Barclays Bank History Series IV

A Genealogical Study of the Families Who Created the Bank 

 PART IV -- THE BEVANS

 

CONTINUED in Part I, Part II, Part III, Part III-A, Part III-B, Part IV, Part V

Barclays Bank Transitions 

In 1865, ten years after Charles Barclay died, Barclay, Bevan, Tritton and Co. merged with Spooner, Attwood, and Twells, taking on the new name of Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, Twells, and Co. Partners of the firm were then:

·         Henry Tritton.

·         Joseph Gurney Barclay.

·         Joseph Tritton.

·         Francis Augustus Bevan.

·         Philip Twells.

·         Henry John Tritton.

·         Robert Barclay.

·         Joseph Herbert Tritton.

Another merger occurred a generation later, in 1888, according to the previously cited Handbook of London Bankers. The previous partners of the banking business at 54 Lombard amalgamated with Ransom Bouverie, and Co., of Pall Mall East, under the style of Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, Ransom, Bouverie, and Co., and business continued at 54 Lombard Street and at 56 Pall Mall East, the office of the newly merged partners. This newly acquired firm had a history described as follows:

Pleydell-Bouverie castle of Earl of Radnor

Ransom, Bouverie, and Co. This well-known West End banking firm was founded by Mr. Ransom, who took into partnership Sir F. B. Morland and Mr. Hammersley, under the style of Ransom, Morland, and Hammersley, who established themselves about 1786 at 57, Pall Mall. That continued to be the style of the firm until 1796, when Mr. Hammersley left them to start a new bank, which he set up at 76, Pall Mall.

From that date to 1814 the firm was known as Ransom, Morland, and Co., carrying on business at 56, Pall Mall. In 1819 Sir F. B. Morland left the firm to establish a bank of his own under the style of Morland and Co.

Debrett's Illustrated House of Commons etc.

In the following year the Directory shows that Ransom and Co. moved to No. 34, Pall and in 1823 to 1, Pall Mall East, at which house the bank is still located. At the death of Mr. Ransom, the Hon. Douglas Kinnaird (fourth son of the seventh Lord Kinnaird, by Elizabeth, daughter of Gaffin Ransom, Esq.) became head partner. He was the uncle of the late head partner, the Honourable Arthur Kinnaird ; and it was he who built the premises Nos. 1 and 2, Pall Mall East, as a banking-house.

The style of the firm was Ransom and Co. until Messrs. Bouverie, Murdoch, Bouverie, and James, of 11, Haymarket, amalgamated with them in 1856; since which time the style of the firm has been Messrs. Ransom, Bouverie, and Co. In 1876 the firm consisted of the following partners:

The Hon. Arthur Kinnaird, M.P. (afterwards Lord Kinnaird). James Gordon Murdoch. Philip  Pleydell Bouverie. Charles Townshend Murdoch. Arthur Fitzgerald Kinnaird. Henry Hales Pleydell Bouverie.

The County Families of the United Kingdom

It was announced in the Times of June 25, 1888, that Messrs. Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, and Co. had entered into partnership with Messrs. Ransom, Bouverie, and Co., to take effect from July 2, under the style of Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, Ransom, Bouverie, and Co., and that the business would be conducted, as heretofore, in Lombard Street and Pall Mall East;the partners being:

• Messrs. Robert C. L. Bevan,
• J. Gurney Barclay,
• Francis A. Bevan,
• Charles T. Murdoch, M.P.,
• Robert Barclay,
• J. Herbert Tritton,
• Lord Kinnaird,
• Henry H. P. Bouverie,
• Wilfrid Arthur Bevan, and 
• Edward H. Barclay.

Messrs. Seymour Pleydell Bouverie and Roland Yorke Bevan hold the signature of the firm. 

We can clearly see that in 1890 Barclays Bank was being run by three Barclays, three Bevans, one Tritton, from the original bank, to whom had been added, as a result of the merger, one Murdoch, one Bouverie and a Kinnaird. 

A lawsuit involving Bouverie which was being litigated at the time of the merger indicated, not only was his income mortgaged to the hilt, but his trustee was in the habit of lying to other potential lenders to Bouverie about the status of his trust--possibly the reason for the Barclays buyout of the Ransom Bouverie bankers. We will mention again this merger in connection with family marriages in the Bevan family with certain persons who had links to the Bouverie bank.

