Word: pbk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Powerful Symbol. In those 175 years, the gold key of PBK has become a powerful symbol in U.S. education. Though most off-campus Americans pretend not to care much about it, most know what it is. Those who wear it can be as different as Franchot Tone and Senator Paul Douglas, as Paul Robeson and Senator Robert Taft, as Byron ("Whizzer") White and Helen Wills Moody. But they all have one thing in common: they got good marks in college...
Over the years, hundreds of members have also earned good marks after college. In its first 70 years, PBK added only six chapters; but by that time its reputation had already spread all over the U.S. When Harvard's chapter gave a dinner in 1824, Lafayette was there. At the Harvard meeting of 1833, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the poet; in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the orator and delivered his famous plea for the liberation of the American scholar ("Our intellectual Declaration of Independence!" cried PBK's Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Our Yankee version of a lecture...
High Standard. At Yale, Eli Whitney won a key, and Chemist Benjamin Silliman bitterly complained about PBK's bibulous anniversary meetings ("After such surfeits, I am always sick"). In 1818, South Carolina College at Columbia applied for a charter, sent it to the Secretary of War, PBK's John C. Calhoun, who in turn sent it to the Secretary of State, PBK's John Quincy Adams. Adams was the first presidential member. Those who came after him: Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt* and William Howard Taft...
Today, from its permanent headquarters in Williamsburg, PBK rules over 151 chapters and 120,000 living members. It still does not recognize non-liberal-arts colleges, even such famed ones as M.I.T., and it still wields no direct power over academic affairs, even on campuses where it has chapters. But in 175 years of dangling its golden key, PBK has set a high standard for U.S. students, and by its very existence has persuaded hundreds to raise their intellectual sights...
...PBK Exercises...