Franklin Roosevelt, a cosseted mama’s boy unpopular at Groton, didn’t get into the Porcellian Club even though he was a legacy—and, according to some, he never quite got over it. Mark Zuckerberg was not elected to any of the secretive all-male final clubs despite their becoming, per Ross Douthat’s Harvard memoir, much more meritocratic in the 1990s (and who, you might wonder, could be more meritorious than the boy genius behind the world’s most ubiquitous social network?). Zuck struck back by creating the least exclusive club ever and then suing his founding partner, a member of Phoenix Club. Ah, sweet revenge…

The exclusivity of Harvard’s final clubs—which brought us Facebook and the New Deal, mind you—is considered an undemocratic relic of a racist, classist world. And criticism of them is nothing new. Veteran reporter Kenneth Auchincloss, cousin of patrician writer-lawyer Louis Auchincloss, wrote in the Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate in 1958: