Halloween and Diwali—A Calendar Coincidence Palooza

Today is both Halloween and the first night of Diwali, two very different observances each with murky origins in dim pre-literate times.  It is also the night of a New Moon, the Catholic All Saints Day and the eve of All Souls Day and the Indio/Mexican Día de los Muertos.  On top of that, a fateful U.S. Presidential Election with its bagful of possible horrors is just five days away.  Ordinarily, that would inspire one of my serendipitous date poems.  But I am having a hard time wrapping my head around this one or finding a creative hook to tie a verse together.

Others, apparently, do not have the same problem.  The Web is afire with memes and notices on Tik-Tok,  YouTube, X, and other social media except Truth Social which does not want to offend Evangelicals or take notice of grubby brown skinned people.  The world press has also chimed in with articles in newspapers and magazines, especially in India where Western Halloween has made cultural inroads in recent years. 

Playful memes combine the celebrations like the skeletons lighting diya lamps. 

My problem is that Halloween and Diwali have little in common.  Both celebrations incorporate  small lamps, but they have different meanings.  Hindus light profusions of diyas, small oil lamps inside and outside of their homes to offer puja (worship) to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and wealth.  In the mystery lore of Halloween a lost soul was condemned to wander for eternity between the gates of Heaven and Hell carrying a hollowed turnip with a candle as a lantern to illuminate his way.  In the U.S. the turnips became pumpkin Jack o’ Lanterns.  Both also share treats—mithai sweets shared with small gifts to family and guests in India and candy as the swag of ritual begging for Halloween.  Finally, both celebrations have pre-historic origins that seem animistic or pantheistic with only fuzzy connections to modern practice.

Diwali seems to stretch back much earlier by millennia to proto-Hindu tribes and clans in the Indus headwaters and valley likely a fusion of harvest festivals in ancient India where each village adored their own local spirits and crypto-gods.  Eventually those spirits were melded and became figures in the Hindu pantheon.  It was mentioned in Sanskrit texts such as the Padma Purana and the Skanda Purana both of which were completed in the second half of the 1st Millennium CE from older texts and oral traditions. The diyas are mentioned in Skanda Kishore Purana as symbolizing parts of the Sun, the cosmic giver of light and energy to all life.  That makes it (usually) the earliest of the Festivals of Life observed by cultures across the Northern Hemisphere.  

William Simpson labelled his chromolithograph of 1867 as Dewali, feast of lamps. It showed streets lit up at dusk, with a girl and her mother lighting a street corner lamp

Halloween arose from the vigorous Celts or Gaels who spread from somewhere in central Asia across much of Europe and  into the British Isles over centuries.  Customs are also attributed to the English Druids who may have been Celtic and/or partly Romanized Briton priests supposedly representing a Quarter festival between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice.  Samhain was particularly important because it was the gate in time to the death and starvation season of winter, as well a time to celebrate the recent harvest. The association with the death of winter also extended to the spirit world, which was considered to be closer to the mortal plane than at any other time of the year.  Druids—marked the occasion with the lighting of bonfires and with gifts of food and drink for the spirits of the dead.

Or so modern Wiccans tell us.  But beginning in the late 19th Century they began confabulating scraps of lore and occasional fancy into a wholly new religion centered around the covens of self-proclaimed witches, warlocks, and wizards who have kept the ancient wisdom alive through persecution by Christians and the disdain of agnostics and humanists.  It never included any form of Satanic Worship—although both Catholics and Puritans would make those charges to justify the orgies of witch burnings in Europe and North America.  Evangelicals still campaign against Halloween in schools and in public.

Details of actual Druid practices are practically unknown but widely imagined as in this illustration of a supposed ritual being confronted and damned by Catholic priests..

On this side of the Pond Halloween slowly took root and morphed into juvenile celebration featuring masquerade and ritual begging similar to Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras.  It did not become pervasive and nearly universal until the post-World War II era and spread like Santa Claus to other cultures across the globe.  

Horror and ultra-violent fantasy became a growing part of Halloween thanks to the influence of both classic Hollywood monsters of the 1930s-‘40s and the slasher blood fests since the ‘70s.  That coincided with the day becoming an adult party excuse second only to New Year’s Eve and is  an economic powerhouse, generating sales second only to Christmas.

Diwali remains a family observation spread out over five days and is so widely celebrated it seems all India is partying.  The diyas drive away any darkness.  It is a festive occasion.

