Society, Texas Style

The following article first appeared in a subscription website, Sanders Research Associates, in 2006 following a hunting accident in which Vice President Dick Cheney shot another hunter in the face. It was the 24-hour delay in reporting the hunting mishap which caused many to question what was being hidden. Few journalists connected the fact that the shooting occurred near the famous King Ranch, actually on a ranch owned by Anne Armstrong and her husband Tobin. Anne shared one important thing in common with Cheney:  Both were employed by Halliburton—the primary beneficiary of the war in Iraq. Was there a connection between Halliburton and the Armstrong Ranch? Take a closer look below.

“According to Austin American-Statesman reporter Robert Elder, the Armstrong [Ranch] is ‘a favored destination spot for this type of Republican with social connections, a fair amount of wealth....Certainly if you have access to the vice president or other high level administration officials, corporate officials, it gives you really a unique opportunity to kind of relax, talk, and who knows what happens from there.’ Well, Dick Cheney knows. He's been kicking back at Armstrong for over 30 years.” -- Arianna Huffington (February 17, 2006)

Profitable relationships

Richard King

Four thousand dollars was a lot of money in 1877 when Texas Ranger, John B. Armstrong—nicknamed “McNelly’s Bulldog” because of his doggedness as a tracker for his boss, Captain McNelly—captured the bounty on the head of John Wesley Hardin. Although bounties rarely if ever exceeded $500 in those days, the Texas Legislature had seen fit to increase the reward for the Methodist gunslinger who, during the bloody days of Reconstruction in Texas following the Civil War, had hired out his gun to the wrong side in a South Texas feud between competing cattle-rustling clans. Land barons like Captain Richard King, who founded the King Ranch within the disputed Nueces strip after the Mexican War ended 1847, advised McNelly to end the disorder by whatever means was necessary. Armstrong became that means, and the bounty he received was only the beginning of a long and profitable relationship.

Disputed land during Mexican War

Five years later Armstrong staked his claim to disputed land claimed by his wife’s family, bordering a southern boundary of the King Ranch. His presence there helped to insulate the larger ranch from marauders crossing the Mexican border, as was their wont, while at the same time it enhanced his claim to the land. For generations land attorneys and Spanish translators would litigate such disputed land titles, while both the King Ranch and the Armstrong Ranch would grow larger each year.

The ranch was not the only domain of the Armstrong clan, however.  The former Texas Ranger somehow managed to rear his family in a three-story Victorian mansion on the fringes of the University of Texas campus in Austin.[1] Three sons lived in the Austin house, one of whom, Charles Mitchell Armstrong, while boarding at the elite Military Institute in San Antonio, would meet Lucy Tobin Carr, whom he married after studying law at Yale Law School. A younger son, Thomas Reeves Armstrong, who chose Princeton, graduated in the class of 1913 and became a vice president of Standard Oil of New Jersey. 

Charles’ wife Lucy—through her mother’s family—connected the Armstrongs to some of the most aristocratic families in Texas. Lucy’s great-grandmother was María de Jesús Delgado Curbelo, a full-blooded Spaniard from the Canary Islands, descended from the first civil settlement in Texas in 1731. The marriage of Spanish land grant heiress Curbelo to John William Smith in 1830 combined the Spanish land grant properties she inherited with those Smith acquired as a land speculator. 

Curbelo genealogy from Debrett's Texas Peerage

Their six daughters would abandon Catholicism to marry only Episcopalian elites:  “the crème of the Texas crop at that time—cattle baron, doctor, lawyer, banker, shipper, planter.”[2]  Like Charles’ father, Lucy’s grandfather, William Gerard Tobin (1833-1884), had also been a Texas Ranger and had helped defend the Spanish land grants of his wife’s family from squatters and thieves.[3]

John Barclay Armstrong

Charles and Lucy named their first son John Barclay Armstrong after Charles’ father and brother. John grew up to marry a King Ranch heiress —his wife being Henrietta (“Etta”) Kleberg Larkin. Her mother grew up in a 20-room Victorian palace in Corpus Christi, similar to the Armstrongs’ house in Austin. Etta’s grandmother was Alice Gertrudis King Kleberg, wife of Robert Justus Kleberg—Captain King’s attorney. [4] In 1854 Captain Richard King had married Henrietta Maria Morse Chamberlain, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary to Brownsville, and she remained in total control of the Corpus Christi palace, and the huge King Ranch, until 1925. At that time it passed to her only surviving child, Alice Kleberg, who died a widow in 1944.

Despite Etta’s aristocratic Texas roots, she was, however, a city girl, having grown up in a high-rise New York City apartment on 81^st Street between Park and Lexington Avenues near Central Park. Her father, John A. Larkin, had been in the Princeton class of 1913 with another Texan, Thomas Reeves Armstrong, uncle of Etta's husband. After John Larkin died in 1948, Etta's widowed mother, married Armstrong, causing much confusion for historians who come upon two Henrietta Armstrongs.

War logistics—1845 and beyond

Princeton, a Presbyterian university, had been favored by the King family because of Captain King’s wife—the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary who came to Texas during its early pioneer days with the hope of bringing Eastern civilization to the barbarians. Long after her husband died in 1885, Henrietta Chamberlain King controlled the ranch—and the family.

 “She ruled the roost, . . . rooming just across the hall from daughter Alice and husband for forty years.  The daughter of a New England Presbyterian minister, the first Protestant preacher in Rio Grande territory, she was prim, proper and Bible-pounding.”[5] 

Mrs. King would have relished the rise to power of her fellow Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, hand-picked as a Presidential candidate by fellow Texan, "Colonel" Edward M. House, who had created four Texas governors before deciding he could only change life in Texas by grasping the power of the federal government.  Living in Austin about twelve city blocks from Charles M. Armstrong’s family, House had selected Wilson, a Virginian who had been chosen to head Princeton in New Jersey, much as he had prepared several Texans for statewide office. The King family had done business with House’s father and brother (both called T.W. House) who ran the House Bank in Houston. Thomas William House, Sr., born in England, had moved to Texas during the days of the Republic and had made much of his family fortune alongside Captain King as a smuggler and blockade runner in Matamoros during the Mexican and Civil wars. 

War logistics was a business model that the families whose wealth was derived as war profiteers in the early days of Texas would return to again and again. 

Both the House and King fortunes had been rescued from the Panic of 1907 by the son of their friend and partner, Charles Stillman. Together with Mifflin Kenedy and William Marsh Rice, the former riverboat owners had acquired sailing ships for which they hired crews to risk life and limb to transport food, clothing and munitions to both sides in both wars, while operating their own intelligence network. Demanding payment in gold, they made sure to deliver their spoils to the safety of banks beyond the fray of battle—in New York. That gold, combined with Rockefeller oil money, became the foundation for National City Bank of New York, now Citigroup. The bank, originally operated by James Stillman and his partner, William Rockefeller, would descend to an extended family created when Stillman’s two daughters married Rockefeller’s sons.

Less than half a century later, it was hoped that the election of the Presbyterian from Princeton would effectively increase the influence and power of Col. House’s Democratic Party friends in Texas—a state where Republicans still brought visions of defeat in the Civil War and the Reconstruction brought by that defeat.

Polo and politics

Click to enlarge.

When Mrs. King died in 1925, her lawyer son-in-law, whose German-educated father had brought his family from Prussia to Dewitt County, Texas even before King himself had arrived, was finally able to assume management of the ranch—free of his mother-in-law’s interference. Unfortunately for him, ill health forced his retirement in 1927, when his second son, Robert J. Kleberg, Jr., took over.  Bob’s marriage the previous year to Virginia debutante Helen Campbell, promised to change the culture, and the politics, of the King Ranch forever. 

Bob Kleberg met Helen while she was visiting her sister in San Antonio, where Elizabeth’s husband, Burdette Wright, trained pilots at Kelly military base. Wright’s military career took a sudden turn after Gen. Billy Mitchell, for whom Wright served as aide, was forced into retirement because of his insubordinate advocacy of an autonomous air force. The General would become Wright’s life-long mentor and would lead the Klebergs into an even more powerful group of rogues. It would also bind them tightly to a community of military men who had retired near Fort Myers, Va., where Elizabeth had met Lieut. Wright.

A polo enthusiast, in 1923 Helen had organized a polo team for Fort Myer officers’ wives. The Chicago Daily Tribune, lacking a wedding photo to announce her elopement in 1926, resuscitated a photograph from 1923 and captioned it: “Polo Girl Weds Texas Ranch Owner.”[6] The Klebergs and Armstrongs became experts at the game; the Armstrongs even played on Prince Charles’ team when they hosted his visit to their ranch in 1977.

Besides introducing polo to the ranch, the new bride also made a virulent strain of Republicanism more respectable.  Her father, Philip Pitt Campbell, had been elected to Congress in 1902 from Kansas and, although defeated in 1922 after many years as chairman of the House Rules Committee, remained in Arlington, Virginia.  His family during that time had developed many close relationships with horse fanciers within the heart of the Virginia Hunt Country.

Foxcroft is in Middleburg, Va.

The choice of Foxcroft—an elite girls school in Middleburg, Virginia—would lead to yet another link in a chain that would bind the Kleberg and Armstrong families even tighter. At Foxcroft Helenita met Anne Legendre. Not only would the girls graduate together in 1945 and enter Vassar at the same time, but each would be a bridesmaid at the other’s wedding. 

 Anne’s father was one of four Legendre brothers from New Orleans, each of whom won football honors at Princeton during the same decade Armstrong men were there.[7] 

Anne Legendre Armstrong with Pres. Ford, left; with Tobin, right

Tobin Armstrong, whose family also had strong ties to Princeton, was suitably impressed when he first met Anne at a King Ranch party. Tobin’s brother, John, and Helenita’s first cousin, Etta Larkin, linked the two Texas families by marriage.[8] Once the two families —Kleberg and Armstrong—had become inextricably intertwined, they seemed to operate almost in conjunction with each other. 

