The Battle of the Baptists

"The Christian church must be a 'propagandist society'."

— Dr. Louis Entzminger

Air Lines and Air Waves in Fort Worth

Working for Brown Brothers Harriman?

When we look behind the corporate curtain to find the money and personnel involved in Elliott Roosevelt's radio station, we uncover much more than meets the eye. The radio station the President's son acquired in 1938 had been owned since 1926 by A.P. Barrett and C.R. Smith of Texas Air Transport, who had used KTAT radio in connection with their own business interests. In 1929 Barrett expanded by incorporating Southern Air Transport (SAT), which absorbed Texas Air Transport, and retained Smith as vice president and treasurer. Later that year, SAT became part of the Aviation Corporation (AVCO), whose chairman was Bonesman W. Averell Harriman, who had recently combined his investment banks with that of the old established Brown Brothers bank of New York.

As mentioned earlier, the attorney for the radio station and the airline which owned it was Raymond E. Buck.

Attorney Buck's father, Judge R.H. Buck, in 1909 was head of the First Baptist Church committee responsible for bringing preacher, John Franklyn Norris, to Fort Worth. Norris described the church in this way:

Millionaires hung in bunches. It was known as "The Home of the Cattle Kings".... I had a literal contempt for the whole machinery. (page 85-86 of file)

Jesse T. Pemberton, who would become Norris' great friend and supporter, was president of the local Farmers and Mechanics National Bank and was quoted (page 84 of file), quite prophetically, as saying:

"I am not opposed to J. Frank Norris; I am for him, but this church is not in condition for his type of ministry. If he comes there will be the all-firedest explosion ever witnessed in any church. We are at peace with the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with one another. And this fellow carries a broad axe and not a pearl handle pen knife. I just want to warn you. But now since you have called him, I am going to stay by him."

As Norris tells his story, he raised no shackles among the congregation for two years. That, however, would change. He says, in his self-deprecating manner, that it began by his telling his wife in 1911 (page 87):

Rev. J. Frank Norris

"I am going to quit the ministry."
She said, "When did you ever begin?"
Such unkindness!...
I didn't care what happened. Mark you there was perfect peace in the church — just as there is in a grave yard. The only difference between that church and the grave yard was the people in the grave yard were buried and everybody knew it, but in the church they were dead and unburied and didn't know it. 

Reading the Entzminger book — much of which is a reprint of Norris' book, Inside the Cup, one has difficulty understanding the chronology of events, as they shift between 1912, 1926 and 1945 as though mere days had elapsed. The author often referred to his antagonists in Tarrant County only with labels (like the district attorney) rather than names. At one point, however, the book does state that Norris' attorneys were Lattimore and Doyle, and it is easy to identify them as Offa Shivers Lattimore (Judge Buck's brother-in-law) and D.M. Doyle, who were engaged in Southern Co-operative Life Insurance together in 1915 (pages 143-144 of file).

The year Norris became active against gambling, liquor and prostitution in Fort Worth, Texas was clearly the year 1911— the same year the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Standard Oil opinion requiring Rockefeller and his big oil cronies to split up their oil trust. Fundamentalists like Rev. William Bell Riley, a close friend of Norris, speaking at the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, charged that the Rockefellers were trying to "standardize" religion, much as they had the oil industry.

Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett write in Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon; Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil:

Fundamentalist distrust of the Rockefellers evolved into a near-pathological conviction that the Rockefellers were not religious at all, but promoters of a vast communist conspiracy to seize control of their churches and impose atheism on their schools.

The Liberal Baptists — a/k/a Rockefeller Funds

"Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, 

but to cause it. " — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Rev. Fosdick

The Rockefellers and their liberal ministers would wage years of battles against the likes of Milton and Lyman Stewart of Union Oil of California, who used Rev. Riley to attack the Rockefellers from his Chicago pulpit. The fundamentalist Stewarts made their donations to the Northern Baptist Convention conditional upon its adherence to the Fundamentalist Creed. When advised of this approach made by his competitors, Rockefeller, Sr. took steps to modify the terms of his own gifts, threatening to revoke them if used to the benefit of Fundamentalist ideas.

Colby and Dennett state that in Thy Will Be Done that "the Fundamentalist Controversy" then ensued with Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick taking the position for the Modernists, along with Rockefeller-sponsored Beardsley Ruml.

