Category Archives: Campus life

“She Flourishes:” Chapters in the History of Princeton Women.

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Mudd Man­u­script Library’s new exhi­bi­tion fea­tures women at Prince­ton, from the days of Eve­lyn Col­lege (1887–1897), mainly attended by daugh­ters of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity and Prince­ton The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary pro­fes­sors, to the appoint­ment of Shirley Tilgh­man as the first woman pres­i­dent of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity in 2001. For the first time our exhibit is accom­pa­nied by his­tor­i­cal film footage from the archives. This com­pi­la­tion of seg­ments from films and videos, most of which was fea­tured pre­vi­ously in The Reel Mudd, is shown here.

The footage cov­ers forty years of his­tory of Prince­ton women, from the admis­sion of Sabra Meser­vey as the first woman at the Grad­u­ate School in 1961 to Shirley Tilghman’s pres­i­dency. Sub­jects cov­ered include the intro­duc­tion of coed­u­a­tion, stu­dent activism and Sally Frank, and activ­i­ties of the Women’s Cen­ter and SHARE (Sex­ual Harassment/Assault Advis­ing, Resources, and Education).

The com­pi­la­tion opens with footage of the Class of 1939’s junior prom in 1938 (taken from its Class film), which was attended by 606 women (all listed by name in the Daily Prince). Women only entered aca­d­e­mic life at Prince­ton in 1961, when Sabra Meser­vey was admit­ted at to the Grad­u­ate School. The footage at 0:37 shows Meservey’s humor­ous account of her ini­tial con­ver­sa­tion with Pres­i­dent Robert Goheen, who ulti­mately over­saw the intro­duc­tion of under­grad­u­ate coed­u­ca­tion in 1969, and wanted to use Meser­vey as a “test case” at the Grad­u­ate School. (For the full story, see the the blog about the Cel­e­bra­tion of Coed­u­ca­tion at the Grad­u­ate School.)

The only filmed rec­ol­lec­tions about the early years of coed­u­ca­tion were found on the doc­u­men­tary Look­ing Back: Reflec­tions of Black Prince­ton Alumni (1:32), cre­ated on the occa­sion of Princeton’s 250th anniver­sary in 1996. The changes on cam­pus did not please every­body. In 1974 Prince­ton icon Fred­er­ick Fox ’39 reached out to dis­grun­tled alumni in the film A Walk in the Spring­time, point­ing out, per­haps tongue in cheek, that Nas­sau Hall’s two bronze tigers were male and female (3:19). In the fol­low­ing frag­ment, taken from the short Acad­emy award win­ning film Prince­ton, A Search For Answers (1973), women fea­ture promi­nently (3:55).

The last frag­ments fea­ture woman activism and the gains of the women’s move­ment of the 1970s and the 1980s. Two frag­ments were taken from the Class of 1986’s Video Year­book: a speech from Sally Frank ’80, who sued the last three all-male eat­ing clubs (4:18), and a Women’s Cen­ter sit-in in May 1, 1986 (4:45). The last two frag­ments have not been fea­tured yet in The Reel Mudd but will be shortly. The first is a sketch from “Sex on a Sat­ur­day Night,” a the­ater per­for­mance for fresh­men about sex­ual harass­ment, pre­sented by SHARE (5:11), The film ends with the inau­gu­ra­tion of Shirley Tilgh­man (5:11) in 2001, taken from the doc­u­men­tary “Robert F. Goheen ’40, *48; Reflec­tions of a Pres­i­dent” (2006).

The exhibit “She Flour­ishes:” Chap­ters in the His­tory of Prince­ton Women may be vis­ited dur­ing Mudd Library’s open­ing hours on week­days between 9.00 am and 4.45 pm. from now until the end of August 2012.

“Princeton: A Search for Answers,” 1973

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Dur­ing a morn­ing ses­sion of the President’s Con­fer­ence in the early 1970s, a mem­ber of the stu­dent panel told the assem­bled alumni that she had come to Prince­ton “not to find a way of mak­ing a liv­ing, but instead to find a way of mak­ing a life.” Film­mak­ers Julian Krainin and DeWitt Sage used this state­ment in their pro­posal in 1972 for a new recruit­ment film for Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. “It seems that it should be the respon­si­bil­ity of a great uni­ver­sity not so much to answer the ques­tion of how to “make a life,” but to present the stu­dent with at least the tools and courage with which he or she might dis­cover the answer.”

The result­ing film Prince­ton: A Search for Answers won an Oscar  in 1974 for Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject. Film pro­ducer and direc­tor Joshua Logan ’31, who had started his stage writ­ing and direct­ing career in Princeton’s Tri­an­gle Club, was one of the first to see it. “I not only believe that it is a mov­ing, funny, and stim­u­lat­ing account of a Uni­ver­sity I once knew but had almost for­got­ten,”  he wrote to his fel­low mem­bers of the Acad­emy. “It tells about the gleam that flits across the human mind and gives us all some­thing to hope for, to live for. It makes the human race quite a bit more respectable then (sic) we have recently thought it to be.” The film which has recently been remas­tered (2013) is fea­tured here.

