The last time Harvard and Yale met together on a field called Soldier's to play football it was November, 1941, and Pearl Harbor stood in the wings waiting for her December cue. In a sense, that game was a capstone of the Years Between the Wars, of the World as it Used to Be. Before the war engulfed them both, the two schools played one more, as anti-climactic as the other had been a climax, the last gasp of a world that was already dying. Taht year an underdog Crimson eleven saw an upset victory over Yale slip from its fingers in the cold drizzling rain and gathering drakness of the Yale Bowl. That contest was four years and a whole world away from the game this afternoon.
Somehow, knowing that the ancient feud has been renewed with all its tradition-hoaried trappings furnishes a sense of continuity with the world that went before which is strangely comforting. But a sense of the past can only reassure and strengthen when it is reinforced by a faith in the present. If the Harvard-Yale game means we have merely "returned to normalcy", then it has ceased to have any real meaning. Fortunately, for both schools, their return to normalcy has not meant a reversion to the collegiate days of F. Scott Fitzgerald or even of the thirties.
For however temporary the phenomenon, it is nevertheless true that under the impetus of the war-born Bill of Rights higher education in America has for the first time become genuinely democratic. For one single, brief instant of our history, the chance at a Harvard or a Yale education has suddenly ceased to depend on the financial resources of one's father. Much has been made in the sports columns of the nation of the appearance for the first time on a Yale varsity eleven of a Negro player and of the number of men on both teams whose names are not Anglo-Saxon. Such an occurrence has a significance that makes any joke or tolerant smile on the subject seem jejeune and slightly sour. For the social flux which is going on in both schools and which is symbolized by the change in make-up of their football teams is packed tight with meaning and significance. Far from being a cause for misplaced humor, it is perhaps the most exciting thing that has happened to either school in this century.
What the enduring meaning this development will have for either Harvard or Yale cannot be foretold today. What remains, supremely here and now, is the game. The holy of holies, which is Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage, and David and Golish all rolled into one, has been resumed. May it never again be interrupted.
