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.
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