“That's when we were marching for jobs … They didn't even have the first black teacher then.”

—Calvin Moody, Black politician, on Milwaukee civil rights activism in the 1940s

The 1930s and 1940s pose a challenge to historians of the civil rights era, since these decades are still the “forgotten years.” Most accounts of the movement focus on the tumultuous events of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s: the mass boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches which mobilized thousands of African Americans. Thus civil rights historians commonly draw upon the 1930s and 1940s only to set the stage, merely a preface to more important events yet to come.

American imperialism opened new battlefields for the conflict between Protestants and Catholics over religion in public schools. The nineteenth-century textbook wars followed the flag to the Philippines. American Catholics had fought to protect their children from anti-Catholic school books and Protestant Biblical readings since the beginning of the common school movement. These issues provided much of the rationale behind the 1884 decision to establish a separate Catholic school system. Nevertheless, many Catholic children continued to attend public schools. With the end of the Spanish-American War, Catholic frustration with secular Protestantism took on fresh urgency. Now they feared that Catholic children in the Philippines, and in other new territories, would have their minds and souls contaminated by false interpretations of their church, interpretations that seeped in through American textbooks. The textbook battles that erupted in the Philippines rekindled old animosities and became part of a longer struggle waged by Catholic leadership in the United States to exercise more authority over colonial education. Its repercussions found their way to the White House and Theodore Roosevelt.

During World War II several popular Norman Rockwell paintings featured the soldier Willie Gillis. Rockwell depicted Willie as your average, all-American boy, a typical GI. Yet the Willie pictured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on October 5, 1946, seemed transformed (see Plate 1). Willie sits in the window sill of his college dorm room, smoking a pipe while diligently studying. The window in the center of the picture frames the venerable college clocktower and trees on the Quad. The everyman, dogface Willie had matured. He had been transformed into a college student with an air of confident assurance, comfortable within his new genteel surroundings. One could only imagine a bright future for Willie.