The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (Gender and American Culture)

The Company He Keeps

gender and american culture Coeditors Thadious M. Davis Mary Kelley Editorial Advisory Board Nancy Cott Jane Sherron De Hart John D’Emilio Farrah Griffin Amy Kaplan Linda K. Kerber Annette Kolodny Nell Irvin Painter Janice Radway Barbara Sicherman Emerita Board Members Cathy N. Davidson Sara Evans Wendy Martin A complete list of books published in Gender and American Culture is available at www.uncpress.unc.edu.

The Company He Keeps a history of white college fraternities

Nicholas L. Syrett The University of North Carolina Press

chapel hill

∫ 2009 Nicholas L. Syrett All rights reserved This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. Designed by Kimberly Bryant Set in Monticello and Linotext by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Syrett, Nicholas L. The company he keeps : a history of white college fraternities / Nicholas L. Syrett. p. cm. — (Gender and American culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8078-3253-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8078-5931-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Greek letter societies—United States—History—19th century. 2. Greek letter societies—United States—History—20th century. 3. Male college students— United States—History. 4. Masculinity—United States—History. I. Title. lj31.s97 2009 378.1%98550973—dc22 2008036716 cloth paper

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for my mother, catherine cooper lovett syrett, and in memory of my father, john syrett

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Contents Preface xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Camaraderie and Resistance: The Founding and Function of College Fraternities 13 Chapter 2. The Sacred, the Secular, and the Manly 51 Chapter 3. Very Fraternally Yours: National Brotherhood in the Nineteenth Century 79 Chapter 4. Greeks and Barbs: Social Class and the Rise of the Fraternity in the Postbellum Years 121 Chapter 5. Fussers and Fast Women: Fraternity Men in the 1920s 183 Chapter 6. Democracy, Drinking, and Violence: Post–World War II Fraternities 229 Conclusion 285 Notes 307 Bibliography 373 Index 401

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Illustrations Johannes Otto Waller, Founding of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity, March 9, 1856 26 Kappa Sigma members, Trinity College, 1870s 96 Beta Theta Pi members, University of California, Berkeley, 1889 122 Alpha Tau Omega members, Duke University, early 1900s 127 Theta Delta Chi dramatic troupe, Dartmouth College, 1892 138 Alpha Tau Omega banquet, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1895 155 Kappa Alpha members with Duke University president John Kilgo, 1908 160 Zeta Psi house, University of California, Berkeley, 1880 162 Delta Upsilon members, Amherst College, with janitor Perry Roberts, 1907 166 Kappa Kappa Kappa members in blackface, Dartmouth College, 1916 170 Delta Kappa Epsilon members, Dartmouth College, on holiday in Bermuda, 1930 195 William McKay Patterson dressed for a school play, Dartmouth College, 1924 204 Ralph Garfield Jones dressed for a school play, Dartmouth College, 1924 205 Sigma Delta members, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1926 210 Delta Kappa Epsilon members, Dartmouth College, perusing Kansas beauties, 1930 224 Raymond Cirrotta, 1949 230 Delta Kappa Epsilon members, Dartmouth College, featuring Raymond Cirrotta’s killers, 1948 232 Phi Alpha Psi members, Amherst College, featuring Thomas Gibbs, 1949 249 Stewart S. Howe, 1925 272 Alpha Delta member funneling beer at party, Dartmouth College, 1997 288 Fraternity members ‘‘drinking beer and girl watching,’’ University of California, Berkeley, 1981 299

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Preface I first became interested in college fraternities because I was disturbed by news reports throughout the 1980s and 1990s about fraternities being involved in sexual assaults upon women and occasionally in group acts of racial bigotry and homophobia. I was curious about the origin of such behavior and wondered why it tended to occur at fraternity events. While it is certainly true that not all college fraternities have a history of such involvement, and that college sports teams also were the focus of some of those reports, it is equally true that most college organizations—and many clubs not affiliated with colleges—have no such history at all. Why is it that a number of college fraternities have, in fact, been involved in these widely condemned activities, but other groups have not? And what does this have to do with gender, with men ‘‘acting like’’ men? Is it just an instance of ‘‘boys will be boys,’’ as the refrain goes, or could it be more complicated than that? The pages that follow are my answers to these questions. In contrast to the logic of ‘‘boys will be boys’’—a logic that insists that young men’s actions are somehow beyond their control and removed from the social and cultural circumstances in which they are enacted—this book demonstrates that fraternity men’s behavior is a product of various historical phenomena that are specific to time and place. Fraternity men have not always acted as some of them do now. The version of masculinity that they espouse in the twenty-first century is not the same as that which they promoted and enacted in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when fraternities were founded on college campuses. This book is in part the story of where today’s behavior—today’s masculinity—has come from. In telling that story, it is a rejection of the biological determinism of ‘‘boys will be boys.’’ I have chosen the title The Company He Keeps for a number of reasons. Throughout their history, as readers of this book will see, fraternity men have been fixated on this phrase. They have believed that a man was known by the company he kept; it was (and is) for this reason that they have been so careful about whom they allow to join their brotherhood. They also have believed that a man’s character was shaped by the company he kept. I agree with them on both counts, but my take on the advantages and disadvantages of these propositions is somewhat different from theirs. They saw xi

associational life in a fraternity as a way of enhancing one’s reputation and making lifelong connections, though only as long as the right members were admitted. I agree with them, but in so doing I have also come to see the fraternity as an artificial means for the creation and maintenance of social divisions based primarily on race and class. They saw the betterment of character and the refinement of manners and morals that group living was purported to bring. I see men behaving in ways they would not normally have behaved on their own, doing things not only because of the influence of the company they kept but also in order to ensure that they could continue to keep that company. The phrase encapsulates what fraternity men have seen as the most rewarding and beneficial aspects of fraternal life—brotherhood, camaraderie, social success, and a sort of didactic friendship, all of which I also recognize—with those I see as the most problematic: social snobbery, conformity, peer pressure, and domination. It encompasses both the appeal and the desired outcome for fraternity men and the crux of the problem for me. Using the lens of gender, masculinity in particular, this book documents the effects—for fraternity men and for everyone else on campus—of the company they kept. i do not believe that keeping company with a group of people is of necessity detrimental; far from it. In this respect, I am in fundamental agreement with fraternities’ best intentions: one can be improved by so doing. It thus gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the company I have kept over the years I have spent writing this book. That I have been influenced, bettered, and aided by those I name here is undeniable. That I might be known for keeping company with such an esteemed group of people is an honor. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture was supportive of me and of this project from the beginning. So too were Matthew Countryman, Phil Deloria, and Hannah Rosen. Hannah, in particular, inspired me to explore the nineteenth century in all its complexity, and for that I am grateful. Mary Kelley was and continues to be a great friend and mentor. She has offered advice, criticism, inspiration, and research and publishing leads, always with a smile and much-needed encouragement. One could not ask for someone more enthusiastic or more knowledgeable to have in one’s corner, and for that I am fortunate indeed. I also thank the following professors at Michigan for challenging me to think about gender, sexuality, and history in complex ways: Tomás Alxii

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maguer, David Halperin, Carol Karlsen, Gina Morantz-Sánchez, Adela Pinch, and Sonya O. Rose. In my affiliation with the Women’s Studies Program and the Program in American Culture, I was aided at every turn by Judy Mackey, Bonnie Miller, Nancy Abinojar, and, most of all, Marlene Moore. Marlene saved me time and again, always as if it were effortless. She is the best—period. I was also fortunate to receive funding from a number of different programs and departments while at Michigan: the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Program in American Culture, the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, the Women’s Studies Program, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. I could not have completed the research for this book—at times I would not have known where to begin—without the knowledge and assistance of archivists and other archival staff at the schools and libraries I visited: Ellen Fladger in Special Collections at the Schaffer Library of Union College; Mary Caldera in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale; Tad Bennicoff in the Seeley G. Mudd Library at Princeton; Abby Lester in the Columbiana Archives Collection at Columbia; Malzorgata Myc at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan; John White, Annie Skilton, Fran Kern, Shelley Mascaro, Susan Davies Chen, Matt Turi, and Susan Ballinger of the Southern Historical Collection and University Archives of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (unc); Peter Nelson, Juliet Demeter, and Marion Walker in Special Collections at the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College; and the staffs of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Duke University, the North Carolina Collection at unc, Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection in Butler Library, the Tamiment Collection in New York University’s Bobst Library, the Stanford University Archives, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Denver Public Library, the University of Northern Colorado’s Michener Library, and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. I would also particularly like to acknowledge the assistance of Lisa Renée Kemplin of the Student Life and Culture Archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Tom Harkins of the Duke University Archives, who both gave much of their time to me. Hazen Allen, Sarah Hartwell, Patti Houghton, Barb Krieger, and Joshua Shaw at the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College were wonderful. Sarah was especially generous with her time and her expertise. Her enthusiasm for my project, both during my visit and long afterwards, is most appreciated. preface

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Many other people also helped me out during my research trips. Thanks to Peter Armenia, Sandra Cavalieri, and Ben Poulter in Durham; Bryan Harrelson in Chapel Hill; Babette Faehmel and Heather Murray in Amherst; Brent Armendinger and Erik Gambatese for putting me up in San Francisco; Susan Ackerman, Katie Greenwood, Giavanna Munafo, Peter Saccio, Abby Tassel, and Drew Wilkins at Dartmouth; Hoyt Alverson for the use of the sources from his anthropology class; and particularly Tom Luxon and Ivy Schweitzer for charitably saving me from the horrors of White River Junction’s Super Eight Motel and for loaning me Ivy’s ‘‘fraternity file.’’ Thanks finally to Mary Kelley for putting me in touch with so many of her former Dartmouth colleagues. I have presented portions of this book at a number of conferences. I am grateful to the scholars who commented upon the papers: Mary Kelley, Dana Nelson, Lorri Glover, Daniel Horowitz, John Howard, Cathy Kelly, John Ibson, Bruce Dorsey, Rodney Hessinger, John Quist, Estelle Freedman, and Diana Turk. I also learned much from fellow panelists, especially Colin Johnson, Lucia McMahon, and Margaret Sumner. I am particularly indebted to my fellow historians of college Greek life, whose own scholarship has so enriched the pages that follow: Anthony James, Shira Kohn, and Diana Turk (who also read and commented upon an early draft of the book in its entirety). In writing this book, I received the astute comments and support of a writing group in New York City. While some of the following have probably never met each other, all at one time or another were in the group, all slogged through at least one draft of mine, and all enabled me to write far away from the structure of school: Tamar Barzel, Alisa Braun, Huey Copeland, Holly Dugan, Libby Garland, Suzanne Hudson, Marion Jacobson, Alix Schwartz, Eliza Slavet, Nikki Stanton, Grace Wang, and Margie Weinstein. Many thanks. For comments on drafts I also thank my colleagues in the history department at the University of Northern Colorado as well as my writing group in Greeley. At the University of North Carolina Press, I have been fortunate to work with Sian Hunter, who has not only pushed me in my prose but also has been supportive and refreshingly, frankly, down to earth. Thanks to Beth Lassiter, Nathan McCamic, and Kim Bryant, who have patiently answered my questions and shepherded the manuscript through the production process. And thanks also to Jay Mazzocchi, whose keen eye for detail has done much to improve the clarity of my prose. Two readers for the press imxiv

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proved the book with insightful suggestions. I have also been aided in publishing matters by my friend and former colleague Ilene Kalish. In a society as obsessed with marriage, couplehood, and so-called family values as ours, there are few opportunities to acknowledge the importance of friendship in our lives. It gives me great pleasure, then, to acknowledge my friends, the people who sustain, entertain, support, and distract me on a daily basis. To greater and lesser degrees I have talked about this project with all of them, and in turn they have talked to me about their own work, both in and—thankfully—well beyond the academy. I am grateful to and for all of them. I met a number of people at Michigan who were, and continue to be, supportive colleagues and friends: Brent Armendinger, Tamar Carroll, María Elena Cepeda, Emilio Dirlikov, Andrea Dottolo, Libby Garland, Colin Johnson, Rona Kaufman, Clara Kawanishi, Robin Li, Will Mackintosh, Katrina Mann, Anna Pegler-Gordon, Erin Pipkin, Jess Rigelhaupt, Brendan Sanchez, Nikki Stanton, Grace Wang, and Kelly D. Williams. A number of non-Michiganders have also become academic colleagues and friends; they include Darrin Alfred, Heather Murray, Tim StewartWinter, and Phil Tiemeyer. The friendships I share with Jason Chang, Jim Downs, and Karen Miller could not be more different from each other, and that’s all for the good. I am lucky to know them. I am also fortunate that I attended graduate school with Jennifer Beckham and Dolores Inés Casillas; both have remained good friends since, and for that I am glad. I would not have survived the process of studying for prelims—and all the years since—without Holly Dugan, Erika Gasser, and Country-W(h)ine Nights. In increasingly disparate locations as we go our separate ways, and through liter after liter of pinot grigio and countless tales of southern heartache, their friendship has been a joy. I also thank Holly, who was my roommate in the tenement in Little Italy, for her patience and companionship during the years I wrote the first incarnation of this book. As Holly left for greener pastures, Laura Hymson arrived, and that, too, was a treat. Our trip through the fields to Urbana-Champaign, where we ‘‘took the long way,’’ has rewarded me with a great friend. Since coming to Colorado I have been fortunate to have such supportive and helpful colleagues in the history department at the University of Northern Colorado, Sára Brown, Joan Clinefelter, Marshall Clough, Linda English, Fritz Fischer, Brian Luskey, and Barry Rothaus among them. Three Colorado friends and colleagues in particular have made living here so preface

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much better than I had thought it would be. Thanks to Geoffrey Bateman, Erin L. Jordan, and Ann M. Little (‘‘elj’’ and ‘‘aml,’’ to those in the know) for being so remarkably welcoming, as well as amusing, wonderfully cynical, and fun. I met Jason Rudy just as I was finishing this book; that I did finish it is a wonder, so distracting has he been. A number of others have been friends since college days. Among them: Sandra Cavalieri, Emily Ford, Mauricio Mena, Tom Meyers, Jane Stewart, Malena Watrous, Carl Watson, and Sarah Wheeler (née Foxetta McConnello). Finally, without the following six people I would be a very sad and very different person. And that sad person would never have completed this book. With all six over the past decade and a half (!), I have laughed uproariously; complained endlessly; teased mercilessly; stayed up late and gotten up early; become (more than) tipsy; traveled the world; dined with their families and they with mine—in short, shared my life. In alphabetical order (as is my constant wont), they are: Amanda Ford, Erik Gambatese, Chris Hardin, Ned Kane, Amy LaCour, and Nancy Schwartzman. One could not ask for better friends. I also thank my family—Syretts, Cadigans, Blanchards, and their partners—for their encouragement and support. With my brother, Tim Syrett, I share the best and only fraternity I’ll ever need, and with my new sisterin-law, Angela Brooks, a wonderful quasi-sorority. My mother and father, Katie and John Syrett, have been as unconditionally accepting and supportive as can be. Without a doubt, they are also responsible for my love of reading and learning. As my brother is fond of saying, ‘‘Whether good or bad, nature or nurture, it’s their fault either way.’’ He and I have been fortunate not only that we grew up with them as our parents, but also that we all enjoy each other’s company so much now that we are grown. This book is for them, and because of them. My father died, quite suddenly, about nine months after I wrote the preceding paragraph. Just days after I finished that first of many ‘‘final’’ drafts, he read the whole thing in two days flat, because that’s the kind of father—and historian—he was. I am not sure that I am yet able to gauge what his loss means to me—indeed, sometimes I am not sure how much I have gauged his death at all—but I know he would have been, as he always was, very proud. While he would have scoffed at the proposition that he could have been proud beyond death, it comforts me still to know how he would have felt had he lived. Thus I dedicate this book to the memory—to the life—of my father, John Syrett. xvi

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The Company He Keeps

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Introduction Writing in his diary in 1847, Amherst College student William Gardiner Hammond described one of his fraternity brothers: ‘‘Seelye is a man of no ordinary mold: uniting in greatest abundance the virtues and talents of the head and heart. Not a man in our class is as strong a character as he.’’ In 1892 a brother in Kappa Sigma at the University of Virginia wrote to another about a group of men at Trinity College (later Duke University) that he hoped would be initiated into their fraternity. He described two of them: ‘‘Daniels is the best all-round athlete in the South undoubtedly. He is a Ph.B. from Trinity and is back taking law. He is about 22 years old. Houston is an A.B. from Trinity, is about 21 years old, and is taking a postgraduate course in Political Economy. His family is one of the best in Monroe, N.C., as Daniels’ is in New Bern.’’ In 1924 brothers in Dartmouth College’s Zeta Psi chapter characterized one of their own in the following manner: ‘‘Brother ‘Stan’ Lonsdale has improved the already magnificent reputation he had attained in past years as Lothario and Don Juan put together, and as representative of the chapter in all women’s colleges within a radius of several hundred miles.’’ On the same campus in the year 2000, a pledge in Chi Gamma Epsilon listed the following as important aspects of the biography of an elder fraternity brother: ‘‘He was going out with jane doe for the past month but he just dumped her yesterday. He speaks Izzo. He said ‘weeeeeee’ after he shot his gf ’s pooper hence the name wiegel [nickname of the brother that rhymed with his surname]. . . . [H]is throw up song is hava nagila.’’∞ These passages, all penned by fraternity brothers, depict very different kinds of men. Each of them emphasizes and applauds different characteristics; each is typical of its time. This book examines men like those described and traces the changes that occurred in archetypes of masculinity 1

from the founding of college fraternities in 1825 to the present day. In doing so, it documents three related claims that structure the larger historical arguments herein. The first is that men have gained prestige and respect, especially from other men, by being masculine—or, in nineteenthcentury terminology, by being ‘‘manly.’’ While the elements of what constitutes masculinity or manliness have changed, what remains consistent is that performing masculinity in particular ways establishes men as worthy of respect and emulation, especially by other men. Many factors—class, race, religiosity, sexuality, athleticism, recklessness—contribute to particular versions of masculinity at different times, but the end result is the same: some men are considered more masculine than others, and those men are the ones who gain the most approbation. The second finding is that most American men have been well aware of these standards, and many of them quite consciously have tried their best to meet them. Whether or not they have done so successfully is another matter, one adjudicated by their male peers. The fact remains, however, that men know the standards of their time and are usually aware of their ability to live up to them. The third finding, following from the prior two, is that some men have been made anxious by standards of masculinity. This anxiety has led to overcompensation, to increased efforts to meet the standards by doing whatever it is that comprises masculinity at a given time. Sociologist Erving Goffman described all three of these findings in his 1963 classic, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. While some of the characteristics may have changed, what is important about Goffman’s description is the notion of a standard for masculinity, a standard understood by men in a given time and place. There is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective. . . . Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior; at times he is likely to pass and at times he is likely to find himself being apologetic or aggressive concerning known-about aspects of himself he knows are probably seen as undesirable. While Goffman was probably right that men tend either to conceal aspects of their identity out of shame, apologize for them, or become confronta2

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tional about them, it is also possible that men might try to change themselves and become more acceptably masculine. The Company He Keeps argues exactly that and explores the ways that men in fraternities have done so throughout the history of these organizations.≤ Fraternal masculinity, from 1825 to at least 1970, was regarded by most college students as the preeminent or hegemonic form of masculinity on college campuses, the standard by which all other college men were measured. While there were always those willing to abandon the standards that fraternity men set, such detractors were often regarded by many, and certainly by fraternity men, as being less than fully men. These detractors were different types of people in different eras, but they all differed from fraternity men in terms of their masculinity—some by choice, others by circumstance.≥ In examining fraternal masculinity, and in contrast to much of the recent cultural and social history of men and masculinity, I am less concerned with how men understood or perceived ideals of masculinity and more focused on the ways that men reacted to those ideals.∂ In other words, some men may have been made anxious by standards of masculinity, but what much of the current literature ignores is that they sometimes took steps to remedy that anxiety. In search of respect and prestige, men have performed particular acts, behaved in particular ways, and made particular decisions. In so doing, men in fraternities have structured not only their own lives, but also the lives of many of their fellow students. From the beginning, fraternity brothers have defined their masculinity through the exclusion of other college students. In this exclusion—not just from their own ranks but often from college life more broadly—they affected the outsiders’ lives as well as their own. As masculinity became increasingly defined through active heterosexuality during the twentieth century, many fraternity men used women, often against their will, to bolster their masculinity. While fraternities have influenced the lives of students on campus, the values they inculcated in their members and the standards of behavior they demanded also reached beyond collegiate environs. Fraternity men were sent off into the world with these values, beliefs, and behaviors; because those who joined fraternities were often middle- and upper-class white men bound for careers in business, law, medicine, and politics—positions of prestige and power in the United States—fraternal masculinity has set standards for life beyond the college campus. While at times acknowledging the more inane aspects of fraternities, this book insists upon their significance in U.S. society. They have long introduction

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been one of the most influential forces on the college campus and are worthy of study for this reason alone. The connections and opportunities afforded by membership in a college fraternity have also done much to advance the careers and achievements of countless fraternity men. Further, many who learn certain standards of masculinity in college fraternities go on to rule our country, quite literally: disproportionate numbers of the nation’s senators and congressmen were in fraternities, and the vast majority of presidents since the 1870s have been members.∑ Looked at broadly, fraternities have always been about class status, about the establishment and maintenance of what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘‘social capital.’’ They have been training grounds for the middle and upper class and vehicles for the perpetuation of those classes. By banding together in exclusive classed groups, fraternity men reproduce the very class status that qualified them for membership in the first place. This was most true for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but remains so to a certain degree to this day. Men who are already privileged by dint of their attendance at a college or university are further elevated above their less wealthy peers through fraternity membership. The same can be said for fraternities’ racial makeup. While this is less true today, at least in some regions of the country, many college fraternities have consistently relied upon race and religion—whiteness and Protestantism—as important criteria for membership.∏ Class and race have been, in many respects, the driving force behind the exclusivity of fraternities—and hence structuring elements of fraternal masculinity—but other factors have also been at work, particularly in the twentieth century. Two deserve special mention: the roles of women and of homosexuality. For the bulk of the nineteenth century, most schools with fraternities were masculine strongholds, enrolling men only. Those in fraternities were selected for membership based on issues of class and, toward the end of the century, race and ethnicity. The excluded were the foils for fraternal masculinity: in the earliest days, fraternity men’s poor and pious classmates training for the ministry; later, simply the less wealthy; and toward the end of the century, newly arrived second-generation immigrant classmates. Manliness throughout the nineteenth century was also defined more generally in opposition to boyhood. A man was the opposite of a boy, and fraternity men were often very eager to define themselves as men.π By the end of the nineteenth century, however, as gender roles became somewhat more malleable and women began to assert greater autonomy in public, the definition of manhood shifted. Men embraced a more aggres4

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sive and virile masculinity that took womanhood or femininity as its foil. This shift was in part a reaction to women’s increased demands for equality and an effort to ensure that power remained a masculine prerogative. At least by the 1920s, if not earlier, masculinity had also incorporated heterosexuality as a constitutive element. For most of the nineteenth century, there had been no specter of the effeminate homosexual as a distinct kind of man. By the early twentieth century, however, this had changed, and masculine men were understood to be heterosexual men; they were defined not only in opposition to women but also in comparison to those men who were thought to be like women: homosexuals.∫ As groups of men who lived, ate, slept, and bathed together, men in fraternities attracted suspicion. Could this intimate friendship between young men be a cover for a den of homosexual vice? In some cases, as we shall see, that was indeed the case. That this was not so for the vast majority of fraternities did not lessen the burden under which fraternity men found themselves laboring by the early twentieth century. In order to prove that they were in no way homosexual, they would have to demonstrate their heterosexuality, which they did through dating and sexual conquest. They boasted about both, not only to each other but also to others on campus. Fraternal masculinity became characterized by successful heterosexuality and by popularity among women. Fraternity men began to take these factors into consideration when making decisions about membership. This shift in masculinity to self-consciously valorize heterosexual activity was perhaps the most decisive development in fraternities’ history and would have some of the most profound effects for other college students, particularly women. By the postwar period (and this remains abundantly clear today), fraternity men used and abused women in order to establish themselves as masculine men, gaining prestige and respect from their brothers through exploitative sex with women for whom they publicly demonstrated no affection. The pages that follow elucidate just how fraternity men—among others—came to embrace this practice as an element of their masculinity. Broadly, then, this book argues that ideals of fraternal manliness originated around class status, had begun to encompass whiteness and Protestantism by the turn of the century, and by the post–World War II period were anchored in the performance of an aggressive heterosexuality.Ω a number of caveats are in order; foremost among them is that not all fraternities are as bad as this book makes them out to be. To read this study introduction

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is to take a journey into the seamy underside of fraternity life. To be sure, some fraternities have resisted the most appalling aspects of fraternal masculinity, and, especially in the twentieth century, a number of national fraternities and chapters have done so quite publicly. For instance, in the wake of the racial exclusions of the early twentieth century, some men formed explicitly multicultural fraternities that admitted members regardless of creed, color, or religion.∞≠ Others in the late twentieth century founded openly gay fraternities.∞∞ Today some fraternities vehemently oppose the excessive drinking and sexual exploitation that characterize so many other organizations. But that these organizations style themselves so explicitly as multicultural or gay or anti–binge drinking indicates the degree to which so many others do not. Even if one could determine exactly how many individual men and fraternities have self-consciously developed alternative models for college fraternity life, they would still remain exceptions to the rule. The Company He Keeps focuses on the masculine ideals and standards throughout the history of college fraternities that have been embraced by large segments of the fraternal world. Not everything promoted and celebrated in fraternity life is negative. Fraternities have always offered a way for men to form friendships that often last a lifetime. Fraternities provide a congenial, social way of life for their members. They also are a major source of housing on many campuses, a fact of financial significance for colleges and universities. Fraternity membership also provides graduates with connections that have been of great assistance to them in their careers. Further—and perhaps most important—they provide what fraternity men call ‘‘brotherhood.’’ As someone who never joined a college fraternity, I am perhaps less qualified to speak about the subject of brotherhood, but suffice it to say that many fraternity men attach great sentimental importance to the concept, considering it sacred at times. These themes are not the primary focus of this book, but each will be considered because of what its importance to fraternity men tells us about brothers’ perceptions of themselves and of the purposes of their organizations. It should also be noted that the versions of masculinity discussed in these pages are by no means limited to men in fraternities. In a sense, a history of fraternities is a case study in changes in masculinity that have occurred much more broadly among youth throughout the nation. Fraternities are a unique case, however, because of their insistence upon group loyalty and conformity. Further, from the 1920s onward, the mainstream media has almost always portrayed the most successful collegian as a fra6

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ternity man. Thus, standards of fraternal masculinity have often come to stand in for college culture more generally.∞≤ In focusing upon the masculinity of white men in traditionally white and Protestant college fraternities, this book is not meant to be descriptive of Jewish, Catholic, African American, Asian American, Latino, multicultural, or gay fraternities. While many of these organizations share similarities with white and Protestant fraternities, there are also key differences between them, not least of which is that all of the above-mentioned organizations were formed precisely because the men in them were at least initially excluded from white, straight, Protestant fraternities. That exclusion is part of the story, however, integral to fraternity men’s conceptions of their own masculinity. And while college sororities and coeducational fraternities are discussed in the pages that follow, these organizations, too, are not broadly represented here.∞≥ Critics of Greek life have had varied concerns throughout the almost 200-year history of college fraternities. In their earliest days, ministerial faculties objected to fraternal secrecy as being sacrilegious. Later, college administrators complained about wealthy fraternity men’s drinking and spending habits. Mid-twentieth-century concerns were also related to alcohol, as well as to the antidemocratic nature of fraternities. Contemporary detractors focus upon binge drinking, hazing violence and deaths, and sexual assault. I address all of these problems throughout; the importance of any of them lies in what they can tell us about fraternity men as men, and further, what they have meant for other students on campus who were not fraternity members. Readers can extrapolate from the analysis a moral or commonsense argument about any and all of these activities, but my purpose is not to indict fraternity men for what they do to each other in the name of proving masculinity. This is history, in other words, and not educational policy. The exceptions to this rule are sexual assault and racial, sexual, and heterosexist harassment and bigotry. What fraternity men do among themselves to feel masculine, while often foolhardy, is in most respects their own business. As soon as they enlist others, however unwillingly, in the service of establishing masculinity, they have crossed a line, and for that they come in for censure in the pages that follow. this is a book about the history of gender, about how men in college fraternities have thought about masculinity and how they have acted it out. Much of what we think of as the substance of gender—what makes us masculine and feminine human beings—may seem beyond our control. We introduction

7

walk and talk and act in certain gendered ways that are largely beyond our own personal choices. But this book also insists that there are many ways in which gender is quite self-consciously performed by men and women. In his other classic, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman explored the ways that people manage information about themselves and their behavior in order to create particular impressions of themselves for others. Goffman is helpful to the historian because he allows us to analyze the ways that people in the past made decisions about how they would like to be perceived. In order to be respected, to meet with approbation by their peers, college students have participated in some activities and shunned others, behaved in certain ways and not in others. For instance, the student who joins a certain club, plays a particular sport, or goes on dates with certain women makes the decisions to do these things based upon the influence of the culture around him, taking into account what each of these actions means in that culture.∞∂ These are the obvious examples and, for the historian, the most easy to recover in documents of the past. But they are not the only ways that gender is performed. In different eras, men have been valued for being hearty, courageous, aggressive, or virile. They have sometimes been denigrated for being sickly or meek or subordinate. They have enacted these characteristics in their bodies and appearances and in the quotidian actions that they have performed. Men in fraternities have produced many written descriptions of their fellow men, and while we cannot always know exactly what particular combination of action, behavior, or mannerism prompted the chosen adjectives, we can pay attention to the overall portrayals, especially when some men are lauded and others are scorned. They have much to tell us about what it meant to be a masculine man.∞∑ Not only were some men’s gendered performances noticed by other actors in history who recorded their observations, but these performances were also as malleable then as they are now. So in addition to looking at the clear choices that fraternity men have made, we must also recognize that even in their everyday performances of themselves, they, like all of us, have made choices. In order to be accepted, welcomed, applauded by others, they have chosen to act in ways that win these reactions. This understanding of gender is particularly helpful in this context because it allows for the educational function enacted by elder fraternity men in their attempts to alter the behavior of their newly initiated brothers. The performance of gender is not just imitative but also didactic. 8

introduction

Some group environments—and college fraternities are among them— are particularly well suited to influence the behavior of their members. They are what sociologists call a ‘‘primary group,’’ a group that serves as the principal setting through which people achieve a sense of identity and have that identity affirmed. The most common primary group is the family, but fraternities fulfill the same function. Men in fraternities depend, to varying degrees, upon their brothers for affirmation and for indications about how they should behave and what their values should be. They learn what pleases their fellow members, regulate their own behavior so as to gain praise, and emulate the older brothers whom they esteem. This makes for a conformity among members that has been noted by almost all critics from the very inception of fraternities. The fraternity as primary group, then, produces masculinity not just through insisting upon certain standards but also through the enthusiasm of its members to live up to those standards.∞∏ Perhaps from the beginning of college itself, freshmen have arrived on campus anxious to make friends and be accepted by their peers. Often starting alone at a school full of strangers, they have been desperate to fit in. Because fraternities and sororities have offered a ready-made means to gain both friendship and affirmation—and on many campuses have been easily the most prestigious and visible means of doing so—many new students have been willing to do almost anything to join. One late twentiethcentury fraternity member put it this way: ‘‘I left a high school class of 150 and entered a college class of about 1,500; some universities have classes five or six times that size. For me, as for freshmen elsewhere, the fraternity offered a sense of belonging. It gave me a lunch table to sit at. It gave me a seat in the basketball bleachers surrounded by people I knew. The ten-cent word for that is community, and most of us yearn for it.’’ Once students join, allegiance to their new primary group often means conforming their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs to those of their new brothers. As one psychologist put it in the 1960s, ‘‘The need of the boy or girl for the recognition, respect, and acceptance of others means that such others hold a potentially powerful instrument of reward and punishment over him.’’ This is not to say that those in fraternities are not responsible for their actions, but rather to recognize that one of the reasons that fraternities are such powerful agents of conformity is the youthfulness of the population they enroll. We must also recognize, as psychologists do, that because early adulthood is such a formative period of the life cycle, the behaviors and introduction

9

mores of fraternities exert a powerful influence, not only upon the undergraduate student members but also upon the mature men that they become. It is perhaps for this reason that the masculinity learned by men in fraternities can prove so durable.∞π as a study in the social history of masculinity, this book focuses upon how men in fraternities behaved on a day-to-day basis—on their activities, on their beliefs, and on how they spent their time. It also explores what ‘‘brotherhood’’ meant for men in fraternities and what this can tell us about their conceptions of manliness and masculinity. Further, it examines the ways that fraternity men’s actions affected their fellow students, the ways that fraternal antics and activities structured college life for their peers and, to a certain degree, for those off campus as well. The study proceeds chronologically from 1825 to the post–World War II period; it concludes with a chapter that examines fraternities in the past twenty-five years, during which time sociologists and anthropologists have done much work to document fraternal masculinity. Chapter 1 begins with a description of colleges in the antebellum period, an introduction necessary to understand the function of fraternities during that time. It then examines the founding of fraternities, arguing that fraternities served three prime needs for their members: they brought prestige, they enabled camaraderie, and they provided a means for resisting an authoritarian faculty. Chapter 2 builds upon this analysis by arguing that antebellum fraternity men conceived of themselves as manly in contradistinction to their more pious, poor, and ruleabiding classmates who were bound for careers in the ministry. By enrolling wealthier men who planned on careers in business and the professions, fraternities provided a means for the cultivation of a more secular manhood, a manhood that emphasized refined social graces and camaraderie that would be much more helpful to them upon graduation. Chapter 3 examines the function of national membership for men in fraternities during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon issues of reputation, networking, and alumni organizations, as well as fraternities’ importance in a country in the midst of great economic and social change. National membership was a way for fraternity men to cement their claims, both pragmatically and in terms of reputation, to elite middle- and upperclass manliness. Chapter 4 returns to the college campus and takes up the issue of social class. During the years following the Civil War, fraternities became a means for class reproduction. At the same time, changes in national ideals of masculinity were felt on college campuses, where football 10

introduction

and other sports now reigned supreme and academic performance declined in respectability. Further, by the early twentieth century, as recent immigrants began to attend colleges and universities, fraternities reacted to the perceived threat to their hegemony by enacting rigid codes of exclusion. This was the moment in which fraternities explicitly colored themselves white. In some ways, as chapter 5 demonstrates, very little changed during the 1920s. In other ways, the college campus became a different world. While fraternity men remained the same in many respects, this chapter also demonstrates that the addition of women to college campuses, in this first era of mass education, had a huge impact on fraternity life. Now forced to interact with women as equals in classrooms and elsewhere on campus, fraternity men recalibrated their standards for masculinity to incorporate success in the realm of dating and sex as constitutive elements. Chapter 6 examines a number of interconnected issues in relation to fraternity men’s behavior: sexual liberalism, social conservatism, drinking, violence, and racial integration. By the end of this period, fraternity men were conservative, rule-abiding men by day and hard-drinking womanizers by night. The racial boundaries of fraternal masculinity may have been permeable, but only because the gendered divides had been shored up so completely. Finally, the conclusion examines the extensive reporting on college fraternities in the past twenty-five years, examining media accounts and studies by sociologists and anthropologists. The primary focus is on the issue of sexual assault and rape. This chapter ties together the elements already examined to demonstrate the ways that fraternal masculinity has changed in many respects yet has consistently been able to reproduce itself as a significant force on nearly every college campus.

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Chapter One camaraderie and resistance The Founding and Function of College Fraternities

On November 25, 1825, five members of the senior class at Union College in Schenectady, New York, met to form a secret society. All five had been members of an organized military company at Union that had recently been dissolved; feeling what was described by one as ‘‘an aching void’’ left by the company’s dissolution, they decided to form a society for literary and social purposes. These five students met again the next day. This time, they conducted a formal initiation, named their organization the Kappa Alpha Society, and, having adjourned their meeting, proceeded into town for a dinner at Knight’s boardinghouse. By the middle of December, they had initiated another eight members.∞ So begins the history of college fraternities in the United States.≤ Within two years, other students at Union had organized themselves into two other societies, Sigma Phi and Delta Phi. From there, the societies began to spread to other colleges. Sigma Phi led the way, establishing a sister chapter at Hamilton College in 1831. In 1832 Alpha Delta Phi (〈q⌽) became the first society to be founded outside of Union, also at Hamilton. The following year, 〈q⌽ established the first chapter west of the Alleghenies at Miami University of Ohio. By the 1850s, secret societies with Greek letter names had a firm footing on virtually every college campus in New England and the mid-Atlantic region, as well as some in the South and the Midwest.≥ 13

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, fraternities became an important part of college life for many students. The popularity of college fraternities sheds light on larger issues related to the place of colleges and college students in the United States during the same period, particularly the reaction of college men to the country’s changing economy and the roles that they might play in it. Fraternities help to illuminate the contested function of college during a time when faculties continued to train students as if they might all become ministers—colleges’ traditional function—while some students began to insist upon an education that would better prepare them for other careers. Arguments over the function of higher education and fraternities’ place within colleges were also intimately connected to what it meant to be a man. Fraternities fulfilled a number of needs for the men who joined them. First and foremost, they allowed a form of resistance to the control of an overbearing college faculty. At a time in their lives when, by contemporaneous standards, college students were neither boys nor fully men and yet were often treated as the former by their instructors, ‘‘secret societies’’— and the term was often used interchangeably with ‘‘fraternities’’ during this period—allowed their members to assert an independence and autonomy that was rarely available to them otherwise. This independence was one of the ways that fraternity members sought to demonstrate their manliness. Fraternity activities also acted as a break from the monotony of college life, most days of which were filled with prayer, recitation, and study. Fraternities were a means to combat the dreary, Spartan conditions of college living. By joining together to take meals and eventually to live together, fraternity men sought to provide themselves with a more comfortable life. Fraternities, with their insistence upon brotherhood and familial ties, also provided a way for young men to make the transition to a collegiate world that was sometimes far from home and often foreign and unwelcoming. They provided companionship and an effective substitute for the family that most college students had left behind. These functions were relatively benign; the ways that fraternities chose the men who would have access to the benefits of brotherhood, however, were more wrapped up with concerns of class status than simply with camaraderie and congeniality. Students bound for the professions (medicine or law, for instance) or finance and business were increasingly conscious of the competitive world they would be entering upon graduation. Fraternities offered them a way of securing a network of friends who would vow loyalty to the death. While a man might be uncertain not only of his future but also of his place among 14

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peers, fraternities created a group of ‘‘brothers’’ who would vow to protect, honor, and be loyal to him. This need, too, is symptomatic of a time when the U.S. market economy had come to value the labor of individuals and the cult of the self-made man. This led to increasing competition between individuals, a competition that could be quite daunting. Fraternities were founded at the same time that available land in New England was dwindling. Fathers who normally would have passed on their land to their sons were often unable to do so (at least not all of them); they were also increasingly unable to provide their sons with the social networks that would help them succeed in the mercantile economy. Fraternities and the brotherhood they offered provided these social ties and helped allay anxiety brought about by an uncertain future.∂ the earliest american colleges were founded in seventeenthcentury New England to educate men for the ministry. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, increasing numbers of nonministerial students, particularly young men from wealthy families, had also begun to attend these colleges. These students were often quite young, many entering as young as ten years old and most graduating well before their twentieth birthdays. By 1820 there were still only twenty-three colleges in operation, although by 1860 that number had risen to 217, with campuses throughout the country. From the 1810s through the 1840s, students in U.S. colleges could loosely be divided into three different groups: poor students who were there to become ministers and teachers (and occasionally other professionals); wealthier students who planned on entering business and the professions or were being educated because it suited their station as gentlemen (southern schools were filled almost exclusively with this group); and students who belonged to that most nebulous of groups in between, the middle class.∑ Colleges were small. During the 1820s there were only 4,647 men enrolled in liberal arts colleges, or approximately 0.78 percent of the entire population of white men aged fifteen to twenty. The number rose to 16,600 by 1860, which represented 1.18 percent of eligible men. The percentage of young men who chose to enter college thus almost doubled between 1800 and 1860, and the absolute numbers had increased almost fourfold. While the population of the country was certainly growing, and growth in college enrollment was proportionally higher than the population growth, no college numbered more than a few hundred students at any one time. Many were considerably smaller than this. Classes grew and waned depending camaraderie and resistance

15

on the fortunes of the college, its students, and the area in which it was located, with more established colleges maintaining steadier enrollments than the newer country colleges. Yale’s class of 1821, for instance, was reduced by 30 percent after the first year when many students were either expelled or forced to withdraw, often because they could not pay their expenses. In 1846, when William Gardiner Hammond entered Amherst College—a school typical of the smaller New England country colleges— there were thirty-six men in his class and only 120 in the school as a whole. The next year, thanks to a particularly large entering freshman class, the total enrollment jumped to 150, and the faculty numbered eight—including the president, five professors (two on leave), and two tutors. In 1840 only eight schools in the Northeast could claim that they had as many as eight professors, and the University of Virginia was the only school outside of the region that could match them.∏ To grasp the appeal of fraternities, one must appreciate the regimentation of college life. Much of a student’s day was accounted for by a precise schedule dictated by the faculty when students entered college. Students rose at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. for morning prayers. They attended recitations, during which they were expected to do just that: recite from memory the Greek or Latin they had memorized under the instruction of their tutors. They dined together, either in college commons (particularly in the early nineteenth century) or in boardinghouses in town, where they paid for their meals. At many colleges, students were expected to be in their rooms by 9:00 p.m. and have their lights out by 10:00 p.m., following attendance at evening prayers. Students had time during the early evening or late afternoon to exercise, study, visit each other, and attend meetings of the clubs and societies to which they belonged. They also attended evening chapel services, as well as a public worship on Sundays.π The curriculum itself was, for most students, dry and boring. As one scholar of the period has described it, ‘‘By no educational criteria derived from any time, place, or philosophy, can the early 19th century American college curriculum as actually taught be made to look attractive. It consisted solely of a drill in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, with a cursory view of science and some moral philosophy and belles lettres as the capstone. The students disliked the curriculum and pursued their studies only grudgingly.’’ Students were quizzed by their tutors a number of times a day for their first three years, and usually the college president assumed teaching duties for the final year of study. Because the curriculum was not fully adequate in preparing students, all colleges also had student-run literary 16

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societies, usually two in number, to which all students were eligible for membership. Almost all students joined, dividing the school evenly into two competing organizations.∫ Most students believed that these societies suited their educational needs much better than college class work. The students staged weekly debates and maintained extensive libraries that often rivaled—or, when added together, usually surpassed—the holdings of the college libraries. These society libraries also contained considerably more fiction than the institutional libraries, a guilty pleasure for many students. Though called literary societies, they were much more than that. While they encouraged reading, they also prepared students in oratory and the forensic arts, they required written assignments, and they provided a more practical education than that given by the classical curriculum. It was within the literary societies that many students felt they learned and grew the most. At the close of each school year, literary societies at most colleges elected their best members to deliver poems or orations and engage in debates with the rival society; these were coveted honors and were staged before an audience of students, faculty, parents, and townspeople at the year’s Junior Exhibition. Offices in the literary societies were also highly sought after, and competition within them for these honors was often fierce. Not only did the faculties know and approve of these societies, but they sometimes also mandated that students join one or the other. Competition for entering freshmen to join a particular literary society was often stiff. These freshmen were often met on carriages and in stations by society members before they had even arrived at college. Ezekiel Porter Belden described this ritual at Yale in the 1840s, where entering freshmen were doted upon by upperclassmen until they had made their choice between literary societies: ‘‘The candidate for admission to College has hardly reached the city, ere he is saluted by his would be brethren; he is escorted to the Colleges, introduced to the committee of examiners; the old order of things reversed, he is now served by the Sophomores, attended not infrequently by the Juniors, and even benignantly patronized by the Seniors.’’ The members of the rival literary society then repeated this process until the freshman had made up his mind. By midcentury, competition for new members at many schools had grown so fierce that the faculty was apportioning the entering freshmen equally between the two societies, usually based on placement in the alphabet.Ω This spirit of competition set the stage for the rivalry that would develop between fraternity men and nonfraternity men as well as among the camaraderie and resistance

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various fraternities on a college campus. The primary rivalries on campus during the second quarter of the nineteenth century were between college classes and between rival literary societies, though toward the end of this period these would be eclipsed by fraternity rivalries. Class feeling and solidarity was particularly high, in part because one attended every recitation and lecture throughout the entire four years with one’s classmates.∞≠ One’s best friends were almost always in the same class, and there were often various class societies that in many ways resembled fraternities, composed strictly of members of a single class. These were particularly popular at Yale (Skull and Bones, a senior society, being the most famous), but most schools had at least one senior society that was reserved for the most popular students. Students in the lower classes showed their deference to seniors in numerous symbolic and concrete ways. Freshmen, for instance, often were made to wear hats. They were also required to avert their eyes and step off the path if an upperclassman approached. At times underclassmen could be marshaled into acting as pseudoservants for seniors, a practice called ‘‘fagging.’’ In all ways, students were reminded of their place as members of a class in a strict hierarchy that permitted no exceptions. In his 1856 Collection of College Words and Customs, a compendium culled from colleges across the nation, Benjamin Hall dedicated a full fifteen pages to definitions of various functions related to class (including ‘‘class marshals,’’ ‘‘classmates,’’ and ‘‘class book’’), as well as sixteen pages to adjectival variations on the ‘‘freshman’’ and his duties. Early nineteenth-century students were well aware of their place in the college hierarchy and partook of a painstaking lexicon to make sure that their inferiors also knew their place. As one contemporaneous commentator noted, ‘‘What airs will a young man sometimes assume, when he first becomes a collegian. And when he reaches the dignified rank of a sophomore, how does his whole carriage denote the still higher estimate he forms of himself.’’∞∞ The fiercest rivalry, in terms of classes, was traditionally between the freshmen and sophomores. This commenced at the beginning of each school year with a terrifying campaign of hazing visited by the sophomores upon the freshmen, a practice descended from sets of ‘‘Freshman Laws’’ that had been in place at many colleges from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, whereby sophomores ‘‘tutored’’ freshmen in the manners of college life. Strategies varied from school to school, but many were common enough throughout New England to be repeated in the historical record. These included jeering and teasing, removal of possessions from a freshman’s room to the center of campus, and ‘‘smoking out’’ (a 18

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process whereby smoke was blown into a room whose keyhole and windows were closed, forcing the student within to exit). Freshmen were kidnapped, stripped, carried off on trips, painted, shorn of their hair, tarred, feathered, bound, gagged, and left in cemeteries. While only a minority of sophomores probably participated in these activities, they occurred regularly every year; those freshmen who had been punished the year before often exacted a misplaced revenge on the next year’s newly arrived freshmen. The purpose, at least as elaborated by those doing the hazing, was to remind freshmen of their place in the hierarchy of the college.∞≤ In addition to these somewhat random acts of hazing, students also enacted a more formal class rush that was again staged between the freshmen and sophomores. At Harvard it took the form of a football match on the main field between freshmen and sophomores. At some schools it was a series of wrestling matches between representatives of both classes. At others, food fights were a regular occurrence between the two classes. All of this emphasis upon the differences between college classes meant that students often assumed an inordinate pride in their class and came to see it as having an identity distinct from other classes in college. One’s accomplishments were credited as a boon to one’s class and became representative of college class distinction.∞≥ While rivalries existed between various college factions, most students, save those who were particularly studious or pious, considered themselves at odds with the faculty and tutors. Tutors were men who had recently graduated from college (almost always the same college at which they then taught) and were in charge of students’ daily recitations, at least until the junior year. Usually no more than a year or two older than their pupils and often younger than some of the older students, tutors had been favorites of the faculty—a fact that was enough to make most students distrust them. The additional problem was that students were expected to pay deference to men who had only recently quit the seats that the students were now occupying. Not only charged with teaching the students but also with disciplining them, tutors sought both to maintain order and garner popularity with men who were closer to being their peers than their subordinates. John Mitchell of Yale’s class of 1821 elaborated: Their relation to their pupils is a brief one; their superiority to them is equally temporary; in a little while they will mingle with them in the world, and as competitors, perhaps, will find themselves inferior. He who today sees his pupil standing modestly in his presence, receiving camaraderie and resistance

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instruction or reproof from him, may to-morrow meet him as a man whose genius and reputation place him far above him. The tutor, therefore, though he may and ought to be independent, has reason both as an officer and as a man to be not indifferent to popularity.∞∂ If tutors were seen as enemies by many nineteenth-century college students, they were also regarded as pliable enemies—certainly more so than the faculty, who were much more aloof than tutors and sometimes had even less to do with students outside of the classroom, save as disciplinarians.∞∑ Most professors in antebellum colleges were still ministers, as all the colleges had been founded to educate men for the clergy. While many of them continued to insist that colleges were designed to school men who would become ministers—despite the fact that increasing numbers of students did not plan on such a career—the antebellum college curriculum was meant to educate a man but not to be vocational in any particular way.∞∏ Professors were responsible for lectures as well as for recitations as students advanced through their college careers. The faculty was also responsible for the awarding of much-coveted college honors, such as the valedictory and salutatory addresses that, in addition to the orations and poems that were decided by the literary societies and delivered at Junior Exhibitions, marked the height of success in one’s college career. Antebellum students elaborated a strict code for governing their interactions with professors and tutors, a code generated as a response to the antipathy they felt for many of their professors. Throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century, students approved of doing well in college, but many considered it unseemly to work too hard for their grades. Ample evidence exists to demonstrate that a fine academic showing was highly prized by college men during this time (the sought-after college honors being the most obvious indication); however, students were expected to attain good standing without sacrificing their entire lives to study, without demonstrating any particular desire for academic recognition, and without, above all else, appealing in any way to tutors or faculty for assistance or special recognition or treatment. While cheating certainly existed at colleges during this period, the evidence suggests that a man was more respected by his peers if he did well in his courses without the appearance of trying to do well, and if he did so honestly. To report one’s peers for cheating was seen as the height of treachery, indicating that cheating was certainly accepted by many. Achieving good grades by this method was not, however, the most honorable route to success. That lay in 20

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an honest earning of grades but through a minimum amount of effort and relying upon what was perceived as a natural talent.∞π Students had an elaborate vocabulary to describe those who were particularly friendly with their professors and tutors, as well as those who were too obvious in their studying. To spend too much time asking faculty or tutors for assistance was called ‘‘fishing,’’ and a number of variants on the theme were used to keep students in line. Students were called ‘‘fishers,’’ ‘‘fishermen,’’ and, at Harvard, ‘‘piscatorians.’’ One could also be called a ‘‘bootlick’’ or a ‘‘toady.’’ To snitch or ‘‘peach’’ on one’s peers garnered one the epithet ‘‘blue-light’’ at Middlebury or a ‘‘Blue’’ or ‘‘Blue Skin’’ elsewhere.∞∫ Students who spent too much time on their studies were known variously as ‘‘digs,’’ ‘‘grubs,’’ ‘‘grinds,’’ or, at Princeton and Union, ‘‘polers,’’ according to Benjamin Hall. At the same time, however, Hall noted that at Union College and surely at other schools, a merit roll was posted every year, ranking students from first to last in terms of marks. ‘‘To be at the head, or ‘to head the roll,’ is an object of ambition, while ‘to foot the roll’ is anything but desirable,’’ he noted. The distinction between those who worked too hard and those who were simply intelligent is perhaps best illustrated in this excerpt from James B. Henry and Christian H. Scharff ’s account of Princeton life in the 1850s. A hard poler is one who sticks very closely to his books, and hardly allows himself any recreation. He always needs much time to poll out a lesson, for he cannot study quickly. A hard poler is the opposite of a smart fellow. This sort of being does everything in an amazingly short time. Five minutes before recitation, he will look at the lesson, and being called upon to recite, will make as big a tare, as the hardest poler in the Class. A smart fellow does not pole much. Hence some are led to believe that the Converse is also true, viz: that one who does not pole is by rights a smart fellow. Were such the case, we would have crowds of smart men at College. Students were thus in something of a bind. To be intelligent and to be recognized as such by the faculty, whose job it was to evaluate such things, was seen as an honor; to purposefully seek out such recognition, especially by currying favor with tutors or faculty, or to utterly devote oneself to one’s studies, was deeply problematic for students at the time. It becomes clear then, when taking these distinctions into consideration, that college students valued intelligence as one of the elements of a properly enacted camaraderie and resistance

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manliness, but they believed that it should be an intelligence that came naturally, or, at the very least, one that was cultivated in privacy.∞Ω A good deal of this distrust of the faculty and suspicion of students who were too friendly with them can be explained through the tumultuous relations that had existed between faculty and students since the seventeenth century, which had to do not so much with grades and academic achievement as with discipline and authority. When colleges were founded, their students were often quite young. The colleges were run like boarding schools, with all of the students’ activities planned and supervised. They needed special permission to do almost anything that was out of the ordinary. Over the course of the eighteenth century, students had been growing older. Some had also been growing wealthier. As young gentlemen of no little money and privilege, the college students of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (excepting the poor and pious students who would begin to enter colleges in the early nineteenth century) were used to having their way at home. This was especially true of southerners at school both in their native South and in the North. When they arrived at college, they encountered a faculty made up of clergymen out of touch with their needs and backgrounds. Students often revolted, and they did so violently. Not one of the New England colleges was without some form of revolt between 1776 and 1860. This revolt ranged from the mild—boots were scraped in chapel as a form of protest, professors were drowned out by loud brass instruments—to the extreme—tutors were killed, buildings were bombed and lit on fire, and faculty members were stoned. Students in the South, accustomed to even greater wealth and privilege than their northern counterparts and having grown up on plantations with slaves to do their bidding, were often worse. Scholars agree that the problem was that faculties were attempting to regulate a changing student population with outdated forms of discipline. As the students themselves changed, so too did the ways that they were accustomed to living and being treated. Faculties during this period continued to insist that the student body obey an antiquated set of rules predicated on the notion that they were still children. Wealthy students revolted because they were unaccustomed to being told what to do. Poorer students, who were often older than their classmates and had lived independently as schoolteachers for a number of years before enrolling, revolted because they, too, were not used to being regulated and treated as if they were less than grown men.≤≠ Conduct manuals of the time designed for students, often written by 22

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clergymen or faculty (sometimes one and the same), urged their readers to obey the teachers at their schools even when the rules seemed arbitrary and severe. They explained that the rules had been established for their good and were administered by those who knew better. John Todd’s 1835 Student’s Manual beseeched students to avoid rebellions, claiming that in questions of discipline, the faculty was always right. Similarly, William Cogswell’s Letters to Young Men Preparing for the Christian Ministry explained to students: ‘‘You are bound to comply with all the requisitions they make, unless contrary to the laws of God, or your own personal interest. You, especially, bring yourselves under this obligation when you sign the rules of matriculation; if you sign none the obligation is implied. Whenever therefore, you enter an institution, you bind yourselves sacredly to observe all its laws and regulations. And so long as you remain there, duty requires that you should do it.’’ In Letters to a Young Gentleman Commencing His Education, Noah Webster concurred. These conduct manuals, directed toward both the ‘‘young gentleman’’ of Webster’s title and the ‘‘young men preparing for the Christian ministry’’ of Cogswell’s, were concerned with order on the college campus and were trying to muster support for a system of government that was being questioned by the pious and the secular student alike.≤∞ Whoever the participants in the riots, by the 1820s most colleges were home to an atmosphere that pitted students against faculty and a student culture that punished any students who became too friendly with the ‘‘enemy.’’ At this time, colleges increasingly began to rely upon parental involvement in matters of discipline to keep their students in line. They did this by beginning to send students’ grades home to their parents, as well as by keeping parents informed of their sons’ infractions of college rules. Increasingly, students were also allowed more autonomy in their day-today lives. This trend toward laxity in rules was primarily in response to the increasing heterogeneity in the student population; poor students and rich students, young students and old, simply could not be made to live in the same ways. As colleges began to recognize the varied ways that students survived—different living and boarding arrangements, different schedules for students who had to earn their way through school—they loosened the rules that governed all students as if they were the same. As a consequence, the most extreme forms of violence against faculties also waned.≤≤ The period between 1820 and 1860 was thus one of transition in the disciplining of college students: some faculties continued to insist on outcamaraderie and resistance

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dated rules of conduct and some students revolted against these standards. In the process, faculties dropped or adjusted the rules to allow for more student autonomy. But they still retained many rules. An understanding of the rules and regulations that governed college life makes the appeal of fraternities more obvious. Fraternities, by deliberately flouting the college rules that banned them, were one of the means by which students asserted their independence. All students signed what was called an acknowledgment when they entered college, which served to remind them of the rules and make them aware of the punishments for breaking them. Among other rules and regulations, they promised, on their faith and honor, ‘‘to avoid profane language, gaming, and all other disorderly behavior,’’ including drinking or introducing drink to others. The form of punishments at colleges before the Civil War was fairly standard. A mild infraction brought an admonition, meaning that a student lost his place in the ranking of scholarship among his peers. If this did not bring about the desired results, a letter was sent home; the hope was that a young man’s parents might be able to make him understand the severity of his actions if the faculty could not. In further order of severity: a suspended student was sent home for a time; a so-called rusticated student was punished by being sent into the country alone; and an expelled student had his connection with the college terminated completely.≤≥ College faculty meted out these punishments for a number of infractions, which included cheating, disorderly conduct, contempt of authority, bad grades, hazing of freshmen, and disturbing others through rowdiness or noisiness. All of these were common infractions cited throughout the College of New Jersey’s faculty minutes during the 1840s and 1850s. For instance, on June 26, 1846, ‘‘Richard Sansom of the Sophomore Class was directed to leave college on the ground that the faculty were convinced that his influence was hurtful.’’ On June 13, 1853, ‘‘Thomas C. Patrick was directed to return home for being intoxicated.’’ Citations like these were standard at colleges in the first half of the nineteenth century. The offenses ranged from the serious—like refusal to attend classes or assaulting a faculty member—to those behaviors that college students increasingly felt they should be able to do if they so chose, like going into town, skipping recitation, or partaking of a draft of ale or a glass of wine. The wars between faculty and students usually resulted from conflicts over these latter behaviors, with groups of students often rallying around their peers to protest a punishment they felt was unwarranted.≤∂ 24

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The Founding of College Fraternities It was within this environment of punishment and resistance that students established college fraternities in the nineteenth century. In his history of white, northern, middle-class men, E. Anthony Rotundo explains that young men had been forming clubs as part of play from early childhood. These clubs were often devoted to activities revolving around the natural world and athletics of a not particularly organized variety. The clubs often had secret passwords and handshakes (which they called ‘‘grips’’), were founded upon the exclusion of at least some members of a peer group, and often provoked fierce rivalries. Part of the appeal of such clubs was also that they were not open to the prying eyes of adults, who might seek to regulate the behavior of the boys involved; they were a means for boys to establish some measure of control over their lives, or so they seemed. Loyalty to these clubs and fellow members was of immense importance, not only in the face of competition from peers but also as a defense against the adults who might inflict punishment should they discover the activities of the clubs.≤∑ Young men brought these patterns of club forming and competition with them when they entered college, but they adapted them to the new setting. In the years before the founding of college fraternities in 1825, college men had formed a number of other societies, many of them with Greek-letter names; they all either died out or became honor societies. Their purposes were often similar to those of the fraternities that would follow them in 1825. These societies took Greek letters for their names because they were all composed of students who spent the majority of their time studying Greek—students who believed that as ‘‘adopted sons’’ of their alma mater, calling themselves by Greek names lent a certain prestige to their endeavors. As historian Caroline Winterer has demonstrated, it was during the antebellum period that Greece eclipsed Rome as the model for a virtuous citizenry in the American imagination and at colleges particularly. To be Greek was to hearken back to the ancients, to the ideals of the founding of Western civilization; it was also to subscribe to notions of self-improvement through literature and oratory. Because members of these societies also thought of themselves as establishing small democratic societies for the debate of philosophy and literature, the Greeks seemed a logical choice upon which to model themselves. These societies offered fellowship and camaraderie to their members; they also offered a way for members to distinguish themselves from nonmembers—the membership camaraderie and resistance

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Johannes Otto Waller, Founding of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity, March 9, 1856, 1931. Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. (Reproduced by permission of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity)

itself seen as proof of some sort of elevated status. As we have already seen in the example of literary societies, and as David Shields has demonstrated in his history of literacy and civility through the eighteenth century, many white men were accustomed to belonging to societies. The secret societies founded in the first half of the nineteenth century (those that died out and, increasingly, the college fraternities that remained) were modeled, to a certain degree, on these literary societies. They were, however, smaller and more exclusive. They were also secret. It was their size, their exclusivity, and their secrecy that would make them increasingly more popular than the literary societies.≤∏ After 1825 and the founding at Union College of the Kappa Alpha Society—the first Greek-letter fraternity to survive and maintain the character of a social fraternity—fraternities spread across New England and into the Midwest and South. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, twenty-two different fraternities had 299 chapters at seventy-one colleges in a total of twenty-five states. Fraternities were here to stay.≤π After their initial founding, fraternities often spread to other colleges by 26 camaraderie and resistance

word of mouth. A number of students at Williams College are rumored to have gone to Union to obtain a charter for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and instead come back ‘‘swinging Kappa Alpha keys.’’ A young man who transferred colleges sometimes founded a chapter of the fraternity to which he had belonged at his former school. At times students learned of fraternities from their friends or relatives when they returned home for winter or summer vacations and asked those friends to recommend them for a charter. This was the case in 1858, when one Chi Psi brother recommended a number of acquaintances at South Carolina College for a chapter of the Chi Psi Fraternity: ‘‘Bro. Richmond visited the college when he was in Columbia on his way to Furman University—he says that he is personally acquainted with some of the Petitioners, and would not hesitate to recommend them to our Fraternity, as young men worthy to become members of the Chi Psi Brotherhood.’’ Not all petitioners were so fortunate. In 1857 R. C. Swain wrote from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to his cousin Jimmie Bryan at Princeton. Swain and his friends had been rejected a charter of Sigma Phi (Bryan’s fraternity), and Swain wrote for advice: ‘‘We are now anxious to get some good society and if you think it possible for us to get one from Princeton I will be much obliged to you if you will give me the names of your clubs and the names of one member of each Club. Do not let anyone find out that we have been refused by your society. . . . We want very much to establish ourselves at Chapel Hill in some Fraternity as soon as possible.’’≤∫ During this early period of fraternity growth, when students were excluded from one fraternity or another for whatever set of reasons, they often simply founded a new one, which in turn would spread to other colleges. John Reily Knox, a student at Miami University of Ohio, explained that he was inspired by the workings of the Alpha Delta Phi chapter at Miami and wanted to establish a similar organization but without what he considered to be its more ‘‘objectionable features’’ (though he did not elaborate on what those were). He looked through a Greek lexicon until he settled upon a name, discussed badge designs with a friend, and worked up a draft of a constitution with a fellow founder. Beta Theta Pi was thus born in 1839.≤Ω Fraternities and Their Purposes When nineteenth-century college students founded or joined fraternities, they usually claimed that they did so for two primary reasons: literary/ camaraderie and resistance

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intellectual pursuits or camaraderie/brotherhood. In this respect, fraternities were not unlike almost all other organizations on early nineteenthcentury college campuses. The primary distinctions between them and other organizations were that fraternities were self-consciously connected to similar organizations at other colleges (the focus of chapter 3), they were secret, and they were exclusive. It was these three characteristics that made them so appealing to the men who belonged. Their focus on literary activities is no great surprise, since fraternity members modeled their groups on the literary societies that flourished on college campuses. If young college students were to gather together in a select group, they believed—at least in the early years—that the group had to have an educational purpose. Constitutions of most fraternities laid out such purposes, and literary pursuits were almost always among them. The constitution of Delta Kappa Epsilon (q⌲⌭) explained that ‘‘the objects of the organization are the cultivation of general literature, the advancement and encouragement of intellectual excellence, the promotion of honorable friendships, and the union of stout hearts and kindred interests to secure merit its due reward.’’ Alpha Delta Phi’s constitution mandated that each member would exhibit three essays per year. And the constitution of Beta Theta Pi also dictated that a member would deliver an essay at each of their meetings.≥≠ While historians of education have often dismissed the claims to literary activities of the early fraternities, most have not actually explored the minutes of the meetings; instead, they usually evaluate fraternity activities based on their behavior in the later nineteenth century.≥∞ Fraternity men, however, like their peers on campus, considered oratorical skill to be one of the prerequisites for manliness, and they attempted to demonstrate this through their activities. Fraternity records as well as diaries and letters of the students who joined them make clear that antebellum fraternities conducted literary exercises on a regular basis. William Hammond recounted the following of his days in the Psi Upsilon Fraternity at 1840s Amherst College: ‘‘Psi Upsilon meeting in the evening. Gay read a piece which was severely criticized; Seelye another. We commenced extempore speaking tonight, and had some great fun.’’ At another meeting he read an essay entitled the ‘‘Cultivation of Social Feelings,’’ and at yet another they discussed The Tempest. At their second meeting, Yale’s Psi Upsilon chapter decided to debate ‘‘the character of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham.’’ Different members were assigned various aspects of Pitt’s character, including his parentage, early education, personal appearance, and social charac28

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ter. The University of Michigan’s chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon was also having a debate at each meeting, assigning political and historical essays and fictitious productions. On December 2, 1857, they debated whether the Bible could be argued to sustain the practice of slavery. Yale’s Kappa Sigma Epsilon also debated regularly at its meetings. In October 1849, the members contemplated: ‘‘Will the acquisition of New Mexico prove beneficial to the United States?’’ Frank Morse, a Delta Psi brother at Wesleyan in the 1850s, also attested to the debates and essays sponsored by his fraternity. While the literary exercises may not have been the most important aspect of fraternity membership, at least through the antebellum period they did comprise a large portion of most fraternity men’s organized activities, indicating that fraternity men understood the ability to think and speak eloquently as being essential to a gentleman’s manliness.≥≤ The second avowed purpose of fraternal life was camaraderie. Fraternities were supposed to foster a bond between like-minded young men, a bond that was thought to last well beyond the time they spent in college. Many graduates counted their fraternity brothers as among their most intimate friends long after they had left college; they also considered the time spent with their brothers to be among their most enjoyable during college. As one fraternity man admitted of his time at Kenyon College in the 1850s: ‘‘However much we may decry the selection of a certain number of men, who are to be nearer and more friendly to each other than to an equal number of those belonging to other societies, or to no society, I have to confess that my best friends were thus obtained.’’ Fraternities offered a social outlet for young men, an organization devoted to fellowship and good times for those who joined. Fraternity members met regularly to take meals with each other, host annual banquets, go on trips to the city, and call on young women in neighboring towns. Fraternities were, in essence, a way to institutionalize friendship, a means to guarantee that a man might have peers upon whom he could depend at all times. Fraternity constitutions attempted to regulate the feelings that fraternity men were to maintain toward one another. As part of their initiation into Alpha Delta Phi, for instance, new members were required to swear to the following covenant: ‘‘You do solemnly promise that you will strive to cultivate in yourselves a spirit of kindness, conciliation and good will toward every member of this fraternity.’’ Delta Kappa Epsilon members pledged something nearly identical: ‘‘I will cultivate in myself and among my fellow members a spirit of kindness and good will.’’≥≥ That fraternity men felt the need to ‘‘guarantee’’ their friendships is camaraderie and resistance

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worth noting; that they did so by calling each other ‘‘brother’’ and cementing the ties through a familial model is also significant. Many men in fraternities were living away from home for the first time in their lives, and some were quite a distance from their families. Fraternities provided a model for family that was comforting to fraternity men separated from their natal families. The familial model was also reassuring because, like one’s real family, fraternal ties were presumed to last a lifetime. The bonds one formed with one’s brothers were not to be broken on a whim. This model of friendship allowed fraternity men to trust one another and to place their faith in each other, satisfied that this trust would not be betrayed. While they did have clubhouses for meetings (they often rented rooms in town for this purpose), fraternity members did not generally live together in one house until after the Civil War, and the now-common ‘‘frat house’’ did not become widely popular until the late nineteenth century. This did not stop fraternity men from symbolically re-creating their home lives in the nomenclature used to describe their relationships with each other. First, and most obviously, members of the same chapter of a fraternity were ‘‘brothers.’’ Different chapters of a fraternity were ‘‘sisters.’’ Often the founding chapter of a fraternity was referred to as the ‘‘parent’’ or ‘‘mother’’ chapter. The Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter at Yale University was continually referred to as ‘‘Mother’’ by other chapters for this reason. Similarly, Union College was the ‘‘Mother of Fraternities’’ because so many mother chapters (including the very first) were founded there. The language used to describe these familial relations often came complete with birthing metaphors and maternal scolding. In 1848 a Hamilton College student named Bangs ‘‘read an essay on ‘Freshmens Home Sickness’ ’’ at the weekly meeting of his fraternity, ‘‘giving a vivid picture of his sad mishaps when first introduced to College Life.’’ To combat this feeling of homesickness, fraternity men structured their organizations like the families from which they had come—albeit families without actual women. In an 1850 letter to his brother in Zeta Psi, Samuel Sumner made this familial connection explicit: ‘‘There is nothing on earth for which I cherish a more ardent affection than the Zeta Psi. I recognize everyone who bears our badge as a brother & a member of the same family.’’ In 1859 W. T. R. Marvin wrote to his brother in Sigma Phi: ‘‘I rejoice to know that the Alpha of N.J. so long the youngest & pet child, if I may say so of our old ‘Sig Ma’—still lives—I have ever taken an interest in it, from its earliest infancy, and indeed was one of the attendant Physicians on the confinement of the old lady, when the child was so happily born.’’ This 30 camaraderie and resistance

letter, more florid than most, simply extends the familial metaphor to its logical conclusion. Each chapter was born of a mother and became a sister to its fellow chapters. Others who might bear witness to the birth were ‘‘attending physicians.’’ All members were united together in a family.≥∂ Notably absent from this configuration were fathers, precisely because young men in nineteenth-century colleges had father figures in abundance. The tutors and faculty members who were charged with trying to control and regulate collegiate life had taken over precisely where the students’ own fathers had left off. While they might have yearned for the sympathy and comfort offered by their mothers, the rules and punishments they received from their fathers were still very much a part of their daily lives. Further, one of the prime purposes of the college fraternity was an attempt to establish some sort of independence from the prying eyes of fathers (of the real or substitute variety). To include father figures in the configuration of fraternal families would have defeated one of the purposes of the fraternity: the assertion of independence from patriarchal authority. While fraternity members readily acknowledged that they depended upon their brothers for camaraderie and support, this was a mutual dependence upon peers and not upon someone with the power to officially punish or regulate them. Mutual dependence upon same-age fellow students was a comfortable midway point between the dependence of childhood and the independence of adult manhood, what historian Joseph Kett has called a period of ‘‘semi-dependence.’’≥∑ Regulation and Resistance This reaction against the controlling father figure was one of the prime functions of the fraternity. Fraternities constituted a rebellion against authority in a number of ways. The first of these ways was symbolic: by deliberately disobeying college authorities, fraternity members declared their independence from them. The second was more practical: by joining together in secret, fraternity men were often able to provide themselves with entertainments and activities that were otherwise forbidden. The key to all of this was certainly in the rule breaking of their activities, the thrill derived not just from the activities themselves but also from the fact of their illegality. Secret societies were forbidden on most college campuses until the middle of the nineteenth century and at some until the century’s final decades. Because college authorities during this period were accustomed to student camaraderie and resistance

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outbreaks and revolts, and because they did everything in their power to curb these disturbances, they saw it as only logical that one way to do this was to regulate when, where, and for what purposes students met. The faculty of many colleges regulated not only established secret societies but also meetings of any group of students. Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, was adamant in this regard: ‘‘I would incomparably rather resign my place than allow young men the right to meet in secret when they choose without the knowledge of the Faculty.’’ In March 1847 thirty-six students were dismissed from Princeton simply for participating in an unauthorized sophomore class meeting. Authorities were determined that students not meet in private because they supposed that plots might be hatched and rules might be broken at secret meetings—often rules regarding profanity, immorality, and the consumption of liquor. In these suppositions, they were often correct. Fraternity meetings sometimes resulted in what nineteenth-century college students called a ‘‘spree,’’ a fun time that involved rowdiness and alcohol, both strictly forbidden by college rules. An 1855 New York newspaper editorial described their activities: ‘‘Removed, by the injunction of secresy [sic], from faculty supervision, these societies are frequently the scenes of conviviality. They decide their own hours. If it is in the ‘small hours’ of the night that they adjourn, who shall call them to account? They may smoke, drink, and chat, under the disguised name of making speeches. This tendency to conviviality is evident enough from the frequency of suppers and dinners which are given in connection with them.’’ Even William Baird, the author of the first extensive guide to college fraternities and a fraternity defender extraordinaire, admitted in 1879 that ‘‘at a few institutions, individual chapters within our own experience have departed from the practice of the principles enjoined upon them, and entered upon a career of open debauchery or secret vice.’’≥∏ Related to this concern over what students might do in their secret meetings was a profound distrust for secrecy itself. Minister John Mitchell explained in 1847: ‘‘I dislike secret societies because I think such secrecy is either mischievous or childish. For if a society be laudable, where is the wisdom of shrouding it in mystery, and requiring pledges upon honor, or upon oath perhaps, as the Masons do, not to blab, as though it were a conspiracy, that feared the light.’’ Though the members of secret societies may well have engaged in acts that college authorities would have found objectionable, equally objectionable, it seemed to the faculties, was the very fact of the secrecy. For if they were not doing anything wrong, as 32 camaraderie and resistance

many society members claimed, why the need to hide their activities? Of course, the purposes and secrets (though not always the activities) of these societies were usually quite commonplace; the ‘‘secrets’’ possessed by one group were remarkably similar to those possessed by their arch rivals (usually something about loyalty and honor and the mysticism that surrounded these mottoes). To the students who participated, then, the secrecy that surrounded their initiation and everyday actions was precisely the appeal, and it was so in proportion to a faculty’s objection to it. There is something of a tautology here, but it was a useful one for students interested in spiting what they perceived as an overbearing faculty. Secret societies existed, at least in part, to protect secrets, the greatest secret of all perhaps being that there was nothing particularly unique about the original secret.≥π Even when the secret possessed by fraternity members was straightforward and remarkably similar to those possessed by other fraternities (as it almost always was), the members still drew a line between those who knew the secret and those who did not. The sociologist Georg Simmel noted that not only does secrecy serve to demarcate lines of difference, it also promotes a loyalty among those who possess the secret they are first told upon initiation. This loyalty lays the foundation for the ability to keep further secrets that may arise around the actions and behaviors of various members or groups of members. Fraternal secrecy thus serves at least two functions: it elevates its possessors and it protects them when they break the rules and laws of a given society—in this case, the college.≥∫ Some contemporary commentators realized the appeal of this secrecy, and almost all found it rather vexing. In The Secret Society System (1882), E. E. Aiken explained that ‘‘secrecy may be employed to exert the power of mystery over the outside world, the societies thus becoming ‘invested with a factitious importance.’ ’’ He also noted that secret societies conducted their business in private and made secrecy their ruling principle: ‘‘The privacy is an ostentatious privacy; as if two friends should publish a notice that they were about to exchange confidences, and warn everybody off; thus violating the very spirit of privacy.’’ Many observers, including college students themselves, were shrewd enough to understand that secrecy itself had a function for men in fraternities but that the secrets were only meaningful if outsiders were aware of them; their existence had to be publicized in order for those in the know to reap their benefits, benefits largely tied to the exclusion of others.≥Ω Some students also objected to secrecy because they saw it as being camaraderie and resistance

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antireligious. Faculties, as religious men, shared these objections; they believed that a student’s primary allegiance should always be to God, and following that, to his family and his college. Secret societies, with their propensity for rule breaking and mischief, threatened to divert a student’s loyalties away from where they should properly lie. To pledge allegiance to a secret oath was threatening because faculties did not know what that secret oath might have been and because it was irreligious to begin with. Secret societies were seen as substituting a lower or partial form of morality for the morality of the divine.∂≠ A third objection to college fraternities, and secret societies more generally, arose in connection to a series of events related to Freemasonry that took place between 1826 and 1831. In 1826 William Morgan, a resident of Batavia, New York, and a former Freemason, disappeared. Morgan was about to publish an exposé of the workings of Freemasonry, including an explication of the first three degrees of Masonic ritual. It was assumed at the time that Morgan had been abducted by Masons intent on silencing him. The backlash against Freemasonry was swift and decisive. An AntiMasonic Party ran a candidate in the next presidential election, and at least twelve Protestant denominations committed themselves to the fight against Freemasonry. College fraternities, whose secrecy and rituals led many to associate them with Masonry, were targeted by extension. Some societies transformed themselves into more open honorary societies in response.∂∞ However paradoxical it may seem, it was during the anti-Freemason fervor that many college fraternities came into being. The students involved could not have been unaware of the scandal, and yet they forged ahead anyway. The secrecy involved in these societies represented a means of combating their faculty, a means of asserting their independence and manliness. Indeed, while the similarities between Freemasonry and fraternities stopped with the ritual (and for fraternities it was a ritual, unlike Freemasonry, that was conducted upon initiates only once), fraternity men might have thought that they were making a claim to manliness by becoming involved in an organization similar to ones that enrolled real men, men with careers and families of their own, men without faculties looking over their shoulders attempting to regulate their every move. It was in this regard that Congregationalist minister and Yale president Noah Porter described fraternity life in the nineteenth century: ‘‘The aggression of constant interference provokes the resistance of boyish mischief and arouses 34

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the wrath of the manhood that is half developed and is therefore intensely jealous for its invaded rights.’’ In this observation, Porter explicitly recognized that college students who broke rules were doing so at least partially to assert their manhood in the face of an overbearing faculty. Joining a forbidden society was one way of doing this.∂≤ Regulation and Acceptable Manhood Faculties at almost all colleges responded to the birth of fraternities by attempting to ban or abolish them. Few were successful. At many schools, the students simply refused to comply; at others, the alumni (some of whom became trustees) remained loyal to their fraternities and were able to influence the faculty to keep them around. On December 3, 1832, Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College, tried to rid his school of fraternities’ ‘‘evil influence’’ by announcing in chapel before the assembled student body: ‘‘The first young man who joins a secret society shall not remain in Coll[ege] one hour, or at least only while we can get him off.’’ Almost exactly one year later, Nott had relented and given full sanction to secret clubs. Mark Hopkins attempted to ban them at Williams in 1845 but was overruled by the trustees; every trustee since Hopkins’s assumption of the presidency and the arrival of the first fraternity at Williams had been a fraternity man. In 1849 University of Michigan officials expelled members of the fledgling Beta Theta Pi, Alpha Delta Phi, and Chi Psi Societies (all founded in 1845 and 1846). The members, backed by Ann Arbor town residents (including some Freemasons), fought back, and eventually some fraternity brothers were reinstated. Others chose to transfer to schools that were more hospitable to Greek-letter organizations. Beta Theta Pi brother Andrew Jackson Poppleton, future mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, left Michigan and enrolled at Union College. Writing thirty years after the fact, he claimed that by leaving Michigan, ‘‘when, a mere boy, I withstood all threats and entreaties to forsake the faith, and quietly shook the dust of the university from my feet.’’ In making the choice between ‘‘the renunciation of my sacred associations, and the shelter of the university,’’ he chose to leave the latter. Some fraternities that chose to stay also had success in combating university officials by claiming the American right of free association, as the Michigan students had done.∂≥ Other institutions refused to budge. In 1856, at their second annual convention, delegates of the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity reported that camaraderie and resistance

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most of the chapters were existing sub rosa, due to faculty opposition, which in some institutions took the aggressive form of requiring upon entrance an oath directed against joining Greek Letter Societies. Apparently no Phi Kap of that day had the slightest compunction in breaking this oath, for the more stringent opposition the more the chapters flourished. An example of this is on record at Epsilon chapter, where the faculty, learning the names of the members, called upon them to disband under penalty of expulsion. The latter, seeing a loophole through which to escape, readily agreed, but as nothing was said against reorganization, as readily reorganized. Plainly, fraternity men took great pride in their ability to outwit the administration at whose college they studied. The correspondence of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity is filled with references to chapters existing sub rosa; they warned their sister chapters not to identify correspondence as being related to the fraternity. This gives some indication that part of the appeal for fraternity men was precisely in the subterfuge necessary to sustain their organizations.∂∂ At their 1858 annual convention, delegates of Alpha Delta Phi reported that the administration at the University of Alabama had successfully stamped out their chapter by requiring matriculating students to sign a pledge promising not to join fraternities. This was the tack authorities at Princeton took as well, and it proved one of the few schools that met with any success in eliminating fraternities. On June 26, 1846, at a special meeting of the faculty called by Princeton’s president John MacLean, it was resolved that, at the beginning of next session, all who are known to be connected with unauthorized societies in college, shall be required to give an assurance to the faculty that such connexion shall for the future cease. And that the following notices are inserted in each circular; The Faculty deem it expedient to inform the Parents & Guardians of the Young Men in this institution, that all students are forbidden to connect themselves with any society not sanctioned by the authorities of the college. Princeton’s faculty was resorting to what they believed would be the most effective way of deterring their students from joining these societies: enjoining their parents to forbid them to do so. Not surprisingly, the plan did not succeed. The societies were too well entrenched by that point, and 36 camaraderie and resistance

enlisting parents’ opposition would probably have encouraged the Princeton students all the more. The point of these societies, after all, was that they were illicit, illegal, and clandestine. To have one’s parents join college administrators in declaring them so would only have added to their appeal. Only through persistent enforcement, and not until 1875 at the earliest, did Princeton manage to rid itself of fraternities. They were soon replaced by eating clubs, which were no less exclusive, indicating that Princeton authorities may have won the war in name only.∂∑ This opposition to fraternities would continue at some campuses until the end of the nineteenth century, though most faculties had accepted fraternities by the postbellum period. It was precisely this type of regulation that initially made fraternities so appealing to their members. Despite many faculties’ most dire fears, it may well be that involvement in fraternities had a placating effect on their members. Historian Leon Jackson has discovered that throughout the Harvard riots of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, members of Phi Beta Kappa were the least likely to have participated; the society’s members were able to convince themselves that they already possessed a certain dignity that was inalienable by dint of membership. The dissident students rebelled in order to gain recognition; members of Phi Beta Kappa recognized each other as possessing a manly dignity and thus did not have the same needs for recognition by the faculty. Jackson’s Phi Beta Kappa in its era of secrecy and the college fraternities of the second quarter of the nineteenth century had much in common. While they all engaged in activities that the faculty would have found objectionable, their propensity to participate in the acts of revolution that swept across U.S. colleges between 1776 and 1860 may well have been tempered by the feeling of revolution inherent in belonging to a college fraternity, as well as by the dignity and manliness that fraternity men believed inhered in that membership. William Baird was astute enough to realize this in 1879, when he wrote that, in contradistinction to the constant disciplinary problems at Princeton (a school without fraternities at that point), ‘‘We never hear of midnight pistol practice at Union, Dartmouth, Rochester, Yale or other colleges where the fraternities supplement the college government, and are wisely and judiciously encouraged.’’ For all of fraternities’ propensity for rule breaking, and despite the fact that they certainly created factions on campus based on social class, it may well be that fraternities actually led to a decreased propensity toward outright acts of violent rebellion.∂∏ camaraderie and resistance

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Competition, Anxiety, and Brotherhood College fraternities competed with each other almost constantly. While young men relished the competition that was a natural continuation of the games they played as children and a precursor to the competition they would face in the market economy upon graduation, they seemed to feel more comfortable if they competed in groups. Fraternities served this purpose: a man succeeded by contributing to a group effort; if he failed, he was not alone. This form of competition created a trying ground for the production of manliness. Because college men were still in a state of flux between childhood and manhood, they relied upon each other for both support in times of confusion and assistance in competition. While men were certainly judged on their individual merits, fraternity men were able to combat some of the anxiety of these individual evaluations by banding together with their peers, by attempting to have others identify them as being part of a select group and then competing as a group instead of as an individual. Loyalty to one’s brothers was prized above all else because it was precisely the competition with other individuals that made men so anxious. If one could be absolutely sure of the fidelity of at least a certain group of men, then one could face one’s competitors, whether as individuals or group against group. For fraternity men, membership in a fraternity was not enough; one’s fraternity had to be better than other fraternities. This was a difficult proposition, for there were no objective criteria for evaluating the success of a fraternity. At least during the nineteenth century, fraternities were not officially in competition with each other. There was no annual prize for the best fraternity, and they did not generally compete with each other in literary exercises or sporting events. Despite this lack of official competition, fraternity men developed a set of criteria for discerning relative rankings. It reflected well upon all members, for instance, if some fraternity brothers were able to achieve honors or assume offices in college. Also important was the number of members a fraternity possessed in relation to other fraternities on campus. One wanted to have the most, but the most of a certain kind. Fraternity members were also to have a certain confidence, well-roundedness, popularity, and manliness. All of these factors were used to determine just how thriving or flourishing a fraternity was and whether it had bested its rivals. Historians of education have long argued that the death of literary societies was due in large part to the birth of fraternities. There is no question 38 camaraderie and resistance

that after a certain point, the literary societies had become a battleground for rival fraternities more than they served any particular literary or oratorical function. This happened at different times at different colleges and was dependent upon a number of varied factors, which complicate the story that has been previously told by many scholars.∂π There is no question, however, that the winning of honors and society offices was one of the key ways that fraternity men could claim decisive victories against each other. They often entered into compacts with each other for the defeat of a rival fraternity. For instance, Alpha Delta Phi and Delta Kappa Epsilon might join together to defeat Psi Upsilon in one society election, whereas Zeta Psi and Psi Upsilon might join together in the other literary society to ensure that Alpha Delta Phi and Delta Kappa Epsilon did not secure any offices. These were called combinations, and students had been employing some variation thereof before the existence of fraternities. The secretary of the University of Rochester’s Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter explained many of these tactics as well as other strategies to achieve popularity: They [Alpha Delta Phi] neither hesitate to make use of the most exaggerated lies, nor have they ever failed to do so in order to obtain numbers. As for their having any power here they have not the least, but at the last election in the Literary societies we actually gave them two minor offices, both of which are the most laborious offices of all, and which no q⌲⌭ would take, while D.K.E. took the Presidency of the Pithonian and a majority of other offices. There is a coalition existing between the ⌿⌼ [Psi Upsilon], q⌿ [Delta Psi], and D.K.E. Fraternities to effectually prevent any 〈q⌽ [Alpha Delta Phi] or Ouden [Delta Upsilon] from obtaining any important office. Not only are the 〈q⌽s extremely unpopular here with everyone except the Oudens but also I can safely say that D.K.E. is the most popular, the most in numbers and the most flourishing fraternity at Rochester University. This excerpt demonstrates almost all of the key ways that fraternities sought to best their rivals. Rivalries in the literary societies often became so fierce that, while the administration could not control the election of officers in these student-run organizations, they did take from the students the privilege of electing the commencement and Junior Exhibition speakers. At many schools, these honors came to be bestowed by the faculty based upon grades rather than selected by the students through literary-society vote as they had been previously.∂∫ It was customary in many fraternities, upon establishment of a new camaraderie and resistance

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chapter, for the secretary of that chapter to write to all other chapters informing them of its birth. In 1855 such a letter by Michigan’s Delta Kappa Epsilon secretary, John Q. A. Sessions, explained that there were three other societies already established at Michigan: Alpha Delta Phi, Chi Psi, and Beta Theta Pi. Sessions wrote: ‘‘The first has fifteen members, but the course they have taken in the Literary Societies render them unpopular and enmity has been created against them. The last two are insignificant, having not more than one-half as many members as the first & composed mostly of 2nd and 3rd rate students.’’ It was not enough to announce that Michigan had a chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon; its status had simultaneously to be established. There seems no question in the mind of Sessions that from the very moment of its inception, the Omicron chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon would be in competition with all other fraternities on campus. Soon thereafter, a response was received from the Kenyon College chapter: ‘‘There is one society here similar to ours between whom & ourselves there exists quite a feeling of hostility. Their name is the ⌰q⌾ [Theta Delta Chi]. I think we are fully able to withstand all their efforts to overwhelm us as we have by far the most talented members of College.’’ A letter arrived from Bowdoin within a few months, explaining that their chapter was one of the larger fraternities on campus with about forty members (quite large for the time). The Bowdoin corresponding secretary (an elected position known as a ‘‘scriptor’’) continued: ‘‘We are constantly increasing in spite of our enemies. There are four other societies here[:] ⌾⌿ [Chi Psi], ⌿⌼, ⌰q⌾, 〈q⌽. So you may imagine we have work enough. We have most of the superior men in the College, and do stand high in every respect.’’∂Ω Letters expressing similar sentiments can be found in the archives of other fraternities as well. In 1858 graduated Sigma Phi brother Charles Howell wrote to his brother still at Princeton: ‘‘I am glad to hear that you are getting on so well at Princeton & in the illustrious w⌽ [Sigma Phi]. But it causes some profanity to hear that that pusillanimous and rotten crowd, —the q⌿ is still right side up with ease. Why don’t your fellows wake up & trounce them in some speedy manner? They are somewhat of the same nature as brown soap—made of grease and lie [sic]—with this restriction, that they do anything but cleanse the hands that touch them.’’ It remains unclear in this letter, however, just what another fraternity could do to ‘‘overwhelm’’ or ‘‘trounce’’ its rivals. Other strategies help to clarify what was at issue in a fraternity’s ability to best or destroy its competitors.∑≠ One of the ultimate tests of a fraternity’s success was its ability to recruit 40

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as many of the year’s incoming freshmen as possible. This was always a matter of keen competition between rival fraternities and one of the only transparent criteria for evaluating which fraternity was more successful. The one who had managed to have its pick of new students was obviously the most appealing and thus the ‘‘victor.’’ As Michigan’s first letter establishes, one of the ways that fraternities were judged as being more successful than others was by the number and character of their members. Many letter writers explain that they are in a ‘‘flourishing condition’’ or that their chapters are ‘‘prospering.’’ These expressions occur so often that they become almost meaningless. One of the conditions of being prosperous, however, was that one had enough members. Prosperity seemed to be dependent upon this and little else. The scriptor from Oakland College’s Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter stated in 1859, for instance, that ‘‘the Omegas are in a most flourishing condition—we have no opponents, no enemies of any kind. In the College there is not one student who would not be proud of being elected as a member. Our number is few and will always remain thus until an opposition society of greater power than ourselves force us to extremities.’’ Here the link was made explicit between having a large number of members and being able to compete with one’s rivals. A letter from Michigan to the New York Free Academy the same year confirmed that prosperity hinged upon membership: ‘‘We were rejoiced to learn of your own good success and can exult with you over the defeat of the [〈q⌽s] who are here likewise our only rivals. They have done so poorly the past two years, however, that they made a desperate effort this [year]. . . . On account of their long standing they are able generally to exert considerable influence over the Western students; but we are always sure of securing all the Eastern men that we want.’’ In the terms of this letter, success was based upon the number of members the group was able to recruit; Alpha Delta Phi was defeated because it was not able to recruit enough of the incoming class.∑∞ Fierce competition for incoming freshmen eventually led to strict rushing and pledging guidelines in the period after the Civil War. Until that time, however, fraternity members were free to pursue new students in any way they saw fit. This might have meant approaching them in their hometowns or as they arrived in the college town by train or carriage. It was a practice with which many students were familiar from the days of literarysociety recruiting. Stories abound of the electioneering campaigns to get certain desirable students to join. One Williams alumnus wrote to a current student and fraternity brother in 1850: ‘‘Strike! & keep striking! camaraderie and resistance

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Heaven & earth must be moved to get that Niles.’’ Edward Hitchcock, president of Amherst College, noted this trend during his lengthy tenure there: ‘‘There would be a desperate struggle amongst the students to obtain the leading men in the classes for the different societies, and they would ere long come to regard this matter as one of the most important interests in college, and they would of course suppose the Faculty took as deep an interest in it as they did.’’ A number of other college presidents, including Mark Hopkins at Williams, Francis Wayland at Brown, Jeremiah Day at Yale, Simon North of Hamilton, and Leonard Woods Jr. at Bowdoin, all concurred that the societies, in their competition for the ‘‘best’’ members, tended to produce factions and cliques in college. This provoked great jealousy among society men and what were seen as underhanded electioneering tactics in order to get them. One of the ways that freshmen were encouraged to join particular fraternities was not only by telling them of the fraternity’s famous graduates (who were no small number by the end of the antebellum period) but also by telling them of their own leading men currently in college and their group’s standing on other campuses. Thus, in 1862 the secretary of Delta Kappa Epsilon’s University of Rochester chapter wrote, ‘‘We have in the Senior Class 4 men good and true, in the Junior 7, Soph 7 and Fresh. 4—the pick of the class. Hoping this will render your ‘fresh’ a little more contented and encourage your chapter in the noble cause.’’ 1840s Amherst student William Hammond was electioneered by members of Psi Upsilon and Alpha Delta Phi. He chose the latter. The next year he wrote in his diary: ‘‘We Psi U’s made up our minds to take Freshman Crosby if we could today. Had him at Soule’s room in the P.M. and Belcher’s in the evening. He is pledged to the Delta Kappa Epsilon, but will join us if he can get clear.’’ The electioneering of entering students was an acknowledged fact of college and fraternity life; to snatch a new student out of the grasp of another fraternity was considered a coup even greater than simply having him join without a struggle.∑≤ Another method by which supremacy was established was through acknowledgment of such either by other fraternities (a rarity) or by neutrals or independents (those not belonging to a fraternity). Contrary to some historians’ accounts of fraternity men keeping their distance from those who chose not to participate in the Greek scene, there was an implicit reliance upon these men for their impartiality and their ability to judge the best or most successful fraternity (hence the name ‘‘neutral’’). For instance, in 1856 Michigan’s Delta Kappa Epsilon secretary wrote to his 42

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counterpart at Yale that ‘‘the q⌲⌭ has no equal in the Institution. We do not pretend to say this in a way which would be a vain and prejudiced boast of our own—but rather quote the sincerity of our own consciences and the admitting of disinterested persons.’’ Logic dictates that these disinterested persons were other students not involved in any of the competing fraternities. In 1858 the secretary of Centenary College’s dke chapter alluded to their ‘‘acknowledged supremacy,’’ and in March 1859, the scriptor from Amherst College boasted: ‘‘We have worked hard for two years and from a decided third rate stand have arisen to the front rank. We say not this of ourselves but all neutrals grant us this honor and none of our rivals claim more than equality.’’ An acknowledgment of supremacy was of the utmost value, but such acknowledgment could be hard to come by. Along with success in the recruitment of members (an implicit acknowledgment of a fraternity’s good standing) and victories in society and literary elections, there was practically no other way for campus men to judge which fraternity was most successful.∑≥ If one central theme is evident in the letters of fraternity men throughout the nineteenth century, it is the constant discussion of various chapters’ status in relation to other fraternity chapters on their campuses. Most impressive about this, perhaps, is that none of this competition was actually necessary. If young college men wanted to establish homelike clubs for themselves in which they could socialize with their friends, they were perfectly able to do so without positing similar clubs as their arch rivals. Further, if young men wanted congenial groups of friends, they could have simply concentrated on enriching the friendship of the men who were already members instead of constantly attempting to initiate the next crop of the ‘‘best’’ men. Competition was not inevitable; it was created by the men who joined fraternities and seems to have been the fraternities’ raison d’être—at least as much as was the aforementioned camaraderie. Further, and unlike in almost any other college competition, there could never be a decisive victor because there were never any set rules. Not only was this a competition created entirely by the men involved; it was also selfperpetuating, since the only real way for a fraternity to achieve a decisive victory was for one of its competitors to dissolve. Even if this happened, there were always others to take up where the defeated had left off. Fraternities then, for all their complaints about the dangers posed by other chapters, thrived on this competition. The secretary of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter at the University of Alabama described their rivals this way: ‘‘They serve to keep alive in our members a spirit of q⌲⌭ pride and to camaraderie and resistance

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stimulate them to nobler exertions.’’ His brother at the Kentucky Military Institute concurred: ‘‘Our rival is in humble submission to our will. We could crush all of its hopes but we prefer its opposition.’’∑∂ The competition of college life, much more than the training in piety that these men were rejecting, was preparation for entrance into a capitalist market economy. This was, however, an economy in which young men could not be certain of their place. Before the Civil War, college was still not necessary for entrance into business or the professions. A man might apprentice himself to a doctor or lawyer in order to learn the ways of medicine or the law; a college man might be required to do the same even after finishing college. Any man might become a clerk or start a business on his own if he had the capital. To be sure, college had its benefits: learning befitted a gentleman and brought him in contact with others of his ilk, others with whom he formed social networks (some in the form of fraternities) that might be of use to him in his professional life. Those who chose to go to college in the antebellum period, however, unless they were training to become ministers, were merely delaying an entrance into the world of competition with peers. There is good reason to believe that this world frightened many of them; this may well have been one of the reasons why they had chosen to postpone entering it. Thus, in a college world constructed of competition in preparation for the world beyond its gates, college men also created companionship to sustain each other and swore loyalty to each other, no matter the situation. College men were coming to terms with the fact of the competition they faced as individuals and with each other. Fraternities were their reassuring answer to this anxietyprovoking situation.∑∑ Most fraternity constitutions mandated that brothers swear their undying loyalty to each other. They also demanded that fraternity brothers be ever vigilant and corrective of each other’s behavior, not just so that it would reflect well upon themselves but also as a service to one another. One of the things that college—and a fraternity particularly—promised was that it would transform unmannered men into gentlemen.∑∏ Students were warned to be careful about the people with whom they associated for fear either that less savory habits might transfer to them or that they might be judged by their associates. In his 1835 Student’s Manual, John Todd warned: ‘‘Be cautious in selecting your friends, and look long and well before you allow any one to say, that he is your bosom-companion, and that you share each other’s thoughts and secrets. In selecting your friends, you will remember that you will borrow habits, traits of character, modes of 44

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thought and expression, from each other; and, therefore, be careful to select those who have not excellences merely, but whose faults are as few as may be.’’ Many nineteenth-century Americans believed that character was malleable; thus, a man could be adversely affected by his associates. He could, however, also be bettered by them, hence the proliferation in conduct manuals for students that have been discussed throughout this chapter. While they were primarily written by ministers and educators who might not have seen eye to eye with fraternity men on exactly what constituted a proper character, they did agree that that character was mutable and in need of guarding. Some fraternities regularly required a critic to offer suggestions to all brothers on their character, deportment, and dress. These young men aimed to assist each other in becoming real men, men who could command respect and walk with dignity in the world. Historians have documented the numerous ways in which young men were made anxious by their entry into the working world. This was also the case for those graduating from college.∑π Writing of graduation, one observer described it thus: ‘‘Ceasing to be seniors of a college, we become the juniors of the professional school, and next to that, the freshmen of the wise and learned world at large. These are large steps downward at the time.’’ The same author also noted that for the man who has not chosen his profession by the end of his senior year, the ‘‘day after he graduated was the most vacant, listless, and depressed one of his life.’’ Writing to his father, Princeton student Jimmie Bryan claimed: ‘‘The dream of years is at last realized, I am at last a graduate and am now ready to try my fortune and try it I hope, successfully.’’ In a letter dated a month earlier, before he had graduated, Bryan was filled with much more bluster about his planned career in the law. He wrote to his father: ‘‘Energy I have, and that energy will carry me through the world in triumph. I know you think, and in a measure correctly, that since I matriculated here it has lain dormant but now that I am on the threshold of life I feel that the course allotted to me will be one that will not only overshadow but obscure in the folds of dark and impenetrable oblivion that pursued by me here.’’ Thoughts of entering the world of business or the professions were almost always connected with aspirations for success, as well as fears of failure and the possibility of disappointing relatives, particularly parents. Many of these parents had paid for three or four years of college education for their sons with the hope that it would aid them in their lives after graduation. Anticipation of that day and the world beyond thus made college men anxious. Though they did not articulate them as such, it seems fair to posit camaraderie and resistance

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that groups encouraging young men to swear loyalty to each other in college and throughout their lives beyond graduation—fraternities—were many men’s answer to this anxiety. This bond of loyalty was of the utmost importance to many fraternity men, and the vows they swore to each other were not taken lightly.∑∫ Fraternity membership was understood to be exclusive; a man could not join more than one. As much as college administrators feared divided loyalties among God, school, family, and fraternity, to divide one’s loyalties between two fraternities was unthinkable to most fraternity men. One Chi Phi (⌾⌽) brother put it this way in 1861: ‘‘A member of the Chi Phi fraternity has as much right to join another club and still be entitled to all the privileges of Chi Phi as a Freshman has to be President of the United States. No one belonging to the Chi Phi can join another club, before first withdrawing from the ⌾⌽.’’ Similarly, in the first edition of his Baird’s Manual of College Fraternities, Baird objected to a practice called ‘‘lifting,’’ whereby a man left one fraternity and joined another in the same college. Competing for new members was, of course, acceptable, but once a man joined a fraternity, he was expected to remain a brother for life. Brotherhood was sacred to many fraternity men; the lifelong vows of loyalty and camaraderie they swore upon initiation attested to this sacredness. One could not just shirk one’s brothers and take up with new ones. The very words ‘‘fraternity’’ and ‘‘brotherhood’’ had been chosen to reflect exactly these ideals. There were, of course, occasions when a man withdrew or was expelled from his fraternity. This phenomenon of disloyalty demonstrates what was at stake for fraternity men and helps us to better understand what brotherhood meant to them.∑Ω In August 1858 Delta Kappa Epsilon held its annual convention, which was hosted by the Bowdoin chapter in Brunswick, Maine. The sole delegate from Michigan’s Omicron chapter was a brother named Hamilton J. Dennis, who was chosen to be poet of the convention and delivered, not surprisingly, the poem with which the convention commenced. In October of the same year, soon after the beginning of Michigan’s school year, Dennis wrote to his brothers informing them that he had chosen to withdraw from Delta Kappa Epsilon. The furor that his resignation caused among the ranks of the Delta Kappa Epsilon brethren, both at Michigan and across the country, is noteworthy. Dennis began his letter by explaining that he felt he had done ‘‘much to disgrace the fraternity,’’ and that a number of brothers had made him feel unwelcome because of it. He did not specify what it was that he had done, nor whether he felt he was mis46

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judged; he did say that he ‘‘could not interpret’’ their actions toward him ‘‘as a brotherly manifestation.’’ Dennis continued: I have been slowly growing out of the q⌲⌭ element until for some members to call me ‘‘brother’’ is a burlesque on the word. I feel that I am not a member of the Fraternity but of a clique which is a mere fractional part of it. Their names I need not mention as I have otherwise marked them as my friends and though I shall not meet them with the q⌲⌭ grip yet it will perhaps be with as warm a heart as when I gave it. Without stopping to specify reasons why—this is the conclusion I have arrived at viz; to withdraw from the q⌲⌭ Fraternity! . . . I may soon be sailing under a different flag but that, of course, is an affair of my own. When I attach my name to this paper I shall consider myself no longer a q⌲⌭ and I shall stand with its members only on that broad platform of friendship. Dennis drew a firm distinction between friendship and brotherhood: his reasons for withdrawal were precisely because he felt that others were not treating him as a brother. For Dennis, it was impossible to continue on in Delta Kappa Epsilon with the brotherhood of only a few of its members (the ones he cites as friends); he had to be considered a brother by all.∏≠ The Omicron chapter responded to Dennis, accusing him of ‘‘cool, deliberate and heartless treachery.’’ They expounded at length about the friendship they had offered to him, the sincerity of their feelings of affection toward him, their admiration of his ‘‘fine intellect and manly traits of character.’’ While Dennis claimed that some brothers had treated him coldly, the brothers of Omicron believed otherwise. The change however has been on your part; not theirs. They have proved true; you false. In their whole intercourse with you they see nothing they would regret if you had only proved worthy of their friendship. They have showered upon you the highest honors in the gift of the chapter, and they have begged honors for you from the Fraternity abroad, believing that you was [sic] worthy of them, and you have reciprocated their friendship and their confidence by using the laurels they placed within your grasp to conceal the dagger you have long intended thrusting to their heart. In this portion of the letter, Dennis’s former brothers tried to clarify who exactly had committed the wrong, turning the tables on Dennis, who, they pointed out, refused to name those he claimed were unbrotherly. They camaraderie and resistance

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were intent upon proving that they looked upon Dennis as one of their own up until the time of the fateful letter. In arguing that Dennis’s actions were ones he had been considering for some time, the brothers of Omicron wrote: It is not a rash step, taken under the excitement of a fresh grievance. You have for a time contemplated the deed. Your course—this unparalleled treachery of yours—was fully decided upon before you accepted the appointment of poet to our convention and when you left us to go there, when you spoke at the festival, before the assembled representatives of the several chapters, in the highest terms of the Fraternity and the Omicron chapter; when you enjoyed the hospitality of your brothers in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York; when you returned and seemingly reluctant to allow a single opportunity to see your friends escape you—stopped to receive our congratulations, you knew you were in every respect, save the overt act, a cool, calculating, despicable traitor. . . . Your conduct has been such that you will be as despised among the members of our Fraternity as Arnold among patriots. What was most important to the brothers of Omicron was that Hamilton Dennis had been harboring unbrotherly feelings for months—months in which he had interacted with his brothers in a genial fashion, represented them among other brothers at their convention, and allowed them to think of him as a brother when such feelings were simply not reciprocated. While the brothers may have been concerned that Dennis had learned the secrets of Delta Kappa Epsilon and would be able to pass them on to the new fraternity he had subsequently joined, most of their anger toward him was because of the treachery of his feelings. For months, Hamilton J. Dennis had not been a brother, and yet everyone had treated him as such.∏∞ In a letter written by the Omicron chapter to the other chapters of Delta Kappa Epsilon, after denouncing Dennis’s treachery as of the ‘‘blackest character’’ and referring to him as heartless and cold-blooded, the brothers explained that ‘‘he was not in heart, as he had ever professed to be, a Staunch and true q⌲⌭.’’ They went on to explicate in some detail their own brotherly treatment of Dennis, thus exonerating themselves from any guilt in his own accusations of unfraternal conduct. They discussed their utter shock at Dennis’s betrayal, especially after they had honored him by soliciting the post for him as poet at the convention. They frankly explained that they had gone into such detail because they sought to excuse them48 camaraderie and resistance

selves from any wrongdoing in sending him as their representative. They also enclosed a copy of their resolution expelling Dennis from the brotherhood of Delta Kappa Epsilon, something of a moot point by then.∏≤ It is doubtful that the Omicron chapter would have gone to so much trouble to inform their brethren in other chapters of Dennis’s withdrawal had not a number of other brothers met him at the recent convention and had he not been sent to that convention explicitly as a representative of Omicron. Indeed, there are letters from other chapters in the Delta Kappa Epsilon correspondence—and in the minutes and correspondence of other antebellum fraternities—announcing the expulsion of brothers for one reason or another, but not nearly as much detail was given as was done in this case. This case is noteworthy, however, not just because of Dennis’s participation in the convention, but also because his withdrawal truly came as a shock to his brothers. When one understands the great spirit of competition that drove the fraternities, it is certainly of note that so very little is made of Dennis’s decision to join Chi Psi. The fact that Dennis joined another fraternity was mentioned but once in the letter that Omicron sent to its sister chapters, and while it was disparaged in typical language, the fact that the other fraternity does not play a greater role in this drama is telling. What was important here was not Dennis’s defection to a rival fraternity but the betrayal of his own by not reciprocating the feelings of brotherhood on which Delta Kappa Epsilon was built. Because Dennis had played the part so well, however, his duplicity called into question the fraternal feelings of all the brothers. If Dennis had been faking it, anyone could. And this violated one of the central tenets of the fraternity: no matter what competition took place within a college, at another college, or after graduation in the wider world, one could always count upon the loyalty of one’s fraternity brothers.∏≥ antebellum college fraternities served many functions. They gave students a way to rebel against college authorities and assert some version of manhood in contradistinction to the way they were treated by the tutors and faculty who disciplined and taught them. They also gave their members a means for coping with the anxiety created by their uncertain futures in a changing nation. Fraternities provided students with a way of allaying the anxiety caused by college competition. For all the fun and camaraderie that fraternities surely offered, for all the literary exercises and competitions in which their members participated, fraternities had a much greater symbolic and functional purpose for the brothers, a camaraderie and resistance

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purpose very much indicative of the changes afoot in colleges and in the United States more generally. Fraternities performed other functions as well. They allowed fraternity men to distinguish themselves as men of social standing and means, especially in contrast to their more religious fellow students. Fraternity brothers, through their membership, laid claim to a version of masculinity that was more in keeping with a changing nation. The next chapter explores how antebellum fraternity men defined that manliness.

