Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (10 page)

Known medical or psychological difficulties led to the exclusion of another 30 percent. The (roughly 300) names remaining were submitted to the college deans, who picked from among them about 100 students each year whom they perceived as “sound.” In essence, this meant students the deans were glad they had admitted, especially the ones involved in extracurricular activities and freshman athletics. For a single class year, the Grant Study selected the men who would become editor-in-chief of the
Crimson,
president of the
Advocate
(the college literary magazine), and president of the Harvard
Lampoon.
Four times as many of the Grant Study men as chance would have predicted held class offices, both in college and, as it turned out over the next half-century, at college reunions. However, the deans also
chose
a disproportionate number of “national scholars,” gifted men from poor families for whom all expenses, including transportation, were provided by Harvard. These youths, often relatively inept socially, were chosen solely for potential academic brilliance.

The freshman physicals of the classes as a whole tell us—and it’s no surprise—that the Grant men were twice as likely as their classmates to be muscular mesomorphs, rather than skinny ectomorphs or pudgy endomorphs.

Out of the 90 (10 percent of each class) sophomores chosen, roughly 1 in 5 ended up not joining the Study for reasons of his own (schedule conflict, disinclination, or failure to show up for intake procedures). About 70 men a year were added to the Study from the classes of 1942 through 1944, bringing the total College cohort to 268.

The Grant Study deliberately cast its net for men who were likely to lead “successful” lives. All of them had already been selected for admission to a competitive and demanding college, and then they were selected further for their capacity to master college life and, in the words of Arlie Bock, “paddle their own canoe.” Many of them were firstborn sons, and independent men were preferred over less autonomous ones. The Study selectors were looking for men with the capacity to live up to or exceed an already high level of natural ability.

The men of the Grant study were homogeneous in many ways. They were well matched in physical and mental health, skin color, education, intellect and academic achievement, and culture and historical epoch (see
Table 3.1
). They all lived through the Great Depression, and they all shared the likelihood of active participation in World War II in the immediate future.

The Study administered the Army Alpha Intelligence Tests, which put the IQs of most of the men in the top 3 percent of the general
population.
Their College Board SAT scores (average 584) put them among the top 5 to 10 percent of college-bound high school graduates, but not beyond the range of many other able college students. Of course, in 1940 the population taking the SAT was more select than today; still, many readers of this book will be entitled to sneer, “Well, I scored far better than that.”

Table
3.1
The Historical Setting of the Grant Study Birth Cohort

The
average Grant Study man was fifth-generation American. A few were immigrants, but more than a few had families that had been here for ten generations. There were no African Americans. Ten percent of the men were Catholics and 10 percent Jews. The remaining 80 percent, a higher percentage than among their classmates, were Protestants. Eighty-nine percent of the men came from north of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Missouri. Twenty-five years later, 75 percent of the sample remained within these boundaries, and 60 percent of the total sample had migrated to the five urban meccas of San Francisco, New York, Washington, Boston, and Chicago.

They were mostly a privileged group, but here they were less perfectly matched. Half of the men had had some private education, but often on scholarship. In college, 40 percent received financial aid (at that time, a year at Harvard cost about $22,500 in 2009 dollars), and half worked during the academic year, paying college costs not covered by their scholarships themselves. The men’s families were classified on the basis of paternal education, occupation, and selection for
Who’s Who in America.
One-third of the men’s fathers had had some professional training, but half of the parents had no college degree. Only 11 percent of the men’s mothers had ever worked, and of those who had, most had been single parents. Of the thirty-two working mothers, two were writers, five schoolteachers, one an artist, and one a lawyer; the rest were secretaries and waitresses.

Once Lewise Gregory began her home interviews, the families were also classified more subjectively by reference to such class- and status-related markers as household furnishings, books, art, and size of house. There was significant variation there. Sixteen percent of the families were categorized as upper class. Even during the Depression they enjoyed multiple houses, motorcars, and servants. Their mean yearly income was $225,000 per capita—yes, I mean per family member—in
2009 dollars. Four percent of the families were classified as lower class. Their annual mean per capita income was $5,200 in 2009 dollars.

So the men did not all come to college with silver spoons in their mouths; and even when they did, their parents or grandparents might have had more humble beginnings. There was Alfred Paine, for example, whom we will get to know more extensively in
Chapter 7
. He had a trust fund from birth; his father had been a head of the New York Stock Exchange; his grandfather was a successful merchant banker. But that grandfather had made his first thousand dollars as an itinerant pioneer, picking up buffalo horns on the Great Plains at night and shipping them back to New England for resale.

The father of another study member, Brian Farmer, was a painter and paperhanger. Soon after Brian’s birth, work grew so scarce that Mr. Farmer moved his family to South Dakota, where he and his wife and older children worked in the sugar beet fields as laborers. For their combined efforts, the family received eleven dollars for every acre they cleared. They had barely enough to eat until a kindly neighbor told them that they could have all the beans and potatoes they wanted from his fields. Together they gathered enough beans and potatoes to last them through the winter, plus a surplus that they traded for staples such as sugar, salt, and other groceries. During those years the Farmers did not know what it was to taste fresh vegetables or fruits. Mr. Farmer picked up odd jobs here and there, but his neighbors were too poor to pay him in cash. When Brian entered Harvard, his father was still earning only five dollars a day.

