St. Anthony Hall - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• The society tabloid Gawker said "In the constellation of collegiate societies—fraternities, sororities, eating clubs, final clubs, and the like—few are more exclusive, and WASPy, as St. Anthony Hall, or St. A's as it is commonly known..."
• Delta Brother E. Digby Baltzell coined the term, "WASP" in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.
• In December 1967, during a week-long fellowship on campus, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan was filmed for public television informally debating Yale students at the Yale St. Anthony Hall. Nancy Reagan is also present, as the Yalies quiz the Governor on Vietnam and various social justice issues.
• John O'Hara, in his 1960 novel Ourselves to Know, uses St. Anthony Hall membership in the characterizations of the protagonists: "Did you join a fraternity at Penn?" I said. "Yes I did. St Anthony-Delta Psi. But I think they were sorry that they invited me..." --- "I happened to know, because I had seen it, that he had a Delta Psi Tea Company gold charm on his watch chain, but the reason he did not show it was one of delicacy; in 1908 they had not accepted his resignation but he kept the insigne hidden..." --- "He and Robert quickly looked at each other's watch-chain and the Delta Psi charm and smiled. "You know, I've been meaning to write you a letter..." ("Tea" Company was a then-used appellation referring to the fraternity's Tau Cross emblem.)
• During the Klondike Gold Rush Fall of 1897 Jack London was a tenant in Dawson of two mining engineers who were graduates of Yale named Marshall Latham Bond and Louis Whitford Bond. Among the other cabin residents was Oliver LaFarge, son of John LaFarge. The three men had the cabin designated a chapter house. Thus much of the period that London was in the Klondike he was a St. Anthony's guest. The cabin residents inspired many characters in Jack London stories including "The Call of the Wild".
• The "St. Ray's" fraternity in Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons is purportedly modeled after the Delta Chapter —"St. A's"— at the University of Pennsylvania where Wolfe attended a fraternity cocktail party while conducting research for the book in 2001.
• Lisa Birnbach, ed. The Official Preppy Handbook, Workman Publishing, 1980. "St. A’s appeals to the ‘cool element’ of Preppies at Yale; this means Preppies who don’t iron their shirts. It isn’t rowdy: parties there conform to the intellectual self-image Yalies hold dear."
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, in several short stories, refers to the Pump and Slipper, an annual party at the Yale Chapter:
  • "May Day" in "Tales of the Jazz Age" "A man with prominent teeth cut in. Edith inhaled a slight cloud of whiskey. She liked men to have had something to drink; they were so much more cheerful, and appreciative and complimentary—much easier to talk to. "My name's Dean, Philip Dean," he said cheerfully. "You don't remember me, I know, but you used to come up to New Haven with a fellow I roomed with senior year, Gordon Sterrett." Edith looked up quickly. "Yes, I went up with him twice—to the Pump and Slipper and the Junior prom."
  • "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" "Warren was nineteen and rather pitying with those of his friends who hadn't gone East to college. But, like most boys, he bragged tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it. There was Genevieve Ormonde, who regularly made the rounds of dances, house-parties, and football games at Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Cornell; there was black-eyed Roberta Dillon, who was quite as famous to her own generation as Hiram Johnson or Ty Cobb; and, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides having a fairylike face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven."
  • "A Short Trip Home", Saturday Evening Post, January 17, 1927. "Joe Jelke and two other boys were along, and none of the three could manage to take their eyes off her, even to say hello to me. She had one of those exquisite rose skins frequent in our part of the country, and beautiful until the little veins begin to break at about forty; now, flushed with the cold, it was a riot of lovely delicate pinks like many carnations. She and Joe had reached some sort of reconciliation, or at least he was too far gone in love to remember last night; but I saw that though she laughed a lot she wasn't really paying any attention to him or any of them. She wanted them to go, so that there'd be a message from the kitchen, but I knew that the message wasn't coming—that she was safe. There was talk of the Pump and Slipper dance at New Haven and of the Princeton Prom, and then, in various moods, we four left and separated quickly outside. I walked home with a certain depression of spirit and lay for an hour in a hot bath thinking that vacation was all over for me now that she was gone; feeling, even more deeply than I had yesterday, that she was out of my life."

• The exclusive "Hamilton House" from the hit TV show Gossip Girl was based on St. Anthony Hall.

• The cover art of rock band Vampire Weekend's first album is a photo of the Columbia Chapter chandelier.

• 1923 MIT campus newspaper reference to "Select Wittstein" providing music for the Pump and Slipper and the Yale Prom in New Haven.

• Article purporting to describe the Columbia and Yale chapters, Yale Daily News.

• Mentioned various times in the 2010 novel, Octopus Summer, by W. Malcolm Dorson (brother of the Delta Chapter, University of Pennsylvania)