Enter to grow in wisdom
Depart better to serve thy country and thy kind.
His personal motto was a saying of one of his Overseers, Edward Everett Hale: “Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.”
But generations of Harvard undergraduates would also remember him stalking through the Yard looking neither left nor right and recognizing no one. They did not like him, for all the new freedoms he brought. He would be remembered for the few rules he enforced more than for the many he did away with. Owen Wister, a freshman in Theodore’s junior year, called him a “flagstaff in motion.” To others he was New England’s “topmost oak.”
Along with his liberal reforms, Eliot also brought a variety of memorable personal views. He disapproved of sermons that mentioned “that scoundrel King David,” for example, and he believed in the benefit to mind and body of strenuous physical activity in the open air. A morbid mental condition, he once told his own son, was of physical origin. He himself could work twelve hours a day and not feel tired. As part of his preparation for life, every boy ought to be able to row a boat and ride a horse, swim a mile and hike twenty-five miles. He approved of football, but had the odd idea that the ball carrier ought always to do the manly thing and hit the most resistant part of the enemy’s line, not look for holes. Baseball he did not much care for because it depended too much, he said, on the pitcher and the pitcher resorted too often to deceptions. The curve ball, a recent innovation, was to his way of thinking a low form of cunning.
The Harvard campus then, like the enrollment, was still comparatively small. About fifteen dissimilar buildings, mostly of red brick, stood near or facing a main parklike quadrangle, the Yard, as it had long been known, which was crisscrossed with straight gravel paths, shaded by numerous elms, and loosely framed by a low rail fence. Massachusetts Hall, built several generations before the Revolutionary War, was the oldest building. Thayer, Matthews, and Weld halls were new since Eliot had taken over. And just beyond the Yard, set apart between Cambridge and Kirkland streets, stood the great red-brick Memorial Hall, the university’s most magnificent building, which had been completed the year Theodore arrived as a freshman. It overtopped the trees with its turrets and pinnacles. Within was a huge central dining hall, or commons, hung with portraits, a theater, and a vaulted transept, the great marble-floored Memorial Hall proper, consecrated to the sons of Harvard—the Union sons only—who had fallen in the Civil War. The walls were lined with white marble tablets, each with the names of the war dead, student-soldiers fallen in battle, arranged by class and with eloquent inscriptions in Latin—“CONSUMMATI IN BREVE EXPLEVERUNT TEMPORA MULTA.” There was no comparable memorial to the war anywhere in the country. “The effect of the place,” wrote Henry James, “is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honor, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor. . .”
What, one wonders, was the effect on an impressionable youth whose father had hired a substitute?
The famous Museum of Comparative Zoology, the “Agassiz Museum,” where Theodore spent a good part of his junior and senior years, was another several blocks beyond Memorial Hall, opposite the Divinity School.
That was all to the north of the Yard. To the south and southwest were Harvard Street (later Massachusetts Avenue), where the Boston horsecars ran, and Harvard Square (actually a triangular junction of Harvard, Boylston, and Brattle streets), where a variety of modest shops clustered about the University Bookstore, the telegraph office, and the Cambridge Bank.
Winthrop Street, where Theodore lived, was two blocks from Harvard Street, in the direction of the Charles River. The quickest route was down Holyoke. The two-story frame house—Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse—stood on the southwest corner of Holyoke and Winthrop.
A student’s room at Harvard, by tradition, was his sanctuary. “Its occupant for the time being is its master,” we read in a contemporary account. “He can do as he will in it; lock his door and be not at home; admit all comers; sit alone and read or study, or sit with his congenial friend and talk out whatever he may have the good fortune to have in mind.” One was expected to have a personal library in view (“nothing furnishes a room so well”), a few sporting prints, family tintypes on the mantel, a tennis racket on the wall, and sufficient furniture (”nothing need match”) to suggest “solid comfort.” A convenient spittoon was usually of polished brass, but the fancier kind, of porcelain with hand-painted rosebuds, was not uncommon.
