Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, The Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power

Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, The Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power: "Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H. Russell - the future valedictorian of the class of 1833 - traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of the United States' most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut State Legislature, agGeneral in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death.s head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth century society of the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the U.S., he found an atmosphere so anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class - including Alphonso Taft, the future Secretary of War, Attorney General, Minister to Austria, Ambassador to Russia, and father of future President William Howard Taft - and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.

The men called their organization the 'Brotherhood of Death,' or, more informally, 'The Order of Skull and Bones.' They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was the second chapter of the German organization, founded in 1832. They worshipped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and covertly plotted an underground conspiracy to dominate the world.

Fast forward 170 years. Skull and Bones has curled its tenta"