Elihu, founded in 1903, is the seventh oldest secret society at Yale University, New Haven, CT. While similar to Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head societies in charter and function, Elihu favors privacy over overt secrecy. To this end, Elihu is the only society whose building, located at 175 Elm Street, has windows, though they are shaded. Elihu is likely the very first society to have tapped an undergraduate from an ethnic minority, Henry Roe Cloud, a Native American who graduated in 1910, in keeping with a reputation for diversity.
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Mission
According to the public page of its website, "The Elihu Club is a non-secret Senior Society at Yale University," the purposes of which are "to foster among its members, by earnest work and good fellowship a stronger affection for Yale; a broader view of undergraduate life and its aims; a deeper and more helpful friendship for one another; and to give its members, after graduation, an additional tie to bind them to Yale and to each other." [1] Elihu’s purposes are realized through an educational and social program, which seeks to enrich the undergraduate experience of each member and to foster a strong connection between all Elihu members, undergraduate and graduate. During the Spring Tap process, sixteen rising seniors are elected into membership of Elihu. Consideration for membership in Elihu is given to those juniors in the College who are nominated by current undergraduate and graduate members. Selection is said to be based on three pillars: excellence, diversity, and leadership. It is named for Elihu Yale, the University's first major benefactor and namesake. The Elihu program is similar to that of the other societies: personal histories and perspectives are shared among the current delegates, with formal meetings each Thursday and Sunday of the academic year.
Architecture
The club is housed in a structure looking out on the New Haven Green; the three-story colonial-era white clapboard house is, in fact, the oldest of all Yale's secret society buildings, and purportedly one of the oldest original structures in the United States still in regular use. Its brick basement is older still, constructed in the early 1600s as the Tory Tavern, a central locale of the Revolutionary War. The building has also been expanded to the rear several times. During the demonstrations and student strikes associated with the New Haven Black Panther trials and other civil unrest in 1970, numbers of the twelve thousand protesters at times found refuge inside the Elihu building. The building is large, belying the modest clapboard facade, and contains two single guest rooms and also a dorm room sleeping up to fourteen persons, although members are not to stay for extended periods. Another tradition on campus is that Elihu contains original papers of the author James Fenimore Cooper, even drafts of his epic novel The Last of the Mohicans, in its collection. (However Cooper could not have been a member as he was expelled from Yale in 1805, a century before Elihu was founded.)
Notable Members
- Joseph Lieberman, U.S. Senator
- Robert B. Semple, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
- Jim Amoss, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
- Cesar Pelli, architect
- John Pepper, Jr., former Procter & Gamble CEO
- Sheila Jackson Lee, U.S. Congresswoman
- Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic
- Paul Monette, author and activist
- Alexander Garvin, urban planning authority
- Stuart Symington, U.S. Senator
- Sam Waterston, actor (Law & Order)
- Sir John Templeton, philanthropist
- Henry Roe Cloud, first full-blooded Native American to attend Yale, reformer, educator
- Lloyd Kaufman, experimental filmmaker
- Lan Samantha Chang, author, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop
- Robert Kaiser, former managing editor, The Washington Post
