All Plums Lead to Gold

 Part 2 

CONDI PICKS A PLUM

© June 9, 2004 by Linda Minor

(See Part 1)

Denver and the Guggenheim Connection

ASARCO mines

John Rice’s loyalty to the tenets of his religion shaped his ambition to do more. He obtained a doctorate of philosophy in 1969 at the University of Denver—the same university where Condi received her bachelor’s degree in 1975 and her own PhD in 1981. Located in the south central area of Denver, this university, initially called “Colorado Seminary,” was founded by John Evans, a Quaker railroad promoter for the Union Pacific in Chicago who came to Colorado when the Colorado gold rush began in 1859. Ten years later, when the boom had slowed and the “seminary” was about to close its doors, wealthy Denverites, initially drawn to the state because of the mining, answered the appeal for donations and thus gained control of the financial arm of the university—its board of trustees.  

Gold Mine in Colorado

One of Denver University’s most generous donors is the Adolph Coors Foundation (Coors Brewing Company’s chairman, Peter H. Coors, is a Phillips Exeter and DU alumnus, as well as a director of the H.J. Heinz Company—the same corporation of which John Kerry’s wife’s former husband was heir.  Another supporter is the Boettcher Foundation (Great Western Sugar Company, subsequently named Great Western United and sold to the Texas Hunt family to whom the Bush family has been very close), the same family who attempted to corner the market on silver at one time. [6]

Madeleine Albright's husband with his uncle, Harry Guggenheim

But by far the greatest wealth resulting from mining in Colorado was generated by the Guggenheim family, a fortune which began in 1880 when Meyer Guggenheim bought two mines in Leadville, Colorado, from which huge deposits of both silver and lead were produced. The family would expand into mineral smelting, eventually controlling American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO), which had a huge presence in the state of Colorado. Meyer’s son Simon Guggenheim would become a U.S. Senator from Colorado in 1906. A generation later Simon’s nephew Harry F. Guggenheim would marry a descendant of Joseph Medill and Robert Sanderson Mccormick, nephew of Cyrus McCormick who controlled the International Harvester (reaper) fortune -- Alicia Patterson -- whose sister would later become Madeleine Albright’s mother-in-law. 

Small world!

Medill Media Empire

Twelve years before the Rice family moved to Denver, fate brought Madeleine Korbel (a recent graduate of the elite Kent School in Denver and working as a summer intern at the Denver Post library) together with her future husband, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, a journalist at The Denver Post. [7] Joseph Albright’s great-grandfather was Captain Joseph Medill, one of the organizers in 1854 of the Republican Party in Ohio, who a year later became identified with the Chicago Tribune as well as an friend and adviser/supplicant to Abraham Lincoln.

Joseph Medill had two daughters—Katharine (Kate) and Elinor (Nellie). Kate married Robert Sanderson McCormick, a nephew of Cyrus Hall McCormick, sion of the reaper family, who established International Harvester and owned the Chicago Times, Medill’s competitor. That marriage joined the two newspaper empires under one family. [8]

Nellie married a minister’s son, Robert W. Patterson, Jr., who attained an influential position at the Tribune. Their daughter, Eleanor (called “Cissy”) would be a bidder in 1933 against Eugene Meyer, Jr. to purchase the Washington Post. [9] Cissy’s brother, Joseph Medill Patterson, groomed his daughter, Alicia, to succeed him in the publishing business. Alicia would in 1939 marry the scion of the Guggenheim family, Harry F. Guggenheim. 

Alicia’s nephew, Joseph Medill Albright (pictured above with his uncle, Harry F. Guggenheim) would meet young Madeleine Korbel—less than ten years after Josef Korbel had been rescued in Great Neck, Long Island (the same area in which the Guggenheim mansion was located on Sands Point) after his flight from Europe to America. Was it a mere coincidence that their first home in America was within a few short miles from where Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, guided by her ambitious husband, had in 1940 created Newsday. [10]

Korbel had attended Sorbonne, University of Paris, 1928-29, and Charles University, Prague, where he received a law degree in 1933, then entered the Czechoslovak Diplomatic Service—assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Prague, 1934-36, then to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1937-38. Two years after Hitler took the Sudetenland in 1937, Korbel moved to London to be the personal secretary to Jan Masaryk in his Grosvenor Square office. Masaryk was the son of the first president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, a new nation formed after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of World War I, whose incipient government was abolished by Hitler. 

