The oaken interior of Sanders Theater crackles with intensity as prominent pacifists lecture on the futility of violence in solving the nation’s problems. The event is one in a series of anti-administration rallies and demonstrations that are quickly becoming a weekly ritual at Harvard. But this late ’60s scene is happening almost three decades too early. The date is April 18, 1940.
A year later, the Pearl Harbor bombing and the country’s entry into the Second World War would remind the United States and its citizens of the impossibility of the American bubble, and Harvard would be no exception. The debate over the war foreshadowed the radical transformation that Harvard would undergo after Dec. 7, 1941. By the war’s conclusion, the change would be undeniable: traditionally elitist Harvard would become, more than ever before, concerned with life outside its historically impenetrable shell.
THE ORIGINAL STUDENT PEACE MOVEMENT
During the late 1930s, debate over the United States’ potential role in the brewing European conflict became an issue of central concern at Harvard. President James B. Conant ’13 championed Harvard’s role in protecting democracy at home and abroad, but student opinion on the matter was conflicted, according to the book “Harvard Observed” by John T. Bethell ’54.
In addition to demonstrations like the one in Sanders, students organized a class-time walkout protest, held rallies on the steps of Memorial Church, and even led a “peace march” concluding at Conant’s doorstep. A 1939 Crimson editorial referred to youth leaders and academic presidents like Conant as people on a hawkish path that is “a super-highway straight to Armageddon,” as quoted in Bethell’s book. And a 1939 poll reported in The Crimson reported that 95 percent of undergraduates opposed immediate US entrance into the War. Although some would dispute the poll’s validity due to The Crimson’s purported isolationist bias, the campus was consumed by a debate global in nature.
As the threat of Japanese or German attack grew, so did student support for American intervention. Conant saw more success in turning student opinion as Britain and France came under duress. After France’s fall and the tremendous allied losses of the Battle of Britain, sentiment was no longer divided, according to Morton and Phyllis Keller’s book “Making Harvard Modern.”
Learned Hand Professor of Law Emeritus Oliver Oldman ’42 remembers that, by his senior year, campus sentiment was unified. “By and large, the isolationist view made no sense,” he said.
The debate was rendered moot after the unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor Saturday Dec. 7, 1941. “The unifying effect was not unlike that of 9/11,” says Morton Keller. “The whole situation was transformed.”
HARVARD AT WAR
Though pre-war debate galvanized the campus, it was Harvard’s wartime efforts that forever changed the face of the University. Harvard reorganized itself to accommodate the demands of a nation at war. Conant’s promise in an address following Pearl Harbor to employ “all resources of Harvard University” in helping the war effort led to a series of sweeping curricular changes in the winter of 1941, ranging from the creation of courses like “Camouflage—Protective Concealment (Fine Arts IX)” to the inclusion of boxing and calisthenics in students’ daily schedules, according to Bethell’s book.
By the spring of 1942, various Reserve Officers Training Corps programs were occupying not only Harvard’s classrooms but also its residential space. Navy officers took over Eliot and Kirkland Houses, Leverett and Winthrop Houses belonged to the army, and a host of Harvard grad school dorms housed members of specialized programs like the Radio Signal Corps. The remaining upperclass population at the College (mostly the young, disabled, or otherwise undraftable) was small enough to fit into Adams, Dunster, and Lowell Houses, according to Bethell’s book.
Harvard’s characteristic luxury and exclusivity eroded as the War wore on. Admissions requirements relaxed in order to attract students to replace the drafted, and considerations of religion and social background began to lessen in importance. The Houses’ dining halls, which had until 1943 featured menus and waiters, switched to cafeteria style due to a shortage of wait staff. Bunk beds were introduced for the first time in order to maximize living spaces’ efficiency. Many of the school’s elite clubs and social organizations, like the Harvard Advocate, suspended operations. Others allowed their resources to be used for war-related efforts. The Signet, for example, was taken over by the Red Cross. Although pre-war discussion caused students to look outside, it was the unintended side product of the war itself that let the outside in.
RETURNING TO A NEW HARVARD
Student veterans returned to a fundamentally different place. Harvard now saw itself as a leader of, rather than a retreat from, the real world. Government and military research continued to grow at the University. Class sizes were growing, and Conant’s meritocratic admissions policies continued to diversify the applicant pool (by 1952, 55 percent of the applicants would be from public school, according to Keller’s book).
Meanwhile, wartime vets returning to finish their degrees were largely unbothered by the change in the College’s atmosphere. “It was quite luxurious after being in a barracks for three years,” says Harold Friedman ’46 of his Leverett housing.
For returning soldiers like Friedman, who was a waiter in Leverett before the war, a return to the academy marked a welcome transition. He remembers walking to and from class after his postwar return and noticing the inscription on Dexter gate, which tells entrants to the Yard to “Enter to grow in wisdom” and people leaving to “Depart to better serve thy country and thy kind.”
“I thought that was appropriate,” he says.
In the end, Harvard had an indomitable advantage in winning its returning students over to its more inclusive ways. When asked about his opinion on the “new” Harvard, Friedman replies: “I was still alive, so it was just wonderful.”
