The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor
in 1911 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented
artist and writer who doubled as a Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself
arrested in Russia in 1915 for alleged subversion, and was later bank-rolled
by prominent Wall Street financiers. Minor's cartoon portrays a bearded,
beaming Karl Marx standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked
under his arm and accepting the congratulations of financial luminaries
J.P. Morgan, Morgan partner George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller,
John D. Ryan of National City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt — prominently
identified by his famous teeth — in the background. Wall Street is
decorated by Red flags. The cheering crowd and the airborne hats suggest
that Karl Marx must have been a fairly popular sort of fellow in the
New York financial district.
Was
Robert Minor dreaming? On the contrary, we shall see that Minor was
on firm ground in depicting an enthusiastic alliance of Wall Street
and Marxist socialism. The characters in Minor's cartoon — Karl Marx
(symbolizing the future revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky), J. P.
Morgan, John D. Rockefeller — and indeed Robert Minor himself, are
also prominent characters in this book.
The contradictions
suggested by Minor's cartoon have been brushed under the rug of history
because they do not fit the accepted conceptual spectrum of political
left and political right. Bolsheviks are at the left end of the political
spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the right end; therefore,
we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing in common and
any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat
conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations
or unfortunate errors. Modern history possesses such a built-in duality
and certainly if too many uncomfortable facts have been rejected and
brushed under the rug, it is an inaccurate history.
On the other hand,
it may be observed that both the extreme right and the extreme left
of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely collectivist.
The national socialist (for example, the fascist) and the international
socialist (for example, the Communist) both recommend totalitarian
politico-economic systems based on naked, unfettered political power
and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of
society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective
of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century
the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient
way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to "go political" and make
society go to work for the monopolists — under the name of the public
good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906 by
Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist.1
Howe, by the way, is also a figure in the story of the Bolshevik
Revolution.
Therefore, an alternative
conceptual packaging of political ideas and politico-economic systems
would be that of ranking the degree of individual freedom versus the
degree of centralized political control. Under such an ordering the
corporate welfare state and socialism are at the same end of the spectrum.
Hence we see that attempts at monopoly control of society can have
different labels while owning common features.
Consequently, one
barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that
all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists
and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and
was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense.
There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international
political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists —
to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely
because historians — with a few notable exceptions — have an unconscious
Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such
alliance existing. The open-minded reader should bear two clues in
mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire
entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning,
the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly
capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist power brokers.
Suppose — and it is only hypothesis at this point — that American
monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia
to the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the
logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan
railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late
nineteenth century?
Apart from Gabriel
Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and the revisionists, historians have not
been alert for such a combination of events. Historical reporting,
with rare exceptions, has been forced into a dichotomy of capitalists
versus socialists. George Kennan's monumental and readable study of
the Russian Revolution consistently maintains this fiction of a Wall
Street-Bolshevik dichotomy.2 Russia
Leaves the War has a single incidental reference to the J.P. Morgan
firm and no reference at all to Guaranty Trust Company. Yet both organizations
are prominently mentioned in the State Department files, to which
frequent reference is made in this book, and both are part of the
core of the evidence presented here. Neither self-admitted "Bolshevik
banker" Olof Aschberg nor Nya Banken in Stockholm is mentioned in
Kennan yet both were central to Bolshevik funding. Moreover, in minor
yet crucial circumstances, at least crucial for our argument,
Kennan is factually in error. For example, Kennan cites Federal Reserve
Bank director William Boyce Thompson as leaving Russia on November
27, 1917. This departure date would make it physically impossible
for Thompson to be in Petrograd on December 2, 1917, to transmit a
cable request for $1 million to Morgan in New York. Thompson in fact
left Petrograd on December 4, 1918, two days after sending the cable
to New York. Then again, Kennan states that on November 30, 1917,
Trotsky delivered a speech before the Petrograd Soviet in which he
observed, "Today I had here in the Smolny Institute two Americans
closely connected with American Capitalist elements "According to
Kennan, it "is difficult to imagine" who these two Americans "could
have been, if not Robins and Gumberg." But in [act Alexander Gumberg
was Russian, not American. Further, as Thompson was still in Russia
on November 30, 1917, then the two Americans who visited Trotsky were
more than likely Raymond Robins, a mining promoter turned do-gooder,
and Thompson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The Bolshevization
of Wall Street was known among well informed circles as early as 1919.
The financial journalist Barron recorded a conversation with oil magnate
E. H. Doheny in 1919 and specifically named three prominent financiers,
William Boyce Thompson, Thomas Lamont and Charles R. Crane:
Aboard S.S. Aquitania,
Friday Evening, February 1, 1919.
Spent the evening
with the Dohenys in their suite. Mr. Doheny said: If you believe
in democracy you cannot believe in Socialism. Socialism is the poison
that destroys democracy. Democracy means opportunity for all. Socialism
holds out the hope that a man can quit work and be better off. Bolshevism
is the true fruit of socialism and if you will read the interesting
testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle of January
that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German sympathizers,
Socialists, and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of the
college professors in the United States are teaching socialism and
Bolshevism and that fifty-two college professors were on so-called
peace committees in 1914. President Eliot of Harvard is teaching
Bolshevism. The worst Bolshevists in the United States are not only
college professors, of whom President Wilson is one, but capitalists
and the wives of capitalists and neither seem to know what they
are talking about. William Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism
and he may yet convert Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company. Vanderlip
is a Bolshevist, so is Charles R. Crane. Many women are joining
the movement and neither they, nor their husbands, know what it
is, or what it leads to. Henry Ford is another and so are most of
those one hundred historians Wilson took abroad with him in the
foolish idea that history can teach youth proper demarcations of
races, peoples, and nations geographically.3
In brief, this is
a story of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, but a story
that departs from the usual conceptual straitjacket approach of capitalists
versus Communists. Our story postulates a partnership between international
monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary socialism for
their mutual benefit. The final human cost of this alliance has fallen
upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and the individual American.
Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and the world has
been propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a result of
these monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and revolution.
This is also a story
reflecting the betrayal of the Russian Revolution. The tsars and their
corrupt political system were ejected only to be replaced by the new
power brokers of another corrupt political system. Where the United
States could have exerted its dominant influence to bring about a
free Russia it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall Street financiers
who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized tsarist Russia
or a centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized free Russia.
And the reasons for these assertions will unfold as we develop the
underlying and, so far, untold history of the Russian Revolution and
its aftermath.4
Footnotes:
1"These are the rules of big business. They have superseded
the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim:
Get a monopoly; let Society work for you: and remember that the
best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise,
subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock
lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical,
lot its exploitation" (Chicago: Public Publishing, 1906), p. 157.
2George
F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (New York: Atheneum, 1967);
and Decision to Intervene.. Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).
3Arthur
Pound and Samuel Taylor Moore, They Told Barron (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1930), pp. 13-14.
4There
is a parallel, and also unknown, history with respect to the Makhanovite
movement that fought both the "Whites" and the "Reds" in the Civil
War of 1919-20 (see Voline, The Unknown Revolution [New York:
Libertarian Book Club, 1953]). There was also the "Green" movement,
which fought both Whites and Reds. The author has never seen even
one isolated mention of the Greens in any history of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Yet the Green Army was at least 700,000 strong!
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