The Future Is Yours Rather Than Mine
The School Committee is handed a bombshell announcement: the search committee has selected a non-Quaker to be head of the school. Three months into Burton Fowler’s new term, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the Quaker school plunges into the midst of war. Treading a path that tries to be both patriotic and pacifistic, GFS families welcome European refugee students, both Christian and Jewish, into their homes, and two Japanese-Americans from an internment camp become the first students of color. Shortages of fuel and food challenge the school’s operations.
The Search Committee would take almost two years (twenty-two months) before it produced a new head. Meanwhile Stanley Yarnall was still principal. His announced retirement seemed to give him new energy. In a flurry, he bombarded the School Committee, parents, alumni and faculty with special reports, suggestions, surveys, and recommendations. He was determined to set his own record of accomplishment clear, and to give his eventual successor information about not only the school’s philosophy, but its nitty-gritty details: governance, constituency, geographic reach, and so on.
It might have been easy for Yarnall to decline gently into this twilight, but he did not. His prose was more vigorous and his stance on issues more determined than they had been for several years. If, at times, he seemed defensive or too much protesting, who can blame him? Forty-three years he had given to the school and would give still more.
Three themes are evident in Yarnall’s writings from 1939 through 1940. The first was his evident pride in the faculty and staff he had assembled. He had kept them together during the hard times of Depression, and he and they had worked together a long time. In 1939, Yarnall hosted a party to celebrate his thirty-year teachers (Burgess and Domincovich) and twenty-five-year teachers: Margaret Alcorn (Primary music), Katherine Dobson (fifth grade), Irvin Poley, Alfred Smith, and Iro Trueblood (who would retire the next year).¹ Even the staff he hired served long tenures. Secretary and later bursar, Georgeanna Dean retired in 1943 after twenty-five years, and Gladys Barkman, whom Yarnall hired in 1924, served as executive secretary until 1963. Chief caretaker George Shelton (hired in 1921) and caretaker Benjamin Boxley (1925) worked for the school for thirty-nine and thirty-eight years respectively.
It was not just the senior faculty and staff who gave the school many years of service. Many of the younger teachers Yarnall hired would stay long past Master Stanley’s time. Joe Cadbury would retire in 1975; and PE teachers Vera Miller (hired in 1935) and Elizabeth Cadbury (1936) would both retire in 1966. High on a list of Stanley Yarnall’s contributions to GFS is the continuity and stability that came with such committed, long-term teachers and staff members.
A feature of Yarnall’s hiring practices was the special pleasure he got from appointing GFS alumni to the staff. He never failed to mention this in his annual reports to the Committee, and in 1940 he noted proudly that seven full- time teachers were school graduates.²
Perhaps because he had been stung by Thomas Shipley’s criticism, Yarnall repeatedly stressed how hard his teachers and staff worked. In 1940, he asked Jane Reilly, the Lower School secretary, to keep track of her activities for a single day, January 11, and presented it to the School Committee without comment.
“Arrived at school at 8:10a.m. Unlocked closets, Miss Hardy’s desk and regulated heat in the halls. Made out lunch tickets. Received and attended to calls, two, about sick teachers not coming in, and also several calls regarding children who were sick and would not be in.
A parent came in to explain about a child in first grade who had been absent with a sprained ankle and was not to go to gym nor to recess.
Rang the bells at 8:40 and 8:45. Miss Comfort [Anna Comfort, Kindergarten teacher 1918 to 1942] too called in regard to a parent’s changing the date and time of conference. Two teachers came in to see Miss Hardy.
Collected the mail from the front office and saw Mr. Yarnall about being released from a summons to do jury duty. A parent came in to inquire about fourth-grade recess and the best way to get an extra pair of ski pants to a child without disturbing the class. A parent called and wanted information about entering a child in school. Another parent called and asked to have a message delivered about her children going home in the afternoon.
It was necessary to quiet the children going to and from recess in the halls. Three children came in at various times during the recess period and asked to have minor cuts and skinned knees fixed up.
Mr. James [Alvin James, PE teacher] to ask for several copies to be done of a list of activities accomplished in boys’ gym work [it should be recalled that this was the era before Xerox machines]. Mr. Burgess came in with a note from Mrs. Maxwell [Genevieve Maxwell, third-grade teacher] which had to be delivered. Helped put up the cots for the second-grade rest period. Got waylaid by a salesman of office equipment whom the front office had asked to come over and see me. Miss Comfort called about another change in a conference date and time.
Out for lunch 1:00 o’clock until 1:30.
Back from lunch to deliver two or three messages to children about going home after school. Wrote two letters and took some dictation from Miss Hardy. Two parents came in and changed time and date of their conferences. Went over conference schedule and checked on the times and wrote teachers notes to explain the changes. Wrote Miss Hardy’s letter.
Miss Porter from Temple called and asked several questions, among them two that had to be relayed to two teachers and answers gotten from them so that I could give the answers to Miss Porter when she called again the following day. Spent the better part of the afternoon cleaning out files, putting away some reports and making up some blue books for the coming parent-teacher conferences. Fixed the homework slips for the absent children and typed and sealed the envelopes to send them home.
Locked up for the night at 4:30.”
Regrettably, Stanley Yarnall never wrote a memoir about his years as principal. He was not much of a writer, in fact, although he and Joe Price together wrote a short biography of William Penn, of which Yarnall was very proud. But in 1939 and 1940, Yarnall’s pen was busy setting his record down. He knew he would be remembered for his buildings. He wanted to be remembered for more than that. A second theme in his reports is the extraordinary growth in academic and intellectual standards in the school curriculum and the need to maintain a balance between progressive reforms and a classical education.
