Laura heard Seth chuckle, then Celia, who was frowning, said, “Laura, you still haven’t told us what got students from this class suspended at the end of their sophomore year.”
Laura knew that her friend was worried about Ned, so she didn’t expand any more on what she’d read about fraternities. Instead, she told them about how some of the class of ’81 had printed out something called the Stinger, which was so scurrilous that it had the faculty in an uproar and came to the attention of a Chronicle reporter who wrote a long article entitled “Bogus Students.”
Celia said, “Bogus? What does that mean?”
“It seems the Stinger was made to look like it was a legitimate copy of the speeches that the juniors were going to give at their Junior Exhibition Day. However, they were not just fake speeches…they were quite cruel. The paper said something about ‘publications stupidly dull and revoltingly obscene’ and that the fake speeches targeted the faculty.”
Kitty said, “Ned told me about this last fall. There was a similar fake program printed up right before the sporting events of Field Day last spring, causing the whole event to be canceled. That’s why we are having two Field Days this year; the one held in the fall was the postponed one from last spring. At the time Ned mentioned this, I didn’t really understand what he was talking about.”
Laura noticed that the train was getting near the Berkeley station, and she hurried on. “That all makes sense. Turns out, after some investigating by the faculty, seven members of the class of ’81 were suspended for writing the Stinger. The announcement came right at the end of the term. However, almost all of the men from that class signed a letter saying that they had also participated. I think the purpose may have been to call the faculty’s bluff, figuring they wouldn’t suspend most of the sophomore class. But they did.”
“I imagine that set up quite an uproar among the parents of these students,” Seth said.
“Oh, yes, a number of letters to the editor to the Chronicle expounded on the theme of ‘boys will be boys,’ saying that the futures of good men were being destroyed, and so forth. Other letters suggested that the faculty and the university president had been too lax, thus cultivating this sort of behavior.”
“Did the faculty give in?” Seth asked as the train began to slow.
“Yes, they did. They reinstated all but fourteen of them before the next fall term started, but I don’t think all of them returned. I couldn’t help but wonder which students of the class of ’81 didn’t sign that letter protesting the suspensions and what kinds of divisions this must have created among them.”
Chapter 18
Thursday morning, March 10, 1881
Berkeley
“The Faculty Issues an Order Requiring a Pledge from Freshman Not to Join Fraternities.” San Francisco Chronicle, August 23, 1879
Caro stood looking out the attic window, again waiting for Laura Dawson, who’d sent her a note yesterday saying that she would come to the boarding house between her morning and afternoon classes and that she had some very useful information to share.
She saw a woman come into view, her upper body hidden by the large umbrella she held tilted against the rain. For the second day in a row, the region was getting a steady downpour. Good for farmers’ spring crops, bad for women’s skirts, which were going to get wet and muddy. Caro recognized the woman from her brown cloak and the leather satchel slung over her shoulder, and she went downstairs so she could help Laura off with her wet things.
“Heavens above, I’m dripping all over everything,” Laura said as she climbed the stairs up to the attic. “If you give me your washbasin, I could wring out the bottom of my skirt. That would help.”
“Why don’t you just remove it, and I will take it down to the kitchen and drape it in front of the stove? There are fresh doughnuts, the one thing that Mrs. Feltzer does really well besides coffee. Shall I bring you some with our tea? Or would you prefer coffee?”
“Doughnuts and coffee would be splendid, and I will take up your offer on trying to get my skirt a little dry, although it will no doubt be soaked again by the time I get back up to North Hall. But let’s be positive…maybe the rain will abate before I have to leave.” Laura pulled up the bottom edge of her basque to unbutton the underskirt and slip it down over her petticoats, which were short enough not to have gotten too damp. “But hurry back; I have such news!”
Caro did hurry, anxious to share what she’d learned as well. For the first time since she’d pulled her cousin out of the snowbank three months ago, she felt the tiniest sliver of hope that she was going to get to the bottom of what had happened to her.
Once they had swallowed the first bites of warm, glazed doughnut, followed by scalding hot coffee, Caro said, “You go first.”
Laura told her about the newspaper articles she’d gone through, her discovery of the hazing scandals that resulted in a shooting, the short-lived anti-fraternity paper, and the events behind the suspension of so many men in the class of ’81.
Laura concluded her report, saying, “At the same time that the faculty voted on the suspensions, they also passed a rule that all incoming freshmen the next year would have to sign a pledge that they wouldn’t join any secret societies. So obviously the majority of the faculty felt there was a connection between the various complaints about student misbehavior, including the Stinger, the so-called ‘Bogus Program,’ and the fraternities.”
“I expect that didn’t go down well with the fraternities,” Caro said.
“A whole lot of people got upset. Turns out a good proportion of the fathers of the suspended students were fraternity men themselves, and these parents mobilized their fraternity brothers throughout the state. There was a massive letter-writing campaign that put enormous pressure on the Board of Regents to force the faculty to rescind this decision. According to one of the articles I read in the Chronicle, this stirred up divisions within the faculty and resulted in complaints about President LeConte’s leadership. Finally, there were counter charges that the Board of Regents were not respecting faculty rights by pressuring them to rescind the rule.”
