America 1917: 4. Morgan / Rothschild, Wall Street Goes To War.

If the Zimmermann telegram was an absurd intrusion and diplomatic own-goal, it was not in itself, cause for war. If the German decision to revert to all-out submarine warfare in the Atlantic was unquestionably aggressive, it had hardly dented the overwhelming power of the American merchant marine’s massed fleets before President Wilson made his decisive move. Both actions, take together, certainly edged the United States towards the precipice because these issues were whipped up into a frenzy by a highly controlled and organised pro-British press. What matters here is; who was pulling the proverbial strings?

American newspaper editors and owners played a critical role in fomenting public opinion for war in 1917, similar to that of Lord Northcliffe in pre-war Britain. Indeed control of the press in the United States was even more calculated and orchestrated than its British equivalent. Congressman Oscar Calloway of Texas exposed the machinations of the money power as it expanded its influence over the fourth estate in order to swing public opinion towards a ‘necessary’ war. On 9 February 1917 he placed the following statement on the Congressional Record:

‘In March 1915 J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding and powder interests and their subsidiary organisations got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapermen in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States’ [1]

Congressman Calloway revealed that Morgan’s twelve chosen men assessed the worth of over 170 newspapers across America and came to the conclusion that by purchasing twenty-five of the most famous titles, they could literally control the policies and direction of public opinion. An agreement was quietly reached through which monthly payments were paid to them through the House of Morgan. A compliant editor was placed in each paper to supervise and edit the ‘news’. Questions of American preparedness for war were raised in the context of alleged German aggression and Mexican duplicity. The governments’s financial policy came under fire as did ‘other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.’ [2] Be certain; J.P. Morgan and his associates sat in the driving seat and carried American public opinion towards the slaughterhouse of a world war … in order to protect their obscene profiteering and future intentions. Taking America to war was not a forgone conclusion even although the Germans had given up any hope of equal-handed neutrality. The people had to be manipulated.

The crucial factor lay at the heart of Wall Street where the money power decided that the time to abandon the illusion of neutrality had come. America had to go to war or their combined losses would have broken the back of the economy. Though fact, it has been vehemently denied ever since. Typical of this attitude is the claim from the American historian Charles Tansill: [3]

‘There is not the slightest evidence that during the hundred days that preceded America’s entry to the World War the President gave any heed to the demands from ‘big business’ that America intervene in order to save investments that were threatened by possible Allied defeat.’ [4]

What nonsense. America’s economy was inextricably linked to an Allied victory. Had the British and French been forced to come to terms with Germany after 1917, potential losses would have been catastrophic. And in April 1917, Wall Street was aware that the balance of forces in Europe had suddenly swung in favour of the Kaiser when his cousin the Czar, was deposed.

Thomas W Lamont, of Morgan Bank, estimated that half a million Americans, many from the wealthy and influential east coast establishment, had invested in loans to the Allies.[5] Consider these words;  half a million wealthy influential people had a vested interest in an Allied victory. Do you imagine that they sat quietly waiting to see how their investment fared as Britain and France haemorrhaged their youth in the slaughter-filled stalemate on the Western Front which could only get worse after the Czar had been deposed and Russia opted out of a hopeless war? This was but the tip of the iceberg of vested interest.

Allegedly, Woodrow Wilson tried to the last to bring about peace, but failed. But how genuine were his intentions?

If President Wilson had hoped to convince the banks that they should stop extending credit to the warring nations to give him time to coax them towards peace, he was deluded. Too many financial opportunities presented themselves which allowed New York to corner the market while competitors were crippled by war. [6] American banks had been building great stores of foreign securities as well as lending directly to London and Paris. National banks in America held around $15.6 million dollars of foreign securities in 1914. Within two years that sum had multiplied tenfold to $158.5. By September 1916 the total amount of foreign securities stood at almost $240 million which naturally thrust Wall Street into a pre-eminent global position from where it could fund the massive increase in its domestic war industries. [7] With such a formidable war-chest to hand, could the money-power really have contemplated anything other than a victorious war? No.

One immediate consequence of the German decision to embark on its unrestricted U-Boat campaign in 1917 was the immediate panic it caused to traders along the busy eastern seaboard. American shipowners refused to send their vessels into the Atlantic war zone and goods purchased in the United States by the Morgan banks sat idle on the wharves. Profit was threatened; the American economy, intimidated. Morgan asserted his influence with the White House. Jack Morgan was shameless. On 4 April 1917 he wrote a letter to the President pledging his support and reminding Wilson of his connections:

‘We are most heartily in accord with you as to the necessity of the United States assisting the allies in the matter of supplies of materials and of credits. To these matters we have been devoting our whole time and thought for the past two years. I write to assure you again that the knowledge we have gained in those two years of close association with the allies in these matters are entirely at the disposal of the United States government at any time…’[8]

What he omitted to say was that he had devoted his ‘time and thought’ over the last two years to making a fortune from the war. His position of sole supplier and agent for the British government brought him immense wealth and prestige. This reminder could hardly have been better timed. It was almost as if he was saying to the President, you know I can handle the money supply…just get on with the war. Two days later when war was declared, the House of Morgan held the reins of real monetary power in the United States. Through his connections with ‘Colonel’ Mandell House and President Wilson, J P Morgan took effective control of the major international loans emanating from the USA once all previous restrictions had been removed.

On 24 April 1917, President Wilson signed a war finance bill which opened the Federal Reserve’s floodgates and removed any possible liability from Morgan’s banks. Every which way was profit on the Midas scale. $200 million was loaned to Britain immediately. All formal banking technicalities were removed. The New York Times reported that in order to speed matters up the American Treasury would not even wait until British bonds arrived in New York. Subscribers were given four months to pay in instalments as ‘had been suggested by banking interests and others to Treasury Secretary McAdoo with strong endorsement’. Of course they gave Secretary McAdoo their full endorsement. It was their idea; Christmas and Thanksgiving rolled into one. What joy. As the New York Times added, ‘ Little if any of the sum would be spent abroad. Virtually the entire loan to the Allies will be spent in this country for foodstuffs, munitions and supplies.’ [9] Subscriptions from American banks exceeded the initial sum of $200 million by 10.AM on the day of issue, and Secretary McAdoo increased the first limit to $250 million.

Consider what had happened. J.P. Morgan spent the first two years of the war using his banking and financial associates to sell British securities on the American market and spend the money on the weapons of war and all its accessories in America. His agents controlled the orders for steel and armaments, for cotton, wheat and meat, for the transportation of these goods across the Americas and the maritime fleets that crossed the oceans. A single example of what this actually meant can be gleaned from the post-war investigation set up under Congressional Investigation into the munitions industry in 1934. The Du Pont company admitted that J P Morgan & Co. acted as agents, under sales contracts aggregating $351,259, 813 . 28, which accounted for almost 72% of the total military business carried out for the British and French governments during the war. At a mere 1% commission, Morgan made a profit of $3,512,598, from that alone. [10]

Once America abandoned its sham neutrality, Morgan became the prime agent for Wilson’s government at war. Loans which he had issued and underwritten on behalf of the Allies were guaranteed by the State. It was impossible for his banks to lose money. The American economy continued to flourish. The British and French tax-payer would eventually be required to repay their debts. It was as if he was a Rothschild. Indeed. The reader might well ask: where were the Rothschilds?

Let the record show that the Rothschilds remained where they always were; at the centre of the money-power, though not necessarily under their own name. J.P. Morgan’s personal affiliation with the House of Rothschild dated back to 1899, from which point he represented Rothschild interests in the United States. [11] The first telegrams of the war sent to Morgan & Co. in New York, were from Rothschild Freres in Paris as early as 3 August 1914. That is before Britain had even declared war on Germany. The French government, anticipating some of the problems ahead, had approached both Rothschild and Morgan, Harjes & Co. (their French bank) for a loan of $10,000,000, but initially the Americans could not circumvent their own government’s insistence that such a loan was ‘inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.’ [12]  It was Lord Nathaniel Rothschild in London who personally advised Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer [13] before J.P. Morgan was chosen as the sole purchasing agent for Britain.

While the financial autocrats pulled the strings behind the scenes, Woodrow Wilson was also driven by personal ambition. As America’s president, his place on the world stage had an immediacy which demanded he exercise power before his time had passed. He looked to the future in the belief that victory would place America at the centre of a new world order and boost his chance of a third term in office. His pronouncements had a touch of papal authority, or might have had, if his new allies accepted his naive declarations. But we will come to the Fourteen Points in due course and wonder at their meaning.

The final word on the impact of the financial – industrial – munitions lobby which unquestionably pushed America into war should come from President Wilson’s close friend and biographer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian, Ray Standard Baker. He believed that the die was cast from the outset, observing;  ‘…by the end of 1914 the traffic in war materiel with the Allies had become deeply entrenched in America’s economic organisation and the possibility of keeping out of the war by the diplomacy of neutrality no matter how skilfully conducted, had reached vanishing point. By October, possibly earlier, our case was lost.’ [14] It was only a matter of time, of when America would go to war, not whether America would become actively involved. The occasion of war might well have been unrestricted submarine warfare but the cause was lay in Wall Street. The American economy faced wipe-out if the Allies failed to win the terrible war of attrition. Neither could be allowed.

1. Congressional Record, 64th Congress of the United States, February 9 1917, p. 2947. Reported in the New York Times on 14 February 1917.
2. Ibid.
3. Charles Tansill was Professor of History at the American University. He prepared the official volume on World War I responsibility for Congress and in 1927 edited another volume for the Library of Congress entitled “Documents on the Formation of the American Union.” His America Goes to War was considered the officially accepted view.
4. Charles Cannon Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 657.
5. Bailey, A Diplomatic History, p. 644.
6. Nomi Prins, All The President’s Bankers, p. 47.
7. Ibid.
8. letter from JP Morgan to President Wilson April 4, 1917, Wilson Papers vol. 41.
9. New York Times, 25 April 1917.
10. Hearings before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, US Senate S.Res. 206.
11. W. G. Carr, Pawns in the Game, p. 60.
12. Hearings before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, US Senate S.Res. 206. exhibit 2040, p. 7505.
13. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 70.
14. Ray Standard Baker, The Life & Letters of Woodrow Wilson, p.181. This was cited in evidence against J P Morgan in Hearings before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, US Senate S.Res. 206, p. 7566.

America 1917: 1 He Kept Us Out Of War.

William Jennings Bryan U.S. Secretary of State

One of the great myths of the First World War is that the United States was not directly involved until April 1917, at which point a coalition of circumstances demanded her formal involvement. Such a convenient interpretation has covered the lie of American neutrality virtually from the day that war was declared by Britain. If neutrality included the vast production of munitions for one side, the enormous loans and credits provided for that same side, the active propaganda which was pumped out, if not exclusively for one side, certainly heavily weighted towards that one side, the provision of vital food supplies and every avenue through which the Allies were aided in their war, then you might argue that America remained neutral. It remains an intrinsically false argument.

Yet the United States was not formally at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary for one overwhelming reason. The people did not want to be dragged into someone else’s conflict. There was no political consensus in favour of war. An active group of upper and upper-middle class businessmen advocated military preparedness but many public figures hated the prospect. Of these, President Wilson’s first Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, was the most outspoken and he had the honesty to resign as Wilson increasingly came under the influence of his minders, Edward Mandell House, and the Wall Street money-power. They supported Robert Lansing as Secretary Bryan’s replacement. A more outspoken opposition to American involvement came from German and Irish communities, but the bottom line was clear. The American people did not want to see American troops sacrificed in Europe. This was not their war.

How and why was America suckered into the conflict despite the overwhelming popular view against, demands examination. The first question to be asked focusses on the President himself.

Woodrow Wilson’s first term in office from 1912-1916, was predicated on an election victory subscribed to and underwritten by the ‘money-power’ in New York. [1] He campaigned under the banner of ‘New Freedom’ and opposition to big business and monopoly power,[2] yet like many presidents, before and after, his actions turned his promises to lies. However the daunting task of defeating the incumbent Republican President William Taft, who had steadfastly attacked the powerful business combinations in the United States, seemed beyond any realistic expectation.

Taft was popular. The Supreme Court’s legal actions against Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company were decided in favour of his government. [3] In October 1911, Taft’s Justice Department brought a suit against U.S. Steel and demanded that over a hundred of its subsidiaries be granted corporate independence. They named and shamed prominent executives and financiers as defendants. Big business was thoroughly shaken. William Taft earned many powerful enemies. Clear favourite to win a second term in office in 1912, Taft’s chances of success were destroyed by a well-contrived split in the Republican party. Financed by J P Morgan’s associates, the former Republican, Theodore Roosevelt created a third force from thin air, the ‘Progressive’ Bull Moose Party and at the ballot box in November 1912, Wilson was elected President with 42 per cent of the vote; Roosevelt gained 27 percent and Taft could only muster 23 percent. The split Republican voted totalled 7.5 million while Wilson and the Democrats won with just 6.2 million. [4]

1916 promised to offer better prospects for the Republican Party. The schism with Roosevelt and the Bull-Moose was closing fast. Wilson’s supposed neutrality was so transparently false that certain sectors of the American electorate were drawn to his opponent, the Republican, Charles E. Hughes, a former Supreme Court Judge. German-Americans and Irish-Americans had been particularly annoyed by what they believed was President Wilson’s partisan behaviour and were expected to vote Republican. These groups could not be ignored and came under sustained attack for what the President termed, ‘disloyalty.’ In his annual Message to Congress on 7 December 1915, Woodrow Wilson ranted against those born under foreign flags and welcomed ‘under our generous naturalisation laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life… who seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion.’[5]

He expressed contempt for those who held fast to their original national identities because they did not put American interests first. These he termed ‘hyphenated Americans’.[6] Wilson’s attitude towards German-Americans was harsh. They had watched from across the Atlantic as their former homeland was bounced into a debilitating war by a British Establishment, financed and supplied by America.