Perhaps a Bollywood musical might be just the ticket for figuring out how to connect the festivals. 

Certainly this poor poet cannot.

 

Bill Mauldin and Willie and Joe Taught Me About War

 

Sgt. Bill Mauldin on the job in Italy covering the war from the front lines for Stars and Stripes.  He looked younger than his 22 years.

When I was a boy I was obsessed with the great event of my parents’ lifetime—World War II.  It was hard not to be.  Almost every house I ever visited had at least one framed photo of a handsome young man in uniform proudly displayed.  Sometimes more.  Husbands, brothers, fathers.  Most came home.  Some did not.

The survivors of those photos were still mostly youngish men in the prime of their lives—my father and the fathers of almost all my friends.  They were serious, hard working men.  They were very busy doing things, sometimes big things.  To a man those I knew best, my father and uncles, could hardly be made to talk about their experiences.  If pressed they would say, “Well, I was in Europe for a while.”  Or “I was a Seabee.”  Further details were seldom forthcoming.

They belonged to the Legion or the VFW, but seemed neither super-patriotic nor querulously eager for the next war.  They took comfort in being around other men who had been there, but they distrusted the occasional braggart and blowhard at the bar.  Their contempt for that ilk was summed up years later in a Bill Mauldin cartoon in the Chicago Sun Times showing one of the bellicose Legion leaders of the Vietnam era beginning and ending his World War II service, “folding blankets in Texas.”

For real information on what our dads did in the war, we had to turn to our mothers.  Mine was glad to share her meticulously kept scrap books with photos, postcards, newspaper clippings, maps, V-mail letters, and even un-used ration stamps.  And she dug out the long buried footlocker in the basement chocked full interesting stuff.  I claimed a khaki overseas cap, which for a season or two I wore everyday in lieu of my customary cowboy hat, a web belt, canteen, mess kit, ammo pouches, a gas mask bag, and a helmet liner.  I was outfitted well for the endless games of war the neighborhood boys played in backyards among hedges and window wells.

On Sunday afternoons I was glued to the TV documentaries about the war that were still a staple of the air—the Army’s The Big Picture, Victory at Sea, Silent Service, and most episodes of Walter Cronkite’s The Twentieth Century.  And then there were the old films that played on the daily movie matinee show which came on just as I got home from school.  I thought I knew what war was about.

Finding a well-thumbed copy of Mauldin's Up Front was an eye-opener for World War II teen fan boy in Cheyenne,  So was Ernie Pile's collected columns in This is Your War. 

But of course, I didn’t know squat.  Until I found in my mother’s bookshelves well-thumbed editions of This is Your War, a collection of columns by the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle and a couple of collections of Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoons for Stars and Stripes.

Both Pyle and Mauldin rose to fame covering the brutal, unglamorous Italian campaign as troops slogged slowly north through the Boot against stubborn German resistance, treacherous mountainous terrain, rubble strewn street fighting, supply shortages, and often incompetent leadership.  So much for Winston Churchill’s “soft underbelly of Europe.”  Fighting there dragged on after it was relegated to a side show and Allied troops, liberated at last from the Normandy beaches, were racing across France far to the north.

Both men talked about the war from the front line perspective of the G.I. dogface—exhausted, bitter, cynical, stripped of all illusions of glory, immune to patriotic exhortations, and suffering as much at the hands of clueless generals and idiot second lieutenants as from the usually unseen Nazis.  Pyle drew the picture with words.  Mauldin just drew the picture.

And remarkably, he did so in the official G.I. newspaper Stars and Stripes as a sergeant in the Army he chronicled.  Willie and Joe were his creations to represent the lives of the grunts on the ground.  They were unshaven, slovenly, and perpetually exhausted.  They looked in those drawings like old men.  But Mauldin, who was only 22 and looked years younger, pointed out that Willie and Joe were the same age he was.  War did that to them.

 

Stuff like this jab a Old Blood and Guts got Mauldin personally called on the carpet by George Patton.  General Eisenhower had to personally intervene to keep him out of trouble and in print.

The old spit-and-polish brass hated Mauldin and often tried to get him banned from the paper or refused to issue passes to their front line units—where he went anyway, regardless of any stinking passes.  General George Patton called him to his headquarters and threatened to have him arrested for disturbing morale.  Dwight Eisenhower had to personally intercede with orders to leave Mauldin alone.  He thought the comics helped his men “let off steam.”

