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: 3. Why Did Wilson Go To War?

If on 4 March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson believed his own rhetoric when he proclaimed that America stood ‘firm in armed neutrality’ why was it necessary some twenty-nine days later, to advise a joint Session of Congress that they would have to go to war to defend and protect democracy? On April 6, 1917, America duly declared that war [1] after the Senate approved the action by 82-6 and the House of Representatives by 373-50.

In the Senate, a few voices were raised hopelessly against what they deemed ‘a great blunder’. Opposition inside the House of Representatives pointed out that no invasion was threatened, no territory at risk, no sovereignty questioned, no national policy contested nor honour sacrificed. [2] Be assured of one important fact. There was no outcry for war amongst ordinary American citizens. No excited crowds took to the streets. At Wellington House in London, the nerve-centre of British propaganda, the manipulators of truth were concerned that the American Press carried ‘no indications of enthusiasm except in a few Eastern papers’. [3] In the United States, citizens were genuinely unsure why the nation was at war, but loyalty to the flag has always carried great weight. Enlistment statistics threw an interesting light on American society. Before 1917, the Eastern seaboard editors, lawyers, bankers and financiers, teachers and preachers, leaders of ‘society’ in New York and Washington alike, had berated the Western states for their alleged unpatriotic attitude towards war. In the event, recruiting figures showed that the response from the western states was greater than their compatriots along the eastern seaboard.[4] How often do the movers and shakers turn into moaners and shirkers and fail to step up to the mark?

There was no instant Kitchener-effect in America. British propagandists watched this lack of enthusiasm with real concern. Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information on 14 April to rouse the public to ‘righteous wrath’.[5] Two and a half year’s worth of Wellington House propaganda was at hand for regurgitation and dissemination. Even so, from 1 April until 16 May, total enlistment was a mere 73,000 men. [6] By June 117,974 men had joined the regular army, but the rate was falling. In July only 34,962 joined the ranks; in August it was 28,155; in September, 10,557. [7] This simply could not continue. A conscript army was required.

On 18 May, 1917, the sixty-fifth Congress passed a Military Act to enable the President to temporarily increase the strength of the army, and the ‘draft’ became law.[8] For all his talk of brokering peace between the waring factions in Europe, and many reported attempts at reconciliation, President Wilson led his country into war, provided the manpower to be sacrificed and stirred the hatred and propaganda necessary to popularise the slaughter on the western front. Why? Why within months of his re-election on the proud boast that he had kept America out of the war, was everything reversed; every assumed position revoked; every implied promise, broken? Some historians insist that Germany forced President Wilson into a declaration of war through two acts of blundering stupidity. Emphasis on such a focus has successfully deflected attention away from much more powerful interests which Wilson could not ignore.

On 17 January 1917, British code-breakers partially deciphered an astonishing message from the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann to his Ambassador in Washington. Though the analysts in Room 40 at the admiralty in London could decipher some of the essential message, the new code which had been delivered to the German Embassy in Washington by the cargo U-boat Deutschland in November 1916, had not been fully broken. Senior British cryptographs were trying to reconstruct this particular code but had made only sufficient progress to form an incomplete text. [9] From their initial reconstruction it appeared that Zimmermann had requested the German ambassador to the United States, Count Johann von Bernstorff, to contact President Carranza of Mexico through the German embassy in Mexico City and offer him a lucrative alliance. ‘Blinker’ Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence, took personal control. His grasp of effective propaganda was second to none. Hall knew that once the full text was available it had to be carefully handled both to protect the anonymity of Room 40 and convince the Americans of its authenticity.

Room 40 focused on the ambassadorial messages between Berlin and the American continent and on 19 February the full text of Zimmerman’s instructions to his Mexican ambassador was traced. It had been sent to Washington by a wireless channel which Wilson and House had previously allowed Germany to use for secret discussions on a possible peace initiative. This effrontery added insult to injury. Once Admiral ‘Blinker’ Hall held the decoded and translated text in his hands, he knew that he had unearthed a propaganda coup of enormous importance. Zimmermann’s telegram read as follows:

‘Washington to Mexico 19 January 1917.

We intend to begin on 1 February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavour in spite of this to keep the USA neutral. In the event of this not succeeding we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following terms:-
Make war together
Make peace together
Generous financial support and an undertaking on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you.
You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the USA is certain, and add the suggestion that he should on his own initiative invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.
Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace. (signed) Zimmermann.’ [10]

After ensuring that they could conceal how they had obtained the telegram, the British Foreign Office released it to Walter Paget, the American ambassador in London, who promptly sent it to the State Department in Washington. Woodrow Wilson received the transcript on 24 February 1917. He was stunned to discover that the Germans had abused the cable line which he had insisted they be allowed to access for peace negotiations. [11] It took President Wilson four days to release the telegram to the Associated Press and following expressions of disbelief, he authorised Senator Swann of Virginia to announce in the Senate on 1 March 1917, that the Zimmerman note to Mexico was textually correct. Robert Lansing made a similar pronouncement from the State Department. Clearly the American public was not easily convinced. Even in 1917, they were suspicious of government pronouncements.