By 1916, there were important and influential groups of ‘hyphenated Americans’. As the table below shows, almost 11,000,000 Americans had comparatively recent German, Austrian or Hungarian ancestry. If the Irish community was added, the total approached 15,500,000.

Table 1. 1910 Census of the United States: Total population 91,972,266 [7]

Defined by place of birth, by persons, both of whose parents were immigrants from that country or one of the parents was foreign born;

German – American 8,282,618
Austria – Hungarian – American 2,701,786
Irish – American 4,504,360
English – Scottish – Welsh – American 3,231,052
Russian – Finnish – American 2,752,675
Italian – American 2,098,360
Note: The U.S. Census of 1910 did not take into account renumbers of foreign-born grandparents or the huge numbers of immigrants from Europe who had settled in America over the previous two and a half centuries.

Puck Cartoon. Wilson asks why the immigrant wants a full vote when claiming to be only half American.

Social tensions diluted Democratic support amongst the American – Irish community. Though many Catholics were not Irish, and not all Irish were Catholic, there was a strong affinity between race and religion on the eastern seaboard states of America. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Wilson made himself even more unpopular by refusing to endorse an appeal for clemency for Roger Casement.[8] The President’s support for the anti-clerical President Carranza in Mexico gave rise to the claim that Wilson was anti-Catholic.[9] The New York weekly newspaper, The Irish World, accused his Administration of ‘having done everything for England that an English Viceroy might do.’[10] Quite a calculated insult by any standard. In truth racism and bigotry lay centimetres from the surface of many American voters.

Little was said of another nascent power-block which was beginning to find its political feet; the hyphenated Jewish-American. The spread of Zionism in America brought with it a fresh wind of political influence.Though still in comparative infancy by election day 1916, certain pro-Zionist Jewish-Americans like Wilson’s newly appointed Supreme Court Judge, Louis Brandeis, were held in high esteem inside the Jewish community. Though Brandeis, and by default, Wilson who appointed him, were initially lambasted in the press.[11] It appeared to have little direct effect in November 1916. That would later change.[12]

Woodrow Wilson had one important advantage, the economy. At the outbreak of war in Europe, America was wallowing in a depression more serious than that of 1907-8, but the war trade brought phenomenal prosperity. [13] The very Trusts which Wilson had spoken against were profiteering on a scale hitherto unknown. Thanks to the massive order book from Britain and France, managed exclusively by the JP Morgan- Rothschild banks, the military-industrial complex thrived, as did the communities around them. There were more and better-paid jobs. On 21 August 1915 Secretary to the ( US) Treasury, McAdoo told President Wilson (his father-in-law,) that ‘Great prosperity is coming. It is, in large measure, already here. It will be tremendously increased if we can extend reasonable credits to our customers’. [14] The customers on whom he was focussed were Britain and France. Wilson’s America forged an economic solidarity with the Allies which made nonsense of neutrality, yet the tacit promise from the Democrats to the American nation in the 1916 election was that ‘He Kept Us out of War’. That was true, as far as it went. The inference was that Woodrow Wilson would continue to keep America out of the war, but the President never claimed that he would continue this policy. Indeed it would have been political suicide to whisper a call to arms. It would also have shortened the war.

1. Anthony Sutton, Federal Reserve Conspiracy, pp. 82-3.
2. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 76.
3. Paolo Enrico Coletta, The Presidency of William Howard Taft. pp. 154–157.
4. http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1912
5. Albert Shaw, President Wilson’s State Papers and Addresses, p. 150.
6. Hans P. Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot, American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897-1933, p. 96.
7. Thomas A Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, p. 611.
8. Roger Casement was at that time a hero of the Irish Republican movement because of his support for and involvement in, the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916.]
9. Edward Cuddy, Irish Americans and the 1916 Election, American Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, Part 1, Summer 1969, pp. 229-231.
10. Irish World, 24 June, 1916.
11. For example, the New York Times urged the U S Senate to throw out Brandeis’s nomination New York Times, 29 January 1916. p. 3
12. See chapter 28 in forthcoming book, Prolonging The War.
13. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, p. 622.
14. Paul Birdsall, Neutrality and Economic Pressures, Science and Society, Vol. 3, no. 2, (Spring 1939) p. 221.

The Great Coup of 1916: 1 Democracy: Roots of Poison

The Secret Elite scorn democracy. They always have. The following series of blogs trace the activities through which they eventually replaced a democratically elected government with one in which they themselves took complete control of the British  government from 1916. 

In the first years of the twentieth century, their most important influence, Alfred Milner, the passionate promoter of British Imperialism, [1] and favoured heir of Cecil Rhodes’s ideals, [2] held an absolute contempt for the British Parliamentary system [3] which he condemned as an ‘absurd waste of power’. [4] His acolyte, Philip Kerr, later lord Lothian, described his mentor’s attitude to democratic government thus:

‘In every fibre of his being he loathed the slipshod compromises, the optimistic “slogans”, the vote-catching half-truths with which democracy seemed to compromise the majestic governing art …’ [5]

Before he returned to Britain in 1905, Milner, a copious letter-writer, wrote to his future wife, then Lady Violet Cecil, that the system was hopeless. With a prescience which might make the reader today shudder, he predicted that, ‘Perhaps the great charlatan – political scallywag, buffoon, liar…and in other respects popular favourite – may someday arise, who is nevertheless a statesman…and who, having gained power by popular art, may use it for the nations ends. It is an off chance…’ [6]

(Ponder these prophetic words. Though expressed in a different era, you might be forgiven for thinking that Milner’s description fitted Tony Blair or David Lloyd George. Both were loyal servants of the Secret Elite in their day, posed as a socialist, or Liberal in Lloyd George’s case, misrepresented the reasons for promoting war, popular when first in office, considered by some to be statesmen – but not buffoons or political scallywags. No. Such words are utterly inadequate to catch their devious characters.)

Milner never accepted democratic government. He was convinced that a dedicated, hand-picked and trained elite was better-equipped to run Britain’s affairs. [7] He was an unreformed disciple of the Oxford philosopher, John Ruskin, who advocated that the control of the state should be restricted to a small ruling elite. Social order was to be built on the authority of superiors who would impose on their inferiors an absolute unquestioning obedience. [8]

With that mind-set and a determination to manipulate the political system, the highest echelons inside Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government had been successfully infiltrated before he became prime minister in 1908. [9] Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary from 1905-16), Richard Haldane (War Minister from 1906-10) and Asquith himself, all Secret Elite place-men, formed the triumvirate which steadfastly steered the British Empire into a predetermined war to crush Germany in 1914. [10] In this they were abetted by Winston Churchill and eventually David Lloyd George. [11] It would be ridiculous to imply that five mediocre British politicians were solely responsible for bringing about the world war.

They did not represent democracy in any shape or form. These men refused to be answerable to parliament or the people. They were, like many who have held top political positions in Britain over the century since, mere instruments of the power behind the scenes – the all-powerful, wealthy secret cabal whom we call the Secret Elite. This sham democracy was aided and abetted by the awesome power of the popular press, much of which was owned and controlled by the same men who wielded real power.

Few knew that a powerful group of newspaper editors and owners were closely associated with Milner and the Secret Elite. His personal network of journalists included George Buckle and later Geoffrey Dawson at the Times, Edmund Garrett at the Westminster Gazette, and ET Cook at the Daily News and Daily Chronicle. All were members of the Secret Elite. [12] Their greatest ally was Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, whom the Secret Elite approved as owner of the Times in 1908 after he had been closely vetted on their behalf by Lord Esher. [13] As owner of the Daily Mail (1896) the Daily Mirror (1903) the Observer (1905) and the Sunday Times, amongst other publications, Northcliffe’s role in the immediate pre-war years was to stir the populace against Germany. His biographers have translated this into an apparently less threatening response to the calls of Lord Milner and Lord Roberts [14] to ‘champion the cause of national defence on land, at sea and in the air.’ [15] He was the scaremonger chosen to undermine public confidence by constantly accusing Germany and the Kaiser of ill-intentions towards Britain and her Empire.

Northcliffe unleashed a torrent of fear deliberately aimed to prepare the nation for war against Germany. The Daily Mail carried concocted half-truths and downright lies to unnerve a people who had previously considered Germany no more than a friendly rival. The unrelenting propaganda spun its rabid negativity into the fabric of the nation in similar vein to the years of fear-inducing hostile headlines which led the British working classes to believe that the Brexit option in 2016 would stop the ill-perceived ‘menace’ of immigration. Falsehood became truth; reason was poisoned. Ludicrous stories filled the pages of the popular press. Little changes. [16]

Spy mania added to the sense of paranoia so cleverly promoted by Northcliffe’s stables. Ludicrous claims were made about German intentions and by default, German residents in Britain. Typical of unfounded scaremongering was Lord Roberts’s calculation that there were ‘80,000 Germans in the United Kingdom, almost all of them trained soldiers. They work many of the hotels at some of the chief railway stations, and if a German force once got into this country it would have the advantage of help and reinforcement such as no other army on foreign soil has ever before enjoyed’. [17] It was of course, nonsense, but how often has the true charlatan abused fear of immigrants to gather public support?

Milner and his associates also had backing from finance and business. He had access to Rhodes’s money and the fortunes of his South African backers, Alfred Beit and Abe Bailey. [18] Having earned the gratitude of the Rothschild family by instigating war against the Boers in order to seize their gold mines, his standing with the armaments and shipbuilding moguls could not have been higher. As increasing numbers of financiers from both sides of the Atlantic joined in associated exclusive clubs like the Pilgrims of the United States and the Pilgrims of Great Britain, [19] Milner’s influence, and consequent power, spread.

As has been fully detailed in both our Hidden History, the Secret Origins of the First World War and over several blogs, [20] this combination of political power, media exploitation and financial backing bounced the British Empire into war with Germany in August 1914 in order to create the Anglo-American supremacy in a new world order.

Consider the awful failing of assumed democracy. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August on the basis of a package of outrageous lies, vile deception and gross exaggeration just as she did in Iraq almost a century later. Despite the presumed responsibility of government to serve the needs of its citizens and stand accountable for its actions, every check which might have stopped the war was circumvented or ignored. War with Germany was visited upon the British people and the British Empire without consent. The people were not consulted. Ironically, the Liberal government which had been elected in 1906 won a landslide victory based on ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’. [21] Further elections in 1910 returned a government whose foreign policy had not changed; officially.

Parliament was not consulted about a declaration of war in 1914, despite several reassurances from Sir Edward Grey that it would be. Asquith did not move for a vote in cabinet because he knew that the cabinet was weighed against any decision to go to war. While the Secret Elite marshalled its forces in the press, the Church of England and the hallowed halls of Oxford, opponents were caught flat-footed, disbarred from criticism as the newspapers joined ranks to exclude their views. In Parliament the substantial anti-war lobby was practically silenced when an open debate was denied them by prime minister Asquith himself. [22] Those who thought that they could turn to Lloyd George to stand firm against the war and lead a popular opposition to it were sorely disabused of the notion. Like many since, he lead the dissenters into a cul-de-sac and left them there. The Welsh firebrand welched.

Britain was railroaded into war by a government which was neither capable of running it nor elected to do so. The belief that her naval and economic power was sufficient to defeat the Germans was one of the fundamental premises which underpinned the widely held assumption in Britain that it would be ‘business as usual’. [23] Amongst a range of disinformation put about to assuage a gullible public was that the navy would protect Britain from invasion, strangle the German economy and win a low-cost war, safe behind a decade of naval investment. There was no invasion. Never at any stage in the proceedings did Germany plan for an invasion. A much vaunted blockade [24] was secretly reduced to tokenism. It would not be ‘business as usual’. Be of no doubt, and we have repeatedly made this point in our blogs, the war could have been over by the Spring/Summer of 1915 had that been the prime objective. It was not due to incompetence, though the government merited that tag, or miscalculation, that the war was outwardly mismanaged, but by very carefully executed strategies to supply the enemy and prolong the war. [25]

In fact, the Secret Elite’s men in government did a very capable job in prolonging the war. Asquith’s dithering indecision, his failure to change the nature of decision-making in cabinet proved to be a stranglehold on progress. Lloyd George acted under the supervision of the banking and financial sectors on both sides of the Atlantic and used their backing to obtain loans and munitions through the exclusive J P Morgan / Rothschild portal. [26] Sir Edward Grey’s men in the Foreign Office bent double to accommodate the American interests and completely nullify the brave and tireless efforts of the navy to run an effective blockade. They also rubber-stamped the secretive and illusionary ‘Belgian Relief’ programme which was run by Herbert Hoover to supply Germany with much needed food. [27] Churchill ran amok like a headless chicken frequently abandoning his duties at the Admiralty in favour of self-serving publicity.

Victory in the field was not the objective unless it was predicated upon the complete destruction of Germany as an economic rival, and that would take time and absolute commitment. Two very different approaches were underway. Most of the liberal cabinet set out on a loosely sketched journey believing that a short war would be won at sea, and a small army would suffice for the continental struggle; the Secret Elite’s men embarked on a long debilitating war which protected their interests, guaranteed great profits, and was backed by vast resources from the United States.

