Weaving Spiders, Come Not Here: Bohemian Grove

The northern coast of California hosts a 2,700-acre campsite owned by the Bohemian Club; a 21+ men’s club that boasts about 2,600 members. The Bohemian Club lays foundational claim to its four pillars of literature, art, music, and drama—members are to have a talent or significant interest in the four pillars to be accepted. Their Shakespearean motto, “Weaving Spiders, Come Not Here” is a nod to the club’s alleged rule which states business or political matters are not to be discussed within the confines of the club. That is, unless it’s about global war strategies.

The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was the escalation of planning that ultimately led to the engineering of the Atomic Bomb. At the forefront of that escalation was the S-1 Executive Committee: a four-time renamed group of scientists, politicians, and engineers that headed up all the Uranium research that took place during WWII. The committee consisted of notable historical figures such as:

• Harold C. Urey (Nobel Prize winning chemist, discovered deuterium)

• Ernest O. Lawrence (Nobel Prize winning physicist, invented the cyclotron)

• James B. Conant (Harvard Chemist, first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany)

• Lyman J. Briggs (Engineer, physicist, Director of NBS, Chairman of Uranium Committee)

• Eger V. Murphree (chemist, co-inventor of the process of fluid catalytic cracking)

• Arthur Compton (Nobel Prize winning physicist, discovery of Compton effect; electromagnetic radiation)

Although J. Robert Oppenheimer was not an official member of the S-1 Executive Committee, he did attend the meetings at Bohemian Grove and likely headed up some of the discussion circles. Through S-1’s collaboration with the British MAUD Committee, nuclear weapons were deemed a feasible possibility and all the research and engineering that took place was handed over to the United States Army, who created the Manhattan District. This maneuver ultimately took power away from the Uranium specialized S-1 section and returned influential prowess back to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Essentially, the NDRC and OSRD were the same entity—but with two different titles.

From this point on, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) would heavily influence the decisions made throughout the military mission we all know famously as The Manhattan Project. OSRD was an organization created by President Roosevelt that followed up the formation of the National Defense Committee (NDRC) after nuclear feasibility was discovered; all while Hitler was marching his troops abroad. Roosevelt appointed Vannevar Bush (a distant cousin to, yes, those Bushes) as head of OSRD, and Bush absorbed significant clout alongside James B. Conant; the eventual Ambassador to West Germany…

After all this information is presented, and you follow the history of these committees being formed, re-named, dissolved, and reformed again as powerful wartime decision-making entities; you may ask yourself if the Bohemian Club is following its own rules. It seems that the spiders are, in fact, weaving their webs.