Who Engineered the Heroin Coup?

Refer back to our October 8 posting of the excerpt from Heroin in Southeast Asia. We inserted a map of the Yunnan province of China, showing Kunming, "the hotbed of military operations," of  

1. Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force and of 

2. the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Detachment 202.

These military operations in this area of China were occurring at the tail end of WWII, and would lead up to the Korean War a few years later.  Kruger's focus in his book was on Captain Lucien Conein, the French Foreign Legionnaire turned OSS agent for the United States. Why? Because he points to our trail of money. Remember, we ALWAYS follow the money.

When President Truman agreed to drop the bombs on Japan, abruptly ending WWII, the old China hands realized their government budget to fight Chinese Communists had just dried up. They had to build an alternative supply to finance the "nationalist" Chinese forces led by the American-educated Soong family satellites, groomed to set up China's central bank by donors to Southern Christian colleges since the time Charlie Soon first arrived in North Carolina.

Background Reading to Get Up to Speed

Readers who have not already done so should familiarize themselves with this author's other blog, which has long followed the trail of opium money through the Forbes family that culminates into today's United States Secretary of State John Kerry, particularly at this point with his ancestor known as Jack Forbes, a contemporary of Secretary of State (later President) John Quincy Adams, who was the actual creator of the Monroe Doctrine during his tenure in the State Department. It was J.Q. Adams who was then handling the career of the first John Murray "Jack" Forbes, not to be confused with his nephew of that name who rose to opium fame several decades later.

At the other website, Where the Gold Is,  I posited that J.Q. Adams had accomplished his purpose of strengthening the nascent U.S. republic by allowing Jack Forbes, the consul he named to an important post in Europe as French hero Napoleon was shipped off to Elba. It should be remembered that at that time the French were our allies, while the victor, the British, were our avowed enemies. Thus, it was of little significance to Adams at that time that the only way that Forbes' consulate post, where he was sent to spy on the British enemy, could be financed was by allowing him to enter into commercial partnerships with family members, also based at the foreign consulate.

Jack's youngest brother, Ralph Bennet Forbes, was one of several partners who took advantage of that opportunity to trade in China following the tanking of his own business using slaves to grow sugar cane in what is now the island of Haiti/Dominican Republic (then known as Santo Domingo). There Ralph had become acquainted with James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, ship owners involved in the triangular barter trading pattern between the island, New England and, during colonial days, Liverpool. They had seen much of their business interests destroyed, however, when revolutionary Americans boycotted and blockaded trade with the former "mother country."

As so often happens, his working relationship with the Perkins brothers led to marriage to their younger sister, Margaret Perkins. Quoting now from my other blog:

By 1811 Ralph had already been married to Margaret Perkins 12 years, and the brothers had given up trade in the West Indies for the East Indies, with China. In the meantime the young Robbins cousin [James Murray Robbins] went to Europe to replace Ralph Forbes. The editor of The Letters reports that President Monroe, through his secretary of state, Jack's old friend J.Q. Adams, called Forbes home and entrusted him with negotiations following Napoleon's defeat at the hands of the British, while the teenage Robbins was sent to Elsinore [Helsingor], Denmark, not far from Jack's 1813 post in Copenhagen. Was he merely there to keep his eyes and ears open and courier intelligence back? ... Did President Monroe, the last Founding Father to serve as chief executive of the United States, know what was about to hit the fan? Did anyone understand at the time that the cost of such intelligence to the new nation was to allow those consular officials free reign in smuggling drugs?

Kris Millegan's Theory

My early research has been guided and directed since about 1996 by the profound ideas and reading of the publisher of Trine Day books, who was then a mere hippie musician turned philosopher--Kris Millegan, who posted the following statement in 2000 to a research group to which I then was a participant:

Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by US law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins' siblings and children. The Perkins opium business had made a fortune and established power over these families. By the 1830s, the Russells bought out the Perkinses and made Connecticut the primary center of the US opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under Russell Trust. By 1856, Russell Trust Incorporated their open pirate emblem -- the skull and cross bones.

Millegan's theory related to the importance of Yale secret society, Skull and Bone, which he had found to be steeped in the long history of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency involvement in the Southeast Asian drug trade. Millegan was an avid reader who shared his insights by posting excerpts of books he read on this subject, one of which was Henrik Kruger's book, Heroin in Southeast Asia, cited previously. Much of this history has been made into an excellent online book by William P. Litynski, in downloadable format, called An Illustrated History of the China Trade and the Opium Wars.

