Overview
Over the past century, historical interpretations that fall outside the framework accepted by major academic institutions, influential foundations, and mainstream publishers have often been dismissed. According to this view, they are rejected not because the evidence has been disproven, but because the argument itself is considered unacceptable by the prevailing establishment.
There is, in this telling, an “official history” that dominates textbooks, trade publishing, media coverage, and library collections. That official version tends to present wars, revolutions, scandals, and assassinations as largely separate, random, or loosely connected events. By its nature, it excludes the possibility that such events might result from deliberate, coordinated action by organized groups.
The argument presented here is that recent American history cannot be fully understood without considering the possibility of conspiracy in the political sphere. Detailed evidence, including names, dates, and places, is said to point toward an organized effort to use political power for purposes at odds with constitutional government. If conspiracy is acknowledged in economic life, the question raised is why it should be ruled out in politics.
Within this argument, it is claimed that while most members of the Council on Foreign Relations are not knowingly involved in any conspiracy, a smaller inner group allegedly operates within it. This inner circle is described as belonging to a secret society whose members are bound by secrecy and use institutions like the CFR for their own ends.
That society is identified as The Order, whose members, meetings, and long-term objectives are described as traceable and historically verifiable. It is portrayed not as a recent creation, but as an organization with deep roots in the United States.
The Order: Origins and Identity
Those close to it reportedly call it simply The Order. Legally, it was incorporated as the Russell Trust in 1856. It has also allegedly been known at various times as the “Brotherhood of Death,” though it is more widely recognized by the name Skull and Bones.
The American branch of this society was founded at Yale University in 1833 by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. Taft later became Secretary of War in the Grant administration and was also the father of William Howard Taft, who would become both President of the United States and Chief Justice.
This organization is presented not as an ordinary college fraternity, but as a secret society centered in Yale’s senior class. Members are said to be sworn to secrecy, discouraged from acknowledging their membership, and oriented less toward campus life than toward influence in the wider world after graduation.
Two other Yale senior societies, Scroll & Key and Wolf’s Head, are sometimes portrayed as rivals, but within this framework they are suspected of belonging to the same broader network.
The significance of the number 322, associated with Skull and Bones, has been the subject of speculation. One interpretation holds that it refers to a lineage reaching back to 322 B.C. and Demosthenes. Society records have reportedly used a dating system that adds 322 years to the current year.
Each year, exactly fifteen new members are selected. Over roughly 150 years, that would amount to around 2,500 initiates, with perhaps 500 to 600 living members active at any given time. The claim is that only a fraction of these members take an active role in advancing the society’s larger goals, while others drift away or lose interest.
Potential members are described as likely to come from established Bones families and to possess ambition, political skill, resourcefulness, and loyalty to the group. Influence, status, and financial opportunity are presented as rewards for service to the society’s objectives.
Initiation is said to involve elaborate ritual and symbolic rebirth. Members receive new names and identify one another through internal titles, while outsiders are referred to dismissively as “gentiles” or “vandals.”
A recurring theme in this interpretation is that a relatively small set of families has exercised disproportionate influence over The Order for generations. Through family tradition, social ties, and intermarriage, these lineages are said to have reproduced their influence across decades.
These families are divided into two broad groups: first, old American families rooted in early East Coast settlement; second, families whose fortunes were made more recently in banking, railroads, oil, lumber, retail, and industry, and who later entered the same elite social network.
How Much Is Known About The Order?
The text argues that published coverage of The Order has historically been sparse. It points to Ron Rosenbaum’s 1977 Esquire article, “The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones,” as one of the few widely known treatments, though it criticizes that piece as superficial and more interested in atmosphere than serious historical investigation.
The stronger claim is that membership lists and open historical records make it possible to trace how members moved through institutions, assumed positions of influence, appointed allies, and advanced certain objectives over time. Rather than relying on confession or official disclosure, this method attempts to reconstruct patterns from documented actions and connections.
Who Belongs to This Society?
According to the argument, most members have historically come from the Eastern United States and from white Protestant elite families with roots in old New England lineages or later financial dynasties. Intermarriage among powerful families is presented as a key mechanism by which influence has been preserved.
The Whitney family is given as one example. Descended from early English Puritan settlers, multiple Whitneys are said to have joined The Order, helping establish a durable family presence within its ranks. Through marriages into the Payne, Vanderbilt, and Harriman families, this influence is portrayed as extending into finance and politics.
The text’s first major hypothesis is that a secret society, dominated by both old American families and later concentrations of wealth, has existed continuously from 1833 to the present.
