-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Archibald MacLeish - An American Life
Scott Donaldson�1992
R.H. Winnick/collaborator
Houghton Mifflen Company
ISBN 0-395-49326-9
------
The still more sacrosanct customs surrounding election to senior societies
resisted such change, despite the efforts of a sizable group from the class
Of 1915. There were then three senior societies: Wolf's Head, Scroll and Key,
and at the pinnacle Skull and Bones. On a Saturday afternoon in May, the
junior class, or at least those of its members who thought they might have a
chance of election, assembled on the campus for the Tap Day ceremony. Each
society tapped fifteen men for membership, so that forty-five men Out Of 380,
or about one in eight, were elected. The chosen elite then retreated behind
the haze of mystery that surrounded the operation of the senior societies.
Each of them was said to own a "tomb," or a forbiddingly dark building,
somewhere near campus. Each was supposed to ensure the future success of its
members by lobbying on their behalf for jobs and advancement. But no outsider
knew for sure what they did, or what took place at their secret meetings. The
shroud of mystery lay most conspicuously over Skull and Bones, to the extent
that it became widely if erroneously believed that a Bonesman must
immediately absent himself from any room in which the very name of the
society was uttered.
This, then, was the institution that came under attack in mid-April 1913, a
month in advance of Tap Day. According to the Yale Daily News, about 150
sophomores banded together to raise three objections, not to the existence of
the senior societies but to the way they were organized. The first and
strongest objection was to their excessive secrecy, which the ringleaders of
the reform movement regarded as responsible for suppressing individuality,
stifling spontaneity, engendering hypocrisy, creating unnatural
relationships, and undermining existing friendships. Second, and in defiance
of logic, the class of 1915 opposed the "extreme publicity" associated with
Tap Day. This "unnecessary and sensational display" not only gave "undue
advertisement to the societies themselves but also overemphasize [d] the
distinction between those who [were] chosen and those who [were] not." Third,
the reformers criticized the societies for "inadvisable choice of members,"
by which they meant that merit should be the determining basis of choice and
that men should be elected "without undue regard to family influence or
personal interests." To make their point more effectively, a significant
number of sophomores bound themselves to refuse. membership in senior
societies until secrecy was "reduced to a reasonable privacy," Tap Day was
abolished, and the choice of members was conducted more equitably.
Undoubtedly the anti-senior-society movement was largely inspired by Owen
Johnson's popular novel Stover at Yale, published in the spring of 1912. Dink
Stover, the hero of that book, spends most of his college career working
toward possible election to Skull and Bones. Dink has no objection to Skull
and Bones's standards of selection; in fact, he admires its seeking out of
men who have had "to contend with poverty, its desire to reward ambition and
industry and character." But a few weeks before Tap Day he boldly takes issue
with the organization's overemphasis on secrecy and ceremony. "I've come to
the point," he tells his wife-to-be, "where I believe secrecy is un-American,
undemocratic and stultifying." So he speaks out against it, but in Owen
Johnson's fictional universe that selfless action merely makes him more
attractive to Bones. Dink is not only tapped for membership but tapped
fifteenth and last, which by tradition meant that he was the society's first
choice.
Arch MacLeish was not unsympathetic to the objectives of his reform-minded
classmates, but he adamantly refused to bind himself not to accept election
to a senior society. That seemed to him a preposterous position to take. In
print he scornfully described its adherents as "the Daughters of Dink," and
predicted that when Tap Day loomed for the class of 19115 the following year,
many of those who had pledged themselves against joining a society would be
fighting to get themselves released from their commitment. As it turned out,
that is exactly what happened. One classmate who had no chance himself of
being elected made it difficult for the others, refusing to release them from
their vows until the last possible moment. In the end, only three members of
the class of 1915 stuck to their pledge and refused election. No one turned
down Skull and Bones.
Shortly after five P.m. on May 14, 1914, Herman Livingston Rogers, a senior
member of Skull and Bones, wearing a black derby hat, came up behind MacLeish
on the Berkeley oval, clapped him on the shoulder, and commanded him to go to
his room in Vanderbilt Hall. Thus was Arch MacLeish chosen for the Bones club
of 1915, along with his roommate the football star Tommy Cornell and the
all-around athlete Harold Pumpelly he'd prepped with at Hotchkiss. Also
tapped was Ranald H. Macdonald, chairman of the News and the only member of
his Bones class to become MacLeish's lifelong friend. Arch himself qualified
for election in a number of ways: he played football, captained the water
polo team, made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, and was going to edit the
Lit in his senior year. Not all of the selections, though, involved big men
on campus. A notable exception was Edwin A. Burn, a future president of the
American Philosophical Society, who ranked second in the class in grade point
average but did not otherwise distinguish himself.
