Skull & Bones and the New World Order

[Khorazyn]

THE ORDER OF SKULL & BONES

Skull & Bones was founded at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in 1832. It is the oldest and most prestigious of Yale's seven secret societies. Among the others are: Scroll & Key, Book & Snake, Wolf's Head, Eliahu, and Berzelius. These fraternities serve as a recruiting ground for young men destined for careers in government, law, finance and other influential sectors of American life. Skull & Bones is the elite of the elite among these secret societies. Only Scroll & Key can claim a near equal influence on American affairs over the past 160 years. Unlike the Greek fraternities on most other American university campuses, Skull & Bones and its similar secret societies exist exclusively at Yale. They are not part of any nationwide public association. The other elite Ivy League colleges, Harvard and Princeton have similar e~clusive secret societies. Yet, even among these few universities, the secret societies of Yale-led by Skull & Bones-are unchallenged in their influence on American political affairs.


According to some accounts, the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale has an underground affiliation with two other societies which were simultaneously founded at two other locations. The number "322" that appears under the skull and crossbones on the Order's emblem is believed to indicate the year of its founding-1832-and the fact that it is the second lodge within an international system. By some accounts, the lodge holding the number "1" is in Germany and the lodge numbered "3" is based at another American college.


Since its founding, Skull & Bones has only inducted about 2,500 members. At any given time, only about 600 or so members of the Order are alive. This small number underscores the tremendous concentration of power in the hands of its members. If the members of Skull & Bones were to select a Hall of Fame from among their own elite ranks, some of the people whose names would almost certainly appear at the top of the list would be: * Alphonso Taft, a founding member of the Order who served as the Secretary of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1876-1880). * William Howard Taft, the only man to ever serve as both the President of and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. * Henry Lewis Stimson, partner in the Wall Street law firm of Root and Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft (1908-1912), Governor General of the Philippines (1926-1928), Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) and Secretary of War under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1940-1946). * Averell Harriman, investment banker with Brown Brothers Harriman, director of the Lend-Lease program of the U.S. State Department (1941-1942), U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943-1946), Governor of New York, Under Secretary of State for Asia (1961-1963), and presidential secret envoy to Soviet leaders Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov.

· Robert Lovett, partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, Assistant Secretary of War for Air (1941-1945), Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense (1950), leading member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.
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* Harold Stanley, investment banker, founder of Morgan Stanley.
* Robert A. Taft, United States Senator (1938-1950).
· Prescott Bush, investment banker and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, United States Senator from Connecticut, father of George Herbert Walker Bush
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· * George Herbert Walker Bush, United States Congressman (1964-1970), Chairman of the Republican National Committee, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, first American Diplomatic Liaison to the Peoples Republic of China, Director of the Central Intelligence Ageney (1975-1977). Vice President of the United States (1980-1988), President of the United States (1988- ).
· * John Thomas Daniels, agro-industnalist, founder of Archer Daniels Midland.
· * Hugh Wilson, foreign service officer, Counsellor to Japan (1911- 1921), U.S. Minister to Switzerland (1924-1927), Assistant Secretary of State (1937-1938). Ambassador to Germany 1938), Special Assistant to the Secretary of State (1939-1941), Office of Strategic Services (1941-1945)

The members of the Order of Skull & Bones, true to their firm belief in "constructive confusion," have intentionallv allowed a series of conflicting mythologies to spring up about the origins and history of their secret fraternity. According to one version of the Order's founding, it was an outgrowth of an earlier British or Scottish freemasonic grouping first established at All Soul s College at Oxford University in the late 17th century. Another version of the history of Skull & Bones is that it grew out of the German "nationalistic" secret .societies of the early 19th century. Still a third explanation is that Skull & Bon~s is an uniquely American institution which adopted some of the rituals of European freemasonry, but molded these rituals and beliefs into a new form. Regardless of these conflicting accounts, it can be stated with certainty that the Order was first established on the Yale campus in 1832 It was officially incorporated only in 1856 under the name Russell Trust Association. According to virtually all the available biographical data on its early members, the money required to sustain the secret order's campus affairs and its broader role in placing its members into key positions of influence upon their graduation from Yale, derived from the opium trade in the Far East. That trade was set up by the British East India Company and was flourishing by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 ending the American War for Independence. The East India Company during this period was controlled by the Baring Brothers Bankt (Toward the closing decades of the l7th century, the British House of Rothschild would supplant the Baring Brothers as the controlling financial interests in the China opium trade.


