The DuPont-Morgan coup and our current dilemma

[RPankn]

I found some of these excerpts at the Rigorous Intuition discussion board, and wanted to post them here because it's remarkable how similar the story of the fascists in the 1930s is that to the neocons today.

The Attempted Coup Against FDR
By Barbara LaMonica

The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression dramatically thrust the question of government’s role to the forefront of American political and corporate life. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt represented a revolutionary realignment of political power: the ascendancy of the Democratic party facilitated by new voting coalitions of rural south and industrialized north which dislodged the Republican Party’s nearly seventy-year dominance, signaling the abandonment of laissez-faire economics in favor of state regulation. The losers in this political process coalesced into right-wing Republicanism, and the next sixty years of American history is, in part, the story of their attempt to regain power, reinstitute Lassiez-faire policies, and dismantle the New Deal.1 I would like to suggest that the forces behind the assassination of President Kennedy were born in the furies which the Great Depression unleashed between these competing sectors of American political and economic life.

I believe that in 1934 there was a foreshadowing of the JFK assassination. A conspiracy was uncovered in which right-wing elements of big business, namely the DuPont family and the Morgan banking interests, planned to finance and arm a veteran’s army to march on the White House and hold President Roosevelt captive.2 The conspiracy was reported by two- time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. Although the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities found his allegations credible, it failed to call major conspirators to testify, and the Committee deleted crucial testimony from its final report to the public. The press relegated the story to the back pages, and discredited those, including Major Butler, who tried to alert the public to the threat against republican government. No prosecutions were forthcoming from the Justice Department, in part because the main witness who would have substantiated Butler’s claims died suddenly from pneumonia at the age of 37. In short, there was a cover-up, maybe worse.

Background

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in November 1932, three years into the Great Depression. National income was cut by more than half and five thousand banks had crashed, wiping out nine million savings accounts. More than fifteen million workers had lost their jobs. Not only was the question "What to do" being asked, but also "Who was to blame?" A Senate investigation into the machinations of Wall Street found that investors organized raids on the stock market, pulled out all their money hoping for prices to drop, and then bought low. Insiders were also afforded the opportunity to buy securities at prices much lower than the public. Financiers were lining their pockets with fantastic bonuses, and the committee found that "...the Stock Exchange was no more than a glorified gambling casino where the odds were weighted heavily against the eager outsiders."3

The severity and persistence of the Depression raised questions in the minds of the public about business leaders and capitalism itself. Underlying this questioning was the perennial debate over what role the government should take. Although Roosevelt wanted and needed the support of business, he also knew that the government must advance beyond representing the "single interest" that is big business and represent the needs of all segments of society. Such interests as farm groups and unions were to be given a voice in the government which had been previously denied them so that, as Senator Robert Wagner argued, "...the strong may not take advantage of the weak."4 Roosevelt himself felt that reforms that from time to time would impose policies distasteful to representatives of industry would be essential to lasting relief. While asking Congress to pass the Securities Act to regulate the Stock Exchange, Roosevelt stated,

In the working out of a great national program seeking the primary good of the greater number, it is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on, and are going to be stepped on. But these toes belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some short cut that is harmful to the great

Roosevelt did step on some toes. Roosevelt and the New Dealers were determined to eliminate the abuses of the financial system by subjecting it to federal regulation. Threatened by prospects of government regulation and taxation of individual wealth as well as corporate profits to fund relief programs and public works, industrialists took up the offensive.

In 1934, two events aroused the wrath of the DuPonts and the Morgans. First, there were rumors that pressure was being exerted to open a Senate investigation into the munitions industry’s alleged role in America’s entry into WWI. The DuPonts were the leading armament producers in the world. They had already earned the title "Merchants of Death" because of the huge profits they made during the Civil War and the War of 1812. The DuPonts always tried to bury this fact in carefully crafted public relations euphemisms such as" DuPont - Better things for better living through chemistry." The DuPonts have always remained reticent about revealing the extent of their wealth, corporate holdings and armament productions. Certainly, a Senate investigation revealing their irregular dealings and huge profits during a time of national hardship, when many Americans were already questioning whether financiers really had the national interest at heart, could be disastrous for industrialists like the DuPonts. It could only lead to more popular support for the reforms Roosevelt was trying to implement.5

The second event that alarmed the big financiers, striking directly at the heart of the Morgan empire, was the passage of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934. This legislation proposed federal supervision of securities traded over state boundaries, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission empowered to enforce the regulations. Some of the abuses that the commission was to address were insider trading, bear raiding, and manipulating stocks to create the illusion of activity. One of the most alarming propositions was that companies selling stocks would have to reveal their financial histories to the public. In choosing a chairman for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Roosevelt needed a man who would strike a balance between the more radical, anti-business theorists of the New Deal, and the entrenched business interests whose support Roosevelt needed. Confiding to his advisors with the cavalier phrase "I’ll set a thief to catch a thief," Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy as the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.6 With this appointment Kennedy became responsible for drafting legislation which would regulate the business dealings of his former Wall Street colleagues. Furthermore, an alliance between the Roosevelt and Kennedy families was indelibly printed upon the minds of reactionary elements of business. I will return to this Kennedy-Roosevelt alliance and its repercussions later.

The Coup

During this same period, retired Marine Corps General Smedley Darlington Butler was approached by two members of the American Legion: Bill Doyle, and Gerald C. MacGuire (who was also a bonds salesman for a Morgan concern). American Legion, ostensibly a veterans’ benevolent society, was founded by wealthy industrialists who used the Legionnaires as strike busters. The men invited Butler to address an upcoming Legion convention. They were dissatisfied with how the organization was being run, and hoped Butler’s influence would help them oust the present leadership. Butler politely listened, but refused, saying he did not wish to get involved in Legion politics. A short time thereafter the two men called upon Butler again. They seemingly disregarded Butler’s former refusal to attend the convention. They had a new plan. Butler would now bring a few hundred Legionnaires with him to the convention and scatter them throughout the audience. MacGuire assured Butler that the Legionnaires’ expenses would be covered as he showed him a bank book with deposits totaling over $100,000. When Butler appeared in the spectator gallery, the Legionnaires were to leap to their feet demanding he speak. MacGuire then produced the prepared speech he wanted Butler to give. The speech urged the convention to adopt a resolution calling for Roosevelt to return to the Gold Standard.

Up until that time the dollar was backed by gold, meaning the US Treasury could only print as much money as there was gold reserve backing that money in Fort Knox. Going off the Gold standard allowed for more money to printed and pumped into the economy, partially to fund the proposed relief programs. Those who had a lot of money were opposed to going off the Gold standard for fear their money would have less value. So Butler was to convince the veterans, who were due a second bonus payment, that if they were not paid in money backed by gold, their bonuses would be compromised. Butler became suspicious. Who was trying to use him in this way? Where did MacGuire get all this money and for whom was he really working? And wasn’t the Gold Standard argument merely a means to alienate the veterans from Roosevelt by convincing them his policies would render their money worthless?8 Feigning interest in order to learn more about the purpose of the intrigue, and who was behind it, Butler said he might be interested, but he needed to know the plan was foolproof. Butler also said he wanted to talk to the top man, and not intermediaries. After some hesitation MacGuire revealed that Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark was instrumental, as was Grayson M.P. Murphy. Murphy ran a Wall Street brokerage house, was a director of Guaranty Trust, a Morgan Bank, and also had interests in Anaconda Copper, Bethlehem Steel and Goodyear Tire.9 [I think it was Anaconda that also held the right to mine Chile's copper mines, which were nationalized by Allende.]

Other meetings followed. At one point MacGuire took out his wallet and threw down 18 $1000 bills saying he wanted to pay Butler for his help. Robert Sterling Clark himself paid Butler a visit, and hinted at such things as Butler’s mortgage payments. Finally MacGuire revealed their real plans: he wanted Butler to lead an insurrection army to march on the White House, "force" Roosevelt to resign, and install a Secretary of General Affairs to take Roosevelt’s place and reinstate the Gold Standard.

Why would the plotters choose Butler? Butler, a two-time congressional medal of honor winner was one of the few well-loved military men. Only Butler could induce veterans, who would ordinarily have nothing to do with insurrection to follow him. The plotters felt they could seduce Butler with money and power. They misjudged him.

Butler was an extraordinary man. Of Quaker stock, he served for thirty years in the Marines and enjoyed great popularity among the men he commanded as well as among the rank and file veterans. His military experiences in China, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba eventually led him to suspect that these interventions were nothing more than scouting expeditions for big business. He felt that the lives of American boys were being sacrificed for the profits of United Fruit. In retirement Butler become very outspoken about this. He went on speaking engagements, and even penned a book entitled "War is a Racket".10 He was also one of the few military men to support the Bonus Marchers. These veterans had camped outside the capital demanding the money owed them, only to have their tents burned down by the likes of Generals MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower acting on orders from President Hoover.

