Skull and Bones: Yale’s Most Notorious Secret Society

Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University, formally the Chapter 322 of the Russell Trust Association. Founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft (the future father of President William Howard Taft), the order has been headquartered in a stone building known as the Tomb at 64 High Street in New Haven since 1856. It is the most famous college secret society in the United States, and one of the best-known fraternal organizations in the world.

The society’s reputation rests on three foundations: the dramatic and somewhat morbid symbolic vocabulary, the unusually distinguished and dynastic pattern of its membership, and the unbroken secrecy of its inner operations. For a list of its most discussed alumni, see the notable Bonesmen reference. For a broader look at American college secret societies, see the college secret societies list and the Bohemian Grove reference, where similar elite-network patterns can be observed in adult American life.

Founding

The conventional story of the founding has Skull and Bones emerging from a small student club in the 1830s, founded in part as a reaction against the Yale literary and debating societies of the early nineteenth century and in part as an offshoot of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter that had existed at Yale since 1780. Two years earlier, in 1830, Russell and Taft had been on a trip to Germany, where they were supposedly exposed to the Order of the Skull of the German student fraternities, the Burschenschaften, and a number of German intellectual societies. The order, as it took shape at Yale, borrowed its central symbols — the skull, the crossbones, the number 322 — from the German model.

The 1832 founding is now generally accepted by historians. Yale’s own official history of Skull and Bones gives the year 1832, and the Russell Trust was chartered in Connecticut in 1856 to manage the order’s property. There is a persistent alternative claim that the order is older, sometimes dating its foundation to 1830 or even 1812. The alternative claims are best understood as part of the order’s own mythology and have not been confirmed by independent evidence.

The two co-founders represent the two main currents that would shape the order’s membership. William Huntington Russell (1809–1885) was a Yale graduate of the class of 1833, a member of one of the wealthy Russell family of Massachusetts (which had made its fortune in textiles), and an early leader of Yale’s effort to professionalize its American literature curriculum. Alphonso Taft (1810–1891), the father of William Howard Taft, was a Yale graduate of the class of 1833, a Cincinnati lawyer and politician who would later serve as Secretary of War and Attorney General under President Grant, and a founder of the Skull and Bones chapter of the Republican Party. The two families — the Russells and the Tafts — would supply Skull and Bones with a continuous dynastic pipeline of members into the twentieth century.

The Tomb

The Tomb is a windowless stone building of about 3,400 square feet with a flat concrete roof, set back from High Street behind a wrought-iron fence in a New Haven residential block. It was built in 1856, replacing an earlier wooden building on the same site. The architecture is neo-Gothic in a deliberately severe style, and the only external ornament is a low-relief carved skull and crossbones above the front door.

The interior of the building is divided into several rooms: the Grave, the main meeting room, in which the alleged bones of various distinguished figures are kept in glass cases; the Yard, a small interior courtyard open to the sky; the Kravis Room and the Kravis Library; the Trophy Room, a repository of memorabilia; and a series of small apartments used for the tap-day weekend. The building also has a swimming pool, a small gymnasium, and a single-track bowling alley, all of which were added in the early twentieth century.

The Tomb is owned by the Russell Trust Association, a Connecticut trust established by Russell himself in 1856. The trust is the legal owner of all Skull and Bones property, including the Tomb, the order’s investments, and the order’s archives. The IRS has at various times challenged the tax-exempt status of the Russell Trust; the trust’s current filing status is as a private foundation. The financial scale of the trust is not public, but it is widely believed to be substantial.

The 322

The number 322 appears in the order’s name (“Chapter 322 of the Russell Trust”), on the door of the Tomb, and in much of the order’s internal vocabulary. Three interpretations have circulated:

The 1832 reading (most parsimonious): 1832 was the year of the order’s conventional founding, and “322” is the last three digits. This is the interpretation offered in most internal order documents and in the Order’s own historical materials.
The Demosthenes reading (the order’s stated rationale): 322 BCE is the year of the death of Demosthenes, the Athenian orator who took poison rather than submit to Macedonian rule. The order treats this as a symbol of resistance to tyranny. This is the explanation the order has historically given to its own members.
The Weishaupt reading (conspiracy-literature construction): 32 is the highest degree of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and 1782 is the year the Bavarian Illuminati was said to have moved to its final form. The 322 is read as “32-2” or “3-22” in the same way Masonic degrees are numbered. This reading was developed in 20th-century conspiracy literature and has no support in the order’s own documents.

The most rigorous historians of the order (Page, Wortman) treat the 1832 reading as the most likely intended meaning, with the Demosthenes reference as a deliberately literary embellishment added by the founders.

