The home of Skull and Bones on the Yale campus is a stone building resembling a mausoleum, and
known as the Tomb.'' Initiations take place on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River (an islandowned by the Russell Trust Association), with regular reunions on Deer Island and at Yale. Initiation rites reportedly include strenuous and traumatic activities of the new member, while immersed naked in mud, and in a coffin. More important is thesexual autobiography'': The initiate
tells the Order all the sex secrets of his young life. Weakened mental defenses against manipulation,
and the blackmail potential of such information, have obvious permanent uses in enforcing loyaltyamong members.
The loyalty is intense. One of Bush's former teachers, whose own father was a Skull and Bones
member, told our interviewer that his father used to stab his little Skull and Bones pin into his skin
to keep it in place when he took a bath.
Members continue throughout their lives to unburden themselves on their psycho-sexual thoughts to
their Bones Brothers, even if they are no longer sitting in a coffin. This has been the case with
President George Bush, for whom these ties are reported to have a deep personal meaning. Beyond
the psychological manipulation associated with freemasonic mummery, there are very solid politicalreasons for Bush's strong identification with this cult.
Observers of Skull and Bones, apologists and critics alike, have accepted various deceptive notions
about the order. There are two outstanding, among these falsehoods:
- 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 powhistorically important and grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come out of Skull anderful, (^)
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. ItRussell family was the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminals founder was William Huntington Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The
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 formPresident John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerfuler U.S.
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 mEdwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-Briembers of the Russell, Pierpont,tish 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