Only Decent Color

"The Dartmouth Green," began a rousing chapel talk .given in 1917, "was inevitable!" Then followed much rhetoric about pine trees deep roots, lofty heads, abundant sap, vigor, and virility and a conclusion exhorting every true and loyal son of Dartmouth to express his Soul and Spirit in the honorable wearing of the inevitable, God-blessed, plain (that is, pine) green.

It's a nice idea, but the truth of the matter is rather more pragmatic than inevitable. American college students began to choose their colors, after the English fashion, during the middle years of the 19th century. Yale athletes had hoisted a blue flag in a rowing competition as early as 1843, but there was considerable waffling about at Yale between blue and green until 1894, when "Yale blue" was officially adopted. Harvard adopted its color in 1858, when two students purchased red silk handerchiefs for the rowing team to wear, though the exact shade of Harvard's red was unsettled for some years, magenta and crimson both being warmly advocated until a final settlement in 1876 in favor of the latter.

According to a Yale Courant account of the Yale-Harvard boat race in Worcester in 1866, Harvard had sported red, Yale was adorned with "true blue," and Hamilton and Williams had just reported adopting orange and purple respectively. In short order, Brown chose brown, Bowdoin white, and Amherst yellow (soon after changed to purple and white).

Credit for the choice of Dartmouth's color belongs to the class of 1867, several members of which were disquieted by the College's colorlessness at various athletic events of 1866. Alfred Thomas '67 had been present at that Yale-Harvard race and reported being struck by the brilliance of the landscape: 'In the summer of '66 I first saw college colors in use, and I felt denuded because Dartmouth had none." In the same year Amherst raised the consciousness of William Ketcham '67. "Amherst had come up with flying colors to teach us how to play baseball," he wrote, "and did it to our sorrow. Every Amherst son sported, as I now recall it, mauve and white as their college colors, and we had none, and the absence of a color that we could claim as our own rankled within us."

Howard Hill '67 once recalled that he and some other students made a temporary selection of cherry for Dartmouth and wore it to a regatta in the late summer of 1866. But that color was found to be too similar to Harvard's, and in the fall of their senior year, Thomas, Ketcham, Hill, and another classmate, Frederick Mather, raised the issue during a meeting in chapel, just after morning prayers, when they proposed green as "the only decent color not taken already."

Objections arose on grounds that the adoption could lead to unwelcome association with Irish firebrands and "the troubles" or that the choice might expose students to some equally unwelcome ribbing about youth and naivete. But Ketcham responded stoutly that the College ought to have enough standing to avoid such vicarious calumnies and, if it didn't, it wasn't fit to have a color. The upshot, according to Ketcham, was that "after a somewhat interesting fight green was selected, not with unanimity, but with enough of a majority to be entirely satisfactory all around."

The students, apprehensive lest their choice be snatched away, staked their claim with an announcement in the Harvard Advocate, which went on to warn that any "cracking the feeble jokes so threadbare and hackneyed on this really beautiful color," risked having their "heads cracked."

The actual shade of green chosen seems not to have concerned the class of' 67 overmuch, since no special effort was made to pin it down. A good many years after the fact, Ketcham, writing to Professor E. J. (Bubby) Bartlett, made a stab at it: "The color selected was just green, nothing else

... just simply plain green, and that is about all the information I can give you."

Fortunately, there is preserved in a file in the College archives a scrap of the silk grosgrain ribbon used by the color-conscious lads of '67 to demonstrate their choice. It is a deep, deep green, a color so dark as to be very nearly black. The archives file is full of other samples of things green and Dartmouth ― commencement badges, bookbinding leathers, regatta ribbons, and a scrap of richly colored flag silk sanctioned by the trustees in 1917 for the College banner. Among all these samples, only the flag silk matches in depth and darkness the original ribbon.

A ceramic souvenir (top) and a "Sambo"game were among Aunt Jemimas, UncleRemuses, and lawn jockeys in a recent"Black Memorabilia" exhibition at Hopkins Center. Speakers discussed the effectsof such stereotypes on racial attitudes.