by Susan Jacoby
My dear Oswald,
This is to acknowledge for $80.00 which, as you know, is $20 short of the amount promised by you to be paid monthly for my maintenance and reaffirmed by our telephone conversation late last month. As to the jewelry of mine I had entrusted to you for safe-keeping, I now wish to present to you the rosette of diamonds set in silver and gold, which in happier times I had instead hoped to give to a wife of yours. This is a gift; it is not in payment of any real or fancied obligation. It is given solely in memory of the love I once believed you had for me. I have neither the time nor the inclination to answer the numerous charges against me you have trumped up to justify your behavior. You are happier believing me dishonest, false, wicked. I find nothing for which to reproach myself unless it is the fault of loving “not wisely but too well.” For the last of all time I wish you every success and happiness. I want you to have all that your heart desires and to forget that you ever had a Mother.
The style of this communication is as recognizable to me as that of a Shakespeare sonnet. Having decided that she didn’t like Mary, my grandmother must have asked Ozzie to return the “rosette of diamonds” she had conferred on him long ago. When Ozzie balked, Granny Jacoby made a point of saying she’d changed her mind—not about Mary but about Ozzie’s keeping the jewelry. (“I now wish to present to you.”) Forget that he ever had a Mother? Not likely. Aunt Edith got into the act by informing Ozzie, also in March of 1934, that “Mother talks of trying to get housework to do but hopes she will die before she does.” Edith advised her brother that it was his legal duty either to bring his mother to live with him or to support her. “I believe that your sense of decency should make you realize your duty to make every effort to reconcile yourself with Mother and to try to give her a little ease of mind for the rest of her poor life,” Edith admonished. She also intimated that Mother might commit suicide if Ozzie did not make amends.
My formidable grandmother, who loved being the center of family feuding, would never have killed herself (though she undoubtedly would have preferred death to life as a cleaning woman). She and Ozzie eventually patched things up and continued to aggravate each other for the rest of Granny Jacoby’s “poor life,” which lasted another thirty-two years. In 1936, Ozzie and Mary moved from New York to Dallas, ostensibly for Mary to be closer to her family but mainly to escape the face-to-face wrangling with Mother. While Ozzie never broke off relations with his mother, he saw her even less frequently than my father did. My own mother proved to be as leery of Granny Jacoby as Aunt Mary was. After the war, there was some talk of my father’s moving his family back to New York, but my mother flatly refused. Granny Jacoby wanted to control both of her sons’ lives, but in very different ways. Her possessive admiration for Ozzie was matched by her possessive denigration of my father. Mary and my mom were right: they kept their families out of harm’s way by keeping them away from the formidable Jacoby matriarch.
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DURING THE early thirties, no one in the family was paying much attention to my father. He was away at Dartmouth until the summer of 1933, when he came home at the end of his sophomore year, knowing he would not be able to return to college in the fall. I think my father may have been quite happy to leave the snows of Hanover, New Hampshire. The outstanding student at Poly Prep had turned, for whatever reasons, into a mediocre student at Dartmouth. Dad entered Dartmouth at a time when the alumni and the administration were becoming increasingly concerned about “the Jewish problem”—the presence of too many Jewish students, especially from New York—on the Hanover campus. During his two years there, my father was exposed to a microcosm of the upper-class anti-Semitism that would, only a few years later, deny visas to Jews frantic to leave Nazi Germany. After learning what Dartmouth officials thought, said, and did about the Jews in their midst during the early thirties, it is easier for me to understand why my father found it so difficult, forty years later, to believe that American anti-Semitism had lost the power to circumscribe his children’s educational and employment prospects. In his mind, there was still a threat. It was not the threat of an American-bred Holocaust, or even of his children or grandchildren being beaten up by bullies in a schoolyard. In my father’s experience, the threat was more subtle and therefore more pernicious. Unnamed powers-that-be might decide, without ever coming right out and saying so, that Jews weren’t quite good enough for their university or their club or their offices. Or they would decide, as they had in the twenties and thirties, that only a fixed number of Jews would be able to pass the invisible test that enabled them to pass invisible barriers. The rest would remain outsiders by virtue of the insiders’ gentleman’s agreements. That is exactly what was happening at Dartmouth, and every other university esteemed by German-descended Jews like the Jacobys, when my father arrived on campus as a freshman in 1931.
