Skull and Bones is a collegiate secret society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The society's alumni organization, which owns the society's real property and oversees the organization, is the Russell Trust Association, named for General William Huntington Russell, who co-founded Skull and Bones with classmate Alphonso Taft. The Russell Trust was founded by Russell and Daniel Coit Gilman, member of Skull and Bones and later a university president. The society is known informally as "Bones", and members are known as "Bonesmen".

President George H. W. Bush, his son President George W. Bush, and the latter's 2004 Presidential opponent Senator John Kerry are members of Skull and Bones.

History

and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale's debating societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliope, over that season's Phi Beta Kappa awards; its original name was "the Order of Skull and Bones."

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.

For most of its history, Skull & Bones operated as a peer society with Scroll and Key and, later, Wolf's Head, two of Yale's other property-owning senior societies.

Skull and Bones 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.'"

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 Society. 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 dropped. Wolf's Head Society was the last all-male society at Yale.

Membership selection

Skull and Bones selects new members every spring as part of Yale University's "Tap Day." The most recent Tap Day was held on April 16, 2009. Every year, Skull and Bones selects fifteen men and women of the junior class to join the society. Skull and Bones traditionally "tapped" those that it viewed as campus leaders and other notable figures for its membership. Traditionally, groups such as the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, Yale Political Union, and Yale Daily News were well represented. The president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity is strongly considered for membership every year (George W. Bush is the most famous example). In addition, captains of various sports teams (football, basketball, crew) are also considered. In recent years, leaders in various Yale cultural organizations have also merited consideration.

Skull and Bones has developed a reputation with some as having a membership that is heavily tilted towards the "Power Elite". Barack Obama's economic adviser Austan Goolsbee was initiated into the club in 1991, the same year the club elected to tap women into the society.

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.

The emblem of Skull and Bones is a skull with crossed bones, over the number "322". One legend is 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 death of Demosthenes and that documents in the society hall have purportedly been found dated to "Anno-Demostheni".

During the senior year each Skull and Bones class meets every Thursday and Sunday night. The goal of the activities is to develop deep friendship and connections with your fellow members and to explore ideas that allow for personal and collective growth.

There is an ongoing rumor that there is some form whereby new members recite to the society their sexual history, and although there has been no corroboration of this by any reliable source, the rumor lives on.

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.Alexandra Robbins, The Atlantic Monthly May, 2000.

Alleged stolen artifacts

Skull and Bones has a reputation for stealing, often from each other or from campus buildings; society members reportedly call the practice "crooking" and strive to outdo each other's "crooks."

The society has been accused of possessing the stolen skulls of Martin Van Buren, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa, but this has never been proven.

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 was "exhumed" from Fort Sill by the club and was "safe" in the club's headquarters.

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. However, the 1918 letter “ adds to the seriousness of the belief [that the theft took place], certainly,” says Judith Schiff, the chief research archivist at Sterling Memorial Library, who has written extensively on Yale history. “It has a very strong likelihood of being true, since it was written so close to the time.” She points out that Members of a secret society were required to be honest with each other about its affairs. Moreover, the yearbook entries for Haffner, Mead, and Davison confirm that they were all Bonesmen. (The membership of the societies was routinely published in newspapers and yearbooks until the 1970s.) Haffner’s entry confirms that he was at the artillery school at Fort Sill some time between August 1917 and July 1918.

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. Writer Mark Singer, a Yale graduate, also rejects the story in a New Yorker article about the myth.

Skull & Bones Hall

The Skull & Bones Hall is otherwise known as the "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 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 here. 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.

Among prominent alumni are Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, "mother of the Central Intelligence Agency" James Jesus Angleton, Senator David L. Boren, and economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.

In popular culture

Skull and Bones' place in popular culture is significant, since, although it is a "secret society," it is probably the best known college secret society in America, as can be seen from the recurring references to it in all kinds of media. Skull and Bones has 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. In The Simpsons, Montgomery Burns is both a Yalie and a Bonesman. The 2000 film The Skulls concerns a highly elaborate secret society with clear parallels to Skull and Bones at a university beginning with a "Y"; A portrayal of Bones also played a substantial role in Matt Damon's 2006 film The Good Shepherd, about the Central Intelligence Agency. A Gilmore Girls subplot involves the main character, Rory (a student at Yale), associating with a Skull and Bones-like group called Life and Death Brigade. The 2000 political-economic novel Crashmaker (see Victor Sperandeo) centers around Skull and Bones-like societies. In the Gossip Girl episode New Haven Can Wait, Chuck Bass gets abducted by Skull and Bones. At the next meeting, he brings three prostitutes, for each member, with hidden cameras on them, which provide him incriminating material against Skull and Bones. When Skull and Bones finds out, he shows some pictures and states that he from thereon 'owns' the Skull and Bones Society. Additionally, in an episode of Family Guy, Lois' father, Carter Pewterschmidt, is a member of the Skull and Bones (whose initiation is satirized) and offers Chris membership.

References

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.

External links

• Yale University archives of Skull and Bones