that it is essentially an American group, an assembly of wealthy, elite ``patriots''; it is
in fact, an agency for British Empire penetration and subversion of the American
republic; and
that it is somehow the unique center of conspiratorial control over the United States.
This misconception is certainly understandable, given the rather astonishing number of
powerful, historically important and grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come
out of Skull and Bones. But there are in fact congruent organizations at other Ivy League
colleges, which reflect, as does Skull and Bones, the over-arching oligarchical power of
several heavily intermarried financier families.
The mistaken, speculative notions may be corrected by examining the history of Skull
and Bones, viewed within the reality of the American Eastern Establishment.
Skull and Bones--the Russell Trust Association--was first established among the class
graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington Russell of
Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of incalculable wealth
derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and
Company, the great opium syndicate.
There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against, freemasonry
and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in particular by the anti-masonic
writings of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who
take oaths to politically powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for
loyalty to a democratic republic.
But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply-intermarried grouping of families
then ruling Connecticut (see accompanying chart). The blood-proud members of the
Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop and Hubbard families were
prominent in the pro-British party within the state. Many of their sons would be among
the members chosen for the Skull and Bones Society over the years.
The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle
for political control over the new U.S. republic.
Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established Russell and
Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into
China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire.
The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created by
Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation of the self-
styled ``blue bloods'' or Brahmins of Boston's north shore. Forced out of the lucrative
African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot,
Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings
and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of
these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made