The Publisher (11 page)

For all the changes, however, Yale remained a small and fairly provincial college, drawing students mainly from the social and economic elites of the Northeast and the industrial Midwest. And despite the modernity of much of its new curriculum, the character of student life was much as it had been in the 1880s. The great badges of achievement were not academic honors. As at Hotchkiss, success at Yale came from such things as playing varsity football, heeling the
Daily News
, winning election to the board of the literary magazine, and gaining admission to the prestigious clubs and senior societies that dominated the social life of the campus. Owen Johnson’s classic novel,
Stover at Yale
, published in 1912, provided a mostly accurate picture of life in New Haven in 1916. From the moment they arrived, ambitious students were encouraged to succeed by “working for Yale” and striving for the distinctions that campus activities offered. “You may think the world begins outside of college,” an upperclassman explained to Dink Stover his first night on campus. “It doesn’t; it begins right here,” in the struggle to get in with “the real crowd,” to become “one of the big men in the class.” “The immediate goal was to be regarded as a success by your friends … to be known as the big men,” recalled Henry Seidel Canby, who had graduated from Yale a few years before Harry arrived and later served briefly as an instructor in English there before becoming a distinguished magazine editor. These were things Harry already knew, having come from a school almost all of whose graduates went on to Yale. He also knew what Stover had to be taught: that the most important badge of success at Yale was election to one of the elite senior societies—and above all to the most prestigious of them, Skull and Bones.
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Harry wanted to combine serious academic work with the many nonacademic temptations of the university. And as at Hotchkiss, he was determined to excel at everything. But the balance of his interests had subtly changed. His first priority—which he had articulated many months earlier while still in Lakeville—was to heel the
News
and win election to its board. But because heeling the
News
was an exceptionally intense and time-consuming experience (the heelers “slept never more than four hours a night … and were rusticated or sent to the infirmary by the dozens,” Canby recalled), he worried about its possible impact on his academic work. “It certainly is very hard to decide just what one ought to do,” he wrote his parents months before his arrival in New Haven. “Theoretically, if it came down to an issue between Phi Beta Kappa and the News, I would take the former.” That was what he knew his parents wanted to hear. Even in writing them, however, he could not leave it at that. “But if, practically, a key and a News charm were laid before me now, I am afraid my hand would almost unconsciously grasp the latter.” The “best policy,” he decided, was to concentrate on the
News
in his freshman year, “then to go after Phi Beta K and the Lit Board in sophomore and junior years.” He had elaborate rationalizations for his choice: “Success will mean prestige and chance for influence,” he predicted, as well as money (since members of the
News
board shared in the paper’s modest profits). And since his goal was a life in journalism, “I do not see how it can help helping me.”
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By the time he got to New Haven the rationalizations and negotiations were behind him, and he was ready to jump into the fray. “Already the race is on,” he wrote after his first few days on campus, before classes or any other activities had begun. “The goals must soon, or never, be chosen, and the quest begun.” Almost single-mindedly he set out to conquer the
News
. Several of his friends from Hotchkiss were doing the same, but from the beginning he knew his greatest competition would come from Brit Hadden, both because of Hadden’s prodigious talent and because Brit was at least as determined as Harry was.
News
heelers earned points for writing stories, offering story ideas, selling advertising, and doing chores around the paper. Harry and Brit (both of whom had experienced a similar heeling process at Hotchkiss, modeled on Yale’s) spent almost every spare moment in the
News
building, as if fearful that any absence would give their competitors an edge. Brit often got out of bed in the middle of the night to put a reporting “scoop” in the
News
box, so that it would be the first thing the editors would find in the morning. Harry often stayed in the building until late at night helping with the writing and editing, even cleaning up.