Butler was still unconvinced that there was a real plot; however, MacGuire made some starling predictions. He predicted there would be an announcement in the press about the formation of a new organization, the American Liberty League. The American Liberty League, funded by the DuPonts, was to complement the coup by functioning as a propaganda organ to discredit the overthrown Roosevelt in the public’s mind (a technique which should be all too familiar to students of the character postmortem on JFK).11 MacGuire was also able to predict, well in advance, important personnel changes in the White House. This apparent forecasting ability indicated to Butler that conspirators were even within the New Deal administration. Butler, now taking the conspiracy seriously, approached some of his friends in Congress and the media. The House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, chaired by Congressmen John McCormack and Samuel Dickerstein, agreed to hear Butler’s testimony.12

What The Committee Revealed

Not surprisingly, when called as a witness, MacGuire denied any plot. He claimed he was part of The Committee For Sound Dollar and Sound Currency, Inc., which was spearheading a lobbying effort on behalf of the Gold Standard. However, his contradictory testimony and his inability to satisfactorily explain the large amounts of money which were deposited in several of his accounts compromised his credibility as a witness. At one point he said he was acting as purchasing agent of securities for Clark, but he never produced any evidence that he ever purchased any securities at all.13 It was also revealed that Clark had sent MacGuire on a trip to Germany, Italy, Spain, and France allegedly to study ‘economic’ conditions. But records of the Committee for a Sound Dollar, where MacGuire filed his reports, indicated he was studying something more. In each of the countries he met with veterans in paramilitary groups. These were the types of groups that carried out coups and assassinations in Germany and Italy on behalf of Hitler and Mussolini. A similar group operated in France, the Croix de Feu, about which MacGuire wrote this glowing report: "... this French super organization is composed of about 500,000 men, and each of them was the leader of 10 others, and that is the kind of organization that we should have in the United States."14 Finally, Butler’s story was corroborated by Commander James Van Zandt of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who claimed he was also approached to lead an insurrection army. It was also alleged by Butler that MacGuire had guaranteed arms on credit from the Remington Arms Company. Investigation by the committee revealed that the DuPonts had just bought the controlling interest in Remington Arms.15

The committee stated in its final report that it found credible evidence of a contemplated plot to overthrow the elected government with a military coup. Nevertheless, some alleged co-conspirators (supposedly revealed to Butler by MacGuire) such as General Hugh Johnson, (who was head of FDR’s National Recovery Administration), former NY Governor Al Smith and General Douglas MacArthur were never subpoenaed.16

Media Treatment Of The Plot

The media gave little or scant coverage to the committee’s final report. The Luce Press, which always led the charge in attacking Roosevelt and bolstering Fascism, ran a story called "A Plot Without Plotters"17 which sought to discredit Col. Butler. He was called a "hothead." Other evidence of Butler’s unsavory character, according to Luce, was that he had once given a speech in which he criticized Mussolini. His advocacy of the penniless Bonus Veteran Army was transformed into haranguing. The committee chairmen fared no better under Luce’s pen. They were accused of only seeking publicity (despite their having sought to suppress the most explosive parts of their discoveries). The New York Times showed an astonishing lack of interest. Reference to the alleged coup was relegated to two paragraphs at the bottom of page five.18 However, not every newspaper discounted the plot. The independent Philadelphia Record ran a cartoon showing big business pointing to a soapbox Communist as the threat, while General Butler marches in with evidence revealing armed Fascists hiding beneath a banker’s coat.19 References to the alleged conspiracy disappeared from the press. Nevertheless, individual reporters did attempt to pursue the story. Paul Comley French of the Philadelphia Record and investigative journalist John Spivak went to the Justice Department. They asked why no one implicated was ever questioned; and since MacGuire had perjured himself, did they intend to file criminal prosecution? The Justice Department indicated it had no plans to carry matters any further at the moment. MacGuire, the only man who could have testified against the rest, died soon after of complications from pneumonia. His physician claimed that his death was partly due to the stress of the charges made by Butler. Grayson M.P. Murphy, the Morgan banker and treasurer of the American Liberty League, died soon after.20

Aftermath And Beyond

Although the coup never materialized, the unrelenting propaganda attack against Roosevelt and the New Deal reforms continued, spearheaded by the American Liberty League. The League listed as its main contributors the DuPont family, representatives of the Morgan interests, Robert Sterling Clark, the Pew Family (Sun Oil), and Rockefeller Associates. Its Treasurer was Grayson M.P. Murphy, MacGuire’s immediate boss. The League itself was ostensibly dedicated to the virtues of the Constitution, individual freedom and free market capitalism. But it claimed that all New Deal reforms were inspired by Communists within the Roosevelt administration.21 In the election of 1936, the League spent twice as much money as the Republican Party in trying to defeat Roosevelt. Although the League disbanded after Roosevelt won his second term, it spawned a series of extreme right-wing groups and paramilitary bands which constituted a network that endured through the 1960s, and whose descendants are with us today. Their propaganda was anti-Communist and anti-Semitic; their tactic was violence. Some groups which the League financed were the Sentinels of the Republic (which labeled the New Deal "Jewish Communism"), the Minutemen and the Minutewomen. Another group, the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, was associated with the Silver Shirt Squad of the American Storm Troopers. The goals of this organization, headed by a Texas oil magnate, were to create a mass movement of whites in the South to dilute Roosevelt’s Dixie vote, and to stir up anti-black racism in order to attack organizing drives by the unions from the North. Significantly, these same hate sentiments were being stirred up against JFK, and for the same reasons. These groups formed the dark underside to the League, which tried to present a polite public face.22 But some industrialists, like Henry Ford, had no qualms about explicitness. American Fascists groups hawked his anti-Semitic tracts like "The International Jew."

The main function of these hate groups was to enforce the will of right-wing corporate America, seeking to regain the political power it lost in the 1932 election. On the grassroots level, this intention translated into supporting the efforts of management to stop workers from unionizing. The most glaring example of this is the struggle at the General Motors plants (General Motors was owned by the DuPonts). The DuPonts employed the Black Legion, a sort of Northern Klux Klux Klan, which would terrorize workers, bomb union halls, and torture and murder organizers. The Legion was organized into arson squads, execution squads, and anti-Communist squads. Discipline within its own ranks was maintained with the weapons of torture or death and was strictly enforced. The LaFollette Committee found that the Legion had penetrated police departments, high government offices, and the Michigan Republican Party.23

These groups also acted as intelligence networks. They infiltrated unions, leftwing groups, and universities, and they sold their information to industry. One example of such an intelligence agency was the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation, headquartered in Chicago and operated by Harry Jung.24 Jung later relocated to New Orleans where he was an associate of Guy Bannister, who also hailed from Chicago. Banister’s Detective Agency was spying for right-wing businesses as well. Some believe it may have been in Jung’s hotel in New Orleans that the famous Congress of Freedom meeting took place in the Spring of 1963. At this meeting, with Edwin Walker and Joseph Milteer in attendance, a police informant reported there was talk of murdering national leaders.

In the Thirties, corporate America’s fear of government regulation threatened by Roosevelt’s New Deal, ("Socialism" in their minds), gave them a reason to embrace Fascism. It justified their financing of paramilitary hate groups to carry out violent, anti-government and anti-union campaigns exploiting the vehicles of racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. By the Sixties these groups had become entrenched in the grassroots landscape.

The institutionalization of the military industrial complex and the national security state, with which corporate America would meld, developed during World War II and its aftermath. The DuPonts, as well as other industrialists, implicated in the attempted coup against FDR played a major role in these developments.

The Nye Committee Hearings to investigate the munitions industry were finally held in 1935. Committee findings revealed that the DuPonts were heavily invested in fascist Italy, and had played a major role in the rearming of Germany.25 According to the Versailles Treaty, which ended WWI, it was illegal to sell arms to Germany, but the DuPonts lobbied State Department delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. They finally obtained assurance from one of the delegates that their business with Germany would be "winked at." That delegate was Wall Street lawyer Allen Dulles. In addition, the Wall Street lawyer who represented the DuPonts at the hearings was William Donovan, who went on to head the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS was the forerunner of the CIA) during WWII.

In spite of the DuPonts’ illegal dealings, no prosecutions were forthcoming as a result of the Nye committee either. The DuPont family interests represented the largest holdings in the military industrial complex. DuPont built and operated the plant for the Manhattan project. They built all the facilities for atomic bomb production including the facility at Oak Ridge Tennessee. DuPont technicians and engineers ran the show; and by the Sixties the DuPonts effectively had control of the whole atomic energy industry.26


www.webcom.com/ctka/pr399-fdr.html

[RPankn]

The Forgotten Man of American Journalism: A Brief Biography of George Seldes
By Randolph T. Holhut

There have been three great independent journalists in this century - Lincoln Steffens, I.F. Stone and George Seldes.

Steffens and Stone are the best known of the three. With his magazine articles and books like "The Shame of the Cities," Steffens _ along with fellow muckrakers like Will Irwin, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair _ helped to invent the art of investigative journalism in the first decade of this century.

Stone, a veteran Washington reporter, published I.F. Stone's Weekly from 1953 to 1971, a newsletter that printed the news that was overlooked in the mainstream press. His work almost single-handedly revived investigative reporting and inspired a new generation of writers on the Left.

The lives and work of Steffens and Stone are well-known to journalists and historians. Unfortunately, Seldes is not. History has overlooked his life and career, but he was the link between Steffens and Stone. His life and work deserve to be reconsidered.

The story of George Seldes is the story of the Twentieth Century. He has written 21 books and is the archetype of the independent and crusading journalist. He was a witness to and occasional participant in some of the most important events of this century.

Seldes was one of a group of four journalists who snuck into Germany at the end of World War I to get an exclusive interview with Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army. The interview might have changed the course of history had it not been censored by the Allies.

In 1922, Seldes was in Russia and there he met Lenin, Trotsky and the founders of the Soviet Union. He spent a year reporting from that country was was eventually expelled by the Soviet government for not bowing to its censorship of the news.

He chronicled the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920's and was also expelled from that country when he refused to write what the Fascisti wanted him to write.

He and his wife Helen Larkin went to Spain in the mid-1930's when General Francisco Franco, aided by Germany and Italy, overthrew the democratically elected government and established a fascist dictatorship. The Seldeses reported on how the dress rehearsal for World War II was being played out on Spanish soil as the world impassively watched.

Disatisfied with censorship and the Right-wing bias of the American media, the Seldeses started In fact, the first publication in America solely devoted to press criticism. It was published from 1940 to 1950 and had a peak circulation of 176,000 before being Red-baited out of existence.

Because of his insistence upon writing the truth, George Seldes has been ignored by the mainstream media and has been denied his rightful place in the history of American journalism. But he harbored no bitterness toward the media establishment. "One of the greatest sources of comfort to me is knowing that I have lived long enough to be vindicated. I've outlived all of my enemies, but I've also outlived all of my friends," Seldes said.

