In the musical Annie, the eponymous curly-haired ginger protagonist walks into a rich man’s mansion and begins to sing “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here.” Walking into the Timothy Dwight courtyard on the first day of my freshman year at Yale, I resisted the urge to break out into Annie’s song. I did, however, in all my own curly-haired gingerhood, think I was going to like it there. The courtyard—lit by the sun and the many friendly faces of TD—perfectly embodied the manicured idealism of the East Coast I had envisioned. With the white pillared dining hall and tall white clock tower, TD represented a culture that I only vaguely understood but had longed to be a part of. The tall gingko tree in the center of the lower courtyard mirrored the green of the shuttered windows, which remain forever open—a relic of colonial architecture, there for show rather than function.
Joining the TD community meant leaving my crunchy, clog-wearing, Reconstructionist Jews of Evanston, Illinois, the Portland of the Midwest where even parents love indie rock and the plentiful coffee is always Fair Trade. But, as an American history nerd, sweater vest enthusiast, and avid To-Do list keeper, the East—buzzy and busy, steeped in history with endless American intrigue woven into its social fabric—appealed to me. I wanted a peek into the Warbucks mansion, the Old Boys’ Ivy League club that somehow manages to maintain its smoothly paved inroads into American society.
There were many Timothy Dwights. The two for whom the residential college was named were Timothy Dwights IV and V, both presidents of Yale College. The Dwight family tree includes a Jonathan Edwards branch, a Woolsey branch, and Kevin Bacon (a hilarious validation of the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory). The Dwight family papers include letters from “Your friend etc.” E. Whitney and “Your most obedient & humble servant” G. Washington.
When I ordered the boxes for my assigned archival research essay, I had no sense of what would be in them. Frederick Dwight, one of many Yale men buried within the folds of the Dwight family, left behind several thick leather-bound journals that I was lucky enough to stumble upon. “Anecdotes of F. Dwight 1930”is embossed in gold along the spine. Frederick’s anecdotes for me, an outsider, were thrilling. I read through hundreds of neatly typed, dandelion colored pages, hoping to find something about his connection to the university; instead, I found the far more interesting chronicle of his life as a wealthy well-connected man in New York in the 1920s and 30s. To Frederick, if you weren’t a “Yale Man” or a “Harvard Man” then you were a “Princeton Man” or a maybe “Williams Man,” and if you weren’t any of those then you weren’t anyone at all.
Fred casually interacted with wealth and power. His friend Evelyn Fox owned a string of beads that she later discovered had been a gift from Napoleon to Josephine. Evelyn, Frederick nonchalantly notes, sold the beads to Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan for sixty thousand dollars. His mother’s friends foolishly passed on the opportunity to buy for ten dollars a painting that later sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three thousand. Frederick’s anecdotes frequently begin at the University Club or Union League Club or with his friend Jack Mather. In the quiet of the Manuscripts and Archives library, I found giggle-inducing entries like: “Last week I was a delegate to the Tenth General Congress of the Society of Mayflower Descendants, held at Plymouth, Massachusetts.” Frederick opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, “considering him to be the emptiest and most inadequate candidate ever put forward for so high an office by one of the major parties during my lifetime.” In this, Freddy revealed the invisible C in WASP that so directly opposes my own upbringing: conservative. His rotating cast of characters included colorful names—Miss Ethel Du Bois, Miss Evelyn Fox, Eleanor Taylor, Rufus Cowing, and George Bartholomew—that still managed to highlight how blindingly vanilla his existence was. On December 16, 1923, he wrote, “The other day, when I dropped in to see Mother, Antoinette, at Mother’s suggestion, narrated an amusing anecdote of Miss Irene Bigelow which illustrates in a striking manner the kind of people one is likely at any time to encounter in this vast and heterogeneous city”—going on to describe her wild experiences paying little “street urchins” to find taxis for her. Frederick somehow managed to live a vastly homogeneous life within his vast and heterogeneous city.
