-Caveat Lector- Treason in America -- From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman ANTON CHAITKIN (C)1984 New Benjamin Franklin House P. O. Box 20551 New York, New York 10023 ISBN 0-933488-32-7 --[17a]-- This book has been out of print and hard to get for years, but a NEW second edition is just out. Highly recommended, there are charts, pix and more. Only $15.00 retail. Om K ----- -17- The Spooks The false and bastard aristocracy that puffed itself up and dreamed of empire�that longed for titles of nobility, and sighed for the hated institutions of kings�is to pass away before the strong arms of American freemen. This fair land is to be renovated . . . New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon, and Washington are to furnish millions of happy homes.... �Report to Congress by Commissioner of Patents D.P. Holloway, on plans for post-Civil War continental development, January 30, 1862. . . . Any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of 21 years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such . . . shall . . . be entitled to enter one quarter section [160 acres] or less quantity of unappropriated public lands.... �The Homestead Act of May 20, 1862. What an immense geography has been revealed! What infinite hives of population and laboratories of industry have been electrified and set in motion!. . . North America is known to our own people.... Our continental mission is set to its perennial frame.... �Address of William Gilpin, former pro-Union Colorado governor, calling for mass migration and development of Western territories, July 4, 1868. The sum of resources is simple and fixed.... The exhaustion of our coal supply is not in the indefinite future.... The iron industry tells a similar story.... No longer can we say that "Uncle Sam has land enough to give us all- a farm." �Financier James J. Hill, Address to Governors Conference on Conservation, calling for an end to Western development, May 14, 1908. Henry Adams (1838-1918) moved back to Washington, D.C. in 1877. After seven years teaching Medieval History at Harvard, the grandson of John Quincy Adams set up a palatial residence, a salon, in the national capital, "the only place in America where society amuses me." He had been there before. After coming to manhood in England during the American Civil War, Henry Adams had taken part, as a Free Trader, in the fight to overturn Abraham Lincoln's nationalist, growth-oriented monetary and tariff policies; and as a journalist, in the creation of an atmosphere of scandal and crisis in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. With Grant politically destroyed, with the Specie Resumption Act set to give monetary control to an international banking syndicate, Adams was back in Washington to launch a direct assault on the still-functioning motor of American development�the settlement of the West with farms, cities, and industries. Adams was to organize a faction�a gang�to seize control of the U.S. government's apparatus for surveying the still-unsettled Western territories, and to wear down that outlook of cultural optimism which Americans still retained from the experience of total technological mobilization under Lincoln's leadership. Henry Adams was, for these malevolent purposes, "the boss"�the chief of the Mugwumps (dissident Republicans). Harvard University's own biography of Adams describes the unoffficial order of rank then in effect in Washington: During the winter of 1878 [President Rutherford B.] Hayes dropped in at the [Interior Secretary Carl] Schurz's, where [Senator, former Mississippi secession leader and future Interior Secretary Lucius Q.C.] Lamar, [Nation magazine editor, Englishman Edwin L.] Godkin and Adams were relaxing over cigars. The trio hardly looked up. Baffled, Hayes left after twenty minutes. Encountering [New York Post reporter Charles] Nordhoff at the White House, he grumbled, "Nor&off, I've just met two of your reformed Democrats at Schurz's�Godkin and Henry Adams. What dull owls they are!" Nor&off, in ecstasy, hurried across the Square to share the Presidential mot [with Adams and friends].(1) Henry Adams' grandfather John Quincy Adams had not only been the President of the United States, like his father, John Adams, before him. J. Q. Adams had been, for the last 30 years of his life, the intellectual and moral leader of American nationalists. How had his grandson been "turned"? Adams' Fall�Baring's Rise President Lincoln had already smelled the corruption of Boston "Brahminism" back in 1861, when he appointed Charles Francis Adams (1807-86), Henry's father, minister to Great Britain. Secretary of State William Seward had ushered the appointee into the White House for the first time; Lincoln looked at him briefly, told him "Seward chose you, I didn't," and turned away. Leaving the Boston of Trancendentalism and Anglophilia that had bred him, Henry Adams went to England as his father's private secretary. Having already thrown off the last vestige of the religious feelings of his ancestors, the young man's greatest consideration was "getting on" in the world. He later described his own initiation in The Education of Henry Adams (speaking of himself in the third person): Socially he had but one relief; and, to the end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During this tedious winter [1861-62] and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis.... Old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan [founders of the House of Morgan], were strong allies. Joshua Bates [Massachusetts representative of Baring Brothers Bank] was devoted, and no one could be kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners . . . were the best in London; but . . . Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams . . . knew enough to understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most required was that of a charming woman [like] Mrs. Russell Sturgis, a dozen years older than himself.... Near her he half forgot the anxieties of Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this social polar winter, the single source of warmth and light.(2) Russell Sturgis (1805-87) was an ex-American, who had made his fortune in the sale of opium to China. He was brought, as senior partner�chairman�into the fir n of Baring Brothers, the English financiers of the entirety of the East Asian trade of Britain and its Boston partners. His family firm, Bryant and Sturgis, founded in 1810 by his cousin Captain William Sturgis, eventually carried perhaps half the U.S.-China trade. The Founder, Captain William Sturgis (1782-1863), had a granddaughter with whom he was particularly close, a virtual stepdaughter. This girl, Marian "Clover" Hooper, was to marry Henry Adams in 1872 (her brother Edward would be treasurer of Harvard from 1876 to 1898). At this point Adams had joined The Company�that very tight, inbred conglomerate of the Barings, the East India Company and their intelligence services, which had taken absolute power in England when Lord Shelburne became Prime Minister in 1782. Adams's Education continued: . . . Towards the close of [1862] he was flattered by an invitation from Monckton Milnes [Lord Houghton] to [his estate at] Fryston.... The third [of the party] was a man of thirty or thereabouts, whom Adams had already met at Lady Palmerston's carrying his arm in a sling. His figure and bearing were sympathetic�almost pathetic�with a certain grave and gentle charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He was Laurence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in the fanatics' attack on the British Legation. He seemed exceptionally sane and peculiarly suited for country houses, where every man would enjoy his company, and every woman would adore him.... The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one.... He resembled . . . a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick moving, with rapid utterances and screams of humor.... Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne ["Pre-Raphaelite," pagan, homosexual poet of the New Dark Ages].... In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with the usual club manners of ladyless dinner-tables.... Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in Adams' bedroom . . . and there after dinner all sat�or lay�till far into the night, listening to the rush of Swinburne's talk.... [Swinburne was] what the French call moyenageux, or medieval with a grotesque turn.... The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.... What could a shy young private secretary do about it?. . . Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm . . . Swinburne he saw [only once more]. Oliphant he met oftener; all the world knew and loved him.... Immediately afterward Milnes proposed Henry Adams for membership [in the St. James Club].... the nomination was ... endorsed by Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. Oliphant and Ashley, as will be explained momentarily, were in a position to open doors even beyond those of London's prime social clubs. While the Civil War raged in the United States, Henry Adams was panting to be accepted by the British aristocracy. In a letter to his brother Charles, written Feb. 13, 1863, Henry describes a dinner given by the Duke of Argyll for the Adamses. There was Lord Clyde . . . Charles P. Villers, a friendly member of the cabinet . . . John Stuart Mill . . . I confess that I always feel a little self-satisfied in such society. I feel my self-respect increased by the fact of standing beside, and feeding with such men. Again, to brother Charles, on July 17, 1863: The atmosphere is exciting One does every day and without a second thought, what in another time would be the event of a-year, perhaps of a Gfe. For instance, the other day we were asked out to a little garden party by the old Duchess of Sutherland.... Half the best blood of England was there, and were cutting through country dances and turning somersets and playing leap-frog in a way that knocked into a heap all my preconceived ideas of their manners.... You may be certain that I took no share in it. A stranger had better not assume to be one of the Gods.... How much of this sort of thing could one do at Boston! The young men whom Henry Adams was plugged into at Monckton Milne's estate, Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley, were at the nerve center of the British Empire's worldwide "black operations." Evelyn Ashley, the son of Earl of Shaftesbury) was the private secretary (and probable grandson, through his mother) of Britain's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston's family estate, Broadlands, would continue to be the headquarters for British strategic operations against America for many years after Palmerston's death in 1865. Here would be practiced those scenes of spookery, controlled illusion and hypnotism, pioneered by Laurence Oliphant, which would be spread to the American scientific community under the name of "spiritualism." Oliphant and The Company Laurence Oliphant (1829-88), who became Henry Adams's friend and career counselor in British society, was Palmerston's most important confidential agent. His "favorite" uncle James Oliphant was chairman of the British East India Company. One branch of his ancient Scottish family, spelling its name Olyphant, had moved across and made a crucial niche for