The Bohemian Club: Inside America’s Most Secretive Members’ Society

This is the Bohemian Grove — specifically the summer encampment hosted each July by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco — and it has been producing this precise situation, with variations in cast and setting but remarkable consistency of character, since 1878. No institution in American life generates a wider gap between what it actually is and what its detractors believe it to be. The Bohemian Club is, depending on which account you encounter, a fraternal organization for creative professionals that gradually became a networking salon for the American power elite; a harmless if extravagant summer camp for powerful men with theatrical tendencies; or — in the fever narratives of the American conspiracy imagination — the physical headquarters of a global shadow government conducting pagan ritual in the forest. The truth, documented across more than a century of journalistic infiltrations, accidental disclosures, and leaked membership rosters, is considerably more interesting than any of those framings, and considerably less dramatic than the darkest of them.

Origins: Journalists, Artists, and a Sunday Morning in 1872

The Bohemian Club was not founded by presidents or oil executives. It was founded by reporters. In the spring of 1872, a group of journalists employed by the San Francisco Chronicle began gathering on Sunday mornings at the home of James Bowman, a writer and eventual co-founder whose literary ambitions ran considerably beyond his day-job coverage. The gatherings formalized over the following weeks, the members chose the word Bohemian as a badge of their artistic aspirations — carrying the nineteenth-century connotation of men who lived by their wits and for their craft — and on the day the club held its organizational meeting in March 1872, the founding membership consisted almost entirely of working journalists, along with some painters, musicians, and theater people who had been drawn into Bowman’s circle.

The original purpose was social and artistic: a place where men who spent their professional days producing prose under deadline pressure could gather in an atmosphere of cultivation, conversation, and what they called High Jinks — the club’s term for theatrical entertainments, originally modest and eventually elaborate, that would become a defining feature of the institution. Oscar Wilde visited in 1882 — barely a decade into the club’s existence — and was reported to have said, with characteristic double-edged admiration, that he had never seen so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in his life. The observation captured, with precision, the transformation already underway: the businessmen and entrepreneurs who had begun joining as permanent members, alongside the artists and journalists who remained its nominal soul, had given the club a different weight in the city’s social landscape than its founders had anticipated.

Key Dates in the Bohemian Club’s History

• 1872 — Founded in San Francisco by journalists from the San Francisco Chronicle, with James Bowman as the central organizer
• 1878 — First summer encampment held in Marin County redwoods, honoring departing member Henry Edwards
• 1881 — First Cremation of Care ceremony, created by James F. Bowman, establishing the ritual that opens every summer encampment
• 1882 — Oscar Wilde visits the San Francisco clubhouse
• 1893 — Club rents the current Sonoma County grove site; purchases it outright in 1899 from timber operator Melvin Cyrus Meeker
• 1934 — Current city clubhouse at 624 Taylor Street completed, designed in a style blending Georgian Revival with Art Deco elements
• 1942 — S-1 Executive Committee meets at the Grove in September; discussions contribute to the organizational framework that became the Manhattan Project
• 1950 — Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon meet for the first time as guests of Herbert Hoover at Cave Man Camp
• 1971 — Nixon, by then president, characterizes the Grove in memorably unflattering terms on White House tapes
• 1989 — Philip Weiss infiltrates the encampment for seven days; his account published in Spy magazine in November 1989
• 2000 — Alex Jones and Jon Ronson separately infiltrate and film the Cremation of Care ceremony
• 2026 — A 2023 camp membership roster of approximately 2,200 names is leaked publicly by journalist Daniel Boguslaw

The City Clubhouse: 624 Taylor Street

The Bohemian Club’s urban headquarters occupies the corner of Post and Taylor Streets in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, two blocks west of Union Square — near enough to the city’s commercial and hotel center to be convenient, far enough from the tourist corridor to be unremarked. The six-story building, completed in 1934 to a design that synthesizes Georgian Revival townhouse proportions with Art Deco decorative details, announces the club’s identity through exactly two visual signals: a pair of carved owls above the entrance, and a plaque bearing the club motto near the corner. Neither is prominent enough to attract casual attention. Both are clear enough to anyone who is looking.

