Porcellian Club

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A menu from a dinner at the Porcellian Club 1884 (original in the Buttolph collection of menus, NYPL.)

The Porcellian Club is a male-only final club at Harvard University, sometimes called the Porc. The year of founding is sometimes given as 1791, when a group began meeting under the name of the "Argonauts,", 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 [Google Books] and sometimes as 1794, the year of the roast pig dinner at which the club was formally founded, originally under the name of "the Pig Club." 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. 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 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." 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 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 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 [link] Access is restricted to members but non-member males and females are allowed only in the first floor room known as the Bicycle Room.

An 1870, a 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 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. p. 354-5. [Google Books text]

Theodore Roosevelt and other members of the Roosevelt family belonged to the club, but Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a member of the Republican Club and managing editor 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.

The Porcellian is the iconic "hotsy-totsy final club," 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. p. 152: "they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some etherealized 'Porcellian' or 'Skull and Bones.'" E. Digby Baltzell ranks the social ladder of the final clubs as "Porcellian and A. D., the most exclusive,... followed by Fly, Spee, Delphic, and Owl." 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 Porcellian "the most final of them all" p. 472 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 [Harvard Legends]

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." p. 14

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., Fly, or Spee." 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.

Much of the secrecy surrounding the exclusive Porcellian clubhouse was dispelled when the Harvard Crimson, the university newspaper, published pictures of the interior.#redirect

Members

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.
Wendell Phillips - leading abolitionistop. cit.
H. H. Richardson, architectop. cit.op. cit
Theodore Roosevelt - 26th President of the United Statesop. 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.
"'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 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[link]

Footnotes

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