'Outside World' Crises, Changes At College Trouble Class of 1936

Harvard freshmen crossing the Charles in the fall of the 1932 came, like all freshmen before and after them, ill-prepared for the shocks of the first year. And like all others, this class survived--even while the outside world lurched toward catastrophe.

The typical freshman arrived and took refuge in a large and homely Union, where "Copey" held forth in an upstairs lounge, explaining that he taught in "the finest gentlemen's library in the world." But the freshman was reminded of the sick world beyond that sanctum when Leverett Saltonstall 'I4, then speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, told him: "We are in the midst of our difficulties. To solve our problems we need the ability, the courage of you gentlemen and others who are entering colleges. . . ."

A CRIMSON editorialist in September 1932 found cause for the Freshman to worry, but he saw the other side of the coin untarnished. "True, they enter College at a time when family and University budgets are severely restricted to essentials. But today, as freshmen, they will find men's minds quickened to thought and imagination by the problems of the present crisis; to the eager student such an atmosphere here is well worth the small sou of temporary financial restriction."

Faculty Favors FDR

National elections were pending. Frank W. Taussig, Felix Frankfurter and sixteen other professors out of twenty-five polled by the CRIMSON extolled Roosevelt; the University listened and then supported Hoover 3-2 in the annual straw vote. Three weeks later the country went along with the professors. In post-election analysis, Arthur N. Holcombe '06, professor of Government, decided that Herbert Hoover ought to resign before March 4--as so many people were urging--since "Roosevelt could not get a new Congress with which to work, and therefore it would be useless." The CRIMSON had already decided that it made little difference to the country who was elected; the Advocate, too, commenting on the small turnout in the straw vote, grumbled that "the whole political machinery of our government is run by people who are either so corrupt or so inefficient that they have made our whole government a laughing matter."

But University concern with national politics was microscopic compared with President Lowell's resignation. The day after plans were announced to honor him with a seventy-sixth-birthday dinner, Lowell himself closed out his administrative career with the decision to retire as soon as a successor could be appointed. Panegyrics flooded into the University from most of the country as educators recalled a great career. Lowell's House plan was called by some the greatest thing that ever happened to Harvard; his tutorial system already included the features which have remained over the thirty-year period since then. In his Government I class of 1909, Lowell had said as a professor that "if I have taught you anything in his course, I have taught you that the institutions which men build up continue to bear influence long after the men who build them have passed away."

While the University enrollment had doubled and the endowment quintupled, the President's stature had grown beyond measure. The CRIMSON editorial of the day caught the tone of most tributes: "During the length of years into which his administration has extended, . . .Lowell has become identified in the outside world with the ideas of educational progress which now appear overpoweringly necessary in an era of material change. . . . President Lowell's influence is not solely that of the president of a university. It is the influence of a great friend of mankind."

Another living legend--Charles Townsend Copeland--had already left the Yard two months before. No less esteemed than a president, "Copey" had climbed three flights of stairs to his Hollis 15 room for twenty years during which time he made magic of rhetoric for several thousand College men. He still read to freshmen for several years more, but his active teaching life was over.

At the same time, controversy swirled around the 200-foot steeple of a new World War Memorial Chapel, in the main Yard opposite Widener. Dean Sperry of the Theological School conducted the first service for men of '36 and the entire University in September; six weeks later the Corporation ended a dispute of two years' standing with the vote to allow Harvard's three German war dead a memorial tablet in the new church. Before the Class of '36 had graduated the Nazi swastika adorned the tablet, placed there by a visiting German official.

No Escape

While room rents fell and scholarships rose in the fade of Depression, the College created 300 new student jobs in the House system. Freshmen in 1932 and '33 had it brought home to them that the College was an unlikely place in which to escape completely from financial worries. The financial crisis which probably touched closest to undergraduates was the Lampoon's; the CRIMSON recorded that 'Poonies had admitted complete despair late in the fall, and appealed for funds in several directions at once. Harvard's only humor magazine and Cambridge's sole newspaper struggled through the winter and following spring, until in a grudging truce, it was temporarily absorbed into the CRIMSON.

A new president opened the sophomore year of the Class of '36 and Harvard's 298th with the statement that "a University is primarily a group of creative scholars." James Bryant Conant 'I4 added, "Universities are the custodians of the great spiritual values which the human race has so laboriously won. . . ." An Alumni Bulletin survey proclaimed that Harvard men had written 308 books between June and December, and the Harvard Medical School celebrated its 150th anniversary with an address in Sanders Theatre from President-Emeritus Lowell. The Geographical Laboratory was getting daily messages from Rear Admiral Byrd in Little America, and President Conant had the 7 o'clock ringing of the bells discontinued in the Yard, while the College's then-most-famous-graduate was quoted as saying from Washington that he would sooner see his name conferred on a baby than on Lowell House's carillon.

