Wolf's Head

Wolf's Head Society is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

The society was founded when fifteen members of the Yale Class of 1884 choose to abet the creation of The Third Society, later known as Wolf's Head Society, by the Phelps Trust Association in 1883.^[1][2] Over 300 alumni with the rising seniors sought to counter the dominance of Skull and Bones in undergraduate and university affairs.^[3][4][5] The incorporation defeated the last attempt to abolish undergraduate secret societies at Yale, and continued the tradition of founding a society if enough potential members thought they had been overlooked by the extant groups. Bones was organized in 1832 after a dispute over selections for Phi Beta Kappa awards; likewise, Scroll and Key, the second society at Yale, was organized in 1841 after a dispute over elections to Bones.^[6][7]

W.H.S. is recomposed annually of fifteen or sixteen Yale College students. The undergraduate members spend their senior year as a delegation answerable to the graduate body, composed of past members, known as the Phelps Association.

Background

Wolf's Head "New Hall", architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, designed circa 1924

From the mid-1840s until 1883, attempts failed to incorporate and sustain new societies at Yale among the Academic Department or liberal arts students.^[8] By the 1830s the campus literary societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliope, were losing prominence. Calliope folded in 1853 and the others shut down after the American Civil War.^[9] Calliope, Linonia, and Brothers in Unity existed respectively: 1819 - 1853, 1768 - 1878, and 1735 - 1868.^[10]

Phi Beta Kappa, originally a secret student group,^[11] was inactive 1871 to 1884 at Yale.^[12] In the 1820s Anti-Masonic agitation across the United States of America prompted PBK to examine the role of secrecy in its proceedings. Secrecy was soon shelved at the Yale chapter.^[13] Associated with PBK's national reorganization in 1881, secrecy disappeared as a signature among all chapters, quelling rivalry with collegiate fraternities, clubs and societies.^[14] PBK exists today, without any secrecy, as an academic honor society.

Beginning in the 1850s, the Yale undergraduate student body grew more diverse. The college was ceasing to be an institution of regional importance where cohesion stemmed from deeply held and shared social beliefs. Students who hailed from environs beyond New England or who weren't Congregationalist or Presbyterian entered the college in large number.^[15] However, the faculty was populated solidly with alumni of Bones, numbering 4 out of 5 faculty members between 1865 and 1916. The administration was likewise dominated by past members of Bones, and Keys to a lesser degree. Yale's president was an alumnus of Bones, 1886 - 1921, then again, 1937 - 1951.^[16]University secretaries were solely Bonesmen, 1869 - 1921. The university treasurers for forty-three of the forty-eight years between 1862 and 1910 were Bones alumni.^[17]

In 1873 The Iconoclast, a once-published student paper, advocated for the abolition of the society system. It opined: "Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men...They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will....It is Yale College against Skull and Bones. We ask all men, as a question of right, which should be allowed to live.?"^[18][19]

History

The Class of 1884 agreed to support another revolt against the society system with a vote of no confidence to coincide with its graduation.^[20] It had been understood that the society system was beyond reform and might well be abolished. However, The Third Society was incorporated in 1883. The initial delegation, lead by Edwin Albert Merritt and including members of the Class Day, Promemade and Class Cup committees, had met in secret during their senior year.^[21] The pro-society seniors won the vote, 67-50.^[22]

An appropriate meeting hall, designed by McKim, Mead and White, had been erected by 1884 with the aid of the original 300-plus alumni members. Members were known as "Grey Friars".^[3]

The New Haven Register reported in 1886: "Wolf's Head is not as far out of the world, in respect to its public doings, as are [Bones and Keys]. There is a sufficient veil of secrecy drawn around its mechanism, however, to class it with the secret societies, and this gives it a stability and respectability in Yale College circles that it might not have otherwise."^[23]

W.H.S. sat at the apex of a social pyramid bricked by freshman, sophomore and junior societies as well as campus organizations, athletic teams, clubs, and fraternities.^[24][25] "By 1884, half the faculty and the Yale Corporation were members of a Yale secret society. In control, they were careful to quash efforts at restricting the societies."^[26]Other societies were formed to keep up with Yale's growing enrollment.^[27]

Style

In 1888 the society changed its name to "Wolf's Head Society", consonant with the approval among undergraduates of the society's pin, a stylized wolf's head on an inverted ankh, an Egyptian hieroglyphic known as the Egyptian Cross or "the key of life". Eternal life is symbolized, rather than death or erudition.^[3][28]

