Porcellian Club

The Porcellian Club is a male-only final club at Harvard University, sometimes called the Porc or the P.C. The year of founding is usually given as 1791, when a group began meeting under the name "the Argonauts,"cite book |year =1901 | title = Student Life and Customs | first = Henry Davidson | last = Sheldon | publisher = D. Appleton, p. 171: source for 1791 origins as the "Argonauts;" later named "The Pig Club", "The Gentlemen's Club", finally "The Porcellian". "Small as the membership has been, the roll of graduates shows many of the most famous of the Sons of Harvard, including Wendell Phillips, Channing, [Joseph] Story, [Edward] Everett, Prescott, Adams, Palfrey, Charles Sumner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and John Lothrop Motley." Online at [http://books.google.com/books?vid=LCCN01026592&id=lkIb9aPJje0C&pg=RA1-PA171 Google Books] ] or as 1794, the year of the roast pig dinner at which the club, known first as "the Pig Club" [cite book | first = Douglas | last = Shand-Tucci | title = Harvard University |year =2001|publisher = Princeton Architectural Press|id=ISBN 1-56898-280-1 p. 89: "...Harvard's still-extant Porcellian Club, which arose out of a legendary dinner of roast pig (hence the club's name) in 1794 at Moore's Tavern. Unlike [Phi Beta Kappa] , the Porcellian's motto, "Dum Vivimus Vivamus," indicates that they were not beguiled by concerns academical or even literary, but, rather by pure conviviality.] was formally founded. The club's motto, "Dum vivimus vivamus" (while we live, let's "live") is literally Epicurean. The club emblem is the pig, and some members sport golden pigs on watch-chains or neckties bearing pig's-head emblems. [Sedgwick, John, "Brotherhood of the Pig", GQ: Gentlemen's Quarterly 58 (November 1988), p. 30, as quoted by cite book | first = Richard P. | last = Horwitz | title = Hog Ties : Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture |year = 1998 | publisher = Palgrave MacMillan|id = ISBN 0-312-21443-X pp. 27-28: ""My father was generally oblivious to the animal world, but he did have an unusual affection for pigs. Around our house... he had porcelain pigs, ceramic pigs, carved pigs, embroidered pigs, painted pigs.... They overran our living-room mantelpiece, swept over the tabletops, covered his bureau, popped up on his cuff links, watch chain and ties and even appeared on our drinking glasses and saltcellar.... Why all these pigs? Because my father was a Brother Porcellian... and the pig is the club's emblem."] cite book | title = The Coming of the New Deal | first =Arthur Meier | last = Schlesinger | Year = 2003 | publisher = Houghton Mifflin | id = ISBN 0-618-34086-6| origyear = 1958 p. 461. [NYSE president] Richard Whitney "had attended Groton and Harvard.... his clubs were the Links, the Turf, the Field, the Racquet, and the Knickerbocker; from his watch chain there dangled the gold pig of Harvard's Porcellian."]

The Porcellian is the iconic "hotsy-totsy final club," [cite book | first = Anton | last = Myrer | title = The Last Convertible | year = 2002 | publisher = HarperCollins |id= ISBN 0-06-093405-0 p. 130, "I ... pulled up in front of the Porcellian or Sphinx or Onyx or whichever hotsy-totsy final club it was"] often bracketed with Yale's Skull and Bones and Princeton's Ivy Club. E. Digby Baltzell ranks the social ladder of the final clubs at Harvard as "Porcellian and A. D., the most exclusive,... followed by Fly, Spee, Delphic, and Owl." [cite book | first = E. Digby | last = Baltzell |authorlink = E. Digby Baltzell | title = The Protestant Establishment Revisited|publisher = Transaction Publishers | year = 1991 |id= 0887384196 p. 23: "At Harvard, Porcellian and A. D., the most exclusive, are followed by Fly, Spee, Delphic, and Owl. The narrow top drawer at Yale includes Fence, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Zeta Psi, and St. Anthony, while at Princeton, the more socially circumspect clubs on Prospect Street include Ivy, Cap and Gown, and Colonial."] A history of Harvard calls the Porcellian "the most final of them all,"cite book | title = Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University| first = Morton | last = Keller | coauthors = Phyllis Keller | publisher = Oxford University Press U.S. | id = ISBN 0-19-514457-0 |year = 2001 p. 472] . Also, an urban legends website mentions a belief that "if members of the Porcellian do not earn their first million before they turn 40, the club will give it to them." [Mann, Elizabeth (1993), "The First Abridged Dictionary of Harvard Myths", "The Harvard Independent" December 9, 1993, pp.10-11 as quoted by the alt.folklore.urban website in [http://tafkac.org/collegiate/harvard_legends.html Harvard Legends] ]

Founding

According to a Harvard Crimson article of February 23, 1887:

This society was established in 1791. It occupies rooms on Harvard street, and owns a library of some 7000 volumes. Its members are taken from the senior, junior and sophomore classes about eight from each class. The origin of its name is popularly supposed to be as follows:

In the year 1791, a student brought a pig into his room in Hollis. In those days the window-seats were merely long boxes with lids, used to store articles in. Said student having an antipathy to the proctor who roomed beneath, was accustomed to squeeze piggy's ears and make him squeal whenever said proctor was engaged in the study of the classics. The result would be a rush by the proctor for the student's rooms, where the student was to be found studying (?), peacefully seated on his window-seat. Piggy, in the mean time had been deposited beneath, and no sound disturbed the tranquillity of the scene. On the departure of the hated proctor, a broad grin would spread over the countenance of the joker, and in a little while the scene would be repeated with variations. But when it was rumored that his room was to be searched by the faculty, the joker determined to cheat them of their prey. So he invited some of his classmates to the room, and the pig being cooked, all present partook of a goodly feast. They enjoyed their midnight meal so much that they determined then and there to form a club and have such enterainments periodically. In order to render historical the origin of the club, and also to give it a classic touch, they decided to call it the Porcellian from Latin "porcus."

In 1831, the society bearing the name of the "Order of the Knights of the Square Table" was joined to the Porcellian, as "the objects and interests of the two societies were identical."

Clubhouse

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location = 1320-24 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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added = June 30, 1983
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refnum =83000824
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governing_body = Known to members as the "Old Barn", Matthews, Joe (1994). "The Harvard Crimson", March 5, 2004 [http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=239916] ] the Porcellian clubhouse is located at 1324 Massachusetts Avenue above the store of clothier J. August. Its entrance faces the Harvard freshman dormitories and the entrance to Harvard Yard called the Porcellian, or McKean, Gate. The gate was donated by the club in 1901 and features a limestone carving of a boar's head.Gewertz, Ken (2005) "Enter to grow in wisdom: A tour of Harvard's gates". "The Harvard Gazette" (a publication of the Harvard News Office), December 15, 2005 [http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/12.15/18-gates.html] ] Access to the clubhouse is strictly limited to members, but non-member males and females are allowed in the first floor room known as the Bicycle Room.

Despite the exclusivity and mystique, some, like "National Review" columnist/editor, Ronald Reagan speechwriter, and Dartmouth emeritus professor of English Jeffrey Hart, have noted the club's modest physical and metaphorical character. Hart wrote:

:...To illustrate, may I invoke Harvard's famous Porcellian, an undergraduate club of extraordinary exclusiveness? ... [I] t is devilishly hard to join. But there is nothing there, hardly a club at all. The quarters consist entirely of a large room over a row of stores in Harvard Square. There is a bar, a billiards table, and a mirror arranged so that members can sit and view Massachusetts Avenue outside without themselves being seen. And that's it. Virtually the sole activity of Porcellian is screening applicants. Porcellian is the pinnacle of the Boston idea. Less is more. Zero is a triumph. [ Hart, Jeffrey (1996) "What is American?". "National Review, 48", (April 22, 1996); Online at [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n7_v48/ai_18211331] , p4]

Much of the secrecy surrounding the exclusive Porcellian clubhouse evaporated when the "Harvard Crimson", the university newspaper, published pictures of the interior. ["In Da Club". "The Harvard Crimson: FM Magazine," (February 6, 2003). Archived online October 26, 2004 at [http://web.archive.org/web/20041026085213/http://www.thecrimson.com/media/2-6-2003/porc.pdf] ]

A portrait of George Washington Lewis, entitled "The Steward (Lewis of the Porcellian)" by Joseph DeCamp hangs in the clubhouse. An obituary in TIME Magazine on April, 1, 1929 notes:

George Washington Lewis, of Cambridge, Mass., for over 45 years the esteemed Negro steward of the Porcellian Club at Harvard College; in Cambridge, Mass. Ancient and most esoteric of Harvard clubs is Porcellian, founded in 1791.* An oil portrait of Steward Lewis hangs in the clubhouse. Steward Lewis had ten Porcellian pallbearers.

