The Lampoon As Social History

Posted on August 2, 2016 by in From The Vault

(Originally Posted on March 19, 2016)

Not to give our neighbors in the castle too much credit, but there is some interesting history to be learned from period pages of the Harvard Lampoon, especially when it comes to determining the mores of FDR’s Harvard. Take the image above, for example, one that is particularly relevant for today as it mirrors a problem soon to be faced by the new Smith Center that the University is building in Holyoke Center. The Harvard Union was the first attempt to establish a place where alumni and students could co-mingle, and it was a hugely expensive flop, for the very reason depicted above: it, like all of Cambridge, was dry. The only liquor available was at private clubs, which is one of the main reasons that final clubs were (and are) popular today: they served booze.

Some Cheering News

Posted on July 23, 2016 by in FDR Suite

Fellow Friends of the Foundation,

In the wake of so much bloodshed and cultural turmoil here and abroad in recent weeks, I wanted to share with you some cheering news for a change. I just this morning received an email from Farhan Javed ’18 (’of Currier House and Tulsa, Oklahoma) who is studying at the Central Bank of Armenia this summer thanks to the FDR Global Fellowship based at Adams House. The spirit Farhan evinces — a desire to both learn and teach, both to accept and be accepted, and most of all, to explore unexpected intellectual paths and ligatures — is EXACTLY what we have been trying to do with this program. We are so proud to have him as Adams’ (and Harvard’s) face to the world. Please read his email. I think you’ll find it a refreshing tonic to your day.

All best, Michael

Hi Michael,

These past two months working at the Central Bank here in Armenia have really opened me up to a new world. I’ve had the opportunity to travel up and down the country, from the industrial cities to the forested mountain towns and rural villages. I can sincerely attest to the hospitality of the people here.  Wherever I’ve gone, strangers have invited me into their homes, insisted on feeding me, and have constantly pried and questioned if I am ever in need of anything. Armenia is, by global standards, a poor country with institutions and systems that don’t always function as they’re supposed to. But the people honestly have very rich hearts and that has made all the excursions rewarding.

One of the big challenges I thought I would face was observing Ramadan during the summer in this rather homogeneous conservative Christian nation. Most people here had never met a Muslim before, and despite strained relations with their Muslim majority neighbors like Azerbaijan and Turkey, I never once felt threatened or discriminated against. People were full of curiosity and I loved answering their questions. During my free time, I visited a lot (emphasis on “a lot”) of churches and monasteries. The sheer quantity of churches would put the Bible Belt to shame. It was an amazing feeling to be a fasting Muslim sitting in a church, listening to choir music, and realizing that we all have a mutual desire for some sort of transcendence. These instances changed the way I internally approached the labels of Christian and Muslim. It didn’t make me want to blur the lines, but rather increased my respect for the fact that we could choose to have those lines and that those labels gave us all meaning. It was also a great plus to find restaurants run by Arab-Armenian (members of the diaspora that had returned after living for a few generations in places like Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria) because they served halal food with the familiar zesty spiciness that I was familiar with from my own background.

Another cool realization I had was all the linguistic connections I began to make. The vast majority of Armenians only speak Armenian and Russian (a vestige of their Soviet legacy). I had the fortunate opportunity to be able to take Armenian classes at the bank and as I progressed I noticed some very definitive cognates and similarities between Armenian and my own native Urdu (the national language of Pakistan), which I realized was due to both regions having been under heavy Persian influence for significant periods of history. Discoveries liked that increased my sense of the interconnected-ness of our world.

The work at the bank itself has been fantastic. It’s been an amazing learning process working with the most brilliant economists and econometricians that Armenia has to offer. I have had the chance to go to several conferences where we had finance chairs and economists from the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, and various universities across the world deliver presentations on the most cutting edge developments on economic policy and econometric modeling. My work over the summer has led to the development of a working paper where I analyze how indirect effects of oil price shocks outweigh the direct farhaneffects for Armenia. This actually has far reaching implications because it means that central banks ought to view a good chunk of oil-importing small open economies (which the majority of developing nations are) as oil-exporters when it comes to combating fluctuations if they have strong trade linkages to oil-exporters. This sort of insight can change the way governments from these countries pursue trade policies and respond to adverse shocks around the world to better safeguard against global crises, benefiting the lives of their citizens.