After Fosdick preached a sermon in 1924 called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" he was ejected from his Presbyterian Church pulpit but would rapidly be hired by the Park Avenue Baptist Church, whose membership included Rockefeller, Jr. Under Fosdick's leadership it would become the interdenominational Riverside Church, moving into an architecturally magnificent new building overlooking the Hudson River in 1930.

Junior had five sons who, utilizing the money from charitable and educational foundations already set up by their grandfather (Senior) and by Junior, further increased the institutional power of their social network. David Rockefeller joined the Rockefeller and Aldrich family banking empire at Chase National Bank in 1946. John D. III coordinated the Rockefeller philanthropic interests, sitting on the boards of dozens of educational, cultural and social foundations into which Rockefeller money was poured. Laurance had a seat on the NYSE and focused on venture capital, setting up Rockefeller Brothers Fund for that purpose in 1940. He was fascinated by aviation, helping to organize Eastern Airlines and McDonnell Aircraft.

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., born and reared in New York, was a Baptist from the American Baptist Society. He believed in molding the minds of his own family, as well as the world, and he set up the General Education Board for that purpose, under Frederick T. Gates:

From the start, the GEB had a mission. A letter from John D. Rockefeller Sr. specified that his gifts were to be used "to promote a comprehensive system." You might well ask what interests the system was designed to promote, but you would be asking the wrong question. Frederick Gates, the Baptist minister hired to disburse Rockefeller largesse, gave a terse explanation when he said, "The key word is system." American life was too unsystematic to suit corporate genius. Rockefeller’s foundation was about systematizing us.
 
In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these new foundations of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and of other corporate families. After a year of testimony it concluded:

The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation.

Foundation grants directly enhance the interests of the corporations sponsoring them, it found. The conclusion of this congressional commission:

The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.

Foundations automatically make friends among banks which hold their large deposits, in investment houses which multiply their monies, in law firms which act as their counsels, and with the many firms, institutions, and individuals with which they deal and whom they benefit. By careful selection of trustees from the ranks of high editorial personnel and other media executives and proprietors, they can assure themselves press support, and by engaging public relations counselors can further create good publicity. [emphasis added]

Planning Society's Future

Senior and Junior

Junior, not one to question his father's strong beliefs, had his children educated along lines his father laid out. In 1919, Senior had commissioned John Dewey, a Columbia Teachers College professor, to found the Progressive Education Association, and it was in this experimental program that Nelson Rockefeller obtained his primary school education. The Lincoln Experimental School at Columbia Teachers College was:

testing ground for Harold Rugg’s series of textbooks, which moved 5 million copies by 1940 and millions more after that. In these books Rugg advanced this theory: "Education must be used to condition the people to accept social change....The chief function of schools is to plan the future of society." Like many of his activities over three vital decades on the school front, the notions Rugg put forth in The Great Technology (1933), were eventually translated into practice in urban centers. Rugg advocated that the major task of schools be seen as "indoctrinating" youth, using social "science" as the "core of the school curriculum" to bring about the desired climate of public opinion.  [emphasis added]

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. died in 1937. In March of the following year Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas expropriated the assets of nearly all of the foreign oil companies operating in Mexico, and this same Nelson Rockefeller, educated to believe in using education to condition the minds of people to acceptance of social change, was introduced to Harry Hopkins in the Roosevelt administration by his advance man, Beardsley Ruml, as being willing to negotiate terms of compensation for the seizure of American oil assets by Mexico. Nelson was then only 30 years old. Listening to Cardenas tell him his own version of Mexico's history of being subverted by the United States government and its leaders was an education in itself, but a teaching experience showing him the need to work covertly within these South American countries which contained a huge reservoir of oil his family would like to capture and control.

Cardenas did not relent to young Nelson's weak plea that foreigners be allowed to retain control over assets they had acquired in Mexico, and the U.S. embargo against buying Mexico oil continued. When Mexico began selling oil to Germany, which was then at war against the British, measures to be taken became more pressing.

The next time Nelson spoke to FDR's adviser Harry Hopkins he spoke about the need to open Mexico up to American corporate investment and augment the consular service with programs in culture, education and science to stimulate production, his requests would magically materialize. The advisory committee that he requested be set up with a person to coordinate the programs who had direct access to the White House would soon be incorporated into a Presidential Executive Order.