I first met Seldes in the summer of 1992, when I interviewed him for what turned into a series of columns about his life and work for my former newspaper, the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer. I came across Seldes' last book, "Witness to a Century," in the Spring of 1992. He completed it when he was 96, a valedictory on his life and the people who populated it. Reading it was like sitting on the front porch, listening to your grandparents tell you stories about the old days, only in this case, the old days are merely the biggest events of the Twentieth Century. As a journalist and amateur historian, I had to meet this man.

Seldes was born in Alliance, New Jersey on November 16, 1890. His rise to the top echelons of journalism was rapid. He started as a cub reporter on the Pittsburgh Leader in 1909; five years later he was the night editor at the Pittsburgh Post. After taking a year off to attend Harvard (at the insistence of his brother Gilbert, who would later write "The Seven Lively Arts" and become a prominent commentator on the American cultural scene), he went to London in 1916 to work as a reporter for the United Press.

Upon America's entry into World War I in 1917, Seldes left United Press and went to Paris. He was selected for G-2-D, General John J. Pershing's press section, as an accredited war correspondent for the Marshall Syndicate. A year later, he became the managing editor of the Army edition of the Chicago Tribune. It was in that role that Seldes got the story that he believes was the most important of his career _ the exclusive interview with Hindenburg.

In the interview, Hindenburg acknowledged the role that America played in defeating Germany. "The American infantry," said Hindenburg, "won the World War in battle in the Argonne." But American newspaper readers never read those words. Seldes and the others were accused of breaking the Armistice and were court martialed. They were also forbidden to write anything about the interview.

Seldes believed that the suppression of the interview proved to be costly to the world. Instead of hearing straight from the mouth of Germany's supreme commander that they were beaten fair and square on the battlefield, another story took hold _ the Dolchstoss, or "stab-in-the-back." This myth held that Germany did not lose in battle, but was betrayed at home by "the socialists, the Communists and the Jews." This was the central lie upon which Nazism was founded.

"If the Hindenburg interview had been passed by Pershing's (stupid) censors at the time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers and undoubtedly would have made an impression on millions of people and became an important page in history," wrote Seldes in "Witness to a Century.'' "I believe it would have destroyed the main planks on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind."

The episode also played an important role in Seldes' life. He would spend the next 10 years in Europe reporting for the Chicago Tribune. He would be in on some major events in that tumultuous decade, like his trip to the Soviet Union.

Lenin was already on his way out when Seldes went to Russia, as the power of the secret police and the Communist Party bureaucrats overshadowed that of the leader of the Russian Revolution. Seldes, who was in Russia to cover the American Relief Administration's efforts to aid famine victims, still remembers the day when Lenin had to talk his way past the guards to address the Third International.

"He'd been missing for about a year, and there were all kinds of rumors about his disappearance," said Seldes. "The hall was crowded with people (who were there for the Third International, a select gathering of Communist leaders, orators, debators and parliamentarians in Moscow in 1922 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution) when we heard a commotion at the entrance. There, we saw a little man arguing with the guards to come in. It was Lenin, and he apparently didn't have the right pass to get in."

Lenin got in and received a thunderous ovation. After he addressed the gathering and the congress adjourned, Seldes and the other American reporters in attendance then crowded in to try and get an interview.

"Someone hollered to ask if Lenin spoke English," Seldes said. "He replied, 'I speak her, ze English, not zo ver goot.' He then started speaking in German, which I did understand." Lenin told Seldes and the other reporters that he occupied "a large portion of my time with American affairs." He added: "Your American newspapers frequently report me dead, Let them fool themselves. Don't take away the last hope of a dying bourgeoisie by saying you spoke to me."

Seldes spent a year in the Soviet Union covering the American Relief Administration's efforts to help famine victims. Every news report that came out was cleared by Soviet censors. But Seldes and other reporters who were interested in reporting the truth found a way around the censorship. "We put our dispatches in the ARA diplomatic courier pouches, where the Russians weren't allowed to look," said Seldes. "We'd write them like letters, start them off with 'Dear so-and-so,' then write our story and close with 'Cordially yours' and mailed them to London."

Eventually, Seldes was found out and was expelled by the Soviet authorities in May 1923. Other reporters, like Walter Duranty of the New York Times, went along with the censorship and stayed on. "Duranty told me that the highest job in America is to be a Times reporter," Seldes said. "Nobody wanted to lose the privileges that came with it."

Seldes told me that he could not believe that the Soviet Union no longer existed. "I never thought I'd see Russia break apart. The things that (Russian president Boris) Yeltsin said and did would have got him executed in Red Square back in the Twenties. I always expected to see a big socialist movement around the world, especially in the United States. It seems to have disappeared entirely."

Seldes was among the first American journalists who dared to write truthfully about fascism. In 1925, the Chicago Tribune assigned him to Italy, where Mussolini had recently come to power. Seldes said that the foreign journalists working in Italy were too timid to print the truth about Il Duce.

"Everyone had copies of the confessions of the men who killed (Giacomo) Matteotti (the head of the Italian Socialist Party and Mussolini's chief political rival). The documents clearly implicated Mussolini in the killing, but not one person wanted to write about it. They thought Rome was too nice a posting to give up to risk publishing them. They didn't want to, but I did."

The story ran on the front page of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and it resulted in Seldes' immediate expulsion from Italy, and a narrow escape from a group of Blackshirts who wanted to kill him. The major American newspapers at the time supported fascism as a legitimate political movement. "They loved Mussolini because they thought he restored order to Italy and businesses there were doing well. It got more and more difficult to report on what was really happening there," said Seldes.

Seldes was sent to Mexico in 1927, when the United States came close to invading that country when the Mexican government threatened to take back the mineral rights from the American corporations that stole them from the Mexican people.

He wrote a series of stories for the Tribune that were censored to fit the political views of Colonel Robert McCormack, the reactionary owner and publisher of the paper. While he usually allowed his European reporters freedom to write truthfully, McCormack did not extend this freedom to his domestic editorial staff. This experience convinced Seldes that he would not be able to write freely until he left the Tribune and wrote on his own.

Seldes quit the Tribune in 1929 and continued as an independent journalist and author. His first two books, "You Can't Print That!," in 1929 and "Can These Things Be!," in 1931, attempted to set the historical record straight as Seldes told the stories that he could not tell in the Tribune. His next book, "World Panorama," in 1933, was a narrative history of the post-World War I years.

In 1932, he married Helen Larkin. They met at a party in 1929 in Paris, where Larkin was a student studying physics at the Sorbonne. When the conversation turned to the Soviet Union, where Larkin wanted to go after graduation to work for the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, Seldes told Larkin about his trip to the Soviet Union "and the many difficulties of ordinary daily life. I went on to attack the Soviet Communist dictators and the regime's denial of civil liberties to the masses and Miss Larkin, who obviously was getting angrier and angrier, cut me short with the remark, 'I don't think I ever want to see you again, Mr. Seldes,' " George recalled in "Witness to a Century."

When they unexpectedly met again in Paris three years later, George said "it was without question 'love at second sight.' " After a three-week courtship in Paris, they were married. With a loan of $5,000 from Sinclair Lewis, the Seldeses bought a home in Woodstock, Vermont, where they would spend their summers for the next four decades. Helen would assist George on all of his writing projects until her death in 1979.

After writing an objective history of the Catholic Church, "The Vatican: Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow," and an expose of the world armaments industry, "Iron, Blood and Profits," in 1934; Seldes wrote the most complete account of the life of Mussolini and how he came to power, "Sawdust Caesar," in 1935. He then turned his attention to the transgressions of the American press with "Freedom of the Press" in 1935 and "Lords of the Press" in 1938. In between writing those two books, the Seldeses went to Spain in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War for the New York Post.

General Franco's forces were well equipped by Germany and Italy, who used Spain as a proving ground for their weapons and tactics. The Republicans, the people who were fighting to take back their country, were outnumbered and outgunned. "They had no guns, food or medicines and the world press published falsehoods about them, called them 'Reds' and let them die," Seldes said.

The major American newspapers of the time took the side of Franco, who was portrayed as ridding Spain of communism. They similarly lauded Mussolini and Hitler for ridding their countries of "the Red menace." The New York Post was at the time among the few liberal dailies in America which would report the truth about the Spanish War but even they succumbed to the pressure of the American Right and the Catholic Church _ both of whom supported Franco and threatened boycotts and economic ruin to any paper that criticized him.

The whole Spanish experience left Seldes and others on the American Left embittered and angry. Evil had triumphed, no thanks to the press lords who refused or were to afraid to print the truth about fascism. It also inspired three more books by Seldes _ "You Can't Do That!," in 1938 discussed attacks by the Right upon civil liberties in America; "The Catholic Crisis" in 1940 examined the Church's ties to fascist organizations and "Witch Hunt," also in 1940, which looked at Red-baiting in America.

Spain also proved to be the catalyst for Seldes to start his own newsletter that would crusade against against the lies of the times _ In fact. The newsletter's mission was clearly stated on its masthead: "An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press."

"He's about as subtle as a house falling in," wrote fellow press critic A.J. Liebling in his classic 1947 book, "The Wayward Pressman." "He makes too much of the failure of newspapers to print exactly what George Seldes would have printed if he were the managing editor. But he is a useful citizen. (In fact) is a fine little gadfly, representing an enormous effort for one man and his wife."

The first alarms on the link between cigarette smoking and cancer appeared in the pages of In fact. "The tobacco stories were suppressed by every major newspaper," Seldes said. "The Nation, The New Republic, The Progressive...none of those magazines were writing about it. For 10 years, we pounded on tobacco as being one of the only legal poisons you could buy in America."

But what really made Seldes a pariah in the world of journalism was his stories on the frauds and falsehoods in the American media. Reporters who could not get their stories published in the papers they worked for gave their information to Seldes on the sly.

In fact was a success. It proved that there were a lot of people in America who believed, like Seldes, that they were not getting the truth from their newspapers. The "In fact Decade" as Seldes called it, also produced four of Seldes' most pointed books _ "The Facts Are..." in 1942 dissected how and why the American media misleads the people; "Facts and Fascism" in 1943 exposed the big money interests behind fascism in Europe and America; "1000 Americans" in 1947 detailed the people and corporations that control America and "The People Don't Know" in 1949 discussed the origins of the Cold War.

