The Key Reporter - Phi Beta Kappa

PHI BETA KAPPA
SUMMER 2012
THE KEY REPORTER SUMMER 2012
43RD TRIENNIAL COUNCIL ✶ PALM BEACH, FLORIDA ✶ AUGUST 2-4, 2012

THE KEY REPORTER
FROM THE SECRETARY
Volume 77, Number 2
Summer 2012
Editor & Designer: Kelly Gerald
Consulting Editor: John Churchill
The Key Reporter (ISSN: 0023-
0804) is published quarterly by the
Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1606 New
Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington,
D.C. 20009. Periodicals postage is
paid at Washington, D.C., and at
additional addresses. IPM #1213423
Opinions expressed in this
publication are not necessarily those
of the editors or the officers of the
Society. Circulation for this issue:
62,376.
For nonmembers, single copies
are available for $2; one year’s
subscription is $5. Printed by Brown
Printing Company, East Greenville,
Pa.
Copyright © 2012 by the Phi Beta
Kappa Society. All rights are reserved.
The Phi Beta Kappa name, key and
The Key Reporter name are
registered trademarks of the Phi Beta
Kappa Society.
The Society’s privacy policy
prohibits the distribution of member
information.
Postmaster: Send change-ofaddress
notices to: The Key Reporter,
The Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1606
New Hampshire Ave. NW,
Washington, D.C. 20009.
Website: www.pbk.org
Circulation Policy
All four quarterly issues of The
Key Reporter are sent to members
who support the Society by donating
to FBK’s annual giving program.
Checks made out to the Phi Beta
Kappa Society may be sent to the
attention of Annual Gifts, 1606 New
Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington,
D.C. 20009. Contributions are fully
tax-deductible.
Newly initiated members receive
all four issues for one year.
The spring and fall issues are
mailed to every FBK member living
in the U.S. for whom the
membership records office has an
address.
The Key Reporter
For a century, The Key Reporter has been Phi Beta Kappa’s principal medium of
contact with the general membership and our journal of record. It is our conduit for
news of interest regarding the Society and for involving members in our advocacy of the
liberal arts and sciences. Our 2010 survey of members’ attitudes and perceptions
supported the idea that The Key Reporter remains an important feature of the Society’s
activity.
Still, its means of production and delivery have been essentially the same since 1910.
Despite the fact that the Society places into the mail, annually, a bulk of paper roughly
equivalent to the heft of eleven bull elephants, there have been strict limits to the space
available for news pieces, book reviews and feature articles about members, chapters,
associations and issues of topical interest. We would like to do more, so we are undertaking
to provide members with more news about Phi Beta Kappa and other items of
interest. We want to give members, on a regular basis, a substantial reminder that they are
tied to one of the world’s leading advocates of values they hold dear: the values of the
liberal arts and sciences. At the same time, we want to be good stewards of the Society’s
resources and to be more environmentally responsible.
So the national office has set in motion a transition whose character will be evident
in the fall. Over the next couple of years, Phi Beta Kappa will offer, and aggressively put
forward to the membership and the wider world through the Society’s website, a greatly
expanded version of what The Key Reporter has provided on paper for the last century:
news about the Society and its members, features related to the liberal arts and sciences
and the values imbedded in those studies, items of general intellectual interest and, of
course, reviews of relevant current literature in and about the arts and sciences. The staff
of the national office is aware that the feature of The Key Reporter that garners most, and
most consistent, positive regard is the book review section. It will grow. Such traditional
Key Reporter content will be joined, on the website, by videos of Phi Beta Kappa Visiting
Scholars and other speakers who have appeared under our aegis.
Web technology will allow us to be far more generous in all these areas than ever
before, and the expansion will provide opportunity for a wider spectrum of members to
be featured in news and to contribute features. This is an exciting new venue for member
involvement with Phi Beta Kappa, and we have already begun a non-residential internship
program through which chapters can invite students to contribute. We think this may
be a significant boost to student interest.
As we scale up the web presence of The Key Reporter, we will take corresponding
steps gradually to reduce the impact of the paper version on the world’s resources. There
are no plans to eliminate paper, but at the end of the transition, that impact should be considerably
less than half its current size. This is important progress, concurrent with
improving the role that The Key Reporter plays in providing members news about the
Society and the cause we advocate, allowing all of us to be more effective champions of
the liberal arts and sciences.
John Churchill
Secretary
John Churchill’s weekly blog, “From the Secretary,” is now available in the Kindle store on
Amazon.com. Subscribe today, or add his blog to the Pulse app on your Kindle Fire.

SPOTLIGHT
CONTENTS
FROM THE SECRETARY
The Key Reporter
2
FBK NEWS
Rita Dove (FBK, Miami University-Ohio, 1973) with President Barack Obama at the White
House, Feb. 13.
Poet, author and past Phi Beta Kappa Senator Rita Dove (FBK, Miami
University-Ohio, 1973) received a National Medal of Arts on Feb. 13, in a ceremony
held at the White House.
The National Endowment for the Arts, when announcing the award,
described Dove’s work as “equal parts beauty, lyricism, critique and politics,”
adding that Dove has worked to create popular interest in the literary arts, serving
as the United States’ youngest poet laureate and advocating on behalf of the
diversity and vitality of American poetry and literature.
Her book Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986) won
a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 1993, Dove was named poet laureate of the United
States and became the first African-American to be appointed to the position considered
the country’s highest literary honor. She also received a National
Humanities Medal in 1996.
National Humanities Medals are awarded as part of the same ceremony, and
this year seven Phi Beta Kappa members were honored for outstanding achievements
in history, literature, education, philosophy and musicology.
The FBK humanities medalists were Kwame Anthony Appiah (FBK,
Harvard University, 2000), philosophy professor at Princeton University; John
Ashbery (FBK, Harvard University, 1979), poet; Robert Darnton (FBK,
Harvard University, 1960), history professor and librarian at Harvard; Andrew
Delbanco (FBK, Harvard University, 1972), humanities professor at Columbia
University; Charles Rosen (FBK, Princeton University, 1974), pianist and musicologist;
Teofilo Ruiz (FBK, City College-CUNY, 1969) history professor and
chair of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Los Angeles;
and Ramón Saldívar (FBK, University of Texas at Austin, 1972), professor of
English and comparative literature at Stanford University. •
43rd Triennial Council at The
Breakers, Palm Beach, Fla.
Secretary’s Circle Meets in New
York City
Laure Astourian Wins 2012
Walter J. Jensen Fellowship
FBK Writing Internships
On Editing Bill: The
Gratification of Working with
William Zinsser on His American
Scholar Blog
by Allen Freeman
Engaging Cultural Differences
Without Moral Panic: A FBK
Visiting Scholar Asks, “What’s on
Your List of Un-American
Cultural Activities”
by Richard A. Shweder
FBK: Phi Beta Kappa
by Michael J. Lombardi
Shakespeare’s Great Stage of
Fools
by Robert H. Bell
Reviews
FROM OUR
BOOK CRITICS
ON THE COVER
Photo courtesy of Florida State
University. Chartered in 1935,
Alpha of Florida at FSU was the
first Phi Beta Kappa chapter in
Florida. Phi Beta Kappa’s 43rd
Triennial Council meeting will be
held this year in Palm Beach, Fla.,
Aug. 2-4.
4
4
5
5
6
7
8
12
13
www.pbk.org
SUMMER 2012 3

