Black and White And Red All Over

Even a casual reader of The Crimson's coverage of the events of 1969 might have detected a faint tinge of radicalism.

A staff editorial that ran the day after police arrested the protesters occupying University Hall, entitled "The Corporation Must Go," would erase any lingering doubts about the newspaper's political stance.

Such positions did not please University administrators.

"They just didn't tell things honestly for a while, so we just had to find some other way to get the documents out where people could read what was actually written or said," says President Emeritus Nathan M. Pusey '28, referring to The Crimson's reporting in the late 1960s. "And that's why we founded the Gazette."

In September, 1969, Crimson President James M. Fallows '70 wrote that the staff was initially pleased with the coverage of the takeover and the strike. Three editors had set up a makeshift press room in a dean's office at University Hall, sending dispatches back to the rest of the staff with couriers who dodged the police patrolling the Yard.

"Hadn't we put more inches of print into every issue of the paper than any other time in history?" Fallows asked ironically. "Weren't we doing a dandy job?"

Many people did not think so. In Push Comes To Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest, Steven J. Kelman '70 wrote that the paper "glorified the unthinking machine," pushing along the controversy while pretending to report objectively.

According to Kelman, The Crimson refused to properly cover the activities of the more moderate Young People's Socialist League, which he says initiated the debate over ROTC. Instead, The Crimson focused almost exclusively on the SDS radicals.

"The Harvard Crimson drove ahead, oblivious to unpopularity and disdain, determined to tell the truth as they saw it, no matter who they offended," Kelman wrote.

Kelman even went so far as to dedicate his book, in part, "to my friends on The Harvard Crimson, without whom, the Harvard confrontation, and thus this book, might never have been possible."

Concern about the Crimson's coverage eventually prompted the founding of two new campus newspapers--The Harvard University Gazette and The Harvard Independent.

But Fallows and other Crimson alumni say that, on at least one occasion, the administration tried to exert some control over the paper by appealing to its graduate board. Although undergraduates run the Crimson on a day-to-day basis, the graduate board owns The Crimson building and is empowered to take charge of the paper should they consider it necessary.

"The administration was grieviously concerned about the output of The Crimson, and they were looking for ways to change it," says Fallows. "One of the ways was to discharge some of the paper's executives, including me."

Fallows says that, while the paper always maintained a left-wing stance on the year's events, the staff held a wide range of opinions.

"It was an intemperate time," says Fallows. "I think that the paper every day was sort of a contest of people with different intemperate views."

"I'm sure The Crimson was in the leftmost one-third in those days, but not in the leftmost one-hundredth," he adds.