-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
--[18a]--
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
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How Environmentalism Killed the American Frontier
On February 21, 1907, a pathetic resolution from the legislature of the state
of Washington was entered into the United States Congressional Record. The
resolution protested the withdrawal of public lands into forest reserves, or
what are now known as National Forests. The resolution was a last gasp of
protest against the closing of the American West to settlement and
development:
To His Excellency Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of
America; to the honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United
States; and to the honorable Secretary of Agriculture [the newly created
Forestry Service was a part of the Agriculture Department]:
We, your memorialists, the Senate and House of Representatives of the State
of Washington, in legislative session assembled . . . most respectfully
represent and pray as follows:
Whereas the people of the State of Washington, in common with the people of
the other States of the Union, are free and liberty-loving; and
Whereas arbitrary power and despotism are abhorrent to them; end
Whereas the honorable Secretary of Agriculture of the United States of
America has usurped the powers, duties and functions of the lawmaking power
of the Government of the United States of America in issuing an arbitrary
edict, or ukase, promulgated as a criminal code for the government of Federal
forest reserves; and . . .
Whereas said Secretary of Agriculture, in pursuance of his assumed and
usurped autocratic power . . . now threatens to prosecute all citizens
alleged to have violated his said criminal code; and
Whereas the Congress of the United States has no constitutional power to
delegate to any one man the making of criminal laws; and
Whereas the Congress of the United States passed an act entitled 'An act to
provide for the entry of agricultural land within forest reserves,' approved
June 11, 1906 [enacted to fool Westerners into believing they could still
make farms within the withdrawn land] . . .; and
Whereas . . . Under said act a prospective homesteader (who is generally a
man of limited means) coming from the East to the West to make settlement
upon lands within the forest reserve, is not permitted to select for himself
. . . land . . . satisfactory for a permanent home, but is subjected to long
delays, lasting months or years . . . whether or not he will ever be able to
select the homestead . . . must be determined by some subordinate of the
Agricultural department . . . and said prospective settler, rather than be
subjected to endless . . . petty exactions . . . is compelled to migrate to
Canada in search of a home of his own for himself and family; and
Whereas . . . tens of thousands of families have deserted their homes in the
East and now find themselves in a new country among strangers, with limited
means, and are confronted with the fact that hundreds of thousands of acres
of public land suitable to be taken for homesteads have recently been
withdrawn from settlement for forest reserves; and . . . now the-serious
question arises, 'What shall such citizens and their families do?'; and
Whereas it is a gross injustice to make wholesale withdrawals of public lands
from homestead settlement under the guise of "temporary withdrawals," with no
regard as to whether or not such lands embrace timber or prairie lands or
lands necessary for forest-reserve purposes . . . large portions of such
lands so withdrawn are essentially agricultural lands; and
Whereas the making of forest reserves out of lands less than 4,500 feet in
altitude above sea level retards and prevents the settlement of the West....
Whereas in 1866 (Congress passed an act . . . which grants a free right of
way across the public lands for the construction of highways, and which
enables citizens and local State authorities to speedily construct roads as
the necessities of new and quickly growing communities require . . . said
section does not apply to forest reserves; and
Whereas communities existing on opposite sides of a forest reserve are
subject to intolerable delays in [building roads] . . . thereby retarding the
development and prosperity of the country thus victimized; and . . .
Whereas if such lands were in private ownership, they would be subjected to
State and local taxations and thereby contribute to the support of government
in new States and new communities where public revenues are generally
inadequate to meet present needs; and . . .
Whereas the Congress of the United States, in pursuance of a wise and liberal
policy, in 1875 passed an act granting to railroad companies generally rights
of way across the public domain, with the right to take from adjacent land
material, earth, stone and timber necessary for the construction of such
railroads, etc., which act has aided materially in the upbuilding of the
West; and
Whereas the {contrary] act of Congress of March 3, 1899 . . . does not grant
the right to such railroad companies to take material, earth, stone or timber
necessary for the construction of such railroads . . . and [negates the
earlier act]; and Whereas the needs of the people require the speedy building
of electric railways; and
Whereas the great source of water power for the operation of such railways
and the providing of electric lights and power for cities and towns and for
the operation of mines is situated within the limits of forest reserves; and
Whereas the present Federal restriction tend materially to defeat the
accomplishment of these benign purposes, on account of such forest reserves;.
. .
Therefore we most earnestly and respectfully protest against the making of
said temporary withdrawals permanent, and ask that they be immediately set
aside and that the lands therein described be at once restored to the public
domain. (l)
President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), to whom this plea was addressed,
ignored it and condemned all critics of his Conservation policies as selfish
robbers or ignorant fools. During; his administration, the Western United
States was largely closed against use by Americans for farms, factories, or
cities. A great mass of territory was permanently frozen in restricted
Federal holdings. Other massive land areas emerged from the Theodore
Roosevelt years as the property of a few feudal-style landlords, railroad and
timber operators who agreed with "TR's" program For ending the growth of the
American West, reversing Abraham Lincoln's homesteading program, and closing
the frontier.
