The Budding Journalists Become Athletes As Well

Chapter 11

ANY Crimson editor who has seen the fruits of hours of hard work destroyed by a web break, a dropped tray, or any of the mechanical ills the press is heir to will sympathize with the printing problems of the new Daily Crimson, as expressed by an editor of the period in the history published in 1906:

The paper was then printed by H. E. Lombard in the loft of a wooden building in Central Square in the 'Port'. Two of us had to go each midnight to read proof. As the ears from Boston ran only once an hour after midnight, and by horsepower, we were usually obliged to walk back to our rooms. In September, 1884, we contracted with an Englishman to print the paper. He had an old Washington hand-press and got off one issue--delivered the next afternoon. He was fired and Lombard opened a printing office for us in Brattle Street.

If there are few independent sources for the history of the first decade of The Crimson's forebears, there is scareely any record of the next 20 years, save the paper itself and three books of-its history which have already been published. Snatches of assignment books, recording each reporter's daily chores, have survived, but there were no comment books such as we have today.

The Crimson, our historians tell us, was located in those days "in a front room one flight up in an old brick building on Massachusetts Avenue between Holyoke and Linden Streets, reached by an open wooden staircase at the back of the building."

The Crimson did quite a bit of moving around before coming to rest at 14 Plympton Street in 1915. Its original home was Stoughton 22, a room which was convenient at least to Yard dwellers, well stocked with punch for the convivial Crimeds, and, if a surviving photograph is to be trusted, comfortable. One editor of the period reminisced about the social life of the room in a letter to the editors of the Fiftieth Anniversary book:

In the small, narrow, and low-studded room, the greater part of which is taken up by the huge editorial table, and the cumbersome stove, are gathered about a dozen men, lolling in the window-seats, seated upon the paper-box or around the table. On the table is a large bowl of mild punch, a bottle or so of Bass's Ale (for the men in training) and a can of crackers. Near each man is a glass filled with his chosen drink, and scattered about at convenient intervals are piles of crackers. Smoke from pipes, cigars, and cigarettes curls gracefully from the lips of the smokers to the thin blue cloud which obscures the ceiling. Thayer, our inimitable Billy, or a year later, Faulkner, is trolling a rollicking song, and at the proper intervals the chorus from every editorial throat swells out upon the night with more of power than of acuracy, and word goes from one late passer by to another that tonight The Crimson is having a punch.

How much the man was mixing memory and desire when he wrote this idyllic description it is impossible to say. Certainly, even after its conversion to a daily. The Crimson retained the atmosphere of a social club along with the seriousness of a newspaper. Most of the clubbiness of the place probably died in 1885, when the Crimson vacated Stoughton for the "front room, one flight up". In 1895, the paper moved once again, this time to 1304 Massachusetts Avenue, in a building known as Hilton's block. Here the paper knew luxury at last, for it rented three stories worth of space; an upper floor for the President, Managing Editor, and Sanctum, a ground floor for the Business Board, and a basement for the candidates and printing presses. This arrangement lasted six years, until a move to the basement of the Union, on Quincy Street.

As it wandered around Cambridge, evolving toward the day when it would find a permanent home on Plympton Street, The Crimson gradually grew into a recognizable fascimile of a modern newspaper. Those were the days of rugged individualism, and the particular rugged individuals who edited the paper concerned themselves with sports to a degree that would startle the modern reader. Harvard football and The Harvard Crimson celebrate their centennial in the same year; and, like children from the same neighborhood, they grew up together. In December of 1884, when the College's Athletic Council decided to outlaw intercollegiate football because of its "brutality". The Crimson jumped to its defense. The editors held a meeting which resolved "to condemn the action as hasty, and to maintain that the colleges ought to be granted an opportunity of amending the rules, so as to eliminate the objectionable features of the game, before the game is unconditionally 'prohibited." In 1885, the paper expanded its sports department. In place of the single Sporting Editor, a relic from the earliest days of the paper, the Board voted to elect "Special sporting correspondents." These writers were men who were themselves involved in the different Varsity sports--many of them as active participants. If their reporting was biased (and sometimes it was), remember that The Crimson did see it as its duty to uphold the honor of Harvard on the playing field, as everywhere else.