If the reader scans the infamous Zimmermann line by line, it quickly becomes apparent that its ludicrous nature verges on lunacy. Alliances are not forged by telegram. Vague promises of generous financial support, of a detailed settlement being left in the hands of the Mexican government and the subsequent ‘reconquering’ of vast tracts of America, did not make sense. Though the Mexicans gave no immediate response, the Japanese Ambassador authoritatively dismissed the proposition. They had no intention of being suckered by a spurious telegram. And why did Zimmermann describe Germany’s submarine tactics as ‘ruthless’? The whole incident seemed contrived.

One major American newspaper-owner firmly rejected the Zimmermann story. William Randolph Hearst had kept his stable independent of the British censor. Just as he had refused to swallow wholesale war guilt, atrocity or war aims propaganda, Hearst cabled his editors that ‘in all probability’ the Zimmermann note was an ‘absolute fake and forgery.’ He believed that the object was to frighten Congress into giving the President the powers he demanded. Hearst’s anxiety was that ‘the whole people of this country, 90 percent of whom do not want war, may be projected into war because of these misrepresentations..’ [12] He also accused the president’s advisor, ‘Colonel’ House of being a corporation lobbyist. Hearst was at Palm Beach in the weeks before America entered the war and his private telegrams to his editors and those of other newspapers, were later made public in an attempt to discredit him.[13]

Though publication of the telegram aroused some anger in the West and mid-West states, American newspapers generally chose to omit any reference to the fact that the proposed alliance would only take place after America had declared war against Germany. [14] The original note had been passed to the American embassy in London in such secrecy that the State Department could not reveal its origins to enquiring journalists. [15] Indeed the propaganda value was diluted by a suspicion that it was a forgery, as Hearst and his newspapers insisted until, to the immense relief of British and American war-mongers, the naive Zimmerman acknowledged that he was the author. At a press conference on 2 March, Zimmermann was invited by the Hearst correspondent in Berlin, W. B. Hale, to deny the story.

He chose instead to confirm that it was true. [16] In modern parlance, it was a spectacular own goal. Some have said that the Zimmermann telegram incident was the “overt act” that brought the United States into the war. It was not. Woodrow Wilson did not ask Congress to declare war until 3 April 1917, fully six weeks after the British delivered the telegram to him.

So why did Woodrow Wilson take the irredeemable step to war? Sympathetic historians were very clear as to the cause. German militarism. The diplomatic record left no room for doubt. ‘ It was the German submarine warfare and nothing else that forced him [Wilson] to lead America into war.’ [17] Newton D Baker, Secretary of War came to the same conclusion, but wrapped it carefully inside a moment of caution. He wrote that ‘ the occasion’ of America entering the war was the resumption of submarine warfare. [18] Don’t confuse the words ‘cause’ and ‘occasion’. Indeed, consider that sentence again, but replace ‘occasion’ with ‘excuse’.

The German government had announced an unrestricted submarine campaign on 31 January, 1917. From that date U-boat commanders were ordered to sink all ships, neutral and belligerent, passenger or merchant inside a delineated Atlantic and North Sea zone. Despite perfunctory American protests, the British blockade had begun to take its toll in Germany from late 1916. Hunger was to be a weapon of war which both sides could use to advantage. German strategists were aware that such a tactic was likely to bring America into the war, but had concluded that Britain could be starved out before America had time to raise an effective fighting force and bring it into the European theatre. As it stood, America could hardly offer the Allies much more assistance as a belligerent than it currently did as a neutral,[19] but one unforeseen consequence hit home quickly. American shipping was temporarily paralysed.[20] Great quantities of wheat and cotton began to pile up in warehouses. The American economy faced dangerous dislocation. American merchant shipping clung to the safety of their shoreline and trade stood still.

Look carefully at the twin ‘causes’ of America Declaration of War, the Zimmermann telegram and Germany’s unrestricted submarine campaign and you will find flaws. The first was not a ‘casus belli’. It was a propaganda coup to soften the American public’s attitude to war, to stir indignation into resentment and stir the fear factor. No matter how ridiculous the notion that Mexican troops could invade Texas, New Mexico or Arizona, the very suggestion of an alliance through which three huge American states might be ceded to Mexico, placed Germany in a particularly bad light. Zimmermann admitted he was the author, but the clandestine nature by which the British secret service ensured that the information was passed to Washington, and the extent to which the Americans covered all traces of British involvement, leaves questions hanging in the air. Did Zimmermann have a cerebral meltdown? Was he secretly trying to prepare for any eventuality? No matter, it was not the cause of war.

