In December 1944, African American newspapers reported that an exceptional Harvard doctoral student, Reed Peggram, had narrowly escaped from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp with his Danish companion. “Two Men with Strange Story Walk Through Battle Lines,” read one headline. Another announced: “Boy Friends Scorn Bombs, Come Out OK.” Reporter Max Johnson, embedded with the African American 92nd infantry division, compared the duo to a modern-day Damon and Pythias, from the Greek legend about loyal friends facing death. “If Peggram’s story proves to be correct,” Johnson concluded, “it will undoubtedly become one of the greatest human-interest stories yet revealed in this war.”
Yet the poignant tale of this African American scholar has been lost to history. What happened to Peggram following his fraught wartime odyssey, endured with the man he considered his soulmate?
His life had begun humbly. Born in 1914 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Peggram was raised primarily by his grandmother, a school janitor. He excelled at what’s now called Boston Latin School and enrolled at Harvard (living off campus, as Black students were required to do then) to study Romance languages and literature. He planned to become a professor, joined the poetry and German clubs, and took courses in French, psychology, history, German, and Spanish, graduating magna cum laude in the class of 1935, with a Phi Beta Kappa key. The granting of a Rhodes scholarship to study in England, however, was complicated by A. Chester Hanford, a Harvard dean who wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation followed by another letter—not shared with Peggram—that told the admissions committee that Peggram was also a “negro.” Peggram instead completed a master’s degree in comparative literature at Columbia University and in 1937 began doctoral studies at Harvard. According to archival material at the U.S. Library of Congress, during that time Peggram had an unrequited crush on undergraduate student Leonard Bernstein. (The one-sided sentiments and the rebuff are revealed within a collection of the composer’s letters, which Peggram had asked him to destroy.) In September 1938, having received Julius Rosenwald and John Harvard fellowships, he moved to Paris to study decadence in nineteenth-century French literature at the Sorbonne. There, on the cusp of World War II, Peggram ignored warnings to return home, determined instead to live out his dreams of becoming a cultured gentleman: traveling, going to operas, joining the Shakespeare and Company library, and exploring his sexuality in a less constrained social setting. This new life soon included a new love, the handsome Danish artist Arne Hauptmann, who Peggram met in May 1939.
A few months later, the pair was living in Copenhagen. But as word of a probable German invasion spread, they left, ultimately landing in Florence, Italy. Family members and others urged Peggram to return home, but he refused to leave Europe because Hauptmann could not get a visa to enter the United States. (Even an inheritance from Peggram’s Harvard friend Montford Schley Variell ’36 was not persuasive.) Peggram and Hauptmann lived in poverty before they were arrested for being foreigners from countries either occupied by, or at war with, the Germans, and were held for more than a year at prisoner-of-war camps.
As Allied troops finally arrived in Italy, amid the fighting, bombing, and general chaos, the camp’s security measures weakened and many prisoners escaped. Peggram and Hauptmann trekked through woods and mountains for several months, once being shot at by German machine gunners, sheltering with partisan families during the day and sleeping in barns at night. Once rescued and resettled, their requests to get Hauptmann a visa to enter the United States were denied. So, in 1945, Peggram returned alone to Massachusetts, his exciting academic fellowship having become a seven-year, life-altering tribulation.
Peggram was candid in 1950 when he wrote to classmates in his Harvard College Class of 1935 Fifteenth Anniversary Report: “After the Second World War, which I saw from Denmark and Italy, I passed through four years of hospitalization for a nervous breakdown. It appeared that I had been using seven languages more fluently than I was capable of doing.”
He had been sent to Medfield State Hospital, in Massachusetts, for electroshock treatment. Discharged in 1949, he was never able to work again. (His own father, Harvey Peggram, had returned from fighting in WWI in 1919 and was hospitalized in mental institutions for the rest of his life.)
Peggram spent his own later years living with family in Dorchester, listening to classical music albums borrowed from the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. His next Harvard class report revealed slightly more: “My own postgraduate history is no particular triumph…All of which reduces my current occupation to singing in Episcopal Church choirs and cultivating enough courage to offer my antique, revised, unpublished doctoral dissertation to a publisher.” He ended with, “My congratulations, meanwhile, to whatever more ambitious colleague has been recognized as V.I.P.” In 1985, the class report under his name simply stated that Reed Edwin Peggram had died on April 20, 1982, in Dorchester.
A life holding such promise, that took a creative young man to Europe to follow passionate and intellectual pursuits, had ended where it began. And he never saw Hauptmann again.
