When everything was ready, the New York financiers started calling 24 hour broker call loans. This meant that the stock brokers and the customers had to dump their stock on the market in order to pay the loans. This naturally collapsed the stock market and brought a banking collapse all over the country because the banks not owned by the oligarchy were heavily involved in broker call claims at this time, and bank runs soon exhausted their coin and currency and they had to close. The Federal Reserve System would not come to their aid, although they were instructed under the law to maintain an elastic currency.
AFTER WORLD WAR I, America had become the world’s largest creditor nation. The money that flowed into America from the $8 billion in war loans granted to France, Great Britain, and Italy was used to fund U.S. business and industry and to provide loans to American workers. While Europe remained in a state of stagnancy, perpetuated by the devastation of property and loss of population caused by the war, cars, highways, bridges, manufacturing plants, hotels, theaters, and department stores were being built throughout America at an unprecedented rate. Unemployment dropped to less than 5 percent. Almost every home in the country had electricity. By 1920, the national income of the United States was greater than the combined incomes of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and seventeen smaller countries.1 Within the next five years, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler emerged as the “Big Three” auto companies, and over 15 million cars were on the road.2 By 1926, over 200,000 gas stations had cropped up throughout the United States, and the personal fortune of John D. Rockefeller, who became the world’s first billionaire in 1916, had doubled.3
The Federal Reserve remained wedded to the Bank of England, and Montagu Norman, the governor of England’s central bank, made regular trips to the United States for meetings with Benjamin Strong, the head of the New York Fed. In one of his visits, Norman addressed the United States Bankers Association and spoke in glowing terms about a great depression that would cause millions of Americans to lose their homes and jobs. He said that such an event would make people easier to govern by the “imperialism” of bankers. Norman told the crowd:
Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through the process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is, thus, by discrete action, we can ensure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.4
The dutiful audience gave him a standing ovation, heeded his words, and proceeded to institute a banking procedure known as the “twenty-four hour call.”
The “twenty-four hour call” enabled investors to purchase securities on extended credit from their bankers. This meant that if someone wanted to purchase $1,000 in stock, he only had to shell out $100 in cash. The loan for the remaining $900 was immediate and readily available from every national bank in the country. If the stock increased 10 percent in value, an investor could double his money.5 In addition to enhancing one’s financial portfolio, the easy money could be used to purchase homes, automobiles, and modern appliances, like self-contained refrigerators that required no ice.
To fuel the market, Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, proceeded to make more and more cuts to the tax rate so that Americans had more and more expendable income. For those who earned $5,000 or less, the rate fell from 15.9 percent in 1920 to 1.1 percent in 1928. Those who earned $10,000 or less saw their rate dwindled from 9.1 percent in 1920 to 2 percent in 1928. And those who earned $25,000 or less witnessed a drop in their taxable income from 16.6 percent in 1920 to 7.1 percent in 1928.6 Mellon had close ties to John D. Rockefeller, who had purchased his oil company at the turn of the century. Between 1923 and 1929, the Federal Reserve added helium to the financial balloon by expanding the money supply by 62 percent. This money was used to build up the stock market to dizzying heights.7
With credit money readily available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, the mass media began to ballyhoo tales of the instant riches to be made in the stock market. According to Ferdinand Lundberg: “For profits to be made on these funds the public had to be induced to speculate, and it was so induced by misleading newspaper accounts, many of them bought and paid for by the brokers that operated the pools.”8
A savvy individual could have discerned that a depression was in the works by the fact that Chase National was transporting large quantities of gold outside the country. In 1928, more than $500 million in gold bars was shipped by the Rockefeller bank to financial firms in England and France.9 Since the dollar remained bound to the gold standard, the depletion of the precious metal was accompanied by a curtailment in the money supply. Everything was ripe for an economic collapse of epic proportion. On February 6, 1929, Montagu Norman arrived in Washington to confer with Treasury Secretary Mellon. Immediately after the mysterious meeting, the Federal Reserve Board began to cut the money supply and to raise the interest rate.10
The collapse began when the commercial banks no longer could receive a flow of greenbacks from the Federal Reserve. Desperate for cash to continue their operations, the banks initiated the “call” on their loans on October 24, 1929. The millions of simple-minded blokes who had received the money so easily from their friendly neighborhood bankers were now obliged to come up with full repayment in twenty-four hours.
