The Beta of the Future

[DoctorThursday]

THE BETA OF THE FUTURE

Some time ago, someone requested the source of the "Beta Spirit" paragraph. After some tussles with the machinery, I am happy to assist with the complete text of a very important speech.
Already over a hundred years old, this banquet speech is still well-known among the ouranioi because it contains the very famous "Beta Spirit" paragraph. It was given in New York on March 24, 1905 by Willis O. Robb, Ohio Wesleyan 1879, and can be found in Beta Lore pages 46-49.

In peering into the future to discover the outlines of the typical, but not ideal Beta supposed to dwell therein, we shall certainly be on solid and wholly unsentimental ground if we take for our guide Patrick Henry's trite saying about judging of the future only by the past. Or, to amplify that saying a little, may we not lay down these three propositions: First, what has been steadily true of the typical Beta from the beginning of our history, and remains true of him to this day, is very likely to continue to characterize the Beta of the future; second, whatever constant tendency toward change or modification in a given direction has heretofore been in the development of the typical Beta of the past and the present, is likely also to keep on showing itself in the Beta of the future; and, third, those tastes and activities and mannerisms which throughout our fraternity history and up to the present time have been transitory and capricious in their appearances and disappearances, as attributes of the typical Beta - moving in cycles or zigzags, not in straight lines or curves - are not likely to put their permanent mark on the Beta of the future, however much he may, at intervals, show their effects. In other words, the line that runs straight from our far past to our immediate present is likely to run on, a straight line still, through all our future; the line that has been a constantly changing curve, deflecting at the same rate in the same direction, is likely to curve on, subject to the same law of constant change, hereafter as heretofore; while the line that has been a series of irregular zigzags, or of alternating reverse curves, or of cycles and epicycles - well, the only safe prophecy about the future of such a line is that it will probably continue to wobble.
Now, take an illustration or two of each of these rules for prophecy-made-easy; and, to reverse the foregoing order of enumeration, let us take first an example or two of the temporary, the fluctuating, the zigzag, in the development and equipment of the typical Beta. I think at once of two rather conspicuous characteristics of the modern college man, and therefore of the modern Beta as a typical modern college man, that seem to me to be distinctly of this class - characteristics that will not permanently characterize. One is over-devotion to athletics, and the other, indifference to and lack of appreciation of the best literature. I shall not discuss either of these portentous manifestations. I merely name them to call attention to their present dominance and to declare my belief in their essentially transitory character. College sport is too strenuous to be clean, college reading too frivolous to be quickening. But I am perfectly sure, in the light of our own past and that of all other peoples, that reactions from both these conditions will and must attend the inevitable and not remote swinging back of the pendulum, in our national and social and educational life, from the present extreme of physical and material preoccupation to the more inward and essential existence without frequent recurrence to which neither men nor civilizations can long survive. Speed the day!
Two other developments, however, indicative of permanent changes in our Beta type - changes that can be expected to be progressively characteristic of our fraternity future as confidently as one can predict the further sweep of an already determined curve. One of them is the trend away from first-hand acquaintance with the ancient languages and their literatures - especially Greek - and the other, the substitution of colony life in chapter-homes for the dormitory or boarding-house existence peculiar to earlier college and therefore earlier fraternity history. I am not sure that either of these changes is an unmixed good, or even that the good in either of them clearly outweighs the evil; but I do feel sure that both of them are permanent and progressive changes in our fraternity environment, and that their growing influence must be taken into account in any picture we may try to make for ourselves of the Beta of the future. The days - not so far back in our past they are, either - when no one was eligible for initiation into Beta Theta Pi who had not at least begun the study of Greek - the days when the chapter-hall or meeting-room, as a development of the still older boarding-house or dormitory gathering of the faithful, embodied the highest ideal of community life for a Beta chapter - those days are gone, I think, forever. Our men of today are following all manner of newly opened educational paths, few of which go through the groves of Academe, and nearly all of which lead not even to Rome; and they live their college life in college homes that combine the features of a medieval monastery, a modern club, and a commercial joint-stock company. Their college study is thus more intimately connected with their future practical careers, and their college way of life more closely assimilated to their future social activities, than was at all true of their predecessors of, say, forty years ago. Whether they do in this way really get either a better education or a better social training for the work they must do and the lives they must live after graduation, I do not here consider, nor do I think the answer to that question at all an easy one. Just now I am content to note merely that these two conspicuous changes in the educational equipment and environment of the Beta of the present sharply distinguish him from the Beta of the past, and are likely still more strongly to mark and characterize the Beta of the future.
