Thursday, April 18, 2013

For Whom Does "the CIA" Really Work?


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

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

Who Was Jock Whitney?

Jock's father was William Payne Whitney, commonly known simply as Payne. As a youngster, Payne Whitney was caught in a feud between his father and his mother's brother, Oliver Payne, following her death in 1893. Promised a share of Oliver's wealth, he turned against his own father, who had married Edith Randolph, a woman scorned by the Payne family, whom he had been seeing before his wife died. According to the New York Social Diary website:
Jock and Betsy Cushing Whitney
In 1902 [William Collins] Whitney’s son, Payne Whitney, who’d sided with Oliver Payne, married Helen Hay from Cleveland, Ohio. Miss Hay was the daughter of John Hay who had been private secretary to President Lincoln and later Ambassador to the Court of St. James under President McKinley. Mr. Whitney who, like his father, went to Yale, was 26. For a wedding gift, Col. Payne gave the couple a Stanford White house at 972 Fifth Avenue.... After the Second World War, he started an investment fund, run by a friend he’d met in the War, to invest in new ideas of the men coming back from the War. He called it Adventure Capital and later dropped the “ad” to coin the now established term: venture capital. He was known for his ventures in Hollywood (“Gone With the Wind”), his industrious ventures, as well as being the last publisher of The New York Herald-Tribune.... Like his grandfather, he was also the Ambassador to the Court of St. James (under Eisenhower). Married twice, first to a beauty who loved horses more, and finally to Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, daughter of the famous brain surgeon Harvey Cushing, first wife of FDR’s son’s James, to whom he [Jock] remained married to the end of his life.... The Payne fortune, inherited by Payne Whitney, and then his children, grew far larger than the fortune left by William C. Whitney to his children. That was partly due to the fact that Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt produced more offspring who produced more offspring. Jock Whitney produced no off-spring, and his investments after the War catapulted him (and partially his sister [Joan Whitney Payson]) into the realm of what are now billions.
972 Fifth Avenue mansion
Payne Whitney had inherited his uncle's huge mansion in New York, and the 1920 census shows Jock and Joan living there with their parents--only four people at 972 Fifth Avenue--being cared for by fifteen servants, none of whom were American-born. Payne's business address, 14 Wall Street, was the Bankers Trust Company, set up by the White and Case law firm in 1903, and was controlled by J.P. Morgan affiliates in the days prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system. Before 1930 Morgan bankers controlled United States government policy on currency. According to economist Murray Rothbard, the first governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank was:
Benjamin Strong, who had spent virtually his entire business and personal life in the circle of top associates of J.P. Morgan. A secretary of several trust companies (banks doing trust business) in New York City, Strong became neighbor and close friend of three top Morgan partners, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, and Thomas W. Lamont. Davison, in particular, became his mentor, and brought him into Morgan's Bankers Trust company, where he soon succeeded Lamont as vice-president, and then finally became president. When Strong was offered the post of Governor of the New York Fed, it was Davison who persuaded him to take the job....The main collaboration throughout the 1920s, much of it kept secret from the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, was between Strong and the man who soon became Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Collet Norman. Norman and Strong were not only fast friends, but had important investment-banking ties, Norman's uncle having been a partner of the great English banking firm of Baring Brothers, and his grandfather a partner in the international banking house of Brown Shipley and Co., the London branch of the Wall Street banking firm of Brown Brothers. Before coming to the Bank of England, Norman himself had worked at the Wall Street office of Brown Brothers, and then returned to London to become a partner of Brown Shipley.

The Role of Brown Brothers Harriman

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


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



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

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

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

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

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



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

Monday, April 1, 2013

Government by Contract

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 in  World 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. 

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

War Is Big Business

Deep Politics of Freeport Sulphur

In the Vol. 3, No. 3, March-April, 1996 edition of Probe, noted JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease wrote in her article entitled "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur":
Freeport Sulphur was born in Texas in 1912. The company later moved the headquarters office to New York. Originally, the principal business was mining sulphur. By 1962, Freeport Sulphur was the nation's oldest and largest producer of sulphur. In 1962, the fertilizer industry used 40% of the sulphur produced in the world. Other business segments that use sulphur in the production process are chemical, papermaking, pigment, pharmaceutical, mining, oil-refining and fiber manufacturing industries. For most of this period, Freeport was headed by John Hay Whitney.

