Word: kappas
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Anniversary Meeting became early the great annual event on the Phi Beta Kappa calendar. The date of the first regular meeting, September 5, was at first selected for celebration; from 1792 until the present the annual gathering has been held during Commencement Week, though the more recently initiated Winter Meeting, on or about December 4 (the date of the granting of the charter) is, precisely speaking, the anniversary. From the first the celebration has comprised a business meeting, literary exercises, and a dinner. Until about 1817, the business meeting took place in the college room of some member...
...Since then, among many other foreign scholars and statesmen, Sir Leslie Stephen, James Bryce, Eugen Kuhnemann, and George Walter Prothero have been chosen to honorary membership; Jean Jules Jusserand was orator in 1912; Alfred Noyes, poet in 1915. The roll of men who have joined the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa in honoring these occasions is as distinguished as it is long...
...whose secret records were stolen, "base conduct" of which this chapter naturally expressed disapproval. But the necessity, and even the advisability, of such secrecy, was called into question before many years had passed. The anti-Masonic agitation of the eighteen-twenties and thirties did not pass by Phi Beta Kappa, which was attacked for binding its members by oath not to disclose its secrets. In 1831, the President of the Harvard chapter, Edward Everett, wrote a letter to Mr. Justice Story, in which he stated: "Several friends with whom I have conversed, think it expedient wholly to drop the affectation...
...this liberalization of policy, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa escaped once and for all the possibility of becoming merely one of many undergraduate social clubs. It made itself definitely free to choose its members on merit, and to devote itself singly to the purpose of scholarship...
Such has been the fundamental attitude of the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa for the past century. As the college has grown, the maximum number to be elected to the Society from each class has been increased--not always with corresponding rapidity--from a normal membership of sixteen from each class, until 1866, by stages of thirty, forty, and forty-five, to the present maximum of sixty-five (about one-tenth of the number of men in each graduating class). Traditionally, eight men are chosen in the fall of their third year, as the "Junior Eight"; thirty-two Seniors are elected...