HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 5

                 DISCUSSION OF PARADIGMS ---continued 

   Natural analogies and and resemblances can be found within almost any group of items. A paradigm is not only an achievement but also a particular way of modeling future practice upon it. How does a community perpetuate particular ways of carrying on from an achievement ? First ask what the problems at the ends of chapters in science texts are principally for. What can it be that students learn while solving them ? 
  One has to acquire an "ability to see resemblances between apparently disparate problems." Yes, textbooks present lots of facts and techniques. But they do not enable anyone to become a scientist. You are inducted not by the laws and the theories but by the problems at the ends of the chapters. You have to learn that a group of these problems, seemingly disparate, can be solved by using similar techniques . In solving these problems you grasp how to carry on using the "right" resemblances. The student discovers a way to see her problems as like a problem she has already encountered. Once that likeness or analogy has been seen, only manipulative difficulties remain. 
  Publishing in 1974, Kuhn could say that work on sociology of the sciences developed in the 1960s enables one to have sharp empirical tools for distinguishing scientific communities. There is no question about what a scientific community "is." The question is what binds its members together as working in the same discipline. This is the fundamental sociological question to be asked of any identified group, large or small, be it political, religious, ethnic, or simply a soccer club for teenagers, or a group of volunteers who deliver meals on wheels to the elderly. What keeps the group together as a group ? What will cause a group to divide into sects, or simply fall apart ? This can be answered in terms of paradigms. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 4

                                                                PARADIGM 

   This element needs special attention. There are two reasons for this. First, the physicist/history writer Thomas S. Kuhn, single-handedly changed the currency of the word paradigm so that a new reader attaches very different connotations to the word than were available to him in 1962, when he wrote his wonderful book, Structure.  Secondly, as Kuhn himself stated clearly in his postscript :"The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of this book." On the same page he suggested exemplar as a possible substitute word. In another essay written shortly before the postscript, he admitted that he had "lost control of the word." In later life he abandoned it. But we, the readers of Structure fifty years after it was published and after a lot of the dust has settled, can, I hope, happily restore it to prominence. 
   As soon as the book was published, its readers complained that the word was used in all too many ways. This prompted Kuhn to clarify. The upshot was an essay called "Second Thoughts on Paradigms." He distinguished what he called two basic uses of the word, one "global" and one "local." Of the local use he wrote, " it is, of course, the sense of 'paradigm' as standard example that led originally to my choice of the term." But readers, he said, had mostly used it in a more global way than he had intended, and he continued, "I see little chance of recapturing 'paradigm' for its original use, the only one that is philologically at all appropriate." Maybe that was true in 1974, but on its fiftieth anniversary, we were able to return to the intended use of 1962. 
   By way of background, the Greek word paradeigma played an important part in Aristotle's theory of argument, especially in the book called Rhetoric.That book is about practical argument between two parties, an orator and an audience, who share a great many beliefs that hardly need stating. In English translations the ancestor of our word paradigm is usually rendered as example, but Aristotle meant something more like exemplar, a very best and most instructive example. He thought that there are two basic types of arguments. One kind of argument is essentially deductive, but with many unstated premises. The other is essentially analogical. 
   In this second basic type of argument, something is in dispute. Here is one of Aristotle's examples, which many readers will find all too easy to update from the city-states of Aristotle's time to the nation-states of today. Should Athens go to war with its neighbor Thebes ? No.  It was evil of Thebes to make war on its neighbor Phocis. Any Athenian audience would agree ; it is a paradigm.  The situation in dispute is exactly analogous. So  it would be evil for us to make war on Thebes. 
  In general : Something is in dispute. One states a compelling example about which almost everyone in the audience will agree --- a paradigm. The implication is that what is in dispute is "just like that."
