10.06
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. “The 40-acre (160,000 m2) retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to ‘get together and rekindle old friendships.’ A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals. Although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. ‘Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings,’ a patriarch sighs. ‘It’s basically ruins.’ Another Bonesman says that to call the island ‘rustic’ would be to glorify it. ‘It’s a dump, but it’s beautiful.’”
Yale became coeducational in 1969, but Skull & Bones remained all-male at the behest of the Russell Trust Association. The Class of 1991, however, disregarded the Trust and tapped seven female members for membership in the next year’s class. The Trust responded by changing the locks on the “Tomb”; the Bonesmen had to meet at the building of Manuscript Society.
A mail-in vote by living members decided 368-320 to permit going co-ed, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move, arguing that a formal change in bylaws was needed. Other alumni, such as John Kerry, spoke out in favor of admitting women, and the dispute even ended up on The New York Times editorial page. A second vote of alumni in October 1991 agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was dropped. Wolf’s Head Society was the last all-male society at Yale.