Americans who believed that they were very rich suddenly discovered that they were very poor. By the end of 1929, five thousand banks had collapsed, and six million Americans had lost their jobs. President Herbert Hoover could only sit back and watch as the financial devastation took place. He possessed no control over the Federal Reserve and was unable to force it to adopt the necessary rescue measures.
The proverbial excrement hit the fan. Throughout the country, the stampede to sell stocks, insurance policies, and businesses began. The stock market crashed; banks throughout the country ran out of cash and closed up shop; and the Fed refused to come to the rescue with a printing of fresh currency.11 On Tuesday, October 29th, the exchanges were crushed by a new avalanche of selling. For many securities, there were no buyers at all. By the end of the day, over 16 million shares had been dumped, in most cases, at any price that was offered. Millions of investors were wiped out. Within several months of continual decline, $40 billion of wealth had vanished. Americans who believed that they were very rich suddenly discovered that they were very poor.12 By the end of 1929, five thousand banks had collapsed, and six million Americans had lost their jobs.13 President Herbert Hoover could only sit back and watch as the financial devastation took place. He possessed no control over the Federal Reserve and was unable to force it to adopt the necessary rescue measures.14
The crash may have devastated the average American investor but not the Rockefellers. They were either out of the market or had sold “short” so that they earned enormous profits as the Dow Jones plummeted. Following the crash, they swooped down on Wall Street like vultures to feast on ravaged companies. Shares that once sold for a dollar now could be bought for a few pennies.15 The worth of John P. Kennedy, a smuggler and bootlegger, increased from $4 million to $100 million. Similarly, while businesses went belly-up throughout the country, the Rockefeller concerns, including Standard Oil and International Harvester, experienced enormous expansion.16
Economic collapse set the Rockefellers up to gain monopolistic control over every necessity of life and source of energy—oil, gas, coal, water, wind, and atomic energy. They had even succeeded in making the sun, the greatest of all sources of power, render them tribute.17 In addition, the family began to gobble up real estate in major American cities. By 1935, they owned 3 percent of the property in New York City.18 They became the largest holders of government securities, including the NYC and State of New York bonds, and public utility companies, including Consolidated Edison, the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company, the Manhattan Transit Corporation, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (NYC), the United Gas Improvement Company, Public Service of New Jersey, People’s Gas of Chicago, Mountain Fuel Supply, Colorado Interstate Gas Company, Mutual Fuel Gas Company, Chicago Railways Company, the Philadelphia Company, et al.19 They gained control not only of America’s railroads, leading industrial corporations, and mines, but also of the nation’s major food suppliers, including Armour and Company (one of the five leading firms in the meatpacking industry), the Corn Products Refining Company (which supplied the raw material for cornstarch and corn oil), Sheffield Farms (which represented the largest dairy in the world), Borden’s (which was the world’s largest producer of dairy and pasta products), and Monsanto, an agrochemical and agricultural biotech company that developed genetically modified organisms (GMOs).20
The decisions of the corporate executives within the board rooms of the Rockefeller empire were made solely on the basis of self-perpetuation and expansion. No considerations of altruism, let alone national well-being, were superseded by profit. The end was gain, and the purpose of the holdings could only be fulfilled when the Rockefeller dynasty gained sole possession of the world’s wealth.