Theodore’s quarters, all four years, were those Bamie had picked for his freshman year and consisted of a living room or study and a small bedroom behind, to which various “improvements” had since been added. (”I had Harry Chapin in here the other day to look at the new bookcase,” he had written Bamie in his sophomore year, “... and after he had examined it he exclaimed, ‘Jove! Your family do act squarely by you!’”)
Harvard undergraduates numbered just over eight hundred, and at a time when only about one American in five thousand went to any college, let alone Harvard, they were an extremely privileged lot. They were not all the sons of rich men, as popularly supposed, and President Eliot’s own particular interest was in those of modest means, who, in his view, constituted “the very best part” of Harvard. But then they were hardly representative of the country that, by Eliot’s lights, they were supposed to serve. Judged by the color of their skin, the churches they attended, the number of syllables in their names, by almost any such criteria, they were as homogeneous an assembly of young men—and as unrepresentative of turbulent, polyglot, post-Civil War America—as one could imagine. It was not just the comparatively small scale of Harvard that gave it a “family” feeling, they all looked alike. There was virtually no diversity to be seen, except by the practiced eye, and then it was usually measured by such things as money or “family” or the cut of one’s clothes. William Roscoe Thayer, warming to his undergraduate memories, would write of the exceptional opportunity Harvard had afforded to meet students of many different views and from all parts of the country, but in fact the decided majority came either from Boston or from towns close by. A study of Theodore’s Class of 1880 shows that nearly two-thirds came from within a hundred-mile radius of the Harvard campus. Harvard, moreover, was supplied year in, year out by the same New England schools. In the case of Theodore’s class, more than half had come from Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Noble’s, Hopkinson, Adams Academy, and other such prestige training grounds. A high-school boy from some point beyond New England was a rarity (there were about a dozen among the 171 who finally graduated).
The same surnames appeared in class after class. In Theodores there were a Blodgett and a Cabot, a Guild, a Morison, a Quincy, and a Saltonstall. The Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott, was actually the sixth of his line to attend Harvard; the first, Nathaniel, graduated in the Class of 1695.
There were no blacks in the Class of 1880, suffice it to say, and no foreign students. There were exactly three Roman Catholics, but no Boston Irish, no Italians, Swedes, or Latin Americans, no one with a name ending in an i or an o; and there were no Jews. Full-page cartoons in the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine, were sometimes crudely anti-Irish, anti-Semitic, or mocking of Negro aspirations.
“If you asked me to define in one word the ‘temper’ of the Harvard I knew,” reflected a contemporary named Samuel Scott, “I should say it was patrician, strange as that word may sound to American ears. . . .”
Birth of course counted for much, prominence in athletics was naturally a help, but scholarly attainments per se went for very littie, I fear. A certain amount of money was necessary, for a man had to dress decently and share in the pleasures and convivialities peculiar to youth, but wealth as wealth was no passport to anything in that
community. . . .
This code, unwritten yet all pervading and all powerful, is difficult to define. Over and above the copybook virtues, it insisted upon a composure of manner, a self-suppression and a sense of noblesse oblige that were in happy contrast with the blatant self-assertions, the unbridled enthusiasms and misconceived doctrines of equality that were characteristic of the country in general. It gave its approval to those who understood that modesty was compatible with manliness, who knew how to combine self-respect with respect for authority and for the opinions of others, and who were firmly convinced that it was truer sport to lose the game by playing fair than to win it by trickery.
I think I am not exaggerating this influence in the college life.... It was all rather narrow and provincial, perhaps, but I still believe that those who were really in sympathy with such a discipline greatly benefited by it, while those who were not, must have been in some way affected by it.
