Publication: A Princeton Companion
Press Club, The, whose undergraduate members serve as Princeton correspondents for metropolitan newspapers and national wire services, was first organized in 1900, although it seems probable that campus correspondents were functioning long before that. President McCosh may have had them in mind some twenty years earlier when, in an effort to ward off threatened misbehavior, he warned students that ``tomorrow it will be in all the New York papers and the next day in the Philadelphia papers.''
Ex-President Grover Cleveland, who lived in Princeton after completing his second term in Washington, was a good source of copy in the early days of the Press Club. He disliked being interviewed but he granted exceptions for students. ``It may mean five or ten dollars for the boy,'' he told a faculty friend, ``and that would pay his board for a week.'' Once, however, he felt obliged to rebuff an undergraduate reporter who pressed him for his opinion on President McKinley's Philippine policy. ``That, sir,'' Cleveland said, ``is a matter of too great importance to discuss in so brief an interview, now rapidly drawing to a close.''
In the early years, Press Club members usually worked freelance and came together only for social occasions. Seniors approaching graduation sold their rights as correspondents for particular newspapers to the highest bidders -- a process that gave more weight to the new reporter's credit at the bank than to his nose for news or his ear for a good sentence.
All of this was changed in 1915 when following a study he made at the request of the Graduate Council, Professor Christian Gauss reorganized the club along the lines it has followed ever since. He persuaded the Graduate Council to purchase all of the correspondents' rights from club members (the Council was later repaid) and replaced the old auction system with freshman and sophomore competitions for membership. He also introduced the practice of having club members pool their efforts. Most significant of all, he accepted appointment as faculty adviser, a position he held until 1924, when he left Princeton for a year's leave of absence before becoming dean of the College. Press Club advisers after him included Alexander Leitch '24, Frederick S. Osborne '24, Edmund S. De Long '22, Dan D. Coyle '38, and George B. Eager.
Sometimes when University news was scarce, Press Club stringers created stories. In the twenties, at the suggestion of Dean Gauss, they asked a number of professors what ten books they would want to have with them if they had to spend the rest of their lives on a desert island. The composite results were unsensational (Shakespeare and Homer led, followed by the Bible, Plato, Dante, and Vergil), but the story got a good play, nevertheless. During a slack period several years later, the club asked another group of professors to list the six most important words (``loyalty'' was mentioned most frequently), and once more the story ran widely.
There were other occasions when Press Club members had more than enough real news to keep them busy -- the Wilson-West row and Wilson's entrance into politics in the early 1900s; the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh's infant son in nearby Hopewell in 1932; the panic caused by Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of ``an invasion from Mars'' that ``landed'' four miles from Princeton; and the University's year-long Bicentennial Celebration in 1946-1947.
Among Press Club members who made a career of journalism were David Lawrence '10, founder of the U.S. News and World Report; Alfred S. Dashiell '23, managing editor of Reader's Digest; Franklyn S. Adams '25, city editor of The New York Times; and Mark Anthony Beltaire III '37, daily columnist for The Detroit Free Press.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).