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HISTORY OF THE CLASS OF NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX YALE COLLEGE
HISTORY OF THE CLASS OF
NINETEEN HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX YALE COLLEGE
FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
EDITED BY JOHN HERSEY CLASS SECRETARY
68
ור
LUX ETT T VERITAS
PUBLISHED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE CLASS SECRETARIES BUREAU 1952
COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY THE CLASS OF 1936 YALE COLLEGE Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved
To the Class of '36:
I served my apprenticeship in American History with the class of 1936, in your Sophomore year and my first year in Jonathan Edwards and History 20. I have known many of you well since those pleasant days. Some of you have been my colleagues. Many of you have been close personal friends. Your class has brought distinction to Yale. I could ask for nothing better than the friendship and support you have given me in my apprenticeship as President.
May I take this opportunity to send you my thanks and best wishes?
Sincerely yours,
(Signed) A. WHITNEY GRISWOLD
CONTENTS
YALE'S GREATEST CLASS, by John Hersey
1
THE CONFIDENTIAL QUESTIONNAIRE 16
THE FIFTEENTH REUNION, by Richard Pinkham
39
IN MEMORIAM
41
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
43
NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF MEN WHOSE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES WERE
NOT RECEIVED
340
HISTORY OF THE CLASS OF NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX YALE COLLEGE
YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
BY JOHN HERSEY
Every five years the Class of 1936 publishes a book about itself. When one member of our class, celebrated among his friends at college for his combative spirit, a quality that has matured splendidly in him over the years, was asked a few months ago to write a brief autobiography for this, our third, volume of the record, all he replied was: "I think Five-Year Class Histories are a ridiculous waste of time and money." He was probably right. Yet the urge to categorize, to poll, to sort men into various labeled lumps of humanity, is very strong in our country, and nowhere stronger than among graduates of the Ivy League, most of whom suffer from a strange recurrent fever, galluping marquanditis. An early Ivy Leaguer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said that this tendency of man to classify himself, to find what unities he can among his fellows, is at least more important than classifying animals, which his young friend Thoreau liked to do.
The class books of Yale '36 do have a certain interest. In the first place, the Class of 1936 is getting to be known as Yale's Greatest Class-more about that later. In the second place, the books assemble some interesting sociological data, such as the fact (to give but one example here) that the members of the Class of 1936 last year had an aggregate income from all sources, before taxes, of nearly sixteen million dollars-more about that later. And in the third place, the experience of this class, which was educated during a terrible depression and grew to middle age through a worse war, provides an indirect answer to those who have alleged, lately, that Yale is a larva-bed of socialism and irreligion. That is so much gooseberry juice. Yale is the mother of Republicans. Her loyal sons are des- perately respectable. They are the fellows walking along in the Brooks Brothers shirts. The Fifteen-Year Record of '36 doesn't prove anything in this discussion of Yale, of course, but it hints, it hints.
A long time ago-in the spring of the year when Mussolini went into Ethiopia and Hitler deprived Jews of citizenship, the year Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, Will Rogers crashed with
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1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
Wiley Post, and Dutch Schultz was bumped off in a gin joint in Newark-a sardonic redhead, a young editor of the Yale Daily News, writing an article in that paper about a Prom, characterized '36 as Yale's Greatest Class. In the light of some not entirely creditable shenanigans a few of his classmates had taken part in, the redhead was evidently trying to be ironical. The end-irony is that the label has stuck and may very well prove to have been apt and true. The group is extraordinary. It is not simply that the class has an un- usually high number of men of reputation, notoriety, or fantastic affluence. It is rather that the group has so many symbolic qualities; it spreads so wide and reaches so far; it is the best and worst and quintessential in our culture.
Our Class Distinctions
We of this class are modern man: we flee our century and at the same time we try to creep into its very heart. One of us is a sport who hunts wild animals with the bow and arrow; one of us is an endocrinologist who hunts putrefaction with radioisotopes. One of us is part owner of a 1911 Chalmers, which starts kind of hard on cold days; one of us has twice flown across the country in a matter of minutes in Bendix Transcontinental Races. One of us sells raw fur pelts for the Company of Adventurers Trading into the Hudson's Bay; one of us, an atomic scientist, has been the mayor of Richland, Wash., a new city, symbolically named, of adventurers into the darkling future.
