Period of Transition at Harvard Begins At Class of '37's Arrival

The 1088 members of the Class of 1937 arrived in Cambridge on a September day in 1933, and with their registration Harvard began a new school year and a new era. A. Lawrence Lowell, who had been president of the College for 24 years, was president no longer. James Bryant Conant '14 had succeeded him, and the new class was the first group to hear Conant speak as Harvard's president.

"Today more than ever," Conant told the freshmen, "the universities are the custodians of the great spiritual values which the human race has so laboriously won in art, literature, philosophy, and science." Though he felt that "the essential feature of a university has always been a small group of distinguished, learned men and a community of students drawing inspiration from their teaching," Conant emphasized that "the experience of many generations has testified to the advantages of a university education as a preparation for a career outside a university." It was a memorable occasion, and the students who heard the president that day would long remember it.

Their class, at least as it appeared then, was not an unusual one, though it contained many men who over the succeeding decades would do unusual things. Among that fall's freshmen, to name just a few, were Gerard Piel '37, destined years later to become publisher of Scientific American, John O'Keefe '37, who ended up working with Project Mercury and the Glenn Flight, and Edward Ahrens, Jr. '37, whose subsequent achievements in the field of medicine include the invention of Metrecal.

There was no lack of persons ready to offer advice. Pitirim A. Sorokin, professor of Sociology, told the freshmen that modern war was 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 college could be dropped to the advantage of everybody." Lewis dismissed grading as "absurd"; whether he heard or not Dean Hanford agreed enough to propose that separate April and November hour grades should be abolished. The head of the Faculty approved this and dropped midyear probations and attendance records for upper classmen at the same time.

The geological laboratory was getting regular messages from Admiral Byrd in Little America those days, but the focal point of interest in world affairs was Germany rather than Antarctica. Incidents involving Ernst Hanfstaengl '09, the Nazi government's foreign press secretary, brought students closer to the oppressive realities of the times. Hanfstaengl was 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 $1000 scholarship for a College student to use at a German university. The Corporation turned him down, on the theory that no donations should be accepted from members of a group as antagonistic to educational enterprises as the German government appeared to be. The arrival of summer found the University a hot-bed of contention over the issue, but the general trend of opinion favored Harvard's action.

As the Hanfstaengl incident slipped ominously into the past, the Corporation voted to resume Lowell House's Sunday afternoon bell-ringings, and the Debating Council decided to stage a mock trial of Adolph Hitler. A bench of five professors, includling Raphael Demos and Arthur N. Holcombe, heard undergraduates argue pro and con on the German leader and then found him guilty on two out of four charged counts. Charles Feibleman '37 was one of the prosecutors, while two more of his classmates, Thomas H. Quinn '37 and Arthur G. Sullivan '37, supported Chancellor Hitler's defense. Quinn, Sullivan, and company were unable to save Hitler from sentences for killing a man without trial and for imprisoning citizens without evidence, but did establish his innocence on charges of mass murder and invading homes without warrant.

Growing concern for international affairs did not overshadow undergraduate interest in domestic politics. A University-wide poll sought opinion on the race for the governorship of Massachusetts and on the policies of the Roosevelt Administration. Harvard upheld one of its sons but condemned another, backing Gaspar G. Bacon '08 by a 7-1 margin over Mayor Curley (who subsequently won) and completely reversing a former pro-Roosevelt stand. The turnabout on the New Deal, many said, was long overdue; for the College should never have drifted away from its traditionally staunch, Republican stand. Cambridge was, after all, not really the place for Democrats.

A majority of the undergraduates came through with a resounding "No" on the question "Do you feel that the policies of the Roosevelt Administration offer a satisfatcory method of Recovery?" And the next day a 3-1 landslide in a Faculty poll backed up the students' position. On the gubernatorial race, the professors were even further off the track than the undergraduates had been--Faculty opinion spotted Republican Bacon as a 20 to 1 favorite over Curley.

It was that fall--the sophomore year for the Class of 1937--that Harvard and Princeton smoothed over an eight-year breech in athletic relations, meeting on the gridiron for the first time since 1926. Back in the 'twenties there had been a lot of haggling about whether Princeton really deserved as important a place as Yale on the Crimson's fall schedule, but the straw that broke the Tiger's back had come from students rather than administration. On the morning of the 1926 game the then-mighty Harvard Lampoon published a special issue with a drawing of two pigs wallowing in the mud, proclaiming "Come, brother, let us root for dear old Princeton." And to cap it off, at half time the 'Poonies put out a fake CRIMSON headlined "BILL ROPER, PRINCETON COACH, DIES ON FIELD." There was an explanatory crossline: "HELD BREATH TOO LONG."

The ill feelings were pretty generally forgotten by 1934, and the football series sprang up again for keeps. Princeton won, incidentally, by 19 to 0. But if Princeton-Harvard bitterness had subsided, the Lampoon had not. Somewhat later in the Class of 1937's sophomore year, the 'Poon put out its notorious "Esquire" issue, whose contents led the University to shut down the Lampoon building for almost a month and pressure the publication's officers into an en masse resignation.

Harvard pranksters made another leap into Cambride prominence with a revival of the nineteenth century's4THE LAMPOON Not Yet Subsided