-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Saga of American Society
Dixon Wecter
Charles Scribner�s & Son�1970, 1937
Elizabeth Farrar Wecter�1965renewal
LCCCN 78-103633
--[b]--
In the clubs heretofore mentioned, the most acute of all discriminations
between the "ins" and "outs," namely secrecy, has played no part. But
somewhere in the broad domain of human action it is bound to appear. To the
young it gives a sense of personal power, and to the elder it satisfies the
mingled hunger for fancied superiority and the pomp of ritual. Secret
societies in the United States-so far removed from the subterranean religious
and political melodrama of Latin countries�usually attract either the young
or the socially underprivileged adult, who finds in the password, the grip,
the cabala, a sense of exclusiveness denied him by humdrum reality. In former
times and circumstances, a few secret societies enjoyed considerable social
favor. The first reference to Free Masons in America occurs apparently in
1715 in a letter from the collector of the port of Philadelphia mentioning "a
few evenings in festivity" with his Masonic brethren. In the days of George
Washington many a Virginia planter and New England merchant was a Mason, and
so much democratic distrust was long brewing against the Order that in 1826
the mysterious disappearance of an apostate Mason named William Morgan
enabled Thurlow Weed to exploit the furore and form the Anti-Masonic Party in
politics. During the nineteenth century, particularly in the smaller cities
and towns, all prominent business men of Protestant faith regarded membership
in Masonic lodges as extremely important. Today Masonry is ignored by many
young men of worldly, sophisticated background, and its social standing
appears to be steadily waning. Odd Fellows and Maccabees represent successive
steps downward in the social scale, whatever their useful charities may be.
The craving for honors and distinctions among masses of commonplace Americans
was reflected in the amazing proliferation of secret societies at the close
of the last century. Schlesinger computes that at least 124 new secret orders
were formed between 188o and 1890, 136 within the next five years, and 230
more by 1901. Knights of Pythias and Elks arose during the decade of the
Civil War, and a little laterwith a characteristic wedding of regal splendor
and camaraderie in title -the Knights and Ladies of the Golden Rule, the Sons
of Malta, the Royal Society of Good Fellows, the Prudent Patricians of
Pompeii, and the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo. Negro societies were even
more magniloquent.
But the social standing of the best college societies is quite a different
story. Most of them have been tinctured with secrecy and conspiratorial airs
at some time in their history, and the majority-whether national fraternities
or local clubsstill guard an arcana of ritual, though hardly with the
grimness of half a century ago. The premier college club is without much
doubt the Porcellian at Harvard. No other group which its members may ever
join�and Porcellians always belong to the best clubs in every city�will claim
their affection half so much. No matter how insouciant and disillusioned
about life in general they may become, the most urbane feel a lump in their
throat and a catch at the heart upon thoughts of the Porcellian�even as the
masses are said to respond to the evocation of Home and Mother. A well-known
novelist of the Philadelphia aristocracy, who was elected to the Porcellian
Club fifty-seven years ago, patiently tried to describe to a questioner the
nature of this feeling. "Nothing has ever meant quite so much to me. It is a
bond," he added after a long minute of hesitation, "which can be felt but not
analyzed." Others reply to inquiry with language faintly suggestive of
mysticism, as St. Francis might speak of stigmata or Dante of Beatrice. Not
only is the Porcellian a sacred subject, but belonging is a career in itself,
a cultus. In the houses of members on Commonwealth Avenue, Long Island, or
the Main Line, one finds that they prize and frame photographs of Club
groups, while across the glass suspended from a green and white ribbon hangs
a silver medal in the shape of a star with eight points, bearing crossed
swords, the two dates 1791 and 1831, and the motto Dum vivimus vivamus. A
Porcellian who lives in Greenwich has filled his handsome house from
mud-scraper to rear garden with suckling pigs, hogs, and wild boars in iron,
clay, china, papier-mache, and chromium. And between the fledgling of twenty
and the veteran of seventy exists an extraordinary rapport. This is of course
the ideal of scores of similar clubs, but few outside Porcellian at Cambridge
and Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key at New Haven seem really to achieve it.
