The coach passengers, like me, were and are flattered by the idea that we've been through a rigorous and merit-based selection process, and we're the ones who've come out on top, unlike the poor slobs who wound up at the safety schools. Run down to the bookstore and get the decals for your parents' car windows and shell out for the licensed merchandise! What we weren't told, and what many still don't understand, is that the Ivies are only partly merit-based, and a percentage of entering classes is still reserved for legacies and other major-donor offspring. The exact size of this percentage, those flying first class, is a closely guarded secret. However, this is simply an extension of policies that have always been in place in the Ivy League.
I was a pretty dense kid back then. I'd wonder, "Gee, Clotty Shipworth has the same name as Shipworth Hall! What a weird coincidence," and I'd think no more of it. Or I'd notice that there was a certain stuffy air of English boarding-school culture, various styles of hazing and certain aspects of preppiness that I'd never seen as a public-school kid, and I'd just chalk it up to -- well, I don't know what I just chalked it up to. What I didn't understand was that the Establishment had found it convenient in the late 1940s to seem merit-based and egalitarian and tone down traditional Ivy exclusivity.
Various social historians from Lundberg onward, as well as communications to Ivy alumni from the 1940s time period, make the point, however, that there's still a first-class cabin, and in effect, it's just a continuation of the old Ivy culture that dates from before 1776. But if you think about it, it was in the Establishment's interest to change the visuals -- if someone now says he went to Princeton, everyone gets to assume he scored really well on tests and got good grades. But Princeton didn't even admit blacks until just before World War II, and the Jewish roommates Law mentions at Harvard in a Boston Globe interview were there under a quota that, according to Alan Dershowitz, has never been lifted, just remarketed as a "diversity" program.
Harvard in the late 1940s, when Bernard Law was considering applying, was only in the process of making that minimal transition. Even now, commentators of the Lundberg school make the point that where one attended prep school is a much more accurate social indicator than where one went to college. If I went to St Paul's and Yale, it says far more about me socially than if I simply went to Yale. Anyone can go to Yale, they just need good SATs and stuff. Not everyone can go to St Paul's.
The egalitarian pose that downplayed this attitude had only partly begun to take hold in the late 1940s, and in fact, the pseudo-aristocratic ideal has never completely disappeared. My parents, anxious to get me into an Ivy in the 1960s, were still careful to ply family connections and get me a recommendation from an authentic Establishment alumnus. It worked. Would I have gotten in without it? Who knows? I think this represents something of the dilemma the Law family must have faced in considering Harvard in the late 1940s.
My informant thinks it might be worth trying to find out if any Catholic parish schools on the upper West Side of Manhattan had any record of the cardinal's time there. I tend to doubt it. What we do know is that his parents sent him to the largely black public school in St Thomas when they lived there. (A Catholic high school, founded in 1946, was in fact available in St Thomas.) His parents weren't very Catholic; neither would have been eligible to receive communion if they ever went to mass. I strongly suspect he was sent to New York public schools as well. A fuzzy memory of his whole childhood would have suited the cardinal in his later years and forestalled any inquiry into whether he'd been to Catholic school at all.
But this adds to the dilemma: Harvard even now apparently reserves a substantial quota in entering classes for applicants from prestigious prep schools. In the late 1940s, this would have been even more the case. That he would come from a working-class and military background via a largely black high school in the Virgin Islands might make him an intriguing curiosity case, but not much more. I suspect his chances at Dartmouth, an Ivy with a more established preference for outliers, would have been better, but this isn't among the schools he said he applied for in the official bio. And Dartmouth at the time would have been just as interested in a pedigree.
Beyond that, it's hard to determine the Law family's true financial circumstances. My informant has discovered that Bernard A. Law authored a 1940 book, Fighting Planes of the World, that may have been an attempt to shore up family finances. In any case, it doesn't appear that the Law family, whether Law's later story about Wedgewood china is true, was inclined to send Bernard to any sort of private school before Harvard.
We don't know if he attended Harvard under any sort of scholarship. However, the evidence we have is that he lived the whole four years at Adams House, the socially prestigious residence with its own swimming pool that calls itself the "gold coast". Surely there would have been less expensive places to live in Cambridge. Beyond that, travel expenses from Jackson, MS or the Virgin Islands, where his parents lived while he was at Harvard, would have been significant in themselves.
It's hard to avoid thinking that someone put in a good word for Law with the Harvard admissions office, and somehow his above-average lifestyle there was accommodated. It's hard to avoid thinking that, struggling even to fly coach, he somehow got a first-class upgrade. As yesterday's visitor put it, "It almost begs the question with Law? Who 'made' him & why?"
