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WWII: D&E at War
Text by Dr. David Turner, Professor of History, Davis & Elkins College
For Davis & Elkins, the 1930s were a time of steady, if not robust, enrollments. It remained essentially what it had been at the beginning -- a small, quiet, tree-lined college in the hills of West Virginia. The campus celebrated its football and basketball teams and enjoyed the whimsy of college life. Every May it celebrated a festival which chose a king and queen and innocently ended the spring term. Like most of America, it basked in remoteness, untouched by the strains of the world.
December 7, 1941, changed all that. The Japanese attack demonstrated that America was not entirely protected by two oceans. Davis & Elkins, as well, saw a transformation, going from predominantly a liberal arts mission to developing a training facility for Army Air Corps personnel. It already had a small civil pilot flying training center in 1939 and became a center for the Civil Aeronautics Administration Training Service, later home to the 334th Army Air Force College Training Detachment. Before its closing in 1944, some 772 pilots graduated from the Davis & Elkins facility, which was ranked "excellent" by those preparing members of the United States air defense.
Suddenly, the military became the symbol of Davis & Elkins -- both its present and its future. Led by President Raymond Purdum, the college identified with the war effort. Its fortieth year celebration, "Forward at Forty," stressed "Christian education in a world at war." This represented not mere sloganeering but a genuine commitment to building a new college based less in the traditional liberal arts than in the hard sciences. Most pictures promoting the college rarely displayed an English or History professor, but instead, either a military instructor or a scientist eagerly teaching students in a laboratory.
Before World War II, D&E was content to project a more circumspect look to the world. President Harry Whetsell, in his farewell address, rarely referenced religion except in the most general terms. In the war years it was a muscular and activist version on display. Purdum was not shy in evoking Christianity and linking it to the war effort.
Georgianne Stary, a refugee from Czechoslovakia, came to D&E eager to blend Christianity with politics. Having arrived in September 1944, she shared with her listeners at chapel her views on what the conflict was all about. She flatly stated that "Nazism is not an idea, it is a religion." The cure for this secular faith was a cleansing which was only possible through "Christian education." Stary, like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, envisioned the new world emerging as a more international version of Protestantism. Stating that "the new education for all countries must be based on good Christian leadership," Stary also advocated a world where "there must be a common language in which everyone will learn to think," thus freeing it from nationalist manipulation."
Her influence was widely felt -- in 1946 she would play a leading role in the acquiring of accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges. And she was not alone in seeing the war as a means to crystallize intellectual views toward a Christian universalism. A colleague, Religion Professor Frank B. Lewis, went so far as advocating a "Christian College War Training Service." As well, he touted a "new measure of strength -- mental, physical and spiritual." This type of activist Protestantism reflected a liberal version of Evangelicalism. Not for nothing that after the full horrors of the war became known that many took solace in religion. In the 1950s, church attendance soared.
After the war, D&E flourished with the return of veterans eager to take advantage of the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 or the "GI Bill of Rights." Trying not to make the mistake of simply offering a "bonus" (as was the case with World War I), Congress tried to offer veterans a life-changing experience, such as owning a home or getting a crack at higher education. Suddenly a generation that had all but ruled out college in the early 1940s was now eligible to attend at the pleasure of the federal government.
Unlike previous D&E students, they were not enamored of May poles or football. They were all business. Still donning uniforms, this "GI generation" transformed academia. Many within the academic community were horrified at the prospect of over-aged and demanding students champing at the bit to return to the outside as soon as possible. "Colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles," sniffed University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, "and veterans...will find themselves educational hobos." But as historian David Kennedy observed, they "were highly motivated students" who gave a boost to institutions of higher learning.
D&E and Purdum celebrated rather than scoffed at the prospect of these returning veterans. Having seen so many come into Elkins during the war, Davis & Elkins was more than prepared to meet the challenge. From 98 students in 1944-1945 and 303 in 1945-1946, D&E saw a jump to 744 in 1946-1947. Of this total, 447 were veterans. In 1947-1948, 941 attended the college, including 878 full-time. Impatient veterans swelled the ranks of summer school, reaching a high of 501.
D&E's reputation as an "excellent" trainer of air crews helped it land an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps in July 1951. D&E also received full accreditation from the North Central Association in 1946. The war years transformed the "college on the hill" to a first-rate liberal arts college. As much in American life, things would never to be the same after the war -- one that inadvertently launched a greater social revolution than was envisioned by the New Deal.
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May Queen, Gloria Payne
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