Wall Street and FDR: Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

Wall Street Buys The New Deal

B.M. [Bernard Baruch] played a more effective role. Headquarters just didn't have any money. Sometimes they couldn't even pay the radio bill for the candidate's speeches. They had practically nothing to carry on the campaign in the critical state of Maine. Every time a crisis came, B.M. either gave the necessary money, or went out and got it.
Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), p. 141. On FDR's campaign in 1932.

I know, the critical state of Maine?? What we glean from this quotation, however, is that our old pal Bernard Baruch was sitting behind the scenes pulling out his wad to keep the Roosevelt train rolling. To back up one election cycle to 1928, there was the Tammany Hall machine candidate, Alfred E. Smith vs. our already known-to-be-a-bankster-boy, Herbert Hoover. As you may recall, Hoover denounced the lasseiz-faire economy in favor of a regulated one, regulated by his friends the banksters, that is.





Enter one John Raskob, VP of both Du Pont and General Motors as well as some other banker directorships. He became head of the finance division of the DNC and gave plenty to Smith's campaign coffers? Well go back to the National Recovery Act and see that its points were heavily supported by Raskob. It would appear that Wall Street thought that Smith would be a better spokesperson for the tenets of the NRA. But make no mistake, Wall Street contributed to both Smith and Hoover. Sound familiar?


Hoover won despite Wall Street more heavily contributing to Smith. And when in office, he did appoint many of Wall Street extraction to the government boards and committees. After the crash hit, as many of you might be aware was due to the contraction of the New York money supply, Hoover was forced to "use the crisis". This is the sort of thing these people live for - a crisis. In 1932, Hoover was pushed to go with the Swope Plan, which was the NRA, aka corporate fascism. Wall Street did NOT like his not going along with their plan. The Elites like the Rockefellers and the DuPonts tended to back the democratic candidate willing to promote corporate socialism. Al Smith, by the way, was also director of the MetLife Insurance Company, a Morgan-controlled company. Just so you know that these boys are tight. So when Hoover didn't go all in for corporate socialism, they pulled all support for him and put it behind FDR. By June 1933, The National Recovery Act was signed into law, along with its coercive elements on small business.

You may notice from the quotation up above that Bernard Baruch went by the acronym BM in the correspondence of these players. I think it's pretty weird too. Hugh Johnson went through a training program in the '20s headed up by BM, which he described as:

I doubt if anybody had any more direct or complete access to sources of information than B.M. and he always gave me a free hand in the consultation and use of such scientists and experts as I might need. I was for several years the only Research Staff which he permanently maintained. That and what went before was a great training for service in NRA because these studies covered a considerable segment of the whole of American industry and the experience with government linked the two together.

Hugh Johnson - 1933 Man of the Year!

Now let's listen to our host, Dr. Sutton explain how the NRA was rolled out to the public, especially one day of note - May Day. 

Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic Presidential candidate was, as we have noted, a director of Metropolitan Life Insurance, the largest life insurance company in the U.S. and controlled by J.P. Morgan, and the greater part of his campaign funds came from the golden circle in Wall Street. Bernard Baruch outlined the NRA plan itself on May 1, 1930— an auspicious day for a socialist measure—in a speech at Boston. The content of NRA was all there, the regulation, codes, enforcement, and the carrot of welfare for the workers. It was repeated in Baruch's platform of June 1932—the one that Herbert Hoover refused to adopt. The NRA was presented again by Baruch in testimony before the Senate and in speeches before the Brookings Institution and at Johns Hopkins University. In all, Hugh Johnson counts ten documents and speeches, all presented before the election of Roosevelt in 1932, in which "will be found the development of the economic philosophy of the 1928 campaign and of almost all that happened since. Of a part of this philosophy NRA was a concrete expression."

