Skull and Bones: the boring version is the interesting one

Skull and Bones was founded at Yale in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. It selects fifteen members from each senior class, a process known as tapping, and meets in a windowless building on campus known as the Tomb.

It is the most written-about student society in the world, and almost all of the writing is about the wrong thing.

What is documented

The membership, largely. Yale class records and members' own biographies establish a great deal, and the society has never been genuinely hidden — its existence, building and selection process are public.

Members have included Alphonso Taft, who became Attorney General and Secretary of War; his son William Howard Taft, president and later chief justice; Prescott Bush; George H. W. Bush; George W. Bush; and John Kerry.

In 2004 both major candidates for the American presidency were members. Neither would discuss it. That is a real and remarkable fact.

The rituals

Accounts describe initiation involving a coffin, recitation of personal history, and considerable theatre, in a building furnished with skulls and memorabilia.

Society rituals of this general kind were common in nineteenth-century American student life, and the imagery belongs to that tradition rather than to anything older.

Treating the ceremony as the substance is the standard error. Undergraduates in a dark room with a skull are undergraduates in a dark room with a skull.

What Yale societies actually did

Skull and Bones was one of several, and the system around it explains more than the society itself.

Scroll and Key, Wolf's Head and others operated the same way, and together they constituted a selection layer within an institution that was already selecting from a narrow social base.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the effect was to identify, at twenty-one, a small group who would be introduced to each other and to previous members permanently.

The Geronimo claim

The persistent story is that members including Prescott Bush stole the skull of the Apache leader Geronimo from his grave at Fort Sill in 1918 and that it is held in the Tomb.

In 2009 Geronimo's descendants sued to recover the remains. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds and no evidence was produced that the society holds them.

The society has never confirmed it. The claim appears to originate in society correspondence describing such a theft, which may itself be boasting. It is unresolved and probably unresolvable without access nobody has.