Mauldin was born on October 29, 1921 in Mountain Park, New Mexico.  His family was no stranger to the military.  His grandfather was a cavalry scout in the campaigns against the Apache.  His father was an artilleryman in World War I.

The family moved to Phoenix, Arizona where Mauldin finished high school and became interested in art.  He enlisted in the Arizona National Guard, but was able to go to Illinois where he attended classes at Ruth VanSickle Ford’s Chicago Academy of Fine Art.

He never completed his studies.  He was called up from the Guard to active duty in 1940.  He was assigned to the 45th Division, the first all-Guard unit activated prior to America’s entry into the war and made up units from New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma including many Native Americans.

Mauldin was a good soldier despite his almost childish appearance.  He advanced to the rank of sergeant quickly and began contributing cartoons to the Division newspaper.  While still training stateside he created Willie and Joe, based on his best friend and himself.  When the unit deployed overseas he was assigned to the Division Press Office.  He did not consider that to be behind the lines duty.

When the Division landed in Sicily in July of 1943 for its first combat operations, Mauldin was right there with the front line infantry.  He stayed there.  He was with them again on September 10 when the Division landed at Agropoli and Paestum, the southernmost beachheads of the Salerno campaign.  Thus began the long, grinding inch-by-inch slog up the length of the Italian Boot.

Mauldin’s cartoons were being reprinted in Stars and Stripes and in February 1944 he was transferred to the Army newspaper, issued a Jeep and given nearly a carte blanche to cover the front as he thought best.  His reputation among G.I.s was high and everywhere he went they welcomed him even if officers were usually mortified.  Recognition that he often took the same risks as infantrymen won him credibility, especially after he was wounded by mortar fire while visiting a machine gun crew near Monte Cassino. 

                       Bogged down hopelessly in Italy, Willie and Joe were a tad cynical about all of the glory of D-Day.

He returned to the front and his drawings, which were now also being circulated by the Army to civilian papers in the States.  The Brass felt that the cartoons would make clear to the public the realities of the war and explain the slow pace of advance in Italy to a public which expected quick victories.

Mauldin was awarded the Legion of Merit, an award usually given to field grade officers in combat operations.  At the end of European operations, Mauldin wanted to have Willie and Joe killed on the last day of combat, a final thumb of the nose to the futility of war.  The horrified Brass quickly nixed that idea.

Back in the States and out of the service, Mauldin found himself something of a celebrity.  He had even made the cover of Time.  He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945.  His first book Up Front, one of the books I purloined from my mother’s selves, was a best seller.  It contained many of the best Willie and Joe cartoons along with no-holds-barred essays that stripped all glory from war.

A defiant liberal, Mauldin found it difficult to fit into an America in the throes of Red Scare paranoia and hardening conservatism.  His attempts to establish a career as an editorial cartoonist were stymied as newspapers shied away from controversial content especially when he echoed the views of the American Civil Liberties Union and its opposition to witch hunts, blacklists, and attacks on individuals for their political opinions.

Willie and Joe had a hard time adjusting to civilian life back home.  Work was hard to find, their relationships broken or strained, and uncomfortable in the emerging post-war red scare.  In this panel Mauldin took a swipe at hardening racial and religious attitudes.    

He tried to transition Willie and Joe to civilian life and chronicled the hard times they had fitting in.  The public wasn’t interested.

Discouraged, Mauldin turned to illustrating magazine articles and books.  He even tried his hand at acting, appearing with another youthful looking veteran, Audie Murphy, in the Civil War film, The Red Badge of Courage.

Mauldin starred with another young vet, Audie Murphy who was the most decorated soldier of World War II, in John Huston's adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. 

Mauldin also struggled with his personal life.  He married three times and fathered eight children.

In 1956 at the height of the Cold War Mauldin ran for Congress in a rural Upstate New York District as a peace Democrat.  He campaigned hard and was personally well received by local farmers—until his foreign policy positions failed to match to staunch conservatism of the district.

Liberal Bill Mauldin was not a good fit for the conservative, anti-Communist Up State New York Congressional District in his run for Congress. 

In 1958 he finally got steady work as staff editorial cartoonist for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch and the national syndication that went with it.  Ironically, Mauldin’s still struggling career got a boost when he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for a cartoon that was acceptable to the anti-Communist crowd.  It pictured Boris Pasternak, author of Dr Zhivago in a Soviet Gulag asking a fellow inmate, “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?”  In fact, the cartoon was in line with Mauldin’s consistent defense of the rights of free speech and civil liberties.

