The Battle of the Baptists

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

— Dr. Louis Entzminger

Air Lines and Air Waves in Fort Worth

Working for Brown Brothers Harriman?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev. J. Frank Norris

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

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

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

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

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

The Liberal Baptists — a/k/a Rockefeller Funds

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

but to cause it. " — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Rev. Fosdick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning Society's Future

Senior and Junior

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

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

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

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

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

Who Slew John in Dallas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Texas 'colonel'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CIAA — Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs

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

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

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

Nelson, the Coordinator

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

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

The Texas State Network--in More Ways Than One

Elliott Roosevelt and TSN Radio

In the beginning of the summer of 2012 I was working on research involving Elliott Roosevelt's radio station in Fort Worth, leading up to revealing how the men who had initially supported his father, FDR, rallied around him in the hope of sucking power from the Presidency to themselves. This is the next segment of the research at that link.

Elliott's first introduction to radio, it is said, came through his work in advertising—handling radio accounts for Albert Frank company, Paul Cornell, Inc., and Kelly, Nason and Roosevelt, Inc. in New York. As sales manager for three stations owned by Alva Pearl Barrett through his Southwest Broadcasting company, Elliott became director of the Southwest division of Hearst Radio, Inc. bought the stations in 1936, then made him its president until January, 1938 when he began forming his own network. At Texas State Network, which began operation on September 15, 1938, Elliott also had a two-day-a-week show called "Texas in the World News" over KFJZ, which was quickly added to TSN.

A Texas Strategy Flouted

It had begun in 1932 with the political strategist, Colonel E.M. House of Texas , who had worked from behind a curtain in 1912 to select, elect and reelect in 1916 the last Democrat to national office, Woodrow Wilson.

Col. House also chose Franklin Roosevelt and encouraged him early on  to run for office. House knew Sara Delano Roosevelt from visits to his summer home in Essex County, Massachusetts, about three miles away from his friend, T. Jefferson Coolidge, of Manchester, whose father had worked for Russell and Company with Warren Delano, FDR's grandfather.

The Delano and Coolidge families had both been steeped in the opium trade in the previous century. But Colonel House died in 1937, and neither Roosevelt nor Garner saw the need to continue the misformed relationship merely to keep a dead man happy.

After two terms as vice president, Garner was fed up with both the President and with being his subordinate. So too were the money men who had accumulated the capital at the instigation of House in 1932, alas, a story reserved for another day! Garner, through his supporters, was prepared to pour the bucket of warm piss which was the vice presidency on FDR's son, if not on the President himself.

When Radio Was New

FDR assigned Elliott "the task of putting in place an infrastructure from which to launch FDR's final run for the Presidency in 1940," although, of course, the younger man's first love was really air transportation.

The Associated Press reported in August 1938 as follows:

The state of Texas today granted a charter to the Texas State Network, Inc., Fort Worth Broadcasting company incorporated by Elliott Roosevelt, Harry A. Hutchinson and Raymond E. Buck. The firm, which has 1,000 shares of no par value capital stock ($50,000 paid in), proposes to operate 23 Texas stations tied in with 108 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting company.

...The president's son bid last spring for managership of the Dallas station but the commission renewed its contract with Mgr. John Thorwald instead. Roosevelt then advanced the counter proposition. Thorwald said in Dallas the network's key stations would be WRR in Dallas and KFJZ or KTAT of Fort Worth.

A.P. Barrett

The KTAT call letters came from Texas Air Transport (TAT), an airline company whose stock was purchased in 1928 by Alva Pearl Barrett, a former state senator, who years earlier had sold the San Antonio land which became Fort Sam Houston to the U.S. Army. Barrett then moved to Fort Worth and became a pioneer in commercial aviation in that city.

The competition to capture contracts to carry federal airmail was fierce as early as 1925, and it was Mayor H.C. Meacham and his ally, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, who fought for it the hardest. Their vision of owning an international mail route was achieved when TAT became the third U.S. transport company to deliver mail to a foreign country by establishing a route via Laredo, Texas, to Mexico. Don Pyeatt has written an excellent history of the development of this airline, in which he states:

In February 1929, Alva Barrett incorporated Southern Air Transport (SAT) in Fort Worth as a holding company for the purpose of acquiring numerous independent transportation related companies. SAT bought Gulf Air Lines (GAL), TAT Flying Service, Airports Engineering and Construction Company and Dixie Motor Coach Bus Lines and merged them into the new company. SAT's headquarters was in Barrett's Aviation Building in downtown Fort Worth and operated from terminals at Meacham Field at Fort Worth and Love Field at Dallas. C.R. Smith of Fort Worth was named vice-president and treasurer of SAT and Tom Hardin became a vice-president and general manager of both TAT and SAT. Silliman Evans, a former political writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a personal friend of Amon G. Carter, was named Public Relations Director.

