Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (34 page)

Bonesmen—no longer an accurate term, but one still applied to the group's members—display a veneer of enmity towards the outside world, or at least that part that intrudes on the Yale campus. Nonmembers who enquire about its actions and membership are openly referred to as “outsiders” or “vandals.” All Skull & Bones members are required to deny any connection with the organization; if the group's name is mentioned in public, they must leave the room or area with no comment. Nevertheless, enough data regarding its members and procedures have been revealed over the 160-plus years of its existence to substantiate all but the most hysterical speculation about its purpose and influence. Despite its serious mode, the organization employs at least a few aspects, especially of its initiation rites, that fans of the movie
Animal House
may find familiar but perhaps more disturbing.

In 1876, long before Skull & Bones was being viewed with increasing alarm by outsiders, a group of Yale students calling themselves The Order of File and Claw broke into The Tomb and gleefully described its interior. Sounding more like a nineteenth-century boy's club than a gathering place for future world leaders, the most evocative description was of an interior room identified as Parlor 323, where

on the west wall hung, among other pictures, an old engraving representing an open burial vault, in which, on a stone slab, rest four human skulls, grouped about a fool's-cap and bells, an open book, several mathematical instruments, a beggar's scrip, and a royal crown. On the arched wall above the vault are the explanatory words, in Roman letters, “Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, wer Bettler oder Kaiser?” And below the vault is engraved… the sentence: “Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich.” (“Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether rich or poor, all's the same in death.”)

A century later, the girlfriend of a Skull & Bones initiate (who was obviously ill-chosen for membership in a secret society) reported that she had been escorted by him on a tour of The Tomb. Her most vivid memory of its interior was the sight of a wall covered with license plates. Every plate bore the number 322, alluding to the death of the famed Greek orator Demosthenes in 322 bc, the mythical year in which Skull & Bones was supposedly founded. All Skull & Bones members, she was informed, were obligated to “confiscate” any license plate on which the figures 322 appeared, returning them to The Tomb where they were displayed on the wall.

Undergraduates in universities less prestigious than Yale have been committing more serious vandalism than license plate theft over the years, so this may be considered a trivial matter. But it is interesting to speculate on the occasions when an inner-city youth, lacking the privilege of social standing as a result of his circumstances of birth, was brought on similar charges of “confiscation” before a judge or prosecuting attorney who happened to be a Yale graduate and a Skull & Bones member. Was the less privileged perpetrator always forgiven his transgression?

The human skulls are another matter.

Reportedly, each class of Skull & Bones was required to “confiscate” the skull of a famous individual, bringing it to The Tomb as proof of that class's mettle. Many skulls remain on display in The Tomb. “Confiscating” license plates bearing the mystical 322 symbol involves little more than stealth and a screwdriver, but stealing a skull entails nothing less than graverobbing, apparently a long tradition of Skull & Bones members, many of whom seek to take their place in the seats of American power.

Howard Altman, an award-winning U.S. writer and editor, reported that in 1989 a man named Phillip Romero visited him, claiming to be the great-great-grandson of the celebrated Apache warrior and chief Geronimo. According to Romero, his ancestor's bones were among those on display in the Skull & Bones collection. It had been removed from the warrior's grave, Romero charged, in 1918 by Prescott S. Bush, father of the forty-first U.S. president and grandfather of the forty-third.

The “322” beneath the symbols inspired the “liberation” of automobile license plates.

For over 150 years, strange goings-on have occurred in the depths of The Tomb on the Yale campus.

When Altman explained that he needed verification of the claim before publicizing it, Romero put Altman in contact with a man named Ned Anderson, who resided on an Apache reservation in San Carlos, Arizona. According to Anderson, a few years earlier a public debate between him and another family regarding the relocation of Geronimo's bones from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Arizona attracted the attention of a Bonesman who wanted to be identified only as Pat. The bones, Pat declared, had not been in Oklahoma for seventy years, but had been used in rituals conducted by the mysterious Yale society known as Skull & Bones.

The story rang true: Prescott Bush had been stationed at Fort Sill in 1918, when the theft of Geronimo's skull was alleged to have taken place. Adding to the story's veracity is the reported existence of a privately printed document authored by F.O. Matthiessen, a Skull & Bones member, describing the expedition and the recovery of Geronimo's skull from the grave. A sample of the document has been placed in a library at Harvard where, under an agreement between both Skull & Bones and the executors of Matthiessen's estate, it remains unavailable to public view.

Anderson had recruited his senator, John McCain, to pursue the matter in 1986 with George H.W. Bush, who was then
U.S. vice-president. McCain reportedly arranged a meeting between Anderson and a number of Skull & Bones representatives including Jonathon Bush, the vice-president's brother. According to Anderson, the Skull & Bones members presented him with a skull they claimed to be his ancestor's, offering it in exchange for a document preventing him and representatives of Skull & Bones from discussing the incident. Anderson refused, objecting to the gag order and not believing that the skull being offered was actually Geronimo's. Like most states, Connecticut bans ownership of human remains except for specialized legal or professional purposes, a charge that, like “confiscating” license plates, Skull & Bones believes is not applicable to them.

