As the fall semester approached, the newly appointed Dean of Harvard College, A. Chester Hanford, requested each father of an incoming freshman “to write about him…as fully as you are willing to do,” promising that any “deficiencies in his earlier education or weaknesses of character would be kept confidential.” Sophie kept Louis’s draft because, she explained in a note, she wanted Harry to “see, some day,…what your darling ‘Pop’ thought of you–and how well he understood you.” There were four headings: Physical, Intellectual, Moral, and Social. Under the first, Louis described Harry as “a big healthy young man weighing about 170 pounds” (he was somewhat overweight much of his life), whose “personal appearance is a little above the ordinary.” He was “not proficient in any special athletic activity,” but–Louis reassured sports-obsessed Harvard–“he has the vigor and the stamina to succeed in any line of this sort which may interest him.” None ever did; however, as his father noted, his “unusual muscular coordination” at least made him “skillful with tools from his earliest years.”
The headings “Intellectual” and “Moral” show, as one might expect, some inclinations that characterized the adult Harry and some that did not. Having learned to read before entering school, he had a “vigorous appetite for independent reading”; a carefully posed photo shows Louis and Harry (age eight) reading together. His intellectual interests were mainly “scientific, mechanical, mathematical and philosophical…rather than artistic or linguistic.” By the time he graduated from Harvard, he had shed his former preference for “the Museum of Natural History or an automobile exhibit” (reported by Louis) and had developed strong interests in art history, music, and languages. At Fieldston, Louis wrote, he had enjoyed debating about ethics and economics–a pleasure that appears throughout his Berlin diary–and had “never missed a meeting” of the Saturday night discussion club of which he was secretary. Under “Moral,” Louis observed his “fine sense of right and wrong”; everyone who knew him appreciated “his strong sense of duty and responsibility.” One of his teachers had summed him up, Louis recalled, by saying that “Harry has ideas and ideals.”
Under the final heading, “Social,” Louis observed that until recently Harry had shown no interest in girls but had lately “formed an attachment for one of his former girl classmates.”43 He was afflicted with a painful shyness “in the company of strangers,” which was “one of his greatest weaknesses.” His compensating strength was an ability to form strong friendships. As a teenager he had been with Ed Popper and Joe Doob at school and at summer camps in Maine, and he overlapped with them at Harvard; they figure again and again in his Berlin diary.44 The last social characteristic Louis described was endearing: “Altho usually serious in all he does… Harry has a quick and keen sense of humor, and a smile which will be a great asset throughout his life.” And so it was.
Part 2. Harry’s Harvard: Professing Inclusion, Practicing Exclusion
Undergraduate studies
Harry’s plan to emulate Sinclair Lewis’s bicochemist hero vanished when he earned a C in analytical chemistry. What to do? Before signing up for courses in his sophomore year, he asked his adviser, a physicist, whether a history major would be a good idea. The answer–“Why not?”–sufficed for him to enroll in a course taught by a new instructor, William L. Langer. As a freshman Harry had taken History 1 to fulfill a distribution requirement; he had done “tolerably well” and had been deeply impressed when Langer guest-lectured in the course for two weeks. Regarding American history as too easy because it didn’t require mastery of foreign languages, he decided to concentrate on European history even though he earned a D in second-year German. Despite this unpromising start, by the time he graduated he had arrived at a focus, an intellectual passion, and much better German. He had also forged two professional relationships that were to be important throughout the 1930s. Langer, who was later to supervise his doctoral dissertation, had “ignited” his desire to become a historian. The other relationship, illustrated in Chapter 3, was with Langer’s sabbatical replacement in Harry’s senior year, a visiting professor from Oberlin College named Frederick B. Artz. No doubt he took History 42, Problems in the History of Continental Europe from 1870 to 1914, a graduate course open to senior Honors students, which was normally taught by Langer but that year by Artz. Meanwhile, a term paper on the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), written for the economic historian Edwin F. Gay in his sophomore year, set his scholarly direction for the next decade.45 His 112-page undergraduate thesis on the SPD, presumably supervised by Artz, showed that he was reasonably comfortable reading and translating German; it also demonstrated a lucid, self-conscious, and sometimes witty style that could carry the weight of his characteristic questioning. His topic was suitable for further development because, as he noted in introducing his bibliographical notes, there were “no good histories of the party in any language which cover its development completely in the period 1890-1914.”46 His doctoral dissertation, built on the foundation of his Honors thesis, did not completely fill this gap, for it stopped at 1903, only a brief epilogue extending it to 1914.
Jews are “better off at Harvard”
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton–“the Big Three”–were conventionally anti-Semitic WASP institutions, but they differed somewhat in their attitudes toward Jews. More Jews applied to Harvard than to the other two, President Charles W. Eliot explained approvingly, because they knew they would be “better off at Harvard than at any other American college.” During Eliot’s long presidency (1869-1909), Harvard offered more scholarships than any other university and awarded them on the basis of academic talent rather than pedigree. When it replaced its own examinations with those administered by the College Entrance Examination Board, it chose a national standard less susceptible to manipulation.47 These policies had serious consequences for WASP hegemony: Jewish enrollment rose. Eliot’s successor, A. Lawrence Lowell–another Boston blue blood–sided with those alarmed by Harvard’s unprecedentedly heterogeneous student body. Although he claimed to advocate mixing students “together so thoroughly that the friendships they form are based on natural affinities, rather than similarity of origin,” in actuality Lowell sought “a homogeneous mass of gentlemen” of his own caste.48 As vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League, he iterated the view common in his social class that the mainly Catholic and Jewish immigrants flooding in from Southern and Eastern Europe were endangering WASP control of America. “Nordics” were superior; Jews, Africans, and Eastern and Southern Europeans were inferior.49
The Immigration Acts passed in 1921 and 1924, enthusiastically backed by Lowell’s League, inspired him to reverse the Jewish tide at Harvard. In force until 1965, these acts effectively stemmed the influx of Polish and Russian Jews, who, besides their other supposedly undesirable characteristics, were “the primary carriers of the un-American ideology of socialism.”50 When Felix Frankfurter entered Harvard Law School in 1902, a classmate told him that the only Jews he had previously met were “unclean” peddlers, and he was glad to meet a “clean” and well-mannered Jew.51 Like Frankfurter, Harry was a “clean” German Jew and therefore capable of being “absorbed into the social pattern.”52 The rough-edged Jewish students who commuted to Harvard from their Eastern European immigrant parents’ homes were assumed to lack that ability; their “naturally repulsive and repugnant”53 manners and their socialist politics were alien to Harvard’s culture. But they were there. The increasing numbers of Jewish students of both German and Eastern European origin made them the first minority group to threaten Protestant hegemony. There were few Catholics (many saw Harvard as a den of apostasy), and hardly any African Americans.54 The latter, naturally, were prohibited from living in dormitories with white students.
Despite his superior pedigree, Harry shared certain Eastern European Jewish qualities offensive to WASPs: he harbored political sympathies like theirs; he lacked social polish; and he studied hard. As rational as Nazis, WASPs excluded Jews from most extracurricular