In the Midst of Changes

All sorts of changes were taking place at Harvard in the late twenties and early thirties. President Lowell had inaugurated the house system, and splendid Georgian buildings were being erected along the Charles River to house the undergraduates in unparalleled comfort and luxury. In the process there was a certain amount of cannibalization of real estate, and ladies who ran boarding houses for students were being done out of their livelihood. This did not sit very well with the city fathers. The relationship between "town" and "gown," always edgy, took a distinct turn for the worse. Some of the awe and respect with which the University had been viewed in earlier days by the rest of Cambridge had been eroded in the last decade or so, and Councillor Toomey, at a meeting of the City Council, even called for the sundering of relations between the City of Cambridge and Harvard.

The student body had grown continuously over he decades and become more cosmopolitan, and in the early days of the house system a kind of true identification with the individual houses took place on the part of both faculty and students. Professors became integral members of the houses, dined there, and mixed with the students in a way that after the Second World War, with the enormous expansion of the student body, was never to be repeated in the same intimate manner. For just a few years the system came close to the ideal of an intellectual fellowship that had been Lowell's idea in the first place.

Even Harvard professors, whose lives in the past had seemed cloistered and parochial, were beginning to break out of their mold. Numerous bright instructors in government and economics and some senior professors, together with a yearly complement of clever young law graduates serving as law clerks to such Supreme Court justices as Brandeis and Cardoza, had begun to trickle down to Washington to work for the Roosevelt New Deal--a trickle that became a veritable flood during the Second World War and one that has continued unabated ever since.

In my days at Radcliffe, so that there would be no unseemly cross-infection. Harvard professors still trudged across the Cambridge Common to repeat lectures delivered in the previous hour to male students in the unpolluted classrooms of Sever Hall Many a faculty baby's birth was financed by the extra dollars earned by its father in these biweekly treks to the hinterland. There were, to be sure, certain professors who looked with horror at the incursions of women into the sacred precincts of Harvard College, even at the safe distance of the Radcliffe Yard, and would have nothing to do with the academic arrangements by which their colleagues taught the Radcliffe students. Roger Merriman, for example, thr first master of Eliot House and professor of history, would not have been caught dead teaching a Radcliffe class.

Though Radcliffe women were allowed to use Widener Library, it was considered a bit wild and dashing, not to say "provocative," to make the trip, and they were segregated in the upper reaches of the library in a small cell into which they were permitted to retire discreetly with their books. In the handbook for my Class of 1934 we were requested to wear hats at all times when we went to the Square, having made no progress on that front from the days of Mrs. Agassiz and the "Harvard Annes." As for the parietal rules listed in the same handbook, in the atmosphere of today they read like the strictures laid upon novices in a nunnery. In fact, the concern about sexuality spelled out by implication in these blameless little red pamphlets has a piquancy when read today that I feel sure the original authors never dreamed of.

The rigmarole attached to going to a party in someone's room in one of the houses was of unbelievable complication--head tutors had to be alerted, chaperones provided, and witching hours observed. The final conclusion after all this exhausting experience on the part of the "fast" girls in my class was that a student who had escaped the Harvard houses and had an apartment of his own was no longer a student but a man. So why bother with the rest!

Radcliffe in the thirties was thought of as something of a poor relation by the other women's colleges. The chic girls went to Vassar, the intellectuals to Bryn Mawr, and the comfortably placed bourgeois types to Wellesley and Smith. At least that was the way it seemed to us. We may have been Cinderellas but we knew something our haughty stepsisters did not. We were getting the best education in the country, and besides, and we weren't banished to the sticks to rusticate. Weekends at Yale and Princeton may have been the answer to a maiden's prayer at Vassar, but we did not have to wait for ceremonial weekends for our entertainment: there were those among the Harvard population who recognized our merits. It took more than a decade and the Second World War for these facts to sink in.

Radcliffe was still in part a commuter college when I was there; perhaps half my class came by streetcar or subway from Boston, the Newtons, Dorchester, or Cambridge. The rest lived in dormitories presided over by house mistresses and were waited on at table by maids in white aprons and caps.

This was still the time of the gentleman's C at Harvard among certain of the prep school graduates and the "clubbies," who treated "greasy grinds" who got A's with contempt and looked upon Radcliffe women as "bluestockings" to be avoided at all costs. Some of us, too, were rather hierarchical and snobbish in our judgment of our classmates. Concentrators in the sciences were thought to be rather "wet," and taking a laboratory course was something to be avoided, because it meant long hours of work in the late afternoon and a freezing walk back home or to one's dormitory in the winte's twilight. In our carefree approach to the whole subject of education, convenience rather than intellectual stimulus seemed to have been the basis for a good many course choices. Nine o'clocks were taboo; eleven o'clocks desirable.

