The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  In many ways it would be hard to imagine two boys more different from each other than Harry and Brit. Brit was gregarious, witty, and charismatic (his classmates named him “Mouth Hadden” in a graduation spoof), enormously popular with his classmates and a “great pet” (as Harry observed) of the faculty. He was a creature of American popular culture—attuned to its slang, its jokes, its entertainments, and its sports. He liked to affect the loping, swaggering walk of professional baseball players, to speak at times in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent, and to express emphatic opinions about almost everything. He was also a mediocre student, despite his considerable intelligence, and had trouble concentrating on subjects that did not interest him—which, in the very narrow Hotchkiss curriculum, was most subjects. Harry, of course, shared none of those characteristics.37

  But perhaps the biggest difference between them, visible even in adolescence, was in their views of the world. Brit had what was in many ways an intensely parochial outlook, bounded by the limited experiences and inward-looking assumptions of his family, community, and class. The childish racism and anti-Semitism he displayed in the Daily Glonk was one example of this insularity. So was his breezy dismissal of people and ideas that departed from those he had absorbed in Brooklyn Heights and at Hotchkiss. And yet Brit was also an iconoclast—sassy, cynical, unimpressed with established authority and existing institutions, already showing signs of what would become the trademark social disenchantment of his generation of writers, artists, and intellectuals. One of his heroes and models as he grew older was H. L. Mencken, and one of his favorite magazines was the one on which Mencken got his start and that helped give voice to his time, the Smart Set. Like many of his contemporaries, Brit was in one sense a true snob, contemptuous of dull, ordinary people and of those he considered his social or intellectual inferiors. But he was also a rebel, always ready to ridicule the pretensions and affectations of his peers, always eager to defy authority (within reasonably safe bounds), never comfortable fitting into a conventional mold.38

  Harry, by contrast, had a much more serious and in many ways more cosmopolitan approach to the world. He lacked Brit’s natural ease with American popular culture, had difficulty forming casual relationships with his peers, and was in general less socially successful. But he had a much more comfortable relationship with the larger world, of which he had seen a great deal more than Brit (or almost any other of his classmates) ever would. Harry had absorbed the values of his father’s sense of Christian mission—unshakable faith in the superiority of American and Western culture, to be sure, but also a tolerance of, and intense curiosity about, other cultures, other ideas, other peoples. He may not have been offended by displays of racism or anti-Semitism among his peers, but he rarely expressed such sentiments himself. Even as an adolescent Harry could be arrogant and aloof, but he was rarely—then or at any time in his life—cynical or conventionally snobbish. And because he did not take his American-ness for granted, because his view of his country had been shaped by his early separation from it and his eager idealization of it, he was much less inclined than was Brit to criticize or ridicule its mores.

  And yet for all their differences, Harry and Brit did have some important things in common. They were both precociously intelligent, both drawn to literature, ideas, and writing, both attracted to journalism, and, perhaps most of all, both exceptionally ambitious and competitive. At Hotchkiss, at least, Harry was a slightly awkward outsider trying to fit in; and Brit was a consummate, supremely popular insider trying in some unfocused way to break out. Somehow, in their common efforts to transcend their designated roles, they met on common ground. But not right away.

  Harry was not the only one determined to make his publication an “eye opener.” Brit, too, set out to make the Record he edited into a campus sensation. The result was an intense but mostly friendly competition that both cemented their friendship and established a long-term rivalry. Each was eager to best the other, but both were committed to winning for their shared literary efforts the same respect and acclaim that the school had traditionally given to sports.

