Seeing the World Whole

When I first began to write historical research articles about financial subjects for Sanders Research Associates early in 2004, I was quite intrigued by the fact that voters that November would have a "choice" between two candidates for President, each of whom had been a member of a secret society that had existed at Yale University since 1832. (Note: Skull and Bones has been discussed at this blog several times. (Use the search engine provided to the right to locate that previous research on this blog or click Skull and Bones in the labels list.)

What are the odds in a "democracy" of almost half a billion people in the United States, we end up with only two candidates, two years apart at Yale, each chosen by the same secret society which adds only 15 new members each year? What class of people is promoting these two men, I wondered. Wouldn't any discerning voter with an ounce of curiosity have similar questions? As I have revised this original research almost a decade later for publication on this blog, I have finally begun to realize what class that was. It was the same class of ancestors Franklin Roosevelt was accused of betraying by his policies, as you will learn below, for, surprising to me, was the fact that Kerry and Roosevelt were hewn from the same cloth!

Indeed, the world is not what it seems. A decade ago, an image arose in my mind of Lewis Carroll's Alice, perched upon a mantel, peering through a mirror into what was not her reflection, but into a totally different world--an alternative universe not recognized by most people. Catherine Austin Fitts referred to my attempt to merge the two worlds into one as "seeing the world whole," refusing to accept either world alone as reality. 

My research proposed to look behind is the hagiographic biographies of our governing elites and delve instead into the source from which their wealth was derived. That is always my focus, much as Oliver Stone's movie version of Woodstein's fictionalized Watergate tale reminded us: Forget the myth the media has created... Just follow the money!

This research was previously published at the website, Minor Musings, as part of a series styled "Election 2004: Can We Handle the Truth?" and titled "John Forbes Kerry: Globalists Through a Looking Glass." 

by LINDA MINOR © 2004 (Revised 2013)

As the 2004 election approaches, the American electorate nestles dreamily in Wonderland, pondering what changes John Kerry might bring—unaware of the heritage which brought him into being. Kerry’s roots lie, however, in another world—a world that, once seen, destroys that “golden gleam” of childhood and innocence. Once we pass, as Alice did, through a looking glass, we will see another John Kerry, leading us into a maze, each entrance of which opens into a path of mystery and intrigue.

Alice, stepping through the mirror into a different world.

In a Wonderland they lie, 
Dreaming as the days go by, 
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam— 
Life, what is it but a dream?

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

On this side of the looking glass, Kerry portrays a liberal, Democratic exterior, though it is well known that he has been cultivated all his life by persons of wealth. The maze of his heritage—through all its twists and turns—reveals much more about how the world works than it tells us about the man John Kerry would like to be.

Maze of mystery

It is apparent that he has already been chosen to replace George W. Bush. [From the author: Boy, was I wrong in my prediction!] The world we will see as we enter through the looking glass may help us understand who made that choice. Step through the looking glass, into the maze, and see for yourself the world John Kerry was born into.

John Kerry's Mother and her Roots

Rosemary Isabel Forbes Kerry

John Kerry's mother, Rosemary Isabel Forbes, has a fascinating ancestry from both her Forbes and Murray roots from her father's side. She was born in Paris in 1913, and through some strange accident of fate, or perhaps a lapse in parental supervision, would become the wife of Richard John Kerry—grandson of a Jewish brewer who emigrated from Austria. Her husband's father worked in Boston as a shoe merchant and committed suicide in 1921. These were not the best ancestors a Forbes would hope for their son-in-law, even though he was a graduate of Yale and of Harvard Law. What is known about Kerry’s father has been disclosed in the Boston Globe series of articles, particularly one published February 2, 2003, which can be read here and here. Also see my additional Kerry research, "Very Different Personages.")

The first of Kerry’s Forbes ancestors bearing that name to arrive in America was Rev. John Forbes of Strathdon, Scotland, who, as a young graduate from Aberdeen, was appointed in 1763 to be a judge in the British Admiralty at St. Augustine, East Florida. That was the same year the Treaty of Paris, ending the French and Indian War, ceded the French territory in Florida to England. Rev. Forbes, arrived a few months after the appointment, in 1764, with the colony’s newly appointed governor—a Scotsman named Sir James Grant, who was allegedly related to Forbes’ mother. 