Benes and Masaryk

While in London Korbel would also head the broadcasting department for the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile. At the close of the war, the exiled government returned to Prague, and in 1945 Korbel was appointed chief of cabinet to Masaryk, then serving under the new president, Eduard Benes; from 1945 to 1948 he was the Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. In February 1948 Czechoslovakia became a Communist satellite of the Soviet Union, terrorized by Joseph Stalin. Masaryk, who refused to resign, was dead by March 10, 1948, his death ruled a suicide, though Vaclav Havel and others who knew him believed he had been murdered.

At that point, Korbel fled with his family to New York. He obtained a job with the United Nations, which had been chartered in 1945 in San Francisco, a city rejected as headquarters by Russia as being too far from diplomatic centers. Korbel in 1948 took his family—Madeleine was then 11—to live at Great Neck on the northern shore of Long Island. Though the Korbel family was Jewish, at some point they became Catholic. Madeleine has said it was only after she became Secretary of State that she learned that many of her Jewish relatives had been exterminated by Nazis. [11] 

Madeleine Korbel Albright

Newsday  had been founded in 1940 at Hempstead, Long Island shortly after Alicia Patterson and Harry Guggenheim were married. Harry lived at Sands Point and was the son of Daniel Guggenheim and nephew of Simon Guggenheim, who had been the U.S. Senator from Denver, Colorado from 1907 to 1913. [12] It seems his primary reason for being senator had been to vote for the Payne-Aldrich tariff and to protect family business interests. He was also a Senator when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress, and he retired from office in that same year. In 1925, after consultation with two former Rhodes scholars, the former Senator poured his massive wealth into a tax-exempt charitable foundation. The Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been ratified in 1913 allowing the Federal government to tax incomes, and the wealthy were thus inspired to be charitable to avoid paying taxes.  [13]

Meyer Guggenheim’s investments in silver, lead and copper mining and smelting in Colorado in 1887 led to the formation of the American Smelting & Refining Company (ASARCO) and the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1899. At that point he began hiring individuals  such as John Hays Hammond (hired to find new metal resources for his company called Guggenex) and William Boyce Thompson (employed to promote Guggenheim companies’ stocks).  

Daniel Guggenheim

William Collins Whitney, married to Standard Oil heir Flora Payne and owner of the Nevada silver mine for which Hammond was then employed, introduced Hammond to Daniel Guggenheim. Guggenheim employed Hammond as consulting engineer and general manager of the Guggenheim Exploration Company, at a salary of $250,000 a year plus a 25 per cent interest in all properties he recommended for development. Hammond's total annual income at this time is said to have exceeded a million dollars. For the Guggenheims he was active in securing properties in Mexico and in other mining operations. [14]

Thompson had left his home in Montana, where his father owned a small mining company, to attend Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. This academy was founded in 1781 by John Phillips, a local merchant and uncle of Samuel Phillips, the founder three years earlier of Phillips Andover Academy, the alma mater of both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. [15] In 1889 Thompson left Exeter without graduating and attended the School of Mines of Columbia University in New York for only one year, returning at that point to Butte, Montana to work in his family’s copper mines. 

At that time Butte was teeming with copper mines, including the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, formed in 1899 by Standard Oil tycoons, William Rockefeller (younger brother of John D. Rockefeller) and Henry Huttleston Rogers. Amalgamated Copper later merged into the Anaconda Mining Company through a financial maneuver in which it has been said that Eugene Meyer, Jr. played a role.  The timing of this merger would have coincided with America’s entry into World War I, when Meyer was chairman of the War Industries Board.  John Dennis Ryan became the president of the reorganized corporation almost simultaneously with his being named as a member of the war council of the American Red Cross, director of the Bureau of Aircraft Production, assistant Secretary of War and chairman of the Aircraft Board. Ryan soon resigned all of these positions in November 1918 to serve as the chairman of the board of directors of the Anaconda Company. [16] In 1923 Anaconda would buy the Guggenheim family’s interest in copper mines in Chile.  

What do these facts mean in terms of the making of Condoleezza Rice?

