CHAPTER ELEVEN
After 1942 nothing at Yale was the same as it had been before and . . . whatever the so-called “normality” of the fifties, certain radical changes, in American education and in those who would pursue it, had occurred . . . [N]othing that had seemed stable and enduring in, say, 1940, and wasclearly a verity in, say, 1914, remained as it had been. . . . [T]here sets in an extraordinary series of changes in Yale, and therefore in the Hall: changes in who came to Yale, in where they came from, in what they chose to do here, in what they were compelled to do, and in what they did afterward.
—A. Barlett Giamatti, History of Scroll and Key, 1942–1972 (1978)
THE NEW UNIVERSITY COLLEGE—AND THE OLD DEMOGRAPHICS
Yale had been largely rebuilt under Angell, who found it in brownstone and left it in granite. The college also changed socially and intellectually during his presidency. By 1941, a fellow Harvard alumnus in John Marquand’s novel H. M. Pulham, Esq. is described complaining: “That’s one of the things that gripes me about Yale. The Elis are always wheeling out the Yale poets and the Yale literary group. Why, hell, we have a lot of the same thing in the Class, except we don’t shout about them.”1 A more mature and sophisticated curriculum had emerged with the conversion of Yale into a university college, where the existence of art, music, graduate and other schools added immensely to the undergraduate experience.
In the educational sphere, over that time, the first definite distributional requirements for the freshman and sophomore years were established, and the Latin requirement for Academic and the PhB degree of Sheffield extinguished. Majors were slowly enlarged under the aegis of the academic departments, reading periods were created, comprehensive examinations (beginning with the class of 1937) were established, and, by 1940, a senior essay was required. It has been estimated that, between the era of Noah Porter and the end of Angell’s term in 1937, “the education of Yale undergraduates had gained almost three years in general maturity.”2
Socially, too, in college life, there had been major milestones of change. The attitudinal transformations of the 1920s, taken together with the growth in numbers of the college, finally killed daily chapel—a tradition over two hundred years old, brought to an end by faculty recommendation and Corporation vote in May 1926. Then, the presence of the residential colleges, the first seven of which opened officially on September 25, 1933, began the demolition of the ancient walls between professors and students (unlike the new Harvard houses, no Oxbridge high tables on raised daises for faculty alone had found their way to New Haven), while the forced admixture of the students from Ac, Sheff, and Engineering removed the old structural divisions, bridging the social chasms among their respective undergraduates. More students were enabled to participate in a wide variety of sports, organized by residential colleges playing one another and, in due course, championship matches against the best Harvard houses on the weekend of the Yale-Harvard football game. Singing and drama groups, individual college newspapers, and special interest clubs sprung up, populated by the three upper classes now housed together in their distinctive quadrangles, fabulous palaces compared to the tradition-wrapped, Spartan community of the 1890s.
Self-help students enjoyed new dignity in the contemporaneous bursary plan which had been envisioned by Harkness. The development of in-college and out-college employment made it possible to eliminate the invidious board jobs of waiter or busboy which had hitherto carried at least a third of the financial load. These were exchanged for posts as advisors and tutors to freshmen, nonworking fellowships for the best scholars, and appointments to help run the colleges themselves, and for outside jobs in other university departments as research and project assistants. A number of bursary men were set to managing the teams, attending the college library, preparing for entertainments, and running errands for the college master’s office, gaining in the process considerable experience in dealing with their class- and college-mates, and competing against each other for the top posts. The residential college senior aide became a man of note, in his own community and beyond. Marks of consideration came his way, including recommendtions for professional or business school, and election to a senior society (Harold Howe of the class of 1940, self-supporting in college and later President John Kennedy’s commissioner of education, was appointed senior aide of Davenport College, and elected to Bones). Soon men who did not need the money sought entrance into the bursary system, and one father even complained that Yale was discriminating against the rich.
Members of the class of 1936, who entered the residential colleges from their Old Campus dormitories as sophomores, gave the new system their wholehearted loyalty and devotion. With the addition of Berkeley College to the original seven in 1934, Timothy Dwight the following year, and finally Silliman in 1940, all finally found places in the new residential regime. Yet, while this elaborately organized intimacy permitted recapture of some of the smaller Yale College of yore, newly to be shared with the privileges of a great university, the demographic composition of the student body had not altered very dramatically.3
The physical Yale College had changed considerably more than had its collegians. Remarkably, the pre–World War II class of 1941 was not that different, even in size, from the pre–World War I class of 1916. The percentage of high school students in the class of 1916 was actually higher than in the class of 1941—29 percent to 26 percent. While most of 1916’s high schoolers were from Connecticut, its number of them from outside Yale’s top six states, comprising twenty-five from sixteen states plus Hawaii, compares favorably with 1941’s count of thirty-two high school graduates from thirteen states and Washington, D.C. The 860 members of the class of 1941 boasted little diversity, including no blacks, one Filipino, and two Armenians. Of the 780 students in the class of 1916, a quarter century before, five were African Americans, three Chinese, two Armenians, two Turks, a German (leaving Yale halfway through sophomore year to fight for his fatherland), and a Brazilian.
Furthermore, after the limitation of numbers policy was put in place in 1923, the percentage of students who were sons of Yale graduates soared upward: 1916’s class had 85 legacies, a bit less than 11 percent of the class, while the class of 1941 had 262 members whose fathers had attended Yale, or 30.5 percent, almost triple that of a quarter century before. Moreover, it appears that over half the 1941 class’s undergraduates had a male relative who preceded them in New Haven (the 1916 figure is about 23 percent). Adding the curious fact that almost one third of the ’41ers came with a “Jr.” or Roman numeral after their names, it might be maintained that there was more inherited privilege at Yale on the eve of the Second World War than perhaps at any time since the American Revolution.
For 1941’s graduating class, there was about a 10 percent Jewish enrollment, and a 5 percent Catholic enrollment. One-quarter of these young men came from five prep schools (Andover, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Taft, and Choate), and if St. Paul’s, Kent, and Hill were added in, a third of the class was included in their collective rosters. The 226 high schoolers in the class were fewer than the intake from the top six prep schools. A letter to the Yale Daily News in March 1940 pointed out that “Yale students, as a whole, are rich,” and that at their preparatory schools, “the annual tuition due is around $1400, which is only about $1000 less than the annual income of 71% of the families of this country.”4
The arguments about the merits and horrors of the senior society system remained familiar ones. Sophomores in the class of 1940 were readers of a News editorial published shortly before Tap Day in 1938, holding that “There is little to be gained by taking issue with the Senior Societies, or even, it seems, by discussing them: every year they recruit groups of worried and often skeptical juniors and convert them into bands of devoted and sincerely inspired Seniors. This fact has always loomed large enough in all considerations of the societies to silence questioning on their value to Yale.” The editor claimed that “nearly all of the Societies are packed,” and hoped that, since the days of Dink Stover were over, “Juniors will manage to keep their sense of proportion on Tap Day.”5
Sophomore McGeorge “Mac” Bundy was the son of a Bonesman (Henry Hollister Bundy 1910, Supreme Court clerk for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and during World War II, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s top deputy on the development of the atomic bomb), and his older brother Bill was a prominent candidate in the immediately upcoming society selection for the class of 1939. Nonetheless, Mac used the column—which his News vice chairman brother had specially arranged for him—to attack the societies, while calling for higher standards. He pointed out in his weekly “Visions & Revisions,” shared on alternative days with junior Richard Morris Jr., that, unlike the old days of discussion only by anonymous writers of tipsheets, the News had printed sober and carefully considered editorials in four of the last five years, analyzing and criticizing the societies.
