The Participants

The first AFS exchange students were college graduates and fell into four general categories, the first two reflecting the origins of the program in university life, the second two a mark of AFS's identity: scholars and women for the first; drivers and Frenchmen for the second.

Scholars. Edmond Méras for instance, a Fellowship holder of 1920-2, was a scholar:

Edmond Albert Méras (b. June 16, 1896 - d. December 5, 1978), Instructor in French and Art, 1942-1964. Edmond Méras, a native New Yorker of French parentage, maintained a family tradition in his choice of profession; in the course of a language teaching career spanning fifty-two years, from 1918 to 1970, he achieved many distinctions. Somehow, after receiving his B.A. from the College of the City of New York in 1917, he found time during his early professional years to gain a Licence ès Lettres from the University of Toulouse, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. from New York University. During those years also, two children were born to him and his late wife, Leslie: John and Phyllis.

Phillips Exeter Bulletin

I have a special interest in Toulouse, for it was there at the end of World War I, that my mother and father met. In the aftermath of the war, American Field Service Fellowships were being offered to young Americans to promote international goodwill.
My father was one of them. My mother was also in Toulouse to perfect her French. I do not know how they met. I do know that they picnicked on the walls of the medieval city of Carcasonne.

Phillis Meras, Providence Journal

Women were increasingly welcome in the university environment---but the Old Boys of the Field Service resisted this outrage to "club society" until WWII. The Institute of International Education was informed that the Field Service preferred that its fellowships be awarded to men.

Drivers. Four of the six drivers to first benefit from the Fellowships---Varnum, Tracy, Cadman and Howard--- were quite likely friends--- veterans, at least, of the same units: Richard Varnum had been in SSU 3, as had Hammond Tracy, Jr. Tracy had also been a driver in SSU 8, as had Paul Cadman. Cadman had as well driven "camions" for the Stanford Unit, TMU 133 where Henry Howard had been a driver. After 1920, six out of sixteen Fellowships awarded to former AFS drivers went to members of TMU units, five out of those six being veterans of TMU 133. This was probably less due to "business as usual" in an Old Boy network than to the fact that, in the absence of an efficient infrastructure to back him, Paul Cadman (who managed the Fellowship Program upon his return) had to fall back on old friends. The odd-man-out amongst the camion driver recruits to the Fellowships was Malcolm Cowley of TMU 526---a man who would go on to a distinguished literary career.

And we ourselves, the newcomers to the Village, were leaving it if we could. The long process of deracination had reached its climax. School and college had uprooted us in spirit; the war had physically uprooted us, carried us into strange countries and left us finally in the metropolis of the uprooted. Now even New York seemed too American, too close to home. On its river side, Greenwich Village was bounded by the French Line pier.

In the late spring of 1921, I was awarded an American Field Service fellowship for study at a French university. It was only twelve thousand francs, or about a thousand dollars at that year's rate of exchange, but it also entitled my wife and me to a reduction of fifty per cent in our cabin-class steamship fares. We planned to live as economically as a French couple, and we did. With the help of a few small checks from American magazines, the fellowship kept us in modest comfort, even permitting us to travel, and it was renewed for the following year. When we left New York hardly anyone came to the ship to say good-by. Most of our friends had sailed already; the others were wistful people who promised to follow us in a few months. The Village was almost deserted, except for the pounding feet of young men from Davenport and Pocatello who came to make a name for themselves and live in glamour---who came because there was nowhere else to go.

Malcolm Cowley, "War in Bohemia," Exile's Return. New York: Penguin, 1951.

Frenchmen. Sixteen years separated the arrivals of the first two Frenchmen to come to the United States under the Fellowship program---and neither knew the other. After his two AFS years at Harvard Law School, Pierre Lepaulle pursued a brilliant career---his texts on comparative international law still appearing on the cursus of today's students. Maurice Pérouse, an engineer, went to MIT on the program, but then changed course and distinguished himself in high government office. During the last years of his life, Monsieur Pérouse was president of the Amis de Blérancourt and was under the illusion that he had been the first French, French Fellow.

Detailed presentations of above roster: American participants: by alphabetical order in chronological order. French participants: by alphabetical order in chronological order.