Litynski mentions that William Russell, trustee of Yale University from 1745 to 1761, had two great-grandsons from two different sons. One was the China-trading Russell and Co. co-founder, Samuel Wadsworth Russell, and another was Skull and Bones co-founder, William Huntington Russell. This fact alone seems to indicate a connection between Yale and the opium trade in China worth pursuing. There are also many important links between the trade in opium in those days, not only with Yale, but with Harvard and Princeton as well, all of which occur because of the close family connections within the management of those three universities.

In January 2012 I traced the various ancestries, first by starting with John Kerry's relationship back through the Forbes family, and then by the Russell family's long connections to Yale and to the founding of Skull and Bones--a project I had been working on for several years. See 2004 article, "Primer on Controlling People, Using Their Own Money." As one can see, the same themes run over and over throughout this history.

In a more recent project, I showed how those same families who were involved in subsidizing the Skull and Bones (Russell Trust) network through the Morgan banking empire were, according to Antony Sutton's research, overthrown after the 1929 crash from a technology based on electric powered streetcars (Morgan) to one envisioning individually owned petroleum-fueled vehicles (Rockefeller). Both group of investors have been heavily entrenched within the Order of Skull and Bones. Whoever controls Skull and Bones thus seems to control the direction of American investment.

Now, Back to Heroin and French Indochina

Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, a/k/a Tommy the Cork, a contemporary of Jesse Jones in Herbert Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation, had cemented his Texas connection in 1937 by lobbying for Sam Rayburn to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Corcoran took a great deal of political flak for the maneuvers (such as the "Court packing plan) he handled for FDR; because of his loyalty, according to author David McKean, in October 1940 he was assigned to perform an undercover task in China:

The importance of being a Delano

Roosevelt conveyed to him, again through Lauchlin Currie, that he wanted to establish a private corporation to provide assistance to the Chinese. Corcoran thought the president's idea was ingenious, and later wrote that "if we'd tried to set up a government corporation per se, or do the work out of a Federal office, there would have been devil to pay on the Hill." Instead, Corcoran set up a civilian corporation, which he chartered in Delaware and, at the suggestion of the president, named China Defense Supplies. It would be, as Corcoran later recalled, "the entire lend lease operation" for Asia.
 
In order to provide the company with the stamp of respectability, Roosevelt arranged for his elderly uncle, Frederick Delano, who'd spent a lifetime in the China trade, to be co-chairman. The other chairman was T.V. Soong, Chiang's personal representative who frequently visited Washington to lobby for aid to his government. Soong, a Harvard graduate, was also Chiang's finance minister, as well as his banker and his brother-in-law. And he was a close friend of David Corcoran, whom he had met when the younger Corcoran was working in the Far East.

It just so happens that David was one of Tommy the Cork's brothers. Drew Pearson wrote about the Corcoran family's involvement in the quasi-government corporation in his August 1, 1942 column, which is so incredible it must be printed here in full, with emphasis added in italics:

WASHINGTON — For a long time official Washington never knew that the celebrated Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran ever had anyone else in his family. The public spotlight which beat down on him as the most intimate adviser of the president was so intent that it put everyone else in the shadow.

Recently, however, Washington has discovered two of his brothers. In fact, it has become very much aware of them. One is Howard Corcoran, assistant United States district attorney in New York, the man primarily responsible for the wholesale arrests in the German-American bund. For more than a year, Howard Corcoran waged an up-hill battle to round up the bund. Other federal officials argued that the bund could not be touched, most of the members being American citizens. Some of the leaders might be arrested, but that was all, they said.

Bund's Nemesis

Howard Corcoran, however, maintained that the proper strategy was not to arrest the leaders and scare the others underground, but to watch the entire organization, then make wholesale arrests. This quiet surveillance was carried on for more than a year, and resulted in the largest arrest in our history. David Corcoran, the other brain trust brother, is fighting the nazis in a unique manner. He has become the chief American spearhead in routing the nazi drug trust from South America.

To appreciate the importance of this, it is necessary to know that the drug industry for years has been the chief undercover organization for nazi propaganda in Latin-America. Nazi traveling salesmen, penetrating the byways, were able to report on everything a foreign military power wanted to know, in addition to arranging political contacts, and using radio and newspaper advertisements to spread nazi "kultur" among Latin-American good neighbors.

