This is the foundation of the forth-coming issue, but while laying it he is never free from interruptions. Editors come in to find out whether they are to have work given to them or not, and they sit around talking and laughing and poking fun at the managing editor while he tries to write, and they wait. Often other officers of the board appear with something to discuss. More than one person calls with the various purpose of pointing out that an organization in which he is interested has not been given enough prominence of late...A freshman is easy to dispose of. But if the caller is an instructor or a graduate the task of pacifying him, of explaining the situation, or occasionally making him see that he is asking for the impossible may be both hard and unavoidable. A familiar class-mate who rides his hobby horse into the office is likely to be attacked bodily, and dumped into a huge waste paper basket near the telephone box, provided enough editors are present. The most exciting of all the morning interruptions can be caused by an angry business manager, who comes waving a printer's bill for extra work.

Before lunch time the assignment list is made out and hung up, and the office can lapse into quiet until evening. Those who come to it in the afternoon come to write and to be left alone.

By half-past seven the lights are lit and the copy box begins its merciless accompaniment to the printer's sharp cry, "Carp-e-e." This box is primarily an invention for conveying manuscript from the desk to the printing room. From then on, the managing editor's business is to keep his head and to see that order and reason prevails in all matters concerning the paper and himself. Candidates come in with botched stories and wonderful excuses. All have to be attended to and set on the straight path promptly. Editors must need be coaxed into getting down to their work, and then persuaded to keep at it until they are finished. Newspaper correspondents arrive and put the unvarying question, "Is there anything tonight?" and then leave for the time being, or else go to their side room to work according to the answer given by the managing editor....More interesting but less common are interruptions caused by the president of the board when he has some editorial question which he cannot settle alone. Indeed, so many and so various are the things which occur on a busy evening that one might say that the time which the managing editor can rescue from interruptions is none too much for the work of editing copy for the printers.

Little by little, as the hours wear on, the hurry and worry lessen, and the office becomes quieter and emptier, until only the proofreader remains for company. Finally the managing editor has nothing to do but to sit back in his chair and keep awake until he has been called up by the Associated Press, and the printers have told him that the paper is full and all is well.

The managing editor of today no longer has the superhuman responsibilities of his predecessor, and the copy box has been replaced by wires and networking. Nobody yells "Carp-e-e," although choicer epithets are often used for a dilatory night editor. The practice of releasing unpublished stories to the public press, which had already been suspended once James wrote his article, died a natural death from old age somewhere in the 1920s or 1930s, its grave unmarked. But candidates still botch stories and give "wonderful excuses," and the flavor of a real newspaper is still there.

During the 1890s, the paper devoted itself to sports and talked respectable Republicanism, because this was what the College wanted. In 1896 the paper urged the whole College to turn out for the Republican parade in Boston. The day after the parades, the paper published its first editorial against police brutality, complaining of the treatment of some Harvard students by the constabulary.

Into this picture walked the Harvard Daily News to compete with The Crimson in 1895. A price war ensued, as well as an increase in Crimson quality, before the Daily News capitulated.

The Turn of the Century

After the great football battle of 1907, editorials turned their thoughts toward more academic matters, and while relations with the College administration were at a low ebb between 1906 and 1910, an editorial board was established in 1911 to handle the increased frequency and importance of pieces.

The old shaded off into the new in the years before the War, when executives still changed every half year, but the paper adopted a new, more open format. Photographs became more of a rule and less of an exception, and extras were no longer confined to football results. President Eliot's retirement brought not only its best extra to date, but also its biggest scoop. Only the president, managing editor, business manager and printers knew that the patriarch of the Augustan age of Harvard was stepping down until the extra hit the streets. The paper also had the best word the next year on the progress of Eliot's internal struggle over whether to accept Taft's offer of appointment to the Court of St. James. Eliot stayed in Cambridge and The Crimson had the news ahead of the Boston papers.

The paper was shocked out of its success when Fabian Fall '10 became the only Crimson president to commit suicide while in office.

During that period the financial state of the paper was strong under the leadership of George Gund '09, the businessmanager for whom the Graduate School of Design'sbuilding is named.

After moving around Cambridge since itsfounding, a successful financial campaign broughtThe Crimson out of the basement of the FreshmanUnion (now the Barker Center for the Humanities)to rest at 14 Plympton St.

Through the spring of 1915 The Crimson ardentlyopposed involvement in the First World War. Later,the president reversed the paper's opinion, andthe paper encouraged students to take MilitaryScience courses. When a straw poll showed 70percent of the campus favored them, PresidentTheodore Roosevelt, class of 1880, responded witha letter to the paper, applauding the College'scommitment to "prepare our giant, but soft andlazy, strength."

The declaration of war in 1917 reduced TheCrimson to its knees as it struggled to put out adaily paper with a fraction of its previous staff.Former Crimson President W. H. Meeker '17 led thepaper's pressure for war, and was one of the 15editors who died in the trenches of France. Thepaper stopped publishing on June 7, 1918, butcontinued in the fall as a weekly, published bygraduate students. In January it returned to adaily schedule, and the business board slowlybegan to pull the paper out of the red.