Close to Home: Still weaving webs at Bohemian Grove

When news broke in April that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has for decades accepted extravagant travel gifts from Republican billionaire Harlan Crow, the Washington Post reported that Thomas had also been a guest of Crow during the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club.

The secretive club’s motto — “Weaving spiders come not here” — hangs over the entrance to Bohemian Grove, the 2,700-acre redwood estate situated alongside the Russian River near Monte Rio. Club members and their guests greet the sign with a wink. It is well documented that for decades these men — the club admits only men — have gathered at the grove to strengthen anchoring threads of socioeconomic supremacy. Today those threads are largely spun by men like Harlan Crow.

I am well familiar with Bohemian Grove. My 19th century ancestors owned and logged 1,100 acres of virgin redwood along the lower Russian River, eventually selling 200 acres of cutover land to the Bohemian Club to expand the grove. During the 1980s, I worked as a reporter in my hometown of Guerneville. My house stood just a half-mile away. During the offseason I enjoyed long runs through Bohemian Grove, though I’d slow to a stroll at the grove’s 100-acre stand of virgin redwood. This is the largest remaining dot of ancient forest standing alongside the Russian River, whose banks were once coated in 100,000 acres of virgin redwood.

To better understand how business and politics gel beneath this towering canopy, consider events of nearly a century ago. The grove is divided into several cutely named camps. One such camp, Pleasant Isle of Aves, was largely populated by regents of the University of California. A collegiate camp in the redwoods might at first glance seem an unlikely place to find world-dominating capitalists. Yet during this time every UC regent was a business titan. There were no exceptions. The regents included not a single academic, not even so much as a schoolteacher, to help guide education policies at the West’s premier academic institution. The regent’s role was to mine the university best minds to fuel the growth of an economic empire.

Typical of the group was William H. Crocker. Crocker joined the Bohemian Club in the late 19th century, and he served as president of the regents from 1926 until his death in 1937. Crocker, like Harlan Crow, frequently brought influential guests — and guests he wanted to influence — to the Bohemian Club’s annual July encampment.

Crocker had inherited a boundless compass of assets from his father, Charles Crocker, a “Big Four” founder of the Central Pacific Railroad — which built the western half of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad — and the Southern Pacific Corp. By 1920, Crocker was president and majority shareholder of 11 major corporations and a director of two dozen others. He controlled municipal water systems, real estate throughout the country, electricity production and distribution, hydroelectric power, steel production, irrigation, real estate development, telephone companies, railroads, ranch lands, coal and gravel extraction, oil wells and refineries, cement plants, life insurance, flour production and the mining of numerous metals and minerals.

In 1932, UC President Robert Gordon Sproul approached Crocker for a donation on behalf of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a nuclear physicist engaged in building cyclotrons at UC. Sproul was seeking funding to build a bigger, more impactful cyclotron for “medical research.” Crocker asked Sproul how much was needed. Sproul later wrote, “I told Mr. Crocker I believed $75,000 would cover it, and thirty minutes later I was back on the ferryboat … with his check for that amount in my pocket.” Today that $75,000 would be worth $1.5 million.

The program didn’t stop at medical research: on Sept. 15, 1942, Lawrence and the rest of the Uranium Committee (codenamed “S-1”) of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development met at the beautiful Bohemian Grove clubhouse. During their meeting, the Uranium Committee launched the Manhattan Project and its progeny, the world’s first nuclear weapons.

Harlan Crow is the latest incarnation of the classic American industrial oligarch. He has donated millions to right-wing organizations, among them Liberty Central, a far-right activist organization headed by Clarence Thomas’ wife, Virginia Thomas. She worked behind the scenes to support the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Today at Bohemian Grove, Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas can easily chat, out of the public eye, with any number of wealthy, influential Americans and dedicate themselves to weaving extreme economic and ideological webs of control. Clarence Thomas may not be developing weapons that would destroy the world, but he and Virginia Thomas are wielding the weaponized funding and influence of people like Crow. Together their work threatens to roll back several important and longstanding protections of American rights. Under the current court, according to the Center for American Progress, “Americans will likely see significant retrenchments of their rights, including those to clean air, religious freedom, effective governance, and to live safe from the scourge of gun violence.” But the rights of the exclusive members of Bohemian Grove, and their friends, will remain serenely uninterrupted.

Greg King, a native of Guerneville, is the author of “The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods.”

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