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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Life at Yale During the Great Depression In the exuberant summer of 1929 the Dow Jones average hit one new high after another, and a Yale College senior named A. Whitney Griswold received his diploma and dashed off to Wall Street in pursuit of a fortune. Irving Fisher '88, '91PhD, Yale economist and national celebrity, said that stock prices had reached a “permanently high plateau.” Then, at the end of October, came the stock market crash. Griswold returned immediately to New Haven where in 1933 he earned his PhD—on the subject of the American cult of success—and joined the faculty. He would become president of the university in 1950. Fisher lost his credibility, and his personal fortune, when the stock market by 1932 had dropped 89 percent from its 1929 high. The Great Depression of the 1930s was for millions of Americans the most painful event of their lives, more so than either of the two world wars. Unemployment reached 25 percent in 1933. The material and psychological impact of lost jobs, savings, and homes was devastating. The political impact opened a chasm between those who lost whatever faith they might have had in business leadership, and who now looked to the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help, and those who saw the “socialist” measures of the New Deal as a threat to free enterprise and individual liberty. Yale’s two presidents during the Depression—James Rowland Angell and Charles Seymour '08, '11PhD—many vocal alumni, and most of the students were in the second group. For Yale the Depression had a deep and long-lasting financial effect. Even as the university saw a building boom, thanks to a bequest from John W. Sterling '64 and a donation to underwrite the residential college system, ordinary income suffered. Although the university had avoided common stocks and kept most of the Yale endowment in bonds, income from the endowment declined by 21 percent. Gifts to the alumni fund, which had exceeded $1 million for the first time in 1926-27, dropped 85 percent to $142,732 in 1934-35. Not until 1950-51 would gifts be above $1 million again. (See "Ups and Downs of Alumni Giving.”) Between 1931 and 1935 Yale cut its expenditures by leaving vacant faculty positions unfilled, by not renewing many faculty one-year appointments, by putting a near freeze on promotions and salary increases, and by squeezing hourly employees hard. The number of Yale College faculty dropped from 107 in 1931 to 90 in 1932 and then remained stable. The presidential salary, $25,000 a year, did not budge until the 1950s. The Corporation also contemplated cutting faculty salaries, but refrained when Seymour said, “The welfare of the institution depends upon the maintenance of our prestige in comparison with Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. … [We] cannot afford to take the lead in a cut at a time when our sister universities somehow or other find the means to avoid it.” With university student enrollment falling—from 6,190 in 1929-30 to 5,362 in 1934-45—President Angell in 1932, and again in 1935, urged the admission of more freshmen and transfer students. In 1933 over 100 applicants with inferior academic records were admitted as freshmen. Predictably, they did badly: a third were dropped and others fell short of promotion to sophomore year. In 1936, Edward S. Noyes '13, chair of the board of admission, refused to repeat the experiment lest Yale admit “too large a proportion of candidates who are undesirable either racially [i.e., Jewish] or scholastically.” Economic conditions were not too bad for tenured faculty. Even as salaries remained stagnant, deflation boosted their purchasing power. Senior faculty could employ a servant for $5 a week plus food and a room on the third floor. The price of a bushel of potatoes at a farm stand was $1. Many faculty sent their children to public school, and the academic standards of New Haven’s Hillhouse High School were equal to those of the best prep schools. Seymour, provost before he became president in 1937, asked the faculty to give dollars to Yale. The gifts came in, a few as small as $2, but so did denunciations of Yale’s effrontery in freezing salaries and promotions and then trying to squeeze even more from the faculty. And did an appeal from the university’s chief educational officer, the gatekeeper of promotions and salaries, put unethical pressure on the faculty, especially those without tenure? Seymour promised that no record would be kept of individual gifts, but strangely the record is there in the archives. In 1938 the new provost, Edgar S. Furniss '18PhD, abandoned the appeal. Life at Yale for wealthy undergraduates resembled escapist movies about the rich and carefree. They enjoyed their automobiles, weekends in New York, country club summers, sailing on Martha’s Vineyard, and trips to Europe. Spectator yachts lined the Thames when Yale rowed against Harvard at New London in June. When the residential colleges opened in September 1933, undergraduates selected by the college masters (there was not room for all) lived in luxurious suites, ordered meals from printed menus and were served by uniformed waitresses, and after eating perhaps repaired to the squash courts for exercise fitting their station in life. Faculty fellows of the colleges delighted in weekly dinners followed by port, conversation, and sometimes bridge or poker. The residential faculty fellows (bachelors only) had large apartments. The masters lived with their families in mansions worthy of bank presidents before the fall. Yearbook histories chronicled football victories, dances, the membership lists of fraternities and senior societies, with only a few passing comments on increased undergraduate interest