The Forgotten Generation: American Children and World War II

2. Schools for War

2 Schools for War † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † Education for Victory till Victory is Won. —John W. Studebaker, U.S. Commissioner of Education (1942) If we can afford war, we can also afford education. —Henry Ford (1942) † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † “I am speaking to you tonight,” Eleanor Roosevelt began her broadcast on the evening of December 7, 1941, “at a very serious moment in our history.” Mrs. Roosevelt addressed her remarks to “the young people of the nation” as she called Americans to “National Faith.” “You are going to have a great opportunity,” the first lady continued. “There will be high moments in which your strength and your ability will be tested. I have faith in you. I feel as though I were standing upon a rock, and that is my faith in my fellow citizens.”1 So began the journey for America’s young citizens as their strengths and abilities would be tested by the stresses and deprivations of the Second World War, and schoolchildren in particular would prove to be a rock of ability, strength, and determination. After the anxiety of that startling Sunday, most children probably looked forward to their routine of school on Monday morning. Although no one knew what the future would hold, most Americans began to realize that their hours and their days for years to come would be devoted to war work. Walking to the school bus stop early that Monday morning, a twelve-year-old Louisiana boy named Richard Young watched his uncle, a Great War veteran, approach holding a copy of the New Orleans TimesPicayune . “Boy, we are in trouble now,” his uncle grumbled. Those words and his uncle’s war stories from earlier years would leave a serious im22 23 Schools for War pression on Richard that would echo throughout the war years. “When the schools opened on Monday, December 8,” declared A War Policy for American Schools, “they had one dominant purpose—complete, intelligent and enthusiastic cooperation in the war.”2 As President Roosevelt’s address to Congress was broadcast across America that morning, many schoolchildren sat restlessly at their desks or perched uncomfortably in gymnasiums as their teachers insisted they listen to this historic moment. On her own initiative, Matilda Mally brought a radio into her elementary classroom in Des Moines, Iowa, and reported that as her students listened, their expressions displayed “intense interest .” In Long Beach, California, sixth-grader Raymond Parker remembered his teacher also bringing a radio “so we could hear President Roosevelt’s historic ‘Day of Infamy’ speech, as he declared war on the Japanese empire .”3 Most children of school age grasped the importance of the sudden anxiety surrounding them, and a child psychologist warned caregivers that A wartime classroom with children studying Africa on the globe. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowa Archives. 24 The Forgotten Generation young children might be affected very personally “by displays of adult emotions such as they had rarely experienced.” Radio announcements punctuated with adult voices sharp with fear left too many children’s questions unanswered. In those immediate days after Pearl Harbor, a Midwestern rural schoolteacher named Deloris Murphy also worried about her young students’ recent obsession with war. “All my students talk about is the war,” Murphy noted ruefully. “They think we must fight the Japs and that we’ll be fighting Hitler soon.”4 The anthropologist Margaret Mead explained to adult audiences that “war need not mar our children.” And Mead also asked the question that almost any parent or educator considered: “Can we protect our children in wartime?” As a realistic observer of the world, her professional answer was probably one most caregivers did not wish to hear at the time. “In the bottom of their hearts most Americans believe that we cannot,” Mead confessed, “that we are condemned to seeing a whole generation of little children marred by war.”5 An educator named Luchen Aigner wrote in an essay titled “The Impress of War on the Child’s Mind,” an acknowledgment that any attempt after Pearl Harbor to keep the war out of schools would probably be fruitless . “Before that parents and educators largely agreed that the war should be kept out of the classroom,” Aigner noted. “Now they feel the school must do what it can to guide the children in assimilating their war impressions in a healthy way.”6 Like it or not, the war had entered the American classroom. Official agencies added comments...