Jock makes the Time cover
In 1927, Payne Whitney, one of America's richest multimillionaires, died, leaving his only son and future Freeport president an estate valued at over $179 million. At the young age of 22, John Hay Whitney became one of the country's richest men. Nonetheless, "Jock," as the press later called him, took a job at Lee Higginson and Co. on a salary of $65 a month. There, he made a fateful friendship with another onetime Lee Higginson employee named Langbourne Williams. Langbourne's father had originally founded Freeport Texas, then lost control of the business. Langbourne enlisted Jock's boss at Lee Higginson--J. T. Claiborne--to help in a proxy fight for control of Freeport. Claiborne urged the young Jock to join their efforts. Jock did--to the tune of a half a million dollars. By 1930, the Claiborne-Williams-Whitney team had won control of Freeport.



Freeport, Texas, was actually a town--not a business. It became a deep-water port when a Swedish Texan named Swenson, coincidentally the widowed brother-in-law of fertilizer magnates from Maryland named Tilghman, decided to use the expiring Herman Frasch patent to develop a sulphur resource. Located within a salt dome located on a part of the historic Austin's Colony granted to Stephen F. Austin, the land was owned by the heirs of Austin's sister, Mrs. James F. Perry, whose Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County--variously called Bryanmound (Bryan Mound) or Bryan Heights Salt Dome -- was first suspected to contain sulphur by stock speculator Bernard Baruch a few years prior to its actual development in 1912.

When Baruch was unable to obtain financing from J.P. Morgan for sulphur production at the Bryan/Perry property, he instead moved to adjacent Wharton County's Boling salt dome, which he (along with the Morgan bank and W. Boyce Thompson) purchased in 1914 from  the Gulf Sulphur Company. In 1918 the name changed to Texas Gulf Sulphur. Austin's original land grant included land all the way to Bastrop, but it is not known whether the mineral estate of Boling Dome was still by that time owned by the Perrys and Bryans.

Freeport Sulphur, early days





Sulphur, however, was in great demand during World War I, and Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board in Woodrow Wilson's administration was sniffing it out. It should not be overlooked that Woodrow Wilson was a wholly owned subsidiary throughout his administration by the little man from Texas named "Colonel" Edward M. House, originally from Houston. 

House's father, Thomas W. House, had run the blockade during the war years and had been in Matamoros and Monterey with Charles Stillman, William Marsh Rice and other merchants from Texas. They knew how to profit from trading in war materiel. 

The New Regime at National City Bank

By 1915 sulphur output would double:


By this time, Erice Swenson was 65 years old, no doubt ready to retire. But, as an officer in the National City Bank in new York, and as head of Freeport Sulphur in the middle of the great war, that was not about to happen. James Jewett Stillman, who died in 1918, was for four years replaced by his son, James Alexander Stillman. 

An 1896 Harvard graduate, young James in 1901 married Anne Urquhart, the daughter of actress Cora Urquhart and James Brown Potter. As founder of high society's Tuxedo Set, Potter was the son of banker Howard Potter, who married Mary Louisa Brown, whose father, James Brown, was the senior partner of  Brown Brothers & Co, an investment bank founded by sons of Alexander Brown of Baltimore.

When Mrs. Stillman followed her mother onto the stage as "Fifi" Stillman in 1921, a long battle played out in news headlines across the nation, and when James' embarrassing personal life hit the front pages of all the newspapers, it was the elderly Eric Swenson who rose to the chairmanship of the National City Bank.

Swenson must have known where lots of bodies were buried over the years, even having been one of the chief witnesses in the case prosecuted by the grandfather of James A. Baker III against the alleged murderer of William M. Rice, whose death opened up the huge endowment for Rice University.

