The sentiment of love between persons of the opposite sex has monopolized the popular interest, while other fine forms of human relationship have failed of their due recognition. The feeling of friendship between persons of the same sex has a profound significance. The friendship of Damon and Pythias and that of David and Jonathan have been sung by the poets and the memory of them perpetuated in the rituals of well known fraternal orders in such a way as to make them classic.
It is good for us to know and to love those with whom the question of sex, with its mysterious attractions and repulsions, does not enter in. The woman who cares little for other women, who is only happy when she is talking with men, or the man who is so much of a “ladies’ man” as to be ill at ease when thrown for an hour exclusively with men, is mentally, if not morally, diseased. It is good for the souls of men to be knit with the souls of their fellows; it is fitting that women should know and enjoy other women.
It is the need for that association which lies at the root of the almost countless fraternities found in all our cities. In searching out names and mysterious forms for them all, men have gone clear over the border into what is both fantastic and foolish. The secrecy of these societies is not to be taken too seriously—as a rule it is mere dust thrown in the eyes of the uninitiated. The members laugh in their sleeves knowing how little the “secrets” amount to, but the organizations offer opportunity for social fellowship in a way to satisfy a wide-spread desire.
The same tendency, with some additional leaning to clannishness and to the love of mystery found in most young people, is evidenced by the Greek letter fraternities in the colleges and in many of the high schools. These have been in operation for more than a quarter of a century and they have not yet by any means so justified their existence as to win the cordial support of the best educational authorities. There is still “the fraternity question,” with a big interrogation point after it, put there by parents, teachers, and citizens, and by many of the young people themselves as they grow wiser.
I speak of this matter as a fraternity man. I have been initiated; I have worn a “pin,” at such odd times as my “best girl” did not happen to be wearing it. I know the mysterious significance attaching to the “grip” when one student meets another and taking him by the little finger pulls it surreptitiously nine times to the left. I have been through all this, for I am a member of Alpha Eta of Sigma Chi. What I say, therefore, is not spoken in that prejudice which sometimes attaches to the utterances of the “anti-frat” man who sees it all from the outside and comes up hot, perhaps, from some hard-fought campaign where the line was closely drawn between “frats” and “anti-frats.”
I speak also with a deep sense of the importance of the question. The principal of the high school in my own city, which has an enrolment of twelve hundred pupils, said to me recently when I had been asked to speak on fraternities, “You have a big subject on your hands.” He spoke as an educator watching the lives of that large company of young people five days in the week. I speak as a pastor and a teacher of spiritual values and I agree with him that it is “a big subject.”
The power of intimate association for good or ill—no nation under heaven, Christian or pagan, has failed to condense its observation and experience on that point into some terse proverb. “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed,” said the old Hebrew. “Evil company doth corrupt good manners,” said the Greek, and Paul quoted it in his letter to the Greek Christians at Corinth. “Talent is perfected in solitude, but character is formed in the stream of the world,” is the German of it. “Live with wolves and you will learn to howl,” the Spanish proverb has it; and in homely Holland fashion, the Dutch proverb is, “Lie down with dogs and you will get up with fleas.” In these terse sayings, elegant and inelegant, the race has recorded its judgment as to the power of association. The fraternity promotes certain forms of most intimate association at a crucial period and thus enters powerfully for good or ill into the lives of young people.
There are certain credits to be entered in making up a trial balance for the fraternity. It marks out a definite group of special friends for closer association. One cannot become intimately acquainted with the whole human race or even with as much of it as happens to be present in a large high school or college. Whether it is done in organized or in unorganized ways, there must come a process of selection by which one’s social interests are kept to a manageable size.
The fraternity gives opportunity for learning to subordinate the purely personal and selfish interests to the larger good. The fraternity man has in view something beyond his own individual pleasure or success. He is taught to aid some fraternity brother who has good prospects, in athletics, in a race for some class honor, or in debate. Mutual admiration, a common enthusiasm, a corporate ambition and the spirit of cooperation, are thus developed in the whole group by a feeling of common interest.
The fraternity brings the lower class man into closer touch with upper class men. The first year man is not a mere unbaked freshman to the juniors and seniors in his fraternity. They have an interest in him, a responsibility for him, because of his fraternity connection. These organizations thus cause the line of social cleavage to run perpendicularly as well as horizontally. My own life will be forever different by reason of the friendship of two upper class men in my university days. Such friendships are wholesome for both the younger and the older men.
