In his first commencement address on a hot June afternoon in 1934, Conant spoke out against Hitler’s totalitarian grip on education, and reaffirmed his commitment to the principle of academic freedom. The reality of the Nazis’ repressive regime was becoming clearer every day as news about the purging of German universities reached across the Atlantic. After Hitler mandated that universities teach only authorized doctrines, thousands of torch-bearing students and professors had paraded through the streets of German cities and college towns laying funeral pyres for the pillaged and impounded books. Praising Harvard’s long history of freedom, Conant argued that American universities must be vigilant guardians of liberty—only by doing so could they be of value to their country and worthy of their past. “It will be a sad day for America,” he told the thousands of alumni and black-gowned students thronging the Yard, “when either reactionary intolerance or revolutionary zealotry takes possession of our academic halls.”
He was nearing the end of his remarks when the air was suddenly pierced by the loud cries of two young female students chanting “Down with Hitler!” “Down with Hanfstaengl!” The hecklers, who had chained their wrists to the stands near the speaker’s platform in Sever Quadrangle, attempted to interrupt the proceedings with more catcalls and shouts of “Fascist butchers!” before the police rushed in and led them away. Hesitating only briefly, Conant continued to speak, ignoring the commotion. Half an hour later, turmoil erupted again as seven more student agitators chained themselves to the light poles in front of Lehman Hall, brandishing placards and haranguing spectators.
It was all part of an elaborate demonstration protesting the presence of Hitler’s foreign press secretary, Ernst Franz “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had been invited to attend his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion that same weekend. Putzi—who never failed to remind reporters that his mother was American and a member of the Boston Sedgwick family—was not only a high-ranking representative of the Nazi regime, he was one of der Führer’s close friends and favorite court jester. Ironically, Harvard’s notorious alumnus was not even on campus to hear Conant’s stirring words, having opted instead to spend the afternoon relaxing at the North Shore mansion of his classmate Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr.
A giant of a man, and hugely gregarious, Putzi was known more for his drinking than intellectual capacity, and for being one of the most popular members of the Harvard class of 1909. Although the foreign correspondent William Shirer described him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown,” in his college years he was by all accounts a talented musician and Hasty Pudding star, and much beloved by his peers for his enthusiastic performances at pep rallies, once banging away on an upright piano lashed to the back of a flatbed truck as it steamed through the back streets of Cambridge. The son of a wealthy Munich art dealer and publisher, Hanfstaengl moved in elite circles, was close friends with Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and spent Christmas 1908 at the White House. He returned home after World War I, and his childlike enthusiasm and willing racism made him the perfect partisan for Bavaria’s right-wing National Socialist leader, proudly telling his class record in 1922 that he had met “the man who has saved Germany and civilization: Adolf Hitler.” The strapping Harvard oarsman was soon serving as Hitler’s bodyguard and personal pianist, and the two reportedly collaborated in writing “The German Storm,” a Nazi marching song.
On receiving the invitation to be vice marshal of the alumni at Harvard’s commencement, Hanfstaengl announced from Berlin in late March 1934 that he was looking forward to it with the “greatest anticipation,” and added that he might, “as a surprise,” bring a propaganda film which could “show better than any words of mine what we Nazis stand for.” After news of his impending visit touched off a storm of protest from Jewish alumni and anti-Nazi groups, he resigned his marshal role and indicated he might not make the reunion, professing to be “flabbergasted” by the negative response.
Not one to surrender the spotlight, Hanfstaengl made news again when he walked into a Berlin bank on June 7, reporters in tow, and requested a draft for 2,500 marks payable to Harvard’s new president, James B. Conant. The purpose of the check, he explained, was to endow a $1,000 “Dr. Hanfstaengl scholarship” for study in Germany. Then he handed out copies of a letter he had sent Conant expressing his belief that his gift was a fitting symbol of his “perennial love for Harvard, Boston, and New England.”
