[[Harvard University]] | [[19th Century]] | [[Elizabethan Club]] ## Harvard's Arts and Letters Society The Signet Society — affectionately known as **"Siggy"** by its members — is an arts and letters club for Harvard College students and their mentors in creative fields, founded in **1870**. It is one of Harvard's oldest and most prestigious social-intellectual organizations, occupying a unique position in the university's ecosystem — distinct from Harvard's exclusive all-male final clubs in its explicitly artistic mission, yet sharing some of the clubhouse culture and selective membership practices that blur that distinction. --- ## Founding & Origins The Signet was founded by members of the class of 1871 at Harvard College. Its first president was **Charles Joseph Bonaparte** — an American lawyer of French noble descent whose grandfather was Jérôme Bonaparte, youngest brother of Emperor Napoleon I, and whose grandmother was Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. Bonaparte would go on to a remarkable career in government: he served as U.S. Secretary of the Navy and later Attorney General under Theodore Roosevelt, and during his tenure as Attorney General he established the **Bureau of Investigation**, which later became the **FBI**. He was also a founder of the National Municipal League and an activist for the voting rights of Black residents of his native Baltimore. The founding impulse was deliberately **counter-cultural within Harvard's social hierarchy**. Five years after the Civil War, the Signet's founders formed their club in the hopes that it would not succumb to the social politics they perceived as dominating the other eleven final clubs. The society was initially dedicated to the production of literary work only, going so far as to exclude debate and even theatrical productions. The founders confined membership to a small group and required that new members be chosen for **"merit and accomplishment"** rather than social standing or wealth — as one faculty member later put it, "the Signet was for poor kids. The final clubs were for wealthy kids." --- ## The Clubhouse at 46 Dunster Street The Society is housed in a distinctive **yellow building at 46 Dunster Street** in Cambridge, in the heart of Harvard Square. The building's architectural history is notable in its own right — architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci described the oddity that the firm Cram & Goodhue, known for its preeminence in Gothic Revival, was employed to renovate an 1820s Colonial residence (previously converted into a Victorian clubhouse in the 1880s) into a neo-Federal structure with baroque details. Shand-Tucci called the result a welcome touch of flamboyance for what would otherwise have been a rather staid clubhouse. The interior features oriental-carpeted libraries, ancestral portraiture, a piano, and two long tables where members sit for lunch — the kind of environment that one Harvard Crimson writer described as a world of china and teeny tea cups, faithful servants and ancestral portraiture, entered through a hidden side entrance with a key. --- ## Membership, Culture & Traditions Any Harvard undergraduate student may apply for Signet membership. The society admits both men and women without prejudice — it has done so since the early 1970s, making it far more progressive than Harvard's all-male final clubs. Required dues are pro-rated by Harvard's financial aid calculations, allowing students regardless of economic background to participate. The society currently maintains up to **seventy-five undergraduate members**, along with over 100 active affiliates (faculty, staff, local artists, graduate students) and roughly 2,000 alumni. Members are typically active in most undergraduate publications and organizations, including the Harvard Advocate, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Lampoon, and the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club. That said, the selection process has always carried tension. Members have acknowledged over the years that social connections play a role in whether one is nominated and elected, and estimates from within the society have placed the social component at as much as 40 percent of the election process. The society has been described as **"semi-secret"** — its membership lists are not fully public, and its selection processes remain somewhat opaque. ### Traditions **The Red Rose:** During inductions, each new member receives a red rose. The rose is to be kept, dried, and returned to the Signet upon the publication of the member's first substantial published work. The society displays these returned roses alongside the works that occasioned their return. T.S. Eliot's rose hangs on the wall along with his original letter of acceptance to the society. **Symbolism and Mottos:** The emblem over the door includes a beehive and bees, and a legend in Ancient Greek: _μουσικήν ποίει και εργάζου_ — "Create art, and live it." A secondary motto attributed to Virgil reads _Sic vos non vobis Mellificatis apes_ — "So do you bees make honey, not for yourselves." From this comes the society's tradition of referring to its undergraduate members as **"drones."