Elihu (secret society)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elihu is the fourth oldest senior society at Yale University and it is also referred to as a club. It was founded in 1903. While similar to Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head societies in charter and function, Elihu, much like Wolf's Head, "favors privacy over overt secrecy." To this end, it is the only senior society whose building, at 175 Elm Street, has windows, although they are shaded. It says of itself that it has historically been among the most egalitarian of the senior societies. It is probably the very first of the Yale societies to have tapped an undergraduate from an ethnic minority, Henry Roe Cloud, a Native American who graduated in 1910.
Selection is said to be based on three pillars: excellence, diversity, and leadership. It is named for Elihu Yale, the University's first major benefactor and namesake.
Reflecting some of its uniquenesses from the secret society tradition, the alumni association is actually called the Elihu Club, Inc. Aspects that are similar to the other societies are: sixteen rising juniors are "tapped" during the spring of their junior year, Members meet formally on Thursday and Sunday nights of their senior year, and while the program is varied, meetings center largely on the sharing of detailed life histories and perspectives.
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[edit] Architecture
The club is housed in a structure looking out on the New Haven Green; the three-story colonial-era white clapboard house is, in fact, the oldest of all Yale's secret society buildings, and purportedly one of the oldest original structures in the United States still in regular use rather than being a museum.
Its brick basement is older than the above-ground structure, constructed in the early 1600s as the Tory Tavern, a central locale of the Revolutionary War. It has also been expanded to the rear several times. During the demonstrations and student strikes associated with the New Haven Black Panther trials and other civil unrest in 1970, numbers of the twelve thousand protesters at times found refuge inside the Elihu Society building.
As with several other societies, its members regard their building as being larger than any of Yale's other secret society tombs. It is certainly one of the biggest, belying the modest clapboard facade, and is even rumored to contain a bed for each undergraduate to stay overnight if they choose. Another tradition on campus is that Manuscript contains original papers of the author James Fenimore Cooper, even drafts of his epic novel The Last of the Mohicans, in its collection. (However Cooper could not have been a member as he was expelled from Yale in 1805, a century before Elihu was founded.)
[edit] Members
- Joseph Lieberman, U.S. Senator
- Robert B. Semple, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
- Jim Amoss, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
- Cesar Pelli, architect
- Ambassador John Negroponte Deputy Secretary of State and former Director of National Intelligence
- John Pepper, Jr., former Procter & Gamble CEO
- Sheila Jackson Lee, U.S. Congresswoman
- Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic
- Paul Monette, author and activist
- Alexander Garvin, urban planning authority
- Sam Waterston, actor ("Law & Order")
- Sir John Templeton, philanthropist
- Henry Roe Cloud, first full-blooded Native American to attend Yale, reformer, educator