More Gold-Plated Plums

The Presbyterian ecumenism (in which Condi's father was educated) and Denver University’s international studies program (created by her Sorbonne-educated mentor), put her in the orbit of those who could bestow ever riper plums to Miss Rice -- many (like Denver) having connections to gold and the mining industry. As we further learn from her c.v.:

At the University of Notre Dame, Rice earned her master's degree in political science, after which she returned to Denver to pursue her doctorate in international affairs. After completing her doctoral program in 1981, Rice headed to the West Coast and a job teaching political science at Stanford University. …She continued to learn more about the Byzantine politics of the Soviet Bloc, a region that she found particularly fascinating.  [17]

She was awarded a fellowship at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control. It was the first time the Center had ever admitted a woman. The fellowship was supposed to be for one year, but Rice made a big impression and was offered a job as an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, which she accepted…. In 1984, Rice attended a faculty seminar where Brent Scowcroft, then head of President Reagan's Commission of Strategic Forces, spoke on arms control. During the dinner following the seminar, Rice asked Scowcroft some challenging questions. Scowcroft was impressed. "I thought, This is somebody I need to get to know. It's an intimidating subject. Here's this young girl, and she's not at all intimidated," he told the New Yorker's Lemann. Scowcroft began arranging for her to attend seminars and conferences. [18]

During the 1985-86 academic year, she was a fellow at the Hoover Institute, a well-known think tank based at Stanford. During this period she published two books that helped to bolster her growing reputation as an expert on Soviet Bloc affairs. … In 1986 her expertise on the Soviet Union earned her an advisory position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A Council on Foreign Relations fellowship brought her to Washington to provide advice on nuclear strategic planning, during which assignment she worked directly under Admiral William Crowe…. Acting on the recommendation of Brent Scowcroft, his adviser on national security affairs, President George H. W. Bush in 1989 named Rice director of Soviet and East European affairs on the National Security Council…. In 1991 Rice returned to her teaching position at Stanford, although she continued to serve as a consultant on the former Soviet Bloc for numerous clients in both the public and private sectors…

In 1993, Stanford President Gerhard Casper named Rice provost at the university…In July of 1999, she took a leave of absence from her provost position to become the foreign policy advisor for Texas Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign. When Bush won the election, he tapped Rice for the position of National Security Advisor…. Rice has served as a director on a number of corporate boards, including Chevron, Transamerica Corporation, and Charles Schwab Corporation. She also sits on the board of the University of Notre Dame, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan, and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors…. [19]

The full name of the Hoover Institute is actually the “Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace” and was founded by Herbert Hoover in 1919 before he became president of the United States. Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa, to a farmer who followed strict Quaker teachings. Both his parents having died by the time he was ten years old, Hoover was sent to Oregon to live with orthodox Quaker relatives named Minthorn. At the age of 17, Hoover enrolled in Stanford the year it opened in 1891. After graduation in 1895, he worked for gold mining companies in California before tapping his own mother lode — becoming a secretary to Louis Janin, a mining consultant.

Janin, a French-American reared in New Orleans, was educated at Yale before attending the foremost metallurgy university in Freiberg, Germany in 1856. Janin, who spent a year in Japan as a consultant to that government about its development of gold, silver, and copper mines, had also trained John Hays Hammond before he went to work for Guggenex. He was also an eminent member of the elite Pacific-Union Club in San Francisco, whose other members included the likes of  Charles F. Crocker, founder of a bank in San Francisco that purchased the Lazards’ California bank branch in 1908, and Leland Stanford, who founded and richly endowed Stanford University.

After leaving Janin’s employ, Hoover was hired by the British mining firm of Bewick, Moreing which sent him to the Australian gold fields, where he was credited with the discovery of the Gwalia Mine at Mount Leonora—making a fortune for his company, which rewarded him with a partnership in 1901. [20]  He then worked in Manchuria, China while the Boxer Rebellion was raging. [21] Hoover made private investments in lead smelting during these years which enabled him to create his own firm in 1908 and to engage in exploration in Russia, where he had set up a branch office in Petrograd. According to Ferdinand Lundberg: 

In 1909 Hoover reached the turning point in his career when he met in London William Boyce Thompson, then a partner of Hayden, Stone and Company, New York investment bankers. Thompson, a stock-market crony of Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan and Company, was also primarily interested in mining promotions. He brought Hoover into a number of Hayden, Stone and Company enterprises. There has been some mystery made of the way in which Hoover came to the fore as Food Administrator in the Wilson Administration; but there is really no mystery. It was the influential Thompson who introduced Hoover, long absent in foreign lands, to the leading figures of American finance and politics.

