July 31, 2007
American Ceremony IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:40 AM EST A quick note on Alexander Burns’s post about pomp and ceremony. In describing Harvard University’s centuries-old tradition of having the governor of Massachusetts paraded into its spring commencement ceremonies by a mounted honor guard, Mr. Burns notes that it was Michael Dukakis, a “liberal Democratic governor [who] decided that he didn’t need the adornment of an honor guard. . . . I suspect Bill Weld, the scion of a venerable Harvard family, might have found the idea alluring. The trouble is, when a custom like this is disestablished in a populist, magnanimous-seeming gesture, it’s hard to revive it without looking like a prig.” Mr. Burns may be right that Dukakis’s liberal leveling instincts were operative in his decision to discontinue the tradition. (I think most political scientists would say that Dukakis, circa 1975, was not a traditional liberal, but rather a leader of the more centrist, “New Politics” movement within the Democratic party. But that is merely a quibble.) I suspect, however, that there may have been more to it. Dukakis was an alumnus of my alma mater, Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution that still retains a good deal of the temperament and political traditions historically central to the Society of Friends. Swatties, as they’re called (Spiro Agnew, ever a fan of alliteration, once dubbed the college the Kremlin on the Crum, after the creek that runs through its grounds), are long on reflection and short on ceremony. Certainly when Dukakis was enrolled there in the 1950s, students attended regular “collections” at the beautiful, but beautifully simple, meeting house. There they discussed politics, the arts, literature, what have you, with a strong dose of decorum and with an eye toward comity and understanding. If the college has traditions, as certainly it does, those traditions are quite plain. Coming from this perspective, I can imagine that the governor may have been mortified by the prospect of being paraded onto Harvard Yard by a mounted honor guard. Had there been an MTA line running through the yard, I’m sure a compromise might have been struck.
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