THE WONDER YEARS 25

1933: UNITED STATES. For a year, a commission established by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has supposedly been investigating the causes of the Wall Street Crash. Initially, the investigation" is little more than a whitewash. The first two commission counsels are fired and the third resigns in protest because there is no power to subpoena witnesses, which makes the whole exercise a bit of a farce. But things take a remarkable turn when a remarkable man, New York City prosecutor, Ferdinand J. Pecora, accepts the position of Chief Counsel to the commission.

In February, Pecora begins a real investigation of what Franklin Roosevelt called "the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system" which caused the Great Crash of 1929 and led to the Depression.

By the time Pecora begins calling the boys in the back room to account, forty percent of all U.S. banks have gone belly up taking the savings of nine million Americans with them. Millions of Americans have lost everything on stock market and "investment" scams. Homes, farms and businesses are being repossessed by the thousands. Seventeen million Americans are unemployed. And, through it all, through all the misery and hunger and despair, some people, already unimaginably wealthy, are getting richer and richer.

As the hearings unfold, America's leading financiers and industrialists, the "cream" of American society, the ruling class, are shown to have engaged, yet again, in an almost endless series of ruthless conspiracies against the people of the United States.

Charles Mitchell, President and Chairman of the Board of the Rockefellers' National City Bank (Citicorp) and a director of the American branch of the Nazi cartel, IG Farben, is the first Wall Street tycoon called to testify and his grilling by the courageous Pecora sets the tone for the rest of the hearings.

Pecora uncovers the fact that National City Bank is really little more than an enormous criminal conspiracy dedicated to swindling small investors out of their savings. For years, the bank has been, via a subsidiary, the world's leading shill for what, in the biz, are called "securities", a direct violation of U.S. law which forbids banks to trade in "securities".

Mitchell tells the Committee that he "did not see it as a problem." Of course for National City Bank, it wasn't a problem. His very good friend, Andrew Mellon of Gulf Oil, Mellon Bank and Alcoa had been essentially running the country for the benefit of the ruling class via the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover since 1921.

Mitchell is forced to admit to evading his personal income tax by way of imaginary interest payments on an imaginary loan of $2,800,000 from the National City Company. Mitchell was receiving about one and a half million dollars a year a time when the average industrial wage in the U.S. was about fifty cents an hour.

Mitchell is forced to confess that a series of unsecured and unpaid loans for millions of dollars was made to National City insiders to cover their stock market losses. The beneficiaries of this theft from the bank's small stockholders include Percy Rockefeller and Mitchell himself. Mitchell admits to conspiring with the U.S. puppet dictator of Cuba, Gerardo "The Butcher" Machado, to dump $31 million worth of useless Cuban sugar loans on the unsuspecting small stockholders of a National City affiliate.

Pecora uncovers the fact that, in 1927 and 1928, National City Bank dumped $90 million of worthless Peruvian government bonds on customers in the U.S. Pecora forces to Mitchell to concede that millions of dollars were made on insider trading and manipulations of Anaconda Copper subsidiaries by National City Bank insiders including Percy Rockefeller, James Stillman Jr., Mitchell himself and Anaconda President John D. Ryan. The bank and Anaconda conspired to defraud the public through massive manipulation of Anaconda stock, fueling a speculative mania which pushed the stock to record highs far beyond its true value.

Mitchell is forced to confess to a series of National City/Anaconda conspiracies which were the greatest frauds in the history of American banking up until the time of the hearings. It is revealed that Mitchell, Rockefeller and Ryan set up a "joint account" of nearly a million and a half shares of Anaconda stock, at no cost to themselves, which was repackaged and aggressively marketed to the public through a National City affiliate. The "joint account" was manipulated by Mitchell and Ryan who ran the share price up, from $40 in December 1928, to $128 in March of 1929. The trio then dumped their stock. This single scam netted Mitchell, Rockefeller and Ryan at least $150 million. By the time of hearings, Anaconda stock had collapsed to $4 a share.

Scheduled to follow Mitchell for a further uncovering of the Rockefeller-Mitchell-Ryan conspiracies is National City Bank director and Anaconda Copper chairman John D. Ryan. Conveniently, Ryan dies under mysterious circumstances three days before the hearings are scheduled to start and takes his secrets to the grave.

Percy Rockefeller, although apparently not too ill to engage in vast criminal conspiracies with Mitchell and Ryan, is allegedly "too ill" to appear before the Committee to answer Pecora's questions.

When asked by Pecora if he paid any income tax in 1930, J.P. Morgan Jr. replies, "I cannot remember." Neither could Morgan remember if he had paid any income tax in 1931 or 1932. In fact, of course, he had paid not one red cent. Question after question was answered with "I cannot remember." Pecora reveals that all of the Morgan family and their partners in their vast financial empire had paid a total of only $5000 in income taxes in the previous five years on hundreds of millions of dollars of income. And, it was all thanks to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon who had crafted U.S. income tax law so that the very wealthy, himself notably included, seldom paid any taxes at all.

During the Pecora Hearings, the financial gangsters who had brought ruin to so many came to be known as "banksters". One of the slickest banksters to be summoned before the hearings was Clarence Dillon (nee Lapowski) of the "financial house" of Dillon, Read, by the time of the hearings heavily involved in financing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.

Nazi public relations specialist Ivy Lee is hired to "prepare" Dillon for his appearance before the Committee. Among Lee's other esteemed clients are Nazi fuel supplier, William Farish of Standard Oil and the Rockefellers' partner in crimes against humanity, IG Farben.

Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas had been directors of United States and International Securities, a massive speculative pyramid scam which swindled Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Miraculously, Dillon, Read insiders cashed in their chips just before the Crash, walking away with $6,844,000 for stock which had cost them $24,110, a return of 28,000%. Ain't "free enterprise" wonderful?

Pecora uncovers the fact that Albert Wiggin, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefellers' Chase National Bank, had surreptitiously sold short 42,000 shares of Chase stock just prior to the Crash through a series of front companies. Other senior executives did the same thing, driving stock prices down and then making millions as share prices collapsed.

It goes without saying that no one named Rockefeller, Mitchell, Morgan, Wiggins, Dillon or even Lapowski ever goes to jail for their crimes and the pinstriped gangsters unmasked by Pecora were no exception. Only a single minion of the ruling class, Richard Whitney, a long time associate of the Morgans and president of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of the Crash, ends up behind bars. But his crime was very serious, stealing from the ruling class.

The misguided Whitney pilfered $800,000 from his father-in-law's estate and then also stole from the New York Stock Exchange Gratuity Fund and, gasp, from the New York Yacht Club, all in order to prop up his liquor business.

Stealing from your clubmates just isn't done, old boy, and Whitney is sentenced to ten years in the slammer for his breach of ruling class etiquette. Of course, he only does three years and is then given a nice little place in the country by his Wall Street buddies, where he lives a quiet and peaceful life until his death in 1974.

As the gangsters in pinstriped suits are called before the Pecora Committee one after the other, one of the biggest swindlers is noticeably absent. It's Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy who, as newly appointed chairman of the SEC, seems to have to be immune to the attentions of the Pecora Committee in the same way he was immune to the draft in World War One.

The Pecora hearings lasted over a year and provoked outrage among Americans. The stupefying greed and criminality of the ruling class so clearly exposed by Pecora, led to the Crash of 1929 and plunged the U.S. and much of the world into the Great Depression, causing untold hardship and misery for hundreds of millions of people. But like so much of American history, the findings of the Pecora hearings and even the fact that they were held, are virtually unknown in the United States.

Following the Pecora hearings, a wave of regulatory legislation attempts to keep America's corporate criminals under control, although "short selling", one of the financial games most beloved of experienced Wall Street swindlers, was not outlawed. Almost all of the protective legislation would vanish or be diluted in the 1990s by William "Slick Willy" Clinton, leaving the savings of Americans once again completely at the mercy of financial racketeers with entirely predictable results.

Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies. Ferdinand Pecora

1933: UNITED STATES. The meltdown of the U.S. banking system which George Menhinick had warned of in the Wall Street Forecast before being terrorized into silence by J. Edgar Hoover and his G-Thugs, comes to pass. Thousands of banks close their doors forever, taking their customers' money with them. There are runs on banks throughout the U.S. Every bank in the United States is ordered to close its doors for an indefinite period. Depositors have no way of knowing if they will ever reopen or if they will even be able to recover their deposits.

Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. Franklin Roosevelt, Inauguration Speech 1933

1933: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. Allen Dulles becomes a director of the Nazi Schroeder Bank, a position he holds until 1944. The Schroeder Bank is intimately involved in financing Adolf Hitler. Members of the Schroeder family are involved in many other aspects of the Hitler Project with the Dulles bothers, including the Hamburg-Amerika Line and the Thyssen steel trust which provides the Nazi war machine with most of its steel, builds the Bismarck in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, builds the rail lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka and provides all the steel used by Nazi armaments makers, Flick and Krupp.

1933: GERMANY. Adolf Hitler is invited to the Schroeder Bank by a group of industrialists who agree to give Hitler money in return for a pledge to break the trade union movement in Germany. Present at the meeting are, inevitably, Schroeder board members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles is Schroeder's general counsel. The Schroeder Bank is keen to help Hitler gain power following the Nazi Party's defeat in the German elections of 1932.

1933: GERMANY. When asked by a reporter for the Detroit News why he keeps a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in his office, Adolf Hitler replies, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”

1933-41: UNITED STATES. Irenee Dupont, whose anti-Semitism puts him in the same league as the Dulles brothers, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler, begins financing fascist groups in the U.S. The best known is the American Liberty League (ALL), a pro-Nazi organization dedicated to whipping up hatred of blacks and Jews and love of Hitler. Dupont provides half a million dollars in the first year alone to ALL which has a lavish thirty-one-room office in New York City, branches in twenty-six colleges and fifteen subsidiary organizations throughout the U.S. which distribute fifty million copies of pro-Nazi pamphlets.

Among the largest contributors of cash to ALL is the "cream" of the American corporate world including J. Howard Pew (Sun Oil), Walter Chrysler (Chrysler), William Farish (Standard Oil), Howard Heinz (Heinz Foods), Andrew Mellon (Mellon Bank, Gulf Oil, Alcoa), H.F. Pitcairn (Pittsburgh Glass), Alfred P. Sloan (General Motors) and senior exectives of Phillips Petroleum, U.S. Steel, First National Bank, General Foods, Grace National Bank, Morgan Partners, Central Hanover Bank and Trust, Westinghouse, JC Penny and B&O Railroad.

1933-45: GERMANY. The Reichstag, the German parliament, is set ablaze, conveniently for Adolf Hitler and the backers of the Hitler Project. Hitler immediately blames the usual bogeyman of the era, the "communists", but the true culprits are never identified. For Hitler, armed and financed by the Duponts, the Bushes, the Harrimans, the Rockefellers, Ford, Standard Oil, IT&T and all the rest, the Reichstag fire is the proverbial "Pearl Harbor-9/11 event" which creates a climate of fear and uncertainty among the German people and serves as a pretext for having political opponents and their supporters arrested without charge or trial. It also serves as the perfect moment for the Nazis to pass the "Enabling Law", a sort of NAZI-Patriot Act, which gives the Hitler regime the power to do pretty well whatever it wants.

The American and German corporations behind Hitler see their investment in the Nazis pay off immediately when Hitler dissolves German labor unions and establishes concentration camps for labor leaders and socialists, rendering Germany's workers utterly powerless.

Most corporations operating in Germany, including the many American-owned ones, are quick to take advantage of the situation and dramatically reduce their labor costs. In the first five years of Hitler's reign, Ford cuts its labor costs from fifteen per cent of business volume to only eleven per cent. Coca-Cola's bottling plant in Essen dramatically increases its profits because, in Hitler's state, workers are "little more than serfs forbidden not only to strike, but to change jobs," driven "to work harder (and) faster" while their wages "were deliberately set quite low."