In April 20, 1939, “the largest gathering of Alumni in the history of the School” paid tribute to Yarnall. In his speech, Yarnall developed his theme. “During the depression years,” he said, “while many schools have gone backward, our policy has been one of expansion rather than curtailment. We have steadily enriched our program in administration, particularly in guidance of individual pupils in re-organizing and re-vitalizing our kindergarten, in adding more teachers in departmental fields, in providing extra courses in social studies, geology, paleontology, physical education, public speaking, dramatics and music…All this has not been done without a great deal of thought, planning and a considerable expenditure.” Once again, he singled out the faculty for praise. “The School has never had so strong or experienced a faculty.”
“What of the future?” he asked. “The future is yours rather than mine. Naturally you have come to think too much of the man who has been here continuously for a long time. But the man is only a small part of the great whole.” This gesture at modesty out of the way, Yarnall got down to business. He was still a builder at heart. “We must be prepared to reach out to most new educational movements, to provide for new physical needs, to face new problems realistically and to solve them by spiritual forces and practical idealism.” This will require money, some for bricks and mortar, but more for improvements in program. “Many fields are ripe for the harvest had we only greater resources… For instance, we are now on the threshold of marked developments in music and we can visualize a really significant department, well-housed and strongly based.”³
It is interesting that Yarnall should single out music in his remarks. He had never been enthusiastic about music in the school. In a December 1932 report to the School Committee he suggested that “the Quaker background of many of our families seems to be a barrier to individual musical efforts.” He had in mind instrumental music, because vocal music was growing quickly under the liberating influence of the Eight-Year Study. The Girls’ Glee Club had become co-educational, and in 1932 Margaret Eaton Shane, with assistance from Poley, staged the first student Gilbert and Sullivan production, Trial by Jury. It was followed in 1933 by Pinafore and so began a long-running G&S tradition. In 1938, Yarnall met with a group of parents who wanted music to be made a major subject in the curriculum. One of those parents, Barbara Rex, later wrote an article, “Music and the School Board,” for The Atlantic Monthly. She recalled the meeting: “We put our case. We talked statistics, schedules, money. I remember we talked our feelings, too — children and music…boys and girls playing together, singing together, carrying all through their lives this music you give them.”⁴ Yarnall raised two objections. Once again he cited “the absence of student musical ability” and worried, too, about finding “time to accomplish real results” on a scale that would suit those parents’ demands. Nevertheless the next year he hired a third music teacher, Joseph Baroni, an instrumental specialist, to join Shane and lower school music teacher Margaret Alcorn.
Barbara Rex’s Atlantic article appeared in October 1940 just when Yarnall was busiest setting his record down. In it she described how a group of determined and energetic parents could overcome the resistance of even the most conservative educators. Stung, Yarnall fired back. His rebuttal article, “Music in School,” appeared in The Friend in December 1940, and Yarnall had it reprinted in Pamphlet form and distributed widely.
Politely describing the Rex article as “delightful,” and Rex herself as “an enthusiastic and co-operative parent, who is making a valued contribution to our thinking,” he nonetheless made it clear he thought she was wrong. “It is fair to say that committee Friends and Principal were not as reluctant as imagined. The Quaker caution and canniness was based in this instance, not so much on lack of conviction as to the values involved, as on finding time, without displacing other essential elements in a rounded education and on meeting the requirements of the conservative and exacting colleges to which most of our graduates go…in retrospect the progress through slow and in a way incredible, seems in reality natural and inevitable, as should be characteristic of the procedure of Friends if we really follow true guidance.” It is a little wordy and defensive, but the record supports Yarnall. His report to the School Committee following the 1938 meeting records his sympathy with the music-minded parents and his hope that “the way would open to work out constructive plans.”
Yarnall listed the strengths of the music program in 1940. Three full-time teachers, “a highly trained intern,” a second, part-time instrumental teacher [Alfred Mann, from Curtis, whose $500 salary was paid for by the parents’ music committee], seven pianos “scattered through the buildings, not to mention those for practice and instruction in the two houses on Coulter Street across from our school,” practice rooms, the Junior Glee Club, the Senior Mixed Chorus, an instrumental club (“which some prefer to dignify with the name of school orchestra”). He placed great emphasis on the “Carnegie Music Set,” a collection of 1,000 “Victrola records” and a 1938 gift from the Carnegie Foundation, which “all of our boys and girls have access to…and use not only in music courses, but in all classrooms of the Lower School and in the history, art, and French classes of the High School.”
He credited these changes partly to parents’ interests, but mainly to the Eight-Year Study. “All these steps were possible only because of the greater flexibility of student schedules made possible by the Thirty-School Experimental Study… along with the more liberal attitude in the colleges toward the study of the arts in the schools…”
All this was true, although Yarnall did not mention that the music classes were music history and music Appreciation, not theory or composition, and met only once or twice a week. Nor did he mention that credit earned in music courses did not apply toward a diploma. His own attitude toward the changes remained ambiguous. He approved the growth of music as a major and integral part of the curriculum, but, in a nostalgic aside, he missed the simplicity of earlier days. “Forty-two years ago when I came to Germantown, Jane Raley was singing her gracious, happy way into the hearts and lives of her Kindergarten children, but without a piano. ‘Follow, follow, follow, follow me. I will follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, thee.’ How the simple lines echo in memory.”⁵
The 1939 Alumni Testimonial Dinner was a grand affair. Four hundred guests applauded when the president of the Alumni Association presented Master Stanley with a silver pitcher and tray. More gratifying to Yarnall must have been the remarks of the principal speaker that evening, Leonard Carmichael ’17, then the president of Tufts University. Carmichael caught exactly the sentiment Yarnall had expressed time and time again. “In his work in this School, Mr. Yarnall helped his associates on the faculty to accept the best in the new progressive education, but he did this in a way which never sacrificed the essential values of the older classical school attitude and curriculum…The result has been a wise middle course.” In 1939 and 1940, Yarnall was driving that point home to the School Committee. Don’t get carried away with progressive changes, he stated again and again. In describing the changes under the Eight-Year Study, he told the Committee “these advantages have been gained without the loss of true educational values, and without losing our soul.” His reports grew longer the closer retirement loomed, and he sprinkled them with comments from alumni and visitors who backed “a middle course.” He wrote letters to all the recent graduates asking for their reactions to the Eight-Year Study and shared the answers he received with the committee. Here is a typical one in 1939: “Two of our girls from Wellesley said we must not get any more progressive because while they were quite equal to their work and found it stimulating, some students from progressive schools were having great trouble.” Another example, from an unnamed 1936 graduate: “one thing I am thankful for is that we were given homework every night and lots of it.” He distributed to the Committee a letter from a state education official: “I have never been to a school that I liked better. It seems to me to be a conservatively progressive school which is so much better than being radically progressive.”