Mauldin moved in 1962 to the Chicago Sun-Times, Marshal Field’s liberal challenger to Col. Robert McCormick’s hyper-conservative Chicago Tribune.  It gave him a supportive home for outstanding political cartooning for the rest of his career.  Mauldin’s editorial page panel was one of the big reasons I was a dedicated reader of that paper for years.

                                Mauldin captured the mood of the country in his iconic drawing the day after the Kennedy Assassination

Among his famous Sun-Times cartoons was the picture of Lincoln seated in the Lincoln Memorial burring his face in his hands the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy—which inexplicably failed to win a third Pulitzer.    He was a bitter opponent of the Vietnam War and supporter of anti-war protestors.  His cartoons during and after the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 featured Mayor Richard J. Daley as a Keystone Kop, which made Hizonor apoplectic.

Mauldin's depiction of Mayor Daley as a Keystone cop during and after the 1968 Democratic National Convention enraged undisputed Boss of Chicago politics.  He also took swipes at the Chicago press and media, including his own Sun-Times, for their often fawning coverage of Hizzoner as the master of the "city that works." 

Mauldin retired in 1991.  He was missed.  He occasionally contributed a cartoon and did several interviews.  He entertained old friends and admirers.

But his fine, sharp mind was fading.  Suffering from Alzheimer’s Mauldin was badly scalded in bathtub accident and died in great pain in Newport Beach, California on January 11, 2002.  He was buried with so many of his fallen comrades at Arlington National Cemetery.

Willie and Joe endure.
 

When You Wear a Hat as Long as I Have —Murfin Verse Redux

The hat was still young and healthy when I wore it at this Peace Vigil in Harvard, Illinois in March of 2002.

Ten years ago back in 2014 I was stumped for a blog post.  Everything I found either bored me or would require an enormous effort to research and probably turn into one of those things that runs to 6,000 words.  I know that no one reads those posts unless a blood relative is the subject.  Sometimes I do them anyway if the topic interests me, but I always regret it.  Anyway, both stumped and unmotivated.  So I lay idly on a couch for an hour or so, turning my old brown felt hat over and over in my hand closely examining the damning evidence of long hard usage.  After a while I said to myself—aloud because the house was empty—“I may as well just write about the damn thing!”  Five minutes later I was pounding out the ode below. 

The hat in question was a Christmas gift from my wife Kathy in 2001.  I was in desperate need of a new dress lid.  My everyday work hat was an Indiana Jones style brown fedora I had acquired in the mid-80’s and re-creased into my favored style with a peaked center ridge pinched on either side and the brim slouched.  I wore it every day to work as a head building custodian in Cary, Illinois and to whatever second job I held—at the time a second shift gas station clerk  at a Crystal Lake Mobile.  It was battered, sweat stained, filthy, and looked like it had been run over by a garbage truck.

An ancestral Open Road in Old Town's Piper's Ally in 1970.  This is the one I wore all through the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations demonstrations.

The trouble was my dress hat was not in much better shape, even though it was a much higher quality sombrero.  I ran across it, as I recall, in a thrift shop and I snatched it up for four or five bucks.  It was a nice off white Stetson Felt Open Road.  I had likewise reshaped it but with it higher crown  and with a broader brim bound with a ribbed silk ribbon it had once gleamed spectacularly atop my head.  It was then only five years old but because of  it its light color now looked grimy and dingy.  A hole was even emerging from the front of the peak where I grabbed the hat between my thumb and forefingers to take off and on.  It clearly no longer qualified as my dress hat and Kathy was embarrassed to be seen with me in either hat.  She was a motivated giver.

Kathy spotted the hat on sale during a Christmas shopping expedition we made to Springhill Mall, the closest big merchandising Mecca in a still bustling Sears.  Later, when we split up to check out other stores in the Mall, she doubled back and bought it then hid it somehow in the car.  It was a light brown, soft felt with a low, flat crown and a wide brim.  It had a narrow, light beige suede band that had not been well cut—it varied in width from here to there.  It was a then popular style of an exaggerated fedora with an extra wide brim but was on the low end of the quality scale.  She paid about $15 for her prize.  With three young adult children and their spouses or mates and three grandchildren there was damn little money to frivol away on the Old Man.

