One of my fervent hopes that the institute would hold a conference just like this that
emphasizes history.
This is because our understanding or interpretation of history is primarily determines our political
and economic views.
Mises was not only an economist, but he was a renaissance type intellectual who was well
are well trained in many disciplines including law, history, and political science.
So I think it's very appropriate that the Mises Institute hold this conference with a primary focus on history.
In the last half of the 20th century, it's been mainly economists who've led the battle for individual freedom.
People like Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Hazlitt, and many others have been the champions of individual freedom
and Visual Freedom, primarily by advocating their economic views on the freedom of the market.
However, there was a time just after World War I when historians were the leaders in this battle,
and they did this primarily through criticism of World War I.
They were especially critical of America's unnecessary entry into that war
and the deleterious consequences to freedom which occurred both during and after the war.
Historians like Harry Elmer Barnes, Sidney Fay, Charles Tansel, Charles Austin Beard
wrote courageously about the deceit and the deception of President Wilson who got us into
that war, unnecessarily.
These historians pointed out how establishment historians were distorting the truth about
how America got into that war, and so they did not want the public to know the truth
about why we entered that war.
As a result of these courageous historians questioning Woodrow Wilson and America's
entry into that war, powerful forces were put into place and they put in a system to
prevent future historians from ever doing this again.
Charles Austin Beard summarized some of the efforts to block historians of the future
from telling the truth, and he's quoted in a book entitled Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace, which was edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, and Beard states the following quote,
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations intend to prevent, if they can, a repetition of what they call the debunking journalist campaign following World War I.
Translated into precise English, this means that the Foundation and the Council do not want journalists or other persons to examine too closely and to criticize too freely the official propaganda and official statements relative to our basic aims and activities during World War II.
In short, they hope that, among other things, the policies and measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt
will escape in the coming years the critical analysis, the evaluation and the exposition
that befell the policies and measures of Woodrow Wilson and the Entente allies of World War
I, end quote.
The importance of understanding the true facts of history and arriving at a truthful and
proper interpretation of historical facts is demonstrated in the statement of Bolingbrook
who said that the importance of history is that it is really philosophy teaching by example.
In other words, history can teach us lessons if it contains truthful facts and a truthful
statement of the ideas that were in place at the time the events occurred.
This will then show us how those ideas worked out in practice.
If those ideas failed, then we can learn our lesson and not repeat the mistakes of the
past.
The reasons that mistakes are so often repeated or that history repeats itself in my judgment
is mainly because we do not have a correct understanding of the history of the past events
because we're not told the truth about the facts and the ideas that were in place at
the time the events occurred. This allows people to arrive at a wrong interpretation
of that history and wrong lessons of thought. Frederick Hayek was very aware of the necessity
of correct history forming our views of our political and economic principles and for
this reason he edited a very important book called Capitalism and the Historians published
in 1954. I want to read to you just a portion of his first paragraph in that introduction.
Quote, political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely
connected. Past experience is the foundation on which our beliefs about the desirability
of different policies and institutions are mainly based, and our present political views
These views inevitably affect and color our interpretation of the past.
Few men will deny that our views about the goodness or the badness of different institutions
are largely determined by what we believe to have been their effects in the past.
The historical beliefs which guide us in the present are not always in accord with the facts.
Historical myths have perhaps played nearly as great a role in shaping opinion as historical facts.
Yet we can hardly hope to profit from the past experience unless the facts from which we draw our conclusions are correct.
Hayek continues by stating the influence which writers of history thus exercise on public opinion is probably more immediate and extensive than that of the political theorists who launch new ideas.
If you will pardon my recounting of my personal experience when I learned that a person's understanding of history drastically influences their economic and political views, I'll tell you about my ill-fated experience in the early Republican Party of the 1960s.
I became active in the Republican Party in 1961, thinking that my ideas on the free
market and our non-interventionist foreign policy would find a new home in the new Republican
Party, which was being planned at the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1960.
I knew John Grenier, who was head of the Goldwater Strategy.
And so the plan was made to get the South to join with the West and Midwest and remove
To remove the Eastern Liberal Establishment or Rockefeller Establishment from control
of the Republican Party, the first step was to get Goldwater nominated and overcome the
influence of the Rockefeller faction in the selection of the candidate, and this took
place according to plan in 1964.
Grenier and we discussed, he did not anticipate that Goldwater would win the election, but
he was considered the best person to nominate in order to change control of the Republican
Party from one route to the other.
I was elected as an alternate delegate to the 1968 National Republican Convention and
began to campaign for my ideas on the free market and a non-interventionist foreign policy.
And my contacts at the convention were mainly with other delegates from Texas and California.
And I had numerous conversations.
Just as a footnote, one delegate that I talked to a whole lot was a lawyer from Texas and
And I sort of followed his career. He became a federal judge and later head of the FBI.
His name was William Sessions. But basically my campaign was as follows. I stated we need
for this new Republican party to be the champion of the free enterprise system and therefore
we needed to eliminate and reduce the regulations on the market. We needed to abolish the Federal
Reserve system. We needed to reduce taxes drastically. We needed to legalize the ownership
of Gold and Return Gold Backing to Our Currency.
