Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Following the Forbes Money Trail

Rosemary Forbes Kerry
We now return to the family of Rosemary Forbes, wife of Fred Kerry's son, Richard, John Forbes Kerry's father. John Kerry would go to Yale and be inducted into Skull and Bones in the class of 1966. He became a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, running against another member of Skull and Bones, George Walker Bush, class of 1968.


Small world!





The Forbes Family Tree


Richard Kerry's Father-in-Law

Clarence Hatry of Austin Friars' Trust
After his stint at AIC, James Grant Forbes (Rosemary's father) was, according to Alistair Tayler’s description of him in his book--The House of Forbes, published in Aberdeen in 1937--a director of Austin Friars Trust. This so-called trust was merely a ponzi scheme, built by Londoner Clarence Hatry with fraudulent assets, and set up in 1927 which led to the stock collapse in 1929, triggering the great depression in the United States. [10The public outcry in the aftermath of this scandal led to creation of the Bank for International Settlements--further centralization of the global banking industry.  

Forbes was also a director of Blair & Co., Ltd., a large investment banking company—often associated with the Boston investment bank of Lee, Higginson & Co.—which played a central role in financing the Dawes Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War I. [11] This relationship with Blair & Co. would place him in contact with the central players who devised the means of creating and financing a global one-world government.


The French Connection

James Grant Forbes and his wife, the former Margaret Winthrop, more about whose family  appears in "The Untitled Aristocracy," reared eleven children in France including John Kerry’s mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry. At the time World War I began, Grant Forbes was living in Paris, where, according to the Boston Globe reporters’ interpretation of his papers, he was involved in “intelligence or security matters.” 

Excerpt from JOHN F. KERRY by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton:

There is a hint from the Forbes historical papers that James [Grant] Forbes played some kind of role in U.S. intelligence or security matters. In his Harvard class history, he said that he had worked "with American security business and ... been on several interesting special missions, notably in 1922 to Moscow and Albania, and in 1924 to Persia. More recently, I have spent considerable time in Germany and Italy," he wrote in 1926.

Two years later, Forbes acquired a magnificent estate named Les Essarts in the Brittany resort town of Saint Briac, where he and his family spent many summers. During the 1920s and 1930s, Forbes played a major role in setting up the coal and steel business in Europe, as well as working in locations from the Balkans to Iran. Most notably, he worked closely with the famed Jean Monnet, who had played a role in the development of the failed League of Nations after World War I and tried to forge a union between Great Britain and France at the beginning of World War II. Failing in that venture, Monnet worked with U.S. officials on post-World War II recovery plans and on a scheme to unite Europe – an effort that eventually led to the creation of today's European Union.

The Forbes family says that Monnet and Forbes had a business relationship, although the details are unclear. One hint of their relationship comes from a letter that Forbes wrote to a relative on April 22, 1938, from Shanghai. Forbes was concerned about the effort by Communists to take over China.  
"Monnet has been in Paris, but is now in New York," Forbes wrote to one of his relatives, W. Cameron Forbes in Boston. 'We have been working on a plan which may be helpful to the Chinese, but it is a very long shot, and probably won't meet with the favor of Washington, so please don't say anything to anybody about it. The railway contract with the French, to connect the Indochina system with Nanking [China], has at least been signed after many postponements. I am planning to stay here all summer to relieve Mazot, Monnet's regular Shanghai representative ...." Forbes then expressed thanks for inviting his daughter, Rosemary [John Kerry's mother], "to keep house for you." [12] (emphasis added)

This passage quoted above opens up many more questions about Forbes’ business operations than it answers. First is his connection to Jean Monnet, often called the “godfather” of the European Union. [13]  Monnet was born in Cognac, France, where his family owned a brandy company near the city of Bordeaux—which had been a port of call of the Forbes triangular trading network for more than a century prior to World War I. The Monnets were descended from a group of French Huguenots who, like the Forbes clan, had been involved in global mercantilism and investment banking for many generations. In 1906, when Jean was only eighteen, his father sent him to Canada to work with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Hudson’s Bay began as a chartered company in England set up as a trading monopoly in Canada, and its later financial history is intertwined with the highest echelons of British oligarchical and banking families, many of whom would have been trading partners with the Forbes and Monnet families.