These snippets are so frequent and regular that one wonders if Yarnall had got wind of what the Search Committee was up to. Did he know they were focusing their attention on one of the most prominent progressive educators in the country?
Yarnall had a third theme he emphasized in 1939 and 1940: the necessity for GFS to remain, emphatically, a Friends school. This was not a new theme, of course; Stanley Yarnall had always been a serious and weighty Friend. In this history he has been portrayed only as an educator, but he was also active in larger Quaker affairs. He had been a founding member of the Friends Council on Education and for many years served as a clerk of the Yearly Meeting’s Peace Committee. He had always viewed the school as an essential part of Quaker witness. But there was an additional urgency in his reports and speeches in these years stressing the centrality of spiritual values and religious experience in school life. Most of his testimonial dinner speech, for example, was devoted to this theme, and he ended it with a favorite scriptural citation: “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”
Evidently Yarnall was worried that the school might lose its Quaker character sometime in the future. In his monthly reports to the Committee Yarnall provides hints of such concern. In February 1940 he presented the Committee with the results of a survey he had done of student religious affiliations. It is a revealing document.⁶ Most striking from a present perspective is that only two of the 563 students who responded had no church affiliation. They were overwhelmingly Protestant (there were twenty-nine Jewish students and four Catholics), and, what may have worried Yarnall, there were twice as many Episcopalians (181) as Quakers (90). Presbyterians, too, outnumbered Friends (113). Quaker enrollment was only 6.47% of the student body.
At the same February meeting, Yarnall presented a second survey listing the residential areas students came from. It demonstrated, as the Committee noted in its annual report to the Monthly Meeting, “we are fast becoming a city school, drawing its client from a widely scattered suburban community.”⁷ In short, the school’s population base in Germantown, and especially in Germantown Meeting, was changing.
Yarnall had a second worry that he expressed more directly. His senior faculty were largely Friends. As they retired, replacing them with young Friends was proving difficult. In 1940, for example, four teachers retired and one died. All were Quakers, and Yarnall was able to hire only three Friends to replace them.⁸
As his long tenure drew finally to a close, Master Stanley bombarded the Committee with suggestions and advice.
- They should plan for a new capital campaign.
- The school should increase its contribution to the library.
- Plans should be made to start a bus service.
- The school should purchase the property on the corner of Germantown and Coulter now available “at a low price.” [The property consisted of Staton’s store, a drugstore, and the Coulter Inn; it is now the site of the Sharpless Building]
It was an impressive performance from an aging man who, a few years earlier, had seemed tired and drained. Yarnall’s energy and vision revived near the end of his principalship, and the school would continue to draw on him in future years.
On November 25, 1940, at a special meeting of the School Committee, the Search Committee gave its recommendation and report. It was a bombshell.
The Search Committee consisted of eight members of the School Committee, so, of course, all were Friends. There were no representatives from alumni, parents, or the faculty.⁹ In a progress report sent to the School Committee in February, search chair Margaret Cary had written: “We are unanimous that any person filling this position must be first and foremost a convinced member of the Society of Friends and that the reason for the existence of the school is because it is a Friends’ School rather than as an excellent private school.” Now the Search Committee announced its choice: Burton P. Fowler — a Presbyterian.
There must have been many astonished faces in the Committee room that evening. There must have been many who were disappointed and probably upset that, for the first time in its history, GFS would have a principal who was not a Quaker. “Must have been” rather than “was” because the official minute of the meeting was, as usual, brief and veiled. It read, “Although many expressed sincere regret that there was not at present a member of the Society of Friends who could satisfactorily fill the position, the Committee, with but one exception, approved the recommendation and requested that he be invited to take the position at the beginning of the school year 1941–1942.” He was offered a three-year contract and a salary of $12,000.
The controversy, if such it was, surrounding Fowler’s appointment had a happy result for the historian. The Committee asked Margaret Cary to prepare two reports explaining her Search Committee’s recommendation. The first would be kept private, for the eyes of the School Committee only; the second, and less candid, report would be published. Together the Cary reports give insight into the search process and serve as an introduction of Burton Fowler.¹⁰ In her published report, Cary described how the search team did its homework. They surveyed the needs of the school from top to bottom (“its problems, its opportunities, its future,” particularly the school’s “shifting population centre”), consulted closely with Yarnall, Hardy, and Burgess (Poley, of course, was a candidate), and interviewed twenty-three faculty and all members of the School Committee. “We took careful notes at all these interviews which often lasted whole afternoons.” Evidently no parents or alumni were interviewed. The committee then developed a profile of the man they wanted (and only men were considered). He should be a Quaker, a “first class educator, a man recognized as a leader in Secondary Education,” someone the Committee could work with (“a man fully and deeply convinced of the value of decisions reached after careful group thinking”). Most of all, “he must be a man’s man.”
