by Kai Bird
That evening, after supper, McCloy sat on the grass as Roosevelt stood by a campfire and delivered one of his more saber-rattling speeches.31 As the sun set against the Green Mountains, Roosevelt started out by congratulating the men for “fulfilling the prime duty of free men.” He then condemned all “professional pacifists, poltroons, and college sissies who organize peace-at-any-price societies.” The crowd applauded, and when Roosevelt paused and said he would not accept applause from any who didn’t feel a “burning sense of shame” for what had been done to Belgium, the men cheered even more wildly than before.”32 The next morning, the former president’s remarks were front-page news across the country. Public opinion was polarized. Editors like Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation inveighed against Roosevelt and the entire “warmongering” preparedness movement.
But the youthful McCloy was greatly taken by both Roosevelt and his stirring appeal to the idea of military service. Congress held hearings in which some disgruntled Plattsburg students charged that “rookie” trainees were being turned into hardened militarists. McCloy’s attitude was reflected in an unsigned editorial in the New Republic, probably written by his friend Willard Straight, on “The Plattsburg Idea” of national service: “The associates of this camp do not propose to militarize the American nation. They seek rather to civilize the American military system. . . .”33
Certainly, Plattsburg was a peculiarly privileged form of public service, performed in the company of the nation’s brightest and wealthiest individuals. But that was precisely its appeal: here were privileged men who voluntarily gave themselves over for the national good. This experience gave McCloy a new set of role models, younger versions of his mentor George W. Pepper.
When the camp was over on September 6, McCloy accompanied Pepper up to Bar Harbor, where his mother had gone on her annual pilgrimage.34 After a few weeks’ vacation, he returned to Amherst for his senior year. Once back on campus, McCloy plunged into the “preparedness” debate with a two-thousand-word article in the Amherst Monthly entitled “Why Not the Camp?” Unaware of his painful encounters on horseback, the editors identified McCloy as “connected with the cavalry at Plattsburg.”35
The article demonstrated that he had fully digested Greenville Clark’s campfire sermons. With boyish earnestness, McCloy publicly swore allegiance to the kind of political affiliations to which he would remain constant for the rest of his life. He declared himself a heartfelt patriot, an internationalist, a pragmatist devoted to “collective action,” and a critic of appeasers and pacifists. Echoing both Clark and Roosevelt, he wrote, “I firmly believe that there are times when a man must fight, I believe it as firmly as I believe in loving my mother.” He argued that the violation of Belgium’s neutrality by Germany was one such instance; it was a great crime that had to be punished. Whereas critics of the war inveighed against the senseless slaughter of millions in brutal trench warfare, McCloy made a highly romantic appeal to his fellow students’ sense of self-sacrificing idealism: “Instead of continually referring to the crime of Europe, it should rather be considered a blessing that men should die for the righting of such a crime.”
He fervently defended TR’s militancy: “Theodore Roosevelt said there were some things worse than war. Because Roosevelt said it, strange as it may seem, the statement ipso facto is not wild militarism. Incidentally, if some people wasted less breath calling Roosevelt names and considered more carefully some things that he says, they might accomplish more.”
He attacked pacifists by quoting Christ: “I bring not peace but the sword.” Of passive resistance he wrote, “They say it hasn’t been tried but it would work. They have great faith in it. I have just as great faith that it won’t work, and anything that I can do to hinder that experiment being tried, I’ll do.”
He reasoned with his Amherst peers that “war is an ever-present possibility. This summer war talk was rife. It would have taken but little to plunge the country into war. People would no more have hesitated because of the size of the army than they ever did.” He dismissed the popular idea that either the army officers or Wall Street was pushing the country into war. “The notion,” he wrote, “that it is the military men who make wars is wholly false. They do not vote, they do not urge their views, they simply do what they are ordered to do. The ones that order them are not the group of financiers in a corner in Wall Street either, it is not the President. It is the people in the last analysis. The man in the street in nine cases out of ten would have the country go to war before the officer would.
“Justice never was and never will be provided by the weak,” McCloy concluded. “. . . Crime and intrigue among nations will stop only when nations take a stand against them, and a very decided stand.”36
The article established his reputation in his senior year at Amherst as a leader of the “preparedness” camp, and it expresses a political philosophy that he subscribed to for the rest of his life. Military preparedness in itself was a simple idea, but for men like Teddy Roosevelt, Grenville Clark, and Henry Stimson, it formed the basis for a world-view eventually shared by a whole generation of “Stimsonians.” McCloy bought into this philosophy at an early stage.
In their last year at Amherst, McCloy and Douglas had both inched their averages to above 90, making them eligible to graduate cum laude. Douglas had no clear idea of what he wanted to do next, but McCloy had set his heart on Harvard Law School. He didn’t even bother to apply to any other law school, and was ecstatic when Harvard accepted his application.37
His class yearbook named him a “stellar performer,” but Douglas won the familiar accolade “most likely to succeed.”38 Their collegiate rivalry did not end with graduation. Douglas announced that he would join McCloy for the August session at Plattsburg. There the two friends competed on the rifle range. Douglas, who had grown up in the West handling guns, was an excellent marksman, but McCloy, who had already gone through two Plattsburg sessions, managed to equal his high score of 448 out of a possible 450.39
McCloy was not the only veteran to return to Plattsburg in 1916; 85 percent of the men trained in 1915 came back, including George Pepper, Mayor Mitchel, Willard Straight, the Roosevelt sons, Hamilton Fish, Jr., and Elihu Root, Jr. One notable newcomer was former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, forty-nine, who was given the temporary rank of acting lieutenant and allowed to command some cavalry troops. (Though Stimson was practically blind in one eye, he shot well, and the doctors obligingly pronounced him fit for active service.) It is quite possible that Pepper introduced “Lieutenant” Stimson to “Lieutenant” McCloy sometime during their cavalry exercises, but there’s no evidence that they established any memorable relationship.40
It was a much larger camp than in 1915; more than seven thousand trainees went through the program that summer. President Wilson had come around to endorsing the “Plattsburg Idea” the previous November, saying, “We have it in mind to be prepared, not for war, but only for defense. . . .”41 General Wood, however, had in mind something more when he wrote a friend about the August camp: “We are putting over the sentiment for universal training and perhaps that is the most important thing we can do.”42 Wood believed war was a certainty. And from the perspective of many of the men stomping through the mud of Plattsburg, there was already evidence that it had arrived on American shores. On the night of July 29,1916, a week before Wood wrote his friend about the need for a draft, a terrific explosion tore apart Black Tom Island in New York. Millions of rounds of ammunition and other explosives bound for the Russian front were destroyed, and the newspapers reported that the police suspected sabotage. As he left Plattsburg on September 6,1916, for Harvard, McCloy could not help wondering how long he would be left alone to study the law.
CHAPTER 3
Harvard Law School and the War Years: 1916–21
“In the synthesis of thinking that must shape the Great State, the lawyer is in many ways the coordinator, the mediator. . . .”
FELIX FRANKFURTER
Harv
ard Law School has been called a republic within the republic, a high citadel and a clearing house for the Establishment. To study law at Harvard qualifies one to become part of the governing mechanisms of the American state, and the friendships students form open doors for the rest of their careers. For McCloy, Harvard was the final stepping-stone into the Establishment. It made him part of a tradition that included men like Henry Stimson, Elihu Root, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
“I have a quasi-religious feeling about Harvard Law School,” Felix Frankfurter once said. “I regard it as the most democratic institution I know anything about. By ‘democratic,’ I mean regard for the intrinsic and nothing else.”1 Frankfurter was only thirty-three in 1916, when McCloy arrived on campus. A Jewish immigrant, the son of a cloth peddler in Manhattan, Frankfurter was awarded a professorship in 1914, a move embodying Harvard’s commitment to pure meritocracy. But the flip side to this egalitarianism was a seductive elitism.2
The rules of the game were simple: “What mattered was excellence in your profession,” recalled Frankfurter, “to which your father or your face was equally irrelevant. And so, rich man, poor man were just irrelevant titles to the equation of human relations.”3 What mattered to a first-year student was making the Harvard Law Review, an honor determined strictly by the year-end examinations. The competitive pressure on McCloy was intense. He was both awed and intimidated by Harvard, and compared his move from Amherst to Cambridge to traveling from the Greek provinces to the sophisticated atmosphere of ancient Athens. “I had to work harder than everyone else there,” McCloy recalled. “I wasn’t as smart. . . . All those boys from Groton and Exeter had a better education than I did at Peddie.”4
One of his Amherst classmates, Homans Robinson, the son of a Springfield, Illinois, lawyer, also entered Harvard Law that year, and McCloy decided to share a room with him. They paid $50 per month for a room in a private home off campus.5 Charles A. Wolfe, another first-year student, took the only other room in the house, and the three of them worked hard that year to keep up with their studies. “The first year there’s a preoccupation with survival,” Frankfurter recalled of his own Harvard christening, “and you don’t know, nobody knows how good he’s going to be at anything in a contest in which he hasn’t been tested.”6
McCloy earned a little extra cash and the occasional steak dinner by washing dishes at a steak-and-seafood house in Boston called Durgin Park.7 He, Robinson, and Wolfe socialized very little. Whereas many men joined one of the traditional “law clubs,” where one could have a substantial dinner, they took most of their meals at Memorial Hall, the cheapest eating place on campus. McCloy played a little tennis with a few of his fellow students, including Wallace C. Chandler, another first-year man, whom he regularly beat.8 But for most of that year, he was hard-pressed to keep up with his studies.
Harvard had been the country’s foremost law school for nearly two generations when McCloy arrived in 1916. Founded in 1817, the school came into its own in 1870, when a young lawyer named Christopher Columbus Langdell was appointed dean. Langdell conceived the “casebook method” of teaching law. Until then, students had listened to abstract lectures on the principles of law, and after a year or two were graduated. Langdell’s Socratic approach required a student to read up on a particular case and be prepared to dissect it under close questioning from his professor.
By 1916, the school’s staff included such noted legal scholars as Joseph H. Beale, Samuel Williston, Eugene Wambaugh, Edward H. Warren, Austin Scott, Frankfurter, and Roscoe Pound. The last had been appointed dean in March 1916. McCloy studied with all of these men. Pound, who wore a green eyeshade, taught torts and equity. Williston handled commercial contract law, Scott did trusts, Beale lectured on taxation and “conflict of laws,” and Frankfurter covered criminal law, jurisdiction and procedure of federal courts, and municipal corporations.9 Williston wrote what is still considered the bible on contracts; McCloy later said he was “the best contracts man ever.”10
They were all towering figures in the legal community, but McCloy’s favorite professor was Beale.11 Beale and Williston, both of whom had been on the faculty since 1890, represented the “entrenched common-law tradition.”12 This conservative school of legal thought was under severe attack at the time from such “radicals” on the faculty as Frankfurter and Pound, the nation’s leading proponent of the “sociological-jurisprudence” movement. Frankfurter thought of himself and Pound at the time as infiltrating Harvard with a “Trojan horse of what [Learned] Hand calls our ‘heretical thinking.’ ”13 McCloy gravitated toward the traditional camp. Perhaps Beale’s orderly, logical approach to the law appealed to his mind. Frankfurter thought Beale “dogmatic” and complained, “He could straighten out the greatest confusion. Everything had to fall in its place. He didn’t allow for any untidiness, and of course the law is as untidy as life with which it deals. . . .”14
