Behind the convention’s closed doors, fraternity members were struggling to preserve their exclusionary membership rules. Fraternity leaders debated a section of SAE’s governing laws dating to the early 1900s:
Any male member of the Aryan race, of good moral character and intellectual ability, who is a student at the domicile of the Chapter Collegiate, is eligible to membership in the Fraternity, except that (1) No person, either of whose parents is a full-blooded Jew, is eligible, and (2) No person who is or has been a member of another college social fraternity is eligible.
The “Aryan race” requirement, not to mention the exclusion of the children of “full-blooded” Jews, sounded as if it had come straight out of Hitler’s Germany. After the liberation of Nazi death camps, such attitudes were becoming less acceptable. The US government was beginning to fight discrimination, and public universities started pressuring fraternities to drop racist membership rules. The University of Connecticut threatened to shut down its thriving SAE chapter. The University of Rhode Island and the University of Massachusetts were expected to be next, as would colleges throughout the North.
On the last full day of the convention, more than 170 men gathered in a hotel ballroom. More than once, Emmett B. Moore, SAE’s president, asked the brothers to ensure no outsiders were present. Unlike all the other business of the convention, no transcript of this “executive session” would be published, not even, as was the custom, in the Phi Alpha, itself a secret publication of the fraternity. One member suggested barring the stenographer. Showing a lawyer’s regard for preserving the record, Alfred Nippert, an Ohio judge, disagreed. Nippert, who grew up in Germany during the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian War, also had a keen sense of history. During World War I, he had acted as an emissary between the German leader Kaiser Wilhelm and President Woodrow Wilson. Now, Nippert took the floor to press his point, saying that they owed an accounting of their actions to the next generations. “We ought to know why and how we did it, when our sons and grandsons come to be members of SAE,” he told the crowd, his faint German accent giving him a sense of worldly authority. Nippert had authority for another reason. The lead financier of the fraternity’s headquarters, he was married to the heir of the Proctor & Gamble soap fortune. Nippert prevailed. Others remained worried that word of their deliberations would leak out. “For God’s sake, be careful, because this may be reproduced some day in every paper in the United States,” one member warned.
To save the Northern chapters, a panel of prominent members had already determined before the convention that SAE had no choice but to change the language of its laws. The group included a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, William W. Paddock, who gained notoriety in 1934 when the Boston papers said his institution processed part of the ransom money for the kidnapped Lindbergh baby. Other members inhabited the upper reaches of law, sports, and medicine: Samuel G. DeSimone, a state judge in New Jersey; Walter “Doc” Meanwell, a legendary former basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and M. Brittain Moore Jr., who became director of venereal disease research at what would become the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he published research on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, infamous for failing to treat hundreds of black men who had the disease.
The SAE leaders had concocted a recommendation that seemed straightforward: instead of insisting on an Aryan brotherhood, the fraternity’s law would allow as members all men “of sound moral character, of creditable intellectual attainments, and socially acceptable throughout the fraternity.” The SAE elders weren’t actually opening up the fraternity to blacks and Jews—far from it. They promised the convention crowd that the new language amounted to a public-relations move, a shift from explicit to unspoken discrimination. “We are all united on one thing, I am very sure, and that is that we cannot have certain people in the fraternity,” proclaimed Albert M. Austin, a past SAE national president. “We just can’t do it. We won’t do it, and, if that happens, if any of you walk out, boys, I’ll be number one.”
Austin lived in New York City, where he was a distinguished patent lawyer whose firm worked on a pivotal case involving Henry Ford’s intellectual rights to the automobile. But he told the audience he was “a Southerner by instinct.” He had grown up in Franklin, Tennessee, vacationed in the mountains of North Carolina, and spoke the language of SAE’s conservatives: “No power on Earth can keep us from selecting our friends. In Soviet Russia, they can’t make a man select his friends.” Sounding like a Southern demagogue, he gave a stem-winder: “Get rid of these words, but stick to our standards, stick to our standards, boys, until death do us part.” The crowd gave Austin a standing ovation.