We have served the American success-ideal; we have an unusual number of prominent men. We have the publishers of three big-city newspapers, in New York, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. We have the captains of two really huge businesses, and lieutenants of several others, who'll get their shoulder bars soon. One of our moguls is officer and director of 34 companies. We have the developer and exploiter of a phenomenally successful home-permanent-wave packet whose good news in the past five years is that he has had a daughter; he christened her Toni. We have a man who is coming to be recognized as the foremost ornithologist of our country. We have a pretty big wheel in the movies; two owners of radio chains; some pathfinders in television. We have two nationally syndicated columnists. Indeed, we have a whole pocketful of good writers. One of them, who hasn't had any books published but has been working on a novel for about ten years, has been saying publicly ever since college that he intends to be the greatest writer in the world, and he may one day be. Many others, less disciplined, have completed books-and a sampling of titles will show the extraordinary range of their enterprise: Search for the Spiny Babbler, Thinking Straight, A Pattern of Politics, Siege of the St. Lawrence, Collective Bargaining and Market Control in
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YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
the New York Coat and Suit Industry, Atlantic City Cantata, and Alkylaminoalkyl Esters of Aminonaphthoic Acids as Local Anes- thetics. Some of us are persuaded that one of our classmates may one day be President of the United States. On the whole we are too young to be Senators and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court as yet- but some of our classmates have been developing ominous tendencies in those directions. We have a famous Fifth Avenue florist; the entrepreneur of a famous commercial language school; the boss of a famous laboratory for the development of antibiotics.
Like the troubles of our times, we crop up everywhere. A member of our class was one of the team of three who first made contact with the Communists at Kaesong and set up the endless truce talks there; another was among the last American officials to be ousted from the U. S. Consulate in Peking by the Chinese Peoples' Government, and was later in the Consulate in Saigon, Vietnam, that denied Graham Greene, the English Catholic novelist, a visa to the United States on the ground that he had once flirted with Communism. Another is a big corporation executive in the newest country in the world, Israel. Another serves imperialism as sales manager for Socony-Vacuum in Singapore, British North Borneo, Johore, and Sarawak; another has served humanity and the Marshall Plan, doing flood relief work in the Po Valley. It is a safe bet that more members of the Class of 1936 have insinuated themselves into the State Department than com- munists and homosexuals put together. We help edit the Voice of America. In the last five years we have taken 913 trips abroad, as exploiters, tourists, missionaries, diplomats, bearers of aid, and oglers of monuments.
There is no facet of our society in which we have not been re- flected. One of our English majors worked for a long time as an apprentice machinist and learned the difference between a gib and a hob. We have a baker of cakes and a sculptor of busts; a canner and a tanner. There are quite a few noted psychiatrists among us; quite a few of us have gone mad. One of us does research at the Yale Laboratory of Applied Physiology on alcoholism; more than one of us have joined Alcoholics Anonymous. (We also have a man who works for Nips, Inc., and a member of the Lubrication Committee of the American Gear Manufacturers' Association; but there may be no connection there.) We have a ski lift operator and a snow shoe in- structor; and a man who has played an English butler in the Little Theater of Miami Beach, Fla., where it never snows. We have a stereophotographer and an anthropometrician. One of us is the boss of four hundred women in a telephone office in Cleveland. We have a large number of university professors and prep school teachers --- and, to keep them well stocked with diplomas, the production manager of the sheepskin division of a large leather company. One of us is a
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1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
professor at Harvard and one of us is the gunnery officer on the U.S.S. Princeton. We have several forest rangers and many farmers and enough lawyers to populate a small country or two, such as Liechtenstein or the Nyasaland Protectorate. One of our lawyers represented Howdy Doody. Another conducted a successful defense of Carol Paight, the Bridgeport girl who mercy-killed her father when she learned he was riddled with cancer. One of us has been a jailbird, but on the whole we are utterly dependable and respectable-we are President of the Reliable Springs and Wire Forms Company, and we have been King of the Memphis Cotton Carnival. We are the man in charge of complaints at Macy's. One of us is a bank vice-president who lives in Little Silver, N.J. Though one of us was a prominent America Firster, 67.72% of us put on uniforms during the war, and while some of us have been satisfied merely to reminisce about k.p., one of our go-getters has made a big thing of selling power-driven potato-peeling machines. One of us has made a hole-in-one. One of us directs a $15,000,000 slum clearance project in Baltimore. Evi- dently baffled by the hurtling years, one of us has taken up, as a hobby, puzzle construction.
