1919-1920: A Summer Of Blood, Lynching Will Brown And J. Edna Hoover Takes The Stage

1919-21: UNITED STATES. One of the countless victims of repression under Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act and Sedition Act is Victor L. Berger who had been indicted for exercising his theoretical right to freedom of speech in the United States by expressing his opposition to Wilson's recently repositioned war.

While under indictment, Berger is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Wisconsin but, in this fine democracy for which the sons of the poor are being sent to die, just because the people elect someone doesn't mean he stays elected, especially if he calls for such radical things as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and taxing war profiteers. We can't be havin' none of that, so the House refuses to seat Berger, even though has has not been convicted of any crime, and calls a special election to try to get someone elected who is more to the tastes of the powers-that-be.

The stubborn people of Wisconsin, not quite understanding how the system works, vote for Berger again, and once again, the House of Representatives sabotages democracy in America and refuses to seat him. Berger is eventually convicted of free speech but, in 1921, wins an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on a technicality by which time his opposition to the war has become a moot point.

1919: HONDURAS. The U.S. invades Honduras to “protect American interests” by controlling the outcome of an election. Gotta make sure it comes out right.

1919: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Senate Overman Committee establishes that the Morgan family's Guaranty Trust had had "an active role in financing Germany during the Great War in an unneutral manner." George Herbert Walker, great grandfather of George W. Bush, is closely connected with Guaranty Trust. Neither Walker nor anyone in the Morgan family is charged with treason. It's just good business.

1919-1922: UNITED STATES. Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy is given a job with the old line Boston stock brokerage of Stone and Company, after his father-in-law, Mayor Fitzgerald, promises to send businesss their way. With the help of his father-in-law's friend, Galen Stone, Jittery Joe uses inside information to make money off unsuspecting investors. Kennedy is also involved in the scam known as stock pools in which the members of a conspiracy trade stocks back and forth, artifically jacking up its value, lure the suckers in, and then cash out, taking the suckers' money with them.

1919-1922: UNITED STATES. The abuse of prisoners, vivisection and eugenics are neatly combined in San Quentin when testicle transplant experiments are performed on five hundred prisoners.

1919-1972: UNITED STATES. Mitchell Palmer takes office as Attorney General of the United States. As Alien Property Custodian during the Great War, the country's highest legal official had seized millions of dollars worth of German assets which had, by amazing coincidence, ended up in the hands of his friends and cronies.

J. Edgar Hoover is made special assistant to Palmer and heads a new section of the "Justice" Department, the General Intelligence Division, established to gather information on "revolutionary and ultra radical" people in the United States. (Translation into English: mainly workers trying to organize into effective unions in order to improve deplorable wages and working conditions and socialists who supported them.)

Hoover's half-century-long assault on the law, on the U.S. Constitution and on the people of the United States has begun. He builds a massive index on "left wingers" which includes half a million names along with more detailed files on sixty thousand people. Hoover uses thousands of illegal wiretaps and informers to spy on Americans. Hoover hires his ultra-right wing friend, George Ruch as his assistant. Ruch, apparently never having heard of the Constitution, expresses astonishment that left wingers "should be allowed to speak and write all they want against the government." Imagine that!

When Ruch leaves Hoover's side to head the "industrial police" of a Pittsburgh coal company, Hoover assigns Justice Department agents to train Ruch's goon squads in the techniques which will be used to terrorize union workers.

In November 1919, the notorious Palmer raids begin under the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act. Palmer's agents raid the offices of the Union of Russian Workers in a dozen cities throughout the U.S. Hundreds of people are arrested, many are severely beaten by police and there are accusations of torture. Hoover at the "Justice" Department "handles" the raids. Virtually all of the victims will be found to be innocent of any crime and are eventually released without charge.

