That the international bankers have been in complete control of the U.S. Federal Reserve System from its inception is readily demonstrated. Dr. Quigley points out that the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was Benjamin Strong, who became a close colleague of Montague Norman of the Bank of England.
“Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan Bank, especially of Henry P. Davison, who made him secretary of the Bankers Trust Company of New York (in succession to Thomas W. Lamont) in 1904, used him as Morgan’s agent in the banking rearrangements following the crash of 1907, and made him vice-president of the Bankers Trust (still in succession to Lamont) in 1909. He became governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the joint nominee of Morgan and of Kuhn, Loeb and Company in 1914. Two years later, Strong met Norman for the first time, and they at once made an agreement to work in cooperation for the financial practices they both revered.”15
The original Federal Reserve Board was largely hand-picked by “Colonel” House and included Paul Warburg. Subsequent appointments have always been completely congenial to the interests of Wall Street and the international bankers. Ferdinand Lundberg confirms Quigley’s evaluations:
“In practice the Federal Reserve Bank of New York became the fountainhead of the system of twelve regional banks, for New York was the money market of the nation. The other eleven banks were so many expensive mausoleums erected to salve the local pride and quell the Jacksonian fears of the Hinterland. Benjamin Strong ... president of the Bankers Trust Company [Morgan], was selected as the first Governor of the New York Reserve Bank. An adept in high finance, Strong for many years manipulated the country’s monetary system at the discretion of directors representing the leading New York banks. Under Strong the Reserve System, unsuspected by the nation, was brought into interlocking relations with the Bank of England and the Bank of France....”16
So now we have run full circle. Dr. Carroll Quigley was anxious to have us know who has been running the world. He makes it clear that in spite of their power, these secret centers of control are seldom in dictatorial positions where they can actually take direct, decisive political action; but their financial stranglehold on the world allows them to influence and manipulate the affairs of various nations to an amazing degree and to suit their own purposes. Therefore, whatever the purposes and goals of this group happen to be are of monumental importance to the rest of the world.
Chapter Footnotes
Chapter Four
What are the Goals of the World’s Secret Power Manipulators?
Having established how powerful the money-managers of the world have now become, Dr. Quigley’s second purpose appears to have been his desire to let us know what the political philosophy of these world giants has turned out to be. This is undoubtedly the most shocking aspect of his book. It is all the more disturbing because the facts in this part of his book fit perfectly with the world of reality in which we find ourselves. Many things which have seemed inconsistent and incongruous suddenly loom up with startling clarity as Dr. Quigley provides an insider’s analysis of what has been happening.
In the beginning of this presentation I pointed out some of the disturbing questions which are likely to occur to anyone who has been trying to understand the significance of the amazing trends of current history. There is a growing volume of evidence that the highest centers of political and economic power have been forcing the entire human race toward a global, socialist, dictatorial-oriented society. And what has been most baffling about it has been the fact that this drift toward dictatorship with its inevitable obliteration of a thousand years of struggle toward human freedom, is being plotted, promoted and implemented by the leaders of free nations and the super-rich of those nations whose positions of affluence would seem to make them the foremost beneficiaries of the free-enterprise, property-oriented, open society in which so much progress has been made. Certainly they, above all men, should know that in order for this system to survive, freedom of action and the integrity of property rights must be preserved. Then why are the super-capitalists trying to destroy them?
Dr. Quigley provides an answer to this question but it is so startling that at first it seems virtually inconceivable. It becomes rational only as his scattered references to it are collected and digested point by point. In a nutshell, Dr. Quigley has undertaken to expose what every insider like himself has known all along—that the world hierarchy of the dynastic super-rich is out to take over the entire planet, doing it with Socialistic legislation where possible, but having no reluctance to use Communist revolution where necessary.
As we shall observe shortly, Dr. Quigley is sometimes reluctant to admit the full ramifications of his ugly thesis when the shocking and often revolting implications of it spill out on the blood-stained pages of recent history. This is why we find him proving his thesis up to a point and then frantically endeavoring to cover up the consequences of it by denying the validity of what Congressional Committees have exposed through their investigations. This black thread of strange contradiction runs through several important sections of Dr. Quigley’s book, but should offer no difficulty to the reader once he understands what is happening.
As we pointed out earlier, Dr. Quigley prides himself in being a member of this secret power group which is identified with the international jet-set of super-rich banking dynasties. He agrees with practically all of their goals and policies. However, he strongly objects to their policy of secrecy.1 He wants them to receive credit for what they have been doing. He therefore undertakes to show who has been largely responsible for the massive movement toward the collectivizing of power on the Socialist-Communist Left during the past fifty to seventy-five years.
It began with the ideological conquest of some important people’s minds.
Dr. Quigley’s Explanation of an Amazing Phenomenon
The ancient political philosophers knew that the most effective way to conquer a man is to capture his mind. There is no slave more devoted nor disciple more dedicated than the man who has become completely obsessed with the vision of what he considers to be a great idea. Dr. Quigley says this is what has happened to the leaders of the world’s secret center of international banking. Its leaders became convinced that they had come upon a fantastically great idea: How to take over and control the resources of the world for the good of humanity.
Here is how Dr. Quigley says it all began.
