Skull And Bones
Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. 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 president of the University of California, first president of Johns Hopkins University, and the founding president of the Carnegie Institution. The society is known informally as “Bones”, and members are known as “Bonesmen”.
During the senior year, each Skull and Bones class meets every Thursday and Sunday night.
President William Howard Taft, President George H. W. Bush, his son, President George W. Bush, and the latter’s 2004 Presidential opponent, Senator John Kerry, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Founder of Blackstone, Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Harold Stanley, co-founder of Morgan Stanley and Frederick W. Smith, Founder of Fedex are all reported to be members.
History
Skull 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 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.
Skull and Bones owns an island in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island:
“‘The 40 acre 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.’”—Alexandra Robbins, TheAtlantic.com
Yale became coeducational in 1969, but Skull & Bones remained all-male at the behest of the Russell Trust Association. The Class of 1991 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.[8][11] Wolf’s Head Society was the last all-male society at Yale.[12]
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.
