Conant's first official move after being installed as president in October, 1933 earned him the amazed thanks of the entire freshman class. Since 1760 men living in the Yard had been roused from their sleep at 7 a.m. by the so-called "rising bell" which was first situated in Harvard Hall and then in Memorial Hall. Conant announced that he had "looked into the matter and found no good reason for continuing the 7 o'clock bell, and therefore ordered that it be discontinued" This move--it was the early Roosevelt era--was claimed by some freshman as the "new deal in Harvard's administration."

Further evidence of that new deal came later in the fall when Repeal went into effect in Cambridge. Students, liberated from the puritanical bonds of the Vol-stead Act, began showing up at meals in the Houses with bottles tucked under their arms. The matter was brought to Conant's attention and he immediately issued a statement: "I am ruling that no student may bring in any beverage of any sort whatever to the dining halls to be taken with his meals." This did not mean that Conant's regime was going to be a prohibitionist one. Less than a month later the University itself applied for and received a license to sell beer in the dining halls, and on January 4. 1934 liquor was served to undergraduates by the University for the first time in over 100 years. By the end of his first years, after the announcement of the National Scholarship plan, the CRIMSON decided that it would be appropriate to cease talking about the Age of Lowell and begin to realize that the Age of Conant had arrived. Even abolition of the beer plan in the next year. I' was costing too much did not serve to lessen the Conant administration's stature.

Revolt

This is not to say that Conant has always been followed at a distance of course by hordes of undergraduates worshipping in his footsteps. During the 30's when political activity ran unchecked through the streets of Cambridge. Conant was a frequent target for extemist student groups. The fat left wing element regularly denounced him as "a tool of Wall Street." This attitude was exemplified by an article in. "The Nation" by a former head of the University. News Office who denounced Conant but added that "I hardly expect the University to thumb its nose at the Wall Street bankers who now help administer its finances."

Conant also was pounced upon by the conservatives in the student body and alumni for his policy on the New Deal As opposed to President Lowell, who was a fighting foe of child labor laws and gloried in being called a conservative. Conant adopted a policy of cautious approval of the New Deal as a worthwhile experiment. His attitude came forth most clearly in 1935 in his awarding of an honorary degree to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and in the accompanying citation: "A public servant of deep faith and high integrity who finds courage to attempt an uncharted journey in our modern wilderness." This citation, written by Conant who takes great care in preparing them each spring, shows his feeling as explicitly as possible, since he has made it a rule never to engage in partisan politics. "Even my closest friends have to guess about how I vote," says Conant, who was at one time listed in "Who's Who" as a Republican, but who campaigned for Al Smith in 1928. His policy toward the New Deal invoked, angry grumblings from alumni which culminated when an old grad supposedly tossed a pie at him during a reunion of his undergraduate social club in the late 30's. Conant does not remember the incident, but it is a rapidly-growing legend in the club itself.

The high point of all anti-Conant fervor came just before the last war when the president was an ardent advocate of aid to Great Britain and further intervention by the United States. He naturally supported the nation's first peace-time draft. This naturally engendered a certain hostility from the College, since some undergraduates got the idea that Conant was trying to force them all into the Army to get shot at. This was hardly a fair attitude, especially since one of his two sons was at the time eminently draftable, but student picketing of Conant speeches nevertheless became a commonplace event.

The one incident that Conant even today still recalls with a touch of bitterness occurred at the Yale game in New Haven in 1940. At halftime things weren't quite so well organized then a group of three students rushed onto the field to present a playlet in which President Conant was represented as engaged in solitary military drill until a chemical retort was substituted for the gun he was carrying. The slogan of the group that put on the act was "Books, not Gups." Conant was not at the game, but he says now "If I had been it would have been hard to sit there. That's what I call unfair ball."

Not all of Conant's opposition at the time came from students. Members of the faculty, especially the late Professor F. O. Matthiessen, violently criticized what they thought was the president's "war-mongering" philosophy. The alumni again made a lot of commotion about his activities in behalf of the Committee to Help America by Aiding the Allies, but Conant still feels that "probably most of the alumni and surely the majority of the faculty felt as I did on the subject of intervention." Conant's stand was no matter of purely academic importance; he, Wendell Willkie, and Florello LaGuardia were the last three witnesses called by the Roosevelt Administration to support its position on the Lend-Lease Bill in the Spring of 1941. The bill passed, and shortly afterwards, FDR appointed Conant to establish better scientific liason with the British.

It was about this time that the nation at large began to read more and more about "the chap they just elected president of Harvard." At first glance there seemed no reason, for the prominence he had gained in national affairs. Conant was born in Dorchester on March 26, 1893. His family has been in the country since its founding, but the Conants were not part of that tight Boston aristocracy to which the Eliots and Lowells so definitely belonged. Indeed James B. Conant did not make the Boston Social Register until 1935, two years after he had been elected president of Harvard.

At Roxbury Latin Conant appeared a bit out of the ordinary so far as scientific accomplishments were concerned the age of 14 he was doing qualitative analysis of a type which baffles juniors and sophomores in college. At his graduation from Roxbury Latin Conant, as one of the outstanding scholars, was given a commencement part. Instead of reciting the usual platitudious nonsense he performed a chemical experiment of intricate complexity and performed. It perfectly Great things were predicted for him at Harvard.

The Two-Beer Dash

As a freshman and sophomore at the College Conant roomed at 7 Linden Street. "Mrs Mooney's Palace of Pleasure" as it was called. His fellow pleasure-seeker John P. Marquand '15 glories in relating one of the main athletic diversions at 7 Linden, Called "the two beer dash," it consisted of rushing by subway into Boston, drinking two beers, and returning to Cambridge in the shortest possible time Conant's prowess in this field have not been recorded for posterity, but he has always been recorded for posterity, but he has always been known as a capable athlete.

Most of his time at College was spent in the Chemistry labs, where he had little trouble in doing all the required work and some original research besides. He made Phi Beta Kappa, graduated in three years, and was an active editor of the CRIMSON all the while. In those days the paper did not run by-lined stories and consequently it is difficult to assess exactly what he contributed, but one remembrance of his days as Assistant Managing Editor still remains in the form of a framed page from the AME's Report Book of the year 1912-13. A hole has been burned in the middle of the page, and underneath, in a handwriting that later became familiar to presidents and commissars, is written:

"This [the hole] happened when I started to write what I thought of the officers of this paper who would not only leave a man without any record of what was across [he was set in type], without a proofreader, but also ask him to write the editorial--which he didn't May God and the graduates who read this sheet be merciful in their judgment." As an undergraduate editor I say Vale."

After saying Vale for the last time Conant studied here for his Ph.D., while spending his summers doing research for a private firm. In 1917 Conant went into the Scientific branch of national defense for the first time. For two years he and a group of associates worked on the ways of developing and then producing new of poison gases. At the war's end Conant returned to Cambridge with an appointment as an assistant professor of Chemistry. His brilliant work had attracted the notice of Professor Richard, chair man of the Chemistry Department Co