Skull and Bones

This society is unusually well suited to showing where a reliable account stops.

Documented: it was founded at Yale in 1832; it selects a small fixed number of undergraduates each year, fifteen in the modern pattern; it owns a windowless building on campus known as the Tomb and a private island retreat; it began admitting women in 1992 after a dispute among its own graduates; and its membership rolls, published periodically over its history, include two presidents named Bush, a chief justice, cabinet secretaries, senators, and a large number of figures in finance, publishing and intelligence. The membership is not secret and never has been.

Reported on the evidence of members, and credible without being verifiable: initiation involves confessional autobiography before the group, and the initiation ceremony makes use of the building's collection of funerary objects. Alexandra Robbins's account, based on interviews with a number of members, is the fullest treatment and is where most of this comes from. It should be read as journalism resting on informants rather than as documentary history.

Not documented, and asserted mainly by writers with a general thesis to advance: that the society directs American policy, that it constitutes a mechanism of dynastic control, or that it is a component of any larger structure. What the evidence supports is narrower and duller. A society drawing from a small number of Yale undergraduates for nearly two centuries produced members who went on to prominence, which is what selective recruitment from an elite institution produces regardless of what the society does with its evenings. Membership overlaps heavily with the American governing class because it was drawn from it.

The building's contents are the one place where a specific claim is worth stating carefully. It has long been alleged that human remains held there include the skull of Geronimo, taken from his grave at Fort Sill in 1918. Descendants brought suit in 2009 seeking their return. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds without any determination of what the society holds, and the question is therefore open rather than settled in either direction.

A surprising amount about Skull and Bones is a matter of public record. The society owns a windowless brownstone on High Street in New Haven, known as the Tomb, and an island in the St Lawrence. Its property and finances are held by the Russell Trust Association, a corporation registered in 1856, whose filings are accessible. Membership is fifteen seniors a year, and the names have been published in the Yale yearbook and elsewhere for most of the society's existence. Its alumni include presidents, senators, cabinet officers and intelligence officials, which is neither surprising nor sinister for an institution that recruits the same year at the same university.

Two documented episodes cut against the folklore. The society admitted women at the beginning of the 1990s after a dispute with its own alumni that reached the courts. And in 2009 descendants of Geronimo sued the society over the long-circulating claim that members had taken his remains from a grave at Fort Sill in 1918. The suit was dismissed on procedural grounds without resolving whether the remains were ever there.

What is not documented is the interior: the initiation, the confessional practice members are said to undergo, the objects in the building. Accounts exist but they are unverifiable, and treating them as established is where most writing on the subject goes wrong.