1. The Secret Origins of Skull & Bones
The story begins at Yale, where three threads of American social
history -- espionage, drug smuggling and secret societies --
intertwine into one.
Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with
the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort
Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from trade
and returned to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a
philanthropist; upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in
Connecticut, he sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent
bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in
1718.
A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There
is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA's headquarters in
Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in
Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush ('48) went to prep
school and joined a secret society at age twelve).
Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of
the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations.
Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the
Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by
the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in
1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship
between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique.
In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the
purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China.
Russell and Company merged with the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830
and became the primary American opium smuggler. Many of the great
American and European fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade.
One of Russell and Company's Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren
Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners
included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who
financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins,
Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge's son organized the United
Fruit company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a
co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)
William Huntington Russell ('33), Samuel's cousin, studied in Germany
from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The "scientific
method" was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia,
which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers
only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the
principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new
educational system. Johan Fitche, in his "Address to the German
People," declared that the children would be taken over by the State
and told what to think and how to think it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche's chair at the
University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his
death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic
philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.
To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is Absolute Reason
and the citizen can only become free by worship and obedience to the
state. Hegel called the state the "march of God in the world" and the
"final end". This final end, Hegel said, "has supreme right against
the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."
Both fascism and communism have their philosophical roots in
Hegellianism. Hegellian philosophy was very much in vogue during
William Russell's time in Germany.
When Russell returned to Yale in 1832, he formed a senior society with
Alphonso Taft ('33). According to information acquired from a break-in
to the "tomb" (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, "Bones is a
chapter of a corps in a German University.... General Russell, its
founder, was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm
friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back
with him to college, authority to found a chapter here." So class
valedictorian William H. Russell, along with fourteen others, became
the founding members of "The Order of Scull and Bones," later changed
to "The Order of Skull and Bones".
The secretive Order of Skull and Bones exists only at Yale. Fifteen
juniors are "tapped" each year by the seniors to be initiated into
next year's group. Some say each initiate is given $15,000 and a
grandfather clock. Far from being a campus fun-house, the group is
geared more toward the success of its members in the post-collegiate
world.
The family names on the Skull and Bones roster roll off the tongue
like an elite party list -- Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Harriman,
Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Phelps,
Perkins, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, Bush, Lovett and so on.
William Russell went on to become a general and a state legislator in
Connecticut. Alphonso Taft was appointed U.S. Attorney General,
Secretary of War (a post many "Bonesmen" have held), Ambassador to
Austria, and Ambassador to Russia (another post held by many
"Bonesmen"). His son, William Howard Taft ('87), is the only man to be
both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court.
.
|
