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Skull and Bones, or 7 Fast Facts About Yale’s Secret Society

Skull and Bones, Yale University’s most famous and most secret society, has inspired sinister conspiracy theories since its founding in 1832. Some people believe Skull and Bones controls the CIA, while others think it’s a branch of the Illuminati, seeking a global totalitarian government. Still others blame it for the Kennedy assassinations.

Those theories got help from at least one of the society’s famous members James Jesus Angleton, who headed CIA counterintelligence for nearly two decades.

James Jesus Angleton

Skull and Bones also has a reputation as a club for future leaders. It so epitomized East Coast elitism in 1925 that F. Scott Fitzgerald had two of his main WASPy characters in The Great Gatsby belonging to it. Later, in the television series Batman, Bruce Wayne’s grandfather wears a Yale sweater in his portrait and was said to have founded Skull and Bones.

They meet in a crypt-like sandstone structure called the Tomb. Only Skull and Bones members may enter, and ghoulish objects like skeletons and the portraits of famous members decorate the walls.

The Tomb.

Here, then, are seven fast facts about Skull and Bones.

1. Skull and Bones ‘322’

The number ‘322’ appears on the society’s insignia, and is said to refer to 322 B.C., when Athens lost the Lamian War and had to dissolve its democracy. A new, plutocratic government allowed only wealthy Athenians to remain citizens.

2. Beautiful Dump

Skull and Bones owns Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River in Alexandria, N.Y. The society uses it for get-togethers, and every new member visits it. Though servants once served catered meals in elegant cottages on the island, little is left of the old buildings. The 40-acre retreat had dense undergrowth, stone ruins and a small lodge. One Bonesman described it as a beautiful dump.

Deer Island

3. The Russell Trust

Alphonso Taft, founder of the political dynasty and father of President William Taft, co-founded Skull and Bones in 1832 with William Huntington Russell. Russell in 1856 incorporated the Russell Trust as the business arm of the society.

William Huntington Russell

In 1943, the Connecticut Legislature passed an act granting a special exemption to the trustees. They wouldn’t have to file corporate reports with the secretary of state, normally required.

4. Bonesmen

George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John F. Kerry

Both President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush belonged to Bones. So did Secretary of State John Kerry, the younger Bush’s opponent in the 2004 presidential election. Bush wrote in his autobiography, “[In my] senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society; so secret, I can’t say anything more.” A reporter once asked Kerry what it meant for two Bonesmen to run against each other for president. He replied, “Not much, because it’s a secret.”

5. Skull Thieves

Bonesmen have a reputation for stealing from other Yale societies. They’ve stolen the skulls of Martin Van Buren, Pancho Villa and Geronimo. In 2009, Geronimo’s descendants charged the society with the theft of his remains. Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush’s father, supposedly broke into his grave during World War I and stole his skull and two bones. The court dismissed the case.

6. Not No. 1

Of Yale’s 41 secret societies, Bones is only the fifth richest, with $4,129,936 in assets in 2015, according to Business Insider.

Buckley in 1952

7. He-Man Women Haters?

Bonesman William F. Buckley led a group that sued to block the admission of women to Skull and Bones in 1991. Though black men were admitted since 1965, the Russell Trust adamantly opposed women. When the class of ’91 tapped seven women for the ’92 class, the Russell Trust changed the locks on the Tomb. Members voted by mail, 368-320 to allow women. But then Buckley and his group got a temporary restraining order against the move. The lawsuit eventually fizzled out and the first women joined in 1992.

This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Deer Island By TravelJournalNetwork at English Wikipedia, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9066842. John Kerry By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States – Senate Candidate John Kerry, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37632626. The Tomb (front facing) By © Nevit Dilmen, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41750558.

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Six Abandoned Places

What is so appealing about abandoned places? Cyberspace abounds with photos, videos and bloggers waxing elegiac about abandoned old mills, mansions and malls.

Tim Edensor, a geography professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, studies why people like abandoned places.

He called them ‘marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects,’ where people can see and feel things they can’t in everyday life. They’re about time, nature, mortality and disinvestment, he says.

Perhaps people like abandoned places because they feel genuine in a world full of commercial clutter and Disneyized cityscapes. Or perhaps they long for an industrial past, when manufacturing provided jobs that would support a family.

Here are six abandoned places, one in each New England state.

Remington Arms, Bridgeport, Conn.

Remington Arms, one of the many abandoned places that once made something.

