![]() ![]() Although its membership has been overwhelmingly of a WASP-Republican type, the Skull and Bones was open-minded enough to tap its first African American member in 1949 its first Jewish members in the 1950s and includes among its members the gay, socialist literary critic F. Other prominent Bonesmen include Time-Life founder and media tycoon Henry Luce and conservative pundit William F. In the world of business, the Skull and Bones not only operates several major investment and law firms including Brown Brothers Har-riman, but their members include Averell Harri-man, Dean Witter, Harold Stanley, and Thomas Daniels, founder of ADM (a large agricultural company). Skull and Bones members continue to be connected to every “insider” and potentially sinister international society, including the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission. Yale has long been the center of CIA recruitment, and a large segment of America’s foreign policy and intelligence establishment has been shaped by Bonesmen, including Kennedy’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy and his brother William, who was a leader of both the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations Hugh Cunningham, former director of Clandestine Services for the CIA and Dino Pionzio, the CIA station chief in Chile during the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Lewis Stimson and three members of the Bush clan: Prescott, George, Sr., and George W. They include political leaders such as the only president to become chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Howard Taft Franklin D. Nevertheless, lists of its most illustrious members are readily available. It is said that members are required to leave the room if they are ever asked about the Skull and Bones. But whatever conspiratorial designs one wishes to believe about this quite real secret society, the Skull and Bones has long fulfilled its critical role of, in Ron Rosenbaum’s words, “converting the idle progeny of the ruling class into morally serious leaders of the establishment.” Given its almost frighteningly elite honor roll of members, and its long trail of rumors and exposes, the Skull and Bones has been said to run everything from the Bavarian Illuminati and the New World Order, to the CIA and the East Coast establishment. Russell and Alphonso Taft in 1832, fifteen juniors are selected, or “tapped,” to become members in their senior year. Each year since its founding by William H. Known as “the Order” to its initiates and housed in a windowless crypt known as “the Tomb,” the Skull and Bones is the oldest and most prestigious of Yale’s secret societies. Bush and Monty Burns from The Simpsons, the Skull and Bones may be the most powerful and most mythologized secret society left in the twenty-first century United States. "If you want to know," said one gruff student, upset at finding a visitor peeking into the windows of his club's tomb, "enroll at Yale.Including among its members both President George W. Or to, as the critics say, practice the art of exclusion.įor 15 undergraduates, however, a tap Thursday night was a chance to find out exactly what goes on inside those massive, locked tomb doors. Perhaps it is the chance to join the prestigious alumni. In fact, it is rare for a student to turn down a Skull and Bones tap. "It's a ton of weird bitterness masquerading as humor," said one student who asked that his name not be printed. The criticism and mocking is generally dismissed as jealousy from the untapped. Some of the tricked juniors were said to have cried. Then The Pundits gathered the juniors in a basement and revealed that it was all a joke. They blindfolded the juniors, told them to call other students' answering machines and leave personal information. A group of students calling themselves "The Pundits" this year, tricked a handful of juniors into believing they were tapped. Skull and Bones has also spawned derisive imitations on campus. The societies, a student columnist wrote last week, "aggrandize the self-love of the already-egocentric." "There is enough petty exclusion in this world without institutionalizing it at college," wrote an editor at the Yale Daily News in 1998. ![]()
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