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AMERICA'S SECRET ESTABLISHMENT -- AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ORDER OF SKULL AND BONES |
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Memorandum Number Four: Who Is In This Secret Society? The membership list of about 2500 initiates into The Order has very obvious features:
From this preliminary information we can derive Hypothesis One: THERE EXISTS [N THE UNITED STATES TODAY, AND HAS EXISTED SINCE 1833, A SECRET SOCIETY COMPRISING MEMBERS OF OLD LINE AMERICAN FAMILIES AND REPRESENTATIVES OF FINANCIAL POWER. The chart on page 19 presents a simplified layout of this hypothesis. Full information remains for a later book -- for now we'll give details of just two key families, the Whitneys and the Harrimans.
THE ORDER The Whitney Family A key family is the Whitneys, descended from English Puritans who came to the U.S. about 1635 and settled in Watertown, Mass. Eight Whitneys have been members of The Order. Of these, three had brief lives; Emerson Cogswell Whitney died a few months after initiation and Edward Payson Whitney "disappeared in 1858" according to his biographer. However, three Whitneys, William Collins Whitney and his two sons, are the core of Whitney influence in The Order which survives today through the Harriman family and intermarriage with Paynes and Vanderbilts. Whitneys In The Order:
William Collins Whitney (1841-1904) is a fine example of how members of The Order rise to fame and fortune. W.C. Whitney was initiated in 1863 and by 1872 had only advanced his career to Inspector of Schools for New York. However, in the last three decades of the century, he rolled up a massive fortune, became a power behind the throne in the Cleveland Administration, and directed the often unscrupulous activities of a cluster of capitalists known as "the Whitney Group". A brief quotation suggests the power that Whitney amassed in a brief 30 years. This is a list of Whitney estates at the turn of the century: "... a city residence in New York, a Venetian palace and 5,000 acres in Wheatley Hills, near Jamaica, L.I.; a Sheepshead Bay house, with a private track covering 300 acres; a mansion at Berkshire Hills, Mass., with 700 acres of land; October Mountain house, with a large tract of land; Stony Ford Farm, New York, used as an auxiliary to his Kentucky Stock Farm; an Adirondack game preserve of 16,000 acres; a lodge at Blue Mountain Lake with a fine golf course, a Blue Grass farm of 3,000 acres in Kentucky; and an estate at Aiken, S.C., comprising a mansion, race course, and 2,000 acres of hunting land." William C. Whitney married Flora Payne, daughter of Standard Oil Treasurer Oliver Payne. The Paynes are not in The Order, but adding the Payne piece of the Standard Oil fortune made Whitney's fortune that much larger. Their two sons, Harry Payne ('94) and Payne Whitney ('98), went to Yale and became members of The Order. After Yale Harry Payne promptly married Gertrude Vanderbilt in 1896 and so the Whitney-Payne fortune now joined some Vanderbilt money. This financial power was channeled into Guaranty Trust, the J.P. Morgan and Guggenheim outfits. And it gets more complicated. For example, the son of Harry Payne Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, married Marie Norton. After their divorce, Marie Norton Whitney married W. Averell Harriman (his first wife) who is today at 91 a key member. It is these tightly woven family and financial interlocks that make up the core of The Order. So let's take a look at the Harriman family. The Harriman Family In the first few days of June 1983 a prominent American, a private citizen, flew to Moscow for a confidential chat with Yuri Andropov. A State Department interpreter went along. This American was not the President, nor the Vice-President, nor the Secretary of State, nor any member of the Reagan Administration. It was a private individual -- W. Averell Harriman. The first time any American had talked with Yuri Andropov since the death of his predecessor, Brezhnev. So who is W. Averell Harriman? The elder Harriman, a prominent and not too scrupulous railroad magnate, sent both his sons to Yale. William Averell Harriman ('13) and Edward Roland Noel Harriman ('17) joined The Order. A good example of how old line families in The Order absorbed new wealth families, although as history has unfolded it may be that Harriman and his fellow investment bankers have dominated the direction of The Order in the past few decades.
