Chapter V
St. Paul's struck the threequarters. Corey took his hat and put his hand on the door. He was a little drunken with fatigue.
"Don't go," said the President. "We need a title for this."
"Tomorrow night I shall give you my answer," said Corey grandly.
"Stay and proofread it with us:" Said the Managing Editor. "It's going to run blackface, across both the ed columns."
"What's the hurry?" asked Corey "Why set it up tonight?"
"Because it's got to be printed tonight."
"What!" Corey's hat fell, Quickly he picked it up. "What do you mean? The column for tomorrow is all written and sent down!"
"Who wrote it?"
"I and candidate Grupp and the Boston Herald."
The President drew on his cigarette. "I'm sorry, old man."
"Why didn't you tell the A.M.E. that you were taking the column tonight?" barked Corey.
The President thoughtfully smoked on. The Managing Editor volunteered quietly: "We didn't decide till about eight o'clock that we would have anything to say. Then I suggested that, since we were sending 400 copies on the night express to the Associated Clubs in Cleveland anyway, we might as well say something--"
Corey's lips were folded. Suddenly he burst out. "It's going to cost you twenty-eight inches of overset. Wait till tomorrow night."
"Tomorrow is Saturday," reminded the President.
"Well. Sunday night then. The alumni can take the sheet home on their last day and show our tergiversations to their families."
"This is a better paper to send to Cleveland," ventured the Managing Editor softly, watching for the President's mood. "It has a good top column baseball victory, for one thing."
The President showed simply by his silence that the discussion was closed. "We're going to take a taxi downtown and put the papers on the train," he announced agreeably after a pause. To Corey he said. "Come along, I know a new speakeasy. The taxi is on the Crimson."
Weakly Corey let his hat fall upon his desk.
"And I better take this masterpiece downstairs," said the Managing Editor, glancing at his wristwatch.
"Wait, now," said the President. "What are we going to call it?"
GEORGE WELLER'S Not to Eat, Not for Love, did for The Crimson what Erich Segal's Love Story did for Harvard hockey a generation later. The 1929 Editorial Chairman's narrative of life at Harvard gained name for its author and his subjects far outside of Cambridge. The churning out of editorials described here was part of an average day at The Crimson in the period from 1905 to 1930. Little else remained constant in this quarter century, as the paper expanded to one more column and several more inches, dropped the heavy emphasis on athletics, and took notice of the Great War by sending most of the editors to the Army, interrupting the publishing schedule for a month or so.
After the great football battle of 1907, when the proponents of the sport had prevailed, the editorial page began to turn its thought toward more academic matters. We learn from earlier histories that the paper's relations with the College administration were at a low ebb around 1906-1910, but what, if any, reaction University Hall had to such editorials as "Theses," "New Elective System," and "Age Upon Entering College" is unknown. In any case, the frequency and importance of editorials made them difficult or impossible for the President to handle on his own any more, and, in 1911 the Editorial Board was established to handle page two.
The old shaded off into the new in the years before the War, when executives still changed every half year but the paper adopted a new, more open format. Photographs became more of a rule and less of an exception, and extras were no longer confined to football results. President Eliot's retirement brought not only its best extra to date, but also its biggest scoop. Only the President, Managing Editor, Business Manager, and printers knew that the patriarch of the Augustan Age of Harvard was stepping down until the extra hit the streets. The paper also had the best word the next year on the progress of Eliot's internal struggle over whether to accept Taft's offer of appointment to the Court of St. James. Eliot stayed in Cambridge, and The Crimson had the news ahead of the Boston papers.
The death of Fabian Fall '10, the President, in the summer of 1909 shocked his contemporaries, for the young Englishman had become a popular figure in his two years at Harvard. A marble bust of Fall stood in a niche in the Sanctum of the Plympton Street building until the late Sixties, when it was removed by person or persons unknown.
The financial state of the paper was strengthened considerably by the efforts of George Gund '09, the Business Manager, whose name is now attached to the immense ziggurat which houses Harvard's Graduate School of Design. But once again, the editorial content of the paper suffered, and, in the years from 1909-1912, the growth of advertising, combined with the four-column, four-page paper, cut down severely on the amount of space which could be devoted to news and editorials. As a result, the editors of the Class of 1912 devoted their efforts to the optimal use of space. New headlines and more imaginative makeup were introduced; new features were tried; and most important, the size of the paper was increased. More six and eight pagers, and fewer fours, appeared, as the Business Board sold enough ads to make them possible. Every penny which could be set aside was put into a fund to build a permanent home for The Crimson. The quarters in the basement of the Union were unsuitable for an expanding daily paper, and the desire for a building owned exclusively by The Crimson had built up over the years since the turn of the century. The move to the Union had come after a plan to finance a Crimson building by renting dormitory space in the lower floors had fallen through.
