The Impact of War Upon UW-Madison
Feb. 5, 1849 – UW-Madison is born.
CIVIL WAR
1861 – Charles Wakeley (one of the two members of UW’s first graduating class of 1854) helped found the Wisconsin Alumni Association seven years after his graduation to aid his alma mater in surviving the lean state budgets in Civil War times. The organization initially served only 40 alumni.
Of the 50 male students who had graduated from the UW up to 1864, 28 joined the Union Army, and a few served the Southern cause. Many male students who were currently enrolled at the UW joined the war, as well.
70,000 Wisconsin troops trained at Camp Randall, which was then an open field on the edge of campus. (The university didn’t acquire it until 1893.) Memorials to the Civil War soldiers who trained in Camp Randall adorn the site. The Camp Randall Memorial Arch was dedicated in 1912 in remembrance.
Camp Randall also served as a hospital and a Confederate prison throughout the war.
1863 - Drained of male students and looking to boost enrollment, the university opened its doors to women for the first time. The first female students were admitted to the Normal Department (for teacher preparation), but in 1867 President Paul A. Chadbourne segregated women into a Female College. President John Bascom, a pioneer of social justice who would have none of the separation, closed the Female College in 1874 and granted women full coeducational status.
Following the Civil War, military drill became a familiar part of university life. The 1862 Morrill Act required that the university offer military training for male students. Participation grew in the 1870s, when Congress approved funds to established a full-time professor of military science and tactics. Drill became a requirement for graduation in the 1890s.
WWI & WWII
Thousands of GIs took advantage of UW correspondence courses during the two world wars. These courses were developed by the university extension program and often administered through the United States Armed Forces Institute.
WWI
The university instituted a course for training auto mechanics for the U.S. Army, utilizing the space available in the Stock Pavilion for demonstration and practical application. The course continued as vocational training following the war.
Women students were called on to pursue instruction in such areas as engineering mechanics.
Instruction in military science and tactics were an accepted
part of the curriculum. Freshmen and sophomores were required
to take the course.
1928 - Memorial Union is dedicated to those who served in WWI
& Civil War. (179 people died in WWI; 30 in the Civil War.)
WWII
1940 – In May of that year, Belgium’s Pro Arte Quartet (one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets) began a series of Madison concerts amid a backdrop of international turmoil. Hitler’s invasion of Belgium cut the artists off from their homeland, stranding them in a new world. From the tragedy, a UW arts institution was born: the university offered the quartet a permanent home on campus, and Pro Arte responded with weekly concerts, radio and television broadcasts, and performances across rural Wisconsin. With a new generation of American musicians, the quartet continues to share timeless music.
1941 – President Clarence A. Dykstra gathered students there after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. President E.B. Fred did the same at the end of WWII.
1943 – UW alumna Mildred Harnack was beheaded in Nazi Germany on direct orders from Adolph Hitler. Harnack and her husband, Arvin, whom she had met at UW, were executed for the “crime” of forming an underground resistance group inside Germany.
Nearly 13,000 UW alumni and students donned uniforms to fight, causing enrollment to drop by half.
At least 150 faculty worked on the problems of national defense. Graduate School Dean (and later university president) E.B. Fred headed the nation’s biological warfare research program.
1953 - Memorial Library opens, dedicated to those who served in World War II and the wars that followed.
Each branch of the military established a women’s auxiliary for service in noncombat assignments, including the Navy’s WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Service), the women Marines and the Coast Guard SPARS (an acronym taken from the Coast Guard motto "Semper Paratus, Always Ready".
Schools established on campus for the navy included a radio school, radio training for WAVES, a school for cooks and bakers, training for navy air pilots and diesel engineering instruction for naval officers. The army was represented with meteorological training and the training of air force machinists in the mechanical engineering department. In addition, the university Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) organized the first ski patrol in the nation.
The university trained officer candidates through the Navy V-12 program and the Army Specialized Training Program.
The Alumni Association provided free subscriptions to the Wisconsin Alumnus magazine to keep servicemen and servicewomen informed about the university. Students became involved through blood drives and the collection of scrap metal.
A small army of scientists and engineers—including three from UW-Madison—worked in a secret effort to build the atomic bomb. Chemist John E. Willard, the first UW scientist to assist the wartime effort, helped develop methods for separating plutonium from uranium. As head of a group studying weapons’ effects, theoretical chemist Joseph Hirschfelder was the first to predict fallout from atomic explosions. Henry H. Barschall, who joined the physics faculty immediately after the war, had helped monitor the shock wave from the world’s first nuclear test at White Sands, New Mexico.