A letter written in 1816 by a cousin, Robert Bennet Forbes, gives evidence of a working relationship with Jardine-Matheson’s predecessor company, which a century later acquired control of Hudson’s Bay. [14] William Jardine’s heirs, the Keswicks, continued in the opium trade but also became directors of Hudson’s Bay Company, a board interlocked with the directorates of the Bank of England and with British merchant banks, such as Hambro’s and Lazard Brothers.

Hudson Bay Transporting and Insurance Agency became a tool for Monnet in 1911 to use in marketing his family’s French Cognac. Monnet's Cognac firm, United Vineyard Proprietors Co., became the sole supplier of brandy to Hudson Bay mail-order merchandising for distribution in Canada. [15] Hudson Bay then negotiated a separate contract with the French government to furnish it, on credit, agricultural products, raw materials and arms and ammunition. During World War I the company allowed its ships to be used as transport for British government operations, and in 1918 Monnet worked with the Allied Maritime Transport Committee—thus acting as a logistics liaison between the Allied forces. Since the ships were furnished by Hudson’s Bay, Monnet must have had contact with the company’s Governor, Lord Strathcona, who was replaced in 1914 by Sir Robert Molesworth Kindersley, also a director of Sun Alliance Assurance Co., a firm founded in 1824 by N.M. Rothschild; Lord Kindersley was also chairman of the board of directors of Lazard Brothers. [16]   This model was a new approach at that time for financing a war, but it has become familiar in our present age—using private corporations to provide public functions, with the money flowing through contract obligations rather than through the sale of bonds, as in previous days.

From War to Reconstruction – a Familiar Tune

At the very young age of 31 Monnet was appointed to assist in negotiations for the French at the Versailles Peace Conference, where he worked with his American counterpart, John Foster Dulles, to work out monetary details to structure war debts and raise the money to rebuild Europe. Monnet’s work with Hudson’s Bay Company and its elite board of directors was a great asset to him in economic planning for world government. He and Dulles worked alongside John Maynard Keynes sorting out who owed money to whom after the war and effecting the most practicable manner of dividing up the spoils. The Versailles treaty was later formalized into a financial contract for loan repayment and reconstruction in 1924 under the supervision of Charles G. Dawes.

Monnet had been given the role of Assistant Secretary General at the League of Nations in 1919. He resigned that position in 1926 to become vice-president of Blair and Co., the same investment company in which Kerry’s grandfather was a director, serving as its representative in France.   Blair and Co. negotiated French and other loans on the U.S. markets during the war. Monnet’s papers reveal that he received business referrals from Dulles and Lazard Brothers’ banker Robert Brand, a member of “the Round Table Group” associated with Robert Brand’s sister-in-law, Lady Nancy Astor.

It was also John Foster Dulles of Sullivan & Cromwell who provided the financial backing for Monnet’s next investment company, Monnet, Murnane & Co., in 1935. George Murnane was an investment banker with the Boston-based firm of Lee, Higginson & Co., a firm founded by relatives of Massachusetts opium-trade families in Boston to make loans and other investments with profits brought into the city from the thriving opium trade. A close relationship existed between Murnane and Andre Meyer, who left the Lazard office in France in 1941 to work in New York.

Curiously, it was Murnane’s firm, Lee, Higginson & Co., which had been the leading bankers for the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger, whose estate was referred by Dulles and Brand to Monnet (and his new partner Murnane) to clean up. Murnane was also a director of Eugene Meyer, Jr.’s company (Allied Chemical & Dye), which also had connections to Lazard. [17]
Monnet’s work for Blair and Co. also brought him into the law offices of Blair’s attorney, John J. McCloy at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. McCloy (who became very close to Monnet) represented John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his sons' trusts, as well as the Chase Manhattan Bank and the seven sisters oil companies, all of which employed the investment banking services of Lazard Freres. Dulles and Lord Brand also arranged for him to assist Chinese loan advisor, T.V. Soong, in 1934 with foreign investment in China.  McCloy would also be appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the Warren Commission to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy; the Warren Commission had been the brainstorm of Joe Alsop, an adviser to LBJ, who was related to the opium family of Forbes through another Russell & Co. partner, Eugene Delano (not coincidentally a partner in Brown Brothers Bank).