All in all, if I could go back, I wouldn’t do it any other way. My final presentation is on the 25th, after which I’ll be mostly concluded with my work here. Currently doing my best to relish these last few days!

I’ve attached a picture of me on horseback riding outside the town of Ijevan

I look forward to catching up in the Fall!

Sincerely,
Farhan Javed

(And of course, if this spurs you to want to create other experiences like this for future students, please email me at michael.weishan@fdrfoundation.org as we TRULY need your financial support to continue this program. M)

 




Cynthia Koch To Join FDR Foundation as Historian in Residence and Director of History Programming

Posted on June 8, 2016 by in FDR Suite

We are ever so DEE-lighted to announce that Dr. Cynthia Koch, the past director of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, will be joining the Foundation as Historian in Residence and Director of History Programming.koch
Cynthia’s distinguished academic record (below) speaks for itself. What I would like to add is that working with Cynthia has been truly a delight. I met Cynthia at almost the very beginning of our quest at the FDR Suite, when on a lark I called the FDR Library and boldly asked to speak to the director. I was eager to let the Library know of our new endeavor, but I wasn’t really expecting her to take my call. Instead, after I announced myself, her secretary put me right through, with the note “it’s pronounced COOK, not KOCH. Suitably prepared, I offered, “Director Koch, thank you for taking the time to speak with me,” in what I hoped was my best professional voice. “Oh,” she answered “it’s always a pleasure to meet another FDR fan, and it’s Cynthia, please.” She had me right there with her friendly, no-pretense spirit, and through all the ensuing research requests and demands on her time, Cynthia was never anything but hugely patient and helpful. Now, with her retirement from service with the National Archives, she has once again showed great kindness and dedication to the FDR cause by agreeing to become our historian in residence.

Cynthia will in fact be “in residence” though still living near Hyde Park, New York. Several times a year she will occupy the Suite, conducting programs for undergraduates and alumni, making Adams the very first house to have its own presidential historian. But even more importantly, Cynthia will become the director of history programming for the extensive upcoming list of Foundation events scheduled the 2016–2018 academic years, in particular with the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this December; the year-long celebration of the 85th anniversary of the Good Neighbor Policy in 2017; and the 120th anniversary of the Spanish American War in 2018. She looks forward this fall to offering programming that explores the political legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt in light of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency.

Cynthia’s appointment to the Foundation, which comes with a dual appointment to Harvard as a member of the Adams House Senior Common Room, begins July 1.

Welcome aboard, Cynthia!

 

Cynthia M. Koch received her B.A. from Pennsylvania State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She was the Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park (1999–2011), and has been on special detail for the National Archives and Records Administration for the past five years. During 2013–2016 she served as Public Historian in Residence at Bard College, where she taught courses on the Roosevelts as well as public history. Cynthia has also served as associate director of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community, an international leadership group of scholars, political leaders, and shapers of public opinion, convened by the University of Pennsylvania; executive director of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities; and director of Old Barracks Museum, a Revolutionary war site in Trenton, New Jersey. She is the author and editor of works on Roosevelt, the presidential library, culture wars, and scholarship in history museums, including “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Sea: From the Atlantic to the Pacific”; “Portugal, the Azores, and the United States in the Roosevelt Years”; and “Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Short Biography” in the proceedings of three conferences on Franklin D. Roosevelt held in the Azores (Fórum Açoriano Franklin D. Roosevelt) by the Luso American Foundation (2008, 2010, 2012). Also “Franklin Roosevelt’s Dutchness: At Home in the Hudson Valley,” in Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture; “Roosevelt and His Library,” a special anniversary issue of Prologue—Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration; and FDR: A Life in Pictures. Most recently she reviewed Roger Daniels’s new biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal for Indiana Magazine of History (forthcoming, September). Other publications include “The Contest for American Culture Revisited,” an update of “The Contest For American Culture: A Leadership Case Study on the NEA and NEH Funding Crisis,” a chapter for Funding Challenges and Successes in Arts Education, Siu Challons-Lipton and Richard Emanuel, editors (Hershey, PA: IGI Global Publishing, forthcoming); and “What About a Jobs Program”? Huffington Post, June 15, 2015,