You can barely swing a cat in New England without hitting an abandoned factory. They’re a sad reminder of the region’s past as an industrial powerhouse. The old plants stand as silent witnesses to the impact of trade deals, tax incentives and government policies rewarding finance over manufacturing.

New England’s once-enormous textile industry began to move south around the turn of the 20^th century in search of cheap land and labor. A similar fate befell the high-tech industry that sprang up after World War II.

Factories that made products for the military continued to thrive, however, and successive wars masked manufacturing’s decline. Remington Arms serves as a prime example.

Eliphalet Remington founded the company in 1816 in New York. He sold it in 1888 to a company that also owned the Union Metallic Cartridge Co. in Bridgeport and the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. of New Haven.

Remington made arms for France, Britain, Russia and the United States during World War I. During the Great Depression, it began making ammunition, and it made the Springfield bolt-action rifle for the U.S. government during World War II.

Remington’s Bridgeport factory expanded in 1915. At one point it was called ‘the greatest small arms and ammunition plant in the world.’ At its height, Remington Arms employed more than 17,000 workers.

Remington Arms closed its Bridgeport plant in 1986.

Today the abandoned Remington Arms plant still sits at 812 Barnum Ave. in Bridgeport, though plans call for its demolition.

Since workers were killed there, it is said to be haunted.

Abandoned Locomotives, The Allagash, Maine

One of the ghost locomotives in the Allagash wilderness.

Deep in the heart of Maine’s Allagash region sit two abandoned locomotives silently rusting in the wilderness. Only a few intrepid canoes, hikers and snowmobilers can see the hulking machines, miles from any road or railhead.

An independent logger named King Ed Lacroix, put the ghost locomotives there. He built a 13-mile railroad in the middle of the Allagash — some would call it nowhere — to haul pulpwood to Maine paper mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket. There the mills turned it into newsprint.

By 1933 the Great Depression had depressed demand for newsprint, so Lacroix abandoned the Allagash, the railroad, the rolling stock and the ghost locomotives.

By the time demand for paper picked up, trucks hauled logs more efficiently than railroads.

Today the abandoned places that Ed Lacroix left are part of the remote and scenic Allagash Wilderness Waterway protected by the State of Maine.

Abandoned Bear Pens, Boston

Bear pens, among Boston’s odder abandoned places.

Abandoned bear pens in Boston? Yup. They’re part of Zoo New England, formerly the Franklin Zoo in Franklin Park.

Frederick Law Olmsted designed an open plan zoological park surrounded by the larger park, also designed by Olmsted. The free zoo was a huge hit when it opened in 1912. Millions came each year. Then came the depression and the decline of the wild zoo.

Bears roamed freely (well, freely-ish) in a large stone enclosure at the bottom of a grand stone staircase. Large bas-reliefs of bears still stand amid the decaying cages.

Bears before their pens became abandoned places. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

In 1958, a city commission took over the zoo and tried to figure out how to revitalize it. They built a fence around the wild menagerie and charged admission for it. The bear pens, hard to tear down, and a badger enclosure, were simply left outside to rot.

They appear in the book and film Mystic River, where a murder victim was found in the pits.

More photos here.

Beech Hill Estate, Dublin, NH

Beech Hill Estate. Even mansions can be abandoned places.

Just because the National Park Service lists a building on the National Register of Historic Places doesn’t mean it’s been preserved. Such is the case with Beech Hill Estate in Dublin, N.H., as it also makes the list of abandoned places.

Noted architect Charles Platt designed the large Georgian Revival manor house for his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Francis Jencks of Baltimore. Like other wealthy Victorians, they fled the hot cities along the Eastern Seaboard for the summer colony along Dublin Lake. Platt designed several other mansions for the Dublin summer colony, but none so large as the Beech Hill Estate. A prominent landmark, the house has a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside.

Built in 1902-03, the house changed hands before becoming the guest house for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in 1949. Though it remains in private hands, the owners abandoned the house in the 1980s and it shows plenty of signs of neglect. The surrounding property is now conservation land with public hiking trails.

Abandoned Kmart, Cranston, R.I.

Cranston’s abandoned Kmart. Dead retail space make up a lot of abandoned places these days.

The company that incorporated as S.S. Kresge in 1916 had 85 U.S. stores. In 1962, the company had grown to hundreds of discount stores and took on the name Kmart.