Lure of Lucre – Markets in the Far East

The letter mentioned earlier in the Boston Globe excerpt was written from Shanghai by Kerry’s grandfather, James Grant Forbes on April 22, 1938 and addressed to his cousin,  William Cameron Forbes. From this letter we can say with certainty that James Grant Forbes, was not only working with Monnet in Shanghai, China, but that he also maintained a close relationship with his somewhat removed cousin, William Cameron Forbes, who had lived in the Philippines since 1904 as Governor General from 1909 to 1913.

Cameron Forbes returned to Massachusetts at that time, where he served as a Harvard Corporation overseer from 1914 to1920 before being appointed by President Harding along with Leonard Wood to the Wood-Forbes Commission in 1921, dispatched to the Philippines for investigative purposes. He also is credited with being a member of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation and trustee of the Carnegie Institution for International Peace. He returned to the Far East as ambassador to Japan at the time of the Manchurian crisis in the early 1930’s. In 1935 he led an economic mission to East Asia. [18]

By 1938, however, at the time the letter was written, Cameron was living in Boston, having invited John Kerry’s mother to come from France to “keep house” for him in an obvious attempt to introduce Rosemary Forbes to eligible young men within Forbes family social circles. W. Cameron Forbes, as evidenced by his Who’s Who record, had a very distinguished career, yet very little is known about him personally. He did not marry or have children.

Mystery pervades his personal life and that of his entire generation of Forbes family members.

Working under cover to reconstruct China

Because of this mystery, the connection between the two cousins becomes quite intriguing, particularly given the circumstances that occurred in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation there and the disclosures that have been made since about gold buried on those islands. [19]  The closeness between James Grant Forbes and Monnet, particularly in China, also raises many questions because of the fact that Monnet’s work fell under the auspices of the League of Nations, a group that the U.S. never joined. Thus it seems likely that any intelligence work conducted by Forbes would not necessarily have been solely on behalf of the United States but rather, perhaps, of another country or group of international bankers and their attorneys. Monnet first arrived in China in 1935, taking as his assistant Lord Perth, the son of the man who had been the first secretary general of the League of Nations. [20] They hired another Frenchman named Henri Mazot as an agent to set up an office for their Dulles-sponsored investment company, Monnet, Murnane & Co., within the French concession in Shanghai, an office in which Forbes was active as well. [21]  

Forbes’ and Monnet’s business in the French concession of Shanghai can be conjectured with some certainty to have brought them into close contact with the legendary T.V. Soong, whose own business in China was intimately connected with the Green Gang Triad that operated out of the French Concession and which was responsible for the rise of Chiang Kai-shek. This gives us great insight into the intelligence circles in which their network was operating. [22]  

The story of the Soong family goes back to their father’s education in a small Methodist college in America in the 1880’s, the influence he wielded as a Christian missionary to his own people, and to the subsequent education of each of his children in similar American Protestant colleges. It is a tale that reeks of long-term planning on the part of businessmen who desired peaceful, even covert, access into the trading centers of the Orient, which they saw as a huge market opportunity. Their influence with the Soongs gave them a secret advantage in China during the regimes of Sun Yat-Sen and his successor Chiang Kai-shek through the Soong women that Sun and Chiang married. Control of the Harvard-educated T.V. Soong not only allowed these businessmen to reap huge fees for loans to China, but it gave them a base from which to oppose any attempt by the Chinese government to expropriate private commercial assets.

The peaceful, albeit covert, attempt by Western business to worm its way into Chinese commerce represented a departure from methods used in the 19th century when wars were fought for the sole purpose of forcing China and Japan to trade with Western merchants. Notably, following the First Opium War waged by the British government against China to open the Chinese markets to opium, the Treaty of Nanking in 1843 opened the ports of Canton, Shanghai and three other ports to the opium trade. [23] In retribution, the emperor was required to pay $6 million to compensate for the opium losses to British traders and other acts committed in defense of Chinese laws, as part of a total $21 million in reparations. Britain, the United States, and France were allowed to conduct business as if the city were their own; each colonial group (comprised of the families and their employees we have discussed previously) living in its own “concession” with its own customs and social hierarchies.

