Taken in the fall of 1900, a young FDR (front row second from left) and Lathrop Brown (front row, far right) gaze serenely into their Harvard future.
To mark the debut of the Ken Burns PBS series on the Roosevelts this Sunday, Harvard Magazine has reprinted Geoffrey Ward’s remarks at the Sixth Annual FDR Memorial Lecture this past May. For those of you who were unable to attend, here’s your chance. Take a look HERE.
If you google the term “gentleman’s C,” chances are you’ll come up with some version of: “a grade given by certain schools (often Ivy League) to the children of wealthy or influential families in lieu of a failing grade” — that’s certainly what I always thought the term meant. But in FDR’s day, the meaning of a “gentleman’s C” was entirely different. A “C” was the grade a gentleman aspired to, so as not to seem too interested in studies and be considered a “grind.”
A 1909 verse by Robert Grant, ’73, LL.B. 1879, explains this neatly:
The able-bodied C man! He sails swimmingly along.
His philosophy is rosy as a skylark’s matin song.
The light of his ambition is respectably to pass,
And to hold a firm position in the middle of his class.
Should you try to hard, you became the stuff of parody, as the “The Grind’s Song” from the 1902 Hasty Pudding Show HI.KA.YA reveals:
I’m a typical College grind,
I look it, you’ll admit, you’ll admit, you’ll admit
You’ve heard it’s a grind to be a grind
Not a bit, not a bit, not a bit! Just the opposite!
Don’t let my words belie my looks
My happiness is in my books
I love to work, I hate to play
For me life’s simply the other way
Don’t enlist your sympathy, I’m as happy as can be,
For to read my Latin Grammar is life in Arcadie!
To document how much things have changed, I thought you might be interested in seeing the study cards of FDR and Lathrop, president and congressman of the United States, respectively. We’ve recently received copies from the Archives, and will reproduce them for viewing in the Suite. The upper right hand corner reveals their entrance examination results, and year by year grades proceed from left to right across the bottom.
Click on each to view them full scale.
As you can see, both FDR and Lathrop (especially Lathrop!) eschewed any possibility of being viewed as a grind! I find this fascinating, not only because it reveals a student ethos so foreign to the current one, but also because it shows the level of grade inflation since the Vietnam War when most universities across the country, including Harvard, felt the pressure of keeping students from falling below a B average and thereby opening them up to the draft. The result was a rapid escalation of grades, to the point where the average grade at Harvard is now -A. (One of our undergraduates recently made the suggestion during a Suite tour that there hadn’t been grade inflation at all, rather that the current students were just smarter, which left me and several of my peers a moment to wonder at the folly of youth.)
On an entirely different subject, today is the last day of the fiscal year, and our coffers are looking uncomfortably bare, given the roster of programming we have planned for the next academic year. I’d like to urge any of you who have been thinking about making a contribution to the numerous activities of the Foundation, that now is time to so! It’s quick, secure and takes only a few seconds online.
Gina Kim ’15, of Adams House, who is also this year’s Lillian Goldman Scholar, will be traveling to China and South Korea to conduct senior thesis research on sex trafficking in East Asia. There she will interview government officials, NGO workers, journalists, and academic experts to research how sex trafficking works in the two countries and how they combat this horrific, amorphous issue in their own ways. Her senior thesis research question is: “Under what circumstances do sex trafficking policy changes occur in China and in the Republic of Korea? Do the factors influencing policy change also affect the effectiveness and implementation of the adopted policy?” After graduation, Gina plans to pursue a joint JD/MPP program, with a goal of working for the U.S. Department of State, Department of Justice or the White House in a legal advisory role.
Alicia Merganthaler ’15, of Winthrop House, will be spending two months in London interning with the Financial Times. As an economics concentrator and active writer, Alicia is interested in studying how the Times, as opposed to many US-based financial publications, presents economics news to inform the public in a nonpartisan manner. At the Times, she’ll have the unique opportunity to work alongside professional researchers to investigate meaningful economic phenomena worldwide, and learn how these economic stories can be disseminated in a way that is theoretically accurate, but also inclusive of individuals with limited economic background. After Commencement, Alicia plans on pursuing a career in economic journalism.
Amanda Hess, from the Harvard Extension School, will be traveling to Kisumu, Kenya where she’ll explore diverse approaches for using innovations and technologies to foster transformative and sustainable healthcare improvements in Africa. During her six-week intensive Harvard Summer School program, Amanda will learn an interdisciplinary approach to healthcare that emphasizes the importance of teamwork in the design, development, and testing of public heath initiatives, and how to integrate these improvements on the local level. This for-credit program also completes a number of her Extension requirements. After obtaining her degree, Amanda plans to work for an NGO in Africa or Asia.
This year the Foundation is also pleased to present an Award of Merit for an outstanding proposal it was unable to fund but found to be very much in the spirit of FDR’s belief that “the only way to have a friend is to be one.”
Zeenia Framooze ’16, of Adams House, will spend the summer in Bombay, India, where she plans to volunteer with the Acorn Foundation’s Dharavi Project. Inspired by Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Zeenia will be working towards the organization’s goal of empowering the waste collectors of the Dharavi slum. Using her passion for teaching, public speaking and photography, she hopes to highlight the complex issues involved in waste disposal in a culminating photo project titled “Recycling Lives.” Zeenia plans a career in broadcast journalism.
