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 activities yet condemned them for not participating widely in campus life. When Harry was enrolled in Harvard Graduate School, the very same Dean Hanford who had asked Louis Marks for his frank opinions of his son sneeringly told President James B. Conant that Harry and nearly all his Communist colleagues belonged to the “chosen race.”55 That “particular race and religion,” Hanford informed Conant, also dominated the predominantly Jewish Harvard Commuters’ Association. The commuters, those offensive sons of immigrants, had just been allotted Dudley Hall as a place to congregate, and “the others”–for once, Christians were Others–felt that they must “stay away” from Dudley Hall, when all they “want is a place to eat their lunch.”56 That was all the commuters wanted; unlike residential students, they brought brown-bag lunches from home. The WASPs and the Jewish commuters were different. Whereas the commuters debated current events over lunch, their gentlemanly colleagues were apolitical and sports-minded, sometimes to the point of violence, displaying their “high spirits” in riots usually connected with sports.57
In 1909, Eliot’s last year as president and the year of Harry’s birth, Harvard’s enrollment was 9.8% Jewish; nine years later, as a consequence of Eliot’s policies, it was 20% and rising.58 The increase was alarming–to WASPs. Would Harvard go the way of Columbia, where Jews had constituted 40% of the student body in the late nineteenth century? By 1921, even though Jews had fallen to 22% of the Columbia student body, some people feared the damage was irreparable; one observer assumed that all grubbily unattractive students were Jews, who “lower[ed] the communal easy handsomeness.”59 Unlike the concerned Columbia alumnus, a Harvard faculty committee found photographs useless in identifying Jews. Agreeing that a “Jewish invasion” such as had occurred at Columbia would discourage boys of good family from applying, the leaders of the Big Three searched for ways to repel the assault. Under the guidance of its anti-Semitic president, Nicholas Murray Butler (in office 1902-45), Columbia instituted “mental alertness tests” suitable to the social experience of “the average native American boy,” who was WASP by definition.60
Determined to avert a Columbia-style catastrophe, Lowell claimed to “revere the democratic ideal while never relaxing his faith in the destiny of his own kind.”61 When Harvard alumni protested in 1922 that too many Jews were enrolled, an abashed Lowell recommended to the Committee on Admission that “Hebrew” transfer applicants be “investigated with the nicest care”; he also proposed that “Hebrews” be awarded scholarships strictly according to their proportion in the student body, even though academic merit and need were the official criteria.62 Public controversy erupted when Harvard made public the necessity for a “limitation of enrollment” to relieve a purported strain on the capacity of dormitories and classrooms. It was “natural,” read the Harvard statement, to solve overcrowding by reducing “the proportion of Jews at the college.”63 The idea, Lowell explained in a commencement address, was to “sift” students so as to preserve the “homogeneous American type” threatened by “huge numbers of strangers.” In a breathtaking confession of its intent, the Committee on Admission proclaimed that it did not wish to “practice discrimination without the knowledge and consent of the Faculty.” Hence it called for an ad-hoc committee to be appointed, the purpose of which (in Lowell’s words) was to avoid clashes among undergraduates caused by “particular temperaments.”64 The nature of this peacemaking effort would be plain to anyone who knew about the particular temperament that WASPs attributed to Jews. At its first meeting, the committee chair stated that the “proportion of Jewish students at the university is greater than that of any other race”; the only other “races” he mentioned were Chinese and Japanese, as if the default Caucasian “race” did not exist.65 He said it was “astounding” that “a number of Jews, coming from poor districts,…enter Harvard and become remarkable students.” “Sifting” students could not fully solve “this problem of the Jew,” but it could reduce its severity, even at the cost of fewer “astounding” students.
Lowell initially advocated an explicit Jewish quota of 12% but settled for 15%, under a cloak of secrecy so as not to disturb the facade of egalitarianism.66 As the controversy developed, five members of a Jewish student group, the Menorah Society, met with five Gentile counterparts for a constructive discussion of the attitudes of Gentile students concerned about “too many Jews,…the ‘City College’ fear.”67 What a Jewish alumnus called the “latent prejudices which wake to life at the lightest touch” were now on full display, and Jewish students and alumni weighed in on both sides: some thought it unseemly that any Jew would make a public protest, while others felt that anti-Semitism must be brought to public attention.68 The illustrious journalist Walter Lippmann (Harvard
’10), who had himself suffered anti-Semitism at Harvard, advised Lowell’s committee against “too great a concentration” of Jews or any other “minority that brings with it some striking cultural peculiarity”; anything more than 15% would “produce a segregation of cultures rather than a fusion.”69 Thus kept in check, Jews and Catholics with suitable “character” might absorb WASP virtues.70 “Character” was a code word for qualities thought to be exclusively WASP: “‘fair play,’ ‘public spirit,’ ‘interest in fellows,’ and ‘leadership.’”71 Interviews could yield “a personal estimate of character” and, as Lowell privately admitted, “prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews.”72 When a highly qualified Jewish applicant was rejected, a Harvard official said that “no personal discrimination against him was involved.”73 He wasn’t personally to blame for being Jewish, after all.
Lowell’s ad-hoc committee fashioned various strategies to cope with the “Jewish problem.” Beginning in 1923, the admissions form asked questions designed to identify Jewish applicants who lacked obviously “Jewish” names: “For the first time in Harvard’s history an applicant was asked about his race and color. Other questions were ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birth Place of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully.)’”74 If a candidate named Brown had a father originally named Brownstein or a mother born Cohen, the inference was obvious. The committee commissioned a statistical analysis that showed rising Jewish enrollment, as expected, but inconveniently proved that Jewish students achieved academic success at far higher rates than Gentiles.75 Jews weren’t really smart, though; as a student explained in 1922, they were like parrots: “They memorize their books!”76
The committee advised “discretion” in making a wise “discrimination” to ensure that students would benefit the college and the “community”–a code word
