The First 100 Years

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.

This is the foundation of the forth-coming issue, but while laying it he is never free from interruptions. Editors come in to find out whether they are to have work given to them or not, and they sit around talking and laughing and poking fun at the managing editor while he tries to write, and they wait. Often other officers of the board appear with something to discuss. More than one person calls with the various purpose of pointing out that an organization in which he is interested has not been given enough prominence of late...A freshman is easy to dispose of. But if the caller is an instructor or a graduate the task of pacifying him, of explaining the situation, or occasionally making him see that he is asking for the impossible may be both hard and unavoidable. A familiar class-mate who rides his hobby horse into the office is likely to be attacked bodily, and dumped into a huge waste paper basket near the telephone box, provided enough editors are present. The most exciting of all the morning interruptions can be caused by an angry business manager, who comes waving a printer's bill for extra work.

Before lunch time the assignment list is made out and hung up, and the office can lapse into quiet until evening. Those who come to it in the afternoon come to write and to be left alone.

By half-past seven the lights are lit and the copy box begins its merciless accompaniment to the printer's sharp cry, "Carp-e-e." This box is primarily an invention for conveying manuscript from the desk to the printing room. From then on, the managing editor's business is to keep his head and to see that order and reason prevails in all matters concerning the paper and himself. Candidates come in with botched stories and wonderful excuses. All have to be attended to and set on the straight path promptly. Editors must need be coaxed into getting down to their work, and then persuaded to keep at it until they are finished. Newspaper correspondents arrive and put the unvarying question, "Is there anything tonight?" and then leave for the time being, or else go to their side room to work according to the answer given by the managing editor....More interesting but less common are interruptions caused by the president of the board when he has some editorial question which he cannot settle alone. Indeed, so many and so various are the things which occur on a busy evening that one might say that the time which the managing editor can rescue from interruptions is none too much for the work of editing copy for the printers.

Little by little, as the hours wear on, the hurry and worry lessen, and the office becomes quieter and emptier, until only the proofreader remains for company. Finally the managing editor has nothing to do but to sit back in his chair and keep awake until he has been called up by the Associated Press, and the printers have told him that the paper is full and all is well.

The managing editor of today no longer has the superhuman responsibilities of his predecessor, and the copy box has been replaced by wires and networking. Nobody yells "Carp-e-e," although choicer epithets are often used for a dilatory night editor. The practice of releasing unpublished stories to the public press, which had already been suspended once James wrote his article, died a natural death from old age somewhere in the 1920s or 1930s, its grave unmarked. But candidates still botch stories and give "wonderful excuses," and the flavor of a real newspaper is still there.

During the 1890s, the paper devoted itself to sports and talked respectable Republicanism, because this was what the College wanted. In 1896 the paper urged the whole College to turn out for the Republican parade in Boston. The day after the parades, the paper published its first editorial against police brutality, complaining of the treatment of some Harvard students by the constabulary.

Into this picture walked the Harvard Daily News to compete with The Crimson in 1895. A price war ensued, as well as an increase in Crimson quality, before the Daily News capitulated.

The Turn of the Century

After the great football battle of 1907, editorials turned their thoughts toward more academic matters, and while relations with the College administration were at a low ebb between 1906 and 1910, an editorial board was established in 1911 to handle the increased frequency and importance of pieces.

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 paper was shocked out of its success when Fabian Fall '10 became the only Crimson president to commit suicide while in office.

During that period the financial state of the paper was strong under the leadership of George Gund '09, the businessmanager for whom the Graduate School of Design'sbuilding is named.

After moving around Cambridge since itsfounding, a successful financial campaign broughtThe Crimson out of the basement of the FreshmanUnion (now the Barker Center for the Humanities)to rest at 14 Plympton St.

Through the spring of 1915 The Crimson ardentlyopposed involvement in the First World War. Later,the president reversed the paper's opinion, andthe paper encouraged students to take MilitaryScience courses. When a straw poll showed 70percent of the campus favored them, PresidentTheodore Roosevelt, class of 1880, responded witha letter to the paper, applauding the College'scommitment to "prepare our giant, but soft andlazy, strength."

