The Presidents Bush: Walker Genealogy Part V

Part I               Part II               Part III               Part IV     Read previous segments.

Polo and Power?

St. Louis began polo in 1892.

Referring back to Part IV, you will remember that G. H. (Bert) Walker returned from his studies in England and Scotland to enroll in law school at Washington University in St. Louis, around 1894. His eldest brother, Sidney, single until 1898, was working at the dry goods firm, while also playing polo at the newly organized St. Louis Polo Club.

Bert also took up polo and far surpassed his brother, Sidney, as shown in society clippings such as the one below. Marked in red are references to members of the Walker family: Bert (G. H.) Walker; his father, D.D., who attended the match in Chicago; brother Sidney, as well as Bert's later wife, Lulu Wear, her mother and married sister--in Chicago to applaud Bert, the star of the team.

It is interesting to note that E.C. Simmons also traveled from St. Louis to Chicago to attend the polo event. Simmons, owner of St. Louis' premier hardware stores, would send three sons to Yale, each of them tapped to Skull and Bones, and he would become the employer of Bert and Lulu Wear Walker's future son-in-law many years after this polo match. Simmons was already an ardent and admiring fan of Bert Walker in 1898 -- more than two decades before Prescott Bush moved to St. Louis to work for Simmons Hardware.

Another name of note is George C. Hitchcock, an attorney, whose family had lived across the street (Vandeventer Place) from D.D. Walker's family. His paternal uncle, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, graduated from William Huntington Russell's military school in New Haven in 1855, and then moved to St. Louis to work with his brother, George's father, Henry Hitchcock. Ethan left St. Louis in 1860 to join Olyphant & Co., a China trading company in which he became a partner in 1866, and from which he retired in 1872, soon returning to St. Louis. President McKinley appointed him the first U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 1897. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity. Both Hitchcock brothers married daughters of Missouri pioneer, George Collier of St. Louis.

Through polo, Bert became interested in horses, and after his starring performance on the polo field in 1898, Bert agreed to chair St. Louis' Horse Shows for several years, beginning in 1899, assisted by his brother Sidney and brother-in-law, Joseph Walker Wear.

David Davis Walker had by that time invested a great amount of his personal funds educating his sons in Catholic institutions. Will had married a Catholic girl from a French background, even though the marriage wasn't entirely successful and eventually ended in divorce after Will's parents died. Maysie had married a Protestant, though he agreed to be interred beside her in a Catholic burial. Sidney announced his engagement to a Protestant, whose father was an eminent doctor, six months before Bert's own small wedding which took place at the home of his bride's mother, her father, James H. Wear having died in late 1893.

Lulu Wear photo

Although "Lulu" had three attendants, Bert had only his brother David at his side. Brother Ted was then in his last semester at Yale, set to graduate in the summer. Also at Yale at the time were three of Lulu's brothers--James H. (Jim) Wear, who had been captain of Yale's freshman football squad in 1897 (class of 1900); Joseph W. (Joe) Wear (class of 1900); and Arthur Y. Wear (class of 1902), who would later die in WWI. 

As for how Bert moved from running his own investment bank in St. Louis to working with or for Averell and Bunny Harriman, the authors of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Anton Chaitkin and Webster Tarpley surmised as follows:

Prescott Bush weds Dotty Walker.

Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919. Walker became the bank’s president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland ( “Bunny” ), Prescott Bush’s close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial sponsor.

In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker’s daughter Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921. [Columbia University Interview in the Oral History Research Project conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower Administration, p. 7.] Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight Woolley and four other fellow Skull and Bonesmen from the Yale Class of 1917. [St. Louis Globe Democrat, Aug. 7, 1921. p. 16. This is the sequence of events, from Simmons to U.S. Rubber, which Prescott Bush gave in his Columbia University Interview; pp. 5-6. The interview was supposed to be kept confidential and was never published, but Columbia later sold microfilms of the transcript to certain libraries, including Arizona State University), pp. 7-8.] The Bush-Walker extended family has gathered each summer at the “Walker country home” in Kennebunkport, from this marriage of President Bush’s parents down to the present day.

When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co., railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife’s father was building one of the most gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple tried to move back to Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in a rubber products company owned by his father. But they soon moved again to Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought the little family business and moved it near there.

Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush–the future U.S. President–was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.

Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that “Bunny” Harriman stepped in to rescue his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family moved to the town where George was to grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.

Unfortunately, Chaitkin and Tarpley failed to answer the following questions:

• What was the name of the rubber company Prescott worked for that took him to Milton, Massachusetts?
• Where is the documentation that Bert Walker organized W. A. Harriman & Co. in November 1919?
• And where is the evidence that Prescott was "rescued" by Bunny Harriman?

Our research makes it seem much more likely that the man who threw Prescott a lifeline was his wife's father, Bert Walker, who was closely associated with Lulu Wear's brother, Joseph Wear, in a linoleum and rubber business based in Philadelphia. Joseph Wear's wife's father, William Potter, in 1920 oversaw the sale of his family-owned company to a Certain-teed, incorporated in St. Louis, which manufactured roofing materials.

The Walker Family Vacations

Even before his retirement, D.D. Walker and his wife enjoyed their travels and were often mentioned in local news accounts, frequently accompanied by daughter Mazie (spelled variously as Maizie, Maisie or Maysie) and granddaughter Martha, while husband, Asa Pittman, remained in St. Louis to work.  

As early as 1886 D.D. Davis' family had a summer cottage in Kennebunkport, and that same year they spent the spring in St. Augustine, Florida, accompanied by Mazie and Martha's mother, Jane Beaky, all according to society news items. 

The three youngest sons--David, Bert and Teddy--were sometimes mentioned in the local gossip accounts as well. For example, when Teddy was a 12-year-old boy, attending St. Vincent's Seminary, a Catholic school run by nuns for girls and primary school boys located at Grace and Locust Avenues in St. Louis, he was mentioned in an 1889 feature item and described as "one of the youngest reporters on earth," as he helped interview youngsters who saw the Olympic Theatre's matinee of Little Lord Fauntleroy, then on tour. Ten years after being cited for his reporting skill, Teddy was named to Phi Beta Kappa for his studies in economics at Yale (the same fraternity his great-nephew, George H. W. Bush, would attain in 1948).

We know from vacation accounts that all three of the younger boys attended Stonyhurst in England, David having been enrolled during the fall of 1887 had been taken on a tour of Europe with his parents and sister the following summer. Bert and Teddy skipped Europe that year, going instead to Kennebunkport, their usual vacation place, possibly with family servants supervising, while presumably the two eldest sons, by then in their early twenties, were working at the dry goods business with other members of the firm. 

Bert's summer break from Stonyhurst

Bert's tenure at Stonyhurst, mentioned in a previous segment, thus was not a circumstance special to him, but something the Walker family had chosen for each son by that time. Bert would follow David to Stonyhurst in 1890, as indicated in the local paper's account (inset, left) of their summer plans. Later, Teddy would follow Bert to the Jesuit institute.

After Bert returned to St. Louis and while he was at law school, during the winter of 1895, the St. Louis newspaper published reports that D.D. and Martha Walker had toured California for three months  with their only daughter, Mazie, and her daughter, Martha Walker Pittman, in tow. After two months back in St. Louis, the four had then gone to Kennebunkport to spend the summer months at the D.D. Walkers' cottage. Two years earlier the paper had mentioned that Bert was staying at the Ocean Bluff  House in Kennebunk, Maine, then a popular summer hotel. Perhaps there was not room for him in the family cottage. Perhaps Bert and his father were already experiencing a conflict of personalities which was to plague them in future years.

Mazie died in 1896, however, leaving her daughter in the care of her father, Asa Pitmann, who tragically died from influenza three years later. Martha Walker Pittman thereafter lived with her maternal grandparents when not off in boarding schools in Paris and Briarcliff, New York. She still spent most holidays with her Walker grandparents for many years to come, and was a bridesmaid in Dorothy Walker's Kennebunkport wedding in 1921--when Bert's daughter married Prescott Bush. Four years later, Martha married a Diplomatic Courier Officer from Baltimore society, John Mortimer Duval, Jr.

Bert's In-Laws--the Wear Family

In January 1899 Bert Walker married Lulu Wear, a daughter of one of his father's former competitors. While Wear and Walker had both made their fortunes in the wholesale dry goods trade, the two fathers were unlike in many other ways. The Walkers were Catholic, while the Wears were Presbyterian. Although the Walkers preferred to summer in Maine, the Wear (sometimes misspelled as Ware) family traditionally vacationed at Jamestown island in Rhode Island.

James Hutchinson Wear, Lulu's father, had been born in central Missouri and moved to St. Louis around 1863. Like David Davis Walker, Wear learned the wholesale dry goods trade for fifteen years before he formed a partnership called Wear, Boogher & Co. with Murray Carleton, whose mother had been a Boogher. Shortly before he died, Wear sold his interest to Carleton in 1893. 

