"A man achieves immortality by the words he has written or spoken, by the deeds he has done, by the gifts he has made, or the impression he has left. His life, gauged by the aggregate lives of men, is short; his work must be monumental for memory of him to outlive a generation or two. Into the living continuous existence of a fraternity have gone the lives, the works, the words of many men. With no thought of immortality for themselves, they have given generously of themselves and their goods. Down through the years in every Greek letter fraternity they have marched, true to the ideals of the men whose vision, inspiration, conditions prompted them to band together, to call each other brother...."
These words penned 60 years ago by Judge Luther Zeigler Rosser, Omega 1908, ring as true in 1999 as they did in 1939. In describing the purest form of the Greek letter fraternity, the former Grand Alpha and national director of the Chi Phi Fraternity was clearly drawing on the elite standards and ardent spirit of Chi Phi, a paragon in the fraternity of fraternities. As the nation’s oldest social Fraternity, Chi Phi holds an enviable and incomparable record of accomplishments, claims more than 50,000 alumni, living or deceased who have excelled in virtually every walk of life and points with pride to a promising generation of young college men who are today’s campus leaders and tomorrow’s world leaders. They stand on the shoulders of giants.
Chi Phi’s roots run deep in history. A mystic order known as Chi
Phi emerged in Bavaria in the 14th century and spread to neighboring Switzerland and The Netherlands. These secret societies were predominantly underground protest movements against the ruling establishment, whether church or state. Such organizations cropped up in Germany during the Reformation and in England during the 16th century. They were generally led by the cultured classes, who championed religious and political freedom under the banner of
Chi Phi.
In Great Britain, these clusters of protest groups were later called "chapels." The tradition of chapels
with a motto which would later become Chi Phi's secret motto and
with the canon of independent thinking was transplanted to the New World where chapels eventually functioned as the patriotic committees of correspondence who fueled the flame of Revolution. Chapels were particularly strong in the colonial South, existing in Virginia and the Carolinas as late as 1850. Soon after, their lingering influence could be felt when talk of secession reverberated throughout Southern states on the eve of the Civil War.