The Final Weeks of the Spanish Republic

UK : £2.01 ; USA : $3.07 ; Germany : €2,38 ; France :  €2,38 ; Spain:  €2,38 ; Italy :  €2,38 ; Japan : ¥ 305 ; Canada : CDN$ 3.03 ; Brazil : R$ 6,06

Some myths are long-lived, perhaps because they are fed by relentless partisan propaganda. One such myth credits Negrín and the communists alone with a will to resist throughout the civil war. A whole swathe of literature has made it its business to portray them as the very symbols of uncompromising opposition, of active, indefatigable resistance “with bread or without it”, “with guns or without them”, and so on, to General Franco and his side. Even today, so many years on, this nonsense is still being peddled; the reality is starkly different. To be honest, the policy of resistance was merely a mask behind which other designs were lurking; whilst harping on about it, the communists, ably abetted by Negrín, were picking off all the political organisations and personalities standing in the way of their quest for hegemony. Thus the POUM was liquidated, the CNT sidelined, the leftist faction creamed off from the Socialist Party, Largo Caballero brought down, first, followed by Indalecio Prieto. Meanwhile, even as the POUM was being publicly and thunderously denounced as having been in cahoots with the Nazis, the Communist Party of Spain’s sponsor, the Soviet Union, was entering into a dalliance with Hitler; and even as Prieto was being labelled a defeatist for searching for some sort of an arrangement whereby the war might be ended, Negrín had opened up channels to the enemy, as he himself later admitted. This riveting account of the last days of Republican Madrid under Juan Negrín  by Spanish Marxist journalist Ignacio Iglesias — a founder member of the revolutionary anti-Stalinist Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and La Batalla journalist — first appeared in the Paris-based Spanish-language journal Interrogations No 1, December 1974.

Ignacio Iglesias

Contents: The myth of resistance; Negrín in the Centre-South Zone; The Double Conspiracy; The Communists; The Libertarians; The Military; The National Defence Council; Civil War Within the Civil War; The Fall of Madrid; Endnotes.

The cover photographs, top, show President Juan Negrín, centre, surrounded by his senior Communist military commanders: Lt Col. Enrique Líster (on Negrin’s left) and, on his right, Colonel Juan Modesto; behind Modesto is Colonel Antonio Cordón. Bottom right, March 6, 1939, Madrid: Cipriano Mera, anarchist commander of the IV Army Corp announcing the ousting of the CP/Stalinist-controlled Negrín government and the formation of the National Defence Council; (on Mera’s right, standing) Colonel Segismudo Casado, Councillor for Defence.

The Death of Durruti

UK : £2.65 ; USA : $4.13 ; Germany : €3,14 ; France :  €3,14 ; Spain:  €3,14 ; Italy :  €3,14 ; Japan : ¥ 394 ; Canada : CDN$ 4.03 ; Brazil : R$ 8,04

Buenaventura Durruti was the most outstanding figure in Spanish anarchist history. Born in León on 14 July 1896, of Basque and Catalan parents,  he dedicated his life from the age of 16 until his untimely death at 40 to the struggle for justice, social revolution and the anarchist idea. It was his commitment to the ‘idea’ that led Durruti to spend the rest of his life in clandestinity, jail, exile and — ultimately — as the inspirational figurehead of the social revolution that confronted the clerical-fascist-military uprising of July 1936. Shortly after mid-day on 19 November 1936, at the height of the Francoist assault on Madrid, Durruti, accompanied by his driver and military advisers, was mortally wounded in mysterious circumstances and died in the early hours of 20 November. The circumstances surrounding his death have never been satisfactorily explained. La Muerte de Durruti (The Death of Durruti), first published in 1973,  remains, forty years on, the only book devoted, exclusively, to the events leading up to —  and after — the anarchist’s  death, some four months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Written in the style of investigative journalism, the author sets out the many conflicting theories circulating at the time, and which have remained the subject of debate up to the present day. In addition he has interviewed those who either knew Durruti or had served in the Durruti column up to the time of his death

See also The Man Who Killed Durruti by Pedro de Paz (also available on Kindle)

One Man’s War in Spain. Trickery, Treachery and Thievery

UK : £2.67 ; USA : $4.13 ; Germany : €3,16 ; France :  €3,16 ; Spain:  €3,16 ; Italy :  €3,16 ; Japan : ¥ 392 ; Canada : CDN$ 4.07 ; Brazil : R$ 8,00

The collected memoirs and documents in this book, penned or preserved by the author with such belief and ideological conviction over so very many years of effort, can be described as a masterwork. Without euphemism or any other sort of circumlocution, they bluntly set out facts that will come as a revelation to anyone who knows only the accounts sympathetic to those who had a hand in the loss of the Revolution and War in 1936–39 – works indeed often written by counter-revolutionaries themselves to conceal the malicious intent that they so cravenly pursued. The revolutionary structures of the anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist movement were undermined to their very roots by all its foes without and within, by Bolsheviks in particular and by the cohorts of the state in general.

As we read through these memoirs and documents, every line is heartrending. We learn of the treachery and criminality enacted by the supporters of collaboration against those who flatly opposed it at a time when the winning of the War by defeating Francoism ought to have been the sole priority.

The author, his claims based on verifiable evidence, has tales to tell us that are nevertheless hard to credit. Such is the impact of those claims that we wonder how the Spanish Libertarian Movement could have countenanced such kow-towing to the Communist Party, the presence of communists in government and the slogans issuing from those occupying the highest positions in the FAI and the CNT.

With conclusive proof and plain, open-minded reasoning, Joaquín Pérez lifts the veil on the farcical performance of those who ran the War. Citing details and supporting documentation, Joaquín Pérez is unforgiving of any one of these murderous clowns, placing all of them under the microscope and exposing their anti-revolutionary exploits. Detailing where and how the arms- and munition-purchasing deals were made, he boldly assigns the blame for arms purchases that never reached loyalist Spain and names those – such as Negrín and his lackeys – who pocketed the money and built up fortunes in foreign banks.

 One Man’s War is a documentation of the Spanish people’s revolutionary history in 1936–39, that part which was not squandered. Rather it should help – tomorrow or in the near future – to prevent upcoming generations from being taken for a ride and show them how to see to it that a worthwhile Social Revolution does not come to grief and can properly succeed. The book is also an account of the survival of one man’s hope, in his daughter’s words,  “that his fellow men would learn to respect one another”.

UK : £2.71 ; USA : $4.13 ; Germany : €3,15 ; France :  €3,15 ; Spain:  €3,15 ; Italy :  €3,15 ; Japan : ¥ 398 ; Canada : CDN$ 4.11 ; Brazil : R$ 8,04

Francisco Ferrer y Guardia (1859 –1909), anarchist, internationally renowned educationalist and founder of the rationalist ‘Modern School’ (La Escuela Moderna), was arrested in September 1909 in the wake of the popular and violent protests in Catalonia against Spain’s highly unpopular war against Moroccan tribesmen. The events of that week in July 1909 came to be known as the ‘Tragic Week’ (La Semana Tragica) for which the Spanish government and Catholic Church selected their most hated enemy, Francisco Ferrer, as the scapegoat — ‘the author in chief of the popular rebellion”. Within a month he had faced a mock military trial – a drumhead court martial – and on October 13 he was escorted to the ‘ditch of many sighs’ in Montjuich Castle and executed by a firing squad.

This account of the life and death of Francisco Ferrer Guardia (now available as a Kindle volume) was written by William Archer for the October and November issues of McClure’s Magazine for 1910. Archer, a freelance journalist, had been commissioned by the magazine editor to go to Spain to find new material on the Ferrer case, as public interest in the affair had been revived. During his stay in Spain, Archer was able to interview Ferrer’s family and friends, as well as his opponents. He was also able to consult the many new books on the Tragic Week that had, at the time, just been published, and the official trial report, Juicio Ordinario Seguido … contra Francisco Ferrer Guardia. It is therefore to Archer’s credit, that on his return from Spain, he was able to write a very fine and well-documented article.

Yet while describing the events and trial that lead up to the murder of Ferrer by the vindictive Spanish Catholic state Archer has ignored the true personality of Ferrer, both as an anarchist and an educationalist. Archer was not an anarchist and had little sympathy for Ferrer on that score. Yet Ferrer’s anarchism is never mentioned in any great detail, or his connection with the anarchist movement in Spain. Ferrer the educator is dismissed as being crude “Ferrer was not a great educator” Archer writes “he was not a great man; his thoughts were crude, his methods were crude.” This in fact is far from the truth. In this short introduction we will examine both these aspects of Ferrer’s life. This will show a Ferrer very far removed from the man portrayed by Archer.

Madrid, 1906: Ferrer on his way to be court martialled (Consejo de Guerra) for his alleged role in the attempted assassination of Alfonso XIII.

Firstly, Ferrer the anarchist: Ferrer’s anarchism has never been examined to any great length, no doubt because his writings on anarchism are few. Nevertheless though, he was a militant despite Woodcock’s misleading assertion in Anarchism, that Ferrer was “adopted” by the anarchists only after his death.

Most probably Ferrer became an anarchist while in France after his break with Ruiz Zorilla. On his return to Spain in 1901 he founded, with Ignacio Clavin, the newspaper La Huelga General, the first issue of which appeared in Barcelona of the 15th November. The paper was to last until 1903 and its collaborators included Anselmo Lorenzo, M. Castellote and Ricardo Mella. In La Huelga General Ferrer was able to express fully his anarchism and in the first issue, under the pseudonym of Cero he wrote:

“… It is a well-known fact that peoples’ knowledge about the condition of their lives is limited to what the master class wants them to know. Very few are those who think about what they read, and fewer still those who had an opportunity to study the anarchist ideal.

Madrid, 1906: Ferrer’s Court Martial

People are still inclined to think that should the day come when the Anarchists shall “rule” nobody would be ‘safe in his person and nobody could feel sure in the possession of the smallest thing, since they aim at the “destruction” of property.

Yet it must be remembered — and we ought to repeat this as often as we can – that in a well organised society, viz — an Anarchist society, everyone will have his own house, his furniture, his clothes, his works of art, his tools, everything in fact that will help to make his life comfortable and happy.

We shall not pass from the absurd and foolish system of today, founded on authority and property, to one of solidarity and the fraternity as rapidly as things are done on the stage, by a quick change of scenery: on the contrary it will require all the propaganda all the teaching, and, above everything, all the example that we can afford to give in order to make an impression upon the mentality of the irrational unreflective beings who today form the great majority of the population.

We Anarchists desire to destroy property as it exists today because it is the result of the exploitation of man by man, of privilege assisted by the state and of the unjust right of the stronger.

We Anarchists think it is not just that there should be slde by side owners of vast estates and people who have not a piece of land on which to stretch themselves: persons on whom all riches of the world descend by right of birth, and persons to whom all the sorrow and misery of the world are the only heritage.

We Anarchists do not think that a title deed or a will is sufficient justification for a person to spend his life without working without contributing to the common welfare.

In the Anarchist society the education and the instruction of children shall be such as to point out to them the duty and necessity of work, and that from this duty only those shall be exempt who are physically incapable.

Since in the anarchistic society there will not be any longer the bad example and the perverting influence of the sight of people slaving away all the day long side by side with others whose whole occupation is the change of amusements: since there will no longer be the disturbing moral influence that comes from daily seeing and taking for granted that there should be side by side hungry people and people over-fed, everybody will – as a matter of course — contribute to the production of the common social wealth, in proportion to his abilities and power, and food will be assured to all.

It will then be quite easy to the teachers and educators of the day to impress upon the young mind the duty, the pleasure and the necessity of work.

Mankind having attained to a certain degree of reasonableness it will also be comparatively easy to find out a working arrangement by which everyone could retain possession of the things he likes and cherishes, even without harm resulting to anybody from this right to a form of personal property, or that it should create a supremacy of a class of men over another.

In a few words: many today oppose Anarchism for no other reason than they are unable to conceive a rational and well-organised society. …” ¹

Ferrer with his partner Soledad Villafranca

In 1907 Ferrer, in collaboration with Anselmo Lorenzo, José Prats and Enrique Puget founded Solidaridad Obrera, Ferrer lending a large sum of money for the renting of an editorial office. In the 1930s Solidaridad Obrera was to become, as the organ of the C.N.T, the best-known Spanish anarchist newspaper.

Secondly, Ferrer the educationalist: Ferrer began to formulate his educationalist ideas in parallel with the development of his anarchism. While a teacher of Spanish in France he began to see, by close observation, that the injustice and exploitation in society was not only the result of authoritarian educational methods, but also more importantly the result of what was taught by these authoritarian methods. Ferrer soon understood that as long as the education of children, the adults of tomorrow, was left in the hands of both the church and the ruling classes there would be no hope of attaining the libertarian society that he, as an anarchist, longed for. Reform of the existing school system, he thought, was futile. Explaining the working of this system in his little book La Escuela Moderna (to be published soon by ChristieBooks), published after his death, he wrote:

Anselmo Lorenzo and Francisco Ferrer i Guardia

“Education” means in practice domination or domestication. I do not imagine that these systems have not been put together with the deliberate aim of securing the desired results. That would be the work of a genius. But things have happened just as if the actual scheme of education corresponded ‘ to some vast and deliberate conception; it could not have been done better. To attain it teachers have inspired themselves solely with the principles of discipline and authority, which always appeal to social organisers; such men have only one clear idea and one will – the children must learn to obey, to believe, and to think according to the prevailing social dogmas. If this were the aim, education could not be other than we find it today. There is no question of promoting the spontaneous development of the child’s faculties, – or encouraging it to seek freely the satisfaction of the physical, intellectual and moral needs. There is question only of imposing ready-made ideas on it, of preventing it from ever thinking otherwise than is required for the maintenance of existing social institutions – of it, in a word, an individual‘ rigorously adapted to the social mechanism.” ²

And describing the teachers he wrote:

“…The teachers are merely conscious or unconscious organs of their (the ruling classes) will, and have been trained on their principles. From their tenderest years, and more drastically than anybody, they have endured the discipline of authority. Very few have escaped this despotic domination; they are generally powerless against ii, because they are oppressed by the scholastic organisation to such an extent that they have nothing to do but obey …”³

He was, therefore, convinced that the only way to regenerate society was through a new system of education. An education Ferrer preferred to call rationalist, which we would call libertarian, free from all dogmas and systems whether they be religious, political, nationalistic, republican or what you will. To this end, on being left a substantial sum of money, Ferrer returned to Spain where, after much preparation, his school, La Escuela Moderna, was opened in Barcelona in September 1901.

