-Caveat Lector- from: http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh3.htm <A HREF="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh3.htm">American Prometheus -- The American System</A> --[3a]-- The American Promethus, Part III: The USA and Peru's War of the Pacific -- America vs. Imperialists by Anton Chaitkin Printed in The American Almanac, 1989. First printed in New Solidarity Newspaper, September, 1986. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In the first two parts of this series (New Solidarity, Aug. 1 and Aug. 22, 1986), we saw how Americans made their country a great industrial power after the Civil War. They had regained through war the power to use the government for national development. With federally financed railroads as the technological "driver" of the economy, with productive investments protected by high tariffs, the nationalists set up America's new steel and electrical industries. Their greatest accomplishments were made in the face of concerted opposition by the international financi ers. We saw that the nationalist republicans were organized in Philadelphia, as a group with political, military and commercial aims. With the aid of the most advanced German scientists in geology, metallurgy and chemistry, they built up America's skills for mining and processing iron and coal, and for agro-industry; and in mathematics, astronomy and geophysics as crucial elements of military success. The European aristocratic oligarchy, represented within the U.S. by their agents in certain Boston and New York families, sought to brake the advance of American development. Trumpeting "Free Trade" and various anti-capitalist slogans simultaneously, they scandalized and financially wrecked the developers (we might accurately rename their philosophy, Free[dom from] Enterprise). They won restrictions on the government's power to issue credit and to subsidize railroads. Their own international banking syndicate increasingly usurped the position of arbiter of America's financial affairs. In Part 3 we will observe the fight between the Americans and the European oligarchs over the role America would be permitted to play in the less developed countries. American nationalists -- Prometheans -- proposed to help build up other nations' own capabilities for industrial and scientific achievement. A community of self-sufficient republics could then withstand the wrecking operations of the oligarchs, and eventually free the entire world from their grip. The anti-republicans proposed that America should instead serve only as an extension of European financiers' power over world development, and that technological "disruptions," such as America's revolutionary steel and electrical complexes, should cease -- both in the United States and in the tropical countries. This dispute over America's global purpose came to a dramatic showdown in 1881. This was effectively the last stand of the American republicans. Today, 105 years later, the U.S.A. is in urgent need of winning virtually the same contest, presented to it in precisely the same arena. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Civilization in Danger In April, 1861, when Southern separatists fired on Fort Sumter to start America's 1861-1865 Civil War, their European political sponsors were already on the march globally with new imperial adventures, threatening to drag the world back into the Dark Ages. The British countered India's 1857-58 Sepoy Rebellion with the reinvasion and crushing of the Indian subcontinent, saving the source of their opium. They were simultaneously engaged with their French ally, Napoleon III, subduing China in the 2nd Opium War (1857-60), saving the market for their opium amongst the ungrateful Asians. The British allowed Napoleon III, meanwhile, the franchise to conquer Indochina (1858-1867), sowing the seeds for the American disaster a century later. The instant the United States was tied up by insurrection, the European imperialists jumped to attack the unprotected southern flank of the Americas. Announcing their resolve to force debt payments from the government of Benito Juarez, the armies of Britain, France, Spain, Austria and Belgium invaded Mexico late in 1861. The British and Spanish withdrew in April, 1862, and the Mexicans defeated the French army at Puebla in May, 1862. Napoleon III reenforced the invasion and captured Mexico City early in 1863 -- just following U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation for the millions of negro slaves held by the insurgents. In June of 1864, the Hapsburg Prince Maximilian was installed as Emperor of Mexico. That same Spring, 1864, the navy of Spain attacked Peru, annexed Peruvian islands, and declared Spain's right to recolonize Peru. In the following year, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were sponsored by the British in a genocidal war against Paraguay, killing over half the Paraguayans and breaking up that country's attempts to industrialize itself on the U.S. model. When the rebel slaveowners surrendered to U.S. forces in 1865, the restored threat of American power helped to repair the situation south of the border. The French, pounded by Juarez's U.S.-equipped army, withdrew and left Maximilian to be executed. The Spanish dropped their pretensions to reconquer their long-lost Peruvian colony. Neither oligarchical versions of history, nor the later political defeat of America's republicans, should divert us from understanding the American Civil War as the central theatre of a global war between freedom and slavery. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ World Development to 1880 A monument to the ideals of victorious republicanism was erected in 1869 in the National Cemetary at Gettysburg, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his famous wartime Address. Liberty stands atop a pillar, whose base is surrounded by the figures of War, History, Plenty and Peace. War is represented by a veteran in repose on a cannon which has seen hard use, his hand open in the hope of peace, his demeanor that of a watchful citizen-soldier rather than a militarist. History has a book open on her lap, with the pyramids of Egypt and the columns of classical Greece cut in bas-relief. Plenty holds a sheaf of wheat; a violin, sheet-music and a painter's pallette are by her side. Peace is a clear-eyed mechanic holding a gear, standing next to a frieze of an industrial plant. A globe is surrounded by mariner's ropes and tools, and the motif of the pyramids is repeated, celebrating the completion during 1869 of the Suez Canal. French engineer-diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps had directed the Canal construction for the previous decade, despite the objections and attempted interference of the British. The khedive of Egypt commissioned Giuseppi Verdi to compose an opera in honor the opening of the Suez Canal; his "Aida" was first produced in Cairo in 1871. Lesseps' interest in organizing Suez, a partnership of the peoples of France (whose subscriptions paid half the cost) and Egypt (whose labor built it), cohered with his family's tradition. Ferdinand's grandfather Martin de Lesseps was French consul general in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, when Russia and other European powers formed the League of Armed Neutrality, helping France ally with the American colonies against Britain. Ferdinand's father Matheu de Lesseps was director of French secret intelligence in the Middle East during the Napoleonic wars, competing with the British for influence in the Islamic world. After Napoleon's defeat, despite the subjection of France to Britain and allied continental oligarchs, Matheu de Lesseps managed to have himself appointed Consul in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lived from 1818 to 1822. He negotiated with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams a commercial treaty between France and the U.S.A.. He was in a position to counsel the Philadelphia-based American nationalists on strategic affairs, as a member of their American Philosophical Society. His friendships with the Egyptians later helped his son Ferdinand launch the Suez project, while his contacts in Philadelphia, the center for exile Spanish American patriots, would give Ferdinand the background for a similar enterprise in the New World. At an 1875, international congress of the French Geographical Society, an organization once chaired by Alexandre von Humboldt, Ferdinand de Lesseps announced his interest in cutting an interoceanic canal through Central America. "Lazzaroni" nationalist Admiral Charles H. Davis, chief of the U.S. Naval Observatory, had sent a representative to the Paris meeting. The U.S. Navy wanted a canal for maximum mobility of its fleet, to be able to challenge Britain for naval supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. Apparently for just this reason, the British and their friends in New York and Boston opposed the canal, as long as America played an anti-colonial role in the region. In 1880 Lesseps toured the United States to drum up American support for his new Panama Canal Company. Pennsylvania industrial figures -- Andréw Carnegie, steel engineer Alexander Holley, and the wife of crippled Brooklyn Bridge builder Augustus Roebling -- turned out to a testimonial dinner at Delmonico's in New York, the hall decked out in French and American flags. Everywhere Americans hailed Lesseps as a hero. He chose Secretary of the Navy Richard W. Thompson, a nationalist disciple of Henry Carey, as chief promoter and chairman of the Canal Company's American Committee. Lesseps asked for American subscriptions to the stock of the company; he would be happy, he said if Americans bought a majority interest, and the company's headquarters was established in Washington or New York. But J.P. Morgan got control of the U.S. sale of its stock, and not a single share was to be sold in the United States. President Rutherford B. Hayes, under the influence of the Morgan-Rothschild international banking syndicate which had forced through Specie Resumption the previous year, turned a cold shoulder to Lesseps. Hayes declared that the Monroe Doctrine was adverse to "foreigners" building an interoceanic canal. He fired Navy Secretary Thompson for associating with the French canal effort. The French company began digging the Canal through Colombia's Isthmus of Panana in February, 1881. The President of Colombia at the time, Dr. Rafael Nunez (1825-1894), was an exceptionally well-educated statesman. A Free Trade advocate during his earlier career, Nunez left Colombia in 1863 and spent two years in the United States covering the Civil War as a journalist. Here he was confronted with the great constitutional question, centralized republican institutions, for the enduring power of an independent nation, versus decentralization in the form of