The owls are…

by Prof. Peter Phillips

(excerpt for Parliament of Owls, 2019)

For the world’s business and political elite, mid-July marks the first day of their annual summer camp. Close to 3,000 men – and it is only men, women are not allowed – gather at Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County, 70 miles north of San Francisco, to sit around the campfire and chew the fat, off the record, with ex- presidents, corporate leaders and global financiers. The Bohemian Grove is a private retreat where 2,400 members of the San Francisco.

The Bohemian Club host several hundred guests each year at a 2,800- acre redwood preserve. The Grove has become a place where male members at the financial centre of global capitalism can network. One might imagine modern-day aristocrats like Henry Kissinger, the Koch brothers and Colin Powell amid a circle of friends sipping cognac and discussing how the ‘unqualified’ masses cannot be trusted to carry out policy, and how elites must set values that can be translated into ‘standards of authority’. 1

Private men’s clubs have historically represented institutionalised race, gender and class inequality. English gentlemen’s clubs emerged during Great Britain’s empire-building period as an exclusive place for the gentleman – free of troublesome women, the under-classes, and non-whites. Men’s clubs were the place where English elites could co- mingle in homogeneous harmony. Copied in the United States, elite private men’s clubs served the same self interests as their English counterparts. As metropolitan areas emerged, upper-crust white males created new clubs throughout the Americas.

The San Francisco Bohemian Club was formed in 1872 as a gathering place for newspaper reporters and men of the arts and literature. By the 1880s local businessmen joined the club in large numbers, quickly making business elites the dominant group. Around 2,400 men are members today. Most are from California, while several hundred originate from some 35 states and a dozen foreign countries.

Of the current members, one in ten is directly involved in major investment funds, venture capital companies, and private equity firms. Additionally, about one fifth of the members are either directors of one or more of the Fortune 1000 companies, corporate CEOs, top governmental officials (current and former) and/or members of important policy councils or major foundations. The remaining members are mostly regional business/legal elites with a small mix of academics, military officers, artists, or medical doctors. Almost all meet the criteria for being in the top 1 per cent of wealth holders in the world. 2

With a historically all-white membership, the Bohemian Club became sensitive to civil rights issues in the 1960s and gradually admitted a few men of colour. Today it remains close to 99 per cent white. The club does continue to maintain its exclusive gender practices, though – other than allowing women to work in food service and the parking lot (which was forced on them by the California Supreme Court) they have remained a defiantly male-only organisation. Class discrimination continues as well. Club applicants must be sponsored by two existing members before being considered for admittance.

By the early 1880s, Bohemian Club members began conducting summer camping trips to the Sonoma County redwoods. The trips proved so popular that the club began purchasing land along the Russian River in 1899. By the 1960s the Bohemian Club owned 2,712 acres, including a 1,500-year-old grove of redwoods, adjacent to the small town of Monte Rio.

The Bohemian Grove summer encampment has become one of the most famous private men’s retreats in the world. Club members and guests gather to recreate what has been called ‘the greatest men’s party on earth’. 3 Spanning three weekends, there are lectures, political debates, off-the-record business discussions, theatre, rituals, friendship re-affirmations, lots of parties, and huge amounts of food and alcohol.

The Bohemian Grove offers daily lectures known as ‘lakeside chats’. The under secretary of the Navy may give a speech on military budget issues, or the president of Mexico may address global free trade. Whatever the topic, those present emerge with a sense of insider awareness of high-level policy issues and political situations which are often yet to be, or perhaps never to be, publicly articulated.

Lakeside chats featured in 2015 and 2016 included:

– Bill Browder (author of Red Notice), ‘Russia: Threat vs Opportunity’

– Karl Eikenberry (Former US ambassador to Afghanistan), ‘Americans and their Military: Drifting Apart’.

– P. W. Singer (author of Corporate Warriors), ‘Cybersecurity and Cyberwar’.

– Frances Fukuyama (author of The End of History and the Last Man), ‘Political Order and Political Decay’.

