Social Cohesion & The Bohemian Grove

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Social Cohesion & The Bohemian Grove

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The Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre virgin redwood grove in Northern California, 75 miles north of San Francisco (map), where the rich, the powerful, and their entourage visit with each other during the last two weeks of July while camping out in cabins and tents.

It's an Elks Club for the rich; a fraternity party in the woods; a boy scout camp for old guys, complete with an initiation ceremony and a totem animal, the owl. It's owned by the Bohemian Club, which was founded in San Francisco in 1872. The Bohemians started going on their little retreat shortly after the club was founded; it became big-time by the 1880s, and it continues today.

However, it is not a place of power. It's a place where the powerful relax, enjoy each other's company, and get to know some of the artists, entertainers, and professors who are included to give the occasion a thin veneer of cultural and intellectual pretension. Despite the suspicions of many on the Right, and a few on the Left, it is not a secret meeting place to plot, plan, or conspire. The most important decisions typically happen just where we might expect: in the boardrooms of corporations and foundations, at the White House, and in the backrooms of Congress. Yes, as I show later, some wanna-be and has-been Republican politicians sometimes visit the Bohemian Grove, including future and former presidents of the United States, but they are there to demonstrate what wonderful human beings they are, to cultivate potential financial backers, or to brag about their past exploits.

Readers who suspect that every gathering of the rich and the powerful has some deeper purpose may doubt this claim, at least until they see my evidence. For those who still might question my conclusions after reading this article, I recommend reading an excellent first-hand account of the Bohemian Grove by a journalist from Spy magazine who snuck into the encampment in 1989; the author had every incentive to tell it exactly as he saw it.

In fact, every person who has written seriously on the Bohemian Grove agrees: even though they provide evidence that there is a socially cohesive upper class in the United States, the activities at the Grove are harmless. The Grove encampment is a bunch of guys kidding around, drinking with their buddies, and trying to relive their youth, and often acting very silly. These activities do contribute to social cohesion as an unintended consequence -- which is why I decided to study the Bohemians in the first place -- but the Grove is merely a playground for the powerful and their entertainers that gives us a window into a lifestyle that is far removed from that of average Americans.

Why Study the Bohemian Grove? Social Cohesion And Policy Cohesion

If this is a web site about power, politics, and social change, why bother with the Bohemian Grove if it is not a place of power?

That's a fair question, and an important one in terms of differentiating rival theories of power in the United States. The answer goes back to the kind of criticisms that used to be made of a class-domination theory by the most important group of theorists in the social sciences during the 20th century, the pluralists. Pluralists deride the idea that there could be class domination in the United States, and one of the reasons they do is that the upper class of rich people is allegedly too fragmented to be able to organize for power. Heck fire, them rich people don't even know each other, most of 'em. All those wealthy capitalists that theorists like me talk about are just a list of names, not a for-real social class.

So I was looking for an opportunity to show pluralists differently when I unexpectedly noticed that a wealthy liberal lawyer I was about to interview in late 1970 about campaign finance -- you know, the kind of stuff I should be studying -- had the membership lists for the Bohemian Club and the even more exclusive Pacific Union Club on a shelf in his waiting room. We hit it off well during the interview, and he clearly liked to stir things up, so I asked him if I could photocopy the lists. He said "sure." and I was off and running. Those two membership lists gave me the starting point for a study that would allow me to trace the social backgrounds and corporate connections of men who slept together in cabins and tents in the California redwoods, so I figured you couldn't get more "socially cohesive" than that.

Moreover, there is a literature in social psychology, called small-group research, or small-group dynamics, which shows that people who meet in relaxed settings, and see their group as exclusive, become even tighter with each other than people in ordinary groups. Even better, people in exclusive groups are more likely to listen to each other and come to a compromise if they have the task of figuring out what to do about some policy issue.

In short, a study of the Bohemian Grove could show that social cohesion is an aid to the formation of policy consensus. I took to saying that from a social-psychological point of view, the upper class is made up of constantly shifting face-to-face small groups -- a board of directors meeting at the corporation in the morning, a meeting of a policy discussion group in the afternoon, a drink with some buddies at an exclusive club in the evening. And best of all, of course, many of them camped out together at the Bohemian Grove one year or another.

