VI
The Chosen and the Heathen
THE INCOMING DARTMOUTH freshman class in the autumn of 1931—the Class of ’35—included the largest number of Jewish students in the history of the college. Of the class’s 696 members, 75—more than 10 percent—were Jews. Moreover, that figure included only those students who stated a Jewish religious preference. Another 97 incoming freshmen—14 percent of the total—declared “no preference.” My father was one of the no-preference students, suggesting that the true proportion of Jews in his class (whether they admitted it or not) was much higher than 1 in 10. Whatever the real number, it represented more than a fivefold increase over a ten-year period, prompting the director of admissions, E. Gordon Bill, to observe sardonically in the alumni magazine that “the triumph of the chosen and the heathen peoples seems to be a continuing process….”
Because Bill’s impolitic comment proved deeply offensive (much to his astonishment) to some Jewish alumni, Dartmouth’s president, Ernest Martin Hopkins, advised his acerbic dean of freshmen (the admissions director’s official title) to absent himself from the next regularly scheduled Alumni Council meeting in the fall of 1931. A full-scale discussion of Jewish undergraduate enrollment by the council—which Bill’s presence could only have served to promote and exacerbate—would have made it more difficult for Hopkins to douse the controversy the dean had aroused by publicly voicing attitudes that were usually reserved for the private world of gentleman’s agreements.
Although some Jewish graduates of Dartmouth were upset by Bill’s comments, others—along with some Jewish undergraduates—were themselves disturbed by the presence of so many Jews in the Class of ’35. Like the Jacobys, most of these anxious Jews identified with the “German” sector of American Jewry, and they feared, characteristically, that admission of “the wrong kind” of Jews—those of Eastern European immigrant origins—would stimulate anti-Semitism at Dartmouth. This surging anti-Semitism might, of course, spill over onto the “right kind”—their kind. Jewish alumni had long been enlisted to screen applications from other “Hebrews,” in order to ensure that they would not be too religious, too unassimilated—too Jewish—for Dartmouth.
What did it mean to be “too Jewish” at an old-line WASP college in the thirties? In a letter to Hopkins on January 3, 1933, the irrepressibly candid Bill confided, “I am increasingly of the opinion that the actual physical appearance of a Jewish applicant is an extraordinarily important factor in determining selection or rejection….”
Bill went on to clarify his meaning. “In other words,” he explained, “I believe that the Jewish boys whom we do not like and who do not seem to fit into the Dartmouth picture and hence should not have been selected, are of a physical type that is unattractive to the average Dartmouth student. This situation pertains to no other race because I believe the more homely and physically unattractive an Irishman is, the better he is generally liked.”
Bill reminded Hopkins that all of the applicants for the next year’s entering freshman class had been required to submit pictures—which would presumably enable the admissions office to identify those of “a physical type that is unattractive to the average Dartmouth student.” After the brouhaha over the large Jewish presence in my father’s class, Hopkins and Bill were determined to reverse a trend that they saw as a threat to the social, if not the academic, reputation of the college. In one of his many epistolary exchanges with Bill on the “Jewish problem,” Hopkins relayed a comment from a visiting Harvard colleague, “who says that he always had heard that Dartmouth was the one Anglo-Saxon college left, [but] insists that he stood on the Inn corner and that every fourth man who passed him in a period of fifteen or twenty minutes was a Jew. Allowing for his undoubted overemphasis, and his desire to claim that we were picking up the group which Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia are refusing, it still remains a fact that we have too many for our own good or for the good of the Jewish boys themselves.”
I CAN EASILY envisage this snooty visitor from Harvard, standing in front of the Hanover Inn (established in 1780), overlooking the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings that form the graceful core of the Dartmouth campus. He was not admiring the architecture or gazing at the surrounding mountains that lend this New Hampshire community so much of its charm. Instead, he was looking for people who did not, as far as he was concerned, belong in such an idyllic New England setting, at a college chartered by King George III in 1769 and charged with the mission of “spreading Christian knowledge among the savages” while at the same time offering “the best means of education” for all of its students. The first objective was soon subsumed by the mission of preparing the sons of the upper classes to take their place in the newly independent United States of America.
