The War that Wadleigh Students Imagined

World War II was a traumatic and key event in the history of the 20th century, affecting societies, institutions and individuals. Schools were no exception. History of education has often focused on how schools reacted to this new war context and the institutional and pedagogical changes they implemented. Student voices - what students thought, what they felt, and how they imagined this new experience in their lives - have usually been silenced.

This exhibit intends to bring those voices to the forefront of the discussion. Looking at the yearbooks of an all-girls Harlem high school and the pieces students wrote and published there, its objective is to introduce the viewer to the ‘historical imagination’ of these young women when thinking about World War II. By ‘historical imagination’ we mean the process through which individuals not only imagine the past, but also imagine themselves and others as ‘historical actors’ across space and time. This exhibit intends to show how, through historical imagination and writing, these girls made sense of what they and the world were experiencing, inhabiting a past that was already gone, a present they were part of, and a future they wanted to build.

History is made through questions. The War that Wadleigh Students Imagined is an exhibit that invites you to explore and interrogate its materials as a historian would.

Local and Global Tensions

Wadleigh students did not live in a bubble. Although they spent most of their days at school, they were part of a community – Harlem – that was facing serious challenges and tensions during the years before World War II, many of them based in ongoing racism in the U.S. After the U.S. entrance into the war in 1941, they were part of a country experiencing a ‘total war’ that affected almost every dimension of society, including the educational system. The different tensions students were in contact with – both local and global ones – informed how they related with the war and are essential to understand their ‘historical imagination’ about it.

Harlem after the Great Depression

In 1925 James Weldon proclaimed that Harlem was “the greatest Negro city in the world [which] occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful sections of the city”(1). Less than a decade later, Beverly Smith complained in the Dunbar News that the “average white New Yorker… thinks of [Harlem] as a region of prosperous nightclubs, of happy-go-lucky Negroes dancing all night to jazz music and living during the day by taking in each other’s policy numbers… The fact is that this community of 220,000 Negroes is the poorest, the unhealthiest, the unhappiest and the most crowded single large section of New York City”(2).

Putting Weldon’s description right next to Smith’s makes it seem like Harlem experienced a sharp decline at the end of the 1920s. Was this accurate, in which case both of them would be right, or was Harlem’s history more nuanced and complicated during these years? Answering this requires to understand how Harlem was affected by the Great Depression.

The Great Depression touched all of the United States, but some communities were more affected than others. Harlem was one of these. Racist labor practices explain why African Americans were more likely to be unemployed during the Depression: according to historian Cheryl Greenberg, in 1930, 1 in 10 individuals in the U.S. employed population were left without work. In the same year the numbers were 1 in 6 in New York City and 1 in 4 within Harlem’s African American population (3). Consequently, living conditions in Harlem declined severely in the first years of the Depression. Providing some relief became part of the work of community organizations and churches. The Abyssinian Baptist Church and its pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., for example, played a key role in feeding and clothing Harlem’s poor. A group of church leaders - under the direction of Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop - were also responsible for organizing the Harlem Cooperating Committee on Relief and Unemployment, which started to function in 1930.

Above: World's Highest Standard of Living

This shift was central for the process of politicization that Harlem would experience in the following years. Historians may disagree on how long it took for this help to be effective, but the consensus is that the New Deal ‘freed’ social organizations from the energy-consuming work of providing relief to those affected by the Depression (4). Political activity was certainly not new in Harlem, but government-provided relief allowed community leaders to focus more on the long-running campaign for employment opportunity for African Americans. The Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaign employed a series of strategies - like pickets and boycotts - and became a strong example of the new forms of political organization that had started to appear in post-Depression Harlem. Success at increasing local black employment took more than a decade, but by 1944, most of salespeople in Harlem were African American (5).

Tensions in Harlem also manifested in more violent ways. On March 19, 1935, rumors that a young boy had been badly beaten by the police after shoplifting a penknife at a store on 125th street ignited a riot that ended up with 5 deaths and more than $500,000 in property damage (6). The riot led Mayor La Guardia to appoint an investigative team to research and study the structural issues that had caused it. La Guardia decided not to make their report public. Nonetheless, a copy of it was leaked and published in The Amsterdam News on July 18, 1936.

