American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  *

  Nu Kappa Epsilon distributes to every new pledge a 250-page hardcover manual called The Marathon, the most recent edition filled with information on the “DO IT!” program, filled with diagrams and hierarchical charts of the National Fraternity, and—most important—filled with the rich and graphic-intensive history of the Fraternity. The manual tells us that Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity was founded in 1910 at Carolina Baptist College, the dream of eight young men scattered far from their birthplaces of Charleston, Columbia, and Charlotte. As was typical in those days, none of these students was older than eighteen; five of the eight men were boys, just seventeen, and one was sixteen.

  A tiny liberal arts college in the northern sand hill country of South Carolina, Carolina Baptist prided itself on its literature and history departments, and the rigorous curriculum was designed to ensure that each male graduate (there were no female students in those days) could converse extensively on the subject of the classics, could speak admirable Latin, and could call-and-respond for hours with Biblical quotations and British poetry.

  Carolina Baptist: fertile soil in which would grow many future lawyers, politicians, professors, and pastors. The college at which these eight students studied was the quintessence of Bible Belt Academia. Not just “fertile soil”…no, bigger…a full nursery of sturdy trees. Yes, plant wealthy-but-rough Southern boys in the tilled dirt of Carolina Baptist, there in the sunshine, and after four years of study, watch them emerge with a newfound sense of culture, etiquette, a firm connection to the strong roots of Deep South Power necessary to earn quick trips into esteemed law firms, into graduate school at the University of Virginia or Duke or Vanderbilt. In 1910, a degree from Carolina Baptist College was a golden ticket born of four solid years of scholarship, of study late at night in the humid dorm rooms, reading thick textbooks by the light of the student’s lamp.

  The campus community at Carolina Baptist, also, featured enough extra-curricular activities for these young men to remain constantly and thoroughly immersed in those Deep South roots of power, that branching underworld of connections which their rich politician-fathers had secured for them at such great expense. The most distinguished of these activities was the campus literary society, The American Men of Letters, and it inducted just three new men each semester and published annually a 50-page book of poetry and of criticism on the contemporary classics of Southern literature. Held in equal esteem was the Carolina Baptist baseball team, which played against nearby Furman, the University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, and Emory and Oglethorpe down in Atlanta; years later, alumni would claim that the baseball team’s overwhelming Southern dominance so scared other universities that the Southeastern Conference passed over Carolina Baptist in the early years of the sports conference’s formation. This legend, of course, ignores the obvious fact that Carolina Baptist had no football team, which, as the years passed and the SEC universities grew larger and more prominent and football became more and more important, sealed Carolina Baptist’s current reputation as a tiny, quaint, and mostly irrelevant campus. That soil hasn’t gone infertile in the last century, but the tree nursery now seems more like a hobbyist’s garden.

  Three fraternities also met regularly on campus, though in the years immediately following the turn of the century, they didn’t yet live together in fraternity houses. Alumni would wait until after the Great War to petition the college for land on which to build the current Greek Row, a block of column-adorned, plantation-style mansions, each complete with porch swings and weeping willow trees. In 1910, these fraternities admitted just three or four new members each term, and as their rites of passage, they didn’t haze their pledges (many fraternity historians insist that hazing originated as the soldiers of WWI and WWII returned to college and introduced boot camp tactics into the houses). Instead, each fraternity steeped itself heavily in a specific academic subject, one studying Roman history and another studying Romantic poetry. Professors and dignitaries at Carolina Baptist sat in honorary positions with these fraternities, giving them extra reading assignments as though fraternity life was another class, helping them to organize academic banquets at which poetry was recited and grades celebrated. And, of course, the greater the passion that students, alumni, and faculty developed for these fraternities, the greater the number of annual traditions and friendly rivalries that developed. Today, Carolina Baptist still holds its Fraternity Wheelbarrow Pull (though the winning fraternity is no longer made to wear dresses and cook dinner for the losers).