“One of them,” Bundy noted, “has stressed the fact that the Societies enforce a dubious Success Standard; another has excoriated the unnecessary brutality of Tap Day; a third has described mumbo-jumbo and secrecy; a fourth, the most recent, has pointed to the dangers of packing and has deplored the new eminence, in the Societies, of the Social Type.” But, he continued, “It should be noted that thus far all of the Chairmen whose comments we mentioned have joined a Society and conformed to its traditions. And this is no blind betrayal of their views. . . . [W]hatever they may fail to do today, the Societies represent a noble tradition of the frank and intimate association of admirable men. Their meetings are not wasted; many of their rewards are life-long in duration. No man can surely analyze the source of their values; no man can deny that it exists.”6 The senior societies, in other words, continued to succeed, because they had succeeded in Yale’s past.
His co-columnist, brother Bill Bundy’s classmate Richard L. Morris Jr., denied in the succeeding opinion piece that good ends are necessarily compatible with bad means, and deplored the “present morass of subterranean dickering and jockeying for post positions in Yale’s most portentous Derby.” He maintained that “as a result of secrecy, least important of the considerations surrounding the million-dollar corporations erected in honor of the successful undergraduate, many an avoidable tragedy and many a regrettable corruption is made possible.”7
In the third column completing the series, the sophomore Bundy agreed that the “monkey business” of “hush hush” went along with “the other besetting dangers of the Senior Societies—packing, family bias, selections based on mere Reputation or physical prowess, and the social emphasis generally”—what he styled “False Gods.” Still, he saw another attitude “on its way” which “recognizes the gradual decline of bulldogism; it refuses to have anything to do with the boys; it elects eminent men only when they are justly eminent; it gives honor to the man and not to his position. The partisans of this new attitude will seek quality, knowing that they cannot judge it by the standards of the past.”8 On the date this column appeared, the junior Morris gathered with his classmates in the main court of Branford College at 4:45 P.M. for Tap Day, to be chosen by Scroll and Key (which classmate Bill Bundy turned down for Bones). After Pearl Harbor, Morris was to enter the Signal Corps in 1941 and perish in Kunming, China, in October 1944. His fellow columnist and iconoclast Mac Bundy, more of a reformer in intent, and later to become dean of the faculty at Harvard, special assistant for national security affairs to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and president of the Ford Foundation, was the last man tapped by Bones the following year, in May 1939.9
Four months before that, Bundy had penned a leader for the February 1939 Yale Lit., “For the Defense.” “[T]he senior societies,” he wrote, “whatever their minor imperfections, have contributed notably to a high ideal of friendship and have held up standards of human character that were not perfect but certainly good enough to keep most of those interested pushing up. . . . It may be bad that we have a system that attracts a blind desire and rewards on arbitrary and half-true bases. It would be worse if the ordinary aspiring freshman were drawn by nothing more compelling than the double-feature at Loew’s Poli or the dubious glories of the Knickerbocker.”10
Nevertheless, not two months later he and two classmates, Harold Howe and Charles Glover III, circulated a pledge agreement under which upward of two hundred juniors swore to stay in their rooms, by way of protest against the traditional election method of Tap Day, deemed “needlessly unkind and undignified.” Then older heads recollected the chaos of the 1933 election, when a similar protest had been mounted, resulting only in confusion, some double-dealing, and a process protracted over several hours. The senior society mandarins advised the pledge organizers that similar disasters were likely to occur this time around and, against an inferred promise that things might change next year when the junior class protesters were themselves seniors, these rebel leaders told their classmates in an open letter that the election would be held in Branford Court, in the usual manner, and no junior was now bound by any commitment to stay in his room.
On the day, Howe, Glover, and Bundy (reportedly also pressured by his mother, who traveled to New Haven to do so) all accepted offers from Bones. Still, Mac Bundy said later that he followed his brother Bill into Bones only because “it became clear to me that it would be a blow to my father if I didn’t join. He believed then in the institution as I do now. But at the time a big part of me was ambivalent. If my father hadn’t been a member of Skull and Bones, I am sure I would not have joined.”11 (Senior society legacies, it must be admitted, were not always pleased at first with the opportunity.) As an adult, Bundy kept a ceramic skull and bones propped on his desk in his study, and received correspondence more than fifty years after his initiation addressed with his society name “Odin,” the Norse god of war, poetry, wisdom, and the dead.12
Several incremental changes were indeed apparent the following year, in the spring of 1940. In April, two weeks before Tap Day, the Yale Political Union held a public debate, unprecedented in the twentieth century and like nothing so much as the senior class debate and vote back in February 1884, the replay resolving 38 to 17 that “the influence of the senior societies is not in the best interests of Yale.” An outvoted supporter of the societies had argued: “As for their Democracy. I invite you to show our American Government a more just democracy than the Yale system in which the poorest boy can rise by pure achievement to the highest honor. Playthings for the idle rich perhaps, but there are no less than five bursary [scholarship] students out of the present fourteen members of the most representative of the societies.”13
Prior to Tap Day this year, all the senior class members of Bones, Keys, Wolf’s Head, Berzelius, Book & Snake, and Elihu were scheduled to meet to discuss changing the election procedure to employ a private event in juniors’ rooms, instead of a public event at the campus’s center. Yale administrators who were Skull and Bones alumni asked that their society’s seniors not attend, and without the participation of the eldest senior society, the matter was dropped.14
The News ran a front-page article on Tap Day, May 9, which went beyond the customary simple announcement of when and where the juniors were to gather for election. Titled “Annual Tap Day Ceremonies Attract Juniors to Branford Where Six Senior Societies Will Seek 1941 Delegations,” it included a potted history of the system drawn from Bagg’s (uncited) Four Years at Yale. News columnist W. Liscum Borden reported in his “Society Sweepstakes” in the same issue that “Time and Life plan to be on hand to cover one of the greatest shows on earth . . . while down at the Yale Club in New York, dignified alumni (so ’tis said) will slip into mint juleps as they watch the election returns coming in by ticker tape directly from Branford Court.” Borden ran a morning line on prospects for Bones (naming seven of the final fifteen, none of the remaining going to Keys) and Keys (ten correct picks, and none of the remaining five accepting Bones). But—forecasting his own fallibility—he noted that “the societies are so on the defensive this year that they are likely to pass over some of the more obvious B.M.O.C.s in favor of lesser known entries with sterling character, and hence, lots of long shots may gallop home with the bacon.”15
One of those correctly predicted for Bones by Borden, William Jackson (“because he looks so spooky in a dark suit”), had been a main organizer of the Political Union debate and wrote his own unprecedentedly public post-election reflections in his newspaper column the following week, “Now It Can Be Told.” Although tapped himself (and not actually in Branford Court that day), Jackson wrote in the voice of one passed over in the arena. “How bestial the watchers looked, lined up on the walks, hanging out of windows, morbid curiosity staring from their bulging eyes—a sort of collective Madame Defarge, sans knitting, assembled at the place de guillotine, waiting for the kill.” Overcome by “a feeling of unutterable loathing and revulsion,” he concluded that “just because the ends are good doesn’t justify any means. Rather, the means should be consistent and of equal dignity with the ends.”16
Time magazine indeed ran the article which Borden’s column had predicted, titled “Skull and Bones.” Time chairman Henry Luce was in Paris that week, or a tell-all article on his beloved society might not have run that reported that “Not strictly accurate is the legend that a Bones man is never without a job, but a Bones man on his uppers often gets handouts from his fellow Bonesmen,” and “The [Bones] ritual is said to include wrestling matches (from which they often emerge in tatters) and critical bull sessions in which members tell each other their faults, prod each other to strive for Success.”
