Bluebooks in Valhalla

Huge, dark, and ornate, Memorial Hall rules its triangle kingdom with a firm Victorian hand. Despite the abuse of words and weather, the Hall continues to stand regally as a reminder of Harvard students who died in the Civil War.

Harvard President James Walker first suggested a monument in 1863, and an alumni committee, including Ralph Waldo Emerson '21 and Oliver Wendell Holmes '29, some set to work on the details. The group declared that the planned memorial "must ever prove an unfailing source of inspiration and elevated sentiment ... to every succeeding age more dear, and more sacredly to be preserved from dilapidation or decay." The committee also predicated that the Hall would have "unity and simplicity of line and mass." And when the alumni presented the building to the University after its completion in 1876, the Corporation called it "the most valuable gift which the University has ever received, in respect alike to cost, daily usefulness, and moral significance."

Daily usefulness, however, soon began to push any moral significance into the darker corners of the hall. For students used the large room as a notoriously rowdy dining hall. When Carrie Nation, famous hatchet-wielding prohibitionist, discovered that Harvard diners are wine jelly and harm with champagne sauce, she made a dramatic appearance in Memorial Hall. The hour was 3 p. m., the date, November 14, 1902.

Stepping onto the visitors gallery, she shouted: "Boys! Don't cat that infernal stuff. It's poison." The students replied by tossing cigars and cigarettes toward Carrie, but the Kansas hatchet-swinger refused to give up and descended into the fray. She slapped faces, seized cigars and pipes, tried to sell hatches for her crusade, and left only after 2,000 stamping students forced her back onto the electric car for Boston.

Other spirited occasions took place in the great dining hall. A gay banquet was held in honor of King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales; boxing matches and dice games were not uncommon. The menu was unappealing, however: four dollars weekly for "fish, eggs, and dessert, with meat extra." Such fare drove many students to other places to eat, and 1925 saw the last scrambled eggs in Memorial Hall. Experimental mice in the University's Psychological Laboratories now scurry through the old basement kitchen.

But food was not the only topic to arouse interest. A demand in the early twentieth century to include the names of Harvard's Confederate dead next to those of the Union created intense controversy. Such Northerners as Charles Francis Adams prevented the move by suggesting that the Confederates build their own memorial at Harvard "when it can be a genuine expression of a universal sentiment."

In recent times, registration tables and blood and donation beds have replaced much of the excitement and drama of the hall's earlier days. Henry Adams, in The American Scene, characterized the structure as "the great bristling brick Valhalla ... that house of honor and hospitality which ... dispenses ... laurels to the dead and dinners to the living." But overgrown ivy has largely crowded out the laurels, and the waiters now serve blue-books instead of wine jelly.