-Caveat Lector-
Kris, while I often only weigh in with comments to disagree, I must here
express thanks for all the information you are taking the time to provide
the list. You are setting a high bar and elevated example for all of us to
try and follow. Jim Condit Jr.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Conspiracy Theory Research List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Kris Millegan
> Sent: Sunday, February 28, 1999 1:09 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [CTRL] [2] AMERICA'S SECRET ARISTOCRACY
>
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> an excerpt from:
> AMERICA'S SECRET ARISTOCRACY
> by Stephen Birmingham (C) 1987
> Berkley Book, New York, NY 1990
> -----
> A very interesting book for details and such. Very well
> researched and I would
> reccommend many of Mr. Birmingham's books to any searcher of
> history. For it
> is my belief, that by better understanding history, we can see
> today's course.
> Om
> K
> -----
> 18. Secret Society
>
> Only recently a New York woman, who can trace her lineage to
> the gracious
> Dutch women who founded Society in New York, gave a dinner for
> fifty of her
> friends. Practically all of them came of families antedating the
> arrival of
> the British fleet that turned Nieuw Amsterdam into New York. No
> mention was
> made of the affair in any paper in New York City, first, because the old
> regime did not and still does not believe that publicity is necessary to
> social success, and second, because the city at large has forgotten the
> families who built it.
>
> Yet these families endure, submerged, and women whose ancestors
> have directed
> the social life of New York for ten or more generations still continue to
> entertain and be entertained without the blare of publicity.
>
> These words, from Mrs. Joful King Van Rensselaer's book, The
> Social ladder,
> were penned in 1924. But they could just as easily, and
> accurately, have been
> written in 1987, and about private enclaves of New York gentlemen. Few New
> Yorkers today are probably aware of the existence, in their very
> midst, of a
> small, elite men's club called The Zodiac. It is typical of
> America's secret
> aristocracy that The Zodiac should have been created, in a very
> real sense, in
> secret, that it should have passed its hundredth anniversary
> several years ago
> without anyone but its members knowing, and that even the Social Register-
> which publishes the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and
> officers of all
> the elite clubs in the country-should be unaware of The Zodiac.
> The Zodiac has
> no clubhouse, and no address, and no telephone. It has no bylaws and no
> president, and no list of its members has ever been published.
> And yet it is
> easily the most exclusive club in the United States. As its name
> implies, its
> membership is restricted, at any given time, to only twelve male members.
>
> The Zodiac was founded in the 1870s by the elder J. Pierpont
> Morgan, and to
> understand the principles behind The Zodiac it is first necessary to
> understand Mr. Morgan. J. P. Morgan has enjoyed, for some reason,
> the worst
> posthumous reputation of any man in the history of American banking and
> finance. History has portrayed Morgan as vain, autocratic, stingy,
> curmudgeonly, and money-mad. He was in fact none of these things.
> What he was,
> was an aristocrat to the marrow. When Morgan died in 1913, much
> was made in
> the press of the fact that, out of his $69.5 million fortune, only a small
> portion of his estate about $700,000-was left to charities, giving the
> impression that the public weal was one of the last things Morgan
> cared about.
> What was overlooked was that, during his lifetime, Morgan had
> contributed vast
> sums to a wide variety of causes. He was a notable collector of
> rare books,
> paintings, and other art objects, and many of these were given to the
> Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was president. Over the
> years, he had
> made large financial gifts to this museum, as well as to the
> American Museum
> of Natural History, Harvard College (especially to its medical
> school), the
> Lying-in Hospital of New York, and the New York trade schools. He
> was also the
> principal financial backer of the Groton School, in
> Massachusetts. It has also
> been forgotten that, in 1895, when the U.S. Treasury's gold
> reserves had sunk
> dangerously low, Morgan's bank loaned the government $62 million
> in gold to
> shore up the gold reserves to the $100 million level, thereby
> supporting the
> country's currency and averting a financial panic. In his will,
> furthermore,
> Morgan stipulated that his son and principal heir, J. P. Morgan,
> Jr., should
> make regular annual gifts to designated charities.
>
> At the time of Morgan's death, the "huge" size of his fortune
> was drawn to
> public attention. In fact, his fortune, though respectable, was
> far smaller
> than those of Henry Frick, E. H. Harriman, or Andrew Mellon and
> even smaller
> than those of Thomas Fortune Ryan and Payne Whitney. And Morgan's
> money was as
> nothing compared with that of the DuPonts or John D. Rockefeller. It was
> Andrew Carnegie who, commenting with surprise on the quality of
> Morgan's art
> collection, said, "And to think-he wasn't even a rich man!"