All the prearrival publicity fueled a growing outcry against his visit. A disgusted Heywood Broun devoted several columns in the New York World-Telegram to the disgrace to his old university. “Beware of Nazis Bearing Gifts,” warned the Baltimore Sun as Hanfstaengl bounded down the gangplank in New York on June 16, carrying in his baggage three busts of German heroes he intended to present to his alma mater.
Conant had never encountered the likes of Putzi before and the Nazi publicist ran rings around him. Hanfstaengl knew he could count on college officials to maintain a dignified silence—Harvard issued a statement to the effect that the reunion invitation was not their doing and solely a matter for the alumni. The Corporation, too important to be inconvenienced by a special meeting, put off ruling on the proffered scholarship until the fall, allowing Hanfstaengl to bask in the role of benefactor. The students also played right into his hands, giving him an unduly warm reception. The youthful editors of the Crimson even urged Conant and the Corporation to confer an honorary degree on a son of Harvard who “has risen to distinguished station” in a country “which happens to be a great world power.” Meanwhile, Hitler’s advance man, flanked by four security guards, created a carnival-like atmosphere wherever he went. During the college’s annual Class Day ceremonies, he marched into the stadium and rendered a Nazi salute, which brought a roar of cheers from his friends in the stands.
Conant encountered Putzi only once, when he attended the reunion tea at the president’s mansion and shook his hand on the receiving line. “Hanfstaengl appeared large as life,” he recalled. As the towering German filed past, he leaned in and whispered, “I bring you greetings from Professor Hoenigschmid.” Conant froze. He remembered the Austrian scientist who had studied at Harvard and had been helpful to him on his first visit to Munich in 1925. Conant also suspected that if the two compatriots were on friendly terms, Hoenigschmid was probably now a Nazi. “My response was cold,” he recalled. “I did not return his greetings.”
Hanfstaengl delighted in his public relations coup, while the university endured a week of embarrassing headlines. In the months following his departure, Conant did his best to mitigate the damage. He pushed for the case against the two women protesters to be dropped. Despite his pleas for clemency, the seven other students were tried and sentenced to six months of hard labor. (They were later pardoned by Massachusetts governor Joseph B. Ely.) When the Corporation met in October, Conant persuaded the fellows to unanimously reject the $1,000 scholarship. Regardless of his personal feelings toward Hanfstaengl, there was nothing that could be done to prevent an alumnus from attending a reunion—all manner of rogues returned to campus all the time. For the same reason, Conant could not stop students and professors from joining in the lavish parties hosted by Back Bay society leaders for the cadets and officers of the German warship Karlsruhe, which had docked in Boston harbor a month earlier. But he would not allow the college to accept a financial legacy from such an unacceptable regime.
“To me the answer was clear and simple,” he recalled. “Hitler’s followers had violated the freedom of the universities; professors had been fired, curricula tampered with.” It was equally clear that Hanfstaengl’s sole purpose in endowing the scholarship was to promote the new Germany, and what better place to plant its flag than America’s oldest university. Convinced that “Hitler’s henchmen were trying to use Harvard as an American base to spread approval of the Nazi regime,” Conant pushed the Corporation to issue a strong statement.
“We are unwilling to accept a gift from one who has been so closely associated with the leadership of a political p
arty which has inflicted damage on the universities of Germany through measures which have struck at principles we believe to be fundamental to universities throughout the world.”
Conant’s firm stand finally earned the university some good press, the “Bully for Harvard” headlines far outnumbering the hate mail. “Harvard Rebuffs Dr. Hanfstaengl,” cheered the Daily Boston Globe, featuring a photograph of the bespectacled college president facing off with the beefy Nazi apologist. Conant took particular satisfaction in a Herald editorial that praised his rejection slip as “one of the finest pages in the three centuries of Harvard history.” The budding young Fascists on the Crimson were affronted and complained that the Nazi’s offer did not deserve “so curt and caustic a reply.”
