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By now Harvard loomed large in American society; the "Hahvahd man" entered the nation's lore as a figure to be, depending on one's point of view, admired or despised. J.P. Marquand observed somewhat ambiguously that "if you have ever been to Harvard, you will never be allowed to forget it." F. Scott Fitzgerald, a devoted Princetonian, was blunter. "I don't know why," said Amory Blaine, one of his heroes, "but I think of all Harvard men as sissies."
Increasingly, university life impinged on public affairs and vice versa. When prominent alumni were infuriated by young Lecturer Harold Laski's vocal support of a Boston police strike in 1919, Lowell said, "If the overseers ask for Laski's resignation, they will get mine."
Lowell's convictions, however, were those of his class (he was one of those Lowells who, via the Cabots, "talk only to God," and it was in his office that a visitor was told, "President Lowell has gone to Washington to call on Mr. Taft"). When the Governor of Massachusetts asked Lowell to head a committee to determine whether the patently unfair trial of Sacco and Vanzetti had in fact been fair, Lowell concluded that it had. And when bigoted alumni kept complaining about the number of Jews at Harvard (the proportion had reached 22% by 1922), Lowell publicly called for a quota system to limit it. That was formally rejected by both the overseers and the faculty, but Lowell ) got his way by indirection. He imposed a limit of 1,000 students in each incoming class and then urged his admissions officials to seek a broad geographical distribution -- that is, to accept more students from Southern and Western states where comparatively few Jews lived. By the time Lowell retired in 1933, the proportion of Jews had shrunk to 10%.
His successor, James Bryant Conant, was a chemist of somewhat more talent than Eliot, and he was to play an important part in the development of the atom bomb. He led Harvard through World War II, when the Yard swarmed with more soldiery than it had seen since the Revolutionary War. When it subsequently swarmed with veterans, Conant introduced the influential "general education" program that required all students to take survey courses in the humanities, sciences and social sciences.
Harvard claims a long tradition of defending dissenters. When Physics Professor Wendell Furry and Research Assistant Leon Kamin took the Fifth Amendment before Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigating committee in 1953-54, McCarthy demanded that they be fired, but Harvard's new president, Nathan Pusey, refused. "There is now an especially urgent obligation upon our universities to preserve freedom of inquiry and freedom of teaching," he said. Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter urged Pusey to fire anyone who took the Fifth Amendment, but Pusey stood firm. A decade later, however, he sacked Timothy Leary, then a lecturer in psychology, for not only singing the praises of LSD but experimentally feeding it to some of his students.