Scroll and Key Totally Explained

Everything about The Scroll And Key totally explained

The Scroll and Key Society is a senior or secret society established by John Porter, William Kingsley, Samuel Perkins, Enos Taft, Lebbeus Chapin, George Jackson, Homer Sprague, Charlton Lewis, Calvin Child and Josiah Harmer" at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1841.

History

The society, according to the Times, was organized by 12 members of the Yale Class of 1842, including those mentioned above with Theodore Runyon, Isaac Hiester and Leonard Case. (William Kingsley, the namesake of the alumni organization, the Kingsley Trust Association (K.T.A.), was a member of the Class of 1843.) The thirteen were "dissatisfied with the elections to Skull and Bones." For ten years, the society tapped annually twelve members; thereafter, "Keys," as the group is known colloquially, thought best to follow the tradition of fifteen (and sometimes, more) undergraduate members established by "Bones" for a Yale senior or secret society delegation or cohort.
   Members meet Thursday and Sunday nights during their senior year in the Society's ornate, windowless "tomb," distinguished by alternating dark and light bands of stone, pattern-pierced stone window screens and ornate column capitals at the entrance. Late at night traditionally after their weekly meetings, "Keysmen" gather on their front steps to serenade College Street with their "Troubador" song. "Keys" co-educated in 1989.
   Tax records show an endowment worth several million dollars more than that of its elder counterpart, Skull and Bones. In addition to financing its own activities, "Keys" has made numerous donations to Yale over the years: the John Addison Porter Prize, awarded annually by Yale since 1872, and in 1917 an endowment for the Yale University Press which has funded the publication of The Yale Shakespeare and other scholarly works. George Parmly Day founded the Yale University Press.
   Many "Keysmen" have been and would be considered members of the power elite. Membership has been defined by two differing and sometime overlapping demographics among the rising senior class: the leading architects, scientists, singers, and squash, crew or hockey athletes, and the descendents of the Mayflower families and families among Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor's "400."

Architecture

Richard Morris Hunt. (1869-70, Moorish- or Islamic-inspired Beaux-Arts.) Architectural historian Patrick Pinnell includes an in-depth discussion of Keys' building in his 1999 history of Yale's campus, relating the then-notable cost overruns associated with the Keys structure and its aesthetic significance within the campus landscape. Pinnell's history shares the fact that the land was purchased from another secret society, Berzelius.

Regarding its distinctive appearance, Pinnell noted that "19th century artists' studios commonly had exotic orientalia lying about to suggest that the painter was sophisticated, well traveled, and in touch with mysterious powers; Hunt's Scroll and Key is one instance in which the trope got turned into a building."

Notable members

Diplomacy, national security

Dean Acheson (1915) - 51st Secretary of State

C.Tracy Barnes (1932) - Central Intelligence Agency operative responsible for Bay of Pigs invasion

Cord Meyer, Jr. (1943) - United World Federalists

Frank Polk (1894) - Davis Polk & Wardwell; (acting) Secretary of State who managed conclusion to World War I

Theodore Runyon (1842) - Envoy, then Ambassador, Germany; Battle of Bull Run

Sargent Shriver (1938) - Peace Corps; Special Olympics; 1972 Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate.

Cy Vance (1939) - 57th Secretary of State; Secretary of the Army

Allen Wardwell (1895) - head of Russian War Relief, name partner of Davis Polk & Wardwell; director, Bank of New York; Vice-President, American-Russian Chamber of Commerce.

Thomas Enders, (1953) - Banker, Salomon Brothers, Ambassador to Spain '83-'86, Assistant Sec. of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Ambassador to the European Union '79-'81, Ambassador to Canada, '76-'79.

Winthrop Brown, (1929), Ambassador to Korea, Ambassador to Laos, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Thaddeus R. Beal, (1939) Under-Secretary of the Army, Pres. Harvard Trust Co.

William C. Bullitt, (1912) - US Ambassador to France '36-'41, first US Ambassador to Soviet Russia '33-'36.