>
> Perhaps Morgan's most famous comment was his laconic reply to a
> man who asked
> him how much a yacht cost. "If a man has to ask," he answered, "he can't
> afford it." At the same time, as an aristocrat who believed that sailing
> provided the truest test of a man's character, he also once said,
> "You can do
> business with anyone, but you can only sail a boat with a gentleman." Also
> memorable was his humorous reply to a friend who had asked him to lend him
> some money. "No," replied Morgan, "but I'll let you walk down the
> street with
> me."
>
> Admittedly, Morgan had a crusty, distant personality and never
> made a fuss
> over other people. He disliked being fussed over himself and, in
> his London
> office, became so annoyed with the European practice whereby
> underlings bowed
> themselves in and out of the offices of their superiors that he
> ordered the
> practice stopped on pain of dismissal.
>
> Like an aristocrat, Morgan observed a strict, almost puritanical code of
> behavior. No scandal, romantic or otherwise, ever attached itself
> to his name,
> even in an era where every rich man was expected to have a mistress. Once,
> when Morgan was taking to task an associate whose love life was
> becoming the
> stuff of drawing room gossip, his associate replied that he was
> doing nothing
> more than what everyone else was doing "behind closed doors." "That, sir,"
> countered Morgan, "is what doors are for." According to Morgan's rigid
> standards, the worst thing a man could do was to break his word.
> Once, when a
> man who had been a longtime friend and business associate and was even a
> relative by marriage, broke his word over a relatively trivial
> matter, Morgan
> never spoke to the man again.
>
> John Pierpont Morgan was a prototypical patrician Yankee. He was born in
> 1837, the son of Junius Spencer Morgan, who, with his partner
> George Peabody
> of the Salem Peabodys, formed what eventually became the
> international banking
> house of J. S. Morgan & Company in London. The banker's son was splendidly
> educated at the private English High School in Boston and at the
> University of
> Gottingen, in Germany. Throughout his life, J. P. Morgan remained very
> England-oriented. His suits, shirts, cravats, hats, shoes,
> walking sticks, and
> even underwear were custom-made for him in London. He admired the
> stiff-upper-
> lip nil admirari quality of the upper-crust Britisher's famous
> reserve, and
> for this he was thought to be a very cold fish indeed. On the
> other hand, to
> the few men whom he considered his true friends, he was intensely
> and almost
> sentimentally loyal. When Morgan built and established New York's imposing
> Metropolitan Club at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth
> Street in 1891,
> it was widely reported that he had done so to spite the older (1836) Union
> Club, which had slighted him. In fact, spite had nothing to do
> with it. Morgan
> had proposed a friend of his for membership in the Union, but the club had
> blackballed him. Acutely embarrassed that a man whom he had
> endorsed should
> have received such humiliating treatment from his fellow clubmen, Morgan
> decided to create a new club for his friend by way of atonement. The
> Metropolitan Club that resulted was a far more luxurious facility than the
> proud but somewhat dowdy Union Club.
>
> One reason J. P. Morgan was vilified by the press after his
> death was that,
> throughout his life, he had an aristocratic disdain for-even loathing of-
> publicity. Though his name was known all over the world, he never made a
> speech or attended a public meeting. He never granted interviews
> to reporters,
> and he dodged photographers. When Harvard, to whom he had been so
> generous,
> wanted to give him an honorary degree, he declined the honor, knowing that
> receiving it would involve an acceptance speech and dealing with
> the press.
> Publishers offered him huge sums for his autobiography, but he
> turned them all
> down and refused to authorize any book to be written about him in his
> lifetime. Even his son-in-law, Herbert Satterlee, was
> unsuccessful in trying
> to persuade him to be interviewed on the subjects of his life and business
> philosophy for posthumous publication. "He had," said one of his former
> associates, "the instinctive shrinking from publicity of the man
> of breeding."
> The closest thing to a public statement of his code occurred a
> year before his
> death, during the monetary trust investigation of 1911-1913 by a House
> committee, when Samuel Untermyer asked him whether commercial
> credit was based
> primarily on property or on cash. "The first thing," roared
> Morgan in reply,
> "is character. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the
> bonds in Christendom."
