Cornell: 'Where Men of Muscle Win Their Way'

Grove Street Cemetery Gatehouse, New Haven, Connecticut

 

     When I was a freshman at Northwestern, I kept a wooden paddle in my dorm room window with the image of a knight in armor holding his thumb to his nose and waggling his fingers along with the letters, "GDI," a parody of fraternity names, standing for "God Damn Independent." 
     I was mystified by frats, found their members, by and large, bullies and boors, and resented that they occupied the apex of social life at NU, enjoying the best housing, a series of ivied, lead-glasses structures along Sheridan Road, while I lived in the NU Apartments, a retrofitted apartment building, gigantic and grim, turned into a 600 person dorm that wasn't even on the college campus, but in downtown Evanston.
     So my reaction to events like the alleged Cornell gang rape that have been pinballing around the media for weeks would be a "What did you expect?" — except that might be seen as insufficient ire in the freefire zone of moral outrage that broke out over this event. Better to stay quiet than to put my hand into that thresher.
     All I can add is there must be something about Cornell. While having a generally positive effect on American culture — the design of Campbell's soup cans are based on Cornell's colors — when they are bad, they are very very bad.
     While my 1992 pranks book, "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow" limited itself to thoughtful, clever pranks, there was one so historically significant and awful I felt obligated to include it, in a box:

     The Chlorine Banquet.

     The most notorious prank of the 19th century was the infamous "Chlorine Banquet" of Cornell University. It was the height of interclass warfare, and though the class of '98 had tried to keep their February 20, 1894 banquet a secret, word leaked out, and the location was discovered ahead of time. By the time, the freshmen, protected by a vanguard of 30 juniors, arrived at the Masonic Hall where the banquet was to be held, the street was filled with sophomores "ready to pounce upon them and use every endeavor… to spoil the freshmen's evening," according to the next day's New York Times. Though the entire Ithaca police force was at hand, a riot ensued as the freshmen tried to enter the building, "faces were punched, hats smashed, and there was a general melee, in which the officers were tossed about like chaff." The freshmen eventually gained entrance to the Hall, and the banquet went ahead, graced by such talks as "Our Noble Selves" and "Where Men of Muscle Win their Way."

     Shortly after 11 p.m., an overpowering odor began to permeate a room that was being used as a kitchen by the caterer. Several waiters and two juniors who went to investigate, were overcome by fumes and had to be taken outside. The cook, Henrietta Jackson, died. Contrary to early lurid times reports, which  fantabulized two dozen freshmen were rushed outside at the point of death, the banquet proceeded normally, and the freshmen were not informed of what was going on in the kitchen. An investigation showed that someone – presumably a group of sophomores – had intended to pump gas into the banquet hall, but misjudged, and bored holes through the floor of the kitchen instead, piping in chlorine gas they created a large glass jug. There was a huge outcry, and a grand jury met to consider charges against several suspects, who fled the campus. But guilt was never determined, and no one was indicted. The negative publicity surrounding the Chlorine Banquet did not prevent foolish students at other universities from replicating Cornell's mistakes. At Montreal's McGill University, in March 1907, sophomores doused the lights at a freshman concert and poured ammonia down the ventilation shafts. Several freshmen were burned, and some nearly blinded.

   This might seem irrelevant trivia, unrelated to the current situation at Cornell, so I will highlight two key similarities — first, a legal investigation went nowhere and, second, it happened again at other schools.