Who Slew John in Dallas?

The author of this blog — Linda Minor — has been conducting research for the last two decades from every direction around a core hub, that hub being the role of Texans who came together in 1963 to kill John F. Kennedy. That role did not emerge overnight; it had been building up for more than a hundred years, as detailed throughout this blog. Understanding that historical context is necessary before one can really answer the question: "Who slew John in Dallas?"

Thomas E.Mahl, author of Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, has contributed much more on this subject than he has been given any credit for, especially by his recognition of how British intelligence has recruited spies within the American government and set up its own intelligence system within the inner workings of the United States. He writes:

British intelligence had certainly infiltrated Benjamin Franklin’s American embassy in France. Franklin’s chief assistant, Dr. Edward Bancroft, was a British intelligence agent who passed all the information he could gather on to England. In the period 1778–83 the problem was how to get out of a war with the Americans, but in 1916–17 it was how to get the United States into a war. Intrepid’s World War I counterpart had been Sir William Wiseman (1885–1962). His family background, sense of taste, good manners, and discretion highly recommended him to Edward M. House, President Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser. 

“Colonel” House liked to associate with the famous and titled, and Wiseman could trace his lineage back to the time of Henry VIII and his baronetage to 1628. As Wilson had favored the British in World War I, Franklin Roosevelt was quite willing to work with British intelligence in World War II. One of the unnoticed consequences of Roosevelt’s cooperation was that British intelligence promoted the creation of two American intelligence organizations. Most well known of these organizations was the Coordinator of Information, which became the Office of Strategic Services. The other intelligence organization was so well camouflaged that it was not until 1976 that the first hint appeared that the “Rockefeller Office,” or more properly the Office of the Coordinator of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, later the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, had been an intelligence operation. The book A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson (no relation to Intrepid) was, for all its flaws, the first to reveal that the Rockefeller Office was an intelligence operation—one that brought the soothing balm of Rockefeller dollars to Intrepid’s ambitious but money-short Latin American operations. [Note—Paul Kramer, “Nelson Rockefeller and British Security Coordination,” JCH 16 (January 1981): 76.]

Another writer has dealt with the role of the British in using secret agents to subvert American opinion and seduce our nation into war. An anonymous author of "The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and The New World Order," known only as W.E.B., published at Terry Melanson's Illuminati Conspiracy website, wrote with a great degree of insight that provides links between the British and Texans as far back as WWI:

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1913, beating incumbent William Howard Taft, who had vowed to veto legislation establishing a central bank. To divide the Republican vote and elect the relatively unknown Wilson, J.P. Morgan and Co. poured money into the candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive Party. 

According to an eyewitness, Wilson was brought to Democratic Party headquarters in 1912 by Bernard Baruch, a wealthy banker. He received an "indoctrination course" from those he met, and in return agreed, if elected: to support the projected Federal Reserve and the income tax, and "listen" to advice in case of war in Europe and on the composition of his cabinet. 

The Texas 'colonel'

Wilson's top advisor during his two terms was a man named Colonel Edward M. House. House's biographer, Charles Seymour, called him the "unseen guardian angel" of the Federal Reserve Act, helping to guide it through Congress. Another biographer wrote that House believed: "...the Constitution, product of eighteenth-century minds...was thoroughly outdated; that the country would be better off if the Constitution could be scrapped and rewritten..." House wrote a book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator, published anonymously in 1912. The hero, Philip Dru, rules America and introduces radical changes, such as a graduated income tax, a central bank, and a "league of nations." 

World War I produced both a large national debt, and huge profits for those who had backed Wilson. Baruch was appointed head of the War Industries Board, where he exercised dictatorial power over the national economy. He and the Rockefellers were reported to have earned over $200 million during the war. Wilson backer Cleveland Dodge sold munitions to the allies, while J.P. Morgan loaned them hundreds of millions, with the protection of U.S. entry into the war. 

While profit was certainly a motive, the war was also useful to justify the notion of world government. William Hoar reveals in Architects of Conspiracy that during the 1950s, government investigators examining the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a long- time promoter of globalism, found that several years before the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie trustees were planning to involve the U.S. in a general war, to set the stage for world government. 