Even although the Liberal majority in Asquith’s cabinet were reluctant to abandon their laissez-faire principles, Lloyd George, recognised that control of the railway network and guarantees for the shipping insurance business were absolutely necessary to the survival of social order. [28] In other words, government in times of modern warfare required direct intervention. Tellingly, Lloyd George’s first actions were to protect the banks, the money markets and the business of war. He took credit for saving the city after embracing advice from Nathaniel Rothschild and ‘a section of the business and financial world’. [29] Of course he did. He was their man.

Liberal ideology, long mocked by Milner and his followers, proved ineffectual. Do not include Asquith, Grey and Lloyd George as ‘ liberals’. The first two had long sold their souls to the imperialist race patriots; Lloyd George had simply sold his soul. They were not proponents of a political theory or party, but obedient servants of an apolitical, (in the Party sense) anti-democratic, power-obsessed oligarchy. These political place-men of the Secret Elite (then as now) were labeled liberal for public consumption. In reality they were not what the people, and even fellow members of their own party, imagined.

Prolonging the war was of course very profitable, but winning the war was everything. By 1915, the Secret Elite realised that Asquith’s approach to war-management was failing. He and his ministers were no longer dealing with the political issues for which they had been elected and could not be trusted with the unequivocal drive to crush Germany. The Secret Elite required a government focussed on the destruction of Germany and these men were not up to it.

Hundreds of thousands of young men had already been killed. Prolonging the war required men with cold, hard hearts devoid of compassion, committed to the Secret Elite’s cause. How had Milner expressed the steel required to see war through to the ultimate destruction of the enemy? His chilling advice to Richard Haldane during the Boer War was to ‘disregard the screamers’. [30] It takes a special kind of ‘strength’ to ignore humanitarian issues, ignore the utter chaos caused by the sacrifice of so many and yet be willing to sacrifice many more. Milner had such cold steel in his core.

To the Secret Elite, Milner’s deep-rooted fears were completely vindicated. Democratic liberalism, watered down as it had been since the death of Campbell-Bannerman, [31] denied Britain a co-ordinated agency to direct the war effort. In Asquith’s cabinet, only Lloyd George, increasingly the sole candidate for Secret Elite support, grasped the need to shake up the traditional approach to government. Even a pretence of democracy would not deliver ultimate victory. It was poisoning their cause.

But how could they remove the prime minister who had done their bidding?

[1] Viscount Alfred Milner was from 1902-1925 leader of the Secret Society funded and promoted originally by Cecil Rhodes. Although he spurned elected position and championed preparations for war against Germany, once the war was underway , he and his associates wanted control of the government in wartime to control the post-war settlement was they envisaged it. See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp 4-14 and p.140.
[2] He envisaged his great purpose in life to expand the English-speaking sphere of influence until it was so powerful that no nation could challenge it. see Robin Brown, The Secret Society, p. 18.
[3] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden history, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 55.
[4] Thomas Packenham, The Boer War, p. 551.
[5] The Nation & Athenaeum, 23 May 1925.
[6] Milner to Lady Cecil as quoted in A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 46.
[7] Robin Brown, The Secret Society, p. 253.
[8] J A Hobson, John Ruskin: Social Reformer, p. 187.
[9] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 101-2.
[11] Winston Churchill, World Crisis Vol 1, pp. 38-9.
[12] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 311-2.
[13] Lord Reginald Esher was one of the original members of Rhodes’s Secret Society. He was the confidante of Kings Edward VII and George V. His full role in vetting and approving Northcliffe’s acquisition of The Times see, J Lee Thompson, Northcliffe, Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922, pp. 151-3.
[14] Lord Fredrick Roberts had formerly been Commander-in-Chief of The Forces before his retiral. A close associate ofViscount Milner, with whom he shared many a platform, he avidly supported compulsory conscription to the armed forces.
[15] J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 159.
[16] The worst of his kind was William Le Queux, a Walter Mitty character, his ridiculous anti-German propaganda was supported by Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. see Christopher Andrews, Secret Service, pp. 37-48.
[17] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 23 November 1908 vol 196, cc1691.
[18] Brown, The Secret Society, p. 253.
[19] The Pilgrims Society was the embodiment of the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Great Britain. [Its centennial history was written by Anne Pimlott Baker.] Exclusive to all but the anglo-saxon elite on both sides of the Atlantic, the Pilgrims of the United States included the most pro- British and influential bankers and financiers.
[20] In particular see Blog of 17 June 2014, Secret Elite 3 : Building the Network.
[21] The great Liberal philosophy which was trumpeted by their parliamentary leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who fought and won the landslide Liberal victory of 1906.
[22] Hansard, House of Commons Debate 03 August 1914 vol 65 cc1831-2.
[23] David French, The Rise and Fall of Business as Usual’, in Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of the British Government, 1914-1919, p.10.
[24] see Blogs on the sham of blockade, posted from 10 December 2014 to February 2015. Also E Keble Chatterton, The Big Blockade.
[25] Perhaps the most interesting and puzzling scandal of the First World War was Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium which ensured that war was prolonged by providing supplies, especially foodstuffs, to Germany from 1914-1917.
[26] Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of British Government 1914-18, p. 90.
[27] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Ocuppee, p. 99 and p. 214.
[28] David French, The Rise and Fall of Business as Usual’, in Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of the British Government, 1914-1919, p. 7.
[29] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 70.
[30] J Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 483.
[31] Henry Campbell-Bannerman died in 10 Downing Street on 22 April 1908 from a heart attack.

Commission For Relief In Belgium 13: As If It Had Never Happened

Herbert Hoover’s reputation could not have survived the war years without protection from his Secret Elite masters. Once he had been presented as the humanitarian face of the so-called relief programme, and his status transformed from unscrupulous and crooked mining-engineer to quasi-diplomat, he had access to the inner chambers of the American, British and German governments. Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) records show that  between 1914-1916 he had discussions with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey [1], Prime Minister Henry Asquith [2] and Chancellor Lloyd George, [3] yet interestingly they blank him entirely from their official memoirs. Why? US President Woodrow Wilson and various Secretaries of State discussed policy with Hoover, as did German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman [4] and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. [5] The Kings of Spain and Belgium and countless senior diplomats across Europe knew Hoover personally, yet their reticence on the subject of Belgian Relief speaks volumes

Critics were silenced, rebutted or otherwise dissuaded in order to protect his  reputation as the ‘great humanitarian’. The greater Hoover’s success at the CRB in prolonging the war, the stronger the Secret Elite’s cordon of protection was drawn around him. Almost everyone who spoke out or questioned him was crushed or discredited, beaten into submission or forced to retract their claims in the face of violent threats and legal retribution. It was as if his past history had never happened. Officially.

Convinced that Belgian Relief was  damaging the British war effort as early as April 1915, the Admiralty in London, asked naval intelligence to investigate Hoover’s background. Allegations were made that he was ‘untrustworthy, had sinister business connections with German mining corporations’, and that ‘his foodstuffs had passed into German hands.’ [6] His activities were subjected to a formal investigation headed by Sir Sidney Rowlatt who duly whitewashed his findings and gave his formal stamp of approval to the Foreign Office. Loyal member of the British establishment, Rowlatt was later responsible for the repressive Rowlatt Act in India which led to serious unrest in the Punjab and the shocking Amritsar Massacre in 1919. [7]

Hoover steadfastly lied about his business connections. Initially, he claimed to have resigned from his mining company directorships because the relief programme left him no time for private business. [8] He is famously quoted as saying, ‘let the fortune go to hell’, [9] yet records from Skinner’s Mining Manual show that he served on thirteen boards of directors in 1914 and on sixteen in 1915. By 1916 he not only remained on thirteen boards but was chairman of one and joint manager of both the Burma Corporation and Zinc Corporation. [10] His companies returned immense dividends during the war largely through the unprecedented increase in demand for metals and munitions. When rumours of his impropriety in the dealings of the Zinc Corporation surfaced in 1916, law suits followed. He approached the Foreign Office to directly intervene on his behalf, on the grounds that his work with the CRB was too important to the war effort. At his behest, the Ambassadors from Belgium and France wrote to the Foreign Office to stress Hoover’s vital role in Belgian Relief. The Foreign Office advised Hoover’s solicitor that, if ‘The Court’ sought their opinion about the importance of his work, they would willingly reply. The British establishment knew how to protect its assets.

In legal proceedings taken against his Burma Corporation, he attempted to pervert the course of justice by claiming to have previously resigned from the company. His ‘resignation’ was a sham, a temporary convenience to avoid court proceedings. Back on the Board of the Burma Corporation, Hoover brokered a deal in December 1917 with the head of the CRB office in New York and Ernest Oppenheimer to develop gold mines in the Rand. He organised the finance chiefly through the CRB’s bankers, J P Morgan & Company and Morgan’s Guaranty Trust Company of New York. Thus the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa was born, a mining giant in its field from day one. [11]

Consider these connections. Hoover used the CRB banking agencies [12] to  broker a deal that rewarded him with a huge shareholding (plus options) which reaped him yet another fortune. Who was greasing whose palm?  Hoover’s access to ‘insider-knowledge’ brought him an enormous stroke of ‘good fortune’. Like Lord Rothschild some time before, he liquidated almost all of his direct Russian holdings in late 1916, just in time to avoid the consequent take-overs obligated by the Russian Revolution. Every one of his former Russian enterprises was confiscated. [13], and other unfortunates had to bear the consequent loss. Lies and evasion, deceit and malpractice were laced into Hoover’s mentality. Yet his illegal business practices were successfully covered up by his Secret Elite minders.

At the end of the war Herbert Hoover was given one final task in Europe by the Secret Elite. Their role in causing the war and supplying the German army during the conflict had to be kept buried. Any evidence of CRB impropriety, of its complicity with the German government of occupation in Belgium and of its role in prolonging the war would have been ruinous. Hoover faced a massive undertaking. With registered offices in New York, London, Brussels, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Paris, Lille and Buenos Aires, [14] official documentation for purchasing agents, shipping agents, insurance brokers, bankers and auditors, statisticians and clothing buyers, the CRB had left in its wake a multiple tonnage of bank transactions, ledger entries, accounts, deposits and records of international exchange. The list was potentially endless, at least, theoretically, because no independent records ever saw the light of day. They were systematically taken after the war by Hoover’s agents and shipped to the west coat of America. Ponder long and hard on this fact; the evidence was physically removed from its point of origin. It was to be as if the illegal importations to Germany and the malpractices of Belgian bankers and speculators had never happened.

We do not know what has since been destroyed or what languishes in the darker recesses of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, but a very determined and successful attempt was made to rewrite history while presenting Hoover as a great saviour of humanity. Our research proves that, in reality, he was a ruthless opportunist – a liar and cheat who browbeat, bad-mouthed and took advantage of the weak while greatly increasing his personal fortune throughout the war. And, had there been no CRB to supply Germany, the war would have ended as early as the Spring of 1915. Millions died while he and other millionaires thrived.

Bad as Hoover’s manipulation and removal of the CRB’s records was, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the outrageous theft of the historical record from all across Europe. In 1919 he was given this important task as the Secret Elite set about removing documentary evidence pertaining to the origins of the war. Once more he had to be re-invented. The ‘great humanitarian’ became a ‘lover of books and of history’ who wished to collect manuscripts and reports relating to the causes of the war because they would otherwise ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. [15] Hoover certainly made sure that anything incriminating ‘disappeared’.

On the basis that his involvement was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, went to Paris in April 1919 to coordinate a great heist of documentary evidence, official and unofficial, and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Adams resolved to keep a diary, but stopped after a week on the spurious excuse that he was making too many contacts and the work was a too interesting ‘to suffer interruption by recording them.’ [16] The task had to be undertaken immediately. Speed was of the essence. Adams was in Paris by 11 June with no plan of action, other than follow Hoover’s instructions that all the documentation was sent to Stanford University in California. It was about as distant a destination from the European theatre as could be imagined.

Nothing was too unimportant. Decisions about relevance would be left to a later date. Two years later Adams still hadn’t even begun the process of creating a catalogue on the rather spurious basis that doing so too early led to ‘disappointment and vexation’. [17] In Belgium, for example, access to government records was facilitated by ‘M. Emile Francqui, mining engineer and a banker of world reputation’. [18] Of course it was. Who else knew where all the important evidence was buried? Francqui, whose all-powerful Belgian bank, the Societe Generale ended the war cash rich and thriving beyond its dreams, [19] was the one man who knew exactly what had to be buried deep for all time.

Why have historians and investigative journalists failed to unmask this charade? Hoover and Francqui orchestrated the removal of documents that enabled the myth of Belgian Relief to flourish while masking its sinister role.

Hoover had many powerful friends. He persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest.  They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium. They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [20] He recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [21] Hoover allegedly donated a $50,000 ‘gift’ for the task. It would only have paid for around seventy of these agents for a year. It has not been possible for us to discover from what source the remaining nine-hundred men were paid.

Hoover’s backers claimed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’. According to Ephraim Adams, Hoover himself estimated that the process of ‘collecting’ would go on for twenty-five years [22] but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue the material. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace ’. [23] How convenient. The official propaganda insisted that the work was urgent, but it would take a millennium to catalogue. They were stealing history.

