The Order of Skull and Bones
Yale University is where three threads of American social history — espionage, drug smuggling, and secret societies — first entwined into one. Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort St. George in the coastal city of Madras (modern-day Chennai, India), in 1687. Having amassed a great fortune from trade, he returned to England in 1699 and gained fame as a philanthropist. Upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, Yale sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent bequests, the socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718. In 1832, William Huntington Russell (a founder and original trustee of Yale College) and Alphonso Taft (founder of an American political dynasty) first assembled the Order of Skull and Bones, a secret society for the elite children of the Anglo-American Wall Street banking establishment. At that time, William Huntington Russell’s stepbrother, Samuel Russell, oversaw Russell & Company, the world’s largest opium smuggling operation. And it was Alphonso Taft’s son, 27th U.S. President William Howard Taft, who would become a leading proponent of the League of Nations, a forerunner to the United Nations.
