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.
 

Boston’s Riot on Broad Street—Fire Brigades Attack Catholics

Generic early 19th Century depiction of rioting/street brawl represents the kind of melee that erupted on Boston's Broad Street in  1837

It began, as so many unpleasant things do, with a traffic jam of sorts.  It was June 11, 1837 and the place was Boston a/k/a the Hub of the Universe.  After fighting a fire in neighboring Roxbury the volunteer firefighters of Fire Engine Company 20 had stopped at a saloon to wash the smoke out of their throats.  After refreshing themselves they departed to make their way back to the station.  They found their way blocked by a passing Irish funeral parade.  An outraged fireman, named George Fey began cursing at the mourners then took a shove at one of them.  Instantly a melee erupted and quickly escalated as paving stones were hurled and all manner of makeshift weapons, including the brigade’s fire axes, were deployed.

Fire Captain W. W. Miller ordered his men to make a run for the firehouse.  When they got there Miller sounded an alarm that called out all of the city’s fire brigades.  Those heroes rushed to the scene and along with Company 20 to the scene of the initial fight.  By that time the funeral procession had passed but the commotion had attracted a crowd which the firefighters immediately attacked.

It was called the Broad Street Riot, and became the greatest street disturbance in the city’s history.  About 1000 people on both sides engaged in a furious street battle.  Fire fighters chased their foes inside some homes which were then systematically smashed up.  Although no one was known to be killed outright, fighting went on for hours.

Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot, a prominent Unitarian, called out the Militia to quell the riot.

It was broken up when Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot—Unitarians will recognize the name as a member of that faith’s most distinguished family—who had been on the scene of the original fire, arrived with 10 companies of militia he had hastily called out.  The violence was quelled, but not the simmering rage boiling between the immigrant Catholic Irish and Boston’s working class Protestants.  The fine lads of the fire brigades, you see, were all recruited among the city’s Protestant laborers, apprentices, and shop clerks.  No Irish need apply.

Boston, founded by Puritans, had a tradition of rabid anti-Catholicism stretching back well before the American Revolution.  It was then the custom for gangs of apprentices and laborers to gather every year on Guy Fawkes Day—called locally Pope Day—for parades bearing effigies of the Pope to be burned.  Gangs from the North and South sides would customarily run into each other and engage in a semi-ritualistic gang brawl between them.  All of this in a city virtually bereft of any actual Catholics, except whatever seamen might be lounging around the port. It took a shrewd organizer, Samuel Adams, to transform these street hooligans into the muscle of the Sons of Liberty.

After the Revolution when Boston’s municipal volunteer fire companies were organized, they were drawn from the same pool.

Volunteer fire brigades like this one required a lot of manpower to pull the engine through the streets, handle hoses and bucket brigades, and tear down burning walls.  The men in Boston were recruited among Protestant apprentices, laborers, and street toughs and were idolized in their community.

Boston had recovered as a major port and trading center.  By the turn of the 19th Century it was beginning to attract immigrants, especially from Ireland, seeking work.  Most of them were Catholics.  There was plenty of work and whatever resentment the locals might have was kept in check by prosperity.  But President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on trade with warring European powers and the War of 1812 all but destroyed Boston’s commerce and led to a regional depression.  Tensions mounted between Yankees and Micks.  Street brawls became common.

The first ever public Catholic Mass in Boston was not held until 1788.  In 1803 the Catholics were numerous and prosperous enough to open Holy Cross Church, designed by the same architect—Charles Bulfinch—who was building the city’s impressive churches for the Standing Order.   By 1808 there were enough Catholics—the vast majority of the Irish—to establish the Diocese of Boston. The first Bishop was Jean Cheverus, a refugee from the French Revolution.  

After the War of 1812, commerce resumed, and so did prosperity.  New waves of immigrants arrived.  Catholics began building not only churches but other institutions—a convent and schools.  This rapid rise of Catholics in their midst inflamed the Protestant Clergy as much as job competition inflamed the working class.  Denouncing insidious Popery in thundering terms became common on Sunday mornings and the city’s several religious periodicals could be relied on for more.

No matter how theologically liberal the Boston clergy were—and most of them were very liberal religiously and would soon formally break from the Calvinist Standing Order and become openly Unitarian—few of its members could resist the siren call of anti-Popery.  Rhetoric heated up which seemed to give a sanction to anti-Catholic street violence.

As fire brigades stood by a Protestant mob burned the Ursuline Convent and Girl's Academy.

