Hidden History: The Legacy of President Herbert Hoover

A Skeptics View of American History

Episode 17 Hoover and the Great Depression

Film Review

In this lecture, Stoler attempts to separate fact from mythology in evaluating the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The latter is commonly blamed for the deep economic depression Americans experienced during the 1930s.

I was very surprised to learn that prior to his election in 1928, Hoover was considered to be a progressive humanitarian, based on his work in international relief programs. As Secretary of Commerce in Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration, he embraced the progressive ideal of using business-government cooperation to abolish poverty. He first came to public attention for organizing food relief to Belgium during World War I and to Central and Western Europe following the war.

Stoler lists a number of economic causes for the Great Depression (aka The Banker-Engineered Deflationary Crisis of 1927-40), but fails to mention the most important: namely the deliberate contraction of the money supply by private banks.*.

Stoler enumerates a number of New Deal  programs started by Hoover but mistakenly credited to Roosevelt. These include the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. the Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Act (providing loans to states to help them create jobs), the Federal Farm Board (created to buy surplus crops from farmers) and the 1932 Glass-Steagall Banking Act. The latter allowed banks to offer commercial paper* and mortgage contracts as collateral on federal loans.

According to Stoler, Hoover’s biggest mistake was ordering the Army attack on the Bonus Army protest in Washington (see The US Government Assault on World War I Veterans and Their Families)

His second biggest mistake was his passage of the Smith-Hawley Act, which significantly reduced international trade through punitive tariffs.

Hoover’s policies, as would Roosevelt’s, would prove ineffective in ending the Great Depression. As Stoler points out in a later lecture on FDR, only US entry into World War I would end the Depression. Yet, owing to Roosevelt’s far greater political experience (the US presidency was Hoover’s first elected office), the former would be revered for failed New Deal policies – while the latter would be demonized.

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*During the early 20th century, as now, private banks created the vast majority of the money in circulation. Carroll Quigley outlines their role in triggering the Great Depression in his masterpiece Tragedy and Hope. See The Real Vampires: An Insider’s View of Banks

**Bank commercial paper is an unsecured form of promissory note that pays a fixed rate of interest

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/hoover-and-great-depression-revisited

Solving the Covid Economic Crisis: Taking a Page Out of History

Brother Can You Spare a Billion?

Directed by Eric Strange (2000)

Film Review

This biographical documentary, narrated by Walter Cronkite, concerns the head of Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), Houston banker Jesse H Jones. The RFC was a national bank owned and operated by the US government (in contrast to the Federal Reserve, which is privately owned). Under the leadership of Jones, the RFC became the “bank of last resort,” lending money to struggling farmers, small businesses and homeowners when private banks refused to give them loans. HR 6422, a bill introduced by Illinois Representative Danny K Davis in March 2020, seeks to address the COVID economic crisis with a National Infrastructure Bank along the lines of the RFC.  (See HR 6422)

Jones, the son of a Tennessee tobacco farmer, left school after eighth grade to help his father. At 19, he moved to Houston to help run his uncle’s lumber yard. When his uncle died four years later, he became the executor of his uncle’s million dollar estate. He used this capital to leverage millions in bank loans to build a chain of lumber yards and over the years, a chain of Houston hotels and skyscrapers. He also ran a Houston bank and was part owner of the city’s major newspaper.

The major cause of the Great Depression that started in 1929 was a contraction in the global money supply, owing to private banks’ extreme reluctance to issue new loans. Then, as now, the vast majority of money (everything but notes and coins) was created by private banks when they issued loans.*

In desperation, President Herbert Hoover created the RFC in 1932, which initially only issued loans to banks (to encourage them to increase their lending) and railroads (1/3 of railroads were already bankrupt and 2/3 on the verge). For ideological reasons, Hoover vetoed a bill Congress passed to allow the RFC to also issue loans to farmers and businesses.

Jones, who first joined the RFC board under Hoover, became its chair following Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. The former Houston banker persuaded Roosevelt to expand lending to businesses and farmers, in addition to banks, railroads, mortgage associations, numerous federal infrastructure projects (eg extending power lines to rural American and building aqueduct supplying water to California and to assist struggling states with relief efforts. Putting more money into circulation generated rapid recovery in numerous sectors of the economy.

Rather than fund the RFC via taxation or increasing government debt, the RFC was capitalized via bonds issued to the general public by the US Treasury. It was then given the same power as private banks to create the vast majority of money it lent out.

With the US entry into World War II, the RFC would finance the massive build-up necessary in armaments manufacture. It would be abolished in 1957.

For more information about the bill that would create a National Infrastructure Bank to fulfill the same role as the RFC, contact the Coalition for a $4 Trillion Infrastructure bank at NIB Coalition

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*FDR wasn’t the first president to create a national bank. He was following the example of Alexander Hamilton, John Qunicy Adams and Abraham Lincoln.

**See In Memorium: Monetary Reform Hero Stephen Zarlinga

Marcus Garvey: A Giant of Black Politics

Marcus Garvey: A Giant of Black Politics

Directed by Howard Johnson (2008)

Film Review

This film is about Black journalist, entrepreneur, and activist Marcus Garvey, as remembered by those who worked with him in the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887, 50 years after slavery ended in that country. Sharing his father’s love of books and learning, he played an important role in educating Blacks in Jamaica and the US about advanced civilizations in ancient Africa.

Essentially the first Black nationalist, Garvey played the dual role of teaching former slaves (in Jamaica and the US) self-love and racial pride and campaigning to create a homeland in Africa for the African diaspora.

He ran into major resistance in Jamaica, where British colonists granted lighter skinned “mulattos” with special status and authority. The latter, direct descendants (usually via rape) of white slave masters, preferred to identify as “British,” rather than Black, and viewed Garvey’s teachings as a threat to their privilege.

In 1916, Garvey left Jamaica for the US, where he also received a mixed reception. African Americans who saw no future for themselves in the US championed his campaign for a new African homeland. Other Black leaders, driven by a deep seated desire to “be white,” viewed native Africans as “savages” and favored integration into mainstream society.

In Harlem, Garvey who was dark skinned faced the same bigotry of light skinned descendants of plantation owners as he did in Jamaica.

In the early 1920s, J Edgar Hoover’s newly formed FBI began investigating Garvey with a few to deporting him. They eventually charged and convicted him for mail fraud (over the failed Black Star Line*) and tax evasion. After 2 1/2 years in US prison, he was deported to Jamaica, where he quickly rebuilt the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

He had a massive following among poor Jamaicans, even after he left Jamaica for England. He died there in 1940.

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*Garvey envisioned the Black Star Line as a Black owned shipping company to facilitate the transportation of goods throughout the African economy. Garvey’s initial arrest and conviction centered around the distribution (by mail) of a photo of a ship the company had yet to purchase.

Secret Societies: How Oligarchs Rule the World

 

An Introduction to Skull and Bones and Other Secret Societies

Kris Millegan (2012)

Millegan is the founder of TrineDay, a small Oregon publishing house dedicated to publishing suppressed books that mainstream publishers refuse to print. Titles include John Potash’s Drugs as Weapons Against Us, Judith Vary Baker’s Me and Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald and Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics

I suspect most people will balk at watching the entire video summarizing Millegan’s 30 years of research into what many commentators refer to as the Deep State. For this reason, I have highlighted the two best sections. I have also attached a reading list Millegan recommends for people seeking a deeper understanding of the oligarchs who rule the US via their secret societies.

00.21 For me the best part of the talk concerns Millegan’s father, who worked for the State Department, OSS and later for the CIA and military intelligence. Lloyd Millegan was in charge of the Philippines desk for OSS and in this role he trained Philippine guerillas resisting Japanese occupation and later spied on General Douglas MacCarthur. MacCarthur’s father MacCarthur was the first military governor of the American-occupied Philippines in 1900. Douglas, who was raised in the Philippines, was suspected of supporting the Philippines oligarchy, who were collaborating with the Japanese.

In 1956, the CIA transferred Lloyd to Vietnam, where he worked with Edward Lansdale, who orchestrated a shoot out between US and French intelligence over control of Southeast Asia’s opium trade.

Lloyd eventually left the CIA to become a junior high school teacher. He tried to explain some of his intelligence work to Kris when turned 20. Very little of it made sense until Kris began researching some of Lloyd’s more outlandish statements (eg that the Vietnam War was all about drugs, that secret societies were behind it, that communism was also a sham created by secret societies, that the Vietnam War was part of a conspiracy to opiate the entire baby boom generation, and that CIA analysts informed Eisenhower in 1954 that US victory in Vietnam was impossible).

1.00 The other really interesting part of the talk directly relates to the history of Skull and Bones, a secret undergraduate fraternity started at Yale University in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alfonso Taft. Russell was the head of the largest opium smuggling network in the world. Taft was attorney general in the corrupt Ulysses S Grant administration and would be sent to Philippines as the first civilian governor after Arthur MacArthur was dismissed. Teddy Roosevelt’s family owed their wealth to opium smuggling and Warren Delano, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather was chief of operations for Russell & Co, a trading company that did big business in opium smuggling in Canton. Numerous members of the Rockefeller family belonged to Skull and Bones, both before and after they founded Standard Oil. Opium smuggling also enabled Skull and Bones members to gain control of the global steel industry and American railroads.

Millegan has a good summary of the corporate elite families who have belonged to Skull and Bones at Skull and Bones families

READING LIST

Perfectabilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati by Terry Melanson – According to Millegan, this is one of the few historically accurate books in English about the Illuminati. Most of the material available in English is disinformation.

Devious Elites by Sterling Seagrave

Gold Warriors: the Covert History of Yamashita’s Gold by Steling Seagrave – refers to gold Japanese looting during World War II and allegedly hid in caves in the Philippines, how Washington secretly recovered it to set up giant Cold War slush funds and manipulate foreign governments

America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones by Anthony Sutton – describes the battle between French and US intelligence over Southeast Asia’s opium trade.

Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Lavenda

Unfriendly Skies : Saga of Corruption by Rodney Stich, Former FAA investigator

Defrauding America: Trojan Horse Corruption by Rodney Stitch – about a “deep-cover CIA officer” assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, code-named Pegasus. This unit had tape-recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy” from a tap on the phone of J. Edgar Hoover. The voices on the tapes belonged to were Nelson Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, Lyndon Johnson, George H W Bush and J Edgar Hoover.

Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: An Investigation into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society – collection of essays edited by Millegan

 

The US Government Assault on World War I Veterans and Their Families

The March of the Bonus Army

PBS (2013)

Film Review

This documentary concerns the brutal 1932 massacre of World War I veterans and their families by Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton.

Owing to insufficient volunteers (the army paid $1.25 a day), the US government was forced to initiate a draft when they first entered World War I in April 1917. When the war ended, veterans agitated for lost wages, leading Congress to authorize payment of a $1.25 bonus, to be paid in 1938.

With the 1929 Depression, unemployment rates for veterans were especially high, and an ex-GI from Portland organized a veterans march on Washington to demand immediate payment of their bonus.

After dozens of veterans occupied every Congressman’s office, the House passed the Bonus Bill.

As the Senate took up the bill, the veterans and their families set up an enormous tent and shack city in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington DC. They passed the time preparing communal meals, boxing, making music, preparing and visiting a library set up by the Salvation Army. One of the most remarkable features of the Anacostia tent city was the natural integration of black and white veterans in all aspects of daily life. During the war, black troops weren’t allowed to fight alongside white Americans, leading 100,000 African Americans to fight under the French flag.

The the Senate overwhelming defeated the Bonus Bill, Congress adjourned and Hoover ordered the evacuation of the 45,000 Bonus Army veterans from downtown Washington DC. After a battle broke out between city police and veterans, Hoover ordered and attack by 400 infantry, accompanied by tanks and armored vehicles to attack. General MacArthur ignored his order not to cross the Anacostia River, and he and his men burned the shacks and tents filled with the wives and children of Bonus Army members.

Congress ultimately passed the Bonus Bill in 1933. I was very surprised to learn that Roosevelt vetoed it and that the House and Senate overrode his veto.

 

The FBI’s War on Black People

The FBI’s War on Black People

Directed by Deb Ellis and Dennis Mueller (1990)

Film Review

This 1990 documentary is based on interviews with Black Panther Party (BPP) activists who directly experienced Cointelpro. The latter was a secret FBI counterinsurgency program created and run by late FBI director J Edgar Hoover. Allegedly shut down in the mid-seventies, there is strong evidence it continues to operate under a different name.

The film begins by quoting directly from secret FBI memos (released under the Freedom of Information Act) detailing the official purpose of Cointelpro – namely to “neutralize: charismatic Black leaders capable of organizing effective resistance to the white supremacist power structure.

The film then explores the suspected Cointlpro role in the assassination of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King* and the proven Cointelpro role in the murder of Chicago BPP leader Fred Hampton. The latter was shot in his sleep by Chicago police with the help of an undercover FBI infiltrator who provided a layout of Hampton’s apartment.

The documentary also covers the less publicized FBI role in the Klan murder of southern civil rights leaders. During the sixties, again according to FOI documents, 25% of Klansmen were FBI informants or agents. Although the FBI nearly always had foreknowledge of these murders, not only did they fail to prevent them – but in many cases FBI plants pulled the trigger.

Surviving Panther members also speak bitterly about the role of FBI infiltrators in fomenting rumor campaigns and factional fighting within BPP groups and between the BPP and other activist organizations. Hoover was also directly responsible for the media’s negative portrayal of the Panthers as dangerous people who hated whites and wanted to hurt them.