In order to write the film treat­ment and script, Dewitt Sage spent sev­eral months on cam­pus, attend­ing classes and sem­i­nars, and talk­ing with stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff. Once the film treat­ment was approved, Julian Krainin took over to super­vise the actual cam­era work. Dur­ing 1972 and early 1973 four­teen and a half hours of 16mm color footage was shot for the thirty minute film. The out­takes are kept in the Uni­ver­sity Archives. To accom­pany the film, the Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­duced a hand­some brochure with quotes and infor­ma­tion about the fac­ulty fea­tured (see SearchForAnswers.pdf).

As already sug­gested by the title, the film’s main empha­sis is on edu­ca­tion, schol­ar­ship, and student-instructor rela­tions. The film includes footage of tuto­ri­als and lec­tures by physics pro­fes­sor and Dean of the Fac­ulty Aaron Lemon­ick (1:50, 9:11), and pro­fes­sors Edward Cone (Music, 3:01, 29:48), John Wheeler (Physics 7:05), Daniel Seltzer (Eng­lish, 12:39), and Ann Dou­glas Wood (Eng­lish, 25:02). Wheeler is filmed dur­ing a lec­ture about the impli­ca­tions of black holes (he is cred­ited with coin­ing the phrase in 1967), while Dan Seltzer teaches a Shake­speare act­ing class and lec­tures about Henry IV (Part 2). Addi­tional footage fea­tures Prince­ton pres­i­dent William Bowen dur­ing a ques­tion and answer ses­sion with alumni and under­grad­u­ates (9:55, 26:11, 27:49) and the work of two grad­u­ate stu­dents: Niall O’Murchadha (Physics, 5:10, 26:51) and Maury Wolfe (Archi­tec­ture, 16:11).

Pro­duced only a few years after the intro­duc­tion of co-education in 1969, at a time when diver­si­fi­ca­tion of the stu­dent body was a pri­or­ity for Prince­ton, women and African Amer­i­can stu­dents fea­ture promi­nently in cam­pus scenes (9:40, 20:56, 24:36) and in the class rooms. There is lit­tle empha­sis in the film on extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. In addi­tion to footage of the Glee Club singing Bach in Alexan­der Hall (directed by Pro­fes­sor of Music Wal­ter Noll­ner, 17:47), sport scenes are lim­ited to marathon run­ning and row­ing (23:25). Addi­tional footage includes stu­dents shar­ing their views of Prince­ton in a pub (19:45, the legal drink­ing age was still eigh­teen!) Some his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs and footage is shown at 22:27, includ­ing a frag­ment of a chem­istry lec­ture by the famous Hubert Alyea (pre­vi­ously fea­tured) and the Tri­an­gle Club.

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Being Jewish at Princeton: from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s days to the Center of Jewish Life

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“The Prince­ton of today is not the Prince­ton of Scott Fitzger­ald. And by that I mean you can feel com­fort­able being Jew­ish, you can feel com­fort­able being Asian, you can feel com­fort­able being African Amer­i­can. And while this might not always have been true (…) it is def­i­nitely true today.” The speaker is Erik Ruben ’98 (1:46), one of the stu­dents fea­tured in the pro­mo­tional video below about the Cen­ter for Jew­ish Life, which opened in 1993. Today’s entry takes a brief look at the his­tory of the admis­sion of Jew­ish stu­dents at Prince­ton since the 1920s.

F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s 1920 debut novel, This Side of Par­adise, was set at Prince­ton and reflected the atmos­phere of the eat­ing clubs and of the uni­ver­sity itself, which (not to Princeton’s lik­ing) he described as “the pleas­an­test coun­try club in America.” Fitzgerald wrote his book at a time when some north­east­ern col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, par­tic­u­larly in urban areas where many East­ern Euro­pean Jew­ish immi­grants had set­tled, per­ceived they had a “Jew­ish prob­lem” in that if they admit­ted too many Jew­ish stu­dents, Protes­tant mid­dle and upper class stu­dents would be dri­ven away. Colum­bia, which had the largest Jew­ish enroll­ment at 40%, was the first to impose a quota in 1921. Prince­ton, how­ever, always claimed not to use quo­tas. As late as 1948 Rad­cliffe Heer­mance, Princeton’s first direc­tor of admis­sions from 1922 to 1950, vehe­mently denied a claim that Prince­ton used a quota to keep Jew­ish stu­dents under 4%. “We’ve never had a quota sys­tem, we don’t have a quota sys­tem, we will never have a quota sys­tem” he told the Daily Prince­ton­ian.

