by Anthony C. Sutton
About the book:
"For 170 years they have met in secret. From out of their initiates come presidents, senators, judges, cabinet secretaries, and plenty of spooks. They are the titans of finance and industry and have now installed a third member as United States President George W. Bush. This intriguing behind-the-scenes look documents Yale's secretive society, the Order of the Skull and Bones, and its prominent members, numbering among them Tafts, Rockefellers, Pillsburys, and Bushes. Far from being a campus fraternity, the society is more concerned with the success of its members in the post-collegiate world. Included are a verified membership list, rare reprints of original Order materials revealing the interlocking power centers dominated by Bonesmen, and a peek inside the Tomb, their 140-year-old private clubhouse."About the Author: Antony C. Sutton was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of 21 books, including Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
Memorandum Number One: Is There A Conspiracy Explanation For Recent History?
The reader anxious to get into the story of The Order should go directly to Memorandum Number Two. This section concerns methods, evidence and proof. Essential, but perhaps boring for most readers.
During the past one hundred years any theory of history or historical evidence that falls outside a pattern established by the American Historical Association and the major foundations with their grant-making power has been attacked or rejected - not on the basis of any evidence presented, but on the basis of the acceptability of the argument to the so-called Eastern Liberal Establishment and its official historical line.
The Official Establishment History
There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations, are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can NEVER be the result of a conspiracy'. They can never result from premeditated planned group action. An excellent example is the Kennedy assassination when, within 9 hours of the Dallas tragedy, TV networks announced the shooting was NOT a conspiracy, regardless of the fact that a negative proposition can never be proven, and that the investigation had barely begun.
Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non- existent.
Just to ensure the official line dominates, in 1946 the Rockefeller Foundation allotted $139,000 for an official history of World War Two. This to avoid a repeat of debunking history books which embarrassed the Establishment after World War One. The reader will be interested to know that The Order we are about to investigate had great foresight, back in the 1880s, to create both the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association (most economists were then more historians than analysts under their terms, with their people and their objectives. Andrew Dickson White was a member of The Order and the first President of the American Historical Association.
Failure of Official History
Times have changed. The weaknesses. inconsistencies and plain untruths in official history have surfaced In the 1980s it is rare to find a thinking reader who accepts official history. Most believe it has been more or less packaged for mass consumption by naive or greedy historians. Although an historian who will stick out his neck and buck the trend is rare, some who do are victims of an even deeper game.
Conspiracy then is an accepted explanation for many events at the intelligent grass roots level, that level furthest removed from the influence of The Order. We can cite at random the Kennedy assassination where the official "lone gunman" theory was never accepted by Americans in the street; Watergate, where a "deep throat" informer and erased tapes reek of conspiracy, and Pearl Harbor, where Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Major General Walter C. Short took the rap for General George C Marshall and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The revisionist historian has a double burden as well as a double task. The double burden is that research likely to question the official historical line will not get financed. The double task is that research must be more than usually careful and precise.
A non-official work is not going to be judged on its merits. The work will be judged on the basis of its acceptability to a predetermined historical standard. What this standard is we shall explore later.
Hypotheses and Method
Which brings us to methodology. In this volume we will present three hypotheses. What is a hypothesis A hypothesis is a theory, a working theory, a start point, which has to be supported by evidence. We arrived at these three hypotheses by examining certain documents which will also be described. The official history hatchet mongers will scream that our hypotheses are now being presented as proven assertions and whatever we write here will not stop the screams. But again, these are only hypotheses at this point, they have to be supported with evidence. They are a first step in a logical research process.
Now in scientific methodology a hypothesis can be Proven. It cannot be disproven. It is up to the reader to decide whether the evidence presented later supports, or does not support, the hypotheses. Obviously no one author, critic, or reader can decide either way until all the evidence has been presented.
We also intend to use two other principles of scientific research ignored by official establishment historians. Firstly, in science the simplest explanation to a problem is always the most acceptable solution. By contrast, in establishment history, a simple answer is usually criticized as "simplistic." What the critic implies is "The poor writer hasn't used all the facts," In other words. it's a cheap "put- down" without the necessity of providing an alternate answer or additional fact.
Secondly, again in science, an answer that fits the most cases, i.e. the most general answer, is also the most acceptable answer. For example, you have 12 events to explain and a theory that fits 11 of these events. That theory is more acceptable than a theory that fits only 4 or 5 of the events.The Devil Theory of History
Using this methodology' we are going to argue and present detailed precise evidence (including names, dates and places) that the only reasonable explanation for recent history in the United States is that there exists a conspiracy to use political power for ends which are inconsistent with the Constitution.
This is known by the official historians as the "devil theory of history," which again is a quick, cheap device for brushing facts under the rug.
However, these critics ignore, for example. The Sherman Act. i.e., the anti-trust laws where conspiracy is the basic accepted theory. If there can be a conspiracy in the market place, then why not in the political arena? Are politicians any purer than businessmen? Following the anti-trust laws, we know that conspiracy can only be proven in a specific manner. A similar pattern of market actions is not proof of conspiracy.
Just because something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and all the ducks act similarly, does not make it a duck - or a conspiracy. Under the Sherman Act a similar pattern of prices, where all prices are the same, is not proof of conspiracy. Similarity of prices can occur in a purely competitive market. Neither is similar political action necessarily a conspiracy'.
Proof of conspiracy requires specific types of evidence. i.e:
(a) there must be secret meetings of the participants and efforts made to conceal joint actions.
(b) these meetings must jointly agree to take a course of action,
(c) and this action must be illegal.
The Council on Foreign Relations
Widely accepted explanations of recent history based on a conspiracy theory do not present evidence that fits the above criteria. For example the Council on Foreign Relations cannot be claimed as a conspiracy even for the period since its founding in 1921. Membership in the CFR is not a secret. Membership lists are readily available for the cost of postage stamp. There is no proof that the entire membership conspires to commit illegal acts.
What has to be proven in any conspiracy explanation of history is that the participants have secret groupings, and meet to plan illegal actions.
Members of the CFR, when accused of being involved in a conspiracy, have protested to the contrary. And by and large they are right. Most CFR members are not involved in a conspiracy and have a knowledge of any conspiracy. And some personally known to the author are about the last people on earth to get involved in an illegal conspiracy.
HOWEVER, there is a group WITHIN the Council of Foreign Relations which belongs to a secret society, sworn to secrecy', and which more or less controls the CFR. CFR meetings are used for their own purposes, i.e., to push out ideas, to weigh up people who might be useful, to use meetings as a forum for discussion These members are in The Order. Their membership in The Order can be proven. Their meetings can be proven. Their objectives are plainly unconstitutional. And this ORDER has existed for 150 years in the United States.Memorandum Number Two: The Order - What It Is And How It Began
Those on the inside know it as The Order. Others have known it for more than 150 years as Chapter 322 of a German secret society. More formally, for legal purposes. The Order was incorporated as The Russell Trust in 1856. It was also once known as the "Brotherhood of Death."
Those who make light of it, or want to make fun of it, call it "Skull & Bones," or just plain "Bones."
The American chapter of this German order was founded in 1833 at Yale University by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft who, in 1876, became Secretary of War in the Grant Administration. Alphonso Taft was the father of William Howard Taft, the only man to be both President and Chief Justice of the United States.
What Is The Order?
The Order is not just another campus Greek letter fraternal society with passwords and handgrips, common to most campuses. Chapter 322 is a secret society whose members are sworn to silence. It only exists on the Yale campus (that we know about). It has rules. It has ceremonial rites It is not at all happy with prying, probing citizens - known among initiates as "outsiders" or "vandals''. Its members always deny membership (or are supposed to deny membership) and in checking hundreds of autobiographical listings for members we found only half a dozen who cited an affiliation with Skull & Bones. The rest were silent. An interesting point is whether the many members in various Administrations or who hold government positions have declared their members in the biographical data supplied for FBI "background checks."
Above all, The Order is powerful, unbelievably powerful. If the reader will persist and examine the evidence to be presented - which is overwhelming -there is no doubt his view of the world will suddenly come sharply into focus, with almost frightening clarity. [1]
Before we go further we need to add a couple of important observations about The Order:
• It is a Senior year society which exists only at Yale. Members are chosen in their Junior year and spend only one year on campus Senior year, with Skull & Bones. In other words, the organization is oriented to the post graduate outside world. The Order meets annually - patriarchs only - on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River.
• Senior societies are unique to Yale. There are two other senior societies at Yale, but none elsewhere. Scroll & Key and Wolf's Head supposedly competitive societies founded in the mid 19th century. We believe these to be part of the same network. Rosenbaum commented in his Esquire article, very accurately, that anyone in the Eastern Liberal Establishment who is not a member of Skull & Bones is almost certainly a member of either Scroll & Key or Wolf's Head.
What is the significance of the "322" in Chapter 322? William Russell imported the society from Germany and so it has been argued the 322 stands for '32 (from 1832), the second chapter of this German organization. Possibly a chapter 320 and a chapter 321 may exist somewhere and 323 is the designation of a room within the Skull & Bones temple at Yale.
Another interpretation is that The Order is descended from a Greek fraternal society dating back to Demosthenes in 322 BC This has perhaps some credibility because Bones records are dated by adding 322 to the current year. i.e.. records originating in 1950 are dated Anno-Demostheni 2272.
