were recruited from regions with small Jewish populations.78 Another new tactic was to admit students in the top seventh of their high school class without examination.79 These plans backfired badly. In 1925, a shocking 27.1% of the student body was Jewish.80 The next year, when five of the eight juniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa were Jewish, the student magazine the Lampoon published an article entitled “No Religious Discrimination at Harvard–Three Gentiles Elected to Phi Beta Kappa.”81 Harvard’s Dean of Admission, in a brilliant stroke, proposed reducing the “25% Hebrew total to 15% or less by simply rejecting without detailed explanation.”82 That approach was effective. In the 1930s, during Harry’s years as a graduate student, the percentage of Jewish students sank to between 12% and 14%.83
When Conant took over as president, he asked for statistics, some of which could be tortured to serve his purpose. Jewish students, the statistics showed, were “more prone to dishonesty and sexual offenses,” although less likely to be drunkards or “to ‘do something for Harvard’” in athletics; they were shamefully unrepresented–surprise!–in the most exclusive Harvard clubs.84 The reduction of Jewish enrollment, while helping to sustain the primacy of WASP-dominated social and athletic activities, had one unexpected and unwelcome corollary: an increased number of WASPs were content to earn a “gentleman’s C.” An analysis of freshman academic achievement in 1933-42 showed an inverse relationship between social prestige and academic standing. Jewish freshmen garnered 31.9% of the top academic ranks despite a total enrollment of 19.3% while only 7.3% were “unsatisfactory”; the prestigious WASP private schools Andover and Exeter produced 13.9% of the top-ranked freshmen but 18.2% of those labeled “unsatisfactory.”85 Conant endorsed Lowell’s plan for geographical distribution, explicitly seeking students from regions with relatively few Jews. He hired a Dean of Admissions who admired Harvard’s wise and intelligent management of “the Jew problem.”86 In such an atmosphere, Harry’s antagonism to all religion was irrelevant. One of his undergraduate teachers, Sidney B. Fay, told him plainly that being Jewish would harm him in the job market.87 The prediction came true when he finished his doctorate (see Chapter 8).
Harry was admitted to Harvard just as Lowell’s final solution to its Jewish problem was being effected. Two years earlier, in 1925, an alumnus wrote to Lowell to complain that Jews, “the skunks of the human race,” had taken over Harvard; Lowell politely thanked him for his observations.88 Was Harry aware that he, Joe Doob, and Ed Popper were skunks? Their common background helped sustain them in an unwelcoming atmosphere; no wonder they stuck together. A Harvard anthropology student who studied his fellow Jews in Harry’s time found that the majority had “casual non-Jewish acquaintances but were widely regarded–and treated accordingly–as Jews.”89
3
A New Young Scholar in the (Old) World
Part 1. Summer in Heidelberg, 1931
The voyage out, aboard the St. Louis, gave Harry plenty of time to study German grammar. This “beautiful tongue,” he rhapsodized, “now unravels its complexities for my straining-to-absorb wits (note the Germanic influence)”; grammatical rules were “as entrancing as ocean transportation is not.”1 Shipboard life made him acutely conscious of his social insufficiencies. In his diary he analyzed “an elemental loneliness, which comes over me at times,” becoming sometimes “morbid, but not seriously.” Even when lonely, though, he could feel uplifting emotions. A solitary walk on deck could be thrilling:
Moonlight from the fresh icy crescent [moon], and a last saffron veil in the west, and the rushing waters colored blue-black-green, hissing as they foam past. The air had flavor, it tasted of cleanness that is originally pure, not scrubbed but born clean–deep draughts you drink, and grow intoxicated…. And so this air, these waters with their wind-whipped stipplings, this moon, and the steamless steel-hearted throbbing of the ship.2
Opera performances and German literature soon afforded similar experiences of intense aesthetic joy.
From Cuxhaven, where the ship docked, Harry made his way by train to Heidelberg. Buying the Vossische Zeitung at the Cuxhaven station, he read “laboriously” about President Herbert Hoover’s proposal of “a general moratorium on both reparations paid from Germany to the Allies and war debts owed by the Allies to the US.”3 The moratorium, a response to deep German resentment of penalties imposed after the war, came too late to help forestall the bank crisis that Harry was to witness less than a month later.
One of 800 Americans studying in German universities,4 Harry spent six weeks in Heidelberg improving his knowledge of German. Knowledge of Germany came more slowly, for students in Heidelberg’s Vacation Courses for Foreigners had no contact with the heavily Nazi and anti-Semitic student body of Germany’s oldest university.5 Harry lodged with his teacher, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Josef Dorn, “a large, friendly, middle-aged man who teaches in the [Helmholtz] Gymnasium–German literature, English, and history.”6 He took private lessons with Dorn and faithfully attended his class in intermediate German. The heterogeneous enrollment–Americans, Italians, Scandinavians, a Czech, and a Swiss–required it to be conducted entirely in German: “All except about 3 can speak much better German than I, but Dorn says I shouldn’t worry–in a week or ten days I’ll be all right.”7 A “revelatory” private lesson on the subjunctive persuaded him “that a benevolent providence guided me into his hands. He has the inestimable advantage of knowing English perfectly, knowing the difficulties which lie in German for English-speaking people, experience in teaching German, and the expository talent.”8 Prof. Dorn taught with humor, inventing the term “Gemixtes Pickles” to describe intermixed languages. A year later, arriving in Würzberg, an exhausted Harry illustrated “Gemixtes Pickles” when he asked for an “einfaches [simple] Room.”9
The Dorns introduced Harry not just to the German language but to Heidelberg. Frau Dorn–much younger than her husband, a common disparity explained by the decimation of young men during World War I–led him to the university office, enrolled him in her husband’s class, and took him to the market. He hit it off with the Dorns’ little girl, Guga, later sending her presents. Dorn showed him the famous Heidelberg Castle ruins, played the harmonium for him, and took him to a beer hall.10 A child of Prohibition, Harry thought beer “tasted like vegetables gone sour” and wondered whether “wine and strong beverages are as enchanting as beer.” A few months later, he had “drunk my first coffee.” He found it “mildly unpleasant” but less awful than beer: “I can understand that some people would like it.”11 Lemonade was his drink.
Once settled in, Harry paid attention to current events: “In Vienna, Munich, Berlin, & now Cologne, National Socialists have tried to raise hell with the universities…. Hitlerite agitators and student organizations go round demonstrating, walloping opposing students, university officials, and the police.” He had a solution for immunizing the police force against “walloping.” German policemen, “no bigger than the average small citizen,” were outfitted in fancy uniforms to impress the citizenry, but this was a mere facade. Harry advocated importing “a dozen…six-and-a-half foot red-faced Irishmen,” such as he had seen controlling the “democratic Freshman vs. Sophomore combats” at Harvard. In Germany, the combat was between Nazis and their enemies–Communists, Socialists, and Jewish student organizations.12
German social and economic problems were no laughing matter. A bank crisis came to a head in mid-July, when one bank failed and several others were temporarily shut down. In Heidelberg, violence erupted: “In my room I heard the sounds of rioting.”13 Harry read the leading liberal papers: all “three editions of the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, and the