Privately Cary told the School Committee that they had found three men who fit the profile, two of them Quakers. The first was president of a junior college, well regarded in educational circles, and very attractive. But investigation discovered he was not an active Friend. That reason, even more than his lack of secondary school experience, disqualified him. The second finalist, described as a “distinctly coming person,” was Henry Scattergood. Interviewed sixty years later, Scattergood was astonished. He had no memory of even being interviewed for the job (although he was) and could scarcely credit that he had been a finalist in the search. He had just completed his M.A. at Harvard and was teaching at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts when the committee approached him. “He made a strong and virile appeal to the Committee,” Cary wrote, but they finally decided he was a shade too young. It would appear, however, that the committee had decided on Fowler’s successor before they had decided on Fowler.
The Search Committee focused on Fowler early in the process. He was fifty- three years old and the headmaster of the Tower Hill School in Wilmington. Several committee members had met him during the Eight-Year Study when, as president of the Progressive Education Association, he had visited, spoken, and consulted at GFS on several occasions. Several faculty members knew him as well. Burgess and Domincovich, for example, had both served on P.E.A. committees with him. Fowler had another connection to the school. Yarnall had just hired Fowler’s daughter, Mary, as assistant teacher in the four-year- old Kindergarten.
It is not hard to see why Fowler interested the committee. He was a distinguished and experienced administrator. Born in South Butler, New York in 1887, he had earned degrees from Syracuse (A.B.) and Columbia (A.M.) and had been awarded an honorary doctorate by Syracuse in 1929. He had been principal of several public high schools in New York and had moved to Tower Hill in 1923 after five years as principal of Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio. Except for the fact he was not a Quaker, he fit the Search Committee profile perfectly. He had a national reputation. In addition to two terms as P.E.A. president, he was an official of the National Council on Education, a frequent speaker at national and international conferences (“in Locarno, Geneva, and Elsinor” Cary noted), and was a trustee of Sarah Lawrence College. He was also, Cary assured the Committee, “a deeply religious man of the highest ideals,” an elder in his church allied “with the finest and most progressive thinking it stands for”, and “deeply sympathetic” to Friends. The Search Committee had evidently solicited a letter on the point from Fowler, and Cary excerpted it in both the public and private reports. Fowler wrote: “The ideals of Friends attract me greatly. It seems to me that during the critical years ahead they give America and the individual citizen something to steer by… The chief challenge to living now is for me the chance to work with congenial spirits in the task of creating a better democracy. And I know of no group that cares so much for this as Friends.” He was even reading several books on Quakerism, Cary reported privately. Finally, the published report addressed the questions directly and tried to shift responsibility for keeping up the Quaker character of GFS. “Our determination to have the school remain a truly Quaker School is even more sincere than when we started our long quest over two years ago. That we are appointing a non-Quaker makes all the more clear to us as it must to you that by your own sincerely Friendly way of life we must help and uphold Burton Fowler’s hands. We are convinced that if the School becomes less of a Friends’ School than it is today, it will be so because those of us on the Committee and Faculty and among our parents and students have failed to demonstrate this way of life to Burton Fowler.”
Fowler was well-aware of the controversy. In a revealing letter to School Committee clerk Thomas Shipley he confessed to only one misgiving about accepting the job: “The fact that I am not a Friend.” He told Shipley he was concerned by “the possible and wholly understandable lack of faith of your community in me as an outsider.”¹¹
If it is easy to see Fowler’s attraction to the Search Committee (gaining a man of his reputation would be a coup.) It is less easy to understand why the job attracted Fowler. Tower Hill was a prominent, respected, and well-endowed school with a progressive reputation. DuPont money had helped build a beautiful campus on the edge of Wilmington. Why leave such a place to come to a crowded block in Germantown to a school with no endowment at all? Cary hinted in the private report that he felt frustrated at Tower Hill. “He believes that if he came to GFS he would have greater opportunity to develop in parents and pupils a carryover of his ideals than he can in the wealthier and more homogeneous group at Tower Hill.”
After he arrived at GFS, Fowler said all the expected things to parent groups and alumni about his attraction to the school: the Quaker tradition, supportive parents, devoted alum, etc. To Thomas Shipley he had been a little more candid. He wanted to head an urban school of moderate size, with a good reputation for excellence and stability, and he wanted to make that school a force for social change. Irving Poley later recalled him as a man of tremendous energy always bursting with plans and ideas, “maybe four or five a month” of which perhaps two would get done.¹² Fowler did not outline his ideas specifically in the Shipley letter, writing only vaguely about “service” and “democracy,” but it is clear he had an agenda in mind and that the Search Committee knew it. Events would prove that at least one item on the agenda was racial integration.
Fowler also made it clear to the Committee clerk that he was of independent mind. After assuring Shipley that he would not embarrass the Committee and would “faithfully support” Quaker beliefs, he pointedly noted that he did not share them all. He specifically cited his conviction about war as an example of disagreement. He concluded his letter by describing his management style: “While my whole policy of school management is one of democratic-sharing based on full discussion with all concerned, the Committee, the Faculty, the parents, and the students, nevertheless it would be my prerogative to make final decisions regarding administrative problems, and that any such problems that may be brought to the attention of individual members of the Committee should first be referred to me before any plan of action is discussed.” If Stanley Yarnall ever read this letter, and he almost certainly did, he would at least have agreed with this last statement.
The School opened with its new principal on September 17, 1941. Eighty- two days later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II.
The storm clouds had been building for years, of course, and GFS people, like all Americans, had looked on anxiously as the world went mad. Students wrote worried essays in The Pastorian about events in China; Lucinda Iliff and Joseph Price added the study of contemporary affairs to their history courses. The parochialism, even innocence that characterized the school on the eve of earlier wars was notably absent in the late thirties.
