Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society
Ed. Kris Millegan
Waterville (Oregon): TrineDay, 2003, (UK) £28.50, h/back
Distributed in the UK by Gazelle Books, www.gazellebooks.co.uk
As an illustration of how much the American media’s view of secret societies has changed in the last 20 years, have a look at the long article on Skull and Bones which appeared in the Washington Post in April.(1) What with John Kerry and George W. Bush (and Governor Howard Dean) acknowledged members of Skull and Bones, it is getting hard even for an establishment paper like the Post to completely dismiss the conspiracy buffs.
In the pursuit of Skull and Bones, Millegan’s collection of essays and reprints of articles is a major addition to the published information on the group.
The interesting material is in the second half of the book, reproductions of many articles from magazines around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries on Skull and Bones and the other secret societies at Yale; and a list of members from 1934 to 1985. Unfortunately the first half of the book is mostly a collection of conspiracy-minded essays on Skull and Bones and related areas which are of little value. The Illuminati first appear on p. 17 and editor Milligan gives us an essay titled ‘Mind control, the Illuminati and the JFK assassination’.
The least risible of these essays are by the late Anthony Sutton, who has been writing about the group for twenty years. In effect the founder of Skull and Bones studies, Sutton was sent a list of the society’s members in the early 1980s and has been writing about them ever since, incorporating the group into his increasingly conspiratorial thinking. There is an interesting autobiographical essay by Sutton which shows his journey from more or less mainstream researcher of American-Soviet technological transfers into a conspiracy theorist.
The central problem here, as with all studies of elite groups, is that while it is possible to show that such groups have distinguished members, it is rarely possible to show that the fact of membership has had any particular impact. This gap is too often filled by conspiracy theorising, as it is in this collection.
Notes
1 <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48358-2004Apr3.html>