Marriages between Barclay and Bevan 

Timothy Bevan

David Barclay and his first wife Anne Taylor, besides the two sons we mentioned in Part II, also had a daughter named Elizabeth, who married Timothy Bevan, a son of Sylvanus the Quaker apothecary.  To this marriage another Sylvanus Bevan was born. 

 

Export of drugs to America in 1758

Timothy and Sylvanus Bevan had worked with Timothy's brother-in-law, David Barclay, to put together the financing to buy the Southwark brewery. Meanwhile, the other Bevans' primary interest was in building up their pharmaceutical inventory and operating an export business for such goods.  

 

The Bevans remained silent partners in Barclay & Perkins while selling their own products abroad until Timothy's death in 1786. Thereafter, Sylvanus joined the pharmacy full time, while his brother, Joseph Gurney Bevan, worked as a partner in the bank.

 

Timothy Bevan's father-in-law David Barclay (1682-1769) had a second set of children after his marriage to Priscilla Freame, including two more sons--John and David. 

 

John Barclay married Susanna Willett and moved to Clapham, near Anchor Brewery, to help Robert with the business, which exported quite a lot of beer to American ports. 

 

The Anchor Brewery's Other Owners

 

In previous posts we indicated that the Anchor had been previously owned by a family named Child, then by one Edmund Halsey. Since publishing that, we did additional research, which indicates how the change in owners transpired:

Ralph Thrale born in 1672 was left an orphan at nine years old, and went to Offley to live with his mother, who had remarried. His uncle Edmund Halsey, who was to become proprietor of the Anchor Brewery in Southwark and M.P. for Southwark, befriended the boy. Ralph went to London and eventually succeeded Halsey as owner of the Brewery. Ralph was the father of Henry Thrale. 

At that same website, we also read:

In 1692 Halsey [Ralph Thrale's uncle] was receiving £1.00 a week - half the salary of his master [his father-in-law, James Child] and within 20 months had become a partner. There is no evidence that he purchased his partnership and, as the partnership deed was drawn up on the 6th November 1693, only ten days before his marriage to one of James Child’s daughters - Anne. It might well have been his wife’s dowry.

From the date of the partnership, Halsey ran the business efficiently, as the cash bulletin for the years 1693 to 1702 shows regular sums of up to £100 per week, large amounts in those days, were paid in excise duty; and in May, 1695, both he and Child drew £400 each in profits.

Sir Josiah Child, EIC

James Child, possibly the brother of Sir Josiah Child, operated the brewery after "two generations of the Monger family" ran it from 1616-1670. James Child died on 22 February 1696, at the age of 66, and he was buried in St. Dunstan-in-the-East Church in London. He served as President of the East India Company from 1686 to 1690, according to same website. King Charles granted two brewing licenses to the Anchor Brewery in 1690, although in April 1666 the king had recommended "James Child, merchant of London," to the Brewer’s Company. His widow retained her husband’s interest in the brewhouse, Halsey paying her a weekly sum until her death in 1701.

Josiah at Portsmouth was appointed "victualler to the Navy," and accumulated a significant fortune which he invested in a joint stock company called The East India Company. Josiah became a director of the East India Company in 1677,  according to one website, and was

"elected governor of the East India Company in 1681, serving in that post for most of the decade. For a time he was virtually the sole decision maker for the company, directing policy as if it were his private business. He was often openly accused of using the company to aggrandize his social, economic, and political position. He received his baronetcy in 1678."

Josiah Child was married first to Hannah Boate, the mother of Elizabeth Child, born before her mother's death in 1662. He quickly remarried Mary Atwood, with whom he had a daughter and son, Josiah Child, Jr., born 1668. His third wife, Emma Barnard, was the daughter of Sir Henry Barnard, "one of the leading Turkey merchants in London." Emma gave birth to  Josiah's second son, Richard Child, in 1680. 

Sir Josiah Child died in 1699, leaving a son, Josiah II (c.1668-1704),  succeeding as "2nd Baronet, his father’s will left him no more than had been settled upon him at the time of his marriage in 1691. His sister Mary, who had married against their father’s wishes, was similarly treated, being left only £5. It was Josiah’s younger half-brother, Richard (1680-1750), who had been made their father’s principal heir, and it was he who came into possession of the Wanstead estate."

