In 2003, President Bush brought back Loyalty Day, a celebration held in early May that took place during the Cold War in response to May Day, celebrated by the Communist Bloc. On May 2, 1954, Middletown celebrated Loyalty Day with a military parade led by the police, and involving the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and a number of other marchers. The parade marched up Washington Street past cheering spectators and turned left onto High Street.
Here the VFW had their first encounter with Wesleyan. A few musicians, calling themselves “The Phantom Band” started playing outside of DKE. Some more students joined in and soon there was a crowd. Someone hung a flag saying “U.N. for Peace” outside the John Wesley House at the corner of Washington and High. Someone else might have had a Stars and Bars, the first Confederate flag. Was this supposed to be some kind of protest? Any message that the students may have been trying to convey was thoroughly ignored by The Hartford Courant, The Middletown Press and the Argus, but that is also due to what happened next.
Some say that a group of Wesleyan students failed to take off their hats for the American flag and induced a riot, that rocks were thrown at the police officers, and that someone spat in the direction of the flag. Some people saw small red ribbons on lapels of some of the students. Students interviewed by the Administration said the police stepped over the line first and “abused their power,” manhandling the students and pushing them out of the road at the corner of Wyllys and High.
Whatever altercation took place, the march continued with the VFW moving up Wyllys Avenue and the rest of the parade heading down High Street. The VFW were supposed to do field exercises on Andrus Field. But then they saw the flag.
A student in Harriman Hall, now known as PAC, had hung a Nazi flag out of his window. Henry Pinchera, VFW state senior vice-commander said that it was fortunate for the students that he managed to restrain the VFW members from “going after them.” The VFW dispersed and headed back down to town.
The VFW then told the local papers that they had evidence that “Wesleyan is one of the Universities where subversives are busy.” A map of New England surfaced that pinpointed Wesleyan as a location where Communist conspirators were at work.
The incident, for at least a few days in May, attracted the attention of newspapers as far away as Chattanooga, Tenn. In Chattanooga, the Hamilton County Herald wrote that the demonstration was “ a regrettable display of shallow brains and vapid hearts and a spontaneous demonstration that the insidious designs of Communist protagonists has come to fruition in the hearts and minds of some American young people who have been subjected to the sly undermining of American ideals, religious morality, and national pride … it was not necessary for a Red agent to slither onto campus and tempt the students into a display of disloyalty, when their hearts and minds have already been corrupted by Communist propaganda rampant in the country for 20 years and more.”
The VFW threatened to look into whether students at Wesleyan were using their time there to avoid the draft and said that drafting the students responsible would be ample punishment. Instead, eight students received two weeks of suspension. President Butterfield issued an apology saying that he was sure that there were no subversive activities taking place at Wesleyan. Dean Eldrige issued another apology saying that it was probably just some college mischief and that the Nazi flag was in fact brought back by a Wesleyan student who fought in Nazi Germany. “It was a thoughtless minority of the student body which engaged in the exhibition … and it is these same boys who will fight World War III if such a major misfortune should descend upon us. In any event, most if not all these hacklers will soon be in uniform themselves – and they will be good soldiers as have Wesleyan men before them.”
As for the red ribbons, it turned out, at least according to Rev. Curtin of St. Sebastian Church, they were marks of a religious celebration in honor of the feast of St. Sebastian. No students connected with the incident were interviewed by any paper and most seemed unwilling to talk about it after they had been taken down to the Middletown Police station.
Thank you to the Olin Library Special Collections and Archives and to Jeffery Makala for the idea for this piece.
Leave a Reply