Rockefeller - Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism
Rockefeller Associates
By Richard Sanders, Editor, TARGET="_blank">Press for Conversion!
The Rockefellers were heavy financial backers of the
American
Liberty League.
ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="0" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3">John Davison Rockefeller
(1839-1937), the world’s first billionaire, was America’s
most generous philanthropist, fascist financier and Nazi collaborator.
Although Rockefeller’s wealth was based largely on a near
global control of oil refining, he also had large interests in
other monoplies. As Anthony Sutton notes, Rockefeller
“controlled the copper trust, the smelters trust and
the gigantic tobacco trust, in addition to having influence in
some Morgan
properties such as the U.S. Steel Corporation as well as in hundreds
of smaller industrial trusts, public service operations, railroads
and banking institutions. National City Bank was the largest
of the banks influenced by Standard Oil-Rockefeller, but financial
control extended to the U.S. Trust Co. and Hanover National Bank
[and] major life insurance companies – Equitable Life and
Mutual of New York” (Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,
1981).
ALIGN="RIGHT" BORDER="0" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3">His incredible rags-to-riches
success story owes much to what he learned from his father’s
attitudes towards business and respect for the public good. Descended
from hardworking German immigrants, his father William Avery Rockefeller
was a travelling, snake oil salesman. “Big Bill” excelled
as a quack doctor, or pitch man, conning the sick and desperate
into buying expensive remedies that were either useless or downright
dangerous. “He would be gone for months and come back with
a great roll of money…. He would go to small towns and put
up handbills advertising himself as ‘The Celebrated Dr. Levingston.’
He advertised to cure anything, but made a specialty of cancer
and kidney troubles” (MacDonald, “Double Life,”
New York World, February 2, 1908). But these were not “Doc’s”
only crimes. He was indicted for rape, but was not arrested or
tried. He fled the area with family and escaped neighbours who
accused him of horse thieving, burglary, arson and counterfeiting.
He had two wives, simultaneously, and was a bigamist for 34 years.
He met his second wife in Norwich, Ontario, where he sold lumber
in 1853, calling himself William Levingston.
William’s example provided ample life lessons to his sons
about the business values of duplicity, deceit, and a blatant
disregard for public health. John dropped out of high school in
1855 to take a business course. He worked as a bookkeeper and
then teamed up with a friend to start a grain commission business.
In 1863, the Civil War propelled him into the oil business. That
year, he – like J.P. Morgan and other rising stars –
paid $300 to avoid conscription. It was a small price for them,
but unattainable for the thousands who would die. At first, he
sold whiskey at inflated rates to Federal soldiers. Then, he invested
his profits in oil refineries. The South had been supplying turpentine
to the North for camphene-fueled lights. When the war cut off
the North’s access to this fuel, kerosene from Pennsylvania
oil quickly took over as the lamp fuel of choice and stimulated
his oil business.
In 1865, Rockefeller bought out his partners in the kerosene
business for $72,500. In 1870, he and a few others, organized
The Standard Oil Company, with capital of $1 million. He built
his company by buying out competitors, price cutting and controlling
secondary businesses related to pipelines, trains, oil terminals
and barrel making. By 1880, his monopoly controlled the refining
of 95% of America’s oil. In 1885, 70% of Standard Oil’s
sales were overseas, largely to northern Europe and Russia. All
of its properties were merged into the Standard Oil Trust with
an initial capitalization of $70 million, and by 1900 Rockefeller
controlled about two-thirds of the entire world’s oil supply.
He was also a director of the U.S. Steel Corp when it formed in
1901.
In the 1880s, an oil boom was brewing in Tsarist Russia, around
the Caspian Sea town of Baku. Robert Nobel, the son of Alfred
Nobel (originator of Sweden’s peace prize and the inventor
of dynamite), was soon competing with the Parisian Rothschilds
for control of Central Asia oil treasure. Their exports threatened
Rockefeller’s near global oil monopoly, especially when Marcus
Samuel, future founder of Shell Oil, developed tankers to carry
the Rothchild’s oil to Europe and Asia. In 1903, Rockefeller
made a deal with the Tsarist government to lease and then buy
the Baku oil fields. Besides selling vast quantities of American
oil to pre-Soviet Russia, Rockefeller also had millions invested
there. Thereafter, seeing an inevitable revolution looming on
the horizon, Rockefeller also invested in anti-Tzarist forces
to protect this branch of his empire. The Soviets did expropriate
the Caspian oil fields from the Nobels and Rothschilds. Rockefeller’s
National City Bank also lost assets, thanks to the revolution.
Its lawyer, Joseph
Proskauer, fought a legal battle to get Rockefeller’s
money back. In 1926, Walter Teagle, the president of Standard
Oil of New Jersey, successfully negotiated oil concessions in
the Soviet Union.
By that time though, Standard Oil’s near global monopoly
had been broken up. In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court decided it
was violating anti-trust laws and dissolved it into about three
dozen companies. Many of these are now household names like Chevron
(Standard Oil California), Amoco (Standard Oil Indiana), Mobil
(Standard Oil New Jersey) and Exxon, previously called Esso (Standard
Oil New Jersey).
When the U.S. was debating whether to join WWI, a group of
so-called “War Hawks,” calling themselves the National
Security League, knew that this war would be a major boon to profits.
This League of bankers and industrialists, including Rockefeller,
J.P. Morgan, Coleman du
Pont and H.H. Rodgers of Standard Oil, promoted increases
in arms production and universal military training. By 1917, they
had helped build war hysteria to a fever pitch. But not all Americans
were on their side. The Woman’s Peace Party, many suffragists
and others, strongly opposed America’s entry into WWI. However,
the League was successful and the War Hawks’ profits skyrocketed.
Soon after WWI and the Russian revolution, many among America’s
wealthy elite felt threatened by rising radicalism, particularly
among unions. In April 1919, letter bombs, destined for John D.
Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and others, were supposedly discovered
in the U.S. postal system. The media quickly stirred up a massive
Red Scare by blaming unions, communists, anarchists and foreign
agitators.
John Spivak says: “Trade unions were openly disbelieving
and denounced with anger the so-called discoveries as a deliberate
frame-up to provide excuses for more raids against organized labour”
(A Man in His Time, 1967). This incident and others were
used as pretexts for the Palmer Raids, during which the government
rounded up more than ten thousand activists across the country.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, while the persecution of leftists
continued, corporate leaders on the extreme right, continued their
criminal rampages in pursuit of profit. Although Rockefeller’s
many links to Nazism are too numerous to list here, a few examples
are worth noting. In the 1920s, Exxon entered into partnerships
with Germany’s top chemical cartel members, BASF and I.G.
Farben. The Bank for International Settlements, which helped fund
the Nazis before and during WWII, was created in 1930 by the world’s
central banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of NY. Its creation
was inspired by the Nazi government and its bankers. Its first
president was Gates McGarrah, a Rockefeller banker formerly of
Chase National Bank and the “Fed.”
BORDER="0" NATURALSIZEFLAG="2">
HEIGHT="254" ALIGN="RIGHT" BORDER="0" NATURALSIZEFLAG="2">In 1932,
Chevron struck oil in Bahrain and was soon operating in Saudi
Arabia. In 1933, when Hitler seized power, Standard Oil New Jersey
supplied Germany with the patents it required for tetraethyl lead
aviation fuel. In 1936, the company Schroder, Rockefeller Investment
Bankers, included board directors linked to the Gestapo and several
European, Nazi-linked banks. It’s lawyers were John Foster
Dulles and Allan Dulles, leading Wall Street fascists who drummed
up American investments in Germany and elsewhere. The Dulles law
firm represented I.G. Farben and Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was Hitler’s
biggest German financier. The Dulles brothers later became Secretary
of State and CIA Director, respectively.