As real wages decline, General Motors, Ford and the rest begin receiving massive armaments orders from the Nazis as the program of German rearmament is rushed to completion. Under the Third Reich, corporate profits skyrocket with U.S. corporate leaders, including William Knudsen, chairman of General Motors and Sosthenes Behn of IT&T openly expressing their admiration of der Führer.

After World War II, anti-fascist resistance member Otto Jenssen writes that corporate leaders were happy "that fear of the concentration camp made the German workers as meek as lapdogs."

1933-39: UNITED STATES. The Warburg family, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential Jewish families and owners of one of the world's largest banking empires, was intimately involved in the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles which bankrupted the German republic and set the country up for takeover by the Nazis. The Warburgs are a major force in restoring German arms makers such as Krupp to economic viability while cooperating with the American promoters of Adolf Hitler, particularly the Rockefeller, Harriman and Bush families and the Dulles brothers. Warburg represents the Harriman/Bush interest in the Hamburg-Amerika Line in Germany and exercises the Harriman/Bush voting rights at stockholders' meetings.

The Warburgs are also heavily involved in assembling the massive chemical cartel, IG Farben another major promoter of Adolf Hitler and the manufacturer of Zyklon-B gas which will used to exterminate millions of Jews and other "subhumans". Members of the Warburg family sit on the Farben board of directors.

The Warburgs apply pressure to Jewish organizations in the U.S. to refrain from criticizing Hitler and the Nazis. Max Warburg's son, Erich, sends a cable to his cousin, Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asks Frederick to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda". Two days later, the American-Jewish Commmittee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzberger family, owners of the New York Times and another powerful and wealthy Jewish family, issues an official joint statement, urging "that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged" and advising "that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed." The two organizations maintain their "Let's not be beastly to Hitler" stance throughout the 1930s, tragically hampering the fight mounted by many Jews and anti-fascists against the rise of Nazism.

It's just good business.....

1933: UNITED STATES. FBI Director J.Edna Hoover's quest for immortality takes precedence over fighting crime and the law itself as police and FBI agents pursue big name criminals across the mid-West. FBI agents arrest Roger "The Terrible" Tuohy, for the kidnapping of a Minnesota brewing magnate. Hoover calls Tuohy, one of the "most vicious and dangerous criminals in the history of American crime." Capturing him was "a credit to the entire Bureau" says Hoover.

In fact, it's just another one of Hoover's countless lies. Tuohy had been spotted by an off-duty policeman while on a fishing trip. Tuohy is convicted and ultimately spends twenty six years in jail on charges which are later proven to have been trumped up. The judge who finally releases Tuohy is scathing in his comments on the FBI's refusal to release files relevant to Tuohy's false conviction.

FBI agents and local police capture George "Machine Gun" Kelly after he leads a chase through six states following a kidnapping. Hoover declares that Kelly's wife, Kathryn, wrote the ransom note and claims "she is a hundred times more vicious and dangerous than a man....she acts with cold brutality seldom found in a man."

In 1970, it will be uncovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had suppressed the report of its own handwriting expert which exonerated Kelly's wife who spent twenty six years in prison through the corruption and criminality of J. Edgar Hoover.
When Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd is captured and wounded, one of J. Edna Hoover's special young "protégés", Melvin Purvis, orders an FBI agent to shoot the injured man again, killing him. Hoover calls Floyd "a yellow rat who needed extermination."


1933: GERMANY. The Nazi Party plays catch-up with the U.S. when it passes the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases which is modelled on the Virginia eugenics law of 1927 mandating forced sterilization for "undesirable" Americans.

1933-39: GERMANY. By amazing coincidence, John Foster Dulles, who had been instrumental in drafting the post-World War One Treaty of Versailles which bankrupted the German republic, becomes the key figure in "restructuring the debt" imposed on Germany by the Treaty, a major factor in the rise of Adolf Hitler. Dulles arranges the restructuring under a series of decrees issued by Hitler himself. Dulles ensures that American financiers will still get the interest owned to them by Germany while ensuring that the Nazis will have sufficient cash to fully arm themselves for their conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union.

1933: UNITED STATES. The boys in the back room take the next step in gaining complete control over the U.S. economy when the Gold Reserve Act is passed. The Act makes the private ownership of gold bullion in the land of the free illegal and makes "gold" notes redeemable only for more little pieces of paper printed by the boys. Americans holding gold are subject to ten years in prison. Sure do love all that freedom. Conveniently, however, paper can still be still be redeemed for gold from outside the U.S. By German subsidiaries of American corporations owned by the boys, for example.

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson. Franklin Roosevelt, 1933

1933: UNITED STATES. Eighteen thousand cotton workers go on strike in California. Twelve cotton growers arrive outside a union hall in Pixley and fire into the building in full view of the police station across the road. As the workers flee from the building, two are shot to death and many are wounded. On the same day, another cotton worker is murdered by growers.

Truth, Justice or The American Way prevails yet again and the murderers are acquitted due to "insufficient" evidence.

1933: UNITED STATES. By 1933, it well known that asbestos presents enormous health risks to people who work with it. Because of the increased risk of death, many North American insurance companies refuse to insure asbestos workers. An enterprising lawyer brings a number of suits against Johns-Manville, the largest manufacturer of asbestos-related products in the U.S., for injury or death caused by asbestos. Manville pays off the claims and then, according to the minutes of the Johns-Manville Board of Directors' meeting uncovered decades later, "makes arrangements" with the lawyer that he would no longer represent any asbestos victims in bringing suits against Johns-Manville. It's just good business....

1933: CUBA. U.S.-puppet dictator Gerardo "The Butcher" Machado uses increasing levels of terror to suppress dissent during the Depression. His death squads, the dreaded Porra, massacre thousands of Cubans, provoking a spontaneous general strike.

Like many a worn out U.S. puppet dictator before him and many to come after him, Machado has outlived his usefulness to his American masters. The U.S. dispatches thirty warships to hover off the coasts of Cuba, eventually forcing Machado to resign.

The Roosevelt regime refuses to recognize the provisional liberal government which replaces Machado, it being insufficiently fascist, and supports instead the power grab of brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista who will serve the U.S. government and the Mafia faithfully for decades to come.

1934: UNITED STATES. The U.S. State Department praises the sham 1934 Italian election in which the Fascists take a remarkable 99% of the vote, stating that the obviously rigged election "demonstrates incontestably the popularity of the Fascist regime." The July 1934 issue of Fortune magazine praises Fascism and its achievements for "accomplishing in mere years what Christendom could not achieve in millennia."

1934: NICARAGUA. Freedom fighter Augusto Sandino is murdered by agents of the U.S. puppet Somoza dictatorship with the explicit approval of the U.S.

1934: UNITED STATES. Half a million southern millworkers go on strike. The strike is crushed by private armies using violence and intimidation. The governors of North and South Carolina call in the National Guard to break picket lines. In Georgia, the governor brings in the National Guard to arrest all picketers. The violent suppression of the strike blocks unionization of southern mills for over twenty years.

1934: GERMANY. The American Curtiss-Wright aircraft company reveals U.S. dive bombing techniques to the Luftwaffe. Dive bombing had been invented by the U.S. Navy but kept a closely guarded secret. U.S. aircraft manufacturers had been prohibited from revealing the technique but Curtiss-Wright, with an eye to selling the Nazis their dive bombers, circumvents the prohibition by demonstrating the technique at air shows. A U.S. Senate investigation will later conclude that, "It is apparent that American aviation companies did their part to assist Germany's air armament." And a damn fine job they did too. The Nazis will use the technology to great effect with their Stuka dive bombers.

1934: UNITED STATES. Two strikers are killed and over two hundred wounded at the Electric Auto-Lite plant in Toledo, Ohio. Thirteen hundred National Guard troops, including eight rifle companies and three machine gun companies, are used against the strikers.

1934: UNITED STATES. Two longshoremen are shot to death by San Francisco police during an International Longshoreman's and Warehouse Union strike. The shootings provoke a general strike in San Francisco and Oakland. Serving the truth, as usual, the mass media, the city government and corporate interests scream that "foreign Communist agitators (have) seized control of the city".

1934: UNITED STATES. Three workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island are killed while participating in a U.S.-wide movement to obtain a minimum wage for textile workers.

1934: UNITED STATES. Congressman Louis McFadden who had served as Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee for over ten years makes a statement in Congress about the private company operating under the name of the Federal Reserve.

This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.

Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lender. In that dark crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man's throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our legislatures; there are those who maintain International propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us into granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.

1933: UNITED STATES. Republican Congressman Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania charges the private company known as the Federal Reserve with "having taken over $80 billion from the U.S. Government in the year 1928, with having arbitrarily and unlawfully raised and lowered the rates on money, increased and diminished the volume of currency in circulation for the benefit of private interests and with having conspired to transfer to foreigners and international money lenders title to and control of the financial resources of the U.S."

According to McFadden, the Wall Street Crash was a "carefully contrived occurrence. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all."

1933: UNITED STATES. Two attempts are made to assassinate Congressman Louis T. McFadden by gunfire. Both fail. Shortly afterward, McFadden dies unexpectedly, a few hours after attending a banquet, raising suspicion that he was poisoned. That's just another silly conspiracy theory, of course, but whatever the cause of his death, old Louis won't be shooting his mouth off any more.

1934-36: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, under Chairman Gerald Nye, holds ninety three days of hearings and examines two hundred witnesses.

The Committee finds that Dupont had led munitions companies in sabotaging the 1925 League of Nations’ disarmament conference in Geneva and that a Dupont executive bragged that, "even the State Department realized, in effect, who controlled the Nation.”

The Duponts, represented at the hearings by no less than seven lawyers led by Wall Street lawyer and Rockefeller "investigator" William "Wild Bill" Donovan, inevitably claim that filthy commies are behind the Senate hearings, and accuse the Nye Committee of undermining U.S. military power.

The Nye Committee hearings uncover the fact that Samuel Pryor, chairman of Remington Arms, has entered into a cartel agreement with IG Farben and that the Nazis terrorizing the German population into submission are doing it with U.S.-made Remington weapons.

Nye attacks as "war profiteers" and "merchants of death" the arms dealers who manipulate countries into war and then sell arms to both sides, singling out Pryor and Rockefeller-owned Remington Arms.

The committee finds that widespread bribery of government officials is normal operating practice of the weapons makers and that bribing officials of other nations to buy additional weapons provokes, in effect, an arms race with neighboring countries, who then feel compelled to purchase addtional arms, increasing the risk of conflict.

The committee finds that the arms industry actively sabotages and opposes peace initiatives throughout the world, including those carried out or sanctioned by the U.S. State Department. The committee also found violations of the Treaty of Versailles, which limited rearmanent by Germany, by Dupont, Sperry Gyroscope and United Aircraft.

The Nye Committee uncovered arms industry propaganda masquerading as news reports designed to mislead the American public about international arms manufacture. Among the guilty parties, Dupont, which had an employee writing false stories under an assumed name. The Committee also uncovered false war scare stories printed in a chain of newspapers at the request of a major naval shipbuilder at a time when a naval bill for over six hundred million dollars was before Congress.

The committee discovered that American arms makers routinely violate U.S. government arms embargoes such as the one against China which the arms makers evaded by shipping weapons via Europe or Panama.

The committee found that American naval shipbuilders had succeeded in sabotaging the 1927 Geneva Disarmament Conference. At the time, American shipyards had been given orders by the Navy for over fifty million dollars in warship contracts, which would have been reduced if the conference had been successful.

