Class of 1949: From Barracks to Books

Its members often call the Class of 1949 the "transition class."

The first class to enter Harvard after the end of World War II, the Class still spent their college years in its shadow.

They came in three installments, in the summer and fall of 1945 and the spring of 1946, to a campus that still lodged Navy officers in Eliot House. And they left as the Class of '52 filled the Yard with first-years too young to remember the rise of Hitler clearly.

Harvard changed drastically in those four years, and the Class of '49 was right in the middle.

After spending months and even years fighting overseas, the returning veterans were older than typical college students and not looking for the same type of experience. The '49ers were, overall, an exceptionally studious group of young men determined to improve the post-war world and their prospects in it.

Men and Boys

Unlike the classes before it, most of the Class of '49 entered Harvard after the war in the Pacific drew to a close in August 1945.

Because the class came to Cambridge after the war ended, it was comprised of both high school graduates too young to have been drafted, and veterans beginning college after their military service.

"I think the most unusual feature of our Class, was really a split group in age," says Thomas Read '49. "I was 16 and around the same age as half the group--the other half were vets coming back from the war."

Memories of a class divided are what stand out in the minds of many younger '49ers today. Going to school with older and worldlier men, they say, made their experience at Harvard unique.

Besides the age differences among the students, there was an unprecedented amount of economic and social diversity in the class.

In the post-war years, the GI bill enabled thousands of veterans to attend Harvard, students who might not have been able to enroll in the country's oldest and most exclusive University during peacetime.

"The GI Bill changed the demographics," says William J. Richard Jr.'49, Harvard's First Class Marshal. "It became more inclusive, it became a national college."

Yet, as the class entered its last year at Harvard, the effects of the GI Bill became less noticeable. Whereas the years before had seen unprecedented peaks in enrollment, 1948 and 1949 saw major drops.

According to the first Crimson issue of the 1948 fall semester, which ran with the headline "College Sees First Enrollment Drop Since War," 200 fewer men enrolled than the previous semester.

In a sense, the Class of '49 was the last to be shaped by World War II both in size and makeup. The classes of '50, '51, and '52 were already part of a new Harvard generation.

War Holdovers

Though the war was over by the time most students ever set foot in Cambridge, its effects echoed throughout the campus in many ways.

Unlike the Harvard students of the isolationist 1930s, the Class of '49 involved itself in politics on a world scale. Throughout the late 40s multiple liberal political groups appeared on campus.

Students organized rallies to "Save the Marshall Plan" and they held and participated in debates to bash the anti-Communist Barnes Bill that was introduced in the Massachusetts legislature during 1948.

President Truman's Universal Military Training plan caused much controversy on campus with heated arguments coming from both sides, and rallies at Sanders Theatre.

Over 1,000 students gathered at Memorial Hall in April 1948 to rally against the escalating Cold War.

In an attempt to educate Harvard students the American Veterans Committee held programs on politics and how to work within the political system.

Undergraduates also supported student movements overseas and collected money and food to be sent to China, India and Greece.

In general, alumni remember that this flourish of political activity, which tended towards the liberal, was new and exciting for them, though it soon died out as memories of the war started to fade.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Whatever they did, in the words of one alum, was with a sense of "earnestness."

Recovering from a big war meant that everyone was " a little more serious and little more concerned" than the younger classes at Harvard.

Their intensity made them a studious group of men so dedicated to their academics that they advertised in The Crimson for their lost class notes.

Class members say they don't remember much of a "party atmosphere" on campus, and administrators worried that veterans were not having enough fun.

Not only were many students veterans of the battlefields, some were already married with families. There were so many "family men" in the Class of '49 that Harvard had to lease the Hotel Brunswick in Boston for them to live in, in addition to temporary housing established on campus.

The lingering insecurity of a world so recently torn by war also contributed to the "earnestness" of the late 1940s.

"It was the immediacy of peace," James H. Powell '49. "Social programs hadn't really started up yet."

Just before the class entered, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, the Cold War was beginning to unfold, and Americans did not yet know if the world would be a safe place.

From Battlefields to Football Fields

They worked hard and they played hard. The '49ers were a group that cared deeply about their academics, their politics--and their sports.

