Education: Class of 1911

After 25 years I am an utter failure, morally, mentally, and financially. . . .

When slight, sandy-haired Sportswriter John Roberts Tunis read that confession from a classmate in the 25-year report of his Harvard Class of 1911. his curiosity was aroused. Sportswriter Tunis, who is not only a prime authority on tennis but the author of many a thoughtful magazine survey of U. S. education, inspected 540 more such intimate autobiographies. Likewise stirred was his Classmate Laurence Leathe Winship, scholarly Sunday editor of the Boston Globe, who on John Tunis’ suggestion sent the Class of 1911 a supplementary questionnaire. From these sources and from his own wide acquaintance in Manhattan’s Harvard Club, John R. Tunis last week presented a full-length picture of the successes, failures, aspirations and accomplishments of Harvard University’s Class of 1911.*

Famed is the Half-Way Book in which a bed-ridden Class Secretary, the late Clarence Day, explored with pen & pencil the Class of 1896, two score years after its graduation from Yale. Was College Worth While?, more factual in matter, more aggressive in manner, shatters the sentimental aura that overhangs most U. S. college reunions and classbooks.

Of the 620 young men who graduated from Harvard in 1911, about half were jolted into War before their careers had fairly begun. Six were killed. Demobilized, the others picked up their lives where they left off, began to make a living, marry, raise families.

My business is rotten. I have no money to travel. My chief occupation is trying to get a living for my family.

After 25 years, says Author Tunis, “one in every three of us is saying frankly: ‘I have not yet figured what to use for money.’ ” Average earned income in 1934 of the 541 members who reported was $4,445. One affluent member of 1911 paid an income tax on $125,000 a year. Another reported himself “a tramp,” added, “I have not slept in a bed for five years.” Of 16 men even their families knew nothing. Author Tunis concludes that most of the 88 who failed to respond to letters, telegrams and telephone calls are probably “failures,” that, taken together with the failures who did answer, about one-eighth of his classmates are either on relief or are living on handouts from relatives.

Not only did 1911 fail to produce many rich men but. Author Tunis admits, it had only a handful of members who rose to “genuine distinction.” Only 23 have squeezed into Who’s Who. Asked to choose the “ten men who had really achieved something in life,” 25 years after Commencement, the Class gave first place to Cartoonist Gluyas Williams, who as an undergraduate was the chief ornament of the Harvard Lampoon. Second place went to handsome Broker Richard Whitney, bow of the 1911 crew who rose to the headship of a potent Wall Street firm and the presidency of the New York Stock Exchange. Proudest moment of Harvard-man Whitney’s life was his Canute-like act of courage on Oct. 24, 1929, when he bid 205 for 10,000 shares of U. S. Steel selling at 190. The Class’s most celebrated writer was moody Poet Conrad Potter Aiken,* who wrote 14 of the 18 volumes of poetry, three (Blue Voyage, Great Circle, King Coffin) of the six novels produced by the class. Author Tunis himself contributed one novel, American Girl. Other 1911 luminaries: Arthur Sweetser, longtime unofficial U. S. delegate to the League of Nations; Hanford MacNider, past National Commander of the American Legion and President Hoover’s Minister to Canada; Producer Kenneth MacGowan; Dr. Alan Gregg, the Rockefeller Foundation’s director of Medical Sciences. First Marshal of the Class was President Herbert Jaques of the U. S. Golf Association, still considered distinguished by many of his classmates.

I married—the only smart move I have made since leaving college. . . .

Seven out of every eight members of the Class married, and almost all mentioned their wives. One bright fact in Mr. Tunis’ survey is that his classmates married happily for the most part, averaged only one divorce in 14 marriages. Nation’s ratio is about 1 to 6.

Almost half the 1911 wives work to. eke out the family income. One is a saleswoman, another runs a hot-dog stand. A good share of the Class of 1911 married college graduates. No Vassar or Bryn Mawr wives Were divorced. Smith and Vassar wives bore the most children—between two and three each. Many Nineteen Eleveners regret that they could not send their sons to Harvard. Said one: “My boy graduated from Harvard this year, which is very wonderful, since I could not have held out until 1937.” Said another: “I resigned from my clubs to keep my boy in Harvard and meat on the table.”

The sports pages of the newspapers still outweigh all the others in interest. . . .

Favorite reading of the class, a large section of which admits that it reads nothing but newspapers and an occasional magazine, comes from Rudyard Kipling, Science and Health, Havelock Ellis, Dickens. “The vast majority of the class,” sternly says Mr. Tunis, “know little about punctuation, and their style is that of a grammar school boy.” As for spelling, beleive, extra-curriculer, and imaginery were frequent. The name of frosty President-Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell was transmuted to Lowel, Economist Frank William Taussig to Towsig.

It seems hard to believe that we were graduated 25 years ago, but after all, from William H. Taft to Franklin D. Roosevelt is quite a jump.

From the Class of 1911, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the Class of 1904 gets many a brickbat. Seventy-five percent declare they will vote for Alf M. Landon this year. As a loyal alumnus, Author Tunis finds that fact painful. “Whence,” he asks, “this strange, almost fanatical hatred of a fellow Harvardman?”

For a basis of comparison, Author Tunis uncovered a post-graduate-report of Harvard’s Class of 1811, found that a full quarter became lawyers, that most were politically alert, that many were distinguished public servants. Class of 1911 produced no mayor, governor, congressman, or state legislator. Largest occupational classification was “manufacturing,” whose average income was $3,000. The insurance salesman, “of whom we have a number,” received the lowest pay: $1,200. Remarks Author Tunis: “As long as taxation and the Government let them alone, they are complacently happy.”

Author Tunis likewise surveyed the reports of the Class of 1911 at Yale and Princeton. Mathematically average Yale-man of 1911, he found, “is a lawyer in New York, with an office downtown, and a house above the Grand Central on a side street east of Fifth Avenue. He is a Republican and an Episcopalian.” His Princeton counterpart is 46, “in business with an office in lower Manhattan, lives in Montclair, N. J., has two children. He has seen every Yale game since the War.” As stanchly Republican as their Harvard contemporaries, Yale and Princeton men will support Landon 80% and 92%, respectively.

Concludes Author Tunis bitterly: “We are a bunch of contented college cows. . . . That lamp of learning, tended by the ancient Greeks, blown white and high in the mediaeval universities and handed down to us in a direct line through Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, has at last produced a group of men whose chief ambitions . . . [are] to vote the Republican ticket, to keep out of the bread line, and to break 100 at golf. . . . Does one need to go to college to have such aspirations?”

Quick were many Harvardmen to insist that whatever Author Tunis’ survey might show, it was true only of the Class of 1911, which many ungraciously suggested was a dud. Harvard’s Class of 1910, for instance, fathered a celebrated motley including Columnists Walter Lippmann and Heywood Broun, Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, Communist John Reed, New York’s Representative Hamilton (“Ham”) Fish Jr.

Nevertheless, said Harvardman Lewis Gannett, Class of 1913 and book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune: “A rough check of my own class disclosed a surprisingly close parallel. . . . Can it be that the rise of the father, in American life, tends to mean the decline of the son?”

Cracked Harvardman Stuart Chase, Class of 1910: “Most of them ask nothing better than a return to the good old days. . . . One is tempted to ask why we should not settle down to the football of our forefathers, with goal posts on the zero yard line, five yards for a first down, and no forward passes.”

*WAS COLLEGE WORTH WHILE?—Harcourt, Brace ($2). *Says Author Tunis: “Our only distinguished writer submits that he is $12,000 in debt and unable to see any ‘way out.”