“In short, a mess,” Caro said as she poured out some more coffee for Laura. “Can I assume that the policy about fraternities was changed, given that there are currently five of them operating on campus…six if you count the female one?”
“Yes, the faculty voted to rescind, but not until February of last year.” Laura’s voice rose with excitement. “Don’t you see, Caro, this confirms what Ned told me, that some of the seniors in the Zeta Psi fraternity didn’t like Grace because of her attitudes towards fraternities. All the stuff about the suspensions and the anti-fraternity rule would still be so raw last term.”
“And I don’t see Grace backing down, just because her ideas were not well received by fellow students.”
“Didn’t you tell me that the minister who convinced her to come to Berkeley made the argument that the campus needed women students who would provide models of morality?”
“Yes, the Reverend Mason was the one who got Grace all fired up about being a good example to her fellow students, which was why she was growing so disappointed in Willie. She thought she’d found someone who shared her ideals, but instead of keeping him on the straight and narrow, he strayed.”
“It certainly sounds like he sided with his fraternity brothers in this case. Which, now that I think about it, is only to be expected. He probably wanted her to keep her opinions to herself like a good little woman.”
Caro thought about the reception she’d gotten when she brought up Grace’s name with other female students. “I can certainly see how her attitude towards fraternities might have turned those women who joined the Kappas against her as well. This could be why Miss Stokker reacted so oddly when asked if they had asked Grace to join. All this makes some of the things I read in the Blue and Gold so much more comprehensible.”
Caro pulled out the yearbooks she’d been pouring over last night and opened the one from Gr
ace’s freshman year. She had stuck scraps of paper to mark different pages, and she opened up to the beginning of the book.
“I was struck by the fact that the yearbook editors seemed to go out of their way in their forward to assert that there hadn’t been any hazing that year.”
“That is a flat-out lie, at least according to what I read in the newspapers.”
“Yes, and listen to what the historian for the class of ’81 wrote. ‘Hazing in the true sense of the word has always been discountenanced by our Class, not withstanding the remarkable report of the Grand Jury of Oakland to the contrary. However, the harmless invasion of the domiciles of Freshmen, and the suppression of unwanted familiarity on their part, has been prosecuted with vigor.’”
Laura leaned forward and said, “There was a Grand Jury report about the shooting that also appeared to address Oakland residents’ general complaints about university student behavior. I can’t believe that the Class of ’81 historian really thought that what his class got up to wasn’t…how did he put it…hazing in the true sense of the word. You can bet that the parents of these marauding students wouldn’t be quite so sanguine if their own precious homes had been invaded by local hoodlums. But it was clearly no problem to him if some boarding house owner like Mrs. Feltzer was frightened out of her wits in the middle of night or some farm boy away from home for the first time was roughed up by so-called gentlemen.”
Caro appreciated Laura’s indignation. And she was sure Grace would have been just as outraged. In fact, she knew her cousin would have been, because she remembered that last summer she had said something about hoping that her brother Josh, who was supposed to go off to college or university next year, never would join a fraternity.
Laura asked, “Did you find anything else in the Blue and Gold?”
Caro brought her mind back to the conversation and said, “When this yearbook came out in the spring, most of the scandals you just discovered wouldn’t have happened yet. But when I examined the next year’s Blue and Gold, I noticed a couple of things. First, instead of it being produced by the class of ’81, which normally would be their prerogative as juniors, it was produced by the Zeta Psi fraternity.”
“No! Do you think there just weren’t enough juniors left, or maybe the feeling was that they couldn’t be objective?”
“Well, I can tell you that the Zeta Psi who wrote the opening forward was anything but objective.” Caro opened the yearbook to the page she had marked and said, “He wrote this long, supposedly literary discourse on Ulysses and Sisyphus, but the crux of the piece is the condemnation of what he calls ‘…the ostentatious student, the dig, the man who, whatever his momentary employment may be, at all times hugs under his arm some precious volume…who writes wordy articles…in which he condemns the frivolity and levity of those around him.’”
“Oh, good heavens. He’s saying the problem is the male student who has come here to get an education! Do you know who the person was who wrote this forward?”
“No, it is anonymous, but he goes on to write pages in defense of drinking and what he calls ‘sportiveness,’ including the argument that eastern colleges engage in all sorts of brutal hazing, so obviously no one should be upset that their western university was engaged in similar time-honored traditions. It really is amazing.”
When Laura finished reading the forward, she said, “The gentleman sounds very defensive, don’t you think? And his jibe about students writing wordy articles must have been directed at the student editors of the Oestrus. I wonder if the person who wrote all this has graduated yet? If not, I can certainly see why he, or others like him, would take exception to Willie having a fiancée who was anti-fraternity.”
“I don’t know if this general editor is the same person as the class historian for ’81, who was of course a junior at the time he was writing. What I do know is that he started out comparing what he called the almost utter annihilation of his class (I assume he was referring to the suspensions) to such international disasters as the spread of socialism in Germany and the attempted assassination of the Czar of Russia.”
