Antony Sutton: The Stanford Scholar Who Exposed the Secret Society Behind American Power

In the early 1980s, a former Stanford research fellow received an anonymous eight-inch package of documents in the mail.

Inside was something that had never been seen by the public. Membership rosters. Internal documents. The private records of a secret society that had operated inside Yale University since 1832.

The society was called Skull and Bones. And the man who received those documents was Antony C. Sutton.

His credentials were impeccable. He held a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Southampton. He studied at the University of London and the University of Göttingen. He was an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles. From 1968 to 1973, he held a research fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, one of the most prestigious conservative think tanks in America.

At Hoover, Sutton produced a three-volume study called Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. The work was so rigorous that Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later become National Security Advisor to President Carter, cited it approvingly in his own book.

What Sutton documented was explosive. He argued that the Soviet Union’s entire technological and manufacturing base was built by United States corporations and funded by American taxpayers. The factories. The steel plants. The automotive industry. All of it.

His conclusion was stark: the Cold War conflicts were “not fought to restrain communism” but were organized “to generate multibillion-dollar armaments contracts.” The United States, through financing the Soviet Union, “directly or indirectly armed both sides in at least Korea and Vietnam.”

In 1973, Sutton published a condensed version called National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union.

Shortly after, he was forced out of the Hoover Institution.

Following the Money

But Sutton didn’t stop. He kept following the money.

Between 1974 and 1976, he published what became known as the Wall Street Trilogy: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and FDR, and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.

Working from State Department files, declassified archives, corporate records, and personal papers, Sutton documented how the same network of Wall Street financiers funded the Bolshevik Revolution, financed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and shaped Franklin Roosevelt’s policies.

His conclusion was not that these financiers were ideologically committed to communism or fascism. It was simpler and more disturbing. They were committed to control. And controlled economies, whether communist or fascist, offered monopolizable markets that free markets could not.

As Sutton put it, they were fostering “corporate socialism” to ensure “monopoly acquisition of wealth” because it “would fade away if exposed to the activity of a free market.”

The evidence was documented. The sources were cited. And the academic establishment largely ignored him.

The Package That Changed Everything

Then came the package.

The anonymous sender was later revealed to be Charlotte Iserbyt. Her father had been a member of Skull and Bones. She had access to documents the public was never meant to see.

What she sent Sutton was unprecedented: the verified membership list of Skull and Bones going back to its founding in 1832, along with internal organizational documents.

Sutton kept the material private for over fifteen years, fearing the photocopied pages could somehow identify his source. Then he published America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones.

He would later call it his most important work.

What Is Skull and Bones?

Every spring since 1832, fifteen Yale seniors are “tapped” to join the Order of Skull and Bones. Just fifteen. Per year. For nearly two hundred years.

That means at any given time, there are only about 800 living members. In a country of over 300 million people.

The society was founded by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. Taft’s son, William Howard Taft, would become the 27th President of the United States and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

He was not the last Bonesman to hold that office.

George H.W. Bush was tapped in 1948. His son, George W. Bush, was tapped in 1968. The Bush family’s Skull and Bones legacy actually began with Prescott Bush, tapped in 1917, who went on to become a U.S. Senator and a founding partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most powerful investment banks in American history.

The 2004 presidential election was the first and only time two Skull and Bones members faced each other for the presidency: George W. Bush versus John Kerry, who was tapped in 1966.

When asked about their membership, both men refused to elaborate. “It’s so secret we can’t talk about it,” Bush told Tim Russert on Meet the Press. Kerry’s response was similar: “Not much, because it’s a secret.”

SIDEBAR: It’s Not Just Yale

Skull and Bones gets the attention. But every Ivy League school has its own system of elite senior societies, final clubs, or secret organizations. Here’s what exists behind the ivy-covered walls:

YALE (The Gold Standard)

The “Big Three”: Skull and Bones (1832), Scroll and Key (1842), Wolf’s Head (1883). Plus Book and Snake (1863), Berzelius (1848), St. Elmo (1889), St. Anthony Hall (1867), Spade and Grave (1864), Manuscript Society (1952), Mace and Chain (1956), Elihu Club (1903), Aurelian Honor Society (1910). Over 40 societies now exist at Yale.

HARVARD (Final Clubs)

Porcellian Club (1791) is the oldest and most exclusive. Motto: “Dum vivimus vivamus” (”While we live, let us live”). Rumor has it that if members haven’t made their first million by age 40, the club gives it to them. Also: A.D. Club, Fly Club, Delphic, Fox Club, Owl Club, Phoenix, Spee Club, and Hasty Pudding.

PRINCETON (Eating Clubs)

Ivy Club is the most selective. Candidates must sit for 10 one-on-one interviews. All 130 members vote. One blackball and you’re out. Other clubs: Cottage (F. Scott Fitzgerald was a member), Tiger Inn, Cap and Gown, Colonial, Charter, and others. Underground secret societies (officially banned by Woodrow Wilson): Phi (1929), 21 Club, Foxtail (women’s).

