"Painful Duty"

Classes come and classes go but undergraduate college publications keep on, more or less, forever. Tradition is strongly upon them but with annually changing boards of editors their excellences and taste fluctuate. The spectacle of an institution as old and honored as the Harvard Lampoon (monthly funnypaper) falling (as it did the past autumn) into the hands of editors callow and ribald, is neither unusual nor significant. The Lampoon's coarse insults to Princeton, subsequent inept apologies and yet more recent displays of awkwardness in prose, verse and cartoon, were simply the sort of thing that can happen in undergraduate journalism--a parallel to the miserable football team that often afflicts a college just after it has won a championship.

So it was startling to behold the always opinionated but seldom unsophisticated New York World pitching into "Lampy" (as Harvards call their campus fool) like a Dutch uncle or beard-tweaked rabbi, belaboring the unimportantly obvious. "Now it becomes," said the World, "a painful duty. . . .

"What the Lampoon needs is a new set of editors, and especially a new staff poet. . . . The metre is slew-footed, the ideas are ignobly feeble, the rhymes set your teeth on edge. The humor, if it can be called humor, is the humor of a comic valentine; that is to say, it is born of nothing more sprightly than oafish malice. . . . It is a platitude that clumsy humor is perhaps the most painful thing to behold this side of eternal damnation. You blush for the fellow who tries it, and feel that he has done something equivalent to appearing in public without his breeches. ... It bears the Harvard name and reflects on Harvard. . . ."

What was the special reason for this earnest vehemence, aside from the fact that the World is a self-constituted tutor to all men on all matters? Harvard men, and many a World-reader, knew. The publishers Pulitzer of the World were Harvard men; Ralph, the elder, having been graduated an A. B. in 1900; younger Joseph having attended, 1904-06. The executive editor of the World, red-headed Herbert B. Swope, would have been Harvard '03 but for an accident. The lumbering World confessionist-colyumist, Heywood Broun, had sat to Harvard professors from 1906 to 1910. And the World editorial writer, Walter Lippmann, fierce purist, who had doubtless dictated the World's rebuke, had in his precocious youth completed the four-year Harvard course in three years, aged 20 ('09), and stayed a year to study philosophy.

Harvard men gave thanks that the Lampoon's rebuke had come, since it had to come, from fond, dutiful brothers and not from a stranger without the gates; from the Harvard-manned if not Harvardized World rather than from, say, the New York Herald Tribune, whereof the dominant figure is, of course, Owner-Editor Ogden Mills Reid, Yale '04 (and a vigorous alumnus, especially in everything appertaining to water polo), one of whose right-handiest men is City Editor Robert Cresswell, famed Princetonian ('19) ; or from some underling of disaffected and disapproved Publisher William Randolph Hearst, Harvard student from 1882 to 1885.