When I opened her present on Christmas morning, I was a bit skeptical.  I had never worn a hat with that low a crown.  It would not hold my attempts to re-crease it in my favored center peak.  It would just pop back into shape.  The damn hat had a will of its own.  It would not be anything other than how it was made.  Sigh.  But I needed a hat, so I put it to work.

A week after Christmas it got it’s baptism of activism, when I wore it to a small New Year’s Day peace vigil organized  by the American Friends Service Committee—the Quakers—by winter dormant Buckingham Fountain in Chicago.  Kathy and I met my former sister-in-law Arlene Brennan and her husband Michael, my nephew Ira S. Murfin and a girl he knew who was on her way to a winter job shooing bison back into Yellowstone Park to keep them from being shot by Montana ranchers.  

        The hat and I at the Haymarket monument in Chicago one May Day after I led a Labor service at a U.U. Congregation. 

It was the first of scores of vigils, marches, rallies, and demonstrations over the next 16 years at which I wore the hat.  Paired with a trench coat, it went with me to a giant anti-war march in Washington, D.C. in January and sheltered my head through weekly roadside vigils that the McHenry County Peace Group kept up over the next two and a half years through all sorts of inclement weather.

When I wrote and posted my poem ten years ago, the old chapeau was still in daily service.  Today it has been demoted to rough duty status.  Although it has held its shape remarkably well and resists  popping holes  at pressure points—which eventually dooms my higher quality Stetsons—the fading and sweat stains can no longer be ignored.  I no longer wear it for regular daily use unless there is heavy rain—its broad brim makes it the best rain hat I ever had.  It also holds up well when it is snowing so hard it measurably accumulates on the brim.  I still throw it on for yard work, snow shoveling, or  when I just go out to fetch the newspaper in the pre-dawn gloaming.

 

            The "new" every day hat, then nine years old, on the Old Man's head in Woodstock in 2018.  Photo by Bill Delaney.  

The old brown hat was replaced for dress and then everyday use by a grey Bailey’s U-Roll-It that I picked up in Sheridan, Wyoming back in 2009.  It is very different from the old brown one—curled brim with the front slouched down and a higher crown.  It shows its age too but is still serviceable for the general running around of a retired geezer.

The black best dress hat celebrating with Mother Jones on her instillation in the Chicago Irish American Hall of Fame at the Irish American Cultural Center in 2019.

Another Christmas some years ago Kathy got me another new dress hat.  This one is very nice but black, a hat color I had never worn.  I have to keep the new hat in a tightly closed plastic bag because each speck of dust stands out against the black.

 

                The new brown dress hat got an early spin at Joe Cavallo's Paladins of Poetry reading in Crystal Lake.

Since I wear the black hat only for weddings, funerals, and other state occasions, last Christmas I picked out a new dress hat—a nice brown Cody James model perfect for date nights with Kathy and Sunday  Sunday morning go to meeting.

When You Wear a Hat as Long as This One

 

When you wear a hat as long as this one—

            you know, the old brown one

            with the broad flat brim

            and low crown,

            the one Kathy bought you for Christmas

            the holiday after 9/11—

you learn to understand that the Universe

            is falling down upon you day after day

            that stardust, ashes, and cat dander

            sift unseen and constant

            day after day,

            year after year,

            one decade into the next

drifting into the creases of the crown,

            balling just a tad if you rub your

            thumb or fingers across the brim

            which has subtly changed color

            under the weight

nothing to be done about it

            the heaviest downpour does not

            wash it away,

            nor can you brush it,

            or beat it against your leg,

the stuff clings to the fine wool fibers

            of the soft felt

            and where the sweat and

            oil from your dirty hair

            touch it, it becomes a little hard

            and shiny

and the old band twisted and stained

            must be covered by one braided from

            bright fabrics somewhere in Nicaragua

            and even that band is faded and

            dusted in its folds and knots,

and the universe continues to fall unconcerned.

 

—Patrick Murfin

It’s Harvard’s Birthday Like It or Not

 

Two years after its founding as The College at New Town, John Harvard, a young Puritan minister died and left a tidy fortune and a 400 book library to the school which was shortly re-named in his honor.  No reliable portrait of Harvard exists, but the College erected a statue anyway.  Note the hand rubbing his toe--a good luck tradition among students that leaves that toe preternaturally bright and shiny.

Flags at half staff at Fox News and Make America Great Again prayer breakfasts.  On October 28, 1636 the greatest bastion of “cultural elitism” in American history came into being and despite stiff competition, it remains a force with tendrils deep into the highest echelons of government, law, business, and the arts.    