By 2000, Kmart peaked with 2,171 stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Then shopping malls started to die, Kmart bought Sears and began to shut down stores. In Rhode Island, both Kmart and Sears stores closed in Warwick, Woonsocket, South Attleboro, Swansea and nearby Fall River in Massachusetts.

In August 2017, the company announced the closing of Rhode Island’s last Kmart in Cranston.

Abandoned Interstate 189, Burlington, Vt.

I-189, one of Vermont’s abandoned places.

Once the Federal Highway Administration planned to build an interstate from Exit 13 on I-89 in Burlington, Vt., to the industrial waterfront where it would service freight carriers. But then a toxic barge canal stopped highway construction just beyond the US Route 7 interchange, only 1.488 miles from its beginning.

About half a mile of unfinished highway remained, though, so Jersey barriers prevented traffic on the orphaned stretch of pavement.

And then industry disappeared. By the 1980s Burlington’s commercial activity mainly involved tourism, so transportation officials abandoned plans to finish I-189, at least for a while.

In 2012, federal highway planners came up with a new plan to extend I-189 to funnel traffic from Route 7 to downtown. Opposition to the plan halted construction, and the abandoned pavement serves as a pedestrian walkway for curious explorers.

Images: Remington Arms by Eric Kilby; Franklin Park Bear Dens By Ekmall – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29727050; Beech Hill Estate By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25650567; abandoned Kmart by JJBers Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0); abandoned interstate by Doug Kerr Attribution Share-Alike 2.0. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Unmaking of Rhode Island’s Manville Jenckes Mills

In 1923, Senator Henry Lippitt decided it was time for him to retire. At age 66, he had served in the U.S. Senate and gone on to run the family’s textile mills, the Manville Mills. With no obvious successor in his family, Lippitt reached out to the owners of the Jenckes Mills. mostly the Jenckes family. Merging their two operations seemed a reasonable approach to ensuring a peaceful succession for the mills. And the Manville Jenckes Mills were born.

Manville had three operations in Rhode Island — Woonsocket, Manville, and Georgiaville. It specialized in fancy, fine cotton clothing, draperies and upholstery fabrics. Jenckes had mills in Pawtucket and Central Falls, R.I., a large one in Gastonia, N.C., and a stake in a Canadian textile mill. Together, they had eight mills with 7,700 workers.

The combined companies had little overlap, and the merger anticipated savings by reducing the overhead and possibly sharing some specialized facilities. In total, it operated 620,000 spindles and more than 10,000 looms.

The stage was set for a disaster.

World War I Prosperity

Sam Slater’s mill. first in the U.S. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Both Manville and Jenckes had prospered during World War I, but Jenckes, especially, had experienced exponential growth. It produced fabric used to make tires.

The tire fabric business boomed during World War I and in the decade that followed. As demand for tires soared, tire manufacturers signed deals with fabric makers to operate a mill on behalf of that tire company. So one mill might be assigned to Firestone, for example, which would receive its total output. And Firestone would pay the entire cost of operating that mill, plus a fixed percentage of profit for Manville Jenckes.

Over time, the tire companies began demanding better pricing, ordering only as they needed at competitive prices. Some manufacturers simply set up their own fabric divisions. Through the 1920s, Manville Jenckes made up for the changes in business practices by selling to smaller companies.

The fine cloth markets, meanwhile, had been more volatile during the 1920s as the company shopped around for jobs producing sheets, cotton twill or satin, whatever kept the mills turning. With military contracts drying up after the war, the overall textile industry suffered from excess capacity, which kept prices low.

Sales of fine textiles shrank at the new company from $13.2 million in 1924 to just $6.3 million in 1928.

The High Life at Manville Jenckes Mills

Life was good for the owners of Manville Jenckes. The company paid dividends to its owners of $600,000 to $1 million per year leading up to 1929.

Salaries were even richer. Salaries paid to the company management increased from three percent of all revenue in 1924 to five percent of revenue by 1930.

In The Financial History of the Manville Jenckes Company, the author concludes that the management salaries at the family-run enterprise were “high, though not exorbitant.” But the salaries undercut one of the original goals of the merger: reducing overhead. Rather than decrease after the merger, overhead increased over five years by 44 percent.

Henry Lippitt

Labor Unrest

As the family that owned the company prospered, its employees did not. To try to increase profitability, mills would speed up machinery and demand longer days from their employees. In 1927, Rhode Island used its police to force workers to return to the mills. Manville Jenckes simply closed two mills that had formed unions rather than negotiate with workers.

