The “Malden Mite” was gearing up for his last hurrah.

Carroll M. Lowenstein ’52-’54 was captain of the Harvard football team and entered the fall of 1951 ready to finish his final undergraduate year and play his last games for the Crimson.

Then the news came.

As war loomed half-way around the world in Korea, word arrived to Lowenstein that he had been drafted.

Team doctors rushed to find a way to keep him off the battlefield and on the football field. He had broken his ankle the previous spring. And, though the medical staff had given him the all-clear to play football, they insisted that he could not enter the military because of the treatments his injury required.

Despite the insistence of doctors and fans, Lowenstein told his teammates in late September: “I’m ready to go next Wednesday, if they want me.”

It turned out that Uncle Sam did want the lightning quick 150-pound tailback, who was famous for his bullet-like passes—which were said to come at receivers so hard that coaches asked him to ease up when he first joined the Crimson squad.

So Harvard lost its football star, along with many other undergraduates, to the war effort.

When students had returned that fall, reassuring words had greeted them. Though the world beyond the Yard was embroiled in a seemingly endless war, an editorial in The Crimson had welcomed students with the promise that “there is still some security to be found in an academic atmosphere—temporary security from being called into the armed services, permanent security in the quest for truths even greater than world wars, and the insecure security of theories that explain what is happening in terms of law, nature, and experience.”

But quickly, as senior year marched on for the Class of 1952, war crept inside the University walls.

Some students, such as the football captain, burst with patriotic duty as ROTC membership swelled and veterans reaped the benefits of a newly extended G.I. Bill.

But others became disaffected with the government’s continuing demands, and for the first time since World War II students formed peace movements and the campus saw its first inklings of rebellion.

ROTC

By the end of September 1951, ROTC enrollment among Harvard men had swelled. Air Force ROTC became so popular that the program actually had to turn applicants away—of the 275 students who signed up for air force reserves, the program could only accommodate 235.

Students protested, claiming they were randomly dropped from the program. But Air Force ROTC’s head, Colonel Frank P. Bostron, explained that there was indeed a system for rating prospective cadets and that the students who had been cut from the Air Force would be offered placement in the Army’s program.