In 1937, John D. Rockefeller died, but his legacy of using
oil money to grease the wheels of fascism continued. That year,
as the Spanish Civil War raged, Texas Co. (later called Texaco)
fueled Franco’s fascists. (In 1936, Texas Co. and Standard
Oil California formed California Texas Oil (later Caltex) to combine
Texas Co’s marketing network in the Middle East with Standard’s
operations there.) Texas Co. also continued shipping oil to Germany
during WWII. In 1938, Brown Brothers, Harriman, the Wall Street
investment firm (with senior partners Prescott
Bush and George Herbert Walker) was involved in funding the
supply of leaded gas for the Nazi Luftwaffe. Chevron and Texas
Co. created Aramco in 1939, to pump Saudi oil for the Nazi war
machine. In 1940, Texaco provided an office, in their Chrysler
Building, for a Nazi intelligence officer, Dr. Gerhardt Westrick.
Executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were “Prominent
figures of Himmler’s Circle of Friends of the Gestapo –
its chief financiers – and close friends and colleagues of
the Baron von Schroder” a leading Gesatpo officer and financier
(Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy). Just before WWII, the
Rockefeller’s Chase Bank collaborated with the Nazi’s
Schroder Bank to raise $25 million for Germany’s war economy.
They also supplied the German government with names and background
information on 10,000 fascist sympathizers in America. Throughout
WWII, Rockefeller’s Chase Bank stayed open in Nazi-occupied
Paris, providing services for Germany’s embassy and its businesses.
In 1943, Roosevelt’s government took control of Rockefeller’s
Aramco. It also seized assets of the Union Banking Corp., which
Harriman, Bush and Walker had built up by collaborating with Nazi
companies that used slave labour. This money was later returned
and it launched the Bushes in oil and politics.
In 1953, after an elected upstart named Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh
nationalized Iran’s oil business, a UK/U.S.-backed coup returned
the Shah to power. CIA Director Allan Dulles and his brother,
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were instrumental in this
coup. Previously, Iran’s oil had been controlled by the Anglo-Persian
Oil Co. (i.e., British Petroleum, BP) but after the U.S. role
in this coup, U.S. companies got a 40% share and the top beneficiary
was Standard Oil of New Jersey.
The next year, the Dulles boys were at it again orchestrating
a coup in Guatemala. This one ushered in decades of fascist military
governments that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. But,
it brought great profits for Rockefeller’s United Fruit Co.,
in which the Dulles were invested. Allen had also been on its
Board of Trustees.
John D. Rockefeller would be happy to see the re-merging of
his great monopoly. In 1988, Standard Oil merged with British
Petroleum. Since then, other mergers have reunited many of his
original oil companies. Exxon and Mobil reunited in 1999, to become
the world’s top oil business. They made profits of $17.7
billion the next year. BP, merging with Amoco and Standard Oil
Ohio, was number two that year and made profits of $12 billion.
J.D. Rockefeller’s philanthropy has been much lauded.
Even as a student, he reportedly gave donations to his Baptist
church and to foreign Sunday schools. By 1900, he offered to buy
a whole church for Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon, a former, southern
politician who was then flogging his white supremacist gospel
in New York. But from the pulpit, Dixon’s fiery tirades against
“creeping negroidism” didn’t reach enough people,
so he took up writing respectable, romantic novels about the KKK.
He churned out two dozen books. The Clansman, his race-baiting
best seller, extolled the Klan’s role in redeeming the South.
In 1915, it was made into a movie, called The Birth of a Nation.
Endorsed by President Wilson, the film helped revive this dreaded
terrorist organization.
Rockefeller’s great generosity was aimed largely at medical
education, perhaps because of his father’s career and its
peculiar contributions to medicine. J.D.Rockefeller, being a high
school dropout, was not well-suited to his new role as godfather
of the country’s centres for higher learning. His philanthropy
was permeated with extremely racist views. In 1901, the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research was created. In 1902, the General
Education Board (GEB) began four decades of tremendously controversial
influence over American schools and universities.
