Not long after the twentieth century was born, there was another birth in the quiet suburban town which is the home of Princeton University. True, there were no huge and splendid celebrations such as had welcomed the year 1900, but it is very likely that some of that same effusive happiness, which comes from the contemplation of the new, and a certain modest pride showed on the faces of the men who walked across the campus in the crisp autumn air of 1901 to take their first meals together as members of the University's ninth and newest eating club - The Princeton Charter Club.

Originally, the founders of the club had considered using the name Cloister, but it was soon discovered that Princeton's sister institution in New Haven already had an establishment with the same name. Professor McDonald, an honorary member of the club, then suggested that the name Charter might be more appropriate since the document known as the Charter for the College of New Jersey had recently been uncovered and presented to the University. The substitution of the new name was readily agreed upon.

In the early days, the club was composed of a Senior Section of the class of 1902 and a Junior Section of the class of 1903. The members leased as a clubhouse a small building on Olden Street known as the "Incubator" because it had housed several other infant clubs. Feeling the need for a more permanent arrangement, the club in the spring of 1903 purchased three lots and a house on Prospect Avenue. The house was redesigned and enlarged under the supervision of an undergraduate member, David Adler '04, with the assistance of Professor Harris of the faculty. The funds for the purchase of the property, three-fourths of the present club land, and the alterations to the second clubhouse were raised by the sale of nineteen $1000 mortgage bonds.

During the time spent in Adler's clubhouse, the alumni and undergraduate membership of Charter joined with those at other clubs in defending the eating club system against President Wilson's Quad Plan, which proposed the replacement of the clubs with undergraduate colleges. Despite the controversy over Wilson's plan, Charter's early years are aptly characterized by the extravagant dances and banquets held, or by men like Andrew Carnegie and Moses Taylor Pyne who were honorary members at the time.

In the spring of 1905 an anonymous gift of $3000 and a $3000 mortgage loan were used to purchase the adjoining lot with a building on it. A few months later the club received another anonymous gift of $2500, and a squash court was built at the rear of the new lot. In 1913, the clubhouse and the extra building were sold and moved away, and the present or third clubhouse was built from plans drawn by Arthur I. Meigs of the 1903 Section. The cost was approximately $70,000 of which $30,000 was raised by a first mortgage, while the remainder was contributed by a great many subscribers. During the entire college year of 1913-14 the construction caused Charter to become the only club on the street to live in the "Incubator" twice.

The completion of the present clubhouse was celebrated in grand style by a magnificent banquet the evening before the Commencement-marking Yale baseball game in June 1914. The undergraduate Sections and many graduates attended. Governors, members of the Building Committee and "volunteers" all spoke, but the undergraduate speaker received the most enthusiastic response. Preceded by graduates who solemnly discussed their successful solutions to the club's financial and building problems, the undergraduate, when called upon, began by saying:

The graduate speakers have been giving the impression that the building of this magnificent clubhouse was complicated. The fact is that it was really very simple. All we did was worry a lot; then we built a house on it.

In the spring of 1917, less than a month after war had been declared, the clubhouse was closed because most of the undergraduate members had enlisted in some branch of the service. The house was temporarily opened in 1917 for the use of men training for wartime YMCA work, but it was not until 1919 that enough members had returned to college to warrant reopening permanently. During the war, Charter men enjoyed the privileges of the Cottage club. Fixed charges on Charter's own property, such as taxes and insurance, were paid by dues and a few short-term notes.

Charter club had a splendid war record, and in memory of the seven members who gave their lives to the effort, a bronze tablet, donated by the entire membership was placed over the mantel in the living room.

The First World War seems in retrospect to have been a coming of age for the club, a step from childhood to adolescence. The early years were marked by the great joys and exaggerated pains of first growth. The actual formation of the club, and the establishment of a permanent home were joyous moments, but the young club also had its problems. Inexperienced in the management and politics of operating a club, the members relied on their own determination and the guidance of older advisors. M. Taylor Pyne was one such man. A University trustee, benefactor, and distinguished resident of the town, he encouraged the founders of Charter, subscribed to the bonds issued to buy the first club property, and advised the club officers in the early days.

When confronted with any problem of club life, individual members and Sections rallied to solve it. Candidates for membership stuck together, and contributed two years of congeniality. When rival clubs made Bicker-time raids, Charter men dropped everything and, with the sympathetic forbearance of their professors, worked day and night to form outstanding Sections. With little or no money for club furniture after the second clubhouse was acquired, Sections like that of 1909 pitched in and presented some. Meanwhile, able managers like John "Judge" Cooper '09 were paring $1000 per year from the club debt, and the Board of Governors was forging a fiscal policy that was to make Charter legendary for financial soundness.

Arthur Maher '11 remembers when he and President Robert Smith showed a deficit:

In those days the word deficit had not acquired the aura of high respectability which it has since gained in Washington and elsewhere. To John Stewart, Fred Fruit, Duke Davies and other members of the Board, deficit was a dirty word. So they threw the whole set of Charter account books at us. I do not remember just what we did, but it must have been effective, because by the time the next Board meeting rolled around, the deficit had vanished.

In the years prior to World War One, Charter's membership comprised a rugged company. The club "practically owned the crew," and inter-Section tackle football was de rigeur. Perhaps this is one reason why so many men joined the Armed Forces in 1917 - and one reason why so many returned to see the club enter a new phase of life in the years which meant a new era for the entire nation - the Twenties.

With the end of World War One, college life renewed and Charter again opened its doors in January 1919. Many of the new members had been elected by mail while still overseas. The reactivated club faced serious financial problems though. Wartime use of the clubhouse had left it in disrepair and the club was heavily in debt. As if by will alone, the Board of Governors, led by John Stewart and Oliver Reynolds, inspired the club with such a consciousness of the need for economy that all back debts were cleared in just three years.

Perhaps the 1922 Section has the best claim to having ushered in the Twenties. It was the first post-War class to enter Princeton, and from it Charter elected the largest Section on the Street, fifty men, in a time when the average Section was eighteen to twenty-five.

The Twenties were wonderful years of tennis in the back yard, "bootleg" Section parties in New Brunswick and other towns, and Charter's enduring reputation for hosting the best houseparties anywhere. All over the nation the Twenties seemed to be years that had been preordained as a time for "the good life." At Charter, it was no different.

In this, the third decade of its existence, Charter hired only the best, the most widely reknown, and necessarily, the most expensive orchestras for the spring houseparties. Bands with famous leaders such as Paul Ash, Don Bestor, and Dell Coon, and some relatively "unknowns" such as Weede Meyer and Guy Lombardo, placed their names before the club officers when the time for houseparties neared each spring. The club was infected with an adolescent joie de vivre, but at the same time, there was a note of sophistication. One club officer in the Twenties, inquiring about a band for houseparties wrote:

We do not wish especially to have any entertainment feature or novelty number along with the orchestra, merely a band that can furnish us with good smooth music, not too loud, and by no means the extremely "hot" type.

In the Twenties, the keynote continued to be sophistication - whether the occasion was the Tea Dance in the fall, the Ohio State football game, Bicker, or the houseparties in the spring. There were instances, however, when the sophisticated became the sophomoric, and the repercussions were felt in Nassau Hall. After the Section party of 1930, held in the firehouse on Chambers Street, Dean of the College Christian Gauss was obliged to write to the Board of Governors. He stated that the town authorities had requested that the University officials intervene with a group of students who were ringing the bell of Engine House Number Three that February evening. He went on to say:

The proctor who appeared in response to this summons found three men on the roof ringing the bell. While attempting to force them to desist he heard considerable uproar in the Engine House.

Some men were engaged in a fistfight. There were five barrels of beer on tap and five gallons of applejack, of which about three and a half had been consumed. The proctor's estimate was that thirty men were intoxicated, seven so seriously that they could not leave the place.

In reply, the Board of Governors deplored the incident itself, but explained some of the extenuating circumstances involved. One was the reason for holding the Section party in Princeton - an act forbidden by University regulations at the time. Their letter read in part:

The officers understood, as a result of some meeting held with you, that while no Section party was to be held in New York or in Philadelphia or at the clubhouse itself, there was no intention on the part of the University authorities to prohibit a Section party held elsewhere in Princeton. They selected the Engine House on Chambers Street with the thought that it would be a most suitable place for the occasion, being off the main thoroughfare and yet not so far as to cause complications. It does not seem to have occurred to them that the fire bell might be rung, and they did not even know that there was a fire bell there. In that connection, we are informed that of the three men your proctor found on the roof, one had been ringing the bell and the other two had been trying to get him down from the roof.

Thus, the Board of Governors restored good will with the Dean's office, and the incident which Christian Gauss had referred to as an "orgy" was reduced to merely being a slight violation of Prohibition ("with which I am not personally in sympathy," wrote Dean Gauss at a later date).

The men of Charter Club seemed to pay about as much attention to the Depression as they had to Prohibition. In the spring of 1934, the club was entirely out of debt for the first time in its history. In 1936, at Charter's 35^th anniversary banquet at the Manhattan Club in New York, John Stewart ceremoniously burned Charter's paid-off mortgage in a chafing dish.

As the Thirties turned to Forties, charter's membership was an impressive list of campus leaders. Pre-official Triangle Club auditions were held in the club library (an event prompted by the rise to stardom of Jimmy Stewart of the '32 Section). The tennis courts in the back yard had been removed, but, above their vestigial clay, fierce softball games flourished in the springtime. The squash court, decorated with Henry Toll's murals, became a houseparties bar. Then, one Sunday afternoon, a billiards game ended abruptly: someone yelled from upstairs, "We're in the war!"

