Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The society's alumni organization, which owns the society's real property and oversees the organization's activity, is the Russell Trust Association, and is named after General William Huntington Russell, who founded the society with fellow classmate Alphonso Taft. Informally, the group is known as Bones, and members have been known as Bonesmen. President George H. W. Bush, his son President George W. Bush, and the latter's 2004 Presidential opponent Senator John Kerry are members of Skull and Bones. Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale's debating societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliope, over that season's Phi Beta Kappa awards; its original name was the Order of Skull and Bones. The only chapter of Skull and Bones created outside Yale was a chapter at Wesleyan University in 1870. That chapter, the Beta of Skull & Bones, became independent in 1872 in a dispute over control over creating additional chapters; the Beta Chapter reconstituted itself as Theta Nu Epsilon. For most of its history, Skull & Bones operated as a peer society with Scroll and Key and, later, Wolf's Head, two of Yale's other property-owning senior societies. Skull and Bones owns a campground island in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island.