Classroom of The Modern School

The Escuela Moderna was by no means the first example of libertarian education. It was preceded in France by Paul Robin‘s experimental school at Cempuis which ran from 1880 to 1894 (Robin’s example was to influence Ferrer) and later Sebastian Fame‘: La Ruche (1906-1916). ⁴ But it was La Escuela Moderna that was to become the most well-known, no doubt because of the stand it made against the church in Spain and the savagery of Ferrer’s murder. It must be remembered also that the French examples were working when a system of secular state education had already been introduced in France.

From the outset Ferrer was determined that the children in La Escuela Moderna would have an education that would prepare them fully for their adult life, a life, he hoped, that would be free of ignorance and prejudice.

“…Neither dogmas nor systems, moulds that confine vitality to the narrow exigencies of a transitory form of society, will be taught. Only solutions approved by the facts, theories accepted by reason, and truths confirmed by evidence, shall be included in our lessons, so that each mind shall be trained to control a will, and truths shall irradiate the intelligence, and, when applied in practice, will benefit the whole of humanity without any unworthy and disgraceful exclusiveness…”⁵

Beginning, in the first year, with 30 children, the numbers increased to 266 by the third year, boy and girl being both taken in complete equality, as were children of the working -and middle classes. Ferrer saw the very great importance of co-education:

“…In my own mind, co-education was of vital importance. It was not merely an indispensable condition of realising what I regard as the ideal result of rational education; it was the ideal itself, its life in the Modern School, developing progressively without any form of exclusion, inspiring a confidence of attaining our end. Natural science, philosophy, and history unite in teaching, in face of all prejudice to the contrary, that man and woman are two complementary aspects of human nature, and the failure to recognise this essential and important truth has had the most disastrous consequences . . . Woman must not be restricted to the home. The sphere of her activity must go out far beyond her home; it must extend to the very confines of society. But in order to ensure a helpful result from her activity we must not restrict the amount of knowledge we communicate to her; she must learn, both in regard to quality and quantity, the same things as man. When science enters the mind of a woman it will direct her rich vein of emotion, the characteristic element of her nature,‘ the glad harbinger of peace and happiness among men …”⁶

This on its own was a radical change from a vast number of school systems in operation at the time, but by far the most important innovation introduced into the Escuela Moderna was made by Ferrer in his position to punishment and scholastic examination:

Some of Ferrer’s Modern School pupils

“… Having admitted and practised the co-education of boys and girls, of rich and poor — having, that is to say, started from the principle of solidarity and equality — we are not prepared to create a new inequality. Hence, in the Modern School there will be no rewards and no punishments; there will be no examinations to puff up some children with the flattering title of “excellent” to give others the vulgar title of “good”, and to make others unhappy with a consciousness of incapacity and failure … Since we are not educating for a specific purpose, we cannot determine the capacity or incapacity of the child. When we teach a science, or art, or trade, or some subject requiring special conditions, an examination may be useful, and there may be reason to give a diploma or refuse one; I neither affirm nor deny this. But there is no such specialism in the Modern School. The characteristic note of the school, distinguishing it even from some which pass as progressive models, is that in it the faculties of the children shall develop freely, without subjection to any dogmatic patron, not even to what it may consider the body of convictions of the founder and teachers; every pupil shall go forth from it into social life with the ability to be his own master and guide his own life in all things.

Hence, if we were rationally prevented from giving prizes, we could not impose penalties, and no one would have dreamed of doing so in our school if the idea had not been suggested from without. Sometimes parents came to me’ with the rank proverb, “Letters go in with blood,” on their lips, and begged me to punish their children. Others who were charmed with the precocious talent of their children wanted to see them shine in examinations and exhibit medals. We refuse to admit either prizes or punishments, and sent the parents away. If any child were conspicuous for merit, application, laziness, or bad conduct, we pointed out to it the need of accord, or the unhappiness of lack of accord, with its own welfare and that of others, and the teacher might give a lecture on the subject. Nothing more was done, and the parents were gradually reconciled to this system, though they often had to be corrected in their errors and prejudices by their own children …

… The teachers who offer their services to the Modern School, or ask our recommendation to teach in similar schools, must refrain from any moral or material punishment, under the penalty of being disqualified permanently. Scolding, impatience, and anger ought to disappear with the ancient title of “master”. In free schools all should be peace, gladness and fraternity. We trust that this will suffice to put an end to these practices, which are most improper in people whose sole ideal is the training of a generation fitted to establish a really fraternal, harmonious, and just state of society …” ⁷

This is what set the Escuela Moderna apart from most schools past and present.

The Escuela Moderna though was not without teething problems. Firstly over teachers, and secondly over textbooks. The problem with teachers at the beginning was perplexing. Ferrer saw the drawback of employing professional teachers because of their traditional attitude towards the child-teacher relationship, and even more of employing volunteers who understood the importance of the school but had had no teaching experience. Ferrer, therefore, founded a Rationalist Normal School for the training of teachers, both men and women. This was to be closed down at the same time as the Escuela Moderna.

Textbooks also presented a problem. The books available for Spanish schools at the time were of no use whatsoever. Take, for example, geography. Ferrer wrote to Elisée Reclus asking him to recommend a textbook for the teaching of that subject. Reclus replied that he did not know of one book that was not tainted with religious or patriotic poison, or, what is worse, administrative routine. He therefore recommended that the teachers should use no textbooks at all.⁸ This was only one subject out of many. Ferrer therefore sought the help and collaboration of the most progressive educators and scientists of the time, and had their works translated into Spanish, and where necessary, he requested that they write new works specifically for the school. In this way the collaborators and supporters of the Escuela Moderna included Odon de Buen, Letoumeau, Jean Grave, Elisée Reclus, Charles Albert, Charles Malato, Clemence Jacquinet, Martinez Vargas, Anselmo Lorenzo, Tarrida del Marmol and C.A. Laisant (the grandfather of the present publication director of Le Monde Libertaire). It is of interest to note that one of the most popular books in the school was The Adventures of Nono by Jean Grave.

This then, in brief, was the work and ideas of Ferrer. The Escuela Moderna, he wrote just after its foundation, would not be the perfect type of the future school of a rational state of society, but a precursor of it. In spite of this modest statement the example of Francisco Ferrer and his Escuela Moderna shines out today in a world where children are still educated with the same ignorance and prejudice that he tried, once and for all, to eradicate.

Ferrer‘s influence began before his death. Through him many Modern Schools were founded in Spain based on his Escuela Moderna. In Lausanne an anarchist teacher, Jean Wintsch, founded a Ferrer school ⁹ which lasted from 1910 to 1919. But the anarchists put his ideas into practice on the largest scale during the Spanish Civil War.

Dave Poole, Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, No. 3 (1977)

Notes:

I. This article was first translated and published in The Anarchist December 27th 1912, Vol.1 No. 31. ‘

2. Francisco Ferrer, The Origin and Ideas of the Modern School, pp. 49-50.

3. Ibid p. 49

4. For an excellent study of these two great examples of libertarian education see Paul Robin et l’education integrale in “Le Monde Libertaire” nos. 124, I25 and 127 (August, September, October and December 1966) and Sebastian Faure et la Ruche, “Le ‘Monde Libertaire” nos. 136 and 137 (November and December 1967) both by Rene Bianca.

5. Ferrer, op. cit p. 80.

6. Ibid p. 25 and 30.

7. Ibid pp.’55-56 and 59.

8. Ibid p. 68.

9. See Le Dr. Wintsch et L’École Ferrer de Lausanne, “Le Monde Libertaire” no. 130 (March 1967) by Rene Bianca.

Bibliography:

Archer, William. The Life, Trial and Death of Ferrer, Chapman and Hall, London 1911, p 332.

Day, Hem: Francisco Ferrer. Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, ed. Pensée et Action, Bruxelles, 1947 p 27.

Ferrer, Francisco: The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School, translated by Joswph McCabe, Watts & Co., London 1913, p 110.

Ferrer, Sol: La Vie et L’oeuvre de Francisco Ferrer, Librairie Fischbacher, Paris 1962 p 239.

McCabe, Joseph: The Martyrdom of Ferrer, Watts & Co., London, 1909, p 94.

Pope Benedict XVI (C) blesses faithful flanked by Vatican secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone (L) and Santiago’s archbishop Julian Barrio at the Santiago de Compostela cathedral, on November 6, 2010 during his two-day visit in Spain.

During Joseph Ratzinger’s 2010 visit to Compostela and Barcelona we were regaled with his protest against heightened opposition to religion and how he was able to compare today’s situation with the 1930s. In the same vein, the Asociación Estatal de Abogados Cristianos/State Association of Christian Lawyers (AEAC) has notified the United Nations (no less)  of 150 alleged instances of religious persecution in Spain over recent months. Victim-ism has been and remains a constant in proselytisation, Vatican-style. Conducting themselves continually as hangmen does not stop them from propaganda heavily laden with words like peace and tolerance. Hypocrisy has always been their strong suit and the case in hand is no different.

Just like today, in the years preceding and during the conflict that gave rise to the social revolution of 1936, the Catholic Church kept its left hand raised high with calls for peace and respect whilst its right was used to deliver deadly blows to the working class.

The main charges formulated related to the attacks upon and killing of its ministers, thereby implying lack of religious freedom, sacrilege and the destruction of art (and not merely religious art). At the same time and with the same resolve they never wearied of reiterating that they quested after peace. Let us see how much truth there is in these protestations and the situation that unleashed the conflict.

RELIGIOUS AND IDEOLOGICAL PERSECUTION

Ever since the Roman emperor Constantine decreed tolerance for the Christian religion and ever since Theodosius made it the official religion in the 6^th century, Christians have not ceased persecuting and eliminating all dissent, labelling it heresy. Arians, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Eutiquianists, Dulcinists, Monophysites, Nestorians, Priscillianists, Waldensians and Cathars, Lutherans, Calvinists, etc., sampled purification by fire or sword under cover of the “sweet name of Mary”. To be fair, some of these ‘heretics’ behaved not much better towards Catholics whom they too deemed heretics. In short, it does not look like the Church is best qualified to speak on the subject of religious freedom.

Ferdinand VII (1784 – 1833), twice King of Spain: 1808 and 1813 to 1833 (painting by Goya)

Furthermore, when, outside of the ambit of religion (of course) ideas began to be entertained that broke with the tradition that absolute power emanated from God and was devolved to men, the priests started crying out to the heavens again. As illustrated by the ferocious opposition they put up against any idea emanating from the Enlightenment following the bourgeois-style American and French revolutions. The Church’s defence of monarchy is well known and evidenced by the cry of “Long live chains!” which greeted Ferdinand VII’s fateful return to Spain and the ensuing repression. Its intransigence is encapsulated to perfection by the insistence during sittings of the Cádiz Cortes that the Constitution known popularly as “la Pepa” should not include freedom of religion.

Should anyone have any lingering doubts on this score he should go straight to the encyclical Quanta Cura (which does not, as might at first glance have appeared, deal with priestly numbers) released on 8 December 1864 by Pius IX. In it one finds statements like these making the position plain:

Pope Pius IX, King of Rome (1846 – 1878)

“False and perverse views, all the more to be despised because they tend to thwart and indeed suppress the wholesome authority which the Catholic Church should be free to exercise until the end of days, whether over individual men or over nations, peoples and supreme governors: errors that also seek to destroy the unity and mutual concord between Priesthood and Imperium that has always been so beneficial to Church and State alike.”

[…] they have no hesitation in enshrining this wrong-headed opinion, extremely harmful to the Catholic Church and the well-being of souls, dubbed by Gregory XVI […] madness, that is, that ‘freedom of conscience and of worship is an inherent right of every man that every well established state should proclaim and guarantee as a fundamental law, and that every citizen is entitled to complete freedom in manifesting his ideas with the utmost publicity – be it, by word of mouth, in writing or any other way -  , with no civil or church authority empowered to repress this in any way.’ In supporting this very rash argument, they neither think nor consider that in so doing they are preaching freedom of perdition and that if men are afforded a free hand in disputation, there will always be someone who dares stand up against the Truth, smug in the loquaciousness of human learning, but Our Lord Jesus Christ himself teaches how faith and Christian prudence should steer clear of such harmful vanity.”

The same encyclical also contains the Syllabus of Errors, a list of 80 of the main errors of modernity, summed up under the following four points.

1. Propositions 1 to 18: condemn errors relating to belief: pantheism, naturalism, rationalism (be it absolute or temperate), indifference-ism, incompatibility between faith and reason, etc. Also included here is Proposition 22 which condemns failure by the intelligentsia to defer to the magisterium of the Church.
2. Propositions 19 to 55: relating to the nature of the Church, the State and relations between them. Stress is laid on the Church’s freedom, the subordination of the state to morality and the existence of natural rights predating the State and independent of it. And separation of Church and State is condemned.
3. Propositions 56 to 74: relating to ethics. Special attention is paid to marriage as well as to secular morality, utilitarianism (Proposition 58) and the distinction between sacrament and contract.
4. Propositions 75 to 80: argue that the Catholic faith should be the state religion and condemn freedom of worship, freedom of thought, freedom of the press and freedom of conscience. Outstanding is the proposition that contends that the Roman pontiff cannot be reconciled with progress, liberalism and modern culture.

Bear in mind throughout that the author of these words actually regarded himself as infallible and since then they have been part of dogma.

Plainly they were worried about the situation at the time, especially given the progress made by socialist ideas and the attempts at revolution occurring across Europe. Fearful of this, Pope Leo XIII in 1891 issued another encyclical Rerum Novarum {Of New Things) where, after a token reference to “the position of workers” he mounted an all-out defence of private property and thus of the status quo. Disgracefully this, the so-called “first social encyclical” contained statements like these:

“With their aim that the belongings of individuals should pass to the community, the socialists are aggravating the workers’ conditions for, by stripping them of the right to freely dispose of their wages, they are denying them the right to be able to better themselves economically and to win improvements”.

“[…] man being the only animal endowed with intellect, he must of necessity be accorded the opportunity not only to use things available, as the rest of the animals do, but also to possess them with a form and lasting grip.”

“The foundation and rationale for the division of goods and for private property are found in natural law itself.”

DEFENDING THE MONOPOLY ON EDUCATION

Freedom of education was resisted even more virulently perhaps. The right to teach being deemed a monopoly, in the early years of the 20^th century and in light of the experience of secular schools that were beginning to emerge, the clergy spoke in these terms:

“No matter how much knowledge they might acquire in secular schools, the children would emerge from them as monsters, because the real monster is the man removed from God, neither knowing nor loving, nor obeying nor serving him. From such a man we must fear anything: down to the most abominable actions and most horrendous crimes. Secular schooling is championed by all who wish to shrug off the yoke of the Ten Commandments so as to surrender to the blandishments of their passions.” (Statement by Urquinaona, bishop of Barcelona, early 20^th century)

Hardly surprising that some years later they railed from their pulpits, clamouring for the execution of Francisco Ferrer, the creator of the Modern School, falsely accused of having been the instigation of the uprising known afterwards as Tragic Week.