Far Eastern intelligence networks

The French also had a colonial opium empire in French Indochina, which ended in 1954, the same year that the United States became secretly active in Vietnam. [24] John Foster Dulles was then Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration, and his brother Allen was Director of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. But prior to the creation of the CIA in 1947, intelligence operations were conducted through other means; mostly, from what we can gather considering the secrecy involved, through Wall Street bankers on missions abroad to discuss potential loans with foreign governments. What we are seeing in the background of John Kerry’s family is indicative of such a secret operation in the 1930’s. Such intelligence operations were financed by private investment companies set up under government sponsorship by Wall Street bankers and attorneys, who were simultaneously representing some of the wealthiest members of the American and British business community with huge investments outside their own countries.

The Boston Branch

James Grant Forbes would have been a natural choice for working in China. The Forbes family  had a long history in the China trade. Even though James Grant was a descendant of the New York Forbes branch, we know from the letter he wrote to Bostonian William Cameron Forbes that a closeness existed with the Boston branch. The same was true in the previous generation, when his father, Francis Blackwell Forbes, made his botanical study of Chinese opium poppies. Francis also had an uncle, the brother of Episcopal minister John Murray Forbes, named Paul Siemen Forbes (born in New York in1808), who was a bankrupt New York speculator rescued by his wealthy Boston cousin, John Murray Forbes, who managed to bring him into Russell & Co., as well as to have him installed as U.S. Consul in Canton for many years. Paul’s name was associated with a scandal in 1865 as a result of his obtaining a contract to ship black slaves to Haiti—a contract never fulfilled—and being forced to return Congressional funds allocated for the contract. His embarrassment was gratefully relieved by his cousin’s display of influence, which he no doubt reciprocated once he assumed his position as consul in China.

As suspected, the trail has led us back to Massachusetts, to the town of Milton, which became the home of the two sons of Ralph Bennet Forbes. The path from Milton to China, by way of France, intersects the path that leads from New York to France. It is easy to get lost or confused along the way. But when we go backwards through time, we discover remnants of documentation, such as ship logs, which were less shrouded in secrecy. That history gives us a clearer picture of the source of the family’s wealth—the opium dens of China—created by merchant traders hungry for that market. [25] So it is to them that we turn next.

America’s First Merchants to the Far East

We recall that the Rev. John Forbes, British colonial agent in Florida in 1763, had three sons, one of whom moved to New York. The youngest son, Ralph Bennet Forbes, married a Perkins, soon to be the leading family in the up-and-coming trade in opium at that time. James Perkins had a business in Santo Domingo in the West Indies trade, dealing in such goods as coffee and sugar. James’ brother, Thomas, married the daughter of Maj. Gen. Simon Elliot of Boston which created a connection for him through his wife’s cousin who was married to James Magee, captain of a ship owned by Elias Hasket Derby, reputedly the richest man in the United States. [26]  Thus, Thomas was hired by Captain Magee in 1789 for the ship’s voyage to China, during which it was docked in Batavia (later called Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies while they negotiated with its governor and director for the sale of spices.

Five years later, Thomas’s personal memoirs related an account of a visit in Paris with “Mr. Russell, Mr. Higginson, and several others” where they rented a room as close as possible to the action for the purpose of witnesses the execution of Robespierre. [27]   While working for the Derby fleet in Salem, Massachusetts, Thomas Perkins attained the rank of first officer, with Joseph Peabody as first mate, marking “the beginning of a friendship between Perkins and Peabody which later became a business partnership.” [28]  Joseph Peabody died in 1844, survived by son George Peabody, who married Clarissa Endicott. The George Peabody, however, who is associated with the bank later headed by J.P. Morgan, was a cousin—both men being descendants of Francis Peabody who settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts before his death in 1697. Another Peabody cousin married Mary Jane Derby, whose sister Laura Derby Welles married Robert C. Winthrop (another ancestor of John Kerry), who will be discussed in a future essay.