Historical significance

Theodore Roosevelt and other members of the Roosevelt family belonged to the club, but Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was president of the "Harvard Crimson", never managed to be elected a member. He later told a friend that this had been "the greatest disappointment in his life". [Frances Richardson Keller, "Fictions of U. S. History : A Theory & Four Illustrations", Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 116.] Harvard graduate Joseph P. Kennedy was also blackballed from the Porcellian Club; a biographer writes that "For years later, Joe Kennedy remembered the day he didn't make the Porcellian Club, the most desired in his mind, realizing that none of the Catholics he knew at Harvard had been selected." [cite book|title=The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings|author=Thomas Maier|publisher=Basic Books|year=2004|id=ISBN 0465043178, [http://books.google.com/books?id=yCmmPID9HLQC&pg=PA72&as_brr=3&ei=Ih4qSJG1GKe-ygTrz-iPCw&sig=BdkxViimyCtu-3tOKo-EuJYg5Ow#PPA72,M1 p. 72] ]

An 1870 travel book said::A notice of Harvard would be as incomplete without a reference to the Porcellian Club as a notice of Oxford or Cambridge would be in which the [Oxford Union| [Oxford] Union] Debating Society held no place. This and the Hasty Pudding Club, an organization for performing amateur theatricals, are the two lions of Harvard. The Porcellian Club is hardly a place of resort for those who cultivate the intellect at the expense of the body. The list of active members is small, owing in part to the largeness of the annual subscription. The great desire of every student is to become a member of it... the doings of the club are shrouded in secrecy... All that can be said by a stranger who has been privileged to step behind the scenes is that the mysteries are rites which can be practised without much labour, and yield a pleasure which is fraught with no unpleasant consequences. [cite book | first = W. Fraser | last = Rae | title = Westward by Rail: The New Route to the East|publisher = Longmans, Green, And Co. |year=1870 p. 354-5. [http://books.google.com/books?vid=LCCNrc01001531&id=AzhNeh9Mv8cC&pg=PA354&printsec=8 Google Books text] ]

A telling indication of the position of the Porcellian in the Boston WASP establishment is given by an historian of Boston's Trinity Church, H. H. Richardson's architectural masterpiece. In speculating as to why Richardson was chosen, he writes::the thirty-four-year-old possessed one great advantage over the other candidates: as a popular Harvard undergraduate he had been a member of several clubs, including the prestigious Porcellian; thus he needed no introduction to the rector, Phillips Brooks, or five of the eleven-man building committee—they were all fellow Porcellian members."cite book | first = James F. | last = O'Gorman | title = The Makers of Trinity Church in the City of Boston | year = 2004 | publisher = University of Massachusetts Press | id = ISBN 1-55849-436-7 p. 14]

Membership criteria

A biography of Norman Mailer says that when he was at Harvard "it would have been unthinkable... for a Jew to be invited to join one of the so-called final clubs like Porcellian, A.D. Club, Fly, or Spee." [cite book | first = Mary | last = Dearborn | title = Mailer: A Biography | year = 2001 | publisher = Houghton Mifflin | id=ISBN 0-618-15460-4 p. 23] A history of Harvard notes the decline in Boston Brahmin influence at Harvard during the last quarter of the 1900s, and says "a third of [the presidents of the Final Clubs] were Jewish by 1986 and one was black. The Porcellian... took an occasional Jew, and in 1983 (to the horror of some elders) admitted a black—who had gone to St. Paul's."op cit.]

More recent information on the membership of the Porcellian Club may be found in a 1994 Harvard Crimson article by Joseph Mathews. He writes, "Prep school background, region and legacy status do not appear to be the sole determinants of membership they may once have been, but ... they remain factors."op cit.]

Joseph McKean Gate

In 1901 a gate to Harvard Yard, directly opposite the clubhouse, was erected. According to a notice published in the Harvard Crimson, on March 20, 1909:

A gate is to be erected at the entrance to the Yard between Wadsworth House and Boylston Hall. It is to be erected by members of the Porcellian Club in memory of Joseph McKean 1794, S.T.D., LL.D. and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, Oratory and Elocution, and also the founder of the Porcellian Club.