   In Latin translations of Aristotle, paradeigma became exemplum , which pursued its own career in medieval and renaissance theories of argument. The word paradigm was, however, conserved in modern European languages but largely divorced from rhetoric. It tended to have very limited usage, for situations where a standard model was to be followed, or imitated. When schoolchildren had to learn Latin, they were told to conjugate to love ----"I love," you love," he/she/it loves"---amo, amas, amat, and so on. That was the paradigm, the model to imitate with similar verbs. The primary use of the word paradigm was in connection with grammar, but it was always available as a metaphor. As metaphor it never took off in English, but it seems to have been more common in German. In the 1930s members of the influential philosophy group the Vienna Circle, such as Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath, were comfortably using the German word in their philosophical writings. 
  In the early-to-mid-1900s, some English analytic philosophers promoted the word. This was partly because the profoundly Viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein had made much use of it in his lectures at Cambridge University during the 1930s. His Cambridge classes were obsessively discussed by those who fell under his spell. The word appears several times in hisPhilosophical Investigations[ another great book , first published in 1953 ]. The first use of the word in that book speaks of a "paradigm of our grammar," although Wittgenstein's idea of grammar is far more encompassing than the usual one. Later he used it in connection with "language-games," an originally obscure German phrase which he made part of general culture.
   Kuhn probably first read Wittgenstein at Harvard and then at Berkeley, but he had many conversations with Stanley Cavell, a fascinatingly original thinker who was deeply immersed in Wittgenstein.  Each acknowledged the importance, at that moment in their lives, of sharing their intellectual attitudes and problems. And paradigm definitely came up as problematic in their discussions. 
   At the same time, some British philosophers invented a happily short-lived "paradigm-case argument," so named in about 1957. It was much discussed, for it seemed to be a new and general argument against various kinds of philosophical skepticism.  Here is a fair parody of the idea. You cannot claim we lack free will [for example], because we had to learn the use of the expression "free will" from examples, and they are the paradigms. Since we learned the expression from the paradigms, which exist, free will exists. 
   "Normal Science" is based on prior scientific achievements acknowledged by some scientific community. Paradigm entered the science vocabulary hand in hand with scientific community. The achievements served as exemplars of what to do, the kinds of questions to ask, successful applications, and "exemplary observations and experiments." 
   Kuhn became interested increasingly interested in events much smaller in scope than Newton, which pertained to small communities of workers. There are very large scientific communities --- genetics, or condensed-matter [solid-state] physics, for example. But within such communities, there are smaller and smaller groups, so that in the end the analysis should apply to "communities of perhaps a hundred members, sometimes significantly fewer." Each will have its own group of commitments, its own models of how to proceed. 
   Moreover, the achievements are not just anything notable. They are 
  [1] "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents" away from what has been going on. And 
[2] they are open-ended, with plenty of problems for the "redefined group of practitioners to resolve." 
   Kuhn concluded : "Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as 'paradigms'." 
   Accepted examples of scientific practice, including laws, theories, applications, experiment, and instrumentation, provide the models that create a coherent tradition and serve as the commitments which constitute a scientific community in the first place. The few sentences just quoted establish the fundamental idea of Kuhn's writing. Paradigms are integral to normal science, and normal science, practiced by a scientific community, continues as long as there is plenty to do, open problems which yield to research using methods acknowledged by the tradition. Normal science is characterized by a paradigm, which legitimates puzzles and problems on which the community works. All is well until the methods legitimated by the paradigm cannot cope with a cluster of anomalies. Crisis results and persists until a new achievement redirects research and serves as a new paradigm. That is a paradigm shift. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 3