Hoover systematically persecutes workers, especially those trying to organize in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and, in January 1920, another six thousand people are arrested, mostly members of the IWW. Union members are rounded up and railroaded out of towns throughout the U.S. Often, the roundups turn violent and end in murder. Labor leaders frequently face trumped up charges and when these fail to stop the labor movement, the cross dressing homosexual Hoover uses blackmail and real or manufactured sex scandals to intimidate, smear and discredit labor organizers. The BI sets up phony union locals and packs them with informants.

During a single night, Palmer's agents arrest over four thousand people. From November 1919 to January 1920, over ten thousand people are arrested, the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. Thousands of the arrest warrants are ultimately cancelled as being illegal.

Hoover goes after Emma Goldman who has been very wickedly exercising her theoretical free speech rights and advocating free love and birth control and, gasp, criticizing organized religion. Can't be havin' none of that in the land of the free.

The Rockefeller-financed revolution in Russia having succeeded, the Commie bogeyman is now a useful tool of social control and is used to create a climate of fear and loathing in U.S. The great "Red Scare" is used to prevent the development of an independent and meaningful labor movement in the U.S. To keep things moving along, Attorney General Palmer announces that a communist revolution will take place in the United States on May 1, 1920. Of course, no such thing happens.

On May 28, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) publishes its Report of the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of "Justice". The report thoroughly documents the crime spree of Palmer and Hoover including unawful authorization of arrests, illegal entrapment by agent provocateurs and unlawful detention without access to counsel. Palmer is called before the House Rules Committee where he devoutly defends his American Gestapo. "I apologize for nothing that the Department of Justice has done in this matter," he says, "I glory in it."

If fascism ever came
to the United States,
it would be wrapped
in an American flag.

Huey Long

In June 1920, Judge George Anderson effectively ends the Palmer Raids when he orders the discharge of twenty "aliens" who have been unlawfully arrested and denounces the actions of the Department of "Justice".

1919: YUGOSLAVIA. U.S. Marines invade Yugoslavia and attack ethnic Serbs in Dalmatia on behalf of the Italian government.

1919: UNITED STATES. The Ku Klux Klan is revived in Maryland and Virginia. In the first six months of the year, twenty eight black men and women are publicly lynched in the U.S. Seven of the victims are war veterans, lynched in their uniforms.

The summer of 1919 becomes known as the “Red Summer” as pogroms in at least twenty six cities result in the murder of thousands of blacks and the wholesale destruction of black communities. The term “Red Summer” refers to the blood of black Americans flowing in the streets of America.
In Washington, DC, a racist rampage by a mob of about four hundred whites is largely ignored by the police. The mob violence was triggered, deliberately it would seem, by sensational and inflammatory accounts in the four major Washingston newspapers of alleged sex crimes by an unnamed "Negro fiend". The violence extends over a period of four days as blacks defend themselves and eventually nine people are killed and more than a hundred and fifty men, women and children are clubbed, beaten and shot.

1919: UNITED STATES. A crowd in Omaha attempts to lynch a black man, Will Brown, who had been accused of rape by a white woman, although her identification of Brown was described as "not positive". What is positive is that Brown lived with a white woman and that the local rag, The Omaha Bee, was on an anti-black fear and hatred campaign designed to embarrass the city administration, which it opposed.

The Bee carried unsubstantiated, probably fictitious, stories of attacks on white women by blacks, a common tactic to inflame racial hatred in the United States at the time. Later Grand Jury testimony will reveal that some attacks did, in fact, occur, carried out by white men in blackface.

A crowd of four thousand goes on a rampage attacking police defending the courthouse in which Brown is being held, attacking blacks living in the area and finally setting fire to the courthouse with gasoline stolen from a nearby service station. In the immediate area of the courthouse, more than one thousand firearms are stolen from stores by the mob. As the mayor of Omaha tries to defuse the situation, he is seized by the mob and lynched, although he is rescued by police and survives. The mob continues to throw gasoline into the courthouse and cuts fire hoses so the fires cannot be extinguished.

Ultimately, Brown is seized and lynched. The mob fires hundreds of shots into his lifeless body which is then cut down and dragged through the streets behind a car. His body is then burned and the charred corpse dragged through the business district of Omaha.

The crowd continues to riot for hours after Brown's murder until federal troops arrive with machine guns. The next day, Major General Leonard Wood arrives in Omaha with 1600 troops to do a little peacekeeping. Lennie is the hero of the Bud Dajo massacre in the Philippines where he directed American troops in the mass murder of some six hundred "Moros" (Muslims), including 196 women and 340 children. Our hero decides that the riot is a good opportunity to do a little Red Scaring and publicly and absurdly blames the Omaha riot on the Industrial Workers of the World.

Although some of the leaders of the riot and of the lynchings are charged with crimes, the only convictions are for trivial offences such as destruction of public property and most defendants are given suspended sentences.

1919: UNITED STATES. Just to show there's no discrimination based on sex in America, United Mine Workers organizer Fanny Sellins is gunned down in cold blood by company goons in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania during a coal miners strike. Miner Joe Starzeleski is murdered beside her. Four company goons are put on trial and are, naturally, acquitted.

1919: UNITED STATES. Seems even the police aren't immune to being repressed by the powers-that-be. Looting, rioting and violence break out in Boston after a thousand Boston policmen declare a work stoppage when their attempts to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor are thwarted. Massachussets governor Calvin Coolidge calls out the entire state militia to put down the police strike.

1919: UNITED STATES. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Wesley Everest is tortured, castrated and then lynched by a mob in Centralia, Washington after four American Legion members are shot while attempting to force their way into an IWW meeting. No one is charged.

1919-1924: UNITED STATES. In 1919, the government-sanctioned private vigilante group known as the American Protective League (APL) which has operated for the past three years persecuting and spying on Americans and "aliens" is ordered disbanded by the Attorney General. But, the APL’s three hundred thousand members are much too fond of their Gestapo-like power and intrigues to let go so easily. They continue operations under a variety of names including the Patriotic American League of Chicago, the Loyalty League of Cleveland, the Home Guard of Cincinnati and the Committee of Thirteen of Minneapolis.

In 1919 and 1920, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer uses former APL members during the notorious Palmer raids against alleged anarchists, socialists and union organizers and the War Department will employ the vigilantes on behalf of the Military Intelligence Division. In addition, various state and local governments will use the vigilantes to investigate Americans for “disloyal” or “un-American” activities, usually consisting of union activity or, gasp, exercising freedom of speech in the land of the free.

The federal government will not stop using ex-APL vigilantes until 1924.

1919-1933: UNITED STATES. A temperance movement had existed in the United States during the 1800s and early 1900s, led by women's and Protestant church groups, urging the banning of alcoholic beverages. But it is not until 1919 that the boys in the back room, most importantly robber baron John D. Rockefeller, suddenly decide that the prohibition of alcohol is essential for the social good of America. The basis of the Rockefeller fortune is, in fact, bootleg liquor and the idea that the murderous Rockefeller gave a rat's ass about the welfare of the peons in the U.S. is so laughable that there must be more to the story, right?

And so there is. Among the countless little-known facts in American history is that Prohibition, which came into full legal effect in 1920, banned not only beverage alcohol but also effectively stopped the use of ethanol as a motor fuel. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the boom in car, truck, bus and tractor sales was well underway and the enormous future growth of the motor vehicle industry was obvious. The demand for fuel for all these vehicles would grow exponentially and, since Rockefeller had gained control of two thirds of the world's oil supplies, he stood to make an unimaginable fortune and to gain equally unimaginable power from it.

But there was a cloud on Rockefeller's horizon. At the same time, another industry was growing rapidly in the United States, the manufacture of ethanol by American farmers. Usually made from grain, although many other farm products can be used, ethanol is a clean burning, infinitely renewable resource. The internal combustion engine, invented by Nikolaus August Otto, was conceived to run on ethanol, not gasoline. Ford's Model T came with a carburetor which could easily accomodate both gasoline and ethanol.