The gate features prominently the symbol of the club, the pig's head, and is a famous Harvard landmark.

Members

*James Roosevelt - 1853 (honorary member), father of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
*Theodore Roosevelt - 26th President of the United States [Frances Richardson Keller, "Fictions of U. S. History : A Theory & Four Illustrations", Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 116.]
*Theodore Roosevelt IV (1965)
*Paul Nitze - School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Founder, State Department, Dillon ReadFact|date=February 2007
*Fife Symington III (1968)- Former governor of Arizona
*Edward Everett - Secretary of State, President of Harvard, Senator from Massachusettsop. cit.]
*Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Professor at Harvard Law Schoolop. cit.]
*Nicholas Platt - former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense, Deputy Asst. Secretary of State, and Ambassador to Zambia
*Nelson W. Aldrich - author
*Wendell Phillips - leading abolitionistop. cit.]
*H. H. Richardson, architectop. cit.] op. cit]
*Robert Gould Shaw - Colonel of 54th Massachusetts Regiment, first black regiment in Union Army, Civil Warop. cit.]
*Joseph Story - Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, leading Federalist theoristop. cit.]
*Richard Whitney - president of the New York Stock Exchange (1930-1935)op. cit.] embezzler
*"'Bobbie,' Porcellian '29, a replica of Louis XVI without the wig..." Character ridiculed in Robert Lowell's poem, "Walking in the Blue"; identified as Louis Agassiz Shaw II, an upper-class Bostonian who murdered his Irish maid and was sequestered at McLean Hospital [cite book | first = Alex | last = Beam | year = 2002 | title = Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital|publisher = Public Affairs|id=ISBN 1-891620-75-4 p. 174: "After a stint on Bowditch Hall, where Robert Lowell immortalized [Louis Agassiz Shaw II] as 'Bobbie...'" Beam quotes two pages of "Walking in the Blue", apparently as an introduction to the book, just before Chapter I.] ["How the mentally ill have been treated — and mistreated — in America", "Chicago Tribune", May 15, 2002.] [LaFerla, Ruth (2002), "Where the Upper Crust Crumbled Politely"; "The New York Times," (Review of Alex Beam's book, "Gracefully Insane"). July 28, 2002 [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E3DE1F38F93BA15754C0A9649C8B63&sec=health&pagewanted=print] ]
*Nicholas Longworth -former Speaker of the House
*James Russell Lowell - poet [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,763262,00.html "The Pore"] "Time Magazine", February 26, 1940 website archive]
*Richard Henry Dana
*Owen Wister - novelist
*John Jay Chapman
*Charles Sumner -- U.S. Senator (1830)
*Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (1825)
*Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1808)
*George Plimpton - author and actor (1948)
*Paul Joseph Revere (1853)
*Joe W. Alsop - journalist (1932)
*William Batts - first black man elected to the club 1986
*Hamilton Fish III - 1910
*Hamilton Fish IV - 1947
*Endicott Peabody - 1882 (honorary member), Head of the Groton School

According to a 1940 "Time" magazine article:

The Pork had as members James Russell Lowell, the two famed Oliver Wendell Holmeses (the author of Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and the Supreme Court Justice), Owen Wister, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, President Theodore Roosevelt (the Franklin Roosevelts go Fly Club). Among its living members are Massachusetts' Governor Leverett Saltonstall, Congressman Hamilton Fish, Yachtsman Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Poloist Thomas Hitchcock Jr., U. S. Ambassador to Italy William Phillips, Journalist Joseph Alsop, and Richard Whitney, now of Sing Sing Prison, of whom all good Porkies prefer not to speak. The Pore is very much a family affair. Upon its roster, generation after generation, appear the same proud Boston names—Adams, Ames, Amory, Cabot, Gushing, etc.

According to a note to the obituary of the Club Steward on Monday, April 1, 1929, in TIME Magazine:

The Porcellian roster includes Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nicholas Longworth, Poet James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry (Two Years Before the Mast) Dana, Novelist Owen Wister, John Jay Chapman. The club's favorite brew is a mixture of beer and gin.

Footnotes