Something Old, Something New

The narrow, cobbled streets of Boston were clogged with traffic. Last week, as every week, it jammed ceaselessly at downtown intersections, honking, lurching and stinking up the fine autumn mornings. Boston's first citizen, small, erect, beak-nosed Charles Francis Adams III, regarded the monster warily. He had never learned to drive a car, and at 80 had no intention of learning. Neither was he enamored of taxicabs, nor of the modern habit of leaping into one every time it rained. He liked to begin his day (after rising promptly at 6:45 in his stately house in suburban Concord) by walking the half mile from North Station to his office on State Street.

The Adamses had always walked--his great-grandfather, President John Quincy Adams, had been as addicted to three-hour hikes as to his famed diary. For another thing, there was something satisfying in a leisurely look at Boston. Despite the Irish, the Italians, the automobile and the social "philosophy" of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Boston was still Boston. Its church steeples still stood unchallenged by tall buildings. Beacon Hill's decorous cascade of red brick houses still defied time and modern architects. The lion and unicorn of England, which revolutionary mobs had neglected to pull down in the 1770s, still stood atop the old State House.

Ancestors & Integrity. To Charles Francis Adams, banker, yachtsman, ex-Secretary of the Navy and the reigning patriarch of the Adams clan, these reminders of the past were not so much landmarks as part & parcel of daily life. Like J. P. Marquand's George Apley, he was neither insensible to change, nor intolerant of it. But nothing had ever moved him to abandon the manners & morals of his New England ancestors--who include two Presidents (John and John Quincy), a famous ambassador (Charles Francis I), authors (Henry and Brooks), bankers, lawyers and scholars.

He believed in thrift, personal integrity, personal independence and the necessity of toil; he abhorred with equal fervor, tobacco, alcohol and ostentation. His favorite dishes were tripe and pig's feet. Although he was an officer of 43 companies and corporations, he shared a small, low-ceilinged office in Boston's museum-like State Street Trust Co. with his secretary (who comes from Illinois). He contemplated buying a new hat as reluctantly as he would have considered selling the house he had built in Concord in 1899.

Last week, in spite of this preoccupation with the past, he symbolized a phenomenon of modern U.S. life which was as familiar to most citizens as the forward pass and nylon stockings--the nation's Community Chests. In a cynical age Charles Francis Adams had never questioned the precept that the man who accepted success or social position thereby accepted responsibility toward 'other men. Neither had he lost faith in the New England belief that a family or a community must care for its own. And after eleven years as president of the Greater Boston Community Fund, he illustrated the fact that these bedrock precepts of U.S. social philosophy were sound.

Dempsey & Hope. The New England conscience had become an enormous enterprise. Last week, in mid-campaign, the Greater Boston Fund was recruiting 40,000 volunteer workers, preparing to raise $7 million from the 2.5 million people of the city and 50 surrounding towns. Hundreds of stenographers, statisticians, bookkeepers, executives (many on loan from Boston businesses) worked in its headquarters office, a conglomeration of desks and telephones set up in the cavernous First Corps of Cadets Armory on Arlington Street.

The Fund trained workers, kept a stable of capable speakers, printed posters by the thousands, plotted dinners, benefits, publicity stunts. As a result, the high points of Charles Francis Adams' week concerned two extremely unlikely characters--an ex-pugilist named Jack Dempsey and a radio comedian named Bob Hope. Dempsey aided Fund publicity by posing for pictures and refereeing boxing matches at the Burroughs Newsboys Foundation on Beacon Hill. Hope packed 10,000 people onto the Charles River Esplanade for an uproarious Sunday afternoon Community Fund rally.

Boston was only one city: Community Chest drives were big business all across the nation. This year one million citizens in the 808 U.S. cities would raise an estimated $165,000,000 for hospitals, the U.S.O., children's aid societies, clinics, convalescent homes, camps, youth organizations and scores of other welfare agencies. This would not be easy--expenses were up and quotas in most cities were at an all-time high. But few organizations, private or public, had learned the secrets of organization as well as the Community Chests or had achieved such wide public acceptance.

