There have been 296 previous Harvard Commencements, one of which was honored by the presence of Andrew Jackson, another by that of George Washington. The distinction of today's affair is that it is by far the biggest ever. This year's exercises do not differ very much in plan from those of the first Commencement Day, which came late in August, six years after the founding of the College. During the three centuries since then only a few graduations have been cancelled, but there have been several formidable threats to the proceedings.

In 1678, for example, when Commencement used to come on the first Wednesday of July, a total eclipse of the sun caused the Corporation to set the date a week forward. It remained there for about a century. In 1764, the exercises were limited entirely on account of an outbreak of smallpox. The longest lapse of the tradition came from 1775 to 1782, when the Revolutionary War sent the College packing to Concord, and there were no Commencements at all.

Otherwise the exercises have been held every year since 1642, and although the traditional basis has been more or less the same, the tone of the festivities has varied greatly. A chronicle tells us that for the first exercises "nine Bachelours, the Governour, the Magistrates, and Ministers from all parts, with all sorts of scholars were present, and did hear their exercises. Then having dined together in Commons, they sang a Psalm and were well content." This note of austerity was lost toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, as the Harvard Commencement Day became a general State holiday.

All the shops in Boston would close, and a large percentage of Boston's population would flock to Cambridge on every kind of vehicle. One anonymous Boston poet of about 1760 wrote:

"Tag, Rag and Bob-Tail, in their best Array,

Appear there on this celebrated Day:

Thus till near Night they flock; and in a Word,

The Town's a Cage fill'd with each kind of Bird."

There were booths and sideshows on Cambridge Common; one of these in 1797 featured a talking elephant that was reputed also to be able to drink thirty bottles of porter at a sitting. The visitors and the graduating seniors came in the height of the day's fashion--embroidered waistcoats, peach-blossom coats, and powdered wigs--,and one elderly lady sat up all night in her elbow chair before the 1758 Commencement in order not to disturb the arrangement of her hair.

This sort of thing disturbed the administrators greatly, and for awhile they tried to keep the day of the exercises a secret until the last minute, but that didn't work at all. Then they passed rules saying that students had to come in sober, dark clothes, and forbidding them to consume distilled liquors or plum cake on the big day. They even had a clause against the eating of plain cake as an evasion of the law. There was nothing stopping wine or punch, however, and things went on as merrily as ever.

During the Nineteenth Century, the establishment of July 4th as a national holiday and of Class Day as the time for a last fling sobered up Commencement Day considerably. Music, dancing, and the booths on the Common disappeared, and at the same time the actual exercises became less stiff. The one Latin, two Greek, and two Hebrew disputations gradually gave way to orations in English, the first of which was given in 1763 by Jedediah Huntington, a future Revolutionary War general.

Occasionally, as last year, a note of political significance has entered the proceedings. In 1743, Samuel Adams, speaking to a Commencement Day audience that included the Governor of the Colony, said, "It is lawful to resist the chief magistrate if the state cannot otherwise be preserved," and a Harvard graduation became one of the first sounding boards for the American Revolution. Now, very much as two hundred years ago, a lot of people look to the Harvard Yard on the second Thursday of June. The dross and the libations have been diverted to other days of the year; the original austerity of the exercises remains.