May Day! May Day! Socialists taking over our nation with a big smiley face. You won't hear this information over at National Review, however. Noooo, they'll just keep on with their talking points that intimate that socialism in this country began with liberal professors in the universities. They won't question where these professors got their funding. They won't wonder why they were never fired for anti-American propaganda. They won't question the power structure at all because if they did, there would be Republicans holding the bag as well. That would never do to upset our left-right paradigmed talking points, now would it? Anyway I've emphasized some points pertinent to us in the 21st century who see things with perfect 20/20 vision:

The following extracts from Baruch's May 1, 1930 speech contain the core of his proposals:

What business needs is a common forum where problems requiring cooperation can be considered and acted upon with the constructive, non political sanction of government. (lol ) It may have been sound public policy to forbid by law anything that looked to regulation of production when the world was in fear of famine but it is public lunacy (you are a loon if you do not agree totally to what BM is saying.) to decree unlimited operation of a system which periodically disgorges indigestible masses of unconsumable products. No repressive, inquisitorial, mediocre bureau will answer—we must have a new concept for this purpose—a tribunal invested like the Supreme Court, with so much prestige and dignity that our greatest business leaders will be glad to divest themselves of all personal interest in business and there serve. Like the Supreme Court also it must be absolutely non-political. (Of course all this is a political invention to consolidate power under BM and his cronies - man what a great acronym!)
It should have no power to repress or coerce but it should have power to convoke conference, to suggest and to sanction or license such commonsense cooperation among industrial units (doesn't Obamacare call us units?) as will prevent our economic blessings from becoming unbearable burdens. Its sole punitive power should be to prescribe conditions of its licenses and then to revoke those licenses for infringement of such conditions. (The MO here is to control all sectors of the economy through licensures. Only those deemed worthy by this all-powerful mind may have a licence to do business. Those deemed unworthy are out of luck. Just ask those GM dealers who didn't donate to Democrats recently. However, don't be fooled into thinking that Republicans are guilty of this same kind of thinking. Rick Santorum isn't going to do away with licensure controls.)
Its deliberations should be in the open and should be wholly scientific, briefed like an engineer's report, and published to the world. Such a system would safeguard the public interest and should be substituted for the blind inhibitory blankets of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. . . . (Unless it's in the interest of "national security" and then it will never, ever be seen by any of us until the Lord Jesus opens the file on Judgement Day.)
It is not government in business in the sense which is here condemned. It is only a relaxation of the grip government has already taken on business by the Anti-Trust Acts. There is no fallacy in restricting ruinous excess production—a policy which the Federal Government is now vigorously urging on Agriculture. Yet if there is nothing in the change of concept from bureaucratic precedent to that of an open forum where business can practice group self-government, acting on its own motion under sanction of non-political, constructive and helpful tribunal —then the idea is not practicable. But that there is a possibility of such industrial self-government under governmental sanction was clearly demonstrated in 1918. Many difficulties suggest themselves. In the first place anything done in the elation and fervor of war must be accepted as a criterion only with caution. (He's referring to his own War Industries Board, which we've talked about previously. That was the prototype for the NRA. He admits that playing around with war is riskly business. Look at what we've got today!)
In the regulation of production price is one consideration. That is a subject which is loaded with dynamite.
There are other obvious reservations. The thought is revived at this critical moment because it seems worthy of consideration as an aid in a threatening economic development 'of unusual extent' and as an alternative to governmental interference and vast extension of political powers in the economic field—an eventuality which, in the absence of constructive action by business itself, is almost as certain as death and taxes.⁵

One thing I notice is that he's pushing all this 7 months after the crash of '29. Even Milton Friedman has remarked that the cause of that crash was a contraction of the New York money supply. Gee, problem-reaction-solution anyone?


Ever hear of the Steiwer Committee? Me neither. But they did a listing of the contributors to the presidential campaign of 1928 who contributed $5000 and above, a princely sum in those days. Dr. Antony Sutton has cross-referenced those names to our friends the banksters and within a one mile radius of that notorious address, 120 Broadway, NYC. Almost 80% of contributions to Al Smith's campaign came from inside that radius. wow Some tables included in this chapter tell you all you need to know.

Major Wall Street Contributors to the Al Smith For President Campaign—1928

Name	Contributions
	1924	1928	1928	Total
	deficit campaign		deficit contribution
John J. Raskob (Du Pont and General Motors)	—	$110,000	$250,000	$360,000
William F. Kenny (W.A. Harriman)	$25,000	$100,000	$150,000	$275,000
Herbert H. Lehman	$10.000	$100.00	$150,000	$260,000
M.J. Meehan (120 Broadway)	—	$50,000	$100,000	$150,000
			Total	$1,045,000

Source: Adapted from Louise Overacker, Money in Elections (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 155.