The Wilson Administration, as we have seen, was in the grip of the "copper crowd," and with the members of this group Thompson was on intimate terms. Thompson, through his work for the Guggenheims, enjoyed a wide acquaintanceship among politicians, newspaper publishers, and businessmen in the western states; as chairman of the Republican Ways and Means Committee he brought Hoover into close touch with such figures as Charles Hayden, Albert H. Wiggin, Harry F. Sinclair, E. L. Doheny, and Thomas W. Lamont. In 1928 Hayden, Thompson's old partner, was placed in charge of Hoover's campaign finances. [22]

Russian oil resources. With the profits made in Russia, this holding company in turn invested in California oil ventures. Hoover was himself very close to the members of the Pacific Union Club, as well as the exclusive, notorious and highly secretive Bohemian Club, formed in 1872 in San Francisco. [23] In 1912, as Europe was on the edge of war, Hoover branched into copper smelting and gold and zinc mining in Russia. At that time he was invited to join the Stanford board of trustees.

By 1914 Herbert Hoover had retired from business and was wealthy enough to head the Belgium Relief efforts during the war. After the war, he attended the Versailles Conference that drew up the peace treaty with Germany. In May 1917 President Woodrow Wilson called him back to head the U.S. Food Administration. Later he was placed in charge of the American Relief Administration, organized to provide food for Europe through Congressional appropriations. When the funding disappeared, Hoover appealed for private contributions to continue the work. 

After Hoover was elected President in 1928, the Cabinet he chose reflected his financial support during the campaign. His Secretary of State was Henry L. Stimson; Secretary of the Interior was Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of  Stanford University; and Secretary of the Navy was Charles Francis Adams, a director of the AT&T and 32 other Morgan corporations, as well as the man in charge of Harvard University's huge endowment fund and father-in-law of Henry Sturgis Morgan, son of J.P. Morgan, Jr.

Hoover fellowships are rewards given to persons who share the business philosophy of the man who founded the institute and set out the manner that trustees who govern it will be selected in order to ensure that funds will be used to promote those principles.  Plums are not distributed willy-nilly.

The last of Condi’s plums, rather than gold-plated, seems to be dripping with oil. Is there possibly a connection between the two resources?

Oil as a Medium of Exchange and Saudi Arabia

The San Francisco-based corporation called Chevron which elected Condi Rice to its board of directors can trace its roots back to several component companies—not least of which is Standard Oil of California (Socal) which became very interested in acquiring rights in the Middle East after World War I.  In 1932 the newly created nation of Saudi Arabia granted a monopoly to explore for oil to Socal,  the concession being assigned to a subsidiary called California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casoc), with 50% of the concession being transferred in 1936 to the Texas Company (Texaco) and Exxon and Mobil being sold a percentage in 1948. The legal model followed in the manner in which Casoc was created allowed the United States government to finance a recognized public function without the appropriation of funds by Congress to pay for the performance of that function. In order to understand how our government works, this model requires a great deal more study.  

Management of that Saudi oil concession has long been centered within the group of persons who control the board of regents at the University of California at Berkeley—next door to Stanford where Condoleezza Rice spent 20 years of her career. Chevron not only appointed Condi to its board, but in 1993 it named an oil tanker in her honor. 

Her response:

"I'm very proud of my association with Chevron, and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in ... making certain that we have a safe energy supply.” [24]

It is obvious Condi viewed America’s urgent desire for inexpensive oil in the same light that her predecessors in office saw their need to control gold, silver, copper and other strategic minerals—as an element of national security.  It is possibly for that reason that so much secrecy shrouds these issues throughout our history.

We have not been told the full truth about how government operations are actually financed; yet, we want to understand, not only where our tax dollars go, but the source of other monies that are being poured into wars against drugs and terrorism.  George W. Bush and Condi Rice did not protect us from the terror that struck on September 11, 2001. But they have managed to enmesh the world in another war we cannot afford. 

