HISTORY chapter at McGill University in Montreal in 1883. The international flavor of fraternities was wellestablished by 1909 with nine active chapters at Toronto and seven at McGill. In 1913, Phi Kappa Pi, Canada’s only national fraternity was created by the union of two locals: Alpha Beta Gamma at McGill University and Sigma Pi at the University of Toronto. Phi Kappa Pi fraternity currently has four active chapters.
Development of New Groups Fraternities have been founded at varying rates over the years. After a slow start in 1825 the period of 1832 to 1845 saw a relatively low rate of one new fraternity every two years. The rate increased to somewhat more than one new group each year from 1845 to 1904, with a 20 year pause from 1874 to 1894, during which virtually no new groups appeared. Zeta Psi fraternity built the first residential chapter house at the University of California, Berkeley in 1879. By 1912, Baird’s Manual reported that ninety percent of all fraternity chapters occupied houses with almost half owning those chapter houses. This high level of
chapter house occupancy and ownership had a significant influence on the evolution of the college fraternity. A chapter house meant the group had wealth, it helped to create separation from others on campus, and it provided a space free of close oversight by college authorities. It took vast sums of money to buy, maintain, and staff a chapter house. Only students backed by considerable wealth could afford to live in chapter houses. This fact reinforced the tendency of fraternities to recruit from among the social elite on their campuses. In the period of 1904 to 1925, 20 fraternities, including Lambda Chi Alpha, were established, an average of one every year. The number of active chapters established also showed an increase as the year 1909 approached, but without the pause in the 1880s. The 1912 edition of Baird’s Manual also reported 39 general social fraternities with just over 1,200 active and just fewer than 400 inactive chapters. Somewhat more than 250,000 men had been initiated. In addition, Baird’s Manual reported almost 14,000 initiates of 163 local fraternities—approximately 40 percent of the locals were established in houses.
www.lambdachi.org/cross-crescent
Some of the growth in the number of new fraternities was in response to the elitism of many older fraternities. As the student population of most campuses became more heterogeneous, the old line fraternities excluded men on the basis of social class. This social class barrier was in addition to the existing racial and religious barriers that prevented all but the wealthy, socially elite students to attain membership in the older fraternities. For most nineteenth century fraternity men family background, “good breeding,” fine clothes, and the ability to pay for entertainment, trips, and vacations were the prerequisites for membership in their fraternity. Membership discrimination based on religion and race lead to the creation of such fraternities as Phi Kappa Sigma (1889), Pi Lambda Phi (1895), Zeta Beta Tau (1898), Alpha Phi Alpha (1906), Sigma Alpha Mu (1909), and Rho Psi (1916). Lambda Chi Alpha, while discriminating on the basis of religion and race, was founded in part to provide a fraternal experience for men of modest means. Much of the early leadership of the fraternity was composed of men from middle class families. Their families reflected the growing
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business and professional class of the early twentieth century. Coming from a middle class family, being a first generation college student, working in college, aspiring for a career in business and commerce, or having a modest budget for entertainment were not barriers to membership in Lambda Chi Alpha. On the national level, attempts at interfraternal cooperation “died aborning” in the 1880s with a small group able to assemble at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The Interfraternity Conference, now the NorthAmerican Interfraternity Conference (NIC), finally had its founding meeting in New York on November 17, 1909. A new era of formal and informal cooperation among the fraternities had begun.