Among the older families named are the Lords, Bundys, Phelpses, Whitneys, Perkinses, Stimsons, Tafts, Wadsworths, and Gilmans. Among the newer wealth-connected families are the Rockefellers, Paynes, Harrimans, Davisons, Weyerhausers, Pillsburys, and Sloanes.
William Collins Whitney is presented as a representative case: a member of The Order who rose to wealth and political influence in the late nineteenth century. Through marriage ties linking the Whitneys, Paynes, Vanderbilts, and Harrimans, the text argues that family, finance, and institutional power became tightly intertwined.
The Harriman family, in particular, is described as especially significant. The merger of W.A. Harriman & Company with Brown Brothers is cited as an example of how financial institutions allegedly became populated by society members. By the 1970s, the private banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman is said to have included a notable number of partners who were also members of The Order.
Prescott Bush and his son George H.W. Bush are mentioned in this context as examples of Bones membership intersecting with political prominence. Because Brown Brothers Harriman was a private partnership, the text emphasizes that its internal operations remained largely shielded from public scrutiny.
The broader conclusion offered is that elite old-line families were able not only to accumulate and preserve influence, but also to direct or absorb outside wealth in service of long-term objectives, often without fully incorporating the families whose fortunes they leveraged.
What Organizations Has It Penetrated?
The Order has either founded or penetrated nearly every major research, policy, and opinion-forming institution in the United States, in addition to extending its influence into the Church, business, law, government, and politics. The development of American society has not, for the past century, been a voluntary process shaped by individual opinion. Rather, its broad direction has been artificially created and deliberately encouraged by The Order.
This is very much the situation Carroll Quigley identified in The Group, centered at Oxford University in England:
“It is probable that most members of the outer circle were not conscious that they were being used by a secret society.”
The Order gets new organizations underway by placing the first President or Chairman in office, introducing the ideas, and then, once the institution is operating smoothly, often fading from view.
Among universities, Cornell University stands as one example, where Andrew Dickson White (1853) served as its first President. Johns Hopkins University, modeled on the German educational system, stands as another, where Daniel Coit Gilman (1852) served as the first President from 1875 to 1901.
Among academic associations, the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society, and the American Psychological Association were all founded by members of The Order or by individuals closely connected to it.
Daniel Coit Gilman also served as the first President of the Carnegie Institution from 1902 to 1905, while other members of The Order have held positions on Carnegie boards since the turn of the century. Gilman was also present at the founding of the Peabody, Slater, and Russell Sage foundations. Later, McGeorge Bundy (1940) served as President of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979.
William Howard Taft (1878), a member of The Order, served as the first Chairman of the American Society for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes. That society became the forerunner of the League to Enforce Peace, which developed into the idea of the League of Nations and ultimately the United Nations. Within the United Nations, Archibald MacLeish (1915) stands out as the figure behind the constitution of UNESCO.
In 1960, James Jeremiah Wadsworth (1927) established the Peace Research Institute. In 1963, it was merged into what became the Institute for Policy Studies, together with Marcus Raskin, who had served as a National Security Council aide to McGeorge Bundy (1940), a very active member of The Order.
Another key example is Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia University in New York. Henry Sloane Coffin (1897) served there as Professor of Practical Theology from 1904 to 1926 and then as President from 1926 to 1945.
In the legal world, the major establishment firms in New York are saturated with The Order. These include Lord, Day and Lord, dominated by the Lord family; Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett, especially the Thacher family; Davis Polk & Wardwell; and Debevoise, Plimpton, the Rockefeller family law firm.
There has also been significant penetration into communications. Some examples include:
Henry Luce (1920), of Time-Life William Buckley Jr. (1950), of National Review Alfred Cowles (1913), president of Cowles Communications Emmert Bates (1932), of Litton Educational Systems Richard Ely Danielson (1907), of Atlantic Monthly Russell Wheeler Davenport (1923), of Fortune John Chipman Farrar (1918), of publisher Farrar, Straus
The Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the most prestigious award in journalism, also reflects this influence. Its first Director was Archibald MacLeish (1915), a member of The Order.
In finance, Pierre Jay (1892) became the first Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Politics and government remain the areas where The Order made some of its greatest advances, with names such as Taft, Bush, Stimson, Chafee, Lovett, Whitney, and Bundy among the most prominent examples.
Operations of The Order
In 1981, The Anglo-American Establishment by Carroll Quigley was published in New York. In that work, Quigley describes in close detail the historical operations of the British establishment, which he presents as being controlled by a secret society and operating in much the same way that The Order operates in the United States.