Things really blew up in 1834 in Charleston—now the Somerville neighborhood of Boston—home to a large population of working class Protestants.  It was also the site of a Convent of Ursuline Nuns, and the academy for girls that they operated.  Since no other equivalently high quality education was available to girls in Boston, many of the city’s Unitarian elite had enrolled their daughters there, regardless of warnings from their ministers.  In 1834 the school had 47 students, only six of whom were Catholic.  The neighborhood Protestants resented both Catholics and the haughty Bostonian elite.

Rumors circulated of Protestant girls being “sold” to the convent.  Then in August word began to circulate about a nun who possibly wanted to leave the convent, but was prevented from doing so.  Inflamed by a circular calling on the citizenry to intervene to free the mysterious woman, a mob gathered on the evening of August 11.  Early the next morning they rushed the convent with torches and burning tar barrels.  The nuns and students barely had time to escape and hide in the garden while the building was vandalized then set on fire.  Responding fire brigades not only refused to extinguish the flames, but they joined the rioters.  The building burned to the ground in two hours.

The following morning Mayor Theodore Lyman convened a meeting at Faneuil Hall to try to calm the situation and instigate an investigation into the arson.  Bishop Benedict Fenwick called another meeting about the same time at Holy Cross, now officially a cathedral at which he tried to keep the outraged Irish from pouring into the streets to seek revenge.  He was largely successful.

But a new Protestant mob assembled and marched first to Faneuil Hall with the intent of breaking up the Mayor’s meting and then on to the Cathedral.  They were foiled at both points by a Militia guard.  After failing to procure arms from the guarded arsenal they proceeded on to the Convent.  In a frenzy as the Convent itself still smoldered the mob destroyed the gardens and orchards, set bonfires, and pulled down fences before exhausting their fury.

The city’s clergy were divided by the convent riot.  Orthodox ministers including Lyman Beecher, soon to rise to fame as a leading abolitionist either openly cheered the rioters or found excuses for their actions in supposed Catholic immorality and exploitation of pure womanhood.  The city’s Unitarian divines generally decried the violence but refrained from any action or speech which could be considered coming to the defense of Catholics.  The only sympathy came from Bishop Fenwick’s personal friend, the Universalist Hosea Ballou, himself an outcast from the local religious establishment.

The self-confessed ring leader of the riot, John R. Buzzell and a dozen others were charged and brought to trial, but Buzzell boasted: 

The testimony against me was point blank and sufficient to have convicted twenty men, but somehow I proved an alibi, and the jury brought in a victory of not guilty, after having been out for twenty-one hours.

In the end only one defendant, a 16 year old boy seen burning a book after the main arson, was convicted.  The boy had no attorney and not a friend in the world.  He became a safe designated scape goat and was sentenced to life in prison.  That sentence was so manifestly unjust and out of line that Bishop Fenwick and Mother Superior Sister Mary St. George joined 5,000 local citizens petitioning for a commutation of sentence for the boy.  He was eventually released.

Catholic demands for restitution for the failure of authorities to protect their property kept the memory of the Convent Riot alive in both communities as the Boston City Council, Charleston Town Meeting, the County of Middlesex, and the Massachusetts legislature all considered and rejected claims year after year.

Anti-Catholic cartoons like this kept Protestant workers inflamed.

Tensions between Catholics and Protestants remained high.  Then in January of 1836 Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed was published and became an instant best seller.  In fact it was said to be the mostly widely read American book between Parson’s Weems’s spurious biography of George Washington and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  The book was a pot boiler novel supposedly written by Maria Monk, a young woman who had escaped from a convent.  It told a hair-raising story of sexual exploitation.  The book, since proven to be almost total fabrication, fueled new waves of anti-Catholicism and led directly to the emergence of the Know Nothings, a rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant secret society and political party.

Given this kind of history, the Broad Street Riot comes clearly into focus.  Fourteen Irish and four Protestants were brought to trial.  Like the earlier Convent Riot, no Protestants were convicted.  The four Irish were all sentenced to terms in the work house.

The riot did cause Mayor Eliot to institute two reforms.  First, he established a paid Fire Department under the authority of the Mayor and Council.  The volunteer brigades were abolished, although almost all of the members of the new professional Department were drawn from their ranks.  Second, he established a Day Police to supplement the existing Night Watch. The two were soon merged into the Boston Police Department.  Recruitment into the new department came mostly from the Irish community.  The Fire and Police Departments remained largely segregated for decades.

Two versions of the riot were told and kept alive in their communities.  The popular version among working class Protestants was that the fire brigade was rushing to a fire when blocked by arrogant Irish mourners who would not let them pass.  In some versions children or whole families perished in the flames.  It was manifestly not true.  

