Class of '45: The Blood Runs Thin?

ON THOSE crisp Fall evenings of 1941, as Milton Hughes and Pat Grant and John Quincy Adams and the group supported each other tweedily and unsteadily up the paths from Wigglesworth Hall to the Freshman Union after a heavy afternoon of gambling and imbibing, someone must have paused at the crest of the hill near the newly opened Rare Book Library to consider how unlikely it all was. And as they sat at their own linen-covered table in the Union ordering cigars and beer from the waitress-a working-class Cambridge mother, one of Lord Harvard's peasantry-surely they all knew deep down that the whole thing could simply not go on much longer.

"Our class was the last flourish of the old clitist Harvard in its pure form," says Mitchell Goodman '45, a codefendant with Doctor Spock in that 1968 draft evasion conspiracy trial. "The Abbott Lawrence Lowell conception of the gentleman-scholar was still taken seriously." Goodman was a scholarship student from public high school in Brooklyn. He was very impressed.

He's not impressed any longer. Except for a panel discussion on Monday, he has boycotted the class's 25th reunion. "The whole notion of 'Funfest '45' is an obscenity in a time like like this." he says. "The announcements they sent were like those of damn-fool pantyraid collegians. It's proof these guys never got over being Harvard men.

"The whole Harvard psychology of our time indoctrinated us. It's hard to imagine today. We ate like little princes. The food was intended for clubmen-to-be. I'd never eaten that well in my life.

"We were carefully sorted out in the Yard in a caste system. The floor I lived on in Thayer there was only one real upper-class type-Lewis Jefferson Proctor [St. Paul's]. His father was head of American Telephone for South America. He died in 1958 of sheer decadence on the Riviera.

"Those of us from public high schools were very naive. We didn't even know what Groton was. A kind of revelation came one dinner late in the Fall. On this night they all turned up on cue wearing their school blazers and crests and ties. That not only told us but them where each stood on the relative preppy ladder. It was an announcement that said 'Keep your place.'"

But they must have known it could not last. Surely! For one thing, there was the war. Pearl Harbor was little more than two months after they registered Freshman year. But even before that, war was the undercurrent which gave their Harvard days a different flavor-however minor-from that of their older brothers and fathers. Harvard President James Bryant Conant and the CRIMSON both came out in favor of an immediate declaration of war first thing in September. The CRIMSON's previous policy had been to advocate "anything short of war" to aid the allies, but it said that it now found that policy "untenable." The CRIMSON story on Conant's statement was printed near the bottom of the page, under a banner headline that football star Chub Peabody had been injured.

The war kept virtually the entire class from graduating on time, if at all. Twenty-seven members of the Class of '45 died in the war. (This was less than either of the surrounding classes, however.) Most came back to finish in '46 or '47; many graduated after only two-and-a-half or three years thanks to the Faculty's generosity in giving credits for basic training and such, and an accelerated program in which many took courses during the summer. When they returned, the linen was gone from the tables and they had to serve themselves cafeteriastyle.

AT THE beginning of the Summer term in 1942, the end of the class's freshman year, President Conant delivered a speech to students in which he said, "Class privilege destroys our frontier heritage. We must curtail hereditary privilege and extend the doctrines of equal opportunity. We must reverse the trend of the past 50 years and restore a high degree of social mobility in the country." In 1941 Conant had written an article for Atlantic Monthly in which he made several proposals for reform of American society in order to justify the loss of young men's lives in the upcoming war. Among them, he proposed to limit incomes by law to $25,000 per earner, and to make all inheritance illegal.

(Note: the median income of the Class of 1945 in 1965 was $24,000.)

"There was a fervor about the new world we would create after the Nazimenace was eliminated," Goodman recalls. "We never asked any real questions. After the war we came back to Harvard to regain lost time."

Class Secretary Robert Treat Paine Storer Jr. says, "After the war we were older and more sophisticated, trying harder to get more out of college. So we feel we understand more about the mind of today's college boys than they think we do."

After the war Harvard had changed and the country had changed too-if not quite in the way Conant had in mind. Harvard's admissions policy was reformed to admit fewer Boston Brabmins from the right prep schools, and more students from varied backgrounds. And American capitalism had exploded after the war into a new plane. It needed aggressive, ambitious clear headed men-not the gentle cut of St. Marks and Middlesex.

