VERITAS

After Father died, Max stayed at home and did not return to St. Paul’s. His grieving mother needed him near, and so did his younger brothers and sisters, particularly his six-year-old brother Louis. The family had not saved much and, while there were a few family trust funds to fall back on and his Grandfather Evarts’ estate was in the process of being settled, the financial situation for the moment was tight.

Young Edward went back to Harvard; he was just starting his sophomore year in 1902. The world was changing rapidly – Not only had Father and Grandfather Evarts and Uncle Charley Beaman and Great Uncle Ned just died, Queen Victoria had died in January of 1901 after almost 64 years on the throne, and President McKinley had been shot to death in September 1901 after four and a half years in office.

Boston was growing by leaps and bounds after filling in the Back Bay and all the way out to Kenmore Square and the Fens by 1900. The Tremont Street Subway was opened in 1897, and streetcars were reaching across the Charles and out into the suburbs. Automobiles, which were beginning to be produced on production lines, were starting to take the place of the horse and carriage.

While Henry James was still writing novels about Americans on tour in Europe, books about life as it was really lived in America, like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: a Girl of the Streets were being read by college students.

Teddy Roosevelt was President. Everything was getting big! The new Harvard Stadium designed by McKim Mead and White seated over 40,000 football fans. After an alarming series of deaths and serious concussion injuries, there was talk of dropping the game, but President Charles Eliot declared “effeminacy and luxury are even worse evils than brutality” and President Roosevelt preached from his bully pulpit “Hit the line hard: Don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard”. The topic for the big Harvard-Yale debate in 1905 was controversial, “Resolved that the intercollegiate football in America is a detriment rather than a benefit”, but there was little doubt about it, Big Time Football had arrived.

Education was becoming open to all; MIT and Harvard were considering merging into an even larger university. In 1900, Julia Harrington Duff, an Irish American Woman, was elected to the Boston School Committee; at Harvard, there were more students from Boston Latin, a public school, than from Groton or St. Paul’s.

Frank Roosevelt, the fop from Groton whose cousin had fallen into the Presidency after the shooting in Buffalo, was living in Westmorly, the most ornate, with diamond-leaded windows and oak wainscoting, of the private "Gold Coast" residence halls on Bow Street. Roger Baldwin, who would serve a year in jail avoiding service in the Great War and found the ACLU, was exploring the bounds of Harvard's tradition of tolerance and liberty of opinions in his own way: "I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal." Lothrop Stoddard was developing his argument that the absorption of the "white" race by "colored" races would result in the destruction of Western civilization (Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby reads a book titled The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard" and throughout Gatsby Tom confusedly and pathetically espouses Goddard's racial theories.)

An effort was made by the best men in the class, including Capt. Hurley and Ray Oveson of the football team, to draw seniors of class of 1905 from the big private dormitories to the “Yard” for their final year, so that senior class would occupy the yard en masse. It was hoped that the change would make Harvard more democratic and foster class spirit and college loyalty. Those who did not fall in line stood a good chance of being ostracized.

Edward was not particularly athletic, and while he was invited to join the Signet, a literary club, his junior year, he didn’t have the means or the inclination to join the Porcellian or the Fly Club. While he had been to St. Paul’s, and Perkins Hall had recently been constructed, he came a generation too late to be able to claim ostentatious wealth as his birthright. He thought he would probably go on to study law like his father and Grandfather Evarts, so he studied the classics, Latin and Greek, and literature.

Max joined him at Harvard in 1903 after things settled down at home. While Edward would keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson by his table the rest of his life, Max kept re-reading War and Peace. While Edward held to a classical course of studies, Max studied literature with Copey Copeland, joined the Stylus Club, got arrested for being drunk and disorderly after the Yale game, and in December became the first member of his class to be placed on probation. Van Wyck Brooks, who like Max, aspired to be a writer, came to Harvard as well, and shared a straw yellow house on Winthrop Street with Max, while his brother Ames, who would become a lawyer like Edward, write one slim volume of verse, and eventually walk in front of a locomotive, went off to Princeton. Max, who knew the swell crowd from SPS, made sure to introduce Van Wyck to all the right people, and helped get him into the Stylus and Signet "absolutely the nicest thing in college to belong to" and the final Fox Club. ("Foxhall Edwards" would be the editor in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again).