By 1920, ethanol represented a real threat to Rockefeller's oil empire. The one thing Rockefeller dreaded above all else was true free enterprise and competition but because there were so many small scale manufacturers and sellers of ethanol, getting rid of them was much more difficult than simply destroying or absorbing a competing oil company, something which Rockefeller did on a regular basis. But, as though by magic, Prohibition gets rid of almost every competitor at a single stroke and the fuel market belongs to Rockefeller.

Competition is a sin.

John D. Rockefeller

Of course, Prohibition has other benefits. Fortunes will be made bootlegging on a gigantic scale during Prohibition by various criminals and mobsters, most notably Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy. Kennedy takes his profits from stock market swindling and creates a bootlegging empire which will soon make him one of the wealthiest men in America. Working with his Mafia business partners in Boston, New York, Chicago and New Orleans, Kennedy will be involved not only in bootlegging itself but in all the associated crimes including bribery, coercion and murder.

I helped Joe Kennedy get rich. Frank Costello, Boss of the Luciano Mafia Family.

From 1922, when he quits his job swindling the suckers at Stone at Company in Boston, Kennedy has no visible means of support and yet, by the mid-1920s, his wealth is estimated at two million dollars, a very considerable fortune at the time.

Joe Kennedy was one of the biggest crooks who ever lived. Mafia Boss Sam Giancana

By 1933, ethanol production in the U.S. has been, for all practical purposes, completely destroyed and long forgotten. America has become a junkie always after the next fix of petroleum, usually from Rockefeller, no matter how many people have to be killed around the world to get it. It is now safe to end Prohibition and so John D. Rockefeller, ever the humanitarian, writes to the New York Times, expressing his heartfelt concern over the evils of Prohibition and urging its repeal. And so it goes.

1919: UNITED STATES. J. "Edna" Hoover and the gang finally manage to silence Emma Goldman and, miraculously, there is no lone assassin involved. Along with 248 other activists, Goldman is deported to Russia from New York on December 21st, never to return to the U.S. Goldman had lived in the U.S. for thirty four years and was married to an American.

Goldman had failed to grasp the two essential elements of "free speech" in America: A) You can say anything you want, as long as it's what the boys in the back room want you to say, or, B) You can say anything you want, as long as no one is really listening. People were listening to Goldman and that made her dangerous.

1920: UNITED STATES. Now that the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgans, Warburgs and their co-conspirators have got complete control of the U.S. money supply and economy through their ownership of the private company known as the Federal Reserve, it's time for the fun and games to begin.

From the time the boys in the backroom managed to slide the bill giving them complete control of the U.S. money supply through Congress in 1913, they have been madly "creating" money, doubling the amount in circulation. The boys were only too happy to hand out loans to all and sundry and then, suddenly, they begin calling the loans in.

Panic ensues. Quelle surprise. 5400 small and mid-size banks collapse and who is there to pick up the all the little pieces and consolidate their control of the banking industry? Why the same fine folks who own the Federal Reserve which created the collapse in the first place. Ain't America grand?

1920: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. After months of scheming and arm-twisting, Averell Harriman announces that he will re-start Germany's Hamburg-Amerika shipping line. All of the Hamburg-Amerika ships had been confiscated by the U.S. at the end of the First World War. By some still-secret arrangement, the ships magically become the property of the Harriman family. Hamburg-Amerika Line then reacquires the confiscated vessels, for a heavy price paid to the Harrimans who retain "the right to participate in fifty percent of all business originated in Hamburg" and, for the next twenty years, have "complete control of all activities of the Hamburg line in the United States." Hamburg-Amerika becomes the largest privately-owned shipping line in the world.

An American front company is established through which to control Hamburg-Amerika which includes two of the men most responsible for the deal, the infamous "merchant of death" Samuel Pryor of Remington Arms and Harriman errand boy and front man George Herbert Walker, grandfather of George H.W. Bush.