With the gold that the Rockefellers exported to England and France, they purchased 69,020 shares of the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company from the Rothschilds and 50 percent of the Nobel Oil Works.21 In 1893, John D. had tried to forge a union with the Rothschilds and Nobel for control of the Russian oil fields, but that effort was thwarted by Sir Henry Deterding, the Royal Dutch director, who knew that Rockefeller was adept at backstabbing. The setback forced Rockefeller to adopt other measures. In The “Federal” Reserve Conspiracy and Rockefellers, Emanuel M. Josephson writes:
The situation left only two methods open to the Rockefeller interests to gaining access to the Russian oilfields, other than the prohibitively expensive and futile attempt to purchase control of the Royal Dutch in the open stock market. Their first approach was to create a breach between the Czarist regime and the Royal Dutch management. The second was to oust the Czarist regime by financing, with the funds of American taxpayers derived through their tax-exempt foundations, a revolution in Russia. The [Rockefeller] conspirators adopted both approaches. For the purpose of attempting to create a breach between the Czarist regime and the Royal Dutch Co., there was effected the publication in Russia, and widespread distribution, under the name of a Captain Linus, a notorious forged document labeled The Protocols of Zion.22
The Protocols of Zion purportedly represents the minutes of 24 meetings held secretly by Jewish bankers and financiers who sought to control the world. The 12th Protocol says: “Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government will become proprietor of the majority of the journals …. It will put us in possession of a tremendous influence upon the public mind.” In accordance with the 17th Protocol, the Church will be annihilated “so that only years divide us from the moment of the complete wrecking of that Christian religion.” The final takeover of the world, the 21st Protocol, will be achieved financially. The 21st Protocol states, “We shall replace the money markets by grandiose government credit institutions, the object of which will be to fix the price of industrial values in accordance with government views …. You may imagine for yourselves what immense power we shall thereby secure for ourselves.”23
The work makes the Jews responsible for present and past disasters from the downfall of Christian monarchies to the French Revolution and the advancement of liberal and bourgeois ideas. The plotters are portrayed as poisonous snakes, spiders weaving their webs, and wolves ready to devour Christian sheep. The final protocols describe the future reign of the Jews, including the installation of a “King of the Jews,” who will be “the real Pope of the Universe and the patriarch of an international Church.”24
The Protocols appeared in Russia shortly after the Rothschilds and the Nobels joined forces to gain control of the Baku oil fields in 1886.25 The preparation and dissemination of the work, according to Josephson, was arranged by Rockefeller.26 The effects were immediate and devastating. A wave of anti-Semitism swept throughout Russia. Pogroms were initiated in 1903 and 1905, which resulted in the death of 2,500 Jews.27 The Rothschilds, who were an integral part of the money cartel, were singled out for hatred, and their ties to the tsarist regime became greatly weakened. In the United States, Henry Ford was duped by agents of the Rockefellers into promulgating The Protocols within the United States.28
The Protocols of Zion purportedly represents the minutes of 24 meetings held secretly by Jewish bankers and financiers who sought to control the world. The Protocols appeared in Russia shortly after the Rothschilds and the Nobels joined forces to gain control of the Baku oil fields in 1886. The preparation and dissemination of the work, according to Josephson, was arranged by Rockefeller. The effects were immediate and devastating. A wave of anti-Semitism swept throughout Russia.
The Rockefellers continued to puppeteer developments in Russia by helping to bankroll the Russian Revolution. In The Surrender of an Empire, British historian Nesta Webster writes:
Had the Bolsheviks been, as they are frequently represented, a mere gang of revolutionaries out to destroy property, first in Russia, and then in every other country, they would naturally have found themselves up against organized resistance by the owners of property all over the world, and the Moscow blaze would have been extinguished. It was only owing to the powerful influences behind them that a minority party was able to seize the reins of power and, having seized them, to retain their hold of them up to the present day.29
Similarly, Antony C. Sutton, a research fellow for the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace, writes in his introduction to Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution:
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 internationalism.30
After the Bolsheviks seized power, Standard Oil purchased the Russian oil fields, set up a refinery for the Soviets, and made arrangements to market the refined oil in Europe. The Rothschilds had been routed. Royal Dutch Shell lost their grip on the Russian oil fields. Chase Bank set up the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce, financed the raw material exports of the Soviets, and sold Russian bonds to American investors.31 The tentacles of the Rockefeller oil empire now extended throughout Europe to Russia and China. The family had come to control most of the wealth of the world. No other family, including the Rothschilds of Europe and the Mitsuis of Japan, possessed half their riches.32
The Rockefellers continued to puppeteer developments in Russia by helping to bankroll the Russian Revolution. After the Bolsheviks seized power, Standard Oil purchased the Russian oil fields, set up a refinery for the Soviets, and made arrangements to market the refined oil in Europe. The Rothschilds had been routed.