Also quoted was an editorial from Yale Daily News chairman Kingman Brewster Jr.: “Six o’clock will bring a general sigh of relief and a sudden realization that after all the day of judgment is still a matter for the Gods and not 90 Yale men.” The piece concluded with the news that nine men turned down Bones, “including Kingman Brewster whom a Bones man found [Harold Howe] in the News office. . . . Absent from the Branford Court but eventually bagged by Bones in his room was another critic of the societies, Kingman Brewster’s roommate, William Eldred Jackson, son of U.S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson.” In a way that would be difficult for non-Yale people to appreciate fully, Brewster’s refusal was seen as a magnificent act of heroism that resonated through the decades and was still a leading signifier of Brewster’s reputation at the time of his selection as president of the university a quarter century later.17
In a 1968 reissue of Stover at Yale, President Brewster reflected once more on the system. “[In Stover’s time] it was a pyramid, with Skull and Bones sitting aperch the top. But it was a pyramid of merit to a remarkable extent and reward did not exclude the rebel nor guarantee the legacy.” He did not reflect on, let alone mention, his own rejection of election.18 Although this was viewed by his peers as a rebellion against the system, his actual reasons for refusal were more varied. “I have no scunner [state of disgusted irritation] against the Senior Societies,” he later protested. “I didn’t join one as an undergraduate for the publicly expressed reasons that they were taking themselves too seriously and flaunting their secrecy as an ornament of exclusiveness: and for the more important private reason that I didn’t want to give up my Saturday commute to Northampton [home of the women’s college, Smith, where he was dating his roommate Jackson’s sister].”19 Jackson was later to say that Brewster believed a secret society membership would be a political liability in the approaching democratic age. On Tap Day in 1940, Brewster bicycled out to Whit Griswold’s house, no doubt expecting that his mentor, then an assistant professor of Government and International Relations (and to be Brewster’s predecessor as Yale president), would be pleased by his youthful independence and iconoclasm. Instead, he learned from Mary Griswold that her husband was back downtown participating in the Wolf’s Head tapping effort.20
The class of 1941’s election was again held in Branford Court, to which admission could be gained only by a card to be procured from the juniors’ college masters; those unable to attend by reason of illness or otherwise were requested to inform the dean’s office. The societies were provided with a list of the attending juniors, and each society was given twenty-five admission cards for their respective guests. Tapped juniors were instructed to go to a corner of the main court or other spot in Branford College designated by the tapping senior, to conclude the election, all to be done before six o’clock. A News editorial remarked that the new system would “certainly be an improvement over the former Roman holiday technique,” and that “the Societies have shown a willingness to try something new, for which even their severest critics must give them some credit.” Liscum Borden’s cheeky column on the prospects for Bones and Keys did not prevent an offer from Bones, which he rejected, and no other society tapped him.21
The Yale College dean’s office was watching too, and promptly prepared a graph which recorded the average grades of the new men in the six societies (Berzelius with the highest marks, followed in order by Keys, Bones, Wolf’s Head, Elihu, and Book and Snake), their fraternities, and their residential colleges. Once more a world war, commencing for the U.S. the previous December, was not permitted to interfere with their initiation. High army and navy officials, with the approval of secretary of war Stimson, authorized home leaves and furloughs to the new members of the six societies, elected offsite because of having left school in February, to return in May to their alma mater from their aviation training in Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
Before that election, in the December 1940 bulletin of the Wolf’s Head corporate body, the Phelps Association, members were reminded that in their official history, published in 1934 at the advent of the residential college system, author John Williams Andrews, noting the new peril in which the fraternities were placed, had argued that “The senior society groups, too, are unhappily aware of the Sword of Damocles. ‘Whether or not they are to survive,’ said a high official of the University, whose guess should be better than average, ‘will be settled in the next seven years.’” Andrews asked, “Will the segregation of life in the Colleges eliminate or intensify the demand for University-wide contacts which the societies can so naturally supply? Do the societies now offer, or can they be shaped to offer, an additional something which the Colleges will always be impotent to meet in spite of their superb equipment for social intercourse?”22
The seven years had now passed, and there was no dangerous prospect of the societies’ demise. For the Yale undergraduate, according to the Wolf’s Head bulletin, “his college, rather than the university, had become the hub of his college existence.” Eating together regularly, as required by the system, “day after day and month after month, goes a very long way to cementing friendships, as well as a long way toward making acquaintanceships that may ripen into friendships. Only lodging in the same entry of the same building, playing on the same team, taking the same trips with the same organization, can compare with the magic of food shared,” and now there were “special college entertainments, special college traditions, special college jokes, literary magazines, crafts (such as printing, photography, wood and metal working and so forth).”
Nevertheless, this message concluded, segregation in the colleges had not only not eliminated the Andrews-identified “demand for the University-wide contracts which the societies can so naturally supply,” but this demand had been “enormously intensified—and not only are the societies meeting this demand, but they must go on meeting it with ever increasing intensity year by year, if the University idea is not to be wholly submerged in the college idea, with Yale [College] becoming no more than a fiction as is the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge.” Wolf’s Head celebrated the fact that in their 1936–37 delegation, there were men from six residential colleges out of seven, and in 1939–40 from five, but over the four years past, all the nine colleges as their number was expanded had representation in their tomb.23
WAR COMES AGAIN
When the radio reported the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, Yale students poured out of their rooms and began spontaneous demonstrations on the Old Campus, singing “Over There” from the last world war and chanting “Let’s go to Tokyo!” By January 1942, thirty undergraduates had departed New Haven to enlist (one-half of one percent of the student body, as opposed to 700 in World War I’s first month, when the duration and brutality of that conflict were not fully appreciated). Yale officials had been expecting this day for at least the two prior years, and the ROTC and Engineering School had begun shaping courses to meet such an emergency.
