While this year's Winter Carnival pays homage to the ancient Romans, the first Carnival theme 1925's "Jutenheim Iskarneval" celebrated the diverse customs of Scandanavian carnivals, after which Dartmouth's Winter Carnival was patterned. The inception of the "Winter Meet" in 1910, however, was not inspired by international tradition instead, it was the result of a fervent letter published in The Dartmouth.
Fred Harris, a member of the Class of 1911, sparked the Winter Carnival tradition in December 1909, when he wrote a letter to the editor of The Dartmouth that bemoaned the College's lack of winter activities.
"The question what is there to do at Dartmouth in the winter?' gives rise to the thought that we might take better advantage of the admirable situation of our College," Harris wrote.
In the letter, Harris suggested a "meet or field day" and the formation of what later became the Dartmouth Outing Club. The first "Winter Meet" which included a ski jumping contest, hockey games, an obstacle course and 100-yard dashes on both snow shoes and skis took place only two months later and was officially renamed Winter Carnival in 1911.
In 1911, the introduction of a DOC-sponsored Carnival dance rendered the newly-founded DOC a dominant influence over Dartmouth's social scene, according to David Hooke '84, facilities manager of outdoor programs and author of the book "Reaching That Peak: 75 Years of the Dartmouth Outing Club." Approximately 50 women attended the dance, which lasted until 3:00 a.m.
"The girl of the 1910s had a flare for lemonade, and the student caught dunking his moustache in his beer was deeply frothed upon," Frank Danzig '34 wrote in the 1935 Winter Carnival Silver Anniversary Brochure.
By the 1920s, Winter Carnival caught the attention of many great journalists of the day, including E. Bigelow Thompson of the Boston Transcript and Fred Hawthorne of the New York Herald, according to a 1930 Dartmouh Alumni Magazine.
"Some of the leading feature writers are sent yearly to cover what is now becoming New England's greatest mid-winter social event," Craig Thorn wrote in the Alumni Magazine.
In what F. Scott Fitzgerald would later call "one of the silliest mistakes I ever made," the renowned author and recovering alcoholic visited campus in 1939 for Winter Carnival. He spent the now-infamous weekend drunkenly attempting to conduct research for a screenplay about the College's Winter Carnival with co-author Budd Schulberg '36.
Schulberg and Fitzgerald visited Alpha Delta and Psi Upsilon fraternities during their visit, according to a 2003 article in The New York Times. Hollywood producer Walter Wanger, a member of the class of 1915, later fired Fitzgerald for his conduct that weekend.
Historically, publicity campaigns for Winter Carnival were quite elaborate. Posters advertising Carnival were displayed in the windows of sporting goods stores throughout New England, and newspaper articles and advertisements were abundant.
"Ted Geisel ['25] very generously drew a set of cartoons for the program giving his impressions of Carnival," the Alumni Magazine reported in 1930. "Geisel, drawing under the pseudonym of Dr. Seuss, has become famous throughout the country for his weird figures," the magazine noted.
An eight-mile long traffic jam occurred in 1952, when Carnival hype prompted a mass influx of visitors from outside the College.
In 1933, the Jack-O-Lantern published a story about Winter Carnival that quipped, "An editorial exhorting guests to have a good time would be just as superfluous as setting good brown ale before a thirsty man and begging him to drink."