 In brief, the percentage of the Al Smith for President campaign funds coming from persons giving more than $5000 and also identified as Wall Street directors was 78.83 per cent. The percentage from donors outside the golden circle was a mere 21.17 per cent. Looking at the total Al Smith contributors another way, the large contributors (over $5000) to the Smith campaign, those in the best position to ask and receive political favors, put up almost four dollars out of five.
The identity of the larger contributors to both the Al Smith campaign and the Democratic National Committee fund is listed in the attached tables.

Contributors of $25,000 or More to Democratic National Committee January to December 1928 (including contributions listed in previous table)

				NOTE
Herbert H. Lehman and Edith A. Lehman	Lehman Brothers, and Studebaker Corp.	$135,000		FDR's chief political adviser
John J. Raskob	Vice president of Du Pont and General Motors	$110,000		NRA administrator
Thomas F. Ryan	President, Bankers Mortgage Co., Houston	$75,000		Chairman, Reconstruction Finance Corp.
Harry Payne Whitney	Guaranty Trust	$50,000		See Chap. 10: "The Butler Affair"
Pierre S. Du Pont	Du Pont Company, General Motors	$50,000		See Chap. 10: "The Butler Affair"
Bernard M. Baruch	Financier, 120 Broadway	$37,590		NRA planner
Robert Sterling Clark	Singer Sewing Machine Co.	$35,000		See Chap. 10: "The Butler Affair"
John D. Ryan	National City Bank, Anaconda Copper	$27,000		—
William H. Woodin	General Motors	$25,000		Secretary of Treasury, 1932

Source: Steiwer Committee Report, op. cit.

Contributions to the Democratic Presidential Primary

1928 by Directors* of the County Trust Company.

Name of Director	Contribution to Campaign and Deficit		Other Affiliations
Vincent Astor	$ 10,000		Great Northern Railway, U.S. Trust Co. Trustee, N.Y. Public Library Metropolitan Opera
Howard S. Cullman	$ 6,500		Vice President, Cullman Brothers, Inc.
William J. Fitzgerald	$ 6,000		—
Edward J. Kelly	$ 6,000		—
William F. Kenny	$275,000	**	President and Director, William F. Kenny Co. Director, The Aviation Corp., Chrysler Corp.
Arthur Lehman	$ 14,000	***	Partner, Lehman Brothers. Director, American International Corp., RKO Corp., Underwood-Elliott-Fisher Co.
M.J. Meehan	$150,000**		61 Broadway
Daniel J. Mooney	Daniel J. Mooney		120 Broadway
John J. Raskob	$360,000	**	Director, American International Corp., Bankers Trust Co., Christiania Securities Co. Vice President, E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. and General Motors Corp.
James J. Riordan	$10,000		—
Alfred E. Smith	—		Presidential Candidate Director: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.
Total	$842,000

Notes: *The following directors of County Trust Company did not contribute (according to the records): John J. Broderick, Peter J. Carey, John J. Cavanagh, William H. English, James P. Geagan, G. Le Boutillier, Ralph W. Long, John J. Pulleyn, and Parry D. Saylor.
**Includes contributions to the campaign deficit.
***Excludes contributions by other members of the Lehman family to the Democratic Presidential campaign that totalled $168,000.

Well now we know that Smith was bought and paid for by the banksta boys, what about Hoover?

Contributions of $25,000 or More to Republican National Committee, January to December 1928

Mellon family	Mellon National Bank	$50,000
Rockefeller family	Standard Oil	$50,000
Guggenheim family	Copper smelting	$75,000
Eugene Meyer	Federal Reserve Bank	$25,000
William Nelson Cromwell	Wall Street attorney	$25,000
Otto Kahn	Equitable Trust Company	$25,000
Mortimer Schiff	Banker	$25,000
Total		$275,000

Source: Steiwer Committee Report, op. cit.