Yale was the first university in the country to make a definite statement of a progressive policy to prepare its students for war and war work. The “Yale Plan” announced on February 25, 1942, structured a course of studies to prepare a man mentally and morally for his duties as an officer in the armed forces, and created liaison plans attempting to accommodate the needs of the army, navy, and industry with the capacity of the facilities of the college. Men were divided into the Navy V-1 class (“V” for volunteer) and the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps plan, and before month’s end, almost 30 percent of the student body—nearly nine hundred students—had enlisted in military and naval programs, which kept them temporarily in college. Army, navy, and marines enlisted reserve units were established in the summer of 1942. Put in charge of the marine corps enlisting unit was graduate Lt. Elliott R. Detchon Jr., ’41, a star football player and Keys alumnus. Put in charge of Yale recruiting for the Navy’s preflight training group was the current football team’s captain and All-American center, Spencer Moseley ’43, who was then a member of Bones.
There was no longer any place for the usual three months’ summer vacation: an accelerated academic program was laid out whereby the university would operate on a year-round basis, dividing its work into three school-year terms instead of the former two. Each term would run approximately sixteen weeks with a brief week’s breathing space between. Attending through the summer, students in all departments might graduate ahead of schedule, reducing the time for a full college course from four years to less than three—to two years and eight months, in fact. Except for the week between terms, classes were held every day except Christmas, and this included Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Thus men under twenty-one would complete their college training before entering into active national service.
The six hundred seniors of the class of 1942 enjoyed the last normal graduation, advanced only a week from the customary date, with the ROTC seniors in uniform and the rest in mufti, as only the faculty wore academic gowns. The first summer session of the accelerated program began in July 1942, and 98 percent of Yale’s undergraduates returned for it (the comparable numbers were 75 percent at Princeton, and 60 percent at Harvard). That same month, 1059 new freshmen of the class of 1945W—W meaning “War”—entered Yale, and were addressed by Harvey Bundy ’09, special assistant to the secretary of war, and his fellow Bonesman Henry Stimson ’88.
The election calendar for the senior societies was necessarily distorted by these events. The class of 1945, 981 of them, had arrived at the normal time in September 1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor, and their class’s Tap Day was April 29, 1943, following by only five months the senior society elections for the class of 1944, held in December 1942. For 1945W, the expectation of their total term at Yale was two years and seven months, with a Tap Day of January 1, 1944, in the Timothy Dwight courtyard attended only by juniors and society members (when Bones tapped only a mere ten men, and Keys fourteen), but even those who stayed the longest had less time than that. Men were constantly lost to different branches of the service, and before their graduation in February 1944 the 1,059 freshmen who had entered had suffered on-campus attrition of 86 percent, to fewer than 150 men.
The crowding-in began, as Yale lost control of much of its own campus to the services: the U.S. Army Air Force rented Silliman College, the Freshman Commons, parts of the Law and Graduate Schools, laboratory facilities, and almost the entire Old Campus—where no Yale student was now allowed to step—for the duration. Six of the Yale College fraternities became officers’ eating clubs. An advance guard of the Air Corps, coming around to see the possibilities, had stopped in delight before the Skull and Bones tomb, seeing it as “The very thing for the Guard House!” University treasurer Lawrence Tighe, who was handling the renting of the campus buildings, as a good Bonesman not suprisingly refused (and it was not Yale’s property anyway). Yale College now resembled an armed camp, housing a student population by the summer of 1943 of 8,000, up from 5,000 before the war.
President Charles Seymour’s message in the classbook for 1943 foretold the end of extracurricular activities: “During the years before us, perhaps most of that which characterized the old Yale life will of necessity be sacrificed. . . . Traditional student activities are bound to be strictly curtailed, the pleasant frivolities of leisure hours will rapidly disappear.” Shrink in size they did, ultimately to vanish, although through 1942 they struggled to endure. On March 26, 1943, the Whiffenpoofs announced their discontinuance, with the Yale Daily News, the only Ivy League college newspaper which was continuing as a daily, reporting the “Temporary demobilization of the little black sheep.” The News had announced that it intended to keep on publishing for the war’s duration if possible, but the self-styled Oldest College Daily succumbed with a last issue on May 8, 1943, one of its final editorials commenting that “Yale is writing ‘the end’ temporarily to a chapter which has often spelt the neglect of proper study, and which has often created a goddess out of success after the fashion of America.”24
THE SENIOR SOCIETIES IN WARTIME
The life of the senior societies was naturally impacted deeply by the enforced disciplines of military training and the severe reduction in optional leisure time. Members of the army, navy, and marines awoke at 6:00 A.M. and attended classes or the gymnasium all day until 6:00 P.M., six days a week; after mess, ninety minutes’ free time was followed by a study period, with lights out at 11:30 P.M. Society members could now only squeeze in meetings on Wednesday nights, when at least the Navy men had the evening off, and before the end of the war some of the societies temporarily ceased to function. The Navy laid no ban on extracurricular activities, “insofar as it does not interfere with prescribed hours or courses of study”—which was exactly backward, as it was the prescribed hours and courses which interfered with extra-curricular activities.
Still, enlisted naval students could join all previously established fraternities on campus available to all students, but were forbidden “to join in any activity or organization not available to membership to all students either civilian or enlisted on the campus,” which eliminated the senior societies. With accelerated graduations coming every four months instead of annually, the cascade of blows fell quickly on the societies’ seemingly immemorial rhythms, first limiting meetings, then scattering junior class candidates and senior class electors to far corners of the country or to overseas battlegrounds, then making even fifteen members hard to find, and finally forcing the complete cancellation of elections.
The centennial of Scroll and Key arrived in May 1942, and the invitation to their graduates hoped that every one “will make the necessary effort to return to the Hall on these occasions in spite of the obvious difficulty of the times.” Attendees were advised that, in recognition of the society’s one hundredth anniversary, Wolf’s Head had sent over one hundred American Beauty roses (“thornless!”) with an autographed poem by Stephen Vincent Benét, read in the Keys tomb on June 9, 1942, by George Parmly Day, the university treasurer and presiding officer for the centennial ceremonies.
The Benét verses recollected that, years before on the fiftieth anniversary of the third oldest College society, Keys had sent “thornless flowers” to Wolf’s Head, and reflected the wartime threat to civilization:
For, as in Rome, Briton and Gaul
Alike could man the Roman Wall
And citizens from near and far
Though born beneath a different star
Remarked, with zeal, “S.P.Q.R.,
Civis Romanus sum.”—so we,
Whatever else we chance to be,
Remain “cives Yalenses” still
And hail our city with a will.
