From Pig to Porc: The Changing World of Final Clubs

They called it "the Pig Club" back in 1791 when it was founded, and some call it that today for different reasons. You see, the Porcellian Club--the most prestigious and mysterious of Harvard's nine final clubs--took its original name from two of its first members who enjoyed "that delicacy in roasted form," according to Cleveland Amory. The vernacular--and even the club--has changed since 1791, and Porcellian is now known to its enamored members as "the Porc."

Final clubbers constitute a somewhat anachronistic social elite within a university which has been, for most of its 341 years, even more of an elite than it is now.

By 1749. all undergraduates entering Harvard were ranked by the president according to their social standing: "to the Dignity and the Familie whereto the students severally belonged." Ranking determined room assignments, seating and serving order at dinner, chapel seating, class seating and even the marching order at college processions. This practice continued into the early 1800s, when it was terminated largely due to the outrage of families whose sons had been placed low on the list.

By this time, however, Harvard's final clubs had taken up the chore of keeping Harvard's--and often Boston's--social register. Originally organized as chapters of national college fraternities, final clubs were founded when they became wealthy enough to divorce themselves of fraternity obligations by chartering themselves as financially independent clubs. Through their 200 years, final clubs have represented prestige, wealth, and "place" in society. Even today, they exclude women. But just as the Harvard of 1749 has changed in social climate, so have the final clubs. The change has been of standards, not of concept, however.

Ours is still an age of status and symbolism. In today's America, we have lost many of the commonly unquestioned social values of the Puritan past. Surnames and father's occupation no longer define people as they once did; it is up to the individual to identify himself to the world. We now identify ourselves with words, clothes, and dinner conversations, cars--America's endless hierarchy of symbols.

Harvard's final clubs are still very much a part of Harvard's social symbols, but they are not life's "be-all and end-all" for most students here anymore. Most "clubbies" will very sincerely say something like, "Aw hell, it's not really elitism, I joined because it's just a lot of fun."

"When I was a freshman, I looked at them and I liked them," one prospective club member said.

"People arein them just to have fun. They take you out, they party, get you soused and have fun--it's hedonistic, but I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm no great moralist, but it's something you can do in college you'll never be able to do again."

Still, Harvard's final clubs--Porcellian, A.D., Delphic, D.U., Phoenix, Owl, Fox, Spee and Fly--symbolize something to everyone on campus. The standards of club membership have changed over Harvard's many years, but the clubs still carry the onus of mystery and elitism they cultivated for over 200 years.

They will always bear the onus of mystery to the innocent-bystander freshman who walked down Mass Ave to read dirty magazines at Nini's Corner only to see three liquor-brave men wearing hospital-clean tuxedos and gnawing on cigars like billowing corporate smokestacks laughing fraternally and singing the Latin chorus of "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" out of key. The repulsion or infatuation he feels will somehow translate into his own social symbols.

And the clubs will always stand for elitism to the up-and-coming student whose ego and self-perception finds a niche in Harvard's plethora of prestige and vanity, and to the super-communist who sneers at the stodgy brick walls of the Fly Club with its fenced-in garden and throws eggs at anything resembling a starchy penguin on Halloween.

Only 16 per cent of today's undergraduates belong to final clubs. During the '30s and '40s, 40 per cent were members. During the tumultous '60s, the figure was reduced to 10 per cent. One club, the Iroquois, closed in 1970. Despite the decline in membership, the issue of final clubs arouses adrenalin in any social circle, particularly when recruiting season comes around.

Funny things happen to about 400 men during their sophomore year. They hear a knock on the door, and rising to answer it, they notice an ivory envelop which has been slipped under the door. The door is opened, and sleuth-like, the messenger is nowhere to be seen.

The envelope contains an elegant, hand-scripted invitation to a cocktail party at a final club. R.S.V.P. Some toss the "punches" in the trash, some are overjoyed and seek congratulations, and others have a vague interest in checking it out. They have been "punched," because early October is "punching season" for the final clubs.