43rd Triennial Council at The Breakers, Palm Beach, Fla.
The 43rd Triennial Council will be
held Aug. 2-4 in Palm Beach, Fla.
All those who will be joining us in
Palm Beach this year will have an
opportunity to engage with fellow
intellectuals from among Phi Beta
Kappas academic and alumni membership,
meet and speak with some of our
country’s most outstanding scholars
and researchers, attend lectures on a
variety of topics in the liberal arts and
sciences, and explore the history and
culture of southern Florida.
The legislative body of the Phi
Beta Kappa Society is the Council,
which convenes every three years to
transact business for the Society as a
whole. The Council alone has the
authority to charter new chapters.
Delegates to the Council are the representatives
of the Phi Beta Kappa chapters
and associations.
However, you don’t have to be an
official delegate to attend. Phi Beta
Kappa members are welcome to register
for the Council’s scholarly lectures
and social events.
Scan the QR code at right, or visit
www.pbk.org, to read more about our
distinguished Council speakers, the
Sidney Hook Memorial Award, the
Award for Distinguished Service to the
Humanities and about our historic
resort destination, The Breakers,
founded in 1896 by Standard Oil
Company magnate Henry Morrison
Flagler.
For more information, please call
(202) 745-3235 or write to triennial2012@pbk.org.
•
Secretary’s Circle Meets in New York City
The Secretary’s Circle hosted its
annual gala weekend at the Yale
Club in New York City, March 23-25.
This year’s gathering was designed as a
thank you and celebration of
Secretary’s Circle members and,
according to veteran attendee Bill
Kelly of Georgia, was a representation
of the best of FBK with affable colleagues
brought together for intellectual
challenge and social enjoyment.
The main event of the weekend
consisted of a moderated discussion of
philosophical texts led by Carol Gluck
of Columbia University. Participants
delved into paradoxes of moral choice,
consideration of societal goals in relation
to individual liberties, and implications
of all of these ideas for higher
education.
Circle member and first-time
attendee Bruce Willock said he was
“stimulated by our discussions on the
challenges facing the U.S. education
system and how the Society is addressing
some of those challenges.” As the
sole attendee from the West Coast,
Willock attests that the seminar, combined
with his trip through the
Pennsylvania Dutch countryside, was a
Attendees at the 2012 Secretary’s Circle Gala Weekend in New York City
worthwhile investment.
Saturday’s events concluded with a
black-tie dinner featuring a lecture by
former FBK Visiting Scholar and
Columbia University Professor Andrew
Delbanco. The author of College: What
It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton
University Press, 2012), Delbanco
engaged the attendees with an account
of his own perspective on the challenges
facing higher education in
America.
To wrap up the weekend, Secretary
John Churchill and Associate Secretary
Scott Lurding briefed the attendees on
the upcoming initiatives and plans for
the years ahead as the Society
embraces an ambitious slate of goals
driven by our purpose as an advocate
for the liberal arts and sciences. •
4 The Key Reporter

Laure Astourian Wins 2012 Walter J. Jensen Fellowship
The recipient of the 2012 Walter J.
Jensen Fellowship for French
Studies is Laure Astourian.
Astourian became a member of Phi
Beta Kappa at the University of
California, Berkeley in 2007 and is
now a doctoral candidate in French at
Columbia University. The working title
for her doctoral research project, for
which she received the fellowship, is
“Tracing Narrative and Politics in 20th
Century French Film.”
The Jensen Fellowship is awarded
for at least six months of study in
France. The purpose of the award is to
help educators and researchers improve
education in standard French language,
literature and culture and in the study
of standard French in the United States.
The fellowship is awarded annually
and has a stipend of at least $10,000.
Phi Beta Kappa will also cover a single
round-trip, economy-class ticket for the
recipient to travel to France. (Some
additional support may be available to
those with dependents.)
Candidates must be U.S. citizens
under the age of 40 who can demonstrate
their career does or will involve
active use of the French language. They
must have earned a bachelor’s degree
in French language and literature, and
demonstrate superior competence in
French. Preference may be given to Phi
Beta Kappa members and educators at
the secondary school level or higher.
For more information about the
Jensen Fellowship or other FBK
awards, call (202) 745-3235 or write to
awards@pbk.org. •
Laure Astourian
FBK Writing Internships
Newsweek
Know a student who would like to
intern with a nationally recognized
organization in Washington, D.C.,
without having to leave their home
campus The national office of Phi
Beta Kappa is seeking juniors and
seniors majoring in the liberal arts or
sciences to serve as non-residential
writing interns.
Our writers will cover diverse topics
and report on events of interest to
Phi Beta Kappa and its members, conduct
independent research and interviews
and produce a series of short articles
for publication on the new online
Key Reporter site that will be launched
this fall.
Students do not need to be members
of Phi Beta Kappa to be eligible,
but they must be recommended by the
Phi Beta Kappa chapter at their college
or university to be considered for an
internship.
For general information about our
internships, write to Kelly Gerald,
director of media relations, at
news@pbk.org. Chapters may write to
Cara Engel, director of chapter relations,
at cengel@pbk.org.
The deadline for chapter referrals
for internships starting in January 2013
is October 29, 2012. •
Special offer for Phi Beta
Kappa members
Subscribe to ($( and
get a special rate of $35 (reg.
$39)
For every subscription,
($( will donate $10 to
Phi Beta Kappa!
Log in on the FBK website,
and click on “Discounts” to
get the member rate and
learn about other offers.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
www.pbk.org
SUMMER 2012 5