It was on this day that the College at New Towne was created by an act of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  New Towne was just up the Charles River from Boston would soon be named Cambridge, in honor of the English university where many leading citizens had received their education.  A fitting name for the home of the very first institution of higher learning in North America.

This was only 16 years after Separatist dissenters, known to us as the Pilgrims, established a tiny colony at Plymouth and eight years since the dour Puritans had established themselves.  Despite a steadily growing population due to new arrivals from England and extraordinary fertility, settlements still clung close to the coast and not many miles inland was still a “howling wilderness” populated by Native tribes and confederacies.  The urgent mission of the school was to train new Puritan divines to fill the pulpits of the town churches that the members of the General Court were sure would be built.  The school began with one Master, Nathaniel Eaton, and nine students. 

After just two years of existence and without graduating a single student the struggling College received a startling and totally unexpected windfall.  John Harvard was a young Puritan minister who had arrived in the New World in 1637 and was settled as minister in Charlestown.  He was the son of a butcher and tavern keeper who rose in the world. In 1625, his father, a stepsister, and two brothers died of the plague.  Only his mother and one brother survived.  His mother remarried and was widowed twice more by men of substance.  She was able to send her son to the Puritan hot bed of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from which he graduated in 1632.  

His mother died in 1635 and his brother in 1737 leaving John the unexpected heir of a small fortune.  Unfortunately the minister contracted the dreaded consumption (tuberculosis) and was dead within a year.  Among Harvard’s closest friends was Eaton, the Master of the New School.  In his will Harvard donated his impressive library of more than 400 volumes to the school in addition to £779 17s 2d, half of the cash value of his estate.  Eaton was entrusted with using it for the benefit of the school.

Eaton put the money to work right away.  He saw to the erection of a fine frame two story building with a stone foundation and a cellar.   The building could supposedly house the Master and up to 30 students with a parlor for instruction. The property included its own apple orchard, barn, and garden plot.  Eaton was glad to rename the school Harvard College on March 13, 1639.

The wood frame Old College was built in 1638 largely with John Harvard's bequest and stood until it burned down in 1670.
 

Eaton was not to enjoy his stewardship of the college for long.  He and his family ran afoul of  notoriously high handed Governor John Winthrop.  Eaton was fired and brought up on charges that he had “whipped too harshly” two of his students and that his wife had served others hasty pudding contaminated with goat feces—an event which inspired the name for a much later college humor society.  After being convicted, Eaton fled to Virginia and was later accused by the Governor of absconding with £100 of the Harvard bequest—an allegation that dogged the man until his dying day in an English debtor’s prison.

Eaton was succeeded in 1640 by Henry Dunster, the first man to hold the title President.  The first students graduated in 1642. During his tenure, in 1650 Harvard College received its official Charter. Dunster remained in his post until 1654 when he too ran afoul of Puritan authorities in a dispute over infant baptism.

Harvard was never officially affiliated with the church.  It didn’t need to be.  The authorities of Massachusetts Bay assumed that all institutions would be subject to “instruction” by a virtual theocracy.  A 1643 pamphlet summarized the mission of the college, “To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churche.”

In the early years there periodic eruptions of campus misbehavior and scandal—even Puritan boys away from home for the first time were apt to go a bit wild, drinking, gambling, whoring, insulting good townsfolk, and occasionally openly rebelling against bad food, inept instruction, and capricious discipline.  These instances were usually met with canings, expulsions, prosecution by local authorities, and—once in a while—the dismissal of faculty members for being too lax or too harsh.

Despite this, the College was succeeding in supplying new ministers—plenty of them, even more than there were pulpits to fill.   Its classic education, drawn from the colleges of Cambridge in the Mother Country, however, was a suitable preparation for other professions as well.  Soon the college produced lawyers in as great abundance as divines, followed by medical doctors.  Even failed students who did not succeed in a profession could fall back upon the calling of the desperate gentleman—school mastering.  Others found their way into business, particularly maritime trade, where a good education in figures stood them well.

In 1664 the College building burned to the ground taking with it all but one of John Harvard’s library books.  It was quickly replaced with grander accommodations.

