Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920
Purge of Campus Homosexuals
by William Wright
St. Martin’s Press. 278 pages, $25.95
FEW PEOPLE alive today would be able to conceive of an American university purging its student ranks of “undesirables” along the lines of Stalin’s purges or Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950’s. Students on most college campuses today (notwithstanding Oral Roberts or Baylor Universities) have the freedom to live their lives in relative safety without interference from Big Brother. Thus one would be surprised to learn what happened at America’s premier Ivy League institution, Harvard University, in 1920.
While that year may have marked the beginning of the F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper era, Harvard’s persecution of allegedly homosexual students and their friends sent tremors of fear throughout the Cambridge campus. The Inquisition-like sessions, known as Harvard’s secret court, evoked the ghosts of New England’s dark history: the Salem witch trials and the Puritans’ persecution of “sodomites.” Students thought to be gay were not only expelled from the College; their lives were forever changed. Expelled students found themselves having to explain the reason for their expulsion to potential employers years after the fact. Many found it impossible to enroll in another university. In a few cases, an expelled student took his own life. How did this come about at a venerable and seemingly civilized institution less than a century ago? The fanatical zealotry of one man, the elder brother of a young gay Harvard sophomore, is what unleashed this scourge of fear and persecution. Cyril Wilcox, a mediocre student, had been suspended by Harvard for low grades and was then readmitted on probation after a stint in summer school. Still struggling with his grades, Wilcox withdrew from Harvard for health reasons and returned home to regroup. During his visit home, he told his older brother Lester that, while a student, he’d been involved in a relationship with an older man in Boston. That fraternal confession caused the doors of hell to open. Brother Lester’s reaction “could not have been good,” writes William Wright, the author of Harvard’s Secret Court, in classic understatement. “It is not known whether Lester reacted to Cyril’s confidence with anger or pity, but his subsequent behavior leaves no doubt that he deplored homosexuality.” Lester seems to have “placed considerable blame on the older lover, and later on Harvard, for his brother’s collapse into this unspeakable depravity.” Wright concludes that Lester no doubt left Cyril “feeling even worse about himself”—contributing to Cyril’s suicide. After Cyril’s death, Lester intercepted a note from a gay classmate of his brother, and this set the ball rolling. The gossipy letter, strewn with words like “dearie” and “my dear,” also made an allusion to a mutual friend getting “sucked dry” by someone in their closed circle of friends. There were also references to dressing up in drag. At this point Lester traveled to 44 Beacon Street, where Cyril’s older lover lived, to force him to name all the homosexual students he knew. After beating up Cyril’s lover, Lester promptly tore a path to Harvard’s dean and demanded that the College rid itself “of this pernicious scourge.” The president of Harvard at the time was the illustrious A. Lawrence Lowell, who was also the elder brother of cigar-smoking lesbian Imagist poet Amy Lowell. Despite the fact that Amy wrote and published love poems to her live-in female secretary, Lawrence Lowell fanned the flames of Lester’s campaign with a crusader’s wrath. (He was always evasive about Amy’s eccentricities. Observes Wright wryly: “He would register his disapproval in the most general terms. On her cigar smoking, for instance, he told a friend, ‘I do not approve of women smoking in public.’ Smoking women were the problem, not lesbian sisters.”) Once the purge of allegedly homosexual students was in full swing, Lowell told one purge victim, an older professor who’d been at the University most of his life, “If I were you, I would get a gun and destroy myself.” While Harvard tried to bury the story in subsequent years, the transcripts from the court’s proceedings were discovered when the files were being recatalogued in the 1990’s. Remarks Wright: “One of the most remarkable aspects of the entire story is that someone in the dean’s office, aware of the files’ embarrassing nature, and the very different image of Harvard that they projected, did not destroy them. In fact, it is extraordinary that the five men of the Court, so obsessed with secrecy, had not themselves destroyed their records in 1920, as soon as they adjourned.” When the files were turned over to Harvard’s daily newspaper The Crimson, staff members spent months researching the cases and contacting family members. The paper would eventually publish a lengthy series detailing the horrors of the secret court and its human toll. Harvard’s Secret Court provides a generous sampling of the kinds of exchanges that took place as the students were interrogated. One student, Keith Smerage, a junior, was asked by the Court how he “first got into these homosexual practices.” “It first happened with an older boy in my hometown. He started fooling around and I guess he got excited.” “Do you presently masturbate?” “No, I have conquered that habit.” When did he last masturbate? “About nine months ago.” “Have you ever had sexual relations with a woman?” “Yes, but not since last summer.” Smerage was expelled from Harvard. The Court often homed in on students who had attended homosexual parties in the dorms, often with townies and sailors from Boston, rather than those who may have engaged in private homosexual sex. Thus a quiet student who did not socialize with partygoers but who may have had sex with his roommate on occasion would not have been a suspect. On the other hand, a heterosexual student who had a flamboyant roommate and who may have had a brief gay experience or gone to a party at some point was grilled just as mercilessly as the most outrageous queen. When one student committed suicide because of his expulsion, the Court recorded this fact as casually as it might note a student’s change of residence. The author of eleven books, including Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman and Pavarotti: My Own Story, Wright sometimes digresses into “gay history 101,” as if he felt compelled to retell the story of Stonewall for the general reader. These sections come off as filler for anyone with a modest background in gay history. Other than that, this important book is also a page-turner, one that might change your opinion of America’s greatest university. It may cause some readers to call for a re-evaluation of the presidency of Lawrence Lowell, whose portrait still hangs in Harvard’s main dining hall. Thom Nickels is the author of two recently published books, Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture.
