A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Twenty-One ... Number Twenty-Two ... May 31, 1974
THE CONTRIVED EVOLUTION
OF REGIONAL GOVERNMENT
PART FIVE
BIRTH OF INTERNATIONALISM
The last decade of the nineteenth century has been called "The Gay Nineties," but the gayety must have been of the kind that is akin to hysteria. For there was a feeling of panic in the air, an uncertainty as to America's future, and a fear of the "Economic Royalists" who were having such an impact on the American economy that the Congress took a hand and passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which declared that "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared illegal." Three months later (Oct . 1, 1890), the McKinley Tariff Act raised the tariff on manufactured goods to the highest levels in American history; but it also provided for reciprocity agreements with other Nations. This led to a Democratic landslide in the November elections, Democrat Grover Cleveland winning easily in the Presidential elections two years later (1892). Meanwhile, strikes and violence swept the country: martial law was declared and federal troops called out to end a veritable war at the Coeur d'Aline silver mines in Idaho; a strike at the Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead, Penn., was put down by State militia, but plant manager Henry C. Frick was shot and then stabbed by a Russian anarchist. And the Socialist Labor Party met in convention in New York City on Aug. 28, 1892.
The financial panic began in 1893. On April 15 the issue of gold certificates was suspended by the U.S. Treasury; securities fell suddenly on the New York Stock Exchange on May 5; the Stock Market crashed on June 27. During the year, 600 banks closed, over 15,000 commercial houses failed, 74 railroads went into receivers' hands (J.P. Morgan and his international banker associates being the receivers in most cases).
1894 saw the organization of the National Municipal League (forerunner of and later amalgamated with Rockefeller's 1313, which became the chief promoter of Regional Government). On Aug. 27, 1894 a new tariff law was passed which contained an income tax provision. Called communistic, it was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court before it ever became effective as law.
On Feb. 8, 1895 the United States Treasury made a contract with the International Banking houses of Morgan and Belmont (the latter being a Rothschild subsidiary) for the purchase of $65,000,000 in gold, to be paid for with interest-bearing government bonds.
And here within a five-year period, we have recorded chronologically most of the contrived occurrences which go together to make up a carefully laid plot, a Conspiracy to gain an unlawful end: political confusion abounded, labor relations were at their worst, stick-wielding communism and carrotdangling socialism along with bomb-throwing anarchism all had been introduced, independent banks were going broke, as were independent business houses, the depression was causing untold sufferings, and the United States Government was in hock to the International Bankers! The time was ripe for the final step in this particular series of contrived events; War!
We are writing, of course, of Conspiracy, of the willful schemings of two or more persons to bring about an unlawful end; in this case, to bring the United States out of its isolated position in the world, and make it a part of an International Concert of Nations, all to be controlled by the Conspirators.
At that time in history, the United States had fulfilled its "Manifest Destiny," the dream of "one nation, under God, stretching from sea to shining sea." True, there was Alaska, obtained by purchase, and Hawaii, adopted territorially. But, essentially, the United States was a Continental power, with no interests other than trade with other nations of the world; free of Old World intrigues, and pledged to keep South America also free of Old World intrikues, under the terms of the then honored Monroe Doctrine. (It was this Monroe Doctrine that would supply the loophole through which the Conspirators would creep in -- as we shall see in upcoming paragraphs).
First, in connection with the nature of Conspiracy and its application to this series of newsletters, we should like to borrow from the writings of Wilson Thomas, author of Harvest of Political Wild Oats (Meador Publishing Co., Boston). He wrote:
Conspiracy does not exist unless there is an intent of two or more persons to accomplish something unlawful. Intent is of the essence of it, and intent is intangible and metaphysical. Nobody can penetrate the secrets of another's thought and produce evidence to establish conclusively another's motive for action or inaction. Conspiracy is a conclusion as to the motive for action which ... leads to certain individuals or interests and connects them in such a way as to indicate that they planned and brought about the whole sequence in order to accomplish unlawful ends ....
If we were to make a careful survey of the whole field of business and professional activity, it would be seen that banking is unique in respect to the natural opportunities afforded for exploitation, acquisition of information of a secret nature inaccessible to the general public, acquisition of undue influences and controls. International banking differs from nationally organized banking principally in the size of its field of operations, which is now world-wide, and in the extraordinary opportunities available to it by reason of diversities of national systems and conflicts of interest among the family of nations .... The international banker ... holds his court in the inner sancta of high finance and power politics, where the adoring high priests of the dollar sign make reverent entrance by appointment, in order to bow down to the gods of wealth. The customers he meets are chancellors of the exchequer, ministers of state, ministers of war and the multimillionaires who control the wealth of the world ....