Hutchins121770.jpgA let­ter from for­mer Uni­ver­sity of Chicago pres­i­dent Robert Hutchins, who vis­ited Prince­ton Pres­i­dent John Grier Hibben in the early 1930s, indi­cated oth­er­wise. Hutchins wrote Prince­ton senior Steven L. Buen­ning ’71 In Decem­ber 1970, as Buen­ning was seek­ing infor­ma­tion for his senior the­sis, a biog­ra­phy about Hibben. In the let­ter Hutchins recalls how he had asked Hibben about the num­ber of Jew­ish stu­dents at Prince­ton. Accord­ing to Hutchins, Hibben claimed that the num­ber just hap­pened, where­upon his wife exclaimed: “Jack Hibben, I don’t see how you can sit there and lie to this young man. You know very well that you and Dean Eisen­hart get together every year and fix the quota.”
This anec­dote has been quoted in sev­eral books, and in their foot­notes the authors refer to Buenning’s the­sis only, which includes quotes from the let­ter. Above we repro­duce the orig­i­nal let­ter, which is found in Hibben’s pres­i­den­tial papers in the Office of the Pres­i­dent Records (AC117, Series 14, Box 65, folder 6). The first para­graph, in which Hutchins recalls Hibben’s pro­fessed igno­rance about the rea­sons why black stu­dents did not come to Prince­ton, is remark­able in itself. Unlike Yale and Har­vard, Prince­ton did not admit African Amer­i­can stu­dents  until World War II (the first four African Amer­i­cans were in the Navy V-12 pro­gram).  For more infor­ma­tion about African Amer­i­can stu­dents at Prince­ton, see our pre­vi­ous blog.

Heer­mance lim­ited Jew­ish enroll­ment by devel­op­ing an admis­sion pol­icy that put an empha­sis on “char­ac­ter,” which, how­ever sub­jec­tive, was still regarded as defen­si­ble in pub­lic. Cri­te­ria like “man­hood,” “lead­er­ship” “par­tic­i­pa­tion in ath­let­ics” and “home envi­ron­ment and com­pan­ions” were assessed by using inter­views, let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion, and a social rank­ing sys­tem. A pow­er­ful dis­in­cen­tive to even apply was the anti-Semitic rep­u­ta­tion of Princeton’s eat­ing clubs, which con­sid­ered most Jews “unclubbable.”

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Princeton traditions, old and new: the Class of 1986’s “video yearbook”

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The Class of 1986 was a ‘his­toric’ class, so the fresh­men were told: they were the first to begin their Prince­ton years in the new social sys­tem of the res­i­den­tial col­leges. Accord­ing to their Class His­tory in the Nas­sau Her­ald, how­ever, the stu­dents car­ried on as the gen­er­a­tions before them. “We worked hard and we par­tied hard. This blend of con­ti­nu­ity and change, of tra­di­tion and tran­si­tion, would char­ac­ter­ize our four year stay at Old Nas­sau.” The ‘video year­book’ fea­tured here, in itself a reminder of the “class films” of the 1920s and 1930s, is an expres­sion of that expe­ri­ence. A fast-paced arrange­ment of video­taped snip­pets cap­tur­ing cam­pus events and stu­dent life, the 26 minute film is a cel­e­bra­tion of both old and new.

The video year­book, pro­duced by “Ground Floor Video,” a group of stu­dents under the direc­tion of Glenn Picher ’86, was filmed dur­ing the class’ junior and senior year. Meant as a com­ple­ment to the print year­book, accord­ing to the Prince, the film con­tains selec­tions from some thirty to forty hours of video­tape, accom­pa­nied by orig­i­nal music com­posed by Peter Cur­tiss ’86 (other music cred­its can be found at 25:55). The film is divided into seven chap­ters: Stu­dent Life (1:03), Aca­d­e­mics (5:33), Sports (7:08), Hol­i­days (10:39), Cam­pus issues (15:09), Spring (17:15), and Grad­u­a­tion week­end (20:50).

The sports and spring scenes, along with the Grad­u­a­tion week­end events were already tra­di­tional ele­ments in the class films of the 1920s. Incom­ing fresh­men were intro­duced to other Prince­ton tra­di­tions in the Spe­cial Class of 1986 issue of the Daily Prince­ton­ian. Some of those tra­di­tions are cap­tured in the “video year­book” fea­tured here. They include the bon­fire on Can­non Green after a major sports victory–in this case the foot­ball team’s “Big Three Title,” the first since 1967 (9:44, com­pare with the bon­fire of the Class of 1923); House Par­ties (19:29; com­pare with the class film of the Class of 1939); and “Arch Sing” (12:48), rem­i­nis­cent of the tra­di­tion of “Senior Singing” as seen in the Class of 1928 footage. The footage in the  “Grad­u­a­tion Week­end” (20:50), cap­tur­ing the P-rade, the break­ing of the pipes on Can­non Green, and the com­mence­ment cer­e­monies is very sim­i­lar to the films from six decades pre­vi­ous depict­ing the grad­u­a­tion of the Classes of 1921 and 1928.

