-Caveat Lector- http://www.thenewrepublic.com/041700/foer041700.html
What's really wrong with Skull and Bones. Tomb of Their Own By FRANKLIN FOER Issue date: 04.17.00 Post date: 04.06.00 "A secret society so powerful it can give you anything you desire ... at a price." --trailer for The Skulls The skulls is a movie about George W. Bush's wild youth. Of course, it's not billed that way. No Hollywood studio would explicitly make a picture about a current presidential contender. But the subject of The Skulls is clear enough: the corrupting influence of a secret society, blatantly modeled after Yale's notorious Skull and Bones, of which Bush was once a devoted member. The depiction of Skull and Bones in the film--just the latest addition to a minor industry of Bonesiana--pretty much captures the prevailing media view of the institution: an aristocratic, all-powerful cabal. Membership, at least according to the movie, entitles the Bonesman to $20,000, a sports car, and a harem of gorgeous women. The Skulls control the university and the local cops. The society's alumni--senators and judges--sit around sipping champagne, chitchatting about hunting, and conspiring to suppress their enemies. Throughout the film, the Skulls' critics fall back on the same mantra: "If it's secret and it's elite, it can't be good." That's half right. Actually, the problem with the Skull and Bones of today may be that it's not forthrightly elitist enough. Skull and Bones, along with Yale's other secret societies, isn't the fusty, preppy, creepy conspiracy it once was. These societies ditched most of the nude wrestling, weird rituals, and boarding-school elitism long ago. In fact, they've spent the past decade running hard in the other direction. To put it crudely, Yale's secret societies--once ground zero of the Eastern establishment--are now high temples of political correctness, the ultimate in Ivy League identity politics. This year's class of Bonespeople has more women than men and as many African Americans as WASPS. Conservatives are scarce. Skull and Bones has democratized--but not in a very productive way. Back when the societies were proudly, offensively elitist, they had a purpose and a paternalistic sense of duty. Bones bragged that it would shape the characters of those who would shape the world. Today, the students in Skull and Bones find that kind of noblesse oblige deeply embarrassing. And, in their efforts to inoculate themselves against charges of elitism, the new elites have directed their energy to less grandiose concerns: namely, themselves. Skull and Bones, once a group for public-minded elites, has become the exact opposite--group therapy. Skull and Bones' roots can be traced to 1826, when a New York bricklayer named William Morgan disappeared just as he was preparing to publish a book that would unveil the secrets of his Masonic lodge. The Morgan case grabbed headlines and sparked a national backlash against all secret societies. In a populist whirl, Harvard and Yale Universities forced their most prominent secret society, Phi Beta Kappa, to ditch its secrecy. The Yale men, angry at having their mystery stripped away, rebelled and created Skull and Bones in 1832. Again, the faculty campaigned to stamp out the clandestine club, but this merely increased its cachet. By the 1850s, when it built its spooky, windowless sepulchre on High Street, Bones had become an exclusive hangout for Yale's top students. They'd get together to perform goofy gothic rituals with coffins, robes, and mud, but mainly they would talk about trendy literature that wasn't covered in Yale's classrooms. Eventually, the guys who couldn't win spots in Bones went off and started their own secret societies. Harvard students also responded to the demise of Phi Beta Kappa by establishing their own exclusive havens: the finals clubs. But these were never more than a Gold Coast, a place for the richest students to socialize with one another and turn up their noses at the rest of the student body. Skull and Bones, on the other hand, steered a more high-minded course. Even when it admitted only men from Groton and Hotchkiss and some of its members touted eugenics, Bones bragged of being a meritocracy. If you excelled in extracurricular activities--as editor of the Yale Daily News or captain of the football team, for example--Skull and Bones tapped you. It's an ethos celebrated in the 1911 novel Stover at Yale, which explains that election to Bones "stands as a reward for merit here." Men spent their college careers positioning themselves for a tap. Rejection was crushing. Or, as Sinclair Lewis melodramatically put it, "Some good men always carried away scars. And the finality and exclusiveness of the choosing created and would continue to create a faint and enduring fault line in the Yale brotherhood." And, while Bones was hardly immune to cronyism and nepotism, high-achieving outsiders did occasionally win admission to the episcopacy's den. Most famously, in 1949, William F. Buckley became a Bonesman, despite being Catholic. Once Bones had picked the year's most promising harvest, it set out to shape the new members to lead. Indeed, that seems to be the reason George W. Bush, whose father and grandfather were Bonesmen, had serious misgivings about joining. For a while, he thought about ditching Bones to join a less serious society more suited to his frat-boy ways. Dad, however, ratcheted up the pressure. As Bill Minutaglio recounts in his biography of W., First Son, "[A]t 8 p.m. on Tap Night, at the moment the bells were tolling in Harkness Tower, there was a knock on George W.'s door at his room in Davenport. When