So, though the Wolf our totem be,
Tonight we honor Scroll and Key
And in our mildly vulpine way
Extol your glad centennial day,
The years as honorably worn,
The honors still so lightly bourne,
The gaiety through years maintained,
The courtesy that is not feigned,
And gaily may your troubadour
Greet the next hundred years, and more!25
Tap Day, seemingly forever a fixture of late May afternoons, was for the first time since the original election of 1833 seriously accelerated, to December 3, 1942, for the elections for the class of 1944, to graduate on December 19. Because of the shortened winter day and evening blackout rules on campus, juniors were asked to report to Branford Court at 4:15 P.M., with the ceremony to begin at 4:30 (or, predicted a News columnist, “perhaps earlier unless the societies want to look for the last few men with kerosene lamps.”) Admittees held tickets mailed in individual envelopes to all juniors in the College, and obtained by Sheff and Engineering juniors from the Sheff dean’s office.
The traditional News election day editorial observed that, unlike in recent years past, “no opinions have been expressed to the public either in condemnation or in affirmation of the senior society system,” but also noted that “each junior must enter Branford Courtyard this afternoon with some basis for either refusing or accepting election to one of the six senior societies. A real basis, and perhaps the only fool-proof one, which alone does not involve penetrating the societies’ perfectly valid secrecy and mystery, is whether one wants the rare privileges and benefits, together with some of the burdens, of fourteen intimate, life long friends.” Men taken in as members were fine men, opined the editorial, but probably would have been fine men without such membership. “In the last analysis,” the News chair wrote, “the best basis for deciding for or against the senior society system is the friendship tradition, which is its unique gift to Yale life.”
That News columnist had asserted that about sixty men of the ninety knew they would be tapped. To Bones that day went Dean Witter Jr., son of the founder of the eponymous stock brokerage house, tapped by Spencer Moseley; James Lane Buckley, later United States senator from New York and thereafter senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; James Whitmore, future Hollywood actor, slapped by Zeph Stewart, future Harvard professor of Classics and Lowell House master; and Townsend Hoopes, to be undersecretary of the air force during the Vietnam War and then president of the Association of American Publishers. Joining Keys that day was John Vliet Lindsay, future mayor of New York City, tapped by Cord Meyer Jr., future president of the United World Federalists, joined in the courtyard by his clubmate George Roy Hill, future Academy Award–winning director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. In 1965, when all three mayoral candidates—Lindsay, William F. Buckley Jr., and Robert F. Wagner Jr.—were Yale graduates, a newspaper columnist facetiously observed that while Buckley was in Skull and Bones, Lindsay and Wagner were only in Scroll and Key, and “[T]hat makes them sensitive to the aspirations of minority groups.”
To Wolf’s Head that day went Sam Wagstaff, who after surviving Omaha Beach on D-Day became a renowned American art curator and collector (his photography collection purchased by the Getty Museum) as well as the artistic mentor, benefactor, and companion of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and poet–punk rocker Patti Smith. Tapping for Berzelius in Branford Court was Elias Clark, later Yale law professor and longtime master of Silliman College. The tally of refusals, eleven in all, showed that the mismatch of society intents and candidate desires continued in a democratic mix: three turndowns each for Bones, Keys, and Book and Snake, and one for Elihu, with only Berzelius completely successful in choosing its first fifteen without rebuff.26
As for meetings in 1942, the Bones clubs of the graduating classes of 1944 (with only four men on campus) and 1945 were sharing Skeleton Hall on Wednesday evenings, eating together, then switching off debate sessions while the non-debating club bided its time, before all rushing back to barracks at ten o’clock; on Saturdays, 1945’s contingent had the hall to itself while the older club went to New York City or to a summer beach house in Madison, Connecticut, loaned by an alumnus. Elections were successfully mounted for the class of 1945W on New Year’s Day in 1944, a Saturday, although only ten men were elected, the fewest in the society’s history (Keys managed to elect fourteen).
By the spring of 1945 with the current members expected to leave for war service in June—since the atomic bomb’s existence was unknown and its dramatic impact unforeseen, not being mentioned in occasional talks given in New Haven by those working in Washington with Secretary of War Henry Stimson—it was determined that, for the first and last time in the society’s storied history, no elections would be conducted for the class of 1946. The Yale News Digest simply if grimly announced: “The Skull and Bones Society will offer no elections this spring.”
Fulfilling the prediction made in the Nineteen Forty Four Class Book, which had postulated in the spring of 1943 that “should the [extracurricular organization] groups be forced out of existence, some provision will be made for handing over the organization to the trusteeship of faculty members for the duration,” a group of local Bones alumni, including Yale faculty and administrators and recently graduated members, formed an ad hoc club, which they styled the “Committee of Fifteen,” to continue the life of the society, meeting on Thursday nights from the remainder of 1945 and into 1946, and this group after V-J Day in August 1945 planned for the coming spring of 1946, when normal campus life was expected to resume. Not until May 16, 1946, for the class of 1947, was there to be an incoming club for Skull and Bones chosen at the customary time in the customary way (although men selected for the societies were informed in their rooms), with the full complement of fifteen, after three refusals. Eleven members of the classes of 1944, 1945, and 1945W were on that date still in attendance at Yale as undergraduates, rescheduled after their respective enlistments to graduate in 1946, 1947, and 1948.
As for Keys, its group photographs for the classes of 1942, 1943, and 1944 each show fifteen men, but for 1945, there are twenty-seven faces: an amalgamation of the classes of 1945, with fifteen, and 1945W, with twelve, and at least six military uniforms. For the class of 1946, eight men were photographed, six again in uniform, with four not shown, constituting the second delegation in Keys’ modern history with less than a full complement of fifteen. For 1947, ten members are pictured, none in uniform, so over two years in three classes, the canonical number was not achieved. And while the portraits for the classes of 1948 and 1949 once more reflect the prewar pattern, fifteen young men in dark suits, nine of that 1948 crowd were World War II veterans and three would go to Korea, while in 1949 all but two were veterans.27
The 1945W Class Book, published in conjunction with the 1947 Yale Banner, evidences the confusion and attrition in annual intake of fifteen, in printing the standard page listings beneath their symbols of the various societies’ members. The Bones page lists thirty-eight names, and the Keys page thirty-three, hailing from the classes of 1944, 1945, 1945W, 1946, and 1947, while Berzelius and Book and Snake each lists twenty-five, and Wolf’s Head twenty.
These Bones and Keys groups of 1949—the former club, similarly all veterans, including two legacies, Henry Sloane Coffin ’97’s nephew William Sloane Coffin, who had worked in the army’s intelligence service as a liaison with the French and Russian armies, before becoming famous two decades later as Yale’s chaplain and civil rights crusader, and Trubee Davison ’17’s son Daniel Pomeroy Davison, a lieutenant in the USAF from 1943 to 1945—would, after some debate, offer election to a man who would have been the first black member in either society’s history.28
WHEN THE SHOOTING STOPPED
Although the Japanese surrender in August 1945 relieved the tension in the battlefields, Yale did not immediately resume its former peacetime status, having officially opened its 245th academic year with the summer term on July 2. At the special graduation held on October 23 for 53 members of the class that had entered in February 1943, President Charles Seymour gratefully noted that “For the first time in four years and five months a class goes forth from the halls of Yale into a world that will concentrate its power on something other than the annihilation of human possessions and the destruction of human lives.” The last navy men did not leave until June 1946, and the boys in uniform could not immediately come home, since demobilization took time. The university resumed its prewar two-term schedule in September.29
The pamphlet “Studies for the Returning Service Men” was prepared for eager inquirers: the government was lending a financial hand with the GI Bill, and many men who had no previous college experience were planning to give it a try. At the beginning of the 1945 summer term, 580 freshmen had entered Yale as the class of ’48. On November 1 another 250 came, and these together with the 228 who arrived with the beginning of the spring term of March, 1946, constituted the class of 1949. These entering freshmen and their counselors were put directly into those colleges which by now had been turned back to Yale by the navy.
