Publication: A Princeton Companion
Princetonian, The, came into existence on June 14, 1876, to provide, in the words of one of its early editors, Woodrow Wilson 1879, ``an impartial record of College incident and a medium for a bold, frank, and manly expression of College opinion.''
From the beginning, the Princetonian caused occasional unhappiness in Nassau Hall. President McCosh had been at one time uncomfortably aware that it was ``in the way of attacking the faculty,'' although by 1888, when he retired, he thought the paper was being conducted ``in the most admirable spirit.'' His only complaint then was that it gave ``more space to gymnastics than to literature,'' an imbalance that led an Oxford don to say to him, after reading several issues of the paper, ``Pray, are you the president of a gymnastic institution?''
In its formative years, the Princetonian was closer in form and style to an eighteenth-century coffeehouse journal than to a modern newspaper. Brief essays considered topics such as American Education, Conceit, The Utility of Women, Life on the Nile, and the College Loafer. Editorials condemned the faculty's disciplinary action following a classroom disorder, curtly dismissed the ``visionary schemes'' of ``puerile graduates'' for the improvement of college discipline, opposed coeducation (``Our belief and hope is that it is destined . . . to die and go the way of all isms.''), and declared, on the subject of faculty preaching in chapel, ``In plain English the College sermon cannot keep the congregation awake.''
One of the first issues contained a plea for unproctored examinations, a cause the Princetonian continued to advocate until the honor system was adopted by the faculty in 1893. The editors also showed enterprise in reporting what news there was, publishing an extra with a telegraphic report of a Yale-Princeton baseball game at New Haven in 1895 -- one of the first, if not the first, uses of the telegraph by a college newspaper.
As the college grew and its activities multiplied, the original ``fortnightly'' became a weekly in 1883, a tri-weekly in 1885, and began appearing as the Daily Princetonian five afternoons a week in 1892 and six mornings a week in 1895. This last change created a problem because students began reading the paper during morning chapel, a practice that was eventually moderated in response to editorial warnings that the displeasure it caused the faculty was endangering the continuance of the morning edition.
Two events around this time inspired special coverage: on President McCosh's death in 1894, a whole issue was devoted to a tribute that must have dispelled any suspicion that he had been the ``president of a gymnastic institution,'' and after the College's celebrated Sesquicentennial Exercises in 1896, extensive coverage of these ceremonies included the full text of all the addresses, among them Woodrow Wilson's famous ``Princeton in the Nation's Service.''
After Wilson became president in 1902, he was a frequent subject of editorials and news. When he made known his intention to build a fence around Prospect, the Prince objected on aesthetic grounds, but when the fence was built, and a group of students tore part of it down, an editorial castigated them for their ``vandalism.'' The editors were enthusiastic about Wilson's preceptorial system, skeptical of his quad plan, and regretful when he resigned to enter political life. On his election as president of the United States in 1912, front-page stories caught the spirit of jubilation that swept the campus and culminated in a midnight student procession to Wilson's house on Cleveland Lane.
The pre-World War I years saw further advances in news coverage and editorial policy. In 1910 the paper enlarged its page size and began publishing Associated Press dispatches. The following year a letter to the editor touched off an extended argument about compulsory chapel attendance -- a perennial source of comment in the Prince until 1964 when the last vestige of the requirement was removed by the trustees. In 1915, when women's suffrage was being voted on in New Jersey, the Prince carried on a strong and well-articulated campaign on its behalf, calling it ``the greatest social question of the day -- the enfranchisement of the other half of the people.'' Two years later, the paper came out in favor of the Cleveland revolt against the eating clubs, an early response to an issue destined to achieve editorial popularity exceeding even that of compulsory chapel.
In the twenties, the Prince, true to the times, was enterprising, prosperous, lighthearted, and -- on occasion -- careless of official dignity. Its editors added a weekly photographic supplement and a monthly ``Literary Observer'' (both of which succumbed to the Depression), introduced a number of popular humorous columns such as ``Diogene's Lamp, ``The Ivory Tower,'' and ``The Crow's Nest,'' and initiated two antic diversions that were carried on for many years, the Gaily Printsanything and the April Fool's story.
The Gaily Printsanything was the title retiring boards gave their last issue, in which they celebrated release from their sober duties. Advertised as ``a scurrilous sheet dedicated to yellow journalism,'' it usually contained lurid tales (accompanied by doctored photographs) of public misbehavior of the president, deans, and faculty, invariably depicted as dissolute rogues and scoundrels.
The April Fool's story that caused the greatest stir was the announcement on April 1, 1927, that the trustees had accepted a gift of $20 million from the executors of the estate of ``Nettie Green'' to establish coeducation at Princeton. At the end of the article, pointed attention was called to the date, but not everybody read that far, and Nassau Hall was besieged with protesting telephone calls, telegrams, and letters.
It came as no surprise to President Hibben's associates when he once confided that he made it a rule never to read the Princetonian until after breakfast.
In the eventful decade before World War II, the Princetonian played a more serious role. It collaborated with the Harvard Crimson in marshaling student opposition to Prohibition. It issued emergency scrip for student use during the 1933 bank holiday. It gave increased attention in news and editorials to the developing world crisis, and as time for decision drew nearer, it opened its columns to opposing views on American intervention. With President Roosevelt's declaration of an unlimited national emergency in May 1941, the paper headlined a front-page editorial ``The Debate is Over,'' and the day after Pearl Harbor, proclaimed in a banner headline: PRINCETON PRESENTS UNITED FRONT AS UNITED STATES FACES TOTAL WAR. In February 1943, the Princetonian suspended publication for the duration of the war.
