![]() ![]() Little is known about the “underground” societies. But the seniors didn’t want to announce the elections publicly, so they simply tapped each selected junior and said only, “Go to your room.” Thus Tap Day was born. Instead of waiting alone in their rooms on election night, they gathered outside on the steps of the Old Campus dormitories to see which societies their friends would accept. Instead, Bones would send a single senior (Scroll and Key sent two) to call quietly at an early hour at a student’s room to ask, “I offer you an election to the so-called Skull and Bones. But along the way, other students so insulted and teased them that they dropped the custom. ![]() At first, members of Bones and Scroll and Key assembled at midnight and went as a group to the room of each junior elected. Much of the mystique grew up around the only ritual secret societies performed semi-publicly: the selection of the next year’s members. The junior societies, which remained as fraternities, were prestigious in their own right as well as for entree into the right senior society. But the freshman societies that recruited from the prep schools were abolished in 1880, and in 1900 President Hadley shut down the sophomore societies. Societies had sprung up for each of the younger classes they were important stepping-stones to selection as a senior. By the late nineteenth century, the prestige of membership in a senior society was reaching its zenith. In 1841, Scroll and Key, the second senior society, was founded. The first expose of Skull and Bones, published in 1871 by Lyman Bagg in his book Four Years at Yale, noted that “the mystery now attending its existence forms the one great enigma which college gossip never tires of discussing.”īagg, a member of the Class of 1869 who published his book anonymously, wrote that “some injustice in the conferring of Phi Beta Kappa elections” led to its establishment “as a sort of Burlesque convivial club.” Sorting the rumors of the time from the facts, he explained that Bones was not transplanted from a German university that it was privately called the Eulogian Club, or Eulogia, for the goddess of eloquence and that the reason Bones places heavy significance on the number 322 stems from either Alexander or Demosthenes, and the year 322 BC. The secrecy seems to have attracted fascination and curiosity from the start. The names of its members weren’t kept secret-that was an innovation of the 1970s-but its meetings and practices were. Russell ’33 and his classmate Alphonso Taft (father of William Howard Taft ’78, the 27th U.S. But for some, secret societies retained their appeal. In the 1820s, however, national sentiment turned against secrecy and PBK dropped its closed-door policy. Yale’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, which was founded in 1780, was actually the first secret society at the university. The first exposé of Skull & Bones was published in 1871. The fact that both candidates are members of this mysterious organization, coupled with persistent rumors that Skull and Bones is more than just a highly selective college fraternity (some have even suggested darkly that its members are part of a clandestine cabal attempting to rule the world) has thrust it and other secret societies into the national spotlight. Bush ’68, who comes from a long line of Bonesmen, was welcomed into the fold in 1967. John Kerry ’66 got the call in 1965 George W. Judith Ann Schiff is chief research archivist at the Yale University Library.Įvery year, 15 juniors are tapped by Yale’s best-known secret society, Skull and Bones, for lifetime admittance to its windowless and forbidding tomb on High Street. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. Yale Alumni Magazine: How the Secret Societies Got That Way (Sept/Oct 04)
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