How many women, blacks and Jews are members of Skull and Bones?

[dolstein]

Granted, as a secret society, this kind of information may be hard to get. But obviously, some membership information isn't so secret. For instance, we know that John Kerry and the current occupant of the White House are members.

Call it a hunch, but I suspect that Skull and Bones isn't the most diverse organization around. So why has Kerry caught so little flack regarding his membership in this "secret society"? After all, can you imagine any candidate for the Democratic nomination being a member of the Augusta National golf club?

[David Dunham]

1. Now there are women, jews, and blacks in it

[ShaneGR]

27. Well, it's like a fraternity... joke inside!

So I'd guess there are Jews and blacks in it. But it's a secret society. Basically they accept 25 members from the Junior class every year. In order to get in, you have to chant incantations, get hazed, sit in a coffin for a couple hours, and run around naked with your pledgemates. Why do you think Kerry is running for President? He saw W naked and said, "No man with a penis that small should be allowed to be President. I will stop him!"

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

45. give me a normal person like in your picture

and these Yalie trust funders can find their own entertainment.

[Throckmorton]

47. So, now its OK to pick on people with small Penni?

Great, I should have stayed in Freeperville, where they take their anti-penally challenged attitude straight, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

[MAlibdem]

32. Kerry's of Jewish ancestry

[dsc]

2. actually one candidate did get flack

Dean gave a speech at a golf club to which his dad belonged. But since he isn't Kerry he didn't get a pass.

[Freddie Stubbs]

23. Skull and Bones now admits women and minorities

Lots of organizations used to discriminate against people. But many have been reformed, and therefore aren't controversial anymore. If that golf club had doen the same, it would not have been an issue.

[dsc]

44. They didn't when Kerry joined

and there is zero evidence he gave a damn back then.

[Beaker]

46. So what?

He's not running for pesident of "back then"...

[dsc]

48. then why all the stories

about Dean's high school yearbook, Dean's park ave upbringing, Dean's dead brother. All of those are contemperary with that and Kerry claims to have cared about Civil Rights back then to boot.

[DrFunkenstein]

3. About As Many As Dean's Cabinet, I Suppose

Beats me. Good thing this, you know, matters.

[Maddy McCall]

4. You bring up the most important point, Dr.: None in Dean's cabinet

And Dean's cabinet was hand-picked by him.

S&B is such a non-issue. A candidate who avoided diversifying his cabinet is a very important issue.

[dsc]

5. Yeah all 6 of them

oh and BTW the one black employee he did have, who helped run the state for him, made his staff over representative. And he had an Asian in that very same cabinet which by itself made it more minority than his state. Can Clark say the same?

[DrFunkenstein]

9. Sorry, Forgot He Ordered A Couple Blacks For College Experience

But you bring up a good point about Dean's bonds with the Black community.

[dsc]

11. He had a black woman

as his chief deputy, though not in the cabinet. Again that makes his staff over representative.

[krkaufman]

20. Good god, yes

Don't be ridiculous. Clark has been widely praised for his efforts in supporting diversity within the military.

Enough of the smears. Come with facts.

[AntiCoup2K4]

7. S&B a non issue?? I don't think so.

The "secret" organization which gave birth to Hitler funding, drug smuggling, terrorist creating criminals is very much the issue. And I don't want a Democratic nominee who is a member of such a group.

[DrFunkenstein]

10. The Navy Killed Thousands - And Kerry Joined Them!

Good thing Kerry spent the last 15 years as head of the Subcommittee fighting terrorists and drug smuggling. He probably is a big fan of Hitler, too.

Alright, you convinced me!

[Piperay]

19. S &B is an issue here but

I would bet that the vast majority of the general voting public hasn't even heard of it and if they have they don't care at all. :shrug:

[ButterflyBlood]

38. while I'm no Dean supporter, that counts as one of the 3 stupid smears

there are three attacks on him I find absolutely ludicrous. The other two is the "draft dodging" nonsense and Vermont's size.

Maybe he had no minorities in his cabinet because it's Vermont? Go look up the demographics. These type of attacks are as dumb as the "Clark is a Republican" attacks.

[tameszu]

6. Lots now

Skull and Bones went co-ed in 1996, and multi-racial awhile before that. A lot of the old S&Bers were really ticked about letting women in, but the new kids' PCness won out, and now it is by all accounts 50-50.