Inside, the facilities are those of a well-established metropolitan club: dining rooms, a bar, a library with works by member artists on the walls, an art gallery, a 450-seat theater — the theatrical capacity being, characteristically, larger than comparable clubs would maintain — meeting spaces, and guest accommodations on the upper floors. The commitment to the arts is structural rather than decorative. The club’s bylaws have long required that at least ten percent of the membership consist of accomplished artists — painters, musicians, writers, architects — a requirement that has given the Bohemian its particular texture and distinguished it from the more purely social and professional clubs that inhabit the same stratum of San Francisco life. Works by Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, and John Sloan have adorned the walls; the interior functions as something between a private club and an ongoing exhibition.

The Grove: 2,700 Acres of Coast Redwood

The Bohemian Grove covers 2,700 acres in Monte Rio, in Sonoma County, along the Russian River. The land was acquired from logging operator Melvin Cyrus Meeker — the club rented the site from 1893 and purchased it outright in 1899 — and the coast redwoods that cover it are among the largest living organisms in the world, some of them several centuries old. In mid-July each year, the grove becomes, for roughly two weeks, the most concentrated gathering of American establishment power in existence — a fact that has been extensively documented across decades of journalism and is not, despite the conspiratorial framing it has attracted, actually a secret.

The encampment hosts approximately 2,500 men — members and their invited guests — distributed across 118 camps, which are the Grove’s basic social unit. A camp is essentially a small village: a cluster of cabins, a communal dining area, a fire pit, and a particular social character accumulated over decades of continuous use. The camps range from the very grand to the deliberately rustic, and each has its own internal culture, its own roster of regulars, its own rituals and songs and running jokes. Assignment to a camp is not a formality. The camp a man belongs to places him within the Grove’s internal social geography as surely as a neighborhood address places him within a city.

The Principal Camps

The hierarchy of camps, while never officially published, is well understood among members and has been reconstructed through decades of reporting. Mandalay, which sits at the physical and social center of the encampment, has historically been the camp of presidents and the most senior corporate leadership. Owl’s Nest was Ronald Reagan’s longtime camp — the site of the famous 1967 photograph of Reagan alongside Richard Nixon, Glenn Seaborg, and other future power brokers in the forest. Cave Man was the camp of Herbert Hoover, and it was there, in July 1950, that Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon met for the first time as guests of the former president. Hill Billies has numbered Walter Cronkite, George H. W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and William Buckley among its regulars; the leaked 2023 roster places Brook H. Byers of Kleiner Perkins and Tim Draper there as well. Stowaway, Silverado Squatters, Uplifters, Hideaway, Isle of Aves, and the others each carry their own gravitational fields of membership, with Nobel laureates, retired generals, and old California family money distributed across the map in configurations that a sociologist of American elite formation would find illuminating.

The physical atmosphere of the Grove, as described by every journalist who has successfully penetrated it, is less sinister than it sounds in the telling and more genuinely strange. Philip Weiss, who spent seven days inside posing as a guest in 1989 and wrote the most thorough firsthand account for Spy magazine, described the experience of rounding a bend in the forest trail and encountering a man with a drink in one hand, relieving himself against a tree — and noted that this, the freedom of powerful men to behave without decorum in the woods, was treated as among the Grove’s most treasured amenities. Jon Ronson, who infiltrated in 2000 alongside Alex Jones, retained the lasting impression of an overgrown fraternity party — men who had reached the apex of their professional lives and appeared, in this context, to have emotionally remained in their college years. Harry Shearer, the actor and satirist who attended as a legitimate guest, described it to Ronson as exactly that: a glorified frat party. The accumulated weight of these accounts suggests that the Grove’s power derives less from any formal agenda than from the simple, sustained fact of proximity — the things that happen when the most consequential men in American life spend two weeks talking to one another with their guard partially down.

The Cremation of Care

Every Bohemian Grove encampment begins, on its first night, with the Cremation of Care — a theatrical ritual that has been performed annually since 1881, when James Bowman created it as the club’s ceremonial opening. The ceremony takes place at the shore of a small artificial lake at the head of the grove, before a forty-foot concrete owl — moss- and lichen-covered, fitted with interior electrical and audio equipment, designed by sculptor Haig Patigian in the late 1920s to simulate a natural rock formation but unmistakable in its deliberate imposingness.