Hoover was the US Secretary of State for Commerce from 1921 and as a fitting reward for all of his sterling efforts on behalf of the Secret Elite, he became their chosen candidate in the US presidential election of 1928. His critics in America were systematically harassed or squashed. Books that exposed his malpractices were removed from shelves and whole editions pulped. Hoover had long employed sophisticated public relations to curry favour with the media. Pliant biographers and party hacks were supplemented by use of the FBI to perform background checks on would-be unsolicited authors. [24]

A campaign of determined denigration was launched against the crusading journalist Walter Liggett, whose well researched book, The Rise of Herbert Hoover stands testament to Hoover as a criminal businessman and opportunist, who strove to manipulate and remove the records of his past wrong-doing. [25] Liggett, a fearless reporter and newspaper editor who represented the best of American investigative journalism, was later gunned down for exposing syndicated crime. [26]

Tracy Kittredge, a loyal insider who worked with the CRB in Belgium, wrote a very comprehensive  history of the Commission for Relief in Belgium – now entitled the Primary Source Edition – in 1919. [27] Hoover didn’t like its content, so it remained unpublished. In 1942 he claimed that Kittredge’s work  was deemed ‘inaccurate and unreliable’ and was not be shown to anyone without clarification. [28] Hoover did not explain what the inaccuracies were, but we suspect that Kittredge’s criticism of Francqui and the bad blood between both the CRB and the CNSA was the cause. He ordered an associate to collect and destroy all copies of the unpublished work which had progressed as far as a bound proof. Fortunately for researchers, a few survived the cull. [29] Even when faced with official records from those who were there, the Secret Elite endorsed the party line; nothing irregular had ever happened. Any view to the contrary had to be suppressed.

The biography which most disturbed Hoover was John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags. [30] It was a hugely controversial expose which resulted in an outpouring of indignation from the Hoover lobby who damned the book as a complete fabrication. Shortly after its launch, Hoover’s legal team reported that Hamill had signed a one hundred and eighty-four page repudiation, admitting ‘false conclusions’. Interestingly Hamill refused in court to admit that his work was entirely false and only went as far as to say that ‘my interpretations were in error in some instances.’ [31] It has since been suggested that Hoover’s own agent, George Barr Baker, wrote the repudiation using strong-arm tactics and thuggery. That is the same George Barr Baker who penned articles published in the New York Times about starving Belgian children, and visited the Pope as the CRB envoy. [32]

Hamill’s conclusion chimes absolutely with ours: ‘The whole scheme of Belgian Relief was planned for the purpose of securing the enormous food supplies of Belgium for Germany. The Belgian Relief …. was the cause of the prolongation of the dreadful war, with all its horrors and miseries, and the loss of millions of lives, including our more than 126,000 brave American boys (not to mention the wounded and crippled).’ [33] It was, and the extent to which the Anglo-American establishment went to cover all traces of its complicity, remains awesome.

And who today has heard of the Commission for Relief in Belgium? Where does it sit in the role of honour for World War 1? No-where. It has been systematically buried; as if it never happened at all. But there was one major political consequence.

On 4 March 1929 the great Belgian Relief ‘humanitarian’ was sworn is as President of the United States of America.

[1] George I Gay and H H Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 18, p. 19.
[2] George H Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, pp. 69-70.
[3] George I Gay and H H Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 147 , p. 266.
[4] Ibid., Document 134, pp. 241-2.
[5] Ibid., Document 140, pp. 252-255.
[6] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 176.
[7] For further information on the Massacre at Amritsar in 1919, known also as the Jallianvala Bagh Massacre, see; http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/jbagh.html
[8] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 270.
[9] Walter Liggett, The Rise of Herbert Hoover, p. 209.
[10] Ibid., pp. 210-211.
[11] http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Anglo_American_Corp._of_South_Africa_Limited.aspx
[12] The Commission for the Relief in Belgium, Balance Sheet and Accounts, published 1921 p. 86
http://libcudl.colorado.edu/wwi/pdf/i71185215.pdf
[13] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 274.
[14] The Commission for the Relief in Belgium, Balance Sheet and Accounts, published 1921.
[15] Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
[16] Ephraim Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California; a report and an analysis, (1921), p. 7. https://archive.org/details/cu31924031034360
[17] Ibid.
[18] Adams, The Hoover War Collection , (1921), p. 36.
[19] After 1918, the Societe Generale continued its expansion, founding Banque Générale du Luxembourg. Banque Belge pour L’Etranger also grew, opening new branches in New York, Istanbul, and Hong Kong, among other cities. In addition, SG had banking interests in Portugal, Spain, and much of Eastern Europe. The year before its 100th anniversary, in 1922, the bank’s books showed credits amounting to BFr 4.1 billion and debits of BFr 2.1 billion. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/generale-bank-générale-de-banque-history/
[20] WhittakerChambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/%5D
[21] New York Times, 5 February 1921.
[22] Adams, The Hoover War Collection, p. 5.
[23] Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/ publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
[24] Roseanne Sizer, Herbert Hoover and the Smear Books, 1930-32, State Historical Society of Iowa, Vol. 47, (Speing 1984) no. 4, p. 347.
[25] Walter Liggett’s The Rise of Herbert Hoover was published in 1932 by the H W Fly company. it can be read on; https://archive.org/details/riseofherberthoo011467mbp
[26] Stopping The Presses, the Murder of Walter Liggett by Martha Liggett Woodbury, his daughter, is an excellent expose of the corruption and sleeze in the USA in the 1920s and 30s and details the victimisation and persecution of a respected journalist who unmasked, amongst other crooks, Herbert Clark Hoover.
[27] Tracy Barrett Kittredge was a member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1914-1917. The Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives includes his correspondence, reports, writing and newspaper clippings, but makes no mention of the book which Hoover ordered to be pulped. See Charles G Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution, p. 126.
[28] G Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, pp. 449-50.
[29] A copy held in the Library of the Free University of Brussels contains a note to the reader in French. It states that ‘the work is both a rare book and a document of real historical interest’. First printed in London in 1920 under the auspices of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, the note states that Mr Kittrege’s writings included some criticism of ‘certain Belgian persons’ so it was decided, in the interest of good Belgian-American, ‘metre au pilon’ literally, to pound it to dust. The note is dated July, 1964.
[30] John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr Hoover under Two Flags, was published by W. Faro in 1931.
[31] New York Times, 5 January, 1933.
[32] New York Times, 21 December, 1916.
[33] Hamill, The Strange Career, p. 306.

Commission For Relief In Belgium 12: Hoover, Servant Not Master

One of the essential skills that the shrewd investor requires is the ability to recognise the moment to sell and move on. The really successful investor has an additional edge; insider information. Herbert Hoover was blessed with well concealed contacts who advised and directed his career paths so that he was guided into safe waters from the storm that would surely follow the closure of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Towards the end of 1916 Hoover wanted out. For nearly two and a half years he had fronted the international funding for the relief programme and had accrued good impressions upon which he intended to build.

Herbert Hoover could rightly claim to number among his friends, Sir Edward Grey and his acolytes in the British Foreign Office [1] and President Wilson’s special advisor, Colonel Edward Mandel House and Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The Secret Elite on both sides of the Atlantic knew that Hoover had doggedly mastered the successful implementation of Belgian Relief to the advantage of all. His New York office manager, William Honnold told him confidentially that President Wilson intended to create a Relief organisation in America to co-ordinate and collect funds. Hoover instantly saw this as an opportunity for a position within the Wilson government. He confided to an associate in November 1916, ‘I would like to get out of Europe and I would like to get out with dignity’. [2]

In the post-Somme aftermath the war took a desperate turn for Germany. Britain began to apply its naval blockade seriously and Germany struggled through a damagingly poor harvest thanks to their access to Belgian foodstuffs and Romanian grain. In a global context, grain prices continued to rise alarmingly and the Allies found it increasingly onerous to fund relief for Belgium.

Hoover tried to set up a new mode of finance for the CRB which would remove the burden from Britain and France who were financing the Commission with loans from America. The solution was to raise an American loan rather than continuing to channel funds firstly to Britain and France which they then fed into the CRB. JP Morgan and his banking associates knew well that the Allies could not continue to support Belgium indefinitely and they advised Hoover to suggest a more direct approach. [3] In December 1916, he confidently reported that: ‘The bankers include Morgans, Guaranty Trust, and all other important groups, who are acting entirely out of good feeling’ were prepared to support the loan. Bankers acting entirely out of good feeling … an oxymoron surely? Hoover then proceeded to advise his men in Europe that the French and Belgian governments should settle the details with Morgan’s bank in London. [4] Clearly it was impossible for JP Morgan to advocate a relief loan which his banks could fund through the Federal Reserve System, from which they would make considerable profit, but if the suggestion came from the head of the CRB, it had much more chance of being approved by Congress.

When Hoover set off for America on 13 January 1917 with the clear objective of refocusing his career, the omens for the CRB were not auspicious. The Miners’ Battalion from New South Wales formally requested that their State Relief Fund Committee stop sending money to support Belgian Relief because they could see that the Germans were seizing the food supplies. [5] Apart from New Zealand, the people of New South Wales had contributed more per head of the population than any other state in the world and this was publicly recognised by King Albert of the Belgians. [6] According to one report, Australian soldiers had seen so many instances of relief food going to the German troops that the CRB was asked to return $220,000 of as yet unspent money. [7] Several continents away, Hoover’s men ignored the Australians’ serious and well-founded allegations and produced a ‘barrage’ of positive, fawning articles in the New York Times in recognition of their leader’s achievements. [8]

Herbert Hoover always appeared to be in the right place at the right time. He had been in London at the outbreak of war in 1914, in Berlin with Arthur Zimmerman and the banker Max Warburg in 1915, [9] and in Brussels during Edith Cavell’s trial. [10] Back in Washington on 31 January 1917, he met with President Wilson on the same evening that Germany announced the commencement of its unrestricted submarine warfare. [11] Within three days two CRB ships, the Euphrates and the Lars Cruse carrying 2,300 tons of Maize had been sunk. [12] All Relief shipping was suspended. In the ensuing rush to safe harbour two CRB ships made it to Rotterdam, a further two were torpedoed, and the remainder sought refuge in British ports

The British government declared that it would be ‘a crime on their part’ to allow cargoes of foodstuffs, which were needed immediately in Britain, to be put at risk from German torpedoes and duly ordered that the food be unloaded. [13] Twenty-five thousand tons of merchandise purchased in Britain was instantly held back. Forty-five thousand tons of foodstuffs was ‘unavoidably’ detained and a further forty thousand tons already on the high seas destined for Belgium was ordered into British ports. [14] Allegedly the food was to be held in storage, though not indefinitely, until the Germans gave cast-iron guarantees of their safe transportation. [15] At a stroke, one hundred thousand tons of food was lost to Belgium and sold to, or requisitioned by Britain. [16]

Hoover was faced with an immediate personal dilemma. What would the consequences be for him if he disbanded the CRB? His distrust of Francqui and the CNSA was profound. He sent an urgent cable to London: ‘I wish to make it absolutely clear: the CRB must be liquidated and disappear’, except as a purely benevolent soliciting agency in the USA. ‘The whole of the files must be transferred to New York’. [17] He insisted that a definitive break had to be made if relief was to continue, that the separation had to involve the complete ‘dissolution’ of the original CRB, and that he would ‘positively refuse’ to surrender its money, its organisation or its ships, on any other terms. [18] Who did he think he was? On his instruction alone, the international relief programme was to be liquidated. All the files had to be gathered together and sent to New York. What motivated Herbert Hoover was self-preservation. To hell with Belgian Relief; so much for the starving poor. This was the action of an endangered dictator whose first thought was to close down the operation and remove all evidence of wrong-doing. What caused this panic? Did he suddenly realise that if someone else took charge, the CRB’s true purpose would be unmasked?

That same evening he attended a special dinner in the Astor Hotel in New York as chief guest of five hundred of the State’s most prominent citizens. Though not an official Pilgrims Society meeting, it boasted all the trappings of the elite. In the full knowledge of his absolute instructions to London, the speech he apparently improvised was cynically disingenuous: ‘If we must retire … then other neutrals must take up this work. The world cannot stand by and witness the starvation of the Belgian people and the Belgian children … the obligation of the American people towards Belgium continues.’ He stood on the platform of the Astor Hotel and delivered these words, having just ordered that the whole programme be liquidated. His gall knew no bounds. In justifying what had taken place he declared that ‘the German army has never eaten one tenth of one per cent of the food provided. The Allied governments would never have supplied us with $200,000,000 if we were supplying the German army’. [19] The assembled elite audience swallowed every syllable of the lie.

We do not know what pressure was brought to bear on him, but next morning Hoover sent a second urgent cable to London to stop the liquidation. Everyone was instructed to stay at their posts. Hoover had erred. The ‘great humanitarian’ had over-recached himself. He was answerable to a higher authority. The Secret Elite would decide if and when the CRB and the feeding of Germany would come to an end.

Herbert Hoover found it difficult to stomach the fact that the CRB was not his to dissolve. In Brussels, Brand Whitlock, the head of the American Legation, wanted to leave the relief programme intact under the control of the Spanish and Belgian agencies. Hoover, who passionately disliked and distrusted Francqui and the CNSA, advocated a Dutch takeover. The confusion continued with a flurry of instructions to Brand Whitlock and the CRB office in Brussels, but on 5 March 1917 Hoover wrote a long and confidential letter to Vernon Kellogg in Belgium which betrayed his real objective. A full month before America declared war on Germany, Hoover primed his key men in Belgium for the eventuality. They were instructed to ‘do nothing to create the impression that he [Hoover] was running away from the Relief.’ He had clearly been briefed by the Secret Elite to adopt their basic tactic of making sure that the blame would be pinned on Germany, or the State Department if it ordered the Americans to leave. If the CRB was ‘compelled to abandon its mission’, Hoover instructed that it was to be ‘absolutely’ liquidated as a business and released from all financial obligations.[20]

When this instruction reached Brussels, Whitlock believed that ‘Hoover must be losing his head’. [21] He raged that though Hoover was three thousand miles away, he thought that he knew better than the men on the ground in Belgium, and ‘was able to impose his brutal will on the [State] Department.’ [22] To an extent he was. Hoover had cultivated his friendship with the President’s Advisor, Edward Mandel House, another Secret Elite agent close to the Morgan banking influence. Furthermore, Hugh Gibson, his strongest ally in every way, had been dispatched from the American Embassy in London to the State Department in Washington. Once again his trusted right hand man was employed where Hoover wanted him; at the heart of American foreign policy.