Listen, I am a Yale grad student. Yes, there is a lot of old money floating around here, and yeah, a lot of the students and profs are infected with a brand of limosine liberalism (Yale Daily News liberalism = "I'm a liberal so long as it doesn't cause me the least bit of discomfort") and I'm sure that Yale is responsible for its share of messing up New Haven, but the bottom line is that Yale is still a lib-Dem campus (the voting breakdown in the 2000 election for Yale's ward was: Gore--81, Nader--11, Bush 8).

S&B is sideshow, an overrated frat for intellectuals, ultra-high achievers, and a few super-connected kids that seniors get to join for a year. Certainly it isn't some big conspiratorial thing--for goodness sakes, the ultra-liberal Harper's editor in chief Lewis Lapham was a member!

[uhhuh]

21. The thing that worries me

Is that both Kerry and the chimp avoid talking about it at all costs.
The chimp is quoted as saying that it was a secret society, so secret that he can't talk about it at all. Kerry's spokesperson said that Sen. Kerry will say absolutely nothing about that topic.
I don't like the idea that a "overrated frat for intellectuals" causes our country's leaders to run away from talking about their membership, and what they may have told to others that now might hang over their heads.
The membership list isn't the point. The point is, if you asked Lapham about S&B, would he tell you what it was all about and the kinds of things they did? Has he been asked about it at all? If so, did he answer candidly?
I don't feel comfortable with the level of secrecy coming out of a supposed "overrated frat." If that's all it was, why are the members so afraid to talk about it? Kerry could just say that and be done with it, but it seems he's afraid of how the other "ultra high achievers" might react to his dismissal of them.It has become an issue.
I want a president commited to the people, not a secret club like the idiot we have now.

[tameszu]

22. Yes

"If you asked Lapham about S&B, would he tell you what it was all about and the kinds of things they did? Has he been asked about it at all? If so, did he answer candidly?"

He answered questions about it in an interview. Everyone at Yale knows S&B isn't that big of a deal (although getting into a secret society is obviously an enviable perk), and everyone knows more or less what goes on in them--people sit around and talk (at S&B, they first have to talk about their sex lives) and invite connected/famous speakers; later in the year, they figure out who to bring in and play pranks and so on to iniate the next batch.

The societies are only a little uncomfortable in the same way that, I dunno, things like merit badges or beauty contests might be a bit uncomfortable: parts of tradition that people are at once proud of, because they're definitive, but also a bit ashamed of, because they are a part of a past that is slowly (one hopes) peeling away.

I am guessing that Kerry isn't that comfortable answering that question because he realizes (a) how elitist and effete S&B would seem to regular folks living in red states; and (b) it would only encourage conspiracy mongers like some folks at DU even more. Heck, GWB doesn't exactly play up his Andover-Yale-Harvard education.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

24. Thanks, tameszu

for confirming independently what I (a former Yale grad student from the 1970s) have been saying on several threads.

By the way, in response to dolstein's original question, I don't know the exact racial/ethnic/religious composition of S&B, but for what it's worth, both the Bonesmen I knew personally in the 1970s were Jewish.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

8. Is this another New England axe-to-grind, we-can't -get-elected-thread?

As Holly GoLightly would say "Quel Drag!"

You hate Kerry, you hate Northerners. Can you give us one objective nugget of truth, or are you just going to continue the "I-hate-the North" mantra ad nauseum? It's getting tiresome...

:eyes:

[NNN0LHI]

12. I am a black, Jewish, woman who is a member of Skull and Bones

What of it? :-)

Don

[DODI]

13. Did he give up his membership before he went to Vietnam?

I had seen that on Bartcop.

I should say mentioned on Bartcop.

[waywest]

14. My question would be,

Are you an American or bonesman first?

[Tinoire]

15. Just a little factoid

Kerry apparently helped to get women admitted into S & B.

I'm not enthralled with S&B at all but thought I'd share this with you.

bostonherald.com

Kerry made his Bones in secret club - like Bush

by Andrew Miga
Thursday, May 15, 2003

<snip>

In 1986, Kerry allegedly tried to recruit Jacob Weisberg, then a college-age intern at ``The New Republic'' magazine.

Weisberg, now Slate magazine editor, said Kerry made his pitch during a private meeting in his Senate office. Weisberg declined, pointedly asking Kerry how he squared his liberalism with membership in such an elitist club that refused to admit women. ``Kerry got sort of flustered and said, `I've marched with battered women,' '' Weisberg told the Herald.

