Ninety-nine years and eight months ago, six students overtook a fusty faculty newspaper to sound the day’s news the way they saw it.
More than half of the front page of the Jan. 1, 1910 inaugural edition of The Triangle, as the paper was then known, recounted school dances and banquets. The paper proclaimed the university’s three pillars of agriculture, engineering and science on its nameplate and debated the definition of a true gentleman in editorials.
It hardly hinted at a future that would include nationally renowned reporters, a notorious plagiarizer, racial tensions and a break from university control amid a struggle for free speech.
Now known as The Diamondback, 15,000 copies of this paper were printed last night and arrived at 72 locations around the campus this morning. As the paper approaches its 100th anniversary, staffers will chronicle its history throughout the academic year.
That history began with a man who was known to his peers as “chief” but would be more recognizable today as the namesake for the home building of the behavioral and social sciences college. Millard Tydings, who would go on to become a four-term U.S. senator, was The Triangle‘s first editor in chief.
Tydings was remembered in his senior-year yearbook for his “verbose contributions,” and judging from The Triangle‘s early stories, Tydings’ grandiose style may have set the tone for the newspaper.
“A few nights ago some enterprising students bedecked the campus and the college buildings with various signs, designating the different streets and avenues, dining halls, etc., in true American University style,” the paper reported after a campus prank.
And in what would become a tradition for the university’s student newspapers, The Triangle invoked the power the student body on its editorial page.
In one piece titled “The Students are the College,” the paper reminded its readers that “the students, and the students alone, make the reputation of a college.”
The Triangle was also a reliable source for the news of the day. Many of its headlines may seem mundane to the modern eye — stories chronicled professors’ vacations, local guests and the attendees of school social events — but in 1910, the university only had about 125 students. But when big news broke, The Triangle was there.
In 1912, a fire devoured the two largest buildings on the campus, both dormitories and most of the university’s records. The Triangle reported the story in its distinctive voice:
“While the moon soared to its zenith calmly and amid a cloudless sky on the night of November 29, the landscape for miles around College Park was illuminated by the glare of a conflagration that was, before its extinction, to level two of [the Maryland Agricultural College’s] proudest structures to the earth.”
Over the next eight years, the paper would change its name four times, becoming the Maryland Agriculture College Weekly, the Maryland State Weekly, the Maryland State Review and the University Review.
slivnick@umdbk.com