By now most of the men who participated in setting up the sulphur facility at the new city of Freeport, Texas and the port that allowed for its distribution, were beginning to recede from the active management. These investors were named as the original underwriters of the stock at page 105 of a book by Gerald Kutney, Sulfur: History, Technology, Applications & Industry, as well as in a magazine article in The Chemical Engineer.

Original underwriters of $700,000 worth of stock in the company included the following:
  • Frank A. Vanderlip, James Stillman, Samuel McRoberts--all officers of National City Bank, along with Eric P. Swenson, whose family bank, S. M. Swenson & Sons, also subscribed, as did Maud Tilghman Swenson's brothers, Frederick B. & Sidell Tilghman. Maud died in 1892, only three years after her marriage to Eric Swenson.
  • John Langbourne Williams & Sons and Franklin Quimby Brown of Redmond bank (also involved in Knickerbocker Trust), who also subscribed as underwriters, were members of a fertilizer syndicate called Interstate Chemical Corporation with the Tilghmans. Their syndicate of investors in railroad securities often included C. Sidney Shepard (Yale, 1878) of New Haven, CT.
  • Smaller investors: Edwin Hawley (tycoon in Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad), Williams & Peters (coal merchants), E. K. Knapp, E. M. Carter, Benjamin Andrews (a mining engineer who held several patents in connection with Union Sulphur Co.), James M. Edwards, Orne Wilson, W. B. Chisolm (part of a fertilizer syndicate), W. O. Wetherbee (a bank clerk who testified with Swenson in the Rice murder trial), John N. Steel, John Hays Hammond (associate of William Boyce Thompson), A. Chester Beatty, A. C. Swenson, F. A. Fearing, George C. Reiter, and S. M. Betts.
Many of those named above were also directors of the Interstate Chemical Corporation.
It was because of the initial investment by the J.L. Williams & Sons banking enterprise that Langbourne Meade Williams, Jr. ascended to a management position in 1930. His father (L.M. Sr.), died in 1931, and the Freeport Sulphur stock the family held gave him an opportunity to make a financial play, but it was another connection which gave him the power to do it. That came from the Rockefellers.




To be continued in a future post.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Citigroup's Texas Roots

From Wethersfield, CT - Puritan Stronghold

Charles Stillman, whose Texas-made fortune was used to set up the First National City Bank in New York City, was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1810. His father, Francis Stillman, was a great-great-grandson of the man referred to by Stillman family genealogists as the "Settler" in America, George Stillman.

Wethersfield, CT
Francis Stillman stemmed from three Nathaniel Stillmans in a genealogical line that began in Hadley, MA in 1691. The first Nathaniel, who married a daughter of David and Honour Treat Deming in 1743, died in Wethersfield in 1770, six years before the Declaration of Independence. Francis' father was the third Nathaniel Stillman, born in 1752, who fought in the Revolutionary War, then died in Wethersfield in 1838, the same year his son Francis died--only two years after Texas had declared its independence against Mexico.

Francis was a ship-owning merchant who took his teenage son Charles to Durango, Mexico, as early as 1823, leaving him there to fend for himself within a trading network already established. "Don Carlos," as Charles was known in those parts, commandeered a profitable mercantile trade, which he would substantially increase during the Mexican War, which began when the new Republic of Texas was annexed as part of the United States in 1845. Upon his death many years later, Charles Stillman's family donated his papers from those years in Mexico and Texas to Harvard, an event which would give rise to research projects designed to establish a link between the New England money interests and Stillman's somewhat hidden Texas roots.

Dredging up the Past 

Chauncey D. Stillman
In 1939 one of these descendants, a cocky young Harvard graduate named Chauncey Devereaux Stillman, recruited some historians to pore through the papers, while he also tossed some family money around in Texas, most of it in the form of grants to memorialize his ancestor's eminent stature in the wilds of Texas. He even brought an entourage with him to Texas for ceremonial purposes, but according to one local resident named G.E. Dodd, more money was sought from the locals to memorialize their unsaintly ancestor than was passed down to them.
Charles Chauncey and sons, 1922

Charles Devereaux Stillman was the acknowledged author of a genealogy which began with the life of Don Carlos, who is said to have made his way on his father's schooner Albion from Mexico's interior near Durango in 1828 to Brazos de Santiago--the "salt water harbor for the town of Matamoros." There he came in contact with Francis Stillman's partner, Daniel Willard Smith, according to this book, Charles Stillman 1810-1875, published in a private printing for the author in 1956. 

