It was a bit uncanny when Sarah Keen, a University of Iowa archivist, walked into the library at Iowa Wesleyan University this past summer. In some ways, the newly closed campus had hardly changed. Buildings were more or less untouched. The James Harlan statue was still astride his pedestal. But there was something missing.
“So to walk in, you realize there's all this stuff here, but there are no people, and so it makes it feel just supremely empty," she said.
Keen’s team was sent to Mount Pleasant to fulfill one of the UI’s more obscure responsibilities. When a college or university in the state closes, there needs to be some way for students to access their records and for the public to confirm that degrees were awarded. Iowa's state code makes the University of Iowa that record-keeper.
When Iowa Wesleyan closed earlier this year, the UI Registrar became the custodian of over 40,000 student transcripts, dating back to the college's founding in 1842. And so, the UI Libraries began the process of determining what to keep.
“Space is absolutely limited. So there was a very small amount of material that we knew we would be able to take," said Margaret Gamm, the director of Special Collections & Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries.
A collection of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. Records from the also-defunct, but not connected, German College. And roughly 15 Bibles – some locally printed for the German-speaking Iowans of centuries past.
The UI doesn’t normally provide access to material that has not been processed and cataloged. But they made an exception for IPR News to see just what was worth the effort.
A particularly eye-catching find
Hiding in a carton is a 1,200-word essay that got a tremendous response from United States veterans back in 1946. In the piece, former Iowa Wesleyan student Helen Braden wrote, "I don't want to marry an American G.I."
"I don't want to marry a G.I. That statement startles you, doesn't it? … The men of our nation have trod with hob-nail boots on the polished floors of French chateaus. They have fraternized with the common women of Naples, Casablanca, Tokyo, and Berlin. They have bombed German Cathedrals. They have been told that illicit sex relations are not to be avoided so long as one can participate without becoming diseased. They have eaten cold "C" rations with the end of a bayonet and they have written their letters home by the light of a Molotov cocktail. They have griped and sworn. All of these are the ways of war — crude and ruthless. When peace comes, manners, refinement, and our established social institutions must again have their places. I want my husband to remember that."
Braden delivered her essay as a speech at Coe College. But Keen said it went national.
“So this got around. It was talked about in the press, and she received over 1,000 letters as a result.”
Among the items that the UI is taking in from Iowa Wesleyan are binders holding just three days of correspondence Braden received after her essay appeared in the newspaper. These were not overwhelmingly positive letters.
"I wonder if you couldn't have your picture placed in the daily news so we G.I.'s can see what you are so proud of," wrote Sgt. Harry Higgins. "I'm sure you will have no trouble getting a husband for there are plenty of IV-H's in this country.”
During World War II, IV-H was a classification that deferred men from serving who were between the ages of 38 and 44.
In another letter, a soldier wrote from a hospital bed he was in for 20 months with a war injury. He wondered if G.I.s were being judged by their worst members.
“No one who has really suffered in this war, who has actually fought in the front lines, or been blown apart by an enemy gun has any desire to be a hero, or to live in the past? We want to forget the past. And well, the real heroes are all under white crosses overseas. We are just a bunch of G.I.s who were lucky enough to return alive.”
Keen said the binders full of plasticized letters are an oddity, but they capture something important about our cultural heritage. In addition to the historical detail, they offer a point of connection to a time that sounds familiar to our own.
The work of processing and cataloging isn’t done. But Gamm said her staff is working to make sure the story of the college and its holdings isn’t lost with its closing.
[CORRECTION: There is a James Harlan statue on the campus of the now-closed Iowa Wesleyan campus. An earlier version of this article mislabeld that statue.]