The Porcellian is not the oldest of Harvard clubs, being outdated by the
Institute of 1770, which is also patrician at an earlier stage of college
life. In 1791 a few intimate friends, Harvard juniors and seniors�Joseph
McKean, Charles Cutler, Henderson Inches, Robert Treat Paine, John Curtis
Chamberlain, Francis Gardner, Francis C. Lowell, William Jones, and Charles
Jackson-fell into the habit of meeting in each other's rooms on alternate
Friday nights for talk and supper, and first called themselves the Argonauts.
But one evening a member of the company invited them in to discuss the merits
of a roast pig, with such jollity and success that the band came to be known
briefly as The Pig Club. With a consciousness of their eminent social
position they also dallied with the name of Gentlemen's Club, but soon with a
happy compromise between dignity and delicatessen hit upon the name
Porcellian. Charles Cutler was the first Grand Marshal and the second Joseph
McKean. In 1831 a similar order of equal impeccability, the Knights of the
Square Table, founded in 1809, was merged with the Porcellian by mutual
desire. In those early days a strong South Carolina strain in the Porcellian
mingled names like Pinckney, Huger, Rutledge, and Alston with the rockribbed
patronymics of Saltonstall, Sedgwick, Winthrop, Codman,, Perkins, Sturgis,
Brimmer, Hunnewell, and Crowninshield. When the Southern tradition of Harvard
waned and was finally broken forever by the Civil War, Knickerbocker and
Philadelphia scions supplanted the flower of Dixie's chivalry. Famous sons of
the Porcellian include Wendell Phillips, Charming, Story, Everett, Prescott,
Charles Sumner, Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, John
Lothrop Motley, Justice Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister. Some
eight to ten members are chosen from each Harvard class, generally in their
sophomore year though in recent years increasingly from the upper-class
brackets.[7]
Another distinguished club at Harvard is the A. D., established in 1836 as an
honorary chapter of the national fraternity Alpha Delta Phi, founded at
Hamilton College four years previously. In 1846 it became a regular chapter
and so remained until 1859 when a great hue and cry against fraternities so
assailed it that, with characteristic Harvard antinomianism, it defiantly
became secret, highly desirable, and quite illegal -known among its members
as the "Haidee," after the name of a college boat and, incidentally, Don
Juan's mistress. In 1865 the chapter handed in its national charter and
became the A. D. Club of Harvard alone; a later attempt to revive Alpha Delta
Phi from 1879 to 1907 failed but left as its progeny the Fly Club. In view of
the failure of national fraternities to strike root in Cambridge one recalls
the boast of William James that "our irreconcilables are our proudest
product," or the half-serious attempt which one critic made to explain the
difference between Harvard and Yale by pointing to William Graham Sumner as
the timeless model of all good Yale men, with his preoccupation with folkways
and mores, the gospel of social conformity-and over against him William
James, Harvard man in excelsis, experimentalist and rebel living by the
lights of individual judgment.
Undergraduate life at Cambridge has not lacked for bitter passages, which
compel notice from any anatomist of society. On the one hand there has long
been a snobbery moulded of New England pride and juvenile cruelty which is
probably more savage than any known to Fifth Avenue and Newport. Its favorite
illustration is the time-worn tale of the lonely lad who to feign that he had
one friend used to go out as dusk fell over the Yard and call beneath his own
windows, "Oh, Reinhardt!"[8] And on the other it has had moments of mad,
terrible loyalty�exampled by the episode which is still recalled, awesomely
without names, over the coffee and liqueurs when Harvard men meet in Beacon
Street or the South Seas. It is the true story of a Harvard senior at a party
in Brookline, who suddenly enraged by a jocular remark made concerning the
girl whom he later married, publicly slapped the face of his best friend and
then in an access of remorse walked to an open fire and held his offending
hand in the flame until it shrivelled away to the wrist. Reclame is added
because the self-martyr, who spent agonizing days in the hospital, was
related to the proudest of Hudson Valley families and became a noted essayist
and critic, and because the young jester bore Boston's premier social and
intellectual name, and achieved future high honors in science.