The main obstacle was that Americans did not want any involvement in European wars. Some kind of incident, such as the explosion of the battleship Main, which provoked the Spanish - American war, would have to be provided as provocation. This occurred when the Lusitania, carrying 128 Americans on board, was sunk by a German submarine, and anti-German sentiment was aroused. When war was declared, U.S. propaganda portrayed all Germans as Huns and fanged serpents, and all Americans opposing the war as traitors.
What was not revealed at the time, however, was that the Lusitania was transporting war munitions to England, making it a legitimate target for the Germans. Even so, they had taken out large ads in the New York papers, asking that Americans not take passage on the ship.

The evidence seems to point to a deliberate plan to have the ship sunk by the Germans. Colin Simpson, author of The Lusitania, wrote that Winston Churchill, head of the British Admiralty during the war, had ordered a report to predict the political impact if a passenger ship carrying Americans was sunk. German naval codes had been broken by the British, who knew approximately where all U-boats near the British Isles were located. 

According to Simpson, Commander Joseph Kenworthy, of British Naval Intelligence, stated: "The Lusitania was deliberately sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting...escorts withdrawn." Thus, even though Wilson had been reelected in 1916 with the slogan "He kept us out of war," America soon found itself fighting a European war. Actually, Colonel House had already negotiated a secret agreement with England, committing the U.S. to the conflict. It seems the American public had little say in the matter. 

With the end of the war and the Versailles Treaty, which required severe war reparations from Germany, the way was paved for a leader in Germany such as Hitler. Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference his famous "fourteen points," with point fourteen being a proposal for a "general association of nations," which was to be the first step towards the goal of One World Government — the League of Nations. 

Wilson's official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker, revealed that the League was not Wilson's idea. "...not a single idea in the Covenant of the League was original with the President." Colonel House was the author of the Covenant, and Wilson had merely rewritten it to conform to his own phraseology. 

The League of Nations was established, but it, and the plan for world government eventually failed because the U.S. Senate would not ratify the Versailles Treaty. Pat Robertson, in "The New World Order," states that Colonel House, along with other internationalists, realized that America would not join any scheme for world government without a change in public opinion.[emphasis added]

The CIAA — Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs

On July 30, 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8840, whose purpose was:

to provide for the development of commercial and cultural relations between the American Republics and thereby increasing the solidarity of this hemisphere and furthering the spirit of cooperation between the Americas in the interest of hemisphere defense, it is hereby ordered as follows:

1. There is established within the Office for Emergency Management of the Executive Office of the President the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs [CIAA], at the head of which there shall be a Coordinator appointed by the President.

Nelson, the Coordinator

The Coordinator FDR appointed to his newest bureau was none other than Nelson Rockefeller himself, then only 33 years old. One year after this appointment, the Mexicans agreed to pay roughly $29 million in compensation to several American oil firms, including Jersey Standard and Socal, whose properties had been seized by Mexico. In the meantime, Nelson Rockefeller's dreams of dominance over South and Central America proceeded unabated.

Fort Worth would become a major recruiting ground for the CIAA's network, as we will see in the next episode. The conservative Baptists under Norris, though ostensibly fighting Rockefeller's liberal programs, were used by the CIAA as spies and covert operatives to fight further expropriation of capitalists' assets within the American hemisphere, as well as in other parts of the world.

When the Rich Marry Up, War Follows

In June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Woodrow Wilson was President and declared the United States to be neutral, as one after another country in Europe entered the war on the side either of Austria-Hungary or Serbia. Wilson's position would persist into 1917, while capitalists and speculators saw opportunities to cash in on the demand, possibly even selling to both sides in Europe.

October 1915

What led up to a "takeover" of Remington Arms actually began in the fall of 1915 with Midvale Steel. A syndicate of money desiring to buy a company to make war weapons contacted investment banker William A. Read to negotiate the purchase of assorted companies involved in steel production to combine into ordnance making. 

Midvale's owner had refused to violate the neutrality by selling to belligerents but was enticed into selling his stock to men who had no such compunction. William E. Corey of U.S. Steel, which had been put together in 1901 from Carnegie Steel by the Morgan banking group, headed the new Midvale Steel and Ordnance company, in which Marcellus Hartley Dodge (who controlled Remington Arms and Ammunition, maker of hunting rifles) also owned stock. Dodge had in 1907 married a sister of Percy Rockefeller of Greenwich, Connecticut, not a great distance from Bridgeport where the munitions plant would be built starting in November 1915.