VI
The Chosen and the Heathen
THE INCOMING DARTMOUTH freshman class in the autumn of 1931—the Class of ’35—included the largest number of Jewish students in the history of the college. Of the class’s 696 members, 75—more than 10 percent—were Jews. Moreover, that figure included only those students who stated a Jewish religious preference. Another 97 incoming freshmen—14 percent of the total—declared “no preference.” My father was one of the no-preference students, suggesting that the true proportion of Jews in his class (whether they admitted it or not) was much higher than 1 in 10. Whatever the real number, it represented more than a fivefold increase over a ten-year period, prompting the director of admissions, E. Gordon Bill, to observe sardonically in the alumni magazine that “the triumph of the chosen and the heathen peoples seems to be a continuing process….”
Because Bill’s impolitic comment proved deeply offensive (much to his astonishment) to some Jewish alumni, Dartmouth’s president, Ernest Martin Hopkins, advised his acerbic dean of freshmen (the admissions director’s official title) to absent himself from the next regularly scheduled Alumni Council meeting in the fall of 1931. A full-scale discussion of Jewish undergraduate enrollment by the council—which Bill’s presence could only have served to promote and exacerbate—would have made it more difficult for Hopkins to douse the controversy the dean had aroused by publicly voicing attitudes that were usually reserved for the private world of gentleman’s agreements.
Although some Jewish graduates of Dartmouth were upset by Bill’s comments, others—along with some Jewish undergraduates—were themselves disturbed by the presence of so many Jews in the Class of ’35. Like the Jacobys, most of these anxious Jews identified with the “German” sector of American Jewry, and they feared, characteristically, that admission of “the wrong kind” of Jews—those of Eastern European immigrant origins—would stimulate anti-Semitism at Dartmouth. This surging anti-Semitism might, of course, spill over onto the “right kind”—their kind. Jewish alumni had long been enlisted to screen applications from other “Hebrews,” in order to ensure that they would not be too religious, too unassimilated—too Jewish—for Dartmouth.
What did it mean to be “too Jewish” at an old-line WASP college in the thirties? In a letter to Hopkins on January 3, 1933, the irrepressibly candid Bill confided, “I am increasingly of the opinion that the actual physical appearance of a Jewish applicant is an extraordinarily important factor in determining selection or rejection….”
Bill went on to clarify his meaning. “In other words,” he explained, “I believe that the Jewish boys whom we do not like and who do not seem to fit into the Dartmouth picture and hence should not have been selected, are of a physical type that is unattractive to the average Dartmouth student. This situation pertains to no other race because I believe the more homely and physically unattractive an Irishman is, the better he is generally liked.”
Bill reminded Hopkins that all of the applicants for the next year’s entering freshman class had been required to submit pictures—which would presumably enable the admissions office to identify those of “a physical type that is unattractive to th
e average Dartmouth student.” After the brouhaha over the large Jewish presence in my father’s class, Hopkins and Bill were determined to reverse a trend that they saw as a threat to the social, if not the academic, reputation of the college. In one of his many epistolary exchanges with Bill on the “Jewish problem,” Hopkins relayed a comment from a visiting Harvard colleague, “who says that he always had heard that Dartmouth was the one Anglo-Saxon college left, [but] insists that he stood on the Inn corner and that every fourth man who passed him in a period of fifteen or twenty minutes was a Jew. Allowing for his undoubted overemphasis, and his desire to claim that we were picking up the group which Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia are refusing, it still remains a fact that we have too many for our own good or for the good of the Jewish boys themselves.”