Dolly Murray Forbes

Only five years later Rev. Forbes would marry the daughter of James Murray, another Scotsman loyal to the British Crown, and his wedding to Dorothy Murray was celebrated on the 300-acre Brush Hill estate in Milton, Massachusetts, which belonged to Dorothy's aunt, Elizabeth Murray Smith. Seven years prior to the Declaration of Independence, war against England already loomed on the horizon, and a revolution against the mother country to which the Murrays remained loyal, threatened all their hard work as well as the connections so important to the lifestyle they had achieved in America.


The Murrays

Dorothy's father was James Murray, who, as we learn from a book called The Loyalists of Massachusetts by James H. Stark (p. 255):

settled at Wilmington, on the Cape Fear River, and purchased a house in town and a plantation of 500 acres and Negro slaves. He was also appointed collector of the Port, and in 1729 he was appointed a member of the Board of Councillors. In 1737 Mr. Murray received news of the death of his mother. This necessitated a journey to Scotland to settle her estate. On returning he brought with him his younger brother and his sister Elizabeth, not quite fourteen years of age. She was installed as his housekeeper, and then began that affectionate intimacy between them which was perhaps the most vital and enduring element in the life of each. James Murray prospered as a planter and merchant. He imported from England such goods as the colonists required and in exchange sent to England naval stores, tar, pitch, and turpentine.

In 1744 he returned to Scotland with his sister Elizabeth, married his cousin, Barbara Bennet, and remained in England and Scotland for five years. On his return in 1749, accompanied by his wife and daughter and his sister Elizabeth, their ship put into Boston, and he returned alone to Wilmington, leaving his family in Boston, because, as he wrote, "they had an opportunity of spending three of the most disagreeable months of this climate in that poor Healthy Place, New England—their health they owe to God's goodness, their poverty to their own bad policy and to their Popular Government." His sister Elizabeth remained in Boston and married Thomas Campbell, a Scotchman, merchant and trader. Their married life was short, for the husband died in a few years.

William Stevens Powell, editor of the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, wrote that in 1755 James Murray was deputy paymaster for British troops on the Ohio River during the French and Indian War under Col. James Innes. In 1757, Governor Dobbs made accusations that Murray had "illegally issued unlimited private paper currency that was to be accepted by the colony in payment of quitrents," and he was temporarily suspended from his position on the Governor Dobbs' Privy Council. The allegation seems to be supported by the fact that he made use use of a young cousin he brought from Scotland and installed to Murray's own advantage, apparently with the help of "his political patron," Governor Dobb's predecessor, Gabriel Johnston (who died in 1752) and Murray's relationship with Colonel James Innes:  

Murray provided a home for him [his cousin and protégé, John Rutherfurd] in his own house in Wilmington, and put him to work in his store; where he learned to keep accounts and sell goods. He does not seem to have enjoyed any educational advantages prior to coming to America, but he was taught by his cousin, who was a fairly educated man, and it was not very long before he began to get the benefit of Murray's influence with Governor Johnston and others in authority, and to be advanced to official position. He [Rutherfurd?] was appointed Recorder of Quit Rents in 1750 and in 1756 was a member of the Council, but having displeased Governor Dobbs by not agreeing with that disputatious and obstinate old gentleman, was removed from the latter position in 1757, and again restored to it by the Crown in 1763.

Sources: 

• See Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality--full title: "Journal by a Lady, of a Voyage from Scotland to the West Indies and South Carolina, with an account of personal experiences during the War of Independence, and a visit to Lisbon on her return 25 October 1774—December 1775," regarding Murray and Rutherfurd's closeness to James Innes. 
• See footnote on page 22 of A history of New Hanover County and the lower Cape Fear region: 1834-1912, by Alfred M. Waddell, published 1909, with reference to Johnston's "most discreditable act" in appointing Murray to the Council; and at page 62 where Murray was described thus: "as the editors of his letters say, 'although public spirited, never a true American,' having been, from his arrival in the Province until he left it and removed to Boston in 1765, an unwavering Loyalist." 
• Waddell also relates at page 62, as to James Murray's property at Point Repose in N.C.: "His property was all confiscated and sold by commissioners appointed for the purpose in 1783, and the deed is recorded in New Hanover County. It was all bought by his nephew, Gen. Thomas Clark, a gallant Revolutionary officer, who was his largest creditor, and General Clark took up his residence at Point Repose." He goes on to state at page 63:

  Gen. Thomas Clark's father, Thos. Clark, Sr., married James Murray's sister Barbara in 1737, and in 1741 was made Sheriff of New Hanover County for two years, and was also appointed Collector of the Port of Wilmington, in place of Samuel Woodward, deceased, by Dinwiddie, Surveyor General of the colonies. He died in 1748 or 1749. His son, Gen. Thos. Clark, was born about the middle of August, 1741, in Wilmington. He was sent to England and there learned the watchmaker's trade, which, on his return, he practiced for a time in Boston, but abandoned it in 1767 and came back to the Cape Fear to take charge of his uncle James Murray's estate, of which his elder brother James had previously been manager. He seems to have been a favorite of his uncle because of his unusual intellectual capacity.

• See also the Laws of North Carolina, 1782, showing Point Repose was conveyed to Clark, to whom Murray was indebted.)

When Barbara Bennet Murray gave birth in 1756 in Wilmington to another daughter, they named her Elizabeth for her aunt (variously called Betzy, Betzey or Betsey in Murray's letters), who had set up a shop in Boston with a supply of millinery and dry goods, which she restocked from English sellers, but becoming increasingly wealthy with each successive marriage. 

In 1760 Elizabeth was remarried to a wealthy sugar refiner, James Smith of Brush Hill near Milton. James Murray's wife had also died, leaving him unable to care for his daughters, whom he called Dolly and Betzey, and they were sent to Boston to live with their aunt. After their father remarried a widow named Mrs. Thompson in 1761, the Murrays began planning to move to Boston, awaiting only an announcement from the Crown concerning the lieutenant governor appointment, which Murray had a vague but unfulfilled hope of receiving.The post was instead filled by William Tryon in 1765, and the Murrays soon joined the rest of their family in Boston. 

James Murray worked in the sugar refinery of John Smith, the second husband of his sister, Elizabeth, and it was Smith's retirement in 1765 that gave James the opportunity to move to Boston, even though he still needed to see after numerous properties he owned in North Carolina. That same year, however, protests against the Stamp Act resulted in an inability to import raw sugar from the West Indies, and the business suffered until the act was repealed a year later. In the meantime, Murray had entrusted his estates in North Carolina first into the care of his nephew, John Inness Clark and later to his brother Thomas Clark. These lands would be confiscated by the new government after a hearing in 1778 and awarded to Thomas, as shown above.

Dolly met Rev. John Forbes who must have visited Boston prior to their marriage in 1769, and he took his bride back to the British colony of East Florida  to her family's great chagrin.
At that time Mrs. Smith (by then a widow once again) took her younger niece to England and Scotland to visit family, and she conveyed the Brush Hill estate she had inherited from Smith to her brother, James Murray, in trust for her two nieces. While in Great Britain, she visited her brother, Dr. John Murray, of Norwich and also went to her birthplace, Unthank and other parts of Scotland. 

Murrays' fear of the American Revolutionaries

During the time there, she arranged for John's children, John and Mary (later joined by their sister Anne), to travel to America, each with a stock of merchandise provided by her brother James, just as she had made her start years earlier. One letter she received from home in late 1770 makes clear the Murrays' sentiments concerning the upcoming revolution. (See the inset to the right.) In other letters, in addition to calling the patriots the "mob," Demons and similar epithets were used.

Elizabeth (variously spelled Betzy, Betzey or Betsey) Smith returned home in the summer of 1771 to look after the affairs of her Boston shop, and in September suddenly married a third wealthy but retired merchant, Ralph Inman, of Cambridge.

Inman had been the agent for Sir Charles Henry Frankland, collector of the port of Boston since 1741, while Frankland's father had been governor of the East India company's factory in Bengal. Being named baronet upon the death of an uncle in 1746, Sir Charles Frankland was able to purchase a large estate in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, west of Boston, and some time later bought the three-story Clarke mansion in North Boston.