Or could it be that, standing behind Condolezza Rice is a team of bureaucratic planners who work for central bankers and know the effect of America's trade deficit on the amount of gold Americans owe to other central banks in foreign countries? 

NOTES FOR PARTS 1 AND 2:

[1] Antonia Felix, Condi:  The Condoleezza Rice Story (Newmarket Press: New York, 2002), p. 83.

[2] By 1920 John Foster Dulles was a partner, and by 1927 he headed the firm. He became special counsel to the bankers who drew up the Dawes Plan of 1924 for stabilizing German finances in the decade following the First World War, and he also advised the Polish government in its debt negotiations. As the Depression descended on America, Dulles’ American clients’ concern was in trying to salvage something from the wreckage of the Dawes loans and other investments in Germany.…Viewed in retrospect, Dulles, like every person who rises to such a level of power, was looking out for his power base—his clients at Sullivan & Cromwell. These clients had made investments in Germany, which Dulles and his brother Allen helped to repatriate. These same investors had also made investments in Cuba, the Philippines and other parts of Asia, as well as in the Middle East that they looked to Dulles to protect.  Quoted from Studies in Reformed Theology, vol. 9, no. 1 (1998), David Emerson Gumaer, “Apostasy--The National Council Of Churches.”

[3] Dulles obtained his job with the firm as a result of a letter written by his grandfather personally to Cromwell, according to an obituary cited at the linked website.

[4] Many of the creditors Cromwell represented were European banks and bondholders—the source of most of the capital for American business at that time.  Cromwell is often credited with convincing Congress in 1902, after eight years of Cromwell’s lobbying efforts, to abandon support of a Nicaraguan canal and build a canal in Panama. Cromwell’s clients who paid his lobbying fees appear to have been proponents of a project created by Ferdinand Marie Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal for the Rothschilds and in 1849 served as minister plenipotentiary to the Mazzini Republic in Rome. Lesseps created a company called the French Panama Canal Company for a capital syndicate that began working in 1880 to build the canal, but failed to complete it by 1889. The investors who lost their money still controlled the monopoly concession that the government of Colombia had granted across its territory; they backed Cromwell’s efforts to salvage their loss, initially demanding $109 million for the concession, but lowered their price to $40 million in 1902, when Cromwell pushed legislation through Congress to abandon the project in Nicaragua. The necessary treaty with Colombia was refused but soon came to no consequence when Panama won independence from Colombia in 1903—with help from the Lesseps investors and the U.S. Navy. Cromwell retired from practice after World War I, but lived in New York until 1948—though spending long periods of time in France.

[5] See Gary North, Crossed Fingers:  How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. Also see an article in the Denver Catholic Register about Jesuit Father Avery Dulles.

[6] Concerning the Hunt purchase, see “Silverfinger,” by Harry Hurt III (September Issue 1980 Playboy).

[7] Annie Hill Special to The Denver Post, 06 December 1996. When his aunt, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim died in July 1963, Joseph Albright, then 26, was promoted to become the assistant of Harry Guggenheim at Newsday. The Denver Post was one of the newspapers which was part of the Patterson/Guggenheim empire.

[8] Robert McCormick became a lawyer and opened a law practice in the Tribune Company building. His brother Joseph Medill McCormick, had been expected to take over the Tribune Company, died young in 1925. In 1910, his uncle, Robert Patterson (managing editor of the Chicago Tribune), also died unexpectedly. McCormick had been working as the treasurer for the business, and persuaded the trustees to entrust the paper to his cousin, Joe Patterson. The two men became joint-publishers, and in 1911 McCormick became the president of the Tribune. He was elected to the board of directors a year later. McCormick and Patterson divided their responsibilities on a monthly basis to avoid power struggles and disagreements. McCormick was also the publisher of the Washington Times-Herald from 1948 to 1954, and with his cousin and partner, Joseph Patterson, established the tabloid New York Daily News. The McCormick news empire would not acquire the Denver Post from the Bonfils family foundations until 1980. See the excellent biography by Richard Norton Smith, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2003).