Above: Title Page, The Complete Report of Mayor LaGuardia's Commission

The 136-pages document reported in detail about the housing, educational, health and security conditions experienced by African Americans in Harlem. It concluded that the “first and more fundamental problem of the Negro citizen of Harlem is the economic problem” (p.122) and that racial discrimination in employment was the key social factor keeping “the Negro worker in the ranks of unskilled laborers and a state of perpetual dependency” (p.123).

In spite of all of this, Harlem remained a place of artistic and cultural productivity. Harlem was still being presented to the rest of the U.S. and the world as a joyful place, filled with music and parties. This silent film from the U.K. producer British Pathé is a great example of the way in which many imagined Harlem and explains Beverly Smith’s irritation in The Dunbar News. The tensions and contradictions would not stop but were heightened once the U.S. entered World War II.

Reflection Questions

Why do you think this film shows a Harlem so different than the one presented by the report of the LaGuardia Commission? Do you think one of these versions was closer to the truth than the other? Or that both positions are true in some ways? Why?

Schools Under War

Like the Great Depression, World War II affected all of the U.S. However, it also affected institutions and communities in different ways. One of the best examples of a “total war,” World War II mobilized all members of society in different ways but with the same objective: victory. Black Americans identified the need for victory not only at war, but against racism at home.

Children and youth became involved in this war through several different institutions. Schools were among these.

Schools have always been political battlefields. For many, they are one of the institutions - if not the most important one - where people become citizens of a democratic state. Therefore, schools are intimately linked to the projects of that state, even if one of these projects is war.

The government and the media presented World War II as a national and patriotic effort that everyone should work for and schools were not an exception. In a time of war, they modified their curriculums, extra-curricular activities, practices and discourses. Although historians disagree on how important and effective some of these changes were, there is relative consensus in terms of the key role played by schools and the new responsibilities that were assigned to them in this critical context (1). The words of a New York City’s principal describing the activities of the wartime committees created at his school are evocative of this atmosphere:

“The defense council has jurisdiction over air-raid precautions. A committee on war courses attends to pre-induction and pre-flight curricula. A committee on High School Victory Corps supervises the conversion of the extracurriculum, and enrolls properly qualified pupils. A committee on teachers’ courses is the coordinator of in-service courses given by our teachers for those who wish to qualify for out-of-license teaching and for other purposes (such as first-aid certificate). Numerous other committees, in which pupils play a large part, are devoted to the sale of bonds and stamps, salvage drives, books for those in service, contributions to the Red Cross and to Allied war relief, blood donations, collation of literature on the war, bazaars and other types of sales drives for numerous war-relief purposes” (2).

The following articles show some of the changes schools experienced during World War II, and how schools responded. The newspapers reported about the war from the perspective of teachers and administrators in New York City schools.

Above: Public Schools Teaching Youngsters How To Aid War Effort

Above: Youth Face Jobs, School

Above: Something for the Boys: Service Men's Service

Reflection Questions

Which of the changes reported here are most impressive to you? How different would your own high schooling have been had you lived during these years?

Although war was presented as a collective and national effort, there were many sources of dissent and conflict, even at a local level. This happened at schools too. Some school actors criticized war-related school practices like the High School Victory Corps, warning that children had no other choice but to participate in them and that war was being excessively emphasized inside schools (3). On the other side of the spectrum, conservative educators and patriotic organizations like the American Legion continued their long-running fight against progressive educators, accusing them of being Communists. They also conducted virulent campaigns like the one against Harold Rugg’s textbooks - Man and His Changing Society -, that ended up with a 90% drop in its sales between 1938 and 1944 (4). Dissent could be expressed even inside the classroom, like it happened with May Quinn, a Brooklyn civics teacher who one morning of 1942 read an anti-Semitic leaflet to her students and praised Hitler, Mussolini and racial segregation (5).

World War II was a national event, but Americans experienced it in different ways. For painting a more complex and complete picture of this, it could be useful to observe the case of a particular high school, what happened in it, and what its actors thought, felt and imagined when confronted by this war.