BORDER="0" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3">That same year, J.D. Rockefeller
and Averell Harriman, a business partner of Prescott Bush and
George Herbert Walker in Brown Brothers Harriman, gave $11 million
to create the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Built on Manhattan
property owned by the Dulles brothers, it spawned America’s
ground-breaking “eugenics” research and the world’s
first “racial hygiene” laws. By 1907, Rockefeller funding
was heavily influencing America’s medical institutions. The
Rockefeller Institute created the first genetics lab in 1909.
The following year, the Eugenics Research Association and the
Eugenics Records Office were founded near Cold Spring Harbor,
New York, on land donated by the widow of Averell Harriman. In
1911, John Foster Dulles summed up eugenics, saying that by eliminating
“the weakest members of the population” a purer race
could be created.
In 1928, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Eugenics,
Anthropology and Human Heredity was created. Run by Ernst Rudin,
Hitler’s foremost “racial hygienist,” the institute’s
main financing came from Rockefeller. Ironically, by 1936 an early
psychiatrist at that institute, the half Jewish Dr. Franz Kallmann,
had fled Nazism to America. According to Anton Chaitkin, Kallman’s
experiments on 1,000 schizophrenics, published by the Freemasons,
was used in 1939 to justify the Nazi’s mass murder of “mental
patients and various ‘defective’ people.” Meanwhile,
other Nazi doctors conducted incredibly cruel and vicious experiments
on live, captive human subjects. Their body parts “were delivered
to [Josef] Mengele, [Otmar] Verschuer and the other Rockefeller-linked
contingent at the Wilhelm Institute.”
References:
Edward Jay Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power
in America, 1977
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/epstein/aof2.html
John D. Rockefeller Page
http://voteview.uh.edu/entrejdr.htm
Albert I. Berger, "William Avery Rockefeller of ND: The
Father of the Man Who Founded Standard Oil and his Remarkable
Double Life,"
http://www.nd-humanities.org/html/rockefeller.html
Destination New Jersey: Sharing With Standard
http://www.pslc.ws/macrog/exp/rubber/synth/share.htm
Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1981
http://www.democracyunbound.com/wallstbolshevik.html
Stephen Kinzer, "A Perilous New Contest for the Next Oil
Prize," New York Times, Sept. 21, 1997
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/azeroil.htm
Elijah Zarwan, "Pipeline Politics," World Press Review,
Nov.-Dec. 2001
http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/front.htm
Richard N. Draheim, Jr., "Oil and 'Socialism,'" The
Dallas Libertarian, Feb 19, 1998.
http://www.lpdallas.org/features/draheim/dr980219.htm
Philip Mattera, "The Return of Windfall Profits: An Overview
of the Oil Industry," Corporate Research E-Letter, Mar. 2001.
http://www.corp-research.org/mar01.htm
Texaco History
http://www.texaco.com/texaco/abouttexaco/history.htm
Yagmur Kochumov, "Issues of International Law and Politics
in the Caspian in the Context of the Turkrnenistan-Azerbaijan
Discussion and Fuel Transport," Caspian Crossroads, Winter
1999.
ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/usazerb/422.htm
Caspian Projects II
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/2000/02/islam/365.htm
Eva Sion, "From 1911 to 9/11: The Institutions of Conspiracy,"
The Tablet.
http://www.tabletnewspaper.com/politics/66_tftgk.htm
Marcelo Bucheli, The History of the United Fruit Company
http://www.stanford.edu/~mbucheli/bitter.html
Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and
Power, 1992.
http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/yergin.htm
Dixon, Thomas Jr.: 1864-1946, Writer
http://docsouth.dsi.internet2.edu/dixonclan/about.html
Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross, 1987
World War I War Hawks and the Passing of the Nineteenth Amendment
http://www.geocities.com/cyberpza007/ww1/WorldWar1WarHawks.html
Dr. Len Horowitz, "The American Red Double-cross"
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/apocalypse/red_double_cross.html
Source: Press for Conversion!
magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American
Fascism," March 2004. Published by the TARGET="_blank">Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.
a hard copy of this 54-page issue of Press for Conversion!
on the fascist plot to overthrow President F.D.Roosevelt and
the corporate leaders who planned and financed this failed coup.
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