America's wealthiest 1%, according to my research, have always been focused on maintaining the stability of our monetary system, whether that system is based on gold or, since 1973, on oil.
We know that William C. Whitney (paternal grandfather of John Hay "Jock" Whitney) was ready for retirement by 1900, and that Thomas Fortune Ryan, his "pump and dump" associate on Wall Street, was then still on the move, having purchased the Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1905. The New York Times on May 19, 1907 said of Ryan, quoting:
"the closest financial friend that Ryan ever had,... the late William C. Whitney:
'He is the most adroit, suave, and noiseless man that American finance has ever known.' "
America's richest man, it was speculated, would also soon be ready for retirement. Who would succeed him? Without answering that question, the Times moved on, reciting for posterity Ryan's vast wealth of properties:
120 Broadway, Equitable Bldg.
The Equitable Life Assurance Society, with $434,000,000 of assets;
the Washington Life Insurance Company, with about $20,000,000 of assets;
the National Bank of Commerce, with $35,000,000 capital and surplus and nearly $200,000,000 of deposits;
the Morton Trust Company, with $6,500,000 capital and $880,000,000 of deposits;
the Mercantile Trust Company, with $8,000,000 capital and surplus and $70,000,000 of deposits;
the Equitable Trust Company, with $12,000,000 capital and surplus and $50,000,000 of deposits;
the American Tobacco Company, with $300,000,000 capital and bonded indebtedness and annual net earnings of $25,000,000 or more;
the Interborough-Metropolitan Street Railroad system, with $225,000,000 capital stock and bonded debt issued and authorized;
the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, with $125,000,000 capitalization.
Continuing in this line, the article succinctly summarized how the syndicates with which Ryan had been associated up until 1907 had operated:
How a syndicate really works?
In street railroad affairs it was first, William C. Whitney, then the Whitney-Widener-Elkins syndicate, then more recently August Belmont through the merger of Mr. Ryan's Metropolitan with Mr. Belmont's Interborough. In the Consolidated Gas Company the Standard Oil group of capitalists are more widely interested than any other. In the Southern Railroad Reorganization it was Morgan and Co.; in the Seaboard Airline, Blair & Co. with Morgan "willin'." In the Bank of Commerce the "life insurance interests," as they were known in the old days, were the co-participators, while the American Tobacco Company, as it is called to-day, represents a wide variety of financial affiliation. Only in the purchase of the Equitable did Thomas Ryan go it alone, as Mr. Harriman has had occasion to remark on several notable occasions.
The Vision Thing
In
the midst of all his ability to work compatibly with certain of his
competitors, Ryan was said to have suffered one memorable defeat, which
he eventually turned into an advantage. Throughout the twenty years or so of activity
in building and reorganizing his various businesses, Ryan had the
advice primarily of William C. Whitney, Elihu Root, and attorney
Paul D. Cravath.
Electric street railways
These men had bet their future wealth on the advancement of a public-sponsored system of electric street railways without having a vision of individually owned petroleum-powered automobiles. Thus their short-sighted vision for the future is now notable only as fanciful history, which disappeared in the great stock market crash of 1929.
Leading up to that crash was a series of run-ins between Ryan, whose Irish Catholic roots in Virginia were at odds with a fellow Virginia capitalist named J.S. Williams. Back in the 1890s, Ryan had been challenged for control of the Seaboard Air Line Railway by this rival, about whom we have already written:
John Skelton Williams
John Skelton Williams of Richmond, who, with J. William Middendorf, organized a new syndicate and offered $200 a share. The Williams party planned a connection with the Baltimore and Ohio. The courts of Baltimore refused Mr. Ryan an injunction to prevent the transfer of the stock of the Williams crowd, and he appeared to have suffered defeat. Thomas F. Ryan never forgot that defeat. He had to wait—wait until the slow panic of 1903 brought the Williams group of financiers into difficulties. Then, through the banking house of Blair & Co. [operated by C. Ledyard Blair], he helped finance the needs of the Seaboard system with the inevitable result. Ryan got the Seaboard....
The question arises naturally, enough, who have been the advisers of Thomas F. Ryan during these twenty years of his participation in the larger financial doings of this town? Two of them, Elihu Root and William C. Whitney, have been already disclosed. Whitney was the close business and personal associate whose stake went in with Mr. Ryan's stake and whose profits came out with those of Mr. Ryan.
When we follow the money, rather than the men themselves, all roads lead to Brown Brothers, the American bank which spread its daughters out like Rothschild's arrows. It's a complicated story, which we'll attempt to clarify over a series of steps.
Start with these links:
T.F. Ryan lost control of the Seaboard Airline Railroad in 1893 to John Langbourne Williams' son, John Skelton Williams, who was working to connect it to the railroad controlled by Baltimore's premier banking family, Alexander Brown and his son, George Brown.
In 1903 Ryan worked through C. Ledyard Blair, head of a bank at 24 Broad Street in New York to regain control of the Seaboard Airline.
During the Panic of 1907, Morgan, with the help of James Stillman
of the National City Bank (now Citigroup), and a few other bankers,
pooled enough money together to allow Morgan-financed U.S. Steel to
purchase the shares of the "too big to fail" Moore and Schley brokerage company in a competitor steel company, with last-minute approval of President Theodore Roosevelt.
