The Crimson Faces the Crisis of Another War

Chapter VII

UNIVERSITY DELAYS IMMEDIATE ACTION, screamed the headline on the Pearl Harbor story. And so, it seemed, the Administration had actually done, if you compare the day to World War I, when The Crimson got Dean Briggs out of bed to cancel the athletic program. But the sneak attack took the country by surprise, and it was only in the coming weeks and months that the University would swing into a wartime stance. The University ran a summer term in 1942, and The Crimson ran a summer paper, on a three time a week basis.

The Class of 1944 took over the paper in early summer to give '45 a chance to go to war. The Crimson seems to have run more smoothly than anything else in the country that year, even with depleted manpower. One series of editorials urged the national government to "Give Us the Blueprints" for the national defense. As its own contribution, The Crimson gave the nation its fence--to be melted down for ammunition.

As Dan Fenn, the premature Class of '44 President, recalled in the 1947 History:

Pipelines between University Hall, the War Service Information Bureau, and 14 Plympton Street were crammed with rumors and counterrumors about the place of the individual student and the College in general in the war effort. Several false alarms preceded the actual announcement, made just before vacation, and published in a Crimson extra with screaming headlines. Dean Buck used the comment book that famous day to express the University's appreciation--an action which Bob Moskin (his special confidant) thrilled to, no end.

Buck's comment in the book has been lost, at least temporarily, among a group of records which were casualties of war. His visit to 14 Plympton Street was, no doubt, a high point in the morale of a group of editors who struggled against growing odds to keep the paper alive through 1942.

Nineteen forty-two bore more resemblance to a normal year at Harvard than any of the next four. On May 1 of that year, a parody Crimson--which attributed itself to "The Spy Club"--appeared. Its editorial board was composed of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Elmer Davis, Ruless R. O. Penyons, and Arch Macleish, and their lead editorial, in flawless Crimson style, declared:

In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, darkened as it is with the clouds of war, global war, we have overlooked the significance of this day, May Day.

Dean Pass D. Buck announced in that issue that the University would "gird its loins," and the notice columns announced:

All Men: All those interested in girding their loins report to 14 Plympton St. between 3 and 4:30 o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Bring loin girders.

The football team played a schedule in 1942, and The Crimson came out with a Princeton Game extra. Another extra appeared on January 7, 1943, to announce the death of President Emeritus Lowell.

As if to prove that they were down, but far from out, the editors produced a large, and very impressive issue to commemorate The Crimson's own 70th birthday. An editorial on that day expressed the paper's prevailing liberalism, and its firm belief in the triumph of democracy. A group of former Crimson editors contributed their thoughts on the state of the world. That same arrangement was closely paralleled in an issue, a few months later, when a group of Harvard Faculty members presented their views of the war and the post-war world. This was the last issue of the regular paper until almost a year after the war was over.

The Crimson put on its uniform on Friday, May 14, 1943. The banner on the paper read "The Service News", and a box on either side of that title carried a large question mark and the plea, "Submit a Name". A few weeks later, a local clergyman won the paper's $25 War Bond by submitting "Harvard Service News."

The stories which ran in the Service News were of a kind The Crimson has never run:

Khakis, Navy Blues to Mingle With

Caps and Gowns at Graduation Rites

an early issue announced, summing up the entire mood of Harvard at the time. But would the civilian Crimson have ever called Commencement "Graduation"?

Fifty Freshmen to Register:

49 Mil Sci Three Men Return

another story told.

Although The Crimson of 1942 had editorially inveighed against the scandalous treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, the Service News had fewer scruples.

Japs Planned Death of

Grew, Charlie Chaplin

read the headline of a story on Ambassador Grew's allegations. A group of insidious Japanese had planned to assassinate him, and kill the great comedian as well during Grew's term in Tokyo in the mid-Thirties. At least Grew believed it, and the Service News believed Grew. Next month, Harvard awarded Grew the only honorary degree it gave in 1943.

"To him a Nip in the trees is a notch in his gun." This line, an advertising slogan for the Camel cigarette people, appeared more than once in the Service News.

Copy of this kind was one good reason the Graduate Board had decided not to empower the Service News to editorialize. Instead, the paper was administered during the war by a board of David M. Little '18, Master of Adams House and Secretary of the University. Mrs. Anna Hoke, the paper's accountant, Donald T. Field '31, and Thomas S. Kuhn '44. These four oversaw a rotating, uneven, erratic staff which sometimes amounted only to Mrs. Hoke and Art Hopkins, as they turned out first a weekly, and later a semi-weekly from The Crimson's quarters. For once, the paper did not have to seek for advertising; J. Press, Filene's Leopold Morse, and a dozen others took large constant ads to announce themselves as official suppliers of uniforms to the Army, Navy, Waves, and practically every conceivable outfit in the Service. Some news of Harvard crept in, and, as the war neared an end. Harvard news took an equal share of the paper. Twice, the Service News announced the birthdays of Charles Townsend Copeland, his eighty-fourth and eighty-fifth, once announcing Copey as a "Champion Survivor", and twice describing his intention to see the war through.2