How did the emissary from Harvard identify non-Christian outsiders strolling near the Dartmouth Common in 1932? Were they talking with their hands? Talking too loudly? Was my father one of the young men wandering by the Inn, constituting a presence too conspicuous “for the good of the Jewish boys themselves”?
THERE WAS nothing unusual about such attitudes on the part of the men who ran the country’s elite institutions of higher education—and nearly everything else—in the decades between the twentieth century’s two world wars. Dartmouth was not the first but one of the last elite eastern colleges to take stringent measures to restrict Jewish enrollment. My father came of age at a time when it was much more difficult for a Jew to get into a top-ranking private college than it had been for his father and older brother. In 1919, when Uncle Ozzie entered Columbia, Jewish quotas had not yet been established at most Ivy League schools. In that year, Jews made up more than 40 percent of undergraduates at Columbia, 20 percent at Harvard, and 20 percent at Brown. But 1919 was also the year in which Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia’s formidable president, ordered the registrar to devise a new admissions form featuring a psychological test that would measure “environmental” factors as well as intellectual achievement. For the first time, applicants were required to list their religious affiliation and their father’s name and birthplace, to supply a photograph of themselves (a tactic Dartmouth did not adopt until the thirties), and to submit to a personal interview. Such procedures, which soon became a model for all private universities, provided a handy way of filtering out applicants of undesirable races, religions, and social backgrounds. When my grandfather and Great-Uncle Harold entered Columbia in the 1880s, all that counted was their academic performance on a rigorous, classics-oriented entrance examination. One can only wonder whether the distinguished Professor Harold Jacoby, who looked so very Jewish as a young man, would have made it through the post-1920 admissions net. Or whether he ever discussed the new undergraduate admissions procedures (and the decline in Jewish admissions to Columbia’s law and medical schools) with Butler, who was a personal friend. Although they were not members of the same class, the two men had known each other since their undergraduate days.
Throughout the 1920s, explicit and implicit Jewish quotas steadily reduced Jewish enrollment at all universities of the first rank. With its new admissions procedures, Columbia cut the proportion of Jews in its freshman class from 40 percent in 1920 to 22 percent in 1922. By 1928, the percentage of Jews in Harvard’s freshman class had also been halved.
Dartmouth did not have a “Jewish problem” during this period because so few Jews had applied for admission in the early twenties. The college’s isolated location, near the Vermont—New Hampshire border, far from any centers of Jewish population, was unappealing to Jewish families living in the northeast corridor between Boston and Philadelphia. Moreover, the Dartmouth of the twenties was not on an academic par with Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. In 1920, when Columbia and Harvard were struggling to cut their Jewish enrollments, Jews made up fewer than 2 percent of undergraduates at Dartmouth. Only when the more distinguished eastern universities began to restrict Jewish admissions did the number of Jewish applicants to Dartmouth begin to rise. Indeed, there was undoubtedly a direct connection between the developing quota system at Columbia—and its success in cutting Jewish enrollment in half during the early twenties—and the rise in applications to Dartmouth from the New York City area.
Nevertheless, Dartmouth had already taken tentative steps toward limiting Jewish enrollment—without instituting a rigid quota system—through an admissions procedure called the Selective Process. Devised by Hopkins in the early twenties, the Process (always capitalized) was designed to ensure geographical and “occupational” (meaning the occupation of the student’s father) diversity as well as to raise academic standards. Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice and a personal friend of President Hopkins, expressed concern as early as 1922 that the new admissions system (modeled to a considerable degree on the procedures already instituted at Columbia) might serve to discriminate against Jews. The Process seems to have been the subject of an ongoing dialogue between Frankfurter and Hopkins. In March 1923, Frankfurter wrote Hopkins that he had taken every opportunity “to give vigorous expression of my conviction that the Dartmouth of which you are the head, cannot conceivably go in for the folly of racial or social lines in the selection of its student body.” Nevertheless, Frankfurter added, “Some day I should like to have a long ‘jaw’ with you on this subject as part of the larger subject of what our colleges, and particularly our universities, are for.” The Process did not harden into an outright quota system until my father’s class produced such a large representation of “the chosen and the heathen.” (Until I read excerpts from this correspondence, I had mistakenly credited Kenneth Starr—the Republican special prosecutor who was the chief bloodhound attempting to bring down President Bill Clinton in the 1990s over the Monica Lewinsky scandal—with the first reverential use of the neutral-sounding “process” to describe a deeply biased policy or form of inquiry.)
