Sport: Good Hate

What is the difference between a Princeton man and a Harvard man? Some say it is the ability to play football, and some that it is the ability to pronounce a broad A; it may be no more than the turn of a hat-brim, the angle of a cigaret. At all events, there has always been a difference. Now there is a breach. Last week Princeton broke off athletic relations with Harvard.

To be sure, it has happened before. Princeton and Harvard did not meet in 1885. They resumed in 1886 and stayed friendly until 1890. They squabbled over professionalism and stopped meeting until 1894. In 1897 they broke off again, Harvard charging unnecessary roughness. They made it up in 1910 and have played every year since then except for the two years of the War. But never, in all this history of feuds and charley-horses, have these two famous universities been driven apart by such puerilities as those which caused the decision of the Princeton Board.

“Are you a Princeton man?”

“No, I was kicked by a horse.”

The Lampoon, Harvard funnypaper, was being witty. Said the editor, one John Ogden Whedon, in an explanation of the Princeton Game issue: “Lampy sees no reason … to disguise the fact that the brotherly love and friendly rivalry existing between Harvard and Princeton are purely imaginary. . . .” The editorial referred to the rumor, brewing for some time and recently denied by the athletic boards of both universities, that Harvard wanted to drop Princeton from its football schedule. “They [Harvard undergraduates] would still like to see Princeton dropped, but they would like even more to see her licked. And as this may be the last opportunity … it will be a glorious free-for-all masquerading under the name of football . . . once more the old eye-gouging . . . after all, there is nothing like a good hate. . . .”*

Followed various quips, exemplifying the good hate of Harvard. There was a picture called “The Huddle System” (five football players with their arms on one another’s shoulders). There was a picture showing The Huddle System “At Princeton” (five football players with their arms on a sooty-looking chorus-girl). There was a skit (“Good Clean Fun For All”) which hinted that Princeton paid its athletes; another (“Honor Where Honor Is Due”) which implied that they cheated in examinations. A page was devoted to a buzzing personal attack on T. C. Clarke, Princeton 1926, cum laude graduate, because his photograph was recently published in Vanity Fair as an endorser of Ide Collars (see p. 31). A poem began with the amazing rhyme:

“From that nursery of heroes

Known as Princeton where the beer flows. . . .”

The first picture in the magazine was a simple pen and ink drawing of two pigs. “Come, brother,” said the caption, “let us root for dear old Princeton!” A spare column bristled with insults to other colleges : A Dartmouth man is “considered an authority on the innocence of country girls”; “At twelve cents a pound on the lap, the co-eds [of Cornell] aren’t worth anything”; “We haven’t a word to say [about the Jews at Columbia], boys. We know just how it is ourselves.” No college west of the Alleghenies was mentioned.

Friends of Harvard were alarmed at the combined dullness and venom of such pasquinades. Friends of Princeton were amazed that the authorities had taken them, seriously. Four days after the Lampoon appeared, President Lowell of Harvard sent a telegram of apology.

Other comments: President Angell of Yale said that the Lampoon attack was “a case of intellectual measles”; Howard Elliott, President Harvard Board of Overseers: “This unfortunate incident will strain the pleasant relations between Harvard and Princeton graduates.”

*Princeton won, 12 to 0.