Strange Death of Franklin Roosevelt - Emanuel Josephson |
The New Deal developed strictly along the lines of the spoils system. Since "Charity begins at home", it was a New Deal first of all for the Roosevelt family and second for the Roosevelt-Delano Dynasty. This is perfectly illustrated by the story of why the United States starved for sugar during the war.
The Adams branch of the Dynasty traditionally are heavily interested in the West Indies sugar industry. One of the cogent reasons for this patrician family throwing in its lot with the "rabble" during the Revolutionary War period was England's interference with the rum, molasses and slave trade with the West Indies.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered office the Dynasty was well represented in its holdings in the sugar industry. "Cousin" Frederick B. Adams, in addition to his interests in the munition industry signalized by his position of Chairman of the Board of the Air Reduction Company and Director of the Remington Arms Company, held many key positions in the sugar industry including: Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Fruit and Sugar Company, President of the Cuban Dominican Sugar Company, President of the Santa Ana Sugar Company, Director of the Sugar Estates of Oriente, President of the Barhona Sugar Corporation, and President of the Tanamo Sugar Corporation; subsequently he became President of the West Indies Sugar Company. "Cousin" Charles Francis Adams, whose interests ran more to local utilities and to shipbuilding and naval construction, represented the Dynasty in only two sugar companies as Director of the American Sugar Refining Company and Director of the Central Aguirre Sugar Company. Robert C. Adams was Director of the Warner Sugar Company. In short the Dynasty was more than a little interested in sugar. Also interested in sugar were the Rockefeller-Morgan clique and the National City Bank.
The sugar industry at this time was in a state verging on bankruptcy and the condition of the West Indies companies was particularly bad. In a commercial Dynasty such as the Roosevelt-Delano, this called for prompt action. Roosevelt's action was particularly prompt. The New Dealers deliberately conspired to destroy the American sugar industry and to favor the West Indies sugar industry.
In the course of the 1932 campaign Hoover had accused Roosevelt of planning to injure the American farmer, among other things, by lowering tariffs. Roosevelt denied the charges. But a year later, his Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, began, on behalf of the Dynasty, the campaign to destroy the continental American sugar industry on special behalf of the West Indies and Latin American industry. On July 31, 1934, Wallace pronounced in a speech to farmers at the free Chatauqua held on the campus of the Louisiana Polytechnic Institute, Ruston, Louisiana, what Charles A. Farwell, executive of the American Sugar Cane League called "Wallace's death sentence on Louisiana's sugar industry." Wallace pronounced according to the report in the Times-Picayune published on that date and quoted, December 1938, by the journalistic genius, Meigs Frost, in a masterly series of articles in the New Orleans State,
"Sugar is an inefficient industry. I am willing to say that in Louisiana where sugar is produced . . .
"I do not believe the Louisiana sugar or any other inefficient industry should be put out of business all at once. That would be hard on human right. But it should be exposed gradually to the winds of world commerce."
That Wallace was assigned by his Dynastic masters to accomplish some particularly vicious dirty work, is revealed by the testimony given previously by one of his subordinates, A.J.S. Weaver, before the House Committee on Agriculture, February 23, 1934 (quoted from the Government report):
"Hope: Well then in other words, the policy is . . . eliminating the (continental American) sugar industry before it gets any bigger. Am I correct in that assumption?
"Weaver: Yes, if you mean limiting the industry. I think that is a reasonable statement.
"Cummings: Is it a reasonable assumption that the object of the bill (Representative's Bill No. 7907: Includes Sugar and Sugar Cane as Basic Commodities) then is to give us a kind of shot in the arm and put us out of business while we are partly unconscious?
"Weaver: Yea.
"McCandless, of Hawaii: What is it, do you believe, will destroy our sugar production?
"Weaver: Reduction in price and reduction in tariff.
"McCandless: If it had not been for the protection and holding up of the sugar industry in the United States, would we not be at the mercy of foreign countries for our sugar?
"Weaver: Oh that is conceivable and there is some danger in that.
"McCandless: And has not the sugar industry employed thousands and thousands of men in the United States?