                   NORMAL SCIENCE and PUZZLE SOLVING 

    Normal science is just working away at a few puzzles that are left open in a current field of knowledge. Puzzle-solving makes us think of crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and sudoko, pleasant ways to keep busy when one is not up to useful work. Is normal science like that ?
   A lot of scientific readers were shocked, but then had to admit that is how it is in much of their daily work. Research problems do not aim to produce  real novelty. If you look at any research journal, you will find three types of problems addressed : [1] determination of significant facts, [2] matching of facts with theory, and [3] articulation of theory. To expand slightly : 

   1. Theory leaves certain quantities of phenomena inadequately described and only qualitatively tells us what to expect. Measurement and other procedures determine the facts more precisely.  

   2. Known observations don't quite tally with theory. What'swrong ? Tidy up the theory or show that the experimental data were defective. 

   3. The theory may have a solid mathematical formulation, but one is not yet able to comprehend its consequences. Some give the apt name of articulation to the process of bringing out what is implicit in the theory, often by mathematical analysis. 

   Since the 1980s there has been a substantial movement in emphasis, with historians, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers attending seriously to experimental science.  As Peter Galison wrote, there are three parallel but largely independent traditions of research : theoretical, experimental, and instrumental.  Each is essential to the other two, but they have a good deal of autonomy : Each has a life of its own. Immense experimental or instrumental novelty novelty is simply missed in some history writer's theoretical stance, so normal science may have a good deal of novelty, just not theoretical. And for the general public, which wants technologies and cures, the novelties for which science is admired are usually not theoretical at all. 
   For a current illustration of what is absolutely right, and also of what is questionable, notice that the high-energy physics most widely reported by science journalists is the search for the Higgs particle. This involves an incredible treasury of both money and talent,all of which is dedicated to confirming what present physics teaches --- that there is an undetected particle that plays an essential role in the very existence of matter. Innumerable puzzles, ranging from mathematics to engineering, must be solved en route. In one sense, nothing new in the way of theory or even phenomena is anticipated. Normal science does not aim at novelty. But novelty can emerge from confirmation of theories already held. Indeed it is hoped that when the right conditions for eliciting the particle are finally established, an entire new generation of high-energy physics will begin. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 2

           Is There Such A Thing As A Scientific Revolution ? 

   We normally think of revolution in political terms : the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution.  Everything is overthrown ; a new world order begins. The first thinker to extend this notion of revolution to the sciences may have been Immanuel Kant. He saw two great intellectual revolutions. One was the transition in mathematical practice in which techniques familiar in Babylonia and Egypt were transformed in Greece to proofs from postulates. The second was the emergence of the experimental method and the laboratory,  a series of events that he identified as beginning with Galileo. He repeats the word revolution several times in just two long paragraphs of his 1787 book The Critique of Pure Reason [ a real page turner !!!! ] . 
   Although we think of Kant as the purest of scholars, you gotta bear in mind that he was living in turbulent times. Everyone knew that something profound was afoot all over Europe, and indeed the French Revolution was only two years away. It was Kant who set in place the idea of a scientific revolution. As philosophers we can find it amusing, and certainly forgivable, that honest Immanuel himself confesses, in a footnote, that he is not in a position to pay attention to the minutiae of historical details. 
   The great physicist/historian [ whom I'm plagiarizing the hell out of ] Thomas S. Kuhn wrote a first book concerned with science and its history and entitled it The Copernican Revolution. The idea of scientific revolution was already very much in circulation. After World War II there was a great deal of writing about the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon was its prophet, Galileo its lighthouse, and Newton its sun. 
   Some historians believe that there was a "second scientific revolution." It took place during the early years of the nineteenth century ; whole new fields were mathematized. Heat, light, electricity, and magnetism acquired paradigms, and suddenly a whole mass of unsorted phenomena began to make sense. this coincided with what we call the industrial revolution It was arguably the beginning of the modern technoscientific world in which we live. 
  Then, there came Einstein's special [1905] and then general [1916] theory relativity that were earth-shattering events. Relativity had, at the beginning,  far more repercussions in the humanities and arts than genuine testable consequences in physics. For sure, there was the famous expedition of Sir Arthur Eddington to test an astronomical prediction of the theory, but it was only later that relativity became integral to many branches of physics. 
   Then there was the quantum revolution, also a two-stage affair, with Max Planck's introduction of quanta around 1900 and then the full quantum theory of 1926-27, complete with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Combined, relativity and quantum physics overthrew not only old science but basic metaphysics. Kant had taught that absolute Newtonian space and the principle of uniform causality are a priori principles of thought, necessary conditions on how human beings comprehend the world in which they live. Physics proved him totally mistaken. Cause and effect were mere appearance, and indeterminacy was at the root of reality. Revolution was the order of the scientific day. 
   Karl Popper [1902--94] was a widely read philosopher of science. Popper had come of age during the second quantum revolution. It taught him that science proceeds by conjectures and refutations,to use the title of one of his books. It was a moralistic methodology that Popper claimed was exemplified by the history of science. First we frame bold conjectures, as testable as possible, and inevitably find them wanting. They are refuted, and a new conjecture must be found to fit the facts. Hypotheses can count as "scientific" only if they are falsifiable. This purist vision of science would have been unthinkable before the great turn-of-the-century revolutions. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 1

  UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE 


                            LOOKING BACK AT 1962

    1962 was a long time ago, when one is talking about scientific development. The sciences have changed dramatically since then. The queen of sciences, then, was physics. Few people knew much physics, but everybody knew that physics was where the action was. A cold war was in progress, so everyone knew about "THE BOMB." American schoolchildren had to practice cowering under their desks. Thse who protested against a nuclear weapon stood a chance of being arrested, and some were. Bob Dylan first performed "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" in September 1962. Everyone assumed it was about nuclear fallout. In October 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come, after 1945, to nuclear war. Physics and its threats were on everyone's mind. 
   The Cold War is long over, and physics is no longer where the action is. Another event of 1962 was th awarding of Nobel prizes to Francis Crick and James Watson for the molecular biology DNA and to Max Perutz and John Kendrew for the molecular biology of hemoglobin. That was the harbinger of change. Today biotechnology rules. Add in information science. Add in what the computer has done to the practice of science. Even experiment is not what it used to be, for it has been modified and to a certain extent replaced by computer simulation. And everyone knows that the computer has changed communication. In 1962 scientific results were announced at meetings, in special seminars, in preprints, and then in articles published in specialist journals. journals. Today the primary mode of publication is in an electronic archive. 
   There is yet another fundamental difference between 2015 and 1962. It affects fundamental physics. In 1962 there were competing cosmologies : STEADY STATE and BIG BANG, two completely different pictures of the universe and its origin. After 1965 and the almost fortuitous discovery of UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND RADIATION, there is only the big bang, full of outstanding problems pursued as normal science.  In 1962 high-energy physics seemed to be an endless collection of more and more particles.  What is called the standard model brought order out of chaos. It is unbelievably accurate in its predictions, even if we have no idea how to fit it together with gravity. Perhaps there will not be another revolution in fundamental physics, although there will no doubt be surprises galore. 

          EXPLAINING THE  DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE 
         REQUIRES A DISCUSSION OF BOTH STRUCTURE
         AND REVOLUTION

                       A DISCUSSION OF STRUCTURE 

 There are scientific revolutions but they have a structure. It's easier to understand this if one can attach a useful name to each node in the structure.  Here are the aphorisms that can be used to understand structure : [1] normal science ; [2] puzzle-solving; [3] paradigm; [4] anomaly; [5] crisis; and [6] revolution, which establishes a new paradigm. 

  That is the structure of scientific revolutions : normal science with a paradigm and a dedication to solving puzzles ; followed by serious anomalies, which lead to a crisis ; and finally resolution of the crisis by a new paradigm. Another important word that has not been yet mentioned is incommensurability.  This is the idea that, in the course of a revolution and a paradigm shift, the new ideas and assertions cannot be strictly compared to the old ones. Even if the same words are in use, their very meaning has changed. That in turn led to the idea that a new theory was not chosen to replace an old one, because it was true but more because of a change in world view. Progress in science may not be a simple line leading to the truth. It may be a matter of making more progress away from less adequate conceptions of, and interactions with,  the world. 

   
          

  