Greater weight may be placed on the general insistence that unrestricted submarine warfare brought about Wilson’s fateful decision. Historians have thrown a vast array of statistics into the equation to prove the importance of this single factor. In the first month of the unrestricted warfare at sea 781,500 tons of merchant shipping was lost.[21] While it is true that after Woodrow Wilson’s warning in February, ten American freighters, schooners or tankers were sunk, nine by submarines and one by a mine (laid originally by the Royal Navy), loss of American lives totalled 24 seamen. In total, 38,534 gross U.S. tonnage was sunk. [22] Was this sufficient to be a cause of war? The pro-war newspapers gave vent to their outrage when it was reported that three American ships, Vigilancia, City of Memphis and Illinois had been sunk on 18 March. The New York World screamed that ‘without a declaration of war, Germany is making war on America.’ The New York Tribune claimed that Germany was acting on the theory that already war existed; The Philadelphia Public Ledger demanded that Wilson’s administration take immediate action insisting was its duty to respond, while the St Louis Republic was confident that the President and his advisors would act with wisdom. [23]

What wisdom? Certainly a very small number of American lives had been lost at sea. Unarguably the Zimmermann telegram was a piece of effrontery … but was it sufficient reason to put the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans at risk? Or were there darker influences?

1. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Presidential Proclamation 1364 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/woodrow_wilson.php
2. H C Peterson, Propaganda for War, pp. 321-2.
3. American Press Resume (A.P.R.) issued by the War Office and Foreign Office. “For Use of the Cabinet”, 18 April, 1917.
4. A.P.R. 30 May, 1917.
5. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 325.
6. A.P.R. 6 June, 1917.
7. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 324. footnote.
8. 65th Congress, Session 1, CH. 15 1917. H.R. 3545.
9. Patrick Beesly, Room 40, pp. 207-8.
10. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/zimmermann.htm
11. Rodney Carlisle, The Attacks on US Shipping that Precipitated American Entry into World War 1. http://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol17/tnm_17_3_41-66.pdf
12. Telegram to SS Carvalho, 2 March 1917.
13. New York Times 11 December 1918.
14. Peterson, Propaganda, p. 314.
15. Bailey, A Diplomatic History, p. 643, note 28.
16. Beesly, Room 40, p. 223.
17. Charles Seymour, American Diplomacy During the World War, p. 210.
18. Paul Birdsall, Neutrality and Economic Pressures 1914-1917, Science and Society vol. 3, No. 2. (Spring 1939) p. 217.
19. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, p. 641.
20. Millis, Road to War, p. 400.
21. Peterson, Propaganda, p. 318.
22. Carlisle, Attacks on American Shipping that Precipitated the War , The Northern Mariner, XVII, no. 3, p. 61. http://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol17/tnm_17_3_41-66.pdf
23. New York Times, 19 March 1917.

America 1917: 2. Promises Given, Promises Broken.

The 1916 election proved to be very close indeed. What matters in an American Presidential election is the Electoral College vote of which, in 1912, there were 530, so the winner had to reach a minimum of 266.

When the first returns from the Eastern States were announced, Republican Charles Hughes appeared to have won by a landslide. By seven o’clock on 7 November it was certain that Wilson had lost New York and the other populous Northeastern States with their heavy votes in the Electoral College followed in swift succession; New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin and Delaware went Republican. It was a rout.[1] Apparently.

Election extras were quickly on the streets bearing huge portraits of ‘The President Elect, Charles Evans Hughes’. As night fell on Washington, strange forces spread across the United States. President Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty was instructed not to concede. He was reported to have received a mysterious, anonymous telephone message warning him ‘in no way or by the slightest sign give up the fight.’ [2] Remarkably the American historian and New York Herald Tribune journalist, Walter Millis wrote ‘Who it was he never knew; perhaps it was a miracle.’ Absurd. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Must we always be taken as fools? How many anonymous callers have the telephone number of the President’s private secretary or could order him not to concede the election? Malpractice was afoot.

