When they came, Harvard’s halls overflowed with veterans. By the time they left, many were on the way to being veterans themselves.
When they arrived, the College enjoyed the benefits of the post-war economy. By the time they departed, the College had hiked tuition and drawn down on its endowment.
While they were here, all the Houses (except Eliot) passed rules allowing females to be “entertained” in the common rooms until 11 p.m.—provided the chandeliers stayed well-lit and standards of decency were maintained.
As they looked toward Commencement, they found a prospering economy with a wide-open employment market.
For the Class of 1952, life at Harvard College marked a time of transformation, a middle ground where the footing seemed stable, at least temporarily.
But across the ocean, a war—the consequences of which nobody really knew—had begun in Korea, and a communist scare traveled fast through American life.
Amid the gathering storm of world events, the man who had guided Harvard through the last world war prepared to depart. As President James Bryant Conant ’14 left, he warned of consequences to come for the University.
“We have witnessed, I am afraid, only the first first phase of a basic conflict that may well last for the balance of this century,” he wrote in his final presidential report.
It was a year of “man-snatching,” the Yearbook wrote. Congress resurrected the draft in the spring of the Class’ junior year, and ROTC programs on campus flourished. From 1950 to 1951, more than 100 College students withdrew for military service.
Patriotism, coupled with the fever of anti-communist sentiments and the desire to find communist sympathizers at every turn, reached a new high.
The men who entered Harvard in the fall of 1948 witnessed a Harvard in transition, forced to deal with the new military, political and social challenges of a country recovering from one war and embarking on another.
“We were accused of being a kind of complacent period,” said Chase N. Peterson ’52, the first marshal of the Class. “But it was a transition, more than anything else, from turmoil to new stability.”
A Restless Bunch
Given a respite for a brief few years from the troubles of the world, the College burst with enthusiasm—energy that had been sucked up by World War II was back in full force.
In the fall of 1950, several football game riots had made the sight of thousands of students charging through the Square almost a matter of routine.
But the spring of 1952 brought student energy out into the open with a new level of frenzy.
It all started when a comic strip joke got out of hand.
With 1952 an election year, a cartoonist named Walt Kelly created a character named Pogo and offered his creation as a candidate for President of the United States.
Pogo was a hit on campus. Thousands of “I GO POGO” buttons had been distributed around the Yard as part of an active campaign by students and faculty. One student had converted his dorm room into Pogo’s Harvard campaign headquarters.
Then in the early evening of Thursday, May 15, Walt Kelly came to lecture at Harvard about the phenomenal success of his invention.
Students were so riled up by the presence of the man behind Pogo that a three-hour melee ensued in Harvard Square.
From an initial gathering of 200, a crowd of thousands of students and bystanders stood out in the Square to spread the word of Pogo’s candidacy. Traffic on Mass. Ave came to a standstill.
Cambridge police came out in full force and arrested 28 students, dragging some away in police cruisers.
The story of what came to be known as the “Pogo riots” made headlines in the Boston Herald.
It was a riot “just for the hell of it,” Peterson recalls, “a spring riot over nothing of importance.”
In the aftermath, Cambridge police called for the expulsion of the riot’s instigators. Students accused the police of having been unnecessarily brutal and having used clubs to subdue the crowd. A city councillor proposed, unsuccessfully, that all students at local colleges—including Harvard and MIT—be given a nightly curfew of 9:30 p.m.
Entering the Gates
For a Class whose senior year ended with such tumult, the beginning of the Class of 1952 was unusually normal.
For the first time since before the Second World War, the 1,339 members of the Class entered the College as a single class in the fall of 1948. The war-time calendar had divided the year into three semesters to accommodate military service, but now it was discontinued.
After an influx of veterans receded, enrollment in the new class dropped. And by the end of the Class’ four-year stay the undergraduate population had normalized to pre-war lows.
The Class of 1952 was one of the last classes to support large numbers of returning veterans. It was not uncommon in a first-year dorm to see a 25-year-old veteran living next door to a 17-year-old. But numbers were down from previous years: just 11 percent of the Class had been in combat, compared with more than half just two years previously.
The Class also saw more exposure to the women of Radcliffe.
The College gave women more opportunities to cross-register in Harvard classes. The administration of the Radcliffe and Harvard libraries was merged.
Kirkland House followed five other Houses in allowing late-night visitation by women on the weekends in order to allow “dancing, card-playing or checkers” in House common rooms.
But when the Student Council and House masters passed a rule to admit the opposite sex in student dorm rooms late in the evenings, Dean of the College Wilbur J. Bender ’27 and the Faculty vetoed the proposition.
Harvard and Radcliffe still maintained tight reigns on the lives of undergraduates—the institutions still saw themselves as something of substitute parents for its students.
“It represents the same old lack of faith in the undergraduate’s ability to arrange his own social affairs, a lack of faith that underlies the present parietal rigors,” The Crimson editorialized.