Of the senior societies at Yale only two matter socially, the Russell Trust
Association, known as Skull and Bones, founded in 1832, and the Kingsley
Trust or Scroll and Key, begun in 1842. In May members of each junior class
lounge about the Memorial Quadrangle, trying to look as nonchalant as
possible under the eyes of several hundred spectators, and furtively watching
seniors dressed completely in black save for a gold insignia at the
throat-who, after glaring about with zest, suddenly catch sight of a favorite
and with a solemn blow on the shoulder, which is never a slap, bestow the
highest of all possible accolades. The lucky fellow grins nervously, flushes
to the ears, and runs to his room, followed by the Hound of the
undergraduates' Heaven, who there gives him private instructions. Such is Tap
Day, currently known as "desire under the elms." Some twelve to fifteen are
chosen by each society, "the best men of the year" in social background,
wealth, good fellowship, athletic or literary prowess-preferably a
combination of two or more qualities. Skull and Bones is a national byword,
but young gentlemen of great social fastidiousness have been known to prefer
Scroll and Key. The latter pre-eminently represents caste and "seasoned
wealth," while the former specializes in achievement-editors of The Daily
News and The Lit., football captains, and brilliant young scholars who at
times have to be coerced into wearing neckties, cleaning finger nails, and
brushing hair; it also taps Heinzes and Manvilles of less seasoned wealth.
Skull and Bones has even been known to smile upon graduates of high schools;
to Scroll and Key this anarchy would be unthinkable.
Members traditionally avoid all reference to their own or rival societies in
the presence of outsiders. On their way to Saturday night dinners in the
"tombs"�massive windowless facades encased in ivy and Virginia creeper, with
iron doors secured by padlocks-they bid good-bye to whatever friends may be
with them, and with a sharp turn march the last few steps alone and in
reverent silence. Never do they allude to anything which happens within those
Lethean portals, and according to a standing joke even the black servants and
the grocer's boys who penetrate those tombs through the postern gate are
inviolable Bones or Keys men. Years ago Skull and Bones built a great
fortress of brown sandstone with a terraced playground behind its tomb,
intending to afford members a place of permanent domicile so that during
their senior year in Yale College they need never set foot on unhallowed
ground save to attend lectures. Opposition from Faculty and Corporation was
so strong, however, that the scheme was abandoned, and today that grimly
feudal structure houses the Yale School of Architecture. Both societies are
immensely rich through gifts, and their old members so potent in American
finance that it is said no neophyte has cause ever to worry about a future
job. Both have weathered many storms of democratic opposition and mockery.
Bottles of ink used to be smashed against their doors and the chains torn
from their staples. A bogus society called Bowl and Stones used to divert
itself by comic songs, posting derisive hand-bills, stealing ice-cream
prepared for inaugural banquets, tapping simple-minded classmates and
instructing them to knock on the door at given times, and travestying the
supposed ritual in the manner of the Black Mass. Not more than six years ago
the editor of a sheet called The Harkness Hoot virulently attacked senior
societies in general and Scroll and Key in particular, with the stock
democratic arguments. Quietly Scroll and Key claimed him on Tap Day, secured
his prompt 'acceptance, and left him to abysmal obloquy. Cynics whispered
that his elder brother had gained admittance five years before to a senior
society by similar tactics. Such victories are Pyrrhic. Under President
McCosh Greek letter fraternities had been extirpated from Princeton. But in
the fall of 1877 sixteen sophomores, disgusted with the food at the one
village restaurant, and having just been expelled from Commons for
rough-housing, bought a stove, hired a cook, and in Ivy Hall set up the first
eating club. David M. Massie, a future judge, Blair Lee, later U. S. Senator,
and Henry W. Frost, destined to become a Doctor of Divinity, were its first
officers. The Ivy Club began to invite likable fellows to join them and share
expenses as old members dropped out, and soon was self-perpetuating. Within
five years, largely through the efforts of Pliny Fiske, Arthur H. Scribner,
and Charles A. Munn, it was installed in its own clubhouse. During the next
decade it gained further power from the presence on its Board of Governors of
Junius Spencer Morgan, C. Ledyard Blair, and Horatio Turnbull. The devotion
which Ivy could inspire is best illustrated by George Kerr Edwards, a
graduate of '89, who years later stricken with an incurable disease returned
to Princeton and the Ivy Club to die, bequeathed it his worldly goods,
attended his last Annual Dinner and passed away during Commencement Week.