Robert Bell Reddick's Ten Walking Tours of Cambridge dismisses the building at 14 Plympton Street in about half a sentence, giving short shrift to its "neo-Georgian" design, and saying that Lampy's castle "puts to shame the Crimson Building." Harvard's semi-official book on it own architecture, Education, Bricks, and Mortar, doesn't mention the building at all, Newspaper buildings by and large are rough, functional structures, which serve a practical daily purpose and expedite the production of their publications. Few of them win architecture awards, and none of them can approach in grandeur the Lampoon's pleasure dome. The Crimson's building has served its purpose for two generations.
THE BUILDING on Plympton Street was designed by H. H. Murdock '01 of Jardine, Hill and Murdock, New York architects. Murdock had been the driving force behind the combination dormitory newspaper, office printing plant plan which had failed in his senior year. The land on which the building was built was acquired in two steps--the first parcel by a committee of graduates and undergraduates, with Crimson money, the second through a $6000 gift from Thomas Cole, of Duluth. Minnesota, father of F. L. Cole '15, then President, Cole's gift, along with a matching sum collected from graduates, was enough to get the project underway. Groundbreaking took place in the Spring of 1915; the building was ready for occupancy by November. The Crimson Printing Company, which had shared the offices in the Union, installed itself in the Plympton Street basement; the Alumni Bulletin moved in downstairs in keeping with its long standing love of football. The Crimson issued its first number from the new building on the day of the Yale Game, November '20. A news story in the next issue made the justifiable claim that. "The ownership of its own building by the University daily sets a precedent for all other colleges and universities throughout the country." Although the building itself remained to be paid for, the Bulletin and Crimson Printing rentals made enough to meet the payments and cover takes as well.
The new Editorial Board was the most exciting thing happening at The Crimson in the new building. For the first time, late night reviews of Boston and Cambridge plays were written and run the morning after opening night. With the President no longer doing editorials singlehandedly, the paper took a sharper editorial stance. Through the Spring of 1915. The Crimson ardently opposed involvement in the First World War, a controversial but well articulated position which R.H. Stiles '16 reversed when he became President in the autumn of 1915. With the exception of "the crew scandal, in which the paper charged favoritism in the selection of the first boat, the War was the only pressing issue of the period. Enthusiasm for war combined with an ill-disguised distaste for Wilson's reelection in 1916 to produce a burgeoning campaign for entry into the conflict. The dark days of the pre-War period were frightened only by a College-wide controversy over the number of beer ads which ran in The Crimson. The editors were naturally reluctant to give up the advertisements they were paid in kind.
BEER AND POLITICS were the hallmarks of 1916 Graham B. Blame I went to St. Louis and Chicago for the party conventions, and The Crimson poll showed Harvard 1940 to 662 for Charles Evans Hughes over Wilson. Editorial neutrality was bravely preserved until the election. The next day, a headline announced.
HUGHES WON CLOSEST ELECTION IN YEARS
Followed in two days, after California came in, by
Wilser Probably Elected
It was a good year for straw polls. First the endorsement of Hughes, then in December, the announcement that "1918 Votes for Soft Drinks." A great story, but, unfortunately for The Crimson, one in which the actual results were reversed. The Class of 1918 had heartily endorsed liquor.
With Wilson back in the White House again, the war seemed further away than ever. But the editorial campaign for military training gained momentum, repeating over and over again the argument that not enough undergraduates had signed up for Military Science courses. The January straw ballot was on the subject of universal military training, and The Crimson proudly reported that 860 Harvard students favored the idea, while only 330 were opposed. Shortly after this revelation, the roar of the great Bull Moose was heard on the front page:
To the Editors of the Crimson:
I'am delighted to hear that Harvard voted for universal military service nearly three to one. If we do not prepare our giant, but soft and lazy, strength, we shall become the Clrina of the Occident, and meet the disaster we shall have richly earned. THEODORE ROOSEVELT '80
Roosevelt's letter and The Crimson's militance brought sharp criticism in the letter column, but the policies of the 1917 editors grew more hawkish until April, when war was declared. The only regret expressed it, the editorial on the declaration was the delay of a "timid" government in jumping into battle. Three inch wooden block letters announced simply "WAR" in the two middle columns. The fourth column announced that Harvard Athletics were suspended; the first that the new Hockey captain had gone to Exeter.
