From Bacchanal to the Banal: 351 Harvard Commencements

The Harvard Commencement has been mostly a solemn affair for the last century.

From its podium, Henry Cabot Lodge, Class of 1861, declared the position that would defeat the League of Nations and George C. Marshall announced his plan to rescue Europe.

Economists, statesmen and women speak seriously from the steps of Memorial Church before a crowd of students, parents, professors and dignitaries all poised with the reverence due such a momentous tradition.

But Commencement historically has a sillier side.

After the punch, plumcakes and drunken Puritans of the 17th century were toned down during the 18th, revelry switched venues and Class Day became the focus during the 19th century, with its dances and wild scramble around the Class-Day Tree. Commencement unruliness during the 20th century showed a more radical side in the closing years of the 1960s.

Through its three and a half centuries the ritual has never lost its uneasy relationship with riotousness.

Loosening the Old Frocks

The Harvard Commencement was the only fun in town for the Puritans, by law.

Crowds would travel for days from the New England countryside to join the festivities around Harvard Yard.

“It was the great holidy of the Province and of the State, and not only of the State but largely of New England as well,” an anonmous 19th-century Harvard history reports.

The inns and taverns filled overflowed onto the streets (contemporary accounts describe accidental defenestration), the “which, for days before and after, were scenes of riot and debauchery,” in the words of one prim contemporary.

The ceremony itself was rather tame. After Harvard was founded in 1636, problems getting the college off the ground delayed the first Commencement until September 1642.

The first Commencement followed in the tradition of commencements at English universities, with orations in Latin and Greek and a formal dinner for 50 guests that included faculty, administrators, and all of the nine graduating seniors.

The offical ceremony was a harrowing experience for students.

Candidates for the A.B. degree delivered their Latin disputations on stage.

Two Seniors were charged with creating a broadsheet listing the candidates’ thesis topics.

Everyone president, from University Overseers and Faculty to alumni could interrogate seniors on the spot on any aspect of their thesis or aspect of the Harvard curriculum.

For the Seniors the preceding weeks were a rare chance to act rowdy.

“All other days of college life were pallid in comparison with the great festival of Commencement,” wrote

historian Samuel Eliot Morison Class of 1908.

A massive mid-day feast held between the two halves of the commencement exercises was often reported as the a favorite part of the commencement tradition.

The President began the feasting festivities with a blessing and gave thanks at the feast’s end. Guests would then hand around a communal “loving cup” or “grace cup” from which all the guests would drink ale.

After the meal and several rounds from the grace cup, the dinner guests would start into a round of songs.

An unofficial tradition was for graduating students and their parents to serve wine and plum cake at small parties in the students dorm rooms.

In 1693 the “truculently virtuous” President Increase Mather Class of 1656 cracked down on this tradition,

announcing that “for the Commencers to have Plumb-Cake, is dishonourable to the Colledge” and instituting a

fine of twenty shillings for each cake-possession offense.

Attempts to rein in the revelry continued into the eighteenth century. The College passed a rule in 1722 to prevent students from providing “distilled liquors or any Composition made therewith, upon pain of being fined twenty shilling and the forfeiture of the provisions and liquors, to be seized by the tutors!”

By the 1730s, however, the popular evasion of this declaration led the Overseers to recommend and the Corporation to consent to a provision making a special exception for tippling at Commencement.

“It shall be no offence if any scholar shall, at Commencement, make, and entertain guests at his chamber, with punch.”

However innocently it was looked upon by the authorities, “punch-frenzies” were cemented as a common part of the Commencement ritual.

The Class-Day Tree

As Commencement itself calmed down, most of the rowdiness become oncentrated on the literary excersizes of class day.

The origins of Class Day date back to 1707. On May 27 of that year, the Fellows provided a senior treat to the graduating class. The ceremony was later moved to the President’s residence in Wadsworth house, where he served the Seniors wine and cake.

Students began the practice of gathering in their rooms for “spreads, “ feasts that grew more lavish and elanorate throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the early eighteenth century, the faculty added literary exercises to Class, the translation and public delivery of classics in English, to improve the elocution of the graduates.

By the 1760s, however, the seniors had made it their own, and the speeches tended toward the bawdy.

One study detailed in verse his “unsuccesful amour with a very tall maid.”

After the lunch and spreads in their rooms in the halls, students would begin “cheering the halls,” a cacaphony of hurrahs taken up the their final exit from the dormitories.

During his tenure from 1829 to 1845, President Josiah Quincy 1790 decided to liven things up by bringing in a “young-lady element” and a band.

The students aid out buckets of punch for the general public, greatly increased with a “non-scholastic” element after the construction of the first CharlesRiver Bridge between Boston and Cambridge.

In addition to the drinking, feasting, and large dances held in Harvard Hall or under lanterns in the Yard, there was ritual scramble around the Class-Day tree.

Based on the Liberty-Tree tradition, the class would set a garland of flowers high on a tree in the Yard. As the crowds assembled, they would begin a dance around it, spinning and holding hands.

Gradually all four classses would enter the fray, until the ring broke down from its own weight and speed.

Immediately, the seniors, dressed for sport, would scramble for the flowers set high in the tree, elbowing and climbing past eachother to gain a memento of Class Day.

In the evening, Seniors and their dates danced and promenaded under Chinese lanterns strung between the trees in the Yard.

The last observance of the Class-Day Tree took place in 1896.

Through the early twentieth century, Class Day settled down, but remained to be a day for the Seniors and for fun.

The President’s receptions moved to the Master’s open houses, the sumptuous spreads became the parent picnic, but the spirit lives in the public wit of the class day speech.

Protest and PR

Commencement’s last fling with disorder came in the late 1960s, and involved a more serious stance than Commencement carnival’s previous incarnations.

In 1969, a student speech decrying the war and calling for student-worker solidarity was passed over in the official selections process.

Coming on the heels of the University Hall takeover, students threatened to burn their diplomas and walk out of the ceremony if the Students for a Democratic Society speaker was not heard.

He was added to the program the day of Commencement.

Radical Harvard was not entirely content. One hundred students walked out of the official ceremony to a counter-commencement where Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic Hilary Putman proclaimed, “Cambridge may now be the first place to have a true worker-student alliance.”

By 1970, the University had taken measures to keep activism out of commencement.

The Corporation agreed to look into building low-income housing in Riverside if theactivists would minimize protests at commencement.

With the concessions, President Pusey said he hoped “that we can halt the desire of every political or social splinter group to have a say at Harvard’s Commencement. We wouldn’t have much of an audience if it becomes a vaudeville protest show.”

But even the Puritans couldn’t stay away from Commencement antics.

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.