C. Ledyard Blair, Ryan's banker in 1903, supported Republican William Howard Taft (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1878) for President in 1908 and again in 1912, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson won.
Wilson selected T.F. Ryan's nemesis, John Skelton Williams, to be Comptroller of the Currency in the very year, 1913, the new Federal Reserve Act went into effect and the same year J.P. Morgan died. James Stillman had retired from City Bank in 1908, and E.H. Harriman died in 1909. There was a vacuum at the top of the big banks during this time, waiting for someone to fill.
Who would fill this gap after the big names either retired or died? A group of banking scions were chomping at the bit to make their names known.
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.
If
Jesse Jones served as the “bridge” between the purposes of the Democratic Party
in the 1930s and the source of funds to accomplish such purposes, those initially "egalitarian" purposes quickly disintegrated into a factional grab for
government succor—much as a newly born puppies fight amongst themselves in
competition for access to their mother’s teats. Being "connected" came to mean the ability to manipulate the system that chose which contractors would perform the services the government's policy planners ordained. Eventually that would lead to planning the policy around the desire for the income from the contracts. That is, naturally, how democracy works.
An Unbridled Administrator
The New Deal was merely an updated continuation of the unfinished agenda begun
by the previous Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson—interrupted by Republicans
Coolidge, Harding and Hoover.
An outline of that platform had conveniently been set forth for us in a
pathetically-written novel, originally published anonymously shortly before the
1912 election, whose author was revealed in the spring of 1916 to be none other
than the mysterious little man from Texas known as Colonel House.
In Philip Dru, Administrator
House laid out his plans for an efficiently run new world order—a model for
rule by a beneficent executive officer in whose hands power would be
centralized. The legislative agenda necessary to accomplish that ideal
government was systematically put in place during the Woodrow Wilson
administration (1913-1921) through enactment of:
Click image to enlarge.
The Federal
Reserve Banking System (Owen-Glass Act, signed December 23, 1913) and
The progressive
federal income tax (Sixteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution, ratified February 3, 1913).
The motive behind the Wilson agenda, to control
the masses without upsetting the applecart, was reflected on the title page of
House’s novel:
"No war of classes, no hostility to
existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property,
but a constant disposition to ameliorate the condition of the classes least
favored by fortune." --Giuseppe Mazzini [1]
An organic metaphor
In this paper, we will observe the results of that effort to make the executive
branch of government, delineated by the U.S. Constitution to be only one of
three co-equal branches of government, into what it is today — a centralized
clearinghouse capable of obtaining natural resources and redistributing them by
means of an oligarchical administrative system in which a bureaucracy contracts
with corporations set up by factions within the financial elite. That clearinghouse function is best illustrated by picturing a spider plant. Over time, an elected executive government, headed by the U.S. President, has spun
off various unelected and unaccountable offshoots to evolve into a bureaucratic infrastructure through which, like the initial plant, distributes
its gathered resources.
The
Model
House
was assisted in his effort to set up a central bank by other behind-the-scenes advisers (in a curtain-behind-the-curtain
sleight-of-hand maneuver), the most important of which was the German Jewish
banker Paul Warburg.In 1907 Warburg met
Senator Nelson Aldrich, who “visited [Jacob Schiff’s office at] Kuhn, Loeb to
ask how the Reichsbank issued treasury bills.Schiff didn’t know and summoned Paul.By the time Aldrich left, an enthusiastic Paul mused, ‘There marches
national bank currency and there goes currency reform.’” [2]
The distribution clearinghouse Warburg designed, which was modified by Congress
before final passage, is comprised of an elite class of bankers who are
shareholders of the private centralized banking system granted power in 1913 — a class
whose ultimate goal is to break free of any legislative or judicial constraints
and to govern the country much as Philip Dru was allowed to do in Col. House’s warped
imagination. The bankers operate within
twelve separate regions of the country, each of which is governed by a separate
governing board.
Jesse Jones, super man?
Col.
House’s challenge after the Act was passed (but before the system was actually
operating to its full extent) was to put in place the administrative
infrastructure he had laid out in his book.As individuals in power tend to
do, he sought expertise for his experiment only from his inner circle of
acquaintances.Jesse Jones states in his
autobiography that, though he had refused House’s repeated summonses to Washington
throughout the Wilson Administration, he finally gave in to the entreaties
because his country needed him to help alleviate the symptoms of the depression;
Jones thus viewed himself as the
ideal administrator.Once Roosevelt replaced him, Jones’ support for the New Deal
waned.Nevertheless, once the
legislation had been enacted and forced down the throat of the Supreme Court,
the enhanced administrative power given the executive branch remained.