in finding part-time employment or the difficulty the Yale Record was having with the cost of its new building. One cartoon showed a man with an empty basket; the caption asked, “Who’s got those six billions Irving Fisher told us Prohibition had saved?” Varsity football prospered. Games filled the Yale Bowl with cheering students and alumni. Gate receipts held up so well during the Depression that in 1931, the chair of President Herbert Hoover’s committee for unemployment relief asked Yale to hold a postseason benefit game with other elite schools. In 1937, Yale raised the salary of one part-time assistant football coach, law student Gerald R. Ford '41LLB, from $3,000 to $3,500, more than that of an entering junior faculty instructor with a PhD. Some alumni recalled afterwards that they were oblivious to conditions outside of Yale. Hear Senator William Proxmire '38: “We lived in a kind of disembodied cocoon, a deliberate isolation from what we could see and smell and hear when we left the New Haven Campus. … Most of my classmates were wholly preoccupied with sports and girls and grades, and bull sessions about sports and girls and grades—in that order. If you wanted to be happy, it was a great time to be a Yalie. If you wanted to be serious—you had to wait.” Or novelist and lawyer Louis Auchincloss '39, who confessed that “ultimately there was not, even for me, any keeping of the world (or FDR) out of Yale. Hitler barked on the newsreels. The King of England abdicated for love. Richard Whitney’s embezzlement shook my father’s world. On weekends at home my mother deplored my ivory tower. 'The world is going to pieces,' she complained at a lunch party, 'and Louis is writing his term paper on the Medici popes.' Bless Medici popes!” In contrast there are the memories of Bernard Wolfe '35, a Jewish New Havener living at home and a political radical. He called the offer of a nonresident affiliation with Calhoun College “an insultingly social-work gesture,” adding, “I felt violated.” That they could have imagined for a minute that I’d go for their insipid English roast, served by a lot of underpaid black women in starched uniforms, most of them my neighbors, some of them my mother’s friends, when nightly I enjoyed those fine pork-chop sandwiches smothered in hot sauce that they featured in the hash joints along Dixwell Avenue, and had the bonus of my real friends eating with me—that I took for the wildest sort of arrogance. … I couldn’t view Yale as something separate and apart from the Depression. … The thought crossed my mind in ways I wasn’t yet smart enough to figure out that Yale was a central component of the whole system that was diverting my mother's earnings as a slavey into somebody else’s anonymous pockets. Wolfe's father, a machinist and talented violinist, had a nervous breakdown after losing his job when his factory shut down. “They took him away and locked him up in Yale’s Institute of Human Relations,” Wolfe wrote, “where they had a psychiatric division devoted to the study of interesting cases. They judged my old man to be an interesting case. You don’t get many factory workers who are devoted to the violin.” Wolfe joined the Communist party and briefly worked for the exiled Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Impoverished students, a minority, struggled to stay in college, and some were forced to withdraw. The dean of freshmen reported that during 1932-33 ten students had to resign and 25 who had not been on financial aid were receiving support. Yale was reluctant to have students enroll in the work-study program of the National Youth Administration—a New Deal agency—because it “might endanger the University’s independence and educational freedom.” But eventually Yale accepted the program, which benefited some 250 students in 1935-36; student need was simply too great. Before it was instituted, the acting dean of Yale College, Clive Day '92, had reported that many students were able to remain in school “only by generous scholarship aid, and by Spartan endurance.” He told of students living on food budgets of 25 cents a day and of one senior who asked to give up his college room “that he might sleep on the sofa of an office in which he earned his living.” The Depression influenced both the choice of courses and majors by undergraduates and the fortunes of many graduates. In Yale College, yearlong course elections in English plummeted, from 2,665 in 1926-27 to 1,170 in 1934-35. Courses in government attracted large numbers. One might have expected large enrollments in economics, but after Irving Fisher's disgrace the department had a dreary reputation. Economics saw a drop from 1,447 course enrollments in 1926-27 to 817 in 1932-33. Students objected to the poor teaching and the use of an uninspired and conservative basic textbook, the infamous Fairchild, Furniss, and Buck, known as “FFB” (although some students suggested the names of the authors should all begin with an F). The authors—all senior Yale economists and administrators—presented fixed conclusions and discouraged independent thinking. “We do not believe that the beginning student profits greatly from that type of discussion which presents arguments on both sides of a controversial question,” the text admonished readers. The book claimed a neutral stance, but it was strongly critical of New Deal economics and concluded with a passionate denunciation of socialism as a threat to capitalism and human liberty. Teaching positions for new PhDs were scarce. Graduate School dean Edgar S. Furniss (who re-tained the post even after becoming provost) recalled that in the 1920s almost any student with a higher degree could find a teaching job. “But now … that the demand for college teachers has been reduced—permanently, it would seem—to much smaller dimensions, the conditions