In your high school textbook, should you have gotten that far, they will paint Herbert Hoover as a strict lasseiz-faire economist. However, his own memoirs contradict this assertion: 

Those who contended that during the period of my administration our economic system was one of laissez faire have little knowledge of the extent of government regulation. The economic philosophy of laissez faire, or "dog eat dog," had died in the United States forty years before, when Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-Trust Acts.

Oh yes, they LOVE them some interstate commerce don't they, those darned dirty collectivists. 


Good ol' Murray Rothbard doesn't forget that Hoover was a supporter of Teddy R's Progressive Party. Hoover's biggest contribution to us as Commerce Secretary, according to Rothbard, was centralization of the radio industry. 

while the courts were working on a reasonable system of private property rights in radio frequencies. Rothbard explains these ventures into socialism on the grounds that Hoover "was . . . the victim of a terribly inadequate grasp of economics."¹¹ Indeed, Rothbard argues that Herbert Hoover was the real creator of the Roosevelt New Deal.

Hoover was not a total free marketer, but he wasn't willing to go as far as BM and 120 Wall Street wanted him to go, to his credit.  When he became president, for example, Hoover got rid of 40 regulatory codes that the banksters had put in with the American Construction Council, because the codes were unenforceable. Then there were committees and more committees, all of which Hoover paid little attention to. Note how our host, Dr. Sutton walks us through the people behind the Keynesian hijacking of America:

Then in February 1931 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce formed a group entitled the Committee on Continuity of Business and Employment under Henry I. Harriman. This committee came up with proposals very much like those of the New Deal: that production should be balanced to equal consumption, that the Sherman anti-trust laws should be modified to allow agreements in restraint of trade, that a national economic council should be set up under the auspices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and that provision should be made forshorter hours in industry, for pensions, and for unemployment insurance. This was followed by yet another Hoover committee known as the Committee on Work Periods in Industry under P.W. Litchfield, president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Then still another committee under Standard Oil Company of New Jersey president Walter Teagle recommended sharing work, a proposal endorsed by the Litchfield Committee. Then came the Swope Plan in 1931.

The Swope Plan mirrored what we've studied with Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and hopefully we will delve into in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. This work on FDR is apart of this trilogy of collectivism. Herbert Hoover knew fascism when he saw it as Dr. Sutton illustrates: 

In fact, Hoover recognized the Swope Plan as a fascist measure and recorded this in his memoirs, along with the melancholy information that Wall Street gave him a choice of buying the Swope plan—fascist or not—and having their money and influence support the Roosevelt candidacy. This is how Herbert Hoover described the ultimatum from Wall Street under the heading of "Fascism comes to business—with dire consequences":

Among the early Roosevelt fascist measures was the National Industry Recovery Act (NRA) of June 16, 1933. The origins of this scheme are worth repeating. These ideas were first suggested by Gerard Swope (of the General Electric Company) at a meeting of the electrical industry in the winter of 1932. Following this, they were adopted by the United States Chamber of Commerce. During the campaign of 1932, Henry I. Harriman, president of that body, urged that I agree to support these proposals, informing me that Mr. Roosevelt had agreed to do so. I tried to show him that this stuff was pure fascism; that it was merely a remaking of Mussolini's "corporate state" and refused to agree to any of it. He informed me that in view of my attitude, the business world would support Roosevelt with money and influence. That for the most part, proved true.   -from Herbert Hoover's memoirs

As you can imagine, the Wall Street machine started in earnest to get their next man up to bat. FDR's 1930 gubenatorial finances were pretty much supplied by Wall Street and as soon as he won reelection, they wasted no time in getting ready for the 1932 presidential election, as the table below gives you a taste of who wanted FDR and his sweet, sweet political control of industry:

Contributors to the Pre Convention Expenses of FDR ($3,500 and Over)

Edward Flynn	$21,500		Director of Bronx County Safe Deposit Co.
W.H. Woodin	$20,000		Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Remington Arms Co.
Frank C. Walker	$15,000		Boston financier
Joseph Kennedy	$10,000
Lawrence A. Steinhardt	$ 8,500		Member of Guggenheim, Untermeyer & Marshall, 120 Broadway
Henry Morgenthau	$ 8,000		Underwood-Elliott-Fisher
F.J. Matchette	$ 6,000
Lehman family	$ 6,000		Lehman Brothers, 16 William Street
Dave H. Morris	$ 5,000		Director of several Wall Street firms
Sara Roosevelt	$ 5,000
Guy P. Helvering	$ 4,500
H.M. Warner	$ 4,500		Director, Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America (stupid MPAA was always bad)
James W. Gerard	$ 3,500		Financier, 57 William Street
Total	$117,500

A lot of these boys got public offices and honor in return for their contributions. 