The Grey Friars, as had been written about the music of Charles Ives, "had a wicked sense of humor and deliberately set out to deflate every kind of pomposity".^[29] Grey Friars mocked as "poppycock" the seemingly Masonic-inspired rituals of Bones. This spirit survived, exemplified by The Pirates of Penzance prank, with the thespian pirate king persuaded to display the numbers 322 below a skull and crossbones at a local theatre,^[30] Whit Griswold's deprecations of "Bonesy bullshit" and "Dink Stover crap" coloring undergraduate life,^[31] a blog post decrying "the public presumptions of these Bones guys",^[32] and the practice of newly- and recently-enfranchised wolves howling in late-April.^[33][34]

Stephen Vincent Benet chided mockheroically the undergraduate aspiration to society membership: "Do you want to be successful? Form a club!/ Are your chances quite distressful?/ Form a club!/Never mind the common friendships/ That no politician has!/ Seek the really righteous rounders/ and the athletes of the class!/ And you'll get your heart's desiring-/ and the rest will get the raz!"^[35]

W.H.S. maintained many traditions, however, common among its peers. Paul Moore recalled the night before he first encountered combat in World War II: "I spent the evening on board ship being quizzed by...about what went on in Wolf's Head. He could not believe I would hold back such irrelevant secrets the night before I faced possible death."^[36]

The Wolf's Head Halls

Goodhue's evocative Wolf's Head Society building, shown behind its high stone enclosure.

• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. designed ca. 1924 and completed posthumously, York Street, gift from Edward Harkness. The "New Hall", with its stone wall and wrought iron fencing, is central to the largest secret society compound on campus. ^[37] Coincidentally, Goodhue was a protege of James Renwick Jr., architect of the first St. Anthony Hall chapter house in New York City.
• McKim, Mead and White, firm of. 1884, former or "Old Hall" at 77 Prospect Street, across the street from the Grove Street Cemetery, commissioned for the Phelps Trust Association (Wolf's Head alumni trust organization)^[38], Richardsonian Romanesque. Purchased by the University in 1924, rented to Chi Psi Fraternity (1924-29), Book and Bond (defunct society) (1934-35), and Vernon Hall (defunct club) (1944-54). Currently houses the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies.[23] ^[39]

A building with windows and an entrance off a main New Haven street, the "Old Hall" was noted as "the most modern and handsomest" of the society domiciles by The New York Times, September 13, 1903.

"The Hall" commands the most prominent location on campus beyond Harkness Tower and the Memorial Quadrangle, gifts from Anna M. Harkness, the mother of Charles Harkness and Edward Harkness. William L. Harkness Hall was erected in memory of their half-brother with funds from his mother, Laura Osborne.

"The Hall", reputedly home to a swimming pool,^[40] sits fronted by York Street and surrounded by the Yale Daily News Briton Hadden Memorial building, the Yale Drama School and its theatre (both gifts from E. Harkness),^[41] and the former homes of the Fence Club (or Psi Upsilon, 224 York Street), DKE (232 York Street) and Zeta Psi (212 York Street). "The Hall" displays throughout an ancient Egyptian motif informed by the Egyptian pantheon.^[42] A campaign has been completed recently to refurbish "The Hall".^[43]

Membership

W.H.S. is reputed to tap the gregarious "prep school type".^[44] Past members were associated intimately with the coeducation of Yale College,^[45] the establishment of the Yale residential college system and the Harvard house system,^[46][47] the founding of the Elizabethan Club,^[48] and the founding of the Yale Political Union.^[49] Members have twice lead Yale University since World War II. Pulitzer Prize winners, political figures, prominent educators and authors as well as over 2,000 other alumni and faculty have enjoyed membership. The extant graduate membership numbers between 900 and 1,000. Any undergraduate delegation will include leaders of political, service, social or media organizations, athletes, artists, and PBKs.

The Phelps Association in late-1991, after several years of debate and plebicites, voted 80% in favor of tapping women; women have been tapped and have joined since the spring of 1992.^{[50][51][52][53]} Jews have been tapped since the spring of 1956 and have joined since 1959.^[54] Undergraduates of African-descent have been members since the late-1960s. Membership diversified further throughout the 1980s.^[55][56]

Notable members

Notes

Other references

• Mayday at Yale: A Case Study in Student Radicalism, John Taft, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1976. ISBN 0891580026
• Insiders and Outsiders in American Historical Narrative and American History, R. Laurence Moore, The American Historical Review (Apr. 1982).
• The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, 1956. ISBN 0195133544, ISBN 9780195133547
• Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan invented the American supereconomy, Charles R. Morris, H. Holt and Co., New York, 2005. ISBN 0805075992