The War to End All Wars depleted The Crimson as well as the College Training camps sprung up to process men into soldiers, and Crimson editors volunteered in droves. Only the invalid and underaged remained within half a year after April, and the paper stumbled along with a changing staff. To the modern observer, the quality of the paper in the early part of the academic year 1917-1918 seems not too much worse than the previous year's version, but turning out a daily sheet became a tougher proposition as Harvard shrank to 60 per cent of its former enrollment. David M. Little '18, the future Secretary of the University, acted as President while stationed at the Naval Training Station in Cambridge, and reach of the rest of the stall squeezed, in work on I'm Crimson after a day of drilling. No great advances in journalism came out of The Crimson during the war years, but the fact that it survived was enough of an accomplishment. We know next to nothing about the characters and personalities of this period but the editors manifested an immense determination just to keep the paper coming out.
Tragically and ironically, one of the first casualties of the War was W. H. Meeker '17, during whose term as President the pressure for War had reached its peak. Meeker had given his life for his convictions, volunteering at the outbreak of hostilities to light for when he described as "the forces of democracy." His sad and early death was one of 15 fatalities sustained by The Crimson in the trenches of France and his name was commemorated by the dedication of a library in his honor, unveiled in the Sanctum in the Spring of 1918.
Liberty Loans, Red Cross and ROTC took up space in the paper during the War along with a suggestion that the University conserve fuel by scheduling all appointments and official functions an hour earlier. The not-quite-original idea was never implemented--another straw ballot allowed that students opposed it, 680-383--but the same effect was achieved throughout the country by the Congressional adoption Daylight Savings Time in 1918. When the draft age was lowered in the spring of 1918, the stall was even more drastically depleted, and the paper gave up publication on June.
When September arrived, the normal daily publication schedule was resumed, then abandoned on October 4 with the announcement that publication would be suspended until the end of the War. On October 24, however, with the aid of graduate editors the paper began appearing as a weekly. Even this arrangement was hard to sustain the second Acting President of the Fall had taken office, and almost all of the editors on the masthead were listed as "in Service." Only the Armistice kept operations moving, because the College had announced that a special College year would begin in January for returning veterans. The Crimson limped through December as a weekly, and reappeared in January as a daily.
THE FINAL HALF of the 1918-1919 academic year was a rebuilding period, with the Business Board gradually pulling out of the red, and the stall painfully readjusting itself to civilian life. It was nothing to compare with the long, agonizing readjustment that would follow. World War II, but the Spring of 1919 saw dozens of Crimson editors trying to reconcile the more or less carefree undergraduate life with the organized brutality they had just escaped. As the adjustments were magic, and as new blood was added to the staff, the paper gradually improved in news and editorial quality, but the first issues of that term were rarely up to pre-war standards.
The most important move of the post-war period was the decision to buy the Harvard Illustrated Magazine. Life was still 17 years in the future, and the term "photojournalism" has not yet been coined. But there was an increasing realization throughout the newspaper industry that photographs had become indispensable to a modern newspaper, and practically every Sunday paper in the country was groping its way toward the new age of photography with a rotogravure section. This particular phenomenon was more often than not an innocuous, somewhat bland showcase for less than brilliant photographs. The Harvard Illustrated was no exception. Since its beginning in 1899, it had given itself largely to posed, rather staid photographs of events at Harvard, group shots of teams and extracurricular activities, and portraits of important Harvard personages.
The absorption of the Illustrated by The Crimson provided the nucleus of what is now the Photographic Board. The Illustrated was issued bi-weekly, its photographic equipment became the property of The Crimson, and most of its editors became Crimson photographers. So, in the decade 1910-1920. The Crimson acquired its two youngest departments, the Editorial and Photographics Boards, and became essentially the modern Crimson.
Nineteen twenty was the year of the new press. A gift of $1,000 in the autumn of 1919 made the purchase possible and finally The Crimson had a bigger paper. A column wider and five inches longer, the new sheet was ready to handle the news explosion which occurred at Harvard between the wars. The editorial page, which had gone from one to two columns before the War, used its extra ten inches to take up the cudgels of a slow of new causes undreamed of before the War. Just before the new press was installed a supplement, the Bookshelf, appeared, and the Playgoer, a page of dramatic criticism made its first appearance in March 1920.