states' rights or regional autonomy. This was precisely the question facing his own country, where Nunez' British-influenced Liberal Party took the side of states rights, championing the outmoded Colombian constitution that prevented national development. It was in the great arena of the war in North America that Nunez apparently first distinguished for himself the political realities of the nation-state from the Free Trade dogmas of British liberalism. Nunez wrote from New York on November 2, 1864: "...the true conservative will be he who keeps this country [the U.S.A.] standing and saves it in its present crisis...In all political societies, as in everything else, a conservative element is indispensible as a principle of existence and of progress. "In the passionate language of parties, all the elements of this type may be confused with inaction and even with retrogression. And I say confused, because there is as much difference between the one and the other, as between good and bad, between truth and falsehood...The conservative element in this country has been the principal of national unity, fortunately and with foresight counterposed since the first years after Independence, to the dissolving doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the States. "This principle of national unity combined with, but superior to, privileges of local government, is the soul of the Constitution; and proof of this is that in the presidential election, the states do not vote with equality, but only in respect to their populations; and that the Constitution was not dictated by the States as independent entities or sovereignties, but by the people of the states collectively. 'We (says the Constitution) the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, etc., etc., ordain and establish this Constitution.' "The first Constitution [after the Revolution, i.e. the Articles of Confederation] had the character of a pact between sovereign States; but...all the influential men of that epoch, led by Washington...[won the establishment of the] second and final Constitution, under whose rule since 1787, the career of the United States has been so marvelous, that it is impossible to avoid recognizing the excellence of this mechanism." Nunez goes on to discuss the economic reality behind the states rights rhetoric of the "feudal gentlemen of the South." They have exaggerated "the liberal Jeffersonian legacy" to preserve their hold on the commerce of the nation, exerted through 4 million negro slaves, worth, as assets, at least $4 billion, and much more in the product of their labor. [1] Nunez spent many more years abroad, working and studying in England and in Continental Europe, before returning home. As president of Colombia in 1880-1882, and 1884-1886, he proclaimed a fully nationalist program in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Henry Carey and Lincoln. It was in this Colombia of Rafael Nunez, that Lesseps began to build the Canal through the Colombian province (state) of Panama. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ American Nationalism vs. The State Department As the republican nationalist group, based in Philadelphia, forged ahead with the industrialization of the United States after the Civil War, they planned for the extension of that construction effort into the republics to the south. William J. Palmer, a gallant freedom fighter before and during the war, projected a railroad route from Colorado through to Mexico City. His intentions regarding Mexico were the same as towards Colorado, whose high-quality, capital-intensive industries he was busy developing. Palmer absolutely distinguished his plan from that of an imperialist, whose policies either kill or impoverish the victims of his looting. Palmer's project, backed by the Careyite nationalists, was designed to expand wealth-producing capabilities and living standards simultaneously in the United States and Mexico. The 1873 annual report of Palmer's Denver and Rio Grande Railroad stated: "when the connection is made, an enormous through traffic will spring up between the heart of Mexico, with its harbors on two oceans, and the Rocky Mountain country of the United States -- Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, California.... "[In return for a mass of imports from Mexico, our] New West will....send back a thousand articles of domestic and agricultural use now unknown to the Mexicans -- iron plows, shovels, cooking-stoves, grates, ranges; also mining machinery and implements of all kinds, sugar, cotton, and woolenmills and brick machines, wagons and carriages, general hardware, and all sorts of tools, bar-iron and steel, wire, guns and pistols, pipe, furniture, butter, hams, cheese, lard, grapes, apples, bush and other temperate fruits, not to be had there, wines and brandies from the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, ice, choice stallions and bulls, etc., to improve their degenerate breeds, cotton and woolen goods, and innumerable other necessities and luxuries from which the people of Mexico have been almost entirely cut off, in consequence of their topographical isolation. The manufactured part of this list, and articles of skill generally, will at first come by this route from Chicago and St. Louis, but in a few years from the works at Canon City, Denver, Pueblo, and Albuquerque, in Colorado and New Mexico. "In the course of time, as the artisans of Mexico become skilled, as