maneuvered their brothers into office. By request of a majority of the Society, the faculty intervened to order a new election with the result that the previously defeated candidates were victorious. Three years later the Dekes were involved in an Aeonian Society fight over the selection of speakers for the Junior Exhibition and, apparently unsuccessful, withdrew in a body, taking many others with them and leaving the organization in wrath at their tactics.
To counteract these “evil influences”
in Adelphian and Aeonian affairs, a few students under the tutelage of Clark B. Oakley, a theologue who had been a D.U. at the University of Rochester, formed an anti-secret society in November, 1865, which early the next year received a charter as a chapter of Delta Upsilon. Meeting at first in each other’s rooms, the group expanded and at length rented quarters in the village. Aside from the obvious advantages of fellowship, they, like the Dekes, stressed cultural pursuits and spent much effort rehearsing one another to ensure performances creditable to the fraternity when they appeared at the Junior Exhibition and on other public occasions. They frequently invited guests to their own literary programs, which seem to have been of a high caliber. They debated Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, and the elective franchise for women, among other questions, and, in a moment of righteous indignation, suspended one member for plagiarism. The Madison D.U.’s were in frequent communication with their brothers at Hamilton College, and on their own campus they seem to have enjoyed tacit faculty approval.
The growing secular influence during the period, 1850-69, appeared also in other practices characteristic of American undergraduate life of the time. One which perennially plagued the faculty was mock schemes, or false programs, which were surreptitiously circulated at the Junior Exhibitions and similar events. Prepared in secret, usually by sophomores and often scurrilous and vulgar, they burlesqued in cartoons and print those whose names appeared on the bona fide programs. In many ways, the mock schemes were forerunners of college humor magazines and some feature columns in college newspapers. The tittering, giggles, and loud guffaws which they excited made the lot of the lampooned speakers extremely trying. Though producing and distributing these sheets was an expulsion offense and the Students Association sometimes cooperated’ with the faculty to suppress them, the custom persisted into the 1880’s.