   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 22

   HARVARD PRESIDENT LOWELL IS TRYING TO FIX 
   THE "JEWISH PROBLEM" AT HIS ELITE UNIVERSITY

   By the spring of 1922, when Lowell moved decisively, the proportion of Jews had already reached 21.5 percent. Unless immediate measures were taken, Lowell wrote in a letter on May 20, it would suffer the fate of Columbia. At Harvard, he warned, "the danger would seem to be imminent." 
   Compared to rural and small-town institutions such as Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Amherst ----which had already taken measures to limit the size of the freshman class and overhaul their admissions policies --- Harvard was particularly vulnerable. An urban institution with a long tradition of openness to graduates of public as well as private secondary schools, Harvard was not insulated from the growing numbers of public school graduates who met its entrance requirements. Between 1900 and 1920, the number of male graduates from the nation's high schools had risen from 95,000 to 310,000---an increase of over 300 percent.  The democratization of the opportunity to graduate from high school was a mixed blessing for institutions such as Harvard. While their numbers meant a larger pool of academically qualified students, it also meant a surge in the number of applicants who lacked the social graces of an earlier generation. Many of these students were from urban areas, and a disproportionate number of them --- especially in the college preparatory track --- were naturally the children of Russian and Polish Jews. 
   Left to his own devices, the authoritarian Lowell would have been more than willing to impose his own solution to the "Jewish problem." Indeed, that is precisely what he tried to do when he asked the Committee on Admissions to admit as transfers only those "Hebrews . . . possessed of extraordinary intellectual capacity together with character above criticism" and to impose a higher standard for admission to the freshman class on members of the "Hebrew race." This was a covert attempt to impose a quota, but it was rejected by Chairman Henry Pennypacker, a graduate of Harvard [1888] who had served as headmaster of Boston Latin School from 1910 to 1920. Though Lowell's subordinate, Pennypacker told him that the group's members "felt that the Committee should not practice discrimination without the knowledge and assent of the Faculty," of which it was "merely the administrative servant." The stage was thus set for a conflict between the autocratic Lowell and a faculty that, while hardly free of anti-Semitism, was reluctant to publicly endorse a policy of discrimination. 
   By this time, the faculty ws actively involved in the debate about the "Jewish problem" that Lowell had initiated. At a meeting on May 23, Lowell's brother-in-law and personal friend, James Hardy Ropes, the Hollis Professor of Divinity, introduced a three-part motion : its most controversial elements instructed the Committee on Admissions "to take into account the proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College" and declared that "it is not desirable that the number of students in any group which is not easily assimilated into the common life of the College should exceed fifteen percent of the whole college." These proposals, which clearly had Lowell's support, generated a complex and at times bewildering array of amendments and countermotions, some of them supporting the basic thrust of Ropes's proposals and others opposed.  Though the motion proposing a 15 percent quota on "any group which is not easily assimilated" [ an unsubtle euphemism for Jews ] was not approved the meeting was a partial triumph for Lowell, for a slightly revised version of the other controversial element was passed by a vote of 56--44. It called upon the Committee on Admission, "pending further action by this Faculty . . . to take into account the . . . proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College." This was a dramatic departure from Harvard's historic commitment to nondiscrimination and, for that very reason, was warmly welcomed by Lowell. 
   Yet even before the faculty meeting, opposition to Lowell's efforts to limit Jewish enrollment had been growing. In addition to Federal Judge Julian Mack, a member of the Board of Overseers, who had exchanged a series of increasingly tense etters with Lowell, further opposition was expressed by Jerome D. Greene, who had served as secretary to President Eliot [1901---1905] and then secretary to the Corporation [1905--1911]. Reportedly Eliot's top choice as his successor, Greene left Harvard to become an important banker in New York two years after Lowell took office. On the Board of Overseers, he was generally thought to represent the views of Eliot, who remained a towering figure at Harvard [and a troublesome presence for Lowell] even though he had retired thirteen years earlier and was nearing the age of ninety. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 21

           THE "JEWISH PROBLEM" AT THE  
           ELITIST UNIVERSITIES IN AMERICA 

     By 1914, the "Jewish problem" was so great at Columbia that its dean, Frederick Keppel, openly acknowledged the widespread perception that the large number of immigrants had made it "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement." While publicly insisting that "Columbia is not 'overrun' with Jews any more than it is with Roman Catholics or Episcopalians," Keppel privately admitted that "boys whose families are in New York society" had a strong tendency to go out of town for college and that no conceivable plans that Columbia could devise would attract them. In truth, New York's upper class had begun to abandon Columbia as early as the 1890s. But the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the years after 1910 seems to have decisively accelerated the process. Still attracting 16 percent of the sons of New York's elite between 1900 and 1909, the proportion dropped precipitously the following decade to 6 percent.
   By the time Columbia finally moved vigorously to repel the "Jewish Invasion," it was far too late. Though the proportion of Jews, which had reached perhaps 40 percent, was reduced to 22 percent by 1921, the sons of the Protestant Elite had abandoned Morningside Heights, never to return. In the 1920s, just 4 percent enrolled at Columbia. Meanwhile, 84 percent matriculated at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, THE BIG THREE. As the case of Columbia had demonstrated, the possibility of "WASP FLIGHT" was a "danger" for any institution with a substantial Jewish presence. 
   The specter of Columbia was very much on the mind of Harvard President Lowell as he confronted Harvard's "Jewish Problem." With Columbia and NYU taking active measures to limit Jewish enrollment, Lowell moved in February 1920 to inquire about the number of Jews at Harvard College. Although the dean's office did not provide a precise estimate, Lowell had ample reason to worry. A study of higher education enrollment patterns in 1918-1919 among the leading private colleges revealed that only Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania ---- the very institutions that many members of the eastern upper class believed had already been "ruined" by the Jews --- had a higher percentage of Jewish students than Harvard. 
 Though the proportion of Jews in Harvard's freshman class had ranged from 13 to 20 percent between 1912 and 1919, Harvard retained its close connection to Boston's upper class throughout the 1910s. Indeed, the link between Harvard and Brahmin Boston was far tighter than the historical ties between the upper classes of New York and Philadelphia with Columbia and Penn respectively. By the 1910s, Harvard enrolled 85 percent of the sons of the Boston upper class, whereas just 52 and 6 percent of their counterparts in Philadelphia and New York matriculated at Penn and Columbia. Harvard, moreover, enjoyed a close relationship with the upper class of New York City, which in recent decades had come to dwarf Boston in economic importance. In the 1910s, nearly a third of the sons of New York's elite enrolled at Harvard. To President Lowell, Harvard's rising Jewish enrollment posed a threat to these crucial relationships, making it imperative to bring the "Jewish Invasion" under control. 
   In a letter to the Harvard philosophy professor William Earnest Hocking, who had proposed enlisting the Jewish alumni to assist in eliminating the "undesirable Jews" [ as he claimed had already occurred at Williams ] , Lowell explained that his main concern was that the sheer number of Jews would cause the flight of the Protestant elite and thereby "ruin the college" : 