Among his last acts was the writing of a letter to the Board of Governors
praising "this one devoted spot, this dear old Ivy Club of ours. Thus in this
clumsy fashion may I be allowed to set forth my feelings in regard to
Princeton as a whole and our dear old Club as an integral part of that
glorious whole. Let me be so bold as to urge upon each Ivy man, past,
present, and those to come, to earnestly and continually strive to push
onward and expand our present prestige by word and deed, so that amongst
Princeton men, to say 'I am an Ivy man' shall correspond to the proud
declaration of the ancient Roman, 'I am a Roman citizen."'
Endowed also by Cuylers, Van Rensselaers, Osborns, McCormicks, Winants, and
Brokaws, and numbering among its literary and scholastic lights Henry and
Paul van Dyke, Booth Tarkington, and James Boyd, Ivy continued to
flourish-and inspired later clubs like Cap and Gown, the Colonial, and Tiger
Inn, along Prospect Avenue. A new President of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson,
grew alarmed at their power. In his report to the Trustees in December, 19o6,
he wrote: "It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance in the life of
the undergraduate of the question whether at the end of his Sophomore year he
is going to be taken in to one of the upper-class clubs. His thought is
constantly fixed upon that object throughout the first two years of his
university course with a great intensity and uneasiness whenever he thinks
either of his social standing, his comradeship, or his general social
considerations among his fellows. The clubs do not take in all the members of
the Junior and Senior classes. About one-third are left out in the elections;
and their lot is little less than deplorable. . . . It often happens that men
who fail of election into one of the clubs at the end of the Sophomore year
leave the University and go to some other college or abandon altogether the
idea of completing their university course." Believing that 49 the
side-shows" were swallowing up the circus, and that "any organization which
introduces elements of social exclusiveness constitutes the worst possible
soil for serious intellectual endeavor," the great idealist undertook to make
Princeton safe for democracy. For three turbulent years, ending only in 1910
with his resignation to run for Governor of New Jersey, Wilson fought to
abolish "bicker week," to supplant eatingclubs with quadrangles where rich
and poor, senior and freshman, high and lowly, might live and dine together.
Mingled also in his epic war was a crusade against an isolated graduate
school, and the dominion of wealth represented by a conditional gift Of
$500,000 from a wealthy soap manufacturer, William C. Procter. Social and
financial power was represented in the heart of Princeton by Moses Taylor
Pyne, who from the "Momo" of Wilson's affectionate letters became his suave
but inflexible enemy. A trustee of different mettle was David B. Jones, a
Welshman who had risen to business success in Chicago; ever loyal to Wilson
and the democratic idea he wrote in November, 1907: "If Mr. Pyne thinks it
best to withdraw his support, I shall be very sorry, but I shall be
infinitely more sorry to see the University dominated by the club men of New
York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh." Wealth and aristocracy fought back: Mr.
Procter withdrew his offer, Wilson was excoriated in the New York press, even
Mrs. Wilson as the President's wife was not invited to a place in the
receiving line at a notable reception at the 1910 Commencement. Only Wilson's
translation to public spheres brought the struggle to a close-leaving the Ivy
Club unliquidated and at peace, with Dean West to select appropriate Latin
mottoes to inscribe over its two great fireplaces. But it had been the
fiercest of all struggles between aristos and demos in the American college.
Today Wilson's "Quad System," called the House Plan at Harvard and the
College Plan at Yale, financed by Edward S. Harkness, is more subtly
undermining the old undergraduate gods. That new ones will arise in their
place no realist can doubt.
Snobbery is inseparable from the college campus. Forty years ago before the
decline of Greek and Latin the majority were called by the anointed hoi
polloi; twenty years ago they were "the Great Unwashed)" and during the Jazz
Age "wet smacks." Today they are known as "blackmen," "drips," and
"meat-balls." Always to fraternity men they have been "barbarians" or
"barbs"�as the Hellenes of old regarded the Per-sians, so termed in mockery
of their outlandish gibberish. College fra-ternities in America have
initiated well over 800,000 members, of whom half a million are still living.
