Chapter III

I WON'T PHILOSOPHIZE. I will be read." An unusual contention for a college newspaper of the period, but nonetheless, this was the motto of the earliest version of today's Crimson--The Magenta, first published on January 24, 1873. Five of the six undergraduate newspapers founded in the Nineteenth Century had already folded the last, the Advocate, held a position of seemingly unchallengeable strength in the Harvard community, Nonetheless, a handful of undergraduates were willing to make the attempt, once more, to give the University a newspaper.

The Magenta set its sights high; it would attempt fairness, accuracy, and encyclopedic coverage; it would avoid gossip, falsehood, and error: in short, it would try to please all of the people all of the time, or as the editors put it in their first editorial:

The book notices and exchanges will be with the design to place before our readers only what is likely to interest them. Generalities are seldom read, and therefore will be omitted in these parts of the paper, and in the column devoted to the theatre as well. From time to time we shall review in a more conspicuous place than usual books that treat of education, or otherwise bear a relation to college life.

There will be occasional criticisms upon the methods of instruction and government followed here. We may differ from those who teach us, but in every case we will be careful not to say anything unworthy of ourselves or them. Wild and general accusations, in which the plainest thing is the author's bitterness, do not get or deserve much attention. But to a carefully considered, temperate article nobody ought to object, for, though its ideas are unsound, they are less likely to be harmful if stated fully and clearly than if left to spread through the college in the disjointed form of conversation. The error will be detected sooner, and, as a rule, college men are too honorable to side with what they see to be unfair even if it chimes with their prejudices.

Concerning news it is hard to say enough and not too much. The rights of the gossip must be held sacred, and it is unnecessary to trespass upon the domain of the childish. There is still room, however, to tell many things that should secure us the patronage of students and graduates....

These were hardly the words of fighting journalists, but these were not the days of great journalism, either. The worst newspapers of the period were the great yellow rags, the best were so genteel as to be stultifying--The New York Times's masthead boasted "It Does Not Soil the Breakfast Cloth." The Faculty of the College had seen to it that several earlier newspapers went out of existence after they had dared to print critical articles, and even a paper co-founded by James Russell Lowell had died from lack of readers. The bravest of the College papers. The Collegian, had boasted on its masthead "Dulce est Periculum"--"Danger is Sweet"--and had run the risk of offending faulty sentiment. It too was closed down. The prospects of success for a new paper seemed bleak.

But The Magenta came into being at the dawn of Harvard's Golden Age, in the early years of Charles William Eliot, and no climate could have been better for fostering such an undertaking. John Finley has suggested that the rise of the Sophist came about because of the need of Athens for expositors of the new imperial civilization, and it is not by accident that Samuel Eliot Morison has referred to Charles William Eliot as "The enlarger of the empire." Eliot's new intellectual empire, as it brought together under the banner of "Veritas" the best and most progressive scholars, students and thinkers in the world, needed expositors, instruments to bring the gospel of the new education to the masses. Eliot found his preachers in strange places--he himself was one of the best--and nothing could express the challenge of the new Harvard better to the undergraduate body than a first rate newspaper.

The faculty which had discouraged and disbanded the earlier newspapers was the same which had issued edicts-against students "grouping in the Yard," and defended the rigid, inflexible undergraduate curriculum which Eliot's reforms would sweep away. They were losing control over Harvard, as the school changed from a parochial college to the first great American university. Only in the light of Eliot's innovations could a newspaper survive where once the forces of academic conservatism had ruled unchallenged.

Yet even Eliot's liberalism did not mean that the Magenta would have an easy go of it with the Administration. As Henry A. Clarke, The Magenta's first President and guiding spirit, later narrated the story in an earlier history of The Crimson. Dean Gurney called Clark to his office for an explanation of the new paper and then:

expressed strong disapproval. I asked him whether the carrying out of the plan was officially forbidden. He said no, but that he wished us to understand that he thought the project very ill-advised. I reported what had taken place to the promoters, who decided to go ahead notwithstanding the Dean's advice to the contrary.

The Faculty, which a decade before might have banned the new publication outright, now held itself to a mild expression of outrage. The Magenta, on its part, largely observed the proper amenities in editorials, although it stood firm to a policy of identifying every editorial as the opinion of all the editors, not just the author. This policy was particularly useful, the Fiftieth Anniversary Book relates, when the Faculty came round looking for the man who had referred to one of their number as "a little tin god on wheels."

The Magenta, (named after the College color, it underwent a change in nomenclature in December 1875, when the College went crimson) at first could not be recognized as what we would call a newspaper today. It appeared biweekly, a thin layer of editorial content surrounded by an even thinner wrapper of advertising. To many, it must have seemed superflous: The Advocate already fulfilled the College's need for reading matter. Why bring out yet another publication?

THE FIRST EDITORIAL mapped out an independent course for the paper, and attempted to differentiate it from The Advocate:

.... We do not attempt to rival it in jeux d'esprit, or in cunningness of speculation, or otherwise poach upon its preserves. We shall be content with the humbler task of satisfying the curiosity of our readers about what is going on in Cambridge, and at other colleges, and of giving them an opportunity to express their ideas upon practical questions....