Three Centuries of Relics

A baby's undershirt from the 17th-century wardrobe of Henry Dunster. Harvard's first president: the diary of Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1832; a 1936 Crimson football uniform; and a 1970 T-shirt that says "Strike because your roommate was clubbed" and 16 other calls to rebellion have all landed this winter in a single Pusey Library display case.

These, and dozens of other relics, are part of a colorful exhibition of the highlights of the University Archives, a remarkable repository of Harvard documents and memorabilia that spans three centuries.

The archives have grown dramatically since their birth in 1850, when the Corporation voted to gather a few stacks of official documents and bind them for posterity. Today, the collection consists of more than 90,000 feet of manuscripts, 250,000 photographs, and thousands of historic objects that occupy eight miles of shelf space.

Unlike Harvard's other libraries, the archives are accessible to the general public. Almost half the facility's 17,000 annual requests are for doctoral dissertations or essays that have won Harvard awards such as the Bowdoin Prize, which numbers among its winners such alumni as Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Students who win writing awards at Harvard are required to donate copies of their essays before they collect any prize money).

The archives contains about 80,000 biographical files, on distinguished graduates and officers, and also on such colorful figures from Harvard history as Sarah the Cat, a well-known inhabitant of University Hall, and Old Jones the Bellringer, who worked in the Harvard Chapel from 1870 to 1920.

Harvard's most precious historical documents are secured two floors underground behind a steel door with a combination lock. There, they are regularly inspected by Harley P. Holden, the archives' curator. "I like to check these every few days," Holden says, as he opens up the large red folder that contains Harvard's original charter, drafted in 1650 but now stained and nearly illegible.

The charter has been removed from the archives for every Harvard president's inauguration although sometimes this maneuver can be tricky. In 1971, when President Bok was sworn into office. Holden and a convoy of University officials had to escort the document to University Hall via underground steam tunnels, out of fear that student protestors might damage the relic. (The mood of students at the inauguration proved so congenial, Holden recalls, that he made the return trip above ground.

Another unusual excursion Holden has had occasion to make came shortly after the 1969 student takeover of University Hall, when he wandered around the Yard collecting leaflets and tearing from the trees. Today, the papers are together with Thoreau's diary in the Archives' collection of student memorabilia.

All official documents in the archives are unavailable to the public for 50 years, according to a University rule. In 1977, Robert D'Attillo, a local historian, launched an unusual challenge to this regulation. D'Attillo wanted access to a sealed package of former President A. Lawrence Lowell's papers. To examine letters Lowell had written while serving on a 1927 governor's committee to review the Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

Although widespread public sentiment at the time held that the pair were convicted and sentenced to death because they were anarchists, the Committee concluded that the trial had been fair. The two men were executed on August 23. 1927.

In 1977, the year the papers were due to be released. D'Attillo sought an injunction forcing the University to release the papers prematurely, claiming that they were public property of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and not personal correspondence. The historian was unsuccessful, but as it happened, when the papers were finally opened in December, they contained very little new historical information.

The archives has also received several requests for premature release from historians anxious to examine files from the 1950s, to investigate allegations that the University threatened to cut off fellowships and blocked promised administrative appointments to former Communists.

"You couldn't get into those files with a neutron bomb," says Thomas Sexton, a staff assistant at the archives.

In general, Holden tries to avoid gauging possible historical importance of documents that come to the archives. "Maybe they won't be used for 100 years, but what does that matter?" he says. "Harvard has been here for 350 years"