And so it came to pass as they ordained. On 23 March, three CRB ships were sunk, and the US State Department ordered Brand Whitlock and all American members of the CRB to withdraw from Belgium. [23] When the diplomatic staff departed on 2 April, Prentiss Grey and three CRB accountants were left behind ‘to close the books’ and train up their successors. [24] Hoover himself dealt with the business end of his London office. Euphemistically, his purpose was to wrap up the loose ends. The wrap-up became a full-blown disposal of incriminating evidence.

On 6 April, 1917, America declared war on Germany.

A solution was found for the CRB, one which Hoover could still control yet took him out of the direct firing line. He (more probably his Anglo-American patrons) proposed the establishment of a ‘Comite Neutre de Protection et Secours’ under the high patronage of the King of Spain and the Queen of Holland, and the immediate patronage of the Ambassadors and ministers of Spain and Holland. They were to provide the guarantees formerly undertaken by the Americans. The Commission for Relief in Belgium proposed to continue its financial control over the purchasing and shipping of food and the supplies would be turned over to the CNSA in Belgium and Comite Francais in the north of France. [25] Hoover, again reversing all that he had originally proposed, decided to remain as overall chairman of the Commission.

Make no mistake, the provisioning of Germany continued. In his half yearly report to Berlin from February to July, 1917, Baron von der Lancken wrote: ‘we have continued successfully to export to Germany, or distribute to our troops, appreciable quantities of food. Certain parts of the agreement have been voluntarily exploited [by the Belgians]. The advantages which Germany accrues through the relief work continues to grow.’ [26]

In May 1917, America agreed to appropriate $75,000,000 to support the revised Commission. Although credited to the British and French governments, the funds were to be spent, as before, by the CRB. The only matter to which Congress would not give its approval was a $2,000,000 gift which Hoover requested to cover his administrative expenses. [27] He knew no shame. In formally withdrawing his request, Hoover cited the alternative solution to cover his costs. ‘As we have been compelled to resell a large quantity of foodstuffs bought but which we were unable to ship due to the suspension of our operations for a period at the outset of the submarine war, we have made a considerable profit on these goods against which we can debit the Commission’s overhead costs …’ [28] In other words, when Congress refused to pay for his administrative costs, he used the money from the sale of foodstuffs earmarked for the ‘starving poor’ of Belgium. So much for charitable giving.

Does anyone still think that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was anything other than a convenient front to prolong the agony of war while the racketeers made their fortunes?

Herbert Hoover was appointed Food Commissioner for the United States by President Wilson in May 1917, [29] ‘fresh from his triumph on the Belgian Relief Committee’. [30] It was but another step in his corrupt ascent to the 31st Presidency of the United States of America.

[1] George H Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p. 298.
[2] Ibid., p. 300.
[3] George I Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 158, p. 278.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hawara and Normanby Star, Vol. LXXII, 6 January, 1917, p. 4.
[6] Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February, 1934 in the obituary for William A Holman, President of the New South Wales Belgian Relief Fund.
[7] John Hamill, The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags, p. 348.
[8] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 311.
[9] Gay and Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Documents 134 -137, pp. 241-248.
[10] Brand Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 9 October 1915. http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bwTC.html
[11] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 312.
[12] Gay and Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 240, p. 361.
[13] Ibid., p. 354.
[14] The Times, 17 March, 1917, p. 8.
[15] Sir Maurice de Bunsen statement to the Associated Press, New York Times, 6 March 1917.
[16] Hamill, The Strange Career, p. 348.
[17] Hoover cable 93 to CRB-London office, 13 February 1917.
[18] Nash,The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 320.
[19] New York Times, 14, February, 1917.
[20] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 326.
[21] Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 4 March, 1917.
[22] Ibid., 13 March, 1917.
[23] Tracy Barrett Kittredge, The History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1914-1917, primary source edition, p. 418.
[24] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 339.
[25] Kittredge, The History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, pp. 435-442.
[26] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Occupee, p. 298.
[27] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 358.
[28] Gay and Fisher, Document 168, p. 286.
[29] New York Times, 4 May, 1917.
[30] The Times, 20 July, 1917, p. 5.

The Commission For Relief In Belgium 3: The Well-Connected American

Hoover the ‘humanitarian’ re-branded himself in the first weeks of the Great War as the saviour of the many thousands of Americans stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic by the unexpected outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914. Most were tourists, school teachers with students, businessmen and the like. Four different support groups had been organised promptly to help distressed Americans get home safely, but Hoover was not initially involved with any one of them. The first American Citizens Committee was led by Fred I Kent, vice-president of the Banker’s Trust Co. [1] and the diplomat, Oscar Straus. Its Headquarters were sited in London’s Savoy Hotel.[2] At the American embassy, the recently appointed U. S. Consul, Robert Skinner, could barely cope with enquires and angry demands for instant repatriation in the early chaos of those August days. This was not what Skinner had expected when he took up the post, but he worked closely with the ambassador and embassy staff to address the pressing problem he had inherited. It was chaos.

Step forward Herbert Clark Hoover. Watch carefully how he operated. Hoover let nothing stand in his way to gain control of a situation from which he could make money. He manipulated officials, lied about his circumstances, invented credentials, leaned heavily on government contacts in America and Britain and emerged triumphant. This was how Hoover did business.

Fred Kent and his American Citizens Committee had prompted the U.S. Ambassador, Walter Page to seek funds from Washington to enable their stranded citizens to return quickly to the United States. Congress instantly approved an advance of $2,500,000 in gold on 5 August and sent it across the Atlantic on the USS Tennessee that same day. [3] Hoover smelled an opportunity and pushed his way to the fore. He claimed that Robert Skinner telephoned him in person and asked for his help. Skinner’s version was that Hoover appeared out of the blue and offered his assistance.

Hoover next telephoned an associate in America, Lindon W Bates, and asked him to approach the Wilson administration in Washington to appoint him as a special commissioner to handle the return of stranded Americans. [4] He convened a meeting of fellow mining engineers and trusted associates and had himself appointed chairman of a ‘Committee of American Residents in London for Assistance of American Travellers.’ He called Bates again on 6 August to announce that he had ‘today been elected President of a Relief Committee established in London by American residents to look after the 40,000 stranded Americans.’ [5] He did not mention that it was his own, self-styled, unauthorised committee.

Hoover meant business. Within 24 hours he had stationary printed with the new committee’s logo on the masthead. Like the proverbial cuckoo he moved in on Kent and the original American Citizen’s Committee and pushed them out of the nest, claiming with his customary disregard for fact that his rescue group was organised under  the ‘official auspices’ of  US Ambassador Walter Page whom, he alleged, had agreed to be honorary chairman. [6] The Ambassador had not been consulted. Indeed on 9 August, Ambassador Page pointedly did not invite Hoover to join a committee empowered to distribute $300,000 in advance of the arrival of the USS Tennessee. Instead, he appointed Fred Kent. Relationships deteriorated. When the Congressional money arrived in London on 16th August in the care of the US Under-Secretary of War, Henry Breckinridge, Hoover magnanimously proposed that they join forces, but was rebuffed in no uncertain manner both by the Under-Secretary and the Ambassador. [7]. Why would they have surrendered a huge sum of public money to the care of an unknown American mining engineer resident in London?

Despite the clear antipathy expressed by both the American Ambassador and the Under-Secretary for War, a seismic change in their opinion occurred, literally, overnight. It was as if there had been divine intervention. The situation was completely turned on its head.  By the evening of 17 August, Hoover and his Resident’s Committee had been formally invited by the Ambassador to take over and manage the entire distribution of the funds. Why? How? Neither Page nor Breckinridge knew or had  worked with Hoover, so who instructed them that he should be entrusted not just with the money, but in his own words, ‘take over the entire distribution’? [8] Given that Kent had impeccable credentials in the United States as a high-profile banker from the J P Morgan stables and Straus was a government-favoured diplomat, what more could Herbert Hoover have to offer? He too was associated with the Morgan empire in New York, but Hoover’s connections traversed the Atlantic. He alone had Secret Elite backing from British politicians and business. That was the difference.

Hoover’s victory was absolute. He was given undivided management of the  congressional funds.  Page also authorised Hoover to use the money to reimburse any costs which had already been incurred by the Resident’s Committee. A ‘most opportune’ subsidy, as he later described it. [9]  This was not a change of heart; radical surgery had been involved.

In a private letter to President Wilson dated 23 August 1914, the Ambassador reported that ‘the organization and measures for helping our stranded people were energetic and right…’ thanks to the ‘Americans of ability who conducted the American Relief Committee.’ [10]  Did he mean Hoover? What pressures were exerted on Page and Breckinridge to bring about such a complete turn around? Who, within the darker recesses of Washington politics, could have authorised a decision so much at variance with the initial instincts of both the Ambassador and the Under-Secretary for War? This is a very important question, and one which will be asked over and again. Who was behind Herbert Hoover? Unquestionably Hoover had many friends in, and associated with, the Wilson Administration in Washington and, as we have shown, in London too.

When President Wilson approached Walter Page in 1912 with a view to his appointment as Ambassador to Great Britain, Page was reluctant to accept the position because he did not think that he could support himself in the necessary style, give lavish dinners and mix with the wealthy upper-class society of London. [11] Wilson arranged for his personal banker, Cleveland H Dodge of the National City Bank of New York to add $25,000 per annum to Page’s account [12] to sweeten the burden of office. Cleveland Dodge was the financial powerhouse behind Woodrow Wilson. [13]

Thus Britain was gifted an American Ambassador financed by a major stock-holder of the National City Bank,  who also happened to be one of America’s munitions magnates  [14] and financial collaborator with J P Morgan. Hoover’s connections in Washington linked him to President Wilson’s right-hand-man, Colonel Edward Mandell House and the Morgan banking empire. Strangely, while House’s semi-autobiography, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, contains no reference to Herbert Hoover, a volume of correspondence about Hoover and his work in Belgium, sent between House and the President, can be found in Woodrow Wilson’s private papers. [15] What was House determined to hide? Why did he want to wipe out any reference to his links with Herbert Hoover?

Hoover allegedly ‘forsook his private pursuits’ and entered the ‘slippery road of public life’ [16] for the greater good of humanity. Events as they unfolded proved just how great a lie that was. He did not forsake his private pursuits.  In fact in order to take advantage of the excessive profits offered by the war, Hoover defied the international embargoes and Acts of Parliament by which the British government forbade trading with the enemy and bought cyanide from Germany for use in his mines in October 1914. At precisely the same time as he was thrusting himself forward at the Foreign Office as the one man who could save the starving in Belgium, he purchased a valuable shipment of the chemical from Germany through a Swiss agent. His cargo was shipped down the Rhine to Rotterdam and paid for by the Swiss agent so that the cash transfer could not be traced back to him. Since both Holland and America were neutral countries, the transaction was untouchable. Once his cyanide was safely in Rotterdam it could be forwarded to almost any port in the world that he chose. Hoover understood well how business found ways around legal barriers, tax liability and contractual obligations. He instructed his agent to use the word ‘stock’ rather than ‘cyanide’ when he cabled London to deceive the British censor. [17] His business ‘ethics’ did not include loyalty. If the Germans could supply a product at a lower cost, he bought from Germans; war or no war. The Secret Elite understood.

Indeed, contrary to the impression that he abandoned his predatory capitalist instincts in favour of charitable humanitarianism, Hoover continued to promote his own business interests from 1 London Wall Buildings. His Russian investments (sold at profit quite miraculously before the Revolution of 1917) still earned him a sound return as did his holdings at Lake View and Oroya in Australia. [18] His Zinc Corporation, which he formed while in partnership with Bewick, Moreing & Co (of Kaiping infamy), flourished. [19] Though he did not attend the 1914 Annual General Meeting of the Burma Corporation in person due to his ‘duties connected with his position as President of the American Belgian Relief commission’, his brother, Theodore, attended as a  Board member. [20] Hoover wrote the Chairman’s Report. It promised great wealth to investors, claimed that the company owned one of the ten most important mining discoveries since the turn of the century, and promised that the Burma Corporation would have ‘an important bearing on the future course of the world’s production of lead, zinc and silver’. With costs of extraction at £3 per ton and selling price a variable between £11- £18 per ton, expectations were high. [21] His prediction was no idle boast. Share prices later rose tenfold between August and December 1915. [22] Of course, war was raging across the globe and both sides paid high prices for the ores from which to manufacture death.

Herbert Hoover was no humanitarian.

[1] Fred I Kent Papers (1901-1954). http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC077
[2] George H Nash, The life of Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p. 4.
[3] Chicago Tribune, 6 Aug 1964, at http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1964/08/06/page/123/article/widow-recalls-husbands-voyage-on-gold-ship-u-s-s-tennessee
[4] George H Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p.7.
[5] CRB Miscellaneous files, H1. Nash, op. cit., reference 22 page 386.
[6] New York Times, 8 August 1914, p. 3.
[7] Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, p. 10.
[8] Ibid., p. 10.
[9] Hoover to Page, 23 September, 1914. Reference 52, as cited in Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 387.
[10] Burton J Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H Page, vol. 3, p.136.
[11] Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s 60 Families, p. 142.
[12] Ray Stannard Baker, (Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and confidante of Woodrow Wilson),  The Life and Letters of Woodrow Wilson, VI, pp. 33-4.
[13] Antony Sutton, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, p. 78.
[14] Lundberg, America’s 60 Families, p. 142-3.
[15] The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol, 32. Princeton NJ, as quoted in Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, p. 96.
[16] Nash, Herbert Hoover The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, preface, p. x.
[17] Ibid., p. 16.
[18] John Hamill, The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two flags, p. 318.
[19] The Mining Magazine, July 1916, p. 9.
[20] Elena S Danielson, Historical Note on the Commission for Relief in Belgium, , in United States in the First World: An Encyclopaedia, edited by Anne Cipriano Venzon http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6z09n8fc/entire_text/
[21] The Times, 23 December, 1914, p. 14.
[22] The Mining Magazine, July 1916, pp. 42, 103, 168,  232.

