Fraternity History & More

Thanks for reading this blog. I appreciate your support and telling others about it. There are 1,100 posts here. The search tool can help new readers find posts about specific topics relating to fraternity and sorority history.

The most viewed post year in and year out is Sorority Women and Fraternity Men in the White House.

The Top 10 posts for 2018:

10. Bess Truman, First Lady and P.E.O.

9. September 11th, the Fraternity and Sorority Members Who Perished

8. Minnie Freeman and the “Schoolhouse Blizzard” on January 12, 1888

7. Female U.S. Senators and Their Sorority Affiliation – 2018 Edition

6. Sorority Women Who Have Won Emmy Awards

5. Barbara Pierce Bush, Literacy Advocate and Pi Beta Phi

4.  Vice Presidents Who Were Members of a Fraternity. If the Vice President doesn’t become President, chances are good that in a decade or two very few people will remember his name. Check out this list of Vice Presidents who belonged to fraternities and I think that more than once you will say to yourself, “Never heard of him!”

3. Mary McLeod Bethune, Delta Sigma Theta, #WHM2018, #notablesororitywomen

2. The U.S. House of Representatives and the Sorority Women Who Have Served

1. Sorority Women Who Have Won Miss America and Miss USA

© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2018. All Rights Reserved. If  you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/. Focus on Fraternity History Facebook group

Oh, to have been in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, 150 years ago today, on December 21, 1868. Earlier that fall, Libbie Brook, a founder of I.C. Sorosis (now known by its Greek motto, Pi Beta Phi), enrolled at Iowa Wesleyan University instead of spending her junior year at Monmouth College, where her organization had been founded on April 28, 1867. It might have been because a chapter of Beta Theta Pi was established there and Libbie might have had a connection to Mount Pleasant. Perhaps her parents felt comfortable allowing her to be in Mount Pleasant. I often wonder why she chose to go to IWU rather than Knox College or Lombard College on her quest to establish the second chapter.

Libbie and her sister Mary took the train from Illinois. The bridge across the Mississippi River had opened for traffic on August 13, 1868. Mary became a student at IWU’s Preparatory School.

Libbie spent the fall getting acquainted with her fellow students. She had a plan and she kept to it. On December 21, 1868, the Gamma Chapter, I.C. Sorosis, was organized the home of Elijah Spry. Even though it was the second chapter, it took on the name of the third letter of the Greek alphabet. Legend has it that Libbie asked some of a group of friends, but not all seven, to become members of her organization.

A month later, on January 21, 1869, those seven, Franc Roads, Hattie Briggs, Mary Allen, Alice Coffin, Ella Stewart, Alice Bird, and Suela Pearson, chose to found a society of their own. They called it P.E.O.

As a P.E.O. and as Pi Beta Phi’s Historian, I am well aware of the early rivalry between the two groups. In fact, there is a section of Pi Phi’s centennial history titled “Rivalry Between P.E.O. and I.C. Sorosis at Mount Pleasant.” According to the report, some of it taken from the Story of P.E.O. written by Winona Evans Reeves, the two groups were for years “mortal foes yet each respected the steel of the other, for the societies were made up of much of the same type of girls. In Iowa Wesleyan they couldn’t even belong to the same literary societies; they had two societies in later years. The two boys’ fraternities (Beta Theta Pi, founded 1868, Phi Delta Theta, founded 1871 and perhaps Delta Tau Delta active 1875-80) had to be very careful in the way they divided their dates and their attentions.”

But the fact remains that the two organizations were intertwined. Had the event of December 21, 1868, not occurred, I likely would not be a P.E.O. today. I seriously doubt if P.E.O. would exist today. So I think it is fitting to celebrate the efforts of Libbie Brook on the way to celebrating the sesquicentennial of P.E.O. January 21st is but a month away!

Hazing is anathema to all the values and tenets of Greek-Letter Organizations. Yet, hazing is the stigma of GLOs. Would outlawing these organizations end hazing? I believe the answer is NO.

Are GLOs the only organizations in which hazing occurs? Hardly likely. Sports teams, bands, and the military have their share, as do other organizations. And it’s my opinion that Ph.D. committees and advisers have sent many a candidate chasing the elusive one more reference, fifty more pages, another revision, ad nauseam.

