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Skulls in the closet | page 1, 2
George Herbert Walker Bush was no doubt selected in part because his father, Prescott S. Bush, was a U.S. senator and a Bonesman. But the president-to-be was also a decorated World War II pilot and captain of the Yale baseball team. George W. Bush, who had a less illustrious youth than his father, is more plainly a legacy member, tapped because of his genes and not his deeds. From its inception, Skull and Bones has been a bastion of privilege -- an ideal steppingstone from a preppie past to an establishment future. And so the society has been regularly denounced for its elitism as well as its secrecy. In 1878, the Yale Courant ripped Bonesmen as "vampires of darkness." Bones, it wrote, was a "a curse to the college" that promoted "royal and stylish living" and divided the undergraduate classes into "castes." That same year, the Yale Daily News called the society's mummeries "supremely silly." During the 1960s, critics claimed Skull and Bones and other Yale-only secret societies rewarded conformity rather than achievement. Today, denouncing those societies as anti-democratic cults is almost as routine at Yale as Tap Day itself. Bones waited about a century to respond to the criticism. After World War II, it began admitting blacks and Jews. In 1991, the outgoing Bones delegation tried to tap the first Boneswomen. Patriarchs, as Bones alumni are called, literally barred the doors to the Tomb. Led by conservative William F. Buckley Jr., they obtained a court order temporarily blocking non-male members. In the society-wide vote that followed, however, the conservative blue bloods were defeated and a few women were admitted to the rolls. There are likely many things this society does well. I would love to have been a skull on the wall in a private debate between, say, Sen. David Boren and Sen. John Kerry or authors Archibald MacLeish and John Hersey (all Bonesmen). But I doubt the Tomb fosters the sort of character necessary for leadership in multicultural America and the new global economy. And I am certain it is an unsuitable incubator for the presidency in the 21st century. This is true for Bonesmen tapped for their accomplishments in rowing or debating. But it is doubly true of those who, like Bush, were tapped primarily for the accomplishments of their forebears. Since our country's inception, Americans have been profoundly ambivalent about power and wealth. That is why Horatio Alger is as much a part of the American mythos as is the Titanic. We like to worship the high and the mighty, but we love to see them go under. True, the rich are different from the rest of us. So are the powerful. But both are supposed to live, at least in this country, by some rules. The rich are expected to earn their money through hard work or cunning. And the powerful are to earn their power in public elections, not private clubs. Just as many years ago George W. Bush was suddenly tapped for an exclusive society, critics today might charge that he similarly coasted into becoming an odds-on favorite for the White House before a single ballot had been cast.
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