STAMP COLLECTOR ATTACKED BY THE MOB

Shortly after his sister's third marriage, James Murray was, unsurprisingly, appointed inspector of the port at Salem. He then visited Dotty in East Florida, attempting to convince her to move back to Boston's healthier climate. The capital of St. Augustine was considered to be as unhealthy a climate as the Cape Fear plantation, so Dolly was often found in Boston with one or more of her three young sons, leaving her husband to fend for himself, according to their correspondence from that time. 

It was a harried time for both Dolly and her aunt, residing respectively in Brush Hill and Inman's house in the Cambridge countryside, warding off the mob of demons, as they called those who protested the Stamp Act. James Murray and Inman were safe in Boston, writing letters back and forth to Elizabeth Inman and Dolly, who now had her three young sons with her, was attempting to keep all their household goods and crops out of the hands of marauding rebels. The letters between the Inmans evidence considerable misunderstanding between the couple, and Elizabeth was not above intense sarcasm, while pretending deference to her elderly spouse. Shortly after February 1776, Murray and Inman were evacuated to Halifax by General William Howe and never saw the women and children again.  

When Elizabeth Murray Smith inherited the Brush Hill estate in Milton from her second husband, the sugar-baker, James Smith, she conveyed in trust for her two beloved nieces, the daughters of James Murray:

1. Dorothy ("Dolly") Murray Forbes, wife of Rev. John Forbes
2. Elizabeth ("Betsy") Murray Robbins, wife of Edward Hutchinson Robbins

Edward Robbins' grandmother (Lydia Foster Hutchinson) was the sister of Sarah Foster (Mrs. Thomas) Hutchinson, the last Royal Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his father was Rev. Nathaniel Robbins, pastor of the church in Milton, whose family went back several generations in Harvard's oversight. The Foster girls were daughters of John Foster, a partner with their husbands' father, Elisha Hutchinson, in a salt monopoly established in Boston in 1695.

Catherine Robbins Delano was Dolly Forbes' great-niece.

Edward H. Robbins, a lawyer and politician from the Harvard's class of 1775, and his wife were parents of 

• James Murray Robbins (1796-1885), who became a European partner of Dorothy Forbes' son John Murray Forbes, who would die in South American in 1831. He acquired the Brush Hill estate inherited from James Smith and conveyed in trust to their mothers; and
• Anne Jean Robbins, who married Joseph Lyman.
• Their daughter, Catherine Robbins Lyman, married Warren Delano II (1809-98), a partner in Russell & Company.
• The daughter of Warren Delano II and his wife, Catherine Robbins Delano, was Sara Delano, the mother of President Franklin Roosevelt.

To be continued....

For Whom Does "the CIA" Really Work?

With this post we continue to explore connections mentioned by JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease, author of "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur," who focused on the sulphur company during times it was headed by John Hay "Jock" Whitney. Originally published in Probe, Pease's article discusses Freeport Sulphur's international nature as well as its close ties to happenings in Cuba during the time JFK was President. 

Valuable in the insight Pease's article gives us into the role of the Central Intelligence Agency's use of Freeport Sulphur, nevertheless it does not ask who really owns and operates the CIA itself. Perhaps looking back deeper into the company and its formative years will help in answering that question.

Who Was Jock Whitney?

Jock's father was William Payne Whitney, commonly known simply as Payne. As a youngster, Payne Whitney was caught in a feud between his father and his mother's brother, Oliver Payne, following her death in 1893. Promised a share of Oliver's wealth, he turned against his own father, who had married Edith Randolph, a woman scorned by the Payne family, whom he had been seeing before his wife died. According to the New York Social Diary website:

Jock and Betsy Cushing Whitney

In 1902 [William Collins] Whitney’s son, Payne Whitney, who’d sided with Oliver Payne, married Helen Hay from Cleveland, Ohio. Miss Hay was the daughter of John Hay who had been private secretary to President Lincoln and later Ambassador to the Court of St. James under President McKinley. Mr. Whitney who, like his father, went to Yale, was 26. For a wedding gift, Col. Payne gave the couple a Stanford White house at 972 Fifth Avenue.... After the Second World War, he started an investment fund, run by a friend he’d met in the War, to invest in new ideas of the men coming back from the War. He called it Adventure Capital and later dropped the “ad” to coin the now established term: venture capital. He was known for his ventures in Hollywood (“Gone With the Wind”), his industrious ventures, as well as being the last publisher of The New York Herald-Tribune.... Like his grandfather, he was also the Ambassador to the Court of St. James (under Eisenhower). Married twice, first to a beauty who loved horses more, and finally to Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, daughter of the famous brain surgeon Harvey Cushing, first wife of FDR’s son’s James, to whom he [Jock] remained married to the end of his life.... The Payne fortune, inherited by Payne Whitney, and then his children, grew far larger than the fortune left by William C. Whitney to his children. That was partly due to the fact that Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt produced more offspring who produced more offspring. Jock Whitney produced no off-spring, and his investments after the War catapulted him (and partially his sister [Joan Whitney Payson]) into the realm of what are now billions.

972 Fifth Avenue mansion

Payne Whitney had inherited his uncle's huge mansion in New York, and the 1920 census shows Jock and Joan living there with their parents--only four people at 972 Fifth Avenue--being cared for by fifteen servants, none of whom were American-born. Payne's business address, 14 Wall Street, was the Bankers Trust Company, set up by the White and Case law firm in 1903, and was controlled by J.P. Morgan affiliates in the days prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system. Before 1930 Morgan bankers controlled United States government policy on currency. According to economist Murray Rothbard, the first governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank was:

Benjamin Strong, who had spent virtually his entire business and personal life in the circle of top associates of J.P. Morgan. A secretary of several trust companies (banks doing trust business) in New York City, Strong became neighbor and close friend of three top Morgan partners, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, and Thomas W. Lamont. Davison, in particular, became his mentor, and brought him into Morgan's Bankers Trust company, where he soon succeeded Lamont as vice-president, and then finally became president. When Strong was offered the post of Governor of the New York Fed, it was Davison who persuaded him to take the job....The main collaboration throughout the 1920s, much of it kept secret from the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, was between Strong and the man who soon became Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Collet Norman. Norman and Strong were not only fast friends, but had important investment-banking ties, Norman's uncle having been a partner of the great English banking firm of Baring Brothers, and his grandfather a partner in the international banking house of Brown Shipley and Co., the London branch of the Wall Street banking firm of Brown Brothers. Before coming to the Bank of England, Norman himself had worked at the Wall Street office of Brown Brothers, and then returned to London to become a partner of Brown Shipley.

The Role of Brown Brothers Harriman

Montagu Norman had been called "the currency dictator of Europe" by the Wall Street Journal in 1927. Thus, when the U.S. government witnessed the decline of the Brown Brothers investment bank in 1926, it felt the need to shore it up with an infusion of capital and turned to the two Yale educated sons of robber baron E.H. Harriman to do so. Averell and Roland (Bunny) Harrison were the Skull and Bones friends and eventual partners of Prescott Sheldon Bush, the father and grandfather of two future presidents.

It is no coincidence that America's earliest attempts at setting up intelligence agencies called upon the talents of the sons of Wall Street bankers. Idealistic principles often fall by the wayside when big money is involved, and it is the wealthy elitists who think they have the most to lose in the games played in international market manipulations. The poor have only their lives, and are often treated as cannon fodder by such elitists on every front.

In the years between the two "great" wars the Brown Brothers partner, Montagu Norman, was actively concerned with handling Germany's reparations payments, working with the first head of the Bank for International Settlements, Gates McGarrah, whose grandson, Richard McGarrah Helms, would later head the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Within six months after the above photos appeared in the news, Norman had found the perfect rich kids to entice with the power of helping to run the world. Their father's death in September 1909, when the boys were mere teenagers, had been the top headline in newspapers throughout America. Their mentor became the man most trusted by their father to run his business, Robert Scott Lovett, who would see that the boys were educated at Yale alongside his own son, Robert Abercrombie Lovett. All would rise to power in the government as the second great war approached, with help from their brothers in Skull and Bones.