Waking at three last night, I did some light reading and stumbled across an article about America’s dominance in paper towel usage. This quote immediately attached itself to recent thoughts I had about hazing, “Perhaps the paper towel satisfies some deeper, uniquely American desire to be immediately rid of a problem, whatever the cost.” I’d been reading an argument that banning fraternities and sororities would end hazing once and for all.

Do I believe that? Not for a second. Currently, there are hundreds of inter/national GLOs whose existence depends on the behavior of their undergraduate members. These GLOs have prohibitions against hazing. Each time hazing occurs, the organization is tarnished and all the good done by its members is suddenly diminished. It hurts all of us who are members. So why is hazing still going on when there are laws and rules against it?

Group dynamics in these undergraduate organizations change as members come into and go out of membership. New members are initiated, older members graduate or leave. It’s a revolving door and the dynamics change at least once or twice a semester and maybe more often than that. And then there are all the variables of advisers, oversight by the international/organization, education about hazing, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, not to mention the issue of alcohol and drug use among all college students, not just the ones belonging to GLOs.

Outlawing these organizations will merely drive the behavior underground. Local organizations will likely replace inter/national ones. An incident occurring in the rental house at the corner of Main and Green is likely to get less press coverage than one taking place in a large house bearing Greek letters, so maybe an incident wouldn’t get traction in the press. Closing every inter/national chapter and chapter house in North America is not going to make any problem disappear. Prohibition did not make alcohol use go away.

When done correctly, the experience of being a member of a Greek-Letter Organization can be a positive and productive one. I believe that wholeheartedly. But I also believe in “done correctly.” Chapters that have no clue about the GLO experience need to be educated or closed. Our future depends on it.

It’s football bowl time apparently. I just texted my sons to see if the bowl teams had been chosen, and, yes they have. Fun to see Syracuse in the mix. The Orangemen are playing West Virginia University in the Camping World Bowl in Orlando, Florida on December 28. When I visited WVU earlier this fall and walked the campus early on a Sunday morning, the steep hills reminded me of the Syracuse campus. 

My friend Penny Proctor, a Hillsdale College Pi Phi alumna, sent me this info in an email and I asked if she would mind if I shared it. Thanks, Penny, for writing it.

Milo J. “Mike” Lude, one of the most respected D-1 athletic directors of his time, is an alumnus of the Beta Kappa chapter of Alpha Tau Omega.

A native of Vicksburg, Michigan, his college career was interrupted by his service in the Marine Corps during WWII. After the War he returned to Hillsdale College to be captain of the football team and a student coach of baseball. Three days after graduation he married his beloved Rena (a member of Pi Beta Phi) and embarked on a coaching career that began at the University of Maine, then took him to 14 years as an assistant coach at the University of Delaware.  He left there for his first, and last, head coaching position, at Colorado State University.  His coaching record was not impressive, but he became the athletic director at Kent State University in 1970, and that is where his talents shone.  While at Kent State, he hired head coach Don James who led the football team to the MAC championship.

In 1976 he became Athletic Director at the University of Washington, and during his tenure turned the $400,000 deficit into an $18 million surplus as well as overseeing the halcyon years of Washington football.  His was the deciding vote that to admit the University of Arizona and Arizona State University to the PAC-10 (as it was then).  When he left there, he became AD at Auburn and hired Terry Bowden as head football coach.  After he “retired” in 1994, he became a private consultant to college football programs all over the country. 

Mike is the recipient of many awards, including   Colorado “Sportsman of the Year,” the NCAA Corbett Award (1988) for top athletic director and the National Football Foundation John L. Toner Award (2001), for demonstrated superior administrative skills and dedication to college athletics, particularly football.  Mike penned his memoirs, Walking the Line, in 2004. He lost Rena in 2015 but at 96 he is still going strong.  

Alpha Omicron Pi was founded on January 2, 1897 at the home of Helen St. Clair (Mullan). She and three of her Barnard College friends, Stella George Stern (Perry), Jessie Wallace Hughan, and Elizabeth Heywood Wyman had pledged themselves to the organization on December 23, 1896. That first pledging ceremony took place in a small rarely used upstairs room in the old Columbia College Library.

Celebrating a Founders’ Day on the second day of the new year proved to be a challenge for the organization, so Alpha Omicron Pi now celebrates Founders’ Day on December 8, Stella’s birthday through January 2 and beyond.