Although my study was well received in many circles, it did not convince anyone, and it got me some new criticisms besides. The pluralists promptly distorted what I argued by saying I was a conspiratorial thinker who believes that policy is made in secret at the Bohemian Grove. At the same time, the usual pluralist claim that the upper class was not "cohesive" slowly faded away in favor of more emphasis on standard arguments that are dealt with elsewhere on this web site. (For my views on conspiratorial thinking, click here.)

Some of the fancier theorists of that by-gone day panned the study too. They thought it was trivial and irrelevant. Why worry about social cohesion as a factor in policy cohesion when the structural imperatives of capitalism make capitalists well aware of their interests and all too ready to agree on government policies that will further those interests? They didn't buy my belief that it was necessary to take the issues concerning social cohesion and social psychology seriously. Whereas I thought that Texas oilmen and Wall Street bankers might well need a little fraternizing to come to trust each other, my critics on the left said the differences from industry to industry and region to region were trivial.

Things didn't get any better when a few left-wing activists grabbed onto my book and said that there were in fact political conspiracies hatched at the Bohemian Grove. They said that the atomic bomb was planned at the Grove, for example, a claim that misses all the key points about what I said in my book on this issue. (A member of the Grove asked the club president if he could use the area during an off-season month to meet with other A-bomb planners; no other Bohemians were present, or knew about the secret meeting, which could have been held anywhere.)

A few years later, some extreme right-wingers got hold of my book and concluded that the "Cremation of Care" ceremony, a harmless put-on that starts the encampment, in fact promotes devil worship and homosexuality. One rightist even suggests there is child sacrifice at the Bohemian Grove. An alarmist video and a web site make these incredible -- and nonsensical -- claims.

So now I am writing about the Bohemian Grove for another reason as well as the original one: to set the record straight. Contrary to what some leftists think, any political discussions that happen there could have been held at any one of several other venues where such discussions usually occur -- for example, restaurants, downtown men's clubs, golf courses, policy-discussion groups, and board of director meetings. Contrary to the rightists, the activities are harmless.

Well, they of course talk politics now and then, and hear speeches by would-be and former political leaders, but that's not what the conspiratorial thinkers on either side of the political spectrum are talking about. (You'll learn more about the political guests in the section on Lakeside Talks.)

Methodology

I used four very different methods to put together the story of the Bohemian Grove: membership network analysis, archival searches in historical libraries, interviews with informants, and participant observation at the downtown clubhouse and the Bohemian Grove itself.

The membership lists for the Bohemian Club and the Pacific Union Club were my starting point. If the Bohemians didn't overlap with the Pacific Union Club, a for-sure upper-class club, the study might have stopped right there. But they did overlap. Moreover, members of both clubs were often in the San Francisco Social Register, an upper-crust telephone book, called a "blue book" in the old days. I was confident that the Bohemian Club was an upper-class venue, but I soon learned that many members were not members of the upper class -- for reasons that help to make the club unique.

More on this article at:

www.sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/bohemian_grove.html
Photo courtesy of: www.isgp.eu/
www.isgp.eu/organisations/Bohemian_Grove.htm
campanaro

