The Harvard Monthly


The Harvard Monthly was a literary magazine of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beginning October 1885 until suspending publication following the Spring 1917 issue.
Formed in the latter months of 1885 by Harvard seniors William Woodward Baldwin, Thomas Parker Sanborn, Alanson B. Houghton, George Santayana, William Morton Fullerton, and George Rice Carpenter, the magazine proposed to afford "...a medium for the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought of the college...". These six men comprised the Monthly's initial staff, with Houghton as editor, Baldwin as business manager and the others acting as editors. The initial October 1885 issue includes works by Sanborn, Santayana, Houghton, Fullerton the magazine's faculty adviser, Barrett Wendell, among others. Some of the essays in this issue which may have been felt controversial have no stated author. In regard to this issue, The Harvard Crimson observed that "The unique form and general typographical make-up of the new monthly is extremely pleasing; it is quite a departure from the form of any magazine we have seen. The table of contents consists of stories, sketches, criticisms, poems, editorials and book reviews, choice morsels for the most delicate palate. It was announced that a feature of each number would be an article from the pen of some prominent alumnus."
File:Hollis Hall, Harvard University - 080019pv.jpg|thumb|The Harvard Monthly was born in George Santayana's room in Hollis Hall.
The Monthly ceased publication in 1917, due to issues involving the First World War, and The Harvard Advocate, a literary publication of Harvard College since 1866, became the primary source of essays, fiction, and poetry for the Harvard community.

History

Founding and subsequent years

For thirteen years, President Charles William Eliot had been attempting to transform Harvard from a provincially famous institution into a nationally recognized and admired leader in higher education. He believed that to do so, Harvard needed to attract students who came from all over the country, not just from Boston—and not just the wealthy. The academic curriculum needed to cater not just students in the liberal arts, but also ones who saw higher education as a path towards upward mobility, and as a way to pursue non-humanist studies. "The 1880s was in a sense the 'last gasp' of the leisured gentlemen, the last time they would dominate the university's academic and social structure."
What seemed a mass movement toward practicality and specialization that would drain the university of the aestheticism and humanism frustrated the young men who would eventually found the Monthly; each was involved with one or more of the other Harvard literary publications—the Lampoon, the Advocate, and the Crimson, which didn't offer the creative outlet they felt necessary. Toward the end of their junior year, W.W. Baldwin and T.P. Sanborn brainstormed in the latter's room in Grays Hall, proceeding to A.B. Houghton's room in Holyoke and, after gathering W.M. Fullerton and G.R. Carpenter, assembling in Santayana's room in Hollis Hall, where they agreed to move forward with a plan for a true literary magazine. They vowed their work would not bespeak the scrupulous consciousness of John Bunyan's Puritan Pilgrim, but rather the doubting scrutiny of William Dean Howells' Silas Lapham who, in Howells’ story, prevails over the empty, hypocritical norms of proper Boston society.
Houghton was elected editor-in-chief. "The title, 'Harvard Monthly', was adopted... instead of 'Harvard Literary Monthly'... lest it might be called the Harvard Lit and thus bring us up for comparison with Yale's sombre-hued institution."
The new magazine was announced in the Crimson as being published the third Wednesday of each month from October to July for the price of twenty-five cents. The second issue featured an article by Harvard alumnus, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, father of editor Thomas Sanborn, titled Harvard in the Struggle for Emancipation.; The magazine continued to include the works of Harvard staff and prominent graduates including Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Phillips Brooks, Crawford Howell Toy, Albert Bushnell Hart and Andrew Preston Peabody By its second year, the staff of the Monthly had grown from six to eleven, and included Bernard Berenson. The roots of what Santayana would later develop into a full-fledged philosophical disassociation with things American can be found in his undergraduate writings, particularly in those submitted to the Monthly
George Santayana would remain involved with the magazine while a professor at Harvard, submitting material until 1903.
On the magazine's second anniversary, the Boston Daily Advertiser recounted its brief history and proclaimed the magazine was "vastly superior to any other college journal", that the literature was "absolutely and inherently good," and that some articles had even garnered favorable comment from abroad.
Those who subsequently served the Monthly include Bernhard Berenson, William Vaughn Moody, Norman Hapgood, Henry Milner Rideout, Philip Henry Savage, Trumbull Stickney, Robert Herrick, John Reed, Charles Macomb Flandrau, Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, Clifford Herschel Moore, Robert Morss Lovett, Hermann Hagedorn, M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Thomas W. Lamont,Lucien Price, John Hall Wheelock, Bliss Carman, Edwin Arlington Robinson Conrad Aiken,Joseph Auslander, Malcolm Cowley, Scofield Thayer, Robert Hillyer, Gilbert Seldes, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings.