The fraternity serves as a convenient basis for fellowship when a man visits another college or when alumni return to their alma mater. The house of one’s own fraternity is open to him, and affords opportunity for him to come into touch with the eager, throbbing life about him. The alumni of a chapter may also exert a real influence for good upon the resident members of the fraternity, because of this continued association.
The fraternity house offers a useful center for returning social courtesies. The students, in their class-day spreads and at other times, may thus indicate their appreciation of social attentions received from townspeople.
All this can be said and said heartily. It may seem that I am making out such a strong case for the fraternities that any criticism offered later will be of no avail. It would be unfair, however, not to state the advantages as strongly as one’s own judgment would approve.
But there are certain offsets in fraternity life which must come up for an equally frank and thorough consideration. There is a constant tendency in any fraternity house to spend more time and more money than many a student can afford. No fellow of spirit can allow others to treat him, take him to the theater, show him all manner of attentions without feeling an obligation resting upon him to return these courtesies. A few men in a fraternity with rich fathers, large allowances, and warm hearts, can, with no sort of wrong intent, set the pace in such a way as to demoralize a whole group of young men. The man of modest means and simple habits, dependent upon a hard-working father for his education and for all the comforts of his home life, is apparently forced into a gait which it is wrong for him to take. He does not intend to be mean or cruel, but he adopts a scale of expenditure which he cannot afford; he runs into debt; he becomes unjust to his parents, who are making sacrifices for his education. It requires more grit than nine out of ten young fellows of the high school or college age possess, to stand up and oppose the course of action which leads to these ill-advised “good times.”
It is to be regretted that simplicity is so overborne in all our social life by the elaborate and the expensive. Business men, husbands, and fathers, are being killed off, before their time, by nervous prostration, heart disease, or exhaustion of other vital organs, in making the necessary money to keep it up. Society women, mothers and daughters, are being sent to sanitariums and rest cures by reason of the strenuous tasks imposed upon them in devising and arranging new and elaborate ways of spending the money. What a caricature much of it is upon real social life, which ought to be a joy, a recreation, a means of relief from serious work, but never a burdensome, exacting labor!
The young girl in high school gives a luncheon for her fraternity elaborate enough for a society woman of fifty. The boys plan for a good time on a scale which might indicate that they were solid business men well on in their prime, with fortunes of their own earning completely at their disposal. The whole tendency of it is bad and only bad. The simple pleasures are the best for everybody and especially so for young people. The tuxedo is not a suitable garment for a five-year-old boy even though his father is able to buy him a hundred of them; and some of our social activity is quite as ridiculous as such a coat would be on the youngster. It rears up a set of young people who, having tasted it all and become blasé before their time, are now nervously intent upon some new sensation by more startling and stimulating forms of social life. And all the while the simple, serious, quiet interests of education have been suffering a loss irreparable.
There is also the tendency in most fraternity houses toward a wasteful use of time. Where there is a lounging room with its open fire, the university colors, pillows, pictures, trophies scattered about, and a group of jolly good fellows always accessible, it is not easy to turn one’s back upon it and sit alone digging on some difficult subject. Eve holding out an apple or even a ripe peach in the garden of Eden suffers by comparison when placed alongside the temptations thus offered to a student whose will may already be a trifle lame.
I recall a certain fraternity house which I watched for a number of years. Splendid fellows they were—my heart warms within me as I think of their faces! It was always Indian summer there—cigarette smoke until one could scarcely see through it. It would not be entirely true to say that one could cut it with a knife; some stronger implement would have been needed, an axe maybe—perhaps “the Stanford axe.” A number of the boys were keen and the jolly talk was sometimes equal to a page from “Life” or “Fliegende Blätter.”
But men cannot make perpetual chimneys of themselves in order to furnish such a volume of smoke or become perpetual jokers without imperiling certain other interests, much more important than smoke or jokes. And that same fraternity, genuinely attractive though it was in its social aspects, became the banner house on the campus for furnishing men who suddenly went home at the end of the term, because “their fathers needed them in business,” or because “their health would not stand the strain of college study”—those graceful explanations which sound well and deceive nobody, either at the college end or the home end of the line. The constant tendency in all fraternity life is to spend upon pleasure more time and more money than the average student can justly afford.