Austin’s speech failed to convince traditionalists, who continued to fight in favor of the racist and anti-Semitic language. In their view, words mattered, and a change could open the door to black and Jewish members. Joseph Walt, a member of the University of Tennessee chapter, said his alumni were “unalterably opposed” to striking the discriminatory clause. Speaking of the admission of blacks and Jews, he said that his alumni “must be absolutely guaranteed that no such thing can or ever will take place.” G. Holmes Braddock, a member from the University of Miami, predicted the controversy would blow over as it had two years earlier at his alma mater when Jewish students briefly protested their exclusion. “We had a member of our faculty who was a Jew, and we had a fight on our hands,” he said. Braddock urged the fraternity to resist outside pressure: “I don’t want to see SAE deteriorate, and neither do I want to see us back down when the fight is just beginning.” Nevertheless, 122 members, more than the two-thirds majority required to pass the altered language, supported striking the discriminatory language. The word “Aryan” was out. Under the letter of the law, a member need only be “socially acceptable throughout the fraternity,” though it would still be understood what that really meant: no blacks or Jews.
But that gentlemen’s agreement failed to satisfy some members, who proposed merely shifting the discriminatory language from SAE’s publicly disclosed laws into the words of its secret ritual. They considered the ritual sacred because it had been passed down from Noble Leslie DeVotie, their founder. Pledges wearing robes and holding candles chanted its words in dark rooms. On the last day of the convention, Walt, who headed the ritual committee, suggested the private words of the ritual specify that only “white Christian Gentiles” could join SAE. The federal government might not abide discrimination in its public laws, but why couldn’t the offending language be included in the ritual? One speaker suggested the discriminatory phrase be written in Greek, so legislators wouldn’t understand it. Meanwell, the Wisconsin basketball coach loved the idea. “We would certainly put something in the ritual that we could stand on and know that we would have no persons of other color or of another race except pure white-blooded Americans, or red-blooded Americans,” he said. John Graves of the George Washington University chapter added, “We have to take something back to our brothers that is ironclad, something with teeth in it. We have to be able to say, ‘Brothers, here is what we did; we have all the safeguards in the world to keep the non-Aryan, the Negro and the Jew out of our fraternity.’”
Armistead I. Selden Jr., an Alabama state legislator who had been a World War II US Navy lieutenant, put forth a compromise. He focused on the words in the public law that had already been approved: members must be “socially acceptable throughout the fraternity.” Selden offered what he thought was a clever solution. What if the convention secretly defined the meaning of “socially acceptable”? What if members proclaimed it to mean, in fact, “white Christian Gentile”? To the Reverend Charles E. McAllister, dean of St. John the Evangelist in Spokane, Washington, the group was playing with words. McAllister was a member of the Washington State College of Regents and the convention’s keynote speaker. However, instead of arguing the fine points of his position, he used his time to tell a racist joke about “an old Negro Mammy… way down South” w
ho called her child Morphy, short for Morphine. When asked why she had named her child after a narcotic, she replied that she had looked up the word in the dictionary: “Well, Mister, it said there that morphine was the product of the wild poppy and if ever a child had a wild poppy, this is the child.” The joke may have had little relevance to the matter at hand, but the audience laughed all the same.
As their 3:00 p.m. checkout time approached, the men were forced to make a decision. They turned to one of their luminaries, Eminent Supreme Recorder John O. Moseley, the fraternity’s executive director, who spoke up for the first time. No one had more standing than Moseley, except perhaps the late Levere. Moseley, courtly and bespectacled, was a Rhodes scholar and classics professor who became president of the University of Nevada. Perhaps most important, Moseley first introduced the True Gentleman creed as a cornerstone of SAE education. (In 1899, John Walter Wayland, a historian at what is now James Madison University in Virginia, wrote its words to win a contest at the Baltimore Sun for the best definition of a “true gentleman.”)
Moseley, born in Mississippi, was very much a Southerner of the old school. At the 1945 SAE convention, Moseley gave a keynote speech filled with racial overtones. He told Uncle Remus stories in a stereotypical black accent. He called Levere, the temperance activist and SAE historian, “a Northern boy who adored the South and loved to tell of the chivalry of our Southern SAEs in that War between the States.” He made casual use of racial epithets, saying apropos of nothing: “Like the nigger said, ‘He should have zigged when he zagged.’”