WAS TRAGIC WEEK PERSECUTION OF RELIGION?

Barcelona, 27 July 1909: the burning of the religious buildings

Those events were to really stir up the civilian and church authorities alike. They sought to pass it off as a tidal wave of senseless  sacrilege, church- and monastery burnings but it makes no sense without the explanation that the revolt triggered by opposition to the forcible  drafting of reservists to crack down on a revolt during the murderous colonial wars being fought in North Africa (in what is today Morocco) and in which the hundreds of thousands who perished as armed protectors of the profits of the capitalists were almost exclusively young men drawn from the working class (as in any war). In keeping with its line down through the ages, the Church championed a status quo wherein 40% of the population was illiterate (up to 60% in working class districts), where the Church received 20 million pesetas a years from the state and controlled nearly a third of all the capital in Spain (according to the Catalan Employers’ Federation in 1912), as well as owning many banks, industries and businesses, directly or indirectly. In Barcelona alone there were 348 monasteries or convents. The church had a monopoly on education and health and paid its workers even worse than the secular employers.

Something that is usually not mentioned is the fact that all of the anti-clerical fervour that prompted the burning of religious buildings (80 of them, in addition to another 32 civil establishments, town halls, registries, banks, etc.) also made it is business to protect the priests, monks and nuns, looking upon them as kidnap victims. Which explains why during the 4-day tidal wave of “chaos” only 3 religious lost their lives and one of those was as the result of a heart attack.

By contrast, upwards of 70 lives were lost to the gunfire of the police, army and sharpshooters. Upwards of 500 were wounded. Some 2,500 people were arrested and a further 5 were executed later, one of them a mentally disturbed man whose horrific offence was to have danced with the remains of a long dead and buried nun who had not died as the result of any violence. However, the events back in 1835 when there was an out and out massacre of religious and arson attacks on religious buildings such as the San José monastery are rarely invoked: those incidents were a lot more widespread and took place against the backdrop of the squabble between liberals and Carlists.  But of course the powers that be insist that liberals need to take a look in the mirror.

May 1931, Madrid: the burning of the churches

The Garotte (Helios Gómez)

As early as 1931 a pro-monarchist pastoral letter from Bishop (later Cardinal) Gomá triggered the people’s fury and a series of church burnings in Madrid, Andalusia and Valencia. In Malaga, the CNT issued a statement calling for calm. In the wake of the Asturias uprising in 1934, there were similar incidents. The Cathedral’s Camara santa was dynamited and several establishments in Langreo, Gijón, Oviedo and elsewhere were torched. In all, the number of religious buildings destroyed amounted to 58, according to most sources and some 34 religious were murdered. Anybody who cares to visit Wikipedia will find a rather tendentious article including these figures, with the events that occurred compared to the persecution by the Roman Empire, no less. Other sources contend that it provided more than ample justification for the Francoist uprising.

The Church Militant: Pamplona bullring

We need not reiterate that the Church backed the landowners, industrialists and nobles of the day and actively participated in the crackdown on any attempt to secure anything resembling social justice. What grabs the attention is that there are folk writing articles about the “very serious attack on the monasteries and their 34 martyrs” in the context of a conflict in which somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people lost their lives. (In addition to the 34 religious, some 320 Civil Guards, Assault Guards and army personnel perished). On 20 and 21 October 1934 alone, 24 people were arrested (among them a 16 year old boy arrested because he was the son of a revolutionary); they were loaded on to a lorry and murdered three days later in the middle of the night with bayonets and finished off by coups de grace from Civil Guard firearms, and dumped in a common grave. Other instances of torture have been authenticated with the discovery of corpses in other common graves with the obvious signs. A corpse was even found with the skull smashed in by a piece of rail track found in the same location as the grave. Nearly 3,000 people were wounded and there is no telling how many were tortured and done to death in the cells. Between 15,000 and 30,000 people were dragged before the courts across Spain. We cannot be any more precise with the figures because of the tight censorship the government enforced on the issue. It is known that in many cases the prisons and holding centres were in many instances religious buildings too, as in the case of the Adoration Sisters’ convent in Oviedo and others in Sama and Ciano. Including the convent school in La Oscura. In short, the scale of the tragedy highlights the hypocrisy of those who zero in exclusively on the deaths of a particular 34 people merely because they belonged to a religious confession.

ANTI-CLERICAL SOCIETY OR ANTI-SOCIAL CLERGY?

We have already referred to hostility towards the Church as an institution on the basis of its accumulation of material assets. Because of bourgeois revolutionary processes under way in France and Italy in the late 18^th and throughout the 19^th century, Spain was a haven for banished religious orders whose numbers were spectacularly boosted.

The predominant force in Catholicism back then was the Jesuits who were meant to mix with the powerful classes and thus with money. Their investments in Spain not only brought them massive dividends but political influence as well. Despite the disentailment programmes of Mendizábal and Madoz (from 1820 to 1841 and again in 1851) by 1912, Joaquín Aguilera, secretary of the Catalan Employers’ Federation, the Fomento del Trabajo, was insistent that the Jesuits controlled ..” without exaggeration, a third of the capitalised wealth of Spain.” The Church owned railways, mines, factories, banks, shipping lines, orange plantations as well as slave-owning cocoa plantations in Guinea (cf. Gustau Nerin, Una guardia civil en la selva). Gerald Brenan, from whom I have borrowed some figures (The Spanish Labyrinth) queries that it was such a big landowner but states that it had close ties to the big landowners and with the big industrialists from whom it obtained alms for its colleges and missions and to whom it was bound by bonds of gratitude. The Church also held a monopoly in education and, to all intents, in the health sector with its 10,000 monks and 40,000 nuns (a record figure, twice that in St Teresa of Avila’s day). The republic’s decrees reducing the number of religious orders, expelling the Jesuits yet again and banning them from teaching, the legalising of divorce and introduction of civil marriages and burials so irked the clergy that they immediately began to speak up for the monarchy and the old privileged order, laying the groundwork for the armed uprising that triggered the civil war. In the spring of 1936, the archbishop of Valladolid, Remigio Ganasegui, sent General Andrés Saliquet (a member of the Junta and one of the chief plotters) a cheque for 5,000 pesetas. Once the war was under way, in October 1936 Gomá handed Franco £32,000 sterling, raised in Ireland from a collection taken up “for the restoration of destroyed churches”.

We need scarcely guess the use to which that money was put.

The Church Militant – 2: In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (Helios Gómez)

Many a time we focus unwittingly on local matters but at the time the labour press and comrades elsewhere in Europe realised what was afoot, especially in Italy and Germany. The rise of fascism there was facilitated by the Church when it pulled its Christian Democrat parties out of the election contests in order to throw the voting weight of Catholics behinds fascism. Whatever differences they had with those regimes in relation to education or state funding for the Church, we cannot forget this ploy of nobbling the political competition in order to ease the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the fervour with which they spiritually and materially (with money and guns) backed the murderous Abyssinian (Ethiopian) campaign, the reoccupation of the Rhineland or the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria to the Nazi Reich) – both actions expressly banned by the Versailles Treaty.

All of which clearly positioned the Catholic Church on the side of the barricades facing the libertarian movement and other socialists who were removing he blindfolds from their eyes. Its stance on earlier struggles, its diehard defence of a class-based society and private property, its condemnation of any hint of freedom or its backing for international fascism were unlikely to inspire any feelings of neutrality in the workers. And did not.

WAR AND REVOLUTION

Wherever the situation was brought under control after 19 July and where Franco’s troops were seen off, religious displays were banished from the life of society. Obviously, anarchists had been theorising for decades about doing away with religion as something redundant and it took no great effort to convince the populace on that score. Quite the opposite. A majority had a handle on atheism and the time formerly spent on prayer could be used for more productive pursuits. Far from being systematically destroyed as commonly alleged, religious buildings were pressed into service as warehouses, hospitals, schools, auditoriums, understandably so given their acoustics and the cool refuge they offered during the long hot summer. This was something that even the bishops conceded in their “Collective Letter”, of which more anon.

Widespread adaptation to the new situation involved nothing traumatic. Disenchantment with religion had been on the increase virtually since the “Glorious Revolution” that had ushered in the First Republic. In Valladolid the Holy Week processions had all but petered out and it required some serious application by Gandásegui (a plaque being installed in a local church for this very purpose) to breathe new life into the tradition. In many places children were not being baptised and ideological groups (many of them anarchist) questioning morality through publications and talks simply grew and grew and increased their influence. Against this backdrop it is hardly surprising that from day one (not to mention the groundwork laid long before then) the Church hitched its star to the generals’ mutiny, knowing that this was a social war and that its very moral code was at stake. The cardinal-primate of Toledo, Plá y Deniel, referred to the civil war as a “Crusade against the children of Cain”. But if there is anything that set the seal on their embracing of the fascist criminals it was the “Collective Letter from the Spanish Bishops to the Bishops of the Entire World Regarding the War in Spain”. Signed by all of the prelates, except those from Menorca, Tarragona and Vitoria who declined to sign, this 15-page document was designed to counter the bad press that the Francoist side and thus the Spanish Church had been receiving even from Catholic media abroad. Care was taken to talk about peace but they could not avert certain weaknesses:

[…] “such is the human condition and such the order of Providence […] that, war being one of the most terrific scourges of mankind, it is sometimes the sole heroic remedy whereby things can be restored to an even keel and brought back to the reams of peace. Which is why the Church, although the daughter of the Prince of Peace, blesses the emblems of war, founded the Military Orders and has organised Crusades against the enemies of the faith”.

“And so there arose within the soul a religious-type backlash against the nihilistic, destructive action of the godless. And Spain was split into two great warring camps […]

So the war is akin to an armed plebiscite.”

They set out clearly the justification for the war and for ideological postures, albeit in a Manichaean form. Anarchism is constantly cited when they invoke some practical example (which gives some indication of its strength), but generally they talk about communism and connect everything to the USSR:

“This hatred of religion and patriotic traditions […] came from Russia exported by Orientals with twisted minds. For the sake of so many victims bamboozled by ‘devilish teachings’, let us state that, going to a death sanctioned by the law, our communists have – the vast majority of them – been reconciled with the God of their fathers.”

In addition to unconditionally backing fascism, the key to the propaganda is plain: on the one hand, the protection of religion against destruction and, on the other, nationalist sentiment. The evil always comes from outside.

There is no point in our expounding at length upon this document which should raise the hackles of anyone with even the slightest knowledge of what occurred. All that can be said of it is that it is one of the greatest displays of hypocrisy and cynicism the clergy have ever left us. That is, after justifying the repression, the word ‘peace’ is used three times in the final five lines as they deny the mass murder, the common graves and the concentration camps.

THE MARTYR FACTORY

The prelates of the day blatantly inflated the figures for martyrs by including all those dead who subscribed to the Catholic faith, that is, virtually all who fought in the Nationalist Camp. These days, conservative sources talk broadly of some 6,600 murdered religious. And even though that figure is high (about 10% of the total), bear in mind that in the dioceses of Avila and Burgos they must have attracted attention on account of their “disproportionate readiness to sacrifice” (to quote Julián Casanova’s La Iglesia de Franco). The bishops did not care that there were warrior-priests on the battlefronts but they did not take kindly to “political” labels being hung on them. The parish priest of Hormaza (Burgos) had “offered his services” to the Falange Española right from day one of the uprising “and in his dual capacity as soldier and minister of the Lord, then travelled wherever his duty took him”, that is, to the battlefront. This war-mongering priest had, according to the Diario de Burgos of 18 August 1936 joined the “countless phalanx of martyrs of the crusade”.

Franco kissing the ring of the Papal Nuncio Cicognani and the bishop of Madrid-Alcala, Eijo Garay during the consecration of the Sacred Heart monument

There was a veritable legion of chaplains enrolled with the Carlists and Falangists. And many others are very dubiously described as martyrs when, say, they had opened fire on the crowd from the Escuelas Pias in Madrid’s Lavapiés district. By action or omission (hiding guns or collaborating with the fifth column) these things were repeated throughout the republican zone.

These days it is rather too casually suggested that the violence came from the anarchists and that the republican government’s forces were simply unable to contain it. In actual fact, appeals went out from every political and trade union organisation that no one should take the law into his own hands.  Such appeals were even backed up by death threats, and the CNT was no exception there. But any attempt to draw analogies between organisations back then and those today or between their membership and consciousnesses is laughable. To take but one example, the town hall in Barruelo de Santullán (Palencia) was destroyed, along with its records, in the revolutionary upheaval of 1934 and that was at the hands of the Socialist Youth.

THE DESTRUCTION OF SACRED AND ARTISTIC ITEMS

Likewise, many people drawn from a very wide range of circumstances destroyed items of worship that they looked upon as pointless; fun was poked at the solemnity of Christian myths and secret burials (sometimes even of foetuses) inside churches, convents and monasteries was denounced. Bear in mind that the damage done by sacrilege exists only in the head of the believer, because there is little harm that can be done to the remains of a dead person. Playing football with the skull of Bishop Torras might rank as disrespectful, but it is wholly disproportionate to punish it with the death penalty as the bishops were demanding in their Letter. Also cited as an unforgivable crime was the symbolic sniping at a statue of little artistic value and which these days even the laxest of urban planning laws would ban: this was the fate reserved for the Cerro de los Ángeles Christ statue in Madrid, which was promptly restored and, to make matters worse, turned into a site of religious pilgrimage.

The Collective Letter also ranks as equally as horrific as the death of priests in an incident in which a militiaman opened fire on a monstrance filled with hosts, saying: “I swore I’d have my revenge on you.” In fact, it is odd that the description of murders takes up barely 20 lines, whereas an entire page is devoted to the destruction of objets d’art and items of worship. Which gives some indication of the intent to blacken the picture and to lie brazenly at every opportunity. By saying, for instance, that the collections of the Prado Museum were looted when we now know that they were protected from Francoist air raids. Likewise they speak of the blowing up of the Roman arch in Bara in Tarragona, in which claim there was not a word of truth, since not only is that arch still blithely standing but all the reports about its condition make no reference to any destruction and subsequent restoration. All that there is is references to restorations. The most recent being in 1936 and designed to help preserve it better by directing traffic away from it. There are also references to the Liria Palace being “sordidly stripped” when it should have been made clear that it was destroyed almost entirely (only its outer walls were left standing) by Francoist aircraft dropping a number of bombs triggering an uncontrollable conflagration. Luckily, the militians rescued many priceless works of art from destruction, something that the bishops also omit to mention.

