If you go down to the Californian Sequoia woods in July you’re sure of a big surprise …Occupying 2,712 acres (l,098ha) of ancient redwood forest near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, California, the Bohemian Grove is a private camping site for an annual two-week gathering of 2,000 or so of America’s great and their guests. It is run by San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, established in 1872 as a gentlemanly refuge from the crudities of frontier life.
Initially the Club membership comprised journalists, writers and artists – hence the “Bohemian” nomenclature – among them being Mark Twain and the socialist writer Jack London. However, the Club was persuaded by member Ed Bosque that it needed monied types to pay for better facilities. Once let into the nest, the money-men took over.
On a visit to the Bohemians, the Victorian dramatist Oscar Wilde quipped that, “I have never see so many well-dressed, well-fed businesslike bohemians in all my life.”Bored with city life at their elegant San Francisco clubhouse, the Bohemians determined to take to the woods in an annual summer camp at the Grove. For a hundred years or more, the “Bohos” have claimed that the camp is merely an occasion for letting elite hair down and doing some uninterrupted male-bonding (women are excluded). Or, as Grove regular President Herbert Hoover put it, the Grove “is the greatest men’s party on Earth”.
Heavy drinking, frat-pack-style “jinks”, lavish meals and musical and theatrical entertainments are certainly core to the Grove experience, in which the members and guests sleep in some 104 log-cabin “camps” scattered among the trees. As if in proof of the Bohos’ hedonistic intentions, an effigy of “Dull Care” (representing the burdens of everyday life) is burned every 14 July at the foot of a 40-foot (12m) concrete owl in the Grove’s mock-druidic “Cremation of Care Ceremony”. The motto of the Grove is: “Weaving spiders, come not here.”But weaving spiders do go to the Grove, and some of them are tarantulas.
And what a tangled web they spin! As the leading academic historian of the Grove, Peter Martin Phillips, observed: “A person would have to look very hard to find such a dense concentration and variety of American socio-economic elites in one place anywhere else in the United States.” Additionally, one would be hard pushed outside of the KKK to find a whiter crowd of Americans: just 1 per cent of the Club’s members are not Caucasian.Every American Republican president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the Grove, including Richard Nixon, who complained that “it was the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine”. Current US politicians who attend the Grove include Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell (a rare non-white) and Newt Gingrich. Meanwhile, approximately one-third of the leading US companies have a representative at the Grove summer fest; by Phillips’s estimate 11 per cent of Bohemian Club members together own US$30.476 billion of corporate stock.
Alan Greenspan, once of the Federal Bank, and A. W. Clausen of the World Bank are both Grove habitués. It beggars belief that these elites do not “talk shop” together. Indeed, by the Grove’s own admission, the Manhattan Project to build the US atomic bomb was conceived in Mandalay camp at the Grove. Dwight Eisenhower began his bid for the presidency after canvassing support at the Grove.
A feature of the Bohemian Grove is the daily “Lakeside Chat”, a lecture by a worthy in his field. Ostensibly these “Chats” can be on any conceivable subject, but they tend to be skewed towards politics. Titles include “Defining the New World Order” and “America’s Health Revolution: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays?”With its potent amalgamation of secrecy, money and power, the Bohemian Grove has been a target for investigative exposés.
In Trance Formation of America (1995) Grove worker Cathy O’Brien recorded lurid tales of sex slaves, although no such torrid goings-on were found by British reporter Jon Ronson when he crashed the Grove for his book Them. Ronson similarly failed to find the Babylonian Brotherhood transforming themselves into giant lizards, as David Icke insisted he would, and nor did he find the New World Order there. “My lasting impression,” wrote Ronson, “was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking … emotionally they [the Grovers] seemed trapped in their college years.”Many of the liberal-left political protests against the Grove are coordinated by the Bohemian Grove Action Network.
According to BGAN: When powerful people work together, they become even more powerful. The Grove membership is wealthy, and becoming more so, while the middle class is steadily becoming poorer. This close-knit group determines whether prices rise or fall (by their control of the banking system, money supply, and markets), and they make money whichever way markets fluctuate. They determine what our rights are and which laws have effect, by appointing judges.
They decide who our highest officials shall be by consensus among themselves, and then selling candidates to us via the media which they own. Important issues and facts are omitted from discussion in the press, or slanted to suit their goals, but they are discussed frankly at the Grove. Is there true democracy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands? Is there any real difference between the public and private sectors when cabinet members come from the boardrooms of large corporations? Is the spending of billions on weapons, which are by consensus no longer needed, really the will of the people?
Or is it the will of General Electric, General Dynamics, and the other weapons contractors represented at the Grove?The BGAN overstates the case: the Grove is too unwieldy to rule America and thus the world. Aside from injecting an annual morale-boosting shot in the arm to the US Eurocentric male elite, the Grove is a good ole boys’ networking opportunity. It is the place in America to win friends (and contracts, jobs …) and influence people in high places.
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