Warren Smith discovered the following in the Harvard Archive while doing research for his Masters thesis in 2019…

In June, as parents and alumni began to flock into Cambridge for the graduation of the Class of 1941, a most awkward paradox confronted them, a paradox that seemed to summarize the divided attitudes of both the college and of the nation. For, up until the very moment of the graduation ceremony itself, seniors in caps and gowns, bearing placards protesting the pro-war attitude of the college administration, paraded incessantly before the gates of the Yard. Meanwhile, President Conant, only recently returned from England, was accompanied on graduation day by the elaborately be-robed Lord Halifax. At the ceremony, with what seemed at the time like an unnecessary amount of pro-British fanfare, he gave up his seat to the Ambassador from Great Britian. It was not, on the whole, a very popular gesture… and there were some embarrassing moments beneath that hot June sun.

The President of Harvard, James B. Conant, carried the torch for Roosevelt who was facing an election, and the public eye and opinion. Roosevelt chose his voice to be that of a Harvard man, whose power, prominence and standing was second only to Roosevelt himself. Conant insisted on flying into England with the battle of Britain in full swing and London being besieged by bombs. He wrote in a letter he estimated the odds of death only one in one thousand. Stubborn because he could see war was a certainty. As was the knowledge that it would be his students fighting it. He got on that plane grateful for the chance to do something that he could look back on in an effort to ease his conscience in the darkest days he must have known lay ahead.

President Conant in his first address of the fall to the undergraduate body. He spoke, not of the scholar’s duties in a peacetime society, but of his duties in wartime. These seemed indeed ominous words. Dr. Conant, however, though himself an advocate of immediate declaration of war, recognized the still-existing opinion against war. “Only when no voice of dissent is heard,” he said, “must we fear that a group of free men has been transformed into a regiment of slaves.”

Winter came and in November three-quarters of the undergraduates voted that they were in favor of non-intervention in the war with the Nazis. along with the heaviest snow fall in twenty years. But there were, as always, distractions from the world conflict. Then, a week-end came; and on Sunday, those who were listening to the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra were surprised by a break in the program. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

Harvard like the nation, had to change almost over-night from a university at peace to a university at war.

Now that war had come at last, a cloud seemed to have been lifted; now students knew where they were going and they knew what they must do. That very literally there were forces of evil at work in the world and that it was the duty of the men of good will to combat them.

When in 1939 members of the older Harvard generation accused students of having lost their faith, they were right. The loss of faith in the traditional standards of the 19th century will in the future seem perhaps the most unique and overwhelming element of this war. The obligation of those who will lead tomorrow, therefore, is to provide a new interpretation for themselves and for their own generation.

It was logic, then, that produced fear in 1939, logic that transformed fear to challenge in 1941, and logic that transformed challenge into intellectual action in 1942. These students could not fight or live without faith. They could not fight or live with the old faiths. And so, they must live with new ones produced and remodeled from the old. But their fight will not end even when peace has been restored. Today, their weapons will be guns; tomorrow, as educated men, their weapons will be their ideas.

Those of you who will be alive five, seven, or ten years from now will have a task of reconstruction, the labor of creating a world in which all men can live together. In the name of the war against race, a nation we must remain, indivisible, un-divided, united by all. We must never faulter, bend or budge. Let it be enough to see we are Americans- we are all- each and every one.

George Washington began the tradition of always having a member of the secret scholars in the White House to serve as an advisor. - Book of Lore

Police had no jurisdiction on campus at Harvard in the 1940s.

Attending class was optional.

The first rule for Harvard men was “keep your name out of the newspaper.”