The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 Read Online Free PDF Page A

grounds for a true manhood that would have its final test on the fields of battle. Even William James, the celebrated Harvard psychology and philosophy professor, thought that war was the natural arena for young men to prove themselves. “Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us,” he wrote in a famous essay attempting to create some “moral equivalent to war.” “So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals and of hardiness, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible.”
    The Brahmin elite had more modest sacrifices to make in peacetime too. Joe could hardly aspire to be part of the Brahmin world without realizing the extent to which the New England Protestant elite, more than any other group in America, developed the idea that great charity is the natural concomitant of great wealth. If Joe was ever to stand with the elite, he too must be seen as a man of beneficence. America was not a land in which a life of the senses, be it of Epicurean indulgence or of cultural pursuit, was a worthy goal. The vigorous pursuit of wealth was a manly endeavor, but the mere spending of that wealth an heir’s pallid pleasure.
    Joe, first of all, had to be accepted among the elite. Three-quarters of the former prep school students made the final clubs, and except for an occasional athlete, almost none of the public school men gained entry. As a public school graduate and an Irish-American Catholic, Joe had no chance of making a final club unless he made his name widely and positively known on campus. Joe was not the populist sort who enjoyed mixing with a broad range of humanity, but he understood the value of getting his name out there. He joined the finance committee of the Freshman Smoker, the one event where most of the class socialized together. He also was one of the fifteen ushers for the class dinner, a position that involved signing up twenty fellow freshmen for his table. Both of these positions involved raising money, typically the least desired and thus the most accessible entry point to an organization.
    Athletics was the arena for attracting attention to one’s name, and here the Gold Coast men confronted Joe. As much as Joe loved sports, these prep school youths had gone to schools where athletics was far more important than at Boston Latin and other public schools. Prep school graduates weregenerally bigger, taller, heavier, and stronger than the public school men. In 1912 the Harvard Crimson noted that a study by Dt. D. A. Sergent of the Harvard Hemenway Gymnasium of roughly one thousand freshmen concluded that “the private school men were in every way superior physically to public school men.”
    The prep schools dominated the varsity sports. They made up nearly the entire first-string Harvard football team; in one typical year, 1911, all but one of the twenty-three football letters went to prep school men. So did most of the crew and track letters. Only baseball, a sport that many thought plebeian and not quite gentlemanly, had a more balanced mix of public and private school alumni. Even here, eight of the fifteen lettermen came from prep schools.
    The Harvard obsession with masculine sport was in part a class struggle, a way to maintain supremacy in a rude and brutal new industrial world. This idea that scholarship and athletics were natural halves of an education resonated deeply within Joe. The veritable machine of legend, the field of manhood, was the Harvard football team. As much as Joe desired athletic fame, however, and as large and strong as he was, he simply did not like the bruising physical demands of the game.
    The Harvard man’s spirit was unleashed on the football field in a torrent during the annual Harvard-Yale game. In Joe’s sophomore year the undefeated Harvard