The period of testing which The Magenta went through in the 1870s did not go easily. Even though the editors of The Advocate extended their editorial goodwill to the new paper, the community at large seemed unenthusiastic. The first issue promised a home delivery system for subscribers; the second retracted the offer because of lack of interest. The wrapper of advertising stayed at four pages until the Fall of 1875--two years without an increase. Also in 1875, in concert with The Advocate, The Magenta cancelled its policy of credit to subscribers. "We have been in existence now for three and a half years, and during that time we have lost something like two hundred dollars on subscribers' bills..." the business manager announced.

The great editorial causes of the early years have a ludicrous ring to them today. The paper fought for plankwalks in the Yard, turning off of the Yard gas lights at a later hour, more spirit at the athletic contests, a student union. The columnists wrote on everything and nothing, from life in foreign universities to athletics and the arts; and every issue of the paper could be expected to contain a selection of poetry and fiction, usually followed by the initials of the editor-author. Drama and book reviews appeared now and again, although these were far from the high point of the paper. One famous reading by Oscar Wilde, damned in the pages of the Boston papers for its lack of style and content, drew high praise from The Crimson's enthusiastic, although apparently unsophisticated, reviewer.

If the weighty issues in the paper's editorial' pages somehow lacked a sense of urgency, it is well to remember that this was a far simpler age. The change of the College color from magenta to crimson, which occurred in 1875, is a case in point. Rather than make any rash decision. Mr. Eliot researched the history of the color, studied the precedents, and began a long series of consultations with alumni and faculty, which all culminated in a mass meeting in Holden Chapel in May. After lengthy argument and debate, a motion to change the color was made. It passed, The Magenta tells us, "by a large majority," although not unanimously, it seems. On May 21, The Crimson made its first appearance.

The formal systems of election and job classification which now esixt at The Crimson seem not to have come into being in the 1870s. One became an editor simply by writing for the paper, or, presumably, by trying to sell advertising. Two editors were put in charge of each issue, and given the responsibility for writing the editorials, soliciting copy from other sources, and seeing the paper through the press. (Printing was done alternately at the Riverside Press and John Wilson & Sons, in Cambridge.) Periodically, meetings of the staff were called by the President, who would hang The Crimson shingle from an iron bar on the side of University Hall to summon editors to his room that evening.

Among The Crimson and Magenta men of the first ten years were such easily recognizable names as Owen Wister '83 the novelist, Josiah Quincy '80, the future Mayor of Boston, Barrett Wendell '77, the legendary Harvard professor, and Frederic Jessup Stimson '76, Wilson's Ambassador to Argentina, who is most remembered today as the author of the early Harvard novel Rollos's Journey to Cambridge.

Around 1876-77, just as advertising was getting up to eight pages an issue, the roof caved in on the already anemic finances of the paper. Editors were forced to pay the printer's bills out of their own pocket for a time, as the delayed results of the Panic of 1873 hit Cambridge. "Our subscription list was very small, as the students could not easily afford to subscribe," wrote a business editor of the period: "The advertisers knew The Crimson was in trouble, and consequently were unwilling to throw away their money, fearing the paper would fail."

BUT THE FLEDGLING entrepreneurs who solicited advertising hit on a plan: "We canvassed our friends, and ascertained what necessities they expected to purchase, and then solicited an advertisement, agreeing to take the article they wanted at a small discount from the regular price, in lieu of cash. This scheme worked famously, and when our board retired, we left our successors a sheet absolutely free from debt, and at least $200, either in cash or in easily collected bills."

The budget surplus was not to be long-lived, but it tended to demonstrate that The Crimson was a viable enterprise, not likely to fold up under an economic gale. As the paper rounded the corner into the 1880s, it seemed fairly sure of its place at Harvard.

Its place at Harvard, though, was to be sharply redefined as it entered its second decade. The editors of the paper, larger in number and more ambitious in outlook than their predecessors, were eager to do something which more resembled the kind of journalism that big city newspapers were engaging in during that heyday I the American press. The first attempt at a revision in format was made in 1882, when, in the words of The Advocate's 1890 catalogue:

Some of The Advocate editors dissatisfied with the condition of journalism at Harvard, evolved a project for uniting The Advocate with The Crimson ...A formal offer of consolidation was made by The Crimson, the terms proposed being, that the publication of The Crimson should be stopped, that its editors should be elevated to The Advocate board, and that The Crimson's debt, amounting to several hundred dollars, should be assumed by The Advocate.

An ambitious plan, and one which would have changed the face of writing at Harvard over the past century. However, The Advocate board found itself sorely split over the proposal, and finally rejected it by one vote. The alumni of The Advocate were said to have been extremely active in opposing the merger proposal.

Having had its proposal spurned by The Advocate, The Crimson was left to take independent action. The editors announced their next step in an editorial on June 28, 1882:

For nearly ten years The Crimson has been regularly issued as a fortnightly, and has none but the most grateful comment to make on the support which it has received from the College. It now seems to the editors that the interests of the College will be best served if the paper shall hereafter appear as a weekly, since the establishment of two successful dailies, it has become evident that fortnightlies must no longer assume to be newspapers, but rather take up the role of magazines. It has seemed to us evident that the interest which the college has taken in this form of literary publication would not warrant the continued existence of two such papers of the same character and aims. The proposal that The Advocate and Crimson be consolidated was deemed inadvisable by our contemporary. In consideration, then, of the facts above stated, and of the fact that The Advocate is the older paper, and has, therefore, certain pre-emptive rights in the premises, we have decided to publish The Crimson as a weekly and to leave to The Advocate a field which it is so well able to fill. By this action we feel that we shall not be abandoning the traditional policy of The Crimson, but shall rather be extending it and carrying it on as it stands epitomized in our motto, 'I won't philosophize and will be read'.....

Certainly, deference to The Advocate was one reason for the decision to become a weekly, but an eagerness to get into the middle of the journalistic fray, join in the press war which was developing at Harvard, must have helped prompt the decision. The editors of The Crimson had stood by for three years while not one but two dailies had been founded. The Harvard Echo in December of 1879 and The Harvard Daily Herald in January of 1892. While the adventurous and talented Herald moved in for the kill on the more stolid and less interesting Echo, The Crimson's editors were consigned to a back seat, serving as observers to a battle they wanted to join. The Crimson's writers had to be content to deliver their opinion of the situation in their editorials. Thus, The Echo was told: "It is, we think, the general opinion that The Echo has never been all that a Harvard daily should be, nor yet all it at one time gave promise of becoming."

If that was not enough, The Crimson felt obliged also to give The Echo's staff a lesson in good Calvinist theology as well: "No college paper can achieve success without hard work on the part of all connected with it. To drop a miscellaneous assortment of items into a hopper can hardly be called editing a paper."