Seeing the World Whole

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

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

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

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

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

by LINDA MINOR © 2004 (Revised 2013)

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

Alice, stepping through the mirror into a different world.

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

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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

Maze of mystery

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

John Kerry's Mother and her Roots

Rosemary Isabel Forbes Kerry

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

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

Dolly Murray Forbes

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


The Murrays

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

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

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

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

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

Sources: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murrays' fear of the American Revolutionaries

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

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

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

STAMP COLLECTOR ATTACKED BY THE MOB

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine Robbins Delano was Dolly Forbes' great-niece.

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

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

To be continued....

Fortune Was His Middle Name

Thomas Fortune Ryan

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.

Marriage--the Ultimate Business Merger

Stillmans remain close to collateral kin.

James J. Stillman did see to it that his children married "well." Daughter Elsie married William Goodsell Rockefeller in 1895; Isabel married his brother, Percy Avery Rockefeller, in 1901; and James Alexander Stillman later in 1901 married Anne Urquhart Potter, an actress.

The Stillman daughters lived in Greenwich, CT with their Rockefeller husbands (both Yale educated and members of Skull and Bones), and they maintained close ties with their Stillman relatives, who worked at the bank which is now known as Citigroup. Charles Stillman, Jr., their bachelor uncle, had graduated from Yale in 1882 and worked in cotton brokerage like the Swensons.

The next generation witnessed the marriage of Elizabeth Goodrich Stillman, the daughter of Elsie's cousin, Chauncey Stillman, to Langbourne Meade Williams, a son of John L. Williams, one of Eric Swenson's investors in his Freeport Sulphur Co., as shown in the following news clipping:

  The John L. Williams & Sons, Banking Family

The Stillman family's shares in Freeport Sulphur were originally acquired in 1912 by James J. Stillman, when the mineral company was founded by a third-generation Texas banker:

Eric P. Swenson, vice- president of National City Bank in New York and a native Texan who retained strong financial ties throughout Texas, showed interest and visited the find in 1911. When Swenson saw the site, he realized that he could also develop a duty-free port nearby. Upon returning to New York, he formed the Vanderlip-Swenson-Tilghman Syndicate. He pooled capital of $700,000 to finance the project and purchased Bryanmound and the surrounding area.

It was said of Eric P. Swenson's Fidelity Bank when it opened in March 1900 in the upper East side of New York City, that:

while it will be a separate institution, it will practically be an up-town branch of the City National Bank....One of the Directors of the new bank said last night: "The institution is designed to accommodate the people up town, and will be more especially a 'householders' bank'. It will probably have close business relations with the National City Bank."

Langbourne Williams, Sr.'s brother, John Skelton Williams, was a Virginian like President Woodrow Wilson, who appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Treasury on March 24, 1913. While awaiting approval of his appointment as Comptroller of the Currency, he was thus placed in charge of the fiscal bureaus of the Treasury Department and would have such control until Warren Harding's inauguration in 1921--the first eight years of the Fed's operation. The Southerner's background was given in an introduction to him by the Washington Post, published May 25, 1913:

 The new Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. John Skelton Williams, has the enviable distinction of tracing his line of descent on the paternal side of his family direct from our first First Lady [Martha Washington], and from his maternal ancestors there flows in his veins the bluest blood of the F.F.V.'s [First Families of Virginia].

Mr. Williams' grandmother, Sianna Dandridge, was the daughter of William Dandridge, of New Kent, whose father, John Bartholomew Dandridge, was the brother of Martha Washington. Sianna Dandridge's mother was Susannah Armistead, the only daughter of Maj. William Armistead, of New Kent, who was a direct descendant of William Armistead, the emigrant, who landed on the shores of Virginia In 1636. 

Nor is Mr. Williams' mother's line any less distinguished. She comes from the Skeltons and the Randolphs—families who have made Virginia's history famous since Colonial days. She is the great-granddaughter of the Edmund Randolph who was the first Secretary of State under President Washington, and who was the first Attorney General of the young republic.
Secretary Williams' parents, John Langbourne and Marie Ward Skelton Williams, were living at their country home, in Powhatan county, Va., when their son, John Skelton, was born, July 6, 1866. His early boyhood days were spent there and at the Virginia capital, and in the private schools of Richmond young Williams received his rudimentary education. Later he attended the University of Virginia [later the alma mater of Mississippi-born Frank Wisner], and in 1886 he took a short term at law at that institution, not with the idea, however, of practicing, but in order to better fit himself for his business career. He entered his father's banking house as an apprentice, and learned the business from the first round of the ladder up. He had remarkable aptitude for business, as was shown when at the age of 18 he began the publication of a pamphlet entitled "A Manual of Investments," a publication commanding such a wide circulation that he continued publishing it for a number of years—in fact, until he became too busy with other things to do so. 

