Those Pesky Republican Operatives

Killer Political Instincts 

©2005 by Linda Minor

A Taste for Blood 

George Walker Bush called Karl Rove his "Brain". Part of the story has been told many times. Paul Begala, Rove's Democrat counterpart said of one book, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by Wayne Slater and Jim Moore: 

"Love him or hate him, Karl Rove is one of the most brilliant and successful political consultants of all time." 

Brilliant, yes. But what makes him successful as a Republican strategist is that atavistic ability to lunge for the jugular and not let go. It is a trait that has come to epitomize Republican politics--at least the political game played by the strategists who get paid to manage the campaigns of of all levels of candidates running for office today.

RNC Head Picks Winner

It was an auspicious meeting between 23-year-old Karl and George H. W. Bush in 1973 which sealed the younger man's meteoric rise within his chosen career. Rove was vying for the chairmanship of the College Republicans against his more traditional opponent, Robert Edgeworth, who heartily embraced Barry Goldwater in that year when Bush was dubbed as chairman of the Republican National Committee at the height of the politically disastrous Watergate scandal. Given the choice between Rove and Edgeworth, the seemingly mild-mannered Bush picked Rove hands-down, according to a 2003 article by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker. [1] The meeting would become only the first step in a long-term relationship between Rove and Bush, leading, as it turned out, to an even more co-dependent association between Rove and Bush's son, "Dubya".It was all about getting into power, which seemed like an impossible dream in those days after Watergate.


George Bush was, at that moment in time, frustrated because former Goldwater idealists, disgusted by Watergate shenanigans, were abandoning politics in droves.In their place, new power was being handed to a youthful electorate within the College Republican organization, whose value to the Party promised an abundance of gratuitous labor and an almost self-sufficient network of grassroots volunteers. Senator Carl T. Curtis summed it up well when he said:

"I can think of no other political organization which can give conservatives a bigger 'bang per buck.' " [2]

George Bush’s Political Secrets

In 1972 the 48-year-old George Bush had already experienced a varied career in both business and public life. A Navy pilot in World War II, he completed his studies at Yale in 1950 (Skull and Bones) and moved to Texas to engage in the oil business. Financed largely by clients of his father and uncle with connections to the investment banks of Brown Brothers Harriman and  G.H. Walker & Co., he worked first for a subsidiary of Dresser Industries (now part of Halliburton), which was then wholly owned by Brown Brothers Harriman, of which his father (Senator Prescott Bush) was a senior partner with a veritable coven of Skull and Bones bankers--Averell and Roland Harriman, Knight Woolley and Robert A. Lovett.

Prescott Bush in Brown Brothers Harriman office with Bonesmen partners Bunny Harriman, Knight Woolley and Lovett

After more than a decade in Texas, having attached himself to wealthy Texans Bill and Hugh Liedtke, W.S. Farish III, and Robert Mosbacher, Bush thought he had gained sufficient backing to enter the political fray. He managed to win election twice to a Republican Congressional seat from a wealthy precinct in Houston in 1966 and served until 1970 when then President Nixon, anticipating an important vote concerning China’s status to that body, appointed him to be Ambassador to the United Nations.

When hell broke loose over Watergate, Sen. Bob Dole, who had replaced Rogers Morton at the Republic National Committee, quickly resigned, and Bush took over in January 1973. Nixon had placed the real political power of his office in the hands of his former law partner, John Mitchell, who headed the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), the source of the scandal to begin with. By placing Bush at the RNC, the White House was hoping for more loyalty to Nixon than Dole had shown. And, too, Bush was also there to cover his own misdeeds and those of his fellow fundraisers, referred to on the “smoking gun” tape as “the Texans,” disclosure of whose role in the campaign could have revealed “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” according to Nixon. [3]

Though conspiracy theories abound, George Bush’s real role in Republican politics during the Kennedy years remained buried, at least until publication of Russ Baker's ground-breaking book, Family of Secrets. Bush would have even more opportunity to cover up prior dirty tricks when President Gerald Ford appointed him Director of the C.I.A. late in 1975.

There's a Lesson There

Segretti

Keeping the lid on the secrets being uppermost in his mind, when the stressed-out Bush met the arrogant and ebullient Rove in 1973, he was, therefore, inspired by the young man’s optimistic spirit, as well as his ability to engage in the same dirty tricks that were to land Donald Segretti in a prison cell. Segretti, one of many "advance men" that had been hired by CREEP to disrupt Democratic campaigns during the 1972 primary season through acts of political sabotage and espionage, once distributed a letter falsely claiming that former Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl. He pled guilty in 1973 to three counts of distributing illegal campaign literature.

