March 6, 2006
Trouser Press Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:15 AM EST It’s not clear whether this was coincidence or a bit of Old Testament-style retribution, but on the day in September 1922 when Harvard’s new application form, designed to filter out Jews, was announced, the Cambridge area suffered a strange visitation. As the incident was described in a New York newspaper: “Boston and its suburbs were captured by millions of tiny flies which swept through the city in such large numbers that many thought the snow had begun to fly. . . . Public health officials were unable to determine what caused the sudden invasion, nor could they say why the flies left the city before nightfall.” Other amazing stories in the news that month bore the headlines TROUSERED WOMAN WALKS BROADWAY and BRIDE REGISTERS UNDER MAIDEN NAME. For more on these, see this page.
March 4, 2006
The Goldilocks Theory of Social Engineering Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST In reviewing the furor over Harvard’s “Jewish problem” of the 1920s (here and here), what I find most striking is that it was yet another example of college administrators’ eternal fondness for social engineering. Like everyone else, academics overrate the importance of their own jobs. At Columbia, where I went to college, for example, there is a long-standing “core curriculum” that is supposed to mold the students’ tender young minds by acquainting them with the classic works of Western civilization. The faculty takes it very seriously, and if you listen to the deans and read the alumni magazine, you’d think that everything we will accomplish for the rest of our lives is the result of having been made to read a few books by dead Greeks and Romans and then discuss them with a bunch of pretentious 18-year-olds. In the social sphere no less than the academic one, college administrators seem to think their own efforts are all that separates students from disaster. In the 1920s President Lowell worried that if Harvard admitted too many Jews, they would not mix with the other students. More recently, President Lee Bollinger of Michigan (who has since moved to Columbia) defended his undisguised use of numerical racial preferences in admissions on the grounds that if the school had too few black students, they would feel “isolated.” So times have changed, or at least excuses have. But it seems clear to the academic mind that if you have too many students from a particular group, they won’t mix with the others, and if you have too few, they won’t mix either. Finding the correct ratio is evidently critical to the students’ future lives, so college presidents are placed in the position of Goldilocks, ever searching for the bowl of oatmeal whose temperature is just right. Speaking of lukewarm gruel, the Lawrence Summers imbroglio, which inspired this series of posts, makes me wonder: When was the last time a college president said anything interesting? Besides Summers, I mean—and his case shows why it doesn’t happen more often, because for the sin of doing so, he had to flagellate himself endlessly and give the feminists on his faculty a $50 million shopping spree, like a husband caught with his mistress. Back in the day, though, college presidents like Nicholas Murray Butler (who is the subject of a new biography by Michael Rosenthal), Andrew Dickson White, David Starr Jordan, Robert Hutchins, James Bryant Conant, Clark Kerr, and Theodore Hesburgh were widely known beyond their campuses—taking an active part in politics (Woodrow Wilson was the most notable example of this), giving weighty opinions on the issues of the day, and chairing panels and committees of the great and good. These days the only time you read or hear a college president’s name is when the college is hitting you up for a donation—or when, like Summers, one of them is unwise enough to speak a truth that would be obvious to anyone who had not spent his or her entire adult life on a college campus. Be honest: Would you want a job that requires all the butt-kissing skills of a politician but commands none of the power in return? The whole situation reminds me of the man who succeeded Butler as president of my alma mater: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike accepted the Columbia job in 1948 after flirting with a run for President of the United States, and if things had worked out the way he had envisioned them, he might well have stayed there. Unfortunately, despite assurances to the contrary from the trustees, he was asked to do much more fundraising than he was comfortable with, and he had much less influence over academic matters than he had expected. (By the way, the old story about Ike’s being offered the job by mistake when Columbia really wanted his brother Milton is not true. Minutes of meetings and correspondence in the university’s archives show quite clearly that Dwight was the Eisenhower they were after from the start.) Another problem Eisenhower had was his unfamiliarity with the academic process of consensus building. To get anything done, he had to go through all sorts of channels and procedures, and to a man who a few years before had moved tens of thousands of troops with a single command, this was quite a comedown. In particular, he was frustrated at having to deal with the city government. When Ike arrived at Columbia, the campus was split in two by 116th Street, an ordinary thoroughfare complete with automobile traffic. One of his first projects as president was to get that block of 116th Street converted to a pedestrian walkway. The goal was finally accomplished six years later, on the university’s bicentennial in 1954—by which time Eisenhower was dealing with somewhat more important concerns as President of the United States. There’s an anecdote about all this that I first heard from Prof. Henry Graff of Columbia’s history department. I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy; like the one about Dwight and Milton, it may have started as a joke and mistakenly been taken seriously. But the story goes that one day a pair of Columbia students saw Eisenhower standing at the corner of 116th and Amsterdam Avenue, waiting to cross the street. The light was against him, and even though there was no traffic in either direction, Ike stood motionless until it changed. Supposedly the students watched this scene in silence, and then one of them asked, “How did he ever invade France?” To which the other replied, “He must have waited for the green light.”