About the only remaining vestige of “old Harvard” in the way of rules was compulsory chapel every morning at 7:45, from which a student could be excused only for reasons of health—for an asthmatic condition, for example—an option Theodore never exercised. Otherwise the student could live much as he chose, so long as he performed up to the mark academically. The elective system had also evolved sufficiently by Theodore’s time so that in his junior and senior years a student was free to pick just about any course he cared to.
The faculty, though still comparatively few in number, was strong in most areas, and when the names of the larger Harvard-Cambridge literary-intellectual community are included, the list is truly awesome.
Emerson, Phillips Brooks, and Charles Francis Adams were Overseers, as was the elder Theodore’s friend from the Cincinnati convention, Richard H. Dana. Francis Parkman (then at work on his Montcalm and Wolfe) was a member of the Corporation, and Longfellow, former professor of Belles Lettres—Old Poems, as he was called—could be seen strolling on Brattle Street in his familiar brown overcoat. The renowned botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief spokesman in America, was officially retired from the faculty, but was still at work and also much in evidence. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler taught geology and zoology, and the younger faculty—all recruited since Eliot took over—included Charles Dunbar, Harvard’s (and the country’s) first professor of political economy; William James, who taught anatomy and physiology; and Charles Eliot Norton (Eliot’s cousin), who offered “Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients.” Recently, Henry Cabot Lodge had been installed to teach a new course in the history of the United States.
But by tradition Harvard students and Harvard professors were a different species and in this at least tradition held sway. Contact between them, apart from the lecture hall or classroom, was minimal. Henry Adams, who had given up teaching in 1877, found it nearly impossible to get students to talk to him. Others on the faculty, like the students, preferred it that way. To involve themselves in the lives or interests of undergraduates was simply not part of their job.
“Don’t take it upon yourself... to ask questions or offer observations in recitations,” the undergraduate newspaper, the Crimson, advised light-heartedly in Theodore’s freshman year. “Your questions would bore the students, and your observations would bore the tutors. And don’t talk to the tutors out of hours.”
In opposition to the Eliot ideals of academic freedom and individual initiative stood a modish student pose of indifference, not to mention the plain laziness that came as naturally to Harvard undergraduates as to any others. “We ask but time to drift,” sang Theodore’s friend George Pellew, class poet, in a Hasty Pudding show during their senior year:
We deem it narrow-minded to excel.
We call the man fanatic who applies
His life to one grand purpose till he dies.
Enthusiasm sees one side, one fact;
We try to see all sides, but do not act.
. . . We long to sit with newspapers unfurled,
Indifferent spectators of the world.
If everyone “flocked” to hear Charles Eliot Norton, it was because his course was a “snap”; while Henry Cabot Lodge, who was known to be difficult, soon had almost no students. “My system was simple,” Lodge later explained, “to make the students do as much work for themselves as possible and have them lecture to me.” His classes shrank from fifty students to three.
“A boy could go completely to pieces and there was no one whose job it was to know anything about it,” remembered a classmate of Theodore’s, who, like many, viewed the Eliot Epoch as a disaster. “There never was a worse time for a boy to be in Harvard.”
In Washington a historic blow for temperance had been struck by Lucy Hayes, the first First Lady with a college degree. “Lemonade Lucy” had banned all alcoholic beverages from the White House. (At state dinners, said William Evarts, the water flowed like champagne.) But no such edict stood in the way of Harvard undergraduates in these years of the Hayes regime. “Students got drunk then” was the terse assessment of another in Theodore’s class, John Woodbury. Even Charles Eliot, looking back, would concede that there had been “much intemperance,” though he thought it had been mainly in the clubs and particularly the Porcellian, the summit of Harvard’s social hierarchy. (He had thought the same of the Porcellian in his own undergraduate days and had refused to have anything to do with it.)
They drank whiskey, which was relatively cheap and easy to get. They drank French champagne and Burgundy, and endless quantities of beer and ale, which were cheapest of all, and shandygaff, a mixture of beer and ginger ale. (For Sunday mornings a concoction of ginger ale and rum was thought “just right.”) The favorite local stop was a grogshop called Carl’s below sidewalk level on Brighton Street.