Munitions 4: Lloyd George And Very Secret Arrangements

For reasons that have not been fully examined, Lloyd George began to assume a proprietary interest in munitions. His work as Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to have kept him occupied in monetary and fiscal matters, raising war loans and extending credit, but his voice as a Secret Elite agent in Asquith’s Cabinet repeatedly brought him into conflict with Kitchener. He interfered with War Office orders, placed twenty-million pounds at the disposal of the Master-General of the Ordnance in an effort to support increased capacity from the established armaments firms and virtually freed the Ordnance Department from Treasury control. [1] He also looked for assistance from America.

The Anglo-American Establishment closed ranks behind its British associates, and the U S State Department, which had previously blocked a request from the JP Morgan banking firm to make loans to the allies, issued a press release on 15 October declaring that, on reflection, it had ‘no authority to interfere with the purchase of goods by belligerents, even of munitions, and it would be highly unneutral for it to do so’. Pressure had been exerted on the Woodrow Wilson’s government ‘to permit the belligerent nations to buy goods and raw materials in America’ [2]. And that pressure emanated directly from the JP Morgan banking dynasty, with its Rothschild connection, the powerful Pilgrims Society, which included a select ‘collective of the wealthiest figures of both Britain and the United States who were deeply involved with the Secret Elite,’ [3] and the presidential advisor, Robert Lansing. [4] Though professing an absolutely neutral stance, the door to America had been opened for the allies by President Wilson’s administration from October 1914. The question was, would the War Office use the opportunity well?

The British Cabinet Committee meeting on 21 October agreed to contact the War Office agent in America with a request for 400,000 rifles and three days later sent their representative, Captain Smyth-Pigott to New York. They did not know that Lloyd George, whom the Secret Elite had determined would have ultimate control, had already acted independently. He had sent his most able Treasury expert, Basil Blackett, to America to evaluate the logjam that had built up in military procurement. His first reports insisted that the War Office and the Admiralty had to start co-ordinating their purchasing strategies because suppliers were raising prices and playing one off against the other. [5] Lloyd George met privately in his rooms with Lord Rothschild to seek financial advice shortly before the ‘Prince of Israel’, as the Chancellor dubbed him, died. [6] and, around the same time, a further most important connection was established.

In November 1914, the Chancellor of the Exchequer contacted his acquaintance, Edward Charles Grenfell, senior partner of Morgan-Grenfell & Co., and director of the Bank of England, to discuss whether rifle production in the United States could be increased and engineering production switched to munitions manufacture. The line of contact started in the Treasury with Lloyd-George, through Grenfell to J.P. Morgan & Co., the largest investment banking firm in America and back through the same channel to London. Morgan immediately promised to liaise with two firms, Remington and Winchester, ‘friends’ of his group, and an understanding was reached. [7] Delivery would however take eleven months. [8] Trusted Secret Elite agents had created a very pro-British accord which would benefit them all.

But Kitchener would not have it. The War Office complained loudly about this civilian arrangement and Kitchener contacted J P Morgan directly, demanding that the order be cancelled. In his view, munition supply was still War Office business and no-one else’s. Lloyd George was furious; Edward Grenfell, outraged. The carefully planned Trans-Atlantic accord appeared to have been smothered by Kitchener’s intervention, but the Chancellor had powerful friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Grenfell complained bitterly that ‘the manner in which the War Office have dealt with the proposed rifles contract with Morgan, Grenfell and Co, will have a detrimental effect on Public opinion in America.’ [9] It was always a good line to take. American public opinion mattered to the British government. That same day Lloyd George smoothed Edward Grenfell’s ruffled feathers by stating that Kitchener’s communication to Morgan was based on a regrettable ‘misapprehension’ and asked for Morgan’s cooperation’ [10] Subsequent orders were placed with Morgan’s chosen men without War Office interference.

Lloyd George’s next tactic was to use his valued associates from his days as President of the Board of Trade. The British Embassy in Washington had reported that a large number of purchasing agents were abusing their position and accepting ridiculously high prices for goods bought in America, so Sir George Macaulay Booth of the shipping company, Alfred Booth and Co. was dispatched to the United States to assess the extent of the problem. Here he found that British buyers were paying thirty-seven shillings for coats that could have been procured for twenty-four shillings.

The British Ambassador, Spring Rice, recommended that J P Morgan be appointed sole purchaser to protect British interests, and Booth returned in mid-November to report to Kitchener and Churchill, as well as the Board of Trade, that there was an over-riding need for a sole purchaser…and that it should be Morgan. Booth was well aware that in addition to his dominant position in American banking, Morgan controlled a vast tonnage in International Maritime Marine, and an alliance with him would guarantee the use of Booth’s ships in the allied interest. Apparently historians have concluded that it is not exactly clear ‘just which cabinet minister formally asked which British or American Morgan partner to take on responsibility, [for munitions] or when.’ [11] It was clearly Lloyd George. He had the confidence of the Secret Elite and they had facilitated the arrangement.

As a result, a purchasing contract was signed in January 1915 between J.P.Morgan and the British Treasury, appointing the New York firm as its sole purchaser in the United States. It should hardly be a surprise. Morgan was intimately linked to the Secret Elite, [12] had offices in London (Morgan-Grenfell and Co,), Paris (Morgan, Harjes & Co.) and New York, (J.P.Morgan and Co.) and E.C. Grenfell personally acted as the go-between. This was not the usual order of business. Under normal circumstances the British Embassy in Washington would have been the point of liaison. What emerged was unprecedented. Control over the spending of thousands of millions of British tax-payers’s pounds was placed in the hands of an American plutocrat and his British agent in London.

Each morning, Edward Grenfell called at the Bank of England with the latest pound-to-dollar exchange quotations from America. He would discuss this with the joint-permanent secretaries at the Treasury before walking back to his office in Old Broad Street. There, he had the orders of the day encoded and sent by secret cable directly to New York. And here again we find that Secret Elite agents operated above the law of the land, out-with the knowledge of the British cabinet, in contravention of the Defence of the Realm Act and over the head of the official censor. Lloyd George permitted Edward Grenfell in London, access to an unrestricted direct cable to J.P. Morgan in New York so that its messages were more secure and absolutely secret. [13]

Ponder for a moment on this unique arrangement. Unrestricted coded cables were sent on a daily basis to a New York banking company agreeing purchasing orders, banking instructions and exchange rates. Taking this line of argument one step further, the men who created and ran the Federal Reserve System were in cahoots with the British central bank to agree the values of their respective currencies without the scrutiny of any political or democratic agency. The Secret Elite, as embodied in the whole Anglo-American Establishment, was absolutely in control. It could be argued that the British economy was being run from J P Morgan’s offices in New York. Is there any clearer example of what was called ‘the Money Power’?

Questions were asked in Parliament when rumours of the government’s agreement were leaked to the press. Morgan was known to favour his own or associated companies to the exclusion of others, a practice which ran contrary to public policy and could adversely affect British manufacturing interests. The MP for Newry, John Mooney, alleged that Morgan companies were buying up goods and selling them on to the British government at higher prices. [14] But to no avail. The deed was done. The public new nothing of this. Indeed no-one knew of this most secret arrangement.

If we take one step back and look at these arrangements in the cold light of reflection, Lloyd George’s interference in armaments and munitions dated from September 1914 when he informed the War Office that he, as chancellor, had set aside £20 million to finance extensions to factories for the production of armaments. His consequent disgust at their intransigence in contacting the armaments ‘trade’, as he called it, to push forward additional supplies of ‘guns, rifles and ammunition’ has been well documented. [15] That he was the first to register serious concerns about the likelihood of a severe shortage of munitions, [16] arguing vehemently against Kitchener in Cabinet meetings that War Office practice was outdated, is in itself interesting. His informants were ‘prominent industrialists’ from ‘all over the country.’ [17] In other words, Lloyd George was the armament trusts’ voice in Cabinet. His confidence was such that he could initiate orders and organise processes, sanction agreements and by-pass War Office restrictions in the knowledge that he would be supported. Little wonder Kitchener felt undermined.

Lloyd George was also in a unique position compared to other Cabinet ministers. He knew of the frequent requests from Sir John French for more shells for his howitzers; requests that became the theme of ‘almost daily telegrams’ from the front. [18] While Kitchener was concerned about the unprecedented rate at which shells were being ‘expended’, urging Sir John French to economise, Lloyd George met with representatives of Vickers, Armstrongs, Beardmore and the Coventry Ordnance to promise them that the government would find the money to increase their capital expenditure on munitions. [19] That money would come from America. Much of that money would be spent in America on armaments and component parts and be paid for, eventually, by the British tax-payer.

So, who did Lloyd George represent?

[1] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 267.
[2] Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, p. 14.
[3] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 312.
[4] See blog post Lusitania 8, published 18/05/2015.
[5] Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of British Government 1914-18, p. 89.
[6] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, Vol. 1,  p.70.
[7] Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, p. 14.
[8] J P Morgan, New York, to E C Grenfell, 11 November 1914, PRO LG/C/1/1/32.
[9] Edward Grenfell to Mr Lloyd George, 13 November, 1914, PRO, LG/C/1/1/33.
[10] Lloyd George to Mr Grenfell, PRO LG/C/1/1/34.
[11] Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, p. 18.
[12]  Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 212-214.
[13] Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of British Government 1914-18, p. 90.
[14] Hansard House of Commons Debate. 20 April 1915, vol. 71, cc175-6.
[15] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 79-80.
[16] Richard Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill, p. 133.
[17] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 82.
[18]  Ibid., pp. 86-7.
[19]  Ibid., p. 89.

Lusitania 8: The Anglo-American Collusion

Predatory beasts that choose to hunt together often use a very successful tactic. While one catches the attention and focus of the prey, the other strikes the mortal blow and both share the carcass. Such was the modus operandi of the Anglo-American Establishment, the expanding Secret Elite so effectively identified by Professor Carrol Quigley. [1] They placed power and influence into hands chosen by friendship and association rather than merit, and have controlled politics, banking, the press and much else in Britain and the United States for the past century. Sometimes referred to obliquely as ‘the money-power, ‘the hidden power’ or ‘the men behind the curtain’, these men amassed vast profits for their companies, banks and industries through the war against Germany. We refer to them as the Secret Elite, [2] and our book, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War reveals exactly how they came to control politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Their complicity in the sinking of the Lusitania and its immediate cover-up, demonstrates just how far their influence extended inside both Downing Street and the White House.

The influential diplomat and historian, Lewis Einstein captured the Secret Elite’s sense of inter-dependence and mutually assured future perfectly in an article published in 1913 in the London edition of the National Review. [3] He argued cogently that the United State’s share in the world power system meant that America would have to ensure that Britain was not defeated in a war with Germany, and would have to intervene in any future major European war if that was threatened. [4]

These views were shared by the anglophile American historian and correspondent for the Secret Elite’s Round Table Journal, George Louis Beer, [5] Ambassador Walter Hines Page, President Wilson’s personal mentor, Edward Mandell House, the US Ambassador at Berlin, James Gerard, and most importantly in terms of the American involvement with the Lusitania, the up-and-coming presidential advisor, Robert Lansing. [6] Woodrow Wilson was a political puppet of the Secret Elite, and the men surrounding and representing him were entrenched anglophiles who staunchly believed in the ultimate victory of the English-speaking race. The ordinary American may have thought his President and his country neutral, but in the corridors of real power, neutrality was a sham.

The most prominent American politician who attempted to enforce neutrality was Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. In August 1914, he advised President Wilson not to allow the Rothschild-backed bankers, J P Morgan and Co to raise loans and credits for the allies [7] but the bankers soon retaliated through their favoured trade advisor to the President, Robert Lansing. Despite Secretary Bryan’s repeated objections, Lansing and the State Department sided with the bankers and munitions manufacturers to alter the rules on credit and trade. They insisted that an embargo on arms sales by private companies was unconstitutional and enabled the US to become the Entente’s supply base despite the appearance of so-called neutrality. [8]

The Germans knew from their own spy network that the ‘secret’ British purchases of munitions and materiel of war was constant and extensive. J P Morgan Jnr was intimately linked to the Secret Elite, and his banking empire,  J P Morgan and Co. was at the core of the conspiracy to arm the Allies. In January 1915, he signed a contract appointing him sole purchasing agent as well as the Treasury’s primary financial agent. [9] Morgan’s associate, E C Grenfell, a director of the Bank of England, personally acted as a go-between with Washington and London. Britain’s munitions procurer, George Macauley Booth, ( of the Shipping co. Alfred Booth, ) readily gave his support to Morgan. In addition to his pre-eminence in US banking, Morgan controlled a vast tonnage of shipping through his International Mercantile Marine Co. George Booth was well aware that an alliance with Morgan meant that both his ships and Cunard’s would benefit greatly from the huge upsurge in Atlantic trade. [10] Vast profits were made. From the start of the war until they entered in April 1917, quite apart from weapons, the United States sent the Allies more than a million tons of cordite, gun-cotton, nitrocellulose, fulminate of mercury and other explosive substances. British servicemen in civilian clothes were employed in the scheme and customs at both ends turned a blind eye to the illicit trade underwritten by the merchants of death. Unfortunate passengers on the liners which carried the munitions knew nothing of the dangers that lurked in their hold.