Texas Air Transport and KTAT

In 1930 Raymond E. Buck moved into Fort Worth's brand-new Aviation Building at the corner of Main and 7th Streets, built by his client, Texas Air Transport, which also owned its own radio station, KTAT.

Glasscock memorial

Buck's civil law practice began in Fort Worth soon after WWI ended. The son of an eminent appellate judge whose paternal roots were planted in Forth Worth in the 1860s, Raymond was also related to another group of Fort Worth attorneys named Lattimore, one of whom was married to Judge Buck's sister Emma Buck Lattimore.

In 1921 Raymond E. Buck married Katherine Camp of Fort Worth, a granddaughter of Catherine Glasscock, whose birth in Texas in 1837 made her an eligible candidate for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT); thus their sons could easily have joined the Sons of the Republic of Texas (SRT).  Katherine Buck's grandmother was a niece of George Washington Glasscock, who arrived with his brother, Joseph Milligan Glasscock, in Texas (then part of Mexico) in 1835. Both men fought in the Siege of Bexar, which began the year prior to the battle at the Alamo, and Joseph died a hero in 1839. We have written many times here about the SRT, a secrecy-loving fraternity that linked Texian descendants all over the state.

In 1938 KTAT became KFJZ Radio when newspapers reported it had been purchased by the wife of Elliott Roosevelt. She acquired 313 shares, Elliott one with one share going to Harry A. Hutchinson, a resident of Benbrook, who was listed in the city directory for Fort Worth as the general manager of the Elliott Roosevelt Properties. 
 
Legal paperwork may have been handled by R.E. Buck, whose father, Judge Raymond Halbert Buck, had long been close politically to Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner. Years later Buck himself told Jeb Byrne, an advance man for the 1963 Presidential visit of JFK, that he himself had been friends of Vice President Lyndon Johnson for many years.

Buck had acquired an interest in the radio station in his own name (possibly as a front for Barrett). Barrett's office was located in the Aviation Building, which was later called the Trinity Life Insurance Building.

In addition to his law practice, he owned interests in other businesses in insurance, banking and corporate matters. He was, for example, vice chairman of Fred Korth's Continental National Bank in Fort Worth. A brief summary of his major clients was furnished by long-time secretary, Mary Marett, given in 1975:

• General counsel and director for Southern Air Transport (SAT);
• Associate counsel for American Airlines (of which Amon G. Carter was the largest shareholder, and Cyrus Rowlett Smith was chairman);
• Associate counsel for General Dynamics; and 
• President of Midway Airport Corp., a corporation set up in 1942, before it evolved into today's D-FW International Airport.

JFK's stetson from Ray Buck

In 1963 Raymond Buck, a longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson, was president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored a "non-partisan" breakfast as the central event of JFK's presidential visit to Fort Worth. It was Buck who presented President Kennedy with cowboy boots and a stetson hat shortly before he traveled to Dallas, where he was assassinated.

Elliot's radio network was operated from KTAT as the flagship, with its offices in the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, while the Roosevelts made their home west of town at a ranch in Benbrook. He had divorced his first wife in 1933 to marry Ruth Googins, the daughter of a Swift meat-packing magnate who helped to create Cowtown. The Hotel Texas, where President Kennedy spent the last night of his life, was a couple of blocks west of the packing plants. The plants remained there until the 1970s, when the area became the popular Stockyards District.

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.

When White Russians Invaded Florida

Bertha Palmer

A considerable area of western Florida was once owned by a Chicago woman, born Bertha Honoré in 1849. Married to a wealthy retailer and hotelier named Palmer Potter, twice her age, Bertha used her wealth to connect with some of the most powerful people in finance and politics. When in 1874 Bertha's sister Ida married Frederick Dent Grant, the son of President Ulysses S. Grant, she attempted to make Chicago an international center of influence, and her personal contacts ranged as far afield as London and Paris. 

