My parents both belonged to houses in the mid 1960s and you can’t walk more than a few feet in their attic without tripping over a paddle with Greek letters on it. My understanding is that their assigned pledges made the paddles.
Agreed.
Only now they’ve stopped cutting one’s throat cut across, tearing out the tongue, and burying the body in the sands of the sea at low-water mark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours.
If fraternities didn’t paddle their pledges, then all those Fraternity paddles are pretty pointless.
Nobody ever claimed that they had any other purpose, like for playing fraternity intramural cricket or swatting big fraternity horseflies.
I went to “a famous state university in PA” in the 1980s, and we did indeed have to make paddles which were signed on the back by the entire fraternity.
During the pledge period there was an event at the end of which pledges each got a token tap on the backside with their paddle. Each had to go into a separate room to receive their “paddling” - what actually happened (and I no longer give a crap about the secrecy of the matter) was that they were quietly told to scream loudly when they got tapped for the “benefit” of the pledges still waiting to go in, and a slapstickwas then used for full audio effect. Actually smacking someone hard enough to cause pain was considered massively dickish and antithetical to the whole concept of “brotherhood” we were trying to inculcate.
ETA: I was aware that other fraternities did really paddle their pledges, some quite hard, and there were rumors of far worse practices including branding. But that was not what my fraternity did - hell, we didn’t even blindfold the pledges during initiation. We just made “we trust you to keep your eyes closed and you trust us to guide you” a point of honor.
My older brother went through this circa 1972. He had to make a paddle for his big brother and got whacked with it. Also, they had a ritual where you were going to be “abducted” and dumped some place on a predetermined Friday night. You were to be penniless and have no ID. The clothes you were to wear had to be presented to the frat, who poured over them to make sure you had no money hidden anywhere within. My brother hid some money in his coat lining (which was found and kept by the frat). But he had emptied a cigarette, rolled up a $20 bill, put it in the hollowed cigarette, stuffed some tobacco into it, and put it back in the cigarette pack and resealed the cellophane wrap with glue to make it look unopened. It went unchallenged, so he had the $20 in reserve. But it turned out to be unnecessary as he and his fellow pledge were dumped in a town in upstate New York. Coincidentally the other pledge’s grandparents lived in that town, so they got to sleep in a warm bed and have hot food. A loan for train fare got them home.
Now when my brother was the big brother, I helped him examine his pledge’s clothes for hidden money. I found a dime (presumably for a phone call) hidden in his belt under the buckle. We replaced it with a penny and an IOU for 9c. His pledge (and another guy) were dumped at the lighthouse at Montauk Point (extreme eastern end of Long Island). It took them a while to make their way back.
Makes one think of those old B/W films probably from the late '40s when some old rich guy lies on his deathbed, prolly a judge or business magnate, and relives the happiest moments of his long and storied life.
Their purpose, in my time (I was in college in the late 1980s), was as a token of membership. Your pledge father gave you one (engraved with his name and yours, as shown in the pictures) during your pledgeship. We were never actually paddled with it, not even a light symbolic tap, nor did we have to make them ourselves. I don’t deny that pledges were actually paddled at one time, or that some fraternities may still be doing it even today. But we never were, nor was there even an implicit threat that we might be. I still have mine.
Our hazing, such as it was, consisted mostly of cleaning the house, running errands for active members, answering the phone, etc. I remember that we always had to have change for a dollar on us, and any active member could ask us for change at any time. If we didn’t have it, we could be “punished” (which just meant extra chores).
During “Help Week” (which is what we called it, rather than “Hell Week”), the pledge class did larger-scale maintenance work around the house, like repainting various rooms, shampooing the carpets, waxing the floors, and other big projects like that.
Did you ask anybody? They’re basically display pieces. I never paddled anyone, or received a paddling, nor did I ever actually think it was a thing. The closest we got was jokes from the active members before initiation. The tradition at our fraternity was that on initiation day (the end of the pledge period) each “big brother” (sponsors/mentors responsible for getting their little brothers through the pledge period) would give their little brothers their first fraternity jersey, and the little brothers would present their big brothers with a paddle.
I have four paddles sitting in the garage somewhere. They’re not functional; most are made from pre-cut boards with beveled edges that make them uncomfortable to hold, and pre-cut letters and images are glued on. Hell, one of mine has a shotglass holder on it, and another is four feet long and would need two hands to “operate it.”
The professionally etched and printed ones like the one in your third link are a relatively new thing. They weren’t available when I was pledging/active in the 90s/2000s.
Whether or not they were used in the recent past, their very existence strongly implies that they were used at one point. again, if they hadn’t been, what would be the point?
That later generations didn’t use them, and kept them around as mascots and totems (as is your experience) is understandable, but only if they were once seriously considered as practical items.
Perhaps. But there are plenty of symbolic objects that have always been symbolic. The Black Rod’s mace has never been functional. It’s just a token of office.
So you’re sure that no keeper of order in a governing body has ever had to use an actual weapon to enforce order? I’m not.
To be fair, that wasn’t part of the initiation process.
It always amazed me that frat boys are supposed to be the straightest of the straight guys but traditional frat initiations are blatantly homoerotic S&M ceremonies.
Meh, it’s just traditional Americana — I doubt if they paddled each other in 17th century Salamanca * or 19th century Oxford or even in 20th century Mexican unis ---- and America has always had a massive homosexual component in it’s culture and thinking, far more sympatico and understanding than the rest of the world. Something I attribute to America’s insanely masculinist nature.
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Except for religious reasons, to please God.
( It, the university, was founded in the 12th century. It had much to do with the New World. )
Well, how about North American football, originally a traditional university sport. Any other sports require one player to jam his hands in the other player’s buttocks?
I think wrestling wins hands down as the most homoerotic sport in existence. Especially the really old school Greco-Roman style. 
If you want a real (although maybe slightly overstated) look at fraternity hazing, get a copy of Chris Miller’s book The Real Animal House, which includes the stories that were the basis of the movie.
I pledged a fraternity (at the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy) way back in 1948.
About two thirds of the pledge class were WWII veterans. No paddling at that frat, no sirree!
I heard stories about frat brothers having to swallow live goldfish as part of the initiation ritual. Any truth to that? This would have been in the 1950s.
When I was a Target cashier in the early 1980s, we got a phone call from a sorority at a local college (OK, I’ll say which college - Drake University in Des Moines) asking if we still sold belted maxipads. We did, and they came and bought all of ours, and told us what they were going to do with them. They were going to tie them together, wrap the girls up in them like a mummy, and then burn them in a big bonfire after they walked up and down the street in this getup. :o
A decade before that, when we were young children, we happened to drive through Greek Row and my brother, who was just learning to read, asked if we were in the Spanish part of town. 