Wadleigh High School and the Depression

Founded in 1897 and located on West 114th Street in Harlem since 1902, Wadleigh was the first high school for girls in Manhattan. Over the 1930s, the student population at Wadleigh grew. The proportion of African American and Afro-Caribbean students at the school increased greatly, while the population of white students declined rapidly. Wadleigh experienced firsthand the local and global tensions produced by the Great Depression and World War II.

Mayor LaGuardia’s Commission report found that Harlem schools were overcrowded and in poor shape. “One needs only to enter one of these schools” the report said “to be made aware of its age which is reflected in its shabbiness, its unsanitary condition, and its antiquated architecture” (1). Many Harlem families and educators understood these inequalities to be the result of racial discrimination, which was evident in the curriculum and opportunities for students as well. After the report publicly exposed these issues, the Teachers Union established a Harlem Committee to face them. The Committee - led by Alice Citron and Lucile Spence - was the basis for the Permanent Committee for Better Schools in Harlem (2). The Permanent Committee was led by Reverend John W. Robinson as chairman, and Lucile Spence as secretary, and had several successes in the following years, like making the city to build two new schools in Harlem (3).

Above: Modern Ideas Followed in Building New High School

Lucile Spence was a biology teacher at Wadleigh since 1926. She was one of the first African Americans hired at this high school and had an important role in the New York’s Teachers Union (4). Through her, Wadleigh became part of the struggle to improve education in Harlem. But Wadleigh illustrated the problem, too. The LaGuardia Commission’s report explicitly denounced racial discrimination at Wadleigh, where Spence remained one of only a very few black teachers. The school’s physical conditions were not ideal either. Wadleigh’s building - praised by The New York Times in 1903 as “the finest high school building in the world” - was 35 years later denounced by the Permanent Committee for Better Schools in Harlem as a poorly equipped forty-year old structure. A campaign to raise funds for the school was organized in the context of the school 40th anniversary but without major success.

A historical institution in New York City, Wadleigh High School got attention from some important newspapers, like The New York Times or The Amsterdam News. In them one can read part of its history and realize how Wadleigh could not avoid the tensions and challenges Harlem was facing in those days.

Above: Both Races Need Wadleigh High School, Audience is Told

Reflection Questions

What characteristics of Wadleigh High School can you deduce from the two newspaper articles here? If you have a New York Public Library card, you can access the New York Times coverage of Wadleigh as well. See, for example, the article “Wadleigh to Mark 40th Anniversary”, New York Times, December 5, 1937. Do you notice any differences between the perspectives of the New York Times and that of the Amsterdam News? Where do you think these differences come from?

The challenges their community was facing were not unknown to Wadleigh students. In “Harlem’s Neighbors,” a piece published in the January 1938 issue of Wadleigh’s yearbook, three students denounced that poverty was dominant in lower Harlem but it was fought by neighbors who shared what they had with each other. The text also ended on a hopeful note:

Above: Harlem's Neighbors, page 1

Above: Harlem's Neighbors, page 2

Above: Harlem's Neighbors, page 3

“‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ but the proof of true neighborliness and humanity would be no fences at all. Harlem neighbors, people from all parts of the world who have taken root here, have within them the seeds of brotherliness, love of liberty, joy in the beautiful. These seeds are sprouting and the trees which spring from them will some day offer shade and comfort to thousand”.

The text gives a more nuanced and complex picture of what life in Harlem was, adding to other perspectives about this community. The ending probably was nodding to the context of international conflict the world was already experiencing, as well as the diversity of Wadelgh’s enrollment in the 1930s. Indeed, The Owl was an important component of life in Wadleigh and window into how conflicts experienced by the community and the country were visible at the school.

The Owl in Depression and War

The Owl was Wadleigh High School’s yearbook. In the 1930s and 1940s it often was published twice a year, usually in January and June. Run by a student board - assisted by one or more faculty advisors - The Owl did not include senior portraits only, but also poems, short stories and articles written by Wadleigh students. Although we do not know how important The Owl was to Wadleigh students, we do know that through its pages we can peek into some of their thoughts and feelings that they chose to share with their peers and teachers.

