In late spring, 1500 students attended a hoax lecture on birth control. But the term wasn't over yet. There was still time for another riot.
And it was a good one. Early one evening a seemingly innocuous water fight along Plympton Street drew together a few stragglers; by 11:30 p.m. a good-sized crowd had gathered. Another twenty minutes gave the disturbance time to swell to major proportions. By midnight 2,500 students filled the Square. After the crowd had crippled three trolley cars by disconnecting their power lines, the police moved in with tear gas, a tactic not to be repeated for over twenty years. But the patrolmen's efforts failed. About 1500 students fought their way up to Radcliffe, where they milled about yelling and hooting for most of the night.
For the Class of 1939 junior year was against serving rum punch to freshman, and actress Joan Bennet, on a visit to Boston, recommended movie careers to a charmed circle of Harvard men.
The athletic year was more eventful. Members of the Class of 1939 had beefed up the varsity, and The Crimson rolled over Princeton, 34-6. The team then beat Yale, 13-6, in rain and snow, when Frank Foley scored a tie-breaking touchdown.
Hurricane
When the class returned as seniors in the fall of 1938, they were greeted by the damage from one of New England's most violent hurricanes. Harvard suffered $100,000 of damage but tree-lovers (whose sons and daughters today carry on the tradition) were most alarmed by the demise of nine stately elms that were flattened along Memorial Drive outside Eliot House.
Politics caused an increasing storm as well. A Czech professor speaking to an SRO crowd in Sanders denounced the Munich Pact as offering no real peace. Five days later, an exuberant group of Yardlings heckled an American Legion parade by goosestepping alongside it, shouting "hells."
On the gridiron, the Varsity, after lying dormant for its first four games, came back to squash Princeton, 26-7, sneak by Yale, 7-0, and carry off Big Three honors for the second straight year.
In March of 1939 a dining hall strike was averted when the University agreed to grant a preferential shop to employees. The Administration's willingness to allow unionization and to increase wages saved undergraduates from being forced to eat the Square's cuisine.
The big news of the spring term was the sustained attack on the tutoring schools. The CRIMSON initiated the campaign charging that the tutoring schools were an organized vice racket which violated ethics of the University. Its front page editorial began "Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels." The paper denounced the "cram parlors" and called for the Administration to "force the lids off the sewer holes, to shine the light of day on the putrefaction within." Within three years all the tutoring schools were closed.
Class Marshals for '39 were Richard H. Sullivan, Robert L. Green, and Francis A. Harding. They led their classmates into the Yard in June where all collected their degrees, joined the fellowship of educated men, and headed out into the world.
Walter Jackson Bate, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities, won the Bowdoin Prize in 1939 for an essay on Keats's conception of the poetical character which later grew into a full biography of Keats that won the Pulitzer Prize this year. Robert Lowell, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is also a member of the class.
Members of the class gained renown both in college and in later life. Among these are Richard H. Sullivan, First Class Marshal, who now is president of Reed College; James Tobin, first marshal of Phi Beta Kappa, who is a professor of economics at Yale and a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors; and Cleveland Amory, president of the CRIMSON and secretary of his class, who wrote The Proper Bostonians and is a commentator on American social life