On Editing Bill
The Gratification of Working with William Zinsser on His American Scholar Blog
By Allen Freeman
William Zinsser, author of the million-seller
On Writing Well and
seventeen other books and beloved former
professor of writing at Yale,
became a blogger at the age of 87, and
this spring his “Zinsser on Friday” was
recognized by the American Society of
Magazine Editors as the best online
commentary for 2011.
“Zinsser on Friday” essays
were posted weekly on The
American Scholar’s website for
more than a year and a half
before he wrote his farewell
last December. As Zinsser’s
editor, I had the privilege of
discussing his essays with him
weekly and offering suggestions.
Early on we began calling
each other by our first
names, and as the weeks progressed
we found such shared
interests as National League
baseball (he, a New Yorker and
a Mets supporter; me, a
Washingtonian and a Nats fan),
politics (rarely), his eyesight
problems (increasingly), and
the songs of Rogers and Hart.
Bill had written articles for
the Scholar for many years,
notably a wry account (a popular piece
on theamericanscholar.org) of his
“movie career” as an extra in a memorable
scene from a Woody Allen film,
Stardust Memories. In January of 2010,
when he offered an essay about his
experiences teaching foreign language
journalism students at Columbia
University, Scholar editor Robert
Wilson suggested running an excerpt in
the magazine and posting the full piece
online. “Writing English as a Second
Language” quickly received 16,000
website hits, enough to turn on a cartoonist’s
light bulb over Bill’s head.
“Yikes!” he later noted on the blog.
“There were real people out there. Real
people reading real articles! On that
day my umbilical cord to Mother Paper
was snipped.” He proposed writing
weekly essays for theamericanscholar.org
— the website’s first blog — and
Robert Wilson came up with the title
“Zinsser on Friday.” Lucky for me, I
got a new assignment as the Zinsser-
Scholar go-between.
Bill considers e-mail a distraction
and has never set up an account, so his
routine was to write each essay on his
office computer in Manhattan, ask his
sagacious wife, Caroline, to comment,
transfer it to a disk, and mail it to me at
William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well and award-winning
blogger for The American Scholar
FBK in Washington, D.C. I would print
two copies, scribble notes on one, and
ask a Scholar colleague to look at the
second. Typically, on the Wednesday
before an essay was to be posted, Bill
and I would go to work on the phone.
Caroline’s edits and his own second
thoughts were incorporated, copy edits
and fact-check corrections were made
with his approval, and I would venture
some additional suggestions.
Bill, who would delight any editor,
encouraged me to be bold, and as
weeks stretched into months I proffered
more advice. In every instance, he
thanked me and either explained why
he wanted the copy to stay as he wrote
it or accepted what I offered, commending
me beyond the merits of my
recommendations. The process, of
course, taught me about what might be
needed and appreciated — a simpler or
slightly funnier way of saying something,
for instance. Coming from the
guru of so many good writers, his
approval was heady stuff.
Last fall, Bill asked my wife and
me to come to New York and help celebrate
his 89th birthday. We quickly
accepted, imagining a roomful of wellwishers.
It turned out to be just Bill and
Caroline and Janet and me for dinner at
the Century Club. After a fine
meal, Bill led us downstairs to
a salon furnished with a
Steinway on which he interpreted
Rogers and Hart and
Irving Berlin in the most interesting
and sympathetic piano
style I could imagine.
An irony of “Zinsser on
Friday” is that Bill’s essays
sharpened as his vision blurred.
A month after his 89th birthday,
he told me he planned to
write a goodbye piece for the
next week and then clean out
his office and move his operations
to the Zinsser apartment
on Manhattan’s East Side.
There, with the help of
Caroline and their children and
grandchildren, plus many
friends, Bill continues to tutor
and mentor writers. Bill, I
imagine, considers himself as much a
teacher as writer. After all, he wrote on
his blog that he discovered his true
writer’s voice when he taught at Yale in
the 1970s and wrote the first edition of
On Writing Well. His current publishing
venture is a compilation of his blog
essays in book form, the manuscript of
which Bill, Caroline, and I recently
completed and sent to his publisher.
This March, when Robert Wilson
accepted the ASME award for “Zinsser
on Friday,” he noted that the magazine
world’s equivalent of an Oscar was
being given to a writer who disdains e-
mail and who started a blog having
never read one. Bill received a protracted
ovation. •
Allen Freeman is advisory editor for
The American Scholar.
6 The Key Reporter

Engaging Cultural Differences Without Moral Panic
A FBK Visiting Scholar Asks, “What’s on Your List of Un-American Cultural Activities”
By Richard A. Shweder
Irecently completed a year as a Phi
Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, traveling
to college campuses around the
country asking students “what is on
your list of un-American cultural activities”
and delivering a series of lectures
about robust cultural pluralism
across the globe and within a liberal
democracy such as our
own. Those lectures
described various
prophesies about the
fate of cultural differences
in the new world
order. And they
addressed the question:
In this era of borderless
capitalism, with its
attendant flow of peoples
across distinct cultural
territories, what is
and ought to be the
scope of tolerance in
the United States for
cultural diversity of the
sort anthropologists
have studied in foreign
lands One of those
lectures featured the
presentation of a short documentary
film on female initiation in Sierra
Leone produced by the American filmmaker
Sunju Ahmadu, whose West
African female ancestors embrace the
practice of male and female genital surgery
and who herself returned to Sierra
Leone to be initiated. The documentary
provided a rare opportunity to hear the
voices of the many powerful and educated
African women who embrace the
practice and experience it as formative
of their sense of identity and selfesteem;
and it provided an opportunity
to engage the very idea of an “un-
American cultural activities list.”
When I was a child growing up in
New York City in the early days of television,
the following jingle was part of
a public service advertisement linking
patriotism to tolerance: “George
Washington liked good roast beef.
Haym Solomon liked fish. When Uncle
Sam served liberty they both enjoyed
the dish.” I can still visualize the cartoon
like representations that accompanied
the verse. It may be one of the reasons
I ultimately became a cultural
anthropologist. So perhaps it is not too
surprising that I spend much of my time
these days trying to figure out how tolerant
of cultural diversity an American
constitutional patriot ought to be. What
if George Washington and Haym
FBK Visiting Scholar Richard A. Shweder meeting with students at Coe College
Solomon had different conceptions of
marriage or gender relations or how to
discipline children What if one of
them liked polygamy and the other
monogamy What if one of their wives
liked to wear short dresses at social
occasions while the other had a personal
code of modesty and preferred to
shield herself from the male gaze by
wearing a burqa in the public square If
you are a constitutional patriot what, if
anything, should be on your list of un-
American cultural activities, and why
(Haym Solomon, by the way, was a
Jewish banker and friend of George
Washington who helped finance the
American Revolution.)
“When Uncle Sam served liberty
they both enjoyed the dish.” Here is
something approaching the opposite
sentiment, expressed by an educated
enlightened Italian physician in the late
19th century and quoted in an essay by
my former colleague Sander Gilman:
“I shout and shall continue to shout at
the Hebrews, until my last breath:
Cease mutilating yourselves: cease
imprinting upon your flesh an odious
brand to distinguish you from other
men; until you do this you cannot pretend
to be our equal. As it is, you, of
your own accord, with the branding
iron from the first days of your lives,
proceed to proclaim yourselves a race
apart, one that cannot,
and does not care to,
mix with ours.”
There is lots of
shouting going on in
the world these days,
and some of it has
direct implications for
the Hebrews. Some of
the shouting is aimed
at other minority
groups, for example
the burqa ban in
France and the prohibition
on building
minarets in Switzerland.
Indeed, for several
decades now the
relatively homogeneous
states of
Northern Europe have
been in a state of moral panic induced
by the free flow of economic migrants
and political refugees and by the
increase of ethnic, cultural and religious
diversity within their territorial boundaries.
Celebrating cultural diversity is
one of the last things European ethnonationalists
have on their minds . . . .
Continue reading online at www.pbk.org.
Richard A. Shweder (FBK, University
of Pittsburgh, 1966) is the William
Claude Reavis Distinguished Service
Professor of Human Development at
the University of Chicago.
www.pbk.org
SUMMER 2012 7