Frankfurter was not a favorite of McCloy’s. “He only paid attention to the bright students,” McCloy recalled, “the ones sitting in the front row. . . . Frankfurter never paid attention to those in the back. I later used to chide him about how he ignored us.”15 Frankfurter’s favorites were those like Dean Acheson (a year ahead of McCloy), Leo Gottlieb, and Archibald MacLeish, who were quick-witted, articulate and self-confident. They sat in the front row, willingly taking the brunt of Frankfurter’s hard-edged banter. They were also invited back to the professor’s home for afternoon tea sessions where the conversation often turned to politics. But this was not McCloy’s experience; sitting in the back rows, he was one of those who, even if he did get called upon by Frankfurter and gave a partially correct answer, would promptly be upstaged by someone from the favored front row.16
McCloy’s other classes were led by equally demanding personalities. Professor Edward H. “Bull” Warren, who taught property law, demanded that students reply to his queries with accurate, tersely stated summaries of all the facts in a case. He once called upon an unprepared student who replied incoherently at great length. Warren let him finish and then said, “Sir, that was a splendid example of a diarrhea of facts and constipation of ideas. I hope you haven’t ordered your shingle, for you won’t need it.”17
If the regimen was brutal, it was also seductive. After a few months, McCloy found himself, in Frankfurter’s words, being “sucked into the law by the very atmosphere of the place.” He patiently read the casebooks and suffered through the Socratic classroom confrontations. “I had to run as fast as I could to keep up,” McCloy recalled.18 His long first year was neither distinguished nor dishonorable; it was, in fact, a familiar Harvard story. The precocious Frankfurter himself had spent the first few months of his own Harvard Law student experience muttering, “This is too fast a crowd for me.”19 Initially intimidated by both the faculty and his fellow students, McCloy just missed making the Harvard Law Review by the end of the year. He was disappointed, but the competition had been fierce. Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish made the Review, and so too did Donald Swatland, a brilliant classmate with whom McCloy was on friendly terms.
There had also been distractions to take his mind away from the law books. The war news from Europe in 1917 was increasingly ominous, and McCloy felt sure that he would soon be in uniform again. Although the Harvard Crimson and other student publications in 1915 had criticized the preparedness movement, the university’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, was an early convert. Feelings ran high on the campus between the pacifist and preparedness camps. One law student remembered with some bitterness, “If you were pro-war, you were a hero. If you were a pacifist, which indeed I was, you were just a no-goodnick.”20
Frankfurter was no pacifist, but he thought the preparedness movement was financed by big business and influenced by “sinister, ignorant forces.” He thought the worst of McCloy’s commanding general at Plattsburg: “The preparedness views of Leonard Wood make me wholly impatient—he has no vision about this country that goes beyond a German General’s.”21
&
nbsp; On this as on many other issues at Harvard, Frankfurter was in the minority. By the summer of 1916, the university had established a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) undergraduate course for the next academic year.22 When President Wilson finally asked Congress for a declaration of war in early April 1917, the campus quickly began to look like a military garrison. Hundreds of ROTC students were immediately sent off to Plattsburg. McCloy was ordered to return to Plattsburg by the afternoon of May 14, 1917.23
As a three-time veteran of the camp, McCloy thought himself professionally superior to most of his peers, who were in the greatly expanded camp for the first time. Hoping to win a commission in the regular army by the end of the summer, he decided to specialize in field artillery. “The work is getting more and more complicated,” he wrote his mother in June. “We have exams each day on the stuff and I am not getting along any too well on them. My chances are pretty slim in this game for a commission at the end of the camp.. . . So I guess my chances of getting to France with the 1st shift are thin.”24
He may always have felt he had to work harder than most, but he invariably succeeded. On August 15, he won a provisional commission as a second lieutenant in field artillery, and by the end of the month was temporarily assigned to the 19th Cavalry. Anna must have been relieved when, instead of being shipped off to the front on the “1st shift,” her son was assigned to Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont.
For the next nine months, McCloy was shuttled between various army camps and kept busy on training exercises. He wrote his mother frequently, thanking her for the little parcels she mailed containing chocolate, apples, and various other foods. Once she sent him a warm quilt and told him to sew the sides together to make a sleeping bag. McCloy demurred, writing, “Sleeping bags are usually a nuisance. They get so sweaty. . . .” He worried about his mother as much as she did about him. When Anna was looking for a new place to live in Philadelphia, he wrote her, “Do promise me that you will get a good place. I’ll give you something out of each month’s check that will help out. . . . If you only knew how much better I’d feel if you were well fixed.”25