More important, the school had taken action. In March 1939, the school agreed to a request from international refugee agencies to take in Jewish children fleeing the Nazi Holocaust. The first to arrive was “a boy named Weigl from Vienna” [John W. Weigl ’43] and by the end of the year there were four refugee children in the school. Each year thereafter more refugee children arrived. In October 1940, Yarnall reported that the numbers had grown to fifteen. They came from England, Scotland, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Sweden, and Austria. Many were Quakers, but Christian and non- Christian faiths were represented. Some had family in the United States and means to pay tuition fees, but half did not. GFS families opened their homes to them, and Yarnall looked for scholarships to help to pay for the others. For most, the school absorbed the expenses. Marjorie Hardy reported on the progress of one Kindergartener: “The latest newcomer is a French-speaking four-year-old boy who is rapidly learning English, and, we hope, forgetting the eight weeks of fleeing with his parents from France through Norway; often hiding in ditches to avoid bombs as they fled.”
Another action the school took before Pearl Harbor was to join with other Germantown institutions to form a civil defense team. Fire drills were stepped up and evacuation plans perfected. The Parents’ Auxiliary sponsored classes in first aid and home nursing for students, parents, and faculty. By the time Burton Fowler arrived at Coulter Street, the school had scheduled frequent air-raid drills, created a student Air Raid Precaution Committee, and stored buckets of sand at every level and corner of the school for emergency use.
The contrast with the GFS reaction to World War I is striking. There were no disputes about displaying the flag or buying war bonds, fewer debates about how displays of patriotism compromised Friends’ principles. The school engaged the issues of World War II forthrightly. In February 1942, the school issued a statement for parents and alumni titled “Germantown Friends School and the Present National Emergency,” written by Committee member Edward Evans and signed by Fowler. It reiterated the Quaker commitment against war and pledged anew the Friends belief in nonviolence. But it also recognized the Quaker commitment to help those victimized by war and pledged the school would do its part in helping the afflicted. Evans and Fowler promised GFS would give its full energy supporting non-violent actions to defeat militarism and fascism.
After Pearl Harbor, the school turned to non-violent service with fervor.
Students volunteered in local hospitals (“the only way you can wear a uniform,” said The Pastorian), raised money for relief agencies, planted a Victory Garden, wrote letters to soldiers overseas, hosted alumni in the service when they returned to school for a visit (“What about it girls? Didn’t Jimmy Kidder look too, too divine in those navy blues,” The Pastorian, 1943), and worried about their futures. The draft took boys into the service at age eighteen. The school set up a special committee to advise students on the technicalities of the draft and conscientious objection. Some male students took summer school courses in order to graduate early. A few were eager to fight. In 1945, for example, six senior boys graduated early to join the war.
Most of the faculty were too old to enlist, and most were, in any case, conscientious objectors, but four did. The three men who enlisted or were drafted were Alfred Mann (music teacher), Alvin James (PE), and William Goodell, the forge-builder. Susan Erwin, a French teacher, joined in the WAVES (“This isn’t meant to be a fashion revue, but who could help but notice how studding Lieutenant Erwin looked in her uniform; that silver star looked awfully nice, too,” The Pastorian, 1943).
For Burton Fowler, the war presented his first challenge, and he seems to have relished it. He was faced with a dozen problems every day. There were fuel shortages, gasoline and tire shortages (“over 600 of us manage to ride, walk, or pedal our way every morning”), food shortages, and salary freezes. The alarms didn’t work; the school buildings needed repair; and, always, there was a conflict between children and adults that is at the heart of any school any day.
Most of his energies were spent on day-to-day activities (the coal bins outside Mr. Breininger’s room overflowed today), but sometimes he reflected more generally on the war’s effect. In January 1943 he wrote:
Not school as usual, but school at its best has been our announced policy for the year. The faculty and students together are undertaking to find out in this world-shattering year of 1942 what that means.
General Summerall recently announced that ‘Every classroom should become a citadel — that all non-war objectives should be stripped from education.” I believe this is a mistake… is education to be one of the most tragic casualties of this war? If this war is to be worth winning, we must have at its conclusion more than a generation trained to fight.¹³
The Victory Garden was a favorite Fowler topic. In the backyard at historic Grumblethorpe, younger GFS students planted and harvested spinach, corn, beans, beets, turnips, onions, and potatoes for the school lunchroom. “Since rationing has cut sharply into our usual food supplies, possibly as much as one- third, the school garden is no mere gesture but an essential industry.”¹⁴
Fowler talked a lot about “democracy” in schools in his first years at GFS, and at first no one really knew what he meant by that. They got a hint in the following:
- February 1944. The Student Council says that it wants to put a plaque in the front hall honoring war veterans.
- March 1944. The School Committee objects to the plaque. It will “conflict with the pacifist attitude of a Quaker school.
Fowler convened a meeting of School Committee members and students to work out a compromise. Edward Evans, for the Committee, and student leader John Fernberger finally hashed out a compromise. There would be no plaque. Instead, students would send a greeting to all GFS veterans of the War, and an inscribed copy of that letter would be displayed in the Front Hall.
This was a typical GFS tempest. But it is revealing of Burton Fowler’s style of leadership, as well as a more accommodating position by Quakers. Dialogue was established, grounds for compromise laid clear, and resolution managed peacefully and civilly. It would not always be possible to achieve resolution so neatly.
Fowler was a complicated man. He was an educational radical and a Republican. He wore double-breasted suits, smoked cigars, and looked and acted like the embodiment of the establishment, but he had a genuinely progressive vision of education. He wanted to give students the power to shape their own lives, but he also demanded that they take responsibility for their actions.