In my view, the most powerful weapon Hoover deployed against the BPP was to deliberately frame and imprison their leaders on false charges.

The film contains rare footage of late political Geronimo Pratt describing attempts to frame him for one of Charles Manson’s murders before they framed him for the “Tennis Court” murder.

Pratt served 27 years until the phony charge was vacated in 1997. He died in Tanzania in 2011.**

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*In 1999 the jury in a civil case brought by the King family, found the US government responsible for King’s 1968 murder. See The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King

**See Geronimo Pratt

The Great Depression: More Stuff You Didn’t Learn in School

The Great Depression Part 2 – The Road to Rock Bottom

PBS (1993)

Film Review

The second episode of the PBS Great Depression series deals mainly with the near collapse of the farm economy, when farmers burned their crops because they couldn’t cover their costs by selling them. The depression in the farm economy had started in the mid-twenties, prior to the 1929 Wall Street crash. World War I  created large demand for US agricultural exports. This led to a crisis of overproduction when the war ended.

With Hoover unwilling to provide government aid, the Red Cross took primary responsibility for providing food aid to starving families in Arkansas and other southern states.

This episode also explores the exploits of Pretty Boy Floyd, known as the Sage Brush Robin Hood, for sharing the proceeds of his bank robberies with families who couldn’t feed their children.

It finishes with the Bonus Army saga, in which 20,000 homeless World War I veterans and their families camped out in Washington DC to pressure Hoover and Congress to authorize early payment of the bonus they were promised in 1945. Under Hoover’s orders, Generals MacArthur, Patton and Eisenhower led a military assault on the encampment. They burnt all the tents and shacks protestors were living in, injuring 55 veterans and killing a 12-week-old baby.

Hidden History: The Great Depression, Henry Ford and Detroit’s Unemployed Workers Councils

1929 The Great Depression Part 1 – A Job At Ford’s

PBS (1993)

Film Review

This is Part 1 of a fascinating 7-part PBS series on the Great Depression, one of the many topics Americans never study in school. The series reveals much hidden history unfavorable to the ruling elite – I doubt that PBS would air documentaries this honest in the current political landscape.

This first episode examines the rapid US industrialization of the 1920s, exemplified by the stellar growth of Ford Motor Company.

Henry Ford’s goal in perfecting assembly line manufacturing was to produce Model T’s so cheaply they would cost less than a team of horses. Ford’s River Rouge complex in Detroit was the largest industrial plant in history, employing 50,000 workers and producing 6,000 cars per day. The availability of credit, another new phenomenon, to purchase cars and other durable goods also played a major role in post-World War I expansion.

Squeezing Workers to Cut Costs

By paying the unprecedented wage of $5/hour, Ford attracted workers from all over the US and Mexico. Over time, however, he cut the hourly wage and sped up the assembly line to further reduce costs. He also created an extremely repressive private security force that relied on 9,000 worker/informants to weed out employees who couldn’t keep up or expressed anger and/or frustration with the speed-ups.

Detroit’s Unemployed Workers Councils

Following the Wall Street crash in October, 1929, the US was the only industrialized country without a government safety net (eg unemployment insurances, old age pensions, welfare benefits, etc) for the millions of Americans who lost their jobs. President Hoover believed the solution to the Great Depression was to increase business investment (and production)* and called on charities and local government to provide relief for homeless and starving families.

The city of Detroit provided relief to destitute families for over a year but ran out of money as unemployment climbed from 20 to 50% in 1930. It climbed to 80% in August 1931, when Ford closed his factory and laid off 60,000 workers.

Assisted by Communist Party organizers, Detroit’s unemployed workers formed a dozen unemployed workers councils, which organized marches and rallies demanding jobs, unemployment compensation and protection against evictions.** The councils also organized direct actions to block sheriff’s officers from removing families’ furniture from their home.

In March 1932, 3,000 unemployed workers organized a hunger march on the Ford factory. In addition to using fire hoses to spray them with freezing water, local police and Ford’s private security force shot 25 of them (many in the back). Four, including a New York Times photographer died instantly.

Ford’s Anti-Semitism

This episode also explores Ford’s anti-Semitic writings in the Dearborn Independent and his book The International Jew, as well as the mutual admiration he and Adolph Hitler shared. It fails to mention the considerable direct and indirect assistance Ford provided the Third Reich in rebuilding the German military machine. See Ford and the Fuhrer

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*Hoover’s views flew in the face of most economists, who viewed the Great Depression as a crisis in overproduction and under-consumption.

**At the height of the depression, 150 Detroit families were evicted everyday and someone died of starvation every seven hours.