Demise

The Harvard Monthly ceased publication with Volume 64, in May 1917, with the following words within black bordering: "The editors of the monthly regret that existing circumstances compel the suspension of publication during the immediate future." The "circumstances" involved World War I and a campus gearing-up for war, with passionate disagreements erupting among Monthly staff members, as described years later by Malcolm Cowley in an on-line biography of his friend, Monthly editor E.E. Cummings. " took no part in the debate over preparedness for war, one which shook the country in the winter of 1916-17 and which, as a minor effect, disrupted the board of The Harvard Monthly. Four of the editors were pacifists, the other four were superpatriots, all eight were impractical, and they couldn't agree on what to print. In April 1917, when Congress declared war, The Monthly disappeared from Harvard, but not from memory."
No clear reason for the journal's cessation was provided either by the Monthly itself or in the Crimson, where the May 5, 1917 issue states, "The present issue is of peculiar interest as it is the last number of the Monthly to appear before the temporary suspension of publication. This, to whatever "existing circumstances" it may be due, is a great misfortune.
The Monthly was never resurrected, and the Harvard Advocate became Harvard's only literary publication, possibly subsuming the sort of material which had differentiated it from its sister-journal, which may have been due to a tradition of being different. Monthly alumnus Malcolm Cowley offered the following insight in his biography of E.E. Cummings: "There were two such magazines at Harvard in those days , The Monthly and The Advocate, and they looked down on each other—-or, to be accurate, they nodded to each other coldly from the facing doors of their respective sanctums on the dusty third floor of the Harvard Union. The Monthlies thought that the board of The Advocate, which then appeared fortnightly, was composed of journalists, clubmen, athletes, and disciples of Teddy Roosevelt, a former editor, with not a man of letters among them. The Advocates suspected that the Monthlies were aesthetes, scruffy poets, socialists, pacifists, or worse. It was for The Monthly that Cummings chose to write."

Significance

The Harvard Monthly met the intentions of its founders and within ten years was said to have improved the quality of writing and thereby strengthened the English Department at Harvard. "The Monthly has always had a close relation to the English department, the growth of which was the direct cause of its appearance, and it furnishes the best record of the literary standards and ambitions of the undergraduates who make English their chief interest. It is the expression of the growth of a special academic tendency towards the study of literary form and of literary and general criticism." Within ten years of its beginning, The Monthly was known to have published the best literary work done by undergraduates; its series of graduate articles has included many of exceptional value and interest; its influence in the college world has always been in the direction of earnestness and seriousness. Seeking only to reflect "the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought", The Monthly provided "a medium of communication between students and graduates" which had not existed in any other of Harvard's periodicals.
By the magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary, it was described as "proof... of the undergraduate cultivation of creative, critical and persuasive letters that still distinguishes the university...from most other in America." That "proof" may best lie in the fact of The Harvard Monthly's many graduates, who went on to make significant contributions to the world.
The Harvard Monthly ceased publication in 1917. For more than thirty years, the monthly journal was produced in accordance with the original plans of six enthusiastic young men who brainstormed in George Santayana's room in Hollis Hall: a medium for undergraduate thought, issued monthly from October to July, the significance of which could not be denied. The Harvard Crimson, in reporting the suspension of the Monthly, opined that the journal, "... has filled to a certain extent the important post of Devil's Advocate amid the blatant orthodoxy of undergraduate life... Harvard sorely needed the Monthly. In the world outside it was looked on as one of the proofs of Harvard's difference from other colleges. The existence of such a magazine indicated... a desire to think things through, to reject ready-made opinions for the mere reason that they were ready-made, to hold a little aloof from current lanes of thought. Such a spirit, only too rare in our land of gigantic uniformities, and almost non-existent in our colleges, gave one hope that here at least a leaven was working which would ultimately transform American thought from the flabby courageless thing it is into something new and liberating." In the forward to an autobiography of former Monthly editor John Hall Wheelock, literary historian Jay B. Hubbell is quoted as saying, "prior to World War I the history of American Literature was the history of Harvard College." The Harvard Monthly belonged to that time.