As abruptly as that billiards game ended, the era for which the Twenties had set the pace ended. There were uniforms in Charter that spring of 1942 - ensigns, second lieutenants, midshipmen and buck privates all back on a weekend's leave. A year later Charter was almost empty, and all the clubs except Elm and Tiger, which were leased as substitute University commons for the remaining civilian students and officers in training, closed their doors for the duration of the war.

As the First World War marked the end of Charter's childhood, that yell from the living room in 1941 ended its adolescence. In the years between 1919 and 1943, the club grew in many ways. The size of the Sections had nearly tripled those of 1902 and 1903. In the second score of the club" life, the day to day operations of the club fell into a set routine. By way of example, the handling of the club" financial records was a burden lifted from the shoulders of the undergraduates. In 1935, a professional accountant was hired to keep the books, much to the relief of the Undergraduate Treasurer, but particularly to the representative from Duke Davies' firm of auditors, Bernard French.

Before the changeover in 1935, Mr. French had journeyed to Princeton several times a year to help post the entries to the books. French was a small and very frail man, but saved from his mousiness by his great dignity and his constantly proper air. A stylish dresser, French always wore a suit with a vest. But he was an extremely nervous person, easily flustered during his visits to Charter, and a man with one unfortunate habit. As French attempted to untangle the financial affairs of the club, his nervousness led him to absentmindedly play with the buttons of his vest. He would turn and twist the top button, until he had eventually torn it off. He rarely noticed that the button had come free. Merely glancing at it loose in his hand, he would slip it into a pocket as he continued to pore over the accounts. Before long, the second button would disappear into his coat pocket. By the end of the day, French had usually ripped most of the buttons from his vest. On days when the accounts were worse than usual, all the buttons would be missing - and more, since the zipper was not yet in style, and Mr. French's trousers had a button fly, at least it had when he arrived at the club in the morning.

For the next two decades, emphasis was placed on operating the club maturely and efficiently. This became necessary in part because the membership has grown - shortly after Charter reopened following World War Two the club had 115 undergraduate members - and because of an increased realization that the club should complement the University more fully, rather then remaining a completely separate entity.

The increased numbers eating at Charter has also required the remodeling of the clubhouse which has taken place since the Forties. At one time or another, many of the rooms have been altered. In 1940, the card room was enlarged, and a phone booth installed. Later, the locker room in the basement was remodeled and designated as the new pool room. The former pool room was then converted to the present party room and bar, while a new downstairs lavatory was installed. In 1959, the main hall, dining and card rooms were redecorated, and in 1963, the private office off the upstairs dining room was made into the television room.

But not all the changes were the result of such careful planning. In 1949, Manager Jim Pace awoke early one morning to find a fire raging in the living room. Before it could be controlled, it spread to the library and the second floor bedroom, and had caused $16,000 worth of damage. Undaunted, the club maintained its operations, and repairs were completed in time to be celebrated at the 1950 houseparties. The origin of the fire was never determined, but the aftermath made one thing plain: The club could survive, and continue normal operation in the face of large-scale adversity.

The club's greatest loss was suffered in 1956 when John A. Stewart '05, who had been chairman of the Board of Governors for fifty years, died. Mr. Stewart gave a great portion of his life to Charter Club, and the memory of his devotion and his many more tangible gifts to the club has provided other members who knew him or had heard of his work with the inspiration to follow his excellent example and leadership.

The next few decades saw many demographic, economic, educational and political changes sweep the nation, the University and the club. When the University decided to admit female undergraduates as freshmen in the fall of 1969, Charter was among the first clubs to announce in December of 1970 that it too would become coeducational. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, the club was faced with the difficult issues of rising costs and competition for members. In April of 1977, Charter became the fifth non-selective, and by such measures as deferring much needed maintenance, competing intensely for sophomore Sections, and soliciting alumni support, the club found ways to weather the nadir of club life at Princeton.

Because of the efforts of John Stewart and other dedicated members before and since, Charter is as magnificent as it is today. The times have changed since 1901, but that original idea for Charter, that concept of what the club might become, those plans which its founders discussed as they walked to the "Incubator," have become actuality. The Charter club is a place to relax and be among friends; it is clean and comfortable; it provides good food and a pleasant social atmosphere. But more than this, the years have seen Charter given real vitality, dignity and tradition by its members. For this reason, Charter members still smile with a certain modest pride, and the club maintains an air of effusive happiness today. The times have changed, and over the years the club has changed - Charter hat bands have given way to Charter T-shirts, and today's undergraduates would rarely decry "hot" music - but nevertheless, the personality which has built and maintained Charter for nearly a century remains today, fresh and active.

Adapted from the 1968 History of the Princeton Charter Club compiled by Donald P. Knight '68.