The liberal Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter led the movement to reopen the case, presenting a persuasive argument that the judge had been prejudicial and intimidated the jury, only to have Lowell’s committee confirm the sentence and send them to their death. “Shall the institution of learning at Cambridge which we once called Harvard be known as the Hangman’s House,” wrote the New York World’s Heywood Broun, a member of the Harvard class of 1910, in a harsh column that caused his fellow alumni no end of distress. Controversy over the Sacco-Vanzetti case continued to hound Lowell for years afterward, convincing most observers that Harvard’s highest office was in need of new blood.
All fall and winter, as the various candidates jockeyed for position, Conant’s name was never publicly mentioned in connection with the presidency. While he had achieved a measure of distinction in his own field, he was not a figure of popular prestige and was unknown to many of the powerful alumni and officers of the university. Early in the search, Charlie Curtis, the youngest member of the Corporation and a Harvard classmate, had stopped by to canvass his views, and Conant had “declared without question” for Ken Murdock. He was delighted at the promotion he felt sure was coming his old friend’s way and had been happy to sing his praises. So that December, when Robert Homans, a recent appointee to the Corporation, requested an informal chat, Conant assumed he was after the same kind of inside dope.
Over tea and toasted muffins in Conant’s comfortable black-walled library, lined with thick tomes on history, economics, and philosophy as well as thin volumes of verse, Homans casually sounded him out on a number of issues of concern. Unspoken, but hanging in the air, was the question of whether Harvard was in danger of slipping from her undisputed rank as the foremost American university. Lowell, the greatest brick-and-mortar man in Harvard’s history, had achieved his goal of rebuilding the college—overseeing the construction of seven new residential houses, as well as new laboratories, music and museum buildings, and the massive Widener Memorial Library—but had failed to simultaneously shore up its commitment to scholarly distinction. His interest lay in “material rather than intellectual growth,” as one critic put it. His twenty-four-year reign had seen a marked drop in Harvard’s share of towering academic figures. Gone were Theodore William Richards, William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, George Lyman Kittredge, Frank Taussig, and Frederick Jackson Turner, among others. As the old lions died or retired, they had been replaced by a new type of educator who, while adept at training undergraduates, did not compare to the previous generation in stature and influence.
The university faced new challenges. There were new rivals in the Midwest and California, competing for the best scholars. Important professors had actually turned down chairs at Harvard, something that was unheard of not long ago. Boston was no longer the hub of the universe. The intellectual center of the country had moved to New York, with the result that Harvard, according to H. G. Wells in his most recent book, The Shape of Things to Come, was on the verge of becoming a cultural backwater, known for producing effete esthetes and teachings of “elegant impracticability.”
Conant, who found Homans to be a good listener, needed little encouragement to air his “negative views.” He provided a candid and concise outline of exactly what was wrong with the college, which he believed had suffered from Lowell’s persistent efforts to secure a system of individual tutoring. As a direct result, the faculty was being filled with “mediocre men.” The college, Conant declared, was going downhill. The crux of the problem, as he saw it, was that the standards for promotion were not high enough. “A university was a collection of eminent scholars,” he argued. “If the permanent professors were the most distinguished in the world, then the university would be the best university.” Harvard should be a community of “outstanding scholars,” he insisted, displaying more intensity than he meant to, and concluding dramatically that anything less was “to betray a trust—to be guilty of almost criminal negligence.”
He then made a passionate case for the survival power of universities by referencing the history of Oxford and Cambridge during the Puritan rebellion in the mid-seventeenth century, when their faculties were purged by the royalists and rebels, depending which side was in power. With the restoration of the king, however, both institutions returned to their former greatness, and professors were once again dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and preservation of achievements “the world would not willingly let die.”
It was a display of dazzling erudition, disarming earnestness, and naked ambition. For more than an hour, Conant had made a brilliant case for why Harvard needed a scholar of his caliber to lead the university and restore it to its former eminence. Homans was mesmerized. Pausing at one point to catch his breath, Conant apologized for being “unduly critical,” but the sixty-year-old barrister merely brushed aside the remark, reached for another muffin, and gestured for him to carry on. When the lawyer finally departed, Conant felt they were of one mind. “The meeting left me with the peculiarly subtle feeling that Mr. Homans and I were kindred spirits,” he noted afterward, “and that he was interested in me as a possible candidate.”
Nothing had been explicitly said, but Conant came away with the definite impression he had talked himself, if not into the job, at least into being a serious candidate for a position for which he had not previously been considered. It had all happened so quickly, he began to second-guess himself: “I rather doubted my intuitions and was inclined to discount them as the products of an overexcited brain.” Patty begged to disagree. Watchful as a cat, she knew better. “My wife, recalling my youthful dream of three lives, which I had forgotten, noted the gleam in my eye when I told her of Homan’s interview. She felt fate was closing in on her.”