A college newspaper is rarely better than the college it covers, and no college is better than its President.
Abbot Lawrence Lowell was President of Harvard in the 1920s. He was a brilliant, capable, often inspired, vigorous, and widely respected college president. He was also vain, stubborn, bigoted, and capable of immense pettiness. Lowell sent Harvard students across the River to scab during the Boston Police strike of 1919. He served as chairman of a Commission which upheld the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti. He also expanded and developed the curriculum, upgraded the faculty, introduced order into Eliot's elective system, and conceived and constructed the House System. In the Lowell years, in turn. The Crimson seemed to reflect the nature of the complex man who was President of Harvard. Starting in the 1920's our records of The Crimson become more and more complete. The modern comment book, the auditor's notebook in which editors share messages and inspirations, dates from 1924, and from the comments which editors have written over the past half century, we get a much more intimate view of life at Harvard, and the nature of The Crimson, than we have from the bare bones records of the first half century. It is at the 51-year mark that we begin the study of The Crimson as a social institution, a cooperative effort of generations of men and women, rather than as merely a daily newspaper.
By all appearances, no great social changes took place in The Crimson in the years between War and Depression. Things seem to have gone along as well (or poorly) as ever. The new press brought an expanded paper, and the new prosperity brought an expanded Business Board. A full time accountant was put on to keep the Business Board's teeming profits in order.
The stories of the 20s tended toward the parochial. More often than not, a day's front page would be made up of rewritten news releases, reports of speeches, and other stories which required little, if any investigation. A typical set of headlines might include:
P.S. Seeley Declares
All Evil Is Unreal
Prof. Babbit Speaks of
True Liberalism
Prof. Grandgent
Advocates Spelling Reform
Dr. Angell Says Colleges Can Raise
General Level of Intelligence
The Crimson was nonetheless respected, as we see from this excerpt from the Fiftieth Anniversary Book:
It is interesting to see what others say of it: an article by Mr. John Palmer Gavit writing in the New York Evening Post of May 5, 1922, said:
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:
FACULTY AND CRIMSON ERECT GUIDE
POSTS FOR WANDERING FRESHMEN
--HARVARD DAILY WILL PRINT ARTICLES ON CONCENTRATION BY PROFESSORS
--WILL ALSO BE ISSUED IN PAMPHLET FORM
The story behind the mammoth headline added only slight details to the banner introduction.
MORE FEATURES--a regular graduate school column, more and more frequent reviews, a 1924 Campaign series written by Faculty members--cropped up in the Twenties. Punches, elaborate initiation ceremonies, dances, dinners, and pranks on the Lampoon made the decade sparkle. It took three tries to photograph the Lampy Castle with a "For Sale" sign, but, when it was done, the College was informed that the humor magazine had gone bankrupt. The 23 to 2 victory over Lampy--in baseball, football, basketball, hockey and anything else--was already a tradition; Starting in 1925, the Confidential Guide to Harvard gave the students' view of courses, and the next year, the Vagabond, who is still wandering through Cambridge meandered into the paper. Victor O. Jones, whose Notes From the Back of an Envelope graced the editorial page of the Boston Globe for decades, worked with Thomas H. Eliot, the former Chancellor of Washington University, and George Weller '29, whose thoughts on The Crimson we have already read, in making the last half of the decade the brightest period to date. News flowed in from the hard working editors and the hard-worked candidates. In November 1928, a light plane narrowly missed exterminating the Harvard Band in a freak crash on Soldiers' Field, and The Crimson duly reported the affair. One of the plane's two passengers, Gordon Cairnie, has been The Crimson's next door neighbor for many years, as proprietor of the Grolier Book Shop. When reminded of the event, and The Crimson coverage a few weeks ago, he said "It you write about it, be sure to mention the Grolier Book Shop." And so we have.
Abbott Lawrence Lowell and James Michael Curley took their share of flak from The Crimson. In both cases, it seems, the personality of the attacked was as important to the editorialists as their programs. Lowell in particular was challenged for his autocratic manner, and his seeming indifference to the College's public image. When he deigned to discuss his House Plan with the press. The Crimson found the occasion surprising enough to make it the subject of an editorial.
When George Baker, the great theatre teacher, resigned to go to the more congenial atmosphere of Yale. The Crimson rebuked Lowell's antagonism to the theatre. Taking a stand in defense of architecture purity, the paper strongly attacked the building of Memorial Church, and ridiculed Lowell's House Plan. Mr. Lowell was unconvinced.
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