FBK: Phi Beta Kappa
By Michael J. Lombardi
On a cold December evening in
1776, five College of William and
Mary students made their way along
Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester
Street to the Raleigh Tavern. They
gathered in its Apollo Room with a
high purpose. They came to found Phi
Beta Kappa.
The Apollo Room had seen
historic meetings before. In 1769
and again in 1774, the Virginia
House of Burgesses assembled
at the Raleigh after governors
dissolved their elected assembly.
In 1773, Richard Henry Lee,
Thomas Jefferson, Patrick
Henry, Francis Lightfoot Lee,
and Dabney Carr met in the tavern
and proposed creation of a
standing Committee of
Correspondence — a step
toward uniting the American
colonies.
On this night, John Heath,
fifteen years old, led five friends
to the Raleigh, to foment revolution
not against the crown but
against the state of the college’s
student societies. Phi Beta
Kappa became the nation’s most
important honor society, its key
a coveted symbol of academic
achievement, but it started with
more modest aspirations.
Student societies, primarily
interested in debating and philosophical
discussions, were popular
institutions at America’s
early colleges. Yale had the
Linonian Society and the Brothers in
Unity, Princeton the American Whig
and the Cliosophic Society. Harvard’s
counterpart was the Speaking Club.
Membership was large and nonexclusive.
More than a third of Yale’s students
belonged to the Linonian
Society.
William and Mary already had two
student societies, the FHC, formed in
1750, and the PDA, which appeared in
1773. Unlike their New England counterparts,
they were exclusive and
secret. The FHC was ultra-elite, and so
secret that it allowed the outside world
to know it only by its initials, presumably
for a Latin phrase, Fraternitas,
Hilaritas, Cognitioque, or friendship,
conviviality, and knowledge.
Nicknamed the Flat Hat Club, the FHC
purported to be a literary and philosophic
society, but often held boisterous,
drunken parties. Jefferson, who
attended William and Mary in the early
1760s, later wrote, “When I was a student
of Wm. & Mary College of this
John Heath, founder and president of Phi Beta Kappa
state, there existed a society called the
F.H.C. society, confined to the number
of six students only, of which I was a
member, but it had no useful object,
nor do I know whether it now exists.”
The PDA was nicknamed Please Don’t
Ask. According to William Short, a
Jefferson associate and an early Phi
Beta Kappa member, it “had lost all
reputation for letters and was noted
only for the dissipation and conviviality
of its members.”
So five young students met in the
Raleigh determined to create a better
society. The minutes from their first
meeting set the tone:
On Thursday, the 5th of December, in
the year of our Lord God one thousand
seven hundred and seventy-six, and the
first of the Commonwealth, a happy
spirit and resolution of attaining the
important ends of society entering the
minds of John Heath, Thomas Smith,
Richard Booker, Armistead Smith, and
John Jones, and afterwards seconded
by others, prevailed and was accordingly
ratified.
And for the better establishment
and sanctitude of our unanimity
a square silver medal
was agreed on and was instituted,
engraved on the one side
with S.P. (the initials of the
Latin, Societas Philosophiae, or
Philosophical Society) and on
the other agreeable to the former
with the Greek initials of
ΦβΚ (Φιλοσοφι′α βι′ου Κυβερνητης,
philosophy, or love of wisdom,
the guide to life) an index
imparting a philosophical
design, extended to three stars,
a part of the planetary orb distinguished.
The founders were determined
to keep the new society’s
secrets. In the original minutes,
the Greek and Latin mottos
were rubbed out and in the case
of the Latin inked over, leaving
only the initials, ΦβΚ and SP.
The meaning of the Greek
motto was not determined until
1831, and a thorough study of
the documents in 1906 finally
established the meaning for SP.
At the second meeting on January 5,
1777, John Heath was named the first
president, and the society adopted a
mode of initiation that required each
member to attest to “keeping, holding
and preserving all secrets that pertain
to [his] duty, and for the promotion of
its internal welfare.” They later devised
a secret handshake and a seal.
It’s likely the founders chose to
create a secret society unbound by the
“Scholastic Laws” so that members
had the freedom to discuss any topic
without regard to the strict regimen of
Greek and Latin readings that formed
the curriculum at early America’s col-
8 The Key Reporter