I stated the Republican Party needed to read, re-adopt the views of the great Republican
Senator Robert Taft and the views of our founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
thereby restoring the idea of a non-interventionist foreign policy and stop being the world policeman.
Of course, we were in the midst of the Vietnam War and it was hard for most people to see
beyond that war to any general foreign policy platform.
And almost uniformly, I got the following responses from a large number of people. Everyone
was very sympathetic to the free market ideas. But they understood from history that the
free market ideas had been tried and that they had failed. And their proof was the 1929
Depression. And they argued that history showed that monopolies were created at the end of
the 19th century due to the failure of the free market system and brought on the necessity
of the Sherman Antitrust Law. In foreign policy, I was told that the ideas of the founders
were out of date and that Robert Taft's foreign policy was discredited by the facts of history.
I was told that I needed to learn the lessons of Munich, which was that appeasement leads
to war, and learn the lesson of Pearl Harbor, which was that isolationist views lead to
weakness and encourage the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. My response to this basically
The 1929 Depression was not a failure of the free market, but it was caused by government intervention into the economy, and especially the Federal Reserve system, which was created in 1913, expanded the credit and the money supply beyond reasonable means. World War I was also a major factor, I argue, told them the free market did not create oppressive monopolies, but it was government that created monopolies, and I cited the history of the railroads as an example.
On foreign policy I said that the lesson of Munich was not that appeasement was bad, but
rather the lesson was that if you ended one war with a fraudulent treaty like the Treaty
of Versailles, then it would cause another war unless you peacefully revised that treaty.
It was this treaty that created the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi party and led to
of World War II, or as I have argued frequently, that World War II was really just a continuation
of World War I with a 20-year recess.
The only way to have avoided another war after the Treaty of Versailles was to have a peaceful
revision of that treaty, and Munich was merely a step towards that.
It's a foolish guarantee of Britain and France to guarantee the defense of Poland that caused
that war to be declared by them.
The issue of Poland should have been peacefully resolved along with the office made to restore
Germany, the German city of Danzig, and settled the corridor problem with just a road over
the corridor to East Prussia, which was the offer the Germans made.
I responded that the lesson of Pearl Harbor was not that non-interventionism or isolationism
led to weakness, but it was the increase in the power of the executive branch which led
to the imperial presidency and allowed the president to use those powers secretly and
to provoke the enemy into firing the first shot.
I argued that the cause of liberty would have been far better served if England and America
and stayed out of World War II and let Hitler and Stalin kill each other off.
Well, I was elected for the 1972 convention as a delegate, and I went back to the convention
armed with three books, Murray Rothbard's book on the 1929 Depression, Hayek's book
on capitalism and historians, and George Morgenstern's book on Pearl Harbor, the story of the secret
of War.
And while I strenuously argued the history and the lessons taught by those books, I had
already become very dispirited and doubted that the Republican Party would fulfill my
hopes.
You may remember that President Nixon had already put on wage and price controls just
before the convention.
He had closed the gold window and announced that he was a Keynesian in his economic views.
I refused to vote for Nixon as a delegate and refused to vote for him in the general election
I tell you this personal story to show you how I learned the importance of people's understanding
of history and how it affects their eventual political and economic views. George Orwell
understood this completely and set this out very clearly in his book 1984. He showed how
This is how you can control not only the present but you can control the future if you can control history and what people understand the lessons of the past are.
My particular interest has been in the history of wars because that's when you see the power of the state in full bloom with its deadly leaves of conscription and false propaganda and taxes in their most virulent form.
Time propaganda becomes the official history after the war because the winners always write
it and they convert that propaganda into the history.
And this is why patriotic political myths are created and called history today.
And with that introduction, I want to cover very briefly two wars and how we got into
those wars.
The first is the American Civil War and World War II, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argues
are the two greatest crises of our American history.
These wars are generally credited by historians as being the primary crises of America and
that Lincoln and Roosevelt were the greatest presidents because they tried to keep America
out of these wars.
But after being forced by the enemy into the war, each president provided great leadership.
The establishment historians tell us that the American government was forced into each
The Patriotic Myths that have been generated out of these wars have become the main patriotic political myths of American history.
We're told in our history books and by most intellectuals that these were both noble wars with the Civil War being fought to abolish slavery and World War II being fought to oppose Nazi tyranny.
In my view, both of these wars were unnecessary for the American government to have entered.
And without the secret and deceitful conduct of the Presidents, Lincoln and Roosevelt,
in maneuvering the enemy into firing the first shot, the American government probably would
not have fought these wars.
Individual freedom would be in far better condition today had the American government
followed the policy of its founders.
Let's talk about the Civil War first, and I want you to relax.
I'm not here to defend slavery. I'll tell you that slavery was good. In fact, the abolition
of slavery is one of the great achievements of classical liberalism and the Industrial
Revolution. In fact, it was the ideas of classical liberalism and the Industrial Revolution that
were the main factors in eliminating slavery throughout Western civilization. The abolition
of slavery was one of the great classical liberal achievements along with trying to
of Limit Government, however, I believe that slavery would have been abolished without the Civil War and the war was not fought for the purpose of abolishing it.
There's an interesting book by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel on this subject with the interesting title, Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men.