John Holliday Wear

John Holliday Wear, the eldest of James H. and Nannie Wear's sons, was born in 1868 and started his career working as a salesman for Murray Carleton, his father's successor, and was still so employed when he married Susan Leigh Slattery in 1903. A year after his sister Lulu married Bert Walker, John Wear obtained a passport with the intent of traveling out of the country, listing his address as Carleton's Dry Goods, 9th Street and Washington Avenue, an address which placed him only a few steps away from Ely & Walker's building, then at the southwest corner of N. 8th and Washington. John H. Wear would thereafter remain in the dry goods business, while his three youngest brothers attended Yale in the late 1890s, as did Bert Walker's youngest brother, Ted. The above addresses today sit across the street from St. Louis' convention center complex.  

Click to enlarge

John Wear resided with his mother, while G.H. and Lulu Walker lived only a mile or so away at 3800 Delmar. A few years after his own marriage in 1903, John's work address became 708 N. 4th Street, while he and Susan lived at 4643 Berlin, changed to Pershing during World War I. The map above also locates the banking office of D.H. Byrd's uncles, mentioned in a previous post at this blog. As we can see, the investment banking offices of Wear, Walker, and the Byrds were within close walking distance from where the Federal Reserve complex was eventually built, and directly across the street from the Wear and Walker dry goods warehouses the city happened to build its convention center, with upscale hotels built at the site of the warehouses.

Mildred Wear (Mrs. Max) Kotany

Lulu's sister, Mildred, four years older than Lulu, was 25 in 1895 when she married 42-year-old Max Kotany, a Hungarian-born stockbroker who immigrated to the U.S. in 1867 at age 14. By 1870 Max was listed in the St. Louis census as a messenger boy in a bank, living in the home of Amelia Abeles, widow of Adolph Abeles, and he still lived in her home on Delmar in 1880. By then he had become a naturalized citizen and a stockbroker.

Mrs. Abeles had been born in Prague around 1831, and arrived in St. Louis in 1849 with the Taussigs, part of her extended family. She married Adolph Abeles almost immediately upon her arrival, and he went into the lumber commission business with Charles S. Taussig. Adolph was unfortunately among those killed in 1855 when the Gasconade Bridge collapsed, and thereafter, Amelia seems to have continued the partnership on her own until her son was old enough to take her place. According to the Find-a-Grave website:

Adolph and Charles developed a vertically integrated business around the Pacific Railroad supplying land, timber and capitol for its development. Adolph was elected state representative to the Missouri General Assembly in 1850 and served two years. Among other things, he promoted the Pacific Railroad's incorporation, which ultimately led to his death.

Amelia's father is shown by some genealogists to have been John Low Taussig, a wholesale dry goods merchant in 1860, as was his brother J. Seligman Taussig. Nevertheless, Amelia was quite close to a family named Singer, who lived in Hungary, and to Minna Singer, married to Alexander Sandor Kotanyi, who remained there. Amelia Abeles obtained a passport in 1867 and made a trip to eastern Europe; that same year Max Kotany arrived in the United States from Hungary to take up residence with Amelia Abeles' family for more than a decade. He told passport officials in 1905 that he was naturalized in 1876. He married Lulu Wear's sister in 1895.

Max also had a younger brother named Ludwig, who moved later to St. Louis and, after studying economics and working with G.H. Walker & Co., was employed as early as 1918 as treasurer of Robert Brookings School of Economics and Government, which had before 1924 been part of Washington University in St. Louis.  

In 1904 Bert Walker was president of the St. Louis Stock Exchange, as well as a member of the New York Stock Exchange. Max Kotany was one of about 50 members of the St. Louis Exchange, and had his own brokerage office on Olive Street, while his brother Ludwig went to work for Max's brother-in-law at G.H. Walker & Co. the year it opened. Bert and Max each served on several committees, with each other and with J. D. Perry Francis, son of former mayor of St. Louis, governor of Missouri, who was then serving as chairman of St. Louis' World's Fair planning committee, after having served in Grover Cleveland's administration. The governor was also a director of the Chicago & Alton Railway, E. H. Harriman's railroad which ran through St. Louis. The connection to the Francis family was powerful indeed for young Bert.

Other wealthy connections came through Bert's wife, Lulu and her sister Mildred Kotany, who had been close to each other and to other girls their age within their father's network of business associates. One such friend, Bertha Dibblee of Chicago, was a daughter of Laura Nash Field Dibblee, Marshall Field's niece and later heir to part of his estate. Bertha had visited Lulu during Christmas holidays in 1897, before her wedding to Bert Walker. Marshall Field was Chicago's biggest retail department store, which bought merchandise from wholesaler Wear, Boogher, while firms like Sears Roebuck and J.C. Penney purchased their dry goods stock from Ely-Walker.

