For 31 years The Druids influenced campus life

Secret societies and fraternal organizations have existed from the days of ancient Egypt and the Greek and Roman Empires. Some are well known while others, such as UConn’s Druids, are not.

The Druids were a secret society for 31 years, so secret that virtually no documentation tracing its activities survives except for annual entries in the Nutmeg yearbook.

All records reportedly disappeared in 1952 shortly after the Student Senate, which appeared to take direction from the Druids, banned the group.

The 1928-29 Druids pictured here from a page in the annual Nutmeg yearbook. For a larger view, click on the photo.

From the yearbook entries, however, the power and influence of the Druids, usually a half-dozen members each year, is staggering. Nothing relating to student governance, it seems, was outside their purview.

“Their potent leadership controls and decides the progress and direction of all student activities of any importance,” says the 1940 Nutmeg.That was also the year that the group’s all-male barrier was broken, with the selection of Elizabeth Rourke ’40 (CLAS), editor-in-chief of the yearbook. Membership was usually limited to six men, although it went as high as nine in 1928.

“They were the classic secret men’s society,” says Daniel Blume ’53 (CLAS), and a member of the Archons, the honors group that replaced the Druids in 1952. “They were self-perpetuating, choosing their successors from campus leaders, like the president of the student government, editors of the Campus (the student newspaper), and guys in the fraternity system.”  

The existence of the group was announced in a May 22, 1920, Connecticut Campus article, with the headline “Rumor of a Senior Secret Society at C.A.C.” (UConn was Connecticut Agricultural College from 1899 to 1933), noted “new members will be ‘tapped’ today.” How the “tapping” worked is unknown, but those selected were approached each year at the Junior Prom.

Things began to fall apart for the Druids in October 1951, a time when college fraternities nationally were fighting over discriminatory membership policies. On Feb. 6, 1952, the Campus reported that “the Student Senate . . . acted to force the Druids into the open.” The Campus article also includes this tantalizing tidbit: “The senators offered microfilm recordings of all Druid minutes and records since the organization’s founding in 1921.” Soon after, the records were gone.

During the course of the Feb. 6 Senate meeting, the Senate president, Peter Brodigan ’52 (CLAS), revealed himself as a member of the Druids, as did Senate member Paul Veillette ’52 (CLAS), secretary of the secret group and one of the three senators working to expose it.  

Over the next week, all the Druids revealed themselves, breaking the three-decade tradition of secrecy.   With their organization in shambles, the former Druids created a new men’s honor society, the Archons, on March 25, 1952, as an open men’s honorary society with almost an identical membership. The Archons, lacking the power and influence of their predecessors, was much more in keeping with an honorary society, and it lasted until 1970.

Over the 31 years that the Druids existed, 159 students were tapped as members. With two exceptions, Rourke, in 1940, and Satashi Oishi ’49 (ENG), a Japanese-American student, in 1949 all were white males. Druids were selected from the ranks of student leaders, so it is possible that as the diversity of the student body slowly changed, it would have been more likely that membership in the Druids would have reflected that change.

But we will never know.

-- Mark J. Roy '74 (CLAS)