The Russell Trust Association is the business name for the New Haven, Connecticut based Skull and Bones society, incorporated in 1856.
The Russell Trust was incorporated by William Huntington Russell as its president, and Daniel Coit Gilman as its first treasurer. Gilman later went on to become president of the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before leaving to become the first president of the Carnegie Foundation. Gilman also served as one of the first board members of the Russell Sage Foundation.
In 1943, by special act of the Connecticut state legislature, its trustees were granted an exemption from filing corporate reports with the Secretary of State, which is normally a requirement.
From 1978 onward, business of the Russell Trust Association was handled by its single trustee, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. partner John B. Madden. Madden started with Brown Brothers Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush.
The business and political network of the Skull and Bones was detailed by Hoover Institution scholar Antony C. Sutton in the exposé, America's Secret Establishment. Social organizations connected to the Russell Trust network include Deer Island Club, which also operates as a corporation.
Famous quotes containing the words russell, trust and/or association:
“A stranger came one night to Yussouf’s tent,
Saying, “Behold one outcast and in dread,
Against whose life the bow of power is bent,
Who flies, and hath not where to lay his head;
I come to thee for shelter and for food,
To Yussouf, called through all our tribes ‘he Good.’ “
“This tent is mine,” said Yussouf, “but no more
Than it is God’s; come in, and be at peace;”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)