Shork shortage has finally manifested itself. I just came back from Europe, so I haven't had a chance to mark the test yet, but by Thursday I will have marked it, so I'll give it back to you.
I was at a conference in Poland and it was heartwarming because the Polish scholars there were all very much against the government.
They were all completely courageous, lashed out at the government at all times with no respect for any of its pronouncements, and very feisty.
I think that's really heartwarming.
None of them believe anything the government says. Good healthy attitude, Carl.
As I said, Teddy Roosevelt had been the Morgan candidate for Vice President, he replaced
Garrett Hobart who had died in office. McKinley hated and Mark Hanna hated Roosevelt and tried
to get other Morgan people to accept the Vice Presidential nomination, they refused to do
it. They were stuck with Teddy, but they figured after all, Teddy was the Vice Presidential
candidate and a few years ago. The plan was that after McKinley's two terms, Mark Hanna
and then that would run for president, Rockefeller was backing him to the hilt and something happened on the way to the White House of course, namely that McKinley was assassinated by one of the many lone nuts that have appeared in American history, the assassination date, September 1901, early in those days the president took office in March instead of in January, so essentially McKinley was only in for about eight months or so in 1901.
Interesting, sort of an interesting thing about assassinations, if you notice in the
history of the United States, there have been many assassinations of American presidents
and American politics.
There have been many assassinations in the world and in all the rest of the world, Europe,
Asia, Africa, whenever somebody is assassinated, it's always assumed there was some political
motivation for this thing, some political group was doing it.
And the police, the police tactics, when any individual is murdered, you look for means
This is motive and opportunity, the famous triad, and motive becomes the key thing, it doesn't mean the person who had the motive was the guilty person, but the person you look at first, in other words, some millionaire dies, is murdered, you look to the grieving widow, was the grieving widow responsible, doesn't mean she was responsible, she inherited five million dollars, she becomes the first suspect. This is never done in the United States, for some reason, an American president, a big shot is assassinated, nobody ever talks about political motivation, it's always some lone nut.
You find the guy very quickly and you've caught him away as being a nut.
And it seems to me rather peculiar that the usual police work has never applied to American
presidents.
You don't look at who's the beneficiary, who benefited when, for example, McKinley is assassinated?
Obviously, Teddy Roosevelt benefited, the vice president.
Somehow he was never suspected, he was never put on the police griddle, police grilling,
were suspected, or the Morgan people, of course, didn't take over, because Morgan all of a
sudden becomes, the Morgan's now have a president, which they were not likely to have in any
other situation.
Doesn't mean the Morgan's did it, doesn't mean that Teddy Roosevelt did it, but at least
he should have been, at least historians, people of the time, historians should at least
have a certain suspicion, at least investigate the possibility that this was a Morgan set
up job.
Said it was a lone nut, some guy named Charles Gudge, they dispose of Charles Gudge quickly,
they try him as a lone nut, they execute him and that's the end of it.
When Huey Long was assassinated in 1936 or 35, it was going to be a very powerful challenge
to Franklin Roosevelt's second term Democratic ticket.
He was assassinated and his guards immediately, of course, killed the guy and that was the
end of it.
It's never considered to be any kind of political plan or conspiracy at work, so it's kind of
odd.
In the United States, you have this sort of official innocence applied to assassinations.
It never has to be a lone nut.
You never even think of the possibility of maybe other people involved, maybe political motivations or whatever.
The case of President Kennedy, of course, our most recent assassinee, obviously the major recipient was Lyndon Johnson.
Doesn't mean Lyndon Johnson was behind it.
It just means the police should have been entertained as a possibility by the media and by the police and by the Department of Justice or whatever.
Because it becomes difficult if the vice president is really responsible and assumes office, it's difficult for the Department of Justice to undertake a serious investigation of the person who is now president and therefore the boss of the Department of Justice.
As we saw with Watergate, it becomes very difficult. You have to have special counselors and all the rest of the...
But the lone nut scheme has always been operative in the United States.
At any rate, as a matter of fact, there had been several assassinations before.
President Garfield was assassinated by a lone nut in 1881, succeeded by Chester Arthur.
Garfield was hated by so many types of the official forces.
Before that, of course, Lincoln was assassinated.
Again, with Lincoln, even though obviously they had to admit there was a conspiracy involved,
even though the focus of historians was always on John Wilkes Booth, but obviously there were many people involved.
There have also been mysterious deaths in the presidency.
Zachary Taylor became president in 1848, was elected as a Whig and even though he was a
He was a slave holder himself. He came from Virginia. He suddenly became anti-slavery.
He led the fight against expansion of slavery in the West.
He died in mysterious circumstances after a July 4th picnic.
He died of gastrointestinal poisoning. The thing is, he was the only one who was poisoned.
You know, 200 people at a picnic, you know, poisoned, you know, whatever it is,
anchovies or mayonnaise sandwiches, several people got food poisoning.
Why did only one guy, the president, get food poisoning and nobody else?
This has never been seriously investigated.
The death of Harding was kind of peculiar, too.
There was a contention by one of the Secret Service people who wrote a book
after Harding died and his wife was responsible, poisoned them because of the Harding scandal.
I'm not taking this as official, that's probably eccentric.
But the point is that there have been, none of these contentions have been seriously investigated.
At any rate, we have a lone nut and he kills McKinley and all of a sudden Morgan gets a president.
President. And Teddy Roosevelt starts using this to the hilt. It's not as if he was passive.
He took full use of this golden opportunity to get a true Morgan presidency in office.
What does he do? As soon as he begins to be president, he assumes the presidency in November,
In January, I'd say his first speech, I think in December, his first message to Congress, yeah.
From the vehicle to the humanity to not let in?
Oh yeah, absolutely. With the mafia, with the CIA and all, yeah.
There's a lot of stuff that's been written on that.
It's pretty conclusive, I think, that the mafia is largely responsible.
But the thing is that the media hasn't really accepted it.