In 1970, it has been often reported, Rove, while working for a Republican candidate and pretending to be a Democrat volunteer for that opponent, removed two reams of stationery from the Democrat's office which he used to advertise the opening of his  headquarters, adding "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." [4] Stories about such successes were undoubtedly boasted about at College Republicans training weekends. Karl Rove was a fast learner. 

While the Watergate scandal was at its peak, Rove’s opponents for the College Republican position—Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth—leaked to the Washington Post a tape recording of an amused Rove and another College Republican, recounting their antics and campaign espionage during previous political campaigns. The story that appeared in the Post ran under the headline

“GOP PROBES OFFICIAL AS

TEACHER OF TRICKS”

Republican Chairman George Bush was not amused. Edgeworth told the New Yorker, “Bush sent me ... the angriest letter I have ever received in my life. I had leaked to the Washington Post, and now I was out of the Party forever. That letter is a family heirloom." [5] In contrast, Bush rewarded Rove with a full-time job at the Republican National Committee. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Rove's Rise to Fame

Lee Atwater

The manager for Rove's 1973 CRNC campaign was none other than 22-year-old southerner, Lee Atwater, who would become famous for his killer political instincts seven years later, after George Bush hired him as strategist in his post-Watergate campaign for the presidency.  Rove's own fame came hot on Atwater's heels.

While a high school senior in Salt Lake City he worked in the campaign of Utah Senator Wallace F. Bennett and got his first taste of political strategy. As a freshman political science student at the University of Utah he interned for Ralph Tyler Smith’s 1970 U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois and so overwhelmed his College Republican boss that he was rewarded with the job as executive director of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC), located in Washington, D.C., no less. [6]

The move to the nation’s capital would be a heady experience for  Rove, a nerdy lad who already had an established history of impatience and even brazenness. As a protege of the College Republicans' national chairman, Joe Abate (now a lobbyist), Rove soon met others with his taste for political blood, including his former campaign manager Lee Atwater, as well as Roger Stone and Terry Dolan—each of whom was trained in the College Republican stable to be a political consultant for the conservative cause. A decade later, equally adept, yet unprincipled, trainees—Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist—joined them there. [7] 

Reed and Abramoff in a casino

Baby-faced Ralph Reed was anointed by Pat Robertson to head the IRS-designated not-for-profit 50l(c)(4) organization, the Christian Coalition. Time magazine in 2006, at the time of his fall from grace, quoted Reed, during the peak of his hubris, in a not-so-Christian moment, likening his political role to a jungle killer fighting a war:

Reed with Pat Robertson

"I do guerrilla warfare," Reed once boasted to a reporter, describing how he ambushed his enemies as a political operative. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag."

Rove's Background

Under Rove, direct mail—a dirt path blazed by Richard Viguerie—would be paved. The simple mailing list would be broadened to establish ideological coalitions spanning the nation. The Republican political base would be analyzed and broken down into categories with enthusiastic young ideologues appointed to raise money from each segment by preaching to their respective choirs about their candidates.

Because 1972 was the first year that eighteen-year-olds could vote, the CRNC became an official auxiliary to the Republican Party, and its chairman (Rove) was made an ex officio member of the national committee’s executive committee. Quite a step up for a young man of Rove’s age. 

At the same time, emotional upheavals in Rove's family life intensified the experience, as he traveled to his hometown of Sparks, Nevada, to check in on his mother and found himself profiled in the Reno Evening Gazette on January 31, 1972, which described him as:

a political science and history major at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where the College Republican National Committee has its offices. He attended Florence Drake Elementary School and Dilworth Junior High when he lived in Sparks.

The paper also proudly proclaimed his other achievements:

Former Sparks [Nevada] Youth Named To Who's Who

Karl Rove, the 21-year-old son of Mrs. Reba Rove of Sparks, has been appointed to Who's Who of Outstanding Young Men of America.

The upheaval involved Karl's being told by an aunt that Louis Claude Rove, Jr. was his adoptive, rather than his biological, dad. He also discovered that Louis was, in fact, gay. Even though Karl would continue to raise funds from the anti-homosexual Republican base constituents by bashing gays, he came to terms with his father's lifestyle.