"Weaver: Well a great amount of labor is employed, yes . . . But the total in terms of seasonal employment even is . . . I should say—not significant, but I hesitate to call its total important. Furthermore it is quite possible that by producing sugar we have robbed ourselves of the chances to employ men to produce goods which we might have traded for sugar, if we had not employed them.
"McCandless: We have now 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 unemployed men, is that not so?
"Weaver: That is right.
"McCandless: Would we not have more if we destroyed the sugar industry?
"Weaver: Well the sugar industry is not in immediate danger of being destroyed.
But the American Sugar Cane League officially presented convincing evidence that the danger of destruction of the American sugar industry was imminent and was deliberately planned and clearly indicated in Secretary Henry Wallace's acts affecting the Louisiana sugar industry. They stated:
"The federal wage-hour law specifically exempts agricultural labor from its provisions. But the complicated Sugar Act, passed September 1, 1937, supposed to be for the salvation of the American sugar industry gives the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture power to rule on cane field wages and hours; the only agricultural industry in which the United States government has power to dictate wages and hours. It provides that the Secretary of Agriculture can do so only after a public hearing. Secretary Wallace has adopted the policy of holding two such public hearings a year.
"In the midst of the sugar-cane harvest of 1937, when Louisiana sugar growers were fighting tooth and toe nail to get their crop harvested before freezes followed by warm weather could ruin it, when men were being cut off from W.P.A. pay rolls and rushed like armies into the cane fields. Secretary Wallace called a hearing on sugar cane harvest wages. Harried sugar planters had to stop work to prepare briefs, attend and testify. Then, when the harvest was virtually over, and some 1,000,000 tons of sugar cane had been ruined, caught by freeze and thaw in the fields, in December 1937, Secretary Wallace issued his rulings on cane field harvest wages for that same season—and made them retroactive clear back to September 1, 1937! Sugar cane planters stood under federal orders to look up men long since finished with their job, often scattered far and wide, and pay them additional back pay ordered by Secretary Wallace. There were penalties for violation of those orders. It was a situation said to be without precedent in American agriculture. Some $250,000 in back pay was involved, for thousands of workers in small amounts.
"Sugar cane planting starts each year in September and October. But in February, 1938, Secretary Wallace ordered a hearing on cane planting wages for the planting season finished long before the hearing was called. The hearing was held. Secretary Wallace's rulings didn't come out until June, 1938, the "lay-by" period in sugar growing, when cane field labor mostly has gone fishing, or is scattered anywhere. And again it was a retroactive ruling, causing the Louisiana planters as much trouble and expense as if that had been its purpose, which some of the League officials say they believe it was.
"Planting of the 1939 sugar cane harvest started as usual in September, 1938. So Secretary Wallace waited until September 27, 1938, when many of the planters had completed their planting, to call a hearing at Baton Rouge, La., to determine how many acres each sugar cane grower would be permitted to plant—on a crop that many of them already had finished planting! The Department of Agriculture men holding the hearing discovered that many planters had finished planting their crop by October 1, and that some for varied reasons had lagged behind. So a ruling was issued giving preferential status to the growers who had finished their planting by October 1, 1938. What was described as only a tentative quota ruling was made by Secretary Wallace. He set a deadline of November 14, 1938, for sugar cane growers to file formal notice that they elected to keep the acreage they had planted by October 1, 1938. Department of Agriculture employees are compiling those notices yet. Secretary Wallace has indicated in a public announcement that a quota cut of up to 25 percent is possible. No man knows just when the official ax may fall.
"The result, officials of the American Sugar Cane League point out, is that thousands of Louisiana sugar growers, after every effort to comply with the Federal law, don't know to this day whether the acreage they have planted is legal or not."
[Editor's note: It was the object of the Dynasty through the New Deal to place all business except their own in a status of illegality through a constantly changing flow of arbitrary edicts by bureaucratic agencies. With all business forced to resort to bootlegging, "Black Markets" and other activities that were made illegal, blackmailing of industry and crushing competition became simple.]
"'If it is not. Secretary Wallace has a stick to hit you on the head with,' says Mr. Farwell. 'All he needs to say is: "You're going to lose your benefit payments if you don't plough under every furrow of sugar cane you've planted in excess of this quota I'm giving you after the planting season is over." Under present conditions in this government-bedeviled industry, if you lose your benefit payments, you've got to quit. And nobody in Louisiana knows when Secretary Wallace's official ax is likely to swing.'"
