never brilliant, he worked hard to earn his usual B’s and occasional A. His favorite courses were in philosophy, Greek, and the American Civil War. His classmates remember him as a “competent . . . but not conspicuous” student.10
Some of the young professors Meiklejohn hired were left-wing in their politics. Walton Hamilton and Walter Stewart in the economics department, and Raymond Gettel in political science advocated greater government intervention in the nation’s economy.11 Some of the faculty were openly socialist and in their spare time taught workers in neighboring towns how to read. Meiklejohn himself encouraged students to donate their time to “classes for workers” in nearby Springfield and Holyoke.
McCloy, however, did not have a yen for teaching the working class how to read. He was still the hairdresser’s son, struggling to better his own status in life. While the college gave him a small scholarship to meet the $140 annual tuition, he waited on tables to help pay for his room and board. Altogether, it cost about $750 annually for an Amherst education, and Anna’s hairdressing money covered the bulk of this. During his freshman year, while rooming with Amzi Hoffman and Gus Edwards in a dormitory, he joined Beta Theta Pi, one of the cheaper fraternities.
Though a scholarship student and relatively poor, McCloy chose friends that were more often than not of a different class. His future brother-in-law was a case in point. Lewis W. Douglas was one of the richest men in McCloy’s class. The son of an Arizona copper-mining magnate, Douglas had the easygoing self-assurance of a young man born to wealth, and soon esta
blished himself as a “big man on campus.” He joined the most expensive and fancy of fraternities, Alpha Delta Phi, and, unlike McCloy, quickly assumed positions of leadership among his peers. He became class treasurer, and led a revolt that first year against the excessive “hazing” of freshmen by older fraternity boys. “Lew” Douglas had strong views about everything and didn’t hesitate to voice them. Indeed, McCloy thought him a bit sanctimonious.12 Gradually, however, the two men established a friendly rivalry, competing for grades and arguing over politics. This rivalry set a pattern, not only at Amherst, but later, in their careers on Wall Street and in government. Although they often disagreed, each judged himself partly by his measure of the other’s career.
In the evenings, McCloy, Douglas, and other Amherst friends occasionally took a trolley ride toward South Deerfield, or joined other students at Dick Rahar’s beer garden. On weekends, they often took long hikes across the Holyoke mountain ridges; afterward, they’d spend 50 cents to eat creamed spinach and chicken at one of the local restaurants.13 Saturday nights, the frat houses hosted dances attended by women from nearby Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges. McCloy, however, was not known for “fussing” or “twosing,” as dating was called. On this score, Lew Douglas clearly outshone him. Douglas spent a lot of his free time chasing women at Smith College; the Class of 1916 yearbook noted: “Jack McCloy and Lew Douglas hold the two ends of the fussing record.”14
When McCloy returned to Amherst for his junior year in the autumn of 1914, the campus was consumed by talk of the European war that had just broken out. Articles advocating first the German and then the Allied cause were published in the Amherst Monthly. Most students were inclined to favor the Allies, and some thought America might someday be dragged into the fight. But early in the debate, President Meiklejohn strongly aligned himself with President Wilson’s policy of neutralism and nonintervention. He discouraged what became known on the campus as the “preparedness movement,” and refused to introduce military training into the curriculum, as suggested by many alumni and students. He was accused of pacifism.
On this issue, McCloy opposed his “Prexy.” Everything he read about the war, particularly the accounts of alleged German atrocities committed in Belgium, struck an emotional chord; he was repelled by “things German.” In the face of Prussian militarism, a policy of military preparedness seemed only good sense. He felt so strongly about the issue that, in the spring of 1915, he and three other students announced that they were going to attend a military training camp in the summer.15 At Plattsburg, he had the formative political experience of his life.
Most Americans were unconcerned about the war in Europe until the afternoon of May 7, 1915. On that day, a German submarine fired a torpedo into a Cunard passenger liner off the coast of Ireland. The Lusitania sank within eighteen minutes, and 1,195 of her 1,959 passengers and crew members drowned. One hundred and twenty-four Americans died, bringing the European war home to America. The New York Times called upon the Wilson administration to demand that “the Germans shall no longer make war like savages drunk with blood.”16
Grenville Clark, thirty-two, heir to a banking and railroad fortune and a senior partner in the firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland, was so upset at the news that he couldn’t work that day. He told his law partner, Elihu Root, Jr., that inaction was intolerable. Two days later, Clark called together some of his friends to discuss what they could do. Clark had noticed an article in the newspaper about an upcoming military training camp for students at Plattsburg, New York. Picking up on the idea, he suggested to his friends that they form a “businessmen’s camp.” The idea met with approval, and by June 14, 1915, Clark had arranged for General Leonard Wood to speak to a packed audience on the subject at the Harvard Club. A veteran of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” General Wood was an ardent interventionist. Over a thousand lawyers and other professional young men listened as he praised the sacrifices being made in the European trenches and warned that the United States had to prepare itself to join the struggle. Afterward, Bernard Baruch, the Wall Street financier, donated an initial $3,000 to prepare the camp at Plattsburg.