capital there takes a manufacturing turn, as coal mines are opened, and iron works and a more complex kind of manufactures are established, many things will be made there which, for the first few years, must be imported; but, by that time, the very growth which this would indicate will render necessary an interchange manifoldly larger...." Palmer sought the cooperation of the Mexican government for his railroad construction project. To this end, he agreed to avail himself of the services of Gen. William S. Rosecrans, who had been U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 1868 and 1869. Upon assuming office as U.S. President, Ulysses S. Grant had removed Rosecrans from his post. Grant had earlier removed Rosecrans from his position as commander of the Army of the Cumberland, after Rosecrans' flight from the battlefield of Chickamauga. Rosecrans stayed on in Mexico, negotiating with the government of President Benito Juarez for railroad concessions. Though Juarez was said to have reached an understanding with Roscrans, Juarez died in July, 1872, and the deal was never fully agreed to by the Mexican government. Palmer, frustrated in his plans throughout the 1870's, fired Rosecrans as his representative and worked directly with the Mexicans himself, and through his own man James Sullivan. He was able to start work on the Mexican National Railway, of which he was the designer and pioneer builder, only during the 1880's. The delay, occasioned by Rosecrans' failure to consummate a deal with the Mexicans, was to prove fatal to the cause of republican industrial development of Mexico. The real sponsor of Gen. Palmer's project within Mexico was Mattias Romero, Benito Juarez's ambassador to the U.S. There were, of course, Mexican opponents to the railroad development, who proposed, under blatant British influence, that Mexico "protect itself" from its northern neighbor by depopulating the entire area of northern Mexico, preserving it as a desert through which nothing could be transported! But beyond this opposition, there was a very ugly, secret side to Rosecrans, which Juarez and other patriotic Mexican leaders probably suspected. This is revealed in a letter, never before published, written from Rosecrans in Mexico City to Secretary of State William Seward, dated Feb. 28, 1869. This was less than a week before the inauguration of President Grant, who would replace both Seward and Rosecrans. In this letter, which we have copied from the State Department archives, Rosecrans called for the United States to intervene in Mexico in order to overthrow the government of Benito Juarez: "The present Government of Mexico arrived here and assumed full control of Mexico nearly two years ago....What have they done? By refusing them Amnesty, they have lost the support of that very large and intelligent body of Mexicans compromised by supporting or acquiescing in the Empire [i.e. the European invasion and occupation, 1861-67], and have inspired them with hatred and ill will. They have persecuted the religion of the people[.] Churches whose charitable foundations for the support of schools, hospitals and worship had been confiscated...conscientious people have lost hope as well as confidence in their Justice....They have lost the confidence of all the foreign, and most of the Mexican capitalists and businessmen [Juarez still refused to put payment of foreign debts above the industrial development of his desperately poor people -- AHC], as well as the large property holders....The army is demoralized and discontented; public Justice notoriously retarded or corrupted; the public highways infested with robbers and kidnappers.... "The late experience of European intervention having proven unsuccessful, and our friendship and trade offering more advantages to European nations than any likely to be derived from political intermeddling with the affairs of Mexico, the liberty and the duty of such intervention in its affairs as may be consistent with Justice, humanity, and our own interests, will not only have their consent, but will be urged upon us at no distant day..... "The present government while apparently the legal representative, neither represents the intelligence, the conscience, the prosperity, or the business of the Nation... "It is weak, vacillating, corrupt, and while of necessity appearing firmly [sic] to us it fears and secretly opposes the introduction of American Commerce, industry, population and enterprise, and will base its policy on the low passions and prejudices of the Mexicans, and has no firm intention of opening the country to emigration from the United States.... "Officers of the cabinet have advised public creditors to take small percentages on their claims as a full payment. Nor does the future promise better results....While the Government is staggering under the weight of pecuniary difficulties to meet ordinary expenses, all the claims of its domestic and foreign debt qre slumbering, even the interest unpaid. What hope [sic] in this cabinet to meet these impending obligations in which our citizens will soon be largely interested? "Almost the entire foreign element here, the chief capitalists and large land owners, the Imperialists, and the conscientious Catholic, would be glad to have American intervention in any way, that would place the rule in their hands without bloodshed, robbery, and social overturn...."