WALL STREET ELECTS FDR IN 1932

Hugh Johnson, BM lackey recounts how their economic planning research was used by the FDR campaign:

Ray Moley and Rex Tugwell came up to B.M.'s house and we went over all the material that B.M. and I had collected and summarized in our years of work. They, with Adolph Berle, had long before worked out the subjects of what they thought would be an ideal scheme of economic speeches for a Presidential candidate, but they had few facts. From that moment we joined Ray Moley's forces and we all went to work to find for Franklin Roosevelt the data which he welded into the very remarkable series of simply expressed speeches on homely economics which convinced this country that here was the leader upon whom it could rely.

The speeches given didn't really have hard facts, but fact-like sounding nuggets that would shut down the thought of the average naive American. Time and again, they cited the War Industries Board as a prime example of how central planning works. In one April 1932 speech, Roosevelt said: 

Persistent Experimentation!!!

Compare this panic stricken policy of delay and improvisation with that devised to meet the emergency of war fifteen years ago. We met specific situations with considered, relevant measures of constructive value. There were the War Industries Board, the Food and Fuel Administration, the War Trade Board, the Shipping Board and many others.

Instead of "Hope and Change", FDR's slogan was  "The Country Needs, the Country Demands, Persistent Experimentation" 


What are they experimenting for? Not what's best for the average person that's for sure. How do you know if you're average? Well, do you dream at night about massive domination in a particular industry or seizing effective control over a corporation, or nay, an entire country? If you answered no to any of these questions, then you might be an average, sane person. Sorry to disappoint you.


Upon accepting the Democratic nomination he said,  "I pledge you—I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American People." Oh boy, here we go!

Freidel's list of pre-convention contributors to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 Presidential campaign.
1932 Reconvention Contributors
(over $2,000)	Affiliations
James W. Gerard	Gerard, Bowen & Halpin (see Julian A. Gerard)
Guy Helvering
Col. E.M. House, New York (he always want a piece of the action, doesn't he?)
Joseph P. Kennedy,1560 Broadway	Ambassador to Court of St. JamesNew England Fuel &; Transportation Co.
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. Underwood-Elliott-Fisher 1133 Fifth Avenue	Bank of N.Y. & Trust Co. (Asst. Comptroller); American Savings Bank (Trustee)
Dave Hennen Morris
Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, Hyde Park, N.Y.	FDR's mother
Laurence A. Steinhardt 120 Broadway	Guggenheim, Untermeyer &; Marshall
Harry M. Warner 321W. 44th St.	Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America, Inc.
William H. Woodin Secretary of the Treasury	American Car & Foundry; Remington Arms Co.
Edward J. Flynn 529 Courtlandt Ave.	Bronx County Safe Deposit Co.
James A. Farley adds to this list:
James A. Farley adds to this list:
William A. Julian	Director, Central Trust Co.
Jesse I. Straus 1317 Broadway	President, R.H. Macy & Co. N.Y. Life Insurance
Robert W. Bingham	Publisher, Louisville Courier-Journal
Basil O'Connor 120 Broadway	FDR's law partner

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Man, I could do a post on every one of those names and really show you how interlocked and incestuous this whole bunch's money really is. I only point this out to blow away the misconception among conservatives that we have a free market economy in this country. Frequently, I'll hear someone defend a large corporation only on the basis that they support capitalism and corporations represent capitalism. This sort of ignorance is a wall to mature understanding on how the power of the state is truly wielded in this nation. So wake up and smell the coffee, it doesn't make one a lib to show how corporations created libs??? But we'll get into that later.

Wall Street and FDR by Antony Sutton is available in its entirety at Reformation Theology.