The findings of the Nye Committee go on almost forever with their litany of bribery, lies, dishonesty, corruption, manipulation, illegality and, above and beyond everything else, unimaginable greed by the merchants of death.

The powers that be having had enough bad publicity, funding for the Nye Committee is withdrawn in 1936.

1934: CHINA. U.S. Marines invade China at Foochow.

1934-41: UNITED STATES. War monger and media mogul William Randolph Hearst puts the massive propaganda weight of his media empire of nineteen newspapers plus magazines such as Reader’s Digest and his International News Service, behind Hitler and the Nazis, promoting a favorable view of Nazism in the U.S. Space in Hearst’s publications is made available to such worthies as Luftwaffe head Hermann Goering for op-ed pieces. Hearst is reported to have received as much as $400,000 a year for his role in promoting Nazism and Hitler in the U.S.

1934: UNITED STATES. Dupont buys Nazi weapons supplier Remington Arms from "merchant of death" Sam Pryor and the Rockefellers and enters into a partnership with Nazi chemical cartel IG Farben Company for the manufacture of explosives. Better killing through chemistry.

1934: UNITED STATES. The Carnegies' little tax avoidance scheme, the Carnegie Institute, decides to stir up the racists in the U.S. when it compiles the family tree of President Franklin Roosevelt which purports to show that FDR was of Jewish descent. Interests opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal used Roosevelt's purported Jewish ancestry to stir up anti-Jewish tensions and create distrust of the President.

1934: UNITED STATES. A Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, founds the imaginatively-named National Union of Social Justice in America, one of the most vitriolic sources of anti-Jewish hate in the U.S.

1934: UNITED STATES. Leading U.S. financiers and industrialists, to a large extent the same group which is financing the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, organize a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt whose New Deal and failure to fully support Nazism are repugnant to the U.S. ruling class.

Among the conspirators are: Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush; Irenee Dupont ultra right wing industrialist, eugenics proponent and founder of the fascist American Liberty League; Grayson Murphy, director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and J.P. Morgan banks; William Doyle, former state commander of the American Legion; John Davis, former Democratic presidential candidate and lawyer for J.P. Morgan; Al Smith, former New York governor and co-director of Dupont’s American Liberty League; John J. Raskob, high ranking Dupont officer and former chairman of the Democratic party; Robert Clark, multi-millionaire Wall Street banker and stockbroker; and Gerald MacGuire, an associate of Clark’s and former Commander of the Connecticut American Legion.

The coup plotters attempt to recruit U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, a popular hero, to stage a fascist overthrow of the Roosevelt government. Butler is offered three million dollars to assemble an army of half a million American Legion members to carry out the coup. Remington Arms will supply all the weapons needed. The coup is short-circuited when Butler tells Roosevelt about it. Fearful of arresting and prosecuting the U.S. ruling class for treason, the White House leaks the news to the press, leading to a congressional investigation.

Later in the year, Butler testifies before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and tells it that the plot called for businessmen and generals to run the country as a fascist state. Even though the Committee is ultimately able to confirm everything Butler says and he begs them to call the Duponts and Morgans to account, they refuse. A whitewashed report, carefully omitting the names of the plotters, is issued by the Committee and the story is almost entirely suppressed by U.S. mass media. That shining beacon of truth, Time Magazine, openly ridicules Butler.

It will be forty years before the long-suppressed full report of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, complete with the names of the plotters and confirming everything Butler said, is uncovered only to be suppressed once more by the ever-vigilant U.S. mass media.

Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about the truth. Aldous Huxley

1934-ongoing: GERMANY/UNITED STATES. The Rockefellers provide the financing which enables one Leo Strauss to leave Germany, ostensibly as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. Strauss is a proponent of the three most influential shapers of Nazi philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi legal philosopher, is personally responsible for arranging the Rockefeller Foundation funding which moves Strauss first to France, then England and finally to the U.S. At the Rockefellers' University of Chicago, Strauss will establish himself as the wellspring of neofascist philosophy in the United States and will train legions of elitist neofascists to serve the ruling class.

Truth, Strauss will teach his students, is the private preserve of a select few who have to tell “noble lies” to the ignorant masses of humanity in order to manipulate them. The strong, says Strauss, are fit to rule, while the weak are fit only to be ruled.

Among Strauss's students will be a long list of devoted minions of the ruling elite and convicted, unindicted and pardoned criminals including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Rupert Murdoch and Ahmed Chalabi.

1934: GERMANY. Macht und Erde, (Power and Earth) is published by German geopolitician Karl Haushofer. It implies that Germany has the natural right to seize all of Eurasia, with its fabulously rich oil and gas fields, and to dominate most of the globe. Haushofer's little plan seems remarkably like a precursor to The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, a plan for world domination by the U.S., written by Rockefeller proxy, Zbigniew "Zieg Heil" Brzezinski.

1934: UNITED STATES. According to testimony of officials of the Harriman-Bush controlled Hamburg-Amerika steamship line, a supervisor from the "Nazi Labor Front" rides with every one of the line's ships; employees of the New York offices are directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provides free passage to individuals travelling for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidizes pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S., as it had done in Germany in order to bring about the destruction of the constitutional government and the installation of Adolf Hitler.

1934-36: PUERTO RICO. Thousands of jíbaros, the peasants thrown off their own land and driven to work for starvation wages on American-owned plantations, following the U.S. invasion, occupation and seizure of Puerto Rico, walk out of the sugar cane fields of the Armstrong-owned plantation in Fajardo. Their wildcat strike spreads. The farmworkers are supported by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNP) under Pedro Albizu Campos.

The idea of organized mass resistance to the colonial occupation by the U.S. of Puerto Rico terrifies the corporate beneficiaries of the occupation and they form the deceptively-named "Citizens Committee of One Thousand for the Preservation of Peace and Order" who cable Franklin D. Roosevelt that, "A state of actual anarchy exists. Towns in state of siege, police impotent, businesses paralyzed." General Blanton Winship is appointed governor and, his aide, Colonel Francis Riggs is named police chief, to suppress the Puerto Ricans. The island's police are quickly militarized and teams of FBI agents secretly arrive to target the independence movement.

Several attempts are made on Albizu Campos's life. After repeated police murders of nationalists, Albizu Campos announces that his movement will respond by targeting representatives of the U.S. occupiers of Puerto Rico. Three Nationalists are killed by police outside the island's main university. Shortly afterwards, the police chief, Colonel Francis Riggs is shot dead. The two young Nationalists who killed him, Elias Beauchamp and Hiram Rosado, are then murdered in police headquarters.

Albizu Campos is charged with seditious conspiracy, conspiring to overthrow the federal government in Puerto Rico. The first trial (in the English-only federal courts) ends when the seven Puerto Ricans on the jury of twelve refuse to convict. Then, under the Truth, Justice or The American Way policy, the U.S. handpicks a new jury with ten Anglo-Americans which obligingly condemns Albizu Campos to the American gulag in late 1936.

1934-79: NICARAGUA. With U.S. approval and support, dictator Anastasio Somoza overthrows the democratically-elected government of Juan Sacasa. The U.S. finances, arms and maintains in power the brutal Somoza family dictatorship for over forty years. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans are kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered by the Somozas and their infamous U.S.-trained National Guard.

Almost all of the wealth of the country is stolen by the Somozas and their cronies, leaving the vast majority of the population in grinding poverty. The Somoza family alone “acquires” personal land holdings the size of the nation of El Salvador. As part of its bargain with the U.S., the Somoza dictatorship allows Nicaragua to be used as a staging area for illegal attacks by the U.S. on other countries in Central America and the Caribbean including Cuba and Guatemala.

After supporting the destruction of democracy in Nicaragua and the installation of one of the world's most repressive dictatorships, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt is reputed to have said of Somoza, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." This quote has been attributed to any number of American presidents referring to any number of U.S. puppet dictators over the years but that great liberal Franklin Roosevelt did have a soft spot for this particular mass murdering son of a bitch, as we can see in the cozy scene above.

After forty five years of murder, torture, terror and theft of the country's wealth with the direct support of the government of the United States, the Somoza family dictatorship is finally overthrown in a popular revolution led by the socialist Sandinistas in 1979.

THE WONDER YEARS 26

1931-1932: Admiring Mussolini, The Depression Ain't So Bad For Some, Murdering U.S. Veterans And Killing Puerto Ricans And Black People For Science

1931-32: UNITED STATES. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 leads to the Great Depression which lasts until World War Two. In the years following the Crash, the wealth of the United States is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The number of unemployed in the U.S. reaches seventeen million. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their homes. Farms and small businesses are lost to foreclosure or are abandoned. Starving refugees take to the roads, looking for a job or a meal. Often, they are met on the outskirts of towns by armed parties of vigilantes warning them to keep moving.

Since 1929, forty percent of all American banks have closed their doors and the savings of nine million individuals and families have disappeared, it would seem, into thin air. The stocks which so many were conned into buying in the twenties, are now worthless. Millions "ride the rods" and live in "hobo jungles". They are harassed and beaten by railroad police, the "bulls". Squalid, crowded and unsanitary refugee camps are a common sight on the fringes of American cities and towns. The refugee camps are called, in honor of the President Herbert Hoover, "Hoovervilles". Old newspapers, "Hoover blankets", are the only thing many people have to keep them warm at night. Men, women and even children leave their cardboard shacks in the camps each day searching and begging for food, clothing and work.

For every job, hundreds or even thousands of people line up hours in advance. Across the U.S., millions get their only meal of the day at a soup kitchen. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers leave home where they are just another mouth to feed and become hoboes. Malnutrition and untreated disease are common. By 1932, hunger marches and riots are common throughout the U.S. All this in a country with huge food surpluses and vast productive capacity lying unused.

Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon advises President Hoover that shock treatment is the solution:"Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate....That will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life." Amazing advice from the multi-millionaire who had been U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout the period leading up to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression and was largely responsible for it. You'll notice Mellon didn't say liquidate the big banks or the big oil companies or the aluminum cartel.

But this terrible poverty, misery and hopelessness afflicting tens of millions is, of course, only one side of The Great Depression in America, the side we always hear about. To a select handful of American families, the Great Depression is not a disaster at all but just another business opportunity. The Rockefellers, the Bushes, the Harrimans, the Duponts, the Mellons, the Morgans, the Carnegies, the Dulles brothers, the Dillons, the Warburgs and the rest of the ruling class and their most trusted and obedient minions still send their children to exclusive private schools. They still live in fabulous mansions, waited on hand and foot by armies of servants. They are still driven by their chauffeurs in spectacular automobiles. They still stay in extraordinarily expensive hotels. They still throw more away on an evening's diversion than many Americans earn through years of labor. In others words, life goes on for them as it always has: at someone else's expense.

With his family's lucrative totalitarian projects, George H.W. Bush's childhood began in comfort and advanced dramatically to luxury and elegance. The Bushes had a large, dark-shingled house with "broad verandas and a portecochere" (originally a roofed structure extending out to the driveway to protect the gentry who arrived in coaches) on Grove Lane in the Deer Park section of Greenwich. Here they were attended by four servants, three maids, one of whom cooked, and a chauffeur.

The U.S. was plunged into the Great Depression beginning with the 1929-31 financial collapse, but George Bush and his family were totally insulated from this crisis. Before and after the Crash, their lives were a frolic, sealed off from the concerns of the population at large. During the summers, the Bushes stayed in a second home on the family's ten-acre spread at Walker's Point at Kennebunkport, Maine......Grandfather Walker had built a house there for Prescott and Dorothy. They and other well-to-do summer colonists used Kennebunkport's River Club for tennis and the club's yachting facilities. In the winter season, they took the train to Grandfather Walker's plantation, called "Duncannon," near Barnwell, South Carolina. The novices were instructed in skeet shooting, then went out on horseback, following the hounds in pursuit of quail and dove. George's sister Nancy recalled "the care taken" by the servants "over the slightest things, like the trimmed edges of the grapefruit. We were waited on by the most wonderful black servants who would come into the bedrooms early in the morning and light those crackling pine-wood fires...."