Acting as the financial hub of the New Deal government of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Jones distributed “Fifty Billion Dollars,” according to the title of
his autobiography, though it has never been clear how that money was
created.While Jones was head of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation he had the power to dole out and deny
contracts to individuals and corporations in order to keep the masses employed
so as not to be engaged in revolutionary activity against the existing power
structure.Upon his return to Houston in
1946, he would not only continue his commercial real estate develop business,
but would work through his Houston Endowment Foundation to set up a secret method to finance intelligence operations
which will be discussed in a future essay. [3]
Secret
Visionaries
One
platform plank remained unfulfilled by the end of Wilson’s term of office.Although it would take another world war to gain
approval for that goal — which, incidentally, helped to further the international
banking ideal desired by the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland — Wilson was still hopeful
he could achieve that goal.In order to
draft a constitution for the League of Nations,
he appointed a four-main committee chaired by Col. House and named another man,
like Warburg, from a German Jewish background, as adviser to the
committee.George Louis Beer, whose
father Julius Beer lived next door to Swiss-born Meyer Guggenheim and his son
William on West 77th
Street in New
York, [4]
used his knowledge of British imperial and colonial policy to develop a
constitution for world government along similar lines. [5]He was chief of the colonial
division of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and in charge
of helping to draft the mandates for the administration of the former German
colonies.
Just as a plant absorbs its required nutrients from the soil, the
Guggenheim family had
been instrumental in acquiring for the United States scarce minerals necessary for the nation’s strategic
purposes — coinage, weapons manufacture, etc.Because of the scarcity and the expense in obtaining those minerals, the
Guggenheims therefore occupied a powerful position in America at the
turn of the century.Having been a
member of the Jewish clique which included an
assortment of Jewish bankers in Kuhn, Loeb and other Wall Street firms, George
Louis Beer understood the importance of such strategic metals in banking and
world trade. [6]His family maintained connections among the
Jewish banking community which moved from one nation to the next, setting up
centralized banking systems which could act within a global clearinghouse in an
attempt to stabilize each nation to maintain control over its currency .[7]
The
Texas Network
Like
Col. House, Jesse Jones greased a political machine composed of Texans with
whom he had been associated in business and banking.It is the network to which they gave power
which maintains power today.It is that
network that explains who Halliburton
is.Without understanding the past, we
can never hope to understand the current power structure — how it thinks and how
it works.
We
can identify the network by its components — the businesses in which its
constituents were engaged.The purpose
of the “administrator” is to distribute the government’s money to those
businesses, assuring the network that it will not need to compete with the same
type of businesses not controlled by the network.Since money usually determines the outcomes
of elections, the network sets up its own method of bypassing the law in order
to funnel money to its candidates.Bush II's administration used Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay in that role.
Vice
President Dick Cheney’s primary function was to distribute contracts to his old
employer, Halliburton, as well as to lay the groundwork for the pretext
necessary to get the United
States involved in a war.Can it really be that simple?The best way to answer that question is to
examine and analyze the governing boards of Halliburton throughout its
history — a time-consuming process.In “TheHalliburton Riddle,” we stated:“Connally,
Rumsfeld, Cheney and Armstrong — of those four, three would serve as directors of
Halliburton. The fourth, Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense would help George W.
Bush engineer the war in Iraq, to Halliburton’s benefit,” thus intimating that
there is a definite connection between that corporate clique and the policy
decisions being made in the White House, and that, to a great degree, those
policy decisions are concerned primarily with trade deficits and currency
stabilization — issues with which the United States has been dealing throughout
its history.
Federal Reserve System regions
The State of Texas
houses one of the twelve district banks that operate the Federal Reserve.Located in Dallas, it controls all banks in Texas, southern New Mexico and northern Louisiana.Texans have always resented their
subservience to Eastern capital, always searching for a way to avoid having to
go to New York
or Boston to
sell their bonds or issue new corporate stock.When Jesse Jones headed the RFC, he made sure that his friends back home
were not neglected, and those friends liked having one of their own as the
nation’s chief banker.
Although
Jones had, in 1917 been one of the initial incorporators of Houston-based
Humble Oil Company (a majority of whose stock was secretly, and illegally,
owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey), he sold his stock when began work for the
Red Cross at the end of World War I.His
co-founders, however, because of Texas’
importance as a resource for petroleum and natural gas, would eventually see
themselves in the chairmanship of Standard Oil of New Jersey.They would also gain access to the board of Houston’s prestigious Rice University,
patterned along the lines of Princeton, where
Jersey Standard was originally headquartered.The founders would also control a major segment of the beef producing
industry — with its King Ranch in South Texas
performing a dual function as cattle raiser and oil producer (having leased its
land to Humble Oil, which found huge oil fields there).
It was, in fact, a scion of the King Ranch — Congressman Richard Mifflin
Kleberg — who gave Jesse Jones’ replacement as head of the Texas network his
first job in Washington, D.C. in 1932.While
young Lyndon Baines Johnson was still learning the ropes as Cong. Kleberg’s
aide, Col. House was in New York
meeting periodically with FDR.But between
1938 (when Col. House died) and about 1941, control of the Texas network wavered between Jesse Jones
and Vice-President John Nance Garner.Once Garner was replaced as Vice-President by Henry Wallace, Jones’
power diminished, and the Texas
network came increasingly under the influence of Lyndon Johnson.It was at that point that George and Herman
Brown, founders of Brown & Root, began to use Johnson’s inside information
and connection to FDR to keep the federal dollars flowing into Texas.