In London, The Times pronounced, ’Mr Hughes Elected’ in a Republican landslide. Its sober conclusion was that Mr Wilson has been defeated not by, but in spite of his neutrality. [3] The Kolnische Volkrientung cheered that ‘German-Americans have defeated Wilson’, while in Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse claimed that Hughes had been elected to bring an end to an era where ‘the Steel Trust and the Bethlehem works may still make further profits and that the price of munitions shares may be whipped up still further while Morgan further extends his financial kingdom.’ [4] The inference was that the people had turned against the military – industrial profiteers. But they were all running ahead of themselves.

At daybreak on 8 November, while the New York Times conceded Wilson’s defeat, Tumulty remained unmoved. He was quietly informed that the rot had been stopped at Ohio by a margin of 60,000 votes. Colonel House ordered the Democratic Headquarters to put every county chairman in every doubtful state across America on high alert. They were urged to exercise their ‘utmost vigilance’ on every ballot box.[5] How odd that such instructions should be issued on the day following the election. What did House know that others did not? Projections of a Hughes’ victory shrank from certainty to doubt until the entire election result hung on the outcome from California. Secret Service agents and US Marshals were drafted into the largest Californian counties to guard ballot boxes and supervise proceedings. California, with 13 Electoral College votes in 1916, was pivotal to determining the winner. On 8 November, the Electoral vote stood at 264 to Wilson and 254 to Hughes.

Before the mystical, middle-of-the-night change of fortune, the Democrats had conceded California to the Republican challenger, but they declared their decision premature. After a two day recount, Wilson was declared winner by a mere 3,420 out of a total of 990,250 Californian votes cast. Talk of election-fraud and vote-buying prompted the Republican party to file legal protests, [6] but nothing significant materialised. They were effectively too late. While scrutiny of the returns showed minor vote-tallying errors, and affected both sides, these appeared to be random. Nothing fraudulent could be proved.

An angry and suspicious Republican Party refused to concede the election. The final recount in California showed that Wilson had gained 46.65% of votes cast and Hughes 46.27%. The Republican candidate baulked at accusing his rival of fraud. His final statement acknowledged ‘in the absence of absolute proof of fraud, no such cry should be raised to becloud the title of the next President of the United States.’ [7] ‘Absolute proof’ set a very high level of certainty. In New Hampshire the lead changed hands during the canvassing of returns and Wilson won the State by a mere 56 Votes. [8]

Vested interests jumped to close down the Republican options. In London, The Times could not believe that ‘the patriotic and shrewd men who manage the electioneering affairs of the Republican Party will attempt to impugn that decision [Wilson’s claim to victory] without clear and conclusive evidence.’[9] Consider the pressure that was heaped upon Charles Hughes. War in Europe raged on. A newly elected government in the United States would have brought about a complete change in all of the key cabinet posts with consequent dislocation of existing ties. Imagine the confusion if a President Hughes had to appoint new ambassadors, new consuls, new State Department staff, new White House staff and so forth.

Woodrow Wilson (left) and Charles Hughes. We will never know who truly won the 1916 election

Colonel House told the President that ‘Germany almost to a man is wishing for your defeat and that France and England are almost to a man wishing for your success.’[10] They weren’t wishing for his success, they were dependant on it. In the end, Wilson won more popular votes overall, ( 9,129,606 – 8,538,221) and no clear evidence of malpractice could be found. On 22 November Charles Hughes accepted the election result as it stood. His acquiescence did not go unrewarded. Charles Evans Hughes became United States Secretary of State between 1921and 1925, a judge on the Court of International Justice between 1928 and 1930, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. His son, Charles Evans Hughes junior, was appointed Solicitor General by Herbert Hoover.

Primed by his jubilant backers, Woodrow Wilson demonstrated an unexpectedly theatrical touch at the start of his second term in office. Not since George Washington had a president delivered his first formal presidential address to the Senate itself. Wilson did this on 22 January, 1917 in a barnstorming speech which created the impression of an enlightened, benevolent master-statesman to whom the world ought to listen. He called for ‘peace without victory’ because:

‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.’[11]

As rhetoric, this was stout stuff. As policy, it did not last for long. He claimed that his soaring vision for peace and the future was based on core American values unshackled by entangling alliances.[12] The shining centrepiece of his dazzling new utopia was to be a League of Nations which could enforce peace. The Senate sat mesmerised and many rose to salute him at the end of an impressive performance. Democrats waxed lyrical with claims that Wilson’s speech ‘was the greatest message of the century…the most momentous utterance that has a yet been made during this most extraordinary era…simply magnificent…the most wonderful document he has ever delivered.’[13] His Republican rivals were more circumspect in their appraisal, describing it as ‘presumptuous’ and ‘utterly impractical.’

