Advocate Voice to be Heard Tomorrow as Three Year's Wartime Silence Comes to Overdue End

An eighty year old tradition will see its revival tomorrow when the Harvard Advocate, the University's oldest publication, takes to the news stands after a three year period of wartime idleness.

Scarcely two months have gone by since the magazine's trustees took the first definite step toward getting the publication back into print with the appointment of a committee of interim editors headed by mild-mannered, pipe-smoking Donald B. Watt, Jr. '47. In the Advocate rooms between Bow and Mt. Auburn Streets, the editors have sorted graduate and undergraduate contributions in an attempt to put together a magazine of "general reader interest" and jolt their charge out of the esoteric mire that drugged circulation down to some 800 copies in 1943.

Watt and his lieutenants are all new to Advocate traditions. They know that out of the unsavory financial and editorial confusion that heralded the Advocate's wartime retirement from the field of undergraduate publications had come a magazine of poems and aesthetics. Their aim, according to Watt, is "to be a Harpers on the College level."

For a model the board has looked back over the years to the early, nineteenth century days of publication, when the editors voiced their opinion on Cambridge topics and published articles of passing and more than passing interest. They plan a discussion of President Lowell's decaying House system and features directed at a College alert to the life around it.

Watt originally entertained a vision of covering the sporting scene in his magazine but admits defeat at the hands of his co-editors. He could have found precedent to back him up in the early days of Advocate journalism when Frank P. Stearns '67, its first business manager, accompanied the Harvard nine to New York as a combination substitute and reporter.

In that same year, the Advocate had been launched from the dry bones of the saucy Collegian. That publication had waged a spirited campaign against compulsory, monitored attendance at morning prayers, and met with the wrath of the corporation. A mock Platonic dialogue pointed out that there were four monitors at morning services to note absences and only one minister to offer prayers. "Is it not a shameful degradation of the worship of God," wrote the editors, "to make it a mere instrument for police service?"

When the atmosphere had cleared, the Collegian's editors, whose names always appeared on the front page, found themselves in receipt of an order to stop publication or risk expulsion. Thus passed the Collegian.

Amid the gale of oratory on free speech and freedom of the press, that followed, Stearns conceived the idea of starting a new paper, under an anonymous but non-Collegian editorship, to serve as the Advocate of the people. His literary aides in the infant enterprise were Charles S. Gage '67, genial versifier and the most popular man in his class, and William G. Peckham '67, a precocious lad who had entered the College at the age of fourteen.

On the evening of May 10, 1866, 400 copies of the new journal arrived from the printer and were placed on sale at Richardson's book store, and the morning's mail carried the first Advocate to each of the Overseers and every member of the Corporation. When split in faculty opinion forestalled disciplinary action, the publication was allowed to "live or die on its own merits." Watt and his interim committee are putting out their first postwar issue this week in much the same spirit.

Tenth Anniversary

The tenth anniversary of the Advocate was celebrated with a wild "decennial feast," as prior to its birth a series of five magazines had had a combined life of but sixteen years. Present were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professors James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. Advocate memoranda of the time record that "representatives of the Crimson and of the new-born Lampoon were allowed to share in the feast of reason and the flow of the soul." The only "distressing" aspect of the affair was that it ruined the paper financially.

The Advocate has a long and outspoken history in College controversy and figured prominently in the christening of the Crimson. An editorial in one of the 1875 numbers disparaged magenta as the College's symbol and affirmed that "historically there was no doubt that crimson was the Harvard color." The Magenta fought hard to retain its name, but a mass meeting in Holden Chapel voted magenta out and crimson in. With its next issue, the Magenta became the Harvard Crimson.

In 1882, the Advocate all but swallowed the Crimson. The two papers had kept up a bantering rivalry of parodies and satires, exchanged in the editorial columns "with savage animosity" and supposedly good for the circulation of both. But the Crimson was deep in debt, while the Advocate, according to its business manager, "although not rolling in wealth, owed nothing to anybody."

The plan of consolidation, he continues, "was hailed with unbounded delight by the Crimson board," whose scheme it was. Its editors were to be elected to the Advocate and its debts assumed by the older publication. By the margin of a single vote, the Advocate board rejected the Crimson.

The literati did not move out of their quarters near the Hasty Pudding Club to the building it now owns till early in the thirties, though the shingle that flies above its door dates back to the turn of the century. During the war, the entire building went over to living quarters at a time when Navy officers, their wives, and children perambulated through the Yard and down Plympton Street. At present the journalists occupy six rooms on the second floor of their gray frame dwelling.

The revival of the Advocate provides continuity to a tradition that includes such men as Charles Townsend Copeland '82, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, emeritus, George Lyman Kittredge '82, Theodore Roosevelt '80, and Kenneth B. Murdock '16, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature. Watt and his staff hang their shingle over the door. The magazine that appears tomorrow will bear the same motto. "Dulce est periculum." within its covers, and carry the same seal on its letterhead, the Advocate's traditional representation of Pegasus chained to a book. The College welcomes its oldest publication back to Cambridge.