It’s not what you know; it’s whom you know

When Ralph Bennet Forbes married a Perkins, he brought his family into a different class of shipping tycoons. Ralph himself had been engaged in the trade between the West Indies sugar plantations, French vineyards, and other European ports where a variety of commodities could be exchanged. Ralph’s death occurred when his youngest son John Murray was a lad of six years; the boy’s mother, Margaret Perkins Forbes, died a short time later after returning with her sons from France to Massachusetts. Her brothers, James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, who had become partners in their own trading venture based in Milton, Massachusetts, took the boys into their business, training and educating them for their life’s work.[29] At the age of thirteen, the eldest of the boys, Robert Bennet Forbes (born in 1804 in Massachusetts) had sailed on the first of several voyages to China under the command of his uncle.

John Murray was the educated member of the family, attending school first at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then at Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts beginning in 1823. In 1830, the Perkins firm merged with Russell and Co. (created by China trader Samuel Russell in 1823) to become the largest American merchant firm in China. Robert traveled back and forth between the Asian and American continents during Britain’s Opium Wars against China, making a huge profit for the firm. A cousin, John P. Cushing had worked in Canton for twenty-five years, overseeing the market for Turkish opium to assure the greatest price for the American firms. He wrote often to Samuel Cabot, Jr. in an effort to coordinate the arrival of ships into Canton at the peak of demand for the product.

Forbes takes charge of Russell and Company

In 1828 Cushing retired and his task was turned over to John's older brother, Thomas, who was lost at sea on his first return voyage; John found himself thrust into that responsibility. For those Americans wishing to break into Britain’s lucrative opium trade in the Far East, Turkey was an alternative source of the poppy; since in the initial days of the opium trade, the British East India Company had a monopoly on poppies grown in India. For everyone concerned, British and American alike, the problem was that China was the only market at that time for the drug, and the Chinese government wanted to protect its people from it. The British Government, however, took the side of the merchants while at the same time ensuring that a percentage of the huge profits were returned to the Crown. With this as incentive, it fought two wars on the principle that no country had the right to prevent trade in its ports.

Robert Bennet was in China during the build-up to the first opium war, sending information back to his Perkins relatives who had merged with Russell & Co., and continued working for that firm, which had forty-eight members, all of whom lived in China part of the time. [30] He returned to Boston in 1838 to replace cousin Samuel Cabot, Jr. upon his retirement. Robert’s last trip to China as a member of Russell and Co. lasted from 1849 until 1851. At the same time he was acting as the Consul of the United States and Vice-Consul of France. By this time, John Murray Forbes had taken over the Canton job, which included acting as confidential agent for a Mandarin Chinese merchant named Houqua, head of the hong (company) which managed foreign trade for China. [31] Houqua, the wealthiest man in China, was the conduit through which all diplomatic affairs were conducted on behalf of the Chinese government. John Murray Forbes was assigned the duty of handling, under his own name, all of Houqua’s english correspondence involving shipping matters, receiving a commission of ten percent of Houqua’s profits for the trade he handled. This included tea and silks that went out of China, as well as opium coming in. John’s role as Houqua’s agent required him to remain in China longer than he desired, but he returned with his huge fortune in 1836, “attending to the interests of Russell and Company in the United States.” [32]

Russell & Company’s role in Skull and Bones
It was not until the Forbes brothers broke in a new trainee, Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt, that they were able to relieve themselves of the need to be in China to carry on the lucrative work for Russell & Co. [33] It was this same Russell & Co. that in 1856 formally incorporated the Russell Trust that had been created in 1832 as the legal endowment for Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale to which both John Kerry and George W. Bush belong. Yale’s endowment was initiated by donations made in 1718 by another opium trader, Elihu Yale (1649-1721), who was himself an official of the British East India Company. Russell & Co. was taken over in 1895 by a British opium trader called Shewan & Co., later Shewan Tomes (Traders) Limited and through a series of mergers is now Hutchison Whampoa, still heavily involved in opium, as is the British Jardine-Matheson Co. discussed in connection with Jean Monnet. [34]

Skull and Bones is a subject that cannot be dealt with superficially. It has been discussed in more detail in a research project concerning John Kerry’s Winthrop family tree, branching from his grandmother, and from his first wife, Julia Stimson Thorne, whose ancestors are as equally illustrious as Kerry’s.

Notes:
[1-9 are covered in previous post.]

[10] The trust was set up by a speculator named Clarence Hatry and took its name from the square located on land owned by the Marquis of Winchester, who as Wm. Poulet, Lord St. John, received the grant of a large part of the house and precincts of the Augustine Friars from Henry VIII. in 1539; he pulled down the Priory buildings and built Powlet House and afterwards Winchester House. Source: A Dictionary of London, Henry H Harben (1918). Date: 07/07/2004 .