Johnson’s
most significant and most secret tap into inside information sources, however,
involved a Texan who is even more mysterious than Col. House — a man named Robert Bernerd Anderson, who possibly did more than any other individual to ensure Texas’ access to mineral
resources independent of the Federal Reserve’s New York and Boston districts.Anderson
will be the subject of more detailed study in the future.
The
political machine for which LBJ worked (he only thought he controlled it;
whereas, it was the other way round) continues to reside in Texas today, although it is now headed by
Republicans rather than Democrats, and is still centered within the Federal Reserve
Bank in Dallas.Thus, it is no mere coincidence that three of
the last seven Presidents allegedly “elected” by the people of the United States have claimed Texas as their residence. [8]The disproportionate influence asserted by
Texans stems no more from a coincidence than does the fact that the election of
2004 pitted two members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones against each
other.Identification of the financial/political
network (some have used the term “cabal”) which rose to power in 1963 — and which
is so reluctant to relinquish that power — is of urgent importance in order to
change the paradigm that has taken America ever closer into the grips of
globalism.
Just
as Brown & Root (Halliburton) understood that maintaining political power is a necessary step
in order to assure its continued access to government contracts, the contracts
themselves helped to determine what policies those politicians, whose power was
contingent on continuing to feed contracts to the network which elected them,
would pursue. It is a vicious cycle that,
in the hands of Texans, always becomes deadly and dangerous.
Notes:
[1]Philip Dru Administrator:A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935, originally published anonymously in 1912 by B.W.
Huebsch.The badly written novel was in
1916 disclosed to have been authored by Col. Edward M. House, the man behind
Woodrow Wilson’s rise to prominence.Indicating that his true purpose in creating such an administrative
framework within the federal executive branch of government was to keep the
peasants happy so as not to upset the existing order, House began his book with
a quote from the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe
Mazzini, whom present-day conspiracy theorists have called an illuminati
leader.
[2] Ron Chernow, The
Warburgs:The Twentieth-Century Odyssey
of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York:Random House, 1993), 132.Chernow
reveals that Paul Warburg, along with Aldrich, “sneaked off” to Jekyll Island, Georgia late in 1910 to discuss
currency reform with other wealthy men from American banking circles.This meeting was discussed in “Membershipby Inheritance Only.”
[3]
William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance:The Rise of the American
Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977).According to Corson, Jones had been chosen by
Colonel House to serve under Major General Ralph H. Van Deman—General Pershing's
senior intelligence officer and Chief of Allied Counterintelligence—at the
Paris Peace Commission after World War I.Van Deman’s 38-year career in intelligence had taken place long before
the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency, or National
Security Agency had been created, before any funding mechanism for intelligence
operations existed.Corson had lived, worked, and traveled in Japan, China, Indonesia,
Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia throughout the cold war years and had fought
inWorld War II, Korea, and Vietnam—retiring
as a retired lieutenant colonel from the Marine Corps.He had “learned the intricate workings of the
intelligence community in a wide variety of field and staff intelligence
assignments,” including “Staff Secretary of the President's Special Group (CI)
joint DOD-CIA Committee on
Counterinsurgency R & D, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense's
Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Officer in Charge of the
Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis) Southeast Asia intelligence
evaluation program.”Yet, with all that
experience, after talking with Van Deman, Corson admitted to being left “with a
conundrum which after 27 years remains unresolved. It involved my stated
disbelief that the activities surrounding his card file project could have been
carried out without the financial assistance of others. His reply was
equally disarming and bemusing. In essence he said, “I have never
personally accepted a penny to carry out this work; however, others have had
need for funds to do what is necessary’ and he asked, ‘Do you have any quarrel
with the idea that private citizens should not make funds available to those
able and willing to carry out the work required to keep us free?’ We left
it there with his gentle admonition, ‘Your father understood this and there is
no reason you should not.’ My thoughts jumped to my father's relationship
with Jesse Jones and the Houston Endowment, but Van Deman, in a sphinxlike
pronouncement said, ‘Your future lies with those in the active forces, but
never fear, there are those in reserve who will help in their own silent ways.’”
(See footnote at pages 104-105.)
[4] The Guggenheims were discussed in “Who
“Created” Condi Rice?” written in 2004 (see revised article and also Part 2).As stated in that essay, the Guggenheims had amassed a fortune in lead,
copper and silver smelting in Colorado,
which “in 1887, led to the formation of the American Smelting & Refining
Company (ASARCO) and the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1899 and created the
American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO).”
[5] In addition to becoming wealthy from importing
tobacco, Beer’s studies had been pursued first at Columbia in New York and later in London, where he learned how the British
socialists had financed their own welfare scheme, first with Indian opium, and
later with gold and diamonds from South Africa.
[6] The Federal Reserve Act’s “chief
architect was Paul Warburg of the German and Swiss banking house who moved to America only nine years
earlier. He brought with him all the experience of European central banking.
His brother Max Warburg was financial adviser to the Kaiser and later Director
of Germany's central bank, The Reichsbank.Paul Warburg’s Wall Street banking operation was a partnership with the
Rothschilds in Kuhn Loeb & Co.”G.
Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, Fourth Edition, 2002).
[7] Julius Beer’s name appeared often in The New York
Times in conjunction with names such as Schiff, Guggenheim, Rothschild,
Warburg, Lewisohn, Lehman and Loeb — within the context of “Jewish society” and
charitable causes of that day.
