Stuart Lathrop Pierson: Hazing Victim

Stuart Lathrop Pierson was born 6 Jul 1887 in College Hill, OH to Newbold Leroy Pierson (1857-1928) & Margaret Smedley (1866-1938).

CONDEMN HAZING OF STUDENTS The following article on hazing and alleged initiation rituals of college and high school fraternities which appeared in -a recent issue of the San Francisco Examiner hag caused much comment in Berkeley: I swear by all my hopes on earth to keep this pledge with the Brethren of our order May my life be accursed my death be loathsome my heart be cut out and cast into the dust my flesh rot from my bones my bones crumble away if I ever reveal any of the secrets of our beloved order or betray my brethren This is the grim vow under the awful influences of which the young university student fresh from the gentle influence of him home with his youthful ideals of honor and loyalty as yet unsullied by contact with the world has braved the terrors of hazing and faced death a hundred times It was the vow that led Stuart Lathrop Pierson the freshman of the little college of Kenyon Ohio to submit as part of his initiation into the fraternity of the Delta Kappa Epsilon and without sign or word or murmur to the awful ordeal of being tied to the railroad tracks of the Cleveland Akron & Ohio Railroad there to be left until a train came along and ground him to pieces For in its effect upon the mind of an impressionable boy this vow is invested with more of awful portent and more of solemnity than the oaths of the Molly Maguires the Whitecaps or of the Suicide Club pictured by Robert Louis Stevenson in the New Arabian Nights Give five thousand members of the alumni of a college fraternity in possession of the secrets of this order and not one throughout a long life shall ever betray them Stuart Pierson lying bound to the track on the railroad river bridge at Gambler hearing the distant rumble of the approaching train and realizing in that supreme moment of horror the awful mistake of his fellow students that doomed him on the very threshold of his young life to death under the wheels was true In spirit to his fellows Could he in that moment have escaped by some miracle his lips must have been forever sealed Bring his back from the grave now and he shall not utter a word of denunciation Victims Father Bars Way of Justice Strong in the heart of his father himself an alumnus of the college and member of the fraternity of the DKE is the spirit of the oath and of blind unreasoning loyalty For in face of cumulative proof sufficient to convince every other man in the country that the son was with a cold-blooded cruelty worthy of the fiends tied to the railroad tracks and left there Mr Pierson hurrying the mutilated remains of his son out of sight of the coroner and the police fiercely opposes every stage of investigation blindly insisting that his boy was not tied to the tracks but that he fell asleep at his post and was thus run down by the train And of him Coroner Scarborough and the citizens of Gambler loyally seeking the whole truth of this barbarous slaughter have said that the honor of his college is dearer to him than the life of his child In proof of their assertion they have produced evidence that in the very moment that his son lay on the track watching the lights of the train bearing down upon him and enduring in those few moments the agonies of a hundred deaths he a business man of mature years was engaged' with another party of students in the work of initiating another victim ' But the accident of the advent of a special train where according to the schedule of the initiating committee no train should have been has led to a gigantic revulsion of sentiment through every college in the country such as will put an end forever to barbarism in the practice of initiations or hazing For the whole State of Ohio aflame with anger over this wanton- slaughter demands that the students who bound and gagged Pierson and led him to the tracks shall be discovered and heavily punished And standing alone against the power and might of the State is Dr Pierce the president of (he college declaring in the face of all the evidence that his pupils are guiltless of wrong The sentiment of the Ohio people however has spread over the country for this case the apex of boyish cruelty has been reached

The Berkeley Gazette

Berkeley, California

24 Nov 1905, Fri • Page 7

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/100937463/stuart-lathrop-pierson/

I found his year book on Ancestry here are the pages.