Education: Unconquered Frontier

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Through wars and panics and all the passions they bring, Harvard's theme never changed. The age (1869-1909) of Charles W. Eliot, "straight and solemn as Hamlet's Ghost," was a golden age for the university, when such men as William James, Josiah Royce and George Santayana flocked to its faculty, and colleges and universities across the U.S. fell all over themselves trying to follow its lead. Eliot's free-elective system had its day; then came squirish Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1909-33) to introduce fields of concentration. But out of the classroom it was a time for being wild-eyed. Such hot-blooded undergraduates as Walter Lippmann started a Socialist Club, the Harvard Men's League for Women's Suffrage, a club of single taxers. Such others as Robert Benchley went out for the Lampoon, whose halls resounded with startling cries ("FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! RAPE! RAPE! RAPE! Don't shoot! I'll marry the girl! My name is John P. Marquand!"). World War I brought shrill demands for the scalp of German Psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, and the '20s brought more of the same for Socialist Lecturer Harold Laski. In both cases, President Lowell firmly planted his feet. "If the Overseers ask for Laski's resignation," said he, "they will get mine!" In such a time, Nathan Pusey, a shy, quiet freshman, arrived on the Cambridge scene. He had been only a year old when his father died, and his mother had supported her three children by teaching school in Council Bluffs, Iowa. To help with the family finances, Nate had a paper route, worked as a bank runner, was al ways on hand to help for a fee when the circus came to town. At night, seated at the big kitchen table, he listened by the hour while his mother read Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels and the Waverley novels.

In high school he made straight A's. He wrote for the student paper, the Echoes, and though a chronic mumbler, became a star of the debating team. At the end of his junior year, the high-school annual predicted that he would end up as a "Virgil teacher." His senior-class prophecy upped him to "editor of the Toonerville Times."

Hoots & Howls. In spite of his 32 high-school A's, Nate Pusey found himself totally unprepared for Harvard. Since he had never seen a rowing shell, he decided to go out for the crew. "I rowed on the machines, went out in the barge, I got into a shell. Then the river froze, and that was the end of my rowing career." When H. L. Mencken's Mercury wa,s banned in Boston, he marched around Harvard Square, "hooted and howled" with the best of them, denouncing the censor's ban. But mostly, Nate Pusey spent his time in Widener, reading.

Under spry little Professor John Livingston (Road to Xanadu) Lowes, he drank his fill of 19th century literature. With Tutor Conrad Aiken, '11, he discovered for the first time the world of contemporary writing. But of all his teachers, it was Irving Babbitt who influenced him most.