Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals by William Wright

Author:William Wright [Wright, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2006-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

Part Two

SURVIVING HARVARD

12

Settling Dust

IN THE DAYS following the conclusion of the Secret Court’s formal proceedings, Lawrence Lowell resumed his principal task: presiding over the administration of Harvard, planning for its future, and pondering the direction of Western civilization. Foremost among these outside interests was his eagerness to defeat the Democratic candidate for president, James M. Cox, a cause that succeeded the following November with the election of Republican Warren G. Harding.

Six years later Lowell would emerge briefly into the national political spotlight when he accepted an appointment by the Massachusetts governor to head a three-man commission to review the robbery-murder convictions of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, one of the most politically charged prosecutions in American history. When the two men were convicted in 1921, the liberal-minded throughout America and Europe—long convinced the case was an anti-radical, anti-foreigner, anti-poor lynching—erupted with protests and demonstrations.

Appeals dragged on for years, with many of the day’s most prominent artists and intellectuals making public appeals on behalf of the two men. When Lowell and his commission had carefully reviewed the testimony, they concluded that Sacco was definitely guilty and that Vanzetti was complicit. That this has also become the verdict of history, primarily due to death-bed confessions by two people closely involved and by more modern forensic evidence, does not lessen the fact that at the time Lowell, in his decision, was going up against a tidal wave of the most “enlightened” thought. What little standing he had with the educated and liberal elite after instituting racial and ethnic quotas for students in 1922 was destroyed by his refusal to intercede on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The deans and Dr. Lee went back to their administrative duties and their chosen intellectual fields. Regent Luce could now concentrate on his business interests, with occasional deliberations about Harvard’s long-range decisions. The expelled boys and their families set out to reconstruct their shattered lives.

If the men of the Court congratulated themselves about nothing else, they surely rejoiced about their expulsion of Ernest Weeks Roberts, whom they had come to see as the vibrant wellspring of all their problems. For them, Roberts with his den of depravity in Perkins Hall was the Pied Piper of gay sex, merrily leading innocent Harvard boys to their doom. With Roberts gone, at least half their problems were solved. As it turned out, getting him off the campus proved more difficult than anticipated.

Although Greenough in his note of June 4 had forcefully asked Roberts to tell his father the full story behind his expulsion, he had little confidence that Roberts would do so. To back up this request, Greenough sent Congressman Roberts a letter on June 7 that came quite close to spelling out his son’s transgression, but the fastidious dean could not bring himself to enunciate the crime clearly. In fact, the letter, which concerns a matter of the utmost importance, is remarkable for its Victorian coyness.

My Dear Mr. Roberts,

I am greatly distressed and embarrassed to have to tell you

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