So important is this drug propaganda network that until a short time ago the nazis flew essential drugs into South America, smuggled aspirin from the United States through pro-nazi Latin-American armies and, thanks to the large stocks accumulated before war broke, have continued to carry on. For a long time the state department and the Rockefeller committee have been trying to get the United States firms to carry similar radio and newspaper propaganda, and now give credit to David Corcoran for doing the most outstanding job along this line.

Guns Turned Around

It is paradoxical that the commercial instrument through which Corcoran works is a firm that for a time had patent connections with the German drug trust. Corcoran's firm, the Sydney Ross Co., is a subsidiary of Sterling Products, the biggest drug business in the U.S.A. [Sterling purchased the U.S. assets of the German Bayer AG, including its patent to aspirin.] Its enormous resources, once partially derived from its relationship with the German drug trust, now have been completely  reversed and, through Sydney Ross, thrown into an economic war to the death in Latin America. As one Washington official expressed it: "We have boarded the Bismarck and turned her guns around."

[According to International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 1. St. James Press, 1988 relative to Sterling Drug, Inc."

 In the 1920's cartels with German companies were condoned as a means of helping Germany's beleaguered post-war economy. Yet, as argued in 1942 Fortune magazine article, it was at this early stage that the German government laid the foundation for a policy of economic fascism. At the roots of the struggle over "a simple glassine envelope containing two aspirin-compound tablets" was "Germany's attempt to reduce a continent to the economic and political status of a colony."

Whatever real or imagined designs Germany had in regard to its Latin American market, however, it soon became apparent that it was neither economically nor politically viable for Sterling to continue conducting business with Farben. Coming within a hairsbreadth of suffering U.S. government action, two Sterling subsidiaries in Latin America, Winthrop Products, Inc. and the Sydney Ross Co., suddenly became the advanced guard for a U.S. trade-war policy against Germany. In other words, an all out economic war to gain hegemony over the Latin American market was waged against Farben; as far as Sterling was concerned the cartel ceased to exist.

This sudden turnaround seemed inconsistent in light of the previous intimate business dealings between the two companies. The initial agreement of 1923 called for Sterling to supply aspirin to the Latin American market only if Farben were at any time unable to do so. Yet as late as 1941, during the British blockade of Nazi occupied Europe, Farben asked Sterling to violate the agreement between the two companies and send Winthrop ethical drugs to Latin America. After two and a half days of debate William Erhard Weiss (at that time chairman of the board) ordered the shipment sent.]

Dave Corcoran, the driving force behind the Latin-American Sydney Ross venture, got to it in a roundabout way, in fact via Asia. Originally he was preparing for a medical career, but a girl diverted him into Asiatic trade. When he was graduated from Princeton, he was entered at Oxford for medical studies, but he fell in love and wanted to get married. His father insisted he have a professional education first. A medical course would take several years, so Dave fished through college catalogues to find the professional education requiring the least time. He took a two-year course at the Harvard business school.

Romance Changes Career 

At the end of the course, he married his girl and went to work for an Asiatic trading company. In the far east, he became Tokyo manager of General Motors, saw the movement through Japan of the first military trucks for the conquest of Manchukuo, left General Motors to sell American pharmaceuticals for Sterling Products in China, the Philippines, Malaya and India. Later, Corcoran was lent to Washington as president of China Defense Supplies, Inc., of the lend-lease corporation, and was the first of the crusaders to get supplies up the Burma road, to make up for the trucks he had sent into Manchuria ten years ago.

About this time Sterling Products promised the justice department to compensate for its previous partnership with the Germans by trying to drive the German drug business off the commercial map of Latin America. It seemed an impossible job. But Sterling fished Dave Corcoran out of its pocket and put him in charge of an economic drive against the key item in the German line — aspirin, which had been trademarked and advertised in Latin America for nearly 20 years and had a practical monopoly.

Corcoran had to begin from scratch with a new name. The Germans had stocks carefully accumulated against the possibility of war. Corcoran had to export from the U.S.A., often by the air, as submarines handicapped shipping routes. The Germans had a solid, 65-year-old organization; Corcoran had only a handful of young Americans.

Dave Goes Into Action

The way the Sydney Ross Co. swung into action still has Latin America gasping. Corcoran called in his old team from all over the world and scoured the lists for every good export man he had ever known. In six months, the Latin American organization had tripled. The new trade name "mejoral" became the subject of the biggest American promotion job in Latin American history.