March 3, 2006
How Many Times in the Past Month Have You Eaten Kreplach? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:00 PM EST Harvard’s response to its “Jewish problem,” which caused some embarrassment for the university’s president in 1923, had already drawn attention the previous fall, when, for the first time ever, applicants for admission were asked to specify their race, color, and religious preference. They also had to say where their fathers had been born and to answer the following question: “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father?” Any such change had to be “explained fully.” Since name changing was common among Jews, the suspicion naturally arose that Harvard was seeking to limit its Jewish enrollment. Prof. Henry Pennypacker, chairman of the admissions board, scoffed at such charges. He said that the government had requested the information and that the new questions were meant to provide information on an applicant’s “family and background,” which could be useful for “making allowances in disciplinary cases.” Besides, Pennypacker said, an applicant could always decline to answer, though he added ominously that “if a boy doesn’t know whether his family changed its name or not . . . it may be then that there are many other things about his family that he doesn’t know.” Harvard had long enrolled moderate numbers of Jewish students, but with the great recent wave of immigration, their presence was reaching levels that made traditionalists uncomfortable—about 21 percent of the student body in 1922, triple the figure for 1900. The university’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, worried that Jewish students in such large numbers would form cliques instead of assimilating and that their presence might scare away gentiles. The revised application form led some Jews to talk of boycotts, with one calling Harvard an “intellectual Ku Klux Klan.” The controversy had first flared up in June 1922, when the university announced a plan to limit class sizes; critics said it was a subterfuge aimed at excluding Jews. Some also saw sinister motives in the school’s decision to hire black dining-hall waiters instead of using students, since most student waiters had been poor Jews working their way through college. Harvard responded to the furor with the traditional academic tactic of appointing a committee, chaired by a professor with the fitting Harvard name of Grandgent. In April 1923 the Grandgent committee issued a report strongly opposing racial or religious discrimination in admissions. The committee also reversed another Lowell policy that banned black students from freshman dormitories. That situation had arisen when Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Jr.—the son of a Harvard man and the grandson of Senator Blanche Bruce, a Reconstruction-era senator from Mississippi—was accepted at Harvard but barred from living alongside his classmates. (Ironically, the freshman dormitory system had been instituted by Lowell himself as a means of forcing students from different backgrounds to mix socially.) The new policy put an end to such discrimination. Still, there was a limit to what Harvard students of the 1920s could be expected to put up with, so the committee’s report included a proviso that “men of the white and colored races shall not be compelled to live and eat together.” In practice, the few black students who got into Harvard were lodged in out-of-the-way places within the dormitories. Regarding Jews, the committee’s decision merely meant that Harvard, like most elitist colleges, would continue to discriminate in admissions, but more subtly. As for the student body, it adopted the official policy of non-discrimination and egalitarianism in typically Harvardian fashion. According to the historian Samuel Eliot Morison (class of 1908), in the period between the wars, “an Irish-American, Jew, Italian, or Cuban was not regarded as such if he went to the right school and adopted the mores of his fellows; conversely, a lad of Mayflower and Porcellian [a Harvard club] ancestry who entered from a [public] high school was as much ‘out of it’ as a ghetto Jew.”
