(NOTE: I wrote this piece for Terry Ross’s Black Lamb in 2008)
I graduated from Yale University in 1964, and in an election year in which both candidates are Yalies who were members of Skull and Bones, some of my friends who think of Yale as a training-ground for Elite Eastern Snobs (which it certainly was while I was there, even more so than its rival in Cambridge), assumed I was an expert about the place’s arcane clubs. This piece started as an email reply to my questioners.
Yup, Yale has always had secret boys’ clubs for Seniors only, although fairly recently, with reluctance, they started admitting girls. They aren’t fraternities, although in my day (and Smirk Dubbya Bush’s – he was a couple of years behind me at Yale), being president of the Yale chapter of a national fraternity like Delta Kappa Epsilon (which Smirk was) almost guaranteed entry into Skull and Bones, considered then to be the most prestigious of the Senior Societies.
There used to be a barbaric ceremony known as Tap Day, which happened every year in May. I’m not sure it still exists: I haven’t followed Yale’s doings much since I left. But in the mid-Sixties every junior who thought he had a chance of being accepted into one of the six Senior Societies assembled the courtyard of one of Yale’s residential colleges (Berkeley, I think, but I’m a little blurry), dressed in a dark suit, and stood around until a representative from one or another of the outfits ran in, gave him a mighty whack on the shoulder, and hollered, “Go to your room!”
At the time the six “above-ground” Senior Societies were Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Book and Snake, Wolf’s Head, Elihu and Berzelius, in no particular order; Bones heads the list because since its founding, its members have wound up more or less running the country. The Big Six were called “above-ground” because they all owned imposing and forbidding windowless club-houses known as “Tombs,” mostly made out of stone. But there were and probably still are a number of “underground” Senior Societies nobody knew anything about, because they were, well, underground, meeting in student rooms and so forth. There’s something in Yale’s air which seems to foster Big Secret Important Clubs You Can’t Get Into.
I was “tapped” for Berzelius, which as such BSICYCGIs go, was fairly harmless. It was founded in the late 19th century by science majors, and named for a Swedish chemist who had something to do with the identification of noble gases (don’t ask me). Back then Yale was dedicated to the liberal arts, and considered science majors grubby nerds, to such an extent that they weren’t even members of Yale College, but had their own little ghetto called the Sheffield Scientific College, a form of academic apartheid they resented. Since they couldn’t be “tapped” for the existing Senior Societies, they formed their own, so they could be just as snobbish and exclusive and secretive as the Yale College liberal artists.
Although by the time I was at Yale, Sheff had long been amalgamated into Yale College, and Berzelius no longer restricted its membership to science majors, it still had a sort of outsider reputation among the above-ground Spooks (Yalie slang for the Senior Societies). BZ preferred mavericks to Future Rulers of the Western World. I was tapped by the President of the Yale Dramatic Association, a good friend who appreciated the fact that I’d spent more time, as he had, doing plays than playing sports or keeping up with my studies.
Our fifteen-man “delegation” (a more portentous term than “membership”) did include one jock, a superlative swimmer who held intercollegiate records in the 200-meter butterfly. And we had a reigning Campus Intellectual, the editor of the undergraduate literary magazine. But the only man in the delegation who entertained anything that could be considered political ambitions was an Oglala Lakota named Sam Deloria, younger brother of the Native American writer Vine Deloria, who wrote CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS and WE TALK, YOU LISTEN, two books which helped to launch the Native American Movement.
Berzelius, back then, met twice a week. One session was semi-open: alumni were permitted to re-enter the Tomb, and the evening usually featured a Distinguished Grad who had gone far in the world, and preached about pulling one’s socks up and getting rich and powerful.
The other session was restricted to the members of the current delegation. Each of us was required to prepare a sort of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, taking turns over the course of the academic year. Immediate criticism was discouraged; instead, the listeners would mail written comments to the evening’s speaker. At the beginning of the next closed meeting the man who had been criticized was allowed a little time to respond.
