James Bryant Conant

1893–1978 · 85 years

The chemist who gave America the SAT and helped build the bomb

Portrait of James Bryant Conant — ACME — 1932-02-04 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The son of a Dorchester photoengraver, Conant passed a competitive exam into Roxbury Latin at 11 and entered Harvard in 1910 to study chemistry. He took his bachelor's degree in 1913 and a doctorate three years later. A side business went badly wrong: the chemical firm he had started with two classmates lost its new Newark plant to an explosion in November 1916 that killed three men, one of them his partner Stanley Pennock, with his own faulty test procedures a contributing cause. He spent the war on the Army's poison gas program and was a major at 25. Harvard hired him back in 1919, and he built a serious career in physical organic chemistry.

He was 40 when Harvard elected him president in 1933, and he came in meaning to change who got through the gate. He created national scholarships for boys with no money, dropped athletic scholarships and class rankings, and asked two deans whether the Scholastic Aptitude Test really measured academic promise. Told it did, he adopted it. What he wanted was an aristocracy of talent in place of one of inheritance. What he produced was bigger: one of those deans, Henry Chauncey, went to run the Educational Testing Service, founded in 1947, and American standardized testing grew from there.

Two records run side by side. Vannevar Bush recruited him to the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 and he took the chair in 1941, sat on the Military Policy Committee that oversaw the Manhattan Project, and in May 1945 joined the Interim Committee, which decided the bomb should be used against an industrial target in Japan as soon as possible and without warning. The aristocracy of talent had a boundary. Conant had voted for the 15 percent cap on Jewish admissions his predecessor Abbott Lawrence Lowell set in 1922, and as president swapped it for geographic distribution preferences that limited Jewish enrollment by another route. He also declined to join the committee aiding displaced German scholars. William Tuttle called this a failure of foresight and compassion while calling Conant an outspoken anti-Nazi. Stephen Norwood disputed the second half.

He left Harvard in 1953 after 20 years and went to Germany as United States High Commissioner, then, when the occupation formally ended in 1955, as the first American ambassador to West Germany. The posting drew hard criticism at home for his approval of early release for convicted German war criminals. Carnegie money then funded a second career in school reform. The American High School Today, published in 1959, argued for folding small high schools into large comprehensive ones with a wide curriculum, and districts across the country rebuilt themselves around it. A series of strokes came in 1977. He died in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire, on February 11, 1978, at 84.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

James Bryant Conant's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Practical Chemistry book
A school textbook written with his own science teacher, Newton H. Black 1920
On Understanding Science book
Grew out of the undergraduate course he taught on how science actually works 1948
Science and Common Sense book
An attempt to explain the habits of scientists to everyone else 1951
The American High School Today book
The Conant Report — the case for the large comprehensive high school 1959
Slums and Suburbs book
Urged Americans to accept de facto segregated schools — by 1964 he admitted he had been wrong 1961
My Several Lives book
The memoirs, subtitled Memoirs of a Social Inventor 1970

Life in brief

with age at each point

March 26, 1893 aged 0 Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts The third child and only son of a photoengraver.
November 27, 1916 aged 23 An explosion destroys his chemical company plant in Newark Three men died, among them his partner Stanley Pennock. Conant had already left for a Harvard teaching post.
September 22, 1917 aged 24 Commissioned into the Army and assigned to poison gas work He was promoted to major on July 20, 1918.
1929 aged ~36 Named Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry at Harvard He published 55 papers between 1928 and 1933.
October 9, 1933 aged 40 Installed as president of Harvard at 40 The Corporation had elected him on May 8, in a decision Alfred North Whitehead publicly disliked.
June 28, 1941 aged 48 Succeeds Vannevar Bush as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee He stayed president of Harvard throughout the war.
July 16, 1945 aged 52 Present at the Trinity test in New Mexico Two months earlier he had joined the Interim Committee advising President Truman.
May 6, 1955 aged 62 Becomes the first United States ambassador to West Germany The high commissioners of the three western powers signed away Allied control that day.
February 11, 1978 aged 84 Dies in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire He was 84, and had suffered a series of strokes the year before.