  An invitation into any campus group, society, sports team, or fraternity, was seen as an instant invitation into that larger network of Southern Somebodies. Admission into Carolina Baptist College was special, certainly, but it was only the first step; membership in a fraternity or a literary society meant that you had made it, no worries. You’d latched onto those roots, and now your future could become warmly intertwined within them, could grow along with them.

  The only problem, though, was that the very exclusivity that seemed essential for these campus groups to exist soon worked to their detriment. Carolina Baptist had been slowly increasing enrollment in the early 1900s, and by 1910 reached a staggering 220 students. But the fraternities, comfortable with their membership numbers, refused to adapt and grow. Exclusivity became even more exclusive, as more potential suitors—from which the fraternities could select at will—appeared on campus, and were rejected and discarded like invasive weeds.

  But thankfully…two blood brothers, Lesley and Jackson Cohen, separated in age by only a year but electing to enroll at Carolina Baptist at the same time, both found themselves in Fall of 1910 among the large number of disappointed freshmen not selected by any fraternity as pledges. Lesley and Jackson soon made friends with a student named C. Anthony Croke, and (as legend goes) the three began to dine together every evening, began to watch with hawkish interest the interactions of the other campus fraternities.

  So infatuated with their own traditions were these fraternities, said Jackson Cohen (the most assertive of the three youths), that they had forsaken all that was meaningful about the fraternity experience. He claimed that fraternity brothers were neither “brotherly” to one another, nor interested in working together for any common good; they seemed devoted only to exploiting that life of power that they had entered. Essentially, he said, fraternity at Carolina Baptist had died. From The Marathon, a famous NKE quote: “We shall have a brotherhood of our own,” said Jackson Cohen. “We shall have a selfless fraternity of gentlemen more distinguished than they.”

  And out of this desire for fraternal bonds came Nu Kappa Epsilon, officially established in November of 1910. And the fraternity bloomed first on that Carolina Baptist campus, as the neglected suitors from all other campus fraternities jumped at the opportunity to start something new and different, to start something living, to find their place, to secure the companionship that they so desperately craved. To found a fraternity, they believed, the right way. Then the fraternity spread its seed throughout the entire Deep South, where many similar colleges and universities experienced the same phenomenon: growing in enrollment but under-served by the over-exclusive campus fraternities.

  Nu Kappa Epsilon first received petitions from students at those schools closest, from Furman and South Carolina and Chapel Hill, and then from schools as far south as Stetson University, and as far west as Ole Miss. Growth slowed during the Great War, but the Roaring Twenties brought a fresh crop of young men to college, and from coast to coast, these men looked to join brotherhoods as strong as those that they had left in the military, and NKE soon found itself with chapters at UCLA and Washington and Penn State and Pittsburgh and Illinois. The Grand Tradition of Nu Kappa Epsilon had begun.

  It’s a fun story to tell, a fun history lesson for any chapter that doesn’t “get it.” They are part of something larger than themselves, a century of tradition that began with young men just like them.

  So that’s the official history. And when
we tell the story, we make the intentions seem so pure. But I’m quickly learning that history is never so neat as we’d like to believe.

  *

  This is Dr. Wigginton’s version of the history:

  “Have you been to State College yet?” Dr. Wigginton asks me, still on the porch after more than an hour of one-sided conversation. He’s already refilled my chili bowl, and once again I couldn’t refuse his hospitality.

  I tell him that I’ve been in Pennsylvania only three or four days.

  “Mmm,” he says, and shakes his head again. “I visited two weeks ago for a coach’s brunch. Only a few old-timers came by. You have seen the house, correct?”

  I tell him that I don’t think so.

  “You don’t know the story of the Penn State house fire? 1985?”

  The gas is starting to build from the chili. I take a deep breath and will it away. “The Penn State house fire?” I say. Does every chapter have a house-fire story?

