Fraternities

Social fraternities, quasi-secret organizations often found on college and university campuses, provide social, personal, and service opportunities for young men. Fraternities, according to the principles espoused by members, allow men to forge friendships and struggle into manhood under the guiding principles of moral integrity, honesty, and loyalty to the bonds of brotherhood. Over the years, however, they have often faced criticism for encouraging undesirable masculine behaviors, including elitism toward nonmembers, hazing (often dangerous initiation rituals) of new members, and a fun-loving social life that has sometimes bordered on decadence.

Phi Beta Kappa, organized in December 1776 at The College of William and Mary in Virginia, was the nation's first Greek-letter fraternity. Although Phi Beta Kappa ultimately became America's most renowned academic honor society for undergraduates, it established a model soon adopted by other purely social fraternal organizations. By the 1820s and 1830s, college men covertly developed regionally isolated fraternities—often meeting in members' dormitory rooms—to forge male friendships and encourage homosocial activities outside of, and in conscious opposition to, the administrative regulation of student life and the humdrum of academic recitation. The Civil War crippled fraternity life as students, especially in the South, exited classrooms for the battlefield. The prolonged and financially disruptive war undermined the practice of fraternity rituals and led to the demise of several Greek-letter organizations.

Fraternities expanded dramatically from the 1890s to the 1920s. College students were not alone in this rush to fraternalism, as hundreds of thousands of American men, anxious about the perceived female influence in American culture and experiencing what some historians have termed a “crisis of masculinity,” joined all types of societies. Although fraternities maintained secret rituals, they constructed residential lodges for members, often in very prominent spaces. The fraternity [Page 179]house provided a visible symbol of prestige, allowed for greater independence, and encouraged the development of government and administrative skills. The fraternity man increasingly mirrored the businessman of America's growing corporate world—an aggressive and purposeful fellow who viewed membership as a possible pathway to success. Fraternities also sought to encourage manliness in members through all-male drinking and sports.

The rise of racial segregation, the growth of immigration, and the escalating number of women in college contributed to the complexity and proliferation of fraternities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For white males, fraternity membership increasingly became a way to identify American manhood with whiteness and Protestantism, and many fraternities utilized racial and religious discrimination to restrict membership to Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Racial and religious minorities, prevented from joining old-line fraternities, soon formed their own, through which they expressed and articulated racially and ethnically grounded masculine identities. As college enrollment grew more diverse, fraternities, ever protective of their membership, became more exclusive. However, all fraternities used their prestige and popularity to increase heterosocial mingling on campus during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Greater fraternity exclusivity tended to exacerbate class division on campus. Fraternities attracted participants with the monetary resources for membership fees and social outings, distinguishing them from financially less fortunate peers. In the 1890s, fraternities initiated and controlled numerous campus activities, such as dances, proms, intramural athletics, and sponsorship of yearbooks and literary magazines. Fraternity men identified themselves as “Greeks,” associating their manliness with a cultured and civilized historical past and berating their nonfraternity classmates as less manly “barbarians.” In politics, Populist leaders attacked the elitism of many state colleges and their fraternities, culminating in the abolition of the fraternity system in South Carolina in 1893, in Arkansas in 1901, and in Mississippi in 1912.

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