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camaraderie and resistance

Chapter Two the sacred, the secular, and the manly

Julian Sturtevant, an 1826 graduate of Yale College, described the dining hall on his first day of school: That group of students was a strange medley. The families of merchant princes of New York, Boston and Philadelphia; of aristocratic cotton planters; of hard handed New England farmers; of Ohio backwoodsmen, and even the humblest sons of daily toil were there, sitting at the same tables. However distasteful this might be to many, there was no help for it. . . . Those who wished to be educated at Yale . . . were compelled to accept this indiscriminate mingling of the rich and the poor. Yale College in 1822 was the most democratic portion of American society. Sturtevant was a poor young man from Ohio who had come to Yale on a scholarship from the American Education Society in order to train for the ministry. There he encountered others like himself as well as a good number of wealthy young men. As we saw in the previous chapter, there was often antagonism between different factions in college—different classes, rival literary societies, and competing fraternities. There were also rivalries between northerners and southerners and between the poorer students and the wealthier sons of privilege.∞ One of these conflicts manifested itself between the poorer students 51

bound for the ministry and those with more means, many of whom joined fraternities. Those who did so elaborated an ethos of fraternal masculinity; this masculinity can be explored by looking at what fraternity men valued and what they scorned, how they acted and what they believed. Part of their definition was inextricably bound up in their scorn for the religiously inclined students, in their self-understanding as men of this world and not the world beyond. Because men in fraternities were also connected to the social world outside campus proper, their interactions with the characters who peopled that world, including white women and African Americans of both sexes, also mandate investigation. Doing so helps to illuminate the ways in which gender and race worked in tandem to constitute and reinforce fraternity men’s version of manliness. from the 1810s through the 1850s, northern and midwestern U.S. colleges saw an influx in the number of poor students seeking an education to become ministers. While the first colleges had been founded to do just that, over the course of the eighteenth century they had increasingly attracted a student body consisting of the sons of wealthy southern planters and of moneyed northerners more involved in the growing merchant economy. These were men who, by and large, were not attending college to become ministers, but instead sought an education (or at least the b.a. degree) appropriate to their station in life. The southerners would return to their plantations as cultivated gentlemen; the northerners would work as lawyers or doctors or continue in some sort of family business. A classical education befitted their identities as learned men of the Republic.≤ The future clergymen, on the other hand, had chosen the ministry and its requisite college education because, as the land available for inheritance dwindled, they were unable to count upon the family farm to sustain them in the future. In addition, westward expansion and the Second Great Awakening had produced a concurrent demand for ministers. Often these poorer students were older than their wealthier fellow students, having remained at home on the farm through their early twenties or having been employed as teachers in order to be able to afford the tuition. From the mid-1810s to the 1840s, some 40 percent of students at New England colleges (Yale and Harvard excepted) became ministers, and even Yale had reached that rate at one point in the 1820s. In the mid-Atlantic states, the same trends occurred, though somewhat later. Smaller schools in this region graduated 50 percent of their students into the ministry in the 1820s. While the South always remained low in its training of ministers (never 52

the sacred, the secular, and the manly

more than 20 percent at any one time), colleges in the Midwest were producing ministers at rates only slightly behind those of New England by the 1850s. A large population of poorer, older students training for the ministry was characteristic of all regions of the country save the South, though the older, more urban schools in each area usually had lower numbers than the newer and poorer colleges.≥ While these two groups—the wealthy and privileged and the poor and pious—constituted the most obvious categories of college students, in between the two sat, often quite literally, members of an emerging American middle class. These young men were not so prosperous as their wealthy classmates but had fathers who worked as professionals (doctors and lawyers), merchants, or perhaps successful farmers. Unlike their poorer classmates who relied on scholarships to go to college, these boys’ parents had been able to pay for their tuition; they did so because they believed that a college education would offer their sons a better chance at a successful career and a prosperous life. A college education was on its way to becoming, though only for some young men, essential to middle-class identity. At a time when fewer than 1 percent of all employed men were collegeeducated, those parents of middling fortunes who sent their sons to college were attempting to take advantage of the social and cultural capital that was presumed to inhere in a college education. They and their sons had hopes for a prosperous future.∂ With few exceptions, fraternities tended to be established at schools in New England and the mid-Atlantic region, as well as at schools in the Midwest and South that were attended almost exclusively by the wealthy. It was the rare small, denominational college of the South or the Midwest that had fraternities prior to the Civil War. What this meant was that fraternities were located at schools where the majority of students was not bound for the ministry but where a significant minority was, though this was less true for southern schools.∑ At the same time, the economy—and consequently the social fabric of the United States—was changing. The same shortage in land that was encouraging men to pursue the ministry, accompanied by a surge in industry and urbanization, was also leading to a growth in an increasingly capitalist, mercantile economy. This economy was one that valued not so much the family or the community but the individual, the self-made man who was supposedly in command of his destiny and relied upon himself for success. This man succeeded in business, trade, or finance by hard work, skill, and ingenuity. All men, in fact, were being increasingly evaluated as the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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unique individuals who could be judged by what they made of themselves in the world.∏ Many American colleges in the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the meeting of these two ideals of manhood: the pious and religious, as embodied in the faculty and the ministers in training; and the ambitious and worldly, as embodied by those attending college to succeed in business and the professions or, at the very least, to cultivate one’s taste as a gentleman. To a certain degree, this meeting and its attendant disputes were fought out through the activities of college fraternities. Historian Frederick Rudolph has argued that if colleges had until that point emphasized values necessary to do well in the world beyond, then fraternities enshrined values that led to success in this world. They emphasized social graces and proper etiquette, sociability, gentlemanly conduct, and competition. This, then, was a struggle over the purpose of the college as well as over just what it meant to be a man. Not surprisingly, the faculty, as well as many of the more pious students, had very different ideas about these matters than did fraternity men.π The Sacred The ranks of many fraternity directories suggest that at a time when ministers in training were flocking to college, few of them joined fraternities. Of the first fifty members of Kappa Alpha at Union College (classes 1826 to 1830), only six joined the clergy (12 percent); 40 percent of Union’s other graduates during that period became clergymen. Of the members of Miami University’s Beta Theta Pi Fraternity who graduated between 1839 and 1861, 45 percent became lawyers and only 28 percent joined the ministry. Alpha Delta Phi’s listings for Hamilton, Amherst, and Harvard Colleges (1832–79) show that 20, 29, and 10 percent of their graduates became ministers, respectively. The figures for Delta Kappa Epsilon are even more striking. Between 1846 and 1864, just under 10 percent of q⌲⌭ brothers graduating from Yale entered the ministry; at Amherst, 18 percent did so; and 0 percent of q⌲⌭s became ministers after graduating from the Universities of Alabama and North Carolina during this time span. These numbers are not inconsistent with those related to ministerial careers of the general student populations of these schools, although they are certainly lower. The percentage of those who became lawyers from these colleges, for instance, is significantly higher. The general rule seems to be that the pious avoided the fraternities, and those 54 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

students who did join them were often not interested in having their more pious classmates as members.∫ This disparity between fraternity and nonfraternity men was partly a function of economic class: joining a fraternity was expensive. The men who belonged to them did so in part because they wanted to be members of organizations filled with others of their ilk, other men who planned on secular careers in the growing mercantile economy. Fraternities were also exclusive; this was part of their appeal. Wealthier fraternity men already understood themselves to be genteel men of society, and the more middling members aspired to this role. Both stood in contrast to the more rugged and backwoods ministers in training. Except by receiving sponsorship to become a minister, the poor had few opportunities to go to college, unless they taught extensively before attending or took time off during their college careers to do so.Ω Nineteenthcentury college students had a wealth of epithets for those who were studying for the ministry, many of which also belittled class status. Future ministers were called ‘‘theologs’’ (those in the theology school), ‘‘evangelicals,’’ ‘‘foundationers,’’ and ‘‘beneficiaries.’’ The latter two terms referred to the fact that these students were supported by the funds of a foundation that was paying for their education. In these, poverty and piety were inextricably linked.∞≠ Poor students were also marked by their shabby clothing, their sometimes extended absences from college in order to teach school, and the sparseness of their accommodations. The pious were also characterized by their seriousness and studiousness; unlike their wealthier fellow students, they could not afford to do poorly in school because they needed the faculty recommendations necessary to receive a ministerial post or a place at a seminary. In his Student’s Manual, John Todd, himself a minister, remarked: ‘‘The great mass of students are anything but wealthy. . . . Those who are to inherit wealth, as a class, will never feel a pressure sufficient to make them serious students. And those who are seeking wealth, will never seek it in the way of study.’’ Whether or not this was generally true, students training for the ministry did gain a reputation for extreme dedication to work and an unwillingness to have fun by flouting college rules. A number of nicknames at various colleges attested to this: at Washington College, they were called ‘‘donkeys’’ and ‘‘lap-ears’’; at Jefferson College, they were ‘‘long-ears.’’ James Henry and Christian Scharff, 1850s Princeton students, explained that a ‘‘relig’’ was one ‘‘who on account of conscientious scrupples [sic] or extreme sanctity, frown down all the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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jovial sport, and seem desirous of banishing all fun and frolic from the Institution.’’∞∞ The contrast between poor and wealthy students was often stark. John Mitchell described his classmates upon first entering college: There was the brown and hardy plough-boy from the country, prepared to plough the classic soil with the same patient industry he had learned to practice on his father’s farm; there was the delicate houseplant from the city; there was the energetic, but unpolished son of the West; the frank and easy Southerner; and the shrewd and humorous New Englander, behind none of his fellows, in any place, whether on the play-ground, in the waves, the long ramble, or the recitation room. There were the rustic and the refined, the turbulent and the quiet, the lively and the dull; in short, a company comprising a great diversity of education, temper, dress, and manners. It was the ‘‘frank and easy southerner,’’ the ‘‘delicate house-plant from the city,’’ and the ‘‘shrewd and humorous New Englander’’ who most often joined fraternities. While the first two are clearly marked by their wealth, the New Englander might well have come from society’s middling ranks. With fraternities’ hefty price tags—the badges alone could run as much as ten to fifteen dollars and were sometimes ordered from companies like Tiffany in New York—fraternities were simply beyond the reach of many of the poorer students. And there is much evidence to suggest that fraternity men preferred it that way. Frederick Rudolph is again suggestive in this regard: ‘‘The students in the colleges had perhaps had too much of equality—the same class program, the same subject, the same cubicles called rooms, the same prayers, the same professors, the same everything. In any case at the very time when the Jacksonian spirit was manifesting itself almost everywhere, it was being very clearly rejected by the young men in the colleges who preferred the privileges of club life and secrecy to equality before God, and who found inspiration in the very exclusiveness which the Jacksonian temper rejected.’’ As wealthy collegians and those who aspired to that status found themselves mingling with poorer classmates in their colleges, they depended upon fraternities to mark the differences in class in their already exclusive collegiate worlds. Fraternities divided the campus into two factions: the privileged and the poor. While there were certainly exceptions to this rule, one of the key tenets behind the exclusivity was that fraternity men would be able to mix with their own kind. Of the qualifications for membership at one fraternity at Williams 56 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

in 1836, the final test was: ‘‘Would you want your sister to marry him?’’ The brothers in this fraternity restricted membership to those they would consider suitable husbands for their sisters; one of the prime considerations in making such a decision was social class. Fraternities were for men of means.∞≤ While there is no question that the wealthy were attracted to fraternities, the organizations would not have survived had they not been open to men of less substantial means as well. This was particularly true at the less-exclusive colleges, where there simply were not enough very wealthy men to constitute a full membership. Thus fraternities provided a way for the wealthy to mark their class status; but perhaps more importantly, they also allowed for those who aspired to wealth and social advancement to make such claims. Being at college in the first place was another instance of the same phenomenon. Mixing socially with the more privileged was one way of doing this; interacting with peers who all planned on secular careers was another. Fraternities are but one more example of the selfconscious class aspirations so amply documented by other historians of the rise of middle-class America in the nineteenth century.∞≥ If fraternity men were reluctant to include their pious classmates, these classmates were also busy with other activities. In the 1820s and 1830s, most northern colleges as well as some southern schools were the site of at least one religious revival, if not multiple revivals. While almost all students were presumed to be Christians, there was a difference between one who simply believed as a matter of course and one who had converted fully to Christianity. The latter required an actual process of conversion through which one claimed to have been saved by the Lord. A conversion was understood to mandate a change in behaviors other than those related solely to worship and belief. A converted man did not swear, drink, or participate in other ungodly activities, such as attending illicit society meetings. William Otis Carr, an 1850s Amherst student in training for the ministry, described the conversion of one of his classmates: ‘‘One young man, who gloried in his wicked ways and seemed the first in any forbidden scheme, was stopped in his maddened course and, blessed be God, made a new creature. And what a change! It is blessed to look upon him now. It was a complete change, and his first act was to banish from his room the servants of sin. He threw into the fire his cards. To the same flame he consigned his immense cane so carefully prepared to row the Freshmen, and upon this he poured out the contents of his brandy bottle.’’ Carr further explained that during the revival, ‘‘many are giving up their foul feasts on the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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tobacco, and instead of the curse, from almost every room may now be heard the voice of prayer.’’ A converted man embraced piety in all aspects of his life, and while he might not necessarily dedicate himself to joining the ministry, this was certainly a choice made by many men who experienced conversion. Indeed, such a conversion was presumed to have already taken place in the men who attended colleges with the intention of training for the clergy. Advice manuals of the time speak of a very specific moment of conversion that all true Christians should be able to identify as the moment at which they had felt their calling. They also make a clear distinction between two types of men attending colleges: those who were professing Christians and those who were not.∞∂ A religious revival was something of a mass conversion, a meeting or series of meetings where a large number of people were led to the Lord at the same time. Most revivals during the Second Great Awakening did not occur on college campuses, but colleges were not immune from the religious fervor that was sweeping the nation. Antebellum minister William Cogswell estimated that there were revivals at some thirty-five colleges between 1820 and 1837, with no fewer than 1,500 students experiencing conversion. These schools ranged from Bowdoin and Middlebury Colleges in northern New England to the Universities of Georgia and North Carolina in the South and Miami University and the University of Ohio in the Midwest. In 1831 alone, nineteen schools were ‘‘visited with the effusions of the Holy Ghost.’’ Many of these schools had repeat visitations. It would be impossible to know how many of the converted were members of fraternities and how many abstained. However, it is worth noting that most students, and almost all educators in this period, would have seen membership in a secret society as being incompatible with true Christian behavior, partially because of the issue of secrecy but also because of the activities that fraternity men embraced or were presumed to do—drinking alcohol chief among them. Indeed, secret societies (both college and more general fraternal orders like the Masons) had been quashed by revivals in the early 1820s in some towns, with members recanting their memberships upon conversion. It was only by the mid-1820s that revivals were no longer able to hold their own against the ever-increasing popularity of the secret-society movement.∞∑ In addition to participation in religious revivals from the 1820s through the 1840s, students of a more serious or pious temperament could join together in other groups, a number of which existed for religious study or for the support of missionaries, temperance, or abolition. They could also 58 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

join anti-secret societies, clubs dedicated to good and moral living that did not cloak their proceedings in secrecy and allowed anyone to join who so desired. The most well known of these was first called the Social Fraternity but later became Delta Upsilon in imitation of other Greek-letter societies; it was founded at Williams College in 1834. By 1847 Delta Upsilon had united with its counterparts at Union, Amherst, and Hamilton Colleges to form the Anti-Secret Federation. Delta Upsilon’s original constitution claimed that the members, ‘‘feeling a deep interest in the peace and prosperity of the Institution to which we belong, and believing that all combinations and societies not founded upon liberal principles are calculated to destroy the harmony of College,’’ formed themselves into a society ‘‘for the purpose of counteracting the evil tendency of associations of which we disapprove, and for the purpose of literary, mutual, and social improvement.’’ The members also held debates and speaking competitions; in 1842 at Williams they debated the question: ‘‘Has science done more for the advancement of society than Christianity?’’ They decided in the negative. In 1847 the members of the Hamilton College chapter heard an oration from Brother Johnson: ‘‘The only Superiority we acknowledge is the Superiority of Merit.’’ As these two examples demonstrate—indeed, as the minutes of most of the Delta Upsilon chapters from the 1840s and 1850s make clear—its members were committed Christians who disapproved of secrecy on principle, as well as to notions of superiority based on social status.∞∏ Delta Upsilon was not able to maintain its original purpose for very long. By 1842 at Williams College, just eight years after it was founded, the society was already requiring that new members be sponsored for membership; and by the late 1850s, it was scarcely distinguishable from its secret rivals in terms of membership selection. By the 1870s it had changed its stance from ‘‘anti-secret’’ to ‘‘non-secret,’’ indicating that it was no longer opposed to the form and function of the college fraternity but would continue to keep its proceedings more transparent. In other words, it had become much like the organizations it had been established to combat. Other chapters maintained an equitable membership-selection process longer than did the Williams chapter, but many had succumbed by the postbellum period. While secret societies provided cachet for their members, anti-secret societies, which were open to all—or at least to all who eschewed drinking and membership in any secret organization—simply did not hold the same appeal. Further, with literary societies already in existence providing opportunities for debate and scholarship without the the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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added feature of secrecy that fraternities offered, there was little to recommend Delta Upsilon in any strong way. William Gardiner Hammond, a student at Amherst in the 1840s, understood this and speculated about the future of the Amherst chapter of Delta Upsilon in respect to its lack of secrecy: ‘‘I don’t think they’ll effect much; they’ll not be able to act with the energy and power of a secret society, but nous verrons.’’ While Hammond never explained what his own fraternity actually ‘‘effected,’’ he was astute in realizing that secrecy as well as exclusivity certainly had much to do with its popularity. The Delta Upsilon minutes detail the expulsions of members who had joined secret societies; many of them seem to have remained in the society only until they were offered something better. They also consistently debated whether or not their bond of union was as strong as that found in the secret societies; plainly, there was some anxiety surrounding this issue. It is not so surprising that Delta Upsilon had begun to mimic its rivals by the 1850s; after all, it attracted students who were obviously interested in some sort of society and had perhaps been excluded from the more secret organizations. That they should continue to be a society in existence largely for the purpose of being oppositional was tenable only for so long.∞π While the students and faculty involved did not always recognize it as such, at issue in this struggle between religious or anti-secret societies (often one and the same) and fraternities were different ideals of manhood. One was a pious ideal that emphasized service to God, hard work, asceticism, and deference to authority. The second ideal, as embodied in fraternities, emphasized social graces, good times, and class exclusivity. It was a model for manhood that was not new to the United States but which was contested on college campuses during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It was also a model for manhood in keeping with the changing ideals of the nation. What it meant to ‘‘be a man’’ was in a period of flux, and fraternity men were seeking to codify their way of life as the most manly.∞∫ The Secular To be manly, for fraternity men, was to be forthright, confident, loyal, eloquent, healthy, robust, and intelligent. A manly man should do well in school but, as discussed in the previous chapter, he should not try too hard to succeed, or at least not do so too obviously. He should be naturally clever. To work too hard was to pay too much attention to the wishes of college 60 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

authorities and thus to subordinate the self. Similarly, manly students possessed a certain disregard for the rules because they were laid out by the college authorities; to defy them was to assert one’s independence and thus one’s manhood. It was certainly true that the sprees involving alcohol and rule breaking engaged in by antebellum fraternity men were a direct contestation of college rules as an assertion of manhood; it was also the case, however, that because many of these men came from reasonably well-off families, they were accustomed to having their own way, as well as to a social life that might include alcohol. Whatever the case, manly men might drink, at least in moderation, and occasionally to excess, without it sullying their character.∞Ω Manliness was also defined through physical appearance. To be manly was to be sturdy, healthy, and handsome. Antebellum Americans did not see manliness as bound up in physical strength and aggression the way it would become later in the century, nor was it defined for college men in terms of prowess in athletic contests; organized athletics had not yet taken center stage in college life. To be sure, a manly man was brave and faced up to his opponents, but his opponents were generally not found on the football field the way they would be in the later nineteenth century. Instead, college men battled each other while debating in literary societies and in other college activities, often those involving fraternities. To be unmanly, by contrast, was often characterized as simply having the opposite attributes. Unmanly men were under the thumb of others and did not assert themselves. They studied too hard and cared too much about what their professors thought of them. They were sickly and unattractive. They dressed shabbily and lived poorly. They obeyed all rules blindly and did not question the college’s governance. In some sense, being too visibly religious itself came to be seen as unmanly. One former student explained of his time in college in the 1820s that some people actually went so far as to conceal their religious conversions from their peers. A Christian man ‘‘will often be apparently more trifling, or irreligious than he used to be. In the effort which his pride makes to conceal his convictions, he over-does, and betrays them by somewhat that is unusual.’’ It was no coincidence that the unmanly men, at least in the eyes of fraternity brothers, were the ones most similar to the faculty. By rebelling against the faculty, fraternity men sought to prove their own sense of manliness through independence; it only makes sense that they would shun those who most resembled and obeyed the faculty to which they objected. Further, and perhaps more importantly, however, fraternity men were embracing a form of manliness the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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that was gaining increasing currency in the world beyond the college campus, a world with which college faculties appeared to be woefully out of touch. It was not a sacred manliness that would best serve fraternity men upon graduation, but instead a much more secular version.≤≠ Fraternities’ official regulations and constitutions enable an understanding of how fraternity men thought of themselves. While these give only a partial picture of what it meant to be a fraternity man, they are nevertheless instructive as a point of departure. Alpha Delta Phi’s constitution declared: Qualifications for membership in this Society shall be a union of good general scholarship and ability: a laudable emulation and diligence in the pursuit of learning: those qualities of mind and heart which will endear one to his fellows throughout all the pursuits of life: and a moral character above suspicion and reproach. And none shall be eligible to this society solely on the ground of literary excellence, or of social feelings, nor shall private friendship or sectional prejudice be allowed any weight in making such selections. Alpha Delta Phi’s constitution emphasized devotion to literary excellence, though it also noted that excellence in this realm alone could not qualify one for membership. Other constitutions were not always so explicit, only speaking generally about the necessity of the current brotherhood being unanimous in their faith that the proposed member would be loyal. Historians of education have long debated the degree to which fraternity men, as opposed to their more impoverished peers, took their studies seriously. The evidence—not only from the constitutions of fraternities (whose goals were often more lofty than the group’s actual practices), but also from fraternity correspondence and diaries—indicates that achievement in scholarship was valued by almost all college students, at least until the middle of the century.≤∞ Amherst student William Hammond finished second in his class and was an active member of Psi Upsilon, also having been courted by Alpha Delta Phi. Hammond wrote of a classmate named Belknap, who Delta Kappa Epsilon decided not to initiate: ‘‘They were fools not to take him in the first place, and the Alpha Sigma were fools not to appreciate the prize they had got: there is not a better mathematician in the class.’’ Belknap was passed over not because he was a mathematician of some skill, but despite this fact. Other examples abound. Jimmie Bryan, an 1850s Princeton student and active Sigma Phi brother, skipped chapel regularly and was often 62 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

reprimanded by the faculty, but he also consistently ranked eighth in a class of ninety-one. Union College student and Psi Upsilon brother Alexander Hamilton Rice explained to his fiancée in 1844: ‘‘I find since my return that I am particularly fortunate in my position upon the merit roll so far as scholarship is concerned: many who have stood above me heretofore are now below. . . . I do not consider the merit roll a very impartial criterion but still since they keep such a thing I am rather gratified than otherwise to share with others in its honorable place.’’ Hall’s Collection of College Words and Customs, culled from schools across the nation, detailed the considerable number of epithets for those students who studied too hard, but it also provided a wealth of words to describe doing well or poorly in recitation. The former was desirable, the latter not. To succeed was to ‘‘curl,’’ ‘‘have a rush,’’ ‘‘sail,’’ ‘‘make a good shine,’’ ‘‘tear,’’ or a number of other expressions particular to different colleges. To fail at recitation was to ‘‘ball up,’’ ‘‘burst,’’ ‘‘cork’’ or ‘‘calk,’’ ‘‘fizzle,’’ have a ‘‘flash in the pan,’’ ‘‘flop,’’ ‘‘flummox,’’ ‘‘flunk,’’ ‘‘slump,’’ ‘‘smash,’’ or ‘‘stump.’’ It is also worth noting that there were words to denote a particularly showy recitation made by one who was trying perhaps a little too hard, as distinguishable from a recitation that had simply been performed well; these were ‘‘highti’’ and ‘‘squirt.’’ Performing well naturally was valued; appearing to care too much about having done so was not.≤≤ The most telling evidence of all, however, is the fraternity correspondence itself. Fraternity chapters writing back and forth to each other often detailed the honors their members had received in college. These were not only honors bestowed by fellow students through elections but also those awarded by the faculty based upon graded performance in recitation. Delta Kappa Epsilon secretaries, for instance, spent inordinate amounts of time recounting the honors they carried off at commencements—honors bestowed by the faculty. For example, Brown’s chapter, in addition to having graduated the valedictorian, also related that ‘‘[our chapter] still occupies the front rank at Brown both in scholarship and popularity.’’ Middlebury wrote that of a year’s incoming freshmen, ‘‘we have five of the very first in class.’’ The scriptor from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania recounted that, ‘‘out of eight junior orators 4 are q⌲⌭ men.’’ It is apparent from these few examples that honors within college were one of the key ways that Delta Kappa Epsilon understood its members as being superior to other men, whether fraternity members or not. All of these examples date from the 1850s, indicating that good scholarship was lauded by students at least until the Civil War. John Mitchell also reported of 1820s Yale the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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that college honors were a healthy stimulus to good scholarship as long as they did not become an end in themselves; in other words, it was perfectly respectable for a man to take college honors if he did not devote himself to that goal alone. It is perhaps because of this distinction that there has been confusion over the antebellum pursuit of good grades. The evidence, however, is clear: students were praised if they did well in school without appearing to care too much or try too hard.≤≥ A manly member of a fraternity also participated in other college activities. While most athletics did not take on their organized character until later in the century, there were certainly other clubs for fraternity men to join. They sought elective offices in their literary societies; they delivered orations and debated in them as well. They wrote for college publications and sought appointment to honor societies. At Yale a literary editorship was coveted by students and was seen as a mark of popularity and intelligence. Fraternity men probably did not join the temperance and missionary societies that appealed to the more religiously inclined students. They also, for obvious reasons, did not join the anti-secret societies.≤∂ Appearance was another criterion by which fraternity men evaluated their own manliness, as well as that of their peers. Nineteenth-century Americans generally believed that appearance was a reliable indicator of a person’s character, as well as of his or her social standing. And nineteenthcentury men, without the stigma of homosexuality to regulate them, discussed each other’s appearances in ways that are striking to twenty-firstcentury ears. Sickliness and dyspepsia were common concerns in the nineteenth century, as illustrated, for instance, by the publication of Edward Hitchcock’s Dyspepsy Forestalled and Resisted, which was based on a number of lectures he gave at Amherst College in 1830. Being healthy and robust was one way of demonstrating one’s manliness. Hammond described one of his peers as a ‘‘handsome, gentlemanly fellow’’; of a new acquaintance, he wrote: ‘‘Was rather pleased with his appearance: tall, and not remarkably elegant in form, but with an exceedingly pleasant face, and a beautiful eye, clear, soft, and dark.’’ In an 1860 letter to his brother in Sigma Phi, Charles Howell described another brother as ‘‘a beautiful and forcible speaker, and the handsomest man of my acquaintance.’’ Another fraternity man characterized his brother thus: ‘‘Baily is our pride. He is a noble looking fellow; with a tall fine form, splendid forehead, and curling hair.’’ Hall’s Collection of College Words and Customs also detailed a number of words based on physical appearance that were either common throughout colleges or particular to different schools: ‘‘puny’’ was a common epithet; a 64

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‘‘spoops’’ was a weak fellow; and at Harvard a ‘‘jack-knife’’ was an ugly fellow, so named because the student with the plainest features was annually awarded a jackknife. Provided that they met other criteria as well, the most attractive and thus manly men were invited to join fraternities.≤∑ Fraternity men, by definition, were also not particularly observant of rules and regulations. The secretary of Lafayette College’s Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter reported on their efforts to recruit new members: ‘‘Our standard is high and those whom we can easily get we do not want and unfortunately for us most of the fellows have too strict a regard for the law.’’ Another chapter told of rejecting a number of students because they were too ‘‘milk and water,’’ meaning that they were a little meek. In order to join, most fraternity men were breaking rules; indeed, flaunting authority was one of the prime functions of fraternity life, so it stands to reason that fraternity men would value this as another of the more manly attributes. Alphonso Rockwell recalled of one former fraternity brother: ‘‘Searight I remember as an amiable man and a good student. He suffered an attack of conscience which compelled him to resign his membership. We never understood it and always thought him a little queer.’’≤∏ The final prerequisites for fraternity membership were sociability and gentlemanly conduct. To some degree, these went hand in hand. The first characteristic is fairly self-explanatory: potential fraternity men had to be social or they would not mix well with their brothers. They also had to behave as gentlemen, with loyalty, honor, and good manners. The word ‘‘gentleman’’ was used with great frequency by fraternity men, and its meaning is evidenced in some of the following excerpts. In 1862 the New York Free Academy chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon reported: ‘‘A few weeks ago we initiated a Freshman, one of the best and most sociable fellows in the class.’’ In a similar letter, William A. Wooster wrote to his brother in Chi Psi, describing the latest recruits of his unc chapter: ‘‘They are all clever well bred gentlemen, ‘men good and true,’ who would do honor to [our] fraternity.’’ Hammond wrote of a man he admired: ‘‘I must say, and I have heard many others make the same remark, that he is the most finished gentleman in every good sense of the word, I ever saw: most thoroughly conversant with society, without an atom of frippery or a shade of the petit-maître.’’ This last caveat is interesting and important. Disdain was heaped upon men who tried too hard to be the gentleman, who wore clothes that were too fancy, who boasted too often of their society connections or their wealth, whose accommodations were perhaps a little too sumptuous. Such men were called a variety of names, including ‘‘Hythe sacred, the secular, and the manly

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phenute,’’ ‘‘blood,’’ ‘‘fast,’’ ‘‘splurge,’’ and ‘‘swell block.’’ As in the pursuit of good grades, there was a fine line to be walked between achieving the status of gentleman and appearing to be trying to achieve it. Fraternity men, like the elite of the eighteenth century, believed that gentlemanliness was important, but only if one came by it naturally. To make obvious efforts to achieve gentility was to reveal that one did not possess it in the first place.≤π In his 1902 history of student life and customs, historian Henry Sheldon explained that about three-fifths of college conversation was about fellow students: ‘‘The amount of attention which men paid to one another, and the time devoted to estimating one another’s social, moral, and intellectual qualities, and discussing details of conduct, were extraordinary. . . . Men were misjudged, misunderstood, overestimated, and underestimated, but acquaintance was very general and constantly ripening, and estimates were in a constant state of revision and reconstruction.’’ Hall discussed the outcome of all this talk in his definition for the word ‘‘popularity’’ in A Collection of College Words and Customs, which read: ‘‘In the college use, favor of one’s classmates, or of the members of all the classes, generally. Nowhere is this term employed so often, and with so much significance, as among collegians. The first wish of the Freshman is to be popular, and the desire does not leave him during all his college life.’’≤∫ This may not sound so different from the state of our colleges today, or indeed of life in general. The key difference, however, was that the means by which men were being evaluated, and hence, becoming popular, was in flux in the world at large and thus debated on campus as well. There was a difference of opinion between those who were clinging to an ideal of a sacred manliness and those who embraced a more worldly version of manhood. Manliness, in other words, was not an absolute but was to be found in the eye of the beholder. Men bound for the ministry knew this and employed a rhetoric of masculinity in an often futile attempt to try to convert students to their way of thinking. John Mitchell, himself a minister, took great pains to distinguish between piety as exhibited in women and in men. In the former, it was ‘‘gentle, affectionate, and winning’’; in the latter, ‘‘open, manly, and decided.’’ Pious authors of advice manuals for students sought to arm their readers with the tools necessary to avoid vice, dissipation, and avarice while still convincing them that they could think of themselves as manly men. Asa Dodge Smith cautioned: ‘‘Let no fear of losing your popularity, or of being called a ‘faculty-man,’ or subjected to any other kind of reproach, prevent you from discountenancing every kind 66 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

of insubordination and immorality. Sustain the Faculty in all their efforts to enforce the college laws. Let the profligate understand, that vice cannot stalk fearlessly abroad beneath your eye.’’ He also explained that ‘‘to be a gentleman, in the best sense of the term, is far from being inconsistent with Christian character. Indeed, it is your duty, as a Christian, to aim at this.’’ Others took the tack of advising men on how to select their friends in college, warning them away from men who broke rules, even if others found them popular. Noah Webster’s advice was representative of this strategy: ‘‘In forming your connections in society, be careful to select for your companions, young men of good breeding and of virtuous principles and habits. The company of the profligate and irreligious is to be shunned as poison. You cannot always avoid some intercourse with men of dissolute lives; but you can always select, for your intimate associates, men of good principles and unimpeachable character. Never maintain a familiar intercourse with the profane, the lewd, the intemperate, the gamester, or the scoffer at religion.’’ While fraternity men and pious educators could agree that good manners were essential in the cultivation of a gentleman, they clearly disagreed about whether drinking and other so-called dissipation, discussing one’s peers, and seeking social position were consistent with manly ideals. Manliness in this debate was about independence on the one hand and obedience and deference on the other. It was also about wealth versus poverty and a recognition of the world beyond the college campus, a world that was swiftly changing to value a capitalist market economy. Through their secret societies, men in fraternities were preparing themselves for that world, and they would in the end shape it in ways that ministers in training would not. While it is not clear that ministerial faculty had ever been particularly influential with those students not bound for the ministry, it is clear that the rhetorical battle over definitions of manliness was one that pious men had by and large lost by the end of the antebellum period. (This is further explored in chapter 4.)≤Ω Fraternity Men and Their Others While the majority of their everyday interactions were with classmates and faculty, fraternity men mixed with others as well, including white women and African Americans of both sexes; this was particularly true when they left campus. Examining the ways that they did so helps us better understand the ways that fraternal masculinity, though primarily defined in relation to other college men who were not members, was also the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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thrown into relief by those who were neither white nor male. With exceedingly rare exceptions, colleges in the antebellum period were populated by white, Protestant men.≥≠ Antebellum college students would obviously have known women in their families and in society away from campus. They would probably have come into contact with African Americans as well. This was particularly true of southern students, most of whom were from the planter elite and would have had slaves at home. The men and women who served the students as janitors and servants on campus were sometimes African Americans, and many southern colleges owned slaves. It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to document in any substantial way the range of attitudes toward women and blacks of both sexes that could have been held by antebellum fraternity men.≥∞ Examining what little evidence exists, however, is important, for it tells something of how fraternity men understood themselves—how they defined their manliness at least in part through whiteness and vis-à-vis white women. Most fraternity men did not feel that their servants were important enough to warrant mention in their correspondence or the published accounts of college life.≥≤ Indeed, it is a function of the almost all-white, all-male, all-Protestant exclusivity of colleges in the antebellum period that fraternity men did not primarily define their manliness in relation to white women or to nonwhite people, but instead in relation to their less-privileged and more pious peers. Their differences from white women and from nonwhites were seen as being so obvious and inherent as to merit little insistence. As the final three chapters of this book demonstrate, however, fraternity men began to emphasize their differences from non-Protestants, nonwhites, and white women as these groups began to arrive on college campuses as presumptive equals. These issues are worth investigating in the antebellum context, then, because they set the stage for the much more extensive relations that fraternity men would have with both white women and men and women of color in the next century. fraternity men were undoubtedly conscious of their whiteness and knew that it elevated them above African Americans. Whether they would have in any way questioned this racial hierarchy is another matter. At least by the end of the antebellum period, and much earlier at some schools, slavery became a topic of informal discussion as well as more formal debates in fraternities and literary societies; some colleges founded abolition societies and chapters of the American Colonization Society, whose goal was to establish a colony for emancipated slaves in Liberia. There is little 68 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

reason to believe, however, that antebellum college students of even the most liberal and antislavery leanings would ever have conceived of African Americans as their equals. We do know that fraternities primarily attracted wealthier students, southern students, and students bound for the professions. In all likelihood, these students were not particularly prone to abolitionism, though there would certainly have been exceptions. The students who joined the anti-secret Delta Upsilon Fraternity, for example, regularly debated issues of slavery and emancipation, with some chapters deciding that slavery was wrong and should be abolished and others advocating for colonization in Liberia as a ‘‘solution’’ to the problem of African bondage.≥≥ Fraternities did not, in their founding constitutions, have restrictive clauses barring nonwhites and non-Protestants from membership. One Chinese student, Yung Wing, Yale class of 1854, was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. He may well have been the only person of color to be initiated into a college fraternity in the antebellum period. Because there were so few men of color on college campuses, initiating just one into a fraternity was not seen as the threat to the hegemony of whiteness that it would become later in the century. This was precisely the reason there were no restrictive clauses in the first place: they were simply not seen as necessary.≥∂ Antebellum college students, especially those who went to school in cities or close to them, would have been familiar with blacks as domestics and janitors. Relations with these employees could have ranged from tolerant to paternalistic to hostile. While some African Americans may have worked for the colleges themselves, it is more likely that they worked directly for the students, often serving more than one student at a time by taking in washing or cleaning and maintaining students’ rooms. At some schools, one particular employee became something of a college personality, working at a college or for its students for many years. This was true of James Johnson, a freed slave who worked at Princeton for over four decades. Johnson, nicknamed ‘‘Jim Stink’’ by the students, performed a number of duties at Princeton over the years, spending considerable time as a janitor—or ‘‘Professor of Dust and Ashes,’’ as students at many different colleges referred to this position. Similarly, an African American man described by one student as a ‘‘coon’’ worked in the janitorial department at Amherst College in the 1840s. Phebe Jacobs, a freed slave, supported herself in the 1830s and 1840s by taking in Bowdoin College students’ washing and ironing. Though it went without saying that colleges the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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were populated almost exclusively by white men, the presence of African Americans (and Irish women) as domestics could not have helped but reinforce the privilege of whiteness of the college students who had their laundry done, their floors swept, and their meals prepared by them.≥∑ Southern students at northern schools were increasingly ardent in their defense of slavery toward the end of the antebellum period, even going as far as to found their own clubs and societies (which gives some indication of the degree to which there was opposition to slavery on at least some college campuses). Many of these students were accustomed to a life where their superiority to African Americans was stitched into the everyday fabric of their lives. To be challenged in this, which would only have happened in northern schools, would have been threatening. Princeton was one school in the North that had long attracted more southern students than others, in part because of the conservatism of the faculty, which appealed to southern slaveholders. Northerners and southerners mixed freely at Princeton throughout the height of southern attendance there in the 1840s; as a result of growing tensions between the North and the South over slavery, southerners had begun to segregate themselves by the 1850s (sometimes in separate fraternities from northerners). For students at southern schools, however, the enslavement of African Americans remained simply a fact of life. Thus George Phifer Erwin, a student at Davidson College in North Carolina and a brother in Chi Phi, was accustomed to receiving letters from his friends at home regaling him with stories of (white) ladies and frolics with a ‘‘gallon of Peach brandy’’ that ended with ‘‘fucking niggers.’’ Attitudes toward blacks among antebellum fraternity men outside of the South could well have been just as diverse as they were in the country as a whole, which is to say that most fraternity brothers probably assumed, without giving it much if any thought, their superiority to African Americans. This was part and parcel of what it meant for them to be men. Though it would have differed in significant ways in the North and the South, there is no question that for white men, manliness was inextricably bound up in their whiteness. This was no less true for those who joined college fraternities.≥∏ the evidence related to fraternity men’s interactions with white women is much more plentiful, though it is still limited. Nineteenthcentury men’s correspondence with their male friends was often filled with ruminations on particular women and on womankind more generally. Gendered separate spheres—while certainly permeable—and vastly differ70

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ing gendered expectations for men and women, often made women seem something of a mystery to young men. In a typical entry, Amherst student William Hammond recounted in his diary in 1847 that he ‘‘spent an hour with Read and Pom. over that everlasting theme—womankind.’’ Subjects for discussion included: who was especially pretty and who was not; who was genuine; who had declared her particular affection for some classmate or other; what women meant when they flirted; what women wanted from the men they entertained. Of course students also discussed women in ways that seemed much more vulgar to contemporaneous observers. While young antebellum men talked and wrote about young women at great length, the historical record has been more silent about what they actually did together aside from the more public activities. For college or fraternity men, these public activities would have consisted of visiting nearby women at their homes, visiting women’s academies or seminaries, taking them on walks or carriage and sleigh rides, and perhaps attending a dance or other social event with them. In many ways these were typical for young men and women regardless of their affiliation with a college or academy.≥π Hammond and his friends visited a number of young ladies who lived in the town of Amherst and at the nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. This visiting was fairly commonplace at most colleges, though it seems likely that the wealthier students would have done it more than their poorer counterparts, who would have considered it more of a distraction and also would not have been prepared for entry into society. In Hammond’s case, he and his companions greatly outnumbered the available women, and thus there was some competition for the favor of their attention. Much jealousy ensued. Juniors and seniors seem to have been given preference by the young ladies. It was not unlikely that a young woman might juggle a number of different suitors at one time. A young man might do the same, as Hammond did with Jennie Gridley, who lived in Amherst, and Nelly, a student at Mount Holyoke, whom he knew through connections from home. He even went as far as to introduce the two of them to each other. He recounted that after a lovely carriage ride to Mount Holyoke with Jennie, ‘‘We reached the seminary about half past three. Nelly glad enough to see us. Made her acquainted with Jennie, and they soon became great friends; could not but be amused to see them take every opportunity unobserved to scrutinize each other from head to foot.’’ Here Hammond gave Nelly and Jennie a taste of their own medicine; this was a situation that he had endured many times before, and usually with much more the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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competition from his classmates than either Jennie or Nelly experienced in this instance. The situation described by Yale’s John Mitchell was typical: ‘‘A classmate said to me, ‘I called last evening on the beautiful Miss ——, having often been invited to do so, by some of her acquaintances. I found eleven students there, and she the only lady present! That was enough for me. My call was a short one.’ ’’ Not only were such visits frustrating for men who would scarcely have the chance to talk to the woman upon whom they had called, but any woman who entertained many beaux at one time was also liable to gain something of a reputation. A woman who lived in town and had been courting men for several years without marrying was referred to as the ‘‘college widow’’ because she ‘‘survived’’ while class after class of men graduated. While the college widow might well be very popular with students, even as she grew to be older than the men attending the college, it was not considered seemly to marry her.≥∫ During college, courtships, though heartfelt, were often fleeting. It was forbidden for men to marry while in college, and most would not have considered doing so until well after graduation, when they could have supported themselves, their new wives, and the families they would expect to have. Some students did become engaged during their college years but they often knew that postponing marriage until after graduation— sometimes long after—was necessary. Union College student and Psi Upsilon brother Alexander Hamilton Rice very much wished to marry his sweetheart, Augusta McKim, when he graduated in 1844 but feared he would be unable to do so: ‘‘Could I after graduating with the honors of this venerable college upon my brow take to my side my dear little wife and settle down in some lucrative and comfortable situation in Boston or its vicinity, it would indeed be a situation which a Saint in Paradise might envy me, but dearest would it be showing any affection to take you from your present comfortable home to a situation of less comfort and one of privation and anxiety to us both[?]’’ Most men did not become nearly so attached while they were still in college. While the crushes and loves that young men experienced were certainly genuine for them, it was rare that they would lead to a lifelong commitment until after college ended. In fact, many men were warned against marrying or even becoming engaged to women while in college; they were simply too far away from being able to make that sort of commitment. They were also warned about the perils of spending too much time in visiting young ladies; the practice was said to be overly distracting.≥Ω Women were at once put on pedestals and feared because they were 72

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fascinating and yet also mysterious. They were loved and adored but also suspected, in part because they made men feel things they were unable to control. Nineteenth-century men were supposed to be ever in control of themselves and their actions. They were, however, unable to control women in courting relations, and perhaps more importantly, they were certainly unable to control their own amorous feelings. This they found rather vexing. Despite all of the fascination and adoration of women or a particular woman, it was always understood that women were both fundamentally different from men and their inferiors. The Delta Upsilon Fraternity debated the status of women at a number of their meetings: ‘‘Ought women to have equal political rights with man?’’ ‘‘Ought women to be allowed to vote[?]’’ ‘‘Is the intellect of women equal to that of men?’’ ‘‘Ought females to be admitted to the learned professions?’’ ‘‘Ought the Elective Franchise to be Extended to Women?’’ These questions, debated at Waterville, Williams, Amherst, and Hamilton Colleges, respectively, were all decided in the negative by the assembled membership. In a brilliantly patronizing piece of advice in his Student’s Manual, John Todd counseled his readers: ‘‘It is frequently said that the student should visit, and, in the society of the ladies, to relax his mind. I could never feel that this is any thing different from an insult to the sex. If you do visit with them, it should, in part, be, to be instructive and useful to them, and not to consider them in the mere light of ‘parlor ornaments,’ with the admiration of which it is very pleasant for you to relax your mind after severe study.’’ Men could be instructive to women, but the idea that they might learn anything from them was probably foreign to most college students at the time.∂≠ Most historians of U.S. sexuality agree that premarital sexual contact between antebellum middle- and upper-class men and women was probably minimal. This was particularly true for college men who were supervised, at least while they were actually at college, and provided they lived in dormitories or even boardinghouses. There are a number of exceptions to this rule. Once a couple became betrothed, they might well have engaged in limited sexual activity before marriage or possibly had intercourse. Most college and fraternity men were not engaged, however, and thus would not have been having sex with fiancées. The other sexual possibility for men was with women considered their inferiors. These included slaves, women of lower socioeconomic means, and prostitutes. Recall the letter from George Phifer’s friend, where he recounts having had sex with slaves. Instances of this sort that survive in the historical record the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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are rare. We do know, however, that rape of slaves by masters and their sons was common practice for many in the South: antebellum southern diarists Mary Boykin Chesnut and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas both wrote of the ways they believed that access to slave women was detrimental not just to fully grown men but also to their sons.∂∞ An incident at the University of Mississippi in 1859 is indicative of the right of access that was granted to privileged young southern men. It is also testament to the degree to which these men understood white women and black women as fundamentally different in kind. In May 1859, while Mississippi’s president, Frederick A. P. Barnard, was away from campus with his wife, two students broke into his home with ‘‘shameful designs’’ upon one of his ‘‘defenceless female servants,’’ a slave named Jane. At least one of them, Samuel Humphreys, raped Jane and beat her so severely that for two months she retained visible bruises. The incident provoked an investigation by Barnard upon his return to campus, and Humphreys was expelled. The expulsion itself prompted a full-scale investigation into Barnard’s actions; because he was a northerner, his support of slavery was being questioned. That he had taken the testimony of Jane against her attackers was the crux of the issue. Though he was eventually supported in his decision, students protested in a series of attacks in which other slaves were beaten and branded. Clearly, students at Mississippi did not share Barnard’s ‘‘Yankee’’ position on slavery. The incident, the rape of a slave woman by a white man, demonstrates the degree to which she was understood as being available to these college students and, as such, fundamentally different from white women. There seemed to have been little attempt to cover up the crime in its aftermath, and many students quickly rose to the defense of Jane’s rapist. Access to the bodies of slave women was simply the prerogative of privileged young southern men.∂≤ The nineteenth century saw a rise in the commercialization of sex, especially in urban centers. Writers of student conduct manuals frequently warned students against venturing into these cities, which were seen by many as dens of vice and dissipation. In cities, otherwise virtuous students might be seduced by fallen women and become intoxicated with spirits. Their own downfall was presumed to follow swiftly. The truth of the matter, of course, was that students who chose to drink and visit prostitutes did so of their own accord. While we may never know just how many did, or which students they were, it seems fair to conclude that students involved in fraternities were much more likely to do so than their more pious counterparts. Visiting a prostitute or simply having casual sex with a will74 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

ing woman was a sin, which would have been taken much more seriously by those training for the ministry. Historian Charles Rosenberg outlines the two paths that might be taken by nineteenth-century men in relation to sexuality: they might choose the life of the Christian gentleman, elevating control of sexuality (among other things) as a means of self-definition; or they might choose to emulate more aggressive men, relying upon older notions of powerful sexuality as being inherent to man’s nature. While there was clearly a middle ground between the two, it is more likely that fraternity men would have chosen the latter (more likely, at least, than their pious peers), eschewing Christian control and virtue as they did in so many other ways. The ability to travel to a city or to pay for the services of a prostitute would also have been beyond the means of many of the poorer students. Further, it should be noted that while prostitution was certainly scandalous to nineteenth-century Americans, it was also fairly commonplace. As a sporting culture of drinking, gambling, taverns, and prostitution developed in antebellum cities, visiting a prostitute was not a practice confined to the lower rungs of society; indeed, in New York some brothels existed alongside the homes of the city’s most respectable citizens. These were, of course, the homes of the most expensive prostitutes, but many antebellum college students, fraternity men in particular, were not without a sizable income.∂≥ In negotiating sexual escapades, including prostitution, some fraternity men turned to each other for advice and support. Jimmie Bryan, a Princeton student from North Carolina, kept up a lively correspondence with friends back home as well as with his brothers in Sigma Phi who had already graduated. In one letter, dated May 14, 1857, Bryan’s friend Jenkins Holland told him: ‘‘Miss Mary G is well. She looks charming I tell you. I would not have the slightest objection to put her through some 3 or 4 times. What say you[?] I did get one of the nicest pieces of ass some day or two ago. That I know would set you nearly crazy. I put Belle Furgason through. She lives at Mother Browns in French St.’’ Mary G. and Belle Furgason, if not prostitutes, were certainly not women of the same class and social position as Bryan and his correspondent. A letter dated later in that year from Bryan’s Sigma Phi brother Thomas McKaig seems to be a response to a letter from Bryan asking about women available in Princeton: I write by this mail to the nymphe of Princeton of whom I told you something, in relation to what you propose. I assure that I myself have not the least objection to allowing you to supply [supplant?] my place, the sacred, the secular, and the manly

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provided, of course she is willing. She is quite a respectable girl about 23 or 24 years old and lives in the outskirts of the town—very good looking, in fact I rather think the handsomest woman in Princeton. I am positive no one ever suspected her, or even knew her while I was there—young men I mean—as she was exceedingly retired. As I found her to be remarkably amorous for a woman I have no doubt she will gladly except [sic] the proposition I made to her in my letter, viz. Of the aid of another to quench the raging fires that continually are consuming her. In this correspondence, access to prostitutes was brokered through the connections of fraternal brotherhood. McKaig adhered to the age-old stereotype of the prostitute—or ‘‘fallen woman’’—as being consumed by the fires of desire, whereas women of his own class were presumed to be virtuous and chaste, their role in fact to control the urges of the men who courted them. Indeed, filed with these very letters are ones from friends of Bryan discussing the lovely ladies of their southern society, which might as well have been written about a different species for all they resemble these accounts. In those, the letter writers advised Bryan not to flirt too much with young ladies for fear that he might ‘‘wound the heart you love.’’ These, however, were women of Bryan’s own class and social station.∂∂ Most nineteenth-century men and women adhered to a double standard that understood men as having sexual desires that were both natural and powerful and respectable women as being utterly without these desires. Only fallen women were thought to possess sexual desire. Whether this assertion was true in practice was almost beside the point; many interactions were completely structured by it. To have sex with a woman of one’s own middle- or upper-class social status would be to sully her reputation and thus make her ineligible for marriage (unless one were already engaged to her). If some people believed that men needed to have a sexual ‘‘outlet,’’ they should visit a prostitute or some other woman of inferior status. Thus it seems safe to conclude that if fraternity men were having sex, they were doing so with women they considered their inferiors—if they bothered to consider them much at all.∂∑ One is tempted to speculate here about how sex with women—and the discussions about it after the fact—worked to constitute some men as more manly than others. In other words, to what degree did aggressive heterosexuality define manliness? Historians have argued that this was the case for privileged southern gentlemen, who were encouraged to experiment sexually as long as they did 76 the sacred, the secular, and the manly

not discuss it in mixed company. Their sexual aggression was what partially constituted their dominance as masters or masters in training. Historian Robert Pace has discovered a number of instances of southern college men boasting of their sexual conquests. One student at the University of Virginia in 1840 claimed there were at least eighty cases of venereal disease in college that year alone. With such little evidence about northern fraternity men, however, it is difficult to know whether men discussed their sexual affairs with other men simply for something to talk about or whether they were attempting to prove their manliness.∂∏ On the question of representation, one is able to make some assessments of fraternity men’s interactions with their same-class female peers. While much pleasure may have been gained from the company of women in and of itself, young college men were also distinctly aware of the ways that popularity with young women was beneficial for their reputations as men. James Henry and Christian Scharff explained that classmates paid particular attention to mail that arrived from young lady correspondents. Southern college men often serenaded young women en masse. Sometimes one individual student was followed by his instrument-playing classmates all the way to a young lady’s front door as they announced his arrival. These pranks both embarrassed a suitor and brought him attention: he had an engagement while his friends did not. Noting the way that others understood his relationship with Jennie Gridley, Amherst student William Hammond wrote that ‘‘Jennie is the belle of the village; and it is no bad thing to be ranked among her particular friends.’’ Hammond was aware that it reflected well upon him, presumably with his peers and perhaps with other young ladies as well, to be known as one of Jennie’s friends.∂π The extant evidence also suggests that fraternity membership counted for something among women and others outside the college campus. It was certainly a symbol of popularity on campus, but others paid attention to fraternity status as well. Hammond recounted: ‘‘On our way home, talking of secret societies, Jennie G. gave me both the Psi Upsilon and Alpha Delta Phi grip!’’ That Gridley and Hammond discussed fraternity membership demonstrates that she was cognizant of its meaning and that she knew it was an honor bestowed upon the most popular students. That she knew the handshakes of the two leading fraternities at Amherst tells us that some brothers were not taking their vow of secrecy to heart and, more importantly, that other suitors, in an effort to impress Gridley, had taught her the grips. Fraternity membership, as used by these men, was in all likelihood a means to impress women. In another entry, Hammond dethe sacred, the secular, and the manly

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scribed the commencement exercises of 1847: ‘‘The procession formed at 9 a.m., and in double file we marched to the church; our men all shone in white rosettes, with the ‘jewel’ in the midst: very pretty things that look immensely popular with the ladies and the sub-fresh.’’ ‘‘Our men,’’ in this instance, refers to Hammond’s fraternity brothers, and the ‘‘jewels’’ they wore were their fraternity badges. Hammond was proud of the favorable impression they made, not only upon the soon-to-be-freshmen but also upon the assembled ladies. In a similar fashion, in 1858 Charles Howell, a graduated brother of Sigma Phi, wrote to his brother in hopes of obtaining a badge to replace the one that ‘‘quietly reposes upon the heaving bosom of a young lady—I should be loth to deprive it of so much pleasure.’’ Howell had given the badge to a young lady he was courting as a symbol of his devotion; that she wore it on her bosom is testament to the fact that she knew what it represented and was proud to be affiliated with a fraternity man. As the fraternity movement spread and gained wider currency and press, this desired reaction was cultivated by fraternity men so that they could use their fraternity membership as a sign of manly status—both among their classmates and the women they hoped to impress.∂∫ in addition to the more public functions and activities of fraternities in the antebellum period, fraternity membership conveyed upon brothers a certain identity, a manly identity. It distinguished them from others on their campuses, particularly their poor and pious classmates, by placing emphasis upon their wealth and their social graces. Fraternity men also embraced participation in activities, good grades, a disregard for college rules, and a manly sociability. Antebellum fraternity brothers fashioned an identity for themselves, and they used their fraternity membership to do so. That all antebellum college students, as white men, understood themselves to be superior to both women and African Americans is beyond doubt. Men in fraternities were also able to take advantage of their status in order to entertain and impress women. Fraternities, then, were not just about the activities and feelings they provided for the men who joined them. At least equally important to fraternity men was the way that they employed their membership in order to distinguish themselves from others. It is to this subject that we turn, in a more national context, in the next chapter.

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Chapter Three very fraternally yours National Brotherhood in the Nineteenth Century

In 1857 the secretary of the New York Free Academy chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon sent a letter to his counterpart at what was then called Michigan University: Our chapter looks down on all competitors. Greatly do we exult in our triumph over our hereditary rivals, the 〈[q]⌽s. But one short year has elapsed since we first had the pleasure of sending out our letter of greeting to our sister chapters. Since that time we have worked manfully and the result is that being firmly established we look forward to long years of undisputed supremacy. Our late convention has inspired each man with new energy and a stronger determination (if possible) to strive increasingly to the object of our glorious Fraternity—we are gratified to hear of your continued and increasing prosperity—tidings of this kind add an additional lustre to the name of q⌲⌭ and find an echo in our own hearts always respondent to the individual and combined interests of our widespread brotherhood. This letter exemplifies the increasing sense of national brotherhood engendered by the spread of college fraternities in the second half of the nineteenth century. As fraternities began to be founded across the nation, chapters at different schools took to corresponding with each other on a regular basis. They began to establish alumni associations, hold conven79

tions of both alumni and active members, and publish fraternity magazines, newsletters, and catalogues of alumni and current members. They hired administrators and traveling secretaries (often fraternity alumni) to manage, coordinate, and, to some degree, to regulate the uniformity of their various branches.∞ In their nationwide expansion, fraternities decided who might become a brother through the acceptance or rejection of petitions for charters from groups seeking to become chapters in already existing fraternities. Key to this process was a careful examination into the reputation and prestige of the school where the new chapter would be based. Fraternity men relied upon these reputations in order to decide whether to allow new chapters to affiliate. Through correspondence with each other, they simultaneously sought to reassure their brothers at other schools that they were maintaining and preserving the good name of their fraternity in the next state or halfway across the country. Fraternities also provided real material benefits that could be accrued from a growing national membership. Nineteenthcentury fraternity men were keenly aware that their fraternities provided them with connections of both a business and social nature. The birth of regional alumni associations, alumni conventions, and catalogues as well as the publicity surrounding the successes of famous alumni all attest to a fraternity membership that was increasingly cognizant of the tangible benefits that might come from being members of an exclusive, moneyed, and educated elite. The correspondence of fraternities also demonstrates the psychic significance that national brotherhood held for them. The archives contain a wealth of material detailing the ways that fraternity men sought connection with their brothers, quite often men they would never meet but to whom they believed themselves united in the bonds of a sacred fraternity. This correspondence, far from being an ancillary task to the true purpose of the fraternity, was in fact a way for fraternity men of the nineteenth century to understand themselves as part of an ‘‘imagined fraternity of white men.’’≤ It was, after all, partly fraternities’ national component that distinguished them from the myriad other organizations to which young, white, college men belonged at their primarily single-sex schools. The purpose of all this correspondence, then, was both to relay news of one chapter’s prosperity to another chapter and actually to create the brotherhood that the correspondence so enthusiastically described. This brotherhood, and the various ways that nineteenth-century fraternity men sought to establish it, are evidence of an increased anxiety about a 80

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nation in the midst of great change. The second half of the nineteenth century brought about major changes in the United States as the nation moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy, increasing numbers of citizens migrated to urban areas, larger numbers of immigrants arrived in those cities, and the advent of corporations created a rise in the employment of men in business and finance. From a world of defined trades and apprenticeships, white men in the middle-to-late nineteenth century increasingly encountered a world of jobs with ill-defined responsibilities and no guarantee of automatic advancement. Fraternity men used the networks established through their fraternities to attempt to safeguard their privilege, a privilege that they were becoming more and more aware might not always be theirs. In this context, the alumni house and the fraternity reunion, both physical spaces, served as a ‘‘gendered space,’’ a clearly marked separate sphere and a means for the preservation of male power through solidarity and exclusivity of access. This would have been particularly appealing to men during a time when women began to play more significant roles in public venues such as the suffrage movement, urban reform, and education. Not only did fraternity men reap the benefits of business and social connections, but they also experienced a psychological comfort through the preservation of allmale spaces in an increasingly mixed-gender world. These spaces were exclusively gendered and set aside for very particular men—college-educated men, men of a certain class, men of a certain fraternity.≥ Fraternity alumni associations, reunions, and clubs also allowed men to prolong intimate friendships, based partially on nostalgia, throughout their adult lives. While the intimate male friendships of white middle- and upper-class nineteenth-century men often ended when they got married (unlike friendships between women), postgraduate fraternity functions allowed men to preserve these friendships, albeit on a more communal basis. The significance of fraternities’ increasingly national reach, previously unexplored in the literature on masculinity and fraternal organizations, should not be ignored. The national character of fraternities plays a key part in explaining their growth and appeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.∂ college fraternities began to spread across the nation at greater rates during the 1840s and 1850s. New chapters were established throughout the South, Midwest, and Northeast. In the 1860s there was a sharp drop-off in the number of new chapters established due to the upheaval caused by the Civil War, but the 1870s again saw an increase in the birth of very fraternally yours

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chapters. By 1880 the ratio of chapters of men’s national fraternities (as opposed to solely local organizations) to male college students was 1:107, compared to 1:253 in 1850. The number of fraternities increased as more colleges were established to meet the needs of a growing nation.∑ Almost from the beginning, men in fraternities were interested in establishing what they called sister chapters, extending their brotherhood across the nation. Unlike the literary and debate societies that existed at most colleges in the nineteenth century that did not have ties to similar societies at other colleges, fraternities were self-consciously aligned with their chapters at other schools. That alignment was one of the key differences between fraternities and any of the other organizations that existed at these colleges. National fraternities offered a way for college students to form bonds with their peers at similar institutions. Fraternity men understood their brothers at other schools, no matter how distant they were geographically, as being similar to them by dint of membership in the same fraternity—as an imagined community of sorts.∏ Reputation and Belonging: ‘‘The Company He Keeps’’ In her book on the mores of the middle class in an increasingly classmobile country, historian Karen Halttunen argues that the mid-nineteenth century was a period during which U.S. Americans were obsessed with evaluating each other’s outward appearances as the key to their true character. Halttunen writes: ‘‘In what was believed to be a fluid social world where no one occupied a fixed social position, the question ‘Who am I?’ loomed large; and in an urban social world where many of the people who met face-to-face each day were strangers, the question ‘Who are you really?’ assumed even greater significance.’’ Membership in a particular college fraternity was one way of answering both questions. It was a way of establishing oneself as respectable and connected. Membership in the right fraternity acted as a sort of imprimatur on the college campus; but perhaps more importantly, it also did so when a fraternity man traveled away from college, where those he encountered would probably not know him. A fraternity man became known by the company with which he affiliated himself. Thus he constantly had to be wary of who he let into his fraternity because he could always be judged, or misjudged, by another’s conduct. He understood his reputation as being affected by the actions of his fraternity brothers, even if he did not know them personally. Fraternity men used their fraternities quite consciously as a means of controlling the 82

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way that they would be understood by the rest of the world, or perhaps more specifically, by the rest of their white, middle-class world. As fraternity booster and educational commentator James Hulme Canfield puts it: ‘‘You are to be more intimate with these society men than with any others; an intimacy which from the very conditions of fraternity associations has a direct and peculiar bearing and influence upon all your after life. A man is always known by the company he keeps, and you are to keep company with these men for at least four of the most important years of your existence. It behooves you, therefore, to make choice of these associates with extraordinary care.’’π As fraternities spread to colleges where Greek-letter organizations had not previously been established or colonized chapters at schools that already had thriving fraternity scenes, members were able to decide which schools would be fortunate enough to be allowed a chapter of their fraternity. They made these decisions based on the reputation of the schools, the recommendations of fraternity alumni, and the self-representation of those men who were petitioning for a charter. The procedure for establishing a chapter of a fraternity was fairly standard. Usually, a group of young men would join together with the purpose of petitioning a national fraternity for a charter to start a chapter of that fraternity at their school. While local fraternities did exist, many saw the benefits of national membership as being preferable to a purely local membership. Often one of the members of the colony (as the petitioning group is called) might have heard of the fraternity at another school, or he might have had a friend or an elder brother who had belonged to the fraternity elsewhere. Perhaps he himself had belonged to the fraternity at another school and had transferred recently to his current institution. As fraternities became more well known during this period, certain fraternities had particularly appealing reputations—often dependent upon the schools where the fraternities already had chapters—and thus were chosen as the nationals to which the hopeful students addressed their petition. Depending upon where they were founded, fraternities often had more developed reputations in different regions of the country, with some fraternities known explicitly as southern, midwestern, or eastern. It was also essential that a fraternity did not already have a chapter at the school the men attended. Once a number of men were joined together and had pledged themselves to form a chapter, they would write to the founding chapter of the fraternity (or, toward the end of the century, to the newly established national headquarters of the organization). Their letters usually detailed very fraternally yours

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the number of men involved, their rank in college both by class and by scholarship, and the activities in which they were involved. If they felt that the school they attended might not be familiar to those to whom they wrote, they also provided information about the institution’s student body, endowment, and academic and athletic strengths. They sought to impress the founding chapter by the reputation of their school and by their selfpresentation as dynamic, intelligent, and manly potential brothers. It was then up to the founding chapter, often in consultation with the other chapters—and toward the end of the century by vote of an annual convention— to decide whether or not to grant the charter. By way of example, what follows is an example of a letter sent by the Tri Delta Society, a local fraternity at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to the parent chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Yale: By this same mail we send to you a circular or statement, published by us, concerning the University of Illinois. The local fraternity, the Tri-Delta which is seeking to become a chapter of D.K.E., is in a very prosperous condition. At present we have sixteen men, together with five spiked,∫ distributed in the various classes. As to our standing in the University, for the last two terms we have received fifty-three first grades (95 or above) and all of our men have maintained a grade above the average. As to our standing in athletics, we hold the following University records, 120 yd. (high hurdle) 17 sec., 220 yd. (low hurdle) 28 sec., high jump 5 ft. 8 ∞⁄≤ in. high kick 8 ft. 10 in. the pole vault and mile walk 7 min. 58 sec. We are also represented on the Athletic Teams and in all the musical organizations, having all of the numbers of the University Quartet members or spiked. Nearly all of our men hold some office or offices of trust and honor in the University, and every man has been asked to join one or more fraternities. As a local fraternity we have received offers of a chapter from two fraternities and intimations from several others of good standing. At any time we would be pleased to give any information in regard to the University or this fraternity and if at any time any of your men find it convenient to be here we will be pleased to entertain them as best we can. The men of Tri Delta sought admission to Delta Kappa Epsilon by extolling the virtues of their members through the listing of academic, athletic, 84 very fraternally yours

and other extracurricular achievements, and also by hinting that Delta Kappa Epsilon might lose them to other fraternities if they did not grant a charter in the near future. They also attempted to reassure the men of Delta Kappa Epsilon, should they have questions about the university they attended, by including a statement about the virtues of the University of Illinois. It would now be up to the parent chapter, perhaps in consultation with the other chapters, to make up its mind.Ω In 1858, at Alpha Delta Phi’s annual convention, the councilor offered these thoughts on the applications submitted by men at Cumberland University (Lebanon, Tenn.), Rutgers College (New Brunswick, N.J.), and Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio): ‘‘The dignity, usefulness and harmony of our Fraternity will rather be guaranteed than imperilled [sic] by a judicious and gradual expansion of its bounds, and that there is nothing in each of these three applications, known to me, which should prevent its being granted, unless one take the ground that the Fraternity is already sufficiently extended, and that all future expansion is therefore injudicious.’’ The councilor had considered the merits of each of the applications and, finding nothing improper about the schools or the petitioners, opined that they should be granted charters. Further discussion of the Kenyon application revealed that the college was in a ‘‘flourishing condition’’ and that the petitioners were ‘‘among the most prominent men in the institution.’’ All three were approved by the convention’s delegates.∞≠ In 1885 a brother in Delta Upsilon (q⌼) wrote to another about the possibilities for expansion: ‘‘While we as a body favor the idea, we still think some caution should be exercised against a too rapid multiplication of chapters in the small and distant colleges. In several of the institutions mentioned in your letter it would be highly desirable to establish chapters of Delta Upsilon. Foremost among them Dartmouth, Univ. of Ver., Boston Univ., Trinity, Wesleyan, and Columbia.’’ The next year, the recording secretary of the University of Michigan Chapter of Delta Upsilon recorded in the chapter’s minutes: ‘‘Standing Committee on DePauw University— The com. finds the university highly endowed and the committee approves of the establishment of a chapter of q⌼ there, providing the institution appears to be improving in grade.’’ Obviously, there was some concern over the reputation of DePauw in terms of scholarship and the caliber of its students, but after considering the size of their endowment, Michigan’s Delta Upsilon seemed willing to take a chance. The brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon were not so willing when in 1862 they received a petition from a group of students at Washington College in Washington, Pennsylvery fraternally yours

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vania: ‘‘Bro. Woodhull of B[eta], Chairman of Com. on granting charters read a letter from Washington Coll. Washington Penn. petitioning for a charter + reported unfavorably. On motion of Bro. Elliott of N[u] the report of the com. was received, accepted and adopted as the sense of the convention.’’ In this instance, whatever Brother Woodhull had managed to find out about Washington College or about the potential brothers there had not been satisfactory, and the petition was denied. The concern for all three of the fraternities discussed above—three of the oldest and most prestigious in the nation—was that the reputation of newer and less-wealthy schools was not proven. In an era of massive growth in higher education, the councils routinely rejected schools that were less established and approved those that had been in existence for a longer time. If the reputations of the schools were not proven, the caliber of their students was similarly suspect. One of their fears was that a poorer grade of brother would reflect negatively upon them and lower the standing of their fraternity.∞∞ Nathan D. Corbin, a Michigan Delta Upsilon brother, offered a good summation of the means of evaluating members in 1885: It naturally follows that the character of the college, its reputation, will be an index to the presence of a desirable class of men or not. Now any college that drags along a feeble existence or is kept in condition merely by an endowment sufficient to cover expense is not a college for us. Neither is an institution fitted for a chapter of q⌼ that has but a few good students although its reputation for some certain line of work is very good. For in such a college, although many fine students, men every way worthy to become members may be found, yet there is no guarantee that that condition of things will be permanent, and it [is] more than likely that a chapter so planted would either drag along a weary public existence or else be compelled to elect inferior men to fill up its ranks. I sincerely hope that the fraternity will never expose itself to the danger of being compelled to recognize other than true gentlemen and careful scholars as its members. We are judged as a whole as we are known through individuals. This thought will prove a salutary check upon any inexpedient haste in decision upon any college. . . . [W]e must enter first class colleges only. One could not ask for a more thorough explication of the reasons for exercising care in selecting which schools might be granted charters. Corbin was worried about his own reputation more than anything else.∞≤ The other method by which a chapter might be established was for 86 very fraternally yours

some interested party, usually a fraternity alumnus or an active brother, to attempt to organize some men on a college campus where a chapter of his fraternity did not yet exist. He did this with the understanding that, if the college were good enough, it would behoove his fraternity to have representation there. Conversely, if his fraternity were not represented at a school of some repute, it would reflect poorly upon his brotherhood and upon their abilities to organize. There was a real sense of looking forward when founding chapters. A fraternity did not want to be without representation at a particular school if it stood a good chance of becoming prestigious because they would lose out on the fellowship of the students at that school while also being known as a fraternity that was not present at a school of some import. The counsel of an alumnus or active brother was thus particularly valued because it was understood that he had the same concerns about reputation as his brothers. For instance, in 1890 a man named A. R. Moore, an alumnus of Delta Upsilon, found himself in law school in his home state at the University of Minnesota. He wrote to the Delta Upsilon powers that be: It is almost needless to say that I am emphatically in favor of establishing a Chapter at the University of Minnesota provided it is done very shortly, and that good material is carefully selected to begin with. The second of these conditions grows from the first, for unless we move rapidly in the matter, the cream of the students will be taken. . . . I take much self pride in establishing a good chapter at my old home and among my old associates, or none at all. . . . I am equally certain [that it is advisable to establish a chapter], only we must be a trifle careful in the men we select at first, in order that our chapter may outrank all others. In another letter to a fellow alumnus, Moore cautioned about simply admitting the group of Minnesota undergraduates who were themselves petitioning for a charter. He was desirous of establishing a chapter there but wanted to make sure that the right men were chosen. He explained: Don’t on any consideration grant a chapter to the University of Minnesota without having a committee of the Fraternity pass on all the men individually—that is, don’t on any consideration take in bodily all among those who have applied for the Chapter. They have all been strangers to me until very recently and I should deem it unwise to take in some of the applicants that I have met: because justice fo[r] very fraternally yours

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ourselves demands that we should not prefer inferior men to excellent ones. . . . There is much excellent material to utilize—men who I would gladly associate with and respect as equals and this is the case. It is striking in these exchanges how indifferent the correspondents seem to be about the amiability of the men who might become their brothers; they are obviously much more interested in how they themselves will be understood and evaluated if they allow certain men from certain schools into their fraternity. By the later nineteenth century, one of the unfortunate side effects of national brotherhood—especially among alumni—was a concern about reputation at the expense of many of the founding ideals of fraternity life.∞≥ A similar exchange took place between two graduated brothers of Kappa Sigma in regard to the granting of a charter at Trinity College (later Duke University) in October 1892. In this letter, Fred Harper, a Trinity alumnus studying law at the University of Virginia (where he had joined Kappa Sigma), urged his brother to grant a charter to the five young men from Trinity petitioning for membership. He described three of the petitioners as ‘‘the best all-round athlete in the South undoubtedly,’’ ‘‘the sportiest, best young fellow in Trinity today,’’ and as ‘‘an honor man’’ who plays on the football team. He also took pains to endorse the families of the petitioners as ‘‘one of the best in Monroe, N.C., as Daniels’ is in New Bern’’ and one of the ‘‘best in Vance County.’’ Of the only one he did not know personally, he wrote: ‘‘They say he has plenty of money and promises well in college.’’ Harper continued by emphasizing that Trinity, already acknowledged to be the best college in North Carolina, ‘‘bids fair to become the best college in the South.’’ Thus it would behoove Kappa Sigma to have a chapter placed there quickly, as the boys would certainly apply to another fraternity if they did not hear soon from the recipient of Harper’s letter. In this instance, a brother was looking out for the wellbeing of his fraternity and his alma mater.∞∂ The southern chapters of Chi Psi Fraternity were preoccupied with the issue of fraternity expansion throughout the later 1850s. They were anxious to see further charters granted to southern schools because many of the active members felt that they were able to interact with southern brothers far too infrequently. It is also clear from the correspondence, however, that the Chi Psi men were anxious about establishing the same good reputation in the South that their fraternity already enjoyed in the North. This could only be accomplished by spreading out to appropriate 88 very fraternally yours

schools south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In 1859 William Wooster wrote to Robert B. Maclean: ‘‘The propriety of increasing the number of our Southern chapters is obvious. We have but three and consequently never have the pleasure of meeting a Southern brother unless he be a member or graduate of our University.’’ A letter written a few days later by another brother echoes these themes: ‘‘I, as every true hearted Chi Psi should be am opposed to allowing our Club to be established at one horse Colleges but when we have an opportunity of putting it at the right sort of Colleges, I do believe it to be to our interest to take advantage of the opportunity presented and render enduring service to our peculiar Institution.’’ In voting against the granting of a charter to a group at Baylor University in Texas, one brother explained: ‘‘As we think it rather a ‘one-horsed’ affair we have refused to grant it and hope you will endorse our decision. With a chapter in the University of Virginia and one in the great ‘Southern University’ when organized, we will rest contented. There is clearly no good resulting from the foundation of chapters in every little prep school of the country, but rather it has a pernicious effect upon our standing inasmuch as it excites the ridicule and contempt of [illegible word] around us.’’ Chi Psi correspondents described the various institutions where petitioning groups were located, offered up alumni and active brother recommendations, and attested to personal acquaintance with the petitioners—all in support of petitions from groups at the University of Mississippi, Furman University, South Carolina College, and the Georgia Military Institute. In short, they used every existing strategy in order to develop for Chi Psi a reputation of prestige in the southern states.∞∑ Because of this overwhelming concern about reputation, a large amount of correspondence among sister chapters of nineteenth-century college fraternities is preoccupied with reassuring each other of the prosperity and success of whichever chapter is writing the letter. As we saw in chapter 1, one of the prime ways of doing this was to compare one’s chapter to the chapters of other fraternities; one chapter’s superiority was used as a gauge of its prosperity and as a way of reassuring brothers at another school that they could be depended upon to hold high the name of the fraternity. In this vein, in March 1862 the scriptor of the Miami University chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon wrote to the Michigan chapter: Kappa sends greetings to Omicron and wishes her a prosperity equal only to that which she enjoys—the banner of q⌲⌭ floats proudly at Miami with 15 as true sons to uphold it as can be found in any chapter very fraternally yours

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of our Fraternity. In the recent Literary Societies and class elections, every aspiring q⌲⌭ was successful and in the class of ’64, containing but three of us, we received the Presidency, Poem, and the last of the two orations. We only wish that Kappa may always occupy her present position at Miami. The posture of 〈q⌽ Fraternity at our institution excites the sympathies of everyone ‘‘not opposed opposed [sic] conscientiously to secret societies’’ for this chapter numbers but 8 specimens decidedly of the milk and water order.∞∏ This letter is typical in a number of ways. First, the Kappa chapter explains that its brothers are as true as any brothers anywhere else in Delta Kappa Epsilon. It does this by elucidating the number of awards that the members have received in recent elections. It closes by asserting its superiority over its closest rival, Alpha Delta Phi. While ostensibly just delivering news to its brothers at Michigan, this letter also serves to reassure them that they are being well represented in other parts of the country.∞π The scriptors of Delta Kappa Epsilon spilled no small amount of ink in describing the superiority of their brothers over other members of ‘‘College.’’ For instance, in 1855 scriptor R. Frank Hawthorne of the University of Alabama wrote: ‘‘We embody emphatically the talent as well as the soul of College.’’ In the same year, the scriptor of the Kenyon chapter claimed that ‘‘without exaggeration . . . the best students in the institution are enlisted under the banners of our glorious Fraternity.’’ The next year, L. H. Mangam of the Princeton chapter wrote: ‘‘We have the choice of the students in College. All our members are high-minded and intelligent gentleman’’; and M. Strother, scriptor of the chapter at the University of Virginia, recounted that his fraternity had ‘‘enough members and of the right sort.’’ These declarations, while tinged with a certain brotherly competitiveness, also worked to reassure chapters far away that their name was not being sullied.∞∫ The words of two of the first presidents of Michigan’s chapter of Delta Upsilon are instructive in this regard. Both were particularly concerned with honor as well as the degree to which a fraternity man’s brothers were counting upon him. In February 1877, W. L. Jenks included the following in his inaugural speech to his brothers: ‘‘We must remember that we have to sustain not only the honor of our chapter here and through her the honor of the Fraternity but also to realize the expectations of the other chapters in regard to us. How many perhaps remember that at the Convention a year ago at Ithaca, the announcement that a chapter had been successfully es90

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tablished at Michigan University was received with long and enthusiastic applause.’’ This was an explicit concern over the conduct of Michigan’s brothers and the expectations that will be placed upon them by their brothers at other schools. Six years later, in his own inaugural address, President H. D. Burnett elaborated on this theme: ‘‘But, what is of more vital importance to the good standing of Delta U. is first—the character of the men that it admits, and second,—the work that it does. The first point cannot be overestimated. Every society is judged by the character of its members, and for this purpose the least brilliant will invariably be selected.’’ Burnett recognized the judgments others passed on fraternity men. He was concerned that the misbehavior of only one member of his chapter would reflect poorly on himself and on all his brothers, both in his own chapter and at others located elsewhere.∞Ω In his fantastically detailed, 700-page tome Four Years at Yale, published in 1871, Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg noted: ‘‘Yale D.K.E. men in many cases do not wear their badges in the vicinity of certain of their chapters, of the extended numbers of which they are heartily ashamed. A report, which was perhaps meant as a joke, used to prevail about college to the effect that D.K.E. raised some of the money to pay for its hall by selling charters to all applicants who would give fifty dollars apiece for them. However this may be, it is certain that the great number of its chapters is the chief source of its weakness as a fraternity.’’ Bagg was cognizant of the fact that men were judged by the company they kept, and while it may have been that Yale Delta Kappa Epsilon men chose not to wear their badges to avoid having to associate with ‘‘inferiors’’ on other campuses, it seems to have been even more important that their presumptive equals at other schools not mistake them for their own unexceptional members. This is a telling testament to the degree to which fraternity men of the mid- to late nineteenth century felt themselves constantly judged either by outward appearances or by association, as well as evidence that for some students, their reputation as men of a superior college (in this case, Yale) was more important to them than their reputation as men of a particular fraternity.≤≠ In order to assuage fears about reputation, Alpha Delta Phi actually set down explicit rules for the defense of a brother’s character in its founding constitution. Furthermore, it shall be the duty of each member of the Society, openly and faithfully to defend the intellectual and moral character of every brother member whenever it may be unwarrantally attacked: and to very fraternally yours

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correct and silence if possible, all false and malicious reports calculated to injure the reputation and prospects of any member of this society. And further every member shall consider himself morally and religiously bound, as far as he is able, under all circumstances, to consult the interests of every brother member. He shall also by all expedient means endeavor to correct the faults he may observe in the conduct and opinions of every brother, which may have a tendency to injure him, in the estimation of his friends, or bring reproach on the Society. In this fraternity, not only was a brother bound to defend the honor of his brothers, but he was also bound to correct his brother’s behavior in an effort to better his character. While one can certainly suppose that monitoring of behavior was for the improvement of all members, it also seems clear that there was a concern for the way that poor manners and misbehavior might reflect upon one’s fellow brothers and hence the fraternity as a whole.≤∞ As a final example of brotherly concern about reputation, a lengthy letter written in 1877 and sent by the Eta Alpha (⌯〈) chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, located at Washington and Lee, is particularly illuminating: Our Chapter (⌯〈) has not been in a flourishing condition for some two years, owing to the great excess to which such societies have been carried in our University. There have been some fifteen or twenty established here, of which a large majority care nothing for any of the requisites which a man must possess to be fit for initiation into our own fraternity. The result has been the death of several chapters already which preferred an honorable death to a disreputable life. The ⌾⌽ & ⍜q⌾ have become extinct, while a few years ago both had good chapters here. The w⌾ and q⌿ have lapsed into a sad state of degeneracy, worse in our opinion than death. This is owing to the rush made by a lot of parvenu chapters of fraternities with no prestige and no reputation to care for, after every new student who has any pretensions to [illegible word] of any kind. Our chapter has always declined to take in any man until he took a good stand among us as a gentleman, sans reproche, if not a high stand in his classes. Now, however, all the men we could have as clubmates are gobbled up blindly by other fraternities before we are enabled to judge of them. Our chapter has never been very large, but has always taken the highest stand in College—I mean as men of high tone, rather than as 92

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scholars, though we have not been surpassed in the latter respect either. Last session we had six members, four of whom graduated—one taking A.B., one B.S., and two M.A. being two out of five who took that degree—our highest. We wrote you last session an account of our status, proposing to keep our charter till this session, and, if unable to rally, to return it to you for safekeeping. You approved our course. Having done our best, we have concluded, rather than compromise our dignity as a fraternity, and soil the hitherto untarnished and beloved scroll, which we have as little right as inclination to do, to send back our charter. We do this with real grief, but with the belief that it not only best under the circumstances, but our duty to our sister Chapters. We assure them all that no harm has accrued to the fraternity through our Chapter. I hope that when this rage for fraternities shall have subsided, we may reorganize here. It is a good place for a Chapter, as we have some as pure and ingenious young men as there are in the world. I hope you will receive this in time to report our action to the Convention. We beg you will keep our Charter safe, as we shall our pledges, and we hope some day to ask it again of your hands. In this letter, the brothers at Washington and Lee were so concerned about sullying the reputation of Delta Kappa Epsilon for their fellow brothers that they have opted no longer to remain brothers in the fraternity at all. While they were also quick to boast about their accomplishments, they recognized that they were too few in number to truly compete with other fraternities at their school, whose Greek system was itself in something of a shambles; thus they chose, as others had done before them, an ‘‘honorable death to a disreputable life.’’ There is no question that these men—and indeed many of the fraternity correspondents—wrote with a rhetorical flourish that itself may have been designed to impress their fellow brothers. However, that this chapter did in fact surrender its charter is indicative of their desire not to disappoint those to whom they had pledged their brotherhood.≤≤ Taken together, these concerns about honor and reputation all point to an increased anxiety about how one could know or evaluate the people with whom one came into contact in an increasingly anonymous country. In 1871 Bagg wrote in the concluding chapter of Four Years at Yale: ‘‘I would accept a college man’s society record as a better indication of his very fraternally yours

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character than any other single test, save personal acquaintance itself.’’ Bagg admitted that personal acquaintance provided the most accurate way to judge a man’s character. However, as was increasingly the case among an urbanizing, mobile U.S. citizenry, one would not always know the people with whom one interacted, or even know people who knew them. College fraternity membership served as a way of being vouched for, a means of reassurance through one’s connection to a larger national organization with which other men (and women) would be familiar. It was the possibility of being judged without the knowledge afforded by personal acquaintanceship that so haunted nineteenth-century fraternity men. Membership in a national fraternity was a solution to this problem; at the same time, it was fraught with difficulties, because when all was said and done, the behavior of others was sometimes beyond the grasp of one’s control. Thus while fraternity men of the nineteenth century were eager to cultivate a national membership, they also did not quite trust themselves to do so. They relied upon the opinions of others when choosing their associates. They knew that national membership could bring tangible as well as more ephemeral benefits, but in a country as large as the United States, they were often unable to be as careful as they would have liked.≤≥ National Membership: The Benefits Fraternity men were keenly aware of the tangible benefits that might accrue to them as members of a national organization bound by ties of loyalty to brothers across an ever-expanding United States. Because of this, during the second half of the nineteenth century, they worked to solidify and regulate the connections between active members and especially among alumni. To that end, they began to hold annual fraternity and alumni conventions. They established regional alumni associations that often purchased alumni halls in major cities like New York for the use of dues-paying alumni. These halls—like the alumni clubs established by some colleges, often complete with restaurants and overnight guest rooms —provided all-male sanctuaries in cities. Fraternities standardized their badges and their secret handshakes so that members could identify each other, and they published catalogues and newsletters so that alumni and active members could contact each other. All of these efforts made it possible for alumni to profit from the connections established by their membership in a fraternity. As an alumnus of Sigma Chi put it: ‘‘The fraternity is an attempt to systematize these social relationships, regulate them, make 94

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them permanent, concentrate them in the case of a man with too large and thin an acquaintance, enlarge them in the case of a fellow too selfish and solitary in his habits.’’≤∂ Fraternities published catalogues of both current and alumni members. The most detailed catalogues included the addresses and professions of alumni, as well as military, political, civil, and collegiate titles of individuals when they were particularly distinguished. They also were organized by city and state, so that a fraternity man could find brothers wherever he moved or visited. Kemp Battle, a historian of the University of North Carolina, recounted the following about nineteenth-century unc fraternity men and their use of fraternity connections: I was informed by Judge Augustus Van Wyck, of Brooklyn, N.Y., that his membership at Chapel Hill was of eminent service to him when he settled, a stranger, in New York. The members there from other institutions soon gave him a large, pleasant and profitable circle of friends. Similar testimony as to their value was given after the reopening in 1875 before the Board of Trustees by General Julian S. Carr, Captain James A. Graham, Colonel Paul B. Means and the late Eugene L. Morehead.≤∑ Also available were volumes such as Greek Letter Men of Pittsburg[h] (which conveniently included other cities of western Pennsylvania and Wheeling, West Virginia), Greek Letter Men of New York, Greek Letter Men of Chicago, and a number of other cities and regions. These regional Greek guides were published at the turn of the century and provided detailed means of contacting various men in the cities that they covered. William Raimond Baird, author of the first edition of American College Fraternities, which would subsequently become known as Baird’s Manual of College Fraternities, the bible of the Greek system, noted in 1879 that ‘‘the oldest and best of the Greek-Letter fraternities publish neat and tasteful catalogues of their members at stated intervals. These catalogues are at times expensive, and are illustrated by one or two steel engravings, and a plate of symbols or coat of arms for each chapter.’’≤∏ Fraternity members in the mid- to late nineteenth century were particularly avid collectors of these catalogues. They relied upon them to know who their brothers were. They were also especially anxious that they be properly included in any published catalogue, fearing that if they were not, their status as a brother could never be sufficiently verified by those very fraternally yours

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Kappa Sigma ‘‘Members at Old Trinity,’’ 1870s. This photo array was published in a thirty-fifth-anniversary volume designed to celebrate Kappa Sigma’s history at Duke University (founded as Trinity College). (Reproduced by permission of Duke University Archives)

with whom they were not personally acquainted. In 1862, following an apparent bungling of the previous year’s catalogue, the scriptor of Michigan’s Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter wrote to the Yale chapter, which was responsible for the printing of catalogues: Omicron is quite anxious that her members be correctly printed in the forthcoming catalogue, for in the last one she is horribly misprinted. Names of residences are put in the places of names of members. Names are repeated. Names are left out entirely. Names are transposed from one class to another, or written in both classes—all this too in the space of less than a page and half. To make sure that it is all right Omicron is desirous of being allowed the correction of a Proof Sheet. She is willing to pay the extra amount on the price of the catalogues so as to relieve ⌽ of the postage expenses, if she be thus accommodated. Members of the Omicron chapter were obviously upset at the mistakes made in rendering their brotherhood into print; part of the reason for this is that they understood that it would be difficult for brothers at other schools to correctly identify them as brothers in Delta Kappa Epsilon. Similarly, the newly established Cornell chapter wrote in 1870 that, among other things, they hoped that the fact of their recent acceptance into Delta Kappa Epsilon would not prevent them being included in the soon-to-beprinted catalogues. Indeed, when the Phi chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon put off publishing the catalogue due to the upheaval caused by the Civil War, a number of chapters, Michigan’s chief among them, complained that they saw ‘‘no good reason in the existence of the war why it should not go immediately on.’’≤π Fraternity badges (what today might be called pins) were a way for a fraternity man to recognize a brother if he did not know him personally. They were also a way for individuals to boast of their membership in a fraternity. As Baird explained, ‘‘When the college colors are worn in connection with the badge, and no fraternity colors are used, the college, chapter, and fraternity can thus be told at a glance.’’ Men wore these badges not just on campus but also in the outside world. Recall Bagg’s example of the Yale Delta Kappa Epsilon men who concealed their badges when visiting schools with lesser q⌲⌭ chapters. The implication was that, unless a brother deliberately decided to do otherwise, he usually wore his badge at all times. Plainly, much of this has to do with status before the rest of society. There was a certain cachet in being a college man, and a further very fraternally yours

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prestige accompanied one’s membership in a fraternity. This was a cachet associated with class and with a particular kind of classed masculinity.≤∫ The badges were a hot commodity for fraternity men. Upon initiation, men were able to purchase and wear a badge bearing their fraternity’s name. When there were delays in the production or sending of the badges, the neophytes often became anxious, as if they were unable to fully take advantage of the benefits of membership without their badges. A brisk correspondence in the first half of 1862 between a number of different chapters of Delta Kappa Epsilon is illustrative of this. Though the details of the letters are themselves somewhat tedious, they demonstrate an anxiety over having enough badges for all members of a chapter and a desire to have those badges be uniform. As the dies used to cast the badges were sometimes accidentally destroyed or misplaced, the issue of uniformity arose. The men of Delta Kappa Epsilon wanted the badges to match so that there was no question about who did or did not belong to the fraternity.≤Ω All fraternities also had a secret handshake, or ‘‘grip.’’ The grip, depending upon the secrecy with which it was guarded (and this was an issue of great concern), allowed fraternity men to verify that a stranger was a brother. All men in the same fraternity would have the same secret grip. If there was any doubt about a man’s membership—if he was not wearing his badge or if one suspected that he had obtained his badge illegally—all one had to do was shake his hand in order to confirm his membership. The following anecdote from Alpha Delta Phi’s thirty-seventh annual convention gives some indication of the importance of grips to fraternity men: Brother North of Hamilton reported from the committee on Grip. By motion of Brother Betts of Yale the report was temporarily laid on the table to allow Brother North an opportunity to show the grip adopted in committee. On taking the report of the committee on Grip from the table, Brother North moved that the test grip, a complicated one covered with the left hand, be adopted. Brother Gates of Rochester moved that the test grip be not used outside of the lodge except to test a stranger. The grip these brothers had finally settled upon was complicated enough so as to preclude it from usage among brothers who were simply greeting each other on a regular basis; thus it was reserved for those special occasions when one had to determine if another man truly was a brother.≥≠ 98