They embrace approximately 200 societies, with a total Of 4500 chapters
located at 660 colleges; of these about 1000 are honorary or semi-honorary,
and therefore chiefly intellectual rather than social. Some $30,000,000 are
invested in fraternity and sorority houses and furnishings. The first Greek
letter society was Phi Beta Kappa, founded at William and Mary in 1776 by a
young classlical scholar dissatisfied with the local Society "F. H. C.,"
possibly because it overlooked him. Adopting the motto, long treasured as a
precious secret, of [greek], "philosophy the guide of life," he took its
initial letters Phi Beta Kappa as the name of a society with ritual, grip,
oath of fidelity, and badge. Ambitions of expansion were soon achieved at
Yale and Harvard. In 1831 after the great agitation of the Anti-Masonic
Party, John Quincy Adams and Judge Story gravely debated and finally decided
that Phi Beta Kappa should abandon any pretense to secrecy. This was done
first at Harvard and later at Yale, completely transforming the character of
the society, which soon became the organization of high scholastic honor
which it has since remained.
The real pattern for the American fraternity system was set at Union College
in 1825 by John Hunter and his friends, who established Kappa Alpha;
stimulated by democratic and faculty opposition it prospered, and in
imitation Sigma Phi and Delta Phi arose two years later. In 1832 at Hamilton
College was founded Alpha Delta Phi, whose reputation particularly in the
East has been rather fashionable and literary, though the withering of its
hopes at Harvard and later at Yale has been a heavy blow. Psi Upsilon was
started at Union College in 1833 and has long enjoyed a prosperous history,
though it likewise has witnessed the withdrawal of its eminently rich and
social Yale chapter from national affiliation to become "The Fence"�even as
Delta Kappa Epsilon ("Deke"), begun at New Haven in 1844, and associated with
the hearty life, has shown no great enthusiasm of paternity for its
provincial offspring, while the Harvard chapter has become "The Dickey."
Fraternity men in the older and more snobbish colleges are often a little
proud of not knowing the grip of their order, incline to laugh at its naive
initiations with red devils and phosphorescent skeletons, and pointedly snub
the eager, puppy-like advances of their brethren from Maine and Iowa.
Fraternities which had the misfortune to originate in the Mid-West, such as
Beta Theta Pi at Miami University in Ohio, are still regarded as socially
second-rate in the complacent East. Chi Psi, begotten at Union in 1841, ranks
high in the West but elsewhere has rarely risen to a parity with the earlier
Union College foundations. Socially damned in most universities are
fraternities like Alpha Chi Rho and Alpha Sigma Phi; their members, unable
discreetly to boast that they turned down all the bids of Rush Week, are
hopelessly confirmed in mediocrity. The first sorority was the I. C. Sorosis
at Monmouth College, Illinois, in 1867, which soon took the name Pi Beta Phi;
three years later Kappa Kappa Gamma began upon the same campus. The same year
saw the foundation of Kappa Alpha Theta at a college which is now De Pauw
University, with Delta Gamma following at Oxford, Mississippi, in 1872.
