Editor’s note:
This is a published version of a talk that Richard Rosenfeld ’63 delivered at his namesake Rosenfeld Hall in Timothy Dwight College on Oct. 2, 2023.
The text of the talk, as published in the Yale Daily News, is available HERE. A video of the talk is available HERE.
The advantage of clicking on the video link and watching the talk (rather than simply reading it) is that the video includes the discussion with students and faculty following the talk, as well as the discussion with Peter Salovey on why he and other university presidents don’t speak out more in defense of Enlightenment values.
RICHARD ROSENFELD graduated from Timothy Dwight College in 1963. Contact him at richard.rosenfeld@aya.yale.edu.
Richard and Peter Salovey following the presentation on October 2nd, 2023
______________________________________________________________________
The Eponymic Voices of Timothy Dwight College
by Richard N. Rosenfeld YC '63
ROSENFELD HALL
Timothy Dwight College October 2nd, 2023
A Message to The Students and Fellows of Timothy Dwight College
(and to the Yale community at large):
In September of 1985, at the dedication of Rosenfeld Hall, I joked that old graduates never die; they just become dormitories. At that time, Rosenfeld Hall was principally Yale's language laboratory, but since then, the building has been reconfigured to provide more TD housing. So, my joke became prophesy. Now I really am a dormitory.
Mary Lui, the head of this college, has invited this old dormitory to share his thoughts about Yale with you. In this year of my 60th Yale Class Reunion as well as my 82nd birthday, I feel privileged to tell you not only what I hope my building says but also what I hope other eponymic figures of TD might say, especially the two Yale presidents, the Reverends Timothy Dwight, for whom the college is named, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin for whom the common room in Rosenfeld Hall is named. This is a good time for these eponymic figures to speak.
So, what do we figures from the past have to share with you? Situated as we are in different centuries, in different life stories, and in different Yale relationships, what common experience have we had that might serve as a lesson for today? I think there is at least one, which is this: that, contrary to what many believe, the Enlightenment was not simply an historical period of intellectual and philosophical development. The Enlightenment was also a choice that this nation and Yale have had to make and will continue to have to make each and every day.
When the first Reverend Timothy Dwight became president of Yale, it was during the U.S. presidency of George Washington. The period we call the Enlightenment was at its end, and the United States of America was at its beginning. Revolutions in England, France, and the United States were then complete, with each country possessing a bill of rights to guarantee the freedoms for which its revolution was fought.
Important Americans had advocated for freedom in each of these countries. Thomas Jefferson, America’s ambassador to France, had co-authored France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen at the beginning of the French Revolution, as he had championed an American Bill of Rights at the end of ours. Thomas Paine had galvanized support for the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense and its plan for an American democracy, had gotten himself outlawed in England for writing against monarchy, had helped draft a constitution for the First French Republic, and finally, in 1794, capped the Enlightenment with his book The Age of Reason, which challenged the dogma and authority of established religion. According to Paine, the Age of Faith was gone. Literally and figuratively, the Age of Reason was now at hand.
Tom Paine and his Age of Reason were very popular at Yale when the first Timothy Dwight became its president in 1795. As one student, Lyman Beecher, recalled, "Before he came, college was in a most ungodly state. The college church was almost extinct.... That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. Boys that dressed flax in the barn, as I used to, read Tom Paine and believed him.... [M]ost in the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, etc., etc."1
Yet a "Tom Paine school" was not a school that Yale’s new president could tolerate. For Reverend Timothy Dwight, the Age of Faith was still at hand.2
Timothy Dwight was a charming and charismatic human being who believed in Yale’s original mission to be a divinity school but did not support, either for the nation or for Yale, the toleration or the democracy that Enlightenment philosophes espoused. Timothy Dwight reflected the values of his home state of Connecticut, which taxed all citizens, regardless of their religion, to support its established Congregational church, allowed an old aristocracy of fewer than a dozen Yale families (the "Standing Order") to run its affairs since colonial times, and resisted replacing its old colonial constitution with a new state constitution until well into the 19th century.3 From colonial days through the presidency of Timothy Dwight, only white, male, Protestant property owners could hold public office in Connecticut.