The Knights of Eulalia

A persistent legend holds that Skull and Bones is the American branch of a German student order called the Knights of Eulalia, founded in 1832 in Munich. The legend has been told and retold in popular accounts, often with a great deal of invented detail. The historical evidence for the Knights of Eulalia is essentially zero. No contemporary German source mentions such an order, and the 1832 date does not match the documented activities of any German student fraternity of the period.

The more likely origin of the Eulalia legend is the Lyman Beecher, a Yale graduate of 1797, who served as a Congregational minister in several New England towns and is often credited with passing the German fraternity story to Russell and Taft. Beecher’s letters to his son Edward (a Yale graduate of 1817) describe a visit to a German student organization of uncertain name; whether this was the Knights of Eulalia, the Burschenschaft of a particular German university, or a figment of Beecher’s narrative is unclear. The Eulalia story should be treated as a piece of Skull and Bones lore rather than as a historical fact.

The Symbolism

The symbolic vocabulary of the order is more elaborate than that of most American college societies:

The skull and crossbones is the principal emblem and appears on the door of the Tomb, on the rings of members, and on the page of the official register.
The ivy and the number 322 appear on the official seal of the Russell Trust.
A map of the world with figures, and a scale, are described in the order’s own internal references as part of the symbolic furniture.
The tombstone of Demosthenes is reportedly depicted in one of the rooms.
Mortal remains of various historical figures are reportedly kept in the Trophy Room. The most discussed include the bones of Geronimo, the bones of Martin Van Buren, and the skulls of Cervantes, Pizarro, and John Paul Jones. The Geronimo claim is the most frequently denied by the order; it has also been denied by the family of Geronimo, who have demanded the return of the alleged remains since the 1980s.
The number fifteen is the number of new members elected each year, the knightship year is the year of election, and the pat is the password of the year.

The internal rituals are described in the order’s own pamphlets, in the Yale student newspaper accounts of the late nineteenth century, and in the well-known 1871 History of Secret Societies by John M. Taylor. The actual tap-day weekend begins with the “pat”, a series of taps on the door of the candidate’s dormitory room on tap day in April, the “knightship year” is the year of selection, and the “Bones” nickname is the most common informal term for the order.

Tap Day and Initiation

The annual recruitment ritual is called Tap Day, and takes place on a Thursday in late April. The fifteen members of the active chapter (“patriarchs” or “old Bones”) meet in the Tomb, then disperse across the Yale campus. When a patriarch encounters a senior he has selected, he taps the senior on the shoulder, says a single line, and the senior is required to follow him to a meeting point. The tap is final: the selected senior may accept or refuse, but the order’s choice is the order’s choice.

The fifteen tapped seniors then spend a weekend in the Tomb — the so-called “Bones weekend” — during which the details of the order’s inner life are revealed to them. The weekend is described in varying degrees of detail in published accounts, and is also a favorite subject of Yale student journalism. The accounts agree on the broad outlines: the candidates are given a new name, are made to take a financial and a personal oath, are given a tour of the Trophy Room, and are initiated into the order’s private symbols and secret signs. The specifics of the initiation ceremony are not known with certainty, and the order’s own representatives have declined to confirm or deny any particular published account.

The financial oath has been the source of considerable legal and political controversy. Members of the order are required to contribute to the Russell Trust on a graduated scale based on their subsequent income, and the contributions are believed to be substantial. Critics of the order have argued that the financial commitment constitutes a kind of binding obligation that is incompatible with public service; defenders have argued that it is no different from the alumni-giving obligations common to most American private institutions.

The Membership Dynasties

The most discussed feature of Skull and Bones is the dynastic pattern of its membership. The order has, over the course of its history, supplied a continuous pipeline of American elite figures to the Russell Trust, including:

The Russell family: William Huntington Russell, the co-founder, and his descendants, including several Russell senators, judges, and diplomats.
The Taft family: Alphonso Taft, the co-founder; William Howard Taft (Yale 1878), the president and chief justice; Robert A. Taft (Yale 1910) and Robert A. Taft Jr. (Yale 1940), the senators.
The Bush family: Prescott Bush (Yale 1917), the senator; George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948), the president; George W. Bush (Yale 1968), the president.
The Harriman family: W. Averell Harriman (Yale 1913), the governor and diplomat.
The Weyerhaeuser family: George Weyerhaeuser (Yale 1953) and his relatives.
The Stimson family: Henry L. Stimson (Yale 1888), the Secretary of War and Secretary of State.
The Lovett family: Robert Lovett (Yale 1918), the Secretary of Defense.
The Whitney family: various Whitneys of the New York establishment.

A separate page covers the most discussed Bonesmen in detail.