The ritual follows a set structure. Hooded figures carrying torches process to the lakeside; a small boat crosses the dark water bearing an effigy called Dull Care, the personification of worldly anxiety and professional obligation. A High Priest — played by a member — inveighs against Care as the enemy of beauty and fellowship. The torchbearers raise the coffin containing the effigy above their heads and carry it to a pyre before the owl. The flames rise. For decades, the voice of the Owl was provided by a recording made by Walter Cronkite — the most trusted voice in American broadcasting, intoning the lines of a mock-pagan ceremony in the California redwoods — which, depending on your perspective, is either deeply absurd or a perfect expression of the American establishment’s relationship with its own mythology. The pyrotechnics conclude; a band plays; a late dinner follows.

The purpose of the ceremony — leaving aside the theatrical production values — is the suspension of professional identity for the duration of the encampment. The Bohemian motto, Weaving Spiders Come Not Here, drawn from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expresses the same intent: outside business is explicitly discouraged within the Grove. The rule is, like many club rules, more aspirational than absolute. The documented history of the Grove includes at least one meeting of historical consequence — in September 1942, the S-1 Executive Committee, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence among others, met at the Grove in discussions that contributed to the organizational framework of what became the Manhattan Project. The atomic age was not, strictly speaking, born at the Bohemian Grove — but the conversations that shaped its early institutional structure took place, in part, under these redwoods.

The Member Roster: Power Without Portfolio

The Bohemian Club maintains a membership of approximately 2,600 men, with a waitlist that the club’s own website has described as sizeable — which, given that the waiting period for a new member routinely extends to fifteen years or more, is something of an understatement. The membership has always mixed accomplished artists with the senior leadership of American institutions, and the balance has shifted over time from the former to the latter without fully abandoning the former — the bylaw requiring ten percent artist membership has held.

The political roster reads like a syllabus for the postwar American executive branch. Herbert Hoover was a longtime member; Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were regular Grove attendees; Ronald Reagan’s Owl’s Nest camp was the site of the famous 1967 photograph that documented the intersection of California Republican politics with the Grove’s social world. George H. W. Bush was a Hill Billies member. Warren Christopher, George P. Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Henry Kissinger, and Edwin Meese — between them they have served as Secretaries of State, Secretaries of Defense, National Security Advisors, and Attorneys General — have all been members or regular guests. The pattern is not quite bipartisan: the Bohemian Club’s political membership has historically leaned heavily Republican, though Warren Christopher’s presence and others suggest the institution has never been entirely a party apparatus.

The 2023 membership roster, leaked in February 2026 by journalist Daniel Boguslaw, confirmed what informed observers had long assumed: the contemporary membership is weighted toward California business and finance rather than national politics, with technology money represented alongside the older institutional presences. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and executive chairman of Alphabet, is on the list. Paul Pelosi, the venture capitalist, is placed at Stowaway. Riley and Gary Bechtel, heirs to the engineering fortune that has been associated with the club for decades, maintain their place at Mandalay. Former NSA director and four-star admiral Bobby Inman is at Hillside. Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist from UCSF, is at Silverado Squatters. Ken Burns, the documentarian. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. The roster, as one member confirmed when contacted by the San Francisco Standard, is real — and reflects an institution whose membership spans a surprisingly wide range of American distinction while remaining oriented, at its core, toward the kinds of men who have held institutional power rather than those who have merely accumulated wealth.

Notable Members and Guests, Historical and Contemporary

• Herbert Hoover — member, president, one of the Grove’s most devoted regulars; inducted into Old Guard status in 1953
• Dwight D. Eisenhower — Grove guest, first met Nixon at Cave Man Camp, July 1950
• Richard Nixon — longtime attendee; memorably characterized the Grove in unflattering terms on 1971 White House tapes, a comment that did nothing to diminish its prestige
• Ronald Reagan — Owl’s Nest member; photographed at the Grove in 1967 alongside Nixon, Glenn Seaborg, and others in a document of California Republican political formation
• George H. W. Bush — Hill Billies member
• Henry Kissinger — member; photographed with Stephen Bechtel Sr. at the club in 1999
• George P. Shultz — member, Secretary of State under Reagan
• Caspar Weinberger — member, Secretary of Defense under Reagan
• Walter Cronkite — Hill Billies member; voiced the Owl in the Cremation of Care ceremony for years
• David Packard — member, Hewlett-Packard co-founder
• Eric Schmidt — member (Aviary camp), former Google CEO
• Jack London and Bret Harte — honorary members, from the club’s literary origins
• Colin Powell — performed as the lead in a Grove production of Macbeth