The Hundred Million Dollar Class
The average member of the Class of 1936 is in his 38th year. He has been married nine years, six days, 20 hours, 38 minutes, and 24 seconds. He has 2.31 children, each of whom he spanks 11.5 times a year. You have to watch these averages. This one, for instance, was brought way up by three men who, like the little old woman who lived in a shoe, spank their children 365 times a year, or say they do. Of course a questionnaire like the one sent our class draws many a half-true, many a twice-as-big-as-life, many a would-be-funny answer. Wiseacres' responses usually revealed themselves, and were elimin- ated from the reckoning whenever possible. A fairer index than the average, perhaps, is the median, the figure that is in the middle, half spank more, half spank less, indicating, as it were, the center of gravity of the situation. The median figure for spankings is three per capita per annum-very progressive. The average man spends 41 minutes and six seconds in active play with his children on each weekday and three hours and 13 minutes altogether on weekends.
But, to come to the point: the astounding thing about the average member of '36 is his wealth.
As head of the family, this man's income before taxes from all sources, last year, was $19,226.41. Of this total, he earned $11,329.01 (median $9,392.50) ; he took in $5,189.30 in unearned income; his wife earned $186.10; and she had unearned income of $2,522.00.
This average man has life savings of $71,212.74 (but here the
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YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
median is $10,865.38), and he has $41,293.28 (median $28,268.00) worth of life insurance.
A book published this year, They Went to College, by Ernest Havemann and Patricia Salter West, affords a comparison of these figures with the incomes of other college graduates in the country. According to this book, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton graduates had, in 1947, the year on which the book is based, a median gross income of $7,365. The '36 median of earned income alone for last year was higher than that figure by more than two thousand dollars; and while inflationary years have intervened since the survey reported in the book, the outside sources of income cited above would, it is safe to say, keep the '36 median gross income well above the current median for graduates of the Big Three. The median income of graduates from other Ivy League campuses (Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Pennsylvania) was reported as $6,142. The median from 17 technical schools (California, Carnegie, Massachusetts, etc.) was $5,382; from 20 Eastern colleges (Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Brown, etc.) was $5,287; from the Big Ten (Chicago, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin) was $5,176; from all other midwestern colleges was $4,322; from all other Eastern colleges was $4,235. The median of all American men was $2,200.
In proportion as the average member of our class is rich, he is also property-ridden. He owns 1.19 automobiles, .017 of an airplane, 2.79 radios, .45 of a television set, .86 of a house, .43 of a dishwasher, .86 of a washing machine, .27 of a clothes drier, .33 of a deep freeze. He is waited on by .69 of a servant. In spite of the load he is already toting, he says he daydreams of buying such things as a movie camera, a mangle, a record player, a rototiller. What house he has is worth $32,428.30 (median $24,384.61). Last year he spent almost exactly the same amounts on charity and on travel-$581.51 and $581.20, respectively.
The aggregate earned income last year of the 830 men in the class, extrapolated from answers to questionnaires by about half of them, was $9,394,353.00, and their aggregate income from all sources was $15,939,966.40. The totals, like the averages, are boosted by the exceptionally rich-but there is an exceptional number of them. Of 365 men who answered the question, "What are your total savings?", 57 said they had savings of between $100,000 and $5,000,000. Ex- trapolating from answers to the questionnaire, the aggregate savings of the class amount to $59,106,574.20, the aggregate life insurance carried is $34,273,432.40, and the aggregate value of homes is $13,123,923.87-making aggregate estates, at this moment, of $106,- 503,930.47. This does not include incidental chattels, such as our 23 Cadillacs, 61 Buicks, 10 Packards, 5 Lincolns, and 19 assorted foreign
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1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
automotive showpieces. In spite of our evident belief in conspicuous consumption, four out of five men in the class say they are living within their incomes. And who can say how much the averages and totals were kept down by those who chose ways of life in which they knew they would never get rich?