The British secret society, known as The Group, was founded at Oxford University, just as The Order was founded at Yale. The Group functions through a series of concentric circles and, like The Order, is made up of old-line families allied with private merchant bankers, known in the United States as investment bankers.
The Group’s objective is recorded in Cecil Rhodes’ will:
“The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands... and the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire.”
Both The Group and The Order have been unwilling or unable to bring about a global society by voluntary means, and so they turned to coercion. To accomplish this, they created wars and revolutions, raided public treasuries, oppressed, pillaged, and lied, even to their own countrymen.
The activities of The Order are directed toward reshaping society and remaking the world in order to establish a New World Order. This would be a planned order with heavily restricted individual freedom, without constitutional protections, and without national boundaries or cultural distinctions. Part of this effort has been carried out in cooperation with The Group, whose objectives run parallel and are part of the historical record.
The elements of society that must be changed in order to establish this New World Order are clear, and The Order’s actions can be examined in that context:
Education: how the population of the future will behave Money: the means of holding wealth and exchanging goods Law: the authority to enforce the will of the state Politics: the direction of the state Economy: the creation of wealth History: what people believe happened in the past Psychology: the means of controlling how people think Philanthropy: so that people think well of the controllers Medicine: the power over health, life, and death Religion: people’s spiritual beliefs, the spur to action for many Media: what people know and learn about current events Continuity: the power to appoint who follows in your footsteps
The next move by The Order was to gain control of the foundations. It took hold of the major ones—Carnegie, Ford, Peabody, Slater, Russell Sage, and others. As in education, the method was to get in first and set the direction for the future. The initial objective was to establish the course of an organization. Once that direction was in place, the selection of managers intuitive or amoral enough to recognize and continue it kept the momentum moving forward.
When examining the activities of individual members, the pattern can at first appear confusing and even contradictory. For example, in the 1920s, W. Averell Harriman was a major supporter of the Soviets through both financial and diplomatic assistance. Harriman took part in Ruskombank, the first Soviet commercial bank. Max May, vice president of Guaranty Trust, dominated by Harriman-Morgan interests, became the first vice president of Ruskombank and was placed in charge of its foreign operations.
Yet Averell Harriman, his brother Roland Harriman, and members E.S. James and Knight Wooley, acting through the Union Bank, in which they held a major interest, also served as major financial backers of Hitler.
Textbooks present the Nazis and Soviets as bitter enemies and their systems as direct opposites. How, then, could the same individuals support both at the same time? The answer is that these actions are not inconsistent at all, because the objective of The Order stands above and beyond them and in fact depends upon such apparent contradictions.
The objective of The Order is neither “Left” nor “Right.” Left and right are artificial devices used to bring about change, and the extremes of political left and political right are essential elements in a process of controlled change.
Both Marx and Hitler, presented as opposite extremes and as enemies in conventional history, emerged from the same philosophical tradition: Hegelianism. The dialectical process did not begin with Marx, as Marxists claim, but with Fichte and Hegel in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. In the dialectical process, the clash of opposites produces a synthesis. This conflict of opposites is essential for generating change.
For Hegel, and for systems built on Hegelian principles, the State is absolute. The State demands complete obedience from the individual citizen. In such organic systems, the individual does not exist for himself, but only to fulfill a role in the life of the State. Freedom is found only through obedience to the State.
This is a central part of the explanation of The Order. When its co-founder, William Russell, was in Germany in 1831–32, he could scarcely have avoided Hegelian theory and discussion. It dominated campus thought and swept through intellectual Germany.
Most people believe that the State exists to serve the individual, not the other way around. The Order holds the opposite view. Its discussions and its funding always move toward greater state power, broader use of state power, and away from individual rights. So long as the rights of the individual are kept out of the discussion, the clash of ideas continues to generate the conflict necessary for change.
How The Order Relates to the CFR and Similar Organizations
Organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) do not meet the requirements of a conspiracy. They are simply too large, and their memberships are not secret. Anyone can obtain a list of members for the CFR and the Trilateral Commission (TC), whereas the membership list for The Order had never surfaced until now.
These larger, open organizations serve as forums for discussion, places where ideas can be tested, where individuals can be evaluated, and where discreet criticism and commentary can be made away from the scrutiny of the press. They may not be elected bodies, but neither are they conspiracies.
The Order is represented within these organizations, though it does not always dominate them. David Rockefeller, a former chairman of the CFR, was not a member of The Order, although Percy Rockefeller represented the family within it. The present chairman in 1983, Winston Lord, was a member.