Prescott Bush, center, with Brown Brothers Harriman partners--Bunny Harriman, Knight Woolley, and R.A. Lovett

By following the money, you often learn how the world really operates, who works for whom, so to speak.

Oliver Stone relates in his book, The Untold History of the United States:

Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another. Researchers have been trying for years to determine the precise nature of Bush's ties to Fritz Thyssen, the wealthy German industrialist who played a crucial role in bankrolling Hitler, as revealed in his 1941 memoirs I Paid Hitler. Thyssen ultimately repudiated the Nazi dictator and was himself imprisoned.
While incarcerated, Thyssen's vast wealth was protected overseas, much of it by the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, through the holding company Union Banking Corporation. The account was managed by senior partner Prescott Bush. 

About ten years younger than the Harriman boys, Jock Whitney and his sister sat atop a huge pile of money which they would make available to those in power engaged in manipulation of international currency. Although Jock went to Yale, he was tapped for Scroll and Key, rather than the Bones secret society, and was a mere two years behind Scroll and Key member James Stillman Rockefeller (son of Elsie Stillman and William G. Rockefeller), whose Uncle Percy, married in 1901 to Elsie's sister Isabel Stillman, was a member of the Skull and Bones class of 1900. Only a year after his Yale graduation, James Stillman Rockefeller had united fortunes with the Carnegies by marrying the niece of the steel magnate whose fortune had been liquidated by the Morgan bank. Five years later, Chase Manhattan bank would acquire the Equitable Trust, another Morgan affiliate--thus shifting control of the New York Fed in 1930 from Morgan to Rockefeller-owned banks at the same time Freeport Sulphur's control shifted under the leadership of Langbourne Williams, Jr., a Stillman son-in-law, as will be detailed in the next installment.

Pecunia non olet

According to the historian Suetonius,Vespasian, who ruled the Roman Empire from AD 69 to AD 79, had a son named Titus who found fault with him for contriving a tax upon public toilets. Vespasian held a piece of money from the first payment to his son's nose, asking whether its odor was offensive to him. When Titus said "No," he replied, "Yet it comes from urine." 

The moral: Money doesn't stink.

But then any emperor would believe the same.

William Hathaway Forbes

© 2012 by Linda Minor

“By the late 1830s, opium was the basis of East-West commerce. It balanced the payments…Everyone needed it.”

 Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel, Hilary Conroy, America views

China: American images of China then and now, p. 61.

Shortly after his retirement from the China trade,  John Murray bought an island off the coast of Massachusetts near Nantucket in Buzzard’s Bay called Naushon. His son William Hathaway was then a mere lad of 7 or 8 years. Then one of the wealthiest families in New England, Forbes began a concentrated effort toward his son's proper education--without much cooperation on the part of the youngster.

William Hathaway Forbes failed to graduate with his Harvard class of 1861, in which he began as a freshman in 1857.[1] To his father's great embarrassment, he was summarily expelled, as revealed in the article below, which appeared in the Pittsfield Eagle during his junior year at Harvard. One biographer linked the scandal to the secret society called “Med. Fac.” that had been operating at Harvard since at least 1820. Not unlike the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, it had its roots much earlier among the medical faculty.

Fortunately for the Forbes family, war intervened and Will Forbes rose in the 2d Cavalry of the Union Army, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. His friend and brother-in-law, Henry Sturgis Russell (whose family had started Russell & Co.) served in the same regiment until he was promoted to brigadier general over the "colored" regiment (the Fifth). Henry married Mary Hathaway Forbes, Will’s sister, in 1863.[3]
  His father, John Murray Forbes, showed his disappointment in his son when headlines in January 1860 revealed him to be the culprit who almost killed an undercover cop who hid in Appleton Chapel hoping to catch a repeat burglar. Reminiscent of Barbara Bush when her son Neil was criticized for helping to loot Silverado Savings, Will’s mother also sped to her son’s defense. Boys will be boys, as the saying goes. But Will's father, usually called simply J.M. Forbes, didn’t want to rock the boat; he had only just begun to remove the stench of opium from his reputation.

William Hathaway’s friend and Harvard classmate from the class of 1860—Henry Sturgis Russell, son of George Robert and Sarah Russell—would join the Massachusetts Cavalry as soon as they heard the war drums. They were young and itching for excitement. Their fathers, grandfathers and uncles had all experienced that same adrenalin in the Far East decades earlier as merchant traders.