There's been a lot of books on it, but the official media, the CBS, NBC, the New York Times, et cetera,
never accepted this. The Congressional investigation said there were at least three shots and it
gets buried on page 85 or something. The paper is never really taken seriously. I think most
of the public agrees with this revisionist view. There's a lot of stuff that's been
written on it, some good books on it. Anthony Summer's, probably the best two Anthony Summer's
conspiracy, which sums up the latest mafia stuff. And a book by David Lifton called Best
is evidence, it's deals with the bullet, the whole bullet problem, you focus on the bullet.
There's also a charming thing which I don't, which I've no proof for, it's never been published,
I haven't seen the manuscript, it's obvious why it wasn't published, this is a book by Fred Richmond,
some other guy, Fred Richmond, some sort of libertarian, and the book focused on the,
the only book that I know of, I'm a sort of Kennedy assassination buff, the only book I know of was
I want to focus on the entourage, on the cars, the presidential, vice-presidential cars.
He, his viewers, the Secret Service killed Kennedy in the car, probably, on sound.
The interesting thing about this, he focused on the cars, the entourage, and how the route changed in the last minute,
like the night before, they suddenly changed the route, go through the D. Lee Plaza instead of right on the freeway,
that you could easily be shot at.
He claims that Kennedy's head, as they turn the corner, apparently the back seat could
be raised so he could make the big shot in the back seat more visible.
He measures the distance in the back seat, he's the only one who ever did this, and shows
that Kennedy's seat goes up by several inches to make him a better target, and he rounds
the corner, and the Secret Service guy in the front of the guy who manipulated the lever,
the only one who had the lever, he assumes that Kennedy was assassinated and destroyed
We know that Johnson dies for the floorboards, as soon as the shots ring out, of course.
But he claims that Johnson dies for the front of the car two and a half seconds before the first shot.
Those are great moments.
This never got published.
Anyway, that's a charming doctrine.
He also claimed, he said, well, up until now, nobody has said who the killer was.
In any case, Teddy Roosevelt revives an old proposal for a new cabinet department of commerce
and labor.
Before that, there was no commerce department, there was no labor department.
Service of means of subsidizing and regulating commerce and industry immediately starts in
very quickly.
He also urged the Federal Board, like the ICC, to supervise industrial combinations, in other words, like the ICC for the railroad, this is a Morgan position now, an official Morgan position, which most big businessmen now adopt in the next few years, that we need, and I keep repeating this on and on, we need to do for industry in general, what the ICC did for the railroad, not as for and not to, they did for the railroad, they helped the railroad by cartelizing them, regulating them, by keeping out, by raising rates, by keeping out competition.
Just as we needed an ICC for the railroads, we also need now a Federal Trade Commission
or a Federal Commerce Commission or whatever for general industry, in other words to cartelize
industry in general like the ICC did for the railroads.
So Roosevelt starts talking about that immediately.
Before he writes his speech, he clears it with two friends, two good friends and advisors,
George W. Perkins, Morgan Portner, and Robert Bacon, Morgan Portner.
These are two guys, yes, yes, great stuff, petty, far away.
So from the very beginning, it starts with Morgan Portner.
As a matter of fact, as soon as the election of 1900 was over, I should say before the assassination,
As soon as the election is over in late November, Teddy Roosevelt, now Vice President, gives
a lavish dinner in honor of who?
JP Morgan.
Without JP Morgan, he would never have achieved his stature, which of course is true.
No gift was ever more deserved.
So, as I say, his first message to Congress after McKinley assassinated, he calls for
checking with Perkins and Bacon, two top Morgan partners, he calls for federal regulation
for Corporations, a Federal Commerce Commission of some sort to regulate an industry, to investigate
corporations.
The first thing he pushes is what he pushed, remember I said on the tape, Jeremiah W. Jankes,
Cornell University economist, one of the so-called new greed economists, compulsory publicity.
Corporations should have to open their books to federal regulations so that we know, everybody
knows what their prices are, you know, what their prices are charging, what they're doing
And notice what this means, again, you know from cartels, cartels break up, one of the
things that breaks up cartels is because secret price cutting, so what the cartelists, those
who want a compulsory cartel, this is a Morgan interest, they want a first of foremost, a
first step, compulsory publicity, don't let them have secret price cutting, this is one
way to do it.
So it sounds very democratic, it sounds great, publicity is good, secrecy is bad, but what
What it really means is to break up cartels, keep cartels from being broken up by not allowing
secret price cutting.
So Jencks was the first economist theoretician of proposer of publicity and this of course
was the Morgan line.
And throughout the summer of 1902, Roosevelt was first summer in office, he peppered his
and his speeches constantly recalls what was supposed to be publicity in order to curb
what he called business evils. He found a strong ally in the attorney general who he
inherited from McKinley, but he had just become attorney general a few months before, a very
important figure named Philander Knox. Philander Knox was a Pittsburgh corporate lawyer and
Pittsburgh corporate lawyer and therefore of course a tool of Mellon interests and Mellon
National Bank was a major financier of Pittsburgh, very closely tied in with Frick in Carnegie,
Carnegie Steel, Frick, Carnegie Frick steel interests.
What happened in 1901, just about this time you see, is that Carnegie Frick merged into
to the U.S. Steel, in other words, version of the Great Morgan Empire. Carnegie decided
he wanted to retire and sold out to the U.S. Steel Corporation. So, in other words, Mellon
was tied in with Morgan. So, Philander Knopf becomes a Morgan tool by virtue of his connection
with Mellon Carnegie and Mellon Carnegie Frick interests. So, he was very happy to start
This fantastic campaign of Teddy Roosevelt, which I'll mention in a second.
Frick, by the way, was now a major shareholder, of course. Frick and Cardy, major shareholders
in U.S. Steel. They were tied in through, was he who owned a business, you're a big
shot in the business, you sell out of the big holding company, you become a major shareholder
in the holding company. So you're tied in with a Morgan interest more or less permanently.
And Frick, Frick is now, Knox is now urging, he's now urging Teddy Roosevelt to establish
a commission of compulsory powers to obtain information, subpoena information from corporations
and to report to the President.
And Roosevelt then submits this proposal to Congress early 1903, a new Department of Commerce
and Labor, which he already proposed, plus this new compulsory publicity power and something
called the Bureau of Corporations, which will be attached to this new department.
So, this I'd say was the Morgan line, there had been a previous U.S. Industrial Commission
which late McKinley had launched, late in his administration, where Jenks was again
running the thing, also calling for a post-break publicity, it all fits into this new trend.
And then Roosevelt submits this bill to Congress, he should have a bureau of corporations with
the power to investigate all subpoena corporations' books and so forth and so on.
The first big regulatory agency for the business in general, the major guy pushing it of course
is George W. Perkins, Morgan's partner, Morgan's main guy in politics who's lobbying this thing
through Congress.
And Perkins by the way was the main guy who helped Morgan form U.S. Steel and International
of the Federal Harvester, the two big Morgan Industrial Trusts in 1901.
Perkins and Roosevelt, Roosevelt's formulating his famous doctrine, which Perkins also was
formulated for him.
There are two kinds of trusts, they said, very famous, even the orthodox historians
The Good Trusts and the Bad Trusts
Good Trusts are great and they should be sponsored and helped. Bad Trusts or Bad should be broken up.
What is the criterion for Good Trusts and Bad Trusts? Well, there's no criterion. It's all subjective.
Whether Teddy Rosa likes them or not, and in practice what it meant, the Good Trusts are the Morgan Trusts.
Morgan Good, it means General Electric, it means U.S. Steel, International Lobster, etc.
The bad trust or anything connected with Rockefeller and Harriman.
Now we get back to the, by definition, this is the moral criterion of business and badness.
Morgan Good, Rockefeller bad.
Now Harriman, I don't know if I mentioned this or not yet, but I did, I repeat it.
Herman was a bring in Wall Street broker who started, I guess he marries this girl and
gets to inherit this small railroad in upstate New York and builds up from that, from financial
genius, no question about that, becomes a big railroad owner and starts and really starts
running Central Pacific, gets control of Central Pacific and Southern Pacific and moves in
on Union Pacific, excuse me, on Northern Pacific and moves in on Northern Pacific and this
and Morgan has been controlling it as a tremendous fight around 1902, around this whole period you see,
a tremendous fight, stock fight between Morgan and Hill on the one hand,
Hill of Great Northern, they form an alliance to keep control of the Northern Pacific,
versus Harriman who's trying to get a hold of it, becomes a big railroad tycoon.
The German joined up with Rockefeller pouring in a lot of money, and Kuhn-Loeb is the investment banker.
Kuhn-Loeb is coming up fast.
There's a big cultural problem between Morgan and Kuhn-Loeb.
Kuhn-Loeb were German Jewish investment bankers in New York.
I'm headed by Jacob Schiff.
These forms of titanic struggle, titanic fight, stock fight,
between the Morgan Hill forces versus the Harriman Rockefeller-Kuhn-Willis forces.
The interesting thing is Harriman and Rockefeller-Kuhn-Willis have been aligned almost ever since.
In other words, this alliance continued from about 1901 until the 1940s, let's say.
And Morgan and Hill finally won out. They formed after a big struggle.
By the way, Morgan of course hated Rockefeller and also hated Harriman, a bitter hatred of Harriman.
Harriman was challenging Morgan in the railroads. Morgan had run practically every railroad.
All of a sudden this young whippersnapper was challenging the great Morgan.
He referred to him as a little punk, because that was one of the many references to Harriman by Morgan.
Also there's a cultural problem here, Harriman being short and thin and Morgan being big, tall, strapping figures.
So the cultural clash between short people and tall people.
Some people might think this is insignificant, but it all works in.
It all worked out great for the picture.
At any rate, the personal hatred between the two in addition to their economic struggle, financial struggle.
At any rate, what finally happens by 1902 is that Morgan wins that but they come to an agreement
where they form a Northern Securities Corporation,
which is a holding company for both Great Northern, which was Hill's railroad,
remember the one going up around a Canadian border with Seattle,
and Northern Pacific, which went to Portland, and combining both of them,
in other words, the shareholders combine their shares and they all become shareholders
in one great northern securities corporation, they worked it out to about 2 to 1 for Morgan,
in other words, I think there were 15 members of the board of directors and 10 of them were Morgan people
and five of them were Harriman Rockefeller people.
So, anyway, around 1902,
let me get this,
the, oh by the way, I thought I'd just mention that.
In 1903, when Teddy Roosevelt was driving
through the Bureau of Corporations bill through Congress,
Rockefeller, Rockefeller was all in favor
of this new trend toward business government cooperation.
However, problem was that he now,
Morgan and Rockefeller now have big odds, hated each other.
So Rockefeller lobbied against it.
In other words, Rockefeller and his standard oil argued,
but the only big business group that argued
against the Bureau of Cooperation's bill
set up this Bureau to eventually regulate industry.
And Teddy Roosevelt then really blashes out,
says that, apparently what happened was that John D. Rockefeller Jr. sent a telegram to
various congressmen urging them not to pass the bill, Teddy Roosevelt holds a press conference
and says John D. Rockefeller Sr. did it, of course John D. Rockefeller Sr. is generally
hated by almost everybody, nobody ever heard of John D. Rockefeller Jr., so Teddy Roosevelt
just sort of escalated it, lied about who actually sent the telegram, and the bill passed.
Before he appointed a commissioner of corporations named James Garfield, he checked with Francis
Lynn Stetson who was an attorney for the House of Morgan to make sure this guy was okay.
In other words, he got another one of his top advisors.
Remember, Stetson was the same guy who was Grover Cleveland's top advisor and also law
partner.
So he had the Morgan connection moving in here, even though both of those were Republican
and Cleveland was a Democrat and they were pretty different ideologically, they all boiled
about the Morgan Domination, around 1903, after he passes this, a strange thing happens,
namely that Penny Roosevelt, after having a cozy arrangement with the U.S. Steel, Frost,
and International Harvest and all that, starts, takes the Sherman Act out of the closet, which
has been unused since Sherman passed it, dead letter, nobody cared about it. The only effect
The only thing they could have was, instead of having cartels, they had mergers.
In the late 1890s, there was a great merger boom.
They figured cartels might violate the Sherman Act, but mergers certainly won't.
So mergers are really worse than cartels, from the point of view of the consumer, because they're more permanent.
You know, cartel can dissolve and break up. Merger is very difficult to break up.
So the result of the Anti-Trust Act was to enforce a stronger trust, so to speak, and it would have been without it.
But anyway, it was a dead letter. It had never been used.
all of a sudden Teddy Roosevelt picks that out of the closet and uses it savagely to break up Standard Oil
in other words, Teddy Roosevelt breaks the informal...
before that the Rockefeller-Morgan competition was much more polite, was much more...
was within certain rules of the game. Morgan was running the Democratic Party
he was in favor of the gold standard and pre-trade and Rockefellers were in favor of tariffs and inflation
but really it wasn't that... it wasn't a savage war to the knife. All of a sudden Rockefeller breaks the...
I mean, Roosevelt breaks the rules and goes for the jugular
To break up standard oil is a bad trust, you have to smash it, and this is very, this is really sort of going for broke.
You start a savage attack on standard oil.
You also try to break up Northern Securities Corporation. Most historians say that this shows he's also against Morgan.
But the result of the judicial decision was to benefit the Morgan forces.
In other words, they broke it up, they had a new arrangement and the result of the arrangement was to reinforce Morgan's control
for Northern Securities and Northern Pacific.
So this is really a pro-Morgan action,
even though historians say, well,
Morgan didn't like it and so forth,
but it really amounted to a pro-Morgan act.
But the key thing in this warfare was to open up,
to try to break up standard oil as being evil and monopolistic.
Secretary, 20th General Knox was happy to do it,
being a Morgan person.
And, but the question is here,
Why does, it has not been satisfactorily dealt with by historians.
Why do they do this?
Why do the Morgan's decide to go all out?
I should also talk about Teddy Roosevelt's cabinet.
In addition to Knox, okay, Teddy Roosevelt appoints
Ella Hugh Root, Secretary of War,
and becomes Secretary of State.
Secretary of State Ella Hugh Root,
who had been Secretary of War of the McKinley,
but a minor figure.
Elijah Hewroot was a Wall Street lawyer, a very important Wall Street lawyer, he was a top lawyer for Thomas Fortune Ryan, a New York City financier, and then for Morgan.
As a matter of fact, he resigned as Secretary of War in order to help Morgan, defend Morgan in order to secure his corporation, also to help Morgan invest in China.
He was a personal attorney for JP Morgan. He then comes back as Secretary of State to Teddy Roosevelt, one of his top advisors.
Originally, he was supposed to be Roosevelt's successor as president.
As a matter of fact, the reason Root turned it down, he said, well, I can't really run
for president in 1908 because I'm a Morgan's lawyer.
I can't run as a Morgan.
I mean, it has to be a bigger, better front than that.
Nobody's going to elect me.
I'm openly known as a Morgan's personal lawyer.
Assistant Secretary of State, here's L.A. Root, Secretary of State, his assistant.
Remember, in those days, there was only one assistant.
And they didn't have a whole fleet of deputies and undersecretaries and all that sort of stuff now, as they do now.
It was Robert Bacon, Morgan partner.
So we have total Morgan control of the government now.
Teddy Roosevelt comes in.
Secretary of State, Eleanor Ruth, undersecretary Robert Bacon, Morgan partner.
Postmaster General is a guy named George von Meyer.
who was a Morgan agent, an agent of the House of Morgan. Secretary of the Navy was a guy named Paul Morton, who was an industrialist and a Morgan president of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, which was a Morgan company, former vice president of Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, Elahue Ruth, Robert Bacon, assistant secretary.
So we have postmaster general as a morgan person, secretary of the navy as a morgan
person, which is more important than the secretary of the war because the navy was the major
military arm those days, assistant secretary of the navy, navy was Paul Morton, of the
Morton-Morgan financial interests, and assistant secretary of the navy was Herbert Satterley,
With Morgan's son-in-law, they get much closer than that, he was the assistant secretary.
The total, frankly, dominant Morgan administration.
Also, in addition to that, Root was extremely important.
From Root comes most of our foreign policy establishment ever since.
Right now, we're almost still being run by Root disciples.
For example, Root's major disciple was a guy named Henry Stimson,
Teddy Roosevelt was a law partner and disciple of Cotagy of Root, becomes district attorney
of New York and then gets the Republican nomination for governorship of New York due to Teddy
Roosevelt's intervention.
And Simpson was the mentor of Atchison, Dean Atchison who becomes a very important person
of Roosevelt's Truman administration and Atchison was the mentor of Bundy, the two Bundy brothers
The School sort of, they're now sort of the older statesmen, but they're basically running the, at least the democratic wing of the foreign policy establishment.
So it all stems, it's a total genealogy stemming from Ruth, Ruth Stimpson-Acheson, or Morgan.
When you say Ruth Stimpson-Acheson, it's very Morgan.
The Morgan, by the way, was so satisfied with Teddy Roosevelt's performance in office that he personally donated $150,000 to Teddy Roosevelt's re-election campaign in 1904.
In 1904, after here he's trying to savagely break up standard oil, poor Rockefeller, almost
all the big business groups supported Teddy Roosevelt's re-election, he won on the landslide,
except for Rockefeller who supported the Democratic choice, Judge George Parker, that's a white
dad, some unknown figure.
So the question is, why did Teddy Roosevelt do this, and my contention is, which I guess
I said on the tape, is like, I think it seems to be related to the international oil war
that developed around 1900.
That was the fact that Standard Oil, which had been dominant in the foreign oil markets
in Asia and Europe, is now being challenged by the Nobel Oil Dutch Shell, a group, Dutch
This is an Indonesian English group, financed by the Rothschild, and it has a mighty international
oil war.
It starts around 1900, continues really for about 40 years, at least, between the Royal
Dutch Shell Group, Rothschild Royal Dutch Shell Group, and the Standard Oil.
And so what you have is a titanic struggle covering the entire world, really, and influencing
politics in Persia and God knows where else, everywhere, South America, Asia, and what
between Standard Oil and Rothschild interests.
Morgan's being associated with Rothschild's, it seems to me it makes a lot of sense that
the Morgan savage attack on Rockefeller is not a coincidence that it happened just about
the time when the international oil competition became really serious between Rothschild's
and the Rockefeller's.