– Christopher Hill (former US ambassador to Iraq), ‘Challenges in the Broader Middle East’.

– Leon Panetta (former US secretary of defense), ‘Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century’.

– Paul Volcker (former chair, Federal Reserve), ‘Where do we stand on Drug Law?’

– Les Moonves (CEO, CBS Inc.), ‘Making Hits in the Golden Age of Television’.

– Michael Mullen (former chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff), ‘Bringing Home Today’s Vets to an American Dream’.

– Richard Haass (president, Council on Foreign Relations), ‘The Middle East: Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse, It Might’.

– Jason Riley (senior fellow, Manhattan Institute), ‘The State Against Blacks’.

– Eric Li (founder of Chengwei Capital), ‘Emperors, Commissars, and Capitalists: America’s 21st-Century Competitors’.

One such chat in 1994, given by a University of California political science professor, warned of the dangers of multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, and the loss of family boundaries. He declared that ‘elites based on merit and skill are important to society. Any elite that fails to define itself will fail to survive... We need boundaries and values set and clear’. He went on to conclude that we cannot allow the ‘unqualified’ masses to carry out policy, and elites must set values that can be translated into ‘standards of authority’.4

Foremost at the Bohemian Grove is an atmosphere of social interaction and networking. You can sit around a campfire with directors of PG&E, or Bank of America. You can shoot skeet with the former secretaries of state and defense, or you can enjoy a sing-along with a Council on Foreign Relations director or a trillion-dollar investment management executive. All of this makes for ample time to develop personal long-lasting connections with powerful influential men.

The Bohemian Grove facilitates the building of insider ties, consensual understandings, and lasting connections in the service of class solidarity. Ties reinforced at the Grove manifest themselves in global trade meetings, party politics, campaign financing, and top-down ‘democracy’ worldwide. It is a venue for the global intersection of transnational power, where regional elites in the US invite several hundred top-level corporate guests. Camping together in the redwoods builds and reinforces international business connections that are increasingly centered on the promotion and protection of consolidated global capital investment. Representatives from the boards of directors of many of the trillion-dollar capital management companies in the world have members or have been guests at the Bohemian Grove. 5

There are 120 individual camps at the Bohemian Grove. Most camps have some sort of entryway that depicts the camp name. Pig’n Whistle has a ceramic group of suckling pigs at its entrance. Toyland has a soft light behind a toy soldier figure in a glass case. Many camps have rustic redwood bark-covered buildings and fences that demarcate camp boundaries. One entryway is set through a redwood stump wide enough for two adults to pass.

The typical camp has a clubhouse building that holds a bar and a kitchen including a sheltered area adequate to seat the camp members during inclement weather. There is an outside deck area large enough for hosting parties of fifty to one hundred men. A campfire pit or fireplace is a featured part in the clubhouse area and fires are set every evening. Many camps have a piano for spontaneous sing-alongs and campfire cheer. Old posters and announcements are often displayed, especially ones for Bohemian events created or written by camp members.

A camp’s membership ranges from less than half a dozen, to up to 125 individuals. The average camp has approximately 16 members with usually one or two live-in valets, paid for by the camp members, who serve drinks, snacks and meals to members and guests.

Sleeping quarters can be a simple four-man tent cabin or a spartan motel-size private room. Almost all construction is of redwood, so that a rustic forest theme is present throughout the Grove. A hundred years of additions and improvements have resulted in elaborate redwood staircases, winding forest trails, several miles of paved roads, a central dining area that seats over 1,500, a large campfire circle, an art studio, museum, civic centre, bar and cafe, and two magnificent outdoor theatres.

The Lake, as it is called on the Grove map, is about 100 feet wide and 400 feet long. Originally built in the mid-1920s, and relined with earth and concrete in 1981, the Lake could be a Disney creation: it has an artificial waterfall tumbling into it, and water lilies kept in natural-looking patterns by water jets embedded in the lake bottom. An early morning mist rises off the Lake giving it a mythic Arthurian quality. A bandstand in front of the giant concrete owl sits on the south shore of the Lake, and is used for concerts and ceremonies during Grove sessions.

When the camp is in session a fully-staffed fire department is on the scene, as well as two doctors and two emergency medical technicians who manage the Grove’s medical centre. In recent years the Bohemian Club has hired a SWAT team of Sonoma County sheriffs to stay during the encampment in case of an active shooter situation. The Grove has an ample staff of security guards to discourage uninvited intruders.

Walking through the Grove at night is an audio- visual delight. Music, songs, and laughter fill the forest – and lights, twinkling through trees and bushes scattered up the hillsides, give the Grove an enchanted forest quality. A California legislator and candidate for statewide office, after visiting as a guest in 1993, described the Grove as ‘Fairytale Land’.

The redwood trees themselves are majestic, with the tallest tree towering over 300 feet above the dining circle. Certain areas in the Grove have a shrine-like quality that some Japanese visitors have compared to sacred forested sites in Japan. All of this, of course, is for the exclusive use of members and guests.

The fundamental social unit at the Grove is the individual camp. The camps are the base of operations for members’ interactions throughout the Grove. Camps develop their own histories, traditions, and favourite activities. Camps transcend the Grove and take on a life of their own on the outside. Gatherings of camp members for seasonal holidays, special occasions, weddings, funerals, and other events is common. The only place cameras are allowed in the Grove is for group pictures at single campsites. Many camps keep annual photo albums of members eating, making music or cocktailing together. These photo albums can become the basis of privately published camp histories that are written for the camp members and Bohemian Club archives.

The 2017 summer encampment photo album for Owl’s Nest camp listed the following as guests:

– Anthony Alexandre, vice president, Silvercrest Asset Management Group.

– Kenneth Beer, CFO, Stone Energy Corporation.

– Bruce Bugg Jr, chair, The Tobin Endowment.

– Sam Chu, managing partner, Phoenix Property Investments.

– Christian Cobb and Justin Kennedy, co-CEOs, Grass River Properties.

– Michael Cronin, co-founder, Weston Presidio.

– Thomas Fanning, CEO, Southern Company.

– Robert Gates, former secretary of defense.

– Alex Gorsky, CEO, Johnson & Johnson.

– Mike O’Neill, chair, Citigroup Inc.

– Wilber Ross, US secretary of commerce, former investment banker.

– David Stern, president, Townhouse Partners.

These guests camped with the twenty-three members of Owl’s Nest camp, who include:

– Charles Cobb, CEO, Cobb Partners.

– James Coulter, CEO, TPG Capital.

– Bob Fisher, CEO, Gap Inc.

– David Gergen, Harvard professor, presidential advisor and CNN political analyst.

– John Hammergren, CEO, McKesson Corporation.

– William R. Hearst III, chair, Hearst Corporation.

– Robert H. Johnson Jr, chair, Franklin Resources Inc.

– Richard Krasno, director, Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services.

– Michael Lazarus, Main-Post Partners.

– Chris Mathews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball.

– Rockwell Schnabel, co-founder, Trident Capital Inc.

A typical day at the Grove starts with juice, fresh fruit and pastries, prepared and laid out by camp stewards, alongside a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. In some camps gin fizzes start the day, although generally alcohol consumption seems fairly limited before noon. A morning campfire allows men to collect themselves in preparation for the journey to the central dining circle for breakfast. Breakfast runs from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m., with seating available at long picnic tables linking twenty-six men together to encourage interaction and conversation. Men are free to sit wherever they like, so generally are within conversation range of several new faces each morning. Breakfast is ample, quickly served and comparable to better quality San Franciscan restaurants. Members can order items such as eggs Benedict, baked trout or a mushroom omelette. Red-coated waitpersons, both men and women, bring out platters of ham, bacon, sausage, pastries and fresh fruits.