Who Was Theodore Roosevelt?
The fundamental economic and world-strategic outlook of the United States
leadership underwent a catastrophic change between 1901 and 1909. To
understand the change, and to realize the profound loss America has suffered
because of it, one must know certain things about the background, the
philosophy, and the character of the man who was the nation's President
during those years, and why he was very, very different from the Presidents
who had preceded him.
During his first term in the White House, TR pleaded with the British
government to make his friend and closest advisor, English career diplomat
Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, their ambassador to this country. Sir Cecil
(1859-1918) was TR's British "handler, " and we shall first look at Roosevelt
through his eyes.
In 1886 Teddy Roosevelt, still demoralized from the simultaneous deaths of
his first wife and his mother two years before, lost badly in his election
race for the New York City mayoralty. He took ship for Britain, the land of
his closest family ties, to try to renew his life. On board he met
Spring-Rice . . . who had been assigned to "spontaneously" make his
acquaintance.(2) When they got to England, Spring-Rice introduced the young
American reformer to the top ranks of the British nobility and government,
including Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, scion of the Cecil family.
Spring-Rice was then best man at Teddy's second marriage, in London.
On Teddy Roosevelt's return to America, Cecil Spring-Rice was assigned to a
post in the British embassy in Washington, where he could make good on their
friendship. From the moment of their first meeting to the end of their lives,
Spring-Rice provided Roosevelt with the emotional support TR always craved,
with flattery and with sophisticated geopolitical advice.
At one point during Roosevelt's presidency, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice gave to his
fellow British diplomat, Valentine Chirol, a letter of introduction to TR, in
which Spring-Rice told the President: "I should like him to know the man who
occupied the first position in the world and is the best suited for it." But
Chirol afterward complained that he had not been able to fix Roosevelt's
wandering attention in any continuous discussion. What the British "handler"
thought of the American comes through clearly in Spring-Rice's reply:
"If you took an impetuous small boy on to a beach strewn with a great many
exciting pebbles, you would not expect him to remain interested for long in
one pebble. You must always remember that the President is about six."(3)
The England to which the unhappy young Teddy Roosevelt fled in 1886 was the
permanent refuge of a very important member of Teddy's intimate family
circle, whom he- would visit in London. Georgia-born James Dunwody Bulloch,
brother of Teddy's mother, had been forced into exile at the end of the
American Civil War as among the worst traitors to his country, ineligible for
inclusion in Abraham Lincoln's broad amnesty for Southern partisans.
Bulloch had been the chief of the international secret service for the
Confederate insurrection. Based in England and operating in Britain and
France, James Bulloch organized the purchase, equipping and manning of a navy
for the war against the United States. With mostly British sailors, Bulloch's
"Southern" warships destroyed American vessels, killed American sailors and
largely succeeded in sweeping U.S. commercial shipping from the Alantic Ocean
during the war. He also personally supervised the running of munitions and
other supplies of war past the U.S. naval blockade for use by Confederate
troops. b postwar reparations talks and legal suits, it was the official
position of the American government that the British and certain continental
bankers, acting through Mr. Bulloch, had prolonged the Civil War to perhaps
double the length it would otherwise have been without this
intervention-drawing out the tragedy to make it the worst war in America's
history, before or since.
Bulloch's role as a top "spook" against American republicanism had been a
personal and family tradition from before the war. In 1854 Bulloch had been
arrested by Spanish authorities in the harbor at Havana, while captaining the
ship Black Warrior into a prearranged provocation. The Young America
movement, in the financial and political orbit of the British Empire, had
been making repeated attempts to "revolutionize" and grab Cuba for an
extension of Southern plantation slavery. Demanding the release of Bulloch's
ship, the pro-imperial faction in Washington, who would soon lead the
Confederate secession from the U.S.A., had then tried unsuccessfully to
interest the public in a war with Spain over Cuba.
For the next several years before the Civil War, James Bulloch had been a
business and political confidante and house guest of his New York
brother-in-law, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the future president.
Following the Civil War, Bulloch's exile in England placed him in congenial
company. In the 1870s the feudalist aristocracy� best represented by John
Ruskin at Oxford�was breeding new theories of tropical empire bolder than the
most bizarre racialist dreams of Anglo-"Confederate" leaders like Bulloch The
young Ruskinite Cecil Rhodes wrote, at Oxford in 1877:
If we had retained America there would at this moment
be millions more of English living in . . . those parts [of
the world] that are at present inhabited by the most des-
picable specimens of human beings. What an alteration there
would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influ-
ence....
Why should we not form a secret society with but one
object�the furtherance of the British Empire and the bring-
ing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the
recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon
race but one Empire?(4)
Buoyed by the ascendancy of these Cecil-family-led Tories, James D. Bulloch
followed the advice of his admiring, Harvard-graduate nephew, Theodore
Roosevelt, and brought out his history of the Confederate secret service.(5)
This two-volume work remains a classic, the standard (and possibly the only)
published account of these operations.