At the end of the war, slavery was abolished, but also at the end of the war and due to the war, the American Republic was destroyed and individual freedom and the free market
were severely wounded by the centralization of power into the federal government and the presidency.
I believe the war was actually fought because of economic reasons and this is why the first shots were caused to be fired.
The tax historian Charles Adams who spoke yesterday has done probably more than anyone else to revive the interest of people into what the Civil War was about
and to show that it was a tariff issue which actually caused the disputes between the North and South to turn into a shooting war.
Lincoln, like his contemporary political leader Bismarck of Prussia, both wanted a strong centralized government to control a nation rather than a confederacy.
But both of these politicians were faced with a central government connected to a confederation of fairly independent states.
And they both decided that war was the means to eliminate the confederacies and to create a nation instead with a strong centralized government.
Bismarck got France to declare war by sending them the distorted message called the IMS dispatch which made them so mad that the French initiated the war and declared war.
Lincoln got the South to fire the first shot and that's the story I want to talk to you about today.
One of the stories in addition to World War II.
The story of the American Civil War actually begins at the time of the negotiations about the Constitution and with George Mason in particular.
He was a delegate from Virginia who opposed the provision in the Constitution, which would allow the taxes to be voted on and passed by a simple majority rather than a two-thirds vote.
The issue, you can find it, is voting on what was called the Navigation Act, but included in the Navigation Act was the tariff tax.
The tariff was primary and essentially the only large tax that was to be allowed.
Mason warned that if Congress could pass a tariff with a simple majority vote, the South
would be oppressed.
Fellow delegate James Madison stated that he saw no problem with a simple majority vote
and the Constitution was so written.
And primarily for this reason, Mason refused to sign as a delegate and then he led the
battle in Virginia to try to oppose the adoption of the Constitution by the state of Virginia.
In 1824, Henry Clay advocated the American system, which created a partnership between big government and big business, or the Federal government and big business.
Henry Clay's system further provided that the revenue from the tariff could be used for internal improvements under the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution, which the South opposed.
This meant taking the taxes which were primarily collected in the South, and that was about three-fourths of the taxes were collected in the South.
and then taking that money and converting it into the use by the North to build roads and canals primarily for the benefit of big business.
The reason the South paid most of the tax was because the South was basically agricultural and had virtually no manufacturing and therefore the South was to buy manufactured products.
They had two choices. They could buy foreign goods from England or Europe or they could buy domestic goods from the North.
However, when the foreign goods reached American shores, the amount of tariff was added to
the cost of the goods and had to be paid by the consumer, which was the south.
Northern business saw that they could compete better with the foreign goods if they could
make the tariff very high, which was called a, quote, protective tariff, end quote.
Then they could price their goods just below the total cost of the goods added to the tax
and make an excessive profit.
Generally a tariff of under 10% was considered a revenue measure, and a tax of over 10% was
generally considered a protective tax for industry.
Now regardless of whether the South bought the foreign goods or the northern goods, the
money ended up in the north, mainly because the north had the political power to bring
the tax money back to be spent under the general welfare clause in the north for internal improvements.
Of course the excessive profits also stayed in the north for the benefit of northern business.
So this was a treacherous scheme that caused a large transfer of wealth from the South to the North that had been going on for some time but reached a crisis in 1828 when the higher protective tariff, which was called the tariff of abomination, led to secession and nullification, not to secession but the threat of secession and actual nullification in the state of South Carolina in 1832.
So the tariff almost led to civil war at that point when President Andrew Jackson threatened to invade the South and specifically South Carolina.
Henry Clay, one of the main instigators of this injustice, stepped in and tried to settle it and became known as the Great Pacificator.
We finally had the Compromise of 1850, which included the agreement not to have another prohibitive tariff like the tariff of abomination.
It's also important to note that much of the hard feelings and even hatred between the North and South that had occurred was over the issue of slavery.
Abolitionists in the North advocated secession of the North from the South so that slavery could be abolished by not having to comply with the Fugitive Slave Law of the Constitution.
And for that reason, the abolitionists were very unpopular in the North because they did not favor the secession of the North.
The abolitionists also attacked the Constitution generally and stated it was a covenant with the devil because it protected slavery.
The advocacy of secession made the abolitionists unpopular and for that reason Lincoln and the Whigs were very careful to avoid advocating the abolition of slavery and to be in any way connected with the abolitionists.
The South made a strategic blunder in trying to promote the idea that slavery was good
and cited the venerable authorities of Aristotle, Cicero and the Bible.
And this then generated vitriolic comments from the North.
The abolitionists not only advocated that slavery was evil,
but that the Southerners were evil people for allowing it to remain.
So you have these twin things going on.
The issue of slavery creating the hatred between the two areas
and the issue of the tariff creating economic exploitation.
The South felt that the Constitution did protect slavery, but it did not protect them from the tariff.
It was within the Union and under the Constitution that slavery was mainly protected.