Concerned with both rowdyism on campus and creeping infidelity, Increase Mather, the powerful pastor of Boston’s North Church, was named Acting President in 1685, named Rector following year, and made permanent President in 1692.  Although not in residence on campus, and seldom even a visitor, Mather instituted sweeping changes in curriculum and discipline.  He purged classic, but heathen Latin writers from the curriculum, instituted study of Greek and Hebrew and emphasized Biblical text and commentaries by Christian writers.  To reign in the unruly students, he enforced rules that they must live and dine on campus.  Mather held sway at Harvard until 1701.

Despite the turmoil and the rigidity of Puritanism, Harvard had done its job well.  At the dawn of 18th Century New England had the highest concentration of college graduates in the world, the most literate general population, and quite likely the highest standard of living.  Although the society had a rigid social structure, it was not a hierarchy of unbreakable class or caste distinction.  The sons of farmers and tradesmen, could, and often did, acquire an advanced education and rise to prominence.  A profusion of ministers, lawyers, teachers and merchants trained at Harvard provided a core of educated civic leadership that was unmatched.

However much Mather and his Puritan peers might have wished it, however, an education inevitably caused inconvenient questioning of authority and received wisdom.  Mather’s successor as President was John Leverett, the first non-minister to serve.  He quietly began distancing the college from control by the Boston clergy.  In the next century the ideas of the Enlightenment would begin to percolate through the school, as well as a growing restiveness with Calvinist rigidity.

Harvard Yard in 1740, soon educating a generation that would spark a Revolution.

Graduates of Harvard like Samuel and John Adams were to become leaders of the drive for Independence.  When the notions of Harvard cross fertilized with Virginian aristocrats who had been schooled by tutors and at institutions like the College of William and Mary where the radical notions of the Scottish Enlightenment held sway, there was revolution in political thought as well as simply politics.

The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a university occurred in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.  Undergraduates still attended Harvard College, with the University offering graduate education in many fields.

Through the last half of the 1700s, Harvard and the ministers it was still producing became more and more unorthodox.  Rival Yale, founded the same year as Mather left the helm of Harvard, was soon seen as an orthodox bastion against Harvard liberalism.  In 1805 the Harvard Board of Overseers filled the Hollis Chair of Religion with liberal Henry Ware, Sr. a move that would eventually lead to the rupture of the New England Standing Order and would leave Unitarians firmly in control of the College, and over most of the congregations of Eastern Massachusetts.  The orthodox Congregationalists responded by founding Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 to train reliable clergy.

Henry Ware, Sr. whose appointment to the Holis Chair of Religion set off the Unitarian Controversy eventually leading to a schism in the New England Standing Order and established Unitarian dominance over the Harvard for the next 150 years.

Over the next fifty years a Unitarian establishment came to dominate the College.  Early on  Unitarians and High Federalists instituted a series of societies and institutions on campus meant to shore up their authority against possible challenges by orthodox Congregationalists.  Ironically, the religious liberals instituted an illiberal regime that was constantly being challenged.  And the challenge was not only from the orthodox. 

By the 1840 Unitarians of Ware’s sort were seen as enforces of their own orthodoxy and were the subject of rebellion by a new wave of philosophy—Transcendentalism exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson who shocked sensibilities with his Divinity School Address.  Many Harvard graduates became leading members of the New England Renaissance, a cultural phenomenon that gave the nation its first full throated literary voice.

Harvard Presidents--Unitarians all--spanning 1829-1862.  From right to left in order of their service--Josiah Qunincy III, scion of a distinguished Massachusetts family;  famed orator Edward Everett;  Jared Sparks whose ordination was the occasion of William Ellery Channing's Baltimore Sermon which was the a virtual Unitarian declaration of a unique identity; James Walker, and Cornelius Conway. 

By the Civil War, Harvard had become the firm foundation of the rule of Boston and Massachusetts by an insular elite—the Boston Brahmins.  The management by a succession of stodgy Unitarian Presidents nearly killed the college by the Civil War, however.  Wealthy Bostonians were becoming reluctant to entrust their young men to religious indoctrination and not practical training for the business world.

To the rescue came yet another Unitarian, Charles William Eliot who became president in 1869.  He was a trained scientist and had attended the advanced polytechnic universities of Europe.  He was also a Transcendentalist who determined to secularize the college in order to free the minds of the students.  

Under his long leadership he instituted the New Education meant to enable students to make intelligent choices, but did not attempt to provide specialized vocational or technical training.  He radically reformed and expanded the curriculum, supplementing the traditional Classics education with a broader sampling of the humanities including modern language and literature as well as a firm grounding in science and mathematics.  He instituted an elective system that let students participate in building their own education.  He reformed graduate schools and added new ones, emphasizing original research as well as instruction.  