Overnight, Sidney Ross became the biggest radio and newspaper advertiser and the biggest sound and movie truck operator in Latin America. For the first time the American government has a Latin-American "sales" organization comparable to anything the Germans ever had in their commercial conquests. This organization covers not only the city areas, but follows the trail of famous German peddler and his mule throughout the interior.

The success of the drive has been phenomenal. Wherever Sydney Ross can get supplies it is already consistently outselling the Germans and has developed such a fierce competitive technique that anti-monopoly cranks in Washington already are more concerned that Sydney Ross will dominate the market than lambasting the Germans. All of which causes Dave Corcoran to remark:

"Monopoly! About the same kind of monopoly the marines had at Wake island!"

(Copyright, 1942, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)

Once you have time to digest all this, we'll be back with more about Tommy the Cork's law partner, William Sterling Youngman, Jr. who is the central man in this story. In 1934 Youngman was licensed to practice law, and in April 1937 was married to Elsie Hooper Perkins. We pick up there next time. Be ready!

Knights and Their Secret Orders

Conditional Allegiance to Power?

In another blog article, I borrowed a quote from famed economic historian Robert L. Heilbroner who was quoted by James Presley in his book, A Saga of Wealth as follows:

Vassal swearing allegiance to lord

“Throughout most of history,” wrote Robert L. Heilbroner, “wealth and power have gone hand in hand.” The alliance, an obvious one, has grown with but occasional public outcries. Working together, possessors of wealth and power may achieve a stability of their own. Over most of history, wealth has been a vassal to power, for as Heilbroner explained, “it was easier for the ruler to become a rich man than the rich man a ruler.” [Presley, page 303]

Elliott Roosevelt was ushered into the radio business initially by Fort Worth men associated in business with  the father of his second wife, Ruth Googins. They enticed him to move to  Texas -- undoubtedly promising him the moon in the hope of attracting his father's power for their own interests. Newly elected Franklin Roosevelt had a power to which these businessmen gravitated, but that expanding federal power could also make them shudder. Americans, since the days of the Federalist blockade against England, have fought tooth and nail against the Constitutional principle of majority rule, which effectively damns the business interests of the defeated minority. They swear their fealty and allegiance to the man in power only when he gives them what they want. Full stop.

In 1930 Texas had quite a number of men, like Elliott's radio investors Sid Richardson and Charles Roeser, who had recently become rich in the oil fields of Corsicana and East Texas. Over the preceding decades these wealthy men had witnessed what they viewed as the usurpation of state law by the federal government. The federal government had obtained the power to tax their incomes in 1913 and to prohibit the sale of liquor within the state in 1920. Both laws could now be enforced through the expanding powers of the Bureau of Investigation, linked to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Prohibition, as opposed to Texas' own police force, the Texas Rangers.

With this feeling of a need to reach out and grab control of federal authority--much as Colonel Edward M. House of Texas had done when he went in search of a candidate for the Presidency in 1912--the newly wealthy oilmen in Texas thought that, by buying Elliott a place within Fort Worth society, they would thus gain the power of the executive office for themselves. Like the du Pont family of Delaware who would attempt to buy Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. in 1937, the Texans soon discovered things did not quite go as planned under the new President.

FDR was happy to accept his minions' pledge of fealty but, as the rich Texans soon learned, he rarely protected their interests if it was inconsistent with his concept of the overall good for America. Two of these wealthy "vassals," as we have seen, Sid Richardson and Charles Roeser, saw their investment in Elliott's radio network tank. At the same time, their primary interest--oil--was also in dire straits. Where was the protection they expected?

Hot Oil in East Texas

FDR was elected in 1932 by a plethora of groups disenchanted with Republican Herbert Hoover's nonaction in overcoming the effects of the stock market crash in 1929 and the depression that seemed to be unending. The Democrats' pledge to repeal the Volstead Act brought several otherwise divergent groups of voters into the Party, including Franklin Jr.'s in-laws, the du Ponts of the famous chemical conglomerate.

Over-drilling in East Texas

A wealthy group of Texas Democrats consisted of oil men made wealthy in the East Texas Oil Fields, who saw their profits being drained by fly-by-night opportunists tapping wells into the massive pools of oil underneath their own oil wells. They believed they had the right to regulate production through the Texas Railroad Commission, originated in the days when Colonel Edward M. House was building his own railroad and electing governors in Texas to appoint men to the Commission judicially recognized as the agency in charge of regulating oil and gas.

