Campus Newspaper Publishes Yale U. 'Secret Society' Initiation Pictures (Skull and Bones)

Yale Rumpus ^ | April 29, 2003 | Spade and Grave

[ewing]

Perliminary Tap Protocol:

Ideally we should shoot for a 2004 year delegation size of 16.

The number that 2002 tapped was 14, and while I think this is a good figure, I believe 16 is better.

Given that we can almost always expect a few dropouts next fall I dont think we should go any lower than 14.

One problem with the small size of our group is that if a couple are absent the size of the group is really, really small.

Anything lower than 14 puts us at having a group our size or even smaller.

[ewing]

If you read the rules, they are nominating women over men in case of a tie, what kind of secret society is this!

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[annyokie]

Hmm. All I saw was a picture of a topless coed reading the newspaper. I guess she has no secrets either!

[martin_fierro]

Links aren't working -- 404

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Click the first link for the pictures..second link down is the 'rules' of the club

[ewing]

You have to be working on a Microsoft app, then the pics will work.

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[Timesink]

Where's Monica Crowley? Certainly there must be some Council on Foreign Relations representation at this important event? Besides, SOMEBODY's gotta jump out of the cake at the end.

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[ewing]

They only started admitting women 10 years ago, Monica Crowley must have been one of the first! (and not a bad looking choice I might add)

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[Phantom Lord]

Their choice of Jager has increased my respect for them.

[all4one]

I read "The Secrets of the Tomb" which chronicles the history of the Skull and Bones at Yale. A very interesting and informative read. A who's who of powerful corporate and political Americans.

Inside a cold, foreboding structure of brown sandstone in New Haven, Conn., lives one of the most heavily shrouded secret societies in American history. Yale’s super-elite Skull and Bones, a 200-year-old organization whose roster is stocked with some of the country’s most prominent families: Bush, Harriman, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney. Journalist Alexandra Robbins, herself a member of another of Yale’s secret societies, interviewed more than a hundred Bonesmen and writes about the rituals that make up the organization. Read an excerpt from her book ‘The Secrets of the Tomb’ below......

THE LEGEND OF SKULL AND BONES

Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H. Russell—the future valedictorian of the class of 1833- traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of America’s most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut state legislature, a general in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death’s head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth-century society the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the United States, he found an atmosphere so Anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class-including Alphonso Taft, the future secretary of war, attorney general, minister to Austria, ambassador to Russia, and father of future president William Howard Taft-and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.

[ewing]

[ewing]

There have been some good exposes in the NY Observer about reporters filming the initiation ceremony, highly recommended (and hilarious) for the Secret Society enthusiast..

[annyokie]

Here, here! You beat me to it! ; )

[rwfromkansas]

hmm

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