For Teddy Roosevelt, his revered uncle, the Rebel in exile, was the practical
authority on geopolitical matters of naval power�the use of a navy for the
maintenance of imperial authority. Bulloch's anti-republican historical
methodology was in line with Teddy's mentor and recent professor, Harvard
Teutonist Henry Adams. As the embittered grandson of John Quincy Adams had
taught a cynical, racialist Realpolitik, so Bulloch, a "man without a
country," moved the young Roosevelt further away from an identification with
American republicanism, away from the American ideal of material progress and
equal rights for all of humanity.
Teddy Roosevelt's core sense of nationality was classically expressed many
years later, when he addressed Oxford University as a retired U.S. President:
"No hard and fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races.... In the
long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling
an other unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and
for the benefit of that other race. That is what our peoples have in the main
done, and must continue . . . to do in India, Egypt, and the
Phillipines....�(6)
Under James Bulloch's prompting, Teddy Roosevelt wrote the first of his own
dreadfully boring historical works�"The Naval War of 1812." Roosevelt's
method is entirely Bulloch's: writing on certain technical details of
historical contests which falsifies by evading or suppressing the
political-economic issues being fought over.
Perhaps as a balance to his family's Confederate connection, Teddy Roosevelt
married Alice Lee after graduating from Harvard. Young Roosevelt "glowed in
the company of George Cabot Lee,"(7) Alice's father, a partner in the Boston
Brahmin banking firm of Lee & Higginson. This extended family partnership had
played a major role in financing and directing the anti-South terrorism of
the radical abolitionists. The Lees and the Higginsons were proud descendants
of the "Essex Junto" arch-Tories, who had originally tried to split the new
American republic as early as 1796. The families' bitter hatred toward
American egalitarian concepts bore tragic fruit in the early twentieth
century, when the Lee & Higginson firm financed the anti-immigrant and "race
purification" movements, the precursors of Nazism.
Another aspect of Roosevelt family life gives us a more precise understanding
of the close identification of Theodore Roosevelt with the outlook of the
British Empire. His mother's sister Anna Bulloch married New York banker
James K. Gracie. The Gracie mansion, the height of fashion in anglophile New
York circles, became famous when it was donated to the city to serve as the
mayor's residence. Uncle James' father, Archibald Gracie II, was president of
the Baring bank office in New York; Uncle James' brother, Archibald Gracie
III, was the Baring representative in Alabama, and a noted Confederate
officer.
The Baring bank financed, and oversaw with espionage, the entirety of the
British and Anglo- American trade with east Asia, the most profitable
component of which was the illegal opium traffic to China. It was Sir Evelyn
Baring (later called Lord Cromer), who went out to Egypt as dictator behind
British troops in 1883, and personally introduced the new Ruskinite era of
British Imperialism to the world. Under Baring's quarter-century of direct
supervision, the anti-Western "Mother Earth" cults of Islamic fundamentalism
and of ancient Egypt (Isis, for example) were harnessed to Imperial uses for
the Middle East and beyond. For the first two years of Roosevelt's
presidency, TR's British "handler," Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, advised TR from
Egypt, -where he worked under Baring/Cromer's direction.
The Uncle James Gracie connection certified the Roosevelts as top British
Empire characters, as did Henry Adams' marriage to a cousin of the Baring
chairman. But, unlike the Adams family, for the Roosevelts this was no
radical departure. Though there had been some patriots both in the New York
line and in the Bulloch family in Georgia, a considerable segment of the
Roosevelts and their family connections had been Tories in the American
Revolution, including the Barclays and the Van Shaacks.
A Roosevelt girl had married Frederick Phillipse, the reigning lord of the
vast feudal estate north of New York which was later a regional headquarters
for Tory intrigue during the Revolution. Cornelius Van Shaack Roosevelt,
Theodore's grandfather, cofounded Chemical Bank in 1824 with his fellow real
estate lords the Goelets, whose fortune derived (quite literally) from piracy
and slave-trading based in the Phillipse estate.
A Roosevelt family concern built the clipper ships with which A.A. Low and
Co. carried on opium smuggling into the 1850s; the proceeds from the
smuggling financed the construction of the present campus of New York's
Columbia University. And a Roosevelt family in-law in China, Mr. Warren
Delano (grandfather of F.D. Roosevelt), was the senior partner of the
Baring-backed New England opium syndicate, Russell and Company.
These family connections are not hidden; their publication is not a new
revelation. They are instead quietly celebrated, in the community of
blueblood history-writing, as straightforward indications of "good breeding."
A life consciously based on this kind of Imperial tradition, as was Teddy
Roosevelt's, could only be called Progressive by historians who had neither
understood nor sympathized with the American Revolution.
The Strenuous Life!
Theodore Roosevelt, who introduced the fraud of "Conservation of Natural
Resources" as a national goal, was the first self consciously aristocratic
American President. It took, as we will see, much more than ordinary
electoral politics to bring such a person into the executive chair of a
democratic society.
