Searching for a way to convey how remarkable it seemed that a once-small Rhode Island bank earlier this month had acquired through merger the once-impregnable symbol of Yankee dominion formerly known as the First National Bank of Boston, I stirred up a certain amount of protest when I suggested that Nathan Pusey was entitled to the credit or blame.
Pusey, who at 91 still summers in Maine, was president of Harvard University when Terrence Murray, the future president of Fleet Financial Group, was admitted to Harvard College in 1958. As the son of a factory hand from Woonsocket, Murray was not the stereotypical Harvard man of the 1950s.
In fact, Murray in those days (or at least others of his ilk) was more likely to be found beating the tar out of the likes of Charles “Chad” Gifford, who grew up to be his opposite number at BankBoston Corp.
To momentarily recall Harvard’s aggressive search in the 1950s for boys such as Murray seemed like a way of calling attention to the role the college played over more than a century in undermining the rule of the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendency and creating the far more nearly equal-opportunity society in which we live today.
A number of persons called or wrote to say that I had singled out the wrong man as author of the policy of inclusion.
I decided to take a closer look. I turned to John T. Bethell, who edited Harvard’s alumni magazine for 30 years. To celebrate the magazine’s centenary last year, Bethell published “Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century,” a survey as lively and various as its subject. In the book, among much else, I found the story of Paul Buck and the “floppy ducklings.”.
And an article in the alumni bulletin in February 1946, to which Bethell devoted a sidebar, really caught my eye–since it offered a pretty good insight into how Fleet Financial’s Terry Murray advanced to the top of that bank.
Paul Buck was a history professor; he served as provost, or second-in-command to Harvard President James B. Conant during World War II, and was the logical candidate to succeed as president in 1953, except that he declined the honor. He died in 1978. In 1946, Buck was caught in the middle between those who wanted Harvard to admit only those applicants with the highest test scores, and those who wanted a more fully-rounded class.
“I share the often-heard view that (the) College would be improved if it had a larger share of the healthy, extrovert kind of American youth which is so admired by the American public,” wrote Buck.
Applications received through the Veterans Office compared favorably with those coming in through the College Examination Board, he said.
Harvard “has done much to supply skillful, sympathetic advice and medical treatment to the sensitive, neurotic boy who has some talent. The result is that solicitous parents connive with harrassed schoolmasters to send their floppy ducklings our way. And the pressure to deposit them in our small pond increases in proportion as we improve their survival rate.
“I do not propose that we should take any action to stop the flow to Harvard of the studious or sensitive type of boys. We must not lose the advantage we now have from the appeal of Harvard to the exceptional boy, even if he is a bit `queer’ from the standpoint of his fellows.” Instead, Buck proposed an extended scouting organization to search out a different sort of student. It was one of these, presumably, who endorsed Terry Murray’s application.
The rest, of course, is history. Harvard opened its doors ever more widely. Back in the 1950s, when this trend was becoming unmistakable to the alumni of the college, Bethell’s book recounts an evening when Nathan Pusey fielded a question from a slightly-tipsy old grad at a Harvard Club dinner. What about my son, the member asked, “whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and whose father went to Harvard, and his father went to Harvard, and now he…can’t…get…in!”
“Well,” said Pusey, “We can’t send him back. The Mayflower doesn’t run any more.”