The burning down of Lérida cathedral was also credited to the Durruti Column and there are still those who invoke this mischievously in the press (Segre and La Mañana in Lérida) even today. But the Durruti Column was not in Lérida on 25 August 1936, having passed that was on 24 July, according to Jesús Arnal Peña (the priest who made a name for himself as ‘Durruti’s secretary’ when, according to himself he was merely scribe to the Column) and was in Bujaraloz by that time. Arnal Peña himself recounts how the perpetrators were later summoned by Durruti and punished “with the utmost rigour” (see Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s El Corto Verano de la Anarquía). On occasions, the arson is credited to certain members of the García Oliver Column or to the Aguiluchos seconded to it, but again the dates do not fit. What a number of sources do record is the opposition of the Lérida CNT to the destruction of the city’s religious inheritance.

In short, propaganda aside, detailed scrutiny of the sensationalist picture of such “iconoclastic revolutionary fury” displayed by anarchism in the revolution shows that anarchists generally conducted themselves in a much more commonsensical way than those with the power ever did.

THE NATIONALIST CAMP

But what do the bishops in their Letter have to say about the attitude of the Nationalist camp? Nothing.  Or rather, they hold it up as exemplary in its administration of justice, with peace reigning in the areas under its control. We have no way of knowing if such rectitude is what Queipo de Llano was displaying in one of his addresses over the airwaves from Radio Unión in Seville when he declared:

Queipo de Llano’s legionaires and Regulares teaching the cowardly reds and their womenfolk what it means to be a man . . .

“Our valiant legionnaires and Regulares have taught the cowardly reds what it means to be a man. And their womenfolk too, by the way. After all, these communist and anarchist types deserve it. Haven’t they been dabbling in free love? Now at any rate they will know what makes real men and not queer militians. They are not going to escape, no matter how much they may wrestle and kick out.”

Odd that even as their saviour generals were talking in those terms, the bishops in their Letter were complaining that “[…] No respect has been shown women’s modesty, not even those women who have vowed to commit themselves to God”, the reference here being entirely to the “red” zone, of course.

“Our minds are made up to enforce the law with inexorable firmness: Morón, Utrera, Puente Genil, Castro del Río, get the graves dug! You have my authority to kill like a dog anyone who ventures to lift a hand against you: if you do so, no responsibility shall attach to you! A column made up of Tercio and Regulares personnel was dispatched to El Arahal and they have wrought terrifying havoc there.”

In gratitude for the faithful, dignified actions mentioned in his speeches, Queipo de Llano was buried with full honours in the La Macarena cathedral , dressed in confraternity uniform, albeit that in more recent times an effort has been made to tidy up his image by removing references to his having been a mutinous general. Examples of his feats, which, according to the bishops, did these men credit, was the strafing and bombardment from naval guns directed at the column of civilian refugees streaming out of Malaga, leaving upwards of 3,000 dead, a macabre figure matched, rumour had it, by those who were slaughtered in Seville. In Triana the legionnaires laid out corpses in the form of a gigantic cross as a sign of their devotion and Rigoberto Doménech, the archbishop of Zaragoza where upwards of 7,000 were murdered, made statements acknowledging and excusing these events in August 1936 in the following terms: “Violence may not be done in the service of anarchy, but, lawfully, for the good of Order, Homeland and Religion.”

But the conflict was not ended in 1939 as some would have us believe. Upwards of 50,000 people were murdered over the ensuing decade, many as a result of treachery and informing by priests and nuns.

CONCLUSION

-       The Church has been and remains one of the essential pillars of an unjust, criminal system of power.

-       It did not take a lot of propaganda to show this, since the people was able to see as much and had suffered ever since the Church set foot in Spain and in many guises, with the Inquisition, the repression that followed the so-called War of Independence, the Carlist wars, the civil war and the Francoist dictatorship.

-       In the specific period analysed here it is plain that there was never any systematic plan for the destruction of every trace of religion or extermination of its followers. The abolition of its public practice is another kettle of fish.

-       Whilst offering no blanket excuse for the killing of anybody, those dead who have been labelled ‘martyrs’ are only to be expected in a conflict of this calibre, in which they were involved with blood-stained hands, as the poet used to say, albeit that he was referring to a different ideological camp.

-       We could go on to add a lot more about how the clergy conducted themselves, such as how they ran the prisons and forced labour camps, stole children, how the Auxilio Social (Social Aid) scheme set up by the Falange was handed over to the Church, but the list would be too long and we reckon that this pamphlet has more than met its target, of explaining why revolutionary minds reject religion and why they fought it once war erupted.

_____________________________________________________________________

Translated by Paul Sharkey from Iglesia y anticlericalismo en los procesos revolucionarios del siglo XX en España, (Publicaciones El Sembrador, Madrid 2012)

UK : £2.69 ; USA : $4.12 ; Germany : €3,14 ; France : €3,14 ; Spain: €3,14 ; Italy : €3,14 ; Japan : ¥ 377 ; Canada : CDN$ 4.07 ; Brazil : R$ 8,09

Anarchy, as the absence of government, is neither chaos nor some impossible Utopian dream. In fact it is a very common form of political organisation and one that has characterised much of the human past. People Without Government describes briefly the anarchic political structures of a number of these societies. True they are mainly small-scale hunting, gathering and horticultural groups. However, the social organisation of certain large populations with complex relations is also sometimes anarchic. Thus anarchy applies to a broad spectrum of different kinds of societies.

This book seeks to show what anarchy has been like in practice. Special attention is paid to the techniques of leadership, maintaining order and decision-making. The dynamic interplay between freedom and authority is considered, particularly the apparent tendency of anarchic polities to degenerate into states with government and for organisations to become oligarchies, and it is concluded that liberty and individuality are at best very tenuous and fleeting entities. There can be no relenting in the struggle for freedom.

Harold Barclay, who obtained his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1961, has lectured in anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada, since 1966. Prior to that he taught at the American University in Cairo and at the University of Oregon. His anthropological research has included studies of Egyptian and Arab Sudanese villages and he is the author of books on the Arab Sudan, the Middle East, and, through his interest in agriculture, the role of the horse in man’s culture.

CONTENTS: Preface ; Introduction ; On the Nature of Anarchy ; On anarchy and anarchism ; Social order and authority ; Social sanctions ; Government and the state ; Conclusion ; Some Observations on Procedure ; Anarchy among Hunter-Gatherers ; Eskimo ; Bushman ; Pygmies ; Australian hunters and foragers ; Other hunter-gatherers ; The Yurok ; Northwest Coast Indians ; Bibliographic note ; Anarchist Gardeners ; Sub-Saharan Africa ; Lugbara ; Konkomba ; Tiv ; The Plateau Tonga ; Two marginal cases: Anuak and Ibo ; Ibo ; New Guinea ; The Ifugao ; The Land Dayaks ; South American Indians ; Bibliographic note ; Anarchist Herders ; The Nuer ; Egalitarianism and cattle pastoralism ; The Lapps ; Bibliographic note ; Anarchy in Agricultural Societies ; Berbers ; The Santals ; The medieval free city ; Fascist corporatism, syndicalism and the medieval commune ; Anabaptists and anarchy ; Bibliographic note ; Anarchy in the Modern World ; The Spanish Revolution ; The anarchist intentional community ; Bibliographic note ; Do Anarchic Politics have a Message? ; Some general characteristics of anarchic polities ; Cultural florescence and anarchy ; Techniques for maintaining order ; Group decision-making ; Types of leaders in anarchic polities ; On the origins of the state.. 102 ; Does anarchy have a future or is history a one-way street?. 106 ; Bibliography ; Index.. 121

Charles Robert Forbes (1878 -1952) — First Director of the U.S. Veterans’ Bureau

V — I. “The Real Old Times”

One month after the inauguration of President Harding, a certain Colonel Charles R. Forbes showed up in the nation’s capitol. He was a ruddy-faced, hard-drinking, swaggering adventurer, with a penchant for spinning extravagant yarns and an easy way with members of the opposite sex. During the war he had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal. His chequered career had also included desertion from the U. S. Army, crooked ward politics on the West Coast, shady operations as a business contractor, and several years of lucrative underhand dealings as a public official in the Philippine Islands.

The reason Colonel Forbes came to Washington in the early spring of 1921 was that President Harding himself had summoned him . . .

Colonel Forbes and Senator and Mrs. Harding had met in Hawaii before the war. The Hardings were enchanted by Forbes* inexhaustible tall tales and boisterous affability; Forbes found Harding to be a good-natured loser at poker; and a warm friendship quickly blossomed between the Colonel and the future President and his wife. During the 1920 Presidential campaign, Forbes, who was then vice-president of the Hurley-Mason Construction Company of Tacoma, campaigned energetically for Harding on the West Coast; and following his election; Harding called his old friend to Washington to take charge of the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Soon afterwards, Forbes was appointed director of the newly formed United States Veterans’ Bureau…

As head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Colonel Forbes was responsible for the management of all veterans’ hospitals in the country, the disposal of wartime medical supplies and hospital equipment, and the construction of new hospitals for veterans. The total expenditures of the Veterans’ Bureau were estimated at approximately  $500,000,000 a year.

The swashbuckling colonel lost little time in exploiting the bonanza that had fallen into his hands. He promptly appointed as his aides and subordinates a number of friends and old cronies, men who could be relied upon to do just what they were told and whose scruples were no more exacting than his own when it came to matters of graft and embezzlement. The offices of the Veterans’ Bureau were soon swarming with hard-boiled swindlers and petty racketeers, who travelled around the country, staging wild parties, carousing and living in luxury on government funds that had been set aside to care for disabled war veterans . . .

A typical letter written by one of Forbes’ field representatives, R. A. Tripp, to his immediate superior in Washington, read in part:

You are missing the real old times. Hunting season is on— rabbit dinners, pheasant suppers, wines, beers, and booze— and by God we haven’t missed a one yet. Collins and I get invitations to ‘em all. Last Wed. I was soused to the gills on rabbit, etc. Last Sat. wines— Oh, Boy! . . . We eat and wine with the mayor, the sheriff, the prosecuting atty. To hell with the Central Office, and the work. And the fun is in the field— ’tis all the work I want— just travel around.

Regarding the site of one veterans’ hospital, Tripp jocularly noted:

Fire hazards— say, if Forbes could only see the “lovely” high (3′) grass  & if fire comes— boom! up she goes.

The letter concluded:

Well, old Boss, ’tis a wonderful time— as happy as can be— as soon as we can lift the freight embargo we will be thru. You should see us— when we can’t get a switch engine, we “swipe” the cars and take the crane to spot ‘em or use a liberty truck- then the Jews— Oh, my, how they weep: “I got stung.” Ha! Ha!   Let me know when Forbes is going to sell by sealed proposals, then’s when I get a Rolls Royce. Got a good drink coming, so here’s back to you.

Colonel Forbes himself, like the members of his staff, strongly believed in mixing business with pleasure. None of his exploits as head of the Veterans’ Bureau more clearly revealed this proclivity than his dealings with Elias H. Mortimer, a representative of the Thompson-Black Construction Company.

Soon after Forbes and Mortimer became acquainted early in 1922, they began privately discussing the extensive building program then being initiated by the Veterans’ Administration. During one of their first chats on the subject, Forbes told Mortimer about his own career in the construction game. The Colonel said pointedly,  “We fixed things so that no one lost money.”

That April a small clandestine conference took place in Forbes’ Washington apartment. Present were Forbes, Mortimer, and J. W.  Thompson and James Black, heads of the Thompson-Black Construction Company. The Colonel informed the others that he was about to let a number of major contracts on hospital buildings, the sites of which had not yet been made public. He himself would soon leave on a cross-country tour to make final arrangements in connection with the jobs. He suggested that Mortimer and his vivacious young wife accompany him on the trip.

“You can look things over at Chicago,” said Forbes. “We are going to put up a five million dollar hospital at Chicago. We are going to put up a hospital at Livermore, California, and one at America Lake, which is just outside of Tacoma. On the way back you can stop off at St. Cloud, Minnesota— and in this way have advance information over everybody.”

Presently, Forbes drew Mortimer aside. He was, he explained, in a rather embarrassing predicament that he hesitated to mention in front of the others. To put it in a nutshell, he was “very hard up” . . .

Mortimer asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“I need about five thousand dollars,” said the Colonel.

Before the group separated, Mortimer had arranged with his associates for Forbes to get the money . . .

The five thousand dollars, it was understood, represented only a token payment. According to the terms of the final agreement reached between Forbes and the contractors, the Colonel was to receive one-third of all profits on hospitals built by the firm of Thompson and Black . . .

That summer Colonel Forbes and Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer travelled across the country together. Their first stop was in Chicago, where most of their stay was devoted to lavishly entertaining business acquaintances and friends in their $5o-a-day suite at the Drake Hotel.

Despite the merrymaking, and in a way because of it, a somewhat trying situation soon developed between the Colonel and his two travelling companions. Describing one of the parties in his suite at the Drake, Mortimer subsequently related:

 . . . Colonel Forbes’ room was off to the right of our apartment . . . Colonel Forbes, when I came in there at about 4:30 in the afternoon was shooting craps with Mrs. Mortimer on the bed. . , There was a bottle of Scotch there, and he had his coat off . . .

Although piqued at this and similar episodes, Mortimer did not at first permit the personal complication to interfere with his business dealings with the Colonel. Together, the Mortimers and Forbes proceeded on to California, having, in Mortimer’s own words, “one royal good time all the time we were on the trip.”

Meanwhile, Forbes’ trusted aide, Charles F. Cramer, Chief Counsel of the Veterans’ Bureau, was receiving sealed bids in Washington on Government hospital contracts. Following Forbes’ instructions, Cramer opened all bids and immediately telegraphed their details to the Colonel in California. Forbes then relayed this supposedly confidential information to Mortimer, so that the firm of Thompson and Black might be able to gauge its own bids accordingly . . .

Forbes was delighted with the way things were going. “We’ll all make a big clean up,” he enthusiastically assured Mortimer.

For Mortimer, however, notwithstanding the mounting profits, the situation was becoming increasingly irksome. As the summer drew to a close, his forbearance finally at an end, Mortimer firmly told his wife and Forbes that he had had enough of their more than friendly relationship.

Returning east a few weeks later, Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer permanently separated. At the same time, the secret partnership between Colonel Forbes and the firm of Thompson and Black came to an abrupt conclusion . . .

Graft from the construction of veterans’ hospitals was only one of Colonel Forbes’ multiple sources of income as head of the Veterans’ Bureau.

