Scroll and Key
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The Scroll and Key Society is a secret society that was established by John Addison Porter at Yale University in 1842. It rivals Skull and Bones and is one of several senior secret societies at Yale.
Founding Keysmen included Theodore Runyon (1842), later governor of New Jersey, Isaac Hiester (1842), a distinguished US congressman, and Leonard Case (1842), founder of Case Western Reserve University.
Each year, the Society's senior members choose fifteen members of the junior class at Yale to succeed them.
Tax records show that its endowment is several million dollars more than that of Skull and Bones.
Prominent members include three US secretaries of state, US supreme court justices, industrialists and financiers, US presidential candidates, Nobel laureates, and famous songwriters, writers, and movie makers:
- George Shiras, Jr. (1853) U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1892-1903
- Harvey Cushing (1891) is by many considered the greatest neurosurgeon of the 20th century and is considered the father of brain surgery.
- Frank Polk (1894) founded prestigious a law firm, David, Polk, & Wardwell. Acting U.S. Secretary of State during World War I: negotiated the peace and headed American delegation to Peace Conference at Paris
- Cole Porter (1913), composer and songwriter
- Dean Acheson (1915), U.S. Secretary of State 1949-1952, architect of the Cold War foreign policy.
Porter and Acheson roomed together at Harvard Law School, and Porter famously withdrew from that school to allow Dean to graduate.
- Dickinson Richards (1917), winner of 1956 Nobel Prize "for [his] discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system."
- John Enders (1919), winner of 1954 Nobel Prize "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue." He discovered the polio vaccine.
- Benjamin Spock (1925), pediatrician, who revolutionized parenting, and best- selling author of Baby & Child Care, US Olympic gold medalist in 1924 crew. 1968 vice-presidential candidate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket with Eldridge Cleaver as his running mate.
- John Hay Whitney (1926), of Whitney family. Publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, venture capitalist, founder of J.H. Whitney & Co., U.S. Ambassador to Court of St. James
- Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (1933), three-term mayor of New York City, U.S. Ambassador to Spain, personal envoy of the President to the Vatican
- Sargent Shriver (1938), Founder of the Peace Corps, founder of the Special Olympics, and US Vice Presidential Candidate
Shriver, a lifelong friend of Cyrus Vance; tapped him to join the powerbase in Scroll and Key:
- Cyrus Vance (1939), U.S. Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter (1977-1980) Secretary of the Army 1962-1964
- Cord Meyer (1943), CIA, president of United World Federalists
- John Lindsay (1944), Mayor of New York City, US Congressman, US Presidential Candidate in 1972
- Bart Giamatti (1960), President of Yale and Commissioner of Major League Baseball
- Calvin Trillin (1957), journalist, humorist, and novelist
- Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau (1970) infiltrated the Tomb (headquarters of Skull and Bones) sometime in the late 1960s and scrawled a picture of his football-helmeted character "B.D." in its guestbook.
- Stone Phillips (1977), Dateline NBC
- Fareed Zakaria (1986), Editor of Newsweek International