Ida Grant's daughter, Julia, whom Bertha had taken under her wing, in 1899 was married in Beaulieu, the William Waldorf Astor cottage in Newport, R.I., which her aunt Bertha Palmer had leased for the summer season. In a small, private Russian Orthodox ceremony Julia was wed to Romanov Prince Michel Cantacuzene of Russia, a diplomat who became Chief of Staff to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, according to a book Julia published called Revolutionary Days Including Passages from My Life Here and There 1876-1917.

Julia and her husband then settled in the Ukraine until Bertha's dream of royal fame was destroyed by the Bolshevik revolution. The Cantacuzenes fled from Russia to live in Sarasota, Florida. There they remained for some time following Bertha's death in 1918. Julia's mother, Ida Grant, lived in "The Acacias," a residence built by an uncle, not far from Bertha's home in Sarasota, "The Oaks." Although Julia divorced the Russian prince in 1934, her son still went by the title Prince Michel Cantacuzene, as he was engaged in selling real estate in Chicago in 1930.

The elder Prince Cantacuzene, whose kingdom was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1917, would also work with his wife's cousins in their real estate company, even after he cheated on their sister with a Sarasota bank clerk Jeannette Draper, who got a job at the Palmer National Bank in 1929. He divorced Julia Grant and quickly married Jeannette in 1934. The Cantacuzenes' home at 870 S. Palm in Sarasota is now the museum building for the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

Cantacuzene was also involved in the Palmer brothers' bank. While his ex-wife moved back to Washington, D.C., her former husband continued working in the real estate development company with Bertha Palmer's sons, Potter Palmer, Jr. and Honoré Palmer, who inherited the personal estate of $1.6 million with the balance estimated at $20 million held in trust. Who managed all that money for the Palmers? A good guess would be an investment manager connected to Brown Brothers, related to Mrs. Grace Brown Palmer.

Grace Greenway Brown Palmer's Family

In 1903 Honoré had married Grace Greenway Brown, one of the daughters of George "Brook" Brown. Whether or not young Palmer knew about the shameful scandal brought to the Brown family by Grace's late grandfather, Alexander Davison Brown (known back in Maryland as Col. A. D. Brown), probably didn't really matter because of the banking importance of the family as a whole, which was written up in the Peerage and Baronetage of Great Britain and Ireland, compiled by Henry Colburn in 1880.

The Colonel, who stabled his racehorses on his Brookland Wood estate, about seven miles outside Baltimore, had been known to race against August Belmont and Pierre Lorillard at Pimlico and seemed to keep himself out of the limelight until, following his wife's death in 1879, he appalled the local Presbyterian congregation of which he was a member by making the notorious Laura Hobson his second wife in a ceremony held a block from the White House at the St. John Episcopal Church facing the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., no less. Laura, allegedly the daughter of his father's lodgekeeper, ran a house of ill repute in Baltimore. 

Grace Potter's father, George "Brook" Brown (click to enlarge)

Eight years later he filed a divorce suit against her, which also made headlines, and the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote on June 14, 1889 that A. D. Brown had himself been indicted on a charge of "keeping a disorderly house." That was not to say he was untidy; he was being called a pimp! A legal separation became final in 1891, only a year before her grandfather's death which occurred when Grace was ten years old. 

Grace was one of eight children born to George Brown, who married in 1866, more than a decade before the scandal erupted. They had remained at A.D.'s Brooklandwood estate , a historic mansion lost by Grace's brother, H. Carroll Brown. A broker who married the daughter of Marcus Daly, often referred to as "the copper king," of Anaconda mining fame, Carroll Brown was forced to convey it to his brother-in-law, Marcus Daly, Jr. because of debts he owed to his estranged wife and her family.

The Chicago Connection

Grace Brown's sister, Fannie, had earlier married Chicagoan Walter Woodruff Keith in 1896. Walter, whose name appeared in the Chicago Blue Book as a resident of the Prairie Avenue district, (George Pullman, Philip Armour, and Marshall Field--both Sr. and Jr.--also lived on the same street) was a grain merchant and member of the Chicago Board of Trade. 

Walter was a long-time friend of  Honoré Palmer and swore on a passport affidavit he had known Walter for more than 20 years, having grown up with him in Chicago, in the Winnetka area, where they were members of the same clubs, such as the Baltimore Club. By 1906 both Palmer and Keith were also listed in the Baltimore Blue book, where their wives had lived. 