In the context of World War II (and particularly after the U.S. entered it in December 1941) The Owl became highly invested in the war efforts. Through new sections that intended to inform students about what was happening across the sea, and by using patriotic symbols, The Owl’s student board and faculty advisors transformed this yearbook into one of the many wartime devices that appeared in schools during those years.

In this section of the exhibit, we invite you to explore a selection of the material published in these yearbooks during the war years.

Above: The Owl [January 1942]

The Owl issue of January 1942, published about a month after the Japanese attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor, was the first to be explicitly dedicated to World War II. It was titled “Four Freedoms Issue” and included a lot of patriotic and wartime visual symbols - like the American eagle and flag in the cover. The issue also featured some informative articles, that intended to teach students about the ‘slang’ used in the Army and Navy and how soldiers spent their days when in camps.

Above: The Owl [June 1942]

With slightly less intensity than the previous one, The Owl issue of June 1942 maintained its wartime rhetoric. Its tone was more optimistic - the issue’s theme was “Thumbs Up!” – and it located the U.S. war efforts in the context of a shared task of the “United Nations.” A section with this title included different world leaders’ declarations about the war, from De Gaulle and Churchill to Pandit Nehru and the Mexican minister Luis Quintanilla. The section also included a summary of The Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, and stated that all these were “messages of unity and faith in the ultimate victory of democracy over fascism.”

Above: A Colored Soldier's Prayer

The June 1942 edition of The Owl featured a poem by student Cecilia Violenes that pointed directly at the contradictions faced by black Americans fighting in World War II. While black soldiers were committed to their duty as soldiers, they also recognized the reality of racism at home and abroad - as the U.S. military remained segregated, for example. They fought, as Violenes put it, “a double battle.” Her language resonated with national civil rights organizations’ calls for a “Double V,” victory over racism at home and abroad.

Above: The Owl [June 1943]

The Owl issue of June 1943 explicitly addressed the role of women in the war. Its main theme was “Women go to War” and the cover showed a woman working in a factory. The graphic symbolism was repeated several times: women dressed in working, nursing and farming outfits were spread along the yearbook, one of them even accompanied by the American flag and the caption “Join our Land Army.” An informative piece about the WAVES program for training girls to be “radio operators, aviation machinists mates, yeomen, parachute riggers, etc.” contributed to the same idea, as a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to Wadleigh students did. In it, the First Lady invited them to work where they were needed. “In times of war”, the letter said “everyone has an obligation to do the best work one is capable of doing”.

Above: Marches Motives

The Owl had traditionally published the senior class song, always composed by Wadleigh students. Starting in 1942, it also published other student-composed songs. Many of them had patriotic and wartime themes. It is unclear whether these songs were produced in the context of a school assignment or simply by the students’ initiative, although different students’ composing songs with the same topic – like the “Marche Motives inspired by the Tunisian Campaign” published in 1943 – suggest they were somehow the result of formal school activities.

By 1943, the war seemed to have infused all aspects of life at Wadleigh. The two could not be separated. The Owl, in that context, had become a pedagogical wartime device. Through it, its editors wanted to teach a particular way students should behave and even feel during a time of war like the one they were experiencing. However, it was also the medium through which other Wadleigh students’ voices could be expressed. Listening to these diverse voices - to the thoughts and feelings they communicated - is necessary to understand how these students imagined the war they were experiencing and themselves as historical actors in the world it was producing.

Imagining World War II

World War II affected Wadleigh students in several different ways. Making sense of it required Wadleigh students to imagine events, processes and characters that sometimes were far away from them, both in terms of time and space. Their ‘historical imagination’ about the war was informed by their past experiences, present knowledge and hopes and fears about the future. Like the war, their imagination extended throughout the world.

Through the different pieces Wadleigh students wrote for The Owl between 1931 and 1945, we invite you to explore how they historically imagined World War II and how, by doing so, they were claiming their agency as actors of their own histories and that of the world.

Imagination and Time

World War II started on June 1st, 1939, after Germany invaded Poland. The United States did not enter the war until December 8th, 1941, one day after its naval base in Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese air force. But Wadleigh students were imagining what was happening with these global conflicts even before U.S. involvement in the war.