There were at Harvard, said Scribner’s Magazine, “lads of good morals and lads with an inclination toward unwholesome experiment.” A Boston paper, angry over a student disturbance in one of the theaters, wrote that seeing the world to such young men meant only “gazing with watery eyes upon half-clad ballet girls and burlesque actresses, and hovering about them, later, like flies about a carcass.”
One wonders if the elder Theodore may have known more of Harvard life than he let on when he advised his son to take care of his morals first. Or if the decision to postpone any thought of Ellie going to college suggests something more than concern for his health alone, if possibly the father had sensed even then what the boy’s susceptibilities were.
The sharpest division within the undergraduate body was between those who were the sons of Boston’s elite and those who were not, and the line between them was clearly understood. In Theodore’s class the “set” or “high set,” “the club crowd” as it was also known, was composed of perhaps twenty-five young men, or no more than ten percent of the class. They were mainly all Bostonians and thought to be very rich and quite impressed with themselves. Their clothes were English in cut. They carried slim canes or walking sticks and wore the heavy gold watch fobs of the kind customarily worn by men twice their age. Several—Robert Bacon, Ralph Ellis, Josiah Quincy, Richard Saltonstall, Minot Weld—parted their hair in the middle, which to the average American was the hallmark of the pampered snob. General Grant was only the best known of those who disliked on sight any man whose hair was parted in the middle.
“The set had a new suit of clothes for every day of the week,” remembered a classmate named Rand, who because of Harvard’s alphabetical seating system was able to observe one such higher being, Josiah Quincy, at close range. Rand sat beside Quincy in class through all four years, yet Quincy never “deigned” to speak to him once. Quincy may have been the worst example, Rand conceded. Bacon and Saltonstall, for instance, would say hello.
But for those few non-Bostonians whom the set found acceptable, the Harvard years could be quite pleasurable, for their society included not just the “right” clubs, but entrée to the “right” families. As Owen Wister, a Philadelphian, observed, “pleasant doors in Boston,
and round about in Milton, Brookline, and Chestnut Hill, stood open” to a world of “gentlefolk” who were truly hospitable—”not mere entertainers”—who could talk of books and horses and winters in Rome. It made all the difference, he thought, in how one benefited from Harvard.
Those students—that small minority—who insisted on taking their studies seriously, who worked hard and made no effort to conceal their academic ambitions, were known as “digs” and were naturally outcasts. Socially, they had no chance. As the Crimson advised, only a little in jest, digs might be “eminently worthy” as people and it was “well to have a pleasant, bowing acquaintance with them, for they may turn out in the future to be very great men,” but their manners, like their clothes, were “apt to be bad; and except at class elections, their friendship is of no sort of use.”
Still, anyone who did not take seriously the academic side of life—or who did not appear to take it seriously—was expected to “go in” for something else (the air of indifference notwithstanding), and athletics rated above all. The late 1870s would be regarded afterward as among the most brilliant years in the history of Harvard athletics. Football, like so much else at Harvard, was new—still spelled as “foot ball”—but already great status attached to anyone who played. (The Harvard-Yale “match” that Theodore saw in his freshman year was only the second time the two colleges had played each other in football and the first game in which the teams were limited to eleven men each, rather than fifteen.) In baseball Harvard was “repeatedly victorious” and Harvard’s eight-oar crew defeated Yale three years running—in ’77, ’78, and 79. Harvard’s color, as of 1875, had been officially designated as crimson—rather than magenta as before—and to wear the crimson on the playing field or as an oarsman on the Charles was the quickest way to notoriety and acclaim. In Theodore’s time there was never any question as to the most popular man in the class. He was Robert Bacon, “the manly beauty,” captain of the football team, heavyweight boxing champion, winner in the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile, number seven on the crew. The Class of 1880 was known then and later as Bacon’s class.
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