By 1930, Hopkins and Bill had become especially worried about the large number of applications from New York City. In September of that year, Bill wrote Hopkins that he had become “increasingly positive this summer…that the Jewish problem in connection with our New York and vicinity application lists should be man-handled. To be specific, I think it would be a good thing if during the next four or five years we take very few Jews from that district. At the present time I feel that they are completely dominating the Dartmouth application lists in…New York and if we don’t look out, we will get into a rut from which we will extricate ourselves with great difficulty.”
Dartmouth’s initial failure to “man-handle” the New York Jewish problem was demonstrated by the presence of twenty-seven Jews from the area in my father’s class—down by four from the previous year, but still not low enough in the view of the administration. In April 1932, Bill traveled to New York to discuss the problem with Judge Arthur J. Cohen (Class of 1903), a Jewish alumnus who had not been outraged by the dean’s comments about “the chosen and the heathen.” A delighted Bill reported to Hopkins that Judge Cohen was “absolutely in agreement with you and me.” The judge, according to Bill, regarded the presence of such a large Jewish contingent from New York as “almost a tragedy.” He suggested that Jewish enrollment be limited through private measures rather than publicly announced policies, and Bill assured him that the Selective Process was designed to achieve just that end. Judge Cohen apparently voiced just one reservation. “The only possible difference of opinion we had,” Bill reported, “was that he felt that all brilliant Jewish students from the New York high schools should be admitted. I told him that he probably had no idea how many such students were applying.” This posed a conundrum for President Hopkins, whose main goal at the time was to raise the academic standing of Dartmouth—to place the school on a par with the more prestigious Ivy League schools—by improving the quality of both the student body and the faculty. On the one hand, the pool of Jewish applicants was filled with outstanding scholars. On the other, the presence of too many Jews at Dartmouth might impel the more academically talented WASPs to choose other Ivy League schools that already had strict Jewish quotas in place. A few weeks after Bill’s meeting with Judge Cohen, Hopkins acknowledged the dilemma, noting that “any college which is going to base its admission wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.”
Just as there was a conflict between raising the academic level of the student body and keeping out Jews, there was a tension between the increasing secularization of Dartmouth under Hopkins and its pious Protestant history. Dartmouth was not of course unique in its religious origins; all colleges dating from the colonial era were founded by ministers, for the purpose of educating future religious leaders. For much of the nineteenth century, however, theological conservatism was the hallmark of ministers selected as presidents of Dartmouth. The ministers who presided over better-known New England colleges tended to be staunch abolitionists, but Dartmouth’s president during the Civil War, the Reverend Nathan Lord, publicly espoused slavery and cited Scripture to support his position. Only in 1893 did the Dartmouth trustees select a president who was both a minister and a progressive—the Reverend William Jewett Tucker, who had already aroused the ire of conservative theologians by arguing that belief in God was compatible with Darwinism. Hopkins, who assumed the presidency in 1916, came from a business instead of a ministerial or academic background; his administration completed Dartmouth’s transition from a Protestant-identified college into a basically secular twentieth-century institution of higher education. Before 1925, when Hopkins abolished compulsory chapel attendance, Jewish students at Dartmouth were required to participate in regular Protestant services, including Sunday vespers.
