Wolf's Head Society (W.H.S.) is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. Membership is recomposed annually of fifteen or sixteen Yale University students, typically juniors from the college. A delegation spends its year together answerable to the Phelps Association, composed of past members.
The society was founded when fifteen members of the Yale Class of 1884, with help from a few members of the Yale Class of 1883 who were considered possible taps for the existing societies, chose to abet the creation of The Third Society, later known as Wolf's Head Society.[1][2][3] The society tapped eventually over 300 Yale College alumni and some prominent Yale Law School faculty soon after the incorporation. The fellowship was joined in part to counter the dominance of Skull and Bones Society 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. Scroll and Key Society, the second society at Yale, was organized in 1841 after a dispute over elections to Bones. The Third Society's founding was likewise motivated by the sentiment among some outsiders that they deserved insider status. "[A] certain limited number were firmly convinced that there had been an appalling miscarriage of justice in their individual omission from the category of the elect," the society founders among the Yale Classes of 1883 and 1884, and some earlier classes, agreed.[3][6][7]
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From the mid-1840s until 1883, five societies were incorporated but each failed to sustain the interest of the Academic Department or liberal arts students.[8] Groups named Star and Dart, Sword and Crown, Tea-Kettle, Spade and Grave, and E.T.L. failed to join the ranks of the sustaining societies.[9]
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.[10] Calliope, Linonia, and Brothers in Unity existed respectively: 1819-1853, 1768–1878, and 1735-1868.[11]
Phi Beta Kappa 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]
The faculty was populated solidly with alumni of Bones, numbering 4 out of 5 faculty members between 1865 and 1916, and the administration was likewise dominated by members of that society.[16][17] In 1873 The Iconoclast, a student paper published once, 13 October, 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] The Class of 1884 agreed to support another revolt against the society system with a vote of no confidence to coincide with its graduation. It had been understood that the society system was beyond reform and might well be abolished. A defense of the society system appeared in the May 1884 issue of The New Englander.[20] However, The Third Society had been incorporated in 1883, quashing the last serious attempt to ban undergraduate societies at Yale.
The initial delegation, including ten Class Day officers and led by Edwin Albert Merritt, all members of the Class of 1884, had met in secret during their senior year, with the aid of members of Class of 1883 who were "eager to start a society provided the evil features of the old societies would be eliminated. [The graduating seniors and rising juniors] were unanimous on this point." Included among the supporters from the Class of 1883 were seniors who though overlooked by the other societies had been touted as sure or near-sure selections by the publishers of the Horoscope, an undergraduate publication that provided feature material on the most likely taps. The pro-society seniors won the Class Day vote, 67 - 50.[21]
An appropriate meeting hall had been erected by 1884. Members were known as Grey Friars. 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...." [22]
Tapping Yale alumni and some prominent faculty help broadened the reach of the society's influence and further legitimized the effort in the local and greater Yale communities. The society was briefly managed similarly to the finals clubs associated with the Sheffield Scientific School, however it soon took on almost all aspects of the older societies.[3]
W.H.S. sat at the apex of a social pyramid bricked by junior societies (sophomore societies were abolished in 1875, freshmen societies in 1880),[23] 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 have been incorporated to keep pace with Yale's growing enrollment.[27]
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. A Roman fasces had been considered as a design element for the pin, but wasn't adopted.[3][28]
The Grey Friars mocked as "poppycock" the seemingly Masonic-inspired rituals of Skull and Bones. Early undergraduate members went as far as allowing fellow Yale undergraduates to handle the society's pin. The Pirates of Penzance prank, with the thespian pirate king persuaded to display the numbers 322 (part of the emblem of Skull and Bones) below a skull and crossbones at a local theatre,[29] along with Whit Griswold's deprecations of poppycock -- "Bonesy bullshit" and "Dink Stover crap" -- coloring undergraduate life,[30] and the practice of newly- and recently-enfranchised wolves howling in late-April [31] sustain the society's early impetus to deflate pomposity among its peer group. W.H.S. maintained many traditions common among its peers, however. 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."[32] The society sent Scroll and Key 100 thornless American Beauty roses for its centennial celebration, in 1942, with an appropriate poem authored by Stephen Vincent Benet.[33]
A building with windows, though each is rather narrow, with 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 building was erected in 1884 soon after the founding members secured financing.[3]
The current society compound 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. "The Hall" sits fronted by York Street and surrounded by the Yale Daily News Briton Hadden Memorial building, the Yale Drama School and theatre (both gifts from E. Harkness),[35] and the former homes of the Fence Club (or Psi Upsilon, 224 York Street), DKE (232 York Street) and Zeta Psi (212 York Street).
Years ago, an olympic-sized swimming pool was said to be among the accommodations in Goodhue's building.[36]
W.H.S. has been reputed to tap the gregarious "prep school type".[36][37] Past members were associated intimately with the coeducation of Yale College,[38] the establishment of the Yale residential college system and the Harvard house system,[39][40] the founding of the Elizabethan Club,[41] and the founding of the Yale Political Union.[42]
Envoy to the Court of St. James's Edward Phelps accepted the offer to be namesake to the alumni association at his farewell dinner at Delmonico's.[3]
The society has tapped women since the spring of 1992. W.H.S. was the last all-male undergraduate society.[43]
Malcolm Baldrige, Jr.,[44] Stephen Vincent Benet,[45] William H.T. Bush,[46] Sam Chauncey,[47] Alexander Smith Cochran,[48] Erastus Corning 2nd,[49] William Clay Ford, Sr.,[50] Paul Goldberger,[51] A. Whitney Griswold,[52] Ashbel Green Gulliver,[45] Edward Harkness,[53] Robert Maynard Hutchins,[54] Charles Edward Ives,[55] Dick Jauron,[50] Rasheed Khalidi,[51] Lewis Lehrman,[56] Christopher Lydon,[51] Edwin Merritt, Clark Millikan,[57] Douglas Moore,[58] Paul Moore,[59] Paul Moore, Sr.,[60] Edward John Phelps,[61] Philip W. Pillsbury,[57] Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.,[62] Sam Wagstaff.[63]