Timothy Dwight's opposition to Enlightenment philosophes and the French Revolution made him not only a leader in his home state of Connecticut but also an important ally to George Washington's Federalist administration, which had grown disillusioned with the French Revolution and with ideologues like Paine, Voltaire, and Rousseau.4 In recent years, the French Revolution had turned increasingly violent, executing the French king, guillotining many prominent aristocrats, disestablishing its Christian church, and replacing old state churches with so called “Temples of Reason.” During the two years prior to the year of Timothy Dwight's election, the radical Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre and his sans-culotte street people had made the guillotine a frightening symbol of what their revolution meant.
George Washington's Vice President, John Adams, was particularly incensed by the French Revolution and by Tom Paine's democratic writings, commenting to Thomas Jefferson, "What a poor ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass, is Tom Pains Common Sense..."5 Adams' home state of Massachusetts, like Connecticut, had an official state church and an undemocratic constitution that Adams himself had drafted, including substantial property and religious qualifications for voting and office holding. Adams saw pure democracy as the road to mob rule, and, in his mind, France had proven the case. Yet America's democrats strongly disagreed.
American democrats like Thomas Jefferson supported The French Revolution and the democratic ideals that Enlightenment philosophes had championed. Jefferson had persuaded his home state of Virginia to disestablish its official state church, and he opposed wealth or property qualifications for voting or office holding. He championed freedoms of religion and expression that we find in America’s Bill of Rights, and he instilled the idea that "all men are created equal" in the dreams of many American democrats.
Disagreement about support for the French Revolution divided America into our two-party system. After George Washington failed to support the new democratic republic of France despite an alliance promising to do so, Thomas Jefferson led many Americans, who themselves wanted a more democratic republic, to form the Democratic-Republican party. Thus, when John Adams succeeded George Washington to the U.S. presidency in 1797, he faced a democratic opposition that made his own task very much the same as Timothy Dwight's at Yale, which was to defend against the influence of French philosophes and to overcome his democratic opposition.
To defend against the influence of the "Tom Paine school" at Yale, Timothy Dwight required Calvinist religious instruction for all Yale students, imposed punishments for any denial of Scripture,6 made attendance at his Calvinist Congregational Church compulsory, and forbade attendance at other churches, even for Episcopalians.7 Month after month, he preached the Bible as truth to Yale students, and he converted one third of the student body to his Calvinist faith.8
Adams did not have Timothy Dwight's powers of persuasion, but he did, as president, command the new federal government, which he used so undemocratically that many thought he wanted to be king.9 He used a sedition act, in violation of the First Amendment,10 to jail his newspaper critics and even a U.S. congressman, and he used immigration laws to keep French refugees from obtaining U.S. citizenship and thereby the chance to vote for his opposition. He proclaimed national holidays for prayer and fasting to ally his administration with the religious establishment, and he used his new federal army as well as private Federalist militias to suppress popular dissent.11 Thomas Jefferson called Adams' presidency a "reign of witches."12
By the summer of 1798, the battle between John Adams' Federalists and Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans was at a fever pitch. On Independence Day, the 4th of July in 1798, while Yale’s President Timothy Dwight ─ by then known as the "Pope of Federalism"13 ─ was preaching in New Haven against Enlightenment philosophes and The French Revolution (and in praise of John Adams' administration),14 students at William and Mary College in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia were burning John Adams in effigy.15 That was the depth of the divide.
For many, the presidential election of 1800 was a Second American Revolution, deciding that Jefferson's dream of democracy was America's dream as well. John Adams' undemocratic theory and practice of government not only cost him that presidential election; it cost his Federalist party both houses of congress and the chance ever to govern again. Democracy was America's future, though not so clearly for Yale.
For the next hundred years, the nation continued on the Enlightenment path the nation chose in 1800. By mid-century, all states, including Connecticut and Massachusetts, disestablished their official state churches and removed property and religious qualifications from voting and office holding. During the 1860s, the nation elevated Thomas Jefferson's messages of equality16 over any remembrance of his slave- holding to fight a war that ended slavery and allowed constitutional amendments to require states (as much as the federal government) to honor the Bill of Rights.