Karl's mother, the former Reba Wood, was divorced from Louis on May 25, 1970 in Reno, Nevada, where Reba took her family to live after giving up her gift shop in Salt Lake City. Reba had met and married Louis while he was a student at the Colorado School of Mines in Denver, when Karl and his brother Eric were quite young. The name of their real father, her first husband, is unknown. Louis' graduation and marriage occurring at the beginning days of the 1950's uranium boom, led to one of his first jobs at Climax Molybdenum Co. in Salt Lake City, Utah. By 1966 he was chief geologist at Vitro Minerals Corp., created under supervision of the Atomic Energy Commission during the peak of the boom in 1955. 

Louis Rove's Resume

From Louis Rove's Who's Who listing

(Note: This blog previously explored a contract between LBJ friend, Morris D. Jaffe, and the Climax uranium company, as well as uranium mining companies owned by Dallasite, D. Harold Byrd. Readers can search this blog or scan tags for more on these subjects, by finding these tools in the frame to the right.)

Carl M. Loeb, Jr.

According to Climax's company history, it merged in 1957 with the non-ferrous metals mining company, American Metal Company (Limited)--the majority of whose stock in 1918 had been placed in a voting trust for its British alien owners, though the company president was an American, Carl M. Loeb (father of John L. Loeb). After the war it became American Metal Climax, Inc., still controlled by the Loebs, evidenced by the fact that Carl M. Loeb Jr.,

"a metallurgical engineer, ... was an executive with the Climax Molybdenum Company, which later became AMAX Inc. [in 1974]. He was also a limited partner in Loeb, Rhoades and Company, a brokerage and investment banking firm that his father, Carl Sr., and his brother John had helped found, and that was later merged into Shearson and then American Express."

The family moved to Sparks, Nevada as early as 1961:

Rove’s father and mother, Louis and Reba Rove, were listed in a local [Sparks] city directory beginning in 1961. Louis Rove was a geologist with the Utah Mining Company (one of the six corporations that built Hoover Dam). At the time, the Roves were living at 2195 Nelson Way, a block east of Pyramid Way and just north of the then relatively new Greenbrae Shopping Center.

By 1962, Louis Rove’s title had changed to regional manager and the corporation’s name had changed to Utah Construction and Mining Company [UCM]. In 1963, the Roves moved to 149 East Gault in Sparks. Karl was the second of five children in the family. His brothers and sisters were Olaf, Reba, Eric and Alma.

UCM was a high-security-clearance company which built a facility for the Atomic Energy Commission after first entering the nuclear industry in 1957. In 1964, according to Jason Wanlass's website at Weber State University, Communications Department, UCM was hired to construct an underground control center for Minuteman missile launching facilities. The company, which began by laying railroads and building dams, "under the guidance of Marriner Eccles, ... expanded into mining dredging, and land development."

Reba Wood Rove

Reba had been born in New Mexico in 1929 to Robert G. and Elsie Wood of Pueblo, Colorado (her father died there in 1973). Prior to her divorce and employment, she had been active in a women's group, Beta Sigma Phi, in Reno since moving there and served as president of the Reno-Sparks city council prior to 1966. 

After her 1970 divorce from Louis, her name sometimes appeared in the news as the coordinator for the Senior Citizen Resource Center, which handled the "meals on wheels" and similar programs for seniors in Reno's Washoe County, but it also announced her resignation from that post in May 1972. Karl's sister, Reba, who was only ten when her parents divorced, became a high school cheerleader. She and her sister Alma were also active in the local chapter of Rainbow Girls, a Masonic-connected society. In 1973 Alma married John Robert Monroe, but divorced him four years later.

It is quite likely that Reba had met her last husband, Lowell Henry Brinson, while she worked at the senior center in Reno. The son of a California railroad porter, he was regional coordinator in Stockton, California in 1968 for the Foster Grandparents Program, before moving to Reno to become Nevada's state director for ACTION, a new federal volunteer agency. Lowell and his wife Shirley had divorced soon after filing bankruptcy in Reno in late 1969--at the exact same point in time Louis Rove abandoned his family to take up a full-time gay lifestyle. They married in Los Angeles, California, on May 17, 1981, the same year she purportedly committed suicide. Although her suicide was mentioned in Time magazine, while reviewing The Architect, the marriage to Brinson was omitted:

In 1981 a third devastating blow struck what remained of the Rove family. Karl's mother committed suicide in Reno, Nev. She had surmounted much in her life, Rove says, starting with poverty. Her father had worked on a road crew in the San Juan Mountains and sold knives from the back of his truck to grocery stores in little out-of-the-way towns. "They lived in a house in southern Colorado where, when they finished reading the evening newspaper, they'd take flour paste and slap it on the wall for insulation," he says.

