Class of 1942 Had One Opportunity: War

The American Legion was marching down Mass. Ave. on the night of Oct. 7, 1938, its members proudly clenching their rifles. Behind them was the Junior Legionnaires brass band. And in between were Harvard freshmen, pouring out of the Yard in increasing numbers, and -- witnesses later insisted--snake-dancing, goose-stepping and firing off the Nazi salute as the Legion marched by.

The band members stopped playing in confusion. The front of the line of march left them there and made it to Central Square, pursued by freshmen all the way. At that point, four of the freshmen were seized by their collars and charged with disrupting a public assembly.

The Class of '42, less than a month old, was front page news.

Swallowing Goldfish

For more than a week, Lothrop Withington's freshmen friends had been calling him a fool, a liar and worse. Well, he could swallow a live goldfish if he wanted to, and that was all there was to it. $10 said he couldn't.

So he practiced. By the morning of March 4, there were only two fish left in his aquarium: a two-incher and a four-incher. The two-incher was downed during the day. At 6:30 that evening, before a large crowd at the Union, he swallowed the four-incher. The crowd cheered. The Boston press heard. The wire services picked it up. Goldfish swallowing spread.

The Class of '42 remained front page news.

Now, because it's more than 25 years later and the kind faces under white hats are descending upon Cambridge, it's the front page news, the goose stepping and the goldfish swallowing, that come back to mind. You pass the reunioners, and you think, if you think about such things, "There goes part of the Old Harvard--swept up finally, just as the Old Harvard was, in World War II." If, thinking that, you smile at them as they pass, they smile back, aware of what you're thinking and realizing just how wrong you are.

The College which the Class of '42 entered was a place full of subtle pressures that members of the Class of '67 might find intolerable. Many freshmen fought and begged to get into a House, because it was considered desirable to do so, but getting in as a freshman could be rough; and there were 260 more applicants every year than there were places. Two out of three undergraduates crammed for their courses at the tutoring services on Mass. Ave. Most offered canned answers for exams in the well-known courses and were willing to "edit" (which sometimes meant ghostwrite) papers.

The election of senior class officers was one of the year's major events; the CRIMSON's coverage lasted for days, culminating in a tally of the vote for every candidate. Lower ranking faculty-members lived with a protracted system for getting tenure that kept them even less secure than they are now.

'Rise of Social Realism'

Yet the Senior Album distributed at the end of the Class' freshman year claimed that Harvard had just gone through a major internal upheaval, "the rise of social realism," lasting, conveniently enough, from 1935 to 1939. The class and intellectual leadership of the Beacon Street man was no more, the Album said; it had shifted to the scholarship holder from the West and Middle West.

This was probably better prophecy than analysis. But the Album had gotten hold of something. The freshman Class of '42 couldn't help but feel itself at the tail end of a dimly understood upheaval. If only a few things were substantially changed that year, everything, suddenly, was under scrutiny and attack; the reports and the headlines almost tripped over each other.

Tutoring Schools

On April 18, the CRIMSON, in an issue that still makes editors who come across it shiver with pride, announced that it would no longer accept advertising from the tutoring schools and called for a crackdown on "the racket."

"Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning obscenely down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels. Every year they are patronized by two thirds of the student body; every year they flout with greater insolence the decency and respectability of this College.... They are making a mockery of a Harvard education, a lie of a Harvard diploma."

Before that, on March 26, Faculty members proposed a wide-ranging plan to break down "overspecialization"--the first step toward the Gen Ed program.

On March 29, the Masters voted to try extending House privileges, such as use of the dining halls, to some of the people who couldn't get into the Houses.

On March 30, a committee of eight distinguished Faculty members proposed steps to standardize the tenure procedure and make it shorter.

On April 17, a student committee recommended that college-wide minor sports and junior varsity teams be eliminated to encourage House athletics.

On May 18, the University cracked down on the tutoring services.

On May 23, President Conant accepted the Committee of Eight's tenure recommendations.

Conant had stimulated more of this activity than any other single individual had. But none of it was entirely his show. He had set up the tenure committee under pressure, after the controversial dismissal of two faculty members and, even after accepting the committee's recommendations, he was violently criticized for the way he and the Dean of the Faculty had put them into effect.

It was no single individual, then. It may have been the Mid-West, or the New Deal, or something else altogether. Whatever it was, it had pushed Harvard to the beginning of an identity crisis. Some of the subtle pressures Harvard had always exerted were clearly being challenged from within.

The freshmen were among the challengers. Two months after he swallowed the four-incher, Lothrop Withington and ten others, including Endicott Peabody II, complained that the Houses were rejecting the leaders of the freshman class and accepting mediocre upperclassmen. They were going to fight for a strict merit system.