In this section we want to invite you to explore how time impacted the way Wadleigh students imagined the history they were being part of. They learned from their past and that of their parents, which informed how they imagined a war that was being fought in the present, thousands of miles away. In this context of war, they also imagined new futures for the world they wanted to live in.

In The Owl of January, 1935, the fictional character Alice wonders around Wadleigh and meets some of its seniors. One of them, of Austrian ancestry, is called ‘Nazi’. The use of the nickname is the first mention of the regime in Germany in The Owl, and its casualness hints at what American discourse did or did not emphasize at the time.

Above: Alice in Wadleighland

Imagining the Past

Student writing in The Owl shows how the past was important to how Wadleigh students imagined their world. Their own past and that of their parents was part of how they understood and claimed the present.

Reimagining World War I

Before World War II, the clearest example of a global conflict Wadleigh students had was World War I. In the agitated decades of the 1930s and 1940s, they used it as an imaginative resource for understanding the tensions and conflicts they were witnessing, but also to present their hopes and fears about it.

Above: Friends and Enemies, page 1

Three pieces, “Shell Game” and “Friends and Enemies,” were published before the war started (in The Owl June 1936 and January 1939 issues). Both short stories have at their center a friendship between an American and a German soldiers during World War I. Although the pieces follow opposite directions - one is the story of two enemy soldiers who become friends, while the other is the story of two childhood friends who end up fighting in different sides and finally meet again - they share elements like the spaces of the trench and of New York City as places for encounter between apparent enemies. The pieces reflect a perspective about war as something absurd and that divides people who otherwise should be united, even against their own will and desires.

Another piece, “When the bugle blows,” has a different tone. A poem published after the war had started (The Owl, January 1941), it also remembers the past as a way of relating with the present: in this case, using the certainty of the end of World War I as a way of hoping for the end of World War II. Their powerful final verses combine despair and hope in equal parts, reflecting the different and sometimes contradicting emotions students felt in front of this war, and acknowledging that these were not unlike those their own parents had felt decades before:

Remember the last time that bugle blew? The feeling we had - oh - if we had known, That after twenty years the world anew Would hear again that bugle blown.

The time draws nigh when the iron birds Thunder again through our peaceful skies. The world with rejoice with untold words When the last faint blow of the bugle dies.

Students’ Experiences Traveling Outside the US

Many Wadleigh students were born and raised in the U.S. Although many wanted to travel outside of the country, only some of them had the opportunity to do it. These experiences were surely less intense than those of who had lived abroad for an extended amount of time, but the impact they had in these students’ memories and how they would later imagine what was going on with World War II should not be overlooked.

Above: Bird's Eye View of Europe, page 1

In selections from the “Who’s Who?” section of The Owl, some senior students are profiled and their trips outside of the U.S. are briefly recounted. (January 1937, January 1938, and January 1939 issues) A student’s chronicle titled “Bird’s Eye View of Europe” published in the January 1937 issue is particularly interesting, not only for the detailed narration of the student’s trip around France, Italy, and Germany, but because of her acute political analysis of the European context. Reading her reflections, one cannot help but wondering how these past experiences informed the way in which she imagined World War II only two years after her trip, and how different her imagination was compared to that of her peers who did not have the opportunity - and the privilege - of traveling abroad.

Students’ Experiences Living Outside the US

Students’ past experiences informed the way they imagined World War II and the events that led to it. Maybe none of these experiences was as important as that of living outside of the U.S. Several Wadleigh students were first generation immigrants, and others had spent a significant amount of time living outside of the country. Their experiences in these other “homes” likely influenced how they later experienced the war.

Pieces from The Owl points to this particular dimension of students’ past. The “Who’s Who” section that profiled some of the school seniors was a traditional one in Wadleigh’s yearbook. The ones published in the June 1937 and January 1938 issues show that it was not exceptional for some seniors to be immigrants, and usually European ones. Other texts add to this mix the students’ own perspectives: in “America” (The Owl, January 1931 a student remembers the experience of coming to America and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time, while in “Houses I have lived in” (The Owl, June 1941 another student writes about the experience of living in the famous Russian hotel ‘The Lux.’ Both texts reflect how past experiences affected these students’ relations not only with these other “homes” but, by contrast, also with the U.S.