Voices in Congress

In 1931, needing a replacement in the U.S. Congress to replace uncle Rudolph Kleberg, who had served for many years, Bob, Jr.’s older brother, Richard Mifflin Kleberg—the Mifflin for his grandfather’s closest partner, Mifflin Kenedy—captured a special Congressional election as a Democrat.[9] Shortly thereafter, the new Congressman hired Lyndon Baines Johnson as his chief aide.  Kleberg, “adept at golf and polo, but awkward in politics,”[10] was more than happy to turn all political matters over to his young protégé, freeing himself to focus on promoting his family’s business—primarily beef and oil—all of which stemmed from the land itself, by then comprising one and a quarter million acres in Texas alone.[11] The eager and politically astute Lyndon would eventually rise to the Presidency of the United States, but would forever be beholden to the wealth and influence of the Kleberg-King Ranch network.[12]

---

[1] 1900 Census:  Address was 2610 Whitis Avenue, the site of which is now part of the University of Texas.

[2] Hugh Best, Debrett’s Texas Peerage (New York:  Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983), 28.

[3] Lucy was a first cousin to Edgar G. Tobin (who died in 1954), founder of Tobin Aerial Surveys, engaged in mapping operations for oil companies, which at the time of his death was the largest aerial mapping firm in the world. Edgar’s father-in-law, Robert L. Batts, was a University of Texas law professor and one-time law partner of Democrat President Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, Thomas Gregory—hand-picked for the administration by their Austin, Texas crony, Col. Edward M. House.

[4] Living in the house at 517 Upper N. Broadway were Henrietta King, daughter Alice, son-in-law Robert, and their five children—Richard Mifflin Kleberg, Alice Gertrudis Kleberg (East), Robert Justus Kleberg, Jr. and Sarah Spohn Kleberg (Shelton and Johnson), in addition to Etta’s mother, Henrietta Rosa Kleberg, who subsequently married John Adrian Larkin.

[5] Hugh Best, Texas Peerage, 55.

[6] Photograph syndicated by Pacific and Atlantic, appeared in Daily Tribune, Chicago, IL on page C4, March 21, 1926.

[7] Helen first married a Philadelphia physician, Dr. John Deaver Alexander, and subsequently married Lloyd Groves.

[8] Little is known about her parentage other than the fact that her father, a coffee importer, was the apparent victim of self-murder in September 1963.  Though his car was found near a bridge, no body or note were ever found.  Several years later on the anniversary of her father’s disappearance, Anne’s brother’s life was saved when he was pulled from the river below the same bridge.

[9] Mifflin Kenedy owned a neighboring South Texas ranch and engaged in land speculation.  In order to increase the value of their lands, and produce income from them, the men formed numerous companies to transport supplies and distribute merchandise throughout South Texas and Mexico.  In 1875 they backed the incorporation of the Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande  railroad, thus thwarting the growth of a competing railroad that had impacted their riverboat empire.  According to The Handbook of Texas: 

“In 1879 the Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande Railroad reached the town [San Diego, Texas], making the port of Corpus Christi easily accessible for Duval County ranchers and farmers. Two years later the Texas-Mexican Railway took over the Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande and then built on to Laredo, completing the first rail link between Corpus Christi and northern Mexico.”   

It was while working for the railroad in San Diego that the paternal grandfather of William F. Buckley, Jr. established his family’s nest egg, which ties them to the same underground intelligence network as the King family even to this day.  Another connecting link stems from the political corruption and vote selling centered in Duval County, long monitored on behalf of the ranchers by the Parr family. Another railroad in which the King-Kleberg family was heavily invested was the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway Company.

[10] James Reston, Jr., The Lone Star:  The Life of John Connally (New York:  Harper & Row, 1989), 9.

[11] The ranch land would be divided in 1935.  Time, December 15, 1947: 

In 1935, when the ranch trusteeship expired, the property was divided among the heirs. The Klebergs got 431,000 acres and formed the King Ranch Corp. with Bob as president and manager, and Dick, then a Congressman, as chairman. The stock is held in equal fifths by Bob, Dick, their sisters Henrietta (wife of Celanese Corp. Vice President John A. Larkin), Mrs. Alice East, and the two sons of Sarah (who was killed in an auto accident). By purchase, Bob Kleberg has built the ranch's holdings up to 750,000 acres, leased 140,000 more to the corporation from his own holdings as trustee of his mother's estate plus 20,000 from outside interests in Texas. The corporation has bought and leased 10,500 acres in Pennsylvania for grass fattening of King Ranch cattle. …

Bob keeps a tight lip about the ranch's profits. But they can be roughly estimated. The 20 million pounds of beef sold this year should gross between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000. (The ranch sells virtually all its cattle to Swift & Co. to keep from driving down prices by open sales.) Sales of breeding bulls bring in another $150,000 or so. But the expenses are huge, too. Real estate taxes run around $200,000, gasoline and oil take $48,000, land-clearing $120,000. The payroll for the 500 employees is over $400,000. At best guess, the ranch this year should net over $1,000,000 before income taxes.