[emphasis added] [2] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Americans vs. Imperialists in Colorado... The Drexel-Morgan partnership deliberately created the Panic of 1873 as an attack against what its European patrons viewed as dangerous American expansion of railroads and heavy industry. Other, more direct methods were also used to the same end.[3] The Northern Pacific Railroad construction had stopped because of Jay Cooke's induced bankruptcy. But Gen. William J. Palmer's continuing mid-continent development program stood out as the boldest American effort, matching that other project of the Philadelphia Interests, Andréw Carnegie's Pittsburgh-area steelworks. Palmer's Denver and Rio Grande Railroad was building westward across the towering Colorado Rockies, and southward from Colorado Springs toward New Mexico; it proposed to continue through Albequerque and El Paso. Then Palmer's line from Mexico City would run up to El Paso, and across from Mexico City to the Pacific. Meanwhile Palmer's organization had begun opening Colorado coal fields, and his Central Colorado Improvement Company founded the town of South Pueblo in 1873, where Palmer would initiate the first iron and steelmaking complex in the American West. During 1873 the financial group formerly known as the "Boston Concern" pushed its long moribund Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad into action against Palmer, suddenly building across Kansas to Grenada just inside Colorado. Their plan was to physically block Palmer's further construction southward toward Mexico, and westward into the Rockies, while preventing his building rairoads in Mexico that might lead to industrial development there. The Santa Fe Railroad was owned principally by John Murray Forbes and Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, members of the "Boston Concern" who had made their fortunes selling opium in China. They were backed financially by the Baring Brothers bank in England, sponsor of the world narcotics traffic throughout the nineteenth century. Coolidge's father Joseph had been paid $10 million per year by the Scottish firm Jardine and Matheson to run opium past the Chinese police. Forbes was also the leading organizer of propaganda for Specie Resumption, to replace Abraham Lincoln's government credit expansion policy with absolute credit control by the international banking syndicate. A Santa Fe subsidiary line pushed through from Grenada to Pueblo, Colorado, in 1875. Palmer's efforts at this time were flagging due to the credit squeeze from the Panic. His D. & R.G. did not reach the area of the Colorado-New Mexico border until 1876. By June, 1877, trains were running across the summit of the Sangre de Cristo mountains at La Veta Pass, 9,300 feet above sea level, higher than anything built so far in Europe or North America. Palmer's famous narrow gauge road made this pioneering mountain construction possible. Throughout the 1870's, the Boston and allied New York bankers waged financial war on Palmer's enterprise. They bought up his stock from the pinched Philadelphia investors. Eastern bondholders tried to close him down in May 1877, but Palmer managed to win refinancing of his debts. The fireworks began early in 1878 on the Raton Pass, over which the Denver and Rio Grande intended to extend its line from Trinidad, Colorado, across into New Mexico. Officials of the Santa Fe saw that D. & R.G. men were on their way to Raton Pass, so they rushed a group of armed men to occupy the pass. When Palmer's men arrived they were unable to proceed with their work, and were forced to withdraw. The D. & R.G. was preparing to build a line from Canon City, through the rugged canyons along the Arkansas River, up into the new booming mining town of Leadville. The Boston men learned of Palmer's intentions by, it is said, intercepting Palmer's April 18, 1878 telegram ordering out a construction crew. Officials and workers of the Santa Fe, heavily armed, deployed overnight to occupy Royal Gorge, just west of Canon City. When Gen. Palmer's crews reached the Gorge, they did not withdraw, but displayed their own weapons and took up positions opposite those of the Santa Fe. With a physical stalemate, the parties entered into a long court battle over the right-of-way. Financial warfare against Palmer continued, however, particularly in pressure through stock market operations. By October, 1878, Palmer was forced to sign a 30-year lease giving operating control of all his existing lines to the Santa Fe. The unbuilt Royal Gorge line was not included, and the armed standoff there continued. In June, 1879, Palmer won a writ from a Colorado court authorizing him to reposess his railroad. Not surprisingly, the Bostonians had not wished to operate a Colorado railroad at all, and had broken the lease contract by failing to maintain the D. & R.G., and charging rates that effectively prohibited any freight from travelling on it! When the Bostonians baldly announced that the Colorado court had no jurisdiction in the case, and then stole the county seal with which the writ was to be stamped, Palmer's forces prepared to move. The Santa Fe complained that Palmer planned violence; according to D. & R.G. historians, the militia was actually called out but refused to budge against Palmer. On the night of June 11, 1879, copies of the writ were distributed to sheriffs in towns throughout the state. Using his own armed men, and sheriffs who were willing to enforce the writ, Palmer seized all the rail