In the spring of 1916, Prescott Bush and "Bunny" Harriman were chosen for membership
in an elite Yale senior-year secret society known as Skull and Bones. This unusually
morbid, death-celebrating group helped Wall Street financiers find active young men of
"good birth" to form a kind of imitation British aristocracy in America.
World War I was then raging in Europe. With the prospect that the U.S.A. would soon
join the war, two Skull and Bones "Patriarchs" , Averell Harriman (class of 1913) and
Percy A. Rockefeller (class of 1900), paid special attention to Prescott's class of 1917.
They wanted reliable cadres to help them play the Great Game, in the lucrative new
imperial era that the war was opening up for London and New York moneycrats. Prescott
Bush, by then a close friend of "Bunny" Harriman, and several other Bonesmen from
their class of 1917 would later comprise the core partners in Brown Brothers Harriman,
the world's largest private investment bank.
World War I did make an immense amount of money for the clan of stock speculators
and British bankers who had just taken over U.S. industry. The Harrimans were stars of
this new Anglo-American elite.
Averell's father, stock broker E.H. Harriman, had gained control of the Union Pacific
Railroad in 1898 with credit arranged by William Rockefeller, Percy's father, and by
Kuhn Loeb & Co.'s British-affiliated private bankers, Otto Kahn, Jacob Schiff and Felix
Warburg.
William Rockefeller, treasurer of Standard Oil and brother of Standard founder John D.
Rockefeller, owned National City Bank (later "Citibank" ) together with Texas-based
James Stillman. In return for their backing, E.H. Harriman deposited in City Bank the
vast receipts from his railroad lines. When he issued tens of millions of dollars of
"watered" (fraudulent) railroad stock, Harriman sold most of the shares through the Kuhn
Loeb company.
The First World War elevated Prescott Bush and his father, Samuel P. Bush, into the
lower ranks of the Eastern Establishment.
As war loomed in 1914, National City Bank began reorganizing the U.S. arms industry.
Percy A. Rockefeller took direct control of the Remington Arms company, appointing his
own man, Samuel F. Pryor, as the new chief executive of Remington.
The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Prescott's father, Samuel P.
Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War
Industries Board. The senior Bush took national responsibility for government assistance
to and relations with Remington and other weapons companies.
This was an unusual appointment, as Prescott's father seemed to have no background in
munitions. Samuel Bush had been president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Co. in
Columbus, Ohio, makers of railcar parts. His entire career had been in the railroad
business-- supplying equipment to the Wall Street-owned railroad systems.