Primer on Controlling People, Using Their Own Money

TAKING THE GOLDEN EGGS

Part I 

© 2004 by Linda Minor

The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people's own money. If the bankers' power were commensurate only with their wealth, they would have relatively little influence on American business.   

Louis Brandeis, Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It [1]

 

Other People's Money

Louis Brandeis in 1912 created a verbal vision for Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” by proposing an ethical code of competitiveness to prevent further monopolistic power. Both Wilson and Brandeis had good intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions are not enough when  power is at stake. Wilson had been set up, as he came to realize before his death.  The very men who put him in the Presidency were the men who wanted to control “the people’s own money.”

Before we explore, at a future date, the role that Woodrow Wilson played in the creation of the Federal Reserve system, we must understand how its predecessor — the J.P. Morgan banking network — functioned “as America’s central bank, and how it stepped into the historic breach between Andrew Jackson’s 1832 veto of the second Bank of the United States and passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.”  [2]

It was a clique centered around the Morgan bankers which would later use Wilson as a pawn. Who they were, and how they got their hands on that money (metaphorically compared by Brandeis to “golden eggs”), is the subject of this article. 

Morgan’s role as central banker has since been superseded by the Federal Reserve System, designed before 1913 by German Jewish bankers who followed a European model. Although the names of the political minions have changed, once we understand how events were shaped (dare we say “manipulated”) by the Morganites, then we can begin to recognize how much control centralized banking interests have over every aspect of our lives today. 

The Role of Skull and Bones in

the Growth of the Morgan Bank

Peabody statue, London's Threadneedle St.

Before 1838, when George Peabody set up a brokerage office in London, there was no real need for a stock exchange in America, since there was no capital surplus large enough to finance the construction of new infrastructure; almost all major capital was raised from foreign investment. 

Opium changed that. Profits from illicit trade in China were such that American entrepreneurs were able to bring huge profits back and reinvest them as equity in such industries as New England textile factories and railroads. Nevertheless, the profits were not sufficient initially to finance all the demands for funding of public infrastructure projects desired by state and municipal governments. Peabody marketed such bonds and other securities in London to raise necessary funds for roads, canals and the like.

By 1868, Peabody had died, leaving his partner Junius S. Morgan in charge of the London banking house. Son of Joseph Morgan of Hartford, Connecticut, Junius Morgan in 1836 married Juliet Pierpont—daughter of John (1785-1866) and Mary Sheldon Lord Pierpont—who came from a long line of Congregationalist ministers. Juliet's paternal great-great-grandfather, the Rev. James Pierpont (Harvard 1681), was a founder of Yale College, and his wife was the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, a Puritan, who founded the colony of Connecticut, which had adopted the first written constitution. [3]  On her maternal side, the Lord family would subsequently become intricately involved in Yale's Skull and Bones society as well as intermarried with families which owned Brown Brothers investment bank which merged with the Harriman banks in 1931.[3a]

 

Rev. Pierpont’s daughter Sarah, who in 1728  had married the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, would later become the grandmother of both accused traitor Aaron Burr and of Northern Secessionist Timothy Dwight—president of Yale from 1795 until 1817. [4]

But Burr would not be the only member of the Pierpont family who lost faith in the policies of America's elected representatives by the early years of the 19th century. Juliet’s own father, John Pierpont (Yale 1804), who practiced law in Newburyport (Essex County), Massachusetts, protested against the War of 1812 and the embargo before moving to Boston to study for the ministry. The Pierponts, in addition to being an aristocratic family with branches that controlled numerous pools of wealth, had long been connected to a faction which opposed the way majority rule operated in the American Republic.

Junius and Juliet Morgan’s eldest son, John Pierpont Morgan, was educated in Vevey, Switzerland and at the University of Göttingen, Germany, before working with his father in London. After serving as the Peabody and Junius Morgan bank’s New York agent for several years, he formed J.P. Morgan and Company in 1895, five years after his father had died. Connections to Yale’s elite came from his maternal grandmother, Mary Sheldon Lord, a descendant of both the Lord and Lynde families, which are strongly represented among the Skull and Bones secret society.

The Pierponts were related not only to the Edwards and Burr families, but to the opium trading Russell family. Sarah Pierpont’s sister Mary, who married William Russell, was mother to Samuel, who founded Russell and Company in 1824, and to Rev. Nodiah Russell, a founder of Yale and the grandfather of William Huntington Russell. The ties to Yale made it possible for Morgan to become banker of choice for the Skull and Bones members who had gained positions as directors and trustees of institutions that had pools of money to invest, according to the original vision in 1832.

[See “Freedom Through Order”]

Cartoon about Tammany Hall thievery, 1871

By the 1870’s, however, a second generation had assumed control, and they were not satisfied with simply investing existing capital. They wanted much more than that. Their vision was of turning the New York Stock Exchange into a goose whose golden eggs would be theirs for the stealing. This second generation was composed of men who had been led to believe they were special, privileged and not answerable to the masses. There is a reason, as we shall see below, why they would become known as the “robber barons,” and their age as “gilded.”

 

Henry Stimson’s Bones Network

In 1856 a special act of the Connecticut legislature gave the Russell Trust Association the status of a corporation. A New Haven attorney named Henry Dyer White (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1851),  was named as its treasurer. [5] 

The earliest progenitor of this American branch of the White family, Elder John White, had arrived in Hartford, Conn. in 1636 with the Hooker company. 

In 1653 he was granted various tracts in Middletown, evincing an intention to remove thither. Rev. Thomas Hooker dying in 1647, the divergence of views on church matters reached such a pass that John White, Elder Goodwin, and others in 1659 founded the town of Hadley, in Mass., where he held many offices. He returned to Hartford in 1670 and united with the South Church and became an elder, hence his title, and it exempted him from holding town office or performing civil services. But as an arbitrator; referee, and counsellor in ecclesiastical matters, he performed good services to the churches.

Click to enlarge.

Henry Dyer White, b. Sept. 24, 1830; d. May 18, 1905. 

From the New Haven Register:

Henry D. White, the oldest member of the law firm of White Brothers, New Haven, died yesterday at the home of his daughter, Miss Elizabeth T. White. He had been in ill health for three years, but attended to his law practice up to this week, when his condition became critical. He was seventy-five years of age, the son of the late Henry White, also a lawyer. The system of keeping title abstracts to real estate established by the latter has been continued by the sons and these records are generally accepted by banks in real estate transfers.

Mr. White was graduated from Yale in 1851 and afterward studied law. He was a trustee of the New Haven Savings Bank for fifty years and was its counsel and also a director of the New Haven County National Bank.

The following resolutions were passed May 19, 1905, by the New Haven County Bar Association:

The bar of New Haven county desire to place on record in this minute a brief tribute to the memory of their friend and associate, the late Henry D. White, an honored member of the legal profession, and for more than fifty years a practitioner at this bar.

As a mark of respect for his memory, the president of the bar association is requested to present this minute to the Superior Court for New Haven County, and ask that it be spread upon its records, and to cause a copy of the same suitably engrossed, to be transmitted to the family of the deceased.

 LOUIS H. BRISTOL, JOHN W. ALLING, HENRY STODDARD, Committee.

Henry Dyer White's mother, Martha Sherman, was a daughter of Roger Sherman (1768-1856) of New Haven and granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence by that same name (1721-1793). The Whites, who had married in 1830, lived in New Haven, where they displayed a painting of her grandfather, Roger Sherman "the Signer," who had been Yale's treasurer the decade prior to the start of the revolution. Roger the Signer had numerous children, but the remainder of his estate after certain specified bequests of property was devised to six daughters, including:

• Rebecca, eldest child of his second wife, married Simeon Baldwin; she was a few years older than the younger Roger Sherman, Mary's grandfather.
• Mehitabel Sherman Barnes Evarts (1774–1851) was the mother of William Maxwell Evarts (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1937), famed attorney.

Mary White Stimson's mother was one of five daughters of Roger Sherman, junior, and each sister was married to a man extremely influential in Connecticut society. It was undoubtedly the Sherman influence which gave the Whites their standing among Yale's elite class. The year Henry Dyer White incorporated the Russell Trust Association, 1856, was the same year his wife's grandfather, Roger Sherman, died, after a long life of business in New Haven, leaving six sons and five daughters.

Antony Sutton mentions in his classic book, America's Secret Establishment, that another member of what he terms “The Order” was Henry Dyer White's brother, Charles Atwood White (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1854), father of Mabel White, who married Henry Stimson five years after his 1881 graduation from Yale.