The relationship between The Order and these larger groups can be understood as a series of concentric circles:
The outer circle — large, open organizations with some membership drawn from The Order The inner circle — one or more secret societies such as Chapter 322 The inner core — a secret society within a secret society, the innermost decision-making center. Its existence cannot be proven, but logic suggests that some members of the inner circle would form an executive committee, action group, or inner core The Outer Circle
The Council on Foreign Relations is the largest organization in the outer circle. It has about 2,500 members at any one time, as many as The Order has had in its entire history. The CFR dates from 1922. Among those who were members of both The Order and the CFR were:
Jonathan Bingham, Congressman William F. Buckley, Editor of National Review McGeorge Bundy, foundation executive William P. Bundy, Central Intelligence Agency George H. W. Bush, Vice-President of the United States
The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and includes 200 members worldwide, about 77 of whom are American. There is no overlap in total membership, yet Trilateral purposes, as described in the literature, are almost identical to those of The Order. J. Richardson Dilworth, chief financial and administrative officer for Rockefeller Family Associates, was a member of The Order.
The Bilderberg Group dates from the 1950s. So far as can be traced, only William F. Buckley was a member of both the Bilderbergers and The Order.
The Pilgrim Society dates from 1900. The Order does not appear directly on the Executive Committee of the Pilgrim Society, but only through family names such as Aldrich and Pratt.
The Inner Circle
Chapter 322 of The Order differs from the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and similar organizations because it is a genuinely secret society. Its purposes and its membership are not disclosed. It is highly protective of its secrecy and careful in covering its tracks.
Another major distinction between the outer circle and the inner circle lies in funding. The families in The Order stand closer to more foundations and more sources of financial power than the Rockefeller family. It was The Order that helped launch John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, not the other way around.
Looking ahead from 1983 to the year 2083, it is entirely possible that the Rockefellers will have followed the path of the Carnegies and the Morgans: names preserved in old files, but no longer represented in the power group.
The Chain of Influence
Initiates into The Order are assured career advancement, success, and often wealth, provided they follow the rule that to get along, one must go along. Intermarriage strengthens the power of the families and broadens their reach. Over time, a chain of influence extending across generations guarantees continuity.
Members of The Order are found in every segment of society. The major occupations represented among them are law, education, business, finance, and industry. These five fields account for more than three-quarters of the membership and are precisely the areas most important to the control of society. By contrast, the least-represented sectors are those with the least ability to shape the structural direction of society.
The practice of absolute preferment for members of The Order has perpetuated its influence in a remarkable way. The Order has initiated only about 2,500 members in its history, adding exactly fifteen each year, no more and no less. Out of 30 to 40 million degree holders in the United States, a few hundred men are presumed to be the only ones fit to occupy the highest posts in government.
There are also approximately 2,500 institutions of higher learning in the United States. Are we to believe that only one of them is capable of producing the talent required to lead the country?
Four families illustrate one such chain of influence: the Whitneys, Stimsons, Achesons, and Bundys.
Chain of Influence Example
William C. Whitney (1863) His attorney and close associate was Elihu Root.
Henry L. Stimson (1888) Joined Elihu Root’s law firm in 1890. By 1901, the firm became Winthrop and Stimson. Married Mabel White, daughter of Charles A. White (1854). Served as Secretary of War under President William H. Taft (1878), succeeding Elihu Root. Served as Secretary of State under President Hoover. Served again as Secretary of War under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.
Harvey Hollister Bundy (1909) Served as special assistant to Henry Stimson during World War II. Was a key Pentagon figure on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.
McGeorge Bundy (1940) Son of Harvey H. Bundy. Co-authored, with Henry Stimson, the book On Active Service in Peace and War (Harper, 1948).
William P. Bundy (1939) Son of Harvey H. Bundy. Served as editor of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs while Winston Lord was Chairman.
Dean Acheson Member of the related Scroll & Key society at Yale. His daughter Mary Acheson married William Bundy. His son David Acheson became a member of The Order.
Harvey Hollister Bundy and two of his three sons, William Putnam Bundy and McGeorge Bundy, were key activists, and that activism followed a Hegelian pattern: the creation of conflict to produce change.
McGeorge Bundy served as National Security Advisor during the early years of the Vietnam debacle. At the same time, his brother William P. Bundy held key Far East positions in both the Defense and State Departments.
By acting together, the Bundy brothers could have exercised complete control over the flow of information relating to Vietnam from intelligence, State, and Defense. This cannot be asserted as proven fact, but it stands as a hypothesis worthy of examination.
Keeping the Lid on the Pot
The Order’s control of history, exercised through foundations and through the American Historical Association, has been effective. Yet from time to time its plans go awry, and the bubbling pot of political manipulation threatens to spill into public view.