In his own comments about Skull and Bones, MacLeish tended to downplay the
organization's mystique. "As nearly as I can make out," he said in an
interview, "the Bones was started in the early part of the nineteenth century
by some southern Yale men who had read Walter Scott and also Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The whole vocabulary of the institution derives
from these writers and is very humorous. The alarming discovery of any newly
elected member is that the Bones is full of humor and warmth and humanity,
all of which has quite a good, sound literary background." Structurally, the
society was organized horizontally rather than vertically, so that loyalties
were normally associated with one's own club: the fourteen other members
chosen in the same year. Since MacLeish had few close connections within his
own club, Bones meant less to him than to many others. He did, however, take
a particular interest in two subsequent elections. In 1917 his brother Kenny
was not chosen for Bones, "a brutal business" that just about demolished his
feelings for the institution. Thirty-two years later he was delighted when
his son Bill was tapped for membership.
pps 56-58
=====
The MacLeish family assembled in New Haven in late June to celebrate Archie's
graduation � all except brother Norman, who had transferred from Williams to
pursue studies in architecture at Penn and was busy with classes there.
Leading the entourage was the patriarch, Andrew, still vigorous at
seventy-six and firmly set in his ways. His wife, Patty, who sympathized with
Archie's desire to be married, asked her son to arrange an interview with
Yale president Hadley during the busy commencement period. Then she insisted
that Andrew keep the appointment alone. Thus Archie's father heard from the
president of the university, also a member of Skull and Bones, what he would
not have credited from many another: that Archie had made a brilliant record
at Yale, and that if Archie were his son, he would certainly stake him to the
graduate study he ought to undertake and allow him to marry into the bargain.
Patty MacLeish paced along the pavement, waiting for her husband to emerge
from the president's office. When he did, it was with head high and the
pleased observation, "Why, Patty, it seems our son is a lad of parts." Then
they went over to Archie's room at Vanderbilt Hall to tell him what Andrew
had decided. He would support him for three years of further education, as
long as he did not marry until after the first year. With the end in sight,
the delay no longer seemed insupportable. At the commencement ceremony the
next day, Archie delivered his class poem with style and distinction.
At the time, Archie had not yet decided exactly what kind of further
education he would devote himself to. At the midpoint of his senior year, he
came close to committing himself to a future in the academic world. "MacLeish
expects to take up the study of literature," the copy for the 1915 Yale Class
Book read. Yet the more closely he observed his Yale professors, the less
inclined he was to follow their example. In correspondence with Bangs, he
discoursed on "professorial emulations and envies." Getting ahead was so much
a matter of pecuniary necessity, so much a matter of life and death, that the
men engaged in academic careers lacked the ability to "stand aside and
smile.... It warps, feminizes and narrows them. They [Tinker, Berdan, and
others] sneer at Mason behind his back and smile cat-like smiles before his
naked brow. And Larry himself, please God, was not always so much a matter of
irony and feline thrusts as now he is." The teaching of literature, he
decided, was not for him. Yet he did not want to go west, and he disliked
business.
pps. 70-71
=====
The question was not whether to go to war but in what capacity. A stateside
desk job was all wrong, Archie believed. The overage or physically infirm
could do that work, whereas he was "athletic, intelligent and accustomed to
handling men and absolutely fitted" for an officer's duty. He had thought of
joining the spring Reserve Officer Training Corps camp at Plattsburgh, New
York, but his mentors at the law school encouraged him to finish the year. He
planned to wait until the next Plattsburgh camp in August. He would emerge as
a lieutenant, and the resulting salary could help support Ada and little
Archie. The only hitch was that he might be drafted in the meantime.
In reply, his father assured Archie that he would of course see to the
welfare of Ada and the baby. In fact, he hoped they would move out to Craigie
Lea if Archie was called. But Andrew MacLeish, now almost seventy-nine, did
not think it right that he should be. "Our family, having given two out of
its three sons, ought to be exempt from further demands." He even proposed
finding a loophole to evade or delay the draft. "If you should come West," he
wrote Archie, "the question might be raised, in case of conscription, whether
you are not a legal resident of Massachusetts."