So that's my hypothesis, I can't prove it because nobody really investigated this, it
seems to me it makes a lot of sense.
Why does Teddy Roosevelt suddenly break the rules and go all out for the jugular, go for
This is the last of the throat, it seems to me it's connected with the international oil war.
Anyway, so Teddy Roosevelt is re-nominated and re-elected and begins this whole progressive era,
progressive era in politics, in federal politics really begins with Teddy.
I should say, I'm going to give you one in the next hour, I have in my briefcase, readings
for the next block, next period, next few weeks, essentially the rest of the Cocoa and Weinstein
books with a couple of exceptional chapters which are exempt on banking and things which
are all esoteric, but the Weinstein and Cocoa book goes through one of its whole progressive
periods at some length and it's a key aspect of the whole thing, because this is the beginning
This is the beginning of a modern warfare state in the United States and really throughout the Western world, because the same things are beginning to happen in Western Europe, too.
What we have is the big business, as I say, Morgan's, and even the Rockefellers, at least in the abstract, although they don't like the way it's being run, essentially saying, look, we try to monopoly in the free market, it doesn't work, we try cartels, we try mergers, they don't work, therefore we have to turn to the federal government to impose it for us, to enforce cartels.
also state and local governments as we'll see too, supplement it, we have to sell it to the public, we can't say we want a monopoly, we have to sell it to the public on the basis of attacking big business, big business is a threat, we need the federal and state regulatory commissions to guide the general welfare, to curb big business, to have democracy and that sort of stuff, and they turn as allies, big business turns to intellectuals who are coming up, intellectuals, technocrats, etc.
who are rising in this period with their own agenda, and they have the importance of a
one-size-chapter one of the National Civic Federation, which is an alliance of big business
and progressive intellectuals, and intellectuals are coming up in many fields, various groups
are becoming professions, engineers, for example, used to be tool-and-dime men, they didn't
University, on the job types. They then become professional engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers and all that.
They all want part of the pod, they want to run the system, they want privileges, they want to keep out competition.
So the government, it says they set up an alliance, such as engineers, psychiatrists, doctors, we'll go into many of this stuff,
physicians, economists, historians, social scientists, all these guys are getting PhDs. For example, there had been no PhDs before.
The only PhDs were essentially in Germany, in the United States there were no PhDs until about the 1880s, 70s, 80s, I think John Hopkins started it.
He didn't have the idea that everybody had to go to college either, a very small portion of the people went to college, 3% of the population, everybody else started working.
So, the idea of being professional graduate school people and professional political scientists and whatever, it's only started in the 1880s and since there were no American school giving PhDs,
The German School of Giving PhDs, they all went to Germany, they went to the University of Berlin and Göttingen and so forth and so on.
And in Germany they imbibed the German ideological set up, which in those days had become welfare, warfare, state oriented.
They imbibed the sort of statism and collectivism in Germany.
They came back fired up with enthusiasm. This is great stuff.
Because it meant for one thing, these intellectuals, one could help plan the system.
If the government's planning the system, they've got to have some people to do it.
Who's going to do it? Experts in the field. Engineers will help plan industry, economists will help plan everything, historians will help do something, political scientists will help plan stuff.
So they become planners, they also become apologists for the system. They become hired as court apologists.
Explaining to the public why you have to have government planning, government war, government racial experimentation, all sorts of other stuff.
So intellectuals become apologists for the system and also planners.
And also the government can supply intellectuals with guild restrictions, monopoly restrictionism,
keeping out competition, licensing the field, licensing doctors, licensing hospitals, licensing
engineers, whatever it is, to keep out the restricted supply of the people in the field,
right?
This is the price, the wage rate on the y-axis, the quantity on the x-axis, this is the number
of engineers or physicists or wherever you can license them to restrict the supply and
and Raise the Wage Rate, so in other words, government can help intellectuals by providing
them the job, status, helping plan the system, apologizing to the system, and also restricting
entry, restricting the field, cartelizing, in other words, and what can intellectuals
do for government?
Well, it's very simple, they can tell the government, they can tell the people why the
government intervention is necessary and just and correct and modern and all sorts of other
things, in other words, what happens here is that in 1900 or so, they begin the reach
and the age-forging of alliance which had been the standard alliance all through history, really.
In other words, from the dawn of civilization until, say, the 17th century or 18th century,
the world was run by governments which were essentially alliances of the king,
which was a state, the king and his nobles were state apparatus,
intellectuals would apologize for the state, tell the public why the state has to be obeyed,
the king rules by divine right, the king is just and wise and good and necessary, etc., etc.
The king was even divine himself. In oriental civilizations, when intellectuals could get away with it, they came to think the king was divine, the king was God himself.
The king is God, you have to obey him, even though he might be a turkey, and still God himself.
So intellectuals then provide the ideology, engineering the consent of the public to the rule of the government,
and in return for that, they get cut in on the feudal, part of a cut of the loot.
Of course, before the 17th and 18th century, almost all intellectuals were churchmen.
There were no priests, there were ministers, whatever you want to call them, there were no lay intellectuals, there were no pamphleteers, professors or whatever, outside of the church.
And so what you have is a state domination by state and church, or a throne and altar, is another way to put it.
A grand alliance between throne, the king, and the priest and altar.
And the American idea of separation of church and state is very extremely important, not just because of the slogan.
The idea is you prevent a link-up between these two powerful institutions, between the government and intellectuals to organize opinion, so to speak, opinion molding.
Because if they're aligned together, the average citizen is going to be screwed, they're going to be dominated by this alliance.
If you prevent the alliance, you'll have independent judgment, room for independent judgment for checking on the king, for example.
You don't allow separation. You prevent this kind of alliance or merger in state and church.
So, but then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, basically, intellectuals were, religion was more or less separated from government.
There were also lay intellectuals, secular intellectuals, they were not churchmen, they were just independent types.
And what you begin to have now as a progressive period is a re-emergence in a different form of the old church-state alliance.