It sounds a little like the later “encounter sessions,” a meeting of AA, or even a Maoist Self-Criticism ordeal during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But in BZ, at least, nobody took it very seriously. The society laid on lashings of drink, as did most of the other spooks, with the exception of Skull and Bones (Smirk Bush almost turned down Bones in favor of Scroll and Keys, because S & B was dry), so most of us were awash when we began our presentations.
I barely even bothered to prepare one. I played two recordings, one of a polyphonic Mass by Guillaume de Machaut (I was minoring in medieval studies), and the other featuring Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Josh White, Leadbelly and other blues masters (I was also frittering away my expensive time at Yale by learning to play the guitar at a local coffee-shop called La Galette). I think I said some drunk drivel about the difference between the two records illustrating the futility of trying to restrict people to uniform slots. The comments I picked up in my mailbox at Yale Station a day or so later mostly called me a pretentious asshole.
But Sam Deloria liked the two records, and his letter pointed out to me that there really wasn’t a wide gap between Machaut’s music and what the bluesmen put out: apples and oranges, sure, but they were both about the fear of death. He was also amused that I cheated during my presentation, playing music to use up most of my time so I wouldn’t have to talk. He befriended me, sort of.
His own presentation was sharp, cogent and very short. He explained that he was a full-blood Oglala Lakota (“Don’t call me a Sioux”), born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and mostly raised at the other Lakota reservation at Standing Rock. He said he felt very lucky to be at Yale, where he was pre-law. Yale Law School had already accepted him, but he felt Harvard Law was better for his purposes, because of its concentration on contracts and corporate law in general. He wanted to become a corporate lawyer, not to enrich himself by working for big firms, but to restore Indian land-rights and get restitution for broken treaties. “Basically,” he finished, “I want to kick all you Europeans back into the ocean.”
Of course in 1964 most of the BZ delegation laughed at him. It didn’t bother Sam a bit. He was a substantial, solid young man who resembled, a little, the 19th century photos of Sitting Bull, although when I pointed it out he laughed and said, “Bull was Hunkpapa. I’m Oglala. We don’t look a bit alike, but how the hell would you know that?” Sam liked to smoke cigars, and he didn’t drink as much as the rest of us.
But after we became quasi-friends, I realized that his presentation had been entirely serious. So did the literary magazine editor, the only other guy who had really listened to Sam’s presentation. The three of us took to going up onto the roof of the BZ Tomb after the closed sessions. Back then the Tomb fronted one of the worst neighborhoods in New Haven, like a sort of Yalie fort on the edge of a restless black ghetto full of angry, terminally poor people. Sam looked over the roof’s parapet, puffing on his stogie, and remarked that the condition of the people reminded him of the plight of the Lakota after Wounded Knee. “We had these guys my grandparents called ‘Hang-Around-the-Forts,” he said, “Drunk Indians who lived in tent ghettoes around the white cavalry posts, begging for booze and food. That kind of shit still goes on at Standing Rock, around BIA Headquarters, people waiting for the dole. We tried the Ghost Dance and it didn’t work, and these black folks have that Black Muslim outfit up on Dixwell Avenue, and that won’t work either. These people need more lawyers.”
Sam indeed finished law school, and became Chief Legal Counsel to the Lakota Nation, and later, Head Counsel to the entire Native American Movement his brother’s books had help to start. He did a lot of good, I think, over the decades, and perhaps his membership in a prestigious Yale spook, even if it’s only a minor detail in his CV, might have helped him breach the racist bar and meet powerful people who could help him argue his cases in high courts.
I contacted him recently, and he didn’t remember me from Adam. But he did express grim pleasure about the success of the Indian casinos. He was only a little sad that Standing Rock hasn’t set one up to relieve “Europeans” of their money, because the reservation is too far away from a major city.