Perhaps this is the reason there are so few famous figures in the Class of 1945. Most Harvard classes have at least a few presidents of large corporations, captains of industry; this class has virtually none. "You usually haven't quite made it to the top by your twenty-fifth," says Howard F. Gillette. General Secretary of the Alumni. But after all, John F. Kennedy had been elected President, shot, and buried by his twenty-fifth. And this class had had much of the competition eliminated at the very beginning of the race. Mitch Goodman has another explanation:

"After nine or ten generations of Harvard and the good life, the dynamic that had raised their ancestors to the top had gone out of them; they'd become decadent. They didn't have the kind of guts to make it in the post-war world."

IS THIS fair? Bob Storer (Belmont Hill; John Hancock Life) says, "Sure, I lived in Wigglesworth and then Eliot House. We all went to prep schools and then to Harvard. Sure we all joined clubs. But I think this-a great many of us went on to become top-flight lawyers and bankers and insurance men. I don't think a lot of us have made a hell of a lot of money, but no one's broke."

Storer and Goodman had a couple of long conversations about a year ago concerning the Class of 1945 gift. (The class's original goal was $900,000, It has since been reduced.) Goodman wanted to propose giving part of it to struggling black colleges in the South "whose faculty are being stolen by Harvard and others to create their own facades, to try to curtail this endless, endless hoarding of money by Harvard when so many other colleges are dying for the lack of only a little." Goodman chose Storer to deal with because, he says, "he's the most humane one in the tight cabal that runs the class-the only one who bothered to show up at my trial two years ago." The plan got nowhere-even a compromise version that would have earmarked part of the money for recruitment of and scholarships for black students at Harvard. "There are too many Southerners in the class-many whom donated generously-for us to give the money to Negroes or the underprivileged or people from the ghetto or things like that," Storer said. "It would offend them. And if we had a vote of the class, many of those voting would be those who didn't give any money.

"Another thing we feel about a Goodman," he said, "is that a Goodman complains without being constructive. SDS and that are just trying to destroy. They say they will be constructive later. Well in business that's not how we do things. If it's true like we read in the Herald that only five per cent of the current Harvard class is making all the trouble, then we'd like the other 95 per cent to make themselves known.

"In our day we would have as many intellectual discussions as the boys today. But then we'd go back to our rooms or to the OG [Oxford Grill] for a beer instead of forming committees and demonstrating and some such.

"We went through college in troubled times too, you know. We didn't know when we would have to go to war. ROTC was called up between Christmas and New Years of 1944 and we didn't get any credit for that whole preceding term. Now the students are demanding credit for no work because they say these are troubled times. We had the war, and a lot of us were not for the war. God knows we didn't want to go. We turned around, though, with PearlHarbor which in my mind was completely brought about by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who needed an excuse to declare war. This group today needs a catalyst. If a Chinese ICBM landed in California that would make people realize that Nixon's handling of Vietnam is not that bad."

Goodman recalls that on the day Franklin Roosevelt died he was studying in the Lowell House library, which overlooks the Owl Club garden. The Owl Club, he says, threw a party that afternoon to celebrate FDR's death.

Storer says. "Mtich Goodman said he wouldn't come to the reunion because it's too frivolous. We feel that when we're working at our jobs we work like hell. We play like hell too. Why can't we come back and have a hell of a good time? A successful guy has lots of friends. I think it's great."

PERHAPS the most successful man in the Class of 1945 is Hugh D. Calkins, Calkins is the youngest member of the Harvard Corporation a prominent Cleveland lawyer, former member of the Cleveland school board, trustee of his alma mater Phillips Exeter, and frequently mentioned candidate for higher office in Harvard and the nation. At Harvard Calkins graduated Magna and was president of the CRIMSON. Naturally, he is chief marshal of the 25th reunion. Calkins has lots of friends. Bob Storer recalls. "From my point of view he was a little liberal-not really in with the Brahmins, even though he did go to Exeter."

Mitch Goodman, who was managing editor of the CRIMSON under Calkins, reminisces. "In the forties we didn't understand what a little pusher Calkins was. We were taken by his enormous propriety. His character at Harvard was that of a well-trained student guy who doesn't fuck around. He's the perfect example of a man not really upper-class, but a semi-decayed pilgrim descendant who had to make good on his own. He's the prime example of the paragon good boy-never made a mistake."

