Look at this a frat kid spewing shot out of his mouth. You sir are wrong, I consider myself an advocate for fraternity life. As the start of a new academic year approaches and recruitment beckons on the horizon, a pesky statistic rears its head. Every time I see it on Greek Life websites or in a chapter’s recruitment information, I cringe. The fact in question is “Every U.S. President and Vice President, except two in each office, born since the first social fraternity was founded in 1825, have been members of a fraternity.â€
To be fair, there may have been a grain of truth in that statistic at one time. Rutherford B. Hayes, born in 1822, was initiated as an honorary member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Every President from Hayes through Calvin Coolidge, a Phi Gamma Delta initiated as a student at Amherst College, belonged to a Greek-letter organization either as a collegiate member or an honorary member. Herbert Hoover was the first to break that long streak.  The next to break it was Lyndon Johnson. Up until this point, the statement would have been true. Unfortunately, after Johnson, the statistic becomes not so true. Neither Richard Nixon nor Jimmy Carter belonged to Greek-letter organizations. Current President Barack Obama is not a fraternity man. And to be honest, I didn’t even go searching for the Vice President information because I quickly came up with more than two recent ones who haven’t been fraternity men, including our current Vice President, Joe Biden. I am fairly certain that neither Walter Mondale, Al Gore, nor Dick Cheney belonged to a fraternity while in college.
While I would love it if the above statement was true, the fact is that it is not. I suspect someone saw it on something written in the 1960s when it was true and used it in a poster or webpage. It then spread like wildfire. It appears on countless websites as a given fact. Don’t believe me? Do a quick search and you will get pages and pages of results. A quick look at the North-American Interfraternity Conference (NIC) web-site points out the truth that “At this date 44% of U.S. Presidents have held fraternity membership.â€