The Texas Oil and Gas Conservation Act of 1919 prohibited production of crude oil “in such manner and under such conditions as to constitute waste” and the Texas Railroad Commission was charged with doing “all things necessary for the conservation of oil” and with establishment of “such rules and regulations as will be necessary to conserve the oil and gas resources in the state.”

Believing the 1919 Act gave Texas complete power to regulate oil well production within Texas, the commissioners attempted to quell the flow from cheap "teakettle" refineries set up by independent oilmen who came to the Texas boom field from all parts of the nation, threatening to drain the pools underneath the wells of the "big oil" interests like Humble Oil. In the summer of 1931, more than a year before FDR's election, a federal appeals court had struck down the power of the Railroad Commission to do more than to "conserve" oil, disallowing a quota system, and thus upholding the rule of capture announced many years earlier in Pennsylvania.

Big Oil vs. Independents

Sterling Mansion portico

The governor of Texas at this time, Ross Sterling, was one of the founders of Humble Oil (now Exxon), who had resigned from the Humble board in 1925 when his sale of stock to Standard Oil of New Jersey made him a wealthy man and gave Jersey Standard half of Humble's stock. Sterling had seen his fortune diminish with the 1929 stock crash, which came on the heels of his sinking a hefty $1.4 million of his new-found wealth into the construction of a 21,000-square- foot mansion in La Porte, Texas.

Governor Sterling

As the Depression deepened without help in sight from President Herbert Hoover, Sterling took action on the state level, calling a special session of the Texas Legislature in August 1931 to address the oil crisis. Federal courts were being requested to grant injunctions in favor of small independent oil men who had contracted to sell more oil than the Railroad Commission permitted them to drill under new proration orders, issued in the hope of stopping the price of oil from plummeting further.

Since June, "the price of oil throughout the Mid-Continent Field had fallen from one dollar and seven cents for high gravity oil, similar to that produced in East Texas, to an average of twenty-two cents a barrel." [Master's thesis of Lucile Silvey Beard, citing L. G. Bignell, “East Texas Must Not Pass 160,000 Barrels of Oil,” Oil and Gas Journal, August 20, 1931, p. 23.]

While appealing one such injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sterling then declared a state of war in East Texas and put the Texas National Guard's Brig. Gen. Jacob F. Wolters in charge of enforcing the new Texas law. Wolters, a graduate of the Fort Worth college that later became Texas Christian University (TCU), was not only a partner in a Houston law firm which acted as general counsel for the Texas Company (later Texaco), but, since 1918, as a general in the Texas National Guard had been the "troubleshooter for many Texas governors. They called on him to establish martial law in areas where even the Texas Rangers could not reassert civil law and order." [1]

In December 1932, a month after FDR was elected but not yet inaugurated, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal district court's contempt order against Governor Sterling "on the ground that a governor can declare martial law only in case of actual insurrection or menacing threats of insurrection."

In Sterling v. Constantin, 287 U.S. 378 (1932), Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who wrote the stinging opinion, addressed the governor's "attempt to regulate by executive order the lawful use of complainants' properties in the production of oil" by interjecting himself in the place of civil judicial process, delegating the authority to the

Humble Oil

Not only did Governor Sterling lose this case, so did former-governor Dan Moody, who had preceded Sterling as governor. Moody, given the credit for ending the reign of the Ku Klux Klan prominent once again during Prohibition, by fighting against the localized corruption of Pa and Ma Ferguson, had made it possible for the federal government to increase its power in areas formerly left to state control.

According to Nicholas G. Malavis in Bless the Pure and Humble: Texas Lawyers and Oil Regulation, 1919-1936, Moody--who had returned to private practice when succeeded by Sterling (elected apparently in an effort to protect Standard Oil's stock value)--was hired as attorney for a plethora of independent East Texas oil operators (filling 13 Pullman train cars) when Dan represented their interest before proration hearings at the Railroad Commission in March 1931. The orders came and went but, without any inherent enforcement mechanism, Governor Sterling was impotent without the national guard.

Rise of the "Federal Authority"

What is important for these purposes, however, is how this battle in the oil fields affected what was later to occur in Texas politics during the 1960's. Having been slapped down for using state action to regulate what they thought should have been within the state's power, certain influential Texans sought to buy their way into federal power. And if that wouldn't work, ... well, it would work. Texans knew how to handle such matters. They had being doing it since 1836.

Pre-1931 photo of Gov. Moody showing Oveta Culp as parliamentarian; she was later wife of Gov. Hobby

Remember San Jacinto!