“He was joking, wasn’t he?”
“Yes and no. He did briefly mention the shooting, the Junior Exhibition Day fake program and subsequent suspensions, as if it had all been good-hearted fun, and he said that the faculty and the newspapers had over-reacted. But there is also a very strong sense of grievance, and sadness, over the fact that a good number of the class didn’t return after their sophomore year. I thought it was interesting that whoever he was, he didn’t sign his name as the other class historians did.”
Laura, who was leafing through the next sections of this yearbook, exclaimed, “I wonder if the editor was Elliot Sinclair, the president of the Zeta Psi fraternity this year. He’s a senior, so I assume he is part of this class of ’81. Ned thinks the world of him and…”
“Sinclair? Wouldn’t happen to be related to Miss Sephronia, Willie’s new flame?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Could be, which is probably why Willie knew her. And why Ned felt it important to insist that Willie hadn’t met her before the Junior Exhibition Day dance. What bosh! Anyway, given that Sinclair is in the Zeta Psi fraternity and is respected enough by them to be made president of the fraternity this year, it stands to reason he could be the person who was made class historian as a junior.”
Laura flipped through a couple more pages and exclaimed, “Can you believe it? The Zetas devote fifteen whole pages to their fraternity chapter. The other fraternities only get two pages apiece. I wonder how that was received by them? Given the number of suspensions, and the general anti-fraternity ban, I assume that it wasn’t just members of the Zeta Psi fraternity who were upset. Did you notice that the Zetas list all their alumni and what they are up to now? Half of them seem to be lawyers! I wonder what that means?”
“Means if any of the current Zetas get into trouble, they won’t have difficulty getting legal representation.”
Caro knew she sounded bitter. She had also noticed that, in contrast to the preponderance of lawyers, there were very few men listed as Zetas who were farmers or other men like Laura’s friend Mr. Timmons, who might actually work with their hands.
She took the last bite of her doughnut, dusted her hands, and said, “I need to stay objective, Laura. I know that cowhands just off the trail, or the laborers crowding the streets of Chicago, have been known to wreak a good deal more havoc than these fraternity boys have done, especially after drowning their sorrows at a local saloon. It just seems as if the fraternity boys should know better. Education should improve, not excuse, bad behavior.”
Laura, who had gone back to the first yearbook, the one that covered Grace’s freshman year, said, “Caro, did you see this? Right at the very back they have the anti-fraternity paper, the Oestrus, listed. I wonder why it wasn’t listed as one of the student organizations?”
Caro hadn’t noticed this paper, not having understood its importance when she first looked at the yearbook. As she ran her finger along the list of students who worked on the paper that year, and their class designations, she was shocked to see the name of Julia Beck, the young Watsonville student who lived down the block.
“Laura, I can’t believe it. Miss Beck, the one I walk onto campus with in the mornings, worked for the Oestrus, as an editor! She’s also the only female listed as a member.”
“And it says Julia was in the notorious class of ’81. Can’t imagine that went over well with her fellow classmates.”
“I’m going to have to completely revise my opinion of her. I had lumped her in with all the other women in Moses’ political economy class who seemed to turn so chilly when they discovered I was from Nebraska. I wonder why she’s taking classes with the juniors if this yearbook has her listed as part of the current senior class?”
Laura frowned and then said, “Maybe after all the uproar at the end of her sophomore year, she decided to stay out a year…wait to come back for her third year this fall, when
hopefully feelings weren’t running so high. I can’t imagine those men who were reinstated the next fall, or any of the fraternity men, given the attempted faculty ban, would look very kindly on students who wrote for that paper. I wonder if that is why the Oestrus is no longer in existence?”
Caro looked down at the list of editors again and said slowly, as thoughts began to coalesce in her mind, “In re-reading Grace’s letters to me from her first two years, I was reminded that she mentioned, just in passing, that she was trying her hand at writing letters to the editor, and she was using the name of a Greek goddess for a pen name. When she also said that her pastor, Reverend Mason, had encouraged her to write these letters, I assumed they were sent to the Oakland or San Francisco papers and were about the need for more support for the Deaf and Blind Institute, a special cause of hers.”
“Oh Caro, what if she had been writing anonymous letters to the Oestrus?”
“And if she did, Julia Beck might have known that. Maybe that is why she got so uncomfortable when I brought up Grace’s name.”
“And…if some of the Zetas learned this about Grace…who knows how they might have responded?”
“I’m definitely going to have to have a talk with Julia. She might be the key to understanding exactly what kind of ‘little jokes’ Willie’s fraternity brothers were playing on Grace this fall and if those jokes played a role in driving her home in such a state.”
Chapter 19
Friday morning, March 11, 1881
Berkeley
“A base attempt to destroy, under the cover of night, the unique and appropriate design which adorned the hall, was frustrated by…the ready wit of the Committee on Decoration in repairing damages.” 1881 Blue and Gold Yearbook
Scholarly Pursuits Page 13