The abandonment of compulsory chapel must have provided yet another spur to Jewish enrollment during the second half of the twenties, yet Hopkins was clearly conflicted over the secularization he himself had promoted. In an article published in 1945 in the New York Post, Hopkins declared that Dartmouth was still “a Christian College founded for the Christianizing of its students.” A half-century later, that provocative statement would be cited approvingly by neoconservative students—ironically, some of them Jews—associated with the controversial Dartmouth Review, dedicated to the proposition that multiculturalism and liberalism were running amok in Hanover. It would be interesting to know if Hopkins ever did sit down for a “jaw” about the Christianizing mission of Dartmouth with his friend Felix Frankfurter. If Hopkins had a fault as a booster of his institution—one of the main roles of any university president in any era—it can only have been that he was more candid than his contemporaries at other colleges. If they felt, as many did, that part of their job was to remain faithful to the Christian and WASP origins of their institutions, they didn’t broadcast their views—especially in forums such as a New York newspaper with a large Jewish readership.
My father and his contemporaries did not need explicit instruction in the prevailing attitudes, at Dartmouth and other old-line educational institutions, toward too-Jewish Jews. It is hardly surprising that Jewish students of my father’s generation suffered from a serious case of tsitterdik syndrome, a condition shared by many Jews, in many social contexts, throughout the nation. The tsitterdik sufferer—the word is derived from the onomatopoetic Yiddish tsitter, to shake or tremble—was condemned to unending worry about the behavior of his fellow Jews. One Jew’s loud voice, pushiness, conspicuous display of wealth—anything, really, that fit anti-Semitic stereotypes—could reflect badly on all Jews. Tsitterdik behavior had long characterized the assimilated community of Jews in Germany (though they would soon learn that looking and behaving exactly like their countrymen provided no guarantee against anti-Semitism on the rampage). In America, tsitterdik responses by German Jews were intensified by the beginning of the Jewish influx from Eastern Europe in the 1880s; the outpouring of German Jewish money into the settlement houses and educational programs of New York’s Lower East Side attested to the nervousness as well as to the charitable traditions of the community. As far as German Jews were concerned, the only cure for these palpitations was the rapid Americanization and assimilation of the new arrivals. Only when the immigrants had abandoned their obviously Jewish and foreign ways would the nervousness of the older American Jewish community subside.
In 1991, Alexandra Shepard—a student at a very different Dartmouth from the institution my father attended—was working in the college archives when she became interested in correspondence during the twenties and thirties among Dartmouth administrators, and from alumni to the administration, concerning “the Jewish problem” on the Hanover campus. Drawing extensively on archival material as well as interviews with surviving alumni, Shepard wrote her honors thesis in history on Jewish students at Dartmouth between 1920 and 1940. Her interviews with alumni are of particular interest, because they illuminate the social insecurity that pervaded the psyches of even those Jewish students who were most successful and most thoroughly assimilated.
In the spring of 1931, Michael Stern (a pseudonym), an editor of the student newspaper, The Dartmouth, and a Big Man On Campus, manifested his tsitter jitters by requesting a meeting with President Hopkins to voice his concern over a “deterioration” in the kind of Jewish students who were being admitted. Hopkins agreed, noting repeatedly in correspondence that it was for the good of the Jews themselves that Dartmouth limit the influx of undesirable “Hebrew” applicants from public high schools and places like Brooklyn. The Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where my father’s family lived after moving from Manhattan, seems to have been regarded by many college administrators (not only those at Dartmouth) as the wellspring of a new, presumably pushier breed of Jewish immigrant. Jewish students like Stern and my father were acutely aware of the need to present themselves as worthy representatives of their people and of the adverse consequences of being perceived as part of a “racial problem” (as it was often called in the days when “Hebrews” were perceived by many gentiles as a race apart). “I didn’t know how Jewish to be,” Stern told Shepard in an interview. His requirement that Shepard use a pseudonym certainly suggests that this former BMOC was still conflicted about his Dartmouth experience and about his attitude toward other Jewish students of his generation. My dad, who was not cut out to be a BMOC, must have been as tormented in college as he was in later years by the fear that he could not measure up to a set of amorphous social standards.