Our earning power is obviously high. We seem to be men of steady habits who stick to our desks and workbenches. In spite of the enor- mous disruption of the war, we have held, on the average, only 3.12 jobs per man since graduation. Of 394 who answered the question "How often have you quit?", 220 replied that they had left 517 jobs. Of 391 who answered the question, "How often have you been fired?", only 47 said they had lost 66 jobs-and many of them were laid off because of reconversion or recession. One man reports that during a slump he was whittled off the staff of the Pal Blade Co.
One reason the class is so well off is that it has so many men in whom the inventive knack is combined with the acquisitive twist. A few examples, taken from our group of entrepreneurs who have dedi- cated themselves exclusively to the inner man, will illustrate the point. We have, for instance, a medicine man who says he "developed a nice process for making sodium pantothenate, a vitamin which doesn't seem to do or prevent anything, but which is included in all our vitamin combinations because the competition has it." One of our doctors, a specialist in kidney diseases, runs a television renting ser- . vice on the side. "Making a helluva lot of money," he tersely writes. We prey upon the produce of our classmates; they are enriched and we are enlarged. We have among us one man who raises cattle on a 25,000-acre ranch; the operator of a feed lot in which beef cattle are fattened; the employee of a meat-canning company; and a fair num- ber of amateur beef-eaters. Indeed, since graduation all of us have gained, in the aggregate, 9,710 pounds-nearly five tons of human midriff. The autobiographical notes of one of our feeders contain a sentence with either a grammatical error in it, or a rather unsettling piece of news about how he makes his money: he says he has been "stimulating the sales of ice cream cones and other paper products, such as straws and drinking cups." Several of the members of this prosperous class have had ulcers, but probably not from eating paper. One man, who refers to his ulcers as "lovely little volcanoes," looks forward to a wonderful month each year in the nothern Minnesota wilderness, where, he says, "the only sounds are the loon's call and the shriek of the arctic owl."
"Slightly to the Right"
Considering the wealth of the class, and its reluctant arrival at middle age, it is not surprising that its members are predominately conservative. "Am still a die-hard, gold-standard, balanced-budget
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YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
Republican," one writes on behalf of many. Or another, more down to earth: "I vote Republican, I drink bourbon, I play golf and poker." Of those who answered the questionnaire, 65% indicate they were Republicans when they left Yale, 14.75% were Democrats, 2% were independents, and 18.25% had no affiliation or conviction. Today 69.77% are Republicans, 16.37% Democrats, .76% are "both," 8.31% are independents, and 4.79% still have no affiliation. In the last Presidential election, 75.19% voted for Dewey, 14.94% for Truman, 3.29% for other candidates, and 6.58% didn't vote. In 1952, 72.56% say they want to vote for a Republican candidate. Answering these questions long before Eisenhower indicated his willingness to run, and many months before the primaries and con- ventions, 41.97% of those participating said they wanted to vote for the General. More members of the class wanted to vote for Taft (11.6%) than for all Democratic candidates put together (10.55%), and in the polling Truman got a net of minus one vote, because, while seven men said they wanted him, eight said they wanted anyone but him.
The class of 1936 indulges in lots of deploring but not much political action. "Wish I could do something constructive towards the millenium of world peace," one man writes, "but the pace of day-to-day living never seems to permit it." The standard plaint is in the vein of what another writes: "Democracy worked better under capitalism; let's try it again!" Very few members of the class have run for public office as yet. One ran for Congress in Illinois, but he picked the wrong district and year to be a Republican. Our most successful politician is the man who got himself unanimously elected mayor of Dellwood, Minn., where a total of seven votes was cast. Mostly our political action consists, as one writes that his does, of "voting for losing candidates." A fair statement for the majority, probably, is made by the man who writes: "My political beliefs are slightly to the right of what they were when I left college-as much, I imagine, because the world has moved to the left as because I have moved the other way. I know less and understand more than I did fifteen years ago."
There are still various minorities, also die-hard, of those who are willing, as one man says he is, to champion "such unfashionable causes as socialized medicine, Secretary Acheson, classical education, and the cat's superiority to the dog as a pet." One man swears he met a man in '48 who knew Truman was going to win, but the fellow's wife shut him up before he could persuade our classmate. Another minority spokesman expresses the opinion that the picture in America "has not been improved by the advent of those never-fading vaude- ville stars of '50 and '51, McCarthy and MacArthur." Despite the number of our adherents to NAM and GOP, a surprisingly large
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1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
minority has worked for USES, OPS, ICAO, CAB, WPB, WSB, ECA, BEW, RFC, FEA, and FCDA. Our smallest minority, consisting of one man, writes that Yale is being taken over by the commies.
Re-reading the five- and ten-year books of the class, one of our public servants was reminded of the comment once made on the architecture of the old State Department building in Washington- that it shows how wrong people can be when they're so sure they're right. "This is a formidable time to be positive," another writes; yet mostly we go on trying to be sure of ourselves. We have our stubborn convictions; we have our fanatacisms. We have a dedicated Henry Georgist, who is convinced we'll all simmer in a pot in hell until we go to the single tax. We have a Yogi. "I meditate," he writes, "on the foibles of a disintegrating society." We have several World Federalists. "Me," writes a Cape-Codder, in despair at being con- fronted with perpetual world crisis, "I'm going fishing."
God and Man After Vale
Four out of five men in our class acknowledge a religious affiliation -to be exact, 299 out of 383 who answered the question on religion, or 78%. Of those 299, 122 said their affiliation was Episcopal, 56 Congregational, 49 Presbyterian, 30 Catholic, and 16 Jewish. The average man goes to church 15.8 times a year (median: five). We have one vicar, several ministers, and many deacons, elders, and plate- passers. One of us has written a book on the Bible, another a book on democracy and the churches.
There is, to be sure, a strain of skepticism toward orthodoxies in the autobiographies sent for the book-but for the most part this seems to be some sort of midst-of-life questing, for we are getting older. Two statements-both, it happens, from doctors-typify this strain. One writes: "I belong nominally to the Conservative Jewish syna- gogue, but heaven knows, by this time, what I really believe. It surely isn't the 'faith of my fathers,' I know." The other says: "I believe we have two chief responsibilities in our work, whatever it may be: first, to do the job for which we have been trained to the best of our ability; second, to use that job as a framework for a life dedicated to helping others. The Christian faith is the hope of man- kind, but the organized church is an archaic vehicle for its practice and perpetuation. That is why the individual must be deeply aware of the two responsibilities in his work." In any case, men who write in this way are considerably outnumbered by those who say they are turning toward organized religion; and they in turn are considerably outnumbered by those who say nothing at all on the subject.
War and Peace
Since it seems to be the destiny of our class to participate in most
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YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
of the symbolic acts of our era, it was inevitable that one of us should have been called back into the Navy to help demothball ships. Another has flown 101 air combat missions in the sky over Korea. Another, a doctor, has worked on a research project to determine the delayed effects of million-volt irradiation. Several have worked on guided missiles and the atomic bomb. We are represented at Lock- heed, Sikorsky, Pratt and Whitney, Wright Aeronautical, Chance Vought. One man, who has worked on an Atomic Energy Commission geological survey in southeastern Idaho looking for T.E. (Trace Elements, a government euphemism for fissionable materials), is characteristic of those of us who have had to be screened for secur- ity. He writes:
Once when I met a T.E. man, I asked him the way to the nearest can. . "Sorry," said he, just as I feared,
"Can't tell you-you haven't been cleared."
To date, despite the deep confidences and dread secrets we have enjoyed, no member of our class has lost his job because he was a poor security risk. In fact, the whole disturbing question of loyalty is raised only once in the book, by the man who writes, "I do wish the Yale Athletic Association would recognize loyalty when they allocate the tickets."
Four of five men in the class think the United Nations will sur- vive; yet nine out of ten consider the organization, in its present form, too weak to keep the peace. Two out of three think it is gradually being strengthened. One man out of three thinks war is inevitable, and he believes (taking his median opinion) that it will come in 1955.
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