The fact of the existence of a conspiracy is coming now to be widely understood. The conspiracy, I am confident, will never be understood, much less defeated by the processes of searching out whipping boys, trying to fasten blame upon individuals, racial, religious or political groups. The reason why it will not be thus solved is that it is organized entirely upon institutional lines and is moved by the impersonal power of money and credit controls .... International banking, I suspect, is today the only real world power. It is a power so all-pervasive that its long fingers of control have probed into and are in intimate touch with every phase of the economy of every country in the world; so highly organized that all the countless threads of fiscal policy and system which comprise the banking and monetary systems of the world have been gathered into the hands of one person, or at most a very small group of persons-men without faces, an absolute oligarchy of absolute economic control. Here is money power unlimited ... for the most part unseen, never vocal, never identified with the visible forms of government, which is nevertheless well able to determine political policy the world around, and move officers of state as a skilled player moves the figures on a chessboard. International banking is the hidden control of all economic wealth and, indirectly, of all government .... In its concealed mechanism will ultimately be found an explanation of the perennial failure of the American people to get the sort of government they want, no matter how they vote, no matter who they put in office.
Are the foregoing wild statements? Are the ideas incredibly fantastic? If the reader thinks so, let him turn to the records of English and American history. Let him read and let him realize that almost before the ink was dry on the Constitution of the United States, the power of the international bankers had enabled them to set it aside, to nullify its provisions relative to the coinage and value of money, and establish a monetary system pleasing to them. That happened nearly two centuries ago. International control of money and credit was then in its infancy.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century there had been such industrial development and the promise of technological miracles yet to be developed, that it was time for the United States to be dragged out of its happy isolation and brought into more intimate relationship with the rest of the world . So reasoned the International Bankers, and so was our original Compact Theory of government forced to give way to the Continental Theory of strong, central government, to pave the way for the eventually superseding International Theory, whose end is World Government!
The last decade of the nineteenth century found imperialist sentiment running high in most great nations of the world. The partitioning of Africa was being concluded, China was being torn to pieces for the benefit of the powers, especially England. And the imperialist nations of Europe began casting avaricious glances toward South America, and coveting the almost untouched riches in natural resources existing in our sister continent.
And suddenly, in the summer of 1895, the people of the United States, England -- and probably the people of Venezuela and British Guiana as well -- were thunderstruck by the news that the United States was threatening to go to war against the British Empire! People wondered how such a situation could so suddenly develop, involving two supposedly friendly powers. The people, of course, didn't understand the machinations of the Money Barons of the World (they still don't.)
This, we believe, was a case where the governments of Britain and the United States were "used" for conspiratorial purposes by a power "bigger than both of them." There had long been an unsettled boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela. No great seriousness was attached to the dispute until, suddenly, the news was spread that gold had been discovered in this disputed territory. The British then claimed the land and, according to the newspapers of that. day, started to move in and take over; while the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine. President Cleveland, apparently at the instigation of his Secretary of State, Richard Olney, sent a message to Congress stating that "Today the United States ,is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." The Presidential Proclamation demanded that a Congressional investigating commission be sent to Venezuela to determine the true boundary line, and the United States must then "resist any encroachments on land assigned to Venezuela."
The boundary dispute proved to be "a tempest in a teapot" and was soon settled to the satisfaction of all parties. However, as a result of the "near warlike condition" that had suddenly developed between Britain and the United States, a special conference was arranged to settle disputes between the two powers. On Jan. 11, 1897, the Olney-Paunceforte Convention was approved by all parties except the United States Senate. So, according to observers at the conference, a secret agreement was arranged, but never sent to Congress. The agreement had little or nothing to do with border disputes in South America. Instead, this was an alliance between Britain and the United States which covered the world, not just the New World. According to Prof. Roland G. Usher in his book Pan-Germanism published in 1915, this was an understanding that in case of war in Europe, the U.S. would promptly declare in favor of England and France, and would do her utmost to assist them. Usher said no papers were signed, but "the alliance, for it was nothing less, was based on infinitely firmer ground than written words and sheets of parchment."
Then, through the Magic of the Money Barons, Spain was to be eliminated as an "Empire Builder" and reduced to simply a State in Europe, and "The lost colonies of North America (the United States) were to be rejoined to Mother England and certain dreams of Sir Cecil Rhodes and Baron Rothschild were to be fulfilled (more about this later). And the threatened war between the United States and England would be replaced by an actual war between the United States and Spain!