A quota of 650 applications had been set for the fall term of 1946, and more than twice as many applications were received. Furthermore, six thousand former undergraduates wanted to return to qualify for a degree, and Yale received 5,175 formal applications from veterans who had either never attended a college or wanted to switch to Yale. In its inaugural issue for 1946, the war-suspended Yale Daily News reported that 5,000 veterans were included in the total registering, with the undergraduate body jumping in number from the normal limit of 3,100 to a total of about 5,600. Over a quarter of the returning veterans, some 1,300 of them, had brought new wives along. Some of them in due course had children, including among those newborns George Walker Bush, to be the 43rd president of the United States, born in New Haven on July 6, 1946.
On Commencement Sunday in 1946, a service of commemoration for the war dead was held in Battell Chapel, a long list, 514 names. The following day saw once again the normal commencement exercises with nearly seven hundred student degrees and the conferring of honorary degrees for the first time since 1942. By the fall of 1946, the physical conversion of the entire University to peacetime status was complete, with the Old Campus available again to entering freshmen.30 What have been called “the veteran years” which followed, between 1946 and, roughly, 1949, were to change the senior societies, as the veterans elevated and dignified Yale in many ways. It was their battle-worn skepticism which first permitted the intensification of the organized mockery of the societies, forcing them to reassess their standards.31
RESUMPTION OF (MOST) TRADITIONS
Tap Day on May 15 in the spring of 1947 for the class of 1948 still did not allow revival of the prewar tradition of elections held in the Branford College courtyard. Elections were offered between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M. to the collegians in their rooms, and those not living in the residential colleges were told to say in their places of residence, whether in or out of New Haven. The campus radio station, WYBC, announced the completion of elections to the several societies as soon as might be done after each society closed its list.
The last man tapped for Bones was George H. W. Bush, whose Yale blue veins and senior society antecedents came from several ancestors and from both sides of the families reflected in his full name. The first Bush to attend Yale was the forty-first American president’s great-grandfather, James Smith Bush, class of 1844. His other great-grandfather, David Walker, had built the largest dry goods import firm west of the Mississippi, and the investment firm of his son, George H. Walker and Company, founded in 1900, had become one of the more important in the Mississippi Valley. Walker became president of the W. A. Harriman & Co. investment firm, where Prescott Bush, Yale 1917 and Bones, became vice president in 1924, having first become Walker’s son-in-law in 1921.
Prescott’s first job after his 1919 discharge from his World War I service as an army captain of field artillery had been at the Simmons Hardware Company, owned by Walter Simmons, Yale 1890 and Bones, in St. Louis, Missouri, where he met George Walker’s daughter Dorothy. In 1931, Prescott became a partner of the newly merged Brown Brothers Harriman, where Averell Harriman was chairman of the board and his younger brother Roland, Prescott’s Bones clubmate, also worked. In 1952 Prescott Bush was named to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, serving until 1962. He had lost his first race, in 1950, his ties with Planned Parenthood hurting him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, where he also served as chairman of that state’s branch of the United Negro College Fund.32
Within the family, his son George H. W. Bush became “Poppy” (a nickname which persisted at Yale), because he had been named by family agreement after his maternal grandfather Walker, known as “Pop” to his sons. He attended Phillips Andover, which many said was modeled after Yale, in terms of social—even secret—clubs and fraternities and Yale-educated leadership. Bush became captain of both the soccer and baseball teams, playing manager of the basketball team, president of the senior class, and (before such societies were abolished after the Second World War) a member of Andover’s own secret society AUV (Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas—Authority, Unity, Truth).
At his graduation in 1942, where Secretary of War Stimson, the commencement speaker and chairman of the Andover Trustees, had warned against early enlistment in the new war, George overrode Prescott’s intent that he go directly from Andover to Yale and enlisted on his eighteenth birthday as a naval aviator, the youngest in the service to that date. He was shot down on September 2, 1944, near the Bonin Islands, and later rescued from an inflated raft by a submarine. Dying in that crash was a Bush family friend, Lt. (jg) Ted White, a squadron ordnance officer, Bonesman of the class of 1942 and son of a classmate of Prescott’s who had begged a ride on a combat mission in the turret gunner’s seat to observe the plane’s weapons system. For his 58 combat missions and 126 carrier landings, George Bush received the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals, and the Presidential Unit Citation awarded his ship the USS San Jacinto.33
While the GI Bill helped not only Bush but others who ordinarily would have attended Yale, funding $500 of the $600-per-year tuition and $105 for a married couple’s monthly subsistence, it also helped thousands more who would not have even thought of Yale, and the social complexion of the campus changed considerably. (Specific scholarships for black students, paid for the by college’s “Budget” charity drive for which Bush was an officer, evidenced that the diversification of the student body had solid support within the college.) The veterans were as a group older than the usual undergraduate body, certainly more seasoned, by virtue of their war service, involving 60 percent of the class of 1948. Their ethnicity was radically more diverse: the 1947 Yale football team for the Harvard game included players named Prchlik, Nadherny, Dluzniewski, Tataranowicz, Setear, Pivcevich, Loh, and Booe. They sat in classrooms attentively and struggled with examinations which represented not the pleasure of a gentlemanly collegiate style, but the doorway to a postwar world.
The outward display of collegiate customs and traditions, such as the Whiffenpoofs, Mory’s, and yes, the senior societies, had less central a place than before the war. “It is undeniably true that these social organizations were not easily going to regain their previous importance and prestige positions in the history of the new Yale,” opined the editors of the 1948 classbook. Still, it was college, not a battlefield, and the yearbook noted that “Yale at war had seen many difficulties” and “studies came first,” meaning that “values tended to be somewhat distorted, with studies actually being overemphasized.” Yet, “Eli was peeling off the vestiges of militarism. The return of the sports jacket and gray flannels gave rise to the feeling that Yale was, once again, her old self.”