Walter Keith died before 1940, and his widow Fannie moved in with her sister, Grace, in Sarasota, where six live-in servants took care of the three adults. The home they had in Chicago was even more magnificent, having been created by Potter Senior years earlier after the Chicago fire, and it remained until 1950.

Palmer Castle in Chicago

Another Brown sister, Sara Carroll Brown,  married Stanley Field, nephew of Marshall Field of Chicago. According to one website:

Stanley was close to his uncle, often playing golf together. When Marshall Field died in 1906, Stanley assumed management of the company. He also served as President of the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, created by a one million dollar endowment from Marshall Field. The museum, now known as the Chicago Museum of Natural History, has sponsored research and exploration, catalogued thousands of species, and continues to be a museum of world-class distinction.... [The Palmers'] Sarasota estate, known as “Immokalee,” took in the land that would become the Field Estate. Sister Fanny married Walter Keith and built a mansion south of Immokalee on Philippi Creek. A niece of the Browns, Harriet Wentworth, built a mansion on Sarasota Bay just south of the Field Estate called “Kimlira.” A niece of the Keiths, Katherine, was married to architect David Adler, who designed the Field Estate. Mrs. Potter Palmer’s estate (now demolished) was further south in Osprey, and is now the historical and archaeological research center Spanish Point at the Oaks.... Adler designs for wealthy Chicagoans included the homes of William McCormick Blair, Albert Lasker, Marshall and Stanley Field, Potter Palmer, and Cyrus McCormick.

In 1920 Stanley filed suit for divorce, but the couple reconciled. Newspapers claimed he filed again in 1923, charging her with desertion, but we read nothing further after that. Most likely Stanley was not happy having his wife living in England while the children were there for their educations. The eldest daughter left in 1920, followed by Daphne in 1921.

Stanley had been chosen in 1906 to run the department stores upon the death of his uncle. The dry goods business had originally been founded by Potter Palmer in 1852, but only 13 years later the tycoon sold shares to Marshall Field and Levi Leiter. One of Potter Palmer's sons was given his mother's maiden name, Honoré Palmer, and married Grace Greenway Brown, a sister of Sara Carroll Brown (Mrs. Stanley) Field. Not only did the families live near each other in the gold coast section north of Chicago, but they socialized together and intermarried with their "class" of wealth.

But who would have thought there was so much wealth in mere retail? 

Maybe they were selling something that became illegal in 1920 with passage of the Volstead Act, the same act which gave birth to a national crime syndicate? Only more research will tell.

Three Degrees of Separation from the CIA?

Paul Helliwell could have boasted, much to Kevin Bacon's chagrin, that there were closer to three degrees of separation between himself and every known money launderer or land fraud artist in Florida.


It would be impossible to dispute such a claim, as we attempt to show here. Possibly by examining the earliest of Helliwell's relationships, we can understand the later ones where he serves as the link between U.S. intelligence agencies, drug running and money laundering.

NY Evening Post, 1909

One Degree of Separation

The earliest fraudster linked to Helliwell was Maude C. Fowler, mentioned in an earlier post. With only one degree of separation from Helliwell, Fowler's biography often states she was known in Kansas City, Mo. as the head of the Women's Athletic Club. Pure hogwash, as we can see here. The actual founder and head of that club was Viola Dale McMurray. In fact, Maude Cody Fowler never even lived in Kansas City!

Maude Cody was married in rural Shelby County, Tenn. in 1890 and moved with her husband to Oklahoma in 1901 when their son Cody was nine. Orin Scott (O.S.) Fowler, her husband, had grown up in St. Louis (not Kansas City), Missouri, where he and his father, Napoleon Fowler, both worked first for John V. Lewis and Co., a pioneer cottonseed oil producer, and later for the American Cotton-Seed Oil Company, known as the cotton trust, which bought Lewis' company.

O.S. Fowler seems to have lost interest in cotton oil after moving to Tennessee. Instead, he moved the family to El Reno, OK in 1901, started a bus line there, and then got into motor cars, founding "Fowler Auto Livery" in Oklahoma City. From there he spent some time in the Texas panhandle before he and Maude settled in Jacksonville, Florida by 1913. Their son had in the meantime attended law school in St. Louis, located 250 miles east of Kansas City, where the land scam connected to Security Underwriters allegedly originated.

