This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Porcellian Club | |
---|---|
Founded | 1791 Harvard University |
Type | Final club |
Affiliation | Independent |
Status | Active |
Scope | Local |
Motto | Dum vivimus vivamus "While we live, let us live" |
Symbol | Golden Pig |
Mascot | Pig |
Chapters | 1 |
Nickname | Porc, P.C. |
Headquarters | 1324 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge , Massachusetts 02138 United States |
Porcellian Club | |
Location | 1320-24 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, Massachusetts |
---|---|
Coordinates | 42°22′22.55″N71°07′04.10″W / 42.3729306°N 71.1178056°W |
Part of | Harvard Square Historic District (ID86003654) |
MPS | Cambridge MRA |
NRHP reference No. | 83000824 |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | June 30, 1983 |
Designated CP | July 28, 1988 |
The Porcellian Club is an all-male 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", [1] or as 1794, the year of the roast pig dinner at which the club, known first as "the Pig Club", [2] was formally founded. The club's motto, Dum vivimus vivamus (while we live, let us live), is Epicurean. The club emblem is the pig and some members sport golden pigs on watch-chains or neckties bearing pig's-head emblems. [3] [4]
The Porcellian is the iconic "hotsy-totsy final club", [5] with a history of Harvard calling the Porcellian "the most final of them all." [6]
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 entertainments 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".
An 1891 article from the Cambridge Chronicle recounts the early members of the club:
Among those who presided at the initial dinners of the club were Robert Treat Paine and Henderson Inches, class of 1792; Charles Cutter, class of 1793; and Rev. Joseph McKean, L.L.D. of 1794. It is to Mr. McKean that the club owes not only its pig, but its principles. [7]
The Porcellian clubhouse is located at 1324 Massachusetts Avenue above the store of clothier J. August. The building was designed by the architect and club member William York Peters. [8] 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. [9] Theodore Roosevelt was noted to have brought his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, to eat lunch at the club while they were undergraduates. [10]
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 (who had never actually been inside the club) 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. That's it…Porcellian is the pinnacle of the Boston idea. Less is more. Zero is a triumph. [11]
A portrait of George Washington Lewis, titled The Steward (Lewis of the Porcellian) by Joseph DeCamp, hangs in the clubhouse. An obituary in Time on April 1, 1929, notes:
George Washington Lewis, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for over 45 years the esteemed Negro steward of the Porcellian Club at Harvard College; in Cambridge, Massachusetts 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.
The interior of the then-new clubhouse was described in an 1891 article in the Cambridge Chronicle:
The enlargement of the club's library, and the fact of its growing postgraduate or honorary membership roll, compelled it from time to time to enlarge its accommodations. Finally, in 1881, it determined to tear down the old house where it had so long met, on Harvard street and build a new structure its site. The new structure is of brick, handsomely trimmed in stone, and rises to the height of four stories, with about seventy or eighty feet of frontage on Harvard street. Two large stores claim a part of the ground floor, but they do not encroach on the broad and handsome entrance to the club's apartments.
The three upper floors are used exclusively by the club. The first of them contains a large hall which opens both into the front and rear reception rooms and parlors, which, in turn, communicate. From each of these rooms a door leads to the library, which extends through from the front to the rear. On the second floor, in addition to a room over the library, there is a billiard hall in the front and a breakfast room in the rear with the kitchen over the main hall of the floor beneath. Nearly the whole of the top floor is taken up by a large banquet hall, vaulted by handsome rafters. [7]
US President Theodore Roosevelt and other members of the extended Roosevelt family belonged to the Porcellian, but the club did not invite his distant cousin, Harvard sophomore Franklin D. Roosevelt (later a US President), to join. FDR joined the Fly Club instead, along with his roommate, and eventually three of his sons. According to relative Sheffield Cowles, however, FDR, in his late thirties, declared, perhaps hyperbolically, that not being "punched" by the Porc was "the greatest disappointment in his life". [12] Additionally, the young Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. received no invitation to join the Porc; 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". [13]
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 Union Debating Society held no place. This and the Hasty Pudding Club… 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 labor and yield a pleasure which is fraught with no unpleasant consequences. [14]
A telling indication of the position of the Porcellian in the Boston establishment is given by a historian of Boston's Trinity Church, Porcellian member 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". [15]
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". [16] 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 an African-American—who had gone to St. Paul's". [6]
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". [17]
As of 2016, the club only admitted male members and defended "the value of single gender institutions for men and women as a supplement and option to coeducational institutions". [18]
In 1901 a gate to Harvard Yard was erected directly opposite the clubhouse. 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. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, Oratory and Elocution, and also the founder of the Porcellian Club.