 

2016 FDR Global Fellows Announced

Posted on April 28, 2016 by in FDR Suite

We are absolutely delighted to name this year’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Global Fellows:

jessJessica Min ’18 of Quincy House and Melbourne, Australia will be traveling to Paris to undertake an internship with the United Nations Environment Program, examining sustainable consumption and production patterns in China and India. Drawing upon her interest in politics in the Asia-Pacific, she will be working on developing regional EU-Asia policy to promote international trade. She will also help set up a conference for trade negotiations between EU countries and China in August, in which she will assist in welcoming a Chinese delegation in Europe.

A sophomore concentrating in economics, Jessica is a news writer for the Harvard Crimson on gender and sexuality issues on campus, the food/in-kind director of the largest undergraduate-run shelter, Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, and a unit test grader for Professor Greg Mankiw’s “Ec 10: Introduction to Economics” course. She also serves on the student advisory board of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, providing advice on increasing student interest in China. As someone who hopes to pursue a career in international development, Jess is passionate about examining the nexus of poverty, climate change and migration to develop practical solutions to improve living standards in the Asia-Pacific. Given the historical agreement between US and China to jointly reduce carbon emissions, Jess is both inspired and interested in finding collaborative approaches to minimize global warming’s impact on livelihoods.

In addition to being an FDR Global Fellow, Jess has been named the 2016 Lillian Goldman Scholar.

 

headshot2Farhan Javed ’18 of Currier House and Tulsa, Oklahoma, will be traveling to Dilijan, Armenia this summer to intern at the Central Bank of Armenia to investigate methods of accelerating economic privatization as Armenia moves away from its Soviet centralized-planning past to a free market. During his 9-week program, Farhan will utilize statistical methods to research and propose methods of liberalization that will be aimed at reforming the nation’s current economic system to create an environment conducive to prosperity for the masses that continue to live in stagnation.

A sophomore concentrating in Economics, Farhan is passionate about macroeconomics, specifically its application to foster growth in developing countries. Immigrating to the United States at a young age and growing up as a Pakistani-American, Farhan has felt that he has feet planted in different parts of the world. This background has spurred his curiosity of understanding why there is such global disparity in wealth. Furthermore, Farhan is fascinated by history and culture. He believes that working in an environment such as Armenia, a place that may seem obscure to many, will deepen his understanding of pluralism. Farhan is currently active in the Harvard Pakistan Student Association, writes global affair analysis pieces for the Harvard International Review, works as a Business Associate in the Harvard Crimson, and serves on the board of the Veritas Financial Group. He plans to work in either consulting or finance after graduation and later transition to policy and international affairs.

ID_Photo__1Juliet Kim ’18 of Quincy House and the Bronx, New York, will be traveling to Trento, Italy this summer to participate in the Harvard Summer School program in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. During this eight-week program, she will take two courses on different methods used to study the minds and brains of humans and of other animals, and how the discovery of common structures, mechanisms, and/or behavior between the two can provide a window into the evolutionary pathway that has made us who we are today.

A sophomore concentrating in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology, with a potential secondary in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, Juliet is very much interested in learning about the development of human consciousness, and in learning about how this is similar to/ differs from the consciousness of other species. Outside of classes, Juliet is a co-director of the Harvard College Alzheimer’s Buddies, a co-Vice President of Harvard Team HBV (Hepatitis B Virus), a Peer Advising Fellow, and a tutor with the Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment after school program. As a pre-medical student from a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of income inequality, she is passionate about supporting the underprivileged, and hopes to work in public health in addition to becoming a doctor.

The Foundation in particular wishes to thank the three anonymous donors who made this year’s award possible. Without them, we would not have been able to send any of these wonderful candidates, as our scholarship fund is empty.  If you, or someone you know, wishes to to aid this laudable program, please contact michael.weishan@fdrfoundation.org  For general information about the Global Fellowships click HERE. Award Criteria are to be found HERE.