Some of the men had other kinds of difficulties. One Study member, whom his adult friends knew as “a very happy guy,” talked about growing up with an alcoholic mother. “I had a terrible time in my second, fourth and sixth grades. I got trial promotions probably because the teacher wanted to get rid of me. Throughout this period,
also,
there was hardly any income in the family. My folks had lost the variety store and gas station and during the winter, warmth at night consisted of getting under a pile of blankets. The winter days of my early years were spent curled up on a bench behind a big potbelly stove in a variety store listening to men talk. I would stay there because it was warmer than it was in the house.”

Whatever a man’s origins, his Harvard degree was a ticket of entry to the upper middle class. When the men returned from their service in World War II, they also benefited from high employment, a strong dollar, and the G.I. Bill, which virtually guaranteed an affordable graduate school education. They were just young enough to participate in the physical fitness and anti-smoking trends of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Most of the 1940 generation of Harvard men were upwardly mobile, and most ended up more successful than their fathers. (There were a few exceptions, like the man whose Wall Street father made two million 1935 dollars a year in the midst of the Depression. No, this father was not Joseph P. Kennedy.)

HOW THE MEN WERE STUDIED: 1939–1946

Three investigators interviewed each sophomore accepted into the Study: Clark Heath, a staff psychiatrist, and Lewise Gregory. The meeting with Dr. Heath included a comprehensive two-hour physical and a history of the young man’s dietary habits, medical history, and physical responses to stress. Each man was also studied by Carl Seltzer, the physical anthropologist, who recorded his racial type (Nordic, Mediterranean, etc.) and his somatotype (mesomorph, endomorph, ectomorph), determined whether his body build was predominately “masculine” or “feminine,” and made exhaustive anthropometric measurements.
13
The Study investigators noted his every physical detail, from the functioning of his major organs to his brow ridges and
moles
to the hanging length of his scrotum. They took a careful dietary history, too, including the number of teaspoons of sugar in his daily coffee or tea (the range was 0 to 7!).

As I’ve noted, the emphasis on somatotyping was an ill-fated effort to advance the then-fashionable science of physical anthropology. Carl Seltzer’s mentor was the Harvard anthropologist William H. Sheldon, who had been influenced by Kretschmer’s work and believed that human personality was significantly correlated with body build. The ectomorphic build, that is, was thought to be correlated with a schizoid temperament, the mesomorphic build with a sanguine temperament, and the endomorphic build with a manic-depressive temperament.
14
This is a cat that I let out of the bag in the last chapter; a third of a century later, Grant Study follow-up revealed that none of the ten outcomes in the Decathlon of Flourishing (or the men’s officer potential) correlated significantly with body type.

Eight to ten one-hour psychiatric interviews focused on the man’s family, his values, his religious experience, and his career plans. The psychiatrists were trying to get to know the men as people, not as patients. No attempt was made to look for pathology or to interpret the men’s lives psychodynamically. The interviews included a history of early sexual development, but unfortunately the psychiatrists did not inquire into the men’s close relationships.

Lewise Gregory integrated individual interviews with the men with the careful social histories that she gathered in her home visits with the men’s parents; I’ve described these above. In keeping with the research methodology of the 1930s, those histories were sometimes more anecdotal than systematic. Her chief informants were usually the men’s mothers, although fathers and siblings at times contributed information as well.

Frederic Wells, the Study psychologist, gave each man tests designed to reflect native intelligence (the Army Alpha Verbal and Alpha
Numerical).
In many cases he also administered two projective tests: a word association test and a shortened version of the Rorschach. The intention here was to test imagination, not to explore the unconscious (for which purpose the Rorschach is usually employed). Also included was the Harvard Block Assembly Test, an assessment of manipulative dexterity and comprehension of spatial relationships.
15

Physiologist Lucien Brouha studied each man in the Fatigue Lab. Brouha measured each man’s respiratory functions and the physiologic effects of running on an 8.6 percent incline treadmill at seven miles per hour for five minutes or until exhausted, whichever came first. Examiners took measures of pulse rate, blood lactate levels, exercise tolerance, and so on as a way of sorting the students by physical fitness. Surprisingly, I noted in 2000—more than fifty years later—that treadmill endurance correlated better with successful relationships than with physical health. (As it turned out, endurance and stoicism turned out to be better predictors of love than health in other areas, too.)

In 1940, the Study received a one-time grant of $2,400 ($35,000 in 2009 dollars) from the Macy Foundation, a philanthropic organization sympathetic to psychosomatic medicine. This windfall enabled the recording of primitive single-channel electroencephalograms, which had just begun to come into use. The neophyte encephalographer’s interpretations of these EEGs sometimes sound more like Tarot card readings than physiological analysis; in some cases the tracings were thought to reveal “latent homosexuality.” The Study also hired an experienced forensic graphologist to interpret the men’s handwriting. It soon became clear that neither handwriting nor EEGs were useful predictors of personality. But however naive or even comical some of these efforts sound now, they reflect a serious and important truth—that the Grant Study was collecting information even before there was science available to capitalize on its investment, in hopes
that
it would prove meaningful later. And in many cases it did. Prewar psychological and medical science were very different from today’s counterparts. It wasn’t only attachment theory that had to wait until the nineteen-fifties; so did double-blind placebo-controlled drug trials. Good science is always reaching a little ahead of itself.

Table
3.2
The Sequence of Contacts