After persevering through all that, the disintegration of a marriage and the challenge of raising five children by two fathers, why had Reba Wood Rove reached a point where she couldn't go any further? "Again, it's hard to figure out," Rove says. "You can speculate on what demons she just wasn't able to overcome, but she couldn't. And it's very sad for my sisters, who were very close to her."

Louis Rove--Louie, as he was commonly known in the piercing party circuit--died on Jul 14, 2004 in Palm Springs, California. 

The Mullen Company, Utah and the CIA

As we mentioned earlier, Rove received his political baptism in the last campaign of Senator Wallace Bennett, who had entered the U.S. Senate only one year prior to Prescott Bush.  Bennett’s wife of 71 years was a daughter of the Mormon Church's former President, Heber J. Grant. 

Sen. Bob Bennett, defeated by Tea Party

Utah Senator Robert F. Bennett, who had headed his father’s campaign the year Rove worked for it, would be elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. He had preceded Rove at the University of Utah by some fifteen years, graduating in 1957, and then running the family’s manufacturing business, from which he took a leave of absence to run his father’s 1962 campaign. He then moved to Washington permanently to work as press secretary for a Republican Congressman. After a stint as a lobbyist, he ran his father’s last Senatorial campaign in 1968, the year Richard Nixon was elected to his first term. President Nixon rewarded him with a job as Congressional liaison for the Department of Transportation.

That was the same year Bob Bennett met Charles Colson—once a lobbyist, an aide to former Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall, and then corporation lawyer—who was tapped to be Nixon’s special counsel. By the summer of 1970, Bennett was receiving phone calls from Colson, as well as from fellow Mormon Bill Gay, who had come to dominate the Hughes Tool Corporation. Both men informed him that Robert R. Mullen was selling his public relations company, Mullen and Company, which already had the Washington account as lobbyist for the Mormon Church. [8] When Hughes Tool fired Democrat Lawrence O’Brien as its lobbyist, late in 1970, Bennett was hired to replace him. [9] Thus armed with this important client, Bennett left his job at Transportation to become president of Mullen and Company, the final purchase of the firm closing in September 1971.

E. Howard Hunt

Between 1968 and 1970, Chuck Colson and E. Howard Hunt, both alumni of Brown University (Hunt in the class of 1940 and Colson a 1953 grad) were seeing each other on a regular basis.[10]  Hunt, a naval officer and an agent of the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 until its demise, obtained a Guggenheim fellowship which paid him to travel in Mexico while he wrote his first novel (later a best-seller). After that he worked on the staff of Ambassador Averell Harriman, a partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, as well as adviser on-call to every Democratic President since FDR.

In 1948 Hunt left Harriman’s employ, having been recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency by Frank Wisner. In the meantime, he had married one of Harriman’s secretaries, Dorothy, who had spent the war years in Bern, Switzerland in the Treasury Department’s Hidden Assets Division, looking for hidden Nazi assets. Coincidentally, or not, it was in Bern where Allen Dulles, Hunt's ultimate boss in the CIA, spent the war years. Those contacts gave Hunt thus powerful references on his resume!

By the end of April 1970 all details fell in place for Hunt’s “retirement” from the C.I.A., and his employment one day later by Mullen and Company. According to Hunt's autobiography, Undercover: Memoirs of an American secret agent, he got the job through the “CIA’s placement service,” and was told by the placement officer that “the Mullen firm had ‘cooperated’ with CIA in the past." [11]

Subsequent to Hunt's settling into his new office, Mullen sold the firm to Rove's friend from Utah, Robert F. Bennett. Though miffed by the change in management, Hunt was stroked by Colson, who only a few months later telephoned him with the opportunity of a lifetime, to work at the White House. Thus, in July 1971 Hunt was hired to work on Colson’s staff as a consultant on a part-time basis until the end of the 1972 election, while still maintaining his position with Mullen and Company.