Years earlier Remington Arms, a company which manufactured sporting rifles, had combined with UMC, a maker of cartridges for those guns. Texas historian John Mason Hart tells us in his highly recommended 2002 book, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War:

[T]he merchants were not men to trifle with: their influence exceeded the mere sale of weapons. Marcellus Hartley, part owner of Schuyler, Hartley, and Graham, served as the president of the Union Metallic Cartridge Company and as a director of Remington Arms. As a director of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States he was also connected to the highest levels of finance. Using his access to large amounts of capital, he eventually assumed control of Remington and merged it with Union Cartridge. He was a close associate of [James] Stillman, [Cleveland] Dodge, Beekman, and [Moses] Taylor. All of them avidly supported Romero and the Mexican Liberals against the French.

Both Percy and brother William G. Rockefeller were married to daughters of banker James J. Stillman, the major stockholder of what was then the National City Bank (now Citigroup). These siblings and spouses thus joined their interests with those of their uncle and cousins at Chase Bank which was, of course, controlled by the other Rockefeller brother's family (John D. of Standard Oil).

Merchants of Death Know: War Pays

Business was good at Bridgeport.

Thus, the capital which helped to make Remington bigger and better came from men who used war profits from the U.S. war against Mexico and the Civil War to build the National City Bank in New York City. The merger resulted in the largest munitions company in America just in time to supply Europe with materiel  to meet their World War I demands. The huge factory was located in Bridgeport, CT, not far from Greenwich and New Haven, home to the famous Skull and Bones secret society. 

The stock of Remington and United Cartridge fell into the hands of a 31-year-old scion of New England wealth, whose grandfather, Marcellus Hartley, had purchased the two companies outright in 1888. He just happened to be Percy Rockefeller's brother-in-law and was described in a January 1916 feature in the NY Times entitled "Our Greatest Arms Plant," as follows:

Marcellus Hartley Dodge is the sole proprietor, and it was he as a young man of thirty-two—who looks like a youth of twenty-one—who waved the magic wand over the swamplands of Bridgeport and created almost overnight one of the greatest manufacturing plants in the country and a contribution for the military preparedness of the United States that is of incalculable value. Mr Dodge is an enthusiast over the great enterprise of which he is the head. His mother died in his infancy, and he was brought up in the home of his grandfather, Marcellus Hartley, the owner of the Remington Arms and the UMC [United Metallic Cartridge].

The article details how this one plant employed 50,000 workers in 38 building built as a city within the city of Bridgeport in only eighteen months.

Grandfather Hartley's death had occurred in 1902, two years after Percy Rockefeller (Skull and Bones) graduated from Yale. Five years later, on April 19, 1907, newspapers announced the marriage of Percy's sister to the weapons magnate:

VAST FORTUNES UNITED
Dodge-Rockefeller Wedding Brings
Together Eighty Million Dollars

Marcy and Gerrie go to the dogs...show.

New York, April 19 - The wedding yesterday afternoon at the bride's home of Marcellus Hartley Dodge and Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller gives the two young people upward of $80,000,000 with which to start their life together. The bride is a daughter of William Rockefeller and niece of John D. Rockefeller, while the groom came into a fortune on the death of his grandfather, Marcellus Hartley.

Miss Rockefeller has $20,000,000 at least in her own name and Dodge inherited $60,000,000, which he has not decreased, yet the wedding was devoid of all ostentation. There were only the closest friends present, hardly a half hundred of them, and the bride wore an extremely simple white satin gown cut in princess fashion.

Thus, while Percy Avery Rockefeller and his brother William Goodsell married the daughters of the banker, James Stillman, their sister (Ethel Geraldine "Gerrie" Rockefeller) married the man whose family had supplied the weapons for the Stillmans to sell during the wars in Texas and Mexico. It is what bankers call "keeping the money in the family."

Mr. Dodge, known to family and friends as "Marcy," was the son of Norman White Dodge, whose father, William Earl Dodge married Melissa Phelps (1809-1903), the daughter of Anson Greene Phelps and Olivia Egleston. In 1833, William E. Dodge and his father-in-law founded the mining firm Phelps, Dodge, and Company, one of America's foremost mining companies. More importantly, he was heir to the Hartley fortune. The two became for a time the wealthiest couple in the nation and were the hub of a family wheel with spokes made of powerful Skull and Bones members with names such as Stillman, Rockefeller, Phelps, Stokes and Dodge.