The Alliance, the Thronewalls Alliance, the alliance of government and intellectuals, of the king, the president, whatever you want to call them, the Fuhrer, whatever the term is, and the intelligentsia, each one getting the old position, the old cozy position of the alliance, the church telling the state, telling the public why they have to obey the king, and the king cutting the church into part of the swag, the same thing is now happening in a different form with secular intellectuals and religious intellectuals too. The pietest ministers come in here too, of course, in a big way.
in a way, as we'll see with the Progressive Party.
So what you begin to have then is a new form, a secularized version of this thrown-over
concept.
And many of these intellectuals, by the way, this links us with a whole pietous liturgical
stuff.
Many of these guys, the progressive political scientists, economists, historians, et cetera,
were originally extreme pietous, this happens in almost every case, I'll give you a case
study of it today, and it happens in almost every case.
These guys were born in a Yankee farm country, upstate New York in most cases, or upstate
Northern Indiana or something like that.
They're born in extreme pious Protestant sects, a Campbellite sect, for example, things like
that.
They then go to college, they become atheists, they drop their religion, they come to the
conclusion that science is the outlaw's religion, or science shows that religion is ridiculous
or whatever.
And they become secularized pious, in other words, instead of saying we need the government
In order to have salvation, we have to stamp out sin. Now they say we have to stamp out
sin, quote unquote, for the benefit of the public welfare of general good, etc. We have
to stamp out capitalism or private property, whatever it happens to be. And when they have
a government crusade, a sort of secularized version of a religious pious, usually by the
same guy, so just transferring their imagery of their allegiance from the church or from
Salvation Through Being Born Again, Salvation Through Government
As Richard W. Ely, a major figure in the economics profession shifting economics from laissez-faire to progressive government intervention
Richard W. Ely said he started out as a government, as a pietist minister
And one quote from Aelius, I think, magnificent, it sums up this whole thing. He says,
Government is God's major instrument of redemption. I'll underline that again.
Government is God's major instrument of redemption. In other words, the way to redeem through salvation
is through use of government power to the utmost, to fix everything up, to cure everything,
to run everything and so forth and so on. He was a major progressive economist with a progressivism
His assistant, he went to the University of Wisconsin, he was the founder of the so-called
Wisconsin Idea, and his assistant in Wisconsin became big shots in Teddy Roosevelt Organizations
and the New National Civic Federation and the rest of it.
Yeah.
What?
What might it be?
Union?
The labor unions?
Or organizations?
Union, the labor unions, or organizations?
Well, they form all sorts of stuff, the National Civic Federation is one clear example, which
founded by big business groups, includes progressive intellectual, social workers, a few labor
union leaders, technocrats, whatever.
Oh, you mean the, I'm not talking about the individual labor union, I'm talking about
These are ideological organizations, in other words, National Civic Federation is a big
business group, including economists, intellectual, social workers and things like that, push
for government regulation of all sorts, welfare state or government regulation in general.
I'm not talking about labor unions, I'm talking about organizations to organize for government
intervention.
So there's all sorts of, there's the Progressive Party, there's all sorts of clubs and lobbying
The leading groups, things like that, think tanks, where all these people get together.
I'll mention a couple, the National Civic Federation is a famous case.
It's a leading group from up until World War I. That's in a Weinstein book.
It has Morgan in it, it has all the Morgan people, it has all the big business people,
plus a whole bunch of economists, historians, political scientists, blah, blah, blah.
Blah Blah Blah, AFL, a couple of AFL representatives, things like that.
The labor unions were craft until the 1930s.
So, anyway, when we get back from the break, I will talk about two things in particular,
two examples of Teddy Roosevelt government regulation which have been misunderstood.
One is the meatpacking paper, meatpacking regulation, the other is the sugar trust,
The Food and Drug Act comes in, finally with Teddy Roosevelt, let's take a 10 minute break.
Before the term is over, an update, current update of the Rockefeller-Morgan situation.
I have two examples here of Petty Roosevelt regulation, important regulation, both of
which were passed in the same month in June 1906 as the second Petty Roosevelt term.
What is the Meatpacking Act? It's called the Federal Meat Inspection Act.
Coco has a discussion of this.
Oh damn, I wanted to bring in the chapters to read here.
Wait a minute, I'll be right back.
What you should read next is essentially the rest of the book.
Weinstein.
I'm already inside chapter one, which is the National Civic Federation.
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. We'll end up with 8, which is World War I, but at least this is the Einstein chapters.
Dealing with progressivism, national civic courage and also local progressivism, it's very important, local government.
and COCO, chapters, we already dealt with, I've already signed one and two dealing with
the merger movement, chapters three, four, five, seven, eight and ten, I'm just omitting
the banking stuff, it's a little too technical, I think so, although very important, if you
want to read it, great, but I just want to concentrate on the industrial stuff, so my
side deals with intellectual, national civic federation and local government and COCO was
and national industrial regulation, including the meatpacking.
The usual myth, the standard myth in historical books, at least until the 60s,
is that the meatpacking was in terrible shape, the so-called beef trust of the large meatpackers,
Armour, Smith, Cudahy and the other one, Swift, in Chicago.
and then a lot of local meat packers all over the place. Local slaughterhouses and the usual
myth was that progressive myth so to speak is you have this meat which is being produced,
meat was diseased, it was terrible shaped, people were dying from it or whatever and
And Optin Sinclair wrote a novel called The Jungle, Optin Sinclair was a socialist intellectual,
luck-breaking novel called The Jungle, and exposed the evil conditions of the diseased
meat in the meatpacking industry and so forth and so on, and because of that, the public
rose up and demanded a federal meat inspection, federal regulation of meat inspection, which
which was then passed by Teddy Roosevelt over the objection of the meatpacking interests,
the Ormer, Swift and Cudahy, opposing federal control, federal regulation.
So this is the general, and this all happened within about a year, in other words I think
the jungle came out by 1905 or so and then the law was passed in 1906, this whole thing
is a lie from start to finish. Every part of this myth is incorrect. So if you've heard
or read it in our high school textbooks, it's all wrong.
The actual situation was very different, the actual situation was that the big meat packers
were calling for federal inspection for 20, 30 years, since the 1880s.
They were asking for it, they wanted it.