How A Member Is Chosen By The Order
The election procedure for new members of The Order has not changed since 1832. Each year 15, and only 15, never more, never fewer, are selected in the past 150 years about 2500 Yale graduates have been initiated into The Order. At any one time about 500-600 are alive and active. Roughly about one-quarter of these take an active role in furthering the objectives of The Order. The others either lose interest or change their minds. They are silent drop-outs.
A Yale Junior cannot ask to join. There is no electioneering. Juniors are invited to join and are given two options: accept or reject. Apparently some amount of personal information is gathered on potential members. The following is the kind of evaluation made in the last century: we doubt it has changed too much down to the present time:
• "Frank Moore is an ideal Bones man, he is a hard worker and a man whose efforts have been more for Yale than himself. He is manager of the Musical clubs and has been active in Dwight Hall. His election will be well deserved and popular."
• "Don Thompson is a sure man whom the class wishes well for and will be glad to see go. He comes from a Bones family."
In selection emphasis is placed on athletic ability - the ability to play on a team. The most unlikely potential member of The Order is a loner an iconoclast, an individualist, the man who goes his own way in the world. The most likely potential member is from a Bones family, who is energetic, resourceful, political and probably an amoral team player. A man who understands that to get along you have to go along. A man who will sacrifice himself for the good of the team. A moment's reflection illustrates why this is so. In real life the thrust of The Order is to bring about certain objectives. Honors and financial rewards are guaranteed by the power of The Order. But the price of these honors and rewards is sacrifice to the common goal, the goal of The Order. Some, perhaps many, have not been willing to pay this price.
Inside The Order
Entry into The Order is accompanied by an elaborate ritual and no doubt by psychological conditioning. For example:
"Immediately on entering Bones the neophyte's name is changed. He is no longer known by his name as it appears in the college catalogue but like a monk or Knight of Malta or St. John. Becomes Knight so and so. The old Knights are then known as Patriarch so and so. The outside world are known as Gentiles and vandals." The Catalogue or membership list - it became "Addresses" sometime in this century - of Chapter 322, however, is made with the usual "outside' names and is unique and impressive. Each member has a copy bound in black leather with peculiar symbols on the outside and inside. The symbols presumably have some meaning. The owner's name and the single letter "D" is gilt stamped on the outer cover of earlier issues, at least up to the mid-19th century. It then appears to have been omitted, at least on copies we have seen. Each right-hand page. printed one side only, about 6 x 4 inches, has the members listed for one year and surrounded by a heavy black border, thick in the early years, not so thick in recent decades. This symbolizes the death of the person named as he adopts his new name and new life upon entering The Order.
Most interesting is an entry between the decade lists of members. On the 1833 list, before the 15 founders names, are the words "Period 2 Decade 3." Similarly, before names on the 1843 list are the words "Period 2 Decade 4." In brief, "Period" stays the same throughout the years, but the "Decade" number increases by one in each ten years. No doubt this means something to The Order, else it wouldn't be there. Another mystical group of letters and numbers is at the top of the first list of names in 1833, "P.231-D.31". The numbers increase by one in each succeeding class. In 1834, for example, the entry reads "P.232 D 32".
Furthermore. the first class list of 1833 has two blank lines in place of the eleventh name on the list. This supports the argument that the society has German origins and this is the listing of the anonymous German connection.
The Members of 1833
We estimate that at any one time only, about one-quarter of the membership is active. Even the active quarter is not always effective or successful. It's instructive to compare 1833 with 1983 and how, over the century and a half span, a group of 20-30 families has emerged to dominate The Order.
The very first name on the very first membership list, Samuel Henshaw Bates, was a private in the Union Army, went west to farm Santa Rosa, California, at that time very much in the boondocks, and died in 1879. A life not different to millions of other Americans.
In fact, out of the first 15 members (actually 14 plus the anonymous member) achievements were not much greater than we would expect from the cream of a Yale "class". Rufus Hart spent several years in the Ohio Senate, Asahel Hooker Lewis was in the Ohio Legislature for a couple of years. Samuel Marshall was an Illinois State Legislator for a while, and Frederick Mather was in the New York Legislature Other members, apart from the two founders of The Order, did nothing much with their lives or for the Order.
By contrast, the two founding members, William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft, went far. William Russell was a member of the Connecticut State Legislature in 1846-47, a General in the Connecticut National Guard from 1862-70, and founded the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven, Connecticut.
Alphonso Taft went further: he was Secretary of War in 1876 - the first of several members of The Order - to hold this post down into the 1950s. Taft became U.S. Attorney General in 1876-7, then US. Minister to Austria in 1882-4, an finally; U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 1884-5.