Parents’ Histories and Stories

Being the daughter of immigrants was certainly not an exceptional experience, both in New York City and Wadleigh. Their parents’ immigration histories likely impacted the way these students imagined the conflictual international atmosphere and the war it gave birth to.

Above: The Land of Opportunity, page 1

Two pieces were published in the January 1931 issue of The Owl. Although World War II was far from starting then, they are examples of Wadleigh students’ connections with Europe through their parents’ past experiences. In “Norwegian Notes” a student talks about their Norwegian parents’ traditions and costumes, while in “The Land of Opportunity” another student tells the history of her father, his escape from Czarist Russia and how he became a Workers Union leader in the U.S. The pride these texts reflect shows how their heritage mattered to these students identities, and helps us when imagining how they felt about the events happening in their parents’ homelands.

Reimagining Other Wars and Conflicts

Through popular memory and their elders’ experiences, World War I was probably the main referent Wadleigh students had to think about a global conflict. However, they also used other past international wars to make sense of the process they were experiencing. Re-imagining these and their effects all over the world, they were able to take a position regarding World War II and its implications.

“The Pearl,”” published in the June 1941 issue of The Owl is an excellent example of this. Set in Manhattan’s Chinatown, it is the story of Kyoto, a Japanese man who falls in disgrace after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. After losing all his restaurant’s clients, the man gets sick and almost dies. The story has a happy ending because of the friendship of Ming, a Chinese man “who loved Kyoto, not as a Japanese of course, but as a man.”” Although Kyoto does not want to borrow money from his friend, at the end Ming deceives him in order to give him what he needs. The story is particularly striking, considering that it was written after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor: it shows that, even exposed to the wartime rhetoric of these years, some Wadleigh students were able to understand that individuals were not responsible for their nation’s actions. In expressing this, the story also might have been critically addressing the massive forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese and Japanese-Americans that were happening in the U.S. at the time.

Imagining the Present

Wadleigh students were not only imagining World War II in relation to what had happened in the past and what would happen in the future. They were also imagining events that were happening far away, but present in their daily lives in many different ways.

Students learned about the war through several different mechanisms, from newspapers to personal conversations. Probably none of these made a stronger impact in them than the letters they received from family and friends who had enlisted in the Army. Through these letters, students imagined and connected in personal ways to the war.

In its January 1942 issue, The Owl published “Letters from Camp.” This section included what seemed to be personal letters from soldiers stationed all around the U.S. and even overseas. We do not know if these letters were real; they might have been written by students, during a class exercise. These letters either reflect or fueled the imagination of Wadleigh High School students, leading them to think about the everyday life of soldiers and their personal thoughts and feelings in the context of the war.

Above: Letters from Camp, page 1

Above: Letters from Camp, page 2

Sometimes letters came from people even closer to the Wadleigh community. In its June 1943 issue, The Owl published a letter from a Wadleigh former student - “our own Ensign Wilson,” The Owl declared. Addressed to “All My Friends at Wadleigh” the letter had the seal of the WAVES program and was presented in front of an article describing the daily life of the women enrolled in it. The letter intended to work as an emotional anchor, allowing the students to imagine the experience of other women who were participating in the war through this program.

Above: Letter to All My Friends at Wadleigh

Wadleigh students learned about the war around the world in many different ways. This knowledge was important in how they imagined what was going on, but their concerns and desires were essential too.

We invite you to explore more of Wadleigh students’ writing. Follow the links to writing in the three main formats these girls used - short stories, poems and opinion essays - while imagining World War II.

Short Stories

“Foreign Correspondent,” The Owl, January 1938, page 17-19. “Thumbs Up”, The Owl, June 1942, page 5-7. “War and Love”, The Owl, June 1942, pages 18-20. “Soldiers of the Sea”, The Owl, June 1942. “Forever Free”, The Owl, June 1943, pages 6-7. “Pacific Glory”, The Owl, June 1943, page 26.

Poems

“Our Life Today”, The Owl, January 1937. “Question”, The Owl, January 1938, page 19. “To a draftee”, The Owl, January 1942, page 40. “Look ahead Americans”, The Owl, June 1942, page 38. “Mrs. America”, The Owl, June 1943.

