Control by a "Hidden Hand"

Is it a mere coincidence so much of today's wealth can be traced back to opium barons of the past? This blog is about Gold--the symbol of political, financial and global power--and our primary interest is in tracking the historical roots of today's power. In 2004 I was fascinated by my electoral choice for the American Presidency coming down to two men inducted into a secret society that annually "taps" only 15 new members. What are the odds of that? Would we learn something about how our world is controlled--and by whom--to look into the background of one of these men? Thinking at the time that those who supported George W. Bush were so embarrassed by his policies that they would switch to his opponent, I chose to research John Forbes Kerry. His ancestry is equally illustrious and even more shocking.

Who "Controls" Our World?

"Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand."

    Benjamin Disraeli, speaking through fictional character

    Sidonia, based on Lord Rothschild, in Coningsby 

Rosemary Forbes Kerry's Ancestors

Born in Paris in 1913, Rosemary Forbes Kerry overlooked her husband's parentage, finding him acceptable perhaps because he had attended Phillips Academy and had just graduated from Yale in 1937 when they met at her parents' summer home in Brittany. They married in 1941, shortly after he received a degree from Harvard Law School. 

Rosemary's father (described in previous post) descended from the old American Forbes family in Massachusetts -- a shipping family with strong connections to France since at least 1813, but with documented global trading partners at least a century before that date. [2] The French province of Brittany’s Celtic tradition—akin to Wales, Ireland and Scotland—neatly commingled with the Forbes clan’s ancient Scottish roots.

The first of the Forbes ancestors in America was Rev. John Forbes of Strathdon, Scotland, who, in 1763, was appointed Judge in the British Admiralty at St. Augustine, East Florida. He became Anglican minister of the church after the French and Indian War treaty gave the Spanish territory to England. Rev. Forbes, then a young man, arrived with the colony’s newly appointed governor—a Scotsman named Sir James Grant, who was related to the minister’s mother. In 1769 Rev. Forbes made his ties to America permanent by marrying another Scottish emigrant, Dorothy Murray, at Brush Hill, Milton, Massachusetts. The wedding occurred only seven years prior to the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the war against England.

Rev. John returned to Scotland, where he died in 1783, but two of his sons remained in America to establish branches of the family name in New York and Boston. The youngest son, Ralph Bennet Forbes, who learned the shipping business as an apprentice to his uncle, John Murray, in Virginia, made his first journey to the Bordeaux wine region of France in 1795 with a shipload of rice and tobacco, which he traded for brandy, a product which his ship then transported to Hamburg, the center of the old Hanseatic merchant associations, before making the return voyage, possibly loaded with salt and other commodities from that port. In this triangular fashion he spent much of his life, at times making his home in France, where two of his three sons were born. He was one member of a large family of adventuring merchants who had traveled the world in such fashion for many generations.

Ralph Bennet had two older brothers, the second of which, John Murray Forbes (born 1771), never married. After graduating from Harvard in 1787, John studied law and was appointed as consul-general to Hamburg and Copenhagen in 1801 and then to Argentina in 1820, where he became chargé d’affaires, and died there in 1831. These Forbes ancestors illustrate the Forbes role as part of a global trading network with recognized political needs abroad--that need for protection in foreign ports being the reason the consular service exists.

The New York Forbes Branch

Insurrection in Santo Domingo

The eldest of the three brothers, James Grant Forbes (born 1769), became the progenitor of the New York branch of the Forbes family—the branch from which John Kerry stems. He was involved in the West Indies trade, based in what was then the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, noted for its sugar cane plantations and molasses production, until a slave insurrection in 1792 disrupted commerce and eventually led to Spain’s ceding its territory to France. In 1804 James Grant married Frances Elizabeth Blackwell in New York. He joined the army during the War of 1812, attaining the rank of colonel before his death in 1825.

