Red-Hot Capitalist

The Class reports on a Harvard graduate traditionally list not only his achievements but his prejudices, cants, and religious eccentricities. Typical of these illuminating self-portraits is the periodic alumni record of Alexander Moss White '25, the New York investment banker and museum executive who was recently appointed to head the University's three-year fund drive. The image, as one friend pointed out, "is just what you would expect of a man who is entrusted with raising a hundred million dollars."

When he was five years out of college, White reported that he had entered his father's brokerage firm. He wrote in 1935 that his own family had increased by 100 per cent (with the birth of two of his three children) and his income had decreased by the same proportion. Ten years later he wrote confidently that "I find myself not at all ashamed to be tagged a Wall Streeter." He also considers himself a "red-hot capitalist."

White currently heads White, Weld & Company, a New York investment house which was founded by his grandfather and grand-uncle in 1837. One of the nation's most conservative and powerful underwriting firms, White, Weld employs more than 500 workers, including 23 partners, in its Wall Street offices. "Alec" White, a tall man with long-fingered hands that gesture as he speaks, became a managing partner in 1929, when his father's illness forced him to "back into the family firm."

But ever since his early days at Harvard, where "I was never on pro and occasionally on the Dean's List," White has been adept at finance. Concentrating in English Literature, he served on his freshman class committee and was business manager of P.B.H.'s annual Handbook. He enrolled for one term at the Business School in 1925, after finishing his College course requirements at midyears of his senior year and spending several months touring Europe in a Model T. When he entered White, Weld, he had not expected to enjoy investment banking, but by 1936 he found it enough to his liking, despite the crippling Depression, to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for a reported $173,000.

White was born in Brooklyn, where he attended Polytechnic Preparatory School and learned to speak a vocabulary in which "first" is still "foist." When he came to Harvard, he knew only six people in his class, but he widened his acquaintance by trying out for football manager (unsuccessfully), stroking a 150-lb. crew in his sophomore year (his shell got tangled in high grass during a race against Middlesex School), and writing for the Lampoon.

Since his youth, White has been interested in hunting and sailing. The latter hobby brought him a commission in the Navy in 1940. After four years in the Atlantic on minesweepers and destroyer escorts, White went to Washington to work for James Forrestal in smoothing the transition to a peace-time Navy. Discharged as a Commander in 1945, he remains a keen salt water sailor, piloting his fifty-foot German-built yawl "Blue Water" through the coves of Long Island Sound "as often as possible." As a weekend skipper, White has won several races, although he lost his mainsail the only time he entered the famed Bermuda regatta.

Before President Pusey asked White to lead Harvard's campaign for new capital, the small-eyed, pipe-smoking Long Island broker had not been really active in College affairs. He had never been an Overseer, although he did serve on visiting committees. From his temporary office in Massachusetts Hall, however, he will be able to call on an impressive list of prominent alumni, including vice chairman Devereux C. Josephs '15, Thomas S. Lamont '21, John L. Loeb '24, Ralph Lowell '12, and David Rockefeller '36. "Somewhat reluctantly," White says, he will have to make a large number of speeches during the next few years.

But possessing a Harvard education places a unique responsibility on the graduate, White feels, explaining his reasons for accepting the demanding post. "For those of us who have had the good fortune to inherit or acquire substantial means," he says, "this campaign presents the best opportunity we will ever have to repay our debt for having been started on the road with a full kit."