Collegiate fraternalism has its banalities-not the least of these being the
dull and occasionally smutty songs of males, the thinly saccharine lyrics of
females, piously sung between courses at dinner-and its occasional abuses in
the matter of hazing and even more smarting social brutality. Formerly in
some Southern and Western colleges the haste to secure desirable members was
so keen that "preps" were pledged and even initiated before entering the
university, and pledge-pins were even handed out to boys in grammar-grades;
today such behavior is outlawed. Yet one who has lived much in a college town
cannot but feel kindly toward fraternities: on the whole they are a
civilizing influence and a discipline, and their idealism though ingenuous is
not without excellence.[9]
Of the making of clubs there is no end. The curious American blend of
business and social intercourse, of comradeship with an eye to "contacts,"
appears most clearly in those boosters' luncheon clubs formally begun by the
Rotarians in Chicago in 19o5. They attempted to select one representative of
each business, profession, and institution in the city. For some years the
movement languished, gained momentum with the foundation of Kiwanis in 1915
and of the Lions in 1917, and reached its zenith with the post-War
prosperity. The hornets of satire were not far behind, and stung with such
pungence that for several years Elks and Rotarians came to be the most
enthusiastic followers of The American Mercury. Today Mr. Sinclair Lewis
turns his gaze upon shapes of things to come more alarming than Babbitt's
waistline, while Mr. Henry L. Mencken appears to have been stranded, like the
Ark upon Ararat, by the receding tide of the Zeitgeist. Yet the bourgeois
business man we have always with us, even as he seems to have existed in 1781
at Salem, Mass., where the Marquis de Chastellux noted: "Stopped at
Good-hue's inn. There was held in this inn a sort of merchants' club. Two or
three of its members came to see me." Obviously they were greeters. Only last
year the proprietor of an enterprising hotel in the West, an incarnate
Rotarian, informed the writer that he personally attended to the welcoming of
every guest in its 1000 rooms, adding "And, by God, when I greet them they sta
y greeted!"
It is in fact no far cry to the club-like aspect of the American luxury
hotel. As early as 1846 Sir Charles Lyell observed their "tacit recognition
of an aristocracy" in the head-waiter's reservation of certain tables or
rooms for the ton. Under no circumstances could the ordinary commercial
traveller tip his way into the Ladies' Ordinary. In Boston there was the old
Tremont House, later the Revere House, upon which the Prince of Wales set his
approval, and still later the Parker House. New Orleans had its Saint
Charles, St. Louis its Planters Hotel, Denver the Brown Palace Hotel, and
Chicago its Palmer House. All in their day bore the social cachet. In New
York the Astor House in the 1840's was termed by a journalist "that simple
and chaste, though massive establishment which for centuries to come will
serve as a monument to the wealth of its proprietor." Little did he dream of
that later and greater hotel built upon land owned by the same resplendent
family, demolished at length only to rise elsewhere in superior glory, the
Waldorf-Astoriawhich, as the late Oliver Herford blandly observed, finally
"brought exclusiveness to the masses."
pps. 252-288
--[notes]�
1.The old-style gentleman is always adored by servants, who love his charm
and the easy, imperious ways which set him at the antipodes to the middle
classes. They are his born retainers and, like hunting-dogs upon the sound of
a gun, at his voice they feel the age-old stirrings of blood. Lord Randolph
Churchill in an extremely indiscreet speech at Paddington once said: "The
best class and the lowest class in England come together naturally; they like
and esteem each other; they are not greasy hypocrites talking of morality and
frequenting the Sunday School while sanding the sugar. They are united in
England in the bonds of a frank immorality." It is no secret that the late
King George, with all the middle class virtues, roused less vital enthusiasm
among Welsh miners and Manchester mill-hands than his father Edward VII or
his son the abdicated Edward VIII.
2. Lord Bryce in The American Commonwealth, Part VI, chap. cxiii, wrote: "The
nature of a man's occupation, his education, his manners and breeding, his
income, his connections, all come into view in determining whether he is in
this narrow sense of the word 'a gentleman,' almost as they would in England,
though in most parts of the United States personal qualities count for rather
more than in England, and occupation for hardly anything."
3. Mr. W. C. Brownell, who spent most of his leisure at the Century
Association, but actually slept at the Athletic Club for change of air, once
overheard one member there say to another, "Did you know there was a club
down on Forty-third Street that chose its members for intellectual eminence?
Isn't that a hell of a way to run a club?"
4. 0f course coteries of gentlemen continued to meet in private houses, and
these were long more select than most tavern groups, like the celebrated
"Wistar parties" in Philadelphia, or that club of sixteen Bostonians
described by both Chastellux and Brissot in the late eighteenth century.
Meetings were held in members' houses by rotation, with the privilege of
bringing one guest each; election required a unanimous vote. "They assemble
after tea-time, play, converse, read the public papers, and sit down to table
between nine and ten," says Chastellux. A few bottles of Madeira and a round
of songs were the lyric passages in these meetings.