He was always a presence in the front hall, his double-breasted suit usually open and flapping, button–holing students and faculty alike to discuss something urgent. “He was a hands-on headmaster,” Betty Cary recalled. He was not a pacifist, and he did not oppose war on principle, but he took a careful stance on World War II, as fitted the non-Quaker head of a Friends School. Still it brought him into a conflict with his Quaker overseers.
In the spring of 1942, for example, Fowler permitted a Navy Lt. Commander to address the student body about the advantages of college officer training courses (NROTC). The School Committee objected but, after consideration, a compromise was worked out. The Committee agreed “that both sides of the question of pacifism should be put before them” [i.e. students], and that the Society of Friends “should not appear to be propagandizing for pacifism.” The Committee even stated as policy that “attendance at any talks on pacifism should be purely voluntary…”
Fowler did not take advantage of that concession. Not long after Lt. Commander Hartenstein’s speech, Steve Cary ’33 was invited to speak to students about his experience in Civilian Public Service camps. Thereafter, and throughout the war, students heard a balanced set of speakers — although, it must be said, the balance favored the Quaker view.
GFS continued to welcome refugees from the war. In 1942, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 created a new set of refugees: Japanese Americans who, solely because of their ethnic origin, were judged to be dangerous to American security. They were summarily sent to relocation centers, which critics labeled concentration camps.
Friends were outraged and worked hard to reverse the government policy. Unable to overcome the racism, paranoia, and opportunism that created the policy, Quakers took advantage of a provision in the law that allowed respectable people outside the declared “Pacific war zone” to sponsor the release of some Japanese Americans interned in the camps.
In December 1943, GFS accepted and gave full scholarships to two Japanese American teenagers from the Relocation Center in Jerome, Arkansas. They entered the eleventh grade. It was an historic moment. John Masai and Richard Hagashi were the first students in GFS history who were not white. They both lived with GFS families, Masai with the Willets and Hagashi with the Henry Evans family, and took regular courses in the school. Like several of their new classmates, Masai and Higashi were on special accelerated programs designed to allow them to graduate early and enter national service.¹⁵ Reflecting on their experiences for their Commencement Papers, Higashi wrote “Relocation Camp” and Masai wrote “Japanese- Americans Adrift.” As GFS’s first graduates of color, they should be counted among the school’s significant alumni.¹⁶ Higashi, in particular, left a record at the school. Fowler declared him the school’s “best violinist,” and The Pastorian blamed the baseball team’s mediocre record in 1944 on the fact that “Dick” had left school to join the military. Their presence and success added considerably to a growing demand that the school drop the color line in its admissions.
Germantown Friends had become uncomfortable with racial exclusiveness even before the war. While the school had no stated policy excluding people of color, “everyone understood” that was the policy. On rare occasions, a student would write an article for The Pastorian mildly questioning the school’s position, but there had been no serious challenge to the color line until 1938. That year an African American girl (perfectly qualified otherwise, the Admissions Committee reported) applied and was turned down. The School Committee anguished long and hard over the decision. The girl was qualified; the Society of Friends professed belief in racial equity; and Friends had always worked for social tolerance — all that was admitted by the Admissions Committee (all Friends from the School Committee). But, the admissions Friends said, we have an obligation to stewardship. We cannot in conscience take a stand that might jeopardize the school. The admission of African Americans could, and we think will, lead to withdrawals and a drop in applicants. We cannot risk the future of the school, they concluded, until “the way opens” for greater racial understanding.
It was not a brave moment for the School Committee. They accepted the rejection. They had held the school together through the Depression and were cautious about any action that might jeopardize their labor. War was looming, too, and who know what that might portend? But there was real unease in confirming the color line.
Margaret Cary asked to have a letter entered into the minutes, such was her anguish. While reluctantly agreeing with the decision (“We have no moral right to jeopardize the financial and therefore the educational set up of the school”), she was clearly tortured. “If we are Quakers, we must, however, believe that ‘There is that of God in every man.’ This is a bed-rock Quaker principle. I believe we can neither honestly nor logically discriminate against any race or color. As members of the Meeting…[and faculty, staff, and student body]… I believe that we must slowly educate ourselves so that we may reach a place where we will be willing to embark on an educational experiment in racial understanding…”
Cary, it should be recalled, was clerk of the Search Committee that recommended Burton Fowler, and Fowler was deeply committed to racial integration. John Masai and Richard Higashi were a great help to Fowler and others who wanted to erase the color line.
Finally, in 1947 the school announced in the Alumni Record that there would be a “broadening” of the school’s “admissions policy, to admit a few highly qualified applicants of minority groups not now represented” and noted that GFS would be the seventh private school in Philadelphia to do so. One Black student, a four-year-old boy, was admitted to the four-year Kindergarten that fall. At least one Black student was admitted each year in subsequent classes. In 1949, the first Black student teacher worked at GFS.
“I’m going to graduate today. Funny, it doesn’t seem like twelve years, it’s all gone so terribly quickly, all the little things that made up my school life,” Connie Wiltberger ’42 wrote in the May 1942 issue of The Pastorian. Her essay is a reminder to us that the shadow of war did not eclipse all the joy of school life. There was still laughter and fun at GFS during the war years. Students larked about, joked, made fun of teachers, and were silly. She made only one oblique reference to the war and that was about volunteer nursing (“in the unbecoming pink outfits from Jones’s for $2.25). Otherwise her delightful essay recalls the happy inconsequential of school life.
- Like always having to dash to get in before the first bell rang in the morning.
- And standing in line eons of time for one hamburger with relish. The lunchroom was always a center of activity, all the different grades from gangly children in stiff pigtails to lanky seniors in glamour bobs.
