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.