ALTHOUGH Bob Jacoby was a graduate of a well-regarded prep school and came from the type of cultivated, acculturated Jewish family favored by Dartmouth’s admissions office, his family’s economic comedown had also saddled him with an undesirable Flatbush address. But Dartmouth never knew that. On my father’s college transcript, and in the freshman “Green Book,” his address is listed as 32 Washington Square West in Manhattan. With its Jamesian associations, this was a much better address than any street in Flatbush. Although plenty of Jews lived on, or at least in the vicinity of, Washington Square by 1930 (most of them in decidedly un-Jamesian accommodations), the address still conveyed a sense of Old New York and old money. It was Uncle Ozzie who lived at Number 32 before he married Aunt Mary, and it was he who provided the front for the Dartmouth admissions office. True, Dad had applied to Dartmouth from Poly Prep (which Dean Bill described as “a splendid school” in the alumni magazine). But he also had an identifiably Jewish name and features—a nose, at any rate—that certainly hinted at his origins. A Washington Square address might offset some of those liabilities. While no longer quite “the ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement” portrayed by Henry James in his 1881 novel, the square (in spite of the encroaching bohemia of Greenwich Village) retained an upper-class aura. In the late 1920s, in spite of the presence of several new apartment buildings, one could still recognize the Washington Square of James’s nineteenth-century description: “It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having something of a social history.”
AS IT HAPPENS, the history of 32 Washington Square West offers a neatly ironic microcosm of the constantly shifting social and residential barriers that affected Jews of my father’s and uncle’s generation. When Uncle Ozzie lived at that address, in a building erected on the site in 1925, he rented his apartment. After World War II, the rental building was transformed into an elegant and exclusive cooperative—a form of apartment ownership largely unheard of outside New York—where, it was well known, Jews need not apply. No Jews were permitted to buy apartments at Number 32 until 1962, when the building’s board of directors caved in under pressure from the city’s recently established Human Rights Commission. Until that time, co-ops had successfully argued that they were exempt from city policies prohibiting racial and religious discrimination in rental apartments. Uncle Ozzie (even though he had a way of gaining acceptance in venues, like the Dallas Country Club, that were generally closed to Jews) would not, in the late 1940s, have been permitted to buy the apartment he had once rented in New York. It is sobering to reflect upon the fact that for much of the twentieth century, no Jew—however well-off, however well-connected—could take for granted the right to live anywhere he chose in the city with the largest Jewish population in the United States. And if that was true in New York, why should my father not have suspected that it might also be true in Okemos, Michigan?
THE PHONY address on my father’s transcript provides one more piece of evidence of the family’s thoroughgoing desire to conceal its true social, economic, and ethnic background. What an immense amount of thought and energy must have gone into this accumulation of fictions, great and small, in the service of another identity! In view of the attitudes expressed by men who had the power to keep a Jewish boy out of a good college, it is easy to understand why the Jacobys went to such lengths. What is so striking about the Dartmouth administrators’ correspondence on the “Jewish problem” is the matter-of-fact, unashamed tone in which the sentiments were voiced. No one was embarrassed to be talking about how to exclude Jewish students of the wrong kind, and it obviously never occurred to these refined WASP educators that posterity might take a different view of their views.
In 1997, Dartmouth president James O. Freedman (now retired) quoted a telling piece of correspondence at the dedication of a campus center for Jewish students. The letters were exchanged in 1934 between Robert C. Strong, Bill’s successor as director of admissions, and Ford H. Whelden, an alumnus from Detroit. Whelden observed that “the campus seems more Jewish each time I arrive in Hanover. And unfortunately, many of them (on quick judgement) seem to be the ‘kike’ type.” The admissions director told Whelden he was “glad to have your comments on the Jewish problem, and I shall appreciate your help along this line in the future. If we go beyond the 5% or 6% in the Class of 1938, I shall be grieved beyond words….It may be that all of the Jewish boys [accepted for admission] will come, in which case we may get up to 6%, but I do not see how it can climb as high as 8% or 9%.” Both Whelden and Strong would surely have been grieved beyond words, and utterly disbelieving, had they known that Dartmouth would one day have a Jewish president, and that the president would cite their correspondence as a prime example of the anti-Semitism shared by many of the college’s alumni, administrators, and students during the first four decades of the twentieth century.
