The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities

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

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by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence

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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 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

paper 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

for my mother,

CATHERINE COOPER LOVETT SYRETT,

and in memory of my father,

JOHN SYRETT

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Camaraderie and Resistance: The Founding and Function of College Fraternities

Chapter 2. The Sacred, the Secular, and the Manly

Chapter 3. Very Fraternally Yours: National Brotherhood in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 4. Greeks and Barbs: Social Class and the Rise of the Fraternity in the Postbellum Years

Chapter 5. Fussers and Fast Women: Fraternity Men in the 1920s

Chapter 6. Democracy, Drinking, and Violence: Post–World War II Fraternities

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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

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 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 Almaguer, 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.

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 improved 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 Stewart-Winter, 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 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 Schwartz-man. 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 sister-in-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.

The Company He Keeps

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."¹

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 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 nineteenth-century 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 confrontational 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.²

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.³

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.⁴ 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 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.⁵

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.⁶

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.⁷

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 aggressive 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 hetero-sexuality 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.⁸

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.⁹

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 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.¹⁰ Others in the late twentieth century founded openly gay fraternities.¹¹ 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 fraternity man. Thus, standards of fraternal masculinity have often come to stand in for college culture more generally.¹²

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.¹³

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 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), Goff-man 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.¹⁴

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.¹⁵

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.

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.¹⁶

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 twentieth-century 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 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.¹⁷

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 rule-abiding 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 upper-class 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 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.

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.¹

So begins the history of college fraternities in the United States.² 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 (AΔΦ) became the first society to be founded outside of Union, also at Hamilton. The following year, AΔΦ 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.³

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 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.⁴

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