In 1716, after Richard purchased an Irish peerage from the mistress of King George I of the German Hanover family, other members of Parliament became concerned that the king would raise Richard to the peerage to replace his Whig father-in-law, Frederick Tylney. Their concern was that it would upset the political balance, since Richard was a Tory. He was first created Baron Newtown and Viscount. Castlemaine and eventually took on the Tylney name of his wife. Once in Parliament he quickly learned on which side his bread was buttered and began voting with the government in power.  

The 2nd Baronet of Wanstead died young and childless, though engaged to be married, in 1704, having briefly represented Wareham in the House of Commons from 1702, and was succeeded by his half-brother, Sir Richard Child, 3rd Baronet. At this point we witness that magical process by which British aristocracy waves a wand to change names of the people we have been searching, making it difficult to prove exactly who did what and when.

He was known as Richard Child until 1731, when he became Viscount Castlemaine, purchased in Ireland from the estate of his mother-in-law, Dorothy Tylney Glynne. Created as Earl Tylney, of Castlemaine in the County of Kerry, also in the Peerage of Ireland, he had Parliament change his surname to Tylney. The title was passed to his son, the 2nd Earl, an overweight man easily caricatured, who died in Italy without having married and without children. It was rumored he had connections to the scandalous homosexual Captain Robert Jones, who was sentenced to death for sodomizing young boys in 1772.

Josiah II was married to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Cooke, one of his father’s East India Company associates, who also served as Member of Parliament for Wareham between 1702 and 1704. As Sir Josiah Child II had no children, Richard succeeded him as 3rd baronet. He also inherited the £4,000 per annum which had been settled upon Josiah for life, bringing his own annual income to some £10,000. 

He did not maintain his father’s active connection with the East India Company. Richard Child was a Member of Parliament and described as demonstrating “a certain political flexibility,” which enabled him to make a smooth transition between the Stuart and Hanoverian regimes. In 1715 he completed the family’s journey from its mercantile origins by purchasing his ennoblement via George I’s mistress the Duchess of Munster (afterwards Kendal). Richard Child later Tylney, 1st Earl Tylney, 1st Viscount Castlemaine and Baron Newtown of Newtown, 3rd Baronet (1680–1750) He and his sons took the name of Tylney in place of that of Child by Act of Parliament in 1734 when his wife inherited the estates of that family. We will continue researching this family alongside the bankers.

The Bevan Marriages

David Barclay Bevan

Sylvanus Bevan's first wife died in 1769, only a month or two after they were married. Four years later he married outside the Quaker community, and thereby lost his standing within it. There were no children from the Quaker marriage. All the children would be born to his second wife, Louisa Kendall. When he had assisted David and Robert Barclay in their purchase of the Thrale brewery in Southwark in 1781, Sylvanus's eldest son, David Barclay Bevan, was then a lad of seven years old. 

Sylvanus left his Quaker community after being ousted in 1773 and located to Winchmore Hill, north of London, where he and Louisa reared seven sons--including David and the youngest son, being named Richard Bevan--who eventually became partners in the bank. 

David turned 17 in 1791, and it was decided that he should be trained in the workings of the bank since his grandfather, Timothy Bevan, had died a few years earlier, leaving a gaping hole that needed to be filled. David Bevan went to work at the bank on Lombard Street, and, after six years of hard work, he met his future wife, 17-year-old Favell Bourke Lee, a recent orphan with an intriguing background.  

David Bevan's Marriage to Favell Bourke Lee 

Favell Bourke Lee

In 1798 David married Favell Bourke Lee, daughter of  Robert Cooper Lee and his wife, Jamaican-born Priscilla Kelly, an illegitimate daughter of Judge Denis Kelly. Lee had been Crown Solicitor-General of Jamaica and had four mixed-race children born out of wedlock there before he returned to live in England, where he married Priscilla before Favell was born in 1780. 

 

Favell's father, Robert Cooper Lee, was born in Ireland, but like many others besieged by Cromwell's anti-Catholic policies had fled to Jamaica in 1749 when he was only 13. At first he sold ribbons to support his family in Ireland, but rose to be Crown Solicitor in Jamaica, working under the Chief Justice, another Irishman, Denis Kelly. Kelly had married a former Jamaican slave, the mother of Priscilla Kelly, future wife of Robert Cooper Lee.