>
> By the 1870s, Morgan had begun to question the role of the private men's
> clubs in the city. Their original purpose, he felt, was being
> subverted. Men's
> clubs in New York and elsewhere had been originally founded on
> the model of
> the men's social clubs in London, designed as places to which men
> of similar
> backgrounds and interests could repair at the end of a business
> day and enjoy
> an hour or so of companionship unrelated to business. The Union
> Club had been
> organized on this principle, and indeed, during the early days of this so-
> called Mother of Clubs, it was considered poor form to discuss
> business on the
> club's premises. This had also been the basic tenet on which the
> oldest club
> in America had been established, the Fish House in Philadelphia, which was
> founded in 1732. To assure that the Fish House would always be assertively
> social, and non-business, it was formed as a men's cooking club,
> with members
> taking turns preparing meals for the membership. (The Fish House,
> also known
> as the State in Schuylkill, was indeed a separate state in
> colonial times and
> was so recognized by colonial governors. For nearly two hundred years, the
> club kept the recipe for its famous Fish House punch-a potent
> mixture of rum,
> brandy, peach liqueur, sugar, and lemon juice-a closely guarded secret.)
>
> Other New York clubs had followed the Union Club's example and were, in a
> sense, all offshoots of the Union. The Union League Club was
> organized in 1863
> by disgruntled Union Clubbers who objected that the Confederate
> secretary of
> state had been allowed to resign from the club when he should have been
> expelled. The Knickerbocker Club had been formed in 1871 by
> ex-Unionites who
> felt the Union was taking in too many out-of-towners and not giving proper
> preference to members of Old Knickerbocker families. The Brook Club was
> founded in 1903 by two young Turks who had been ousted from the
> Union Club for
> attempting, or so they said, to fry an egg on the bald head of one of the
> Union's most venerable members.
>
> But it was not frivolity or politics that Morgan found
> objectionable about
> New York's men's clubs. It was a trend he spotted developing in
> the post-Civil
> War era of capitalist expansion, in which the clubs were abandoning their
> initial precepts of gentlemanly good-fellowship among peers and
> were becoming
> places where business deals were put together. In this, he was
> foresighted,
> for this is exactly what the men's clubs have become, particularly in a
> financial city such as New York. The clubs have certainly
> wandered far from
> their original goals. The Links Club, for example, was first
> organized. as its
> names implies, "to promote and conserve throughout the U.S. the
> best interests
> and true spirit of the game of golf." Today, the Links, on East
> Sixty-second
> Street in Manhattan, is far from any golf course and has become a
> club whose
> membership consists of business leaders from all over the
> country-Minneapolis
> Pillsburys, Beverly Hills Dohenys, Dorrances from Philadelphia,
> and Kleenex-
> making Kimberlys from Neenah, Wisconsin.
>
> The commercialization of the private clubs is now almost
> complete. As one New
> York clubman put it recently, "If I have a
> hundred-thousand-dollar deal to put
> together, I'll take my client to lunch at the Union or the
> Knickerbocker. If
> it's a million-dollar deal, I'll take him to the Brook. If it's
> ten million,
> we'll go to the Links. If there's no deal to discuss, we'll go to the
> University Club."
>
> To offset what seemed to Morgan such an alarming and
> unaristocratic trend,
> his answer was the tiny Zodiac club: twelve gentlemen selected on no other
> basis than, as one member has put it, "good-fellowship and good
> genes." For
> nearly a hundred and fifteen years, twelve Zodiac members have met on no
> regularly scheduled basis, but at least two or three times a
> year. For each
> gathering, a member is designated "caterer" to the other eleven and is
> expected to provide a dinner, either in his own home or in one of
> the private
> rooms of one of his clubs. No female guests have ever been invited to
> meetings, though once a year a dinner is held to include the
> wives of members.
> For years, Zodiac members met in full evening dress, white tie and tails,
> wearing medals and decorations where appropriate. Today, that
> dress code has
> been relaxed somewhat, and Zodiac dinners are black-tie. Conviviality and
> conversation are the only orders of the evening. Business is never to be
> discussed.
>
> Not that Zodiac members are necessarily men who lead lives of idleness.
> Their gatherings are intended to be marked only by "congeniality and
> conviviality," but there is an underlying, more serious theme:
> the cultural
> and civic betterment of the city of New York. Membership in The Zodiac is
> supposed to be kept very secret, as Mr. Morgan wished it, but
> this author has
> been able to ascertain the names of ten of the current dozen
> members. These
> are:
>
> - Robert G. Goelet, of the old New York real estate family,
> related to Astors
> as well as to Vanderbilts, a trustee of the American Museum 0f
> Natural History
> and former president of the New York Zoo.
>
> - John Jay Iselin, descendant of John Jay and former president
> of New York's
> WNET/Channel 13 public television station.