While Conant would later dismiss the Hanfstaengl episode as a “public relations problem,” some critics view it as damning evidence of his reluctance to sever ties with Germany, despite the book burning and expulsion of Jewish scholars. But at that stage, the National Socialists had been in power for less than eighteen months, and almost no American politicians and very few commentators had the prescience to see where the Nazis’ fanaticism and savage philosophy would lead. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, at the head of a shaky coalition, the New York Times predicted confidently that the bid by the odd, unprepossessing figure to “translate the wild and whirling words of his campaign speeches into political action” would quickly founder. Even the usually prophetic Walter Lippmann got it wrong. Eager to believe the dictator had only used his strong-arm tactics to hold his disintegrating country together, and would soon moderate his policies, he wrote admiringly of Hitler as the “authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people.” Expressing the widespread belief that Nazism was a product of a harsh treaty and ruinous postwar reparations, and fearing what might happen if the German people were made into pariahs, he argued that Germany must not be “morally isolated or politically encircled.”
Hitler’s withdrawal from the faltering League of Nations less than nine months later was alarming, but not enough for Lippmann and others to advocate action. The United States remained steadfastly isolationist, unwilling to confront the growing militancy of Fascism abroad, and more interested in improving economic conditions at home. With Roosevelt’s advisors adopting a policy of watchful waiting, and the leaders of most American corporations and institutions following suit, Conant, as the historian William M. Tuttle Jr. observes, was “not alone in his reticence.”
Harvard’s young president also aspired to national prominence, and sought wherever possible to avoid what he referred to as the “danger of controversy.” New to power, he could be cautious to a fault and was on occasion unwilling to take the risks of leadership. “But as a university president, Conant was not really a free agent,” wrote Tuttle. “His constituency was Harvard: her alumni, faculty, and students, and this was a constituency which at times displayed not only ambiguous feelings toward Germany but even pro-Nazi sentiments.”
Going back to the spring of 1933, before Conant’s election, as the first of thousands of refugee scholars started arriving in the United States, Harvard was conspicuously absent from the ranks of prominent American universities willing to lend a hand and endow temporary lectureships. When the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, a humanitarian organization headed by Cornell University’s president, Livingston Farrand, approached the outgoing Lowell about inviting a Jewish professor to serve on his faculty for two years, with the promise of a $2,000 stipend from the committee and the Rockefeller Corporation, he was not only unreceptive but responded with unmistakable anti-Semitism. In his view, Jewish organizations were trying to exploit the university for propaganda purposes, and would take advantage of any offer in order to persuade others into following their lead. This example of Harvard’s institutional arrogance would have come as no surprise—it had been the university’s default mode for decades.
When the Emergency Committee asked the newly installed Conant to reconsider the aid program in the fall, he apologized for not getting to it sooner and agreed to take it up at the Corporation’s next meeting in October. Two weeks later, they voted not to participate. Conant, perhaps echoing the Corporation’s view, took a hard line. It was one thing to want to help the refugee scholars flooding the academic market, he told Grenville Clark, who favored taking a few, and quite another to “mix up charity and education.” Not wanting to sound callous, he explained that in order to hire a professor, there would have to be an opening, but, he added with apparent candor, “I have not seen many men on the list of displaced scholars whom I thought we could use.” Conant had vowed to rebuild Harvard’s faculty by recruiting topflight teachers, and nothing should stand in the way of achieving that goal. Filling professorships with “imported people of middle age” was not part of the plan and would only discourage their own up-and-coming stars. “The best chance of a brilliant, intellectual future in America,” he maintained, “is to give every opportunity for our young men to develop.”
Conant’s argument at least had the virtue of consistency. His private correspondence on the subject, however, does him little credit, and shows that he was not immune to the latent anti-Semitism that was pervasive at the time. That September, he was contacted by DuPont, soliciting his opinion of Max Bergmann, an organic chemist who had been dismissed from his job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research. The company believed that he had a great reputation in Conant’s field, but had reservations: “Our London representative states that he is decidedly of the Jewish type and raises the point that his appearance might react against favorable reception in many circles in the United States.” Conant responded in the same vein, noting that Bergmann was “certainly very definitely of the Jewish type—rather heavy,” and with “none of the earmarks of genius,” a view he acknowledged that many American chemists did not share.