itself in America�in the China trade. His admirer Henry Adams and the United States were thus Laurence Oliphant's particular assignments for reasons of family, and because of Oliphant's own wild espionage background, of which a brief summary follows. Henry Adams' consciousness of his position, as a diplomat in a nation which was arming his country's enemies in war, is made clear in a letter to his brother Charles, March 20, 1863: I was put up for a club in St. James's Street by Mr. Milnes and seconded by Laurence Oliphant, a thorough anti-American.... I'm thinking my character would not be raised in America if I were known to keep such malignant company. Laurence Oliphant started out as private secretary to his father, the chief justice of the-British colony of Ceylon who rather coldly mass-executed rebellious Ceylonese. Laurence entered the British secret service on his own account with assignments in Nepal in 1851 and Russia in 1852. He then joined the "American sector" team headed by Palmerston's son-in-law, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the expert profiler of American liberals, bankrolled by George Peabody. Oliphant became a favorite of Queen Victoria and a most personal agent of her son, Prince Edward VII. After the treasonous Franklin Pierce administration took over in the United States, Oliphant was made private secretary to Canadian Governor-General James Bruce, Lord Elgin. On the pretext of negotiating a Canadian-U.S. trade treaty, Oliphant and Elgin moved into Washington in the summer of 1854, as the Southern secession movement was being cooked up. Oliphant worked among South Carolina plantation owners and other likely subjects. "I said one day to my chief, 'I find all my most intimate friends are Democratic Senators.' 'So do I,' Elgin replied dryly."(3) Lord Elgin then immediately made Oliphant superintendent of Indian Affairs in Canada. Under this cover he traveled into the United States, up and down the Mississippi, onto Lake Superior and to Chicago. At that moment and in that region, certain Americans and Canadians were then establishing the secret society known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, which would arm 100,000 men for the Southern insurrection by 1860. Oliphant published an account of his travels in 1855, "Minnesota and the Far West, " in which he declared Midwestern Americans were favorable to the extension of slavery and predicted a civil war. After more than a year of service in British military intelligence on various Russian and Turkish fronts, Oliphant returned to the U.S.A. in 1856 on a supposed assignment for the London Times. He conferred in New York with British-trained American cultural experts, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mystic Henry James, Sr. Making his way to New Orleans, he joined an expedition of the mercenaries in support of William Walker's conquest of Central America�after being assured of their intention to establish an Anglo-Saxon colony under European, not American, rule. Off the coast of Nicaragua, Oliphant was transferred onto the British warship HMS Cossack, toured the region and sailed back to England. Walker became dictator of Nicaragua and re-established black slavery, but was eventually executed. In 1857 Oliphant became again secretary to Lord Elgin, now envoy to China, for the commencement of Britain's second Opium War. He proceeded directly to Calcutta to obtain troops, and returned to China for the bombardment of Canton, carrying 1,500 boxes of opium and lecturing on deck about spiritualism and the occult; he personally stormed Tientsin with his troops. While Prime Minister Lord Palmerston's forces were ravaging China in 1860, an American named Ethan Allen Hitchcock joined the Oliphant firm in China, staying with them until 1872 and making a fortune as a partner. Nearly a half century later, Hitchcock would carry out a war against public officials of the American West as President Theodore Roosevelt's interior secretary. After taking part in wars and insurrections in Italy, France, Poland, and Germany, and two years in Parliament, Laurence Oliphant moved to a spiritualist cult commune at Brocton on Lake Erie in upstate New York. According to Britain's official Dictionary of National Biography, the commune- master Thomas Lake Harris was in the habit of "casting out devils and forming magnetic circles among his disciples." Oliphant was now clearly qualified to play an active role among the post-Civil War American reformers. Between seances, Laurence covered Canada, England, and New York City. Over the next few years, he became an American commercial executive and entered into friendship with financier Jay Gould. After Gould's spectacular collapse set off America's worst depression in 1873, Oliphant published an article on the secrets of the U.S. commercial rings in Britain's Blackwoods magazine. In 1879 he announced a plan for colonizing Palestine with Jewish immigrants. On behalf of Foreign Minister Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, he went to the Mideast and began negotiating with the Turkish Empire. In 1882 he and his wife moved to Turkey, then to Haifa in Palestine. There they gathered around them pilgrims from upstate New York and some of the Jewish immigrants, and wrote crypto-Eastern mystery books. The major philosophical concept expressed was the necessity for prohibiting sexual intercourse between men and women. Oliphant's first wife died in 1887. The next year he went to the United States and returned with Rosamond Owen; daughter of Smithsonian Institution founder Robert Dale Owen. Oliphant died of chronic syphilis in 1888, shortly after Miss Owen became his second wife. The