The family took yet another house at Aiken, South Carolina. There the Bush children had socially acceptable "tennis and riding partners. Aiken was a southern capital of polo in those days, a winter resort of considerable distinction and serenity that attracted many Northerners, especially the equestrian oriented. The Bush children naturally rode there, too...."

Alec, the family chauffeur, drove the two boys to school every morning after dropping Prescott Bush at the railroad station for the morning commute to Manhattan. The Depression was nowhere in evidence as the boys glided in the family's black Oldsmobile past the stone fences, stables, and swimming pools of one of the wealthiest communities in America. From George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

And the Bushes are just the bum boys and errand boys to the ruling class. Imagine how the Rockefellers, Mellons, Morgans, Harrimans, Duponts, Kennedys and Carnegies made out during the Depression.

1931: UNITED STATES. Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy pulls off another major stock scam when he arranges for RKO Pictures to buy the Pathe newsreel company. Kennedy arranges that he will be paid eighty dollars a share while ordinary shareholders get one dollar and fifty cents.

1931: UNITED STATES. The United States' most highly decorated Marine, Major General Smedley Butler, talks informally after a speech and tells of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini hitting and killing a child with his car, then simply driving on and telling his passenger, "Never look back."

Mussolini is so admired by the powers-that-be in the U.S. that Butler, the most popular military hero in the country, is arrested and court martialed by Henry Stimson, Secretary of War. Butler is ordered to retract his statement. He refuses and is forced to retire from the Marines. The Rockeller-connected Stimson has, of course, a soft soft for dictators, having himself been dictator of the U.S.-occupied Philippines under the Coolidge regime.

1931: UNITED STATES. Armed vigilantes attack striking miners in Harlan County, Kentucky.

1931: PUERTO RICO. Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, infects dozens of Puerto Ricans with cancer cells. Thirteen of Rhoads' victims die. Of course, Rhoads wasn't too fond of the people of the occupied country of Puerto Rico anyway. He had previously written that Puerto Rican "dissidents", (translation: freedom fighters opposing the theft of their country by the U.S.) should be "eradicated" by the "judicious" use of germ warfare.

Appropriately enough, Rhoads will go on to establish U.S. Army biological warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah and Panama, and will later be appointed to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission where he will be responsible for radiation experiments on American prisoners, hospital patients and soldiers. For his fine contributions to humanity, the American Association for Cancer Research will honor Rhoads by naming its exemplary scientist award after him.

1932: GERMANY. The U.S. Ambassador to Germany reports to the State Department that the Hamburg-Amerika steamship line, controlled by George Herbert Walker, grandfather of George W. Bush, and Averell Harriman, is financing propaganda in Germany opposing the German government’s attempts to disarm the 300,000 to 400,000 members of the SS and SA who are terrorizing the German population into submission to the Nazis and murdering political opponents. The weapons for the SS and SA are being supplied by Rockefeller-owned Remington Arms and carried from the U.S. to Germany by Hamburg-Amerika.

1932: UNITED STATES. Eugenics proponents meet at the Museum of Natural History in New York at the Third International Eugenics Congress to plot the creation of a Nordic "master race". Among the sponsors are Averell Harriman's mother, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, Mrs. H. B. Dupont and nutty cornflakes magnate, Dr. J. Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Race Betterment Foundation and promoter of boxing gloves as a "cure" for masturbation in children. On the agenda is the "problem of Negroes" who, according to the delegates, should be sterilized in order to "cut off bad stock".

Averell Harriman's sister Mary, is director of "entertainment" for the Congress. Her home state provides the keynote speaker on "racial purity", W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker holds delegates spellbound with his account of the valiant struggle to stop "miscegenation" and inter-racial sex in Virginia.

The Congress proceedings are dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother who had provided much of the cash for the founding of the eugenics movement in 1910.

The Bush and Harriman families provide transportation via the Hamburg-Amerika line to a number of German Nazis to facilitate their attendance at the Congress. Among them is Dr. Ernst Rudin whom the Congress elects president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. On returning to Germany, Rudin, whose eugenics work is funded by the Rockefellers, supervises the policy of sterilizing those Germans who are retarded, deaf, blind or alcoholic. He will soon write the Nazis' own eugenics law, based on the eugenics statute of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Funding for the Congress is generously provided by William Draper, head of Nazi finance at the Wall Street firm of Dillon (Lapowski), Read and later to be economic czar of occupied post-World War Two Germany.

1932: UNITED STATES. The Great Depression hits even those with what they thought to be good, secure jobs. Three thousand half-starved autoworkers, together with their families and union organizers, march on Hitler supporter and Jew hater Henry Ford's Rouge Plant near Dearborn, Michigan. The marchers' goal is to present a list of demands to Ford. Dearborn police block the route and attack the marchers with tear gas. The marchers fight back with rocks and frozen mud. Near the Ford plant itself, demonstrators are attacked with firehoses and gunfire.

Five marchers are killed by machine gun and pistol fire and nineteen are wounded. Invevitably, the marchers are labelled by the ever-compliant mass media as filthy commie rats rather than as starving workers. Aside from owning every politician in Dearborn, Ford has the police force well under control. Dearborn police officers are required to swear an oath to uphold and protect the Ford Motor Company. Of course, no one is charged in the killings.

1932: EL SALVADOR. U.S. warships are used to threaten peasants rising up against the U.S.-supported dictatorship of El Salvador in an attempt to recover land which had been stolen from them. The dictatorship orders its military to destroy every Indian village and to kill every man, woman and child in Indian dress. More than thirty thousand Indians, four percent of the population of the country, are killed in the genocide, virtually exterminating them in the region. The survivors of the massacre abandon Indian clothing, language and customs with the hope of becoming "invisible" to the death squads. The bloody suppression of the uprising allows the U.S.puppet dictatorship to remain in power, unchallenged, for more than three decades.

1932: UNITED STATES. Gay-baiting homosexual cross-dresser cum FBI Director J. Edna Hoover illegally uses the power of the Gestapo, sorry, the FBI, to terrorize and silence George Menhinick, a persistent critic of President Herbert Hoover. As publisher of the Wall Street Forecast, Menhinick runs articles about the dire condition of U.S. banks which is supposed to be a secret known only to the U.S. ruling class. Hoover has five agents "interrogate" Menhinick and then reports to President Hoover, "Menhinick was considerably upset over the visit of the agents. He is thoroughly scared and I do not believe that he will resume the dissemination of any information concerning the banks." Sure do love that free press.

1932: UNITED STATES. The infant son of aviation hero, Jew hater and Nazi supporter Charles Lindbergh is kidnapped and murdered. The case is built into a media sensation in the U.S. In spite of much propaganda and hoopla, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his much propagandized G-Men are completely ineffectual in solving the case and the "break" only comes because Elmer Irey of the Internal Revenue Service intelligence unit ensures that some of the bank notes and certificates paid as ransom are identifiable, which eventually leads to Bruno Richard Hauptmann who is executed for the crime. Typically, Hoover hated Irey for stealing his thunder and placed the IRS man and his aides under illegal surveillance by FBI agents.

1932: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. Throughout the year, as the Depression deepens, American gold is shipped to Germany almost every week. In mid-May almost $12,000,000 in gold is shipped.

1932: COLOMBIA. Allen Dulles takes a brief break from financing the takeover of Germany by the Nazis to fix the 1932 presidential election in Colombia on behalf of the Mellon family's Gulf Oil. The Mellons are rightly worried that a legitimately-elected government might recover the oil and mineral deposits they have managed to "acquire".

1932: UNITED STATES. 47,000 protesters, including 17,000 veterans of World War One, hard hit by the Depression, march on Washington, DC, to press for early payment of U.S. Army Service Certificates. The protesters, known as the Bonus Army, set up camps in the hope that their presence will convince the Senate to pass the bill for early payment of the Certificates, a measure which had already passed the House. President Herbert Hoover decides that we can't be havin' no democratic protests in Washington, DC and orders police to expel the veterans. Police shoot and kill two veterans. Hoover then orders the Army in to drive the veterans from the Capitol.

The U.S. Army's 12th Infantry Regiment, commanded by the heroic General Douglas MacArthur with the heroic Dwight D. Eisenhower at his side, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, complete with six battle tanks, commanded by the heroic Major George S. Patton, form in Pennsylvania Avenue as thousands of U.S. government employees line the street to watch the show. The Bonus Army, mistakenly assuming that the military action is a display in their honor, cheer the troops. Patton then orders his cavalry to charge the veterans.

Following the cavalry charge, infantry with fixed bayonets using chemical warfare agents invade the Bonus Army camps, expelling veterans and their families who flee across the Anacostia River. At this point, Hoover orders the Army assault against the veterans stopped. General MacArthur, however, has other ideas. According to him, the Bonus March, like anything else we want to suppress these days in the land of the free, is a plot by the filthy Commie rats to overthrow the freedom-loving government of the U.S. MacArthur duly attacks the Bonus Army, murdering two veterans, murdering two babies by asphyxiation with poison gas, and injuring hundreds of men, women and children with gunfire, bayonets and poison gas.

The Bonus March is duly crushed and, naturally, no one is charged with murder. General MacArthur is not court martialled for launching a murderous attack on American veterans in direct violation of an order from the president.

1932-34: UNITED STATES. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller convinces her husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., to commission a 63 foot-long mural by internationally renowned Mexican artist Diego Rivera for the lobby of the soon-to-be-completed Rockefeller Center in New York City. Rivera's mural reflects a distinctly pro-worker, anti-capitalist ideology and includes a representation of Lenin. Apparently forgetting that the murdering old bastard, John D. Rockefeller Sr., had financed Lenin and various other communist revolutionaries in Russia in order to get his mitts on Russian oil, the managers of Rockefeller Center order Rivera to remove the offending images and, when he refuses, workmen, destroy the mural with axes in the middle of the night to avoid a protest in support of Rivera .

1932: UNITED STATES. Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy becomes Franklin Delano Roosevelt's bagman. With a personal criminal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars and contacts with other wealthy indviduals, Kennedy is well placed to produce the cash for Roosevelt. Kennedy is in business with warmonger and Nazi mouthpiece William Randolph Hearst whose media empire is ultimately swung behind Roosevelt.

1932-1936: UNITED STATES. Deep distrust of the gangsters in pinstripe suits who have brought about yet another financial catastrophe, this time the Great Depression, is a major factor in the election of Franklin Roosevelt as president. During the campaign, Roosevelt speaks to huge crowds of "the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system." He scorns the "economic nobles" who control a system which allows "a few powerful interests to make industrial cannon fodder of the lives of half the population."

1932-1972: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Public Health Service launches the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Four hundred poor, uneducated black men with syphilis are identified in Tuskegee, Alabama. They are never told by the Public Health Service that they have syphilis nor are they treated for it. They are, instead, monitored, as an experiment. By 1969, the Public Health Service has stood by and done nothing while one hundred of the men die through lack of treatment. Predictably, the disease spreads to the men’s families.

THE WONDER YEARS 27

1929-1930: The Crash of '29--A Federal Reserve Production, Racist Pseudoscience, Murdering Workers (Again) And The Dulles Brothers Help Old Adolf

1929-41: UNITED STATES. The Wall Street Crash is the opening act in the Great Depression, the latest production of the boys in the back room who own the private company operating under the deceptive name of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve was supposedly created to prevent such things as the Wall Street Crash happening. But, from 1921 to 1929, the Fed dramatically increases the U.S. money supply, fueling massive speculation.