Prior to the war, steel had been primarily sold for railroads, whose companies may have seen a future market with the growth of the automobile industry, which would also make use of petroleum, to the glee of the Rockefeller family. Morgan had not foreseen the automobile's expansion to individual consumers and instead concentrated his efforts upon the electric street railway industry. Which direction investment monies would flow was still in limbo in 1914, and war speculation thus came at a good time for the likes of these "gentlemen.

McCloy and the Rockefellers

Rockefeller Land, Bill Zeckendorf and John J. McCloy

William Zeckendorf was acting in 1946 as real estate adviser for John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and a few years later by his sons--Nelson, David, Winthrop and Aldrich.  Behind all these transactions was the attorney John J. McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany following World War II, followed by presidency and chairmanship of the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York.

 

FLUSHING, N. Y., (UP). — The United Nations general assembly plans to put its final stamp of approval today on the choice of New York City for permanent U. N. headquarters. The assembly had before it an
overwhelming recommendation of the U. N. headquarters committee in favor of building a skyscraper world capital in midtown Manhattan. Thirty-three nations voted to accept the offer of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of land worth $8,500,000 along the East river. Seven nations — all of them Moslem nations except Australia — opposed the site.

 

Leonard Lyons column - DECEMBER 22, 1949

The Rockefeller family has retained William Zeckendorf, head of Webb & Knapp, as their real estate advisor for Radio City, the largest single privately-held parcel in the world. Nelson Rockefeller, consummated the deal with Zeckendorf, who was also responsible for selling to the Rockefellers the site on which the new U.N. buildings are being erected.

January 14, 1955

Biggest Bank Merger
Okayed By Directors

NEW YORK (AP)—The biggest bank merger in history has been approved by directors of Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Co. If the plan is approved by stockholders and the New York superintendent of banking , Chase would be merged into Bank of the Manhattan Co. to produce the nation's second largest bank.

Bank of America in California is the largest bank with total resources of around 94 billion dollars. The Chase Manhattan Bank, as it would be called, would have resources of about 7 billion. Chase Manhattan would become the largest bank in New York—a position now held by National City Bank of New York.
On Dec. 31, Chase had deposits of $5,379,000,000 and Bank of the Manhattan Co. deposits totaled $1,479,000,000. The two thus would have deposits of $6,858,000,000 compared with Bank of America's $8,270,000,000 and National City's $5,639,000,000.
 
John J. McCloy, Chase chairman, would be chairman of the new bank and J. Stewart Baker, Manhattan's chairman, would become president and chairman of the executive committee. Percy J, Ebbott, president of
Chase, would have the post of vice chairman, the two banks announced.

 We can't leave here without connecting one more dot: how Zeckendorf became involved in Texas with the Wynne family in Dallas. That, too, began with our friend Jack McCloy. Author/historian Kai Bird tells us at p. 409 in The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment (1992):

"Only three days after Eisenhower issued his 'clarification,' McCloy came to the White House for one of the president's intimate stag dinners. He was one  in The Chairof fourteen tuxedoed guests that evening. Others included such old friends as Bernard Baruch, Milton Eisenhower, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Dr. Henry Wriston, the president of Brown University. Seated across from him at dinner was Sid Richardson, a Texas oil man who was then one of America's wealthiest individuals. Richardson had met Ike aboard a train traveling from Texas to Washington, D.C., in December 1941. The two men had kept in close touch since the end of the war, and Ike now counted the oil magnate as one of his closest friends. For years, Richardson had kept the Eisenhowers' freezer stocked with hundred of pounds of Texas beef, sausage, and hams. As president, Eisenhower consulted Richardson on oil and economic matters and used the Texan to influence the newly elected Senate minority leader, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.

"That evening, Richardson took an instant liking to McCloy and invited him to visit his farm in Texas. In a very short time, their friendship would also include some business dealings. But on this occasion, the dinner talk was all politics."

The Texans, Sid Richardson and Clint W. Murchison, have been shown many times to have been parts of an intricate network of businessmen in Texas tied up with all sorts of "deep political" intrigue. The first researcher to make the connection was Peter Dale Scott, whose work led this writer to engage in many other research projects following up on this fascinating connection. Those links can be seen in this blog at various tags and also in another website called Minor Musings. Search key words here.