Five years later, Kerry was among those voting to force the club to admit women after a bitter court fight.


http://www.propagandamatrix.com/kerry_made_his_bones_in_secret_club

On edit: Adding this:

Bones waited about a century to respond to the criticism. After World War II, it began admitting blacks and Jews. In 1991, the outgoing Bones delegation tried to tap the first Boneswomen. Patriarchs, as Bones alumni are called, literally barred the doors to the Tomb. Led by conservative William F. Buckley Jr., they obtained a court order temporarily blocking non-male members. In the society-wide vote that followed, however, the conservative blue bloods were defeated and a few women were admitted to the rolls.

About the writer : Stephen Prothero graduated from Yale in 1982. He teaches in the religion department at Boston University and is the author of "The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott" (Indiana University Press).


http://www.karenlyster.com/gwb.html

[Freddie Stubbs]

16. Harry Truman applied to be a member of the KKK

I doubt that they had many women, blacks and Jews as members. But he turned out to be one of the best Presidents of the 20th Century. He desegragated the military and was a big supported of Israel.

[tinanator]

35. and dropped the bomb

yeah, wasnt he something? Give me Eisenhower any day of the week.

[Freddie Stubbs]

49. He dropped the bomb to save American lives

An invasion of Japan would have cost thousands of American lives.

[Zomby Woof]

17. I don't know

It's the media's fault.

[Myra]

18. Until very very very very recently, none, according to the author

on a book who was interviewed about it on 60 Minutes.

Now I think there are a couple of tokens.
But that's the point in an exclusive club, to keep power
in the hands of a few rich white guys. That was the vision
of the country's founding fathers in fact.

[Lurking Dem]

25. Women, blacks, and Jews

weren't even allowed at Yale until fairly recently in the scheme of things. What percent of the Yale population is any of those things now?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

37. When groups were admitted

Women have been admitted to the graduate and professional schools since the 19th century, but the first undergrad women were admitted in 1969. At the time I attended, there were fewer women than men, but not to such an extent that you'd be really struck by the imbalance.

There have been Jews and blacks at Yale for a long time, but it was hard for them to get in. The unofficial restrictions on Jews were lifted after WWII, and in the 1970s, they were about 1/3 of undergraduates. In fact, there were enough Orthodox Jews that they had their own kosher dining hall.

After the civil rights movement, Yale instituted affirmative action, just as most other places did. There were never a lot of black students, but they certainly weren't absent from the campus.

[theboss]

43. If it's like Princeton, a fair percentage

The Ivy Leagues has had Jewish students forever. It wasn't admissions that were an issue. It's how they were treated on campus. Thus you have Princeton's eating clubs nasty bicker in the 50s were something like 80 percent of the students who were rejected by the clubs were Jewish.

Joe Paterno also tells a story of a Jewish student getting blackballed in his fraternity at Brown. Paterno stood up, said it was his blackball and he wanted to pull it back.

Princeton started admitting black students in the late 50s, early 60s. There was never an official policy of segregation though. Today, I think they make up 8 to 9 percent of the student body.

Women were first admitted in 1969. I think they are almost 50 percent of the student body now.

The last two eating clubs finally admitted women in the early 90s.

[sangh0]

26. You're not curious about homosexuals?

:shrug:

[Freddie Stubbs]

29. Do you have any evidence that homosexuals are/were excluded?

:shrug:

[sangh0]

31. Yes

.

[Freddie Stubbs]

42. Can you provide a link to back that up?

:shrug:

[Freddie Stubbs]

50. Can anyone provide a link to back that up?

:shrug:

[blm]

28. Really? Kerry nominated minorities to open S&B up to diversity.

You forgot to mention that, dolstein. Remember Jacob Weisberg? He declined but he wrote of it.

[Dr Fate]

30. Yes- but those where "evil, secret minorities", BLM...

The reason why the poster did not mention that is because its A SECRET!!!!!!!!!!

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

33. I don't know. Maybe it's his voting record over the last 20 years that

has insulated him from the BIGOT mantra. Ya think?

BTW Dolstein, I always though you were at LEAST above this kind of attack.

[sangh0]

36. I disagree

I never thought of dolstein as any better than anyone else here.

[THUNDER HANDS]

34. S&B even allows gays now

Read it in the NYT today.

[David Zephyr]

39. "Even Allows"

Wow. "even allows"!

[jonnyblitz]

40. damn now they're really trollin...

for members. gasp. :eyes:

[David Zephyr]

41. "S&K Even Allows Gays"

"even"....