The violence would reach a peak in Rhode Island in 1934 when the National Guard shot four mill workers in Saylesville. When word spread that a crowd of workers were massing at Manville Jenckes North Carolina plant, the governor of Rhode Island banned public assemblies in Rhode Island. The Guard ordered an emergency supply of teargas. The plane carrying it crashed, killing the pilot.

Manville Jenckes’ North Carolina plant saw the worst violence. Northern mills had a long history of shifting work to the South. In the 1920s, a northern mill worker could expect $21.50 for a 48-hour work week. Southern workers got $15.80 for a 55-hour week.

But a squeeze on cotton continued, and even the North Carolina plant pushed its workers to work more hours at faster paces. By 1929, all across the South workers were furious. They walked off the job and demanded the right to unionize. In April of that year, workers struck the Manville Jenckes plant. Police and militia broke it up. In that strike, a local police chief was killed, a crime that was never solved.

End of an Era at Manville Jenckes Mills

The 1929 stock market crash and beginning of the Great Depression took a heavy toll on the tire fabric business. Small tire makers failed by the score. Manville Jenckes sales figures highlight just how deeply the crash hurt the company. In the first half of 1929, sales were $14.4 million. That dropped to $8.8 million during the second half of the year. The first half of 1930 saw the company take in $7.7 million. Only $4.9 million came in during the second half.

The impact on fine textiles was just as bad. Before the crash, annual sales were hovering at $5 million to $6 million. In 1932 the company sold just $2.7 million worth of fine textiles.

What demand for fabric existed focused on cloth used for essentials — underwear, coat linings and casket cloth.

Depression Days

Manville Jenckes had been blindsided by the Depression of the 1930s. The company purchased raw materials well ahead of when it needed them. That way production would not halt should commodities such as cotton become scarce. Now, with no demand for its own goods, the company had a massive oversupply of raw material. To make matters worse, the Depression crushed prices. So raw cotton that Manville Jenckes owned was worth less than half what it had paid for it. Even if it could find a buyer, the company would take huge losses on its raw materials.

The company was pressed to pay for orders of raw goods it didn’t need and years of fat salaries and dividends left it without enough cash to operate.

Mills fell quiet and workers lost their jobs. The pain was passed on to the families that owned the mill, as well, as the dividends stopped.

Sen. Henry Lippitt in 1930 came out of retirement at 73 to try to rescue the mills. Other members of the owners’ families would resign. Lippitt himself would die less than three years later.

In February of 1931, facing demands for money it didn’t have, the company went into receivership and reorganized.

Thanks to The Financial History of Mansville Jenckes Company, by Henry Lippitt II and Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960, by Gary Gerstle.

If you liked this story you might enjoy The Brunswick Children Strike the Cabot Mill. This story last updated in 2022.

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Philo Bennett, Connecticut Tinsmith, Destroys William Jennings Bryant’s Political Career

New Haven’s Philo Bennett probably thought he was doing William Jennings Bryan a good turn when he left him $50,000 in his will. It turned out he was killing Bryan’s political career.

Political cartoon mocks William Jennings Bryan.

William Jennings Bryan

Today we remember William Jennings Bryan, if at all, for his flamboyance. A publisher, lawyer and a populist politician, he invented the modern idea of the presidential campaign trail. While prior politicians campaigned for the presidency by lying low and letting surrogates do the heavy lifting, Bryan created the tradition of the presidential stump speech. That, and his support for working-class people, helped earn him the moniker ‘the Great Commoner.’ The three-time Democratic candidate for president gave more than 500 speeches in 1896 alone.

Jennings, an Illinois lawyer, rose to the House of Representatives from Nebraska. He eventually served as Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson. He resigned due to his inability to persuade Wilson to keep America out of World War I. His final contribution to American history was serving as prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey Trial. During the trial, a Tennessee schoolteacher was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution to school children in 1925. Bryan won the trial and died days later.

William Jennings Bryan campaigning in 1896

But the political tide that originally carried Bryan to prominence was the fallout from the financial panic of 1893. With America wrestling with a depression, two elements fought to control American monetary policy. Bankers and the wealthy leisure class preferred the tight money supply tied to the gold standard. It restricted growth, but protected their hoarded cash piles from inflation. Bryan and others, however, promoted a loose monetary policy that would have used silver as a currency to create more money to spur economic growth — and also inflation.