A combination of incessant Red-baiting and the apathy of the liberal-left forced Seldes to close down In fact in October 1950. "The word got around that I was a communist," Seldes said. "I never, never, never was a communist, even though Earl Browder (then the head of the Communist Party of the United States of America) kept asking me to join." J. Edgar Hoover's FBI compiled lists of people who subscribed to In fact as well as other liberal publications. Many of Seldes' subscribers cancelled their subscriptions for fear of being branded "subversives."

Three newspaper columnists in particular _ Westbrook Pegler, George Sokolsky and Fulton Lewis Jr. _ frequently slandered Seldes. "They were bastards," Seldes said. "They would write that a Russian agent stopped by my office each week to pay my salary. I didn't have the money to sue them for libel. My lawyer told me it would take years to reach a settlement and I even if I won I would never see a dime. There was no way I could fight them."

Seldes devoted the post-In fact years to summing up his life, his career and his views on the American media in four different books _ "Tell the Truth and Run" in 1953, "Never Tire of Protesting" in 1968, "Even The Gods Can't Change History" in 1976 and "Witness to a Century" in 1987. He also compiled the best ideas and quotations of the world's great thinkers in two books _ "The Great Quotations" in 1960 and "The Great Thoughts" in 1985.

When I first met Seldes in 1992, a stroke a couple of years earlier slowed him somewhat. He couldn't remember much of the present but his memory of the past was marvelous. He was under round-the-clock care and couldn't walk without assistance. His eyesight was still pretty good, but his hearing was about gone. He tired easily and he spent much of each day sleeping. But people still found their way to his home in Hartland-Four-Corners, Vermont to visit a man who has seen so much history. He was always ready to talk.

"A lot of people call here and say 'I didn't know you were still alive,' " he said. "For the longest time, my name never appeared in the papers. People thought 'this guy is a troublemaker, the hell with him.' I never had it easy, but I never missed a meal and I've never been broke."

Seldes' place in the history of journalism is secure, as the crucial link between Steffens and Stone. "Lincoln Steffens was the godfather of us all," said Seldes. "He was an older man when I first met him (in 1919). He was the first of the muckrakers. As he once said, 'where there's muck, I'll rake it.' He often warned me that I was starting to get a bad reputation for myself. I guess I never worried about that."

Steffens inspired Seldes to become an crusading journalist. In turn, Seldes inspired Stone to start his own newspaper. "He wanted to restart In fact after I stopped publishing it," Seldes said. "I warned him about how badly I was Red-baited and suggested he start up his own paper. I gave him my subscription list, the 'Five Dollar Liberals' we called them, and he got his paper going."

For someone who saw and been involved in so much history, Seldes was a modest man. He wasn't nostalgic for the good old days for he knew that they were not always good, especially in his chosen profession.

"It's hard to understand how lousy newspapers were in my time," he said. "There is no comparison, the quality of the press today is much better. Things were pretty crude in my time, but it's a new world now."

Many of the the dragons that Seldes battled are still with us, under different aliases. Instead of Father Charles Coughlin, we have Reverend Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition to represent religious reaction. Pegler, Sokolsky and Lewis no longer walk the earth, but people like Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan carry on their tradition. Are Ross Perot and Steve Forbes nothing more than Huey Long with bigger bank accounts? The children and grandchildren of the "1000 Americans" that Seldes said control America still rule today. The press lords like William Randolph Hearst, Colonel Robert McCormack, Roy Howard and Frank Gannett have been dead for years, but the media empires they created have grown more immense and still control what America reads, hears and views. Advertising has become even more pervasive and powerful.

This is not to say that Seldes labored in vain. He was one of the first to write about the dangers of tobacco, now there are few if any Americans who do not know that cigarette smoking is harmful. Seldes was an early booster of consumer reporting. Consumers Union, once Red-baited, is now an American institution and more media outlets do objective reporting that benefits the consumer. In fact pioneered press criticism, now it has become a staple in publications of all political stripes. The Liberal media is still is the minority in America, but the stalwarts like The Nation and The Progressive have been joined by vibrant voices like Mother Jones, Tikkun, Utne Reader, In These Times, Z, the Village Voice and others.

In short, there are been victories, stalemates and defeats for the Left in America in this century. George Seldes was involved in many of the battles. He did not conform to any rigid ideology other than that of finding the truth and letting the facts speak for themselves. More often than not, that put him on the Left, but he disdained the Left's political orthodoxy and sectarianism. His writing was open-minded and fair, but it also took a stand.

"The middle of the road is a crowded place (and many on it are crushed by the cars of Juggernaut, radicalism and reaction, pushing inevitably to the Right and the Left)," wrote Seldes in "Tell the Truth and Run." "During all these years of work and talk I had had a fine contempt for the frightened majority which traveled the middle road. I had thought of myself as one of the non-conformists along the less-traveled and rather lonely individual path of my choosing."

Seldes said that "tell the truth and run" was an old Yugoslav proverb. "People didn't like that as a book title," he told me. "They said I should've called that book, 'Tell the Truth and Stay.' Stay and get killed! Sometimes its better to run and get another chance to tell to the truth."

When asked the inevitable question of how he made it past the century mark, Seldes credits three things. "I never got drunk, I was married and stayed faithful to one woman for almost 50 years and I stopped smoking in 1931.

[Continued in next post.]

[RPankn]

[Continued from previous post.]

"I'm the only person in my family who has lived past 100, and I really don't know why. All I feel like doing now is laying in bed all day. I like to say that I'm the biggest lie-r in America. I miss getting out, because the doctors don't want me outside without accompaniment. I've thought about writing a book. I'd call it 'To Hell with the Joys of Old Age.' My publisher said I'd sell 20,000 copies just on the title alone. But I don't think I've got that much time left."

After that first meeting, I visited him regularly thereafter, stopping by his house in Hartland-Four-Corners, Vt., for lunches that were usually topped off by a big bowl of chocolate ice cream with Oreo cookies crumbled on top. He would have lived on chocolate ice cream if he had the choice. After lunch, I would talk to him for as long as he could stay awake and just let his stories wash over me. Even when he started to repeat himself, I still loved listening to his storytelling.

I was amazed that a person who had seen so much had been virtually ignored by the journalism establishment. In the course of writing the columns, I sought out as many of Seldes' books as I could find. I discovered his work was very readable and held up well over the decades since it was written. I searched the used book stores to try and find Seldes' 20 other books, a search that took over a year to complete.

I learned that his nephew, Timothy, was a literary agent in New York. I wrote Timothy a letter suggesting that an anthology of George's work would be a good opportunity to expose a new generation of readers to his writing. The idea was to make a book that would collect George's writing into a combination autobiography/revisionist history of the Twentieth Century/press critique/adventure story.

The idea became reality and almost a year after sitting in George's living room for the first time, I was there with George signing a contract for what became "The George Seldes Reader," published by his long time friend, Lyle Stuart, on his Barricade Books imprint.

"I'm probably not going to live long enough to see the royalties," George said that day. He had hung up his typewriter and didn't plan on writing another book. He was more than happy that someone else was going to do the heavy lifting for him. But he did see the royalties, and it was a pleasure to give him a bit more attention while he was still alive to enjoy it.

When Seldes died on July 2, 1995 at the age of 104, he didn't get a lot of press coverage about his passing. The New York Times did give him a short obit, but most of the major media ignored the story. Time Magazine gave him 40 words and Newsweek didn't mention his death at all. Aside from The Nation, In These Times and Extra!, the Left press didn't do much more.

He deserved better. Seldes had lived so long and had done so much, you took for granted that he was always going to be there. I felt cheated, since I had only known him for three years and had hoped for more time with him. With his death, we lost a national treasure. Every honest journalist in America owes Seldes a great debt. The abuse he endured to write the truth has made it easier for his progeny to do the same.

Seldes believed in the words that Abraham Lincoln said during the Civil War, words that guided Seldes throughout his career. "I am a firm believer in the people," said Lincoln. "If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts."

One of Seldes' mentors, William Allen White, once said that "newspapers cannot be free, absolutely free in the highest and best sense, until the whole social and economic structure of American life is open to the free interplay of democratic processes."

A key part of the democratic process is a free, fair and responsible press. That's what George spent a lifetime fighting for. He felt the best formula for the press was "the facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself."

That ideal has rarely been achieved in the American media. It is still a worthy goal to aim for, and to me, would be the best way to honor the memory of a great man who was never afraid of the word "truth."


www.brasscheck.com/seldes/bio.html

[RPankn]

Facts and Fascism
excerpted from the book
The George Seldes Reader

p249

The time will come when people will not believe it was possible to mobilize 10,800,030 Americans to fight Fascism and not tell them the truth about the enemy. And yet, this is exactly what happened in our country in the Global War.

The Office of War Information published millions of words, thousands of pamphlets, posters and other material, most of it very valuable and all of it intended to inspire the people and raise the morale of the soldiers of production and the soldiers of the field; but it is also a fact that to the date of this writing the OWl did not publish a single pamphlet, poster, broadside or paper telling either the civilian population or the men and women in uniform what Fascism really is, what the forces are behind the political and military movements generally known as Fascism, who puts up the money, who make the tremendous profits which Fascism has paid its backers in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and other nations.

Certainly when it comes to relating foreign Fascism with native American Fascism there is a conspiracy of silence in which the OWl, the American press, and all the forces of reaction in America are united. Outside of a few books, a few pamphlets, and a few articles in the very small independent weekly press which reaches only a few thousand readers, not one word on this subject has been printed, and not one word has been heard over any of the big commercial radio stations.