Through the sponsorship of the Barings and also the Rothschilds, a number of leading New England families, some of whom had sided with Great Britain during the American Revolution, were brought into the opium trade as junior partners. These merchant families ran fleets of clipper ships and became in many cases fabulously wealthy as the result of their asscoiation with the British East India Company. Among these key New England merchant families were; Cabot, Coolidge, Forbes, Higginson, Sturgis, Lodge, Lowell, Perkins and Russell. These New England merchant families founded the United Fruit Company and the Bank of Boston. The founding families of Skull & Bones included the Russell and Perkins families, Over several generations, however, all these families heavily intemarried and became, in effect, one extended power grouping. William Huntington Russell incorporated Skull & Bones as the Russell Trust Association.


Throughout the 20th century, the Russell Trust Association listed the New York City headquarters of Brown Brothers Harriman as its address. Russell was valedictorian of his class at Yale in 1833. He and his Skull & Bones comrades considered themselves to be a special elite among the merchant banking and Puritan pilgrim elite of Yale. They took the Puritan beliefs of the early New England settlers, that they were "elected by God," and pre-ordained to rule North America. The founding of Yale College in 1701 pre-dates the Amencan Revolution by several generations. Many of the founders of Yale were righteous men of the Puritan heritage who devoutly believed in God and country. Some of these patriotic souls later made up the core of Benjamin Franklin's political coalition which ultimately broke with the mother country, Great Britain. Many graduates of Yale were active in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States.

Two critics of the Order, historian Antony Sutton and investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum (himself a Yale graduate), both concluded that Skull & Bones has degenerated since its founding and has taken on more of the occult and ritualistic trappings of the majority of European freemasonic and illuminati secret societies. Sutton charges that the Order is secretly known among its initiates as the "Brotherhood of Death" and has become an evil instrument in the hands of America's secret power elite. Rosenbaum claims that the society's Germanic origins are inherently wicked and pre-Nazi. In a long 1977 article in Esquire magazine, Rosenbaum charged that the Skull & Bones building on the Yale campus houses remnants from Hitler's private collection of silver. While these stories cannot be dismissed out of hand, it must be noted that authors Rosenbaum and Sutton may be biased.


As a young Jewish student at Yale, Rosenbaum was almost automatically excluded on religious grounds from the inner sanctum of the campus's secret societies. Sutton, a British-born eccentric historian, proudly admits his strong British biases, frequently citing philosopher John Stuart Mill as the spiritual mentor in his book on the Order. Despite the possible personal biases in these two accounts of the history of the Order of Skull & Bones, it must be acknowledged that the membership of the society has tended over generations to converge upon a small group of New England families who have intermarried and then sponsored their sons and nephews into the Order. This kind of inbreeding always tends to produce narrow-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, which can be a serious shortcoming, particularly among individuals responsible for charting the course of a nation as powerful as the United States.


It can be documented by comparing the family charts of the early Bonesmen that there is today a core group of no more than 20 to 30 families who form the nucleus of the Order. The majority are old-line Puritan families who came to North America in the very first wave of settlers in the 17th century. Among these prominent families are: Whitney, Lord, Phelps. Wadsworth, Allen, Bllndy, Adams, Stimson, Taft, Gilman and Perkins. A second group of families in the Skull & Bones core earned fabulous fortunes during the 18th and 19th centuries and thus won a rite of passage into the New England elite, even though they were not among the earliest settlers.


The leading Skull & Bones families in this second category are: Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison, Pillsbury and Weyerhauser. A few of the Jewish banking families who made their way from Germany to the United States during the 18th and l9th centuries were eventually granted limited access to the WASP inner sanctums. Some families, like the Schiff, Warburg, Guggenheim and Meyer families, were unofficially designated as intermediaries between the New England WASPs and their cousins in London. This was especially true after the Rothschild interests supplanted the Anglican Baring group as the most powerful financial cabal in the City of London. Some of these German Jewish families became so absorbed into the WASP or Anglican society that they eventually converted from Judaism to Protestantism and were gradually ostracized from the Jewish aristocracy.


The WASP families, however, never saw the prominent Jewish investment banking families of America as equals. The Jews were considered politically and cultrally different by the WASPs, and have never been accepted into the latter's inner circle. For the most part, these Jewish merchant bankers are viewed with suspicion and distrust by the members of the Order. Moreover, the Jewish fraternal societies, such as B'nai B'rith, were formed out of the British-based Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Their sponsors in America, the Rothschilds and the Cecil Rhodes Trust (also known as the British Round Table Group), are connected with the British Foreign Office and its secret