[12] The two men were introduced by Welly Hopkins, a member of the Texas state senate, after Hopkins met Lyndon while campaigning in his hometown.

Birthdays

Another birthday...another year.
Gee, ain't it funny...how time slips away?
The people we love are the folks who have the greatest ability to distract us from our real purpose in life. But who's to say, really, which purpose is of more importance?
There is love, and then there's the mission, which, in my case is to discern how we--our country--got us into the mess we're all in together.

So for awhile at least the mission looms before me again, at least until the distractions intervene.

My husband has been reading Graham Greene's novels of late and happened upon one called The Quiet American. Having finished it a week or so ago, he agreed that we should watch the movie adaptation also called "The Quiet American" starring Michael Caine. I highly recommend it.

The novel first came out in 1955, long before the United States became too deeply mired in Indo-China to extricate ourselves. That was five years before John F. Kennedy won election as President, eight years before he was brutally and publicly murdered in Dallas. What if, like Alden Pyle, General Edward Lansdale had been murdered instead--just as Graham Greene had envisioned it in his 1955 book? Gives us something to think about--the futility of alternate universes, if nothing else.

Richard West's 1991 review of the Greene novel includes this paragraph:

The Quiet American, Alden Pyle, arrives in Vietnam full of the theories of an absurd pundit, York Harding, author of The Advance of Red China. The Englishman Fowler teases Pyle and derides his hope of building a third force between communism and French colonialism. Then Pyle falls in love with Fowler’s girl, Phuong, and wins her away with the promise of marriage and life in the United States. Fowler is told by the Communists that Pyle is a secret agent engaged in importing plastic for bombs to use in a terror campaign on behalf of a “third force” general, which culminates in a vast explosion in front of the Continental Hotel. The incident is based on an actual bombing outrage which killed dozens of people. Fowler agrees to set up Pyle to be killed by the Communists.

I keep wondering how much Greene knew about Lansdale, and of course when and how he knew it. Another reviewer, Andrew J. Bacevich, writing in World Affairs in 2009, adds more information, as he gives his description of Pyle:

...Alden Pyle, a young American newly assigned as an economic attaché with the U.S. mission. Pyle is polite, modest, and boyish. “With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze,” Greene writes, “he seemed incapable of harm.”

Yet appearance and manner are deceiving. Pyle’s nominal assignment is a tissue-thin cover; he is actually a CIA agent (although the agency is never identified as such). To stem the Communist tide threatening to inundate Southeast Asia, the agency wants to conjure up an indigenous democratic alternative to French colonialism. Pyle’s job is to devise this Third Way. As he undertakes this task, Pyle draws inspiration from a journalist named York Harding, a sort of proto–Thomas Friedman who parachutes into various trouble spots and then in best-selling books serves up glib recipes for advancing the cause of liberty. In Pyle’s estimation, the challenge he faces does not appear all that difficult. York Harding provides the answer: “you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.”

“Impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance,” Pyle embodies all that Fowler (and Greene) can’t stand about Americans: too much money, too much confidence, and too little self-awareness. Cruising the streets of Saigon in oversized Buicks, air conditioning everything in sight (to Fowler’s dismay, even the U.S. legation’s lavatories), passing out cigarettes as if they exist in infinite supply, and quoting York Harding, zealots like Pyle proceed on the assumption that American know-how backed by American values can make short work of even the most perplexing difficulties. Born and raised a Unitarian, Pyle takes God’s existence as a given, his faith reinforcing his conviction that America’s purposes necessarily reflect God’s will.

What I kept remembering was all the information Kris Millegan once shared about his own father, Lloyd S. Millegan, who knew Edward G. Lansdale, the CIA psyops agent from whom the Alden Pyle character is said to have been adapted. In his presentation last November in Arlington, Kris began talking about a Dr. Joseph Ralston Hayden, his father's mentor, who had died in 1945 at the young age of 57. Hayden had been Vice-Governor of the Philippines, where Lloyd Millegan was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, in 1933-36. According to the bio located at the website for his papers:

Hayden was a recognized authority on the Philippine Islands. In this, Hayden was carrying on a tradition begun by Dean C. Worcester, who, like Hayden, was both on the faculty of the University of Michigan and called to public service in the Philippine Islands because of his expertise and experience. In 1922-23, Hayden was an exchange professor at the University of the Philippines; in 1930-31, he was the Carnegie Visiting Professor in the State University of the Philippines. In 1922-23, 1926, and 1930-31, Hayden was special correspondent in the Far East for the Christian Science Monitor. Hayden used each of these opportunities to travel in the islands, to study, and to make contacts with Philippine citizens, both government officials and private citizens.

In recognition of his learning and wide experience in Philippine matters, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Hayden to serve as vice governor of the Philippines and secretary of public instruction. His choice for governor general, Frank Murphy, though possessing administrative skills and political charm, was coming to the Philippines without any real knowledge of the actualities of Filipino life and custom, and thus Roosevelt's reasoning for pairing Hayden with the former Detroit mayor. Hayden responded admirably to his selection by the president, performing his duties efficiently, even serving as acting governor general when Murphy returned to the United States for a six-month period.

With the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, Hayden returned to the University of Michigan, where he taught and worked on what would be his classic work, The Philippines: A study in national development (1941). Following his return, Hayden was named James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and chairman of the department.

Hayden returned to public service with the outbreak of World War II, where his knowledge of the Philippines proved invaluable. From 1941 to 1945, he worked with the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Information and, after June 1942, with its successor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. From 1943 to 1945, Hayden was named civil adviser and consultant on Philippine affairs with the U.S. War Department, attached to the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. As part of this later activity, Hayden developed and headed up as chief a special staff section of the United States Armed Forces for the Far East -- the Philippine Research and Information Section. The role he envisioned for the Philippine Research and Information Section was three-fold: to prepare reports and studies about the Philippines; to distribute information about the Philippines as needed; and to collect books, magazines, newspapers, and printed and manuscript materials about the Philippines with a view to their "effectiveness in furthering the prosecution of the war."

The last part of the website lists the files maintained by Kris' father, Lloyd Millegan:

File maintained by Lloyd Millegan [series] Roll Mf611          

• Sulu and North Borneo areas, report about written by Captain J.A. Hamner, Philippine Regional Section, Allied Intelligence Bureau,  1943-1944 (41-3)   Roll  Mf613

• JRH's mission to China and Australia for the Office of Strategic Services, papers about  (41-5) Roll Mf613

• Memorandum of conferences with MacArthur, Willoughby, and Merle-Smith regarding O.S.S. operations in the Southwest Pacific Area  (41-7)   Roll   Mf613

• China and JRH's activities in Chungking, China in  1942 papers about,  1940-1944  (41-8)  Roll  Mf612

• Co-ordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services, papers about,  1941-1942   (41-10)   Roll   Mf612 

• Trip to China, reports and notes concerning,  1942-1943     (41-12)      Roll   Mf613

• Memo from JRH relating to a memorandum to Colonel Donovan from Pearl Buck discussing the role of China in the war effort,  1942     (41-16)  Roll   Mf610

• Statement of Edward M. Kuder written to JRH on events and conditions in Lanao immediately preceding the war and from  1941-1943, 1943  (includes appendices on the problems of government in predominately Moslem provinces)  (41-17) Roll Mf614

• Preliminary report entitled "Philippine Civil Affairs: Policy and Organization"  April 16, 1945  (42-1)   Roll  Mf614

• Notes of conversations with General Douglas MacArthur,  1944-1945 (42-2) Roll   Mf614

• Notes of conversations with Manuel Quezon, including drafts of statement on conferences,  March 1944     (42-3)     Roll   Mf614

• Miscellaneous notes and directives from Manuel Quezon,  1944     (42-4)  Roll   Mf614

• Question of presidential succession in the Philippines, copies of correspondence between Quezon, Osmena, and Roosevelt,  1943     (42-5)     Roll   Mf614

• Evolution of a civil affairs policy for the Philippines, papers concerning,  1943-1944     (42-6)     Roll   Mf614

• Philippine collaboration, papers concerning,  1945     (42-7)     Roll   Mf614

• Treatment of American POW's and civilian internees in the Philippines, papers concerning,  1945     (42-8)     Roll   Mf614

• Status and duties of the Commonwealth Government, the Commander-in-Chief, and the High Commissioner upon reoccupation, papers concerning     (42-9)     Roll   Mf614

• Report: "Principles governing arrangements for civil administration and jurisdiction in Netherlands Territory in the southwest Pacific area"     (42-10)     Roll   Mf614

• Telegrams of condolence upon the death of Manuel Quezon,  August 1944     (42-11)     Roll   Mf614

• Continuance of Quezon as Commonwealth President after  November 1943 papers concerning,  1943     (42-12)     Roll   Mf614

• Constitutional status of the Philippines during the war, paper written by UM Law School dean Henry M. Bates, papers about,  1943     (42-13)     Roll   Mf614

• Provincial government of Palawan, report concerning,  1944     (42-14)  Roll   Mf614

• Report of the Philippine Research and Information Section,  April 1945  (42-15) Roll  Mf614

Here is the source information, which I would request anyone who is nearby with time on his or her hands to access and write about:

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan1150 Beal Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113
Phone: 734-764-3482
Fax: 734-936-1333
e-mail: bentley.ref@umich.edu
Home Page: http://www.bentley.umich.edu/

Government by Contract

© by Linda Minor

An Unbridled Administrator

If Jesse Jones served as the “bridge” between the purposes of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and the source of funds to accomplish those purposes, those allegedly egalitarian purposes quickly disintegrated into a factional grab for government succor—much as a newly born puppies fight amongst themselves in competition for access to their mother’s teats.

The New Deal was merely an updated continuation of the unfinished agenda begun by the previous Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson—interrupted by Republicans Coolidge, Harding and Hoover. An outline of that platform had conveniently been set forth for us in a pathetically-written novel, originally published anonymously shortly before the 1912 election, whose author was revealed in the spring of 1916 to be none other than the mysterious little man from Texas known as Colonel House.