John Ruskin
The Coming Of John Ruskin To Oxford
“Until 1870 there was no professorship of fine arts at Oxford, but in that year, thanks to the Slade bequest, John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He h
it Oxford like an earthquake, not so much because he talked about fine arts, but because he talked also about the empire and England’s downtrodden masses, and above all because he talked about all three of these things as moral issues.”2
Who Was John Ruskin? (Reviewer’s note)
We need to pause for a moment to get better acquainted with John Ruskin so we can better appreciate what Dr. Quigley has to say about him. John Ruskin (1819-1900) was born in London, the son of a wealthy wine merchant from whom he inherited a substantial fortune. His education was in art, literature, architecture, mathematics, Latin and Greek. He traveled widely, graduated from Oxford, and in 1870 became the Slade professor of art at his alma mater. However, art was only a partial interest. He had his students build roads and venture out into a variety of community experiments. He established the “St. George’s Guild” which was designed to set up a model industrial and social movement, to buy lands, mills and factories, and to start a model industry or cooperative on socialist lines. The Guild failed, but as Dr. Quigley will point out shortly, the ideas of Ruskin were planted in the fertile minds of his students who were the scions of the British aristocracy.
What were his ideas? Kenneth Clark, in his Ruskin Today says:
“He saw that the state must take control of the means of production and distribution, and organize them for the good of the community as a whole; but he was prepared to place the control of the state in the hands of a single man. ‘My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others.’ He had a very low opinion of democracy, and what he thought of freedom may be found in the passage ... on the housefly. These views are not at present accepted in the English-speaking world; and it must be admitted that the experiences of the last thirty years have done little to recommend them.
“No doubt Ruskin underrated the corruptibility of man and the coarseness inherent in all forms of government. He would have been horrified by the exploits of Hitler and Stain. But I doubt if he would have shrunk from the results of his doctrine as much as one would suppose. In spite of its materialist philosophy, he would, I think, have approved of Communism; the peasant communes in China, in particular, are exactly on his model. He would not have thought the cure worse than the disease because he could not imagine a worse disease than the capitalist society of the nineteenth century.”3
John Ruskin, Clark tells us, derived most of his ideas and inspiration “directly from the source book of all dictatorships, Plato’s Republic. He read Plato almost every day....”4 Of course Marx, Engels, Proudhon and Saint-Simon drank from that same fountain. Therefore, there is a remarkable parallel in the writings of Ruskin, Marx and other disciples of Plato. Plato wanted a ruling class with a powerful army to keep it in power and a society completely subordinate to the monolithic authority of the rulers. He also advocated using whatever force was necessary for the wiping out of all existing government and social structure so the new rulers could begin with a “clean canvas” on which to develop the portrait of their great new society.
The upper dimensions of Plato’s “ideal” society included the elimination of marriage and the family so that all the women would belong to all the men and all the men would belong to all the women. Children resulting from these promiscuous unions would be taken over by the government as soon as they were weaned and raised anonymously by the state. Plato wanted women to be required to be equal with men—to fight wars with the men and perform labor like men. There was to be selective breeding of men and women under control of the government and children considered inferior or crippled were to be destroyed. There was to be a three-level structure of society into fixed classes: the ruling class, the military class and the worker class. Plato said the People would be induced to believe a government-indoctrinated falsehood that people were born with gold, silver or copper in their souls and the rulers would determine which metal was present in the soul of each person and assign him to the appropriate class.
Plato admitted all this was a falsehood but said it would facilitate the administration of affairs by the rulers because it would be taught to the people as a religious principle. Plato reserved the full blessings of communism for his ruling class. It would be there that he felt private property could be eliminated, family relations communalized, and intellectual energy devoted to determining what was good for the masses in the lower classes.
All this was part of what John Ruskin read “almost every day.” Now we will continue with Dr. Quigley’s analysis of what happened when John Ruskin “hit Oxford like an earthquake.”
Ruskin Taught That the Ruling Class Of England Had a World Mission
“Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged, ruling class. He told them that they were the possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper-class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the empire.”5
Cecil Rhodes about the time he attended Oxford.
Cecil Rhodes at the height of his power.
Cecil Rhodes Caught the Vision Of a World-Wide Federation
“Ruskin’s message had a sensational impact. His inaugural lecture was copied out in longhand by one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, who kept it with him for thirty years. Rhodes (1853-1902) feverishly exploited the diamond and goldfields of South Africa, rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896), contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and South Africa, and sought to win a strip of British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and ultimately with a Cape-to-Cairo Railway. Rhodes inspired devoted support for his goals from others in South Africa and in England. With financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa as DeBeers Consolidated Mines and to build up a great gold mining enterprise as Consolidated Gold Fields. In the middle of the 1890’s Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year (then about five million dollars) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes that he was usually overdrawn on his account.”6
Rhodes Launched a Long-Range Program To Federate the World
“These purposes centered on his desire to federate the English speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control. For this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition throughout the English-speaking world as Ruskin had wanted.”7
Rhodes Received Wide Support and Organized a Secret Society
“Among Ruskin’s most devoted disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends including Arnold Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttleton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry) Birchenough. These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out his ideas. A similar group of Cambridge men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord Esher), Sir John B. Seeley, Albert (Lord) Grey, and Edmund Garrett were also aroused by Ruskin’s message and devoted their lives to extension of the British Empire and uplift of England’s urban masses as two parts of one project which they called ‘extension of the English-speaking idea.’ They were remarkably successful in these aims because England’s most sensational journalist William T. Stead (1840-1912), an ardent social reformer and imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society of which Rh
odes had been dreaming for sixteen years.”8
The Original Structure of Rhodes’ Secret Society
“In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a ‘Circle of Initiates’; while there was to be an outer circle known as the ‘Association of Helpers’ (later organized by Milner as the Round Table Organization). Brett was invited to join this organization the same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his return from Egypt. Both accepted with enthusiasm. Thus the central part of the secret society was established by March 1891. It continued to function as a formal group, although the outer circle was, apparently, not organized until 1909-1913.”9