The declaration of war in 1917 reduced TheCrimson to its knees as it struggled to put out adaily paper with a fraction of its previous staff.Former Crimson President W. H. Meeker '17 led thepaper's pressure for war, and was one of the 15editors who died in the trenches of France. Thepaper stopped publishing on June 7, 1918, butcontinued in the fall as a weekly, published bygraduate students. In January it returned to adaily schedule, and the business board slowlybegan to pull the paper out of the red.

Between the Wars

The Crimson's most important move of thepost-war period was the decision to buy theHarvard Illustrated Magazine. The term"photojournalism" had not yet been coined, butthere was an increasing realization throughout thenewspaper industry that photographs had becomeindispensable to a modern newspaper andpractically every Sunday paper in the country wasgroping its way toward the new age of photographywith a rotogravure section. The bi-weeklyIllustrated contained bland photos of posed shots,but it was the beginning of what is now thephotography board, and with that the modernCrimson was born.

Coverage during the early twenties consistedmostly of rewritten press releases but graduallyimproved as the decade progressed. High pointsincluded an interview with H. L. Mencken, thepolice-instigated "riot of 1927," in which severalHarvard students were assaulted by Cambridgepolice, and a plane crash that nearly exterminatedthe Harvard Band on Soldiers Field.

News at the turn of the decade includedstudents arrested for rioting after a hockey gameand for passing out socialist literature, aprofessor's prediction that Fascism would nevertake hold in Germany, and the prohibition ofRadcliffe women from taking part in a Harvardtheatrical production. When The Crimson ran aneditorial criticizing the drunken carrying-on ofthe American Legion convention in Boston, itbrought the wrath of a nation--and scatteredapplause--on the paper. And for a time, TheCrimson entered the photo-developing business oncampus.

Abbot Lawrence Lowell, class of 1877, wasHarvard's president during the 1920s, and TheCrimson's editorial page made his policies--andautocratic personality--the focus of many acritical comment. His Plans to build MemorialChurch and institute the House Plan met withvigorous Crimson opposition. The anti-MemorialChurch editorial was picked up by the Boston andNew York papers, which seemed incensed that acollege paper would oppose a war memorial. Thiswas the last great campaign before The Crimsonsettled in for several of its worst years.

As the decade aged, morale at the paper--andits quality--settled to an all-time low. Open bookcomments were no longer couched in humor. Instead,disgruntled editors wrote comments such as "God! Inever saw a paper with less news". The financialsituation of the paper did not help the mood atthe paper. During one dismal year, The Crimsonlost $500 and saw a business manager resign indespair.

The academic year 1932-33 ended with thefollowing letter from a College official:

"I am wondering if The Crimson is very proud ofits handling of the epidemic story this morning.The headline states that there was "No OfficialWord About Epidemic in Freshman Class". Actually,there were about 180 'official words', and I gavethem to you myself."

The follow September there was a new dedicationto accuracy and increased coverage. By December,the gains started to slip, and the enthusiasticnews-hounds insisted that the paper be expanded tosix pages. The business board, which at that pointwas still rebuilding, smelled disaster and giantlosses in an enlarged paper. The board rounded upenough votes in the winter executive elections toelect their candidates.

For the second time in Crimson history, war wasdeclared.

Eleven editors left to found their own paper,The Harvard Journal, which gave The Crimson theonly tough fight in its history. The Journal hadthe staff, but The Crimson had the facilities, thebusiness contacts, the tradition--and the edge.

The battle was neck and neck for a few weeks,but the end of the fight was predictable; when theyear ended, so did The Journal. Its editors lostmoney, sleep and study time in their struggle toset up and run a new paper.

The short-lived challenge did wonders for thestruggling Crimson. The Crimson of June 1934 wasinestimably better than its namesake of a fewmonths before.

With the threat beaten back, The Crimson turnedto cover the news of the University, whichincluded a tenure controversy prompted theUniversity to establish standardized promotion andtenure procedures.

The paper also began a campaign againsttutoring schools--institutions dedicated to makingmoney from the laziness and lack of dedication ofHarvard students. It lost six cents in a libelsuit to one of the schools, but after a vehementeditorial campaign and dropping theiradvertisements, the College outlawed their use in1939.

The Tercentenary of Harvard College was markedwith a series of thick, lavishly illustratedpapers detailing the pyrotechnics of thecelebration. On the whole, The Crimson's job onthe Tercentenary could stand up to any othercoverage.