At the 1951 convention, Moseley backed Selden’s approach. Moseley assured the crowd that SAE would keep its door shut to the wrong people. “I was born and raised in the state of Mississippi and if anybody brings someone contrary to my social standards into this fraternity, Albert Austin said he would be the first to leave, and I’ll be the second,” Moseley said. He called for a voice vote on Selden’s compromise: that they would agree that day that “socially acceptable,” in fact, meant “white Christian Gentile.” In other words, SAE could tell college administrators it had changed its rules and ended discrimination, even though it hadn’t. It was an appealing strategy, although perhaps difficult to square with the creed of the True Gentleman, “who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy.” The motion carried.
The True Gentlemen had voted in favor of a lie.
TO CREATE AN American elite, the fraternity movement had long practiced discrimination, while its members praised it and its official literature codified it. Fraternity men liked the other definition of discriminating: a cultured person with refined taste, a discriminating gentleman. “Who made it a bad word, anyhow?” David A. Embury, chairman of the National Interfraternity Conference asked at a 1947 meeting. “I love the discriminating tongue, the discriminating eye, the discriminating ear, and above all the discriminating mind and the discriminating soul.” Or, as Coach Meanwell told members at SAE’s Chicago convention four years later, “You are chosen because of your traits, because of the manly traits you possess. Let’s face it. We do discriminate.”
The SAE men defending prejudice were some of the most respected leaders in the history of the fraternity and are still held up as models for members. Moseley founded SAE’s leadership school in 1935. The University of Oklahoma students had learned the racist chant from other members attending the John O. Moseley Leadership School. Moseley had deep ties to Oklahoma. He had joined SAE when he was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma; undergraduates later named the chapter after him. Walt, the Tennessee undergraduate pushing to add discriminatory language to the secret ritual, became a fraternity historian. For half a century, from 1959 through 2008, Walt edited the Phoenix, the manual given to all new members that outlined SAE’s values and history. He died in 2013, but his words still appear in the foreword of the edition handed out to undergraduates: “The basic principles that drive Sigma Alpha Epsilon are the same today as they were more than 155 years ago.”
Other members wielded influence in American society. Selden, who first suggested the compromise that created the unwritten rule that only “white Christian Gentiles could be members,” later became an Alabama congressman, an assistant secretary of defense, and an ambassador in the Nixon administration. Braddock, the alumnus from Miami opposed to Jewish membership, served on the Miami-Dade School Board from 1962 to 2000. There, in an instance of historical irony, he led the effort to desegregate Miami’s public schools. One school is named in his honor. “The world was different then,” Braddock, who was now ninety-one years old, told me. “I was born and raised a Southerner. As all Southerners did in those days, I grew up in segregation. I didn’t know any better.”
SAE’s Southern roots influenced its racial attitudes. When Noble Leslie DeVotie and his seven friends christened the fraternity by candlelight at the University of Alabama in March 1856, they shared prevailing Southern views. DeVotie’s own family had roots in both North and South. His father, James H. DeVotie, was born in upstate New York and was a descendant of French Protestants who arrived in the New World before the Revolutionary War. But the elder DeVotie, a severe, rugged-looking man with an unruly white beard, had become a diehard Alabamian. As a teenager, he was born again as a Southern Baptist, a denomination that advocated for slavery. James DeVotie became a preacher, then married into a prominent Montgomery, Alabama, family. Not surprisingly, his son, SAE’s founder, held similar views. Over the next three years, the younger DeVotie and his minions founded SAE chapters on other campuses. Staunch believers in slavery and the second-class status of black people, they chose not to venture above the Mason-Dixon line, instead opening chapters at ten Southern schools, including the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia.