That was not quite true for the senior societies, to go by the opinion expressed by Horace D. Taft, Senator Robert Taft’s son (and future dean of Yale College), in his social history of the class of 1949: “Tap Day came around for our class and was held in Branford Court once more. Being a new and extraordinary process for most of us, it evinced a great deal of curiosity, but for the great majority it was too incongruous a procedure to be very impressive. These societies, as well as fraternities and other groups, have not recaptured the position of importance they held before the war. There is too much else offered by the University.”34
Only weeks after his return from the Pacific, on January 6, 1945, Bush married Barbara Pierce. In overcrowded New Haven, the young married couple lived, over the two and one-half years of his college education in the still-accelerated course, in three apartments, losing the first because of Barbara’s pregnancy with their first son. The last residence was at 37 Hillhouse, formerly a single-family dwelling next to the one inhabited by President Seymour, now divided into thirteen separate apartments for nine families including eleven children, where the kitchen and bathroom had to be shared with others. Despite having a young family, Bush entered fully into the college’s frenetic social and athletic life, joining and then serving as president of the junior fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon; captaining the Yale baseball team and playing in the first two College World Series (the pregnant Barbara Bush sat in the extra-wide seat in the Yale stadium which had been designed for William Howard Taft to use while teaching at the law school); and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an achievement perplexing those who had known him at Andover.
Barbara’s father wrote to a childhood friend, updating him on the Pierce family after his son-in-law’s graduation, that his daughter’s husband was “by all odds the biggest man on the campus, having been the last man tapped for Skull and Bones and having been awarded a faculty prize [the George Gordon Brown Prize for “all around student leadership”] for having done the most for Yale.” The 1947 club tapping him included another political scion, John Chafee, great-grandson of a governor and grand-nephew of another governor and of a U.S. senator, but blooded differently as a marine at Guadalcanal and Okinawa, and later to serve as governor of Rhode Island, secretary of the navy under President Nixon, and then four-term United States senator.35
In his senior society life, too, Bush participated fully, albeit married, and his clubmates, all war veterans themselves and seven of them pilots, included Thomas William Ludlow (“Lud”) Ashley, subsequently thirteen-term Democratic congressman from Ohio; Howard Sayre Weaver, future dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture; and David Grimes, to chair the founding board of the Association of Yale Alumni. This club discussed admitting both blacks and Jews to their institution.36
George Herbert Walker Bush, of course, had the most remarkable political career of all these veterans, and one of the most remarkable of all American politicians, serving one term as congressman from Texas’s 7th District, then ambassador to the United Nations for twenty-two months. Thereafter he served as chair of the Republican National Committee for twenty months, then chief of the China liaison office—functionally, ambassador—in Beijing for sixteen months, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency for a year, then vice president of the United States (sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Bones 1937) under Ronald Reagan for eight years. Finally, when no sitting vice president had been elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren one hundred fifty years before, he became the forty-first president of the United States for a single term.
His clubmates and graduate members of his senior society were instrumental over the years in funding this rise and in allowing him to unburden himself at reunions and dinners: a Washington Post article in the run-up to the 1988 presidential election was titled “Bush Opened Up to Secret Yale Society” and detailed the group’s programs of C.B.s and L.H.s, even describing Bush’s anguished retelling of the wartime death of his San Jacinto shipmate Ted White.37 These intersections of intimacy and political power, noted by the media, only served to fuel the conspiracy theories which swirled around Skull and Bones.
While it would have been easy for Bush to go down to New York and be an early success on Wall Street—his 1948 class yearbook lists twenty-five separate affiliations and achievements during his scant twenty-seven months in New Haven—young men of his background had begun looking southwest and west for different opportunities in the bursting economy. But even here, his senior society connections helped. He was taken on as the only trainee, an equipment clerk, for Dresser Industries, an oil services company later known as Halliburton, by its president, Neil Mallon, who had been an intercollegiate All-American basketball player and a member of the 1917 Bones club with Prescott. As George H. W. Bush had been the navy’s youngest pilot in World War II, Mallon, at twenty-three, had been the army’s youngest major in World War I.38
OTHER CASTES BROKEN
The junior class in 1949 was the largest in Yale’s history, and in March the Scroll and Key delegation wrote their alumni, inviting suggestions regarding eligible candidates and reminding them that, in accordance with policy, no notice of election intention would be communicated before Tap Day, and so any inquiring should know that the lack of prior contact did not mean a lack of interest. The event itself was once more held in Branford Court, on May 12, with admission only by cards being sent to the juniors. News chairman William F. Buckley ’50, in an editorial titled “Tap Day Procedure,” deplored “the extraordinary callousness which tolerates a mass spectacle wherein scores of students are unnecessarily embarrassed for the sake of convenience, color and tradition.” The reforms suggested were that society elections should be delivered to juniors in their rooms, and bids should include a list of all societies tendering invitations to the individual. “The change may seem a small thing, but it can loom large to the junior who leaves Branford gate untapped, lungs full of tobacco, a stiff upper lip, and the necessity of having to make small talk until he reaches the privacy of his room.”39 Both suggestions were disregarded, making what happened in public on that day all the more visible.
The African American Levi Jackson, son of the longtime steward at the Yale Faculty Club, was a graduate of New Haven’s Hillhouse High, employed while a highschooler as a turf man in the Yale Bowl. He was elected the captain of the Yale football team in November 1948, the first black both to play on and to head a university team, and the first “townie” to play on the varsity since Albie Booth of the 1931 team. New York newspaper sportswriters promptly predicted a future election to Skull and Bones. For weeks before the election the college was abuzz with the possibility, and notions of demonstrated merit and democratic fairness were reported as figuring heavily in campus discussions.
“Bones’ main criterion for election,” wrote Joe Williams for the World-Telegram on the eve of Tap Day, “is success and leadership in college. This being so Jackson is obviously a natural.” He continued: “The Yale crowd have been outspoken in their insistence that if Bones is to justify itself and its lofty conception of brotherhood it must tap Jackson for membership. . . . Unaccompanied by the noisy preaching of liberals and the hamfat posturings of heavy thinkers, Yale struck a telling blow for human decency by naming Jackson captain of the football team, and apparently it is all set to deliver another one of equal force by accepting the Negro half back into is most exclusive society.” Jackson, the sportswriter hazarded, could absent himself from campus and avoid the issue, but he “owes it to himself and the democracy of this great university to take a stand on the Yale campus tomorrow, come what may.”40
Jackson himself had allowed as how he was in doubt whether to accept any society’s bid, even until just before the ceremony. “This racial question has been brought up so much,” he said. “Even at Ebbets Field last Saturday people came up and asked me if I was going out on Tap Day.” He was an elected class deacon, and a member of the Aurelian Honor Society, but had turned down bids from the junior fraternities. The 1949 Yale Class Book was to observe that “Yale’s fraternities have not been caught as vigorously as chapters on other campuses in the fight over discrimination raised by the expulsion of an Amherst chapter from its national fraternity because of the admission of a Negro. . . . Levi Jackson could have presented the problem in a more vigorous form if he had ever signed up for rushing.”41
On that day, as reported on the front pages of both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, Jackson stood with about 1,400 juniors outside the Branford College courtyard, where campus policemen barred entry to reporters, other students, and would-be spectators. With all eyes on him, Jackson was at 5:00 P.M. the first to be tapped, almost simultaneously, first by Bones, then by Keys, but he declined to move, in accordance with tradition for rejecting the offers. He then received a slap from Rick Mapes, a New Haven senior in Berzelius—described prominently and correctly by the Times as the “third oldest society”—to whom Jackson nodded and then went to his room.
