The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (review)

Even before I reached the stunning conclusion to Nicholas L. Syrett's The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, I had already found it to be one of the finest "masculinity histories" I had ever read. Although positioning itself within the recent historiography of American masculinity, the book deftly evades some of the pitfalls so often found in masculinity studies, particularly the tedious insistence on male anxiety (whether performance related or otherwise), or the repetitive claim that American men are always or have always been in some sort of crisis or another. The problem particularly with the latter thesis is that we have ended up with a raft of books which retell American history as men's history, albeit an anxious one. In six substantive, chronologically ordered chapters, Syrett tells the story of how American men fashioned their identities within the fraternity systems that emerged within American colleges and universities between about 1820 and today. The larger story Syrett tells is how fraternities influenced, and were influenced by, trends in American higher education, and how the fraternity experience connected to larger cultural and historical movements (muscular Christianity) and events (the Civil War, World War II). Syrett deftly reads his archive in relation to the interactions of class, economics, social order, racial identity, religion and gender. From its beginnings in secretive obscurity and intellectual clubiness, the white, mostly Protestant, American fraternity experience has come to define not just one, but possibly the defining character of the American man at college. Antebellum fraternity brothers engaged in literary debate and encouraged intellectual ambition; "frat boys" in the post-World War II partied in the "Animal House" and pursued careers in date-rape and anti-gay bigotry. How on earth did this happen?

Syrett begins in the early antebellum period, with the establishment, in 1825, of a secret society at Union College in upstate New York. He suggest that, in this period, fraternities provided its members with bonds of loyalty and friendship in an age that was increasingly coming to value competition and rivalry as the key terms of American male identity. In this early period as well, the antagonistic relationship between a faculty charged with disciplining its students provided the occasion for fraternities to shelter its members from hostile male authority, as well as to stage acts of rebellion against the institution itself. The theme of rebelliousness carries over into subsequent chapters as well. Indeed, if I have a criticism of the book as a whole, it is that Syrett does not consider the self-fashioned rebelliousness of American fraternity life in relation to the national myth America's revolutionary personality. Chapter two describes the divergence of a secularized definition of manliness from the clerical or sacred manliness that had defined the earlier fraternal organizations and higher education ethos more generally. Fraternity men increasingly demanded that colleges and universities prepare them for lives outside of ministry; fraternities provided wealthier collegians an opportunity to define themselves apart from poorer and also pious classmates.

Chapter three details how fraternities went national over the course of the middle-years of the nineteenth century. "Membership in a national organization," Syrett finds, created the "imagined fraternity" which in turn provided men from disparate regions and backgrounds the opportunity to define themselves as the natural leaders of the nation and embodiment of its best values. (118-119) The books next and possibly best chapter details the emergence of a recognizably modern fraternity man, one defined increasingly through class and economic advantage, athletic achievement, and "a properly enacted masculinity" (181) defined increasingly in terms of sexual achievement and white Protestant superiority. With the increasing numbers of American women pursuing higher education, the hitherto secondary role of sexual identity and performance becomes a strikingly visible feature of fraternal identity in the 20th century, arguably the measure of fraternal "success" in the 20th century. (228)

Chapter six and the book's conclusion return us to a terrain familiar enough from...