Bush Family Connections to Naval History

A Prelude to the story of Samuel Prescott Bush appears at this blog in "Bush and Fay Family--Roots and Skeletons," first published November 25, 2016, but recently revised with new material added. That new material shows a link between the Bush-Fay family (Rev. J. S. Bush and wife Harriet Fay) and the Meiggs-Keith family who created the United Fruit Company. 

What follows here is much of the original story that appeared before the revision.

Samuel  Prescott Bush was born in Orange, New Jersey, at the peak of the War Between the States.  Despite the fact that his mother, formerly Harriet Eleanor Fay, had been born in Savannah, Georgia, Samuel's father was such a rabid Unionist, there were complaints made by members of his New Jersey congregation.

Possibly that is why he signed on in 1865 as chaplain aboard the naval fleet bound for California, commanded by Commodore John Rodgers II.  Rodgers’ father was the senior officer of the United States Navy—having commanded brave young American seaman for years in battle against the more powerful British navy—when, in 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was founded near his home at Annapolis, Maryland.[1] 

Was Rev. James Bush a mere man of the cloth, or were there other ambitions that took him across the continent with naval officer headed for California's new Pacific Navy Yard at Mare Island?[2]  Was his later retreat to nature sincere, and, if so, how do we explain his descendants' transition from transcendentalism to transnationalism?

Beginning of the Black Budget?

Military begging from Congress?

Strangely enough, though Congress approved the establishment of the naval academy at Annapolis and donated the Fort Severn Army base for its use, no funding for its construction and maintenance was provided.[3] This all-too-typical Congressional failure to fund what military men consider to be vital elements of national security helps explain how today's black budget funding of weapons systems and covert operations has come about. Numerous such examples from history can be found—institutions chartered by governments in name only—skeletons created without meat or blood to make them viable.  History also reveals myriad patriotic political and military leaders, who trustingly paid for necessary supplies from personal funds and then became frustrated by their inability to obtain reimbursement for such expenditures.  

As the years passed, such men would seek a means of funding their budgets in a way that would eliminate the need to beg for crumbs from Congress, as required by the United States Constitution.  A perhaps innocent and quite understandable intent to create a workable funding mechanism for national defense instead helped to breed a militant strain of what Thomas Hobbes called a "disease of the Commonwealth"—a ghostly off-the-books monster, separate from the sovereign and accountable to nobody. [4]  Our goal is to track how that malignant progeny was born—begotten through a marriage made in hell between makers of munitions and magicians of money.  Once we identify its parents, we may then be able to devise a way to excise and exterminate it—like the life-threatening tumor it has become. 

In his mature years S. P. Bush had a central role in arming Europe and America in The Great War and then died three years after grandson George was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in action. Samuel Prescott Bush died a wealthy man—his fortune made from iron and steel—a necessary component, ironically, for both building a civilization and for tearing it apart.

Moving On

Samuel Prescott Bush was a two-year-old lad in Orange, New Jersey, when his father boarded the USS Vanderbilt in 1865. We are not told when the rest of the family joined Chaplain Bush in San Francisco, only that he served as minister at San Francisco's Grace Episcopal Church until 1872. Samuel was six years old when Leland Stanford drove the golden spike into the rails that linked the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in 1869. Before that auspicious date, travel was an arduous task, eased somewhat in the 1850's by steamers traveling through Panama or Nicaragua, though Rev. Bush had gone with the naval fleet around Cape Horn. Transportation technology was changing then as rapidly as communications has evolved in our own generation. 

In 1870 the promise of the future was the railroad. When the family journeyed back to the East in 1873, they in all likelihood made the trip by rail.  Rev. Bush was to become rector of the Church of the Ascension at Staten Island, New York, only a few miles from his first church in New Jersey. What an exciting journey for a nine-year-old boy that would have been—from coast to coast on a steam locomotive! 

The Camden & Amboy Railroad, built by Robert and Edwin Stevens, had leased its rails two years earlier to the Pennsylvania Railroad, expanding its route closer to New York in the hope of competing with Vanderbilt's New York Central. Debarking at its terminus in New Jersey, the Bushes were only a ferry ride away from Staten Island. The village of West New Brighton on the island’s north central part was just a stone's throw west of Commodore Vanderbilt's Staten Island Ferry, which carried commuters to Manhattan. North of the New Brighton city center, standing on the north shore, one could look  across a murky channel of water called Kill van Kull to where Upper New York Bay extends its fingers into the eastern boundary of Bayonne Peninsula. 

Coming of Age in Hoboken

Perhaps it was the change taking place across this channel near his home that caused Samuel to seek an education in New Jersey rather than go to Yale as his father had done. From his Hoboken vantage point, it was possible to watch New Jersey being transformed into an arsenal. By 1873 the Hazard Powder Company's gunpowder and explosives manufacturing center—first opened during the War of 1812—was booming, figuratively speaking. The area had become an active railroad departure point for the movement of troops and munitions during the civil war, a conversion which had spurred industrial growth of all types. Prentice Oil Company, established in 1875 in Bayonne, was purchased in 1878 by John D. Rockefeller of Cleveland, Ohio, as the site for his new oil refinery, Standard Oil of New Jersey, which later laid pipelines to bring crude oil directly from the West and Southwest areas of the country. Tidewater Oil Company, chartered in Pennsylvania, Rockefeller's biggest competitor, moved there in the same year.[5] Samuel's school, Stevens Institute is shown in the photo as it jutted into the Hudson River.

Stevens Institute, top

Little did Samuel realize when he entered Stevens Institute in Hoboken two years later (1875) what a significant role oil and pipelines would play in the lives of his descendants after his own death in 1948. As a young teenager, he watched as increasing numbers of ships cruised through the channel into Upper New York Bay. 

While attending classes at Stevens high school, followed by four years at Stevens Institute in the "Castle," perched as it was on a bluff jutting high above the Hudson River, directly across from Manhattan's Greenwich Village, he could watch Holland America Line's ships arriving at their Hoboken berth below.[6]  Before long, the Hoboken terminal would also be home to the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika lines as well. He could not have dreamed then that his own son, Prescott S. Bush, would in 1921 become the son-in-law of G. H. Walker, the St. Louis banker who moved to New York in 1920 to become president of W. A. Harriman & Co., a corporate device he helped the sons of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman set up to invest his millions in American and foreign business opportunities. One of those opportunities was the shipping companies seized from America's German enemy at the outset of WWI.

Had he viewed the scene in person three decades later (instead of only mentally upon hearing news reports in 1916), he would have been in great danger. The entire area exploded in flames, sending shrapnel in every direction. With New Jersey's industries supplying almost ninety percent of war materiel to England and France, Hoboken—twenty percent of its population consisting of German immigrants—became the center of German sabotage activities.[7]  

Black Tom Island—today Liberty State Park, just south the Stevens campus—was a massive staging area for exportation of munitions.[8] Lehigh Valley Railroad, extending from Jersey City to Buffalo, N.Y.[9], would later be awarded $50 million in damages as a result of a lawsuit won by Wall Street attorney John J. McCloy, whom we met previously in Taking the Golden Eggs Part I and Part II.[10]  The significance of this seemingly irrelevant fact will become clear later in the history of the rivalry between the Samuel Bush’s first employer, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and its biggest competitor, the New York Central Railroad. That important story, unfortunately, must be saved for another day.

The Man of Steel

In 1884 Samuel Bush stood at the Pennsylvania Railroad station, ticket in hand—employed by the very railroad that would carry him west to a four-year apprenticeship in Logansport, Indiana, and then to Columbus, Ohio, with the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad. The next two years he would work as assistant engineer of motive power, followed by employment as master mechanic of the shops at Dennison, Ohio. By 1891, as a master mechanic, he had made Columbus, Ohio, his permanent residence. In 1894, the year he married Columbus native Flora Sheldon, he became superintendent of motive power of the southwest system of the Pennsylvania lines in Columbus, Ohio.  

In 1899, five years after marrying into the Sheldon family, Samuel took a job as superintendent of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, a major investor in which was William G. Rockefeller.  During the two years the family lived in Milwaukee, the younger son (named Robert Sheldon for Flora’s father and brother) contracted scarlet fever and died. In their grief, the family returned to Columbus in 1901, when elder son Prescott was six years old. However, the Rockefeller connection was not broken by the return to Ohio. If anything, it was enhanced when he took a position with Buckeye Malleable Iron & Coupler Company, which owed a significant debt to the Rockefeller family.

