Mere egalitarianism was never the problem, since left-wing political commitments rarely stopped anyone from accepting admission to a society, even when outsiders accused them of hypocrisy.
Less clear is what precisely about that seismic cultural shift proved fatal. Their decline coincided with the increasingly meritocratic policies of the 1960s. Membership is still sought after by the ambitious for networking purposes, but the secret societies have lost their glamor. Undergraduates walk past the brownstone tomb on High Street with no more interest than they walk past Yorkside Pizza. They no longer have the cultural cachet they enjoyed in the days of John O’Hara and Dink Stover.
Richards’s microscopic view of his subject obscures the larger fact that Yale’s secret societies have long been in decline. He waits until nearly the end of the book to mention that one of the undergraduate ringleaders in favor of admitting women was future Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. Richards fumbles what should be the climax of his book. (He is a lawyer by profession.) The fight that led to women finally being let into Skull and Bones in 1991 makes a gripping saga: keys to the tomb confiscated, lawsuits threatened, top-secret memos leaked and printed in the Wall Street Journal. The bagginess of this 800-plus-page tome is made worse by the fact that Richards is not a natural storyteller. But even the original Bonesmen of the 1830s would probably agree that their dirty jokes (“How did Demosthenes have such numerous progeny when he carried his stones in his mouth?”) did not need to be entered into the historical record. refused to join the Fence Club if it continued to blackball his friend Thomas Guinzberg for being Jewish. Conservative readers will be gratified to learn that William F. “Skull and Keys,” by David Alan Richards (Pegasus Books)Īlas, without the juicy details, “Skulls and Keys” amounts to little more than a succession of anecdotes, some more interesting than others. David Alan Richards admits at the beginning that “there will be no ‘secrets’ here that have not already, somehow and somewhere, been revealed at least once in print.” Richards is a Bonesman himself, so he could divulge hidden secrets if he wanted to, but apparently he decided that his book didn’t need to be spiced up with juicy insider details. If it is the secrecy of these groups that you find appealing, “Skulls and Keys” is the wrong book for you. But no one ever based a horror movie franchise around the Princeton dining clubs.
What is it about Yale’s secret societies that makes otherwise sensible people so awestruck? Why did young men like Kenneth MacLeish feel it was a matter of life and death whether they were admitted to the clubs? Strictly speaking, the Yale senior societies are not fundamentally different from the exclusive social clubs found at every other Ivy League school. 14, 1918, less than a month before World War I ended. Kenneth MacLeish left school to join the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, deployed to France as a pilot and was shot down over Belgium on Oct. “I want to get to France and forget the whole thing.” He had not even been tapped by Skull and Bones, where, through Archie, he was a legacy. The younger brother of the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a letter to his fiancee in 1917 complaining about how depressed and humiliated he felt at having been passed over by all of Yale’s secret societies. Helen Andrews is a 2017 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and has worked as an editor and a think tank researcher.