"Walter Pater is in every college bookshelf. DeQuincey may be on the bottom shelf...Every college-man of culture is a life-member with Mr. Elbert Hubbard . . . we see the rooms of these intellectual devotees and patrons of the arts plastered with Mona Lisas and Vierges au Rochers . . .We are sure to find certain wall-schemes with a single Rembrandt and a couple of aesthetic candles (going, if possible, all day)." The cults of John Donne and Dante met at the home of Charles Eliot Norton, C.C Perkins old friend, but Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman had no place at that time in the Harvard canon.

The Perkins boys, without the resources to take off on frequent holidays, visited their uncles’ families on weekends; their mother’s brother Prescott Evarts was the Rector of Christ Church in Cambridge, and their dad’s brother Charles Bruen Perkins, the architect, was living at Oakwood on Jamaica Pond, next door to their Cleveland cousins living at Nutwood (the city had taken the big Pine Bank house to be part of Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace park). When Uncle Prescott learned that Max had been invited to join the Fox Club but couldn't afford it, he wrote a check to cover the expenses. When they went to Newport in the summer, their Grandma Perkins gave Edward Longfellow's invitation to Uncle Ned to join the Saturday Club, and gave Max letters from Browning, Lowell, and Motley to hang on the Fox Club walls.

554 men received their Harvard College degrees in 1905. An additional 253 more men would be listed as “Special Students and Affiliated Members.” Edward Newton Perkins, having failed to complete all his physical education requirements, would fall into the latter category.

Yasnaya Polyana, New Jersey

I think of the Perkins as a raft of Boston culture, - one of those rafts that were to be found in many another American town, serenely riding the wild waters of the world around them . . . Now the Perkins were not only New Englanders, they were even doubly so, for they united the two great lines of Boston and New Haven, - Harvard and Yale, - the twin immemorial schools of the mind of New England. Max, descended on one side from the old East India magnates, - some of whom had been Loyalists in the Revolution in Boston,- was, on the other, through his grandfather Evarts, the Senator and Secretary of State, descended from John Davenport and Roger Sherman. I mention this merely because I have known few other Americans in whom so much history was palpably and visibly embodied, so that one saw it working in him, sometimes not too happily, for his mind was always in a state of civil war.