American newspapers split opinion in predictable fashion. The New York World saluted his principles of liberty and justice; the Philadelphia Public Ledger declared that Wilson’s oration was inspired by lofty idealism and the Washington Post thought it constituted a shining ideal. The conservative New York Sun caustically remarked that having failed for four years to secure peace with Mexico, Wilson had no business lecturing the world on the terms for peace with Europe, while The New York Herald warned that ‘Mr Wilson’s suggestion would lead to the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon nations…propaganda for which ‘has been in evidence for a quarter of a century.’ [14]

In Europe reaction was naturally selfish. The British government refused to countenance his proposal first and foremost because he had added a passage on freedom of the seas which challenged their divine right to dominate the oceans. Having shed rivers of blood on the fields of Flanders and beyond, the Europeans were not attracted to ‘peace without victory’. The French novelist, Anatole France, a Nobel Prizewinner for literature, likened peace without victory to ‘bread without yeast…mushrooms without garlic…love without quarrels…camel without humps’. [15]

But Wilson strode that world stage for darker reasons. Who, one wonders, whispered in his ear that all of his visionary pronouncements could not deliver a place at the high table of international settlement at the end of the war if America was not a participant? He could not logically take part in the final resolution of the conflict unless the United States was a full partner in absolute victory. Peace without victory was an empty promise, a misdirection to the jury of hope.

On 4 March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave his second inaugural address to Congress and proclaimed that America stood ‘firm in armed neutrality’ but warned that ‘we may even be drawn on by circumstances…to a more active assertion of our rights’.[16 ] Twenty-nine days later, on 2 April, he again addressed a joint Session of Congress. This time his purpose was to seek their approval for war with Germany. In a lofty speech he revisited the same moral high ground with which the Secret Elite and their agents in Britain had previously gone to war. With claims about saving civilisation, it might have been penned by Sir Edward Grey:

‘It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.’ [17]

America was encouraged to war in order to fight for democracy. The phrase has a familiar ring. What had caused this violent swing from peace to war in barely four months?

1. Cuddy, Irish Americans and the 1916 Election, American Quarterly vol. 21, no 2, Part 1 p. 235.
2. Walter Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 352.
3. The Times, 8 Nov. 1916, p. 9.
4. The Times, 18 Nov. 1916. p. 7.
5. Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 353.
6. Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, p. 202.
7. New York Times, 11 November 1916.
8. Foley, Ballot Battles: p. 431.
9. The Times, 13 November, 1916, p. 9.
10. H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 281.
11. Woodrow Wilson: Address to the Senate of the United States; World League for Peace, 22 January, 1917.
12. Ibid.
13. New York Times, 23 January, 1917, Scenes in the Senate .
14. New York Times, 23 January, 1917. Wilson’s Senate Speech – Press comments
15. Alfred Carter Jefferson, Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism, p. 195.
16. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/wilson1917inauguration.htm
17. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War against Germany, 2 April, 1917. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366

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.

First World War Hidden History Blogs – an update

We appreciate the number of blog readers and followers who have continued to support our drive to demonstrate clearly how the  First World War was justified, prolonged and deliberately aimed at the destruction of Germany and her allies. Over the past nine months we have been focussed on completing the second book spanning the years 1914-1919. It will be entitled, Prolonging The Agony and published by Trineday in the United States in the autumn / fall. As soon as the production work is completed we intend to post directions from the blog to the publishers so that you can get hold of a copy should you want to read the entire narrative and have it was a historical record. The revelations contained within its covers unmasks many of the myths of ‘The Great War for Civilisation’. It is a history that the establishment does not want to acknowledge, yet year on year, has been forced to concede, as the evidence of their collusion and lies grows ever more obvious.

Over the next two years we intend to examine the period from late 1916-1919 in a series of blogs which will be unrepentantly contentious. As the First World War was deliberately prolonged, so the opportunities for racketeers and armaments suppliers, millionaire bankers and financiers and political opportunists, expanded exponentially and the Secret Elite, whom we have regularly  exposed, began to extend into the trans-Atlantic, Anglo-American establishment, first documented by Professor Carroll Quigley. [1]

In July 1917, the great war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, [2] wrote a letter to his regimental masters in his capacity as a Second Lieutenant of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. It was read aloud in the House of Commons on 30 July by his friend and Member of Parliament for Northampton,  Lees-Smith, and might well have resulted in a court martial and Sassoon’s execution. It read:

‘Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.
3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
July, 1917.