** The society's colors are gold and black. **The Loving Cup:** Initiation ceremonies conclude with the passing of a large silver bowl known as "the loving cup" from person to person, each taking a sip. **The Elizabethan Club Rivalry:** The Signet has a longstanding, reciprocal relationship with the **Elizabethan Club ("The Lizzie") of Yale University**. The two groups host parties for one another following the Harvard-Yale football game and compete in a lawn croquet tournament, for which a handled and engraved silver pudding cup in a mahogany case serves as the trophy. **Annual Events:** Since 1910, the Signet has hosted an Annual Dinner honoring poets, authors, musicians, and social commentators. Other annual events include a Christmas party, a spring banquet put on by the Associate Board (the year's biggest event), and **"Strawberry Night"** — a spring party hosted by the undergraduates. **Artists-in-Residence:** Since 2010, the Society has hosted Artists-in-Residence in a second-floor apartment, further integrating working artists into the community's daily life. --- ## Notable Members The Signet's alumni roster reads as a **compressed history of American arts, letters, and public life**: **Literature & Poetry:** T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, John Updike, Norman Mailer, James Agee, Conrad Aiken, John Ashbery, John Berendt, Kenneth Koch, Donald Hall, Sarah Manguso, George Plimpton, Van Wyck Brooks **Music:** Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma (though the society's initial rejection of Ma while he was an undergraduate has been called one of its "gravest mistakes" — he was later inducted), Matt Haimovitz, Matthew Aucoin **Theater, Film & Entertainment:** Tommy Lee Jones, Natalie Portman, John Lithgow, Conan O'Brien, Rashida Jones, Colin Jost, Whit Stillman, Donal Logue, Tom Werner, Robert Sherwood **Scholarship & Science:** William James (philosopher-psychologist), Thomas Kuhn (philosopher of science and author of _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_), Samuel Eliot Morison (historian), Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (historian), Andrew Weil (physician, pioneer of integrative medicine) **Politics & Public Life:** Theodore Roosevelt (26th President), Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd President), Charles Joseph Bonaparte (Attorney General, FBI founder), Caspar Weinberger (Secretary of Defense under Reagan) **Harvard Presidents:** Charles W. Eliot, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, James B. Conant --- ## Position Within Harvard's Social Architecture The Signet occupies an **intentionally ambiguous space** between Harvard's official academic institutions and its unofficial social hierarchy. It is not a final club — its mission is artistic, it admits women, it adjusts dues for financial aid — but it is selective, housed in a private clubhouse, and carries social prestige that overlaps with the final club world. Past reporting has indicated that roughly 20 percent of members have also belonged to final clubs. The tension is baked into the institution's identity. It was founded as an **anti-elitist alternative** to the clubs, grounded in intellectual and artistic merit rather than wealth and social pedigree. But any small, selective organization at an institution like Harvard inevitably accumulates social capital and replicates some of the dynamics it was designed to transcend. The Signet's history is, in miniature, the story of **meritocratic ideals contending with institutional inertia** — a microcosm of Harvard itself. What distinguishes it from the final clubs more than anything is its **functional purpose**: the daily lunches bring undergraduates into contact with faculty, visiting artists, writers, and scholars in an informal setting that Harvard's house system was designed to provide but often does not. As one professor noted, venturing into a house dining hall for lunch is "frankly, terrifying" for faculty who don't see anyone they know — the Signet solves that problem by creating a dedicated space where the artistic and intellectual community can actually find each other. --- ## Notable Controversies & Criticisms The Yo-Yo Ma rejection stands as the society's most publicly acknowledged error — a reminder that merit-based selection is only as good as the people doing the selecting. More broadly, the Signet has faced recurring criticism about whether its selection process genuinely reflects artistic merit or merely reproduces social networks under a meritocratic veneer. The charge of **elitism** is difficult to fully deflect — the society is small, selective, and socially connected, and its members have been candid about the role personal relationships play in elections. The pro-rated dues structure and gender-inclusive membership represent genuine structural commitments to accessibility, but they do not fully resolve the tension between the founding ideal of merit and the reality of how selective institutions operate. --- ## Summary The Signet Society is a **155-year-old institution** that has quietly produced an outsized share of American cultural and intellectual life — from the poet who reshaped modernism (Eliot) to the composer who reshaped American music (Bernstein) to the presidents who reshaped the country (both Roosevelts) to the lawyer who created the FBI (Bonaparte). Its yellow house on Dunster Street, its dried roses on the walls, its beehive emblem and drone nicknames, and its insistence that bees make honey not for themselves — these are the markers of an institution that has managed to remain both exclusive and purposeful, both traditional and open to reinvention, across three centuries of Harvard life. Whether it has fully lived up to its founders' vision of merit over privilege is a question the society continues to negotiate with every election cycle — but the roses on the walls suggest that whatever the process, the results have been extraordinary.