Archie could understand his father's feelings, but once he had decided to
serve, he was eager to start doing so. August seemed unconscionably far away,
and he began exploring alternatives to the ROTC camps. What he wanted was a
military assignment in which he could do his duty without being killed � he
owed it to his family to return from the war � and with, if possible, an
officer's commission. The American Ambulance Field Service, already operating
in France, provided one possibility. Late in May he asked several Yale
professors and administrators, including President Hadley, to recommend him
for the field service. They did so in glowing terms. "I always regarded him
as one of the finest men we have ever had, a very strong man," read one
letter of support. But the ambulance corps was already oversubscribed.
By mid-June Archie was considering two additional alternatives. One was a
commission as a supply officer in the army aviation corps. Samuel B.
Hemingway, an assistant professor of English and head of the Yale branch of
the Intercollegiate Intelligence Bureau, supported him for this position, and
for a time it looked as if MacLeish "might have an opportunity to buy copper
wire after all." This plan fell through because of the War Department's
directive that such posts should be reserved for men too old for more active
service or for "younger men with slight physical defects."
So it was the other alternative, the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit, that Archie
chose. Dr. Edward Streeter, whose wife had lent the MacLeishes her
cockroach-inhabited cottage in Bermuda, encouraged him toward this decision.
Under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Marshall Flint, head of surgery at Yale
Medical School, the unit was training its personnel, mostly Yale graduates,
at New Haven. Its mission was to set up a mobile field hospital that could
function immediately behind the front lines, in order to provide the best and
quickest care possible to the wounded. This sounded like useful work,
certainly. The only trouble was that Archie, lacking any knowledge of medical
procedures, had to enlist as a private. This did not appeal to him, but
neither did being drafted into the infantry. Late in June he signed on with
the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit.
Among others in this unit were three members of Arch's club in Skull and
Bones: Lou Middlebrook, captain of the 1915 Yale baseball team; Lyon ("Nick")
Carter, captain of the 1915 Yale track team; and MacLeish's former roommate
Tommy Cornell. Three other classmates also enlisted, one of them Frank Bangs.
Bangs was on his way to join the marines when he stopped at the Yale Club in
New York City. There he met MacLeish. If he wanted action, if he "wanted to
do the right thing and not be hurt," Archie argued, Bangs should join the
Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. The marines might send him to Guatemala instead of
Europe. The Yale unit was committed to operate just back of the trenches, and
was leaving soon for France. Bangs, persuaded, came on board.
In August the unit's complement of a dozen medical officers, half a dozen
nurses, and seventy enlisted men sailed for France aboard the SS Baltic. En
route the difference between the commissioned and noncommissioned ranks was
brought home in unmistakable terms. The officers and nurses were comfortable
in their first-class accommodations. The enlisted men rode in steerage, and
were served maggotty oatmeal for breakfast, horse meat for lunch, and
hardtack and tea at every meal. Since most of the enlisted men were
manifestly "officer material," they were particularly resentful of this
double standard.
As the convoy drew closer to the U-boat-infested waters off the English
coast, the ships ran without lights. One night Bangs and MacLeish were
leaning over the deck rail of the Baltic, watching the white foam alongside
the ship as it proceeded in total darkness. Archie went inside and emerged
soon afterward with a sonnet, "Soul-sight." It commingled memories of
Margarett Sargent and his wife, Ada, he told Bangs.
Like moon-dark, like brown water you escape,
0 laughing mouth, 0 sweet uplifted lips.
Within the peering brain old ghosts take shape;
You flame and wither as the white foam slips
Back from the broken waves: sometimes a start,
A gesture of the hands, a way you own
Of bending that smooth head above your heart, �
Then these are vanished, then the dream is gone.
Oh, you are too much mine and flesh of me
To seal upon the brain, who in the blood
Are so intense a pulse, so swift a flood
Of beauty, such unceasing instancy.
Dear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,
All beauty has become your dwelling place.
Two nights from landfall the troopships in the convoy separated, with a
destroyer assigned to accompany each of them to port. The Baltic headed for
the Irish Sea, where it was struck by a torpedo. The men in steerage felt a
tremendous shock, then rushed to their lifeboat stations to see the destroyer
laying down a pattern of depth charges. Fortunately, the ship was not
seriously damaged, and it docked at Liverpool the following morning, on
schedule.
Eventually the Yale unit made its way to Le Havre, where it boarded a slow
freight. The officers occupied a passenger car, while the enlisted men were
crowded into two boxcars bearing the legend "Huit chevaux ou quarante hommes"
(eight horses or forty men). Their destination was Limoges, where they were
to spend the next six months billeted in an empty Haviland porcelain factory.