The Apollo Room in the reconstructed Raleigh Tavern, Colonial Williamsburg, Va.
leges. As many as twelve of the first
fifty members were Masons, and it is
possible they borrowed the idea for a
handclasp, sign, and other rituals from
the Masonic order. The group named
itself to outsiders only by the initials
SP and more often ΦβΚ, and they soon
became know as Phi Beta Kappa, the
first Greek letter fraternity.
On March 1, Phi Beta Kappa conducted
its third meeting and adopted
twenty-seven bylaws. To uphold the
group’s serious purpose, the rules
required “that four members be selected
to perform at each session, two of
whom in matters of argumentation and
the others in apposite composition.” In
other words, two would present written
arguments and two others would
debate an issue. Worthy compositions
were to be preserved. None has been
discovered, but the topics noted in the
minutes included the kind of debates
that shaped the Republic:
The Justice of African Slavery;
Whether a wise State hath any interest
nearer at Heart than the Education of
the Youth; Whether anything is more
dangerous to Civil Liberty in a free
State than a standing army in time of
Peace; and Whether any form of
www.pbk.org
Government is more favorable to public
virtue than a Commonwealth.
The early brothers, determined to
maintain their ideals, enacted bylaws
that included a five-shilling fine for
missing a meeting without an acceptable
excuse, and said “That the least
appearance of intoxication or disorder
of any member by liquor, at a session,
subjects him to the penalty of ten
shillings.”
In May 1779,
It being suggested that it might tend to
promote the designs of this Institution,
and redound to the honor and advantage
thereof at the same time, that others
more remoter or distant will be
attached thereto, Resolved, that leave
be given to prepare the form or
Ordinance of a Charter party . . . with
delegated power in the plan and principles
therein laid down, to constitute
establish and initiate a fraternity correspondent
to this...
The charter party, from the French
charte partie, or divided charter, is an
agreement written in duplicate on the
same sheet of paper and torn in two,
one part kept by the originating chapter,
the other going to the new branch.
Phi Beta Kappa now had a means to
expand.
The first charters were for chapters
in Virginia. The William and Mary
society as the originator would be the
Alpha chapter and the others would be
designated Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so
on. Nothing came of the plan to create
other Virginia chapters, but Hardy suggested
extending the fraternity to other
states, and the perfect courier was at
hand.
Elisha Parmele had studied at Yale
until the American Revolution forced it
to close. He graduated from Harvard
and came south for his health. He met
Short, now chapter president, who
introduced him to the society. Parmele
was initiated on July 31, 1779, and by
December’s anniversary meeting, he
had been granted a charter for Harvard.
Four days later, Parmele had a charter
for Yale as well.
Parmele returned north, reaching
New Haven in the spring of 1780.
There he established Alpha of
Connecticut by initiating four members.
Parmele traveled to Cambridge in
the summer of 1781 and introduced Phi
Beta Kappa to four rising seniors, who
were initiated that summer and began
Continued on page 10
SUMMER 2012 9

FBK: Phi Beta Kappa
Continued from 9
meeting in September 1781 as Alpha of
Massachusetts.
The establishment of outposts in
New England ensured Phi Beta
Kappa’s survival. In 1787, the Harvard
and Yale branches considered granting
a charter to Dartmouth College in New
Hampshire. They tried to consult with
the William and Mary chapter but
received no reply, and so they issued
the charter together.
The founding chapter no longer
existed.
In December 1780, Benedict
Arnold led a British invasion of
Virginia. The College of William and
Mary suspended classes in January,
and on January 6, 1781, Phi Beta
Kappa president Short called a meeting
“for the Purpose of Securing the Papers
of the Society during the Confusion of
the Times and the present Dissolution
which threatens the University.” The
members gave them to the college
steward for safekeeping. The war had
already scattered chapter members,
and though William and Mary classes
resumed the following year, Phi Beta
Kappa did not. More than seventy
years would pass before the Alpha of
Virginia Chapter would be re-formed.
In 1783, Landon Cabell, one of the
last members of the founding society,
retrieved the papers from the steward.
No one knew what had become of
these documents until 1848, when Dr.
Robert Cabell, Landon’s son, presented
the minutes to the Virginia
Historical Society in Richmond. In
1895, the minutes were returned to the
College of William and Mary, where
they reside in the Earl Gregg Swem
Library.
After the William and Mary chapter
disappeared, the debates and secrecy
disappeared from the New England
chapters. During the last years of the
eighteenth and first years of the nineteenth
century, secret societies came
under attack from religious leaders
who saw in them the advancement of
philosophy over faith. In response, the
cloak of secrecy was eventually lifted
from Phi Beta Kappa’s proceedings.
The regular debates that had been so
important to the founders began to disappear
from the New England chapters.
By the 1820s, Phi Beta Kappa had
essentially become an honor society
with scholarship and academic
achievement as the requirements for
election.
In 1851, two William and Mary
professors, Phi Beta Kappas from
Union College in New York, sought to
revive the Alpha of Virginia Chapter.
They wrote to Short, then ninety-one,
and with his approval, they re-formed
the chapter.
Ten years later, another war swept
over Williamsburg, and the college
again closed, in May of 1861. The
Civil War took a toll on the college.
Union troops burned the Wren
Building, gutted the Brafferton, and
left the campus in ruins. Phi Beta
Kappa tried to come back after the war,
and in 1875 six new members were initiated,
but there were no further meetings
until 1893, when the chapter was
again reactivated.
Today, Alpha of Virginia is the
proud founding chapter of the 280
branches of the preeminent honor society
in America.
Phi Beta Kappa’s roster reads like
a who’s who in American political life,
the arts, and business. Seventeen presidents
of the United States were members,
including John Quincy Adams,
Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower,
Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and
Bill Clinton. Ten chief justices of the
Supreme Court, including William and
Mary’s John Marshall and current
Chief Justice John Roberts, were Phi
Beta Kappas, as well as 136 Nobel laureates.
Leonard Bernstein, Pearl Buck,
Glenn Close, Francis Ford Coppola,
Betty Friedan, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Gloria Steinem, Paul Robeson, and
Booker T. Washington all were elected
to Phi Beta Kappa.
So was John D. Rockefeller Jr.,
son of America’s wealthiest man and
an initiate of Brown University in
1897. So was the Reverend Dr. W. A.
R. Goodwin, rector of Williamsburg’s
Bruton Parish Church, who was given
a gold Phi Beta Kappa key on the 130th
anniversary of the society’s founding.
Their Phi Beta Kappa associations
proved pivotal to Williamsburg’s
restoration.
In 1924, Rockefeller, a Phi Beta
Kappa senator — the senate being the
national governing body — attended a
banquet in New York focused on raising
funds for a proposed Phi Beta
Kappa national memorial hall at
William and Mary. Goodwin addressed
the gathering on “The College of
William and Mary and Its Historic
Environment.” Since 1923, he had been
teaching religion at the college and
raising funds for campus improvements,
which included restoration of
the Wren Building. Who better to fund
the plans than Rockefeller
Goodwin met Rockefeller that
evening and invited him to visit
Williamsburg. Rockefeller said he
would like to visit some day. Goodwin
took him at his word. During the next
two years, Goodwin wrote letters
renewing his invitation. In the interim,
Goodwin’s ideas grew to include
restoration of some of Williamsburg’s
eighteenth-century homes that he
thought the college should acquire for
faculty housing and academic uses. He
helped save a 1700s house about to be
demolished for a gasoline station,
began restoration of the church-owned
Wythe House, and forestalled development
of properties adjacent to the 1714
Powder Horn.
In March 1926, Rockefeller combined
a house-hunting trip, a visit to
Hampton Institute, which he had supported
for years, and an excursion to
Williamsburg, perhaps to inspect the
progress on the new Phi Beta Kappa
Memorial Hall now being built through
his fund-raising efforts and donations.
Goodwin provided a tour of the
college and expanded it to include historic
sites throughout the city. In
November, Rockefeller returned for
the dedication of Phi Beta Kappa
Memorial Hall — reduced by a 1954
fire to a wing of Ewell Hall. At the dinner
that evening, Goodwin sat next to
Rockefeller, and they talked about not
only restoration of the Wren but reconstruction
of the Capitol and the
Raleigh, and of acquisitions all over
town for the benefit of the college.
Rockefeller authorized Goodwin to
have sketches drawn. In 1927,
Rockefeller undertook to restore the
town.
10 The Key Reporter

