Ferdinand Lundberg

America's 60 Families (1937)

Some highlights and notes from the book, extensive references at the end.

• Download: America's 60 Families

CONTENTS

This was written about the USA in 1937.

6000 people top the US #usurocracy in 1937 with Rockefeller on top.

"Without minimizing the significance of control by the dominant owning clique through corporate devices, it is nevertheless true that corporations are merely the instruments or tools of control behind which the living masters hide in discreet anonymity."

Unchanged CORP(SE)-ORATE

The immense Rockefeller wealth compared to European Royalty and Indian Princes. Not even Czar Nicholas II or Queen Victoria could compare. (Wealth comparisons to Rothschilds and others is missing - we can only know today that it's unlikely to have been squandered!)

The power and influence of family connections. "Any tendency toward dispersal of great wealth that might be expected from its supposed distribution among numerous offspring of unions between rich and poor has been more than offset by the actual marriage of wealth with wealth."

"The rich families which the Rockefellers have interlocked in have been interlocked by marriages with other wealthy families, so that one can trace an almost unbroken line of biological relationships from the Rockefellers through half of the wealthiest 60 families of the nation."

"A sound psychological reason for the marriage of wealth with wealth is simply that the rich are suspicious, when it comes to contracting marriage, of the motives of those who are not rich. They are afraid of fortune-hunters, and properly so, for there have been many cases..."

"It is one of the many ironies of the situation that the United States should be pumping forth dividends and rents to support persons in stations so alien to the American concept of social status."

America's 60 Richest Families Wealth (1937) based on tax records

USA - Percentage distribution of income and % saved, 1929.

In 1929, 99% of US citizens earned $5000 or less.

"So perfect, so thorough, has been the collaboration of politics and private fortune since the founding of the American colonies that it is difficult to ascertain from the data of any given period where political intrigue on behalf of specific private interest has terminated."

"Marcus Alonzo Hanna, commissar extraordinary of John D. Rocke-feller, became the political architect of the new era, whose unique characteristics have been a tremendous drive into foreign markets..."

• Wikipedia: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hanna
• Biography - Internet Archive: archive.org/details/marcusalonzohann01crol
  
  
  

"In 1860 more than half the land area of the nation was held in trust for the people by the government, but by 1900 fully nine-tenths of it had been given away under the stimulus of corrupt payments, to railroads, mining syndicates, speculative land enterprises and homesteaders."

"That the ingenious Hanna, with his Rockefeller tutelage, brought into American politics a new technique rather than a new philosophy may be seen from the size of the funds that have snared American votes since 1860."

Corrupt President Cleveland & J P Morgan government bonds-for-gold scam. This is the reason for public auction of government securities.

Reasons why the US War against Spain was made to take control of Cuba.

"The practice in the new holding-company era was for a banking group, usually led by J. P. Morgan and Company, to induce the dominant families of competing enterprises to exchange their holdings for cash or for stocks and bonds in a consolidated enterprise."

"...after the 1890s that nearly all the ambassadors to London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, and lesser foreign capitals are the trusted deputies of the Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, and other banking camps."

When has a US President not been in the pocket of bankers?
"When Roosevelt's 2 terms are weighed it becomes patent that during this period, J P Morgan and Company and its clients made the greatest progress in their history. The evidence in support of this conclusion is crushing."

"Throughout his tenure Roosevelt continued to demand and re-ceive funds for the building of a huge Navy intended merely to under-write foreign economic conquests of Wall Street; in 1907 he theatrically sent the fleet around the world."

• Wikipedia: Great White Fleet
  

1907 Fake News and White House Collusion with J P Morgan

Attorney "General Bonaparte" 😁
USA oligarchy, New World wealth intermingled with European blue-blood

• Charles Joseph Bonaparte
  
  

• Internet Archive: The wreck; an historical and a critical study of the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and of William Howard Taft (1913) by Hansbrough, Henry Clay, 1848-1933
  
  
  
  

Pres. Taft suppressed an important opinion of Solicitor General Frederick Lehmann, who held that securities affiliates were illegal. Lehmann's opinion was not made known until 1933, when it was discovered during the inquiry into Wall Street irregularities.

• Wikipedia: Frederick William Lehmann
  
  

Such control also made possible the reaping of enormous profits by manipulation, profits in which the actual owners of property usually did not share. The consequences against which Brandeis specifically warned did not descend on the nation until 1929-33.

• NYT: F. Lundberg, 92, Author Who Wrote of the Rich By WOLFGANG SAXON MARCH 3, 1995

Cracks In The Constitution, By Ferdinand Lundberg

• Summary of book - PDF: Cracks In The Constitution

"Woodrow Wilson took office ominously, one might say, as a re-former and a liberal. Wall Street was not disturbed."

• Income Tax
• FTC
• Federal Reserve

After the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, Thomas Fortune Ryan on Wilson: "He is a great man and a great President."