The rest, as they say, is history. Or it would be history...except for the fact that it's still going on!

~~~~~~~~

NOTES:

[1]  For details of the battle for the chairmanship, see Nicolas Lemann, “The Controller,” The New Yorker (May 12, 2003).  Both Rove and opponent Robert Edgeworth claimed to have been elected and appealed to the Republican National Committee, of which George H.W. Bush had recently become chairman.

[2]  Scott Stewart, “The College Republicans – A Brief History” (July 24, 2002).

[3]  See the transcript from Nixon archives.

[4] Jake Tapper,“Spy vs. spy” in Salon, September 26, 2000.  See also the website supporting Public Broadcasting System’s “Frontline” episode on Karl Rove, "The Architect."

[5]  James Moore, Wayne Slater, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), p. 135.

[6]  The Salt Lake Tribune, 18 September 2004.

[7]  For Norquist’s views on Rove’s agenda, see Michael Scherer’s article at Mother Jones, January 2004.

[8]  The Associated Press Political Service, 15 June 1992.

[9]  O’Brien had been placed on retainer in 1968 after Robert Kennedy’s assassination upon orders from Howard Hughes, who felt he hit paydirt when O’Brien also landed the job as head of the Democratic National Committee in 1969.

[10] Colson was president of Brown University’s alumni association and Hunt was vice president.  Brown University had been named for its first major donor and treasurer, Moses Brown, a member of a wealthy Rhode Island shipping family long engaged in the slave trade, who used public relations to create a reputation for themselves as abolitionists. In “Money and Gunpowder” it is revealed that Providence, Rhode Island was the home of John D. Rockefeller’s father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich who was most instrumental in setting up legislation creating the Federal Reserve banking system. When Samuel and Flora Bush sent their eldest son, Prescott Bush, to St. George's prep school at nearby Newport, Rhode Island, Samuel Bush was placed on the board there, where he served for many years. The family vacationed on Narragansett  Bay every summer, and Flora Bush died there, having been struck accidentally by a car. See Part Two also.

[11]  Hunt specifically mentions in Undercover (Putnam 1974) that the PR firm had “established and managed a Free Cuba Committee for CIA.” [p. 141]  Hunt, at that point in his book, brings up a name—R. Spencer Oliver—whose real importance is never fully explained by Hunt. It is only through books published after that date that one learns what some say was the real reason for the burglary of the Democratic headquarters. What Hunt does not reveal is that, at the time of the Watergate break-in, Oliver was working for the Democratic National Committee, where, as Executive Director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen, he had an office in the complex. Not only that, but the key to his secretary’s desk was found in burglar Bernard Barker’s pocket. This secretary, Ida Maxwell "Maxie" Wells, filed a lawsuit against G. Gordon Liddy, which she lost and subsequently appealed.  The opinion in Wells v. Liddy, reversed on appeal, contains some most interesting information about a call girl ring operating out of Oliver’s office in the DNC.  Hunt’s purported reason for mentioning this name is to give evidence of why Hunt felt uneasy at Mullen after Bennett’s taking over the firm. He describes Oliver as the “son of a lobbyist occasionally employed by our firm.  A Democrat, Oliver had been engaged for some time in an international student exchange which I suspected to be financed by CIA.”  [Undercover, p. 142]  Hunt may have been referring to the National Student Association, headed by Cord Meyer, Jr., exposed in 1967 as a C.I.A. front by Ramparts. magazine in 1967.

Money May Not Smell, But....

The Odor of Blood Does Reek

Bloody Bleeding Kansas

William E. Connelley included a chapter titled "Lane's Army of the North," in his book,  A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans--referring to Col. James H. Lane, who had gone to Washington, D.C. in March to present the Topeka Constitution to Congress, and attempt to have Kansas admitted as a State. He later went to Chicago, where he told those who heard him:

"I have been sent by the people of Kansas to plead their cause before the people of the North. Most persons have a very erroneous idea of the people of Kansas. They think they are mostly from Massachusetts. They are really more than nine- tenths from the Northwestern States. There are more men from Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, than from all New England and New York combined."

 Speaking further of President Franklin Pierce, Col. Lane, quoted by Connelly, declared:

"Of Franklin Pierce I have a right to talk as I please, having made more than one hundred speeches advocating his election, and having also, as one of the electors of Indiana, cast the electoral vote of that State for him. Frank was, in part, the creature of my own hands; and a pretty job they made of it. The one pre-eminent wish of mine now is that Frank may be hurled from the White House; and that the nine memorials, sent him from the outraged citizens of Kansas detailing their wrongs, may be dragged out of his iron box."

Connelley tells us that organizations were formed all over the North to help Kansas in the struggle with the slave power. 