Phi Beta Kappa was born in the
Raleigh Tavern, created by young men
with a vision. The society that grew
from their vision would honor the most
accomplished students in America and
play a role in Colonial Williamsburg’s
creation. In 1932, Virginia’s governor,
city fathers, restoration officials, and a
few Phi Beta Kappa keyholders gathered
on Duke of Gloucester street for
the dedication of the town’s first
restored exhibition building, the
Raleigh Tavern. •
Michael Lombardi (FBK, College of
William and Mary, 1966) is a writer
and producer. This article was originally
published in the Winter 2012
issue of Colonial Williamsburg, the
journal of the Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.
Suggestions for further reading:
• Richard Nelson Current, Phi Beta
Kappa in American Life: The First Two
Hundred Years (Oxford University
Press, 1990).
• Janice Fivehouse, “The History of
the Alpha Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa”
(master’s thesis), 1968, Earl Gregg
Swem Library, Williamsburg, Va.
• “Minutes of the Alpha Chapter of
Virginia, Phi Beta Kappa; December 5,
1776 to January 6, 1781,” Earl Gregg
Swem Library, Williamsburg, Va.
• The Original Phi Beta Kappa
Records, including the minutes of the
Meetings from December 5, 1776, to
January 6, 1781, at the College of
William and Mary, with notes and
introduction by Oscar M. Voorhees
(New York, 1919).
• Jane Carson, James Innes and His
Brothers of the F.H.C., Williamsburg
Research Studies, Colonial
Williamsburg (Charlottesville, Va.,
1965).
• William and Mary website:
wm.edu/about/history/index.php
Want More From
Your Membership
www.pbk.org
www.pbk.org
SUMMER 2012 11

Shakespeare’s Great Stage of Fools
By Robert H. Bell
As Feste, the jester in Twelfth Night,
proclaims, “Foolery . . . shines
every where.” In Shakespeare’s drama,
it encompasses infatuation, homicide,
jokes or holiness; follies can be sublime
or ridiculous, tragic or trivial. In
Henry the Fourth, for instance, folly is
represented in intimate antagonists,
the foolosopher king
Falstaff and the madcap Prince
Hal. To make a study of
Shakespeare’s fools is to explore
the uses, meanings, virtue and
value of foolery as represented
and advocated by clowns, fools
and jesters, virulently critiqued
by self-proclaimed anatomists of
folly, regarded and practiced by
comic and romantic protagonists,
perceived and enacted by tragic
heroes.
Shakespeare’s fools also can
be fools for love, as in the competition
between fooling and feeling
in Much Ado About Nothing, As
You Like It, and Twelfth Night. In
the first two, foolery between
hero and heroine is beneficent
and follies are felicitously reparable.
However, these comedies do
not license and authorize folly.
Though fooling permits self-affirmation
and relatedness, it also
impedes self-awareness and love.
How, in a world of duplicities and
“counterfeiting” where fooling is
interrogated, does Shakespeare’s audience
determine the validity of particular
attitudes and feelings Not necessarily
simple or harmless misapprehension,
fooling also entails complex
deception and dubious trickery. Some
feelings really do matter and mean
something. Warily licensed and seemingly
celebrated in Much Ado and As
You Like It, folly in Twelfth Night takes
the form of madness and maintains its
troubling persistence amid the requisite
happy ending.
The bard’s obnoxious and
persuasive scourges ─ Mercutio,
Jaques, Malvolio and Thersites ─ may
be appalled, disgusted or outraged, yet
they embody the power of folly even as
they repudiate and denigrate it. Romeo,
Richard II, Hamlet, Lear and Othello
also play the fool, both deliberately
and willy-nilly. In its tragic incarnations,
forms of folly variously inspire,
confound, entrap and undo
Shakespeare’s heroes in motley. Fool is
the wicked Goneril’s term of abuse for
her good husband and “poor fool” is
Lear’s term of endearment for his murdered
Cordelia. Contagious and insinuating,
folly links “mighty opposites”
who, as Hamlet observes, are a “little
more than kin.” The stubborn
intractability of folly and the disturbing
tendencies of foolery give The Tempest
its peculiar and haunting resonance.
Prospero painfully discovers that the
cursed “folly of this island” is pervasive,
deep-rooted within — where “the
antic abides.”
Fools are indeed everywhere we
look, except in the mirror. Whether it is
possible to study folly without becoming
a fool remains, in Falstaff’s phrase
and Bell’s playfully speculations “a
question to be ask’d.”
Fools intrigue us even as we amuse
fools. Expecting comic relief or divertissement,
we are mocked and manipulated.
Seeking clarification or anticipating
proverbial wisdom, we become
confounded. Fools and fooling complicate
perceptions, disrupt meaning, confound
and compound perspective.
Fools bring us closer to the heights and
depths of experience and keep
both poles in play. This giddy
oscillation between extremes is
both a source and an effect of
fooling. A fool’s discourse might
be nonsense, blither or babble, or
it might be pertinent, insightful,
even inspired. Is it gold or fool’s
gold, the real turtle soup or merely
the mock Fools foment the
illusion that audiences are collaborators
and participants in the
illusion, and solicit spectators
face to face, as if the fool is on
our side and at one with us. But
fools are two-faced rascals
always double-dealing and sometimes
saying so. Like Jaques
drawing auditors into the circle,
fools ensorcel and make fools of
us all. •
Robert H. Bell (FBK, Dartmouth
College, 1967) is the Frederick
Latimer Wells Professor of
English at Williams College and
the author of Shakespeare’s Great
Stage of Fools (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
FBK members who have recently
published a book now can have their
work featured in our online listing of Phi
Beta Kappa authors. To have your book
included, write to news@pbk.org.
12 The Key Reporter

