Everything about Flat Hat Club totally explained
The Flat Hat Club (as it was known outside its membership) or
F.H.C. Society was the first of the collegiate
secret societies or fraternities founded in the present
United States, at
the College of William and Mary in
Williamsburg, Virginia, on
November 11,
1750.
History
The initials of the F.H.C. Society stand for a Latin phrase, likely "Fraternitas, Humanitas, et Cognitio" or "Fraternitas Humanitas Cognitioque" (two renderings of "brotherhood, humaneness, and knowledge"). As members of the first American collegiate fraternity in the modern sense, the "brothers" of the F.H.C. devised and employed a secret handshake, wore a silver membership medal, issued certificates of membership, and met regularly for discussion and fellowship. The Society became publicly known as the "Flat Hat Club" in probable allusion to the
mortarboard caps then commonly worn by all students at the College (now worn at graduation by students at most American universities).
Another Latin-letter fraternity, the P.D.A. Society (publicly known as "Please Don't Ask"), was founded at William and Mary in March, 1773, in imitation of the F.H.C. Society.
John Heath, a student at William and Mary who (according to tradition) sought but was refused admission to the P.D.A., in retaliation established the first Greek-letter fraternity, the
Phi Beta Kappa Society.
The undergraduate members of the F.H.C. appear to have suspended the activities of the Society in 1781, probably as a result of the suspension of academic exercises at the university (which the College of William and Mary had become in 1779) as the hostilities of the
American Revolution approached Williamsburg. The name of the Society was revived in the twentieth century by application to a select group of twelve undergraduate men and several professors which had been founded in 1916 as the Spotswood Club (it thus differed markedly from the original Society, a fraternity of six undergraduate men and additional alumni "in urbe"); the Society again suspended its activities in 1943 as the number of men enrolled at the College steeply declined because of American involvement in World War II. The modern F.H.C. Society was revived in May, 1972. It remains an all-male fraternity, with most of its activities comparatively secret within the community of the university.
The Flat Hat, the twice-weekly student newspaper of The College of William and Mary, took its name from the public nickname of the Society.
Notable Alumni
The F.H.C. Society numbered among its members many notable Virginians of the late colonial, Revolutionary, and early federal periods. Perhaps the most famous was
Thomas Jefferson, who late in life wrote an enquiring member of
Phi Beta Kappa that the F.H.C. had "served no useful object", even though his friends in the society had remained confidantes for life. Other notable members of the original Society included Col. James Innes, St. George Tucker, and George Wythe.
Further Information
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