The decades following the war saw the paper through one of its busiest periods. The Prince brought out an extra the morning of Albert Einstein's death in 1955 and devoted most of the next day's regular issue to tributes from friends and colleagues. Another extra in 1956 reported President Goheen's election a little more than three hours after it had been announced at a faculty meeting. The following year there were special editions on the retirement of President Dodds and the death of Football Coach Charlie Caldwell. Eating club elections continued to be an important source of news and editorials through the fifties and sixties, with emphasis first on the ideal of 100 percent sophomore elections and later on the need for social alternatives to the club system itself.
In 1963 an extra covered President Kennedy's assassination and the cancellation of University events that weekend, and for a week following Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, the paper featured editorials, letters, and accounts of various meetings on how best to advance the cause he embodied as ``the responsible leader of a race striving to obtain peacefully the rights which belong to all Americans.''
Editorials of this period were sharply critical of the war in Vietnam and called for early disengagement, while pressing on the University front for a larger student role in campus affairs, for the adoption of coeducation, and for support of the administration's efforts to increase the enrollment of minority groups. In 1968 a feature titled ``A New Era for the Negro at Princeton'' won an award as the best college newspaper story of the year.
In the next two years the Princetonian published some of the most significant news in its history. In the spring of 1969 banner headlines announced trustee approval of coeducation beginning that fall; the same issue reported trustee acceptance of the proposal that a member of each graduating class be elected to a four-year term on the board, and added a word of congratulation to the trustees for their ``courage'' and ``foresight'' in an editorial captioned ``Victory for the Student Voice.'' At Commencement, the paper distributed a two-page reunion extra headlining the fact that the newly constituted electorate -- juniors, seniors, and members of the two youngest alumni classes -- had chosen Princeton's first black alumni trustee. These and other innovations, and the new responsibilities and opportunities they presented, were summed up in the annual June issue for incoming freshmen in a lead editorial headed ``The times, they are a changin'.''
In 1970, the Prince took an active part in the growing campus protest against the war in Vietnam, which culminated in an unprecedented student strike following the extension of the war into Cambodia. Besides providing up-to-the-minute schedules of strike activities, the Prince staff hand-set and distributed a special Sunday 2 a.m. strike extra, gave detailed coverage of student rallies, faculty meetings, and a community-wide Jadwin Gym assembly, and in the place traditionally used for University condolences, extended its sympathy to the families and friends of the four Kent State University students killed while protesting the war. The editors also helped promote adoption of a two-week recess for student political campaigning before the November congressional elections, made possible, they later wrote, by ``the remarkable unity of community opinion,'' which allowed the University ``to channel the energy of the strike into constructive action.''
The paper celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 1976 with a June seminar titled ``The Ethics of Leaks'' and a two-day symposium titled ``The Press and Social Change.'' In its day-to-day activities, it was still committed to the objective it had set for itself at its founding, but now the operation was considerably larger and faster. The fortnightly that a staff of eight or nine produced in the beginning took five days to print by hand press in Trenton. A hundred years later, the five-times-a-week daily tabloid required the efforts of more than a hundred editors, reporters, photographers, and business people, and took only hours to print by the photo-offset process it converted to in 1972. Thanks to the revenues produced by energetic advertising and circulation departments, it was one of the country's few financially independent college newspapers.
Over the years the Princetonian has maintained a respected position in campus life. In senior polls it was usually voted the most highly regarded extracurricular activity outside athletics. Places on the board were eagerly sought, and competition for them could be strenuous, as Hamilton Fish Armstrong '16, suggests in this picture of half a dozen surviving ``heelers'' his freshman year:
``We were exhausted, suspicious, eating little, sleeping little, barely hanging on to passing grades in our academic work, bleary-eyed, pimply, scavenging for bits of news to supplement the stories assigned to us, fighting in every way possible, fair or foul, to add to our lineage in the paper.''
For their part, most editors would probably agree with the 1879 board's valedictory statement that ``the duties of editing'' had given them ``a closer and more perfect view of college life and affairs.'' Nassau Hall, for its part, apparently has come to accept the fact that as long as there is a Princeton, there will be a Princetonian carrying on the time-honored mission of college journalism, which is, President Dodds once ruefully observed, ``to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.''
Former Princetonian editors have achieved prominence, particularly in government and journalism. Government leaders have included, in addition to Woodrow Wilson, Adlai E. Stevenson '22; Secretary of Defense James Forrestal '15; Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan '20; Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas '20; Under Secretary of the Treasury H. Chapman Rose '28; General Counsel of the Treasury Nelson P. Rose '31; and Ambassadors Livingston T. Merchant '26, Jacob D. Beam '29, Shelby C. Davis '30, Robert H. McBride '40, and William H Attwoo~d '41.
Among those conspicuous in journalism and letters have been: Robert McLean '13, publisher, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin; Henry A. Laughlin '14, president, Houghton Mifflin Company; Hamilton Fish Armstrong '16, editor, Foreign Affairs; Richard Halliburton '21, world traveler, explorer, and writer; John S. Martin '23, managing editor, Time; Edward W. Barrett '32, Dean, Columbia School of Journalism; John B. Oakes '34, editorial page editor, New York Times; William H. Attwood '41, publisher, Newsday; John N. Brooks, Jr. '42, author and staff member, The New Yorker; Peter D. Bunzel '49, op-ed page editor, Los Angeles Times; Donald Oberdorfer, Jr. '52, national affairs correspondent, Washington Post; R. W. Apple '57, chief of the London bureau, New York Times; Robert A. Caro '57, Pulitzer prize-winning biographer; Donald Kirk '59, national correspondent, Chicago Tribune; James Ridgeway '59, editor and writer, New Republic and Village Voice; B. Frank Deford '61, writer, Sports Illustrated; and Jose M. Ferrer III '61, associate editor, Time.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).