In the dreary Fall of 1930, midway between Wall Street's Great Crash and Roosevelt's Presidential campaign, 897 young men arrived in Cambridge for Freshman Registration--Harvard's Class of '34. On that day, September 19, bootleggers shot and killed a Federal revenue agent in a New Jersey brewery, Einstein submitted a paper on "Theory of Space Conceptions with Riemanian Metrics and Extended Parallelism," and U.S. Steel closed the market with 150 bid.

The weekend before, off Block Island, the Enterprise had won the American Cup Series. In the exciting new world of talking pictures, the front runner, ironically enough, was "All Quiet on the Western Front," and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. starred in "The Way of All Men." In the Times' Sunday book review section, Al Capone--The Biography of a Self-made Man was offered for sale.

While the Class of '34 lived around the Square, the Old Order's crisis deepened, and Roosevelt's New Deal burst dramatically into almost everyone's life. Politically and economically, it was an exciting era--but in Cambridge, undergraduate attention seemed to focus more on the football field than on the stock market.

The House System

Even for the many whose consciousness centered almost exclusively on Harvard, however, there was excitement. In addition to his ambitious plans for Tutorial and General Examinations, President Lowell sparked a vast building drive that centered around the Houses but extended all over the growing campus. Just as the College is entering a period of growth today--with its new theatre, visual arts center, Houses, health center, Non-Resident House, and science facilities--the early Thirties saw a flurry of dramatic construction.

The new school of Geology, the Institute of Biology, an addition to Jefferson, Wigglesworth Hall (completing the "cloistering" of the Yard), the Faculty Club, and the mammoth Indoor Athletic Building--all were under way, and some ready to be opened. But the center of attraction remained a cluster of neo-Georgian structures along the river--Lowell's new Houses. In late September, the President conducted a press tour of the newly opened Dunster and Lowell. The latter's first High Table was held soon after, and things went up from there.

But the Houses met a mixed reaction--far from the nearly unanimous approval they enjoy today. The CRIMSON wondered editorially whether the new social system might not infringe on student individuality, and the undergraduates themselves were not uniformly anxious to commit their College life to the House idea. As the months rolled on, however, one House after another was completed, and the Class of '34 became the first (in history) to spend all three of its upperclass years as members of a House system that quickly gained student respect.

Religious Distribution

Just as today, there were eager pollsters, and in their freshman year, the Class of '34 was asked to designate not only their religious faith, but also their choice of career. In striking contrast to today, a fifth were Episcopal, a sixth "Hebrew," a sixth Roman Catholic, a tenth Congregational, a tenth Presbyterian, a twelfth Methodist, and another twelfth Unitarian.

As usual, law, medicine, and business were the top trio of intended careers, with a sixth, an eighth, and an eleventh in these categories, respectively. Education followed with a seventeenth, a twenty-seventh picked engineering, and the same number chose journalism.

The biggest news of the year, to some, was the resumption of athletic relations with Princeton, except for football--after a lapse of four and a half years. And in late February, a Boston morning paper ran a story claiming that President Lowell was planning to resign--a story branded as "unsubstantiated" but before long proved correct.

Memorial Church

In a far-reaching decision that aroused considerable College controversy (and ultimately led to last year's religious squabble), the University decided to replace the old Appleton Chapel with a "War Memorial Chapel," in memory of Harvard's sons who died in the war to end all wars. Complaints fell into three main groups: first of all, the University planned to exclude the names of three Harvard sons whose loyalty was to the Central Powers and who died fighting against this country; secondly, many feared that the proposed chapel might turn out an architectural monstrosity in a Yard already cluttered with buildings; and most important, a large and vocal group, while in favor of a war memorial, stood strongly opposed to making it a chapel, especially a chapel confined to one religious tradition. Protests aside, however, Appleton came down and Memorial Church went up, its slender steeple rising 200 feet.

The only other subjects of concern in a relatively quiet year also sound vaguely familiar to more modern ears--the rising cost of attending Harvard, and the lack of adequate medical facilities. Faced with high tuition and service charges under depression conditions, many concluded that, while its President spoke about an "aristocracy of brains," Harvard was rapidly developing into an aristocracy of wealth.

In University Hall, Delmar Leighton, now Master of Dudley House, completed his first year in the newly created position of Freshman Dean, and a young man named Wilbur J. Bender was appointed Assistant Dean of the College.