CORNELL

Sphinx Head (1890) is the oldest senior society. Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, was himself a Yale Bonesman who encouraged its formation. Built an Egyptian-style “tomb” at 900 Stewart Ave. Astronomer Carl Sagan once lived there. Quill and Dagger (1893) was the first Ivy society to admit women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Janet Reno were honorary members. Between 1913 and 1984, at least one member sat in Congress every single year.

DARTMOUTH

Sphinx (1885) is the oldest, all-male. Egyptian tomb across from the athletic center with rumored underground tunnels and “Cleopatra’s Swimming Pool.” Members remain secret until graduation, when they reveal themselves carrying canes with Sphinx symbols. In 1989, 16 members were suspended for stealing $12,000 worth of campus art during a “scavenger hunt.” Also: Dragon Society (membership unknown). 31% of Dartmouth seniors belong to at least one of the 14+ senior societies.

BROWN

Pacifica House (originally Franklin Society, 1823) is America’s oldest continuously operating secret society. Taps 15 juniors annually. Rumored to be a branch of a larger order that includes Yale’s Skull and Bones.

COLUMBIA

St. Anthony Hall (1847) is the original chapter of what became a national organization with chapters at Yale, Princeton, and Penn. Also: Nacoms (1898) and Sachems (1915), both 15-member senior societies.

PENN

Sphinx (1900) is the most prestigious. First Penn society to admit African-Americans (1952). Notable members include John Legend. Also: Friars Senior Society (1889), the oldest.

The Pattern: Cornell’s first president was a Yale Bonesman. St. Anthony Hall has chapters across four Ivy schools. The class society model spread from Yale to Wesleyan to Brown to Rutgers to Cornell between 1865 and 1930. These networks don’t just exist within schools. They connect across them.

The Network Sutton Documented

Sutton’s research revealed that Skull and Bones was not simply a college fraternity. It was a recruitment mechanism for a network that placed its members in positions of power across American institutions.

The documented membership includes:

Three U.S. Presidents: William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush

Cabinet Secretaries: Henry Stimson (Secretary of War under Taft, FDR, and Truman; Secretary of State under Hoover)

Titans of Finance: Averell Harriman (Brown Brothers Harriman, Ambassador to Soviet Union and Britain, Governor of New York), numerous partners at major investment banks

Media Moguls: Henry Luce, co-founder of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated

CIA Officials: The agency’s early leadership drew heavily from Yale and Bones connections

Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Congressmen: Too numerous to list individually

The families read like a roster of American aristocracy: Taft, Bush, Harriman, Rockefeller, Pillsbury, Whitney, Vanderbilt, Ford.

Sutton documented how these members didn’t simply succeed individually. They operated as an interlocking network, placing each other in positions of influence, financing each other’s ventures, and coordinating policy across supposed partisan divides.

The Hegelian Connection

What made Sutton’s analysis different was his focus on methodology, not just membership.

He argued that Skull and Bones operated on Hegelian principles: the idea that progress comes through managed conflict, the clash of thesis and antithesis producing a controlled synthesis.

If you control both sides of a conflict, you control the outcome.

This explained, in Sutton’s view, how the same financial networks could fund both the Bolsheviks and their opponents, both Hitler and his future enemies, both sides of the Cold War. The point was never to win. The point was to manage.

The Silence

Sutton authored 25 books. His three-volume study at Hoover was cited by one of America’s most influential foreign policy strategists. His documentation was drawn from official archives and primary sources.

Yet mainstream academia largely treated him as if he didn’t exist. His books were rarely reviewed. His conclusions were almost never engaged directly. He was simply ignored.

“His work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as ‘extreme’ or, more often, simply ignored,” one assessment noted.

Sutton died in 2002, in relative obscurity compared to the significance of what he documented.

But his work hasn’t disappeared. America’s Secret Establishment has been continuously in print for over forty years. It has been translated into multiple languages, including a Russian edition of 12,000 copies.

The questions he raised about Skull and Bones have only become more relevant. When both major party candidates in 2004 belonged to a secret society of 800 living members, and neither would discuss it, something worth examining was clearly at work.

The Pattern Holds

The pattern Sutton documented hasn’t gone away.

The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington continues. The same networks fund candidates across party lines. The same families appear in positions of power generation after generation.

You don’t need to believe in shadowy conspiracies to recognize that power in America is concentrated, coordinated, and largely unaccountable to democratic processes.

You just need to read what a Stanford research fellow documented when someone sent him the membership lists.

And ask yourself why his work has been so consistently ignored.

The Work Continues

Quigley documented the network. Sutton traced the money. Their work laid a foundation that scholars are still building on today.

Eric Daniel Buesing spent 22 years researching elite power structures, building on exactly this foundation. His book The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations traces these patterns even further back, from Sumerian temple economies to modern corporate networks. It’s the kind of comprehensive historical analysis that connects the dots across millennia, not just centuries.

If Quigley showed you the 20th century blueprint and Sutton showed you the money trail, Buesing shows you the 5,000-year pattern.

Pre-order now: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hidden-hand-eric-daniel-buesing/1148336792