Samuel became vice president and general manager of the company, known simply as Buckeye Steel Castings Company, a manufacturer of car couplers and all kinds of steel castings.[11] The corporation had begun business in 1881 amidst enormous competition—23 foundries competing in Columbus in 1887. The president, Wilbur Goodspeed, began producing railroad couplers in 1890, borrowing heavily from Frank Rockefeller, who then helped ensure their marketability by acquiring  Buckeye stock in exchange for the debt and for additional services. Rockefeller and another Standard Oil associate, Thomas Goodwillie, agreed to "use their best endeavor to secure the introduction and use upon railroads of the said couplers of the said corporation and in all ways to advance the interest of said corporation."[12] Goodspeed, an artillery man in the Civil War, maintained his shooting skills as a member of the Cleveland Gatling Gun Battery, where he and fellow member Goodwillie first met. Such a knowledge of artillery would come in handy when the factory would later produce weapons for World War I. By that time, Samuel would be guided by Frank Rockefeller to play a role in the national war effort.

Down at the Foundry

The new automatic coupler made in the foundry, like one patented by Eli Janney in 1873, as shown in the figure to the right, replaced the manual link and pin coupler which required a man to stand between railroad cars and insert a pin to hold the link in place.[13]  An Ohio law requiring all railroad cars to be equipped with automatic couplers by 1899, enacted shortly before the 1892 contract, promised that Buckeye could sell as many couplers as it could turn out, thus guaranteeing their success when combined with the sales to Rockefeller’s railroads.  This connection would be one of many to link the Bush family to the Rockefeller network.  Although some sources state that the Rockefeller brothers were at odds, the testimony that Frank Rockefeller gave in 1876 to Congress concerning the need for a law regulating interstate commerce, was actually in line with the plan devised to maintain their control over the government agency which would eventually regulate the industry.[14] 

Buckeye would eventually have offices in New York, Chicago and Atlanta, and Samuel would be listed as a director of the Hocking Valley Railway and the Sunny Creek Company, a trustee of Mercy Hospital, a member of the National Manufacturers Association, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburg and the Engineers Club of New York city, besides the Ohio Club, Columbus Club and the Arlington Country Club.  By 1908 he was promoted to president, a position that would advance him into the public eye as he chaired the executive committee for more than a hundred Columbus citizens appointed by the mayor  to raise funds for the war.  Shortly thereafter, he apparently went to Washington, D.C. as chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition section of the War Industries Board headed by Bernard Baruch, a position that would have placed him in a position to help Buckeye convert its production from railroad couplers to munitions, for which it had a ready market.[15]  Moreover, it would have brought him in contact with a cabal accused in 1933 of attempting to set up a military coup to replace FDR. See this blog. [16]  The relationships developed with the men on Baruch’s Board would also have helped to ensure the entry of his son, Prescott Bush, into an increasingly more complex military-industrial network.

                                                                                                                    

Climbing the Social Ladder

Butler Sheldon family mansion

Marrying into the Sheldon family had greatly 
improved Samuel’s social standing, to the delight of his widowed, social-conscious mother, Harriet Fay Bush. Flora was a daughter of Robert Emmett Sheldon and his wife Mary Elizabeth Butler Sheldon of Columbus. Mary’s father was Courtland Philip Livingston Butler, born in Clinton, New York, and her grandmother was "a Livingston" who was even more society oriented than Flora’s mother-in-law. Mary’s brother, Robert E. Sheldon, Jr. (born 1883) a 1904 graduate of Yale’s Sheffield School, married a member of the eminent Church family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[17] 

The Church family connection helps to explain Samuel Bush’s membership in the elite Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, since his wife’s sister-in-law was the daughter of Samuel Harden Church (1858-1943)—secretary of the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad (Samuel Bush’s employer until 1899)—as well as a trustee of the Carnegie Institute, appointed by Andrew Carnegie himself.[18] Church’s work for the P,C,C & S.L Railroad, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, took him and his family back and forth between Pittsburgh, Pa. and Columbus, Ohio—both cities being steel-producing centers with many other overlapping interests.  It should be briefly noted here in passing that Church was a founding member of the American Liberty League, the “cabal” to be discussed in greater depth in the next segment.[19]

 

After Robert Sheldon, Jr. married Ruth Church, they built a home in Upper Arlington, northwest of the town center of Columbus.  Called Marble Cliff, this suburban area (which was made accessible in minutes as a result of Sheldon’s streetcar railway) became the home to some of the wealthiest citizens of the city.  Robert worked for many years at the family retail dry goods store which moved to extensive buildings in 1905, after Robert Sr. developed a wholesale trade.  This step up in the world came after the elder Sheldon first succeeded Emerson McMillin as president of the Columbus Street Railway Company and then in 1903 succeeded General John Beatty as President of the Citizens Savings Bank.[20]  

Even more significant than allowing him to accumulate a personal fortune, these positions reveal very clearly that Robert Sheldon, Sr. had become an insider in the syndicate headed by J.P. Morgan until his death in 1913.  Morgan bought out Pittsburgh’s leading steel producer, Andrew Carnegie, in 1901 for $500 million to merge into Morgan’s United States Steel Corporation. We have already seen in "Taking the Golden Eggs" how Morgan, operating as a clearinghouse between U.S. and foreign currencies,  used William C. Whitney’s streetcar holding companies’ “pump and dump” schemes to create income to finance the purchase of Edison’s electric utility companies by a syndicate of American investors. He used this model also to develop street railway, municipal light companies, and acquire steel production plants in numerous smaller cities of the country.  

It will be recalled that William Whitney was married to Flora Payne, whose father was Senator Henry B. Payne of Cleveland—a long-time associate of the Rockefellers. Flora’s mother was a granddaughter of Judge Nathan Perry, one of the city’s founders in 1796, and daughter of Nathan Perry, Jr., the largest dry goods wholesaler in Cleveland. Both Senator Payne and Samuel Bush also served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which began operations in 1914, covering not only Cleveland but Columbus, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh as well. It was William Avery Rockefeller’s son—William Goodsell Rockefeller (1870-1922)—who would leave Cleveland and establish National City Bank in New York City and would eventually usurp the Morgan Bank’s control of the New York Fed. That was a powerful rung on which Prescott Bush would begin his own career, as we shall see.

Scioto Country Club

Samuel built his family’s home, one of the first to be built in Upper Arlington, in 1908. All of the Sheldon siblings lived within walking distance from Flora and Samuel, and they all belonged to Arlington Golf and Riding Club, later to be known as Scioto Country Club, of which Samuel, along with developers of the new suburb, was a founding member. By far the grandest home was the mansion at 1599 Roxbury, owned by Flora’s brother, Butler Sheldon, who also served as mayor of the community in 1909.[21] Butler succeeded his father as President of Columbus Railroad, Columbus Light and Power, Columbus Traction and  Sheldon Dry Goods. Their sister, Mary Sheldon, married Carl J. Hoster, a grandson of a native of Germany and operator of the family brewery in downtown Columbus. He also was president of the Hoster-Columbus Associated Breweries, the U.S. Brewers Association, vice-president of the Ohio Trust Company and director of Columbus Railway & Light Company—no doubt a result of his marriage into the Sheldon family. 

Samuel seems like such a likeable fellow—football fan and avid golfer, community booster, loving father, attentive husband—just like all the Bush men. Quite a bit like Undershaft in Bernard Shaw’s play, actually.  He grew wealthy while manufacturing “mutilation and murder,” and tucked his cannons and torpedoes all neatly into his father’s religion. All in the name of patriotism.




ENDNOTES:

[1] See Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812 (1869), online; to see the entire book, review Contents.  Also see Biography of John Rodgers, whose mother was a daughter of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who opened Japan to American trade, and a niece of Commodore Oliver Hazzard Perry, who stated: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."  The Perrys of Newport, R.I., married into the notorious Slidell family, as well as with members of the Vanderbilt and August Belmont family—a fact which leads one to conclude that there is more to this relationship than can be seen on its face.

 

[2] See photo archive of Mare Island ships.

[3] "This brief phrase was followed by a quote from the Maryland Republican that began, 'The various buildings have been organized and surprisingly improved, considering the small expenditures and the brief time allowed, especially the quarters allotted to the midshipmen…' " [quoted by Ginger Doyel, "A Brief Look at Buchanan," found at USNA  website]. 