  Harry spent several days toward the end of the summer visiting potential printers for the magazine in an effort to reduce costs. He also met with established journalists and editors (among them the editors of Outlook and Scribner’s) to request advice and, it was surely not lost on him, to make connections. He watched the “October Scribner being run off the gigantic machine—but not one page of it could I carry to the outside world as a proof that I had seen it! I saw where the many beautiful color plates are made, and the foreman gave me a score or two of the beautiful pictures that had adorned Scribner’s in the past. In short, I learned a good deal of the mechanical part of publishing, and had a most interesting afternoon.”39

  Back at Hotchkiss for his long-awaited senior year, he claimed not to “feel that elation or exultation which had been promised me.” But he leaped nevertheless into his usual frantic schedule. “The pleasant days of summer have given way to the days of work,” he wrote. “Which are more blessed, even to the schoolboy, I cannot say.” Most of all he leaped into his new role as editor of the Lit. Recalling his memorable day watching Scribner’s Magazine roll off the presses, he launched the magazine with an issue containing a special picture supplement (“First in the Prep School World,” he boasted on the cover). The pictures were relatively simple black-and-white drawings and photographs, not the “beautiful color plates” he had admired in New York. Even so, they were an expensive innovation for a school publication, and they were made possible in part by his success in attracting an unusual amount of advertising through the parents of wealthy classmates and friends of the McCormicks. Harry managed as well to increase the number of pages in the Lit, expand the number of articles (including many of his own), and add more essays dealing with contemporary issues and events. Under his direction the Lit became not just a monthly literary magazine, but a journal of reportage and opinion. The response, he wrote his mother, was gratifying. “Such a stir over a mere magazine I never had in my life expected to see,” he wrote after the first issue appeared. “I would, unnoticed, walk in a room, the Senior Room perhaps, and the comments I overheard positively prevented my keeping a straight face. In short, the school appears to approve of our new Lit, with all its obvious faults and shortcomings…. [W]e intend to proceed on the ever forward movement for a ‘better’ magazine.” “The Better Magazine” became, in fact, the Lit’s masthead slogan.40

  The implicit challenge from the Lit did not escape Brit, and he took a gentle swipe at Harry’s pretensions with a review in the Record of the rival publication. “We are well aware that ‘The Better Magazine’ means a magazine which aims to be ‘better’ than itself in each successive issue. At the same time, however, we still fear that the slogan might readily be misinterpreted by an outsider as meaning better than any other magazine.” Brit was making his own mark on the Record (with Harry’s occasional help as an assistant managing editor). He transformed it from a weekly to a semiweekly, added coverage of national and international news, and received much the same enthusiastic reception from faculty and students that Harry was getting for the Lit. Over time their good-natured rivalry evolved into something like a mutual admiration society. “Luce’s poem, entitled ‘Stanzas,’ is by far the best that has appeared in the Lit this year,” Brit wrote in the Record. “‘Mediocrity in Scholarship’ by the same author is an article which should receive the thoughtful and sincere attention of every fellow in the school. More articles by this writer would be desirable.” Harry responded late in the year with an editorial, “The Literary Game,” arguing that writers deserved as much respect as athletes, and paying a particular tribute to Brit: “To run a semi-weekly, six-page newspaper—outside of study hours—and to have not more than one typographical error a fortnight, and to have a keen, clear, pointed editorial to each issue … we say that there is no harder job in the entire Hotchkiss School—no football game that ever will demand more ‘guts�
� than this.” Naturally he did not exempt himself from such praise: “Casting the convention of modesty to the dust, we say that to publish a monthly magazine with 300 pages … and to pay for nearly 200 electrotypes … is no tea-parlor, silk-sock, poetically temperamental game.”41

  In his senior year Harry was well established as both an impressive scholar and an important campus leader, and he was well satisfied with his success. “I think, if I were to boast of my career here,” he wrote, “it is that while I am not popular in the crowd, I have not an enemy in the class. And this is in spite of some harsh things I have said and some mistakes I have made.” He still carried the stigma of a scholarship student, with his daily chores (now working in the library and serving as an usher in chapel) and his inferior accommodations (a garreted room in the attic of a teacher’s home, which he shared with another scholarship student, “joined to Bissel Hall, wherein will live our classmates of better means”). But he seemed less conscious of this difference in status than he had once been—confident now that he had proven himself the equal of even the wealthiest and most socially prominent students. It was, perhaps, that eager confidence that made him react so bitterly to a falling-out with the school’s imperious headmaster.42