Addi­tion­ally, more recent tra­di­tions fea­tured here include the “Nude Olympics (12:00), and the party activ­i­ties of “blow pong” (3:35 and 4:47), and what is assumed to be the “Trees and Trolls,” the annual rum­ble between the over 6 ft tall and the shorter mem­bers of the then still all-male eat­ing club, the Tiger Inn (4:23). Both activ­i­ties were accom­pa­nied by copi­ous amounts of beer. Dur­ing 1986’s fresh­men year the drink­ing age was raised from 18 to 21, mak­ing senior year the first year that most stu­dents could legally drink alcohol.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est for the topic of “tra­di­tions” is the address of Sally Frank ’80 at the Woodrow Wil­son School on Novem­ber 20, 1985 (16:28). Ear­lier that year, Sally Frank had won her law­suit against the all-male eat­ing clubs of Cot­tage, Ivy, and Tiger Inn, which she had filed in 1979 after they refused her a chance to bicker due to her gen­der. Addi­tional issues addressed in the sec­tion ‘Cam­pus protests’ include the block­ade of the entrance to Nas­sau Hall on May 23, 1985 to protest Princeton’s  invest­ments poli­cies with respect to South Africa (15:09) and the Women’s Cen­ter sit-in of May 1, 1986 (16:52).

Within the video a few other faces have been iden­ti­fied as the following.

  • Eng­lish pro­fes­sor John Flem­ing is shown lec­tur­ing (5:39)
  • The late art his­to­rian John R. Mar­tin (5:56)
  • Pres­i­dent Bill Bowen (6:32, appears again 19:05).
  • The late art pro­fes­sor Jerry Buchanan cri­tiques a student’s work (5:42).
  • Harold Med­ina ’09 is seen rid­ing in a golf cart (21:20)
  • Dr. Ruth Wes­t­heimer makes a brief appear­ance (22:41)

This VHS tape is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 1324).

Commencement and reunions in 1928, and Princeton’s penultimate flour picture

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In a recent blog we shared our old­est film depict­ing Pres­i­dent Hibben’s inau­gu­ra­tion in 1912 and some unex­pected footage of Woodrow Wil­son. In today’s post we show you more sur­prise footage from that reel: com­mence­ment activ­i­ties and P-rade scenes, most of which we had already found in a puz­zling “film mosaic” on another reel. We now have iden­ti­fied the mys­tery footage as scenes from the class films of the Class of 1928. The footage from both reels is fea­tured here, along with two reunion films that helped date the mate­ri­als. Together the four films cap­ture the com­mence­ment and reunion week­end of 1928, which included a par­tic­u­larly spec­tac­u­lar P-rade, when many classes were, accord­ing to the Prince, “decked in gaudy and grotesque costumes.”

As a bonus there is footage of the Class of 1928’s fresh­men ‘flour pic­ture’ from 1924–the first in many years in which only water and flour were used, which appar­ently made this haz­ing tra­di­tion too tame to survive–it was abol­ished in 1926.

Accord­ing to the list of class films in the records of the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil, the Class of 1928 had three  film reels cap­tur­ing their com­mence­ment, with some of the footage sim­i­lar to the grad­u­a­tion film of the Class of 1921. The footage fea­tured here con­tains only a few scenes, with­out the titles that orig­i­nally accom­pa­nied them. The film, which is not in chrono­log­i­cal order, opens at the end of the class exer­cises on Mon­day, June 18 with the break­ing of the pipes on Can­non Green, which sym­bol­ized the break­ing of ties with under­grad­u­ate life. The footage is fol­lowed at 0:22 by the com­mence­ment exer­cises on Tues­day, June 19, end­ing with the singing of “Old Nas­sau” (0:44).

1928gradsx.jpgThe film con­tin­ues on Sat­ur­day, June 16 in front of Nas­sau Hall (0:54), where all alumni were wait­ing for the Class of 1928 to lead the P-rade. After the arrival of the 466 grad­u­at­ing seniors, car­ry­ing white umbrel­las (1:04, left), the other classes would join in, begin­ning with the youngest. The footage at 1:16 shows var­i­ous classes com­ing through the Arch at Prospect Avenue, from where the pro­ces­sion pro­ceeded to Uni­ver­sity field.

FoxHunt2x.jpgFrom 1:30 the pro­ces­sion is seen march­ing around the base­ball field, prior to the tra­di­tional game against Yale. The cam­era­man zoomed in on classes with par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing cos­tumes. These include what is thought to be the Class of 1918 with feather hats (1:39), and an unknown class (pos­si­bly the Class of 1912) act­ing out a fox hunt (1:59, right). The film ends with footage of pre­sum­ably the Class of 1928’s last Senior Singing on the steps of Nas­sau Hall (2:19), with the seniors tra­di­tion­ally dressed in white.