On the 10th of July, there was a meeting at Buffalo, New York, to consolidate all these local bodies into a National organization, to be directed by one head. Governor Reeder presided at this meeting. It was determined to open a road through Iowa and Nebraska to enable emigrants to come to Kansas without being obliged to pass through Missouri....Lane had advocated the route through Iowa even before it was known that the Missouri River would be blockaded by the Missourians, saying that Free-State emigrants to Kansas ought not to be compelled to pass through hostile territory where they were insulted, maltreated and sometimes mobbed. The route through Iowa was recommended by this meeting. The National Kansas Committee was organized, composed of the following members:

• George R. Russell, Boston; 
• W. H. Russell, New Haven; 
• Thaddeus Hyatt, New York, 
• N. B. Craige, Pittsburgh; 
• John W. Wright, Logansport; 
• Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, 
• E. B. Ward, Detroit; 
• J. H. Tweedy, Milwaukee; 
• W. H. Hoppin, Providence; 
• W. H. Stanley, Cleveland; 
• F. A. Hunt, St. Louis; 
• S. W. Eldridge, Lawrence; 
• G. W. Dole, J. D. Webster, H. B. Hurd, J. Y. Scammon, and I. N. Arnold, Chicago.

Eli Thayer's Emigrant Aid Company

In a book Eli Thayer wrote years after the event, A History of the Kansas Crusade,
edited by Edward Everett Hale, he stated that the convention was not so much about opposing slavery as opposing the stranglehold the Puritan fathers like Winthrop and Lawrence had for so long held over New England. They had "readily joined the disaffected Democrats of New York in the Buffalo Convention" after Zachary Taylor was nominated in 1848 after the war with Mexico and annexation of Texas. This combined party, however, according to Thayer, grew smaller every year until in 1853 they lost a battle with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and formed the Free Soil party. Thayer blamed the southerners for the ensuing bloody battle that eventually occurred in Kansas, while President Pierce always laid the responsibility for the bloodbath on the New Englanders who formed the Emigrant Aid Company.

Thayer chose a man born in Old Lyme, Connecticut, James Denison Colt, to assist him. Colt's genealogy takes us back to the family of Samuel Colt, inventor of the improved revolver for which he received a British patent, and profited greatly from the wars against Mexico and native Americans:

Colt received a boost in sales during the Texas Revolution and the Mexican American War. His weapons contributed to the U.S. Army's success, and to the resulting westward expansion of American territory. A Texas Ranger, Captain Samuel Walker, wrote Colt a testimonial that read, in part:"Your pistols...[are] the most perfect weapon in the World... to keep the various warlike tribes of Indians and marauding Mexicans in subjection."

Construction of the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut began in 1853, after renting space there since 1848.

Machine Tools and Interchangeable Parts

British scientists had long been interested in American factory outputs for interchangeable moveable parts. In the book, English and American tool builders, author, Joseph Wickham Roe, tells the history of the rivalry between British and American inventors and dates the rise of the interchangeable parts inventions with Eli Whitney in New Haven and Simeon North in Middletown, Connecticut, the same town from which Skull and Bones founder, William H. Russell, had hailed. 

Simeon North's oldest son, Reuben, inherited his father's armaments business in Middletown, and the youngest son, Dr. Simeon North (1802-1884)  graduated Yale, class of 1825 (eight years ahead of William H. Russell) and became the fifth president of Hamilton College in New York. Dr. North's wife, the former Frances Harriet Hubbard, was a sister of Mrs. William H. Russell--wives being daughters of Dr. Thomas Hubbard, professor of surgery at Yale and president of the Connecticut State Medical Society, 1822-27. Mary E. Hubbard Russell would assist her husband in operating the Collegiate School in New Haven, which became one of the favored prep schools for young men who would later be tapped for Skull and Bones.

Click image to enlarge.


 
Mary Bellis, has written:

Both Eli Whitney and Simeon North helped to establish the United States Arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts, and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which their methods were adopted. Both the Whitney and North plants survived their founders. Just before the Mexican War the Whitney plant began to use steel for gun barrels, and Jefferson Davis, Colonel of the Mississippi Rifles, declared that the new guns were "the best rifles which had ever been issued to any regiment in the world." Later, when Davis became Secretary of War, he issued to the regular army the same weapon.

Whitney's factory and its assets, including any patents he may have owned, were sold by his descendants in 1888, to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven. During the interim, the Sharps rifle company was moved to Hartford, and several of the Colt company's top managers, Billings and Fairfield, helped to supervise that company as well as their own. What we learn from this history of the machine tools is that whatever domestic use could be made for the machinery--whether for cotton gins, sewing machines, lathes, or even cotton mills or men's suspenders made of India rubber and fabric cartridge belts used in machine guns and ammunition belts, manufactured by the Russell family's factories in Middletown--the machine tools could always be converted to make weapons when it became more patriotic or profitable to do so. The researcher ,who provided the information about Russell Manufacturing for his website, stated:

From information provided by the Russell Library, Middletown, CT, the Russell Manufacturing Company, established in Middletown by Samuel Russell in 1834, had a history of producing military equipment dating at least back to the Spanish-American War when they produced cartridge belts for use with the M1892 Krag rifle and possibly cartridge belts for various state militia units equipped with M1873 trapdoor Springfield rifles. When WWI started the Russell Company was producing about 300 M1910 "BELT, Cartridge, Dismounted, Model of 1910" per week. The M1910 had 10 "eagle" snap and later lift-the-dot flap pockets each holding two 5 round stripper clips of M1906 .30 caliber ammunition. This belt was very similar to the M1923 cartridge belt used in WWII and Korea and served the army until it was phased out in 1957 with the advent of the M14 rifle which used a detachable 20 round box magazine. As the country was preparing to celebrate the first post-WWI "Decoration Day", now known as Memorial Day honoring the U.S. WWI war dead, the Middletown Press, on May 29, 1919, ran a feature story highlighting the local manufacturers contributions to the war effort.  The cut below lists items that Russell Manufacturing produced for the WWI war effort.

Founder of Russell Manufacturing Company in 1834

Samuel Russell, son of Capt. John Russell

Excerpt from History of Middlesex county, Connecticut, 

with biographical sketches of its prominent men 

by J.B. Beers

Samuel Russell, eldest son of Capt. John and Abigail Russell, was born at Middletown, Conn., August 25th 1789. His father having deceased when he was but twelve years of age, he was placed under guardianship, and after receiving an ordinary education was placed in the store of Messrs. Whittlesey & Alsop, Washington street, Middletown, and afterward with Mr. Samuel Wetmore, where he remained until he arrived at majority; he then went to New York city, and entered the house of Messrs. Hall, Hull & Co., foreign shipping merchants, and was sent by them as supercargo to Spain; after which he was invited to enter the house of B. & T.C. Hoppin & Co., Providence, R. I., who were engaged in the Calcutta and China trade, where he remained until he became a partner of Messrs. E. Carrington & Co., Cyrus Butler, and B. & T.C. Hoppin. 

On the 26th of December 1818, articles of co-partnership were signed for the transaction of business in China for a term of five years, which at the expiration of that time eventuated in the establishment of the house of Russell & Co., at Canton — one of the most celebrated firms in China, doing business under the same name up to the present time; having numbered among its partners such men as Phillip Amidon, Augustine Heard, William Henry Low, John C. Green, John Murray Forbes, Joseph Coolidge, A. A. Low, W. C. Hunter, Edward King, Robert Bennett Forbes, Warren Delano jr., and Russell Sturgis.

Mr. Russell's life in China is thus briefly described by one who knew him intimately and enjoyed his lifelong friendship:

While he lived no friend of his would venture to mention his name in print. While In China, he lived for about twenty-five years almost an hermit, hardly known outside of his factory except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy, and by his good friend, Hoqua, but studying commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest details. Returning home with well earned wealth he lived hospitably In the midst of his family, and a small circle of inmates. Scorning words and pretensions from the very bottom of his heart, he was the truest and staunchest of friends; bating notoriety, he could always be absolutely counted upon for every good work which did not involve publicity."

The house of which he was a member had a world-wide reputation, and the name of Samuel Russell was potent wherever commerce reached. It is said of him, personally, that his word was as good as his bond.

In 1837, he returned to Middletown, where he had made previous arrangements for the erection of the elegant mansion on the corner of Washington and High streets. This was done under the supervision of Hon. Samuel D. Hubbard. He did not sit down, on his return, simply to enjoy his wealth, but entered heartily into public and private enterprises. He founded the Russell Manufacturing Company, and was its first president. He was president of the Middlesex County Bank nearly ten years, and was a large stockholder. During the panic of 1857, he advanced $75,000 of his private fortune to sustain the bank through the crisis. He was constantly assisting private individuals who were in financial trouble, and while he frequently lost large sums in this manner, it never occasioned him any regret. His motto was "Duties are ours; events are God's.''

He was a man of broad and liberal views, and gave freely to the support of all religious denominations. He gave liberally toward the building of the Roman Catholic church, and induced the quarry companies of Portland to contribute the stone. He assisted nearly all the other churches by large contributions. He made judicious investments of his money, which yielded large returns, but it is said of him that he gave away, and lost by assisting others, a sum fully equal to all he made in China.