Staff

Volume 1: October 1885 to February 1886
Volume 2: March 1886 to July 1886
Volume 3: October 1886 to February 1887
Volume 5: October 1887 to February 1888
Volume 6: March 1888 to July 1888
  • Editor-in-Chief: H.S. Sanford Jr.
  • Business Manager: C.H. Moore
  • Editors: Herbert Bates, H.G. Bruce, R.E. Neil Dodge, Robert W. Herrick, W.A. Leahy, Charles T. Sempers
Volumes 7-8: October 1888 to February 1889, March 1889 to July 1889
Volume 9: October 1889 to February 1890
Volume 10: March 1890 to July 1890
Volumes 11-12: October 1890 to February 1891, March 1891 to July 1891
Volumes 13-14: October 1891 to February 1892, March 1892 to July 1892
*Volumes 15-16: October 1892 to July 1893, March 1893 to July 1893
Volume 17: October 1893 to February 1894
Volume 18: March 1894 to July 1894
Volume 19: October 1894 to February 1895
Volume 20: March 1895 to July 1895
Volume 21: January 1896 to February 1896
Volume 22: March 1896 to July 1896
Volume 23: October 1896 to February 1897
  • Editor-in-Chief: Henry Alexander Phillips
  • Business Manager: William Belmont Parker
  • Editors: Robert Steed Dunn, Henry Wise Miller, Robert Palfrey Utter
Volume 24: March 1897 to July 1897
  • Editor-in-Chief: Henry Alexander Phillips
  • Secretary: Robert Steed Dunn
  • Business Manager: William Belmont Parker
  • Editors: Henry Wise Miller, E.W.Sutton Pickhardt, Alfred Zantzinger Reed, Henry Milner Rideout, Robert Palfrey Utter, S.R. Wrightington
Volume 25: October 1897 to February 1898
Volume 26: March 1898 to July 1898
Volumes 27-28: October 1898 to February 1899, March 1899 to July 1899
Volumes 29-30: October 1899 to February 1900, March 1900 to July 1900
Volume 31: October 1900 to February 1901
Volume 32: March 1901 to July 1901
  • Editor-in-Chief: James Grant Forbes
  • Business Manager: Charles Ernest Reck
  • Assistant Business manager: Herbert Spencer Martin
  • Editors: John LaFarge, Jr., Robert Montraville Green, Lauriston Ward, Benjamin B. Lee, Gilbert Holland Montague, Hoyt Landon Warner
Volumes 33-34: October 1901 to February 1902, March 1902 to July 1902
  • Editor-in-Chief: Robert Montraville Green
  • Business Manager: Herbert Spencer Martin
  • Assistant Business Managers: Alfred Edward Ells, Arthur Linwood Thayer, Merwin Kimball Hart
  • Editors: Laurence Murray Crosbie, George Clarkson Hirst, Henry Wyman Holmes, Harold Stanley Pollard, Howard Ruggles Van Law, Lauriston Ward, Hoyt Landon Warner, Barrett Wendell Jr., Samuel Alfred Welldon
Volume 35: October 1902 to February 1903
Volume 36: March 1903 to July 1903
  • Editor-in-Chief: Hoyt Landon Warner
  • Business Manager: Merwin Kimball Hart
  • Assistant Business Managers: Enoch Lewis Burnham, Richard Henry Miller
  • Editors: Vincent Van Marter Beede, William Harris Laird Bell, Ernest Bernbaum, John Victor Judah Brandon, Oscar James Campbell Jr., Laurence Murray Crosbie, Henry Wyman Holmes, Lauriston Ward, Samuel Alfred Welldon
Volumes 37- 38: October 1903 to February 1904, March 1904 to July 1904
Volumes 39-40: March 1905 to July 1905, October 1904 to February 1905
Volumes 41-42: October 1905 to February 1906, March 1906 to July 1906
Volumes 43-44: October 1906 to February 1907, March 1907 to July 1907
Volume 45: October 1907 to February 1908
Volume 46: March 1908 to July 1908
Volumes 47-48: October 1908 to February 1909, March 1909 to July 1909
  • Editor-in-Chief: Robert Emmons Rogers
  • Secretary: James Thayer Addison
  • Business Manager: Joseph Webster Adams Jr.