Remember, this scholarship program receives no financial support from Harvard College and is entirely funded by contributions from people like you. Please give generously. You can donate safely and securely online by clicking the button below.
Historian Geoffrey Ward is the author of 16 books including three of the principal bios of young FDR
Ladies and gentlemen,
We still have a 10 or so tickets left for the 6th Annual FDR Memorial Lecture, Saturday April 5th, 4 PM with historian Geoffrey Ward. His talk, the Roosevelts at Harvard will be followed by a cocktail reception in the conservatory, featuring our now famous Roosevelt Raw Bar. Tickets may be purchased below. If you are unable to attend, won’t you consider sponsoring a student or tutor? We run our educational programs as a service, not a profit center, and we can always use your support.
Looking around snow covered, frigid Boston you would never know it was March 5th, but it’s true! The Six Annual FDR Memorial Lecture is upon us!
Geoffrey Ward
This year we are dee-lighted to welcome historian and television writer Geoffrey Ward to Adams. Geoffrey C. Ward, former editor of American Heritage magazine, is the author of seventeen books, including three focused on FDR: Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt 1882-1905; A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of FDR (which won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); and Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley. He has also won seven Emmys and written twenty-seven historical documentaries for PBS, either on his own or in collaboration with others, including Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Unforgivable Blackness,” “Prohibition” and “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” a seven-part, fourteen-hour series on Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt” that will run on PBS this September.
His topic will be “The Roosevelts at Harvard”
We are equally delighted to welcome back Dr. Cynthia Koch, Former Director of the FDR Presidential Library and now Professor of Public History at Bard College (and our 4th Memorial Lecture speaker) who will introduce Geoffrey.
This year is a reception year, as opposed to a banquet year, and comes with all the trimmings: The famous Roosevelt raw bar will return, to accompany cocktails and a book-signing after the reception. (The question before us is which of Geoff’s 17 books we’ll offer!)
This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet the man behind three of the most important FDR bios ever written, not the mention, thanks to his work on PBS, one of the most influential and far-reaching American historians of the last century.
Tickets may be purchased easily on line by clicking the button below. Seats are limited to 50, so they will go fast! If you are unable to attend, please consider donating a place to an Adams student or tutor using the ticket options window below.
Sixth Annual FDR Memorial Lecture
Saturday April 5th at 4 PM
Adams House Lower Common Room
26 Plympton Street, Cambridge Massachusetts
[For this this issue we’re delighted to have Pam Canfield Grossman, Lathrop Brown’s granddaughter, as guest author. – Eds.]
Lathrop Brown, Helen Hooper Brown, and daughters Halla and Camilla, about 1915
Questions about my grandfather Lathrop Brown and his life after Harvard keep surfacing in these pages, most recently concerning the Tin House at Big Sur. The life stories of Lathrop and Hélène Brown could practically be told as a succession of the houses in which they lived, nearly always at the edge of the continent. First on Long Island where Lathrop raised and raced horses [now the Knox School], then near the White House in Washington while Lathrop was in Congress and, later, when he was assistant to the Secretary of Interior. Afterwards they lived in Manhattan, then Montauk Point, and Boston.
Saddle Rock and the Cove
In 1924 they traveled to Carmel, California in search of a secluded site at the ocean. On a horse and mule trip to the Big Sur area they found Saddle Rock Cove where a waterfall poured over the rocky bluff into the Pacific. They purchased the adjacent 1800 acre cattle ranch and began a bi-coastal life, maintaining a residence in Boston as well as Big Sur.
The Big Sur & Pacific Railroad
The old ranch house at Saddle Rock was soon replaced with a new house built using the local redwood trees. Electrical power was supplied by a waterwheel driven by the stream. In 1939 construction began on Waterfall House. Sited halfway down the cliffs from the newly built highway above and reached by a short funicular railway, it was a beautiful contemporary building, with gardens around the house and across Saddle Rock cove.
Waterfall House from the West
The Tin House, which the family called the Gas Station, was built in the mid 1940s high on the hills above Saddle Rock cove. It could only be reached by a rough dirt road climbing steeply up through the ranch to a bluff overlooking the ocean.
The house was actually constructed of materials from two abandoned gas stations and, oddly, had no windows facing the spectacular view. I have no idea why my grandparents built it.
The Tin House
The story that it was to be some sort of vacation retreat for FDR is pure fabrication. It was a small, primitive, and nearly inaccessible place, wholly unsuited to a wheelchair bound president. It has now fallen into total disrepair.
When Lathrop died in 1959, my grandmother left Big Sur and gave the ranch and the house to the state of California as the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. She wanted the house to be used as a museum and a center for local artists, and insisted that the house be destroyed if that was not possible. When funds for that purpose could not be found the house was bulldozed into the ocean below.
Pamela Canfield Grossman, Berkeley, California.
[There was one last amazing Brown housing project: at the time of Lathrop’s death, the Browns were in the process of converting a former Mississippi paddle boat into a winter home on Sanibel Island, Florida. It was never completed. For more on Lathrop’s fascinating life, see HERE – Eds]