 

Lee left Jamaica for England and worked as a barrister in Bedford Square. There he filed a lawsuit to legitimize children born to him in Jamaica before his marriage to Priscilla. One source relates:

Robert Cooper Lee who had four mixed-race children born illegitimate in Jamaica, and was responsible as a trustee and guardian for his illegitimate mixed-race nephews, made such an application in December, 1776, in an Act “to authorize and enable Robert Cooper Lee, late of the Island of Jamaica, but now of the kingdom of Great Britain, esquire, to settle and dispose of his estates, both real and personal in this island, by deed or will as he shall think proper, notwithstanding an Act of the Governor, Council and Assembly of this island, instituted, an Act to prevent inconveniences arising from exorbitant grants and devises made by white persons and the issue of negroes and to restrain and limit such grants and devises.” [Source: Anne Powers (17 December 2011). "Blocking Legacies to Negroes and Mulattoes," A Parcel of Ribons: Eighteenth century Jamaica viewed through family stories and documents. 

Trent Park mansion of R.C.L. Bevan

David and Favell married in 1798 and soon had sons to help make up the next generation of the bank. Their second son was Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, named for Favell's late father, and was described as:

An excellent man of business, Robert [Cooper Lee] Bevan spent fifty years in the City, and with justifiable pride witnessed and assisted in the expansion of Barclay, Bevan, Tritton & Co. into one of the leading banking concerns in the kingdom. Little, however, did these shrewd bankers of a hundred years ago foresee the enormous proportions to which their business would attain, and great would be their surprise to-day if they could peruse the current balance sheets of Barclays Bank, Limited. In 1864 the cramped old premises at 54, Lombard Street were demolished, and a more modern building erected. [Source: Audrey Noble Gamble, A History of the Bevan Family (London: Headley Brothers, 1924] 

 

R.C.L. Bevan

Since Favell's father was a member of the Irish peerage, David Bevan's marriage took him into a whole new realm of non-Quaker acquaintances and set up his children, beginning with the eldest daughter, Louisa Priscilla Bevan, to marry into a somewhat "higher" social class. 

 

In 1825 Louisia married Augustus Henry Bosanquet of Marlebone, whose name would appear for many years as a director of the Imperial Fire Insurance Company, alongside the names of Louisa's brother, Robert Cooper Lee (R.C.L.) Bevan and a cousin, Thomas George Barclay, whose father, Charles Barclay, inherited the brewery from Robert, who had been installed there by David Barclay with help from Timothy and Sylvanus Bevan. Just in case you may have forgotten.

 

Admiral J.S. Yorke

R.C.L. set his marriage sights on Lady Agnetta Elizabeth Yorke, a daughter of the late Admiral Joseph Sydney Yorke and great granddaughter of Philip Yorke, the 1st Earl of Hardwicke. The Yorke men rose in Parliament during the period of the Hanoverian Kings and were rewarded as a result to their attachment to them.

 

According to Romney R. Sedgwick: "In 1740 he [Philip Yorke] entered the territorial aristocracy by buying the estate of Wimpole in Cambridgeshire from the 2nd Lord Oxford," and in the same year "married his eldest son to the grand-daughter and heiress of the Duke of Kent, on whose death shortly afterwards she succeeded to Wrest in Bedfordshire, becoming a Marchioness in her own right."

 

Titles were everything. With them came landed estates. 

 

Lady Agnetta Yorke's brother, Charles Philip Yorke, was Postmaster-general in Lord Derby's cabinet, and also installed as the 4th Earl of Hardwicke. The Yorkes were a powerful force within Britain's government of that time, but her father was also tied to naval duties and never quite grasped the art of political prowess. He "was drowned off a yacht struck by lightning in the Hamble, 5 May 1831." 

In 1836 Robert Cooper Lee Bevan replaced Robert Barclay as Auditor for Imperial Fire Insurance Co., and R.C.L. Bevan would continue rising in his career at the bank, eventually replacing David Barclay Bevan, his father, as chairman.

 

 

 

Timothy Bevan's descendants. Click to enlarge.

 

To see what else was involved in the decision, we go back to Sylvanus Bevan--son of Timothy Bevan and wife Elizabeth Barclay--and his eldest son, David. 

David married Favell Bourke Lee in Marlebone in 1798. Her father had been an important lawyer in Jamaica when he retired back to England and settled in London's Marlebone district.

David and Favell's first child to survive was named Louisa Priscilla Bevan. In 1825 Louisa married Augustus Henry Bosanquet (1792– 1877), who had retired four years earlier after eleven years in Bengal, India. He then settled down to write, joining his family's West India business and joining his wife's family's Barclays banking firm. 

