Porcellian Club


The Porcellian Club is an all-male final club at Harvard University, sometimes called the Porc or the P.C. The year of founding is usually given as 1791, when a group began meeting under the name "the Argonauts", or as 1794, the year of the roast pig dinner at which the club, known first as "the Pig Club" was formally founded. The club's motto, Dum vivimus vivamus is Epicurean. The club emblem is the pig and some members sport golden pigs on watch-chains or neckties bearing pig's-head emblems. The club was originally started by a group of 30 students from Massachusetts who wanted to avoid the dining halls and their food by roasting pigs.
The Porcellian is the iconic "hotsy-totsy final club", often bracketed with Yale's Skull and Bones, Princeton's Ivy Club, Dartmouth's Sphinx Club, Cambridge's Pitt Club, and Oxford's The Gridiron Club. A history of Harvard calls the Porcellian "the most final of them all."

Founding

According to a Harvard Crimson article of February 23, 1887:
An 1891 article from the Cambridge Chronicle recounts the early members of the club:

Clubhouse

The Porcellian clubhouse is located at 1324 Massachusetts Avenue above the store of clothier J. August. The building was designed by the architect and club member William York Peters. Its entrance faces the Harvard freshman dormitories and the entrance to Harvard Yard called the Porcellian, or McKean, Gate. The gate was donated by the club in 1901 and features a limestone carving of a boar's head. Access to the clubhouse is strictly limited to members, but non-members are allowed in the first floor room known as the Bicycle Room.
Despite the exclusivity and mystique, some, like National Review columnist/editor, Ronald Reagan speechwriter and Dartmouth emeritus professor of English Jeffrey Hart, have noted the club's modest physical and metaphorical character. Hart wrote:
A portrait of George Washington Lewis, titled The Steward by Joseph DeCamp, hangs in the clubhouse. An obituary in Time on April 1, 1929, notes:

George Washington Lewis, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for over 45 years the esteemed Negro steward of the Porcellian Club at Harvard College; in Cambridge, Massachusetts Ancient and most esoteric of Harvard clubs is Porcellian, founded in 1791.* An oil portrait of Steward Lewis hangs in the clubhouse. Steward Lewis had ten Porcellian pallbearers.

Interior

The interior of the then-new clubhouse was described in an 1891 article in the Cambridge Chronicle:

The enlargement of the club's library, and the fact of its growing postgraduate or honorary membership roll, compelled it from time to time to enlarge its accommodations. Finally, in 1881, it determined to tear down the old house where it had so long met, on Harvard street and build a new structure its site. The new structure is of brick, handsomely trimmed in stone, and rises to the height of four stories, with about seventy or eighty feet of frontage on Harvard street. Two large stores claim a part of the ground floor, but they do not encroach on the broad and handsome entrance to the club's apartments.
The three upper floors are used exclusively by the club. The first of them contains a large hall which opens both into the front and rear reception rooms and parlors, which, in turn, communicate. From each of these rooms a door leads to the library, which extends through from the front to the rear. On the second floor, in addition to a room over the library, there is a billiard hall in the front and a breakfast room in the rear with the kitchen over the main hall of the floor beneath. Nearly the whole of the top floor is taken up by a large banquet hall, vaulted by handsome rafters.

Historical significance

and other members of the extended Roosevelt family belonged to the Porcellian, but the club did not invite Harvard sophomore Franklin D. Roosevelt to join. FDR joined the Fly Club instead, along with his roommate, and eventually three of his sons. According to relative Sheffield Cowles, however, FDR, in his late thirties, declared, perhaps hyperbolically, that not being "punched" by the Porc was "the greatest disappointment in his life". Additionally, the young Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. received no invitation to join the Porc; a biographer writes that "For years later, Joe Kennedy remembered the day he didn't make the Porcellian Club, the most desired in his mind, realizing that none of the Catholics he knew at Harvard had been selected".
An 1870 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 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 labor and yield a pleasure which is fraught with no unpleasant consequences.
A telling indication of the position of the Porcellian in the Boston establishment is given by a historian of Boston's Trinity Church, Porcellian member 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".

Membership criteria

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. Club, Fly, or Spee". 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 were Jewish by 1986 and one was black. The Porcellian…took an occasional Jew and in 1983 admitted an African-American—who had gone to St. Paul's".
More recent information on the membership of the Porcellian Club may be found in a 1994 Harvard Crimson article by Joseph Mathews. He writes, "Prep school background, region and legacy status do not appear to be the sole determinants of membership they may once have been, but…they remain factors".
As of 2016, the club only admitted male members, and defended "the value of single gender institutions for men and women as a supplement and option to coeducational institutions".

Joseph McKean Gate

In 1901 a gate to Harvard Yard, directly opposite the clubhouse, was erected. According to a notice published in the Harvard Crimson, on March 20, 1909:

A gate is to be erected at the entrance to the Yard between Wadsworth House and Boylston Hall. It is to be erected by members of the Porcellian Club in memory of Joseph McKean 1794, S.T.D., LL.D. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, Oratory and Elocution, and also the founder of the Porcellian Club.

The gate prominently features the club's symbol, a boar's head, directly above the central arch and is a famous Harvard landmark.

Notable members

According to a 1940 Time article:

The Pork had as members James Russell Lowell, the two famed Oliver Wendell Holmeses, Owen Wister, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, President Theodore Roosevelt. Among its living members are Massachusetts' Governor Leverett Saltonstall, Congressman Hamilton Fish, Yachtsman Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Poloist Thomas Hitchcock Jr., U. S. Ambassador to Italy William Phillips, Journalist Joseph Alsop, Richard Whitney, now of Sing Sing Prison, of whom all good Porkies prefer not to speak. The Pork is very much a family affair. Upon its roster, generation after generation, appear the same proud Boston names—Adams, Ames, Amory, Cabot, Gushing, etc.

According to a note to the obituary of the Club Steward on Monday, April 1, 1929, in Time magazine:

The Porcellian roster includes Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nicholas Longworth, Poet James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Novelist Owen Wister, John Jay Chapman. The club's favorite brew is a mixture of beer and gin.