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I CAN EASILY envisage this snooty visitor from Harvard, standing in front of the Hanover Inn (established in 1780), overlooking the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings that form the graceful core of the Dartmouth campus. He was not admiring the architecture or gazing at the surrounding mountains that lend this New Hampshire community so much of its charm. Instead, he was looking for people who did not, as far as he was concerned, belong in such an idyllic New England setting, at a college chartered by King George III in 1769 and charged with the mission of “spreading Christian knowledge among the savages” while at the same time offering “the best means of education” for all of its students. The first objective was soon subsumed by the mission of preparing the sons of the upper classes to take their place in the newly independent United States of America.
How did the emissary from Harvard identify non-Christian outsiders strolling near the Dartmouth Common in 1932? Were they talking with their hands? Talking too loudly? Was my father one of the young men wandering by the Inn, constituting a presence too conspicuous “for the good of the Jewish boys themselves”?
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THERE WAS nothing unusual about such attitudes on the part of the men who ran the country’s elite institutions of higher education—and nearly everything else—in the decades between the twentieth century’s two world wars. Dartmouth was not the first but one of the last elite eastern colleges to take stringent measures to restrict Jewish enrollment. My father came of age at a time when it was much more difficult for a Jew to get into a top-ranking private college than it had been for his father and older brother. In 1919, when Uncle Ozzie entered Columbia, Jewish quotas had not yet been established at most Ivy League schools. In that year, Jews made up more than 40 percent of undergraduates at Columbia, 20 percent at Harvard, and 20 percent at Brown. But 1919 was also the year in which Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia’s formidable president, ordered the registrar to devise a new admissions form featuring a psychological test that would measure “environmental” factors as well as intellectual achievement. For the first time, applicants were required to list their religious affiliation and their father’s name and birthplace, to supply a photograph of themselves (a tactic Dartmouth did not adopt until the thirties), and to submit to a personal interview. Such procedures, which soon became a model for all private universities, provided a handy way of filtering out applicants of undesirable races, religions, and social backgrounds. When my grandfather and Great-Uncle Harold entered Columbia in the 1880s, all that counted was their academic performance on a rigorous, classics-oriented entrance examination. One can only wonder whether the distinguished Professor Harold Jacoby, who looked so very Jewish as a young man, would have made it through the post-1920 admissions net. Or whether he ever discussed the new undergraduate admissions procedures (and the decline in Jewish admissions to Columbia’s law and medical schools) with Butler, who was a personal friend. Although they were not members of the same class, the two men had known each other since their undergraduate days.
Throughout the 1920s, explicit and implicit Jewish quotas steadily reduced Jewish enrollment at all universities of the first rank. With its new admissions procedures, Columbia cut the proportion of Jews in its freshman class from 40 percent in 1920 to 22 percent in 1922. By 1928, the percentage of Jews in Harvard’s freshman class had also been halved.
Dartmouth did not have a “Jewish problem” during this period because so few Jews had applied for admission in the early twenties. The college’s isolated location, near the Vermont—New Hampshire border, far from any centers of Jewish population, was unappealing to Jewish families living in the northeast corridor between Boston and Philadelphia. Moreover, the Dartmouth of the twenties was not on an academic par with Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. In 1920, when Columbia and Harvard were struggling to cut their Jewish enrollments, Jews made up fewer than 2 percent of undergraduates at Dartmouth. Only when the more distinguished eastern universities began to restrict Jewish admissions did the number of Jewish applicants to Dartmouth begin to rise. Indeed, there was undoubtedly a direct connection between the developing quota system at Columbia—and its success in cutting Jewish enrollment in half during the early twenties—and the rise in applications to Dartmouth from the New York City area.