In the Harvard Business Review of Autumn 1938, John E. Dalton, former high Federal official with wide authority in sugar affairs, in an article entitled "Federal Sugar Control", wrote:
"The outstanding feature of this enormous American sugar machine is that it is under the immediate direction of the Federal government. No other industry in the United States, excepting perhaps public utilities, experiences such a high degree of government control, a control extending to output, prices, agricultural practices, and labor conditions."
"'And all this power,' points out Mr. Farwell, 'is in the hands of one man. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, open and avowed enemy, by the printed, uncontradicted record, of continental American sugar as an industry.'"
However, Wallace's harassment of the Louisiana sugar growers and his employment on them of the New Deal lettres de cachet, confiscatory retroactive wage and acreage ruling, that were as dishonest as they were doubly un-Constitutional and un-American—for they confiscated property without the due process and made a man retroactively guilty of violating a law which did not exist at the time of the act—do not fill the whole picture of the conspiracy.
The Department of Agriculture through education of the sugar growers and development of new strains, had brought about a ten-fold increase in production of sugar in Louisiana, from 45,000 to 450,000 tons per year; and the per acre yield had been more than doubled. The Resettlement Division of the Department of Agriculture had brought back thousands of acres into production. A pretentious sugar experimental station had been built by the Department at Houma. The Government had engineered the building and putting into operation of seven new co-operative mills in which five million dollars had been invested, 60% by the government and 40% by the sugar growers. Employment was increased and wages rose. All this was done for the purpose of increasing employment in the sugar industry.
While these developments were under way Roosevelt proceeded to lower the price of sugar, by lowering the tariff on Cuban sugar produced with cheap labor, from $2.10 to $.90 per hundred pounds. Pawn Wallace, in the meantime, had forced the 40% reduction in acreage planted under a pretendedly "voluntary" plan. It was laden with coercion and intimidation by "marketing licenses" which made the sale of "nonassented" cane impossible. He also threatened an additional retroactive 25% cut in acreage, or ploughing under of the cane after the crop had been planted and the expenses incurred; and imposed retroactive wage increases. Simultaneously, the Dynasty's and their Wall Street allies agent, Cuban dictator, Col. Fulgencia Batista, visited Washington at their behest, and on leaving announced that he had made a deal, on the basis of which he predicted that Congress would reduce the tariff on Cuban sugar from 90 to 75 cents per hundred pounds and increase the quota admitted. Shortly thereafter Wallace issued a false statement of the type that are so dear to New Deal commodity speculators of the Barney Baruch type, which forced the price of sugar down 25 points to the lowest reached in the depression.
No move was overlooked in the effort to depress the price of sugar or to bankrupt the Louisiana and other continental American producers. Peru was permitted to ship 50,000 tons of sugar to the United States on a deal that involved the Grace interests. Peru was so completely a newcomer in the field of sugar that she had not the machinery to grind the cane. It could not be pretended even that this deal stimulated the United States heavy industries. For with funds supplied by the U.S. taxpayer, Peru bought the grinding machinery from the Krupps in Nazi Germany in order to be able to ship the sugar into the American market and further depress it.
The pattern of the Dynasty's plotting in sugar makes its objective obvious. They were utilizing every device to expand and bankrupt the American sugar growers so that they could take over their holdings and build up a complete monopoly. In the meantime their enormous profits in the West Indies industry, which were gained in the process of bankrupting the American industry, would help to pay for the purchase of the latter at a forced sale.
The outcome of these maneuvers was increased unemployment and a reduction of the continental American sugar production to less than 25% of our depression needs. At a time when war was threatening, the United States was made completely dependent for its sugar on overseas sources. The seriousness of the situation and the threats that it offered were clearly and prophetically portrayed by Clarence J. Bourg, President of the American Sugar Cane League in an address before the New Orleans Association of Commerce, December 1, 1938, quoted from Meigs Frost's report in the New Orleans States of the following day:
"Let us consider another national program. In the past several weeks we have read from day to day dispatches speaking about war. Preparedness is the watchword of the Administration. I am no alarmist and have no intention of stirring people to the fear of war, but the Federal Government is using every element of its propaganda machine to justify the expenditure of billions of dollars for the purpose of building armaments in the cause of preparedness. We subscribe to and support this program of national defense but we point out that armaments and guns and battleships are not the only sinews of war. People must eat whether they he soldiers or civilians back home. What has that got to do with sugar?