[11]  See contents of the book--The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees van der Pijl.

[12] Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton, JOHN F. KERRY.

[13] Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 97.

[14] The letter, set out in full in L. Vernon Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family (Boston: C.E. Goodspeed, 1927), p.324, states: “Jardin’s house has been doing nearly all the Opium trade on the Coasts, & they have made, it is said a million of dollars since last May. I do not doubt it. Dent & Co. sincerely gave it up, & have done nothing in it. We have washed our hands clear of it, & the balance due us in India is short of Ten thousand dollars, for which we have the security of the chief Superintendent’s receipts & nothing more. I think the British Govmt. Will not pay for the Opium directly, but that they will get it out of China, in some shape or another in time.”


[16] Other directors of Sun Alliance are set out at http://www.mail-archive.com/ ctrl@listserv.aol.comctrl@listserv.aol.com. [since removed] extracted from Eustace Mullins, The World Order.

[17] Can we handle the truth? Who “created” Condi Rice? provides an extensive background on Eugene Meyer and Lazard Freres.

[18] The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press; also in Who Was Who in America, 1926-27.

[19] A brief summary of the gold and other treasure can be found at Rense together with information about how to find out more about it. The website excerpts an article written by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave: 
“In the final stages of work on a biography of Japan's imperial family titled The Yamato Dynasty, we were told that in October 1945, American intelligence agents learned where some of the Japanese loot was hidden in the Philippines, and quietly recovered billions of dollars worth of gold bullion, platinum, and loose diamonds. This information, if true, revealed the existence of an extraordinary state secret, something the United States Government kept from its own citizens for more than half a century. …Early that October, Kojima broke and led [Col. Edward G.] Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the rugged country north of Manila. What they found astounded everyone from General Douglas MacArthur all the way up to the White House. After discussions with his cabinet, President Harry Truman decided to keep the recovery a state secret. …Truman administration set this treasure aside along with Axis loot recovered in Europe, as a secret political action fund to fight communism in the Cold War. Crudely put, it would be used to bribe statesmen and military officers, and to buy elections for anti-communist political parties. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot had originated with US secretary of war, Henry Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a brain-trust thinking hard about recovered Axis plunder, and how it should be handled after the war. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the ''Black Eagle Trust'', after the black eagle emblem of Hitler's Reichsbank in Berlin. The Black Eagle Trust was first discussed in secret during July 1944, when 44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the post-war economy. …To hide the existence of all this treasure, Washington had to tell a number of lies. Especially lies about Japan, which had stolen most of the gold. America wanted Japan to become its anti-communist bastion in Asia, where the mainland was being overrun by communists. Because they remained ''off the books'', these enormous political action funds got into the wrong hands, where they remain to this day. …”
See also David Guyatt's Project Hammer Reloaded.

[20] “John David Drummond, the 17th Earl of Perth, son of Eric Drummond and Angela Constable Maxwell, was born into the political milieu; his father was a career diplomat, who had served as private secretary to the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, attended the Paris peace conference in 1919, served as the first secretary general of the League of Nations, and in late life served as Ambassador to Rome. Educated at Downside and Trinity, Cambridge, and looking to restore the family's fortunes, Lord Perth embarked on a banking career. On the outbreak of war he was sent to Paris to help Noel Coward run a propaganda office, and on the fall of France, returned to England to work in the War Cabinet office and at the Ministry of Production. After the war he joined Schroders; he succeeded to the Earldom in 1951. As both a successful banker and as a man of great integrity, he caught the attention of Harold Macmillan, and in 1956 he was appointed Minister of State for Colonial Affairs.” 

[21] http://wwwarc.iue.it/pdf/inv-jmds.pdf and http://www.jean-monnet.ch/anglais/pArchives/archMonnet.htm [both since removed].

[22] For a history of the phenomenal Soong family dynasty, and the role Soong, his sisters, and their father have played in the Westernization of Chinese politics and trade, one must read The Soong Dynasty by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave. See a synopsis.