Yet, for the same hundred years, Yale would retain its theocratic presidency and its mandated religious observance and, in 1886, choose its second Reverend Timothy Dwight (a biblical scholar and grandson of the first) to be its president and religious leader, just as Yale College was becoming Yale University. Ironically, Tom Paine's Age of Reason would haunt this Timothy Dwight just as it had his grandfather.
To the dismay of religious leaders like Timothy Dwight, religious skepticism had been gaining ground during the course of the 19th century, as Evangelical revivals and increasing American Arminianism fractured mainstream Calvinism into many Protestant denominations and as advances in technology and two Industrial Revolutions allowed science to challenge religion as the best measure of human accomplishment.
Furthermore, in 1859, Charles Darwin challenged the biblical story of creation by offering evolution and natural selection as alternative explanations for the "Origin of the Species,” whereupon two schools of Darwinian thought totally abandoned biblical injunctions to help the poor and disadvantaged in favor of allowing natural selection to run its course.
The first of these was Social Darwinism, advocated by British sociologist Herbert Spencer, who first identified natural selection as "the survival of the fittest" and proposed unfettered competition to reward the fittest with no social safety nets for those who were not.
The second of these was “eugenics,” the name and pseudoscience that Darwin's second-cousin Francis Galton attached to his plan to breed human beings selectively, that is, to accelerate natural selection by getting society’s most desirable people to multiply and preventing its least desirable people from doing the same. Enthusiasts for eugenics found apparent support for Galton’s plan in the green pea plant experiments of geneticist Gregor Mendel, which demonstrated that selective breeding could make the inheritance of dominant traits mathematically predictable.
By the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics had become a popular social movement and, for some, even an existential philosophy by its association with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, writing at the same time as Galton, had declared that "God is dead" and that a new ethics based on everyone’s pursuit of his own self-fulfillment and a new societal goal of producing the superior human (the Übermensch) offered better roads to any promised land.
As the 20th century unfolded, Adolf Hitler would adopt this thinking in his genocidal pursuit of an “Aryan” master race; Yale University would adopt this thinking in its discriminatory pursuit of the ideal “Yale Man,” and, in the minds of many, the Übermensch, the “Aryan,” and the “Yale Man” merged into the same Northern European archetype.17
In all events, at the end of the 19th century, in the face of increasing religious skepticism, and upon the retirement of Yale's second Reverend Timothy Dwight in 1899, Yale finally embraced the disestablishmentarianism of the Enlightenment and chose to disestablish the Congregational Church from its presidency. For the first time in two hundred years, Yale would choose a president who was neither an ordained Christian minister nor even an avowed Congregationalist.18 Arthur Twining Hadley was a railroad expert, an economist, and a Social Darwinist, who favored an unregulated economy as a racetrack for the fittest and 19th century monopolies as appropriate rewards for those who won. As Hadley correctly observed, "We have lost faith in... supernatural manifestations of power; in certain dogmas and formulas once supposed to be essential to salvation. We have gained faith in man, faith in law, faith in the truths of nature, and faith in the justice of God."19 In this new more secular Yale, compulsory church attendance would soon be gone.
Though the Enlightenment's scientific method and religious skepticism had found traction in the nation and at Yale during the course of the 19th century, the Enlightenment's vision of toleration and equal rights remained a dream as yet unachieved. American Blacks, though freed from enslavement, were still segregated from the rest of American society, as were Asians who were subject to exclusion laws, as were Jews and Catholics who suffered social, cultural and religious discrimination, as were women who were subordinate by law. To make things worse, a flood of Catholic, Jewish and other non-Protestant refugees from Eastern and Southern Europe were heeding the call of Lady Liberty and clamoring for entry to America. Some of their children sought entry to Yale. So, at the start of the 20th century as at the start of the 19th century, the Enlightenment posed questions of equality and toleration that the nation and Yale would again have to decide.