Throughout the 1920s, Americans with modest income and savings are lured into the stock market in large numbers by the ruling class including the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the Dillons. People who know nothing of the true forces and limitless skullduggery behind financial markets and cannot afford to lose the money they invest are persuaded to pay artificially inflated prices for hundreds of millions of shares. Suckers are lured into the market with the trick of buying on margin. A purchaser puts down ten percent of the value of the shares being bought and then counts on the continuing inflation of share prices to make a profit. It's like getting something for nothing. With millions of suckers lured into the market, share prices are driven up and, for a while, John Q. Sucker, looks like coming out ahead.

However, that is not the nature of the financial world. In fact, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Dillons and their minions are fleecing ordinary Americans of hundreds of millions of dollars in an orgy of financial scams many of which will be later uncovered in the long-suppressed Pecora Hearings. Massive manipulation and speculation drives share prices to unsupportable levels. A few months before the Crash, word has it that the Rockefellers, Joe Kennedy and all the other scam artists quietly exit the market, selling when the artificially inflated prices are sky high. On October 24th, the big banks, owned by the same unindicted co-conspirators, call the loans to the suckers. Invevitably, a selling panic ensues and the whole house of cards collapses. Gee, what a surprise.

It is seldom considered, however, that most of the shares which crashed on October 29 and in the next two weeks had been bought for some thirty billion dollars more than they were ultimately sold for, an astonishing amount of money in 1929, most of which ended up in the pockets of some individuals in the know. Neither is it considered who rushed in to buy up the vast numbers of shares being dumped during and after Black Tuesday, acquiring companies and their assets for pennies on the dollar. The Crash and the Depression which followed were, for some, not so much a disaster as simply another business opportunity in which they could snap up assets for a fraction of their true value and, simultaneously, and very importantly, drive down the cost of labor.

The way to make money
is to buy
when blood is running in the streets.

John D. Rockefeller

Of course, it helps if you are in a position to make the blood run in the streets. Over the next ten years, tens of millions of Americans will pay the price in untold misery and hardship for the accumulation of yet more wealth by the handful of families which constitute the American ruling class.

Following the Crash, the boys who run the Federal Reserve contract the money supply, plunging the U.S. into the Great Depression and making it possible to snap up anything they want including farms, businesses and land for pennies on the dollar. Not coincidentally, hundreds of small banks which provide the big boys with a bit of competition, are also driven to the wall and snapped up.

The Crash and the Great Depression which follow come after almost a decade of economic rule by multi-millionaire banker and oilman Andrew Mellon as U.S. Treasury Secretary. Mellon, one might assume, knew exactly what he was doing. In was during Mellon's tenure that the rampant manipulations and scams which led to the Crash were allowed to be carried out. Mellon dramatically reduced taxes on the wealthy and ultra-wealthy, including inheritance taxes, to the point where many paid no tax at all. Mellon, of course, increased those taxes largely paid by the poor and working class, such as excise tax.

As a little gift to his oil industry buddies and to his own Gulf Oil, he also introduced the "oil depletion allowance", a cute little accounting scam which reduces the taxes paid by oil companies almost to zero. The multi-millionaire Mellon claimed to be a believer in the so-called "trickle down" theory of economics under which, if you make the ultra-wealthy even wealthier, tiny drips of cash will theoretically "trickle down", sooner or later, to the underclass. Mellon refused to give tax breaks to the poor on the perfectly understandable grounds that they would just piss it away on food, clothing and shelter.

Mellon clearly recognized that, for some, the Great Depression was a good thing, a fine business opportunity, and made no bones about it. "People will work harder, live a more moral life," the millionaire Mellon pontificated as the Great Depression deepened. "Enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

This American system of ours,
call it Americanism, call it capitalism,
call it what you like,
gives each and every one of us
a great opportunity
if we only seize it with both hands
and make the most of it.

Al Capone

By 1933, the value of the shares on the New York Stock Exchange is less than a fifth of what it had been at its peak in 1929. Businesses close their doors, factories shut down and banks fail. Farm income falls by fifty percent. By 1932, approximately one out of every four American workers is unemployed and many of those who have jobs are working for a fraction of their pre-Crash wages.

Between 1929 and 1933, forty percent of all the banks in the United States, some 10,797 out of the 25,568 existing in 1929, fail, taking their depositors' savings with them. As is the case with the stock market crash, in bank failures, for every loser, somewhere there is a winner. Every single dollar deposited by the Americans who lost everything in the bank failures ended up in someone's pocket somewhere. And, as a nice little benefit for the Rockefellers and Morgans, forty percent of competing banks in the U.S. ceased to exist.

The U.S. economy's output of goods and services (GNP) declines by thirty percent between 1929 and 1933 and recovers to the 1929 level only in 1939 with the boom times of World War Two. Prior to 1939, business investment in the U.S. comes almost to a standstill; the Rockefellers, Harrimans, Duponts, Fords, Mellons and the rest of the U.S. ruling class have other priorities: investing vast sums of money in Nazi Germany and the arming of Adolf Hitler.

When voters give Mellon and Hoover the boot in 1932, Roosevelt's New Deal relieves some of the suffering of ordinary Americans through extensive public works programs. As many as twelve million Americans work at some time on public works or in relief jobs (through the Public Works Administration, the Works Project Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps). What ultimately ends the Great Depression however, is the fabulous business opportunity known as World War Two.

It was a carefully contrived occurrence.
International bankers sought to bring about
a condition of despair
so that they might emerge
the rulers of us all.

Congressman Louis McFadden

In the next few years, McFadden, who is an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve and the families who own it, will be the victim of a shooting attempt and will then be poisoned at a political banquet but, hey, these things happen in a free country.

The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen....At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers.

The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties. New York City Mayor John F. Hylan, 1922

1929: UNITED STATES. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography, Confessions, is banned in the land of the free.

1929: UNITED STATES. Ella Mae Wiggins is murdered by vigilantes when her truckload of striking union members is ambushed during a textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. All defendants will be duly acquitted.

1929: UNITED STATES. Charles Davenport is Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, funded by the American ruling class, notably the Carnegie family, and located on the Dulles family estate on Long Island, New York. At Cold Spring Harbor, Davenport created the notorious Eugenics Record Office, funded by the Harrimans, to organize ze creation of ze master race.

In 1929, Davenport publishes Race Crossing in Jamaica, a supposedly scientific text purporting to prove biological and cultural degradation following interbreeding between white and black populations. In order to promulgate racism disguised as science, Davenport ruthlessly twists and misrepresents data.

Davenport maintains close links with institutions and individuals in Nazi Germany and holds editorial positions on two influential German "scientific" journals. One of Davenport's most important Nazi collaborators is Otto Reche, who will become an important figure in the Nazi scheme to "remove" those humans considered "inferior".

1929-42: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. For half a century prior to 1929, Wall Street's most powerful law firm, Sullivan und Cromwell has provided, for a price, the legal smokescreens behind which a large proportion of the U.S. ruling class have done their dirty work. Following the First World War, the "international finance specialists" of Sullivan und Cromwell are none other than Rockefeller cousins John Foster and Allen Dulles. Both are violently anti-Semitic and boycott their sister’s wedding because she is marrying, gasp, a Jew.

The Dulles brothers, both of whom had been involved in the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles which systematically bankrupted Germany after World War One, organize a shadowy financial network which funnels enormous amounts of American gold and capital to finance the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The Dulles brothers set up numerous agreements for IG Farben, developers and manufacturers of Zyklon-B gas to be used in the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, homosexuals and other “sub-humans”.

John Foster Dulles sits on the IG Farben board of directors which supports the Nazi party because it opposes genuine free enterprise and favors the establishment of slave labor camps to make industrial production “more efficient”. Farben will become a leading player in the Nazi atomic bomb project.

In addition to arranging financing of ventures inside Nazi Germany, the Dulles brothers organize a labyrinth of hundreds of corporations in the United States and Central and South America to provide fronts behind which Farben and other Nazi companies can operate secretly when war comes. Among them are the pharmaceutical and chemical companies Bayer, Agfa, Schering, Winthrop and Sterling.

A secret agreement is arranged by Sullivan und Cromwell under which the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil will collect royalty payments on thousands of patents for IG Farben, even if the U.S. goes to war with Germany.

A massive investment in Nazi Germany is made by the U.S. ruling class while the United States itself languishes in the Great Depression and tens of millions of Americans are unemployed and losing their homes, farms and businesses to the banks owned by the Rockefellers and their clubmates.

After the Nazis seize power in Germany with arms and financing supplied by the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Duponts and other members of the U.S. ruling class, with the help of their minions such as the Bush family, the Nazis begin their "Aryanization" program under which Jews are forced to sell their business assets for a small percentage of their true value to "Aryans". Many American corporations are quick to cash in their markers with the Nazis by sticking their snouts in the "Aryanization" trough, none more avidly so than the Ford Motor Company under one the world's most rabid anti-Semites, Henry Ford.

1929: UNITED STATES/NICARAGUA. U.S. Marines Major General Smedley Butler admits to veterans in Pittsburgh that, in 1912 in Nicaragua, he had helped rig elections on behalf of the notorious Brown Brothers Bank (Brown Brothers, Harriman). For speaking the truth in the land of the free, Butler is called on the carpet by Navy Secretary Adams who just happens to be tightly connected to American banking interests.

1930: UNITED STATES. Customs officers in the land of the free seize copies of Voltaire’s Candide on their way to Harvard. Too dangerous for "free" people in a "free" country to be reading.

Those who believe absurdities
will commit atrocities.

Religion is not merely
the opium of the masses,
it's the cyanide.

A lie is a lie
even if everyone believes it.
The truth is the truth
even if no one believes it.

Voltaire

1929: UNITED STATES. Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy makes an offer to buy the Pantages theater chain from Alexander Pantages, a Greek immigrant who had built it from nothing into a very successful, multi-million dollar business. When Pantages refuses to sell, Kennedy uses his influence in the movie business to prevent Pantages getting first run movies for his theaters but Pantages still won't sell out.

In August, a young woman named Eunice Pringle makes an accusation of rape against Pantages who is convicted and sentenced to fifty years in jail. On appeal, the conviction is overturned when Pantages' lawyer demonstrates that the claimed rape was a physical impossibility.

Ruined by the bad publicity, Pantages is ultimately forced to sell his chain to Kennedy for less than half of the amount originally offered.

There are conflicting versions of what caused Pringle to make the false rape accusation, foremost of which is that Kennedy gave Pringle $10,000 to do it. Whatever the truth of that, Pantages was ruined and Kennedy, a man possessed of not a single scruple, got the Pantages theater chain.

1930: UNITED STATES. A black man, George Hughes, is accused of raping a white woman in Sherman, Texas. A white mob dynamites the courthouse in which Hughes is being held, burning him to death. The mob then seizes his corpse, cuts off his genitals and drags his body through the black business district before burning it to the ground. To this day, the county where Hughes was murdered has only two black professionals.

1930-ongoing: SWITZERLAND. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is created by a group of the world's major central banks. The ostensible purpose of the BIS, established under J.P. Morgan banker Owen D. Young's so-called Young Plan, is to provide the Allies with German reparations for World War I. Strangely enough, the BIS soon turns itself to exactly the opposite purpose, siphoning money from the U.S. to the Nazis to build the Hitler war machine.

The structure of the BIS, safely tucked away in war-free Basle, Switzerland, is inspired by none other than Hjalmar Schacht, who will shortly become Nazi Germany's Minister of Economics and president of the Reichsbank, a man with powerful Wall Street connections. Even before Hitler rose to political power, Schacht had pushed for an institution which would maintain channels of communication and collusion between the world's financial leaders in the event of a world war. By its very structure, agreed to by the governments of all participating nations, the BIS is the perfect instrument for the boys in the back room. Written into the BIS charter is total immunity from closure, seizure or censure, regardless of who is at war with who. How convenient.