Other Presidents, before and since, have been Harvard graduates. But none of
the others has been recorded as choosing to be pulled around the Harvard
campus in his own private dogcart, as more in keeping with his dignity than
walking.
Teddy Roosevelt was a delicate child, who seems to have been in the habit of
using his regular asthmatic attacks as a means of forcing his parents to drop
everything and devote themselves exclusively to his care.(8)
But did little "Teedy," as he was called, outgrow this infantilism? Could he
live down such a pathetic reputation? Of course: he became a fearsome killer!
Picture the young pre-adolescent, on an- Egyptian holiday with his family.
His father, the amateur naturalist (co-founder with J.P. Morgan of the
American Museum of Natural History), gives Teedy a shotgun. The boy goes out,
squinting in the sun�he was very nearsighted-and begins blasting away. He
kills, and kills, and continues killing all living creatures in the area
until he is utterly exhausted. He brings back to his family about 200 dead
animals: many small birds, mice and squirrels, large insects, mostly blasted
to pieces. But those which are repairable he works at with the tools of his
curious hobby�and another dozen stuffed shot animals join his collection.
His naturalism was later developed under the discipline of his Harvard
professor, Henry Adams. TR was elected to membership in Adams' Cosmos Club,
which since 1879 had been the political headquarters for anti-development
scientists in Washington. Along with the First Secretary of the British
Embassy, Cecil Spring-Rice, and another product of Adams' anti-republican:
history teaching, Henry Cabot Lodge, Teddy Roosevelt was
included in a very intimate set of Anglophiles based in Henry Adams'
Washington house.
In the late 1880s Roosevelt and a few friends started the Boone and Crockett
Club. The men for whom the club was named, frontiersman Daniel Boone and
Texas patriot Davey Crockett, may well have groaned from their graves. To be
eligible for membership, a gentleman had to have killed in chase at least
three different species of American big-game animals. The excitement of the
club was in killing animals; the social goal of the club was to prevent the
frontier from being developed with agriculture and industry. The world was-
to be a park, in which their lordships could kill, rest, and kill again. One
of Teddy Roosevelt's proteges in the Boone and Crockett Club was Madison
Grant, the developer of the Bronx Zoo, who dedicated his life to "saving"
animals, sterilizing inferior humans, stopping immigration and extinguishing
the non-Aryan races of men.
After his mother and first wife died, Teddy Roosevelt temporarily retired
from his New York millionaire existence, and took up the life of a Western
rancher. He bought a very expensive deerskin suit from Brooks Brothers, and
with his silver buckles made a dashing sight for the national political
photographers. His diary in the 1884 records his summer days spent in
relentless killing, with a Colt revolver, a 10-gauge shotgun and three
high-powered rifles.
Knocked the heads off two sage grouse. 12 sage hens and prairie chickens, 1
yearling whitetail . . . through the heart. Broke the backs . . . of two
blacktail bucks with a single bullet.... 1 female grizzly, 1 bear cub ... the
ball going clean through him from end to end.(9)
Killing His Way to The Presidency
In the mid-1890s, Teddy Roosevelt was a moderately unsuccessful politician.
He had served for awhile as a New York State legislator and Republican
leader, but his aristocratic airs had made him very unpopular. He had a
certain reputation among the "British" party as an aspiring reformer,
following his term as New York Police Commissioner and as a United States
Civil Service Commissioner; but he had really accomplished almost nothing at
all.
Through the intervention of his dose friend Henry Cabot Lodge, now a U.S.
Senator from Massachusetts, President William McKinley was prevailed upon-to
appoint Teddy Roosevelt an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. This was a stage
for action, albeit only the corner of the stage.
In 1897, as in James Bulloch's heyday before the Civil War, the project for
the "liberation" of Spain's colony of Cuba was again hot. Senator Lodge,
Teddy Roosevelt and their close friends ran the propaganda campaign. The
"Cuban Revolutionary Junta," playthings of the Britain-Boston-New York
merchant banking circuit as before, made it a habit of meeting at the home of
Mr. Henry Adams in Washington. They were determined that the United States
must be pulled into war with the Kingdom of Spain.
The issue, as President McKinley recognized, was not Spain or Cuba, but
whether the United States would remain the leader and example for the world's
republicans. McKinley said "no" to this war. He carried on in the tradition
of President Abraham Lincoln, and of the great U.S. Secretary of State, James
G. Blaine, maintaining high tariffs modified only by reciprocity treaties
with various Ibero-American republics. In these proto-alliances, two nations
could fix lower tariff rates between them, and guarantee markets for their
manufacturing�without trade war, and without "free trade." McKinley was
anxious that this lucrative development of mutually beneficial trade, this
strengthening of the Monroe Doctrine's protection of the Western Hemisphere,
not be damaged by the United States plunging into the role of imperialist.
At the same time, America's example of industrial development had been copied
in Germany and Japan, whose industrial and commercial power were growing
immense. In Russia, Count Sergei Witte's faction intended to take the Czar
and the nation as far as possible toward Americanization. Even Canada and
Australia tended to look toward the United States for protection and
development.