This is a time-line of the club at Bohemian Grove

1872 The Bohemian Club is organized in San Francisco as a gathering place for men who like the arts and literature. The clubhouse is located in the Astor Hotel on Sacramento Street and the owl is chosen as the club's symbol. 1874 The Club has 182 members. 1875 The Bohemian Club's motto, "Weaving spiders, come not here", first appears on a Club announcement. It was taken from Shakespeare's "A midsummer Night's Dream". 1877 The Club has outgrown the Astor Hotel and moves to 430 Pine Street in San Francisco. 1878 In 1878, several dozen Bohemians hold a Jinks in the forest in Sonoma County near what is now known as Camp Taylor (California Historical Society, Bohemian Club 1947). This was the start of a long Bohemian tradition of trekking to the Sonoma County redwoods during July and August of each year for camping and self entertainment. 1882 The Club's patron saint becomes John of Nepomuk. The legend says that St. John was killed in 1393 at the orders of Wenceslaus IV, King of the Bohemians & King of the Holy Roman Empire, because he didn't want to disclose the confessional secrets of Queen Johanna of Bohemia. Today, St. John symbolizes the right to privacy of the Bohemians. 1885 The extremely successful Joseph D. Redding is elected president of the Bohemian Club. He will devise the Cremation of Care in 1893. Where he got his inspiration for the ceremony isn't clear. Redding is a very successful attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which is owned by the Rockefeller-connected Pilgrims Society families of Harriman & Harkness. Redding is considered a musical genius. (2) More details on this in the article that deals with the symbolism surrounding the Bohemian Grove. Also more information in the membership list. 1887 The Club has 561 members, which are a combination of literary figures and San Francisco businessmen. Among them are 4 members of the Crocker banking family, 3 Spreckles, William Randolph Hearst, Bay Area shipbuilder Arthur W. Moore, columnist and writer Ambrose Bierce, writer Henry George, and 14 officers from the Army and Navy. Other Bohemian Club writers are Charles K. Field, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Daniel O'Connell, and Mark Twain. 1892 The 70 ft. high Buddha statue is built within the Sequoia Valley, now known as the Bohemian Grove. It is modeled after the Daibutsu of Kamakura, the Great Buddha from Japan. The statue used to be part of the Cremation of Care. 1893 Joseph D. Redding creates the Cremation of Care and serves as High Priest of Bohemia during this ceremony. Within a couple of years he will move his business to New York where he again becomes part of 'high society'. The Bohemian Club starts renting a piece of land in the Sequoia Valley from the Sonoma Lumber Company. They will do this until 1899 when they make their first land purchase. 1899 The Bohemian Club buys a 160 acre piece of land in the Sequoia Valley, today known as the Bohemian Grove. The Club will make twenty-eight purchases of land over a 67 year period. Today it owns 2,712 acres. The New York Times writes two articles about the Cremation of Care and how impressive it is. 1905 The Washington Post reads: "The Taft party to-day visited the Bohemian grove of redwoods...", which is the first reference I have seen to presidents visiting the Bohemian Grove. 1913 The Cremation of Care ceremony is moved to the first weekend of the encampment. 1914 The Bohemian Club has 1259 members, of which 787 resident members, 241 non-resident members, 19 Navy officers, 49 Army officers, 29 faculty members, 114 associate members, and 20 honorary members. mid 1920's The Lake is built. It is about 100 feet wide and 400 feet long. Or for everybody outside of the United States: 30 meters wide and 124 meters long. 1929 The concrete owl is built and there are 169 camps in the Bohemian Grove. summer 1933 The Club takes up residence at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel when the dismantling of the old clubhouse begins. The club has grown to about 2000 members. A large new Club House is opened the following year. 1941 Membership drops to 1643 due to World War II. 1981 The Lake is relined with earth and concrete. It has an artificial waterfall tumbling into it, and water lilies are kept in natural-looking patterns by water jets embedded in the lake bottom. The only natural aspect to the lake is the early morning mist rising off of it every morning. 1994 There are 124 camps in the Bohemian Grove. There are camps like: Cave Man, Hideaway, Hill Billies, Hillside, Isle of Aves, Lost Angels, Mandalay, Midway, Owl's Nest, Sempervirens, Silverado Squatters, and Stowaway. Mandalay seems to be the camp for international relations and consists of many members officially or otherwise connected to the intelligence agencies. Mandalay is the only camp you cannot just walk into, and before you are allowed on the compound someone will ask you who you have an appointment with. If you're cleared for access, you are taken up the hill with an electric pulley, designed by Bechtel. Many members of camps like Hill Billies or Stowaway (Rockefellers and Morgans) have been to Mandalay at one time or another.
Thanks to:
www.isgp.eu/
www.isgp.eu/organisations/Bohemian_Grove.htm
campanaro