On the dock-side in New York, cargoes were inspected by the Admiralty forwarding agent, and the more urgently needed were allocated to faster ships. Cargo manifests were a charade of false names and supposed destinations. Security was tight, but munitions are difficult to disguise, even if the cargo list claimed that raw or gun cotton was ‘furs’, or weapons of war appeared as ‘sewing machines’. It was standard British practice to sail on the basis of a false manifest  with the tacit blessing of the Collector of Customs, Dudley Field Malone, another of the President’s place-men. [11]

A friend and protégé of President Woodrow Wilson, Malone had known and supported him since the beginning of his political career.  In November 1913, after a brief period at the State Department, Malone was appointed to the post of Collector of the Port of New York. This was a political sinecure, paying $12,000 a year for supervising the collection of import duties. [12] It was mere child’s play to have the manifest stamped with the approval of Messrs Wood, Niebuhr and Co., Customs Brokers of Whitehall Street, New York. [13] The Admiralty in London was advised in advance which ships carried what cargo, and of their destination and estimated date of arrival. Such was the understanding between governments that British Consul-General Sir Courtney Bennet, who directed the British counter-intelligence operation in New York, had his own desk in the Cunard general manager’s office. [14] Exports of munitions from America to Britain was so blatant that it should embarrass every historian who denies the practice or claims that the Lusitania was simply a passenger liner.

The sinking of the Lusitania posed a serious problem for President Wilson’s administration. On 9 May 1915, an official statement from the German government stated that the Lusitania was ‘naturally armed with guns…and she had a large cargo of war material’. [15] Alarmed by possible ramifications, President Wilson telephoned Robert Lansing demanding to know precisely what the Lusitania had been carrying.  Lansing had a detailed report from Malone on his desk by noon. It stated that ‘practically all of her cargo was contraband of some kind’ with lists denoting great quantities of munitions. This was political dynamite of the most damning kind. Lansing and Wilson realised that if the public learned that over a hundred Americans had lost their lives because of their abuse of neutrality, they would not survive the inevitable  backlash. [16] Consequently, the official statement from the Collector of the Port of New York stated ‘that Report is not correct. The Lusitania was inspected before sailing as customary. No guns were found.’ [17] The denial was given full coverage by the international press and became the mantra of court historians from that time onward. The real manifest was consigned to obscurity and may never have seen the light of day had not Franklin Delaney Roosevelt, at that time Assistant Secretary at the Navy, not saved it for posterity, [18] and Mitch Peeke and his team not traced it to the FDR Presidential Archives. [19]

The text and terms of the American Note of protest to Germany of 11 May 1915 was a historic and deliberately abrasive document. Omitting the customary diplomatic civilities, Wilson protested that American citizens had the right to sail the seas in any ship they wished even if it was a belligerent and armed merchantman. His words were ‘unanimously approved and commended by the financial community’ where a group of leading bankers and financiers vowed to help finance the Allies in memory of the drowned capitalist, Cornelius Vanderbilt. [20] The official German reply from their Foreign Office regretted that ‘ Americans felt more inclined to trust English promises rather than pay attention to the warnings from the German side.’ [21] Germany deeply regretted the loss of American lives and offered compensation, but British merchant vessels had been instructed by Winston Churchill to ram and destroy German submarines where possible. They refused to concede that the sinking of the Lusitania was an illegal act, and repeated, correctly, that she was a vessel in the British Navy’s merchant fleet auxiliary service and had been carrying munitions and contraband of war.

The final, undeniable proof that the Lusitania had been used contrary to international law came with the resignation of President Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan on 8 June 1915. His resignation statement was clear and unambiguous, though he posed his distaste as a rhetorical question. ‘Why should American citizens travel on belligerent ships with cargoes of ammunition?’ He believed that it was the government’s duty to go as far as it could to stop Americans travelling on such ships and thus putting themselves, and by default, the American nation, at risk. His parting shot clarified what had happened on the Lusitania. ‘I think too that American passenger ships should be prevented from carrying ammunition. The lives of passengers should not be endangered by cargoes of ammunition whether that danger comes from possible explosions within or from possible explosions without. Passengers and ammunition should not travel together.’ [22] He might just as well have said, ‘it matters not whether the Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo or an internal explosion from munitions onboard. The truth is she was carrying munitions.’ Lives had been lost; the truth had to be suppressed by the the American government too. Immediately. To his eternal credit, Bryan would have nothing more to do with the Wilson Administration. He was replaced by the Wall Street champion, Robert Lansing, whose connivance in favour of both the money-power and the Allies in Europe had established his credentials.

Suppression of evidence continued unabated. Wesley Frost, the American Consul in Queenstown obtained affidavits from every American survivor and these were forwarded by him to the State Department in Washington and the Board of Trade in London. Not one of the thirty five affidavits was ever used in British or American inquiries. Nor is there any trace of the copies sent to London save the acknowledgement of their safe receipt. [23] Why? We can only speculate that they would not have corroborated the story about a single torpedo. Charles Lauriat, Jr., for instance, a Boston bookseller, survived the ordeal, and on his safe return to London, met Ambassador Page. Surely his independent testimony would have been very valuable, given an experience which he shared with the Ambassador, but he was convinced that here had been a single torpedo. Lauriat was also angry about the manner in which survivors were threatened by the British authorities at Queenstown. [24] He was not called.

And what of that powerfully influential coterie of American anglophiles who gathered at Ambassador Walter Page’s residence on the evening of 7 May? What did they really know? Just five days before the sinking, Page had written a letter to his son Arthur forecasting ‘the blowing up of a liner with American passengers’. On the same day he wrote ‘ if a British liner full of American passengers be blown up, what will Uncle Sam do?’ Note that the question concerned a ship being blown up, not sunk. Then he added ‘That’s what’s is going to happen.’ [25] What too of Mandell House’s discussions on 7 May both with Sir Edward Grey and King George V? They questioned him directly about the impact on America of a passenger liner being torpedoed, [26] yet House seemed to find nothing suspicious in their foreknowledge. They knew that a disaster was about to happen, because they had been complicit in its organisation and preparation. On both sides of the Atlantic evil men pursued greater profit from human loss.

The official American reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania contained so many lies and went to such a depth to cover government complicity that there can be no doubt whatsoever that they shared in the blame for the dreadful incident. American authorities, bankers, financiers and politicians close to the Secret Elite were obliged to hide the truth that they were supplying Britain and France with much needed munitions in contravention of international law. In addition, they allowed American citizens to act as human shields and defied  public opinion in so doing. Yes, Captain Schweiger of U-20 fired the fateful torpedo but the great liner had deliberately been set up as an easy target or, as the cold, scheming Churchill called it, ’livebait.’ [27]

Newspaper outrage denounced the sinking as the mass murder of innocent American citizens. The New York Times likened the Germans to ‘savages drunk with blood’ [28] and the Nation declaimed that ‘the torpedo that sank the Lusitania also sank Germany in the opinion of mankind’. [29] Stirred though they were, the American people were reluctant to embrace all out war. In a somewhat crude analysis the East coast had been galvanised by the powerful Anglo-American interests whose profits were already mounting in millions by the day. But the further news travelled from New York,  through the Mid-West to the Pacific coast, the sinking of the Cunarder excited less and less attention. The British Ambassador regretfully informed the Foreign Office that the United States was a long way from war with anybody. The British Ambassador at Paris described Americans as ‘a rotten lot of of psalm-singing, profit mongering humbugs’. [30] Changing opinion requires patience and the constant reiteration of propaganda.

The sinking of the Lusitania, and the successful cover-up by two complicit governments, played an important role in bringing about an eventual sea-change in opinion across America. They were also complicit  in the murder of 1,201 men, women and children.

[1] Carrol Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, published 1981, Books In Focus.
[2] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins OF The First World War, p. 18.
[3] Lewis Einstein, The United States and the Anglo-German Rivalry, National Review, LX, Jan. 1913.
[4] Ibid., pp. 736-50
[5] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 168.
[6] Robert E Osgood, Ideals and Self Interest in America’s Foreign Policy, pp.114-34; and 154-50.
[7] Bryan to JP Morgan and Co. 15 August, Library of Congress, Foreign Relations, Supplement 580.
[8] Daniel M Smith, Lansing and the Formation of American Neutrality Policies, 1914-1915, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol.43 No. 1, p. 69.
[9] Kathleen Burk, War And The State, The Transformation of British Government, 1914-1919, p. 89.
[10] Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, pp. 18-19.
[11] Colin Simpson, Lusitania, pp. 49-51.
[12] http://notorc.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/dudley-field-malone-1-courage-of-his.html
[13] lusitania.net
[14] Simpson, Lusitania, p. 59.
[15] The United States and War: President Wilson’s Notes on the Lusitania and Germany’s reply, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, vol. XXX (1915).
[16] Simpson, Lusitania, pp. 172-3.
[17] The United States and War: President Wilson’s Notes on the Lusitania and Germany’s reply, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, vol. XXX (1915) p. 47.
[18] Our thanks to Colonel Robert A Lynn, Florida Guard, from personal communication.
[19]See Guest blog, 2 May 2015, Mitch Peeke; The Lusitania Story – The Struggle for The Truth.
[20] The Times, Saturday 15 May, 1915, p. 7.
[21] The United States and War: President Wilson’s Notes on the Lusitania and Germany’s reply, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, vol. XXX (1915) p. 47.
[22] Ibid., p. 48.
[23] Simpson, Lusitania, p. 168.
[24] Lauriat, Charles E.  The Lusitania‘s Last Voyage.  Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1915.
[25] Burton J Hendrick, The Life And Letters Of Walter Page, vol. 1. p. 436.
[26] Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol.1, p. 432.
27] Reported in a letter from George Booth to Alfred Booth, 25 September 1914.
[28] Thomas A Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, p. 626.
[29] New York Nation, 13 May, 1915.
[30] H C Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 170. and footnote 6.

Briey (3) Comite des Forges; Rule of the Iron Masters

The Comite des Forges represented a powerful group of iron and steel producers whose links with the French government were so dominant that the two were often as one. Imitating the American business practice by which major manufacturing heavy industry companies acted together in monopolistic collusion, the Comite des Forges harmonised its prices and liaised with other international iron and steel groups which completely dominated the world market. The Comite was the epitome of capitalist power structure in France. [1] It bound together individual iron and steel companies by strict agreements on quotas and prices. These ranged from large conglomerates like the Comptoir Siderurgique de France to smaller units like the Comptoir des Rails.

The Comite neither sold nor produced products. It acted in a far more subtle manner, retaining political, strategic and economic influence by means of elected politicians and well financed propaganda. The Comite des Forges had no subsidiaries, though its members paid annual dues to the central treasury based on the size of their output and number of employees. Under the leadership of the President of the Comite this power-bloc controlled all of the major iron and steelworks in France through regional committees in Loire, Nord, l’Est, Miniere d’Alscace-Lorraine, Forges de Lorraine and Champagne. It controlled regional and national press. It influenced the French Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay and many top level national politicians emerged from these roots in later years. [2]

Its first President was Eugene Schneider, a director of the Creusot Company, Depute for Saone-et-Loire and at one point, Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. He grew rich on the monopoly gained from the French government to supply armaments and railway construction material. [3] The French navy purchased its armour plate from Schneider Creusot which became a market leader in naval artillery. [4] Eugene Schneider was also a director of the Credit-Lyonnais and a founder of Banque de L’Union Parisienne. A mutually supportive blueprint for success emerged from the turn of the century where arms firms, government ministers and banks collaborated at the highest level to win foreign orders and maximise profits. [5]

Before the war began, the Comite des Forges appointed Francois de Wendel as its president, the man dubbed by the socialist leader Joseph Caillaux as ‘the symbol of the plutocracy’. He embodied every aspect of the industrial elite in France. Elected Deputy to the National Assembly, acknowledged as a maitre de forges (iron master) from a dynastic line of iron and steel producers, Wendel became a Regent of the Banque of France and worked closely in conjunction with his great ally, Edouard de Rothschild. [6] Coming from a family which suffered the embarrassment of being torn in two when Lorraine was ceded to Germany in 1871, Francois was deeply anti-German and a strong supporter of Raymond Poincare and his Revanchist party.

His father, Henri Wendel remained behind in the annexed section of Lorraine as a subject of the new German Empire in order to keep control of the family’s extensive industrial interests there. Indeed he quickly reoriented his political loyalties and was elected to the Reichstag as a Representative for Lorraine from 1881-1890. In like vein his cousin Charles sat in the Reichstag from 1907-1911. Thus the Wendel family retained both its political and economic interests on both sides of the border, with Francois in the French National Assembly and his father and cousin in the Reichstag. Together they owned the mines and factories, the plants and smelters in Briey and Thionville.