Britain's Imperial thinkers looked on these developments with great pain.
Cecil Spring-Rice had written back to London on the trouble the Yankees were
causing with these American System policies, when they were being carried out
in 1891 under Blaine's leadership in the State Department: ". . . We must
count on the present tariff for a year and a half at least . . . probably for
much longer. We must reconcile ourselves to it and look for new markets. A
serious aspect of it is the reciprocity clause, which drives us out of the W.
Indies and S. America."
In his correspondence from his post at the British mission in Russia, one may
observe Spring-Rice seething with hatred and resentment against Count Witte,
who loved neither Russian absolutism nor British-inspired anarchism.
The American example was a terribly awkward thing. It could not be destroyed
by war�that had been tried, and had failed, in the Revolution, the War of
1812, and the Civil War. America must be made to shed its republican colors,
to renounce its passion for progress, to appear before the world as an armed
branch of the East India Company.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was ready for action. But
was the time right? How would Britain react, and (what was even more
doubtful), how would Germany react to an American move against Spanish
Caribbean possessions?
These questions were answered in a letter from Cecil Spring-Rice to Teddy
Roosevelt, written from the British mission in Berlin on November 3, 1897. In
this letter, Spring-Rice hammered away at the theme he would pursue with
Roosevelt for many years: that Germany is America's enemy, Germany is a
tyranny of self-interested aristocrats; Germany benefits from chaos. At the
same time America can end chaos in Cuba by going to war with Spain and
seizing Cuba; though loving chaos, the cowardly Germans dare not and will not
intervene if you proceed to make war in the Caribbean; by implication,
England will of course not object. You ("six-year-old"!) are a mighty
soldier, a knight of the old school, a real Anglo-Saxon hero:
I have been very much interested in watching the view taken here about
Cuba.... To begin with there is the feud that every official German has with
America . . . for teaching Germans English and making them Republican. Then
there is the economical feud caused by [American tariff] measures.... All
these feelings ... make German comment on American affairs rather bitter.
Then there is the sympathy with monarchical Spain.... If order is restored in
Cuba and the normal amount of sugar produced, the sugar growers of Germany
will naturally suffer. Chaos is in their interest. The sugar growers . . .
belong to the old Prussian nobility which has for years been the mainstay of
the throne. So the pull they have is considerable.
But with all these strong factors on the side of Spain, I should think it
quite out of the question that Germany would move in favour of Spain.... The
prevailing motive underlying German policy is peace and commercial progress.
Anything which would endanger their enormous interests on your side [of the
ocean] trade, shipping, investments - would be avoided with the most
scrupulous care. They dare not go to war.... The press is admirably
disciplined.... There can be no sort of doubt as to what the [German] Empire
would like to see done in Cuba; but I don't think there is the slightest
chance of Germany running the risk of being found out doing it....
[Germany is] the country of the soldier and the Jew, but between the soldier
and the Jew everyone else is crushed. Which side would you take? I would like
to see you here for a time-and hear your opinions. I believe you would go on
the side of the Soldier and drink the Kaiser's health with tears in your eyes.
Three months later, on February 15, 1898, another American ship ran into
trouble in Havana harbor: The battleship Maine exploded and sank, and 260
American sailors died. No one has ever demonstrated who was responsible for
the explosion. Old James D. Bulloch in London, recalling his 1854 arrest in
Havana as a Young America revolutionist, must have read about the affair with
great interest.
Bulloch's adoring nephew Theodore Roosevelt was anxious to take advantage of
this inexplicable tragedy and to finally bring to a successful conclusion
what his uncle's generation had failed to accomplish.
Despite immense pressure from the war party�who were identical ideologically
with the "peace party" of the Civil War era�President McKinley still held out
for a peaceful settlement with Spain. But on February 25, 1898, McKinley's
Navy Secretary John D. Long was unfortunately absent from Washington; he had,
as it were, turned his back. His Assistant Secretary, Theodore Roosevelt,
technically in charge of the United States Navy for the day, ordered the
American battle fleet under Commodore Dewey to steam into the Western Pacific
to challenge the Spanish at the Philippine Islands. This overtly warlike
action made war with Spain a certainty, and expanded it beyond the Caribbean
when war came.
After President McKinley reluctantly asked Congress for a declaration of war
in April 1898, Teddy Roosevelt resigned his post on the Naval Board and took
a commission as Lieutenant Colonel. He and Colonel Leonard Wood raised a
cavalry regiment of volunteer cowhands and Long Island polo players. In the
battle of San Juan Hill, Roosevelt's Rough Riders suffered heavy casualties
as they were forced to retreat. The fact that Negro regiments in battle there
were significantly more successful has not been trumpeted about in the
history profession since then.
In any event, Teddy Roosevelt's manliness against the Spanish was
glorified�in perhaps the same fashion as in the case of Aaron Burr's supposed
heroism in the American Revolutionary combat in Quebec. And this glory was
parlayed into a successful run for the governorship of New York State.
But America had plunged a knife into herself; Roosevelt would push it in
deeper.