That the Spanish-American War was contrived, totally unnecessary, and brought about simply to project the United States onto "the world stage" for ulterior purposes, is now admitted by almost all historians. It was a shameful affair for which this Nation has had its share of suffering (to say nothing of the people of Cuba and the Philippines) and it altered the course of the whole world, politically and economically.
In his excellent The Myth of the New History -- L. Hoggan comes closer to the whole truth about the event, than does any other historian whom we have read on the subject. We quote:
America was in many respects the most fortunate nation in the world in 1895 .... Although still a debtor nation economically (European holdings in the United States were much greater than American holdings abroad), there was good reason to expect that, under normal conditions, America would become a creditor nation in about fifty years. In the meantime, paying the interest on foreign investments was no problem in view of the proverbial American favorable balance of trade (except that, as we have shown, those international bankers who had sizeable investments in the United States were able to use that power to manipulate the foreign policy of the United States-Ed.) It was in the context of this happy situation that American leaders began to wonder if perhaps they did not need overseas colonies and an entente with England (such leaders as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the Jays, Whitneys, Aldriches and other Anglophiles among the "60 families who owned America" at the turn of the century-Ed.)
It was against this background (Hoggan continues) that the United States in 1898 decided to go to war against Spain. In any real or meaningful sense, there could be no military glory in such a war.... There was no compelling reason for the United States to go to war against Spain in 1898 .... It has never been proven that the Spaniards sunk the Battleship Maine ... it is incredible that the Spanish government planned the explosion. ...McKinley had plenty of time to call off the dogs of war. The president recommended force against Spain two days after the Spanish Government had surrendered to American demands on the Cuban issue ....
William Randolph Hearst purchased the New York Journal (November, 1895), in a deliberate effort to capture the lead in New York City newspaper circulation from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst was quick to see the advantage of lurid and sensational reporting about events in Cuba and Pulitzer soon decided to follow Hearst's lead in exploiting this field of sensational journalism (it came to be called yellow journalism -- Ed.)
The presence of (Admiral) Dewey at Manila (in the Philippines at the start of the war) was the achievement of Theodore Roosevelt, the Under-Secretary of the Navy, who was to succeed McKinley as President in 1901. During the absence of Secretary of the Navy Long, Theodore Roosevelt had issued the orders which sent Dewey to the Far East long in advance of the outbreak of hostilities. Roosevelt believed that the United States, as a future great naval power, ought to have a naval base in the Far East comparable to the British bastion at Hong Kong. Fortunately, no one suggested attacking the Spaniards at Rio de Oro on the west coast of Africa ....
One of the most fateful consequences of the Spanish-American War was the acquisition of an American colony in the eastern hemisphere, which seemed to contradict the original promises on which the Monroe Doctrine was based. Furthermore, the first solid events in Anglo-American collaboration, beginning with Secretary of State John Hay's open door notes in 1900, took place in the Far East ....
"Anglo-American Collaboration," or the entry of the United States into the new world balance of power was the real reason for the Spanish-American War, and for the presence of the U.S. Navy at Manila when hostilities began, and for the presence of the U.S.S. Maine at Havana where it could conveniently be blown up, probably by paid insurgents under the command of General Roloff, a Polish Jew who was a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Of the new Anglo-American Alliance, Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the British Colonies declared: "We now see our cousins across the water entering the lists and sharing in a task which might have proved too heavy for us alone."
A grim and ugly historical footnote: It was later realized that the International Bankers did not need to promote a war with Spain in order to bring the United States into this new balance of power, because the alliance had been concluded before the war began and -- as Anglophile Nicholas Murray Butler later complained: "The Spanish-American War was absolutely unnecessary, and if it had not been insisted upon by the belligerent press, aided by numerous influential leaders of opinion, including Theodore Roosevelt, Cuba would have become free without any armed hostilities whatsoever."
Chauncey M. Depew, New York Senator and important and powerful political and financial leader of his day, in My Memories of Eighty Years, published in 1924, records a conversation in which Lord Rothschild offered Peurto Rico and the Philippines to the United States and stated the willingness of the Spanish Government to grant independence to Cuba and to comply with every demand the United States can make. Regretfully, he wrote further, "The proposition unfortunately came too late, and Mr. McKinley could not stop the war...."
At the turn of the century, as America began to become an International Power, the Elite directing the use of that power began to believe that individual State Governments had powers that should be taken from them and concentrated in Washington, D.C. Thus, plans for Regional Government began to be prepared.
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