The last major structural change at The Crimsonrevamped the election process: executives would beelected in the fall of their Junior year, takeoffice in February, and leave office in January oftheir Senior year. No longer would editors worktheir way up the ladder of assistant managingeditor, managing editor and president, changingjobs each semester.

Also in 1940, the Crimson Network, a whollyowned subsidiary which broadcast Crimson newsthrough the College, was founded by severaleditors with $400 of the paper's money. Thepredecessor of WHRB soon separated from itsparent, for lack of common interests.

WWII and Its Cold Aftermath

In 1940, the specter of war could no longer beignored, and The Crimson urged preparations. Theissue announcing the bombing of Pearl Harborcarried a 5:11 a.m. time slug. The paper hadstayed open until the last possible minute to getthe latest bulletins.

The University ran a summer term in 1942, andThe Crimson ran a summer paper, publishing threedays a week. As its own contribution to the wareffort, The Crimson gave the nation its fence--tobe melted down for ammunition.

The Crimson published its own 70th birthdaycommemorative edition that year. Within a fewmonths, it would publish its last issue of theregular paper until almost a year after the warwas over.

The Crimson dawned its uniform on Friday, May14, 1943. It would carry the "Harvard ServiceNews" banner until nearly a year after the war'send.

The new paper had a very different tone.

Although The Crimson of 1942 had editoriallyinveighed against the scandalous treatment ofJapanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, the ServiceNews had fewer scruples. "Japs Planned Death ofGrew, Charlie Chaplin," read the headline of astory on Ambassador's Grew's allegations. Atleast, Grew believed it, and the Service Newsbelieved Grew.

This kind of copy was one of the reasons whythe Graduate Board decided not to empower theService News to editorialize. Instead, the paperwas administered during the war by a board thatconsisted of David M. Little '18, master of AdamsHouse and secretary of the University, Anna Hoke,the paper's accountant, Donald T. Field '31 andThomas S. Kuhn '44.

In short, the paper was run like a patrioticversion of The Gazette.

As the war drew to a close, the paper coveredmore news of the College. General Education andthe development of President James B. Conant'sideas on American education were big storiesduring the 1943-45 school year, and the ServiceNews covered them extensively.

The Crimson reappeared in 1946, but thefinancial rebirth was more difficult to achieve.The trustees absorbed the Service News' debt, butthe building needed renovation and a new heatingsystem. It managed to pull through in time togreet McCarthyism and the most intriguing time ofThe Crimson's history.

A shameless publicity hound, Senator JoeMcCarthy picked victims whose prominence wouldassure him widespread coverage--and Harvard was aperfect target. For several years, McCarthy madeHarvard and Harvard professors his whipping boys.

The Crimson provided comprehensive coverage ofthe Senator's three-ring circus.

In the face of academic which-hunts, TheCrimson offered the best editorial advice it couldgive:

"The alarmists are right only in that there ismuch to fear today. But if the academic world wereto grant the conclusion that there is little or nohope, the baleful predictions might well cometrue. When more universities reject self pity andtake instead a forthright stand against eachunfounded attack, the education can match in itsown defense that spirit of progress and initiativewhich has marked its advance in every otherintellectual endeavor."

Although it began its opposition to theWisconsin Senator uncertainly, the paper soonpicked up steam in its defense of academicfreedom, and served as a forum for renownedMcCarthy foes. In bringing the truth to theHarvard community, and in showing that others werestanding up to the threat, The Crimson saved themorale of a University under siege.

McCarthy ranted, and students were arrested andbeaten by the carload in the "Pogo riots," whencartoonist Walt Kelly arrived in Cambridge for a1952 speech about his creation. A number ofCrimson editors landed in jail, in what would bethe first of several times in the next two decadeswhen the Middlesex County Jail would serve as amotel for Harvard students.

Relations with Massachusetts Hall were strainedby the 1958 controversy over Memorial Church, whenThe Crimson ran a campaign to have the edificeopened for services of every denomination, andFaculty members took up the banner and marchedwith it to the President's door. In the end, thechurch dropped its Christians-only policy.

President Pusey and The Crimson were back onspeaking terms by 1959, when the President madehis decision to suspend Harvard's use of fundsauthorized by the National Defense Education Act.The government monies, which provided a largeamount of loan funds and outright grants everyyear, came with long and binding strings attached.Every recipient was required not only to sign aloyalty oath but also to sign a document attestingthat the beneficiary had not been a member of anumber of subversive organizations.