Her instincts were right. Homans had made up his mind then and there that Conant was his choice to be Lowell’s replacement. This came as rather a surprise to some, who wondered how the chemist had contrived to emerge from comparative obscurity into a contender. Granted, he had done “well” in the war and had married into a family with impeccable crimson credentials. Still, how was it that this otherwise sedentary, solitary man of science had vaulted to the top of the Corporation’s short list?
After Christmas, the other fellows, on one pretext or another, called on Conant in order to size him up. The final selection process took place over a series of dinners that winter. During these stag nights, well-lubricated affairs held in a variety of Boston clubs, the pros and cons of the leading prospects were discussed—as well as the more delicate matters of character and social background—and the list was narrowed down to Elihu Root Jr., a New York lawyer, Henry James (the son of the philosopher and the nephew of the novelist), and Conant. Despite being Lowell’s protégé, Murdock had been eliminated after a report reached the fellows’ ears that he had been seen “crossing the Atlantic in the company of a woman not his wife.”
Meanwhile, they had managed to discover little about Conant’s foibles beyond the fact that he preferred beer to strong liquor (on account of a weak stomach) and smoked cigars after dinner, but switched to cigarettes at receptions where women were present. His idea of a holiday was a strenuous week spent climbing the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he kept a primitive cottage, after which he returned refreshed for work. He was known to have a droll, occasionally mischievous, sense of humor. If he had any religion, he was quiet about it and described himself only as a “deist.” It was decided that they needed to learn more. Lawrence Henderson, a close ally of Lowell’s and a Conant relation by marriage, was dispatched to do some discreet digging.
While the fellows were generally agreed that Conant had an “attractive personality,” several remained unconvinced that he would be able to command with confidence. Despite his obvious achievements and apparent poise, they were leery of his ability to boss what one old hand described as the “hardest boiled alumni in the world.” Based on his initial impressions, Grenville Clark, one of the Corpo
ration’s most influential members, had his doubts. Writing to Homans on March 8, Clark worried that Conant, not yet forty, was too young, stating that he for one would feel “safer and surer” if they went with “a more mature and more experienced man of greater demonstrated ability to take on so many-sided a job.” His misgivings were reinforced by a letter Homans received two weeks later from Felix Frankfurter enumerating the chemist’s shortcomings:
The more I think about it, the more distressed I am by the possibility of Conant. Concentration on him seems to me the counsel of despair. If you have read [Alfred North] Whitehead’s Science and the Modern Man, you will know how much of science is responsible for the mess in which the world now finds itself. From all I have seen of Conant and all I have been able to learn about him cross-examining others, he seems to me an essentially unperceptive mind, however distinguished in its own specialty . . . We need a man and a mind of distinction. A distinguished chemist is not enough.”
Still, many were of the view that Charles William Eliot had presided over one of Harvard’s golden ages, and when he came to the post, he had been barely thirty-five years old, a failed chemist, and the last choice of everyone on the faculty. Yet this unlikely leader had succeeded in transforming what had been a small, humble college into a great university, adding graduate schools and increasing both the endowment and faculty tenfold. Lowell, it was often said, had endeavored ever since to “rescue the college from the university,” rekindling a sense of community through his house plan, and bringing undergraduates and their teachers into closer contact. While the acres of raw red brick were evidence of his building spree, Lowell’s hammer had been stilled. The Depression had wiped out many wealthy donors. The days of endless expansion—in acreage, endowment, and enrollment—were over. Harvard was at a crossroads and needed another creative and dynamic president along the lines of Eliot to propel it forward.
Opinion began to shift in Conant’s favor after Homans circulated several interviews with admirers, who attested to his outstanding intellect and administrative ability. Toward the end of February, after a brief respite in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Conant began hearing from friends that they had it on “good authority” his name was being considered. “The Cambridge atmosphere since we got back has been thick with excitement,” Patty reported to Marjorie in a long letter detailing the developments in the “great game of choosing a president,” adding, “Bryant doesn’t want the job and hopes he won’t get offered it. He says, ‘The happy days would all be over.’ But he apparently feels it couldn’t be turned down. He does seem so far from the beaten track as a possibility that it seems impossible he will finally be asked.”
A few days later, Grenville Clark summoned Conant to New York and interrogated him at length. Still hoping to derail Conant’s candidacy, Clark told him that no offer would be forthcoming. But the previous day, while in Washington at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, Conant had received a note from his wife reporting that Uncle Lawrence (Henderson) had paid her a visit with the sole purpose of gathering details about his family and youth. It appeared the Corporation was having trouble making up its collective mind. Exasperated by the mixed signals, Conant cabled Patty on March 29: ENJOYED YOUR LETTER SUBJECT CERTAINLY GETTING STALE AM GOING TO SUGGEST THEY CONSULT A SPIRITUALIST MEDIUM.