... It was he who first thought out, and then brought to consummation, the short line from New York to Florida—that which is now known as the Seaboard Air Line Railway system. In 1900 he was elected the first president of the system—a most unusual honor to come to a man in his thirty-fourth year. Since then Mr. Willlams has been more and more identified with the business interests of the South. He became a director in numerous trust companies, banks, railroad and other corporations, and is now a recognized leading financier, not only of the South, but in many of the business centers of the country.

Taking Charge of the New Fed

A mere seven months after this introduction Williams was being viciously attacked in the press, and soon thereafter was being investigated by Congress. Claims were made by a Republican who had been involved politically with Theodore Roosevelt, named Milton E. Ailes, that Williams had "resorted to extraordinary methods to obtain information with which to attack the National City Bank of New York" as well as the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C.

blue blooded Virginian

George Peabody's partner in Baltimore, Elisha Riggs, had founded the Riggs bank. This blog has previously detailed George Peabody's rise from the elite enclave of China traders in Essex County, Massachusetts, to enter banking in Baltimore. His training complete, he shipped off to England during the days his Danvers relatives were accumulating capital in the so-called China trade, into which various members of the Peabody clan, such as Endicott Peabody, were intermarried. George Peabody's role in London, as a representative for the House of Morgan, was to launder profits of his opium-trading kin through what then served as America's bank of last-resort lending. He created the model for using drug money to build up America's gold reserves.

John Langbourne Williams' financial network

Perhaps Ailes was aware of this connection, from the previous century, between the opium traders in New England and the Baltimore bankers. Perhaps he was urged to destroy the triangular scheme by which anti-Federalist shipping merchants, who were blockade runners and smugglers during the War of 1812, had linked up with Southern bankers--both of which groups had ties to British banks which had similar experience with East India Company profits before the opium wars shut off that faucet for them.

All we know at this point is that Milton Ailes made vicious attacks against the Virginian whose father, banker John Langbourne Williams of Richmond, Va., was in partnership with the J. W. Middendorf banking family, according to information from Baltimore: Its History and Its People (1912). J.W. Middendorf II would, in 1968 help finance George Bush's run for President against Richard Nixon and others; he almost got Bush's name on the ballot as vice president, he revealed in his 2011 book, Potomac Fever.

Ailes also stated that "Williams had maliciously used his high office as a cover to impertinently, arrogantly and insolently pry into matters with which he had no official concern whatever, for the purpose and with the intent to injure the bank and wreak his vengeance on certain of its officers against whom he entertained a personal hatred." Ailes was obviously working on behalf of competing banking networks, likely based in New York, who did not want to allow these Southerners to compete with them. Eventually, a grand jury indicted the Riggs bankers for selling stocks short, but the defense used former Presidents William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt as character witnesses for the defendants. It was all set out in a book by banker, Thomas P. Kane, in The Romance and Tragedy of Banking.

A Faked Memorial

Ten years after the 1916 trial, John Skelton Williams died, but his influence remained. The major investment in sulphur his father's bank had made in 1912 was destined to fall under the control of the former Comptroller's nephew, Langbourne M. Williams, Jr. in 1930, not coincidentally the same year Langbourne married Elizabeth Goodrich Stillman. As the sister of the same Chauncey Devereaux Stillman, introduced in a previous post, Mrs. Williams served as a link between the capital acquired at the turn of the 20th century by an old Connecticut family--with mining assets, including sulphur, in Mexico and Texas, along with assets in petroleum brought in when her Stillman aunt and grandmother married sons of William Rockefeller.

The 1930 marriage would allow financial management of those mining and oil assets to be handed over to one of Virginia's oldest banking families. Yet it seems nobody understood what was actually happening. G. E. Dodd, who had to pay the newspaper to get it to print his version of the farce that took place when Godfrey S. Rockefeller and J. Sterling Rockefeller went to Brownsville, Texas, with the Stillmans and Williamses to create a fake memorial for Charles Stillman did not know exactly what was amiss, only that he smelled a rat. It was with this Brownsville memorial that we began our series about the Stillman family in Texas with the intention of exploring Lisa Pease's research which connects Freeport Sulphur to the John Kennedy assassination.

It is at that point we will pick up eventually. Watch for it.