And the North did not have the political power to change the Constitution or to outlaw slavery,
but they did have the political power in Congress to declare laws that raise the tariff to higher protective levels and to spend that revenue in the North.
of the North. Therefore, the secession of the South placed slavery at risk, but secession
protected the South from the higher or protective tariff. Finally, when the new Republican Party,
which eventually got all of its votes in the North, stated in its platform that the Republican
Party intended to pass a higher or protective tariff and to spend the money for internal
improvements, which meant the North would help big business, then the South saw that
that they had no hope within the Union. The platform did not advocate that the Republicans
would try to abolish slavery. In the South, and Lincoln specifically claimed he did not
want to abolish slavery. In the South, where it already existed, but merely keep it from
spreading to the territories and new states. As the southern states began to secede in
December of 1860, more and more power was left with the northern states, and by March
In March of 1861, the Confederacy had been formed. On March 2, 1861, two days before
Lincoln's inauguration, the Morrell Tariff was signed into law by President Buchanan.
And within a year, it became the highest tax in American history, with the average being
47 percent of the value of imported goods. However, the war did not start with secession.
America was at peace when Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office two days later on
on March 4, 1861 and promised he would not do anything to abolish slavery where it already
existed. However, the South felt that he had declared war when he stated that he would
use force or invasion to collect the tariff and to hold the forts, which were the enforcement
means to collect the tax. The story of the firing of the first shot by the South is best
understood by looking at two cabinet meetings held by the Lincoln administration. The first
on March 15 and the 2nd on March 29 of 1861. Even though Lincoln had advocated in his inaugural
address that he would use force and invasion to hold the forts and collect the taxes, on
March 15 his cabinet heard the testimony of military leaders, especially General Scott,
that the efforts to hold the forts would be a useless act since the forts could not be
held for any appreciable time and therefore the taxes could not be collected. It would
would be an act which would cause the South to fire the first shot and start the war.
Therefore, the cabinet voted with only one dissent and recommended in writing to Lincoln
that he abandon the forts.
However, only a few weeks later on March 29, the cabinet voted with only two dissents for
Lincoln to send food and reinforcements to Fort Sumter for the purpose of holding the
forts.
Therefore, it's critical to know what occurred that caused this change in the two cabinet
votes in this month of March.
The first thing that happened was a knowledge gained from the fact that Lincoln sent two delegates,
Mr. Herbert and Mr. Lammon, to the South, and specifically to South Carolina,
after the first vote on March 15, to investigate for him.
They came back before the March 29 meeting and told him that if Lincoln even sent a ship carrying food,
the South would fire the first shot because this would tell the South that Lincoln intended to hold the forts
The second thing that occurred was that the South had adopted its constitution on March 11, which declared that it would never charge more than a 10 percent tariff on imported goods.
The comparison of the two rates of tariff began to send shock waves throughout the Northern mercantile and banking interest.
The comparison of the two rates of tariff began to send shockwaves throughout the Northern mercantile and banking interest. Foreign goods would no longer be coming to the North, but would be coming to Charleston and to New Orleans. The virtually free trade zone of the South would make the North an economic desert. The third thing that happened was a drastic change in the political positions of the business and economic interest in the North, but especially in New York, which was the main port.
The merchant and banking interests there, which I'll simply call Wall Street, change their position drastically.
There's a very interesting book on this subject of Wall Street and the Civil War, which is rarely cited in any Civil War history.
It's gone under various names, but my copy is entitled Business and Slavery, The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict.
The author is Philip S. Foner, and it was published in 1941.
It tells the amazing story that Wall Street, prior to the Civil War, was economically and
politically aligned with the rich southern plantation owners.
Wall Street did their banking and they became personal friends and entered into various
joint economic ventures.
They were also basically in the same political party of the Democratic Party.
Prior to the two taxes being passed by their respective governments, Wall Street had mobilized
How many of you have ever heard that before or read that book?
It's new to me, and Charles Adams is the one that had me read it.
Unfortunately, I don't go into this in the reassessing of the present, but I do cite it in the pages you need to read.
Prior to the tariff issue, many of the newspapers and the general population of the North simply told Lincoln, let the South go in peace.
They did not want to use force to bring the South back in.
So it was a safe thing for Wall Street to decide to go with the South, because they foresaw no war about it.
The only people advocating war openly were the radical Republicans, who were not really Lincoln supporters.
However, when the reality of the contrast and the two tariffs sank in and the business and political interest throughout the North began to demand that Lincoln go to war and stop this free trade zone, it became evident that there would be a possibility of a war.
And Wall Street began to realize that if they did not secede and they were part of the North, then they would become part of this economic desert due to the free trade zone.
So they had previously promised their support to Jefferson Davis and they switched completely 180 degrees and began to demand that Lincoln go to war.
Charles Adams has some cartoons in some of his tax books and it shows the Wall Street gang bringing the sacks of money to Lincoln and demanding that he go to war.
And these were the previous supporters of the idea of secession and Jefferson Davis.
This was the key economic support that Lincoln needed when Wall Street switched to the war position and support of Lincoln.
When the cabinet voted again on March 29, Wall Street and the economic interests of the North had joined Lincoln's camp and demanded war.
The cabinet, with only two dissenting votes, voted to hold the forts, including Fort Sumter.
Now, Lincoln may be the most astute politician ever to be president, which is not a compliment.
He was an astute politician, but he was not a great president.
In fact, he, along with Franklin Roosevelt, in my opinion, as stated in the book, Reassessing
the Presidents, are two worst presidents.