Not only was Limoges more than a hundred miles from the front, but the unit's
equipment was commandeered to go to Italy. There was nothing much for the men
to do. Occasionally they were invited to tea with members of the aristocratic
Haviland family. At other times, Major Flint assigned them to digging
drainage ditches and other make-work details. This was emphatically not the
duty they had volunteered for. Like many of the enlistees, MacLeish wanted
out. Unlike most, he was able to do something about it.
On a trip to Paris, Archie wangled an appointment at General Headquarters,
American Expeditionary Forces, with Major Hugh A. Bayne, a member of General
Pershing's staff. Bayne, Yale '92 and also Skull and Bones, lent a
sympathetic ear to MacLeish's story. He and his fellow Bonesmen wanted to
contribute to the winning of the war, Archie said, and they could certainly
make a greater contribution as officers in some other branch than as
timeservers in the moribund Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. In late November,
working outside channels, Bayne arranged for his four fellow Bonesmen to be
discharged from the Yale unit, enlisted in the field artillery as second
lieutenants, and sent to Saumur for officers' training.
Major Flint, of course, was furious � he could see his command dwindling
before his eyes � and took steps to make it extremely difficult for others to
follow the example of the Bonesmen. Bangs had some reason to feel abandoned
by his friend MacLeish. From Saumur, Archie assured him that he would not
"give over the search till you are safely out of the Y.M.U." But the barriers
had come down against further defections to the field artillery. As Bangs
wryly put it in a 1928 account, "The mystic influences ... which ... rescued
MacLeish, Carter, Middlebrook, and Cornell from fretful inactivity" provided
"not even the comfort of bones" to their classmates left behind.
pps. 86-89
=====
Fortune Beckons
If Archie had been able to work at home and spend more time with his
children, relations within the family might have turned out differently. But
with the crash of October 1929, the dividends on the Carson Pirie Scott stock
he had inherited started slowing down, and it became clear that he would have
to find employment to support his family. He couldn't make any money farming.
He didn't want to go back to the law. Luckily, opportunity arrived with a
phone call from Henry Luce in New York. He was starting a business magazine
called Fortune and was looking for writers. As a poet, MacLeish seemed an
unlikely choice for such an assignment. According to Luce, however, the pool
of possible staffers was composed of men who could write poetry and men who
could read balance sheets. Those who could read balance sheets couldn't
write. It was "easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn
bookkeepers into writers." Would Archie be interested in a job, Luce wanted
to know. He would indeed, but he was also determined to finish Conquistador,
the long poem that had been percolating in his mind. He told Luce about that,
and the editor made him a proposition he couldn't refuse.
"All right," Luce said. "You can work for us as long as you need to pay your
bills, and spend the rest of your time on poetry. How would that be?"
It was more than generous. In October 1929, the month of the crash, Archie
went to work for a new magazine whose first issue had not yet appeared. He
started on a half-time basis, at a salary Of $5,000. Luce did not lose money
on the arrangement. MacLeish proved to be the most productive writer on what
may have been the best journalistic staff ever assembled. Sometimes
half-time, sometimes full-time, during the next nine years he wrote more
words for Fortune than anyone else.
Actually, this was not MacLeish's first job with Luce. When Time got under
way in 1923, he had served briefly as education editor for the newsmagazine
while continuing his law practice in Boston. But Archie was a stringer then,
made few contributions, and was paid a paltry ten dollars a week. The Time
connection figured not at all in his decision to leave for Paris, where, on
their honeymoon, Harry and Lila Luce called on Archie and Ada. They had just
returned from a trip into the campagne east of Paris, where, Luce said, in
one hotel they could secure only an extremely small room with one narrow bed.
"Lila had to sleep on the floor," Luce told the MacLeishes, apparently in
earnest. It was Ada's favorite Harry Luce story.
Luce's original attitude toward MacLeish was something like awe. He was
precisely four years behind Archie in school, first at Hotchkiss and then at
Yale, where both climaxed their careers with election to Skull and Bones.
Thus the two never met, and word of Archie's athletic and literary
achievements came down to Harry unsullied by any personal contact. He was,
for the younger man, "a god without clay feet." During the years at Fortune,
and even thereafter, Archie was always something more to Luce than an
unusually talented employee. For his part, MacLeish came to regard his boss
as a genius of an editor-publisher, a judgment shared by many, and also as a
subconscious democrat, a position shared by almost no one else at all. The
hero worship Luce began with toward MacLeish somehow reversed itself over the
years. It was important for Archie, nine years in Luce's employ, to feel that
he had worked so long in the service of someone great.
