The novelist (later senator) James Webb wrote shortly after the war that America had shown itself “afraid to ask the men of Harvard to stand alongside the men of Harlem, same uniform, same obligation, same country.” Now young men who as grade-school students had gasped when they learned that the Northern rich had been able to pay substitutes to fight and die for them in the Civil War were themselves seeking to carve out, in the middle of the so-called century of the common man, a niche that was worthy for elites to live in.