But Lincoln knew that he could not gain the support of the North if he started the war.
He recognized that the South would have to fire the first shot.
So Lincoln devised a plan and he started with the information from Herbert and Lammon that
the South would fire even on a ship bringing food. Major Anderson at Fort Sumter had plenty
of food because he had an agreement with the Charleston merchants for the supply of fresh
meat and vegetables on a daily basis and supplies were not cut off until after Lincoln made
his plans and the South discovered that he was not only sending a ship with food but
Lincoln announced to the public that he was only sending food to the, quote, starving Garrison, but the South knew that the Garrison had plenty of food and he was sending armed forces and therefore had repudiated his promise given through Secretary of State Seward that he was going to abandon Sumter.
There are several smoking guns which tell us about the secret plan of Lincoln, but the
best is contained in the diary of his good friend and political ally, Sumter Orville
Browning of Illinois.
When Fort Sumter was fired on, Lincoln issued an order for Congress to meet on July 4, 1861,
by giving him two and a half months to carry out his dictatorial plan to subdue the South
without any congressional approval.
So on July 3, 1861, his close friend, Senator Browning, arrived in Washington and had a
private meeting with his friend, President Lincoln, to hear the speech that Lincoln was
going to give the next day to Congress.
While Lincoln had the utmost trust in Senator Browning, he did not know that Browning kept
a meticulous diary.
And after Lincoln read the speech to be given to Congress the next day, he told Senator
Browning about how he had planned for the South to be perceived as starting the war
by firing the first shot at Fort Sumter.
When leaving the White House that night, Senator Browning went immediately to his hotel room
and recorded the conversation in his diary, and this is what it states, quote,
He, meaning Lincoln, told me that the very first thing placed in his hands after his
inauguration was a letter from Major Anderson announcing the impossibility of defending
or resupplying Sumter, that he called the cabinet together and consulted General Scott,
Scott concurred with Anderson, and the Cabinet, with the exception of Postmaster General Blair,
were for evacuating the fort, and all the troubles and anxieties of his life had not
equaled those which intervened between this time and the fall of Sumter.
Still quoting the diary, he himself conceived the idea and proposed sending supplies without
an attempt to reinforce, giving notice of the fact to Governor Pickens of South Carolina.
And then here's the key phrase, quote, the plan succeeded.
They attacked something, it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could,
end quote.
Now if the plan was to bring food to the starving Garrison, that plan failed because the ship
never came close to the shore and the warships never came in.
But if the plan was to get the South to fire the first shot, then certainly the plan did
To indulge in some counterfactual history, I believe that if Lincoln had not sent the ship, I believe there would have been no war.
If the South had been allowed to secede peacefully, I believe that slavery would have gradually disappeared
due to the fact there was no fugitive slave clause to be enforced against runaway slaves.
Further, the Industrial Revolution was making slavery a thing of the past throughout the world,
and this would have happened to the South eventually.
and this would have happened to the South eventually. The South would have maintained a decentralized type of government, preserved the ideas of the founders against a strong centralized government.
America would not have been converted into a monolithic centralized government through the war. I believe American history would be much better for freedom if Lincoln had not provoked the South into firing the first shot.
Now let's go to Pearl Harbor. This is the next patriotic political myth, which is taught as recently as the current movie on Pearl Harbor.
In our new book, published by the Mises Institute, entitled Reassessing the Presidents, I contribute two chapters.
One is the story of Fort Sumter and the other the story of Pearl Harbor.
and I go into much more detail but however there are three fairly recent events in regard to Pearl Harbor I'd like to highlight in telling you the Pearl Harbor story.
The first is a resolution adopted by the U.S. Senate in May of 1999 in regard to Pearl Harbor.
There had been a previous Congressional investigation of Pearl Harbor in 1945 and 1946, which came
to the conclusion by the Majority Report of the Democrats that Pearl Harbor Commanders
Admiral Kimmel and General Short should be blamed for Pearl Harbor.
Their ranks were reduced, they were made the scapegoats and dismissed from the service.
The Republicans in their Minority Report in 1946 blamed Roosevelt and Marshall for the
Pearl Harbor debacle.
Since that time, Admiral Kimmel and General Shorty both died, but their families have
tried to correct this injustice, and so the U.S. Senate agreed to make a new investigation
of Pearl Harbor. A bipartisan resolution adopted by the U.S. Senate in May of 1999 posthumously
restores the full rank of these two officers and declares that both men perform their duties
competently and professionally. Further, this bipartisan resolution states that the surprise
The Mises attack was not the result of the dereliction and the performance of their duties,
but was caused by withholding critical information that was available in Washington DC that foretold
of the war with Japan.
But this information was withheld from the commanders.
This resolution puts the blame squarely on Roosevelt and his advisors in Washington for
bringing America into the war.
The second new development grew out of the publicity of this Senate hearing and resulted
in a letter being written by Mrs. Helen E. Hammond to President Clinton, stating that
she learned that the families of Admiral Kimmel and General Short were trying to clear their
names in regard to the Pearl Harbor matter.
She felt compelled to reveal the confession that her father had made to her before his
death.
Her father was a Mr. Don C. Smith who died in 1990 at the age of 98.