The gate prominently features the club's symbol, a boar's head, directly above the central arch and is a famous Harvard landmark.
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." A 1940 Time article said:
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, Richard Whitney, now of Sing Sing Prison, of whom all good Porkies prefer not to speak. The Pork is very much a family affair. Upon its roster, generation after generation, appear the same proud Boston names—Adams, Ames, Amory, Cabot, Gushing, etc
Notable members of the Porcellian Club include:
Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard College is Harvard University's traditional undergraduate program, offering AB and SB degrees. It is highly selective, with fewer than four percent of applicants being offered admission as of 2022.
Owen Wister was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
The Boston Brahmins, or Boston elite, are members of Boston's historic upper class. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, they were often associated with a cultivated New England accent, Harvard University, Anglicanism, and traditional British-American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins. They are considered White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs).
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Holmes is one of the most widely cited and influential Supreme Court justices in American history, noted for his long tenure on the Court and for his pithy opinions—particularly those on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy—and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures. Holmes retired from the Court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice on the Supreme Court. He previously served as a Brevet Colonel in the American Civil War, in which he was wounded three times, as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and as Weld Professor of Law at his alma mater, Harvard Law School. His positions, distinctive personality, and writing style made him a popular figure, especially with American progressives.
The Cabot family is one of the Boston Brahmin families, also known as the "first families of Boston".
John Davis Long was an American lawyer, politician, and writer from Massachusetts. He was the 32nd governor of Massachusetts, serving from 1880 to 1883. He later served as the Secretary of the Navy from 1897 to 1902, a period that included the primarily naval Spanish–American War.
Berwick Academy is a college preparatory school located in South Berwick, Maine.
The Hasty Pudding Club, often referred to simply as the Pudding, is a social club at Harvard University, and one of three sub-organizations that comprise the Hasty Pudding - Institute of 1770. The current clubhouse was desgined by Peabody and Stearns and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 9, 1978.
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was an American painter and educator.
The Dante Club is a mystery novel by Matthew Pearl and his debut work, set amidst a series of murders in the American Civil War era. It also concerns a club of poets, including such historical figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, who are translating Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy from Italian into English and who notice parallels between the murders and the punishments detailed in Dante's Inferno.
The 1994 Massachusetts gubernatorial election was held on November 8, 1994. Incumbent Republican governor Bill Weld won reelection as Governor of Massachusetts by the largest margin in state history, winning every single county and all but 6 of the state's 351 municipalities. As of 2024, this is the most recent election in which Boston, Somerville, Lawrence, Chelsea, Brookline, Northampton, Provincetown, Monterey, Great Barrington, Ashfield, Williamstown, Williamsburg, Shelburne, Sunderland, and Pelham voted for the Republican candidate for governor.
Harvey Hollister Bundy Sr. was an American attorney who served as a special assistant to the Secretary of War during World War II. He was the father of William Bundy and McGeorge Bundy, who both served at high levels as government advisors.
Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
Charles Wentworth Upham was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts. Upham was also a member, and President of the Massachusetts State Senate, the 7th Mayor of Salem, Massachusetts, and twice a member of the Massachusetts State House of Representatives. Upham was the cousin of George Baxter Upham and Jabez Upham. Upham was later a historian of Salem and the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 when he lived there.
The Harvard Club of Boston is a private social club located in Boston, Massachusetts. Its membership is open to alumni and associates of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The Back Bay Clubhouse is located in Boston's historic Back Bay neighborhood, at 374 Commonwealth Avenue.
The Union Club of Boston, founded in 1863, is one of the oldest gentlemen's clubs in the United States. It is located on Beacon Hill, adjacent to the Massachusetts State House. The clubhouse at No. 7 and No. 8 Park Street was originally the homes of John Amory Lowell (#7), and Abbott Lawrence (#8). The houses were built c.1830-40, and they were remodeled for club use in 1896. The clubhouse overlooks the Boston Common, and has views of the Common itself, Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, and the hills to the west of the city.
The Yorick Club was a private social club in Lowell, Massachusetts, which twenty prominent young Lowell men founded in February 1882. The club went bankrupt in 1979 and was dissolved; its former clubhouse is now Cobblestones Bar & Restaurant.
The Harvard Boxing Club is a student organization at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)