March 3, 2006
Loose-Lipped Lawrence Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:45 AM EST Lawrence Summers is not the first president of Harvard to get in trouble for making unguarded remarks. On Christmas night in 1922, President A. Lawrence Lowell was stuck in a Pullman car between Boston and New York. The train was delayed, so Lowell struck up a conversation with Victor Kramer, a 1918 Harvard graduate. Kramer, a Jew, asked Lowell about Harvard’s recent moves to restrict Jewish enrollment (see my blog entry that will shortly follow this one). This was a favorite subject for Lowell, a fervent assimilationist, and according to The New York Times, “So interested were the pair in the discussion that neither thought of dinner.” Several weeks later Kramer, the manager of a Bronx laundry, recounted the conversation at a meeting of a Jewish men’s club, saying (as the Times recorded his remarks): “President Lowell takes full credit for the plan to limit the number of Jews in Harvard. It was his view that so long as the Jewish people desire to remain apart as a distinct entity in American life and not merge in a social way by intermarriage with the Gentiles, just so long will prejudice continue and grow even worse. “President Lowell predicted that within twenty years we will see in the United States the same conditions that now exist in Central Europe, where blood is spilled as a result of anti-Semitism. “The time will come, Dr. Lowell said--and he believed it would not take longer than a generation--when the Jew must be treated in the same way as the negro in the South and in many of the universities. Dr. Lowell’s advice was that the Jews drop their faith. “The fact that the Jews no longer try to proselytize the Christians indicated, Dr. Lowell said, that they have outworn their religion and that it is no longer a necessary religion. We Jews must give up our peculiar practices, which have marked our religion these many centuries, and must leave aside our individuality if we want to be treated with equality in this country in the future, Dr. Lowell said. “He also asserted that a Jew cannot be an American, for to be an American, in Dr. Lowell’s opinion, one must be that and nothing else. He said that Harvard is not the only university that is barring men of the Jewish faith, but that right here in New York, Columbia and New York University are gradually reducing their Jewish enrolment. He seemed to be delighted that, as he said, the Jewish enrolment at New York University has been reduced from 60 to 30 percent.” After the above story was published, Lowell said it had grossly misrepresented his views. Kramer stood by his account of the conversation. The president took some criticism, but since many of Harvard’s professors and alumni agreed with him, the controversy died down quickly. In April 1923 the university’s overseers banned racial or religious discrimination in admissions, and from then on, the college dealt with its “Jewish problem” by finding less obvious ways to enforce quotas.
March 2, 2006
Eponymy and Vice Presidents Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:15 PM EST A few reflections on recent blog entries by my colleagues Frederic Schwarz and Joshua Zeitz.
1) I think the recent tendency to unname schools, government buildings, etc., because the person originally honored is perceived to have fallen short of modern ideas of right and wrong is one of the more deplorable aspects of political correctness. To judge people who lived in one age by the moral standards of a later age is the historical sin of temporal parochialism. This sin reached its apogee, perhaps, 20 years ago, as the country was gearing up for the bicentennial of the Constitution. Some said at that time that we should not celebrate it at all because the Constitution did not outlaw slavery. The fact that no constitution that did could possibly have been ratified was regarded, apparently, as neither here nor there. Fortunately these people were paid no attention to, and one of the supreme achievements of the Enlightenment was duly and properly celebrated.
2) J. Edgar Hoover, of course, is a different matter. He did not live in a world made alien by time. He unquestionably abused his office and he was, by all accounts, an utterly loathsome human being. So should his name be stripped from the FBI building in Washington? I confess to being a bit of two minds on the subject.
A lot of people who were not assumed directly into heaven on their deaths nevertheless have been honored subsequently in one way or another for their achievements. In the 1950s Oscar Hammerstein II had a great deal of trouble raising money to erect a statue of George M. Cohan, one of the giants of the American musical theater, in Times Square. The reason was simple enough: many people in the Broadway community then personally remembered Cohan all too well and refused to give one dime to honor a man they regarded as one of the world’s supreme S.O.B.’s. And Actor’s Equity, remembering Cohan’s attempts to break the strike of 1919, fought the project tooth and nail. Hammerstein finally raised the money, and the statue (an excellent one) of the man who wrote “Give My Regards to Broadway” now gazes serenely down that storied boulevard.