He told her back in the 1970s that he had worried for many years about the fact that
a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and while he held the position of Director
of War Service with American Red Cross, he was summoned to the White House for a private
confidential meeting with President Roosevelt.
In this meeting, President Roosevelt revealed to her father that his intelligence staff
had warned Roosevelt of an impending attack by the Japanese, and Roosevelt anticipated
it would cause many deaths, injuries and damages.
Roosevelt instructed her father to send numerous Red Cross workers and massive supplies to
a holding area on the west coast where they would be delivered by the military to the
proper location.
Ms. Hammond reported further that her father protested to the President about keeping this
a secret from the American people and the military personnel to be attacked.
Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe
unless they were attacked within their own borders.
Mrs. Hammond further reported that her father reluctantly followed the orders of the President
and spent the rest of his life feeling that he was morally and ethically wrong to have
participated in this deceit and deception upon the American people and the servicemen
at Pearl Harbor where nearly 3,000 lost their lives and thousands more were injured and
massive destruction of the Pacific fleet was inflicted.
Subsequent investigation of Mrs. Hammond's allegations have shown that it is correct
that the Red Cross did transfer substantial personnel and supplies to the West Coast which
was then transferred to Pearl Harbor just prior to the attack.
This shows that not only did Roosevelt know when and where the Japanese would attack,
but he knew specifically it would be at Pearl Harbor because that's where he sent the supplies.
And the third development is the most dramatic and sensational, and this is the publication
of a book written by Robert Stinnett entitled Day of Deceit, The Truth about FDR and Pearl
Harbor. It was published in 1999 and the author was an officer in the American Navy stationed
in the Pacific during the war. He spent 17 years researching this extremely important
book and he dedicated it to the late congressman John Moss of California who was the author
of the Freedom of Information Act. Stinnett used this act to gain access to over 200,000
documents, and he used these documents in numerous interviews to turn up conclusive
evidence about Roosevelt's deceitful activity. I'm going to tell you about three of those
developments.
First, in regard to the provocation of the Japanese to fire the first shot, Stinnett
found a critical document in the files of Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, who
Macaulay, who was born in Japan to American Baptist missionaries. Macaulay grew up in
Japan learning their language, their culture and their politics, and then came to America
and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Macaulay became the key resource person for
Roosevelt in regard to the provocation of Japan. Roosevelt specifically requested that
Macaulay prepare a document which would show Roosevelt how to provoke the Japanese into
firing the first shot. We don't know when this document was actually prepared or first
was discussed with Roosevelt, but there's a record, and we do know, that they privately met in the White House on October 7, 1940, McCollum and Roosevelt, over one year before Pearl Harbor, and discussed the eight steps that McCollum had recommended, some of which had already taken place by that time.
These eight steps included moving the Pacific Fleet from its normal base at San Diego to Pearl Harbor, which was known by the naval personnel to put it at great risk for attack.
Act.
The document further recommends that Roosevelt worked with the Dutch and the British to cut
off all oil supplies to the Japanese and worked with the British to place an embargo on all
trade to Japan, which would force them to attack in order to relieve these restraints.
We now know that Roosevelt followed the advice and carried out all eight steps.
The second startling revelation in Stinnett's book is that it reveals for the first time
that not only was the diplomatic code of the Japanese broken by the Americans before Pearl
Harbor but also the military code was broken. The American code breakers were listening
to all the military commands which occurred before Pearl Harbor and relaying these translated
messages directly to Washington D.C. But the commanders at Pearl Harbor never got the slightest
bit of this information about the military commands. The book shows that these radio
The radio intercepts had location finders, which allowed the code breakers to determine
the exact location of the Japanese fleet, which left Japanese waters on November 25,
1941, headed for Pearl Harbor. The code breakers followed their progress through the North
Pacific and all the way up to the point when they launched their attack on Pearl Harbor.
When both the location and the destination of the Japanese fleet were determined, an
An order came from Washington D.C. called the, quote, Vacant Sea Order, and this removed
all American commercial and military traffic from the North Pacific Ocean for the purpose
of letting the Japanese forces have an unobserved, unobstructed path to Pearl Harbor.
Stinnett's book shows that without White House knowledge or approval, Admiral Kimmel in Pearl
Harbor had ordered a substantial portion of his fleet to move into an area north of Pearl
in Pearl Harbor, two weeks before Pearl Harbor. In fact, he went to the very area where the
launch was eventually made by the Japanese. Upon discovery of this maneuver of Kimmel
back in Washington, orders came directly from Washington for Kimmel to return immediate
to Pearl Harbor and not to send any more surveillance out in that direction. Senate rightfully concludes
In his book he reads that obviously Roosevelt did not want to risk an open sea battle and would prefer a surprise attack on American forces on American soil, which would so inflame the American people that they would become united and bring them into war with the righteous vengeance just as had been done by the firing on Fort Sumter.
And finally, in Senate's book, we read about the cover-up orders, and it shows the first order was issued on December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor,
telling all military personnel to destroy their documents and not to talk with anyone concerning their knowledge of the intercepts, especially the military code intercepts.