Contacted later by reporters, Jackson declined to discuss the reasons, although his classmates attributed his choice to the fact that, as he himself was said to have indicated with a grin, three of his friends on the football team were also joining Berzelius, and other sources declare that, as was the pre-tap custom with some societies, he had pledged himself to that society before the tap. To one newspaper, he said merely “I had to make one choice. I just chose Berzelius. I’m sorry, but that’s all I have to say. No, I do not know what Berzelius means or what it might have come from.” To another reporter, he said he was “quite pleased” at his election but, as among the three societies seeking him, he “actually had no preference.” He was later to say, “Being in a society gave me the feeling that I belonged. I felt I was finally getting the real Yale experience.”42Jackson’s election was not without cost to Berzelius: some alumni reportedly severed their connection with the society, as was to happen in a parallel situation when Bones tapped women in 1991.
Both small and large factors were at play behind Jackson’s choice, and the choice of Jackson. Bones was no stranger to refusals in the preceding decades, and six others declined the oldest senior society that election day, including Milton DeVane, the son of the dean of Yale College, and James Symington, the son of the United States secretary for air, who accepted Berzelius, as did Payne Whitney’s grandson Harry Payne Whitney II, while four men besides Jackson turned down Keys’ offers. But there was a larger shift as well, effected by World War II and the tidal wave of veterans returning to New Haven to finish their college careers. Charles Fenton, class of 1948 and subsequently professor of English at Yale, recollected that in the “era between 1946 and, roughly, 1949, which we might call the veteran years . . . the veterans elevated and dignified Yale in many ways. It was the skepticism of the veterans which first permitted the early, organized mockery of the senior societies and caused the societies to reassess themselves.”43
Jackson served two years in the army as a staff sergeant at Fort Lee, Virginia, before enrolling in Yale in 1946 and won a place on the varsity football team in his first year under a revised rule that made freshmen eligible when they had been in the armed forces. He had served his country and his college honorably, and his fellow veterans were prepared, unlike prior generations, to celebrate that service in spite of Jackson’s race. Yale’s next black football captain was Rudolph Green, class of 1975, who was tapped for Bones and, unlike Jackson, accepted.44 Not until 1989, forty years later, was there to be an African American on the Yale Corporation, Kurt Schmoke of the class of 1971, who became Senior Fellow in 1999. And at “The Game” in 2014, sixty-five years after Jackson Levi’s senior society election, the captains of both the Yale and Harvard teams were black.
It has been said that, years later, Jackson would joke that “if my name had been reversed [Jackson Levi], I never would have made it.”45 Given Jackson’s innate modesty, not only does this remark seem out of character, but it was not true (the Jewish football star Al Hessberg had been tapped by Bones years before, in 1937). More to the point, it was not true again in Jackson’s own election year, when Bones tapped and was accepted by Thomas H. Guinzberg, Hotchkiss graduate, winner of a Purple Heart at Iwo Jima, and managing editor of the Yale Daily News, chaired by his classmate and new society clubmate, William F. Buckley (a Catholic, Bones’ last man, tapped by the outgoing basketball captain, future Boston Celtics star, and Catholic Tony Lavelli). Hessberg and Jackson were both football heroes, so Guinzberg’s election represented a further sociological shift, a Jewish scholar-striver finally achieving senior society recognition.
Anti-Semitism was still a force: the Fence Club, Yale’s most exclusive fraternity, rejected Guinzburg because he was Jewish, until his close friend Bill Buckley advised the fraternity that he would not join if Guinzburg was blackballed.46 Guinzberg’s senior society election, however, did not attract any special newspaper notice, in New Haven or elsewhere. He was to join with his Yale roommate Peter Matthiessen (not a senior society member, having spent his junior year at the Sorbonne), George Plimpton, and others in Paris to establish The Paris Review in 1953, and eventually followed his father as president of Viking Press and its successor by merger, Viking/Penguin.47
Election prospects were slowly changing for public high school graduates, too. In 1942, when 25 percent of the Yale freshmen were public school products, only 6 percent of the society men were; the number was still 6 percent in 1949, but jumped to 17 percent in 1950. In one decade, that gap would narrow such that when 35 percent of the freshmen were public high school graduates, fully 25 percent of the senior societies’ members were among them.48
HIDING THE HARVARD LAMPOON
After the high drama of the Jackson tap in the spring came the farce of the Harvard Lampoon in the fall, on the weekend of the annual Yale-Harvard football game, this year in New Haven. At 1:15 A.M. on Friday, November 18, campus policemen found two Harvard students placing placards on fences and telephone poles, advertising the sale of a special issue of their humor magazine featuring the senior societies. The Harvards were F. Ellsworth Baker, business manager of the Lampoon, and a member of the class of 1951, Ernest Monrad, a candidate for the magazine’s staff. The campus police advised them that all such placards—featuring a big picture of the magazine cover and the large-lettered legend AN EXPOSÉ—THE YALE SECRET SOCIETIES—could only be put on bulletin boards.
Alerted to the impending insult, five Yale students found Monrad in Timothy Dwight College, where he was staying as a guest, and they demanded, confiscated, and left with his car keys, returning in fifteen minutes with the keys and a warning to “go to bed or else.” When Monrad went to his car, he found the Yalies had taken three thousand copies of the Lampoon and the remaining posters. Monrad called Baker and advised him of the theft, which was reported to the Yale campus police at 5:00 A.M. Using the 1950 class book, Monrad identified the man who had taken his keys, Evan Galbraith, a member of Skull and Bones (later to be President Reagan’s ambassador to France and then the secretary of defense’s representative to Europe and NATO for President George W. Bush).
Faced with the law, which had come to his room in Calhoun College, Galbraith advised the policeman that the offending magazine issues were secreted in the Bones tomb garden, and a police cruiser went to High Street with Galbraith to retrieve and return them to Monrad back at the campus police office. Monrad had telegrammed the Lampoon offices in Cambridge to order another five thousand copies, but said he would cancel that order now that the original copies were back in hand. According to the campus police report to Dean Richard Carroll, the Harvards said they did not want to press charges or to get Galbraith into any trouble over the matter; they did not ask, nor were they told, where the copies had been found. The Lampoon went on sale the next morning and sold out almost before the majority of Harvard supporters arrived in New Haven, the Yalies apparently being as curious about the cover story subject as those from Cambridge.49
Whatever the blow to the amour propre of the Yale senior societies, the insult was no impediment that afternoon to Jackson, with two touchdowns of his own, leading the varsity football team to a resounding 29 to 6 victory over the Crimson. Recalling that weekend, the historian of the class of 1950 remarked of Tap Day that “Most of us watch Levi Jackson out of the corners of our eyes, and when he was tapped we were heartened—more for him than for the ostensible humanity in the gesture. The accolade was rightly his; they could not withhold it. Since Tap Day we have heard nothing except an occasional stealthy tread on Thursday nights. We know only what we read in the Harvard Lampoon, and, after all, that’s not much.”50