Despite Depression, War, Harvard '30 Beat the Odds

Certainly the class of 1930 shows as many successes as any other to come out of Harvard: numerous lawyers and investment counselors, writers and editors, doctors, the author of "Around the World in Eighty Days," and the president of the Polaroid Corporation.

Yet, when Harvard men of other years would have headed for the open path to success, the class of '30 found itself roadblocked by the Depression. Not surprisingly, these men often took whatever jobs they could get: Cameron Blaikie Jr. '30 reports positions as an apprentice iron worker, salesman for a chimney-cleaning oufit, bill collector, and finally a railroad man.

"During the following four years, dedicated to avoiding bankruptcy, I saw history repeating itself," John D. Elliot Jr. writes, adding, "the great blunders had been and were continuing to be made by the Experts, in the interest of those who were unconcerned with reversing the Depression but rather, profiting from it."

Foreign service officer Walworth Barbour says that even overseas while working for the government, the Depression seemed very close. "Everyone was given one month's leave without pay and we were stuck--all because the government wanted to cut down," he says.

Another man's parents had him committed to a mental institution in Vermont because he couldn't find a job. After eight years of sweating out to see a lawyer, he finally secured his release, although the courts have never awarded him damages.

"Papers were served on the institution; my father showed up and said he wasn't interested in contesting the case, and the hospital agreed to my unconditional release," he writes.

The world inside the confines of the College had been a hard world of a different sort, the end of the '20s, a different era from the beginning of the '30s.

Many of the Class of '30 moved into the River Houses with an eye toward a room in the Yard senior year. Spencer Brown '30 says he remembers most vividly conversations with his classmates about "life, God, science, and all those things we didn't know much about." He adds that, as a scholarship student, he felt the constraints of social class, symbolized by the automobile and the gentleman's C. "It was easy to distinguish between those with the Back Bay accents and cars and those who were interested in getting on the Dean's list and keeping their scholarship," he says.

Not everyone could live in college dormitories sophomore year, and a bad lottery number meant removal to special "slums" long gone from the Square. "You wouldn't have been surprised to be bitten by a rat in one of those rooms," he recalls. "The other dormitories were too expensive for anyone but the Gold Coast denizens to live in," he adds.

One of those "Gold Coast denizens" found his professional career in a theater on Holyoke St. Harold Adamson came to the College with no idea that he wanted to be a lyricist until he wrote the book for Hasty Pudding and Pi Eta Club shows. "When I did the first Pudding show we had a professional from New York doing the choreography, and he said I was good enough for Broadway so I went," Adamson says. He went on to write for Ziegfeld shows in New York, and was later voted to the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then governor of New York, delivered the 1930 Commencement address to his son James and the rest of the graduating class, he may not have realized the effects his later actions as president would have on the political ideas of the group entering "the company of educated men and women."

His New Deal, which most members of the Class of '30 alternately describe as 'a handout" and "a giveaway program" helped codify many of their ideas about the economy. "It's not only Carter but the whole socialist giveaway, welfare state, with its endless social programs and wasteful spending, begun under Roosevelt and propagandized by those like J.K. Galbraith and other college professors who accept good salaries and hope for tenure and long vacations, as well as sabbatical leaves, and yet so hypocritically criticize capitalism that provides this largesse for them," Gordon B. Worcester writes to his class. But Elliot, a lobbyist, emerges with an opposite view, "I reached the never-to-be-reversed conviction that Uncle Sam's taxing authority utilized to balance our economy by curtailing greed and dishonesty and developing social benefits and policies...was the only means which could effectively reverse the Depression and permanently carry forward the just, honest economy we ought to enjoy so as to maintain full employment."

Just as the Depression may have been their first experience with the power of economics beyond its favor with business and law school admissions officers, for some World War II provided a dramatic reminder of the responsibilities of the international stature of the United States in the late 30's.

One engineer writes, "In the war, I learned that five years infantry experience in a southern military school, and two years with A's in Mil. Sci. had no value; but I received a commission in the Air Force based on business experience."

Barbour was stationed in Bulgaria when war was declared. "There was less of it at the beginning, in 1930, and diplomacy was acquiring opprobrium as a striped pants gentlemanly occupation. However, clouds were gathering, clouds which carried the lightning of upheaval, and which still persist today, with different manifestations but with the fundamental ingredient of increasing Soviet power."

What did you do in the war, Daddy? "My toughest fight was with my draft board. Sent to England, I spent the first six months in base and convalescent hospitals," Blaikie reports. From their various war offices and combat units, the Class of '30 returned home to another term of FDR, many deploring the necessity of war but convinced of the importance of military preparedness.

"Only the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, can make the Kremlin pause and think. Not by military tactics, but by the power of its will and preparedness to stop the imbalance, made manifest at all times, and including the inherent threat to employ the military if essential, to continue our existence and that of our equally determined allies," Barbour writes.

John C. Gray '30, now a physicist, connects world-wide aggression with the predominance of sexism in most cultures. "Whatever advantages existed once for the traditional roles assigned males and females, the world is now too small and populated, too interdependent, and supplied with terrible weapons, to continue male macho dominance," he writes.

Richard G. Tinnerholm, a corporate vice president, sees the need for more sweeping reform. He writes that the federal government that produces "inevitable stalemates has outlived its usefulness and has demonstrated its inability to give effective leadership in current domestic and international crises," adding he would recommend a form of 'enlightened presidential dictatorship' operating under the surveillance of our Supreme Court," and abolishing Congress as serving no purpose.

Brown, now a retired high school principal, describes his political transformation 50 years after Harvard. "Ideologically, I have moved from Christianity to Marx and Freud and finally to agnostic stoicism," he writes. "The socialists immunized me against infection by Stalinism, Russian or Chinese. I never voted for FDR or Truman, only for Norman Thomas.