The USSR proved to be a great place for the Rockefellers to conduct their business. They could control the country’s oil production and withdraw their profits from Swiss bank accounts. There existed no way for a federal agency in the United States or elsewhere in the Western world to investigate their earnings. This arrangement allowed American money and technology to flow into the hands of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier, who used it to create “the big red war machine” that would represent the greatest existential threat to the United States.33
The Rockefellers became completely enamored with Communism. It represented a monopolist system of government, a government over which enterprising industrialists and bankers could gain control through loans to the government, the manipulation of the country’s centralized banking system, and of course, bribes.34 This realization eventually prompted the Rockefellers to provide support and funding to further the spread of socialism in the United States.
1 David Jarmal, “American History: Foreign Policy during the 1920s,” Masking of a Nation, February 2, 2011, http://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/american-history-foreign-policy-during-the-1920s-115124654/116037.html, accessed February 12, 2019.
2 “Automobile History,” The History Channel, April 26, 2010, https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/automobiles, accessed February 12, 2019.
3 Carl O’Donnell, “The Rockefellers: The Legacy of History’s Richest Man,” Forbes, July 11, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the-rockefellers-the-legacy-of-historys-richest-man/#5e387a823c26, accessed February 12, 2019.
4 Montagu Norman, quoted in Stephen Mitford Goodson, A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind (London: Black House, 2014), p. 92.
5 James Perloff, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (Appleton, WI: Western Islands, 2005), p. 56.
6 Veronique de Rugy, “1920s Income Tax Cuts Sparked Economic Growth and Raised Federal Revenues,” CATO Institute, March 4, 2003, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/1920s-income-tax-cuts-sparked-economic-growth-raised-federal-revenues, accessed February 12, 2019.
7 Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy (San Diego, CA: Dauphin Publications, 1971), p. 53.
8 Ferdinand Lundberg, quoted in Gary Allen, “How a Group of International Bankers Engineered the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression,” Friends of the American Revolution, February 11, 2008, https://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/how-a-group-of-international-bankers-engineered-the-1929-crash-and-the-great-depression/, accessed February 12, 2019.
9 Emanuel M. Josephson, The “Federal” Reserve Conspiracy and Rockefellers: Their “Gold Corner” (New York: Chedney Press, 1968), pp. 89–90.
10 Eustace Mullens, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve (Staunton, VA: Bankers Research Institute, 1983), p. 143.
11 Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, pp. 54–55.
12 G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve (New York: American Media, 2008), p. 499.
13 “1930s High Society,” History Detectives, PBS, n.d., http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/1930s-high-society/, accessed February 12, 2019.
14 Josephson, The “Federal” Reserve Conspiracy, p. 100.
15 Perloff, The Shadows of Power, p. 57.
16 William P. Hoar, Architects of Conspiracy: An Intriguing History (Appleton, WI: Western Islands, 1985), p. 190.
17 Emanuel M. Josephson, Rockefeller “Internationalist:” The Man Who Misrules the World (New York: Chedney Press, 1952), p. 20.
18 Ibid., p. 25.
19 Ibid., p. 37.
20 Ibid, p. 26. See also Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File (Seal Beach, CA; ’76 Press, 1976), p. 34.
21 Josephson, Rockefeller “Internationalist,” p. 25.
22 Emanuel M. Josephson, The “Federal” Reserve and Conspiracy, p. 72.
23 Brigitte Sion, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion: The Lie That Will Not Die,” My Jewish Learning, n.d., https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion/, accessed February 12, 2019.
24 Ibid.
25 Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 48.
26 Josephson, The “Federal” Reserve Conspiracy, p. 72.
27 Robert Weinberg, The Revolution in 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 164.
28 Josephson, The “Federal” Reserve Conspiracy, p. 92.
29 Nesta H. Webster, The Surrender of an Empire (London: Bowell Publishing, 1933), p. 74.
30 Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Revolution (London: Clairview, 2011), p. 19.
31 Perloff, The Shadows of Power, p. 43.
32 Josephson, The “Federal” Reserve Conspiracy, p. 27.
33 Allen, The Rockefeller File, p. 104.
34 Perloff, The Shadows of Power, p. 44.