In his business he was very methodical and painstaking; in his private life was frugal and economical, avoiding all display or ostentation, but very hospitable. His friends always found a hearty welcome under his roof. In his private charities no one but himself and the recipients ever knew the extent of his gifts.

Mr. Russell was twice married; first, on the 6th of October 1815, to Mary Cotton Osborne, in New York city, daughter of David and Mary Cotton Osborne, of Stratford, Connecticut, an orphan (both parents having died in the West Indies), by whom he had two sons: George Osborne, and John Augustus Russell. During Mr. Russell's first absence, in China, his young wife died suddenly at the early age of twenty-three, leaving his two little children in charge of his sister, Frances. After having completed the five years' engagement with the Providence house, Mr. Russell returned from Canton for a brief stay, during which time he married Frances A., the sister of his first wife, and again returned to the East. George and John, his sons, did not inherit strong constitutions, and although sent to Europe for travel and treatment, and living much in the West Indies, neither of them attained far beyond the age of early manhood. George Osborne, the eldest, married Amelia C., daughter of Thomas Mather, and left two sons: Samuel and George Osborne. John A. married Helena E. Webster, of Cuba, and left one son, Frank W., who died while a youth.

Mr. Russell had one son by his second wife, Samuel Wadsworth Russell, who married Clara A. Casey, daughter of Dr. William Casey, of Middletown, by whom he had three children: William Wadsworth, Mary Alice, and Cornelia Augusta. This third son of Mr. Russell was much younger than his half brothers, and survived his father some years, but died at the early age of 31.

Samuel Russell, son of George Osborne, and grandson of Samuel Russell, the East India merchant, lost his father when but three years of age, and was brought up by his grandfather. He represents the family in Middletown, and is in possession of the fine old residence, built by his grandfather, and maintains with pride the characteristics of the old mansion.

He married for his first wife, Lucy McDonough, second daughter of Hon. Henry G. Hubbard, and granddaughter of Commodore McDonough, by whom he has three children: Samuel, Thomas McDonough, and Lucy Hubbard. He married, for his second wife, Sarah Chaplin Clark, daughter of John Clark jr., and Caroline Madison Pickering, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by whom he had one daughter, Helen Pickering. Mr. Russell has been, for some years, the vice-president and a director of the Russell Manufacturing Company, and also holds several directorships elsewhere.

Edward Augustus Russell was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on the i6th day of June 1797. He was the second son of John Russell and Abigal Warner, his wife, and was born in the old family homestead, which had been owned and occupied by four generations before him, among whom were the Rev. Noadiah Russell, and the Rev. William Russell, who were consecutively together pastors of the North Congregational Church in this city for seventy-three years — or from 1688 to 1761.

At an early age he was apprenticed to Mr. Samuel Wetmore, merchant, with whom he remained as long as Mr. W. continued in business in Middletown, Mr, Russell then went to Providence, R. I., as clerk to Edward Carrington & Co., in the East India trade.

On the 12th of September 1820, he married Miss Elizabeth Brown Hall, daughter of William Clark Hall, a native of Boston, but more recently of Middletown, and moved to Petersburg, Va., where he was engaged in business for about two years, when he returned North to enter the office of Mr. George Douglas in New York. He had not been there long, however, when offers of strong inducement caused him to sever his connections with Mr. Douglas and to seek a home from which he then supposed he might not return for many years. In the spring of 1825, he sailed from New York for China, to take part in the house of Russell & Co., in Canton, which had been formed the year before by his elder brother, Samuel, in partnership with Mr. Philip Amidon, of New York. He was, however, within two years from the time of his arrival there, stricken down with that dread scourge of the East — liver complaint — and after a long and protracted illness was obliged to return to his native country.

Again entering the office, in New York, of Mr. Douglas — this time as partner — he continued for some years, and until this connection was severed by his being called to the presidency of the Royal Insurance Company in that city, which position he held until he retired from active business, and returned to Middletown in 1838.

During the remainder of his life, he was interested in the affairs of his native town, and held many trusts outside as well as at home. He was mayor of the city from May 1857 to January 1861, was representative to the Legislature, delegate to National Convention, president of the Charles River Railroad, as well as director in other roads, and was also interested in the development of the manufacture of silk in the State of Massachusetts.

By his marriage he had seven children, three of whom, with one grandson, now occupy the old homestead. He died in Middletown, April 4th 1874, on the same spot where he was born, and which has now been owned and occupied by seven generations of the same family.