In Philip Dru, Administrator House laid out his plans for an efficiently run new world order—a model for rule by a beneficent executive officer in whose hands power would be centralized. The legislative agenda necessary to accomplish that ideal government was systematically put in place during the Woodrow Wilson administration (1913-1921) through enactment of:

• The Federal Reserve Banking System (Owen-Glass Act, signed December 23, 1913) and

• The progressive federal income tax (Sixteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution, ratified February 3, 1913).

The motive behind the Wilson agenda, to control the masses without upsetting the applecart, was reflected on the title page of House’s novel:

"No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property, but a constant disposition to ameliorate the condition of the classes least favored by fortune." —Giuseppe Mazzini[1]

In this paper, we will observe the results of that effort to make the executive branch of government, delineated by the U.S. Constitution to be only one of three co-equal branches of government, into what it is today—a centralized clearinghouse capable of obtaining natural resources and redistributing them by means of an oligarchical administrative system in which a bureaucracy contracts with corporations set up by factions within the financial elite. In another essay, “Rewriting History,” we describe that clearinghouse function using a spider plant metaphor to illustrate how an elected executive government has over time spun off various unelected and unaccountable offshoots, through which it distributes its gathered resources. Ongoing historical research continues to support that metaphor.

The Model

House was assisted in his effort by other behind-the-scenes advisers (in a curtain-behind-the-curtain sleight-of-hand maneuver), the most important of which was the German Jewish banker Paul Warburg. In 1907 Warburg met Senator Nelson Aldrich, who

The Warburgs

visited [Jacob Schiff’s office at] Kuhn, Loeb to ask how the Reichsbank issued treasury bills. Schiff didn’t know and summoned Paul. By the time Aldrich left, an enthusiastic Paul mused,

‘There marches national bank currency and there goes currency reform.' [2]

The distribution clearinghouse Warburg designed, which was modified by Congress before final passage, is comprised of an elite class of bankers who are shareholders of the private centralized banking system granted power in 1913—a class whose ultimate goal is to break free of any legislative or judicial constraints and to govern the country much as Philip Dru was allowed to do in Col. House’s warped imagination.  The bankers operate within twelve separate regions of the country, each of which is governed by a separate governing board. 

Col. House’s challenge after the Act was passed (but before the system was actually operating to its full extent) was beginning to put in place the administrative infrastructure he had laid out in his book. As individuals in power tend to do, he sought expertise for his experiment only from his inner circle of acquaintances.

Click to enlarge; note where Jesse's arms led.

Jesse Jones states in his autobiography that, though he had refused House’s repeated summonses to Washington throughout the Wilson Administration, he finally gave in to the entreaties because his country needed him to help alleviate the symptoms of the depression; Jones thus viewed himself as the ideal administrator. Once Roosevelt replaced him, Jones’ support for the New Deal waned. Nevertheless, once the legislation had been enacted and forced down the throat of the Supreme Court, the enhanced administrative power given the executive branch remained. 

Acting as the financial hub of the New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jones distributed “Fifty Billion Dollars,” according to the title of his autobiography, though it has never been clear how that money was created. While Jones was head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), he had the power to dole out or to deny contracts to individuals and corporations in order to keep the masses employed, so as not to be engaged in revolutionary activity against the existing power structure. Upon his return to Houston in 1946, he would not only continue his commercial real estate develop business, but would work through his Houston Endowment Foundation to set up a secret method to finance intelligence operations, as well as to fund political campaigns.[3]

Secret Visionaries

One platform plank remained unfulfilled by the end of Wilson’s term of office. Although it would take another world war to gain approval for that goal—which, incidentally, helped to further the international banking ideal desired by the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland—Wilson was still hopeful he could achieve that goal before his term of office ended in 1921. In order to draft a constitution for the League of Nations, Wilson appointed a four-main committee chaired by Col. House and named another man, like Warburg from a German Jewish background, as adviser to the committee. George Louis Beer, whose father Julius Beer lived next door to Swiss-born Meyer Guggenheim and his son William on West 77th Street in New York,[4]  used his knowledge of British imperial and colonial policy to develop a constitution for world government along similar lines.[5] He was chief of the colonial division of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and in charge of helping to draft the mandates for the administration of the former German colonies.

The Guggenheims

The Guggenheim family—just as a plant absorbs its required nutrients from the soil—had been instrumental in acquiring for the United States scarce minerals necessary for the nation’s strategic purposes—coinage, weapons manufacturing, etc. Because of the scarcity and the expense in obtaining those minerals, the Guggenheims therefore occupied a powerful position in America at the turn of the century. Having been a member of the Jewish clique which included the Guggenheims as well as an assortment of Jewish bankers in Kuhn, Loeb and other Wall Street firms, George Louis Beer understood the importance of such strategic metals in banking and world trade.[6] His family maintained connections among the Jewish banking community which moved from one nation to the next, setting up centralized banking systems which could act within a global clearinghouse in an attempt to stabilize each nation to maintain control over its currency.[7]

The Texas Network

Like Col. House, Jesse Jones greased a political machine composed of Texans with whom he had been associated in business and banking. It is the network to which they gave power which maintains power today. It is that network that explains who Halliburton is. Without understanding the past, we can never hope to understand the current power structure—how it thinks and how it works.