And Hamburg-Amerika is so much more than just a shipping line. From 1935 until Germany declared war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, the line will serve as the prime conduit for Nazi spies being infiltrated into the U.S. and for the carriage of American defense secrets to Germany. Hamburg-Amerika will also serve as the main means of importation of pro-Nazi propaganda into the U.S.

The takeover of the line by the Harrimans also creates an effective instrument for the manipulation and fatal subversion of Germany. It is a vital element in the "Hitler Project". Over the coming decades, Hamburg-Amerika will actively finance pro-Nazi and anti-government propaganda inside Germany and will carry hundreds of thousands of weapons from Remington Arms in the U.S. which will be used by the Nazi SS and SA to terrorize the German population into submission and to assassinate hundreds of opposition politicians who dare to speak out against the Nazis.

1920s-1950s: UNITED STATES. In the long and dismal history of frauds committed by American corporations against the American people, one of the most damaging is perpetrated by Nazi armaments maker General Motors Corporation (GM) in collusion with the Rockefellers' Nazi fuel supplier Standard Oil and Firestone, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Truck. In a massive and well-financed conspiracy to destroy electrically-powered public transit throughout the United States, GM runs tame candidates in municipal elections and bribes other politicians. The corrupt politicians then vote for the buyout of their municipal streetcar systems by a holding company, National City Lines (NCL) jointly owned by GM, Standard Oil and Firestone.

By 1941, NCL has gotten into its clutches the municipal transit systems of eighty three American cities including New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. NCL removes the rolling stock, tears up the tracks and, most importantly, breaks up the rights of way, making it virtually impossible ever to rebuild the systems. In total, the GM/Standard/Firestone conspiracy destroys more than one hundred streetcar systems in the U.S. The number of streetcars in operation fell from 73,000 to 18,000. The conspiracy forcibly increases bus and automobile sales, fuel consumption and tire sales by destroying safer, cleaner, more economical and sustainable alternatives.

The long term negative effects of this conspiracy of some of America's most ruthless corporations are literally beyond calculation. The forced switch from environmentally-friendly public transit to the private car and diesel buses results in squandering irreplaceable petroleum resources and all the murder and mayhem which has gone to secure or steal oil around the world. The conspiracy has resulted in vastly increased pollution and, ultimately, in climatic change. The engineered obsession with the private car has led to millions of excess deaths and injuries in automobile accidents, hundreds of billions of dollars in debt for Americans and a catastrophic change in the way American cities have developed, with the devastation of urban neighborhoods, the destruction of urban small business and countless other economic and sociological effects.

Where attempts have been made to restore light rail systems in urban areas, costs to taxpayers have run into billions of dollars. As worldwide oil production diminishes and the private passenger car becomes hopelessly uneconomic to run, doubtless taxpayers will be called upon to pay trillions to reconstruct the systems destroyed by the conspirators. Let's try to guess who will be making hundreds of billions rebuilding it all.

Ultimately, GM is found guilty of conspiracy and is fined the stupendous sum of $5000. A handful of guilty executives is fined $1 each.

1920: UNITED STATES. In the spring of 1920, a typesetter and anarchist named Andrea Salsedo is arrested in New York by Bureau of Investigation (BI) agents and held incommunicado, without charge or access to legal counsel. Eight weeks after he was arrested, Salsedo's mangled body is found on the sidewalk, fourteen stories below the New York BI office. The official version is, of course, that Salsedo had committed suicide by jumping from the fourteenth floor window.

Two friends of Salsedo, anarchists and workingmen in the Boston area, having just learned of his highly suspicious death, begin carrying guns for self-defense. They are arrested on a streetcar in Brockton, Massachusetts, and charged with a holdup and murder which had taken place two weeks before. The two men are Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They are tried, found guilty and spend seven years in jail while appeals are made. The trial and appeals become a cause celebre around the world. The trial record and the surrounding circumstances strongly suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death because they were anarchists and foreigners. In August 1927, as police break up marches and picket lines with arrests and beatings, and troops surrounded the prison, they are electrocuted.