The Wynne-ers' Circle

 The Power of the Wynne Family

Excerpt from Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, pp. 285-86:

Toddie Lee Wynne, Sr., the founder of the Wynne family fortunes, had begun in the 1930s as attorney for Clint Murchison, Sr. [10]  Bedford Wynne, the senior partner in the family law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley, was a Washington troubleshooter for the powerful Murchison oil and construction interests in Texas; we have already seen that in 1963 his questionable lobbying activities were beginning to attract the attention of the federal government.

*****

TSHA

Bedford Wynne

Most accounts of the efforts to bring an NFL team to Dallas treated Murchison and [Bedford] Wynne as partners and Wynne clearly served as the spokesman of this partnership. Wynne was the one who announced the hiring of Tex Schramm as general manager of the proposed team in November 1959. Wynne was also present at the meeting in Miami in 1960 when NFL owners officially approved the Dallas club as a franchise.

The picture above [see photo inset to right] shows Wynne and Murchison left along with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall and Tex Schramm. Marshall had been one of the more vocal opponents of expansion especially to the Southwest.

Wynne’s story is actually quite fascinating. Born July 14, 1923 he attended high school in Longview before graduating from the New Mexico Military Institute. He spent three and a half years in the Army and then attended the University of Texas. After graduating from UT he moved on to SMU Law School and was later admitted to practice in Texas.

He came from a prominent family in East Texas. His father [Angus Gilchrist Wynne, Sr.] was a lawyer [from tiny Van Zandt County] and active on the political scene. His brother [Angus Gilchrist Wynne, Jr.] was a successful real estate developer and his uncle [Toddie Lee Wynne] was a famous oilman. Wynne joined his family’s law firm and became a partner.

His interests were diverse. He was a director with such companies and organizations as Reliance Life Insurance Company the Sweetwater Development Center Junior Achievement Children’s Development Center the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association University of Texas Ex-Students Association Highland Park United Methodist Church and the nonprofit Garrett Foundation. He was also co-owner of Wynne & Black an oil business as well as the Garrett-Wynne Angus Ranch of Longmont Colorado.

In 1959 he earned media attention when he bought a share of a famed Black Angus bull named Prince 105 which reportedly carried a hefty price tag of $230,000. During the same year Wynne was actively involved with an effort to bring top professional bowlers to the Dallas area. At that time he was an official with Great Southwest Lanes of Arlington.
When Dallas millionaire Lamar Hunt and others announced the formation of the American Football League during the summer of 1959 the NFL moved quickly to announce that the older league would expand as early as 1961. The first two cities named as possible locations were Dallas and Houston and Murchison and Wynne appeared in the newspapers constantly during negotiations. These negotiations ultimately succeeded and Dallas received a franchise a year earlier than originally announced.

Because Wynne appeared in the newspaper so often many thought he was an equal co-owner. However Clint Murchsion owned 95% of the team with his brother John while Wynne was only a minority owner along with Toddie Lee Wynne and W.R. “Fritz” Hawn. Bedford Wynne held the position of director and secretary of the Cowboys.

In 1967 Wynne decided to sell his shares in the Cowboys to help organize the expansion New Orleans Saints. He also left his law practice in 1967 and began to focus on other business ventures.

After 1967 Wynne’s name surfaced less and less. In one interesting story he won a camper at the Byron Nelson Classic in Fort Worth when he hit a tee shot closer to the mark than opponent Mickey Mantle.

He was chairman of a group that operated and managed Teen America Associates which produced a teen beauty pageant for several years and he later became president of Family Recovery Inc. a family counseling service.

Wynne died at the age of 65 on December 30 1989 of a heart attack. He was survived by three daughters and a son along with six grandchildren.

[Source: Viewed at  Sports Comet  [http://www.sportscomet.com/sports_thread/view/id-10802] no longer extant.]