Athletic fever extended beyond mere journalistic interest. Around 1885, Crimson editors began to form their own teams, taking on all comers. The Board voted to establish a Crimson baseball team, and to offer "cups to be played for by competing nines." The 1906 history reprints a New York Tribune report of October 11, 1885, which says: "The Harvard scratch races were rowed this afternoon over the one-fourth mile course in front of the Harvard Boat House, Charles River.... (In the first heat) The Crimson crew won easily in 1 min. 39 1 2 s. The second heat of the Fours between The Crimson crew and the Four-of-a-Kind Crew was the closest race of the day. The opinion of the judges was that The Crimson crew won by one-fourth of a length in 1 min. 4 1 2 s., from which opinion the Four-of-a-Kind crew dissented."

In something of an anti-climax from these great Achaean contests. The Crimson also took on The Advocate and The Lampoon, but in the less taxing sport of tug-of-war, which was, inexplicably, as popular at Harvard then as Frisbie throwing is today.

Not surprisingly, it was sports which got The Crimson back into the business of putting out extras, which had lapsed after the Herald merger. A veteran of the first such effort, dated May 30, 1892, described the procedure in the 1923 History:

F.I. Hunt '93, our business manager, was at the bottom of it. He arranged with Wheeler, who then ran a printing press at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Linden Street, for the use of his press. Mac and Ed were there on the job to set up the type. The game was on Holmes Field, and perched up on the top row of the bleachers were Frederick Windsor '93 and Maynard ladd '94 to write up the game. But how to connect Windsor and Ladd with Mac and Ed? Again Hunt, overcomer of obstacles, came through with one of his schemes. He corralled a lot of boys with bicycles, and as fast as Windsor and Ladd could get a bunch of copy written they would wrap it around a stone and drop it over the bleachers to one of the young bicyclists waiting 'below, and away it would go across the Yard and into the waiting hands of Mac and Ed at Wheeler's. The last bit of copy was carried by a plucky little beggar who rode as he had never ridden before, and was quite done out when he fell off his wheel as he delivered his copy. But he had done his bit well, and the crowd, coming from the game, was met in the Yard with cries of "Full account of the game! Crimson extra!"

Our half century historians tell us that the newsboys were in the Square four minutes and fifty-four seconds after the close of the game; 1441 copies were sold in two hours. The experiment was so successful that the tradition of the football extra never died. After the 1893 Yale football game, in Springfield, an extra "was sold in Cambridge which "came off the press twenty seconds after the last despatch was received." After the Pennsylvania game, the extra "was ready for sale five minutes after the game was finished."

The playing fields--especially the football field--monopolized the attention of The Crimson's editors well into the new century. Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, during his Presidency, conducted a lively campaign to lift the flagging sporting spirit of the average undergraduate, and even conducted an editorial recruiting campaign for the football team. "The lack of heavy men is now even more pronounced than last year," an October, 1903 editorial announced, "there are indeed scarcely enough now playing to form one team of only average weight and ability. It is certain that many men are in the University who are of sufficient weight to make it an obligation to their fellows to answer the appeal of Captain Marshall and Coach Cranston. Lack of experience is no excuse for not coming out...."

The football season was disastrous, but not for lack of trying on the part of FDR's paper. Week after week, editorials urged students to get down to the field and support the team: week after week Monday morning brought columns bemoaning the previous Saturday and expressing hope for the next one. Once, Roosevelt seems to have stooped to an old Crimson devise of writing an unsigned "communication" to the paper so that he could comment editorially on his own letter. Football became an obsession for the next several years; culminating in 1907 S in a campaign to save the sport, which seemed in danger of imminent death. FDR's cousin Teddy came to the Union to express his support for the game, and the paper used his speech as the linchpin of an editorial campaign. The editors canvassed the University with postcards, and received overwhelming support for the continuation of intercollegiate competition. A petition kept at The Crimson offices got 2000 undergraduate signatures for the continuation of the sport, and President Allen W. Hinkel 'OS presented it to a meeting of the Faculty. In the end, The Crimson side prevailed, and saved the day for generations of tailgaters, sport swriters, and television football fans.

