The Harvard Teachers' Union called the bill "subversive" and "un-American," and the Student Council voted unanimously to send official delegates to the Massachusetts State House to register Council opposition to the measure.

Although the bill eventually passed, the storm of protest paid off. The Barnes Bill was significantly diluted on the Senate floor: Instead of jail sentences, instructors who refused to pledge their allegiance to the U.S. were subject only to fines.

Marshalling the Forces

The academic year 1947-48 also marked the debut of the Marshall Plan, which Secretary of State George C. Marshall had announced with great fanfare in his historic 1947 commencement address.

While the class of 1947 could cherish the euphoria of being the first to learn of the nation's plan for European reconstruction, the class of 1948 spent their senior year watching the nation work out the day-to-day details.

Calling it "appropriate that the University which was the birthplace of the Marshall Plan should give impetus to the movement to save it," Faculty and student leaders signed an official petition to support the faltering policy.

Varsity football captain Vincent P. Moravec '50 lent his campus celebrity status to the cause, leading the charge as the head of the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee to Save the Marshall Plan. In March, the Band led a torchlight parade before a 300-person rally in support of speedy implementation of the European Recovery Program.

The Student Council also created several programs to help war-torn Europe reconstruct its cultural life. The year 1948 marked the second year of the Salzburg Seminar, a school of American culture and civilization.

Housed in an Austrian castle, the seminar was administrated by students from Harvard and seven other colleges in an effort to teach Eastern Europeans about their American counterparts. The Austrian organization also acted as a facilitator, distributing the food and books sent overseas to Europe.

Significant donors to the student-run organization included the Rockefeller Foundation and an anonymous member of the Radcliffe class of 1948, who wrote a check for $5,000 on her 21st birthday--the day she came into her inheritance.

On a more immediate level, the Student Council took up the issue of the European food shortage. After President Truman called on the nation to curtail food consumption and conserve grain in late September 1947, enthusiastic members of the Council spent months wrangling over the implementation of a University-wide conservation program.

Beginning with ambitious plans to eliminate meat two days a week, grain products from one meal a day and butter another day each week, the beginning of the spring term saw the Council no closer to a food rationing program than it had been the previous fall.

Following a Council poll to determine student enthusiasm for the program, the University decided that a 65 percent approval rating was not enough to warrant an austerity program for the entire University. The matter was turned over to the jurisdiction of the Houses, and finally to the individual students themselves.

But like this year's "Great Grape Debate," in which student activists tried in vain to continue a University-wide boycott on grapes, the food conservation program failed to muster University support, forcing students to abandon plans to influence the world with their dinner plates.