During the 150-year interval since 1833, active membership has evolved into a core group of perhaps 20-30 families; it seems that active members have enough influence to push their sons and relatives into The Order, and there is significant inter-marriage among the families. These families fall into two major groups.
First we find old line American families who arrived on the East coast in the 1600s, e.g., Whitney, Lord, Phelps, Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams and so on.
Second, we find families who acquired wealth in the last 100 years sent their sons to Yale and in time became almost old line families, e.g. Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison.
Some families, like the Whitneys, were Connecticut Yankees and acquired wealth in the nineteenth century.
In the last 150 years a few families in The Order have gained enormous influence in society and the world.
0ne example is the Lord family. Two branches of this family date from the 1630s: Those descended from Nathan Lord and those from Thomas Lord. Other Lords arrived in the US over the years but do not enter our discussion. Of these two main branches, only the Thomas Lord group appears to have contributed members to The Order. Their ancestry traces to Thomas Lord, who left Essex, England in 1635 in a company led by Rev. Thomas Hooker, and settled in what is now Hartford, Connecticut. In fact, part of Hartford is still known as Lord's Hill.
The line of descent for this Lord family is full of DeForest and Lockwood names because intermarriage is more than common among these elite families.
The first Lord to be initiated into The Order was George DeForest Lord (1854), a New York lawyer. Together with his father, Daniel Lord (another Yale graduate), George DeForest Lord established the New York law firm of Lord, Day and Lord. Among its present day clients are The New York Times and the Rubin Foundation. The Rubin Foundation is one of the financial agents for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
In the next hundred years five more Lords were initiated into The Order:
Franklin Atkins Lord ('98)
William Galey Lord ('22)
Oswald Bates Lord ('26)
Charles Edwin Lord. II ('49)
Winston Lord ('59) When we ask the question, what have these member achieved? And what are they doing today? a dramatic picture emerges....as demonstrated in the chart...
Past Lords In The Older
1854 George de Forest Lord
1898 Franklin Atkins Lord
1922 William Galey Lord = Francis Norton
son is Charles Edwin Lord 2nd
1926 Oswald Bates Lord = Mary Pillsbury (of Pillsbury flour family)
son is Winston Lord
1949 Charles Edwin Lord 2nd
1959 Winston Lord
The Lords Today
CHARLES EDWIN LORD
Acting Comptroller of the Currency (1981)
WINSTON LORD
Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1983)
"A very detailed history of the elite. Skull And Bones:The secret society imported from Germany. People like George Bush and his son George W. Bush were members of this Yale elitist club. When questioned on their membership they either wont comment (senior Bush) or they chuckle and question whether it is still in existence. Why don't they want to address this club? Could they be hiding something? They were in fact members! Read the book and you will know the secrets these and other men would prefer you not know! " [This reviewer gave the book a '4 star review']
"Shocking! If you like reading about American history, this book will be a page turner for you. What surprised me the most about this book is the evidence that Sutton displays to back up his facts. I recomend this book to anyone who is interested in history." [This reviewer also gave the book a '4 star review']
"'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.' I was struck by [this] phrase used recently by Dubya (whose father and grandfather apparently were Bonesmen) and its use by the author as the objective of the Order for a New World Order. I had read two of Sutton's Wall Street books, and the linking of the figures involved in them with the Skull and Bones was quite scary.Those readers who doubt the power and influence of this Establishment secret society should read our Rep. Jack Kemp - 33rd Degree Mason; Senator John Kerry - Skull-And-Bones man! web page!
The supplementary material from the 1870's explaining the Yale senior societies and some of the critiques of the Bones was also fascinating.
Basically, the thesis of the book is that there is a secret society (Skull and Bones) motivated by Hegelian philosophy (state is supreme, and change is generated by conflict) that has infiltrated the elite control groups (CFR, Bilderberg, finance, law, politics) that has brought us to the sorry state of affairs today. An interesting thesis...with enough supporting evidence that points in the right direction of the truth than the media and historians give.
One interesting point, I did a search on the Bones of 1985, and the names I could find did confirm that they graduated from Yale in 1985. Two of them were the SOLE representatives for the '85 reunion class, and one of them is a big wig at Goldman Sachs. Coincidence? Buy the book and make up your own mind " [This reviewer gave the book a '5 star review']
A well-researched, immensely readable and eye-opening work, 'America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull And Bones' will shock and amaze you into a truer understanding of how the American political system is really run, and how the same small grouping of 'aristocratic' Establishment families preserve dynastic power and privilege for themselves and secretly pass it down through their generations!
Hardcover: 335 pages; Dimensions (in inches): 0.96 x 8.98 x 5.76
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