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Harry was awed at times by the intensity of the
News
competition. He had entered it with extraordinary apprehension (“All I ask is strength and ability to stick out to the end!”), and he moved through it almost as if in a dream. His moods swung up and down with every minor achievement and every small setback. At one moment he despaired of making the paper at all, the next he predicted he would finish the competition in first place. In the fever of his ambition, he was already calculating not just what would happen in his freshman year but who would be elected chairman of the
News
almost three years later. Heeling, he said in a moment of optimism, “is a very holy and wonderful piece of complicated machinery,” which “serves very well.” In lower moments he complained that his competitors were taking unfair advantage of a fallible system. “This heeling business is awful,” he wrote at one point, “and you can’t imagine how depressing it is.” Most of all he obsessively calculated where he stood in the competition—now fourth, then second, later third, from time to time first—all these predictions based on nothing but his own uninformed and subjective judgments.
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Finally, in March, the great announcement came: Harry was one of four first-year students elected to the
News
. He had come in third, behind Brit and one other Hotchkiss classmate. But for the moment, at least, he seemed not to care about anything but his appointment. “Successful,” he wrote his parents in a one-word telegram to China, and they of course understood immediately what it meant. (“It is too splendid for words!” his mother wrote back.) For the next few weeks Harry basked in the glow of his triumph. “The bright sun and wind of a March afternoon sweep leisurely through my room,” he wrote a few days after the election. “No more, as on other Mondays, the blind mad rush of heeling, not again as in that last Monday, the intolerable suspense; but now assurance, quiet leisure, duty and pleasure.” He was, for once, almost smugly self-satisfied—the raging ambition that made him so chronically and methodically hyperactive through most of his life suddenly, if briefly, quelled: “My position in college, in so far as I can make it is made. I have come to Rome, and succeeded in the Roman circus. Now there is for me free rein to enjoy over three years of philosophy, history, and poetry. So I hope to be able to say at the end of this college course with Johnson: ‘The days of thought were the goodly days.’”
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Harry had good reason to be pleased with himself. Only a little more than one semester into his life at Yale, he had not only achieved one of the most coveted positions in the college—a place on the
News
—but had placed first in his class academically, had a poem accepted by the literary magazine, and been awarded the Chamberlain Prize for the best performance
by any Yale student on the university’s comprehensive entrance examination in Greek, which he had coveted throughout his years at Hotchkiss. “This achievement will mean a holiday for the Hotchkiss school [a tradition when recent graduates achieved something notable], and a valuable reputation for myself,” he wrote. Harry also found himself socially popular, something he had never quite been in the much more class-conscious environment of Hotchkiss. “Am meeting more fellows all the time, and, to be brief, am enjoying college,” he boasted. He even joined a club for “foreign” students—which mostly consisted of young Americans, like Harry himself, who had lived abroad. One of its members was the future playwright Thornton Wilder, a missionary son from China who had spent a miserable year with Harry at Chefoo. Harry’s roommate—a result of pressure from his parents—was Horace Pitkin, Jr., the son of his father’s beloved, martyred college classmate. The younger Pitkin was a slightly troubled young man utterly without the restless ambition that drove Harry’s life and whom Harry gradually came to view with some condescension and even contempt. Harry’s relationship with Brit Hadden was close, friendly, and slightly tense, as it would always remain, reflecting their tacit acknowledgment of both powerful bonds and profound rivalry. His larger social circle—the young men with whom he had an easier intimacy—consisted, at least at first, almost entirely of other Hotchkiss graduates.
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At Yale, unlike at Hotchkiss, Harry was not a scholarship student. He paid his own way with his own earnings at college and in summers, with help from his parents, and with generous gifts from Nettie McCormick. That spared him the outward badges of inferiority he had experienced in prep school. There were no demeaning work assignments, no talk of “special responsibilities,” no banishment to remote accommodations. Even so Harry remained one of the least affluent members of his class, a problem he seldom revealed to others but one he agonized over privately. He struggled to keep within his tight budget even as he yearned to join the expensive activities of his friends. His residence hall, he conceded, “is not the most desirable dormitory socially.” He claimed not to mind, but he balked at eating in the college commons, at $5.00 to $6.00 a week the cheapest place on campus. Instead, Harry chose to join a dining club, which cost $7.50. He explained this “extravagance” to his parents by saying that “the food is excellent,” and “the fellows are the nicest in our class.” His father, always concerned about Harry’s social status and—intrepid fund-raiser that he was—acutely aware of the advantages of connections with the wealthy, supported the decision.
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Yale was, in fact, a turning point in Harry’s attitude toward wealth. An important part of the missionary ethos he had absorbed as a child was a kind of pride in having forsaken the material rewards of more lucrative professions, a belief that material self-denial was a sign of virtue and character. Although Harry had already decided not to become a missionary himself, he tried still to embrace the ethos and struggled (with scant success) to resist material temptations. Even years later, when he himself was enormously rich, he often seemed impatient with and even embarrassed by the opulence of his life and from time to time tried ineffectually to escape from it. But his experience at Yale also helped intensify his fascination with, and attraction to, wealth—an attraction that had begun in his first years in America during his frequent visits to Mrs. McCormick’s palatial home in Chicago. His thirst grew stronger as he became exposed to the way his more affluent classmates lived.

During Yale’s spring recess in 1917, in the aftermath of the exhausting competition for the
News
, Harry’s Yale and Hotchkiss classmate Alger Shelden invited the newly elected board members to spend a week at his home in Detroit. Harry claimed to enjoy the visit most because it gave him a chance to take walks through the “soggy wood and muddy field” surrounding the Shelden estate. “My heart beat high in praise of ‘the country again,—the country!’” he wrote at the time. But his accounts of the week in letters to his parents could not disguise his awe at the manner in which his friend’s family lived. Alger’s father, he wrote, was a high-ranking executive at the Ford Motor Company and “one of Detroit’s richest of the rich.” His home was “one of the largest and handsomest estates in Grosse Point.” The young men from Yale were entertained lavishly, with visits to the Hunt Club, the country club, and other institutions serving the city’s automobile aristocracy. They went riding and hunting on “splendid mounts.” They were served a “sumptuous supper” after going to the theater one night. On another day they were taken on a tour of the Ford factory—young princes in suits and ties quietly watching what Harry described, without comment, as the “thousands of workers whose job consists of ‘screwing one screw or hammering one nail, or turning one lever of a machine.’” The vacation, he wrote en route back to New Haven, “gave me about as much fun as I ever had in my life.” It was the last such vacation he was to have for several years.
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Three years earlier, at the beginning of his second year at Hotchkiss, Harry had returned from the summer to find a large map of Europe on one of the school bulletin boards, with dozens of blue and red pins stuck
along a line running through Belgium and France: The First World War had begun. Every day the teachers would move the pins to mark the slow, inconclusive movement of troops back and forth across the swath of France in which the torturous, stalemated struggle was being fought. The war was naturally the subject of much conversation among Harry and his classmates, but until 1917 their interest was essentially academic. “I do not believe in the possibility of [America going to] war,” Harry wrote in March 1916, a few months before his Hotchkiss graduation. The “heroes of Verdun”—British, French, and German—would never “allow innocents like ourselves … [to] interfere much in the way they settle things.”
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But in April 1917, as he and his friends returned to Yale from their lavish week in Detroit, the war was no longer an academic question. The United States, after more than two years of hesitation, had finally entered the conflict, and Harry knew that, in one way or another, he would enter it too. Looking back a year or so later, as the war shuddered to a close with Harry never having left America, he claimed to wish he had chosen what his more adventurous classmates had done—left the college and enlisted right away. “Had I done that I would probably be in France now,” he said wistfully. But Harry was not one to defy the norms of his institutions, and so he did what the president of the university, Arthur Hadley, urged all Yale students to do: stay in school, stick together, join the Reserve Officers Training Corps Field Artillery Unit that the army had established on campus, and prepare for war as “Yale men.” There were plenty of available troops, Hadley said; what the nation needed was officers, and the university would provide them.
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