When World War II brought an acute need for antibiotics and blood plasma, a team from the UW botany, bacteriology and biochemistry departments raced to assist. The team found a strain of penicillin culture that would permit the mass production of antibiotics—although the discovery came too late for the war.
After WWII: Enrollment and operating budget tripled. The size of the faculty nearly doubled. The regents and the administration prepared for this sudden and substantial demand on the university’s physical resources by establishing the Campus Planning Commission. The biggest building boom in campus history (to that point) kicked in: plans for 12 new buildings and additions to existing structures were approved. Quonset huts were constructed on the Lower Campus, temporary buildings scattered throughout the campus and faculty taught some classes in local churches. New students lived in temporary metal huts, tents and trailers that filled every open area on campus.
Korean War
Able-bodied male students coming to the university had to enroll in two years of compulsory ROTC. After that, they could take two additional years of ROTC, which would lead to a commission and a period of active service, or take their chances on a semester-to-semester draft deferment.
Vietnam War
The notorious anti-establishment identity of The Daily Cardinal peaked in the 1960s, when it joined in the tumultuous protests of the Vietnam War. The era inspired an alternative student weekly, the Badger Herald . This paper started in 1969 as a right-winged voice to counteract the Cardinal’s leftward leanings. The Herald went daily in 1986, making UW-Madison the nation’s only campus with two student dailies.
Anti-war demonstrations mobilized thousands of students and drew national attention to Madison. Tensions peaked when an October 1967 student protest of Dow Chemical (a napalm manufacturer recruiting for employees on campus) turned violent, injuring 74.
Winter 1969 – A group of students presented a list of 13 “non-negotiable” demands to the administration to secure greater representation and rights for black students and faculty. This precipitated a student “strike” which lasted for most of February and necessitated the involvement of the National Guard. Eventual by-products of the strike included the establishment of the Afro-American Studies department and the creation of a special five-year program to provide counseling, guidance and scholarship opportunities for minority students.
February 1970 – A mysterious fire caused damage to the Army ROTC headquarters housed in a portion of the Old Red Gym.
Aug. 24, 1970 – Radicals bombed Sterling Hall, which housed the Army Math Research Center. A post-doctoral student was killed, hastening an end to anti-war protests on campus.
In the final days of the Vietnam War, thousands of Hmong refugees fled Laos for sanctuary; 32,000 Hmong people settled in Wisconsin, one of the largest concentrations of Hmong immigrants in the nation. The university’s relatively new Center for Southeast Asian Studies began making a difference in the lives of these new Americans, helping state teachers work with Hmong students to bring Hmong culture and history to their classes.
Misc. Info
Chemistry professor Farrington Daniels anticipated the future in the 1950s when he conducted experiments on the use of solar energy. The technology became more prominent as a possible energy source in the 1970s, when Middle Eastern oil suppliers instituted an embargo.
Civil War
More than 70,000 Wisconsin troops trained at Camp Randall, which was then an open field on the edge of campus, and drilled on Bascom Hill. Memorials to the Civil War soldiers who trained in Camp Randall now adorn the site. In 1863, drained of male students and looking to boost enrollment, the university opened its doors to women for the first time.
World War I
Instruction in military science and tactics was an accepted
part of the curriculum. Freshmen and sophomores were required
to take the course. Women students were called on to pursue
instruction in areas such as engineering mechanics. In 1928,
Memorial Union was dedicated to those who served in WWI and
the Civil War.
World War II
Nearly 13,000 UW alumni and students donned uniforms to fight.
At least 150 faculty worked on the problems of national defense.
Graduate School Dean E.B. Fred headed the nation's biological
warfare research program. A small army of scientists and engineers,
including three from UW-Madison, worked in a secret effort
to build the atomic bomb.
Korean and Vietnam Wars
Male students had to enroll in two years of compulsory ROTC
during the Korean War. Anti-war demonstrations drew national
attention to Madison during the Vietnam War. In 1970, radicals
bombed Sterling Hall, which housed the Army Math Research
Center, killing a student and, as a result, hastening an end
to anti-war protests on campus.
Gulf War
Anti-war protests returned to campus after Iraq's armies invaded
Kuwait. The issue of debate sometimes was portrayed as whether
the United States was coming to the aid of an invaded country
or protecting its oil interests in the Middle East.
Possible war with Iraq
Some see the anti-war movement on campus as more organized
and quickly focused than in the past, but, so far, involving
a smaller segment of the student, staff and faculty population.
The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States
have affected the views of many toward military action. Meanwhile,
many student and staff reservists are being called to duty.