The founding
The University of Illinois was thirty-one years old that January, with an enrollment of 2,007. The library was in Altgeld Hall, then two years old. A few years earlier the University trustees had condemned fraternities and decreed that no student could receive a class card unless he signed a pledge not to join one.
The initiates came from the Red Ribbon Society, a social club organised in 1897 for camaraderie and social interaction. Credit for the petition goes largely to George B. Worthen of Keokuk, Iowa, who learned of SAE at the University of the South and, in the summer of 1897, found two friends who were members of Ohio Epsilon at the University of Cincinnati.
Eighteen men were initiated on a cold, snowy January day in 1899, under Eminent Archon William C. Levere of Illinois Psi-Omega — the same Levere whose name went on the national home in Evanston in 1930. SAE joined six fraternities and two sororities then on campus.
For the rest of that year the chapter met in members’ rooms, classrooms, and — it is said, though the book does not confirm it — a time or two in Murphy’s Saloon.
“The eighteen men initiated that cold, snowy day in January, 1899 saw the purple and gold unfurled at Champaign-Urbana.”
The History of the Illinois Beta Chapter, 1899–1999
The eighteen first initiates
“…there varnished forever the kaleidoscope of college life at Illinois the brilliance of the red ribbon, and its place appeared the rich colors of the purple and gold.”
The chapter historian, on the founding banquet at the Beardsley House