Crackpots #4: Secret Handshakes and a Spooky Election Season by Matt Farwell (Patreon)

This week's edition of Crackpots comes from Matt Farwell. 

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A week ago, walking back to the English Department from a sandwich shop on a sun-filled autumn day, I noticed a black-framed letter leaning against the southwest column of the Palladian-inspired Rotunda, the centerpiece of Thomas Jefferson’s original “Academical Village” for the University of Virginia. I walked up the marble steps to get a closer look and take a photograph; it was then that I noticed the white Z inscribed in a black circle that served as the signature for the letter. 

This is how the Secret Societies at the University of Virginia communicate with the general public; anonymous banners, graffiti and night letters, sometimes sealed with wax, placed covertly in places where they can be read by the un-initiated. The Z’s—one of the three major secret societies here, alongside the IMPs and the 7’s, had a gripe: On October 10, someone forged letters from the Z’s endorsing Donald Trump for President, dropping these letters off at various spots around Grounds. The Z’s don’t have much in the way of a sense of humor, as the real letter they put out in response showed. 

“In the context of a highly contested and emotionally charged election, such actions—whether intended as a joke or not—have a tremendous impact. The Z Society believes it is both irresponsible and unethical to use elections and fake endorsements as prank material.”

I took a photo, ate my sandwich, and went to class. 

I’m a graduate student but not a member of any secret society. The walk back to my building reminded me how many there are here. 

Later that week, walking on the downtown mall, I ran into an old classmate from twenty years ago who’d been tapped as a Z, and still wore the Z ring the undergraduate members are allowed to wear from Graduation Day on—Z’s identities, while still students, are supposed to remain secret. 

What was the deal with that letter, I asked. Oh, the IMPs, he told me, you know how they are. They’d done the same prank in 2016, he explained.

The IMPs here are hell-raisers; when I was an undergraduate, my roommate Dwayne was an IMP and I attended their annual IMP Ball with a Persian actuarial student named Miriam. When they’re out on the prowl, the members of the society all wear soft hoods with fabric devil horns, carry wooden pitchforks, wear bathrobes and get rip-roaring drunk. They were the descendants of the Hot Feet Society, who’d caused some consternation before World War I when, one well-lubricated night in 1908, they’d liberated the taxidermized animals—including a full-size moose—from Brooks Hall and placed them strategically around grounds. Professors woke up with stuffed animals in lewd positions blocking the doors to their pavilions, and were not amused; the Hot Feet were banned, and in 1913, the IMPs (Incarnate Memories Prevail) took their place.

I’ve been fascinated by the dynamics of the Secret Societies since I was a first year here in 2002. It’s hard not to be; their iconography is everywhere, their membership (except for the IMPs) a mystery, their power whispered about. The power aspect of it seems ridiculous, until it seems real; I’ve spent the past year examining the archival papers of Frank Gardiner Wisner, a founding father of the Central Intelligence Agency—the Deputy Director (Plans) responsible for all the covert operations and espionage—who went to undergrad and law school here. Wisner was an IMP; only after his suicide in 1965 was his other affiliation known. The Z’s reveal their identities at graduation; the Sevens reveal their identities only after death.  

Frank’s son Ellis—who went to Yale, not UVA—told me that Frank never spoke about being a Seven, and the family only knew of Wisner’s affiliation with the University of Virginia’s most powerful and mysterious secret society when a large wreath of black magnolias in the shape of the numeral 7 mysteriously appeared overnight by his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, which sits adjacent to the Army post that houses the 3d Infantry Regiment—the Old Guard. My brother is buried there; I’ve been to the place many times. Arlington National Cemetery is closed to visitors at night; it took some juice for the 7s to get that wreath in. 

“They constructed in the senior societies, with admirable insight, a mechanism to mobilize the emotions of the selected few to their high purposes. Exactly how this was done, in nine months, in weekly meetings, in secret places, whole lives were changed, is past all discovery. Such special election produces no doubt a sense of large responsibility; the compressions of the secret can create great energy. At any rate, for most of those engaged, it worked,”

wrote Elting E Morison in Turmoil and Tradition: A study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson. 

Stimson (Skull and Bones 1888) was Secretary of War under President William Howard Taft (Skull and Bones 1878, William Howard Taft was son of the society’s co-founder, Alphonso Taft), then Governor General of the Philippines under President Calvin Coolidge, Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover, and again Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt, responsible for organizing and training the 13 million men and women who joined the military during World War II. He was also the man General Leslie Groves and Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer reported to about the status of the Manhattan Project, the above top secret conspiracy between private industry, government, and academia that resulted in the Atomic Bomb.   