Henry Adams' dearest friend, John Hay, by this time U.S. Ambassador to
England, had received from British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury his direct
approval for the Spanish-American war. Cecil Spring-Rice said it best, in a
letter to Hay during the short conflict: "Therefore, as I say again, let us
try while we can to secure what we can for God's language" [i.e. English].
Theodore Roosevelt, hero-killer of the hapless Spanish, had a very good
press, and was perceived as temporarily popular with the electorate. He was
nominated and elected governor of New York in 1898, after the conclusion of a
deal with the state's Republican Party.
In 1900, after TR's mildly unpopular two years as New York governor,
Massachusetts Senator Lodge proposed that he be nominated for the U.S.
vice-presidency on the ticket with President McKinley, to replace Garret
Hobart, McKinley's first-term Vice-President, now dead.
McKinley opposed Roosevelt's being made his running mate. National Republican
Party chairman Mark Hanna despised Roosevelt. The party bosses in New York
State, who had to deal with Governor Roosevelt, found him intolerable. Then
how did he get there? We are informed by Roosevelt-friendly
historians-liberals that New York State Republican Party boss Thomas C. Platt
pushed for TR's vice-presidential nomination in order to get him out of New
York politics. According to this tale, the British-controlled trust empire of
J.P.Morgan, which was then taking control of American business from the top
down, was not involved in Roosevelt's ascent to power; they are even said to
have opposed it.
Under nationally orchestrated pressure against the regular Republican Party
apparatus, McKinley and Hanna finally caved in at the Republican convention.
Roosevelt, in his cowboy hat, was nominated. The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket
was elected, and took office in March 1901. Six months later President
William McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist, and Theodore Roosevelt
became President of the United States.
It was under President Theodore Roosevelt, the "progressive" presidential
benefactor of Conservation, that J.P. Morgan and his trusts achieved control
over approximately one-quarter of all American businesses and, together with
allied bankers, a veto power over the further development of the American
economy.
The United States Steel Company, whose formation was announced on the day
Teddy Roosevelt was inaugurated as Vice-President, was consolidated under
TR's presidency to incorporate over 100 former steel companies. J.P. Morgan
and his partner George W. Perkins formed the International Harvester trust by
taking over all major American farm machinery companies. Railroads owned or
controlled by J.P. Morgan, or by his selected friends, accounted for all
important national rail lines. Other control had been previously achieved.
Morgan's General Electric Company, which had formerly been Thomas Edison's
business, made a cross-licensing agreement with Westinghouse in the late
1890s, freezing the nation's new electrical industry under their joint
control and making Morgan the dominant power.
To make Roosevelt (and thus the Conservation he introduced) look clean, he
has had to be somehow divorced from his status as a collaborator of the
biggest, dirtiest multinational trust in history; thus, his oratory against
the rich, and his undeserved reputation as a "trust-buster." We do have,
however, a concise piece of evidence showing Theodore Roosevelt's actual
relationship to the criminal trust activities of this foreign bank, J.P.
Morgan and Company.
President Theodore Roosevelt's Commissioner of Corporations, Herbert Knox
Smith, who was supposed to have been investigating International Harvester
for the President, wrote the following letter for a Senate investigating
committee:
On August 27, 1907, by direction of the President, I met George W. Perkins,
Chairman of the Finance Committee of the International Harvester Company, and
discussed the matter with him. On August 28 I saw the President and briefly
stated my views, and upon his instructions I then, on the next day, saw the
Attorney General.... The President had instructed the Attorney General to
take no further action in this matter until a final conference could be
held....
I believe that industrial combination is an economic necessity; that the
Sherman [anti-trust] law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, is an
absurdity and is impossible of general enforcement and, even if partially
enforced, will, in most cases, work only evil. I believe the principle it
represents must ultimately be abandoned; that combination must be allowed and
then be regulated.
[Mr. Perkins told me] that the interests he represented, notably including
the International Harvester Company but also the far-reaching Morgan
interests generally, had originally favored the creation of the Bureau of
Corporations and the policy of the President whom that Bureau represents . .
. that if after all the endeavors of this company and the other Morgan
interests to uphold the policy of the Administration and to adopt their
method of modern publicity, this company was now to be attacked in a purely
technical case[!], the interests he represented were going to fight.... I
have no knowledge of any moral ground for attack on the company.... The
attitude of the Morgan interests generally has been one of creative
cooperation.
It is a very practical question whether it is well to throw away now the
great influence of the Morgan interests, which up to this time have supported
the advanced policies of the Administration, both in the general principles
and in the application thereof to their specific interests, and place them
generally in opposition.
The Stanley Committee of the U.S. Senate tried in 1908 to acquire the records
of Smith's Bureau, but the President ordered the papers locked up in a vault
under the White House and defied the committee to impeach him.