It was also war which consumed  much of the career of another descendant of Samuel Russell--William Huntington Russell--who in addition to operating a military school in New Haven also had helped to found the secret society Skull and Bones similar in many respects to the Med Fac society which operated years earlier at Harvard.

Henry’s Russell's uncle, Samuel Wadsworth Russell had started Russell & Co. at 2 Suy-Hong in Canton in 1824 in competition with the Perkins and Forbes family, with whom he merged his company in 1832. Henry’s father, George Russell was a partner in Russell, Sturgis & Co. formed in Manila in 1828.[2] They had more or less taken over the trade of the East India Company in China when the British departed.

By the time William’s own father, John Murray Forbes, first laid eyes upon the Chinese city of Canton, where his uncles (one of whom, James Sturgis, had married a Perkins girl, making him “Uncle Jimmy”) and brothers had garnered the family wealth, he was working for the larger firm which bore the Russell name. But it was all the same family business--trading mostly in opium in China and later investing profits in America for their Canton trading partner, Houqua, under the name of Russell & Co.

After his first tour in China, Will Hathaway’s father had returned to Milton, Massachusetts, married Sarah Hathaway, a friend of his sisters, and then quickly returned to China to seek his fortune. In the meantime, Russell & Co. had made him a partner of the firm, based on his close relationship with Houqua, who controlled the opium trade on the mainland. To please his new partners he stayed in China without seeing his new bride again for almost two years. Once he returned, however, he remained in Milton, working as Houqua’s agent until Canton’s importance was toppled by the rise of Hong Kong. 

After those best-forgotten days in China, where he and the Houqua hong had made fortunes working around China's leaders who wanted to keep opium out of the hands of its people, John Murray Forbes spent the remainder of his life investing those fortunes (both his and Houqua's) in what was then America's most high-tech industry. He built the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad.


Ten years after Will's Harvard class graduated  without him, the university finally awarded him a retroactive honorary 1861 Harvard degree. They had forgotten his adolescent indiscretion as well as his status as a drop-out, as soon as he struck it rich. Perhaps to celebrate this honor, Will built a summer house on the island his father had purchased with opium profits, a home which future generations of the Forbes family used as a networking base.

Harvard Crimson - October 13, 1897 

Colonel William Hathaway Forbes '61, died on Monday at his place on Naushon Island. W. H. Forbes was born on Nov. 1st, 1840. He was the son of J. M. Forbes and the brother of J. Malcolm Forbes. In college he was a classmate of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Col. N. P. Hallowell, W. P. Garrison and H. P. Bowditch. He left college during his first Junior term and entered business in Boston in '61. In December of the same year he was given a commission in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. In 1865 he married Miss Edith Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was engaged in active business in Boston until 1887. In 1872, by the vote of the corporation, he received the degree of A. B. 

Colonel Hallowell who was Mr. Forbes' chum in college speaks of his broad-mindedness and generosity of nature. He was always ready at college to help those who were struggling, and in later life he was never happier than when doing a generous act in behalf of some unfortunate who had appealed to him. 

With interests many and wide, for many years a prominent figure in Boston business and society, Colonel Forbes bore worthily a name that has been among the foremost and best in the life and progress of several generations.

Is it naive to question the source of the money that built the railroad? Does money somehow lose the taint when invested in good old American free enterprise? It's a question that persists until the present day.

---

[1] Edited by Albert K. Teele, The History of Milton, Mass.: 1640 to 1887, p. 356 (Boston: Press of Rockwell & Churchill, 1884), p. 356. Also see Massachusetts Historical Society papers of Edith Emerson Forbes and William Hathaway Forbes at the website for the Forbes Papers, accessed August 25, 2009.

[2]His partner was Henry Parkman Sturgis, later referred to euphemistically as a "merchant in the Far East," and there were three other Sturgis brothers involved in the firm—Russell, George and Samuel.

[3] Teele, History of Milton, p. 570. Also Mary Caroline Crawford, Famous families of Massachusetts Vol. I  (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1930), p. 304.