Nothing Daunted (8 page)

When it came time to choose an “invitation house,” Ros joined the White Lodge, and Dorothy agonized between that and
Delta Sigma, which was, one of its founding members emphasized
, not a secret society or a sorority—a distinction, perhaps, without a difference. The invitation houses cost more than campus housing, but along with an exclusive circle of friends, they promised single rooms, a housekeeper, a cook, a waitress, and some freedom not allowed on campus. Dorothy wryly described the choice between the two houses as “really one of the great problems of my young life—what I should do about this.”

She joined Delta Sigma as a sophomore, and she idolized the juniors and seniors—“I thought they were the most beautiful and brilliant creatures on earth.” The members had recently moved into a yellow clapboard house off Main Street, with a welcoming veranda and a spacious side porch that had two long wooden swings, cushioned in chintz and suspended from the ceiling by chains. The living room had a large fireplace, which was lit on chilly days after lunch. Sixteen students ate their meals at a long table in the dining room, presided over by the house matron. When they invited President Seelye or professors to dinner, dessert was the Faculty Cake, filled with macaroons, sherry, and whipped cream. The girls managed the household budget and were expected to observe the college’s “ten o’clock rule” at bedtime. The college held dances, but they were women-only.
Students were allowed to invite gentlemen
to the Junior Promenade, the Rally on Washington’s Birthday, and the Glee Club Concert.

Dorothy and Ros played gentle games of tennis in white skirts sweeping their ankles, and planned off-campus activities, including picnics. They took the trolley out Main Street to the end of the line in Greenfield, and walked through the woods to a brook, where they gathered twigs and built a fire. They roasted sausages called “bacon bats” on forked sticks, which they ate on buttered rolls, and they made coffee in a tin pail. For longer trips, they rented an old horse and wagon and rode out into the country, occasionally stopping for a night or two at one of the farmhouses.

Several weeks before graduation, Dorothy wrote to her grandmother. She and some friends had visited Deerfield’s Memorial Hall, a museum that contained relics from the French and Indian Raid of 1704. Referring to the sacking of the town and the letters written from Canada by captured French officers to their families, she observed: “The village is so little and sleepy, and still so much in the country, that it required very little imagination to take us back to those times.” The girls had supper by “that same brook, which has seen so many awful things,” she wrote, “but I never saw more wonderful country. The mountains are so very green, dotted here and there with fruit trees and the air heavy with the odor of lilacs.”

There is no indication that either Dorothy or Ros had in mind anything more taxing for their futures than the kind of charity work pursued by their friends and mothers in Auburn. Nor were they intent on finding husbands, not having met any young men whose company they liked nearly as much as they liked each other’s. Dorothy told her grandmother how much she appreciated the privilege of attending college, then said, “Nevertheless, I am looking forward a great deal to being at home with you all next year.” On a note of determined good cheer, she concluded: “I am sure I shall be very happy.”

On the afternoon of June 13, 1909, the first of the four-day commencement events for Smith College, Northampton residents lined the streets and clustered by the First Congregational Church. “
It was a fine opportunity
,” the
Springfield Republican
reported, “for the automobile experts to see a larger variety of automobiles than is
often observed in Northampton and an equally rare opportunity, most appreciated by the women, to see a splendid display of handsome gowns and beautiful millinery.” At four o’clock, the seniors marched in from the vestry, attended by the junior class, to the sight of masses of pink mountain laurel on the platform. President Seelye gave the sermon, telling the rows of serious young women, “[Y]ou will not become the useless members, but the benefactors, of society. Whatever be your employments, your lives then will be prolific of good deeds.”

The congregation sang “Jesus Comes, His Conflict Over,” and as Seelye gave the benediction, a light rain began to fall. It was pouring as they got ready to leave the church. The junior ushers rushed back to campus, returning with the girls’ black rubber coats and hats and armfuls of umbrellas. They escorted the seniors and their guests into the hacks and carriages and automobiles outside the church.