- Van Wyck Brooks

In his “hyperaesthetic youth”, Van Wyck Brooks was mortified to have been born in the dully named town of Plainfield, New Jersey. As he grew older however, he was greatly relieved to find out that Tolstoy’s place Yasnaya Polyana, where he wrote War and Peace, meant the same thing in Russian, and he eventually discovered that Plainfield in the 1880’s, had more mystery, intrigue, and personality than most simple unadorned American towns. By the time the new train station was built in 1885, Plainfield was growing into one of the affluent suburbs made possible by the railroad link to New York. With its relatively pure air, the local paper touted Plainfield as the “Colorado of the East” and a haven for sufferers of respiratory illnesses, even though it boasted no exalted Rocky Mountains. The “Town of a Hundred Millionaires” filled up with capitalists and robber barons, as well as some literary folk such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian, Julia Ward Howe’s daughter Florence, and Bret Harte’s abandoned wife and daughter. Edward and Betty Perkins moved out from Manhattan to Plainfield after the first three boys, Ned, Max, and Carley, were born. They bought a nice comfortable house on Central Avenue, and Edward, who never wore an overcoat, bought the first high wheel bicycle in town and rode it to the train station each morning to commute to his law practice at Gray & Davenport in the city. Three more children followed, Molly (1890) and Fanny (1892), and finally Louis (1896), and Edward and Betty quickly became close friends with other young parents in town, including Rowland and Fanny Cox and Charles and Sallie Brooks. The Perkins threw themselves into their new community. They were active in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and helped found the “Shakespeare Club of Plainfield” where they read Shakespeare aloud with their neighbors (the first reading selection came from King Lear). They made sure not to miss a week, because the club had the habit of electing as president a member who was absent from the meeting. Betty and Sallie Brooks and Fanny Cox joined The Monday Afternoon Club which provided a literary outlet for women (Betty explicated Matthew Arnold's Dramatic Poetry, while Sallie addressed the club on Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Turkish, and Moorish Ornament). Edward, whose father had been on the School Board in Boston, ran for School Trustee as a Democrat, and on Sunday nights at home, he read aloud to his children from Ivanhoe, The Rose and the Ring, and the Three Musketeers. “I have watched my own career since 1885 with friendly interest, but I hardly think a particular account of it is anxiously desired by my friends and classmates, though I hope many of them will be glad to know that I have been fairly prosperous and successful." When Mr. Gray was appointed to the Court of Appeals, the firm became Davenport, Smith & Perkins, then Smith & Perkins, and then Perkins & Jackson. Edward worked hard, and his practice was successful. One of his important cases was Goetze vs. United States in which it was decided by the Supreme Court that Puerto Rico ceased, after the treaty with Spain, to be a "foreign country" within the meaning of the tariff laws. His personal style reflected his New England training and ancestry and made him a valuable member of the grievance committee of the New York Bar Association. They often travelled into Manhattan to visit Betty’s parents and their city friends. Society in New York had moved uptown and the slums had moved in around the old downtown neighborhood, but the Evarts still lived in the old house at 231 2nd Avenue. Plainfield society came into the city when Uncle Charles Bruen Perkins finally, in 1896, got married to Elizabeth Ward, a tall and sweet looking brunette. Monsignor Doane conducted the ceremony, and the New York Times took note: "a fashionable wedding in an old-fashioned New York house early in September is so decidedly a novelty". Grandfather Evarts, the Senator, was getting old and blind. In 1889 he had sailed to Europe on “La Champagne” with his son Allen and his daughter Mary to consult the best oculists in Europe. By the mid nineties, he began to find it hard to travel. The grandchildren, however, were full of life. Ned and Max Perkins made life-long friends with Ames and Van Wyck Brooks. Ned and Max were sent off to St. Paul’s when they turned thirteen. Ned entered the School in 1896, where he was an Isthmian who played on the second eleven, an assistant editor of the Horae Scholasticae Magazine and a member of the Concordian Literary Society, the Missionary Society, and the Library Association. Max, who shared his literary inclinations, followed him in 1898 and became quarterback and captain of the third Isthmian Football Team. Grandfather Evarts became increasinngly housebound in New York. Joseph Choate came to call just before embarking for England where he had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Evarts congratulated him and prophesied a brilliant diplomatic career, but then shook his head and said, "When I think what a care I am to my people, lying so helpless here, and that I can do nothing any more to repay their kindness, or to help in the world, I feel like the boy who wrote home from school to his mother a letter of twenty pages, and then added: 'P.S. Mother, please excuse my longevity.' " The former Senator and Secretary of State, who had moved the unanimous nomination of Lincoln, defended Johnson against impeachment, and secured Hayes disputed election, turned eighty-three on February 6th, 1901. Two weeks later, he was stricken with pneumonia. On the last day of February, he died. In the summer the family travelled to Grandmother Perkins house in Newport, Bruen Villa, a virtual museum of old paintings and objets d’art which C. C. Perkins had collected in Florence. She gave Ned and Betty a superb Michelangelo sketch for the Last Supper which they hung in the Plainfield house, (although some later challenged its provenance), and recalled stories of the old days in Italy, banditti in wild passes of the mountains and travelers robbed on the road in the middle of the night – musical soirees in Rome – the Marble Faun – “Harry” and “Willie” James and the family of Charles Eliot Norton. Great Grandmother Bruen rocked in her chair and remembered for the boys the time, when she was just a child, she saw George Washington ride on his white horse in front of New York’s City Hall. She lived to the age of 99, and died in 1892, while Grandmother Frances Davenport Bruen Perkins herself lived on in the Bruen Villa for fifty years until 1909. Every summer the family took the White Mountain Express to Windsor. Senator Evarts left the Skinner house in Windsor, as well as some property across the river in Cornish, to Betty. Fifty years later Van Wyck Brooks vividly remembered visiting with his best friend Max, and recalled "the little girls in pigtails, white dimity and sashes, playing croquet on the lawn in the golden afternoon". The children ran free - swam in Runnemede Pond, canoed on the Connecticut River, climbed Mt. Ascutney, ran through the woods in Paradise with their Evarts cousins, and caught turtles at Ohl’s Pond. You could catch turtles there from the bank, for they would poke their heads up through the weeds and you would grab just behind their head and get the turtle. One day we were doing this. Uncle Edward was looking sharply for a head. He saw one and grabbed, - and brought out a long slimey snake! You know a snake’s head is almost exactly like a turtles. Ned went on to Harvard in 1901. In October of his sophomore year, troubling news came from home. Father had developed a bad cold, and then a fever, and then pneumonia. On All Hallow’s Eve a telegram arrived; Ned rushed back from Harvard and Max was hurried back from St. Paul’s. Ned was 19, Max 17, Carlie 16, Molly 12, Fanny 10, and Louis 6, and at the age of 45, on October 30th 1902, Father was dead.