[4] Thomas Hobbs had little regard for the concept of separation of powers, which he considered to be a deterioration of the sovereign’s power to protect its subjects: "These are the rights which make the essence of sovereignty, and which are the marks whereby a man may discern in what man, or assembly of men, the sovereign power is placed and resideth. For these are incommunicable and inseparable. The power to coin money, to dispose of the estate and persons of infant heirs, to have pre-emption in markets, and all other statute prerogatives may be transferred by the sovereign, and yet the power to protect his subjects be retained. But if he transfer the militia, he retains the judicature in vain, for want of execution of the laws; or if he grant away the power of raising money, the militia is in vain; or if he give away the government of doctrines, men will be frighted into rebellion with the fear of spirits. And so if we consider any one of the said rights, we shall presently see that the holding of all the rest will produce no effect in the conservation of peace and justice, the end for which all Commonwealths are instituted." Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.

[5] According to the PBS website:  "The Standard’s only serious competitor -- the Tidewater Pipe-Line Company (later the Tidewater Oil Company)–emerged in 1879-83. It took Rockefeller by surprise and succeeded in building a pipeline from the Oil Regions east across northern Pennsylvania to Williamsport, where the oil was transferred to the Reading Railroad. The Reading then took the oil down to a refinery at Chester, Pennsylvania on the Delaware Bay. Rockefeller tried to gain control of Tidewater but failed, and his rival had about 10% of the market in 1888."  In 1953 J. Paul Getty would gain control of Tidewater.  But that story will wait until another day.  For more information on the beginnings of the rock oil industry and the role played by Frederick Prenctice and George Bissell, founders of the New Jersey Oil Company in Bayonne, N.J., see Paul Frederick’s website about Venango County, Pa.

[6] A history of Stevens Castle from a 1902 book (Historic Houses of New Jersey by W. Jay Mills, 1902) is given at the website Get NJ , which states:

On the highest eminence of “Point Castile,” whose “greene and white cliffes” were supposed to be “copper or silver mynes” by the followers of Henry Hudson, on his memorable voyage up the river which bears his name, Colonel John Stevens, the famous inventor, built a handsome mansion soon after his purchase of Hobuck Island, in 1784, and called it the Castle.... Hobuck Island, or Hoboken Island, formed the largest part of the confiscated Bayard estate, and was much sought after when it was noised about that it was to be put upon the market.... Both the New Jersey and New York shore lines above the harbor presented a very rural appearance in those days. Back of the slim line of wharves were low houses and church spires, and stretches of green fields and undulating meadow-lands rolled away into a gradually rising and wilder landscape.... Hoboken as a pleasure resort, and the early Castle itself, are now but memories. The present Castle was erected about 1845, and is a familiar landmark to the millions who cross the New York and Jersey City ferries to the railroad termini. Rising out of a grove of old trees, it is a most imposing building, and it is pleasing to think that it is always to be owned by a Stevens and can come to a serene old age, smiling on generation after generation.... The Stevens home to-day does not miss the wide strip of pebbly beach, now profaned by huge piers and warehouses, the immortal river walk, which has disappeared, where old New York came to promenade and recruit its wasted energy, and the forgotten green where the weary rested and sipped their sangaree punch and strong waters. These all belong to another period, but it can ever look proudly on the great institute which the wealth given by Hoboken helped the family to establish, almost on the spot where Colonel John Stevens, the planner of the forgotten “Hoboken, the Beautiful” had his workshop and conducted his mechanical experiments.

                A terminal map showing Castle Point, as well as an interactive map of Hoboken in 1881.

[7] See "Imperial Germany's Sabotage Operations In The U.S." at Federation of American Scientists website.

[8] According to Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989):

The explosion—“like the discharge of a great cannon,” as a newspaper report described it—sent flaming rockets and screeching shells high into the sky like a mammoth fireworks display, turning the night into day. Shrapnel scarred the Statue of Liberty and damaged buildings on Ellis Island. The shock wave from the blast slammed into Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Bayonne, shattering thousands of windows. In Lower Manhattan, glass and debris plunged to the streets. Pedestrians were knocked off their feet. The blast jolted the Hudson Tubes train line that linked Jersey City and Hoboken with Lower Manhattan, panicking passengers.

[9] The Railroad's history shows how it came to be a wholly owned subsidiary by 1961 of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  When the LV first began expanding into Pennsylvania by joining in a lease with the Philadelphia & Reading (a railroad that had borrowed with assistance from financiers J. P. Morgan and Anthony Drexel), until Morgan backed out on the Reading and allowed its collapse.  Morgan then agreed to fund the Lehigh Valley and even moved its general offices from Philadelphia to New York. "The independent stockholders of the line protested the diversion of money from dividends into physical plant, and regained control in 1902. Several other railroads bought blocks of LV stock — New York Central, Reading, Erie, Lackawanna, and Central of New Jersey — and the road became part of William H. Moore's short-lived Rock Island system. In 1903 the company underwent some corporate simplification, merging and dissolving a number of subsidiaries....Several events during the teens adversely affected LV’s revenues: a munitions explosion on Black Tom island on the Jersey City waterfront in 1916, the divestiture of the Great Lakes shipping operation in 1917 (required by the Panama Canal Act), the divestiture of the coal mining subsidiary (required by the Sherman Antitrust Act), and a drop in anthracite traffic as oil and gas became the dominant home-heating fuels."  In the 1920's the Pennsylvania Railroad would hold 31% of the Lehigh Valley stock.   In 1961 the Pennsylvania Railroad bought all the outstanding stock to protect its previous investment in the Lehigh Valley.  The importance of this railroad and its merger with the New York Central cannot be overemphasized and will be explored in future segments.

[10] U.S. Supreme Court case Z. & F. Assets Realization Corporation v. Hull (found at 311 U.S. 470), can be read in full online.  McCloy also represented the other plaintiffs (the Agency of Canadian Car and Foundry Company, Limited and Bethlehem Steel Company), claiming arson against the German government under the Settlement of War Claims Act of 1928.  

[11] The name “Buckeye” came from the mascot of Ohio State University, where Samuel—a superior athlete and great fan of the new sport of football—volunteered to coach the university’s team.

[12] Quoted from "Memorandum of Agreement Made this 25^th day of November, 1892 by and between Orland Smith, S.P. Peabody, R.M. Roland, James Timms and W.F. Goodspeed,... and Frank Rockefeller and Thomas Goodwillie..." by Mansel G. Blackford, "Small Business in America:  Two Case Studies," paper delivered at Ohio State University.  See papers on other subjects at the "Business and Economic History" website.

[13] The Janney Coupler was one of 8,000 patents, but its design was probably the best.

[14] The testimony was quoted in Ida Tarbell's classic study, The History of Standard Oil.  It was the resulting commission which Gustavus Myers discusses in another classic work, History of the Great American Fortunes (1936).

[15] The word “apparently” is used here for lack of any official source having been found to verify his role.  In The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, authors Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin cite their source for their statement as follows:  “Gen. Hugh S. Johnson to Major J.H.K. Davis, June 6, 1918, file no. 334.8/168 or 334.8/451 in U.S. National Archives, Suitland, Maryland”.   Johnson (1882–1942), a West Point graduate, worked under Quartermaster General George Goethals to reorganize army procurement, and he represented Goethals on the War Industries Board—helping to integrate military and industrial sectors behind a massive wartime buildup. He again returned to government in 1933 under the New Deal to head the National Recovery Administration.  Goethals had replaced John F. Stevens (from the family who founded Stevens Institute) as chief engineer of the Panama Canal.  The chapter entitled “The War Department From Root To Marshall” in the book by James E. Hewes, Jr., Special Studies:  From Root to McNamara; Army Organization and Administration (Washington, D. C.:  U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1975), gives a good history of the reorganization of procurement services during the first decades of the 20^th century.  (See Contents.)  However, it does not mention the name Samuel P. Bush.  A short time later, again according to Tarply and Chaitkin, he would move to the Facilities Division of the War Industries Board.

[16] General Smedley D. Butler accused Gerald McGuire, who worked for Col. Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, of attempting to bribe him to use his influence with veterans to join the cabal, which included Gen. Hugh S. Johnson, Robert Sterling Clark and John W. Davis, attorney for the “Morgan Interests.”  The plot is described in the book by Jules Archer, The Plot To Seize the White House (New York:  Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973), one review of the many which discuss the plot can be read online here.  

[17] Her great-grandfather Samuel Church (1800-1857), born in Ireland, was the  major partner in Kensington Iron Works after he moved to Pittsburgh in 1822—as well as a preacher for 17 years at the First Christian Church of Allegheny.  Colonel Samuel Harden Church’s importance in the community of Pittsburgh can easily be seen from his role in the Centennial Celebration of Pittsburgh in 1909.  The chapter on the celebration is excerpted from the book by J. H. Garrison, ed.   Program of the International Centennial Celebration and Conventions of the Disciples of Christ (1909), the contents of which can be searched and read online.

