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Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals

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William Wright has revealed an astonishing and gruesomely fascinating episode in American history in this investigation of a roundup of students at Harvard College who were homosexual or indulging in homosexuality. Following the suicide of a student who had been left by his Boston cafe-owning lover, a secret court was established whose major governing influence was the college president, the beloved A. Lawrence Lowell, better known for his part in sending Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair, changing the acceptance procedure to ensure that the number of Jews admitted to the college was limited, and attempting to prevent black students from living in dormitories. This secret court "requested" the appearance of anybody from the Boston/Cambridge area who it felt had influenced its precious charges in such a loathsome and immoral way, and all such "requests" to appear were respected, even though the persons subpoenaed by this kangaroo court were in danger of having their reputations destroyed. But the book primarily investigates the students involved, the facts of the investigation and the future lives of the accused, one of whom committed suicide immediately after questioning and another after 10 years, his life having been, for all intents and purposes, ruined by the influence of his expulsion from Harvard. Some of the expelled recovered to one degree or another from the experience to eke out decent lives. One became a very influential and politically connected jurist. The story is heartbreaking and the cruelty and vindictiveness of the court staggering. Wright takes no prisoners in delineating the facts. Bizarrely, however, after observing that Lowell left his fortune to a Harvard-related philanthropic organization, Wright notes that it is his mistakes that are remembered, "perhaps unjustly". Such a generous judgment is hard to explain. This book is vividly illuminating of the overweening arrogance of WGU (World's Greatest University), the hysteria surrounding homosexuality in the U.S. post-WWI, the potential for a hateful cruelty among conservative Brahmin educators, and human resiliency and human tragedy in the face of a vengeful witch-hunting elite.

WOW, to think that the powers that be at Harvard in the 20's and future leaders of the US can affect the lives of individuals is something akin to todays government......don't cross me! Very well written and a real eye opener. You'll enjoy this book start to finish.

I really enjoyed this. Like reading a mystery but it is all true. I got really involved with the students and cared about them. I hated to put it down. Almost read it in one sitting. Moves really fast and the ending is a real shocker.

I've read books that have chilled me. I've read books that made me burn with righteous indignation. I've even read books that made me sick. But this is the first time that I've come across one that did all three.

In 1920, a young Harvard student named Cyril Wilcox committed suicide for reasons that were likely related to poor academic performance and ill health. His older brother, Lester, was convinced that the recent breakup of Cyril's relationship with an older man was the cause, and persuaded the powers that be at Harvard to begin what can best be described as a witch hunt.

Deciding that Cyril gave up on life because a 'homosexual underworld' had dug its nails into him, the head academicians conducted a Secret Court whose sole purpose was to find out which Harvard students and faculty were gay, and get rid of them. Their methods, and the end results, were deadly. Eugene Cummings, who was days away from receiving a dentistry degree that he was worked five years to obtain, was expelled from the university and assured that Harvard would see to it that such a moral leper did not get into another school. He killed himself. The Harvard officials even took it a step further on the hate ladder and tried to ruin the life of a boy who wasn't even a student, but rather a waiter at a Cambridge restaurant. They found out that this young man had been in a relationship with a Harvard boy, and contacted the restaurant's manager, asking that he be fired. Unbelievable.

Believe it though. It did happen. William Wright did an incredible job tracking down the descendants of the gay Harvard students whose lives were wrecked by the Secret Court. He's equally tenacious in analyzing the social and personal reasons behind the vendetta. It's a history book, but reads like an exciting novel, complete with a plot twist at the very end.

Joyce Carol Oates summed it up best in her review: "Disturbing and illuminating... reads like a tragic mystery from an era uncomfortably close to our own."

This book is based entirely on a series of articles that Harvard's own student newspaper brought out a few years back. The students who broke the story are to be commended for their first-rate journalism. Having read both the articles and this book, however, I can only report that the latter adds very little to the former. An obvious advantage of having a book length treatment in the public domain, brought out by a popular press, is that it's likely to reach a wider audience than the articles. If only for that reason, it's a good thing that such a book is available for interested readers. Still, it's too bad the book in question is the one under review. Publishers Weekly is quite right to call HSC melodramatic and repetitive. It is, indeed, a lot of both. It is also padded: with the author's unnecessary speculations (as to the motives of protagonists, etc.), with concocted dialogue, and with a non-sequitur and scattershot penultimate chapter on the history of homophobia. In short, HSC is completely superfluous to the very fine series of articles that were written about this tragic and shameful chapter in Harvard's history. I'm glad I read this book, for having learned about the circumstances it relates. But I wish that a more able historian -- not to mention a better writer -- than WW had written it.