[8] The first of the three, Lyndon B. Johnson, entered
the White House as a result of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 and
was elected in 1964.The second was
George H.W. Bush, virtual president for much of Reagan’s eight years in the
Office, elected in 1988.The third is
George W. Bush, who has held the job since 2001.We don’t count Gerald Ford as being
“elected”; he was appointed to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned
and ascended to the Presidency following Richard Nixon’s disgrace.We also use the term “elected” loosely
because of disputes surrounding the elections of 2000 and 2004.
"The North Americans created the myth that those who had wealth or who were children of those of wealth were superior people, harder working, and more intelligent." --H.G. Wells
It seems to be
very simple. Accumulate a pile of money. Associate with others who also
have piles of money. Network together to combine the money to attain
power and control government institutions. Use the government power
to keep the wealth within the network. Use the wealth to keep members
of the network in power. It all leads to a more orderly business
environment. Right?
Henry Stimson's Skull and Bones Networks
According to Henry Stimson’s biographer, his father — Dr. Lewis Atterbury Stimson, a surgeon — did not relish the thought of his son’s marriage to a person of a lesser class than his family, even though Mabel’s ancestry, through her grandmother, was directly traceable to Captain Miles Standish of the Plymouth Colony. [9]
The good doctor
believed that "accumulated wealth" should combine with organized
learning institutions to make their power productive:
"The
man, the brain, is the essential. The history of thought and science is
filled wίth instances of great accomplishment effected with only the
scantiest aid from accumulated wealth; but the same history shows most
painfully the cost, the waste, and the limitations due to the lack of that
aid. The combination of the two [the brain and wealth] permits the man of affairs to make his
accumulated power productive along lines where his interest could not be
gratified without the aid of special training, and it makes possible
for the possessor of that training, much that could not be accomplished
without it. The workshop and the endowment must come from the
intelligent interest of the outsider, and that interest must be created
and stimulated by the worker.
"Of
such fruitful aids to the advancement of knowledge and of wise
instruction, this building, for the opening of which we are gathered
today, is another added to those grouped upon our Campus
which testify to the wise and generous thought of the benefactors of
the University. It is for us to use the means thus afforded in order
that that wisdom and generosity may have their full effect and that
their fruits may stimulate others to effort in the same beneficent
work."
The American health industry has always felt it had a nobler cause than merely making the masses healthy. The motivation of Henry's father, as shown above, was to build a medical infrastructure so that men of his own class could continue to be trained in medical research and the study of disease. In many ways Dr. Stimson had a mentality similar to the doctors in Germany, where had studied. His own classmates would ultimately use Jews as subjects in experiments before World War II, for the "advancement" of knowledge. They, too, simply wanted to know how disease worked in the body and had no regard for persons of lesser class or race. Their ultimate goal was to improve the lot of their own kind. It was the same mentality that pervaded the secret society called Skull and Bones.
The Skull and Bones network was illustrated by Antony Sutton in his book, America's Secret Establishment, as follows:
Networking Through Marriage
When Henry Lewis Stimson married Mary White, he gained a phenomenal connection to the Order through his new in-laws that tapped into many generations of accumulation of wealth and power in New England. Mary White Stimson's father, Charles Atwood White, and her brothers were not only members of Skull and Bones, but her uncle, Henry Dyer White, was treasurer of the Russell Trust Association in 1856, the year Skull and Bones became a state-chartered corporation in Connecticut.
This strong connection to the Order's goals gave young Stimson a
foot in the door with another relative of his wife —Bonesman Sherman Evarts (Yale, Skull and Bones,1881), who became his own law associate —but to a Bonesman who was a Yale classmate of his father (both were members of the Yale class of 1863), William Collins Whitney; while Henry's uncle and namesake,Rev. Henry Albert Stimson
(Skull and Bones 1865) was only two years behind the two.[10]
The secret society at Yale soon was able to control — as was its goal, according to Antony Sutton in the video below — the boards of many of the most prestigious networks of professionals in America — attorneys, clergy, universities, and the medical profession.
W. C. Whitney wasted no time introducing Stimson to his own attorney, Elihu Root, a graduate of Hamilton College where Root’s father was a mathematics professor. Root's daughter, Edith, would marry Ulysses S. Grant III in 1907, an event that would help Republicans move away from the Democratic Party, which Whitney represented. But that would still be years in the future, after Whitney's own son accepted the beneficence of his uncle, one of Standard Oil's largest investors--Oliver Hazard Payne, Flora Payne Whitney's brother.
Hamilton College had also been the alma mater of Whitney’s father-in-law, Henry B. Payne, before his move to Ohio in 1833. Payne's own father-in-law, Nathan Perry, was the leading merchant in what was then "the West." [11]
Through this marriage, U.S. Senator Henry B. Payne had thus made contact with the nautical Rhode
Island Perrys of Newport — a town with the unpleasant distinction of
having been the center of the African slave trade. [12]Newport was then an opulent resort for America’s most wealthy, including the Vanderbilt and Astor families as well as the Rothschild banking representative August Belmont, who married the daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry.