[18] Church had even been a guest at Carnegie’s Cluny Castle in Scotland while retracing Cromwell’s steps after his book was published in 1894.  See Volume XXIV, Biographical Review, Containing Life Sketches of Leading Citizens of Pittsburgh and Vicinity (Boston: Biographical Review Pub. Co., 1897), p. 288.  A photograph of Cluny Castle is online.  Another trustee of the board selected by Carnegie was modern painter John W. Beatty.  As stated in Garrison’s Program described above:  “Andrew Carnegie first chose Pittsburgh realist painter and friend John W. Beatty to head the institute's department of fine art.”  Another famous Pittsburgh citizen, Andrew W. Mellon, would also hold a seat on the board at a later date—as well as serving in the role of U.S. Treasury secretary under presidents William G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, the latter of which also appointed Mellon ambassador to Great Britain in 1932.  Mellon (1855-1937) was one of the richest men in the United States, owing to investments in aluminum, coke, oil, and steel.  Mellon will be profiled in a future article.

[19] A photo of Church and a brief description of Church’s role in the plot can be reviewed at the website maintained by the Coalition To Oppose the Arms Trade.

[20] William Alexander Taylor, Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio  (Chicago-Columbus: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1909), p. 198.  This book is online and has an excellent search engine.

[21] An excellent website—highly recommended—with historical information and photographs is maintained by the Grandview Heights neighborhood association.

 

The Family Business

While researching a totally different money trail on another blog, Quixotic Joust, the author/blogger  (i.e. me, Linda Minor) came across a point of intersection with the research being done currently for Where the Gold Is, and it rang a bell. That linking point was the Inniskillen Dragoons, a military regiment that shared links between the British government's presence in India during the Opium Wars era and also intermarriage with the banking family of Alexander Brown, whose sons operated the Brown Shipley company as well as being partners in their father's bank based in Baltimore. James Brown later became the senior partner in the New York investment bank set up around 1825 called Brown Brothers, which just over a century later merged with capital infused by sons of railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman.

In America 1825 was the year the Erie Canal opened and opened up new trade routes into what was then "the West," areas such as Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. Just as American business boomed, Britain was going through a devastating financial crisis that year, just a decade after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Alexander and Sarah Benedict Brown's son was James Clifton Brown, who married Amelia Rowe Brown:

1. Douglas Clifton Brown (b. 1879), married to Violet Cicely Kathleen Wollaston. Violet was Grace Brown Hargreaves' granddaughter; James Clifton Brown and Violet's mother, the former Anne Hargreaves, were first cousins. Named Viscount Ruffside, Douglas Clifton Brown served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1943 to 1951.
2. Another son of James Clifton Brown—Edward Clifton Brown—became a partner in the Brown Brothers London office in 1899.

Arbuthnot in India

Anne had married a military man, Frederick Eustace Arbuthnott Wollaston, whose grandfather, Sir Alexander Dundas Young Arbuthnott, had fought in the Napoleonic wars—at Copenhagen in 1807, the capture of Antwerp, and in 1814 had escorted to the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia to England. He was 38 when he married in 1827. Their daughter, Josette, was born in France, and in 1850 she married another military man, Frederick Wollaston, a Major in the Enniskillen Dragoons. It was their son whom Anne Hargreaves chose for her husband in 1877.

Footnote: Intriguingly, Anne's marriage thus links the Brown family in a vague way to our previous research. You may recall these battles in which Admiral Arbuthnott was involved as occurring during the exact same time that John Murray "Jack" Forbes I was acting as consult and spy for President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

Violet Cicely Wollaston (daughter of Anne Hargreaves Wollaston) married Douglas Clifton Brown—second son of Grace Brown Hargreaves’ brother, Alexander, and Sarah Benedict Brown, daughter of James Brown (see the first Brown tree above)—thus uniting three branches of the Brown family, two in England and one in America. 

Sir Alexander Hargreaves Brown, who was born in 1844 (during England's second opium war with China), according to Kelly's Peerage, in 1876 married Henrietta Blandy, whose father Charles R. Blandy, was a wine merchant in Madeira, an island in the Atlantic, west of Portugal and Morocco. Two years earlier her sister had become the wife of the famous electrician who had met the Blandy family while engaged in laying the Atlantic Cable.

The island of Madeira had been a huge producer of sugar, using slave labor, late in the 15th century, but shifted to wine production by the 17th century. The defeat of Napoleon resulted in ceding the island to Britain in 1807, but it was returned to Portugal in 1814, while the British government kept its eyes on the strategic area through consuls, one of whom was Captain David Holland Erskine, who was in contact with Charles R. Blandy in 1862 concerning a claim against the Confederacy for destroying cargo belonging to him. Erskine died in 1869.

The pattern that emerges when we look closely at the sibling attachments of the Hargreaves children indicates that Sir William developed a strong connection through Grace Brown Hargreaves and her husband to military and Crown civil servants, whose role was to protect the British Empire’s investments during the late 18^th and the 19^th centuries. One after another of the sons and husbands of daughters was an officer in one of His Majesty’s Regiments. The Wollaston name was tied to the Inniskilling Dragoons, and the Arbuthnot(t) family stemmed from even higher rank in its closeness to royalty and, we would assume, to Royal Family investments.

The Royal Exchequer, we recall from history, felt forced to turn their eyes to the Far East in the attempt to siphon off a greater return from the East India Company’s charter. In 1784 the India Act was passed by Parliament to create a Board of Control to oversee the company and eliminate the reasons for previous corruption and bribery scandals (as well as reports of torture and rape) involving Company officials. This rings a bell with some of Erik Prince's shenanigans, does it not? After Blackwater scandals, the company was forced to change its name and go into deeper hiding.

But the most significant result, visible only in hindsight, was in giving these civil servants and soldiers the opportunity to observe first-hand how the Empire and its contractor, the Honourable East India Company, operated the lucrative opium trade. That knowledge would be stored away in their collective conscience for future reference. 

It is worthwhile to peruse the Contents of the public domain book, The Register of Letters, etc.: Of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London Trading Into the East Indies, 1600-1619, to gain a glimpse of the metaphor described in a previous blog post about global family networks. In 1600 Queen Elizabeth had commissioned the royal adventurers to explore and bring back wealth to sustain the government, as did James I in 1604. Note, for example, this fascinating entry: "Letters Patent exempting spices and drugs sold by the Company for re-exportation from the operation of the statute for the well garbling of spices, 9th August, 1606." A century later the contractors would be complaining that the requirement that they clean and garble spices was too "oppressive and vexatious," requesting that the government assume that role, saying that it would benefit the public and should therefore be paid for by the public rather than the businessmen.

The American Browns

Alexander’s linen trade did so well in Baltimore, that his two youngest sons moved to Philadelphia to set up a bank, primarily for the convenience of clients in Baltimore who wished to have an agent in Philadelphia to purchase manufactured goods there on their behalf. William, stationed in England, set up a separate partnership with his brothers for the dry goods trade in Liverpool, but also opened a London bank with a partner named Shipley to facilitate payments through the financial center.

It was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 which resulted in New York’s becoming the dominant commercial and financial center in America and which inspired James Brown to set up Brown Brothers & Co. there. John A. Brown remained in Philadelphia, but retired in 1839, James to consolidate the Philadelphia concern with his New York office. Back in Baltimore, Alexander worked with the second son George beginning in 1827 in organizing the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Alexander died in 1834 and George retired in 1852. His son George Stewart Brown replaced him in their business interests in 1865, along with a partner, his sister's husband William H. Graham, whose son-in-law Benjamin Howell Griswold, Jr. joined the firm in 1904.

John A. Brown and George Brown sold their shares in 1840 to their brothers, William and James, leaving James the head of American operations, which also expanded to Boston during this period. More economic troubles in 1857 caused the firm to increasingly focus on banking operations and to ease out of importing and exporting completely. The two brothers shared power until William's death in 1864, and control passed entirely to James. In 1868 new articles of partnership were drawn up. By this time, William's sons had died, his grandsons were too young, and only two of James's sons had enough experience to run the business, making it necessary to bring in outside partners and thus jeopardizing the Brown family's control of the firm. Reorganized, however, Brown Brothers was now better suited to a changing world. Its credit business became so lucrative that the partners contributed outside money to maintain sufficient working capital. When William's grandson, Alexander Hargreaves Brown, became a partner in 1875, not only was family control restored, but a major portion of William's estate returned to the firm, helping Brown Brothers to prosper in the final decades of the 19th century. [Source: International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 45. St. James Press, 2002.]