One of Calkins's classmates who's been successful in his own way is James Leroy Bernard. Bernard refused to serve in World War Two, and spent time in McNeil Island Federal Prison, then the psychiatric section of the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles. He visited a Utopian colony in Paraguay after the war to gather material for his senior thesis, and ended up staying thirteen years until the colony went out of business in 1961. He and his wife organized an obstructive but non-violent picket line at Port Chicago, California, from which 90 per cent of U.S. ammunitions for Vietnam are shipped, and maintained it for 800 days despite official pressure, police harassment, and arrests. A second series of raids by federal authorities "convinced me that if I wanted to stay free I'd best stop being brave," so Bernard moved to Costa Rica, where he's organized a commune for "exiles from military dictatorships near and far."

Another prominent member of the class is Justin Kaplan, whose biography of Mark Twain won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Kaplan lives in Cambridge so he can be near Widener Library. As a consequence, he is more in touch with students than many of his classmates. While he probably agrees with, most of Goodman's criticisms of their class, he is more gentle about it. (He remembers Calkins as "someone terribly nice.") Kaplan graduated from Horace Mann School in New York, and says when he came to Harvard he was "definitely made to feel marginal." Nonetheless he does not see any Brahmin conspiracy to control the class.

"In my time around here," he says, "there were the early bloomers as politicians from Winnetka and Oak Park. You could get elected president of the freshman class with only five votes if you really wanted. But as soon as the class graduates, it falls into the hands of the alumni association, the leaders of which have got to be from Boston, and have got to be involved with money. So you end up with the State Street or insurance types almost, by definition after all the express purpose of the 25th reunion is to get money from the fat cats.

"Mitch thinks I've been co-opted, but there's a difference in style. My job is to organize 'the college activities' for the reunion-wholesome pauses for intellectual activities in five days of orgiastic drinking. If I didn't do it, someone worse would. If one of those State Street people took over, it would be bland propaganda. They are all too inert to be shaken up-but at least we'll try to excite them a little. You can call it co-optation, or you can call it boring from within.

"I'm amazed at how terribly meek they all are-more and more. They genuinely want to learn things, I think. At a certain age they realize they have a certain insularity. But of course they really can't get off their asses. You're not going to get Ralph Lowell Jr.-a classic Brahmin fundraiser type-to raise money from Southern alumni for black colleges."

Kaplan remembers a different Harvard from the one Storer loves and Goodman hates. "I've never since felt as alone as I did freshman year." he says. "I talked to hardly anyone. But I made beautiful discoveries academically. I thought the beauty of Harvard was that they left you alone. We moved back to Cambridge ten years ago just so I could be near Widener Library-I love it and depend on it."

THE CLASS of 1945's 25th Anniversary Report is filled with sad tales, most of which are variations on the theme of "survived the army: returned for my degree: went into business-insurance-finance where I am now associate director of internal operations: married my wife and have three kids and a dog: we like to ski and vacation in the Carribean." Some of the variations, as can only be expected when covering the lives of 1000 people, are bizarre.

One gentleman is recalled by a classmate to have been a Jew who dressed up in preppy clothes and "snuck" into a Final Club, from which exalted position he was constantly threatened with exposure by old high school friends. Now he reports he's a member of the John Birch Society and believes in Karma and reincarnation. Another hopes to send his sons to Harvard and therefore calls himself an optimist, except for his belief that overpopulation will destroy the world before the year 2000. One appears to have achieved reincarnation in this life, being cross-referenced as both Joseph D. MacDonald and Donald Eliot Marks.

One writes that his body is slowly rejecting its own liver. Another writes modestly that he has "pursued a business career," without reporting whether or not he has found it.

And so it goes. Now 378 of the 942 living members of the Class of 1945 have returned for their 25th. And on these damp June evenings of 1970, as they support each other (and their wives) tweedily, unsteadily, and arthritically up the paths to their headquarters in the Freshman Union after heavy afternoons of reminiscing and imbibing, surely someone must realize how unlikely it all is-that the whole thing can't go on much longer.

Surely someone. But not Hugh Calkins. Lofting a FunFest '45 beer can, he says, "I don't see any reason not to have a reunion." To which Bob T.P. Storer can only add. "A successful guy has lots of friends. I think it's just great."