By buying Government supplies at fabulously high prices and selling them at a fraction of their worth, Forbes won the esteem of numerous business executives, who naturally did not object to sharing profits with the Colonel.

From one favoured firm, for example, Forbes purchased $70,000 worth of floor wax and floor cleaner— a quantity, it was later estimated, sufficient to last the Veterans’ Bureau for one hundred years. The Colonel paid 87 cents a gallon for the material, which was worth approximately two cents a gallon . . .

Forbes’ largest single transaction in this field involved the Government’s immense supply depot at Perryville, Maryland, where there were more than fifty buildings filled with vast quantities of medical stores and other supplies. Without any public advertisement of the sale, the Colonel signed a contract with the Boston firm of Thompson & Kelly, Inc for the disposal of the entire con- tents of the Perryville warehouses. The day the contract was signed, fifteen empty freight cars moved into the Perryville railroad yards; and before a week had elapsed, more than 150 freight cars were being simultaneously loaded with huge amounts of goods and materials from the Government supply depot.

In all, Thompson & Kelly purchased at Perryville for the sum of  $600,000, supplies whose actual value was conservatively figured at $6,000,000.

By the end of 1922, from all parts of the country, furious criticism of Forbes’ management of the Veterans’ Bureau was pouring into Washington from veterans’ organizations, high Army and Navy officers, and businessmen who had had no opportunity to bid on Veterans Bureau contracts.

The Perryville deal brought matters to a head.

Early in January 1923, President Harding summoned Colonel Forbes to the White House. Forbes came bringing with him a bundle of old dilapidated sheets to indicate the “worthlessness” of the goods he had sold at Perryville. The President was not impressed. He told his friend that the irregular practises at the Veterans’ Bureau would have to stop.

Before the month was out, Forbes sailed for Europe. From France, he sent his resignation to President Harding.

That spring the Senate initiated an investigation of the Veterans’ Bureau. Public hearings began in Washington in October.

Among those to appear at the hearings was Colonel Forbes, who had just returned from Europe. “I worked sixteen long hours a day “ declared the Colonel about his directorship of the Veterans’ Bureau, “and no man loved the ex-servicemen better than I did.”

Another witness was the building contractor, Elias Mortimer, who described in intimate detail his various dealings with Colonel Forbes, including those involving Mrs. Mortimer. After Mortimer’s testimony, Mrs. Mortimer’s attorney appeared at the hearings to request that his client be given the opportunity to testify, so that she might publicly defend her reputation. The attorney told the senators, in what was probably the most poetic utterance at the hearings: “A woman’s character is a fragile thing, as delicate as the frost upon the morning window, which a breath dispels, and it is forever gone. And yet, a woman’s character is her most priceless possession.”

Following the Senate committee hearings, Colonel Forbes was indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States Government. He was tried in Federal court, found guilty and sentenced to a fine of $10,000 and two years’ imprisonment.

It was estimated that Forbes’ machinations as Veterans’ Bureau director had cost the American people about $200,000,000, a fair portion of which had ended up in the Colonel’s own pocket.   Impressive as the sum was, it represented only a fraction of the vast loot that was being systematically extracted from the public treasury by U. S. Government officials and American big businessmen during the Harding Administration.

2.     The Dome and the Hills    

One day in the early spring of 1922, Harry F. Sinclair of the Sinclair Oil Company and James E. O’Neill, president of the Rockefeller-controlled Prairie Oil and Gas Company, met with two business associates for a quiet meal at the exclusive Bankers’ Club in New York City. The four men had come together to discuss a highly confidential, multi-million-dollar oil transaction.¹

“I wish,” said one of the men during the meal, “that I was Secretary of the Navy for about two years.”

“Well,” replied Sinclair, “you’d have a better job than the President.”

“I’d clean up some millions!”

Harry Ford Sinclair (1876 -1956)

“You all have to be careful after this,” warned Sinclair, “and each one will have to look out for himself.”

“Suppose there’s some trouble afterwards? Who would take care of it?”

“If the Sinclair Oil Company isn’t big enough, the Standard Oil Company is,” remarked O’Neill, whose firm was closely tied to Standard interests. He added, “Why, we make a hundred million dollars a year.”

The secret deal that the four men were discussing concerned the leasing of certain oil lands at the Naval Oil Reserve at Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

For a number of years the largest American oil companies had been trying to get control of the rich naval oil reserves established in 1909 in Wyoming and California by an Executive Order of President William H. Taft and confirmed by Congress in the Pickett Act. The oil reserves were Navy Petroleum Reserve No. 1 at Elk Hills, California; Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 2 at Buena Vista Hills, California; and Naval Reserve No. 3 at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The purpose of these reserves was to hold the oil in the ground for possible future use by the U. S. Navy, in the event that regular commercial oil resources should become depleted.

During and immediately after the First World War, as the value of oil soared to unprecedented heights, American private oil interests became all the more determined to get their hands on the naval oil reserves. With Harding as President, the oilmen knew their chance had come . . .

Teapot Rock, Wyoming (close to the ‘Teapot Dome Oil Field’ the designated Naval Petroleum Reserve Number Three.

A few weeks after taking office, President Harding issued an Executive Order, against the vigorous opposition of high-ranking Navy officers, transferring control of the naval oil reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior.

The Government official now responsible for determining what happened to the naval oil reserves was Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall

March 1921: Swearing in of Senator Albert B. Fall as Secretary of the Interior

A cantankerous short-tempered man with a drooping white moustache and long wavy white hair, who looked like an elderly frontiersman. Secretary Fall had one main interest in life: to make as much money as he could, as quickly as possible, by whatever means were necessary.

Within a week after the promulgation of Harding’s Executive Order, Secretary Fall dispatched a confidential letter to Edward L. Doheny, the president of the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company of California. The letter read in part:

There will be no possibility of any future conflict with Navy officials and this department, as I have notified Secretary Denby that I shall conduct the matter of naval leases, under the direction of the President, without calling any of his force in consultation unless I conferred with himself personally about a matter of policy. He understands the situation and that I shall handle matters exactly as I think best . . . 

Edward Laurence Doheny (1856 -1935)

Edward L. Doheny, a millionaire oil operator whose insatiable yearning to exploit new oil resources were equalled in intensity only by his burning hatred of “Bolshevism,” was an old friend of Secretary Fall. Years before, Doheny and Fall had prospected together for oil in the Southwest.

Now, once again, the two men were to become profit-sharing partners in an oil venture . . .

Certain obstacles precluded the immediate leasing by Secretary Fall of the naval oil reserves to Doheny’s company. There was, for example, the Naval Fuel Oil Board, which had been set up to safeguard the reserves. In October 192 1 Secretary Fall’s associate. Secretary of the Navy Edwin N. Denby disbanded the Naval Fuel Oil Board.

This accomplished, Secretary Fall put through a telephone call from the Department of the Interior to Doheny, who was then in New York City.

“I’m prepared now to receive that loan,” Fall told Doheny.

The oil magnate promptly dispatched his son, Edward L. Doheny, Jr., to the bank, where he drew $100,000 in bills. Carrying the money in a small black satchel, Doheny, Jr., travelled to Washington.  There he turned the $100,000 over to the Secretary of the Interior . . .

Soon afterwards, Fall granted to Doheny’s Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company a 15-year lease to all the oil acreage of the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 1 at Elk Hills, California.

Regarding these arrangements, Judge Paul J. McCormick of the United States District Court of California subsequently stated:

It was in effect a complete surrender and transfer of approximately 30,000 acres of valuable proven oil land and its oil contents, estimated at from 75,000,000 to 250,000,000 barrels of oil for fifteen years at least.

Doheny, at the time, put the matter more simply. “We’ll be in bad luck if we don’t get $100,000,000 profit,” the oil tycoon— whose private railroad car was named The Patriot — said of the contemplated draining of the naval oil reserves.

Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall

While furtively negotiating with Doheny, Secretary Fall was engaged in similar clandestine dealings with Harry F. Sinclair of the Sinclair Oil Company.

On the morning of December 31, 1921, Sinclair and his attorney.  Colonel J. W. Zevely, after whom the oil magnate had named his famous racehorse, “Zev,” arrived from New York in a private railroad car at Three Rivers, New Mexico. The two men had come to visit Secretary Fall, who was spending the Christmas vacation at his nearby ranch.

The purpose of the visit was not purely social. As Sinclair himself said later: “I went to Three Rivers to discuss with Senator Fall the leasing of Teapot Dome.”

Following several additional private conferences in Washington and New York between Sinclair, Zevely and Fall, a contract leasing the property of the Teapot Dome oil reserve to Sinclair was secretly drafted in Colonel Zevely’s Washington law offices. On April 7 Secretary Fall signed the contract with Sinclair.

One month afterwards, Sinclair travelled to Washington. In the seclusion of his private railroad car, Sinclair handed $198,000 in Liberty Bonds to Secretary Fall’s son-in-law, M. T. Everhart.  Later that same month, Everhart visited New York City, where, in Sinclair’s office, he received another $35,000 in Liberty Bonds and  $36,000 in cash, to take to his father-in-law. When Sinclair again visited Fall’s ranch that autumn, he gave the Secretary of the Interior an additional $10,000 in cash; and, in January 1923, in his suite at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, the oil magnate presented Fall with another $25,000.

In all Secretary Fall and his son-in-law, Everhart, received $233,000 in Liberty Bonds and $71,000 in cash from Harry Sinclair…

From Sinclair’s viewpoint, it was a conservative investment. Appearing in January 1923 before the Senate Committee on Manufactures, Sinclair declared: “I consider the value of the Mammoth property at this time — it is only a guess— at a greater amount than  $100,000,000.”

Sinclair was referring to the Mammoth Oil Company, which he had incorporated solely for the purpose of exploiting the oil resources at Teapot Dome.

Although profitably concluded. Secretary Fall’s leasing of the oil reserves at Teapot Dome and Elk Hills had not failed to arouse considerable suspicion among certain Naval officers and congressmen.

In the Upper House, Senator Robert M. LaFollette secured a passage of a resolution calling for an investigation by the Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys of the leases to the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserves . . .

At the same time, angry protests were mounting among oilmen whose companies had been given no opportunity to bid on the contracts. There were increasing demands for the resignation of Secretary Fall.

A 1924 cartoon shows Washington officials racing down an oil-slicked road to the White House, trying desperately to outpace the Teapot Dome scandal of President Warren G. Harding’s administration.

Fall, however, clung obdurately to his post until the last of his secret financial transactions had been concluded with Sinclair and Doheny. Finally, on March 4, 1923, he handed in his resignation to President Harding.

After reluctantly accepting the resignation, Harding announced that he had offered Fall an appointment as Supreme Court Justice; but that Fall— because of the tribulations of public office and a desire to return to private life — had gratefully declined the offer . . .

“I feel entitled to classify myself with the martyrs,” Fall publicly stated, referring to the early Christians who had met their fate singing hymns in Roman gladiatorial arenas, “for I confess to a grateful sense of satisfaction as I contemplate my approaching political demise.”

Before leaving Washington, Fall purchased the handsome Jacobean furniture in his office at the Department of the Interior and had it shipped to his ranch at Three Rivers, New Mexico. The value of the furniture was estimated at $3,000.00. The price Fall paid for the furniture was $231.35 . . .

Back at his ranch, Fall received this letter from Washington:

My dear Fall, This note is just by way of expressing appreciation for the many kindnesses I had at your hands during the last two years in the Cabinet.

I know that the vast majority of our people feel a deep regret at your leaving the Department of the Interior. In my recollection, that department has never had so constructive and legal a headship as you gave it.  I trust the time will come when your private affairs will enable you to return to public life, as there are few men who are able to stand its stings and ire, and they have got to stay with it.  

The letter was signed, “Yours faithfully, Herbert Hoover.”

Harry M. Daugherty and Warren G. Harding at Harding’s home in Marion, Ohio during the 1920 presidential campaign. He served as a campaign adviser to Harding. After Harding was elected he appointed Daugherty Attorney General, a cabinet post that Daugherty held from 1921-1924. He resigned amid charges that he was involved in a conspiracy to defraud the government known as the Teapot Dome scandal.

3. Mr Smith Goes to Washington

“I wouldn’t have given thirty cents for the office of Attorney General,” remarked Harry M. Daugherty one year after taking office, “but I wouldn’t surrender it for a million dollars.”

Among the various lucrative enterprises connected with the Justice Department while Daugherty was Attorney General were:

“We did not play for marbles,” the Justice Department agent, Gaston B. Means, said later. “The harvest was ripe, and we knew we were there as the reapers.”

Gaston Bullock Means (1879-1938). German Secret Service agent and Justice Department Bureau of Investigation agent

None of the many adventurers connected with the Harding Administration was more unscrupulous and remarkable than Gaston B. Means. A hulking, 200-pound, six-foot southerner, with a bulging forehead, thin receding hair, and little eyes set in a pudgy moon-shaped face, Means had formerly served as a German Secret Service agent in the United States, under the direction of the German naval attaché and espionage chief, Captain Karl Boy-Ed. He had also operated from time to time as a secret agent for the Mexican, Japanese and British governments, and for a number of years had been employed as an undercover man by the William Burns Detective Agency. When Attorney General Daugherty appointed William J. Burns director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, he brought Means with him to Washington. In Burns’ opinion, Means was “the best investigator in the business.”

Among Means’ various duties as an agent of the Bureau of Investigation were collecting graft from bootleggers, selling confiscated liquor, acting as a liaison in surreptitious deals between the Justice Department and the criminal underworld, and spying upon congressmen who were calling for investigation of Attorney General Daugherty.

According to Means’ subsequent testimony before a Senate investigating committee, he personally collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for providing bootleggers with liquor permits and for “insuring” various gangster operations against Federal interference.

In his book, The Strange Death of President Harding, Means gives this description of how he received his “payments”:

 the big bootleggers in New York City wanted to pay for Federal protection … It became known in the underworld that they could pay this protection money to me. I was then stationed at the Vanderbilt Hotel first . . .

Our method there was simple. We had our runners, twenty-five men,  —tipsters of the underworld. They were to keep us posted as to how much money different bootleggers were making. From their reports, my superior officers would estimate how much each one would pay, for protection. These bootleggers were then notified . . .

We did not want these bootleggers to be handing this money to any individual. I then had another room engaged— on another floor of the Vanderbilt Hotel— we will say number 518. The register would show that another man had engaged this room. In similar manner, the room next door, number 517 was engaged.  

In room 518, I took a big round glass bowl that one could easily see through, a big gold fish aquarium. We made a peephole in the door connecting 518 and 517. This big glass bowl was conspicuously placed on a table in 518 . . .