Football was an obsession of the end-of-the-century Crimson, but it did not take up every minute of an editor's time. Indeed, the foremost worry of the post-merger paper was a much simpler one--survival. The balance sheet of November, 1883, reported a deficit of $600. For the previous year, the combined balance sheet of the Herald and Crimson had shown liabilities of $3,527,95, and assets of $2,743,43. That winter, an editor recalled. "The advisability of stopping the paper was discussed." But, by June. The Daily Crimson had a surplus of all of $15, and was on its way to financial stability. In September, 1884, the price of a year's subscription was raised to $3.50, and advertising had gone up. The paper's financial position remained healthy into the new century, and, in 1904, a permanent sinking fund was established from the annual profits to be used against capital expenditures and financial setbacks.

The spirit of the paper in those decades around the turn of the century was heady. Editors were eager for bigger and more ambitious projects, and threw themselves whole-hearted into their work; it is not an accident that one biographer has quoted FDR as saying that his best training for the Presidency of the United States was the Presidency of The Crimson, for he ran the paper in a time when it rode high in the College community, when it was respected, and listened to, and when the President had more power on the paper than he ever had, before or since. From 1887 on, The Crimson became almost the official bulletin board of the University, and the Faculty used it often for all manner of official notices. In that decade, the President assumed control of the editorials, the Secretary wrote the "Fact and Rumor" column, and the Managing Editor was responsible for everything else. Thus, although the M.E. did the lion's share of the work, setting up the paper and making assignments, it was the President who guided the paper's policies, subject to the general consent of the Board. Henry James '99, President of The Crimson, wrote this description of a typical day at the paper in the December, 1899, Harvard Graduates' Magazine:

Roughly speaking, the reporting and first-draft writing is done by the candidates, who number from about forty, when a batch begins to try, to seven or eight when the most successful are elected editors. But as the poorest of them drop out or are dropped, the better ones are given more and more suggestions and assignments. If a candidate shows interest and industry, if he is accurate and reliable in writing up his news, and if he has any interest, intellectual, social, or athletic, which brings him into contact with some of the sources of College activity, he is pretty sure to be successful.

At an hour in the morning depending on the time at which he got to bed the previous evening, and also on his lectures, the Managing Editor comes to the office and begins his day's work. After a glance at his memorandum books, he is ready to make out the list of assignments.

This is the foundation of the forthcoming issue, but while laying it he is never free from interruptions. Editors come in to find out whether they are to have work given them or not, and they sit around talking and laughing and poking fun at the Managing Editor while he tries to write, and they wait. Often other officers of the board appear with something to discuss. More than one person calls with the various purpose of pointing out that an organization in which he is interested has not been given enough prominence of late...A Freshman is easy to dispose of. But if the caller is an instructor or a graduate, the task of pacifying him, of explaining the situation, or occasionally making him see that he is asking for the impossible, may be both hard and unavoidable. A familiar classmate who rides his hobbyhorse into the office is likely to be attacked bodily, and dumped into a huge waste-paper basket near the telephone box, provided enough editors are present. The most exciting of all the morning interruptions can be caused by an angry business manager, who comes waving a printer's bill for extra work.

Before lunch time the assignment list is made out and hung up, and the office can lapse into quiet until evening. Those who come to it in the afternoon come to write and to be left alone.

By half-past seven the lights are lit and the copy box begins its merciless accompaniment to the printer's sharp cry, "Carp-e-e." This box is primarily an invention for conveying manuscript from the desk to the printing room. From then on, the Managing Editor's business is to keep his head, and to see that order and reason prevails in all matters concerning1