The Wendels completely controlled French iron and steel supplies. With the Germans allowed unchallenged ownership of the Briey basin in August 1914, there was precious little left for the French iron and steel industry. Although the Comite des Forges was permitted to import 19,0000 tons of metal from Britain each month, nothing happened for seven months. At which point a tried and tested method was itself imported into the system. Just as the British appointed J.P. Morgan as their sole agent for all purchases from the United States, so the French government decided to approve a single agent to purchase the importation of iron and steel; it was Francois de Wendel’s brother,  Hubert. The French military attaché in London responsible for overseeing the purchasing agent was de Wendel’s brother in law, General de la Penouze. It only got worse. In the ministry of munitions in Paris, responsibility for checking these vital imports rested with a director of the Comite des Forges’s bank [7]  who was given the rank of captain and raised to the position of general secretary of the Commission of Woods and Metals. [8] When accusations were made of speculation and profiteering in the iron and steel industries towards the end of 1915, they were referred to the Committee of Markets at the Chamber of Deputies and duly investigated by its most experienced member, Francois de Wendel. Three years later the Chamber of Deputies was still waiting on the report. [9]

Can there be any wonder why both during the war and at the end of that terrible conflict the Wendels were accused of using their immense power to protect their vast mineral assets at Briey and Thionville? The mineral rich Briey basin extending to the left bank of the Moselle around Thionville was the Wendel’s personal fiefdom. They owned it, they ran the great mines and factories, they represented the people both in the French Assembly and the German Reichstag, they patronised the Catholic Church and owned the local newspapers. From 1906, Francois Wendel subsidised L’Echo de Lorraine and the family controlled Le Journal de Debats, a loss-making political journal which was sent free to every teacher in Wendel’s electoral district.[10]

When in 1919 bitter accusations were raised against him in the French National Assembly, and in particular the charge that he had blocked the destruction of the Briey steelworks, Francoise Wendel haughtily dismissed them. He cited a list of generals who claimed either not to have had the technology capable of such long-ranged destruction, or who considered the target inappropriate as a military objective. [11] Accusations that the Comite des Forges had paid a pliant journalist to write an article in Le Temps in 1916 were rejected on the basis that according to Francoise Wendel, President of the Comite itself, it did not have a publicity fund. This was truly an outrageous claim since the Comite controlled whole swathes of the press. The story written by Max Hoschiller suggested that the destruction of the Briey complex would not substantially weaken Germany, a ridiculous claim that flew in the face of every other assessment. [12]

Unsurprisingly, the Regent of the Banque de France, President of the Comite des Forges, Deputy of the National Assembly and international associate of the global munitions family, a friend and colleague of the Paris Rothschilds and long term supporter of President Poincare survived these attacks relatively unscathed. The verdict of supportive historians was that ‘none of these claims about a Wendelian conspiracy were ever substantiated or corroborated’. [13] The reader must make her /his own decision as to what can be defined as corroboration when key documents are missing or destroyed and the wealth of the Wendel family is given a higher priority than the lives it cost. But such a focus on one family, one example, no matter how pertinent, could deflect the spotlight away from a greater influence.

[1] Jean Noel Jeanneney, Francois de Wendel en Republique, L’Argent et le Pouvoir, Revuie Historique, T. 257, Fasc. 2 (522) Avril-Juin 1977, pp.495-498.
[2] Congressional Record for March 6 and 12, 1934, Text of the Nye Resolution to Investigate America’s Armament Makers, United States Government Printing Office Washington : 1934; 52620 – 10175. Article from Fortune Magazine, 22 May 1934, A Primer on Europe’s Armament Makers who prolong War and disturb Peace.
[3]Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p.518.
[4] David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914, p.29.
[5] Ibid., p.30.
[6] Michael J Rust, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 37, issue 2, June 1977, p.531.
[7] The Demanchy Bank was controlled by the Comite des Forges.
[8] Clarence K Streit, Where Iron Is, There Is The Fatherland, pp.24-25.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Harold James, Family Capitalism, p.185.
[11]Ibid., p.186.
[12] Streit, Where Iron Is, There Is The Fatherland,  pp.29-32.
[13] James, Family Capitalism, p.187.

Wellington House, The Lie Factory

In September 1914 the British foreign office authorised a War Propaganda Bureau under Charles Masterman at that point, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a minor position in Asquith’s government. Asquith’s prime objective appears to have been to keep his paramour, Venetia Stanley fully informed of events, often secret events, while keeping the British public in dutiful ignorance.

After the Cabinet meeting was informed that the War Propaganda Bureau would be set up in secret, he wrote on 5 September to his beloved Venetia Stanley: ‘The papers I see are crying out (not without reason) for news, of which they have had precious little all this week. I am just going to tell Winston to repeat his feat of last Sunday, and to dish up for them with all his best journalistic condiments the military history of the week. K (Kitchener) is absolutely no use for this kind of thing and has an undisguised contempt for the “public” in all its moods and manifestations.’ [1]

So much for the steady stream of trustworthy information which Asquith’s government had promised. How many of the young men who answered Kitchener’s call would have done so had they known the contempt he bore for the general public?

In advance of the announcement of his appointment, Masterman held two conferences on 2 September and 7 September 1914 to organise and co-ordinate the official propaganda directed at foreign opinion. The first was with prominent literary figures, the second with journalists and publicists. Masterman took over possession of the Buckingham Gate premises occupied by the National Insurance Commission, better known as Wellington House. Work was conducted in absolute secrecy. Masterman was convinced that his target opinion leaders would be unwilling to commit themselves wholeheartedly if they knew the source of their information. [2]

Even members of the Cabinet did not know about his department The most famous literary figures of the day signed up to what amounted to the paid publication of their novels and short stories. It was little more than a free lunch for the well-fed. Distinguished writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, G K Chesterton, Sir Edward Cook and Hilaire Belloc were amongst the literati who penned articles, tales and stories specifically aimed at spreading British propaganda, especially in America. Naval Intelligence, for the two were often kept apart, called on the additional services of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Alfred Noyes. [3] The master-craftsman of this literary propaganda was none other than Alfred Milner’s private secretary from the Kindergarten years in South Africa, John Buchan. His career in propaganda and military intelligence blossomed magnificently from 1916 onwards when, as Milner’s trusted appointee, John Buchan a member of the Secret Elite [4] linked them to the heart of the British intelligence community. [5] More on this later.

Masterman’s task was neither straightforward nor easy. Conflicting views between allies, and military criticism of and from French High Command was somewhat fraught at times. It all had to be handled with great care and the whole business of propaganda moved swiftly into the new media of pictures, photographs, film and newsreels. Propaganda grew from a cottage industry into an international business in its own right. Its aims remained intact; promote the great cause of the allies and damn the evil actions or intentions of the enemy. Its reach expanded into new quarters of the globe. By 1916, Masterman had to open a department of Muslim affairs, such was the growing importance of India, Persia, Egypt, Turkey and the Middle East. [6]

Part of the problem lay in the long-term rivalries that beset various departments of state. Despite Haldane’s stalwart work of reorganisation at the War Office, and to a lesser extent Churchill’s modernisation at the Admiralty, both pursued propaganda and intelligence with almost childish self-interest. The Home Office and Foreign Office, insisted on working within their own jealously guarded jurisdiction. Thus on 23 September 1914 a Neutral Press Committee was set up at Whitehall House as part of the Home Office.  G H Mair left the Daily Chronicle to head the new committee which was involved in expanding the transmission of news by wireless stations, amassing a foreign news summary each day and safeguarding visiting foreign journalists. Not to be outdone, the Foreign Office created a news department of its own and, as the fighting became bogged down in the mud of Flanders, organised visits for foreign journalists to the western front. Grey’s officials also sent daily messages to legations and embassies in foreign capitals. They liaised with Reuters, sent official messages by wireless and cable to all parts of the Empire and kept a watchful eye on the movement of ordinary citizens in and out of the UK.

Too many organisations, departments, sometimes even individuals became involved in propaganda, to the extent that no-one seemed to have clear control of what had grown into a monstrous beast. Duplication of effort and inter-departmental jealousies became debilitating. Effective propaganda requires continuity, creativity and speed of action. [7] This was what the Secret Elite wanted. Lord Robert Cecil, as parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, and a member of the Secret Elite, [8] represented them at a crucial inter- departmental conference on 26 January held at the Home Office. Matters degenerated into a bitter row between the War and Foreign Offices, but it was Cecil who triumphed. The Foreign Office assumed the lead role in a wholesale reorganisation of propaganda which saw all the other departments ( the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, The Press bureau and the Neutral Press Commission ) bend the knee and appoint a liaison officer to supply the Foreign Office with relevant information. But Lord Robert Cecil’s victory was temporary for the Foreign Office proved inflexible in a theatre of war where flexibility and creativity were invaluable pre-requisites.

The Central Committee for National Patriotic Organisations was yet another organ of the mass investment in propaganda. The two men responsible for this were directly linked to the Secret Elite. George W Prothero was closely associated with the Cecil family and Alfred Milner [9] while Henry Cust was a protégé of William Waldorf Astor, a member of the inner-circle of the Secret Elite. [10] He had edited the Pall Mall Gazette and was associated with Arthur Balfour, George Curzon, Margot Asquith and Alfred Lyttelton, often referred to as The Souls.  With prime minister Asquith as their honorary president, they organised lectures, patriotic clubs, rallies in the major cities and in country towns to counter-act any opposition to the war. In addition they targeted individuals from neutral countries, using a tactic of direct personal approach to enlist sympathy and support for the war. Distinguished men and women agreed to play their part in this with the result that foreign acquaintances, colleagues, business associates and fellow workers across the globe were sent propaganda material directly to their homes and work-places. More than 250,000 books, pamphlets and other publications were sent abroad through this agency during the war. [11] By 1916, they had used 250 speakers to conduct 15,000 meetings. Students from neutral countries and British nationals abroad were exploited in a similar manner [12] They flooded the libraries in industrial districts with 900,000 leaflets and distributed a similar number to schools. Children too were also a frequent target for Masterman’s people at Wellington House. [13] Propaganda is no respecter of age.

Secrecy was demanded from all who served in Wellington House. In the first two years of the war some of the civil servants initially transferred from their posts at the national insurance commission to propaganda work, left. They were replaced at the higher levels with Milner’s men, James Headlam-Morley and Arnold J Toynbee, both members of the Secret Elite, [14] and a new Balliol man, Lewis Namier. Wellington House was well organised in its international set-up with sections based on a geographic or linguistic basis like Scandinavia, Italy and Switzerland. Masterman worked in tandem with the Belgian legation on propaganda, and his office generally acted as the ministry of propaganda for Belgium in the early months of the war. [15] The foreign press was studied in detail on a daily basis, and the department kept files on public opinion in all neutral countries. Specific ‘stories’, most of which was concocted nonsense, were directed to the appropriate country to maximise impact. The greatest priority was always the United States [16] and it continued to be so at every level, until America joined the war.

Americans were welcomed with open arms. Press correspondents and distinguished visitors were courted shamelessly to express support for Asquith’s government or changes in government policy. Special correspondents were sent to America to glean first hand information about public opinion in the United States, and, when necessary, counter opposition to British policy. They liked to keep it personal, person to person, using banking, business, academic, journalistic and even family ties to bolster support for Britain and the Allies. Few were better connected through all of the above-mentioned agencies, than the Secret Elite.

The Anglo-American bond proved to be an unassailable asset to the British and allied cause, and did much to help spread the propaganda. In Washington, the German military attaché, Franz von Papen claimed that a conference was held in the New York offices of JP Morgan as early as 23 August 1914 to seek ways to promote and endorse British propaganda in America. Von Papen wrote that they adopted a policy to colour the American press and duly appointed English editorial writers on forty U.S. newspapers. [17] Naturally Morgan and his powerful companies supported the allies. He was after all closely associated with the Rothschilds and the Secret Elite, and had been chosen as their sole nominated representative for buying munitions and organising loans for Britain, from which he was literally making a fortune.

Sir Gilbert Parker, head of the American department at Wellington House, explained [18] how the British government went about its business in America to promote the allied cause. Three hundred and sixty newspapers in the smaller states were supplied with an English newspaper which gave them a weekly review of the war from the British and French perspective. Important Americans were encouraged, he did not say how, to write articles for the local press, and eminent professional Americans received personal correspondence from their British counterparts, ‘beginning with university and college professors’. [19]   His mailing list contained the names of over 260,000 prominent Americans.

The French historian and politician, Gabriel Hanotaux wrote an illustrated history of the war of 1914 in which he interviewed Robert Bacon, a former US Ambassador to France and ex-Morgan partner.  Bacon stated: ‘In America …there are 50,000 people who understand the necessity of the United States entering the war immediately on your side. But there are 100,000,000 Americans who have not even thought of it. Our task is to see that the figures are reversed and that the 50,000 become the 100,000,000. We will accomplish this.’ [20] It proved to be no idle boast. News reel propaganda in cinemas became increasingly common as the war progressed. Every possible method was used to connect the man in the street; cinema, pamphlets, advertising, photographs, illustrated news, novels and interviews. The mass media had become a weapon of war, [21] and America was its prime target.

[1] HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p.221.
[2] Gary Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, p. 38.
[3] H C Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 18.
[4] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[5] John Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, pp. 169-70 and pp 205-8.
[6] M L Sanders, Wellington House and British Propaganda in the First World War,  The Historical Journal, vol. 18, No1. (March 1975), pp. 120-1.
[7] Phillip Taylor, British Propaganda in the 20^th Century: Selling Democracy, p. 11.
[8] Quigley, Anglo-American, p. 313.
[9] Ibid., p. 27.
[10] Ibid., p. 312.
[11] Gareth S Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, p. 218.
[12] Report of the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organisations, (London 1916) p. 18 ff.
[13] Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 19.
[14] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[15] Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, p. 40.
[16] First Report of the Work of Wellington House, 7 June, 1915, Inf. 4/5 (PRO) p.1.
[17] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Official German Documents relating to the World War, vol. II, p.1315.
[18] Printed in Harper’s Magazine in 1917.
[19] Bertrand Russell, These Eventful Years, Vol. 1. p.381.
[20] Gabriel Hanotaux, Historie Illustre de la Guerre de 1914, vol. 9, p. 56.
[21] Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 212.