In the 1820s, Anti-Masonic agitation sweeping across the United States prompted PBK to examine the role of secrecy in its proceedings. Phi Beta Kappa was inactive at Yale from 1871 to 1884, coinciding in part with a national reorganization of the society. Star and Dart, Sword and Crown, Tea-Kettle, Spade and Grave, and E.T.L. įrom the mid-1840s until 1883, several societies were started, but each failed to sustain the interest of liberal arts students at Yale College, broadly known as the Academical Department. Calliopean folded in 1853, and the others shut down after the American Civil War. By the 1830s, the campus literary societies Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliopean had lost stature. Antecedents īefore the founding in 1780 at Yale of the Connecticut Alpha chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the second chapter established after that society's founding in 1776 (which still practices a secret handshake among members), Yale College students established and joined literary societies. " certain limited number were firmly convinced that there had been an appalling miscarriage of justice in their individual omission from the category of the elect," some founders agreed. The Third Society's founding was motivated in part by sentiment among some young men that they deserved insider status. The tradition continued of creating and sustaining a society if enough potential rising seniors thought they had been overlooked: Bones was established in 1832 after a dispute over selections for Phi Beta Kappa awards Scroll and Key Society, the second society at Yale, was established in 1841 after a dispute over elections to Bones. The founding defeated the last attempt by the administration or the student body to abolish secret or senior societies at Yale. The effort was aided by more than 300 Yale College alumni and a few Yale Law School faculty, in part to counter the dominance of the Skull and Bones Society in undergraduate and university affairs. The society changed its name to Wolf's Head five years later. The rumors became pronounced enough that the descendants of Geronimo sued to get it back.Īdapted with Permission from: The New England Grimpendium by J.W.Fifteen rising seniors from the Yale Class of 1884, with help from members of the Yale Class of 1883 who were considered publicly possible taps for the older societies, abetted the creation of The Third Society. Most infamously, some have claimed that in the early 1900s the Bonesmen stole the skull and bones of Geronimo, the Apache warrior and Native American hero. Death is apparently their décor of choice, with skeletons, skulls (both real and artificial), coffins, and other grim funeralia, statuary, and artwork adorning the inside of the tomb. This extends from strange rites and initiation rituals to the objects that they keep in their inscrutable tomb. The Skull and Bones society is particularly renowned for exulting in the macabre. It was built in 1856, and has had wings and other additions built onto it in the intervening years. The Skull and Bones Tomb is a bare, symmetrical, sandstone building and the quintessential Yale tomb…imposing, windowless, and full of secrets. Bush), as were various media leaders, presidential cabinet members, congressmen, finance industry captains, university presidents, and Supreme Court justices. presidents were members of the Skull and Bones (William Howard Taft, George H. Founded in 1832, it has inspired numerous stories due to its strange rituals and high-ranking roster of alumni. The oldest and most famous of all these societies is the Skull and Bones. Each one of the landed societies has its own headquarters building with access more or less only granted to initiates. These elite, secretive self-run student organizations have been around for more than a century and a half, with mysterious-sounding names like Scroll and Key, Wolf’s Head, Book and Snake, and Sage and Chalice. Yale College in New Haven, CT, is well-known for its tomb societies-also called senior societies, and landed societies.
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