Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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HARVARD NINETEEN THIRTY-FOUR CLASS ALBUM 19 It is an arresting fact that the man who sits in the presi- dentls chair of the university, which is interwoven with all the traditions of culture in Massachusetts and New EnglandJ has no direct ancestor among Harvard graduates or, for that matter, among the graduates of any collegea-so far as the record has been uncovered. This notwithstanding that the Conant family, which has been seated in New England for 300 years, has furnished in collateral lines seventeen Harvard graduates within that period. In May, 1636, the name of the ancestor of them all, Roger Conant, who had come from English Devonshire thirteen years before, appears in connection with a plan to devote to the use of a college for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay a large tract ofland at Salem, a town of which this Roger was the rightful founder. Not Salem which history has linked with trials for witchcraft, but Cambridge, close to upstart Boston, got the college. But the record of Roger Conantls activity precedes by some months the official act which created the institution that we now know as Harvard. And thus his name leads all the rest that the written word preserves of the pro- moters of the seat ofleaming over which his six-times great- grandson rules. Roger, though a member of the Worshipful Company of Salterers ofLondon towneMassachusetts was deep in the salt fish business in those days-ehad his academic background, too. His nephew, John Conant, was Rector of Exeter Col- lege, Oxford, and Vice Chancellor of the university. James Bryant Conantls ancestral lines also lead back to Governor Bradford and John Alden of the Plymouth Colony. Of such sound New England stock is the man who has in his hands the destiny of New Englandis oldest college, which many also count Amerieals most distinguished universitye- at least when there are no Yale, Columbia, Princeton or Virginia men within hearing.

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18 HARVARD NINIZTEEN THIRTY-FOUR CLASS ALBUM might fancy, even for the modern empirical-minded youth. Harvard, Conant holds, having no right to waste excep- tional advantages, tlshoulcl endeavor to draw to its staff the ablest investigators and teachers lemphatically he wants no division between the twoi in the worldjl and should ttpro- Vide every opportunity for the ambitious, brilliant young scholar to come to Harvardll- alike for the scholars own benefit and Harx'ardls credit. Though, basically, it remains a New Eng- land college, or a college largely recruited from a now widely scat- tered ltHarvard community? based on New England origins or traditional associations, ttHarvard, as a truly national university, should even more in the future than in the past attract to its student body the most promising young men throughout the whole na- tion? This does not assume that Har- vard is so superior that she is en- titled to hog all the best. Rather, as a member of the big league of uni- versities, the team from Cambridge 0n the Charles must enter into the keen competition for the best team, made up of the best men, which Conant conceives to be the ideal healthy condition of a big league of universities, as ofa big league of baseball players. It was this condi- tion which existed in the German universities during the three-quarters of a century when German scholarship won such prodigious prestige throughout the world. Essential in Conantis view is this: tlThat any man with re- markable talents may get his education at Harvard, whether he be rich or penniless, whether he come from Boston or San Francisco? In such cases distance and penury should be eliminated as factors of exclusion. Adequate scholarships should be provided to make this possible. As we have seen, the process of extending the provision of scholarships in this direction has begun. Thus the picked crew of the engine of instruction is a prime concern of the new administration. But hardly less in the mind of the head of that administration bulks the tteom- munity of scholars and students, as a social body. iiMore souls are saved around the dinner table than through coursesf is a saying that sums up this side of Con- ant,s educational program. In his address to his first class of freshmen, he said: tiAll through your four years you will have the privilege of dining with a group of your friends, and, of course, will be thrown into a variety of human relationships by your mere presence in an active student body. With a little discrimination on your part you can hardly fail to have a group of friends who are interested in almost the whole range of human activities. By talking with them and under- standing their hobbies you will lay the basis for a truly liberal education. One can afford to be something of a specialist, even in ones undergraduate days, provided one has, as friends and companions, those who are interested in entirely different thingsf, This is a leaftorn from Conantls own book oflife. He began being a specialist in chemistry in the Roxbury Latin School On the steps of University Hall which prepared him for Harvard. But neither at school nor at college were his friends picked only or mainly from the laboratory. When the choice for president of Harvard fell upon a man who had made his reputation in a scientific laboratory, his fellow-workers cried out that it was a shame to make a mere executive of a chemist who had made important cliseoveriesu discoveries, too, in that borderland between chemistry and the mystery of lile where lies the most adven- turous hope, perhaps, of the further significant advance ofhuman know- ledge. Conant had been working on the green coloring matter of plants, called chlorophyll and the hemo- globin in the blood. What he achieved tin his own modest wordsi included the lielueidationi, 0f the probable nature of the second, and the ttpartial elueidationli of the structure of the first. It is not a sub- ject that we can even partially elucidate. As a boy, in Dorchester, Mass, where he was born, Jim, or Bryant Conant, as he was variously tagged by his familiars, had rigged up a lab- oratory for himself in his fathers house, that father, James Scott Conant, being an inventive wood- engraver who went on to photo- engraving and made for a time a considerable success of the busi- ness, after serving both in the army and in the navy during the Civil War. The son was tthey sayi a bad speller but sufli- eiently diligent in diversified studies to get into Harvard be- fore he was 18, and, with chemistry for stroke oar, to arrive at his degree with high honors three years later. After a summer spent in the laboratories of the Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia, he was back at Cambridge to take his Ph.D. in 1916. Hard on that came his war service. As part of the task of beating the Germans, our army was trying to better the German chemistsa lethal inventions. Actu- ally it was the mild-mannered man with the blue eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, now president of Harvard, who, while on military duty as lieutenant and then as captain in Washington, worked out a method for the production of the gas, more powerful than mustard gas, that came to be called ttlewisite? As Major Conant, he was sent to a commandeered motor-ear plant at Willougby, Ohio, where, with a score of other oHicers and some 500 men, his concern was the quantity production oflewisite. As extreme precaution toward guarding a prime military secret, he and his companions found themselves confined for the duration of the war within the high wire fence which en- closed the plant, It was called lithe Mousetrapfl The armis- tice found the gas-making going on full speed ahead tthough no shipment had yet been made overseasi and Conant very much on the job as technical expert in charge. His executive ability, his technique of handling men, were each tried, proved and tempered in the Mousetrap. There, too, his happy gift for the unhurried, efficient dispatch of business was con- siderably cultivated and perfected. From the Mousetrap he went back to Harvard and his chemical oceupations,bec0ming full professor in 1927 and head of his department in 1931.