  Until his last term at Hotchkiss, Harry had what he considered a good relationship with “the King.” “I flatter myself that I am decidedly in the good graces of Dr. Buehler,” he wrote in his junior year. “Whereas most fellows go from one term’s beginning to its end without conversing with him, he has already spoken to me half a dozen times—and not by way of reprimand.” But something went badly wrong as he neared graduation. Buehler began to chastise him for neglecting his duties as a scholarship student, for neglecting his library work, for being careless in his chores. To Buehler the problem was that Harry now believed he had so risen in the world that scholarship work was beneath him. (He once referred in a school sermon to “the supercilious boy, the fellow who thinks he knows too much” as someone in “great danger.”) Harry blamed the problem on Buehler’s own determination to keep a poor boy in his place. Both of them were probably at least partly right. Whatever the reasons, Buehler appeared determined to slap Harry down—and he did so by humiliating him in the way he knew would hurt him the most, by doing so in the eyes of his father. In a letter to Shantung in March 1916, he wrote, “You should know that for sometime we have not been satisfied with Harry’s attention to detail in connection with some of his duties.” He was doing well academically and in his activities, Buehler conceded, but “he has seemed careless or indifferent in regard to things which he should consider equally important.” His complaint seemed to rest on reports of Harry’s entering the library too noisily and leaving his drawer of books “carelessly open.” This fault, he insisted, “is more serious in its relations and bearing on his future than he seems to realize,” particularly since he was “a scholarship boy and … expected to set the right example.” As apparent punishment, Harry was reassigned from the library to the more menial task of taking care of the “Bissel Hall lights.”43

  Harry’s furious and almost desperate reaction to Buehler’s reprimand—a wounding but ultimately petty slight—suggests how fragile his new self-image as a mature, self-reliant young adult still was, and how painful it was to be reminded so bluntly of his social standing, which he thought he had transcended. To his father he wrote imploringly that he hoped “it will not shake what trust you have had in me, because that’s a thing a fellow hates to lose most of all.” But he could not help adding swipes at Buehler for his pettiness in reporting “highly magnified nothings.” Rev. Luce urged him to be conciliatory and to accept the criticism “gracefully, without resentment,” but Harry was in no mood to compromise. He would talk to “the King” about the problem, he assured his father, but he would not go “crawling” to him. Privately he was much angrier than he let his parents know. At the bottom of Buehler’s letter reassigning him to Bissel Hall, Harry wrote a draft of a reply, which he clearly never sent: “Sir, My opinion of you is that you are a damned fool, and someday I’ll prove it to you.”44

  Harry’s conflict with Buehler even caused him momentarily to question his otherwise seldom-questioned ambition. In the light of this “aspersion on my general character,” he said, he had begun to contemplate “the call of the road, outcast from convention and the etiquette of morality and manners.” It would be wonderful, he mused, “to live near the heart of the highways and byways of life, to buy bread by any occasional pence I could get, to smile at men and the world, to help lame dogs over any sty’s [sic] I can…. [T]he life of a fool is greater than the temporal power of some demagogue (Dr. Buehler or Napoleon).” But he knew, of course, that he would “never follow” such a path; and although he did not forgive Buehler and, indeed, spoke bitterly about him even forty years later, he neared the end of his years at the school still loyal to Hotchkiss and proud of his record there. “I have made a success,” he said, “as few will ever appreciate or understand.” His class, he claimed, “has done some big things at a critical time in the history of the school” in fighting the “dry-rot of self complacency” that had been “at the core of the place.”

