The Changing Color of Harvard

Mass revolt is no recent institution at Harvard. To manifest their response to spring, however, four students, of apparently bookish nature, did introduce a wholly different breed of insurgency: ingenuity and individuality became the tenor of the Dark Suit Rebellion that rocked Harvard College in the previous century.

Consider, for example, a baleful freshman witnessing the expulsion of the entire sophomore class in 1834, rusticated for its somewhat less than restrained reaction to the stringency of the Quincy regime. Henry Thoreau, obviously, was scarcely one to test the college ordinance demanding "no grouping in the Yard", tempting as the Harvard faculty had made the proposition by defining a group as "two students and the pump." Thoreau's disobedience was conducted in a more civil and self-reliant manner.

One of Harvard's more puritanical regulations prohibited attire other than the traditional Oxford Mixed--black and white. Indeed, Quincy took pleasure in congratulating each successive graduating class on being the best dressed class under his administration. It was inevitable then that Thoreau should wear olive green.

"The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive or capable of arousing democratic envy . . .," reminisced James Lowell, neglecting to mention Thoreau's breach of decorum and, moreover, humbly refraining from revealing that even as Thoreau strode in olive green, he himself, in the class behind Thoreau, was decked out in vests and jackets reflecting the wilder reaches of the visible spectrum.

Thoreau had but this one olive green suit (though surely he should choose some fruit more Acadian to characterize its hue). Receiving the countenance of an understanding faculty, Thoreau took a grim delight in his impunity.

Not so Lowell. "Was he poor," remarked Lowell in interpreting Thoreau's perverse logic, "money was an unmixed evil." For Lowell, a plea of impoverishment could scarcely prove viable; a faculty hesitant in reproving Henry now proved all the more severe in striking down the persistent and exuberantly dressed James.

More successful, and certainly the most energetic of the insurgents fomenting the Dark Suit Rebellion, of course, was the instigator, Charles Summer. Where Lowell hankered for the more arresting colors, the radical Summer thought a more conservative buff would suffice. The faculty did not. Mere approximations to the permissible white vest were not to be condoned.

Twice the faculty tribunal threatened. Thrice Charles Summer, impressed by the preference of Webster and Burke for buff on state occasions, remained adamant. Destined in the senate to argue the necessity of equating black and white, already young Summer had the temerity to equate buff and white. It is a credit to his rhetoric (more interminable than grandiloquent, in this instance) that in the trial following his third departure from the college norm, the exhausted faculty voted " . . . that in the future, Summer's vest be regarded by this board as white."

Triumph--triumph of the individual, triumph of ingenuity, triumph for the Dark Suit Rebellion. On the other hand, however, from the point of view of the administration, rescued was the letter of the law. But how might the law be manipulated when a gangling young tutor, participating in the regatta of 1858 knotted a blood-red handkerchief about his head? That color became the color of Harvard College, and that athlete Harvard's most distinguished president.