The “purchaser of protection” was instructed to come to the hotel room containing the glass bowl:

He would enter 518, — would see nobody, but he would see the glass bowl, which always had bills of money in it. From 517, through the peephole in the door, I could see him all the time. They were instructed never to bring a bill less than $500.00. He would throw into the bowl so many $500.00 bills— or so many $1000.00 bills. I watched for two reasons: to make sure that he put his money into the bow-l and to be sure that he took none out. As soon as he would step out, quick as a flash, I’d unlock the door between and lock the outside door. I’d check up.  Never once was I short-changed! Then, I would leave the money, — say $10,000.00 in the bowl, unlock the outside door again and wait for the next man . . .

Bootleggers are straight shooters in matters like that. Seeing money in the bowl gave them assurance that others were paying for protection also . . .

According to Means’ account:

By this process . . . we covered in territory besides New York City and New York State, — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania. 

 A conservative estimate of the sum total of each visit I made, I would put at a quarter of a million, — $250,000.00 . . .

Fully $7,000,000.00 passed through my glass bowl and through my hands.²

After the money had been collected, Means records, it was turned over to Jesse Smith, Attorney General Daugherty’s private aide and confidante.

Jesse W. Smith (on left), close associate and roommate of Harding’s corrupt Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, died of a gunshot wound to the head in May 1923. His ex-wife, Roxy Stinson, discounted the finding of suicide, believing Smith was murdered. 1920.

Jesse W. Smith was really not cut out for his job with the Attorney General. He was a plump, middle-aged, rather effeminate man, who had formerly owned a dry goods store in the little town of Washington Court House, Ohio, and was happiest when discussing clothing fabrics. A close friend and worshipful admirer of Daugherty, he had readily accepted the latter’s invitation to come to Washington to “give a hand” with the nation’s affairs. Dazzled by the glamorous atmosphere of the capitol and by the fact he was rubbing shoulders with the most famous personages in the land.  Smith became a frequent caller at the White House, arranged when- ever possible to be photographed standing alongside President Harding, and periodically went shopping with Mrs. Harding, fastidiously helping the First Lady select hats, dresses and shawls for her wardrobe.

While holding no official post, Smith had a private desk directly outside the office of the Attorney General, and word soon got around Washington that the way to approach Daugherty was to  “see Jess first.” ³

Soon after joining Daugherty in Washington, Smith began having large sums of money at his disposal. “We are all much better off than we have ever been before,” he cheerfully told his former wife, Roxy Stinson. She and Smith had been married in 1908; and although their marriage had lasted less than two years before they were divorced, they had remained warm, intimate friends.

From the nation’s capital Smith frequently sent considerable sums of cash to Roxy Stinson in Washington Court House, Ohio.  Sometimes the money Smith sent was for her personal use, and sometimes she was instructed to buy certain stocks at a brokerage firm where Smith had opened an account for her under an assumed name. Smith himself had several such blind accounts at brokerage houses, and much of his time at the Justice Department was spent on the Attorney General’s private telephone line, calling brokers and ordering the purchase and sale of various leading stocks . . .

In a short time the former dry goods store proprietor was discussing matters of high finance with the casual air of a veteran banker. “In the past few days,” he informed Roxy Stinson on one of his visits to Washington Court House, Ohio, “five men have made $33,000,000.”

“Were you and Harry in on it?” she asked.

“No,” he said ruefully. “That’s what we’re sore about. They were our friends too.”

Other big projects, however, were underway.   Not the least of these projects concerned an internationally controlled copper concern called the American Metals Company.

During the war a large portion of American Metals stock had been seized by the U. S. Alien Property Custodian as German- owned and sold at Government auction for $7,000,000. In the fall of 192 1 a certain Richard Merton visited the office of the Alien Property Custodian. Presenting himself as the representative of a  “Swiss Corporation”, Merton claimed his firm was the rightful owner of the American Metals stock that had been auctioned and that the American Government therefore owed his firm $7,000,000.  The claim of the “Swiss representative” was quietly recognized as valid by the Alien Property Custodian and, at Merton’s request, the $7,000,000 was turned over to the Societé Suisse pour Valeurs des Metaux  — a Swiss front for German metal interests . . .

A number of persons in Washington had been involved in facilitating this transaction for Merton, and they were generously rewarded for their assistance. To John T. King, Republican National Committeeman from Connecticut, who had acted as a general contact man throughout the negotiations, Merton presented $391,000 in Liberty Bonds and a $50,000 check. Of this sum, $50,000 went to the Alien Property Custodian, Colonel Thomas W. Miller, for his  “services.” And, in appreciation of certain vital “introductions” in Government circles and various other help, $224,000 was passed on to Attorney General Daugherty’s aide, Jesse Smith . . .

The stakes, however, were getting too steep for Smith. The more deeply he became involved in the grandiose political-financial conspiracies afoot in Washington, the uneasier he felt. “I am not made for this,” he wrote to Roxy Stinson. “This intrigue is setting me crazy. If I could just come home— but I am in now and have to stand by Harry . . .”

By the spring of 1923, Smith had further cause for anxiety. The details of Colonel Forbes’ embezzlements in the Veterans’ Bureau were coming to light. The Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys was investigating the leases to Teapot Dome and Elk Hills, and Secretary of Interior Fall had just resigned. How long would it be, Smith wondered, before someone discovered what was going on inside the Justice Department?

When Smith visited Washington Court House, Ohio, that April, he was a terrified man. He knew “too much,” he told Roxy Stinson; and he could no longer trust anyone. Even the men with whom he had worked so closely— yes, even his old friend Daugherty— had now become suspicious of him. They thought he was weak and might talk. And they were men, he said, who would stop at nothing …

Smith and his former wife went to Columbus, Ohio, to attend a dance, but Smith urged that they return to Washington Court House while it was still afternoon.

“Let’s go home before dark,” he said.   On the train back to Washington Court House, Smith handed Roxy Stinson his brief case, which was bulging with documents and papers. “Carry them,” he said, “I don’t want to carry them.”

When they were in a taxi driving away from the Washington Court House station, Smith kept glancing nervously out the rear window. Finally, Roxy Stinson told him, “Don’t you do that again.”

“All right,” replied Smith with a weak smile.

They drove on in silence for a while. Then Smith said, “They are going to get me, they are going to get me.”

“No, they won’t.”

“They passed it to me.”

“Oh, don’t,” said Roxy Stinson. “You are all right. You are all right.”

“You better destroy any letters and papers.”

Roxy Stinson placed her hand on his. “Tell me all about it, Jess,” she said. “I know so much.”

“No, no, no,” said Smith. “Just cheer me up, just cheer me up.”

The final thing Smith told Roxy Stinson before leaving Washington Court House to return to the Capitol was not to go out by herself after dark and never to drive alone.

“The man was afraid,” she said later. “The man was afraid.”

It was the last time that Roxy Stinson saw Jesse Smith.

Shortly before dawn on May 30, 1923, Jesse Smith was found dead in the suite that he shared with Attorney General Daugherty at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D. C. He was lying on the floor with a bullet in his head, and in his outstretched hand was a revolver.

The coroner’s verdict was suicide. William J. Burns, chief of the Bureau of Investigation, took charge of the body.

No autopsy was performed before the burial.

Attorney General Daugherty was not present when Smith’s body was discovered. He had spent the night at the White House.

“The act,” stated Daugherty regarding the death of his old friend, “could be accounted for only on the ground of a complete mental collapse.” Smith, he added, had suffered severely from diabetes. “This insidious disease plays sad tricks with the brain . . . It has made many suicides. It has broken down the moral fibre of character. I shall always remember my friend before his illness when he was himself, kindly, helpful, loyal, generous.”

The Attorney General was conspicuously absent from Jesse Smith’s funeral.

4. Sudden Death  

Jesse Smith was not the only man prominently associated with the Harding Administration to break under the strain of criminal intrigue and the dread of exposure, and to die under unusual or mysterious circumstances. There were a number of others.

Among them was President Harding himself.

By early 1923 an extraordinary change had taken place in Harding’s personality and appearance. He was no longer the handsome, affable personage who had been sworn in as President in March 1921. He had aged shockingly. His face, now haggard, lined and sallow, wore a haunted look. Occasionally, when he made a public appearance, his features twisted into a grotesque grimace— he was attempting to smile. His hands shook uncontrollably. He could not sleep at night. Great dark pouches lay under his eyes, which seemed to stare fearfully at the world about him.

As the various Senate investigations moved relentlessly ahead, and the whole scandal of his Administration threatened to flare into the open, Harding periodically asked the few newspapermen he still trusted what a President should do “whose friends have betrayed him”…

In June, 1923, travelling in his private railroad car, the “Superb,” President Harding set out from Washington for a tour of the west coast and Alaska. The tour was never to be completed.

Returning by boat from Alaska in the latter part of July, Harding was stricken with what was at first reported to be an attack of ptomaine poisoning. On his arrival in San Francisco, he was con- fined to bed at the Palace Hotel, his illness now being diagnosed as pneumonia. A few days later, the President’s physicians announced that Harding was “resting comfortably” and was safely on the way to recovery.

Then, suddenly, on the evening of August 2, the startled nation was informed that President Harding was dead. “Death,” stated an official bulletin signed by Harding’s physicians, “was apparently due to some brain evolvement, probably an apoplexy.”

In the early morning hours of August 3, by the flickering light of an oil lamp in the living room of his family’s farmhouse at Plymouth Notch, Vermont, Calvin Coolidge was sworn in by his aged father, a justice of the peace, as the new President of the United States.

Various strange circumstances surrounded President Harding’s final illness and death.

The food poisoning from which Harding had supposedly first fallen ill was said to have come from eating crabmeat on the boat from Alaska. Crabmeat, however, was not among the supplies listed in the steward’s pantry. Furthermore, no other member of the presidential party was affected by “ptomaine poisoning.”

During the first few hours following the President’s death, newspapermen were officially informed that no physician was present when Harding died and that Mrs. Harding had been alone with her husband at the time. This report was then altered to specify that the President’s chief physician. Brigadier General Charles E. Sawyer had been in Harding’s bedroom when death came. On August 5, three days after Harding’s death, the New York Times reported:

There have been several versions of the incidents surrounding the death of President Harding … It was told by some of those in the vicinity that Mrs. Harding rushed to the door of the bedroom and called for help from her husband’s physicians . . . People with nerves on edge or stunned by the tragedy were unable to give any coherent account of what took place . . . The official bulletin was in error . . .

Several of the physicians who had been attending President Harding urged that an autopsy be held. On Mrs. Harding’s insistence, however, Harding was buried without an autopsy.⁴

5- Millionaires on Trial

“If I could write one sentence upon his monument”, said Bishop William Manning a few days after President Harding’s death, in a sermon delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, “it would be this, ‘He taught us the power of brotherliness.’ It is the greatest lesson any man can teach us. May God ever give our country leaders as faithful, as wise, as noble in spirit, as the one whom we now mourn.”

But Warren Harding was not long in his grave before the nation was getting a glimpse of what had been transpiring behind the scenes during his Administration.

On October 23, 1923, in a large caucus room in the Senate Office Building, the Senate Committee on Public Lands opened public hearings on the Government leases to the naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome and Elk Hills.

The first witness at the Senate hearings was ex-Secretary Fall himself. Verbose, arrogant and blusteringly evasive, Fall angrily denied there had been anything remotely improper about his conduct in office. In making the oil leases, as at all other times, declared Fall, he had been motivated by patriotism of the highest order.

Fall’s testimony was supported by that of Harry Sinclair, who emphatically stated that in his dealings with the Secretary of Interior the latter had received no “benefits or profits, directly or indirectly, in any manner whatsoever.” Edward L. Doheny told the Senate Committee, in a voice vibrant with emotion, that he was deeply shocked by the disgraceful accusations that had been levelled against his old friend, Albert Fall. “I want this record to show,” said Doheny, “that I felt very badly about it; in fact, felt outraged by it.”

But during the ensuing weeks, as dozens of geologists, naval officers, oil experts, government officials and other witnesses appeared before the Committee, one incriminating fact after another came into the open; and slowly but inexorably the pieces of the complex jigsaw of criminal intrigue, venality and fraud fell into place.

By the beginning of 1924, leading oil circles in the United States were infected with a mood of feverish anxiety. The rumour spread that the Senate Committee was about to subpoena a number of leading figures in the oil industry. Overnight, there was a sudden exodus from America of oil tycoons.

On January 16, Harry Sinclair sailed for France aboard the S.S.  Paris with his name discreetly missing from the passenger list. In February, James O’Neil, president of the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, and Henry Blackmer, president of the Midwest Refining Company, after resigning from their respective posts, also sailed for Europe. Colonel Robert W. Stewart, chairman of the board of Standard Oil of Indiana, abruptly departed for Mexico and South America. H. S. Osier, head of the dummy Continental Trading Company, went to Africa “to hunt lions”. ⁵

On his return to the United States in the summer of 1924, Harry Sinclair was again summoned before the Senate Committee. This time, on the constitutional grounds that his answers might tend to incriminate him, Sinclair refused to answer any questions. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of contempt of the Senate.

Albert Fall (l) and Ed Doheny, with lawyers Frank Hogan and Mark B. Thompson. Photo was taken during the Teapot Dome scandal trials on Oct. 2, 1929.

On June 30, 1924, Albert Fall, Harry Sinclair, Edward Doheny and Edward Doheny, Jr., were all indicted by a special federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy and bribery.

The federal indictments of Fall, Sinclair, Doheny and his son, were followed by months and months of protracted court action, with a battery of high-priced lawyers employed by the oil magnates resorting to every conceivable device to delay and frustrate the process of the law.

Not until March 1927, was Sinclair finally tried on the Senate contempt charge, found guilty and sentenced to three months, imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

In the fall of 1927, Fall and Sinclair went on trial on charges of criminal conspiracy to defraud the Government. On the first day of the trial it was disclosed by the prosecution that jurors and witnesses were being trailed and intimidated by operatives of the William Burns Detective Agency and that Sinclair was paying the Agency for these services. It was also revealed that attempts had been made to bribe a number of jurors. The judge declared a mistrial.

Sinclair and William J. Burns, the former chief of the Bureau of Investigation, and several of their accomplices were subsequently tried for seeking “to bribe, intimidate and influence” jurors. Found guilty, Sinclair was sentenced to six months in jail and Burns to fifteen days. Burns was exonerated on appeal, but Sinclair served con- currently three months for contempt of the Senate, and six months for intimidation and influencing of jurors.

When Fall and Sinclair were tried a second time on charges of conspiring to defraud the Government, both men were acquitted . . .

