“FOR GOD, FOR COUNTRY, AND FOR YALE” IN WAR AND PEACE (2011)

6 Y ‘‘ F O R G O D , F O R C O U N T R Y , A N D F O R Y A L E ’’ I N W A R A N D P E A C E G A D D I S S M I T H In the spring of 1898 the United States declared war on Spain. In New Haven students celebrated with the largest assembly in the history of Yale University up to that time. They were heard for blocks around singing ‘‘Bright College Years,’’ concluding with the soon-to-be-famous lines: So let us strive that ever we May let these words our watch-cry be, Where’er on life’s seas we sail: ‘‘For God, for Country, and for Yale.’’ That occasion transformed the ﬁnal line of the lyrics written in 1881 by Henry Durand, a Yale College senior, into a triad of devotion. A Harvard man is said to have called it the world’s greatest anti-climax. But the words help the historian measure how Yale University responded to important issues, especially during a century when the United States fought more wars in more places than any other country. This essay is mainly about war, but it will conclude with some comments on the relationship of some nonmilitary issues to ‘‘For God, for Country, and for Yale’’ and on 7 R reasons the phrase became obsolete at the end of the twentieth century. On the outbreak of war with Spain hundreds of Yale students sought to enlist. A few were accepted into Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘‘Rough Riders’’ unit. Students and alumni raised money to put guns on a passenger liner converted to carrying troops and renamed Yale. The Alumni Weekly editorialized that the university was better because of this patriotism. ‘‘And the educated people of this country, for whom she stands, are stronger in their inﬂuence . . . because the best sons of the great mother so willingly o√ered their all when their nation called.’’ Bernadotte Perrin, a popular professor of Greek, said Yale should subordinate all to the needs of the country and close the university if necessary. A local clergyman exhorted Yale to hold the nation ‘‘true to the consecrated cause of the struggle.’’ A watch-cry was now a war cry. The ‘‘splendid little war’’ (to quote John Hay) was over quickly. Spain was defeated in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and in the Philippines, where the United States fought a second war against a Philippine independence movement. There were few Yale casualties, although one death is memorialized to this day by the gate between Battell Chapel and Durfee Hall, and another by the university ﬂagpole outside Woodbridge Hall. The outcome of the wars was applauded by Yale president Arthur Twining Hadley but not by the aging William Graham Sumner, the founder of social science at Yale. He was ill during the war but in the autumn of 1898 wrote an essay titled ‘‘The Conquest of the United States by Spain.’’ He declared: ‘‘My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States was never a great nation until in a petty three months’ campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. . . . The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards will be the task of suppressing rebellions. Meanwhile we cannot assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to negroes inside the United States.’’ Sumner’s peace cry had no inﬂuence on country or Yale. Sixteen years later, in 1914, Europe was convulsed by the ‘‘Great War’’ involving Germany and Austria against Britain, France, Italy, and Russia. The United States remained neutral. The overwhelming opinion in New Haven was for supporting and preparing for 8 S M I T H Y war. Some students enlisted in Canada or Great Britain. But in January 1916 the Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary of Yale, dissented. In an essay in this journal Stokes wrote that if the United States went to war, ‘‘it is much more likely to be the result of the Congress being inﬂuenced by the Jingoism of the yellow press...