Psychology of Treason Henry Adams returned to post-Civil War Boston, superbly equipped, psychologically, to teach medieval history at Harvard. As a rabid pro-feudalist and pioneer Teutonist, he picked up two important student disciples Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt. He was now prepared not only to betray his country, but to destroy the republican tradition of his most distinguished Adams ancestors. Though he knew his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, to have been a great man, who had died at his desk in the Congress fighting for humanity, Henry Adams had filled his mind with self-justifying hatred. Years later he let the hatred spill out in lies about his grandfather: [John Quincy Adams] loathed and hated America.... He never thought of going home without nausea, but he and his son and his grandchildren had to be trained to profess a passionate patriotism which very strongly resembled cant.... I knew that the old man was in a high degree obnoxious to me . . . but I had no idea how acute the antipathy would be.... The picture of this slovenly German Gelehrte [scholar] whose highest delight is to lecture boys about a rhetoric of which he never could practice either the style or the action or the voice or the art, and then gloating over his own foolish production in print, instead of rolling on the ground with mortification as his grandchildren would do�this picture grinds the colors into my esophagus.(4) [In John Quincy Adams] you will see the same vein of feeble and commonplace sentiment [as he showed in politics in 1809 and 1829] mixed with a strange burlesque of Walter Scott and Lord Byron, calculated to turn me green with shame. Literally I groan with mortification at the thought of it.(5) Henry Adams went to Washington in 1877 to organize the means to smash the American West and prevent people from settling there. But he did have one other, not unrelated, employment in Washington. He had written an article praising the leadership of Albert Gallatin's son James, the head of the tight-credit bankers of New York opposed to Lincoln during the Civil War. In the mid-1870s, Albert Rolaz Gallatin, Albert's only surviving son, invited Henry Adams to write the official, authorized biography of his father, and turned over to Adams the Gallatin family papers. Henry would have to find other papers for the biography in the National Archives. The book he would finally produce would laud Albert Gallatin as the noblest, the purest, the greatest American statesman. Thus commissioned, employed, seduced, and married by the very European oligarchs whom his family had fought against in the American Revolution, Henry Adams commenced his "salon" in the national capital. Is the West. Inhabitable? America's Western development program�government-commissioned railroads, free land for settlers, free education, government-aided mining and manufacturing�roared into motion at the end of the Civil War, despite the assassination of President Lincoln, whose program it was. Settlers pushed west, and began to occupy those largely uninhabited spaces between the 100th meridian, running through the middle of Nebraska, Kansas and Texas, and the eastern sections of Washington, Oregon, and California. In the census of 1870, some 765,000 persons had resided in the area now comprising the states of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, an area of 946,000 square miles. In the 20 years from 1870 to 1890, the population of this section would grow by 3,344,000, to 4,109,000, more than a fivefold increase. The individual increases, from 1870 to 1890, were: Colorado 40,000 to 413,000 Idaho 15,000 to 89,000 Montana 21,000 to 142,924 Wyoming 9,000 to 63,000 Utah 87,000 to 211,000 New Mexico 92,000 to 160,000 Kansas 364,000 to 1,428,000 Nebraska 123,000 to 1,063,000 The Dakotas 14,000 to 540,000 But in the following 30 years, from 1890 to 1920, the population in this massive area�nearly a third of the contiguous 48 states--did not even double; it increased by only 3,165,000, to 7,274,000. And it failed even to double in the next 60 years from 1920 to 1980, when the population stood at just over 13 million. Today this region of massive untapped mineral wealth lies more or less uninhabited. To get an idea of its comparative emptiness, assume it had the same population density as, say, Indiana: It would then have 144 million residents. Montana and Idaho together, for example, would have 35 million people, instead of less than 2 million. The westward movement was derailed as a result of a systematic sabotage, a concerted effort over a 30-year period to close off the frontier lands, an effort which reached its successful, malicious climax under President Theodore Roosevelt between 1901 and 1909. In the decade following the Civil War, several geological and mapping surveys of the unsettled Western territories were commissioned by the authorities in Washington, D.C. Three of these surveys, and their leaders, the geologists Ferdinand V. Hayden, Clarence King, and John Wesley Powell, were of crucial importance in shaping the public outlook on the possibilities of Western development. The report of Ferdinand V. Hayden, M. D., to the Secretary of the Interior, October 15, 1869, concerning Colorado and New Mexico, was a call for development: . . .We may confidently assert that Colorado, at no very distant day, is destined to be one of the chief agricultural sections in the Rocky Mountain regions, yea, we may say the most important. The mining region affording a home market, it possesses a completeness within itself not found in any other section of the Union, while New Mexico will be the great fruit and wine region.... The coal