Just how much of a liberal President Lowell is, of his own impulse and from his own conviction, was shown at the time that Louis D. Brandeis was nominated by President Wilson for the Supreme Court. Brandeis is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, and was a prosperous corporation lawyer in Boston; a man of European culture and charming manners, he was the darling of Harvard, in spite of the fact that he is a Jew. The Lees and the Higginsons took him up—until suddenly he ran into the New Haven railroad! Then the other crowd, the Kidders and the Peabodys, took him up—until he ran into the gas company! After that everybody dropped him, and if he had not been a man of wealth he would have been ruined. When he was proposed for the Supreme Court, a committee of lawyers, with Austen G. Fox, a Harvard man, at their head, took up the fight against him in the United States Senate. This fight didn’t involve Harvard, and there was no reason for President Lowell to meddle in it; but he made it his personal fight, and a fight of the most determined and bitter character.
In 1918 there was a great strike in the Lawrence textile mills, and this made a delicate situation, because Harvard holds six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of woolen mill loans and mortgages, and an equal amount of bonds and stocks. It seemed natural, therefore, to the overseers that Harvard students should go out as militiamen to crush this strike; it did not seem natural to them that members of the Liberal Club should call meetings and invite strike leaders to tell the students of the university their side of the case. But the members of this Liberal Club persisted, and when the district attorney accused the strikers of violence, they appointed a committee to interview him and get his facts. They gave a dinner, to which they invited the directors of the mills to meet the strike-leaders; they appointed a committee to consider terms of settlement, and in the end they forced a compromise.
Things like this caused most intense annoyance to the interlocking directorate. This was voiced to a Harvard man of my acquaintance, one of the organizers of the Liberal Club, by a Harvard graduate whose father has been a Harvard overseer, and is one of Massachusetts’ most distinguished jurists. In the Harvard Club of Boston my friend was challenged to say what he meant by a liberal; and when his definition was not found satisfactory, the Harvard graduate exclaimed: “A liberal? I’ll tell you what a liberal is! A liberal is a —- —— —— —— —— ——!” In order to reproduce the scene you will have to fill these blanks, not with the ordinary terms of abuse used by longshoremen and lumber-jacks, but with the most obscene expletives which your imagination can invent.