he opened it up, his father, the U.S. congressman, was standing outside, asking that his first son do the right thing and join Skull & Bones--become a Good Man." Become a Good Man: the phrase sounds like it was plagiarized from a bar mitzvah speech, and that's no coincidence. For men like former President Bush, Bones was a rite of passage--an invitation to quit horsing around on the baseball diamond and get serious. In ways that now sound hopelessly hokey, President Bush's generation of Bonesmen spoke of their organization as a place to buff one's character before becoming a full member of the elite. It was an experience so intense that, as it was commonly described, it would "warp the bones of your skull." Henry Stimson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secretary of war, liked to muse that he learned more from Bones than from the rest of his Yale education. The most intense character-building rituals are spelled out smack in the middle of George W.'s 1968 yearbook--in an article coauthored by, of all people, future Clinton spinmeister Lanny Davis. On Tap Night, "the initiate faces the delegation and the alumni alone and is physically beaten. Next he is stripped and made to engage in some form of naked wrestling." The abuse continues later in the year with the Mirror Images, a night "on which each society member is personally, frankly, and quite brutally evaluated by other members." Sam Chauncey, a longtime Yale administrator, recounted that his roommate sank into a deep depression after his society pronounced him lazy. Yale Professor Gaddis Smith tells of students forced to seek psychological treatment after their friends pointed out their many flaws. Yet the sadism had a purpose. Like the rest of Yale at mid-century, Bones was infused with a spirit of noblesse oblige--only more so. The male bonding and the rituals were inseparable from an almost missionary vision of public service, a certainty that an elite could rationally reshape the world. According to Geoff Kabaservice, a historian of Yale, "First they tried to break down the individual, then remold him as someone equipped to take over the world." As Tom Wolfe has written, "Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions.... But out of the fire and the heap of ashes would come a better man, a brother, of good blood and good bone, for the American race guerriere." Indeed, it was Bonesmen who shaped cold war liberalism. McGeorge Bundy, Henry Stimson, and Averell Harriman were the architects of its foreign policy. Other Bonesmen invented and then populated the CIA. They held top slots at the Ford Foundation, which sought to remake social policy. At universities, they pressed for more meritocratic admissions, recruited heavily from public schools, lifted quotas on Jews, and instituted coeducation. In fact, it was men from the secret societies, like Yale administrators R. Inslee Clark, William Sloane Coffin, and Sam Chauncey, who ended the dominance of their kind, the boarding-school elite. And eventually they ended their dominance of the societies themselves. As Ron Rosenbaum revealed in his 1977 Esquire essay "The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones" (the locus classicus of all Bonesology), by the '70s, with elitism no longer in vogue, Skull and Bones was in decline--possibly terminal decline. Yalies commonly turned down offers to join; the group's deepest secrets were increasingly open. Rosenbaum concluded his essay on a wistful note: "I didn't exactly set out to write an expose of Skull and Bones, but neither did I think I'd end up with an elegy." The other societies were in the same boat. Several even fell on their swords, declining to tap successors and refusing to meet in the fancy Tombs. But, in a deft stroke, the remaining societies turned the elitism charge on its head and saved themselves. Beginning in the late '70s, they swung open their doors to women, gays, and minorities--people anxious to join, if only to proclaim victory over the racist patriarchy. And, once the societies were filled with people of color, white liberals had fewer qualms about joining. In the '90s, Bones flourished. In the past five years, virtually no student has turned down a tap. Of course, the societies were right to diversify. It's probably a good thing that this year's Bones class, according to one Bonesologist, is composed of three African Americans, four students of East Asian decent, two Jews, and a Latino, with the balance being white; that the prestigious societies Wolf's Head and Berzelius regularly have more African Americans than whites; and that all the groups divide their taps more or less equally between men and women. The societies, though, have diversified in a strange way. The logical path would have been simply to honor the old, rhetorical commitment to merit--and finally let in Yale's highest-achieving students of all races and backgrounds. But the rush to diversify wasn't an effort to finally live out the "best and brightest" creed. It was an escape from that creed, an effort to deny that groups like Skull and Bones represented an elite at all--because, if they did, then no one could rationalize joining. As a result, the dominant criterion for membership has become identity: not what you have done but who you are. Tapping next year's class often degenerates into an elaborate quota system in which students jostle to make sure they have successors who look like them. Take, for instance, the story of the Korean-American student in Wolf's Head who considered it his obligation to hand over his slot to another Korean. When the group proposed choosing a student of