That did not stop it from being believed and the story is retold to this day. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a popular Ska and proto-punk band in the 1990’s sang:

The Boston fire-fighting volunteers
On their way to fight a fire somewhere 
Met with a funeral procession 
Proceeding way too slow 
A brownstone burns out of control 
We need to lay to rest this soul 
Loggerheads on Broad Street Eye to eye and toe to toe.
Broad Street’s just not broad enough 
And you just don’t love God enough…

A new wave of immigrants arrived in the 1840’s spurred by the Irish Potato Famine, and the flood gates of Europe opened up after the Civil War.  Catholics gained a majority in the city population and led by Irish politicians seized the City government, a move as bitterly resented by the class of Unitarian Brahmins who were used to running things as by the still large Protestant working class.

Meanwhile the enthusiasm for reform among the intellectual elite of Boston tended to grow in direct proportion to the growing Irish Catholic population.  Early support for moderation in alcohol use was transformed into a temperance movement aimed squarely at the taverns of the scary, rowdy Irish.  Free public education was supported as a counter to the Catholic’s system of parochial schools.  Compulsory public schooling was at first meant to close the Catholic schools and place children into public schools where they would be inoculated with Protestant values.  Crusades for decency and morality in entertainment were aimed at popular amusements.  What Do-gooders saw as reform, the working class Irish recognized as a cultural attack upon them.

Late 19th Century resentments resulted the persistence of the No Irish Need Apply signs still frequently seen in shops and factories.  The politics of Boston and those signs would be bitterly remembered by Joseph P. Kennedy when he became a fabulously rich man married to a daughter of the former Boston Mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.  He would inoculate his sons, and by extension their children with a resentment of the WASP elite, and a determination to prove themselves better than any of them.

Members of the almost all Irish Boston Police Department leave a 1919 strike meeting.  WASP governor Calvin Coolidge crushed the strike with National Guard troops and banned the strikers for life from any public employment souring still strong resentments in Boston's Irish Southie community that have lingered to this day.

While Protestant/Catholic relations improved across much of the nation, and as Irish Americans established themselves in politics and the professions, the old strains eased in most places.  But not in Boston.  The Irish found themselves “put in their place” when Governor Calvin Coolidge, a quintessential WASP, crushed the strike by the virtually all Irish Boston Police in 1919, banning every man for life from public service.  Many of those men, unable to find work, would make their close-knit South Boston neighborhood—Southie—a bastion of bank robbers, cartage thieves, and gangsters to this day.

If the Irish in Boston hold resentments to this day, the Protestants have not been shining examples of brotherhood.  The Unitarian’s Beacon Press continued to publish virulent anti-Catholic screeds well into the 1950’s.  Unitarian Universalist ministers generally supported Boston school desegregation in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s including forced bussing which was voraciously—and occasionally violently—opposed by the Irish of Southie and were often harsh in characterizing the opposition as racist.

A Boston Police sergeant--by the look of him, Irish--guards Black teens boarding school busses in compliance with a court ordered desegregation plan.  They would be greeted by angry crowds and rioting in the same Southie neighborhood where the cop probably lived.  Resentment over "forced busing" and liberal recriminations of racism kept Catholic/Protestant relation inflamed in Boston.

More recently conflicts over abortion rights, LGBT rights, and marriage equality, along with the continued clergy sex abuse scandals in the Church, has stoked new criticism of the Church.

Today in most parts of the country with heavily Catholic populations, large proportions—often majorities—of local Unitarian Universalist congregations—are made up of former Catholics.  But not so much in Boston, and especially not among the Boston Irish.  Disgruntled liberal former Catholics would generally go anywhere to worship before they would set foot in a congregation of those they see as their ancient tribal enemies. 

It seems some street brawls never really end.

Hanging Crepe in Trump Land—It’s Harvard’s Birthday

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 today.  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 a 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 as 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 the 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.”

Even 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 was producing 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 rowdisim 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 tradesman, 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 occurs in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.  Undergraduates still attend Harvard College, with the University now offering graduate education in many fields.

Through the last half of the 1700, 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 the Unitarians firmly in control of the College, and over most of the churches 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 evetually leading toa 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 the 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 Brahmans.  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.  Her reformed graduate schools and added new ones, emphasizing original research as well as instruction. 

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

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 curriculums to prepare for college admission, thus almost single handily inventing the modern High School.  He instituted admission to the school by standardized testing.

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.

Harvard now has both female and minority group majorities in the student body, but plenty of WASP legacy students are still admitted and graduate. 

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 in 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 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 Barack 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 announce policy that would make undergraduate admission free to needy students.  But the recent recover in the Stock Market has already recovered much of the loss.  No one is going to have to hold a bake sale for Harvard any time soon.

Idyllic Harvard in some eyes.  A nest of elitists and traitors to many others.

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