Chapter VI

As far as I'm concerned, putting over The Crimson (In face of any competition which may arise) means more to me than staying in college. I shall guarantee to spend ten hours a day working on The Crimson during the next two weeks.

We've all (editors and future editors) got to show originality, ingenuity, imagination, and indefatigable energy.

Candidates and editors have got to get good men out for the next competition.

Let's make them the best competition in the history of The Crimson. It is during the first two or three weeks of a rival paper that we (by our own papers), can make or break that paper.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at its flood, leads on to fortune:

Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat:

And we must take the current when it serves.

Or lose our venture. --W.S. (S for Shaksper)

THE note was a bit fulsome: later, the author admitted that he had been drunk when he wrote it. But it marked a turning point in the affairs of The Crimson, the end of a period in which money and morale vied with each other in a race to hit bottom. This note appeared in a comment book in the Spring of 1934, the day before. The Crimson's first serious competition in decades was to hit the stands--a newspaper founded and staffed by ex-Crimson editors. This civil war followed a period in which the Depression wiped out The Crimson's business board, and came at a time when no two editors seemed to be on speaking terms with each other. To the outsider, forty years away, it is a mild surprise that the paper got through the Thirties.

The Thirties, of course, were a bad decade for the world; for The Crimson the Thirties brought disasters trooping along one after the other. But, whereas for the rest of the world the Thirties began in October of 1929 on the day the Market crashed, a reader of Cambridge's Breakfast Table Daily would have learned little about the state of Wall Street from his newspaper. The Crimson of the period saved most of its strength for the ongoing fight against the House Plan, a fight which spilled over from the Twenties into the Thirties, diminished from a frontal assault to a guerrilla action. By 1929, the Houses were starting to rise, and it was obvious that the battle was at an end. The Crimson published a series of conciliatory, articles, including an interview with the first two House Masters. Julian Coolidge of Lowell and Chester Greenough of Dunster, in which the new administrators assured undergraduates that students and tutors would be served the same food "by the same waitresses," and that formal attire would not be required at dinner. Nonetheless, when opportunity presented itself, the temptation to snipe, was irresistible. In January, 1930, the front page displayed an interview with Professor R.E. Rogers '09, who declared "It is my belief that the Harvard House Plan is the result of the despairing conviction that the college is disintegrating." Mr. Rogers, The Crimson explained, believed that fraternities were the answer to the college's social problems.

One of the last and most effective jibes at Mr. Lowell's pet plan was the editorial "Putting on English" which took Lowell and Coolidge to task for their Anglophilia. After the first High Table at Lowell House, at which tutors in evening dress looked down over a Dining Hall filled with students, the lights failed several times and the undergraduates were served three quarters of an hour late, the news writer and the editorialist went to town. But the paper also editorially lauded the choice of house staffs, and reached an accord with the Administration on the House Plan. When the list of the first students admitted to Lowell and Dunster was published, the names of several Crimson editors were conspicuously present.

1929-1930 saw The Crimson covering the arrest of a group of Harvard students after a riot on a subway car bringing them back from a Boston hockey game, and the arrest of a Harvard student for passing out socialist literature in Harvard Square. The latter, the paper noted, stood trial in Cambridge Court after "One Irishman, one Italian, and one hybrid" had been convicted of drunkenness. Later in the year, a headline told Harvard: "Director of Fogg Art Museum Receives Threatening Letters Denouncing Late Purchase of Paintings--Suspect Black Hand."