J Edgar Hoover: A Textbook Case in Corruption

This is an intriguing documentary about J Edgar Hoover, founding director of the FBI. It’s largely based on an official federal investigation that occurred shortly after Hoover’s death in 1972 and Anthony Summer’s 2013 book Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover.

The film explores Hoover’s long track record of both low level and high level corruption. The former involved his routine use of FBI employees to drive him to private functions and to remodel and redecorate his home, as well as the routine use of taxpayer funds to pay for private vacations. The high level corruption involved his close association with Mob figures to fuel his (illegal) offtrack betting habit.

Hoover was notorious for his refusal to investigate or arrest organized crime bosses during his tenure of office. He consistently maintained the US had no national organized crime problem. This was the major cause of his three year battle with John and Bobby Kennedy – which ended in the JFK assassination.

The documentary also reveals how Hoover forced Kennedy to accept Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, by threatening to release surveillance tapes the FBI had made of JFK’s extramarital affairs.

Hoover undertook this type of illegal surveillance on most, if not, all major Washington political figures. He also routinely made it known to lawmakers when he had compromising files on them. These files made him virtually untouchable despite fairly wide knowledge of his own corrupt activities.

Hoover, in turn, was held in check by senior Mob figures who had photos of Hoover engaged in sexual relations with his lover and lifetime partner Clyde Tolson. Officially Hoover condemned homosexuality as a sexual perversion and banned gays from serving as FBI agents.

Dupont: A Textbook Case in Corporate Criminality

DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Iron Curtain

Gerald Colby

Prentice Hall (1984)

Book Review

If you want a precise understanding of how a major corporation sets out (and succeeds) in corrupting all aspects of democratic government, Behind the Nylon Curtain is for you. If it doesn’t convince you that democracy is impossible in a capitalist economy, I don’t know what will. This 800+ page book traces every bribery and corruption scandal; every flagrant violation of labor, environmental and trading with the enemy laws; every frivolous lawsuit (eg challenging the EPA’s ability to regulate air and water pollution); every instance of war profiteering and gouging the US taxpayer; and every case of electoral fraud the DuPont company has engaged in their 215-year history.

DuPont’s Role in Potting 1934 Coup Against Roosevelt

In addition, Colby details the prominent role DuPont played in the formation of the American Liberty League and the 1934 fascist coup the group plotted to remove Roosevelt from the residency; in re-arming the Third Reich prior to World War II; in arming private vigilante groups to attack union organizers and strikers; and in secretly building the nuclear facilities supplying uranium and plutonium to the Manhattan Project. In the mid-seventies (when DuPont workers and Delaware residents began dying of cancer in unprecedented numbers), they successfully blocked a bill to require safety testing on all new chemicals before they could be marketed.

Colby also enumerates numerous efforts by Congress, unions and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader to challenge DuPont’s overtly criminal behavior. Owing to the company’s long time control over local and national media, the Delaware State government and the executive, legislative and judicial branch of the federal government, it has been virtually impossible to sanction DuPont for their illegal activities.

How DuPont Came to Own Delaware

Historically the DuPonts have totally controlled Delaware (government, newspapers, radio, TV, colleges and newspapers).  Thanks to DuPont, Delaware has the lowest business tax in the country and the lowest cost of incorporation. It’s also the only state allowing Delaware corporations to hold out-of-state stockholder and board meetings. The majority of Americans largest corporations are incorporated in Delaware.  In 1980 governor Pierre DuPont successful introduced a law enabling Delaware banks to circumvent other states’ usury laws by setting credit card interest rates that are binding on out-of-sate residents. (see How Banks Use Credit Cards to Rip Us Off )

Roosevelt: More Pro-Corporate than Pro-Labor

I found Colby’s revelations about Franklin D Roosevelt – a significant departure from the pro-labor image promoted by the Democratic Party – the most illuminating. Prior to reading this book I had no idea that Roosevelt

• imposed wage freezes during a period that prices increased by 45%
• tried to pressure sit-down strikers at General Motors (then owned by DuPont) to settle with GM on management’s  terms
• vetoed a law authorizing World War I veterans to be paid the Bonus Bond they were promised (the military assault Hoover ordered on Bonus Army protestors was instrumental to his defeat in 1932).
• triggered a new economic depression in 1937 by implementing across the board austerity cuts.

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*DuPont also blocked distribution of this book for 40 years. Although initially published by Prentice Hall in 1974, DuPont fought Colby in the courts for 30 years to block its distribution (Colby describes his legal ordeal in the introduction). In 2014, he finally released the 1984 edition as an ebook. Although Prentice Hall still owns the print rights, the author retains electronic rights. Used print editions are available from Amazon. The Kindle edition is $9.99.