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Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

History

First Advisor

Dr. Pippa Holloway

Abstract

In the 1980s, an organization known as the Bohemian Grove Action Network (BGAN) protested the Bohemian Club’s annual summer encampment in Monte Rio, California. For two weeks every July, members of the elite all-male Club, known as “Bohemians,” met to vacation at the “Grove,” a 2,700-acre forest of virgin redwood trees. Within the Grove, Bohemians put on amateur theatre performances, indulged in catered meals and gin fizzes, and some even wandered the woods naked. The Grove was reported to have a membership list of 2,500 men, which included Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, Henry Kissinger, and other political and corporate leaders. BGAN popularized the presence of these men at the Grove to claim that the Grove facilitated more sinister objectives, such as the proliferation of nuclear war, anti-feminism, and generally a cohesion of the power elite.

This project examines the ideologies, rituals, and histories that Bohemians and BGAN members incorporated into their representations of the imaginary Western Frontier and their perceptions of power structures in the US. Chapter one focuses on the Bohemian Grove from within, and places its 1872 establishment in the context of an American crisis of masculinity that prompted Bohemians to conflate maleness with mastery of the wilderness and reprieve of urban life. The Grove provided a landscape to stimulate homosocial camaraderie as a response to an increasingly “feminizing” society. Chapter two situates BGAN as a part of a wider US radical feminist movement. As a coalition that attracted dozens of advocacy groups from the Bay Area, BGAN catered to a plethora of activist groups that diagnosed social inequality as the result of irresponsible American leadership. Their counter-encampments were no less symbolic than the Bohemians’, as they also included an annual ritual meant to both promote community and neutralize the negativity they believed radiated from the Grove. The epilogue briefly explores how the Bohemian Club and BGAN shaped American perceptions of the Grove, and by extension, the power elite.

The sources for this work were derived primarily from the Mary Moore Papers found in the Bancroft Library located at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. Additionally, I relied extensively on published play transcripts from the Bohemian Club found in the Shirley and Albert Small special collections at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, V A. By examining the publications of the Bohemian Club and BGAN, I situated the Bohemian Grove and the counterprotests in a wider American context of radical activism and male escapism into the wilderness. This project introduces the Bohemian Grove as a location ripe for investigation into the “tamed” wilderness as an antidote for crises of masculinity throughout US history, and the projection of broader American anxieties throughout the 1980s.

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