An administrative reformer as well, Elliot reorganized the faculty into schools and departments and replaced recitations with lectures and seminars. He encouraged both private and public secondary schools to change their curricula to prepare for college admission, thus almost single handily inventing the modern High School.  He instituted admission to the school by standardized testing. 

 

Long time Harvard President Charles William Eliot transformed Harvard into a modern research university and the most prestigious school in the United States.

A tireless fundraiser, he solicited the generous support of the very wealthy to create a huge endowment and build the many new structures his expanding university required.  In doing so he tied Harvard closely to the emerging plutocracy of Gilded Age America.  Although a noted progressive and liberal—he insisted on educating Blacks and admitting Jews, for instance, he displayed class loyalty by fierce opposition to unionism and the labor movement and encouraging Harvard students to actively become strike breakers. By the time Eliot’s tenure ended in 1909 Harvard had been transformed into a world class research university.

Over the rest of the 20th Century Harvard evolved away from being a de facto Unitarian fiefdom.  They ceased to dominate the Corporation.  Presidents came from other religions and traditions.  The very Brahmin elite that had empowered Unitarian domination was dispersing and drifting away from the New England tribal faith to more conservative, conventional, and less controversial faiths.  While Harvard Divinity School remained an important and prestigious training ground for Unitarian Universalist ministers—indeed bright pink Harvard doctoral robes are still a passport to the most prestigious pulpits, and leadership positions within the Unitarian Universalist Association—most students and graduates are now not UUs.  Indeed for several years there were no active Unitarian or Universalist professors at all on the faculty until the endowment of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Chair of Divinity and the appointment of its first professor in 2008.

Jews and Catholics, previously admitted on a strict quota basis, began being admitted in large numbers beginning in the 1960’s.  Black and other minority students became actively recruited and supported as the 20th Century closed.  Harvard absorbed Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 as the Harvard Annex for Women in 1977 making it fully co-educational.  Women now are a majority in the College and are enrolled in large numbers in all graduate schools.  .

Today Harvard remains the most prestigious American University with 2,000 faculty to teach and advise approximately 6,700 undergraduate and 13,600 graduate and professional students in 12 degree-granting Schools and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  The Harvard University Library is the largest academic library in the United States, and the second largest library in the country.  

Harvard President Claudine Gay being grilled by a Congressional hearing.

Harvard displayed it’s institutional commitment to diversity of it student body, faculty, and leadership in 2023 when Claudine Gay was named the 30th President amid much hoopla.  She was a political scientist, academic administrator, and  the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies whose research addressed American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.  Her appoint was seen as a slap to the long campaign of conservatives to overturn consideration of race in admission policies and sniping at every work-around the University came up with to still insure full and equitable participation by racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.  She had also been prominent in supporting Black Lives Matter protests both on and off campus.  

But after just a year in office Gay was forced to resign after she defended the right to protest by War in Gaza activists  and campus organizations who were charged with being Anti-Semitic in their attacks on Israel and Jews in general.  She was grilled and humiliated by a Republican-led Congressional investigation and many Democrats with historic ties to Israel and major Jewish American organizations  chimed in.  Along with two other University Presidents she was forced to resign for failing to use maximum police force to clear their campuses of tent cities and daily protests.   

Harvard is—by a wide margin—also the wealthiest school in the world.  In June 2009 the University had an endowment of $25.7 billion despite having lost maybe as much of half of its value in the economic crisis of 2008.  The losses have resulted in some major finger pointing—largely at former President Lawrence Summers who departed a controversy wracked tenure to become President Barak Obama’s top economic advisor.  The losses caused some belt tightening, the delay of a capital project or two and a review of a previously announced policy that would make undergraduate admission free to needy students.  But the Stock Market has recovered its losses and regularly flirts with record highs.   Even with calls to boycott contributions from wealthy Jews and other donors,  no one is going to have to hold a bake sale for Harvard any time soon.

Most universities like to list a handful of distinguished alumni in their brochures.  It would take a phone book for Harvard with 8 Presidents of the United States including both George W. Bush and Barak Obama and 21 Supreme Court Justices.

The school, even with a far more diversified student body than in the past, continues to pump its graduates into all of the elite institutions in the nation.  Since most of them can read, write, and formulate independent informed opinion, this continues to depress and outrages the Right.