Along about 1939 or 1940 the Federal government became interested in the CRIMSON from the standpoint of corporation taxes. Courteous but curious Internal Revenue agents wrote to the paper's president and business manager, requesting them to outline its legal and executive structure so that the Bureau would know what taxes to impose and which people to see about them.

Forced to think about the paper's legal status and executive hierarchy for the first time, the president and business manager rushed about frantically trying to gather a coherent report on how the CRIMSON functioned. Finally someone suggested that the T-men be sent a copy of the paper's constitution and told to puzzle it out for themselves. This idea rode high until an editor remembered that there happened to be only a single copy of the constitution, and that that copy was pasted into an ancient scrapbook in which all editors since 1904, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and James B. Conant, have signed their names.

This difficulty was solved by having a team of editors make a duplicate copy of the constitution. Then the whole, hopelessly-complex mess, with its amended provisions about car-fare money for the hockey reporter and fines for negligence, was packed up with all other slightly pertinent CRIMSONIANA and sent off to Washington.

Nothing has been heard of the matter since.

The fact that the paper's editors were just as baffled by its set-up as the Bureau of Internal Revenue will come as no surprise to any past or present Crimed. As one editor put it, "The CRIMSON is an amazingly complex operation run in an amazingly hap-hazard way which results in an amazingly successful newspaper."

The whole nasty, hap-hazard business started on January 24, 1873, when a group of juniors produced the first issue of a semi-weekly journal called "The Magenta" (it became The CRIMSON two years later when the College's official color was changed). The tiny, 8 x 10 inch Magenta was primarily a literary magazine which relied heavily on the essay and ran about two poems per issue. It did print College news, however, and in 1878 added an athletic column and a "sporting editor."

The early CRIMSON had lots of competition; the Advocate, then a semi-weekly newsmagazine like the Crime, the daily "Harvard Echo," and the Daily Herald. In October 1883 the Crime and the Herald joined forces to emerge as the Herald-Crimson, then the Daily Crimson, and finally, in 1891, the plain-ole CRIMSON.

The publication resulting from the merger was slightly larger than the old CRIMSON and usually four pages. The left hand column of the front page was devoted to advertising. The rest of the front page was given over to regular news and sports items, all arranged under identical one-column headlines which read "Football Today at 3," "Results of Class Elections," and so forth.

Sports news played a very large part in the paper of the Gay '90's, Accounts of the daily football practice were invariably given the best spot in the paper, and slight jugglings in the jayvee crew boatings were big news. Early CRIMSON writers were much franker in their criticism of teams than today's timid journalists. Specific players were singled out for uncomplimentary comment: "Simmons will just have to try harder. . .Stokes still waits too long on the recovery. . .Charlton refuses to charge ground balls" are typical examples. There was a lot of talk about overemphasis of sports, but in 1893 the paper published a series giving a recapitulation of Harvard's encounter with Yale in every major sport for the past five years.

But all was not quite so rugged. The paper also printed a monthly supplement which eventually split off from the Crime and lived for a good number of years as the Harvard Monthly, a competitor of the Advocate.

A member of the '86 staff says that the paper of those days should be thought of rather as a social club than as a disciplined board. In the following year the joyous journalists wrote a CRIMSON song destined to last into the 20's. The chorus went:

This is the Daily Crimson

That now is at the head

Of all the College Publications

Because it's always re(a)d.