Herbert Knox Smith was truthfully echoing Morgan's own policy when he
declared that trusts should take over the economy and then be regulated by
the government. J.P. Morgan's two crucial underlying assumptions must not,
however, be forgotten:
First, the trusts must be directed by Morgan and the British interest, not by
Americans or people who think like Americans; and
Second, the government which then regulates the trusts and all other business
must itself be committed to stopping that terrible American engine for the
unlimited expansion of technology and production capabilities, before the
British oligarchical system of financial and social control is broken
throughout the world.
The Royal Forester, Or An Introduction to
British Germany
Launching the Conservation movement was the most significant achievement of
the TR Administration, as he himself believed....
Having just been born, the new arrival was still without a name. There had to
be a name to call it by before we could even attempt to make it known, much
less give it a permanent place in the public mind. What should we call it?
Both Overton [Price] and I knew that large organized areas of Government
forest lands in British India were named Conservancies, and the foresters in
charge of them Conservators. After many other suggestions and long
discussions, either Price or I (I'm not sure which . . .) proposed that we
apply a new meaning to a word already in the dictionary, and christen the new
policy Conservation.
During one of our rides I put that name up to TR, and he approved it
instantly....
Today, when it would be hard to find an intelligent man in the United States
who hasn't at least some conception of what Conservation means, it seems
incredible that the very word, in the sense in which we use it now, was
unknown less than forty years ago. (10)
The foregoing words were written by the architect of the Conservation
swindle, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, Gifford
Pinchot. It is unlikely that more than a handful of American citizens are
aware that "Conservation" was, as Pinchot proudly admits, cooked up early in
the present century. The identities, the interests and the social
philosophies of the creators of this movement are unknown to the general
public today. It is thus an unfortunate fact that citizens of good will are
unable to form a competent judgment of the validity of the claims of the
"environmentalists, " when these are given without a single challenge by the
news media. The possibility that deliberate deception is involved, that very
bad motivations are masquerading under "Save Mother Nature" banners-
motivations that would frighten and enrage the normal citizen, this
possibility is not considered if the sense of an artificially constructed
"movement" is not known to the public.
If one observes that today's World Wildlife Fund, headed by Britain's Prince
Philip, is sponsored by the oil multinationals, one might mistakenly conclude
that these kinds of interests joined a worthy cause in order to look good.
It has always been their movement.
Gifford Pinchot was a tall, handsome son of a millionaire New York real
estate speculator. He attended Yale University in the 1880s. His family later
created a forestry school at Yale in which Pinchot taught. While he was a
Yale undergraduate, Pinchot and his father decided that the young man would
become a "forester"�what that was to mean would be worked out under the
appropriate tutelage, since there were at that time no "foresters" in the
United States.
How Pinchot achieved his goal and became a "forester" is a fascinating
mystery. The United States Library of Congress states that the files of
correspondence and memorabilia they maintain on Gifford Pinchot are its
largest on any single individual -some one million items. There are numerous
Pinchot diaries and thousands of letters and memoranda, often on the most
trivial topics imaginable.
But on the most crucial week of his life, there is an unfortunate gap. Having
graduated from Yale, Pinchot sailed for England. According to a typed summary
of his diary for October 18-24, 1889, Pinchot went to the India House and
conferred with the top officials of the British Indian Empire. The actual
diary for this week is missing from the Library of Congress, though a diary
in the Library's possession goes for many months up to the week before the
London visit.
This missing document might provide a marvelous detailed picture of precisely
how a young American is mustered into the political army of his country's
enemies.
According to the summary in Pinchot's Library of Congress file, the India
House officials gave him introductory letters to the director and the former
director of the British forestry service in India, and he was assigned to
study forestry with the former director. He then visited the Fabian Socialist
settlement house known as Toynbee Hall and the "People's Palace."
He spent three days at Cambridge, the home base for much of the experimental
religious and social philosophy of the British aristocracy�including the
Society for Psychic Research, which he would join back in the United States.
The summary mentions a "Long discussion of Cambridge in diary. "
He met with the director of the British forestry service, who "advised me to
strike for reservation of National Forests for he does not believe that Arbor
Days, etc., are of any practical use. As I learn more of forestry, I see more
and more the need of it in the United States.... " [emphasis added].
>From London, Gifford Pinchot was sent to the Continent and studied the theory
and practice of forestry under Sir Dietrich Brandis, in Germany, Switzerland,
and France. Brandis was a Prussian, hired by the British East India Company
in the last days of its rule (1856) to supervise the forests of Burma and
India. Queen Victoria, upon taking personal possession of India, made Brandis
the chief of the British forest service. Following his retirement he spent
many years back in Europe teaching the cadres who would go out to India in
the British colonial service. Curiously, after Brandis the British continued
to use German nationals to run the forests of India. One of them, Berthold
Ribbentrop, was the original for a fictional Chief Forester "Muller" in
Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli story "In the Rukh. "
When Gifford Pinchot was finished with his European training, he returned to
the United States to manage a forest estate belonging to the Vanderbilt
family in North Carolina. Here he was joined and advised by a strange
visitor, the gruff Anglo-German Mr. Berthold Ribbentrop, who finally retired
to England. Meanwhile, Pinchot kept in close touch with his mentor Sir
Dietrich, and remained under his instruction as he entered the United States
government and advanced his "forestry" project. Brandis eventually submitted
a 20-page memorandum to Pinchot which provided the outlines for the United
States Forest Service.