Making friends with Frederick Dwight allowed me some insight into the high society of the East Coast that had long fascinated me. I had always thought that I had an East Coast personality. My type ‘A,’ go getter attitude, I thought, suited me well to the East Coast culture I imagined—its pace, its values, its rich, dramatic history and aggressive intellectualism—the one represented by Gilmore Girls and Fitzgerald’s stories. Between Fred’s obsession with antiques and the historic plaques on the walls of TD suites, though, I realized that more than anything, what often characterizes the East Coast ethos is a reverence for the old, an obsession with an America frozen within the clutches of wealthy white families. It’s the reason almost every sweatshirt, coffee mug, and golf ball that blares “Yale” in the school’s custom typeface also boasts “1701” like a badge of honor. You’re never fully dressed without a smile or the year your school was established, apparently. This wouldn’t be a problem if the cult of antique Americana didn’t directly oppose an environment of innovation and evolution, of change.
Over the course of last year, my first on campus, an email from an Associate Master (the then-dated and confusing title for the spouse of a head of house, now Associate Head of College) condoned cultural appropriation and a fraternity member manning the door at a Halloween party declared “white girls only.” The fire that was sparked still burns across campus, but it is challenging to change an institution so warped by tradition. Everything must be sent to the Yale Corporation, wrapped tightly in sticky red tape, and stacked on top of other ignored requests for change.
In the wake of the reminder that Yale may not be so inclusive a place as it would like to believe, Timothy Dwight’s female Head of College and female dean started a reading group devoted to authors of color and other marginalized perspectives. The discussions were held in the dining hall.
Many of the photos I came across in my research were of the dining hall. It looks exactly the same, with the dark wood beams and high windows. The one notable difference are the diners themselves. In the dated photographs, young, white men in sport coats and dinner jackets line the wooden tables. The only women in the room wear black and white serving uniforms. This is not surprising. It is, though, fascinating to peek into the Yale of old as I get to know the Yale of today. In the photo, the old boys, the company of scholars, society of friends—the Yale men—sit with white cloth napkins and toast the new Timothy Dwight College on October 25, 1935. Though last August I sat with women and men in shorts and t-shirts and toasted the Timothy Dwight Class of 2019, I couldn’t help but believe that the Yale I see now isn’t as different from the Yale of 1935 as it should be.
I thought I would like the traditionalism of the Ivy League. I thought I would appreciate its reverence for the past and connection to history. I thought I would enjoy the legacy of the powerful families and acute Americana that surrounds the institution. And I suppose I enjoyed my peek into the life of Frederick Dwight and the culture of East Coasters the way I enjoyed watching Gilmore Girls. Walking into the dining hall, though, I’m grateful that it doesn’t look like the photo I found—that I’m not standing in a maid’s uniform serving the food—because it means, though it may be hard, change is possible. In the year since I considered singing the soundtrack of Annie, the concept of the East has been de-romanticized for me. I do like it here. But not in the same way I thought I would. I like it because I have the chance to change it, to improve it.
Frederick Dwight’s papers amused me, and the alien world he so vividly establishes—one where his friends share the names of Yale’s buildings—still captivates me. I still sit under Timothy Dwight’s bright yellow gingko tree, which predates the college itself and appears in all of the old archival photos in shades of gray rather than green and yellow. It would be nice if Yale were more like the gingko, shedding its leaves entirely and committing to growing new ones.
When I head back to the dining hall in TD, at Yale, in Connecticut, on the East Coast of the United States, I feel more Midwestern than I ever did at home, not just because the plate in front of me is flooded with Ranch dressing or my chilled feet sit snugly in my clogs. I feel proudly Midwestern because more than I’m type A or driven or fast-talking, I’m committed to change and inspired by the students working to radically change an institution that has, since its founding in good ole 1701, evolved at a glacial pace. Looking at Frederick’s cozy life in the arms of his elite privilege, I’d rather pledge allegiance to the hard knock life.