Friday flashback

With that in mind, IU Home Pages flashes back to the 1941-45 home front via October 1991. During the 50-year anniversary ofWorld War II, James Madison, now the Thomas and Kathryn Miller Professor of history at IU Bloomington, coordinated a national conference at IU celebrating the diverse experiences of Americans on the home front.

American troops scattered across the globe, but those who never left home fought, too. Changes in the American way of life—some temporary and some foreshadowing permanent transformation—were the norm. Madison’s 1991 conference examined several of those changes—rationing, citizen morale, the role of women, war production, civil rights, the effect of war on children and wartime conditions on the Bloomington campus.

An image of “Rosie the Riveter” was used to promote the conference. Madison is pictured (above left) with “Rosie,” along with conference presenters Stephen Vaughn, a professor from the University of Wisconsin (“Cutting Room Commandos: Ronald Reagan and Army Air Corps Propaganda, 1942-1945”) and Robert Westbrook from the University of Rochester (“Why We Fought: Private Interests and Political Obligation in WWII”).

American university campuses joined the home front enthusiastically. At IU, wartime efforts included an accelerated program of study in which a student could complete four year of university courses in two and two-thirds years, which enabled greater numbers of trained men and women to join the armed services. In separate initiatives, the number of nurses being trained was doubled, and compulsory physical fitness training for all undergraduate students also was initiated in a program accepted as a model at many universities across the nation.

The U.S. Naval Training School and the Army Specialized Training Program were on the Bloomington campus for pre-engineering classes and area language programs. The training in nine languages offered in that program was the largest number given by any American university. During that time, Portuguese language study was added to the IU curriculum as was instruction in Turkish, a war-critical language. There also was a class in cryptology, the study of codes.