After breakfast men can wander back to camp, go off for trap and skeet shooting, take a perimeter ride around the Grove in an open-air truck, or attend a scheduled ‘museum talk’ at 10:30 a.m. Museum talks are a post-World War II tradition, originating with UC Berkeley professor Emanuel Fritz’s talk on the redwoods in the Grove in 1948. The original talks evolved into daily programs and Grove nature tours known as ‘walkie-talkies’.

2015 Museum Talks:

– ‘A Record Fall: From 25 Miles in the Stratosphere.’

– ‘A Masterpiece of the Ice Age: the Chauvet Cave.’

– ‘Waterfowl and Waterfowling.’

– ‘David Grusin Revisited.’

– ‘Buying Time: Adventures in Suspended Animation.’

– ‘Remaking a Nation of Inventors with 3D Printing and Digital Fabrication.’

– ‘The Portolan Chart: How Did the Medieval Mapmakers Draw It?’

– ‘Harry Warren, Hollywood’s Music Man.’

– ‘What Happened to NASA?’

– ‘Search for Life Beyond Earth.’

– ‘Odyssey into the Human Genome.’

– ‘Bitcoin: How to Create Wealth out of Thin Air.’

At noon there is an organ or band concert as a prelude to the lakeside chats, which are usually a thirty-minute talk beginning at 12:30 p.m. After the chat, Bohemians go off to their camps for lunch. This is a time when personal invitations are frequently given to friends and associates at the Grove to join a camp for lunch, which is usually cooked and served by the camp stewards. Early afternoon is the time of day that many Bohemians begin to drink alcohol. As no money exchanges hands at the Grove, if you are a guest in a camp for lunch or a party, all the food and alcohol is paid for by camp members.

Mid- to late afternoon at the Grove is the time for camp-to-camp visiting or a walk to the Russian River for a swim. Camp visits are one of the principal activities at the Grove, and the hospitality mat is always out.

The Bohemian Club’s symbol is an owl, which has been in use since the first year the club started. The owl has come to symbolise the wisdom of life, and companionship that allows humans to struggle with, and survive the cares and frustration of the world. The owl is found on all Bohemian materials, from matchbook covers and doormats to the most elaborate publications. A 40-foot concrete owl stands at the head of the lake in the Grove. This owl shrine was built in 1929 to serve as a ceremonial site for traditional Bohemian rituals and is used yearly for the annual Cremation of Care ceremony. 1910 marked the first ceremonial burial of the cares of the world during the summer encampment, and by 1913 Care was being cremated during the first weekend of the Grove every year. This ceremony has been rewritten on several occasions but the theme is still the same. The addition of the owl statue in 1920 allowed for the voice of the owl to be incorporated into the ceremony. Care is still dispatched yearly in a fiery death that includes dozens of monk-robed torch bearers, high priests in elaborate dress, and the Bohemian orchestra providing stirring music.

Club members claim the cremation ceremony is not symbolic of the destruction of human sympathy, but is meant ‘to set aside the nagging and often unworthy preoccupations which inhibit openness and warm sympathy for human affairs generally and for works of artistic and moral creativity in particular’.6 The ceremony may mean different things to different Bohemians, but the consistent theme for eighty-four years is the exchange of everyday mundane concerns for the brotherhood of Bohemian friendship. The ritual continues to be an important event in the annual Bohemian trek to the redwoods.

The Bohemian Grove summer encampment is a famous experience for transnational global elites. An invitation to attend means a man has earned a significant place in the world and is being recognised for his importance.

1 Quoted from a 1994 lecture, cited in Peter Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, University of California, Davis: PhD dissertation, 1994.

2 People with assets worth $770,000 are in the global top 1%. www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615/ are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp

3 John Van der Zee, The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth: Inside the Bohemian Grove, San Diego: Harcourt, 1974.

4 ibid. Phillips

5 The seventeen trillion-dollar investment management firms in 2017 held $41.3 trillion of investment capital. See: Giants: The Global Power Elite, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018.