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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy December
18, 2002: By Jane Chapman Martin '89 Over the past few months there has been a hue and cry over the lack of female members at Augusta National, the Georgia golf club that is home to the famous Masters tournament. The unfortunately named chair of the club, Hootie Johnson, has come under heavy fire for his defense of the club's right of free association, which he believes supersedes its responsibility not to discriminate. The debate will ring a familiar chord with anyone who attended Princeton before all the eating clubs became coed. (Even now I can hear an Ivy Club-member friend wailing, "You know the types of girls they'd let in ...") But it's an argument that long predates women at Princeton. In my last column I referred to a PAW On the Campus column written by John McPhee '53 in May 1953. Several other of his columns from that year addressed the most pressing issue on campus of that day: 100 percent Bicker. In 1950 the clubs had achieved the notable goal of ensuring that every eligible sophomore received a bid to an eating club (this after 500 sophomores pledged not to join a club at all if 100 percent bicker was not accomplished). But just four years later, it was already clear that the laudable aim of accepting every man into a club was an emotionally charged proposal. In the March 13, 1953, issue, McPhee reported that the Interclub Committee had passed a resolution saying: "The Interclub Committee is in favor of 100 percent by natural selection. The committee condemns the artificial means [assignation by the ICC] now used in achieving 100 percent. Admission to the University does not constitute a guarantee of subsequent admission to a club." As so often happens at Princeton, the campus uproar then made its way into the national press. The Prince, in an effort to present the various arguments surrounding 100 percent bicker, ran two pages of differing viewpoints. Unfortunately for the Prince and Princeton, the way the six different pieces were laid out suggested that they were editorial opinions, perhaps held by the editors themselves. Time magazine picked up one of the pieces and ran an article, as quoted in McPhee's column of April 17, 1953: "After Princeton's once exclusive eating clubs had taken in every eligible sophomore for four years in a row, old grads said that the democratic dreams of onetime President Woodrow Wilson had finally come true. Last week, fingering their old club ties, they read the Daily Princetonian and began to wonder. After all, said the Princetonian, there are some Princeton men these days who are just not the eating-club type. ...These men, though they had excellent high school grades, did not have a social background which would fit them into the Princeton system. Was it fair for the University to admit them? Were they informed of the nature of the club system?'" The initial campus reaction to the article was indignation; wrote history professor E. Harris Harbison '28 in a letter, "In all my years of reading Prince editorials, I have never read anything which touched this for sheer smugness." But just as faculty and students were nodding in agreement with Harbison, Time printed its story and "revived the furor," as McPhee wrote. The best perspective on the uproar came from English professor Thomas Riggs '37, who in his own letter to the Prince compared bicker to a tribal initiation rite, with an important distinction: the tribesman were preparing "to be worthy of a vision of the supernatural; the Princetonian is preparing himself to be worthy of eating three meals a day. Bicker is a religious frenzy over the choice of a restaurant." Could there be a similar lesson here for Mr. Johnson?
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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