For the Southerners of SAE, a black person’s smallest missteps could provoke violence. In 1857, a student at the University of Nashville’s Western Military Institute beat a black waiter whom he believed had offended him. The college demanded the student apologize to the waiter or be expelled. “To the young white men of the South, the demand was one they deemed unacceptable,” wrote William Levere, the SAE historian. Henry Halbert, an SAE member from Mississippi, petitioned the administration in favor of the white student, who had been expelled. The school demanded an apology from Halbert, too. He refused and was also kicked out. Halbert then transferred to Union University, a Southern Baptist institution whose president had no quarrel with Halbert’s behavior. There, he helped found an SAE chapter, the second in Tennessee.
Of the 369 men then initiated into SAE, nearly all fought for the Confederacy. One founder, DeVotie’s closest friend, John Barratt Rudulph, lost his arm to General Sherman’s forces in the Battle of New Hope Church in Georgia. Of the seven founders who were alive when the war began, six enlisted. Three of the enlisted men died, including DeVotie, who fell off the dock in Mobile, Alabama, at age twenty-three, hit his head, and was swept to sea. In all, seventy SAE members died in battle. Only one chapter survived, at what is now George Washington University. SAE later expanded into the North, starting with an outpost in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the South’s bloody Civil War defeat. The northern expansion sparked furious debate within the fraternity. Finally, one of its most successful leaders won the Southerners over by couching it as a quasi-military campaign to conquer “the best colleges and universities of the great North, East and West.”
In the early years of the movement, fraternities had no need for explicitly discriminatory policies because only a relative handful of Jewish and black students attended college, and it would have been unimaginable to consider admitting them. Even Catholics weren’t welcome. In response, these outsiders began to form their own organizations. In 1895, three Yale students founded nonsectarian Pi Lambda Phi, which became a haven for Jews. In 1899, students at Brown created the first Catholic fraternity. The first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, followed in 1906 at Cornell, where Asian Americans established Rho Psi ten
years later. The Latino fraternity, Phi Iota Alpha, founded in 1931, can trace its roots to 1898 and the formation of the Union Hispano Americana at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Members of these groups look with pride on their traditions, and many make an affirmative choice to belong. Yet they are creations of discrimination, of historically white Greek organizations seeking to preserve one of their core values: separation by race, religion, and ethnicity.
In 1900, Levere revealed what might happen when a student tried to cross these strict boundaries. He wrote a novel set at his alma mater, Northwestern University. In the book, a penniless “Persian boy” tries to join a fraternity and no one will choose him. “That dago has been rushing the frats so hard it’s a pity he cannot be accommodated and given a first-class initiation,” one fraternity man says in the novel. The brothers make up a fake fraternity called Alpha Sigma Sigma, whose initials stand for “ass.” On a dark, rainy night, they pick the outsider up in a carriage, blindfold him, and take him off campus for a mock initiation. There, he is beaten, forced to drink a mixture of milk and vinegar, stripped to his underwear, poked with sharp sticks, plastered with flypaper, and baptized with molasses. Finally, members deposit him in front of the Northwestern president’s house, where he would be picked up by the police. Levere presented the episode as all in good fun.
In the nineteenth century, SAE’s attitudes reflected many of the prevailing prejudices of the times. But certainly by the early twentieth century, Greek organizations displayed less tolerance than other elite groups. Ivy League schools, eager to attract the brightest students, began accepting immigrants, especially Jews, and, with the exception of Princeton, a small number of blacks. To be sure, these new members faced discrimination on campus and sparked a backlash. According to the sociologist Jerome Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton changed their admissions requirements to limit the number of students considered “socially undesirable,” namely, Jews from Eastern Europe. Rather than base decisions on academic performance, where Jews excelled, admissions officers turned to the subjective criteria of “character,” “manliness,” and “leadership.” These were the same characteristics prized by the historically white fraternities. The Ivy League, like Greek-letter groups, deemed that Jews lacked these qualities. In this context, elite college admissions officers sounded much like the fraternity leaders at SAE’s fateful 1951 convention. Robert Nelson Corwin, chairman of Yale’s board of admissions, called Jews “an alien and unwashed element” that “graduates into the world as naked of all the attributes of refinement and honor as when he was born into it.” Under the more subjective admissions standards, rich white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men received preference, and Jewish enrollment was suppressed by quotas.
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