Elihu (secret society)

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Elihu's colonial-era building, on a basement constructed earlier, in the early 1600s.
Elihu's colonial-era building, on a basement constructed earlier, in the early 1600s.
Emblem of Elihu
For other uses, see Elihu.

Elihu, founded in 1903, is the sixth oldest secret society at Yale University, New Haven, CT. While similar to Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head societies in charter and function, Elihu favors privacy over overt secrecy. To this end, Elihu is the only society whose building, located at 175 Elm Street, has windows, though they are shaded. Like the other societies, the organization's building is closed to non-members. Elihu is likely the very first society to have tapped an undergraduate from an ethnic minority, Henry Roe Cloud, a Native American who graduated in 1910, in keeping with a reputation for diversity. It was also one of the the first senior societies to tap women.

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[edit] Mission

According to the only public description of the organization, Elihu is "a private Senior Society at Yale University," the purposes of which are "to foster among its members, by earnest work and good fellowship a stronger affection for Yale; a broader view of undergraduate life and its aims; a deeper and more helpful friendship for one another; and to give its members, after graduation, an additional tie to bind them to Yale and to each other."

Elihu’s purposes are realized through an educational and social program, which seeks to enrich the undergraduate experience of each member and to foster a strong connection between all Elihu members, undergraduate and graduate. During the Spring Tap process, sixteen rising seniors are elected into membership of Elihu. In its earlier days, Elihu offered application to the society to all of the junior class, so that no one would be overlooked in choosing its sixteen members. Selection is now performed behind closed doors, in keeping with the other major societies. Consideration for membership in Elihu is given to those juniors in the College who are nominated by current undergraduate and graduate members. Selection is said to be based on three pillars: excellence, diversity, and leadership. The society is named for Elihu Yale, the University's first major benefactor and namesake.

The Elihu program is similar to that of the other secret societies: personal histories and perspectives are shared among the current delegates, with formal meetings each Thursday and Sunday of the academic year.

[edit] Architecture

The organization 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. Its brick basement is older still, constructed in the early 1600s as the Tory Tavern, a central locale of the Revolutionary War. The building 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 building.

The building is among the largest of the societies, belying the modest clapboard facade, and is rumored to contain two single guest rooms in addition to beds for all the current undergraduate members. Another tradition on campus is that Elihu 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] Notable Members

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