Sixteen cases of ale and forty of beer went on tap around the Houses as the impassioned battle for the joys of 3.2 beer came to an end. Around the turn of the year Harvard's first liquor license in 100 years made it legal to serve to over-21's at the dining tables. Within tea months, however, the administration announced that apparently the big thirst was only temporary: consumption was falling off and the College was losing money by supplying the few remaining quaffers. The liquor permit would be permitted to expire the following January, which it did, in a blaze of apathy, Harvard men turned back to milk at the Bick, and a few months later another perennial polltaker informed them that milk was indeed Harvard's favorite drink.

Contemporary Critics

Sophomores found little alarming in Professor Pitirim Sorokin's warning that modern war is 2000 times worse than the medieval version. Clarence Darrow denounced "poverty-creating big business" as "the cause of all crime." Sinclair Lewis declared that "one-half the people in colleges could be dropped to the advantage of everybody." Lewis denounced grading as "absurd"; whether he heard or not, Dean Hanford agreed enough to propose that separate April and November hour grades be abolished. The head of the Faculty approved this and dropped midyear probations and attendance records for upperclassmen at the same time. The head of the Hygiene Department labelled Stillman Infirmary "inadequate for a university of 7000 people" and demanded immediate plans to build a new infirmary.

Incidents involing Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler's foreign press secretary, brought students closer to the oppressive realities of the Thirties. Hanfstaengl was first chosen a class marshal for his 25th reunion, but he himself declined to serve after protest came from many quarters. Near the end of the year he again embarrassed Harvard by offering a student's scholarship to be used at a German university. The Hitler lieutenant made a similar offer two years later, only to be repulsed again. By this time Harvard opinion was solidly behind President Conant.

A mock trial in the Lowell House Common Room early in the fall of 1934 convicted Adolf Hitler on only two criminal counts out of four; yet even in its serio-comic recognition of Nazi Germany, the Harvard community was beginning to shake the sleep from its eyes. Local politics, however, lost no ground to international. Boston's Mayor Curley got a no-confidence vote from numerous Faculty professors, and hostility to President Roosevelt was confirmed by a straw vote of Faculty and undergraduates. Again Harvard conservatives stood out against the national voice, which of course voted in New Dealers in the off-year local elections.

The Lampoon found itself in trouble again after its infamous "Esquire" issue in spring 1935; in righteous disciplinary fervor the Administration closed down the "Poon establishment while officers scrambled to desert the sinking ship. Only the autumn before, the CRIMSON, Lampoon, and Life magazine had gone on sale in tandem at a combined price of $5.00, never again to be duplicated. A mild stir arose at the vague revival of the Med. Fac, Club, open to any undergraduate who could commit anything which would have him expelled and jailed if caught. But the revival died quickly; members succeeded only in blowing up the old well in front of Hollis Hall.

Commuter Ills

This was the year of revolution for the commuting segment of the community, beginning with the formulation of a Commuters' House Committee at PBH. Both PBH and the commuters were dissatisfied with the arrangements for 250 day students to eat and take part in occasional activties at the center. The pot boiled over when the PBH cabinet expelled the commuters June I, effectively forcing the Administration to provide new quarters. Both sides settled finally upon Dudley House, using only the first floor in the beginning and eventually taking up the whole building.

The Student Council came out against goalpost rioting while the Faculty concerned itself with abolishing the elementary language requirement. This was the year when Tallulah Bankhead told the CRIMSON that drama must never be censored, and the spring when it was discovered that Harvard University was left without a single dean or executive above the rank of secretary to the President for one entire weekend.

Almost all other activities between the opening of the Senior year for the Class of 1936 and the beginning of the Tercentenary celebration ten months later, were eclipsed by a many-faceted dispute over the Teachers Oath Act, which required most instructors in Massachusetts institutions to swear they would support the national and state constitutions. Kirtley F. Mather, professor of Geology, struck out against the Massachusetts Legislature's stricture as "unwarranted and dangerous to democracy." Mather claimed to speak for many Faculty men when he said he would not take the oath since it violated his constitutional rights. Seniors circulated a petition to support him while Mather reconsidered, then retracted his stand in the interest of keeping the University out of a threatened lawsuit.

The CRIMSON harbored no such inhibitions in its editorial columns. Their point was made early in the term: "Nothing could be a more ludicrous and at the same time pathe-