Why did they want it?
Because they wanted to screw their competitor, the small meat packers.
In other words, they wanted, if you have a costly federal regulation, let's say the federal
government says you have to fill out 20 forms and have an inspector, it's costly, it means
it imposes a high fixed cost on operation, which means a small businessman, a small competitor
are shafted and to the advantage of the big one. In other words, if you have a big business
man can hire one guy to sit on the desk and fill out the forms. A small business man can't
do that. It might have only three employees. You can't have one guy doing a full-time form
fill out. So for these various reasons, what you're doing is you're shafting your small
competitors. And so the meat packers have been calling for government inspections since
in the 1880s. For one thing, also, they wanted to get European governments started to prohibit
meat imports because they wanted to protect their own farmers. And the excuse was that
foreign meat is a disease. We can't import American meat because it's a disease. The
same thing now with Argentina. We can't import Argentinian beef because it's a disease.
You use a specter of disease and most people are hypochondriacs because it can be induced
in becoming hypochondriacs. Disease, therefore, you shouldn't import it. You should have
and Meat.
So the Europeans are doing the same thing.
So the meat packers want to have a U.S. government imprimatur saying, this meat has been inspected
by the U.S. government, therefore the European governments would allow the import of that
meat.
So it's sort of like using the government to socialize your costs, to give you a stamp
of approval.
And also, of course, as I say, to keep out the smaller competitors.
So you're doing two things here, the U.S. government, by labeling the meat as safe,
so to speak, is pushing exports and also restricting the supply of American meat, so you're doing
two things for the benefit of the large meat packers.
So Chicago, the large meat packers being concentrated as I say in Chicago, Armour, Swift and Cudahy,
they got the Chicago city government to have inspections from the 1880s on, but this did
not keep out the southern meat packers, the small meat packers in the south, small slaughterhouses
in the West and that sort of thing. So they wanted to have a federal government do it.
In other words, the major meat packers, the Omer, Smith and Cudahy was behind, they were
the ones pushing the federal meat inspection. As I say, for many years, for about 20-25
years, and Congress in 1891 began to do that, began to have federal meat inspection. So
So the problem was that the, as a matter of fact, they passed a, say, 1891 federal meat
inspection law, so by, and in a few years the federal government was inspecting about
75% of American beef.
The problem was that the smaller competitors were able to avoid the inspection, they were
able to get around it, they were not visible, so they were able to get through the gate,
so to speak.
So the idea was, in order for this cartel to succeed, you had to force the small meat
packers to be inspected.
And that was the whole idea. I stepped up the enforcement procedures just to screw the small meat packers.
Not that the small meat packers are diseased meat, but just that they... you make them fill out all sorts of forms and regulations and whatever.
There's all sorts of stuff. By the way, probably the single most hated government agency right now is obviously IRS.
We know, coming up April 15th. We all know that.
The second most hated outside of New York, where everything is visible, is OSHA.
The Office of Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, which inspects all small businesses
and has all sorts of crazy safety regulations and my brother-in-law, for example, is a printer
in West Virginia.
He said, if OSHA ever came there to try and enforce regulation, he'd just hand him the
keys, he couldn't operate.
There are all sorts of crazy things, the wires have to be, you know, see, whatever it is,
it costs about three times as much as a non-OSHA-inspected plan.
It's no more safe, it's just regulations imposed by bureaucrats.
For example, they're always trying to kill the sheep herding industry in the West because
they want the force of the sheep herders, the ranchers, to have portable toilets for
every sheep herder.
The whole thing is absurd, you walk around with a big cabin, a portable cabin for toilets.
And it's extremely costly and idiotic, I know that the sheep herders don't want it, they
They think it's idiotic, it's just somebody in Washington is imposing this.
At any rate, so the large meatpackers were one of the spread of the enforcement to the
small competitors, especially because small competitors were growing.
The competitive pressure, there were about a thousand meatpackers in 1900, by 1909 there
were 1600, because as they were getting more cartelization, getting higher profits, new
New businesses came in, new smaller meatpackers came in, Alcafete, Swift and Armour, etc.,
lower cost and all the rest of it.
So at any rate what happened was that the, and also another thing is that opposite Sinclair's
jungle had nothing to do with diseased meat, nothing to do with it, he wasn't concerned
with that, he was worried about working conditions, he said the workers aren't getting paid enough,
not getting enough light, he didn't talk about the meat that was coming off the meatpack,
and he was talking about the conditions of the workers in the meat packing plants
and he said the whole thing is, he wasn't interested in the Federal Meat Inspection thing
he said the whole thing is a racket from his point of view
anyway, when Ticlayer's Jungle came out in early 1906
remember this is, the novel comes out in early 1906
the whole, the law was passed in June 1906, only took about three months
when the book came out, J. Ogden Armour, who was the head of, the owner of Armour
He's a meatpacker, and still is one of the biggest meatpacking firms in the country.
He wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post, which was the biggest weekly magazine at the time, popular magazine.
He defends government inspection of meat, and he calls for more inspection.
And he said that large packers had always favored inspection, always pushed for it, which is true.
Here's what he writes. Quote, this is from J. Ogden Ormer, March 1906, it's quoted in Coco.
There's a very good discussion on this. He says,
To attempt to evade government inspection would be, from the purely commercial viewpoint, suicidal.
No packer can do an interstate or export business without government inspection.
Self-interest forces him to make use of it.
Self-interest likewise demands that he shall not receive meats or byproducts from any small packer, either for export or other use,
unless that small packer's plan is also official, that is, under U.S. government inspection.
This government inspection thus becomes an important adjunct of a packer's business from two viewpoints.
points. It puts the stamp of legitimacy and honesty upon the packer's product, and so
is him a necessity to the public as an insurance against the sale of diseased meats. In other
words, the government then puts a stamp of approval for exporting from domestic firms
on this meat packer. It doesn't mean the meats are really any better. One of the problems
with that government inspection is as low as the public in the thinking that the meat
is, the food is good or safe or whatever. Because it has a government stamp of approval,
they don't have to worry about competitors looking at it further, which in many cases
is a mistake. So what happens is, so Armer writes this article, in May 1906, Senator Beverage
of Indiana was a big progressive Republican and an old friend of George W. Perkins Morgan
Partner, introduces a bill for meat inspection, compulsory meat inspection. The bill was vigorously
supported by the Secretary of Agriculture, funds a quadruple for inspection, blah, blah,
blah, and it passes unanimously both houses of Congress. That's the federal meat inspection
The Large Meat Packers, when the bill was passed, were enthusiastically in favor of
it because it was designed to bring the small packers under federal inspection.