Faraway Fascism has been attacked, exposed, and denounced by the same publications (the Saturday Evening Post for example) which for years ran articles lauding Mussolini and his notable backers in all lands; and the Hearst newspapers, which published from 1934 to Pearl Harbor dozens of signed propaganda articles by Dr. Goebbels, Goering and other Nazis, now call them names, but no publication which takes money from certain Big Business elements (all of which will be named here) will dare name the native or nearby Fascists. In many instances the publications themselves are part of our own Fascism.

But we must not be fooled into believing that American Fascism consists of a few persons, some crackpots, some mentally perverted, a few criminals such as George W. Christian and William Pelley, who are in jail at present, or the 33 indicted for sedition. These are the lunatic fringes of Fascism; they are also the small fry, the unimportant figureheads, just as Hitler was before the Big Money in Germany decided to set him up in business.

The real Fascists of America are never named in the commercial press. It will not even hint at the fact that there are many powerful elements working against a greater democracy, against an America without discrimination based on race, color and creed, an America where never again will one third of the people be without sufficient food, clothing and shelter, where never again will there be millions unemployed and many more millions working for semi-starvation wages while the DuPont, Ford, Hearst, Mellon and Rockefeller Empires move into the billions of dollars.

I call these elements Fascist. You may not like names and labels but technically as well as journalistically and morally they are correct. You may substitute Tories, or Economic Royalists, or Vested Interests, or whatever you like for the flag-waving anti-American Americans whose efforts and objectives parallel those of the Liga Industriale which bought out Mussolini in 1920 and the Thyssen-Krupp-Voegeler-Flick Rhineland industry and banking system which subsidized Hitler when Nazism was about to collapse. Their main object was to end the civil liberties of the nation, destroy the labor unions, end the free press, and make more money at the expense of a slave nation. Both succeeded. And in America one similar organization (the National Association of Manufacturers) has already made the following historical record:

1. Organized big business in a movement against labor.
2. Founded the Liberty League to fight civil liberties.
3. Subsidized anti-labor, Fascist and anti-Semitic organizations (Senator Black's Lobby Investigation).
4. Signed a pact with Nazi agents for political and economic (cartel) penetration of U. S. (Exposed in In fact.)
5. Founded a $1 million-a-year propaganda outfit to corrupt the press, radio, schools and churches.
6. Stopped the passage of food, drug and other laws aimed to safeguard the consumer.
7. Conspired, with DuPont as leader, in September 1942, to sabotage the war effort in order to maintain profits.
8. Sabotaged the U. S. defense plan in 1940 by refusing to convert the auto plants and by a sit-down of capital against plant expansion; sabotaged the oil, aluminum and rubber expansion programs. (If any of these facts are not known to you it is because 99 percent of our press, in the pay of the same elements, suppressed the Tolan, Truman, Bone Committee reports, Thurman Arnold's reports, the TNEC Monopoly reports and other Government documents.)
9. Delayed the winning of the war through the acts of Dollar-a-year men looking out for present profits and future monopoly rather than for the quick defeat of Fascism. (Documented in the labor press for two years; and again at the 1942 CIO Convention.)

Naturally enough the President of the United States and other high officials cannot name the men, organizations, pressure lobbyists, and national associations which have made this and similar records; they can only refer to "noisy traitors," quislings, defeatists, the "Cliveden Set" or to the Tories and Economic Royalists. And you may be certain that our press will never name the defeatists because the same elements which made the above nine-point record are the main advertisers and biggest subsidizers of the newspapers and magazines. In many instances even the general charges by the President himself have been suppressed. In Germany, in Italy until the seizure of government by the Fascists, the majority of newspapers were brave enough to be anti-Fascist, whereas in America strangely enough a large part of the press (Hearst, Scripps-Howard, McCormickPatterson) has for years been pro-Fascist and almost all big papers live on the money of the biggest Tory and reactionary corporations and reflect their viewpoint now.

It seems to this writer that the most important thing in the world today next to destroying Fascism on the field of battle, is to fight Fascism which has not yet taken up the gun.

This other Fascism will become more active-and drape itself in the national flag everywhere-when military Fascism has been defeated. So far as America is concerned, its first notable Fascist leader, Huey Long, a very smart demagogue, once said, "Sure we'll have Fascism here, but it will come as an anti-Fascist movement."

To know what Fascism really is and why we must fight it and destroy it here in America, we must first of all know what it is we are fighting, what the Fascist regimes really are and do, who puts up the money and backs Fascism in every country (including the United States at this very moment), and who owns the nations under such regimes, and why the natives of all Fascist countries must be driven into harder work, less money, reduced standard of living, poverty and desperation so that the men and corporations who found, subsidize and own Fascism can grow unbelievably rich.

This is what has happened in Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries; it is true to a great extent in Spain, Finland, Hungary, Romania, the Polish so-called Republic, and although not one standard newspaper or magazine has ever breathed a word about it, the same Fascist movement - the march of the men of wealth and power, not the crackpot doings of the two or three dozen who have been indicted for sedition-is taking place in America.

p259
Hitler's entire history is one of spending big money to build a party, big money to get millions of votes, and when his backers' money failed to put him in office, he made the conclusive deal with them, finally selling out the great majority who voted for him in the belief he would keep his 26 promises, most of them directed against Big Business, the Junkers and the other enemies of the people.

Hitler's fascist party was never a majority party. In many countries where several political parties exist-and even in the United States at those times when three major parties are in the field-the chancellor or president elected to office represents only a minority of the electorate. Nevertheless, it is true that Hitler did succeed in fairly honest times before he was able to use bloodshed and terrorism for his 'la" elections, in making his the largest of a score of parties.

Why was he able to do this?

There are of course many reasons, notably the disillusion of the nation, national egotism, the natural desire to be a great nation, the psychological moment for a dictator of any party, right or left, economic breakdown, the need of a change, and so forth. But important, if not most important, was the platform of the Nazi party which promised the people what they were hungering for.

It must not be forgotten that the word Nazi stands for national socialist German workers party, and that Hitler, while secretly in the pay of the industrialists who wanted the unions disbanded and labor turned into serfdom, was openly boasting that his was a socialist party-socialism without Karl Marx- and a nationalist-socialist party whatever that may mean. But it did mean a great deal to millions. The followers of Marxian socialism in Germany, split into several parties, would if united constitute the greatest force in the nation, and socialism and labor were almost synonymous in Germany. Hitler knew this. He capitalized on it. He stole the word.

'Hitler was able to get 13 million followers before 1933 by a pseudosocialistic reform program and by great promises of aid to the common people. In the 26 points of the Nazi platform, adopted in 1920 and never repudiated, Hitler promised the miserable people of Germany:

1. The abolition of all unearned incomes.
2. The end of interest slavery. This was aimed against all bankers, not only Jewish bankers.
3. Nationalization of all joint-stock companies. This meant the end of all private industry, not only the monopolies but all big business.
4. Participation of the workers in the profits of all corporations-the mill, mine, factory, industrial worker was to become a part owner of industry.
5. Establishment of a sound middle class. Nazism, like Italian Fascism, made a great appeal to the big middle class, the small business man, the millions caught between the millstones of Big Business and labor. The big department stores, for example, were to be smashed. This promise delighted every small shopkeeper in Germany. George Bernard Shaw once said that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers. This was just as true for Germany-and German shopkeepers were more alive politically. They were for Hitler's Nazism to a man-and they supplied a large number of his murderous S.S. and S.A. troops.
6. Death penalty for usurers and profiteers.
7. Distinction between "raffendes" and "schaffendes" capital - between predatory and creative capital. This was the Gregor Strasser thesis: that there were two kinds of money, usury and profiteering money on one hand, and creative money on the other, and that the former had to be eliminated. Naturally all money-owners who invested in the Nazi Party were listed as creative capitalists, whereas the Jews (some of whom incidentally invested in Hitler) and all who opposed Hitler were listed as exploiters.

The vast middle class, always caught between the aspirations of the still more vast working class and the cruel greed of the small but most powerful ruling class, has throughout history made the mistake of allying itself with the latter. In America we have the same thing: all the real fascist movements are subsidized by Big Money, but powerful organizations, such as the National Small Business Men's Association, follow the program of the NAM in the hope they will benefit financially when the Ruling Families benefit.

In all instances, however, history shows us that when the latter take over a country with a fascist army they may give the middle class privileges, benefits, a chance to earn larger profits for a while, but in the end monopoly triumphs, and the Big Money drives the Little Money into bankruptcy.

This is one of the many important facts which Albert Norden presented in his most impressive pamphlet, "The Thugs of Europe," a documentary exposé of the profits in Nazism taken entirely from Nazi sources. My thanks are due to Mr. Norden-a German writer who escaped to America and who went to work in a war plant recently-for permission to quote some of the evidence. Norden takes up the matter of Nazism and its promises to the middle class:

"If the Third Reich were for the common man, the middle class would not have been sacrificed to the Moloch of Big Business. If the Third Reich were for the common man, the banks and industries and resources of the sub-soil would belong to the people and not be the private affair of a few score old and newly rich .... As it is now, it is the rich man's Reich. That is why there is such a widespread underground anti-Nazi movement among the German people.

"This war is being waged by the Third Reich, the heart of the Axis, as a 'struggle of German Socialism against the plutocracies.' Goebbels has duped millions of young Germans with this slogan. Not only that: Nazi propaganda outside Germany and particularly in North and South America has succeeded in recruiting trusted followers with this slogan ....

"The Nazi theory of a struggle of the Have-nots against the so-called 'sated' nations is as true as the myth that Goebbels is an Aryan and Goering a Socialist. The following facts, taken from official German statistics, prove that in the Third Reich there is a boundless dictatorship of the plutocrats; that a small group of magnates in the banking, industrial and chemical world have taken hold of the entire economic apparatus at the expense of the broad sections of medium and small manufacturers, artisans, storekeepers and workers, and are making unprecedented profits.

p262
.... The department store of the Jewish owner Tietz was handed over to a consortium consisting of the three largest banks, the Deutsche Bank, the Dresdener Bank and the Commerz-und Privatbank .... The large department store Karstadt... of its eight directors four are big bankers, one a large exporter and a sixth an influential figure in the Deutsche Bank ....