Berzelius was a little silly, to be sure. Our initiation ceremony involved candles and oaths and hooded black robes, but the spookiest thing in the tomb was an ancient, elegant suit of samurai armor, brought back from Japan by some intrepid alumnus at the turn of the 20th century. It was too small for any of us to get into, even though we tried when we were drunk. But I confess that at 21, I was flattered to have been tapped for one of the Big Six, and although I can’t say I made the “fourteen best friends” the Senior Society system was supposed to encourage, I liked playing the game of privilege. And at least I met a serious man.
BZ went co-ed early on, and the Tomb was the first one to be opened to neighborhood people. For many years it has fostered tutoring programs for local kids, taught by members of current delegations, and in general the Tomb today no longer functions as a sanctuary for 19th century WASP values.
Skull and Bones is more reactionary, and scarier. It was the last spook to admit girls, and a lot of old Boners were so furious they stopped in their checks. But college girls can be as savage as college boys, and the Bones initiation ceremonies, it seems, continue to be terrifying. Rush Limbaugh, neither a Yale graduate nor a Boner, dismissed the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners as nothing worse than a Skull and Bones initiation, so I guess Smirk Bush must have told him something about those rituals of abasement. Bones continues to foster a core of initiates who connect to a generations-old chain of power: Boners constituted the inner circle of both the WW II OSS and its CIA successor, to cite just one example of the influence the spook has had over the determination of American policy for the last sixty-odd years.
Of course when I was at Yale, I only heard gaudy rumors about the place (“Eee, the Tomb’s decorated with human skulls, and every new delegate has to bring in a new one!”). If readers want a detailed exposé of Bones, see Ron Rosenbaum’s book about it, which came out a year or so ago.
Rosenbaum was in Smirk Bush’s class at Yale, but he thought the Senior Societies in general and Bones in particular were a bad idea both for the University and the Republic. Later on, as a famous and well-heeled journalist, he marshaled a clandestine force and managed to get a spy-camera mounted on a building above the courtyard of the Bones tomb, and shot rather murky footage of the outdoor part of an annual initiation. It turned out to be fairly nasty: new members were stripped naked and subjected to verbal and physical abuse. But what seems truly weird to me, if Rosenbaum’s account is accurate, is that the Skull and Bones initiations draw upon Laurence Sterne’s quirky 18th century satirical novel Tristram Shandy for their initiation liturgy. I wonder if the girl MPs in Iraq quoted Uncle Toby while they were leading their naked male prisoners on leashes…
Sheesh, and all BZ had was an old suit of Japanese armor.
I don’t imagine either Bush or Kerry will brag on their Bones membership during the campaign. In fact a recent Yale graduate (Class of 2002), an accomplished young woman, told me that although the Spooks still exist, they’ve gotten even more secretive, because it’s no longer a mark of special favor to be in one, and they are generally mocked by a far more multicultural, intelligent and practical student body today. So the Spooks may be on the way out of New Haven.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Bones, in particular, whose tentacles have extended through geopolitics for decades, isn’t still scary. But at least current Yale students find the grim old boys’ club silly, and the one thing the Boogeyman can’t abide is mockery.
And I’ve left out the silliest part of all. Even Berzelius, rather moderate and easy as Spooks go, had a big, expensive stone building to maintain, and we delegates certainly didn’t cook our own food or clean up after ourselves, for the twice-a-week suppers. Since Bones was richer and more prestigious, I can only assume that the service in the Bones Tomb was ever finer, absent the open bar (if you believe that). So if anyone really wants to know what goes on inside Yale’s Tombs, a good place to start would be by interviewing the cooks, waiters and maintenance workers who kept the damn things running for so many years. Most of them, if my experience in BZ is typical, were and are black, all of them ordinary working-class New Haven people, many of them folks who had worked inside the oo-ee-oo secret Tombs for decades, and had seen the pampered fledgling Masters of the Universe come and go. These people are a resource even Ron Rosenbaum never drew upon for his Bones exposé. Well, maybe when they were hired, they were told they would be killed if they blabbed – and Skull and Bones, a sort of WASP Mafia, has always had the means to back up its threats.