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The badge, the grip, and the catalogues were all ways of establishing the veracity of another man’s claim to brotherhood. This was increasingly necessary as brothers from disparate chapters began to interact with each other face to face, taking advantage of the national brotherhood that they had established. This is not to say that personal interactions were the norm among fraternity men from different chapters. Indeed, it is likely that most brothers from different chapters would never meet each other, at least not while they were students. However, there is some evidence that fraternity men did begin to visit each other in different cities; certainly they encouraged each other to do so. While the conventions were the most organized opportunities for this type of socializing, correspondence also indicates that fraternity men were eager to meet each other in person and encouraged their distant brothers to drop in and visit should they ever find themselves in the neighborhood. The scriptor for the Michigan chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon wrote to the Amherst chapter in 1856: ‘‘Whilst a restless population is sweeping so constantly westward it would be very strange if some of your men did not come, now and then. If so, let the traveler remember we are on the great route and that we hail with pleasure every brother of the Name.’’≥∞ While it was certainly possible that fraternity men might visit each other in other cities of their own personal volition, the most common way for brothers to meet each other was at fraternity conventions. Almost from their founding, fraternities held annual conventions whereby a delegate or two from each chapter would travel to the city of the chapter hosting the convention. Although not all chapters sent representatives every year, they were very much encouraged to do so. At the convention, fraternity business was discussed—the amendment of the constitution, deliberation over new bylaws, petitions for new chapters at other schools, badges, catalogues, grips, and rituals. The men at the conventions usually enjoyed a banquet with each other during the evening hours when the formal part of the proceedings had come to a close for the day.≥≤ These conventions were often reported in major newspapers, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century; the election of officers, the names of speakers, and the names of delegates were included in these articles. By this point, fraternities were tolerated if not wholeheartedly supported at most schools. This reporting of fraternity affairs in major newspapers gives us some indication of the degree to which the general public was aware of the activities of fraternities and that it was assumed that people might care very fraternally yours

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about these activities. In the early days of the conventions, all brothers were invited, often with the knowledge that not a great number would attend. These delegates attended the formal proceedings, while the dinner seems to have been open to alumni members as well. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, most of the national business of fraternities was conducted in this manner—by active brother delegates from each of the chapters of the fraternity.≥≥ Increasingly after 1875, however, with the growth of fraternities nationwide, alumni began to have a greater voice in the management of fraternity affairs. This was partly a response to the expanding wealth of fraternities and the necessity of having adults and not college youth manage those assets. For instance, in order for fraternities to purchase houses to live in, they often had to have a number of alumni members incorporate themselves in order to become owners of that house. This board of trustees became responsible for the financial aspects of the ownership and preserved the house from year to year—an important role, since its actual residents were transient and changed annually, with no man residing in the house for more than four years. While there is no doubt that the necessity of alumni involvement in fraternities’ financial affairs increased the likelihood of their participation in its other doings, it also seems clear that alumni became involved in their fraternities as alumni because they derived some pleasure from it—whether in the form of nostalgically reliving college days, making new friends among the brotherhood, or making business connections. They were not usually paid for their services, and fraternities often employed only one or two men; the other men who served their fraternities as alumni representatives on boards and at conventions gave their time voluntarily.≥∂ Fraternity alumni associations were (and continue to be) organizations designed to facilitate the interaction of men who belonged to the same fraternity while at college, though not necessarily the same chapter of that fraternity. By at least 1875, many fraternities had such associations, often in a number of different locations. These associations maintained offices in major cities, sometimes sharing space with fraternity administrative offices; purchased lavish clubhouses for alumni visitors to those cities; held annual alumni meetings and events; and maintained scrupulous records of the names, addresses, and professions of all fraternity alumni. The goal of all of these activities was increased interaction among men, often from different chapters, who had been members of the same fraternity. This interaction maintained the good feelings engendered by a college experi100

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ence fondly remembered. For instance, William Schultze, a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Lafayette College, wrote to his brother at Michigan in 1862: As a member of the class of ’62 I cannot but contemplate with regret the rapid approach of the time which will sever our connection with the Fraternity as active members, but I feel assured that it is the sentiment of every D.K.E. of the class in your own and every other college where our chapters are planted, as I know it is in Lafayette, that our fraternity will be through life our ‘‘patron saint,’’ our Mecca towards which we will ever turn with feelings of love and admiration. Judging from my own experience I can truthfully say that the most pleasant and delightful reminiscences of College life are those connected with q⌲⌭ and that the warmest, firmest, most endeared friendship is that which has been formed under its magic influence and united in its mystic ties. Henry Seidel Canby described the late nineteenth-century college graduate in his 1936 memoir, Alma Mater: ‘‘The youth stepped out into the world trailing clouds of memory behind him. He took on a new identity as clerk, law student, or office assistant, yet held desperately to his affiliation with a caste of men whose memories were like his own.’’ Alumni organizations allowed men to relive their college days and to feel as they had during those days.≥∑ Alumni clubs also resembled the other venues for the growing number of single young men who flocked to urban centers throughout the nineteenth century. Many of these men joined civic associations and fraternal lodges and lived in rooming houses in order to find camaraderie with similar men. Alumni associations and alumni fraternity clubhouses are but two other examples of this phenomenon. Because alumni associations were open to older men as well, they were a way for graduates to bridge the gap between the intimate friendships of their college days and the more reserved relations that tended to characterize the friendships of men once they married and formed families of their own. Historian E. Anthony Rotundo tells us that most men did not maintain the type of intimate friendships that they may have had in their youth, and which continued for middle-class women even after marriage, as historian Carroll SmithRosenberg has demonstrated. Instead, they tended to curb the intimacies of their youth and rely upon their wives for the emotional support they had earlier received from their male classmates and friends. Alumni associations and houses allowed men to gradually wean themselves from this male very fraternally yours

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friendship. They could be involved to greater and lesser degrees with their former classmates, spending some time with them but also slowly becoming accustomed to depending upon their families for more personal interactions.≥∏ It is also worth noting the degree to which alumni associations, reunions, and especially alumni houses all served as ways to maintain allmale spaces in an increasingly mixed-sex public world. While the historical literature on gendered separate spheres has concentrated, for the most part, on the effects of these spheres for women, it is also important to realize the degree to which men, especially as a reaction to women’s increasing presence in public space, used male spaces in order to safeguard and fortify their power as men. In her book Gendered Spaces, Daphne Spain argues that men’s power is reinforced by such spatial separation, especially when denying women access to such spaces also deprives them of the ability to participate in decisions related to the larger workings of society—the worlds of business, politics, and finance, for instance. Historians make the same point regarding fraternal organizations in the late nineteenth century. By barring women from admission, men implicitly emphasized what united them and excluded others: their maleness. If men were made uncomfortable by the entrance of women into the public sphere—and we can certainly read their resistance to it as evidence of such discomfort—all-male spaces like the alumni house served to assure them that there still remained places that women were unable to enter.≥π Another benefit of the interaction among men in fraternity alumni associations was the cultivation of ties among individuals increasingly involved in the world of business and finance. Indeed, with the U.S. economy moving increasingly away from an agrarian model to that of an industrialized nation, with occupations and economic futures more uncertain, with the incorporation of U.S. business interests, and with the swiftly urbanizing Northeast leading the way for the rest of the country, more and more men, especially those with a college education, were finding themselves working in business in urban centers. Alumni associations provided ways for these men to connect with each other and look for assistance from those with whom they were already united in the bonds of fraternity. These networks also allowed more senior businessmen to hire men they felt they could trust, men who came not only with a college pedigree but also with the imprimatur of fraternity brotherhood. This solidification of business and professional interests was most obviously demonstrated in the founding of the first career-oriented fraternities in the 1860s for students studying 102

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for particular professions. In 1864 the first engineering fraternity was founded at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and in 1869 the first law fraternity was founded at the University of Michigan. These fraternities, even more explicitly than others, united men with common interests, giving them connections that would extend long past their college years. One contemporaneous antifraternity commentator noted that ‘‘in certain cities, ‘the members pull together in every way they can; and I might give startling instances of how they favor one another in places and ways that seem beyond their reach.’ ’’ James Anderson Hawes elaborated: ‘‘Cases are innumerable of younger men securing business positions and owing their entire success in life to employment or assistance given by the alumni to them as members of their fraternity. Many boys, a bit wiser than the average, consider this very practical advantage of membership in a fraternity, and are often influenced to join one or another because of the greater business opportunities offered by one body of alumni over another alumni body of perhaps not the same numbers, wealth or business success.’’ While Hawes was concerned with the choices made by freshmen deliberating fraternity membership, his argument certainly conveys the sense in which fraternity men looked out for their own, both during college and particularly when college was over.≥∫ Fraternities regularly held alumni association banquets and conferences. While some of these events were held in conjunction with the administrative meetings of the fraternities themselves, others were purely social affairs. These gatherings allowed for men in the same region to meet and socialize with each other. In 1892 the Southern D.K.E. Alumni Association sponsored the forty-sixth annual convention, the first in the South since the war; the southern hosts reassured northerners in their invitation that ‘‘old issues are as dead as Hector,’’ yet they also promised that battle sites would be there for the viewing. They explained that ‘‘an enjoyable feature will be the rendition of plantation songs by the original and worldrenowned Fisk singers.’’ Four years later, the Delta Kappa Epsilon Association of Central Tennessee, in extending their invitation for the SemiCentennial Annual Convention, promised that not only would there be dancing and refreshments but that ‘‘pretty and entertaining ladies from the best society of the city’’ would also be present. The addition of these two features, African American performers and comely white women, made the conference the perfect site for Delta Kappa Epsilon alumni to reassuringly bond over their mutual whiteness and maleness. Both invitations also stressed the business opportunities available to q⌲⌭ alumni, the first very fraternally yours

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explaining that ‘‘the South is the growing section of our country,’’ the destination of ‘‘hundreds of young professional men’’; and the second that the club at which one of the receptions was to take place ‘‘is composed largely of the best professional and business men of Nashville.’’ Alumni conventions were the perfect occasions to meet other men involved in the world of commerce and thus mix business with pleasure.≥Ω Other banquets of this kind were more often held in urban centers, allowing men who lived there to see each other with more regularity. For instance, in November 1875, a reunion dinner was held at Delmonico’s in New York City for regional alumni of Alpha Delta Phi. About 100 members attended, with John Jay, Columbia class of 1836, presiding as toastmaster. The following year, a record of the proceedings was published with a register of all New York area alumni, complete with addresses. There are some 400 names in total. Registers of this sort were common throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Often combined with a brief history of the fraternity or the chapter, they provided full contact information for all members in a given geographical area, allowing men previously unknown to each other to become friendly.∂≠ The successes of fraternity men, both the actual accomplishments and the rhetoric surrounding them, are also worthy of exploration. Every college fraternity was an avid raconteur of the triumphs of its most famous members. They published their names in newsletters and flyers, in college catalogues and yearbooks, in newspapers and magazines. The motives for this are fairly clear: fraternity men wished for their fraternity to bask in the glory of accomplished alumni. A little of this reflected glory might well have gone a long way for some men, making them perhaps feel more likely to achieve success themselves. Fraternity men also used the names of their most famous graduates in attempts to convince matriculating freshmen that their fraternity was truly the best on campus. James Canfield was explicit about this when advising students on how to choose the most appropriate fraternity: ‘‘What manner of men are those who form the fraternity? What is their rank and standing in college? What is the life of present undergraduate membership, and in what way are these men felt in the college world? What have graduate members accomplished after leaving college? . . . Who are the great and notable men whose names appear on the rolls of the fraternity annual?’’ Canfield was arguing that affiliating oneself with a fraternity to which great men belong would mean that one would also be exposed to the stimulating environment that allowed them to achieve greatness. Of course the reality is more complicated than that. At 104

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the very least, one should note that the most illustrious fraternities were almost always able to pledge the most promising freshmen, those who had already demonstrated their abilities or their wealth. In this sense, a particular fraternity’s success was markedly self-fulfilling: it graduated men who became (or remained) wealthy and influential because it had done so in the past, and the wealthy and influential joined it precisely for this reason.∂∞ There is something else at work, however. The connections that fraternity men made (and continue to make) while in college and beyond helped them achieve the success about which their fraternities were so boastful. A listing of ‘‘Prominent Members’’ of fraternities in a 1923 publication of the Interfraternity Conference includes the names of seventeen presidents of the United States and thirteen vice presidents, and this by 1923 alone. This list included all the presidents who were eligible for fraternity membership at the time that they were students.∂≤ The listing continues on for forty additional pages, listing various cabinet ministers, chief justices of the supreme court (seven), associate justices (twenty-seven), U.S. senators (227), leaders of the army and navy, governors, judges, and college presidents (almost 600). Clyde Johnson’s 1972 listing in Fraternities in Our Colleges updates the list, informing us that Herbert Hoover is the only U.S. president not to have joined a fraternity who had the opportunity to do so, and that Presidents Cleveland, Hayes, McKinley, and Truman became honorary members sometime after they graduated college. There can be no question that fraternity brothers have been remarkably successful, and while there is no way to prove conclusively that their connections brought them this success, it is certainly a claim that fraternities themselves hint at. Bearing in mind that fraternities already preselect for the wealthy and promising, one should not lose sight of the value that membership in a nationwide fraternity, bound by ties of loyalty and camaraderie, can bring to its brothers.∂≥ Correspondence and the Construction of National Brotherhood Many fraternities mandated in their constitutions that communication be maintained between different chapters, usually electing a corresponding secretary, or scriptor, for this purpose and sometimes requiring that a certain number of letters be sent either per term or per year. Section 7 of Article VI of Delta Upsilon’s constitution read as follows: ‘‘The several Chapters shall communicate with each other by letter, at least once a term.’’ The sixth article of Section 4 of Alpha Delta Phi’s constitution mandated very fraternally yours

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that the scriptor be responsible for a minimum of two letters to each and every other chapter per year. Correspondence among chapters was clearly important to fraternity men.∂∂ Fraternity men of the nineteenth century were eager for a type of imagined community with men they perceived as being similar to themselves. At a time when only 1 percent of the pre–Civil War workforce was collegeeducated, many mid-nineteenth-century young white men who had chosen to go to college may well have been uncertain about their decision. College was not necessary for advancement and success at the time; the other options for such similarly situated young men would have been direct entry into the workforce or perhaps apprenticeship. While most men in nineteenth-century college fraternities would have been well aware of their elite status vis-à-vis those of lesser means, it does not follow that they were necessarily comfortable in their positions. In a world quickly changing with the spread of capital and industry, many of these men had good reason to be anxious. Their status as members of the middle class was not necessarily secure and their occupational futures remained uncertain. They realized that upon graduation they would be competing with other young, privileged white men—men just like their fraternity brothers—for jobs and opportunities. The brotherhood sought by these men with others they would likely never know was a way for them to stave off the sense of competition that was increasingly pervasive in a changing United States. Anxiety could be allayed by a sense of kinship established among men who otherwise would be competitors upon graduation. This sense of competitiveness was only further exacerbated by the endless antagonism among chapters of different fraternities at any one school. Through investment in the collective identity of a fraternity, brothers were able to postpone the necessity of becoming individuals with responsibilities, decisions, and futures. Interfraternity correspondence was a key component in the establishment of this collective identity.∂∑ Literary critic Dana Nelson has written of an imagined fraternity among white men established with the birth of the Republic and continuing on at least until the mid-nineteenth century. In National Manhood, Nelson posits that the notion of ‘‘white manhood’’ worked as a way of describing an individual identity and as a fraternal contract between the people named by such an identity. Adapting ‘‘white manhood’’ as the marker for civic unity worked as an apparently democratizing extension of civic entitlement. It worked 106

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symbolically and legally to bring men together in an abstract but increasingly functional community that diverted their attention from differences between them—differences which had come alarmingly into focus in the post-Revolutionary era. Men whose interests had been temporarily unified in wartime were increasingly encountering fellowmen not as citizen but competitor in an unstable, rapidly changing, post-war market economy. The national need to cultivate ‘‘sameness’’ was threatened by the differences structured not only through the variety of ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds of the colonial population, and the regional, colonial, and state affiliations that they had come to enjoy, but by the very market economy that supposedly ensured the nation’s health. The insistence upon communication among sister chapters was a way of attempting to actualize this ‘‘imagined fraternity.’’ Nelson explains that this focus on what she calls ‘‘national manhood’’ caused men to search for a fraternity that they would never fully experience because of the structural differences among them. She suggests that the notion of fraternity offered a sense of mutuality that fulfilled the psychic needs for connectedness among white men. In short, the idea of national manhood and the fraternity of white men served to make those men feel a part of a larger community. National manhood served a purpose, then, but it also promised much more than it could ever deliver. Because a true feeling of fraternity was not a possibility among actual men who knew each other, they sought to cultivate that fraternity with imagined (white, male) others. Though Nelson is writing of a somewhat earlier period, the letters between fraternity men served much the same purpose. In an environment (a particular chapter of a fraternity) in which the bonds of brotherhood may not always have been true (as in the example of Hamilton J. Dennis in chapter 1), the letters served as a way to imaginatively form fraternity with other men. This argument is also not dissimilar to that offered by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. Anderson claims that print culture and cartography functioned as a way for citizens of newly constituted nations to imagine themselves as connected with their fellow citizens—to imagine, in essence, a nation. By reading about those they were told were their fellow citizens in newspapers and magazines, people were able to imagine a sense of shared identity with them. Fraternities did this as well, but on a much smaller and somewhat more intimate scale. They, too, imagined a nation, but theirs was composed solely of white, moneyed men.∂∏ very fraternally yours

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The Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity has left a particularly rich archive in this regard. These men believed that their fraternity extended from chapter to chapter, uniting members from Michigan to Maine to Alabama in the bonds of brotherhood. What is striking about this is that it seems unlikely that the vast majority of fraternity men would ever meet their brothers at other schools, at least not while they remained students. Exploring the letters allows us to see how these men constructed brotherhood with men they did not actually know. As we have seen, the letters’ ostensible purpose was to relay from chapter to chapter the results of elections of officers, and indeed many of the letters did that and that alone. It seems doubtful that the names of those elected to the offices of president, vice president, and secretary would have been any more familiar to Delta Kappa Epsilon men three states away than they are to contemporary readers. Secretaries also regularly wrote from chapter to chapter requesting college catalogues with the names of Delta Kappa Epsilon members circled. Men in q⌲⌭ were interested in knowing who their brothers were even if they could not know them personally. The exchange of names through catalogues and letters was a key part of this, as was the correspondence itself.∂π In September 1855, the scriptor of the Upsilon chapter at Brown wrote to the newly established chapter at Michigan: ‘‘With pleasure do I engage in any task in the service of q⌲⌭, whose mystic bonds allow us, though strangers, to hold intercourse as brothers and friends.’’ Similarly, in October of the same year, the scriptor for the Dartmouth chapter gushed, ‘‘With pleasure do I perform a duty which is a link in the chain that binds in union the many chapters of our glorious Fraternity.’’ A newly elected scriptor at the Waterville College chapter wrote: ‘‘And here at the outset let me express the wish that our correspondence may be fuller and more cordial than the generality of such communications are. Although so far distant from us geographically you seem nearer to us than many even in the New England States.’’ The secretary of the Nu chapter at the New York Free Academy expanded on this, claiming that ‘‘correspondence is indeed ‘the keystone of our fraternal arch’ ’’ and asking the Omicron chapter to ‘‘help us then to impress on our sister chapters the necessity of regular, frequent, and extended communication by letter.’’ Describing the brotherhood, the scriptor for the Sigma chapter at Amherst wrote in a letter to the newly born Omicron chapter, ‘‘I congratulate you on having made choice of a band of Brothers and we are such in a sense that can be said by no other society. . . . [T]he feeling of brotherly sympathy which 108 very fraternally yours

exists among the different chapters exists in no other order.’’ In perhaps the most thoughtful summation of the purpose of the correspondence, another scriptor for the New York Free Academy explained that brotherhood ‘‘can only be attained between the numerous and widespread Chapters of our Fraternity by a constant and punctual correspondence. In this way each of us becomes acquainted with the doings and prosperity of all the others; by a frequent interchange of sentiments and opinions we become united and better qualified to overcome our rivals.’’∂∫ The purpose of these letters was certainly to communicate a sense of the goings-on in each chapter, including the elections of officers. The letters were read aloud at chapter meetings, so the news of other chapters across the land would have been shared with all of a chapter’s members, not just its corresponding secretary.∂Ω One of the benefits of being unified was that a fraternity could better ‘‘overcome its rivals.’’ This becomes clear in the frequent requests on the part of many chapters for information on rival fraternities on various campuses. By trading information on their enemies, the chapters sought to better fortify themselves against attack. Despite the apparent concentration on logistical details, however, one can see that the prime function of the letters was in the construction and maintenance of brotherhood among men who considered themselves to be equals bound by the fraternity of Delta Kappa Epsilon. The letters extended that fraternity across the states, effectively uniting men who were geographically separated. Indeed, the letters occasionally mention the act of ‘‘giving the grip’’ across the country, a reference to Delta Kappa Epsilon’s secret handshake. In 1855 the scriptor from South Carolina College wrote: ‘‘It is gratifying for a student to feel that there is a bond of union that connects him with others of the same class and occupation. We are not isolated beings. The union of Stout hearts and Strong heads has for its object the keeping alive the kindred feeling which ought to exist between all American Students.’’ This particular excerpt is fascinating because of the ways that the writer’s assertions are based upon this ideal of national manhood. For instance, he is gratified that in the brotherhood of Delta Kappa Epsilon he has found a ‘‘bond of union’’ to connect him to other young men. Implicit within this, though unstated, is that his brothers are white men—indeed privileged white men if they have found themselves at colleges and in Delta Kappa Epsilon in 1855. If he considered ‘‘student’’ to be an occupation, and he might well have, then he was indeed correct that he shared another characteristic with his correspondent. However, the occupations that these two men (the two secretaries involved, and by extension their respective very fraternally yours

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brothers in South Carolina and Michigan) might assume upon graduating would not necessarily be the same once they had chosen them. Were they to be so, they might well be in competition with each other. Further, as would become evident a mere six years later, the bonds of Delta Kappa Epsilon would not be enough to keep students at both Michigan and South Carolina from taking up arms against each other in the Civil War. In other words, the writer of this letter is calling upon notions of what Nelson would call national manhood in order to form—however unconsciously—imaginative fraternal bonds with his correspondent. Though this letter is more explicit than most, the bulk of the correspondence was attempting to do much of the same work—work that was possible precisely because the men who wrote the letters almost never actually met each other.∑≠ This evocation of national brotherhood can be further explored through two particular phenomena in the correspondence. The first is a reading of a number of letters sent during the Civil War that address the tension between the North and the South and its implications for national brotherhood. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, brothers from both the North and the South joined up to fight against each other. The logical outcome of this seems as if it would be a cessation of brotherly relations between northern and southern chapters, but this was not the case—and not only for the brothers of q⌲⌭. The men of Sigma Chi, for instance, met for their annual convention one week after the firing at Fort Sumter in the border city of Wheeling. When they parted ways at the end of the convention, they gave each other the fraternal grip in the knowledge that they would soon be pitted against each other in war. At the outbreak of war, the single southern chapter of Zeta Psi sent a letter to all its sisters in the North: ‘‘Though our Federal Union has been dissolved, still the Circle of Zeta Psi fraternity shall never be broken. Resolved: That the bonds of Zeta Psi which bind us to our brothers in the North are as strong as they ever were.’’ Many fraternities told stories of what one historian called ‘‘battlefield fraternization,’’ some of which must be apocryphal. At the Battle of Chattanooga, a Confederate soldier identified a wounded Union soldier as a Zeta Psi brother by his badge and saw to it that he received the proper medical attention. The Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity established a temporary chapter in Cumberland, Maryland, where those wearing the blue and gray could ‘‘mingle socially within the bonds of fraternity.’’ Perhaps the most dramatic story is that of the battlefield dead on Roanoke Island on February 8, 1862: ‘‘Here lay the body of Union Capt. Joseph J. Henry, a Theta Delta Chi from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His hand were 110

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clasped firmly in the fraternity grip with a soldier dead in Confederate Gray.’’ While it would be difficult to know which of these stories were created after the fact in order to reinstate the bonds of brotherhood in a postbellum United States, the correspondence of the Delta Kappa Epsilon members during the war attests to the degree to which fraternity men actively sought to preserve their fraternity even as they became brothers at arms.∑∞ It is apparent from the letters that brothers in the North felt sure of their righteousness vis-à-vis the South in the national struggle, and northern brothers were certainly more candid about this with their northern compatriots than with their southern ones. Still, the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon were intent on preserving their brotherhood despite the fact that they were fighting, sometimes quite literally, against each other. They believed, or perhaps they desperately hoped (the letters can be read both ways) that the brotherhood they experienced in Delta Kappa Epsilon would be able to transcend the conflicts of the Civil War—a war they often characterized as a conflict that would soon be over, thus restoring peace to their fraternity and to the country as a whole. Many of the chapters of Delta Kappa Epsilon wrote proudly of the men from their brotherhood who had joined the Union army, sometimes listing their ranks and often emphasizing that they had enlisted voluntarily. They also sent letters to sister chapters announcing the deaths of brothers in the war. These letters follow the tradition of boasting about the successes of one’s brothers as well as the relaying of news, especially news of the loss of a brother either through death, expulsion, or resignation.∑≤ More interesting, however, are the letters where Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers are grappling with the sectional divide between North and South, the Union and the Confederacy. This letter, from C. E. Davenport of Hamilton College, demonstrates that the men of Delta Kappa Epsilon were fond of the idea that their brotherhood could transcend the strife brought about by the war: I had a letter a short time ago from a friend of mine who is now a Lieut. in the Army of the Potomac and he said that another Lieutenant and himself were invited over to the Rebel Camp promising them that they should be returned in safety. They went and took supper with them and he writes as follows: ‘‘Among the number I saw a tall, fine, manly looking fellow of apparently considerable intelligence. While talking with me he asked me if I was acquainted with any students of the very fraternally yours

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North, and on answering that I did at Hamilton, he inquired quickly were there any D.K.E.s there. I told him that there was, and that I was personally acquainted with some of them. At this he seemed much pleased, and I had a splendid time with him. He said that he was a q⌲⌭ connected with a college in Miss and also that there were a great number of q⌲⌭s in the rebel army. He sent his best respects to q⌲⌭s of the North, and said that he regretted much that they had to take up arms against each other.’’ The above is a quotation from a letter I received and I know it all to be so. This letter is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Union soldier telling the tale described the Confederate soldier he befriended as a ‘‘tall, fine, manly looking fellow of apparently considerable intelligence.’’ One has to wonder whether the soldier’s status as a Delta Kappa Epsilon brother might not have colored the Union soldier’s perception of him in hindsight, especially his claim that he was able to determine that the Confederate soldier was of ‘‘considerable intelligence’’ before he had even spoken with him. Further, the letter is particularly fascinating because the imagined brotherhood of Delta Kappa Epsilon was somehow able to transcend the conflict of war, as evidenced by the Union soldier’s positively glowing appraisal of the Confederate soldier and in the latter’s regret that he had to take up arms against his northern brothers. This regret is particularly fascinating, not only for what it might be able to tell us about some soldiers’ belief in the war they were fighting, but also because the Confederate soldier is attempting to reconcile the notion of brotherhood with his duties as a Confederate and a southerner. In the end, he comes down on neither side: he will continue to fight but he will also apologize for having to do so.∑≥ While the northern brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon were very much intent upon winning the war and certain of the justness of the Union cause, which they called a ‘‘battle for freedom and constitutional authority,’’ they were nevertheless intent upon retaining the affectionate and brotherly ties that obtained in the fraternity before the outbreak of war. To that end, the brothers of Omicron at the University of Michigan sent this letter to their brothers at Nashville University: It is with the greatest of pleasure that I embrace this opportunity to extend to you the continued good wishes of Omicron for your prosperity and to renew to you our promises of sincere and eternal fraternity to the friendships formed by the bonds which unite us to you as members of 112

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our glorious q⌲⌭, and to assure you that Omicron always extends to her sister chapters, wherever they may be found, and whatever the political party they may support, whether they owe allegiance to Lincoln or to Davis, the fraternal hand of true D.K.E. love, and give the hearty D.K.E. grip with all the sincerity of yore, although circumstances may the next day array them in deadly strife on the bloody field. Of course we sincerely regret the circumstances that produce such results but still we are not debarred the pleasure of swearing continual fealty to the principles which once united us and which are eternal in the breast of every loyal D.K.E.—‘‘the union of strong hearts and sound head to secure merit its due reward.’’ . . . I hope you will be able to prosper as well as you always have deserved, notwithstanding the trials which beset you and your state. It does not become me to allude to the causes which have brought on the troubles in our country whatever they may be, but rest assured that the Spirit of D.K.E. still burns as brightly as ever in the halls of Omicron, and she takes just as much delight in wishing well to her sisters as ever and receiving from them the evidences of their friendship. This letter is filled with reassurances for the southern chapter: they still wish them well, they understand the necessity of the war, they still feel as they always have. The men of Delta Kappa Epsilon were attempting to make sure that everything would return to normal as soon as the war was over, or they were trying to convince themselves and their southern brothers that that was possible. Note also a distinct avoidance of any explicit discussion of the war or the causes for it; the Michigan brothers seemed to feel that discussing specifics might well impinge upon the possibility of reconciliation.∑∂ It may well be that they felt some compelling interest in maintaining ties to their southern brethren, perhaps a future economic interest in a postbellum South they envisioned as having to welcome industrialization; but more than that, the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon were intent upon believing (or convincing themselves) that their brotherhood was strong enough to withstand absolutely anything, including a war that was tearing the country apart.∑∑ This eternal hopefulness was made even more explicit in the letter drafted at their next annual convention, with the approval of all attending delegates, and sent to all southern chapters. It reads, in part: When your name was called[,] no delegate responding[,] the Secretary of the convention read the last letter received from you by the ⌽ chapvery fraternally yours

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ter & in proper order the latest letters received from our Southern Brethren. The sentiment of these letters was unanimous in attachment to the fraternity & in determination to let no political differences interfere with devotion to its interests. The reading was followed by enthusiastic applause & expressions on every side of the most fraternal feeling for those brethren from whom the present unhappy strife has separated us. A committee was immediately appointed to convey to you as soon as the way should be opened the greetings of this convention. It is necessary to say but little but we wish you to feel that that little is from the heart of all the Northern members of [the] Fraternity. The convention deeply regrets that unhappy causes deny us the pleasure of seeing representatives from your chapter. The differences of opinion which have led to the division of our country are in regard to principles little influencing those which have bound together so long D.K.E. in happiness & prosperity. Whatever may be the result of the national contest, we trust that our good old society union may remain unimpaired. We ask you to resume communication with us, to send delegates to the next convention & to cherish with us the hope that we may soon be working together to maintain D.K.E. in her present eminence & advance her to her proud destiny. At the end of this letter, the northern brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon alluded to the future successes of their fraternity, aware that they would not be able to meet their ‘‘proud destiny’’ without a widespread brotherhood. Regaining the southern chapters, once the colleges at which they were located reopened after the war, was key to this. Once again, however, the prime concern of both the northern convention delegates and their southern brothers (in the form of their last letters read aloud) was that nothing disrupt the ‘‘fraternal feeling’’ that characterized Delta Kappa Epsilon. That fraternal feeling transcended sectional strife and conflicts over a southern aristocracy, slavery, and free labor.∑∏ Many years later, in 1908, the Delta Kappa Epsilon annual banquet was dedicated to the memory of the Old South; the names of all those southerners who had died or been wounded in the Civil War were read aloud. Also listed were the different ranks of Delta Kappa Epsilon soldiers and commanders for both the Union and Confederate armies (nearly 1,500 q⌲⌭s fought in the war, representing 60 percent of the fraternity at that time). A toast was given to President Theodore Roosevelt, who happened to be a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Toastmaster Charles H. Beckett, 114

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surrogate of New York County, proclaimed: ‘‘Tell me the story of Delta Kappa Epsilon and I will write you the history of the civil war. That war began when Brother Theodore Winthrop of Yale, leading the Northern advance, was killed at Great Bethel; and that war did not end until, six weeks after the surrender at Appomattox, Brother Philip Brent Spence of Princeton was the last Confederate commander to surrender.’’ Forty-three years after the end of the Civil War, the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon were still boasting of their bravery and courage as well as ignoring obvious inter-fraternal conflicts, and indeed deaths, in favor of a belief in a united and harmonious brotherhood.∑π when a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon died, it was customary for a committee of three or four other brothers to write a number of resolutions on behalf of their chapter in memory of the departed brother. This was true of all fraternities in the nineteenth century.∑∫ These resolutions usually included recognition that, though the brothers mourned the passing of their friend, they respected the infinite wisdom of their Creator in having called the deceased to Him. The resolutions often also recommended a way to officially mourn the passing (usually the shrouding of one’s badge and perhaps a part of one’s hall) and encouraged other chapters to do so. The resolutions thoroughly praised the individual who had died, extolling his manly virtues as a scholar, a brother, and a gentleman. The resolutions were then transcribed and sent to all other chapters, as well as to the family of the deceased. These eulogies were a means for the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon to achieve a fraternity with the deceased that might not have been available to them in life, a way for brothers to acknowledge the uniqueness and value of an individual in death that had not previously been possible. In National Manhood, Nelson writes that ‘‘ ‘fraternity’ works best— perhaps works only—with absent or dead men.’’ Nelson suggests throughout her book that the dictates of democratic citizenship entail a profound curtailment of human interconnectedness between white men, primarily because of ideals of capitalist individuality and manly stoicism. In short, because of an ethos of capitalist citizenship and manly self-reliance, adult men found it difficult to form satisfying friendships with each other primarily because they were in competition with those who were to be their closest friends. In this regard, fraternity men actually occupy something of a liminal position between the world of youth and the arena of adult male citizenship. Most college men had left their homes but had not yet entered very fraternally yours

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the workplace or married. While colleges and fraternities promoted intimate friendships among men, they also fostered a serious ethic of competition about grades, club membership, awards, and athletics, not to mention prospects for the future. In this regard, then, while fraternity men may well have experienced some intimacy in their friendships, they also were being schooled in the ways of competition. This would have been the case especially regarding brothers at other schools, who they did not personally know and with whom they would have been unable to form any sort of intimate friendship. The ideals of national manhood attempted to remedy that lack through the promotion of fraternity among men, but, as Nelson explains, it was a fraternity that could never truly be fulfilled. She argues that the memorialization of men in death was a way for their friends, or brothers in this case, to glorify the fraternity that they were not able to achieve in life. Examining these resolutions helps to elucidate what was at stake for men in fraternities.∑Ω In 1858 the death of a brother at Dartmouth College prompted the following resolutions: Whereas God in his Providence has been pleased to remove by death from our brotherhood Richard Hunnawill, one of its most loved members, therefore— Resolved. That while in this affliction we acknowledge the hand of an All-Wise Providence, we do unanimously testify our respect for the true friendship and superior ability ever manifest in the character of our deceased brother. What is noteworthy here is that not only was Hunnawill acknowledged to be a true friend, but that in death he also became one of the chapter’s ‘‘most loved members’’—something that would be a surprising admission were Hunnawill still alive, in that it would be a public declaration that some brothers were not as well-liked as others. In death, Hunnawill’s brothers were going to great lengths to establish the power of their brotherhood, so much so that they even admitted to liking him more than other brothers. Similarly, in 1859 the brothers of unc’s chapter wrote: ‘‘God in His wisdom has seen fit to take from our midst Edmund S. Jones, one of the most loved members of our brotherhood.’’ Again, in this resolution we see the insistence that the deceased was more loved than other brothers of his chapter, an admission unthinkable had Jones been living.∏≠ Another death at unc prompted the following rather extensive resolutions regarding a deceased brother. 116

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Whereas an All-wise Providence has seen fit to call away from earth a beloved brother—one who so recently moved among us—one lately so full of life, and having such fair promises of a brilliant and useful career—one whom we loved so well, and whom all his associates could but admire for all the noble qualities of his heart, and whom his instructors justly praised for his force of intellect, his unwearied application, and his gentlemanly deportment, and around whose brow the laurels of a well-spent collegiate course were fairly beginning to bloom, therefore, Resolved, that while we bow humbly to the will of the Great Ruler of all things we cannot but lament the untimely fate of our dear brother, Nathaniel Pearson Lusher of Memphis, Tenn.; nor can we restrain our sorrow when we remember that one so young, so loved and so gifted has passed away forever. Resolved, that though he can be with us no more, his mild disposition, his gentleness of heart and his unassuming modesty have made an impression on our hearts that no lapse of time can erase, and that his death has left a void in our chosen circle that no other form can fill as well as his. Resolved that in all the duties of College life he well performed his part; and we remember with pride that he was a brilliant star in a peculiarly brilliant Class—that his talents were second to none—that his attainments brought him high honors and that none stood higher in the opinion both of instructors and companions than did our departed brother. This letter is worth quoting at length because it is so extraordinary among the rest of the correspondence for its focus upon one person and his distinction. With the exception of the scandal over Hamilton Dennis (discussed in chapter 1), these resolutions remain the only occasion on which Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers were discussed and valued in their individuality. While part of this is a function of the fact that there was never an ostensible need to discuss an individual unless he had died or done something wrong, it is particularly noteworthy that in death it became acceptable, even necessary, to extol the fraternity possessed between brothers, a fraternity based upon a brother as a unique individual. While the correspondence in its entirety is rife with references to the harmonious brotherhood of entire chapters and indeed the fraternity as a whole, it is only in death that brotherhood can truly be achieved with an individual. Also significant is very fraternally yours

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that while these brothers are discussed as individuals, it becomes fairly obvious after reading enough of these eulogies that there is nothing particularly unique in the actual descriptions. While the brothers were obviously making an attempt to describe the characteristics of their deceased brother, doing so in the most general terms (‘‘good student,’’ ‘‘honest,’’ ‘‘admirable,’’ and ‘‘gentlemanly’’) was really a way to extol their fraternity with the deceased brother, not a way to talk about his particular qualities. In other words, the eulogies are about brotherhood; they are not about particular deceased brothers, though they claim to be exactly that.∏∞ In these resolutions, as in much of the rest of their correspondence, the men of Delta Kappa Epsilon sought a sense of national brotherhood. That they were united in the bonds of a sacred brotherhood was of immense significance to them. The correspondence offered a way for an imagined fraternity to be achieved by the brothers of dke, precisely because one’s brothers across the country were abstracted enough that they were consequently incapable of betrayal. This insistence upon brotherhood exemplifies the phenomenon that Nelson describes as the ‘‘melancholy’’ of white manhood, an inability to achieve an interconnectedness with each other. In this light, the correspondence takes on a new significance as not only an additional and inconsequential function of national membership, but also as fulfilling the psychic needs of the men of Delta Kappa Epsilon for fraternity. this chapter has focused upon the national aspects of fraternity life, an area heretofore unexplored in the literature on nineteenth-century colleges. It was this national component that, among other things, differentiated fraternities from the other organizations on college campuses, like literary societies and debate clubs. In some ways, fraternities were much like these other organizations: they were composed of the same types of men who participated in many of the same types of activities. In this national aspect as well as in their exclusivity and secrecy, however, they were different. Membership in a national organization allowed fraternity men to feel as if they were part of the nation at large and experience a sense of connectedness to other young men who shared their particular set of circumstances. They found this comforting. That they did so is indicative of the changes afoot in the United States, changes that would affect the futures of the white, moneyed men who joined college fraternities. Fraternities also served as a means of bridging the gap between youth and adulthood. The imagined fraternity created among disparate brothers, as well 118

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as the intimate yet often competitive friendships fostered in the fraternity house, helped fraternity brothers to become men (as manhood was then conceived) and understand their place in the world. When fraternity men graduated, national membership also allowed for more tangible benefits in the form of business and society connections. The alumni houses, alumni associations, and alumni reunions that were founded in the latter part of the nineteenth century also provided a bulwark against the ever-increasing presence of women in public life. In a changing United States, being both assisted and vouched for by men of means and power was a remarkably appealing prospect. Fraternity brothers knew this and took advantage of it. But they did so carefully. In an increasingly anonymous and urbanizing country where reputation and appearance weighed so heavily, they were ever wary of the ways that they could be judged by their associates, even when they were not known to them personally; they thus sought to limit their membership to those they felt would not bring them into ill repute. They were constantly attempting to control just whom they would call brother—whether face-to-face in the fraternity lodge or alumni club or through the mail from coast to coast—as well as how brothers (and through them, fraternity itself) would be represented and remembered.

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Chapter Four greeks and barbs Social Class and the Rise of the Fraternity in the Postbellum Years

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, students at the University of California, Berkeley, began to publish two newspapers, the Oestrus and the Occident. One of their chief purposes was to criticize fraternities. The editors alleged that men in fraternities rigged college elections, were poor scholars, promoted discord among otherwise amicable classmates, and broke college rules more often than nonfraternity men. The newspapers went as far as to calculate the number of expulsions and suspensions meted out to fraternity members and compare those to the rates of nonmembers (42.28 percent of fraternity men had committed an offense warranting such discipline in the ten years since fraternities had come to Berkeley, compared to only 18 percent of non-Greeks). They further claimed that fraternities produced conformity among their membership, as well as conformity’s result: a deterioration of morals and scholarship. Finally, they observed: ‘‘The fraternities are for the most part composed of men of means, men who can pay initiation fees and regular dues and the other expenses of fraternity life. And a fact that is patent to the most careless observer, namely, that with a single exception the fraternities make money a chief requisite of membership.’’ These allegations did not go unchallenged. The editor of the Oestrus was twice assaulted by a group of fraternity brothers in attempts to horsewhip him. The editor of the Occident was also threatened 121

Members of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, 1889 (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

with bodily harm on a number of occasions. As a result of these difficulties, the regents of the university, urged on by the faculty, voted to abolish fraternities. They rescinded their decision, however, when a group of angry, wealthy alumni, in league with active fraternity brothers, threatened to cut off their support of the university.∞ These incidents speak to the degree to which fraternities had, in the decades following the Civil War, become defined by class and academic laziness. Fraternities, as well as the colleges and universities where they made their homes, were increasingly the bastions of wealthy men. While this had been true to a certain extent in the antebellum period, there had been many more exceptions. These exceptions had become more and more rare. If fraternity men’s disdain for their religious peers had always been mixed with a certain class bias in earlier times, they now enthusiastically embraced this bias as constitutive of their identity as collegiate gentlemen. Fraternities had also become the chief arena for undergraduate socializing and, by combining forces among themselves, were often able to control 122

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most student organizations on college campuses, to the exclusion of nonaffiliated members. The evidence suggests, as well, that fraternities were involved in more drinking, hazing, pranks, and what authorities called ‘‘immoral’’ behavior than their non-Greek peers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the arrival of increasing numbers of Roman Catholic and Jewish students (and to a much lesser extent, African Americans and Asian Americans) on campus, fraternities had established the racial and ethnic barriers of entry that would lead to the founding of separate fraternities for these minority populations. The solidification of barriers between fraternity men and the unaffiliated led to new modes of conceptualizing fraternal masculinity. From the end of the Civil War until approximately 1910, fraternity men increasingly defined their manliness through athletic success, extracurricular activity, wealth, and finally, whiteness. The importance of academic standing concurrently declined in definitions of collegiate success, and hence in definitions of manliness as well. These changes were entirely in keeping with shifts in understandings of masculinity throughout the nation. While the previous chapter examined the ways that fraternity men sought to limit their brotherhood on a national level during this period so as to maintain their reputations, this chapter explores what it meant to be in a fraternity at the local level of the college or university campus, as well as what the behavior of fraternities meant for those who did not or could not belong. Integral to this is an understanding of the ways that colleges changed over the course of the nineteenth century, for fraternity men’s activities and attitudes are indeed a product of these changes. collegiate populations had been steadily increasing over the course of the nineteenth century. College costs, as a proportion of workers’ wages, had also been mounting. This meant that by century’s end, many colleges had become institutions serving a moneyed elite. This was especially true for colleges in New England, as well as larger, established colleges in the mid-Atlantic and southern regions of the country. To be sure, there were still many less-expensive denominational colleges throughout the country that poorer students could attend, colleges that continued to be more responsive to the communities in which they made their homes. These schools, as well as the growing number of normal schools (which trained teachers), were often relatively poor themselves. Wealthy young men were not likely to be sent to them. The gap between older and wealthier colleges and their poorer counterparts was widening. Because fratergreeks and barbs

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nity charters were often denied to men at these newer and poorer institutions, the colleges and universities at which fraternities made their homes usually had a wealthier student body than those without fraternities. These affluent colleges came to be seen as members of an elite league competing among each other rather than as institutions that served the communities around them, as was the case for many of the smaller colleges during the antebellum period.≤ Young men’s reasons for obtaining a college education had also changed. Prior to the Civil War, many colleges graduated a sizable minority of men bound for the clergy. In the years following the war, this was no longer the case. The number of ministers in training had been on a steady decline at most schools since the 1840s. And while it remained unnecessary to have a college degree in order to enter the professions, schools that offered training in the law and medicine were increasingly requiring some college training, if not an actual b.a. For the most part, however, children of the growing urban business and professional classes were being sent to college so that they could make connections and establish social networks for themselves and for the families who were paying for their educations. A college education, especially from an elite college, had increasingly become an indicator of class status. Students came to college not so much for education itself but for the experience of college life and the social standing that they would acquire. A description of such a student, admittedly a caricature of a number of these elements, is found in John Addison Porter’s 1886 Sketches of Yale Life: ‘‘Why he [the ‘‘man about college’’] comes to college is easily explained. His father was college-bred; it is the thing to do and he does not mind having a liberal education. He shows a woeful lack of ambition and is the despair of indulgent professors, but he is the embodiment of social sympathy. . . . [H]e neither aspires to the councils of legislation nor desires scholastic eminence and professional glory. But in sociability he is the most attractive of his fellows.’’ Whether or not this man about college entered into business or the professions remained to be seen; in the meantime, he partook of college life as if it was the society that he was accustomed to frequenting at home.≥ Upon graduation, many postbellum students went into the professions, particularly law and medicine, while others went into business. Colleges that had the most success in placing their students in good careers attracted more students bound for similar vocations. This was a self-perpetuating cycle of prestige: wealthy students became even more successful by dint of their attendance at certain schools, and those schools continued to attract 124

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wealthy students who continued to meet with success after graduation. Certain schools—particularly the elite eastern colleges—came to be seen as the most prestigious. It was no accident that these were the oldest schools and those that had always been patronized by a wealthy elite. In the first of what would become the popular genre known as the ‘‘college novel,’’ William Tucker Washburn described just this phenomenon in Fair Harvard (1869): ‘‘One cannot over-estimate the advantage to your son of becoming a member of Harvard College. Not only will he thereby become master of all ancient and modern languages, sciences, and arts; not only will society of the highest fashion and fortune at once open their doors to welcome him: but he will secure for himself the sure means of future preferment and honor, in any profession he may choose to follow.’’ While Harvard, even at that time, was considered the preeminent college in the United States, it would be fair to interpret Washburn’s sentiments as more broadly applicable, though perhaps to lesser degrees, for almost any of the elite New England and mid-Atlantic colleges and increasingly for a college education in general.∂ Upon finishing their degrees, college graduates were much more likely to reside in urban areas for at least some part of their lives than those who had not attended college. Taken together, and read alongside what we know about fraternity networking from the previous chapter, these changes in colleges and their constituents combined to create an urban, educated elite that used its schooling not so much for any knowledge it might provide but for the prestige it afforded. Fraternities were, in many ways, simply an enhancement of this prestige, a further way to divide and recognize one another, another way to form connections. They were also practice for the kind of networking and socializing that was increasingly characterizing the urban worlds of commerce and business. Fraternities were training grounds for young capitalists. While there would always be distinctions between different fraternities, simply having been a ‘‘fraternity man’’ was often enough to establish someone as a gentleman.∑ As their alumni changed, so too did the colleges. While small colleges certainly did not flounder during this ‘‘age of the university,’’ there is no doubt that they, too, adapted to a changing nation. Before the Civil War, most colleges began to augment their classical curriculum with a spectrum of electives, including science, lessons in the forensic arts, and modern languages. Ministerial training was no longer a prerequisite for faculty; professors also professionalized, establishing disciplinary conferences and greeks and barbs

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journals and increasingly obtaining graduate degrees in specific fields before they were taken on at colleges. With their new roles as professional scholars, many faculties also became resentful of their roles as guardians to their students, and thus discipline was also relaxed at most colleges. In conjunction with the rise in intercollegiate athletics, college alumni, both as an influence in policy decisions (on boards of trustees, for instance) and through financial contributions, became much more influential. Presidents and trustees were often at the mercy of the alumni who financed their schools; to displease them meant risking financial insecurity. Colleges were forced to become much more responsive to the desires of these powerful alumni—lawyers, doctors, and particularly businessmen—so that schools, and particularly their sports programs, came to be run like businesses themselves. No longer able to concentrate solely upon educating their students, college administrators were under increased pressure to maintain a certain public reputation for their alumni; this reputation was often bound up in athletic performance.∏ Definitions of manliness were also undergoing shifts that would shape fraternity practices on the college campus. Students decreasingly valued academic achievement as part and parcel of the successful gentleman; it was replaced by athletic competence. Participation in other extracurricular activities—college politics, newspapers, the yearbook, glee club, banjo club, and so forth—was also necessary in order to be admired and be seen as a credit to one’s college. Locking oneself away to study was seen as selfish. Two depictions of college life at Yale—Henry Seidel Canby’s Alma Mater and Owen Johnson’s popular college novel, Stover at Yale (1911)— show college living as dominated by activities, with scholarly achievement taking a backseat and cheating becoming increasingly acceptable for survival. At the end of this period, Woodrow Wilson, at the time the president of Princeton, would famously write that the ‘‘side shows are so numerous so diverting,—so important, if you will—that they have swallowed up the circus.’’ Fraternity men were, without a doubt, the ringleaders.π Ideals of the gentleman were sometimes in uneasy relation with the emphasis upon athletics, activities, and the rule breaking that came to dominate fraternity men’s behavior. Fraternity brothers cultivated a reputation as a moneyed elite on college campuses, as gentlemen. By calling themselves gentlemen, what they meant was that they had sophisticated tastes and manners suited to their station as sons of the upper classes. This emphasis upon gentlemanliness did not, however, preclude drunken sprees and debauched weekends in the city. In some sense, they used their status 126

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Members of the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity, Duke University, early 1900s. Professor of mathematics (and future university president) Robert Lee Flowers is seated in the middle behind the goat. (Reproduced by permission of Duke University Archives)

as self-proclaimed gentlemen to justify their less-savory antics. The public image of the gentleman was used as a shield to protect their other behaviors. In performing gentlemanliness in public, they justified their existence. What they did behind closed doors was then supposed to be their business alone. As in the antebellum period, fraternities and their detractors continued to work out their differences using a rhetoric of manliness, though like men throughout the nation, fraternity brothers had begun to embrace notions of a more passionate and virile masculinity. While it pleased fraternity men to think of themselves as virile, aggressive, and masculine, their opponents were often still relying upon notions of manliness as defined by honor, loyalty, and independence. The importance of the argument lies in the fact that a language of manliness or masculinity—a language of what it meant to be a proper man—was plainly seen as being persuasive for both sides. Just as historian Gail Bederman found that rhetoric of ‘‘civilization’’ worked to influence Americans in debates over racial superiority, so too did the similar rhetoric of masculinity have sway among college men.∫ Two examples serve as bookends to this period and help to illustrate the cultural power of claims to manhood. The Delta Upsilon Fraternity at greeks and barbs

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Brown reported to their brethren at other schools in 1874: ‘‘We number thirty-eight of the leading men in College. In making additions we seek those who will make brothers; manliness a prime requisite.’’ Thirty-five years later, commenting on the fraternity situation at the University of Wisconsin in 1911, one observer beseeched the students: ‘‘Let the nonfraternity students realize the worth of their own manhood and womanhood, and be proud of their merits. Let them realize that a man may belong to the most exclusive social set and still be a nonentity. Let the fraternity man realize that the fraternity has not placed the stamp of ‘man’ upon him, just because he has been initiated, but that the fraternity has given him a chance to ‘make good’ in the world.’’ Plainly, fraternity men at Wisconsin believed that fraternities had indeed made men of them—to the detriment of all those who were not invited to join. Caught between childhood and adulthood and preparing for life in the latter, college students wanted to be able to think of themselves as men. Throughout this period, fraternities offered one avenue to that goal.Ω Cognizant of this, those opposed to fraternities argued back, employing the same language used by fraternity men. In 1882, for instance, E. E. Aiken opined: I believe that in most cases it does require a sacrifice of manliness and independence to join a society whose customs and requirements are secret. The candidate is committing himself to the control of those who have no rightful authority over him, to methods which he does not know, for objects which he does not know; and the sacrifice is in principle the same, it will be seen, quite irrespectively of what these really are. The spirit and methods of a secret system . . . are essentially opposed to the development of a vigorous and independent type of character. Aiken was calling upon notions of manliness as independence in his crusade against fraternities. That he used this rhetoric is telling. It was one he knew had currency not only with fraternity men but also in society more generally. Perhaps no one developed this rhetoric more fully than did H. L. Kellogg in his College Secret Societies. Published in 1874, the book was an assemblage of the opinions of antisociety men as well as accounts of various fraternity scandals, all designed to convince the reader of the evil of fraternities. Throughout, the writers rely upon a language of manliness. In one instance, Kellogg quoted an editorial from Yale’s Courant: ‘‘It would be a 128 greeks and barbs

good thing if young men had the manliness to appreciate the bad effects of these societies and to voluntarily repudiate them and revive the more honorable and more manly rivalry of the great, open, college debating societies.’’ He quoted another educator who referred to society men as ‘‘partial men,’’ this because ‘‘only one-half, and that the poorer, belongs to humanity—the better is a slave to a clique.’’∞≠ By the end of the century, the demographics of college student populations were also changing in other significant ways. Women were being admitted to the larger public institutions, and the children of recent Catholic and Jewish immigrants were beginning to attend the Protestant denominational colleges as well as the larger and more secular universities. In very small numbers, African Americans and Asian Americans were also being sent to college. Fraternity men responded to these shifts in college student populations by excluding their more recently arrived classmates. While this made some degree of sense in the case of women—fraternities were billed, after all, as being a brotherhood of men—fraternity men often went beyond simply excluding women from their ranks to the point of shunning them on campus and refusing to interact with them socially. In the case of Jews, Catholics, and nonwhite students, almost all fraternities instituted de facto, if not de jure, rules of exclusion that barred all but white Protestant students from membership. They did this to safeguard their prestige as well as to emphasize a definition of masculinity that was bound up in whiteness and Christianity. In other words, the ways that fraternity men reacted to the presence of ‘‘others’’ on what had formerly been ‘‘their’’ college campuses tells us much about how they understood themselves. Fraternities and Class: The Greeks and the ‘‘Barbs’’ Like any society that includes some people and excludes others, fraternities gain prestige precisely through that exclusion. College fraternities during the postbellum period primarily excluded men on the basis of social class. There were a number of reasons for this, perhaps the most important of which is that fraternity men perceived themselves as being high-toned gentlemen. They cultivated this, and doing so required money. More so than in the antebellum years, fraternity men’s conceptions of class revolved around a much more straightforward definition: who had money and who did not. Some older fraternities still insisted upon ‘‘good breeding’’ and well-known lineage, but many more cared only that their members were greeks and barbs

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wealthy. Indeed, that fraternities self-consciously cultivated an image of themselves as societies for gentlemen is in itself telling and indicates that antebellum fraternity men were more subtle in their understandings of gentlemanliness. For antebellum fraternity men by and large, gentlemanliness was not something that could be cultivated. One either had it or did not, and one’s family background was usually the crucial factor in the calculation. By later in the nineteenth century, a new elite was born through success in the industrial economy. In recognition of this development—and as increasing numbers of wealthy young men arrived at colleges, men whose wealth was perhaps somewhat newer—the understanding of the gentleman had shifted. The definition of manliness that they embraced and performed was one that involved good clothes, expensive trips and vacations, and pricey entertainment. In the 1870s and 1880s, many fraternities also began to buy or build elaborate houses to live in, the cost of which had to be borne by active members and alumni. Precisely because of these costs, many fraternities were quite explicitly concerned with initiating members who came from ‘‘good families,’’ meaning wealthy ones. Moreover, fraternities placed a premium on admitting members who would be valuable to other brothers as future professional contacts, those bound for careers in law, business, and so forth, rather than men who planned to become schoolteachers. Finally, by regulating their membership for class status, fraternities maintained the exclusivity of their groups. This was especially true at larger universities, where only a small proportion of men would be asked to join a Greek-letter organization, but it was also true at smaller colleges, where a majority of men were fraternity brothers. At the smaller schools, fraternities were simply ranked according to prestige, which was often linked to wealth. Greek-letter men began to refer to nonaffiliated men as ‘‘barbs’’ during the period, an abbreviation for ‘‘barbarian.’’ The Greek/barb distinction was a reference to ancient Greeks’ characterization of those who spoke languages other than Greek. In the sense that fraternities meant it, ‘‘barb’’ pointed to the ways the fraternity men saw non-Greeks as being less than gentlemen or somehow uncivilized. A barbarian was not fit for polite society, not able to converse properly, and unsure or perhaps even unaware of the rules of etiquette that governed social interactions, from cotillions to dinner parties to calling upon a woman in her home. At a time when white men were using notions of ‘‘civilization’’ in order to assert their superiority over people of color, fraternity men used the same concept in order to demonstrate the inferiority of their less-affluent classmates.∞∞ 130

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Students, whether in fraternities or not, were well aware of the qualifications for membership. In the 1890s, for instance, Willie Grimes, a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote to a friend and former unc student: ‘‘I do not know how it was when you were here, but now unless a student belongs to some Fraternity he is not looked upon as being much. I think I can well say that all the boys who are from nice people and have friends here are sure to get in some Fraternity.’’ In this instance, ‘‘boys who are from nice people’’ was clearly meant to indicate that they were from families with money and social standing in their communities. When forming a chapter of Kappa Sigma at Trinity College in 1873, the men involved agreed that the ‘‘policy of this chapter from the very first was to exercise the greatest care in the selection of the very best men and to solicit those who were of the highest moral and social standard.’’ In 1868 Walter Hill, a fairly wealthy student at the University of Georgia and a member of Chi Phi, wrote to his mother about those who did not belong to secret societies, calling them ‘‘the ‘OIPOLLOI’ (the many) —the rabble—the plebeians. Don’t think that I am getting arrogant & aristocratic, when I speak of the rabble &c. While I do not assume any feigned condescension, I like these ordinary boys as much as I can. There is some thing good in every character no matter how common. I associate with oipolloi & have friends among them.’’ While Hill’s condescension here is palpable, he at least claims to have made an effort to socialize with those he considered his inferiors. Many fraternity men did no such thing.∞≤ The previous three examples come from southern schools, but competition and exclusivity were no less keen at schools in the North, the Midwest, and—as the example from the University of California, Berkeley, with which this chapter opens indicates—the West. Indeed, in the pages of the Oestrus, one student at Berkeley utilized the rhetoric of class against fraternity men in a particularly clever way. First noting that fraternity brothers quite often claimed to be composed of the ‘‘upper ten’’ of college society, this letter writer turned the tables on fraternity men. An assumption of social superiority, a demonstration or announcement of being more than common is always a little vulgar; the truly high in station make no demonstrations, and need make none; if a man is very directly descended from some great man, you might live a year with him and not hear it mentioned, but if he is only remotely connected with such a man, he will tell you of it daily. And again, though one man’s taste cannot dictate for another’s, there certainly are those to greeks and barbs

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whom the wide extent, the formal organization, the pretentiousness of the large college fraternities seem not in good taste: there are to my knowledge people outside of fraternities because fraternities seem to their taste—rather common. The author of this letter, well aware that fraternities selected men based on perceived social class, attempted to outdo the fraternity men in snobbery, pointing to men of his acquaintance who did not join fraternities precisely because of their vulgar and rather common reliance upon the outward trappings of wealth as markers of worthiness for membership. He would never have attempted this argument had fraternities not been so obvious in their reliance upon class as a criterion for brotherhood.∞≥ Having gone to a private preparatory school dramatically increased one’s chances for election to a fraternity, whereas attendance at a public high school made fraternity membership virtually impossible, at least in many New England colleges. This was less true in western schools, where fewer graduates of the elite eastern prep schools went to college. Almost all contemporaneous commentators on education, even those who defended fraternities, acknowledged that wealth was one of the prime criteria for selection. Frederick Keppel went as far as to note, ‘‘The fraternities, particularly the older ones, seem to me also to be too cautious. In selecting their new members they lay so much stress on what is supposed to be social position that they are afraid to take chances, and as a result are likely to get a majority of rather negative-minded boys, and this results in what seems to me to be the most important danger—a narrowing of social horizon and of human charity.’’ Aiken, in his antisociety screed, called them an ‘‘aristocracy’’ and noted that people joined them in order to get ahead: ‘‘They generally aim at prestige and power by the choice of prominent men.’’ And John Corbin, author of an advice manual for those deciding which college to attend, remarked upon the ‘‘curious lack of democracy in fraternity life’’ and observed that at the University of Wisconsin, ‘‘lines of caste are drawn between rival fraternities, as indeed they seem to be at all fraternity institutions; and here as elsewhere the fact is more regrettable because the basis of judgment is birth and manners rather than ability.’’ Others took a different course, but the critique amounted to the same thing. Howard Crosby, chancellor of the University of New York, complained in the late 1860s that he objected to societies’ expensiveness, which caused otherwise poor students to spend money in excess of their means in order to become members. This critique was typical of its time in the early part of the post132

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bellum period; by the end of the century, most fraternities exceeded the budgets of almost all poor students, no matter how much they scrimped and saved. Indeed, that very scrimping would have been taken as evidence of a candidate’s lack of suitability for membership.∞∂ Class status, family background, and ‘‘good breeding’’—in essence, the demonstration of class status through social graces—were essential to fraternity membership by the end of the nineteenth century. Clarence F. Birdseye, himself a member of Chi Psi, proudly claimed in his book Individual Training in Our Colleges that the fraternities could be divided between the older and richer societies, which kept their numbers down and had chapters only at important schools, and a second variety, which had a much larger number of chapters (the implication being that they were also more common). Even William Raimond Baird, champion of fraternities extraordinaire and editor of Baird’s Manual of College Fraternities, acknowledged that this function of fraternity membership could be taken to extreme lengths. In 1915 he wrote about an acquaintance of his, a man who would have attended college in the 1860s, as follows: ‘‘Elbridge T. Gerry, a well known and respected citizen of New York, a man of large affairs and great social prominence, was a member of Chi Psi in his youth. . . . If he is still alive, he must be eighty years old, and he told me not more than five years ago that every member of Chi Psi was of course a gentleman (which is quite far from the truth I assure you), that every other fraternity man was presumably a gentleman, and that boys who went to college and were not invited to join fraternities could not possibly be gentlemen.’’ The importance of this passage is not just that Gerry plainly subscribed to notions of gentlemanliness as being associated with fraternity membership, but also that while Baird was willing to poke fun at such a direct equation, he also employed similar rhetoric in describing Gerry as a ‘‘man of large affairs and great social prominence.’’ As late as 1915, the concept of the gentleman still had currency and many still associated the gentleman’s classed manhood with fraternities. This was no accident; men in fraternities quite consciously limited their membership to men of means.∞∑ The Circus and the Manly Sideshows: The Extracurriculum During the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the number and variety of college extracurricular activities expanded exponentially. In addition to the literary societies and fraternities that had existed prior to the Civil War, most colleges also now had a great many greeks and barbs

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musical societies (glee club and banjo club, for instance), student publications (literary magazine, humor magazine, college yearbook), honor societies, and athletic teams, as well as organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association and various other religious, academic, and serviceoriented clubs. While some such organizations had existed before the Civil War, there is no question that they flourished in the decades following it. Historian Leonard Ellis has argued that in the postbellum period, as colleges increasingly withdrew from the communities with which they had interacted in the antebellum period, they created worlds where status was gained only within these closed societies and prestige obtained only within the abstract sphere of the college. In other words, the only activities that mattered during this period were those that occurred within the confines of the college; interaction with the outside world, even if only in the form of debating events from that world in literary societies, became unnecessary. Fraternity men were particularly active in almost all of these endeavors. All members of fraternities, and college students more generally, were encouraged to ‘‘go out’’ for some activity, and often more than one. Distinction in the realm of the extracurriculum was perhaps the only way to gain admission to fraternities if a student did not possess wealth. Most of these organizations also elected officers and sometimes presented awards; the winning of these offices and awards was coveted by fraternity men, and they often combined forces with other Greek-letter men in order to ensure that some office or other did not fall into the hands of the ‘‘barbs.’’ This was college politics, and many students took it very seriously.∞∏ Fraternity competition and the domination of college politics and activities both lessened the possibilities for participation by nonfraternity men and served as a way for Greek-letter men to gain prestige on campus. Literary societies are a useful example. By the end of the nineteenth century, what once had been vibrant college institutions had been so transformed that they were effectively unrecognizable. Contemporary observers and historians of education have usually blamed fraternities for the demise of literary societies. This is only somewhat true. While by the postbellum years, literary societies had clearly become a stage on which different fraternities competed for college honors (in the form of elections to offices in the societies, as well as elections to speaking positions at commencement or junior exhibitions), other forces were also at work. As colleges expanded, literary societies—usually two in number at any school—also grew, until many became unwieldy. There was no longer an opportunity for every student to participate equally. Colleges were also expanding the 134 greeks and barbs

offerings of their courses and the holdings of their libraries. The functions originally performed by literary societies—public speaking, debating about current issues, and maintaining a well-stocked library—were thus being assumed by the college either in the formal curriculum or through the growing college libraries. Further, the number of other activities, those involving theater, music, and publication, diverted students away from literary societies. Finally, the emphasis among students upon academic achievement was waning as athletic prowess came to assume new prominence. Activities that used to take place in literary societies were seen as intellectual and academic; they became less popular as athletics became more so. Whether this can be blamed upon fraternities is debatable. It seems more reasonable to conclude that the rise of fraternities and the death of literary societies were both the products of the same historical processes at work in colleges and universities, with these processes themselves stemming from changes in the nation as a whole—namely, growing wealth, industrialization, corporatization, and urbanization. The story of literary societies is as much the story of the changing interests of postbellum college students as it is of fraternities’ destruction of what had once been a thriving college institution. As the purpose of college changed—at least for the majority of students who attended them, if not for the faculty who taught at them—so too did the activities in which these same students participated. No longer could acclaim be won from one’s peers simply by being an eloquent speaker or a fine debater. Increasingly, peerbased recognition was achieved through participation in a myriad of other activities.∞π Literary societies did seem to last longest at schools that had lessestablished fraternity cultures, and they lasted especially long at those without fraternities altogether. This was certainly the case at Princeton. The faculty and trustees there were explicitly concerned not only by secret societies’ influence upon the Whig and Clio literary societies, but also by the effect that increasing enrollment might have upon literary societies. In 1875 Princeton’s president James McCosh recounted to the trustees in his annual report: ‘‘I cannot close this subject of Societies without mentioning that there is a strong feeling among a number of the present students, that the number of students in the College has become too great to admit of all getting much benefit from the two large societies, the ‘Whig’ and ‘the Cliosophic.’ This feeling may or may not be well-founded but it undoubtedly exists.’’ Despite McCosh’s worries, Princeton, a school free of fraternities by 1875, had flourishing literary societies until the end of the century, greeks and barbs

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at which time even that institution was forced to recognize that the days of such societies had come and gone.∞∫ Literary societies met their end much sooner at schools with moreestablished fraternity systems; these were generally northern schools. By 1871 they were but a distant memory at Amherst College, where the literary societies’ libraries merged with the college library in 1867 (their literary functions had actually tapered off some years before that). The same changes occurred at Dartmouth College in the 1850s, as fraternities began to claim greater student allegiance, the importance of the literary exercises waned, and the college eliminated all charges associated with its own library. There, literary societies’ libraries merged with the college library in 1874. By the turn of the century, Columbia president Frederick A. P. Barnard was regretting the loss of the literary societies at his alma mater, Yale (the societies had disappeared from that campus at least some twenty-five years earlier). To be sure, some of the original literary societies exist to this day, though none ever again saw the enthusiastic participation that was evident in the nineteenth century. Literary societies represented an older order of collegiate life where a majority of students valued intellectual rigor for its own sake; during the last decades of the nineteenth century, this order had been replaced by a newer model represented by athletics and fraternities.∞Ω It was perhaps one of the chief conceits of college life in this period that students believed they were ‘‘working for’’ their college if they participated in a great number of activities. Sidney Brockhurst, who plays the consummate devil’s advocate in Johnson’s novel Stover at Yale, has the gumption to respond to the sentiment: ‘‘ ‘Work for Yale! Work for Princeton! Work for Harvard! Bah! Sublime poppycock!’ exclaimed Brockhurst, in a sort of fury. ‘Of all drivel preached to young Americans, that is the worst. I came to Yale for an education. I pay for it—good pay. I ask, first and last, what is Yale going to do for me? Work for Yale, go out and slave, give up my leisure and my independence—to do what for Yale? To keep turning the wheels of some purely inconsequential machine, or strive like a gladiator. Is that doing anything for Yale, a seat of learning?’’ It is no small irony that college students of the late nineteenth century who claimed that they were working for their alma mater were, in point of fact, working for their own betterment, not only through the connections they might make through the activities in which they participated and the prestige they would gain among their peers by doing so, but also through the reputation they hoped to establish for their colleges—reputations based on the skill of 136 greeks and barbs

their sports teams, the excellence of their literary publications, and the tenor of their competing glee clubs. While Brockhurst may sound more like an individualist than his classmates who were ‘‘working for Yale,’’ the more accurate reading is that Brockhurst was actually among those who still valued the education available at colleges in the United States. Whether or not most students were cognizant of the degree to which this rhetoric of ‘‘working’’ or ‘‘doing’’ some activity for one’s college was selfserving is open to debate. That it was so seems beyond question.≤≠ There were a variety of ways that a male college student could establish himself as a ‘‘Big Man on Campus.’’ In 1897, for instance, the Stanford chapter of Zeta Psi boasted, ‘‘During the year we have been well represented in both athletics and music. On the Glee Club we have Sewall, Schneider, Macy, and Bush. On the mandolin club we are represented by Sewall—leader, and Haden—manager.’’ The next year, they gushed: ‘‘On March 12th, Frank Brauch Riley, of Portland, was taken into the fraternity. Bro. Riley was a sophomore and had already taken a leading part in the dramatic and musical societies of college, being a member of the ‘Sword and Sandals.’ He had also done the specialty work in the Glee Club and taken part in several private theatricals with great success.’’ To be sure, by the end of the nineteenth century, athletics ruled, but it is telling that the leader of the banjo club and the editor of the college newspaper were also regarded with some reverence by their peers, and indeed compared to their more athletic classmates in ways not at all disparaging. In contrast to today’s climate on college campuses, this tells us something important about the construction of masculinity in fraternities: athletics were not yet the only means of performing masculinity.≤∞ Fiction of the period is particularly telling in this regard. In ‘‘The Wooing of Melville R. Corydon,’’ one of the tales in James Gardiner Sanderson’s 1898 Cornell Stories, the protagonist Corydon is courted by three different fraternities. Each of them introduces him to their most important members, men who have distinguished themselves on campus. Of one fraternity’s members, Corydon exclaims to himself: ‘‘Surely he was meeting the most prominent men in college,—the captain of one team, the pitcher of another, and the leader of the Banjo Club! Who would come next, he wondered.’’ He is further informed that the leader of the banjo club could have been the ‘‘funny man on the Glee Club’’ but gave it up for his current position. Meade Minnegerode’s The Big Year (1921) similarly portrays the two Big Men on Campus as Curly Corliss, captain of the football team, and his roommate Angel Benson, a member of the glee club. greeks and barbs

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Theta Delta Chi Fraternity Dramatic Troupe, Dartmouth College, 1892. The existence of a dramatic troupe in a fraternity—and one in which men could dress as women— demonstrates the degree to which the criteria for manly collegiate participation were significantly less circumscribed in the late nineteenth century than they are today. (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

In Stover at Yale, Dink Stover’s first days on campus are taken up with discussing among his classmates what each of them would go out for: ‘‘Stone was out for the glee club, already planning to take singing lessons in the contest for the leadership, three years off. Saunders was to start for the News. Logan had made drawings during the summer and was out for the Record. Hunter was trying for his class team and the crew. Only McNab was defiant.’’ They proceed to have a heated conversation on the advisability, indeed the very possibility, that one might not go out for something or other. Key to all of this, as Canby makes clear in his memoir of Yale, is that the activity in which one participated had to be done for and with others at college. ‘‘To be musical and indulge in music privately was a sure sign of freakishness, as bad as private drinking or the reading of poetry in seclusion. The banjo, the mandolin, and the guitar were respectable, since skillful players could ‘make’ the instrumental clubs and so gain social recognition; but proficiency on the violin was a sure sign of something wrong, as was skill on the piano not confined to ‘beating the box,’ and also the singing of ‘classic’ music.’’ Canby further elaborated that while money, good looks, social standing, and athletic ability were certainly valued more than anything else, ‘‘there were routes upward for men who could write what the college magazine wanted, or make the music that undergraduates liked; and a broad path, much trodden in my day, for the energetically pious who could organize religion, and sell God to the right kind of undergraduate.’’ While the religious student may seem anomalous in this context, what made him comparable to his musical or athletic peers was his ability to involve others in his work. The activity had to be communal: the collegian without respect was the one who did all for himself and nothing for his college.≤≤ By the end of the nineteenth century, athletics, particularly of the intercollegiate variety, had come to dominate the extracurriculum. They served not only as a way for individual men to distinguish themselves, but also for colleges to do so. Participation in college sports had become the single most important marker of masculinity. Those who played for their colleges’ intercollegiate teams were revered on most campuses. Sports also, and importantly, served as a way for colleges and universities to prove to the public that they were not composed solely of effete sons of privilege or, alternatively, of anemic and bookish intellectuals. In The College Man and the College Woman (1906), a book dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt—who among other things had ‘‘Shown the Power for Good a College Man Can Be’’—Bowdoin’s president William DeWitt Hyde informed his readers that athletics led to ‘‘increased physical health, moral tone, and freedom greeks and barbs

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from asceticism and effeminacy in the college community as a whole.’’ Similarly, in his 1878 profile American Colleges: Their Students and Work, Charles Thwing, president of Western Reserve University, assured his readers: ‘‘The typical college man is no longer sallow-faced, hollowchested and weak-kneed, but of strong nerves, muscular and vigorous. His health is better, his strength greater than the health and strength of the average New York or Boston clerk of the same age.’’ At a time when Roosevelt and others were advocating intervention in Cuba and the Philippines in order to make men out of boys, sport became an important way for young men to demonstrate their masculinity. It was during this period across the nation that an emphasis upon masculinity began to supersede that of manliness. While manliness carried connotations of loyalty, honor, and responsibility, masculinity was much more bound up in aggression, physicality, and virility. Sports, and football especially, were a means for men to prove their masculinity—and not just on campus. As increasing numbers of middle- and upper-class men found themselves working in offices and in cities, sport, war, and engagement with the great outdoors became an important way to cultivate masculinity because they tested a man’s mettle in ways that sitting behind a desk could not. Roosevelt’s own advocacy of the ‘‘strenuous life,’’ as well as his support for the preservation of natural resources in the form of national parks, both speak to this fear of the enervating effects of civilization on men’s virility. Sports, and physical strength more generally, were also ways to prove the supposed physical superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. College students and administrators were among the greatest proponents of these ideologies.≤≥ While antebellum college students had been encouraged to seek exercise to remain healthy, by and large this had meant walking or gymnastics. The playing of football was limited to class rushes between the sophomore and freshman classes and, at some schools, to informal games played on sunny days. Indeed, many considered athletic competition to be vulgar and unbecoming of gentlemen. It was assumed by social elites that those who were particularly skilled in physical pursuits could not also be intellectually astute, and vice versa. The sports that had previously been favored by these elites—such as fencing, riding, and hunting—were not ones that required a particularly muscular body for success. They were also thought to involve skill rather than brute strength. Competitive team sports played between colleges did not begin until the 1850s. On August 3, 1852, the first intercollegiate sporting event took place between Yale and 140

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Harvard on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The schools’ crews raced each other (Harvard won). From the very beginning, intercollegiate sports were a commercial enterprise; a businessman had paid for both crews’ transportation and accommodations for eight days in New Hampshire and had done much to publicize the event so as to attract spectators to the area. The regatta was a huge success and led to a series of similar regattas involving more and more schools (with their student fans in tow) throughout New England. Competition in baseball and football soon followed. The first baseball game between colleges took place in 1859, when Amherst played Williams (Amherst won, 73–32); and the first football game between Rutgers and Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) was held in 1869 (Rutgers won, 6–4). Baseball reigned as the most popular sport during the 1880s, but by the end of the century there was no question of football’s ascendancy.≤∂ College athletics became the primary way that the public learned about colleges and one of the main ways that alumni identified with their alma maters. In attending games and matches, alumni relived days of yore and publicly claimed the prestige of the schools they attended and cheered. Winning was the name of the game from day one. Indeed, schools would sometimes withdraw from leagues in which they were defeated too frequently, only to compete against weaker schools to increase their chances of victory. For instance, Harvard and Yale at various times agreed to compete only with one another after Harvard was trounced in football in the 1890s and when Yale and Harvard lost too many crew races during the 1870s to schools like Cornell, Columbia, and, most embarrassingly of all, the Massachusetts Agricultural College. Professional coaches were hired and paid for by eager alumni in almost all sports starting in the 1860s. Games were covered in the local and national press. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of seriousness with which many college alumni, students, and some college administrations approached their athletic programs. For instance, in 1874, when Columbia managed to defeat both Harvard and Yale in crew, a parade was led up Fifth Avenue to the Columbia gates, where President Barnard addressed the crew and their assembled fans: ‘‘I am convinced that in one day or in one summer, you have done more to make Columbia College known than all your predecessors have done since the foundation of the college by this, your great triumph.’’ John Corbin’s Which College for the Boy? echoed this theme in relation to Harvard: ‘‘Life in the world has not convinced the vast majority of Harvard men that for the largest of greeks and barbs

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American universities to be the most signally unsuccessful in athletics is anything else than a disgrace. Men of our race and time instinctively regard prowess on the field of manly sport as of no less value in the training of character than scientific acquirements.’’ One of the prime goals in college athletics, as evidenced by these sentiments, was to make one’s college ‘‘known’’—and to make it known as a virile and manly institution, not the home of dyspeptic scholars of days gone by.≤∑ With all of this emphasis upon athletic triumph as virility, combined with a rise in muscular Christianity (a popular movement combining religious teachings with athleticism) in the 1880s, it is no wonder that college students revered athletes more than their brainier classmates. In their study of college life in the 1880s, Cornelius Howard Patton and Walter Taylor Field related that while membership in the glee club might bring prestige, ‘‘it was a consolation prize for the man who could not make one of the athletic teams—for then as now, the college athlete occupied the first place in the public esteem.’’ In some ways, this emphasis upon athletics served as a democratizing agent on college campuses. A football player, no matter how humble his origins, could be a Big Man on Campus. Indeed, observers like Henry Canby argued that in college, lines of social class were drawn differently than in the rest of society precisely because of this fact. However, it was generally only athletic talent that created exceptions to the rules of class and privilege. A poor man who wrote well could not similarly be assured of selection to the best fraternity or one of the senior honor societies, as is evident in the following tirade spoken by one of the characters in Richard Holbrook’s novel of life at Yale, Boys and Men (1900): Now, this is how I look at the whole business. If a man is a big athlete, he is absolutely sure of having anything he wants. Tarbell, for instance, and Eldredge. Why, in two years, those men will have the whole University in their pocket! . . . But suppose that a man isn’t an athlete,—I calculate that there are only ninety-nine connected with the University teams,—what kind of a chance has he then of being known? What does debating amount to, anyway? In my opinion it’s a fake. Did the man who virtually downed Harvard last year receive any recognition? Not on your life! Thus, while there may be some reason to celebrate the possibility for success that sports provided for men of humbler backgrounds, it was a conse142

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quence of the rise of athletics that this possibility usually came at the expense of the validation of academic work.≤∏ Nowhere was this more evident than in fraternities. It should come as no surprise that fraternities—always interested in garnering the most prestige on campus and ever responsive to changes within both college and society generally—would have embraced the athlete as worthy of reverence and hence membership. Athletic stars were almost always assured of receiving bids to all the top fraternities on a campus. Indeed, they were often contacted long before they arrived at college by fraternity alumni who lived near them in hopes of obtaining pledges to join a particular fraternity before they had even commenced their studies. For instance, fraternities were revived at Trinity College in the 1890s, the same time that football arrived. All the major players were in Alpha Tau Omega or Kappa Sigma. Rutgers’ chapter of Delta Upsilon informed sister chapters in 1894 that ‘‘three Delta U’s were on the foot-ball team, one of whom made a touchdown against Yale’’—no small feat in an era when Yale was virtually undefeated in football. At Stanford, Zeta Psi boasted of a new initiate: ‘‘On Jan. 28, 99, William Wilson Carson of Eureka, Calif., was initiated into the fraternity. He came from Bellmont School at the beginning of the school year with an enviable record in athletics. Brother Carson was one of the most desired freshmen in college and well worthy of the name ‘Zete.’ He played on the freshman football team and will probably make next year’s varsity team.’’ College novels of the time also depict the hero, almost invariably skilled in football, as having his pick of fraternities. In addition to trying to initiate as many collegiate athletes into their ranks as possible, many fraternities began to compete against each other in intramural games of baseball and football. Augmenting but never fully replacing the competition over rushing and membership described in chapter 1, athletic victories served as another means for fraternities to distinguish themselves and better their rival societies. By 1900 even Amherst College’s ‘‘Non-Fraternity Association’’ had a baseball committee ‘‘to look out for the baseball interests of the society.’’ By century’s end, sports had come to assume a critical link in the construction of masculinity, a link still with us to this day.≤π Among the most important consequences of this emphasis upon masculinity as enacted through athletics is that the respect for intellectual achievement and curiosity declined on most college campuses. While the ‘‘grind’’ or ‘‘dig’’ had always been stigmatized, there had been respect for the gifted orator or intellect during the antebellum period. As the cengreeks and barbs

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tury wore on, this respect waned. Among fraternity men in particular, the amount of time dedicated to doing well in extracurricular activities took its toll upon the academic work of the brothers. This change occurred in tandem with the recognition that it mattered little in the outside worlds of business, finance, and law just how well one had performed in college. It was vigorous competition, not docile study, which made manly men. It was also the fact of having attended college that counted, not one’s grades while there. As Canby observed of his first year of teaching: ‘‘For I quickly learned, intuitively, crudely, yet I learned, that whether it was the history of the English language, or Shakespeare, that I was trying to teach, the actual conflict was not with ignorance but with college life and all that it implied; and behind it the ideas and ideals of an American society in which materialism dominated action and governed thought.’’ And if grades did matter, one could always cheat. Students in postbellum colleges cheated with abandon, often developing detailed methods to evade the watchful eyes of their professors.≤∫ If fraternities had competed manfully for college honors during the antebellum period, by the end of the postbellum period they were attempting to prove, against much evidence to the contrary, that they were capable of decent scholarship. In the earlier period, the enthusiasm for academics came from within; many students, while they may have sought to rebel against overbearing faculty, still believed there was merit in academic achievement. By the end of this later period, fraternity men merely attempted to attain the ‘‘Gentleman’s C’’ that was necessary in order to allow them to stay in school. At Princeton, President McCosh recounted to the trustees that the secret societies ‘‘combined to lower the standard of scholarship.’’ Lyman Bagg explained that at Yale, only about half of all compositions were original and written by the person who claimed the work as his own. He further elaborated: ‘‘A poor scholar who is too conscientious to skin [cheat] is respected for his scruples; but a man who is too conscientious to help another skin—at least passively, as by helping along on its destination a skinning paper, prepared by some one else—is thought little better than a monomaniac on the subject of honor, a being too immaculate to breathe with common men.’’ Bagg wrote this during the early 1870s, explaining that cheating was acceptable for all but those who took the highest stand or top grade in his class; those men should have achieved the distinction on their own. This did not mean, however, that they would be respected for it. 144

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The reporters in Berkeley’s Occident informed readers that fraternity men consistently ranked lower in scholarship than their nonaffiliated peers, were remanded from college for poor scholarship with greater frequency, and more often failed to graduate for the same reason. They were still popular, however.≤Ω The situation had become so marked by the end of the nineteenth century that fraternities themselves were becoming concerned about it. Thus in 1893 Michigan’s chapter of Delta Upsilon saw fit to expel a ‘‘Bro. Kimball’’ from membership, but only after the faculty had suspended him for his poor academic work. Indeed, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, college faculties were publicly discussing the connections between fraternity membership and poor scholarship. In 1912 Dartmouth officials lamented: ‘‘One of two unpleasant conclusions seems unavoidable: either the fraternities are exercising a damaging influence upon their younger members; or they are deliberately choosing poor intellectual material. Whichever of these conclusions is correct, it constitutes a serious indictment of our Greek societies.’’ And in 1911 at unc–Chapel Hill, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts reported to the trustees that ‘‘a comparison of the grades of those students who are not members of fraternities makes reasonably clear: (1) that membership influences the scholastic standing of those who join; (2) that this influence is not good.’’ Edwin Slosson’s profile of Stanford University recounted a similar story: failures in scholarship were highest among fraternity men—twice as high, in fact. They ranked fourth below those who lived in dorms, those living in private houses, and those who lived at home. Men as a whole also ranked behind women, and fraternities behind sororities, which should give us some indication of the degree to which academic achievement was still compatible with a successful femininity but not with the performance of masculinity.≥≠ By the early twentieth century, most fraternities had special committees or officials designated to monitor the scholarship of their constituents in efforts to ensure fraternity survival on campus. One such effort is encapsulated in a pamphlet titled ‘‘Chi Phi, Traditions and Standards of Scholarship,’’ in which Frederick M. Hunter, Chi Phi ‘‘scholarship counselor,’’ wrote the following, which captures much of the fraternal attitude toward academic achievement. Some very fallacious and detrimental ideas are in current circulation among fraternity men. These result in an attitude of secret disdain for greeks and barbs

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high scholarship and a feeling that just ‘‘getting by’’ on examination and final term standings is good enough. These ideas often find expression in such statements as these: ‘‘Oh, our boys don’t wish to become professors or Ph.D.’s. They just want to be successful businessmen.’’ Or[:] ‘‘Scholarship isn’t very important—good fellowship and school spirit count for a lot more.’’ The above are exact quotations of statements from our own alumni. These sentiments reflected what was, by the early twentieth century, glaringly obvious at most schools. For the most part, fraternity men did not study much, dedicating themselves instead to extracurricular activities, camaraderie, athletics, and having fun.≥∞ It is worth pausing to look at the ways that fraternity men’s participation in athletics and other extracurricular activities had an impact upon their fellow classmates. Because there was such a strong emphasis within fraternal circles upon extracurricular achievement, Greek-letter organizations often worked together to make sure that one of their own was elected to every position of prestige. While this practice was not new in the postbellum years, most observers noted a decided increase to the point that there was an almost complete control of college politics and activities by fraternity men. Administrators had always objected to these practices as antidemocratic, and these objections only escalated after the Civil War. Recall from the discussion of literary societies that it was precisely concerns over combinations in the election of speakers and officers that had caused so much trouble at many schools. Bagg described the system at his school in the 1870s: ‘‘Upon the junior societies [fraternities] at Yale, as at present organized, hinges the entire system of college politics.’’ There, once the fraternities had settled upon the candidates that they would support for various elections, members were made to sign contracts agreeing to abide by the choice of the fraternity or publicly decline to do so. In his depiction of college life at Northwestern, William C. Levere described the scene thus: For years, the fraternities have been running things. A man who didn’t wear a pin could not get an elective college honor. The fraternity always combined against him. . . . Recently the fraternities had grown so powerful that they controlled student affairs with ease. The class elections, the selection of prize contestants, the honors which were 146 greeks and barbs

bestowed by the students themselves, were manipulated as the Greeks dictated. Occasionally a popular and able barb was elected to a position, but this was unusual. This was attained only when the barbs united, a move which the lack of organization and of leaders made infrequent. Combining to win elections was also carried on at Princeton, at the University of Georgia, and at the University of Chicago; indeed, the practice was so widespread that those schools without it were an exception to the rule.≥≤ Fraternities controlled the commencement and junior exhibition honors and the literary society officers, and they also had a hand in the election of athletic managers, glee club officers, and newspaper and journal editors. Without aligning himself with a similar nonfraternity combination, an unaffiliated student had very little chance of being elected to such a position. In his letters home, Walter Hill, a student at the University of Georgia in the 1860s, described in great detail the process of electioneering. Taking it as axiomatic that he would vote for his own, he told his mother: ‘‘Party spirit is running high and Electioneering is the order of the day. Being a ⌾⌽ I shall, of course, vote for Emory. . . . I voted and worked for Bull of LaGrange, a Chi Phi, because he was the most worthy candidate.’’ While Hill downplayed the connection, the fact that he too was a Chi Phi had everything to do with his choice. To campaign or vote against party lines was unthinkable.≥≥ Fraternities often published the annual yearbook and made up the membership of student governments and social committees. Frequently, they had founded these publications or committees themselves and for some time were able to control their membership without the interference of faculty demands for more equitable division of the positions. This was during a time when college administrations took a hands-off approach to many extracurricular activities, for the most part allowing the students to run things on their own. Thus, if fraternity men wanted to exclude non-Greeks from the yearbook, they were able to do so with impunity. It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that newer fraternities and non-Greeks were able to break the charmed circle. The Delta Upsilon Fraternity, for instance, one of the younger fraternities at Michigan, desired to have a place on the board of the Palladium (Michigan’s annual), and thus also be included in the publication; it took years before the older fraternities finally relented and let them join. And it was not until 1912 greeks and barbs

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that nonfraternity men gained the right to representation on the Cotillion Board at Johns Hopkins University. Through control of elections and various boards, fraternity men sought not only to represent and orchestrate college life; they also barred non-Greek men from leadership positions in many organizations and sometimes from participation of any kind.≥∂ In 1913 the Inter-Fraternity Conference (ifc) organized a survey to be sent to 151 presidents of schools with fraternities. They were interested in what kind of criticism was lodged against fraternities, particularly in those schools and states where efforts had been made to eliminate them altogether. In other words, this was a preemptive measure designed to enable them to better combat their critics. Of the eighty-eight replies, only nine were unreservedly favorable. Though sixty-five others were generally favorable, all of these presidents also expressed reservations, sometimes reporting the complaints that others had about fraternities at their schools. Reading the summary of the surveys—already edited by the ifc—makes it clear that many college presidents depended on fraternities for their housing and the social activities that they organized; the men who joined also quite clearly liked being members. But most of the respondents also expressed reservations, primarily about the experience of college life for those who either could not afford to join or were not asked to join for other reasons. One claimed that ‘‘the Greek holds himself aloof from the nonGreek. The Greek, for some reason or other, considers himself above his less fortunate brother, who has not been looked upon favorably by any fraternity.’’ Another reported that fraternity critics at his school believed ‘‘that the rushing system and the castes that followed afterwards were cruel and undesirable in a system of education designed to foster ideals of democracy; that fraternity chapters often conspired to defeat non-fraternity candidates upon no other basis than that of fraternity lines.’’ A third respondent explained that ‘‘there is also a tendency on the part of many fraternity men to be continually conscious of the fact that they are a selected group of choice spirits, the superiors of the student body at large.’’ The college presidents, whether speaking for themselves or echoing the sentiments of those who criticized fraternities on their campus, were almost unanimous in their complaints: fraternities were snobbish and undemocratic; they tended to lower scholarship; they monopolized other activities; they established ‘‘unjustified artificial social relations’’; and they were extravagant and populated by the wealthy to the exclusion of poorer students. Even when generally favorable to fraternities, the chief concern of these college presidents was that fraternities divided the campus into factions to the detriment of 148

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those who were not members. Despite the benefits to fraternity brothers themselves, then, there were also consequences for the ‘‘barbs.’’≥∑ Brotherly Exploits In addition to playing sports and participating in extracurricular activities at the expense of their studies, fraternity men were also spending a good deal of time socializing among themselves at meetings, parties, and more informal gatherings in their houses. The debates and readings of essays that had been part of fraternity meetings in the antebellum period had, by and large, ceased to be a function of Greek life by the end of the century. An examination of the minutes of the meetings of Michigan’s Delta Upsilon chapter, for instance, reveals that their literary exercises began to taper off in the 1880s, being replaced by discussions of annuals (yearbooks), sports, physical education, and, as always, competition with other fraternities. By the late 1890s, they often wrote ‘‘No Literary Meeting’’ before proceeding to other business; and by the 1900s, the literary premise seems to have been abandoned altogether. Because Delta Upsilon was always a fraternity known for its commitment to scholarship and to moral living, there is some reason to believe that this cessation is somewhat later than for other fraternities, at least those in northern schools.≥∏ During the postbellum years, fraternity meetings were increasingly a bureaucratic affair, made up of reports of various committees on finances, rushing, and entertainment. With the advent of fraternity houses, the real life of the fraternity was no longer conducted during meetings but instead was lived out in the quotidian experience of socializing, dining, and communing with one’s brothers. To be sure, this had long been the case to some degree. The change that occurred in this period was that fraternity men, by and large, abandoned the pretense that their organizations actually did anything other than advance their own interests, chief among them prestige and a lively social life. The raison d’être of fraternity life, as increasingly its members were admitting publicly, was camaraderie. Then, as now, fraternities provided a ready-made group of friends. At some schools they so effectively controlled the social scene that it was difficult to make friends without being in a fraternity. In a letter to his mother, Walter Hill explained of the competition between different fraternities: ‘‘They bind the cords of friendship together, between the students who belong to the same one.’’ In 1895 the Phi chapter of Chi Phi described just what brotherhood meant to them: ‘‘Perhaps the greeks and barbs

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ideal of a family is the closest that can be attained in our thought of the ideal fraternity. A family means or should mean perfect congeniality. It should mean a unitedness of purpose, a friendly and even brotherly striving after the things worthy of strife. It should mean close friendship. It should mean all that can be meant by the idea of a body of men banded together, working for the same ends, treading the same paths, meeting the same obstacles, and overcoming the same difficulties.’’ This friendship was quite often described as ‘‘manly.’’ Commentators on fraternities, especially those who defended them, insisted upon this manliness. John Corbin, for instance, explained to his readers, ‘‘If the spirit of manly jollity and helpful comradeship has ever been more successfully cultivated than in fraternity life at its best, I do not know where.’’ John Kind claimed that ‘‘fraternities stand for manhood . . . of the highest type.’’ Thomas Arkle Clark, dean of men at the University of Illinois and a consummate defender of fraternities, used some of the same rhetoric: ‘‘Fraternities will justify themselves only as they can establish the fact that their purpose is a serious one; that their members are men rather than foolish, unruly boys.’’ This emphasis upon manliness served two related purposes: by claiming manliness, fraternity men hoped to achieve prestige and distinguish themselves from what was seen as the antithesis of manhood—boyhood. While standards were changing in the United States—men were increasingly being evaluated with women and femininity as a foil to their masculinity—it was still the case that young men in fraternities, poised between childhood and adulthood, insisted that they were men as a way to emphasize their independence and what they hoped was a greater distance from childhood.≥π This was a difficult task, especially considering the infantile antics of many fraternities—antics that often involved senseless vandalism and rowdy public disturbances. These often took the form of destruction of property in nearby towns, stealing the clapper from the college bell tower, stoning the president’s house, disturbing the meetings of literary societies, and numerous practices particular to initiation rituals and hazing as well as to interfraternity competition, such as breaking into another fraternity’s house in order to steal its constitution. When Stanford University established a committee to work on curbing student excesses across campus in 1906, the first thing they did was call representatives of the various fraternities before them. They were interested in cutting back on fraternities’ ‘‘disorder and destruction of University property.’’ Over the next five years, the committee would primarily concern itself with the antics of fraternity men, particularly activities related to drunkenness and harass150 greeks and barbs

ment of women students. Because fraternities tended to attract students who were less serious about their studies and more intent on having a good time, fraternity men often outnumbered non-Greek men in the punishments meted out by college authorities. It was precisely these activities that fraternity defenders worried about when they tried to argue that fraternities created men and not boys.≥∫ Hazing within fraternities was another way for fraternity men to test the manly mettle of their prospective initiates. In many ways, this kind of hazing was simply an extension of the hazing that had been doled out to incoming freshmen by sophomores from the colleges’ earliest days. However, as college populations grew, class solidarity and identification waned; freshman-sophomore rush was among the traditions that fell by the wayside at many colleges. Fraternity identity stepped up to take the place of class identity. Hazing had also been employed by battalions in the Civil War. As students who had fought in the war returned to campus, they brought the practices they had learned with them. William Baird claimed that because of this, fraternity hazing increased in the late 1860s. Others have claimed that hazing may have been imported from West Point by students who had dropped out there and transferred to nonmilitary colleges. Students had certainly been hazing each other since the early nineteenth century; whatever the origin, the significance of the postbellum hazing is that the site for that hazing was beginning to switch to fraternities, which were increasingly measuring the manliness of their neophytes even if college classes more generally were not being so evaluated.≥Ω The problem of fraternity hazing first came into the national spotlight in 1873 with the death of Mortimer Leggett, a Kappa Alpha pledge at Cornell. Leggett fell to his death in an Ithaca gorge while wearing a blindfold he had on for an initiation ritual. Such outdoor rituals usually employed the same amount of mysticism as did the indoor ones, but they might also make use of humiliation and fear. While most of the actual rituals are lost to history, we do know that by this point, hazing rituals could include painting the body of the victim, ‘‘torturing him with electrical horrors,’’ feeding the initiate nauseating concoctions, and beating him. At Stanford in the early twentieth century, almost all fraternities admitted that they ‘‘tubbed’’ their freshmen for disciplinary purposes, a process whereby students were stripped and fully submerged in a tub of cold water until they ‘‘strangled’’; then they were released. When asked just how many freshmen needed to be tubbed, one fraternity brother replied: ‘‘Nearly every freshman the first greeks and barbs