     The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no school at all. A similar thing has happened in the case of Columbia College ; and in all these cases it is not because Jews of bad character have come ; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body. Therefore any tests of character in the ordinary sense of the word afford no remedy. 

Lowell's personal preference was "to state frankly that we thought we could do the most good by not admitting more than a certain proportion of men in a group that did not intermingle with the rest, and give our reasons for it to the public." But he also anticipated quite presciently that "the Faculty, and probably the Governing Boards, would prefer to make a rule whose motive was less obvious on its face , by giving to the Committee on Admission authority to refuse admittance to persons who possessed qualities described with more or less distinctness and believed to be characteristic of the Jews." For Lowell, however, it was crucial that "the Faculty should understand perfectly well what they are doing, and that any vote passed with the intent of limiting the number of Jews should not be supposed by anyone to be passed as a measurement of character really applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike." 
   In frankly endorsing a double standard, Lowell was rejecting the argument that applying ostensibly neutral criteria such as "character" would be sufficient to reduce the number of Jews. On this issue, as on many others, Lowell was utterly forthright : his goal was restriction itself. In a letter to Julian Mack, a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a federal judge, Lowell made explicit some of the cultural assumptions behind his commitment to a Jewish quota : "It is the duty of Harvard to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to this country without our background as it can effectively educate ; including in education the imparting, not only of book knowledge, but of the ideas and traditions of our people. EXPERIENCE SEEMS TO PLACE THAT PROPORTION AT ABOUT 15%. " 

JEWS IN THE UNITED STATES FROM1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 20

    EMPHASIZING THE STRENUOUS LIFE AT GROTON 
  [ continuing with the saga of Endicott Peabody, headmaster]

   
   Peabody's most important ally in promulgating the "strenuous life" ideology at Groton was Theodore Roosevelt, who had been preaching the virtues of "the strenuous life" since the 1890s. A close friend of Peabody's and the father of a student, TR was a frequent visitor at Groton, where he unfailingly preached the virtues of a life of gentlemanly service to the public. In a speech on Groton's twentieth anniversary, in 1904, President Roosevelt told the students : "You are not entitled, either in college or life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been to Groton---not an ounce, but we are entitled to hold you to exceptional accountability because you have been to Groton. Much has been given you, therefore, we have a right to expect much of you." 
   Adherence to the philosophy of "the strenuous life," Roosevelt believed, implied a duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself." The Christian gentleman, then, was impelled on both moral [ ? ] and practical grounds[Reckon these are economic grounds?] to take up what some have called the "gentlemen's burden" : the responsibility, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, to "fulfill duties to the nation and . . . to the race" and to "do our share of the world's work by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers has driven the Spanish flag." 
   Peabody, whose beloved Cheltenham had sent many of its graduates into the imperial civil service in India, shared Roosevelt's enthusiasm for America's fledgling empire. Indeed, even before the Spanish-AmericanWar ended, he wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, offering Groton as a source of the officials who would be needed to administer the empire. Yet Peabody was not, as the historian James McLachlan has rightly noted, "a howling imperialist ; he simply believed that if America was to have an empire, it should be a Progressive empire --- honestly administered by well-educated gentlemen, pure, clean, and Christian."

