The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth
The Greatest Men's Party on Earth by John van der Zee examines the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club inside California’s redwood forest, where the most powerful men in America converge for two weeks each July. Framed as a rustic, artistic, and spiritual retreat, the Bohemian Grove gathering functions as an elite masculine enclave, cultivating social bonds and informal networks of influence that span government, business, media, and the arts.
A Hidden Republic of Power
Men arrive in private jets and limousines, guided by coded invitations and personal networks that define the inner circles of American authority. Politicians, Fortune 500 executives, military generals, and university presidents disembark not for policy summits or economic briefings but for ritual theater, communal meals, and fireside talks under giant redwoods. Van der Zee, disguised as a waiter, traces the gestures and rhythms of this world, recording the coded rituals and social choreography that structure access and allegiance.
The Grove is not a backdrop. It is a spatial logic that arranges hierarchy through natural monumentality. Towering trees become sentinels of continuity. Camp names like Mandalay and Owl’s Nest carry embedded histories of personal alliances and institutional memory. In this geography, proximity to the lake or the amphitheater signals relative status. Ritual performance operates as a test of cultural fluency. Newcomers must learn how to signal inclusion without self-promotion, how to banter without overt ambition, and how to navigate satire without exposing fragility.
The Ritual of Care
Each encampment opens with the Cremation of Care, a theatrical ceremony in which robed figures burn an effigy of worldly stress before a massive owl shrine. The act is framed as catharsis—a purging of responsibility and political gravity. Yet van der Zee observes the deeper function: ritual neutralizes accountability. It permits the convergence of politically opposed actors, from Nixon to Bobby Kennedy, under the premise that the Grove is a zone of respite, not policy. That premise allows plausible deniability. But the patterns of interaction, sponsorship, and repeated attendance tell another story.
The ceremony mocks the burden of public service even as it incubates its continuity. The audience laughs, drinks, and applauds while watching their own avatars burn symbols of civic duty. Care becomes both the name of what is destroyed and the fiction that it can ever truly be abandoned. The Grove stages a release from responsibility, but it engineers allegiance.
A Theatrical State
Performance is the dominant grammar of Grove life. Members stage elaborate plays, musical concerts, and comedic sketches. These productions—often written and produced by artists within the club—are supported with Broadway-level resources and treated with serious regard. They provide a space in which the powerful may explore, parody, or aestheticize their own influence.
The club divides each summer encampment into “High Jinks” and “Low Jinks,” formal and informal entertainment rituals that enact internal mythologies. The most ambitious production—the Grove Play—deploys custom scores, mythic scripts, and complex staging. The audience comprises cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices, tech founders, and oil barons. Theater becomes a means of myth-making. These aren’t performances about art; they are performances about belonging.
Bohemian identity, once defined by Henri Murger’s Latin Quarter misfits, transforms here into a ceremonial affect—eccentricity in the service of power. The club’s early artistic ethos has been retrofitted into a decorative frame for elite ritual. This does not erase the artistic impulse but repurposes it. The Grove Play affirms the exceptionalism of its audience. It offers them an imagined genealogy: rulers as guardians of civilization, nobles of culture, spiritual heirs to forgotten orders.
Networks of Trust and Ascent
Friendship is not incidental to the Grove’s function. It is the vehicle of influence. The camp structure, which breaks the club into 126 smaller groups, creates micro-communities. These are not random. They reflect professional affinities, political affiliations, or generational mentorships. Camps like Cave Man’s serve as sanctuaries for former presidents, intelligence chiefs, and influential financiers. Access here depends on decades of mutual loyalty and service.
Within these bounded zones, major decisions often germinate. Nixon and Reagan both delivered informal campaign previews in lakeside speeches. Hoover retreated here annually to consult with business leaders and foreign policy architects. Even those who claim that “no business is conducted” at the Grove cannot deny the transactional aura. Introductions, endorsements, strategic advice—these move quietly, beneath toasts and piano solos.
The Grove does not replace institutional politics. It amplifies it by removing friction. Trust precedes policy. In these woods, a single night of shared jokes or shared silence may matter more than months of official lobbying.
Artisans of the Mask
Van der Zee exposes how the Grove’s artists—the actors, musicians, set designers, and illustrators—play a double role. Many are full club members. Others are tolerated outsiders, maintained for their aesthetic contributions. They serve as interpreters and jesters, allowed to comment but never command. Their creative work gilds the Grove’s rituals with the semblance of spontaneity. Yet they remain dependent—economically and symbolically—on the men they entertain.
Some find this role honorable. They receive access, patronage, and a stage unmatched by any regional theater. Others, particularly in the early decades, revolted. The Pandemonium Club, an ephemeral breakaway formed by disgruntled artists in 1880, attempted to reclaim a more authentic bohemianism. It collapsed within weeks. The Grove absorbed its members and its myth.
Van der Zee shows how the artistic elite—far from resisting the power elite—often seeks absorption. Club artists win status through proximity to wealth, and wealth wins cultural capital through sponsorship. This exchange is rarely equal, but it is enduring. The Grove institutionalizes it.
The Grove and the State
The Bohemian Club is a private entity, but its history shadows the American state. Club records document the presence of defense contractors, CIA officials, nuclear scientists, and cabinet members across multiple administrations. Informal discussions here have shaped policy frames—from Cold War escalation to environmental deregulation.
Van der Zee documents how figures like Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Secretary of State William Rogers, and intelligence chief Richard Helms used the Grove to float ideas, test loyalty, and solidify relationships. These interactions rarely yield signed agreements, but they often signal consensus.
The Grove functions as an auxiliary structure of the American political economy. It is a place where agendas are aired, resistance is gauged, and narratives are aligned. It performs the vital work of elite cohesion: not just agreeing on policies, but agreeing on the story they will tell the nation.
The Sacred and the Secular
Despite its outward secularism, the Grove relies on sacred structure. The owl, the lake, the fire rituals, and the priestly costumes are not mere theatrics. They encode legitimacy. The ritual language borrows from ancient and esoteric traditions, evoking mystery and permanence. The architecture—shrines, amphitheaters, altars—reinforces this mood.
Sacralization does not render the Grove spiritual. It renders it durable. The sacred language shields it from scrutiny. Outsiders interpret the ceremonies as symbolic, apolitical, or eccentric. Insiders use them to mark status and continuity. The effect is insulation. The Grove becomes untouchable not because it is hidden, but because it performs its visibility as farce.
A Masculine Citadel
Van der Zee’s most enduring insight centers on masculinity. The Grove does not merely exclude women. It constructs manhood as a civic rite. Laughter, storytelling, nudity, and physical proximity forge bonds under the guise of play. Political rivalry becomes competitive affection. Power becomes brotherhood.
This masculinity is not ornamental. It is infrastructural. It binds men across industries and ideologies into an affective alliance. The absence of women is not incidental. It enforces a myth of origin—a world before negotiation, before pluralism, before interruption. In the Grove, men imagine themselves as elemental.
From Ritual to Reality
The Grove does not control the world. It teaches its rulers how to see themselves. Van der Zee’s work shows how narrative, performance, space, and allegiance conspire to produce a distinct form of elite self-conception. In the Grove, the powerful rehearse their roles, forgive each other’s contradictions, and anoint the next wave of leadership.
The Grove endures because it replicates a story that powerful men want to believe. It tells them that leadership is a burden, that power must retreat to remain just, that art and ritual sanctify dominion. It offers a vision of governance as fraternity and memory as authority.
The campfires flicker, the bands play on, and the owl watches. The Grove does not legislate. It legitimizes. In the theater of the Grove, America’s leaders rehearse their myth. Van der Zee shows us the script.