By 1939, the BIS will have invested millions in Nazi Germany while the Nazis, in turn, will have deposited vast sums looted from various groups of "subhumans" into the BIS. Aside from laundering Nazi loot, the BIS will grow to be a supranational club with membership restricted to the handful of families who have defacto control of much of the global economy.

1930: UNITED STATES. The evolution of a Nordic master race through the "science" of eugenics is dear to the heart of many of America's ruling class. Among the most prominent members of the American Eugenics Society in 1930 are: cornflakes magnate and anti-masturbation guru J. Harvey Kellogg, robber baron, banker and U.S. Steel chairman J. P. Morgan, Jr., cancer heiress Mary Duke Biddle, copper barons Cleveland H. and Cleveland E. Dodge and their wives, banker and B&O Railroad tycoon Robert Garrett, United Press International heiress Miss E. B. Scripps, Brush Electric Company heiress Dorothy H. Brush, and Planned Parenthood activist Margaret Sanger, married to 3-M Oil tycoon, Noah Slee.

National Socialism is nothing
but applied biology.

Rudolph Hess

1930s-42: GERMANY/UNITED STATES. George W. Bush's great grandfather, Herbert Walker, who is already playing a vital role in financing the takeover of Germany by the Nazis, decides to help them out even more by acting as front man in the U.S. for Nazi-linked businesses including the Harriman family-controlled Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line.

The Hamburg-Amerika line carries weapons, largely manufactured by Rockefeller-owned Remington Arms, from the United States to Germany to be used by the Nazis in their rise to power through the intimidation of the German population and the murder of anti-Nazi politicians. Hamburg-Amerika also routinely carries Nazi propagandists and propaganda materials into the U.S. The shipping line will later serve as an important conduit for the introduction of German spies into the United States and for the transportation of hundreds of stolen American defense secrets to Germany.

THE WONDER YEARS 28

1930s: UNITED STATES. In the midst of the Depression, a crime wave hits the mid-West. Kidnapping and armed bank robberies are carried out by the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.

The crossdressing, gay-baiting, homosexual, conspicuous non-combatant J. Edgar Hoover's response is to create his own ministry of propaganda which will exploit the situation to create a completely false image of both the FBI and of himself in the minds of Americans.

Hoover hires one Courtney Ryley Cooper who has a varied past as a circus clown, as a press agent for "Buffalo" Bill Cody and as a writer of pulp westerns to immortalize the transvestite FBI Director. Cooper will use his overblown imagination to create the relentless stream of lies, misinformation, disinformation and propaganda which will make Hoover a household name in the U.S. by the end of the 1930s.

1930: UNITED STATES. More than one hundred farm workers are arrested in California's Imperial Valley for attempting to form unions. Eight are convicted of "criminal syndicalism". Can't be havin' no organized peons in the land of the free.

1930s: UNITED STATES. Michael Fooner of the FBI makes the mistake of supporting the formation of an FBI branch of the Federation of Government Employees. When, forty years later, he gets hold of the file J. Edgar Hoover then assembles on him, it will be six inches thick.

1930s: UNITED STATES. Nazi supporter and Jew hater Henry Ford uses his Mafia connections to terrorize workers attempting to unionize Ford factories. Ford's right hand man, Harry Bennett, maintains personal contact with Joe Tocco and Leo Cellura of the Detroit mob and arranges Ford motor vehicle franchises for mob associates. Mob-supplied thugs beat up Walter Reuther and others trying to organize Ford workers. Eventually Bennett assembles his own in-house gang of thugs, armed with pistols, blackjacks and lengths of rubber hose to break up union meetings and attack union activists.

1930-1962: UNITED STATES. An ultra right wing conspicuous non-combatant, Harry J. Anslinger, is appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) by Gulf Oil/Alcoa representative cum Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Anslinger's reign, which rivals J. "Edna" Hoover's as head of the FBI, is marked by absurd and blatantly racist disinformation campaigns on the terrifying evils of marijuana, carried to the U.S. public by the media empire of warmonger, yellow journalist and paid Nazi mouthpiece, William Randolph Hearst.

Anslinger's war against marijuana may have something to do with the fact that his patron, Mellon, is heavily involved with the Dupont interests whose petrochemical-based fibers are in direct competition with hemp, which is grown on on an industrial scale and promises to provide a wide range of fibers, chemical feedstocks and other raw materials for industry in sharp competition with oil. Anslinger sabotages attempts by the medical profession to use marijuana and other "narcotics" for pain relief.

In the classic fashion of the U.S. ruling class and its minions, Anslinger plays both sides of the street and, in the 1950s, becomes the morphine supplier to alcoholic druggie witch hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy. Following his retirement in the 1970s, after decades of blocking the medical use of "narcotics" for pain relief, Anslinger ends up taking morphine to control his own pain.

Two Negroes took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of marijuana. Upon recovery, she was found to be suffering from syphilis. From anti-marijuana propaganda article by Harry Anslinger published in Hearst's American Magazine.

A very nice combination of fear mongering, racism and anti-hemp propaganda from the highly principled Hearst.

1930-1970: UNITED STATES. In 1930, the industry trade magazine, Asbestos, publishes its last article on the growing evidence of the disastrous health consequences of asbestos. For the next forty years, this shining beacon of the free press in America will publish not a single word of the mounting toll of death and misery caused by its advertisers' products.

1930: UNITED STATES. Harriman family errand boy and front man, Prescott Bush, takes time out from financing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to organize the finance for William Paley to buy the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), at the time a radio network but soon to evolve into America's largest television network. Paley will be forever grateful to Bush, Harriman and the rest of the Hitler Project gang and will happily make CBS available to the CIA for propaganda and psychological warfare operations against the people of the United States.

1930s: UNITED STATES. The Black Legion, affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, is formed in Detroit. Members swear to "support God" and to give their all in any "war" against Catholics, Jews, Negroes, aliens (presumably foreigners not extra-terrestrials) and Communists. Each member pays $7 for a KKK-like robe complete with skull and crossbones, pays ten cents a month in dues and is required to own a pistol.

The Black Legion is, in effect, a terror and enforcement arm for the Dupont family's General Motors, organized along military lines. The Black Legion has five brigades, 16 regiments, 64 batallions, and 256 companies. There are probably between 20,000 and 30,000 members in Michigan in the 1930s, one third in Detroit. Among the Black Legion's duties is to stop General Motors workers organizing a union. Legion members throw bombs into union halls, set fire to labor activists’ homes, torture union organizers and kill at least fifty people in Detroit alone. Many of the victims are black. One victim of the Black Legion is Reverend Earl Little, murdered in 1931. His son, later known as Malcolm X, was six years of age at the time. Two years previously, the Black Legion had burned down Reverend Little's house.

1930s-1985: UNITED STATES/NAZI GERMANY. Herr Doktor Erich Traub leads a varied and interesting life. In the 1930s, the German scientist is trained in the fine art of manipulating bacteria and viruses at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He rounds out his first term in the U.S. with membership in the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American ‘club’ also known as Camp Sigfried. Camp Sigfried is the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement.

At the outbreak of World War Two, Traub will return to his native Germany and apply his Rockefeller-acquired skills to Nazi germ warfare, working directly under SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, and conducting grotesque experiments on live victims. Among his many accomplishments for Nazi Germany will be the release of live virus sprays over the occupied Soviet Union.

At the close of World War Two, Traub's life will come full circle when, along with thousands of other Nazi war criminals and mass murderers, he is rescued from prosecution by Allen Dulles' Operation Paperclip and, nicely de-Nazified, goes to work for the government of the United States of America. Traub finds a satisfying new job in the U.S. Navy's biological warfare program at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. America sure is the land of opportunity.

1930s-ongoing: PUERTO RICO. With their country stolen from them by the U.S., local food production all but destroyed and reduced to working on American-owned plantations and in American-owned factories for slave labor wages, Puerto Ricans are driven to even greater desperation by the Depression. A new Puerto Rican independence movement is born, led by Pedro Albizu Campos, who rises to head the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNP).

The PNP completely rejects participation in the charade of politics and colonial elections stage-managed by the U.S. They proclaim the obvious fact that U.S. domination of Puerto Rico is illegitimate and refuse to recognize the colonial occupying authorities, their courts or their laws. The PNP accuses the U.S. of causing the ruin and poverty of Puerto Rico's people. Most daring of all, they maintain that Puerto Ricans have the right to wage armed struggle against the U.S. invaders and occupiers in order to gain their liberty.

1930s: UNITED STATES. Rockefeller cousin John Foster Dulles sets up an American subsidiary of the Nazi chemical combine and concentration camp operator-to-be IG Farben, American IG. Its directors include Walter Teagle, chairman of the Rockefellers' Standard Oil, Paul Warburg of the banking and investment house of Kuhn Loeb & Company, Charles Mitchell, president of the National City Bank and Edsel Ford, representing the Ford interests. At least two of the Farben directors, Teagle and Warburg, also sit on the board of the privately owned company operating under the name of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

1930s-1940s: NAZI GERMANY. Before and after Pearl Harbor, the American broadcasting and electrical giant, RCA is in partnership with a host of Nazi businesses, including Telefunken, with Italcable, owned by the Mussolini dictatorship, and with collaborationist Vichy France's Compagnie Generale, in an organization known as the Transradio Consortium. RCA also holds a share with another Nazi business partner, International Telephone and Telegraph (IT&T), in an Axis-controlled telephone and telegraph company in South America.

According to the U.S. State Department, Transradio, with the full knowledge of RCA head, David Sarnoff, maintained a direct line to Berlin throughout World War Two providing an unmonitored channel for sending vast amounts of intelligence to the Nazis.

1930-1961: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. U.S.-trained, armed and supported national police and army chief Rafael Leonidas Trujillo seizes power and begins a reign of murder, torture, terror, rape and theft of the country’s wealth. His seizure of power is made all the easier by the fact that during its illegal military occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, U.S. forces had prohibited ordinary Dominicans from owning weapons while heavily arming local traitors and collaborators such as Trujillo and the U.S.-indoctrinated army and police.

Political opponents and those who offend Trujillo and his cronies are tortured and murdered, often thrown over cliffs on the south coast of the island nation to the sharks, or are held in concentration camps and worked to death on farms Trujillo has stolen from the Dominican people. All attempts by Dominicans to achieve freedom and democracy are ruthlessly crushed with the whole hearted approval of such as U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull seen here with his buddy Rafael.

By the time his American masters inevitably turn on him in 1960 and the CIA under Nazi shyster Allen Dulles begins to plot his murder, Trujillo has tortured and murdered unknown tens of thousands of Dominicans and murdered twenty thousand Haitians. By the end of his U.S.-maintained dictatorship, Trujillo and his family will have “acquired” seventy percent of the land and ninety percent of the industry of the country while the vast majority of its people live short lives of fear and hopeless poverty.

1930s-1972: UNITED STATES. J. Edgar Hoover brings all "law enforcement" propaganda in the U.S. under his personal control. With his paid sychophant, Courtney Ryley Cooper still churning out shamelessly flattering fluff, and the ever-compliant mass media delivering the lies to an unsuspecting American public, Hoover hires Louis "Nick the Greek" Nichols to mastermind an ongoing nationwide propaganda campaign. Nichols creates the deviously-named FBI "Crime Records" division which is simply a massive misuse of taxpayers' money and FBI resources to convince the American public of the greatness of J. Edgar Hoover and the fantasy image of the FBI he wants to project.

