When I started research on Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, my only agenda was to take some of my series characters across the San Francisco Bay to solve a crime on the University of California campus at Berkeley. I was primarily curious about what life was like for college students in 1881, and since my mystery series focuses on women and their experiences in this period, I assumed I would mostly deal with what life was like for my female characters. (If interested in this topic, see this post.)
What I did not expect was to find myself researching college fraternities and the role they played in the emergence of a new kind of hyper-masculinity among young men of the late nineteenth century.
In fact, if you had asked me before I embarked on the research for this book, I would have guessed that there weren’t any fraternities on such a recently-established, state-supported campus (the University of California was founded in 1868 and opened its first campus at Berkeley in 1873.)
Instead, I learned that in 1881 there were five male fraternities and one female fraternity (which was not yet called a sorority) and that four years earlier, Berkeley’s Zeta Psi fraternity was the first fraternity in the nation to have built their own fraternity house.
I also discovered that members of these campus fraternities had played prominent roles in the brutal hazing of fellow students, drunken beer bashes, and the creation of scurrilous fake publications, sparking an anti-fraternity movement on campus that resulted in a temporary ban on fraternities that divided the students and faculty and may have resulted in the recommendation by the Board of Trustees that the university president be fired in May, 1881.
Most of this information I unearthed from the annual university Blue and Gold yearbooks and scattered articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, giving me plenty of material to work with as I developed the plot of Scholarly Pursuits. However, as I did additional research into fraternities in the nineteenth century, I also learned that the antics and behaviors of these Berkeley students were part of a national dialog that had been going on about what defined masculinity.
Nicholas Syrett, in The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities(2009), argues that,“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.”
Laurie Wilkie, after studying the Berkeley chapter, echoes these conclusions in her book, The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity at a University Fraternity(2010). She also argues that the four years spent as undergraduates were an important time of transition for young men, a time when they could escape the women-dominated confines of their family homes while putting off the responsibilities of full adulthood.
In short, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, college appeared to be a place where these fraternity members could pretend to be men, while continuing to act like boys.
In addition, Wilke points out that the men who went through this experience became powerful sources of influence in society, for example, among prominent Zeta alumni from this period there was a California governor, a vice-president of Stanford, the founder of the Bank of Oakland, and several University of California Regents and professors.
So, what explains why college fraternities were so important in the development of a new definition of masculinity in the late nineteenth century?
First of all, before the Civil War, most colleges were founded as the place to train ministers and teachers. As a result, morality and scholarship were considered the most positive attributes for a college man to possess, and most colleges had numerous rules designed to encourage these attributes.
However, when fraternities began to be formed on these college campuses (the first, the Kappa Alpha society, was founded in 1825), college faculties and administrators were not particularly receptive. They saw these organizations and the young sons of the elite who joined them as challenging their authority and ability to discipline students.
Fraternities, in response, promoted the idea that they were organizations that did encourage scholarship and academic excellence. Consequently, they emphasized their members’ participation in college literary societies, the number of academic honors their members gained each year, and the extensive libraries they maintained. Nevertheless, these fraternities had an additional requirement for membership––that a student belong to one of the “old” elite families, which was their way of asserting that their members were “true gentlemen” and distinguishing themselves from the poorer students on campus.
After the Civil war, however, a new business and professional elite began to challenge these old families for dominance in society. Colleges and universities became the place where these new elites sent their sons so they could make the kind of social connections that would help advance their social status and careers. The University of California at Berkeley was no exception.
At the same time, after the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act in 1862, the creation of state (tax-supported) universities meant that these public institutions began to attract a much more diverse range of students. In 1881, there was no in-state tuition at Berkeley, which mean that students who were from rural areas and small towns or were the native born children of immigrants from San Francisco could attend. In addition, just under thirty percent of the students at Berkeley that year were female, similar to the pattern in undergraduate institutions throughout the United States.
Fraternities––being exclusive and expensive—were the primary way for the wealthier students from these new elites to distinguish themselves from these other students. One of the ways they did so was to redefine masculinity in a way that fit their own behavior, while denigrating other male students as being effeminate (and often chiding the female students as too masculine.)
For example, simple wealth became the new, most important pre-requisite for membership. By the end of the nineteenth century, being able to afford to buy the right clothes, take expensive trips, indulge in expensive entertainments, and pay for the building and running of a fraternity house became much more important than being from the “right family” or achieving any academic success.
The one exception to this rule about wealth was the student who excelled at sports. In the past, the old style “gentleman” might have known how to fence or ride a horse as part of a fox hunt, but none of these activities took particular strength or aggressiveness. In the late nineteenth century, a college man’s virility was increasingly associated with his ability to engage in competitive team sports, including track and field, baseball, and football. As a result, a student who excelled at these sports might be recruited by a fraternity, even if they didn’t have the usual financial where-with-all.
Fraternities often mentioned that participation in extra-curricular activities in general was a necessary characteristic for entrance, and they frequently offered the fact that their members belonged to and often held offices in glee clubs and campus literary societies and worked on the yearbook and student newspapers as proof that they were well-rounded individuals.