Although he had not been asked to make any official ruling in Bergmann’s case, Conant added that he was “rather against bringing him over.” He reiterated his opinion that “we shall not help the cause of American science any by filling up the good positions in this country by imported foreigners . . . I think a deluge of medium and good men of the Jewish race in scientific positions . . . would do a lot of harm. Needless to say, don’t quote me too widely on any of this.” By approaching the issue purely as a bureaucratic problem, he hoped to appear disinterested and remain above the fray, but his response suggests a singular lack of empathy for the human dimension of Nazi persecution.
Later that fall, when Bergmann was in New York, Conant did bring him to the attention of Harvard’s Chemistry Department but advised Columbia chemist Hans Clarke, with whom the German was staying, “I doubt if we can use him.” Clarke pleaded with Conant to help secure Bergmann a post at the Rockefeller Institute, telling him that the outcome “lies entirely in your hands.” Bergmann did end up at Rockefeller, though it is unclear if Conant played any part in his getting hired. Harvard eventually took in a number of exiled scholars, including the renowned authority on modern German literature Karl Vietor, psychologist Erik Erikson, art historian Jakob Rosenberg, mathematician Richard von Mises, philologist Werner Jaeger, theoretical physicist Philipp Frank, and Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.I At the time, however, Conant’s single-minded focus on restoring Harvard’s eminence prevented him from seeing that an infusion of European talent would revitalize the university, as turned out to be the case at the University of Chicago and other institutions that took in large numbers of Jewish professors. In not exerting his influence to do more on behalf of refugee scholars, concluded Tuttle, Conant’s attitude reflected a “failure of compassion and political sensitivity.”
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Nazi Germany’s efforts to score a propaganda victory by exploiting Harvard’s prestige continued to test Conant’s diplomatic skills. In September 1934, he learned that the University of Berlin would be awarding an honorary degree to the famous dean of th
e Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound. There was no doubt that it was a thank-you from Nazi officials. Pound, on a tour of Germany the previous summer, had twice publicly congratulated Hitler for restoring domestic tranquility, and on his return told reporters he had no knowledge of Jewish persecution. Furious that the event would besmirch his “beloved Law School,” Felix Frankfurter refused to attend.
Frankfurter vented his spleen over a lunch meeting with Conant, who was understanding but intractable. “We’re in a kind of a hole, and I don’t see how we can get out of it,” he admitted readily. While Conant had nothing but contempt for Pound, whom he called a “pathological case,” he argued it would be inconsistent with his belief in academic freedom to interfere with the presentation of the honorary degree. Not only that, but he felt duty bound to attend, explaining he could not stay away without “insulting a friendly government.” Frankfurter was not mollified and left after fifteen minutes. As much as Conant privately shared the noble jurist’s sense of outrage, he was still too unsure of himself to make a public protest and felt obligated to subject his personal opinions to his official role. “If I were not president of the university,” he assured Frankfurter, “I would write the kind of letter you are proposing to send Pound, because I feel about the German situation the way you do.”
Although constrained by his position, Conant was not about to allow any pro-Hitler declarations to go unchallenged. As a precaution, the weekend before the ceremony, he and an old friend and classmate, A. Calvert Smith, drafted a short speech that was “not very pleasant” about the Nazi regime. If Conant did not like the tenor of the speeches, he wanted to be ready with a rebuttal. It proved unnecessary, although Pound again praised Hitler’s “new order.” Conant held his tongue. When photographers asked him to pose with German ambassador Hans Luther and Pound, however, he bristled. “I’m not in it,” he snapped, stepping sharply out of the frame. “It’s strictly a matter between these two gentlemen. I’m not in it.”
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