Immediately after the war, and when no reason existed to keep the military secret that the Japanese military code had been broken,
was broken. Admiral King issued orders to all code breakers and the intelligence personnel
that they would be imprisoned and all their Navy and government benefits would be cut
off if any of them revealed anything about the military code intercepts. This order was
issued just prior to the congressional hearings in 1945. All witnesses since 1945 have testified
under oath that the military code had not been broken and that the military information
had not been intercepted from the Japanese. If ever there was any reason to doubt that
Roosevelt lied us into the war, first by provoking the Japanese to fire the first shot, then
by withholding the critical information from the Pearl Harbor commanders, and then by covering
all of this up, this book settles that issue. However, there's one disturbing part of Stenett's
book which you'll find at page 259 in the epilogue. He states that as horrible as it
It may seem to the families and to the veterans of the war that Roosevelt did this.
Stenitz said that it must be recognized that there was a greater evil to stop.
The Nazi invaders in Europe had begun the Holocaust and were poised to invade England,
he says.
There were also powerful isolationist forces, Stenitz said, which prevented Roosevelt from
getting into the European war.
I believe this is the only defense now left to Roosevelt and his supporters, which is
Professor Thomas A. Bailey, a Stanford University historian, wrote a book in 1948 following the Congressional investigation of 45-46, which made this claim explicitly.
Bailey asserts that there might be a veil in the defense, that the end justifies the means, and states that Roosevelt had a moral right to lie to the American citizens.
And I'll quote a portion of Bailey's book.
If you adopt Machiavelli's advice that the end justifies the means, then you must pursue
the next question, and that is, what was the real end that Roosevelt sought?
Most defenders have said that he had to use the back door of Japan in order to fight the
war with Germany, because Germany was a dangerous tyranny and a threat to America. However,
in December of 1941, Germany and Russia were already at war, and at that time the evidence
was clear that Soviet Russia was the greatest tyranny the world had ever known. In order
to fight Germany, we would have to be an ally of Soviet Russia. Stalin had already proved
to be the most horrible murderer ever known in history. At that time, it was known in
in Washington that he had already murdered over 10 million of his own people through
the reign of terror and starvation from the period of 1929 to 1939. Now since the archives
have been opened, we know that that figure is 20 million. By 1939, Hitler had only killed
about a hundred, less than a hundred of his own people, mainly through the purge of his
own troops. So this was the stark comparison and contrast between Stalin and Hitler as
As they were known in 1939 through 1941.
Even after the war ended, Stalin was still ranked as the number one murderer in the world
history.
And number two was another communist dictator, Mayo of China.
Communism as a worldwide movement murdered over 100 million of its own citizens.
This is not wartime soldiers' deaths, this is citizens killed by their own governments.
Furthermore, Soviet Communism advocated a world revolution by uniting the workers of the world, including the workers in America and Great Britain, to abolish all capitalistic systems and to abolish all private property.
Fascism was instituted in Italy by Mussolini in 1922 as an anti-communist movement that advocated a strong centralized government which allowed private property, but industry was to be joined with government as a partner under strict controls and regulations.
An excellent example of the economic structure of fascism was Roosevelt's New Deal, but
of course Roosevelt's policy was definitely not anti-communist.
Hitler's fascism also was anti-communist, but he added a new factor, anti-Semitism.
However, Hitler advocated a peaceful coexistence with America and the British Empire.
Hitler greatly admired the British Empire and even offered to enter into a permanent
alliance with them.
The only war Hitler advocated was the war against communism in Soviet Russia for more
living space for Germans in the East.
We now know from the Russian archives that Stalin had planned to attack Germany in July
or August of 1941, but he was beat to the punch by Hitler's invasion of Russia in June
of 1941, a war Hitler had always promised, and Stalin knew it was coming, but he didn't
know it would be in June of 1941.
Furthermore, Winston Churchill admitted in a conversation with Stalin that occurred in 1944, that back in 1940, Churchill could have made a very favorable peace treaty with Hitler that would have completely protected the British Empire.
Here's what Churchill told Stalin in 1944, about 1940.
We never thought of making a separate peace even in the year we were all alone and easily could have made one without serious loss to the British Empire and largely at your, meaning Stalin's, expense.
Of course, Churchill refused to make a peace treaty because he knew that he had Roosevelt's secret guarantee that Roosevelt would bring America into the war through some means or method.
Many American statesmen at the time of America's entry in the war stated that the cause of freedom and the opposition to tyranny would have been served far better by staying out of the war.
This is a conclusion also reached by military expert Hanson Baldwin in his book called Great Mistakes of the War published in 1949, and he states, quote,
There is no doubt whatsoever that it would have been in the interest of Britain and the
United States and the world to have allowed, indeed to have encouraged, the world's two
great dictatorships to fight each other to a frazzle. Such a struggle, with its resultant
weakening of both communism and Nazism, could not but have aided in the establishment of
a more stable peace. There were many political leaders, diplomats and even the Pope who warned
I believe that if the Polish-German war became a European war, which brought in the British Empire, that the only beneficiary would be communism, especially Soviet Russia.
I believe Senate's statement attempting to justify Roosevelt's actions to fight tyranny of Germany is a wrong interpretation of history,
and that Soviet Russia was a much greater threat to America than was Nazi Germany.