In October 1929 Fall was tried on the charge of accepting a bribe from Edward L. Doheny. The former Secretary of Interior was found guilty, fined $100,000 and given a one-year prison term.

Five months after Fall was convicted of accepting a bribe from Doheny, the California oil tycoon was tried on charges of giving the bribe. Doheny was acquitted.

“We ought to pass a law,” Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska commented bitterly, “that no man worth $100,000,000 should be tried for a crime. That at least would make us consistent.”

The intrigues of Sinclair, Doheny and Fall were not the only ugly secrets of the Harding Administration to come to light after Harding’s death.

In the spring of 1924 a Senate Select Committee began public hearings on an investigation of the activities of Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty.

Republican Party leaders, apprehensive over the possible harm to their cause in the Presidential election that fall, decided that Daugherty must resign immediately. Daugherty angrily refused to do so. The Senate investigation, he said, was the work of “Communist agents and their tools,” and Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who was conducting the inquiry, was “no more a Democrat than Stalin, his comrade in Moscow.”

Only after President Coolidge sent the Attorney General a written request for his resignation did Daugherty resentfully resign . . .

One of the first witnesses before the Senate Select Committee was Jesse Smith’s former wife, Roxy Stinson. She not only told the Committee what she had learned through Smith about the criminal conspiracies in the Justice Department, but also revealed she had been repeatedly threatened in an effort to prevent her from testifying. “I am not Jess Smith,” said Roxy Stinson, “and there is not going to be a convenient bullet in my head”. ⁶

Another of the numerous witnesses to appear before the Senate Select Committee was Gaston B. Means. In copious, uninhibited detail, and not without a certain pride, Means described his criminal operations as an agent of the Bureau of Investigation. Among other disclosures, Means revealed how various Senators had been secretly investigated by Justice Department operatives, in an effort to forestall the Teapot Dome probe and other senatorial investigations.

“You also investigated Senator LaFollette, did you not?” asked Senator Wheeler.

“Yes,” replied Means.

“And you went through his offices here, did you not, in the Capitol?”

“I saw that it was done … I would just as soon investigate a tramp as anybody else . . . The man is a number. I never ask who he is . . . Thousands of people have been investigated. Bishops have been investigated. And clergymen—”

The Chairman of the Senate Committee, Senator Smith Brookhart, interrupted. “When did this terrific spy system start in the United States,” he asked, “by what authority, if you know?”

“I never saw a candidate that loomed up . . . that they did not go out and make an inquiry about him . . . The financial crowd finance and get investigations.”

“You mean the financial interests investigate everyone who is a candidate for office to get something on him,” asked Senator Brookhart, “so they can control him, is that the idea?”

“Well, yes, that would be my interpretation . . .”

“And that gang . . .” said Senator Brookhart, “is the same gang that I have denominated as the non-partisan league in Wall Street?  Is that the crowd?”

Means nodded. “I think that President Wilson gave them the best designation, ‘invisible government’”. 7

Daugherty flatly refused to testify at the hearings. When Committee investigators sought to examine his accounts at the two banks in Washington Court House, Ohio, his brother, Mai Daugherty, who headed both banks, would not permit an inspection of the records. It was later learned that all the records had been destroyed.

Despite the extensive evidence of his malfeasance as Attorney General, Daugherty appeared in court to answer for only one of the many conspiracies with which his name had been associated, while he was in office. In 1926, together with the former Alien Property Custodian, Colonel Thomas W. Miller, Daugherty was tried on charges of conspiracy to defraud the Government and receiving bribes in connection with the settlement of the American Metal Corporation case.

Daugherty again refused to testify on the ground that his testimony might tend to incriminate him. Colonel Miller was found guilty, fined $5000 and given a year-and-a-half sentence. The jury reported they could not reach an agreement on the guilt of Daugherty, and he was acquitted . . .

To the bitter end, Harry Daugherty insisted he was the victim of a sinister international plot that had its fountainhead at the Kremlin in Moscow. “I was the first official,” he charged in his memoirs,  “to be thrown to the wolves by the Red borers of America. Their ultimate success, in my case, was intended to intimidate men who succeeded me and make the American Republic thereafter cower under a reign of terror.”

But the actual menace to the American Republic during 1920- 1932 was of quite a different nature from that indicated by former Attorney General Daugherty. As Karl Schriftgeisser states in This Was Normalcy:

   . . . Fall and Daugherty, Forbes and Jess Smith, and all the rest of the gangsters of this truly “incredible era,” were in reality merely symbols of a greater corruption which overtook the country during the next twelve disastrous years. They cannot be ignored by the historians, but their thefts and violences and the sounds of their revelry . . . were only coincidental to the abdication of the democratic spirit that was the fundamental crime perpetrated upon the people in these years.  

Albert E. Kahn, May 1950

1 The names of the two businessmen who met with Sinclair and O’Neill are, despite considerable speculation, still not definitely known. The dialogue quoted is taken from the subsequent testimony of a witness before a Senate investigatory committee, who had overheard part of the conversation between the four men at the Bankers’ Club.

2 There is no documentary substantiation of Means’ picturesque description of the manner in which he collected graft and “protection money” from bootleggers. However, the fact that such money was collected, in sums running into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then turned over to Daugherty’s man, Jesse Smith, has been corroborated with ample evidence.

In view of the fact that Gaston B. Means was an unusually fluent liar, the author of this book has been careful to quote Means only in instances where there exists corroborative evidence of his statements, and where such does not exist, to so indicate.

3 Smith’s first name, Jesse, was soon abbreviated to “Jess” in Washington; and before long he himself adopted the shortened form, and used it even when signing his “official” correspondence in the Justice Department.

4 Various theories were subsequently advanced in explanation of President Harding’s death. One was that, facing imminent catastrophe from exposure of the corruption and crime within his Administration, Harding had committed suicide. Another theory held that Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband, either because she had discovered the details of his affair with Nan Britton or because she wished to avert national disgrace for him from the mounting scandals in the Administration.

In 1930, in his book, The Strange Death of President Harding, Gaston B. Means, who had been in close touch with the White House while a Justice Department agent, clearly intimated that Mrs. Harding, in connivance with Dr. Charles E. Sawyer, had murdered her husband and that she had later practically admitted this to him. Means.

“Both the suicide theory and the Means story are very plausible,” writes Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday.

Oswald Garrison Villard, in Fighting Years, states: “I am of those who lean to the belief that there was foul play in his death . . .”

Some commentators on the period are of the opinion that there was nothing mysterious about Harding’s death and that he died from natural causes. “There was no mystery” observes Samuel Hopkins Adams in Incredible Era, “other than that conjured up by excited minds, or concocted, and commercialized by Gaston B. Means.”

But whatever the real cause of President Harding’s demise, there were in addition to his death and that of Jesse W. Smith, a strangely coincidental number of other sudden deaths and “suicides” of persons who had been closely connected with the Harding Administration.

On March 14, 1923, Charles F. Cramer, Colonel Forbes’ former aide and chief counsel of the War Veterans’ Bureau, was found dead in his bathtub at his Washington residence. A bullet had been fired through his brain. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

On September 23, 1924, Brigadier General Charles Sawyer, Harding’s former personal physician, who was said to have been with the President at the time of his death, was found dead at his home, White Oaks Farm, at Marion, Ohio.  The New York Times reported: “General Sawyer’s death was almost identical with the manner of death of the late Warren G. Harding . . . Mrs. Harding was at White Oaks Farm when General Sawyer was found dead. Members of his family had no intimation of the seriousness of the General’s condition up to the moment he expired.”

On March 12, 1926, Thomas B. Felder, a lawyer who had been closely associated with Attorney General Daugherty in Justice Department intrigues and had later been sentenced to jail along with Gaston B, Means, died at Savannah, Georgia. His death was reported due to a “heart attack” and “alcohol poisoning.” The New York Times stated that shortly before Felder died he had announced his intention to “publish the complete records of the case in a Georgia paper he intended to buy in order to vindicate himself.”

On May 13, 1926, John T. King, the former Republican National Committeeman who had been involved in the American Metals Company scandal died of “pneumonia.” Shortly before his death, King had been indicted on the charge of conspiracy to defraud the U. S. Government in the American Metals case. The New York Times reported that the Government had “expected to use Mr. King as a witness to prove the alleged payments of $391,000… to Col. Miller, the late Jesse W. Smith, friend of Mr. Daugherty, and himself.”

On May 3, 1926, J. W. Thompson, partner in the Thompson-Black Construction Company, who had been sentenced to jail along with Colonel Forbes, died of a “heart attack” in St. Louis, Missouri.

On February 16, 1928, while under indictment on conspiracy charges for his part in the bribing of Secretary Fall, Edward L. Doheny Jr., was murdered by his secretary, who then committed suicide.

5 The Continental Trading Co. was a dummy company incorporated under Canadian law late in 192 1 by Harry Sinclair, James O’Neil, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, and Henry M. Blackmer. Operating through this company, the four associates secretly arranged to buy more than 30,000,000 barrels of oil from a large new oil field in Mexia, Texas. The price they paid was $1.50 a barrel. Continental Trading Co. then resold the oil at $1.75 a barrel to the American companies headed by Continental’s promoters. The profits to Sinclair and his colleagues from this deal would have exceeded $8,000,000— and would have cost the stockholders in their American firms the same amount— if these oil magnates had not turned in these profits to their respective companies after the deal was exposed by Senate investigators.

There was no direct connection between the Teapot Dome and Continental deals; but Sinclair received some of Continental’s profits in Liberty bonds, and later turned over a portion of these bonds to Secretary Fall at the time of the leasing of Teapot Dome. It was through tracing these bonds that Senate investigators discovered the Continental Co. arrangements.

After hurriedly departing from the United States in 1924, the oil magnates connected with the Continental deal straggled back to the country during the following months, with the exception of Henry Blackmer. He remained in France until September 1949. After agreeing to pay the U. S. Government $3,671,065 in back taxes and $60,000 penalties, he returned to the United States. It was then reported that the Government had removed blocks on frozen assets of Blackmer amounting to some ten million dollars. Five criminal charges against Blackmer were dismissed, after he paid $20,000 in final settlement for income tax evasion.

6 One of the witnesses who testified at the Senate hearings was Mrs. W. O. Duckstein, former secretary to William J. Burns. The day after she had given her testimony she received a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, then Acting Director of the Bureau of Investigation, peremptorily dismissing her from her job in the Justice Department.

7 Gaston B. Means died in 1938 in a federal penitentiary. He was then serving a term for defrauding Mrs. Edward B. McLean of $100,000 in 1932 on the pretext that this sum would enable him to get back the kidnapped child of Ann and Charles Lindbergh.

Chapter 1 ; Chapter 2 ; Chapter 3 ; Chapter 4

Geordies — Wa Mental, David John Douglass (ISBN 978-1-873976-34-0),  £3.36. ChristieBooks. PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, TN341ZS. This (Kindle eBook) edition published 2012. LOOK INSIDE

UK : £3.36 ; USA : $5.00 ; Germany : €3,92 ; France : €3,92 ; Spain: €3,92 ; Italy : €3,92 ; Japan : ¥ 492 ; Canada : CDN$ 5.07 ; Brazil : R$ 9,85

THE WHEEL’S STILL IN SPIN — David Douglass was a pitman for 40 years in the coalfields of the Tyne and in South Yorkshire. This book, the second in his trilogy Stardust and Coaldust, deals with the period from the end of the 60s to the coming to power of Thatcher. In this 15-year period, dramatic events in the world revolution course around the globe. Dave Douglass transports us back to a time conventional histories have tried to forget or bury or rewrite. It is political and social history told by a direct participant in the events and not from some distant hill of academic neutrality. It has deep and insightful cameos of pit work and the recent history of the Miners Union

The Wheel’s Still in Spin. David John Douglass (ISBN 978-1-873976-36-4),  £3.36  ChristieBooks. PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, TN341ZS. This (Kindle eBook) edition published 2012. LOOK INSIDE

UK : £3.36 ; USA : $5.00 ; Germany : €3,92 ; France : €3,92 ; Spain: €3,92 ; Italy : €3,92 ; Japan : ¥ 492 ; Canada : CDN$ 5.07 ; Brazil : R$ 9,85

GHOST DANCERS, the final volume in Dave Douglass’s mining trilogy, will be launched to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the end of the miners’ strike. A first-person, insider’s view, of, probably, the last generation of miners and their union. Following on Cameron’s description of ‘a broken Britain’ this book comes close to describing who broke it and how.

The definitive history of the great coal strike of 1984/85 and the background to it, this book explodes all the prevailing myths around that epic period, and corrects the inaccuracies in dozens of books previously penned by academics and journalists. Written by a participant at the sharp end of that struggle, it uniquely deals with the poststrike period, which hitherto no other writer has attempted to describe, nor any commentator understood. It portrays the efforts of the miners to stay in the ring and stay on their feet, in the run-up to the John Major assault in ’92/’93 and the last stand of the miners as a social force. The book reveals the harsh internal relations within the National Union of Mineworkers in the post-strike years, set against a backdrop and commentary on other world and domestic events like the Poll Tax, the Gulf War, and the Good Friday Agreement. Inevitably, it addresses the role of Arthur Scargill both during and after the strike — which in the author’s view displays two distinct and conflicting aspects of his leadership. However, Dave shows how the central role in both periods was that played by the miners themselves organised in their Union.  Dave has not sought to exclude those smaller, more personal aspects that intersect this trajectory and link the personal to the political, the major to the minor. Though it is not written in the style or with the pretensions of academic neutrality, this book will be an essential reference for any serious academic study in the future. The title of this work, Ghost Dancers, is inspired by the last stand of the Native American Indians in their efforts to retain their culture and dignity, and by the Durham Miners’ Gala as a mining equivalent of that same endeavour. The book records the last stand of the last generation of pitmen and their communities.

Ghost Dancers — The Miners’ Last Generation, David John Douglass (ISBN 978-1-873976-40-1), ChristieBooks. PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, TN341ZS. This (Kindle eBook) edition published 2012. LOOK INSIDE

UK : £3.36 ; USA : $5.00 ; Germany : €3,92 ; France : €3,92 ; Spain: €3,92 ; Italy : €3,92 ; Japan : ¥ 492 ; Canada : CDN$ 5.07 ; Brazil : R$ 9,85

A statement reviewing the ups and downs and the institutional vicissitudes suffered by the AEP and reaffirming our determination to pursue the campaign to recover that which was stripped from the working class in Spain.

Eliminating worker culture … through red tape. We return to the charge with this expose of the non-implementation of the agreement to endow the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular and its vitally important documentary resources – bearing witness to working class culture and its struggles -  with appropriate premises.

The Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular (AEP) was launched in 1902 by two working men, Eladi Gardo and Josep Tubau and a 22 year old student, Francesc Layret, in Layret’s home.