There is furthermore the tendency to a narrow exclusiveness which sometimes degenerates into actual snobbishness. This is especially true of the high-school fraternities. The spirit of narrow clannishness is stronger then than later. Breadth of sympathy, which ought to be the spirit of our public schools, is thus destroyed. The girl is tempted to think that, out of hundreds of girls in high school, only the little group of twenty in her own fraternity are fine, choice girls. When the social interests are thus being “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” it is not a long step to the spirit of that bigot who prayed, “O Lord, bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four and no more.” The “us four and no more” attitude is apparent to thoughtful observers in almost all of the high-school fraternities. The larger loyalty and broader sympathy is overborne by a narrowed social interest.
It is the judgment of an ever-increasing number of men at the head of the secondary schools that the high-school fraternities at least are nuisances. This is their verdict in spite of the fact that many of the best students are members of them, striving to make them helpful, not hurtful. But when the losses and the gains are accurately computed, the losses seem to far outrank the gains. The spirit of social exclusiveness is opposed to the spirit of our public schools and encourages the development of qualities that have no rightful place in American young people.
Some high-school principals are non-committal, but more of them frankly utter their condemnation of the fraternity as prejudicial to the legitimate work of the school; as weakening the more inclusive class loyalty and as offering an effective temptation to social dissipation. They may not hope as yet to carry all high-school students with them in this judgment, but if they could line up all parents who believe that fraternities tend to alienate young people from their homes, all high-school teachers who deplore the evil which results from loyalty to a part instead of to the whole school, and all those who, having advanced to college, look back upon those earlier fraternities as cases of premature development, the young people would be amazed at the verdict against the high-school fraternity!
We are constantly hearing the assertion that it is difficult for girls to complete the high-school course without breaking down. Under anything like normal conditions such a claim should be preposterous! There are good reasons for believing that the nervous collapse is due less to faithful study than to the unnecessary excitements of fraternity rivalry and to the irregular hours and social dissipation consequent upon fraternity life.
The right place for the fraternity is in the university where boys and girls have become young men and young women, better able to guard such organizations against these abuses; better able to see to it that no barriers are built between them and those whom they ought to know; better able to extend their generous admiration to those not of their particular clique. In the university large numbers of students are away from home, as is not the case in high school—and where it is wisely controlled, the fraternity may be made a center for the deepening of wholesome intimacies, in a way to render it a useful educational force.
It is well for every student to postpone the choice of a fraternity until near the end of the first year. Before he joins, he will need to look the various chapters over carefully and learn more about them than appears in the shape of the pin or in the color of the flag at the top of the house. He will want to ask what kind of men belong; what are their ambitions and aims; what is their rank and standing in college; whether their habits are clean, sound, wholesome, or enervating and shady; what is the moral atmosphere about their house; what sort of alumni have been sent out. He will only join one fraternity and he wishes to make no mistake in that choice.
The habit of “rushing” men for membership has become inexpressibly silly. The heads of weak men are turned by the social attentions thrust upon them and the stronger men are frequently repelled by this overdone eagerness. One would suppose the various chapters would be ashamed to exhibit such anxiety to have men join as would seem to indicate a sense of their own weakness. Let the fraternities make themselves worth joining and a sufficient number of promising candidates to fill all the lists will be forthcoming! Let any student make himself worth having and the door will be open into a desirable house whenever he is ready to enter it.
It would be well if each student made his fraternity experience preparatory to the larger social status into which he will enter as a mature man—a status where the narrow exclusiveness of the snob finds the door shut in its face by men of sense. If he has really gained a genuinely social spirit, he will be better able to take his place in the business world as one ready to aid in building it upon the basis of honor, integrity and mutual consideration. If he has rightly learned the lessons of fraternity life he ought to be a better citizen, ready to work in harmony with men who are bent upon making the State an organized expression of wise and just principles. He ought to be fitted to be a better churchman, making that institution a worthy expression of the organized spirit of reverence toward God, of fellowship with men, and of helpfulness for all good causes. And he will best attain all these high aims if, in the supreme relationship of his life, his own soul is knit with that “friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” The Master of men came to found a fraternal kingdom of which there shall be no end, and in that kingdom every man of fraternal spirit should have standing.