Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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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

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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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HARVARD NlNll'lilLliN 'lVIIlR'l'Y-IVUUR CLASS ALBUM but he had won distinguished aeadeniie recognition. He had written a book on English Goyernment that by many is ranked with Bi'yeeis gZXmeriean Commonwealth and his ltGoyernment Iii was a famous course among undergradu- ates. Mr. Lowell came to his new post with nobody questioning his full share in the induratetl tradition oil the people who haye always run Haryartl and whose right to be. considered the best in New England is not questioned by any sane New Englander. If you Choose, he was of the essence of hard- boiled New England. An accomplished scholar, a sound historian, a man of the world, an athlete-he had eyen played poloidressing simply in the quiet manner of people accustomed to the best, he had yet only to put on a slicker and souiwester to look a dead ringer for a well-weathered Gloucester fishermanian equally authentie expression oli hard-boiled New England. In his full name you read his title Clear. Abbott Lawrence Lowell is bone of the bone and flesh 01. the flesh ofthe stock that founded the colony oliltlassaehusetts Bay and built up in the yieinity ofBoston a material prosper- ity and moral superiority till now alike impregnable. Lowell and Lawrence are names not only of well-saltecl-down fam- ilies in that colony and Commonwealth but ofthe mill towns on which are based the substantial worldly fortunes of these two families, counting as kinsfolk tusually halfa dozen waysi practically all the other well-salted-down families that owe allegiance to the sacred eoclfish. The Abbotts come in that way, too. In the line of the Lowells tLowles, as they arriyed from English Somersetshirelt are parsons and poets as well as merchants. In the line ofthe Lawrence are bankers, Bishops, diplomatists, as well as profiteers ofthat far-Hung trade upon the sea which was New Englandls fat meal-tieket before the Lowells talong with the Cabotsy diseoyered the secret of nourishing infant American industry tmeaning New Eng- landls manufacture of woolen and eottoni on the bottle oil the protectiye tariff. To yary the metaphor, this man is woyen ofone piece with his race. Every significant thread in the warp and woofof his peculiar people is in the pattern of his single personality. He is a part of the pattern of Haryarcl in the same sense. From the beginning Lowells, Lawrenees and their entangled eon- sanguineous and eonnubial lines haye been Haryard men all the way from freshan to members ofthe faculty and fellows of the corporation. If, therefore, Haryard had to be remade, no better person could be found to tackle the task than this manvespeeially if the remaking was in an image remote from the exterior aspect of the older Haryard and done that way deliberately in the teeth ofopposition from other good Haryard men who saw the ancient tradition grieyously offended. This was, in fact, precisely what Mr. Lowell proceeded to do, and con- triyed to saye Haryard in the process. That much is hardly disputed eyen by the most irreconcilable anti-Lowellites as their Victorious antagonist resigns his post of power. Eliot also remade Haryard. He found the college beside the Riyer Charles, the loeal pride as the nursery of New Eng- landis select striplings and certain sons oli Federalists liom the South. He left a great uniyersity, national in scope. He fortified that uniyersity during his lbrty years oli rule with a faculty of strong men, judged by the suryiying impress of their names, not to be matched in any uniyersity today. It is an easy gibe to sayiantl it has been said-that Dr. Eliot lelt Harvard rieh in men, while President Lowell is leayingr Har- xartl, besides a lot of line, new buildings, richer in money by $100,000,000. Behind the gibe, olieourse, is the laet that Mr. Lowellls twenty-three years olipresiclential aetiyity haye been consistently deyoted to putting baek into Haryartl things which Dr. Eliot, riding the full tide oliideal Victorian liben alism, had discarded as antique Clutter. It is useless to pretend 7whateyer his outward politeness to the demo- cratic ideal of his Com- monwealth and his eoun- tryrthat A. Lawrence Lowell puts his trust in any saying grace inher- ent in what John Locke called ila too numerous demoeraeyllawhieh is always the democracy that has to be dealt with in practice. Such trust is not in the nature of the man, his blood, back- ground, mentality or training. It is because he is securely an autoerat in his own right tot posi- tion and conseieneey that he has been able to go about beingr an autocrat quite unobtrusiyely. Thereby he has got away with things which produced for another eminent and con- scientious autoerat-though an ideal democrat in theoryi a head-on collision which wrecked his well-laicl plans. For it was Woodrow Wilson, as president ofPrineeton, who first tackled the tough job of splitting up into more wieldy pieces the knotty problem of the oyergrown American col- lege. That was a quarter ofa century ago. Today indiyisible Haryard is cliyideel. Princeton is still one piece. Haryard Col- lege in 1932 is a going concern of seyen colleges, tactfully tagged thousesli to saye the face of the old college and to soothe the feelings ofsentimental old grads. In fact Haryard College does remain Haryard College, and one. President Lowell prescribed the operation and personally performed it so painlessly to the patient at Cambridge- though onlookers shucldered and shrieked aloudathat Yale put herself on the table next, submitting of course, not to Dr. Lowellls knile but those of her own surgeons. Two years hence Yale will be a going concern olitwelye colleges, boldly so designated, with mother college left to saye her face as best she may. Being autoerat so unobtrusiyely, Mr. Lowell was able to take immediate adyantage of the offer of the Harkness mil- lions deyoted to the material transformation oliboth colleges, though the loyal Yale malts first approach was to his alma mater. Seizer and improyer of opportunities by yoeation as well as by nature -eall him opportunist, if you desire to be- little a large giftrwithin three years the head oli Haryard had got the pattern of undergraduate life at Cambridge re- constructed in terms ofbrieks ancl mortariGeorgian liaeatlest dormers, eupolas, quadrangles, lisaming green grass plots. He had got it reconstructed, too, according to the younger manis yision set out in his inaugural aclchessithe older Inanis Latest Portrait of Dr. Lowell dream had come true. For the things that Lowell has clone represent the aehieye- ment, point by point, oil the program he laid out and pub- licly confessed when he assumed his trust. IVhen Harkness eame alongr with the money Lowell had already been looking tor years for funds to use as he has used the Harkness gilt. He would hate lbund the money anyway.