History
Scroll and Key was established by John Addison Porter, with aid from several members of the Class of 1842 and a member of the Class of 1843, Wiliam Kingsley, after disputes over elections to Skull and Bones Society. Porter, William Kingsley, Enos Taft, Samuel Perkins, Homer Sprague, Lebbeus Chapin, George Jackson, Calvin Child, Charlton Lewis, and Josiah Harmer were among the society's first members. Theodore Runyon, Issac Hiester and Leonard Case were also early members from the Class of 1842. William Kingsley, the namesake of the alumni organization, was a member of the Class of 1843. Initially, members met in ornately decorated rented rooms that burned down in December 1842, forcing them to relocate.
The society is one of the reputed "Big Three" societies at Yale, along with Skull and Bones and Wolf's Head Society. In the initial years after Scroll and Key's founding, Skull and Bones held a more prominent role in Yale social circles. A 1871 publication on the Yale social scene by Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg wrote that "up until as recent a date as 1860, Keys had great difficulty in making up its crowd, rarely being able to secure the full fifteen upon the night of giving out its elections." However, as Bagg continued to relate, the society was on the upswing: "the old order of things, however, has recently come to an end, and Keys is now in possession of a hall far superior...not only to Bones hall, but to any college-society hall in America."
Members of the Yale classes of '55 and '56 published the sophomoric "Inside Eli, or How to Get On at Yale," a pamphlet that provided current students with the authors' "collective wisdom about how Yale really worked". In it, they joked that "Scroll and Key is probably the leading society in the eyes of the average Yale man. It always has many of the more distinguished class wheels. Its members are generally pleasant, civilized, and intelligent. They are the Yale ideal."
The society went "coed" in 1989, a move that distanced some of the older alumni from the society but saw the return of many more who opposed the male-only admissions policy. Chief among them was Yale President Bartlett Giamatti who "loved" the society, but vowed "never to visit again unless women were admitted".
In addition to financing its own activities, "Keys" has made significant donations to Yale over the years. The John Addison Porter Prize, awarded annually by Yale since 1872, and in 1917 the endowment for the founding of the Yale University Press, which has funded the publication of The Yale Shakespeare and sponsored the Yale Younger Poets Series, are gifts from Keys. The society has also endowed a number of professorships and continues to fund multiple undergraduate prizes for students of Yale College.
Mark Twain was admitted to the society in 1868 as an honorary member.
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