Halsted, despite being football captain and a talented player on the baseball team, was not tapped by either one. Both Gilman and Welch belonged to Skull and Bones, while Harvey Cushing was a member of Scroll and Key and may have turned down a tap from Bones. Running like a golden thread through this story are Yale's secret societies, dominated by the famous Skull and Bones. In the second half of the 19th century, Yale College produced four men who were to play pivotal roles in creating a new and distinctly American kind of university and in the way medicine was taught in this country: One Harvard alumnus was quoted as saying that he intended to send his son to Yale because, “in real life, all the Harvard men are working for Yale men.” Yale men made such records that … to rival institutions and academic reformers there was something irritating and disquieting about old Yale College. Yale inspired a loyalty in its sons that was conspicuous and impressive. Yale was exasperately and mysteriously successful, and the power of the place remains unmistakable. The official history of the college puts it this way: It is worth noting that every name I have mentioned, including the fictitious ones, were members of Yale's famous secret society, Skull and Bones, except for those few who matriculated before Bones was founded in 1832. Yale's reputation was such that it even spawned fictitious Yalies such as Frank Merriwell and Dink Stover. White, founding president of Cornell and a future president of the United States, William Howard Taft. Willard Gibbs educators such as Timothy Dwight, future Yale president, and Andrew D. Calhoun scientists such as Benjamin Silliman and J. Morse men of letters such as Noah Webster statesmen such as John C. Numbered among Yale's graduates were inventors such as Eli Whitney and Samuel F. Having celebrated its centennial in the first year of the new century, the college was transforming itself from a regional New England school whose main function was the education of young men for the Congregational ministry to a dynamic national school whose new function was to train the leaders of the expanding, dynamic America that sprung into being in that century. During the 19th century, Yale College was an academic powerhouse.

George bush skull and bones