Social life revolved around the playing field. And for the Class of '49, the Crimson did not often disappoint.

The basketball team made it to the NCAA championship in 1946 for the first time, and the football team did not lose a single game in the first year after the war.

Winning the Harvard-Yale game in '45 and '48 were highlights of the class's experience at Harvard. The Game, which was one of the major social events of the year, invariably sold out, slowing traffic to a standstill for blocks around the Stadium.

One graduate, remembering the excitement of The Game in the late 1940s, says he was "shocked and amazed" to see that there were empty seats in the Stadium at the 1998 game.

For a class of such disparate ages, athletics was one of the few things that brought them all together.

Intramural sports were also extremely competitive with high rates of participation and fan turnout.

When Kirkland House ended the 1948-49 school year with the best intramural sports record and was awarded the Straus cup, their victory was a major coup.

All for One and One for All

In a class with so many divisive factors, members say that there was no real sense of class spirit. Yet there were not really any tensions either. "The group mixed well," Read says.

"We perhaps didn't have some of the unity that began in the class of '50," Richard recalls. "They were more homogenous, they didn't have quite the same diversity in their origins."

Yet, if that unity did not exist for the Class, its members were able to experience Harvard spirit through their Houses. There, members of the Class formed their closest friendships--some of which have lasted until the present day.

This is in part due to the fact that those who entered Harvard in '45 or '46 never lived in Yard as all other first-year students did. Instead, because of the Navy officers still on campus, they moved directly into their Houses. The four years spent together, instead of only three, helped foster House spirit.

Additionally, as the enrollment numbers began to drop post-war, the already overcrowded dorms began to open a little and allow the students who had been commuting to live on campus with their classmates.

Radcliffe Postwar

The shadow of WWII also touched the women of Radcliffe. If nothing else, some graduates remember with a smile, the gender ratio on campus was very much in favor of the "'Cliffe dwellers," as they were often called.

The hordes of returning veterans meant that there were "six men for every woman."

"You could have dates for breakfast, lunch, tea, drinks, dinner and a dance with someone different each time," recalls Anne T. Wallach '49.

Young women who had grown up in the restrictive 1930s were freed from their mothers' watchful eyes and were able to enjoy an active social life in Cambridge.

Yet Radcliffe was not free from rules either.

"We had to be in at the right time at night," Wallach remembers. "[We} couldn't wear pants unless it was very cold, couldn't smoke in the street."

Radcliffe women often took their higher level classes at Harvard where they were given "the best seats in large lectures."

Officials announced in February 1946 that the "joint instruction" begun during the war when instructors were scarce would be a permanent part of a Harvard education.

Access to the newly built Lamont library, however, was not available to women when the library opened in January 1949. According to officials, the staff needed to chaperone a mixed group of students in reading rooms was prohibitively expensive.

Student publications also made it clear that Harvard men and Radcliffe women were separate and only dubiously equal.

In the fall of '49, the Crimson ran a picture on the front page of four "Cliffies" with an extended caption about the physical measurements of Radcliffe women.

But women's liberation was still decades away, and members of the Radcliffe Class of '49 overwhelmingly say they enjoyed their undergraduate years.

"The thing to understand is that being at Radcliffe was so much better than being home with your mother that we wouldn't have dreamed of complaining about inequality with men," Wallach says.

One alumnus remembers that his wife was made to feel at home at Harvard where she could sit in on classes, and even organized her own poetry reading.

In general though, the gender inequalities that women faced here were minimal compared to those in the rest of the country, and Radcliffe women were given access to resources most were not.

"I think most of us loved Radcliffe because it gave us a glimpse of how the world could be for women," Wallach says.

With the return of students to Harvard, they could once again enjoy the social pleasures that had been denied them during the war. By the time the '49ers were getting ready to graduate, dances, masquerades, and other fun events began making a comeback.

In 1945, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals put on "The Proof of the Pudding," their first show after America entered the war, and other student activities were resurrected as the class made its way through the college.

As time went by, memories of Hitler's Germany, the atomic bomb and wartime rationing faded from memory. The '49ers studied, played House football and attended dances. With the Class of 1949, Harvard put WWII firmly in the past.