  “I’ll have to refresh your history at another time. In any case, it’s an impressive mess those young men have made of that home! More than a hundred members, and they seem incapable even of wiping the sprayed beer from the glass frame of the charter.”

  I picture the ceiling fan at Pittsburgh, the beer, the paint.

  “They cannot empty trash cans,” he says. “Even on gameday, they cannot just pretend that they appreciate tradition. And this is a four-million dollar house.” So far, I’ve been his audience but not his conversational equal, and I fear that I might spend the entire afternoon listening to him relive his fraternity memories. A wasted alumni visit. So I tell him that I understand, that I appreciate tradition, that this was the reason I took the job.

  Dr. Wigginton stops, considers me from an angle, eyes squinted. “Do you?”

  “Most definitely. When you become an alumnus”—I savor the word—“that’s, like, the most important thing. Tradition. How everything, everyone, fits together.”

  He reaches into his pants pocket, digs around for a moment, and then his hand re-emerges with a thick gold coin the same size as the rim of his coffee mug. He holds it up for me, lets the sunlight catch its side to shadow the embossed script across its polished surface: “A New Beginning,” it reads, with the voluptuous outline of a white carnation below these words.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asks, voice dramatically low, as if he’s looking into the lens of a camera, prepared to inform the world about the death toll from a South Pacific tsunami.

  “It’s a coin?”

  He shakes his head. “This…this is tradition. One of just fifty alumni medallions produced to commemorate my chapter’s founding. You’ve never seen an alumni medallion?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You appreciate tradition, Mr. Washington, but you don’t seem to know very much.”

  “I, um. I try to learn.”

  “Experience is the best teacher,” he says and points his spoon at me. “It was an all-Southern fraternity in the early century, that’s what you can’t learn from reading those manuals. And Penn State was vital.” He clears his throat and lets out another “Mmm, mmm,” like the low motor hum of a failing weed whacker. “You see, you’ll learn a bit when you visit my boys at Penn State next week.” He smacks my knee again. A moment, this knee-slapping, that I can’t figure out. An old-man quirk, the same as when my grandmother used to call the ladies at her church “her girlfriends” and the kids on my block “my boyfriends?” Or an awkward attempt at youthful masculinity, like when my father wears a Red Sox hat on company picnics?

  “I don’t visit Penn State this semester,” I say.

  “Mmm,” he says. “Well. We were the first chapter established north of Mason-Dixon’s line. The first. The original founders at Carolina Baptist were hesitant about expanding northward, you understand. In those days, young men still had grandfathers who’d served in the Civil War. Try to tell some Confederate soldier that you’re now brothers with a young man in Pennsylvania.” I shift in my chair, open my mouth, gas building again. Close my mouth, sit still, hope he won’t smack my knee again. “It was Lesley Cohen, more than the others. The manuals praise him, but he didn’t want to colonize outside the Carolinas.” Dr. Wigginton sits back, looks at the porch railing and shakes his head. Laughs. “He died early, that’s something else the manuals don’t say. The joke is that he visited the University of Illinois, saw that they had a Negro brother in their fraternity, and had a heart attack on the spot!” Laughing harder now, but still with that newscaster look, like he’s watching video of a squirrel water-skiing.

  “Are you joking?” I ask.

  “Oh, no no. You should read Cohen’s early speeches at conventions.” He stops, looks at me, trying to decide if he can trust me with a secret. “The number of times he uses the word ‘nigger,’ a Klansmen would be embarrassed.” Closes his eyes and chuckles again, face overtaken by wrinkles. “Had an alcohol problem, too, did Lesley Cohen. Fell from a bridge in his early thirties, and”—now Dr. Wigginton is wagging his finger, laughter subsiding—“probably a good thing, too, for the national fraternity!”