1920: UNITED STATES. Charles Ponzi devises the classic pyramid scheme buying postal coupons from Spain and selling them to the U.S. Postal Service at a profit. To raise capital, he promises investors a fifty percent return in ninety days. Initially he pays off "old" investors with cash coming in from "new" investors. In total, he defrauds forty thousand people of $15 million. It's just business....

1920: UNITED STATES. As part of the "red scare" being perpetrated against the American people, five members of the New York State Legislature are expelled for being, gasp, members of the Socialist Party. They will be legitimately re-elected, but once again will be refused permission to sit in in the legislature. Sure do love all that democracy here in the land of the free.

1920: GERMANY. Wall Street lawyer William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who will later head the World War Two Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA, is sent to Germany by the Rockefeller Foundation to compile a report on the defeated nation. Donovan reports to the Rockefellers on the popularity of the German military and its desire to rearm. He also points out that in the economic chaos of post-war Germany, which has been deliberately created by the draconian terms of the Treaty of Versailles, drawn up by Rockefeller proxies John and Allen Dulles, among others, there is a marvelous opportunity for a fanatic promising to lead the German people out of the disaster. You don't say.......

1920s: UNITED STATES. Police departments in major American cities, most notably Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, form so-called "Red Squads". Under the guise of battling the commie bogeyman, their real task is to seek out and sabotage the efforts of union organizers and critics of the government. Many outspoken immigrants, laboring under the delusion that they have moved to a democracy and a country where free speech is permitted, are ruthlessly hounded because they ask for higher wages or better working conditions. They are frequently jailed without charge or access to counsel. Many are deported without legal remedy or recourse.

1920-21: UNITED STATES. Henry Ford launches ninety one consecutive weeks of anti-Semitic propaganda in his Dearborn Independent newspaper. Adolf Hitler will later describe Henry Ford as his inspiration.

1920: HAITI. U.S. troops slaughter two thousand Haitian peasants protesting the illegal U.S. occupation of their country.

1920-32: UNITED STATES. President Warren G. Harding appoints Andrew Mellon Secretary of the Treasury and, within months, Mellon pushes the infamous Oil Depletion Allowance Act through Congress. The Act provides a cloak of legality to an accounting scam which reduces the taxes paid by oil companies to virtually nothing. This makes a few families in the U.S. very, very, happy and very much richer including the Rockefellers and, by amazing coincidence, the Mellon family, which just happens to own Gulf Oil.

1920: UNITED STATES. On New Year's Day 1920, J. Edna Hoover's Bureau of Investigation agents and police arrest ten thousand people in twenty three cities throughout the U.S. with gross brutality and widespread violation of civil rights. Virtually all are eventually released without charge. In the true spirit of a leading law officer of a constitutional democracy, Hoover uses the BI to spy on the lawyers of those who have been arrested or who worked to expose the violations of civil rights by the government. One of Hoover's targets is future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor. Hoover will keep files on Frankfurter for half a century, referring to him in private as "the most dangerous man in the U.S."

1920: GUATEMALA. The U.S. invades Guatemala to “protect American interests” by suppressing the attempts of Guatemalan workers to unionize in order to achieve minimal living standards.

1920-21: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Army is used on four separate occasions against striking mine workers in West Virginia. Among the hardware employed: fourteen bombers.

1920s-2005: UNITED STATES/IRELAND. Primary funding of IRA and Provisional IRA terrorism has always come not from supposedly evil (and not coincidentally oil-rich) "rogue" states such as Libya, as we are led to believe, but from, you guessed it, the U.S. of A., mainly from the Boston and New York areas. The Provisional IRA has remained conspicuously absent from the U.S. State Department’s “List of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations”.

1920: UNITED STATES. You can never be too paranoid, so the U.S. War Department formulates War Plan White to deal with a domestic revolution in the United States just in case them pesky socialists and unionists manage to make a comeback from their near-destruction by the democracy-loving Wilson regime during the war.