College Was Rural, Self-Contained 75 Years Ago as Golden Age Began

Seventy-five years ago the Magenta appeared in a college which stood at the beginning of a period that was to change it from a small classical institute into a world-famous university. Harvard was entering its golden age, the age of President Eliot, and already some of the changes could be noticed.

New buildings were going up in the Yard, and the village of Cambridge had begun its change into a modern industrial city. Eliot's reforms in the College curriculum had for the first time in Harvard's history allowed the students elective courses, instead of the entirely prescribed program of former years.

Harvard Square was the center of a lazy village in those days. The most modern convenience was a horsecar that left hourly for Boston, carrying undergraduates in search of entertainment. The administration frowned at the growing popularity of trips to Boston, but there was not much the officials could do about it.

The College was entirely contained in the shaded seclusion of the Yard, and even there modern buildings were appearing every year. Matthews Hall, called "the finest college dormitory in America," had been built two years before; it marked an all-time high in student luxury. No longer would the men have to go out to the pump on cold mornings, for there were bathrooms in the basement. Weld and Thayer, also recent acquisitions, were only slightly less magnificent.

The most spectacular change in the scenery was the memorial for the Civil War dead that was being built beyond the Yard on the College Delta. Memorial Hall was a beautiful example of neoGothic architecture, and it was useful, too, containing two badly needed items: a large dining hall and a theatre.

Perhaps better than any other College building, old Gore Hall symbolized the Harvard of 1873. It was a picturesque structure, with high, thin towers that looked down on the bare west side of the Yard. But despite its quiet charm, Gore was totally inadequate as a library. It was poorly lighted and so damp that moisture collected on the books while one was reading them.

Since 1869, when President Eliot had been appointed, the life of the undergraduate had already been changed greatly. Eliot been impressed by the academic freedom allowed the students in European universities, and now he was utilizing Harvard to pioneer in American education.

Elective System

By 1872 he had the elective system in full swing at Harvard. There was still an inflexible program for Freshmen, a program consisting of the old standbys: Greek, Latin, geometry, and German, but the upperclassmen could choose most of their courses from any one of a large number.

Harvard's faculty was excellent, and the students were advised to choose their courses by professors as much as by subject matter. William James was an instructor in physiology (NOT psychology), while James Russell Lowell taught English poetry. Informal discussions were initiated in order to bring the students into closer contact wit these figures.

Luxury was fast increasing at Harvard, while discipline was waning. The students were no longer treated as a group of recalcitrant schoolboys, and so they began to behave differently. As organized athletics grew swiftly in popularity, the riots that were so frequent in the 1840's died out. A football team had just been organized; it played a primitive form of the game that resembled rugby more than modern football.

Organized crow had come a long way since the '50's, when the men would take the shell down the Charles to Boston every night in order to got drunk. It was through the magenta handkerchiefs the crew were around their heads that Harvard got its color and the new journal its name.

"Bloody Monday"

The last remnants of student riots was "Bloody Monday," a day every year when the Sophomore would attack the Freshmen en masse and if possible throw them into the Charles. Eliot told his faculty to take no notice, and it wasn't very long before even "Bloody Monday" had died a natural death.

The energy that had been used up in riots was now put to more creative purposes, such as decorating one's room. In these efforts anything went. If the undergraduate had a coupled of Roman plaster busts handy, they would naturally, go on the mantelpiece. Mecrachagum pipes might decorate a table, odd signs on the walls, and if the resident could afford one of the new upright planes, he could be rightly proud of his interesting, if overstuffed, room.

The Harvard of 1873 was a fairly closely knit community, and it boasted of many "campus characters," men who spent their whole lives in the service of the college boys. Some of them, such as William Emmons, pushed handcarts around the Square. Emmons sold a beverage called "egg pop," whose recipe nobody ever discovered. An amateur politician, Emmons had his harangues printed, and sold them with the drinks.

The undergraduate of 1873 had a pleasant life, so it was not surprising that he was a conservative through and through. When the chapel was being repaired during the winter of 1873, and the compulsory attendance order was temporarily lifted, the students still came in droves, whether out of habit or devotion.

In politics, too, they were conservatives. During the Grant-Greeley Presidential campaign a few months before the appearance of the Magenta, the student body staged a torchlight campaign for Grant through Boston. An unexplained record has it that one Freshman carried a poster of Greeley suffering from the Horse Epidemic