READING THESE old words in the Dartmouth archives, more than thirty years after my dad first admitted to me that he was Jewish, I could finally comprehend, on an emotional rather than a purely intellectual level, the depth of his fear that his children might be deprived of something they wanted in life simply because their father had been born a Jew. My father wasn’t delusional (as I had ignorantly half-concluded in 1966) to think that a Jew could never quite predict when a door might be slammed in his face. Instead of directing his anger at people who talked about a “Jewish problem” in the thirties, my father internalized the judgments embedded in President Hopkins’s and Dean Bill’s letters.
In his formative years, Dad could not have seen these attitudes for what they were—one piece in an overarching edifice of unexamined prejudices and stereotypes applying not only to Jews but to everyone outside the WASP elite. Bill, after all, was as certain that the whole world loved a homely Irishman as he was that the whole world despised a hook-nosed Jew. His views of black Americans were cut from the same cloth. In March 1932, Bill took time out from his incessant worrying about Jews to focus on the much less significant (in terms of the number of applicants) but still anxiety-producing question of whether to admit a Negro or two. He was trying to decide on the application of “a Negro boy from New York City who is evidently an outstandingly fine member of that race.” The young man, a high school track star, had been recommended by Dartmouth’s track coach, who assured Bill that the prospective freshman “should at least add color to the campus. Inasmuch as this boy can run a 440 in 52 sec. flat…even tho he be a Chinaman we can use him….”
Much to my regret, the question of admitting women to Dartmouth never came up during the thirties. It would no doubt be edifying to read Dean Bill’s analysis of the intellectual abilities of female applicants, and his image of what a girl ought to look like in order to gain full acceptance by the Dartmouth community.
I WAS SURPRISED at the depth of my anger as I sifted through these letters. Most of them were written nearly seventy years earlier, yet they retained a certain power over me because the authors, and men like them, wielded a great deal of power over my father. Cultivated men, men dedicated not only to their college but to education itself, the administrators of Dartmouth used part of their power to restrict the opportunities of those whom they regarded as social inferiors. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner? Not a chance. Although anti-Semitism was an error bred in the bones of upper-class gentiles at that time, some of Hopkins’s and Bill’s contemporaries, like Eleanor Roosevelt, made a serious attempt to wean themselves from the prejudices with which they had been raised. It is no excuse, though it is an explanation, to acknowledge that the administrators at Dartmouth, and throughout the Ivy League, were typical products of their social class and generation. Their policies—the logical extension of their ingrained biases—lived on for decades. A Dartmouth alumnus (not Jewish), now in his mid-sixties, tells me that some of his classmates were furious when President Freedman’s speech, quoting excerpts from the anti-Semitic letters, was reported in The New York Times. “The campus certainly has more than its fair share of Jews now,” one of my friend’s ex-roommates had said to him, “so what’s the point of airing out that dirty linen?”
MY FATHER’S conflicts about his Jewishness formed only one strand in his unhappiness at Dartmouth. The outstanding student at Poly Prep had turned into a C student in college. My father participated in no extracurricular activities (another contrast to his years at Poly), although “well-roundedness” was considered more important than academic distinction in the Dartmouth of that era. Moreover, Dartmouth, unlike a number of other private colleges, does not seem to have placed any barriers in the way of Jewish students interested in extracurricular activities. Jews occupied prominent positions on Dartmouth student publications, in drama groups, and in intellectual discussion clubs—all activities that had attracted my dad at Poly. At Dartmouth, he seems to have formed few lasting friendships. I was unable to track down anyone who remembered my father from college, as Charles Wardell remembered him from Poly, even though many members of his class were still alive when I began working on this book.
The fraternity system at Dartmouth divided Jews and gentiles in much the same manner as it did on all other campuses (though Dartmouth’s non-Jewish fraternities did occasionally pledge Jewish BMOCs, which was not true at every school). There was one Jewish fraternity on campus at the time, composed mainly of men from German Jewish families like the Sondheims and the Jacobys. However, I doubt that my dad would ever have joined a Jewish fraternity even if he had been selected as a pledge, and even if his family had been able to afford frills like fraternity initiation fees. Becoming a member of any identifiably Jewish group would have gone entirely against the grain of his upbringing. Jews, he had been taught, should not set themselves apart. And if most Jews could not expect to be invited to join a gentile fraternity, better to be unaffiliated than to appear “clannish.” Better to be seen as one of the heathen than one of the chosen.