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Princeton’s Polo Team and ROTC Field Artillery Brigade in Action! (circa 1928)

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The film fea­tured here, shot around 1928, con­tains three dis­tinct sec­tions. The first con­tains images of the Prince­ton Polo Team play­ing on W. B. Dev­ereux Jr. ’04 Field (0:00–5:52). The sec­ond sec­tion opens with a woman and a small boy after the polo tour­na­ment (5:53–5:58), fol­lowed by scenes of Prospect Avenue and the var­i­ous eat­ing clubs located on this street (5:59–6:45). The third sec­tion doc­u­ments the annual inspec­tion of the Reserve Offi­cers’ Train­ing Corps (ROTC) Field Artillery Unit, per­formed by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the United States War Depart­ment. The ori­gins of the film, which does not appear on the list of films that were kept by the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil in 1931, are unclear.

Polo at Princeton

Although polo has been around for mil­len­nia, the first doc­u­mented games on Princeton’s cam­pus occurred in 1902, when Wal­ter Bourchier Dev­ereux Jr. ’04 and a few class­mates orga­nized a group of polo matches. The pop­u­lar­ity of the sport grew quickly among the stu­dents, and by the spring of 1903, Prince­ton was the first col­lege to offi­cially adopt polo as a col­le­giate sport. Har­vard and Yale soon fol­lowed suit. As rapidly as the sport emerged on cam­pus, it soon dimin­ished, due to a num­ber of fac­tors includ­ing the cost to secure and main­tain horses and lack of inter­est from later classes.

poloridersx.jpgIt was not until 1919, with the cre­ation of the ROTC Field Artillery Bat­tal­ion, that polo would once again be played at Prince­ton under the lead­er­ship of Major J. E. McMa­hon, 1st Com­man­dant of the Prince­ton Unit. He intro­duced the sport to the unit in order for its mem­bers to develop fun­da­men­tal com­bat skills. Most of the polo play­ers were mem­bers of the ROTC unit and were pro­vided aux­il­iary horses and equip­ment by the Unites States War Depart­ment; those play­ers, how­ever, who were not mem­bers of the unit had to pro­vide their own horses.

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Princeton’s last class film: Freddie Fox’ Class of 1939

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Although we have a fairly good idea about the class films of the 1920s, there is vir­tu­ally no infor­ma­tion about the class films of the 1930s. The excep­tion is the film of the Class of 1939. That is prob­a­bly not an acci­dent: it was the class of pre­vi­ously fea­tured Fred­eric Fox ’39, who was the first and only keeper of Prince­to­ni­ana from 1976 until his untimely death in 1981. The 16mm film in the archives turned out not to be the two hour long film that was announced in the Daily Prince­ton­ian on May 1938, and it sadly also lacks the sound that was sup­posed to have been a major inno­va­tion. How much the ulti­mate film ‘shat­tered prece­dents’ by depict­ing ‘inti­ma­cies dur­ing cam­pus years’ as the Prince announced in March 1938, we may never know. But one thing is clear: the Class of 1939 had a lot of fun that included women and beer.

 

The footage is in chrono­log­i­cal order, start­ing with fresh­men foot­ball prac­tice dur­ing days, nights, and in the snow. After this, ath­let­ics (always empha­sized in pre­vi­ous class films) get very lit­tle atten­tion: only foot­ball and row­ing are fea­tured with­out any iden­ti­fi­ca­tions, other than a Yale-Princeton game (6:49). The fresh­men scenes con­tinue with footage about the Vet­er­ans of Future Wars (VFW) (1:50), founded in March 1936 by mem­bers of the Class of 1936 and 1937, which became one of the most famous col­lege pranks in the coun­try. The footage is part of a news­reel of March of the Times, which can be viewed online (with sound!). The three “likely pieces of can­non fod­der” (shown at 2:19 in the chairs), who came up with the idea, are  Lewis J. Gorin ’36, “National Com­man­der” (mid­dle), Urban Rush­ton ’36 (left), and prob­a­bly Richard Waters ’36 (right). Accord­ing to 1939’s class his­tory in the Nas­sau Her­ald, it was the “main event” of the sec­ond term that year, and the move­ment received the freshmen’s “whole-hearted back­ing.” The records of the Vet­er­ans of Future Wars are kept in the Uni­ver­sity Archives.