Almost every day we read where the Japs have told the American government in so many words to jump in the ocean and that suggests there might be a war with Japan. If there is a war with Japan, of what possible good will the Philippine Islands be as a source of supply of sugar? Do you think that a cargo of Philippine sugar will ever reach the United States when they are as far away as the Japanese themselves. And then there is Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where they can be easily surrounded by submarines and airplanes. The possibility of our receiving sugar from Hawaii in times of war could not be relied upon. Now there are two million tons of sugar from Hawaii and the Philippines that we depend upon as our source of supply. But suppose the Japanese are content to confine themselves to Chinese invasion.
On the Atlantic side we have Hitler to contend with. I do not want to arouse alarm about Hitlerism, but the American government is sufficiently concerned to send its Secretary of State down to Peru to have an international conference, the purpose of which is to build up a united defense in the Western Hemisphere. Suppose Hitler does make war on the Atlantic side. Of what good will Puerto Rico be as a source of supply? Yes, of what good will Cuba be with the submarines and the airplanes doing their diabolical work? We depend on those two islands for three million tons of sugar. Two million tons on one side, three million tons on the other side, and only two million tons allowed to be produced in the United States. And supposing the Germans and Japs get together and make war on both sides. What is the answer?"
It is to the everlasting credit of the Louisiana cane growers that they spoke up and fought despite very real fears of reprisals. But it availed them little.
During all this time that the continental American sugar growers were being forced to the wall by a treacherous and traitorous conspiracy by Government officials acting on behalf of American controlled foreign interests, the West Indies sugar industry had enjoyed a subsidy paid by the U.S. taxpayers of $119,000,000 and had flourished and profited enormously.
This is made clear by "Cousin" Fred B. Adam's report of the West Indies Sugar Corporation November 16, 1937:
"The statistics set forth above [year's gross income, $9,270,094.18; year's final net profit, $909,714.16, and others, including 'your corporation has no current indebtness save that contracted in the usual routine of business'] present such a marked contrast to the conditions existing in the industry five years ago [1932, when a Republican administration sat in Washington] that it is fitting at this time to make some acknowledgement of the part played by the Administration at Washington in effecting this change. It was the example of the United States in bringing about more satisfactory conditions through the establishment of production and import quotas of sugars . . . The role played by the government, therefore . . . has become one of great importance. So much so that government policies today do more than any other single factor to preserve or upset the balance between the varied interests of the industry . . . "
"Cousin" Fred's tribute to "Cousin" Franklin's help and cooperation is patent. It is notable that the West Indies Sugar Corporation alone was permitted to send into the United States more sugar (319,425 bags) than all the growers of the State of Florida were permitted to produce under the quota allowed them; also that in 1938, Wallace listed Cuba for a quota of 1,954,303 tons and Louisiana for 429,553 tons.
The consequences for the nation of this traitorous conspiracy were inevitable. Clarence Bourg's prediction were completely fulfilled. On the eve of the war, the U.S. had been deprived by a treasonous conspiracy of even her barest needs of sugar, a vital food and chemical raw material, just as by similar conspiracies she had been deprived of rubber, tin, oil, scrap iron and other vital war materials, exactly as is being done today once again in the face of another war. Fortunately for the nation, Wallace had not succeeded in carrying out his Dynastic bosses' orders to completely destroy the "inefficient" American sugar industry, or we certainly would have starved literally and lost the war.
The Dynasty is quite loyal in dealing with its own, and invariably there is a "pay-off", direct or indirect. While thousands of workers in the American sugar industry were thrown out of work, and the American people were being doomed to starve for sugar, when war had come, James Roosevelt was collecting fat dividends on the service that his father's Administration had rendered the West Indies sugar industry. In an interview which he gave Walker Davenport of Collier's Magazine, that was published in the August 27, 1938 issue under a facsimile of the "crown prince's signature, captioned "I'm Glad You Asked Me", James Roosevelt stated:
"We got the contract with the West Indies Sugar Company because its president, F.B. Adams is my cousin. And we did a good job too."
