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Episcopal Goes to War
How a student’s curiosity about the “forgotten war” led him to create a rich history of the school during WWI.
Between World War I’s first salvo in 1914 and America’s entry into the conflict in 1917, Episcopal took on a martial air. Guest speakers preached national preparedness. Students wrote of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany as a barbarous villain and France as a virtuous symbol of liberty. The School even conducted daily military drills, with students dressed in khaki uniforms and wielding government-issued Springfield rifles.
These are just some of the nuggets that Jerry Chen ’19 uncovered last year in a deep dig into the history of Episcopal during World War I. In the School’s digital-history course and later during independent research he conducted as part of his senior externship, Chen assembled a rich online account that examines the conflict’s influence on EHS alumni and campus life.
This was not Chen’s first exploration of Episcopal’s past. As part of the School’s commemoration last year of its 1968 integration, he contributed to a history of the Stouffer Foundation, which was founded in the late 1960s to provide scholarships for African American students to attend Southern preparatory schools such as Episcopal. Also, he researched the impact of African Americans who worked at EHS before integration.
Entering the second semester of his senior year, Chen was intrigued by accounts of World War I and the centennial commemorations of the armistice declared in 1918. Beyond the fighting, he wanted to dig deeper into how the war influenced and even accelerated changes on the American homefront. The war coincided with and fundamentally changed, among other things, the Great Migration of blacks to the north, the suffragists’ movement, and rising fear of communism.
Despite this significance, Chen was surprised to learn that downtown Washington features memorials to every American conflict of the 20th century except World War I. “It’s a big war that reshaped America, but it’s a forgotten war,” he says.
Laura Vetter, the School’s archivist, was impressed by Chen’s sophisticated approach. “Not a lot of students think much about World War I,” she says. “They tend to be drawn to the better-known conflicts — the Civil War and World War II.”
Chen’s first stop in his research was the plaque in Pendleton dedicated to the 22 EHS alumni who died in WWI. Using the Bryan Library archives and online databases, he wrote a short biography of each man and created a digital map showing where they had fought and died. “Although most of the action took place in Europe, it was a world war,” Chen says. “I wanted to show that it wasn’t just happening in the muddy trenches of the Western Front but also at Gallipoli and in the Middle East and Siberia.”
More than 400 EHS students, faculty, and alumni fought in the war, serving on battlefronts across the world. The Chronicle featured frequent accounts of EHS-related news from the trenches, noting who had enlisted, won military honors, or died. The first among the fallen was Cuthbert Buckle, Class of 1910; among his belongings was found a letter from EHS Headmaster Archibald Robinson Hoxton Sr.
On the home front, Chen found that war news and debate crowded into EHS classrooms, chapel, and meetings. Before the United States joined the war, faculty routinely shared with students articles on patriotism and speeches by British leaders. In 1916, Headmaster Hoxton held the School’s annual contest in public speaking on the subject of “Christianity and War.” The rivaling Fairfax Literary and Blackford Literary societies later debated the merits of a military draft.
Over time, the School began to see its role as preparing their charges for the battlefield. Formal military training was introduced in the spring of 1916, with daily drilling that cut into practice time for sports. Students, Chen found, chafed at this new requirement and the accompanying khaki outfits that became required wear throughout the day. Whispers once observed that most students considered the drills an “irksome imposition”; later it called them “stupid.”
After American troops crossed the Atlantic to fight, Hoxton and other teachers routinely read to students from letters sent from the front lines by fellow students, teachers, and alumni. In School gatherings and Bible classes, the boys of Episcopal heard firsthand from their EHS brethren fighting in the first war to feature the Industrial Age’s brutal, mechanized weaponry.
In late October 1917, Hoxton shared a letter he had received from teacher Patrick Henry Callaway, who had donned a uniform and joined the fighting, interrupting what would become a legendary 70-year career as an Episcopal teacher. Callaway told of his pursuit of an officer’s commission and urged his former charges to write him with news of the School. There was also a letter from Arthur Barksdale Kinsolving, Class of 1914, who recounted how his poor eyesight had kept him from assignment as an ambulance driver — until a corps commander discovered the two were both EHS Old Boys.
Chen found that the academic program changed little during the war; Episcopal, for instance, retained instruction in German, which many public schools dropped. But the war intruded frequently on student fiction and poetry, often with Germans depicted as bloodthirsty.
A poem Chen discovered titled “Spring —1917” read: “For truth and right they grasp the sword — Fear Death? / What word has Spring for these fellow men? / Far o’er their heads an eagle circles high, / And the nature whispers soft: ’Tis good to die.’ ”
On November 6, 1920, a year after the war formally closed by treaty, the entire School gathered with nearly 100 alumni to mark the erection of a marble tablet in the chapel to memorialize the 22 alumni who died. Many dignitaries attended, chief among them Secretary of War Newton Baker, an EHS alumnus from the Class of 1888. Baker’s speech was a “beautiful and eloquent address,” according to a Whispers account of the day that Chen found. He told the students that “the responsibility of whether or not this country would witness a repetition of this disaster to civilization” rested upon the shoulders of their generation.