The next morning, the heavy skies lifted in time for the Ivy Day procession. After chapel services at St. John’s Church, the alumnae set forth by class along a white canvas carpet, past the gymnasium to Seelye Hall. The junior class—in brightly colored dresses and hats festooned with flowers—carried the ivy chains (actually long ropes made of laurel leaves) on their shoulders. The graduating class marched in pairs, their hair piled high in soft buns, in wasp-waisted, high-collared white dresses, carrying their roses. To Dorothy’s great disappointment, her mother and father didn’t see her graduate. They were in Europe and unwilling to interrupt their holiday. They returned with a present for her: a filigreed silver card case from Holland.

After the ivy song was sung and a class photograph taken, the graduates marched into the assembly hall for the class-day program.
At the chapel exercises
, President Seelye spoke of the first Smith class, of 1879: “There were eleven graduates and ten are still living, and seven of them are married. All of them hold honored positions. One of them is a professor in college; two are wives of college professors; one is at the head of an educational institution; a number of them are interested in educational work and are home-makers, and the same is true of graduates of succeeding classes.”

Old World and New

U
NFENCED

F
arrington Carpenter had a different kind of experience in college, and not only because it was a men’s school. His jocular personality disguised a sensitive intelligence and a restless nature, and he was far more uncomfortable with the American class system than most of his peers. The old-line East Coast students hastened to exploit his awkwardness. He had not been to Exeter or Andover. He was from Evanston, Illinois, a town that many of them had never heard of, and his father, although wealthy enough, was a shoe manufacturer.
When he arrived at Princeton and read the “Freshman Bible,”
he realized that the stiff collars, vested suits, and neckties his mother had bought for him were hopelessly unstylish. “A freshman had to wear a black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and a little black cap called a ‘dink’ on the back of his head,” he wrote in his autobiography,
Confessions of a Maverick.
When someone joked
that
Farrington sounded like the name of an English resort town
, he told everyone his name was Ferry, but they dubbed him Skinny instead. It wasn’t long before he turned his lack of social standing to his advantage. He took courses taught by the college’s president, Woodrow Wilson, and made sure he got to know him.

Wilson’s years at Princeton shaped his convictions about the purpose of education in a democracy—and Carpenter’s beliefs were shaped alongside them. When Wilson assumed the job in 1902, his political views were conservative.
In November 1904 he gave a speech in New York
to the Society of Virginians on “The Political Future of the South.” Implicitly denouncing the populism of William Jennings Bryan, he declared, “The country as it moves forward in its great material progress needs and will tolerate no party of discontent or radical experiment; but it does need a party of conservative reform, acting in the spirit of law and of ancient institutions.” At the university, though, Wilson was soon undertaking a radical experiment of his own known as the Quad Plan.

He officially introduced it to the Board of Trustees
in December 1906. The idea was to replace the university’s snobbish eating clubs or to absorb them into larger and less exclusive “quads.” Ferry Carpenter acted as an enthusiastic student liaison. As conceived by Wilson and endorsed by some faculty and alumni, the quads would provide living and eating quarters for 100 to 150 students, from freshmen to seniors, thus encouraging them to enlarge their circle of acquaintances. Young faculty would live there, too, so that conversations, as Carpenter put it, would venture beyond sports and dirty jokes.
The prospect of not getting into a club
, he said, was appalling—one was deemed “a sad bird” and socially ostracized.

Wilson told Ferry
, “Some of the wealthy New York and Pennsylvania people with sons here would like to turn this college into a Tuxedo Institution, a country club. I refuse to head such an establishment.” However, the board mostly was composed of wealthy easterners, and they vigorously opposed Wilson’s idea. Over the next three years, as told by one of Wilson’s biographers, Henry Bragdon,
the press reported the controversy at Princeton as a fight between “college democracy” and social privilege. Wilson was depicted as a courageous progressive. “
To the country at large, his dispute with the Princeton clubs was analogous
to Theodore Roosevelt’s struggles with the trusts, the meat packers, and the railroads.” Infuriated though he was by the trustees’ intransigence, Wilson found that the role of reformer suited him.

In June 1908 Ferry wrote to “Dr. Wilson” about his progress with potential supporters of the Quad Plan. He had joined the “middle-rated” Campus Club, to avoid the sad-bird taint, and become its secretary. Thanking Wilson for the clear grounding he had given him in his courses in jurisprudence and constitutional government, Ferry said that he had just read an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
that “sounded like a trumpet call to Americans to rally to Democracies’ standard.”