By
accepting Elihu Root’s offer of employment in 1891, Stimson would thus be working
for a man who had helped Governor Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, end the Tweed
Ring’s control of Tammany Hall, even though Root had earlier represented Boss William Tweed, a Republican, in 1873. But Whitney’s goal had not been to
stop corruption; he simply wanted to control it — believing that graft and political
corruption were contemptible only so long as
they were not being used to his own advantage.
Whitney boasted that he
hired Root’s firm because, in so many words, Root knew how to manipulate the law without
breaking it. It was a useful lesson for those who wanted to control the increasingly powerful federal government.
Inventing the “Pump and Dump”
Building ships for U.S. Navy
Whitney’s
loyalty to the Democrats, however, won him an appointment as Secretary of
the Navy under Grover Cleveland in 1885. As naval chief for four years,
Whitney supervised an ambitious program to build battleships in order to
modernize the navy — to the benefit of the Perry family, who were, incidentally, connected by marriage with Rothschild banking agent, August Belmont, whose financing was critical in the plan. Only by building up the naval fleet of battleships could America have the ability by 1898 to challenge Spain in Cuba and the
Philippines, necessary for the expansionist plans of President Taft's Skull and Bones network. [13] Ship construction on such a massive scale required money, of course, and August Belmont was there to help the Perrys and Whitney — all an intricate part of "the government" of President Cleveland — with the financing of the massive effort.
By
1890 Whitney had returned to New York, and his investment syndicate began
consolidating street railways in Philadelphia, New York, and smaller
cities into one electric transit company. They hired attorney Francis Lynde Stetson to incorporate America’s first holding company, which would become a model for financial fraud even to the present day. [14] Within ten years, the Whitney syndicate would "merge" with the Rockefellers, according to the New York Times story posted to the right.
Metropolitan Traction
According to the legal model Stetson followed, stock of Metropolitan Traction Company,
a holding company, was issued to pay Whitney and his associates for the
forty or so independent surface transit companies whose properties they
had purchased, including the right to operate exclusively in various metropolitan areas (called franchise rights). Since Whitney’s syndicate
controlled the new city officials, they were able to obtain a monopoly
concession to build one electric streetcar system along the various
routes previously authorized — a right which theoretically increased the value of the
properties sold to the holding company, even though most of the purchased properties were decrepit horse-car lines in
unprofitable territory, with little earning capacity or value. Still
Metropolitan paid prices in amounts from five to twenty times their
acquisition costs plus anticipated cost of construction. [15]
When
the holding company’s management (Whitney’s wealthy syndicate members who desired to invest in the most modern technology then available) began
declaring huge dividends for Metropolitan Traction Company — thus pumping up the stock’s price to ever greater heights — the unwary public rushed to the NYSE to buy the stock. Insiders who knew how inflated the value was, were happy to dump their stock to the tune of millions in profits for themselves.
Having
once sold all their stock, the promoters then felt no obligation to
actually build the modernized streetcar system they had promised.
Newspaper publicity against the fraud perpetrated by the Metropolitan
Traction Co. resulted in rescission of its monopoly franchise, an action
overturned after an appeal to the Supreme Court handled by Elihu Root's firm.
Elihu Root
"It is not a function of law," Root rationalized, "to enforce
the rules of morality."
The
evidence supports only one conclusion:
Henry Stimson’s true role as an
attorney and “statesman” was engineered by men inside Yale's inner core. His role as Secretary of War placed him in a position of being able to defend financial investments abroad of the men he fronted for. As his network saw it, without continued profits from those companies, stocks and related interests they held, they would be unable to support Yale's endowment, which, as a consequence, would limit the influence in political affairs of their alumni, who had branched out into so many areas of American life. It was a vicious cycle. Whether the money or the power came first was of no consequence; reality was that the loss of either meant the loss of both.
Investment Roll-Overs
This merger of investments, as indicated in the Whitney Syndicate cover-up story above, is highly suspicious. Why would the transportation empire controlled by William C. Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan begin this switch in 1900 from electrically powered transportation to oil and gas powered engines?
We can only surmise that part of the answer may have been the fact that 1900's Yale Skull and Bones graduates included a Rockefeller, whose uncle was John D. Rockefeller, and whose first cousin was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Percy (who went by his middle name "Avery") in 1901 married Isabel Goodrich Stillman, sister of Elsie Stillman. Both were daughters of James Stillman, president of the National City Bank.
Elsie Stillman had married P. Avery's elder brother, William G. Rockefeller in 1898. Perhaps Yale's elite saw an opportunity to benefit its endowment by using this scion as leverage for its own sustenance.
[This subject will be examined at another time. It is also dealt with at other blog/websites of this author: MinorMusings.com and QuixoticJoust.blogspot.com., each of which contains labels and a search engine to facilitate further research.]
Skull and Bones 1900--Percy Rockefeller, seated at right.
Stimson's law office was located
almost adjacent to the site where in 1914 the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York would be located, in a building which would remain his home
base off and on for over fifty years. [16] When Root left the firm in 1899 to join the Republican administration, Stimson and another associate,Bronson Winthrop,
started their own firm in the same location, engaged primarily in
corporate securities and litigation.