We can identify the network by its components—the businesses in which its constituents were engaged. The purpose of the “administrator” is to distribute the government’s money to those businesses, assuring the network that it will not need to compete with the same type of businesses not controlled by the network. Since money usually determines the outcomes of elections, the network sets up its own method of bypassing the law in order to funnel money to its candidates.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s primary function under George W. Bush was to distribute contracts to his old employer, Halliburton, as well as to lay the groundwork for the pretext necessary to get the United States involved in a war. Can it really be that simple? The best way to answer that question is to examine and analyze the governing boards of Halliburton throughout its history—a time-consuming process.  In an essay called “The Halliburton Riddle,” we stated:

“Connally, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Armstrong—of those four, three would serve as directors of Halliburton. The fourth, Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense would help George W. Bush engineer the war in Iraq, to Halliburton’s benefit.” 

Thus it was intimated that there is a definite connection between that corporate clique and the policy decisions being made in George W. Bush's White House, and that, to a great degree, those policy decisions are concerned primarily with trade deficits and currency stabilization—issues with which the United States has been dealing throughout its history.

The State of Texas houses one of the twelve district banks that operate the Federal Reserve.  Located in Dallas, it controls all banks in Texas, southern New Mexico and northern Louisiana.  Texans have always resented their subservience to Eastern capital, always searching for a way to avoid having to go to New York or Boston to sell their bonds or issue new corporate stock. When Jesse Jones headed the RFC, he made sure that his friends back home were not neglected, and those friends liked having one of their own as the nation’s chief banker.

Although Jones had, in 1917 been one of the initial incorporators of Houston-based Humble Oil Company (a majority of whose stock was secretly, and illegally, owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey), he sold his stock when began work for the Red Cross at the end of World War I. His co-founders, however, because of Texas’ importance as a resource for petroleum and natural gas, would eventually see themselves in the chairmanship of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

They would also gain access to the board of Houston’s prestigious Rice University, patterned along the lines of Princeton, where Jersey Standard was originally headquartered. The Humble founders would also control a major segment of the beef producing industry—with its King Ranch in South Texas performing a dual function as cattle raiser and oil producer (having leased its land to Humble Oil, which found huge oil fields there).

LBJ

It was, in fact, a scion of the King Ranch—Congressman Richard Mifflin Kleberg—who gave Jesse Jones’ replacement as head of the Texas network his first job in Washington, D.C. in 1932. While young Lyndon Baines Johnson was still learning the ropes as Congressman Kleberg’s aide, Col. House was in New York meeting periodically with FDR. But between 1938 (when Col. House died) and about 1941, control of the Texas network wavered between Jesse Jones and Vice-President John Nance Garner.

Once Garner was replaced as Vice-President by Henry Wallace, both Garner and Jones returned to Texas and began to operate a top-secret network of Texans to counter what they saw as the evil influences of Franklin Roosevelt, who now had no loyalty to the vision of Col. House. Jones’ power within the RFC and the Commerce Department disappeared almost overnight. Garner retired to Uvalde, where he lived until 1967, perhaps mentoring a whole new generation of Democrats with a more conservative focus than FDR. The Texas network came increasingly under the influence of Lyndon Johnson, and it was at that point that George and Herman Brown, founders of Brown & Root as a construction company, began to use Johnson’s inside information and connection to FDR to keep the federal dollars flowing into Texas. After FDR's death in 1945, Johnson made a decision to stay within the Democratic establishment, while other Texas Democrats openly rebelled against the New Deal. FDR's last vice-president came from Missouri, and therefore, when Harry Truman rose to the Presidency, so too did Missouri's influence within the banking establishment rise to some extent—including the influence of St. Louis investment banker G.H. "Bertie" Walker and his son, "Herbie," a grandfather and uncle, respectively, of George H. W. Bush. We will return to this family in the future.

Lyndon Johnson, nevertheless, had a secret tap into the role that had been assigned to Robert Bernerd Anderson, a Texas Republican appointed by Truman to a task even more mysterious than the work engaged in by Col. House. An essay about Anderson, "Tilting at Oil Wells," was posted at other of the blogs written by this author—Where the Gold Is. Anderson possibly did more than any other individual to ensure Texas’ access to mineral resources independent of the Federal Reserve’s New York and Boston districts. He acted as a transition between the old Texas network (which obtained political power through the Democratic Party) and the new Bush network, which led Texas into the Republican Party. Because of what Anderson knew, the Texas network in 1968 turned Republican. Despite what they owed to LBJ (what he helped them do in November 1963), former Governor John Connally organized Democrats for Nixon, and Lyndon knew his time for power was over.