Moving from the British to the American family, we find that the oldest son in Baltimore, George Brown, succeeded his father at the Alex. Brown & Son bank and helped to finance much of the Baltimore infrastructure, including building the first railroad in America. When George died, his wife, Isabella McLanahan Brown—the granddaughter of an Irish-American who had served as U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania—donated funds for a new Presbyterian church in Baltimore, which to this day is still called the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church. 

Elkridge Fox Hunt Club

Their second son, George Stewart Brown, was in charge of the bank until his own death in 1890, and was then succeed by his son, Alexander. George Stewart Brown’s major interest had been the founding of the Elkridge Fox Hunting Club in Maryland, which brought him into contact with the wealthy Anglophiles on the Southeast Coast, some of whom had relocated to Baltimore from Philadelphia, the original U.S. Capitol, and still had family back in Pennsylvania.

Alexander’s wife, for example, Bessie Montague, not only came from a long line of aristocrats from Virginia, but her father and brother headed a company in Baltimore which acted as agents for two London-based insurance companies. It was Bessie’s family from which Mrs. Wallis Simpson (later known as the Duchess of Windsor) claimed descent.

B. Howell Griswold, Jr.

Upon Alexander’s death, the Baltimore bank management passed to his son-in-law, Benjamin Howell Griswold, Jr., descendant of Matthew Griswold and Anne Wolcott, two of the most distinguished families in Connecticut. The branches of their family trees are not only inextricably interwoven with the most powerful names in Yale’s Skull and Bones hierarchy, but over the years have taken on an increasingly German connection, with a distinctly fascist-prone outlook.

The Griswold papers betray a strong distrust of power in the hands of commoners not bred to rule. This distrust exhibits itself in promoting ever greater secrecy in the government’s financing mechanism, which is slightly easier to detect from an examination of the other Brown family bank—Brown Brothers & Company—which would merge with the Harriman brothers’ bank in 1931.  

Rev. Alonzo Potter, Howard's father

During the first century of the bank’s existence, it was merely a brokerage operation in which all four Brown brothers were partners, though it was under the management of James, the youngest of them. Besides his eldest daughter, who married her cousin William in Liverpool, another daughter, Mary Louisa, married a man named Howard Potter, and their son, James Brown Potter, would become a partner in both Brown Brothers & Co. and Brown, Shipley & Co. Potter was a descendant of some of America's most noted Episcopal bishops.

From his marriage in 1879, a most strategic connection would subsequently arise when his daughter, Anne Urquhart Potter in 1901 married James Alexander Stillman, grandson of the founder of Citibank.  After Stillman’s death in 1944, Anne married Fowler McCormick, a descendant of the famous McCormick reaper family.  It was just after 1900, in fact, that the brokerage firm took on more of a private banking role—locating profitable investments for wealthy clients.

We find some of these names reappearing at the time the W. A. Harriman & Co. investment bank was merged in 1931 with that of Brown Brothers of New York and Philadelphia. When E. H. Harriman's youngest daughter, Carol Averell Harriman Penn Smith became a widow in 1929, she soon married W. Plunkett Stewart, who had been a horseman at the Green Valley Hunt Club in Maryland. Stewart's daughter, Doris Lurman Stewart, in 1931 married William Potter Wear, the first cousin of George Herbert (Herbie) Walker, Jr.

Political Fundraising, or "Pimping for Pedophiles?"

Morton C. Blackwell, founder of the Leadership Institute, trained candidates and activists in such matters as:

1. How to raise needed funds and increase your donor base from the shared knowledge of direct mail experts and fundraising professionals. 
2. How to set up grant-making foundations and planned giving programs. 
3. How to draft a campaign plan, organize an effective grassroots coalition online and offline, fund-raise from low- and high-dollar donors, and develop a winning message that is sure to lead you to victory on Election Day.

At the College Republican National Convention in Orlando, Florida, on July 7, 1989 Blackwell gave a fascinating speech (printed in full at the bottom of this page) in which he focused, in his own words, on "sex," two scandals which were then in the news:

• The scandal involving Congressman "Buz" Lukens, who had just been sentenced to 30 days in jail on misdemeanor charges for having sex with a 16-year-old girl, leaving unresolved whether he also had sex with her when she was 13. He would eventually lose his Congressional seat to future Speaker John Boehner in the 1990 elections.
• The second scandal then unfolding involved the exposé of a largely homosexual prostitution ring in the Washington, D.C. area. The Washington Times, which broke the story, was said to have in its possession 500 credit card receipts for sexual services rendered, involving Reagan and Bush administration officials--with reports of bugged rooms, two-way mirrors, blackmail and midnight tours of the White House by teams of homosexual prostitutes.

1989 Republicans' Call Boy scandal

Blackwell's speech was sincere, showing his admiration for Lukens' work for Republican values but not for his personal choices, saying:

Buz Lukens

I want to be sure you know, that Buz Lukens played a unique role in the development of the conservative movement. And he was a key player at a critical time in Republican youth politics. My first College Republican National Convention was in 1963, while I was state College Republican chairman of Louisiana. In those days the College Republican and Young Republican national conventions were held together. In 1963 in San Francisco, Goldwater Republicans won control of both organizations. An exciting book could be written about how Buz Lukens became the new Young Republican national chairman. It was a new era.

1954 photo of Bozell with Buckley

Blackwell and Lukens had both apparently been early members of the American Conservative Union Foundation (ACUF), a 501(c)(3) educational foundation, first created December 18, 1964 by William F. Buckley Jr., L. Brent Bozell (who was married to Buckley's sister, Patricia), and Robert E. Bauman and others, with a three-fold mission:

1. To consolidate the overall strength of the American conservative movement through unified leadership and action,
2. To mold public opinion, and
3. To stimulate and direct responsible political action.

Bauman would be encouraged by Goldwater and Buckley in 1980 to "pull out" of his campaign for re-election after his admission to having "homosexual tendencies" following his arrest for soliciting a 16-year-old boy, which had prompted his being blackmailed by James Edward Regina, a 26-year-old male who attempted to extort $2,000 from the Maryland congressman in exchange for a promise not to tell about their affair.

Walter Brasch wrote in Counterpunch (June 26-28, 2009), an article entitled "Adultery as Family Value? Tarnished Shields":

Republican leaders aren’t the only ones who commit adultery, nor are conservatives or members of the Religious Right, including preachers, solely the ones to have violated the seventh and tenth Commandments. Democrats also have a litany of their own scandals. But, it is the "family values" Republican leaders, who have led the party of right wing moral indignation; it is the Religious Right that has overtaken the party and wears the now-tarnished shield of righteousness to protect itself against anyone who doesn’t share their own views of the world, including moderate and liberal Republicans, and anyone belonging to another political party.

White House Press Scandal of 2005

A February 18, 2005 Houston Chronicle story revealed that Robert R. "Bobby" Eberle had a bachelor's degree from Texas A&M University, a master's and a doctorate degree in engineering from Rice, and that he had once worked as an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin before deciding to become a political journalist. He began working with Young Republicans after politically supporting a losing 1994 Congressional campaign. [fn - Given the fact he lived in Pearland, a small city on the border of Brazoria and Harris Counties, by 2005 (Tom Delay's 22nd Congressional District), we must assume he lived elsewhere in 1994, or else that he worked for a different campaign. He could not have worked for Steve Stockman, who also won that year.]

Bobby Eberle stated that his interest in politics was motivated by the deaths of two teenage girls from Waltrip High School in 1993--the same school in Houston, incidentally, where Barbara Bracher had graduated in 1973. Barbara's father had been born in Texas to Barbara's grandparents--Gustav Adolphus Bracher (born in Bern, Switzerland in 1882) and a Texas-born Selma, daughter of Max Adolph Schneider (born in Germany in 1847). Gus Bracher's father had immigrated to Brenham, Texas before 1887 when Gus was a child, and died there in 1908 after his wife, Rosette Meister Schneider, gave birth to three more children who were confirmed in the Lutheran Church at Brenham. She too died in 1931 in the town of Wallis, midway between Rosenberg and Sealy in Austin, County, Texas, where she spent the last eight years of her life with a married daughter named Ida Sprain.

Barbara Olson's grandfather, Gus A. Bracher, lived to be 91 years old, dying in 1973 at Heights Hospital in Houston. He had spent his adult life as a civil engineer with the Texas Highway Department, building state roads. After retirement, he moved to Houston, where his adult sons operated a lumber company near Heights Blvd. and Yale Street. That was his address at the time Gus received his WWII draft notice--190 Yale, next door to their business.

When Barbara's father' Victor Charles, was born in 1916, Gus and Selma lived in Beaumont, but by 1918, the highway department had assigned Gus to work in Columbus, Texas. While Gus was off on assignment building a new highway, Selma often lived with her parents, the Schneiders, at 2300 East Avenue in Austin, an address which has not existed since Interstate Highway 35 was adjacent to that right-of-way, and Texas Longhorn stadium has since been built at the site. Their house, which had been across the street from Mt. Calvary Cemetery, was next door to inventor Herbert O. Winfrey, who patented a machine that made tamales. Gus Bracher and Selma Schneider married in Austin, Texas in 1912, and their first child, Edwin, a pilot, achieved the rank of captain for the Scandinavian Airlines System, after co-founding the airline. Edwin also was active in YMCA organizing and in Rotary International, sponsoring in 1963 the founding of the new chapter in Clear Lake City by NASA contractors and astronauts who worked at the LBJ Space Center.

The second son, Barbara's father, Victor Charles Bracher, operated the lumber company Edwin owned, using it as a base for his his house-building and land development company in Houston. Located on Yale Street, the lumber company was a few miles south of 842 W. 43rd Street -- the house where Barbara grew up. The modest home on a tree-lined street was a mile and a half from Waltrip High School, attended 20 years later by two girls who were gang-raped and murdered. Whether or not that incident elicited any attention from Barbara is unknown, although her mother and two siblings were still living in Houston then and may have mentioned it to her.

During Barbara's last year at Waltrip, her father had been chosen by a group affiliated with Oveta Culp Hobby, which submitted his name as a person to work with Governor Dolph Briscoe in his campaign to attack the use of bonded water districts then being used by developer Walter Mischer, a client of John Connally's law firm, Vinson & Elkins. Dolph Briscoe, however, refused to select Bracher and chose his own man. Perhaps he suspected that Bracher, who had obtained financing from the Connally-affiliated bank, First City in Inwood Forest, would not oppose the law firm Vinson & Elkins, which acted as legal counsel for the large majority of those districts. Mrs. Hobby, of course, was a member of the Suite 8-F Crowd, just as Walter Mischer was being groomed to be at that time. Connally as governor named Mischer to sit on the prison board in 1965. [fn - The Suite 8-F Crowd took its name from the Lamar Hotel suite of George and Herman Brown, founders of road construction and engineering company, Brown & Root, which their foundation sold to Halliburton a year after Herman's death. George then used the Brown Foundation to buy his way into Houston "Society," which is defined in terms of Rice University, of which he was placed on the Rice board of trustees after helping oilman Harry C. Wiess acquire for Rice the Rincon field from Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis. After serving with Wiess on the board, Brown was named to the chairmanship of Rice's trustees in 1950.]

Barbara Bracher began her undergraduate education in Austin at the University of Texas but soon transferred to St. Thomas University in Houston, a Catholic school from which she graduated in 1978, two years after marrying James  Barton McNeil, also from a Houston family. However, she filed for divorce from him in Houston in 1980, using her father's attorney, Dan Wolfe. Her father died in 1987, after Barbara had given up ballet-dancing and her work for a movie production company. She graduated from Yeshiva University Cardozo School of Law, located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 12th Street in downtown Manhattan, in 1989.

Theodore Olson revealed much of Barbara's history in the 1st Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society For Law And Public Policy Studies, delivered three weeks after 9/11.

Talon News--A Plethora of Pedophiles

White House press scandal in 2005 in which linked his ... to the mysterious background of Jeff Gannon a/k/a James Guckert, a former press member of Talon News, which was wholly owned by GOPUSA, the property of Bruce's brother, Bobby Eberle, a so-called "grassroots Republican organizer" at the time.

The scandal erupted after Gannon, not only was seated within the professional press corps at the George W. Bush administration's press briefings, but was often called on by name in the hope he would toss “softball” questions to President Bush and his press secretaries. Media Matters alleged that Gannon's press credentials were, in fact, flawed since:

Gannon/Guckert pieces for Talon News are little more than what it calls “reprints of Republican and Bush administration releases,” and demonstrates that Gannon is a frequent “lifesaver” for White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who regularly calls on Gannon/Guckert when he needs a safe question to allow him to get back on track. Media Matters has found out more about Talon News itself; it reports that the information unearthed “casts additional doubt on Talon’s claim to be a media outlet and raises questions about whether Gannon/Guckert should be a credentialed member of the White House press corps.” 

At the time Gannon's background first became a news issue, the internet was still reeling over disclosures in Omaha involving the Franklin Community Credit Union, centered around a pedophile ring operated by Lawrence E. King, Jr., a nationally influential black Republican, for the gratification of the political and business elite of both Republican and Democratic parties, according to Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin in their book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Chapter 21, entitled "Omaha."

The story was reiterated in a more recent volume by author Nick Bryant in a 2009 TrineDay publication called The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal. 

The Penn State controversy surrounding Jerry Sandusky's involvement with young boys has brought further attention on the sexual obsession certain men have with innocent boys who look up to them as role models. 

Gannon/Guckert admitted to being a “former” gay prostitute, but said no one at the White House knew about his sexual past, and asked: “Does my past mean I can’t have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?” He used a pseudonym, he said, because his real name is difficult to pronounce.

Gannon a/k/a Guckert

Liberal gay activist John Aravosis, whose AmericaBlog was the first to publish pictures of Gannon/Guckert advertising his sexual favors on gay escort websites [now apparently expurgated from the web]. One of the removed photos can still be viewed at another Democratic website forum, however, under the caption Gannon's 21 Club. and provides a link to an even more blatant reference to Republican connections to gay prostitution.

Both Aravosis and the Agitprops blogger (name taken from a Russian word meaning the bureau which plans agitation and propaganda) said the issue was not Gannon/Guckert’s right to be a journalist but rather his ability to gain “White House access.…” without having to go through Secret Service channels or other security clearances. But they failed to gain credence because of their blatant bias against Republicans.

They totally ignored a similar situation that occurred when a Democrat, R. Spencer Oliver, or at least a person or persons using his private telephone line, was undoubtedly operating a call-girl operation for the “benefit” of visiting “straight” local political chairmen at the national headquarters of the Democratic Party in 1972. Oliver's father was, according to Jim Hougan, employed by the same public relations firm that had hired both E. Howard Hunt and Douglas Caddy--Robert R. Mullen and Co.


Providing Prostitutes for Politicos
As Far Back As Watergate?

R. Spencer Oliver today

Is it possible that this left/right dichotomy is merely part of a higher or outside power unrelated to issues presented to the American voter? Consider the role played by R. Spencer Oliver, Jr. from the Watergate controversy down to the present day:

In 1977 he was a member of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), who took part in the Belgrade Conference led by Arthur J. Goldberg to consider violations of the Helsinki Accords. According to the website of the Organization on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which replaced the Commission:

The Helsinki Final Act encompasses three main sets of recommendations, which are often referred to as 'baskets'. These three baskets are:

1. Questions relating to security in Europe.
2. Co-operation in the fields of economics, of science and technology, and of the environment.
3. Co-operation in humanitarian and other fields.

In a paper written by Vicky Davis on March 5, 2008 it was stated:

The Helsinki Final Act is -- with the benefit of hindsight, one of the most important agreements the U.S. ever entered into in terms of how it affects U.S. domestic affairs.  The scope of it is breathtaking.  And when the lines are drawn from the conceptual areas of agreement to the legislation and actions of our government, it becomes clear that members of Congress -- and in particular, the Senate are mere puppets who have in effect, been operating as agents of a foreign power -- against the interests of the American people and our nation.   So how did that happen?

When Willy Brandt was elected in West Germany in 1969, the peaceful reunification of East and West Germany was a priority.... Toward that goal, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) began in 1973 and the agreed upon framework of actions for reunification was codified in the Helsinki Final Act that was signed in 1975....

One would be hard pressed to consider that the establishment of the David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission in 1973 was coincidental to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) given that the mission of the of the Trilateral Commission coincides with the agenda of the Helsinki Final Act.  Even though Japan was not a participant in the CSCE, the efforts of Nixon and George H.W. Bush to open up China led to Bush sending Robert Zoellick to Asia to assist in the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative in 1989.

Let's focus here on R. Spencer Oliver, Jr., who would ultimately become the first Secretary General of OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly.

R. Spencer Oliver, Jr.

In 1969, the year that OSCE's priority was reunifying the Germanys, the Omaha World Herald published a photo of Oliver, then 32, resident of Bowie, Maryland, national president of the Young Democratic Clubs of America (YD), who spoke at the Nebraska club's state convention.

