The Harvard Union

The news that the University was going to convert the Harvard Union to a Freshman Commons hit the Harvard Clubs like a thunderbolt. Throughout the nation, old grads bestirred themselves from leather chairs to telegram protests to the Administration. "If the--whippersnappers have to socialize," wrote one member of the Class of '88, "let them go to Memorial Hall."

That alumni in 1932 winced at the bought of a Union devoted to Freshmen only was not surprising. Most remembered, and some had even shared in, the long fight to build the Union into Harvard's most democratic club, the focus of social life at the College.

They might have remembered the editorial in the CRIMSON in 1895 which set the fuse to the idea. "Social chaos reigns at Harvard," it began, and argued that the transition from small college to bustling University had left the club system insufficient in its wake. According to the CRIMSON, one club open to all was the only solution.

Perhaps no groups preached this democracy moire rabidly than the Harvard Union, college debating society which had formed twenty-five years before in imitation of the Unions at Oxford and Cambridge. For in the Union were the handful of Midwestern worshippers of Senator William Jennings Bryan who were Harvard's fiery-eyed radicals of the Gay Nineties. They convinced their Eastern colleagues to stop arguing the Free Silver question and turn their eloquence upon wealthy alumni to raise money for this new clubhouse. The debaters even offered to donate their society's name to the new structure.

After searching for five years, they found a gold mine in Major Henry Lee Higgenson, whose portrait now hangs at the left of the dining hall entrance. With his gift of $150,000 the "experiment in democracy," as he called it, went up in a year. Completed in 1902, the building was garnished with momentous of the recent Spanish war, including a "rapid-firing" cannon from the cruiser Harvard. This now stands in the basement, aimed threateningly at the entrance to the office of Athletic Director Thomas D. Bolles.

Turn of the century undergraduates joined the Union in flocks, partly because of its reputation for good food. Union chefs served up eight course dinners for fifty cents. The snack bar, which proudly "bottled its own tonics, sodas and minerals," offered a concoction called a Lampoon Soda (five cents). Imbibers would undoubtedly follow this with spirits of ammonia (ten cents).

Hall of Fame

Sharp-eyed Freshmen have noticed elaborately carved walnut panels in one corner of the Union's main dining hall. On them are engraved the names of Charles Sumner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others. These are the charter members of a now abandoned project, the Harvard Hall of Fame. The Union Dining Hall, it seems, was to become a sort of collegiate Cooperstown, with the name of one famous graduate on every panel. The announcement of the plan was accompanied by a great hue, and pressure by groups of alumni desiring impannelment of their special hero. But the high cost of matching the first elaborate carvings soon stopped the Hall of Fame idea altogether.

But the less renowned continued to use the Union. After thirty years as a club, it became the Freshman Commons, despite the astonished cries of alumni. During the war, the Navy took over, and later the Summer School. Finally, it served as the headquarters of the 25th Reunion Class during Commencement. And those who see in each new use a break with hallowed tradition, might lay down their critical pens and remember the words of founder Higgenson at the Union's opening ceremonies in 1901:

"Change it, develop it, do with it what you will. But use it in a kindly spirit and in later life come back to it as your home."