Re: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution

"Schmedley" <schmegegel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:QPidnQ9qTcFQQjPVnZ2dnUVZ_rrinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx

Provocative. But it would help the analysis if the author would do a
simple factcheck on Minor's bio.


Thank you for your reply. It is provocative, but it would help if you
elaborated on what the *** you're talking about. Are you implying that
Anthony Sutton does not know what the *** he's talking about? This I would
love to see. Spit it out, Schmedley.

-PP



"Paul Popinjay" <paulpopinjay[nospam]@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:6wzrk.7600$np7.382@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/


Chapter I

THE ACTORS ON THE REVOLUTIONARY STAGE


Dear Mr. President:

I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited
for the Russian people...

Letter to President Woodrow Wilson (October 17, 1918) from William
Lawrence Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll-Rand Corp.; director, American
International Corp.; and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New
York


The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor in
1911 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented artist and
writer who doubled as a Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself arrested in
Russia in 1915 for alleged subversion, and was later bank-rolled by
prominent Wall Street financiers. Minor's cartoon portrays a bearded,
beaming Karl Marx standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked under his
arm and accepting the congratulations of financial luminaries J.P.
Morgan, Morgan partner George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller,
John D. Ryan of National City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt - prominently
identified by his famous teeth - in the background. Wall Street is
decorated by Red flags. The cheering crowd and the airborne hats suggest
that Karl Marx must have been a fairly popular sort of fellow in the New
York financial district.

Was Robert Minor dreaming? On the contrary, we shall see that Minor was
on firm ground in depicting an enthusiastic alliance of Wall Street and
Marxist socialism. The characters in Minor's cartoon - Karl Marx
(symbolizing the future revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky), J. P. Morgan,
John D. Rockefeller - and indeed Robert Minor himself, are also prominent
characters in this book.

The contradictions suggested by Minor's cartoon have been brushed under
the rug of history because they do not fit the accepted conceptual
spectrum of political left and political right. Bolsheviks are at the
left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the
right end; therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing
in common and any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to
this neat conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre
observations or unfortunate errors. Modern history possesses such a
built-in duality and certainly if too many uncomfortable facts have been
rejected and brushed under the rug, it is an inaccurate history.

On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the
extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely
collectivist. The national socialist (for example, the fascist) and the
international socialist (for example, the Communist) both recommend
totalitarian politico-economic systems based on naked, unfettered
political power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly
control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the
objective of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth
century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most
efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to "go political" and
make society go to work for the monopolists - under the name of the
public good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906
by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist.1 Howe, by the
way, is also a figure in the story of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of political ideas and
politico-economic systems would be that of ranking the degree of
individual freedom versus the degree of centralized political control.
Under such an ordering the corporate welfare state and socialism are at
the same end of the spectrum. Hence we see that attempts at monopoly
control of society can have different labels while owning common
features.

Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is
the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of
all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl
Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is
nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between
international political capitalists and international revolutionary
socialists - to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved
largely because historians - with a few notable exceptions - have an
unconscious Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of
any such alliance existing. The open-minded reader should bear two clues
in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire
entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning,
the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly
capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers.
Suppose - and it is only hypothesis at this point - that American
monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to
the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical
twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad
monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth
century?

Apart from Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and the revisionists,
historians have not been alert for such a combination of events.
Historical reporting, with rare exceptions, has been forced into a
dichotomy of capitalists versus socialists. George Kennan's monumental
and readable study of the Russian Revolution consistently maintains this
fiction of a Wall Street-Bolshevik dichotomy.2 Russia Leaves the War has
a single incidental reference to the J.P. Morgan firm and no reference at
all to Guaranty Trust Company. Yet both organizations are prominently
mentioned in the State Department files, to which frequent reference is
made in this book, and both are part of the core of the evidence
presented here. Neither self-admitted "Bolshevik banker" Olof Aschberg
nor Nya Banken in Stockholm is mentioned in Kennan yet both were central
to Bolshevik funding. Moreover, in minor yet crucial circumstances, at
least crucial for our argument, Kennan is factually in error. For
example, Kennan cites Federal Reserve Bank director William Boyce
Thompson as leaving Russia on November 27, 1917. This departure date
would make it physically impossible for Thompson to be in Petrograd on
December 2, 1917, to transmit a cable request for $1 million to Morgan in
New York. Thompson in fact left Petrograd on December 4, 1918, two days
after sending the cable to New York. Then again, Kennan states that on
November 30, 1917, Trotsky delivered a speech before the Petrograd Soviet
in which he observed, "Today I had here in the Smolny Institute two
Americans closely connected with American Capitalist elements "According
to Kennan, it "is difficult to imagine" who these two Americans "could
have been, if not Robins and Gumberg." But in [act Alexander Gumberg was
Russian, not American. Further, as Thompson was still in Russia on
November 30, 1917, then the two Americans who visited Trotsky were more
than likely Raymond Robins, a mining promoter turned do-gooder, and
Thompson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Bolshevization of Wall Street was known among well informed circles
as early as 1919. The financial journalist Barron recorded a conversation
with oil magnate E. H. Doheny in 1919 and specifically named three
prominent financiers, William Boyce Thompson, Thomas Lamont and Charles
R. Crane:

Aboard S.S. Aquitania, Friday Evening, February 1, 1919.

Spent the evening with the Dohenys in their suite. Mr. Doheny said: If
you believe in democracy you cannot believe in Socialism. Socialism is
the poison that destroys democracy. Democracy means opportunity for all.
Socialism holds out the hope that a man can quit work and be better off.
Bolshevism is the true fruit of socialism and if you will read the
interesting testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle of
January that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German
sympathizers, Socialists, and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of
the college professors in the United States are teaching socialism and
Bolshevism and that fifty-two college professors were on so-called peace
committees in 1914. President Eliot of Harvard is teaching Bolshevism.
The worst Bolshevists in the United States are not only college
professors, of whom President Wilson is one, but capitalists and the
wives of capitalists and neither seem to know what they are talking
about. William Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism and he may yet
convert Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company. Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is
Charles R. Crane. Many women are joining the movement and neither they,
nor their husbands, know what it is, or what it leads to. Henry Ford is
another and so are most of those one hundred historians Wilson took
abroad with him in the foolish idea that history can teach youth proper
demarcations of races, peoples, and nations geographically.3

In brief, this is a story of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath,
but a story that departs from the usual conceptual straitjacket approach
of capitalists versus Communists. Our story postulates a partnership
between international monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary
socialism for their mutual benefit. The final human cost of this alliance
has fallen upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and the
individual American. Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and
the world has been propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a
result of these monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and
revolution.

This is also a story reflecting the betrayal of the Russian Revolution.
The tsars and their corrupt political system were ejected only to be
replaced by the new powerbrokers of another corrupt political system.
Where the United States could have exerted its dominant influence to
bring about a free Russia it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall
Street financiers who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized
tsarist Russia or a centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized
free Russia. And the reasons for these assertions will unfold as we
develop the underlying and, so far, untold history of the Russian
Revolution and its aftermath.4





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