[9] Robert S. McCormick, who served as ambassador to Austria-Hungary, provided Cissy entrée to Viennese society; and it was at a ball in Vienna that she met Count Josef Gizycki of Poland, a fortune hunter twice her age, to whom she was briefly married. In 1930 William Randolph Hearst hired her with no experience as editor-publisher of his ailing Washington Herald, which she would eventually transform into the Washington Times-Herald.  An overview of the Tribune Group is quite informative.

[10] That discovery came in 1996 when accusations were made that, when her father fled the Soviets after Masaryk’s death, he absconded with a priceless collection of paintings and antiques owned by descendants of Karl Nebrich, an Austrian industrialist. London Times, March 30, 1999. Korbel, as a reward for his services to the exile Czech foreign ministry, in 1945 was given a luxurious first-floor flat at 11 Hradsanke Street in Prague, expropriated from the Nebriches. That flat also contained personal possessions allegedly not part of the reward. When he fled with his family to America in 1948, however, he took those personal possessions as well. The Nebrich family filed a lawsuit in 1999 claiming damages from the Korbel estate.

[11] According to author John H. Davis, Simon Guggenheim was the last indirectly elected U.S. Senator, and his method of being elected was simple: “He would personally finance any state legislator’s campaign for reelection in return for his vote, and once he, Simon, was elected, would help his electors and their families in any way he could.”  John H. Davis, The Guggenheims:  An American Epic (William Morrow  and Company, Inc.:  New York, 1978), p. 247.

[12] The 16th Amendment authorized individual income taxation. It gave Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” The Act exempted from its coverage "any corporation or association organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, or educational purposes, no part of the net income of which inures to the benefit of any private stockholder or individual."

[13] American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958. Hammond, a graduate of Hopkins Grammar School at New Haven, Connecticut, and of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, also graduated from the Royal School of Mines at Freiberg, Saxony in 1879. In 1893 he began his career searching for gold in South Africa, first with Jewish diamond dealer “Barney Barnato,” and a short time later with his rival Cecil Rhodes.

[14] These academies have traditionally trained the most elite men in American society and government. The Andover Academy in Essex County, along the northern coast of Massachusetts, contained the cities of Salem, Peabody, Beverly, Lawrence, Andover, and Newburyport, and was a center for the American opium trade engaged in by certain New England families at the time. It was these families who used their profits to endow institutions of learning. See further discussion at The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin.

[15] William formed one of the group made up chiefly of himself, Henry H. Rogers, and James Stillman of the National City Bank, and which came to be known as the "Standard Oil Gang." They carried on numerous adventurous and audacious promotions in Wall Street, chief of which was the Amalgamated Copper deal which led Thomas W. Lawson to write his sensational denunciation under the title, Frenzied Finance (1905). The years 1898 to 1912 were the golden years of the promoters. William Rockefeller and Rogers went heavily into numerous corporate fields. Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.

[16] He was also president of the United Metals Selling Company, and chairman of the boards of the Andes Copper Mining Company, the Chile Copper Company, and the Chile Exploration Company. He was a director in several banks and corporations. For his church activities and benefactions, Pope Pius XI made him a Knight of St. Gregory the Great in 1923. "John Dennis Ryan," Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.

[17] Source: Newsmakers, Issue 1. Gale Group, 2002.

[18] Source: Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Vol. 23. Gale Group, 2003.

[19] Source: Newsmakers, Issue 1. Gale Group, 2002.

[20] William J. Coughlin, "Into the Outback: How the Young Herbert Hoover Made His Name -- and Fortune -- in Australia," Stanford Magazine.

[21] Several decades previously the Chinese had lost two wars against the British in an effort to keep Chinese trading ports closed to the British East India Company opium.  The Boxer Society was set up to protest the attempts of the Empress Dowager of China to further Westernize their country. See the book by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Dragon Lady : The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China.

[22] Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families, The Vanguard Press©1937 & 1938.

[23] This unattributed quote appears at numerous websites: “The most powerful men in the country do their ‘networking’ here, despite the Grove's motto ‘weaving spiders come not here’ (don't do business in the Grove). At these gatherings men representing the government, military-industrial, and financial sectors meet and make major policy decisions. The Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs, was conceived at the Grove in 1942. Other decisions made at the Grove include who our presidential candidates will be.” 

[24] Ken Silverstein “How the oil tanker Condoleezza Rice lived up to its name,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2001.