Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2009 > January-February 2009	Print View

Panty raids were not as amusing on some campuses. Click to see story.

A handful of male students, and then a handful more, started to mill on the lawns near Pioneer and Centennial halls, all-male dorms on the U’s Minneapolis campus. Around 200 assembled for the first rush, and the atmosphere was squirrelly from the get-go. Some of the guys even decided to go bare-chested in the chill spring air—hoping, wrote a reporter for the Minneapolis Star in the next day’s paper, that they would soon be wearing “some feminine souvenir back to their dormitory.”

Exactly who pointed them toward Powell Hall, a dormitory across campus that housed nursing students, is unclear. But as with any mob, it didn’t take much to steer them. Off they went with a whoop and a testosterone-fueled howl toward the University’s various female quarters, beginning with Powell. By the time they were through, their numbers would swell to nearly 1,500 students and they would raid not just Powell, but Comstock, Sanford, and several sorority houses. They would also draw the wrath of three separate police forces; get their first whiff of tear gas; and set off a round of hand-wringing and recrimination among University administrators and public observers about the state of college youth.

Panty raids came to the University of Minnesota on May 19, 1952, just as they visited almost every major university around the nation, beginning in Ann Arbor on March 21, the first day of that lunatic spring. One campus after the next hosted various forms of the hysteria. Thousands of students across the nation took part in raids, which largely consisted of male students storming the dormitories of their female counterparts and—just as the term suggests—swiping women’s underwear. Headline writers had a field day: “More Lingerie Looters by U.S. Students,” “Lust for Lace Grips Students All over the U.S,” “Childish Pranks by Grownup Cranks.” Time magazine ran a head-shaking story on the weird and wayward fad, and Life followed with a photo essay, which only served to fuel the craze.

At the University of Missouri, 10,000 students stormed two nearby women’s colleges in search of undergarments. Three thousand University of Vermont students were undaunted in their raiding even as the Burlington fire department rolled out the hoses to try to calm them down. Women at the University of Connecticut doused their attackers with buckets of water, but the Connecticut men were not deterred. In Austin, the University of Texas football team took it upon themselves to form a protective barrier around women’s dorms to keep out the raiders.

Many of the women of the University of Minnesota, on the other hand, were fully complicit in the high jinks at the U. According to accounts, they could be seen leaning from windows and balconies, twirling bras and panties above their heads as the guys traveled from Powell (where a staunch housemother kept them at bay) to Comstock, where their numbers jumped to 500. Meanwhile, campus police had been alerted to the presence of the marauders, but just 12 officers were sent to Comstock.

The doors leading into the dormitory were locked and only one window was open, but some students, nonetheless, made a rush for that opening. Others tried to climb up to the balconies where the women were now leaning down, dangling their lingerie like fishing lines. Enough guys got into the dorm, prompting the campus police to call local police forces for reinforcements and headed inside after them. Several students were collared and dragged out, including one who was heard crying plaintively to a friend, “Florence, tell ’em I’ve been here all night.”

By the time units from the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments arrived—13 squad cars in all—the size of the crowd had tripled and the mob decided it was time to move on ahead of the cops to Sanford Hall. There, someone found an unlocked door and upwards of 300 men poured inside. Finally, they got their hands on some panties and headed for the door, but the local police were fast on their heels and the total haul failed to impress a Minneapolis Tribune reporter. It was, he wrote, “less than Evelyn West wears in her [burlesque] act at the Alvin.”

Undeterred, the guys now went to nearby sorority row and were just beginning deliberations there when word spread that the women of Comstock were organizing a counter raid at Centennial Hall. The crowd rushed back to defend its home turf, where they found a small band of raiders clamoring to get inside.

By this time, the police had had enough of the nonsense. The officers not only let loose some choice words at the students, but a canister of tear gas as well. As students wiped their eyes, some of the officers intimated to the students that if they wanted to do some nighttime raiding, they ought to be doing it in the uniform of the U.S. Army in Korea rather than making trouble for the local police. The U of M men took exception to the name-calling and fistfights broke out between cops and the students. Depending on who was observing, either the police overreacted or a group of boys got justly spanked. In either case, the crowd was still lingering, the police were about to deliver more tear gas, and it was still only 11:30 p.m. when University vice president William Middlebrook climbed atop a squad car and somehow got the attention of everyone gathered. “All these policemen are going to leave now if you boys go home,” he hollered, according to the Minnesota Daily. “You’ve had your fun and your publicity.”

For his trouble, Middlebrook would later find that someone had deflated his car’s tires. Nonetheless, his promise of sending the cops home was enough to calm everyone assembled, and the great panty raid of 1952 was over. 

While occasional underwear thefts were carried out at colleges around the United States in years to come—including a few at the University of Minnesota—never did another as large or contagious as the one that swept the country 57 years ago break out again. Still, for a fad that began and reached its height in one brief spring, the concept of panty raids has held an enduring place in the history of campus life. While numerous absurd crazes—dance marathons, goldfish-eating, cramming into phone booths—evoke an era, perhaps none resonate as strongly in the imagination as the panty raid. Dressed up in bobby socks

Click to read a historical article on Cal-Berkeley's Great Panty Raid of 1956.

and rolled-up blue jeans and steeped in a giggly sense of repressed sexuality, the idea of busting into a woman’s dorm room in pursuit of the contents of her underwear drawer seemed so perfectly suited to the decade from which it arose that if panty raids hadn’t been real, they would surely have been invented in an episode of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

The University, through its administration, served in loco parentis (in place of the parents) on the campus of the U, and that was the governing essence of student life at Minnesota and colleges and universities across the United States. The Ozzies and Harriets of campus life—largely, dorm monitors and various other staff working out of the dean of students’ office—ran pretty tight ships, particularly for the female students.