Written midway through the past decade, Harvard's Secret Court hasn't been touted as it should be or read as widely as it needs to be. Wright's nonfiction study of a gay witch hunt at one of the country's most respected universities reads like a fiction thriller. Those who tend to shy away from nonfiction will find this book as exciting to read as the best of the mystery genre. The sad part is that the witch hunt, the suspense with which Wright seduces the reader, and the characters are all real. Everyone should read this book: gay folks, straight folks, history buffs, parents with sons or daughters at universities, and anyone who fears prejudice and hate. This well-written and well-researched book shows us how easy it is for the fear of one or two individuals to ruin the lives of many. Yes, the action in Harvard's Secret Court took place in 1920, but what happened then could happen again. This book, although of gay and lesbian interest, should not be stuck on a "gay ghetto" bookshelf awaiting only gay readers. Wright's work deserves to be read - and thought about - by a large cross section of the reading public: high-school students, college graduates, atheists, and the right-wing religious. Harvard's Secret Court will keep the reader up all night as the action - and the appalling reality - sends one back to a New England campus in the 1920s to meet an interesting cast of characters. We will all look forward to future work of this caliber from William Wright.

Even though the facts are new, there's nothing really shocking about the three week secret court of 1920 at Harvard. Homophobia, if that's what we can agree to call it, has been a part of human history for eons, and I wasn't surprised to find that deans of the college had interviewed thirty students, teachers and Cambridge outsiders about their sex habits, only to expel fourteen of them later down the pike. It was horrifying but not really a shock.

As Wright notes, it's bizarrely confusing at first because some of the main characters have names that rhyme--Say, Lay, Day and Gay. It must be a Harvard thing.

Wright, the author of the best biography of Lillian Hellman, surely knows human cruelty as have few observers since Montaigne. His picture of Lawrence Lowell is magnificent. Lowell was the best and the brightest, and the most obdurate of anti-gay hatemongers, and yet oddly enough his sister, the great US modernist Amy Lowell, was certainly a lesbian, and very much an in your face "out" case. And his relations with her were just fine, but maybe, as Wright suggests, he was taking out on the poor students his fury at feeeling unable to keep Amy's gay passions under check.

The whole affair began when one student, Cyril Wilcox, killed himself mysteriously at home, and his family was shocked to find some compromising letters sent to him from fellow students. One of them boasted about trying to seduce his fiancee's younger brother, saying that once he and Bradlee were in bed together, he wouldn't be "taking it out for two days and two nights"! Okay, sort of rough stuff for your mother to find on top of your dead body in 1920, but it led to untold privations for a group of tagged and persecuted men, whose only crime was really that they managed to find a moment or two of sexual bliss in a dark and hateful era.

The only down side to this book was a few chapters worth of invented dialogue--needless, and spoiled the sober effect; and also a certain amount of p-a-d-d-i-n-g and repetition. You feel like saying, all right already. But all in all, a story of fascination, and you feel with the three suicides that those boys are still on the march, seeking vengeance right now on a homophobic nation. This time I'm with the ghosts.

Typically, I do my leisure reading in the realm of fictional prose. However, because I am very much involved with Queer Theory in my graduate studies, I could not pass this up. William Wright has done an astonishing job of capturing this story, which is simultaneously amazing and disconcerting. I disagree wholeheartedly with a reviewer who said, "William Wright has a tone that implies: -Anybody who dared to be visibly gay deserved censure because it was foolish to be visibly gay." This is simply untrue. What Wright is saying is that, in the confines of 1920 Harvard, being visibly gay came at a steep price." Wright's being a "closet homophobe" would negate any reason to write this text in the first place. Nevertheless, what is important here is looking at the ways in which America's most beloved and respected university abused its power, and then proceeded to sweep their abhorrent actions under the rug for 80+ years. If they felt so right in their procedures, why the cover up? A number of ruined lives and suicides were the result of this witch hunt enacted by the so-called "secret court." Though those serving on the board and faculty of Harvard today can hardly be looked at with scorn, it is important to note the embarrassing blight a university, devoted to liberal ideas and education, was capable of, lest we repeat it in the future.
In a world that is (thankfully) becoming more and more understanding/tolerant of gay culture every day, this book could not come at a better time. It is a prime example of the extreme damage ignorance and self-righteous, superimposed moral authority can inflict...not just on those men who happened to be gay (or simply sexually experimental), but on their family members and the friends who dared to overlook their sexuality for other, more substantial traits.
This book is amazing on a number of different levels. Kudos to William Wright for blowing the lid off Harvard's little secret and bringing it into the open---and!---for writing a truly accessible and engaging account of this episode in American history.

I was very disappointed in this book.
The facts themselves are interesting, but the way that William Wright presents them is not well-done.
William Wright has a tone that implies:
-Anybody who dared to be visibly gay deserved censure because it was foolish to be visibly gay.
-Trans women are perverted and highly abnormal homosexual males.
-Homophobia is natural and is genetically encoded into human beings.
-The heterosexual families suffered more than the boys themselves.
In addition to problems of this nature, Wright says the same things again and again and again.