"It's one big party," one punchee said. "They take you out to the North Shore and play touch football and drink, and I've never found them condescending or stuck-up."

"I don't feel compelled to behave in a certain way with them," another said, "but the threat of rejection is still there and you're a little nervous. But they just try to have fun with you. Once you're in, you definitely feel like an equal."

The partying lasts for six weeks, and is followed by a "moratorium" on punching activity. The selections are made. "It's simply not true that they don't punch or won't accept people from a certain background--that's just not true anymore. They won't exclude anyone they like," a punchee said.

If the club members feel a student won't "fit in" they won't elect him. Furthermore, a candidate can be shut out by "blackballing"--when any one club member adamantly opposes a certain student's election.

Nevertheless, you are likely to find some diversity within most of the final clubs. "Even the Porc," said a clubbie. Blacks, Italian surnames, Irish surnames are found among the Cabots and the Lowells.

"It's not any kind of racial or ethnic discrimination I'm bitching about--it's a different kind of elite than it was years ago. They're making judgments on people according to their personalities and their values--and that bothers me," one student who (like almost evervone else) wished to remain anonymous said. He was afraid of losing some friends. He was also "checking out" the punching season.

Once admitted to a club, a student must usually pay a $100 initiation fee and, on the average, a $300 fee for annual dues. The dues cover a limited number of free meals and drinks, and they do not begin to cover a club's yearly overhead. Property taxes on some of the clubs take as much as $30,000 every year.

"People say it's wrong to spend so much money for pleasure, but I don't see anything wrong with it. It's fun," another punchee said.

But for every clubbie who calls himself a hedonist rather than an elitist, there are ten other non-clubbies who can't see the high striding tuxedos as anything but an attempt at elitism. Fun or vanity, final clubs have and will continue to constitute an economic and social elite at Harvard.

Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, admits that club alumni are often "wealthy and powerful." During the '60s, he said, 80 per cent of Harvard's governing boards, Board of Overseers and Corporation were former clubbies. Epps said that ten per cent of the University's individual donors--many of whom are clubbies--supply 80 per cent of Harvard's donations.

Many club alumni take an active role in their clubs as members of the club's graduate board. While the graduate board does not determine the club's day-to-day operation and social activities, they can make the final decision about any club policy or activity. Last year, for example, the graduate board of the D.U. overruled the club's decision to admit women to their ranks.

Names like Roosevelt, Kennedy, Saltonstall, Cabot, Lodge, Lowell and Conant are laced across Harvard's final club history with inbreeding and nepotism. There is even a story of J.P. Morgan, who at Harvard was already every bit the stormy and ruthless baron who glares from the pages of history books. Refused membership in the Fly Club, an insulted Morgan decided to build his own final club, the Delphic. For years it was called "the Gas" because its steward kept the gas lights burning all night, making the club appear as a social beehive to passing outsiders. Unquestionably, by tradition and present practice, final clubs constitute an economic and social elite of a sort.

When asked about how he felt about being part of an elite, one final club member snapped back over his dinner at Lowell House, "So what? There will always be elites, there have to be elites--why shouldn't I be part of one?"

"We're not trying to put anyone down," a candidate said, "we're just going to a place where we know we have friends."

Harvard's administrators neither defend nor criticize final clubs. Cleveland Amory wrote that Harvard officials at the time considered the clubs "a necessary evil," from which much of the University's wealth was drawn. One of Amory's friends wondered why it was necessary to have a group of men who "dress alike, look alike, walk alike, talk alike, and, if pressed, think alike."

"I guess you gotta have them around," Joseph A. Incagnoli '80, a punk rocker and non-clubbie, said, "they pay for my education."

To have a chance for membership in a final club a boy must be, to start with, what is called 'club material'... These clubs for which the Pudding acts as a sort of proving ground, are the real be-alls and end-alls of Harvard social existence, and since there are but ten of them and in lean social years some have been known to take as few as four members, it is not a life for everyone. --Cleveland Amory '39, from The Proper Bostonians, 1947