The football season was disastrous, but not for lack of trying on the part of FDR's paper. Week after week, editorials urged students to get down to the field and support the team: week after week Monday morning brought columns bemoaning the previous Saturday and expressing hope for the next one. Once, Roosevelt seems to have stooped to an old Crimson devise of writing an unsigned "communication" to the paper so that he could comment editorially on his own letter. Football became an obsession for the next several years; culminating in 1907 S in a campaign to save the sport, which seemed in danger of imminent death. FDR's cousin Teddy came to the Union to express his support for the game, and the paper used his speech as the linchpin of an editorial campaign. The editors canvassed the University with postcards, and received overwhelming support for the continuation of intercollegiate competition. A petition kept at The Crimson offices got 2000 undergraduate signatures for the continuation of the sport, and President Allen W. Hinkel 'OS presented it to a meeting of the Faculty. In the end, The Crimson side prevailed, and saved the day for generations of tailgaters, sport swriters, and television football fans.
Football was an obsession of the end-of-the-century Crimson, but it did not take up every minute of an editor's time. Indeed, the foremost worry of the post-merger paper was a much simpler one--survival. The balance sheet of November, 1883, reported a deficit of $600. For the previous year, the combined balance sheet of the Herald and Crimson had shown liabilities of $3,527,95, and assets of $2,743,43. That winter, an editor recalled. "The advisability of stopping the paper was discussed." But, by June. The Daily Crimson had a surplus of all of $15, and was on its way to financial stability. In September, 1884, the price of a year's subscription was raised to $3.50, and advertising had gone up. The paper's financial position remained healthy into the new century, and, in 1904, a permanent sinking fund was established from the annual profits to be used against capital expenditures and financial setbacks.
The spirit of the paper in those decades around the turn of the century was heady. Editors were eager for bigger and more ambitious projects, and threw themselves whole-hearted into their work; it is not an accident that one biographer has quoted FDR as saying that his best training for the Presidency of the United States was the Presidency of The Crimson, for he ran the paper in a time when it rode high in the College community, when it was respected, and listened to, and when the President had more power on the paper than he ever had, before or since. From 1887 on, The Crimson became almost the official bulletin board of the University, and the Faculty used it often for all manner of official notices. In that decade, the President assumed control of the editorials, the Secretary wrote the "Fact and Rumor" column, and the Managing Editor was responsible for everything else. Thus, although the M.E. did the lion's share of the work, setting up the paper and making assignments, it was the President who guided the paper's policies, subject to the general consent of the Board. Henry James '99, President of The Crimson, wrote this description of a typical day at the paper in the December, 1899, Harvard Graduates' Magazine:
Roughly speaking, the reporting and first-draft writing is done by the candidates, who number from about forty, when a batch begins to try, to seven or eight when the most successful are elected editors. But as the poorest of them drop out or are dropped, the better ones are given more and more suggestions and assignments. If a candidate shows interest and industry, if he is accurate and reliable in writing up his news, and if he has any interest, intellectual, social, or athletic, which brings him into contact with some of the sources of College activity, he is pretty sure to be successful.
At an hour in the morning depending on the time at which he got to bed the previous evening, and also on his lectures, the Managing Editor comes to the office and begins his day's work. After a glance at his memorandum books, he is ready to make out the list of assignments.
This is the foundation of the forthcoming issue, but while laying it he is never free from interruptions. Editors come in to find out whether they are to have work given them or not, and they sit around talking and laughing and poking fun at the Managing Editor while he tries to write, and they wait. Often other officers of the board appear with something to discuss. More than one person calls with the various purpose of pointing out that an organization in which he is interested has not been given enough prominence of late...A Freshman is easy to dispose of. But if the caller is an instructor or a graduate, the task of pacifying him, of explaining the situation, or occasionally making him see that he is asking for the impossible, may be both hard and unavoidable. A familiar classmate who rides his hobbyhorse into the office is likely to be attacked bodily, and dumped into a huge waste-paper basket near the telephone box, provided enough editors are present. The most exciting of all the morning interruptions can be caused by an angry business manager, who comes waving a printer's bill for extra work.
Before lunch time the assignment list is made out and hung up, and the office can lapse into quiet until evening. Those who come to it in the afternoon come to write and to be left alone.
By half-past seven the lights are lit and the copy box begins its merciless accompaniment to the printer's sharp cry, "Carp-e-e." This box is primarily an invention for conveying manuscript from the desk to the printing room. From then on, the Managing Editor's business is to keep his head, and to see that order and reason prevails in all matters concerning