The controversy over Geronimo's skull launched a number of charges regarding the Skull & Bones collection, including one that The Tomb housed the skull of legendary Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and that a child's skull was among those on display. Hard evidence is lacking, not surprisingly considering both the charges and the nature of Skull & Bones. Compared with other activities of the group and its secretive members, however, confiscated license plates and purloined skulls are petty concerns relative to espionage, drug smuggling, war profiteering and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, all involving Bonesmen. On these subjects, proof galore exists.

The origins of Skull & Bones are well documented and not flattering. In 1832 William Huntington Russell, whose family operated a firm called Russell & Company, returned from an extended visit in Germany to begin his senior year at Yale. At the time, Germany was in the grip of Hegelian philosophy, which sprang from the mind of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who died while a professor at the University of Berlin the year before Russell arrived for his visit.

Hegel promoted the concept of Absolute Reason, claiming that the state “has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.” Building on
writings from earlier members of the German idealistic philosophy school, such as Immanuel Kant, Hegel's concepts were enormously influential and served as the theoretical underpinnings of both communism and fascism. Russell returned to Yale overflowing with admiration for Germanic society and Hegelian assumptions. Soon after arriving in New Haven, he partnered with fellow student Alphonso Taft to form “The Order of Scull and Bones,” which later became the Order of Skull & Bones.

Something about the atmosphere at Yale during those years encouraged the founding of secret societies among its bright and privileged undergraduates. By the mid-1800s at least seven groups dedicated to surreptitious rituals and identities were flitting around the campus in the dead of night, their members sharing secret signals and names to identify themselves as members of Scroll & Key, Book & Snake, File & Claw, Wolf's Head or some other organization delighting in the exclusivity of its name and rituals. The most exclusive, most secretive and most ritualistic was Skull & Bones.

The original Germanic connection of Skull & Bones has produced speculation about a direct connection between Skull & Bones and the Illuminati. Those who subscribe to this notion point to Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt's words: “By the simplest means, we shall set all in motion and in flames. The occupations must be so allotted and contrived that we may, in secret, influence all political transactions.” Little else connects the two, but the family of founder Russell was involved in activities far more destructive than anything the fabled (and likely fictional) Illuminati had been proven to pursue.

When Russell cofounded Skull & Bones, his family and their company were acquiring massive wealth as a direct result of supplying the Chinese people with opium purchased in India and Turkey. Chinese authorities tried desperately to ban the narcotic, which was draining the country not only of hard currency but of productivity as well. Nothing proved effective; China, in the nineteenth century, was seen by Western countries as a market and a people subject to unfettered exploitation.

The Russell firm became the third largest opium trader in the world, behind Scottish merchants Jardine-Matheson and the British company Dent, and for a time it remained the only opium importer in Canton. The hypocrisy of the British and U.S. governments in this matter remains breathtaking to this day, since both countries had banned the import and use of opium by its own citizens, yet they insisted on the right to ship hundreds of tons of the narcotic into China each year.

Continued efforts by Chinese authorities to ban opium, and resistance to these laws by the importing countries, led to the First Opium War in 1840. The two-year conflict saw China beaten by the technical superiority of the British armed forces. Under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Britain humiliated China by negotiating favored rights of opium importation to that country; France and the U.S. added their signatures to the treaty two years later. Russell profited directly from this formalization of opium rights. While the fortunes of Skull & Bones members may have been acquired from myriad sources over its 175-year history, the group's financial roots are deeply embedded within one of the most scandalous and inhuman episodes of mercantile history.

The chief of operations for the Russell company's Canton office was Warren Delano Jr., grandfather of future U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Delano's position marked the first of a lengthy list of influential families associated with the company and Skull & Bones, which has acted as an incubator for men who sought and seized power out of all proportion to their actual numbers. Skull & Bones founder Russell became a general of the U.S. Army and a state legislator, while his cohort Taft rose through government and ambassadorial ranks to become secretary of war—a post held by many Skull & Bones members—and fathered William Howard Taft, the only man in history to serve as both president and chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The list of Skull & Bones members sounds like a culling of the most prominent males in the U.S. edition of
Who's
Who
: Whitney, Bundy, Harriman, Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, Lovett and, of course, Bush, a list made even more impressive when it is remembered that only fifteen individuals were selected for membership each year.

The selection process for Skull & Bones initiates is suitably dramatic. On a chosen night in April, Skull & Bones seniors arrive outside the rooms of each of the selected juniors, one by one, and pound loudly on the door. When the junior opens the door, a Bonesman slams the candidate on the shoulder and bellows, “Skull and Bones—do you accept?”

If the candidate accepts the invitation, a note wrapped in black ribbon and sealed with black wax is handed over. Inside, along with the Skull & Bones mystical number 322, the message instructs the candidate to appear at The Tomb on initiation night and not to wear any metal.