>
> - S. Dillon Ripley, retired head of the Smithsonian Institution
> and married to
> a Livingston.
>
> - Schuyler G. Chapin, former dean of the Columbia University
> School of Arts
> and a Schuyler descendant.
>
> - Daniel G. Tenney, Jr., a descendant of Massachusetts Sedgwicks,
> married to a
> Philadelphia Lippincott, a partner in the old New York law firm
> of Milbank,
> Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation.
>
> - Robert S. Pirie, president of L. F. Rothschild & Company.
>
> - August Heckscher, former New York City Parks commissioner and
> The Zodiac's
> secretary and only officer.
>
> - Arnold Whitridge, occupation "gentleman," and the club's oldest member.
>
> - Howard Phipps, Jr., of the Pittsburgh steel family.
>
> - J. Carter Brown III, director of Washington's National Gallery of Art.
>
> The observant will note a preponderance of Harvard and Yale
> alumni among The
> Zodiac's membership. The even more observant will spot the fact
> that many of
> these men are graduates of the Groton School. Mr. Morgan would
> have approved
> of that, too.
>
> Today, only three men's clubs in America survive that are dedicated
> principally to good-fellowship and good times. There is the
> ancient State in
> Schuylkill, still a men's cooking club, which was obviously the
> inspiration
> for Morgan's Zodiac. The State in Schuylkill calls itself "The
> oldest formally
> organized men's social club in the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized)
> world." The governing qualifiers here are the words "formally
> organized." Such
> famous London clubs as White's, Boodle's, and St. James's would appear at
> first glance to be older, but State in Schuylkill members point
> out that these
> private clubs started out as public coffeehouses, until White's became
> "formally organized" in 1736, thus making the State in Schuylkill
> four years
> older. As for its informal name, the Fish House, this stems from
> the fact that
> the club was originally a "Fishing Company" of Philadelphia men
> who fished the
> banks of the Schuylkill River in the eighteenth century and
> enjoyed cooking
> their catches afterward.
>
> The Fish House meets thirteen times from May to October for
> its home-cooked
> luncheons, and periodically during the winter months for dinners.
> Each course
> of each meal is the responsibility of an individual member, meaning that
> members get a chance to try their hand at various dishes-with an
> emphasis on
> hearty, outdoorsy fare such as boola-boola soup (made with
> mussels), planked
> shad, and pressed duck-throughout the year. As with, The Zodiac,
> there is a
> dress code at the Fish House. Preparers of the dishes don long
> white aprons
> and odd-looking wide-brimmed straw hats called boaters, but which
> look more
> like Chinese coolie hats. Members explain that "these hats are of
> a pattern
> brought from China early in the last century, and were worn by a
> high Mandarin
> caste."
>
> The State in Schuylkill clings determinedly to the notion that it is a
> separate state, and no part of Pennsylvania. Its members are
> called Citizens,
> and among its elected officials are a secretary of state, a
> secretary of the
> treasury, a governor, counselors, a sheriff, and even a coroner. Meals
> traditionally begin with a toast-"To the memory of General Washington"
> -followed by a second, "To the memory of Governor Morris," who was Samuel
> Morris, Jr., governor of the State in Schuylkill from 1765 to 1811. After
> other past governors have been toasted, there is a toast "To the
> President of
> the United States," though during the presidency of Franklin D.
> Roosevelt this
> part of the ritual was conspicuously omitted. The club's bylaws
> permit no more
> than thirty Citizens, or members, at any one time, though at its
> meetings a
> certain number of carefully screened Apprentices-or hopeful
> members-to-be are
> invited. While the Citizens do the cooking, the Apprentices do
> the serving. As
> a result of the thirty-Citizens-only rule, there have been fewer than five
> hundred Citizens of the State of Schuylkill in the more than two
> hundred and
> fifty years of its existence. Citizenship, it may go without
> saying, is nearly
> always conferred upon members of old Philadelphia families.*
> (*Membership is
> supposed to be a closely guarded secret but who belongs can be
> ascertained by
> consulting the Social Register.)
>
> During Prohibition, the State in Schuylkill reminded itself that
> it had never
> actually ratified the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, it saw no reason to be
> bound by the strictures of the Eighteenth Amendment.
>
> Then there is San Francisco's remarkable Bohemian Club.
