I saw this today about an elite club at Yale called the Skull and Bones club. After a bit of searching, I located this as well.
Both link to articles/stories about an elite club at Yale. Only the wealthiest cream of the crop are initiated - which doesn’t sound all that great:
They swear to give their estate to the club, have tremendous loyalty, own half of Yale, etc…Apparently, George Bush Sr. and Jr. are members.
I have never in my life heard of this - When I saw the MSNBC article, I thought I was reading a fictional book exerpt. Then I found this article from the Washington Post.
I heard of them some time ago; from what I gather, they’re a fraternity, just more secretive than most, and they tend to accept only “social elite” into their membership. They seem to like being thought of as a “secret society”, even though their existence is hardly a secret; hell, there was a joke on The Simpsons about them (Mr. Burns shakes the paw of Bart’s superdog Laddie, and after a moment says, “Smithers, I believe this dog was in Skull And Bones!”). And of course that movie The Skulls was supposed to be rather loosely based on the fraternity.
The only thing notable about them is the number of world leaders and other powerful persons who belonged to S&B while at Yale. Of course, being blue-blood Yalies with powerful parents, odds are they would have risen to positions of power regardless of who they hung out with as an undergrad, so perhaps that isn’t so notable after all.
WV, I assume you meant the part about the initiation.
I agree - it sounds like crap which is why I thought it was part of a fiction book or something. I have a hard time imagining that an intelligent person would go through a rather twisted initiation like that. It’s from the MSNBC article.
I happened to ask my boss, Mr. Chief Legal Counsel himself, who went to school in the New England area what he thought of the group. He did not say much about the group but said that he recalled hearing from many people that years ago, Yale took nude pictures of all the students as a matter of record. He’s about the biggest skeptic on earth so I was surprised to hear him say he thought it was true.
Secret societies are actually fairly common at colleges; Yale has many more than just S&B.
My school has six or eight, I think. Some are single-sex, some are coed. They each have a bit of a different focus- one in particular does a fair bit of activism on campus- but some of them seem like just another excuse to get together and drink.
William Poundstone, in either Big Secrets or Bigger Secrets, I forget which, discussed Skull & Bones. He sensibly pointed out (quoting from memory):
“Conspiracy nuts think the Skull and Bones want to take over the world. Heck, these guys already run the world.”
(Meaning because they’ve got so many leaders, big-time capitalists, etc., not in some weird X-Files conspiracy way.)
When I was a student at UGA, William F. Buckley (rumored to be a member) gave a talk one night, which I attended. He had a question-and-answer session after a while, and a fairly wild-eyed looking radical, who had obviously taken care to sit by the microphone, jumped up and, reading from a notepad, began shouting. “Mr. Buckley, how do you respnod to allegations that the Yale-based Skull and Bones Society is blahblahblah takingovertheworld blahblahblah militaryindustrialcomplex blahblahblah” and so on for quite a while. Buckley stood there smiling a little while the dude went on, and when he had finished, Buckley calmly walked up to the mike and said, “You can hardly expect me to validate your little scoop, can you?”
It was hilarious. Is the kid right? Who knows? Who even listened to what he said, for that matter? I guess he thought Buckley (a master orator, whatever one thinks of his politics) was going to shout, “OK! You caught us, you industrious young scoop! It’s all true! I confess!”
(The kid stomped out in a huff. He might have been crying.)
Dear god, not Phred Phelps! Honestly, I recognize all the names except that one. He’s the only Phelps I can think of. If that’s not his family, whose is it?
The book in the MSNBC link is devoted to debunking it, largely. They just give you a teaser making you think otherwise. This is an excerpt from the Publisher’s Weekly review:
“Robbins (Quarterlife Crisis) begins by setting readers up with the ridiculous myth of Yale’s Skull and Bones, an exclusive society whose powerful members including both presidents Bush are sworn to secrecy for life about the club’s activities: the myth says that the society’s members form a clique that rules the world. Robbins then proposes demystifying the group. On the one hand, she propagates the myth, spelling out how Bonesmen have promoted one another in enormously successful political and business careers; they presided over the creation of the atomic bomb as well as the CIA, she says. On the other hand, Robbins turns up much that is prosaic, as she traces the society’s origins back to 1832, when William Russell founded it as retribution for a classmate’s having been passed over by Phi Beta Kappa; she discovers that the club’s cryptic iconography is derived from German university societies. She reveals the inventory of the Tomb (an evocative name for what is essentially a frat house) and details about the group’s oddly juvenile fraternal ritual. The narrative never gets more dramatic than Robbins staking out the Tomb for President George W. Bush during Yale’s tercentennial celebrations in 2002, and while she relies heavily on the testimony of many Bonesmen, she never names names.”
I recently (last two weeks) read a book at Barnes and Noble (I read fast and I’m cheap) that supposedly tells what Skull and Bones is all about and their customs, etc. Basically, they are a secret social debating club for seniors. You get picked and then spend your senior year preparing for debates, either as a debater or debate master. While the club is wealthy, the “graduates” get no endowments, but do get a nice set of connections to other alum. In summary, fairly harmless, except for the exclusivity thing.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. The MSNBC article said the S&Bers were chosen for their “wealth”, among other attributes…so why would they get 15 grand or whatever? One would think that if wealth is a factor, it would be for the sake of the $$ that members could contribute.
And I still want to know who this “Phelps” family is!
The guy from Mission, Impossible. Didn’t you ever wonder what kind of connections he had to get such a cool job?
Seriously, there’s a Phelps Hall on College Street in New Haven, which houses the Classics Dept. and serves as the main gateway leading from the Green to the Old Campus.
Whoever the Phelpses are, they gave enough dough to have a major building named after them in the late 19th century.
AFAIK, the Phelps that you’re referring to is the family of Anson Phelps, who co-founded the Phelps-Dodge Corp., a copper wire manufacturer. The town of Ansonia, Connecticut, a few miles NW of New Haven, is named after him.
Also, the Hartford Courant did a story on S & B a few years ago. As I recall from the article, a graveyard on the New Haven green (a few blocks from the S & B tomb), was being relocated, and it was found that there were fewer graves in the new location than there had been in the old. :eek: