Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (35 page)

Through most of its history, the initiation rites for Bonesmen remained among the best-kept secrets of the group, although bit by bit certain activities have come to light. The most enduring ritual, up to recent years at least, obligated the initiate to relate the story of his life in two installments. The first episode, delivered on a Thursday night, covered general aspects of the new member's life, a tale as bland or as entertaining as he chose. The second episode, conducted the following Sunday evening, required him to lie naked in a coffin while recounting details of his sexual history from prep school masturbation to his latest Saturday night conquest, which may have occurred less than twenty-four hours earlier.

With the arrival of coeds on Yale's campus in the late 1960s, the sexual accounts provided substantial titillation for other Bonesmen in attendance, and angry embarrassment for the women whose privacy was invaded in the presence of fourteen male students with greater allegiance to Skull & Bones than to their lovers. One woman confessed an intensely personal experience to her partner, who swore that he would never reveal it to another person. On his return from the Sunday
night sex session, she knew instantly by the way he avoided her eyes that he had divulged her darkest secret to his Skull & Bones buddies.

Variations on the ritual seem to have come and gone. During the years between the two world wars, initiates such as future Washington heavyweight W. Averell Harriman and
Time
founder Henry Luce reportedly underwent the sex-tales-in-a-coffin rite of passage. In the late 1930s, when future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was a Bonesman, seniors dressed in skeleton suits and howled at new candidates, whose initiation into the group required them to wrestle each other naked in a pit of mud.

The reward for Bonesmen may have been worth the humiliation. Acceptance by Skull & Bones reportedly brought with it a $15,000 cash gift to a successful candidate and, upon his marriage, a wedding gift of a good-quality grandfather clock.

Reaction to Skull & Bones from nonmembers on campus was negative from the beginning. The response might by categorized as sour grapes by those overlooked for selection, but the criticism was, and always has been, specific to the enormous power enjoyed by this network of privileged men. In October 1873, a periodical called
The Iconoclast
appeared in New Haven for the first time, with much of its premier edition devoted to disparaging Skull & Bones. Among its points were these:

We speak through a new publication, because the college press is closed to those who dare to openly mention ‘Bones’….

Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men. They have gone out into the world and have become, in many instances, leaders of society. They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will….

Year by year the deadly evil is growing. The society was never as obnoxious to the college as it is today…. Never before has it shown such arrogance and self-fancied superiority. It grasps the College Press and endeavors to rule it all. It does not deign to show its credentials, but clutches at power with the silence of conscious guilt.

… It is Yale College against Skull and Bones. We ask all men, as a question of right, which should be allowed to live?

At least part of the answer arrived quickly.
The Iconoclast
was never heard from again.

Even before the appearance of this article, a pattern of questionable alliances and activities by Skull & Bones members had been established at Yale. In 1856, three Skull & Bones members traveled, as Russell had, to the University of Berlin for studies in philosophy. Upon their return one of the young men, Daniel Gilman, incorporated Skull & Bones as the Russell Trust Association, appointing himself as treasurer and the group's founder, William H. Russell, as president.

The Russell connection has tainted Skull & Bones since its inception. In some instances, such as the Russell family's involvement in the Chinese opium trade, the connections are tenuous; no evidence exists that any Skull & Bones members outside the Russell family were directly engaged in that activity. But as time passed the relationship continued, with suspicions fueled by unusual coincidences and, from time to time, confirmed with hard facts.

Perhaps one of the most startling revelations in recent years has been an alleged association between the German Nazi party and Skull & Bones members led by Prescott S. Bush, father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents.

Prescott Sheldon Bush, Yale ’17, was ideal Skull & Bones material, active in all the right places on campus including the Glee Club, the cheerleading squad, the University Quartet, the varsity baseball team and the famous Yale Wiffenpoofs. After graduation, Bush shrewdly married the daughter of George Herbert Walker, one of the wealthiest men in the U.S., and one of the least admired for anything beyond his penchant for squeezing as much money as possible out of partners and friends. Walker's earlier career as a heavyweight prizefighter established his personality;
according to his contemporaries, Walker's hobbies were golf, hunting, drinking Scotch and beating his sons to a pulp.

Among Walker's business associates was Averell Harriman, a Bonesman from the class of 1913, who founded W. A. Harriman & Co. in 1920, naming Walker president of the firm. Two years later, Harriman traveled to Germany, a country that appears to have held special interest for early Skull & Bones members, and established a branch in Berlin. On the same trip, he established a close acquaintance with August Thyssen, patriarch of the family that dominated Germany's iron and steel industry. In the years between the two world wars, the value of Thyssen's industrial empire was estimated at $100 million, a figure that would be perhaps fifty times higher in today's currency.

August's son Fritz stood to inherit the family wealth. Concerned about the socialist waves that swept his country following Germany's surrender in 1918 and the hyperinflation that followed it, Fritz Thyssen began searching for two saviors: an effective political leader for Germany, and an offshore bank that would serve as an economic anchor in future perilous times. He found them in Adolf Hitler and George Herbert Walker.

Hitler mesmerized Thyssen as, in fact, he mesmerized virtually an entire country desperately in need of strong, decisive leadership. At their first meeting in late 1923, Hitler informed Thyssen that the Nazi Party urgently needed money to grow into a national party, defend itself against attacks from the Communist/Jewish conspiracy, and realize its dream of a fascist state capable of returning the country to its glory. Almost without being asked, Thyssen pulled out his checkbook and handed Hitler 100,000 German marks and a promise to persuade other industrialists to follow his lead. They did, overflowing the Nazi coffers and providing the nascent party with enough funds to survive the aftermath of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch.

Fritz Thyssen. As part-time banker to the Nazis, he maintained a curious relationship with many Bonesmen.

Meanwhile, Fritz Thyssen's younger brother, who had married a Hungarian aristocrat and acquired the title Baron Thyssen Bornemisza de Kaszon, moved to Rotterdam, where he took over the reins of the Netherlands-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. In 1924, while Fritz remained in his early rapture over Hitler's charisma and plans, Harriman's bank, with Prescott S. Bush at the helm, joined forces with the Thyssen family's Dutch bank to form Union Banking Corporation (ubc), whose corporate offices were at 39 Broadway in New York City, the same address as Harriman's bank. Through ubc, over $50 million in German bonds were sold to U.S. citizens, financing the rise of Germany's industrial muscle in a close parallel to the growing strength of Hitler and the Nazis.

With this success, Walker provided his son-in-law with a hand up the corporate ladder by naming Bush a vice-president of Harriman & Co. Once settled in the executive suite, Bush added two old friends from Yale to his team, Bonesmen Roland Harriman and Knight Wooley. Bush worked hard, as did everybody under Walker's thumb. He may have worked harder than others, however, because his next career boost involved supervision of a new German steel operation named the Thyssen/Flick United Steel Works, which included the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company, both located in Poland.

While Prescott S. Bush was running one of Germany's leading steel producers, Hitler encountered new financial troubles and once again turned to his old friend Fritz Thyssen for money. This time, Thyssen handed over between 250,000 and 800,000 German marks—he claimed the lower figure, others estimated the higher amount—which Hitler used, among other things, to convert a Munich palace into elaborate new headquarters for the Nazi Party.

The Great Depression in the early 1930s sent Germany and the rest of the world on a slide towards disaster. Through a series of political manipulations and the application of brute
force, by 1934 Hitler completely controlled Germany, promising to build an intricate system of high-speed highways and launch “a rebirth of the German army.” For the latter, he turned to Thyssen's steel mills, whose profits soared in the following years, overflowing into the coffers of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam and the Union Banking Corporation in New York.

Walker and his son-in-law, through their direction of the Harriman financial organization, seem to have tolerated, if not favored, antidemocratic regimes. In 1927, they were dealing both with Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini and Russia's Communist party while Stalin held his country in an iron grip. The bank's Russian connection inspired Lord Bearsted of Britain to recommend that Union Banking cease its dealings with Stalin, prompting Walker to retort: “It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent…. I think we have drawn our line and should hew to it.” Business was, after all, business.

Four years later, Harriman and Co. merged with Brown Brothers, a British-American investment firm, creating Brown Brothers Harriman, whose New York office was managed by Prescott S. Bush.

Through the 1930s, Bush's involvement with Nazi Germany's finances expanded beyond Union Banking into shipping via the Hamburg Amerika Line, managed out of Bush's office through a wholly owned firm called the American Ship and Commerce Corporation. In September 1933, Bush helped orchestrate the merger of Hamburg Amerika, or Hapag, with the North German Lloyd Company to create Hapag Lloyd. Meanwhile, another spin-off from the same parent firm was set up to coordinate all trade between the U.S. and Nazi Germany, and Bush arranged refinancing for the German-Atlantic Cable Company, providing the only direct communications linkage between Germany and the U.S. The legal details of this latter arrangement were finalized by a Wall Street lawyer named John
Foster Dulles, who would later become a hard-line secretary of state under President Eisenhower.

Union Banking Corporation grew into the leading financial connection between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world, and by the mid-1930s the relationship was bonded at the highest levels. Consider the identity of its eight members of the board of directors:

Of these eight powerful men, six either belonged to Skull & Bones or were members of the German Nazi Party. And although
the parent firm of Brown Brothers Harriman employed several Yale graduates in positions of authority and responsibility, only Skull & Bones members sat on the ubc board.