The year I enrolled in college, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, was himself a collegiate Secret Society Member at his Alma Mater, Yale—Skull and Bones, Class of 1968; the year I dropped out of college the first time, he ran for re-election against John Kerry,  Skull and Bones, Class of 1966. 

Lore holds that part of the Skull and Bones initiation ritual involves laying in a casket and masturbating while delivering a full recitation of one’s sexual history to the rest of the society. I like to think they are all clad in cloaks, although I really have no way of knowing. It seemed to me, even in those early days, that the Presidential election the choice was between a man who’d jacked it in a coffin in front of college classmates in 1966, and a man who’d jacked it in a coffin in front of college classmates in 1968. 

George W. Bush’s codename within the society was ‘Temporary’ or ‘Gog,’ depending on who you ask. His father, George H.W. Bush—who would serve as the 11th Director of Central Intelligence before assuming the Vice-Presidency under Reagan and the Presidency after Reagan—was Skull and Bones 1948; his codename was Magog, reportedly given to the initiate with the most sexual experience. Who knew? 

The small number of secret society alumni permeate American politics and government in ways too elaborate to get into here (Remember, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Batman villain Steve Mnuchin, was Skull and Bones 1985) but they also permeate American culture; the Simpsons character Monty Burns (Skull and Bones 1914) was, canonically, a roommate of Dink Stover at Yale. Stover at Yale, a 1911 novel by Owen Johnson that F. Scott Fitzgerald called “textbook” for his generation, was a collegiate bildungsroman. Dink Stover, fresh from Lawrenceville, arrives at Yale and is taken under the wing of Hugh Le Baron. 

"What do you know about the society system here?" said Le Baron abruptly.

"Why, I know—there are three senior societies: Skull and Bones, Keys, Wolf's-Head—but I guess that's all I do know."

"You'll hear a good deal of talk inside the college, and out of it, too, about the system. It has its faults. But it's the best system there is, and it makes Yale what it is to-day. It makes fellows get out and work; it gives them ambitions, stops loafing and going to seed, and keeps a pretty good, clean, temperate atmosphere about the place."

By the end of the book, after spending the majority of the novel awaiting “Tap Day” when the secret societies meet students in their rooms to offer membership, Stover is disillusioned with the whole Secret Society system. He decides to tell the local eminence grace of Skull and Bones—Judge Story—how he feels, rehearsing the lines on Judge Story’s daughter, to whom he is engaged. 

"That Skull and Bones, which does a great good here—I believe it—also does a great deal of harm; all of which is unnecessary and a weakness in its system. In a word, I've come to the point where I believe secrecy is un-American, undemocratic and stultifying; and, as I say, totally unnecessary. I should always be against it."

Of course, by the end, when Stover is actually tapped for Skull and Bones, he, delirious with the status it provides, accepts the offer, justifying the decision to his friend Hungerford.  

"It shows the stuff that's here," said Hungerford, "when you once can get to it. Now I take off my hat to them. I only hope you can make your influence felt."

"I'm going to try," said Stover solemnly. "The thing is so big a thing that it ought not to be hampered by bug-a-boo methods."

Just the other day, shortly after I walked past the Z Society’s letter on the Rotunda, Bonesman Robert Kagan (1980), married to State Department ghoul Victoria Nuland, resigned from the Washington Post’s board over the paper’s decision to not endorse a Presidential candidate. It reminded me of the letter from the Z’s I saw last week. So let’s get back to the point: these things understandably might appear—to the outsider—to be goofy private collegiate clubs for the rich and the aspirational strivers that want to join their ranks, but that doesn’t mean the membership doesn’t take them seriously. When Kerry and Bush, twenty years ago, were asked about their secret society affiliations by the press, they brushed off the questions. 

When Bush was reelected, he had a bunch of Bonesman out to Camp David for a society weekend, a Marine Corps veteran who’d done security at the Presidential Retreat told me. The organizations leave their mark and weave their influence, and have for the last hundred years.    

There’s not a Bonesman on the ticket this year, but that doesn’t mean the secret society alumni won’t have power in the next administration; they will, no matter who wins the election. Whether the electoral roulette pill lands on Red or Blue November 5th, you can be sure that after the inauguration in January that a Bonesman, a Seven, a Scroll and Key, a Wolfshead, an IMP or a Z will be there to shake the President’s hand. Power, in America, has resided in the mysteries for at least the last hundred years, and I don’t see that changing in the next seven days. 

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Matt writes The Hunt for Tom Clancy, a paranoid lens on American popular culture. He is the author of American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan (Penguin Press 2019). An Army infantry veteran of the 10th Mountain Division and 2019 graduate from the University of Virginia, he is back in the Blue Ridge burning up the last of his GI Bill Bloodmoney getting a Master’s Degree in English from Mr. Jefferson’s University.