5. Hone's earliest entry regarding the Club is under June 17, 1836: "A new
club is about being established, at the head of which are a number of our
most distinguished citizens, to consist of four hundred members, and to be
similar in its plan and regulations to the great clubs of London, which give
a tone and character to the society of the London metropolis." At the
December meeting he was offered the chairmanship of the committee but
declined. Hone was a perennial joiner, a "clubable man" in Doctor Johnson's
famous phrase; he belonged to the Reading Club with Duers, Hoffmans, Kings,
and Washington Irving, and was a frequent guest of the Kent Club of noted
lawyers, "with oceans of champagne." Although his own antecedents were humble
French-German ones, he was asked to join in 1835 a Knickerbocker Society
which in 1875 was re-christened as the St. Nicholas Society to consolidate
the Dutch aristocracy of Stuyvesants, Rapeljes, Fishes, Costers, and
Schermerhorns. And his friends paid him the rare tribute of forming a Hone
Society in 1838, of twelve gentlemen who met at each other's houses: "A
sumptuary law was enacted confining the dinner to soup, fish, oysters, four
dishes of meat, with a dessert of fruit, ice-cream, and jelly." Religion,
party politics, and gossip were interdicted topics, but Daniel Webster was a
revered guest since he stood for "government founded on cautious legislation
and conservative policy." Upon Hone's death in 1851 it disbanded.
6. The great multiplication of clubs occurred at the close of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth century. Thus in New York alone, as we learn
from Rossiter's Club Men of New York-an annual of club membership begun in
1893�during the eight years of its publication up to 1901, clubs had
increased in number from 119 with 24,000 members (excluding some 32,000
repetitions) to 157, with 38,000 names. The editor ascribes this growth
chiefly to "prosperous conditions," and points out the significant fact that
the majority of club members belong to more than one organization
-foreshadowing the "clubman" of the tabloids. Rossiter's is an extremely
catholic list because of his inclusion of athletic clubs and fraternal groups.
Somewhere between the palmary social club in every community, and the
plebeian athletic club in whose lounge dominoes and pinochle tend to supplant
bridge, lie various strata of relative social exclusiveness. Most cities have
for example a University Club, which requires a college background and modest
social standing; of this order the best and most critical is the University
Club of New York. Several of the larger cities have also their Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, and other college clubs, whose rank is generally secondary.
7. That ominous gaps may sometimes occur in such solid ranks is at least
suggested by early Catalogues of the Porcellian Club, which for many years
give a notable dash beside the name of the Librarian for 1836. Beginning with
the Catalogue Of 1887, after this fifty years' mysterious silence, the names
of Christopher Columbus Holmes and John Francis Tuckerman are supplied.
Another socially acceptable organization is the Hasty Pudding Club founded in
1795 "to cherish the feelings of friendship and patriotism." It is best known
for its theatricals of the lighter sort, and with its miscellaneous functions
includes many members of the Porcellian, Fly, and A. D.
8.The implications of this story were not lost during its greatest currency
fifteen years ago when Harvard College, panicky over the magnetism of the
School of Business Administration, was attempting with supposed subtlety to
limit the quota of Jews. On the authority of a late registrar of Yale, the
Harvard Admissions Board at that time was examining one day the candidacy of
a young man whose aspect was suspiciously Semitic. Among other arch questions
he was asked, "And what language do you speak at home?" "Oh," said the
candidate simply, "we always speak English, but I think I can soon pick up
enough Yiddish to get around in the Harvard Yard."
9. An attempt to found a kind of social register of fraternity men was begun
but abandoned by one Will J. Maxwell from 1898 to 1903. He compiled and
published a series called Fraternity Men or Greek Letter Men of the following
cities and regions: Albany, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Minnesota, New York,
St. Louis, Syracuse, Washington, Rocky Mountain States, Pacific Coast. Ile
standard reference work for American college fraternities is Baird's Manual, b
egun in 1879, now in its 13th edition. Banta's Greek Exchange (1913- is the
chief periodical now serving the pan-Hellenic group.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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