Truly, this is an amazing world. When in the starlit heaven the majesty of the sun comes and goes the great men of the earth step forth into the unnatural darkness and reveal themselves in their own true light. Coolidge the President, Coolidge the "strong silent man," of the White House, Coolidge the Sphinx become a critic of fashion! It doubtless took all of that sophisticated air so carefully nurtured in Old Nassau to keep the jaws of the three Princeton men from gaping wide when President Coolidge objected to the cut and width of their trousers.
President Wilson would have known better. As head of the University he might have objected to clubs, but to trousers, never! Nor would he have brought himself so close to the old, old witticism as to suggest (even very delicately) a pair of suspenders to keep up the trousers of his Princeton callers.
Had President Coolidge graduated from good old Siwash out on the plains where men begin to be men, he might be pardoned for a certain old fashioned prejudice at Eastern innovations. But being a New Englander he must know that flapping trousers are a heritage of the sea; if they penetrate to the inlands of jersey it must be either that they are beautiful or that the sailor sons of sailing fathers cooped up far from shore satisfy in this way their insatiable New England longing for the ocean wave. In any case, President Coolidge is wrong; he must have a dark and subtle purpose in his mind. A Mussolini of fashion, another critic of lipstick and rolled stocking, a self-appointed censor of the beaches--who knows? That in the face of this sinister warning of a fell future purpose the Princeton men bravely declared that such trousers as theirs "were the thing among college men" is a theme for epic and song. May their heroic action not go unrecognized.
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M. A. C. Beats Green