Isn't this a little excessive? It seems so to us, but the emphasis has
not yet shifted. Only a month or so ago we were talking in New Haven
before an organization of Yale graduates upon a subject so unpartisan as
the American drama--though to be sure Harvard has turned out ten
playwrights of note to every one from Yale--and somehow or other the
talk drifted around to football. In pleading for less intensity of
football feeling we mentioned the man who dropped the punt and his
brother and told how Yale had recovered the fatal fumble on Harvard's
nineteen-yard line. Then, with the intention of being jocose, we
remarked, "The Yale eleven with characteristic bulldog grit and courage
carried the ball over the line." To our horror and amazement the
audience immediately broke into applause and long cheers.
Some of my best friends are Yale men and there is no basis for the
common Harvard assumption that graduates of New Haven's leading
university are of necessity inferior to the breed of Cambridge. Still,
there is, perhaps, just a shade of difference in the keenness of
perception for wit. Practically all the Harvard anecdotes about Yale
which we know are pointed and sprightly, while Yale is content with such
inferior and tasteless jibes as the falsetto imitation which begins
"Fiercely fellows, sift through." Even the audience of graduates to
which we referred was singularly cold to the anecdote about the
difference in traditions which prevails at New Haven and at Cambridge.
"When a Yale man is sick, the authorities immediately assume that he is
drunk. When a Harvard man is drunk, the authorities assume that he is
sick."
Nor were we successful in retelling the stirring appeal of a well-known
organizer who was seeking to consolidate various alumni bodies into a
vast unified employment agency for college men. "There should be," he
cried, "one great clearing house. Then when somebody came for a man to
tutor his children we could send him a Harvard man and if he needed
somebody to help with the furnace, we'd have a Yale graduate for him."
Joking with undergraduates we found still more disastrous. After the
last Harvard-Yale football game--score Harvard 9, Yale 0, which doesn't
begin to indicate the margin of superiority of the winning team--we
wrote an article of humorous intent for a New York newspaper. Naturally
our job as a reporter prevented us from being partisan in our account of
the game. Accordingly, in a temperate and fairminded spirit, we set down
the fact that, through the connivance of the New York press, Yale has
become a professional underdog and that any Harvard victory in which
the score is less than forty-two to nothing is promptly hailed as a
moral victory for Yale.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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