The Lampoon As Social History

Posted on March 19, 2016 by in FDR Suite

Not to give our neighbors in the castle too much credit, but there is some interesting history to be learned from period pages of the Harvard Lampoon, especially when it comes to determining the mores of FDR’s Harvard. Take the image below, for example,  one that is particularly relevant for today as it mirrors a problem soon to be faced by the new Smith Center that the University is building in Holyoke Center. The Harvard Union was the first attempt to establish a place where alumni and students could co-mingle, and it was a hugely expensive flop, for the very reason depicted below: it, like all of Cambridge, was dry. The only liquor available was at private clubs, which is one of the main reasons that final clubs were (and are) popular today: they served booze.

Screen Shot 2016-03-13 at 11.39.54 AM

Click on this and any of the other images to enlarge.

The next image took me a while to figure out. The key is that the proctor from the floor below is the same character entering the door of the piano-playing student in the first panel. He’s playing, piano dolce, “Babbie Waltzes.” (Hear the tune HERE on a wax-cylinder recording.)  Also note the time. Apparently 10PM was the cut-off for loud noise in individual suites, so to take revenge on the proctor for reprimanding him him the night before, the next day “Sporter” arranges for a little concert with his friends. The music starts with “Honey, Don’t Get Me Wrong” a forgotten ragtime tune of the day, and ends with “Up the Street,” a march still played by the University Band. What caught my eye was the gas lamp on the proctor’s desk. These lamps were attached by rubber “extension tubes” to either a wall or ceiling gas outlet. Frankly, it’s amazing that the whole place didn’t burn down — or explode — many times over. While electricity was available in certain deluxe suites like FDR’s, electrical outlets wouldn’t be invented for several more years.

Screen Shot 2016-03-13 at 11.47.18 AM copyWhat’s interesting about the next panel is not the joke —it’s a play on grub (food) and grub (caterpillar) — but rather something that is almost forgotten today. Those lines above the Square aren’t meant to indicate clouds, they are telegraph, telephone and electrical lines. In 1900, competing companies ran their own wire to each client, so a single large building might have hundreds of wires running to it from all directions. This tangle persisted until the 1930s, when individual concerns were absorbed into larger entities and regulation of utilities became the norm.

Screen Shot 2016-03-13 at 11.51.43 AM copyHere’s a photographic view, looking the other way, that better reveals this crazy-maze of wires. That’s John the Orangeman on the cart, btw, heading for a Harvard rally. (If you don’t know about John, by all means click the previous link as he is critical to the FDR Suite story.)

parade

The panel below explains the grub joke: it shows the interior of Memorial Hall, where most of the undergraduates ate. Notice the gawking guests in the balcony, which was open to the public and used as a viewing gallery by the locals — a perfect spot  for a chaperoned young lady to get an overview of prospective suitors to invite to her next “at home” day.

memhallThis last is one of my favorites, not just because of the great drawing style of S. A. Weldon, a classmate of FDR’s, but rather as it shows just how luxurious life in the Gold Coast actually was. No smelly gas lamps here. There is an electric desk lamp (which had to be plugged into the overhead fixture each time it was turned on, which meant gas or kerosene was still the norm) as well an assortment of comfortable furniture, walls and shelves chock-a-block with personal mementos, even velvet portieres on the door. And of course our boy under the desk has just come up from a dip in Claverly’s “tank,” the first of what would be a succession of ever larger private swimming baths on the Gold Coast. Considering how little we knew about this period in Harvard’s history when we started, it’s always reassuring when pictures like this come along that show many of the very same objects in the FDR Suite today — a gratifying indication that our representation of Gilded Age life at Harvard is reasonably on track.

Claverly Pool copy

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When Reason Trumped Politics: The Remarkable Political Partnership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Wendell L. Willkie

Posted on March 7, 2016 by in FDR Suite

As the American people nervously watch this year’s presidential campaign descend into a rant of name calling and outright crudity that would be inappropriate in a saloon, it might be wise to pause and look back 75 years to a remarkable partnership between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Wendell L. Willkie, opposing candidates in the 1940 election. Though the race was boisterous and equally contentious — FDR was running for an unprecedented third term to the horror of the Republican Party — each candidate managed to wage a vigorous campaign that kept sight of a shared common goal: the betterment of America. Even more importantly, their cooperation during that election year and in the years that followed likely prevented the collapse of Great Britain and provided America with its greatest fighting ally against the forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

This relationship is all the more remarkable considering….read more