Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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his-if f mira? a a , Q , the entire Harvard team could participate in the game. For liberal opinion throughout the university this was a victory, and the subject was finally dropped. In june, however, as parents and alumni began to flock into Cambridge for the graduation of the Class of 1941, a most awkward paradox confronted them, a paradox that seemed to summarize the divided attitudes of both the college and of the nation. For, up until the very moment of the graduation ceremony itself, seniors in caps and gowns, bearing placards protesting the pro-war attitude of the college administration, paraded incessantly before the gates of the Yard. Meanwhile, President Conant, only recently returned from England, was accompanied on graduation day by the elaborately be-robed Lord Halifax. At the ceremony, with what seemed at the time like an unnecessary amount of pro- British fanfare, he gave up his seat to the Ambassador from Great Britain. It was not, on the whole, a very popular gesture. . . and there were some embarassing moments beneath that hotjune sun. During the summer months, Russia declared war against Germany. Whether it was because of this or not that students changed their opinions concerning America's position Two lieutenants, in their summer and winter uniforms, check the luggage of newly arrived naval officers in front of Littauer. Students, air-raid wardens, white-helmeted auxiliary policemen, ensigns and visitors learn how incendiary bombs should be extinguished. H61

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ge avi-1. Iii 5 MUS- Members of Harvard's guerilla unit gather behind the Business School to learn how to use hand grenades and to practice commando tactics. report of this also carried the following editorial: Our fleet still has a marked superiority over Nippon's. So long as we maintain that edge, and so long as we hang on to our iron clad defense line in the Pacific, we are safe from the Land of the Rising Sun .... May was active. The largest riot in five years followed the kidnapping by an M. I. T. fraternity of Rochester, radio comedian, from the Smoker. A few days later, as Freshmen began to file their applications for the various Houses, reports in the newspapers indicated that France was cracking. Of more immediate concern, however, was the new Willkie-for President Club that had been started by the inhabitants of an obscure room in Gray's Hall. Events moved quickly, now. As preparations for thejubilee were well under way, the whole issue of College versus Tutoring Schools was brought to a head. From the Dean's office came a decree absolutely for- bidding any student to enter or make use of these schools. An old tradition of Harvard Square was at an end. Towards the end of May, a Freshman climbed a tree and threatened to remain there until a Radcliffe girl consented to give him a date. The day that France was divided in two by the German armies, the Crimson, now virulent and vitu- perative, printed an editorial .... lf America is truly an- xious to remain free of the war at the cost of a German victory -and this is the grim possibility we must face,-then the first essential is to get rid of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and the present administration as quickly as possible. Final examinations came in a hotjune. And the class, disbanding to go home, found itself no longer Freshmen. It did not know it, but the historical forces that had been at work throughout the past three decades, culminating in the fierce conflict in Europe, were sweeping towards their shores and towards their own lives. The last Crimson of the academic year 1939-1940 came out. On that day, France capitulated. Y Throughout the year 1940-1941, college life continued much as it had before. Early in November, during the heat of Presidential elections, Wendell Willkie with entourage passed through Cambridge, and in Harvard Square spoke a few moments to a crowd of students who jammed street and sidewalk to hear him. The winter passed, and spring brought with it a three-day battle between the Lazmpoon and the Crimron. Then, when the Lazmpoon had Hnally released the Crimronk kidnapped president and as broken windows were being mended, students turned their attention to a more important matter. At Annapolis, Harvard's star negro lacrosse player had been forced to remain out of the Navy game. This display of prejudice and lack of courtesy on the part of Annapolis's administration brought in its wake cries of protestafrom the liberals of the student body. Petitions were circulated, editorials and letters were written, meetings were held . . . until, finally, Mr. Bingham was forced to declare that henceforth Harvard would play no college unless 'l15lL fe 1 fn

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in the world conflict is hard to say. The fact remains, that when the college once again opened its doors, all was not the same. Perhaps, with the death of Professor Kittredge, the era of the old college with its traditions of the isolated scholar and of the eccentric but dramatic lecturer dehnitely passed away. The great professor died, the last of his kind died with him. Now a new type of professor held the academic chairs that had been left by the old. William Langer, the very an- tithesis of the isolated scholar, had been called to Washington for special work, and William Y. Elliot was to commute by plane from his desk in the nation's capitol to his lecture plat- form in Cambridge. If the place of the professor in society had changed over the past two decades, so had the place of the student. Bur the most striking and immediate change, a change that had taken place over merely the past two months, was expressed in Chapel by President Conant in his first address of the fall to the undergraduate body. He spoke, not of the scholar's duties in a peacetime society, but of his duties in wartime. These seemed indeed ominous words. Dr. Conant, however, though himself an advocate of immediate declaration of war, recognized the still-existing opinion against war. Only when no voice of dissent is heard, he said, must we fear that a group of free men has been transformed into a regiment of slaves. A few days later, as the news columns of the Crimron were reporting a serious water shortage at Mt. Holyoke college and as Harvard men were gallantly offering their female colleagues the use of their own shower baths, an editorial Ensigns line up in front of Hollis Hall before marching to class. appeared which announced a complete shift in the paper's policy. The editors, almost solidly non-interventionist but a few months before, had come to a different conclusion. Either we must believe that Hitler has to be defeated, they declared, or we must believe that America can live alone and like it. We believe the former. But the most spectacular, if not surprising, change was the volte hte of the Student Union. A year before, at an angry meeting, members of the Union had not minced words in declaring their stand. We protest, they had cried, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's attempt to belittle the desires of the American people to keep at peace! How different were their words as the academic year of 1941-1942 hit its stride: . . the goal of all persons wishing to preserve democracy . . . must be the military defeat of Hitler. For them, as for so many others, the character of the war had somehow changed. Meanwhile, there was still doubt, and because of this doubt, there was confusion in thought and action. Students themselves were torn between their own problems at the university and the problems that arose from a future of mili- tary service. They were torn very literally, as the Lazmpoon put it, between Scylla the Dean and Charybdis the Draft. And every once in a while, over this rising tide of pro-war sentiment, a voice still loyal to the cause of non-intervention could be heard. On the very day that President Conant was announcing plans for the formation of courses in Civilian Defense, john Haynes Holmes '02, in words reminiscent of his stubborn but courageous stand in 1917, wrote to the Crimron: There is a reason for this pro-war campaign .... It Undergraduate ROTC marching to Stadium in spring review. -l17lr