Scroll and Key

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The Scroll and Key Society is a secret society that was established by John Addison Porter and others at Yale University in 1842. Its primary rival is Skull and Bones, another senior secret society at Yale. The Society is incorporated as the Kingsley Trust Association and is often informally referred to as "Keys."

Each year, the Society's senior members choose fifteen notable members of the junior class at Yale to succeed them. Members meet Thursday and Sunday nights during their Senior year in the Society's ornate, windowless "tomb," an exotic Moorish temple built in 1869 and designed by noted Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt. While the Society's program and rituals are closely-guarded secrets, Scroll and Key, unlike Skull and Bones, does not greatly and publicly focus on their secrecy.

Founding Keysmen included Theodore Runyon (1842), later governor of New Jersey, Isaac Hiester (1842), a distinguished US congressman, Leonard Case (1842), founder of Case Western Reserve University, and William L. Kingsley (1843), editor of The New Englander and the Yale Review.

The Society elected its first female members in 1989, 20 years after Yale admitted women as undergraduates. Tax records show that its endowment is several million dollars more than that of Skull and Bones. Scroll and Key has made numerous donations to Yale over the years. The Society endowed the prestigious John Addison Porter Prize, awarded annually by Yale since 1872, and in 1917 established an endowment for the Yale University Press which has funded the publication of The Yale Shakespeare and many other scholarly works.

Prominent Keys members since 1842 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 a prestigious law firm, Davis 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." His discovery allowed for easy production of the polio virus for the research that led to 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. 1972 presidential candidate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
  • 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 the Court of St. James
  • Paul Mellon (1929), son of Andrew Mellon, philanthropist and major benefactor to Yale. Donated Morse and Ezra Stiles residential colleges, and the Yale British Museum.
  • 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
  • R. 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:

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