FoxHayesx.jpgThe Tri­an­gle Club gets quite some atten­tion in the class film, which is under­stand­able: Fred Fox ’39, Mark Hayes ’39 and Sanders (“Sandy”) Maxwell ’39 were involved in three pro­duc­tions, the first two as actors (Hayes played Mandy Mag­num in pre­vi­ously fea­tured Take it Away) while Maxwell con­tributed music. The footage shows scenes from Fol-de-Rol, Triangle’s pro­duc­tion for 1937–1938, includ­ing chorines danc­ing (7:20) and Mark Hayes singing with Fred Fox, who had a lead­ing roll as King Charles II (8:33). It is not pos­si­ble to deter­mine if the party scene with whiskey and bear that fol­lows is related (8:43). Triangle’s 50th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion Once Over Lightly, in which Hayes and Fox both played lead­ing roles (Sandy Maxwell, Triangle’s direc­tor, con­tributed most of the music), is fea­tured at 16:18. It is not known who the man and woman are who are pre­sented with a gift by Fred Fox at 16:32.
The footage fol­low­ing the first Tri­an­gle show is thought to cap­ture the Junior Prom on March 18; 1938, with music by the swing band of trum­peter Larry Clin­ton (11:14). The prom was attended by 606 girls (all listed by name in the Daily Prince). promcrasherx.jpgFun­nily enough, the one junior stu­dent who is shown alone among the danc­ing cou­ples is Fred Fox (at 10:49 with bow tie and glasses), who was voted ‘most likely bach­e­lor’ in his senior year. In an arti­cle in the Prince 35 years later, Fox explains that he prob­a­bly got the vote because he never had a date until his senior year, when he shared one with his room­mate. More scenes with girls are shown at 5:37 (pre­sum­ably watch­ing a row­ing regatta), as well as at 11:52 and  at the senior house par­ties (21:51).
Remain­ing footage shown must have been shot at the ROTC train­ing camp at Madi­son Bar­racks, NY, in the sum­mer of 1938, at the end of the Junior year (13:10). SandyMaxwellx.jpgSim­i­lar footage is fea­tured in our pre­vi­ous blog, which may even have been shot on the same occa­sion. The footage at 11:59 shows J.C. Hur­d­man ’39 at the micro­phone and Sandy Maxwell at the piano dur­ing a WTNJ radio broad­cast of “Prince­ton On The Air,” fea­tured in the Prince. The film ends with brief footage of the Commencement.

It is not known why the class film ended up in the Uni­ver­sity Archives with­out sound. The orig­i­nal idea to have a two-hour film with sound seems to have been too ambi­tious: on June 7, 1939 the Prince announced that the senior class film was delayed by audio edit­ing. The final result, to be pre­miered at the Class’ first reunion, would only be 1000 feet long, due to the exten­sive costs of the sound track. The Prince’s descrip­tion of the final film, which would also include some added cam­pus scenes in color, is very dif­fer­ent than the footage that is fea­tured here. What hap­pened? Did the sound track get lost? Or could this be the footage that was excluded from in the final film? If any­body could explain the mys­tery, we would love to hear it!

This 16mm silent film is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0199)

“The Class of 1923–its deeds and its antics,” 1922–1923

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Among the ear­li­est silent films that were shot on the Prince­ton cam­pus are those pro­duced and financed by the classes of 1921 to 1939 (see our pre­vi­ous blog). The first true ‘class film’ was titled “The Class of 1923–its deeds and its antics.” A com­pi­la­tion of footage from this film and of the film “Cham­pi­ons 1922,” with foot­ball high­lights of the fall of 1922, sur­vive in the archives. Be ready to watch the “foot­ball team that wouldn’t be beaten,” the build­ing of a cham­pi­onship bon­fire, a dirty flour fight, Tri­an­gle chorines and more Prince­ton lore.

The two 16mm film reels on which this footage was found con­tain almost all scenes (though in dif­fer­ent order) of the orig­i­nal nitrate base films that were kept by the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil. Accord­ing to the Grad­u­ate Council’s lists of cap­tions or “titles” of the films, the orig­i­nal “Cham­pi­ons 1922,” which was rented out to alumni groups, took up one reel, and the film with the class’ “deeds and antics” took up six. Por­tions of six of the seven orig­i­nal reels were used, with only the class’ com­mence­ment scenes omitted.

Princeton’s three foot­ball vic­to­ries that clinched the cham­pi­onship in the fall of 1922 are found at sep­a­rate places: the Yale game (Novem­ber 18) at 0:00, the Har­vard game (Novem­ber 11) at 3:18, and the Chicago match (Octo­ber 28, 1922) at 11.42. 1923tigerx.jpgThe film fea­tures a live tiger cub (2:33) that, accord­ing to the note found with the film reel, was donated by the father of one of the play­ers “since Prince­ton won (the) Har­vard game.” An arti­cle in the Prince iden­ti­fies the donor as J.F. Howard from Haver­hill, MA, father of Albert “Red” F. Howard ’25, who had caught the cub while hunt­ing in the jun­gles of India. The note indi­cates that the tiger was given to Philadel­phia Zoo after graduation.