From Our Book Critics
By Svetlana Alpers
Chinese
Architecture and
the Beaux-Arts.
Edited by Jeffrey W.
Cody, Nancy S.
Steinhardt and
Tony Atkin.
University of
Hawaii Press,
Honolulu and
Hong Kong University Press, 2011. 385
pages. $52.00
Publications of collected papers, be
they records of conferences, or occasional
essays, can be daunting to read
and daunting to review. What holds them
together When they are a success, it is
precisely because one is aware of how
multiple views can be the making of a
subject — rather as angled tesserae give
life to the overall pattern of a mosaic surface.
The strangeness, at least to me, of
the subject was the attraction of this fascinating
book based on a 2003 international
conference “The Beaux-Arts, Paul
Philippe Cret, and 20th Century
Architecture in China.” It is surprising
to learn that the convergence between
the established French architectural
training and design system and traditional
Chinese architectural craft took place
in the 1920s at the University of
Pennsylvania. By means of the United
States indemnity to China in the wake of
the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese students
went there (instead of Paris) to study
with the Frenchman Cret.
The book is shot through with public
life and politics (the Soviet Union
plays a part), but at its heart are studies
written by historians and architects,
from the United States and from China,
of what one might call comparative
architecture. The essays on the Beaux-
Arts tradition, and on Chinese architecture
before and after it, are richly illustrated
by photographs of buildings
which at first appear to be European
transplants to China. The reality is more
complicated. The Chinese architectural
historian Zhao Chen proposes (after having
seen Venetian palazzi along the
Grand Canal) that the two architectures
are incommensurate because the
Western façade does not exist in the
Chinese timber system.
These days we are used to images of
the newest wonder a Western architect
has designed for China. But in February
2012, Wang Shu became the first
Chinese citizen awarded the prestigious
Pritzker Prize for architecture. And it is
serendipity that in October we can go to
Roosevelt Island in New York’s East
River and see the Franklin Delano
Roosevelt Memorial, a posthumous
work by Louis I. Kahn. For him, as for
Yang Tingbao, a remarkable modern
Chinese architect who was Kahn’s classmate
at Penn in 1924 and is discussed in
this book — the site, locality and the
assumption of a shared vision are alternatives
to the spirit of commercialism
now as rampant in China as in the
United States
These rich and diverse essays make
architecture a way to become better
acquainted with China’s huge presence
in our world.
Art and the
Early
Photographic
Album. Edited
by Stephen Bann.
Studies in the
History of Art
Series. National
Gallery of Art,
Center for
Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, distributed
by Yale University Press, 2011.
277 pages. $70.00
The straightforward title of this
large-format book does not suggest the
complexity of its contents. Based on a
2007 symposium coming out of Stephen
Bann’s research in the department of
image collections (did you know it existed)
at the National Gallery, its subject is
photographs of art mounted by individuals
in albums or published in printed
albums, which often in the 19th century
were given the title “museum.”
Today, when digital is displacing
analogue technology on screens that are
everywhere, it is bracing to be reminded
of the time when photography was
replacing burin engraving and the album
was a central site. Photography as artifice
and craft was in the air then as now.
What can it reproduce It is astonishing
to learn of the varieties of printing
processes then employed. The move
from handmade to photographic reproduction
was hardly the teleological progression
towards realism as has often
been suggested.
To give you a taste of the contents:
Elizabeth Anne McCauley illuminates
travellers’ devotion to antique statuary
by analyzing the physical conditions of
photographic access and display in the
impressive Macpherson’s Vatican
Sculpture of 1863; Philippe Jarjat considers
the canonical visual identity photographs
gave to Michelangelo’s frescoes
starting with the post-1869 initiative
of Adolphe Braun’s Michel-Ange —
Chapelle Sixtine. Martin Bressani and
Peter Sealy probe architecture as viewed
in the unprecedented eight volumes published
by Charles Garnier about the Paris
opera house he designed. While traditional
engravings and chromolithographs
scan the whole, photography
focuses the eye on sculptural details.
Frederick Bohrer concludes by arguing
an essential fit between the album format,
photography and, in addition,
archaeology, whose artifacts gained aesthetic
interest seen in photographic
reproduction.
As a whole, the book ups our interest
in and respect for the look and use of
photo-mechanical reproductions of art.
Great Works:
50 Paintings
Explored. Tom
Lubbock. Frances
Lincoln, 2011. 216
pages. $29.95
And now for
something completely
different.
Tom Lubbock was a British art critic
who, from 2005 until 2010 shortly
before his early death, wrote a newspaper
piece each week for The
Independent called “Great Works.” Fifty
www.pbk.org
SUMMER 2012 13