However, the kind of extra-curricular activities that fraternities extolled the most vigorously were the ones that got them into the most trouble on college campuses.
These behaviors included “cane rushes,” which were violent scrums between the freshmen and sophomores (the goal being to tackle, beat up, and hog-tie all the members of the opposing class), drunken “beer busts” that often resulted in sprees of petty vandalism directed at the property of local Berkeley residents (including their chickens), the publication of defamatory broadsides, and hazing rituals that had freshmen dragged from their homes, dunked in water barrels, heads shaved, and naked bodies tarred and feathered—one incident at Berkeley actually resulting in a shooting and Grand Jury report.
And if all this extra-curricular activity meant you had to engage in a little cheating to pass…so be it, because to these fraternity members, making the right social connections at college had supplanted academic achievement as their goal.
All this behavior culminated in a resolution in 1879 by the Berkeley faculty that required the incoming freshmen to sign a pledge that they would not join a secret society.
The editors of that year’s Blue and Gold yearbook, who were members of the Zeta Psi fraternity, were very up-front about blaming this anti-fraternity ban on the students who had started publishing an anti-fraternity paper the year before.
The forward to the yearbook describes these anti-fraternity students as “…the ostentatious student, the dig, the man who, whatever his momentary employment maybe be, at all times hugs under his arm some precious volume; he who writes wordy articles, with high-sounding titles…in which he condemns the frivolity and levity of those around him. Their recreations are vanities to him; their follies crimes.” This forward goes on to declare that this student “may be a virtuous as he pleases; but for us, we will still eat our cakes, and drink our ale.”
This attitude was supported by the Harvard physician, Edward Clarke, in his very popular book, Sex in Education(1873).Clarke wrote, “The brain cannot take more than its share without injury to other organs. It cannot do more than its share without depriving other organs of that exercise and nourishment which are essential to their health and vigor. It is in the power of the individual to throw, as it were, the whole vigor of the constitution into any one part, and, by giving to this part exclusive or excessive attention, to develop it at the expense, and to the neglect, of the others.”
Clarke’s work was primarily designed to support his thesis that women’s attendance in co-educational institutions––where they would taught in the same fashion as men––would destroy their health and reproductive abilities. In the case of men, Clarke wrote, “When this sort of arrest of development occurs in a man, it takes the element of masculineness out of him, and replaces it with adipose effeminacy.”
The students who edited the Blue and Gold year books clearly agreed because the class histories, the illustrations, and satiric essays, promulgated a consistent message. Woman who were attempting to get an education were in danger of becoming unattractive, too masculine, and ending up old maids. The male student who put his academic achievements above other activities, like drinking and having a good time, weren’t real men. Instead, they were portrayed as spindly, myopic, effeminate individuals whose attack on fraternities came out of “sore-headed” jealousy.
Not surprisingly, the ban on fraternities was quickly over-turned, once the fraternity men on the Berkeley campus complained to their fathers (many who were fraternity alumni themselves) who then complained to the newspapers and put pressure on the Regents.
In turn, I wasn’t surprised when I examined the 1882 yearbook to see the historian for the sophomore class (who had adopted a child’s blue cap as their freshman symbol) only mentioned in passing that about half of their class flunked out by the end of their freshman year, instead, spending most of the essay on detailing their extra-curricular exploits, writing:
“Several cane rushes, in each of which we were victorious, occurred during the first term. Meanwhile, we kept up our interest in athletics, and although suffering an occasional defeat, we managed to maintain a very good average. A hotly contested game of foot-ball with ’85 was decided in our favor after a three hours’ struggle. From the beginning of the term, the sublime cheek, the unbearable gall, of many of the Freshmen had showed itself in innumerable ways.
“Suddenly we were aroused from our studious meditations by the report that one of our classmates had suffered a great indignity at the hands of a burly Freshman. Shortly before the noon hour of the same day the offender was escorted to the Gymnasium, where he was put through a new and improved order of gymnastic exercises. His silken locks, which he had somehow lost during the performance, were carefully preserved as mementoes, in case he should not recover. The Faculty were informed of this little diversion in about two weeks, through the medium of the newspapers.
“In deference to the demands of the press, the Faculty determined upon harsh measures. …they brought forth a decree that drove sixteen of us into exile. At the same time some delicate “valentines,” elaborately gotten up, signed by William Carey Jones, Recorder, and registered at an expense to the State of thirteen cents each, announced the sad news to our astonished parents.”–1882 Blue and Gold Yearbook
I was also not astonished to discover the class historian who had written this was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, which had been founded the year of the anti-fraternity ban.
To read more detail about the exploits of students on the Berkeley campus—real and fictional, Scholarly Pursuits is now available in Kindle and all other major retailers.
M. Louisa Locke, March 11, 2019
Blue and Gold Yearbooks (1878-1882), University of California, Berkeley.
The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, Nicholas L Syrett, University of North Caroline Press, 2009.
The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity at a University Fraternity, Laurie A. Wilkie, University of California Press, 2010.
Sex in Education, Edward Clarke, 1873