The times could hardly have been less auspicious for the launching of a
magazine designed to celebrate American business. That was what Luce had in
mind, at least up to October 1929. A devout believer in the Protestant ethic,
Harry Luce considered worldly success a sign of election and successful
businessmen as the proper leaders of the country, in moral and intellectual
as well as financial matters. At first the working title for his new magazine
was Power. That was changed to Fortune, but the prospectus remained the same.
"American business has importance � even majesty � so the magazine in which
we are to interpret it will look and feel important � even majestic."
Photographs would be used to complement text; the paper, the typography,
everything about the magazine was to be first-class. Fortune, it was decided,
would appear monthly, at the expensive price of one dollar a copy or ten
dollars a year.
When the crash came resounding around everyone's ears, putting out a magazine
conceived to glorify American business made very little sense. Yet the
collapse and the extended depression that followed raised questions that
people were intensely interested in. Instead of becoming an advocacy journal
for American business, Fortune tried to figure out what had gone wrong and
why. In[s]tead of concerning itself with business for its own sake, Fortune
in the depression became a general magazine devoted to the economic crisis in
the country. Often it was not probusiness at all.
pps 192-193
=====
The Librarian Profiled
The man Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose for librarian of Congress was
forty-seven years old in the autumn of 1939, though his leanness made him
look younger. The same impression was conveyed by his characteristic vigor of
movement; aides had to scurry to keep up with him as he walked the halls. His
hairline was receding, but that only served to emphasize the nobleness of his
Palladian brow. He was thought by most to be an unusually handsome man, and
he took care to keep himself in fit condition. He knew the forks, and
practiced the prevailing canons of deference to women and the elderly. By far
his most appealing attribute was his voice, which could be almost hypnotic in
its effect. Although he did everything else at full throttle, in public
appearances he spoke slowly, even haltingly, as if each word were a pearl to
be strung on the course of his utterance. Even the pauses were musical. He
had "the most beautiful voice, man's or woman's, I have ever heard," Jill Ker
Conway said of him. "If he read you the small type on the back of an
insurance policy, you'd buy it," another friend remarked. Much of his
considerable power of persuasion came from that voice. "Isn't it lucky
Archie's on the right side?" E. E. Cummings once said. "He'd be a dangerous
man on the wrong side."
Being in the right � being passionately in the right � mattered a great deal
to MacLeish, who was ever ready to struggle against injustice. There was
nothing self-serving about this combativeness. He was just as outraged at
infringements on the personal liberties of others as of his own. Archie was a
"cause seeker," with a crusader's instinct, Bob Lovett said. At the same
time, he was not given to empty gestures. As an old-fashioned liberal, he
wanted not only to do and say the right thing, but to achieve his ends
against whatever opposition presented itself.
"My God," he blurted out in the course of an interview, "life is a fight, and
if you pretend you are not in a fight you aren't talking about life." But he
also said that "life was like panning for gold � all of the bad things go
through the screen and only the nuggets stay on top." He was equipped for the
struggle, in other words, with a strong personal sense of optimism, a natural
ebullience reinforced by the progressive outlook of his middle-western
upbringing and the forward-going affirmation and ambitiousness inculcated at
Yale, particularly in Skull and Bones. There were good reasons for him to be
optimistic. He was, for instance, fortunate in his ancestry and in his
financial situation. As librarian of Congress, he earned a salary of $10,000,
the same as that of Cabinet officials. Quarterly dividends from Carson Pirie
Scott ran to about $1,600 during this period, and he fleshed out that income
with honoraria for speeches, payment for articles, and royalties from books.
He and Ada spent almost all of their money. They sent their children to
expensive boarding schools and colleges. They took pleasure in living well.
Archie dressed in the tweeds and Brooks Brothers suits of the Ivy League
gentleman, and Ada in dresses made to her order. They bought wine by the case
from importer Frank Schoonmaker in New York.
pps. 301-302
=====
George Plimpton, another English S student in MacLeish's first year,
initially planned to write a novel about patricide for his major undertaking,
but the book fizzled out and he switched to an expose on the hush-hush topic
of the senior societies at Yale, and particularly Skull and Bones. Since
MacLeish was a Bonesman sworn to secrecy, this put Plimpton in the unusual
position of attending tutorials with a teacher who was honor bound not to
discuss the subject of the student's work. In the end, Archie awarded him an
A. It wasn't a novel, he commented, but there were a lot of anecdotes in it
that could be used in a novel.
Also he was impressed by how much Plimpton had found out.
pps. 408
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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