Fowlers in Miami 1921

Maude and her husband moved to Florida from Oklahoma and resided in Jacksonville, Florida, as early as 1913, managing the Artesian Farm Land Co., owned and operated in 1910 by Sherman Bryan Jennings, a cousin of often-defeated presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

Governor Jennings helped to pass laws granting land to people who would promise to drain and develop what was then mostly swampland. To disguise his own ownership of corporations set up to hide his name, he hired advertising companies to handle the sales on his behalf.

Maude and Orin Fowler's names appeared in the Miami city directory in 1921, as shown above. That happens to be the same year they showed up in Tampa, leaving in their wake the brewing scandal involving the Florida governor.

Enter the Palmer Family

Cody Fowler home built around 1921

Maude Fowler moved to Tampa around 1921 and became one of the founding developers of Temple Terrace, according to photos and history in Temple Terrace, a book by Lana Burroughs, Tim Lancaster, and Grant Rimbey:  

"... On May 25, 1925, the City was incorporated, with D. Collins Gillette, one of the founding developers, serving as the first mayor, and Maude Fowler, serving as vice mayor. Her son Orin Cody Fowler relocated from Oklahoma City with his wife, also named Maude, at or before 1925, when his name appeared in Tampa’s directory, and he practiced at the firm of Fowler, White in Tampa. Maude Fowler died suddenly in Tampa on April 7, 1942."

Temple Terraces, Inc. was incorporated in 1920 to develop the land that had previously comprised Bertha Palmer's hunting reserve in Hillsborough County. She bequeathed the lands to her brother, Adrian Honore, who also acted as trustee for the trusts covering her Sarasota County lands left primarily to her sons.

The earlier history of Tampa was centered around the families who founded the law firm of  MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane--which hired Cody Fowler when he relocated to Florida from Oklahoma. It was while a member of this firm that Fowler and Paul Helliwell worked together in 1933 at Cuban Rum.

Palmer Development of Sarasota and Tampa Area

When Bertha Palmer visited southwest Florida in 1910, she purchased what she would name Riverhills Ranch in Hillsborough County for a hunting preserve. She left the acreage to her brother Adrian Honore in her will before her death in 1918. He wasted no time turning 7,000 acres of it into Temple Terraces, Inc., incorporated in 1920. 

The men associated with that company then recruited the Fowler family to move to the area. Adrian sat on the Temple Terrace board with all of them for years, at the same time he lived in Sarasota and supervised his development of citrus grove farms and residential subdivisions.

Honore was also named as trustee over all the other lands she owned in the area, most of the trusts created for his sisters two sons, but others for grandchildren and other family members. He was also president of the Sarasota-Venice Company.

Bertha had her winter mansion, called "The Oaks" near Osprey in Sarasota County, which passed to a trust for her two sons, Honoré Palmer and Potter Palmer, Jr., and their wives. Bertha's sister, Ida Honore Grant, also had a home nearby, called "The Acacias," located just north of what is now called Centennial Park on Sarasota Bay, west of 10th Street downtown. Ida died in 1922, survived by her daughter, Princess Cantacuzene, and a son, Ulysses S. Grant III.

Bertha's brother, Adrian Honore, was trustee for the estate, and it was he who sold the Hillsborough County land to Burks Hamner, Vance Helm, D. Collins Gillette, and Maude Cody Fowler (mother of Tampa Attorney O. Cody Fowler). Adrian kept a seat on the corporate board of Temple Terraces, Inc., so we can assume the Palmers and Honores retained stock in the company. 

They wanted to "foster the realization of Mrs. Potter Palmer’s citrus and golf course community vision," and make a few dollars in the process.

According to one historical website of the area, the new owners developed a golf course with residential areas surrounding it, as well as 5,000 acres of orange groves. 

Within that enclave, in 1922 Cody Fowler, son of Orin Scott Fowler of Oklahoma City, built for his family a five-bedroom home, where they resided until a similarly styled home was built on Davis Island's Baltic Circle, looking out on Hillsborough Bay.

The Fowler law firm (MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane and Fowler) was located at 706 Franklin in Tampa, on the 10th floor of the Citizens Bank Building. Fowler subsequently formed a firm with Morris White, now called Fowler White Burnett.

Mayor Gillette, a Tampa associate of Maude Fowler, thus had three degrees of separation from Paul Helliwell, who worked with Maude's son, Cody, in the Cuban Rum importing firm. Could there be a political or intelligence connection Helliwell may have acquired at this early point in his career? That question spurs us to dig deeper into the Palmer family.