My father’s tight budget was also a social liability—more so at Dartmouth than it would have been at Columbia, which enrolled many day students who lived at home in order to save money. (Columbia did pressure freshmen to live on campus—one way of discouraging applicants from immigrant families, who would find it hard to pay dormitory room and board.) Dartmouth’s geographical isolation meant that every student’s family had to come up with money for room and board, and this requirement virtually guaranteed a more affluent student population than the one at Columbia or Harvard. My dad told me he began to gamble seriously during his college years (even if he didn’t have many close friends, there was never any shortage of gambling buddies) in order to come up with the money he needed to invite a girlfriend to social events like Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival and to accept invitations to mixers at women’s colleges. The man was, of course, expected to pay for everything, whether his girlfriend visited him in Hanover or whether he visited her at her college. Dad often came up short. “Sometimes I had to throw myself on the mercy of the girl,” he recalled, “because of course I usually lost more money than I won in an effort to pay for my share. I would let it be known that my family had lost its money in the stock market crash and there was just enough left for my tuition. Which was partly true. It wouldn’t have impressed my dates to learn that I’d lost the money meant for a Hanover Inn dinner in a poker game.”
When my father filled out a questionnaire for his twenty-fifth class reunion in 1960—which he did not attend—he noted only, “Did not return to Dartmouth after sophomore year (remember the Depression).”
By the time my father left the college, the Dartmouth administration was well on its way to attaining its goal of a sharply reduced Jewish undergraduate presence. In the fall of 1932, only 5.8 percent of entering freshmen were Jewish, compared with 10.8 percent in my dad’s class just a year earlier. The Jewish delegation, Bill reported in an alumni magazine issue published a year after his ill-advised quip about “the chosen and the heathen,” was now “back to normal.” Furthermore, Bill observed with satisfaction, the number of those stating no religious preference had declined from ninety-seven to nine. Given the small furor over his comments about the previous freshman class, Bill would have been well advised to refrain from making any further public statements that could be regarded as anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from returning to the sensitive subject of physical appearance as an admissions criterion. “One boy was admitted,” Bill explained, “because he had such lovely light hair and blue eyes and was about six feet two in height. Our Phi Beta Kappa societies are getting so swarthy that it is well to lighten things up a bit.”
FOR MY FATHER, Dartmouth was always a memory tinged with sadness. I am certain that the emotional turmoil connected with my grandfather’s death must have contributed to his poor academic performance and his overall unhappiness during his two college years. The death of a parent is a heavy burden for any adolescent; a mysterious death, with no chance to say good-bye, imposes a dual burden of loss and secrecy. To me, nothing speaks more eloquently of the crushing nature of this burden than my father’s lifelong insistence that the early death of his father was “not really all that important.”
I don’t think my dad blamed Ozzie for not paying his tuition after his sophomore year, although he deeply regretted his failure to complete his college education. I do blame my grandmother and my aunt, who were on the scene and could have insisted that my dad finish school in New York City. Of all the dismaying facts I have learned about my father’s family, the worst is its failure to see that its younger son receive an education commensurate with his brains. If Granny Jacoby were still alive, I’d ask her why she didn’t sell the damned diamond rosette to keep my dad in school. What was wrong with a woman who hung on to a hundred-year-old set of china, a huge collection of sterling silver pieces, and a large array of other heirlooms while her son dropped out of college? I think it is perfectly understandable that my father’s education wasn’t the number one concern of the newly married Ozzie. But I do not understand Granny Jacoby—except insofar as “wicked” (if that is the word Ozzie really applied to her) describes her behavior.