Threats and bribes are widely used by Hoover to encourage the media to do his bidding. Compliant journalists are rewarded with gifts and tips. Journalists who do not see the light are punished by having information withheld from them. FBI agents once again are in the forefront of criminal activity in the United States when they illegally spy on journalists and the Bureau builds detailed files extending to thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of pages on each one over decades for the purpose of blackmail or smear campaigns.

Hoover cultivates gossip columnist Walter Winchell who, provided with "tips" by Hoover, becomes one of the biggest outlets for Hoover's self-promotion campaign. During the first thirty five years of Hoover's reign, only a single major American publication, the New Yorker, will dare to publish material on the FBI which has not been invented or sanitized by Hoover and Nichols. Ain't nothin' like a free press, is there?

Hoover's taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign operates on a massive scale. There is a G-Man radio program, G-Man movies, G-Man books and comics. American kids run around with G-Man badges and G-Man tommy guns then go to bed in their G-Man pyjamas. There are rumors that J. Edgar himself liked to prance about in a G-String.

A survey of 11,000 American school boys in 1936 shows that J. Edgar Hoover has become the second most popular person in the United States, second only to Robert Ripley of Ripley's Believe it or Not, a stunning comment on Hoover's effectiveness in manipulating the mass media into doing his bidding.

After turning Hoover into a demi-god, Crime Records' secondary purpose is to keep the American people terrified of the commie bogeyman. Nichols churns out reams of "anti-communist" hate literature, best known of which is a book, Masters of Deceit, ostensibly written by Hoover but, in fact, produced by Nichols' team of hacks.

Many thanks for the handsomely autographed copy
(of Masters of Deceit). Once again you have gone
into the forefront of the defense of our nation against the Commie rats.

Raymond Henle NBC "newsman" in a letter to J. Edna Hoover

Nichols' hacks churn out another blatant propaganda piece, a book entitled The FBI Story. The propaganda value of the book is greatly multiplied when Warner Brothers makes a movie of it. Both Jack Warner and Jimmy Stewart, who starred in the movie, had long been cultivated and given special favors and treatment by Hoover at the expense of American taxpayers.

The well-known television series, The FBI, which began broadcast in 1965, was pure propaganda. Each script was personally read and had to be approved by Hoover with the help of his live-in lover, miraculously promoted FBI Assistant Director Clyde Tolson. An FBI agent was present on the set at all times to oversee shooting and make sure the actors didn't say anything they weren't supposed to.

1930-1996: UNITED STATES. Thomas Midgley, developer of one of the world's most dangerous and toxic substances, tetraethyl lead, outdoes himself and invents the refrigerant Freon for the Duponts' General Motors. The invention will cement Midgley's position as the single individual in history most responsible for the destruction of the environment.

Over the years, millions of pounds of Freon will be released, migrating high into the atmosphere, degrading into chlorine and eventually causing wholesale destruction of the ozone layer, a protective barrier essential to life on Earth.

The ozone layer will thin dramatically and the size of polar ozone holes will grow almost every year as increasing amounts of Freon are discharged into the air. As the ozone layers thins, increased levels of ultraviolet light reaching the surface of the Earth from the sun result in millions of additional skin cancers throughout the world. In only twenty seven years, from 1973 to 2000, the rate of skin cancer among American males will quadruple. But, hey, it's just good business. You get to make all that money on Freon and then even more on the cancer drugs.

Increased UV levels also have profound effects food production, both on land and in the sea.

A disinformation campaign, typified by the efforts of conspicuous non-combatant and drug abuser Rush Limbaugh, attempts to convince the public that since Freon is heavier than air, it cannot rise into the atmosphere. If fact, Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are carried high into the atmosphere by wind and convection currents and are present in almost equal concentrations from ground level up to six miles high and, in lower concentrations, much higher than that.

THE WONDER YEARS 29

1927-1928: Sterilizing Americans, Slaughtering Miners, Making Your Boyfriend FBI Assistant Director, Invading China And Dive Bombing Nicaraguans

1927-1981: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Supreme Court, ever vigilant in the defense of the rights of American citizens and of the U.S. Constitution, puts its stamp of approval on the quest of eugenics proponents for a master race. The Court upholds the Virginia eugenics law in the case of Buck v. Bell. The decision, written by that great champion of human rights, Oliver Wendell Holmes, opens the floodgates to the forced sterilization of American citizens designated as "unfit" under the definitions created by the ruling class via such institutions as the American Eugenics Society.

Carrie Buck had been forcibly sterilized at the Virginia Colony Home for the Mentally Infirm. Amazingly enough, Buck was white. Although her mother was mentally handicapped, Buck was mentally normal. Under the Virginia eugenics law, which will form the basis of eugenics legislation in the Third Reich, Buck was declared capable of having a "less than normal child" and was, therefore, subject to forcible sterilization by the freedom loving Commonwealth of Virginia.

Virginia is only one of seventeen American states which have laws purporting to legalize the forcible sterilization of its citizens. The Virginia eugenics law will remain in effect until 1981.

1927: UNITED STATES. John D. Rockefeller continues his business strategy of murdering uppity workers when six miners, picketing in a strike called by the Industrial Workers of the World, are massacred with machine guns at Rockefeller's mine in Columbine, Colorado.

1927-72: UNITED STATES. Fraud artist, unindicted criminal, conspicuous non-combatant and and homosexual transvestite cum FBI Director J. Edna Hoover hires cute little Clydie Tolson as an FBI agent-in-training.

Within a year, J. Edna is insisting that her new squeeze be included on White House invitation lists. By 1930, Clydie is miraculously promoted all the way from agent-in-training to Assistant Director of the FBI, J. Edna's right hand man, as it were. Tolson will remain in that position and be the gay-bashing Hoover's lover until J. Edna's long overdue death in 1972.

Although Hoover's homosexuality is well-known in certain circles, his much propagandized and completely fictitious public persona is dead butch and, as part of the cover up and because he is a nasty old queen, Hoover persecutes homosexuals and other "sex deviates" relentlessly.

J. Edna makes rather ironic public statements about hunting for "sex deviates in government service" and orders FBI agents to "penetrate" homosexual rights groups across the U.S., collecting the names of members, photographing demonstrations and recording speeches.

The FBI's criminal spying on American citizens attempting to practice their theoretical rights of free speech and freedom of assembly will go on for at least twenty three years.

Hoover repeatedly uses homosexuality, real or fictitious, as a smear tactic against those who dare to speak out against his endless abuse of power or in order to discredit people of whom he disapproves. In addition, the threat of exposure for real or imagined homosexuality is a powerful blackmail tool in Hoover's arsenal although doubtless there are other things in his arsenal.

Hoover will misuse his position as FBI Director for half a century to persecute, oppress and blackmail homosexuals and to blackmail heterosexuals with the threat of being smeared as homosexual.

Among Hoover's victims-to-be are Franklin Roosevelt's Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, who will be entrapped in an engineered homosexual liaison and forced to resign. Hoover will also use the homosexual smear tactic in attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Adlai Stevenson and three of Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon's gang of criminal thugs, for whom it is hard to feel sorry.

But the darkest side to Hoover's hidden homosexuality and predilection for wearing ladies' clothing is that it lays him wide open, no pun intended, to blackmail. The Mafia, CIA Director, Nazi shyster and Rockefeller minion Allen Dulles and others are quick to take advantage.

A photograph of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation performing fellatio on the Assistant Director of the FBI allegedly ends up in the hands of Mafia kingpin Meyer Lanksy. Possession of the photo ensures complete freedom of operation for the Mafia in the United States during almost forty years of Hoover's tenure. Hoover will repeatedly stymie and block investigations into the mob and claim that the Mafia simply does not exist.

No one who is a sex deviate
will ever be appointed to the FBI.

J. Edna Hoover
Homosexual transvestite and FBI Director

I regret to say that we of the FBI
are powerless to act
in cases of oral-genital intimacy
unless it has, in some way,
obstructed interstate commerce.

J. Edna Hoover
Homosexual transvestite and FBI Director

J. Edna gave great Hoover.

Clydie Tolson
J. Edna's main squeeze and Assistant FBI Director

That old cocksucker....

Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon

(Ed: This might have been just about the only thing Tricky Dick ever said which wasn't a lie.)

1927: NICARAGUA. Pre-empting Hitler's Luftwaffe, the U.S. becomes the first nation on Earth to use dive bombers, attacking Nicaraguan peasants at Ocotal who had risen up against the American troops occupying their country. After dive bombing the town of Ocotal, the valiant flyers then strafe the peasants with machine guns as they run for safety. America massacres more than three hundred defenseless civilians with this exciting new innovation in delivering freedom and democracy to the world's oppressed peoples.

1927-34: CHINA. U.S. Marines invade and occupy many parts of China to ensure that it remains open to the depredations of American corporations, most notably the Rockefellers' Standard Oil.

1928: NICARAGUA. The U.S. military seizes control of the Nicaraguan army and begins a demonization program and hunt for the freedom fighter Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino who is preaching to virtually enslaved mine workers about social inequality and the need for change. Can't be havin' no talk about freedom and equality this close to the U.S. of A. Someone might get ideas.

1928: SOVIET UNION. In the interests of promoting communism, er, capitalism, well, who cares? In the interests of making a shitload of money, Harriman and Company becomes the chief organizer of a huge engineering program to modernize Soviet heavy industry. Averell Harriman furnishes securities for all the Soviet purchases in the United States and, of course, makes a fortune in the process, pimping for the commie rats.

Hang on here, Averell, aren't we relentlessly persecuting alleged commies throughout the land of the free? Oh, I forgot, this is about a billionaire making more money, so that's OK.

1928: GERMANY. Henry Ford merges his German assets with Nazi chemical cartel IG Farben.

WELCOME TO MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR HYPOCRISY

This is what is called, in the history biz, a revisionist history. American history, at least as far as the general public knows it, is in desperate need of revision, bringing what is taught and what is said about America's past more in line with the truth.

Making the World Safe For Hypocrisy is a chronology of the largely suppressed history of the United States. It is the history that good upstanding Americans are not supposed to know.

Almost everything you read here is based on publicly available information and most historians know all about it. And yet they remain strangely silent, allowing the fantasyland, propagandized version of American history and the fatuous pseudo-patriotic nonsense spewed by politicians and the mass media to stand unchallenged.

A nation
which does not know
what it was yesterday,
does not know
what it is today.

Woodrow Wilson

He who controls the present,
controls the past.
He who controls the past,
controls the future.

George Orwell

The essence of propaganda
consists of winning people
over to an idea
so sincerely, so vitally,
that in the end
they succumb to it utterly
and can never escape from it.

Joseph Goebbels

America has been something
of a divided personality,
tragically divided
against herself.
On the one hand
we have proudly professed
the great principles
of democracy,
but on the other hand
we have sadly practiced
the very opposite
of these principles.

Martin Luther King

None are more
hopelessly enslaved
than those
who falsely believe
that they are free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

ANTI-AMERICAN?

Whenever anyone dares to point out the painfully obvious fact that the U.S. and its leaders have for two hundred years consistently acted in a fashion diametrically opposed to the values which America claims to represent, that person is instantly accused of being anti-American.

Am I anti-American? I don't think so. But, if believing in free speech and real democracy is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government should not lie endlessly is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government should not spy on its own citizens is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government should not kidnap, torture and murder is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government shouldn't slaughter millions of innocent people simply to further enrich the same old handful of psychopathic bastards and their offspring is anti-American, then I guess I am.