Meanwhile, David's youngest brother, Richard Bevan, fourteen years younger than David, was still living at Clapham, Surrey, where the family brewery was located, when he married Charlotte Hunter in 1823. Their wedding occurred only two years before Richard's niece married A. H. Bosanquet. As years passed, the Bevan family watched Louisa's son Percival Bosanquet grow to adulthood with the idea of matching him with Richard's eldest daughter, Charlotte Bevan. That's exactly what happened in 1859. By then both Richard and David were living in East Barnet in Hertforshire, north of London, less than five miles from Osidge House, the stately home of Sir Francis Lipton, the India tea merchant. Before Augustus Bosanquet died in 1877, he had purchased Osidge House for his family. 

 

Bosanquet residence formerly Tipton mansion

  

Spouse Families Brought into Barclays, Bevan and Co.--Yorke and Earls of Hardwicke  

Earl of Harwicke

R.C.L. Bevan, as Robert was often known, had lived a lustful life by his own description, before being converted a generation or more after his Quaker ancestors were kicked out of the sect. He then became determined to meet Agneta Yorke, sister of the Earl of Hardwicke. He proposed to her in 1836, and, in seeking her brother's consent, Robert admitted their unbalanced social status, saying: "I am quite aware of the difference in our Stations in Society, but I have reason to hope that will not be considered by you as an insuperable objection." 

After four years of marriage, RCL and Agneta rejoiced over the birth of their son--Francis Augustus Bevan--who would be educated at Harrow before joining Barclays Bank at the age of 19. 

Robert Cooper Lee

 

Three years after he had gone to work for the bank Frank Bevan married Elizabeth Marianne Russell. Her father--Lord Charles James Fox Russell--was Sergeant at Arms of the House of Commons from 1848 until 1875. 

 

Lord C.J. Fox Russell 

Because of the photos we have seen, he appears to have been the man who carried the Black Rod in the ceremony in which the Commons are summoned to the Lords. The ceremony is thought to have begun in its present form in the year 1642 and was intended to:

...emphasise that both the House of Commons and the City of London are independent corporations, with franchises or liberties of their own, and a royal messenger engaged on formal business needs the special leave of the corporation to enter it. 

I backed up and took the research more slowly the second time. When I had added Francis Augustus "Frank" Bevan's wife to the family tree, and added in her ancestors, something had clicked. It was as though someone behind the scenes had been at work to manipulate the marriages and births for at least a hundred years or more prior to that wedding. 

 

Georgina Gordon

Frank Bevan's father-in-law, as it turned out, was the son of Sir John Russell, the 6th Duke of Bedford. It was his wife, Georgiana Elizabeth Gordon, born in Scotland in 1781, who led us back to something that rang a familiar note. Her parents were named Alexander Gordon and Jane Maxwell. It certainly It was like deja vu, all over again, to quote Yogi Berra's well-hackneyed phrase. 

 

We traced our steps back to a prior Alexander Gordon. You may recall Alexander Gordon, the 12th Earl of Sutherland, who married Jean Gordon in 1573. It was their granddaughter, Katherine Gordon, the White Rose of Scotland, who married Col. David Barclay in 1647, leading up to numerous marriages we have already explored. This new Alexander, amazingly, appeared to be a descendant of the Barclays' Scottish family explored in Part One of this series. I say "appeared to be" because some have strongly contested that claim. 

 

See video.

But then I looked more closely at the name Sir John Russell as well and discovered his ancestor, William Russell, 1st Duke of Bedford, born in 1710 at Streatham, was found guilty of treason and was beheaded in 1683, at the end of the Hanoverian era, five years before the Act of Settlement ushered in William and Mary as the new monarchs from the House of Orange. 

 

Then I noticed that Streatham also sounded familiar. 

 

What had I overlooked? Had I misunderstood the importance of the Anchor Brewery? 

 

Ownership of Streatham Manor 

 

Floundering around the search engines, I discovered the Thrales did not appear to have owned Streatham House where they lived and entertained Dr. Johnson, as we discussed in Parts II and III-A. Only a few years earlier, the Manor House at Streatham had been the venue for the marriage of 11-year-old Elizabeth Child and 14-year-old John Howland, as depicted in a portrait painted by Holland Tringham, according to the following:

Holland Tringham painting

Elizabeth Howland was a daughter of Sir Josiah Child, Chairman of the East India Company. The Howlands had been Lords of the Manor of Tooting Bec since 1599. Elizabeth married John Howland, and their daughter, also Elizabeth, was heir to her parent’s fortune and also to a considerable portion of Sir Josiah’s.