It was late in the year, too late to accomplish anything. But the Class of '42 had let it be known that it was picking up the cause.

Opposition to War

By the time the men of '42 were sophomores and war had broken out in Europe, a number of campus organizations opposing American intervention were at their height. The sophomores could join these organizations--or the smaller interventionist groups (in 1939)--but, for the most part, they did not lead them. It was the juniors who had formed the groups, who took the brunt of the arguing and the organizing, who brought Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union to speak (as the Harvard Student Union, an anti-interventionist group, did in early 1940), or who decided Quill leaned too far to the left and set up a rally featuring Norman Thomas (as a rival group did the same day).

Then, as the German threat grew, as Britain became more and more vulnerable, as war spread to the Far East, it was mainly members of the Class of '41 who had to make public declaration of consciences. Just as their unanimity had welded the organizations together, so their divisions (over such issues as aid to Britain) destroyed them.

Had the groups lasted another year, members of the Class of '42, as juniors, might have assumed leadership. But, even though the anti-interventionists drew 600 people to Sanders Theatre as late as April, 1941, the signs of imminent war were unmistakable and demoralizing.

ROTC enrollment jumped. Polls showed that a narrow majority of students now favored intervention. President Conant became more and more open in his calls for American action. The Corporation cleared the way for shorter degree programs. And, in the fall of '41, a few months before the U.S. declared war on the Axis powers, Math. A was suddenly the College's most popular course.

All-American

The Class was not denied the more traditional routes by which to show its maturity. Coach Dick Harlow culled from it the best Harvard football team in a decade, including Endicott Peabody, Harvard's last All-American, Loren MacKinney, Captain Francis Lee and Charles Ayres. In their most brilliant season, senior year, they upset Dartmouth 7-0 and whipped Yale 14-0. As was customary, many of them were elected representatives to the Student Council.

They also swelled the growing ranks of honor candidates, helping to push their number over half of the upperclass enrollment for the first time.

In the accounts of football games, student councils, academic honors, the frequency of the numeral '42 is glaring as its lack of frequency in the stories of the protest organizations or the academic debates.

This is not a measure of what the Class of '42 felt or did; it is only a measure of what happened to its leadership. After its freshman year, for the most part, tradition kept pulling it in--not because it was conservative, but because the time for assertive protest passed it by too quickly.

Members of the Class of '42 did, in in fact, play important roles for a time in such anti-interventionist organizations as the American Independence League (Peabody for example) -- and in such oppositelyminded groups as the Student Defense League (Thomas Winship, for example). It was not they that faltered; it was the organization and the moment.

But to say that the Class of '42 was not conservative explains too little. There was a claminess to the Harvard tradition of the early '40s, capable of gluing ardent faith in the New Deal and proper Republicanism together. When the Class of '42 were freshman, a delegation of "seven Harvard liberals and two Radcliffe New Dealers" went to call on flamboyant Boston Mayor James M. Curley. They were going to urge him to adopt a New Deal platform in the interest of "the Middle Class voting block," the CRIMSON said, "which Curley has reached only slightly, but which might be a valuable asset to him in the coming campaign for governor."

They caught Curley at his headquarters, writing his convention speech. "What schools are you from?" Curley asked. They told him "God help you," he replied, and went back to his speech.

And in 1940 the Class joined the rest of the student body (though not the faculty) in going for Wilkie.

What, then did they take away with them? The Old Harvard, or the New Harvard, or both? The tradition--from the Hood milk truck (that waited in front of Mem Hall to snare freshmen for milk deliveries) to the last Yale game? Or the disruptive part, the protest, the angry academic debates in which too few of them played a central role? One thing is clear: both Harvard and the Class of '41 had several of their assumptions and traditions challenged before World War II ever swept down on them.

But the war did sweep down, finally, and, like everything else for the Class of '42, it came too soon. A number of class members didn't even wait for June; they were awarded special degrees in January and enlisted.

The war gave George Chase, dean of the University, a chance to push the usually apocalyptic Senior Album preface as far as it would go. "It may indeed be questioned," he wrote, "whether the college will ever return to a schedule of two terms a year and a long summer vacation."

For a few, of course, it never did. Their stories are told by the black crosses next to their names in the Class' 25th Report.

Chase then went on to make a statement which, if somewhat rhetorical, probably wasn't too far from the graduates' own thoughts:

"The Class...leaves college for a world which faces what seem almost insoluble problems, but for the individual, the immediate future presents only one question: what can I do to contribute most to the war effort and the peace which must follow? [May] the members of this class find a satisfying answer to this question and to the many others that will confront them..."

Today they are telling each other about their answers