Thousands of circulars and application blanks were soon mailed out to colleges and various alumni lists on the Eastern Seaboard. McCloy may have heard of Plattsburg through one of these fliers, but it is more likely that George Wharton Pepper provoked him into joining the camp. Pepper signed up for the first businessmen’s camp, scheduled for August, and McCloy joined a training session for students beginning on July 6, 1915. “It seemed to me that all the right people went,” McCloy recalled many years later.17 They were certainly an elite group of students: Out of a total of 613 trainees, Harvard boasted the largest contribution with 76, followed by Yale with 62, and Princeton with 48. The rest came from similar colleges, such as Dartmouth and Bowdoin, and a few prep schools, such as Andover.18
Plattsburg was a small town of ten thousand residents. The army camp was located outside the town, on the shore of Lake Champlain and had a breathtaking view of both the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks.19 McCloy arrived on the afternoon of July 5, to be greeted at the depot by a group of army officers and escorted to the camp, where he paid $27.50 for the privilege of four weeks’ training ($17.50 for food and $10 for a uniform).20 After a medical examination, he was taken to a stretch of ground sloping toward the lake where sixteen rows of conical tents had been pitched.
The next morning, he rose at 5:15 A.M. to begin the day with a cold shower, followed by group calisthenics and a quick breakfast. He and his squad, members of Company A, were issued rifles and taught how to care for them. The rest of the morning was devoted to marching drill. Noon mess was wolfed down by the hungry trainees, and then the students were allowed a choice of “voluntary work” in the afternoons. McCloy concentrated on rifle practice and learning to play soldier on horseback. He was good on the rifle range, and terrible on horseback. Some recruits were thrown from their horses so often that they joked it was “aviation” they were learning, not “equitation.”21
At the end of each day, with his buttocks often blistered from the afternoon scrimmage with the saddle, McCloy was moved by a spine-tingling exercise in ceremonial patriotism. As the “colors” were lowered, and after the “retreat” was sounded by bugle, the entire camp came to attention as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. “I do not believe anyone in the camp,” McCloy wrote a few weeks later, “no matter how tired or how blue he felt, ever ‘stood retreat’ without having a tiny thrill run up his spine.”22
When the four-week session was over, he requested permission to remain for the businessmen’s camp session, beginning on August 8. He and a few other enthusiastic students, including Archie Roosevelt, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, settled in for another four weeks. He was now in very special company. One major organizer of the businessmen’s camp, DeLancey K. Jay, was a descendant of both John Jay and John Jacob Astor. Jay had recruited “the best & most desirable men” from as far away as Buffalo, Chicago, and Cleveland.23 Standards were extremely high. Of the twelve hundred men who attended the camp that summer, more than 90 percent were college graduates.24 Included were New York Police Commissioner Arthur Woods; Ralph W. Page, son of the U.S. ambassador to London; and Willard Straight, a millionaire then working for J. P. Morgan & Co. The previous year, Straight had founded The New Republic, which, of course, was running articles in support of preparedness.25
There were, indeed, so many men of substantial wealth that the press quickly dubbed Plattsburg the “millionaires’ camp.” It was reported that “the butterflies of Newport and Bar Harbor complained that life was desolate, since the best of their young men were at Plattsburg.”26
McCloy used his month-long “veteran” status to make himself known to a few of these men, and his relationship with George Pepper helped smooth the way. He became friends with Jay J. Scandrett, twenty, a nephew of J. P. Morgan partner Dwight Morrow. He so impressed Morgan partner Willard Straight that he was off
ered a job in the Philippines with a Morgan-affiliated company. He turned the proposition down.27
The businessmen’s camp routine was similar to what McCloy had just gone through in the previous month—except for the level of propaganda. As one historian later put it, “Plattsburg was not just a military training camp, it was, in a way, a secular retreat for a whole generation. There, amid simple, material surroundings, the upper-class elite underwent a conversion experience of patriotism. . . .”
In the evening, the men sat around fires, listening to army officers talk about the inadequate state of the nation’s defenses. Grenville Clark often spoke, and McCloy was fascinated by the charismatic lawyer’s words. General Wood, who had come to supervise the camp, believed such sessions were as important as the daily rifle drills. The first week, Wood told the men that William Jennings Bryan’s recent assertion that the country could easily be defended by a million citizens springing to arms between sunrise and sunset was “a perfectly asinine statement.”28 America, he warned, could easily be invaded by a relatively small army, only three hundred thousand men.29 Wood was a jingoist and an alarmist, and although he was under orders not to say anything that would undermine the Wilson administration’s official stance of neutrality between the Allies and the Germans, the Plattsburg trainees came to recognize their potential enemy. Reporters heard the men singing this ditty while on the march:
We’re Captain Kelly’s company
We’re neutral to a man
But if we have to lick the Dutch
You bet your life we can. 30
These and other remarks were reported in the daily papers around the country, causing jitters in Washington, and increasing tension between Wilson and Wood. The Plattsburg general then invited Theodore Roosevelt to address the trainees. Roosevelt showed up early on the morning of August 25, wearing his familiar Rough Rider outfit. He spent the day watching McCloy, his son Archie, and twelve hundred other men in the camp perform maneuvers against regular U.S. Army units.
