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Skull and Bones
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Skull and Bones is a secret society based at, but not formally affiliated with, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The society's alumni organization, which owns the society's real property and oversees the organization's activity, is the Russell Trust Association, and is named after General William Huntington Russell, founding member of the Bones' organization along with fellow classmate Alphonso Taft.
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Skull and Bones is a secret society based at, but not formally affiliated with, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The society's alumni organization, which owns the society's real property and oversees the organization's activity, is the Russell Trust Association, and is named after General William Huntington Russell, founding member of the Bones' organization along with fellow classmate Alphonso Taft. In conversation, the group is known as "Bones", and members have been known as "Bonesmen".
Even after Yale became coeducational in 1969, Skull & Bones remained all-male until the Class of 1991, when that year's class "tapped" seven female members in the Class of 1992. The decision was controversial among alumni members, some of whom obtained a temporary restraining order and changed locks, before yielding to a close majority vote of the membership.
Many Skull & Bones alumni have gone on to positions of great power, including both the Democratic and Republican nominees in the 2004 Presidential election.
History
Skull and Bones was said, in 1903, to be formed in 1832 as a result of a dispute among Yale's debating societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliope over the Phi Beta Kappa awards.
It was once referred to as The Brotherhood of Death, but a more common alternative name was Eulogia.
The only "chapter" of Skull and Bones created outside Yale was a chapter at Wesleyan University in 1870. That chapter, the Beta of Skull & Bones, became independent in 1872 in a dispute over control over creating additional chapters; the Beta Chapter reconstituted itself as Theta Nu Epsilon.
The emblem of Skull and Bones is a skull with crossed bones, over the number "322". Some have speculated that 322 stands for "founded in '32, 2nd corps", referring to a first Corps in an unknown German university. Others suggest that 322 refers to the era of Demosthenes and that documents in the society hall have purportedly been found dated to "Anno-Demostheni".
Members meet in the "tomb" on Thursday and Sunday evenings of each week over the course of their senior year. As with other Yale societies, the sharing of a personal history is the keystone of the senior year together in the "tomb".
Members are assigned nicknames. “Long Devil" is assigned to the tallest member; "Boaz" goes to any member who is a varsity football captain. Many of the chosen names are drawn from literature ("Hamlet," "Uncle Remus"), from religion and from myth. The banker Lewis Lapham passed on his name, "Sancho Panza," to the political adviser Tex McCrary. Averell Harriman was "Thor," Henry Luce was "Baal," McGeorge Bundy was "Odin.” George H.W. Bush was "Magog," a name reserved for a member considered to have the most sexual experience. George W. Bush, unable to decide, was temporarily called "Temporary," and the name was never changed.
Other alumni include Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Senator David L. Boren, and Barack Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.
Skull and Bones also owns a campground island in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island. "The retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to 'get together and rekindle old friendships.' A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals. Although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. 'Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings,' a patriarch sighs. 'It's basically ruins.' Another Bonesman says that to call the island 'rustic' would be to glorify it. 'It's a dump, but it's beautiful.'"
Admitting women
Yale became coeducational in 1969, but Skull & Bones remained all-male at the behest of the Russell Trust Association. The Class of 1991, however, disregarded the Trust and "tapped" seven female members for membership in the next year's class. The Trust responded by changing the locks on the "Tomb"; the Bonesmen had to meet at the building of Manuscript. A mail-in vote by living members decided 368-320 to permit going co-ed, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move, arguing that a formal change in bylaws was needed. Other alumni, such as John Kerry, spoke out in favor of admitting women, and the dispute even ended up on The New York Times editorial page. A second vote of alumni in October 1991 agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was eventually dropped.
Lore
The first extended description of Skull and Bones, published in 1871 by Lyman Bagg in his book Four Years at Yale, noted that "the mystery now attending its existence forms the one great enigma which college gossip never tires of discussing." Brooks Mather Kelley attributed the secrecy of Yale senior societies to the fact that underclassmen members of freshman, sophomore, and junior class societies remained on campus following their membership, while seniors naturally left.
Alleged artifacts
Legend has it that the society holds the stolen skulls of former president Martin Van Buren, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa.