Philo Bennett Meets William Bryan

Over his political career Bryan attracted many supporters (and enemies), but perhaps his biggest fan was New Haven businessman Philo Bennett. Bennett made his money as a food wholesaler. He believed Bryan’s pro-growth policies would benefit American business and American citizens. He and Bryan developed a friendship when Bennett served as one of Connecticut’s electors in the presidential election of 1896.

Bennett had supported Bryan in his 1896 campaign. When he lost, Bennett gave him $3,000 to allow him to prepare for the 1900 election season. After Bryan again lost in 1900, Bennett traveled to Nebraska to visit Bryan. While there, Bennett, Bryan and Bryan’s wife drew up a will for Philo Bennett.

With an estate of about $300,000, there was plenty of Bennett money to go around. Bennett left his wife, Grace Imogene Bennett, $75,000 in cash and the couple’s homes. To the Bryans he left $30,000 for the purpose of endowing scholarships at 25 universities around the country.

But Philo Bennett also left Grace a further bequest of $50,000 to be held in trust. He wished her to dispose of that $50,000 in accordance with instructions contained in a letter sealed in a safe deposit box. That letter instructed her to give the $50,000 to Bryan. Bryan would later say that Bennett made the gift out of concern that Bryan’s political involvement had hampered his career, making it difficult for the lawyer to adequately provide for himself. He had more than generously provided for his own wife, Philo Bennett reasoned, and he wanted Bryan to be comfortable in his old age.

Philo Bennett – Tinsmith With a Heart of Silver

Philo Bennett, born in northern Connecticut, trained in Brookfield and Fair Haven as a tinsmith. In his early years he saved assiduously and eventually made his way south to New York City. He went to work for several wholesalers, shifting between New Haven and New York. By 1900 he had partnered with Alfred Sloan. Sr., father to auto industry titan Alfred P. Sloan Jr. He also ran the prosperous wholesale firm of Bennett & Sloan. But Bennett’s modest roots probably helped him relate to Bryan’s populist message.

Each summer, Philo Bennett took a protracted vacation. In 1903 he traveled west to visit some mining properties he had invested in. Bennett died accidentally in Idaho when the brakes failed on a coach he was riding in. The coach tipped over, slamming him into a tree and killing him instantly.

As the news reached the East, Bennett’s will was read. It named his partner, Sloan, and William Jennings Bryan as executors. Bennett’s unexpected death put a spotlight on the will. Though he had lost twice in his presidential campaigns, Bryan was still a leading figure in the Democratic Party.

The story of the will had a couple of unsavory elements. First, the notion of a political leader accepting cash gifts from his patron smacked of corruption. But worse, Bryan himself had drawn up the will that would make him a wealthy man. And the language of the will suggested that Bryan was deliberately trying to keep the bequest private, suggesting he was ashamed of it.

Still, Bryan might have gotten the money quietly and painlessly but for one other element in the will. Grace Imogene Bennett might well have handed over $80,000 to the Bryans – more cash than she herself received – if her husband Philo had not also left a $20,000 bequest to his mistress. The insult was one too many, and Grace challenged Bryan’s right to act as executor.

Overturning The Will

Bryan and Bennett had anticipated that Grace might challenge the will. Bryan was ready with a story. The $50,000 didn’t represent a gift, rather the money was speaking fees. He had agreed with Bennett to deliver a number of speeches, and he would waive all fees since Bennett had already paid for them.

The shabby affair gave Bryan’s enemies ample ammunition and they gleefully played up the story of Bryan “robbing” a widow of her inheritance. In the end, the court concluded that the will did not place any binding requirement on Grace to follow her dead husband’s instructions about the $50,000. She was free to do what she wanted with it.

Had Bennett’s will simply included a simple bequest of $50,000 to Bryan, he would have received the money. By structuring the will the way he did, referencing an outside letter, he lost it all and in a very public manner.

Bryan made one final attempt at the presidency in 1908. He lost the election by his largest margin yet. Woodrow Wilson would receive Bryan’s political support in the 1912 election, and he rewarded Bryan by naming him secretary of state.

After resigning, Bryan would seek his fortune in Florida real estate.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Maxine Elliott: The Maine Starlet and Winston Churchill

In all the movies, books and histories that explored the life of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, only a short excerpt from an aide’s long-ignored oral history revealed his tragic affair with British celebrity Doris Castlerosse in the 1930s and how Maine’s Maxine Elliott made it happen.