The first decades of the 20th century are known as the Progressive Era, when, among other efforts to democratize the country, a major push for equality began. In those early years, civil rights organizations like the ACLU, the NAACP, and The Anti-Defamation League were formed. In 1913, thousands of suffragettes made a march on Washington, and in 1920, a constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote.
Yale, however, remained steadfastly distant from equality and toleration. The same belief in science that had freed Yale from the intolerance of a theocratic leadership now produced a comparable intolerance in the racism and eugenics of Yale President James Rowland Angell, who succeeded Arthur Twining Hadley in 1921.
James Rowland Angell believed that "human races differ appreciably in their native intelligence."20 Within a year of his inauguration, he welcomed the American Eugenics Society, which would lead the American eugenics movement for the next twenty years, to establish its headquarters on the Yale campus,21 and, in 1924, he created the Institute of Psychology to make Yale the preeminent research center for the study of eugenics and "racial" behavior.22 Both organizations were headed by Yale faculty.
From the start of his administration, Angell monitored the enrollment of racial and religious minorities at Yale, examining in particular what he called the "problem" of Jewish enrollment.23 In 1922, he instituted a "Committee on the Limitation of Numbers,"24 which imposed new restrictions and policies on undergraduate admissions, starting in 1923,25 and which kept Yale College entirely white (except for tokens), 10% Jewish,26 and just above 10% Catholic27 from 1923 through the time I entered Yale, under the 10% Jewish quota, in 1959. Similar restrictions also affected the graduate schools, with instructions to the medical school admissions committee: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."28
A decade after the imposition of these restrictions, James Rowland Angell responded to a report from his admissions director that many of Yale’s Jewish applicants were from New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford.29 "It seems quite clear," Angell answered, "that if we could have an Armenian massacre confined to the New Haven District, with occasional incursions into Bridgeport and Hartford, we might protect our Nordic stock almost completely.”30
When William Sloane Coffin became Yale’s new chaplain in 1958, the university had no expectation that anything was about to change. Yale’s president at that time was A. Whitney Griswold, who had been a student at Yale in the 1920s when James Rowland Angell was president and was a direct linear descendant of the Griswold family who had ruled Connecticut, as part of the state’s “Standing Order,” when the first Timothy Dwight was president. William Sloane Coffin also bore the mantle of Yale's traditional leadership, as an ordained Congregational minister of pure English ancestry, who was white, a Yale graduate (as were his brother, father, uncle, and grandfather), and of wealth and social prominence.
In short, A. Whitney Griswold and William Sloane Coffin looked like old Yale, so what happened at Yale when Bill Coffin took the pulpit came as a complete surprise to students, faculty, alumni, and administration alike.
As I wrote in a piece for the Yale Daily News, "Upon ascending Yale's pulpit in 1958, Bill Coffin spoke boldly and in a fashion that Yale had never heard before, enunciating articles of faith he described as 'the uncomfortable Gospel.' As Battell Chapel filled (soon with people of all religions) to hear him, he preached that Yale should care about disenfranchised Black people, about victimized Asians, about Jews, Catholics, the poor, and everyone else. He said Yale should eschew bigotry and prejudice, that its admissions and societies should be open to all who were qualified — regardless of race, creed, religion, color, or social class. He said Yale should be something better than an enclave for the privileged; it should be a moral example to the world and concerned citizen of the world. From the moment he arrived at Yale and during the ensuing decade of the 1960s, William Sloane Coffin exercised his moral authority to lead Yale away from a quarter millennium of fashionable bigotries and clubby isolation to embrace a set of values as democratic as the U.S. Constitution and as outreaching as the Statue of Liberty."31
Two years after his arrival at Yale and in the highly charged atmosphere of moral expectation and social awareness that his ministry had created, Coffin confronted A. Whitney Griswold with accusations of racial and religious discrimination in Yale admissions. When Griswold balked at the claims, Coffin warned the Yale president that he would be an unremitting “conscience of Yale” on the subject, whereupon Griswold reluctantly gave Coffin permission to conduct an investigation of the charges. Coffin did so in 1961 and, with the support of Yale’s other religious leaders, proved the discrimination to Griswold in March of 1962, convincing him that admissions needed to change.32 One month later, the Yale President’s Committee on the Freshman Year proposed new admissions policies, omitting race and religion as factors in admissions, elevating “outstanding intellectual capacity” as the preeminent criterion for acceptance, and recommending that women be admitted.33 On May 19th, the Yale Corporation approved these proposals; the proposals became policy, and Yale’s long history of institutional racism and religious intolerance finally came to an end..34 I see William Sloane Coffin, not Elihu Yale, as the founder of the Yale we know today. As the plaque in the William Sloane Coffin Common Room attests, “Under his moral leadership in the 1960s, Yale opened wide its doors to all of the human family."