These events occurred a relatively short time before Texas started to plan for the Centennial to commemorate its 100 years of independence from Mexico, declared on March 2, 1836, but not officially won until winning the battle at San Jacinto on April 21 that year. Ironically, Texans were only able to build a suitable monument to their glory days of independence by tapping into funds obtained from the federal government. And it just so happened they had powerful men in place who did the tapping for them--Vice President John Nance Garner and RFC chairman Jesse H. Jones.  The total monies for the memorial was set out in a special article in the San Antonio Light May 9, 1937:

The government, appropriated $3,000,000 for Centennial markers and buildings and other government agencies contributed enormous amounts of money toward various Centennial projects. The expenditure for San Jacinto is approximately this:

Vice President Garner's Centennial commission..................$ 385,000
WPA for landscaping...............................................................325,000
WPA Funds for terracing........................................................ 500,000
Extra fund approved by president........................................... 200,000

Total federal funds.............................................................. $1,320,000
State appropriation .............................................................$   250,000

Houstonians and Texas officials were embarrassed when Jesse Jones who, as chairman of RFC was instrumental in obtaining the WPA and PWA grants and originally inspired the San Jacinto monument, came to Houston to level the cornerstone which was to have borne his name. Additional embarrassment is in store for those who accompany President Roosevelt on his scheduled visit to San Jacinto at the end of his gulf fishing trip.

The reason the original fund set up in Texas was not used was that the constitutional amendment authorizing a centennial celebration and instructing the legislature to make adequate financial provision for resulted in competition among Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to host the central exposition. Although it possessed the least historical background, the commission chose Dallas because it offered the largest cash commitment ($7,791,000), the existing State Fair of Texas facility with provisions for expansion, and unified urban leadership headed by bankers Robert L. Thornton, Fred F. Florence, and Nathan Adams. The Texas legislature and the United States Congress each appropriated $3,000,000 for the special 1936 centennial; however, it was determined these funds could not be used in this monument.

It was thus up to Houstonian Jesse Jones to ensure that those "Sons of the Republic of Texas" who fought at San Jacinto were properly memorialized. An editorial in the Kerrville Daily Times humorously recounted events surrounding San Jacinto Day celebrations of 1937:

It has been suggested that an enemy of Jesse Jones is responsible for the protest of the patriotic organization. This may or may not be true, but the whole fuss looks like a tempest in a teapot to us. Far too many squabbles have developed during the Texas Centennial period over the location bill u provision which would have of Centennial memorials, etc. Such foolishness should stop....Jesse Jones foremost citizen of Houston, and a National leader, was largely responsible for the Federal appropriation for the monument. We see no good reason why his name and the names of the President and Vice President might not have been cut into an inconspicuous cornerstone. The whole fuss is being humorously referred to as the "Second Battle of San Jacinto." A similar uproar about the Alamo which occurred several years ago, was designated as the "Second Battle of the Alamo," and just now a third battle seems to be possible over the location of the Alamo Museum.

Jesse H. Jones and Sam Houston's only surviving son, Andrew Jackson Houston - 1936

In a show of gratitude that the long-dreamt-of monument was finally a reality, the Sons of the Republic of Texas (Gen. Jacob F. Wolters had been a president of the fraternity before 1934) made Jesse an honorary member. He could not be a regular member, because of its bylaws:

The society of Sons of the Republic of Texas is composed of white male persons of good moral character who are more than 16 years old and who are descended from an ancestor who was a loyal resident citizen of Texas prior to its annexation to the United States of America in February of 1846.

Base of San Jacinto Monument

Then they took him into their small secret order, the Knights of San Jacinto, created by Texian President Sam Houston in 1843, and revived by the Sons of the Republic of Texas at the culmination of Centennial celebrations on San Jacinto Day 1939. San Jacinto Museum of History Association headed by George A. Hill, Jr., the man "primarily responsible for creating the San Jacinto Museum."

The secret order's major role in later history will be explored in other posts at this blog.

 __________________

Endnotes:

[1] Wolters, a partner in an eminent Houston firm--Lane, Wolters and Storey--with Judge James L. Storey and Jonathan Lane. When Storey died in 1925, his obituary stated he had recently withdrawn from the firm -- making it Wolters, Blanchard, Woodul and Wolters -- which then included former lieutenant governor Walter F. Woodul, with offices on the  eighth floor of Jesse Jones' Houston Chronicle Building.