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Semester, some of them twice. Two or three freshmen ‘need it’ the second semester.’’ The report continued: ‘‘In one house an average of three tubbings each man per semester. One house admitted having done too much until effect was spoiled.’’∂≠ Writing in 1915, Thomas Arkle Clark called fraternity hazing a form of ‘‘horseplay,’’ a practice that he erroneously claimed had fallen out of favor. He defended its purposes, among them that it kept up a worthy tradition and taught the freshman his proper place—the latter being especially necessary after what could have been an extended period of wooing, promising, and flattering that very freshman in order to get him to join. Clark claimed that hazing acted as a means of discovering if the freshman were ‘‘yellow’’ and as a test of his character. He quoted an unidentified source, someone in favor of freshman hazing during pledging and initiations, using the following rationale: He [the freshman] is distinctly not a man, and the fraternity must take up the task of character shaping where the parents left off or never began. His exaggeration of his own omnipotence must be dissipated, and as one of our own freshman puts it, he usually cannot reason it out, so other methods must be used. If he could fully comprehend the significance of fraternity ties, ‘‘horse play’’ would be unnecessary; but he cannot do this, and more material means are necessary. Furthermore, the so-called ‘‘rough house’’ is a means of determining what a man possesses, whether he has a streak of ‘‘yellow’’ or whether he has stamina. Greek-letter men were plainly aware that being in a fraternity brought prestige, and they wanted new initiates to not only work for it but also to appreciate it. Hazing, in this rationale, was about ideals of manhood. By 1894 fraternity hazing had become commonplace enough that at their national fraternity convention, Phi Kappa Psi was willing to go on record as being in opposition to the practice, the first Greek organization to do so publicly at the national level.∂∞ Related to hazing in some ways, but also distinctive in its own right, is the practice of ‘‘pledging,’’ another means for active fraternity men to exact punishments upon neophytes in exchange for the honor of membership. During the postbellum period, the now almost universally accepted practice known as pledging, or agreeing to join a fraternity, came into existence. During the antebellum years, as fraternities scrambled to enroll the best men in each new entering class, the period between pledging and 152 greeks and barbs

actually becoming initiated could be as short as a day. As the pledging process became more standardized, however, the period of time that a future fraternity member spent as a pledge increased. During this period, he was often asked to perform certain tasks in order to demonstrate his dedication to the fraternity. These were often tasks of a servile nature, similar to the acts of deference required of all freshmen by upperclassmen throughout the nineteenth century. For instance, Delta Kappa Epsilon’s pledges at Amherst College were required to remove their hats when encountering upperclassmen and also to refer to junior and senior members as ‘‘Mister’’ and ‘‘Sir.’’ It is difficult to know exactly how long this period of pledging lasted; it probably varied from fraternity to fraternity and from school to school. By the early twentieth century, administrations at most schools had become so frustrated with the behavior of fraternities that they set stricter guidelines for when students could be pledged (not until their sophomore year at some schools, for instance), on how long a pledging period could last, and on what kind of tasks were suitable for pledging. Until that time, however, fraternities were free to inflict various forms of punishment upon their pledges.∂≤ However they may have originated, the practices of hazing and pledging tell us something important about the prestige associated with fraternity membership in the decades following the Civil War. In these years, that prestige was so well established that freshmen and sophomores were increasingly willing to undergo humiliation and torture for the privilege of membership. For these men, any number of sacrifices seemed warranted for the chance to be a brother. Further, that those who argued in favor of pledging and hazing did so in a language of manliness also tells us how fraternity men conceived of their brotherhood. They believed that their membership should be composed only of men who were able to withstand particular tests of manhood. Before a man could be hazed or pledged, however, he had to be rushed. Fraternities in the postbellum period continued to compete with each other in rushing the most impressive freshmen. They solicited advice from their alumni, contacted freshmen before they arrived, met them when they came to college for their entrance examinations, and boarded arriving trains a couple of stations early in order to beat rivals for a freshman’s pledge. Initiating the ‘‘best’’ freshmen continued to mark a fraternity as being successful. These freshmen were the ones who came from good families, had attended the best prep schools, and were known to be promising greeks and barbs

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athletes. John Corbin recounted a particularly extreme example of rushing run amok: ‘‘One freshman arrived with his parents. Three fraternities vied for the honor of bearing this Homeric youth into Cornell life. The most active of them went up the line a station and grabbed the boy. The second boarded the train at Ithaca and grabbed his father. The third had to content itself with his mother. . . . The husband flew to the rescue of his wife, and the freshman bleated and ran to his parents, so that the fraternity that had begun with the mother landed the son.’’ In 1887 a brother in Delta Upsilon at Tufts University posed these questions to a q⌼ alumnus: ‘‘Do you think it the best plan to make a man we want think we are anxious to get him? Or would you advise us to try and make him imagine that we are not at all troubled, and that the society is conferring a favor in electing him to share in its jobs? Which method in the end would prove most effective?’’ In elaborating the two options—being honest or playing hard to get—this alumnus was likening rushing to the process of courtship that it really was. Men in fraternities were attempting to get the best men; whether or not they were able had in part to do with how they themselves were perceived. If they were attractive enough, the most attractive prospective members could also be theirs. When this process became accelerated in a mad rush to get the best pledges, many ended up not knowing much about the fraternities that they had agreed to join, and fraternities often knew little, aside from a pledge’s most obvious qualifications, about those they had taken in. Despite the ideals that were supposed to inhere in ‘‘fraternity,’’ brothers’ desire for prestige in many instances won out over the possibilities for congenial friendship.∂≥ By the early twentieth century, college administrators’ frustrations over the disruption caused by pledging, and rival fraternities’ desire to regulate each other’s conduct, led to colleges setting standardized sets of rushing and pledging rules. Among the rushing rules at Amherst College adopted in 1903, for example, were the following: ‘‘Resolved, that we make no appointments or pledges with prospective members of Amherst College before they leave trains upon their arrival in Amherst, or before getting off the electric cars at the corner of Northampton Road and Pleasant Street, or the Amherst terminal. . . . Resolved, that by no statement, allusion or gesture we cast any slur upon the members, the spirit or the position of any other fraternity.’’ While cheating was commonplace, these rules, fantastically arcane at times in their specificity, did go some length toward ensuring that all rushing and pledging occurred on a set schedule and that no fraternity would have an unfair advantage.∂∂ 154

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Alpha Tau Omega Initiation Banquet, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 16, 1895. Thomas Arkle Clark, dean of men at the university (and first dean of men in the United States), is the man with the moustache standing on the left. (Photo courtesy of the Alpha Tau Omega Archives, maintained by the University of Illinois Archives)

Once initiates became brothers of fraternities, they were able to partake of all the benefits of membership that their elders enjoyed. They also were able to take advantage of their new status as manly fraternity brothers. They could live in the fraternity house, attend fraternity parties, and generally enjoy the conviviality and companionship for which fraternities were famous. Fraternities were also supposed to train young men in social etiquette and good manners; the sense of reputation so inculcated in the antebellum period was still alive and well. As Clark explained, ‘‘The fraternity man who is crude, or coarse, or impolite, or ill-trained has some one to correct him, has some one usually to set a good example before him.’’ While it is doubtful how many coarse and crude men were asked to join fraternities in the first place—though college novels often show the rugged westerner and star of the football team being just that—some fraternities regularly included ‘‘criticism’’ in their weekly meetings, whereby an appointed critic would detail the various social gaffes and faults made by other members, primarily freshmen. In Michigan’s Delta Upsilon chapter, table manners were an area of particular concern. At Stanford University in 1913, one young man wrote home to his parents about the strategies taken by himself and his friends in their desire for a successful petition to Phi Kappa Sigma. greeks and barbs

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Some of the boys are really crude, at least they will not observe what they know if they do and by our present means we have a good deal of fun and are really able to accomplish much. For instance in passing to or receiving a dish from a person on your right you use your left hand. This is something for which we make a hard fight. . . . You see we realize that it is useless to expect to appear anything more than crude in the eyes of company or at least unnatural in the matter of table manners unless we do every day just what we would wish to do if we had a critical guest present. These men hoped to train themselves to possess the good manners that were necessary to be initiated into a college fraternity. Fraternities hoped to train socially acceptable young men for the outside world, men with whom they would not be embarrassed to associate themselves.∂∑ Despite this concern for reputation, Greek-letter houses continued to be known for being home to the most vice on campus. Even though forbidden by college regulations, gambling and drinking were both easily done within the walls of a fraternity house. While this penchant for vice and debauchery stands in contrast to fraternity men’s concern with good manners and gentlemanliness, the acceptance of alcohol and other so-called vices was very much in keeping with fraternity men’s self-perceptions as masculine men of the world. As one contributor to John Porter’s Sketches of Yale Life put it: ‘‘There is a prevalent opinion that birds and flowers are fit for girls, but that a boy to be noble and hearty and in no respect a milksop, must put away innocent things, and get a little of the fiery flavor of sin; that men respect him more, and women smile upon him sooner when he has a small coloring in his voice. Hence he indulges in semiprofanely words, chews tobacco and demeans himself stoutly, in order to gain the poor name of a plucky mettled fellow.’’ In 1871 Bagg explained, ‘‘Public sentiment in college inclines favorably towards moderate drinking and does not disapprove of one’s ‘getting moderately tight’ occasionally. To chaff a man for participating in some well-known drinking bout is accounted rather complimentary than otherwise.’’ In this account, drinking was bound up in notions of manliness. Fraternity men, always the first to embrace attitudes and behaviors that would mark them as manly, were drinkers. This tendency toward ‘‘dissipation’’ was one of the chief complaints about fraternities. Before he managed to outlaw secret societies altogether, President McCosh of Princeton reported in 1875 that members 156

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of fraternities often brought in drink and cards to their meetings. In recognition of this phenomenon, the faculty at unc recommended in 1885 to the trustees that the fraternities be permitted to exist on campus only as long as they ‘‘use no spirituous liquors at their banquets at Chapel Hill.’’ Delta Upsilon at Michigan saw fit to expel a number of brothers in the 1890s for, among other things, drinking intoxicating liquors. By 1910, however, they had amended their rules from a stance that no intoxicating liquors be allowed in the house to one that simply outlawed freshmen from drinking in Ann Arbor and nearby Ypsilanti. Indeed, as historian Henry Sheldon recounted in 1902, for every fraternity that expelled members for drunkenness, another would expel a man who was not periodically drunk.∂∏ At Stanford University in the early twentieth century, more than one fraternity had a ‘‘permanent ‘bust’ room’’ in its cellar: ‘‘The purpose of this arrangement was to prevent drunken men from breaking furniture when they threw bottles, to provide a place for them to stay until they got sober, and it was easy to clean up the mess with a hose. This fraternity, by underground arrangement, has been called a fraternity of ‘gentlemanly drinkers,’ but witness declares that five of its members get drunk at each celebration.’’ Another observer at Stanford noted: Two houses held inter-weekly celebrations at week-ends, with lights burning all night and staggering students passing frequently from one to the other, vomiting and making indecent exposure in the street, and using most profane and vulgar language. . . . This witness has been thrown with sheep herders and similar classes of men and declares that the students are less gentlemanly in their drunkenness than are these. He says that the plea of the students for the cultivation of ‘‘gentlemanly drinking’’ is a farce, for that is not the kind they practice. In both of these 1908 descriptions from Stanford, the students described their drinking as being ‘‘gentlemanly.’’ Though Stanford’s officials clearly disagreed (and outlawed drinking on campus that year, resulting in a rowdy riot by several hundred students), this designation tells us about how fraternity men understood themselves, or at least how they attempted to get away with their drinking. Throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, fraternity men attempted to walk a thin line between gentlemanliness—as exemplified by good manners, social graces, and good breeding—and rising notions of masculinity— characterized in part by a man’s prerogative to drink, sometimes to excess. greeks and barbs

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In part, this was accomplished by emphasizing different traits at different times—gentlemanliness in public and masculine rowdiness behind closed doors. Maintaining the boundaries was not always their strong suit.∂π Drinking was not the only vice attributed to fraternity members. At various times at different colleges, gambling, dancing, smoking, and attending the theatre were also punishable offenses. A correspondent to Berkeley’s Oestrus claimed as fact that the majority of one fraternity’s members were gamblers. He went on to explain that the members indulged in this vice in order to be seen as ‘‘Hail fellow, well met.’’ Given the widely held belief that vice was primarily found in cities, urban schools were generally believed to be more riddled with rule breaking. This was also the case for schools that enrolled young men from cities, even if their campuses were located in rural areas. Athletics, too, were also said to be linked to vice. Players and their classmate fans were known to indulge in all sorts of debauchery when they left campus for away games, especially games in big cities where neither team actually attended school. In 1907 one commentator noted that there was a ‘‘foolish notion that prevails too widely in our colleges and fraternities that ‘seeing life’ or ‘knowing life’ necessitates indulgence in vice and drifting away from better things.’’ Whether or not, from our standpoint, there was anything morally wrong with drinking, gambling, and the like is largely beside the point. What mattered to the men who engaged in so-called vice was that it helped turn them into particular kinds of men: worldly men, masculine men. Participating in illicit and morally suspect activities had come to be markers of a successfully performed masculinity. Fraternity men embraced this notion with enthusiasm.∂∫ Alma Mater: The Influence of Alumni The influence of alumni during this period over the finances and management of colleges and universities, their sports teams, and their fraternities should not be underestimated. Canby astutely captured the spirit of an alumnus of his alma mater in this excerpt from Alma Mater: ‘‘I saw in my own experience his [the alumnus’s] romantic enthusiasm for ‘our team’ become a country-wide passion which came near to making athletics the chief purpose of so-called higher education. Like children wanting one more exciting story before bedtime, the alumni demanded victories until intercollegiate play was expanded into a professional entertainment which has slaughtered more than one educational ideal to make a November 158 greeks and barbs

holiday.’’ This alumni enthusiasm contributed both to the growth of fraternities in the postbellum period and to their impact upon colleges and universities, an impact that remains with us to this day. Fraternity alumni were of immense aid to their college-student brethren on the campuses where they had once studied. In 1887 one recently graduated Delta Upsilon alumnus enumerated his devotion in a letter to a fellow alumnus: ‘‘As to money, I expect to send something to the boys every month and toward the end of the year also shall be more than glad to pay a large share of the expenses. . . . I need not tell you how deep and unflagging is my interest in the chapter, for you know it well already.’’ While he was not always explicit about the ways that the success of his college or fraternity might help constitute his masculinity, a man wanted to be sure that when he mentioned the name of that college or fraternity, he could hold his head up proudly as a particular type of man. The rage for intercollegiate sports owes much to this phenomenon. But so too do the fraternities, whose alumni poured millions of dollars into the building, supplying, and maintaining of fraternity houses and who defended fraternities from being ousted by college authorities. In so doing, they further solidified the fraternity as a power with which to be reckoned in the postbellum collegiate world.∂Ω By the mid- to late nineteenth century, and certainly earlier at some schools, many of the professors, presidents, and trustees of colleges and universities had themselves been in fraternities as undergraduates—a marked change from the antebellum period when fraternities were covert organizations that had as one of their purposes opposition to the rule of their faculties. Indeed, it is a testament to their increasing acceptability that by the postbellum period, most colleges and universities not only openly recognized their Greek systems but also publicized the names of their Greek-affiliated professors. These men were naturally rather reluctant to quash or sometimes even regulate organizations in which they were members. In some cases, they worked actively to ensure fraternities’ growth and survival at the schools with which they were affiliated. In others, as administrations attempted to condone and regulate fraternities, professorial alumni would be appointed as chapter advisers. Certainly the fraternities themselves had begun to proudly list their alumni in fraternity publications and in their annual college yearbooks. In a number of instances, fraternity alumni were the crucial barrier between maintaining or abolishing a campus’s Greek system. Recall from chapter 1 just such a case at Williams College in 1845; there, President Mark Hopkins attempted to abolish fraternities from campus and was overruled by the board of trustees, a majorgreeks and barbs

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Kappa Alpha Fraternity at Duke University, 1908. John Kilgo, Duke’s president and a Kappa Alpha member, is seated in the chair on the right side of the photo. By the turn of the century, many college administrators were fully supportive of fraternities’ presence on campus, and many were themselves members. (Reproduced by permission of Duke University Archives)

ity of whom had been Williams alumni involved in the Greek system. Similar scenarios existed at other colleges. At Trinity, President Braxton Craven had banned fraternities from campus in 1878. Slowly but surely, they had worked their way back onto campus sub rosa beginning in the 1890s. In 1900 Craven’s successor John C. Kilgo announced at a meeting of the board of trustees that, as a Greek-letter man himself, he was unwilling to carry on a policy forbidding fraternities while at the same time maintaining his own membership. He thus proposed to rescind the opposition. The board of trustees, itself composed of a number of members of Kappa Sigma and Alpha Tau Omega, supported his decision, and fraternities were reinstated at Trinity with the approbation of the administration. At Amherst College, too, a similar rollover occurred. Edward Hitchcock, so opposed to secret societies in the antebellum years, gave way to Edward Hitchcock Jr.—a member of Alpha Delta Phi and a longtime faculty member of Amherst—in 1861. With the number of Greek-letter men on faculty growing, excluding fraternities from the undergraduate population simply became untenable at most schools.∑≠ Other forces were also at work. As college faculties came to include 160

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fewer ministers, the antebellum objections to secrecy as such fell by the wayside. Faculty members who had been in fraternities also realized that while they might well be divisive to a student body, they were not the evil incarnate that earlier faculties had thought them to be. There is also no reason to assume that faculty fraternity brothers would have been any more sensitive to the needs of the unaffiliated than were their undergraduate brethren. More significantly, by the late nineteenth century, many faculty members wanted as little as possible to do with the social and extracurricular lives of their students. They were certainly not about to stage a full-on campaign against fraternities—a campaign that had never been successful at more than a handful of schools previously—when they were occupied with their own teaching and research. In short, even those who might have been opposed to fraternities believed they had better things to do. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the alumni and not the faculty sat on the boards of trustees and controlled the purse strings of the colleges and universities. Alumni, increasingly active in business and finance, had perhaps reaped the most benefit from their fraternity connections already. Unwilling to see a part of their own undergraduate lives disappear, almost all worked to retain fraternities.∑∞ To be sure, sometimes the presence of fraternity faculty members excited the suspicions of men in rival fraternities and students who chose to remain neutrals. Attempts continued to be made to remove fraternities from college campuses, as in the example of the University of California, Berkeley. Again, alumni support for fraternities usually proved decisive in allowing them to remain. While Princeton’s fraternity alumni were unsuccessful in their attempts to lift the Greek ban at their alma mater, most groups of alumni triumphed by hinting that the feelings they held for their colleges might wane should their fraternities be removed. Many trustees and presidents accurately understood this to mean that their financial contributions might also decline, which is precisely what happened at Bucknell University in the early 1870s. There, President Justin Loomis banned fraternities, curbed athletics, and expelled a member of Sigma Chi, which had been operating there sub rosa. Alumni complained enough that Loomis resigned in 1878; he was replaced by a younger successor, who soon reinstated fraternities. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it had become obvious to almost all colleges and universities that they could abolish fraternities only at the risk of cutting off sources of funding to which they were beholden. This was a risk that most were unwilling to take.∑≤ Fraternity alumni were also instrumental in providing housing for their greeks and barbs

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Zeta Psi house, University of California, Berkeley, 1880. This was the first house built by a fraternity (1876) for the purposes of housing its members and not just as a clubhouse for meetings. (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

undergraduate brethren. In 1846 the Chi Psi Fraternity at the University of Michigan used a small shack in the woods of what is now one of Ann Arbor’s cemeteries as a meetinghouse. This was the first building used exclusively for the purposes of fraternal life. Over the next ten years, chapters of many fraternities followed suit, either buying, renting, or building meeting halls and clubhouses on or near campus. None of these buildings, however, served as actual residences for fraternity brothers. Not until 1874 —at the University of California, Berkeley—did fraternity men actually live exclusively together in a fraternity house. By 1879 some thirteen fraternities owned their own houses, including Berkeley’s chapter of Zeta Psi, which was the first to build its own house in 1876. By 1920, 774 chapters of fraternities owned and resided in their own houses. Much of this was paid for by alumni. At the University of Illinois, for instance, about a third of the school’s fraternities had houses by 1915: ‘‘The plans for the erection of these houses were in each case devised by an interested alumni [sic], the 162

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money for their erection has come in large part from the alumni, and the management and control of these investments is in each case . . . now in the hands of a corporation composed largely of alumni. The building of these houses has drawn heavily upon the time and resources of a large number of men and shows a thoroughly commendable interest on their part.’’∑≥ Aside from its demonstration of remarkable alumni devotion, fraternity housing is significant for a number of reasons. First, it allowed fraternity men to segregate themselves from others on campus. Second, it allowed them to do so based on wealth. Fraternity houses were expensive, and only college students who could afford their share were invited to join. Living in a fraternity house could also prove costly; they often employed cooks and other servants who served lavish meals. Third, on campuses where administrations often provided very little housing for students (most students stayed in town, and poorer students stayed in run-down dormitories), the existence of fraternity houses allowed colleges to ignore the residential needs of their students. This reliance upon fraternities for housing and social life would prove instrumental in the life of these schools from the late nineteenth century onward.∑∂ On October 29, 1890, the following appeared on the front page of the Amherst Record beneath a carefully detailed drawing of a large mansion: By courtesy of B. W. Hitchcock, class of ’81 [the artist], at Amherst College, we are enabled to present to our readers to-day the above portrait of the new and elegant chapter house of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, recently completed, which is beyond question, the handsomest building of this character in Amherst and will rank well with any in the New England States. The estimated cost of the building was $40,000, and the money has been so expended as to produce a building that is not only an architectural ornament to the town, but one that furnishes a comfortable and elegant home to members of the fraternity during their sojourn in Amherst. The story went on to detail the sumptuousness of the home (which replaced an earlier dwelling consumed by fire), including descriptions of various rooms—among them a basement room in which the janitor might reside. Similarly, the ‘‘lodge-room’’ of the Delta Psi Fraternity house at Columbia was ‘‘magnificently furnished in Egyptian designs especially imported from Thebes for this purpose, at a cost of several thousands of dollars.’’ Buildings such as these were paid for by the Alpha Delta Phi or Delta Psi alumni of these particular chapters. They provided comfortable greeks and barbs

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rooms for their members to live in, a place for them to congregate and entertain, a refuge for returning alumni, and a means to impress, as is evident from these descriptions. Fraternity houses, or the lack thereof, became but one more way for fraternity men to compare their chapter with others, both nationally in the same fraternity and, in particular, among rival organizations. The largest and most lavish house was indicative of the most successful fraternity. This, in turn, would allow for the recruitment of the most promising and wealthy new members, which would ensure the good reputation and continued prosperity of the fraternity itself.∑∑ A student writing in Berkeley’s Oestrus described the phenomenon in the following way in 1878: ‘‘These fraternities are constantly trying to outshine each other in the fineness of their houses and in the brilliancy of their entertainments and banquets. If one fraternity gives a banquet, the others feel that they must render theirs more brilliant, and accordingly spend more money to carry it on.’’ The writer goes on to claim that all of this competition induces some men to spend beyond their means in order to keep up. While he does not mention it in this editorial, the other and perhaps more pronounced effect was that it tended to further segregate wealthy fraternity men from their poorer classmates. Indeed, a contemporaneous commentator made the following suggestion after a visit to Cornell, which had a thriving Greek system: ‘‘The more fully developed the system of Greek-letter fraternities at a university, the greater is the need of residential halls. And if, in addition to such halls, there were a dining-hall in which the men from the fraternity houses and men from the public halls took their meals together, the arrangement would make for democracy and fraternity and tend to eliminate cliquishness and social sectarianism.’’ One of the effects of the building of fraternity houses was to further separate affiliated students from their non-Greek peers. While this may have come about in large part because many colleges and universities themselves were not providing dormitory space for all of their students, and because fraternity men were capable of spending the funds required to build and maintain the houses, a large part of the impetus for the construction also came from fraternity brothers and alumni being anxious to differentiate themselves from those they perceived as their inferiors on campus.∑∏ The building of houses, then, in addition to the more explicit qualifications of wealth, acted as a means for maintaining a wealthy elite on college campuses. By the end of the nineteenth century, the need to pay for the houses was a further barrier to membership. Men who could not afford to contribute were not invited to join. In this way, house building 164 greeks and barbs

not only acted as fraternal competition but also perpetuated the class hierarchy of fraternities. Fraternity Men and Their Others With remarkably few exceptions, colleges and thus fraternities had always been populated by white, Protestant men. At the end of the nineteenth century, the demographics began to change. Women, Jews, Catholics, and small numbers of African Americans and Asian Americans began to enroll in colleges that had been all white, all Protestant, and all male. With the arrival of these newer populations on the college campus, fraternities had to make choices about whether or not to exclude their new classmates. Fraternities did exactly that, prompting the excluded to form their own organizations that were in most respects copying the originals that had shunned them. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of ethnic and racial minorities at colleges and universities, fraternities were much more self-consciously concerned with their whiteness and their Christianity. If these elements had been taken for granted in previous decades, by 1900 fraternal masculinity was raced white and Protestant. These two elements had come to be constitutive of the prestige that inhered in being a fraternity man—in direct relation to nonwhites’ and non-Protestants’ increased presence in the public world beyond the college campus. By 1900 many fraternity men on newly coeducational campuses developed an antagonistic attitude toward their female classmates as well. These women were seen as interlopers, and many men felt threatened by the women’s presence, especially when those women competed with them for college honors and in other activities. In this are the first inklings of a trend that would become cemented by the 1920s: masculinity was increasingly being defined in opposition to women and femininity as opposed to boys and youthfulness.∑π Throughout the period, fraternity men (and college men with money more generally) continued to be served by Irish women and African American men and women. Indeed, most fraternity houses would have employed at least one janitor or porter and perhaps a cook as well. College fiction of the time, as well as humorous pieces published in college newspapers, depict black men in particular as comic characters of little intelligence and no great skill, even at menial tasks. Occasionally, mention is made of the dedicated service of a particular servant like ‘‘Jim Stink’’ at Princeton, but many fraternities may simply have taken it for granted that greeks and barbs

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Delta Upsilon Fraternity, Amherst College, 1907. When the chapter published this picture of itself, the caption read, ‘‘A person of no little importance in Amherst chapter life is ‘Perry,’ who has been their faithful janitor for twenty-five years.’’ Perry’s last name, not noted in the caption, was Roberts. (Reproduced by permission of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)

they would employ men of color. In 1893, for instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) chapter of Chi Phi wrote in its annual newsletter that ‘‘Edward Epps, a gentleman of color, was engaged to take care of the Freshmen.’’ Sometimes these ‘‘gentlemen of color’’ received somewhat more celebration. This was the case with Perry (tellingly, no last name provided), who worked for the Amherst chapter of Delta Upsilon: ‘‘He has been with us longer than the janitor of any other fraternity house in Amherst and celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of his service next January’’ (this was written in 1907). Perry was pictured seated front and center among twenty-five white faces in Delta Upsilon’s sixtiethanniversary publication. The correspondent claimed that a celebration was 166 greeks and barbs

being planned in Perry’s honor. While treatment such as this was certainly better than the hostility that African American domestics may have received in other fraternities, it is likely that Perry’s existence in the basement janitor’s room and in fraternity portraits served to reassure white fraternity brothers of their racial superiority.∑∫ Worse, of course, were the depictions of black ‘‘sweeps’’ as illiterate and simpleminded to be found in Bagg’s Four Years at Yale and Henry Beers’s 1895 The Ways of Yale. At Yale, the great debate centered around whether it was better to live on or off campus. Bagg explained that in a dorm one could do as one pleased without fear of disturbing one’s landlady: ‘‘And if he can’t ‘wallop his own nigger,’ he can at least swear at his private sweep.’’ Conversely, the author of an article published in Porter’s Sketches of Yale Life advocated living off campus: ‘‘A nigger does not poke his wool into my room every day, and interrogate me thus: ‘Eny appleths?’ Ugh! No old Jew disturbs my study hours by opening my door, and saluting me thus: ‘Fine day? Any old clothes, my dear?’ No ragged thief comes to my door and asks for half a dollar, ‘to kape himself and family of fifteen children from starvin.’ No little girl, with the appearance of Sappho on a drunk, besieges my door for a ‘penny.’ ’’ Another contributor to the same volume described his African American sweep as being like the ‘‘real oldfashioned Negro servants’’ of the southern states, though he himself had not been south of New Jersey. His perfectly childish love of mischief and of laughter, merely for laughter’s sake and without any reference to the thing which caused it, and the queer mixture of shyness and simplicity which is so observable in him, accord well with the traditional character I have mentioned, so common in fiction, and so rare but real in life. He has, too, just the proper amount of personal vanity, as I discovered to my great amusement when he told me, in the most matter-of-fact way, that he had dyed his whiskers the night of the Jubilee, and that the stuff would not come off; but most of all he has in perfection the oft-quoted pride in ‘‘my gentlemen,’’ and brags, in a manner worthy of Gumbo himself, of their good looks, virtues, and fine rooms, with little remarks thrown in, now and then, by way of parentheses, on the excellent care he takes of them. There are considerably more representations of African American domestics in colleges from the period during and after the Civil War than from the antebellum period. In the earlier period, the servility of black people was simply taken for granted. As African Americans gained their freedom greeks and barbs

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and white racial superiority could not be grounded in slavery, representing blacks as menial, servile, and simpleminded served to make white college men feel secure.∑Ω College novels of the time, which are rife with references to black sweeps and servants, bear this out. The Chi Delts in James Sanderson’s Cornell Stories have a ‘‘trig little negro boy’’ to wait on them and bring them wine and crackers. A ‘‘short darky’’ makes an appearance on the third page of Richard Holbrook’s Boys and Men, is described as ‘‘anything but intelligent,’’ and is made to speak in a dialect that aims to reveal him as such throughout the remainder of the novel. Even Owen Johnson, otherwise critical of college life, throws in some performing ‘‘coons’’ in Stover at Yale. By the postbellum period, amusing black servants had become stock characters in the drama that was college life. In other parts of the country, the racial other was not necessarily black. At early twentieth-century Stanford, when a Stanford Dye Works employee who happened to be Japanese came to the Kappa Sigma house to collect a bill, brothers poured hot water on him from the roof and ruined his suit.∏≠ In keeping with cultural anxieties beyond campus, college students, and fraternities in particular, were in no great rush to welcome newly arrived immigrants’ children or African Americans. Most scholars have noted that when the numbers of Jewish and African American students remained low on college campuses, little was made of their presence. A number of Jews attended Yale throughout the nineteenth century, for instance, without attracting attention; some wealthy Jews were even initiated into fraternities. Between 1880 and 1925, however, the population of Jews in the United States increased from approximately 250,000 to over 4 million. Further, in contrast to the more established Jews of the nineteenth century, who were predominantly German in national origin, those newly immigrating to the United States were Russian and Eastern European Jews who came with little or no wealth. That anti-Semitism was as present in U.S. colleges as in the wider society is to be expected. Between 1890 and 1925, the Jewish undergraduate enrollment grew at a rate five times that of the rest of the Jewish population. Jews also tended to do well academically. Colleges and their students reacted to this influx with resentment, ostracism, and exclusion.∏∞ Pi Lambda Phi, the first Jewish fraternity, was founded at Yale in March 1895 by three Jews who identified the fraternity as ‘‘non-sectarian.’’ Historian of Jewish fraternities Marianne Sanua argues that they did this precisely because of the anti-Semitism at Yale. They wanted the benefits of 168

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Greek life that had been denied them because of their Judaism but did not particularly want to identify themselves as Jews. The second Jewish fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, was founded by a group of rabbinical students at the Jewish Theological Seminary (jts) in New York in 1898. Both fraternities soon branched out to Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the City College of New York, Cornell, mit, and Harvard, among others, allowing Jewish students at these schools access to the Greek life that they were being denied in Gentile fraternities.∏≤ The story of other ‘‘minority’’ fraternities is much the same. The first Catholic fraternity, Phi Kappa Sigma, was founded at Brown in 1889; the first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, was founded at Cornell in 1906; and the first fraternity for Chinese students, Rho Psi, was also founded at Cornell in 1916. Though these organizations claimed to celebrate their unique cultural, religious, or racial heritage (and they still do), the fact remains that they came into existence at a time when fraternities controlled the social scene on campus and ethnic and racial minorities were barred from membership. With the exception of Zeta Beta Tau’s first chapter at jts, minority fraternities were not founded for the purpose of celebrating their differences; they were founded precisely because their differences had prevented their participation in the first place.∏≥ By the end of the nineteenth century, stereotypes and depictions of immigrant students abounded. They were the epitome of the ‘‘dig,’’ ‘‘grind,’’ or ‘‘greasy grind’’: ‘‘The ‘greasy grind’ was a racial or social variant of the plain grind. The greasy grind seldom changed his collar. He had a sneaking cleverness which taught him to snap up the hard questions in easy courses, thus collecting high marks as a protection against a world that, quite properly, wished to keep him down. He would argue with teacher for ten minutes trying to get a B changed into an A; but he had no intellectual curiosity. Education for him was a coin, useless unless you could buy something with it.’’ This description comes from Canby’s reminiscences of teaching English literature at Yale in the early 1900s. Children of recent immigrants were, understandably, much more intent upon their studies than were the social elites who came to college and treated it like a finishing school, a place where making contacts was perhaps of the most importance. These newer students were more likely to be poor, to already live in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located, and to be less likely to participate in athletics and other extracurricular activities. This was a function primarily of their poverty, the need of some to work in their extra time to support themselves, as well as their belief that academics greeks and barbs

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Kappa Kappa Kappa Fraternity, Dartmouth College, 1916. White men appearing in blackface only further served to emphasize their whiteness and difference from the African American students who were beginning to attend their school. (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

were paramount in school. Many immigrant children took college at face value, working hard in their studies in hopes of succeeding later in life. The same stereotypes that dogged Jews and Catholics in the outside world —Jews as money-grubbers, Catholics as papist conspirators—also plagued them in college. At Yale in 1890, the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity put on a play called ‘‘Shylock: The Sarcastic Sheeny, or the Manoeuvering Merchant of Verdant Venice.’’ Novelist Owen Wister’s Philosophy 4, published to much success in 1903, tells the story of Bertie and Billy, sophomores from old families attending Harvard, who rely upon greasy grind Oscar Maironi to tutor them for their philosophy exam. The moral of the story is that Bertie and Billy, having spent the day before the test drinking and carousing, do better on the exam by giving fresh and imaginative answers, while Oscar gives the answers by rote and is downgraded for lack of imagination.∏∂ Having described grinds, greasy grinds, and blue-blooded prep-school boys, Canby also explained to readers that another kind of college student also existed. 170 greeks and barbs

The second generation from the East of Europe was beginning to come to college:—Polish Jews with anemic faces on which were set dirty spectacles, soft-eyed Italians too alien to mix with an Anglo-Saxon community, seam faced Armenian boys, and now and then a Chinese. These, except the last, were all in college to learn how to live in America. Their mien was apologetic; you could see them watching with envious curiosity the courteous indifference of the superior race; they took little part in the discussions, and asked for no credit. . . . Occasionally there would be a revelation of intellect or a hint of the future, when some Chinese boy, caught off his guard, and forgetting the convention of the classroom which was to answer a question and sit down, would give a précis of the entire lesson, and perhaps the previous one and the next, which only a French intellectual could have equaled. Or some Russian Jewish exile, asked to comment on an Ibsen play, and losing control of his guarded intellect, would expound a social philosophy that made the class squirm as if a blast of fire had scorched the seats of their comfortable pants. To Canby, himself a Yale graduate and child of blue-blood privilege, recent immigrant arrivals at college behaved in only two ways: as greasy grinds or as these overeager intellectuals. He did not seem to have much patience for either. The recent immigrant’s consummate problem was that he was too eager, too obvious, too interested in grades, too by-the-books, and none too subtle. He was not fraternity material. By contrast, in Stover at Yale, Stover and his roommate await the knowledge of whether or not they’ve been chosen for senior societies thus: ‘‘each took up his book in order to be found in an inconsequential attitude, outwardly indifferent, as all AngloSaxons should be.’’∏∑ The vast majority of the literature on college ‘‘others’’ in the late nineteenth century is about Jews. They, unlike Catholics and African Americans, actually attended the established Protestant institutions. Certainly some Catholics did as well, but Catholics also founded their own colleges and universities, as did African Americans. It may also be, as at least one historian has argued, that by the time Catholics got to Protestant colleges, some of them were also more assimilated than their Jewish counterparts. African Americans were barred outright from many schools, certainly all in the South. Even when individuals from any of the three groups were admitted to colleges, fraternities excluded them. Until the late nineteenth greeks and barbs

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century, fraternities had no need to actually codify their racism and antiSemitism; they attended institutions that were, by and large, free from ‘‘undesirable elements.’’ Once anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism were the order of the day among America’s social elite—such prejudice itself a function of the growing numbers of Jews and Catholics in the United States—it stood to reason that they would govern the practices of the training grounds for that elite as well. By the early 1910s, then, fraternities were adding codes of exclusion to their constitutions mandating that members must be white, Christian males. Although these codes were largely moot, as de facto exclusion had been established by that point, the codes demonstrate the concern that some renegade chapter might initiate an unsuitable member if it was not explicitly forbidden. Such members would only reflect poorly on the national brotherhood and were to be avoided at all costs.∏∏ Fraternity men’s reactions to the arrival of women on their campuses were more complicated. Coeducation was instituted at very different times at different schools. The first coeducational college, Oberlin, stood alone for years before it was joined by Antioch in 1856 and others after that. The larger state and land-grant institutions tended to go coed first—the University of Iowa in 1858, the University of Wisconsin during the Civil War, the University of Michigan in 1870, and Cornell in 1872, for instance— and by the late nineteenth century, newly founded state schools often began as coeducational institutions. Coeducation was usually a result of monetary concerns; in order to survive, these schools needed as many students as possible. If some of the students had to be women, so be it. The statesupported schools were also funded by tax dollars; by the late nineteenth century, many taxpayers wanted their daughters as well as their sons to be educated, and the states were forced to respond to these demands. Following their lead as well as that of the established women’s colleges, some elite eastern men’s schools also founded sister institutions, or ‘‘coordinated colleges,’’ in the late nineteenth century. These included Radcliffe at Harvard (1879), Barnard at Columbia (1889), and Pembroke at Brown (1891). Other colleges waited until well into the twentieth century before they admitted women. Both college administrators and students often feared that admitting women would ‘‘feminize’’ their college and tarnish its reputation. They feared that the school might lose prestige if women were admitted. Nevertheless, as with Jews and blacks, women were often tolerated, if not exactly welcomed, as long as their numbers remained low. When the number of women students began to increase, 172 greeks and barbs

hostility toward them became common. So ostracized were women on some campuses (Michigan and Cornell among them) that college life remained essentially a male-only preserve.∏π Predictably, fraternity men banned women from membership. Fraternities were about brotherhood, and women obviously could not be brothers. Further, the presence of women on campuses was seen by many men as unnecessary and offensive; to allow them admission to fraternities would be to imply approval of their place at college, something many fraternity men would not countenance. Some women reacted to this by founding women’s fraternities of their own, later called sororities at the suggestion of a Syracuse University Latin professor. The first of these was Kappa Alpha Theta, founded at Asbury University in Indiana in 1870. Writing in 1907, Ida Shaw Martin, an early sorority woman, explained the need for sororities, especially in coeducational colleges: ‘‘Misunderstood in the classroom, shut out from participation in the literary and debating societies organized by the men, unrecognized in the social life that crystallized around the fraternities, the few who were courageous enough to brave outspoken ridicule or veiled slur were sadly in need of the moral support that the sorority could give.’’ Like the ‘‘minority’’ fraternities, women in sororities banded together when excluded from the life of the college as it was already constituted.∏∫ In An American Girl and Her Four Years in a Boys’ College, her semiautobiographical novel of college life in the 1870s, Olive San Louie Anderson described the first years of coeducation at Michigan, which she calls ‘‘Ortonville University.’’ Her book portrays much more congeniality between the male and female students than others have reported. There were limits, however. Women were not permitted to participate in most of the extracurricular activities and certainly not in the fraternities. The heroine of the novel, Wilhelmine Elliott (who goes by the name Will), is clearly inspired by Little Women’s Jo March. She is intelligent and capable both in and out of the classroom and earns the grudging respect of some of her male peers only after she rescues one of them from drowning. The romance she has with the studious Guilford Randolf is doomed, however, because she plans to become a doctor. The boys at ‘‘Ortonville University’’ could tolerate their female peers if they did not threaten them; those women who planned to devote themselves to husbands and families after graduating were just such women. As one male student recounts to a number of other boys, ‘‘You know we fellows don’t like to see anything in any woman that we would not want to see in the woman we would marry; and I’d as soon greeks and barbs

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think of marrying an iceberg or the north-pole as Miss Elliott.’’ Will Elliott is usurping the masculine power of her classmates and she is shunned by some of them for it. Because Guilford Randolf is embarrassed by her ambition and her skill, their romance ends in heartache. Will Elliott was not alone. Between 1870 and 1920, when only 10 percent of women nationwide did not marry, between 40 and 60 percent of female college students chose not to do so. It was these independent women who fraternity men were shunning on what they thought of as ‘‘their’’ campuses.∏Ω At some schools, fraternity men were the most open in opposition to women’s presence on campus. At Cornell, fraternity brothers were forbidden by Greek leaders to date Cornell women or even to talk to them on campus, and Cornell women were not allowed to attend fraternity parties until the mid-1920s, though other women were often invited. Commentator Edwin Slosson recounted the following about fraternity life at Cornell: We have the spectacle of young men sitting on the porch of a luxurious fraternity house and criticizing certain passing ‘‘coeds’’ with an acridity almost feminine, expressing disgust because their clothes do not fit them, and their hands are not neatly manicured. . . . The leader of the Sophomore cotillion not long ago asked a university girl, his fiancée, to take part in that function with him. His associates thought this an undue recognition of the existence of the ‘‘coeds’’ and prevailed upon him to break or get released from his engagement—the dance engagement —and take an outside girl instead. At early twentieth-century Stanford—a school that had been coeducational from its founding in 1891—fraternity men were also routinely cited for their mistreatment of women, both classmates and faculty wives. Fraternity men disrupted the sororities, broke into their homes late at night, left them vulgar notes, and vomited and urinated on their lawns and porches; on October 24, 1908, seventeen Stanford fraternities were made to apologize officially to the sororities of the Pan-Hellenic Council for their disorderly conduct. Five years later, little had changed: ‘‘The men of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity have the habit of lying on their lawn and making audible comments to passing women on the underwear which may or may not be visible. . . . The wife of a professor was passing and she was made to feel insulted by comments and actions every step of the way while passing the lawn. . . . Another professor’s wife was struck by a batted ball recently and also felt indignant.’’ At Michigan, as the number of women students grew (by 1897 women graduates outnumbered the men), the number of fraterni174

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ties also grew, from only seven in 1870 to twenty-one in 1895 and thirty-two by 1920. Fraternity men banded together, as they did against their nonaffiliated classmates, to exclude women from participation in extracurricular activities. This exclusion is hardly surprising, principally because fraternity men expected the honors of college life to be theirs; in one sense, it did not much matter who lost out in the process as long as fraternity men continued to dominate. In another sense, however, losing an office or college honor to a woman must have been particularly painful, so much so that women were simply barred from participating. This strategy is not unlike that taken by Harvard and Yale when they found themselves continually beaten in athletic contests by schools they considered their inferiors; far better to exclude them from the outset than to compete with them and lose.π≠ At schools without women, fraternity men did not interact with women as equals or peers but instead in ways that were much less threatening to them: as objects of curiosity, love, fascination, and occasionally disdain. These women, unlike Will Elliott, could be expected to take their rightful place as wives and mothers. While some men did court their female classmates, most of the romantic liaisons that took place between fraternity men and women were with women unaffiliated with colleges. At the very least, most college and fraternity men in this period preferred to date women who were not enrolled at their own colleges, even if those women did happen to be students elsewhere. One common figure, though not a student herself, was the ‘‘college widow,’’ familiar to us from antebellum years. The following is a glowing (yet deeply patronizing) description of the college widow from Canby’s Alma Mater: She began at sixteen or eighteen, as a ravishing beauty, the darling of freshmen; she passed on in the years of her first blooming from class to class of ardent youngsters, until, as her experience ripened, she acquired a taste, never to be satisfied by matrimony, for male admiration, abstracted from its consequences; and more subtly, for the heady stimulant of intimacy with men in their fresh and vigorous youth. By her thirties she had learned the art of eternal spring, and had become a connoisseur in the dangerous excitement of passion controlled at the breaking point, a mistress of every emotion, and an adept in the difficult task of sublimating love into friendship. . . . To smoke a cigarette with her when cigarettes were still taboo for women, and drink her coffee and liqueur, was a lesson in civilization. greeks and barbs

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Absent from this description, of course, is the disdain that college men often had for the college widow once she had outgrown her usefulness. To marry the college widow was simply not done. As in the antebellum period, the other exception to the rule of little mixed-sex interaction was women of lower-class backgrounds. While it was still considered unseemly for respectable men to boast publicly of their sexual relations with prostitutes or other women ‘‘beneath’’ them, certainly they continued to have these relations.π∞ In this regard, perhaps no other source has been cited as often as Henry Seidel Canby’s other memoir, The Age of Confidence (1934). Indeed, such consistent reliance upon it is a testament to just how little we know about college men’s and women’s sexual behavior during this period. It is nevertheless a rich source for gaining insight into how men understood the women from whom they procured sexual favors. Canby described a world where respect was given to women of one’s own class, so much so that ‘‘but one hint of the sexual made her ‘common,’ which was only one word above vulgar.’’ Upper- and middle-class men tried not to think of women in their class in sexual ways precisely because they did not want to sully their reputation—a reputation bound up in the women’s chastity. In an oftquoted passage, Canby recounted that young men ‘‘raided the amusement parks or the evening streets in search of girls that could be frankly pursued for their physical charms. ‘Chippies’ was the cant name, which implied something between shaded virtue and easy yielding.’’ A chippy was made up of a ‘‘pretty face’’ and ‘‘shapely limbs’’ alone. Quoted less often is the following: ‘‘Companionship, friendliness never entered to complicate a simple and exciting relationship except in surprising moments when a plaything struggling against a last and not too determined assault, became suddenly a human pleading to be aided against the ardors of her own blood.’’ Canby hints that, even with chippies, sexual intercourse was rare; even putting aside his complete lack of regard for the chippy as an actual human being, however, this passage makes clear that whatever did occur with these chippies may not have been as consensual as he presumed.π≤ Others recount stories of attempts to meet working women, ‘‘fast girls,’’ ‘‘lewd women,’’ and especially chorus girls. In the late 1870s, for instance, a Berkeley Chi Phi man and his friends met several ‘‘fast girls’’ and brought them back to their boardinghouse, passing them off as their sisters; they were reported by the landlady the next morning. Bagg explained that perhaps one man per class at Yale kept his own mistress, and a little less often a man’s hurried withdrawal from college was indicative of an indis176

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cretion with ‘‘some damsel in the city.’’ Fraternities at early twentiethcentury University of Minnesota were known for telephoning women of low repute, and at the University of Kansas, fraternity houses were known to be ‘‘houses of assignation where the members congregate to tell lewd stories, gamble, drink, and to do those things which are most unbecoming of a gentleman.’’ At Stanford, as the minutes of the Student Affairs Committee explained, ‘‘One student under treatment for venereal disease declared that he never would have contracted it had he not gone while drunk with members of the fraternity, at the close of a banquet, to the place where it was contracted. He soon had the disease again and pled the same circumstances. Again five men from the same fraternity were known to be under treatment for gonorrhea at the same time. (Suggesting ‘teamwork’ in vice.)’’ Also at Stanford, a Pi Kappa Psi fled from school when authorities learned that he had been spending nights at the St. Francis Hotel in San Jose with a young ward of the juvenile court named May Perry. The same faculty committee noted that the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity at Stanford ‘‘has had the service of a red Peerless car’’ and chauffeur, ‘‘the men being carried to Menlo and to saloons in San Jose, and it is reported that lewd women were carried back and forth with them also.’’ A member of the same fraternity was expelled for writing obscene notes to members of the university community, including one of the school nurses: ‘‘The boys in some of the Frats are looking for mistresses that they can have nearer than Menlo. And as you have had the rep. for a year and a half or two of being Doctor SNOWS paid mistress we thot [sic] may be if we made it worth your while you would serve us. . . . You look kind of used up but you would do.’’ Fraternity brothers, as men with money, were accustomed to having their way with certain women of the lower classes. While it was still not seemly to go on about it publicly, it was nevertheless a man’s prerogative, and by the early twentieth century, it was coming to define his masculinity.π≥ In his novel of early twentieth-century life at Yale, The Beginning of Wisdom (1912), Stephen Vincent Benét describes a relationship that took place between the novel’s protagonist, Philip, and a local girl, Milly Stillman. Philip, an Alpha Delta Phi brother, makes the mistake of falling in love with Milly, an Irish girl who has had experience with Yale boys before. When she first meets Philip, she tells him: ‘‘All you Yale boys are nice—but some of you get rough! Oh my! Oh dear!’’ As they continue to see each other, Philip must keep Milly a secret from his classmates for fear of ruining his own reputation. As Benét tells his readers: ‘‘Of Philip’s class of greeks and barbs

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three hundred and fifty, about two-thirds would have been willing to go on a ‘petting-party’ with girls like Milly, ten or twelve—and certainly not more—might have proceeded to extremes had they found her attractively lacking in virtue, only one or two would have ever thought of falling in love with her. But Philip, for good fortune or bad, was the thirteenth currantbun in the baker’s dozen.’’ Though they remain virtuous throughout most of their courtship, they finally give in to their passion and consummate their relationship. Plagued with guilt, Philip and Milly promptly marry. Within months, Milly comes down with pneumonia and dies. Philip, having managed to keep the marriage a secret from Yale authorities (who would have expelled him had they known), becomes so grief stricken that he misses his exams and fails to graduate. The tale is admittedly extreme, but it does characterize the degree to which college men’s relationships with working-class women were regulated, not just by college authorities but by peers as well. To take brief advantage of such a girl was acceptable; to fall in love with her was unthinkable.π∂ Fraternity men continued to talk about and socialize with more suitable society women whom the wealthier students met in town. In many ways, little had changed from the antebellum period and the mixed-sex interactions described by 1840s Amherst student William Hammond in chapter 2. Thus, while University of Georgia student Walter B. Hill was too young to be courting young women (he was only sixteen when he entered college), he became acquainted with several young ladies on the occasions when he was invited to dinner in town. In 1869 he recounted to his mother: ‘‘I went to the Reception, and enjoyed myself immensely. It is a great pleasure even to look on at a gathering in Athens where its ‘youth & beauty meet.’ The young ladies are gifted with all manner of charms.’’ Students visited neighboring women’s colleges; they also met young ladies at faculty receptions or when away from college for sports or a glee club tour. William Preston Few, future president of Duke University, wrote to his mother in 1886 while a student at Wofford College that ‘‘all the members of our fraternity are going to ride on Monday afternoon. I am going with Miss Mary Moore. It will be Few & Moore[.] I hope I may enjoy the afternoon.’’ Tufts student Wilson Fairbanks wrote to a fellow brother in Delta Upsilon in 1887 about attending a dinner party: ‘‘Five of the Tufts chapter attended, three of us taking ladies. Needless to say, the three are now devoted D.U. sisters.’’ At some coeducational schools where relations between the sexes were more amicable, students could go on expeditions in mixed-sex pairs, though never as a single couple for the sake of the girl’s reputation. 178 greeks and barbs

At the University of Wisconsin, couples often went on group outings in buggies to dine at a hotel on Lake Mendota; another Wisconsin source reports that by the early twentieth century, ‘‘girls outside sororities never, or seldom, get invitations to fraternity dances, no matter how charming they may be. Individual men may admire them immensely, but feel ‘they don’t belong’ and ‘they can’t do us any good.’ ’’ In the mid-1890s, Stanford student and Zeta Psi brother Samuel Simmons recounted of one night: ‘‘To-night is a gala night here—the Sophomore cotillion—The house is almost deserted for most of the boys have gone to it—But it is too much for me—can’t or rather don’t like to—‘stag’-it—and pay $4 for a ticket—$5 for a hack and $2.50 for flowers to the young lady.’’ In this he attested not just to the mixed-sex socializing of his fraternity brothers but also to the costs that attended it. Historian of women’s fraternities Diana B. Turk also reports that by the early twentieth century, the women of Kappa Alpha Theta regularly hosted events to which they invited men’s fraternities for dining, socializing, and other entertainments.π∑ There is much evidence to suggest that fraternity men used their status to attract women. Not only were they aware that membership in a fraternity made them more desirable to some women, but they also went out of their way to cultivate such a reputation, often organizing to keep nonaffiliated men out of social affairs altogether. Men in fraternities were becoming increasingly aware that being popular with the opposite sex contributed to the respect that one received from one’s male peers. At unc in 1892, the members of one fraternity counseled young ladies not to receive the attentions of unaffiliated men or they would risk driving off the fraternity men. The young women listened, much to the dismay of the nonfraternity men who complained to the faculty. At Yale, fraternity men showed their ‘‘lady friends’’ their society halls in order to impress them. At Johns Hopkins, the fraternity men pooled their available dancing partners during the cotillions, making it virtually impossible for nonfraternity men to fill their cards; they also shunned the women who came with nonfraternity men. A similar scheme was enacted at Ohio State University, where ‘‘at college proms, fraternities have boxes, and the girl who doesn’t go to a prom with a fraternity man has a pretty poor chance of a good time, for dances are interchanged among fraternities.’’ On occasions when women were invited on campus at Beloit College, the fraternity men all flocked together and attempted to monopolize the women, ‘‘who shared the weakness of their sex for badges of distinction.’’ And finally, at Berkeley, the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority operated under the aegis of fraternity men, who insisted greeks and barbs

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that only women agreeable to them be initiated. A writer for the Occident explained: ‘‘For their votes, the Kappas are paid ‘attentions’; for their ‘roping in’ members they are paid ‘attentions,’ for their humiliating subserviency they are paid ‘attentions’; and, as has been said before, sneered at behind their backs by the sort of men they receive attentions from.’’π∏ In addition to this soliciting and monopolizing of female attention to the exclusion of nonfraternity men, brothers also emphasized the character of their relations with women in a number of other ways. One chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, when joined by guests from other chapters, marched through the streets of their town singing fraternity songs in front of young ladies’ boarding schools. Psi Upsilon’s fraternity song included this verse: The bright-eyed maidens love to hear The story of our brave career And looks upon the man as blest Who wears the diamond on his breast. It concluded with the chorus: ‘‘Hurrah! For the Psi U Ladies.’’ The Chi Phi Fraternity sang: The fairest ladies in the land Are Chi Phis firm and true; They wear the scarlet on their cheeks, Their eyes of brightest blue. At Trinity College, ‘‘Some [students] played double games while at home during vacation. They made love to several girls, and simply, we suppose, for the pleasure of reporting their triumphs when they returned to college.’’ Indeed, the man who was on familiar terms with many young ladies was often admired by his peers. He had to be careful, however, lest he appear too preoccupied with them. As in all things, a man might be popular, but he should never appear to be trying to be popular; it should come to him naturally. In a fine example of this phenomenon, Walter Hill described such a man in a letter to his father: ‘‘Harris has lost ground in the College this term, lost it even with me, by showing a sickly sentimentality over the ladies. The female man is a very poor character to assume: he has assumed it. Not a lady does he meet on the street but he makes himself escort. To every church service & from every church service he accompanies a lady. This femaleishness has worked disastrously to his reputation in College.’’ Rather, the attentions of a young woman, never solicited, should be shrugged off or acknowledged casually. This was the case for Curly 180 greeks and barbs

Corliss, football hero of The Big Year, who is ‘‘far too busy with football and with all the people he knows in other places to bother his head about girls.’’ The author of the novel, however, is also sure to tell readers about the scads of letters Corliss receives from female admirers who had seen his picture in the paper, such as the one ‘‘from a girl in California, who wanted to know all about him, and told him her hair was marcelled too, but not like his, and anyway it was natural with him she guessed. . . . And was he a ‘frat man’ and she supposed of course he was, or he would not have been captain of the team—at least that was the way it was in the college in her home town.’’ Fraternity men had the reputation for being popular with women; this was a reputation that they had set out to develop in a society that was increasingly valuing male virility and masculinity as markers of successful men.ππ fraternal masculinity in the postbellum period had changed in some significant ways from its antebellum articulation. No longer was a strong stand in the literary society as respected as it once had been; indeed, the extant literary societies were only a shadow of their former selves. Fraternity men now prided themselves on athletic ability, extracurricular achievement, and notions of gentlemanliness, defined largely as wealth and social breeding. By century’s end, fraternities were also increasingly embracing white Protestantism and popularity with young women as constitutive of their identities. Fraternity men had ideas about what it meant to be a man, and their participation in fraternities was one of the prime ways they sought to prove their manhood. Though the ideal had changed somewhat from the antebellum period—and as we shall see in the following chapters, it would continue to change—a properly enacted masculinity remained the essential criterion for membership in a fraternity.

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Chapter Five fussers and fast women Fraternity Men in the 1920s

In November 1926 the New Student, an alternative national newspaper, published a short story about a freshman adjusting to his first year away at college. Its protagonist, Bruce, has pledged a fraternity upon his arrival. At their Monday meetings, pledges are required to tell about their exploits during the week. At the meeting during which we are first introduced to Bruce, a fellow pledge has just risen to speak: This one was telling about a girl he had taken to a dance. He had taken her out before, but then she wouldn’t do anything. This time, though, he had given her some whiskey, and stopped the car on a side road, and turned out the lights and started to neck. He had tried to get his hand on her, but she wouldn’t let him. He had given her some more to drink. He said he hated to think of letting her have all that liquor and not getting anything out of it. The fellows around the table laughed, and Bruce laughed too, and felt sick and a long way off. He tried not to listen but the story went on. . . . The second drink had loosened her up, and it had been a cinch; she had given hotter’n hell. The story continues with the pledge receiving praise about his technique and speculations that his liquor had not been wasted after all. Bruce is made uncomfortable by all this talk. He has had sex before, but with a girl 183

he cares for at home. It sickens him to imagine talking about her the way these boys are discussing the girls with whom they have sex.∞ By the end of the short tale, however, Bruce is asked to attend a party with his brothers and to help them out by taking an extra girl, a waitress from a nearby town. He accepts. The party is a few towns away, and when Bruce and his brothers arrive a couple is making out on a couch: ‘‘[Bruce] took a good look at his girl, compared her with the others and was satisfied that this girl was just as good looking as the rest.’’ The partygoers proceed to get drunk and then start dancing. One by one, the couples ascend the stairs to the bedrooms above. Bruce resists at first, but when his girl goes as well, he follows her upstairs and into a bedroom at the end of the hall. The next morning, Bruce and his fraternity brothers return to campus. Bruce goes directly to his room, embarrassed by what he has done. ‘‘Then some of the other fellows came in,’’ the narrator explains, ‘‘and started bragging about the party, told how much better their women were than the ones the others brought. Bruce was intoxicated by a superior feeling, and told them that wasn’t anything. He had a girl at home who was a lot better than this one.’’≤ Though heavy-handed in its message and none too subtle in its use of symbolism (there is a bird that makes repeated appearances throughout, symbolizing the innocence that Bruce is losing), this story does reveal some important aspects of fraternal culture in the 1920s. The anonymous author described a culture of masculine boasting and pressure that had found its home in college fraternities by the early twentieth century. At the beginning of the story, Bruce has nothing but pure thoughts about girls. By the end, in response to fraternal pressures, he has had sex with a pickup (the waitress) and betrayed his girl at home by boasting about her to his brothers—boasting in ways that have little to do with how he feels about her as a person and everything to do with her appearance. The story also points out a number of other elements of fraternity life. The episode in which the brother describes his technique for seducing a woman is indicative of a way of thinking about obtaining sex as a matter of strategy and subterfuge. It makes sense, as well, that the author depicts Bruce having sex with a waitress from a nearby town. The reader is meant to see the sex as meaningless because the woman is not of the same class as Bruce; she is not a college student. This was typical of the sex that took place between college men and women during the 1920s. That alcohol was part of both the first seduction and the party was also typical for the time. The use of techniques (including alcohol) in order to obtain sex from girls had be184

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come a way for men to prove themselves as men. Fraternity men embraced this new way of gauging their masculinity. During the 1920s, the first era of mass education, thousands upon thousands of middle-class students flocked to increasing numbers of colleges and universities. Fraternities and sororities reigned socially supreme on most college campuses. In addition to a dramatic increase in college attendance, the decade saw a number of other factors influence the lives of American youth, including the increasing sexual permissiveness of middle-class college women (and men), more widely available birth control, the automobile, the movies, a booming national consumer culture, the decreasing significance of religion, and the increasing number of coeducational colleges. These combined to create a new world, not only for fraternity men but also for everyone else on campus. By examining these factors and the way that fraternity men reacted to them, we will be able to see the ways that they adjusted with zeal to new standards for the performance of masculinity. In many ways, the seeds for these trends had been planted much earlier. Nevertheless, the events of the 1920s were distinctive in a number of ways and would themselves set precedents for future generations of fraternity men and—perhaps more importantly—their fellow students. During the 1920s, fraternity men in large part completed the transition to a standard of masculinity that is recognizable to us today. As we have seen, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, social class had become firmly entrenched as a requirement for initiation for all but the best athletes, and fraternity men had begun to exclude the small number of Jews and blacks who found their way to college. It was during the 1920s, however, that barriers to the admission of these religious and racial minorities hardened. Many national fraternities enacted amendments to their constitutions to bar their admission. And while manly performance on the college campus had by the end of the nineteenth century already embraced athletics and physical prowess as constitutive elements, sexual performance became key to a successfully enacted fraternal masculinity in the 1920s. While the decade may well have meant a break from Victorian standards of strict gender difference and gendered segregation, there is much evidence to indicate that the twenties ushered in its own set of problems for women. In attempting to compensate for the increasing number of women on campus—and the growing demands that they be treated as equals—fraternity men established ways for interacting with their new female classmates, ranging from ostracism and exploitation at one end of fussers and fast women

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the spectrum to uneasy, competitive dating on the other. Fraternity men adapted, then, to the changes on campus and throughout the nation by elaborating a method for performing masculinity that made use of the women with whom they were increasingly forced to interact. They dated these women and attempted to extract sexual favors from them, such as necking and petting; and they continued to look off campus for women like Bruce’s waitress for strictly sexual liaisons. As other historians have noted, the behavior and attitudes of 1920s youth were a significant turning point in the social history of the United States. The same is true for college fraternities.≥ The Plastic Age: College Life in the 1920s Between 1900 and 1930, the number of students attending colleges and universities tripled; many colleges doubled their enrollments during the 1920s alone. In the academic year 1919–20, there were almost 600,000 young people enrolled in college; by 1929–30, this number had jumped to just over 1.1 million. By 1930, then, close to 20 percent of U.S. Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two were attending a postsecondary school of some sort. This proportion was a huge increase over previous decades; indeed, during the first decade of the twentieth century, only 2 percent had done so. As historian Paula Fass and others have argued, the concentration of same-age peers on college campuses led to the creation of a self-conscious peer culture that was at odds with the traditions of the students’ parents but never completely rejected them. That youth culture, personified perhaps most famously by Amory Blaine, hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), was one obsessed with itself, which essentially meant that young men and women were obsessed with themselves and their peers. Thanks to a growing national economy and consumer culture, as well as a national media rife with advertising, the ways of youth were broadcast around the country for emulation by young people in practically every city and town. Coonskin coats and convertible cars, jazz music and the fox-trot, fraternity parties and sorority teas—this was the stuff of youth. Young people were almost always portrayed as being in college, so much so that many college students complained that what made them distinctive as college students was too easily copied by those not in school. During the 1920s, U.S. Americans endlessly debated the changes they saw in the youth all around them, and no one symbolized that youth more than the college man or the college woman.∂ 186

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By the end of World War I, college had moved into the mainstream of the United States. It had become expected that middle-class men and women would send their sons and daughters to a college or university to prepare them for a career (or, in the case of some young women, for a husband).The growing number of middle-class families considered a college education as one more symbol of their status as middle class. As one contemporaneous undergraduate noted: ‘‘In recent years, American colleges have been deluged by a certain type of fellow who goes there simply because it is the thing to do. He usually has plenty of money, a high or a prep-school education and an immense yearning for ‘college’ life. He is the popular type of fraternity prospect and is rushed from the day the college opens.’’ A college education was increasingly necessary for procuring a job after college in the worlds of business and industry, and most professional schools were also requiring a b.a. for admission to their programs. To succeed in the white-collar United States after World War I, one went to college. In his study of the emergence of the college as a mass U.S. phenomenon, historian David O. Levine notes: ‘‘The functions of institutions of higher learning and their students, faculty and administrators were no longer antithetical to the broad economic and social values of society; indeed, the colleges became the primary champions of those values. The college became a center for the ethos of an emergent white-collar, consumptionoriented middle class.’’ While our study of colleges in the late nineteenth century has shown that not all of these trends were particularly new—the established elite, for example, had long embraced college as ‘‘finishing school’’—there can be no doubt that a growing middle class led to increasing numbers of students in colleges who would embrace these values.∑ Men in that middle class were overwhelmingly oriented toward business. Commentators on the period are in agreement that male college students were consumed with the ways that their lives in college might prepare them for careers in business. They were convinced as never before that the study of the arcane knowledge available in the college classroom would do them little good; instead, one should learn outside the classroom from one’s peers. A college or university prepared a man to get along with his fellows, to participate in group activities, and to learn the competitive and yet cooperative culture of the workplace and the market. Whether or not college actually did this is almost beside the point; that so many were convinced that this should be its purpose tells us much about 1920s college students’ attitudes toward their studies and their reasons for being in college in the first place. College students also understood that a b.a. fussers and fast women

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marked them as being from the middle class or higher; that distinction would also aid them in obtaining employment.∏ While increasing numbers of immigrants and people of color began to attend colleges during the 1920s, there is no question that, with a dearth of financial aid available, elite colleges continued to serve the privileged. The vast majority of college students of any variety remained, at the very least, solidly middle class. This certainly included the two-thirds of college students who attended coeducational residential colleges during the decade. Their peers at pricier eastern single-sex colleges for men and women were even more privileged. The rise in numbers of poorer college students, those who worked and continued to live at home, was most often to be found at urban commuter schools. The national peer culture, then, was one enjoyed primarily by students from relatively privileged backgrounds. Indeed, a good deal of money was often necessary to pay for the tuition, clothing, entertainment, automobiles, vacations, and Greek-letter-society dues necessary to measure up to one’s peers. And while some students certainly worked, one historian estimates that no more than 15 percent were actually self-supporting, and these would have been largely at the urban commuter schools where the youth-oriented peer culture was least developed.π What developed at both coed and single-sex residential schools was a society that, in keeping with the growing consumer culture, was intensely preoccupied with appearances, both in aesthetics and behavior. Rigid standards existed on all campuses governing all aspects of students’ social and extracurricular lives; these standards, thanks to a growing national media, were strikingly uniform from campus to campus. Fass succinctly notes: ‘‘Competition within conformity and conformity in the service of competition were the structuring facts of campus life in the twenties.’’ These values were tailor-made for success in business in the 1920s economy, and they mandated watchfulness on the part of all students toward their peers and themselves. It was a culture of prestige and self-consciousness. Almost all students sought the former, and they did so through acquiescing to group norms of behavior and appearance. Fraternities and sororities were the most prestigious groups on campus, and they were the most rigorous at ensuring strict conformity to the collegiate ideal. During the 1920s, 11.74 percent of college men joined fraternities. This percentage is the highest in fraternities’ history—although, because some schools did not have Greek-letter organizations at all, the number does not represent the 188 fussers and fast women

actual percentage of fraternity men at schools with a Greek system; their percentage on any particular campus was often much higher.∫ Fraternities were recognized throughout the nation as being the ultimate fulfillment of the collegiate ideal. A college man who did not belong to a fraternity was not regarded as quite as collegiate as his Greek peer. Freshmen arrived on campus in anticipation of college life; fraternity membership was seen as an integral part of that life. The pressure to belong was thus felt not only on campus but also at home from families, friends, and perhaps former high school classmates. Local and national newspapers annually published the names of the men who had been selected for fraternity membership. A 1929 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, and a sorority member there, explained: ‘‘I have seen snobbishness and false evaluation of associates generated within fraternities, which, incidentally, is spreading beyond college and into our cities and towns. Too often, both in college and out, one hears the question, ‘What fraternity does he belong to?’ asked as a basis for forming an opinion of a person. It is a new system of caste which has arisen in the past ten years, and which is getting too serious a grip on our minds.’’ Norma Smallwood, another young Oklahoman and Miss America 1926, revealed to the New York Times that her ideal man ‘‘must have a college fraternity pin, chestnut hair, brown eyes, good reputation, sound teeth and must be a singer.’’ Fraternity membership defined collegiate success, and not just on the college campus. The young man who returned home at Christmas of his first year at college without a fraternity pin on his lapel often did so under a cloud of disgrace.Ω As in the later nineteenth century, in order to maintain their positions of prestige on campus, fraternity members were expected to participate in as many extracurricular activities as they were able. And while individuality was encouraged to a certain degree, it was almost always within circumscribed limits and in the service of a group. That students gained some individual fame from their activities would be unavoidable, but the greater good would be reflected back upon the brotherhood. Athletics reigned supreme. As Thomas Arkle Clark put it in 1926: ‘‘The athlete is the undergraduate idol. He is the big man in college, the god whom the freshmen worship, and to whom the young women offer incense and to whom they write congratulatory notes.’’ From there, a descending order of prestige for all other activities ended with the scholar, who could either be tolerated if he kept his interests to himself or be openly scorned if he were more public fussers and fast women

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about them. Again, as in the later nineteenth century, the activities that were most valued were those that were understood to contribute to the culture of the school more generally. One national study found that a majority of students at every school participated in activities of some sort, and that most considered them to be more important than their academic commitments. At the University of Minnesota, for instance, a school of 5,000 students, one-half of the students took part in two activities, 15 percent in three or four, and 5 percent in five or more. The average man spent thirtytwo hours on activities per week and the average woman approximately half that. Those who participated in many activities for the sake of making a name for themselves were called ‘‘activity hounds’’ (and not always derisively). Competition for recognition within the activities was fierce, and fraternities and sororities controlled most of the major offices—and sometimes the entire membership—through the political combines they had perfected from their very inception. There is at least one story of a glee club made up entirely of fraternity men who could not sing but were selected because of their Greek-letter connections. As one fraternity brother put it, ‘‘Anything that makes us better known on the campus is an activity. If distinction in scholarship brought honor to our house in the eyes of the college we would call it an activity and go after it. We would rather have an athletic letter man any day than a Phi Beta Kappa. It means more honor to our house.’’ Individual achievement in any of these realms was for the betterment of the group, which in turn reflected back upon all the individuals in the group, allowing them to recruit new members to the group who would further the reputation they had worked so assiduously to cultivate.∞≠ The exception to the rule of individual achievement, though at times only slightly, was in romantic or sexual accomplishment. Make no mistake: a beautiful girl was a credit to her sorority and a boy with a good line did well for his fraternity,∞∞ but there was more individuality allowed in the romantic lives of 1920s college students than in their extracurricular pursuits —which is not to say that they did not all follow the same strictly regimented set of rules that governed mixed-sex interactions, because they did. What it did mean, however, was that individual men or women might distinguish themselves beyond their peers by their performance with, and desirability to, the opposite sex. While part of this was done precisely through extracurricular activity, nice clothes, and money (which fed directly into fraternity and sorority membership), a man or a woman might possess discrete attributes like good looks, charm, sophistication, and confidence that would set him or her apart. In these areas, men and women 190

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might compete among themselves, even among their Greek brothers and sisters. They did so while enacting scripted masculine and feminine roles. Mixed-sex interactions were governed by what sociologist Willard Waller famously called the ‘‘Rating and Dating Complex.’’ Boys and girls were rated based on their appearance, their line, their fraternity or sorority membership, their family background, and their extracurricular participation. Those who rated highest dated each other. Usually this meant that the boys from the top fraternities dated the girls from the top sororities, those from the second tier organizations dated each other, and so on down the social scale. With a remarkable degree of agreement, most students could list fraternities and sororities in descending order of prestige. On many campuses, it was unheard of for Greek-letter men and women to date outside Greek circles. Immense pressure was often used to dissuade those few who ventured astray from doing so again. In her history of courtship in the twentieth century, Beth Bailey emphasizes the degree to which dating in the 1920s was a matter of competition. Girls and boys often went on dates every night of the week. To be seen with the same person on too regular a basis was enough to lower one’s rating; to be seen with the wrong person was enough to destroy it. Bailey also shows that dating was based upon an ethic of consumption. A large part of what defined a date for both men and women was that the man was able to pay for the woman: ‘‘He desired to be in the public situation that defined a date: he desired to have a date, and he desired for others to see that he had a date.’’ This ability to pay was partially what defined the man’s accomplishment in dating; having the man pay for her was the woman’s accomplishment. To date the most popular men or women on campus further heightened that accomplishment.∞≤ Rating and dating, and the endless discussions that resulted from the practices, meant that college students—and fraternity men and sorority women in particular—were well aware of how they rated on campus and how they compared to their peers both within their organizations and outside of them. While they might compete as a group for college honors, and while their Greek-letter organizations might help them gain dates, they were also evaluated as individuals based on their sexual attractiveness. This was nothing new for women, who had been evaluated on little more for at least a century. It was, however, new for men. In his history of what he calls the ‘‘First Sexual Revolution,’’ Kevin White emphasizes that early twentieth-century consumer culture encouraged men to question their appearances as they had never done before. New types of clothing, cosmetics, hair tonics, sun-tanning lotions, and physical exercise equipment for men fussers and fast women

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were widely advertised and worked to convince men that they were in need of fixing in order to be found attractive. Physical culture and youthfulness were emphasized perhaps above all else. Taken together with the publicity and competition involved in dating, men became newly aware of which traits might be impressive to both their fellow men and to women. In fraternal circles, this led, among other things, to the episode of masculine competition with which this chapter opened. Men discussed among themselves who was particularly successful with women and who was not; this success became a marker of masculinity.∞≥ In addition to the heightened consciousness surrounding masculinity and sexual attractiveness, the nation was slowly becoming aware of a growing homosexual subculture. Homosexual men were believed to behave like women, were thought to be particularly concerned with their appearances, and were said to be very ‘‘aesthetic.’’ Twenties college men, who were themselves increasingly behaving in ways that were suspiciously like this description of the homosexual, compensated by emphasizing what made them not homosexual: they publicly proclaimed their dates and sexual conquests. One cannot help but imagine the ways that college men, and fraternity men in particular, reacted to evaluations of their appearance and sexual attractiveness by their male peers. This is not to say that they were necessarily interested in each other sexually (though it is clear that some of them were) but that they were now in a position where measuring one’s male peers in these terms was inescapable. A number of scholars have lamented the loss of intimacy among men that resulted from this greater awareness and the communal fear of homosexuality; while this does indeed seem to be one of the side effects, the most unfortunate consequence is the degree to which masculine heterosexual posturing negatively affected the women with whom these men attempted to prove their heterosexuality.∞∂ A Study of Dartmouth College Examining the culture of fraternities at one school in particular tells us much about how Greek-letter men behaved in their day-to-day lives. In the 1920s, Dartmouth College was an all-male residential college of around 2,000 students located on the banks of the Connecticut River in rural Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth was a campus dominated by its fraternities in spirit if not in number; a little over half of all students were members. Since the turn of the century, the fraternities had been battling out their differences through an increasingly arcane set of rushing 192

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and pledging rules designed to make sure that no single fraternity would achieve an advantage over the others and to satisfy the administration’s desire that the rushing and pledging process not overly interfere with the smooth running of the college. To that end, by the 1921–22 school year, Dartmouth officials had postponed rushing until the second semester of a student’s first year at college. This was a compromise with the undergraduates and with fraternity alumni, many of whom had complained about an earlier ruling that had banned rushing until students’ sophomore year.∞∑ Ernest Martin Hopkins, president of Dartmouth College from 1916 to 1945, was a graduate of Dartmouth and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Hopkins, along with faculty fraternity advisers appointed by him, was responsible for overseeing the conduct of fraternities on campus. He had his hands full. While Hopkins was a loyal alumnus of q⌲⌭, he had little patience for fraternity men—undergraduate or alumni—who placed the life of the fraternity ahead of the peaceful functioning of the college or who placed extracurricular activities ahead of academics. Hopkins believed that allegiance should be first to Dartmouth and only secondarily to one’s fraternity.∞∏ Throughout the twenties, while believing firmly in the importance of fraternities on Dartmouth’s campus—and indeed encouraging more of them to establish chapters there—he also spent much of his time disciplining undergraduate fraternity men and restraining overzealous Greek-letter alumni. The former involved enforcing regulations about drinking, socializing with women, vandalism, poor grades, hazing, and the constant problem of what to do with the uninitiated. The latter meant attempting to make national fraternal advisers more responsible for the conduct of their undergraduate brothers. By the end of the decade, Hopkins had also managed to suppress a minor scandal involving a fraternity that was home to a growing homosexual clique on campus. Exploring Hopkins’s correspondence, as well as other materials from 1920s Dartmouth, allows us to see how fraternity men occupied their time and what this can tell us about the ways that they conceived of themselves as men.∞π The students who joined fraternities at Dartmouth College (already an exclusive school with tuition of $400.00 by 1925, a year when the average U.S. annual income was $1,317.00) were even wealthier than their fellow students. A 1924–25 Dartmouth survey indicated that students’ annual total expenditures (including tuition) ranged from a low of $775.00 to a high of $4,800.00; the average was $1,535.00. The same survey found that of the lowest financial quarter of the students surveyed in 1924–25 (those quarters determined by their annual expenditures), only 44.7 percent fussers and fast women

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joined fraternities; in the highest quarter, 85 percent did so. Of course, what put people into these quarters was their expenditures, fraternity dues among them. That said, there is no question that there is a positive correlation between those students who spent the most money on an annual basis and those who joined fraternities. The survey also found that every family of the boys in the highest quarter employed a servant or two, versus only one in eight of the lowest quarter. Additionally, in the highest quarter, every boy’s family had either one or two cars, while in the lowest, the family of only one man in two owned a car. Dartmouth fraternity men came from relatively wealthy families.∞∫ Fraternity men at Dartmouth were no less involved in activities than their brothers around the nation. Lambda Chi Alpha’s 1923 newsletter to alumni, for instance, reported that the brothers participated in all of the intramural athletic tournaments. They were runners-up in basketball, losing out only to Chi Phi, and they fared well in baseball, eliminating Psi Upsilon and Sigma Chi; but they did not do quite so well in tennis, meeting defeat at the hands of Alpha Delta Phi. Lambda Chi Alpha was also well represented on the soccer team (with two members wearing varsity D’s), in the outing club, in the glee club, in debating, and on the Winter Carnival Committee. Zeta Psi’s 1924 newsletter reported similarly that among their seniors were the managing editor and business and advertising managers of the Dartmouth (the school newspaper), the president of the Forensic Union, the editor of the Aegis (the yearbook), three letter men, and two senior society men. And those were just the seniors. The report went on to detail the accomplishments and memberships of each and every member of the fraternity that year. These newsletters, sent regularly to chapter alumni, were designed to assure those alumni brothers that their chapter continued to keep the good name that it had when they had been members. The reports themselves also tell us much about what fraternity men valued. Athletics were always highlighted, followed by positions of prestige in senior societies, publications, musical groups, and finally the more academically oriented activities like debating and forensics. Also noted in most of these newsletters was some sort of report about the Winter Carnival or the dances that had been hosted by the fraternity. Delta Kappa Epsilon’s 1920 newsletter recounted the two house parties hosted by the Pi chapter, and their 1930 volume gave a report on the trip they took to Bermuda that year. The newsletters, then, give evidence of the extracurricular achievements of fraternity men and demonstrate the degree to which wealth played a part in their lives. Weekend-long parties and 194

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Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, Dartmouth College chapter, on holiday in Bermuda, 1930. Delta Kappa Epsilon reproduced this image in its annual newsletter, Log of Pi. (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

cruises to tropical islands were not minor costs to be borne by college students; many fraternity men had money.∞Ω Achievement in extracurricular activities was the means for fraternity men to impress each other and to bring prestige to their brotherhood. Along with the social ties cultivated in the bonds of brotherhood, this prestige was the raison d’être of fraternity membership. William Coles, a 1929 Dartmouth graduate, looked back upon his days in Delta Kappa Epsilon and remembered the following: When I was in college, President Hopkins, Dean Laycock and important people in all directions were Dekes, also a majority of the letter men on the football team and other so-called big men on campus. It was one of the three most credited fraternities, the other two being Psi Upsilon across the street, and Alpha Delta Phi down by the gym. . . . The Dekes had a reputation of being a little rough and perhaps a little vulgar but there was something glorious about them. To tell you about the greats of my time . . . would take up too much space. There was even something special about the non-greats, like Chester Haltom from Fort Worth who wore a derby hat and a raccoon coat and drove a Pierce Arrow, and Cy Worth who was the best athlete that ever came to Dartmouth but never got to play because he was always on probation. fussers and fast women

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There was great glory in being a Deke, and no wonder I felt I had reached the height of social achievement when I was admitted. . . . No wonder I felt I had to maintain a certain democratic understanding and tolerance for some of my friends . . . who had joined a cheesy outfit called Phi Gamma Delt, poor guys. Delta Kappa Epsilon had long been known at Dartmouth as a fraternity of athletes. Notable also in this account is that the greatest athlete, of whom Coles seemed quite proud, never actually played any intercollegiate sports because he was on academic probation throughout his time there. Plainly, academics were not one of Delta Kappa Epsilon’s greatest strengths. That they were ‘‘rough’’ and ‘‘vulgar’’ also contributed to their identity as masculine; this was entirely in keeping with shifts away from manliness toward a more aggressive and virile masculinity throughout the nation. Coles took pride in belonging to such a band of brothers and, even writing forty-five years after the fact, could not help but compare his fraternity to three others on campus. It was how he had gained his identity as one of the Big Men on Campus.≤≠ In 1920 a Dartmouth alumnus with a considerable involvement in the life of the school (and a Psi Upsilon member himself) wrote a letter of complaint to Hopkins’s secretary. I believe it to be a fact that they [fraternities] are now definitely injurious to the student-body life. They are, so I find, inclined to be arrogant and snobbish, are not always clean in their politics, and by their power and influence they make the college life of the 45% of nonmember students narrower and more restricted than it would be did they not exist. They add to Dartmouth, and this is perhaps the strongest point against them, a measure of values for all students which bears no relation to daily conduct or to scholarship; but is dependent solely on the selective power of a small minority of the student body. . . . [I]t has grown so slowly and insidiously and has so deep a hold on all the undergraduate student body that non-members silently accept it as if it were an essential part of Dartmouth life; and feel that any protest or criticism of the present status of fraternity and non-fraternity students would be injurious to them. He noted in a postscript that ‘‘of about 226 officers, and memberships of importance, in student-life organizations, about 200 are held by fraternity 196

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men. Of course these 200 positions are not secured to fraternities by open and free competition.’’ At issue in this letter and in many complaints about fraternity men was that they monopolized the various extracurricular activities to the exclusion of unaffiliated students, who often were unable to participate. Fraternity men’s ability to gain prestige was predicated upon the exclusion of the unaffiliated. Situations similar to this existed at most schools. At the University of Michigan, for instance, 43 percent of fraternity and sorority members participated in activities and athletics compared to only 13 percent of independents, and at Syracuse University a majority of independent students felt that it was more difficult for the unaffiliated to participate in activities than it was for fraternity members. Indeed, 46 percent of Greeks there claimed that it was only right that they should have dominance over extracurricular activities.≤∞ Seven years after this letter, Dartmouth’s president would take up some of the same issues with James Anderson Hawes, the national secretary of Hopkins’s own fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon. In a frank letter, Hopkins explained to Hawes that the College is definitely engaged in undertaking to grade up its capacity for intellectual achievement on the part of the thoroughly normal, all-around good men. So far as I can make out, the ideals of some of the older fraternities, among which D.K.E. is numbered, are that they will specialize in good fellows, no matter to what extent this same group is subversive to the ideals of the College. . . . The group results in the chapter at Dartmouth do grave injustice to fine individuals in each of the delegations. The conditions, however, are such that I should endorse the statement of a sharp-tongued associate of mine who remarked that he thought that a high-grade student in D.K.E. deserved more credit than a man of the same grade in any other chapter in the College, for he made his record against greater odds. Hopkins pointed to what by the late nineteenth century and certainly by the 1920s had become well known among educators: fraternity men did not study. They were not completely alone in this; as historians have noted, most students in the twenties were remarkably apathetic about academics. But fraternity men were more often content to sit back and enjoy the extracurricular aspects of college life than were many of their peers. As the recorder-secretary of Psi Upsilon and a friend of Hopkins’s would note in the same year, ‘‘The trouble with fraternities like D.K.E., Alpha Delta and fussers and fast women

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Psi U is that the young men when taken into these fraternities think that because of the age and reputation of the society, they do not have to make any particular effort in their studies which is primarily their reason for going to college.’’ While Hopkins’s correspondent here refers to only three of the older fraternities at Dartmouth, many other educators had some difficulty distinguishing between the older and newer in terms of their disinterest in scholarship.≤≤ Leon B. Richardson, professor of chemistry at Dartmouth, claimed in his 1924 study of liberal-arts colleges that the only ‘‘high-stand’’ student who would be taken on by a fraternity was the one who conformed to type in every other respect so absolutely that his scholarly aptitude was incidental to his character. He also noted that the fraternity man consistently ranked scholastically below the nonfraternity ‘‘element’’ in college, scholarship being ‘‘a piece of baggage which he is better off without.’’ He attributed this to the intense pressure placed upon all students to conform to type: ‘‘The moment a man shows intellectual superiority, or even manifests unusual interest in those things which the college is for, he at once falls under suspicion. He must show that he is not possessed of the pride of intellect; he must show that he has in his makeup elements of good fellowship; he must show that he conforms sufficiently to the normal college type not to be a marked man.’’ While scholarly attainments had been in disfavor since the late nineteenth century, the 1920s represented the nadir of achievement, and fraternity men led the way.≤≥ It was the problem of conformity to a set type that Milton A. Harrington, Dartmouth’s first full-time college consultant in mental hygiene, identified in his 1926–27 paper, ‘‘The Mental Health Problem in the College.’’ In this report on his work at Dartmouth, Harrington commented on those men who were socially unsuccessful: The fact that there is so much social life in college, so many gay times, only makes the situation worse as far as these men are concerned, for it serves to call their attention to what they are missing. It makes them clearly conscious of the fact that they do not belong. A particularly unfortunate factor in this situation is the fraternity system. It is felt that to be a social success in college one must make a good fraternity. A very considerable percentage of men in college of necessity fail to make any fraternity at all and have therefore brought home to them clearly and unmistakably the fact that they are social failures. What makes this particularly bad is, of course, the fact that the men who are thus left out 198

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are the shy and awkward individuals, the poor mixers, the very men who are most urgently in need of the companionship and social facility a fraternity is supposed to give. Harrington noted the problems inherent in the fraternity situation for those who were not asked to join and also highlighted precisely why this occurred: many individuals were shy, awkward, and reserved in social settings.≤∂ Perhaps not surprisingly, fraternity membership was extended to men who were socially inclined, the ‘‘all ’round good mixer’’ or the ‘‘hale fellow well met,’’ as he was sometimes called. Richardson described the ideal fraternity man as ‘‘ ‘normal’: normal in dress, in manner, in personality, in mental outlook; men who conform to established code; men, in other words, whose recommendation is their mediocrity.’’ A student in a national survey summed up what fraternities were looking for in their pledges: ‘‘Men who will make a fair appearance, be athletic or interested in campus activities; be good mixers who will help the fraternity internally, and be fair students, although this is often forgotten. Wealth counts, but one cannot get in on wealth alone.’’ Burnham Putnam Beckwith, a 1920s Stanford student, concurred: I was rushed by only one fraternity, and then only belatedly and weakly and on the urging of my mother’s friends in Pasadena. Although my family was wealthy and my mother had social recognition, my own physical and personality defects more than offset these advantages in the eyes of fraternity men. During my second year at Stanford, my father, on my mother’s urging, gave my brother Sterling and me his old Cadillac to take to Stanford with us. Cars were very few on the Stanford campus in those days, and yet it did not enable either of us to ‘‘make’’ a fraternity. We were both thin, nervous, self-conscious, and awkward at games, and family wealth and position, even a Cadillac on campus, could not compensate for these defects. Max McConn, dean of Lehigh University, claimed: The criteri[a] of eligibility are: money, family, prep school, and social presentability—in an ascending scale; that is, the possession of plenty of money counts less (they are not sordidly mercenary) than family, and family less than the prestige of the prep school attended; and all three of these count less than the social presentability of the man himself. If a youngster is a ‘‘slick’’ dresser (to just the right degree of fussers and fast women

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‘‘slickness’’) and a ‘‘smooth’’ talker and either a promising athlete or an adept at parlor tricks—playing the piano or the ukulele or dancing the Black Bottom,—he is grabbed at once. Finally, Christian Gauss, dean at Princeton, was succinct on the subject: ‘‘In general, whether the boy makes a club or a fraternity depends not upon his financial rating but upon one thing only—whether he is or is not ‘wet’ and ‘wet’ means, simply, personally unattractive. The question of family will enter in only if he wishes to make the most exclusively snobbish upper-crust fraternities or clubs and even there family cannot prevail over ‘wetness.’ That and not poverty is the unpardonable campus sin.’’ Fraternity membership was offered to men who were personally attractive and active on campus. The fact that wealth might have helped a student but was no guarantee of admission stands in contrast to membership criteria of the later nineteenth century, when wealth played a greater role. In part this was because the campus itself had democratized to a certain degree. While by no means a haven for the poor, many of the men in college were solidly middle class, but not wealthy by then-current standards. Only certain fraternities, the very oldest and most prestigious, continued to insist upon a family pedigree for admission. Further, the growing number of fraternities meant that not all could continue to discriminate based on wealth. There were simply not enough very wealthy men to go around.≤∑ Fraternity membership in the 1920s, as in the nineteenth century, was also for men who were not opposed to flouting the rules upon occasion. The rules most often broken had to do with drinking. While Prohibition reigned in the United States until the early 1930s, many Americans continued to drink throughout the decade, and fraternity men were among them. Drinking on campus must be understood in its context. While many surely drank because they enjoyed the taste and the effects, drinking also symbolized masculinity. To drink was to embrace both the working-class masculinity of the saloon and the middle-class prerogative to consume alcohol socially within the home. Drinking thus marked fraternity men as masculine men as well as men of means. A Dartmouth undergraduate sociology paper described the 1920s Dartmouth man as one who ‘‘built around himself the stereotype of the hard-drinking, rough-tough, and athletic back-woodsman’’ and noted that ‘‘the bon mot of the period was, ‘You can always tell a Harvard Man, but you can’t tell him much; you can always tell a Dartmouth man—and how!’ ’’ In this description, consumption of alcohol was portrayed as being a way for Dartmouth men to establish themselves 200

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as men. Drinking also, as in the nineteenth century, represented a defiance of authority and, during the 1920s, a defiance not only of the college administration but also of federal law. Through this defiance, fraternity drinkers on campus asserted their independence from the president and deans who sought to regulate them. It was rumored at some schools that ‘‘some fraternities won’t pledge a man unless he carries a flask.’’ Even fraternity officials lamented the drinking of their members. At the 1922 National Interfraternity Conference annual meeting, officials declared the two greatest problems of fraternity life to be poor scholarship and intemperance. Other fraternity officials acknowledged that illicit drinking certainly took place but argued that it served an important purpose. James Hawes of Delta Kappa Epsilon asked his readers the following: Do you honestly wish that youth shall so change, and your son become such a strange youth, as when for instance a friend, who has entertained him at his college arrives for a return visit and he takes him . . . down to a drug store and treats him to a glass of raspberry ice cream soda? O, older man, did you do that, and is that the virile, full-blooded sort of boy we all like and who has become the best citizen of the world since time began, or have times changed and efficiency run to such an extent that this is the type of boy America hopes for? In this excerpt from Hawes’s book about college life, drinking was linked explicitly to masculinity and virility. In order to behave as real men should, Hawes argued, they must be able to drink, and while Hawes does not say so explicitly, many fraternity men valued not just drinking but drunkenness.≤∏ By the end of the decade, drinking was no longer just a male prerogative. Drinking in mixed-sex groups—at parties and dances, in cars and fraternity houses—was almost fully accepted by young people. Taking a cue from their middle-class parents, who were themselves holding cocktail and dinner parties with other couples, young women were able to maintain their respectability and also imbibe upon occasion, though they were always expected to have stricter limits than the men with whom they socialized. For men, the goal was often all-out, falling-down drunkenness. Fraternity brothers had begun to place value on the volume of alcohol that they drank and to care much less about their self-control when intoxicated. Masculinity was increasingly judged by the former and not the latter. Many college officials also noted that the most drinking occurred on celebratory weekends when younger alumni returned to their fraternity houses—so much so that colleges sometimes wrote to these alumni befussers and fast women

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seeching them not to bring alcohol. The same correspondent who complained to Hopkins about fraternity men’s monopoly of extracurricular activities had this to say about a party cohosted by Alpha Delta Phi, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Psi Upsilon at a country club near his home in Woodstock, Vermont (a party that would have included men and women): ‘‘This crowd had there a large quantity of liquor secretly brought in from Canada in violation of the law, that this was drunk freely and that the whole crowd became so intoxicated that before the night was over they had injured the club house to such an extent that they were obliged to pay $200. damages on the same.’’ Excessive drunkenness led to rowdiness and vandalism; all three were valued by fraternity men, or at the very least they were not condemnable.≤π Earlier in the same year, Dartmouth had been in the news when one of its students, Robert T. Meads, shot and killed a fellow student, Henry Maroney, in an argument revolving around a stolen bottle of whiskey that Meads was attempting to sell to Maroney and a friend. Meads and a colleague were experienced bootleggers, bringing in quarts of liquor from Montreal in suitcases on the roofs of cars and in the cars’ ventilation systems. Maroney, a member of Theta Delta Chi, had been a confirmed alcoholic but had supposedly given up drinking some time earlier. Meads was convicted of manslaughter in September 1920 and sentenced to fifteen to twenty years of hard labor in the state prison. He was later transferred to the state mental institution. While this incident was without a doubt an extreme case, it does point to a number of the elements already discussed: drinking and bootlegging were both commonplace in 1920s fraternities.≤∫ In addition to flouting the rules prohibiting drinking, fraternity men continued to haze their members before and during their initiations, a practice that was strictly prohibited by authorities at most colleges. Hopkins attempted to regulate not only the practice of hazing but also its consequences for the initiates (whose schoolwork suffered) and others in the Dartmouth community (whose property was damaged and who were often disturbed by the antics). At one point, Hopkins had to extract a fee from every fraternity to pay for damages to the nearby Etna Cemetery, where at least one fraternity had conducted their preinitiation ceremony. As in the later decades of the nineteenth century, this hazing was conducted to impress the new members with the honor being conferred upon them in their initiation into the brotherhood. It was also designed to recoup the masculinity and authority of the upperclassmen, who had been groveling before freshmen in their attempts to get them to pick their fraternity over 202

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others. One Dartmouth alumnus of Delta Kappa Epsilon recalled the initiations of the 1920s as having distinct phases made up of running a gauntlet, extensive paddling, eating a concoction of oysters and asafetida (dried resin from certain plant roots), and a number of other rituals that were more ‘‘elevated in tone.’’ One of these was a ritual branding, whereby the ‘‘q⌲⌭’’ was seared onto the forearms of the newly initiated brothers. The brand itself served as a marker of election for life, more permanent than any fraternity pin, but the process of branding also had import: by withstanding the pain of the ‘‘red hot pronged branding iron,’’ the neophytes proved their masculinity, and they did so in service of their fraternity.≤Ω The 1920s were difficult for Dartmouth president Hopkins. In the fall of 1925, he was in the midst of sorting out another scandal that centered on the Epsilon Kappa Phi Fraternity. A number of its members, as well as at least two alumni who had graduated the year before, had rented a farmhouse across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth in the hamlet of Beaver Meadow. There they threw parties involving copious amounts of alcohol. There were also rumors about drug use and moral degeneracy, which at the time generally meant lewd sexual behavior and in this case referred specifically to homosexuality. The same students and former students were well known on campus for their ‘‘aesthetic’’ temperaments. They ‘‘made a parade of [their] effeminacy’’ around the campus and were heavily involved in the theatre, taking the women’s parts almost exclusively. The problem, it now seemed, was not only that they were drinking so much but also that they were attempting to ‘‘lure’’ other students across the river to join them in their alcoholic debauchery and immoral activities. Although they were thought to be homosexuals, the word itself does not once appear in the correspondence surrounding the incidents, so euphemistic was the language employed by everyone involved.≥≠ In October of that year, after a number of students had threatened to burn down the house at Beaver Meadow and run one of the involved students out of town, Hopkins wrote to three faculty members who, as alumni of the fraternity, served as its advisers on campus: ‘‘As one of the seniors expressed it in a conference last May, ‘there was a smell of something decayed and unpleasant about certain individuals of the group.’ ’’ He explained that he expected the fraternity itself to ‘‘eliminate the undesirables’’ and that it was understood that visiting the house at Beaver Meadow ‘‘was prima facie evidence of undesirability.’’ One such young man, an alcoholic under close watch by Hopkins, was taken over to Beaver Meadow by Joseph Goodwin, one of the Epsilon Kappa Phi brothers fussers and fast women

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William McKay Patterson of the Epsilon Kappa Phi Fraternity, dressed as Hyacinthe for a performance of Blue Blood, Dartmouth College Winter Carnival, 1924 (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

Ralph Garfield Jones of the Epsilon Kappa Phi Fraternity, dressed as Olga for a performance of Blue Blood, Dartmouth College Winter Carnival, 1924 (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

involved. This young man claimed the next morning: ‘‘ ‘I have had few limits but I went last night beyond those even which I have had.’ ’’≥∞ In the end, Goodwin was expelled from his fraternity and from Dartmouth, and the two alumni brothers, Ralph Jones and McKay Patterson, were asked to leave the fraternity house, where they had been staying when not in the rented home across the river. Hopkins was unable to punish them any further since they had graduated the year before. The fraternity itself ‘‘decided to refrain from any activity which may be misinterpreted as effeminacy.’’ The case is a fascinating study in 1920s understandings of homosexuality, not least because Hopkins had, five years earfussers and fast women

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lier, been remarkably understanding when another student had come to him fearing that he was an ‘‘invert.’’ The correspondence as a whole reveals that Hopkins and his colleagues believed that indulgence in moral degeneracy, like indulgence in alcohol, was a choice. Those who chose to do so would be punished; those who chose otherwise, like the student five years earlier, would not. The correspondence also reveals that Hopkins and others worried that this indulgence occurred because various students were coerced or tricked into participating. One of their prime fears was that the two alumni members who lived in the fraternity house and at Beaver Meadow would succeed in turning more and more of their fraternity brothers into ‘‘inverts.’’≥≤ The case serves as evidence of a number of overlapping phenomena. It is certainly indication that there was, not surprisingly, homosexual sex among some fraternity members during the 1920s. At Dartmouth, and surely elsewhere as well, people feared that a fraternity might turn fully degenerate if left to its own devices under an immoral influence. Further, that the other students reacted with such animus—the threats to run Goodwin out of town and destroy the house at Beaver Meadow—indicates, among other things, that they feared for the reputations of their school and their fraternities should the story leak to the public. This fear of publicity is mentioned explicitly in a number of the letters and is often connected to whispers of effeminacy and aesthetics; the three were often thought to be inextricably linked.≥≥ Thus, while it might be difficult for outsiders to prove without an outright admission that students had in fact had homosexual sex, the fact that they behaved effeminately was often thought to be evidence enough. Worse yet, effeminacy, unlike the actual sex, was public enough that it could be seen by all, tarnishing Dartmouth’s reputation to the outside world. Two years after the incidents, Hopkins, normally lukewarm in his support for athletics, would declare that ‘‘intercollegiate sports, particularly football, had ‘certain vital values’ which could not be spared ‘without impairing the masculinity and virility which most of us want to feel to be typical of communities of college men.’ ’’ Masculinity could be cultivated and effeminacy could be eradicated through healthy competitive sports.≥∂ Hopkins and others at Dartmouth feared that fraternities there might be tainted by the stigma of homosexuality, as exhibited by the effeminate men involved. This was a growing concern, not just at Dartmouth but elsewhere as well. The fraternity’s decision to refrain from behavior that might be construed as effeminate meant that they would instead behave 206

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in ways that were masculine. This masculinity was to be demonstrated through participation in athletics and through heterosexuality. Most noteworthy about this case is not that some gay sex took place in fraternities during the 1920s but that the specter of a newly publicized homosexuality loomed over fraternities in ways inconceivable in the nineteenth century— in some cases prompting men in those fraternities to behave in ways that were understood as masculine (itself now understood as heterosexual). Building upon notions of masculinity—as distinct from manliness—that had been developing since the late nineteenth century, Dartmouth’s fraternity men, as well as their president, believed that athletics were key to creating masculine men. Fraternity brothers continued to believe that accomplishments in the realm of the extracurriculum also distinguished them from their peers as being successful men. In keeping with their status as children of the elite and middle classes, as well as with common understandings of a man’s prerogative to drink, fraternity men, despite the national ban on the consumption of alcohol, drank with abandon. Much of this was not noticeably different from the trends of the late nineteenth century. The key difference was the degree to which fraternity men were able to dominate conceptions of the successful college man as well as the life of the actual colleges. They did this not only by excluding those they deemed unworthy—the successful scholar, the non-wasp, the nonathlete, the ‘‘wet’’—but also by successfully painting the college man as a fraternity man in the national consciousness. Expansion and the ‘‘Right Sort of Man’’: A Study of the University of North Carolina Fraternities expanded rapidly in the 1920s. In 1912 there were 1,560 fraternity and sorority chapters; by 1930 there were 3,900. In the 1920s alone, 863 chapters of national organizations were founded. Though estimates vary, by 1930 the proportion of students in a fraternity or sorority was more than 50 percent at some schools, and the percentage was always somewhat higher for men than for women. At the University of Michigan, for instance, membership grew from 22 percent to 36 percent between 1906 and 1926. The number of fraternity houses also increased. In 1920, 774 chapters had their own houses; by 1929, 1,874 had them, with a total estimated value of some $90 million. The process of this expansion was still complicated. Because of the much-publicized youth culture in fraternities, there was perhaps more pressure to expand now than there had fussers and fast women

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been in earlier decades, and there was certainly much more alumni involvement in this expansion. There was also pressure placed upon alumni to make sure that the increasing number of nationally recognized schools had a chapter of one’s fraternity. Each national fraternity had a small group of remarkably dedicated and active alumni who worked as representatives of their fraternities, on a national level at National Interfraternity Conference meetings, and in the capacity of local advisers. They also continued to operate alumni clubs and houses and publish alumni directories and newsletters.≥∑ One of the prime responsibilities of fraternity alumni during the 1920s was expansion. Because fraternities were now operating with the sanction of the authorities at any given college or university, much of the negotiation for new fraternity chapters was conducted directly with college presidents and deans, many of whom were themselves fraternity alumni. By and large, they were enthusiastic about having new chapters founded on their campuses. Colleges were growing rapidly and did not have nearly enough housing for their students. At many schools, fraternities housed students at no cost to the schools. Further, many university administrators simply believed—often quite correctly—that all students would want to join a fraternity, or at the very least they should have the opportunity to do so if they so desired. While this was sometimes at odds with the desires of fraternity men themselves (who continued to believe that membership in their fraternity was an honor that they alone could adjudicate), alumni also were anxious to spread out to suitable schools. They wanted to take advantage of the reputations of up-and-coming colleges and cultivate relationships with prosperous alumni in their regions.≥∏ During the early decades of the twentieth century, fraternity men became much more systematic about the ways that alumni connections might benefit both alumni and current students. They set up national job bureaus and sent out questionnaires to undergraduate members who might be looking for employment upon graduation. In keeping with the collegiate culture of future businessmen, fraternities often emphasized the number of their alumni who were in business, always clarifying for the undergraduates what advantages these connections would bring later in life. In this way, fraternity alumni also helped to structure the aspirations of their undergraduate members, nudging them away from teaching and other professions and into the world of corporate capitalism. The larger the brotherhood, then (as long as the men remained appropriate), the betteroff the fraternity.≥π 208 fussers and fast women

As in the nineteenth century, expansion continued to be problematic for fraternity men. It had undoubtedly become much easier to determine which schools were good enough to warrant a chapter of their fraternity, since many colleges were well established and a national media was available to report on them. It was more difficult, however, to ascertain whether or not there were suitable men at that college who were not already members of older and more established fraternities. To expand to a school where all the best men had already been taken simply would not do. To that end, fraternity alumni sought to find out as much as possible about the situation at a school before they attempted to colonize there. This lengthy process often involved alumni visits to schools, during which they would consult with other fraternity men, faculty, nearby alumni, and boys who might be interested in pledging. They wanted to determine not only if there were enough suitable boys, but also just what it would take to make their fraternity rate on campus. Was a house necessary, for instance? They were keenly aware that an impressive house was one way that freshmen were enticed to join a fraternity. If they were not able to provide a house to a newly established chapter, would that chapter be able to attract suitable candidates for membership? And if not, was it worth the risk of granting a charter at that school? Examining a number of fraternities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill allows for an exploration of these issues, particularly what they can tell us about fraternity men’s conceptions of the properly masculine member. In 1926 a group of men calling themselves the Sigma Delta Fraternity, a local fraternity at unc, wrote to the national offices of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity petitioning for a charter.≥∫ This, too, remained common practice throughout the twenties. It was their second petition in as many years. They would make a third the next year, also to be rejected. The application they sent was a professionally produced booklet complete with posed photographs of the men and lengthy descriptions of unc and its attitudes toward fraternities: ‘‘Two years ago, ninety-six men out of a freshman class of more than 600 were taken into fraternities. Last year, 175 out of a class of 800 were taken in. These figures speak for themselves.’’ The Sigma Delta boys were demonstrating that fraternities at unc, theirs included, were suitably exclusive for the standards of Delta Upsilon. They described the other fraternities on campus so that q⌼ might have some idea of the caliber of similar organizations, and then they gave a brief summary of their history at unc. Most importantly, they detailed their members’ numerous accomplishments in the realm of the extracurriculum: magazines, athletics, fussers and fast women

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The Sigma Delta Fraternity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1926. This picture was part of the application petition that Sigma Delta made to Delta Upsilon with the hope of being made a chapter of that national fraternity. They were rejected. (Reproduced by permission of the University Archives, Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; printed by permission of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity)

senior honor societies, rifle club, theatre, junior officers, and many other activities. They concluded with sixteen letters of support from various campus figures—the university president, the Interfraternity Council, other fraternity officers, q⌼ alumni working and studying on campus, various deans—all attesting to their involvement on campus, their ‘‘social position,’’ their excellent ‘‘personnel,’’ and their prominence and recognition as leaders. Applications like this one were commonplace in the 1920s. If a group of young men wanted to be affiliated with a national fraternity of some prominence, as in the case of Sigma Delta with Delta Upsilon, it was imperative that they demonstrate their seriousness through their application. This was done in part by impressing the national fraternity with their accomplishments, but presenting a polished application was also critical for success. The time and money invested by local groups attempting to gain membership—money spent primarily to demonstrate to the national organizations that the applicants came from good families and attended a good school—is quite striking.≥Ω 210

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The other and perhaps more common way fraternities expanded during the decade was through a group of interested alumni. These alumni sought out suitably prestigious schools where their fraternity did not yet have a chapter and proceeded to investigate the possibilities of expanding there. They often approached groups of young men who might be interested in affiliating themselves with a well-known national organization. And just as in the Sigma Delta group, these young men were often keenly aware of the benefits of national affiliation. Not only the boys but also their parents sometimes became involved, as is exemplified by the following letter from Helen Laughlin, the mother of a unc student. Writing to a member of the local Alpha Chi Society, she explained her concerns: ‘‘I have no objection to my son joining the Alpha Chi Society at Chapel Hill except for the fact that it is not a national fraternity. Naturally I want the best for my only child and I felt that a connection with a national fraternity would mean more to him in future . . . and so with your information and the almost certainty that the chapter at Chapel Hill will be taken in by the Chi Psi Fraternity, I have written him [her son], withdrawing my protest and leaving the decision entirely in his hands.’’ Chi Psi was a national fraternity, and at that point it was seriously considering offering a charter to the boys of Alpha Chi. Whether or not it would do so in time to benefit Mrs. Laughlin’s son remained to be seen. That she was interested enough to become involved in her son’s decision is indicative of the degree to which fraternities—and indeed particular national fraternities—had become respected and influential throughout the country.∂≠ In March 1927, during the same school year in which the Laughlin boy had decided to join Alpha Chi, one of its alumni wrote to an official in the Chi Psi Fraternity about that year’s freshman recruits: ‘‘Our class compared with Zeta Psi, D.K.E. and outstrips Chi Phi. . . . Mr. Williams, may I say that in the history of fraternities at the University of North Carolina and especially in the past five years, (my stay here) no national fraternity has had the opportunity of coming in under as favorable circumstances in every respect as Chi Psi does at present in accepting Alpha Chi.’’ He went on to explain that never before had a group of boys been so recognized ‘‘as gentlemen’’ by old-line fraternities already at unc, and that never before had the university itself been as nationally recognized as it was then. Also included in the same collection of papers is a list of names entitled ‘‘Notations on Families.’’ Beside each name is a brief description of the family from which the boy came. The family of Mrs. Laughlin’s son, R. M. Laughlin, was described as follows: ‘‘Very old North Carolina family, fafussers and fast women

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ther deceased, uncle Zeta Psi, uncle Sigma Nu.’’ Another boy’s family was described thus: ‘‘Father President Durham Life Insurance Company, very well-to-do Virginia family.’’ Almost all entries detailed the father’s profession (one is described as ‘‘engineer, capitalist, retired from active practice of business’’); some noted the family’s background (ranging from observations about class status to ethnic background, such as ‘‘very good English and Scotch family’’); and finally, many listed the boy’s fraternity connections through his uncles, fathers, cousins, and brothers. This was standard practice for prospective fraternity men. They needed to convince the national board that they came from suitably wealthy, professional, and college-educated backgrounds.∂∞ Almost a year before the Alpha Chi alumnus had written to the Chi Psi officials, Chi Psi had sent an official visitor to investigate the situation at unc. After his four-day visit, he reported: ‘‘Your Visitor was favorably impressed with both the University of North Carolina and the petitioning group.’’ He was not, however, without reservations: ‘‘The fraternity house problem is my objection to establishing an alpha [the first branch of a fraternity in any given state was its alpha, the second its beta, and so on] and, as I see it, it is a big one. . . . With all competitors being situated in homes that far outshadow the one held by Alpha Chi the fraternity would be under a severe handicap. . . . I feel that I am justified in being rather pessimistic about revival without a new lodge.’’ Members of Zeta Psi and Kappa Sigma, two other fraternities at unc, had explained to him that because they lived in comparatively older fraternity houses, they were having increasing difficulty in ‘‘maintaining their positions.’’ He continued: ‘‘If Zeta Psi and Kappa Sigma, fraternities that have become firmly established on the campus and who have many alumni aiding them in rushing, need a new house to compete with better housed fraternities how can Chi Psi hope to go into Carolina and rank with the leaders?’’ He thus recommended that Chi Psi deny the charter unless the boys of Alpha Chi could demonstrate that they would have the funds to build a new lodge; they already owned one but it was not, apparently, appealing enough to be an asset for rushing. Only a month earlier, Chi Psi had sent another two visitors to evaluate the fraternity scene at unc. They disagreed with each other on whether to expand there. For them, too, the principle objection to expansion revolved around the possibility of obtaining a suitable fraternity house. They provided detailed cost estimates of the other houses on campus and their plans for future construction, and, after meeting with countless university officials (in addition to a loan agent, a bank cashier, and a 212

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contractor), they gave lengthy estimates for how much money would be necessary to properly establish Chi Psi at unc—including how much could be expected from the boys themselves.∂≤ Throughout the four-year period in which Alpha Chi was being considered, various interested parties—alumni of other Chi Psi chapters living in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South, alumni of the local Alpha Chi, fraternity officers—wrote letters to the men at the national office who would ultimately be responsible for putting the decision to the national convention, where it had already been denied at least once. The Alpha Chi Fraternity also sent a glossily produced booklet to Chi Psi’s executive offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan. By late 1926, the executive council had recommended to the national convention that ‘‘a Chapter be established at Chapel Hill only on condition that a sufficient amount of money be raised with which to build a Chapter House in as desirable a location as that now had by other Fraternities already established there.’’ The national convention remained unconvinced, again denying the charter at their annual meeting, though the Chapel Hill petitioners were made aware of the council’s recommendation. The responsibilities for the southern alumni interested in reviving unc’s Chi Psi chapter were thus twofold: they not only had to raise the money necessary for a suitably impressive chapter house, but they also had to convince the representatives of the other chapters at the national convention that the granting of the charter was in the best interests of the fraternity as a whole.∂≥ Finally, and despite vigorous opposition from some Chi Psi representatives—a number of whom were apparently concerned with the housing issues and convinced that expansion anywhere in the South was not in the best interests of the fraternity—the supporting alumni managed to convince a majority of the national convention of June 1928 to grant the charter. This occurred only after they had managed to secure upwards of $60,000—estimated to match the cost of the land and construction of the best house then on campus, that of Beta Theta Pi—toward the building of Chi Psi’s impressive new dwelling on unc’s Fraternity Row. R. M. Laughlin, by now a junior, would have enjoyed two years as an active Chi Psi brother and a lifetime of the national ties his mother had so hoped for him.∂∂ A number of issues are of particular interest throughout the saga of Alpha Chi’s bid to become a chapter of Chi Psi. First and foremost is the degree to which Chi Psi’s officers were unwilling to consider expansion to unc without assurances that Chi Psi would rank among the best fraterfussers and fast women

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nities already there. Once it had been established that Alpha Chi’s men were up to standards (one investigator reported that ‘‘they would appear creditably on the campus of any northern school in which we are represented,’’ testament to the doubts that some had about expansion southward), and it was confirmed that unc ranked highly among other schools in the United States, the most important issue was the house. While the dwelling of the fraternity itself was of interest to the officers because it would be seen by many in the town and any visitors, the key worry was simply that without a decent house, the undergraduate brothers would be unable to attract pledges in the years to come. Freshmen were regularly shown the fraternity chapter houses in which they would live if accepted as well as pictures of the fraternity houses of their sister chapters around the nation; indeed, fraternity catalogues and magazines often had extensive sections of nothing but photographs of chapter houses. A fraternity derived much of its status from the ‘‘quality’’ of both its men and its residence. Or, put another way, one could only obtain ‘‘quality’’ men—men who had money—by displaying money at the outset. By the 1920s, as competition grew fierce between fraternities, one of the prime ways that fraternity men distinguished one fraternity from another was through the expense and luxury of their homes. Of greatest importance is the degree to which, despite frequent protestations to the contrary, wealth was still inextricably bound up in what counted as appropriate fraternity material.∂∑ Because of this focus upon money and chapter houses, one of the great problems that fraternities encountered during the twenties (and especially in the thirties as the national economy nearly collapsed and fraternity enrollments plummeted) was that, in their great rush to outdo each other, many fraternities took out large loans to finance their houses. These loans needed to be repaid, and one of the ways fraternity men did so was by trying to attract wealthy young undergraduates. Officials at the National Interfraternity Convention regularly debated the difficulty experienced by fraternity members who were unable, especially by the 1930s, to pay for even the upkeep of their homes, much less the mortgages—sometimes second and third mortgages—that had been taken out on the houses. Even the 1940 Baird’s Manual admitted that sometimes fraternity chapters’ memberships were much larger than would be desirable simply because the additional dues were necessary to pay for the upkeep of the houses. Chapters had relied upon alumni in some cases to buy the houses outright, but alumni could not always be counted on to supply them with new furni214

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ture, heat, or maintenance. Thus in many fraternities, the recruitment of wealthy members was emphasized out of sheer necessity.∂∏ While it was generally understood that all members paid the same dues—aside from recruited athletes, some of whom were on scholarship and whose dues were shouldered by the membership—wealthier members’ fathers might make generous donations to offset the costs of a fraternity’s loans. Or the scion of a wealthy family might well make a donation himself upon graduation once he had come into his share of the family fortune. Thus, fraternities sometimes found themselves taking in men who they otherwise would have scorned as ‘‘wet.’’ In Percy Marks’s novel of college life in the 1920s, The Plastic Age, the nouveau riche Carl is told in no uncertain terms that he can buy his way into one of the ‘‘Big Three’’ at the college by buying them new furniture. Carl ends up receiving more bids than the popular protagonist Hugh simply because of his money. In his nonfiction account of college life, Marks echoed this theme, explaining that wealthy members were needed in the hopes that their fathers would make generous donations. The fraternal obsession with wealth, then, was based on both the belief that those from so-called good families made more desirable members and the fact that well-heeled members could bail out the organizations financially.∂π The second issue revealed by Chi Psi’s expansion debates is the striking contributions made by fraternity alumni. While alumni officers often complained that most alumni did not contribute (with their money or their time) nearly as much as they would have hoped, the fact remains that most of the fraternity houses were built with alumni dollars and that the men who labored so hard to revive Chi Psi at unc (and establish numerous other chapters across the nation) were giving voluntarily of their time. This issue is noteworthy, not just in the local case of Chi Psi at unc but also in the national context of any fraternity man who volunteered his time in service to his brotherhood. Why did the alumni of various Chi Psi chapters who happened to live in and around North Carolina care so much if unc had a chapter of their fraternity? Why did others believe so strongly that it should not? Further, why did so many men (the vast majority of whom were never paid, the exception usually being the traveling secretary and the manager of the national office) give so much of their time to an organization to which they had belonged for a mere four years in college? In short, why on earth did they care so much about their fraternity? In trying to answer this question in 1926, Percy Marks posited that fussers and fast women

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while the vast majority of fraternity men had little to do with their fraternities once they graduated, there were three kinds of men who did remain active as alumni. The first, men that Marks considered to be relatively rare, were those who happened to be interested in the welfare of college boys. The second group of men believed themselves to be part of the first group but were in fact ‘‘perpetual undergraduates’’ who, as Marks described, ‘‘take the fraternity very seriously indeed and are always ‘going around to the house to help the boys out.’ The boys hate such a man.’’ These men, Marks claimed, sacrificed their dignity and pride in trying to win the friendship and respect of the undergraduates. They were also difficult to get rid of, in that they plainly meant well and were often members of the faculty or, increasingly, deans and other college officials. The third group, also a relative rarity, were men who were so grateful to have made a fraternity while students that they worshipped the fraternity from the day of their initiation onward: ‘‘They would no more think of appearing in public without their fraternity pin than they would without their trousers, and there are flippant and callous people who tell tales about such men wearing the pin on their pajamas. It would not be impossible.’’ Marks claimed that the latter two groups of men must be held responsible for the faults of fraternities.∂∫ More than seventy-five years later, Marks’s analysis remains convincing. While it would be impossible to know with exactitude just how many men remained highly involved with their fraternities after graduation, their numbers, relative to those who joined as undergraduates—or even relative to those who took advantage of alumni connections or attended an occasional reunion—were never large. And while we cannot know their motivations with certainty, it is clear from the countless pages penned by active fraternity alumni that, if nothing else, being a ‘‘Chi Psi man’’ or an ‘‘Alpha Delta Phi man’’—a fraternity man of some sort—was integral to their identity. It mattered. It was how many of them performed masculinity and understood themselves as particular kinds of men. The motive for expanding Chi Psi, for giving and working so much on its behalf, was that increasing numbers of people would hear about Chi Psi. The more people who knew about Chi Psi—or about any national fraternity—the more they would, presumably, be able to understand what it meant that a particular individual was a Chi Psi man. What it meant, of course, was that men marked by Chi Psi were collegiate gentlemen. This, too, was why they were so concerned about exactly who would be invited to join their fraternities. A fraternity man was known by the company he kept, whether he 216

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had met those men or not. As chapters expanded throughout the twenties and alumni remained active in their national organizations, these men sought to ensure that they would be judged alongside only the most suitable new brothers.∂Ω The issue of ‘‘suitable’’ new brothers was further complicated by the arrival at college of even greater numbers of second-generation immigrant children and African Americans. In the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, fraternities had reacted to the presence of greater numbers of non-wasps by excluding them in ways that were often systematic but generally not codified. In other words, they simply refused to let them join. This led to the formation of the various ‘‘minority’’ fraternities discussed in the previous chapter. By the 1920s, however, a number of fraternities had amended their constitutions to include regulations barring all but white, Christian (and often specifically Protestant) men. An influx of second-generation Jews, who studied diligently and succeeded academically, threatened to disrupt campus life by throwing into sharp relief the behavior of their academically apathetic peers. They called into question the habit of not studying that was being practiced so enthusiastically by everyone else. In the early twenties, a number of colleges with growing Jewish populations—most famously Harvard and Columbia—established quotas for the number of Jews they would admit in any given year. Fraternities soon followed suit; by 1928 more than half of all national fraternities and sororities had specific written rules that barred all who were not white and Protestant. Those without the written restrictions often continued to limit membership in the traditional way. Some campuses only allowed the white, Protestant fraternities a place on the Interfraternity Council, thus excluding black, Jewish, and sometimes Catholic students from participating in major campus events. Other campus officials, like President William Faunce at Brown University, would not even allow Jewish fraternities on campus, even when the percentage of Jewish students at his school reached nearly 20 percent of the student body. This was also the case at Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Amherst, and Williams.∑≠ Some commentators argued that it was primarily the alumni who were opposed to admitting Jews and blacks into their brotherhoods. It would certainly be in keeping with their concerns about reputation generally, as well as with their insistence that they were ‘‘better qualified’’ to work for the welfare of the fraternity than were the undergraduates. Alumni were often more conservative than undergraduate members, and they were interested in preserving the fraternity as they remembered it being in their fussers and fast women

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college days. Others, however, pointed to ample discrimination on the part of college students themselves—and fraternity members particularly. At least one fraternity chapter during the 1920s was discovered to be a covert branch of the Ku Klux Klan. A study of Syracuse University students, for instance, found that those in Greek-letter organizations were less likely than their nonaffiliated peers to be tolerant of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on campus. Specifically, the study found that 55 percent of fraternity and sorority members claimed they had no personal prejudice toward any of these groups but would exclude them based on public opinion, leading the authors to conclude: ‘‘Their loyal regard for the ‘reputation of their fraternity’ permits them to rationalize their own personal prejudices under the cloak of a more liberal motive.’’ An undergraduate Delta Kappa Epsilon member explained the situation like this: ‘‘One man can exert an effective blackball. If one Jew is taken in, he may refuse to pass anybody else unless some of his Jewish friends are admitted. No fraternity wants the reputation of having a number of Jews as members.’’ The concerns here were plainly about reputation. To have Jews as members would reflect poorly on the rest of the members, who would be tainted through their association. There is no question that some of this was old-fashioned antiSemitism, but it also had its own particular collegiate twist. Jews were perceived, often correctly, as hard workers who achieved good grades, the very epitome of the ‘‘greasy grind.’’ At least equally important, they were never known for their athletic participation. If two elements could be named to characterize fraternal masculinity during the 1920s, they would be a decided lack of interest in scholarship and a worship of athletics. The stereotype of the Jew was everything fraternity men tried not to be. In order to preserve the masculine reputation of the fraternity, Jews were excluded.∑∞ As in the nineteenth century, fraternity men continued to care deeply about their reputations in the 1920s. And just as in former times, they firmly believed that a man was judged by the company he kept. This meant that they persisted in making decisions about whom to admit based on the reputation, religion, race, and family status of potential members and not on their personal characteristics. Fraternity men did not want to be forced to associate with any of those they perceived as the riffraff that were attending college in the twenties, nor those who did not live up to fraternal ideals of masculinity. Perhaps even more importantly, they did not want to be associated in the minds of others with such men. 218 fussers and fast women

‘‘Wolves’’ and ‘‘Easy Lays’’: Sex and the 1920s Fraternity Beginning in the 1920s, a number of trends that have been examined extensively by other scholars made it possible for young men and women to spend considerable amounts of time together without adult supervision.∑≤ Breaking from stricter traditions of courtship, college students (and youth more generally) devised new standards for sexual morality and sexual behavior. Petting emerged as an acknowledged and discussed ‘‘way station’’ between absolute chastity and intercourse. Depending upon a girl’s standards, she might participate in petting while technically maintaining her virginity and her reputation. Thanks to a double standard inherited over many generations, a boy’s petting and sexual practices did not harm his reputation in the ways that a girl’s might. The twenties only heightened the degree to which a boy’s sexual experiences enhanced his prestige, at least among his male peers. Sexual relationships between college men and women were often structured by a set of unwritten but widely understood rules, whereby the boy attempted to get as much as possible from the girl sexually and the girl attempted to have fun and appease the boy, while at the same time retain her virtue and popularity. A girl had to allow a certain amount of petting if she wanted to date with any frequency, but she could not allow too much or she might compromise her reputation and become one of ‘‘those girls’’ to whom boys went for sex and sex alone. Girls who would not pet at all were called, among other things, ‘‘flat tires,’’ and those who went too far too quickly were known as ‘‘easy lays.’’ Boys were often encouraged to press on with girls until they met resistance, using every trick in the book in order to get them to go further than they had otherwise planned. There were some limits to this, and they occurred differently for different people. Most boys would not even think of attempting coitus (as it was called in most of the literature) or perhaps even heavy petting with girls that they respected or might be serious about (‘‘nice girls’’); other boys (sometimes called ‘‘wolves’’) attempted to evaluate just who was and was not a ‘‘nice girl’’ by whether or not she resisted his advances. Boys who dated girls somewhat further down the ‘‘rating-and-dating’’ scale might attempt more sexual activity with them than they would with those considered their social equals. As Margaret Mead put it at the time: ‘‘The boy demonstrated his desirability by demanding more and more erotic satisfaction, while the girl demonstrated her sureness of her own popularity by refusing his request.’’ fussers and fast women

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The situation was clearly somewhat adversarial. That it proved difficult for college women especially is unquestionable.∑≥ With working women, high schools girls, and prostitutes, many college men sought sexual intercourse; when unpaid, these women were known as pickups, and liaisons with them were brief.∑∂ Many scholars writing on this period (and on all periods at least through the 1970s) have noted rightly that standards often varied widely from college to college and by region of the country. Different schools unofficially sanctioned different standards of sexual conduct for students of both sexes. Some schools would have been more liberal than others; southern schools, for instance, were extremely conservative about women’s sexual conduct, whereas northeastern schools were more liberal. There were limits, however. There was no peer culture at any school anywhere in the 1920s that would have condoned casual sexual intercourse for women students. Despite these regional differences, and because of a national press that publicized youth culture (often for consumption by that very group of people), historians of the period have also noted the remarkable uniformity of the cultures—dating, sexual, and otherwise—from school to school.∑∑ Based on the limited evidence available for study, one must conclude that the majority of college men in the 1920s were not having sexual intercourse with college women or anyone else. Many of them probably were petting, however. In two articles published in the mid-1920s, two sociologists explored the sexual histories of college-educated men. Thirty-five percent of their sample had had sexual intercourse. The authors also inquired about the men’s sexual partners and found that a sizable minority of those who had had intercourse had done so at least once with a prostitute. The authors do not, unfortunately, inquire further as to their other partners (whether they were girlfriends, fiancées, or pickups), but the fact that some men experienced difficulty in distinguishing the category ‘‘others’’ from that of prostitutes (one actually said that he did not know whether any of his sexual experiences had been with prostitutes or not) goes some way toward indicating that the men were probably not having sex with women of their own socioeconomic or academic class. Those men not having sex with prostitutes were probably having it with women of a lower-class background, the working women and ‘‘charity girls’’ who would trade a night on the town for sexual favors. Others might have found willing older women— sometimes married, sometimes divorced—who desired sexual relations. These women, too, were likely to be of a different class background than 220

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their college lovers. While some of these relationships might have been ongoing, evidence suggests that the majority of them were transitory.∑∏ In a study based on over 1,100 interviews with students and faculty in 1924, another group of researchers discovered striking patterns in the sex habits of college men. The researchers reported that some students with greater means took trips into the city (if they did not already live in cities), where they stayed in hotels and had sexual relations with ‘‘questionable’’ girls, sometimes working women (clerks, factory girls, waitresses) or women involved in the theatre as chorus girls or actresses. They sometimes brought these same chorus girls to their proms and fraternity dances; they could be more assured of sex with them than with students from their own campus or from nearby women’s colleges. At some schools, men in fraternities, often under more lax supervision than those in dormitories, were able to bring women to the house for sexual entertainment. Some fraternity men were also found to have made a practice of seducing local high school girls into sexual relations. Both men and women students frankly acknowledged the difference between a woman who was thought of as dating material and one who was just a pickup. A man had less respect for a pickup and was generally interested only in getting as far with her sexually as he was able. The authors of the study concluded that sex ‘‘irregularities,’’ by which they meant sexual relations, with female fellow students were extremely rare; most men either went off campus or imported women from town onto campus for sex.∑π Fraternity men were mentioned throughout the study, and indeed in most accounts, much more than other groups of men. In part, this was a function of the fact that fraternities were the most recognized male-only group on a coeducational campus. They were visible in ways that other less formally organized groups of men were not. There is more to it than this, however. The exploits of sports teams are not mentioned with the same frequency as those of fraternities, for instance, despite the fact that sports were in their heyday at this time and the athlete was the most revered man on campus. Fraternity men dominated this culture of sexual experimentation even as early as the 1920s for a number of reasons. Fraternities usually had private houses in which they could break more rules than others because they were not as heavily supervised. Second, fraternity men were more likely to have the financial resources that allowed them to travel, entertain women, buy alcohol, and drive cars. Fraternity men, more than any other group on fussers and fast women

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coeducational campuses, also isolated themselves from the company of women in most of their daily activities, thus further emphasizing what united them: their masculinity. Because fraternity membership was an honor on most campuses, and because fraternity men were typically young men of privilege, fraternity culture bred a feeling of entitlement; fraternity men felt they could get away with much more than others, and they often did. They were the ultimate fulfillment of the ‘‘college man’’ ideal that so fascinated Americans in the 1920s. They were both the most popular dates on campus and the most sexually active. Commenting on their popularity, one contemporary noted: ‘‘No girl, not even the familiar college town product, likes to be seen at [nonfraternity dances]. She feels instinctively that it might compromise her socially.’’ Whether or not the majority of male college students would have wanted to date so much, the fact remained that an extremely active social life was often much easier to obtain for a member of a fraternity. Not surprisingly, fraternities attracted the men who were most eager to meet women. Once a member, the pressure only heightened among one’s brothers to perform socially and sexually.∑∫ It was in fraternities that the most dating and the most sexual boasting were found. Thomas Arkle Clark explained that the ‘‘fusser,’’ or socially active man, rarely committed himself to one woman but instead liked to be seen with many of them and talked about by many others. Clark claimed that the fusser was usually a fraternity man, was scornful of ‘‘barbs,’’ and could be found at every party. He had an opinion about all girls and wanted to contradict everyone else’s opinion. Fraternity men talked about the sex they had, sharing knowledge of women who were particularly willing to have sex. In one of the stories in Lynn and Lois Montross’s Town and Gown, once the protagonist is initiated into a fraternity, ‘‘he was initiated into the society of women, the slipperiness of dance floors. He learned to speak with sly innuendo of a ‘mean woman’ and a ‘wicked party.’ ’’ Fraternity men, as in the story with which this chapter begins, also shared strategies for how best to ‘‘make’’ a girl. In another story in Town and Gown, called ‘‘Girls Who Pet,’’ Andy, ‘‘a champion fusser,’’ explained to his fraternity brothers: If a girl doesn’t pet, a man can figure he didn’t rush ’er right. . . . Even a flapper likes romance. A man makes a mistake to depend on his line and overlook the moon. . . . It’s a game—sure—but you’ve got to make her forget that. . . . She reneges ’nd you call ’er—you might as well quit. She stops playin’ because you watched the rules too close. . . . No, for222 fussers and fast women

get the game yourself. Don’t be afraid to let that ‘‘aching, unguarded note’’ slip into your voice. You both know you’re both pretending— sure. College is a hard, sordid, practical kind of place ’nd petting is its substitute for romance. The ability to seduce a girl was explicitly linked to a man’s skill in so doing—sex as sport. Those who were the most skillful at getting as much as possible from girls—girls who were themselves trained to withhold— were the most lauded. Along with wealth, good looks, and extracurricular success, a fellow’s skill with women marked him as masculine, or not.∑Ω Because men talked about the women they dated and often relied, as did the women, upon the opinions of their peers in governing their dating choices, women were wary of being used by fraternity men. In the words of one frustrated female student: ‘‘Fraternity men can ruin a girl’s reputation. If she won’t ‘neck’ they slander her. If she does, they tell their men friends she is ‘a good party,’ and those men friends will pay her a call with that idea in mind. It is hard trying to go straight.’’ Another claimed that it was only nonfraternity ‘‘boys who are willing to express ideas and to discuss their interests outside of ‘dates’ and ‘petting.’ ’’ By the 1920s fraternity men had gained a reputation on most campuses as being particularly ‘‘fast.’’ And college women, at once attempting to be popular themselves by dating fraternity men but also trying to maintain their own reputations, were caught in a system that allowed for more sexual freedom than in previous eras but whose rules, though certainly structured, were without any absolutes, and thus that much more treacherous.∏≠ In the late 1920s and early 1930s, playwright William Inge attended the University of Kansas as an undergraduate. In his novel My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971), he gives an account of fraternity life there that his biographer believes to be largely based upon Inge’s own experiences at Kansas. In the story, the fraternity brothers, ‘‘wealthy country-club types,’’ regularly take their sorority-girl dates home by one o’clock on weekend nights and then go in search of a prostitute or an ‘‘easy lay.’’ Sorority women, those the fraternity men thought of marrying, knew better than to allow intercourse. To do so would ruin their reputations. The protagonist of the novel also participates in a ‘‘gang-bang’’ in the basement of the fraternity house. Inge writes: ‘‘I felt that to have refused would have cast doubts upon my masculinity, an uncertain thing at best, I feared, that daren’t hide from any challenge.’’ The woman in the story is portrayed as consenting to the sex, even though she calls the brothers ‘‘snob sonsabitches.’’ She had fussers and fast women

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Delta Kappa Epsilon, Dartmouth College chapter, 1930. This photo was published by Delta Kappa Epsilon in its newsletter, Log of Pi, with the caption: ‘‘Picking the Kansas Beauty with Difficulty.’’ The publication explained that the fraternity had been asked by the yearbook staff at the University of Kansas to make the selection of Kansas’s beauty queen because ‘‘Dartmouth men were well versed in feminine pulchritude, in short that we were connoisseurs of female beauty.’’ They also reported that the ‘‘epistle went further to say that the Deke house was known in the mid-west as a powerful fraternity and that they would like to have our name footing the judgment for these reasons.’’ (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

apparently been to similar parties at every fraternity on campus. The protagonist, though desperately afraid of his growing homosexual longings, later has fumbled sex with a fellow first-year fraternity brother. The incident highlights the ways in which, by the 1920s, sexual performance— indeed the sexual humiliation of a woman in the name of fraternal male bonding—was understood by at least one terrified undergraduate to be necessary to maintain his masculinity.∏∞ During the late 1920s, at all-male Dartmouth College, students began spending weekends away from their rural New Hampshire campus, as well as having women students from single-sex colleges visit for special weekends like Winter Carnival (the women would stay at the fraternity houses and the men bunk up with friends in other houses). The women 224

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whom the men were visiting on their weekends away were probably not the same ones they invited to campus for the big weekend. The same newsletters telling alumni of extracurricular triumphs also gave reports on prom and other weekends, the number of girls who attended, and the details of the festivities. Others went as far as to acknowledge one or two brothers as particularly popular with their dates, as in the example with which this book began of brother Stan Lonsdale, ‘‘Lothario and Don Juan put together.’’ The same fraternity chapter that went to Bermuda told alumni that ‘‘various girls’ colleges were represented on the same boat, both going and coming, hence many of the travelers from Hanover came back lighter by the loss of their fraternity pins.’’ And in 1928 Dartmouth seniors described their ideal girl as having ‘‘blue eyes, brown hair, and being relatively fast.’’ These examples attest to a culture whereby sex (with certain women) and dating (with certain other kinds of women) were used to bolster a man’s reputation as just that—a man.∏≤ At Amherst College, the fraternity dances were said to be the most popular social occasions of the Connecticut Valley, particularly for students at all-female Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges. They were so popular, in fact, that Smith students were only allowed to attend one dance per fraternity per year. The dances, until 1929, were held with stag lines, a system common at many colleges. Brothers of the host fraternity invited girls to attend the dance free of charge. Stags—men without dates, generally from other campus fraternities—would attend the dances for a fee, thus allowing the host fraternity to spend more lavishly on the entertainment and refreshments. The ratio of men to women was generally around three to one, meaning that men would regularly cut in on couples as they danced. Women danced all night without a break, allowing the stags time to retire upstairs for a ‘‘bit of refreshment.’’ The system of the stag line benefited women in that they received most of the attention. For men, however, it meant greater competition and greater public acknowledgment of any given man’s popularity.∏≥ While the greatest number of Greek-related problems that found their way to the dean’s office at any school involved hazing infractions and liquor violations, there were also considerable problems having to do with fraternity men’s relations with women. At the University of Michigan, for example, a number of letters in the dean’s files attest to complaints about fraternity men bringing married women to the fraternity houses for questionable purposes, one of them from the woman’s own husband. An unfortunate female undergraduate was forced to drop out of Michigan and her sorority fussers and fast women

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after an anonymous correspondent attempted to blackmail her because she had had sexual relations with some of the brothers of Delta Upsilon, further evidence of the consequences of premarital sex for college women. Another serious indictment of the fraternities in the early 1920s, and one that points to anxiety about women’s strides toward equality on campus, was that a number of fraternities refused to allow female Michigan students to attend their parties, welcoming instead local women or women from other nearby colleges. One angry correspondent, a Michigan professor and fraternity man himself, complained to the dean: ‘‘This ‘no coed’ proposition has always angered me, and I am fully of the opinion that just so long as the State of Michigan says we will have coeducation here, just so long should it be prohibited to any fraternity to enforce such a rule.’’∏∂ Coeducation and the rise in the number of women students posed a threat to many college men. By the 1920s the number of female students in colleges and universities equaled that of male students. In addition, as the decade wore on and the gains of the feminist movement grew more apparent, women’s increasing (though still limited) power vis-à-vis men became an issue. As was the case with racial and ethnic minorities, when women students constituted only a small minority of students on campus, their fellow students often accepted, or at least tolerated, them. As women’s numbers grew throughout the early twentieth century, men became more and more hostile toward them. The number and strength of fraternities also grew on some campuses simultaneously with the rising rates in female graduates and female success in college. This was the case at the University of Michigan, for instance. At Cornell University during the same period, fraternities forbade their members from dating Cornell women or even talking to them on campus, and Cornell women were not allowed to attend fraternity parties until the mid-1920s. At some fraternity parties into the 1950s, they were charged more than non-Cornell women for entrance. While it would be difficult to establish a causal link between the way that some college men conceived of sex and the increases in women students at their colleges, it bears noting that many men reacted with open hostility toward their female classmates. This helped create a climate whereby some men, fraternity brothers particularly, learned to think of differently classed women in different ways: they slept with the women with whom they did not attend school, women they did not have to think of as their intellectual equals; and they ostracized those female classmates who threatened their hegemony on campus. This obviously happened at different times and in different ways—some schools, for instance, fully 226

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sanctioned dating female classmates—but there can be no doubt that many men expressed their anger at women’s growing influence on campus by excluding them socially. This hostility, and the way that it would play out in the sexual arena, would only become further complicated as the century wore on.∏∑ Fraternity men, at least by the 1920s, had developed a blueprint for the type of virile masculinity that became not only more pronounced throughout the century but also more widespread. This is not to say that others on college campuses were not behaving in similar ways, but that fraternities were easily the most visible group of men to do so and, because of their continued social prestige, far and away the most influential. Further, because fraternities continued to self-segregate around ideals of masculinity —cutting themselves off from women students and differently inclined male students, even as schools became increasingly gender-mixed in all activities throughout the century—they remained on the vanguard of a masculinity that revolved around dating and sexual conquest for its definition. the seeds of 1920s fraternal masculinity had been planted long before the dawn of the twentieth century: the reverence of athletics and of other extracurricular involvement, the exclusivity, the use of combines to control college politics and activities. None of this was particularly new. Novel, however, was the degree to which all of these elements were emphasized among fraternity men. What made it even more influential was the degree to which it went virtually unquestioned among their fellow students. Fraternity men’s actions were by definition the most cutting edge, the most worthy of emulation—in short, the most collegiate. To be popular on campus, one played by fraternity rules almost without exception or one did not play at all. Also undeniably unique to the 1920s, as compared to earlier decades, was the incredible expansion of both fraternities and colleges and universities more generally. This meant that fraternal ideals of masculinity spread even further afield. While not everyone could belong to old-line fraternities like Alpha Delta Phi and Delta Kappa Epsilon, the newest and least respected fraternities did all in their power to ape everything that the older ones had been doing for a century. This was true not only for the white, Christian fraternities, but also for the newer Jewish fraternities.∏∏ One of the practices that spread most rapidly among fraternity men, and a practice that is without doubt a product of the twenties, was the construction of a masculinity in part dependent upon sexual and dating sucfussers and fast women

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cess for its definition. It was in the twenties that it became popular— indeed, commonplace—for young, middle-class men, fraternity brothers among them, to discuss their sexual exploits with each other. While historians are right to emphasize the magnitude of the changes in the twenties, especially in regard to sexual morality, it would be foolhardy to think that twenties youth fully abandoned the traditions of their parents or even their grandparents. Fraternity men enthusiastically embraced the double standard as yet another way to prove themselves: he who obtained the most sex from a girl trained to withhold it won the prize. On some campuses, that girl was increasingly a female student, and that most coveted prize was peer-recognized masculinity. Relying upon off-campus pickups for sexual intercourse, fraternity men began to pressure the female students they dated to go further and further sexually. The most masculine man was the one who was most successful in both realms—with pickups and with his female classmates.

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Chapter Six democracy, drinking, and violence Post–World War II Fraternities

Early on the morning of March 19, 1949, Dartmouth College student and World War II veteran Raymond J. Cirrotta died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. He had been beaten senseless by two men as six of their drunken fraternity brothers looked on and did nothing. The night before, Kappa Kappa Kappa (or Tri Kap), a local fraternity at Dartmouth, had hosted a party at their fraternity house. Tri Kap members and their guests, including at least six Delta Kappa Epsilon men, were in attendance. At some point, a number of the partygoers began to speak of a classmate named Raymond Cirrotta, a student with whom some of them shared a class in the Education Department. Cirrotta was an intellectual student from New Jersey, the son of a New York diamond merchant. He had attended Dartmouth before the war and had enlisted voluntarily, serving overseas in Japan and returning to Dartmouth on the G.I. Bill. He was left-leaning in his politics, and even his friends agreed that he enjoyed an argument. One noted: ‘‘He was [of] Italian descent, happy-golucky, [a] friendly type of fellow, very opinionated, dogmatic and apt not to see the other side of a fellow’s problem.’’∞ Evidently, one or two of the partygoers were not fond of Cirrotta, and once the discussion got under way, someone suggested that they pay him a 229

Raymond Cirrotta in 1949, the year he was killed (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

visit to teach him a lesson of some sort. Reports of what happened next vary, but some mention the possibility that the fraternity men thought Cirrotta may have been on a date and that finding him with his date and teaching him whatever lesson was planned might doubly humiliate him. In the end, eight men left the fraternity house in search of Cirrotta. Six of them were members of q⌲⌭ and two of Tri Kap. Three of them were on the varsity football team. Five men later claimed not to know Cirrotta at all. Some were taking the same education class with him, but only two of them were actually in his discussion section. All eight admitted to being in various stages of intoxication. Those eight went to what they believed was Cirrotta’s dormitory, but upon their arrival they were informed that he had moved earlier that year. They went to his fraternity house, but he was not there either; they were told that he now lived in Massachusetts Hall. When they arrived at his room, they found him asleep. They roused him and discovered that he was wearing a Dartmouth letter sweater, a sweater reserved for those on the varsity football team (which Cirrotta was not). One of them commented snarkily: ‘‘He even sleeps in it.’’ What happened next remains somewhat 230

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murky, though it is clear that after a number of the men began to ransack the rooms, Cirrotta received multiple blows from two of the men, Thomas Doxsee and William Felton, while the other six, as well as an across-thehall neighbor, looked on and did nothing. By all accounts, Cirrotta did not defend himself, not once striking back. The eight men left Cirrotta prostrate on the floor and returned to the Tri Kap house, whereupon they discovered the party had run out of beer. They headed across the Connecticut River to White River Junction, Vermont, for more. Cirrotta was found by his roommate, taken to the college infirmary, later transferred to the local hospital, and died on the operating table at around five in the morning.≤ The case made headlines around the country and was a sensation in the Northeast. It provoked speculation in the media about the role of fraternities, privilege, and alcohol on the college campus. An Italian-language newspaper based in New York called Il Progresso took up the case, and one of its reporters published a series of fourteen articles, some of questionable veracity, which were translated and republished in major newspapers in New England. Dartmouth College administrators, including President John Sloan Dickey, were inundated with letters from angry citizens. Many of them were anonymous, though sociologist Helen Merrell Lynd, coauthor of the famous Middletown study (1929), also wrote to express her shock and disgust over the incident. The subsequent trial, with only Doxsee and Felton as defendants, resulted in both receiving suspended sentences and fines of only a few hundred dollars. Also adding fuel to the fire was the fact that the county solicitor, the attorney general, the governor of New Hampshire, and the boys’ defense attorney were all Dartmouth graduates. The county solicitor was a Tri Kap man, the defense attorney belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, and they were both from the class of 1938. The only member of the judiciary lineup who was not already involved with Dartmouth College, judge Harold Wescott, had recently been acquitted on charges of manslaughter in a hunting accident, and he had had the same defense attorney as the accused Dartmouth students.≥ Cirrotta’s death possessed all of the elements of a perfect scandal. The incident made such a splash in the media because Cirrotta died, a result which seems safe to assume was not his assailants’ intent; it is likely that many similar incidents have occurred with less severe results. The aftermath of the crime was a contest wherein various players in the drama seized upon different aspects of it in order to argue their cause: many of the anonymous letter writers blamed alcohol; some felt that Dartmouth was far too tolerant of the antics of its moneyed students, especially those democracy, drinking, and violence

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Delta Kappa Epsilon, Dartmouth College chapter, 1948. Pictured are Raymond Cirrotta’s killers, Thomas Doxsee (second row from top, third from left) and William Felton (third row, fifth from left). (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

in fraternities; the Italian newspaper argued that the murder was race based, citing Cirrotta’s Italian heritage; the editor of the Dartmouth student newspaper claimed that Cirrotta was a member of the Progressive Party and was killed for his politics; and some even hinted that the victim may have received his letter sweater from a varsity player with whom he was involved sexually, adding another twist to the plot. We will never know the true reasons behind the death of Raymond Cirrotta, and indeed the answer may well be that there are elements of truth in all of these stories. The attackers certainly were drunk at the time, and they did seem to enjoy a great deal of freedom at college. The victim was Italian American, and that may have had something to do with the murder, though the fraternities to which the eight men belonged had other men with Italian surnames as members. Cirrotta had been a member of the Progressive Party in his hometown but was, it turned out, completely unknown to the 232

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president of Dartmouth’s Progressive Party. Finally, we will never know where Cirrotta got the letter sweater.∂ The murder of Raymond Cirrotta was certainly an extreme case, though in the same year three other incidents—the strangulation of an Iowa student by her fraternity-brother boyfriend after a party, the shooting death of an Ohio State student by his fraternity brother, and the accidental death of a Brown student during a fraternity event—also made headlines. The Cirrotta murder, more than these other three deaths, highlights a number of important themes. These include the relations between fraternity brothers and their veteran classmates, especially surrounding issues of democracy and race that were brought to the fore by World War II; the political conservatism of fraternity members; the increasing significance of homosexuality as a foil for masculinity; the growing role of alcohol consumption in fraternities; the continued significance of an alumni ‘‘old boys’’ network; and finally, the increasing violence and vandalism in college fraternities, much of it connected with alcohol abuse. Also of significance during the postwar era was the growing tension between fraternity men and their female classmates, as the latter demanded greater equality both in the classroom and in social arenas.∑ following the fraternity heyday of the 1920s, fraternities in the 1930s were almost universally regarded by college administrators as being at the nadir of their existence, in terms of numbers as well as behavior. As one report from Amherst College put it: ‘‘They [fraternities] were, in varying degrees, self-centered, discriminatory, and anti-intellectual, and served as little more than comfortable retreats for social irresponsibility. Furthermore, many of them were approaching financial disaster; some houses operated soundly, but most were in a bad state of chaos.’’ This was largely due to the Great Depression. If some people who otherwise would have sent their sons and daughters to college were no longer able to do so, even fewer were able to pay for them to join exclusive social clubs while in school. Only the very wealthiest members of college continued to join fraternities. And in contrast to their fellow students, who were often described as particularly subdued and serious in their studies, fraternity men continued to misbehave. The drop in membership, especially as many fraternities struggled to pay off the mortgages taken out in the spending spree of the twenties, led some chapters to fold, and many of the newly purchased houses were sold.∏ World War II only made the situation more dire for fraternity men. democracy, drinking, and violence

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Most fraternity houses closed down, if only temporarily. Some were taken over as residences for men in the armed forces who were being housed and trained at colleges and universities across the country. Many fraternity men were either drafted or volunteered to serve in the war effort. Not only were college and fraternity numbers depleted during the war, but fraternal activities simply could not be maintained by most. In contrast to those men who were fighting and dying for their country, fraternities appeared petty and foolish. Fraternity leaders, especially at the national level, were preoccupied with what might happen to the fraternities when the war ended. Would they be revived? In order to appear concerned about the more pressing issues of national security, they often linked fraternities to the war effort. L. G. Balfour, chairman of the National Interfraternity Conference (nic) and the nation’s largest manufacturer of fraternity jewelry, wrote to presidents and secretaries of national fraternities in July 1940 and suggested that ‘‘the fraternities make so constructive a contribution to present-day problems [that is, World War II] that they will become a vital factor in the solution of our country’s problem. That is our opportunity. . . . It is the youth of our country that will receive the first call. If the fraternities constitute basically a youth movement, why should they not furnish vital leadership in youth’s supreme movement?’’ Mindful of the ‘‘untold harm which the last war did to fraternities,’’ he astutely noted that ‘‘we must not run the risk of forcing on [parents and a ‘serious-minded public’] the thought that the fraternity is a dispensable luxury in times like these.’’ Always planning for the fraternal future and consistently hyperbolic, the chairman of the nic’s War Committee, Cecil Wilkinson, wrote to the deans of men at fraternity schools in 1942: ‘‘Now the United States has joined Canada in the fight for the preservation of the ideals of the American college fraternity.’’ In the next breath, however, he continued: ‘‘To maintain continuity of fraternity life is the stern duty of those who believe in it.’’ Fraternity men had long claimed that fraternity life was founded on principles of democracy and inculcated those same values in their members; now fraternal democracy had become the raison d’être for World War II. Many fraternity men probably did believe these claims; however, the voluminous correspondence from many of them, including a full-scale published report on the ‘‘Post-War Situation,’’ belied their true fears. What concerned them most was that their brotherhood not suffer. They wanted to ensure that rushing, pledging, and fraternity activities would return to normal just as soon as the war was over.π At the same time, college administrations, many still mindful of the 234

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state of fraternity life in the 1930s, were setting up committees to take advantage of the lull in fraternity activity that was afforded by the war to discuss their plans for a postwar campus and whether or not it should include fraternities. At Amherst College the faculty, recognizing that the fraternities discriminated based on race, religion, and wealth and dominated the social life of the campus, voted in 1945 to abolish fraternities altogether. They declared in their report to the college’s trustees that fraternities were anti-intellectual, that they bred ‘‘social irresponsibility and emotional regression,’’ and that ‘‘good looks, good clothes, an air of premature sophistication, and athletic prowess’’ were the criteria for membership. Believing that it was a fundamental inconsistency that students admitted to Amherst College were not admitted to all organizations therein, they also insightfully noted that ‘‘the fraternities represent an entrenchment of the world without inside the college community. They are the center of a kind of social education that reinforces conventional values of our society in an environment where those values are being analyzed,’’ concluding that there was a ‘‘real and natural antagonism’’ between the fraternities and the college. The majority of the Amherst alumni committee designated to study the problem came to the same conclusion: fraternities should be abolished. A third committee, however, also made up of alumni active in their fraternities and calling themselves the Fraternity Business Management Committee, argued that fraternities should be allowed to remain on campus if they made certain reforms. Among these were an end to racial discrimination and a new system for allotting membership so that any man who wanted to join a fraternity would have the opportunity to do so (known as the 100 percent membership clause). The trustees, influenced by the third committee, voted in June 1945 to retain fraternities at Amherst.∫ Few schools came as close to abolishing their fraternities as Amherst had, but fraternity men were right to fear for their futures during the war. Throughout the country, there was a growing sense that if men had been fighting for democracy overseas, perhaps organizations that seemed so fundamentally antidemocratic (despite fraternity men’s claims that they were the essence of democracy) did not belong on America’s college campuses. One of the more vocal spokespersons in this regard was Mrs. Glenn Frank (who always published under this version of her name), wife of the president of the University of Wisconsin and a former sorority woman herself (she was expelled from Pi Phi when she went public with her objections to the Greek system). Frank was not as concerned with the democracy, drinking, and violence

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exclusion of racial and religious minorities (though she was articulate on this issue as well) as she was in the fundamentally antidemocratic character of the Greek system and the pain borne by those who were not chosen for membership. In a 1945 article in Woman’s Home Companion called ‘‘Heartache on the Campus,’’ Frank asked, ‘‘Now why, in a nation which is pouring out its blood and substance to provide equal rights for all people, do we permit a cruel caste system to flourish in our public schools?’’ She told stories of students and alumni/ae who experienced a ‘‘deep sense of inferiority’’ about being denied membership, including one woman, a Wisconsin graduate who had failed to make a sorority while there. This woman had a ‘‘successful husband, a lovely home and devoted children,’’ but confessed to Frank that ‘‘if a guest in her house mentions colleges she gets up and leaves the room for fear she may be asked what sorority she belonged to.’’Ω Frank also recognized that at the end of the war, when, she calculated, 20 percent of all chapters were inactive and membership was depleted in all others, the time was right to abolish the Greek system. It may well have been worse than this; between 1943 and 1944 alone, the number of active fraternity chapters declined by almost 40 percent. Further, she pointed to what was by 1945 becoming obvious on many college campuses: many veterans were not as interested in participating in Greek life (or other college activities) as their nonveteran peers. Frank told the story of one veteran, wounded in the Pacific, who had been offered bids by three fraternities because of his heroism. He declined them all: ‘‘Why should he, after what he had been through, scrub a sidewalk with a toothbrush during hell week because some upperclassman ordered him to?’’ He was not alone in his feelings. From 1946 to 1948, veterans made up the majority of men on college campuses; 2,232,000 of them attended college in all, swelling the ranks of many college populations. At the University of Michigan, for instance, of the school’s 20,000 undergraduates, 11,000 were veterans in the immediate postwar period. Many of these students were older than their counterparts who had not served, they were quite often married, and they were much more serious about their studies. They were interested in obtaining their degrees and moving on with their lives. Intellectual, left-leaning Raymond Cirrotta, who was sound asleep at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night when roused by his killers, is indicative of this trend. Nonveteran students at many colleges complained about their veteran classmates, claiming that they would not participate in college activities, that they studied too much, and that they were snobs, evincing a superi236

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ority over their younger classmates. Most veterans probably would not have disagreed with this characterization, one claiming that ‘‘amusements for 17-year-olds could not be imposed on veterans.’’ Another said that ‘‘no 18-year old kids are going to warm our bottoms.’’ As a result, the last vestiges of freshman rush and hazing were fazed out at almost all colleges nationwide.∞≠ While there was a decided lull in fraternal activities during the immediate postwar period, by the mid-1950s and continuing into the 1960s, fraternities got back on their feet; the great majority of veterans were, after all, only on campus for a few years. More chapters of national fraternities were founded in the decade of the 1960s (830 total) than any other decade except the 1920s. While it is not altogether surprising that the fifties, a decade well known for its conservatism and ‘‘button-down culture,’’ should have been so hospitable to fraternities, it seems somewhat contradictory that the sixties, best known for radical politics on campus, should have been quite so conducive to fraternity life. It bears noting, however, that even in 1969, estimates indicate that no more than 28 percent of college students had participated in any form of strike or demonstration. Further, while college populations grew exponentially from the 1940s onward and schools continued to produce new fraternity chapters, the percentage of students who chose to join fraternities and sororities did not remain proportional to the growth in the college student population overall. The absolute number of fraternity men continued to climb, but as a proportion of the total number of male students, fraternity membership was waning. At the height of fraternity participation at the end of the 1920s, 11.74 percent of male students enrolled in traditional four-year colleges were members. By 1970 this number had been on a steady decline, sinking to a twentieth-century low of 4.8 percent of traditionally enrolled men.∞∞ During this era, fraternities, more than ever before, began to attract a very particular segment of the collegiate population, and it was generally not the 28 percent who were involved in protests. Those who joined fraternities through the fifties and sixties were, most studies have indicated, socially and economically more conservative than their peers on campus, as well as remarkably conformist. They were more wedded to futures in business and the professions, they were less intellectually curious, and, by and large, they did less well academically. To a degree, this described the college campus of the fifties more generally—conservatism and careerism were the orders of the day—but by late in the decade and certainly by the sixties, there was growing room for questioning the status quo and for democracy, drinking, and violence

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opposition. Throughout, fraternities remained the bastions of conservative students who continued to participate in the same collegiate activities that had been around since the late nineteenth century—athletics, student government, social committees, and so forth; and while they may have broken rules having to do with drinking and socializing when it suited them, they were often the first to defend their school’s administration when more liberal students protested their college’s political affiliations or policies on and off campus. Some national fraternities issued resolutions attesting to their dedication to principles of law and order during times of protest in the late 1960s; they often advocated, as did the Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity’s 1968 resolution, ‘‘that student controversies may be presented within the bounds of established school procedures and with due regard for the rights of fellow students.’’ It was not just the nationals that felt this way; on some campuses, fraternity members were conspicuous for their counterprotests. At Columbia, Beta Theta Pi played an active part in the opposition to the 1968 strikes, leading the conservative students on campus. Another fraternity played the same role at Berkeley. At the University of Colorado in 1969, fraternity and sorority students organized a group to counter the claims of Students for a Democratic Society. A University of Michigan Interfraternity Flyer announced proudly in 1953: ‘‘Communists Finding Fraternity System Hardest of All to Infiltrate.’’ Tom Charles Huston, national vice chairman for the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, proclaimed in 1964: ‘‘The American fraternity system is an integral part of the American dream. In many ways it is the last conspicuous vestige of an era of commitment to ideals. It stands as a bulwark in defense of what once were accepted as eternal verities: truth, honor, love, duty, country.’’ None other than J. Edgar Hoover himself recognized a connection between fraternities and anticommunism: ‘‘As a fraternity man, you support those values which the SDSer denies: tolerance and understanding, the free play of ideas, the striving toward the truth, the supremacy of the law, the dignity of man as a child of God.’’∞≤ Fraternities continued many of their practices from the twenties and earlier. Competition was fierce on campus for positions of prestige; the difference was increasingly, however, that many unaffiliated students were no longer as interested in proving themselves through student government and other activities. Even among fraternity men, the emphasis on these activities slowly began to wane. While elected offices were still sought, it was decreasingly fraternity men who battled it out for spots on the glee club and the yearbook staff. Athletics still reigned supreme, and many 238

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fraternities sought to initiate as many athletes as they were able. The nic’s official 1946 manual, Pledge Training, stressed the responsibilities to be shouldered by the fraternity man. As a member of the group he helps to establish its strength or its weakness, its good repute or bad. Everything he does reflects upon his chapter and his fraternity; he can never divorce himself from them; and henceforth he must regulate his actions with that in mind. If he distinguishes himself, he reflects credit on his fraternity; if he disgraces himself, discredit. He has a real responsibility then to uphold the prestige and good name of his fraternity. . . . The college man’s final position in the opinion of his fellow students will be determined by the company he kept. While officials saw this as one of the primary benefits of fraternity life (in that it was supposed to make men behave well for fear of sullying their organization’s reputation), others noted another consequence: conformity. That conformity did not just pertain to activities, academics, and dress, but also to much more mundane habits and behavior. The manual continued: ‘‘We might call attention to the little mannerisms or habits that many of us have, which are not serious in themselves, but which are a source of annoyance to others and interfere with our relations with them. Since an important step to leadership is the ability to attract people, it seems wise to eradicate any mannerism or habit which others find annoying or unattractive.’’ In this edict, the manual’s author seemed to be calling for the elimination of whatever characteristics might have made the pledges themselves. At the University of Illinois, a reporter for Look found that a fraternity pledge ‘‘must view nearly every move he makes—from taking a test to getting a date—in light of what it does ‘for the house’—a term so familiar at Illinois that it is abbreviated to ‘fth.’ ’’ The doctrine of fth made for a remarkable conformity among fraternity brothers, as all sought validation for behaving exactly as they were told by their elder brothers.∞≥ Competition on a national basis between fraternities also continued apace. Following the postwar lull, many nationals attempted to expand to schools where they did not already have chapters. Strategies for doing so remained the same for the most part, though other methods were developed as well. In the fall of 1958, for instance, Paul Cox, formerly a student at Colorado State College, enrolled at the University of Michigan with the intention of forming a group to petition Alpha Kappa Lambda. Alpha Kappa Lambda’s national executive secretary Lewis Bacon requested of democracy, drinking, and violence

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Michigan’s dean’s office that Cox be given a room in the dorm because ‘‘he will need to be in a position to meet independent men. . . . We will be happy to advance a deposit on signal from you.’’ Cox had been given a scholarship by Alpha Kappa Lambda for the purpose of attending Michigan and establishing a chapter of the fraternity there. This strategy, enacted with the full cooperation of the dean’s office, is evidence of the fact that men who were hired to oversee fraternities were increasingly fraternity men themselves and to the extreme lengths that the national fraternity offices would go to see that their organizations were represented at schools of some repute. In addition, fraternity men expanded the reach of their alumni organizations and connections, instituted more job and career bureaus, and continued to recommend ‘‘legacies’’ for brotherhood. Those alumni connections continued to grease wheels and garner jobs. As Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother Leroy Collins, president of the National Association of Broadcasters and former governor of Florida, put it: ‘‘When a stranger is identified as a fraternity brother one instinctively senses that there is a personal common denominator. Doors leading to friendship and understanding become immediately opened.’’∞∂ By the fifties, fraternities found themselves in an odd predicament. They publicly advocated for the societal status quo and were almost uniformly conservative in their political leanings and social and career ambitions. They remained at the heart of an otherwise declining rating-and-dating system that had been in existence since the 1920s.∞∑ They also continued to mandate very strict codes of behavior for their members. As an editorial in a campus newspaper from the time put it: ‘‘Now all of this is not to say that a thoughtful student or a conscientious and ardent worker cannot be a member of a fraternity. He can be; he is. But he must remember at all times that the attitude of his confreres is different from his, and that when he refuses to go drinking of a Friday night, he may be branded a grind, or a turkey, or whatever the current fraternity phrase is. He may be successful in his acceptance of the subtle criticism, he may not end up an outcast—but he is always aware that the disapprobation exists.’’ Another fraternity member described it this way: ‘‘The fraternity swallows us up—and our values, too. Only the boys with really strong convictions hold out. They’re respected but they are still individuals, not really a part of the house.’’ Despite their obvious attention to conformity, however, fraternity brothers broke rules with abandon. For the most part, men in fraternities would defend these rules publicly, never actually advocating that they should be changed (there were some exceptions to this, and they usually had to do with rush240

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ing regulations and drinking), and certainly never protesting them in any organized defiance of administrative authority. However, once dusk settled over campus, fraternity men ignored almost all of the rules that administrators and student judiciary committees (of which they were often members) attempted to enforce. These rules often had to do with alcohol consumption, but they also prohibited vandalism and destruction of property, illegal parties and socializing, and hazing and rushing. Despite, or perhaps because of, the rules, all of these illicit practices only grew in importance within fraternal conceptions of proper masculinity.∞∏ ‘‘Animal Quad’’: Duke in the 1950s and 1960s Duke University’s fraternity men were no exception to this rule-breaking code. While it would be impossible to know with any certainty whether or not they were worse than brothers at other schools, the evidence for their behavior is plentiful in the archives. When they broke rules, most fraternity men apologized for their antics, explained that things had gotten out of hand, promised never to do it again, and claimed that the rule breaking was the result of only a few out-of-control members. Administrators debated why the brothers broke the rules, and they duly punished them. The national offices bemoaned the injury done to their reputations and threatened national derecognition while also secretly faulting the universities for being too strict in their regulations. Observers noted that fraternity men seemed to be reacting to the stress produced during their pressure-filled study schedules. All of these explanations may well be true to a certain degree, but in many ways they are wholly beside the point. More germane is an exploration of which rules fraternity brothers broke, how they broke them, and what their actions meant to them. By and large, the rules fraternity men broke either had to do with the consumption of alcohol (prohibited in campus dormitories) and the pranks they pulled once they were intoxicated, or secondarily, with hazing, also strictly prohibited. Both sorts of infractions can be read in terms of fraternity men’s conceptions of masculinity. Fraternity men at Duke—as elsewhere—drank copious amounts of alcohol; it was one of the ways they impressed each other. The men who could drink the most were the most accomplished and the most masculine. What happened after they were all intoxicated is also indicative of their ideals of masculinity. They often became destructive. This physicality—the ability to destroy, sometimes their own property and sometimes that of a rival fraternity—is also compelling democracy, drinking, and violence

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evidence of their conception of properly enacted masculinity. It was, by their definition, difficult to control. Another variety of antic that was sometimes combined with hazing or with alcohol involved some sort of sexual escapade, often with the intention of embarrassing either a pledge or the Duke women before whom he was humiliated.∞π A typical incident occurred on the night of March 10, 1954, when members of Beta Theta Pi assembled in front of their dormitory section and proceeded to have a series of water fights complete with yelling and catcalls. Around midnight, a member of Beta was apprehended in front of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s section, where he had just defaced a statue by dousing it in paint; the Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers ‘‘took the man into their section and shaved his head.’’ Sometimes the only infraction was drinking at a party without any other rules being broken; this was the case when the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity at Duke was suspended for a semester in 1959. By 1970 disturbances were commonplace. On one night in particular, twenty to thirty Kappa Sigma members ran nude around their quadrangle, throwing beer bottles at buildings and shouting threats at rivals Sigma Chi and Sigma Alpha Epsilon, most involving profanity. Drunk and rowdy students, when confronted with administrators, often refused to back down, becoming belligerent and requiring physical restraint by their brothers. In at least one incident, bottles were thrown at a Duke staff member who was trying to curb disruptive activities; the injuries required a trip to the hospital. Standing up to collegiate faculty and staff in this manner was a clear assertion that, despite the administration’s supposed authority, and despite the fact that the disturbances took place on Duke property, fraternity men would not allow themselves to be disciplined by their college. The brothers who refused to back down were asserting their rights as men to behave as they chose.∞∫ Damage to the dormitories in which fraternity men lived in groups was commonplace. Repeated complaints were lodged with the dean’s office by the operations staff, who felt that they should not be responsible for cleaning up the mountains of bottles and other waste left in the common rooms and stairwells or for repairing broken windows, furniture, bathrooms, and radiators. At times, the damage was somewhat more gruesome. Late in 1961, Duke’s manager of operations reported that a black cat had been found ‘‘cut open, burned and left on the corridor floor’’ of the Kappa Alpha section. With little concern for the cat (or indeed for future such cats), he continued: ‘‘I feel that such pranks should not occur in living quarters— the odor lingers in the building.’’ In 1966 Duke’s Kappa Alpha appeared 242

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before the disciplinary board no fewer than nineteen times for charges ranging from assault and battery to drunk and disorderly conduct and ‘‘malicious damage to University property.’’ In 1969 Kappa Alpha members who had been drinking heavily ‘‘acquired and burned the benches of several other fraternities in the middle of Craven quadrangle.’’ (Each fraternity at Duke has a large wooden bench outside its section that is decorated with fraternity colors and serves as the fraternity’s way of asserting its individuality without an actual house with which to do so.) Kappa Alpha’s national organization suspended them the next year, and Duke disbanded them as a living group.∞Ω Other damage inflicted, not just by Kappa Alpha but by many other Duke fraternities, was at times accidental but often quite deliberate. Street signs were smashed through windows. Beer kegs were hurled onto sinks. More windows were broken by more thrown bottles than anyone could ever have counted. Destruction was obviously fun for fraternity men. It also served to mark them as reckless, wild, disobedient, and drunk. Despite endless regulation and punishments, Duke’s Greeks would continue these practices well into the seventies and eighties. Disobedience and reckless abandon had come to be the markers of the fraternity man. Although the film Animal House, inspired by Dartmouth graduate Chris Miller’s experiences in his fraternity during the 1960s, would not be released until 1978, one of the residential groupings at Duke was known as the ‘‘Animal Quad’’ by the 1950s. It was where the fraternity men lived. Incidents involving female classmates on Duke’s East Campus were also frequent. In 1950, as part of a fraternity initiation, two boys stood outside the Woman’s College Union dressed only in shorts with ‘‘the upper part of their bodies wrapped in a sheet and reading [Alfred Kinsey’s] ‘Sexual Behavior in the Homan [sic] Male.’ ’’ In this case, the manager of operations explained that the Duke women who had reported the boys did not believe that they ‘‘should be reading such matter in that area.’’ He noted that he was in possession of their copy of Kinsey’s report. In December 1965 students in Kappa Alpha paraded around the Women’s Campus singing Christmas carols with language ‘‘not recognizable as words in our known carols.’’ They also exploded a number of firecrackers. In 1970 another young man was chained by his neck to a post at the Women’s College bus stop wearing only his underwear. He was then covered in molasses and feathers.≤≠ Incidents like these served a number of purposes within fraternity ranks. The second—the lewd Kappa Alpha carolers—resembled the panty raids democracy, drinking, and violence

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that hit college campuses during the 1950s. The very first panty raid was at the University of Missouri in 1952; 2,000 boys invaded a women’s dormitory as well as nearby all-female Stephens College, running off with women’s underwear as their trophies. The governor called in the National Guard to control the rioting men. The incident made national news, and within a week similar raids occurred at Michigan, Nebraska, Miami, and Iowa, with other schools following soon thereafter. At some schools, the women encouraged the men, waving their underwear from dorm windows. Indeed, as the Duke Kappa Alpha boys sang their obscene Christmas carols, they were cheered on by their female classmates. At times, however, it got ugly, as at the University of California, Berkeley, where some women were themselves carried from the dorms screaming, one sorority housemother was injured, and the sorority houses themselves incurred thousands of dollars worth of damage as sisters protected themselves against raiders by brandishing hot clothes irons. Officials there observed: ‘‘There is no question that in past years fraternity members have been the hard core of student misconduct in this area, even though their conduct has attracted other students, sometimes by the thousands.’’ At Columbia, 200 students attending a beer party in John Jay Hall marched across Broadway to Barnard College and ripped apart a fence surrounding a dormitory, breaking at least one window and a porch light—all the while serenading the Barnard students, who booed them from their windows. Columbia dean Nicholas McKnight announced that the fraternities were responsible. Duke’s panty raids also occurred in 1952, and though it is unclear whether fraternity men led the way, it would not be at all surprising. Some contemporaneous observers called panty raids ‘‘symbolic rapes,’’ and while this might be extreme, there is a kernel of truth to the observation. If nothing else, the men involved were asserting their mastery over their female classmates and establishing their masculinity through an extremely powerful symbol. At a time when sexual standards were actively being debated among college students, college men were proclaiming their right to—or at least their desire for—access to female students’ bodies. When Princeton students marched on nearby Westminster Choir College, they chanted: ‘‘We want girls! We want sex! We want panties!’’≤∞ Perhaps the most disturbing and explicit of such incidents came in the spring of 1973, the year that Dartmouth first admitted women. For months, Dartmouth men had been calling their new female classmates ‘‘co-hogs’’ as a play on both ‘‘coed’’ and ‘‘quahog,’’ a clam that is indigenous to the area. The term was meant to be a derogatory reference to 244

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female genitalia. In April 1973—on sink night, the night when fraternity rushees accepted their bids and became pledges—a group stormed into one of the women’s dormitories and left copies of a letter addressed to ‘‘CUNTS.’’ Despite the fact that a majority of Dartmouth undergraduates had quite recently voted in favor of coeducation, the letter began: ‘‘Your status as a co-hog compels our organization to treat you as an enemy. Your mere presence at this institution is a direct confrontation to the goals we consider sacred.’’ They continued, naming four demands that would be necessary in order for them to live in harmony with the female students. The first was that the women’s upper bodies must remain naked (‘‘before our eyes’’) while in the dining hall. Second, the women’s ‘‘services must be made available at all times.’’ Third, the ‘‘co-hog softball team must also play naked on the green. Cunts with large floppy tits may wear bras. The bush area must remain uncovered.’’ And finally, they demanded that ‘‘one of you must give the mad Hungarian [Dartmouth’s president] a blowjob. Then maybe he will lose his fag tendencies.’’ Throughout the same year, Butterfield Hall, a mixed-sex dorm, was vandalized on a regular basis and its residents continually disrupted by drunken Dartmouth men screaming at them from below. Beta Theta Pi also conducted a pledge parade through the halls of Butterfield late one night, which earned them a stint on social probation. Dartmouth had always been an extreme case, and the antics of Dartmouth fraternity men in 1973 were prompted by the recently arrived coeducation; nevertheless, they demonstrate a concerted and explicit effort on the part of Dartmouth men, fraternity men particularly, to assert their dominance over women.≤≤ The first and third incidents by Duke students—the Kinsey-reading boys and the pledge chained to the bus stop—were stunts required of fraternity pledges. They were designed to be humiliating and seen as doubly so because acted out before the boys’ female classmates. Humiliation was a part of most hazing rites by the postwar period. Fraternities at Duke were regularly cited for breaking hazing regulations by requiring their pledges to perform a variety of demeaning acts that usually involved food, alcohol, paddling, nudity, or some combination of the four. In 1960 Phi Delta Theta pledges were made to take off their undershorts and throw them in a fire. In 1963 Phi Kappa Sigma pledges’ ‘‘back-sides’’ were painted. Beta Theta Pi pledges were made to roll small stones down a flight of stairs with their noses while syrup and shaving cream were poured on them. They were also kept up all night doing exercises at ten to fifteen minute intervals. No doubt many other inventive trials were devised democracy, drinking, and violence

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that never made their way into the dean’s files. Many of these exercises were harmless enough in and of themselves, though at other schools some students were taken to hospitals suffering from exhaustion after sleep deprivation and excessive exercise. Initiation rituals and pledge tasks were designed to make pledges submissive to the upperclassmen and to humiliate them. Once their egos had been thoroughly decimated, their manhood supposedly tested by their ability to withstand the hazing, and their brotherhood as a ‘‘pledge class’’ cemented through solidarity in the face of their hazers, they were welcomed as full members of the fraternity. The same story has been told of ritual initiations for centuries and continues to be told to this day.≤≥ Revolting and absurd as these examples are, they remained on a different scale from the hazing deaths and injuries publicized around the country in the postwar period. Recall from chapter 4 that the first such recorded incident occurred in 1873 with the death of Mortimer Leggett, who fell down a cliff while blindfolded during a Kappa Alpha outdoor ritual at Cornell University. Though tragic and foolhardy, the death was accidental. The difference between accidents of this sort and those that began to be reported in the post–World War II period was that the fraternity men who demanded the tasks of their pledges should have been aware of the dangers inherent in what they were requiring in the name of brotherhood. In 1959 a University of California, Berkeley, student pledging Theta Xi was hospitalized with kidney problems after he had been jabbed repeatedly with a paddle while in a state of physical exhaustion. In 1961 a Kappa Alpha pledge at the University of Texas made headlines when he was chained to an outdoor fountain in thirty-eight-degree weather. Though he made it through the night unharmed, others were not so fortunate. In 1940 a student death at the University of Missouri was blamed on the consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol shortly after his initiation into Theta Nu Epsilon, a secret and elite fraternity that emphasized drinking. At mit a Delta Chi pledge drowned while participating in Hell Week activities in 1956. In 1959 a pledge at the University of Southern California choked to death while attempting to swallow a three-by-four-inch, oil-soaked hunk of liver. The incident made headlines nationwide. These deaths and injuries—and their numbers would only increase throughout the twentieth century—indicate that hazing rituals, despite their being banned by all national fraternities, were becoming more exhausting and more dangerous. They were also involving alcohol much more than in previous decades. Alcohol, no longer just a masculine prerogative, was 246 democracy, drinking, and violence

being used as a test for admission. Fraternity upperclassmen demanded that pledges drink excessive amounts in order to prove that they were worthy of becoming members. By the early 1960s, Columbia’s chapter of Delta Psi (also known as St. Anthony Hall) required only one stunt of some pledges: consume a fifth of straight scotch.≤∂ While definitions of the word ‘‘voluntary’’ are sometimes strained by the process of fraternity pledging and initiation, all of these incidents— save the paddlings and the bus-stop and fountain chaining—were undertaken with the consent of the pledges involved. Indeed, most of the acts were not done to the pledges but performed by them, a testament to the degree to which fraternity membership was still seen as a remarkable honor on many campuses. Students across the nation were more than willing to subjugate themselves to fraternal hazing rituals if it meant that they might become fraternity men. For some, it was the hazing itself that made them into men. Others disagreed. In the 1940s administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received anonymous letters from prospective fraternity pledges begging them to do something to stop the hazing. ‘‘Hell Week is about to start,’’ one such letter began. ‘‘Why doesn’t the Administration curb these things when more time is needed for study during these war days? ACT PLEASE!!!!!!!!!’’ Another, signed ‘‘Anxious Pledges,’’ pleaded: ‘‘We ask your help before it will be too late. If the practice is kept up, it will end in someone being seriously injured, or perhaps killed and certainly it will result in low grades for this quarter due to the degree of emotional pitch [in which] the ‘pledges’ are kept.’’ These pleas presumably came from pledges who themselves were so desperate to belong to a fraternity that they were unwilling to refuse outright the hazing that they knew lay in their futures. Their only recourse was to higher authorities who could eliminate the hazing without requiring that the pledges themselves call their own masculinity into question. For a significant minority on U.S. college campuses, the most exalted masculinity was that of fraternity men. Many were willing to make sacrifices to be counted among them.≤∑ Many postwar fraternity men, then, were conservative, anti-intellectual, rule-abiding Big Men on Campus by day and hard-drinking, profane, violent men by night. It may be that their nighttime alter egos compensated for the degree to which they toed the line throughout the rest of their conventional lives. That is, their brazen defiance of the rules in a sort of bacchanalian nighttime carnival may have been something that fraternity brothers experienced as liminal and, in some ways, were able to psydemocracy, drinking, and violence

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chically divorce from other areas of their lives. It is clear, nevertheless, that for fraternity men, masculinity was defined through their defiance of the rules, and certainly through their drinking. Officials at the nic 1963 annual meeting observed that many fraternity members told them, in essence. ‘‘without liquor, we will have no fraternities.’’ A Wisconsin student agreed: ‘‘It gets to be an obsession with some boys.’’≤∏ ‘‘The Discriminating Soul’’: Racial Exclusions and the Meaning of Fraternity The national saga of fraternity desegregation began in 1946, when Amherst College’s trustees formally decided that no fraternity on Amherst’s campus after World War II would be allowed to operate if it or its national organization contained a membership clause that restricted membership based on race, ethnicity, or religion. The trustees set February 1, 1949, as the deadline by which every fraternity was required to report officially to the trustees that their constitutions contained no such restrictions; they later postponed it by two years. The national office of Delta Tau Delta immediately denied its Amherst chapter permission to reopen after the war until such time that Amherst became ‘‘a suitable field for national fraternities.’’ The members of the Amherst chapter and its local alumni responded that they had ‘‘gone through a war where the ideals of democracy were tested under fire,’’ and that they were ‘‘serious in their wish to see their ideals in action.’’ Delta Tau Delta renamed itself Kappa Theta and began operation as a local fraternity. The gauntlet had been thrown down, however quietly.≤π What happened next, however, would make headlines around the nation. In March 1948, Amherst’s Phi Kappa Psi chapter pledged freshman Thomas Gibbs of Evanston, Illinois. Gibbs was, in the parlance of the day, a Negro, as well as a member of the track team and a class officer. Despite the fact that Phi Kappa Psi’s constitution did not contain any racial restrictions, before making the decision, the chapter nevertheless consulted with its own alumni, who by and large were supportive of the move. Within a few weeks, however, they began to receive letters from the national office and other chapters questioning and protesting the decision. At the annual convention that summer, despite the fact that the Amherst chapter had sent letters to all of the delegates explaining their decision, it was ruled that other chapters had not had enough time to consider the matter, and thus Amherst agreed to depledge Gibbs in what they believed was a temporary 248

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Phi Alpha Psi Fraternity, Amherst College, 1949. African American Thomas Gibbs, whose initiation caused Phi Alpha Psi to break from their national organization, Phi Kappa Psi, is in the top row at the extreme right. (Reproduced by permission of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)

solution. The national conference, however, considered the matter settled to their satisfaction. Back at school that fall, the Amherst chapter still wanted to pledge Gibbs. To that end, they wrote to fifty-four other chapters of their fraternity soliciting their opinions; of the one-third that responded, half were opposed, a third were in favor, and the rest were noncommittal. This legwork completed and still set on their decision, the Amherst chapter wrote to the national in November of the same year, two weeks ahead of Gibbs’s planned initiation on November 23rd. Before the letter arrived, however, a reporter from a Boston newspaper broke the story and it made headlines across the nation, many of them praising the courage and principle of the Amherst boys. Enraged by the publicity, as well as by what they felt to be the Amherst chapter’s deliberate and willful disobedience of its orders, the national organization promptly yanked Amherst’s charter. At Amherst, Phi Kappa Psi became local Phi Alpha Psi, and Thomas Gibbs became a brother.≤∫ Stories like these run the risk of glorifying all undergraduate fraternity brothers as radical integrationists, but obviously this was far from true. After all, half of the undergraduate chapters of Phi Kappa Psi were opposed to the Amherst chapter’s decision. It was the case, however, that fraternity alumni were almost always more opposed to racial and religious democracy, drinking, and violence

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integration than were their undergraduate brethren. The fight on behalf of integration was fought by undergraduates and university administrators, often with the assistance of the courts. From 1948 through the 1960s, increasing numbers of colleges and universities would adopt policies similar to that of Amherst College, which demanded that all fraternities on their campus desegregate or be disbanded. After 1965 and the enforcement of Section 601, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, all universities that received public funds were required to desegregate by law. Some national fraternities relented and removed the discriminatory clauses from their charters. Some refused, necessitating the revocation of charters on many campuses and the formation of larger numbers of local fraternities in their places. At least two other strategies were used by national fraternities to varying degrees of success. At times they removed the written clause but continued to encourage—and often demand—that the undergraduate chapters maintain a whites-only policy. They enforced this by visitations at initiations or by requiring photographs of the pledges to be submitted to alumni review boards. One national officer put it this way in a letter to chapters: ‘‘I’ve got a good chance of getting that discriminatory clause taken out—so long as you boys don’t go taking in any damn’ niggers.’’ These steps were often unnecessary when the undergraduates themselves were in harmony with the racist ideals of the nationals; one study at the University of Missouri found that most discriminatory policies, while enforced by alumni, received substantial support, or at least tacit acceptance, by undergraduate members. Other nationals simply wrote special exceptions to the rules for those chapters at schools where they risked losing a chapter; those chapters would have the autonomy to select their own members while the national would keep their restrictions. Nationals that chose this route often did so because they wanted to retain chapters at prestigious schools, especially those elite eastern schools that were the first to mandate integration. The most agitation for integration came from northern schools and from schools considered to be more elite; while there were some exceptions to the rule, southern schools, not surprisingly, lagged behind their northern brethren.≤Ω Throughout the controversy—and it was a controversy that attracted, much to the horror of alumni, national attention—the debate was argued using a number of concepts said to be inherent to the meaning of being an American. The three most often used key words were ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘autonomy,’’ and ‘‘discrimination.’’ Both sides of the argument utilized the words to their own ends. Defenders of segregation claimed that in a democ250

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racy, men had the right to freedom of assembly and to choose those with whom they would associate—the right to discriminate, in other words. They decried college administrative attempts to interfere with their autonomy to make these decisions on their own. Supporters of integration, by contrast, defended the concept of democracy as being that which had recently triumphed in World War II, a democracy that did not discriminate based on creed or color. They fought for the autonomy of their individual chapters to choose their own members, regardless of the outmoded and antidemocratic prejudices of the national organizations. Both sides painted their struggles as not only quintessentially American but also as being about the future of a postwar United States. Would the United States succumb to the Communists and allow the government to dictate how and with whom its citizens might associate? Or would the United States stand by the principles for which it had fought in World War II and guarantee equality—embodied, however bizarrely, in the college fraternity? The unlikelihood of the college fraternity as egalitarian haven aside, the arguments of the integrationists proved more compelling. While they might have considered putting their altruism to more productive projects, there is little doubt that the young men who fought to have black, Jewish, and Asian American brothers did so because they believed it wrong that they should not be able to do so. Whether or not these young men were themselves free of anti-Semitism or racism is beside the point; they recognized that they should be, and that to institutionalize such sentiments was wrong. Further, in contrast to the impassioned invocations of democracy, autonomy, and discrimination made by undergraduate integrationists, the same words rang false when employed by the segregationists. In large part, they adopted and manipulated the same words because they were left with little choice. Much to their chagrin, the national attention had forced them to confront the issue head on. In a speech to the annual meeting of the National Interfraternity Conference in 1947, its chairman, David A. Embury, manipulated all three concepts to his own ends in addressing the controversy. The speech is worth examining in detail, not only because Embury is so unapologetic in his defense of segregation but also because his real fears and motivations are made so glaringly obvious in the course of the speech. After noting (for the most part incorrectly) that the demand for desegregation on campuses was coming from ‘‘left-wing radicals’’ in the student government, Embury explained that ‘‘it is axiomatic that in a democracy it is the privilege of every man to form a group . . . and that that group is the democracy, drinking, and violence

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sole judge of its own membership qualifications.’’ In contrast to a totalitarian regime, where no groups can function without the sanction of the government, ‘‘if you or I want to form a fraternity whose membership shall be limited exclusively to bow-legged men, it is our privilege to do so.’’ He then told his audience: ‘‘There is nothing arbitrary or capricious or unnatural about fraternity membership restrictions based on race, creed, or color.’’ In the ‘‘closest-knit, most intimate group to be found anywhere outside the family,’’ a group that lives, eats, sleeps, and dates together, nothing could be more natural than men selecting other men who are like themselves in all respects. He continued with an ornithological metaphor that is particularly telling: ‘‘I think that every bird-lover must admire both the red-breasted robin and the golden oriole. Anyhow, I do. Both belong to the same genus. Both were created by the Almighty Father and both in pretty much the same form, although each with certain definite distinguishing characteristics—notably in color. I should not care to try to rate either as superior to the other. No one, however, expects to find both of them in the same nest. Nature, in its wisdom, has not so ordained.’’ In invoking this metaphor, Embury revealed one of his chief concerns: the nest. In a group where men met and frequently married each others’ sisters, friends, and other relatives, where men double-dated, where they socialized with all-white sororities, the specter of the black man loomed large. This was not just about white fraternity men having to interact with Jews and blacks but about their female counterparts having to do so as well.≥≠ He was not alone in this fear. When Amherst’s Phi Kappa Psi announced their black pledge, the head of their alumni corporation received many angry letters, among them: ‘‘Brother Romer, Would you want YOUR DAUGHTER TO MARRY A NEGRO?’’ As in many other debates about integration that had been going on at least since Reconstruction, the ultimate fear—and argument—was intermarriage. Integration of fraternities was seen as just the beginning of a slippery slope that might lead to miscegenation. Further, fraternity men (recall Embury’s description of the intimacy of fraternal bonds in a fraternity house) looked upon their organizations as being like a family. One fraternity official put it this way: ‘‘A fraternity brother ideally is a man you are willing to live with, to have eat, and sleep in your home, to have become intimate with members of your family.’’ He believed that every man should ask himself the following question of prospective pledges: ‘‘Will I be proud to take this man into the sanctuary of my home, introduce him to my loved ones as a brother, and 252

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share my home with him?’’ George Todt, secretary of the Interfraternity Association of Southern California, further explained: ‘‘As any lady or gentleman knows intuitively, guests are never ‘inflicted’ on the home—but they are ‘received’ in the home. . . . Isn’t any social group simply the worldly extension of one’s home? And who is the final arbiter to say of who shall come into one’s home except the person involved and his or her family themselves?’’ Yet another brother explained that while he might believe in a Brotherhood of Man, ‘‘such a brotherhood belongs to the areas of work, education, worship, and talents. I do not believe that the Brotherhood of Man was intended to apply to social privileges.’’ In this instance, social privileges referred not only to the benefits of social contacts through national membership but also to exclusive access to the bodies of white women, which these men considered to be within their domain as white men. While the federal government might legislate equality in various legal ways, it was social equality that scared fraternity men.≥∞ Continuing his speech, Embury attempted to recuperate the word ‘‘discriminate’’: ‘‘And by the way, I wish we would stop shivering at the word ‘discrimination.’ Who made it a bad word, anyhow? . . . My dictionary defines it as the power to distinguish or differentiate. . . . I love the discriminating tongue, the discriminating eye, the discriminating ear, and, above all, the discriminating mind and the discriminating soul.’’ Confronting the idea of autonomy—the right of one chapter to pick its own members despite the membership restrictions of the national organization—he returned to his bow-legged metaphor: That, of course, overlooks—or, at least, tries to undermine—the very foundation stone of national fraternities. If I form my fraternity of bow-legged men, let us say, at Amherst, and, because it succeeds there, groups of bow-legged men from Dartmouth, from Williams, from Bowdoin, and elsewhere petition and receive charters establishing chapters of the bow-legged fraternity in their schools also, all are bound by this membership restriction which forms one of the common ties, one of the distinguishing characteristics of this particular group. It does not lie within the discretion of any individual chapter to accept into membership a knock-kneed student, however perfect may be his other qualifications. What was at issue here was that the brotherhood would be tainted by black or Jewish blood. The ‘‘white Aryan’’ brothers of a given fraternity would no longer be able to hold their heads high when they announced that they democracy, drinking, and violence

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were Chi Psi men or Dekes if they also knew that at some other chapter they had a Jew for a brother or a Chinese American man. As one fraternity alumnus put it: ‘‘A man is not initiated into a chapter; he is initiated into a fraternity, which is constituted of many units, and he should be as acceptable to the undergraduates and alumni of one campus as another.’’ For them, the essence of their fraternity was inextricably bound up in whiteness and Protestantism; it was, in Embury’s words, ‘‘one of the distinguishing characteristics of this particular group.’’≥≤ Many other alumni concurred. The Johnstown, Pennsylvania, alumni of Phi Kappa Psi demanded that the national amend the constitution immediately to specify that chapters were ‘‘not only traditionally, but constitutionally, forbidden to initiate negroes and restricted to initiate only members of the white race.’’ They continued: ‘‘The amendment should also forbid religions which do not respect the oath of secrecy, adherents of faiths and isms which are known to be antagonistic to the beliefs, customs, and traditions of the great majority of our present undergraduate and alumni members, and adherents of all political doctrines which would destroy our nation’s system of democratic government and free enterprise.’’ This group, also playing upon postwar fears of Communism, linked the infiltration of blacks and Jews to the downfall of democracy and free enterprise.≥≥ The controversy—in concert with nationwide struggles over civil rights —would continue through the 1960s, with different schools mandating integration throughout the period. The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 would heighten the pressure. Reports from many schools— Minnesota, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Vermont among them—showed that the majority of fraternity members, those in fraternities with and without discriminatory clauses, favored the removal of such clauses. Many schools simply followed the pronouncements of their students on the subject. Columbia, for instance, began proceedings to have all sixteen of their fraternities renounce their discriminatory clauses or sever relations with their national organizations in the early 1950s. Their student government and their Interfraternity Council, Pamphratria, had already expressed their support for integration. At Michigan, the situation was more complicated. The student legislature there, though opposed by the Interfraternity Council, voted in 1950 to require fraternities to remove their discriminatory clauses or secede from their nationals, giving a 1956 deadline. Michigan’s president Alexander Ruthven vetoed the decision in 1951. He claimed that he did not have the authority to require the nationals to do 254

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anything, that it was a national’s ‘‘legal right to define in its constitution the qualifications of its members.’’ He also worried about jeopardizing the ‘‘vested property interests’’ of the nationals. The student legislature went back to the drawing board and passed a similar resolution, though without a deadline, in 1952. Michigan’s new president, Harlan Hatcher, vetoed this resolution as well, claiming that he preferred to allow ‘‘the processes of education and personal and group convictions’’ to ‘‘bring us forward faster, and on a sounder basis, than the proposed methods of coercion.’’ Some may have sincerely believed that it was antithetical to the ideals of a university to force students to comply with what administrators recognized as the right thing to do; if fraternities were to remove the prejudicial clauses from their constitutions, they should do so because they realized that prejudice was wrong, not because they were forced to do so. Others simply feared the wrath of the alumni, especially since many of them controlled sizable amounts of property in and around college campuses.≥∂ On other campuses, university administrations made unilateral decisions without consulting their students at all. The University of Connecticut recognized in 1949 that as a publicly funded institution, it was under an obligation to offer the same opportunities to all of its students and made the decision to desegregate on this basis. The State University of New York (suny)—a conglomeration of twenty-seven geographically disparate colleges—urged its fraternities in 1953 to give up their national affiliations, giving them a five-year deadline. They simultaneously informed all campus organizations that they were to eliminate any discrimination in their membership practices, either de jure or de facto. suny’s president, William Carlson, and its trustees were sued. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court before being thrown out, upholding Carlson’s position that he was simply obeying the laws of the state of New York, a law that forbade the use of ‘‘artificial criteria’’ in employment or admissions practices generally.≥∑ While this decision would lend muscle to other administrators who would institute similar measures, it was not until the mid-1960s that the issue would finally be resolved. The scandal this time centered around the Stanford University chapter of Sigma Chi, which no longer had a written discriminatory clause but required that all pledges be approved by the executive committee, using photographs of the pledges to control for race. They had made it known to all their chapters that while discrimination might not be codified, nonwhites would never meet with the approval of the committee. Stanford’s chapter wrote in March of that year to the nademocracy, drinking, and violence

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tional, expressing their objections and their desire to be able to pledge members regardless of race or religion. Sigma Chi’s national president, Harry V. Wade, responded: ‘‘I personally would not resent having a highclass Chinese or Japanese boy admitted to Sigma Chi. But I know full well that his presence would be resented on the West coast. Therefore I must submerge any personal feeling and refrain from proposing a Japanese or Chinese boy because of the reaction it would cause among your alumni.’’ After surveying local Bay Area alumni, one-third of whom responded favorably to the chapter’s desire to admit students of color, the Stanford chapter of Sigma Chi pledged a black student, who accepted the bid on April 3, 1965. A week later, their charter was suspended.≥∏ Only four years earlier, the Stanford chapter of Alpha Tau Omega had gone local when its national had withdrawn its charter for initiating ‘‘persons who do not accept the Christian faith as provided by the Constitution of the Fraternity.’’ Stanford and the Alpha Tau Omega chapter had little recourse at the time. Four years later, however, the situation had changed. Until mid-1965, while there had been discussions at many schools about the possible applicability of 1964’s Civil Rights Act to fraternities, many Greek-letter men had been reassured by the act’s Meader Amendment, which specifically prohibited the Civil Rights Commission from inquiring into the membership practices of private social organizations. In June 1965, however, the federal government’s position was made perfectly clear. On the 18th of that month, Francis Keppel, commissioner of education, declared that fraternities that discriminated on racial grounds at schools that received any federal funding were doing so in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Schools that continued to allow any of their student organizations to discriminate on such a basis would forfeit any federal funding they might receive. Schools across the country that had not previously required their fraternities to desegregate rushed to make sure that they were in compliance. By the fall of 1965, however, the situation had changed again. Fraternity men in Congress had further refined the applicability of Title VI. They attempted to formulate an amendment to the Higher Education Bill that would make it impossible for the government to interfere in private social fraternities. The amendment was modified somewhat in the Senate, and it became impossible for schools to receive the federal funding if they housed discriminatory organizations on their campuses; those fraternities and sororities that owned their own property (about 85 percent of the total) were free to carry on. This changed little for schools like Duke, where all fraternity housing was on campus. Many 256

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other schools—including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill— had, in compliance with Keppel’s earlier statements, set deadlines for desegregation. In the wake of these statements, and despite the revised legislation, many colleges that had previously accepted Sigma Chi’s assurances that they had expunged the discriminatory clauses demanded that their own Sigma Chi chapters disaffiliate immediately. They were further bolstered by the 1966 decision by the U.S. District Court in Denver, on a suit that Sigma Chi had brought against the University of Colorado’s regents. The court ruled that the university was within its constitutional rights to require all undergraduate student organizations to comply with nondiscrimination.≥π While the results of the congressional battles remained vague for some, most schools had by this point adopted some sort of rule demanding that fraternities declare that they had no discriminatory clauses in their constitutions. The choice for fraternities and sororities with such clauses was either to disband or disaffiliate from the national. This met with resistance on the part of many alumni, some of whom wrote to college administrators to express their anger. Mrs. William M. Ramey, a Duke grad and member of Kappa Delta, a sorority that had been forced to disband because its national refused to comply with the nondiscrimination clause, informed the Duke Alumni Fund that she would no longer contribute to her alma mater: ‘‘I am sorry that what I feel is misdirected ‘social’ concern to equalize all has come to play such an important part on the Duke campus.’’ In the wake of the Sigma Chi fiasco at Stanford, one Sigma Chi alumnus wrote to an alumnus brother: ‘‘You may well know that Stanford is as pink as Columbia and ‘Ha’vad.’ It is the most left winged of all the left winged California institutions. In other words it stinks to high heaven as a radical institution. I have an idea that it is this group that pledged the Negro. He was NOT pledged by a Sigma Chi chapter . . . because their charter had already been suspended. So far we have not had a Negro pledged anywhere; if one should be pledged he for sure will NOT be initiated.’’ He explained that the national was ‘‘taking the stand that any group has the inherent and constitutional right to select their own friends and associates. . . . If that right is taken away, then we all might as well move to Russia, Cuba, Red China—or even the Congo!’’ It was not unusual to blame Communists for the fight against discrimination or to link the fears of desegregation to a disintegration of democracy. This had been going on since Embury made his famous speech before the nic in 1947, and indeed as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. As late as the 1966 andemocracy, drinking, and violence

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nual meeting of the nic, the president of Beta Theta Pi declared: ‘‘There are people, many of whom are ‘do gooders,’ or are just plain socialistically inclined, who have been trying to harm and even kill our great American college fraternity system.’’ For these alumni, anything that threatened to change their fraternity from the structure that they recognized was inspired by Communist plots or, at the very least, misguided liberals. It became increasingly untenable to hold these convictions, however, when it was not just college administrators but one’s very own undergraduate members who were agitating for change. This was one more in a series of skirmishes between a more conservative alumni and an undergraduate population that had come of age in a different time.≥∫ Not all fraternity undergraduates accepted racial integration. Although the racial controversies would lead some students across the country to found fraternities that explicitly embraced a multicultural membership, others clung to more outdated forms of racial exclusivity and prejudice. Indeed, social scientists studying fraternities continued to find that their members were more ethnocentric than their nonaffiliated peers and harbored more prejudice toward nonwhites and Jews. And many of these fraternities, with or without explicit discrimination clauses, continued to select their members based on skin color and religious affiliation. A number of students in a 1956 nationwide study of college freshmen attested to this: ‘‘I joined the only fraternity I could possibly agree with here. I was genuinely shocked at the discrimination against Jews and other groups which was clearly displayed by all the others.’’ And another student, who had chosen to transfer schools, confessed: ‘‘In many ways I respect this college, and shall hate to leave it. But the bias and discrimination shown in the fraternity system is such that I cannot stay.’’ A study at the University of Missouri found, not all that surprisingly, that even those fraternity and sorority members who held somewhat liberal views on racial and religious minorities thought that pledging them would be a bad idea because it would affect the reputations of their organizations and would thus hinder their ability to pledge other students. Of course, there were also those who made no effort to hide their racism, although these members also feared for their reputations: ‘‘I would blackball a Nigger or a damn Jew quicker than I would anybody. But who’s going to put up one for membership? Who’s that crazy? . . . You let Jews, Niggers, and all of the other chinky-winkies in and pretty soon you don’t have a frat. No one will want to belong. . . . We’re proud of our fraternity, and we aren’t going to turn it into a rabble for chinks and Niggers.’’ A more liberal student claimed that his fraternity 258