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HARVARD NINETEEN THIRTY-FOUR CLASS ALBUM The Man Who Remade Harvard resigned the presidency of iversity after twenty- three years on the job is an outstanding figure in the contemporary land- scape 0n the score of ex- traordinary accomplish- ment-not merely be- cause he is the only col- lege president and al- most the only public character in America who has never been in- terViewed. lVIr. Lowell during his student HIS 611le68, WhO 31:6 days not a few, and h1s friends who are many, agree that he has re- made our oldest collegeethough some still prefer to write the word unmade. This is because in remaking it he has divided Harvard into seven colleges, as a part of a grand scheme of putting order into chaosga scheme which has been so successful that it has gone a long way toward trans- forming the entire higher education system of the country. Those who would make Mr. Lowell-he is not often called President Lowell inside of Harvardia snob because he will not do for the press what is almost universally done by public characters, including Kings, Emperors, Presidents, not merely of colleges but of republics, stub their toes on this fact. Sticking imperturbably to his almost singular policy, he habitually uses a degree of frankness alike in private conver- sation and in public speaking and writing which very few public men in America would care to emulate. Indeed, he is a most unassuming person to meet, easier of access in his ofiice in Bulfinchk University Hall in the Harvard Yard than almost any college president that this writer has ever had occasion to approach. There he is. Usually Mr. Lowell is not in his ofhce but in the big faculty room with the portraits of all the Harvard presidents on the walls, and the long tables and the chairs. His way, when he makes a speech is to stride up and down as he talks. When hejust talks he still strides up and down, it may be with two hands behind his back, or one hand behind his back, if the other is holding a paper in front of him. His shoulders are roundedethe shoulders of an athleteenot of an old man, even today, when he is on the eve of his seventy- sixth birthday. His head is habitually bent down, though he is not tall. He is ruddy of face, light blue of eye, with the hooded lids Characteristic of so many of the elder type of Americans. He wears a business suit, usually of a subdued striped pattern, a boiled shirt and round cuffs. Often his tie used to be red. Twenty years ago the business suit was a bobtailed cutaway; and then his hair and drooping mustache were tawny rather than gray. Otherwise he is outwardly much the same as the man who in 1909 stepped into the shoes of Charles W. Eliot, retired emeritus after four decades in the presidents chair. He talks casily, with pungency and humor, simply and di- rectly. He is a man of decision and action, ready and wary at once, and words are means not ends. He puts on no side, his courtesy is unfailing. The usual View of Mr. Lowell enjoyed by Harvard men for this quarter-century past, however, is not indoors. It is when he walks briskly across the Yard, carrying a green bag of the sort for which Harvard is famous. He greets under- graduates passing upon their several occasions pleasantly, but neither his greeting nor his bearing affects any dislocation of the undergraduate traffic. Unobtrusive he is always, and, in the beginning, the con- trast was noted to the processional 0r pontifical manner, more of the theatre, honors worn simply too, but with an air, of Dr. Eliot. Eliot was a tall man of stately habit. Lowell, as we have said, is not a tall man. Ofa Sunday afternoon he used to keep open house for the members of the college. He told stories to the group at his end of the big room, while at the other end another group clustered around Mrs. Lowellls tea table. A Harvard freshman of that date remembers that Prexyis flow of apt anecdote was a bubbly and unfailingr stream. Mr. Lowellis characteristic directness of speech has not been absent from his annual addresses to the freshmen. A man now some ten years out of college recalls the shock he got when, as a newly matriculated member of Harvard, he heard the president of the university say right out in meeting it was no wonder there was a lot of knowledge in colleges and add: iiThe freshmen always bring in a little and the seniors never take any away? The subversive assertion followed that it was not necessary to remember what one learned at college. At another time and with quite another twist of the wrist Mr. Lowell observed that possession of the B.S. degree was a certificate, not of a mans mastery of science but to his ignorance of Latin. The way the President of Harvard goes about the Yard and pokes around the university buildings suggests more than anything else a man pottering around in his own back lot. Mr. Lowell is the sort of man who likes to see things himself, to do things with his own hands. He used to clip the hedge about his house. He was seen one day when the Widener Library was about completed armed with a bundle of sharpened sticks and a line. With these he proceeded to lay out the walks about the new building. The new chapel in the Yard, just completed by Charles Coolidge, the college architect-in-chief, followed a scheme in every particular indicated by Mr. Lowell, and even in his seventy-fifth year he climbed all over the building in process and scaled the scaffolding of the steeple. With this goes the famous story of his walking out to Soldiersl Field with James Bryce and challenging the then British Ambassa- dor to climb over the picket fence which had been built there expressly to keep climbers out. Bryce declined the challenge. But Lowell scrambled over. In his early fifties Mr. Lowell stepped up from a professors chair in history to the presidency ol'the university from which he had been graduated thirty-two years before. Three years after his graduation he took his degree at the Harvard Law School and for seventeen years thereafter had practiced at the Boston bar. HC had held his professorship less than ten years