>
> Since San Francisco is a much newer city, the Bohemian Club
> cannot claim the
> great age of many eastern men's clubs, but it is nonetheless a spiritual
> descendant of both the State in Schuylkill and New York's Century
> Association,
> which in turn was another of the splinter groups to emerge from
> the old Union
> Club. Formed in 1847, the Century's first membership consisted of
> gentlemen
> who felt that intellectual and artistic endeavors were being
> slighted by the
> Union. (At the time, one Union Club member grumbled, "There's a
> club down on
> Forty-third Street that chooses its members mentally. Now isn't
> that a hell of
> a way to run a club?") From the State in Schuylkill, the Bohemian Club has
> borrowed its emphasis on the great outdoors. From the Century,
> the Bohemian
> has taken its emphasis on matters of the mind, or at least the
> imagination.
>
> Every Bohemian Club member is expected, no matter what his
> actual calling or
> profession, to demonstrate some sort of artistic talent-whether
> it be writing
> doggerel, playing a musical instrument, or singing a passable
> baritone. When
> "other qualifications have been met," a candidate for Bohemian
> membership can
> even make a willingness to paint flats for the scenery of the club's stage
> shows pass for a "talent." In the city, the Bohemian Club
> occupies a handsome
> red brick Georgian clubhouse on one of the flanks of Nob Hill,
> and among the
> facilities here is a 750-seat theatre, where members prepare and present
> regular amateur theatricals. But the club's most celebrated
> institution is its
> annual two-week summer "encampment" at Bohemian Grove, a
> twenty-eight-hundred-
> acre tract it maintains high in the Sierra wilderness. Each Bohemian
> encampment begins with a campfire ceremony called The Cremation
> of Care and
> continues with such events as lectures, poetry readings, musical
> productions,
> spectacles of son et lumiere, and concerts presented by the club's own
> seventy-piece symphony orchestra. All these productions are
> written, produced,
> directed, and performed by the club's membership, and a high degree of
> professionalism is expected and often achieved. In between these cultural
> events, there is plenty of time for entertainment of a more
> bibulous nature.
> By eastern standards, the Bohemian Club is large, with some twelve hundred
> members, but it is also in one sense exclusive. Because social
> San Francisco
> has been accused of being both parochial and provincial (as well as a bit
> nouveau), and to offset the fact that some older established
> eastern families
> still tend to think of San Francisco as being at the end of the
> Anglo-Saxon
> (which is to say civilized) world, the Bohemian Club likes to
> think of itself
> as a national, not just a city, club. Though plenty of Old Guard
> (which is to
> say late-nineteenth-century) San Francisco names such as Crocker, Flood,
> Spreckels, and de Young are represented in its membership, the
> Bohemian Club
> welcomes members from other cities. Thus, while prominent San
> Franciscans and
> other Californians often have to wait for years to be invited to join, men
> from Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington go sailing in with
> no delay at
> all. The club also has members from Canada and from European
> cities. To each
> encampment, a small, carefully screened list of out-of-town
> guests is invited.
> These have included Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. But
> otherwise
> the encampments are members-only, and assertively all-male.
>
> For a long time, the location of the Bohemian Grove was a
> jealously guarded
> secret, which led to stories and speculation particularly among wives of
> members-about wild goings-on, involving loose women, at the
> grove. Naturally,
> members did nothing to scotch these lurid tales. But eventually the secret
> leaked out. Today; wives and children of Bohemian Club members
> are permitted
> to visit the grove, though never during an encampment. They find
> it a peaceful
> spot for picnics, and if there were ever orgies there, no sign of them
> remains.
>
> Then, finally, there is the little Zodiac club of New York, the
> most secret
> of them all. Aside from its once-yearly nod to spouses, women are never
> included at its gatherings, nor have outside guests ever been
> invited. With
> only twelve members, a member must die or otherwise be placed
> hors de combat
> before a new member can be taken. As a result, only about fifty men have
> belonged since J. P. Morgan started it more than a hundred years ago.
>
> "Part of the fun of belonging to The Zodiac," says John Jay
> Iselin, one of
> the club's newer members,* "is that nobody else knows about us
> and, because
> nobody else much cares, they can't call us 'exclusive.' We're
> just a bunch of
> friends who like to get together and enjoy each other's company."
>
> And to enjoy the company of good genes.
>
> (*An opening for Iselin appeared upon the death of James Bryant
> Conant, former
> president of Harvard, later U. S. high commissioner for West Germany, and
> still later American Ambassador to Germany.)
>
> pp. 205-215
> --cont--
> Aloha, He'Ping,
> Om, Shalom, Salaam.
> Em Hotep, Peace Be,
> Omnia Bona Bonis,
> All My Relations.
> Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
> Amen.
> Roads End
> Kris
>
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frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
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Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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