Brown Brothers Harriman, advertisement from Wall Street Journal listing partners. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Tuesday, July 11, 1972 Business Established 1818 STATEMENT OF CONDITION, JUNE 30, 1972 ASSETS LIABILITIES PARTNERS LIMITED PARTNERS COMPLETE BANKING FACILITIES Licensed as Private Bankers and subject to examination and regulation by the Superintendent of Banks of the State of New York and by the Department of Banking of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Subject to supervision and examination by the Commissioner of Banks of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The activities of the Chicago and St. Louis offices are limited to Investment Advisory and Brokerage Services. In the 1930s W.A. Harriman & Company merged with Brown Brothers. This was an older financial house whose partners were also members of The Order. Alexander Brown was founded 1800 in New York and Philadelphia. By the 1970s the relatively unknown private international banking firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman, with assets of about one-half billion dollars, had taken in so many of "the Brotherhood" that out of 26 individual partners, no fewer than 9 were members of The Order. We don't know of any greater concentration of members. And to make it more interesting, Prescott Bush, father of President George H. W. Bush (both in The Order), was a partner in Brown Brothers, Harriman for over 40 years. Finally, because Brown Brothers, Harriman is a private banking firm it has relatively no government supervision and does not publish an annual report. In other words, we know NOTHING about its operations -- at least we know nothing from Brown Brothers, Harriman sources. Here's a line-up of Brown Brothers, Harriman partners who were also members of The Order in the mid 1970s:
It's worth thinking about this concentration of names and the power it represents in the light of outside comments on The Order over the years. After the title page of this volume we reprint the verse of an anonymous Yale student of the 1870s. He commented on the requirement to put The Order ahead of all else. The Editor of The Iconoclast (also in the 1870s) wrote:
And on their breasts they wear a sign Another writer in the 1870s called The Order the "Brotherhood of Death":
And settle down in silence solidly, Ron Rosenbaum in his 1977 Esquire article a century later, was no less caustic. Rosenbaum called it a Mafia. From evidence to be presented later this author would term The Order "an international Mafia" ... unregulated and all but unknown. To the outside world, however, it's merely Brown Brothers, Harriman, 59 Wall Street, New York. But obviously Yuri Andropov over in Moscow knows who holds the cards. The British Connection Some well read readers may raise a question -- how does The Order and its families relate to Cecil Rhodes' secret society, Milners Round Table, the Illuminati and the Jewish secret society equivalents? How do these fit into the picture? We are concerned here only with the core of a purely American phenomenon with German origin. It is undoubtedly linked to overseas groups. The links between The Order and Britain go through Lazard Freres and the private merchant bankers. Notably the British establishment was also founded at a University -- Oxford University, and especially All Souls College at Oxford. The British element is called "The Group." The Group links to the Jewish equivalent through the Rothschilds in Britain (Lord Rothschild was an original member of Rhodes' "inner circle"). The Order in the U.S. links to the Guggenheim, Schiff and Warburg families. There were no Jews at all in The Order until very recently. In fact, The Order has, as Rosenbaum suggests, some definite anti-semetic tendencies. Token Jews (and token blacks) have been admitted in recent years. There is an Illuminati connection. Some details are in the Esquire article, more details will be in our future volumes. All these groups have cooperative and competitive features. But to argue that all the world's ills can be ascribed to any one of these groups is false. The core of The Order, like the core of "The Group" in England, comprises about 20 families. In the U.S. case they are mostly descendents from the original settlers in Massachusetts. New wealth did not enter The Order until the mid-19th century and until recently, has never dominated The Order. On the other hand, key families, the Whitneys and the Harrimans, are linked to their own banking interests. In many ways these old line Yankee families have outsmarted the bankers. The Puritans diverted bankers' wealth to their own objectives without always absorbing the banker families. The Order controls the substantial wealth of Andrew Carnegie, but no Carnegie has ever been a member of The Order. The Order used the Ford wealth so flagrantly against the wishes of the Ford family that two Fords resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation. No Ford has been a member of The Order. The name Morgan has never appeared on the membership lists, although some Morgan partners are with the inner core, for example, Davison and Perkins. Interestingly, the Astor name is prominent in "The Group" in England, but not in The Order in the U.S.
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