And so it was, a quarter millennium after its founding, that Yale finally chose the open-mindedness and the liberalism of the Enlightenment, the equality of Thomas Jefferson, the toleration and empiricism of John Locke, the intellectualism of Voltaire, the optimism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the individualism of Adam Smith, and the opposition to dogma of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. The Age of Reason was now welcome at Yale, as were that open-mindedness and liberalism that lie at the heart of the Enlightenment.
So, what about this fellow Rosenfeld? Under Bill Coffin's moral leadership, I was transformed from a child of the 1950s to what everyone understands to be "a child of the 1960s." As an undergraduate, I joined Bill Coffin's freedom rides and sit-ins to integrate Blacks in the South, wrote against racial segregation, and started a political magazine to encourage debate.35 I withdrew from my fraternity when its national charter prevented the acceptance of an African-American applicant.
As a child of the '60s, I created a business that enabled a million less privileged Americans to travel,36 including thousands of African-Americans, who visited ancestral roots in West Africa;37 wrote a revisionist history of the Early American Republic to show the benefits of teaching history from Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican point of view;38 and tried to address homelessness through board service for the Salvation Army and to advance civil liberties through board service for the ACLU and the NAACP. So, we come to Rosenfeld Hall.
The greatest opposition to the changes that William Sloane Coffin championed at Yale came from old Yale alumni, who remembered their Yale as a fraternity of white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, private school graduates, males who were the legacies of Yale men who had gone before. The new Yale would not be the Yale they remembered, despite the efforts of the alumni office to reassure them otherwise. Those old alumni and even the Yale alumni office were of a different temporal community that would only diversify when future student bodies became old alumni like themselves. When that time came, as it did by the 1980s, only one temporal community remained to diversify, which was the community of eponymic figures whose names grace the buildings and other places at Yale.
As I commented to Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti (who was Yale's first non-Anglo-Saxon and first non-Protestant president) at the dedication of Rosenfeld Hall, I looked forward to a time when the names on Yale's buildings and other places would exhibit the same diversity as the student body that Bill Coffin had championed. That would be a final measure of the distance Yale had travelled from the time of the first Timothy Dwight.
Thus, it is as a remembrance of William Sloane Coffin and as a product of the 1960s that Rosenfeld Hall and I stand before you today. With the other eponymic figures whose names adorn TD buildings, I am here to remind you that the Enlightenment was not just a period of cultural and philosophical development but rather a choice that Yale and the nation have had to make and will continue to have to make each and every day.
For the future, I hope that Yale will always choose the Enlightenment and will defend Enlightenment values whenever they come under attack, whenever, for example, politics, tribalism, ignorance, superstition, or demagoguery threatens to diminish our belief in science, our respect for an honest press, our demand for proof and facts, our appreciation for racial, religious, and other diversity, our commitment to democracy and full representation, our goal of an enlightened citizenry, our demand for equal rights and opportunity, our freedoms to inquire, think and opine, our toleration of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, our encouragement of critical thinking, our expectation of fair and impartial justice, our belief in the rule of law, our commitment to the separation of church and state, our belief in the individualism of free and competitive enterprise, our pursuit of the general will for the sake of the common weal, and, last but not least, our expectation that open-mindedness, facts, reason, truth, and a very liberal education will chart the nation's best road ahead.
About the road ahead, I will close with an observation of the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who intoned with his usual moral clarity, "Remember that even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat." So, in the footsteps of those who gave us the Enlightenment, let's all try to do some good.
Thank you.