To our sur­prise, we had already seen the bon­fire footage at 4:22. It was fea­tured in Ger­ardo Puglia’s 250th anniver­sary doc­u­men­tary and was thought to be the cham­pi­onship bon­fire of 1926 when it was put online by the Prince­ton Alumni Weekly. Now we know that it was actu­ally the cham­pi­onship bon­fire of Novem­ber 21, 1922. Given the cap­tion on 1923’s Class film, it is easy to under­stand the mis­take: it was tra­di­tion­ally the task of the fresh­men (in this case the Class of 1926) to find wood for the cel­e­bra­tory bon­fires. That this involved quite a bit more than gath­er­ing brush­wood is demon­strated in the film. A photo mon­tage of the events can be found in the Daily Prince­ton­ian of Novem­ber 25, 1922.

Another Prince­ton tra­di­tion depicted on the film is the annual “flour pic­ture,” the first pho­to­graph of the fresh­men class on the steps of Whig or Clio Hall, which was taken after the sopho­mores dumped flour on the fresh­men. The seniors of 1923 were merely bystanders when the Class of 1926’s flour pic­ture was filmed on Octo­ber 30, 1922 (5:40). The footage must have ended up here because the Class of 1923 had taken the ini­tia­tive for the com­bined Motion Pic­ture Com­mit­tee that would coor­di­nate the class films for all four classes, includ­ing the film­ing of the freshmen’s flour pic­ture. (See our pre­vi­ous blog.)

1923flourx.jpgThe title that accom­pa­nied the orig­i­nal footage appar­ently was removed:  “Flour (?) pic­ture: 1926 under­goes its bap­tismal rites.” The ques­tion mark indi­cates that more than flour was dumped dur­ing this haz­ing rit­ual, and a year later, the Class of 1926, now sopho­mores, added their own spe­cial ingre­di­ent to the mix: acid! Not sur­pris­ingly, the flour pic­ture was abol­ished imme­di­ately. The Prince wrote solemnly: “This action was neces­si­tated by the degen­er­a­tion of the Flour Pic­ture in recent years until this fall it was a dis­tinctly non-Princeton affair.”  A later arti­cle detailed what may have been mixed with the flour on this footage: eggs, tar, paint, molasses “and what­not.” The flour pic­ture was rein­stated in 1924 with water and flour only, but the inter­est of the sopho­mores waned, and the prac­tice stopped after 1925.

The pho­tog­ra­pher of the flour pic­ture is prob­a­bly Orren Jack Turner, who appears at 6:28, fol­lowed a bit later by B.F. Bunn ’07 (6:36), man­ager of the Uni­ver­sity store and finan­cial adviser to many cam­pus orga­ni­za­tions, who advanced the money for the cam­era pur­chased by the Motion Pic­ture Com­mit­tee. The footage of Bunn is fol­lowed by scenes from the Tri­an­gle show “The Man from Earth” (6:46), the annual show for 1922–1923, with Wally Smith ’24 in the title row, singing “That’s why I left the world behind” (7:36). This is the ear­li­est Tri­an­gle footage in the Uni­ver­sity archives, pre­ced­ing even the footage of “The Golden Dog” of 1929 that was fea­tured in a pre­vi­ous blog.

1923sundialx.jpgThe remain­der of the footage includes ath­letic teams and  train­ing ses­sions, as well as class offi­cers and mem­bers of the boards. Sports fea­tured include soc­cer (1:21, 5:28), cross coun­try (2:15), base­ball (7:49. 14:31), row­ing (8:25. 17:33) and golf (16:12), while footage of con­struc­tion of the Hobart Baker ice hockey rink can be found at 6:42. The footage includes mem­bers of The­atre Intime (14:00) and the board of the Daily Prince­ton­ian. The lat­ter footage cap­tures another Princeton’s tra­di­tion: the priv­i­lege, exclu­sive to seniors, to sit on the steps of the Mather Sun­dial, in the cen­ter of McCosh Court­yard (16:44).

This footage on this 16mm film is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0195 and 0196). 

What happened to Princeton’s silent movies?

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ArthurPenrose.jpg Film­ing of the com­edy “Arthur Pen­rose” (1923)  (Photo The Prince­ton Bric-a-Brac,1925)

It started at Yale
On Feb­ru­ary 19, 1920 the Daily Prince­ton­ian announced Yale’s deci­sion to record impor­tant cam­pus events on film, to be kept by the classes and used for reunions. By the end of that year, accord­ing to the Prince, Princeton’s Class of 1921 had estab­lished a “fund by which a class motion pic­ture could be taken, includ­ing scenes which might prove to be of inter­est to the Class in later years.” The film of its grad­u­a­tion week­end in June 1921, fea­tured in our first post, must have been the result. Fol­low­ing the exam­ple, the Class of 1922 appointed a Motion Pic­ture Com­mit­tee at the begin­ning of its senior year to coor­di­nate its own class and foot­ball films, thus start­ing a tra­di­tion  that lasted through the 1930s. Only a few class films have sur­vived in the Uni­ver­sity Archives. What hap­pened to the oth­ers? Do we know what was lost? A recently dis­cov­ered box of records of the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil, part of the yet unprocessed Records of the Alumni Orga­ni­za­tions pro­vides some answers.
Champions1922y.jpgRent­ing a film from the Grad­u­ate Council