  But it was time to look ahead. “I dread leaving my moorings and jumping into the race again,” he wrote a few months before his graduation. “But unless we race we rot.” As he looked ahead to the next chapter in his life—Yale, which, along with fifty-two out of his sixty-nine classmates, he would be entering in the fall—he saw only new challenges, new opportunities for achievement. “They say—and they are saying it pretty loudly—that Hotchkiss is not holding its own at Yale.” It was up to his class to change that impression. Always calculating, always striving, Harry was leaving little room for spontaneity, even as he prepared to enter an institution he barely knew. “For one thing we must show that we have a man with enough ability and ‘guts’ to make the [Yale Daily] News,” he wrote, clearly referring to himself. The News was “‘Yale’s choicest prize’” and “a man who makes the news has a 99% chance of success everywhere in life.” He would “hit the News hard in freshman year—then … go after Phi Beta K and the Lit Board in sophomore and junior years.”45

  Hotchkiss graduation was a difficult moment for Harry. Most of his classmates were surrounded by proud parents and siblings. He spent the day in the company of a distant cousin he barely knew. He had been named class poet and read a short ode at the Class Day ceremony, but the position of class orator, which he had particularly coveted, went to Brit instead. He finished his senior year not first in his class, as he had almost always been, but second, “beaten by a terrible greasy grind! I wish somebody had had the time or opportunity to beat him out.” In a class poll he received no votes at all for “most likely to succeed;” he ranked high not only as “brightest” and “most energetic,” but also in such categories as “most absent-minded” and “most eccentric.” In the class yearbook, he was mildly ridiculed for having used “stolen” yearbook photographs in the Lit. He was, in short, confronted by his own hidden self-image and how he appeared to others. When it was over he expressed relief but little exaltation. “It is done,” he wrote flatly in his first letter home after commencement. “For the last forty-eight hours I have been capable of no other thought than ‘It is done.’ My school boy life with all its many failures and few half-successes is over.” He left Hotchkiss looking unsentimentally ahead, as always, to the next step, to a new life once again, “without illusions, romance, high flown talk or sentimental teas.”46

  III

  Big Man

  At eighteen years of age, dispatched from Hotchkiss and bound for Yale, Harry was at once remarkably mature and strikingly naive. He was more traveled and more knowledgeable of the world than almost any of his peers—a gifted student, an accomplished linguist, and at times an unusually sophisticated writer. Thousands of miles from his family, with no expectation of seeing any of them for months and sometimes years, he had learned to make his way alone in a country that not long a
go had been almost entirely new to him; and he had learned to handle aspects of his own life—finances, travel plans, doctors, housing, vacations—that most adolescents of his background still left to their parents.

  In other respects, however, Harry was still very much a boy. Even when dressed up in the formal suits that young prep-school men donned for portraits and formal occasions, his thatch of reddish brown hair always seemed slightly tousled, his clothes slightly wrinkled and ill fitting, his gaze somewhat too studied in its seriousness. Away from school he still sometimes wore the knickers he had grown up with in China. He was tall, nearing the six feet he would soon attain, but thin (usually just under 150 pounds) and slightly gawky. He had begun to smoke, but tentatively and self-consciously, insisting it was only to ease his discomfort in public and that it would never become a habit. (In fact it became a lifelong addiction that eventually helped to kill him.) And perhaps most painful to him of all, he was socially awkward and sexually inexperienced. His Hotchkiss classmates, in their senior poll, ranked him ninth in the class as “worst woman-hater.” One of his friends, writing to him of the attractions of summer in Nantucket, noted that “the dancing is fine (but that doesn’t interest you!), the girls—(but there again I forget who I’m writing to).” Both the maturity and the naiveté were visible in one of the most conspicuous aspects of Harry’s personality at this turning point in his young life: his intense ambition. He had been a diligent striver for years, working desperately to prove himself to his father, his teachers, and his classmates. But his ambition to succeed in school was only a prelude to his much greater ambition to lead an important life. As he looked forward to Yale, he was planning once again an assault on the honors and privileges available to him as a student; but he was also beginning to look beyond—to a larger world he hoped to find some way to shape.1