It was not supposed to succeed. All of its predecessors had failed. The Faculty and administration were resistant to both its founding and its survival. The Depression nearly wiped it off the books. Two world wars robbed it of staff. And its politics drew the contempt of a nation.

But the determination of the 10 men who founded what was then called The Magenta remained with the paper through these travails, allowing it to beat out competition, win over the administration, scoop the nation and survive as Cambridge's Breakfast Table Daily.

Founding and First Decades

The Magenta's first president, Henry A. Clark, class of 1874, later recalled in a history of The Crimson that the Dean of the College was not too keen on the idea of a student newspaper at Harvard.

"[He] expressed strong disapproval. I asked him whether the carrying out of the plan was officially forbidden. He said no, but that he wished us to understand that he thought the project very ill-advised. I reported what had taken place to the promoters, who decided to go ahead, notwithstanding the Dean's advice to the contrary," Clark later wrote.

Previously the Faculty had closed down several newspapers that had dared to take a critical view of College policies. Ten years ago it might have banned the new publication outright, but now it held itself to a mild expression of outrage.

And so the earliest version of today's Crimson was born on Jan. 24, 1873, publishing as a bi-weekly under "The Magenta" banner. (The paper changed its name two years later when the College changed its color.) It was a thin layer of editorial content surrounded by a thinner layer of advertising. It barely scraped through the 70s, sometimes requiring its editors to pay for the printing costs themselves. But at the beginning of the 1880s it found itself on more solid financial footing.

The editors of the next decade were anxious to make The Crimson more of a newspaper, and they sought in 1882 to merge with The Advocate. The Advocate rejected the proposal by one vote, leaving The Crimson to take independent action.

It became a weekly, and as it watched two daily papers, The Harvard Daily Herald and The Harvard Echo, compete, Crimson editors found themselves anxious to get into the fray of daily journalism.

The Echo failed after one term, leaving The Herald as the champion of daily news--but deeply in debt after the struggle. Its board voted to present a merger proposal to The Crimson, which eagerly accepted. Four days after Herald editors conceived of the idea, Harvard readers found themselves reading one daily paper, The Herald-Crimson, which would one year later change its name back to The Crimson.

Over the next two decades The Crimson made athletics an editorial priority, bemoaning the lack of participation in the early part of the century and forming its own teams. After the merger, the paper began to see fewer extras, but the sports board turned the trend around. The Crimson had post-game extras on the street just minutes after the game was over. When football seemed on the brink of demise, The Crimson ran an aggressive editorial, petition, and donation drive to save the sport in 1907.

During this period The Crimson struggled to keep afloat financially, but its position on campus was unparalleled. 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 time, 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 managing editor 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 executive board. Henry James, class of 1899 and a former 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.