James Grant  and Elizabeth Blackwell Forbes reared three sons in New York. The eldest, Rev. John Murray Forbes, born in 1807 in New York, returned to Aberdeen, Scotland in 1836 to serve as Heir-General to his grandaunt, Mrs. Margaret Forbes Paterson—an indication that in the four decades since his grandfather had died in Scotland had not broken the connection with the Scottish relatives. Rev. Forbes returned to New York in 1837 and married Anne Howell, who stems from the same family as Benjamin Howell Griswold, former head of Alex. Brown Bank. 

James Grant Forbes would become Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in the Greenwich Village area of New York and was noted for emphasizing High Church practices, laying more stress upon the outward ecclesiastical organization of the Church than upon emotional religion in opposition with the “Oxford Movement” of that period. [5]

Chinese Poppy for Opium

One of the sons born to Rev. Forbes was Francis Blackwell Forbes, who, through contacts with the Boston branch of the family, moved to Shanghai and became a merchant in the “China trade,” as well as an avid student of the uses of the Chinese opium poppy. [6]  

Is it a "mere coincidence" so much of today's wealth (as well as the endowments that poured into Yale and Harvard) can be traced back to opium barons of the past?

The Second James Grant Forbes

The youngest of Francis B. Forbes’ three sons (born in Shanghai, China in 1879) was named for his grandfather—James Grant Forbes—and would become the grandfather of Presidential candidate John Kerry.

Shanghai Bund

Kerry’s maternal grandfather spent his infancy in Shanghai, a heavily commercialized port city which became home to numerous British, French and American trading merchants at the conclusion of the opium wars. [7] Although he was sent first to boarding school in England to be educated, he later graduated from Harvard (Class of 1901). [8] After practicing law in the United States for a time, he traveled the world as an international lawyer and banker, working on railway ventures in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay; encyclopedic references do not, however, state by whom he was employed. [9]   We learn that detail from passport data stored at Ancestry.com, which reveals his employer was the American International Corporation.

 

James Grant Forbes passport

American International Corporation

In the above 1921 passport application (showing a photo of J. Grant Forbes), a letter dated the same date Warren G. Harding was inaugurated as President was attached. Written by the President of the American International Corporation (AIC), Charles A. Stone, who was simultaneously chairman of Stone & Webster Engineering Co. and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wrote to confirm that Forbes was being sent to London on business for AIC. Fred Morris Dearing, assistant Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes in the new Harding administration, submitted an affidavit indicating he had known Forbes since 1917. It should be noted here that one of the directors of Stone & Webster was William Cameron Forbes, a cousin from the Boston branch of the family.

In those days prior to creation of the Office of Strategic Services or the Central Intelligence Agency, the role of collecting intelligence, not performed by the military, was usually carried on within the State Department. We can only wonder at this point what role within AIC Grant Forbes played. At that time Secretary Hughes had already been governor of New York and had served six years as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, before resigning in 1916 to run for President against Woodrow Wilson. He was a believer in international arbitration and justice, often either arguing before or sitting as judge in the international tribunals sponsored by the League of Nations, for which President Wilson (a mere pawn of Colonel Edward M. House from Texas, a close friend of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge) had failed to get approval from Congress. 

It has correctly been stated, that as Secretary of State:

Sec. Charles Evans Hughes   

Hughes was concerned with securing foreign markets for wealthy American banks, such as the one run by John D. Rockefeller. Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover used the Fordney-McCumber Tariff to secure oil markets in the Middle East, especially in modern-day Iraq and Iran. His administration revised Germany's war debts downward through legislation, passed in 1923, known as the Dawes Plan. Hughes also called for a naval conference with nine other nations to freeze naval spending in an effort to reduce spending.