formation along the base of the mountains was studied with great interest. With these coal beds are associated valuable deposits of brown iron ore.... The supply of both is quite inexhaustible and of excellent quality.... Irrigation is necessary throughout Colorado and New Mexico.... That it is inconvenient and imposes a hardship upon the farmer of limited means, at the opening or settling of his farm, is true. But when his primary ditch is completed, if properly made, he may feel himself forever secure from loss through drought.... Valuable ores abound almost everywhere in the granite and gneiss of the Rocky Mountains, and the economic question is not to find the material, but the capital and labor with which to work.... The country ... is replete with those minerals [for fertilizer] which by their decomposition are found by experience to most enrich the soil, as it is with the before-mentioned minerals of commercial value.... The climate is healthful and delightful, the country well supplied with water.... The communication with the East and West is becoming daily more easy.... The land is being tilled and prepared to support the large population which must soon settle here, and everything smiles on that man who brings to the country intelligence and willing hands. What stands in the way of the country's progress are the greedy speculators . . . and the system of grants . . . which . . . exercise a baneful influence on the prosperity of such a country. . .. Certain mines ... have been hacked to pieces to produce ore . . . in the shortest possible time.... Valuable mines have been ruined.... But the remedy will present itself, when Colorado and New Mexico shall be filled with citizens determined to own and occupy them.... It would be well for interested parties to consider in what way to manage their property out here so as to assure themselves against present possible loss, and of future increase in its value. To do this without radiating prosperity on all around them, and building up the wealth and power of the country, is a problem which will tax their abilities to the utmost.... The Arid Lands By 1878, Lincoln Republicanism was dying,- and Major John Wesley Powell submitted to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz his "Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States." As may be guessed from the title, the report was an attack on the entire idea of setting the American West. Powell announced that insufficient rainfall in the region west of the 100th meridian required the termination of Lincoln's land policy. Farmers who did use irrigation could effectively produce crops on smaller pieces of land�so each homesteading allotment should be cut in half. On the other hand, cattle ranches on drier land would require larger areas, so ranchers should be given 10 times greater allotments than before. While nothing could be done without irrigation first being secured, large corporations should not construct irrigation works this would lead to Monopoly. Neither should the federal government do the work, through its Army Engineers�this would be too much of Big Government. Better to leave irrigation arrangements to the Little Man, to the local Community�where,- of course, major water-moving projects could never be accomplished. And rather than have the West organized under the old, impractical U.S. Constitutional framework, new "regional" structures of government would need to be created. In any event, Powell claimed, nothing should be done, settlement should stop, until thorough, painstaking mapping of the land could be accomplished. This report was a declaration of factional war by the neo-feudalists, Henry Adams and company. Mr. Adams would direct the battle for its implementation. John Wesley Powell had been schooled in the geological literature and outlook of Robert Owen's New Harmony community and the British empirical method in science by a tutor in his boyhood days on the farm in Ohio. His earnest political training had been in the abolitionism of family friends Charles G. Finney, Oberlin College founder and leader of frenzied religious revivals, and Salmon Chase, anti-Whig liberal who as Supreme Court Chief Justice would overturn the Lincoln easy-money greenbacks monetary policy. Powell lost an arm in the Civil War, and went on to gain his fame in an 1869 exploring trip down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. The aggressive, ambitious young geologist was noticed by a great power in the liberal journalistic establishment, publisher Samuel Bowles of the Springfield (Illinois) Republican. Bowles discerned Powell's potential for the anti-industrial cause; he proceeded to publicize Powell's "gallant" and "resolute" exploits to a national audience, and Powell's reputation was made. Powell's ambition was now firmly attached to the anti-development faction which was buttering his bread. Publisher Samuel Bowles, in turn, was recognized for his services to the cause of British imperial economics by his election, in 1872, to the Cobden Club of London. Carl Schurz, another intimate of Henry Adams, was also elected in 1872. Adams himself was elected in 1873, joining his brothers Charles and John, elected previously. As a national celebrity, with backing by Smithsonian Institution director Joseph Henry, Powell received Congressional funding in 1870 for continued Colorado survey work. By a "clerical error" in the bill, of which the Congress was unaware, his new survey was removed from the jurisdiction of the Interior Department and placed under the anti-development Smithsonian Institution. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. 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