The aesthetes frequented the Fogg Museum, where Paul Sachs produced platoons of future museum directors in his museum course, and the intellectual elite concentrated in history and literature, where a remarkable group of tutors like Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdoch created an atmosphere of excitement for whole generations of students. The emphasis in literature seemed to have been on English authors. If one read Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, or dipped into Zuleika Dobson, it was a true sign of sophistication. French literature was pretty much uncharted territory, except in my case, for I received a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal with a "sensitive" inscription on the flyleaf from some moony boyfriend. The unexplored terrain of a the Russian novel was as immense as the steppes themselves.

Sociology was an academic stepchild and psychology a minor pseudoscientific discipline not much discussed in those days. It was history that held a paramount place in the curriculum. Those of us who took Sydney Fay's course in modern European history emerged imbued with the idea that the Germans were not solely responsible for the first World War, a revolutionary thought that we digested with a certain amount of skepticism. Our bible was the Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, which we read with a sense of the author's courage and valor that we all longed to emulate. It fitted in well with our firm conviction that there must never be another world war and that, of course, there never would be. The world simply could not afford it. So deeply was this concept in stilled in us that in spite of Hitler's rise, the Japanese invasion of China, the Spanish Civil War, and all the other signs of international anarchy, when the Second World War finally broke out, it seemed absolutely inconceivable.

In comparing the academic interests of her college years with those of her daughters, my mother, a member of the Radcliffe period of 1899, said. "We were avid for science--the theory of evolution, the decline of outdated theology. Now girls are interested in world affairs, international relations. The world does move!"

Harvard Square in the thirties compared with its present incarnation resembled a country crossroad. The streetcars still clanged along Massachusetts Avenue, and the newsboys under the shelter of the kiosk leading into the subway sang out the list of newspapers, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, the Evening American, the Evening Transcript and the Boston AD-VA-TISA, like an incantation. On the first warm days of spring there would be the usual "spring riots" on the part of high-spirited undergraduates, who threw rolls of toilet paper out the windows of their ancient dormitories in the Yard, or snake-danced through the Square--mild stuff by modern standards but considered pretty far out for the times. The Cambridge Police looked on with a certain amount of benevolence and left the nabbing to the college "cops." And late in the spring, during the "reading period," the Harvard Glee Club used to give concerts in the early evening on the steps of Widener while couples sat on the grass and held hands.

Going into Boston was a big adventure. But when ennui overcame us and the double features at the "Unie" palled (even though a heavy date might pay the extra fee and take you to sit in the overstuffed seats in the balcony), we would get on the "Mass Ave" streetcar and go into town to the Fine Arts Theater around the corner from the old Loew's State-Theater. There we would sit entranced by Rene Clair's Sous Les Toits de Paris and Le Million or Congress Dances, a charming old chestnut about the Congress of Vienna, replete with waltzes and romantic intrigue, which for some reason or other we used to pride ourselves on having seen at least a dozen times. For years the Fine Arts was the only theater showing foreign films in Boston.

The favorite hangouts of the student population ranged from the all-night eateries like the Waldotf Cafeteria on Massachusetts Avenue to Gusties in Brattle Square, where one could get a square meal for thirty-five cents and be waited on by a busty proprietress who was apt to dictate what one ate Up the street, at the Brattle Inn, presided over by two maiden sisters, bright law students such as Jim Rowe and Ed Rhetts (who went on to distinguished careers in the Roosevelt administration) and David Riesman, winding up their third year at the Harvard Law School under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter, would argue cases over lunch in the ladylike atmosphere of the inn's dining room David Riesman, whom I remember as the intellectual pet and buzzing fadfly of his more worldly classmates, would have a hundred ideas in one lunchtime, a good many falling flat but a few brilliant and penetrating.

Only a handful of my classmates went on to graduate school, and most of my classmates got married upon graduation, usually to worthy graduate students whom they would dutifully help, through law or medical school by working as researchers or secretaries. The height of their career aspirations, if they had any, was to be a researcher for Time. A job at Macy's was considered rather glamorous, too, and also gave one a chance to live in New York, an experience considered de rigeur among certain of my classmates. It all seems a millennium ago, and the Radcliffe of my day was in many ways a quaint and dated institution. But I still look back on those years with nostalgia and a certain amount of pride. We knew a good thing when we saw it and seized the moment.

This essay is excerpted from a longer piece in My Harvard. My Yale, a collection of reminiscences. It is reprinted with permission of the author.