Baker Goes to Yale
All this warning went to no avail and on November 26 it was announced that Baker had resigned to accept a position as director of a Yale Drama School to be set up with the gift of a million dollars from E. S. Harkness, a gift which probably had also been offered to Harvard and turned down. The reaction was immediate and indignant. The CRIMSON wrote a vituperative editorial which laid the blame for Baker's resignation squarely at the feet of the President and Overseers and their "shameful neglect" of Baker. "Their guilt must not go unnoticed," the editorial declared, "Not in years has there been such a justified need for an outburst of indignation from every Harvard man against the powers that be in the University."
Reaction outside the University was just as strong. Heywood Broun '10 wrote in the New York World "Harvard fumbles; Yale recovers." Elsewhere ran the headline: "Yale 47-Harvard 0."
Reaction from the alumni was the strongest of all. One representative alumnus wrote to the CRIMSON declaring that Harvard's decision to go ahead with the Business School and ignore the theater means that "money and moneymakers are controlling Harvard policy, that the University is being run by merchants for the benefit of those who aspire to be merchants" and that it is these who are behind "this crass and painful blow at the Arts and the Drama."
Much of this bitterness was beamed at President A. Lawrence Lowell. Lowell was accused of a personal animus towards Baker, but he hastily denied it. "This was not a matter of personal feeling at all; we just felt that the enthusiasm for the drama here at Harvard might very well be enthusiasm for Baker, and that if we spent $700,000 on a theater we might be left with another white elephant like Memorial Hall when Baker was no longer here. We didn't want him to go, but we did hope he would stay on our terms. We hoped he would go on using the facilities at hand until he was ready to retire."
State of Shock
For a few years after Baker's departure Harvard theater was in a state of shock and relatively inactive. Then in 1928, the HDC and the Liberal Union began sounding out student opinion and discovered considerable interest in reviving a study of playwrighting and producing. Reporting this to the administration, they received an altogether unsympathetic reply. It was then that the HDC conceived the idea of an appeal to the literally hundreds of Baker Workshop and other Harvard alumni already active in professional theater.
The American stage in the 1920's and '30's was if not dominated then certainly permeated by Harvard graduates. A partial list of the best known include playwrights Owen Davis '94, Percy McKaye '97, Hermann Hagerdorn '07, Edward Sheldon '03, Sidney Howard, Sp '14-'15, Eugene O'Neill, Sp '14-'15, S. N. Behrman '16, Robert E. Sherwood '18, Philip Barry Gr '19-'20; critics H. T. Parker '90, Van Wyck Brooks '08, Heywood Broun '10, Kenneth Macgowan '11, Robert Benchley '12, Brooks Atkinson '18 and John Mason Brown '23; designers Lee Simonson '09, Robert Edmund Junes '10 and Donald Oenslager '23; actors and actresses Walter Hampden '97, Osgood Perkins '14 and Dorothy Sands; and producers Winthrop Ames '95, Maurice Werthheim '06, George Abbot '12, Richard Aldrich '27 and Theresa Hilburn.
Leaders of the HDC went to New York in 1929, held six conferences with alumni there and returned with promises of full financial support and active participation. Thus it happened that in February 1930 the Cambridge School of the Drama opened with an enrollment of 65. The school had no official connection with the University, although three quarters of its students were also undergraduates at either Harvard or Radcliffe. The administration was entirely in the hands of an alumni board of governors, including Simonson, Abbott, Davis, Macgowan, Jones, Wertheim and Ames. These men formed a visiting faculty which supplemented the permanent staff by coming to Cambridge periodically, when their professional duties allowed, to give lecture series and work with students on productions. This system seemed to strike the perfect balance between the professional and the academic, and there was much optimism about the school's prospects. But it ran for only two years and then folded for lack of financial support. Rumors circulated that the University would have agreed to take over the school had it been a success.
'Golden Age' Ends
With the death of the Cambridge School in 1932 ended the "Golden Age" of theater at Harvard. Fortunately, though, the HDC and other dramatic groups were still enough alive to continue the College's dramatic heritage. The strongest, of course, was the HDC. In the club's early years, it stuck to the policy of producing only plays written by students or recent graduates; but after the first World War HDC decided that it could not compete with the Workshop in this field and went on a new tack. In the next two decades HDC devoted itself almost exclusively to giving American premieres to foreign playwrights, a policy which attracted considerable interest in its productions. Among the foreign writers to whom HDC gave first American productions were Maeterlinck, Guitry, Galsworthy, Cocteau, and A. A. Milne. The club also went out of its way to produce unusual native plays like John Dos Passos' The Moon is a Gong in 1925 and Auden and Isherwood's Dog Beneath the Skin in 1936. During this time the HDC had no theater to work with, moving its productions all over the area from Sanders and Brattle Hall to Worcester's Horticultural Hall and the Boston Academy of Music. But perhaps the most unique setting was the hall of the Germanic Museum where HDC gave 10 striking Christmas miracle plays during the 1930's.
World War II, of course, disrupted dramatic activity at the College, but the war indirectly gave birth to the finest theater group here in the last two decades--the Harvard Veterans Workshop. Back from the wars in 1947 came a group of talented, ambitious students who already had done considerable work in profession-