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Continuation of Peter Dale Scott excerpt:

In August 1963 Bedford Wynne was the subject of a highly critical army audit of his "salary" from a firm with federal-government contracts (Sweetwater Development), which had been set up by the Murchisons' Tecon Corporation through the law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley. [11] To Wynne this must have seemed like gross political ingratitude. As recently as January 1963, Bedford Wynne had raised a half-million dollars for the depleted treasury of President Kennedy's Democratic party, after which Clint Murchison's son John was granted a mutually satisfactory interview with President Kennedy about preserving the oil depletion allowance. [12]

But it was unlikely that Wynne could escape being noticed in the mounting publicity about the scandalous activities of Lyndon Johnson's Senate protege, Bobby Baker. As noted earlier, it was in the Life issue of November 22, 1963 (p. 92A), that Bedford Wynne was first named as a member of the "Bobby Baker set" at Washington's Q Club. Subsequent Treasury and congressional investigation of Bedford Wynne and Clint Murchison established that their Sweetwater company had made payments (which looked very much like political kickbacks) to the legal firms of Bobby Baker and of Democratic Congressman Emmanuel Celler.[13]  Dallas Republican leader Robert H. Stewart III, a director of Great Southwest, had also arranged for questionable loans to Bobby Baker, via the same two Murchison employees (Robert Thompson and Thomas Webb) who figured in the Baker payoffs from Bedford Wynne.[14]

*****

The Great Southwest Corporation's Project in Texas


When Charles Hurwitz began acquiring a company called McCulloch Oil in 1978, the chairman of the
company was Charles Wood, Jr.--the man who had designed and engineered the construction of
Disneyland in 1955. McCulloch Oil had been founded by Robert McCulloch, a close business associate
of Wood. In 1960 McCulloch and Wood began to develop Lake Havasu City near Scottsdale, Arizona
around a man-made geyser and the London Bridge, which had been transported across the Atlantic and
reassembled. After Disneyland, Wood had gone on to build Freedomland in the Bronx, New York and to
work with Toddie Lee and Angus Wynne of the Great Southwest Corporation in building Six Flags in
Texas. The Great Southwest Corp., in conjunction with Webb and Knapp had gone into great debt in the
early 1960s pursuing these projects and tried to recover by selling the corporate stock to the Penn Central
Railroad owned by the Pennsylvania Company, which, at the same time, bought Macco Realty and
Arvida.

What is intriguing about this is that McCulloch Oil, the Great Southwest, Macco and Arvida were very
rich in land. This fact was no doubt known by David Murdock, who in 1964 had moved to Los Angeles
from Phoenix where he had been involved in home construction. Although he was allegedly insolvent
when he arrived in California, he founded a company that made tile to be used in construction and later
became a land developer and then a corporate tycoon. We do not know at this point whether Murdock,
whose background before that time is extremely sketchy, may have been involved with the Bonanno family which had been involved in real estate development in Arizona.


In 1956-57 the area between Westwood and Los Angeles proper, now called Century City, was owned by Twentieth Century Fox (headed by Spyros Skouras); it was the Tom Mix ranch and the backlot. But the studio needed cash and decided to sell off this 260 acres of real estate. The studio contacted William Zeckendorf--who headed Webb & Knapp--was a Rockefeller-connected developer in New York (he had hired Disney's engineer, Charles Wood, to build Freedomland park in the Bronx and who was a partner with Toddie Lee and Angus Wynne in developing the Great Southwest project in Texas). He agreed to buy the land and lease back a portion to the studio for one and a half million dollars a year.

Zeckendorf eventually sold out his interest to the Mellon family's Alcoa. He states in his autobiography that he became great friends with "General Richard Mellon," whose family has long been connected to O.S.S. and C.I.A. activities, as well as with Gulf Oil (at the time the Mellons were largest shareholders), which was an investor brought into the Zapata Corporation by the Liedtke brothers.(5) By the time Victor Palmieri went to work for Janss Investment, the Janss brothers had sold a half interest in the commercial properties, in 1955, to Arnold S. Kirkeby of Chicago, owner of a chain of hotels including the Beverly Wilshire at Wilshire and Rodeo Drive. Kirkeby changed the design of the village by bringing in highways and high-rises.

The Arizona Project, a journalistic investigation into mob activities in Arizona, which found strong financial links between Arizona real estate development and construction of Las Vegas casinos, also noted:

For [Del] Webb, the Flamingo experience (6) led to a series of deals with other developers who had their own ties to the Mob-dominated Chicago political machine, including Henry Crown and Arnold S. Kirkeby of Los Angeles,