The Bush family connection is the most discussed. Three generations of Bushes have been Skull and Bones members, and the order’s critics have used the connection as a centerpiece of their allegations of dynastic political control. The order’s defenders point out that the Bush family’s involvement in the Republican Party and the broader American establishment long predated the order’s specific relationship with them, and that the order is best understood as a mirror of American elite life rather than a driver of it.

The “Gathering of Eagles”

The intelligence-alumni network of Skull and Bones is one of the most distinctive features of the order. A disproportionate number of CIA directors, deputy directors, and senior operations officers have been Bonesmen. The connection is now a permanent part of the American national-security establishment.

The relevant facts are well documented:

Prescott Bush (Yale 1917) was a senior Wall Street banker and, briefly, a United States senator.
George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948) was Director of the CIA from 1976 to 1977, the first Bonesman to head the agency.
A long list of senior CIA officials have been Bonesmen, including William F. Buckley Jr. (the spy-novel publisher and CIA station chief), and a number of senior operations officers of the 1950s and 1960s.

The phrase “Gathering of Eagles” is sometimes used to refer to the intelligence-veterans’ events that bring together senior Bonesmen, alumni of the Office of Strategic Services, and alumni of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The phrase is also used in a more general sense to refer to the network of Bonesmen in the national-security establishment.

The Order and American Politics

Skull and Bones has produced three American presidents (Taft, the elder Bush, and the younger Bush), two senators of unusual long service (Prescott Bush and Robert Taft Jr.), a large share of the senior leadership of the CIA, two Supreme Court justices, and a substantial fraction of the American diplomatic corps of the twentieth century. It is, in this sense, less a single secret society than a node in the broader American elite network, comparable in function to the Bohemian Grove for the post-college years or to the Council on Foreign Relations for the policy world.

The conspiracy theories about the order are addressed in the relevant reference, and the membership of the order is broken down in the notable Bonesmen page. For the place of Skull and Bones in the wider American college-society tradition, see the college secret societies list.

Criticisms and Defenses

The order has been criticized on four main grounds:

Discrimination: The order admitted only men until 1991, when it admitted its first women. Critics have argued that the all-male tradition made the order a vehicle for the perpetuation of male elite networks.
Secrecy and the public interest: Critics have argued that the order’s secrecy, and in particular the alleged financial oath, is incompatible with public service. The argument has been made most explicitly in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, when the younger Bush’s Bonesmen status became a minor campaign issue.
Anti-Catholic allegations: The order’s Catholic critics have alleged that the order is theologically anti-Catholic. The order has consistently denied the claim.
Theft of relics: The order has been accused of possessing the bones of Geronimo without the consent of the family. The order has denied the specific claim; the Geronimo family has been making the same demand for return of the alleged remains since the 1980s.

The order’s defenses, as articulated in the rare on-the-record statements of its members, are:

The order is a private social organization with a long history, and it is not in any formal relationship with the state, the government, or the political system.
The members of the order are bound by the same legal and political obligations as any other American citizens.
The order’s secrecy is no different from the privacy that any private association has a right to.
The membership rolls of the order are no more distinguished than the membership rolls of, say, the Harvard Lampoon or the Order of the Coif; the political prominence of the order is largely a function of the prominence of the families from which it has historically drawn its members.

Skull and Bones in Popular Culture

Skull and Bones has been a recurring character in American popular culture since the 1870s, when the first popular exposés of the order were published. The 1871 History of Secret Societies by John M. Taylor gave the order a long public description, and the 1877 Skull and Bones by E. H. Trumans was the first book-length treatment. The order appears in the 1946 John O’Hara novel Blowing Wild, in the 1978 William Peter Blatty novel The Ninth Configuration, in the 1999 Tom Clancy novel Rainbow Six, and in a long list of works of popular history, including the 2004 Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of George W. Bush, which made the Bush-Bones connection a centerpiece of its argument about the Bush family.

For the broader tradition of American college secret societies, see the college secret societies list, the Bohemian Grove reference, and the famous secret societies overview.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard treatments are Marc Wortman, The Secret Society: Yale and the Hush, Hush, History of Skull and Bones (2004); Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Rites of the Elite (2002); and the older Anthony C. Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of George W. Bush (2004), which treats the Bush-Bones connection. The Russell Trust’s tax filings and 2009 IRS challenge are covered in the Hartford Courant and New York Times coverage of 2009. The Robbins and Wortman books both draw on the same pool of published membership lists and on the order’s own historical materials; neither author claims to have seen internal rituals.

The Skull and Bones membership list, college secret societies list, Bohemian Grove explained, conspiracy theories and hidden power, and famous secret societies cover the surrounding context.