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II ---- Episode 19

        GROTON TURNED OUT "MANLY CHRISTIANS " 

    The idea of "manly Christian character" was a British import that may be traced back to the writings of Charles Kingsley [1819--1875] , an Anglican clergyman, novelist, and Cambridge professor who exerted a profound influence on the young Endicott Peabody.  A passionate advocate of what came to be known as "muscular Christianity," Kingsley was a devoted English patriot and a stout defender of British imperialism.  A proponent of a reformist strand of "Christian socialism," he believed that committed Christians were warriors on behalf of goodness whose responsibilities both at home and abroad could not be met without great "strength and hardihood." Kingsley was a firm champion of vigorous athletics, for sports would instill the sturdy character and shape the strong body that permitted Christians to do God's work. Athletics, he believed, would offer England's privileged classes "that experience of pain and endurance necessary to bring out the masculine qualities." 
   Kingsley was near the height of his influence when Peabody was a student at Chetenham and Cambridge. Early in his college career, the young American read the Life of Charles Kingsley, which first gave him the idea of becoming a minister.  Kingsley's biographer, Peabody later recalled, "set forth his subject's enthusiasm in connection with social problems" and "introduced me to a man of vigorous, virile, enthusiastic character ; a gentle, sympathetic, and unafraid example of muscular Christianity, a 'very' gentil Knight." Kingsley's distinctive version of muscular Christianity exerted an enduring impact on Peabody as well as on the headmasters of many other boarding schools. 
    As at the British public schools, Groton's vehicle for the development of manly Christian character was athletics. Competing in sports, Peabody believed, helped develop in students a multiplicity of virtues : loyalty, courage, cooperation, and masculine strength. Bt teaching young men to exert themselves to the fullest while playing within the rules, athletics would teach self-control and a sense of decency and fair play. 
   Though quite attached to crew and "fives" [a kind of squash imported from Eton] , Peabody reserved his greatest enthusiasm for football. All boys, however physically slight or personally uninterested, had to play. Football was, in Peabody's view, a deeply moral enterprise. Writing to a friend in 1909, he articulated his views : "In my works at Groton I am convinced that football is of profound importance for the moral even more than the physical development of the boys. In these days of exceeding comfort, the boys need an opportunity to endure hardness and, it may be, suffering. Football has in it the element which goes to make a soldier." For Peabody, as for many of his contemporaries in the British and American upper classes, life was a ruthless Darwinian struggle between good and evil in which the morally superior ---those who represented "civilization" against "barbarism" --- would sometimes need physical force to impose moral order. 
   With athletes occupying the apex of the student pecking order, both Christianity and character tended to be overshadowed by "manliness." Ranking lower still was intellect --- a quality that was viewed with suspicion as oriented to the self rather than the community. "I'm not sure I like boys who think too much," Peabody once said. "A lot of people think of things we could do without."
   In such an atmosphere, the boy of bookish or artistic inclination who lacked interest in ---or talent for --- manly sports was relegated to the lower ranks and sometimes despised. Remembering his years at Groton, Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of Atlantic Monthly who later became a trustee, recalled "but a single instance of a boy who became the acknowledged head of the school wholly innocent of athletic supremacy and merely gifted with character and superlative intelligence." In a school in which "organized sport is the personification of manliness" and the belief widespread that "moral courage is a by-product of the physical struggle," Sedgwick observed, "the boy who seeks another path to his development presents to the master a picture of a shirker and not infrequently a poltroon as well." 
   There was little room at Groton for the boy of artistic or intellectual inclination. As his biographer admits, Peabody "distrusted artists as a genus," believing them to be "a folk who have unreliable relationships with the world, the flesh, and the devil, with a consequent weakening of moral fiber." Nor was there much room for the independent spirit. In a letter to the parents of boy whom Peabody suggested "would get more from a different school," the young man, whose offenses were admittedly "very slight," seems to have been guilty of the crime of being "an individualist who has little in common with his surroundings." 
   Peabody was fond of saying that a headmaster has "to be a bit of a bully" and needs to have the capacity to inflict pain. But in Groton's system of authority and social control, it was often the students who used the harshest means to enforce conformity and to punish classmates judged deviant. For students deemed to be in violation of the school's rigid and sometimes mysterious code of etiquette or who were felt to be lacking the right "tone"[often by showing insufficient deference to upperclassmen], the punishment could be brutal. 
   The harsh atmosphere was part of a larger system of socialization that imposed on the children of the privileged a willful regime of austerity and deprivation. These schools were hardening the sons of the elite for a life of command in which subordinates --- whether inferior classes, ethnic or racial groups, or colonial "natives" ---would often be disinclined to obey and would sometimes mount resistance. The system of power and control at the elite boarding schools was devised to expose the young men who went through them to the experience of both obedience and command, often under trying conditions. Having survived institutionalized bullying, the graduates would have the necessary toughness to succeed in their future leadership positions. 
   The Groton ethos, like that of the leading British public schools, was an admixture of two seemingly contradictory systems of belief : gentility and social Darwinism. On the one side, men such as Peabody were deeply committed to the nurturance of Christian gentlemen : men whose devotion to such virtues as honesty, integrity, loyalty, modesty, decency, courtesy, and compassion would constitute a living embodiment of Protestant ideals. But on the other side, life was viewed as a struggle in which the battle went to the strong, and those individuals and nations not manly enough to participate would be left remorselessly behind in a world in which only the fittest survived. The Christian gentleman thus had no choice but to be aggressive and even ruthless in order to win. 
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --Episode 18