As the 50s ended, Harvard and the nation werecalm. With McCarthy in the background, theUniversity pursued cultural exchange.

The paper continued to devote itself to theinnocent and carefree matters of Collegelife--where "College" finally began to includeRadcliffe. During this period, some of the firstwomen were elected to the executive board.

The Sixties

By the early 1960s, the politics of the paperhad shifted from conservative to liberal. Nolonger did Crimson editors support the Republicanticket. John F. Kennedy '40 was a former Crimsoneditor, but his connection with the paper wastenuous at best. Still, the paper felt asentimental attachment to him, and in comparisonwith the other candidates, he seemed the onlylogical choice for President in 1960.

After the Kennedy administration deprivedHarvard of its senior Dean of the Faculty,McGeorge Bundy, Pusey decided to assume the dean'soffice himself. After almost a year of Pusey'smultiple office-holding, the paper began aweek-long series of editorials criticizing hisstewardship.

Shortly after the pieces appeared, Puseyappointed a new dean.

As drugs began to assume a new importance insociety, two denizens of William James Hall,Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, were using the"mind-expanding" drug pscilocybin in experimentson students. Andrew T. Weil '64 was The Crimson'sdrug expert at the time-although he was also aPoonster-and did the bright, relentlesscomprehensive reporting that led to the eventualbanning of the experiments and termination ofLeary and Alpert.

As involvement in Vietnam increased withoutconsent of Congress or the people, studentsprotests more frequent and highly militant. TheCollege was entering a dark period.

The Students for a Democratic Society, a small,left-wing militant group demanded an end tomilitary and military-industrial recruiting,Harvard expansion into poor communities, the ROTCprogram, and other connections between theUniversity and war-related activities.Administrators walked a fine line as they soughtto reach a satisfactory balance of studentdemands. The bureaucracy could not move fastenough to satisfy one segment of SDS.

A fraction of those in attendance at a SDSmeeting on April 8, 1969, decided to occupy abuilding the next day. Shortly before noon onApril 10, they did so, ejecting the deans inUniversity Hall and renaming the building "CheGuevara Hall."

Students who gathered outside the buildingoverwhelmingly opposed the occupation, and therewas talk of football players and other able-bodiedstudents coming to remove the occupiers. Then, atdawn the next day, with no advance warning to theFaculty or the students, President Pusey orderedin the police.

Arrayed in combat gear and ready for violentaction, they came by the hundreds. At dawn, theymarched in and cleared the building with nightsticks and battering rams. Many students wereinjured, a few seriously; a significant number ofreporters were arrested and tossed in jail. Inseconds, the mood of the University changed fromanti-occupier to anti-Administration.

The Crimson came out with an extra soonafter--its second in two days. Crimson editorswere among the group of reporters from the mostdistinguished publications in the country who werearrested, and Crimson photographers were among themany whose cameras were smashed by police billyclubs.

For a generation of Crimson editors, the act ofsummoning riot-equipped police to the Harvard Yardstood as tantamount to treason.

The selection of a successor to Pusey engagedthe attention of the University in 1970-71. WhenDerek C. Bok was selected as President, TheCrimson was ready to tell Harvard everything therewas to be known about the Law School Dean and thereasons for his selection.

At the close of The Crimson's first century, amore elaborate version of this history waspublished in a book form by Michael Ryan, andscores of Crimson alums gathered at the HarvardClub of Boston to celebrate the paper'scentennial.

The first editorial of The Crimson contended:"I won't philosophize, I will be read." Theclosing lines of The Crimson's centennial historyprovided some context for that promise and itssuccess--in spite of near failure.

"To survive and to prosper, any community needsa newspaper. A community's newspaper will be itsvoice and its conscience: it will prod, it willprotest, it will expose, and it will complain; itwill report, it will explain, and it will givepraise when praise is due. It will notphilosophize, and it will be read. The communitywill support it, and it will keep the communityalive.

"Harvard is just such a community."FACE-OFF: Dean of Students Archie C.Epps III meets with student protestors during the1969 occupation of University Hall. The protestssparked further tension between The Crimson andthe University.