Slogans & Feathers. By now the slogan "Everybody Gives--Everybody Benefits" and the red feather symbol* evoked an almost automatic response from millions of U.S. citizens. Newspapers gave the Community Chests front-page publicity as a matter of course. U.S. labor, once a little standoffish, contributed both money and manpower. Walt Disney had produced a cartoon short in which Pluto the Pup contributed his largest and juiciest bones to the cause. Jack Benny, Abbott & Costello, Kate Smith, the Great Gildersleeve, and a score of other top-flight radio personalities had plugged the Chest over national networks.

The Community Chests had worked out systems of extracting funds which were as difficult to dodge as police dragnets. They conducted separate campaigns for wealthy citizens and corporations--a system which operated admirably, since many leading spirits of Community Chests were big businessmen or members of wealthy families themselves. In San Francisco it was Mrs. Henry Potter Russell, member of the old and wealthy Crocker clan; in St. Louis, Henry Hitchcock, assistant vice president of the Mississippi Valley Trust Co.; in Pittsburgh, H. J. Heinz II, producer of the famed 57 Varieties; in Milwaukee, George A. Morison, a Harvardman and transplanted New Englander who, like Charles Francis Adams, felt his stewardship.

In many cities captains or chairmen of Chest subdivisions kept cards on prospects after the fashion of ward heelers. Solicitation in business districts was often conducted in advance of the door-to-door residential campaigns to keep office workers from saying, "I contribute at home." The collectors would rather get him at the office: because many business houses run check-off systems, a man is likely to give more generously there.

Undebatable Points. Despite all this pressure, the vast majority of U.S. citizens were patently contented with the Community Chests. Viewed coldly, this acceptance and the mushroom growth it had fostered seemed little short of miraculous. It had come in less than 25 years. The Chest idea was born in Cleveland in 1913 but did not really develop until the 1920s, did not achieve its major growth until the Great Depression.

Its coast-to-coast successes stemmed from the obvious energy, honesty and intelligence with which the drive was administered, and the enthusiasm of its workers. After attending a few meetings, the average Chest solicitor pursues his quarry with the fervor of an evangelist and the guile of a confidence man. Popular acceptance was also due in part to two practical and all but undebatable selling points: 1) citizens in Community Chest cities are asked to contribute only once a year; and 2) Community Chest organizations spend only 7% of their funds for campaign and administrative expenses.

To many a U.S. citizen all this seemed like much more than material victory. In one sense it was a restatement of the American thesis that men of all political beliefs, religions and races could work hand in hand. And it had proved once more that the U.S. was capable of adapting basic philosophies to meet the changes of an imperfect world.

One of the Family. To many a Boston admirer of Charles Francis Adams, the triumphs of the Community Fund were added proof of something more personal; that the strength of the amazing Adams line had not thinned out in five generations.*

Few men had ever been born under such a crushing weight of tradition as Charles Francis Adams III. Even as a child in suburban Quincy (pronounced Quinzy) he was not simply Charley Adams, but an Adams as well.

He grew up in a white house on President's Lane. It was close to Adams Street, on which the historic home of great-great-greatgrandfather President John Adams stood, a rambling clapboard house with a mansard roof. On the hill above it stood a copper beech tree which great-grandfather President John Quincy Adams had imported from England.

He was early conscious of the fact that his grandfather and namesake, the first Charles Francis, had served as Lincoln's Ambassador to England during the trying days of the Civil War. And when he was six years old his father, John Quincy II, was nominated for Vice President on the Democratic "Straight Out" ticket which opposed Ulysses S. Grant in the campaign of 1872. As a youngster Charles went to an Adams school in Quincy and visited famed kinsmen: Uncle Brooks the scholar, and Uncle Henry the medievalist, world-traveler, scorner of 20th Century materialism, friend of Teddy Roosevelt, author of the Education of Henry Adams.

Bezique & Bathing. All this helped shape a man but it did not disturb a pleasant boyhood. As Henry Adams wrote: "It was unusual for boys ... to read . . . the tablet in memory of a President greatgrandfather who had 'pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor. . . .' But boys naturally supposed that other boys had the equivalent of President grandfathers. . . ."