The All-Male Tradition and Its Discontents

The Bohemian Club admits only men — a policy that has been continuous since its founding in 1872 and that has generated increasing friction as the decades have passed. The first significant legal challenge came in the 1980s, when a lawsuit compelled the club to permit the hiring of female workers during the summer encampment — a ruling that the club accepted with respect to its labor practices while maintaining its membership policy unchanged. A 1987 California court ruling confirmed the employment requirement while leaving the membership restriction intact.

The argument the club has historically made — that the Bohemian is a private organization with the same right to define its own membership that any private association enjoys — is legally coherent but has grown harder to sustain as a matter of public persuasion. The membership’s response, in the main, has been to regard the criticism as external to the institution and irrelevant to its purposes — which is, depending on your view, either principled consistency or a failure of self-examination remarkable in men who have otherwise demonstrated considerable capacity for analytical rigor. The policy has not changed. Whether it will is a question the membership has declined to answer publicly, which is consistent with its general orientation toward questions it would prefer not to answer.

The Conspiracy Theories: What the Record Actually Shows

The Bohemian Club attracts a specific category of conspiratorial attention — the belief that its summer encampment is the physical site where the American ruling class meets to coordinate its control of global affairs, conduct occult ritual, and reach decisions that are then implemented through the institutions its members nominally lead. Alex Jones, who infiltrated the 2000 encampment with a camera alongside Jon Ronson, characterized the Cremation of Care as a human sacrifice to the owl-deity Moloch. Jones’s documentary Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove has been viewed by millions and continues to circulate as a primary reference in the conspiracy literature about the institution.

The record on the human sacrifice claim is unambiguous: it is false. Ronson, who was present for the same ceremony Jones filmed, later stated explicitly that Jones had misrepresented what occurred — that the ceremony involved a burning effigy, elaborate theatrical production, and a great deal of hooded robes and pyrotechnics, none of which constituted anything beyond what the club had always publicly acknowledged. A subsequent incident — a man named Richard McCaslin entered the Grove at night in 2002 wearing a skull mask, set fires, and was arrested — illustrates the real-world consequences of the more extreme interpretations. No evidence of occult practice, human sacrifice, or coordinated global decision-making has emerged from any of the documented infiltrations, despite the fact that four separate journalists and at least two amateur investigators have successfully entered the encampment and reported extensively on what they observed.

What the record does show is more complicated. The September 1942 meeting of the S-1 Executive Committee at the Grove contributed to the organizational thinking that became the Manhattan Project — a documented fact that is stranger and more consequential than most of the fabricated claims. Nixon, who privately disparaged the Grove’s social atmosphere while continuing to attend, used the encampment as a political networking venue throughout his career. The Owl’s Nest photograph of 1967 — Reagan, Nixon, and future power brokers arrayed around a table in the forest — is a genuine historical document of how California Republican politics were organized. The Bohemian Grove is, in short, a place where men who hold significant power spend time in proximity to one another with the formal prohibition on business discussion functioning more as an aspiration than a rule. That is not nothing. It is also not a shadow government.

Jon Ronson’s assessment, formed through close observation and documented in his book Them: Adventures with Extremists, remains the most accurate summary in the public record: these men, who have reached the apex of their professions and in many cases shaped the course of American history, come to the Grove and exhibit an all-pervading sense of immaturity. The heavy drinking, the cod-pagan ritual, the theatrical productions, the freedom to behave badly in the woods — all of it suggests that what the Bohemian Grove actually provides is a context in which powerful men can temporarily stop being powerful men and become, for a fortnight, something closer to boys at summer camp. The fact that those boys happen to include former secretaries of state, Nobel laureates, and the heirs to some of the largest fortunes in American history gives the scene a particular quality that is neither sinister nor entirely comfortable, but is, unmistakably, real.