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.’ [3]

Ponder the key words here. Sassoon wrote his outcry in wilful defiance of military authority because he believed as a fighting soldier, that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who could have ended it. He no longer considered it a war of defence and liberation but of aggression and conquest. Had the reasons for war been clearly set at the start, the end would already have been attainable by negotiation ( the peace that Britain and France refused to entertain). He could no longer be involved with prolonging these sufferings at the Front for objectives which he described as evil and unjust. He castigated the politicians for their lies for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. He blamed deception and callous complacency with which those at home accepted the agonies which continued in the trenches. This is the very vocabulary which we have used repeatedly to try to come to grips with the horrendous fact that young men across Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and, by 1917, America were being sacrificed. Sassoon’s very words; being sacrificed. Slaughtered, abandoned, surrendered to a faceless evil. It was  young men across the world who were betrayed … for the aims of a Secret Elite who sought to control a one world power for themselves. These words sit at the core of our thesis that the First World War was deliberately prolonged.  What Sassoon could not point out were the names of the elite cabal involved in this monstrous charade.

Our future blogs will prove beyond argument that this evil was deliberately prolonged just as Sassoon stated. When The Times reported that the letter had been read aloud in Parliament [4] the ruling powers had already taken steps to nullify his brave outburst. For Siegfried Sassoon was a very brave soldier who had won the Military Cross for his actions on the Western Front and had received several commendations for his leadership and decisiveness. This was not a man who could be thrown into prison or executed as a traitor. No. The official conclusion, which the War Office had prepared in advance, was that Sassoon was not responsible for his actions because he was suffering from a nervous breakdown. They decided that there ‘must be something wrong with an extremely gallant officer’ and had him sent to a special hospital for shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh. It was by far the easiest solution for Lloyd George’s government to avoid of the wrong kind of publicity. [5]

Between 1917 and 1919 momentous changes were brought about because of the prolonged war which impacted severely on the future direction of a fast-changing world. These events did not ‘just’ happen. Each on its own has grown into further and future power struggles, with consequent misery and disaster.

In 1917 two immensely significant events helped destroy the old world order. In Russia, the once-mighty Czar and his royal family were forced to abdicate before being summarily shot by the rising force of bolshevism. What ensued involved hidden forces from the American banking dynasties, the money-power, which bled Russia of her wealth before abandoning her to the misery of Lenin’s secret police. We will demonstrate how Lord Alfred Milner and his Secret Elite colleagues were intimately involved in the downfall of the Romanov dynasty.

A second momentous event was not awarded  its proper significance at the time. In 1917, the British government sent a letter to Walter Rothschild and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain intimating that it sympathised with, and approved, the idea of a future Jewish homeland in Palestine. Though a range of conditions and understandings concerning the rights of the native arabs were also inferred, the Balfour Declaration, as the letter became known, was to have far-reaching consequences. It was not as it has been politely portrayed by sympathetic historians. As events became manipulated by the nascent Zionists, this action also prolonged the war, and, unknown to the general public, had deep rooted links in America.

By 1918, as the relentless stalemate appeared to have no foreseeable end, Germany was driven to seek an armistice. But the war was not over. Far from it. Had the Germans not been completely deceived by the lofty pronouncements from President Wilson and his mythical Fourteen Points, they would never have surrendered. Yet, because historians and politicians have distorted the true facts, we have long believed that the First World War ended in 1918. It did not. From 1918-1919 war against Germany and her allies continued to be waged through the cruel strangulation of a total food blockade to deliberately crush the German people. Her women and children, her starving troops returning from the front line, and her old and disabled became the victims of a merciless allied revenge. Starvation became the weapon of attrition until the crippling and false Treaty of Versailles was signed in mid-1919; until the Anglo-American establishment was satisfied that Germany had been crushed.

If these statements of intent cause you a deep intake of breath, bear with us. All of these great issues deserve close analysis. We start with the convenience of America’s entry to the fray after an election which championed the President who had previously kept the United States out of the war, Woodrow Wilson. Let the story unfold.

[1] The Anglo-American Establishment written by Professor Carroll Quigley is the seminal work on the elite cabal in England which developed after 1919 into a much more powerful trans-Atlantic power-group.

[2] For a brief but informative piece on Sassoon’s life and works see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/sassoon_siegfried.shtml

[3] The letter can be read in full at; siegfried-sassoon.firstworldwarrelics.co.uk/html/protest.html

[4] The Times, 31 July 1917, p. 6.

[5] Ibid., p. 8.

