The Harvard Crimson--a very fine and high-grade expression of the best student sentiment--has great influence and deserves to have it. Twice, upon entering the dean's office early in the morning. I found that day's Crimson on his desk, with an editorial marked: each time the editorial made suggestions for bettering administrative methods, and each time the suggestion was complied with. I saw the editorials of the Crimson voicing the growing movement for reform in intercollegiate athletics pounding their way, day after day, by sheer sanity and force, into the public opinion of the college, both faculty and students.

Harvard news began to be more interesting and the reporting of it more challenging, in the mid-20s. One bright spot was The Crimson's coverage of the arrest of H.L. Mencken in Boston for selling the April 1926 issue of The American Mercury. Mencken gave The Crimson an interview and lashed out at the Watch and Ward Society leader who had engineered his arrest. The 1927 "riot" in the Square, a police-instigated incident which embroiled the City and University in controversy, received several feet of column space in the Spring of 1927, including an extra story with one of the longest lead sentences in the paper's career.

The 39 Harvard students, including alleged rioters and onlookers, who were arrested in the Square early Saturday morning when a police call for aid was turned in following a disturbance cause by the curiosity of an after-theatre crowd in the arrest of two inebriates, will be arraigned in the Third District Court next Friday before Judge Robert Walcott...

Several of the students had suffered severe injuries: according to The Crimson report, the police had arrested quixotically, and applied their nightsticks at random. Among the arrested were a Somerville clerk who was making a bus transfer in the Square when a police van passed by; two students were picked up on Holyoke Street, several blocks from the "riot" in front of the University Theatre, by a passing Black Maria; one student had his nose broken and face lacerated by a policeman attempting to knock a pipe from his mouth.

These were the old days of Harvard-Cambridge relations; President Lowell responded to the altercation by summoning four Cambridge policemen and ordering them to resign. When they refused, the paper reports, he took his demand to the Chief of Police. After complicated legal wranglings, the case died in April when those arrested pleaded nolo contendere. What happens seems to have been a clear infringement of the civil rights of the students involved, but The Crimson records no legal action taken against the police involved.

The other big story of Spring 1927 was the resignation of Chester Noyes Greenough as dean of Harvard College, and his replacement by A. Chester Hanford. The Crimson broke its tight, single column format to give the resignation a three column banner head. Huge (by contemporary standards) double column photographs of the incoming and outgoing deans adorned the page.

The editors of the period were intensely concerned with the quality of their product. Every day's paper was dissected in the comment book, with praise, humor and declamation in equal measures. Wayward editors were presented with such reproofs as:

Did Miss Strong really say "John Reed '10 will go down" etc? Russian history may record the deeds of John Reed, but I doubt if they will ever set aside a holiday as John Reed '10's birthday. (Or is it John Reed's '10 birthday?)

or:

An interesting paper--for anybody who didn't read the Sunday Herald.

or:

In regard to the story in regard to The Crimson having misquoted the instructor whose name shall be nameless, don't you think this brings up the question of "newspaper ethics" which has almost been lost sight of in our campaign for live and startling news? In the past year there is hardly a member of the faculty who has not been misquoted in some way or another. I know, because I've done it myself.

The editors were enjoined to political neutrality in the 1924 campaign, with the simple statement:

If we must hit LaFollete, let's hit Coolidge and Davis too, and give equal space to the three funerals.

The constant struggle to improve the paper in the 1920s brought about not by competition but by a new and more serious interest in journalism, brought The Crimson into closer cooperation with the College authorities. One three column headline announced: