A Generation's Buried Secrets Uncovered

Bagley's testimony at HSCA

Every generation has its own secrets it would like to keep buried. What do those secrets reveal about our forefathers? Were they complicit in high crimes or only misdemeanors? Did they have good intentions that, only in retrospect, appear to be unforgivable? There were many secrets buried in the backyards of Tennent "Pete" Bagley's family members. Not even he knew what they were, because his many uncles had undoubtedly taken oaths of confidentiality not to discuss their business with family members without clearances. Pete must have wondered about such secrets before he would come face-to-face with the biggest test of his career. 

On June 8, 1962, Yuri Nosenko, a security officer in Geneva with the Soviet delegation attending a disarmament conference, passed a note to an American diplomat, who immediately contacted the second secretary at the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. That diplomat was actually Pete Bagley, then 36-years-old, a C.I.A. agent clandestinely assigned to the  Soviet division. 

(Read Part I and Part II, PART III, Part IV)
 
Part V
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture

By Linda Minor

One Memorandum Dredges Up Much History

Memo to Mr. Bielefeldt, C/FDD at CIA

Approximately six weeks after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas, Lee H. Wigren of C/SR/CI/ Research section the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) typed a memo addressed to the attention of "Mr. Bielefeldt," in the CIA section called C/FDD -- the Foreign Documents Division.
Wigren's research department for counterintelligence (CI) was ultimately headed by Tennent "Pete" Bagley:

Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia [SR] division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time [March 1959] that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI.

Pete Bagley's Baggage: Uncle Josephus

Pete Bagley, CIA

In 1950, when he joined the CIA, Pete Bagley was a youthful 26 years old. He undoubtedly had been groomed from birth for the role he was to play in international spy games. His given names came from his mother's father, Tennent Harrington, cashier of the Colusa County Bank in California. As a teen, his mother, Marie Louise Harrington, traveled frequently with with her maternal aunt and uncle, Commander William D. Leahy, to Washington, D.C., and was introduced to an array of naval officers there.

Although she may have met Lieutenant Commander David Worth Bagley, whom she married in 1918, in Washington, one wedding  announcement indicates they had in fact met in Newport, R.I., the upper crust resort to which Marie Louise had traveled with a paternal aunt and uncle, Admiral Albert Parker Niblack.

In Pete's parents' wedding announcement in the Washington Post (right) toward the end of WWI, the groom, David Worth Bagley, was revealed as a brother of Adelaide Bagley Daniels, wife of Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.

As a matter of fact, Daniels (editor of a Democrat-financed newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.) had published in 1898 a biography of his wife's older brother, Ensign Worth Bagley, the first Navy officer killed in action during the Spanish-American War, and Adelaide would name David's brother Worth Bagley Daniels after the war hero.

Secretary Daniels first entered appointive political office in 1893 when another southerner, M. Hoke Smith, a railroad reformer and champion of  farmers, selected him to work in Grover Cleveland's Interior Department, a position he would hold for only a year. After purchasing controlling interest in the Raleigh News and Observer and in 1905, however, he perfected his political writing skill and was chosen in 1912 to head the "publicity bureau" of the Wilson campaign. Since Wilson's campaign was controlled by Edward M. House of Texas, Daniels no doubt had acquired the attention of the "Colonel" himself. After the campaign he was rewarded with the job as Secretary of the Navy, probably because of his wife's close ties to Naval officers.

Although Daniels left office in 1921, his propaganda efforts continued. His wife worked with Mrs. Robert Lansing, wife of the Secretary of State, in sponsoring the first National Conference of Church Women in Washington, D.C. in 1920. The Interchurch World Movement's division for "Women's Activities," organized by Adelaide Worth Daniels and Eleanor Foster Lansing and other wives in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, also had help from Mesdames John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Henry P. Davison. This "women's work" allowed their husbands to gather unofficial intelligence through the State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American and International Red Cross Societies, and Protestant church-related foreign missionary groups, which allied themselves with Friends' organizations, the YMCA, and "war work councils". There was no official civilian intelligence agency in those days.

This blog discussed the Dulles family's role in world missions a year ago, under the caption "John Birch Society Warning to JFK in 1958." It should be recalled that the wife of Wilson's Secretary of State, Mrs. Robert "Eleanor Foster" Lansing, was a sister of Edith Foster Dulles, whose sons John Foster and Allen Dulles were being trained to exert the same missionary zeal in the 1940's and 50's over world affairs and intelligence as these sisters' father, John Watson Foster, had done in the 1870's, 80's and 90's. Protestant fundamentalists were the original settlers of American colonies. Through their control of institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they also controlled the purse strings of charitable and missionary efforts abroad. It was simple enough to set up front groups through which to spy on suspected dissidents.


Josephus Daniels returned to "public service" in 1933 to become President Roosevelt's Ambassador to Mexico, a post he held in Mexico City at the time Leon Trotsky was living in asylum at nearby Coyoacan. Did Daniels have a role in having Trotsky murdered in August 1940 by an "ice-ax-wielding assassin"?

 Had young Pete Bagley ever heard stories told by his uncle about those days in Mexico? Daniels died in 1948. Pete was then 24 years old, but he would have been a teenager in 1940 when he read about Trotsky's death.The convicted assassin Jacques Mornard van den Dresch finished serving his prison sentence in 1960 and went to Cuba with a Czech passport. Mexican officials by then claimed he was a Spaniard, though he had earlier claimed to be Persian-born of Belgian parents. Pete Bagley must have wondered what his uncle had known. But we can no longer ask him. He died in March 2014.

Talbot Bielefeldt's Own Skeletons  

By 1963, however, Pete Bagley was not looking back to Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940. He had a more current assassination to solve. Having been in charge of Soviet counterintelligence since 1959, it was his office which tasked Lee Wigren to obtain an "analysis of the Soviet press reaction" to the assassination of President Kennedy. Was there a reason Wigren addressed his questions to Talbot Bielefeldt, whose expertise was not Russian, but Japanese?

J. Bagnall

Exactly who was Talbot Bielefeldt? We do know from the above memo that he worked in the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA, and therefore his boss would have been John J. Bagnall. who also seems to have something to do with "Project USJPRS".

In February 1962 E. Howard Hunt, who had been attempting to find work for his wife Dorothy, was advised to check with Bagnall to see if he could find work for her in JUSPB [sic]; the writer must have been referring to, USJPRS, the U.S. Joint Publications Research Service:

JPRS was established in March 1957 as part of the United States Department of Commerce’s Office of Technical Services, about six months before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. Acting as a unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, JPRS staffers prepared translations for the use of U.S. Government officials, various agencies, and the research and industrial communities. During the Cold War, the reports were primarily translations rather than analysis or commentary, with an emphasis on scientific and technical topics. Over time, however, that scope expanded to cover environmental concerns, world health issues, nuclear proliferation, and more.

Writer, Leo Sarkisian, who worked with Voice of America, was once photographed at a party with the Bielefeldts and other CIA officials who worked with foreign translations.

Nixons at Fullerton Union

Talbot's family in 1920 was living in Placentia, California, a Quaker community, the same small town where Richard Nixon’s family lived at that time. Though Talbot was ten years older than Richard, he did have siblings the same age as the Nixon boys. Talbot and his younger siblings attended Fullerton Union High School, where Richard Nixon was a student in 1927-28, though the Nixons had moved to Whittier after 1920. Did they cross paths before Nixon came to prominence during the Red Scare wave?

Though Talbot’s parents were born in Iowa, both sets of his grandparents immigrated to Iowa from Hanover, Germany. His father and grandfather tried their hands at mining near Silverton, Colorado for a time, but moved to Maryland after a scarlet fever plague killed several family members. Talbot and his two closest siblings were born while the Bielefeldts lived in a large house on the Miles River in the Chesapeake region, and his name likely came from Talbot County, where it was located.

When Talbot was five years old, his family had moved from the east coast to the west, settling in North Orange County, where three more children were born. Talbot's father turned to farming and by 1930 owned a prosperous citrus ranch in Placentia. It is likely Talbot's exposure to the German language stuck with him. Then, at Stanford in the early 1920's, he gravitated toward internationalism. The summer before his senior year, he spent a month in Japan with a group of young men his age. Although there is no independent evidence of the fact, his wedding announcement in 1936 revealed:

Mr. Bielefeldt, who is postmaster at Placentia, is a graduate of Stanford University. He was a faculty member of American schools in the Orient, in China and Japan.

Fernanda Eliscu in Winterset, 1936

His new wife, Eugenie Pfeil, was the daughter of two stage actors, who used the names Carl Anthony and Fernanda Eliscu (born in Romania). After Carl's death in 1930, Fernanda began making movies, her first being the "photoplay," Winterset, written and produced by Maxwell Anderson in 1936. Talbot took his new wife back home to Placentia, where he had been assigned a commission by the President as Postmaster of his hometown.

A week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Talbot enlisted in the Navy and served six years, first being assigned to the Japanese Language School on the campus of University of California at Berkeley. By September 1944 he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Commander and there are indications he was involved in cryptology. From there it was only natural that he would join the Central Intelligence Agency when it was created in 1947.

Excerpt from Roger Dignman in Deciphering the Rising Sun: Navy and Marine Corps Codebreakers, Translators and Interpreters in the Pacific War.

As shown in the excerpt above, W. A. Talbot Bielefeldt was among the first men chosen for the Japanese Language School held in California, along with someone called "Gerald J. Bagnall".  Could  Gerald have been a disguised "John"? This first class preceded the selection of Roger Pineau, who attended the same school after it was moved to Colorado because of internment of Japanese taking place at the original location.

According to the CIA's website:

With the creation of the Central Intelligence Group there commenced a process of accretion of functions taken from the wartime agencies and from departments which were anticipating reductions in budget under peacetime conditions. The Strategic Services Unit was transferred from the Department of the Army and became the Office of Special Operations - charged with espionage and counterespionage functions. The Washington Document Center was taken over from the Navy and shortly after that the Army's German Military Documents Center at Fort Holabird joined this unit and together became the Foreign Documents Division. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an organization with worldwide bases for monitoring all non-coded radio traffic, which had originally been under the Federal Communications Commission, was transferred from the Army and became the Foreign Broadcast Information Division. During World War II the Army and Navy and OSS and occasionally other agencies had all approached US businesses and institutions in search of foreign intelligence information. An early agreement was reached that this domestic collection should be performed as a service of common concern by Central Intelligence with other agencies participating as they desired, and this became the Contact Division. Another illustration of the type of functions taken on is the division of responsibilities with the Department of State on biographic intelligence. The list would be much too long if we attempted to enumerate all of the functions acquired in this method.

In December 1953 Talbot was rated at the salary level GS-14 in the C.I.A., and his name appeared on a list of 96 CIA employees cleared for Top Security, who were "certified to meet the standards required" to attend lectures at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. On that list were also the names Thomas W. Braden, C. Tracy Barnes, E. Howard Hunt, and Cord Meyer, Jr., but many more names were redacted, even upon the list's release in 1998.

Two years after receiving clearance to attend the Industrial College, Talbot wrote the following memorandum to Bruce Solie of the CIA's Security Analysis Group (SAG):

click to enlarge

Re: Orr, Paul & Violet
William A. Hyde was in Washington this last week-end, visiting his daughter and son-in-law, Sylvia and John Hoke, 763 Kennedy, N.E. The latter invited [REDACTED] and me over to meet him on Saturday night, 17 December, since we three were friends at Stanford.

Why would Solie's security group have been curious about William Hyde and his eldest daughter, Sylvia Hyde Hoke? And who, pray tell, were Paul and Violet Hyde?

The Hyde Family Tradition of Reform Christian Values

"The first casualty when war comes is truth."

Quote from California Governor Hiram W. Johnson

(Read Part I and Part II, PART III)
 
Part IV
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture

By Linda Minor

Reform Politics in Palo Alto

Good Government League banquet in 1909

During his childhood and college years, William Avery Hyde was inculcated with values learned from his father, a seemingly honest and dedicated businessman who practiced the virtues of self-government for the benefit of his entire community. As manager of the Stanford bookstore, he took an avid interest, not only in selling books, but in operating free libraries. As president of the Palo Alto Civic League, as well as chief executive of the commission government of the city, he also helped his city build and run its own public power and electric plant, to the considerable ire of Pacific Gas & Electric, a corporation which desired to add the city to its own profit base. He served on the legislative standing committee of the statewide League of California Municipalities (1910-11).

All these events transpired within the context of the "reform" administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office after William McKinley's assassination and left reluctantly in 1913 as Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated.

W.F. Hyde's name appeared in local newspapers in association with other civic leaders. In August 1906 the San Francisco Call announced:

A new Republican club was organized here last night. Judge S. W. Charles acted as temporary chairman and W. R. Allen as secretary-treasurer. A committee of six was named to prepare a ticket of prospective delegates for the primaries. This committee consisted of B. P. Oakford, Marshall Black. W. F. Hyde, F. B. Simpson, John D. Boyd, F. L. Crandall and S. W. Charles. The ticket, that this body brought before the meeting was made up as follows: Delegates to the State Convention. Marshall Black and W. F. Hyde; delegates to the Congressional Convention, John D. Boyd and Dr. John C. Spencer. The delegates to the County Convention are: Precinct I— W. D. Cashel, W. B. Allen, Professor H. W. Rolfe, B. P. Oakford, A. N. Umphreys; Precinct 2— F. A. Marriot, F. B. Simpson, Dr. C. W. Decker, E. E. Peck and Professor R. E. Swain.

Another announcement appeared in the November 3, 1906, San Francisco Call:

GOOD GOVERNMENT LEAGUE IS FORMED

 PALO ALTO, Nov. 2.— Citizens interested in good government met in Fraternity Hall annex last evening and formed the Civic League of Palo Alto. The meeting followed a preliminary conference, at which W. F. Hyde, W. E. K. Vail and Dr. C. W. Decker were authorized to draft a set of by-laws and issue a call for a meeting. The league's object is purely civic and it will not engage in furthering the interests of any religious sect or political organization. The constitution among other things provides that the league is formed to insure a more perfect administration of municipal affairs; to promote the general welfare and prosperity of the city, to secure such State legislation, as the interests of the city may from time to time require and to arouse a more widely extended interest in local municipal legislation and administration. A committee of nine will compose the active working body of the league five of whom were appointed at the meeting last night. They are W. F. Hyde, Professor Elmore, Walter E. Vail, Dr. C. W. Decker and Fred B. Simpson.

Almost a year later, the new Civic League would experience an incident that was written up into the Call as though a major scandal had occurred:

San Francisco Call - November 24, 1907

SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE CALL 

PALO ALTO TRUSTEES WOULD UNEARTH GRAFT

Suspicion That There Is Something Wrong Exists in Minds

     PALO ALTO, Nov. 23.— Scantily clothed insinuations of graft stuck their ugly heads out of the ruck of discussion at a mass meeting of the city fathers— and mothers— held in the old Presbyterian church here last night. One other thing also noticeably protruded, the unpopularity of Edward P. E. Troy of San Francisco.

     One of the speakers suggested the reading of an open letter from Troy to the president of the Civic league and the very mention of the hated name brought out such a storm of protest that the presiding officer, W.F. Hyde, took refuge in compromise and promised not to read the letter, but to give it to the press. 

     For the best part of two hours those present sat with their hands to their ears figuratively speaking, while they attempted to learn from the successive speakers exactly what the financial condition for the city is at present. Out of the turmoil and talk came the conviction that the city's system of book keeping is in sad need of fixing.

     The Palo Alto Civic league was hard at work and President Hyde made plain that rapid action was imperative in view of the financial report filed by Town Clerk [John D.] Boyd. Things are very much awry in Palo Alto. The city owns its own water works and lighting plant, and the terrors of municipal ownership stare it in the face. These are the main points in the president's talk. Then he introduced A. A. Young, professor of economics at Stanford university.

     "System, always system, and lots of book keeping, coupled with constant watchfulness, is the price a city has to pay for owning its own public utilities," said Professor Young. He added that only the most, careful book keeping , and strict attention to details would serve to scare graft away from such a city.

     "Where is that surplus the present board started with?" cried Trustee William Dean, when he secured the attention of the chairman. "There were $75,000 in hand then. Where is it? What has become of the $200,000 the city has spent in the last 18 months?"

     "There is nothing to show for it save debts," he went on. He also demanded the cause of the order issued by some of the members of the present board forbidding the trustees to sell electric current outside of the city. 

     "It looks like protection of private interests to me," he finished.

     Then came the incident of the Troy letter which nearly caused the gathering to break up in confusion. Dr. C. W. Decker, started it by asking that the letter, which contained strictures on the present board, be read in meeting. J.F. Bixbee jumped to his feet, shouting a protest against it. 

     "It would be an insult to this assemblage to read that letter. If Troy came into my office, I'd kick him out. No I won't ---he's too little— but I would get rid of him somehow." Bixbee said.

Through the above excerpts William Fletcher Hyde is revealed as a hard-working reformer in the mold of liberal Christians of that era. Edward P.E. Troy was just such a man. A Californian, Troy advocated the passage of the single tax program proposed much earlier by Henry George's Christian Socialist movement. Whether or not he wrote the open letter to President Hyde of the Palo Alto Civic League because they were acquainted with each other or not, what is notable is how much vehemence was expressed in the objection to his letter's being read at that meeting.

In July of 1909 at the California Republic Convention, W.F. Hyde was one of the delegates who voted unanimously in favor of the following:

Resolved, that we pledge the Lincoln-Roosevelt league delegates to the several conventions to nominate an able and conscientious republican to represent the people of the the Fifth congressional district of the state of California in the United States congress, a candidate free from the control of the Southern Pacific railroad, or any other special interest, and pledged to represent the people of California; also to nominate as a candidate to the legislature such a man as can be relied upon to vote and work for the election as United States senator of a clean republican, not controlled by or affiliated with the Southern Pacific railroad, or any other special interest, and in full sympathy and accord with the principles of this league and the policies of President Roosevelt;  ...

Among the other speakers who pointed out the aims and ideals of the organization were State Senator Marshall Black and Richard Keating. The balloting for delegates at the various conventions resulted as follows: For the county convention — Charles Baker, J. T. Coulthard. W. F. Hyde. Richard Keating, Fernando Sanford. H. W. Simkins W. H. Sloan, John C. Spencer. A. N. Humphreys. A. G. Walker. C. B. Wing: for the congressional convention — E. D. Mosher, B. P. Oakford; for the state convention— E. P. Cashel, Edward Ackley.

Hyde's politics seems in alignment with the Republican governor of that era, reformer Hiram W. Johnson, a supporter of the Progressive wing of Republicans who, by bolting from the Repubican convention in 1912, played a part in electing Democrat Woodrow Wilson rather than the Bonesman, William Howard Taft, who had been TR's chosen vice president and successor, to the Presidency. Taft's father, Alphonso, had in fact co-founded Skull and Bones at Yale in 1823, along with William H. Russell, while the son had spent years on the Philippine Commission with W. Cameron Forbes, overseeing America's colonial empire.

Hiram Warren Johnson was born in Sacramento, September 2, 1866, the son of Grove and Annie (De Montfredy) Johnson. He was educated in the Sacramento public schools and attended the University of California at Berkeley. He left in 1886, in his junior year, to marry Minnie L. McNeal. He studied law in his father's law office, was admitted to the bar in 1888, and practiced in Sacramento. In 1894 he and his brother, Albert, managed their father's first congressional campaign. However, they opposed him in his bid for re-election and backed a reform group. The political rivalry estranged father and sons for many years.

In 1902 Johnson went to San Francisco to practice law. In 1908 he was selected to take the place of Francis Heney, after the latter was shot during the prosecution of the graft trials, and secured a conviction against Abraham Reuf [sic] for bribery. At this time Johnson came to the attention of the state reform element and enhanced his anti-machine reputation by his dynamic speeches before the Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican League.

By 1910 he was the acknowledged leader of the progressive movement in the state, and in November he was elected Governor. In 1912, he led the California delegation to the Republican convention in Chicago, and, with Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressives, bolted the convention after the renomination of President William H. Taft. Johnson then became the vice-presidential nominee of the newly formed Progressive Party. In 1914, he was re-elected Governor and in November 1916, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. On March 17, 1917, he resigned his state office and went to Washington.

Johnson served as a U.S. Senator from California for five terms, 1917-1945. During this time he maintained his image as a progressive reformer by his sponsorship of the Boulder Dam project, through investigations into the labor conditions in the West Virginia coal mines, by his attack on the power of private utilities, and through his strong support of the public works projects in the New Deal era. In the field of foreign relations, Johnson's stands were always highlighted by a vigorous nationalistic spirit, and he was popularly termed an "isolationist".

The coming of World War II brought Johnson into a headlong clash with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The disintegration of American neutrality alarmed Johnson and led him into a bitter losing battle from which he never recovered. Once the war began he gave it full support, but his failing health kept him more and more from the active business of the Senate. He died in Bethesda Naval Hospital on August 6, 1945.

At this point it should be mentioned, with reference to Skull and Bones, that Stanford University was linked to that secret society from inception as a result of Leland and Jane Stanfords' consultation with Cornell president Andrew Dickson White, who advised them to select David Starr Jordan as the first president of their university.  Jordan, in his eulogy at the death of Jane Stanford, stated:

I first saw the Governor and Mrs. Stanford at Bloomington, Indiana, in March 1891. At that time, Governor Stanford, under the advice of Andrew D. White, the President of Cornell, asked me to come to California to take charge of the new institution he was soon to open.

The Bibles about Skull and Bones

Readers were first made aware of the role Andrew Dickson White played in expanding the influence of the order of Skull and Bones by Antony C. Sutton in his book America's Secret Establishment. Kris Millegan reprinted Sutton's book and also published his own research into the Order--Fleshing Out Skull and Bones. According to Corey Earle's "The Secret Life of A.D. White," published in the Cornell Daily Sun, February 28, 2007:

Andrew Dickson White, the co-founder of Cornell, had graduated from Yale in 1853, where he edited the Yale Literary Magazine, rowed on the crew team, joined multiple fraternities and won numerous oratory and literary awards. At the conclusion of his junior year, he was one of fifteen students tapped for Skull and Bones, an organization surrounded with intrigue and mystery.

White was crucial in developing the educational ideals upon which Cornell was based. It was White who convinced Ezra Cornell not to donate his wealth to an already existing upstate New York college, and White who proposed the State Senate bill for Cornell University’s establishment. He was elected the school’s first president, serving from 1866 [at age 31!] to 1885. After his resignation, he remained involved in the University, participating as a trustee and adviser until his death in 1918.

Both White and Cornell were good friends with an Ithaca native and Skull and Bones member (or Bonesman), Francis Miles Finch. Upon Cornell’s founding, Finch became a charter trustee, legal adviser, lecturer and later, dean of the Cornell Law School. Was Finch’s involvement in Cornell’s founding related to his common allegiance with White? Or, was it simply due to his residence in Ithaca? But the plot thickens as Yale alumni joined the fledgling Cornell faculty.…

In 1867, as Cornell’s trustees attempted to gather a faculty, the first name proposed by White was Evan W. Evans, another Bonesman. Evans would become the first official faculty member of Cornell University. Shortly thereafter, the first Cornell professor of physics was appointed, Bonesman Eli W. Blake. This pattern would continue for the remainder of White’s reign.

In 1870, the professor of Latin was fired for drunkenness, and Bonesman Tracy Peck was hired. In 1881, Bonesman Moses Coit Tyler was hired by the University as the country’s first chair of American history. Tyler’s biography reveals that he met White at a Skull and Bones meeting when Tyler was a senior and White was a graduate student. According to correspondence, White offered Tyler a professorship as early as 1871, and even asked if he would consider being Cornell’s president in 1880.

Daniel H. Chamberlain, Bonesman and former governor of South Carolina, was hired to the law faculty in 1883. When Cornell’s School of Philosophy was created in 1890, the first person hired was a local Ithacan and Bonesman, Charles M. Tyler. History indicates that he was first considered for the faculty in 1881, when White was still president.

Oliver H. Payne

With the founding of Cornell Medical College in New York City in 1898, four Bonesmen physicians were hired nearly simultaneously. Coincidence? A further look reveals that the medical school was endowed by Oliver H. Payne, a Yale alumnus who left school early to enlist in the Civil War. However, Payne’s brother-in-law [William Collins Whitney] was a Bonesman whose two sons would also become Bonesmen. The founding faculty also included Lewis A. Stimson (father of Henry L. Stimson, a Bonesman who would become Secretary of War and Secretary of State) and W. Gilman Thompson, a nephew of Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman.

Gilman was actually one of President White’s closest associates at Yale. When Johns Hopkins University was founded in the 1870s, its trustees approached White for help in finding a university president. Correspondence between White and Gilman shows that they discussed the matter, calling it the “Baltimore scheme” since the Hopkins trustees were based in that city. The “scheme” was successful, and Gilman served as Johns Hopkins University’s first president from 1875 to 1901. Gilman did his part by hiring Bonesman William Henry Welch to the faculty in 1884 and appointing him first dean of the School of Medicine in 1893.

Interestingly, White was publicly silent about his membership in Skull and Bones. His voluminous autobiography fails to mention it, despite a full chapter on his activities at Yale. White’s own diary, spread across sixty-nine volumes, disappeared after his death. It wasn’t until 1951 that a Cornell librarian discovered it locked in a suitcase and hidden in the library stacks, surrounded by books. Concealed with the diaries was an especially unique item: White’s personal Skull and Bones membership book. Was the Bones book hidden by White himself?

White’s experiences with Yale’s oldest and most prestigious secret society clearly influenced him heavily. While a professor at Michigan, he allegedly founded a similar organization called The Owls, and he encouraged the creation of a society system at Cornell University. He would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Germany and Russia, both popular positions for Skull and Bones members. Bones founder, Alphonso Taft, was ambassador to Russia less than a decade before White.

Was Andrew Dickson White acting in the interests of Skull and Bones while serving as president of Cornell University?

A Segment in the Life of William Fletcher Hyde

"History is not a succession of events but a segment of human life," 

quoted by David Starr Jordan in reference to his mentor, 

Andrew Dickson White

(Read Part I and Part II)
PART III
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture

By Linda Minor

Ruth Hyde Paine's Grandfather
William Fletcher Hyde

Martha Constance Smith Hyde, described more fully in the previous segment, arrived in Palo Alto, California, in 1898 from Chicago. Although she had a Ph.D. and did additional graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley and at Stanford, she seems to have sacrificed all those years of education when she married William F. Hyde in 1900. Only a year after they married William Avery Hyde was born, and before long, another son, Theodore, undoubtedly named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who spent time in California. Sylvia Alden Hyde, the third child, was born in 1907.

Although W.F. Hyde seems to have tried to become a miner in 1896, it was short-lived, since he never completed an engineering degree. Instead, he relocated to Palo Alto, evidenced by a letter written to Mrs. Leland Stanford in 1898, as manager of the Stanford bookstore. He held a similar position at University of the Pacific before his attempt at mining. His move to Palo Alto occurred three years after future U.S. President Herbert Hoover had been in Stanford's first graduating class (1894).

W.P. Hyde moved to Lincoln Ave. residence in 1899.

Census records of William Fletcher Hyde family in Palo Alto: 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930.

The Birth of Stanford and Palo Alto

Although George Washington had admonished his countrymen to "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," when he left office in 1796, he also advised that "just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated." Herbert Hoover, a member of Leland Stanford Junior University's first graduating class of 1894, embodied those feelings during his career. He studied geology under John Casper Branner, who was destined to become Stanford's second president in 1917.

Hoover family in 1917

As the Hoovers settled themselves into Palo Alto life, Herbert Hoover was contacted by President Wilson's Ambassador to the Court of St. James in London, Walter Hines Page, to assist Europe in finding gold to finance the war. He took his family with him briefly until Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914. Then the boys returned to school in Palo Alto (the 1920 census shows them living on Cabrillo Avenue, near Dolores Street, close to where they contracted to build their mansion at 623 Mirada).

South of the Stanford Quad, the Hoover home was about two miles from the new Palo Alto High School, which opened in 1918. Channing grammar school was less than a mile from the Hyde residence on Lincoln Avenue. Since these were the only public schools, it is impossible that William Avery Hyde, Ruth's father, eldest of the children of W.F. and Martha Smith Hyde, was not acquainted with both Herbert Hoover, Jr. and his younger brother, Allan H. Hoover, born in 1903 and 1907 respectively.

President Jordan

As the United States had grown, it experienced one financial panic after another--the result of not having a central bank in charge of monetary policy. Both the Bank of the U.S. and the Second Bank of the U.S., envisioned by Alexander Hamilton, had been killed by policies instigated by Andrew Jackson before the civil war. Hope had been renewed by discovery of gold in California and Colorado, but still investment in infrastructure required money, much of which was sought from Europeans who bought stocks and bonds issued by American banking houses.

Leland Stanford, one the "Big Four," who built Abraham Lincoln's Central Pacific Railroad, had become wealthy in California by the time his son died in 1884. He and his wife decided to create Leland Stanford Junior University in his memory and consulted Andrew Dickson White, who had built Cornell in Ithaca, New York, staffed with elite Skull and Bones graduates of Yale, White's alma mater. White highly recommended that the Stanfords offer the job as Stanford's first president to David Starr Jordan.

Leland Stanford did not live to see the first graduating class cross the podium. He died in 1893, and the endowment continued to be controlled by his wife, the former Jane Lathrop, with whom Jordan worked very closely to ensure the university would survive during the difficult years resulting from the financial panic of 1893. Working with them was Timothy Hopkins, appointed a trustee in 1885; he was the adopted son of Mrs. Mark Hopkins, wife of Stanford's former partner in the Southern Pacific Railroad, though he received no inheritance from her when she died in 1891.

Only in the new century did the assurance come that the university would survive, at the time of Jane's death (1905), when the endowment received the anticipated funds from her estate:

In June 1903, Jane transferred control of the university’s endowment to the Board of Trustees, and she urged the board to increase graduate enrollment and support research and teaching. However, it was only with her death in February 1905 in Honolulu [allegedly from strychnine poisoning]# that the transfer of powers was legalized, and funds continued to flow to the construction of several significant buildings through 1905.

Stanford's "World View"

Jordan was a young man of 40 when he assumed the presidency. An ichthyologist (student of fish), he had studied at Cornell before assuming presidency of Indiana University at the age of 34.

Some of Jordan's papers, labeled "Peace Collection," note that he was president of the World Peace Foundation from 1910 to 1914 and president of the World Peace Conference in 1915; these papers were donated to the Quaker college at Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Jordan retired from Stanford in 1916, remain in the public eye until 1925. His death in Palo Alto occurred in 1931, while his friend Herbert Hoover was U.S. President. An obituary referred to him as the "chief director" of the World Peace Conference. In 1922 Jordan dedicated his selected essays entitled War and the Breed: the Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations to Andrew Dickson White, "who taught me to see in history, not a succession of events but a segment of human life."

The World Peace Foundation was the American section of a broader movement for international peace at that time, one goal being the expansion of the league of nations and the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration to settle international disputes. One advocate of this Court was the grandfather of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles--John Watson Foster--who was on the Advisory Council of the World Peace Foundation with David Starr Jordan. As Foster related in his history of the Hague Peace Conference, among the Americans present in 1899 was Jordan's mentor, Andrew D. White.

White, as first president of Cornell University, also acted as a behind-the-scenes mentor of the man given credit for putting together the coalition that in 1912 elected President Woodrow Wilson--"Colonel" Edward M. House of Texas, who attended Cornell in the mid 1870's but never graduated.

By the time Ruth Paine's grandfather moved to Palo Alto in 1897, Hoover had jumped into his mining career on the international stage, and was determined to assist his somewhat older brother, Tad, in completing his degree in mining engineering at the same college.

As his biographer Will Irwin reported, in 1899 Herbert married Lou Henry, and together they set out to the Far East, where they found themselves at Tianjin in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion in China. From there they would move to London where two sons would be born. By 1909 the Hoovers were able to return at least several months a year to the United States, much of it in Palo Alto, especially by 1912. As Europe became more involved in war, requiring gold as payment for arms, munitions and other necessities, Herbert Hoover remained on call for globe-trotting assignments in search of such gold, although in 1912 he became one of Stanford's trustees. The Hoover sons were enrolled in school in Palo Alto, undoubtedly the same school as the children of W.F. Hyde.+

Theodore Jesse (Tad) Hoover entered Stanford in the same class with W.F. Hyde's younger brother, James McDonald Hyde in 1897, and they not only graduated together in the class of 1901, but in 1919  both were named Stanford professors. They had spent the intervening years, much as Herbert Hoover had, traversing the world in search of gold and other precious metals. Dr. Branner continued to head the geology department until President Jordan's retirement in 1918, succeeding him in that position the following year. Tad Hoover got his place heading the geology department, with James Hyde as his chief associate.

James M. Hyde remained in that position until one year before Herbert Hoover's election to the Presidency. During that time he and his wife and daughter lived on Churchill Avenue near the high school. He relocated to Hollywood and became vice president of the the Board of Public Works in Los Angeles. Before long he was elected a city councilman, and served off and on until he finally lost that position in 1939 when the mayor asked for his "purge," along with others. He switched to the Democratic Party in 1935. He died in 1943.



Good Government and Career Changes

William Fletcher Hyde, father of W.A. Hyde

William Fletcher Hyde was in Palo Alto, California during the above events, though he remained quite invisible to historians. 

In addition to working with library and bookseller groups (see clipping to left), W.F. also was involved as a delegate to local and state Republican Party conventions as early as August, 1906, when he and Marshall Black were elected to attend the California state Republican convention. Black, head of Palo Alto Mutual Building and Loan Association, served as state senator, and was so wealthy by 1903 he built the historic mansion in nearby Menlo Park recently purchased by Mark Zuckerberg. By 1912, however, Black was accused of irregularities that led to his conviction and imprisonment. We can only wonder whether W.F. Hyde, who served on five grand juries over the years, had a role in seeing this associate sent to jail.

As elections rolled around in November 1906, Hyde helped to write a constitution for the Palo Alto "Good Government League" with several men with strong business connections--Dr. Jefferson Elmore (Stanford Latin professor), Walter E. Vail (life insurance agent), Dr. C. W. Decker (physician), and Constable Fred B. Simpson. Various Hyde family members are listed on page 62 of the 1915 city directory, with W.F. Hyde being conspicuously absent at that time. We do, however, find him listed in 1918 as an employee of Underwood & Underwood in Los Altos under the heading "stereoscopic views." According to Taylor & Francis:

By 1900, Underwood and Underwood, the largest company in the United States, was turning out 35,000 stereograph cards daily and 10 million yearly (Darrah 1977, 47). The large-scale production and distribution of stereographs enabled them to become a mass-distributed visual source of information consumed for a variety of purposes, such as entertainment, education and propaganda (Speer 1989, 301).

1922 ad

In about 1913, however, the Hyde Book Store in Palo Alto was operated by his brother, Edward L. Hyde and his wife, the former Lauretta Coe Foster. By 1920 William Fletcher had become an insurance agent and began to sell real estate as well. In fact, when the Hoover family in 1930 gave up their 15-room residence at Stanford's "San Juan Hill," the realtor who listed it for rent was none other than W.F. Hyde.

Carol Hyde Meets W.F. Hyde

As mentioned in Part I, Carol was descended from the original Hyde ancestor as William Avery, but from a different branch. Her parents entered the ministry when Charles Ludlow Hyde, her father, was 35 and graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. By 1916, however, after being sent to churches in Colorado and California, he had seemingly tired of the ministry. According to an item that appeared in several United Press news carriers in July 1916:

Another strange case is that of Rev. Charles L. Hyde of Niles, Cal., who wants to give up his pastorate at the First Congregational church there and go to work as a farm hand or on a poultry ranch.

Nevertheless, Rev. Hyde had the last laugh on the press, since the 1920 census finds him employed as the secretary of a poultry association in Palo Alto, California. As the item to the right shows, once they moved to the Palo Alto area, the Charles L. Hydes became acquainted with the W.F. Hydes at the local Congregational Church. Carol's mother played the organ, while Charles and William Fletcher sang bass in the choir. Carol was an alto, but William Avery was nowhere to be found. Most likely it was Carol Hyde Hyde who encouraged her youngest daughter Ruth to take up folk singing and dancing, where as it turned out she would meet her husband, Michael Ralph Paine in Philadelphia prior to their marriage in 1957.

Like his son's new father-in-law, William Fletcher Hyde would also experience an abrupt change in his career during the years prior to or during WWI, at a time the couple had three young children ranging in age from six to ten years old. He had served as president and trustee of the Palo Alto Public Library for many years, and his sisters were librarians, Mary  at the San Francisco public library and Lillian at Stanford. W.F. also was a trustee for the California state library association. Though he could not have known then that Herbert Hoover would become U.S. President in 1928, he most likely knew that Herbert Clark Hoover was his younger brother's employer, and it is possible that, through that connection, W.F. felt greener pastures were in store for him.

James McDonald Hyde, had graduated from Stanford in 1901, and by 1903 had a teaching job at the University of Oregon. Then in 1910 he went to London to work for Herbert Hoover's brother Tad, whom James had known in college. Tad, actually Theodore Jesse Hoover, had been manager of Minerals Separation, Ltd., since 1907, but left soon after installing James at the company. While there, James had a disagreement with another Stanford geologist named Edward Nutter, but left within a year to work in Montana. Minerals Separated, Ltd. then sued James for infringing one of its patents. When the case came to trial in Montana in 1912, the Hoover brothers were the chief witnesses on James' behalf. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal in 1915. A portion of James' testimony is excerpted to the left.

The 1920 census record shown above indicates the W.F. Hyde family lived in Los Altos, Santa Clara County, that year, with W.F. engaged in insurance and real estate. He had also become involved with the Los Altos Improvement Club. The eldest child, William Avery, was 17 and looking forward to attending Stanford University soon--almost at the same time his father starting selling insurance and real estate. While he was a student, his mother died at the young age of 53.

In 1932 William Avery Hyde's aunt, Sylvia Hyde, was an art instructor at San Jose State College. She and Theodore Hyde, neither of whom had married, continued, after their mother's death, to live in the three-story residence at 334 Lincoln, even after their father's death in 1939. Sylvia most likely developed her interest in art from her aunt, Bessie Hyde Kennedy, who also lived in the large residence until her own death in 1944.

Sylvia worked from home as an artist and also worked in her father's insurance/real estate office, and at 310 University Avenue, Menlo Park. This address was the same as the University Realty Co., just a few doors from the Hyde Bookstore of Edward L. Hyde at 362 University (either the location or the street numbering changed). Edward's wife, Lauretta was the daughter of Harrison Streeter Coe, a 1903 Stanford mining graduate, who filed a patent for an invention like the one J.M. Hyde had been sued for infringing.

By 1943, she was hired as a teacher at Grant Union High School and had moved to Del Paso Heights north of Sacramento. Sylvia later married Otto V. [von Thulen] Rhoades at some point after he divorced in the 1930's, and she continued to correspond with her nephew and visit with him on infrequent visits in California; she only recalled meeting Ruth on two occasions. Theodore Hyde died in Walnut Creek, California in 1991. Nothing else about these siblings of William Avery Hyde has been discovered.