Harvard men and Radcliffe women were sometimes told to keep their distance. In the Red Book, the student handbook given to incoming first-years in the Radcliffe Class of 1952, young members were instructed on the etiquette of dating.
“It isn’t a Good Idea to go out with an unknown man who simply calls up and asks for a date,” the guide advised. “A pick-up at the corner drug store and unchaperoned calls at a man’s apartment house are Out. As for the man who sits next to you in Psychology, well, you have eyes, haven’t you?”
After an era of overcrowding that packed dorm rooms with classes of veterans, residential life sought to provide the appropriate amenities to a burgeoning student population.
Apley Court, which had been used as overflow housing, was closed and Claverly Hall now received all overflow.
Self-service laundries were planned in Kirkland and Leverett. During the Class’ senior year, Dunster House experimented with student porters, but the tryout proved unsuccessful because students found the job left too little time for academics and, besides, it involved cleaning the bathrooms. The House planned to reinstate maid service the next fall.
The University was urged to build a theater by students in the Dramatic Club who complained that Sanders Theatre was not a suitable location for dramatic productions, and plans were made to hire Harvard’s first full-time instructor in theater.
The picture post-college looked rosy. Graduating seniors were lucky that defense production had strengthened the economy and created new jobs. Combined with the shortage of hands from the recently enacted draft, that meant plenty of employment opportunities.
“Vast opportunities await job hunters in this year’s graduating class, and science majors will be able to practically take their pick of jobs,” The Crimson reported in February 1952.
Ivory Towers
The Class’ senior year was Conant’s last year as president of the University after 20 years in the position, and the final years of his presidency saw several changes to the academic life of Harvard designed to increase the support structure for students.
In his final year, the College dean’s office was reorganized, senior tutors were added in all of the Houses and tutorial instruction was expanded.
Students began to take a greater interest in the College’s decision-making structure. In 1951, the head of the Student Council asked for representation on all Faculty committees.
Students showed academic progress, achieving the highest rankings of any year on record.
“I told my class at one of its 25th reunion meetings in June that Harvard students had improved greatly since our days in the college,” Dean of the College Bender wrote, “and I submit that the change since the Bathtub Gin and Coonskin Coat Era of the Twenties is indeed striking.”
Indeed the years of the early ’50s marked the triumph of academics over athletics.
The College decreased emphasis on athletic programs. Intramural games between Houses grew in popularity. But to cut expenses, the high maintenance steel stands that had transformed Harvard Stadium from a horseshoe to an oval were torn down over the protests of the football coach.
And in October 1951, Conant joined the presidents of Princeton and Yale in agreeing on new athletic recruiting policies. The schools would no longer admit students who did not meet normal academic standards, and no athletic scholarships would be given.
As it scaled back athletics, the College sought to broaden its academic offerings. General Education, an experiment introduced in 1946, formally became a requirement in 1951.
In its guide to prospective students the Admissions Office boasted of the new core curriculum, where students were able to take courses designed to “look first to all his life as a responsible human being and a citizen.”
With an expanded course catalog came new buildings. Renovations to several aging structures were planned, and construction was underway on a new lecture hall and laboratories.
Burr Hall housed large lectures, mainly for General Education classes, while the new McKay Laboratory offered a much-needed space for applied science.
“Another year, another building,” read one Crimson headline.
Red Scare
Overshadowing the battles over parietal rules and student representation on Faculty panels were far greater struggles in the field of political and intellectual freedom.
The post-World War II era had brought the fear of communism to a nationwide frenzy, and accusations tainted some of Harvard’s top professors.
The name of a war victim was removed from a plaque in Memorial Church following the discovery that he had been a German. A Class of 1952 marshal was accused of being a socialist.
The most publicized charges were made against Professor of History John K. Fairbank ’29, who made national press when he was accused on Capitol Hill of being a communist.
In mid-February 1952, he repeatedly answered charges in the Senate’s Internal Security subcommittee by denying that he harbored communist sympathies.
In March, he accused the Senate of “jumping to conclusions on the basis of hearsay evidence and scattergun accusations.”
Gravely concerned by the dilemmas that confronted academia, Conant addressed the red scare in his final report.
On one hand, he denied the presence of any communists on campus and said he would not knowingly hire one.
“But even if there were,” he wrote, “the damage that would be done to the spirit of this academic community by an investigation by the university aimed at finding a crypto-communist would be far greater than any conceivable harm such a person might do.”
Of course, he said, some professors held unpopular views.
But “it would be a sad day for the United States if the tradition of dissent were driven out of the universities,” he wrote. “For it is the freedom to disagree, to quarrel with authority on intellectual matters, to think otherwise, that has made this nation what it is today.”
At the same time that patriotic sentiments swept across the nation, a countermovement of peace activists slowly took shape on campus with several student organizations.
One war had ended; another was beginning. And Harvard—no less than the rest of the country—was plagued by an internal battle over freedom versus national safety.
The authors of the 1952 Yearbook concluded: “The year was not a good one for the free men.”
—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.
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