As Pinchot admitted in his autobiography, "Long before my training in Europe
was over, it had become my chief ambition, timid at first but determined
later on, to tread in the footsteps of Dr. Brandis. Thus I might hope to do
for the public forests of the United States some part of what he had done for
the forests of Burma and India."(11)
Pinchot actively promoted the objectives he had learned in the British
service, even before the Theodore Roosevelt presidency. By legislative
trickery during the final months of Grover Cleveland's first presidential
term (1885-1889), John Wesley Powell and the Henry Adams group had attempted
to withdraw over one million square miles of public land from settlement by
American citizens. This had been reversed by a still-alert Congress. Gifford
Pinchot and his allies in the new generation later achieved a small permanent
victory in President Cleveland's second term (1893-1897): Cleveland withdrew
21 million Western acres into forest reserves, most of it from the new states
of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington. But it was not until TR's
administration (1901-1909) that the full British program would be brought
before the public and implemented. As a pro-environmentalist has put it, "An
assassin's bullet had presented the chief of an obscure governmental bureau
with an opportunity, almost unique in the country's history, to put into
practice his cherished vision. Pinchot enjoyed a special-relationship with
the President.... In access to the President's ear and the influence that
this position implies, Pinchot (Chief Forester in the Department of
Agriculture) stood well above most Cabinet members.''(12) In 1905, the Bureau
of Forestry was converted into the United States Forest Service under Gifford
Pinchot, and control over the forest reserves, or National Forests, as they
were now to be called, was given over to the new Service. By the end of
Theodore Roosevelt's administration the acreage of the National Forests had
risen from 42 million to 172 million acres, near the present total growth
area in the National Forest system of 230 million acres (as of 1983).
The Origin of America's Inflation
We shall deal later on with the political movement led in the U.S.A. by
Gifford Pinchot and his friend, anthropologist William J. McGee, beginning
with the New Imperial movement of which it was a part; in the end, we will
encounter Forester Ribbentrop's more famous cousin.
But it is necessary here to present the simple economic logic of the
Roosevelt-Pinchot Conservation program. It is said that the land withdrawn
into National Forests, and the other massive areas now held by the government
under the Bureau of Land Management, are necessary for preservation of
mountain streams, for prevention of erosion, and for protection of
harvestable forests from overcutting and fires, etc. This has some relevance
for those areas in which tree-clad mountains exist, though much of the
National Forests is neither mountains nor forests of any kind. But it raises
the question: How much land is needed for this purpose; how much forest do we
want, and where do we want forests?
The actual, historic Conservation program of Roosevelt and Pinchot was part
of a much different economic process, having less to do with preserving
resources than with disrupting human progress.
The victory of the Union in the Civil War opened the way for a
government-directed development of the American West, which operated for the
rest of the nineteenth century as the motor for mankind's most ambitious
industrialization program to date. Homesteading on Federal land, state
colleges built with Federal land grants, federally sponsored transcontinental
railroads, and the highest tariffs in history combined to encourage an
outpouring of new inventions which revolutionized industry.
Millions of immigrants and natives moved westward onto farms and into the
agro-industrial complexes of the new Midwestern cities. The refrigerator car,
invented in the 1870s, carried fresh meat and produce eastward to American
workers, and for export to Europe; new harvesting machinery was in general
use on hundreds of thousands of farms only months after its invention. The
successful railroad project and the government-protected steel industry
called forth a massive flow of the new bituminous coal, which then became the
fuel for electrifying the cities and factories with Thomas Edison's new power
plants. Cheap transport for food and raw materials constantly more powerful
machinery and new resources coming into use pushed down the cost of
production and prices fell almost continuously for a third of a century under
American System economics.
The wholesale price index shown in the graph on page 500 tells a dramatic
story.
"Morganizing" the economy means a ballooning ratio of capital invested in
business to capital actually invested in productive facilities. Watered
stock, or money invested in takeovers of existing plant, creates as much
credit and demands as great a return as the stock of productive enterprise.
This is monetary inflation.
"Morganizing" the economy means that international bankers who are
unsympathetic to the free play of inventive genius which may undercut
expensive plants and make them obsolete control and can stifle or prevent the
work of Edisons, Fultons or Morses. The deflation of costs of production is
halted.
"Morganizing" the nation means closing the frontier, closing down the object
of that creative investment which had been centered on great needs for
capital formation and the growth of new families. It means that stagnant
technology must stick with whatever is its present base of raw materials and
power sources, and therefore must gradually exhaust them and make them more
expensive.
The loss of the creative element, which was our ability to revolutionize
technology and to constantly invent whole new modes of productive work,
ensures that "Morganizing," and its servant Conservation, cause inflation and
make it a permanent aspect of national life�until the American System takes
back the economy.
--cont--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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