SCROLL AND KEY

The 'Scroll and Key Society' is a secret society established by John Addison Porter and others at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1841.

Contents

History

Architecture

Notable members

Diplomacy, national security

Business and industry

Scholars, writers and journalists

Politics

The judiciary

The sciences

Arts and architecture

See also

External links

History

The society is known informally as "Keys", and was incorporated as the Kingsley Trust Association. Members meet Thursday and Sunday nights during their senior year in the Society's ornate, windowless "tomb"[1], distinguished by alternating dark and light bands of stone, pattern-pierced stone windows screens and ornate column capitals at the entrance. Late at night after their weekly meetings, "Keysmen" (the society co-educated in 1989) gather on their front steps to serenade the street with their traditional "Troubador" song.
Founding Keysmen included Brigadier-General Theodore Runyon (1842), who served at the Battle of Bull Run and was later Mayor of Newark, New Jersey and Ambassador to Germany; Isaac Hiester (1842), US congressman; Leonard Case (1842), founder of Case Western Reserve University; and William L. Kingsley (1843), editor of the ''Yale Review''.
Tax records show an endowment worth several million dollars more than that of its elder counterpart, Skull and Bones.[2] In addition to financing its own activities, Scroll and Key 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.

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.''" (p.125, "Yale University" 1999 Princeton Architectural Press ISBN 1568981678 [[3]].) Additional data at [4]

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

★ R. Sargent Shriver (1938) - Peace Corps; Special Olympics

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

Business and industry

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

★ George Houk Mead, Jr. (1941) - Mead Paper Company

★ Paul Mellon (1929) - philanthropist

★ Robert Sargent Shriver III - former part-owner of Baltimore Orioles; son of Sargent Shriver

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

Scholars, writers and journalists

★ Michael Danziger (1985) - Steppingstone foundation

★ 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''

★ Alexandra Robbins (1998) - ''Secrets of the Tomb''

★ Gideon Rose (1987) - ''Foreign Affairs''

★ Calvin Trillin (1957) - journalist, humorist, poet, novelist

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

★ Fareed Zakaria (1986) - ''Newsweek International''; CFR; Yale Corporation

Politics

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

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

The judiciary

★ George Shiras (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''

★ Charles Ives (1897) - classical modernist composer.

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

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

★ Philip Proctor (1962) - The Firesign Theatre

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

★ Garry Trudeau (1970) - ''Doonesbury''

See also

★ List of collegiate secret societies

External links

★ Secret societies swimming in cash, IRS reports show

★ How the Secret Societies Got That Way