REVISITING: Skull and Bones

In 1828, a bricklayer and Freemason named William Morgan decided to expose the secrets of his order by publishing a tell-all book. His publisher’s office burned down under suspicious circumstances. Morgan was arrested on fabricated charges, then released when a mysterious person paid his bail. He was never seen again. The episode uses this disappearance as its entry point into the story of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale University that has counted presidents, senators, and intelligence officers among its members—and that, according to legend, may have been shaping American power ever since.

The anti-democratic origins of Skull and Bones

The public backlash against the Freemasons after Morgan’s disappearance created a political climate hostile to secret societies. By the early 1830s, many Americans saw them as fundamentally undemocratic—small groups of hand-selected elites doing each other favors in secret, the opposite of what the United States was supposed to stand for. Important officials publicly distanced themselves from such organizations.