Noting that it was Oliver's private phone line at the DNC which allegedly was being tapped by E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and their team of burglars, Jim Hougan asked a DNC secretary whether she told Liddy's attorneys "it was likely that Spencer Oliver and Maxie Wells were running a call-girl operation." Hougan cited his 1984 book, Secret Agenda, as source of his statement that former chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities Lou Russell "hung out with call-girls at the Columbia Plaza Apartments, barely a block from the Watergate," and that "according to Fensterwald and two of his employees, Russell told them he was tape-recording telephone conversations between the prostitutes and their clients at the DNC."

In fact, Hougan seems to believe that the primary motive for the Watergate break-in was to obtain evidence that could be used for blackmail, writing also that prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office:

were putting together a case in which sexual blackmail was said to be the central motive in the Watergate break-in. Asst. U.S. Atty. Earl Silbert was convinced that “Hunt was trying to blackmail Spencer (Oliver).” The same point was made by Charles Morgan, who represented [Maxine] Wells and [Spencer] Oliver at the burglars’ trial in early 1973. Determined to block any testimony about the contents of the conversations that Baldwin overheard, Morgan said Silbert told him over lunch in December, 1972, that “[Former CIA agent, E. Howard] Hunt was trying to blackmail Spencer, and I’m going to prove it.”

Earl Silbert, it turns out, had also been a member of the Young Democrats with Michael Dukakis while they were at Harvard, and Silbert's father spent his legal career at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The son went to work for the Tax Division of the Department of Justice in 1960, supervised by Assistant Attorney General Louis F. Oberdorfer. In 1964 he moved to the prosecutor's office at the U.S. Attorney's Office, still a part of Justice, and in 1969 he was part of the Office of Criminal Justice under a Republican, Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst. By the time Watergate occurred, Silbert was first assistant to the D.C. U.S. Attorney Harold Titus and received a call from Chuck Work, then a clerk in Superior Court, in the early morning hours following the arrest of the burglars. Young attorney, Doug Caddy (portrayed in the movie All the President's Men by soap opera actor Nicolas Coster), had appeared at about five o'clock that morning to represent the men who had been arrested, though none of them had been allowed to make any phone calls. Work and Silbert became curious about who had called Caddy.

Caddy refused to answer the questions propounded to him during the grand jury proceedings, claiming attorney-client privilege. After Judge Sirica ordered him to answer, Caddy appealed. In the meantime, as Silbert told his oral history interviewer in 1992, they had learned either from the FBI or the Metropolitan Police that former FBI Agent Alfred C. Baldwin had checked out of the Howard Johnson motel across the street early the same morning and had returned home to Connecticut, and that arrested burglar James McCord had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA].

Silbert revealed (page 96 of the transcript) that Baldwin told them the purpose of the entry into the DNC office on June 17 was to tap Lawrence O'Brien's telephone; that a previous bugging had occurred in May on Oliver's phone, but that information was not what the burglars were seeking. Silbert, however, believed that the FBI had missed finding the bug on Oliver's phone when a sweep was made following the June 17 arrests.

Eberle as a Political Consultant

Dotty Lynch attempted to draw lines between the dots to connect the various direct mail processors and political consultants in an article entitled “Rove-Gannon Connection?”; Feb. 18, 2005.l ).

 
Bruce Eberle joined the Young Americans for Freedom in 1963 and was placed on the New Mexico board for YAF in 1969. By 1975 he headed Ronald Reagan's direct mail fund-raising efforts for his unsuccessful 1976 campaign. A photo of him with his parents (Adolph Herman and Emma Reinert Eberle) appeared in his hometown newspaper, the St. Joseph, Mo. Gazette in 1981. Census records show Adolph had two older brothers and three younger ones who could have passed the same last name down to Bruce's cousins.

Bruce himself, according to city directories and newspaper items, had two brothers--Allen R. and Robert D. Eberle. Allen worked for a time in Culver City, California, before settling in Idaho, while Robert (Bob) Eberle became a civil servant in Auburn, Washington, and has since become part of Bruce's fundraising conglomerate for conservative Republicans:

Bob has served variously as an elected legislator (Washington State), an appointed member of boards and commissions, and as a United Way Campaign executive on loan from the Boeing Corporation. Bob also served as GSA Director of Region Ten. Bob has a BS from the University of Missouri and a Masters Degree from the University of Alabama. For more than forty years he has lived in Washington State, near Seattle.

Bruce, although born and bred in St. Joseph, Missouri, took a job in the engineering field in which he was educated, working as an engineer for Gulf Oil in Port Arthur, Texas before being able to follow his dream of working full-time to raise money for Republican candidates. In 1971 he moved his family to northern Virginia to be closer to the nation's Capitol. Twenty years later his direct mail firm came under fire for false "news" reporting about Vietnam POW-MIA matters, but he ignored the flak until 1999, when the evidence presented resulted in his being fired from John Ashcroft's campaign.

Robert Raymond "Bobby" Eberle, Jr. was growing up in Victoria while Bruce lived about 200 miles away in Port Arthur, Texas. Although Bobby's father, who allegedly had come from Illinois, had died before 1990, Bobby and his sister, Susan Denise Eberle Justitz, both were able to graduate from Texas A. and M. University, while another sister, Erika Robin Eberle Buesing, got a degree at Texas Tech. His mother, Enedina (Dina), was a daughter of Rodrigo L. Perez of Falfurrias, Texas, who grew up on a south Texas ranch called La Mesa, (acquired in 1873 by Manuel Perez), a part of the La Encantada Grant on which oil was discovered in the 1930's. The landowner named Brijido Ramirez, who sued, contesting others' claims to the oil, was related to the family of Dina Eberle. Intriguingly, no records turn up anywhere pertaining to Dina's deceased husband's birth, marriage or death. It seems quite likely they lived outside the United States during their marriage.

Bobby begins to show up at Victoria High School in 1984, when he played tennis while at Victoria until graduation in 1986. He was elected president of the Houston Young Republicans and director of club development for the Texas Young Republicans Federation in 1995, the same year he received his Ph.D from Rice University in Houston. He was then employed as an aerospace engineer by Lockheed Martin. Dr. Bobby Eberle created the conservative activist group GOPUSA, as early as 2003. USA Today stated in December 2003:

Freewheeling 'bloggers' are rewriting rules of journalism... GOPUSA.com, a Web site run by Bobby Eberle, a Houston engineer with no previous journalism experience, scored an interview with President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove. 

GOPUSA owned Talon News," a virtual organization with no physical office space or newsroom,"  which featured writer "Jeff Gannon," whose real name was James D. Guckert.

Full speech by Morton Blackwell:

I will focus today on a topic none of you have ever heard me address before: sex.

Right now, Washington, D.C. is experiencing two sex scandals which affect the party you have joined.

The first involves Congressman Donald "Buz" Lukens of Ohio. A few days ago, Buz Lukens was sentenced to jail on misdemeanor charges for having sex with a 16 year old girl. Unresolved are possible felony charges that he also had sex with her when she was 13. Buz Lukens is 58.

His unsuccessful defense in court was that he couldn't have contributed to this girl's delinquency because she was already immoral.

The second scandal is still unfolding. It involves the expose of a largely homosexual prostitution ring in the Washington, D.C. area.

Already there have been banner headlines about some Reagan and Bush administration officials' involvement.

In the news about this second scandal are reports of bugged rooms, two-way mirrors, blackmail and midnight tours of the White House by teams of homosexual prostitutes.

Five hundred credit card receipts for sexual services rendered are in the possession of The Washington Times, which broke the story.

Reportedly, a lobbyist who spent as much as $20,000 per month on male prostitutes for himself and friends gave an $8,000 Rolex watch to a White House Secret Service officer who gave him access to the White House West Wing, which contains the President's Oval Office. I will focus today on a topic none of you have ever heard me address before: sex.

Right now, Washington, D.C. is experiencing two sex scandals which affect the party you have joined.

The first involves Congressman Donald "Buz" Lukens of Ohio. A few days ago, Buz Lukens was sentenced to jail on misdemeanor charges for having sex with a 16 year old girl. Unresolved are possible felony charges that he also had sex with her when she was 13. Buz Lukens is 58.

His unsuccessful defense in court was that he couldn't have contributed to this girl's delinquency because she was already immoral.

The second scandal is still unfolding. It involves the expose of a largely homosexual prostitution ring in the Washington, D.C. area.

Already there have been banner headlines about some Reagan and Bush administration officials' involvement.

In the news about this second scandal are reports of bugged rooms, two-way mirrors, blackmail and midnight tours of the White House by teams of homosexual prostitutes.