1 Charles Beecher, ed., Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc. of Lyman Beecher, DD (New York: Harper & Bros., 1804), 48.
2 Ralph Henry Gabriel, Religion and Learning at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 65-68.
3 Ibid, 57-63, 68-71; David Corrigan, “The Standing Order: Connecticut’s Ruling Aristocracy,” Connecticut Explored Magazine (Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall 2012) pp. 26-31.
4 See Charles E. Cuningham, Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817: A Biography (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1942), 196-300.
5 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, June 22, 1819, Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters … (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1959), II, 542.
6 Laws of Yale College, in New Haven, in Connecticut, enacted by the President and Fellows (New Haven: T. & S. Green, 1795), Ch. 8, Art. 1-2, Early American Imprints no. 29931.
7 Robert J. Imholt, Timothy Dwight, Federalist Pope of Connecticut (The New England Quarterly, Sep., 2000), Vol. 73, 390
8 Cuningham, Timothy Dwight, 30
9 See Richard N. Rosenfeld, The Adams Tyranny; Lost Lessons from the Early Republic (Harper's Magazine, Sept 2001), 82-86. See also Richard N. Rosenfeld, "The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and The Threat of an American Monarchy; A Foreword" in William J. Watkins, Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), ix-xx.
10 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 273-274 (1964).
11 Richard N. Rosenfeld, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 608-636.
12 Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, Philadelphia, June 1, 1798, Paul Leicester Ford. ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson. Volume VIII (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 432.
13 See generally Robert J. Imholt, Timothy Dwight, Federalist Pope of Connecticut (The New England Quarterly, Sep., 2000), Vol. 73, 386- 411.
14 Timothy Dwight, The duty of Americans, at the present crisis, illustrated in a discourse, preached on the fourth of July, 1798 …at the request of the citizens of New-Haven. (New-Haven: Thomas and Samuel Green,1798)
15 Rosenfeld, American Aurora, 179-180.
16 For Jefferson’s message about slavery, see his "Query XVIII: Manners" in his Notes on the State of Virginia
(1784).
17 On Yale's Nordic and Teutonic aims, see Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti), 50; James R. Angell to Robert Corwin, Jan. 6, 1933, "Board of Admissions" folder, "Admissions" box, JRA,
18 See Frederick H. Jackson, Simeon E. Baldwin and the Clerical Control of Yale, The American Historical Review Vol. 57, No. 4 (Jul., 1952), 110.
19 Arthur Twining Hadley, "The Union of Faith and Intelligence" (1910) in The Moral Basis of Democracy; Sunday Morning Talks to Students and Graduates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929).
20 James R. Angell, “The Evolution of Intelligence,” in The Evolution of Man: A Series of lectures delivered before the Yale chapter of the Sigma Xi during the academic year of 1921-1922 (New Haven, CT, 1922), 115.
21 John Doyle, "Measuring Problems of Human Behavior": The Eugenic Origins of Yale's Institute of Psychology, 1921-1929" (2014). MSSA Kaplan Prize for Yale History. p. 8. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/mssa_yale_history/8. See Neil Thomas Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti and The Battle for Fairness in America (State University of New York Press, 2020, 49-50.
22 Doyle, "Measuring Problems of Human Behavior," p. 14. See Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti, 40-41, 50.; "University Ship of State Launched... Institute of Psychology," Yale Daily News, Sept. 25, 1924
23 "Memorandum on the Problems Arising from the Increase in the Enrollment of Students of Jewish Birth in the University," May 12, 1922, Records of the President, James R. Angell Papers (JRH), Yale University Library, New Haven, CT. Box 84, J.-JOH, file Jewish Problem Etc.; Frederick S. Jones to R N Corwin, May 6, 1922, Records of the Dean, FSJ, Box 5, file Jews. See generally Synnott, Marcia Graham, The Half- Opened Door: Discrimination and Admission at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, 1900-1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press ,1979) 147-159.
