Phi Beta Kappa Prepares Plans for Coming Sesquicentennial Celebration

In celebration of the one hundred forty-ninth anniversary of the founding of the Phi Beta Kappa, the United Chapters and Alumni Associations throughout the United States will hold meetings or dinners on December 5.

This anniversary is looked forward to as a particularly momentous occasion, because it constitutes a reunion of the members of Phi Beta Kappa to make plans for the sesquicentennial next year. Important features of the progress of many of these gatherings will be addresses reviewing the history of the fraternity and reports of the progress made in raising the one hundred fiftieth Anniversary Endowment Fund, the most significant project initiated by the United Chapters in recent years.

Fund Has Three Objects

The Endowment Fund, which it is hoped may be raised by the date of the sesquicentennial, was proposed with three objects in view: the erection of a Phi Beta Kappa building at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Va., as a memorial to the fifty founders of the fraternity: the financing of a program for promoting a more widespread recognition of the value of high scholarship among university, college, and high school students; and the support of the regular activities of the fraternity. The goal of the fund is $1,000,000 equivalent to a contribution of $25 by every member of the fraternity. Construction of the memorial building at William and Mary college is already well under way.

Phi Beta Kappa was the progenitor of all Greek-letter college fraternities although, unlike its successors, it based its membership solely upon scholarship. It is older than the Constitution of the United States, having been founded on December 5, 1776. The idea of an organization which should weld men of scholastic attainment together in fraternity was conceived by John Heath, a student at William and Mary College, who formed the nucleus of Phi Beta Kappa with four fellow-students. The strength of their conviction as to the need of such a fraternity for "attaining the important ends of Society" is attested by the fact that they launched it at a time of national turmoil, in the very hour when General Washington and his army were being forced back across the Jerseys to their line of last defense at the Delaware.

Third Enlist in Army

The urgent call to the colors drew fully a third of them into military service, either with the Continental Army or the Virginia Militia. By 1781 one member was elected to the Virginia House of Deputies; by the end of the century a third of their number had served in that body, some being promoted to the Senate and others to the Governor's Council.

The fraternity's representation from Virginia in the Convention of 1788 was large enough to determine the issue for ratification, and John Marshall, leader of the ratification forces in opposition to the eloquent Patrick Henry, was a Phi Beta Kappa man. Two of the original fifty became members of the Continental Congress, one going on from that body into the First Congress of the United States, to which John Heath also was later elected.

Two of the fifty founders became United States senators, one representing Virginia and the other Kentucky. Two served as judges of the higher courts of Virginia, one having the unique honor, as presidential elector, of voting twice for Jefferson, twice for Madison, twice for Munroe, and once for John Quincy Adams 1787, who was the first Phi Beta Kappa man to become President of the United States.

William Short, second president of Phi Beta Kappa, accompanied Jefferson to Paris as secretary, and when Jefferson returned to America to become Secretary of State under President Washington, Short remained in Paris as charge d'affairs, his commission being the first to be signed by George Washington as President. Later William Short represented the United States at The Hague and in Spain.

Besides John Marshall, who had so successfully espoused the cause of ratification of the Constitution, been a member of the first Congress, represented the United States on a special mission to the Court of St. James and served for a time as Secretary of State in the cabinet of John Adams 1775, another Phi Beta Kappa man, Bushrod Washington, became a justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Forced From William and Mary

The fraternity continued at William and Mary College, in early times, for only four years. When early in 1781, the Revolution brought the British Army to Virginia, and then to Williamsburg, the college was forced to close its doors for a time. Before leaving the town the six members of Phi Beta Kappa who still remained there sealed up the records and left them in the hands of the college steward, to be safeguarded by him "until the desirable event of the Society's resurrection."

But before this date in 1779 Elisha Parmele, a Connecticut Yankee who had become one of the fifty original members returned to the North taking with him a charter for Harvard, voted on the third anniversary of the founding of the Society, and another for Yale, granted five days later.