Whist, the game for the elites

The couple first met while young Stimson was a Yale student at a whist party given by the Whites’ next-door neighbor, William Dwight Whitney, Professor of Sanskrit and member of the Massachusetts Whitney family closely tied to the Order. [6] 

Prof. Whitney was married to Elizabeth Wooster Baldwin, whose grandmother was Rebecca Sherman Baldwin: 

William D. Whitney married Elizabeth Wooster, daughter of Roger Sherman and Emily (Perkins) Baldwin, of New Haven; her father, a lawyer of the highest rank, had been governor of Connecticut and senator in congress, and inherited his name from Roger Sherman, the well-known signer of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the committee charged with drawing it up, whose grandson he was. They have had six children, three sons and three daughters; of these are living one son born 16 Aug 1857, Edward Baldwin, a lawyer in New York City (firm Burnett & Whitney, 67 Wall Street), and the three daughters. 

Another sister, Mehitabel Sherman, married Jeremiah Evarts and was the mother of famous attorney, William M. Evarts. These families were all closely connected during Yale's days in the early 19th Century. Mabel’s grandfather, Henry White, was a New Haven lawyer who had five sons initiated into the Order, several of whom became attorneys and worked at various times in his [7] firm. The Whites lived at  87 Trumbull, which today is part of Yale’s campus. [8] Skull and Bones was the social circle into which Stimson’s marriage brought him.

(See Part II)

NOTES:

[1] From Harper's Weekly, November 29, 1913.

[2] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan:  An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance  (New York:  Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), p. 77.

[3] “Governor Winthrop, … was an aristocrat to the core. He believed in the government of the many by the few, and it was he that influenced the Bay colony to create freemen out of the citizens but slowly, and to limit the suffrage to members of the Church. To this Hooker could not agree. A sharp controversy ensued between him and the governor of Massachusetts. To Winthrop he wrote that, ‘In matters which concern the common good, a general council chosen by all, to transact business which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole.’ ” History of the U.S.A. website

[3a] James Couper Lord, who died in 1869, married Margaret Hunter Brown, daughter of James Brown, then the head of the well-known firm of New York bankers, Brown Bros. & Co. See Lyman Horace Weeks. Prominent families of New York; being an account in biographical form of individuals and families distinguished as representatives of the social, professional and civic life of New York city. (page 64 of 110)

[4] In 1793 Dwight wrote to a friend: "A war with Great Britain we, at least in New England, will not enter into. Sooner would ninety-nine out of a hundred separate from the Union, than plunge into such an abyss of misery."

[5] The resolution appears in Fleshing out Skull & Bones: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society, edited by Kris Millegan, a book available for purchase through TrineDay Books.  It was signed by William H. Russell, John S. Beach, Henry B. Harrison, Daniel C. Gilman, Henry T. Blake and Henry D. White, constituting the Russell Trust Association as a “body corporate and politic” for the purpose of the “intellectual and moral improvement of its members, and for that only” to have perpetual succession in law with the right to purchase, receive, hold and convey title to real estate up to a value of $15,000. This resolution appears to have been approved by a special law passed by the Connecticut legislature (most likely that set out in Volume IV, Page 1201; Volume VI, Page 850; and Volume 24, Page 432 of the special acts of the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut). Amendments were dated July 5, 1870 to change the charter so that the value of property was increased to $350,000; on March 24, 1887 to ratify new by-laws; on July 9, 1943 to increase the value of real estate to $700,000; and on November 12, 1943 to change the name to RTA Incorporated, formed under Connecticut’s Nonstock Corporation Act as an educational organization.  A report filed with the State of Connecticut in 1962 indicates that George H. Walker, Jr. (George H.W. Bush’s “Uncle Herbie”) was treasurer of the group, with his address listed as Dingletown Road in Greenwich, CT.  A subsequent filing dated February 1997 shows one of the directors of the group to be Jonathan Bush with a residence address of 2 Sutton Place South, Apt. 18D in New York City with a business address of 55 Whitney Avenue in New Haven, CT.  See Antony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment:  An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones (published privately, 1986, at p. 253), available through Trine Day publishers.