Five hundred credit card receipts for sexual services rendered are in the possession of The Washington Times, which broke the story.

Reportedly, a lobbyist who spent as much as $20,000 per month on male prostitutes for himself and friends gave an $8,000 Rolex watch to a White House Secret Service officer who gave him access to the White House West Wing, which contains the President's Oval Office.The White House liaison for the U.S. Labor Department [Dave DenHerder, senior advisor to Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao?] was implicated and has already resigned.

The FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, and other Federal, State and local authorities are scrambling to do their jobs as the facts unfold. This story is far from over.

As Republican youth activists, you should know who Congressman Lukens is. He is politically destroyed now. But you should know, I want to be sure you know, that Buz Lukens played a unique role in the development of the conservative movement. And he was a key player at a critical time in Republican youth politics.

My first College Republican National Convention was in 1963, while I was state College Republican chairman of Louisiana. In those days the College Republican and Young Republican national conventions were held together.

In 1963 in San Francisco, Goldwater Republicans won control of both organizations. An exciting book could be written about how Buz Lukens became the new Young Republican national chairman. It was a new era.

After Goldwater's defeat, Buz was elected in 1966 to the Congress from Ohio. He immediately started supporting Ronald Reagan for President. Through the Reagan efforts of 1968, 1976, and 1980, Buz was a key leader.

For 27 years, despite political defeats, a divorce, financial difficulties, a close call with disabling throat cancer and other troubles, Buz Lukens remained a state and national conservative leader, effective and admired by grassroots activists. Since 1962 he has been a good friend to me.

I don't mind telling you my eyes have filled with tears more than once in recent months as a sex scandal of his own making has brought him down. He made the wrong choices.

I pray he can personally recover from this self-inflicted disaster, but his political situation is hopeless.

In the unfolding, so-called "call-boy" scandal in D.C., two of the alleged patrons have had ties to conservatives for many years. They are the only ones yet named whom I have known. They made the wrong choices.

But what can one say about the judgment of someone who pays for a prostitute with a credit card? Memories may fade, but not credit card records.

You who are in your late teens and early twenties live in a world very different from the one I grew up in. A skirt above the knees raised eyebrows then. Movies were self-censored very effectively. Books, magazines, radio, music, and even conversation were much more restrained by traditional morality than they are today. What is commonplace now in the media was rare or non-existent then.

There has been a massive assault on moral values. Everywhere there are voices urging young people:

"Do it. Do it if it feels good. Do it now. The church is wrong. Your parents are old fogies. Everyone is doing it. Don't be left out. You're entitled to something for nothing. There are no bad consequences. And besides, you won't get caught."

In many ways our society has failed you, ignoring the hard-won lessons of history, the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the maxims of morality. Truths revealed, experienced and long respected are not well taught to most in your generation. And the decline began before your generation.

My grandparents and, probably, your great-grandparents were given copybooks in school. These copybooks served two purposes. At the top of each page was written a heading, a maxim or saying which gave moral guidance, such as, "Honesty is the best policy" and "Honor thy father and thy mother."

Students learned handwriting by copying each heading many times, filling each page with the most useful, sensible advice, gleaned from the long experience of civilization. I have one of my grandfather's copybooks from the 1870s.

The great English poet and writer Rudyard Kipling is probably best known to most of you, if at all, through Walt Disney's version of Kipling's Jungle Book. But Rudyard Kipling was highly perceptive. As early as 1919 he warned in a marvelous poem, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," that our very survival depends on our not forgetting the lessons of history.

Kipling contrasted the eternal verities, which he called the Gods of the Copybook Headings, with the tempting siren songs of Social Progress, "The Gods of the Market-Place," which falsely claimed that times have so changed that the old truths no longer apply.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS

"As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

"We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

"We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor windborne like the Gods of the Market-Place; But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come. That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

"With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch. They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch. They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings. So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things."

What Kipling is describing here is a cyclical process, which each few generations must experience anew. Yes, the times are always changing, but not always changing in the same direction.

In ancient Rome, Marcus Cicero's thundering denunciations of the sexual behavior of Marc Anthony were followed in the next century by the open depravity of Nero and Caligula.

And in England, the licentiousness of the Stuart restoration period was followed two centuries later by the Victorian era. The pendulum swings back and forth over time.

At a time when our society is newly outraged over the burning of our country's flag and when increasing restrictions on abortion are now certain, and when deadly AIDS is killing thousands, it is not a good bet that society will acquiesce in the loss of all standards of sexual propriety.

Torturing each other for fun and profit, public sex acts, drinking urine, eating feces, and even itinerant bed hopping will, I believe, become less acceptable, not more licit in years to come.

"When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace, They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease." But when we disarmed They sold us, and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

"On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'The Wages of Sin is Death.'"

Notwithstanding waves of propaganda to the contrary, the old truth has emerged: There is no safe sex, except in a monogamous, faithful marriage.

There are ways of lessening the risk of promiscuity, but value-free, sexual fun and games, none of them safe, are multiplying the number of victims of incurable, sexually transmitted diseases, one of them absolutely fatal.

As yet we have increasingly shrill voices who advocate going beyond today's high level of toleration and say we should create new legal privileges for each increasingly bizarre form of sexual relationship. We are even told AIDS is a civil rights issue, not a public health issue.

It was British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke who wrote in 1772: 

Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul, But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'

Perhaps the most fraudulent of the false gods today is the argument that, somehow, a high proportion of us are inevitably, genetically, uniquely foreordained to homosexual activity.

One does not have to be a clinical psychologist or any type of scientist to see through that preposterous lie.

Young man, your father, your grandfathers, all four of your great grandfathers, all eight of your great grandfathers and on back beyond the reach of recorded time, all their fathers performed successfully and heterosexually. You are the product of eons of heterosexual activity.

Young lady, your mother and your grandmother were not the product of parthenogenesis. They and all your maternal ancestors performed heterosexually and successfully. You are living proof they did.

To say that ten or twenty percent of humanity is doomed to heterosexual disfunction is nonsense. Dangerous and arrant nonsense.

Authorities agree that sexual behavior is learned behavior. Researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson wrote, "We're born man, woman and sexual beings. We learn our sexual preferences and orientations."

No reputable scientist has found any hereditary tie to homosexuality.

Even Dr. Alfred Kinsey wrote, "I have myself come to the conclusion that homosexuality is largely a matter of conditioning."

The problem is that for many years our society has been conditioning more and more people for this kind of behavior. Sympathetic portrayal is the rule now in movies and dramatic television.

I believe it could be demonstrated statistically that in the last ten years major network television productions have portrayed sympathetically fewer clergy than homosexuals. And in so doing they have killed a lot of people. Literally killed them by leading them into temptation.

Humans are so constituted as to enjoy sex. If sex were not a pleasure, there would be a lot less procreation.

That which is pleasurable tends to be habit forming. And habits include many things, good, bad and indifferent. Among them are gambling, alcohol, illegal drugs, poetry, music, and various forms of sexual arousal. Just because something feels good does not mean it is good.

Bad habits can be broken, particularly if people understand that they are not inevitably, hereditarily forced into those bad habits. The problem I am discussing here is not bad genes but bad choices.

Most of us have sense enough not to try heroin or other highly addictive drugs. We recognize there are things, once started, that cannot easily be stopped. Such wisdom could and should be applied to sexual activity.

And those whose counterproductive behavior has become addictive, it is still possible to change. Many take control of their own lives every day: smokers, gamblers, alcoholics, and illegal drug users.

Studies indicate that about one third of former homosexuals have reformed themselves.

Of course there are those who decide at some point to flaunt their homosexual behavior, taking up the cause of gay rights and saying how much better they feel to be out of the closet. Unfortunately for them, feeling better doesn't really make it better.

I am reminded in these cases of Winston Smith, the central figure in George Orwell's powerful novel, 1984. Beaten by remorseless conditioning at last, Winston Smith finally thinks he loves Big Brother. But his loving Big Brother only makes the tragedy complete.

No reader of 1984 closes that book with feelings of hate or fear of Winston Smith. What one feels is sadness, pity, a wish that someone could help.

Our modern era will one day be a bygone era. The people of the future will be descendants of those of us who made the right choices in our own lives.

It is a dangerous, imperfect world. But those who came before us have left us valid lessons, not always written as copybook headings, which we would be wise to follow.

A person does not profit from his own fatal mistake. But the fatal mistakes of others should be highly instructive.

Kipling ended his poem:

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew, And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true. That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four--And the Gods of Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-- There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: -- That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

My young friends, please spread the word. Traditional values are survival values.

- See more at Blackwell's website and at Survival Values.