Dormitories for women were closed at midnight on weekdays and at 2 a.m. on weekends, according to The University of Minnesota, 1945–2000, a history of the U. Study hours were maintained from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. in dorms, and men were shooed out at 11 p.m. on weekdays and 12 on the weekends. “Rowdiness in the dining rooms was not permitted, nor were the women allowed to come [to dinner] with their hair ‘up or uncombed.’?”

While the University tried to enforce dinner-table hairstyles and dampen the possibility of sexual congress, they couldn’t do much to keep other worldly matters at bay. Like it or not, these students were not innocents. They had grown up as witnesses to the horrors of World War II and were now part of the generation that was fighting yet another war, in Korea. The Selective Service Agency had recently instituted a policy granting college students deferment from the draft (something that hadn’t existed during the Second World War, and an obvious reason for the acrimony with the local police), and young men on campus understood that they were just a couple of failing grades from a transport ship to Seoul.

In the early 1950s, much more than repressed sexuality was simmering just under the surface, sometimes to boil over. Early rock ’n’ roll was taking off, the Civil Rights Movement was just around the corner, and McCarthyism was at its height. A few years earlier, in 1949, the University had forced the resignation of physics professor Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of famed nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, after Frank had been called to Washington, D.C., to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he confessed to having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s.

Two years later, Forrest Wiggins, the only African American professor at the University at the time and one of the few black faculty members in the United States, had been denied tenure in December 1951. Wiggins was a self-professed Communist who nonetheless had, by most accounts, a fine teaching record. His dismissal, which was made final in June 1952, was viewed as overtly political by campus liberals and proponents of academic freedom.

Finally, in the spring of 1952, University President James Morrill denied a request by a student group, the Young Progressives, to bring the famed African American singer Paul Robeson to campus. A lightning rod for controversy because of his leftist views and affiliation with the Communist Party, Robeson was subject to persistent blacklisting through the 1940s and ’50s. In nixing his invitation to appear on campus, Morrill called Robeson an “anti-American, anti-democratic propagandist” who would be a “clearly identified symbol of Soviet sympathies in this country and abroad.” Just as the faculty could do little to aid Oppenheimer and Wiggins, the Young Progressives were left with little recourse in the face of the administration ban.

So it was in the midst of these campus upsets and the wider drama surrounding the Korean War, the McCarthy Era, and the Cold War that students at the University of Minnesota decided to go diving for lingerie in the drawers of their female counterparts.

It would be a stretch to suggest that the gang of 200 who set off from Pioneer and Centennial Halls on the night of May 19, 1952, were overly concerned about the injustices dealt to Paul Robeson and Forrest Wiggins. For whatever goofball reason, they wanted to come home with panties in their pockets and bras stretched over their bare chests. Yet, as the giggles subsided in the aftermath of the raid, and students, administration, and the general public reflected on the near riot, a sense of uneasiness settled over campus. The University suspended about 20 students who’d participated in the raid, and the administration spent weeks sending memos back and forth trying to map out strategies in case of future raids.

The school’s All-University Congress and the editorial pages of the Minnesota Daily complained of the harshness of the penalty against the agitators; and students, in general, felt the administration overreacted, particularly by calling in the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments, whom they accused of aggravating the situation and turning an evening of prankishness into a confrontation. Some also charged the administration of hypocrisy for being overly concerned with protecting the “good name” of the University in the case of panty raids but being less sensitive to its own virtue when it came to dismissing Wiggins or banning Robeson from the campus.

The military draft issue continued to hang over the incident as well. The Daily printed a letter from the Minnesota men of the 2nd Battalion, 179th Infantry, in Korea who got word of the raid and addressed their comments to the panty thieves at the U. It read in part: “If they want to go on raids so bad they can come over here and take the places of some of our buddies who didn’t come back.” President Morrill also scolded the boys in the press. He was quoted as telling a Minneapolis newspaper that “many at the University are deferred; others are in the service of the nation—in America, Europe, and Korea. This simple fact cannot be forgotten by you or by me.” Not surprisingly, some U of M students read this as a veiled threat to their deferment status and wondered, as did one letter writer to the Daily: “What bearing did this statement have on the raids on the dormitories?”

The Sturm und Drang of the situation abated as summer came and the U of M campus emptied. The suspended students were reinstated at a less heated moment a few weeks after the raid. Deans of students across the nation, including E.G. Williamson at Minnesota, got in touch with one another before fall semesters began, gathering information and discussing best options should the panty raid craze spring up again during the football season.

As noted above, that didn’t happen. Isolated raids sprang up for years to come but were never as infectious as that first spring. As the Korean War gave way to Vietnam and dorm room lockdowns surrendered to Woodstock and free love, the concept of panty raids came to be viewed by the next generation of students as quaint and frivolous as flagpole-sitting.

Of course, this was the same group that would soon be streaking across college grounds throughout the nation.

Tim Brady is a regular contributor to Minnesota. He lives in St. Paul.

Comment on this story.