of these short essays have been collected
and published in this compact, elegant
book. It is an act of homage to a man, but
also to art past and present about which
he wrote with energy, wit and intelligence.
Each work is illustrated and there
is a telling note about the artist.
The works Lubbock chooses are not
obvious ones. I was delighted to find a
special favorite — Eugène Delacroix’s
odd landscape Still-Life with Lobsters in
the Louvre. These are not emotional
responses to paintings but thoughts on,
in, about, occasioned by them: a Honoré
Daumier painting makes Lubbock challenge
the reader to try to draw her own
outline; the Giovanni Bellini Madonna
with Saints in San Zaccaria is hallucinatory;
a Kazimir Malevich produces
thoughts on the face and art; Samuel
Beckett comes to mind looking at
Tintoretto’s sketch for his huge
Paradise.
I don’t agree with Lubbock on
everything he sees and says. I was even
irritated sometimes. But he serves as an
example for people to go to a museum,
ignore labels, refuse ear-phones and just
look and think. Read the book, bit by bit
not all in a rush, and try it yourself. •
Svetlana Alpers, an artist, critic and
renowned art historian, is professor
emerita of the history of art at the
University of California, Berkeley and a
visiting scholar in the Department of
Fine Arts at New York University.
By M. Thomas Inge
Gittin’ Through: A
Southern Town
During World War
II. Roy T. Matthews.
Trafford Publishing,
2011. 498 pages.
$24.95
Many historians
believe that history is
best told from the ground up — that is,
from the point of view of the ordinary
people, the soldiers, the workers and
those directly involved in momentous
events. If written from the perspectives
of the political leaders, the policy makers,
or the generals on the hill, history
will tell little truth about what actually
happened and its impact on society and
a way of life.
In Gittin’ Through, Roy T.
Matthews, professor emeritus of humanities
at Michigan State University, tells
the story of World War II from 1938 to
1945 as it had an impact on the lives and
thoughts of three generations of working-class
people in a small Southern
town, based on the author’s own hometown
of Franklin, Va. He has, however,
moved away from historical narrative to
relate the story through fiction, creating
a large cast of characters no doubt based
on real life counterparts. Thus as the
novel opens customers in a barber shop
talk about things in general, but when
Hitler and the Munich Agreement come
up, things turn political. This becomes
Matthews’ method as current events and
political news are woven into the fabric
and lives of the people in a town called
Madison.
The book represents an extensive
amount of research in local and national
histories, documents and newspapers of
the time, but rather than follow a straight
chronological timeline of important
events, Matthews artfully blends the
research into casual conversations and
fictional situations. The result is a simultaneous
local and national narrative that
trades dry facts for engaging reading.
The war abroad touches lives directly as
people go about the usual tribulations of
falling in love, raising a family and
breaking up, with young men going off
to fight, growing prosperous or poor, and
trying to live honorable lives.
Assessing our ultimate victory in
the war and the future, Matthews concludes,
“Our psychological problems
will be many, but American common
sense will prevail. Our greatest challenge
will be to make sure that we have
a lasting peace.” Many would argue that
these goals have not been met. But the
dedication and spirit that shines through
this warm-hearted novel is a strong indication
that peace and common sense
remain possibilities.
African-American
Classics. Edited by
Tom Pomplun and
Lance Tooks.
Graphic Classics
Volume 22. Eureka
Productions, 2011.
144 pages. $17.95
Ten years ago
designer, editor and publisher Tom
Pomplun began to issue a series of
“Graphic Classics,” modern graphicnovel
style adaptations of stories by traditional
and popular authors such as
Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ambrose
Bierce, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis
Stevenson. Distantly modeled after the
widely-read Classics Illustrated comic
books of the 1940s, which were pedantically
and slavishly devoted to the original
works, Pomplun’s volumes opt for
lively and original versions in which the
artists and adaptors follow their own
artistic inclinations in rendering pages
more attuned to the contemporary visual/verbal
sensibility in comic art.
An especially noteworthy addition
is volume 22 devoted to African-
American short stories, poems, and folktales.
The stroke of genius is that the editors
have invited some of the brightest
and most talented contemporary black
comic artists and writers to adapt the
original works. A unique black-on-black
aesthetic emerges.
Many of the selections are by wellknown
authors such as Langston
Hughes, James Weldon Johnson or Zora
Neale Hurston, while others are by fine
writers overlooked by literary historians
such as Frances E. W. Harper, Robert W.
Bagnall and Florence Lewis Bentley.
Most of the stories were originally published
in the 1920s.
Among the most striking adaptations
are “The Goophered Grapevine”
by Charles W. Chesnutt, in a beautifully
designed version by Shepherd Hendrix
that captures much of the humor and
regional charm of that classic story, and
“Filling Station” by Hurston as rendered
in outrageous kinetic caricature by
Milton Night. Some aim for a lyricism
in design like co-editor Lance Tooks
visually pleasing parable “Shalmanezer”
written originally by Harper.
While ethnicity and the black expe-
14 The Key Reporter

ience in America are central themes in
this anthology, they are by no means the
only concerns. Most of the stories speak
to the universal human condition and
deal with the hopes, dreams and frustrations
of common experience among
blacks and whites. They suggest too that
the hurt and pain of racism can be transformed
through innate creativity into
gems of artistic power. The influence of
words, the beauty of poetry and the
appeal of visual art combine into a reading
experienced that only graphic fiction
can provide.
Walt Disney’s
Mickey
Mouse. Floyd
Gottfredson.
Fantagraphics
Books, 2011. 2
volumes boxed.
288 and 280
pages. $49.99
There is no more widely known
iconic figure in the world at large than
Mickey Mouse. So widely distributed
have been the films and comics, and so
strongly appealing is the image of the
mouse to children and adults alike, that
there are few small corners of the earth
where Mickey is not instantly recognizable,
even if by nothing more than a set
of round ears.
But Mickey has not always been the
sweet-natured and squeaky-clean creature
we have come to know and love.
Once he was a wild, adventurous, and
hell-raising rodent out to create havoc
among his fellow creatures and force his
attention on a reluctant Minnie Mouse.
This was the Mickey from the first three
animated shorts drawn by Ub Iwerks
and released in 1928 in which he
imitated Douglas Fairbanks, Charles
Lindbergh and Buster Keaton. This was
a Mickey who smoked, drank, chewed
tobacco, and harassed Minnie when she
rejected his kisses.
This was the same Mickey, as well,
who moved into a very successful comic
strip in 1930 eventually to fall under the
brilliant hand of a storyteller and cartoonist
named Floyd Gottfredson.
While the screen Mickey began a metamorphosis
when parents complained to
Disney about his shenanigans, his alter
ego would continue his merry way as
Gottfredson created a 25-year epic of
grand adventure as Mickey battled murderers,
kidnappers and spies.
Almost four years of this trendsetting
comic strip (April 1, 1930-Jan. 9,
1934) have been collected in a handsomely
designed and produced two-volume
boxed set. Each contains copious
background notes, appreciative essays
and archival material which serve to
evoke a reading experience you could
only have known firsthand if you are in
your eighties. This is invaluable cultural
material and great reading fun. •
M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory
Blackwell Professor of Humanities at
Randolph-Macon College in Ashland,
Va. He is an authority in American studies
best known for his work in Southern
literature and the art of the comics.
All authors are welcome to submit their
books for possible review in The Key
Reporter. Mail copies to The Key
Reporter, 1606 New Hampshire Ave.
NW, Washington, DC 20009.
0+/ 4*' '%2'4$2893 +2%-'
$/& *'-1 $&6$/%' 052 '((0243 40 342'/)4*'/ .'2+%$/ '&5%$4+0/ $/& 4*' -+(' 0( 4*' .+/&
$/,'2
: 2$/,-+/ $/& $23*$-- 0--')' 9 *+-0301*8
secretaryscircle@pbk.org 1606 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20009 www.pbk.org
www.pbk.org
SUMMER 2012 15

THE KEY REPORTER
THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY
1606 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington, D.C. 20009
Tel: (202) 265-3808
Fax: (202) 986-1601
Periodicals Postage
P A I D
at Washington DC
and at additional mailing addresses
2011 UTNE Independent Press Awards
The Best
Writing
Utne Reader’s editors chose the Scholar
as the best-written magazine of the year
among 1,300 publications considered
Now available in every conceivable
format—including print
W I N N E R
2012 Digital National
Magazine Award for
Commentary
N O M I N E E
2012 National Magazine
Award for
General Excellence
theamericanscholar.org