Secret Societies

This week I went on a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada. Every time I go on long trips I like to buy a new book to read while I’m traveling and during downtime I have while on the trip. For this trip the new I chose is Secret Societies: Inside the Freemasons, The Yakuza, Skull and Bones, and the World’s Most Notorious Secret Organizations By: John Lawrence Reynolds. So far, I am enjoying this book; it’s very detailed and also easy to understand. 

In the archive I decided to look for secret societies since I am reading a book about them. To my surprise there was a fair number of videos with mention of secret societies. The biggest theme I noticed was the heavy presence of Ivy League institutions. I was not surprised, but it was just something I noticed. HistoryMaker George E. Lewis discusses his experience at Yale and being a member of the Skull and Bones society. He says the AACM is similar to the Skull and Bones society in the fact that they are both built on tradition. He said, “there's only two things you have to do in Skull and Bones, well it's several, well several, you have debates, you have no reason why, there's no reason why you have debates, it's just tradition, you do it—” when referring to their weekly dinners and the debates they would have in the tomb.  B. He said that while he was in school the dorms were separated by ethnicity and he stayed in the Black and Puerto Rican dorm. When asked what exactly Skull and Bones is, he responded “I see it, it was a kind of a rite of passage through which you learned to assimilate diverse points of view to create your own sort of task. And in a way it could be 'Lord of the Flies' [William Golding], you know, because they give you nothing, you get a little talk at the beginning, there's a sort of a little thread of tradition they give you, you have to do this, you have to do that, it's kind of, you know, if you were, you--it's like if you were in a situation where you were told that there were some obscure spiritual rite that you had to do every day, and you have no idea why you did it, or as my son [Tadashi Lewis] says, it's a tradition, you just do it, you know?” After this he learned that his class was over and it was time to start picking the next group. This made him question what he had done for the past year and why was it so important. He wondered why he needed to pick another group of people. Ultimately, he said his involvement with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) prepared him for Skull and Bones. Skull and Bones has multiple politicians and influential historical figures as members. During his interview he was asked, “And at what point do you learn about these, you know, famous names that have been a part of it like, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush?” he answered that he met George H.W. Bush through Skull and Bones and even sung a song with him. He said that he found out to his surprise that he was the musical person for his class which was his (George E. Lewis) position in his class. Throughout his interview he talked about the conventions he went to and the people he had the pleasure of networking with. 

During our staff meeting this week we discussed interviews. Ms. Richardson told us what goes into doing the interviews and how they format them. When she told us about the amount of prep work that goes into doing an interview it really got me thinking. As an interviewer you have to thoroughly research your subject so you know what questions to ask. We also got to see two mock interviews done during the staff meeting We were given a couple of interviews to go back and watch. During the interviews I noticed that the interviewer had to be very adaptable and quick on their toes but also try to get them to open up more and give more details about themselves and their lives.