"The more Jews were dragged off and murdered in concentration camps, the richer Germany's magnates became. They let the S.S. and S.A. mobs riot and trample all human laws under their hobnail boots-meanwhile the Dresdener Bank acquired the Berlin bank of Bleichroeder (Jewish bank, patronized by the former Kaiser) and Arnhold Bros. (Jewish bank, one of the best banks in Germany, patronized by U. S. Embassy and newspapers); the Deutsche Bank seized the Mendelssohn Bank. In the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft, an important private bank, Herbert Goering, a relative of Marshal Hermann Goering, replaced the Jewish partner Fuerstenberg. The Warburg Bank in Hamburg was taken over by the Deutsche Bank and the Dresdener Bank in conjunction with the Montan Combine of Haniel and the Siemens Trust. The latter also took out of Jewish hands the Cassierer Cable Works .... The armaments kings of the Ruhr did not shrink from profiting from the pogroms. As a result of Hitler's persecution of the Jews, the Mannesmann concern received the metal company of Wol, Netter & Jacobi, and the Hahnschen Works; while the big industrialist Friedrich Flick (one of the dozen men who put up most of the money to establish Nazism), today one of the 20 richest men in the Third Reich, seized the metal company of Rawak and Gruenfeld. This list could be expanded at will. It illustrates the prosperous business which the solidly established German trusts acquired as a result of the infamous crimes against the Jews. Together with the top Nazi leaders these German financial magnates were the main beneficiaries of the sadistic persecution of the Jews ...

p265
The first modern fascist regime is the Italian. (Fascism itself is as old as history, and although Mussolini is a colossal liar, he told the truth for once when he defined Fascism as Reaction.)

Who put up the money for Mussolini?

Why did they invest in Fascism?

How were they repaid, and who footed the bill?

The original Fascist Party of Italy, likewise the Nazi Party which was formed almost at the same time, was subsidized by a handful of the richest industrialists and landowners who wanted to preserve their wealth and power and prevent the majority of people from living a better life. (The American Legion was organized for the same reason: to preserve the privileges of the few and fool the millions who believed better things would come after victory.

p266
Mussolini was subsidized by the Italian equivalent of our NAM and similar Big Money outfits shortly after the seizure of the factories in 1920.

In March 1919, fascist agitators caused the workers to seize the Franchi-Gregorini plant. Mussolini called this a "creative strike," because the workers intended to run the plant for their own benefit. One of Mussolini's colleagues wrote: "At Dalmine he was the Lenin of Italy." At this time Mussolini was trying to get back into the labor movement.

When the factories of Milan and Turin were occupied by the workers Mussolini held a conference with Bruno Buozzi, who then held a place equivalent to that of Sam Gompers in our American Federation of Labor. He proposed using the factory occupation as the beginning of a military movement to seize Rome and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Buozzi indignantly kicked Mussolini out-labor believed in the democratic political processes, and the main proof was that not an act of violence marked the factory seizures, although the press of the world for a month ran daily lies of bloodshed and terrorism.

Within a few days Mussolini had sold the same idea to the owners of the occupied factories-only this time the same Blackshirts were to be used to create a dictatorship of Big Business, rather than of workers. Signor Agnelli, head of Fiat, admitted to Buozzi that Mussolini actually had dealt with Olivetti, of the Confederazione dell'Industria, while dealing with Buozzi. (This document in Chapter VIII of Sawdust Caesar.)

Olivetti and company put up the money. Mussolini took Rome. And in payment to the subsidizers his first important act was the abolition of all labor unions-the equivalent of our AFL, CIO and Railroad Brotherhoods.
From the day he became dictator Mussolini began paying back the men who paid him in 1920. He abolished the tax on inheritance, for example, because it was supposed to end big fortunes, and that of course meant loss of money for the rich, who had in a body gone over to Fascism after 1922. But Mussolini did not have the courage to abolish the political democratic system all at once, and he had many opposition parties which criticized and attacked him. His chief opponent was the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti.

The reason Matteotti had to die was because he committed the one unforgivable crime in a Fascist nation: he exposed the profits in Fascism.
There is no program, no policy, no ideology and certainly no philosophy back of Fascism, as there is back of almost every other form of government. It is nothing but a spoils system. We too in America have a spoils system, which is talked about every four years when a President is elected, and sometimes when a governor is elected, but this refers largely to a few jobs, a little graft, a considerable payoff for the boys in the back room of politics. It is also true that we in America have ruling families, men and corporations who put up most of the money for elections, and do not do so because one candidate has baby blue eyes and the other is beetle-browed. It is done for money, and the investors in politics are repaid. But Fascism is a system whereby a handful of ruling families get the entire nation.

p270
The landowners (and the industrial owners) were Mussolini's chief backers. No one knew of the subsidies he had received from the great estates. Immediately on becoming dictator Mussolini granted his first important interview to the press of the world. He said:

"I love the working classes. The supremest ambition and the dearest hope of my life has been, and is still, to see them better treated and enjoying conditions of life worthy of the citizens of a great nation .... I do not believe in the class war, but in cooperation between classes. The Fascist government will devote all its efforts to the creation of an agrarian democracy based on the principle of small ownership. The great estates must be handed over to peasant communities; the great capitalists of agriculture must submit to a process of harmonization of their rights with those of the peasants."

This interview was printed in America on 15 November 1922 but on 11 January 1923 less than two months later, Mussolini issued a decree law which dispossessed all the small peasants who since the war had settled on the seized lands of the "latifundia" of the great landowners. Needless to say, there has been no agrarian reform, no division of estates into small holdings, no "harmonization" of "the great capitalists of agriculture." The landowners were paid off with a return of all land which had been given the landless and by the employment of the Blackshirt Militia which prevented any further attempts to divide the land.

p271
In its July 1934, issue, a song of praise for Fascism, Fortune magazine (owned by Henry Luce, a Morgan partner, and other powerful and wealthy Americans) told of the great corporations and how they progressed under Mussolini.

"The significant facts to hang on to," concluded Fortune, "are these: if you were an early Fascist, or contributed generously to the March on Rome, you are likely to enjoy the business benefits that accrue to a high position within the Fascist Party."

p277
Fascism in Spain was bought and paid for by numerous elements who would profit by the destruction of the democratic Republican Loyalist government. There were generals who wanted glory and others who wanted the easy graft money some of their predecessors had made. There was the established Church, and more especially the powerful Society of Jesus, which had suffered loss of property when King Alfonso was thrown out. There was the aristocracy, and there were other elements as there are in all fascist regimes, but more important than all these forces combined was the force of Money.

p278
Of course the people of Spain-the vast majority, the farmers and workers-wanted land and a decent living. Franco therefore did the usual fascist thing: he made big promises.

In the Twenty-Six Points of the Phalanx, the ruling Fascist Party of today-all other parties have been abolished and Spain is totalitarian-the nation was to be turned into "one gigantic syndicate of producers," so that there would be plenty for all, instead of superabundance for only the rich, as had been the case under both monarchy and fascist dictatorship; the banks were to be nationalized, land was to be irrigated, and those large estates which were found to be neglected were to be broken up.

What does the balance sheet today show of the Franco "experiment" of 100 parcels of land, the distribution of a glorious total of 17,000 acres in 1938 and the promise that at least neglected estates would be broken up? The writer-journalist Thomas J. Hamilton presents the latest and final report:

"The landed aristocrats of Spain ... had little real cause for complaint against the Franco regime which addressed itself to the work of undoing any damage to their interests that they had suffered from the Republic. This was not large. The grandees had been frightened by talk of breaking up the great estates, but they had managed to sabotage the Republic's first Agrarian Reform Law and the second was just getting into operation when the Civil War began. Only a few hundred thousand acres had actually been taken over, either in accordance with law or as a result of the movement among the peasants in the spring of 1936 to seize the land without waiting for the slow operations of the government.

"The test of any Spanish regime was its attitude toward this fundamental question, and it may be supposed that some of the grandees had anxious moments when Franco adopted the Phalanx program with its demand for land reform. Carlists and moderate royalists together, however, proved more than strong enough to prevent the regime from harming the interests of the landowners. All land which had been occupied by the peasants, legally or otherwise, was returned to the owners, and soon there was no longer even any mention of breaking up the great estates ....

[Continued in next post.]

[RPankn]

[Continued from previous post.]

"In general, the old nobility, fighting very much the same type of fight that it had under the Republic, managed to keep the Phalanx from hitting its pocketbook."

*

Mussolini's prediction, made years before World War II broke out in September 1939, that the entire world was lining up in two camps, Fascism and Democracy, and that it was "Either We or They," showed itself a matter of fact in the so-called civil war in Spain. It was actually a rebellion of the military leadership-which committed wholesale treason by betraying the government to which it had taken an oath of allegiance - armed and paid for by the vested interests. The "We" consisted of Fascists from all parts of the world, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Germany, Italy and Portugal, all fascist lands, whereas the "They" of Democracy consisted of some 30,000 men of the International Brigade, not one a conscript soldier as were all on Franco's side, but every man a volunteer, a man of intelligence, a first fighter against Fascism. (Of the foreigners on the Loyalist side about 700 were Russians, mostly aviators and technicians, and not one infantry soldier. The press of America, Britain and other countries as usual lied about Russian aid and perpetuated the myth that the Loyalists were Communists.)

On Franco's march to Madrid he took not only the labor union leaders but a large percentage of the industrial workers of each town he captured, lined them up, and shot them down with machine guns. In Madrid the Fifth Column of Fascism killed as many of the working class as Lit could.

p280
The Fifth Column, hidden Fascists, were the people who had subsidized Franco. To them every working man was an anti-Fascist and therefore marked for death. And since the Loyalists in wartime did not wear white shirts, or white collars, or fine suits of clothes, or felt hats, or even neckties, the Fascists of the Fifth Column, fighting their guerrilla war in the streets of Madrid on 8 November 1936 spared every well-dressed wealthy-looking man as a possible ally, and murdered the men of the working class. Men in overalls were always shot by the Fascists.

