At least Doriot knew where he was going, or so he thought. The same friend of Georges’s father who suggested he should come to America also recommended that Georges should attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). So Doriot and his parents contacted the American University Union and arrangements were made for Georges to attend MIT. Not knowing much, if anything, about America, the school seemed like a good choice. Established in 1861 in Boston, then the industrial center of the United States, MIT was a well-known regional engineering school that aspired to become a national research university.
As twenty-one-year-old Doriot cruised across the Atlantic Ocean at a steady pace of around 19 knots, he had more than a week on that beautiful ship to ponder his fate. La Touraine was built in 1890 by Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, one of the great French maritime companies. She was 522 feet long with two funnels and three tall masts, and held about fifteen hundred passengers. It must have been an exhilarating if not frightful journey. America was emerging as the world’s most powerful nation. And since the United States had escaped the Great War without any serious damage to her people, economy, or terrain, the opportunities offered by this vast country seemed limitless.
Up until the moment that he stepped on that ship, Georges’s parents had done all they could for their son. But he was now on his own, an inexperienced young man who had never left home for more than a few months, under immense pressure to do well in school so he could find a good job that would help him take care of his family. He had no family or friends in the United States, nor much money to fall back on. He was facing the most difficult challenge of his life. Standing on the deck of La Touraine, looking out into the deep dark void of the sea, Georges must have wondered: What does my future hold? What am I going to make of myself ? And what happens if I fail?
The S.S. Touraine pulled into New York Harbor on January 15 at noon. In the 1920s, New York’s harbor was as busy as Broadway during rush hour. Half of America’s exports and imports moved through the bustling piers that lined Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the New Jersey banks of the Hudson River. Oceangoing steamers entered or left the port about every twenty minutes. Doriot stepped off the boat, took in the armada of coastal freighters, harbor tugs, river steamers, and other ships bobbing in the water, and proceeded to the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street from Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station.
One of the largest hotels in New York, Hotel Pennsylvania was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1919 and was operated by the successful hotelier Ellsworth Statler. Doriot checked into room 1721A. During his first night at the hotel, he was amazed by the double door that allowed men to put newspapers and packages in front of the second door, which he could then open from his room. It was a Sunday morning and in that space between the two doors Doriot was delighted to see several pounds of newspaper.
“I thought that, America being a very kind country, people realized that I had been at sea for a week and, therefore, had very nicely kept a week’s newspapers for me to read upon my arrival,” wrote Doriot. “Much to my amazement, I discovered that those pounds of papers were just the Sunday edition of the American newspaper.”
At one o’clock on January 20, Doriot hopped onto a train in Pennsylvania Station bound for Boston. He pulled into town just after six o’clock and checked into the Hotel Tremont. Soon after, he went to Cambridge to register at MIT. But before classes began, he decided to look up Mr. Lowell, the gentleman to whom his letter was addressed. “I decided that I should be considerate and polite, as my father and mother would have told me to be,” recalled Georges. “So, I looked for him and found that he was president of a university called Harvard.”
The Doriot clan had never heard of Harvard, though it was the most well-known and prestigious college in America. Georges called on Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell on the second floor of University Hall, with barely a clue as to the significance of the man. A well-known lawyer who was the son of one of Boston’s most prominent families, Lowell was president of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933, during which time the school flourished.
Albeit imposing, Lowell was kind to Doriot. When he asked the young man what he wanted to learn, Doriot shared his dream of one day running a factory. Lowell smiled at this response and informed Doriot that he had chosen the wrong school. Instead of MIT, he explained, Doriot should attend a place called the Harvard Business School, whereupon he took Doriot downstairs in University Hall and introduced him to Wallace B. Donham, the dean of the Business School. Having helped found the Business School over a decade earlier, Lowell remained an energetic advocate of the institution. Donham concurred with Lowell that Harvard Business School was the ideal place for Doriot, and without further ado, Georges’s papers were transferred over to Harvard.
Placing his trust in these wise men, Doriot enrolled at Harvard Business School in the spring of 1921. Doriot was the first Frenchman to attend the school, and one of only a handful of foreign students, the others hailing from the Philippines, Greece, and China. He studied the basics of business education: industrial management, factory problems and systems, accounting, labor relations, statistics, and corporate finance. He enjoyed the experience very much and was impressed by his teachers. As part of his course in factory systems, Doriot took a few field trips, including a visit to the Rolls Royce factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, during which he inspected the plant and reviewed its cost accounting system.
A photograph taken in March of 1921 that Doriot sent to his parents revealed that Georges had matured considerably since his days in the Army. The soft, timid face of a teenager had hardened into a portrait of a serious young man with penetrating blue eyes and a short, trimmed moustache. The military dress was replaced by the armor of an enterprising young businessman: a sharp, three-piece suit, crisp white shirt, and well-knotted tie, accented by a white handkerchief peeking out of his suit pocket. These years gave birth to the formal look that Doriot favored until the last years of his life, always wearing suit and tie in public.
During his second semester, Doriot was listed as a “special student” in the Official Register of Harvard University, along with thirty-seven other young men. In those early days of business education, an MBA degree was a brandnew concept and had yet to acquire the cache it has today. So many students, including Doriot, only took the basic core curriculum of the first year, and then left to seek their fortune.
Near the end of 1921, Doriot met some financiers in New York from the well-known investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company. They offered him a job, which he gratefully accepted. Comforted by the security that came with such a position, Georges decided to settle down in America. During an earlier trip back home to France, he had discussed the decision with his parents. “I had come to France to visit the family and they decided that it was probably best for me to stay in the United States because people there were very nice to me and I could probably earn a living,” recalled Georges. “Things were not very happy in France at that time. We were still suffering from the after-effects of World War I.”
Things were very happy in New York City, though. When Doriot walked around New York over the next few years, he marveled at a city on the cusp of greatness, a city of immense vitality, of great “stone buildings that the human mind has not had the vision to conceive nor the power to build until New York stimulated mankind with its magic,” as Rebecca West described it. It was the time of great dance halls, where throngs of city dwellers crammed into hundreds of joints, drank moonshine, took in cabaret shows, and danced the night away.
These were the sights and sounds Doriot saw as he walked to and from his office in Lower Manhattan. His position at the bank was a cautious yet smart choice for a first job. Founded in 1867 by Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb, two German-born brothers-in-law who had run a successful merchandising business in Cincinnati, Kuhn, Loeb moved to New York to take advantage of the nation’s economic expansion. In the late nineteenth century, Kuhn, Loeb made its name by selling securities for many