Winthrop (an American globalist,
who had been born in Paris and educated in England), shared with John Forbes Kerry a mutual ancestor, Wait Winthrop, as detailed in Untitled Aristocracy.
In
1906 Stimson followed the same path blazed by Elihu Root — as attorney
for the southern district of New York — the district with jurisdiction
over the New York Stock Exchange and the lower Manhattan banks. Bronson
remained in the original offices to carry on the firm’s legal business,
with Stimson returning from time to time between appointments in
Washington. These men comprised an internationalist, even
imperialistic, circle of men deter-mined to make America a supreme power
in the world.
When Edith Root married Ulysses S. Grant III in 1907, The New York Tribune, then owned by Whitelaw Reid, considered the upcoming nuptials to be something akin to a royal coronation. Three days before the wedding the Sunday insert proclaimed:
Daughter of Secretary of State to Wed Grandson of a President.
Photos of the bride, the groom, Elihu Root, his son, Elihu, Jr., Mrs. Clara Root were presented in a collage, which also included a photo of President Grant's son, General Frederick Dent Grant and wife, Ida Honore Grant and their daughter--Julia Dent, otherwise known as Princess Cantacuzene. Julia, it seems, had married the White Russian Romanov Prince Michel Cantacuzene in 1899 and would live in the Ukraine until the Russian Revolution in 1917 made refugees of them.
Musical Chairs Skull and Bones Style
Oliver Hazard Payne
In
1899 Republican Elihu Root was appointed secretary of war by President
McKinley, who had spearheaded the Spanish-American War, which would then
lead to his suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. [17]
Less than six months after the inauguration on his second term,
McKinley was assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt became President.
Secretary of State John Hay, whose daughter Helen in 1902 would marry
Whitney’s son Payne (Skull and Bones 1898), had supervised the treaty to
end the Spanish-American War and formulated the Open Door policy. [18] No doubt Secretary Hay was looking out for his daughter's financial future in his role as foreign policy adviser to the President--equating what was best for the nation as what was best for Standard Oil, in which Payne Whitney had a huge stake which he inherited from his Bonesman uncle, Oliver Hazard Payne.
When Hay left the Cabinet, Elihu Root took his position and would be
replaced in turn by William Howard Taft (Skull and Bones 1878, son
of co-founder Alphonso Taft). Taft had first served in 1900 on the
Philippine Commission, eventually serving as Governor General of the
Islands, before advancing to the chair of Secretary of War in 1904.
After his stint as head of the State Department, Taft moved to the White
House in 1909.
As
President, Taft appointed Root’s former associate Stimson to be
Secretary of War in 1911. In 1912, after Taft and TR had campaigned
against each other, thus making way for a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to
usher in the radical banking “reforms” which the Republicans had been
supporting by other names for years, Taft returned to Yale as a
professor until he was named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921.
In
1927 Stimson served under Calvin Coolidge in Taft’s former role of
Governor General of the Philippines (where John Kerry’s great-uncle W. Cameron Forbes, had also served), as well as being Secretary of State in
the administration of Republican Herbert Hoover. So popular (or perhaps
only “connected”) was Stimson that he was also tapped by Democrats
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to be Secretary of War. [19]
Stimson’s
ubiquity in each successive administration was due, not so much to his
military and diplomatic brilliance, but to his knowledge of how to
secretly finance war and extract spoils from the defeated — combined with
his closeness to the money spinners operating undeterred behind the
scenes. Colonel Stimson was like a sentry, pacing back and forth in
front of the door to the henhouse where geese were busily laying golden
eggs. He was there, not to protect the geese or their eggs, but to run
interference for his co-conspirators inside who snatched up the gold as
soon as it appeared. These "geese" represent pools of wealth accumulated
through hard work, charitable donations and taxes imposed on Americans.
Investment bankers, ostensibly intending only to “borrow” the gold and
return it with interest, have been trained for generations how to
stealthily remove that gold, in order to amass huge fortunes for
themselves through market manipulation and fraud.
When
they fail in their claimed intent to return the gold, to prevent
exposure they blithely plan new wars or other diversions in order to
save their reputations. McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft, for example,
promised the American people that there was an urgent need to “liberate”
the islands of Cuba and the Philippines from Spain, and that the
territory would be “developed” and “reconstructed” for the benefit of
those abused populations.
We
all recognize that George W. Bush is in no sense a creative
intellectual. Neither are those who planned the war in Iraq. They
are merely following the same model used at the turn of the previous
century — for exactly the same reason. They know there is oil in Iraq,
and that the untapped markets there could not be tapped while Saddam was
in power. By removing him, it would be possible to open the door to
trade with Iraq — another goose of sorts — whose glittering eggs were too
hard to resist.
[9] Godfrey Hodgson, THE COLONEL, p. 48; The Family Forest Descendants of Thomas Mitchellgenealogy.
[10]
Stimson had worked since leaving law school for Sherman Evarts, another
Bonesman (1881) from a prestigious, politically connected, family, at
52 Wall Street—the same building which housed National City Bank of New
York, where Franklin Roosevelt would later have his law office.
