The Wonderful Winters of Old

  

As students are bundling up for a chilly ‘Blizzard of Oz’ Winter Carnival this weekend, we thought we’d take a trip back through the wizardly festivities that Hanover has seen over the years, from ‘The Winterland of Oz’ in 1972 to ‘There’s Snow Place Like Home’ in 2002, to try and answer the question: what continues to draw Dartmouth students to the story and setting of L. Frank Baum’s quintessential American fairy tale? 

As a member of the 2002 Winter Carnival committee explained to The Dartmouth, “obvious connections between the Emerald City and Dartmouth” gave them lots of material to riff off of to play up the theme of the event. Beyond the visual synchronicity and a fervent love of the color green, both the citizens of Oz and Dartmouth students suspend their notions of reality for a bit. Since its inception, Winter Carnival has promised an escape: from coursework for Dartmouth students, and into Hanover’s snowy woods for the guests who joined them.

Despite the magical theme and a towering snow sculpture of the Emerald City, complete with staircases and a slide, the 1972 Winter Carnival arrived amidst a flurry of change, controversy, and anticipation; as the final Carnival held before co-education and the last to host a Queen of the Snows competition, students were abuzz with speculation about the women who would be joining the undergraduate population in the coming academic year. When asked whether the admissions office would be taking beauty into consideration for female applicants, Admissions Director Edward Thoyt Chamberlain stated that scholastic achievement would be the “most heavily weighted” factor for all prospective students and dismissed the feasibility of physical assessment, telling The Dartmouth, “‘You can’t trust pictures they send us. We all know that’” (February 11th, 1972). 

Just days earlier, on February 8th, the college newspaper published a brief article entitled “Sexism: Carnival Council Seeks Dumb Broad” to announce the Winter Carnival Council’s decision to remove the “intelligence criteria” for the Queen of the Snows contest; by February 14th, the paper had dubbed the newly elected Queen “brainless and beautiful.” While Kappa Kappa Kappa member Bill Farnum celebrated his fiancée’s coronation with her in front of the Emerald City, his fraternity’s snow sculpture, ‘Eleazar Goes Broad-Minded,’ depicts the founder of the College leaning down towards a young woman splayed on the ground and inviting her to attend the school. Echoing early imagery of Wheelock gesturing towards a seated Native American student, the sculpture points to the varied response of Dartmouth students to the nearing onset of co-education.

Though the majority of students polled supported the shift to admit women, anti-coeducation sentiment during this period was palpable. Several of the early female Dartmouth students reported feeling particularly unwanted and out of place during Winter Carnivals, as women from the Seven Sisters colleges continued to be preferentially invited as dates for the weekend’s festivities. Beneath the Oz-themed spectacle, the Carnival became a site where broader cultural shifts – and the discomfort surrounding them – played out in very public ways.

Want to see these images for yourself? Head over to Rauner and request Iconography 1647: Photographic files"Snow Sculpture 1972" to explore the 1972 Winter Carnival, or DA-671, Objects 50 and 80 to view the 1972 and 2002 Winter Carnival posters.

You can also check out the ‘Baum-y Weather: Blizzard of Oz Strikes Campus’ exhibit in Rauner’s main entrance to learn more about L. Frank Baum’s beloved children’s novel, its many sequels, and various artistic, musical, and cinematic adaptations. While you’re here, stop by the reference desk and peek at our ‘Something Cool’: a photo of the child actress who played Dorothy in the iconic 1939 film adaptation shooting pool on campus with her short-lived Dartmouth fiancé at Alpha Theta fraternity in 1967!  

A Small University

When Daniel Webster 1801 said that Dartmouth was a "small college," he wasn't kidding. These words, uttered during Webster's successful defense of the college during Trustees of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward in 1819, have become an important part of the school's identity over the last two centuries and more. This week, while looking through our broadside collections in preparation for a history class on the Revolutionary War, we found evidence of just how small Dartmouth was at the time.

In January of 1800, or perhaps 1799, a small broadside was published that listed the names of the members of Dartmouth's class of 1801, including Daniel Webster and his high school and college roommate James Bingham. A total of thirty-four names are listed in both print and manuscript; some names are crossed out, indicating their departure from the school, while a few late arrivals have been inked in by an unknown hand. This little document is fascinating to us because it underscores how tight-knit and intimate each Dartmouth class must have been at the time (no bigger than a large seminar class nowadays, perhaps). We're also intrigued by the various additions and deletions from the sheet, especially the removal of a mysterious John Russell, for whom we can find no other archival records as of yet. Of most interest to us, however, is that the document states that it is a catalogue of the members of the sophomore class of "Dartmouth University". We dug a little deeper and found a similar catalogue of the class of 1788 that also identified the school as a university, less than two decades after the founding of the school and sixteen years before the controversy that sparked the Supreme Court showdown.

This little detail has left us with many questions, some that can be answered and others that will never be: At what point had the College begun to call itself a University long before the schism of 1804 that caused the creation of two rival institutions, Dartmouth College and Dartmouth University? Did Webster and his classmates also call it that when they were students, and if so did it seem odd to him to call Dartmouth a "small college" in 1819? Regardless, the school had clearly left a deep impression on him and his small cohort of classmates during their time in the wilderness.

To see the list of members of the class of 1801, come to Rauner and ask for Broadside 799101.