Again, the Beta of the future will be distinguishable and distinguished from all other kinds of fraternity men whatsoever by just a little warmer and stronger, just a little tenderer and more enduring fraternity feeling than any of them can attain to. For it was always so. I do not in the least know how it happened, nor why it persisted after it happened, but a long time ago there came into Beta Theta Pi a fraternity spirit that was, and is, and apparently will continue to be, unique. We know it, who are inside, and they see and record it who are outside the Beta pale. Whether young or old, in college or out, from the small school or the great university, we are conscious of a heritage of genuine fraternalism that has not been vouchsafed in like measure - I say it deliberately - to any other of the great college fraternities. And we cannot doubt that in this, as in other respects, our "future will copy fair our past," and that in the world of fifty years from now, as in that of fifty years ago - as in that that lies around us today - the first mark of a Beta will be his Beta spirit.
And finally, though this is but viewing together, perhaps, the two characteristics we have just been considering separately, the Beta of the future will be the most democratic of all fraternity men. He always has been; he is now.
I have long cherished the belief that fraternities like ours, by the peculiar bond they establish and maintain among college-bred men of all geographical sections of the country, contribute appreciably to the maintenance of our federal union, and of our national homogeneity and solidarity. Certainly the district and national conventions of Beta Theta Pi and the numerous city alumni reunions of her membership, do tend to strengthen the very social and political fabric of the nation. But more than that, they and the great fraternal system of which they are the expression tend to establish other bonds the enduring strength whereof may well help to save this nation from a threatened form of dissolution more dreadful than any mere dismemberment could be. Sectional or geographical separation and disintegration, indeed, the United States of America have not needed seriously to fear - since forty years ago. But the possibility of a fierce strife of class with class - of the horizontal splitting of our whole social mass into hostile strata - that dreadful possibility is never wholly absent from the thoughts and fears of the students of American life and its phenomena. No need now to dwell on the forces that make for that disastrous outcome of our great national experiment. Rather let us remember the reasons for hoping that they cannot prevail.
And well may we be thankful that those reasons are so numerous and weighty - that so many sweet but strong interclass ties are being everywhere established and strengthened - that philanthropy and sociology and religion, and all the forces they create and wield, unite to keep joined together those personal and class elements of our national life that the forces of disruption are ceaselessly striving to put asunder. And among these unifying forces I cannot but give an important place to such a great national democratic fraternity as Beta Theta Pi. Her undergraduate membership averages 1,300 year by year, her living graduates number perhaps 10,000; and they represent almost every social, commercial, and political class in the Republic. Her chapters, each usually made up of many sorts and conditions of men, are planted in sixty-seven colleges, scattered throughout twenty-seven states, from the great university drawing students from the whole country, to the rural college supported almost entirely by local farmers and their sons. There are chapters of Beta Theta Pi of which almost the entire active membership is drawn from wealthy homes and from what are called "old" families; there are others, three-fourths of whose undergraduate members are earning their own way, in whole or in part, through college. And as to our out-of-college Betas, their lines are gone out into all the earth, and their work and daily lives are helping to make the world over.
Under such circumstances, the action and reaction of brother on brother, of chapter on chapter, of graduate on undergraduate, in the warm atmosphere of the fraternity relation, cannot but make powerfully for the upbuilding of that conservative but democratic spirit that is the hope of our national existence, the pledge and token of our national immortality. And it is in this soil that is springing up, it is in this atmosphere that is being nurtured, the Beta of the future. How can he be otherwise than warm-nurtured, clear-eyed, and big-hearted - fraternal, forward-looking, and democratic? ... These, then, and such as these, are the marks by which the Beta of the future will be distinguished. They may not, indeed, prove him to be the ideal Beta with whose picture we began the evening, but well will it be for Beta Theta Pi, and for the world of the future in which her mission lies, when they have come to mark, everywhere and always, the real Beta! Here's looking toward him!