For recreation, the Adams clan "looked down" on such obvious resorts as Bar Harbor. They spent their summers at a rambling, cupolaed South Shore hotel named the Glades House, which they owned in company with the Saltonstalls, Codmans, Ameses and other old Boston families. Charley Adams (who still goes there each summer) bathed, played tennis, learned to sail, and watched his elders play Bezique--for beans, since nobody approved of gambling. He also applauded at least one expression of the Adams instinct for independent thought. His uncle Charles Francis II described it: "We gave some of the matrons a rather rude shock. We considered that the Sabbath was made for man, and that innocent enjoyment was in no wise objectionable to an all-seeing Providence. Accordingly we went in bathing and went out sailing."

But if the pleasures of childhood were prearranged for Charles Francis III, so were the responsibilities of manhood. He accepted them as if all the old Adamses were watching, and lived his life the same way. At first he followed landmarks. He graduated cum laude from Harvard, made a tour of Europe, and studied law. "He should have gone into the Navy," says his sister with disarming Beacon Hill frankness, "but people didn't do that when he was young." Instead, he got into politics and served two terms as mayor of Quincy. After that, circumstance took a hand in his affairs.

The Sailor. Though almost all Adamses were exceptionally long-lived, his father had died in 1894 at 61. Everyone said he had been killed by the panic of 1893. "Father was quite a borrower," says Charles Francis Adams, "and he was very unhappy in 1893." Charles Francis inherited his father's debts, and had to accept genteel poverty.

He became treasurer of Harvard University, kept the job for 30 years, increased the university's investments from $13,000,000 to $120,000,000, building it into the highest endowment of any U.S. university's. Cautiously, prudently, over the years he built the Adams estate back toward the million-dollar mark. He was past middle age before he could demonstrate publicly the Adams talent for controversy and decision, the Adams intolerance of compromise.

His great passion was for the sea and yachts, and from boyhood he had built and raced them. He wore an astounding yachting costume--a white navy enlisted man's cap which turned down over his nose, golf knickers which hung down around his shins, and layers of battered sweaters. But he is one of the greatest sailors the U.S. has ever produced. Said one admirer: "He always seems to be in perfect harmony with the boat and sails it with great firmness."

In 1920 the world read his name. He was picked to handle the U.S. cup defender Resolute against Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock IV, and won after one of the most famous sailing duels in yachting history.

Boston loved him for the dramatic finish but loved him more for turning up at his office precisely on time the next morning and acting as if nothing whatever had happened.

"This is Hell." And Boston appreciated --as few other U.S. cities would--the furious forthrightness he demonstrated as Secretary of the Navy under President Herbert Hoover. He admired Hoover (although he had been a Democrat until 1920). He took it upon himself to praise him publicly at a time when White House relations with Congress were strained.

But at the same time, Adams fought Hoover's reductions of naval appropriations vehemently. Neither the marvels of politics, nor four years of proximity to naval pomp and naval braid caused any alteration of his habits. He ate lunch daily in the Navy Building cafeteria, after standing in a line of clerks and stenographers and carrying his own tray to a table. Once, when motion picture cameramen asked him to sit down and write something while they photographed him, he pulled out a pen, thoughtfully scribbled "This is hell. . . this is hell. . . this is hell. . . ."

Now, once more a director of corporations, he makes weekly trips to New York but, like many a rock-ribbed Bostonian, so arranges things that he does not have to stay in the alien city overnight.

It is this willingness to brave personal purgatories in the interests of others which has kept him serving the Boston Community Fund in spite of age and his horror of the "inspirational talk." Though he talked of resigning, he will probably stay on in the president's job for a while longer--he has a rare talent and Boston still covets it.

Said the Fund's chairman, John E. Lawrence: "I don't know what we'd do without him--he puts things on such a high plane that nobody can resist him."

-The best feathers for Community Chest purposes come from Chinese ducks, have been unobtainable since the outset of World War II. This year's 3 3/4--inch red feathers (wholesale price: $1.50 a thousand) are plucked from pigeons' wings, and are much less amenable. Reason: 50% bend to the left, will not ride well on the left side of a masculine hat band.

-Adams married Frances Levering, daughter of Massachusetts' Congressman William C. Lovering, in 1899. He has two children, Charles Francis Adams Jr. and Mrs. Catherine Adams Morgan, daughter-in-law of famed Financier J. P. Morgan; nine grandchildren.

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