  • Assistant Business Managers: Joseph Webster Adams Jr., Harold Pitman, Walter Max Kraus
  • Editors: David Carb, Louis Grandgent, Henry Beston Sheahan, Roy Wilson Follet, Clarence Dewey Britten, Earle Wentworth Huckel, Edward Eyre Hunt, John Silas Reed, Paul Mariett, John Stocker Miller Jr.
Volumes 49-50: October 1909 to February 1910, March 1910 to July 1910
  • Editor-in-Chief: Edward Eyre Hunt
  • Secretary: John Stocker Miller Jr.
  • Business Manager: Joseph Webster Adams
  • Editors:Clarence Dewey Britten, Norman Foerster, Clarence Earle Hale, Earle Wentworth Huckel, Walter Lippmann, John Silas Reed, Alan Seeger, Kenneth Roscoe MacGowan, Paul Mariett, Philip Snedeker, James Gorden Gilkey, Richard Douglas, Elliott Dunlap Smith, Wheeler Sammons
Volume 51: October 1910 to February 1911
  • Contributors : Thomas H. Uzzell, Philip Snedeker, H.W. O'Connor, Walter Lippmann, J.S. Reed, Norman Foerster, Lothrop Withington, R.E. Robbins, Paul Mariett, H.J. Seligmann, Grover Harrison
  • H.K. Moderwell, J. Gordon Gilkey, Rollo Britten, Earle Wentworth Huckel, Robert M. Yerkes, Hubert V. Coryell, Theodore H. Wilbur, Harry R. Blythe, Kenneth W. Hunter
  • B.G. Whitmore, J. Donald Adams, C.V. Wright, C.B. Harris, Stanton Coit Kelton, J.D. Adams, E.W. Wescott, Grover Harrison, C. Gouverneur Hoffman
Volume 52: February 1911 to July 1911
  • Editor-in-Chief: Paul Mariett
  • Assistant Editor: Kenneth Macgowan
  • Editors and Contributors: George Cronyn, C.V. Wright, Kenneth W. Hunter, Grover Harrison, Herbert J. Seligmann, J. Gordon Gilkey, Richard Douglas, Alanson Skinner, Woodburn E. Remington, H.K. Moderwell, Florence Lincoln, J. Donald Adams, David Carb, Percy MacKaye, Walter Prichard Eaton, E.W.Wescott
Volume 53: October 1911 to February 1912
  • Editor-in-Chief: Richard Douglas
  • Secretary: Hiram K. Moderwell
  • Business Manager: Wheeler Sammons
  • Assistant Business Managers: Elliott D. Smith, Herman R. Page, S. Paul Speer
  • Editors: Clarence Britten, James Gordon Gilkey, Herbert J. Seligmann, Rollo Britten, Grover Harrison, Cyril B. Harris, J. Donald Adams, Cuthbert V. Wright, Gilbert V. Seldes
Volume 54: March 1912 to July 1912
  • Editor-in-Chief: Clarence Britten
  • Secretary: Cuthbert V. Wright
  • Business Manager: Wheeler Sammons
  • Assistant Business Managers: Elliott D. Smith, Herman R. Page, S. Paul Speer, O. Williams
  • Editors: James Gordon Gilkey, Richard Douglas, Rollo Britten, Grover Harrison, J. Donald Adams, Cyril B. Harris, Scofield Thayer, Gilbert V. Seldes, Arthur Wilson
Volume 56: March 1913 to July 1913
  • Editor-in-Chief: Cyril Beverly Harris
  • Secretary: Scofield Thayer
  • Business Manager: Herman R. Page
  • Assistant Business Managers: S. Paul Speer, Robert G. Dort, Richardson Morris, Curtis T. Vaughan, Osgood Williams
  • Editors: J. Donald Adams, Grover Harrison, W. Roger Burlingame, Irving Pichel, C. Merrill Rogers, Gilbert Seldes, Charles H. Weston, E. Estlin Cummings, Arthur Wilson, Cuthbert Wright
Volume 57: October 1913 to February 1914
Volume 59-60: October 1914 to February 1915
Volumes 63-64: October 1916 to May 1917
  • Editor-in-Chief: C.G. Paulding, A.K. McComb
  • Secretary: Robert Littell, Elisha Whittlesey
  • Treauurer: William Burry
  • Circulation Manager: D.E. Lynn
  • Advertising Manager: G.W. Emery, W.H. Cary Jr.
  • Editors: P.F. Reniers, H. Henderson, Dudley Poore, Cuthbert Wright, Thatcher Nelson, B.D. Allinson, A.D. Fay, F.D. Perkins