[6] Godfrey Hodgson, THE COLONEL:  The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 38.  The 1870 U.S. census for New Haven, CT reveals that Professor William Dwight Whitney lived next door to Mabel’s grandparents.  According to the online 1911 Encyclopedia:  “His interest in the study of Sanskrit was first awakened in 1848, and he at once devoted himself with enthusiasm to this at that time little-explored field of philological labor. After a brief course at Yale with Professor Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901), then the only trained Orientalist in the United States, Whitney went to Germany (1850) and studied for three years at Berlin, under Weber, Bopp and Lepsius, and at Tubingen (two summer semesters) under Roth, returning to the United States in 1853. In the following year he was appointed professor of Sanskrit in Yale, and in 1869 also of comparative philology. He also gave instruction in French and German in the college until 1867, and in the Sheffield scientific school until 1886. An urgent call to a professorship at Harvard was declined in 1869. The importance of his contributions to science was early and widely recognized. He was elected to membership in numerous learned societies in all parts of the world, and received many honorary degrees, the most notable testimonial to his fame being his election on the 3ist of May 1881, as foreign knight of the Prussian order pour le merite for science and arts to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Carlyle. In 1870 he received from the Berlin Academy of Sciences the first Bopp prize for the most important contribution to Sanskrit philology during the preceding three years. This edition of the Taittiriya-Pratisakhya (Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. ix.). He died at New Haven, Connecticut, on the 7th of June 1894.”  See The encyclopædia britannica: a dictionary of arts, sciences ..., Volume 28 edited by Hugh Chisholm; Classic Encyclopedia (1911).

[7]The whist-playing professor’s brother, Edward Payson Whitney, was a medical student in the same Skull and Bones class with Mabel White Stimson’s father; another brother, Josiah Dwight Whitney, was an eminent geologist who surveyed western American regions for valuable mineral deposits before he became a Harvard professor. Half-brother James Lyman Whitney was in the 1856 Skull and Bones class with Chauncey Depew, attorney for Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad. Depew was a member of the newly created Republican Party in 1858 and became the first minister to Japan, appointed by President Johnson in 1866; however, he resigned before departure to work for Commodore Vanderbilt—building the New York Central Railroad. He was a member of the Yale Corporation from 1893 to 1906.

[8] The Family Forest Descendants of Thomas Mitchell genealogy:  Martha [Sherman] married Henry WHITE son of Dyer WHITE and Hannah WETMORE on 7 Jan 1830 in New Haven, , Connecticut, USA. Henry was born on 5 Mar 1803 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He died on 7 Oct 1880 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. They had the following children:  Henry Dyer WHITE was born on 24 Sep 1830 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.; Charles Atwood WHITE was born on 11 Nov 1833 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He died on 18 Jun 1909 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Charles married Frances Spencer EATON on 15 Oct 1861 in New York, , New York, USA. Frances was born on 18 Jul 1836 in Ft. Gratiot, , Michigan, USA. She died on 14 Aug 1911 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Willard Wetmore WHITE was born on 7 Feb 1836 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.; Roger Sherman WHITE; Thomas Howell WHITE; Oliver Sherman WHITE; George Edward WHITE.

   Most of these names are all reflected on the census records for 1860 and 1870 as living in the White household. The 1860 census for New Haven shows Henry White and his wife Martha, living with sons Roger S., Thomas H., Oliver S. and  George E., with Henry D. White, a lawyer, age 29, living in the previous residence with Mrs. Eunice White, age 76. The 1870 New Haven census shows lawyer Henry White, married to Martha, with a son Roger S. White, age 32, a lawyer, living in the same house; the 1900 census for New Haven shows Charles White working as a lawyer and living at 87 Trumbull.  Mabel Wellington White was born in 1866 in Astoria, New York to Charles A. White.

   The Whites’ house was located in the same block as 37 Hillhouse—the home where George W. Bush lived when his father was a student at Yale. The Bush residence is now Yale’s Department of Economics, and Yale’s president lives at 43 Hillhouse.  See website for Farnam Guest House, which states: "Henry Farnam (1803-1883), made his fortune in the railroads in the middle 1800's and contributed a great deal of money to the early beginnings of Yale. Through his generosity, Farnam Hall, the freshman dorm at Yale, and The President's House at 43 Hillhouse were erected....The Farnams built this lovely Georgian Colonial, 616 Prospect Street, in 1934 and moved here when their residence, 43 Hillhouse Avenue, was bequeathed to the president of Yale."