Carrie Nation Cursed Vice At Blue-Book Sweat-Shop

As Memorial Hall prepares to open its massive portals once more to swarms of exam-crammers, to be filled by hundreds of students who have stayed up all night in order to write coherent "it is therefore clearly obvious that's" in blue books, attention turns to the ungainly structure on the hallowed ground of "The Delta," predecessor of Soldiers Field.

Time has passed since Mom Hall was dedicated to Harvard men who had fallen in The War Between the States, and many scars have been graven on the memory of the walled patriarch of Harvard.

Carrie Nation's Raid

She recalls that day when a woman upset the staid order of affairs and sent the undergraduates into an uproar. There have been few more boisterous hours in Harvard's history than those between noon and 3 o'clock of November 14, 1902, when Carrie Nation made a whirlwind campaign to woo the student body from rum and nicotine. The Kansas hatchet swinger, who personally broke enough whiskey bottles (full) to arouse envy in the heart of the most rabid prohibition agent, stepped off the electric car that carried her from Boston to Cambridge and went straight to those claustral walls, where a thousand students were eating their midday meal. She had heard that ham was occasionally served with champagne sauce and that she had seen a menu which listed jelly.

Well do the walls remember how she went directly to the visitors gallery. As soon as the students became aware of her identity, her first words were greeted with cheers and jeers. She tried to warn them against cigarette-smoking teachers. Then she came to the subject of the intoxicating items on the menu. "Boys! Don't eat that infernal stuff. Its poison," she cried.

The students promptly took her at her word and abandoned their food as she came down the stairs to sell her famous miniature nickel-plated batches. Students pressed around her, offering her cigars and cigarettes, and feigning great surprise when she struck, their smokes wrathfully to the ground. One student made a grab at her bonnet, but was unable to detach it.

"Remember the Good Book says that men shall not wear the garments of women, nor women the garments of men," she shrieked at the youth.

She ran about slapping faces, seizing cigars and pipes, and crying that everyone at Harvard was a hellion. The students enjoyed every bit of it, and proceeded to swarm about her and sweep to Sanders Theatre. The boys smashed their way through the door and triumphantly carried Mrs. Nation onto the stage. The crusader again attempted to speak, but the hall vociferously drowned her out. Someone presented her with a bunch of chrysanthemums, which she accepted with profuse bows and acknowledgements.

John Harvard's Sinners

Unable to give her speech because of the constant interruption of cheers and snatches of song, Carrie finally gave up in disgust, abandoning the Harvard boys to their horrible fate.

This encounter can hardly be compared with the brilliant spectacle of a few months later. Mem Hall was crowded to capacity that winter night, for King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, was inspecting Harvard and was the center of attention at the gay banquet in his honor.

Mem Hall is no longer used as a dinning hall. In past years, in fact, it has been scarcely used at all and the cry has been frequently raised for its destruction--"an architectural hodge-podge," it is called, "an anachronism and a sore-spot."