The political machine for which LBJ worked (he only thought he controlled it; whereas, it was the other way round) continues to reside in Texas today, although it is now headed by Republicans rather than Democrats. Thus, it is no mere coincidence that three of the last eight Presidents allegedly “elected” by the people of the United States have claimed Texas as their residence. The disproportionate influence asserted by Texans stems no more from a coincidence than does the fact that the election of 2004 pitted two members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones against each other. Identification of the financial/political network (some have used the term “cabal”) which rose to power in 1963—and which is so reluctant to relinquish that power—is of urgent importance in order to change the paradigm that has taken America ever closer into the grips of globalism.

Just as Brown & Root understood that maintaining political power is a necessary step in order to assure its continued access to government contracts, the contracts themselves helped to determine what policies those politicians, whose power was contingent on continuing to feed contracts to the network which elected them, would pursue. It is a vicious cycle that, in the hands of Texans, always becomes deadly and dangerous.

Endnotes

  1. Philip Dru Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935, originally published anonymously in 1912 by B.W. Huebsch.  The badly written novel was in 1916 disclosed to have been authored by Col. Edward M. House, the man behind Woodrow Wilson’s rise to prominence.   Indicating that his true purpose in creating such an administrative framework within the federal executive branch of government was to keep the peasants happy so as not to upset the existing order, House began his book with a quote from the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, whom present-day conspiracy theorists have called an Illuminati leader.

  2. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York:  Random House, 1993), 132.  Chernow reveals that Paul Warburg, along with Aldrich, “sneaked off” to Jekyll Island, Georgia late in 1910 to discuss currency reform with other wealthy men from American banking circles.  This meeting was discussed in my essay “Membership by Inheritance Only.”

  3. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977). According to Corson, Jones had been chosen by Colonel House to serve under Major General Ralph H. Van Deman—General Pershing's senior intelligence officer and Chief of Allied Counterintelligence—at the Paris Peace Commission after World War I. Van Deman’s 38-year career in intelligence had taken place long before the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency, or National Security Agency had been created, before any funding mechanism for intelligence operations existed. Corson had lived, worked, and traveled in Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia throughout the cold war years and had fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—retiring as a retired lieutenant colonel from the Marine Corps. He had “learned the intricate workings of the intelligence community in a wide variety of field and staff intelligence assignments,” including “Staff Secretary of the President's Special Group (CI) joint DOD-CIA Committee on Counterinsurgency R & D, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense's Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Officer in Charge of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis) Southeast Asia intelligence evaluation program.” Yet, with all that experience, after talking with Van Deman, Corson admitted to being left 

with a conundrum which after 27 years remains unresolved. It involved my stated disbelief that the activities surrounding his card file project could have been carried out without the financial assistance of others. His reply was equally disarming and bemusing. In essence he said, "I have never personally accepted a penny to carry out this work; however, others have had need for funds to do what is necessary" and he asked, "Do you have any quarrel with the idea that private citizens should not make funds available to those able and willing to carry out the work required to keep us free?"  We left it there with his gentle admonition, "Your father understood this and there is no reason you should not." My thoughts jumped to my father's relationship with Jesse Jones and the Houston Endowment, but Van Deman, in a sphinxlike pronouncement said, "Your future lies with those in the active forces, but never fear, there are those in reserve who will help in their own silent ways." (See footnote at pages 104-105.)

  4. The Guggenheims were discussed in Linda Minor, “Who “Created” Condi Rice?” in 2004. As stated in that essay, the Guggenheims had amassed a fortune in lead, copper and silver smelting in Colorado, which “in 1887, led to the formation of the American Smelting & Refining Company (ASARCO) and the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1899 and created the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO).”

  5. In addition to becoming wealthy from importing tobacco, Beer’s studies had been pursued first at Columbia in New York and later in London, where he learned how the British socialists had financed their own welfare scheme, first with Indian opium, and later with gold and diamonds from South Africa.

  6. The Federal Reserve Act’s “chief architect was Paul Warburg of the German and Swiss  banking house who moved to America only nine years earlier. He brought with him all the experience of European central banking. His brother Max Warburg was financial adviser to the Kaiser and later Director of Germany's central bank, The Reichsbank. Paul Warburg’s Wall Street banking operation was a partnership with the Rothschilds in Kuhn Loeb & Co.”  G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, Fourth Edition, 2002).

  7. Julius Beer’s name appeared often in The New York Times in conjunction with names such as Schiff, Guggenheim, Rothschild, Warburg, Lewisohn, Lehman and Loeb—within the context of “Jewish society” and charitable causes of that day.

  7. The first of the three, Lyndon B. Johnson, entered the White House as a result of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 and was elected in 1964. The second was George H.W. Bush, virtual president for much of Reagan’s eight years in the Office, elected in 1988. The third was George W. Bush, who held the job from 2001 through 2008.  We don’t count Gerald Ford as being “elected”; he was appointed to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned and ascended to the Presidency following Richard Nixon’s disgrace. We also use the term “elected” loosely because of disputes surrounding the elections of 2000 and 2004.