Business and industry

Bart Giamatti (1960) - Commissioner of Major League Baseball; 16th President, Yale University

Peter Ligouri (1982) President and CEO of FX Networks (Fox)

Paul Mellon (1929) - philanthropist

Robert Shriver - Baltimore Orioles

John Hay Whitney (1926) - New York Herald Tribune; J.H. Whitney & Co.; Ambassador to the Court of St. James's

Robert Rutherford McCormick (1903) - Chicago Newspaper Baron, Owner, President, Editor and Publisher of the Chicago Tribune; co-founder of Kirkland & Ellis

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1895)

Noborne Berkeley, (1945), President and Director, Chemical Bank, one of America's largest banks (later Chase Manhattan) and director of Freeport-McMoRan.

Percy Chubb, (1956) Chubb Corp. Insurance

James Cox Brady, (1904), Prominent Investor and director of over 20 companies including Chrysler and Central Union Trust.

James Cox Brady Jr. (1929), Founder and President Brady Security & Realty Corp.

James Stillman Rockefeller, President and Chairman of The First National City Bank of New York; Olympic gold medal for crew, 1924.

Brewster Jennings, (1920) Founder and President of the Socony Mobile Oil Company (Standard Oil of New York, now Exxon Mobile), son of Oliver Burr Jennings, President of Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases and Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

George Sturgis Pillsbury (1943), Pillsbury Company, Sargent Management Co., Minnesota Senator.

Hugh D. Auchincloss (1879), Standard Oil, married Emma Jennings, daugher of O. B. Jennings, Standard Oil founder.

Robert O. Hayward, (1909), Banker, Dillon, Read & Co., helped finance Latin American debt, Rhodes Scholar.

Samuel Sloan Colt, (1914), 6th President, Bankers Trust.

Sidney Morse Colgate, (1885), Chairman of Colgate-Palmolive Co., President of Corporation of Colgate University.

Gilbert Colgate, (1883), President and Chairman of Colgate & Co.

Robert Stanton Brewster, (1897), Major Shareholder of Standard Oil, President of Metropolitan Opera and Real Esate Co., New York Security and Trust.

George Stephenson Brewster, (1891)- Financier and shareholder of Standard Oil.

Benjamin Brewster, (1929), Shareholder and Director of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (later Exxon).

Lester Armour, (1918) - Chicago financier, Chairman Harris Trust and Savings Bank, Chairman & CEO, Chicago National Bank, Director, Pure Oil Co. (later Unocal)

Scholars, writers and journalists

George Parmly Day (1897) - Yale University Press

Ray Lorenzo Heffner (1945) - 13th President, Brown University

William Kingsley (1843) - Yale Review

Maynard Mack (1932) - Yale faculty, namesake of distinguished-speaker series of Yale's Elizabethan Club

Stone Phillips (1977) - Dateline NBC

Wayne J. Riley (1981) - Meharry Medical College

Alexandra Robbins (1998) - Secrets of the Tomb

Gideon Rose (1987) - Foreign Affairs

Calvin Trillin (1957) - humorist

Stephen Umin (1959) - Rhodes Scholar; law clerk, Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart

Fareed Zakaria (1986) - Newsweek International

Philip B. Heymann (1954) - Watergate Special Prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General, Harvard Law Professor.

Joseph M. Patterson (1901), American media mogul, Manager of the Chicago Tribune, Founder and President, New York Daily News.

Politics

James L. Connaughton (1982) - Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)

Robert D. Orr (1940) - Governor of Indiana

John Lindsay (1944) - Mayor, New York City; Representative, New York's 17th District

Robert Wagner (1933) - Mayor, New York City; Envoy to the Vatican; Ambassador to Spain

Joseph Medill McCormick (1900) - U.S. Senate '19-'24, Publisher, Chicago Tribune.

James C. Auchincloss, (1908), Member of the 78th to 88th Congress, Governor of the NYSE., US Military Intelligence WWI.

Herbert Parsons (1890), US Congress '04-'10

The judiciary

George Shiras Jr. (1853) - U.S. Supreme Court Justice

The sciences

Harvey Cushing (1891) - neurosurgeon considered father of brain surgery

John Enders (1919) - shared 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Dickinson W. Richards (1917) - 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Benjamin Spock (1925) - Baby & Child Care

Arts and architecture

George Roy Hill (1943) - 1974 Academy Award for Directing, The Sting

Austin Pendleton (1961) - Circle Repertory Company; Drama Desk Award

Cole Porter (1913) - composer and songwriter; original Whiffenpoofs

James Gamble Rogers - (1889) collegiate Gothic architecture, favored architect of Edward Harkness

Garry Trudeau (1970) - DoonesburyFurther Information

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