The final lesson from Spain, however, should not be lost by the thousands of American business men, big and little, who from 1922 on have been saying kind things about Mussolini and others who made trains run on time and seemed to insure bigger profits by outlawing unions, and the rights of the working people.

In Germany a million business men were ruined by Hitler, and only the upper thousand, the wealthiest and most powerful, profited by Nazi rule. As in Italy, so in Germany, the fascist regime had to rob not only the poor and reimpose serfdom on millions, but it also had to rob its own supporters to maintain a new bureaucracy, and a new army on whose bayonets the bureaucracy tried to build a permanent government.

Fascism has to exploit either a foreign people or its own people; it has to have money, and if it must pay off the top subsidizers this means it has to destroy its millions of smaller helpers.

Hitler and Mussolini robbed and impoverished their own party members in order to feed the super-monopolists. In Spain the situation is similar. Hamilton writes:
"Spain was traditionally the land of special privilege. Franco's success in restoring these privileges therefore produced a singularly vicious combination: the rich stayed rich, if they did not get richer, and the poor were even hungrier than they had been in the worst days of the civil war .... Suffering was increased immeasurably by the restoration of the old privileges; despite the steadily increasing misery of the poor, the wealthy managed to obtain virtually everything they needed. And a new class of parvenus, who had made their money by the special 'favours' obtained from the government officials in charge of operating the faltering economic machine, spent their profits with an abandon which was one failing that could not be charged against the old families."

The Franco regime had, in fact, loaded still more privileged classes upon a suffering country....

*

The Nazi Cartel Plot in America

[In his speech at Burgos on 19 April 1939 Franco announced a Nationalist Syndicalist state which would restore the status quo ante 1931-the time the Republic was overthrown. The New York Times headline was: "Franco Reassures Owners of Capital."]

p281

Only the little seditionists and traitors have been rounded up by the FBI. The real Nazi Fifth Column in America remains immune. And yet there is evidence that those in both countries who place profits above patriotism - and Fascism is based entirely upon profits although all its propaganda speaks of patriotism - have conspired to make America part of the Nazi Big Business system.

Thurman Arnold, as assistant district attorney of the United States, his assistant, Norman Littell, and several Congressional investigations, have produced incontrovertible evidence that some of our biggest monopolies entered into secret agreements with the Nazi cartels and divided the world among them. Most notorious of all was Alcoa, the Mellon-Davis-Duke monopoly which is largely responsible for the fact America did not have the aluminum with which to build airplanes before and after Pearl Harbor, while Germany had an unlimited supply. Of the Aluminum Corporation sabotage and that of other leading companies the press said very little.

p282
Our press, which had nothing but praise for Mussolini for almost a generation, and which has always protected Fascism, Nazism and reaction in general by Redbaiting every person and movement which is anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi and anti-reactionary later made a grand noise over the traitors, seditionists and propagandists such as Father Charles Coughlin, Fritz Kuhn and William Pelley, who were the outstanding loudmouths at the time of Pearl Harbor. These small-fry fascisti and the Rev. Gerald Winrod and numerous others spread the same lies which they received from Hitler's World-Service (Welt-Dienst) of Erfurt; all these noisy propagandists and traitors, repeating Hitler's propaganda, did succeed in raising a huge smokescreen over America. Behind this artificial Redbaiting, antiSemitic, anti-New Deal fog of confusion and falsehood, however, there was a real Fifth Column of greater importance, the great owners and rulers of America who planned world domination through political and military Fascism, just as surely as Hitler did in Germany, and like groups and like leaders did in other countries. There is no reason to believe that the United States was the one exception to the spread of Fascism.

p283
Nine men, two representing Hitler and several leading American industrialists, members of the Congress of the United States, and representatives of large business and political organizations met at a hotel in Boston, on 23 November 1937-at a time Hitler was trying out his Condor Legion, his dive bombers, his new tanks and his Panzerdivisionen and his Blitzkrieg tactics on the poor and practically unarmed people of Spain to formulate a working agreement by which American forces would join Nazi forces in the monopolistic control of the world's business and the political and military domination of the whole world.

The document which follows is a memorandum written at the conclusion of the meeting. The secretary who collected the notes from five of the persons present, each of whom contributed a part, was not versed in social, economic and political matters, but was impressed somehow with the importance of the event, and although her notes were taken away from her, she did succeed in retaining a carbon copy of the document. It had a long journey, went to Scotland, was copied by persons who realized its value, and brought back to the United States, where I was able to obtain it for the readers of In fact. Here it is in its entirety:

*

Text of Nazi - U.S. Cartel Memorandum

p284
[Nine men representing Hitler and several leading American industrialists, several members of Congress and representatives of large business and political organizations met in a hotel room in Boston on November 23, 1937.]

Our second German guest [made] the following points:
"Germany has been grossly misrepresented before the American public by Jewish propaganda. 'In order to clarify the picture,' he said, it is necessary to recall that Germany of the Republican period has thrown a remarkable confusion into the minds of the Germans. The state has been identified with some popular welfare institution. Creative capital was overburdened by the effects of a Utopian "social welfare" legislation. Unemployed insurance, sick, old-age, and death benefits, social security and war pensions meant terrible handicaps already. Trade union wages and hours have lifted productive costs above world standards.' [Proof that neo-liberals are fascists.]

"What is the paramount achievement of National Socialism? 'The spirit of New Germany [Note the use of the adjective "New."] was conducive to a kind of national solidarity. Exaggerated demands and "social service" were reduced and production costs realistically brought into harmony with the requirements of competition on the world markets. This is what we have done. Not more and not less. It is true that many objections had to be overcome. The conception featuring the State as a supreme welfare agency had to be eradicated and a policy of increased production pursued instead. We had to silence therefore all centers from where class struggle was being fomented and imprison dangerous Utopians and sentimental philanthropists. It is true that Jewish propaganda was able to capitalize on some stern measures and slander New Germany before the world opinion. This is undoubtedly a detrimental fact. But we have gotten more by the rebirth of national solidarity and the cooperation of all for the same purpose.

"Without wishing to arouse any semblance of interfering with domestic questions in the United States, I cannot help mentioning that today's America presents a very close picture of Social-Democratic Germany. Unrealistic "welfare legislation" sponsored by the Administration, chaotic class struggles and wage demands absolutely out of any proportion, strong Jewish influence in the political, cultural and public life of the country are disquieting phenomena. We Germans, at any rate, are disquieted. We carry on a good work for world recovery and we know what potential danger an increasing Red influence in the United States would mean for the whole world.

"Another disquieting characteristic of the situation is the lack of unity and clear-sighted leadership in the scattered national camp. You cannot start a strong concerted drive of all forces and agencies for the revival of American nationalism as long as this situation prevails.

"It is time to think seriously of the centralization of all forces of American nationalism and traditionalism. We Germans are seeking the cooperation of all American nationalists. Above all we believe in cooperating with the economic leaders of the country, whatever the suitable form of the cooperation may be. There is little comprehension on behalf of the United States Government, but in our belief there must be comprehension for our viewpoint on behalf of business.

"We would advance the idea of such informal conferences between responsible business and political leaders in order to consider questions of national and international importance affecting economic and, yes, political recovery."

p286
"The following opinions were expressed by the American participants of the conference:

"(a) The substance of the German suggestion amounts to changing the spirit of our nation as expressed by recent elections. That is possible but by no means easy. The people must become aware of the disastrous economic effects of the policies of the present Administration first. In the wake of the reorientation of the public opinion a vigorous drive must start in the press and radio. Technically it remains a question as to whether this drive may center around the Republican National Committee.

"(b) Farsighted business men will welcome conferences of this kind. A tremendous inspiration might come out of them. There is no reason why we should not learn of emergencies similar to those prevailing in our own country and the methods by which farsighted governments were trying to overcome them. It is also clear that manufacturers, who usually contributed to the campaigns of all candidates, must realize that their support must be reserved to one, in whose selection they must take an active hand. We must just as well recognize that the business leaders of this country must get together in the present emergency. By now they must have realized that they cannot expect much from Washington. We will have to resort to concrete planning.

"We can all agree that it is desirable to convince our business leaders that it is a good investment to embark on subsidizing our patriotic citizens' organizations and secure their fusion for the common purpose.

"Unified leadership with one conspicuous leader will be a sound policy. We will be grateful for any service our German friends may give us in this respect.

"(c) American foreign policy must be chiefly guarded against the danger of the sovietization of the Far East. More than ever we must supervise by Congress what the State Department does. Rapprochement with Germany, while unpopular, is a necessity, if we consider the strong pro-Soviet agitation going on and finding patronage in the United States. It is of the greatest importance that leading and influential figures in our business life and the policy-making bodies of both political parties should be appraised of this first conversation and prevailed upon to discuss the possibilities of a non-partisan cooperation on the subject."

The importance of the foregoing memorandum, the first of a proposed series of notes upon which a political-commercial pact between the Nazi regime and pro-fascist Americans could be arranged, was recognized at the time.

p287
The importance of the document lies largely in the prominence and importance of the nine men who attended the conference and the forces and corporations they represented. Of these nine, their governments, and their corporations and other interests ...

p287
General Motors Representative. General Motors was completely involved in Nazi affairs. Until Pearl Harbor it was the owner of the Adam Opel A. G., worth more than $100 million. It had paid $30 million for 80 percent of the stock. It had made 30 percent of Germany's peacetime passenger cars. After Hitler came into power, it began manufacturing the trucks and panzer division equipment with which Hitler waged war. In 10 years it had made a profit estimated at $36 million. But, since Hitler banned the export of capital, and American stockholders were thereby denied these dividends, General Motors invested at least $20 million in other industries, all owned or controlled by Goering and other Nazi officials, and thus General Motors was completely affiliated with Nazi success or failure. (Source for statistics: Poor's Manual.)

p288
DuPont Representative. The four most important facts about the DuPont Empire are:

a. that it controls General Motors, owning $197 million of General Motors stock;
b. that it financed the Liberty League, Sentinels, Crusaders and one dozen native American fascist outfits;
c. that it knowingly and secretly and in violation of the U. S. and other laws, aided Hitler to arm for this war;
d. that the DuPonts betrayed military secrets to Hitler.

