Oliver Wendell Holmes, Andover class of 1825. This dreadful poet of the `` leisure class,
'' a tower of Boston blue-blooded conceit, was famous as the father of the twentieth
century U.S. Supreme Court justice. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., symbolized the
arbitrary rule of the racial purity advocates, the usurpers, over American society.
Andover installed a new headmaster in 1933. Claude Moore Fuess (rhymes with fleece)
replaced veteran headmaster Alfred E. Stearns, whom the Brahmins saw as a dyed-in-the-
wool reactionary. Stearns was forced out over a `` scandal '': a widower, he had married
his housekeeper, who was beneath his social class.
The new headmaster was considered forward-looking and flexible, ready to meet the
challenges of the world political crisis: for example, Fuess favored psychiatry for the
boys, something Stearns wouldn't tolerate.
Claude Fuess had been an Andover history teacher since 1908, and gained fame as an
historian. He was one of the most skillful liars of the modern age.
Fuess had married into the Boston Cushing family. He had written the family-authorized
whitewash biography of his wife's relative, Caleb Cushing, a pro-slavery politician of the
middle nineteenth century. The outlandish, widely known corruption of Cushing's career
was matched by Fuess's bold, outrageous coverup.
During George Bush's years at Andover, Feuss, his headmaster, wrote an authorized
biography of Calvin Coolidge, the late U.S. President. This work was celebrated in jest as
a champion specimen of unwholesome flattery. In other books, also about the blue
bloods, Fuess was simply given the family papers and designated the chief liar for the ``
Bostonian Race. ''
Both the Cushing and Coolidge families had made their fortunes in opium trafficking.
Bush's headmaster named his son John Cushing Fuess, perhaps after the fabled
nineteenth-century dope kingpin who had made the Cushings rich.
Headmaster Fuess used to say to his staff, `` I came to power with Hitler and Mussolini. ''
This was not merely a pleasantry, referring to his appointment the year Hitler took over
Germany.
In his 1939 memoirs, Headmaster Fuess expressed the philosophy which must guide the
education of the well-born young gentlemen under his care:
Our declining birth rate ... may perhaps indicate a step towards national deterioration.
Among the so-called upper and leisure classes, noticeably among the university group,
the present birth rate is strikingly low. Among the Slavonic and Latin immigrants, on the
other hand, it is relatively high. We seem thus to be letting the best blood thin out and
disappear; while at the same time our humanitarian efforts for the preservation of the less
fit, those who for some reason are crippled and incapacitated, are being greatly
stimulated. The effect on the race will not become apparent for some generations and