================================================================

NEEDLES OF TRUTH IN THE HAYSTACK OF LIES

• 1984, George Orwell: Old George was bang on with the techniques used by the rulers. "America" couldn't exist without doublethink.
• A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn: More history you're not supposed to know.
• American Holocaust, David Stannard: The genocide of the American Indians.
• Body of Secrets, James Bamford: The National Security Agency spies on all Americans all the time.
• Deadly Deceits, Ralph McGehee: A insider's look at one of the world's leading terrorist organizations, the CIA.
• Freeing The World To Death, William Blum: Essays on the American Empire.
• Full Spectrum Dominance, Rahul Mahajan: The U.S. in Iraq and beyond.
• Hidden Agenda, Ramsey Clark et al: The destuction of Yugoslavia by the U.S. and NATO.
• House of Bush, House of Saud, Craig Unger: The Bushes have had their snouts up the Saudi pursehole for half a century.
• IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black: the Nazis and America's most powerful corporations in cahoots.
• Imperial Brain Trust, Laurence Shoup and William Minter: The Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations.
• Killing Hope, William Blum: A saddening record of America's use of overwhelming violence to crush democracy and hope around the world.
• Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen: American children are taught the lies from day one.
• Propaganda, Edward Bernays: The textbook of manipulation of the public by Woodrow Wilson's propaganda maven.
• Rogue State, William Blum: All other rogue states pale into insignificance when compared with the U.S.
• Terrorizing the Neighbourhood, Noam Chomsky: What America really does to its neighbors.
• The Culture of Terrorism, Noam Chomsky: And he ain't talking about car bombs.
• The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers: America's leading law enforcment officer was a lifelong crook. Quelle surprise.
• The Splendid Blond Beast, Christopher Simpson: Nazi war criminals rescued by the U.S. and hired by the U.S. government and military.
• Warriors of Disinformation, Alvin Snyder. On disinformation by someone who should know, the former director of the U.S. Information Agency.
• Western State Terrorism, Alexander George Editor: The title says it all.

THE BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN LASTED 6 MINUTES

THE LITTLE BIG HORN COVER-UP

WAY DOWN IN THE LAND OF COTTON

Hasan Galioğlu

SHANTY TOWN

TOLL BRIDGE

MAIN STREET

WILLOW BAY

GRAND RAPIDS

THE CONQUEST OF LATIN AMERICA

The Confederacy’s Plan to Conquer Latin America
by the mag - December 15, 2008 - 11:33 AM

Editor’s Note: I’ve asked co-founders Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur to select some of their favorite mag articles from 2008. Today’s story is the work of Erik Sass. And if it puts you in a subscription-giving mood, here are the details.

By Erik Sass
September-October issue

In the years leading up to the Civil War, many Northerners and Southerners alike wanted the federal government to take a more aggressive approach toward acquiring new territory. In fact, some private citizens, known as filibusters, took matters into their own hands. They raised small armies illegally; ventured into Mexico, Cuba, and South America; and attempted to seize control of the lands. One particularly successful filibuster, William Walker, actually made himself president of Nicaragua and ruled from 1856 to 1857.

For the most part, these filibusters were just men in search of adventure. Others, however, were Southern imperialists who wanted to conquer new territories in the tropics. Abolitionist factions in the North greatly opposed their efforts, and the debate over Southern expansion only increased tensions in a divided nation. As the country drifted into war, U.S. Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky warned that “the Southern states cannot afford to be shut off from all possibility of expansion towards the tropics by the hostile action of the federal government.”

But Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 put an end to the argument. The anti-slavery president refused to compromise, and war broke out in April 1861.

Confederate Colonies, South of the Border

Winning the war was clearly a higher priority for the Confederacy than conquering Latin America, but growth was certainly on the post-war agenda. Confederate president Jefferson Davis made sure the Confederate constitution included the right to expand, and he filled his cabinet with men who thought similarly. He even hinted that the slave trade could be revived in “new acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande.”

During the Civil War, Confederate agents attempted to destabilize Mexico so that its territories would be easy to snatch up after the war. One rebel emissary to Mexico City, John T. Pickett, secretly fomented rebellion in several Mexican provinces with an eye to “the permanent possession of that beautiful country.” Pickett’s mission ended in failure in 1861, but fate dealt the South a better hand in 1863. French Emperor Napoleon III seized Mexico, and the move provided the South with a perfect excuse to “liberate” the country after the Civil War.

Of course, Mexico was just part of the pie that the South hoped to inherit. Confederate leaders also had their eyes squarely on Brazil—a country of nearly 4 million square miles and more than 8 million people. Prior to the outbreak of the war, U.S. Naval Academy founder Matthew Maury dispatched two Navy officers to the Amazon basin, ostensibly to map the river for shipping. Instead, they were secretly plotting domination and collecting data about separatist movements in the region. When the South lost the war, Maury refused to abandon his plans. He helped 20,000 ex-rebels flee to Brazil, where they established the Confederate colonies of New Texas and Americana. To this day, hundreds of descendents of the Confederados still gather outside Americana to celebrate their shared heritage of rocking chairs and sweet potato pie. In a strange way, a part of the Old South still survives—thousands of miles below the U.S. border.

STORIES THEY DIDN'T TEACH YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL

7 Civil War Stories You Didn’t Learn in High School
by Eric Johnson

For many American historians, the Civil War is the climax in the story of how the United States came to be what it is today. But you knew that. For mental_floss readers, it’s also a source of some bizarre and surprisingly cool trivia.

1. Lincoln’s first solution to slavery was a fiasco

Early in his presidency, Abe was convinced that white Americans would never accept black Americans. “You and we are different races,” the president told a committee of “colored” leaders in August 1862. “…But for your race among us there could not be war…It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Lincoln proposed voluntary emigration to Central America, seeing it as a more convenient destination than Liberia. This idea didn’t sit well with leaders like Frederick Douglass, who considered colonization to be “a safety valve…for white racism.”

Luckily for Douglass (and the country), colonization failed spectacularly. One of the first attempts was on Île à Vache, a.k.a. Cow Island, a small isle off the coast of Haiti. The island was owned by land developer Bernard Kock, who claimed he had approved a black American colony with the Haitian government. No one bothered to call him on that claim. Following a smallpox outbreak on the boat ride down, hundreds of black colonizers were abandoned on the island with no housing prepared for them, as Kock had promised.

To make matters worse, the soil on Cow Island was too poor for any serious agriculture. In January 1864, the Navy rescued the survivors from the ripoff colony. Once Île à Vache fell through, Lincoln never spoke of colonization again.

2. Hungry ladies effectively mugged Jefferson Davis

The Confederacy’s image hinged on the notion that the rebellious states made up a unified, stable nation. However, the hard times of war exposed just how much disunity there was in Dixieland. Civilians in both the North and South had to cope with scarcity and increased food prices, but the food situation was especially bad in the South because outcomes on the battlefield were directly linked to the CSA’s currency - rising food prices were hard enough to deal with without wild fluctuations in what the money in your pocket could buy.

Invading northern troops, of course, poured salt on the wounds of scarcity, burning crops and killing livestock. But in Richmond, Virginia, those who couldn’t afford the increasingly pricey food blamed the Confederate government. Hungry protesters, most of whom were women, led a march “to see the governor” in April 1863 that quickly turned violent. They overturned carts, smashed windows, and drew out Governor John Letcher and President Jefferson Davis. Davis threw money at the protesters, trying to get them to clear out, but the violence continued. So, he threatened to order the militia to open fire, which settled things down pretty quickly.

3. The Union used hot air balloons and submarines

The balloons, directed by aeronaut Thaddeus Lowe, were used to spot enemy soldiers and coordinate Federal troop movements. During his first battlefield flight, at First Bull Run, Lowe landed behind Confederate lines, but he was rescued.

The Union Army Balloon Corps got no respect from military officials, and Lowe resigned when he was assigned to serve, at a lower pay grade, under the director of the Army Corps of Engineers. In all, the balloonists were active for a little under two years.

In contrast, the paddle-powered Alligator submarine saw exactly zero days of combat (which is why it can’t officially be called the U.S.S. Alligator). It suffered from some early testing setbacks, but after some speed-boosting tweaks, it was dispatched for Port Royal, South Carolina, with an eye towards aiding in the sack of Charleston. It was to be towed south by the U.S.S. Sumpter, but it had to be cut loose off of North Carolina on April 2, 1863, when bad weather struck. Divers and historians are still looking for the Alligator today.

But the undersea capers don’t end there. A few months after the loss of the Alligator, the CSA launched their own submarine, the H.L. Hunley, named after its inventor. The Hunley attacked and sank the U.S.S. Housatonic off the coast of Charleston, making it the first submarine ever to sink an enemy ship. The only problem is that it also sank soon afterwards, and all eight crewmen drowned.

4. “Dixie” was only a northern song

The precise details of when composer Dan Emmett wrote “Dixie” seemed to change every time he told the story (and some even dispute that Emmett was the author in the first place). But he first performed it in New York City in 1859, with the title “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land.”

Emmett was a member of a blackface troupe known as the Bryant’s Minstrels, but he was indignant when he found out that his song had become an unofficial anthem of the Confederacy. He went on to write a musicians’ marching manual for the Northern army.

Before and during the war, the song was a huge hit in New York and across the country, and quickly became one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite tunes. The day after the Surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln told a crowd of Northern revelers, “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ was one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it.” He then asked a nearby band to play it in celebration.

5. Paul Revere was at Gettysburg

Paul Joseph Revere, that is—the famous Paul Revere’s grandson. Unfortunately for fans of the first Revere and his partly mythical Ride, PJR was in the infantry, not the cavalry, with the 20^th Massachusetts. He and his brother Edward were captured at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in October 1861. After being released in a prisoner exchange, the Reveres rejoined the fight.

Paul was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in September, 1862, shortly before he was wounded in the brutal Battle of Antietam (a.k.a. the Battle of Sharpsburg). Edward, however, wasn’t so lucky – he was one of more than 2,000 Union soldiers who didn’t make it out of Sharpsburg, Maryland, alive.

By the following year, Paul was promoted again to Colonel, leading the 20^th Massachusetts at Chancellorsville and, in his final days, at Gettysburg. On July 3, 1863, he was mortally wounded by a shell fragment that pierced his lung, and he died the next day. He was posthumously promoted again to Brigadier General, and is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

6. Mark Twain fired one shot and then left

At least, that’s what he claimed in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” a semi-fictional short story published in 1885, after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but before A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In it, he recounts a whopping two weeks spent in 1861 with a Confederate militia in Marion County, Missouri. But he introduces the tale by saying that even the people who enlisted at the start of the war, and then left permanently, “ought at least be allowed to state why they didn’t do anything and also to explain the process by which they didn’t do anything. Surely this kind of light must have some sort of value.”

Twain writes that there were fifteen men in the rebel militia, the “Marion Rangers,” and he was the second lieutenant, even though they had no first lieutenant. After Twain’s character shoots and kills a Northern horseback rider, he is overwhelmed by the sensation of being a murderer, “that I had killed a man, a man who had never done me any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.” However, his grief is slightly eased by the realization that six men had fired their guns, and only one had been able to hit the moving target.

7. The armies weren’t all-male

Hundreds of women on both sides pulled a Mulan, assuming male identities and appearances so that they might fight for their respective nations. Some of them did it for adventure, but many did it for monetary reasons: the pay for a male soldier was about $13 month, which was close to double what a woman could make in any profession at the time.

Also, being a man gave someone a lot more freedoms than just being able to wear pants. Remember, this was still more than half a century away from women’s suffrage and being a man meant that you could manage your monthly $13 wages independently. So it should come as no surprise that many of these women kept up their aliases long after the war had ended, some even to the grave.

Their presence in soldiers’ ranks wasn’t the best-kept secret. Some servicewomen kept up correspondence with the home front after they changed their identities, and for decades after the war newspapers ran article after article chronicling the stories of woman soldiers, and speculating on why they might break from the accepted gender norms. Perhaps not surprisingly, in 1909 the U.S. Army denied that “any woman was ever enlisted in the military service of the United States as a member of any organization of the Regular or Volunteer Army at any time during the period of the civil war.”

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