Opinion Essays

“Speak of the Silent Brave”, The Owl, June 1942, frontispiece “American Beauty”, The Owl, June 1943. “Las mujeres latinas van a la guerra”, The Owl, June 1943. “Les volontaires francais”, The Owl, June 1943.

Reflection Questions

Do you think the format of each piece - short story, poem, or essay - could have affected how the student writing it was imagining the war? If so, in what ways?

Imagining the Future

World War II affected the ways in which Wadleigh students were able to imagine their future. In a world like the one they were living in, just imagining a future was a radical act in itself. Looking through their school’s windows in search of tomorrow, these girls saw different things and expressed them in their writing. In what follows, we present three of these ‘windows’ and take a glance at what these students imagined through these.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty was a recurrent emotion Wadleigh students had to deal with when imagining their future. In a context of increasing international tension first and during World War II later, many students feared what tomorrow would bring for them. Student writing published in The Owl shows this theme.

The first one, “Bird’s Eye View of Europe,” (The Owl, January 1937 is both the chronicle of a student’s trip around Europe and a detailed analysis of its current political scenario. At the end, the evidence of what is happening there seems so overwhelming, that the author refuses to end her text with any answer: “How will all this end?; ask the old stone walls [of a German castle] and we echo the question: ‘How will all this end?’”

The same feeling is expressed in both of the pieces published in the 1939 issue. “Untitled,” written by Leonore Garagusi, uses the metaphor of a group of dancers and the leader of a band to wonder “who will reach destruction first, the leader, or the led?” “Dance Macabre,” on the other hand, is a short story that explicitly predicted both World War II and the kind of event that would provoke the U.S. to enter it. Its characters exude uncertainty at every step of the story, never knowing if things will stop or if the war will crush their dreams forever. It was a feeling that in those days was probably shared by many of Wadleigh students.

The beginning of the war would certainly increase the uncertainty and the fears associated with it. Future became a place where even survival was uncertain and where the Past might not be retrievable anymore. The poem “I Wonder,” (The Owl, January 1942, would repeat these feelings and put them into words in a time when there were no answers, and only questions remained:

I wonder if I shall live to see, (…) I wonder if the blue of the sky, Will get some rest before I die; No more planes to mar its beauty, No more bombs doing their duty.

Hope

Wadleigh students faced a war that had seemed inevitable in the conflict-filled international atmosphere of the 1930s. When it became a reality, some students knew what was needed to avoid a situation like this one happening again. Imagining a more peaceful future and looking at it with hope, they dreamed of a world rid of wars and conflicts.

In pieces published in The Owl, Wadleigh students spoke to the Future through the language of hope. “Foreword” appeared in the June 1936 issue, calling for a future world in which nationalities were not a reason to divide humankind. The issue’s main theme was international goodwill, which shows how attuned students were with the international political scene. Four years later in the June 1940 issue the students Mildred Banner and Ellen Mead hoped again for a better world, in “Utopia.” In this text, the students imagine the world 500 years from then, where “there will be none of the prejudices and grudges on which people of today stupidly feed their minds.” The text was not naive about the present: the students believed this new world would be created only after wars and disasters had destroyed “our very way of life.” Nonetheless, even in the darkest hours of World War II, the text was an expression of hope. In pieces like these, Wadleigh students were hoping for a better Future, imagining it as a ‘promised place’ they will be able to inhabit at some point.

A Different Future

Not every Wadleigh student could imagine her future in the same way. For understanding how African American students did, probably there is no other piece as important as the poem “A Colored Soldier’s Prayer.” Published in the June 1942 issue of The Owl by West Indian-American student Cecilia Violenes, the poem was dedicated “to all those soldiers who are fighting a double battle.” The dedication resonates with what African Americans called the “Double V”: victory abroad over Fascism and over Racism at home. Fighting against Racism was presented by African American leaders as part of the war efforts especially when discrimination was lawful: according to Martha Biondi, even in New York State 90% of the defense plants refused to hire African Americans in 1940. Community leaders linked wartime and anti racist rhetorics, and the war fueled their efforts. In Harlem, in the context of the local fight against racism in hiring practices, Reverend John Johnson would even declare one of the Four Freedoms to be “the freedom from want and the freedom from want means the right to work.”

