Skull & Bones, Now vs. Then

Skull & Bones members during the college days of George H. W. Bush (standing to the left of the clock) and in 2010 (Photos adapted from Anthropology.net IvyGateBlog.com, via The Atlantic)

The vaunted Skull and Bones secret society is now accepting women and ethnic minorities—and gays, the Atlantic tells us in an amusing article titled “Skull & Bones: It’s Not Just for White Dudes Anymore,” and which supposedly delves into the society’s present as well as past.

From the article: “For generations, the organization’s alumni corps has granted a coterie of white, privileged, predominately heterosexual men easier entry into the upper echelons of American society.

But that was then. More recently, the organization has become the antithesis of what it was when Kerry joined in 1966: Racist, sexist and elitist practices have been jettisoned in a rush towards more egalitarian standards. Yale’s famous old boys’ club has become a mélange of minorities, genders, and sexual identities that’s less dynastic and more dynamic than ever.”

The author claims to have contacted 200 members of the secretive Yale society—from which such famed persons as George W (and H.W.) Bush, William Howard Taft, and Time magazine founder Henry Luce graduated—and gotten about five percent, or 10 people, to talk to him on condition of anomyity about the supposedly changing society.

E., a woman selected in the 2000s, says that they want to undo “certain attitudes of the past” (or only picking white males) and “actively negate them” (picking a much more diverse crowd).

She also, though—as everyone interviewed did—disagrees with the “allegations of malice” from people including historian Anthony Sutton (author of America’s Secret Establishment). Or the theory that the Skull and Bones is a front for a sinister organization that only lets hallowed bloodlines in, a connection to the Illuminati.

 “We weren’t inducted into an Illuminati-like society that guarantees our success,” says E. “None of us plan to establish a ‘New World Order.’”

Instead, we are told, they meet twice a week, once to socialize and the other to debate “cultural and political affairs,” meeting in a windowless tomb that non-members are forbidden to enter. Skulls and skeletons are many in here.

And they also introduce each other with long oral auto-biography’s “a time-consuming event meant to forge friendship.”

That’s where the present seems to come in. The beginning may have been letting Black males in 1965, and now includes all types of ethnicities and other people.  Indeed, the article portrays that in after that people began joining less and less, concerned with the prospect of women not being allowed in. When John Kerry tried to convince one elite to join, he was told “you’re a liberal–why do you support this organization that does not admit women?”

From the article: “There were rituals that some women would find offensive,” says a Bonesmen from the 1960s, who refused to elaborate. “Some [alumni] wanted to fight to make sure those traditions didn’t have to change.

Now, like Congress, the Oval Office and the U.S. military, the Order has reached new levels of diversity, in part because today’s Bonesmen want to quash any remaining vestige of exclusivity.

“The stereotype of the society as a bastion of white-male privilege has survived for way longer than it was true,” says a Bonesman from the mid-1990s.

In recent years, the Bones crypt has transformed into a forum where women and racial and sexual minorities express their struggles (scenes that may have Bonesman William F. Buckley Jr. turning over in his grave). Hispanic members have explained they’ve felt like second-class citizens; Arabs have revealed incidents of Islamophobia; women have confessed to bouts of bulimia; and gay students have affirmed how hurtful epithets like ‘fag’ can be, Bonesmen report.”

And referring to how George W. Bush and John Kerry were criticized about Skull & Bones’ history of discrimination (Did they?), and how people were “arguing they belonged to an establishment with little respect for democratic values,” that would be unlikely “if a Bonesman from the Millennial generation runs for high office.”