II

My mother thought I was too young to attend Harvard College immediately after William Penn Charter School and suggested Exeter—perhaps to be followed by Antioch College; she admired Arthur Morgan, who had revived Antioch. I wanted to go on an educational cruise around the world. We compromised, and my mother found a school near Tucson, the now defunct Evans School. It was a dismal year. My principal pleasure and escape came from horseback trips in the mountains every weekend. A few of the students were semidelinquents who had been thrown out of schools like Saint Paul's, although I found in John Heinz II a good friend; he and I edited the humor magazine, where we used our sardonic energies against the lackluster masters and the largely indolent students. The English headmaster, Dr. Evans, taught Latin, but without the slightest interest in it.

At Harvard College I soon found myself for the first time in a place where I wanted to be. I actively went out for activities; I competed twice for acceptance onto the staff of the student newspaper, the Crimson, and, succeeding on the second try, made it my "club" for the next years. The Crimson not only legitimated my roaming curiosities concerning Harvard University but also focused my energies, and the severe criticisms we made of one another as writers and editors in the

"Comment Book" engendered a kind of competitive camaraderie and, at best, craftsmanship.

Mistakenly I thought my parents sensible when they encouraged me to study subjects at Harvard that could only be pursued in an academic setting, and that meant the natural sciences, for one could always read books. Thus I majored in biochemical sciences, making clear to curious friends on the Crimson, most of whom majored in English or another discipline of the humanities and had no heavy laboratory work, that the last thing I would ever be was a premed. Neither did the idea occur to me that I would ever become a professor. The science teaching I experienced, including that of James B. Conant, was routine until in my senior year I encountered Lawrence J. Henderson's magnificent course, focused on the physiology of blood.

But I did enjoy reading history, and as a sophomore I petitioned Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., for permission to take his course on American social history, open to juniors and seniors. It was a disappointment, for although Schlesinger was a fine person and an admired mentor of graduate students, he was a poor lecturer and did not seem to me to be a penetrating scholar. The following year I had a piece of good fortune in the visit of Charles Kingsley Webster from the University of Aberystwyth in Wales who gave a course in British diplomatic history in the era of Castlereagh and Canning. Webster had burrowed with ingenuity and thoroughness in the archival materials, and it was engrossing to be able to learn something in such fine-grained detail, including the British origins of the Monroe Doctrine—a relevant concern for me in the light of my already established misgivings concerning Manifest Destiny. I enjoyed a few conversations with Webster in his rooms in the Continental Hotel. I had "discovered" Webster, and I wandered about in the humanities, sometimes briefly auditing courses in literature favored by my friends. I shared their admiration for John Livingston Lowes but not their enthusiasm for George Lyman Kittredge's course on Shakespeare, which in my view was philosophical pedantry not made more palatable by his carefully cultivated eccentricities.

In my senior year, however, I had better luck and perhaps better judgment. Since I was writing an honors thesis (on a theoretical topic in biochemistry I have forgotten), I was permitted to reduce my course load to two rather than the standard four courses. In addition to Henderson's course, which entranced me (as did his book, The Fitness of the Environment ), I opted for Irving Babbitt's course on romanticism. Babbitt's personality was not appealing to me, but I found his outlook bracing and attractive.^[2] (Most students were uninvolved with Babbitt's

judgments. He displayed his erudition, and there was a students' betting pool on the number of names he would drop each day; I sympathized with Babbitt in the face of the philistines!) I wrote a long essay on an extravagantly ambitious topic, "The Educational Theories of Goethe and Rousseau." I did not read much secondary literature, and I pondered Émile and other apposite writings of Rousseau as well as Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann .

I appreciated Rousseau's originality, but not his vision. Well before I encountered Irving Babbitt, I had gained a keen sense for the fragility of civilization. Eight years old when the United States entered World War I, which led to the internment of my governess's fiancé, a German merchant seaman, I was aware of the storm of hatred for "the Huns"; frankfurters became hot dogs; schools stopped teaching German. In the 1920s I read about the propaganda campaigns that helped bring the United States into the war on the side of the Entente, whereas I concluded that had the United States sought to impose a peace in 1917, the Germans would certainly have been willing, and the French might have been forced, to accept a settlement. My sense of the volatility of public opinion in a democracy and my misgivings concerning nationalism, in the United States and among other potential combatants, have been fairly constant in my outlook to this day.