The poem, certainly in a less combative tone, put some of these dreams for the Future in a soldier’s prayer.

And when this war is over For myself I’ll ask no glory,

the soldier prays.

But Great God! I pray with fervor That we’ll have a different story.

The soldier’s words remind the reader that, even in the pervasive context of the war, many of the problems faced by African Americans at home were not solved yet. The poem also emphasizes the collective nature of these dreams and the hope that the victory will bring not only a new, but a better future for African Americans, for Harlem and for many of Wadleigh High School students:

That my people then may stand (…) And know a new day’s begun That’s why I fight, Dear God; (…) And before I rest beneath the sod May we all sing freedom’s song.

Imagination and Space

Wadleigh students’ imagination of World War II was not only related to certain moments in time. It was also linked to particular places where they imagined the war happening. A few of these were just blocks away from their school while many others were located at the other side of the world. Some of these places they knew personally, some their parents had told them about, and some they just have heard of in the news. However, all of them were important in how they experienced World War II.

The map below shows the different places Wadleigh students imagined through the pages of The Owl.

Above: Map showing places references in student writing in _The Owl_

World War II had Wadleigh students imagining places all over the world and thinking about the global connections between these.

Reflection Questions

In today’s world, what current issues do you think can help students to engage and imagine different places around the globe and the connections between them?

Why do you think some Wadleigh students tended to imagine some areas of the world more than others in this context? What does this tell you about how they experienced World War II?

By Way of Conclusion… Or Not.

Throughout this exhibit you have witnessed how Wadleigh High School students experienced a traumatic but transformational historical event–World War II.

Imagination played a key part in this process: through it, students not only traveled across time and space but expressed their concerns, fears and hopes regarding the world in which they were living. Expressing this ‘historical imagination’ was a way of making this world their own, and of becoming aware of the history they were a part of and the active role they had in it.

But this has been only a sample of Wadleigh students’ ‘historical imagination.’ Many others characters, events and processes paraded through the pages of The Owl during these years. By way of conclusion we actually invite you not to conclude, but to dive in the ‘repositories of historical imagination’ these yearbooks are and to see the world - an imagined, but also so real world - with the eyes of a group of high school girls from Harlem…

The Owl [January 1931]

The Wadleigh Year Book [1908]

The Owl [January 1935]

The Owl [January 1919]

The Owl [January 1937]

The Owl [January 1938]

The Owl [January 1939]

The Owl [January 1942]

The Owl [June 1935]

The Owl [June 1936]

The Owl [June 1937]

The Owl [June 1938]

The Owl [June 1940]

The Owl [June 1941]

The Owl [June 1942]

The Owl [June 1943]

The Owl [January1944]

The Owl [1945]

The Owl [January 1947]

The Owl [June 1944]

The Owl [January 1946]

The Owl [June 1946]

The Owl [June 1949]

Reflection Questions

What kind of digital exhibit - like the one you just read - would you be able to put together with these yearbooks? What would be its main theme? How would you present its material to its audience?

Sources

Primary Sources

Johnson, James Weldon. “The Making of Harlem” in Alain Locke, ed., Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, Survey Graphic, 1925, 635.

Secondary Sources

Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Harvard, 2006)

Dorn, Charles. American Education, Democracy, and the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Giordano, Gerald. Wartime Schools: How World War II Changed American Education (Peter Lang, 2004)

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford University Press, 1991).

Harbison, Tom. “‘A Serious Pedagogical Situation’: Diverging School Reforms priorities in Depression-Era Harlem” in Ansley Erickson and Ernest Morrell, Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (Columbia University Press, 2019)

Hartman, Andrew. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

Johnson, Lauri. “A generation of women activists: African American female educators in Harlem, 1930-1950”, The Journal of African American History 89(3), 226-227.

Taylor, Clarence. “To Be a Good American: The New York City Teachers Union and Race during the Second World War”, in Clarence Taylor (Ed.), Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

Credits

Exhibit by Rodrigo Mayorga, edited by Ansley Erickson.

Rodrigo Mayorga completed his PhD in Anthropology of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2020. He now teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.