of the times require that our graduate schools make searching reexamination of their vocational purposes and methods.” Forestry dean Henry S. Graves '92 in 1932 lamented that jobs for foresters were disappearing. But two years later, with the New Deal and its Civilian Conservation Corps in full swing, there were more jobs than graduates. Law dean Charles E. Clark also saw a silver lining in the unprecedented demand for lawyers “with vision adequate to meet the vast problems facing the profession and society in which we live.” He listed with pride the members of the faculty working for the New Deal in Washington. President Angell, however, abhorred the political views and involvement of left-liberal law faculty. In April 1933 Ferdinand Pecora, the crusading general counsel to the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, asked professors Wesley A. Sturges and William O. Douglas (later a Supreme Court justice) to write a report on “various social and economic aspects of stock market operations." Angell said such participation could embarrass the university, and, under pressure, Douglas and Sturges declined the invitation. Pecora’s hearings exposed the irresponsibility and malpractices of banking and provided the foundation for sound banking regulations. For his part, Angell was correct; the hearings also discredited men and institutions important to Yale. Throughout the Depression, President Angell’s greatest concern was that the trend toward higher taxes on the wealthy and on estates meant that “the two largest sources of [private university] income … will almost inevitably dry up … or be gravely impaired." Speaking at the Harvard tercentennial celebration on a rainy day in 1936, he said: “I was told when leaving the deluge this morning that this was President Conant’s method of soaking the rich. So long as they are Harvard’s rich, I don’t care. But the endowed institutions of the United States cannot long survive under the threat of unjust taxation.” While Yale was completing its great building program and experiencing a combination of luxury and moderate loss of income, the city of New Haven was in desperate straits. In 1933, Mayor John W. Murphy and president of the board of aldermen Vincent Scully (father of Vincent Scully Jr. '40, '49PhD, now Sterling Professor emeritus of the history of art) delivered a plea. “It is conceivable,” they said in a memo for a meeting with a committee of Yale’s governing board, the Corporation, “that in the course of time Yale might purchase and place on the [tax-]exempt list all the land in New Haven, in which event there would be no other taxpayer and the University would either assume the entire cost of municipal services or dispense therewith.” They conceded that New Haven could not tax Yale, but asked the university to contribute to municipal services from which it benefited and to remove no more property from the taxpaying list. Yale’s response was an unqualified no, saccharined with the usual list of benefits Yale brought to the city: employment for New Haven residents, taxes on its investment real estate, purchases by students, faculty, and Yale itself; sports events, visiting speakers, concerts, museums. One list noted that in the Peabody Museum, New Haveners could look at the dried skeleton of a 15-foot giant squid. The university also pointed out that over 570 Yale students were New Haven residents and they received thousands of dollars in financial aid. In response, Mayor Murphy suggested that Yale should eliminate the aid and give the money directly to the city, so as to relieve the tax burden on all citizens, not just the tuition burden on those selected by Yale. The Corporation replied: Yale was not chartered to contribute money to help the City of New Haven to fulfill the various governmental duties and obligations imposed upon it, such as police and fire protection, care of poor persons, public schools, etc., etc. The contrary has existed from the beginning, and none of the gifts to Yale has been made for these purposes. Any such change of policy as is now suggested would be a plain perversion of the charter of Yale and of the terms of its gifts. Such a perversion of the present system, and as a necessary consequence, would prevent future development of Yale University as now administered, controlled, and financed. The city persisted throughout the 1930s in asking for help, but the university held fast to a negative, legalistic position architecturally symbolized by the moats, turrets, high walls, and inner courtyards of the grand new buildings. Not until the 1980s, when Connecticut began providing subsidies to cities with tax-exempt properties, would the tax question lose some of its bite. (In early 2009, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and Yale president Richard C. Levin ’74PhD reenacted the scene of 1933, but in their contemporary version, Levin agreed to increase Yale’s voluntary annual payment to New Haven from $5 million to, in 2010, $7.5 million.) The Depression made Yale’s poor labor relations worse. A 1938 article, entitled “Yale Needs the CIO,” in the Nation noted that the maids who cleaned students' rooms worked five hours a day for seven days a week and earned 25 cents an hour, or $8.75 for the week. A worker in the Divinity School refectory (dining hall) started work at 7:30 a.m. and finished at 6:45 p.m.; she earned $12 a week. Night watchmen worked ten hours a night for 13 nights out of every 14—an average of 65 hours a week—and earned $25. Thomas W. Farnam, Yale’s associate treasurer and the man in charge of labor policy since 1921, was quoted as saying that the seven-day week was good for employees, because “it kept them occupied and out of trouble.” The article drew national attention to Yale. It also inspired three students to form the Student