The American Meat Packers Association endorsed a bill.
Thomas Wilson, that's the other, the fourth big packer, Armour, Swift, Cudahy and Wilson.
Thomas Wilson, the head of the Wilson Meat Packing Company, the hearings of the House
Committee of Agriculture on the packing of this bill, puts the whole position of a large
Chicago Packers, he says, quote, we are now and always have been in favor of the extension
of inspection.
We have always called the government inspection under proper regulations an advantage to the
livestock and agricultural interests and to the consumer and of course this also means
I say that it imposes costs on a small firm much more heavily than on an alleged one.
Any rate, so Perkins, when the bill passes, Perkins is delighted and he writes to Morgan
William Salpany says this is great, this new law he says quote, will certainly be a very
great advantage when the thing once gets in operation and able to use it all over the
world as it will practically give them a government certificate for their goods, in other words
government certificate, badge of approval.
The only opposition, well the opposition was one of the meat packers to pay more of it,
that was the only question of who should pay for the inspection.
Some of the leftist opponents of business were clear on this thing, they realized the
whole thing was a meatpacker scam. Senator Nelson, for example, said that the law of
the meatpackers bonanza. opposite Sinclair, as I said, realized that the law was designed
to benefit the packers and was against it, but nobody cared about this as a general approval.
So after the law was passed, Swift and company and the other large packers took out full
And he wrote a two-page ad all over the country, hailing the bill, saying it was great, saying the purpose, he says, it said, quote, is to assure the public that only sound and wholesome meat and meat food products may be offered for sale. It is a wise law. It is enforced and must be universal and uniform. Unquote.
Okay, so that's the meatpacking. The meatpacking thing had nothing to do with up in the jungle, it was just a cover.
It was a law pushed by the meatpackers for 20 or 30 years and they finally used the agitation from the novel to push through a law they'd been always in favor of,
namely to sort of screw the small meatpackers and to cartelize the meatpacking industry for their benefit.
The next case study, I think it's even more interesting, is the Pure Food and Drug Act, which came in the same month, June 1906.
Allegedly to help the purity of food and all that, which is now, of course the FDA is now
regulating the drug industry and all that sort of thing, all over the place, regulates for
cancer and all the rest of it.
How does this thing start?
It starts off with one guy, the main agitator for this thing for many years, his name is
Harvey W. Wiley.
R.V.W. Wiley, again there's a cocoa to some of us, sort of a prototype, I think he's a fascinating character, sort of a prototype of his whole progressive movement.
R.V.W. Wiley was the leading food chemist for the Department of Agriculture, in fact he started off as the only food chemist for the Department of Agriculture.
He was born in Indiana, a farm boy of Ulster-Scott, Scottish Presbyterian background, to a father
who was a lay preacher in an ultra-pietistic, Campbellite sect, which was even more pietistic
than the Presbyterians in general, Campbellite Scottish Presbyterian sect, whose father was
a preacher, a lay preacher, a Campbellite movement, and also the whole Wiley home was
Then while he goes to Hanover College, which is a Campbellite college in Indiana, he begins
his lifelong obsession with purity, and begins to give lectures to his classmates in the school
in general on the purity of body, mind and soul, the importance of purity.
He was very early convinced that tobacco and pork were foul impurities and more the perfection of one's body.
Remember, the cancer thing of tobacco was only very recent. I mean, nobody had that doctrine.
He gives a commencement address, valedictorian, 1867, at Hanover College.
He combines the themes of purity, pietism, and value-free medicine, quote-unquote, in ways that would foreshadow his later career.
He declared that man must preserve his God-like purity of body and mind.
He exalted the nobility of physicians, men who, quote, guard the holy covenant God made with man.
Physicians, he concluded, may not be able to make man immortal,
but he, quote, he may help to make the probation state a proper place of preparation,
the probation state of man's life on earth.
Physicians may help to make the probation state a proper place of preparation for the precious life
that beckons from beyond the misty hills, I mean, towards heaven.
After delivering this medicine address on purity, he went on to tutor languages at Northwestern Christian University, at Kempelite University in Indianapolis.
Then he went to Indiana Medical College and got an M.D. in 1871. He became a physician.
He then shifted his interest to chemistry, becoming a professor of chemistry at Indiana Medical School,
obtaining a B.S. in chemistry at Harvard, and became professor of chemistry at Northwestern Christian,
and becomes a professor of chemistry at newly founded Purdue University in 1874.
So then five years later he studied medicine, chemistry, and physics at the University of Berlin
where he was inspired by Dr. Sell's government laboratory for detecting impurities in food and drink
It's not an impurity of soul when you wind up with an impurity of food
So Berlin finally picked up his other big lifelong interest, in addition to purity, sugar chemistry
big sugar chemistry fan
began his permanent alliance with the US sugar industry
and with government in the United States
Comes back here in 1881, he begins to agitate for the government's protecting the consumer
from adulterated sugar products, the state of Indiana, specifically he calls for a state
requirement that sugar and syrup products be required to carry labels detailing their
composition, beginning of compulsory labeling.
Notice this analogy here with compulsory publicity for corporations, compulsory label.
So by requiring compulsory publicity, he needs to cripple traits, trait secrets, known as
Brand Name Secret, thereby helping to restrict competition in the sugar industry, to cartelize the sugar industry, very similar.
Supposed to be labeling, supposed to be ingredients means you can't have, you know, like Coca-Cola can't have its magic syrup or something, you force it with the ingredients.
By adulterating sugar, by the way, he didn't mean poison or something like that, he had a very peculiar definition of adulteration of food, etc.
By adulteration he meant any change in the name and definition. A very peculiar guy,
but it fits in with the progressive doctrine.