Hoover, likewise, has real achievements. He converted the FBI from an obscure federal agency into perhaps the most famous crime-fighting organization in the world. Should his later misbehavior negate that achievement? I don’t know. Let’s call this the “Pete Rose dilemma.”
(Alright, I can’t resist. Several years ago, after the idea that J. Edgar Hoover had been a deep-in-the-closet homosexual and transvestite began to circulate, former Senator Bob Dole spoke at the Gridiron dinner, an annual event in Washington attended by everyone who is anyone, politicians and media people alike. He pointed out Helen Thomas, a lady of a certain age and a fixture of the White House press corps for decades, and said, “Oh, Helen, you look lovely tonight, in your new dress from the J. Edgar Hoover collection!” The joke brought down the house, but I suspect no one would have laughed had Hoover—his secret files at the ready—still been alive.)
3) Whether we should unname things is a question. What should not be a question is naming buildings, highways, bridges, etc. after living—and, worse, still office-holding—politicians. Perhaps the recent attention paid to “earmarks” will cause this egregious abuse of office to go out of fashion. The federal government has a rule that no one living can appear on a U.S. postage stamp. That rule should be applied to everything.
4) Regarding the Roosevelt birthplace on 20th Street east of Broadway: It’s a reproduction, built in the 1920s, on the site of the original. The public rooms are exact copies (and the furniture is real—the Roosevelt family was notorious for never throwing anything away and it was found in the attic of Sagamore Hill). Alas, the kitchen is vintage 1920s instead of 1850s, but it isn’t open to the public anyway. The place is well worth a visit.
March 2, 2006
More Vice-Presidential Trivia Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST 1) Nobody we know was able to come up with a Vice President other than Aaron Burr and Dick Cheney who shot someone while in office, but Stephen Eschenbach, the author of an article for Invention & Technology about the first pitching machine writes us to say that Adlai Stevenson, the grandfather of the 1950s Democratic presidential candidate, who was Vice President during Grover Cleveland’s second term, “accidentally shot and killed Ruth Merwin, a friend of his sister's, when he was twelve years old.” [Note: Stephen Eschenbach has written to say that the Adlai Stevenson who shot his sister's friend as a child was the 1950s presidential candidate, not the Vice-President.] And of course a number of Vice Presidents may have shot people before they were in office, while serving in the military—most prominently Theodore Roosevelt. 2) If Cheney remains in office until the end of his term, it will be the first time in our nation’s history that two consecutive Vice Presidents have served two complete terms. And if George W. Bush stays in office until the end of his term, the same will be true for Presidents for the first time since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe served two terms apiece. 3) At least half a dozen Vice-Presidential historic sites can be found within a 20-minute walk of American Heritage’s offices: the site of a mansion formerly occupied by John Adams, and later by Aaron Burr; the site of a farm owned by George Clinton (Vice President under Jefferson and Madison), which by the way was later sold to John Jacob Astor; the grave of Daniel D. Tompkins (Vice President under Monroe); the former home of Levi P. Morton (Vice President under Benjamin Harrison); a statue and the former home of Chester Alan Arthur; and the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt. Now don’t you wish you worked here?
