THE CRIMSON HANDKERCHIEFS

It seems natural that Harvard teams and students should journey to New Haven today and tomorrow, for Harvard has had a parental interest in Yale for a good long while. When at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Apleys and Aldens of New England felt that theologically Harvard was slipping into radical sloughs, they realized a perennial dream for a college in Calvinist Connecticut. The Rev. Pierpont, Class of 1681, obtained a charter, and the Rev. Pierson, Class of 1668, was chosen rector. In 1716 the "Collegiate School of Connecticut" was permanently established in New Haven, and at the suggestion of Cotton Mather, another Harvard man, it received the name of Elihu Yale, a Boston native who, like John Harvard, had made a gift of books. From the first, historians say, relations between mother and child were intimate; students of both studied a similar curriculum, saturated in Calvinism, and transferred frequently from one to the other. Yet, as symbolized by the color which she adopted for her livery. Yale was much more conservative.

The years went by, and the mother in Cambridge continued to be freer, more adventurous than her daughter in New Haven, and--in Santayana's phrase--to have "a single eye for the truth." Perhaps if Yale had lacked proper respect, she might have lifted her unyielding nose and branded the parent a hussy. The year 1858 underlined the differences in attitude, when six Harvard athletes picked the color which for them represented the tone of their alma mater. The occasion was the Boston City Regatta, at which Harvard deemed it necessary to have some distinctive mark. So the boat club rowing for Cambridge appeared on the Charles with China silk handkerchiefs of bright crimson tied about their heads. And, blessed with red, the six men won.

To the child in New Haven this was akin to waving a flag. At a desperate moment for the Union in the Civil War--July, 1864,--Yale, instead of enlisting, rowed Harvard a furious race at Worcester before a large and excited throng. Like-wise, as Harvard took up the new games appearing in the Victorian period, Yale was out of envy forced to follow, and each time unsuccessfully. In their first baseball game, 1868, Harvard beat Yale 25-17. In 1875 one hundred and fifty students saw the Crimson defeat the Blue in their first football match.

But the New Haven daughter, regardless of how blue she was, had yet to show gratitude to her crimson mother. As is the case with these filial things, its expression required maturing. It came, finally, in 1928 when a son of Yale, Mr. Harkness, walked into President Lowell's office with a present of seven Houses, truly a noble return for Harvard's part in bringing Yale to life. A decade later the seven Houses are as meaningful and vital as the six handkerchiefs (one of them still lies in the archives). And our teams, all of them, will show how proud we are of both when they win today and Saturday.