Forgive my copy and paste. I thought GCers might be interested in this post from my blog. While it once was true, it was before my time and I graduated college during the Jimmy Carter years.
I consider myself an advocate for fraternity life. As the start of a new academic year approaches and recruitment beckons on the horizon, a pesky statistic rears its head. Every time I see it on Greek Life websites or in a chapter's recruitment information, I cringe. The fact in question is "Every U.S. President and Vice President, except two in each office, born since the first social fraternity was founded in 1825, have been members of a fraternity."
To be fair, there may have been a grain of truth in that statistic at one time. Rutherford B. Hayes, born in 1822, was initiated as an honorary member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Every President from Hayes through Calvin Coolidge, a Phi Gamma Delta initiated as a student at Amherst College, belonged to a Greek-letter organization either as a collegiate member or an honorary member. Herbert Hoover was the first to break that long streak. The next to break it was Lyndon Johnson. Up until this point, the statement would have been true. Unfortunately, after Johnson, the statistic becomes not so true. Neither Richard Nixon nor Jimmy Carter belonged to Greek-letter organizations. Current President Barack Obama is not a fraternity man.
And to be honest, I didn't even go searching for the Vice President information because I quickly came up with more than two recent ones who haven't been fraternity men, including our current Vice President, Joe Biden. I am fairly certain that neither Walter Mondale, Al Gore nor Dick Cheney belonged to a fraternity while in college.
While I would love it if the above statement was true, the fact is that it is not currently true. I suspect someone saw it on something written in the 1960s when it was true and used it. It then spread like wildfire. It appears on countless web-sites as a given fact. Don't believe me? Do a quick search and you will get pages and pages of results. A quick look at the North-American Interfraternity Conference (NIC) web-site points out the truth that "At this date 44% of U.S. Presidents have held fraternity membership."
It is my opinion that we - those of us who advocate for and believe in the fraternity system when it works as it was meant to - shoot ourselves in the foot when we spout clearly false information simply because we assume that it is true, because it once was true, and/or because we want it to be true. If you have connections to one of the web-sites that is using that "all but two" information, please bring it to the webmaster's attention. It hasn't been true since the late 1960s. It's also a good example of that old adage about a lie traveling round the world before the truth has a chance to tie its shoelaces.
The list of Presidents (and First Ladies) who are GLO members is at:
http://wp.me/p20I1i-Vb
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