According to Antony C. Sutton, AIC had been founded in 1915, shortly after the Federal Reserve System was passed into law. American investors and bankers were then clamoring to "reconstruct" Europe with funds made during the war years, hoping to cash in on Europe's devastation. During AIC's early years, Stone and Webster Engineering, whose president controlled AIC, had been heavily invested in U.S. electric power and traction street railway systems financed largely by banking firms which supported Democrats. After WWI ended, it expanded into Russia, South America and the Far East.  Rosemary Kerry's uncle, William Cameron Forbes, was  

• chief of the financial department at Stone & Webster from 1897 until 1902 and after that spending much of his life in the Philippines--on the Philippine Commission,
• as secretary of commerce and police in government of Philippine Islands, 1904-08; 
• as vice governor from 1908 to Nov. 10, 1909; 
• as governor general from Nov. 11, 1909 to Sept. 1, 1913, when he resigned. 
• In 1921 Harding sent him back as a member of the Wood-Forbes Mission to investigate matters there.

1921 was the same year Richard Kerry's father (Fred A. Kerry) died in a Boston hotel bathroom when Richard was a young boy of six. On the very day Harding was inaugurated, March 4, 1921, J. Grant Forbes was authorized to travel on behalf of AIC. Four months later, Richard Kerry's parents applied for passports for Fred Kerry to travel to Europe on behalf of an illusive company headed by Boston attorney Daniel J. Lyne, whose partner, Stewart C. Woodworth, had married Coline Macrea Ingersoll in 1917, whose brother Ralph McAlllister Ingersoll (according to the New York Times - Aug 19, 1921 edition):

traveled from Paris to Lyons, Nice, Monte Carlo and Rome by air. He was accompanied by a friend, Roland Hooker of Hartford, Conn.

Only a few months after the above item appeared, it was followed by another society notice in Hooker's hometown newspaper, the Hartford Courant, on October 23, 1921:

ROLAND MATHER HOOKER. Miss Winifred Hollhan, who starred in the film, "The Queen of Sheba," married Roland Mather Hooker of Hartford, at the Hotel Plaza.

Less than a month later, more details about the marriage appeared in the Washington Post on November 17:

Cards were received in Washington last week from Mrs. Francis Maurice Holhan, announcing the marriage of her daughter. Miss Winifred Cartwright Holhan, to Mr. Roland Mather Hooker, of Hartford, Conn. The bride, with her mother, had recently returned from Europe, and on account of the death of her uncle, Judge Andrew X. Monteiro, of Goochland, Va, the wedding, which would have taken place in Durham, N. C., was quietly solemnized at 50 Central Park West, New York City. Mr. and Mrs. Hooker are on an automobile tour from New England to Florida and will be at home after January 1 at Hartford, Conn.

Unless you want to do the research yourself, you really do need to join this blogsite in order to guarantee not to miss hearing who these people really were and others with whom they were in contact. Keep in mind that there was no agency called the Central Intelligence Agency in 1921, and the Office of Strategic Services would not be created until 1939. But both Hooker and Ingersoll were connected to closest thing America had to those spy groups during the interval between the two "world wars".


And it is now clear that the last employer of John Kerry's grandfather, Fred Kerry, before he mysteriously "suicided" was a partner with (1) a high military official, Brig. Gen. Logan; and (2) the brother-in-law of Hooker's friend, Ralph Ingersoll. 


More on these connections a little later, so stay tuned.

NOTES:

[1] deleted after original publication of the article.

[2] John Lauritz Larson, Bonds of Enterprise, McGraw-Hill, 1984.

[5]  The current website for the church states: "In 1845, St. Luke's became a leading proponent of Anglo-Catholic worship in the United States, offering daily services of the Divine Office as well as weekly Sunday eucharists."

[6] The Free Dictionary.

[7] For a discussion of the Opium Wars, see this article by Anthony Spaeth.

[8] James Grant Forbes had four siblings: F. Murray Forbes, Ethel A. Forbes, C. Stewart Forbes, and Evelyn Forbes.

[9] Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton, JOHN F. KERRY: The Complete Biography: By the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best. Chapter One of the book has been excerpted by the Boston Globe and appears online. The only railroad builders with projects in all of those South American countries at that time were Boston-based Frederick Pearson and Percival Farquhar—both of whom were associated with the British firm S. Pearson & Sons owned by Sir Weetman Pearson (Lord Cowdray). The Pearson firm was by 1897 was the world’s largest global construction contractor.