another Asian American extraction, he threw a tantrum. His slot had to go to a Korean. He became so impassioned that he broke down in tears, storming out of a meeting. Soon after, a Chicano in Wolf's Head announced that he felt strongly that the Chicano perspective must always be represented in the group. His spot couldn't go to a Puerto Rican or Salvadoran, he insisted. He too threw a tantrum. And, because students are selected as representatives of their identity groups, they have to toe the group line. The Jews have to explain Jewish culture; in one society, members grumbled when they realized their initiate didn't speak Hebrew. In another case, an Asian student was rejected because his views of his native country were deemed regressive by a member of the same ethnicity. If you're head of the Korean American Students at Yale or the Black Student Alliance or the Yale Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Cooperative, you're a solid bet for Bones. At Wolf's Head, the presidents of certain African American and Latino fraternities are usually shoo-ins. But, if you're a black student who heads the campus anti-abortion group or a lesbian physics major who's never attended an anti-homophobia rally, you don't stand a chance. In fact, the old Bones standbys--the president of the student council, the editor of the Yale Daily News, the head of the Political Union--are rarely tapped by the top societies anymore. They're considered unseemly climbers. Instead, they've gone off and launched their own new secret society, dubbed Hack and Tool. And the shift in selection criteria has changed the way Yale's societies see their purpose. Bones no longer tries to break down and remake its members for leadership; today it affirms them. Like all the other societies, Bones is organized around the sharing of "bios" or "life histories": each member is granted an entire evening to tell his or her life story to the rest of the group. Talk to society members and the boast you'll most frequently hear is that, with their groups, they have created a "safe space," a place to feel comfortable "sharing your experience." Consider a few commonplace images from three of the most prestigious societies. At Berzelius, a woman strips to the buff as she recounts her sexual awakening, a football star confesses to suffering from bulimia, and an African American woman muses about why she exclusively dates white men. In Wolf's Head, a woman describes being molested as a child. In Bones, a straight guy tells of his fantasies about another man. As the biographies unfold, the others in the groups play armchair shrinks, asking questions and, when needed, giving hugs. It's a far cry from Mirror Images, with its constant challenges and neuralgic homing in on members' flaws. And, if the old Bonesmen had a rather haughty view of their obligation to the rest of the world, at least they thought about it. For all their ideological trendiness, today's societies don't do much in the way of community service or political action. In fact, they rarely leave their tombs. Not surprisingly, older alumni are furious. Ever since Skull and Bones went coed, many of the fusty old white alums have stopped attending reunions or donating cash. At Wolf's Head, alumni actually convened a task force that aimed to tone down the society's fixation on diversity and quash the complaints about racial preferences. But the fixation on identity, and the fixation on self, can't be easily stamped out--they're desperate attempts to give inherently elitist organizations a populist veneer. Bonesmen used to flaunt their affiliation. In the nineteenth century they wore ties with a Skull and Bones insignia. Up until the middle of the last century, the names of incoming members were printed in The New York Times and the Yale Daily News. (George W.'s membership in Bones is trumpeted in his senior yearbook.) And, if you asked a Bonesman about the club, he would leave the room or issue an ostentatious denial--a denial calculated to provide a clear answer to your question. But it almost seems that the current crop of Bonespersons maintain vows of secrecy because they are genuinely embarrassed by their affiliation. Those I talked with turned logical somersaults to justify joining an organization that they had previously considered offensive. Even inside the Tomb, they approach the rituals with a dash of self-loathing. They mock the songs they sing, changing the lyrics. And they crack jokes about the "old white guys." When I asked a member of the current Bones class if he considered the group a collection of Yale's best and brightest, he replied, "I sure hope not." On a recent Sunday night, I staked out Skull and Bones with Nicholas Fleisher, an editor of the Yale tabloid Rumpus. The staff of Rumpus has filled many an issue by reporting on silly arcana of the university's secret societies. Reporters have sifted through Bones garbage and determined that Snapple is the drink of choice. Two years ago, they printed the code that opens the Bones door, inspiring a wave of trespassers. When I met up with Fleisher, he had already unsuccessfully tried to break into Bones that evening via the roof of an adjacent building. As we sat and watched Bonespersons walk out of the Tomb, dressed in hipster attire, Fleisher waxed nostalgic: "There's not much to make fun of anymore. They're so dull these days." Walking past Fleisher, a Bonesman put a hand to his face--a vain attempt to hide his identity. It was an emblematic gesture. (Copyright 2000, The New Republic) ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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