24 Com. on Limitation of Numbers 1922, Freshman Office Records-EX-1926-1927 (3), Student Folders Van Camp-Budd.
25 "Selection of Candidates for Admission to the Freshman Class under the Provision for the Limitation of Numbers," March 16, 1923, and "Admission to the Freshman Class," March 23, 1923, Com. on Limitation of Numbers 1922, Freshman Office Records-EX-1926-1927 (3), Student Folders Van Camp-Budd; See Dan A. Oren, Joining The Club; A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 38-63.
26 Oren, Joining The Club, 320-322, Appendix Five, Enrollment at Yale College 1902-1969. See Jerome Karabel, The Chosen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 110-119.
27 The Yale Chaplain's Office reports Catholic enrollment at 11.77% for the 1930s, 14.67% for the 1940s, 10.41% for the 1950s. "Changing
Demographics: Behind the Numbers...". Chaplain's Office, Changing Demographics | Chaplain's Office (yale.edu). Yale's Catholic priest from 1943 to 1960, Fr. Edwin O’Brien, reported a 13% ceiling on Catholic admissions in the late 1940s. Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 142. At the close of the 1950s, Fr. O’Brien complained to William Sloane Coffin, "They've lowered the Catholic quota." Coffin, Once to Every Man, 138.
28 These instructions were given in 1935 when there were 76 openings. Gerard N. Burrow, A History of Yale's School of Medicine: Passing Torches to Others (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2008),107ff; Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti, 69; Oren, Joining The Club, 148. 29 Robert N. Corwin to James R. Angell, January 3, 1933, enclosing table dated October 19, 1932, "showing our Jewish population for the
last ten years," Box 2, file Board of Admissions, and [Dean Clarence W. Mendell], report on "Harvard," stamped "Dec. 8—Rec'd," box Mar- Clarence W. Mendell, file Clarence W. Mendell, Records of the President, James R. Angell, YUA. See Oren, Joining The Club, Chapter Three, Limitation of Numbers.
30 James R. Angell to Robert Corwin, Jan. 6, 1933, "Board of Admissions" folder, "Admissions" box, JRA. See Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti, 69; Oren, Joining The Club, 63. On Yale's Nordic aims, see Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti), 50
31 Richard N. Rosenfeld, "A Forgotten Yale Hero to Be Honored," Yale Daily News (October 24, 1990), pg. 2.
32 William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Once to Every Man: A Memoir (New York: Athenium, 1978), 137-138; Karabel, The Chosen, 330-332.
33 The Report of the President's Committee on the Freshman Year (April 13, 1962), 12, 10. This was also known as "The Doob Report:" Oren Joining the Club, 202-204
34 See Karabel, The Chosen, 334-337; "Freshmen Year Report," Yale Daily News, April 18, 1962, 2; "The Quiet Revolution," Yale Daily News, June 11, 1963, pp. 1-2; Proto, Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti), 201-202.
35 Yale Political (New Haven) v. 1-4, no. 1; Feb. 1962-fall 1964 https://search.library.yale.edu/catalog/5539591 See "Yale Political to Appear Soon," Yale Daily News, January 17, 1962, pg. 1; "Three Yale Students Issue Magazine," New York Times, Feb. 21, 1962, pg. 28.
36 Display Ad 19, New York Times, Sept. 29, 1984, pg. 39. See Display Ad 231, New York Times, Jan. 20, 1985, pg. XXV.
37 See David Brisson, "Richard Rosenfeld Wants You To Go Away" (Sunday, The Boston Herald Magazine, November 11, 1984); "Alumni Profile: Richard Rosenfeld: '59," Tabor Academy Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, Winter, 1985 (Alumni and Development Office, Tabor Academy, Marion, MA) 14.
38 Richard N. Rosenfeld, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). See Esmond Wright. "Troublemaker," Los Angeles Times, May 11,1997, pg. 254; Jared Gardner, "Reign of Witches," The Nation, May 26, 1997, pp. 27-29. See also, Rosenfeld, The Adams Tyranny; Lost Lessons from the Early Republic (Harper's Magazine, Sept 2001). For a more contemporary Democratic-Republican view, see Richard N. Rosenfeld, "What Democracy? The Case for Abolishing The United States Senate," Harper's Magazine (May, 2004), pp. 35-44.