My father might have lived at home and gone to Columbia, which would have been much cheaper than Dartmouth because he would not have had to pay room and board. Even with the strict Jewish quota instituted under Butler, my dad would surely have been admitted as a legacy, given that his father, uncle, and elder brother had all been Columbia men. Or Dad could have gone to that great public institution of higher education, the City College of New York. During the thirties, thousands of New York students, most of them from families much poorer than the Jacobys, received a first-rate, free education there. From 1920 through 1950, the City College of New York was arguably the most distinguished public college in the nation (possibly the world).
My grandmother, with her snobbery about being a Sondheim of Frankfurt, may have considered City College so far beneath her that it never even occurred to her as a possibility for her son. But that seems unlikely, since her own sisters were graduates of Hunter College, the city’s equally distinguished public institution of higher education for women. Still, Granny Jacoby may well have felt that what was good enough for her siblings wasn’t good enough for her children. However socially undesirable City College might seem to the descendants of German Jews, the academic status of that institution was not in question in 1932. My grandfather, during the last years of his life, could hardly have been unaware of the brilliant legal and scholarly career of Felix Frankfurter—a career unimpeded by Frankfurter’s undergraduate degree from City College. Born in 1882, the future Supreme Court justice, a Viennese Jew who arrived in New York in 1893 with scarcely a word of English, was already, by the 1920s, regarded as one of the most outstanding legal minds of his generation. My grandfather, who had begun life with so many more advantages, was reduced to defending small-time swindlers. Estelle Frankfurter alluded to the comparison when she told me about having met my grandfather. “Your grandfather started out with everything,” she said pointedly.
By the beginning of the thirties, the student body at City College was composed almost entirely of Jews—but not Jews like the Jacobys (or the Frankfurters, who, though they were poor, came from a long line of rabbinical scholars). The City College students of my father’s generation were, for the most part, the children of uneducated immigrants from Eastern Europe. They were hungry for every form of knowledge, fiercely competitive, and openly ambitious in ways that fit the anti-Semitic stereotypes held at the time not only by the non-Jewish American majority but also by German-descended Jews like my father and his siblings. Had my father gone to City College, he might have rubbed shoulders with Alfred Kazin or Jonas Salk, but my grandmother would have been appalled at the thought of her son associating with Jews who came from Yiddish-speaking homes, were raised in neighborhoods like Brownsville and the Lower East Side, and who spoke English with the coarse accents of the New York streets rather than prep school diction.
THE COURSE of my father’s life would surely have been very different had he gone on to finish his education at City College. Fresh out of Poly Prep and two years at Dartmouth, with all that implied about the aping of WASP gentility and restraint, he might have been almost as out of step in his first weeks at City as he had been in a Brooklyn public school. But that wouldn’t have lasted long. His natural gregariousness (in spite of his adolescent shyness with girls), love of wordplay, literary and historical erudition, and enjoyment of numbers would have served him well with his classmates at a commuter school for people who could not afford any other sort of higher education. Young Bob Jacoby—who was, after all, in precisely the same boat—might have benefited greatly from being around contemporaries who were determined to educate themselves with or without ivy-covered walls. When I moved to New York in the early seventies and first encountered New York Jewish intellectuals of my father’s generation, I immediately felt a sense of familiarity because their manner—quick, funny, impatient, argumentative, openly emotional—reminded me so much of Dad. My father would have fitted in here, in a way he never quite did with men whose idea of a good time was an afternoon spent stalking deer in the Michigan woods.
I am also quite certain that my father would have chosen a very different way of making a living had he completed his education in New York. I doubt that he would have become an accountant—a profession for which he was ill suited, in spite of his mathematical skills, not only because he was chronically disorganized but also because he was more interested in talking to people than in poring over detailed columns of figures. I can see him as a high school history or English teacher, like his Sondheim uncle and aunts, doing work that would have tapped both his love of language and his empathy for kids. And he might have come to terms with his Jewishness had he stayed in the city and gotten to know Jews who hadn’t been shaped by several generations of identification with, and the desire to be identified as, Germans or American WASPs. He might even have married a Jewish girl—if Granny Jacoby didn’t get in the way. And his child would have grown up knowing she was a Jew—even if she received no Jewish education and her parents were completely nonobservant. But the child wouldn’t have been me.