Geronimo
Skull and Bones members supposedly stole the bones of Geronimo from Fort Sill, Oklahoma during World War I. In 1986, former San Carlos Apache Chairman Ned Anderson received an anonymous letter with a photograph and a copy of a log book claiming that Skull & Bones held the skull. He met with Skull & Bones officials about the rumor; the group's attorney, Endicott P. Davidson, denied that the group held the skull, and said that the 1918 ledger saying otherwise was a hoax. The group offered Anderson a glass case with a skull of a ten-year-old boy, but Anderson refused it. In 2006, Marc Wortman discovered a 1918 letter from Skull & Bones member Winter Mead to F. Trubee Davison that claimed the theft; however, Mead was not at Fort Sill.
In 2009, Ramsey Clark filed a lawsuit on behalf of people claiming to be Geronimo's descendants, against, among others, Barack Obama, Robert Gates, and Skull and Bones, asking for the return of Geronimo's bones. An article in The New York Times states that Clark "acknowledged he had no hard proof that the story was true." Alexandra Robbins says this is one of the more plausible items said to be in the organization's Tomb. But Cameron University history professor David H. Miller notes that Geronimo's grave was unmarked at the time. Investigations ranging from Cecil Adams to Kitty Kelley have rejected the story. A Fort Sill spokesman told Adams, "There is no evidence to indicate the bones are anywhere but in the grave site." Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apache tribe of Oklahoma, also calls the story a hoax.
Pancho Villa
Pancho Villa's skull was indeed stolen shortly after his death. While Robbins originally wrote in her book that the Bonesmen had the skull, she has since retracted the claim, saying that the story that the Bonesmen paid $25,000 for it in the 1920s is implausible. Mark Singer also rejects the story in a New Yorker article about the myth.
Skull & Bones Hall and its architecture
The Skull & Bones Hall is otherwise known as "Tomb". The architectural attribution of the original hall is in dispute. The architect was possibly Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–1892) or Henry Austin (1804–1891). Architectural historian Patrick Pinnell includes an in-depth discussion of the dispute over the identity of the original architect in his 1999 history of Yale's campus.
The building was built in three phases: in 1856 the first wing was built, in 1903 the second wing, and in 1911, Davis-designed Neo-Gothic towers from a previous building were added at the rear garden. The front and side facades are of Portland brownstone and in an Egypto-Doric style.
The 1911 additions of towers, (relocated from another Yale building), in the rear created a small enclosed courtyard in the rear of the building, designed by Evarts Tracy and Edgerton Swartwout, Tracy and Swartwout, New York. Evarts was not a Bonesman, but his paternal grandmother Martha Sherman Evarts and maternal grandmother Mary Evarts were the sisters of William Maxwell Evarts (S&B 1837). Pinnell speculates whether the re-use of the Davis towers in 1911 was evidence suggesting that Davis did the original building; conversely, Austin was responsible for the architecturally similar brownstone Egyptian Revival gates, built 1845, of the Grove Street Cemetery, to the north of campus. Also discussed by Pinnell is the "tomb's" aesthetic place in relation to its neighbors, including the Yale University Art Gallery. Additional data can be seen . New Hampshire landscape architects Saucier & Flynn designed the wrought-iron fence that currently surrounds a portion of the complex in the late 1990s.
Bonesmen
Judy Schiff, Chief Archivist at the Yale University Library, has written: "The names of (S&B's) members weren't kept secret, that was an innovation of the 1970s, but its meetings and practices were. The secrecy seems to have attracted fascination and curiosity from the start."
While resourceful researchers could assemble member data from these original sources, in 1985 an anonymous source leaked rosters to a private researcher, Antony C. Sutton, who wrote a book on the group titled America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. This leaked 1985 data was kept privately for over 15 years, as Sutton feared that the photocopied pages could somehow identify the member who leaked it. The information was finally reformatted as an appendix in the book Fleshing out Skull and Bones, a compilation edited by Kris Millegan, published in 2003.
Popular culture
The 2000 film The Skulls concerns a highly elaborate secret society with clear parallels to Skull and Bones. Bones was also included, as well as the a cappella group the Whiffenpoofs, in the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, about the Central Intelligence Agency. Skull and Bones has also featured from time to time in the Doonesbury comic strips by Garry Trudeau; especially in 1980 and December 1988, with reference to George H.W. Bush, and again at the time that the society went co-ed.
See also
Further reading
- Begin, Jeremy. Fighting for G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, and Drugs). Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9777953-3-8
- Millegan, Kris, ed. Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society. Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003. ISBN 0-9720207-2-1
- Robbins, Alexandra. Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Back Bay Books, 2003. ISBN 0-316-73561-2
- Sutton, Antony C. America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003. ISBN 0-9720207-0-5
- Tedford, Cody. Powerful Secrets. Hannover, 2008. ISBN 1-4241-9263-3
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