“This Week in Williams History” is a column that looks back at memorable moments in the College’s past through articles in the Record. This week in history, the Record covered an 11-hour power outage, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations against a professor of government, and Dining Services’ goldfish giveaway.
March 21, 1936: College power lines down for 11 hours amid raging flood
While students today lament a few minutes of a spotty Wi-Fi connection, students at the College in 1936, who experienced an 11-hour power outage, might have had it worse.
“Undergraduates and townspeople reverted to the gaslit era of the Gay Nineties last Wednesday when flood conditions rendered all electrical appliances in the town useless for an eleven-hour stretch,” the Record reported on March 21, 1936.
In place of electricity, students flocked to Spring Street to purchase candles, depleting several stores of their supply. One store sold their entire ten year inventory, the Record reported.
While some exams were postponed to prevent students from “cramming for hour tests by candlelight,” other events went on uninterrupted: “Undaunted, however, the Adelphic Union clashed with the visiting Yale orators in candlelit Jesup Hall,” the Record reported.
Students weren’t the only ones tried by that night’s floods — so was a fraternity’s pet pig. The Record reported that “A burly black pig named Marmaduke, an erstwhile fraternity pet, was floated from his pen near the Hoosac River. He waged a successful struggle with the elements on Tuesday night, and was finally rescued by his master.”
Hold on a minute. Fraternities had pet pigs?
March 18, 1950: Professor Frederick Schuman denies McCarthy’s allegations of communism
Caught up in the storm of McCarthyism, a professor at the College was accused of Communist sympathies after he suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union were equally to blame for the Cold War. “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin … leveled his Red finger at Dr. Frederick L. Schuman Tuesday and charged that the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government is ‘one of the closest collaborators in and sponsors of Communist front organizations in America,’” the Record reported.
Schuman denied the allegations during a lecture in his political science class. Though quick to assert: “I am as opposed to Communism as is Senator McCarthy,” Schuman, who had faced similar accusations before, took a humorous approach to the topic during his lecture. “Observing that he again had been placed in ‘rather distinguished company,’ the Williams professor commented drily, ‘I am flattered to be associated with Albert Einstein,’” the Record recounted.
Schuman poked fun at the timing of the allegations. “This is the Ides of March — for many politicians, it seems to be the silly season.”
Whew. At least the Ides of March are behind us.
March 16, 1999: Dining Services hand out live goldfish with dinner
Special dinners at the College are always an occasion for excitement — chocolate fondue on Valentine’s Day, assorted candy on Halloween, and freshly-baked beignets for Mardi Gras draw in crowds of students. But none of those memorable delicacies compare to the Caribbean-themed dinner in spring 1999, when Dining Services distributed live goldfish to students in Mission dining hall.
In an op-ed for the Record on March 16, 1999, Chrissy Fletcher ’01 described her discontent with this event. “The decorative live goldfish on the tables seemed like a creative and positive idea at Mission Dining Hall’s Carribean-themed [sic] dinner — that is, until I noticed the plastic bags,” she wrote. “Near the punch bowl holding the fish at the card-swipe counter, students were excitedly collecting their new pets and leaving the dining hall.”
Disturbed by this flippant treatment of the fish, Fletcher approached then-Mission Hall Unit Manager Mike Cutler, who justified the fish giveaway with his general trust in the student body and his certainty in the caregiving capacities of female students. “He also told me that most of the students taking the fish out of the dining hall were female, and so he expected the problem to be minimal,” Fletcher wrote.
As a student of marine science, Fletcher was particularly concerned with the diet of the fish. “Mr. Cutler told me that he assumed that students would ‘feed them bread’ in the period before they bought proper fish food… It is unfortunate that Mr. Cutler did not know that feeding a fish bread for more than a couple of days can lead to digestive tract problems,” she wrote.
As Fletcher says, “Fish, to me, and I hope to other students, are not merely ‘novelties’ like ice cream, but living creatures that can feel pain.” All the more reason to enjoy the ice cream on plant-based street food night at Whitmans’, and save the goldfish for people who have more than stale crusts to feed them — as long as they’re female, of course.