In early April Henderson informed Conant that he had been dispatched by Lowell to explore the possibility of his taking his seat. He also told him Lowell said he would be “a fool” to do it. Conant, who had heard much the same from Lowell before, was unmoved. On a subsequent visit, Henderson disclosed excitedly that Lowell, who had crossed swords with Grenville Clark in the past, felt the lawyer was a “poor choice” and, although he had very little belief in the chemist, was now leaning toward Conant. There were more visits by members of the Corporation, and more questions. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, the presidency was beginning to have the feel of inevitability.
On Monday, April 24, he received a phone call telling him Lowell wanted to see him. A few minutes later, he strode into Conant’s office, sat down, and told him stiffly that the Corporation had that morning elected him president. It was a unanimous decision. Formal ratification by the Overseers would take another two weeks, though because of some arcane rule in the charter, it could not be finalized until commencement day in June. There was, he added ominously, no guarantee of their consent. Dressed in his customary old-fashioned morning coat, striped pants, and bright red cravat, the retiring head pledged not to interfere in any way with the new administration, his coolness conveying absolute skepticism. “It was painfully evident,” recalled Conant, “that he expected the worst.”
Disconcerted by the ungracious reception, and feeling aggrieved, Conant asked outright if his salary demands had been met. Unlike the past two incumbents, he was not a man of means. The expense of maintaining a large official residence was weighing on his mind. But it was not the moment to raise the subject of money, a lapse in manners Lowell punished with a frigid reply. “They said you wanted twenty thousand dollars,” he said, “and you shall have it.” He added a few well-chosen words about his having given to Harvard, not taken, and, with a last withering glance at his successor, departed.
Conant carried on with his day as usual, delivering his final lecture of the semester to his unsuspecting students. As they filed out, he looked around the empty classroom and realized he had just come to the end of his career as a teacher and chemist. He walked quickly back to his home and closed the door, his face wet with tears. He was mourning not only the loss of a subject that had engaged and inspired him since boyhood, but also any dreams of a Nobel, which was now forever beyond his reach. “Parting with chemistry,” he reflected later, “was not as easy as I perhaps hoped it would be.”
A few days later, after he’d had time to collect his thoughts, he sent Clark a brief conciliatory note. “I hope events will prove that you and the Corporation have not made a mistake,” he wrote. “Whatever people may say about the wisdom of your action, they cannot question your courage nor perhaps mine.”
* * *
When the news of his selection was announced at eleven in the morning on Monday, May 8, 1933, official Harvard let out a gasp of surprise. The reporters who gathered outside University Hall and clamored for a first glimpse of the “dark horse” were astonished to learn he was not present. The professor had kept a long-standing engagement to lecture at the University of Pennsylvania on the abstruse topic of “weak acids and bases.”
The slim, boyish president elect immediately shattered two traditions held sacred by his predecessor. First, he happily posed for pictures in his laboratory—even agreeing to hoist a slide rule for the cameras—in stark contrast with Lowell, who, one reporter recalled, “used to flee from pressmen as from a pestilence.” Secondly, he issued a brief statement, and agreed to talk to reporters on background. Then he stayed on, chatting and shaking hands like a seasoned politician, impressing the assembled journalists with his “ease, accessibility, and lack of stiff formality,” leading the Boston Herald to declare that this new man might signal the end of the “stuffed shirt” era.
The Boston papers generally applauded his election. “An admirable choice,” opined the Post, and the Globe agreed. The undergraduates also gave him a friendly reception, with the Crimson expressing satisfaction that Conant was “a man who to a large extent has risen from the ranks, and is not a member of that aristocracy represented by the Lowell-Eliot binary.” The New York Times sounded a more cautious note, calling Conant “100 percent a scientist,” and pointing out that he was such an “enigma” that there was no way of anticipating what the future direction of the university might be: “Not only Cambridge, and a family of some 70,000 Harvard alumni, students, and faculty, but probably the entire world of education will now focus its attention on another Harvard experiment.”
Patty’s family thought he was making a terrible mistake. “I don’t in the least see the idea,” Bill Richards
wrote his sister from Berlin on May 11, 1933, on hearing that Conant had been made president. The news filled him with “horror,” and it was quite beyond him to make the expected polite noises about it. “I mean, having to sell one’s idea to Teddy Mallinckrodt and the Overseers,” he began indignantly. “And pumping the more fatuous of the alumni for that odd, reluctant five dollar bill . . . And weekly speeches to the Harvard Club of Spokane or Little Rock . . . Oh, I suppose plenty of the disadvantages that I can’t even imagine have been fought through, to and fro, in your parlour.” Richards, by then an assistant professor of chemistry at Princeton University, was appalled at what he saw as the utter waste of talent. “The trouble is that Jim is not only a chemist, an active chemist, but also a very effective one who is by no means nearing the point of exhaustion,” he continued, stunned by his brother-in-law’s decision to forsake science at the prime of his career. “I’ve never known Jim to take an unwise step yet—even marrying you, although that looked pretty bad at the time. So I’ll just ‘have faith,’ and admit, meanwhile, that I don’t understand the situation.”
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