Sherman’s father was William Maxwell Evarts
(Skull and Bones 1837), the attorney general under Andrew Johnson (who
defended the Republican on impeachment charges) as well as being
secretary of state under Rutherford B. Hayes when the controversy over
the 1876 election was decided). The elder Evarts was also a trustee of
the Peabody Educational Fund, 1867-1901 and a member of the Corporation
of Yale College, 1872-91. See OBITUARY RECORD OF GRADUATES OF YALE UNIVERSITY DECEASED FROM JUKE, 1900, TO JUNE, 1910.
[11]
“Mary Perry was the only daughter of Nathan Perry and Pauline Shimmer.
Nathan had moved to Cleveland in 1804, one year after Ohio became a
state. He became the chief rival of John Jacob Astor in the fur trade,
and later became the leading merchant in Cleveland. Edward Perry, a
Quaker, emigrated to Sandwich, Mass around 1639. Two of his sons, tired
of harassment of Quakers, moved around 1704 to Narragansett country,
near the town of Newport, Rhode Island which had large farms which used
many slaves imported through Newport. Church of England enjoyed greater
prestige. The impact of this gay, opulent, slaveholding society was
unfavorable to the growth of so ascetic a sect as the Quakers, and the
Perrys eventually moved into the Anglican communion. Freeman Perry
married Mercy Hazard in 1755, the daughter of Oliver Hazard. She
inherited 300 acres in North Kingstown and lived and died there.” Oliver Hazard Payne website. The Payne mansion was donated to Marist College, which hosts the website.
[12]
“Rhode Island was a key juncture of the ‘notorious triangle’ in which
Rhode Island rum was sold for African slaves, who then were sold in the
Caribbean for molasses and sugar that were, in turn, sold to rum
distillers in Rhode Island….The papers of other Rhode Islanders with
slave trade connections appear in Part 2. These businessmen lived in
Providence and Newport as well as Bristol, which was a center of the
African trade in later years, until the 1808 congressional ban on slave
importing.” Editorial Adviser: Jay Coughtry, Author of The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807.
[13] The battleships Maine and Texas, commissioned during Whitney’s tenure, were useful in the Spanish-American War that began in 1898.
[14]
Originally called Bangs & Stetson, the firm’s name was later
changed to Davis, Polk & Wardwell, though in 1890, while former
President Cleveland was a partner there, it was known as "Bangs,
Stetson, Tracy, & MacVeagh." Partner Charles Tracy was the
father-in-law of J.P. Morgan. Its offices were located at 15 Broad,
next door to the Morgan bank. Bangs made his reputation by taking on
William ‘Boss’ Tweed, whose corrupt political machine dominated New York
City in the 19th century. Stetson was one of the first attorneys to
build a large practice by advising corporations on business matters (as
opposed to litigation). In 1887 Stetson began representing J. Pierpont
Morgan when he helped Morgan combine several small electric companies
into General Electric. The firm had also been counsel for Samuel J.
Tilden in the Tilden-Hayes controversy over the 1876 Presidential
election and also set up the U.S. Steel, International Paper, and ITT
corporations. The Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, 7th edition,
(2004), p. 122;
The
name “Wardwell” belonged to Stetson’s son-in-law, who was appointed to
the Red Cross Mission to Russia. This mission was discussed by Antony
Sutton in his book , Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution.
[16] Hodgson states that the firm was on the 14th floor of the Liberty Mutual Insurance Building at 32 Nassau. Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel, p. 48. Today’s maps do not identify that building, but it appears to have been very near the New York Fed.
[17]
McKinley favored the remonetization of silver. Aware of silver
sentiment among his constituents, he sought some means of securing
bimetallism without inflation and therefore surprisingly voted with the
Democratic majority to pass the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 over the veto
of President Hayes, authorizing limited silver purchases and instructing
the treasury secretary either to coin the silver or to issue silver
certificates. As author of the McKinley Tariff Act in 1890, he forced
tariffs to new highs. He was then defeated for reelection to Congress.
He served as governor during the Panic of 1893, before being nominated
for President. Although McKinley was prepared to campaign on the issue
of tariffs, the nomination of William Jennings Bryan—an ardent
free-silver advocate—changed the central issue of the campaign. McKinley
dropped his advocacy of silver coinage and came out strongly for the
gold standard, winning the support of President Cleveland and many other
conservative Democrats.
[18] Hay carried to the Treaty the protocol issued by McKinley. In the re-election campaign, the Republican Platform
characterized the Spanish-American War as “a war for liberty and human
rights … a war unsought and patiently resisted,” and called Americans to
“a new and noble responsibility” in foreign affairs. The document
reaffirmed the party’s traditional commitments to the gold standard,
tariff protectionism, trade reciprocity, veterans’ pensions, voting
rights for all races, and an inter-oceanic canal in Central America. It
approved the annexation of Hawaii (1898), antitrust legislation, and the
creation of a cabinet-level department of commerce.
[19] Another fascinating Cabinet member during this era was Charles Joseph Bonaparte,
great-nephew of the Emperor Napoleon—first serving as Secretary of the
Navy, and then as Attorney General during Theodore Roosevelt’s
administration. In 1875 Bonaparte, a Baltimore attorney, married Ellen Channing Day, daughter of Bonesman, Thomas Mills Day (1837), in Newport, Rhode Island.