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might let in a Jew if ‘‘he did not have a Jewish name or did not look ‘too Jewish.’ ’’ And yet another worried about who black members would date: ‘‘If they brought Negro girls, white sorority girls would probably object. A Jew might be a little less repulsive, but their mannerisms would undoubtedly be different and because of this they wouldn’t fit in very well.’’ Throughout the study, and with the exception of the more admittedly racist respondents, students often couched their objections in terms of their fears about the reactions of alumni, national organizations, and their fellow members, while often espousing their own purportedly more liberal views. With some exceptions, the most visibly race-segregated fraternities were in the southern states. The prejudice against racial minorities, as opposed to Jews, was also more pervasive and deep-seated; this was especially so in the South, where some Jews were welcomed more openly than they would have been in the North. The evidence also indicates that elite, private institutions were generally quicker to work toward integration than the larger public schools.≥Ω Some fraternities, especially those in the South, continued to define themselves through their whiteness in a much more public fashion. The Kappa Alpha Order, a southern fraternity, held its Old South Ball throughout the postwar period; members of the fraternity and their dates dressed in costumes designed to recall the antebellum period, with men wearing Confederate uniforms and women wearing elaborate dresses and bonnets. They attended a Sharecroppers Dance and hired black bands to provide the entertainment. In 1957 more than 250 Kappa Alpha brothers from across North Carolina marched through the streets of Charlotte and listened as a fellow Kappa Alpha man read the proclamation declaring North Carolina’s secession from the United States. Kappa Alpha brothers regularly displayed the Confederate flag on their house and at fraternity events. The Kappa Sigma Fraternity at California State College at Long Beach also flew the Confederate Flag at dances in the mid-1960s; the dance flyers announced that ‘‘the South shall rise again.’’ At Duke, the Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity dressed up like Chinese people during Rush Week in 1963 for a Chinese Open House, where chop suey and rice were served. That same year, and again at Long Beach State College, members of Tau Kappa Epsilon were suspended after singing ‘‘Bye, Bye Black Man’’ at a fraternity rush party. The lyrics included the following: ‘‘Black man, you’d better play it cool / else we’ll bomb your Sunday school.’’ (The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, had been bombed a month earlier.)∂≠ democracy, drinking, and violence

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Some incidents, however, were more than symbolic. A unc student who brought a black fellow student to a joint Delta Kappa Epsilon–Zeta Delta Xi house party in 1963 was assaulted. The next year at unc, as civil rights marchers walked past fraternity row, members of Alpha Tau Omega shouted epithets and obscenities at them. Also in 1964 at unc, a group of about thirty fraternity brothers accosted a Liberian student and his friend, calling them ‘‘nigger’’ and ‘‘nigger-lover’’ (the friend was white). Incidents like these were not confined to southern schools, however. In 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., two black Colgate University students walking by the Sigma Nu house were fired at by brothers, who screamed: ‘‘There go some niggers—let’s shoot them.’’ While the gun turned out to be a starting pistol that only fired blanks, the message was crystal clear. At the University of California, Berkeley, members of the Beta Theta Pi chapter harassed and beat three Chicano uc students and one employee in the middle of the night as they walked to their car, which was parked near the Beta house. Men in fraternities— primarily in the South, but also in some northern and western schools— were threatened by the incursions of racial minorities into what had previously been all-white spaces. Not only did they maintain an all-white brotherhood, but they also sometimes lashed out at people of color outside of their fraternities.∂∞ Throughout the period, the numbers of nonwhite and non-Protestant students who became members of traditionally white, Protestant fraternities rose only slightly. And when one of these fraternities did take in a new member, it often made headlines, as almost invariably some other chapter of the same national organization protested. Even without a protest, it was news enough—at least in campus papers and sometimes among college administrators—that a black student had been initiated into a previously all-white fraternity. Often these black students, in keeping with fraternities’ emphasis upon athletics, were stars of the football, basketball, or track teams. At Yale, for instance, a Trinidadian track star was initiated into Delta Psi, prompting Delta Psi men at the University of Virginia to stage a protest. By and large, even with the civil rights movement erupting around them, fraternities that had started out white and Protestant remained that way. In 1971 unc’s Faculty Committee on Fraternities and Sororities reported that only four black students had thus far pledged white fraternities, and three of them had depledged. The committee had reported the year before that ‘‘there seems to be no desire among blacks on this campus to seek membership in existing fraternities and sororities,’’ as 260

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they granted permission to a black student to found a chapter of Omega Psi Phi, a traditionally black fraternity. That they expressed surprise at this is the only surprising part of the report.∂≤ Many white members of college fraternities did not want to have black, Jewish, Latino, or Asian American brothers because they did not want to associate with those they considered their inferiors, and also because they feared that their reputations on campus might suffer. Fraternities had always been vehicles for prestige; through their exclusivity and the accomplishments of their members, they made names for themselves on campus. Individual members then parlayed these reputations into identities for themselves. Integral to this had always been a particular conception of masculinity. That masculinity was raced white. To invite nonwhite or nonChristian men into the brotherhood was to compromise a very particular ideal of manhood, something that many fraternity men were simply unwilling to do. Organizations that had done so were often assigned epithets, and their reputations suffered: Columbia’s chapter of Phi Sigma Delta was called ‘‘Phi Nig’’ in the early 1950s because it had black, Jewish, Catholic, and Japanese members. While there can be no doubt that many of the men were ethnocentric enough that they simply wanted no contact with blacks and Jews, equally important was that their admission would have compromised standards for the fraternity, standards that were in place to ensure that a fraternity was seen as suitably masculine on campus. In order to maintain their prestige, many fraternities refused to admit men who were not white and Protestant.∂≥ ‘‘Snow Jobs’’ and Scorekeepers: Sex and Fraternal Masculinity During the postwar period, fraternity men completed the transition to a standard of virile masculinity recognizable to us today. They did so in a changing sexual culture that was increasingly permissive for women. As more and more college women became sexually active prior to marriage, men sought more often to have intercourse with their female classmates rather than with the male college student’s former source for sex— prostitutes and working-class women. Men embraced this change in college women’s behavior, building upon the traditions that had been in play at least since the 1920s, whereby men evaluated each other in all-male groups based on their ability to convince women to have sex with them. As in the 1920s, and because of a lasting double standard, girls, with very few exceptions, continued to trade various forms of sex for affection and comdemocracy, drinking, and violence

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mitment, whereas boys traded in the opposite direction. Because of women’s justified fears for their reputations, the sexual revolution of the postwar period (even during the 1960s) continued to be a doubled-edged sword for women. There were further complications. At the close of World War II, homosexual communities and visibility were growing, accompanied all the while by denigration and widely publicized links between homosexuality and Communism. Because of this, fraternity men were under even greater pressure to perform heterosexuality so that they would not be mistaken for homosexuals, especially in light of their intimate living conditions. This meant that many men, especially in all-male groups that were the most suspect in terms of homosexuality, reported on their sexual exploits with frequency. While this undoubtedly led to the fabrication of many sexual exploits, there is evidence to indicate that it also led to sexual aggression on campus, especially between fraternity men and the women they dated. In order to prove themselves as men, many fraternity men were increasingly forcing themselves on their female classmates. from the 1920s onward, and prompted by that decade’s obsession with all things youthful, social scientists had been publishing studies evaluating the sexual behavior of college students.∂∂ During the late 1940s and 1950s, rating and dating seems to have decreased somewhat from the heyday of the 1920s, though it still remained an active part of social life for those in sororities and fraternities. As in the 1930s, couples continued to go steady in ever-larger numbers, and there was less of a break between dating, engagement, and marriage. Of course, the 1950s was also the era of the lowest age of marriage in the twentieth century. Young people’s attitudes toward sex when a couple was in love or engaged continued to relax; permissiveness with affection became the single standard for many more. Strict adherence to this standard was more common for women than for men. Of the college women who had sex before marriage, the greatest number did so with their future spouses only; this was not the case for the men.∂∑ One 1953 study of married college-educated men and women (from data obtained between 1936 and 1946) found that 68 percent of the men had had sexual intercourse before marriage, but only 47 percent of the women had done so. Further, 35.6 percent of the women had only done so with their future husbands (representing three-quarters of all women who had had sex), compared with only 17.4 percent of men (or two-sevenths of the 262

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total number of men who had had sex).∂∏ Winston Ehrmann’s 1959 study of college students (data obtained between 1946 and 1953) found that 65 percent of the men had had sexual intercourse (57 percent of nonveterans and 73 percent of veterans) and 17 percent of the women had done so.∂π Ehrmann continued to find that while for women the relation between sexual intercourse and feelings of love was directly related, ‘‘the degree of physical intimacy which the males had experienced or would permit themselves to experience [was] inversely related to the intensity of familiarity and affection existing in the male-female relationship.’’∂∫ Men were much more likely to have had sexual relations with what Ehrmann called acquaintances or friends than with lovers; for women, the trend was exactly the opposite. The relationship between class and sexual partners was also striking. Men and women were both more likely to date within their own social class; however, of those men who dated above or below their social class (and they were more likely to do the latter), they were much more likely to have intercourse with women from lower social classes. Men were between 20 and 30 percent more likely to go further sexually with working-class women than they were with women of their own class, and at least 30 percent less likely with women of a higher social class. Men who dated in all three social classes were the most sexually active.∂Ω Though a liberal single standard was certainly gaining ground, there was a sizable minority of men who still subscribed to the strict double standard in the 1950s (Ehrmann claimed 33 percent of his sample∑≠). Often these were men who had a steady girlfriend but also dated others outside of that relationship, sometimes with the knowledge and consent of their girlfriends, women who themselves continued to abide by an orthodox double standard. It was these men who had the highest rates of intercourse of any in the study.∑∞ These men had sex most often with the same familiar pickups—clerks, typists, stenographers, secretaries, waitresses, factory workers, nurses, technicians, teachers, landladies, high school students, and occasionally prostitutes—all of whom were women from a lower socioeconomic class than the college men. Men who had sex with these women typically felt that they should attempt to go as far as they were able, often differentiating implicitly between pickups and good girls, as in the following: ‘‘I do have some regard for their feelings. . . . Pick-ups are, of course, another story.’’ Another, who said that it would be wrong to have sex with ‘‘a girl,’’ had already experienced intercourse with thirteen women, none of them apparently ‘‘girls’’ in his mind.∑≤ democracy, drinking, and violence

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Ehrmann is clear in his estimation that those who adhered to a double standard and had most of their sex with women of lower socioeconomic classes (as opposed to popular men with liberal single standards of conduct) did so primarily because they also believed in much more circumscribed notions of gender than did their more liberal peers. Sex with women to whom they were not committed served to reinforce their sexual and gendered dominance as men. The double standard in this formulation turns some women into something less than fully human. During the 1950s, it was still these ‘‘bad girls’’ with whom double-standard college men (those most concerned with notions of masculine performance) were having sex; most of these women, with a few exceptions, were not their classmates. There were some double-standard men who would determine whether a girl was good or bad by whether or not she resisted his advances, but by and large, the men having sex on 1950s college campuses were doing so with women other than their steady girlfriends, unless they were liberal single-standard men in committed relationships.∑≥ Certainly the figures reveal that this latter group is the only one with whom most college women had sex, if they did so at all. Two other studies confirm Ehrmann’s findings.∑∂ Lester Kirkendall’s 1961 study analyzed the sexual experiences of 200 college men. Of those, thirty-eight had had sex with a prostitute. Alfred Kinsey had earlier noted that patronizing prostitutes was least common for college-educated men, less common than the groups of any other educational level (only 28 percent by age twenty-five); it seems from Kirkendall’s findings that even that number may have been waning. What is most striking about his findings is not the number (which due to his means of sampling, does not tell us much), but that of the thirty-eight men who had visited a prostitute, a full thirty-four had done so with a group of friends or fraternity brothers; even a man who had been twenty times had done so every time with at least one friend. Twenty-three men had only gone once, and six of the men accounted for a full forty-nine of the ninety-two total liaisons with prostitutes. Visiting a prostitute was a group activity, something of an adventure. Many of the men reported that they did so on a dare or because of pressure from the friends with whom they went.∑∑ In comparison with the percentages of men who frequented prostitutes in earlier decades, visiting prostitutes had declined as the double standard had done so. To go to a prostitute by oneself was increasingly seen as proof that one was not capable of finding a willing, unpaid woman. To go in a group, however, not only served as an experience in male bonding but also 264

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freed the men involved in the visit from the aforementioned stigma because they were doing it with their peers. While men may well still have sought out prostitutes for sexual satisfaction, the same cachet no longer applied to the man who went to a prostitute alone: he was not wild or manly but desperate, and this desperation was a consequence of his inability to seduce a woman on his own masculine merits. One virgin man, for instance, claimed that visiting a prostitute would ‘‘constitute the final proof of his inadequacy.’’∑∏ Kirkendall’s findings for the interactions with men and pickups were wholly consistent with Ehrmann’s. Men interacted with pickups, women of lower-class backgrounds, for sex and sex alone. They often boasted about their accomplishments afterward and shared the names of these women with their friends and fraternity brothers. Men were much less likely to engage in pickup sex in groups. Kirkendall suggested a number of reasons for this, but perhaps he came at the question from the wrong direction. It is not that sex with pickups was more an individual than a group affair; it was that sex with prostitutes was almost exclusively a group affair. To have sex with a prostitute increasingly demanded the presence of other men in order to offset stigma. Whether one ‘‘shared’’ a pickup with a group of friends was a situational or logistic matter; leaving aside the important issue of homoerotic male bonding, in terms of masculinity and reputation it did not matter whether one had sex with her alone or in a group because either way the woman was not being paid.∑π Another study, published around the same time, also confirms Ehrmann’s and Kirkendall’s findings. In that study, many of the men had had their first sexual experiences with prostitutes but thereafter were not regular visitors. When sex with prostitutes did occur, it was usually during a visit with a group of friends or fraternity brothers. The researchers also found that many of the men, to their surprise, were still very much wedded to the double standard. The double standard persisted despite the fact that many of their informants realized that logically it made little sense. The study confirmed that those men with little or no sexual experience usually felt inadequate, often beginning to date because of peer influence. As one student claimed, ‘‘Social pressure, more than any sex drive, was what led me to the company of the opposite sex.’’∑∫ Until the 1960s, women’s and men’s attitudes toward premarital sex had changed only gradually; rates of men’s sexual intercourse had steadily climbed, and women’s had remained relatively low. This changed with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as more and more college women engaged democracy, drinking, and violence

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in sexual relations before marriage. While figures for college women and sexual intercourse from the 1920s onward had ranged from 13 to 25 percent (most of them closer to the lower end), by 1968 investigators were finding that as many as 41 percent of college women had had premarital sex (and this study was among a group of sophomores, allowing at least two more years for sexual experimentation).∑Ω As sociologist Ira Reiss put it in 1966, ‘‘What was done by a female in 1925 acting as a rebel and a deviant can be done by a female in 1965 as a conformist.’’∏≠ Other investigators reported exactly that: increasing numbers of women had adjusted their standards and their behavior such that engagement and sometimes even going steady were not prerequisites for sex.∏∞ The revolution in contraceptive technology—particularly the pill, but also the decreasing stigma attached to single women owning diaphragms—also contributed to this rise in intercourse. No longer were the risks of pregnancy so high.∏≤ Because the double standard remained, however, there were still women reluctant to go ‘‘all the way’’ for fear of risking their reputations and their prospects for a husband. Rates of petting and other sexual behaviors, always far ahead of intercourse for both sexes, were also increasing, perhaps as compensation for, but also in acknowledgment of, the double standard. Petting experiences were also becoming much more similar between men and women, largely because in increasing numbers men and women in same-classed pairs were engaging in the petting.∏≥ The decline, though certainly not the fall, of the double standard had brought about a sexual economy whereby more and more college boys were dating, petting, and having sex with their classmates and not the pickups and prostitutes of earlier decades.∏∂ All of this served to increase the pressure upon college men to have sex. This is something of a tautology, but it is a useful one. As greater numbers of college women became more permissive, men increasingly realized that they could obtain sex from their peers on campus. As sex became more accepted and readily available, the reasons for not having had it, for men especially, dwindled. No longer could one say that it was impossible to meet a willing woman, and only the most religious and isolated men continued to insist in any public way that they would wait until marriage before having sex. Masculinity became increasingly associated with virility by an ever-growing percentage of the population. Testament to this is the decreasing support, if not downright scorn, for virginity in men (not to mention women in some circles). Women could at least keep their virginity by relying on older notions of chastity and still maintain their reputations; 266

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they might be seen as somewhat frigid or perhaps prudish, but it is doubtful that they would be seen as any less feminine. The same option was not available for men. To be a male virgin was now shameful, not only because virginity was a sign of failure with women (and success with them indicative of masculinity), but also because there was a growing suspicion that male virginity might be a sign of a repressed or even active homosexuality.∏∑ in reaction to a growing visible minority of homosexual communities, especially on the two coasts following World War II, crackdowns on homosexual sex escalated everywhere from the upper echelons of government to the classrooms of universities. The linkage between leftist politics and homosexuality made colleges particularly suspect, and raids were conducted at many schools and the ‘‘guilty’’ purged. The G.I. Bill that sent many veterans to college denied benefits to any soldier discharged for homosexual activity, further enforcing the stigma against gay men and lesbians. Further, there was a growing recognition that effeminacy was not necessarily linked to male homosexuality; a stereotypically masculine demeanor was no longer the only proof necessary for heterosexuality. Masculine gay men had fought in World War II; if they could be homosexual, then gender performance could be malleable enough that anyone could be a homosexual.∏∏ Postwar Americans were intolerant of homosexuality, and this fear found its way to college men. David Riesman explained at the time that the postwar college generation had ‘‘a new fear, one which a generation earlier was not conscious for most men no matter how sheltered, nor for most women—that is, the fear that they might be homosexual. . . . [T]his fear is one factor which haunts the campus, putting pressure on many young men to be guarded in their relations with each other, and also with their male teachers, while at the same time putting pressure on them to seek out relations with girls in order to convince themselves and perhaps each other that they are not.’’ By ‘‘sheltered,’’ Riesman seems to have meant sexually inexperienced. Being a virgin was seen as suspect or at least questionable; one study called it an ‘‘ostracizable offense’’ by the 1970s. A 1961 study of male virgins found that men who had not had sex suffered a loss of prestige among their peer group, a sense of inadequacy, and, for some, constant ridicule and teasing. If everyone was dating, and many were having sex, what could be wrong with the men who were not? Increasingly without religion and chastity to fall back upon, many men felt pressured to gain democracy, drinking, and violence

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some sexual experience, if only to prove to themselves and others that they were capable. Riesman mentioned that this was particularly true for men in all-male colleges who became hesitant around their peers and male teachers; this hesitancy would also obtain for fraternity men, as would the resultant pressure for sexual prowess. Dartmouth’s resident psychiatrist, Martin Bauman, claimed: ‘‘The males who have limited experience in heterosexual relationships often see themselves as inadequate misfits. They may fear that their lack of sexual experience makes them somehow weak or effeminate. In a monoeducational setting [Dartmouth was still all male], this often adds a greater pressure to succeed or to prove one’s masculinity.’’ In this excerpt, the connections between sexual experience, masculinity, and effeminacy (or possible homosexuality) are made explicit. Men who had no sexual experience, where that experience was considered masculine, feared that they might be effeminate or homosexual. More than this, they feared that others might think them so. Bauman came to exactly that conclusion: ‘‘A suggested hypothesis for the origin of the hypervirile myth [of Dartmouth men] is that it originated to allay any of the stigma of homosexuality which might be attached to a young man who voluntarily withdraws himself from a heterosexual environment to a relatively isolated all-male community.’’ Bauman went on to note that while the phenomenon he was discussing occurred at a men’s college, the same situation occurred when a student ‘‘retreats and constructs for himself for himself [sic] his own ‘monoeducational subculture’ within the coeducational confines.’’ In other words, college fraternities.∏π Dartmouth’s Epsilon Kappa Phi Fraternity of the 1920s was not the only one to be linked to homosexuality. In the late 1930s, when journalists Dorothy Dunbar Bromley and Florence Haxton Britten published their study, Youth and Sex, they noted that some men reported that the homosexual sex occurring on their campuses centered in fraternities, ‘‘but what there was of it was rather a makeshift for mutual physical relief, and rarely involved any complex emotional interest.’’ This casual attitude toward homosexuality would have been increasingly difficult to maintain in the postwar climate of homophobia that took hold in the United States. No longer would it be so feasible for men to engage in homosexual sex ‘‘for mutual physical relief ’’ without the stigma of a homosexual identity attaching itself to them. Fraternities that gained such a reputation in the postwar period were in trouble. At the University of Kansas, for instance, the dean found that the Acacia Fraternity and Alpha Chi Sigma were both rumored 268

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to be havens for homosexuals. Whether or not the rumors were true is almost beside the point. To label a fraternity as ‘‘gay’’ had become the ultimate disgraceful epithet, the supreme marker of the lack of masculinity.∏∫ In his history of college fraternities in the postwar period, Anthony W. James argues that hazing in college fraternities, despite the greater awareness of homosexual subcultures, became even more homoerotic than it had previously been. In fact, it was precisely because of the denigration fraternity men experienced as inherent to homoeroticism that they increased their emphasis upon it. In order to humiliate their pledges as much as possible, they employed more homoeroticism at exactly the same cultural moment that it was becoming increasingly stigmatized. While many fraternities hazed with paddling and nudity from the early twentieth century, it was only in the wake of a greater publicity surrounding homosexuality that fraternity men began to question the importance of their hazing practices. For instance, as early as the 1930s, nic officials questioned the practice of paddling, fearing its connections to more deviant sexual subcultures. Instead of curtailing the homoerotic elements of hazing, many individual fraternities increased them, while compensating through the performance of a more aggressive heterosexuality in their social life. Common practices involved tying string and other objects to penises, comparison of penis sizes (with punishments for the smallest), masturbation contests, and games whereby pledges had to retrieve small objects with their buttocks. These hazing practices, while they may not have been known to the general public, surely made some fraternity men uneasy.∏Ω What also may have made fraternity men uneasy if they knew about it— as at least some did—was the growing fetishization of the fraternity among some gay men. During the postwar period, homoerotic images of fraternity men and their initiations began to crop up in publications read by gay men. The images—usually, though not exclusively, cartoons and drawings— featured muscular and scantily clad young men performing chores in their fraternity houses or being subjected to hazing rituals. These images circulated in magazines like Physique Pictorial, published by the Athletic Model Guild. With their emphasis upon the recruitment of attractive members and their own choice to haze their members through nudity and sexual humiliation, fraternities were in some sense the perfect choice for those producing erotica for the consumption of gay men. The fraternity remains a popular fantasy scenario in gay pornography to this day: fraternity-themed videos, magazines, and websites catering to gay men are readily available. democracy, drinking, and violence

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More significant, however, was the way in which fraternity men who found out about this subcultural fetish might react: with increased and more virulent homophobia.π≠ Whether or not fraternities were home to large numbers of gay men (and it seems unlikely that they were), it is not difficult to imagine why some might think them so. As Patrick Dilley notes in his history of gay and bisexual men on college campuses, while some consciously gay men joined fraternities hoping that they would be made into ‘‘real’’ men, others joined precisely so that they could enjoy what one called ‘‘homosocialization’’ with a bunch of ‘‘hunky guys.’’π∞ No one better exemplifies this phenomenon than Stewart Howe, one of the most renowned fraternity brothers of his day. A Kappa Sigma brother, Howe attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating in 1928. Two years after graduation, he founded the Stewart Howe Alumni Service, an agency that worked to maintain contact between fraternities and their alumni, not only to increase monetary support for fraternities but also to foster alumni connections and involvement on campus. The service remains in operation to this day. He also founded and owned at various times the Fraternity Management Company; College Fraternity Magazines Associated, which produced fraternity alumni magazines; and a printing company in Columbia, Missouri, that printed much of the literature he produced. Between the various agencies and companies, he had from fifteen to twenty offices across the country at any given time from the 1930s to the 1960s. While some of them were in large cities like New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston, Howe also founded offices in college towns like Ann Arbor; Bloomington; Urbana-Champaign; Columbus, Ohio; Ithaca; Lafayette, Indiana; and State College, Pennsylvania.π≤ In his day, Howe was among the most public and well-known fraternity men in the country, sought out not just by other fraternity and sorority officers but also by those in the non-Greek world for his expertise in alumni affairs and organizational development. Through his work and the travel he undertook for it, he was, of course, known in fraternity and sorority houses across the country. And above all, he was known and revered by others involved in a widespread network of active fraternity alumni. Howe was also gay, and his long and active career as, essentially, a professional fraternity brother greatly increased his opportunities for sex with both undergraduate and alumni brothers. This is not to say that Howe entered the fraternity world for these purposes—there is no evidence to suggest that—but it is quite clear that his work in the fraternity world gave him 270

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greater access to sex with other men than he would otherwise have had. Howe was also friends with a number of other gay professional fraternity men, in particular traveling secretaries and executives in Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Nu. Stewart Howe gave new meaning to the phrase ‘‘alumni relations.’’π≥ In his capacity as director of the Stewart Howe Alumni Service, Howe frequently visited his satellite offices throughout the country and paid visits to many colleges in attempts to gain their fraternities as clients (and, once he had done so, to report to those client fraternities on his progress with their alumni). Howe spent a considerable portion of every year on the road. Though he was a member of Kappa Sigma, his agency represented many fraternities, and he often visited many different chapters on a single campus. While there, he took the opportunity to cultivate the friendship of countless young men; he wrote to some of these men after their meetings. Many of the letters in response begin with the young men expressing surprise and pleasure at being contacted by Howe and go on to express gratitude to him for taking the time to speak with them on his recent visit. For instance, Bob Kittel, whom Howe met in Ann Arbor in the autumn of 1938, wrote: ‘‘I certainly was very much pleased to receive your letter this morning. I must confess it was quite a surprise, and even more appreciated.’’π∂ Others go on to write explicitly about what Howe’s visit meant to them: ‘‘Stew, this morning after you left instead of going to bed for a couple of hours I tried to remember everything we talked about and get them organized in my own mind. Needless to say, I was not successful. But I did realize one thing—that someone was swell enough to spend some time with me so I could at least understand myself and my problems.’’ This student, Bob Hauserman, a Phi Kappa Psi brother at the University of Missouri, went on to explain that he had ‘‘been trying for sometime to figure out myself ’’ and then asked Howe whether he ‘‘would be willing to be that person whom I hold in high respect and also that is on a higher level than myself—fully realizing that it will have its disadvantages? . . . I know it would be difficult at this stage in the game, to find any one who I respect more, or who has as keen an understanding of me as you do.’’ He then asked: ‘‘Just why did you bother to talk to me? The reason I’d like to know is simply that I want to cultivate what-ever qualities or characteristics which I might have that helped. Further, I want to do my share of the bargain.’’ Presumably, he meant the ‘‘bargain’’ of their friendship and wanted to ensure that it continued to be pleasurable to Howe as well. He democracy, drinking, and violence

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Stewart S. Howe, 1925. This picture of Howe was taken when he was a freshman at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. (Record Series 26/20/30-P1; courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives)

went on to tell Howe that, as per his recommendation, he had located a copy of novelist Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and would begin it as soon as possible. He ended by saying that he recognized that Howe’s advice was correct and that a boy they had discussed named Stockdale could not give him the ‘‘something’’ that he was looking for: ‘‘I am going to start looking around here for ‘the person’ and will let you know about that—but even with the distance and his many jobs and limited time he could spend on this matter—I know who the ‘person’ is, but that is all up to him.’’π∑ While this letter is more frank than most (and even it is not very explicit), it is not unique. Others mention Howe’s recommendation of the works of Proust (who was openly homosexual) as well as gratitude for taking the time to speak with them despite what they saw as Howe’s obviously busy and important fraternity duties. Howe seems to have focused on those young men he believed to have been gay (or might one day be gay), those whom he found attractive, or perhaps both. In some cases, Howe’s hunches proved correct, and in others they did not.π∏ For instance, in October 1937, Howe received a letter from another brother in Phi Kappa Psi, this one at Purdue University. Bob Pennel 272

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explained that he would soon be in Chicago for a school trip and would like to see Howe. He would be with friends. He had one caveat, however: ‘‘My conduct is swell so far and it might be for a while so lets not force any issues. You know damn well I may break down sometime so let’s not break the tie that binds.’’ One could go on at length detailing Howe’s many young male correspondents. What is particularly striking about all of them is the degree of gratitude that they express for Howe’s interest in their lives. One, for instance, wrote to Howe: ‘‘It’s so nice to know that someone like you gives a damn for someone like me. You don’t know how much our friendship means to me Stewart. I wouldn’t want anything to come between it for the world.’’ This was typical, and it came from a young man who discussed his homosexual exploits with Howe as well. Many also explicitly asked him for advice about jobs, careers, and choices they would have to make after college. Howe was filling a need in these young men’s lives that was not being met elsewhere. But at the same moment, he was looking for sex—or at the very least, some sort of fellow-feeling in the realm of homosexuality. And Howe may well have been a particularly impressive, as well as persuasive, role model precisely because he combined in one persona a conservative businessman, a fraternity brother, and a gay man. Howe thus represented a particularly palatable version of homosexuality to young men who might have been concerned that embracing their homosexual inclinations would mean abandoning the parts of their lives that they held dear and that helped them to define themselves as normal American men.ππ Howe is significant in at least two ways. First and foremost, although he was one of the most influential fraternity men in the country—and indeed passionate about brotherhood and Greek life in all its many facets—he was also using fraternities toward ends that would have appalled most brothers. In one sense, this is hardly surprising, since Howe was a gay man in an organization peopled exclusively by other men. But that Howe—so remarkably well known and, because of that, so vulnerable to discovery— was never caught is nothing short of astounding. If he could get away with being gay in such wide-ranging social and professional circles, how many others within singular fraternity chapters were also covertly gay? Howe, then, serves as evidence of the uses to which fraternities could be put, uses utterly at odds with most members’ notions of brotherhood. Second, and equally important: if Howe serves as evidence of gay sex in college fraternities, he and others like him also justified the suspicions that many had about college fraternities in the postwar years. That is, Howe matters not so much for his sly subversion of fraternal ideals but because he repredemocracy, drinking, and violence

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sents the ultimate fear about what ‘‘fraternity’’ actually meant in practice. Make no mistake: there was no more devoted fraternity man than Stewart Howe, and not only because it might provide him with sexual opportunities. He believed in the ideals of brotherhood and reputation so much that he devoted his life to them. But he is also evidence of the blurring of lines between appropriate and inappropriate fraternal intimacy; he demonstrates that that line, particularly in a world peopled with some who identified as homosexual, did not necessarily exist. Homophobia in college fraternities has been, at least in part, about the desire of brothers to disavow the possibility that fraternities are filled with men like Howe. In order to prove to themselves and to the outside world that they were not homosexual, these men would have to demonstrate their heterosexuality. This they did through dating and sex. in her history of courtship in the twentieth century, Beth Bailey argues that by 1950 going steady had completely supplanted rating and dating as the criteria for popularity among youth.π∫ She notes, however, that going steady might or might not lead to marriage. It was more intimate than simply exchanging dates on a nightly basis and would probably lead to more sexual intimacy as well, but it was by no means always permanent or even long lasting. And it was just as public as rating and dating had been. A girl and boy would go out with each other. When they became somewhat more serious, the girl would be pinned by the boy; he did this by giving her his fraternity pin. The next stage was for the girl to be lavaliered, and finally engaged. Of course, many courtships did not make it to the final stage and were broken off in between pinning and lavaliering or at some other point in the sequence. All of these various steps (including depinning) were publicized, announced at fraternity and sorority meetings, and often published in the school newspapers. They were also made evident in who accompanied whom to various parties, dances, and celebratory weekends.πΩ As in the twenties, fraternity men went out with sorority women. One Illinois Greek ‘‘was forbidden by his brothers to date a girl who not only didn’t belong to a sorority with sufficient status, she didn’t belong to one at all. By some backstage diplomacy she was pledged to an acceptable sorority and romance resumed.’’ Both groups dated with more frequency than nonaffiliated students because they were popular enough to get into the Greek-letter organizations and also because the fraternities and so274

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rorities quite often served the function of dating bureaus. Some sorority women were known to date men ‘‘one fraternity at a time.’’ Sorority sisters especially were frowned upon if they dated men outside the Greek system; it would reflect poorly upon them personally and upon the sorority as well. Social scientists also found that fraternity men and sorority women had greater need for heterosexual relationships and affirmation than did their nonaffiliated peers. Greek-letter men and women quite rightly perceived that these needs, despite the sex segregation inherent in joining a fraternity or sorority, would also be met by those same organizations. It was at least in part because of the sex segregation that fraternities were so intent on establishing themselves as the dating hubs on campus. As fraternity historian and brother Clyde Sanfred Johnson put it: ‘‘A keen interest in girls and dating appears to be as required of fraternity men as is the possession of a Ph.D. by a teacher seeking acceptance at his faculty club.’’∫≠ Fraternities advertised their connections with women in a number of ways. On many campuses, fraternities regularly serenaded the sororities. In his autobiography, Willie Morris remembered that at the University of Texas, ‘‘while the idiotic fraternity songs were sung, the girls on their balconies or porches would giggle or squeal their approval with proper gradations of intensity depending on how close to the top those doing the serenading came on the social register.’’ Fraternity chapters also elected one beauty per year to be their queen; she was selected from among the women that the fraternity men were dating. Perhaps none was as famous as the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, for whom a song of the same name was sung regularly by the brothers in that fraternity: ‘‘And the moonlight beams on the girl of my dreams / She’s the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.’’ Kappa Alpha and Pi Kappa Phi, among many others, elected ‘‘Roses.’’ Each chapter Rose competed against all others to win the title of National Rose. In 1956 the Mu chapter of Pi Kappa Phi at Duke was thrilled to have Kay Stewart, who was pinned to one of their members, elected as National Rose. In 1957 Duke’s Kappa Sigma chapter crowned Jo Ann Waller as their Dream Girl. The Dream Girls, Roses, and Sweethearts were not necessarily students at the same colleges as the fraternities they represented. While Stewart was a Duke student, Waller, for instance, attended Woman’s College in Greensboro, and Pi Kappa Phi’s Chapter Rose for 1957, Martha Jarvis, was a junior at Salem College in Winston-Salem. The women were elected not because of their fitness or beauty among fellow students but because of their beauty vis-à-vis the other brothers’ girlfriends. They qualified only democracy, drinking, and violence

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because they dated members of the fraternity, and they were used as a means for fraternities to compete with each other, the fraternity or the chapter with the most beautiful girl being the winner. The election of Queens, Roses, and Sweethearts was publicized in newspapers, by the fraternities in their newsletters and yearbooks, and at dances sometimes designed for the occasion.∫∞ Fraternity men in the 1950s also used their status as such to impress women. While the craze for fraternities was not perhaps what it had been during the twenties, there was still a subset of the population for whom fraternity membership was the sine qua non of collegiate life. Fraternity brothers used this to their advantage. One group of students described the situation at Stanford as the following: ‘‘Freshmen women, you see, are more susceptible to a Greek snow job. This is not a fault of their own. Many come from parts of the country where ‘just everybody who is anybody’ is in a fraternity, and naturally assuming this situation exists at Stanford, freshmen women fall into the snow drifts.’’ While fraternity brothers might not be the only ones who were ‘‘anybody’’ at Stanford, plainly this was still the case at many other colleges. And many outside of fraternities themselves were still aware of the gradations in prestige attached to the various fraternities. One commentator noted, ‘‘Occasionally an AD [Alpha Delta] member is known to append the initials ‘AD’ to his name when introducing himself to a Smithie. The ‘AD,’ like a Standard and Poor’s ‘AAA’ credit rating, lets her know that he is gilt-edge.’’ At Carnegie Mellon University in the mid-1970s, one fraternity’s brothers ‘‘had attractive girlfriends who wore the house letters across their chests as protection against men outside of the frat,’’ testimony not only to other men’s aggressiveness but also to the status that inhered in being affiliated with that fraternity. Fraternity membership, as in earlier decades, served as an official stamp of approval on the college campus.∫≤ Being an attractive fraternity man who dated with frequency was one of the ways that men defined masculine success on campus. At Indiana University, in a change from the typical election of numerous campus beauty queens, fraternities competed to elect the Bachelor of the Year. Other colleges elected similar Kings and Bachelors. These were men who fulfilled certain ideals; they were handsome, perhaps athletic, and involved in campus activities (especially their fraternities), and they were perceived to be desirable to their female classmates. This Big Man on Campus was a living stereotype of the kind of masculinity that was defined in fraternities. By 276

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the 1950s, a man’s popularity with women was necessary to have him qualify for these honors.∫≥ because standards of sexual permissiveness were changing and men knew it, by the 1950s men who most measured their masculinity by their sexual prowess were attempting more and more to have sex with their classmates and not just with ‘‘bad girls.’’ While the men were not necessarily succeeding, women on college campuses were reporting both pressure to have sexual or petting relations with their male classmates and physical sexual aggression. In a 1957 study, two sociologists found that 55.7 percent of the women in their sample reported being offended by some level of erotic intimacy attempted by a male companion. They also found that 20.9 percent of the women were the victims of forceful attempted intercourse, and 6.2 percent of the women’s dates had used ‘‘menacing threats or coercive infliction of physical pain’’ in order to obtain intercourse. One hundred sixty-two women reported a total of 1,022 incidents, meaning that most of them had had these experiences repeatedly. Sorority women slightly outnumbered nonsorority women in reporting such experiences; sorority women on most campuses were more likely to date fraternity men. Indeed, the authors found that men of the same socioeconomic class, and fraternity men particularly, were overrepresented in the groups of offenders.∫∂ While some college men had probably been trying to go further than their dates wanted them to since the 1920s, when dating itself was born, it is worth noting that in this study, more than half of the women interviewed reported being offended by unwanted sexual advances. Perhaps the most important piece of information for our purposes is that just over one-fifth of the women in the survey had reported forceful aggression in pursuit of sexual intercourse. This is indeed a striking difference from the 1920s, when one considers that all of these women were college students, and that many of them were in sororities—precisely the type of women who had traditionally been ‘‘good girls,’’ those suitable for love and marriage but rejected for sex for the same reasons. This study, while small in scope, demonstrates that men’s ideas of who might be their sexual partners had undergone a definite shift by the 1950s: for some, classmates were now fair game. What all this meant for boys who had not abandoned the double standard (and their number was still legion) was that girls of one’s own class democracy, drinking, and violence

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(in both senses of the word, economic and collegiate) could now be ‘‘nice’’ as well as ’’bad,’’ though never one and the same—at least not at the same time and for the same man.∫∑ Casual sex continued to mark the man as being a man; it was just that he could now look for that sex among campus women. Fraternities continued to lead the way in this regard. They were the hubs not only of dating but also of more liberal attitudes toward sex, as well as in sexual aggressiveness to the point of assault.∫∏ In a 1970 study of college-student attitudes toward sex, two other sociologists found that fraternity men perceived their fraternity brothers to be approving of casual sex more than any other group on or off campus (including close friends or siblings). Women and nonfraternity men indicated relatively low levels of perceived peer approval for casual sex, thus indicating that fraternities cultivated an environment whereby casual sexual encounters were rewarded, despite the fact that they would meet with general disapproval outside the fraternity house. Further, though they were having more sex than their non-Greek peers, fraternity men reported the highest rates of dissatisfaction with their sex lives. Two sociologists concluded in separate studies in the late 1960s that this was a function of their membership in organizations that not only stigmatized virginity in men, but also placed great pressure upon brothers to prove themselves by having multiple sexual experiences. These men were dissatisfied only because their aspirations were higher than the comparatively inexperienced men; they had such high aspirations because of the examples set and pressures enacted by their fraternity brothers.∫π The most aggressive men, those who were more often than not members of fraternities, were also more likely to use a greater variety of strategies to obtain sex from women than were other men. These strategies included alcohol, promises of marriage and love, threats of breaking up, and physical force. One study claimed that fraternities probably inculcated the desire for sex in members through constant pressure, but it noted too that men who behaved this way were also likely to do so before coming to college, indicating that students self-selected for groups like fraternities that they could be confident would allow them to sustain their sexual habits. Most of these men were hesitant to admit that they had used force but would readily admit to the other strategies, tricks they had learned from their fraternity brothers: ‘‘Erotic achievement is now evaluated by taking into account the desirability of the sex object and the nature of its acquisition. A successful ‘snow job’ on an attractive but reluctant female who may be rendered into a relatively dependable sex outlet and socially 278

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desirable companion is considerably more enhancing than an encounter with a prostitute or a ‘one night stand’ with a ‘loose’ reputation.’’ Exceptions to the rule of nonaggression were women considered teases or gold diggers or those who had either suggested or said outright that they would be sexually permissive and then reneged; in those cases, aggression could be reported as it was perceived as being warranted. Men sanctioned this aggression when it served to thrust a deviant woman back into conformity or into her previously occupied role of ‘‘bad girl.’’∫∫ The evidence from colleges across the nation substantiates this trend. While some men continued to seek sex from women they considered their inferiors (working-class women and high school girls, particularly), others looked for sexual relations wherever they could find them, and from the 1950s to the 1960s, that began to include their female classmates. By 1963 one cynical observer noted that ‘‘professional prostitutes would never prosper if they catered to the campus trade; free amateurs provide overwhelming competition.’’ At the University of Texas in Austin during the 1950s, fraternity men went on what were colloquially called ‘‘fuck dates,’’ dates where intercourse was the only object. Others observed that these dates usually occurred during the week, the weekend nights being reserved for the Campus Queen or a man’s steady. These ‘‘easy lays’’ were known among fraternity men on campus. Men shared the women’s names with each other; by so doing, a man did his brother a favor while confirming his own masculine prestige by boasting that he had already slept with the woman in question. As one fraternity man explained, ‘‘A few girls living on campus are dated for another reason—sex. These girls whose moral standards allow them to engage readily in sexual intercourse are ever popular. But they are more likely to be dated in midweek and on short notice. Some of them, although they never know it, achieve great fame among the fraternities. They are sure to be dated every night but usually taken to a more out-of-the-way bar than to the big favorites.’’ Another claimed: ‘‘Their names are brought into fraternity bull sessions a great deal and their warmness is much talked about.’’ The difficulties for these women were legion, as one student explained: ‘‘Once a boy has the idea you’re fast and you brush him off, you’re in trouble. He certainly won’t go back to the boys that told him you were fast and admit you weren’t. He’ll say, ‘Boy, she was great.’ Then, sister, you’ve had it.’’ Not only was the woman’s reputation shot; she also could be sure that increasing numbers of boys would expect her to put out, and some of them might go to more extreme measures to ensure that she did so.∫Ω democracy, drinking, and violence

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Other fraternities simply preyed upon those who were less able to defend themselves. In 1959 eight naked fraternity men were discovered in the basement of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house at unc with a young woman, also naked, who was an outpatient at the local psychiatric institution. They claimed to be playing strip poker. By the mid- to late 1970s, incidents like this were becoming commonplace. In 1964 a stripper attempting to leave a University of Southern California fraternity party was assaulted when she refused to accompany a brother in his car; her nose was broken and three teeth were knocked out. In 1965 at Syracuse University, between twenty and forty men—primarily members of Zeta Beta Tau and Phi Sigma Delta —were investigated for sex parties involving one female first-year student. In 1978 at Dartmouth College, a woman on leave from a mental institution to attend her daughter’s graduation had just gotten off a bus in White River Junction, Vermont, when she met a number of Dartmouth men at a restaurant that adjoined the bus stop. The men took her to fraternity row at Dartmouth, where she was passed from house to house (at least three), with many brothers having sex with her. Eventually they introduced light bulbs and fire extinguishers into the assault. Campus police found her wandering down fraternity row wearing only a Dartmouth T-shirt. Other variations on the theme of sexual humiliation that would figure prominently in the 1980s and 1990s were already in play by the 1960s. At unc, some fraternities hired a prostitute to come in and ‘‘release frustrations.’’ The brothers then ‘‘commence[d] to commit atrocities on this poor lady’s body and person.’’ A report at Amherst College described how members of Beta Theta Pi gathered around a window to watch a brother having sex with his girlfriend, to the great discomfort of the girl in question when she found out. Some fraternities also initiated the ‘‘Pig Party,’’ an event where fraternity men brought the least attractive woman they could find to a party and attempted to seduce her. The winner of the contest was the one who was judged to have found the ugliest of the ugly. The chief delight came, of course, when the women themselves found out why they’d been invited.Ω≠ Fraternity men prided themselves on their ability to seduce women and on the number of women they were able to bed. One Swarthmore woman described fraternity men as ‘‘more the oglers and scorekeepers.’’ Yale’s fraternities annually held ‘‘Pig Night,’’ where young women from New Haven were invited to the houses to initiate sophomores into sex. As one magazine described the situation for the sophomores: ‘‘If they refuse, they face social ostracism for the rest of their New Haven careers—plus the 280

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horrid fate of being labeled queer.’’ In the late 1960s, Stanford’s Phi Delta Theta Fraternity held parties and invited students from the all-women Mills College: ‘‘ ‘After things got going, this one boy just came up to a group of us and—well—bit a girl on the . . . uh . . . chest.’ . . . ‘Later, a girl went to the john. . . . Before you could say Stanford University, five boys followed—in the nude—and talked about attacking her. She ran out screaming.’’ Writer Richard Stambolian, who joined a fraternity in the fifties at Dartmouth and would later come out as gay, remembered that, in efforts to prove his heterosexuality to his fraternity brothers, he embarked on road trips to Smith and nearby Colby Junior College with his brothers. He recalled that he was known as ‘‘quite the ass man. . . . I was getting more action than most of my fellow students.’’ Another 1960s Dartmouth graduate recalled that heterosexual gamesmanship and the ‘‘frequent ‘seductions’ of drunken women in fraternity basements, were seen as reliable signs of one’s heterosexuality.’’ In addition to the students at Colby, nurses at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover were seen as fair game by many Dartmouth men and ‘‘were all called dogs, regardless of whether they were absolutely gorgeous.’’ Dartmouth’s psychiatrist noted that one of the great problems with an all-male college like Dartmouth was that men never gained the understanding of same-aged women as intellectual and social peers. They served one purpose: sex. And that purpose, even more than the actual pleasure that might obtain in the act itself, was bound up in the enhancement of a man’s reputation. As one particularly reflective fraternity man at the University of Minnesota put it: ‘‘To us the female body becomes a source of curiosity and challenge. To have sexual intercourse with a girl friend or one-night acquaintance is regarded as a conquest, a victory, and all too often, a goal in itself. In short, a girl is frequently looked upon as a mindless body, built for the pleasure and satisfaction of the male.’’ In his estimation, ‘‘such attitudes make the female into something other than a living human being.’’ Fraternities were an island that allowed men to sustain the belief and practice that women existed for their desires alone.Ω∞ Fraternity men, because of their emphasis upon loyalty to the group and notions of virile masculinity, not only devalued the women with whom they had sex; they also were often jealous of the time brothers might spend with their girlfriends or fiancées. At the University of Illinois in the mid-1960s, recently engaged fraternity men were coated with syrup and feathers. And at the University of Georgia in the 1970s, Alpha Tau Omega brothers who pinned girlfriends were ‘‘treed’’: they were stripped to their underwear; democracy, drinking, and violence

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their genitals were packed in ice; they were covered in garbage, including a dead rat; and they were tied to a tree until their girlfriends kissed them and set them free. The complicated symbolism of this act aside, men were clearly being punished for having committed relationships with women. To be tied to such a woman’s ‘‘apron strings’’ was to be submissive to her and was seen as a compromise of one’s masculinity. One psychologist studying college men’s behavior put it this way of certain male cliques: ‘‘These cliques prized male solidarity, virility, dominance, sexual ‘scoring,’ and a ‘cool’ attitude toward women. Sentimental attachment to women threatened the solidarity of the group and pressure was exerted against excessive loyalty to the girl short of a formal engagement.’’ This description sounds suspiciously like that of a fraternity. And indeed the testimony of at least one fraternity man in the early 1970s confirms that this was the case for him: ‘‘A brother can become glorified for his sexual promiscuity and his personal relationships become a matter of public policy, discussion, and admiration. Girl friends of brothers, designated by barbed nicknames, are hated with jealous passion if they demand their boy friend’s time too often, separating him from his clique.’’ Another explained his behavior at parties: ‘‘You try to pick up a girl. I go through the motions to please the guys. If I didn’t, they would say that I am on a string to my girl friend. . . . I go along but I feel pretty bad going to see my girl after such parties.’’ While it seems unlikely that this attitude had prevailed as early as the 1940s, by the end of the 1960s it was commonplace. Brothers’ girlfriends might well be understood to be different from casual pickups, but they were no less denigrated, albeit in a different fashion. The true scorn, however, was heaped upon the women, often nameless and faceless, whom the brothers used as a means of gauging each other’s sexual prowess.Ω≤ Fraternity men’s chief intimate commitments were to each other. While they might well date women with varying degrees of seriousness, many expected a brother’s chief commitment to be to his fraternity. They attempted to maintain this commitment in the face of a society that increasingly understood intimacy between men to be sexual. This had not always been the case. In order to compensate for this, fraternity men had to prove that they were heterosexual. The only way to do this and at the same time not betray their commitment to their brothers, was through the sexual denigration of willing, and increasingly not-so-willing, women. At Long Beach State College in California, nine fraternities banded together to make explicit their feelings toward women: in 1965 they sponsored ‘‘Hate 282

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Women Week,’’ which involved kicking women out of the cafeteria and pelting them with food.Ω≥ The social science studies of the period acknowledge that men used sex to prove their masculinity to themselves and to each other. One claimed: ‘‘He may, for example, have no conscious awareness that he has based his self-esteem on demonstrating his sexual prowess to his peer group.’’ The evidence, however, suggests that most men were more than able to assess the pressures they were under to perform a virile masculinity in order to impress their peers. While some embraced this standard with abandon, perhaps less aware of the way that their senses of masculine selves were contingent upon external standards, others understood that ‘‘scoring’’ was what one did to save face. Masculinity for fraternity men in the postwar period was a game of numbers. At the risk of overly sentimentalizing sex, it was also a game devoid of sexual feelings that had much to do with affection. As one commentator put it, ‘‘Amidst it all the girl is often left hungry: she has sex but she is hungry for affection. Sometimes this is an improvement on her mother at college, who didn’t have either. College girls once traded the promise of sex for a promise of marriage: they now trade the currency of sex for some modicum of affection, college status, security. The trading mentality persists.’’ Even when the woman herself was quite comfortable with the casual nature of the sexual relationship, many fraternity men insisted upon painting it as exploitative. In many ways, college men and women of the fifties and sixties may have rebelled against their forebears, but they, like college students of the twenties, could not escape the pervasiveness of the double standard. As long as the double standard, however eroded, remained salient, as it does to this day, the relations of men seeking to prove their masculinity and women seeking something else—through a relationship, through sex alone, or through something in between—will be structured by it. And no matter how emotionally stunted this leaves the men, it is the women whose bodies are being used in the service of men’s egos.Ω∂ chris miller, a 1963 graduate of Dartmouth College, is one of the writers of the 1978 hit film Animal House. Miller acknowledges that much of the inspiration for Animal House came from his experiences at Dartmouth. The movie, while exaggerated, is not off the mark in its depiction of fraternity life at Dartmouth. It is filled with drunkenness, inane antics performed either as pledge stunts or for no reason whatsoever, and the democracy, drinking, and violence

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exploitation of women. In a 1989 article reflecting on the success of Animal House, Miller remarked that what happened in fraternity houses was ‘‘sheer, mindless, fun-for-fun’s-sake.’’ In some respects, he is absolutely right. The majority of the antics of fraternity men are not particularly harmful to anyone except the dignity of the fraternity brothers themselves. And as Miller also claimed: ‘‘It’s hard to explain to those who have missed the fraternity experience how richly satisfying booting [vomiting], or mooning, or eating your underwear can be.’’ So be it.Ω∑ Although Miller and other fraternity men might defend their antics as just plain fun, the importance that they bestow upon these behaviors tells us much about what they value and the ways that they see themselves as men. In the postwar period, fraternity men cultivated an image of conservative, anti-intellectual defenders of the status quo by day and vandalizing, vomiting wild men by night. To not care, to party with abandon, to drink to excess, to wreak havoc on persons and property—these had come to define a certain kind of masculinity: fraternal masculinity. Fraternity defenders like Miller usually fail to consider, however, the treatment of others outside the fraternity system, in this case racial minorities and women. While many fraternity undergraduates during this period did their best to democratize their sacred brotherhoods, most met with little substantial or lasting success. While many were able to remove their discriminatory clauses, the evidence suggests that most white fraternities remained predominantly white, and many people of color who wanted to join fraternities felt much more comfortable joining those that were either explicitly black, Asian, or multicultural. The alumni, ever conscious of the possibility of tainting the reputation of their brotherhood, were even more conservative than their undergraduate brethren. Fraternity men were also at the forefront of a culture that exploited women, not only for sex but also for the status that that sex gained them. It is unfortunate for these men that the specter of homosexuality should have brought about such a fear of male intimacy, an intimacy that was plainly of immense importance to the men who joined fraternities. The greater misfortune, however, is the aggressive way that these men chose to protect themselves against societal homophobia. In this choice, they established patterns for the exploitation of women and the denigration of gay people that are very much with us today.

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Conclusion On the night of February 27, 1982, the brothers of Duke’s chapter of Beta Phi Zeta (〉⌽⌮, known colloquially as ‘‘bozo’’) gave their pledges a task. They were to find the ugliest girl they could at a party that night and bring her back to their dorm section for a ‘‘train’’—a colloquial term for group sex, whereby each man has sex with the woman in turn, waiting one behind the other like the cars of a train. Two pledges did find such a woman, a Duke student so intoxicated she was having difficulty standing up and speaking coherently. They brought her back to their section and at least two of them had sex with her, while a number of other brothers waited outside the room, chanting ‘‘train, train, train,’’ presumably waiting their turns. The woman left the dormitory early that morning with no memory of what had happened to her.∞ An investigation of the incident was initiated by Duke’s administrators only when they and the Duke student newspaper received an anonymous letter three days later reporting on what had occurred. In the meantime, the pledges involved approached the woman—who still had no memory of the incidents—and persuaded her that if she called the dean and explained that everything that had occurred had been consensual, no one would ever know about the incident or about her role in it. She called the dean as the pledges sat beside her. Once the story became public, however, the fraternity went straight to the Duke Chronicle, naming the victim in a statement designed to argue their innocence. Feeling distraught and betrayed, the victim finally confessed to Duke officials that she had no memory of the events and had been coerced into making the phone call by the 〉⌽⌮ pledges, acquiescing primarily because she wanted the whole incident to disappear without anyone else on campus knowing about her involvement. After a thorough investigation—during which a number of witnesses, both 285

from the party and from the fraternity, were interviewed—Beta Phi Zeta’s Duke chapter had its charter revoked. Incidents like these prompted me to study college fraternities in the first place. I wanted to know if the fraternities that committed acts like the one above had always been capable of such things. And if they had not been, when and why did they change? Further, how was their behavior connected to masculinity and its sometimes destructive influence within fraternal societies? The previous chapters are my answer to these questions. They demonstrate that fraternities—even the ones that have made shocking headlines—have not always behaved in this manner, and that the misogynist culture that leads to incidents like this rape at Duke are a relatively recent development in the life of Greek culture. Incidents predicated upon the sexual humiliation of women so that men may bond with each other, however, have been common in some fraternities from the 1970s onward, and evidence suggests that they were likely occurring as early as the 1920s. Recall, for instance, the incident of group sex described by William Inge (chapter 5) that occurred in 1930. While we will never know with any degree of certainty just how frequent or how prevalent these practices were, enough cases have been reported in the past thirty years alone to warrant our attention. It is quite possible—indeed, it is likely —that the reported cases represent only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.≤ Since the late twentieth century, in order to maintain intimate male friendships in a world that devalues intimacy between men as inappropriate at best, deviant at worst, and almost always unmasculine, fraternity men have compensated by attempting to prove their heterosexuality. They have done this through aggressive homophobia and the denigration of women. By joining together in fraternities, brothers remove themselves from the mixed-sex campus social world that demands they take women seriously as students, scholars, and peers. In a country where virtually every college and university is coeducational (and those that are not are allfemale), men in fraternities self-select to make their closest companions other men. They do this partly because they value men, and themselves as men, more than they value women, and they seek others who hold the same ideals. Fraternities provide a means of security for men who are unsure of themselves around women, who are made uncomfortable by the independence and autonomy exhibited by their female fellow students. Anthropologist Michael Moffatt’s ethnography of students at Rutgers University during the 1980s describes a group of young men who decided to join fraternities. In Moffatt’s estimation, ‘‘They were threatened by ‘women 286

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who acted like men.’ And they often found the combination of asexual friendship and sexual tension on coed dorm floors particularly difficult to deal with. They wanted the women to be sex objects again, and they resented them for not automatically ‘giving’ them sexual satisfaction. Yet they would not have ‘respected’ them if they had.’’ In fraternities, women do not have to be taken seriously. In fraternities, manhood is affirmed, but at a cost: the devaluation of women.≥ But if this kind of manhood is about valuing men over women, and indeed excluding women from male friendships, it is also about asserting that women, and only women, are the proper objects of male sexual desire. Because what goes on behind fraternity doors is intimate in ways that can be construed as sexual—or, at the very least, homoerotic—fraternity brothers attempt to convince the outside world, as well as each other, that they are not homosexual. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued in another context: ‘‘For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already crossed line from being interested in men.’’ Fraternity men cross this line frequently, and it demands a concurrent disavowal of this interest in other men. Perhaps the simplest tactic to prove heterosexuality is through expressing homophobia outright, which many fraternities do with abandon. By denigrating actual homosexuals, as well as presumptively heterosexual rivals, through the use of homophobic epithets, fraternity men seek to prove that they themselves are not homosexual. In their relations with women, they also demonstrate their masculinity through exploitation. Caring about women, showing emotion toward them, is often derided in fraternity circles. Rather, women, in fraternal logic, exist for men’s pleasure, not as human beings interested in their own fulfillment. Abiding by a double standard easily recognizable from the nineteenth century, many fraternity men deliberately seek sexual relations with women whom they see as less than fully human if they are willing to ‘‘submit.’’ By dehumanizing the women they bed, fraternity men prove to their brothers that they do not actually care for the women, that fraternity comes first, and that they are undeniably heterosexual.∂ The notion that ‘‘fraternity comes first’’ is the source of most of the problems in more ways than one. Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women; the intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality. As this book has demonstrated, this complex sociopsychological equation is peculiar to twentieth- and twenty-first-century fraternal culture. It is conclusion

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Alpha Delta Fraternity member funneling beer, 1997 (Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library)

predicated upon particular notions of masculinity, masculinity understood as bound up in virility and as being inherently different from women’s femininity and male homosexuals’ presumed effeminacy.∑ This version of masculinity emerged from several historical forces, such as evolving class structures, changing collegiate populations, the invention of ‘‘dating,’’ and the increasing malleability of gender roles for men and women. Fraternal masculinity continues to be defined by athletics, destructive recklessness, and binge drinking (a 1998 study found that fraternity members drank an average of 12.36 drinks per week compared to the unaffiliated man’s 4.83).∏ While these elements remain salient in fraternity culture, it is primarily in the area of their performance of gender vis-à-vis women and gay men that some fraternity brothers are currently exacting the most significant damage to their fellow students. to understand the ways that fraternity men attempt to prove their heterosexuality in the contemporary moment, it is worth exploring why 288

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they continue to feel compelled to do so. This demands an examination of fraternal intimacy. By intimacy, I do not mean sex, but rather a space and a context—the fraternity house and the bonds of ‘‘brotherhood’’—that allow men to be emotional, confessional, affectionate, and vulnerable with each other. It is precisely because all four of these practices are seen as stereotypically feminine that fraternity men feel ashamed of them and hope to keep them secret from the outside world. They fear what they perceive as the ultimate threat to their masculinity: being branded as homosexuals. Fraternal intimacy takes place in at least two contexts: during hazing initiations and in the everyday lives of fraternity men in the privacy of their houses. The first instance is not only the most obviously homoerotic but also the one most in need of defense by fraternity men, generally because it is the most publicized. Most fraternity initiations involve nudity and sexual humiliation of some sort.π Often the humiliation is quite deliberately homoerotic in nature; because being a homosexual is seen as the ultimate degradation, active fraternity members make their pledges simulate homosexual acts in order to degrade them. The rise of ‘‘the homosexual’’ as the ultimate foil for masculinity not only inspires the initiation stunts but also demands a concurrent and equally demonstrative disavowal of the possibility of actual homosexuality. Active fraternity men wish to make the initiations as humiliating as possible; this they do through making their initiates be physically (and sometimes sexually) intimate with each other. Once done, however, the fraternity is under increased pressure to prove that what they have done does not in any way implicate the brothers as homosexual persons, no matter how homoerotic the acts demanded and performed. Some fraternities require that their pledges pretend to be gay people. As a means of humiliation, at least one fraternity has required that its pledges attend meetings of a campus gay student group. At the University of Vermont, Phi Gamma Delta required its pledges to ‘‘wear cowboy outfits and endure a rain of antigay insults based on the recent movie Brokeback Mountain.’’ Most hazing rituals are much more intimate, however. Hazing rituals may well be as varied and diverse as the number of organizations who employ them. Many of them appear in the record so frequently that they must be fairly common. In one, pledges are made to stand on a roof or wall, and pieces of string are tied around their genitals. At the other end of the strings are bricks, which are thrown off the roof or the wall. Although the strings are long enough that the bricks hit the ground before affecting the genitals, the pledges have been thoroughly frightened. Another favorite has a number of variations but involves pledges stripping conclusion

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naked, kneeling, and lining up with their noses in the behinds of the men in front of them; at times they will have to retrieve something using their mouths that has been inserted in the behinds in front of them (a hot dog, for instance). Pledges must sometimes perform what are colloquially known as ‘‘circle jerks,’’ whereby all pledges sit in a circle and masturbate, ejaculating onto a cracker or piece of bread in the center; the last pledge to ejaculate must eat the bread. Some pledges are sodomized digitally and by foreign objects; they are led around by their genitals, as if on a leash; they perform mutual masturbation and oral sex; they are regularly paddled and spat and urinated upon. Sometimes the active fraternity brothers themselves get naked and participate in the rituals. Because the rituals are secret and because hazing is illegal in most states, it would be impossible to know which fraternities demanded which stunts of their initiates. No doubt some abide by antihazing legislation and limit their initiations to largely ceremonial rites. A number of published accounts testify to the great variety of strategies, many of them predicated upon homosexual and homoerotic humiliation. In the years that I have been working on this book, I have heard stories of rites like those described above numerous times from ex-fraternity men and those who know them.∫ Intimate behavior among men in fraternities takes other forms as well. The Sigma Chi Fraternity at the University of Michigan regularly hangs a sign from its house during rush season in order to encourage rushing freshmen to visit. It reads: ‘‘Sigma Chi. You’ll find it here.’’ Though most fraternity men would probably not name it as such, that ‘‘it’’ refers to intimacy in the form of brotherhood. In a society that stigmatizes intimacy between men, the brotherhood offered by fraternities is one way for men to achieve it. That fraternities remain as popular as they do is testament to the fact that their members enjoy this intimacy. In the fraternity house, men can be affectionate with each other. One former member recounts that when his brothers got drunk (which they did with some regularity), they would often hug, telling each other, ‘‘I love you, man.’’ The uses of ‘‘man’’ as well as of alcohol are telling, though in different ways. The ‘‘man’’ serves to masculinize the declaration, closing off the possibility that it might be meant in a romantic sense. The alcohol was likely the impetus behind the declaration, serving to loosen inhibitions, but it also serves as cover for it, in that one could always blame the intoxicant for one’s behavior—provided anyone even remembered it the next day. Another former member recalls being regularly kissed by a brother when he was intoxicated. Whether or not alcohol is involved, in the bonds of brotherhood, fraternity men at 290

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times express affection for each other that would be denigrated or perceived as inappropriate in the outside world.Ω In order to preserve the intimacy, however, outsiders must never be allowed to witness it. Outsiders, both women and men, are precisely those who might misconstrue male intimacy as indicative of homosexuality. In her 1999 study of cadets at the then all-male Citadel, Susan Faludi demonstrated why they were so opposed to admitting women into their school. Their responses parallel the situation for men in Greek-letter fraternities. The following excerpt from her book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, is worth quoting at length: ‘‘When we’re in the showers, it’s very intimate,’’ a senior cadet said. ‘‘We’re one mass, naked together, and it makes us closer. . . . You’re shaved, you’re naked, you’re afraid together. You can cry.’’ . . . Another added, ‘‘Maybe it’s a Freudian thing, but males feel more affection with each other when women are not around.’’ . . . The rules imposed upon them, rules enforced not just by the Citadel but by the rest of society, required that, being men, they could not enjoy intimacy without denouncing it at the same time. Private tenderness was allowed only to those who publicly promoted their contempt for homosexual love and who were shielded from the assumedly disapproving gaze of women. As Rembert [a Citadel professor] put it to the class, ‘‘With no women, we can hug each other. There’s nothing so nurturing as an infantry platoon.’’ The cadets at the Citadel received comfort from male intimacy, but they could only fully enjoy it by constantly reassuring each other that it did not mean that they were gay. Fraternal intimacy operates by much the same logic, albeit on a smaller and less completely segregated scale. As one Alpha Tau Omega brother at Duke put it: ‘‘I think I would rather have no fraternities at all [than coed fraternities]. The reason you join a fraternity is to be with a bunch of guys and have special friendships that you couldn’t have in just a co-ed living group. It’s not the same atmosphere.’’ Another brother claimed that any man who believes women should be admitted to fraternities ‘‘either knows nothing about fraternities, or has missed one of the best times of a boy’s life, or both.’’∞≠ Some fraternities engage in intimate and structured rituals on a regular basis, rituals that appear remarkably homoerotic. For instance, Chris Miller reported the following about his 1989 return to his Alpha Delta stomping grounds: conclusion

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Seventy naked guys cram into the TV room, which is about as large as a small one-car garage. Beers are distributed by dick size—those with big ones get king cans of Bud; those with small cocks drink from shot glasses. The worst, most repellent, vile and disgusting porno tape available is popped into the VCR. The brothers keep checking one another out—anyone who gets a hard-on faces rigorous punishment. No one’s quite sure what the punishment might be, no one has gotten a hard-on during Naked-in-the-Tube-Room Hour, but they keep checking anyway, just in case. Another more recent account of Dartmouth fraternity life as observed by a student ethnographer included the following description of a ‘‘keg kill,’’ an event where all fraternity members cram into a small basement room to drink a keg of beer. As the keg kill began, I noticed that everyone had removed, or was in the process of removing, their shirts. They were standing in a circle around two trash cans, placed there so that people could vomit into them. . . . As brothers began to sing/toast one another and drink the beers, the door would open occasionally and more brothers would come into the room and join the keg kill. Each time a new person entered and joined, a wave of cheers came from the rest of the brothers in the room. . . . Later that same night, I heard one of the brothers who had arrived late (and was cheered and toasted as he arrived) comment on how he felt when he entered the room: ‘‘I walked into the room, and I was the only one with my shirt on. Took it right off. That’s just a sweet feeling. You’re like, you know what’s coming. You’re thinking, okay this is what’s gonna happen now.’’ A third observer of fraternity life at Dartmouth noted that the brothers of Psi Upsilon, among others, ‘‘would fill the basement with beer and take off all their clothes and wrestle. And you’d look in the window and see them just gripping each other in their nakedness’’ Another fraternity in upstate New York regularly held ‘‘beer slides’’: naked brothers slide along an improvised ‘‘Slip ’N Slide’’ of lathered dish soap, beer, and urine. In these descriptions of fraternity events, nudity or partial nudity, drinking, and homoeroticism are combined, all for the mutual enjoyment of the brothers. These events are not staged as punishment or humiliation for the pledges but instead because members of the fraternity enjoy them. Through bond292

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ing over alcohol in states of nudity or near nudity, fraternity men affirm their loyalty and affection for one another.∞∞ If fraternity life fosters intimacy among brothers in the form of homoerotic initiations and structured rituals of group nudity and togetherness, it also does so in much more mundane and quotidian ways. The fraternity house provides the privacy that allows men to be affectionate with each other, to express emotions, fear, and sadness. Fraternity men regularly attest to the sense of camaraderie, closeness, mutual dependence, and brotherhood they experience with their fellow members. The fraternity, in this sense, fosters a communal and intimate friendship. While it is true that the ongoing popularity of fraternities among some men testifies to the extent to which these men value male friendship (and there is clearly nothing wrong with that in and of itself), the behavior and attitudes of those same men—in institutionalized homophobia and misogyny—also testifies to the intense need to define this friendship as strictly platonic. the fact that homophobia is commonplace in fraternities is well documented.∞≤ As in many all-male groups across the United States, epithets like ‘‘fag,’’ ‘‘homo,’’ ‘‘cocksucker,’’ ‘‘fudgepacker,’’ and ‘‘queer’’ are used ubiquitously among men in fraternities as ways of putting each other down. The practice is similar to the use of ‘‘pussy,’’ ‘‘bitch,’’ ‘‘snatch,’’ or ‘‘cunt,’’ also popular words used for denigration that work in similar ways. They are all designed to feminize and thus subjugate their object. Though they are often employed in jest, the fact that such epithets are used at all is testament to their negative connotations. Fraternities work assiduously to avoid having their brotherhood tainted by rumors of homosexuality within their ranks. One Indiana college student recalled that when a brother in his fraternity publicly came out of the closet, another fraternity on campus put up a sign reading: ‘‘NO FAGS IN OUR HOUSE,’’ and another hung an effigy from the roof with a sign attached, reading ‘‘FAGGOT.’’ Other fraternities do not allow their effeminate (and sometimes gay) members, should they have them, to participate in any rush or recruitment activities for fear that they might scare off prospective pledges and garner the whole house a reputation for being gay. A particularly liberal fraternity at 1970s Carnegie Mellon—one brother described it as a ‘‘fraternity of misfits’’— allowed one of its gay brothers to hold a gay party at their house: ‘‘We decided to let him have it, but as a precaution, we drew all the blinds in the house when the men started dancing so no one else in Frat Square could see in.’’ To gain a reputation as gay was not only to tarnish all members but conclusion

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also to risk the future of the fraternity. Most brothers assume that no one will want to pledge a house rumored to be gay; their prestige will thus suffer as their numbers dwindle.∞≥ In order to combat the ‘‘gay problem,’’ some fraternities simply expel any members who come out after joining the brotherhood or make life so difficult for them that they ‘‘choose’’ to leave of their own accord. One 1990s University of Kentucky brother in Sigma Pi came home to his room in the fraternity house one night, after being spotted in the parking lot of a gay bar, to find his door broken down, his belongings destroyed, his bed covered in feces, and messages scrawled on the walls in shaving cream: ‘‘Faggot, go home!’’ He dropped out of the fraternity immediately. In 1984 the Kappa Kappa Kappa Fraternity at Dartmouth College purged nine members suspected of homosexuality from their ranks. Since at least the early 1980s, Tri Kap had been fighting a reputation—not entirely unwarranted according to Allen Drexel, historian of gay life at Dartmouth College—as being a haven for homosexuals. In efforts to combat the reputation, the active members made a public showing of expelling all of the most ‘‘obvious’’ gay members from their ranks. As in almost all aspects of fraternity life, many brothers are desperately afraid that they may be tainted by the actions of another brother, being known, as they are, by the company they keep.∞∂ Fraternities also use variations on homosexual epithets to describe their rivals and any other group or individual to which they object, regardless of whether or not they are admitted homosexuals. At the turn of this century, for instance, the Chi Gamma Epsilon Fraternity at Dartmouth referred to all the houses on Frat Row, save their own, as ‘‘gay bars.’’ In a 1984 letter to the brothers of Kappa Alpha’s Duke chapter, one of their own reported on the goings-on over the summer at Duke: ‘‘The American Dance faggots have invaded East Campus. I won’t go over there until they’re all gone.’’ Given the use of homophobia in describing presumptively heterosexual people, it should come as no great surprise, then, that treatment by fraternity men of actual homosexuals is often not overly cordial. Not only do most fraternities do their utmost to keep gay men out of their brotherhood —going as far as to expel them if they come out while already brothers, or simply refusing to pledge or initiate any men who do not seem adequately heterosexual—fraternities have engaged in homophobic violence against men entirely unconnected with their organizations.∞∑ In 1978, for instance, Stewart Lewan, leader of Dartmouth’s then fledgling Gay Students’ Support Group (gssg), attended a party at the Bones 294

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Gate Fraternity, a local organization at Dartmouth. After he had paid his $2.00 entrance fee, he was soon recognized as a gay student leader by fraternity brothers and was pummeled up a set of stairs from the basement and thrown into a snowdrift. Similar incidents occurred at other Dartmouth fraternities through the 1980s and 1990s. Immediately following the Bones Gate incident, the brothers of Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta Fraternity announced in the Dartmouth that they were forming a ‘‘Heterosexual Support Group’’ and elaborated their mission as a parody of the gssg’s mission statement. In 1982 men in drag who attended a party hosted by Sigma Alpha Epsilon at Duke University were physically removed. One was thrown down the stairs; others were punched in the face and beaten about the neck. While the men may or may not have been gay (they were dressed in drag to protest Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s policy of having parties to which only women are invited, colloquially known as ‘‘cattle drives’’), their attire surely had much to do with their expulsion.∞∏ Fraternity members are preoccupied with demonstrating their heterosexuality to the outside world. They want to define the intimacy fostered through the bonds of fraternity as safely heterosexual and to defend their reputations against the specter of actual homosexuals in their ranks. There is yet another way, however, that fraternity men grapple with issues of (homo)sexuality. Many fraternities quite consciously choose whom to rush and pledge based on physical appearance. In order to maintain reputations as attractive and popular organizations, they must ensure that most of their members are also attractive. In discussions surrounding the selection of new members, physical appearance and popularity with women are often two of the prime criteria. In Goat (2004), a memoir of his fraternitypledging experiences at Clemson University, Brad Land recounts that his fraternity pledged a former model from New York, despite the fact that he was a Yankee, because the brothers felt he would be a ‘‘bitch magnet,’’ drawing attractive women to the fraternity. Fraternities that are more concerned than others about this issue are known colloquially as ‘‘face houses.’’ One early 1990s Michigan student makes the link between homophobia and concern over male appearances explicit: When we were selecting new members just prior to handing out bids, homophobia often reared its ugly head. On many occasions during these ‘‘hashing’’ periods, statements were uttered such as ‘‘That guy is such a fucking faggot, I don’t want him in my house. If he gets in, I’ll fucking quit.’’ . . . At the same time I heard these statements, the same conclusion

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person might make comments about the appearance of the rushees. There is no denying that many of the guys in my fraternity were interested in bringing the more attractive-looking men into the fraternity. Most of them admitted that this was true, reasoning that the bestlooking brothers attracted the best-looking women. Other members would become angry about this type of recruiting of ‘‘chick-magnets’’ because, unlike others, ours was not a ‘‘face house’’ that wanted goodlooking guys for its membership. Part of me believes that this type of recruiting is a form of latent homosexual desire that most men would strongly deny. Whether or not the author of this passage is correct that those who advocated for recruiting the attractive men were expressing homosexual desire, of greater import is that they were aware that it could appear that way; hence, the same individuals couched their remarks in homophobic epithets about other possible candidates for brotherhood. The only way to make observations about another man’s appearance—and indeed to appreciate that man as attractive—was to simultaneously disavow any possibility of homosexuality.∞π Many fraternity men are thus trapped between a rock and a hard place. They deeply enjoy the intensity of emotion and affection that they share with each other. They find the ritual and camaraderie of initiations and other ceremonies to be of significance and comfort. They seek to better the reputations of their organizations, as well as their own chances to meet attractive women through the recruitment of attractive men; this necessitates an acknowledgment that men can be understood as attractive by other men. All of this makes fraternity men nervous, because they are well aware that much of their activity would probably not appear particularly heterosexual to outsiders. Even more disturbing than this, of course, is the presence of actual gay men in fraternities, as well as men who engage in homosexual sex upon occasion. Countless gay men who were once members of fraternities tell of first sexual experiences with fraternity brothers. Much of this sex goes unacknowledged, of course, but many men are also aware that it goes on. This is of significance (and recalls the discussion of Stewart Howe in the previous chapter) precisely because fraternities are attractive to many gay or protogay men, not just because they offer brotherhood, but also because they offer the chance to participate in an affectionate and intimate friendship with some of those thought to be the most attractive men on a college campus. In their very persons, gay fraternity brothers 296

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are perceived to (and sometimes actually do) blur the line between brotherhood and queer desire, tainting the brotherhood in the eyes of others. Because fraternity men’s masculinity is bound up in heterosexuality, they respond to the threat of being perceived as homosexuals by denigrating homosexuality itself and gay people in particular. They also prove their heterosexuality to the outside world as well as to each other through copious amounts of much-publicized exploitative sex with women.∞∫ if the sociological literature on fraternities of the past thirty years has demonstrated anything, it is that fraternity men are more likely to rape women than are their nonaffiliated classmates. Some estimate that between 70 and 90 percent of all reported gang rapes are affiliated with fraternities, with many of the remainder perpetrated by athletic teams (which are not dissimilar from fraternities and whose members often belong to fraternities as well). The abiding principle of fraternal sexual culture is that women are to be treated as objects, preferably available for consumption by the brotherhood. Long-term, intimate relationships between brothers and individual women certainly do occur, but those women are often derided in fraternal circles for stealing the men away from their brothers. In the words of one fraternity, ‘‘Brothers over Babes’’; others abbreviate the same sentiment, ‘‘Bro’s before Ho’s.’’ At some schools, brothers who give their girlfriends their lavalieres are hazed as a punishment for making a commitment to a woman. The ideal function of a woman in the eyes of many fraternity men is sexual.∞Ω Anthropologists have long recognized that when a group of people unites around a particular characteristic that they share, those who do not share this characteristic are often derided and dehumanized. In the case of the fraternity, this means women. Anthropologists further note that when the group of people accrues power because of their separation, as fraternities often do on college campuses, abuse of those who are excluded usually follows. Because fraternity men are so concerned about projecting an image of masculine heterosexuality, the abuse of women is generally sexual. Even when the women are not abused per se—when they are themselves willing participants in whatever sexual encounters might occur, for example—fraternities foster a culture where the most reward goes to the brother who can portray the sex as exploitative, regardless of what actually happened. In comparing sexually experimental men and women in his study of Rutgers University students, Michael Moffatt astutely noted the difference between the two: ‘‘Neanderthals picked up sluts and pigs; exconclusion

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perimentalist women picked up cute guys.’’ The women who had casual sex did so either because they enjoyed it or perhaps secondarily because they felt it enhanced their prestige to sleep with attractive men. The men who had casual sex (the ‘‘Neanderthals’’) may well have enjoyed the sex but they only received approbation and prestige if they subsequently denigrated the women. That the women in Moffatt’s study did not feel the corresponding pressure to degrade those with whom they had sex tells us much about the way the Neanderthal men constructed their masculinity. In the words of Moffatt: ‘‘Neanderthals were misogynists; experimentalist women were androphiles. Neanderthals proved their manhood through sleazy sex with sleazy females; experimentalist women looked for sexual fun wherever they could find it.’’ For the women, it was about the sex itself; for the men, the chief delight figured in how they could talk about it afterwards.≤≠ Many fraternities mandate sexual reporting at their weekly meetings. Each member must report to the assembled brotherhood on when he has had sex and with whom. This ritual is also sometimes part of initiation ceremonies. In the Alpha Delta Fraternity at Dartmouth, for instance, pledges have had to remove their pants and describe the most erotic sex act in their experience. In one of the more scandalous incidents of sexual reporting, two secret Zeta Psi newsletters were leaked to Dartmouth’s campus newspaper. These newsletters were produced and circulated on a weekly basis at Zeta Psi’s meetings and detailed the sexual exploits of the brothers: ‘‘She’s baaaaackk. And she’s dirtier than ever if young [female name] hooks up with one more Zete, I’m going to need a flow chart to keep up.’’ ‘‘[Female student]’s cunt couldn’t get any looser.’’ ‘‘Commenting on [Brother B]’s chances for a highly-coveted spot in the Manwhore Hall of Shame, [Brother C] said, ‘Are you kidding me? Rancid snatch like that makes you a fucking lock.’ ’’ Other women are described as ‘‘guaranteed hookups.’’ And finally: ‘‘Next week: [Brother X]’s patented date rape techniques!’’ Other fraternities celebrate ‘‘scores’’ and ‘‘scams’’ in similar ways; one fraternity gives a ‘‘beaver award’’ each week to the brother who has completed the ‘‘most interesting’’ sex the previous week.≤∞ That the award goes to the most ‘‘interesting’’ sex act is telling. While simply having had sex was enough in the post–World War II period to establish one’s masculinity in fraternal circles, by the late twentieth century, penile-vaginal intercourse between sober and consenting adults contributed little to a man’s reputation. In order to fully prove oneself in some fraternities, the sex act must itself be perceived as exploitative or, at the 298

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The archivist has titled this photograph ‘‘Frat members drinking beer and girl watching, 1981’’ (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

very least, be understood as giving more pleasure to the man than to the woman. To that end, oral and anal sex are often valued over more ‘‘standard’’ sexual activity, because in both it is presumed that the woman is sacrificing her own pleasure for that of the man. To coerce a woman into these acts, rather than standard sexual intercourse that could be understood as mutually satisfying for both partners, is thus doubly rewarded.≤≤ Sexual reporting and rewarding in fraternities has a number of consequences. It brings fraternity men closer together by allowing them to bond over the degradation of women’s bodies, thus assuring each other that while they may have sex with women, their loyalty remains to each other. Sex with a woman is had for one’s brothers, for communal consumption by them. Sex is thus degraded so that it ceases to have meaning in and of itself—even as simply a means to pleasure—and becomes defined through its ability to garner prestige and acceptance. Men in fraternities increasconclusion

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ingly have sex not because they may enjoy the act itself, but because they enjoy the act of reporting it, as well as the respect that such reporting brings. As one fraternity man explained, the joy of sex was ‘‘not just in the pleasure derived from the act, but the feeling of acceptance and approval of my masculinity which goes along with having sex with a new person.’’ This in turn heightens the pressure upon all men, but especially those who are not doing so, to have sex in order to maintain their masculinity. Men in fraternities report that those who have nothing to confess week in and week out are often ridiculed. This pressure to have sex only raises the possibility that at least some women will be forced or coerced into sex against their will.≤≥ Fraternity men experience their sexuality as communal in numerous other ways. It is well documented that many fraternities watch pornography together. Some even have a ‘‘porn chair’’; in the same way that the social chair is in charge of social events, the porn chair ensures that pornography is rented or purchased on a regular basis for the brothers’ viewing pleasure. Fraternity brothers watching pornography together is another means through which they communally consume the women being viewed. Feminist porn critics have astutely noted that the experience of watching straight pornography allows men to feel that they are in control of the women who are being dominated on screen. In the case of fraternities, the men share this experience with each other. The same experience is gained when fraternities hire strippers, as many do with some regularity.≤∂ In 1982 members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Nu at the University of California, Davis, were required to attend a forum on ‘‘Images of Women in the Media’’ after disrupting a ‘‘Take Back the Night’’ march earlier in the year by calling the women ‘‘bitches’’ and ‘‘dykes’’ and spitting on them. As the women chanted ‘‘We won’t be raped. We won’t be beaten,’’ fraternity men responded with, ‘‘Don’t come around here or you will be.’’ Once at the forum, the men were shown images of women from pornography and music album covers: women bruised, bound, gagged, and in pain. One fraternity brother yelled out ‘‘All right!’’; another asked, ‘‘How can you expect us not to get turned on by this? We’re red-blooded American boys.’’ Then the men began to snap their fingers in unison: ‘‘As the noise reached a crescendo, the men began to chant, ‘Gang rape . . . gang rape.’ ’’ Clearly, the men here were at least in part reacting to what they saw as the unwarranted presumption of their misogyny and criminality, but that they did so by exhibiting that very misogyny so vividly is 300

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telling. Enacting their dominance communally reinforced their masculinity, their loyalty to each other, and their claims to subjugated women’s bodies.≤∑ As anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday demonstrates in Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus (1990), the fraternity that watches porn together is all too often the fraternity that reenacts the very scenes they have witnessed on screen in its own house. Sanday’s account of a gang rape at the University of Pennsylvania emphasizes a number of important features of fraternity life. First and foremost, the gang rape, or ‘‘train,’’ allows men to bond with each other in a sexual manner, but it also allows them to disavow the homoeroticism of the situation because of the presence of a woman—even if that woman is unconscious or incapacitated, as she often is in these situations. Through group sex, fraternity men affirm their bond with each other and the power of their masculinity to dominate. During one gang rape at the University of Florida, a brother in Pi Lambda Phi told the victim, a seventeen-year-old firstyear student: ‘‘We brothers share everything.’’ In another incident at Florida State University, another victim of a gang rape was found with ‘‘ ‘crude words’ and the fraternity’s symbol marked on her thigh,’’ symbolically claiming her for the fraternity. It is precisely because gang rape also serves as an affirmation of masculinity that those who might not otherwise participate in a rape continue to do so against their better judgment. As psychologist Claire Walsh has stated, ‘‘Men rape for other men.’’ Psychologists use the terms ‘‘deindividuation’’ or ‘‘groupthink’’ to describe what occurs in such situations; even those brothers who may recognize that gang rape is wrong simultaneously recognize that failing to participate calls both their masculinity and their loyalty into question.≤∏ Two other fraternal sexual practices are also common enough to warrant discussion here, and both are predicated upon the humiliation of women in the service of fraternal community. The first has a number of variations, one of which is exhibited in the incident with which this chapter began. Fraternities establish contests for finding unattractive women and having sex with them. The brother whose sex partner is judged the ugliest by the brotherhood is the winner. When these events take place in a social setting, they are often called Pig Parties. The Pig Party stands in marked contrast to the sexual practices of fraternity men more generally in that the men are trying to ‘‘score’’ with a woman deemed unattractive. They are able to reconcile this practice with their usual behavior only because inherent in it is the humiliation of the woman involved, and also because it is structured conclusion

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as a contest. For one brother to have an ugly girlfriend or fall in love with an ugly woman from afar would be an entirely different matter. To use ugly women for sport among brothers, however, reduces the stigma of sleeping with an ugly woman because all members of the fraternity have agreed to the rules of the game. The final sexual practice, also designed to humiliate a woman and to bring men closer together, involves fraternity men watching a brother have sex with a woman. Not only do the voyeurs bond, but the sexually active brother generally also knows what is going on; he quite literally performs his heterosexuality for his brothers. The more he is able to convince the woman to do something she otherwise might not want to do, the more successful his performance. As one brother put it: ‘‘When my friends pick up chicks and bring them back to the fraternity house everyone else runs to the window to look at somebody else domineer a girl and I tell you what you almost get the same satisfaction. Some of the guys like to put on a show by doing grosser things each time. . . . Watching my friends have sex with other girls is almost as satisfying as doing it myself. . . . By the same token I enjoy conquering girls and having people watch.’’ The view of women as objects of domination seems to preclude any understanding that the women themselves might be acting on their own desires. That the men are exploiting these women, regardless of the women’s own feelings or desires, goes without saying for this brother; indeed, he uses the verb ‘‘conquering’’ to describe what seems to be otherwise consensual sex.≤π At the heart of the practices of fraternal homophobia and sexual exploitation are an overvaluation of the masculine and a denigration of the feminine. Because fraternity men—however covertly and fearfully—also experience their relationship as somewhat feminine in its affection and intimacy, they must compensate by simultaneously disavowing that femininity. the forms fraternal masculinity takes at the beginning of the twenty-first century would be unrecognizable to those brothers of Kappa Alpha who founded their fraternity in 1825 at Union College. While those founders emphasized intellectual rigor, oratorical skill, forthrightness, and independence, many of today’s fraternity men place value upon athletic achievement, a high tolerance for alcohol, and sexual success with women. Despite these differences, there are also a number of continuities. Today, as in the nineteenth century, fraternities value loyalty to the brotherhood above almost all else. One is tempted to speculate that the same fears and anxieties that plagued nineteenth-century collegians—fears of being alone, 302 conclusion

of being unpopular, of life after graduation—continue to structure the lives of present-day students. In that regard, the knowledge that one has a band of loyal brothers serves as a source of great comfort to fraternity men. Another continuing theme is the prestige and social capital that fraternity brothers gain through their membership. In joining an exclusive organization on campus, men in Greek-letter organizations have always hoped that they will be admired, envied, respected, and emulated. They also continue to rely upon the connections forged through their national organizations, connections that serve them not only in material ways—in the form of contacts in business and employment—but also in ways more ephemeral but no less valuable: reputation and prestige. Traditionally white fraternities at many colleges, and the older fraternities especially, continue to select new members based upon class status and race, just as they did in the nineteenth century. Fraternities are able to preserve a collective identity for themselves only by carefully policing the boundaries of their membership, so that those deemed different or ‘‘other’’ are not able to taint their fraternal reputations. Men in fraternities also persist in flouting college authorities in particularly public ways more than their unaffiliated fellow students do. While fraternity men of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are probably more destructive of physical property than their counterparts of 180 years ago, those nineteenth-century members were certainly no strangers to violence. And as in the nineteenth century, while this breaking of rules is associated with alcohol, there is no question that current fraternities’ overwhelming reliance upon alcohol in order to socialize is a marked change from the early parts of the nineteenth century. The most profound and disturbing differences between fraternity men past and present are instead bound up in fraternity men’s relations with women. If racism and classism remain constants—not only in mandating exclusions but also in structuring fraternal masculinity through those exclusions—it is the changing and new roles of misogyny and homophobia, respectively, that account for the most noticeable differences between the behavior of today’s fraternity men and that of their nineteenth-century brethren. In response to women’s growing, though still circumscribed, autonomy in the public worlds of education and politics 100 years ago, fraternity men and others of their ilk reacted with a virulent misogyny. Respect for women in the nineteenth century was structured by a very clear understanding that women had a place of their own: the home. As women began to insist that they be treated seriously outside the home (and conclusion

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on the campus), fraternity men could no longer rely upon the patronizing deference for ‘‘true womanhood’’ that once characterized their regard for women of their own class. In order to maintain their self-regard as masters of the campus in the face of the arrival of capable young women—women who consistently outranked them academically from their first arrival on campus—fraternity men at first sought to insist that these women conform to type and assume the roles of housewife and mother upon graduation. When, by the 1920s, fraternity men felt increasingly threatened by their female fellow students’ academic success and enfranchisement, Greek-letter men employed the newly minted practice of dating to further their own ends. Like their female classmates, they used success in dating as a means to gauge their popularity on campus. But unlike those same female classmates, and thanks to a double standard that continued to punish women, they also began to use sex as a marker of a man’s skill in the realm of dating. The man who was able to extract the most sex from the least willing woman was increasingly defined as the most masculine. Uncomfortable with women’s incursion into what had formerly been an all-male preserve and threatened by women’s increasing autonomy, fraternity men simply devised a purpose for women that would work to further their own reputations and egos. From the nineteenth century onward, some fraternity men had been having sex with women they understood to be their inferiors: workingclass women and prostitutes. As the century wore on and middle-class college women became more sexually active themselves, fraternity men’s sexual relations with these ‘‘pickups’’ and prostitutes correspondingly declined. In one way, this was simply about supply and demand. If sex could be had on campus for free, why go further afield and pay for it? In another and more significant way, it was also about masculinity. As fraternity men embraced a standard of masculinity that took sexual experience as one of its central tenets, it was no longer as admirable to pay for sex or indeed to obtain it from a too-willing woman. Instead, fraternity men judged each other based upon their abilities with women who were themselves trained to withhold. Sex, in this model, is much less about pleasure in or desire for the act itself as it is about the prestige gained through having accomplished it. Another cultural shift from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth was the birth of the homosexual as a discrete identity category. As other scholars have pointed out, with the invention of the homosexual came the birth of the heterosexual. Fraternity men were used to spending a 304 conclusion

good deal of private, intimate time with each other. Throughout the nineteenth century, this had never been suspect, at least not in ways understood as sexual; but by the turn of the century, a shadow of homosexuality hung over such fraternal intimacy. Fraternity men’s insistence upon a virile heterosexuality, then, was not just a response to the threat posed by women on their campuses but a preemptive strike to disavow the possibility of homosexuality in their ranks. As fraternities continued to employ homoerotic hazing (which they did precisely because of the rise of the homosexual and the denigration that accompanied him), and as they continued to evaluate potential brothers’ physical appearances, they simultaneously worked to make sure that outside observers—as well as the members themselves— would not perceive them as homosexual. As with all people, men in fraternities have responded to greater changes in the structures of our economy, society, and culture; they are not simply creatures of their own invention. And yet they have also made choices that many others have not. Not all men—even all white, moneyed men who attended college—chose to join fraternities. The men who did, however, embraced the standards of manliness and masculinity espoused by their brethren. The story of fraternities, then, is the story of the men who have most relied upon their whiteness, their maleness, their class status, and their heterosexuality to assure their continued prestige and power. Indeed, in banding together, they helped in part to create, or at least to reinforce, those very categories. Fraternity men, in this light, have taken the easy way out. This study in the history of fraternal masculinity reveals, then, not only the ways that masculinity is constructed in conjunction with the society around us—thus refuting the biological determinist logic behind ‘‘boys will be boys’’—but also the ways that masculinity is bound up with notions of power and exclusion. No matter their incarnation, throughout fraternities’ long history, many brothers have sought power on campus through exclusion and sometimes domination. Fraternal masculinity is intimately connected to the power that fraternity men maintain over others.