 

 

 

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 5: An Act Of Heresy

Kitchener was not a man who relished being sidelined, despite which he remained in office after his role as Secretary of State for War was deliberately subverted by his enemies and detractors in 1915, when he went to Gallipoli to assess the situation on the government’s behalf. Decisions were taken behind his back. As The Times noted, ‘in the absence of Lord Kitchener’ a small War Committee had been set up to co-ordinate the government’s organisation for war. [1] It comprised, Asquith, A J Balfour, Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Reginald McKenna, with Sir Edward Grey available when required, and Kitchener when he returned from his visitation to Gallipoli and the Near East. [2] By late 1915, he knew exactly what he was up against. In terms of armaments, Lloyd George had grasped control of the War Office’s ordnance remit and subsumed it into a new department, the Ministry of Munitions. [3] Strategically, Sir William Robertson was appointed Chief of the General Staff on 21 December, effectively taking charge of strategy on the Western Front. Robertson’s focus was exactly in line with the ultimate aim of the Secret Elite. He advocated the concentration of war in Europe in order to bring Germany down. While lack of success on the Western Front and the failure at Gallipoli reduced Kitchener’s standing inside Cabinet, his popularity within the mass of the populace did not waver. In stripping Kitchener of major responsibility for strategy, Asquith was sufficiently astute to retain him in office.

Maurice Hankey, [4] the Secret Elite’s central cog inside 10 Downing Street, was the prime minister’s confidant and most valued advisor. Hankey had been secretary of the powerful think-tank Committee of Imperial Defence since 1908, and was the most knowledgeable and experienced strategist in the country. In Hankey’s diary for 8 December 1915, he noted that Asquith wanted to be rid of Kitchener who, ‘darkens his counsel and is a really bad administrator, and he evidently wants to find some way of fitting K. [Kitchener] into his scheme so that the Govt. can still use his great name and authority as a popular idol … Personally I can see no way of fitting him in without making him a cipher in every sense.’ [5] This was the problem. How could the high priests remove the people’s idol without losing their credibility? The only answer was to find him high profile but marginal tasks to keep him distanced from the centre of power.

But Kitchener had always been his own man. He cared nought for politicians and cast doubt on their capacity to act wisely. He expressed these concerns to Sir William Robertson with honest clarity: ‘I have no fear as to our final victory, but many fears as to our making a good peace.’ [6] Such intentions shook the Secret Elite and especially Alfred Milner. Alarm bells rang in the memory of those who served with Lord Milner in South Africa. Kitchener had interfered then, at the end of the Boer War, to bring about his peace. It had taken all of Milner’s considerable influence to stop Kitchener agreeing a date for the restoration of Boer self-government. [7] Milner had gone to war against the Boers to break the mould and recast the country, not negotiate a political peace. Peace terms implied compromise. Milner had admitted to his acolytes that there was no room for compromise in South Africa. But Kitchener ‘paralysed’ Milner, and in his view, betrayed the peace. [8] Consider again the main objective of the Secret Elite. They wanted to break the mould of Germany and recast the country and its colonies so that it would never again pose as a threat to the British ascendency. Surely Kitchener was not thinking about interfering in a European peace – in 1916?

Did Kitchener really see himself as the arbiter of a good peace? Yes, he did. And there was one very important source which corroborated Kitchener’s intentions. Lord Derby, [9] reflected on Herbert Kitchener’s state of mind in his diary in 1938. [10] Had this been published in the years immediately after the war when the official censor edited, withdrew or destroyed information that the government wanted to keep secret, Derby’s evidence would have been buried. Herbert Kitchener held very strong views that he intended to push to the fore when peace was eventually negotiated. Kitchener confided his philosophy to Lord Derby over dinner some three or four days before he sailed on his final journey. Derby took notes immediately afterwards so that he did not have to rely on memory at a later date. He recorded Kitchener’s absolute belief that ‘whatever happened’, at the end of the war, the peace negotiators should not ‘take away one country’s territory and give it to another’. The fate of Alsace and Lorraine was included in his statement: ‘I think if you take Alsace and Lorraine away from Germany and give them to France there will be a war of revenge.’ He was insistent that Germany’s colonies should not be taken from her on the basis that ‘if they have colonies they would go there peacefully and not want to engage in war for new territory.’ [11] His sense of a ‘good peace’ had nothing in common with the complete destruction of Germany.

Can you imagine the impact these words would have had inside the closed corridors of the Foreign Office. Kitchener’s sentiments ran contrary to all that the Secret Elite had worked towards. Leave Alsace and Lorraine as part of Germany? Let them keep their colonies? Good grief, would he next advocate the restoration of the Ottoman Empire? He still held influence in these eastern parts, and the British government had great ambitions for Persia after the war. Surely not. Kitchener spoke heresy. Such sentiments stood to undo the war against Germany which the Secret Elite had so carefully planned  [12]

Kitchener had also confided in Sir Douglas Haig [13] that only a decisive victory against Germany followed by a fair peace treaty, would prevent further wars in Europe. He had come to the conclusion that the war should not be about the conquest of Germany. [14] In the eyes of the Secret Elite, he had completely lost focus. Imagine if the concept of a ‘fair peace’ had been leaked to the men in the trenches. That the great man himself was thinking ahead towards peace, had implications for the murderous continuation of war. And not just peace, but a fair peace? To the powers behind the government it was unthinkable. Unimaginable. Consider the impact which Kitchener’s words would have had amongst his armies if in recognising that the war had become a stalemate, he advocated an end to hostilities. If it was put about that the commander-in-chief thought that enough was enough they would have cheered him to the echoes. It would have acknowledged that he thought more of the safety and survival of his own men than the continuation of a bitter struggle to the death with Germany, Kitchener had become more than just a liability. He was a danger to the Secret Elite’s ambitions. His future intentions put everything at risk.