More effective than outright censorship is the use of the left-right political spectrum to neutralize unwelcome facts and ideas, or simply to condition citizens to think along prescribed lines. The left-leaning press can always be counted on to attack information coming from the right, and the right-leaning press can be counted on to do the same in reverse.
Some media outlets were set up for precisely this purpose. On the left, both The Nation and The New Republic were financed by Willard Straight using Payne Whitney funds from The Order. On the right, National Review, published by William Buckley of The Order, has operated at a perpetual deficit.
The Order also faces several problems:
The Order lives in a cultural straightjacket — its knowledge of the world comes from an in-group and from those willing to play along with that in-group, and the in-group lacks both morality and diversity. It is easy prey for the ambitious outsider — Henry Kissinger serves as a prime example of an outsider desperate to remain on the inside. Genetic problems — extensive intermarriage among the families raises serious questions about genetic malfunctions. A shallow power base — The Order lacks philosophical and cultural depth and suffers from an absence of diversity.
The great strength of individualism—an atomistic social order in which the individual holds ultimate sovereignty—is that any counterrevolution against an imposed social order, one in which the State is master, can take a million roads and a million forms.
No one will create an anti-Order movement. That would be both foolish and unnecessary. Such a movement could be infiltrated, bought off, or diverted too easily. The force that topples The Order will be far simpler and far more effective: ten thousand, or a million, Americans who decide that they do not want the State to be master, that they prefer to live under the protection of the Constitution. They will make their own independent decision to resist The Order.
In the end, one point must be emphasized above all others: understanding The Order and its method of operation is impossible unless the reader keeps in mind the Hegelian roots of its game plan. A statist system is the objective of The Order.
Above all, the reader must set aside the familiar descriptive clichés of left and right, liberal and conservative, communist and fascist, even republican and democrat.
These terms may matter for self-identification, but in this context they only confuse unless they are understood as essential parts of a larger strategy. The Order can never be understood if it is forced into the labels of right or left.
The Order: Origins and Identity
Those close to it reportedly call it simply The Order. Legally, it was incorporated as the Russell Trust in 1856. It has also allegedly been known at various times as the “Brotherhood of Death,” though it is more widely recognized by the name Skull and Bones.
The American branch of this society was founded at Yale University in 1833 by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. Taft later became Secretary of War in the Grant administration and was also the father of William Howard Taft, who would become both President of the United States and Chief Justice.
This organization is presented not as an ordinary college fraternity, but as a secret society centered in Yale’s senior class. Members are said to be sworn to secrecy, discouraged from acknowledging their membership, and oriented less toward campus life than toward influence in the wider world after graduation.
Two other Yale senior societies, Scroll & Key and Wolf’s Head, are sometimes portrayed as rivals, but within this framework they are suspected of belonging to the same broader network.
The significance of the number 322, associated with Skull and Bones, has been the subject of speculation. One interpretation holds that it refers to a lineage reaching back to 322 B.C. and Demosthenes. Society records have reportedly used a dating system that adds 322 years to the current year.
Each year, exactly fifteen new members are selected. Over roughly 150 years, that would amount to around 2,500 initiates, with perhaps 500 to 600 living members active at any given time. The claim is that only a fraction of these members take an active role in advancing the society’s larger goals, while others drift away or lose interest.
Potential members are described as likely to come from established Bones families and to possess ambition, political skill, resourcefulness, and loyalty to the group. Influence, status, and financial opportunity are presented as rewards for service to the society’s objectives.
Initiation is said to involve elaborate ritual and symbolic rebirth. Members receive new names and identify one another through internal titles, while outsiders are referred to dismissively as “gentiles” or “vandals.”
A recurring theme in this interpretation is that a relatively small set of families has exercised disproportionate influence over The Order for generations. Through family tradition, social ties, and intermarriage, these lineages are said to have reproduced their influence across decades.
These families are divided into two broad groups: first, old American families rooted in early East Coast settlement; second, families whose fortunes were made more recently in banking, railroads, oil, lumber, retail, and industry, and who later entered the same elite social network.
How Much Is Known About The Order?
The text argues that published coverage of The Order has historically been sparse. It points to Ron Rosenbaum’s 1977 Esquire article, “The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones,” as one of the few widely known treatments, though it criticizes that piece as superficial and more interested in atmosphere than serious historical investigation.
The stronger claim is that membership lists and open historical records make it possible to trace how members moved through institutions, assumed positions of influence, appointed allies, and advanced certain objectives over time. Rather than relying on confession or official disclosure, this method attempts to reconstruct patterns from documented actions and connections.