The summer prior to Bertha's visit to St. Louis, Mildred Kotany had chaperoned her sister (inaccurately called Miss L.J. Ware in the newspaper) at the Wentworth Hall casino in Jackson, New Hampshire.[*] Max Kotany was primarily involved with the Taussig brothers in a silver mining syndicate, Good Hope Mining. James J. Taussig was an investment banker who was part of a Montana silver mining syndicate with other wealthy St. Louis businessmen as early as 1879, but his eldest brother William was a physician, who had studied chemistry in Prague before locating in St. Louis. Later Dr. William Taussig was named a director of the newly consolidated St. Louis Union Trust. James Taussig and his family often spent summers at Kennebunkport before acquiring in 1898 a summer home at Shoreby Hill on Jamestown, the island wedged between Newport and Narragansett, Rhode Island. 

James E. Taussig was president of the Wabash Railroad before his death in 1949. James Taussig, a legal associate of Charles Nagel (then married to Fanny Brandeis), in 1878 became a "mentor" to young future Justice Louis D. Brandeis. After Fanny's death, Nagel married Anne Shepley, sister of John Foster and Arthur Shepley and of Louis Shepley (Mrs. Isaac) Lionberger. The Shepleys were grandchildren of Ethan Shepley, U.S. Senator from Maine who resigned to become that state's chief justice. All were part of the power elite in St. Louis.

Both John F. Shepley and Isaac Lionberger, who had been law partners for several years, in 1896 abandoned the Democratic Party of William Jennings Bryan to become Republicans in favor of the gold standard. By this time, Shepley had been at the St. Louis Union Trust for six years, and was married to Sarah Hitchcock, daughter of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, soon to be named by William McKinley as minister to Russia, and also to serve in Teddy Roosevelt's cabinet as secretary of the interior.

James H. Wear, Jr.

James Hutchinson Wear, Jr., Yale class of 1901, married in 1909 Ellen D. Filley, daughter of John Dwight Filley of St. Louis. James played football at Yale and was scorer for the baseball team, according to Yale's yearbook.

Joseph Walker Wear

Lulu's brother, J. W. Wear, finished his studies at Yale in 1899 and married Adaline Coleman Potter, daughter of William Potter of Philadelphia in 1903. William (and Jane Kennedy Vanuxem) Potter lived in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, and Adaline's parents both descended from illustrious families in Philadelphia, her father acting as the attorney for his father's company--Thomas Potter & Sons oilcloth and linoleum flooring business. It was a dangerous business, judging from the blazes which occurred on their premises in 1898, 1905, 1915 and 1917. Nevertheless the sale of the Potters' stock to the roofing company owned by George M. Brown of St. Louis, put $3 million in their pockets only a few month after an announcement had been made in March 1920 that Bert Walker was creating a new company to be known as Morton and Company.

In 1920 the company was sold to Certain-teed Products of St. Louis, a move which earned both Bert and William Potter a seat on the new board, while his brother-in-law, Joseph Wear, became treasurer of the new company.

Joseph himself had a patent issued in his name in 1917 for a linoleum product. But before moving to Philadelphia in 1914 to work for his father-in-law, he returned to St. Louis to work in the dry goods company with his older brother John. Two years after John's death, he and his wife moved to her hometown of Philadelphia where J.W. was a very active tennis player at the Cricket Club, especially in doubles competition. He and Dwight F. Davis of St. Louis, who had played on Harvard's team, won the doubles title in 1914, and in 1920-1924 J.S. partnered with Jay Gould II, son of George J. Gould, to capture the championship each year.

In 1892 William Potter had been named Minister to Italy during the administration of President Benjamin Harrison. He later was named president of the Jefferson Medical College and sat on the Board of the Philadelphia City Trusts. At the end of WWI he also went to the Far East in 1919 when Japan was in the process of invading Manchuria.

Arthur Yancey Wear

He played on the Yale baseball team graduated from Yale in 1902 and was tapped to Scroll and Key. President of the St. Louis Club at Yale in 1902. He would be killed in France during WWI.
He was a cousin of Joseph G. Holliday (B.A. 1884), Samuel N. Holliday (B A. 1908), and Joseph Holliday (B.A. 1913).

To be continued.

Who Engineered the Heroin Coup?

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

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

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

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

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

Background Reading to Get Up to Speed

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

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

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

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

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

Kris Millegan's Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, Back to Heroin and French Indochina

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

The importance of being a Delano

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

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

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

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

Bund's Nemesis

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

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

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

Guns Turned Around

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romance Changes Career 

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

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

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

Dave Goes Into Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.