Doris Castlerosse, a British socialite, made a habit of sleeping with wealthy men. She had relationships with both Winston Churchill and his son Randolph. Born in modest circumstances, Castlerosse’ marriage to Richard Castlerosse, a viscount and columnist for England’s Sunday Express newspaper, catapulted her to fame.

Maxine Elliott (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library)

They had a violent, turbulent marriage that did little to slow Doris’ interest in other men (and probably women). With Richard Castlerosse’s family cutting off his access to the family money, Doris frequently needed money to fuel her globe-trotting lifestyle.

In the 1930s in the south of France, at Cannes, Doris crossed paths with Maxine Elliott, who was then in the final chapter of her eventful life.

Maxine Elliott

Maxine Elliott was born Jessie Dermott, in 1868 to a Rockland, Maine, sea captain. She went to New York as young woman and married comedian Nat Goodwin. Maxine’s beauty and acting abilities led to a 30-year career as a stage actress, and she skyrocketed to fame. For a time, she also operated a New York theater branded with her name, “Maxine Elliot’s Theatre.”

Maxine’s life was a wild one. Her intimates included J.P. Morgan, British King Edward VII and Charlie Chaplin, among many others. In 1913 she began dating New Zealand tennis star Anthony Wilding. During World War I she went so far as to donate her money and her time to Belgian war relief. But Wilding was killed in the war.

Maxine Elliott Theatre (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library)

By 1920, Maxine’s talent, and some help from her wealthy friends, had left her with no need for more money. She retired to a Mediterranean estate in Cannes, France. She wished to age gracefully at her home, Château de l’Horizon. A white art deco villa, it featured a large terrace and a long slide to drop her and her guests from the swimming pool into the sea.

Large parties of libertines assembled at Maxine Elliott’s French estate, and it became notorious. Winston Churchill visited from 1933 to 1939. During these years Churchill fell out of favor with the majority of Britons. He spent his time on the French Riviera, writing and plotting his return to power.

Winston Churchill 1949

Winston’s wife Clementine had little use for Château de l’Horizon or Maxine and her friends. Clementine viewed them as gossipy and frivolous. Though perhaps her objections were more directly related to a single guest, Doris Castlerosse. It was at Château de l’Horizon that Winston and Doris would begin their affair.

People have long known about Churchill’s connection with Doris. In one letter to her he writes, “What fun we had at Maxine’s. I wonder shall we meet again next summer.”

Dirty Old Men

Yet Churchill scholars defended him for decades, arguing there was no proof of an affair. Then in 2018, someone finally listened to the oral history of his aide, Jack Colville. Colville recorded his recollections in 1985, though they remained un-listened-to for decades. When someone did listen to them, they found the revelation. “He was not highly sexed and I don’t think he ever slipped up, except the once. He had a brief affair with Doris Castlerosse.”

Doris Castlerosse

The affair lasted from 1933 to 1937. Churchill once repaid Castlerosse for her affection during the war years by securing a seat for her on an airplane from New York to London. He did it either as an act of kindness or because someone blackmailed him.

Maxine Elliot/Jessie Dermott died at her French estate in 1940 at age 72, far from her Rockland, Maine, beginnings. Her estate now belongs to the Saudi royal family.

Doris Castlerosse died in 1948 of an overdose of sleeping pills. In need of money as always, she was under investigation by Scotland Yard. Detectives were looking into her plans to sell some of her diamonds, illegal during World War II.

Her life as one of Britain’s wildest socialites caused talk in England for decades, though she had some cautions for others who might follow in her footsteps. “You may think it fun to make love,” she once said, “but if you had to make love to dirty old men as I do, you would think again.”

This story about Maxine Elliott was updated in 2022.

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Louis de Rochemont: The New Hampshire Moviemaker Who Took on Hitler in 1938 and Won

Louis de Rochemont had a bone to pick in 1938. In the 1930s, American attitudes toward Nazi Germany and Adolph Hitler were mixed. Even as Hitler ratcheted up his attacks on German Jews and increased his rhetoric about Germany reclaiming countries lost in World War I, there was some admiration for his restoration of the German economy. Streets were clean, men had jobs and the country was attractive.

Theater patrons line up to see Llouis de Rochemont’s Inside Nazi Germany

The 1936 Olympic games had provided a showcase for German achievement, as well as its volatile leader, who some still believed was a laughable buffoon. But Louis de Rochemont saw, instead, the harsh fascist policies Hitler employed to make his vision for Germany come true. True, men had jobs, but they had no labor unions to demand good pay or protect their rights. German farms were booming, but it was because families were forced to support them. German children were well-cared for, but only while being indoctrinated in fascist principles.