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Notes abbreviations AC

Archives and Special Collections, Robert Frost Library, Amherst College

CU

Columbiana Archives, Columbia University

DC

Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College

DU

University Archives, Duke University

DUP Delta Upsilon Papers, Special Collections, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation, New York Public Library MHS Massachusetts Historical Society NYT

New York Times

PU

Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University

SHC

Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

SU

Special Collections, Stanford University

UC

Special Collections, Union College

UCB

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

UI

Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

UM

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan

UNC University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill YU

Manuscripts and Special Collections, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University

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introduction 1. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, entry for May 25, 1847, 113; Fred Harper to Herbert Martin, October 19, 1892, in Winslow, Eta Prime of Kappa Sigma, 32; ‘‘Delta’s Report: Psi Epsilon, 1924,’’ Report 1924 Folder, Zeta Psi Papers, DC; Chi Gamma Group Notes, March 2000. ‘‘Jane Doe’’ is a pseudonym. The ‘‘Group Notes’’ are a cheat sheet of sorts for pledges who must memorize information about the active brothers. Each pledge must have an interview with each active brother, whereby he will be asked to answer certain questions, some of them pertaining to the particulars of the active brother’s personal biography. The cheat sheet was compiled by pledges who had already had the interviews with the active brothers and was designed to make the process easier for those who had not. The brother described in this excerpt had asked pledges to be knowledgeable about these aspects of his personal life. Tests like these are common in fraternities. Often pledges must keep pledge books in which they dedicate a page to the personal life of each brother. They are then made to memorize the information. The idea is that it breeds informed brotherhood and helps the pledges get to know the brothers; while it may do this, it also serves as another task for pledges, designed to subjugate them to the active brothers. On pledge books, see Jason DeParle, ‘‘About Men,’’ Washington Monthly, November 1988, 43. 2. Goffman, Stigma, 128. 3. The term ‘‘hegemonic masculinity’’ comes from Connell, Masculinities, 77. 4. Traister, ‘‘Academic Viagra.’’ Traister notes that much of the current literature on masculinity focuses upon ideals and the ways that men are made anxious by the thought that they have been unable to live up to these ideals. He points out that analyzing masculinity in this way runs the risk of making all men seem equally anxious. Some men do meet the ideals, or at least come much closer to doing so than others. But my point is that the anxiety created by such ideals does not just lead to stasis and acceptance of anxiety; some men do things to meet the ideals. See also Ditz, ‘‘The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power.’’ For a brief review of the literature on masculinity, see Clatterbaugh, ‘‘Review Essay.’’ 5. Fraternities do receive some treatment in histories of youth and of education. The most notable examples are Horowitz, Campus Life; Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful; and Sheldon, Student Life and Customs. None of these books, however, focuses upon the issue of gender. Fraternal orders, much more popular than fraternities in their late nineteenth-century heyday, have generated a number of historical studies that focus, to varying degrees, upon the question of gender. See Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; and Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture. For a whole host of reasons, however, fraternal orders are quite different from college fraternities. On the percentages of fraternity members in elected office, see the website for the North-American Interfraternity Conference ([www.nicindy.org]). In 2004 the 308

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NIC calculated that while only 3 percent of the population belonged to a Greekletter organization, 42 percent of U.S. senators and 30 percent of U.S. representatives were in them. 6. On social capital, see Bourdieu, ‘‘The Forms of Capital.’’ For a contemporary account of racial segregation in the Greek system, see Eric Hoover, ‘‘New Scrutiny for Powerful Greek Systems,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8, 2001. 7. Rotundo, American Manhood, 7, 46. 8. On the issue of masculinity and homosexuality, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 272–79. The definition of homosexuality moved away from one based on act (having sex with another man was a homosexual act but did not constitute a kind of person) to identity (being a homosexual). The argument about acts and identities is most famously made by Michel Foucault and further elaborated by George Chauncey. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1; and Chauncey, Gay New York, chap. 4. For more on the shift from manliness to masculinity, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16–20; and Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 10. 9. The best account of what he calls the ‘‘birth of male heterosexuality’’ is White, The First Sexual Revolution. 10. It should be noted that these fraternities are rarely regarded as the top organizations on any campus. Having abandoned their exclusivity, their prestige also suffers. 11. Delta Lambda Phi is one such national gay fraternity. On gay fraternities and gay men in otherwise straight fraternities, see Bob Moser, ‘‘GreekActive,’’ Out, September 2002, 69–70, 72, 74–76; and Jeanne DeQuine, ‘‘Out of the Closet and on to Fraternity Row,’’ Time, March 11, 2003. See also the Lambda 10 Project ([www.lambda10.org]), a national organization for gay, lesbian, and bisexual students in the Greek system. 12. On the dissemination of college life, see Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 126–28. Michael Moffatt has argued that by the late twentieth century, college life and the life of youth could no longer be distinguished from each other in terms of style and trends. To a certain degree, he is absolutely right. However, I do think that the use of collegiate themes in clothing in the past fifteen years by clothing companies Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle Outfitters demonstrates that college life, as distinct from the life of youth more generally, still carries a certain cachet. See Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey, 50–51. 13. On black fraternities, see Ross, The Divine Nine; Kimbrough, Black Greek 101; and Jones, Black Haze. On Jewish fraternities, see Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek.’ ’’ On gay fraternities, see Yeung, ‘‘Gay Fraternities in a Double World’’; Wharton, ‘‘Hegemonic Masculinity in Gay Fraternities’’; and Yeung and Stombler, ‘‘Gay and Greek.’’ On multicultural fraternities, see Leo Reisberg, ‘‘Ethnic and Multicultural Fraternities Are Booming on Many Campuses,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2000. On sororities, see Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood; and Turk, Bound by a Mighty Vow. notes to pages 4 – 7

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14. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, esp. the introduction. 15. The preceding paragraph owes much to the work of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, chap. 1. While I agree with Butler in her contention that gender itself exists only in its performance and not in some abiding gendered essence—the performance is the gender, in other words—I diverge from her analysis in that I am also interested in actors making conscious choices. In examining the ways that people act and behave, I have also been influenced by the arguments of Susan Leigh Foster, who uses the lens of dance to broaden our understanding of how bodies move and enact gender. In using dance as a metaphor, she also insists on the ways in which gender is a learned performance. See Foster, ‘‘Choreographies of Gender.’’ 16. Bogardus, ‘‘The Fraternity as a Primary Group’’; Newcomb, ‘‘The General Nature of Peer Group Influence’’; Scott, Values and Organizations, 81–82; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 130; Kelley, College Life and the Mores, chaps. 1 and 4. 17. Fraternity member is DeParle, ‘‘About Men,’’ 40. DeParle also notes that his brothers were rich, smart, and smooth. Being a member made him popular as well. Psychologist is Coleman, ‘‘Peer Cultures and Education in Modern Society,’’ 247. On the desire to fit in and combat loneliness on impersonal campuses among female students and the ways that sororities help with this, see Robbins, Pledged, 272. For an anthropological analysis of college life as being formative, see Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey, esp. 26–28.

chapter one 1. This story of the founding is taken from Charles Clark Young’s account, published in A Record of the Members of the Kappa Alpha Fraternity, 7–8. Young was one of the founding members. The others were John Hart Hunter, Isaac W. Jackson, Thomas Hun, and Andrew E. B. Knox. See also Kappa Alpha booklet, 173–74, found in box 162, Kappa Alpha Folder, Historical Subject Files: Fraternities, PU. 2. Deciding where to begin this history is somewhat contested in the fraternity world. I have chosen 1825 and Union College (as have most chroniclers of fraternity history) because the organization founded there is the first society founded for social purposes that continued to function as such. Union College is known as the Mother of Fraternities because of this. Kappa Alpha was also the first social organization to branch out to other colleges, initiating the spread of this particular form of social fraternity. Historians of fraternities engage in fierce debates about which fraternity was founded first. Many date the founding of Greek-letter organizations to the birth of Phi Beta Kappa at the College of William and Mary in 1776, while others note the founding of Chi Delta Theta, a senior society, at Yale in 1821 or Chi Phi at Princeton in 1824. I choose 1825 because Phi Beta Kappa soon became an 310

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honor society where students were asked to join by the faculty based on their grades, and because the other earlier prototypes (Chi Delta Theta or Chi Phi) died out soon after their founding and did not spread from their birthplaces to other colleges. On the first, see Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 12; on the two latter, see Baird, American College Fraternities, 15–16. For examples of debates surrounding the ‘‘first fraternity,’’ see the correspondence in box 162, Chi Phi Fraternity Folder, Historical Subject Files: Fraternities, PU. 3. Baird, American College Fraternities, 16. Fraternities were much more common during the antebellum period in New England and the Middle Atlantic states than they were in the South and the Midwest. While they often had chapters in the smaller denominational colleges in New England as well as the larger schools, this was less true for colleges in the South and the Midwest, where fraternities tended to be restricted to larger state schools like the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, the University of South Carolina, the University of Michigan, and Miami University of Ohio (which had some state support but was also affiliated with the Presbyterian Church). Thus, the analysis that follows in this chapter is mainly true for New England and mid-Atlantic schools, though certainly it has some applicability to larger and more established schools in the Midwest and the South. For a geographical analysis of the spread of fraternities during this period, see Torbenson, ‘‘College Fraternities and Sororities,’’ 57–64, 88–97. 4. I will also deal with these issues in chapter 3, in which I discuss the implications of these fears and desires for the establishment of national brotherhood. On the birth of the self-made man, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 3, and chap. 1. 5. On numbers, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 18; on students training for the ministry, see ibid., 140–54; and on New England, see Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, 3–4, 16. By the 1820s many students were also much older (sometimes in their midtwenties), as will be discussed in the next chapter. On students in the South, see Geiger, introduction to The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 20. Only after 1830 did the South see any denominational colleges for the training of ministers—schools that would have attracted poorer students. Because they were geared toward the wealthy, southern schools were usually much more expensive than northern schools, though by the end of the period, the cost of almost all schools had increased exponentially as well as in proportion to the average earnings of a skilled manual laborer (see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 50). 6. On percentages, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 54–55. These are conservative estimates, based on students in liberal arts colleges only; the percentages are based on a sector of the population that was also younger than a student might actually be. On Yale in 1821, see Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 26. Others withdrew on the advice of their tutors, and some also died or fell back a year due to lack of preparation. On Amherst, see Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 15, 11. On faculty numbers, see Geiger, introduction to The American notes to pages 13 – 16

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College in the Nineteenth Century, 17. At the beginning of the century, most colleges had no more than two professors, one tutor, and a president. 7. On recitations and schedules, see, for instance, LeDuc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, 119; Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 29–30, 74; Member of That Institution, Sketches of Yale College, 79; and Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, 197–98. For an overview of college life based on a number of memoirs, see Geiger and Bubolz, ‘‘College as It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.’’ 8. McLachlan, ‘‘The Choice of Hercules,’’ 466. On college curricula, see also Winterer, The Culture of Classicism, chaps. 2 and 3. 9. Member of That Institution, Sketches of Yale College, 162. On the purchase of fiction, particularly works in nineteenth-century romanticism, see LeDuc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, 121. On learning in literary societies, see McLachlan, ‘‘The Choice of Hercules,’’ 472–74; and Earnest, Academic Procession, 35, 82– 87. On competition in literary societies, see Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 15; Cutting, Student Life at Amherst College, 22; and Henry and Scharff, College as It Is, 80. For a general overview and history of literary societies, see Harding, College Literary Societies. 10. It was not until later in the century that the elective system was developed, allowing students to select classes that were more to their liking and that might also expose them to more students outside of their class. 11. Smith, Letters to a Young Student in the First Stage of a Liberal Education, 148. On class societies, see Jackson, ‘‘The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth,’’ 69–70; and Hall, Collection of College Words, 64–80, 211–26. See also Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 30. 12. Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 85–87. 13. On rush, see ibid., 102, 105; on food fights, see Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 116; on class identity, see Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 123. 14. Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 136. On the ages of tutors and their roles, see Jackson, ‘‘The Rights of Man,’’ 55; and Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 237. 15. There is some evidence to suggest that by midcentury, relations between students and faculty had grown somewhat better, at least at some colleges. Henry and Scharff ’s account in College as It Is (1853) includes a discussion of which professors they liked and disliked; that they liked any at all surely tells us that things had changed (see chap. 9). The Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, by the 1850s, was electing honorary members to their ranks; these men were, for the most part, on the faculty of the various schools where Delta Kappa Epsilon had chapters. That the brothers of q⌲⌭ would want to socialize with their faculty, and that the faculty would feel the same way, also tells us that the gulf between student and professor was lessening. See q⌲⌭ Correspondence, Records of the Omicron Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, UM. 16. This would begin to change around the middle of the century as the role of 312

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the university changed, and it would develop in this direction even more so as the ideals of the German educational system were embraced in the second half of the nineteenth century. The purpose of the university transitioned from the training of ministers to the training of students in specific fields of knowledge, fields that the faculty would become increasingly specialized in themselves. For a detailed description of this transition, see Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, chaps. 6–8. 17. See the account in Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 279–80, for a description of Hammond’s quest for the top honors in his class. Other historians of education have argued that antebellum students did not care about their grades because those grades were awarded by the faculty, whom they disdained. That interpretation also holds that many, if not most, students cheated, and at the very least there was widespread approval for cheating. This analysis is made most famously by Horowitz in Campus Life, 30–35. She argues that college men paid no attention to their professors’ grades and evaluated each other solely on their own terms—terms that had nothing to do with grades. Horowitz bases this claim primarily upon Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg’s Four Years at Yale, which was published in 1871 under the pseudonym ‘‘A Graduate of ’69.’’ Horowitz seems to accept Bagg’s memoir as representative of college life more generally. In other words, her claim is based primarily upon one published source from the second half of the nineteenth century. The evidence I have gathered makes it clear that academic standing as evaluated by college faculties was indeed very important to college students, at least in the antebellum period before excessive numbers of college activities, including athletics, came to dominate student conceptions of what it meant to be a successful collegian. 18. On ‘‘fishing,’’ see Hall, Collection of College Words, 199, 353; on ‘‘bootlick’’ and ‘‘toady,’’ see ibid., 34, 461. The final epithets are in ibid., 346, 30; Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 96; and Cutting, Student Life at Amherst College, 132. 19. Hall, Collection of College Words, 159, 241–42, 356; Henry and Scharff, College as It Is, 36. Emphasis in original. 20. The definitive study of campus revolt is Novak, The Rights of Youth. In southern schools, particularly, Robert F. Pace has argued that rebellion was tied up with southern notions of honor as related to manliness. See Pace, Halls of Honor, 4, 8, and chap. 4. See also Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 229, 233–35; Horowitz, Campus Life, 25, 27; Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, 108, 110; Jackson, ‘‘Rights of Man,’’ 47; Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 33, 131; and Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 107–8. 21. Todd, The Student’s Manual, 248–54; Cogswell, Letters to Young Men Preparing for the Christian Ministry, 57–58, 55; Webster, Letters to a Young Gentleman Commencing His Education, 21. On these conduct manuals more generally, see Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 214–22; and Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn, chap. 5. 22. Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, 110, 115, 122; Earnest, Academic Pronotes to pages 21 – 23

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cession, 43. Anthony Rotundo has pointed out that there were usually two methods of keeping young men in line during the nineteenth century: bluster, physical threats, and specific consequences as executed by men; and the often more powerful guilt and moral suasion as exerted by boys’ mothers. Administrators were plainly trying to take advantage of the latter, finding that the former was not as effective as it once had been. The new strategy is indicative of this particular era, when the family moved from a model of paternal control to one of maternal control over children in the form of moral motherhood. See Rotundo, American Manhood, 50–51. 23. Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, 61–62. On ‘‘acknowledgments,’’ see Hall, Collection of College Words, 2; and Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 23. The other points are in Hall, Collection of College Words, 160, 291, 398, 186; and Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, 64. 24. See Minutes of Faculty, 7 August, 1845, to December, 1854, PU. See also the introduction by J. Jefferson Looney to College as It Is for a list of infractions at Princeton (xviii) and Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, 107. 25. Rotundo, American Manhood, 37–43. 26. On ‘‘adopted sons’’ and ‘‘alma mater,’’ see Hall, Collection of College Words, 6–7. On the choice of the Greeks, see Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 105; and Winterer, The Culture of Classicism, chaps. 2 and 3, esp. 62–66, 81–83. On civility, literacy, and societies, see Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. 27. Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 23. 28. Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 101 (‘‘swinging keys’’ meant that they had become members of Kappa Alpha and were holding ⌲〈 badges); James A. Walker to Brother, March 16, 1858, series 4, box 1, folder titled Correspondence Files, General, 1858–2001, 2002, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of the Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC; R. C. Swain to James Bryan Jr., March 18, 1857, series 1.2, box 21, folder 238, Bryan Family Papers, SHC. See also letter from Charles Howell to Bryan regarding the reasons for the rejection of the UNC petition, December 2, 1859, box 23, folder 271, SHC. I will discuss the reasons for these types of refusals as well as the logic behind the association between chapters at different schools at greater length in chapter 3. 29. This account is taken from John Reily Knox to Edward Bruce Stevens, April 14, 1843, quoted in Shepardson, The Beta Book, 6. For other accounts of foundings, see Botsford, Epsilon Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, 7–10; and General Register of the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity, 1850–1910, 7–13. Many abbreviated founding histories can also be found in Duerr, Baird’s Manual of American College Fraternities. 30. On the need to have a literary purpose, see Rudolph, The American College and University, 146; Rotundo, American Manhood, 68; and Sheldon, Student Life 314 notes to pages 24 – 28

and Customs, 173. Constitutions: Constitution of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, article III, section 1, Delta Kappa Epsilon Records, vol. 3 (1888–1958, Constitution), UNC; Constitution of Alpha Delta Phi, section 6, article II, box 1, folder 2, Alpha Delta Phi Records, YU; Constitution of Beta Theta Pi, article 10 in Shepardson, The Beta Book, 10. 31. Others simply claim that the literary activities were not the ‘‘true’’ purpose of the fraternity. While I agree with the latter to a certain degree, we should not ignore the fact that, true purpose or not, unless the minutes are a complete fabrication, they did actually go through with these exercises. 32. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 96, 207, 213; second entry (1839), box 61, vol. 1, folder 289, Psi Upsilon Records, 1839–50, YU; entries for April 14, 1855, and December 12, 1857, among others, Minutes of Omicron Chapter, Delta Kappa Epsilon, 1855–1863, Delta Kappa Epsilon Records, UM; October 1849 entry, Kappa Sigma Epsilon records, 1847–55, box 54, folder 259, YU; entry for April 3, 1858, Frank C. Morse Papers, MS N-25, Frank C. Morse Diary Folder, 1858, MHS. 33. Rockwell, Rambling Recollections, 92; Constitution of Alpha Delta Phi, article II of Covenant, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU; Constitution of Delta Kappa Epsilon, article V, section III, Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers, UNC. 34. Entry for May 18, 1848, box 2, folder 2, Hamilton College, DUP; Samuel Sumner to Ezra Peck, July 3, 1850, quoted in Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 103 (emphasis in original); W. T. R. Marvin to James Bryan Jr. [?], September 14, 1859, series 1.2, box 23, folder 268, Bryan Family Papers, SHC. On the prevalence of the word ‘‘homesickness’’ among antebellum young men, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 56–57. On families without actual women, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 66; and Nelson, National Manhood, 196–97. 35. Kett, Rites of Passage. Rotundo explains, ‘‘At no other time in life [youth] were males so likely to seek help and reassurance from their male peers,’’ and that the groups they formed ‘‘offered social acceptance at a time of life when other bonds and commitments were in flux’’ (American Manhood, 61, 63). Historian Leon Jackson also contends that fraternity, unlike the relation of a father and child, was enduringly equal. Brothers at one time would always be brothers, not only in their loyalty, but also in the lack of hierarchical relations between them. See Jackson, ‘‘Rights of Man,’’ 76. Fraternity men differed from other young men who had already entered the workforce and were joining fraternal organizations like the Odd Fellows and Freemasons. Historian Mark C. Carnes has analyzed the ritual of these organizations and posits that it acted to give these men symbolic father figures, figures they were without in their everyday lives. This was not the case for men in fraternities. See Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. Even for those sons who continued to live at home, scholars have noted the increasing movement of fathers out of homes due to the growing mercantile economy;

notes to pages 28 – 31

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many men were increasingly able to support their families only by working outside the home instead of within it as in an agrarian economy. See Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Rotundo, American Manhood, 25. 36. Francis Wayland to Edward Hitchcock, August 3, 1846, Fraternities General Files, AC; Minutes of Faculty, August 7, 1845–December 11, 1854, entries for March 4 and 5, 1847, PU; Earnest, Academic Procession, 128; ‘‘Secret Societies in College,’’ New York Commercial Advertiser, July 14, 1855, in box 162, Greek Letter Societies Folder, Historical Subject Files: Fraternities, PU (emphasis in original); Baird, American College Fraternities, 199. 37. Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 106. 38. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 330–76, 347–48. On secret societies, see also Gist, Secret Societies, chaps. 2 and 3. 39. Aiken, The Secret Society System, 13, 15. Among those students who objected to secrecy as such were those who formed the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, an anti-secret society discussed in the next chapter. For examples of the ways they discussed the harmfulness of secrecy, see the minutes of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, DUP. 40. See Aiken, Secret Society System, chap. 7. 41. Ibid., 90–92. In 1848 Henry L. Valance, a Mason, admitted to having kidnapped Morgan, to holding him at Fort Niagara, and eventually to drowning him. See Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 16, 21; Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 228; and Kellogg, College Secret Societies, 7. 42. Porter, The American Colleges and the American Public, 200. 43. Jonathan Pearson diary, entries for December 3, 1832, and December 11, 1833, UC. See also Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, 389–90. The Williams story is in Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 116–17. The Michigan story is in Donnelly, The University of Michigan (1800); Poppleton (the author’s great-great-great-great uncle) is quoted in Schurtz, Greek Letter Fraternities at the University of Michigan, 27–28, though see also 15–34; the argument about free association is in Horowitz, Campus Life, 39. 44. General Register of the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity, 21–2; ‘‘Correspondence of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity in the Michigan University,’’ box 1, Delta Kappa Epsilon Records, UM. 45. Minutes of 26th Annual Alpha Delta Phi Convention, Williams College, August 1858, box 1, folder 5, YU; Minutes of Faculty, August 7, 1845–December 11, 1854, entry for June 26, 1846, PU. Emphasis in original. 46. Jackson, ‘‘The Rights of Man,’’ 77–78; Baird, American College Fraternities, 200. 47. Colleges were expanding. As they did so, the literary societies (still usually numbering two, or three at the most, per college) also grew until they became unwieldy and lacking in any intimacy. Students were searching for smaller groups of congenial colleagues, an atmosphere that had previously been provided by the 316 notes to pages 32 – 39

literary societies and was now available in the smaller fraternities. Further, between 1850 and the 1870s, the curriculum of the colleges changed. Literary societies had long provided students with the intellectual stimulation that they did not receive in the classroom, allowing for discussion of contemporary fiction and political events as well as the practice of forensics, debate, and oratory. As colleges grew and many became universities in the German educational sense, they relaxed their insistence that all students follow the same classical curriculum and began to institute a system of electives that allowed students to pick and choose which classes best suited them as individuals. These included many of the subjects as well as the honing of skills that had previously been available only through the literary societies. Thus, as colleges changed, so did their offerings. It was not just that fraternities turned literary societies into battlegrounds for popularity (though they did do this); it was also that by the postbellum period, the function of literary societies had itself become somewhat redundant with the official curriculum. As I said, this occurred at different times at different schools and usually had to do with the degree to which schools expanded, diversified their populations, and changed course offerings. For the best account of this process, see Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 134–35, which also notes that the demise of the literary society was due in part to the rise of the college athlete as the preeminent symbol of manliness after 1870. 48. James H. Kelly of Rochester Chapter of q⌲⌭ to N. H. Winchell of Michigan Chapter, April 11, 1862, q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. On ‘‘combinations,’’ see Hall, Collection of College Words, 454; and Henry and Scharff, College as It Is, 216. 49. John Q. A. Sessions of Michigan Chapter to S. L. Rackleff of Yale Chapter, January 22nd, 1855 (a similar letter was eventually sent to all chapters); William H. Lunnard of Kenyon Chapter to Sessions, March 2, 1855; S. Edward Floyd of Bowdoin chapter to Sessions, March 28, 1855; all in q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. On competition from the moment of inception, see General Register of the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity, 43, where the author explains, ‘‘It was with the idea of a rivalry with Delta Phi, then the only college fraternity established at Pennsylvania, . . . [that] Phi Kappa Sigma . . . was organized on the 19th day of October, 1850.’’ 50. Charles Howell to James Bryan Jr., October 28, 1858, series 1.2, box 22, folder 257, Bryan Family Papers, SHC. 51. Oakland Chapter to Michigan Chapter, January 19th, 1859; C. F. Taylor of Michigan Chapter to A. W. Lozier of New York Free Academy Chapter, November 30th, 1857; all in box 1, q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. Delta Kappa Epsilon was first established on the East Coast and seems to have sustained a reputation there among Michigan students from the East, thus accounting for its ability to attract eastern students more easily than western students. 52. Samuel Sumner to Ezra Peck, September 16, 1850, quoted in Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 111; Hitchcock, Reminiscences, 320; Mark Hopkins to Ednotes to pages 39 – 42

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ward Hitchcock (hereafter EH), August 8, 1846; Jeremiah Day to EH, August 7, 1846; Francis Wayland to EH, August 3, 1846; Simon North to EH, August 6, 1846; and Leonard Woods Jr. to EH, August 12, 1846; all in Fraternities, General Files Collection, AC; University of Rochester Chapter to Michigan Chapter of q⌲⌭, January 10, 1862, q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM; and Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 75 (for similar entries, see 119, 187, and 178). 53. W. M. Hill of Michigan Chapter to S. H. Lee of Yale Chapter, November 16th, 1856; William M. Johnston of Centenary Chapter to A. W. Chapman of Michigan Chapter, September 10th, 1858; R. D. Douglas of Amherst Chapter to Edward H. Butler of Michigan Chapter, March 31st, 1859; all in q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. 54. R. Frank Hawthorne of Alabama Chapter to Sessions of Michigan Chapter, April 10th, 1855; W. H. Morgan of Kentucky Military Chapter to Charles H. McCreery, of Michigan Chapter, April 26th, 1858, both in q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. 55. Dana Nelson makes a similar argument in her book, National Manhood. I return to Nelson’s argument in chapter 3. 56. Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 115. The truth, of course, for most fraternities was that they only accepted gentlemen in the first place, though this was less true at country colleges where there were fewer gentlemen to be found. 57. Constitution of Alpha Delta Phi, Covenant, articles 2, 7, and 8, box 1, folder 2, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU; Todd, Student’s Manual, 100. For similar examples, see Webster, Letters to a Young Gentleman, 14, 17; and Rotundo, American Manhood, 62–66, 78, 91. 58. Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 190–91; James Bryan Jr. to James Bryan Sr., May 1860, series 1.2, box 24, folder 276, Bryan Family Papers, SHC; Bryan to Bryan, April 10, 1860, folder 275, Bryan Family Papers, SHC. 59. Stephen Winstead to ‘‘Brother,’’ February 15, 1861, subseries 1.2, box 2, folder 20, George Phifer Erwin Papers, SHC; Baird, American College Fraternities, 22. 60. Hamilton J. Dennis to ‘‘Gentleman of the q⌲⌭,’’ October 19, 1858, q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. Interestingly, Dennis included the phrase about disgrace in quotation marks, as if perhaps quoting a brother who had accused him of this. 61. George A. Flanders, C. B. Grant, and B. M. Thompson, committee on behalf of Michigan Chapter to Hamilton J. Dennis, undated, q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. Emphasis in original. 62. Flanders, Grant, and Thompson to all other chapters, undated, q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM. 63. While there is not space to go into it here, Omicron’s sister chapters were equally shocked at the behavior of Dennis and concur heartily with Omicron in their castigation of him. See especially the letters of the chapter at the New York 318

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Free Academy (December 24, 1858), Union College (January 15, 1859), and Amherst College (March 31, 1859), all in q⌲⌭ Correspondence Log, UM.

chapter two 1. Sturtevant, An Autobiography, 79. 2. See, for instance, Winterer, The Culture of Classicism, 15–22. 3. Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 140–54. On New England, see Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, 9. Colin Burke reports that the majority of schools in any region of the country had large numbers of students entering after their twenty-first birthdays—from 1810 to the 1820s, 37 percent. See Burke, 103, 115–18. 4. On colleges and the middle class, see Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism; on conceptions of what it meant to be middle class, see Bledstein, ‘‘Introduction: Storytellers to the Middle Class’’; on the numbers of middling men attending antebellum colleges, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 111–19 and chap. 3 generally. This was most true for students in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and the Midwest and least true for the South, where wealthy sons of the planter elite predominated. On social and cultural capital, see Bourdieu, ‘‘The Forms of Capital.’’ For similar arguments about female academies and seminaries in the antebellum period, see Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 82–83. 5. For the number of fraternities at small denominational schools in the South and Midwest, one must compare the colleges at the time as reported by Burke in his appendix A with William Raimond Baird’s listings of antebellum fraternities in the first and later editions of his ‘‘bible’’ of college fraternities, American College Fraternities. There have been discrepancies between this first edition of Baird and later editions. In every case, if any edition claims a fraternity chapter prior to the Civil War, I have included it—making my calculations, if anything, an overestimation. Of the forty-six antebellum southern denominational colleges, only seventeen in eight states (counting Virginia and West Virginia as one state) had fraternity chapters by the 1850s. These colleges usually had only one or two chapters each (thirty-seven total for seventeen schools), and almost all of them were at Presbyterian colleges (Baptist and Methodist colleges were less likely to have them). Similarly, in the Midwest the colleges with fraternities during the antebellum period were the more established nondenominational state schools (and occasionally Presbyterian or Episcopalian-financed colleges) that attracted a wealthier student base. Midwestern denominational colleges were more likely than their southern counterparts to have one chapter but were unlikely to have many more than that. 6. On the market economy and the changes it brought, see, among many others, Sellers, The Market Revolution; Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class; Kelly, In the New England Fashion. For overviews of manliness in this period, see Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 1; and Pugh, Sons of Liberty, 13–27. notes to pages 51 – 54

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7. Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 114. In his study of Amherst College, Thomas LeDuc concurs; see Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, 123. 8. A Record of the Members of the Kappa Alpha Fraternity, 11–19; Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 184; Catalogue of Beta Theta Pi, 4–15; Catalogue of the Alpha Delta Phi, 7–77; and Delta Kappa Epsilon (1871), 9–92. On percentages of all students who became ministers, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 138–54; and on those who became lawyers, see ibid., 183–85. 9. While wealthier students did sometimes become ministers as well, there was a distinct relationship in nineteenth-century colleges between the poor and the ministry. On the possibilities for the poor allowed by education societies, see Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, chaps. 4 and 5; and Cogswell, Letters to Young Men Preparing for the Christian Ministry, 31–32. Poorer students training for the ministry were, of necessity, pious. In order to have received scholarships from organizations like the American Education Society, they would have had to have proven their piety and devotion to the clergy in their local communities. 10. While the pious were quite often poor, they were poor in relation to their wealthier classmates and not necessarily in relation to many others who would never see the inside of a college classroom. In order to have made it to college, they already possessed a substantial amount of what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital (in the form of previous education) as well as a certain amount of social capital (in the form of backing from local clergy and organizations like the American Education Society). See Bourdieu, ‘‘The Forms of Capital.’’ 11. For ‘‘theologs,’’ see Rockwell, Rambling Recollections, 95; for ‘‘evangelical,’’ ‘‘beneficiary,’’ and ‘‘foundationer,’’ see Hall, Collection of College Words, 180, 25, 208; on ministers-in-training and their need to do well in school, see Horowitz, Campus Life, 14, 56; and Todd, A Student’s Manual, 284. Nicknames are in Hall, Collection of College Words, 165, 285, 298; and Henry and Scharff, College as It Is, 37. 12. Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 17. In 1860 a Chi Phi Badge was $12.00 and accompanied by a side pin and chain, $14.00; Tiffany and Company to George Phifer Erwin, March 30, 1860, subseries 1.2, box 2, folder 18, George Phifer Erwin Papers, SHC. Rudolph quotation is in American College and University, 203–4. Williams student quoted in Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 103. 13. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women; Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women. 14. Carr, The Amherst Diary of William Otis Carr, entry for March 18, 1855; Cogswell, Letters to Young Men, 42–43; Todd, The Student’s Manual; Hitchcock, Dyspepsy Forestalled and Resisted; Smith, Letters to a Young Student in the First Stage of a Liberal Education; Webster, Letters to a Young Gentleman Commencing His Education. 320

notes to pages 54 – 58

15. Cogswell, Letters to Young Men, 211 (quotation on 210). Rudolph claims that there were religious revivals every two years between 1836 and 1858 at Williams College (Mark Hopkins and the Log, 118). John Mitchell recalls religious revivals at Yale in the 1820s (Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 157–58). D. A. Wells and S. H. Davis also report on revivals at Williams between 1826 and the 1840s (Sketches of Williams College, 94–95). See also Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 234. While it may seem difficult to determine exactly how many students embraced Christianity in any given year, it is worth noting that most who discuss the phenomenon seem remarkably sure of their numbers. It may be that conversion was such a public event that it was possible to actually count the newly pious. On secret societies being quashed by revivals, see Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 106. 16. On founding of Delta Upsilon, see Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 179; quotations from Catalogue of the Social Fraternity, Williams College, 7. For an account of the founding of the Williams chapter, see Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, 69. Delta Upsilon’s motto was ‘‘Nothing Secret,’’ a testament to the degree to which secrecy itself was seen as the prime problem with fraternities, at least in their early years. Debate at Williams took place on June 14, 1842, box 2, Williams Chapter, Constitution, Minutes Folder, 1840–52, DUP; oration at Hamilton took place on November 11, 1847, box 2, folder 2, Hamilton College, DUP. 17. On Delta Upsilon at Williams, see Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 108–9; and Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 169. For details on expulsions, see the minutes in boxes 1, 2, and 3 of DUP. 18. On the existence of this way of associating and socializing in earlier decades, as well as the forms of manhood it promoted, see Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America, chaps. 6 and 7. 19. In the analysis and evidence that follows—concerned with what fraternity men valued and scorned—I have been hard-pressed to find many specific examples where they explicitly describe these qualities as being ‘‘manly’’ or ‘‘unmanly.’’ Nevertheless, they certainly did evaluate their fellow students based on the characteristics that I outline here. They also continued to insist that, as a group, they were particularly manly. The difficulty, then, is in establishing a direct relationship between that which fraternity men praised (good looks, social graces, intelligence, and so forth) and manliness. I believe, however, that they saw this relationship. There is no question that men in fraternities—indeed, men generally—valued manliness. Men in fraternities talked about initiating the most manly men of an incoming class, for instance. Because the evidence is clear on which characteristics they valued in a fraternity brother, I have taken the sum of these traits as constituting manliness, which is not to say that one could not be manly if one lacked one or another of the traits. Manliness, then, as masculinity or femininity are today, was a subjective evaluation, produced in part through the discourse of that evaluation. 20. Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 159. I do not mean to insinuate that Protestantism and the market were somehow incompatible with each other. As other notes to pages 58 – 62

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historians have demonstrated—as the concurrent rise of both demonstrates—this was clearly not the case. However, it is clear from the sources that some antebellum college men saw their faculty—the overwhelming majority of whom were also ministers—as being out of touch with the world beyond the campus, a world they understood as being not only secular but also governed by the competitive world of the market economy. Thus, while colleges themselves were, in actuality, preparing young men to enter into that world—with social capital if not with vocational training—students could still perceive the relationship between their colleges and the world of employment and competition as being at odds with one another. It is also not the case that antebellum college men were themselves not Protestants, but they were able to draw a distinction between belief as a matter of course and devotion to religion as a vocation. On the connections between Protestantism and the market, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, chap. 7; and Noll, God and Mammon. 21. Constitution of Alpha Delta Phi, 1832, section 6, article 3, box 1, folder 2, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU. Emphasis in original. For other examples, see Beta Theta Pi’s constitution in Shepardson, The Beta Book, 9–10. 22. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 280; Jimmie Bryan’s report cards are in folder 260 of box 23 and folder 272 of box 24, series 1.2, Bryan Family Papers, SHC. Alexander Hamilton Rice to Augusta E. McKim, January 28, 1844, Alexander Hamilton Rice Letters, MS S-9, MHS. To ‘‘succeed,’’ see Hall, Collection of College Words, 146, 397, 399, 422, 455; to ‘‘fail,’’ see ibid., 19, 49, 133, 202, 204–5, 434, 450; ‘‘high-ti’’ and ‘‘quirt’’ are also in ibid., 254, 443. 23. W. G. Sufford of Brown Chapter to John Q. A. Sessions of Michigan Chapter, September 8th, 1855; H. H. Thomas of Middlebury Chapter to R. C. Davis of Michigan Chapter, May 15th, 1856; A. C. Trippe of Lafayette Chapter to R. C. Davis of Michigan Chapter, June 20th, 1856; all in Correspondence of the q⌲⌭ Fraternity (hereafter, q⌲⌭ Correspondence), UM; Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 74. See also Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 108, 118. 24. On orations and debates, see, for instance, Cutting, Student Life at Amherst, 22; on Yale, see Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 156. Sheldon argues explicitly that antebellum college students saw brain and brawn as mutually exclusive attributes; the former was valued, the latter was not. Those seen as possessing athletic prowess were denigrated by their peers as not being sufficiently civilized (Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 145). For contemporaneous examples that bear out that conclusion, see Cogswell, Letters to Young Men, 172; and Hitchcock, Dyspepsy, lecture 6. 25. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 21, 240; Charles Howell to James Bryan Jr., Feb. 28, 1860, series 1.2, box 24, folder 273, Bryan Family Papers, SHC; Freeman Bumstead to William Whitney, October 2, 1845, quoted in Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, 104; Hall, Collection of College Words, 382, 442, 267. 322

notes to pages 62 – 65

On appearance and character, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 42; Halttunen, Confidence Men. 26. Joseph Barrett of Lafayette Chapter to A. W. Chapman of Michigan Chapter, February 21st, 1859; N. H. Winchell of Michigan Chapter to W. F. Bloomfield of Union Chapter, March 14th, 1862; both in q⌲⌭ Correspondence, UM; Rockwell, Rambling Recollections, 93. 27. Charles Taylor to Michigan Chapter of q⌲⌭, June 12, 1862, q⌲⌭ Correspondence, UM; William A. Wooster to Brother, August 7, 1858, series 4, box 1, folder titled Correspondence Files, General, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC; Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 113. Emphasis in original. The definitions for ‘‘Hyphenute,’’ ‘‘blood,’’ ‘‘fast,’’ ‘‘splurge,’’ and ‘‘swell block’’ are in Hall, Collection of College Words, 261, 28, 190, 440, 453, respectively. On Hyphenute, see also Henry and Scharff, College as It Is, 60. On gentlemanliness in the eighteenth century, see Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. And on the anxiety that centered around false gentlemanliness, also a nineteenth-century concern, see Halttunen, Confidence Men. 28. Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 124; Hall, Collection of College Words, 359. 29. Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 171; Smith, Letters to a Young Student, 170, 150; Webster, Letters to a Young Gentleman, 14. For a more extensive discussion of the differences between fraternity men and their pious faculty, see Syrett, ‘‘Sociability or Piety.’’ 30. In my research I have found very few references to students of color in colleges prior to the Civil War (in schools other than Oberlin College, which admitted black students early on). Charles S. Johnson reports that there were a total of twenty-eight black college graduates as of 1860; see Charles S. Johnson, The Negro College Graduate, 7. Dan Oren reports on at least three Jews at Yale prior to the Civil War. See Joining the Club, 6–7, 11. Women seeking postsecondary education attended women’s colleges, seminaries, and academies. Oberlin was the rare school to open as a coeducational college (1833). On female academies and seminaries, see Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak. 31. For a more complete picture on men’s interactions with women, see D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters; Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life; Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 5; Rothman, Hands and Hearts; Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America; and Lystra, Searching the Heart. On blacks, other racial minorities, and the construction of whiteness, see Nelson, National Manhood; Takaki, Iron Cages; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; and Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, chap. 1. 32. As chapter 4 demonstrates, however, this had changed by the postbellum period, when college novels and memoirs included extensive descriptions of African American servants, as if the emancipation of blacks in the South encouraged

notes to pages 65 – 68

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white students to emphasize their whiteness more insistently vis-à-vis the black men and women who served them. 33. Boxes 1–3, DUP. There were established relationships between the abolitionist movement and those active in the Second Great Awakening, activists in the former movement often springing from the latter. Because we know that fraternity men were much less likely to participate in revivals and other religious activities, it is not unlikely that they also shunned the abolitionist movement. Certainly, this would have been true for the southern students. 34. Yung Wing is in Delta Kappa Epsilon (1874), 14. 35. On attitudes toward blacks, see Henry and Scharff, College as It Is; they note that bootblacking was done by ‘‘darkies,’’ who also swept, ‘‘but not very well’’ (68). On James Johnson, see ibid., 54. On ‘‘professor of dust and ashes,’’ known as a ‘‘sweep’’ at Yale, see Hall, Collection of College Words, 378 and 452; and Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, 77. Also see Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 172. Phebe Jacobs is in Margaret Sumner, ‘‘ ‘To Pursue with Pleasure and Advantage,’ ’’ 8–10. 36. On northerners and southerners at Princeton, see Looney, introduction to College as It Is, xxiii–xiv. B. F. Boyd to George Phifer Erwin, March 12, n.d. (1861?), subseries 1.2, box 2, folder 21, George Phifer Erwin Papers, SHC. My first inclination was to assume that the African Americans that Erwin’s friends were raping were women. Hannah Rosen suggested to me that they could well have been men. On this point, see Clifton, ‘‘Rereading Voices from the Past.’’ 37. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 182. On men discussing women among themselves, see Hansen, ‘‘ ‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’ ’’; on more vulgar discussions, see Cogswell, Letters to Young Men, 166; and Hall, Collection of College Words, 204, 347. I should also note that during the nineteenth century, a vast literature in obscene and pornographic images came into wide circulation; surely some of it must have been enjoyed by college men in groups. See Horowitz, Rereading Sex. On courtship and differing gender ideals, see Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 5; and Rothman, Hands and Hearts, 91–95. On courtship practices in colleges, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 100. Cutting tells us that the first visit of Amherst students en masse to Mount Holyoke occurred in the early 1850s (Student Life at Amherst, 110). J. Jefferson Looney, by contrast, tells us that at 1850s Princeton, interactions with women in town were quite rare. See introduction to College as It Is, xxi. On interactions with women at southern schools, see Pace, Halls of Honor, 73–77. On separate spheres more generally, see Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’’; and Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place.’’ 38. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 118; Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 155. Hammond later remarks, in reference to a rival for the affections of yet another young lady, Mary Warner, ‘‘though as a freshman and a boy he will be less in my way than anyone else in the same circumstances would’’ (232). By using the word 324 notes to pages 69 – 72

‘‘boy’’ (and the emphasis is his), he differentiates himself, a ‘‘man,’’ from his more youthful competitor. 39. Alexander Hamilton Rice to Augusta E. McKim, March 2, 1844, Rice Letters, MHS. Men who married in college were automatically dismissed. See Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 150. On warnings to avoid too much socializing with women, see Todd, A Student’s Manual, 178; Hitchcock, Dyspepsy, 264; and Graduate of Yale, Reminiscences, 154. C. Dallett Hemphill has argued that many young, middle-class men and women experienced a middle ground between a stage of homosocial camaraderie with their peers (which often involved extensive discussion of the opposite sex) and a commitment phase, whereby young men and women paired off with those they would eventually marry. This middle stage involved extensive courtship—usually chaste—and very little commitment. The players were emotionally invested, but Hemphill argues that they were generally aware that the relationships were fleeting and would not lead to marriage. Men in college, with some exceptions, seem to be poised in between the first and the second stages, some of them courting more than others. See Hemphill, ‘‘Isaac and ‘Isabella.’ ’’ 40. Debates are November 1, 1852, in Waterville College minutes; February 22, 1853, in Williams College minutes; June 25, 1855, in Amherst College minutes; and March 21, 1849, and November 7, 1850, in Hamilton College minutes all in boxes 1–3, DUP; Todd, A Student’s Manual, 178. For a different approach, see Cogswell, Letters to Young Men, 166. He believed that the presence of women tended to have an edifying effect upon men, lessening the chances for improprieties that were more common when men were alone without the company of women. On men’s difficulty with issues of control, see Rothman, Hands and Hearts, 110; Rotundo, American Manhood, 22, 120–23; and Rosenberg, ‘‘Sexuality, Class, and Role in 19th-Century America.’’ 41. On sex with slaves, see D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 95; FoxGenovese, Within the Plantation Household, 189, 325–26; Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America, 63–74; and Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood. Chesnut and Thomas are noted in Faust, ‘‘Enemies in Our Households,’’ 230 42. Cabaniss, A History of the University of Mississippi, 50–54; Chute, Damn Yankee!, 169–71; Sansing, The University of Mississippi, 96–99. My thanks to Danielle Jones for discussions about this incident. 43. On the commercialization of sex, the status of prostitutes, and brothel locations, see Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 46–49 and chaps. 3 and 5; and Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, chap. 4 particularly. On advice manuals for young men pertaining to sex, see Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn, chaps. 5 and 6; and Rosenberg, ‘‘Sexuality, Class, and Role,’’ 139–41. As Rosenberg points out, these are two extreme ideals; most people probably fell somewhere in the middle. It is still debatable just how much men in the early to mid-nineteenth century relied upon ideals of aggressive manliness, though it seems apparent that some certainly did so. Having sex outside of marriage would in fact have been part of what made up this notes to pages 72 – 75

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aggressive manliness and what distinguished some men from those who were more wedded to ideals of the Christian gentleman. On this question, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 227–32; and Horowitz, Rereading Sex. 44. Jenkins Holland to James Bryan Jr., May 14, 1857, series 1.2, box 21, folder 240, Bryan Family Papers, SHC; Thomas McKaig to James Bryan Jr., September 22, 1857, series 1.2, box 21, folder 244, Bryan Family Papers, SHC. 45. On adherence to a double standard, see Cott, ‘‘Passionlessness’’; D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 57–68; and Rosenberg, ‘‘Sexuality, Class, and Role,’’ 143–45. For a discussion of the inconsistency in regards to this dictate, see ibid., 138. 46. On the southern question, see Glover, ‘‘ ‘Let Us Manufacture Men,’ ’’ 29; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 292–324; and Pace, Halls of Honor, 77–80. 47. Henry and Scharff, College as It Is, 201; Pace, Halls of Honor, 74–75; and Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 111. 48. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, 130, 172 (emphasis in original); Charles Howell to James Bryan Jr., June 19, 1858, series 1.2, box 22, folder 253, Bryan Family Papers, SHC.

chapter three 1. A. W. Lozier of New York Free Academy Chapter to George A. Flanders of Michigan Chapter, November 7, 1857, ‘‘Correspondence of the Omicron Chapter of the q⌲⌭ Fraternity in the Michigan University, Established Jan. 1855,’’ box 1, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Omicron Chapter Records (hereafter q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence), UM. 2. I borrow this phrase from Dana D. Nelson, whose arguments I turn to in a later section of the chapter. See Nelson, National Manhood. 3. On the changes in the United States, see Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America; and Painter, Standing at Armageddon. On the effects for white men, see Rotundo, American Manhood, chaps. 8 and 9. On masculinity and gendered spaces, see Spain, ‘‘The Spatial Foundations of Men’s Friendships and Men’s Power,’’ 71. See also Spain, Gendered Spaces. 4. On men’s intimate friendships in the nineteenth century, see Rotundo, ‘‘Romantic Friendships.’’ 5. Torbenson, ‘‘College Fraternities and Sororities,’’ 58–59, 69; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 26, 28. 6. Anderson, Imagined Communities. I return to this argument in the last section of the chapter. 7. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, xv; Canfield, The College Student and His Problems, 87. On the middle class and this anxiety, see also Bushman, The Refinement of America, chap. 12. 8. ‘‘Spiked’’ meant that these additional men were either pledged, though not 326 notes to pages 76 – 84

yet formally made members, or that they had been selected by the current brothers and might have expressed a reciprocal interest in joining the fraternity. 9. Tri-Delta Fraternity to Phi Chapter of q⌲⌭ at Yale University, May 15, 1893, box 40, Correspondence File 184 (N–Z), Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers, YU. For examples of similar letters, see October 2, 1897, letter from Epsilon Fraternity at Illinois to Yale q⌲⌭ Chapter; November 3, 1894, letter from revived Theta Chi Chapter of q⌲⌭ at Union College to Yale q⌲⌭ Chapter; and letter from men at Northwestern, n.d., to Yale q⌲⌭ Chapter; all in Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers, YU. 10. Minutes of 26th Annual Convention of Alpha Delta Phi, August 1858, Williams College, Yale Chapter, box 1, folder 5, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU. 11. J. S. Festerman to F. M. Crossett, box 4, third folder, DUP; Minutes for October 2, 1886, Records of the Michigan Chapter of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1884–1896, box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM; Minutes of Delta Kappa Epsilon Convention, July 29–30, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 12. Nathan Corbin to F. M. Crossett, May 11, 1885, box 5, third folder, DUP. 13. A. R. Moore to E. J. Thomas, February 6, 1890, box 5, first folder, DUP; Moore quoted in R. E. Dodge to E. J. Thomas, February 1, 1890, box 5, first folder, DUP. 14. Fred Harper to Herbert M. Martin, October 19, 1892, quoted in Winslow, Eta Prime of Kappa Sigma, 32–33. 15. William A. Wooster to Robert B. Maclean, February 5, 1859; Charles C. Holliday to Brother, February 8, 1859; William A. Wooster to Brother, August 7, 1858; all in series 4, box 1, folder titled Correspondence Files, General, 1858–2001, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. 16. ‘‘Milk and water’’ meant that the members were somewhat meek, not particularly dynamic. 17. Samuel F. Hunt of Miami Chapter to N. H. Winchell of Michigan Chapter, March 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 18. R. Frank Hawthorne of Alabama Chapter to John Q. A. Sessions of Michigan Chapter, April 10, 1855; John Leithead of Kenyon Chapter to Sessions, July 21, 1855; L. H. Mangam of Princeton Chapter to M. A. O. Packard of Michigan Chapter, February 22, 1856; M. Strother of Virginia Chapter to Packard, January 13, 1856; all in q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. For other examples from the later nineteenth century, see The Beta Tablet for 1893, a newsletter of the Beta Chapter of the Chi Phi Fraternity, box 1891, Chi Phi Fraternity Papers, MHS. 19. Inaugural address of W. L. Jenks, President, February 18, 1877; Inaugural address of H. D. Burnett, President, October 1883; both in box 1, book 1, Delta Upsilon Records, University of Michigan Chapter, UM. 20. Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 120–21. 21. Constitution of Alpha Delta Phi, Yale Chapter, 1832, section 6, article 4, box 1, folder 2, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU. Emphases in original. 22. W. T. Leavell of Eta Alpha Chapter of q⌲⌭ at Washington and Lee, Octonotes to pages 85 – 93

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ber 8, 1877, to Phi Chapter at Yale, box 40, Correspondence Folder 184 (N–Z), Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers, YU. 23. Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 690. Bagg is here referring not only to fraternities but also to the societies to which one might belong in all four years at Yale, which had separate societies for each class in college; the senior societies like Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, and others are the most famous. The junior societies at Yale were the equivalent of fraternities elsewhere and were themselves affiliated with fraternities nationally. Because Bagg was aware that most other campuses did not have such an elaborate system, and because junior societies (fraternities) were among those he considered a part of one’s society record, his estimation of a man who did not attend Yale would rest upon his fraternity membership. On secret societies, see Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb. 24. June 10, 1890, letter from Augustus L. Mason in The Sigma Chi: The Official Organ of the Sigma Chi Fraternity, vol. 9, no. 4, July 1890, 224, Walter L. Fisher Papers, Library of Congress. 25. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, 620. 26. Maxwell, Greek Letter Men of Pittsburg[h]; Maxwell, Fraternity Men of Chicago; Maxwell, Greek Letter Men of New York; Maxwell, Greek Letter Men of St. Louis; Maxwell, Greek Letter Men of the Pacific and Rocky Mountain States; Baird, American College Fraternities, 13. For examples of these catalogues, see Zeta Psi Fraternity, Catalogue of Zeta Psi Fraternity; Delta Upsilon Fraternity, Catalogue of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity; Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, Catalogue of Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity; Register Fraternitas, Chi Phi; and Alpha Delta Phi. These catalogues were also regularly published to cover the alumni of one particular chapter. 27. N. H. Winchell of Michigan Chapter to Bro. John Johnston Jr. of Yale Chapter, June 8, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM; Cornell Chapter of q⌲⌭ to Yale Chapter, February 6, 1870, box 40, Correspondence File 181 (A–C), Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers, YU; Winchell to W. F. Bloomfield of Union Chapter of q⌲⌭, March 14, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 28. Baird, American College Fraternities, 11. For a brief description of the variation in badges, see ibid., 10. 29. See, for example, Winchell to George Brown of Yale Chapter of q⌲⌭, June 19, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 30. Minutes of 37th Annual Convention of Alpha Delta Phi, Yale University, May 12th and 13th, 1869, box 2, folder 11, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU. 31. R. C. Davis of Michigan Chapter to Benjamin H. Abbott of Amherst Chapter, October 13, 1856, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 32. For a general description of these conventions, see Baird, American College Fraternities, 12. For examples of the minutes of conventions, see the accounts in records of the Delta Kappa Epsilon and Delta Upsilon Fraternities, UM; Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU; as well as Baird, A Decade of Fraternity Reconstruction. 33. See, for instance, ‘‘The Kappa Alpha Society,’’ NYT, January 3, 1891, 8; 328

notes to pages 94 – 100

‘‘Theta Delta Chi Fraternity,’’ NYT, November 18, 1892, 8; ‘‘Phi Kappa Psis in Council,’’ NYT, March 29, 1894, 2; ‘‘Chi Psi Fraternity Meeting,’’ NYT, April 4, 1894, 2; ‘‘Delta Kappa Epsilon Convention,’’ NYT, November 17, 1895, 15; and ‘‘Chi Phi Fraternity Convention,’’ NYT, November 30, 1895, 2. 34. John Addison Porter dates the establishment of alumni councils and alumni houses to 1876; see John Addison Porter, ‘‘College Fraternities,’’ Century Magazine, vol. 36, 757, in box FS-1, American College Fraternity System Folder, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, series 26/20/30, UI. On the voluntary nature of alumni service, see Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 127. I address the other reasons for participation below. 35. Wm. C. Schultze of Lafayette Chapter to Winchell of Michigan Chapter, April 28, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM; Canby, Alma Mater, 226–27. On fraternity alumni houses, see, for example, Porter, ‘‘College Fraternities,’’ 757; and The Delta Kappa Epsilon Club. 36. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, 6, and chap. 4; Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 3. On separate spheres and friendship, see Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’’; Rotundo, American Manhood, 87–91; and Hansen, ‘‘ ‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other.’ ’’ 37. On separate spheres, see Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘Female World’’; Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood; Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place’’; Spain, Gendered Spaces, chap. 1; Carnes, Secret Ritual, 84–89; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; and Clawson, ‘‘Nineteenth-Century Women’s Auxiliaries and Fraternal Orders.’’ On women in cities, see Ryan, Women in Public; Stansell, City of Women; and Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman.’’ 38. Aiken, The Secret Society System, 64; Hawes, Twenty Years among the Twenty Year Olds, 74. 39. Southern D.K.E. Alumni Association to Brothers in q⌲⌭, October 8, 1892; Delta Kappa Epsilon Association of Central Tennessee to Phi Chapter of D.K.E., October 22, 1896; both in box 40, Correspondence Folder 181 (A–C), Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers, YU. Emphases in original. Other letters from the New England Alumni Association and the Mississippi Valley Alumni Association are also filed with these letters. On the romanticization of the Civil War in its aftermath, see Silber, The Romance of Reunion. 40. Alpha Delta Phi, Reunion Dinner in New York 1875. For other examples, see Record of the Members of the Kappa Alpha Fraternity and General Register of the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity. 41. Canfield, The College Student and His Problems, 88–89. On pamphlets detailing accomplishments, see, for instance, ‘‘History of Kappa Alpha,’’ box 162, ‘‘Kappa Alpha’’ Folder, Historical Subject Files: Fraternities, PU. 42. By this I mean presidents who attended college after fraternities were established and attended colleges where there were fraternities. notes to pages 100 – 105

329

43. Musgrave, College Fraternities, 185–226; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 315, note 5 on 329. Johnson continues on at some length, noting a number of well-to-do men in business, religion, education, and the arts who were members of fraternities. Since 1972, Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush have also been members. See also the list from the ‘‘Fraternity Insider’’ in box 16, ‘‘Fraternity Humor’’ Folder, Student Affairs Collection, Wilson Heller Papers, series 41/2/52, UI. 44. Delta Upsilon Fraternity, Catalogue of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 7; section 4, article 6, Constitution of Alpha Delta Phi, 1832, box 1, folder 2, Alpha Delta Phi Papers, YU. 45. On college education and the workforce, see Geiger, introduction to The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 3. 46. Nelson, National Manhood, 6, 17; Anderson, Imagined Communities. 47. Fraternity men also routinely reported to sister chapters on those who had been expelled from their ranks for various reasons. While it is doubtful that their far-flung brothers would have actually known the expelled men personally (although it was possible, as in the case of Hamilton Dennis), it seemed important to have their names stricken from the record so that one did not make a mistake in the future by treating that person as a brother. 48. W. G. Sufford of Brown Chapter to John Q. A. Sessions of Michigan Chapter, September 8, 1855; F. D. Ayer of Dartmouth Chapter to Sessions, October 21, 1855; Henry A. Hart of Waterville Chapter to R. C. Davis of Michigan Chapter, August 21, 1856; James Godwin of New York Free Academy Chapter to George A. Flanders of Michigan Chapter, February 11, 1858; Dana J. Jocelyn of Amherst Chapter to Sessions, April 16, 1855; Richmond B. Elliott of New York Free Academy Chapter to Augustus W. Chapman of Michigan Chapter, February 12, 1859; all in q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 49. This can be gathered from a number of letters that refer to the reactions of entire chapters to various pieces of news and to the desire on behalf of the members of a chapter to hear more news than simply the results of an election. A consultation of the minutes of the Omicron chapter also reveals that the reading of correspondence was a regular part of most meetings. See Minutes of Omicron Chapter, Delta Kappa Epsilon, January 11, 1855, to May 12, 1883, box 1, Delta Kappa Papers, UM. The Delta Upsilon Fraternity also regularly read letters aloud in chapter meetings. See Minutes of Delta Upsilon Fraternity, boxes 1 and 2, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM. 50. C. A. Fisher of South Carolina Chapter to Sessions of Michigan Chapter, undated, though probably written in late March or early April 1855, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 51. Ruth Ann Gregory, ‘‘Fraternities in Fratricide,’’ The Shield of Phi Kappa Psi (Winter 1970), 89–90, 92–93, in box FS-1, American College Fraternity System Folder, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 330

notes to pages 105 – 11

52. See, for instance, Winchell of Michigan Chapter to Wm. C. Schultze of Yale, January 16, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 53. C. E. Davenport of Hamilton Chapter to Winchell, January 20, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 54. The Michigan chapter wrote to the Yale chapter in the only explicit reference to slavery in the entirety of the correspondence that ‘‘the breaking up of slavery (for that is surely to be the result of this war) is going to revolutionize the South politically and socially and things will for many years be in a very unsettled condition.’’ Otherwise the northern chapters do not speak about specific causes or issues with the southern chapters. Winchell of Michigan Chapter to H. S. Pratt of Yale Chapter, June 8, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 55. Winchell to the Brothers of Nashville Chapter, March 5, 1862, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 56. Minutes of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Convention, July 29–30, 1862, New Haven, Conn., q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 57. ‘‘D.K.E. Honors Its Veterans,’’ New York Sun, February 21, 1908, in box 162, Delta Kappa Epsilon Folder, Historical Subject Files, PU. See also ‘‘Dekes Call Their Battle Roll,’’ Evening Post, February 21, 1908, in same folder. On the politics of a reunited United States, see Silber, Romance of Reunion; and Blight, Race and Reunion. 58. Resolutions of this kind are found throughout the minutes of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity (boxes 1–3, DUP) and in almost all fraternities whose records I have examined. 59. Nelson, National Manhood, 202, 177. 60. Chase H. Dickinson, Ferguson Haines, and Francis W. Perkins, committee on behalf Dartmouth Chapter to A. W. Chapman of Michigan Chapter, November 19th, 1858; F. W. Cooper, C. C. Pool, and A. C. Stewart, Committee on Behalf of North Carolina Chapter to Chapman, February 1st, 1859; both in q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM. 61. V. A. Allen, George S. Wilson, G. Nicholson, and S. Frierson, Committee on Behalf of North Carolina Chapter to Chapman, February 1859, q⌲⌭ Omicron Correspondence, UM.

chapter four 1. Accounts of the incidents can be found in An Account of the Greek-Letter Fraternities in the University of California as well as in the issues of the Oestrus and the Occident from 1879 to 1883. The disciplinary figures are in An Account of the Greek-Letter Fraternities, 7. The quotation comes from Occident 4, no. 4 (February 4, 1883): 29. Accounts of violence are in Oestrus 4, no. 9 (April 7, 1879): 3; and Occident 3, no. 18 (December 15, 1882): 140. The account of the regents’ decision is

notes to pages 111 – 22

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in Stadtman, The University of California, 1868–1968, 162. The alumni petition can be found in box 3, folder 7, UC Regents Papers, UCB. 2. On the increasing number of students as well as escalating costs, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, chap. 2, 214–23, 239–43. Because of this increase in costs, especially during the postbellum period, the greatest growth in student populations was not seen at the liberal arts colleges or at the newly established universities, but at normal schools, nursing schools, and professional schools, which did not yet require a college education for entry. Women also accounted for a large proportion of the increase. On the question of fraternities making their homes only at wealthy colleges, see the previous chapter, as well as Torbenson, ‘‘College Fraternities and Sororities,’’ chap. 3. 3. ‘‘The Man about College,’’ in Porter, Sketches of Yale Life, 92–93. For another such description, see Canby, Alma Mater, 125–26. On the declining rates of ministers, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 140–43, 150–53. Regarding the changing graduate school requirements, it is important to note that not until the twentieth century did professional schools truly become postgraduate schools. Until that time, a majority of their students solely obtained a graduate degree. See Geiger, introduction to The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 36. As Leonard Ellis also points out, the number of elite boys’ boarding schools also rose in this era: more than 100 were founded between 1880 and 1920. See Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 195–99. 4. Washburn, Fair Harvard, 99. For an interesting summation of the ways that graduates of different colleges were thought of as possessing different characteristics inculcated by those colleges, see Thwing, American Colleges, 24. On student careers, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, chap. 4 and 221–22. Many students were also entering education, but those who did so in the secondary or primary levels were increasingly women, and even the men who taught at these levels generally did not attend the elite colleges and universities. 5. Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 191–200. 6. Ibid., chap. 1; Potts, ‘‘Curriculum and Enrollment,’’ 45. Much has been written in the past two decades to discredit the thesis advanced by Richard Hofstadter that the postbellum period saw a decline in the status of liberal arts colleges during the ascendancy of the university. The most thorough reworking is Burke’s American Collegiate Populations. See also Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars; Geiger, introduction to The American College in the Nineteenth Century; Peterson, The New England College in the Age of the University; Tobias, Old Dartmouth on Trial. Suffice it to say that while the German-influenced university may well have flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, the still very well-attended liberal arts colleges also felt the effects of the university’s educational ideals. The fraternities in this study are situated at both kinds of institutions, and I have found that differences between the two did not have a profound impact upon their fraternity cultures. The key difference had to do with how well established fraternities were at a 332

notes to pages 124 – 26

school and not so much with the type of school, though region did contribute to the equation, as southern fraternities were often only newly formed after the disruption of the Civil War. On the question of alumni involvement, see Geiger, introduction to The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 31–32; Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars, chap. 11; and Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 289–91. 7. Woodrow Wilson, ‘‘What Is a College For?,’’ Scribner’s Magazine, November 1909, 576; Canby, Alma Mater, chap. 2; Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale. Descriptions of this phenomenon can be found in almost all histories of college life. See, for instance, Horowitz, Campus Life, chap. 2; Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars, chap. 9; Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, chap. 5; Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 128; and Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ chap. 5. 8. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. On the importance of manliness in the post–Civil War period, see also the collected essays in Mangan and Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality. 9. The Delta Upsilon, 5; Kind, ‘‘The Fraternity Situation at Wisconsin,’’ 12. Kind is here referring to both men’s and women’s fraternities; note, however, that the argument quickly becomes one about manhood for fraternity men—and nonGreek men, especially—and women’s womanhood drops out of the picture. 10. Aiken, The Secret Society System, 66; for similar examples, see also pages 98 and 109. Courant quoted in Kellogg, College Secret Societies, 43, 64. Similar arguments about manly men and whether or not they can be found in fraternities saturate almost any opposition to fraternities. See, for instance, Oestrus 2, no. 12 (September 23, 1878): 3. 11. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 23–31. It is telling that when we think of a ‘‘barbarian’’ today on a college campus, many of us think of fraternity men because they are known for their rowdiness, their pranks, and their antisocial behavior—a testament to just how much masculinity (as well as our understanding of the word ‘‘barbarian’’) has changed in the past 150 years; in the nineteenth century, to call someone a barbarian was to make a class or race-based claim. 12. Willie L. Grimes to friend, n.d. [1890s], quoted in Tolbert, Two Hundred Years of Student Life at Chapel Hill, 103 (emphasis in original); Winslow, Eta Prime of Kappa Sigma, 6; Walter B. Hill to Mary Clay Hill, May 9, 1868, in Walter B. Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 82. For other examples of Hill’s commentary on class relations, see College Life in the Reconstruction South, 20, 26. 13. ‘‘O.P.Q.’’ to Editor, Oestrus 3, no. 6 (November 11, 1878): 5. For further examples of class as a criterion for membership, see Parlin, A Brief History of the Regulation of Fraternities in the University of Texas, 35–38. 14. Keppel, The Undergraduate and His College, 145; Aiken, The Secret Society System, 53; Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 173, 202 (see also page 265); Howard Crosby, ‘‘Why I Object to Secret Societies in College,’’ quoted in Kellogg, College Secret Societies, 35. On prep schools, see Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 224–25, 227; Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 127–28. notes to pages 126 – 33

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15. Birdseye, Individual Training in Our Colleges, 216; William Raimond Baird to Varnum L. Collins, December 9, 1915, box 162, Chi Phi Fraternity Folder, Historical Subject Files: Fraternities, PU. 16. Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 299–301, 309–10. 17. A typical contemporaneous account of fraternities’ superseding of literary societies can be found in Cutting, Student Life at Amherst College, chap. 1. Horowitz is representative of the secondary sources; see Campus Life, 37. On the question of the attraction of other activities, see Geiger, introduction to The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 15. For a gleeful listing of the various clubs available to students at Yale (which included a chess club, a rifle club, a whist club, a yacht club, and an orchestra), see Beers, The Ways of Yale, 10–11. For a listing of similar organizations at Trinity College, see Patrick, ‘‘The Front Line,’’ chaps. 3–6. 18. James McCosh, ‘‘President’s Report,’’ December 22, 1875, series 11, box 38, Reports to the Board of Trustees of the College of New Jersey, James McCosh Records, Office of the President Records, PU. For a history of the literary societies at Princeton, see Looney, Nurseries of Letters and Republicanism. 19. Cutting, Student Life at Amherst College, 10, 37–43; Duff, ‘‘The Unification of 1874,’’ 9–14. Barnard’s lament is in Thwing, The American College in American Life, 139. On the dating of the disappearance of literary societies at Yale, see Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 219. 20. Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale, 246. For an analysis of the debates over college life in Stover at Yale, see Horowitz, Campus Life, 98–100. On the responsibility to ‘‘go out’’ for something, see also Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 307, 323. In Alma Mater, 37–38, even Canby acknowledges, writing some forty years after his graduation, that all they did ‘‘for college’’ was done in fact to gain prestige among one’s peers. When reading the secondary literature on college life in the postbellum United States, it is astounding how much three sources, all of them based on Yale, predominate: Canby’s Alma Mater, Johnson’s Stover at Yale, and Bagg’s Four Years at Yale. Indeed, it is one of the distinct problems of researching nineteenthcentury colleges that so much of the extant evidence focuses upon a small number of schools, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Amherst, and Williams chief among them. Nevertheless, the three aforementioned sources are incredibly rich in detail. We must be mindful, however, not to extrapolate too much from these accounts. 21. Zeta Psi ‘‘Delta’s Journal,’’ entries for September 1897 and 1897–98, Zeta Psi Fraternity, Mu Chapter Records, 1893–1911, SCM 061, SU. 22. Gardiner, Cornell Stories, 35; Minnegerode, The Big Year, 24–27, 34; Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale, 16–17; Canby, Alma Mater, 130, 70. Though Minnegerode’s book was published in 1921, he dedicated the volume to his fellow graduates of the class of 1910. Further details in the text lead one to understand that it is more descriptive of a period earlier than the 1920s. 23. Hyde, The College Man and the College Woman, 1, 324; Thwing, American Colleges, 89. For a general account of the rise of intercollegiate athletics, see Smith, 334

notes to pages 133 – 40

Sports and Freedom; on their connection to masculinity, see, among others, Park, ‘‘Biological Thought’’; and Higgs, ‘‘Yale and the Heroic Ideal.’’ On the supposed connections between athletic competition and the world of the public sphere, see Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 206. On Theodore Roosevelt, masculinity, and American imperialism, see Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood. On the shift from manliness to masculinity, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16–20; Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 10. 24. Smith, Sports and Freedom, 4, 28–33, 54, 69–70, 81. 25. Ibid., 49–51, 42, chap. 11, 46; Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 71. James Hulme Canfield also notes the institutional pride fostered by intercollegiate athletics in The College Student and His Problems, 105–6. On the public understanding colleges through sports, see Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 230. 26. Patton and Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel, 292; Canby, Alma Mater, 49, 70; Holbrook, Boys and Men, 37. On the question of democracy fostered through sports, see also ‘‘College as a Means of Stifling Thought,’’ NYT, March 25, 1912, 20, where Owen Johnson comments that athletics are the great leveler in college. On muscular Christianity, see Putney, Muscular Christianity. 27. ‘‘Politics Scuttled Frats,’’ Durham Morning Herald, Duke University Centennial Edition, Spring 1939, 6, DU; ‘‘Semi-Annual Report of Rutger’s [sic] Chapter,’’ 1884, box 4, DUP; Zeta Psi ‘‘Delta’s Journal,’’ 53, Zeta Psi Fraternity, Mu Chapter Records, 1893–1911, SU. For Amherst Non-Fraternity Association, see box 2, folder 2, Constitution and Minutes, 1900–04, Clubs and Societies Collection, AC. On interfraternity sports, see, for instance, Occident 1, no. 8 (September 29, 1881): 3, where it is recounted that Berkeley’s Chi Phi chapter beat Delta Kappa Epsilon in baseball, 19 to 14; and ‘‘Some of the Marked Differences between Cornell and Others of the Large Universities of the East,’’ NYT, February 4, 1912, X6. 28. Canby, Alma Mater, 108. On the lack of manliness in study, see Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 279. Leonard Ellis has also pointed out that fraternity men, because they were wealthier and more likely to have attended elite prep schools, were much better prepared for the classroom than their poorer or even more middle-class fellow students. They could afford to take more time out of the classroom to invest in other activities, whereas those who were not so well-prepared were often admitted to college with ‘‘conditions,’’ meaning that they had extra remedial work to perform in addition to the regular work assigned to all students. See Ellis, ‘‘Men among Men,’’ 273. 29. McCosh, ‘‘President’s Report’’; Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 647, 650; on Berkeley, see An Account of the Greek-Letter Fraternities. For more on cheating, see Patton and Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel, 330; Standish, Frank Merriwell at Yale, 12, where Frank assists his future roommate during their entrance examination; and Walter B. Hill to Mary Clay Hill, July 4, 1868, in Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 55. For those who disagreed, see Canby, College notes to pages 141 – 45

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Sons and Fathers, 14, in which he claims that pretending not to study is posturing on the part of young men, interesting evidence in and of itself. 30. ‘‘Records of the Michigan Chapter of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1884– 1896,’’ entry for October 23, 1893, box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM; ‘‘A Report on Interfraternity Relations of Dartmouth College, Confidential, Issued May, 1914,’’ entry for April 22, 1912, 189, DC; ‘‘Report of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts,’’ January 17, 1911, 301, Subgroup 1: Minutes, vol. 11, May 1904–September 1916, Trustees Affairs Collection, UNC; Slosson, Great American Universities, 127–28. 31. Frederick M. Hunter, ’05, Chi Phi, Traditions and Standards in Scholarship, 7, Miscellaneous Folder, Chi Phi Files in General Files, AC. For cases at a variety of schools, see Parlin, A Brief History, 55; ‘‘Keeps Tab on Fraternities,’’ NYT, February 15, 1912, 1; and ‘‘Fraternity Men’s Standing,’’ NYT, February 11, 1912, X7. The fact that the New York Times was regularly reporting on fraternity scholarship standards should give us some idea of the degree to which the trend had become of national concern by the early twentieth century. Even fraternity historian Clyde Sanfred Johnson admits, ‘‘By the beginning of the 20th Century the dichotomy between faculty values and those held by students had become deep and wide.’’ See Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 175; despite this he quickly claims that fraternity members were no different than any other students. 32. Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 128–38; Levere, ’Twixt Greek and Barb, 12, 27–28; McCosh, ‘‘President’s Report’’; Wallace, Princeton Sketches, 121; Coulter, College Life in the Old South, 353; Kellogg, College Secret Societies, 24. 33. Walter Hill to Mary Clay Hill, November 7, 1868, and Walter Hill to Mary Clay Hill, February 27, 1870; both in Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 78, 146. See also Parlin, A Brief History, 38–40. 34. Delta Upsilon Minutes for early 1880s through April 5, 1890. They were finally granted a spot on the board, provided they agree to purchase forty copies of the Palladium once published; box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM. On Johns Hopkins, see ‘‘Victory for Non-Greeks,’’ NYT, November 24, 1912, X14. On the fraternity control of newspapers and yearbooks, see Patton and Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel, 299–300. For a lackluster defense of fraternity control of extracurricular activities, see Clark, The Fraternity and the College, 26. For a fictional representation, see Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale, 184; or Washburn, Fair Harvard, 291–92. 35. ‘‘Report of the Committee on Anti-Fraternity Legislation’’ to the 1913 InterFraternity Conference, November 29, 1913, 23–24, 34; in box 8, Report of the Committee on Anti-Fraternity Legislation, 1913, Folder, Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, series 41/2/20, Student Affairs Collection, UI. 36. See ‘‘Records of the Michigan Chapter of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1884–1896’’; ‘‘Recording Secretary’s Books of Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1900– 1902’’; and ‘‘Recording Secretary’s Book of Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1902–06’’; all in box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM. 336 notes to pages 145 – 49

37. Walter B. Hill to Mary Clay Hill, May 9, 1869, in Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 85; Phi Record, vol. 2, nos. 1 and 2, April 1895, 2; Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 105 (see also 144); Kind, ‘‘The Fraternity Situation at Wisconsin,’’ 7; Clark, The College and the Fraternity, 81. 38. Entries for November 22, 1906, May 6, 1907, and November 12, 1907 (but see also the entirety of the minutes), box 1, folder 1, Student Affairs Committee Records, SC 016, SU. For vandalism in town, see Canby, Alma Mater, 29. For descriptions of antics, see An Account, 14–15; ‘‘Expelled for an Escapade,’’ NYT, December 6, 1912, 5; Walter B. Hill to Mary Clay Hill, February 29, 1868, in Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 28; and Patton and Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel, 242–47. For constitution stealing, see Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 143. On fraternity versus nonfraternity numbers, see the example with which the chapter opened as well as Slosson, Great American Universities, 128. 39. On the question of freshman/sophomore rush, see Beers, The Ways of Yale, 12, in which he claims that all spontaneity had left the class rush in that it was now thoroughly an organized affair (this by 1895). At some schools it had ceased altogether by this point, while at others it continued vibrantly through the early twentieth century. Baird cited in Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 30. On the possibility of hazing being imported from West Point, see Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage, 103; on traditions of class hazing, see ibid., 104–9. Nuwer claims that class hazing, at least of the violent variety, came to an end almost everywhere by the 1930s (110). For complete histories of hazing in fraternities, see Nuwer, Broken Pledges; and Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage. 40. On Leggett, see Kellogg, Secret Societies, chap. 5; Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage, 123; and Clark, The Fraternity and the College. For Stanford, see box 1, folder 11, Minutes for March 15, 1911, Stanford University Student Affairs Committee Records, SC 016, SU; other hazing tactics of the time are available in Cormack, Initiation Stunts, and in a Chi Phi scroll addressed to ‘‘Freshman Morrow’’ sometime in 1910 in q⌲⌭ Miscellaneous Folder, General Files, AC. 41. Clark, The Fraternity and the College, 69–74, 55, 72–73; ‘‘Fraternity Opposes Hazing,’’ NYT, March 30, 1894, 4. On theories of hazing, see Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, chap. 6; Turner, The Ritual Process, 94–103, 167–70; Leemon, Rites of Passage in a Student Culture; Nuwer, The Hazing Reader; Tiger, Men in Groups, 144–45; Raphael, The Men from the Boys, 79–95; and particularly Sweet, ‘‘Understanding Fraternity Hazing.’’ 42. Delta Kappa Epsilon Rules, n.d., q⌲⌭ Miscellaneous Folder, General Files, AC. Some have plausibly argued, for instance, that the practice of extended pledging began as a result of fraternities extracting pledges from prep-school students to join fraternities before they had even graduated from their schools. Certainly this did occur. Fraternities also pledged men the year before they started college when they came to take their entrance examinations and waited for them at train stations on the day of their arrival for the first day of college. My research also indicates that notes to pages 150 – 53

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at some schools, as the administrations imposed restrictions upon entering students’ joining fraternities, the active brothers compensated by gaining pledges from the freshmen, requiring them to perform certain tasks but not officially initiating them into the fraternity—thus obeying the letter but not the spirit of the administrators’ laws. See, for instance, President’s Report in Trustee Affairs, volume 9, April 1891–January 1898, entry for February 12, 1896, 469, Subgroup 1: Minutes, UNC, where the president reports that the only consequence of their prohibiting freshmen from joining fraternities was to make the fraternity men give the freshmen pledge pins but not initiate them until the rules allowed them to do so. It would indeed be ironic if pledging and pledge tasks evolved out of administrative edicts designed to curb precisely these practices. The bottom line is that as long as there was a lag between committing to join a fraternity and actually joining it, hazing and other pledge ‘‘activities’’ could be conducted. On the prep school pledging thesis, see Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage, 122; and Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 99–100. 43. Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 144; Wilson Fairbanks to F. M. Crossett, June 19, 1887, box 6, Second Folder, DUP. For a critique of the rushing practices resulting in little knowledge of pledge by fraternity or fraternity by pledge, see ‘‘Fraternities,’’ Occident, vol. 2, no. 18 (1882), 4. On rushing as a form of courtship, see also Tiger, Men in Groups, 144–45. 44. Birdseye, Individual Training, 218–19; for an account of what happened when some fraternities broke the rushing/pledging agreement, see ‘‘University of Pennsylvania: Broken Fraternity Agreement Causes a Flurry of Excitement,’’ NYT, October 6, 1912, F10. For other attempts at this, see ‘‘Trinity College: Effort to Put through an Interfraternity Rushing Agreement Fails,’’ NYT, December 1, 1912, X14. The situation was so dire at Brown that in 1912 the winning entry of their annual essay contest was a treatise on the fraternity rushing problems. See ‘‘Brown’s 1880 Prize Topic,’’ NYT, November 17, 1912, X15. 45. Clark, The Fraternity and the College, 25; on criticism, see ibid., 62–63; Minutes of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity at the University of Michigan, entries for May 8, 1903, May 2, 1910, and May 16, 1910; all in box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM. Stanford student is Alva Barzen to Family, October 19, 1913, box 3, folder 14, Alva Barzen Letters, Student Memoirs and Letters Collection, SC 103, SU. On influence of elder members over younger, see also Patton and Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel, 268. 46. ‘‘Ambulatory’’ in Porter, Sketches of Yale Life, 225; Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 527; McCosh, ‘‘President’s Report’’; Faculty Minutes, vol. 1:6, 1856– 1885, entry for Monday, June 1, 1885, UNC; ‘‘Record of the Michigan Chapter of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1884–1896,’’ entries for October 14, 1893, and November 6, 1893, box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM; ‘‘Minutes of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1908–1915, 1331 Hill Street,’’ entry for October 16, 1910, box 1, Delta Upsilon Papers, UM; and Sheldon, Student Life and Customs, 219. 338

notes to pages 154 – 57

47. ‘‘The Customs as to the Use of Liquor in Stanford University,’’ attached to resolution for February 7, 1908, box 1, folder 2, Student Affairs Committee Records, SC 016, SU; accounts of the riot and protest are in the same folder. For an example of the use of ‘‘dissipation,’’ see ‘‘Interchange,’’ Academy, vol. 2, no. 8, November 1887, 372–74, in which a number of college presidents debate the merits of secret societies. 48. Letter from ‘‘A Freshman,’’ Oestrus, vol. 4, no. 8, March 21, 1879, 4; Birdseye, Individual Training, 181. On gambling, see also Keppel, The Undergraduate and His College, 142. On the question of vice and cities, see, for instance, Thwing, American Colleges, 43–48; and Birdseye, Individual Training, 179, 279. For a fictional account of a vice-addled urban boy, see Washburn, Fair Harvard, 33. For reports surrounding athletics and debauchery (mostly alcohol), see Smith, Sports and Freedom, 123, 129; and Birdseye, Individual Training, 157. 49. Canby, Alma Mater, 235; Wilson Fairbanks to F. M. Crossett, November 11, 1887, box 6, Second Folder, DUP. 50. Birdseye, Individual Training, 212, 314. On fraternity affiliation of faculty members, see, for instance, ‘‘Psi Upsilon in 1876–7,’’ Programs Folder, Psi Upsilon Files, General Files, AC. On Williams College, see chapter 1 of this book, as well as Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log. On the situation at Trinity, see ‘‘Politics Scuttled Frats’’; Winslow, Eta Prime of Kappa Sigma, 44–47; and Horowitz, Campus Life, 53–54. 51. It is a testament to the appeal of secrecy that at the same moment that almost all colleges officially recognized and supported college fraternities, a secret fraternity composed of selected members of the top fraternities on campus, Theta Nu Epsilon, was founded and spread out across the country. This fraternity emphasized drinking and secrecy more so than did the officially recognized organizations, and because of this, deans and fraternity leaders did their best to eliminate it from their campuses. For debates over Theta Nu Epsilon, see, in particular box 10 of the Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, UI. Clark was one of the most committed enemies of Theta Nu Epsilon, and he seemed completely unable to recognize that it was, in most respects, identical to the earlier incarnations of the very fraternities that he cared so much about. It was also founded for the same reasons. For Clark, Theta Nu Epsilon was evil and other fraternities good. For many students, Theta Nu Epsilon and the official organizations were much more of a piece. 52. Princeton alumni attempts are detailed in ‘‘The Greek Letter Societies in Princeton College. Report of the Committee and Arguments of Hugh L. Cole, Esq., and of Jonathan Edgar, Esq., in behalf of the Princeton College Alumni Association of the City of New York, before the Trustees of the College, at Princeton, N.J., on the 22nd day of December, 1875,’’ in box 162, Historical Subject Files: Fraternities, PU. Bucknell example is in Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars, 41–43; Bucknell was then called the University of Lewisburg. There were also statewide efforts to rid state schools of fraternities. The most success—in the form of legislative notes to pages 158 – 61

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bans on Greek-letter organizations—occurred in Arkansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi, though state supreme courts eventually stuck down the laws. No laws have been in existence banning fraternities since 1929. See ‘‘Laws Prohibiting Fraternities at Universities,’’ box 10, Fraternities Folder, Fred H. Turner Papers, series 41/1/20, Student Affairs Collection; ‘‘Report of the Committee on AntiFraternity Legislation to the 1913 Inter-Fraternity Conference,’’ November 29, 1913, box 8, folder titled ‘‘Report of the Committee on Anti-Fraternity Legislation, 1913,’’ Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, series 41/2/20, Student Affairs Collection; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, ‘‘The College Fraternity at Mid-Century,’’ in The College Fraternity in 1951, 6, published by the Fraternity Press, box 3, Major Magazine Articles Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, series 41/2/50, Student Affairs Collection; all in UI. 53. Thomas Arkle Clark, ‘‘The Fraternity and Its Alumni,’’ 3, offprint from Banta’s Greek Exchange, dated January 25, 1915, box 17, 1914 Folder, Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, series 41/2/20, Student Affairs Collection, UI. On dates for houses, see George Banta Jr., ‘‘Early Fraternity Houses,’’ n.d., Banta’s Greek Exchange, General Files, AC; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 30; Stadtman, University of California, 161; and Burns B. Crookston, ‘‘Fraternity Housing,’’ 1954, box IF-9, Housing Folder, 1954, Interfraternity Organizations, Stewart S. Howe Collection, series 26/20/30, UI. 54. The housing situation was different at different schools. By and large, however, by the mid- to late nineteenth century, most students lived and boarded in the nearby towns or lived with their parents if they came from those same towns. Poorer students tended to live in the dormitories, which had been built in earlier eras and were often poorly maintained but were much less expensive than living in private homes and paying rent there. This was a time in which college administrators and trustees felt it more prudent to spend their limited resources on books, salaries, and academic buildings than on dormitories, especially if it was possible to make other arrangements for housing; for an elaboration of this argument and its response, see Porter, The American Colleges and the American Public, 184; and Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars, 100. It was not until the early to mid-twentieth century that many schools began to build dormitories with the intention of being able to house the majority of their students. By this point, the fraternity houses were already well-established, meaning that Greeks and non-Greeks would continue to live segregated from each other. There are exceptions to this scenario, of course. Trinity (later Duke), for instance, instituted such strict rules for the building of fraternity houses that none were ever erected. Students lived in town until Duke built dorms, and then all students were required to move into them. At Yale and Harvard, private, for-profit residential houses (at Yale, Hutchinson, or ‘‘The Hutch,’’ and at Harvard, the Gold Coast) were built for wealthy students, while the poorer students remained in the older dormitories. Almost all schools divided their housing along class lines in some way, no matter how unintentionally. For a bril340 notes to page 163

liantly classist description of this split in college housing, see ‘‘ ‘Where Do You Room?,’ ’’ in Porter, Sketches of Yale Life. 55. Amherst Record, October 29, 1890, 1; John Addison Porter, ‘‘College Fraternities,’’ Century Magazine, 1888, 755, in box FS-1, American College Fraternity System Folder, Stewart S. Howe Collection, series 26/20/30, UI. 56. Oestrus, vol. 2, no. 10, September 9, 1878, 4; Corbin, Which College For the Boy?, 152. 57. As I note in chapter 2, women had been attending seminaries and academies for some time, as well as all female colleges. A few men of color and a handful of Jews had also graduated from antebellum colleges. 58. Beta Tablet, no. 2, 1893, 9, in box 1891, Chi Phi Fraternity Papers (which is actually a folder), MHS; Delta Upsilon Quarterly, n.d. [1907], General Files, AC. On the connections between whiteness and black domestic servants, see Hale, Making Whiteness, chap. 3. 59. Beers, The Ways of Yale, 51–53, 79; Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 293, 297; ‘‘ ‘Where Do You Room?,’ ’’ in Porter, Sketches of Yale Life, 77–79. Description of the sweep from ‘‘The Sweep,’’ in Porter, Sketches of Yale Life, 100. Patton and Field recount that at some schools the janitor and his assistants were known as ‘‘slaves’’ or ‘‘servi.’’ See Eight O’Clock Chapel, 248. 60. Sanderson, Cornell Stories, 54; Holbrook, Boys and Men, 3, 22; Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale, 83; A. B. Clarke (?) to Eugene Kern, December 17, 1912, box 1, folder 15, Student Affairs Committee Records, SC 016, SU. 61. Oren, Joining the Club, chaps. 1 and 2; Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 38–41; Broun and Britt, Christians Only, chap. 2; Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot, 2–9. 62. Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 54–56, 19–21; Oren, Joining the Club, 25–26. 63. On founding dates and descriptions of ‘‘minority’’ fraternities, see Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 46–47; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 38, 41–42; Lee, Fraternities without Brotherhood, 21–24; and Ross, The Divine Nine. 64. Oren, Joining the Club, 25; Wister, Philosophy 4. Helen Horowitz has argued that Oscar Maironi, despite his last name, is coded as a Jew in the novel; see Horowitz, Campus Life, 80. 65. Canby, Alma Mater, 128–29; Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale, 76. 66. On the argument about Catholic assimilation, see Steinberg, Academic Melting Pot, 2. For an exception to the rules of Jewish exclusion, see Oren, Joining the Club, 36, where he notes that two wealthy German Jews were members of Psi U and q⌲⌭ at Yale in 1908 and 1913, respectively. On the first exclusion code, see Lee, Fraternities without Brotherhood, 24. 67. On the issue of reputations and feminization, see Miller-Bernal, Separate by Degree, 66. On the issue of tolerance for women when still small in number, see Bordin, Women at Michigan, 10–13. On women’s exclusion, see Horowitz, Campus Life, 41. For a helpful summary of the history of coeducation, including the treatnotes to pages 164 – 73

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ment of women at newly coed schools, see Rosenberg, ‘‘The Limits of Access.’’ Women college students increased from 11,000 in 1870 to 283,000 by 1920. See Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women, 46. 68. Ida Shaw Martin quoted in Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 59–60. On sororities, see Turk, Bound by a Mighty Vow, chap. 1 especially, for the ostracism faced by early sorority women. Turk credits Kappa Alpha Theta as being the first Greek-letter women’s fraternity because it was the first to actually use Greek letters in its name; at least two other organizations had been founded just before Theta on other campuses but did not call themselves women’s fraternities. On the use of ‘‘sorority’’ instead of ‘‘women’s fraternity,’’ see Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 25. On sorority founding dates, see Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 58–59. In at least two fraternities, serious debate did take place from 1869 through the 1880s on the possibility of allowing women to become full members (some fraternities had earlier allowed women to join as auxiliary members), with a handful of fraternities initiating no more than ten women total (all of these before 1890). Few of these women were actually students at the institutions in which the fraternities had their homes, and even Johnson admits that their roles were subservient (56–58). 69. SOLA, An American Girl, 84; Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘The New Woman as Androgyne,’’ 253. It was not just, of course, that the men did not want the women, but also that many women realized their independence would be sharply curtailed if they married. 70. Slosson, Great American Universities, 332–33; Chairman to K. L. Schaupp, September 10, 1913, box 1, folder 16, Student Affairs Committee Records, SC 016, SU; Bordin, Women at Michigan, 19–22, 26; Conable, Women at Cornell, 117; Lowe, Looking Good, 56, 61–73, 95–96; Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 116– 17. By 1890 there were five sororities at Michigan, and by 1915 there were fourteen (Bordin, Women at Michigan, 22). 71. Canby, Alma Mater, 14. For fictional accounts of the college widow that end in disdain for her, see Hyde, The College Man and the College Woman, 20–23; and Ade, The College Widow. For a more sympathetic portrait of the college widow, see SOLA, An American Girl, 38. 72. Canby, The Age of Confidence, 91, 161–63. In Alma Mater, he describes prostitutes as ‘‘hearty barbarians like ourselves, giving and expecting nothing but a temporary companionship’’ (40). 73. An Account, 21–22; Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 527; ‘‘Report of the Committee on Anti-Fraternity Legislation,’’ 34–36; ‘‘The Customs as to the Use of Liquor in Stanford University’’; ‘‘The Case of Kelly,’’ n.d. [1911], folder 11; ‘‘Memorandum to the Student Affairs Committee,’’ n.d. [1908], folder 3; Anonymous to Mrs. Vera Townsend-Snow, n.d. [1908]; and A. B. Clark to C. H. Raymond, May 4, 1908, as well as typescripts of many other anonymous notes and postcards, folder 5; all in box 1, Stanford Student Affairs Committee Records, SC 342 notes to pages 173 – 77

016, SU. For two fictional accounts of chorus girls, see Flandrau, The Diary of a Freshman, 278–82; and Sanderson, Cornell Stories, 9. 74. Benét, The Beginning of Wisdom, 119, 126; entire Milly romance on pages 118–145. 75. Hill to Mary Clay Hill, June 20, 1869, in Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 92 (italics in original); William Preston Few to his mother, June 11, 1886, box 1, Correspondence: 1885–1899 Folder, Few Papers, DU; Fairbanks to F. M. Crossett, March 6, 1887, box 6, Second Folder, DUP. On Wisconsin, see Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 207; and ‘‘Report of the Committee on AntiFraternity Legislation,’’ 43. Samuel Ewer Simmons to his father, n.d. (probably 1895), box 1, folder 23, Samuel Ewer Simmons Papers, SC 391, SU. Kappa Alpha Theta in Turk, Bound by a Mighty Vow, 48–57. On mixed-sex socializing at Cornell after the first decade of coeducation, see Lowe, Looking Good, 93; and on other ways of meeting women, see Patton and Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel, 265–67, 292. 76. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, 470; Graduate of ’69, Four Years at Yale, 120; ‘‘Discuss Fraternities,’’ NYT, April 7, 1912, X9; ‘‘Report on the Committee of Anti-Fraternity Legislation,’’ 26; Corbin, Which College for the Boy?, 266; Occident, vol. 4, no. 1, January 12, 1883, 5. 77. Kellogg, College Secret Societies, 22; Psi U song in Songs of Psi Upsilon Folder, n.d., Psi Upsilon Files, General Files, AC (other songs in the folder date from the mid- to late nineteenth century); ‘‘First Anniversary Banquet of Beta Chapter of Chi Phi,’’ December 4, 1891, box 1891, Chi Phi Fraternity Papers, MHS; ‘‘Students and Matrimony,’’ College Herald, vol. 1, no. 1, November 26, 1881, DU; Walter B. Hill to Bernard Hill, May 29, 1871, in Hill, College Life in the Reconstruction South, 175; Minnegerode, The Big Year, 183.

chapter five 1. I have chosen to use the terms ‘‘women/girls’’ and ‘‘men/boys’’ interchangeably throughout this chapter. When I am quoting, girls/boys will appear with more frequency than women/men because college students called each other girls and boys. The words ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘men’’ would have connoted those older than college students at the time, though there are some exceptions. For instance, the terms ‘‘college man’’ and ‘‘college woman’’ were used with some frequency, though generally when referring to archetypes or to groups of college men and college women. 2. ‘‘Green,’’ New Student, vol. 6, no. 6, November 3, 1926, 5–6. This story was reprinted in the New Student from UC Berkeley’s Occident. For a description of the politics of the New Student, see the introduction to the collected volumes in the New Student, vol. 1. Writings from the New Student will henceforward be cited with their original page and volume number and dates of publication. 3. The best and most complete, at least in regard to college students, is Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful. notes to pages 178 – 86

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4. Ibid., 124 and chap. 1; Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 39; Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise. 5. ‘‘Inside the Fraternity,’’ New Student, vol. 8, no. 9, June 1929, 13–14, 15; Levine, The American College, 19. 6. Levine, The American College, chaps. 3 and 6. 7. Ibid., 127–33; Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 130–31, 135. In addition to the two-thirds of students who attended coed residential schools, 17 percent of all college men attended men’s single-sex schools and 16 percent of women were at women’s colleges. This chapter focuses, then, upon residential schools in suburban, rural, and some urban locations. It does not describe the urban schools that were largely nonresidential and that tended to enroll students who worked, lived at home, and participated little in other college activities. Of course, not all urban schools were like this. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago were all located in cities and all had vibrant extracurricular programs. 8. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 226; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 89. The percentage of students in fraternities varied from school to school. Schools that did have Greek systems, however, usually ranged from percentages of 25 to 75 percent membership. 9. Virginia Nelson, ‘‘Holding No Grudge,’’ 93; ‘‘ ‘Miss America’ Finds Ideal,’’ NYT, September 14, 1926, 29. On newspaper accounts, see, for instance, ‘‘Yale Fraternities Choose Members,’’ NYT, December 8, 1925, 4; and ‘‘Yale Fraternities Pick 14,’’ NYT, October 23, 1926, 11. For other accounts of the status of the fraternity man at home, see Angell and others, A Study in Undergraduate Adjustment, 116; Marks, Which Way Parnassus?, 157. 10. Thomas Arkle Clark, ‘‘In Defense of College Athletics,’’ Dearborn Independent, June 26, 1926, 28, in box 18, 1926 Folder, Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, 41/2/20, Student Affairs Collection, UI. The national study is Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 91, 41; Minnesota statistics are in Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 189; the glee club story is in Marks, Which Way Parnassus?, 225; and fraternity member quotation is from Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 106–7. Fraternities and sororities as well as almost all extracurricular activities had, by this point, been condoned by the administrations of schools at which they existed. Deans of men and women were hired at many schools to oversee, direct, and advise the personal and extracurricular lives of the students at their schools. This was in keeping with a philosophy of student life in the early twentieth century that saw colleges as being responsible for the entire lives of their students and not just their academic pursuits. See Horowitz, Campus Life, 111. 11. A ‘‘line’’ was what a boy used as his verbal means of introduction. It was meant to be flirtatious and to impress the girl with its originality and humor. 12. Waller, ‘‘The Rating and Dating Complex’’; Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 59. See also Gordon, ‘‘Was Waller Ever Right?’’; Modell, ‘‘Dating 344 notes to pages 186 – 91

Becomes the American Way of Life’’; and Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 199–203. The dating rules did not pertain to engaged couples, but to be engaged was to remove oneself from the social whirl to a certain degree. Unless one had a fiancé(e), rating and dating was a way of life. 13. White, The First Sexual Revolution, chap. 2 and 64–70. 14. On the issue of masculinity and homosexuality, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 272–79; Foucault, The History of Sexuality; and Chauncey, Gay New York, chap. 4. For the issue of the loss of male intimacy, see Ibson, Picturing Men; Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans, 366–400; Chauncey, Gay New York, chap. 4; and Rotundo, American Manhood, 278. 15. ‘‘Fraternity Advice for Freshmen, Dartmouth College, with Rushing Rules for Season of 1921–22,’’ Library of Congress. For an examination of the varieties of strategies regarding rushing rules, see A Report on Interfraternity Relations of Dartmouth College. 16. See, for instance, Ernest Martin Hopkins (hereafter EMH) to Wilbur M. Walden, February 6, 1932, box 187, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. 17. On the issue of Hopkins’s enthusiasm for allowing new fraternities on campus, see, for instance, EMH to William P. Smith, March 14, 1917, box 6, folder 95; EMH to Emerson Packard, February 8, 1922, box 57, folder 95; EMH to Thomas H. Johnson, July 23, 1926, box 122, folder 95; all in Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. 18. Dartmouth College Bulletin, new series, vol. 14, no. 6 (December 1925), 118, 121, DC; U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, 164; Elwood T. Dickinson, ‘‘Student Finances at Dartmouth,’’ Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, vol. 17, no. 9, August 1925, 750, 757, 759, DC. On the costs of joining a fraternity, see also Thomas Arkle Clark, ‘‘Shall I Join a Fraternity?,’’ American Boy, 1922, in box 18, 1922 Folder, Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, 41/2/20, UI. 19. Thetagraphs, vol. 3, no. 2, published by Theta Zeta of Lambda Chi Alpha, 1923, 8–11, DC; ‘‘Delta’s Report: Psi Epsilon, 1924,’’ Zeta Psi Records, 1919–1987, box 1, ‘‘Report: 1924’’ Folder, DC; Pi of Delta Kappa Epsilon, vol. 1, no. 1, 17, DC; Log of Pi, vol. 2, no. 1, 8, DC. See also the Phi Gamma Delta, vol. 74, no. 3, January 1952 (the chapter’s fiftieth anniversary) for their accomplishments in the late 1920s (162), Phi Gamma Delta Vertical File, DC. On fraternity participation in activities at the expense of their studies, see ‘‘Senior Report of 1924,’’ in ‘‘Report of the Committee for the Survey of Social Life in Dartmouth College: Fraternities,’’ May 1936, 18, DC. 20. Coles, Jottings, entry for August 12, 1973, 14–15. On the meanings of masculinity as virile and aggressive, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16–20. 21. John Cotton Dana to Eugene Clark, September 30, 1920, box 39, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC; Angell, The Campus, 139; Katz and Allport, Students’ Attitudes, 133–5.

notes to pages 192 – 97

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22. EMH to James Anderson Hawes, July 25, 1927, box 132, folder 95; E. H. Naylor to EMH, August 25, 1927, box 132, folder 95; both in Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. 23. Richardson, A Study of a Liberal College, 49, 24, 26. In making his report, Richardson traveled to a number of schools across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain with the object of making recommendations for Dartmouth’s future. 24. Milton A. Harrington, M.B., ‘‘The Mental Health Problem in the College,’’ 5, in box 104, Folder 34: Mental Hygiene, 1926–27, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. 25. Richardson, Study of a Liberal College, 49; Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 53; Burnham Putnam Beckwith, Autobiography of Burnham Putnam Beckwith (1904–1982), 85–6, in box 3, folder 10, Student Memoirs and Letters Collection, SC 103, SU; McConn, College or Kindergarten?, 160; Gauss, Life in College, 50. See also Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 241–45. 26. Goodman, ‘‘Changing Attitudes of the Dartmouth Undergraduate,’’ 26; Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 66; National Interfraternity Conference Minutes, 1922, 52; Hawes, Twenty Years among the Twenty Year Olds, 110. On drinking in fraternities, see also Angell, The Campus, 84, 162–63; Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 66–67, 71, 181–86; and Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 310–23. On middle-class drinking, see Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 170–74. On gender and alcohol in this period, see Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks, chap. 1. 27. John Cotton Dana to William H. Barber, July 12, 1920, box 39, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. On drunkenness, see Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 316–18; on alumni drinking, see Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 66, 71–72. 28. Harold Gibson Hamilton’s ‘‘Scrapbook of Newspaper Clippings Concerning Dartmouth College, 1836–1945,’’ vol. 1, DC. Clippings are primarily from the Boston Globe, the Boston Post, and the New York Globe. 29. On regulating antics, see the letter sent to each fraternity by EMH, October 21, 1921, box 57, folder 95; EMH to M. G. Jones, March 19, 1923, box 66, folder 95; both in Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. The Etna Cemetery letter is EMH to Robert Coltman, May 4, 1932, box 187, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC; recounting of initiation is in Coles, Jottings, entry for August 13, 1973, 15. 30. Clifford Orr to EMH, October 30, 1925, box 108, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. On the issue of theatrical involvement of the students in question and their taking women’s roles in plays, see the Aegis (Dartmouth’s yearbook) for 1922, 462–64; for 1923, 500–502; and for 1924, 385–87. On the salience of gendered notions of effeminacy and aesthetics in relation to homosexuality, see, for instance, D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 227–28. 346

notes to pages 198 – 203

31. Clifford Orr to EMH, October 30, 1925; EMH to Ralph P. Holben, October 8, 1925; EMH to Clifford Orr, October 28, 1925; all in box 108, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. 32. Epsilon Kappa Phi to EMH, October 11, 1925, box 108, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. On Hopkins’s dealings with the other homosexual student in 1921, see box 40, folder 101, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. For a different account of the reaction to homosexuality at the University of Kansas in the 1920s, see Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 53–56. At Harvard University, officials responded by expelling all the students involved in a 1920s homosexual clique. See Wright, Harvard’s Secret Court. For a more complete exploration of these incidents, see Syrett, ‘‘The Boys of Beaver Meadow.’’ 33. In a number of letters, Hopkins explores the connections between the three elements, wondering if an interest in aesthetics and things deemed ‘‘cultural’’ led to the development of effeminacy or whether the sequence of events operated the other way around. Hopkins was not alone in these questions. Influenced by European sexologists and by Freud, particularly, psychiatrists were grappling with what exactly homosexuality was through the 1920s. See D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 226–27; and Chauncey, ‘‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality.’’ 34. Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 144. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Dartmouth had begun importing women to play the women’s parts in their plays by the late 1920s, perhaps in response to the preponderance of Beaver Meadow boys taking on women’s parts in earlier years. On effeminacy, homosexuality, and tensions with masculinity, see White, First Sexual Revolution, 64– 70. For an analysis of masculinity gained through sport, see Putney, Muscular Christianity. 35. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 144; Clyde Sanford Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 86; Angell, The Campus, 87. There is a good deal of discrepancy between different sources about just what percentage of students were in fraternities at any given time. Suffice it to say that the 1920s had the highest percentage in the history of fraternities in either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. 36. For a contemporaneous analysis of the pros and cons of expansion, particularly in the 1920s, written by an acknowledged fraternity leader, see Thomas Arkle Clark, ‘‘Fraternity Expansion,’’ Banta’s Greek Exchange, vol. 9, no. 2, March 1921, 75–77, in box 17, 1920–21 Folder, Thomas Arkle Clark Papers, 41/2/20, UI. 37. There are exceptions to the rule of fraternity expansion. Some of the older fraternities believed that they could maintain their prestige only by limiting the number of chapters to a certain finite number of schools. On the question of alumni job bureaus, see, for instance, the correspondence between Nat Olds and EMH, April 1919, box 21, folder 95, Ernest Martin Hopkins Papers, DC. On businessmen in fraternities, see Hawes, Twenty Years among the Twenty Year Olds, 74. 38. Sigma Delta was a local fraternity at UNC, meaning that it had no sister

notes to pages 205 – 9

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chapters at other schools. It was probably formed for the express purpose of petitioning a national fraternity (in this case, Delta Upsilon) for membership. Until it was admitted, however, it had to have a name of its own. That they chose Greek letters is symbolic of the fact that they considered themselves to be a fraternity, albeit one without sister chapters as yet. 39. Petition, May 20, 1926, in folder 1, Records of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, UNC. UNC would not get a charter for a chapter of Delta Upsilon until 1953; see ‘‘Local History of Delta Upsilon: North Carolina Chapter,’’ folder 4, Records of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, UNC. These petitions were common. See, for instance, ‘‘Petition from Psi Delta Sigma of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity,’’ December 1930, box 3, Sigma Alpha Epsilon Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU. 40. Helen Laughlin to Frank Cooper, October 22, 1926, series 2, Chi Psi Central Office: General Folder, n.d., and 1925–1953, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. That Mrs. Laughlin wrote to the fraternity instead of Mr. Laughlin is atypical. As we will see below, however, Mr. Laughlin was deceased. 41. Walter Crissman to Clifford Williams, March 9, 1927, series 4, Correspondence Files: General, 1858–2001, 2002; ‘‘Notations on Families,’’ series 8, Membership Files: folder titled Rushing Letters and Lists of Actives, 1927–1958; both in Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. 42. ‘‘Report of J. Truman Bidwell, Visited May 5, 6, 7, 8, 1926’’; ‘‘Report of C. H. Williams and H. S. Slifer, University of North Carolina and the Alpha Chi Society, Visited April 13, 14, and 15, 1926’’; both in series 4, Visitors’ Reports Folder, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. Chi Psi had originally had a chapter in North Carolina at UNC but it had died out during the Civil War. Part of the problem in reviving the chapter was that there were no alumni left from the earlier chapter to lead the revival. 43. See, for instance, C. Van Leuven to Executive Council of Chi Psi, March 19, 1925; Frank Cooper to Clifford H. Williams, May 25, 1925; and ‘‘Alumni Report on Reestablishing Alpha Sigma at the University of North Carolina,’’ June 22, 1926; all in series 2, Chi Psi Central Office Folder, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. The council’s decision and the responsibilities of the southern alumni are detailed in John Wendell Anderson to H. Seger Slifer, November 16, 1926, series 2, Chi Psi Central Office Folder, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. Emphasis in original. Petition is in series 3, Chi Psi Central Office Folder, Petition for Admission, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. 44. On the opposition as well as the raising of the money, see Nelson T. Levings [one of the alumni involved in the revival] to William E. LeClere, September 23, 1965, series 3, Chi Psi Central Office Folder, Petition for Admission, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. On the national convention’s 348 notes to pages 210 – 13

decision, see the first letter of revived Alpha Sigma of Chi Psi to ‘‘Brother in Chi Psi,’’ November 14, 1928, series 3, Chi Psi Central Office Folder, Petition for Admission, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. 45. In Percy Marks’s novel of college life, for instance, protagonist Hugh is shown pictures of the houses at other schools. See Marks, The Plastic Age, 116. 46. Duerr, Baird’s Manual of American College Fraternities, 7. On the issue of alumni financing and undergraduate inability to pay, see National Interfraternity Conference Minutes, 1922, 106; National Interfraternity Conference Yearbook, 1931, 74–76; and National Interfraternity Conference Yearbook, 1934, 142. 47. Marks, The Plastic Age, 124–25, 128; Marks, Which Way Parnassus?, 178. See also Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 60; and McConn, College or Kindergarten?, 160. 48. Marks, Which Way Parnassus?, 162–64. 49. In fairness, many of the active alumni may also have enjoyed the conferences they attended and the opportunities to socialize with their peers and former classmates, to make new friends among the brethren, and to cultivate business connections. This alone, however, cannot explain the passion with which some men cared about the welfare and the future of their organizations. For that, we must look to reputation, identity, and manhood. For another defense of alumni involvement from a man who dedicated much of his life to his fraternity, see Hawes, Twenty Years among the Twenty Year Olds, 76. On the issue of reputation and expansion, Diana Turk concurs for the case of women’s fraternities. See Turk, Bound by a Mighty Vow, chap. 3. 50. Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot, 11–16; Synnott, The Half-Opened Door; Horowitz, Campus Life, 105; Lee, Fraternities without Brotherhood, 24; Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 116–19, 171. 51. Marks, Which Way Parnassus?, 181; Angell and others, A Study of Undergraduate Adjustment, 116; ‘‘Called Ku Klux,’’ NYT, December 15, 1924, 3; ‘‘Nordic Turns Greek as Klan Masks as Frat,’’ New Student, vol. 4, no. 12, December 20, 1924, 1 (the fraternity chapter was in Albany, N.Y.); Katz and Allport, Students’ Attitudes, 145–52. The undergraduate D.K.E. member is quoted in Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 121; see also 93–101, 118–22. For some evidence that southern schools and fraternities were more welcoming of Jews than were northerners, where proportions of Jews remained much higher, see Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 286–88. 52. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, chap. 6; Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 13–24; Modell, ‘‘Dating Becomes the American Way of Life’’; Rothman, Hands and Hearts, chap. 7; Thomas Arkle Clark, ‘‘The Passing of the Chaperon,’’ Atlantic Monthly, vol. 129, April 1922, 516–19; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, chaps. 10 and 11; White, First Sexual Revolution. 53. Blanchard and Manasses, New Girls for Old; Dickerson, So Youth May Know; Eddy, Sex and Youth. One of the primary difficulties I have encountered in doing the notes to pages 214 – 20