Though "Prince" James was immodest in claiming full credit for the job, it must be acknowledged that it was "a good job", in the sense of thoroughness, that was done in ruining the continental American sugar industry and in sugar-starving and endangering the security of the nation. It must have been a great comfort to Americans hungering for sugar to know that Jimmy was collecting commissions on Cuban sugar company insurance policies.
Florida alone could supply the sugar needs of the United States. But the New Deal had blocked the development of Florida's sugar industry to an even greater extent than it has throttled Louisiana's. With war once again on hand, national safety demands that continental United States shall be made independent of any off-shore sources.
An investigation of each and every phase of the New Deal Agricultural Allotment plan, represented as Roosevelt's boon to farmers, would reveal exactly the same type of devious subsidy of speculators and financial interests, allied with the Dynasty. And in each case there could be found a similar "pay-off".
Anent the club which Jimmy wielded in building up his insurance business, Hamilton Fish relates an illuminating story. He relates that, though he himself is in the insurance business, he took Jimmy to the office of President Gifford of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and urged the wisdom of giving him some of the A.T.T. insurance business.
"You know who that is, don't you", Fish told Gifford.
"Yes", Gifford replied.
"Well, it is a good thing to have a friend in court". Fish advised.
Gifford refused to permit blackmailing his Company. Shortly thereafter an investigation of the A.T.T. was launched.
Even Jimmy's "liberalism" was bought and paid for according to Robert W. Kenny. He stated in an A.P. dispatch dated September 6, 1947,
"In 1946, Mr. Roosevelt was paid $25,000 to support progressive candidates, but he was too busy selling insurance to make more than a few perfunctory appearances."
However loyal F.D.R., and his New Deal, may have been to the Dynasty and its financial supporters in the matter of sugar, it is obvious that he was equally disloyal, or traitorous, to his "solid Democratic" Louisiana voters. But he felt, no doubt, that there was no need to court even with promise an electorate stupidly loyal to him, even while he was engaged in betraying them.
The same pattern was repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam in all the various industries in which the Dynasty and its financial supports were interested. In the interest of kinsman William C. Clayton, of Anderson, Clayton and Company, and their foreign cotton monopolies (that had been built up with the aid of Roosevelt and the Dynasty during World War I) the cotton growers of the South were betrayed and bankrupted by the New Deal in even worse fashion than were the sugar growers. Indeed, it can be said without much fear of contradiction that in times of need President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the worst enemy the South ever had.
Though the Democratic and Republican branches of the Dynasty make a great display of animosity to the public, behind the scenes they cooperate very amicably in raiding the Treasury. The Roosevelt Steamship Company, Inc. is an excellent example of such cooperation. Kermit Roosevelt, Republican son of Theodore Roosevelt was its President and Director; he also served as Director of the American Line Steamship Corporation, President and Director of the United States Lines Company, and Vice President and Director of the United States Lines Operations Inc. Vincent Astor, nephew and close intimate of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and heavy contributor to his campaign funds, was also Director in the same companies. Until the Dynasty and Democratic Senators raised objections, in the early days of the New Deal, that the public might grow suspicious of the association and forbade it, F.D.R. spent most of his weekends on Vincent Astor's yacht, the Nourmahal. Archibald B. Roosevelt, partner of Roosevelt and Sons, was also Director of Roosevelt Steamship Company.
The dealings of the Roosevelt Steamship Company and the other lines controlled by the group with United States Shipping Board under the terms that were most amazingly generous to them, have cost the American taxpayers enormously. The 'City of Rayville', for instance had two Busch diesel engines replaced on one trip at a cost of over half a million dollars, at the expense of the taxpayers. The Shipping Board paid the bill, the Company collected the revenue. How many millions were drained out of the U.S. Treasury by the relative "enemies" of Roosevelt make interesting though disgusting reading. But they are an eloquent commentary on the sham enmity between the two branches of the Dynasty, faked to ensure that they will continue in power no matter which political party wins elections.