By 1938, many in America still believed Hitler could be moderated by others in Germany, and that the worst of his threats against Jews and other minorities were just rhetoric. Within Germany itself some didn’t believe Hitler was serious in his threats. Some Jewish German bankers even gave money to the Nazi party, believing it would have a moderating influence on Hitler.

Back in America some journalists sounded alarms about Hitler’s Germany, but their voices were mixed in with others who were less critical and repeated the American government’s more moderate line. Those sounding the alarm simply didn’t have a loud enough voice. But Louis de Rochemont did. He had a much louder megaphone than most, and he decided to direct it at Hitler’s Germany.

Louis de Rochemont’s megaphone was: The March of Time. It was a documentary-style film series that each month showed at movie theaters around the country. News reels were not new, but The March of Time advanced the art of news reels. It ran 20 to 30 minutes, much longer than most, and it dramatized its stories using actual footage, as well as actors and staged scenes, to bring the story lines to life. And it was not afraid to be political.

de Rochemont had taken over as producer of The March of Time in 1935, in partnership with Time Magazine. He tackled topics such as the harsh working conditions of American blacks working in the cotton fields of the South and environmental issues, such as the farming practices that caused the dust bowl and controversy over developing Florida’s wild lands.

But it was fascism that drew most of de Rochemont’s fire. In January, 1938 – almost a year before the Nazi’s launched the Kristallnacht rioting and violence that openly targeted Jewish families and businesses – de Rochemont put his film, Inside Nazi Germany, into American theaters. You can watch it here.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, the film seems tame as it looks at how Hitler’s fascist government impinged on the liberties of the typical German household and how antisemitism was spreading in the country as it built up a fierce war machine.

de Rochemont had in his sights not just changing opinion about Hitler, who was not popular in America, but also snuffing out support for Nazi politics in America. The German American Bund – a U.S.-based organization of German-Americans who supported Nazi politics – was slowly growing across the country. Among the group’s organizing tools were a series of summer camps for Germans to visit.

As he did in other films, de Rochemont found material for Inside Nazi Germany in his own back yard: Southbury, Connecticut. While the American Nazis had been able to build camps throughout other parts of the country, Connecticut reacted in horror at news that the Nazis had bought land in Southbury for a campground. Two of the campground builders were arrested for working on a Sunday in violation of the state’s blue laws. The town organized to block the camp by changing its zoning laws, which drove the American Nazis to sell the land and move on.

The message to moviegoers was clear: they should follow the lead of flinty New Englanders and not give Nazi ideals a home.

de Rochemont himself could be described as a flinty New Englander. He was born in Massachusetts in 1899 and his family moved to Newington, N.H. when he was a boy. It would be his lifelong home. He developed a love of theater as a youngster, and cut his teeth working for the newsreels, covering news.

By the time he was heading The March of Time, de Rochemont had polished his craft. He had a knack for spotting international hot-spots and highlighting them for viewers at just the right moment. And he knew how to dramatize news stories for easy consumption. Inside Nazi Germany has been recognized as very influential in shaping American attitudes toward Germany and Nazism.

de Rochemont and The March of Time would inspire characters in Orson Welle’s film, Citizen Kane, which featured the work of journalists working for the fictional newsreel News on the March.

After the war, de Rochemont left The March of Time in the hands of his brother, Richard. Richard would win an Academy Award for a March of Time episode that focused on the post-World War II struggles of Italians.

Louis, meanwhile, would go on to producing feature films. Two films he produced were set in his home state of New Hampshire. The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951) was set in a New Hampshire mill town and highlighted labor-management strife. It marked the film debut of Ernest Borgnine. Lost Boundaries (1949) told the story of a New Hampshire couple who were black but passed as white to avoid racism, and the complications that brought to their lives.

Perhaps his most unusual work was de Rochemont’s production of an animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He developed the cartoon in partnership with the CIA, which lead his critics to categories de Rochemont as an anti-communist propagandist. You can watch it here.

Critics of de Rochemont’s work argue that in his docu-drama style he was too free with his use of actors and fabricating scenes to tell his stories. And his reputation suffered because of his staunch anti-communism and the ugly aspects of the communist purges in the film industry in the 1950s.

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