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research for this project is that the reactions of the pickups and prostitutes frequented by fraternity men are far too often lost to the historical record. The sociologists and journalists who documented men’s and women’s sexual behaviors were often only interested in their middle-class peers and not those they considered beneath them. Because of this, my study does not shed much light on the sexual experiences of the working-class women with whom fraternity men had sex; this should not be taken to mean, however, that I think these experiences irrelevant. On working-class women’s sexuality, treating, and prostitution in this era, see Clement, Love for Sale. 54. Margaret Mead, introduction to Ehrmann, Premarital Dating Behavior, xv. 55. Kelley, College Life and the Mores, 8; Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 126–29; Lowe, Looking Good, 9–10. 56. Peck and Wells, ‘‘On the Psychosexuality of College Graduate Men,’’ 708, 707. In the follow-up article by Peck and Wells two years later, the percentage had risen to 37 percent; Peck and Wells, ‘‘Further Studies in the Psychosexuality of College Graduate Men,’’ 514. While some of the men in their studies had graduated from college as much as ten years earlier, the mean age of those in the study was twenty-three, and it was found that a majority of those who had experienced sexual intercourse had done so for the first time by age twenty-two and were much less likely to have done so for the first time after that age. Because of this, these numbers may be slightly inflated. On prostitutes and ‘‘other’’ women, see Peck and Wells, ‘‘On the Psychosexuality of College Graduate Men,’’ 709; Peck and Wells, ‘‘Further Studies in the Psychosexuality of College Graduate Men’’, 516; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 110–13; Peiss, ‘‘ ‘Charity Girls’ and City Pleasures’’; and Clement, Love for Sale. 57. Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 16–17, 26, 30, 188, 198, 67, 184–85, 199, 192. See also Angell, The Campus, 168–69. Angell concluded that petting was common enough among both college men and women but ‘‘actual immorality’’ between university men and women was not. 58. ‘‘Inside the Fraternity,’’ 13. 59. Clark, Discipline and the Derelict, 195, 198–99; Montross and Montross, Town and Gown, 35, 108–9. 60. Edwards, Artman, and Fisher, Undergraduates, 218, 181. 61. Accounts of William Inge and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (including quotation) are from Voss, A Life of William Inge, 35–36. It is important that in this account the woman is not a college student. It would have been almost unthinkable for a female college student during the 1920s. 62. Thetagraphs, May 1923, 12; Pi of Delta Kappa Epsilon, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1920, 17; Log of Pi, vol. 2, no. 1, May 1926, 8; ‘‘Delta’s Report: Psi Epsilon, 1924,’’ Report 1924 Folder, Zeta Psi Papers; Joanna Henderson Sternick, ‘‘ ‘Lest the Old Traditions Fail,’ ’’ 30; all in DC. 350

notes to pages 220 – 25

63. F. B. Colton, ‘‘Stag Line Put under Ban at Amherst Frat Dances,’’ Boston Herald, November 24, 1929, in Fraternities/Newsclippings File, AC. On Amherst dances and Smith College students, see also Lowe, Looking Good, 113. 64. Carl Stuhrberg to Joseph A. Bursley, January 18th, 1928, and Paul P. Donohy [?] to Bursley, October 22, 1930, both in box 1, folders: Meetings, 1926– 27, and Meetings, 1929–30, respectively, Vice President for Student Affairs Collection, UM; Anonymous blackmail letter to ‘‘Miss Fink,’’ February 18, 1924, box 1, folder titled Meetings, 1924–25, Vice President for Student Affairs Collection, UM; Fink’s letter to Bursley about transferring to another school, January 25, 1927, box 1, folder titled Meetings, 1926–27, Vice President for Student Affairs Collection, UM; Henry E. Riggs to Bursley, January 11, 1922, box 3, Phi Delta Theta Folder, Vice President for Student Affairs Collection, UM. 65. Bordin, Women at Michigan, 22; Conable, Women at Cornell, 117; Lowe, Looking Good, 118. 66. On Jewish fraternities and their behavior vis-à-vis Gentile fraternities, see Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 3.

chapter six 1. Transcript of interview of Robert Kilmarx with Robert Jones, County Solicitor for Grafton County, March 19, 1949, Folder titled ‘‘Cirrotta—Factual,’’ Raymond Cirrotta Papers, DC. 2. The preceding account is taken from a number of different documents, principally: Dartmouth College News Service press release, March 19, 1949, in Raymond J. Cirrotta Alumni File, DC; ‘‘Summary of George G. Eaves, ’49 and George L. Day, ’49 on events preceding the death of Raymond Cirrotta as given before the Judiciary Committee of the Undergraduate Council on June 3, 1949,’’ folder titled ‘‘Cirrotta Case, 1949–50, A–H,’’ John Sloan Dickey Papers, DC; ‘‘Statement of Robert Fox,’’ folder titled ‘‘Cirrotta—Correspondence with or about Individual Students Involved,’’ Raymond Cirrotta Papers, DC; Transcripts of interviews with Robert Jones, County Solicitor for Grafton County, March 19, 1949, folder titled ‘‘Cirrotta—Factual,’’ Raymond Cirrotta Papers, DC; as well as numerous published articles about the murder in Raymond Cirrotta Papers, DC. 3. Helen Merrell Lynd to John S. Dickey, June 3, 1949, folder titled ‘‘Cirrotta Case, 1948–49, J–Z,’’ John Sloan Dickey Papers, DC. 4. See the various letters to President Dickey in Cirrotta case folders, John Sloan Dickey Papers, including letters from the Progressive Party of New Hampshire (March 29, 1949) and Mrs. Paul Robeson (March 2, 1950) and the translated Il Progresso clippings, published in the New Hampshire Morning Union through the summer of 1949 in Raymond J. Cirrotta Alumni File, DC. 5. On the other deaths, see ‘‘Iowa Co-ed Found Slain,’’ NYT, December 12,

notes to pages 225 – 33

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1949, 22; ‘‘Student Kills Fraternity Brother after Ohio State Cocktail Party,’’ NYT, November 13, 1949, 1; ‘‘Brown U. Fraternity Bias Banned; Activities Curbed,’’ NYT, March 11, 1949, 4. 6. ‘‘Fraternities at Amherst,’’ Amherst Reports, vol. 2, no. 4, June 1963, 14, AC. At other schools, see ‘‘Report of the Committee for Survey of Social Life in Dartmouth College: Fraternities,’’ May 1936, DC; John R. Tunis, ‘‘Are Fraternities Worthwhile? No!’’ Rotarian, September 1937, 16–17, 57–58, in box 25, folder titled Are Frats Worthwhile?, Fred. H. Turner Papers, series 41/1/20, UI. On college students’ behavior generally in the 1930s, see ‘‘Youth in College,’’ Fortune, June 1936, 99–102, 155–56, 158, 161–62; Fred H. Turner, ‘‘Students of the Depression,’’ Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1935, in box 25, folder titled Students of the Depression, Fred. H. Turner Papers, UI. On numbers of men and women in the Greek system throughout the century, see Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 78–87. While the number of intercollegiate chapters has been on a steady increase since their founding, the number of members, as a percentage of total students enrolled, has been declining since the end of the 1920s (see ibid., 89). 7. L. G. Balfour to Presidents and Secretaries of Fraternities, July 9, 1940; Cecil J. Wilkinson to Deans of Men at Colleges Having Fraternities, February 20, 1942; both in series 13, box 2, folder titled National Interfraternity Conference, 1939–46, Records of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, UNC. The final published report by the National Interfraternity Conference, ‘‘Report of the PostWar Planning Committee,’’ November 24, 1944, can be found in box 2, folder titled National Conference, 1920–44, Vice President for Student Affairs Collection, UM. 8. ‘‘Amherst College, Report of the Faculty Committee on Long Range Policy,’’ January 1945, 108–24; ‘‘A Report of the Alumni Committee on Postwar Amherst College,’’ Amherst Alumni Council News, vol. 18, no. 3, February 1945, 111–24; ‘‘The Amherst Fraternity,’’ Report of the Committee on Postwar Fraternities by the Fraternity Business Management Committee of Amherst College, February 1945, in Fraternities Reopening after the War Folder; ‘‘Summary of Action on Fraternities’’; Ralph Young, ‘‘Discrimination in the Amherst Fraternity,’’ May 1959; all in AC. I will return to the issue of racial discrimination later in the chapter. 9. Mrs. Glenn Frank, ‘‘Heartache on the Campus,’’ Woman’s Home Companion, April 1945, 41. 10. Ibid., 41; Allen W. Porterfield, ‘‘The Hereafter of College Fraternities,’’ School and Society 61, 1579 (March 31, 1945), 196, in box 25, folder titled Publications, Others, Fred. H. Turner Papers, UI. Veteran quoted in Edith Efron, ‘‘The Two Joes Meet—Joe College, Joe Veteran,’’ NYT, June 16, 1946, SM11; second veteran quoted in Lee, The Campus Scene, 1900–1970, 84. There is some discrepancy about whether veterans joined fraternities or not. Many contemporary observers claimed that they did not, while others disputed this. On the latter point, see Clyde Sanfred Johnson, ‘‘Chapter House Discussions: How Student-Veterans 352

notes to pages 233 – 37

Put New Life in an Old Fraternity Tradition,’’ 1947, 1, 9, in box IF-9, folder titled Student Veterans, 1947, Interfraternity Organizations Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, series 26/20/30, UI. Veterans’ numbers are in Horowitz, Campus Life, 184. See also Waller, The Veteran Comes Back, 154; letter for history of Alpha Sigma of Chi Psi by Albert M. Dickson, UNC class of 1951, March 28, 1996, folder titled Histories and Descriptions: Tradition of Excellence, 1950s, Student Organizations and Activities Collection, series 7, Records of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of Chi Psi Fraternity, UNC. On Michigan’s declining rates of men interested in pledging, see John P. Gwin, Assistant to the Dean, to Donald Hamman, Expansion Secretary of Alpha Kappa Lambda, December 6, 1949, box 3, Alpha Kappa Lambda Folder, Vice President for Student Affairs Collection, UM; Kelley, College Life and the Mores, 148, 212–26. 11. Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 86, 89; on protest, see Levine, When Dreams and Heroes Died, 4. The overall number of men in fraternities increased from around 30,000 in 1920 to over 200,000 in 1970, but as a proportion of the total number of students, fraternities were obviously less popular than they had been. It is indicative of students’ careerism that the numbers of members in professional, academic, and honorary Greek-letter organizations has grown at a much higher rate than those of the traditional single-sex social organizations. See Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 77–79. The postwar expansion boom primarily occurred at schools that even many fraternities considered to be second rate; part of the expansion was also a product of new fraternities, which were founded in order to accommodate the growing number of college students who sought membership. At the same time, fraternities began to lose their hold on the older and more established colleges. See William R. Butler, ‘‘New Directions for Fraternities and Sororities: A Glance at the Past 35 Years,’’ 1964, in box 12, folder titled Butler, Speech on Fty. Trends, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, series 41/2/50, Student Affairs Collection, UI; ‘‘Campus Loses Its ‘Good-Time Guys,’ ’’ NYT, November 3, 1968, in box 12, folder titled Fraternities, IFC, Discrimination, NIC, 1967–69, Fred. H. Turner Papers, UI; and ‘‘Notorious Deaths,’’ 1981, in box 16, ‘‘Century Ago’’ Folder, Wilson Heller Papers, series 41/2/52, UI, which recounts the ‘‘exodus’’ of fraternities from Yale University. In other cases, those fraternities at more elite schools were more willing to disaffiliate from their nationals and become local fraternities because the students gained more prestige from their colleges than they did from the national fraternities to which they belonged. See ‘‘The Status of Fraternities at Brown University,’’ November 1961, box 2, folder titled Brown U Fty Study, 1961, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. 12. Pi Kappa Phi resolution, August 22, 1968, box 1, folder titled Pi Kappa Phi, 1969–1973, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; Columbia and Beta Theta Pi are in Albin Krebs, ‘‘6 in Columbia Fraternity Guard Their House with Gun,’’ NYT, August 10, 1968, in folder titled Beta Theta Pi, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, CU; Colorado group in Lawrence G. Weiss, ‘‘New CU Movement— notes to pages 237 – 38

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Student Moderates,’’ Denver Post, n.d. [1969] in box 14, folder titled NIC, 1969, Fred. H. Turner Papers, UI; Michigan Flyer is in VP for Student Affairs Collection, box 2, folder titled Fraternity Fliers, 1953–54, UM; Tom Charles Huston, ‘‘ ‘Operation Greek’: The Attempt to Destroy the American Fraternity System,’’ reprinted from the New Guard, 1964, box FS-2, folder titled Fraternity Foes, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI; J. Edgar Hoover, ‘‘ModernDay Campus Attilas—Or the SDS in Action,’’ February 12, 1970, 15, box FS-4, folder titled Role of Fraternities, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. Barry Goldwater also weighed in; see Goldwater, ‘‘The Four Principles of Fraternity Greatness,’’ Alpha Phi Quarterly (Summer 1961): 154–58, box FS-5, Values in Fraternity Folder, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. On fraternities’ conservatism, see Bohrnstedt, ‘‘Conservatism, Authoritarianism, and Religiosity of Fraternity Pledges,’’ 36, 39; Goldsen and others, What College Students Think, 119–21; Feldman and Newcomb, The Impact of College on Students, 199, 209; Boroff, Campus U.S.A., 61; ‘‘Survey Reveals Beta Profile,’’ Diamond’s Ray, Duke University, vol. 3, no. 1, Fall 1967, 1, in box 1, folder titled Beta Theta Pi, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU; Hoge, Luna, and Miller, ‘‘Trends in College Students Values between 1952 and 1979’’; Scott and Scott, Values and Organizations, 107; and Astin, Four Critical Years, 87. On the careerism of students in the 1950s, see Jacob, Changing Values in College, 1; and Kolb, ‘‘Changing the Collegiate Culture,’’ 67–68. On Greek-letter school spirit, see Wenkert and Selvin, ‘‘School Spirit in the Context of a Liberal Education,’’ 156– 68. One study also found that there was little difference in the attitudes of different fraternities, or of actives and pledges within the same fraternity. See Elton and Rose, ‘‘Brothers under the Pin.’’ 13. Alvan E. Duerr, Pledge Training, 24, 26, 30–31, in box IF-9, folder titled Pledge Training, 1946, Interfraternity Organizations Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI; ‘‘College Fraternities: The Perils of Big Brotherhood,’’ Look, March 12, 1963, 56. On fraternity men’s activities and those of the unaffiliated, see Friedson, Student Government; Williamson, ‘‘The Group Origins of Student Leaders.’’ 14. Lewis Bacon to William G. Cross, June 11, 1958, box 1, Alpha Kappa Lambda Folder, University of Michigan Fraternity Office Papers, UM; Leroy Collins in ‘‘Enduring Values of the College Fraternity,’’ 10, published by the National Interfraternity Conference some time in the 1970s, in box IF-9, Interfraternity Organizations Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. On expansion in the postwar years, see National Interfraternity Conference, ‘‘Information for Local College Groups Desiring Affiliation with National Fraternities,’’ 1957, in box IF-9, folder titled National Affiliation, 1957, Interfraternity Organizations Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. On job bureaus, see the documents in box 12, Vocational Services Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. 15. I will return to this issue in the final section of the chapter. For the persistence of rating and dating among sorority and fraternity members, see Smith, ‘‘Rat354

notes to pages 239 – 40

ing and Dating’’; Blood, ‘‘A Retest of Waller’s Rating Complex’’; Blood, ‘‘Uniformities and Deformities in Campus Dating Preferences’’; Gordon, ‘‘Was Waller Ever Right?’’; Rogers and Havens, ‘‘Prestige Rating and Mate Selection on a College Campus’’; Krain, Cannon, and Bagford, ‘‘Rating-Dating or Simply Prestige Homogamy?’’ 16. Editorial and student quoted in Eddy, The College Influence on Student Character, 157. Eddy and his colleagues agreed with these students: ‘‘We were forced to conclude that fraternities at their worst had become islands of anti-intellectualism with the waves of true learning only lapping at the shores’’ (156). On conformity, see also Strang, Group Activities in College and Secondary School, 119. Occasionally, fraternities protested in an organized fashion. At Berkeley, for instance, when administrators banned alcohol from campus parties, ‘‘fraternity men paraded in black arm bands and flew flags at half mast for a few brief hours yesterday. One sign read, First Loyalty Oaths; Now Temperance; Sex Next.’’ See ‘‘Student Party Drinking Is Banned by UC President,’’ n.d., box 2, Social Life Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. 17. On drinking and masculinity, see Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks, 49–59. In their 1953 study, Drinking in College (data obtained between 1949 and 1951), Robert Straus and Selden Bacon found that fraternity men’s drinking was only slightly higher than other men’s drinking (124–25). They did, however, discover that those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds drank more than their less wealthy peers (49) and that men tended to drink in groups (69, 98). While Straus and Bacon did not discover a statistically significant relationship between drinking and fraternity membership, the archival evidence I present here, which essentially begins at the time their research ended, indicates a very real correlation between the two. 18. William H. Jennings Jr. to Office of the Dean of Men, n.d., box 1, Beta Theta Pi Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; ‘‘Administrative Decision on the Violation of University Regulations by the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity on October 17, 1959,’’ in box 2, folder titled Fraternities, 1949–63, Herbert J. Herring Papers, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; ‘‘Kappa Sigma Fraternity Disturbance, Complaint by Allen Feezor,’’ December 14, 1970, Kappa Sigma Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU. The bottle throwing is recounted in a report by J. E. Douthat of the Men’s Residential Staff, October 2, 1971, Phi Kappa Fraternity Folder, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU. Complaints about rowdiness, snowball fights, firecrackers, drunkenness, bottle throwing, and all sorts of dormitory damage can be found in almost every fraternity’s file in the records of the dean’s office. 19. On the cat, see H. F. Bowers to Dean Robert B. Cox, December 20, 1961, Kappa Alpha Folder, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; 1966 statistics are in ‘‘Disciplinary Cases Involving Members of Kappa Alpha Order during Recent Years,’’ Kappa Alpha Folder, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; notes to pages 241 – 43

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‘‘The Kappa Alpha Case, Michael Garner for the group,’’ October 8, 1969, record of proceedings of Judicial Board, Kappa Alpha Folder, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU. A fraternity at UCLA demanded that its pledges bring them a dead dog that they had killed themselves as part of pledging. See ‘‘Youth Gives Details of Frat Orders to Provide Slain Dog,’’ March 3, 1948, in box 3, Hazing and Hell Week Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. Fraternity men at the University of New Mexico shot a mule. See ‘‘M for Mule,’’ Long Beach Press Telegram, May 12, 1966, A-25, in box 3, folder titled Pranks, Foolishness, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. 20. H. F. Bowers to Dean Robert B. Cox, May 1, 1950, Lambda Chi Alpha Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; Bowers to Cox, December 16, 1965, Kappa Alpha Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; James M. Case to Cox, April 15, 1970, Delta Tau Delta Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU. 21. On panty raids, see Lee, The Campus Scene, 96; Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 45–48; Bordin, Women at Michigan, 67; John D. Phillips, ‘‘University of California Student Disturbances, May 1956, Report and Recommendations, Berkeley, CA, 1956,’’ 2, in box 34, folder 8, Chancellors’ Records, UCB; Jay Bardwell, Bob Coppock, and Deane Wylie, ‘‘Confusion Follows U.C. Rioting,’’ Daily Californian, May 18, 1956, 1, 8; Jay Bardwell, ‘‘Rioters Receive Suspensions; Sororities Tarred and Painted,’’ Daily Californian, May 29, 1956, 1; ‘‘Columbia Students March on Barnard,’’ New York Herald Tribune, April 4, 1948, and ‘‘Fence Raid at Barnard,’’ NYT, April 4, 1948 (both in Fraternities—General Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, CU); A. A. McDonald to A. Hollis Edens, May 17, 1952, Student Affairs Folder, Arthur Hollis Edens Papers, DU; R. A. Elder to Edens, May 21, 1952, and Edens to Elder, May 27, 1952, box 33, Student Affairs Folder, Arthur Hollis Edens Papers, DU. The Princeton incident is in Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 46. 22. The ‘‘Woodward Letter,’’ so named for the dorm in which it had been left (Monday, April 8, 1973), is in box 2, Coeducation Anniversary Keynote Address Research 1997 Folder, Women at Dartmouth Collection, DC; ‘‘A Butterfield Coed Protests,’’ Dartmouth, May 7, 1973, Women at Dartmouth Collection, DC; Drew Newman, ‘‘Beta Put on Social Probation,’’ Dartmouth, May 7, 1973, in Women at Dartmouth Collection, DC. 23. H. F. Bowers to Robert B. Cox, May 2, 1960, Phi Delta Theta Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; ‘‘Trial of Phi Kappa Sigma,’’ February 13, 1963, Judicial Board Proceedings, Phi Kappa Sigma Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; ‘‘Interfraternity Council, Executive Board,’’ May 10, 1960, Pi Kappa Phi Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU. For a 1952 list of ‘‘pledge tasks’’—those things that pledges often had to do together as a group, something like a scavenger 356

notes to pages 243 – 46

hunt—see Philip E. Leinbach Collection in Alumni Collections, DU. For an exhaustive overview of hazing and its meanings, see Nuwer, The Hazing Reader. 24. ‘‘Report of the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct on Violations by Nu Chapter, Theta Xi Fraternity of University Regulations Governing Hazing,’’ October 27, 1959, box 34, folder 16, Chancellors’ Records, UCB; W. McLeod Patterson Jr. to ‘‘Active and Alumni Chapters and Interested Institutional Authorities,’’ February 24, 1961, Kappa Alpha Folder, Fraternity Files, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; L. G. Balfour to William Preston Few, April 17, 1940, box 2, folder titled Fraternities, 1936–48, Herbert J. Herring Papers, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; Memorandum from Jefferson A. Coleman to Deans of Men and Chapter Leaders, March 8, 1956, box 3, Delta Chi Folder, Vice President for Student Affairs Records, UM; ‘‘Youth in Hazing Chokes to Death,’’ NYT, September 18, 1959, 10; John Syrett, personal communication with the author, August 28, 2004. Syrett was initiated in 1961 after drinking the scotch. A complete record of hazing deaths can be found in Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage. 25. Postcards, both dated January 23, 1942, are in box 1, series 10, folder titled Fraternities and Sororities, 1941–43, 1946–48, Records of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, UNC. For an analysis of fraternity hazing rituals, see also Herbert, Sexual Violence and American Manhood, 62–67. 26. National Interfraternity Conference Yearbook, 1963, 32; Boroff, Campus U.S.A., 28. By 1956 administrators agreed that Yale’s fraternity system, already in serious decline, pretty much existed solely to give students a place to drink. Fraternity men themselves admitted that the fraternities would have little or no function without their bars. See Norman S. Buck, Archibald S. Foord, Sidney Lovett, and Thomas C. Mendenhall, ‘‘Fraternities and Fraternity Problems at Yale,’’ 1956, series 1, box 27, folder 268, Provost’s Papers, YU. 27. Howard Whitman, ‘‘The College Fraternity Crisis,’’ Collier’s, January 8, 1949, 65. At that point, a number of Amherst fraternities had Jews as members and the nationals did not seem to object. In 1947, however, Alpha Sigma Phi had derecognized their Middlebury chapter when it attempted to initiate three Jews. See Lee, Fraternities without Brotherhood, 26. It would be the Amherst incidents, however, that would cause the most stir. The most thorough history of the desegregation of college fraternities is James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition.’’ For other contemporaneous accounts of the controversy and the debates over democracy and discrimination, see Carey McWilliams, ‘‘Does Social Discrimination Really Matter?,’’ Commentary, November 1947, 408–15; McWilliams, ‘‘Equality or Fraternities?,’’ Commentary, May 1948, 407–15; and McWilliams, ‘‘Toward Real Fraternity,’’ Nation, August 12, 1950, 144–45. For a helpful overview of the antidiscrimination debate, see James, ‘‘The College Social Fraternity Antidiscrimination Debate.’’ 28. On Phi Kappa Psi, see press release, November 8, 1948, and Frederick D. Greene II, President of Amherst Phi Kappa Psi to Howard L. Hamilton, President

notes to pages 247 – 49

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of the National Organization, November 7, 1948, in folder titled Regulation and Discrimination, 1940s–1950s, General Files, AC; Alfred S. Romer, ‘‘The Color Line in Fraternities,’’ Atlantic Monthly, June 1949, 27–31; and Morris Kaplan, ‘‘Rumblings in the Fraternities,’’ New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1949, 17, 24, 26. 29. Whitman, ‘‘The College Fraternity Crisis,’’ 65. For an example of such an exception, see Herman B. Wells to Douglas M. Knight, November 3, 1966, where he explained that Sigma Nu offered what they called a ‘‘waiver with honor,’’ which permitted a chapter to initiate a member who would not have otherwise been admissible under the national rules (box 14, folder titled Fraternities, Title VI, Douglas Knight Papers, DU). Missouri study is in Gist, ‘‘Fraternal Membership Policies and Minority Groups.’’ 30. National Interfraternity Conference Yearbook, 1947, 123–26. 31. Romer, ‘‘The Color Line in Fraternities,’’ 30; Donald Richberg, quoted by D. R. Collins in ‘‘Panel on Selectivity’’ of the NIC, 1953, 5, 7, box 14, NIC Folder, Fred H. Turner Papers, UI; Todt in ‘‘IRAC Bulletin Extra,’’ IRAC Bulletin Folder, box 2, Fred Turner Dean’s Office Papers, series 41/1/41, UI; fraternity man quoted in Packard, The Status Seekers, 244. For more on fraternity as family and its implications, see George Starr Lasher, ‘‘Discrimination? Selection!,’’ Adventures in Fraternity, reprinted from the Fraternity Month, March 1949, box FS-1, Admissions Policies Folder, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 32. National Interfraternity Conference Yearbook, 1947, 123–26; D. R. Collins in ‘‘Panel on Selectivity,’’ 5. 33. Johnstown alumni quoted in Romer, ‘‘The Color Line in Fraternities,’’ 30. On the supposed links between the antifraternity camp and Communists, see also James, ‘‘The College Social Fraternity Antidiscrimination Debate,’’ 315–56; ‘‘Against Removal of the Clause: C. J. Hardee,’’ n.d., in box 2, Aut-Org—ATO Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. 34. On Columbia, see the letters from W. Emerson Gentzler, Assistant Provost, to the presidents of all Columbia fraternities and their alumni representatives, June 22, 1951 and February 19, 1952, folder 1.1.210 (2/1951–6/1951) and folder 1.1.210 (7/1951–4/1952), respectively, Nicholas McD. McKnight Papers, CU; ‘‘Fraternity Ruling Urged: Columbia Group Demands Negro Decision by Eisenhower,’’ NYT, December 24, 1948; ‘‘Columbia Interfraternity Council Urges End of ‘Race, Color, Creed’ Membership Bans,’’ NYT, February 16, 1950; ‘‘Columbia to End Fraternity Bias: Sets Oct. 1, 1960, to Withdraw Recognition from Groups Practicing Discrimination,’’ NYT, May 11, 1953; all in Fraternity Bias Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, CU; on Michigan, see Lee, Fraternities without Brotherhood, 56; and Lawrence, ‘‘Movements for the Abolition of Fraternity Segregation at Thirty-Three Colleges.’’ Ruthven and Hatcher statements can be found in ‘‘Fraternity Autonomy with Respect to Fraternity Membership,’’ 14–16, a book358 notes to pages 250 – 55

let prepared by Albert S. Bard, folder titled Fraternities, Autonomy, 1952, General Files, AC. 35. On Connecticut decision, see Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 234; on SUNY, see William S. Carlson, ‘‘Fraternities: Evil Force on the Campus,’’ Saturday Review, September 10, 1955, 28, 59–61. 36. Stanford timeline is in Lyle M. Nelson, Stanford University Director of University Relations to Douglas M. Knight, President of Duke University, April 29, 1965, box 14, folder titled Fraternities, 1963–69, Douglas Knight Papers, DU. Wade would later attempt to deny that the suspension had anything to do with Stanford’s black pledge, arguing that it was a result of the chapter’s refusal to abide by certain formal rituals. See Wade to ‘‘College Administrators Where the Sigma Chi Fraternity Maintains Chapters,’’ May 4, 1965, folder titled Fraternities, 1963– 69, Douglas Knight Papers, DU; and ‘‘Fraternities Get the Grip,’’ Time, June 25, 1965, 53. Sigma Chi had officially eliminated its discriminatory clause in 1961; see James, ‘‘Defenders of Tradition,’’ 104. 37. Stanford ATO decision is in Stewart T. Daniels, President of Alpha Tau Omega to Michael Kavanaugh, March 7, 1961; and Daniels to ‘‘All Chapters, Chapter Advisors, Alumni,’’ March 6, 1961; both in series 2, subseries 2.12, box 31, folder 312, Allard K. Lowenstein Papers, SHC. See also Alpha Tao Omega Correspondence File, 1959–85, Jack L. Shepard Papers, SC 622, SU. The Stanford Sigma Chi decision is in Wallace Turner, ‘‘Colleges Face U.S. Aid Cutoff if They Permit Fraternity Bias,’’ NYT, June 18, 1965, in box 14, folder titled Fraternities, Title VI, Douglas Knight Papers, DU; Wallace Turner, ‘‘Sigma Chi Head Backs the Status Quo,’’ NYT, June 19, 1965, in box 14, folder titled Fraternities, 1963–69, Douglas Knight Papers, DU. The Keppel declaration is Francis Keppel to Senator Lee Metcalf, June 17, 1965, copy in box 14, folder titled Fraternities, Title VI, Douglas Knight Papers, DU. On the Meader Amendment, see James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition,’’ 101–2. On the later 1965 amendment, see Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, to Elizabeth O. Falk, Editor of the Duke Chronicle, November 29, 1965; ‘‘Ervin Urges Freedom of Association Amendment to Education Bill,’’ press release, September 2, 1965; both in box 14, folder titled Fraternities, Title VI, Douglas Knight Papers, DU. The complete legal fiasco is detailed in James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition,’’ chap. 4. For the NIC’s reaction to the Title VI decision, see National Interfraternity Conference Yearbook, 1965, 8, 23, 30–31. On Sigma Chi and CU, see press release from University of Colorado News Service, September 7, 1966, in folder titled Sigma Chi, 1966–67, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU. 38. Mrs. William M. Ramey to Duke Loyalty Fund, January 19, 1968, box 14, folder titled Fraternities: Title VI, Douglas Knight Papers, DU; ‘‘Roy’’ to Wesley Critz George, April 16, 1965, series 1.4, box 11, folder 85, Wesley Critz George Papers, SHC; Beta Theta Pi president quoted in National Interfraternity Yearbook,

notes to pages 255 – 58

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1966, 30. I thank Diana B. Turk for pointing out fraternities’ long history of claiming to be bastions in the fight against Communism. 39. Boroff, Campus U.S.A., 32; Feldman and Newcomb, The Impact of College on Students, 199; Segal, ‘‘Fraternities, Social Distance, and Anti-Semitism among Jewish and Non-Jewish Undergraduates’’; Marcson, ‘‘A Symposium on Segregation and Integration in College Fraternities.’’ Students quoted in Townsend, College Freshmen Speak Out, 56; Gist, ‘‘Fraternal Membership Policies at Missouri University,’’ 168, 169–70. For an explicitly multicultural fraternity, see Howard Whitman, ‘‘The College Fraternity Crisis, Part 2: Democracy in Action,’’ Collier’s, January 15, 1949, 34–35. 40. Lucius Pullen to all ‘‘Number I’s in Smith Province,’’ December 29, 1965, box 1, Kappa Alpha Folder, Student Affairs Records, DU; ‘‘It All Sounds (and Looks) Like Greek,’’ Durham Morning Herald, April 7, 1963, 7A. On black bands, to whom Duke’s Kappa Alpha chapter gave a rubber check in payment in 1961, see Lloyd C. Caudle to Claude T. Moorman and Thomas Swain Kale, April 18, 1960, Kappa Alpha Folder, Student Affairs Records, DU; on the celebrations in Charlotte, see Mary Lou Davis, ‘‘The Confederate Gray Marches along Charlotte’s Streets Again,’’ Charlotte Observer, April 14, 1957, 2-D; Thomas V. Miller Jr., ‘‘Rebel Uprising,’’ June 17, 1951, source unclear, found in box 18, Kappa Alpha Order Folder, Wilson Heller Papers, UI; ‘‘Dance Poster Causes Furor,’’ November 10, 1965, CSCLB Forty-Niner, in box 3, folder titled Pranks, Foolishness, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. On Duke and the Chinese party, see ‘‘After Five Days, Rush Season Comes to an End,’’ Durham Morning Herald, January 31, 1963, 12A. ⌻⌲⌭ and the song lyrics are in Bob Wilcox, ‘‘Anti-Negro Song Puts Fraternity on Probation,’’ Long Beach Press Telegram, October 18, 1963, in box 3, Conduct Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI; For more on fraternity men’s attitudes about race, see also James, ‘‘A Collection of Young White Men.’’ 41. Joel Bulkley, ‘‘UNC Student Roughed Up Sat. Night,’’ Daily Tar Heel, November 5, 1963. Delta Kappa Epsilons involved in the incident later denied that race was a factor in the incident, though the victim claimed it was perfectly clear that the problem was that he had brought ‘‘a Negro’’ to the party. See ‘‘D.K.E.’s Apologize to Tilden,’’ Daily Tar Heel, November 6, 1963. On 〈⌻⌷ and the marchers, see ‘‘One Jarring Incident Mars March,’’ Daily Tar Heel, January 14, 1964. Herbert Bilick, ‘‘Fraternity Stand Called Stagnant,’’ Letter to the Editor of the Daily Tar Heel, February 20, 1965. I would not have found these examples without the citations in James, ‘‘A Collection of Young White Men.’’ Colgate incidents are in James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition,’’ 115–17. On Berkeley, see Michael Taylor, ‘‘UC Boots a Fraternity,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1983, 2, in box 14, Hazing and Other Incidents Folder, Wilson Heller Papers, UI. 42. ‘‘Virginia Greeks Object to Pledge,’’ Daily Tar Heel, October 29, 1961; ‘‘Report of the Faculty Committee on Fraternities and Sororities,’’ 1969–70; and 360

notes to pages 259 – 61

‘‘Racial Discrimination in Fraternities and Sororities,’’ March 1971, subseries 7, box 21, folder titled Fraternities and Sororities, 1966–71, Chancellors’ Records, Chancellor Sitterson Papers, UNC. 43. Sanua, ‘‘ ‘Going Greek,’ ’’ 439. 44. On these social scientists, see Beth Bailey’s insightful chapter, ‘‘Scientific Truth . . . and Love,’’ in From Front Porch to Back Seat, 119–37, in which she notes the way that these studies were often used in a prescriptive manner to attempt to influence the behavior of the very subjects they purported to study. Despite the bad name that is given to social science by many historians, I have found that the majority of the studies upon which I rely in the pages that follow are written by journalists and academics who were well aware of the limitations of their studies. They understood that their testing methods might not always elicit exactly the answers they were designed to gain. And they were rarely the conservative prescribers of old-fashioned morality that many paint them as being. Whatever the case, the findings of these studies remain some of the only evidence we have of the sexual behavior of college students. For their quantitative conclusions and especially for their qualitative analyses, they are invaluable. 45. On rating and dating, see Blood, ‘‘Uniformities and Diversities in Campus Dating Preferences’’; and Goldsen and others, What College Students Think, 66– 68. On going steady, see Cole, ‘‘American Youth Goes Monogamous,’’ Harper’s Magazine, March 1957, 29–33; Blood, ‘‘A Retest of Waller’s Rating Complex’’; Lowrie, ‘‘Dating Theories and Student Responses’’; and Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 25–56. On women’s permissiveness, see Riesman, ‘‘Permissiveness and Sex Roles.’’ 46. Burgess and Wallin, Engagement and Marriage, 330. The numbers are higher than the numbers in the Ehrmann study (below). This is most likely because they asked about whether men and women had had sex before marriage, whereas Ehrmann was surveying students while still in college and not after they were married (which could be a number of years after graduating college). 47. Ehrmann, Premarital Dating Behavior, 178–79. Of those men and women who had had sexual relations, 56 percent of the men had had sex with an acquaintance, 60 percent with a friend, and 24 percent with a lover; while 2 percent of the women had had sex with an acquaintance, 6 percent with a friend, and 17 percent with a lover. 48. Ibid., 178; emphasis in original. For a condensed version of these findings, see Ehrmann, ‘‘Premarital Sexual Behavior and Sex Codes of Conduct with Acquaintances, Friends, and Lovers.’’ 49. Ehrmann, Premarital Dating Behavior, 147. Again, these findings are summarized in Ehrmann, ‘‘Influence of Comparative Social Class of Companion upon Premarital Heterosexual Behavior.’’ 50. Ehrmann, Premarital Dating Behavior, 189. The majority of the rest of the

notes to pages 261 – 63

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67 percent adhered to a liberal single standard. Eighty-six percent of women adhered to a conservative single standard, meaning they believed that neither party should have sex before marriage (190). 51. Ibid., 140. Only 4 percent of men had gone further with a lover than with a nonlover, compared with 41 percent of women (194). 52. Ibid., 236. 53. Ibid., 195. 54. Both studies are confined to 200 men each and are thus more helpful for their qualitative rather than quantitative findings. One of them is concerned only with men who have had sexual intercourse; this one obviously cannot tell us anything about the rates of intercourse among men more generally. 55. Kirkendall, Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships, 25–26. Another study confirms this account of visiting a prostitute by a group of men: ‘‘Even in an openly sexual incident of a group of male students having sexual relations with one girl, the motivation may be lodged less in sexual impulse than in a desire to belong to the group or in a fear of being considered lacking in masculinity.’’ See Committee on the College Student of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Sex and the College Student, 123. 56. Komarovsky, The Dilemmas of Masculinity, 65. Though her study was published in 1976, Komarovsky conducted her interviews in 1969–70. See also Butler, God on the Secular Campus, 154, who reported that visiting a prostitute was something of a lark or a ‘‘blast’’ with friends. By the 1970s Morton Hunt found that visits to prostitutes by college men were drastically reduced. See Sexual Behavior in the 1970s, 145. 57. Kirkendall, Premarital Intercourse, chap. 3, 58–59, 64–65, 68. Only half as many boys had sex of this sort in groups as they did with prostitutes (58). The issue of group sex—which evidence suggests is on the increase—is a fascinating one. It seems to be quite clearly about male bonding, with the woman playing little real role other than foil for homoerotic exploits with, and sexual performance for, other men. 58. Kronhausen and Kronhausen, Sex Histories of American College Men, 141– 42, 277, 199–208, 104. Emphasis in original. 59. Kaats and Davis, ‘‘The Dynamics of Sexual Behavior of College Students,’’ 390. Robert Bell and Jay B. Chaskes find somewhat lower percentages in their study but still find an increase over previously accepted rates (28 percent of their women were having sex in a steady relationship and 39 percent were doing so once engaged); see Bell and Chaskes, ‘‘Premarital Sexual Experience among Coeds, 1958 and 1968,’’ 82. Another study found a rate as high as 43 percent; see Cannon and Long, ‘‘Premarital Sexual Behavior in the Sixties,’’ 40. 60. Reiss, ‘‘The Sexual Renaissance,’’ 126. 61. Bell and Chaskes, ‘‘Premarital Sexual Experience among Coeds,’’ 82–83. 62. This, of course, was also a tool used by men in order to coerce women into 362

notes to pages 263 – 66

having sex. No longer were women able to hold out by using the same excuses as before; men could argue against Victorian morality and the fear of pregnancy much more effectively than they had been able to do in the 1920s, thanks in large part to Freud, Kinsey, and birth control. See Gloria Steinem, ‘‘The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,’’ Esquire, September 1962, 97, 153–57. 63. Winston Ehrmann, ‘‘The Variety and Meaning of Premarital Heterosexual Experiences for the College Student,’’ 24, 27; Nancy Lynch, ‘‘Lady Chatterley Goes to College,’’ Mademoiselle, August 1963, 224; Martin Abramson, ‘‘Campus Romance: A Degree in Divorce,’’ Cosmopolitan, September 1963, 49. 64. When sociologists Erwin O. Smigel and Rita Seiden published ‘‘The Decline and Fall of the Double Standard’’ in 1968, they were more than a little premature. 65. On men’s virginity, see Tebor, ‘‘Male Virgins’’; Berger and Wenger, ‘‘The Ideology of Virginity’’; Kirkendall, ‘‘College Youth and Sexual Confusion,’’ 11; and Greene, Sex and the College Girl, 172. On pressure for women to lose their virginity, see ibid., especially chap. 1. 66. Dilley, Queer Man on Campus, 59; Johnson, The Lavender Scare; Howard, Men Like That, 69. By contrast, Beth Bailey claims that at the University of Kansas, suspected homosexuals were sent to mental-health professionals for counseling and not expelled. See Sex in the Heartland, 52–53. On the association of homosexuality and leftist politics, see Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire; D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 292–93; and Howard, Men Like That, 129, 142–66. On the GI Bill and homosexuality, see Canaday, ‘‘Building a Straight State.’’ On the breakdown of the homosexuality/effeminacy link, see James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition,’’ 169. James points out that Kinsey also assisted in this breakdown of the stereotype by instructing Americans about the high number of homosexual experiences that were had by otherwise heterosexual men. 67. Riesman, ‘‘Permissiveness and Sex Roles,’’ 214; Lamont, Campus Shock, 42; Tebor, ‘‘Male Virgins,’’ 41; Martin H. Bauman, M.D., ‘‘Psychosocial Problems in a Men’s College,’’ Journal of the American College Health Association 17:5 (June 1969), quotations on 2 and 4; typewritten copy in box 2, folder titled Collette Gaudin Papers, 1971–4, Women at Dartmouth Collection, DC. See also Leonard L. Glass, ‘‘The Dartmouth Animal and the Hypermasculine Myth,’’ Dartmouth Alumni Magazine 73, September 1980, 35; Committee on the College Student of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Sex and the College Student, 24; Bell, Premarital Sex in a Changing Society, 80. 68. Bromley and Britten, Youth and Sex, 209–10; Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 66. 69. James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition,’’ chap. 5. See also Drexel, ‘‘Degrees of Broken Silence.’’ 70. James, ‘‘The Defenders of Tradition,’’ 173–77. For examples of these cartoons, see ‘‘Initiation Week,’’ Physique Pictorial, vol. 3, no. 3, August 1953, and notes to pages 266 – 70

363

‘‘Initiation Rites,’’ Physique Pictorial, vol. 9, no. 4, April 1960, 19. Both of these are reprinted in The Complete Reprint of Physique Pictorial, vols. 1 and 2, respectively. I would not have found these illustrations without Anthony James’s dissertation as a guide and his assistance in sending me copies of the illustrations. 71. Dilley, Queer Man on Campus, 67, 76. 72. Information on Howe’s professional activities and the Stewart Howe Alumni Service is taken from the various documents in box P-1, folders titled ‘‘Howe, Personal Clippings,’’ ‘‘Who’s Who entry,’’ and ‘‘Biographical Material,’’ Personal Papers, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 73. Among his gay fraternity correspondents were Don Gamble, associate editor of the Record of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, based in Evanston, Illinois; and Lawrence Reedy, editor and traveling secretary for Sigma Nu, based in Indianapolis. See the correspondence with both in box P-13, folder G, and box P-15, folder titled Reedy, Lawrence, Personal Papers, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 74. Bob Kittel to Stewart S. Howe (hereafter SSH), November 2, 1938, box P-14, folder K, Personal Papers, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 75. Bob Hauserman to SSH, March 15, 1942, box P-14, folder H, Personal Papers, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 76. For a number of sets of correspondence with college men that do not go quite as well as Howe might have hoped (in that the young men seemed to remain resolutely heterosexual), see the correspondence with Kenneth Setterdahl, box P-15, folder S, and correspondence with Paul Faris, box P-14, folder F, Personal Papers, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. 77. Robert S. Pennell to SSH, October 18, 1937, box P-15, folder P; Chuck Flanders to SSH, January 21, 1946, box P-14, folder titled Flanders, Charles; both in Personal Papers, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. I thank Erin L. Jordan for emphasizing this point to me. 78. At least one contemporaneous account noted that rating and dating, which they called ‘‘dalliance dating,’’ might be on the wane; ‘‘that dalliance dating . . . persists, however, cannot be doubted.’’ See Bernard, Buchanan, and Smith, Dating, Mating, and Marriage Today, 47. 79. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 49. On pinning, lavaliering, etc., see Boroff, Campus U.S.A., 30; and Bernard, Buchanan, and Smith, Dating, Mating, and Marriage Today, 42–43 For a complaint about the degree to which dating led straight to marriage, and far too quickly, see Jerome Ellison, ‘‘Are We Making a Playground out of College?,’’ Saturday Evening Post, March 7, 1959, 19–21, 44, 46, 51–52. He claimed that more than a fifth of college students were married in 1959. 80. Sid Moody, ‘‘Are College Fraternities on Their Way Out?,’’ Chicago SunTimes, April 28, 1963, 22, in box 2, Growth and Decline of System Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, Student Affairs Collection, UI; Clyde Sanfred Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges, 299. On fraternity and sorority dating, see Frank, ‘‘Heartache on Campus,’’ 21; Goldsen and others, What College Students Think, 364

notes to pages 270 – 75

66–67; Scott, ‘‘The American College Sorority’’; and Bernard, Buchanan, and Smith, Dating, Mating, and Marriage Today, 47. On the need for heterosexual companionship, see Jackson and Winkler, ‘‘A Comparison of Pledges and Independents,’’ 380. 81. Morris, North Towards Home, 154. The Sigma Chi Sweetheart in ‘‘College Fraternities,’’ Life, February 6, 1950, 86–98; Phi Kappa Phi Rose is in ‘‘Mu Has Two Roses, National and Chapter,’’ Mu Muses, vol. 16, no. 1, Pi Kappa Phi Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU; Kappa Alpha Rose is in Mary Lou Davis, ‘‘The Confederate Gray Marches along Charlotte’s Streets Again,’’ Charlotte Observer, April 14, 1957; ‘‘Jo Ann Waller of Duke Selected as Dream Girl,’’ April 15, 1957; both in folder titled Fraternities, 1930–1975, Office of Public Relations, News Service Files, DU. See also ‘‘Arkansas Coed Is Fraternity’s ‘Dream Girl,’ ’’ Long Beach Independent Press Telegram, August 26, 1964, in box 2, Social Life Folder, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, Student Affairs Collection, UI. 82. Stanford students are in . . . a second look . . . , n.d. [1961–62], series 2, subseries 2.12, box 31, folder 323, Allard K. Lowenstein Papers, SHC; Alpha Delta is in Alan Boles, ‘‘Amherst’s Gentlemen Rush,’’ Yale Daily News, April 14, 1967, 7, in Fraternities/Newsclippings Folder (1), General Files, AC; Jeffrey Zaslow, ‘‘A Peek at Going Greek,’’ Orlando Sentinel-Star, September 15, 1980, in box 16, Fraternity Humor Folder, Wilson Heller Papers, UI. 83. Ellison, ‘‘Are We Making a Playground out of College?,’’ 20. 84. Kirkpatrick and Kanin, ‘‘Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus,’’ 53–55. 85. What I mean by this is that one man’s bad girl could be another’s nice girl, depending upon the knowledge that either one has about the girl’s past. Further, a girl might be a nice girl until the time that she has sex and then become a bad girl, all in the eyes of the same man. 86. On the persistence of the double standard, see, for instance, Kaats and Davis, ‘‘The Dynamics of Sexual Behavior of College Students,’’ 393–94. 87. Ibid., 397; Kanin, ‘‘An Examination of Sexual Aggression as a Response to Sexual Frustration’’; Mirande, ‘‘Reference Group Theory and Adolescent Sexual Behavior.’’ For examples, see also Greene, Sex and the College Girl, 141, 179. 88. Kanin, ‘‘An Examination of Sexual Aggression as a Response to Sexual Frustration,’’ 430; Kanin, ‘‘Reference Groups and Sex Conduct Norm Violations.’’ Almost half of his sample of admittedly aggressive college men claimed that their aggression was justified when women were either teases or gold diggers or had reputations for being ‘‘loose.’’ The latter applied to women about whom they had heard rumors as to their sexual availability. This hearsay alone was enough to make these men feel justified in using force to obtain sex from the ‘‘loose’’ women. See also Greene, Sex and the College Girl, 141–42. 89. Butler, God on the Secular Campus, 154; Morris, North Towards Home, 157; Burgess and Wallin, Engagement and Marriage, 87–88; Greene, Sex and the Colnotes to pages 276 – 79

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lege Girl, 141. For more on the changing double standard that now encompassed female classmates, see Freedman, The College Experience, 102; and Reiss, Premarital Sexual Standards, 99. 90. Sigma Alpha Epsilon at UNC event is in Ransom Taylor to Chancellor Aycock, May 26, 1960, series 1, box 6, folder titled Discipline, General, 1941–1961, Records of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, UNC; and Ransom Taylor to Chancellor Sharp, October 16, 1965, subseries 7, box 7, Student Discipline Folder, Chancellors’ Records, Chancellor Sharp Series, UNC. USC is in ‘‘USC Bans Fraternity after Stage Party,’’ Long Beach Press Telegram, September 23, 1964, in box 3, folder titled Panty Raids, Etc., Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. Syracuse is in Andrew Porte, ‘‘Sex Investigation Revealed,’’ Daily Orange, March 4, 1965, folder titled Panty Raids, Etc., Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. Dartmouth story is in Andy Merton, ‘‘Hanging On (by a Jockstrap) to Tradition at Dartmouth,’’ Esquire, June 19, 1979, 57. The prostitute at the UNC frat is in James, ‘‘A Collection of Young White Men,’’ 8. Amherst incident is in Boles, ‘‘Amherst’s Gentlemen Rush,’’ 7. Pig parties in Morris, North Towards Home, 154. 91. Boroff, Campus U.S.A., 72; ‘‘Pig Night at Yale,’’ publication unclear, n.d. [1955?], in box 3, folder titled Hazing, Hell Week, 1950s, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI; ‘‘Why That Stanford Frat Got It,’’ n.d. [1966 or 1967], box 3, folder titled Pranks, Foolishness, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. Stambolian quoted in Drexel, ‘‘Degrees of Broken Silence,’’ 29; the other grad is Paul Gambaccini and is also cited in ibid., 35–36. Nurses cited in ibid., 27; Bauman, ‘‘Psychosocial Problems in a Men’s College’’; Dennis Hall, ‘‘Coed Fraternities Advocated,’’ Triad, n.d. [but probably 1970s], 27, box FS-1, Coed Fraternities Folder, Fraternity Subject Files, Stewart S. Howe Collection, UI. By the early 1970s at least, some fraternities had initiated ‘‘Little Sister’’ programs, whereby female students at the college were granted a sort of associate membership in exchange for performing various duties for the fraternity. These included hosting parties, serving as dates for fraternity men and the men they rushed, providing food, and so forth. These women were picked for their physical appearance, and it was widely understood that some of the services they performed in exchange for associate membership were sexual. See Stombler, ‘‘ ‘Buddies’ or ‘Slutties,’ ’’ 298, 303. 92. ‘‘Feathered but not Tarred,’’ NYT, May 22, 1964, box 3, folder titled Pranks, Foolishness, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI; Cathy Young, ‘‘Everybody Loves a Lover,’’ Athens Observer, January 20, 1977, in box 14, Hazing and Other Incidents Folder, Wilson Heller Papers, UI; Komarovsky, Dilemmas of Masculinity, 95; Jonathan Ingram, ‘‘Memoirs of a Frat Man,’’ April 12, 1975, box 1, Clippings Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU; Komarovsky, Dilemmas of Masculinity, 96. 93. ‘‘ ‘Hate Women’ Brawl! 9 LBSC Frats Curbed,’’ November 9, 1965, and other clippings from the Long Beach Press Telegram and the CSCLB Forty-Niner in box 3, folder titled Pranks, Foolishness, Clyde Sanfred Johnson Papers, UI. 366 notes to pages 280 – 83

94. Committee on the College Student of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Sex and the College Student, 35; Max Lerner, introduction to Greene, Sex and the College Girl, 10. 95. Chris Miller, ‘‘Son of Animal House,’’ Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, September 1989, 26–30; Chris Miller, ‘‘Return to Animal House,’’ Playboy, n.d. [1989]; both in J. Christian Miller Alumni File, DC.

conclusion 1. The account of the incidents is taken from a number of sources, which can be found in box 17, folder titled Fraternities, Beta Phi Zeta, 1982–88–89, Division of Student Affairs Records, DU; box 123, Beta Phi Zeta Folder, 1982, Office of the President Records, Terry Sanford Papers, DU; and box 1, Beta Phi Zeta Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU. These sources include a memorandum to the file by Dean William J. Griffith, May 6, 1982, as well as reports by Sergeant L. O. Wardell, March 22, 1982, and notes on the incident by Dean Suzanne J. Wasiolek, March 17, 1982. Their conclusions are in turn based upon interviews with BOZO members, the victim, and various witnesses. While the victim was only able to attest to that which occurred in the days following the incident, others bore witness to the actual event and those leading up to it. The anonymous note that sparked the investigation is also included in the folder. Newspaper accounts from the Duke Chronicle are in the Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU. 2. On the question of estimations of campus rapes and our inability to know, with any certainty, just how prevalent they are, see Campbell-Ruggaard and Van Ryswyk, ‘‘Rape on Campus.’’ 3. Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey, 48. See also Ehrhart and Sandler, ‘‘Campus Gang Rape,’’ 5. For another example of excluding women so as not to have to respect them or treat them equally, see Susan Faludi’s exploration of allmale life at the Citadel in Stiffed, 117. This chapter relies to a much greater degree than the previous seven upon secondary sources by anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, who have conducted in-depth, on-the-ground research in and with fraternities over the past thirty years. Their data, based primarily upon interviews, surpasses most of what I was able to find in the archives. For that reason, readers are advised to consult a number of the sources cited herein for a more thorough account of the issues discussed in this conclusion. 4. Sedgwick, Between Men, 89. Thanks to Phil Tiemeyer for reminding me of this useful formulation. For a theoretical account of the links between masculinity and homophobia, see Kimmel, ‘‘Masculinity as Homophobia.’’ 5. For overviews of fraternity men’s understanding of gender and their sexism, see Sievers, ‘‘Sexism in the Greek System,’’ 1–2; and DeSantis, Inside Greek U. 6. The drinking study is in Center for the Study of the College Fraternity Update, no. 1, 1998, in box IF-20, CSCF Update Folder, Interfraternity Organizations Files, notes to pages 283 – 88

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Stewart S. Howe Collection, series 26/20/30, UI. On drinking and recklessness, see, for instance, Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage. Indeed, some speculate that raising the drinking age to twenty-one has only increased the appeal of fraternities because they remain one of the few places where access to alcohol is freer. See Boyer, College, 208. Fraternity professionals (deans, counselors, and so forth) are aware of many of the shortcomings of fraternal and sororal life, including poor grades, binge drinking, sexual assault, and so forth. While almost always pro-Greek in their attitudes, a number of collections have been published to address these concerns, most of them geared toward helping fellow professionals with the issues. See, for instance, the essays in the following: Bryan and Schwartz, The Eighties; Whipple, New Challenges for Greek Letter Organizations; and Winston, Nettles, and Opper, Fraternities and Sororities on the Contemporary College Campus. 7. Studies have shown that African American fraternities generally employ violence, rather than humiliation, in their pledging and initiations. See Jones, Black Haze. 8. The trip to the gay student group occurred at Dartmouth College; Brokeback story is in Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, May 10, 2006, cited in Miller, ‘‘On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain,’’ 60. For a variety of nonfiction hazing stories, see Wingate, Hazing. For other initiation stunts, see Chris Miller, ‘‘Return to Animal House,’’ Playboy, n.d. [1989], J. Christian Miller Alumni File, DC; Andy Merton, ‘‘Hanging On (by a Jockstrap) to Tradition at Dartmouth,’’ Esquire, June 19, 1979, 60; Scott Straus, ‘‘Escape from Animal House: Frat Boy Tells All,’’ On the Issues: Progressive Women’s Quarterly (Winter 1996): 26–27; Land, Goat, 121–24; Garfinkel, In a Man’s World, 102–4. 9. Einhaus, ‘‘I Love You, Man,’’ 76; Wilson, ‘‘In Flux,’’ 7. 10. Faludi, Stiffed, 127. Duke student is in Taylor Batten, ‘‘My Brother, My Sister,’’ Duke Blue, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1990, 25, DC; second brother is in Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape, 27. 11. Miller, ‘‘Return to Animal House,’’ 105; Hoyt Alverson, ‘‘An Ethnography of Alcohol and Commensality at Dartmouth College,’’ 25–26, in the possession of Hoyt Alverson, whom I thank for allowing me to read and cite from it. Third quotation is from a student interviewed by Drexel, ‘‘Degrees of Broken Silence,’’ 70; the fourth is Welles ‘‘In the Haze,’’ 19–20. 12. I have some difficulty with the word ‘‘homophobia’’ because it implies that homophobes are afraid of homosexuals and homosexuality in the same way that agoraphobes are afraid of the outside and claustrophes are afraid of closed spaces; actually, this attitude toward homosexuality is a prejudice akin to racism or sexism. On the problems with the word, see Beneke, Proving Manhood, 143–45; and Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet. 13. Pecen, ‘‘Tattooed,’’ 136, 134; John H. Lee, ‘‘Night and Day,’’ 151; Mitchell, ‘‘No Regret,’’ 156; Jeffrey Zaslow, ‘‘A Peek at Going Greek,’’ Orlando Sentinel Star, September 15, 1980, in box 16, Fraternity Humor Folder, Wilson Heller Papers, 368

notes to pages 289 – 94

series 41/2/52, UI. On homophobia, see, for example, Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape; John L. Larew, ‘‘Blue Devil Blues,’’ Harvard Crimson April 6, 1989, in box 16, folder titled General Correspondence, 1898–91, Office of Student Affairs Records, DU; Land, Goat, 117, 149; and almost all of the essays in Windmeyer and Freeman, Out on Fraternity Row. On the issue of sexist jokes and name-calling among groups of men, see Lyman, ‘‘The Fraternal Bond as a Joking Relationship’’; Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey, 183. 14. Lee, ‘‘Night and Day,’’ 150; Drexel, ‘‘Degrees of Broken Silence,’’ 87–91; Domenic Gaeta and Chad Rosenberger, ‘‘Vote Taken to Force Brother out of TriKap; Another Ordered Inactive,’’ Dartmouth, February 13, 1984, 1; Dan Fagin, ‘‘Dean Looks into Tri-Kap Incident,’’ Dartmouth, February 14, 1984, 1; Joan E. Smith, ‘‘Campus Homophobia Flares at Tri-Kap,’’ Harbinger, February 1984, 3, 6; Richard Hyde, ‘‘How Homosexuals Fit into the Dartmouth Image,’’ Dartmouth, February 23, 1984, 4–5. On the increasing—though by no means universal—acceptance of gays coming out in fraternities, see Case, ‘‘Breaking the Cycle of Invisibility,’’ xxxiii; though also see page xxxv, where Case describes fraternities who may be accepting themselves but fear for their reputations and thus demand that the gay brothers be discreet about their orientation. See also Driscoll, ‘‘Every Man, a Man.’’ 15. Chi Gamma Epsilon is in Chi Gamma Group Notes; Kappa Alpha is in Jim to KA brothers, June 8 1984, box 1, folder titled General Correspondence, 1976– 1984, Kappa Alpha, Alpha Phi Chapter Records, DU. 16. Drexel, ‘‘Degrees of Broken Silence,’’ 64–65, 68; Stephen Harrigan, ‘‘Men in Drag Ejected from Fraternity Party,’’ Duke Chronicle, September 13, 1982; and J. Randall Kiel to the editor, Duke Chronicle, September 20, 1982, both in box 3, Sigma Alpha Epsilon Folder, Fraternities and Sororities Collection, DU. 17. Land, Goat, 119; Chaz, ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’’ 38. On ‘‘face houses,’’ see also Anderson, ‘‘Holding the Closet Door Shut,’’ 88–89. For an analysis of what fraternity men look for in their prospective brothers, see Martin and Hummer, ‘‘Fraternities and Rape on Campus,’’ 461. 18. On gay men and sex in fraternities, see Ean Barnard, letter to the editor, n.d. [probably 1980s or 1990s], Daily Illini, Gay Greeks Folder, Clippings Subject Files, UI; and the essays collected in Windmeyer and Freeman, Out on Fraternity Row, and Windmeyer, Brotherhood. Even gay fraternities are usually quite explicit in their denunciation of sex between brothers, both as a rebuttal of the stereotype of the oversexed gay man and as a means to insist that they can achieve brotherhood free of sex. See Jeanne DeQuine, ‘‘Out of the Closet and on to Fraternity Row,’’ Time, March 11, 2003. 19. Scott Straus, ‘‘An Argument against Fraternities,’’ bug, May 1992, 14; Alverson, ‘‘An Ethnography of Alcohol and Commensality at Dartmouth College,’’ 13; Robbins, Pledged, 127. The literature on rape in fraternities is voluminous. See, for instance, Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape; Martin and Hummer, ‘‘Fraternities and notes to pages 294 – 97

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Rape on Campus’’; O’Sullivan, ‘‘Fraternities and the Rape Culture’’; O’Sullivan, ‘‘Acquaintance Rape on Campus’’; Schwartz and DeKeseredy, Sexual Assault on the College Campus; Boswell and Spade, ‘‘Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture’’; Boeringer, Shehan, and Akers, ‘‘Social Contexts and Social Learning in Sexual Coercion and Aggression’’; Copenhaver and Grauerholz, ‘‘Sexual Victimization among Sorority Women’’; Robbins, Pledged, 54–63; DeSantis, Inside Greek U. 20. Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey, 221. For an example of the anthropological theory about segregation and abuse, see Sanday, ‘‘The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape’’; and Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape, 20. 21. Straus, ‘‘Men of Dartmouth,’’ 28; Mark Bubriski, ‘‘Zete’s Graphic ’Sex Papers’ Exposed,’’ and accompanying photographs, Dartmouth, April 18, 2001; Straus, ‘‘An Argument against Fraternities,’’ 14. A similar incident occurred at Colgate University in 1989 with the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. See Robin Warshaw, ‘‘Secrets of the Deke House: In the Bonds of Fraternity,’’ Nation, August 21, 1989, 1, 206. For more on reporting, see Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape, 32–33, 57–58. 22. There are conflicts over this general rule at times. Because some women are more willing to perform oral sex than they are to have penile-vaginal intercourse, as the former does not constitute ‘‘going all the way,’’ some men may attempt to make a woman go all the way simply to see if he can. However, oral sex has its own particular attractions to some men. One, a fraternity brother interviewed for Sanday’s study, had the following to say: ‘‘There are many reasons why oral sex is so gratifying. A blowjob is significant because the emphasis is so completely on having the woman devote herself to our pleasure. In other words, it is the least mutual form of lovemaking. In posture, sensation, and emotional content, a blowjob involves the most subservience to the man’s desires’’ (Fraternity Gang Rape, 123). It is particularly telling that this fraternity brother uses the plural ‘‘our’’ to describe the pleasure that inheres in oral sex, almost as if he is cognizant of his status as a man and a brother when receiving a blowjob. The woman is subservient not just to him individually but to men collectively or at least to his manhood. 23. Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape, 115. 24. ‘‘Porn Chair’’ is in Chi Gamma Group Notes. On porn in fraternities, see, among others, Schwartz and DeKeseredy, Sexual Assault on the College Campus, 85; Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape; and Sanday, A Woman Scorned, 202. On feminist critiques of porn, see, for instance, Cornell, Feminism and Pornography. 25. Ann Japenga, ‘‘Non-Fraternal Violence between Sexes at UC Davis,’’ Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1982, in box 18, folder titled Articles on College Social . . . etc., Wilson Heller Papers, series 41/2/52, UI. Members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon disputed the fact of their chanting ‘‘gang rape,’’ claiming that they were simply snapping their fingers in affirmation of the speaker’s message. 26. Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape; Mary Schmich, ‘‘What Really Happened at 370

notes to pages 298 – 301

Pi Lam Fraternity House?,’’ Orlando Sentinel, February 26, 1984, and ‘‘FSU Suspends Frat Suspected in Gang Rape,’’ April 23, 1988, both in folder titled Sexual Assault, Greek Related, Clippings Subject Files, UI. Walsh quoted in Ehrhart and Sandler, ‘‘Campus Gang Rape,’’ 6; Irving L. Janis, ‘‘Groupthink;’’ Schwartz and DeKeseredy, Sexual Assault on the College Campus, 70. 27. Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey, 205; see also Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape.

notes to page 302

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Bibliography primary sources Manuscript and Archive Collections Amherst, Massachusetts Amherst College Archives, Robert Frost Library, Amherst College ‘‘The Amherst Fraternity’’ Amherst Alumni Council News Amherst Record Amherst Reports Amherst Student Clubs and Societies Collection General Files Report of the Faculty Committee on Long-Range Policy Ann Arbor, Michigan Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan Delta Kappa Epsilon Papers Delta Upsilon Papers Fraternity Office Papers Vice President for Student Affairs Collection Berkeley, California Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Chancellors’ Records Daily Californian Occident Oestrus Regents’ Papers Boston, Massachusetts Massachusetts Historical Society 373

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Index Acacia Fraternity, 268 Academic performance, 20–22, 23, 55, 169, 171, 189–90, 313 (n. 17); and fraternities, 62–64, 84, 93, 143–46, 196, 197–98, 201, 237, 336 (n. 31), 355 (n. 16) African American fraternities, 7, 169, 261. See also individual African American fraternities African Americans, 67–70, 74, 103 African American students, 129, 165, 168, 171–72, 185, 248–49, 252–53, 256–57, 258–61, 323 (n. 30) Aiken, E. E., 33, 128, 132 Alcohol, 1, 7, 32, 61, 67, 74–75, 156– 58, 177, 183–84, 200–202, 203, 231–33, 241–43, 246–47, 248, 290, 292, 303. See also Binge drinking Alpha Chi, 211–14 Alpha Chi Sigma, 268 Alpha Delta, 276, 288 (ill.), 291–92, 295, 298 Alpha Delta Phi, 13, 27, 28, 29, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 54, 62, 77, 85, 90, 91– 92, 98, 104, 105–6, 160, 163, 194, 195, 197–98, 202, 227 Alpha Kappa Lambda, 239–40 Alpha Phi Alpha, 169

Alpha Tau Omega, 127 (ill.), 143, 155 (ill.), 160, 256, 260, 281–82, 291 Alumni, 42, 81, 87–89, 100–105, 122, 126, 158–65, 201–2, 208–17, 217– 18, 235, 240, 270–71, 349 (n. 49); associations, 94, 100–104; meetings, 103–4, 114–15; and monetary support, 159, 162–64, 215; and discrimination, 217–18, 249–50, 254–56, 257–58 Alumni houses, 94, 100–102 American Education Society, 51, 320 (n. 9) Amherst College, 1, 16, 28, 42, 43, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 69, 71–72, 73, 99, 108, 136, 141, 143, 153, 154, 160, 163, 166–67, 217, 225, 233, 235, 248–50, 252, 280 Anderson, Olive San Louie, 173–74 Animal House, 243, 283–84 Antioch College, 172 Anti-secret societies, 59. See also Delta Upsilon Anxiety, of fraternity men, 2–3, 38, 44– 46, 80–81, 106–7, 302–3, 308 (n. 4) Asbury University, 173 Asian American fraternities, 7, 169. See also individual Asian American fraternities 401

Asian Americans, 69, 168 Asian American students, 165, 171, 258 Athletic Model Guild, 269 Bacon, Lewis, 239–40 Badges, 78, 97–98 Bagg, Lyman Hotchkiss, 91, 93–94, 97, 144, 146, 156, 167, 176–77 Baird, William Raimond, 32, 37, 46, 95, 97, 133, 151 Baird’s Manual of College Fraternities, 46, 95, 133, 214 Balfour, L. G., 234 Barnard, Frederick A. P., 74, 136, 141 Barnard College, 172, 244 Bauman, Martin, 268 Baylor University, 89 Beckett, Charles, 114–15 Beckwith, Burnham Putnam, 199 Beers, Henry, 167 Belden, Ezekiel Porter, 17 Beloit College, 179 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 177–78 Beta Phi Zeta, 285–86 Beta Theta Pi, 27, 28, 35, 40, 54, 122 (ill.), 174, 213, 238, 242, 245, 258, 260, 280 Binge drinking, 6, 7, 201–2, 288 Biological determinism, xi, 305 Birdseye, Clarence, 133 Bones Gate Fraternity, 294–95 Boston University, 85 Bowdoin College, 40, 42, 46, 58, 69, 139, 217 Brokeback Mountain, 289 Brotherhood, xii, 6, 10, 14, 29–31, 46– 49, 149–50, 154, 289, 290–93, 302– 3; national, 80, 82, 88, 105–18. See also Intimacy Brown, Mother, 75 Brown University, 32, 42, 63, 108, 169, 172, 217, 233 402

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Brown v. Board of Education, 254 Bryan, James, 27, 45, 62, 75–76 Bucknell University, 161 Burnett, H. D., 91 California State University, Long Beach, 259. See also Long Beach State College Canby, Henry Seidel, 101, 126, 139, 142, 144, 158–59, 169, 170–71, 175– 76 Canfield, James Hulme, 83, 104 Careers: of fraternity men, 3, 52, 54, 81, 102–5, 109–10, 208, 237; of college students, 14, 15, 20, 44–45, 106, 124–25, 187–88 Carlson, William, 255 Carnegie Mellon University, 276, 293 Carr, Julian S., 95 Carr, William Otis, 57 Catalogues, 95–97, 104, 214. See also Directories Catholic fraternities, 7, 169. See also individual Catholic fraternities Catholic students, 129, 165, 171–72 Centenary College, 43 Cheating, in academics, 20, 144 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 74 Chicano students, 260 Chi Delta Theta, 310–11 (n. 2) Chi Gamma Epsilon, 1, 294 Chi Phi, 46, 70, 92, 131, 145–46, 147, 149–50, 166, 176, 180, 194, 211, 310– 11 (n. 2) Chi Psi, 27, 35, 40, 49, 65, 88–89, 133, 162, 211–15 Cirrotta, Raymond, 229–33, 236 Citadel, 291 City College of New York, 169 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 250, 256 Civil War, 26, 81, 97, 103, 110–15, 151, 167

Clark, Thomas Arkle, 150, 152, 155, 189, 222, 339 (n. 51) Class, in college, 17, 18–19, 71. See also Class rush; Freshmen; Senior societies Class, socioeconomic: and fraternity membership, 3, 4, 14, 55–57, 65–66, 105, 121–23, 126–27, 129–33, 148– 49, 163–65, 193–94, 194–95, 199– 200, 210, 211–12, 214–15; of college students, 15, 22, 51–54, 124–25, 169–70, 187, 188, 319 (n. 4), 320 (n. 10); and dating/sex, 74–76, 176– 78, 221–22, 263–64, 266. See also Gentlemanliness; Middle class; Pickups; Working-class women Class rush, 19, 237 Clemson University, 295 Cleveland, Grover, 105 Coed fraternities, 7, 291 Coeducation, 172–73, 226, 245–46. See also Women students Cogswell, William, 23, 58 Colby College. See Waterville College Colby Junior College, 281 Colgate University, 260 Coles, William, 195–96 College honors, 17, 20, 38, 39, 64, 84, 134 College of New Jersey. See Princeton University College populations: in antebellum era, 15, 68, 69, 311 (n. 5); in postbellum era, 165, 332 (n. 2); in 1920s, 186, 344 (n. 7); in post–World War II era, 237 College purposes, 15, 52, 124–25, 187– 88, 312–13 (n. 16) Colleges: in antebellum era, 15, 16, 82; in postbellum era, 123–27, 134–35, 321–22 (n. 20), 332–33 (nn. 2, 6); in 1920s, 186–89; in post–World War

II era, 236–37. See also College populations; College purposes; Women’s colleges; and individual colleges College widow, 72, 175–76 Collins, Leroy, 240 Colorado State College, 239 Columbia University, 85, 141, 163, 169, 172, 217, 238, 244, 247, 254, 261 Communism: fraternities as counter to, 238; fraternities as under attack by, 254, 257–58 Competition: between men, 15, 106; between literary societies, 17; among students, 17, 190, 225; between college classes, 18; among fraternities, 38–44, 79, 109, 164, 190, 214, 238– 39, 239–40. See also Class rush Conformity, xii, 6, 9, 121, 198–200, 239, 240 Connections, established through fraternities, 4, 6, 15, 80, 94–95, 97, 102–4, 105, 124–25, 208, 240, 303 Conservatism, political: of fraternity members, 237–38 Conventions, 36, 46, 48, 98, 99–100, 113–14, 248–49 Corbin, John, 132, 141–42, 150, 154 Corbin, Nathan, 86 Cornell University, 97, 137, 141, 151, 154, 164, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 226, 246, 254 Correspondence, between chapters: purposes of, 79–80, 89–90, 105–18 Courtship, 71–73, 77–78, 174, 175–81, 325 (n. 39); and manly status, 77– 78, 179–81. See also Dating; Sex; Women; Women Students Cox, Paul, 239 Craven, Braxton, 160 Crosby, Howard, 132 Cumberland University, 85 Curriculum, of colleges, 16–17, 20, 125 index

403

Dartmouth College, 1, 37, 85, 108, 116, 136, 138 (ill.), 145, 170 (ill.), 192– 207, 224–25, 229–33, 244–45, 268, 280, 281, 283–84, 292, 294–95, 298 Dating, 1, 5, 186, 190–91, 219–20, 222, 226–28, 240, 262, 274–76, 281–82; and masculine status, 219–20, 222, 275–74, 304. See also Courtship; Sex; Women; Women Students Davenport, C. E., 111–12 Davidson College, 70 Day, Jeremiah, 42 Delta Chi, 246 Delta Kappa Epsilon, 28, 29, 30, 36, 39–44, 46–49, 54, 62, 63, 65, 69, 79, 84–86, 89–90, 91, 92–93, 97– 99, 101, 103–4, 108–18, 153, 170, 180, 193, 194, 195–96, 197–98, 201, 202, 203, 211, 218, 224 (ill.), 227, 229–33, 260 Delta Phi, 13 Delta Psi, 29, 39, 40, 92, 247, 260 Delta Tau Delta, 248 Delta Upsilon, 39, 59–60, 69, 73, 85– 88, 90–91, 105, 127–28, 143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 155, 156, 159, 163, 166– 67, 178, 209–10, 226, 321 (n. 16) Democracy, as exhibited in fraternities, 7, 234, 235–36, 250–51 Dennis, Hamilton J., 46–49, 117 DePauw University, 85 Dickey, John Sloan, 231 Directories, 54, 104 Discipline, 19–20, 22–24, 31–32, 126, 150–51, 242–43, 313–14 (n. 22). See also Faculty: and regulation of fraternities Double standard, sexual, 76, 219, 228, 263–64, 265, 266, 277–78, 283, 287. See also Sex Doxsee, Thomas, 231–32 Duke University, 1, 88, 96 (ill.), 127 404 index

(ill.), 131, 143, 160, 178, 180, 241–46, 256, 257, 259, 275, 285–86, 291, 294, 295 Economy: effects for men in fraternities, 14–15, 44, 53–54, 81; and colleges, 321–22 (n. 20) Embury, David A., 251–52, 257 Epps, Edward, 166 Epsilon Kappa Phi, 203–6, 268 Erwin, George, 80 Eulogies, of fraternity brothers, 115–18 Exclusion: from fraternities, 3–4, 7, 26, 42, 55–57, 129, 165, 169, 199– 200, 208, 235, 305; from college life, 146–47, 172–75, 179–80, 196–97 Expansion, of fraternities. See White fraternities: spread of Expulsion, from fraternities, 49, 60, 294 Extracurricular activities, 64, 84, 126, 133–47, 189–90, 194–95, 209–10, 238, 344 (n. 10). See also Sports Faculty, 7, 16, 17, 19–24, 32, 34, 125– 26, 145, 153, 241–43, 321 (n. 20); and regulation of fraternities, 31–37, 153, 159–60, 208, 235, 260–61, 312 (n. 15), 344 (n. 10); as members of fraternities, 159–61, 216 Fairbanks, Wilson, 178 Family, fraternities as like, 14, 30, 252– 53, 315–16 (n. 35) Faunce, William, 217 Felton, William, 231–32 Fergason, Belle, 75 Few, William Preston, 178 Field, Walter Taylor, 142 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 186 Florida State University, 301 Frank, Mrs. Glenn, 235–36 Fraternities. See African American fra-

ternities; Asian American fraternities; Catholic fraternities; Coed fraternities; Gay fraternities; Jewish fraternities; Latino fraternities; Multicultural fraternities; White fraternities; and individual fraternities Fraternity houses, 30, 149, 161–65, 207, 212–15, 233–34 Fraternity songs, 180, 275 Freemasonry, 32, 34, 35, 58, 315–16 (n. 35) Freshmen, 9, 17, 18–19, 41, 150–54, 237. See also Class, in college Furman University, 27, 89 G., Mary, 75 Gauss, Christian, 200 Gay fraternities, 6, 7, 369 (n. 18) Gender, as performance, 7–8, 310 (n. 15). See also Gentlemanliness; Manliness; Masculinity Gentlemanliness, 44–45, 65–67, 126– 27, 129–33, 155–56, 157, 216. See also Class, socioeconomic; Manliness Georgia Military Institute, 89 Gerry Elbridge, 133 Gibbs, Thomas, 248–49 Goodwin, Joseph, 203, 205–6 Government officials, fraternity members as, 4, 105, 308–9 (n. 5), 330 (n. 43) Grades. See Academic performance Graham, James A., 95 Great Depression, 233 Greek letters, use of, 25, 27 Gridley, Jennie, 71, 77 Grimes, Willie, 131 Grips, 77, 98, 109 Groupthink, xii, 301 Hall, Benjamin, 18, 21, 63, 64, 66 Haltom, Chester, 195

Hamilton College, 13, 30, 42, 54, 59, 73, 111–12 Hammond, William Gardiner, 1, 16, 28, 42, 60, 62, 64, 65, 71–72, 77–78, 178 Handshakes. See Grips Harper, Fred, 88 Harrington, Milton B. 198–99 Harvard University, 19, 21, 37, 54, 65, 125, 141–42, 169, 170, 172, 217 Hatcher, Harlan, 255 Hauserman, Bob, 271 Hawes, James Anderson, 103, 197, 201 Hawthorne, R. Frank, 90 Hayes, Rutherford B., 105 Hazing, 7, 18–19, 151–52, 202–3, 243, 245–47, 269, 289–90, 305 Henry, James B., 21, 55, 77 Henry, Joseph J., 110–11 Heterosexuality, 3, 5, 281, 295, 297, 300, 302; and masculinity, 184, 192, 207, 223–24, 226–28, 267–68, 269, 297–98, 300–301, 304. See also Dating; Sex. Hill, Walter B., 131, 147, 149, 178, 180 Hitchcock, B. W., 163 Hitchcock, Edward, 42, 64, 160 Hitchcock, Edward, Jr., 160 Holbrook, Richard, 142, 168 Holland, Jenkins, 75 Homoeroticism, of fraternities, 269, 289–90. See also Homosexuality: in fraternities Homophobia, 7, 268–69, 270, 274, 287, 293–97, 368 (n. 12) Homosexuality, 4–5, 192, 206–7, 262, 267–68, 304–5, 309 (n. 8), 347 (n. 33); in fraternities, 203–7, 224, 232, 268–74, 296–97 Honorary societies, 34. See also Phi Beta Kappa Hoover, Herbert, 105 index

405

Hoover, J. Edgar, 238 Hopkins, Ernest Martin, 193, 197–98, 202–3, 205–7 Hopkins, Mark, 35, 42, 159–60 Housing, in college, 6, 163–64, 208, 340–41 (n. 54). See also Fraternity houses Howe, Stewart S., 270–74, 296 Howell, Charles, 40, 64, 78 Humphreys, Samuel, 74 Hunnawill, Richard, 116 Hunter, Frederick, 145 Huston, Tom Charles, 238 Hyde, William DeWitt, 139 Immigrant students, 4, 169–72, 217, 232. See also Catholic students; Jewish students Indiana University, 276 Inge, William, 223–24, 286 Integration. See Racial restrictive clauses Inter-Fraternity Conference, 148–49. See also National Interfraternity Conference Intimacy, in fraternities, 101–2, 286– 88, 289, 290–93, 296, 299–300, 302, 305. See also Brotherhood Jacobs, Phebe, 69 Jane, 74 Jay, John, 104 Jefferson College, 55 Jenks, W. L., 90 Jewish fraternities, 7, 168–69, 217, 227. See also individual Jewish fraternities Jewish students, 129, 165, 168–72, 185, 217–18, 258–59 Jewish Theological Seminary, 169 Johns Hopkins University, 148, 179 Johnson, Clyde Sanfred, 275 406 index

Johnson, James, 69, 165 Johnson, Owen, 126, 136, 139, 168, 171 Jones, Edmund, 116 Jones, Ralph Garfield, 205–6 Kappa Alpha (northern), 13, 26, 27, 54, 151, 302, 310 (n. 2) Kappa Alpha Order (southern), 160 (ill.), 242–43, 244, 246, 259, 275, 294 Kappa Alpha Theta, 173, 179 Kappa Delta, 257 Kappa Kappa Gamma, 179–80 Kappa Kappa Kappa, 170 (ill.), 229– 33, 294 Kappa Sigma, 1, 88, 96 (ill.), 131, 153, 160, 168, 212, 242, 259, 271 Kappa Sigma Epsilon, 29 Kappa Theta, 248 Kellogg, H. L., 127–28 Kentucky Military Institute, 44 Kenyon College, 29, 40, 85, 90 Keppel, Francis, 256–57 Keppel, Frederick, 132 Kilgo, John, 160 Kind, John, 150 Kinsey, Alfred, 243, 264 Kittel, Bob, 271 Knox, John Reily, 27 Ku Klux Klan, 218 Lafayette College, 63, 65, 101 Lambda Chi Alpha, 194 Latino fraternities, 7 Laughlin, Helen, 211 Laughlin, R. M., 211, 213 Leggett, Mortimer, 151, 246 Lehigh University, 199 Levere, William C., 146–47 Lewan, Stewart, 294–95 Literary exercises, of fraternities, 28– 29, 59, 149

Literary societies, 16–18, 26, 28, 38– 40, 134–36, 316–17 (n. 47) Little sisters programs, 366 (n. 91) Long Beach State College, 282–83 Lonsdale, Stan, 1 Loomis, Justin, 161 Loyalty, in fraternities, 6, 33, 38, 46– 49, 281–82, 299, 302–3. See also Brotherhood Lusher, Nathaniel, 117 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 231 MacLean, John, 36 MacLean, Robert, 89 Mangam, L. H., 90 Manliness, 2, 4, 14, 34, 60–67, 115–16, 123, 127–28, 150, 321 (n. 19); and transition to masculinity, 4–5, 123, 127–28, 140, 157–58, 196; and independence, 14, 31, 67; and intelligence, 22, 62, 144; and oratory, 28– 29, 135; and competition, 38; and piety, 61–62; and appearance, 64; and race, 68, 69–70; and women, 68, 77–78; and sex, 73–76, 325–26 (n. 43); and hazing, 152–53. See also Gentlemanliness; Masculinity Manners. See Gentlemanliness Marks, Percy, 214–15 Maroney, Henry, 202 Martin, Ida Shaw, 173 Marvin, W. T. R., 30 Masculinity, xi, 2–5, 6, 7, 7–8, 102, 181, 216, 286–88, 305, 308 (n. 4); and transition from manliness, 4–5, 123, 127–28, 140, 157–58, 196; and sports, 139–40, 142–43, 195–96, 206; and drinking, 158, 200–202, 241–43, 284; and race, 165, 261; and women, 165, 192, 225, 227–28, 276– 77; and sex, 184–85, 222, 223–24, 261, 264, 278, 279, 282–83, 297–

98; and hazing, 202–3, 247; and recklessness, 241–43, 284, 333 (n. 11). See also Heterosexuality; Manliness Massachusetts Agricultural College, 141 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 166, 169 McConn, Max, 199–200 McCosh, James, 135–36, 144, 156–57 McKaig, Thomas, 75–76 McKim, Augusta, 72 McKinley, William, 105 Mead, Margaret, 219 Meads, Robert T., 202 Means, Paul B., 95 Miami University of Ohio, 13, 27, 54, 89–90, 244 Middlebury College, 21, 58, 63 Middle class, 53, 57, 106, 187, 319 (n. 4). See also Class, socioeconomic Midwest, 13, 26, 53 Miller, Chris, 243, 283–84, 291–92 Mills College, 281 Ministry, 4, 14, 15, 20, 23, 52–53, 54, 55, 66–67, 124, 320 (nn. 9, 10) Minnegerode, Meade, 137, 181 Mitchell, John, 19–20, 32, 56, 63–64, 72 Montross, Lynn and Lois, 222–23 Morehead, Eugene L., 95 Morgan, William, 34 Morris, Willie, 275 Morse, Frank, 29 Mount Holyoke College, 225 Multicultural fraternities, 6, 7 Muscular Christianity, 142 Nashville University, 112 National Interfraternity Conference, 201, 208, 214, 234, 239, 248, 251– 52, 253–54, 257–58, 269. index

407

National membership, benefits of, 83, 105–18, 211, 213 Nelly, 71 New England, 13, 15, 18, 22, 26, 52–53 Newsletters, 194 New Student, 183–85 New York Free Academy, 41, 65, 79, 108–9 North, Simon, 42 Northwestern University, 146–47 Nott, Eliphalet, 35 Oakland College, 41 Oberlin College, 172 Occident, 121–22, 145 Oestrus, 121–22, 131–32, 158, 164 Ohio State University, 179, 233 Omega Psi Phi, 261 Panty raids, 243–44. See also Women students Patrick, Thomas C., 24 Patterson, William McKay, 204 (ill.), 205–6 Patton, Cornelius Howard, 142 Pembroke College, 172 Pennel, Bob, 272–73 Perry, May, 178 Petting, 219–20, 222–23, 266. See also Sex Phi Alpha Psi, 249 Phi Beta Kappa, 27, 37, 190, 310–11 (n. 2) Phi Delta Theta, 245, 281 Phi Gamma Delta, 196, 289 Phi Kappa Psi, 152, 248–49, 252, 254, 271, 272 Phi Kappa Sigma, 35–36, 110, 155, 169, 245 Phi Sigma Delta, 261, 280 Physique Pictorial, 269 408

index

Pickups, 221, 263, 265, 304. See also Sex; Working-class women Pig parties, 280–81, 301–2. See also Sex Pi Kappa Phi, 238, 275 Pi Kappa Psi, 177 Pi Lambda Phi, 168–69, 301 Pi Phi, 235 Pledging, 152–53, 192–93, 246–47, 308 (n. 1), 337–38 (n. 42). See also Hazing; Rushing Pornography, 292, 300 Poppleton, Andrew Jackson, 35, 316 (n. 43) Porter, John Addison, 124, 156, 167 Porter, Noah, 34–35 Prestige. See Reputation Princeton University, 21, 24, 27, 32, 36–37, 40, 45, 55, 62, 69, 70, 75–76, 90, 126, 135–36, 141, 144, 147, 156– 57, 161, 244 Prostitution and prostitutes, 74–76, 177, 220, 264–65, 280, 304. See also Sex Protestantism, 5, 254, 321–22 (n. 20). See also Ministry; Racial restriction codes; Second Great Awakening Proust, Marcel, 272 Psi Upsilon, 28, 39, 40, 42, 62, 63, 72, 180, 194, 195, 196, 197–8, 202, 292 Purdue University, 272 Race. See African Americans; African American students; Asian Americans; Asian American students; Chicano students; Racial restriction codes; Racism; Whiteness Racial restriction codes, 69, 172, 185, 217–18, 235, 248–58 Racism, 7, 69, 167–68, 217–18, 257–61 Radcliffe College, 172 Ramey, Mrs. William, 257

Recklessness, 241–43, 283–84, 288. See also Vandalism Religion, 2, 16, 34, 57–58. See also Catholic students; Jewish students; Ministry; Protestantism; Racial restriction codes; Second Great Awakening Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 103, 110 Reputation, and importance for fraternities, xii, 80, 82–94, 97–98, 104–5, 125, 155–56, 189, 191, 208–9, 214, 216, 218, 239, 258, 261, 303; of colleges, 83–86, 136–37, 142, 209; and homosexuality, 206–7, 268–69, 293–94. See also Exclusion: from fraternities; Racial restriction codes Rho Psi, 169 Rice, Alexander Hamilton, 63, 72 Richardson, Leon B., 198, 199 Ritual, 34, 151–52, 292–93. See also Hazing Roberts, Perry, 166–67 Rockwell, Alphonso, 65 Roosevelt, Theodore, 114, 139, 140 Rule breaking, 24, 31–35, 65, 121, 158, 201, 240–41, 241–48. See also Discipline Rushing, 41–42, 153–54, 192–93, 212. See also Pledging Rutgers University, 85, 141, 143, 286– 87, 297–98 Ruthven, Alexander, 254–55 Salem College, 275 Sanderson, James Gardiner, 137, 168 Sansom, Richard, 24 Scharff, Christian H., 21, 55, 77 Schultze, William, 101 Second Great Awakening, 52, 57–58. See also Ministry; Protestantism; Religion

Secrecy, 32–34, 36, 58, 59–60, 161, 339 (n. 51) Senior societies, 18, 171, 328 (n. 23). See also Class, in college Servants, 68–70, 165–68 Sessions, John Q. A., 40 Sex: with women, 1, 5, 73–76, 176–78, 183–85, 219–24, 226–27, 244, 262– 67, 277–83, 297–302, 304, 370 (n. 22); with men, 203–7, 224, 268– 69, 273–74, 296–97. See also Pickups; Prostitution; Sexual Assault Sex, group, 223–24, 265, 280, 285– 86, 301–2, 362 (n. 57). See also Pickups; Prostitution Sexual assault, xi, 5, 7, 70, 74, 176, 262, 277–79, 280, 285–86, 297, 298, 300–301 Sigma Alpha Epsilon, 26 (ill.), 177, 240, 242, 271, 280, 295, 300 Sigma Chi, 92, 94–95, 110, 161, 194, 242, 255–57, 275, 290 Sigma Delta, 209–11 Sigma Nu, 212, 260, 271, 300 Sigma Phi, 13, 27, 40, 62, 64, 75–76, 78 Sigma Pi, 294 Skull and Bones, 18, 328 (n. 23) Slavery, 29, 68–70, 74 Slosson, Edwin, 145, 174 Smallwood, Norma, 189 Smith, Asa Dodge, 66 Smith College, 225, 276 Sororities, 7, 9, 145, 173, 174, 178–79, 189, 190–91, 207, 217, 223, 226–27, 235–36, 244, 257, 274–75, 342 (n. 68). See also individual sororities South (region), 13, 26, 52–53, 88–89, 104, 110–15, 213, 259, 260 South Carolina College, 27, 89, 109 Spence, P. B., 115 index

409

Sports, 19, 84, 137, 139–43, 158, 181, 189; and fraternities, 143, 194–96, 260 Stambolian, Richard, 281 Stanford University, 137, 143, 145, 150– 51, 151–52, 155–56, 157, 168, 174, 177, 179, 199, 255–57, 276, 281 State University of New York, 132, 255 Stephens College, 244 Strother, M., 90 Students for a Democratic Society, 238 Sturtevant, Julian, 51 Sumner, Samuel, 30 Supreme Court, U.S., 255 Swain, R. C., 27 Swarthmore College, 280 Syracuse University, 173, 197, 218, 280 Tau Kappa Epsilon, 259 Theta Delta Chi, 40, 92, 110–11, 138 (ill.), 202 Theta Nu Epsilon, 246, 339 (n. 51) Theta Xi, 246 Thomas, Ella Gertrude Clanton, 74 Thwing, Charles, 140 Todd, John, 23, 44, 55, 73 Todt, George, 253 Trinity College (Durham, N.C.). See Duke University Trinity College (Hartford, Conn.), 85 Truman, Harry, 105 Trustees, 35, 159–61, 235, 248 Tufts University, 154, 178 Tutors, 19–20 Union College, 13, 21, 26, 27, 30, 35, 54, 59, 63, 72, 302, 310 (n. 2) Universities. See Colleges; and individual universities University of Alabama, 36, 43, 54, 90 University of California, Berkeley, 121– 410

index

22, 131–32, 145, 158, 161, 162, 164, 176, 179–80, 238, 244, 246, 260 University of California, Davis, 300 University of Chicago, 147 University of Colorado, 238 University of Connecticut, 255 University of Florida, 301 University of Georgia, 58, 131, 147, 178, 281–82 University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, 85–86, 150, 155 (ill.), 162–63, 239, 270, 274, 281 University of Iowa, 172, 244 University of Kansas, 177, 223–24, 268–69 University of Kentucky, 294 University of Michigan, 29, 35, 41, 42, 46–49, 79, 89–91, 97, 99, 101, 103, 108, 112–13, 145, 147, 149, 155, 156, 162, 172, 172–74, 174–75, 197, 207, 225–26, 236, 238, 239–40, 244, 254–55, 290 University of Minnesota, 87–88, 177, 190, 254, 281 University of Mississippi, 74, 89 University of Missouri, 244, 246, 250, 258–59, 271 University of Nebraska, 244 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27, 54, 58, 65, 95, 116–17, 131, 145, 156, 179, 209–14, 247, 257, 260–61, 280 University of Northern Colorado. See Colorado State College University of Ohio, 58 University of Oklahoma, 189 University of Pennsylvania, 169, 301 University of Rochester, 37, 39, 42 University of Southern California, 246, 280 University of Texas, Austin, 246, 275, 279

University of Vermont, 85, 254, 289 University of Virginia, 1, 77, 88, 89, 90, 260 University of Wisconsin, 128, 132, 172, 179, 235–36, 248 Vandalism, 150–51, 157, 202, 241–43, 303. See also Recklessness Van Wyck, Augustus, 95 Veterans, 236–37, 352–53 (n. 10) Violence, 23, 37, 121–22, 229–33, 242, 246, 280. See also Sexual assault; Vandalism Virginity, 264, 266–67, 267–68, 278. See also Masculinity: and sex; Sex Wade, Harry V., 256 Waller, Willard, 191 Washburn, William Tucker, 125 Washington and Lee University, 92– 93 Washington College, 55, 85–86 Waterville College, 73, 108 Wayland, Francis, 32, 42 Webster, Noah, 23, 67 Wescott, Harold, 231 Wesleyan University, 29, 85, 217 Westminster Choir College, 244 West Point, 151 White fraternities: spread of, 13, 26– 27, 80, 81–82, 83–89, 207–14, 226– 27, 226–27, 239–40, 347 (n. 37); founding of, 13–14, 25–27; numbers of, 26, 82, 207, 236–37, 319 (n. 5), 353 (n. 11); and membership policies, 46, 198–200; and locations, 53, 123–24, 311 (n. 3); costs of, 56, 132; numbers of men who joined, 188– 89, 311–12 (n. 6), 353 (n. 11); during Great Depression, 233; during World War II, 233–35; after World War II, 236–39. See also Manliness;

Masculinity; and individual fraternities and entries for themes related to white fraternities Whiteness, 5, 68–70, 103, 106–7, 109, 254. See also Racial restriction codes Wilkinson, Cecil, 234 Williams College, 27, 35, 41, 42, 56– 57, 59, 73, 141, 159–60, 217 Wilson, Woodrow, 126 Winthrop, Theodore, 115 Wister, Owen, 170 Wofford College, 178 Woman’s College, Greensboro, 275 Women, 4–5, 70–78, 81, 103, 174, 183– 85, 253, 303–4. See also Pickups; Sex; Sororities; Working-class women Women’s Colleges, 1, 71, 172, 221, 224– 25, 275, 281. See also individual women’s colleges Women’s fraternities. See Sororities; and individual sororities Women students, 129, 165, 172–75, 179–80, 219–20, 222–23, 225–27, 243–45, 261–62, 262–64, 265–67, 274–76, 279, 283, 285–87, 297– 302, 304. See also Coeducation; Sex Woods, Leonard, Jr., 42 Wooster, William, 65, 89 Working-class women, 176–78, 184, 220–22, 263–64, 265, 279, 304, 349–50 (n. 53) World War II, 5, 229, 233–34, 251, 267. See also Veterans Worth, Cy, 195 Yale University, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 30, 42, 51, 52, 54, 63–64, 69, 72, 84, 91, 97, 124, 128–29, 136–37, 139, 140– 43, 144, 158, 167–71, 176–77, 177– 78, 179, 260, 280, 328 (n. 23), 334 (n. 20) index

411

Young Americans for Freedom, 238 Youth, 6, 9, 115–16, 309 (n. 12), 315– 16 (n. 35) Youth culture, 186–88, 207–8, 220 Yung Wing, 69

412

index

Zeta Beta Tau, 169, 259, 280 Zeta Delta Xi, 260 Zeta Psi, 1, 30, 110, 137, 143, 162, 179, 194, 211, 212, 298