But the spring of 1952 brought student energy out into the open with a new level of frenzy.

It all started when a comic strip joke got out of hand.

With 1952 an election year, a cartoonist named Walt Kelly created a character named Pogo and offered his creation as a candidate for President of the United States.

Pogo was a hit on campus. Thousands of “I GO POGO” buttons had been distributed around the Yard as part of an active campaign by students and faculty. One student had converted his dorm room into Pogo’s Harvard campaign headquarters.

Then in the early evening of Thursday, May 15, Walt Kelly came to lecture at Harvard about the phenomenal success of his invention.

Students were so riled up by the presence of the man behind Pogo that a three-hour melee ensued in Harvard Square.

From an initial gathering of 200, a crowd of thousands of students and bystanders stood out in the Square to spread the word of Pogo’s candidacy. Traffic on Mass. Ave came to a standstill.

Cambridge police came out in full force and arrested 28 students, dragging some away in police cruisers.

The story of what came to be known as the “Pogo riots” made headlines in the Boston Herald.

It was a riot “just for the hell of it,” Peterson recalls, “a spring riot over nothing of importance.”

In the aftermath, Cambridge police called for the expulsion of the riot’s instigators. Students accused the police of having been unnecessarily brutal and having used clubs to subdue the crowd. A city councillor proposed, unsuccessfully, that all students at local colleges—including Harvard and MIT—be given a nightly curfew of 9:30 p.m.

Entering the Gates

For a Class whose senior year ended with such tumult, the beginning of the Class of 1952 was unusually normal.

For the first time since before the Second World War, the 1,339 members of the Class entered the College as a single class in the fall of 1948. The war-time calendar had divided the year into three semesters to accommodate military service, but now it was discontinued.

After an influx of veterans receded, enrollment in the new class dropped. And by the end of the Class’ four-year stay the undergraduate population had normalized to pre-war lows.