For 50 years after the end of the war in 1945, the Cold War continued with communism and it became a hot war in Korea and Vietnam,
and finally there was the nuclear showdown with Soviet Russia over the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For further support that the main threat was Communism, I recommend numerous books by Robert Conquest
and especially his new book entitled This Ravaged Century.
Also see the new book entitled The Black Book of Communism with articles by many French intellectuals
who endorsed Communism at one time and are now totally against it as they see the horrible effects
and the success that it had in the 20th century.
However, it's my personal opinion that one of the main reasons FDR wanted America into the war was his private agenda,
which was the same private agenda that Woodrow Wilson had.
Woodrow Wilson was Roosevelt's idol and his mentor, and Roosevelt wanted to succeed where Wilson had failed.
Wilson had an unrealistic but an idealistic dream and imagined that he could be the most important man the world had ever known
We could create a worldwide organization such as the League of Nations and bring peace to
the world and eliminate war forever, but Wilson's dream could only be realized if America entered
the European war and helped dictate its post-war settlement.
And this was one of the main reasons Wilson wanted America into that war.
When Wilson failed to get America to join the League of Nations, his dream ended.
President Roosevelt served in the Wilson administration and was the vice presidential candidate along
with Cox for president in 1920.
and Roosevelt made over 800 speeches in favor of Wilson's League of Nations. In a recent
book praising Roosevelt entitled FDR and Creation of the UN by Hoops and Brinkley, they point
out that Wilson's ghost was always at the side of Roosevelt and that even before Pearl
Harbor, Roosevelt met with Churchill at the Atlantic Charter meeting in August of 1941
to propose the United Nations idea to Churchill. Roosevelt wanted an international organization
with a police force, with the four policemen being America, Great Britain, Russia and China
to enforce the peace.
Churchill was very much opposed to a centralized world organization and stated he could only
support regional organizations with spheres of influence.
Nevertheless, the book points out that within three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt
held a meeting in Washington wherein representatives of Soviet Russia, China, Great Britain and
America signed what was called the United Nations Agreement.
Roosevelt spent the entire war trying to convince Stalin about his idea of the United Nations.
When Roosevelt and Stalin first met face to face in 1943 at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt
gave Stalin the details of this centralized UN organization with an international police
force and Stalin voiced the same objections as Churchill and further objected to China
Roosevelt used the Lin-Lease Act to give vast war materials, weapons and money to Stalin
and gave him everything he wanted in an effort to get Stalin to agree first to Roosevelt's
concept of the United Nations and secondly to get Stalin to agree to enter the war against
Japan in the Pacific once Germany was defeated.
Roosevelt helped to build Soviet Russia into a massive superpower and he seemed to have
have little interest in what happened in Europe as a result of creating this monster, all
of which was demonstrated at the Alta Conference.
If you look at the end result of World War II, or really what was phase II of World War
I, it's clear that communism and Soviet Russia were the big winners by protecting and enhancing
communism in Russia and eliminating its main enemies of Germany, Japan and Italy.
The war further allowed the evil empire of communism to spread into Europe and to take
Take over the entire nation of China, which also made it a threat to world peace.
The British Empire and France were reduced to second-rate powers, and America entered
the dangerous and ill-advised role of being the world policeman with a permanent garrison
state imposed under an avalanche of taxes over the last 50 years, and our armed forces
are still in Europe.
So in looking back at what drove Roosevelt to war, the alleged tyranny of Germany, or
The Creation of the U.N. I consider these hardly justifiable ends and reasons for America
entering phase two of World War I. The American policy of isolationism and non-interventionism
is not what caused the war to end in the 20th century, but it is the policy of interventionism
which caused World War I and phase two of that war to be the great tragedies of the
20th century.
In conclusion, I state that the American Civil War and World War II as well as America's
entry into World War II were unnecessary and these were not inevitable events.
In our book, The Cost of War, America's Period Victories, the theme is that contrary to the
patriotic political myths which are called history, these were not noble and great wars.
By winning these wars, American freedom has been diminished primarily by the enlargement
and centralization of power into the federal government and the ending of our non-interventionist
The American government could have avoided each war if their respective presidents had sought peace rather than actually seeking war. However, in each case, the president had a political agenda and needed a war to accomplish that agenda. Neither could afford to be perceived as starting a war and therefore they needed to maneuver the alleged enemy into firing the first shot so the American people would not know the truth. In our new book, Reassessing the Presidency, I go into much more detail.
about these two wars.
And this is just a brief preview of what is given in more detail there.
But the theme of that book is basically that the office of the President of the United
States has been elevated in power to that of the imperial presidency and far beyond
what was intended by the founders.
This has been one of the main reasons that America has become the world policeman.
And if America is to avoid the disasters of other nations and empires of the past, we
must learn the truth about our history.
We must adopt political policies that reduce the power of the Presidency and reduce the
power of the Federal Government.
We must restore the free market and the non-interventionist foreign policy.
Ludwig von Mises teaches that the best way to avoid war is to reduce the size of government
and to separate government from the economy so that economic forces are not allowed to
use the government to get into wars.
Mises further advocated free trade throughout the world without tariff barriers.
If we learn the truth about our history, instead of believing the patriotic political myths
that have been created, we will be in a better position not to repeat the mistakes of the
past.