On 23rd May 1695, Elizabeth married the Marquess of Tavistock, later the 2nd Duke of Bedford, at the Manor House in Streatham. The Marquess became, by marriage, immensely wealthy, and in the same year King William III created him Baron Howland of Streatham. Both the bride and groom were just 14 years old. [According to some accounts at Ancestry.com, she was three years younger.] Their children later became the third and fourth Dukes of Bedford. The Marquess and Elizabeth both died of smallpox, he in 1711 and she in 1724.

Elizabeth Child had a brother named James Child, who was mentioned in a website called Thrale History, where I discovered that, in 1693 the King recommended James Child, "merchant of London, who has done faithful service in supplying the navy with beer, and has bought a brewhouse in Southwark to brew for the household and navy, for admission as a free brother of the same company, for the same fee as the late Timothy Alsop the King’s brewer paid."

King William III's reign encompassed the years 1689 until his death in 1702, and Timothy Alsop had been referred to several times in Samuel Pepys' Diary as "Brewer to the Royal Household." The Child family also popped up in the family tree I was making on the families who owned Barclays Bank--all of whom were intermarried. Only one genealogy covered all of them. 

Our interest in Anchor Brewery originally stemmed from the fact that it became the property of the Barclay family in 1780. Learning that its origins coincided with its connection to the British East India Company (BEIC) caused us to wonder whether the Barclay family's ultimate success in banking stemmed from the same connection as "victualers for the King."

King Charles II had created that position as early as "1660 and succeeded the earlier position of Clerk of the Navy" and Keeper of the King's Ports and Galleys. Sam Pepys himself held down the position until about 1690. As for the Child family:

We emphasize at this point in our research that Josiah Child's policies fell under the category called mercantilism. According to the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (Updated: June 27, 2025):

Mercantilism contained many interlocking principles. Precious metals, such as gold and silver, were deemed indispensable to a nation’s wealth. If a nation did not possess mines or have access to them, precious metals should be obtained by trade. It was believed that trade balances must be “favourable,” meaning an excess of exports over imports. 

Reading that definition in 2025, I was struck with how similar the idea was to what's happening today in Trump World, thanks to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Forcing a trading partner to buy our goods is exactly the same belief about trade that led to the Opium Wars with China. Who planted that belief in the little educated, irrational mind of Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick? We can only wonder at this point.

 

Nevertheless, I was intrigued about how Josiah Child, famous mercantilist head of the East India Company, found his way into our Barclay banking families' genealogy, so I kept digging for any sort of information I could find. I learned that Child had been the author of a treatise with a long title some 18 years before his death: 

"A treatise wherein is demonstrated, I. That the East-India trade is the most national of all foreign trades, II. That the clamors, aspersions, and objections made against the present East-India company, are sinister, selfish, or groundless, III. That since the discovery of the East-Indies, the dominion of the sea depends much upon the wane or increase of that trade, and consequently the security of the liberty, property, and protestant religion of this kingdom, IV. That the trade of the East-Indies cannot be carried on to national advantage, in any other way than by a general joynt stock, V. That the East-India trade is more profitable and necessary to the kingdom of England, than to any other kingdom or nation in Europe by Philopatris." [London: Printed by T.F. for Robert Boulter,]

 

M. Kienholz had called John Howland of Streatham the "Earl of Berkeley," before stating that William Russell (Baron Howland) married a daughter of John Massingberd, the East India Co.'s treasurer. Elizabeth Massingberd, Countess of Berkeley, was born in 1627, so that was one possible place to start. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Plums Lead to Gold

 Part 2 

CONDI PICKS A PLUM

© June 9, 2004 by Linda Minor

(See Part 1)

Denver and the Guggenheim Connection

ASARCO mines

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

Gold Mine in Colorado

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

Madeleine Albright's husband with his uncle, Harry Guggenheim

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

Small world!

Medill Media Empire

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

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

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

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

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

Benes and Masaryk

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

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

Madeleine Korbel Albright

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

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

Daniel Guggenheim

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

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

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

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

More Gold-Plated Plums

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oil as a Medium of Exchange and Saudi Arabia

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

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

Her response:

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

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

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

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

NOTES FOR PARTS 1 AND 2:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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