“Did you follow the news this week?” That’s how The New York Times News Quiz announces itself each weekend.
For nearly a century, off and on, The Times has used a variety of contests to encourage readers to stay abreast of current affairs (by buying The Times, naturally). For example, the Saturday News Quiz, edited by Linda Amster, appeared from 1976 to 1989.
The grandest competition was the Intercollegiate Current Events Contest, sponsored by The Times, which was conducted from 1925 to 1932. A national winner was chosen from among contestants at 20 participating colleges, based on answers to a factual quiz that the school administered, and the strength of essays on a defined topic.
Besides a cash award of $650 (roughly $12,000 in today’s money), the winner received a 10-by-14-inch bronze plaque designed by the sculptor and painter Emil Fuchs. It showed an allegorical female figure of knowledge in bas-relief, casting her light on both hemispheres of the globe. Above her were the words, “Every morn is the world made new,” from a poem by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey that also adorned a lobby mural in the former Times headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street.
On the back of the plaque, circled in a wreath, was space for the winner’s name to be inscribed, with the legend: “Intercollegiate Current Events Contest / Awarded by The New York Times to __________ for his knowledge of the news.” Despite the wording, women were eligible to compete. Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley were among the participating colleges.
The archive of the Museum at The Times has the front half of one such plaque.
Princeton fielded the winner of the 1927-28 contest: a senior named Francis Bosley Crowther Jr., from Washington, who served on the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian student newspaper. Both of his winning essays, “The New Position of the United States” and “Intervention in Nicaragua,” were printed in The Times.
“War is becoming more deadly,” a young Mr. Crowther wrote, 11 years before World War II began. “Men must realize that the only hope for further existence lies in a way of peace. Anything else means destruction.”
It wouldn’t be the last time that Times readers heard from this particular contest winner. Under the byline Bosley Crowther, he became The Times’s film critic in 1940, a post he held for the next 27 years. Mr. Crowther died in 1981, at 75.
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