Abbott Lawrence Lowell—the Massachusetts spindle cities of Lowell and Lawrence were named for his forbears—was the tenth-generation descendant of the Bristol merchant-trader Percival Lowle who in 1639 at the age of sixty-seven had protested against the ship-money tax by sailing for America with his family of fifteen. Second of the two armigerous families in early New England, the Lowells became one of the few truly dynastic families in America. Abbott Lawrence was a worthy if not extraordinarily distinguished member of his clan. Although in his early middle years he had written the solid, pedestrian The Government of England and been appointed Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, without the prestige of his family name he would never have succeeded Charles W. Eliot in 1907 to the presidency of America’s oldest university.
He was born in 1856, but his mind was a throwback to a decade earlier than that—before the Irish invasion—when Boston was still a mellow self-contained brick town to which he and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts belonged, and which in turn belonged to them. To Lowell the mass newcomers—the Famine Irish and the later Italians and Jews—were an intrusion on the Athens of America that Boston might have been. Dismayed at the appearance among his undergraduates of increasing numbers of Polish-born Jewish day students, he at one time planned to limit their admission to Harvard to a small fixed quota.
Yet Lowell, whatever the limitations of his outlook and sympathies, inherited a rectitude impervious to external pressures. When, during the Boston police strike of 1919, Harold Laski—then a temporary lecturer in political science at Harvard—spoke out in favor of the strikers, many local Harvard graduates denounced him as a traitor and a Bolshevik and demanded his dismissal. Lowell himself had opposed the policemen and even helped furnish strikebreakers from the undergraduates, but at the hint that the governing boards were considering getting rid of Laski he announced that if they exercised this undoubted legal right his own resignation would immediately and irrevocably follow. In that same year he took the side of United States entry into the League of Nations in a debate at Boston’s Symphony Hall with the irreconcilable Henry Cabot Lodge.
When Lowell agreed to serve on Fuller’s committee he did so reluctantly. From what he had read of the case in Frankfurter’s Atlantic article, he told Judge Grant, he rather expected to find that injustice had been done.
Whatever the criticisms that dogged Lowell afterward, he would always feel that he had done his duty. No man would ever be able to accuse him of temporizing with what he thought was right. The only question centered in that qualifying word thought. Ferris Greenslet, the well-disposed chronicler of the Lowell generations, remarked that although President Lowell had shown all his life an open mind, “it was perhaps closed at one point only, against any action or consideration tending to show a flaw in the administration of justice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” John Moors, Lowell’s Harvard classmate, was blunter; he told Frankfurter that Lowell was “incapable of seeing that two wops could be right and the Yankee judiciary wrong.”
At the time Lowell acceded to the governor’s request he was in his seventy-second year, still briskly vigorous in walk and manner, although his Lowell features had begun to droop. It has been said that people as they grow older tend to resemble their dogs. Lowell, with his paunched and brooding face, seemed more and more to take on the look of the sad-eyed cocker spaniel that was the companion of his walks.
At the outset of the committee deliberations he assumed, as did everyone else except Judge Grant, that his was to be the controlling voice, and indeed the officially designated Governor’s Advisory Committee became known almost at once as the Lowell Committee. Each day when the three men returned together to the State House after lunch, Grant and Stratton would head for the basement elevator while Lowell would spring up the forty-one granite steps leading to the porticoed entrance to the executive chambers. By the time the other two arrived they would find him already seated at the head of the table preparing the agenda.
Grant and Lowell had played together as children on Beacon Hill, and Grant for all his self-effacing manner resented the automatic assumption of authority by his younger playmate. Alphabetically his name had come first on the governor’s list and he had, he felt, more right than Abbott Lawrence to head the committee even if the latter had suggested his name to the governor. For thirty years Grant had been Judge of the Suffolk Court of Probate and Insolvency. From the cut of his mustache to the cut of his voice he was a wispy man, with shoe-button eyes and an English accent once removed, part of the genteel desiccated Boston that after its brief literary flowering had been withering away for two generations under the cloud of immigrants. A light versifier and wit, in hours filched from his not-too-arduous judicial duties he had written unreadable novels about Boston that were at one time much read in the city. In 1908, while he was traveling in Italy, some of his luggage was stolen, whereupon he sent outraged appeals not only to the American ambassador but to the State Department in Washington; several years later in his autobiographical The Convictions of a Grandfather he was still spluttering about Italian thievery. Before accepting his place on the committee he did have the common sense to ask Fuller what he would do if he got a divided report. The governor replied that he would then consider that there was ground for doubt.
Stratton, chosen by Fuller at Lowell’s suggestion so that the committee would not seem too much of a Back Bay family affair, was an Illinois farm boy who had made himself into a mathematician, physicist, and engineer. As president of one of the country’s great scientific schools he inhabited a Cambridge divorced from the old literary associations. It was predicted that he would be of great help in evaluating the ballistics evidence and other technical points. So far as can be determined he never opened his mouth during the sixteen days that the committee met.