One great cartel of the merchants of death is called Dynamit-AktienGesellschaft (DAG). Exhibit 456 in the Nye-Vandenberg munitions investigation shows that DuPonts not only own stock but a voting right and a voice in the management of the cartel. Exhibit 456 also shows DuPont has a financial interest in I. G. Farbenindustrie, the Nazi cartel which ties up with the Aluminum monopoly, Standard Oil, synthetic rubber, Sterling and other drug concerns.

p289
The DuPonts knew that according to the Thyssen plan German Fascism was nothing more than a system by which the biggest German industries got control of the nation, smashing small business, seizing political rule. Wendell R. Swint, director of DuPont foreign relations, testified the DuPonts knew of the "scheme whereby industry would contribute to the (Nazi) Party Organization funds, and in fact industry is called upon to pay one-half percent of the annual wage or salary roll to the Nazi organization." (Munitions Hearing, Vol. XII.)

The relationship of the DuPonts to Nazi Germany-the story of how they armed Hitler with the help of Mr. Hoover-as exposed by the munitions investigation, gives valuable support to the foregoing.

On 4 December 1938 the Associated Press, Moscow bureau, sent out a list issued by the official Tass government press bureau of a "fascist clique" in the United States, which list follows with explanatory facts about each person:

"War Industry Magnate" DuPont. The official statement said the DuPonts had "great capital investments in fascist Germany."

William S. Knudsen, president of General Motors. Knudsen told a New York Times reporter (6 October 1933) on arriving from Europe that Hitler's Germany was "the miracle of the 20th Century." Nevertheless paragraph "c" in our memorandum was not written by Knudsen, but by another GM official of equal prominence.

Colonel Charles Lindbergh. In addition to collaborating with the British Cliveden Set, Lindbergh had written an article for the reactionary Reader's Digest stating Hitler's Aryan myth and other fascist doctrines.

Former President Herbert Hoover.

Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy. Kennedy's secret report to Roosevelt on the war favored Britain going Fascist.

Henry Ford.

*

NAM (National Association of Manufacturers): The Men Who Financed American Fascism

p291
The two corporations which were part of the Nazi cartel plot in the United States are two of the main vertebrae of the backbone of American Fascism. Lammot DuPont and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., of the DuPont Empire and General Motors respectively, have been exposed by Congressional committees as subsidizers of fascist organizations and movements. Both corporations and both men are also among the top flight rulers of the National Association of Manufacturers.

p296
In establishing the fact that the NAM was founded primarily to fight labor, and that it was still doing so, Senator La Follette introduced a statement published in 1904 in a NAM magazine called American Industries. In objecting to the only large union of its time-1904-this publication said: "We are not opposed to good unionism if such exists anywhere. The American Federation brand of unionism, however, is un-American, illegal and indecent."

p297
When the O'Mahoney committee released its Monograph 26 the newspapers of the nation, always happy to suppress anything that is critical of the hand that feeds it-that is, Big Business, through the medium of advertising, obliged by refraining from mentioning the matter at all, or, like the New York Times, published a report that lobbying had been condemned but omitted the name of the NAM.

The Times, which did publish a column story, and therefore did publish much more than other papers, nevertheless omitted most of the following quotations-which will give the reader a taste of the tremendously important material Monograph 26 contains:

'The American people are confronted with the problem of who shall control the government." The monograph then discusses the big pressure group, notably the American Legion lobby, farmers, peace groups, but concludes that the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and their agents, the lawyers' associations, the newspaper publishers' associations, rule the country.

"From the beginning, business has been intent upon wielding economic power and, where necessary, political control for its own purposes .... Even today, when the purposeful use of government power for the general welfare is more widely accepted than at any time in our history, government does not begin to approach the fusion of power and will characteristic of business." Everyone is fighting for power, for control, in Washington, but "by far the largest and most important of these groups is to be found in 'business' . . . as dominated by the 200 largest non-financial and the 50 largest financial corporations, and the employer and trade associations into which it and its satellites are organized." The 200 nonfinancial corporations in 1935 controlled $60 billion of physical assets. The march of America toward public betterment "has been hindered, obstructed and at times apparently completely stopped by pressure groups."

"Business ... has fought ... government ownership. Through the press, public opinion and pressure groups it is possible to influence the political process .... Both press and radio are, after all, 'big business' and even when they possess the highest integrity, they are the prisoners of their own beliefs."

Business, continues the report, operates on the principle that $60 billion can't be wrong.

"In this connection the business orientation of the newspaper press is a valuable asset. In the nature of things public opinion is usually well disposed toward business .... Newspapers have it in their power materially to influence public opinion on particular issues .... With others, editorializing is practiced as a matter of course. And even where editors and publishers are men of the highest integrity, they are owners and managers of big business enterprises, and their papers inevitably reflect, at least to some extent, their economic interest. When organized business deliberately propagandizes the country, using newspaper advertising as one medium, the press is a direct means of channeling business views into the public mind .... Lawyers have remade constitutional guarantees in the image of business .... The newspaper press, and the advertising professions have all helped business by spreading this changed conception of the Jeffersonian idea."

In other words, Business, using lawyers, the press and advertising, has undermined Jeffersonian democracy.

The report names the business pressure lobbies, notably the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Edison Electric Institute, Association of Life Insurance Presidents, American Iron and Steel Institute, American Petroleum Institute, American Bankers Association, American Investment Bankers Association, American Bar Association, and adds: "Through the American Newspaper Publishers Association [Lords of the Press] the country's daily newspapers join their strength for business and against government." This is a most d**ning indictment. It did not appear in the Times

p303
You will have to read the free and independent press, which is largely the press of small unbribed weeklies, and a few pamphlets and books to get the truth. The truth is not in the commercial press because the truth is a dagger pointed at its heart, which is its pocketbook. Native American Fascism is largely the policy of the employers of gangsters, stool pigeons, labor spies, poison gas, and antilabor propaganda; it is the fascism of the NAM, the Associated Farmers and Associated Industries, the Christian American Association; the KKK, the Committee for Constitutional Government, the Constitutional Educational League, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the old Liberty League and its present subsidized outfits, and the Royal Family which unfortunately controls the American Legion.

[Continued in next post.]

[RPankn]

[Continued from previous post.]

The following statement made by Professor Gaetano Salvemini of Harvard is noteworthy. Professor Salvemini told reporter Joseph Philip Lyford of the Harvard Crimson that "a new brand of Fascism" threatens America, "the Fascism of corporate business enterprise in this country." He believed that "almost 100 percent of American Big Business" is in sympathy with the "philosophy" of government behind the totalitarianism of Hitler and Mussolini; the bond of sympathy between Big Business and the Fascist Axis, said the professor of history, lies in the respect of American industrialists for the Axis methods of coercing labor.

There are two means which the industrialist can employ to crush labor, Professor Salvemini explained; one way is to hire strikebreakers to "crack the workers' skulls," the other way is to pass a law outlawing strikes. "Mussolini has used both methods in Italy," Professor Salvemini asserted; "in America Big Business has only been able to use the first." But business is definitely sympathetic to anti-strike legislation, he added, and compared the organization of the Ford plant at River Rouge to the organization of the Fascist auto industry, and the strikebreaking methods used by Ford there to those which had been used by Italian industry to crush the workers on the eve of Mussolini's rise to power.

Salvemini's statement, based on Italian Fascism, paralleled the statement which Ambassador Dodd made on returning to America from Germany. Both these men noted the relationship between foreign Fascism and American business monopolies and the handful of super-industrialists who rule most countries for their own profit.


www.thirdworldtraveler.com/George_Seldes/Facts_Fascism_TGSR.html

[karpomrx]

Reclaim democracy, indeed.
I sometimes feel that liberty was strangled in the USA in its' infancy. The rich white guys were not so much interested in freedom ,as in grabbing whatever wealth was not nailed down.
Lincoln's first Secretary of War, Cameron, was so corrupt that it was said of him that he would steal anything.."except a red-hot stove."
I was one of those reading Izzy Stones' work, I was always pleased that he culled most of his information from the wire services and the mainstream press sources-printing the news that was not fit to print for the sceptics and boat- rockers that didn't buy the party line, whether from D.C. or Wall Street,(or Moscow, for that matter).
Until the Gestapo shuts down sites like this one, I still have a faint hope that facts will somehow overwhelm these psychos, that we will become a better people than we now seem to be.

[Moses]

One of my very close relatives was and industrialist who hated Roosevelt, and I recognized what I had heard from him in the Bush II Administration. While I had thought we had evolved from the crude premises and prejudices of the Republicans of that era, it was clear that these people, this cabal, had clung to them with a vengance, festering in their secret societies and such, and that this underbelly, these insects under rocks had taken control. And it does derive from the pro- fascists of the Prescott Bush generation. And Bush is like the idiot grandson whose priviledged inheritance is to believe these simplistic ideologies as part of the ruling class. (I heard him say in his Lehrer interview that he is able to explain things to the American people and then spouted one of his simplistic slogans-- his concept of the American people is that they are lowly children-- I'll try to get the quote).

Another similarity that struck me when I read a biography of James Hall (Mutiny on the Bounty) was the eagerness of the publishing moguls to get us into War. James Hall was a wanna be writer who had volunteered to serve with the British in WWI before US had entered war. He had written something that was seen by the Editor of Atlantic Monthly, and he was called in to be invited to write a series for them. In the interview, the Editor made it clear that he was soliciting the series so that Americans could understand why we needed to get into the war. It wasn't to find out about the horrors of war, or the real feelings about war, or to get a factual piece on the war. It was meant to be propaganda to get Americans to back going into the war. (If I see the book which I leant out I will find the quote).