Committee on University Employees and confront Farnam. He wrote Seymour about the meeting: “I told [the students] that … I thought that they could have confidence in the breadth of view of the Corporation in providing fair compensation and hours to University employees. … I informed them that the Sunday work was for a brief period, and I feared that a reduction of hours in the janitor service might result in reduction in pay.” The provost appointed a faculty committee, which recommended in 1939 that Yale “take the lead in setting community standards, involving a greater attention to humane considerations than those required in competitive business or industry" and set wages to “meet the cost of living, productive of health, efficiency and normal relations for the worker and his family” while providing “for a gradually rising standard of life.” The Corporation accepted the report, ended seven-day work weeks, and increased wages for maids by 40 percent. Farnam was relieved of responsibility for labor relations. By 1940 the Great Depression was over. But its legacy, combining with war clouds, war itself, and the difficulties of postwar adjustment, held the university back for another decade. President Seymour, about to retire in 1950, admitted, “I have been holding on the three-yard line.” The
next president was A. Whitney Griswold, the young man who had gone to Wall
Street in 1929, failed to make a fortune, and returned to Yale. He served until
1963 and enjoyed an era of great prosperity. He would triple Yale’s endowment
and add more than two dozen new buildings, including works by great
contemporary architects. But he was not tempted to overconfidence. In 1951, he
looked back on 1929, the year of his commencement, and deplored the “romanticism"
of that era: “We were graduated into the greatest economic depression in history … with
assurances that poverty was about to be banished from the earth.” |
Entrepreneurs That well-worn but still vibrant query of “Good summer?” with which returning undergraduates were wont to greet each other dropped out of sight as Yale moved to New Haven for the college year of 1931–32. In its place you heard classmates welcomed with the purposeful question of “Hello—are you all signed up for your suit pressing?” … Everybody was working for one of the undergraduate agencies, and each and every upper-classman seemed determined to sign up all his friends for everything from eating-houses to garage space. The chase of the dollar became so grim at the start of college that the Freshmen … spent their first few evenings answering knocks on the door and turning away eager salesmen. Finally Dean Walden issued a pronunciamento to the effect that there would be a closed season on canvassing freshmen for three weeks. … But all is not drab and poverty-stricken in New Haven. Sophomores, no longer required to eat in Commons, and searching for a place to take their meals, were met at the station in taxicabs by the representatives of a new eating house on York Street which provides music at all meals, together with cigarettes and beverages at cost, to attract the hungry and esthetic. The new place is so luxurious that it succeeded in drawing a capacity crowd of Sophomores from the very start. |
Two
Memories of the ’30s As the large crowds of students and their dates and whoever else jumped aboard platoons of [trolley cars] on the way to football games at the Bowl, … swarms of seemingly poor children gathered along the tracks yelling “Scramble! Scramble!” while the young lords tossed pennies to be fought over by the lower classes. I miss those old open cars, sometimes called “breezers,” but not those screeching children. They made me morally uncomfortable. Some of them, I hope, grew up and went to Yale themselves. … The long-awaited College Plan went into effect with the completion of the first seven residential complexes. My roommate and I arrived in colonial (well, mostly) Davenport, in rooms never before occupied, a double suite with a large living room overlooking the green quadrangle, and two single bedrooms; each contained a desk to which one might retire to study. Maids came in to clean and make beds after the young masters had gone to breakfast in the beautiful dining hall amidst fine furniture, china, and silver. |
House Proud Like practically every institution in the country—business, charitable, or educational—the University of course has been affected by the long depression. … There is nothing remarkable about this. Reductions of business and institutional income have been the rule rather than the exception for over a year, and it is possible that the end is still not in sight. … It is of course an obvious paradox that Yale, in the midst of its splendid new buildings going up on all sides, should have difficulty in meeting the cost of doing its educational work in them. But this is not a new thing at Yale; it has always been the case. The University is singularly like a poor man who has been given a house to live in and has difficulty in paying the grocer. |
Conspicuous Consumption It is trite to say, “Do not give your boy too much money to spend.” We all know that “too much” is bad, but the question is, “What is too much?” In this I am not prepared to quote figures, for the amount will properly differ with individuals. By this I do not mean that the amount should be regulated by the size of his father’s pocketbook. More sons of rich fathers are ruined in this way than any other. I think the allowance should be determined by the boy's demonstrated ability to use money wisely. In a place where one third of the students are working for money with which to pay for their education, ostentatious display of wealth is in bad taste. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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