  “This is all true?” I ask. “Where is this…”

  But Dr. Wigginton still isn’t listening to me. “Truth be told, we only started at Penn State because…Roger ‘the Rooster’ Redding, they called him, a Nike from Charlottesville…fled the University of Virginia because, it’s rumored, he impregnated the daughter of the local sheriff! Rode out of town with a shotgun firing at his heels! Enrolled in Penn State, found five other men who would form a new chapter of Nu Kappa Epsilon with him, and the rest is history. First chapter in the North.”

  “He got her pregnant and just left town? That’s the story behind Penn State?”

  “It’s legend, young man,” he says and waves away my question. “Don’t question it too much. This was, oh, 1913, 1914, I believe, and once the Penn State chapter was going, they spoke with friends at Penn, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Delaware. The schools, in those days, they all played one another in baseball, see, so our brothers—all of whom played for State—knew the outfielders at Pennsylvania. And the brothers, they just started all of these chapters across Pennsylvania and even as far west as Miami University in Oxford.”

  “But a sheriff? A shotgun? Lesley Cohen on the bridge? It just seems so…not right.”

  “That’s why they can’t write it in the pledge manuals,” he says. “But we’re the reason—Penn State is the reason—that this fraternity flourishes from coast to coast. Oh, certainly, certainly. This is the reason that these medallions were issued: to honor the first decade of Penn State brothers, those who made this a truly national fraternity. We’d have been a strictly Carolina fraternity, otherwise. And can you imagine that?” He pats my knee again.

  I remember talking with Walter LaFaber a month or two ago, back at Headquarters, when he first discussed the esteemed Dr. Wigginton. LaFaber had a general’s look in his eyes, the sort of sharp edge that says, “When we speak of Dr. Wigginton, we speak with reverence.” But was there something else in that look?

  “So how did you get one of the medallions?” I ask.

  “An interesting story,” he says. “Long. But very interesting.”

  Shit. So quickly I try to steer the conversation away from odd fraternity legends, guide it back toward me. Only a short while left before I take off to find a hotel somewhere, and I need to make an impression. “I bet,” I say. “You know, it’s going to be tough to leave Nike when my contract expires in May. I don’t even know where to start looking for jobs.”

  “Mmm,” he says. And thankfully he deposits the coin back into his pants pocket. “A common enough problem. What’s your degree?”

  “Organizational communications.”

  “Vague field.” He stares into the clouds. “Difficult to find quality careers.”

  “That’s what my father said. But my advisors told me that vague was better.”

  “I would have advised you toward a different maj
or.”

  “I can’t go back now.”

  “You graduated in Spring? You’re fortunate to have found a job so quickly.”

  “I worked hard in college. I’m, you know, confident about the future.”

  “Organizational communications.” He inhales and seems to taste the afternoon air. “My colleagues have grown fond of filtering resumes, you see. They receive large stacks, hundreds, and so they try to make candidate selections more efficient. There are some degrees that…due to the reputation of a program’s difficulty…they discard the resume if they see these degrees.”

  “They do that? Filtering?”

  “Mmm,” he says, shrugs. “But there’s hope with the path you’ve begun. Continue to wedge yourself into the world of college administration. Most of these consultants I meet, they’re climbers. They use this position to get something better. That’s what you should do.”

  “Well. That’s not why I took this position, to be a ‘climber,’” I say.

  “No? That’s not why you’re on my porch right now?” he asks. “Ahh, that reminds me! Walter told me about the…Wait, have you visited Illinois?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Have you at least heard about the problems at Illinois, then?”

  “No,” I say. “Something serious?”

  “Yes. But if Walter hasn’t told you yet, I shouldn’t elaborate. I can only say that you might be enlisted to avert catastrophe at that university.”

  “Oh,” I say, the bowl of chili gone cold in my hands, and now he’s talking about something else, and I consider trying to redirect the discussion back to my career, but it seems futile. Afternoon in Kinston, Pennsylvania, and I have nowhere to go but the porch, with a smiling old man who still takes tiny bites long after the food is no longer worth eating.

  “So you’ll be staying with me tonight, I’ve been told?”