Crimson's Mother

Tongue in cheek, the Harvard Crimson solemnly printed a letter from "a Radcliffe Mother" pleading for the drafting of Harvard's 18-year-olds. Wrote Mother: "Every weekend [my daughter] goes out with a Harvard boy 18 years old, and I say draft him and his kind, the whole lot of them, the quicker the better. Mothers . . . should see him simpering on her doorstep, his fuzzy face shining and insipid, his white shoes dirty and scuffed. They should hear his simple-minded conversation . . . Put him in uniform, give him the experience which will make a man out of him."

The Crimson had used the "Radcliffe Mother" tag before on phony letters, and thought everyone would spot it as an obvious gag. But, said the editors ruefully, they "failed to reckon with the Associated Press." The A.P. gave the letter a deadpan lead ("Awaken ye men of Harvard . . ."), inserted the phrase "purportedly from the mother of a Radcliffe girl," and sent it clicking across the nation.

More than 100 papers and radio stations gave it a play (HARVARD SEEN DRAFT SOURCE; MOM WANTS SIMPERING HARVARDS IN SERVICE). New York papers used it, all but one knocking out the word "purportedly." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch played the story on Page One.

Last week the Crimson's editors swam out from under a deluge of critical, serious letters from across the nation. Said one: "If by any chance you thought it funny ... I urge you to revise your sense of humor in fairness to American boyhood within your precincts." Replied the Crimson: "Local boyhood had no trouble with the Crimson's humor. Other people, aided and abetted by eager copy editors and an ambitious wire service, had plenty of trouble indeed . . . The reaction . . . sets up a little lesson in how the press gets news and how readers accept that news. It is not a particularly funny story."

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