- Cliques of us draped artistically over the front steps, soaking up the sun and conjugating Latin verbs or reciting French idioms.
- Our class meetings where everybody had an opinion and voiced it at length.
- The bedlam that was the front hall table and daily despair of the office force.
Connie Wiltberger’s reminiscence should strike true for generations of alumni. The names would change as years passed, but not the sentiments. “Oh, the fun in all the classes. Boners that people have pulled, amusing things that teachers have said. Mr. Price philosophizing on life and conditions… Mr. Domi reading the drunken porter scene in Macbeth or ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ Class discussions in English about current affairs always ending in a quarrel.”
Students and faculty were enlisting in the armed forces or choosing non- violent service; the school was on short rations for food, coal, and gasoline; and news from the war front was very bad in May of 1942, but Wiltberger stressed the normal, the ordinary. Life at GFS would go on day by day until “Commencement” (the title of her essay). “The boys in white flannels and blue coats, the girls in misty white armfuls of flowers. Two by two, up the aisle flanked by familiar faces and suppressed murmuring. We’re graduating — the class of ’42.”¹⁷
For teachers, the creation of the normal and ordinary school life was more difficult. The war distracted students from their work, excited their emotions, and threatened to disrupt the whole tenor of life in school dedicated to peace and non-violence. The faculty, like Fowler and the School Committee, had to wrestle hard with the conflict between Quaker principles and the widely held belief that World War II was a good war.
The experience of a Lower School teacher serves as a good example of faculty efforts to contain the war’s impact in the classroom. Caroline Narvel was a second-grade teacher at GFS during the war, and in December 1943 wrote a report to Marjorie Hardy about her class.¹⁸ “At the beginning of the term,” she reported the eighteen second graders “were so enthusiastic over war planes that the room was literally swamped with them. Pictures were brought in and all our conversations centered about planes seen this summer guarding the coastline or about relatives flying in war zones. It seemed that our entire year was to be spent in imagining a serial combat.”
Determined to resist this emphasis on militarism but recognizing that “it is impossible to obliterate any intense interest just by ignoring the situation,” Narvel despaired. “The problem is to turn the enthusiasm into worthwhile channels,” she wrote. The solution she devised was to turn students’ interests to aviation in general. She read a book (Timmy Rides the China Clipper) about a young boy flying alone to Hong Kong. “We all envied Timmy and wished we, too, could take such a trip,” she reported. A class project was launched. Maps were drawn, books about airplanes were consulted in the library, TWA air schedules were studied, and a time and route planned. “For days no one had mentioned the war or combat planes. We were too involved in the intricacies of aerial travel.”
Teachers writing reports almost always belabor the obvious, and Narvel was no exception. She listed at great lengths the skills learned by students from this study: research skills, geography, money management, and arithmetic involving miles and time zones. She concluded, “Since ours is a Democracy, the greatest value of all is that we are learning to plan and work happily together towards a common goal.”
A contemporary educator might question the wisdom of much of this. Should students be diverted from a study of a serious, and deeply felt, problem to one less troublesome? Is Narvel’s notion of democracy correct? But such questions are irrelevant here. Narvel’s experience illustrates well the way GFS tried to deal with war in the classroom, and of course, she was teaching second graders.
As the war dragged on, students intensified their community services. By 1944, thirty girls were serving in area hospitals; other students were raising money for the Community Chest and the Red Cross, collecting toys for the Friends Neighborhood Guild, or working at the Germantown Settlement- sponsored Tot Lot. Friends’ weekend work camps, helping the poor and unfortunate in Philadelphia neighborhoods, were strongly attended. So busy were students that, in 1943, the infamous Information Tests were omitted for the first time since 1907. No room in the schedule for the Information Test? It was incredible! Not even the cheap, paperback version of the annual Blue and White yearbook that year could be better witness of the war’s impact.
In 1944, the tide of war shifted. Allied forces eventually crushed Nazi Germany, and Burton Fowler faced a dilemma. For his civic contributions, he had been invited to participate in a VE day celebration at City Hall. Would the School Committee permit it? It would indeed.
The decision was an endorsement of Fowler’s leadership during the war. He had directed a school which professed pacifism and gave full voice to its witness, but at the same time did not preach it exclusively. Fowler’s leadership produced a school that worked hard at providing public service opportunities for its students. The tone of the school seemed, to the School Committee, consistent with the broad beliefs of peace and brotherhood that underlay a faithful Friends School. The non-Friend who had replaced the legendary Master Stanley had succeeded masterfully in just three years.
Master Stanley had not yet disappeared and still had a role to play. “The future is yours, rather than mine” he had said, and he meant it. He never interfered or publicly voiced disagreement with Burton Fowler, although he must have disagreed with many of Fowler’s actions. He was a frequent, but benign, presence at the school after his retirement. Walking slowly to Fifth Day Meeting, his cane tapping along the walk, and then sitting on the facing bench in repose, a dignified, grave Quaker presence — he probably terrified the next generation of GFS students.
Yarnall had proposed in his last list of suggestions that the school launch a new, big, important capital campaign. In 1944, the school acted on his suggestion.
It was an extraordinary decision. The war was not over; there had been no survey of the school’s potential resources; and there was not even a plan in place to show where the school would use the money. But after VE Day, GFS, along with the rest of the nation, took new hope and could look to the future.
Edward Evans was now clerk of the Advisory Committee, and in October 1944 he sent to the Monthly Meeting a proposal to raise $100,000 to $150,000 for expansion of the school. The proposal was short on details, and the Meeting reacted coolly, but provisionally approved. They wanted no new buildings on their grounds, however.
