Inside Money by Zachary Karabell

Author:Zachary Karabell [Karabell, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

THE TAPPED

It happened every May, on a midmonth Thursday. The juniors of the college had been talking about it for months, anticipating what might happen, wondering if they would be included and anointed, or left out and humiliated. The ceremony had originally been private, done in the shadow of night, with rumors of who was picked and who was not only gradually trickling out later. But in the 1870s, the juniors had had enough of waiting nervously in their rooms; instead they grumpily marched out to the Old Campus to wait together. So began the public spectacle of Tap Day that had grown by the turn of the twentieth century to involve hundreds of students and onlookers crowding the streets and cramming the windows of adjacent buildings, covered by major newspapers with the same gossipy passion of the Ivy League football games that had come to define the clubby group of Northeast colleges that trained—if not schooled—the young men who would, it was assumed, lead the United States. And of those exclusive schools, Yale in those years was the most exclusive of all.

The ceremony itself was simple enough, albeit agonizing for the juniors assembled. All college juniors gathered under a stately oak tree near the Victorian Battell Chapel, waiting till just before the clock struck five, when a small group of derby-wearing seniors, blue suited with the gold pin of membership shining in their lapels, began to weave in and out of the crowd. Quickly, briskly, they would tap a select few and utter one simple command: “Go to your room.” The ones chosen would scatter, while the others were left to face the rest of the year still part of the select but not eligible for the inner sanctums. Even in elite circles, there are rooms within rooms.

Three “secret” societies, none particularly secret, and called at Yale “senior societies,” would choose on that May day fifteen juniors apiece, for membership in Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, or Wolf’s Head, or any of the other clubs. In the case of Skull and Bones, the most coveted, that meant a place in the Tomb, the society’s neogothic clubhouse, fitting for a group whose alternate name was the Brotherhood of Death. The first decades of the tap ceremony had been a Yale-only affair, but with the rise of American wealth and power, fascination with the lives of the elite grew. Tap Day became a regular feature of The New York Times and other major papers, with reporters keeping a running ledger of who was picked and publishing their names the next day along with colorful commentary.1

Being tapped was the peak of a Yale student’s career. It was admittance to the ultimate club, more selective than any club that these men would later join. Once in, they would be embraced by a tight group bound by honor and privacy, where they could all drop the pretense of who they were supposed to be and be as they were. They could, safely,

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