![]() Two of the club who had not yet been formally admitted as members of the senior class were advised they would not be admitted at all-although in time the faculty relented, and the two graduated with their class.Īn 1872 memoir tells the story that, at another time, “the faculty once broke in upon one of meetings, and from what they saw, determined upon its abolishment, but by the intercessions and explanations of its founder then serving as a tutor among them, were inclined to spare it.” Nine members of the Bones club of 1834, including a future Yale treasurer, a future US congressman, and a future associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, received warnings with letters sent to their parents. The professors met on Christmas Day of 1833 to determine the punishment for antics at a “convivial meeting” of Bones. The society was almost immediately offensive to the faculty. Graduate members are “patriarchs” and initiates “knights,” and all meet in a “temple.” And, again following the ancient Greeks, society members called outsiders “barbarians.” Why 322? There are many theories, the most often cited being that 322 BCE was the year on or near to which Alexander or Demosthenes died. The symbol quickly generated a name for the society on campus and was adopted for the group’s badge-a skull and crossbones over the number 322. View full image Manuscripts & Archives A late-nineteenth-century engraving showing the halls of Psi Upsilon (top), Skull and Bones (left), DKE (right), and Scroll and Key. Manuscripts & Archives A black wax seal, circa 1865, with the Skull and Bones emblem. ![]() ![]() The name Skull and Bones came about almost by accident, when one of its members in that first year posted a meeting notice in the usual place for undergraduate announcements-Yale’s chapel door-and, as he wrote later, impetuously “sketched over the notice a Skull & Cross-bones… simply to attract attention and make a sensation among outsiders! Which it did very decidedly.” The society was known to its members as the Eulogian Club: eulogia is Greek for “a blessing” and is applied in ecclesiastical usage to the object blessed. They seem to have made a deliberate attempt at diversity the eight included the only two members of the Class of 1833 from the Western states (Ohio and Illinois), and also two of the class’s seven members hailing from Southern states. They invited eight classmates to join them. (Alphonso, his son William Howard noted in a speech given at Yale in 1909, had been so determined on a quality college education that he “walked from Vermont to Amherst College, Mass, and then he heard there was a larger college at New Haven, and he walked there.”) Russell, Taft, and their four cofounders were all Phi Beta Kappa. He was joined as a founder by Alphonso Taft, future father of US president William Howard Taft, Class of 1878. The conception seems to have been that of the 1833 valedictorian, class orator, and secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, William Huntington Russell. It was a single forbidding, windowless block in Egypto-Doric style. “Tomb” was the name it attracted when it was built in 1856, and a tomb is what it resembled, even more so than in its current remodeled state. But the oldest fraternity house still standing is the Skull and Bones tomb in New Haven, on High Street near the corner of Chapel. The first fraternity house built in the United States was a log cabin erected in 1855 by Delta Kappa Epsilon at Kenyon College in Ohio. In nineteenth-century America, college fraternities were called “secret societies,” and they met in windowless buildings constructed for the purpose. ![]() View full image The New Haven Museum The Skull and Bones tomb as it appeared in its original configuration, with just one rectangular, windowless block. Library of Congress The Skull and Bones building, the oldest US fraternity house still standing, is shown here in the early twentieth century, with the entrance and right-hand block that were added in 1903.
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