Much ado about something? James Bryant Conant, Harvard University, and Nazi Germany in the 1930s

Abstract

This paper discusses the actions of noted Harvard University president James Bryant Conant, taken in regard to the Nazi government in Germany, from the time of Conant’s becoming president of Harvard University in 1933 to the time of the widespread pogrom in Germany of 9–10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Conant’s attitudes and actions toward the Nazis have been chronicled in some depth by scholars including William M. Tuttle in a doctoral dissertation in the 1960s, and an article based on that dissertation published in 1979 and, more recently, Stephen Norwood as part of his 2009 indictment of American universities for their widespread tolerance and frequent support of Nazism. Norwood’s indictment criticised Tuttle’s work for being insufficiently critical of Conant’s dealings with Nazi Germany. This paper will evaluate both Conant’s actions and the historical interpretations of those actions by Tuttle and Norwood. It will also address the issue of Conant’s power as president of Harvard University and how that position of power relates to the actions taken by Conant and the evaluations of those actions by Tuttle and Norwood. Our main focus in this effort is on contextualising Conant’s actions in terms of the perceived and actual power of the president of the leading university in the United States of America. What are the powers of university presidents, especially the Harvard University president, and how do Conant’s actions cast light on the contours of those powers and the limits on them, self- and socially imposed?

Keywords:

• James Bryant Conant
• Harvard University
• anti-Semitism
• Stephen Norwood

Notes

¹ Stephen Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49.

² William M. Tuttle, “James B. Conant, Pressure Groups, and the National Defense, 1933–1945” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1967), 60.

³ Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 54.

⁴ Quoted in Tuttle, “Conant … and the National Defense,” 65.

⁵ Ibid., 68.

⁶ As quoted in James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 96.

⁷ James B. Conant, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 146.

⁸ Tuttle, “Conant … and the National Defense,” 75.

⁹ Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 72–73.

¹⁰ See footnote 2. See also William M. Tuttle, Jr., “American Higher Education and the Nazis: The Case of James B. Conant and Harvard University’s ‘Diplomatic Relations’ with Germany,” American Studies 20 (Spring 1979): 49–70. This article is based completely on research done for Tuttle’s dissertation.

¹¹ Tuttle, “Conant … and the National Defense,” 50.

¹² As quoted in ibid., 45.

¹³ As quoted in ibid., 64.

¹⁴ Ibid., 64–65.

¹⁵ Tuttle, “American Higher Education and the Nazis,” 52–54; quotation p. 54.

¹⁶ Tuttle, “Conant … and the National Defense,” 66, 71–72. It was also the case, however, that Einstein chose not to attend the Harvard celebration because of Nazi participation.

¹⁷ Ibid., 80.

¹⁸ Conant, “American Higher Education and the Nazis,” 66.

¹⁹ In addition to his 2009 book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, Norwood first published his critique of Conant and Harvard in Stephen H. Norwood, “Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime, 1933–1937,” American Jewish History 92 (June 2004): 189–223.

²⁰ Norwood, “Legitimating Nazism,” 189 and Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 36.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Norwood, “Legitimating Nazism,” 190 and The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 37.

²³ Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 60.

²⁴ Ibid., 65–70.

²⁵ Ibid., 70–72.

²⁶ Ibid., 40.

²⁷ Ibid., 42–43.

²⁸ Ibid., 73.

²⁹ Ibid., 74.

³⁰ On this issue, we rely on Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). For Lowell and the quota on Jewish students, see especially pp. 87–109. Conant’s actions aiding Lowell are described on pp. 92 and 102.

³¹ Ibid., 166–99.

³² Ibid., 199.

³³ Tuttle, “American Higher Education and the Nazis,” 60.

³⁴ Ibid., note 51, 69.

³⁵ Ibid., note 15, 67–68; quotation, p. 68. The quotation is taken from Stephen Duggan and Betty Drury, The Rescue of Science and Learning (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

³⁶ Kirsten Fermaglich, review of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower by Norwood, Journal of American History (June 2010): 236.

³⁷ Tuttle, “Conant … and the National Defense, 1933–1947,” 81.

³⁸ Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 36, 73–74.

³⁹ Richard Breitman, reviews of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, by Norwood and Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945, by Michaela Hoenicke Moore, American Historical Review 116 (February 2011): 198.

⁴⁰ Philo Hutcheson, “It Wasn’t the Academy’s Finest Hour”, review of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, by Norwood, Thought and Action, the NEA Higher Education Journal (Fall, 2009): 176. Hutcheson notes the views in Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). For another review that notes differences between presidential actions in the 1930s and 1960s, see Stephen J. Whitfield, review of Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, by Norwood, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41 (Autumn 2010): 324–35.