The auctions of eBay seller brettandjan are feature fraternity and sorority items. When last week’s crop of items highlighted this eclectic collection of AOPi items, I thought I’d feature it for Founders’ Day. Alas, I have been down a rabbit hole trying to solve the mysteries of these items.

The hand-completed rush invitation is likely from Syracuse University, where during the 1920s, the Alpha Omicron Pi chapter house was located at 602 University Avenue. In 1925, September 26 was on a Saturday.  The name on the card is written “Beaulah Lincoln,” not the standard way of spelling “Beulah.” Was this an error on the part of the person who wrote out the card? I came across a few leads for Beulah Lincoln, but I could not connect any of them to Syracuse University. I do not have access to e-yearbooks, although I have several 1920s Syracuse yearbooks at home. But I am not there, and I thought better of asking my husband, my long-suffering husband, to go on a wild goose chase looking for her, when he has been saddled with the house and the dogs for months now.

The photo of Evelyn Purkaple from the Kansas University chapter proved a little easier once I enlarged the photo enough to see the spelling of the last name.

She left KU to marry W. W. “Bill” McConnell in the summer of 1922. A decade later, after the birth of two children, a girl and a boy, her husband, a superintendent of schools in Winfield, Kansas, was found dead of a gunshot wound in the school parking lot. Evelyn finished her degree at Southwestern College in 1938 and earned a master’s degree from Columbia Teacher’s College in 1967.  She spent more than 33 years employed in the Winfield school system as teacher, principal and elementary school coordinator. She died in 1997. 

The handmade, colored paper invitation is likely from the University of Maine chapter as Balentine Hall is on that campus.

Today, there are only a handful of men alive who were stationed at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. We are losing the heroes of World War II. That was brought to the forefront this week during the funeral for George Herbert Walker Bush, our 41st president (and Delta Kappa Epsilon), the last of our presidents to serve in World War II. The sight of Senator Robert Dole, a Kappa Sigma and WWII Purple Heart recipient, painstakingly standing from his wheelchair and saluting the casket of the former president brought tears to my eyes. Those of the “Greatest Generation” are leaving us and will soon live only in our memories.

In the fraternity and sorority magazines of the 1940s, one can get a glimpse of what it must have been like when the men left and returned to campus. A report from a University of Illinois fraternity published in a 1945 magazine, noted that, “As did everyone, we had the strange problem during rushing of not knowing some of our brothers, as well as the rushees, for we have men back from as far as the class of ’42.” 

The two institutions from which I graduated, Syracuse University and Southern Illinois University Carbondale, owe much those who took advantage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of June 22, 1944, commonly known as the G. I. Bill. It had six titles, only one of which dealt with the education and training of veterans. Yet, the educational benefits of the G. I. Bill have become a benchmark for higher education. More than two million World War II veterans attended college courtesy of the G. I. Bill. 

Economics, not education, was the original intent behind the legislation. The nation had been through an economic depression prior to its involvement in World War II. The wartime economy improved, but President Roosevelt was aware that unleashing significant numbers of veterans into a peacetime economy at the war’s end might be disastrous. Roosevelt’s first mention of educating returning veterans was on November 13, 1942, the day he signed into law a Selective Service Act amendment lowering the draft age to 18.

On December 19, 1945, the Senate approved several amendments to Title II, the education component of the G. I. Bill. The benefits were no longer restricted to those servicemen under 25 years of age, more time was allotted for the completion of a degree, and monthly subsistence allowances were raised $15 per month. Single veterans would get $65 per month allowance and those with dependents would receive $90.

The American Council on Education [ACE] aided the institutions by providing information on the 800 training courses taught by the armed forces. George P. Tuttle, Registrar at the University of Illinois, headed the committee which produced A guide to the evaluation of education experiences in the Armed Services.

The peak of veteran enrollment occurred in the fall of 1947; institutions scrambled to find housing, instructors, and classrooms to accommodate the record numbers of students. The G.I. Bill opened higher education’s door those who would not have previously attended college, and many veterans were the first in their family to attend college. Married students became an accepted part of higher education. The Korean War and the Vietnam War had their own G. I. Bills, and today the Veteran’s Administration provides educational benefits to those veterans who qualify.