Nevertheless, Dartmouth had already taken tentative steps toward limiting Jewish enrollment—without instituting a rigid quota system—through an admissions procedure called the Selective Process. Devised by Hopkins in the early twenties, the Process (always capitalized) was designed to ensure geographical and “occupational” (meaning the occupation of the student’s father) diversity as well as to raise academic standards. Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice and a personal friend of President Hopkins, expressed concern as early as 1922 that the new admissions system (modeled to a considerable degree on the procedures already instituted at Columbia) might serve to discriminate against Jews. The Process seems to have been the subject of an ongoing dialogue between Frankfurter and Hopkins. In March 1923, Frankfurter wrote Hopkins that he had taken every opportunity “to give vigorous expression of my conviction that the Dartmouth of which you are the head, cannot conceivably go in for the folly of racial or social lines in the selection of its student body.” Nevertheless, Frankfurter added, “Some day I should like to have a long ‘jaw’ with you on this subject as part of the larger subject of what our colleges, and particularly our universities, are for.” The Process did not harden into an outright quota system until my father’s class produced such a large representation of “the chosen and the heathen.” (Until I read excerpts from this correspondence, I had mistakenly credited Kenneth Starr—the Republican special prosecutor who was the chief bloodhound attempting to bring down President Bill Clinton in the 1990s over the Monica Lewinsky scandal—with the first reverential use of the neutral-sounding “process” to describe a deeply biased policy or form of inquiry.)
By 1930, Hopkins and Bill had become especially worried about the large number of applications from New York City. In September of that year, Bill wrote Hopkins that he had become “increasingly positive this summer…that the Jewish problem in connection with our New York and vicinity application lists should be man-handled. To be specific, I think it would be a good thing if during the next four or five years we take very few Jews from that district. At the present time I feel that they are completely dominating the Dartmouth application lists in…New York and if we don’t look out, we will get into a rut from which we will extricate ourselves with great difficulty.”
Dartmouth’s initial failure to “man-handle” the New York Jewish problem was demonstrated by the presence of twenty-seven Jews from the area in my father’s class—down by four from the previous year, but still not low enough in the view of the administration. In April 1932, Bill traveled to New York to discuss the problem with Judge Arthur J. Cohen (Class of 1903), a Jewish alumnus who had not been outraged by the dean’s comments about “the chosen and the heathen.” A delighted Bill reported to Hopkins that Judge Cohen was “absolutely in agreement with you and me.” The judge, according to Bill, regarded the presence of such a large Jewish contingent from New York as “almost a tragedy
.” He suggested that Jewish enrollment be limited through private measures rather than publicly announced policies, and Bill assured him that the Selective Process was designed to achieve just that end. Judge Cohen apparently voiced just one reservation. “The only possible difference of opinion we had,” Bill reported, “was that he felt that all brilliant Jewish students from the New York high schools should be admitted. I told him that he probably had no idea how many such students were applying.” This posed a conundrum for President Hopkins, whose main goal at the time was to raise the academic standing of Dartmouth—to place the school on a par with the more prestigious Ivy League schools—by improving the quality of both the student body and the faculty. On the one hand, the pool of Jewish applicants was filled with outstanding scholars. On the other, the presence of too many Jews at Dartmouth might impel the more academically talented WASPs to choose other Ivy League schools that already had strict Jewish quotas in place. A few weeks after Bill’s meeting with Judge Cohen, Hopkins acknowledged the dilemma, noting that “any college which is going to base its admission wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.”
Just as there was a conflict between raising the academic level of the student body and keeping out Jews, there was a tension between the increasing secularization of Dartmouth under Hopkins and its pious Protestant history. Dartmouth was not of course unique in its religious origins; all colleges dating from the colonial era were founded by ministers, for the purpose of educating future religious leaders. For much of the nineteenth century, however, theological conservatism was the hallmark of ministers selected as presidents of Dartmouth. The ministers who presided over better-known New England colleges tended to be staunch abolitionists, but Dartmouth’s president during the Civil War, the Reverend Nathan Lord, publicly espoused slavery and cited Scripture to support his position. Only in 1893 did the Dartmouth trustees select a president who was both a minister and a progressive—the Reverend William Jewett Tucker, who had already aroused the ire of conservative theologians by arguing that belief in God was compatible with Darwinism. Hopkins, who assumed the presidency in 1916, came from a business instead of a ministerial or academic background; his administration completed Dartmouth’s transition from a Protestant-identified college into a basically secular twentieth-century institution of higher education. Before 1925, when Hopkins abolished compulsory chapel attendance, Jewish students at Dartmouth were required to participate in regular Protestant services, including Sunday vespers.