Twenty years later, Chen notes, Baker’s hopes of a lasting peace would be dashed. Tragically, what was supposed to be the “war to end all wars” only prepared the world stage for another cataclysmic conflict, and for another group of Old Boys to cross the Atlantic to fight.
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These are just some of the nuggets that Jerry Chen ’19 uncovered last year in a deep dig into the history of Episcopal during World War I. In the School’s digital-history course and later during independent research he conducted as part of his senior externship, Chen assembled a rich online account that examines the conflict’s influence on EHS alumni and campus life.
This was not Chen’s first exploration of Episcopal’s past. As part of the School’s commemoration last year of its 1968 integration, he contributed to a history of the Stouffer Foundation, which was founded in the late 1960s to provide scholarships for African American students to attend Southern preparatory schools such as Episcopal. Also, he researched the impact of African Americans who worked at EHS before integration.
Entering the second semester of his senior year, Chen was intrigued by accounts of World War I and the centennial commemorations of the armistice declared in 1918. Beyond the fighting, he wanted to dig deeper into how the war influenced and even accelerated changes on the American homefront. The war coincided with and fundamentally changed, among other things, the Great Migration of blacks to the north, the suffragists’ movement, and rising fear of communism.
Despite this significance, Chen was surprised to learn that downtown Washington features memorials to every American conflict of the 20th century except World War I. “It’s a big war that reshaped America, but it’s a forgotten war,” he says.
Laura Vetter, the School’s archivist, was impressed by Chen’s sophisticated approach. “Not a lot of students think much about World War I,” she says. “They tend to be drawn to the better-known conflicts — the Civil War and World War II.”
Chen’s first stop in his research was the plaque in Pendleton dedicated to the 22 EHS alumni who died in WWI. Using the Bryan Library archives and online databases, he wrote a short biography of each man and created a digital map showing where they had fought and died. “Although most of the action took place in Europe, it was a world war,” Chen says. “I wanted to show that it wasn’t just happening in the muddy trenches of the Western Front but also at Gallipoli and in the Middle East and Siberia.”
More than 400 EHS students, faculty, and alumni fought in the war, serving on battlefronts across the world. The Chronicle featured frequent accounts of EHS-related news from the trenches, noting who had enlisted, won military honors, or died. The first among the fallen was Cuthbert Buckle, Class of 1910; among his belongings was found a letter from EHS Headmaster Archibald Robinson Hoxton Sr.
On the home front, Chen found that war news and debate crowded into EHS classrooms, chapel, and meetings. Before the United States joined the war, faculty routinely shared with students articles on patriotism and speeches by British leaders. In 1916, Headmaster Hoxton held the School’s annual contest in public speaking on the subject of “Christianity and War.” The rivaling Fairfax Literary and Blackford Literary societies later debated the merits of a military draft.
Over time, the School began to see its role as preparing their charges for the battlefield. Formal military training was introduced in the spring of 1916, with daily drilling that cut into practice time for sports. Students, Chen found, chafed at this new requirement and the accompanying khaki outfits that became required wear throughout the day. Whispers once observed that most students considered the drills an “irksome imposition”; later it called them “stupid.”
After American troops crossed the Atlantic to fight, Hoxton and other teachers routinely read to students from letters sent from the front lines by fellow students, teachers, and alumni. In School gatherings and Bible classes, the boys of Episcopal heard firsthand from their EHS brethren fighting in the first war to feature the Industrial Age’s brutal, mechanized weaponry.
In late October 1917, Hoxton shared a letter he had received from teacher Patrick Henry Callaway, who had donned a uniform and joined the fighting, interrupting what would become a legendary 70-year career as an Episcopal teacher. Callaway told of his pursuit of an officer’s commission and urged his former charges to write him with news of the School. There was also a letter from Arthur Barksdale Kinsolving, Class of 1914, who recounted how his poor eyesight had kept him from assignment as an ambulance driver — until a corps commander discovered the two were both EHS Old Boys.
Chen found that the academic program changed little during the war; Episcopal, for instance, retained instruction in German, which many public schools dropped. But the war intruded frequently on student fiction and poetry, often with Germans depicted as bloodthirsty.
A poem Chen discovered titled “Spring —1917” read: “For truth and right they grasp the sword — Fear Death? / What word has Spring for these fellow men? / Far o’er their heads an eagle circles high, / And the nature whispers soft: ’Tis good to die.’ ”
On November 6, 1920, a year after the war formally closed by treaty, the entire School gathered with nearly 100 alumni to mark the erection of a marble tablet in the chapel to memorialize the 22 alumni who died. Many dignitaries attended, chief among them Secretary of War Newton Baker, an EHS alumnus from the Class of 1888. Baker’s speech was a “beautiful and eloquent address,” according to a Whispers account of the day that Chen found. He told the students that “the responsibility of whether or not this country would witness a repetition of this disaster to civilization” rested upon the shoulders of their generation.
Twenty years later, Chen notes, Baker’s hopes of a lasting peace would be dashed. Tragically, what was supposed to be the “war to end all wars” only prepared the world stage for another cataclysmic conflict, and for another group of Old Boys to cross the Atlantic to fight.
