The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [9]
“A hundred or so of the class are devoured by the Institute and carefully told that there are two kinds of men at Harvard—‘gentlemen’ and ‘cads,’ “wrote Paul Mariett in the Harvard Illustrated in May 1911. “The Institute contains the gentlemen.” The first seventy or so chosen became members of DKE, or the Dickey. They in turn joined “waiting clubs” out of which the new members of the final ten clubs would be chosen, the most prestigious being Porcellian, followed by AD and Fly.
Joe found it impossible to get to know many of the Gold Coast men. They kept to themselves and their clubs. Their motto was “Three Cs and a D, and keep out of the newspapers.” “Our friendships are made in our rooms, with men who appreciate a good cigar much more than a Greek pun,” one of them wrote, dismissing the tedious world beyond Mount Auburn Street.
For a young man who aspired to great wealth, it was natural that Joe gravitated toward the Harvard upper crust. Everywhere Joe looked, he saw irrefutable evidence that money and class were the same. The names of over half the millionaires in Boston were listed in the Social Register. About two-thirds of the Bostonians who were officers and trustees of major American businesses came from the upper class. They sent their sons to a Harvard that those young men largely dominated.
By the time Joe entered Harvard, he was disgorging anything that might mark his Irish immigrant heritage. He did not drink, sidestepping one stereotype: the bulbous, blustering, belligerent Irish drunk. He had been born and brought up in an East Boston known as an immigrant enclave. During his Harvard years, the family moved to the prestigious seaside suburb of Winthrop.
Joe could change his accent, dress, and home address. He could not change the fact that his grandmother had been a servant, as had most of the Irish immigrant women of the famine generation, and that his ancestors had been peasants. His grandmother’s name, Bridget, had been so ubiquitous that the Brahmin ladies referred to female servants as “their Bridgets,” and the now-debased name had largely disappeared with the next generation.
For the most part Joe’s professors felt nothing but contempt for the immigrant onslaught that they believed had so besmirched the pristine reaches of their Boston. One of them, Barrett Wendell, reflected that almost everyone of his class had contemplated suicide because of the immigrants.
Joe was not one to query his teachers and challenge their ideas or expose his background by rubbing against the wrong kind of ideas or people. As at Boston Latin School, he was no student. Joe took no pleasure in the bounty of courses set before him. In his freshman year he barely managed a “gentleman’s C.” That was prime evidence that he had not been infected by the contagion of academe, losing his manhood by sitting too long in class and library. The very mediocrity of his grades suggested that the professors and their arid pedantries had not produced what Teddy Roosevelt called another “over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues.”
The Brahmin world that Joe wanted so desperately to enter was more than a charade of social rituals and endless disdain for the vulgar masses. Harvard gentlemen bravely shed their blood in their country’s wars. For Joe and the other students, the martyred dead were not simply names on monuments that they breezed by on their way to class. There were Harvard men still living who had fought in the Civil War and were the living testament to noble acts. When the students entered Memorial Hall, dedicated to the memory of the Civil War dead, they doffed their hats; those who neglected this modest gesture of respect were greeted by the sound of hundreds of students drumming silverware on their water tumblers.
Harvard took itself seriously as an incubator of courage, considering its classrooms and playing fields as the highest