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