      BY THE LATE 1800s, THE PROTESTANT ARISTOCRATS
      SAW THE "NECESSITY" OF PREP SCHOOLS FOR THEIR
      KIDS 


The tiny Groton School was an almost immediate success. Within five years of its founding, Theodore Roosevelt,  who had declined Peabody's invitation to to become one of the school's first teachers, wrote to the headmaster, telling him that he was "doing a most genuine service to America" and that "it has been a great comfort to me to think of small Ted [then ten years old] at your school." In 1889, Peabody was asked to apply for the presidency of Columbia University [he declined] , and in 1890, the prominent diplomat and future secretary of state John Hay asked Peabody to place Hay's two sons on the list of students wishing to attend Groton. To support his request, he offered a list of references that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Adams, and Phillips Brooks. [In the end, Peabody placed the boys on the wrong waiting list, and they were forced to attend other schools.] Even Emily Post entered one son's name at birth for admission to Groton and the other's at age two. By 1900, a veritable Who's Who of the American ruling class---Whitneys, Biddles, Adams, Saltonstalls, du Ponts, and Roosevelts ---had entrusted their sons to Endicott Peabody and Groton. 
   Social distinction was at the very center of Groton's magnetic appeal to the Protestant ruling class. Peabody himself---with his patrician appearance, his gentlemanly demeanor, and his ardent commitment to the boys' cultivation of impeccable manners ---attracted the scions of leading families. The men of wealth and power who entrusted their sons to him were well aware of his unique social position. To be sure, many other boarding school headmasters shared his background [if not his British education] . But none of them could match his personal location at the crossroads of America's two most important investment banking firms of the era --- the House of Morgan and Lee, Higginson and Company ----in New York and Boston, the nation's two greatest financial centers. To the Protestant elite, a Groton education meant, not only the inculcation of the right values, but also the fostering of intimate ties to "THE RIGHT PEOPLE." One of the principal motivations to send boys to Groton and like institutions seems to have been their parents' desire to rescue them from the life of luxury and self-indulgence that they feared the children were destined to lead unless vigorous countermeasures were taken. "Early Groton parents," wrote Peabody's biographer, were privately disgusted with the bringing up of well-to-do American boys of the period, "whom they considered 'spoiled ladies' men tied to women's apron strings." Affluence, they believed, was rendering their sons soft and effeminate." 
   In response to these concerns, the "St. Grottlesex"schools imposed a regime of Spartan deprivation on their charges. At Groton, the students lived in small, barren cubicles almost totally lacking in privacy. Showers were cold, and weekly allowances were limited to a quarter, a nickel of which was to be donated at Sunday church services. Deprivation, Peabody firmly believed, was salutary. Otherwise, the parental "tendency to overindulge their children" would lead to a "lack of intellectual and moral fibre." 
   What did not loom large among these parents was a commitment to intellect. Scholarship as such was not something most of these parents gave a shit about. Mathe WASP ny of these eminent parents had never attended college themselves.  What they correctly saw in Peabody was a man who considered character [ethical conduct among peers] far more important than intellect. In hiring teachers, Peabody valued intelligence, but he believed that "there were things distinctly more important" such as "fine character," a "lively manner," and a love of boys. 
   At the core of Peabody's vision of Groton was the ideal of "manly Christian character." Generally speaking,  the WASP elite was not really and truly religious : Some of the early fathers did not care a tuppence for religion, except as a thing to be generally encouraged and strengthened.  What the fathers of the ruling class were really concerned about was emphasis on "MANLY CHARACTER." What Peabody promised the ruling class was that Groton would turn their fragile and overindulged sons into the kind of "manly" men fit to run the affairs of the nation.