The box con­tains cor­re­spon­dence (1921–1950) about Princeton’s class and foot­ball films, which were the prop­erty of the classes. They were kept by the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil on their behalf, which rented the foot­ball films to alumni groups around the coun­try. The records include detailed hand­writ­ten and type­script lists, drawn up in 1931, of sev­enty silent movies, usu­ally one to three reels long. The sum­maries and lists of the film cap­tions or “titles” that were used give a good idea of the con­tents of Princeton’s films of the 1920s (lists of the class films of the 1930s are lack­ing). A few films were listed as prop­erty of the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil itself: some uniden­ti­fied (pre­sum­ably early) foot­ball games, the short lived Arthur Pen­rose (1923), a com­edy pro­duced by film enthu­si­ast Stas Azoy ’14, who seems to have been in charge of the films at the time, and the University’s very first pro­mo­tion film Prince­ton (1921). This five-reel film (85 min­utes), which was revised three times and renamed Just Prince­ton and Prince­ton: a ‘National Uni­ver­sity,’ was rented to high schools and other inter­ested groups until 1926, when it was con­sid­ered out­dated (most of the footage was appar­ently seven years old). The silent movie, which was ini­tially meant to be accom­pa­nied by Prince­ton songs and music, has not sur­vived, but the list of cap­tions in the film pro­vides a detailed account of the scenes (see Prince­ton film.pdf).

The class films of the 1920s

After the Class of 1922’s appoint­ment of a Motion Pic­ture Com­mit­tee  to ensure a memento of its senior year, all classes fol­lowed suit. On Novem­ber 3, 1922 the Prince announced the merger of the four class com­mit­tees into one cen­tral body with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all four classes. It would film cam­pus events of inter­est to all, so that each class would have a com­plete four-year record, end­ing with its com­mence­ment. The first films taken under the new man­age­ment were shown in the Gar­den The­ater on Decem­ber 7, 1922. They included the Class of 1926’s “Flour Pic­ture” (a haz­ing rit­ual in which sopho­mores dumped flour and water on fresh­men prior to their first class pic­ture) and the foot­ball vic­tory over Yale and cham­pi­onship cel­e­bra­tion in November.

inventoryPYgame1926.jpgThe annual flour pic­ture would only be filmed a few more years, as the tra­di­tion was dis­con­tin­ued after 1925. But the major foot­ball games con­tin­ued to be filmed in the fall. The foot­ball films, which were most pop­u­lar among alumni groups, took up half of the col­lec­tion of the Grad­u­ate Coun­cil. They were the prop­erty of the class in whose senior year they were taken. The foot­ball films for 1926, for instance, were the prop­erty of the Class of 1927 (left). The major­ity of the remain­ing class films were shot dur­ing spring and Com­mence­ment. The spring films usu­ally fea­tured com­mit­tees and groups, cam­pus scenes and sports. Some­times the footage included small skits. In addi­tion to these films, the Grad­u­ate Council’s lists include a few films of row­ing, base­ball, and other sports, as well as some early reunion films.

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Coeduation in Princeton: it started at the Graduate School

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In Sep­tem­ber 1969, more than two years after Pres­i­dent Goheen asked for­mer Woodrow Wil­son direc­tor Gard­ner Pat­ter­son to inves­ti­gate the intro­duc­tion of coed­u­ca­tion, Prince­ton wel­comed its first under­grad­u­ate women to cam­pus. Within the Ivy League Prince­ton was rel­a­tively late: while Yale made the move at the same time, only Dart­mouth (1972) and Colum­bia (1983) went coed­u­ca­tional later. It was not the first time, how­ever, that women entered Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity for a degree. In 1961 Sabra Fol­lett Meser­vey, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of his­tory at Dou­glass Col­lege in New Brunswick, became the first woman to be enrolled at the Grad­u­ate School as a full time degree can­di­date in Ori­en­tal Stud­ies. Meser­vey pro­vides a humor­ous account of her meet­ing with Goheen to arrange the ‘test case’ dur­ing the cel­e­bra­tion of coed­u­ca­tion at the Grad­u­ate School on June 3, 1989 (14:45).

Fea­tured here is a ninety-minute forum dur­ing which five speak­ers dis­cuss their expe­ri­ences as women at the Grad­u­ate School and after. After a his­tor­i­cal intro­duc­tion about women in higher edu­ca­tion by the orga­nizer of the event, Lisa Drake­man *88 (1:35), Sabra Fol­lett Meser­vey *66 is the first speaker (10:26). She is fol­lowed by T’sai-ying Cheng *64, the first female recip­i­ent of a degree in Prince­ton (28:04), Phyl­lis Thomp­son *76 (50:15), Mau­reen Quirk *82 (1:08:38), and Sindee Simon *92 (1:19:34).
This VHS video is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no.1306).