Sports, Tradition Played Major Role in '22 As Post-War College Returned to 'Normal"

A quarter of a century ago, at Commencement time, 520 seniors members of the class of 1922 were welcomed into the company of educated men by President Abbott Lawrence Lowell. The same afternoon they heard Senator Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama and the Attorney General of Massachusetts plead for the continuance of American traditions, internationalism, and disarmament.

The years which followed 1922 made the World War I chaos, which the graduating seniors sought to escape, look fairly mild. But in their final year at Harvard, '22 did its level best to attain the three alms of Senator Underwood and the Attorney General.

Matriculating in a College which had that year reached in all-time high enrollment of 2620 undergraduates, '22 devoted the first half of the academic year chiefly to the maintainance of tradition. Coach John Fisher's football team, with Richmond Keith Kane as its captain, fought a nine-game schedule with considerable success. Two local colleges, Boston University and Holy Cross, were the first to bow to the Crimson 7 to 0, and 3 to 0.

Two real intersectional games--no longer a feature of today's bone-crushing schedules--next tested the eleven. Indiana succumbed 19 to 0, and Georgia was added to the list of victims by the good right too of Plaffman, whose field goal broke up a 7 to 7 deadlock. Penn State provided unexpected resistance to the team and, as the CRIMSON headline put it "Crimson and Penn State Battle to Draw Before Spellbound Thousands." The score: 21-22.

The first defeat an upset came at the hands of Centre College (where are they now?) whose backfield full of cols and antelopes provided the final 6 to 0 margin. The loss was the Crimson's first in five years.

Thrown off stride by the Praying Colonels from Kentucky, Coach Fisher's forces next journeyed to Princeton where the Tigers punched through a 10 to 3 victory, as hundreds got their gridiron thrills vicariously by watching electric "play-by-play" scoreboards at strategic places throughout the University. the Brown Bear, next week, could not contain the team that had been clawed by the Tiger, and in the pre-Yale tilt, the Crimson triumphed 9 to 7.

Thirst for Victory

The Elis, who came to Cambridge with great expectations and a thirst for victory unquenched since 1916, went away not much better off. Kane lead his team to a convincing 10 to 3 victory in the Stadium.

By way of supporting this major bit of tradition, the undergraduates, aided and abetted by the CRIMSON, beat the inevitable tattoo on the hapless skull of the H.A.A. The subject? Ticket distribution, of course. From the first game, when it was claimed that non-University personnel sat in cheering section seats, to the last, when inept distribution of tickets was alleged, the Athletic Association was on the receiving end of a steady drum-fire of adverse publicity.

Editorial Blasts

Other traditional editorial blasts were levelled against University Hall, for supporting a miasma of red tape, and against those who 1) didn't participate in Union activities, and 2) didn't turn out for the various football rallies.

Also around the University in the Fall of 1921, Professor James B. Conant was an adviser, holding office hours in Boylston 6, and Professor Charles Townsend Copeland was hearing undergraduate problems in Hollis 16. E. E. Hutchinson, M. F. Lesses, G. B. Roberts, Lazarus Rubin, D. H. Sanders, David Seegal, and Samuel Teitelbaum were the only men of '22 to hold Group One averages as the year got under way. And the Otis Elevator Company advertised that the Kremlin was only one of the world's many famous buildings equipped with Otis Elevators.

Disarmament

1921 represented the first year in the history of the world in which disarmament was really taken seriously. The Washington Conference, held in the fall of the year was the springboard, and the CRIMSON outdid itself in the pursuit of this objective. A series of 20 special articles examined this and other topics connected with world peace; countless editorials supported the position. Mass meetings were held in the Union and Professor Albert Bushnell Hart 'so said that Americans were learning that isolationism was impossible. But the CRIMSON, wise far beyond its knowing said "we may not necessarily agree . . . that Germany is preparing for a war of revenge . . . but when an export (General Taufflieb of the French Army) warns us that war is coming, it is undoubtedly the part of wisdom to listen."

Coincident with the Princeton football game was the threat of a general rail road strike. To keep the iron wheels rolling in this eventauality over 500 students in the University signed up as volunteer trainsmen in the emergency.

Later on, a CRIMSON campaign culminated in the University administration's dropping the requirement that seniors take four courses. A Ku Klux Klau organizational campaign was pooh poohed by the breakfast table daily as was the idea of a Soldier's Bonus.

Sensational news made the last few issues of the CRIMSON a sneak thief was unfortunate enough to be identified while pilfering a room in Westmerely, while up at Jefferson Laboratories some oil in an oxygen tank was the cause of an explosion fatal to two workers.