Nineteen twenty was the year of the new press. A gift of $1,000 in the autumn of 1919 made the purchase possible and finally The Crimson had a bigger paper. A column wider and five inches longer, the new sheet was ready to handle the news explosion which occurred at Harvard between the wars. The editorial page, which had gone from one to two columns before the War, used its extra ten inches to take up the cudgels of a slow of new causes undreamed of before the War. Just before the new press was installed a supplement, the Bookshelf, appeared, and the Playgoer, a page of dramatic criticism made its first appearance in March 1920.

A college newspaper is rarely better than the college it covers, and no college is better than its President.

Abbot Lawrence Lowell was President of Harvard in the 1920s. He was a brilliant, capable, often inspired, vigorous, and widely respected college president. He was also vain, stubborn, bigoted, and capable of immense pettiness. Lowell sent Harvard students across the River to scab during the Boston Police strike of 1919. He served as chairman of a Commission which upheld the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti. He also expanded and developed the curriculum, upgraded the faculty, introduced order into Eliot's elective system, and conceived and constructed the House System. In the Lowell years, in turn. The Crimson seemed to reflect the nature of the complex man who was President of Harvard. Starting in the 1920's our records of The Crimson become more and more complete. The modern comment book, the auditor's notebook in which editors share messages and inspirations, dates from 1924, and from the comments which editors have written over the past half century, we get a much more intimate view of life at Harvard, and the nature of The Crimson, than we have from the bare bones records of the first half century. It is at the 51-year mark that we begin the study of The Crimson as a social institution, a cooperative effort of generations of men and women, rather than as merely a daily newspaper.

By all appearances, no great social changes took place in The Crimson in the years between War and Depression. Things seem to have gone along as well (or poorly) as ever. The new press brought an expanded paper, and the new prosperity brought an expanded Business Board. A full time accountant was put on to keep the Business Board's teeming profits in order.

The stories of the 20s tended toward the parochial. More often than not, a day's front page would be made up of rewritten news releases, reports of speeches, and other stories which required little, if any investigation. A typical set of headlines might include:

P.S. Seeley Declares

All Evil Is Unreal

Prof. Babbit Speaks of

True Liberalism

Prof. Grandgent

Advocates Spelling Reform

Dr. Angell Says Colleges Can Raise

General Level of Intelligence

The Crimson was nonetheless respected, as we see from this excerpt from the Fiftieth Anniversary Book:

It is interesting to see what others say of it: an article by Mr. John Palmer Gavit writing in the New York Evening Post of May 5, 1922, said: