Editor’s note: Pitt in the Making is an occasional series looking at the history of the University.

By MARTY LEVINE

When it came to indulging in vices, Pitt students in 1932 were proficient but “no more so than their fathers,” the Pitt Panther student publication assured its readers in March of that year. The Panther had gathered anonymous Pitt professors’ evaluations of their students — and students’ evaluations of their professors — and one of the city’s three daily papers, the Pittsburgh Press, was happy to reprint their opinions.

“Moonlight intoxication in the old buggy has found an excellent substitute and supplement in moonshine in the automobile,” one professor said of the current generation, compared to the past one.

Students, in turn, were happy to complain about their professors, particularly “young men (who) have had two or three years’ experience, and think they are immeasurably superior to any of the feeble minds in their classes.”

Other issues of the Panther that year warned students that “if a college ‘man’ flashes money these days the chances are that his old man is a bootlegger.” Another campus humor mag, Frosh Script, delighted at publishing the worst of history exam answers, including “Aristophanes is a river in north Africa”; “An epicurean is one who can pronounce French words on a restaurant menu”; and “The tenets of Christianity are found in the Koran. “

The year 1932 at Pitt was a time of transition, with the Cathedral of Learning in partial use but still under construction — a symbol of Pitt’s past and future all at once. How much should we or could we progress? How much must we preserve?

“Shall we teach sex in high school?” the assistant dean of women, Helen Rush, was asked to address before the Western Pennsylvania Association of Deans of Women and Girls Advisers, the Press reported. “Or should they learn about it through whispers, as millions have learned about it before?”

First-year college women, Rush countered, “don't know enough about their physical makeup to describe intelligently their symptoms when they are ill. They are not familiar enough with the names of the organs of their bodies to speak to a physician without embarrassment.”

Over in Pitt’s chemistry department, a professor announced he was the first to isolate hexuronic acid — the old name for Vitamin C — and his department head trumpeted that, should we pinpoint its uses, “we have accomplished something in biochemistry which is important to human well-being.’” However, he cautioned, first the professor must present his findings at a national society of “biological chemists.” Alas, it would still be five years before Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi would win the Nobel Prize for such a discovery, changing the vitamin’s name to ascorbic acid to signify its anti-scurvy properties.

Recruiters were active that spring on Pitt’s campus for the Students’ Bureau for Miners’ Relief, which hoped to bring 5,000 U.S. college students to the coal fields of Kentucky’s Harlan County. They planned to study its notoriously brutal conditions as well as to bring the miners clothing, food and publicity for their cause.

And that spring’s graduation included the daughter of the first female student at Pitt, Margaret Stein, who, along with her sister Stella, had begun classes in 1895 — after the board of trustees held a special session to permit it.

That fall, the student newspaper Pitt Weekly went twice weekly and offered a $10 prize for a new name. Somehow, The Pitt News won. The losing names were unfortunately not revealed.

By late October 1932, when Pitt beat Notre Dame on its way to another Rose Bowl berth, the University was testing 24 grass types in a large grid on the Cathedral lawn. One half of each block was cut low, the other half high, to see how they held up under players’ cleats.

Comic actor Joe E. Brown, just a few years into his movie success (but 27 years before his most famous line, “Nobody’s perfect,” capped “Some Like It Hot”), was here to root for Pitt. Following the victory, students celebrated in what the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph called “good-natured downtown street disorders.” Two thousand “paraded noisily … disrupted traffic and tried to crash the gate at the Stanley Theater,” today the Benedum. “They were repulsed by police who arrested three.”

Then 400 male students “reorganized and stormed the Academy Theater,” the town’s burlesque palace. “It is a Pitt tradition that the gate of the Academy be crashed in celebration, but a compromise was affected. Manager George Jaffe established the temporary collegiate price at 25 cents, which the celebrators paid.”

Photos from the time show cheering students jammed in overburdened open jalopies, standing on running boards and sitting atop front wheel wells. The arrested trio was let off, after a hearing in Morals Court, once they apologized to police.

Back on campus, the zoology department kept a monkey as a pet named Jimmie, whose favorite pastime was scribbling with a pencil and then erasing who-knows-how-many masterpieces. And Pitt’s Chancellor John G. Bowman, who that summer had won first place at the Bedford County fair for a prize bull from his farm there, joined freshmen at the annual pre-class excursion to Camp Kon-O-Kwee near Ligonier, with 10 other faculty.

Bowman was not beyond pining for Pitt’s rural past, even though the Cathedral was his baby. Comparing Pitt and Pittsburgh during the Depression to Pitt’s rustic beginnings, in his biennial report to trustees, he mused: “How strangely something has gone wrong” in industry’s rush for money. He ached for the return of “the smell of oak chips and of newly split walnut shingles about a log-school,” Pitt’s condition in 1787, when “money was scarce, work was hard and thought had to be practical. … Perhaps we are in a new era, in an era when, as never before in history, men will give less time to earning a living or to the gathering of material things, and more to trying to realize the full richness of the common life by living it more intensely.”

How this sort of talk resounded among Pitt’s trustees, seated in the lush atmosphere of the Duquesne Club, is anyone’s guess.

Yet he also offered this: “If any student needs the opportunity that a college affords and if only one type of student could be considered, it surely should be the ordinary, or average one. The exceptionally bright student is able to make his own way, college or no college. A college can do much for the bright student. And it can do this while the ordinary boy is around.”

As long as that ordinary student isn’t a pacifist, or worse.

When Gen. Douglas MacArthur spoke at Pitt’s commencement in spring 1932, two Pitt students had been arrested at the University’s behest before they could even finish painting their protest signs – but their fines and convictions for disorderly conduct were reversed when the judge cited their free speech rights.

Undaunted, Pitt unveiled a mandatory loyalty oath that fall for students. The pledge cited allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, all state laws and “loyalty in spirit and in action to the purposes and regulations of the University of Pittsburgh.”

Choose not to sign before classes this fall, the administration said, and you would not be allowed to register.

Asked to explain the pledge’s purpose, Chancellor Bowman commented: “It is self-explanatory. Let the students start something and they will soon find out.” The National Student League, the group behind the MacArthur protest, quickly labeled the oath a “powderpuff attempt to stop budding Communists.”

And the Sun-Telegraph pointed out that such an oath would now force students to obey Pennsylvania’s often ignored “blue laws,” which banned most fun and commerce on Sundays. They would also have to adhere to Prohibition: “By subscribing to this new pledge the students cannot take a drink, cannot play baseball, golf, tennis or buy gasoline or cigarettes on Sunday, and will have to obey all other antiquated statutes.”

Pitt business manager and sometime spokesman John Weber’s response was none too subtle: “We think we have as loyal a student body here as anywhere, and we went to prove it. … We could settle it another way – by turning the students loose on them (the protestors), but that wouldn’t be very nice.’”

A few students stepped forward to question the pledge’s value, and Weber said the University would allow pledge refusers to explain their reasons in writing — but would not say how Pitt would judge such responses.

"Is it to be a ‘Cathedral of Learning’ or a ‘Tower of Reaction?’” editorialized the Press.

Board of Trustees Chair George H. Clapp added that “the only reason I know for it (the pledge) is that a lot of Red papers all over the country have been urging these boys to get into devilment.”

Pitt claimed only one student had refused to sign, explained his reasons and been allowed in class. Pitt’s student government supported the pledge and blamed the brouhaha on local newspapers.

Then a second refusal to sign came from a graduate student — a local pastor who refused the pledge because the U.S. Constitution “ignores Jesus Christ.”

By the time the Socialist Party’s 1932 presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, compared the pledge to “the edicts of Mr. Mussolini,” the whole thing faded from the news.

Then, with a dozen days left in the year, the unfinished Cathedral caught fire. From the fourth floor, up 11 stories the fire rose through the falsework — the wooden structure holding the form of the building from the inside, with plumbing and wires running through it, before the stone walls were complete. The stone protected the classrooms and offices already furnished and in use, but water pipe joints melted and telephone wires burned or hung with icicles in the 22-degree cold of the night of Dec. 19, 1932.

“For a time, the flames imperiled the luxuriously furnished ‘Foreign Nations’ rooms on the first floor,” one paper reported. “It was the second time the Cathedral of Learning, famed throughout the world, has been afire. Once before, straw used as temporary insulation burst into flames. The fire did not interfere with class schedules because the University began its customary two-week Christmas recess today.”

Thanks goodness for small miracles.

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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