[24] In 1887 France formed Cochin China, Cambodia, Annam and Tonkin into a union of Indochina, with a governor-general at its head; Laos was added to the union in 1893. In 1940 Japan received an interest in the northern part of Indochina (Vietnam), which threatened the United States’ territorial interest in the Philippines. Even before the end of the war, the French announced plans for a federation of Indochina within the French Union, with greater self-government for the various states. The federation was accepted in Cambodia and Laos. Vietnamese nationalists, however, demanded (1945) the complete independence of Annam, Tonkin, and Cochin China as Vietnam, and after Dec., 1946, these regions were plunged into bitter fighting between the French and the extreme nationalists, oftentimes led by Communists. The war in Vietnam dragged on for years, culminating in the French defeat. The Geneva Conference in 1954 effectively ended French control of Indochina. http://www.bartleby.com/65/in/Indochin.html [since removed]

[25] A good overview of the growth of the opium trade among American merchants can be found in Kris Millegan’s “Boodle Boys”.

[26] Derby—son of Captain Richard Derby and Lydia Garnder Derby—controlled the “greatest fleet of merchant ships in the history of Salem shipping.” Mary Caroline Crawford, Famous Families of Massachusetts, Vol. Two (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1930), p. 292. As a pioneer in the trade in the East Indies, he was reputed to be the richest man in the U.S., with the further reputation of being the purveyor of certain types of intelligence—such as taking news to London of the Battle of Lexington, to George Washington of the signing of the peace treaty in Paris in 1783. “His were the first American ships which carried cargoes of cotton from Bombay to China.” [p. 293.]

[27] Mary Caroline Crawford, Famous Families of Massachusetts, Vol. One (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1930), p. 201.

[28] Joseph Peabody died in 1844, survived by son George Peabody, who married Clarissa Endicott. The George Peabody, however, who is associated with the bank later headed by J.P. Morgan, was a cousin—both men being descendants of Francis Peabody who settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts before his death in 1697. Another Peabody cousin married Mary Jane Derby, whose sister Laura Derby Welles married Robert C. Winthrop (another ancestor of John Kerry), who will be discussed in a future essay. Crawford, Famous Families of Massachusetts, Vol. Two, p. 299.

[29] Margaret Perkins had four sisters, who married other notable men in the shipping trade: Nancy, married to Robert Cushing, was mother of John Perkins Cushing; Mary married Dr. Abbot, in charge of the Phillips Academy at Exeter; Esther first married T. Doubleday and later Josiah Sturgis; and Eliza married Samuel Cabot, Jr. who handled the J. and T.H. Perkins office in Boston. Another brother, Samuel G. Perkins, married Barbara Higginson. See Crawford, Vol. One, p. 201.

[30] Crawford, Vol. One, p. 297.

[31] “The first Chinese merchant to be called Howqua by Westerners was Wu Kuo-ying (1731-1800). Wu Kuo-ying's third son was Wu Ping-chien. Wu Bingjian is another way of romanizing the Chinese characters in Wu's name. One of his personal names was Wu Tun-yuan. These are all the same person, Wu Ping-chien (1769-1843). He became a member of the merchant guild in Canton, and in 1827, with the approval of the Western merchants of Hong Kong, he changed the name by which he was known to Westerners to Howqua, the name previously applied to his father. In 1826 he was succeeded by his fourth son Wu Yuan-hua (1801-1833), the third Howqua. After his death he was succeed as Hong (the guild of merchants that monopolized the Western trade) merchant by his brother Wu Ch'ung-yueh (1810-1863), also known to Western merchants as Howqua. (He was the fifth son of Wu Ping-chien). Wu Ch'ung-yueh and family had cordial relations with Russell & Co.” The above information comes from entries under the respective names in the definitive reference work EMINENT CHINESE OF THE CH'ING PERIOD, Arthur Hummel, comp. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1944). See "Chinese Account of the Opium War"

[32] Crawford, Vol. One, p. 299.

[33] The Delano and Roosevelt families’ connection to Russell & Co. is set out in detail in a book by Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt (Harper & Row, 1985), beginning at p. 70.

[34] Source: http://www.chamber.org.hk/info/the_bulletin/april2001/founding.asp and http://www.pwinn.com/tomorrowstigers.htm. Both websites have since been removed.

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