lines, train stations, telegraph offices and work depots of the Denver and Rio Grande system. He travelled through the night on a special military command train. The biggest fight occured in Pueblo. The Bostonians brought in Bat Masterson, marshall of Dodge City, Kansas, with a gang of thugs. Governor C.A. Hunt, a Palmer ally, marched into Pueblo at the head of several hundred of Palmer's coal miners to confront Masterson's gang. A posse of the Pueblo sheriff shot it out at the train dispatcher's office, and more Palmer troops arrived from Colorado Springs. By morning, the whole rail system was in Palmer's hands. But the court battle went on inconclusively, In April, 1880, a "compromise" signed by Palmer and Santa Fe President Thomas Jefferson Coolidge was ratified in court. The D. & R.G. would not, for the next ten years, build south of Colorado, but Palmer would legally regain his line and could extend it within Colorado and to the west without Santa Fe interference. Though the Bostonians had stopped Palmer's drive toward Mexico, he promptly used his new notoriety to raise $50 million to build up Colorado. In the three years 1879 to 1882, Palmer built 908 new miles of railroad within the state. In 1880 the South Pueblo Ironworks began operating a Bessemer steel plant and rolling mill; the first rails were produced in April, 1882. The Colorado Coal and Iron Company produced coal, iron ore, pig iron, steel and rails under Palmer's presidency until 1884. The New York bankers who had refinanced his debts in 1877 renewed the financial war against Palmer in 1881 and 1882, finally taking control of the D. & R.G. board in 1883; Palmer and his associates were forced to resign. The bankers made no pretense of running a railroad. They squeezed it, took a strike in 1885, and delivered the company into bankruptcy. Palmer's Colorado Coal and Iron Company was eventually taken over by John D. Rockefeller as the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, famous for its violent war with the labor force. No more industrial development on any important scale ever again took place in Colorado after Palmer passed from the scene. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ...And South of the Border Working with concessions granted to Gen. Palmer and his agent James Sullivan, the "Mexican National Construction Company" (a Colorado corporation) began building its line in Mexico under a May, 1881 contract for the "Mexican National Railway Company" (also a Colorado corporation). There was at this moment, as we will see shortly, a flurry of activity under a new American presidential administration committed to rapid progress throughout the Western Hemisphere. By 1883, Palmer had completed rail lines stretching 255 miles north from Mexico City, and 235 miles south from Nueva Laredo, at the Texas border, to Saltillo. The line from the Pacific Ocean had progressed less than 30 miles when it was halted in November, 1882, for lack of funds. Under the strain of continual financial warfare by the international bankers, Palmer had written in 1878 to his former assistant Edward H. Johnson, who was then Thomas Edison's business manager: "Edison's last developments beat Aladdin completely. I always declared he could invent anything he wanted to. Give him my compliments, and tell him I wish he would discover for me some mode of building a railway to Mexico without money."[4] While Palmer was strapped for cash, the Boston group struck in Mexico. >From sympathetic parties in the Mexican governemnt, they took over the concession that had previously been granted to Palmer for a rail line from El Paso to Mexico City, forcing Palmer to commence his line from further east, at Nueva Laredo. The Bostonians also got the right to build a Mexico City-Pacific Coast line, generally following the original concession to Palmer. Though Palmer had surveyed Mexico's rail lines from the beginnning, and had begun construction, he was, at last, completely stalled in Mexico and he was frozen out. His own Mexican National Railway Company was reorganized by British bondholders in 1886. The lines he was building, and those of the Bostonians, were completed so far as he had mapped them out. The Mexican government took national control over the railroads early in the 20th century. But Palmer's planned use of the rail lines, for industrial development, was aborted in Mexico as it had been in the American Rockies. Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, whose money had stopped Palmer's railroad from connecting Colorado and Mexico, founded the United Fruit Company in 1899. Coolidge combined Boston-British opium money and the muscle of New Orleans-based Russian immigrant mafiosi. His United Fruit was to carry out the plans of which the secessionist Knights of the Golden Circle had spoken only in secret, hushed tones. Under Teddy Roosevelt's manic glare, tropical countries would become giant plantations, but yielding bananas or coffee instead of cotton. They would not be permitted to follow the liberating example of the United States of America, though the U.S.A. then still remembered how it had recently fought its way to industrial greatness. Before this tragic lapse in America's Promethean mission, the republican forces were to make one last great stand. The showdown would come in 1881. --[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. Substance—not soapboxing! 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