Matters were exceptionally sensitive in 1916. There was much talk of peace and peace conferences. Most of it originated from America where President Wilson had an election to win and ‘peace’ was a vote-catcher. The war had reached a point of deadlock; victory was only likely to be achieved by the ‘guerre d’usure’, the war of exhaustion. Certainly, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, was in regular touch with the President through the controlling offices of his White House minder, Edward Mandell House, [15] but peace was not an issue that any of the warring nations could be seen to contemplate. Yet a deal took shape. Mandell House and Grey jointly drafted a confidential memorandum on 22 February 1916 which was confirmed by the President. It proposed the restoration of Belgium, the surrender of Alsace and Lorraine to France, the acquisition of an outlet to the sea for Russia, and compensation to Germany in territories outside Europe. If Britain and France thought the time was right, President Wilson would propose that a ‘Conference should be summoned to put an end to the war. Should the Allies accept this proposal and Germany refuse it, the United States would probably enter the war against Germany.’ [16] Sir Edward Grey had actually worked with Edward Mandell House to construct a memorandum which by definition was a basis for a negotiated peace. [17] By the end of the year Grey would be replaced as Foreign Secretary by Arthur Balfour who was in the inner core of the Secret Elite. [18]

But what to do with Kitchener? He was an enigma indeed. After the horrendous casualties at Loos in September 1915, nine cabinet ministers urged Kitchener to force Asquith to accept conscription, but he would not be disloyal. The Prime Minister warned his Secretary of State for War that this move had been instigated by Lloyd George (whom Kitchener loathed) to undermine him, but added confidently ‘so long as you and I stand together, we carry the whole country with us. Otherwise the deluge.’ [19] He needed Kitchener to take the flack.

In June 1916, Asquith accused him behind his back of abdicating his responsibilities and lying. Undoubtedly it suited the prime minister’s purpose to deflect criticism away from himself. He derided Kitchener’s tortuous speech and his repetitive presentations [20] but was obliged to defend him in Parliament in a brief but brilliant oration which was cheered from all sides. [21] Kitchener, for his part, kept faith in Asquith. Lord Derby wrote in his diary that Kitchener was devoted to the prime minister and liked him very much indeed, which may partly explain why he stayed his post. [22] As Asquith sat down in Parliament on 1 June, the conservative leader Bonar Law leaned forward and whispered; ‘That was a great speech, but how after it shall we ever get rid of him?’ [23]

How indeed?

[1] The Times, 12 November, 1915, p. 9.
[2] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 338.
[3] See blog Munitions 4: Lloyd George And Very Secret Arrangements. Posted on 24 June 1915.
[4] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[5] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Vol. 1, 1877 – 1918. p. 237.
[6] Sir George Arthur, Kitchener vol. III, p. 299.
[7] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, p. 570.
[8] Ibid., p. 551.
[9] Lord Derby, Edward George Villiers Stanley, 17th Earl aided Kitchener in promoting recruitment. In October 1915, as Director General of Recruitment, he introduced a scheme which included enlistment and conscription. Asquith made him Under-Secretary of State for War after Kitchener’s death. Derby was one of the few politicians whom Kitchener trusted.
[10] Randolph S Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, p. 210.
[11] Ibid.
[12] The complete history of the Secret Elite’s drive to create a war with Germany is contained in Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor’s Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, published 2013.
[13] PRO 30/57/53 Kitchener Papers.
[14] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 348.
[15] Edward Mandell House was President Wilson’s eminence grise in the White House. closely associated with the Morgan financial empire in New York, House was very much an anglophile who advised the President on all aspects of the war in Europe.
[16] Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, Vol III, p 63.
[17] Ibid., pp. 68-71.
[18] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 312.
[19] John Pollock, Kitchener, p. 453.
[20] George Casssar, Kitchener: Architect of Victory, p. 474.
[21] The Times, 1 June, 1916, p. 10.
[22] Churchill, Lord Derby, p. 210.
[23] Pollock, Kitchener, p. 471.

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.

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.