The Membership Process: How the Club Selects Its Members

The Bohemian Club does not accept applications. There is no form to complete, no fee to submit in advance of consideration, no self-nomination of any kind. Membership begins, and only begins, with a sponsorship from an existing member who is willing to put his personal standing behind the candidate’s admission — a commitment that carries genuine social weight in an institution where reputations are long-held and memories are longer.

Sponsorship and the Vetting Process

The sponsor initiates the process by formally proposing the candidate, supported by additional letters of endorsement from members who know him well. The committee’s evaluation considers professional distinction — the Bohemian Club has always valued genuine accomplishment, whether in business, government, the arts, or the academy — alongside personal character and social fitness. The requirement that ten percent of the membership be accomplished artists is not merely aspirational; it shapes the selection process, and candidates who bring genuine creative credentials are considered against a standard that values that distinction specifically.

The process is long. The waiting list runs to years — in many cases, to more than a decade — not because the bureaucratic machinery is slow but because there are simply more men of appropriate standing than there are positions available. A man may be proposed by a sponsor in his forties and receive his invitation in his fifties. That this is understood to be a normal timeline speaks to the depth of commitment the membership holds toward the institution.

Bohemian Club Membership Cost

The Bohemian Club does not publish its fee structure, and the figures that circulate in the press are based on accounts from former members and industry reporting rather than official disclosure. By those accounts, the initiation fee runs to approximately $25,000, a number that has been cited by multiple sources and appears to have remained relatively stable over the past decade. Annual dues are reported at $3,000 to $5,000 per year. Attendance at the summer encampment carries additional costs — the two-week Grove retreat involves camp-specific assessments and shared expenses that add an estimated $5,000 to $10,000 for those who attend, on top of personal travel and provisions. Individual camp dues within the larger structure vary and are not publicly disclosed.

The combined cost of full participation — initiation, annual dues, Grove attendance — runs to something in the neighborhood of $35,000 to $50,000 in the first year of membership, with ongoing annual costs in the range of $8,000 to $15,000 thereafter depending on camp and attendance. These figures place the Bohemian Club well below the cost of entry at certain elite golf and country clubs but well above the merely social tier of urban membership organizations. The club’s fee structure, like the Knickerbocker’s, reflects an institution that is not attempting to monetize its prestige so much as sustain a specific cultural product.

The Owl, the Motto, and What the Club Actually Is

The owl — the club’s mascot, present above the door of the Taylor Street clubhouse, perched over upper-story windows, cast in forty feet of concrete at the lakeside altar of the Grove — derives from the classical association between owls and Athena, wisdom and the arts. The motto, Weaving Spiders Come Not Here, taken from Act II of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — where Titania instructs her fairies to keep away anything that might intrude on the enchanted space — is not a threatening incantation. It is a request for a particular kind of temporary suspension: leave your professional calculations at the gate, and enter as yourself.

What the Bohemian Club is, stripped of the theatrical apparatus and the conspiratorial overlay, is a fraternity of the American establishment — not a fraternity in the diminished sense the word has acquired, but in the older sense of a bond formed among men of shared values and complementary backgrounds, sustained over time through shared ritual and enforced proximity. The Grove’s function is to bring together men who would otherwise encounter one another only in formal professional contexts and place them, for two weeks, in a setting where the formal markers of rank are somewhat suspended — where the former president and the retired CEO and the Nobel laureate and the Kleiner Perkins partner are all, at some level, campers in the woods. The relationships that form, deepen, or are maintained in that context carry back into professional life, into board rooms and cabinet meetings and investment decisions, in ways that are real and consequential but that are not the product of any formal agenda. The club has never needed a conspiracy. It has something more durable: proximity, repetition, and the specific alchemy that occurs when powerful men are placed, year after year, in an environment that asks them to be something other than powerful.

That is what the leaked membership rosters confirm, and what the journalist infiltrations have documented, and what the Manhattan Project meeting in September 1942 suggests about the Grove’s actual function: not secrecy for its own sake, but the conditions under which the American establishment thinks, networks, and occasionally decides.

PCM works with members of legacy clubs and the candidates seeking entry — confidentially. If you are navigating a membership process at the Bohemian Club or an institution of comparable standing, our consulting practice begins with a private conversation.