Smith, who also hailed from Wethersfield, had been appointed American Consul to Mexico by President James Monroe. The consul's job was to resolve disputes that American citizens, then trading with Mexico (which at that time included what is now known as Texas), had with the government or other citizens of Mexico during an extremely tense time. Evidence of that tension was revealed in this article published in early 1837 recounting numerous reports recently received in the U.S. capital regarding incidents that had occurred in Mexico:
Zalmon Hull, father of Hezekiah Hull, Lydia Wells' father

Zalmon Hull's father was a resident of Fairfield, CT., 60 miles or so down the road from Wethersfield, passing by Middletown and New Haven. But Zalmon married a Redding girl named Betts and relocated further inland, even though he shipped out to engage in the Mexican trade. He was mentioned in the January 1914 edition of National Magazine, an article entitled "The Tragedy of Mexico," page 847 of which reads:

This "American consul" was Daniel W. Smith, who was already married by that time to the widow of Zalmon Hull's son, formerly Mrs. Hezekiah Belden Hull. That marriage made him the stepfather of her daughter Lydia Ann Hull, the mother of James B. Wells, Jr., for whom Jim Wells County in Texas was named. Lydia's husband, James Babbage Wells,
"was a privateer or mercenary during the Texas Revolution and commanded the Texas Navy yards at Galveston. In Aransas village, Wells was a cattle rancher who owned a schooner."
It was that fact which caused his name to be listed in an extremely rare book called The Sons of the Republic of Texas., which glorifies the lives of those who settled Texas when it still a part of Mexico prior to 1836, and before statehood in 1845.

When Charles Stillman arrived in Matamoros (often spelled Matamoras) in 1828, he naturally gravitated to fellow natives of Connecticut there, in addition to two of his brothers with whom he was involved in business partnerships until 1847, when the last of them, Frank D. Stillman, returned to Connecticut. Charles was then on his own but soon established a partnership with John J. Young on Rosales Street in Matamoros. Young died in 1859, but his descendants remained, and we will hear more about them later.

During this time, Charles realized the U.S. government would want to sell off part of the land on which Fort Brown was located and had almost 5,000 acres surveyed out of it. This was to become the city of Brownsville. We can only wonder if Frank had helped to make that happen once he returned to the northeast. A land boom quickly occurred, making Charles quite wealthy, but the population diminished from cholera epidemics. In 1849 Charles, at the ripe old age of 38, returned to Wethersfield for a wife.

Chauncey Devereux Stillman

Keep in mind that Charles Stillman's descendant, fresh from Harvard in 1929, had taken it upon himself to research and write the history of his family in Texas. In 1955 he traveled down to Brownsville to dedicate a house to the City of Brownsville, claiming it to have been the home that Charles Stillman bought for his bride Elizabeth Pamela Goodrich Stillman a century earlier.

Beginning in 1945, articles began to appear in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly on this subject, such as this one by Harbert Davenport, whose father was a law associate of Judge James B. Wells, Jr. Newspaper articles, like the one below, appeared under the byline of his wife:


Not everyone believed the story told by Jim Wells' law partner, Harbert Davenport, or by Mrs. Davenport in the above article. One witty, courageous long-time Brownsville resident, however, named George Emmet Dodd (son of Beeville, Texas attorney William W. Dodd), responded to the Mayor Stokeley's trumped up decision to grovel before the Stillman and Rockefeller families who came to Brownsville in 1955 to memorialize Charles Stillman with a little help from the city taxpayers. Dodd himself had a long and illustrious heritage in Texas, married to a granddaughter of Colonel James Eskridge Graham

It's unfortunate there aren't more people like G.E. Dodd in the world, who can tell fake historians and paid public relations "experts" to take a flying leap.