The campaign would coincide with the Centennial Celebration described earlier. That weekend celebration would prove to be a great success, but the capital campaign was not. On the day alumni, faculty, and students mingled in celebration of one hundred years of school history and to view the tableaux in the gym, visit classes, hear music and watch spectacles, less than half the proposed campaign goal had been reached. And the weekend celebration did not prompt many of the guests to open their wallets.
There were at least three reasons. First, and most important, GFS had never had great benefactors. There had been Alfred Cope long ago, but no one since. Irvin Poley was generous, but his fortune was modest, and there was no one else in the alumni, school, or Meeting capable or willing to give the large sums that give a capital campaign impetus. It is a continuing refrain through the school history. GFS has done much with very little financial backing.
The other problems were more specific. This fund drive had no focus. As Evans framed it, the money raised was for “expansion and endowment” and givers were not moved by such vague goals. Then there was the problem of leadership. Dale Purves ’19 was the campaign director, but his business interest took him away frequently, and he had to resign his directorship.
Fowler pointed the way to a solution. The Square Club, across Coulter Street, was once again for sale. During the war it had been used by employees of the Bendix Corporation as a recreation center, an improvement, from the School’s viewpoint from its earlier incarnations as German social club and Democratic Party headquarters. There was a four-lane bowling alley in the basement and a basketball court on the second floor. The building could be purchased for about $30,000, and its purchase became the target of the campaign. Now styled the “Alumni Building” (because alumni contributed most to the Centennial campaign), it is still an integral part of the campus and home to the history and Classics departments.
The question then was who should direct the final drive aimed at acquiring the Alumni Building?
The school asked Stanley Yarnall, and he agreed. It was a beautiful, even symmetrical choice. It would round out Yarnall’s long service to the school. Master Stanley, the builder, would close his association with GFS on yet another building. He would complete a capital drive he had proposed in his last years, and he would help acquire a building he had coveted and recommended for purchase.
Stanley Yarnall had passed the torch to new leaders with grace and dignity. Worn down though he was, he must have felt regret when he retired. He had created a fine school, and it was “his school.” His successor was brilliant, popular, acclaimed — but, when disaster threatened, it was Master Stanley the school turned to for help. For Stanley Yarnall, the last fund drive must have been eminently satisfying.
Next: Henry Scattergood: A Son of the Meeting
Previously: Irvin Corson Poley: Master Teacher
Notes
1 For some reason, Emma Roberts (1903–1940) was left out.
2 Yarnall did not list the names of the seven alumni, but he must have meant Poley ’08; Margaret Shane ’18; Lucinda Iliff ’20; Elizabeth Cadbury ’24; Elizabeth Stetson ’25; William Goodell ’26; and Allen Stokes ’32; who replaced Iro Trueblood in 1940.
3 Alumni Record, June 1, 1939, pp. 1 and 4.
4 The Atlantic Monthly, October 1940.
5 The Friend, Twelfth Month, 12, 1940.
6 The survey’s figures, as recorded in the Committee minutes, are: Episcopal 181, Presbyterian 113, Friends 90, Lutheran 35, Jewish 29, Unitarian 25, Methodist 23, Baptist 6, Roman Catholic, Congregational 3, Christian Science 2, Reformed 2, Protestant 2, New Thought 1, Universalist 1, none 1, not given 1.
7 The survey of residence: Queen Lane to Mt. Airy Avenue, 334; Mt. Airy Avenue through Chestnut Hill, 113; North of Chestnut Hill, 39; West of Germantown and Chestnut Hill, 16; East of Germantown and Chestnut Hill, 42; Queen Lane to Wayne Junction 22; Olney and Frankford 5; “Town”, 12. Total: 583. School Committee Minutes, February 1, 1940. The quotation is from Annual Report to Monthly Meeting, October 4, 1940, filed with Monthly Meeting minutes in Haverford College Quaker Collection.
8 The retirees (and the year they started at GFS) were Emma Roberts (1903), Iro Trueblood (1914), Esther Arnold (1918) and Evelyn Wood (1922). Primary teacher Anne Maxfield died in 1940. The Friends appointed to replace them were Allen Stokes (1940–1945), Kathryn Kerlin (1940–1943), and Mary Ritter (1940–1942).
9 Search Committee members included the weightiest Friends on the School Committee: Margaret M. Cary, long clerk of the Advisory Committee, was clerk. The others were School Committee clerk Thomas E. Shipley; Bernard Waring, treasurer and clerk of the Finance Committee; Morris E. Leeds, former clerk of the Committee; Hadassah M. Leeds; Gertrude M. Woodruff; William E. Cadbury; and John A. Silver, who would replace Waring as treasurer in 1941. Alumni Record, April 15, 1942, p.1.
10 Margaret Cary’s report to the School Committee is filed with the Committee minutes, between pages 146 and 147 in volume N 4 19.3 in the Haverford Quaker Collection. The published version, which is substantially different, appeared in the Alumni Record, April 15, 1941.
11 The letter is dated December 23, 1940. In School Committee minutes.
12 Poley’s remarks are quoted by Eric Johnson the GFS Bulletin, Spring 1972, GFS Archives.
13 Alumni Record, January 26, 1943, GFS Archives.
14 Alumni Record, April 15, 1943, GFS Archives.
15 In the class of 1945’s graduation photo, Higashi, Masai, and eight of their classmates are represented by individual portrait photographs attached across the top of the traditional photo of the graduating class on the front steps of Main Building.
16 In the Class of 1945’s June Commencement program, it is noted that Higashi (along with several others) received his diploma in January, and both he and Masai are listed in the class roll. Interestingly, neither Higashi nor Masai are listed in GFS alumni directories published in 1982, 1989, 1994, and 2000; they appear as alumni in 2012 edition, however.
17 The Pastorian, May 1942 and Alumni Record, April 15, 1943.
18 Narvel was on the staff only three years, from 1942 to 1945.