"1913 James Speyer of the banking house of Speyer and Company, called at the State Department and confided his anxiety that the Huerta regime in Mexico would default on a $10,000,000 loan maturing in June."

Early implementation of John Perkins' Economic Hitman System ™️

"The major portion of the war profits, the fact is, went into the hands of the wealthiest families. Net corporation profits for the period Jan 1916 - Jul 1921, when war-time industrial activity was finally liquidated, were $38 bln or approx the amount of the war expenditures."

"...we shall become a creditor instead of a debtor nation, and such a development, sooner or later, would certainly tend to bring about the dollar, instead of the pound sterling, as the international basis of exchange." -- Thomas W Lamont, JPM, April 1915

• Wikipedia: Thomas W. Lamont
  
  
  

"Early in 1917 the Allied governments, which now owed the Ameri-can bankers and their clients nearly $1,500,000,000, had been brought virtually to their knees by the German armies, and it was believed that the limit of Allied credit had been reached."

"There was every reason, of course, for Wall Street to regard the war as beneficent. By the close of 1916 Stock Exchange prices had risen 600% over the 1914 average. For stockholders and bankers 1916 was until then the most prosperous year in American history."

WW1 - The Red Cross, a cover operation headed by a banker and prospector spying, fomenting revolution and starving people who were on the wrong side.
"The purely political func-tion of the Red Cross is not generally appreciated even today." (1937)!

"Yet, in saying that newspapers do not exist to serve truth, it does not follow that they never serve truth and are never actuated by idealism, although truth in established journalism is always secondary, and very often is incidental, even accidental."

"FREEDOM of the press in the United States is largely theoretic and Pickwickian, consisting, in the main, of the tenuous right of small dissident groups to publish newspapers and magazines of limited circulation for sectarian audiences."

"The most authoritative statement of the press philosophy of the dominant capitalists was given by The Wall Street Journal, central organ of finance capital, on January 20, 1925, as follows:"

"The average newspaper reader believes that labor starts riots, throws bombs, and is the enemy of law and order. Misrepresentation of union labor is, indeed, fundamental in all newspapers, almost without exception..."

"The middle classes, notably in their role as consumers and investors, are duped by the plutocratic press. In 1929, for example, the press con-sistently refused to give due weight and display to warnings about the collapse of the stock market..."

"In reading through the newspapers of 1929-33 one is confronted with this apparent paradox: corporations in 1933 suddenly began rehiring employees that had never been laid off!"

"American newspapers, in short, are, paradoxically and with few exceptions, not newspapers at all."

"The pecuniary inhibitions that rule the press like a Freudian complex have brought such discredit upon newspapers that they are no longer trusted by informed persons or even by business interests."

"From its inception in 1924 Time has consistently performed as the journalistic champion of the wealthiest families."

"Few readers are able to see through the spurious claim of objecitivity behind which Time and Fortune class-consciously maneuver, for both employ a highly refined and deceptive journalistic technique wherein a brief adjective or adverb may slant a whole series of facts."

(a) "the stock market break [1929] is purely local & has no relation to general business or economics"; (b) "the situation[1930] should improve"; (c) "the depression [1931] must take its course"; ... (f) "the banking system [1932] is fundamentally sound."

• en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lamont
  
  

"Philanthropy, or Noncommercial Investment" chapter does quite a job of putting the benevolent 'Foundation', 'Charity' myth into perspective - it's mainly Public Relations - and look at 'giving' rather as 'buying' and with strings attached.

Philanthropists

Not going to tweet more from this book, unless I find anything interesting which is available online from the extensive bibliography.

References

• Internet Archive: Frenzied Finance (1905) by Lawson, Thomas William, 1857-
  
  
  

• Internet Archive: Years of plunder; a financial chronicle of our times (1935) by Hansl, Proctor W
  

• Internet Archive: Other people's money, and how the bankers use it (1924) by Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, 1856-1941
  
  

• Internet Archive: Rulers of America; A Study of Finance Capital - Anna Rochester (1936) by Rochester, Anna
  
  
  

• Internet Archive: The masters of capital; a chronicle of Wall street (1921) by Moody, John, 1868-1958
  
  

• Internet Archive: The Mirrors Of 1932 by Anonymous
  
  
  

• Internet Archive: The story of life insurance (1932) by Hendrick, Burton Jesse, 1870-1949
  
  

• Internet Archive: Capitalism and Its Culture (1935) by Jerome Davis

• Internet Archive: Forty years of American finance (1909) by Noyes, Alexander Dana, 1862-1945
  
  
  
  

• Internet Archive: History of the great American fortunes (1908) by Myers, Gustavus, 1872-1942
  
  

• Internet Archive: The theory of business enterprise (1904) by Veblen, Thorstein, 1857-1929
  
  
  
  

• Internet Archive: Washington Merry Go Round (1931) by Horace Livbright
  
  

• Internet Archive: Democracy at the cross-roads (1919) by Petre, Maude Dominica Mary, 1863-1942