March 1, 2006
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST In 1911 an Illinois businessman and self-taught musician named Charles Dawes wrote an instrumental composition called “Melody in A Major.” A friend heard him play it, and the song was quickly published, supposedly without Dawes’s knowledge. It achieved moderate success as a recording and in sheet-music form. A few years later Dawes became a major himself (and eventually a general), overseeing the Army’s purchasing and supply operations during World War I and selling off its surplus property afterwards. In 1921 President Warren G. Harding appointed him director of the Bureau of the Budget, and in 1923 he chaired a committee looking for ways to bring order to the postwar chaos of the German economy. The resulting Dawes Plan was enough to win him the Nobel Prize in 1925. By that time he had been elected Vice President under Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge—following a campaign in which he was greeted at almost every stop by brass bands playing his song. After his term was over, Dawes continued his activities in business, banking, and international philanthropy, struggling mightily to help America and the world pull out of the Depression. He died in 1951 at age 85. At the time of his death, Dawes may have been unaware that his “Melody in A Major” had recently acquired lyrics by Carl Sigman, who had previously written the words to such hits as “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and would go on to collaborate on “Arrivederci Roma” and “Theme From Love Story (Where Do I Begin),” among many others. The resulting song, called “It’s All in the Game,” was recorded by a crooner named Tommy Edwards. It made the Billboard charts in 1951, and on its re-release seven years later, it reached number one. In the years since, “It’s All in the Game” has been covered by Dinah Shore, the Four Tops, Van Morrison, and many others—including, most recently, Barry Manilow. Manilow’s version appears on his new CD The Greatest Songs of the Fifties, which was the best-selling album in the country the week of its release. So, to recapitulate: A song that was written when William Howard Taft was President by a man who became Vice President under Calvin Coolidge, and which was then released under Harry Truman and topped the charts under Dwight Eisenhower, has been rerecorded by a man whose career peaked under Gerald Ford—and it’s part of another chart-topping record under George W. Bush. What better way to demonstrate the endless tapestry that is our great nation’s history? In a way, you have to feel sorry for Dawes that a throwaway tune, supposedly written in a few minutes’ noodling at the piano one afternoon, is what he’s best remembered for. True, most Vice Presidents do not achieve even that degree of eminence: Coolidge’s predecessor in the office, Thomas Marshall, is known only for his pronouncement that “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar” (supposedly spoken to a fellow sufferer while some windbag was pontificating on the Senate floor), while Dawes’s successor, Charles Curtis, is distinguished only as the last Vice President to have facial hair. Surely Dawes deserves better. Yet when you look closely at his biography, it’s not so clear. The Dawes Plan did help end Germany’s hyperinflation, but in view of later events it can hardly be called a long-term success. As Vice President, according to the Dictionary of American Biography, “Dawes shocked the Senate by demanding, although unsuccessfully, effective limitations on filibustering.” After leaving office he tried to rectify the Dominican Republic’s finances, head off war by means of limitations on naval forces, settle the disputes between Japan and China, and kick-start America’s economy with President Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In 1941 he urged America to stay out of the war in Europe. Considering the forces Dawes was up against—Japanese and German imperialism, global economic collapse, worldwide political tensions, and, most intractable of all, the United States Senate—he cannot be blamed for failing to accomplish any of these goals. Meanwhile, his genuine and numerous achievements in banking and industry have gone unnoticed, as such things generally do. And perhaps it’s not so bad after all to be remembered for a catchy and strikingly protean melody. This way, 10 or 20 years from now, when the song reappears as a hip-hop sample, or in some other musical form as yet uninvented, the memory of this otherwise obscure Vice President will be dusted off once more for yet another generation of Americans.
March 1, 2006
Forget J. Edgar Hoover Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST In response to my passing suggestion in a recent review of Taylor Branch’s new book, At Canaan’s Edge, that the U.S. government consider removing J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI’s national headquarters, my friend Fred Schwarz makes a good case against getting carried away with historical finger-pointing. On the whole, I agree with Fred’s premise. But with regard to J. Edgar Hoover, I do not. Hoover was, in simple terms, an unreconstructed racist who hounded Martin Luther King, Jr.—and King’s political associates—without mercy. He employed blackmail, extortion, illegal wiretaps, illegal bugs, and coordinated political sabotage to destabilize King’s professional and personal relationships, to hurt the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s fundraising operations, and to undermine other leading members of the black civil rights struggle. One needn’t even delve into his organization’s questionable maintenance of a national detention list, which kept tabs on tens of thousands of liberal activists—all of whom the FBI was prepared to arrest summarily, and without charges, on the attorney general’s order; or his organization’s strange collusion with prominent Klansmen; or his expert use of political blackmail to maintain a bureaucratic edge for several decades. In the post-Hoover era, we can only hope that the FBI has evolved from a lawless organization into a law-abiding, law-enforcing organization. Indeed, everything we know about it suggests that it has done just that. All the more reason to take Hoover’s name off that building. It’s nothing short of unseemly to name the headquarters of the federal government’s law-enforcement arm after a man who broke as many laws as he enforced. It inspires very little confidence in those who would like to know that we have moved beyond those less enlightened times when the federal government violated citizens’ rights to property and person with impunity. Now more than ever, in fact, it would do a world of good to see the beltway power elite repudiate the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.
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