Flat Hat Club
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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. It was established at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia on November 11, 1750. The organization's initials stood for Latin words (the fraternity predates Greek-letter societies), likely "Fraternitas, Humanitas, et Cognitioque". 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 society, the P.D.A. Society (publicly known as "Please Don't Ask"), was founded at William and Mary early in 1773 in imitation of the F.H.C. 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 on December 5, 1776. In the chaos of wartime Virginia, the Phi Beta Kappa chartered chapters at other colleges before (as the two Latin-letter fraternities) suspending its existence at William and Mary during the Yorktown campaign; later, during the course of the Anti-Masonic controversies of the 1830s, the Phi Beta Kappa Society was changed from a social fraternity into the country's first collegiate honorary fraternity, which it remains today.
The F.H.C. and P.D.A. Societies, however, remained social fraternities after their revivals; whether chapters of either exist at other universities is unclear. The F.H.C. was revived in 1916, suspended again in 1943, and revived yet again early in 1972. It is active today.
The F.H.C. Society numbers 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 the Phi Beta Kappa Society that the Society had "served no useful object." [1] Whether he genuinely lost interest in the F.H.C. in his old age is uncertain, for friends in the society had remained confidantes for life.
The Flat Hat is also the weekly student newspaper of The College of William and Mary, taking its name from the fraternity.
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- Robert W. Storm, "In Token of Friendship: Early Fraternity Medals at the College of William and Mary"; 1973. Typescript in university archives, Earl Gregg Swemm Library, College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia).