Later the AEP moved into premises at No 30, Carrer del Carme (Barcelona) where it occupied 4 floors, each in excess of 100 square metres, plus basements. In addition, it had premises on the Carrer Portaferissa, a chalet in La Molina (seized by the Francoists and now occupied by the Generalitat) and a plot of land on the Ramblas adjacent to Pintor Fortuny, presently the site of a hotel. It boasted an important library divided into several sections – Literature & Fine Arts, Economics, Naturism, and a Commerce Studies and Languages Night School –where its members (upwards of 25,000 of them) pursued their interests.

The AEP represented a place where workers could find a quality popular educational alternative to the bourgeois version and this was maintained by the workers themselves in the form of commitment and subscriptions, together with students and professionals who made their expertise available.

A wide spectrum of individuals of great civic talent and importance belonged to the AEP: people such as Layret, Companys, Joan Bastardes, Jaume Aiguader, Josep M De Sucre, Ángel Pestaña, Joan Salvat Papasseit, Joan Amades, Salvador Seguí, Victor Colomer, Amadeu Hurtado, Joaquim Maurin, Jaume Serra Hunter, J P Fábregas …

The AEP was to play a leading part in setting the tone of city life. It mounted numerous campaigns in defence of the rights of workers and citizens and against war and militarism. It laid on a huge number of debates and lectures with a very wide variety of contributions from all who had something to say in order to enrich Catalan culture. It also promoted other sots of cultural activities, such as poetry recitals by Federico García Lorca and Margarita Xirgu at the Barcelona theatre, held to mark the reopening of various libertarian workers’ ateneos shut down as a result of the revolution in Asturias in 1934. The day after that recital, Lorca penned a moving letter to his parents about it, explaining how things had gone, how it had drawn thousands of people, inside and outside the theatre. Lorca signed off by saying: “It was the most moving gathering in my entire life.”

The AEP carried on with its activities up until Francoist troops overran it on 26 January 1939, being the first non-governmental premises taken over by the Francois troops commanded by General Yagüe. Its resources were confiscated – the archives along with the books held in its library were burnt on the Ramblas.

From that date forward, the AEP was non-existent throughout the nearly forty years of the cruel Francoist dictatorship.

In 1977, thanks to the efforts of a small number of people, the AEP was reborn, ready to salvage the memories not just of the Ateneu itself, but that of an entire people that had fought fascism and which, at certain points, had managed to defeat it, and eager to carry on with the cultural and educational mission that the AEP had performed during the years between 1902 and 1939. Following a fire at the premises on the Carrer Reina Amalia, it moved first to the No 5, Carrer Montalegre and thence to No 26 Passeig de S. Joan, in precarious circumstances and temporarily throughout. At present it has a membership of 200.

The Ateneu has played a significant part in the recovery of Historical Memory. Together with the Centre de Documentació Histórico-social it currently holds thousands of documents and publications – upwards of 12,000 titles – rescued for classification and archiving over the past thirty years, plus some 30,000 books and currently represents an indispensable source consulted by all investigating the workers’ movement or popular culture in Catalonia.

Furthermore, it has engaged in intensive educational and cultural work, staging numerous events: lectures, debates, poetry recitals, book launches and documentary launches, travelling exhibitions like the ones on Ferrer i Guardia, the social ferment of the 1920s, the libertarian press during the underground years ..

And it has also been actively involved alongside other collectives and individuals, in civic projects like “Re-thinking Barcelona”, the DVD on “La ciutat suplantada”, etc.

With the ending of the Dictatorship, the matter of the confiscated asses of the AEP became a matter of justice to be sorted out with the utmost urgency. But, more than 37 months on from the death of the Dictator and upwards of 34 months on from the approval of the current Constitution, nothing has been done to remedy that confiscation  despite the multiple overtures made.

Those overtures began back in the days when Narcis Serra was mayor of Barcelona and in recent years they have been stepped up. Thus, in 2004, the AEP held talks with the supervisors of Ciutat Vella (Old City) district, Carles Martí and Itziar Gonzáles and with the Generalitat’s head of archives, Ramón Albert. In October 2006, the AEP issued a statement calling for its assets to be returned, a statement that was submitted first to the CCCB and subsequently to other bodies such as the Ateneu Barcelonés. In 2008, it issued a letter in which it spelled out its position and demands, to the mayor of Barcelona, to the Generalitat’s Councillor in charge of Culture and to the Speaker of the Parliament of Catalonia and the teaching staff at the Contemporary History Department at Barcelona University forwarded to the Councillor for Culture a letter endorsing the demands of the AEP. In 2009, the AEP issued a letter, similar to the one just cited, to all the political parties represented in the institutions.

Finally, at the 3 March 2009 Municipal Plenum of the Ciutat Vella district, at the suggestion of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), supported by every other political party with the exception of the PP (Partido Popular), which chose to abstain, it was determined that the AEP should be furnished with fixed premises of considerable area in the El Raval barrio where it might get on with its activities.

That resolution from the Plenum was, however, not implemented during its recent term, albeit that the district president, Senyor Carles Martí, gave an explicit undertaking in response to the challenge brought by the AEP before the Public High Court on 9 March 2010. Given the persistent failure to implement the resolution, the AEP brought a second complaint before the Public Court on 10 March 2011. The mandate expired before a calendar could even be agreed or a premises selected.

On foot of the second challenge, in March 2011, His Excellency Senyor Jordi Hereu Bhoer, speaking for the Most Excellent City Council of Barcelona and Senyor Manel Aisa Pampols, representing the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular in his capacity as President signed a cooperation agreement between Barcelona City Council and the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular apropos of the usufruct of premises, in which agreement it was stated, among other things, that “Barcelona City Council, within no more than two years from the signing of this present Protocol, is to offer the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular premises to be used as its base and for the pursuit of the activities proper to it.” “The premises to be offered to the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular shall meet the requisite specifications so that the latter can, in appropriate circumstances, pursue its ateneo-related activities (lectures, debates, recitals, exhibitions, documentation, etc.) as well as its archival and public reference activities” … “Said premises must consist of a usable floor space of between 750 and 100 square metres. The premises shall consist of at the least a ground floor.”

As of today’s date, however, now that the period of grace laid down in the Protocol has run out, and despite any talks held with the City Council, the latter has not offered any premises meeting the specifications laid down in the afore-mentioned Protocol, which constitutes another blatant failure to deliver on the part of the city authorities, on the accords to which Barcelona City Council had signed up.

All things considered, it is plain that the representatives of the institutions vested with the ability to remedy, albeit only in part, the losses suffered by the AEP, lack any political will to do so. Thereby constituting a blatant injustice, a grievance which in this specific instance is all the more outrageous in that the AEP was such a significant factor in the forging of the mind-set of the Barcelona which on 19 July 1936 proved capable to defeating the army in its attempt to impose fascism.

So much so that it is as if General Mola’s war-time  watchword “We must eliminate worker culture” were still in force. A motto which General Yagüe so diligently enforced against the AEP on 26 January 1939.

April 2013 (Translated by Paul Sharkey)

Warren Gamaliel Harding (November 2, 1865 – August 2, 1923), the 29th President of the United States (1921–1923)

I. The Making of a President

The Republican National Convention, which took place in June 1920 in Chicago, Illinois, was a most extraordinary affair.

The Presidency was for sale,” writes Karl Schriftgiesser in This Was Normalcy, “The city of Chicago, never averse to monetary indecencies, was jam-packed with frenzied bidders, their pockets bulging with money with which to buy the prize. The Coliseum became a market place, crowded with stock gamblers, oil promoters, mining magnates, munition makers, sports promoters, and soap makers . . . The lobbies and rooms of the Loop hotels were in a turmoil as the potential buyers of office scurried about lining up their supporters, making their deals, issuing furtive orders, passing out secret funds.”

Harry Ford Sinclair, head of Sinclair Oil Company

Among the captains of industry and finance who had flocked into the Windy City to make sure the Republican Presidential candidate was a man to their taste were Harry F. Sinclair, head of the Sinclair Oil Company, who had already invested $75,000 in the Republican campaign and was to put up another $185,000 before the campaign was over; Judge Elbert H. Gary, Chairman of the Board of Directors of U.S. Steel, whose name had figured prominently in the smashing of the 1919 steel strike; Samuel M. Vauclain,  president of the Baldwin Locomotive Company; Thomas W. Lamont, partner in the firm of J. P. Morgan and Company; Edward L. Doheny, president of the Pan American Petroleum Company; and William Boyce Thompson, the copper magnate, who had recently returned from Soviet Russia, where as head of the American Red Cross mission he had staked $1,000,000 of his own money  in an effort to stem the tide of the Russian Revolution.

For conducting the devious, backstairs negotiations among the different delegations, and for keeping things in general under control at the open sessions of the Convention at the Chicago Coliseum, the renowned industrialists and financiers were relying on a small, select group of Republican politicians. These “political deputies of wealth”, together with their connections, as named by Ferdinand Lundberg in his book, America’s 60 Families, were

Thomas W. Lamont, George Whitney and J.P. Morgan, conferring at one of the numerous congressional investigations into financial practice ⓒ The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

Senators Henry Cabot Lodge (Morgan), Medill McCormick (Chicago Tribune-International Harvester Company), James E. Watson of Indiana (Klan), Reed Smoot (Utah sugar interests), James W. Wadsworth of New York (Morgan) and Frank Brandages of Connecticut  (Morgan).

Shortly after dinner on the sweltering hot night of June 9, with the Convention balloting for the Presidential candidate deadlocked between General Leonard Wood and Governor Frank O. Lowden of Illinois, the junta of Senators met in the three-room suite of the Republican National Chairman, Will Hays, at the Blackstone Hotel.   Present at the secret meeting, in addition to the Senators, was George B. M. Harvey, the eccentric, influential publisher of Harvey’s Weekly, who had close connections with J. P. Morgan and Company and was frequently referred to as the “President-maker”.

Henry Cabot Lodge (May 12, 1850 – November 9, 1924)

Periodically, as the evening wore on, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and a key figure in the inner circles of the Republican Party, drifted in and out of the smoke-filled room in which the private, animated conference was taking place. Around midnight, the decision was reached as to who should be the Republican candidate for President . . . Senator Warren Harding of Ohio, tired, dishevelled and slightly intoxicated, was summoned to Will Hays’ suite. “Senator, we want to put a question to you,” said George Harvey. “Is there in your life or background any element that might embarrass the Republican Party if we nominate you for President?” The meaning of this question was to be later interpreted in various ways. One interpretation was that Harvey and his colleagues wanted to be certain that Harding was not part Negro, as had been claimed in some scurrilous racist propaganda then circulating in Chicago. Harvey’s own subsequent explanation was that the Senator was being asked to seek Divine guidance regarding his fitness to become President. Another version was that Harding was being given the opportunity to inform his backers whether his relationship with Nan Britton, the mother of his illegitimate daughter, might be disclosed and become an embarrassing issue during the Presidential campaign. At any rate, Harding retired to an adjourning room, remained there a short while, and then came back and solemnly assured the others that there was nothing in his past to preclude his becoming President . . . On the following afternoon, Senator Warren G. Harding was nominated as the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Selected to be his running mate, as candidate for Vice-President, was Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, best known for his role in suppressing a police strike in Boston in 1919.   Commenting editorially on Harding’s nomination, the New York Times stated:

‘The President-Maker’: Colonel George Brinton McClellan (b. 1864 – d. 1928)

. . . the Chicago convention presents a candidate whose nomination will be received with astonishment and dismay by the party whose suffrages he invites. . . Senator Harding’s record at Washington has been faint and colourless … The nomination of Harding … is the fine and perfect flower of the Senatorial cabal that charged itself with the management of the Republican Convention . . . As for principles, they have only hatred of Mr. Wilson and a ravening hunger for the offices.

According to the Nation, Harding was a “colourless and platitudinous, uninspired and uninspiring nobody” who had been trotted out by the Republican Old Guard “like a cigar store Indian to attract trade”.

Warren Harding’s own succinct comment on the fact he had been selected to run for President of the United States was: “We drew to a pair of aces and filled”.

2. “God, What a Job!”

Harry M. Daugherty, 1920

There was one thing about Senator Harding on which everyone agreed: he was an unusually handsome man. Tall and distinguished-looking, with a large well-moulded face, deep-set ingenuous eyes and silvery-grey hair, he cut an imposing figure in any gathering. It was this quality which, years before, had convinced his close personal friend and Presidential campaign manager, Harry M. Daugherty, that a great political future lay ahead of Harding. “He looks like a President!” Daugherty repeatedly insisted. And, from the beginning, Daugherty had been determined to see that Harding became one . . .

Harry Micajah Daugherty, a blustering, heavy-set man who usually sported a massive pearl stickpin in his garish ties, was a lawyer by profession. His real business, however, was lobbying for large corporations in the Ohio State Legislature, in which he himself had served two terms as a member of the House of Representatives. For a good many years, Daugherty had played a prominent role in the notoriously corrupt Republican political machine in Ohio that was known as the “Ohio Gang”.

“I frankly confess to a leadership in the so-called ‘Ohio Gang’ . . . ,” Daugherty subsequently stated in his book. The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy, which he wrote in collaboration with Thomas Dixon, author of The Birth of a Nation and other pro-Ku Klux Klan writings. “On the lips of rival politicians the ‘Ohio Gang’ is an epithet. I wear its badge as a mark of honour”.

Harding with fellow members of ‘The Ohio Gang’

In 1914 Daugherty had persuaded his friend, Harding, who was then editor of a small newspaper in Marion, Ohio, to run for the United States Senate. Harding at first had been reluctant. “When it came to running for the Senate”, Daugherty later reminisced, “I found him sunning himself in Florida like a turtle on a log, and I had to push him into the water and make him swim.” With the support of the Ohio Gang, Harding was elected to the Senate . . .

As Senator, Harding spent most of his time in Washington at poker games, the ballpark and the racetrack. The few speeches Harding made in the Senate, as unforgettably described by William G. McAdoo, left “the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”

When Daugherty proposed that Harding make a bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, the Senator asked: “Am I a big enough man for the race?”

“Don’t make me laugh!” said Daugherty. “The day of giants in the Presidential Chair is passed . . .” What was now needed was an “every-day garden variety of man”. And Harding, declared Daugherty emphatically, was just that sort of man . . .

In February 1920, three months before the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Daugherty had made this remarkably accurate prediction: “At the proper time after the Republican National Convention meets, some fifteen men, bleary-eyed with loss of sleep and perspiring profusely with the excessive heat, will sit down in seclusion around a big table. I will present the name of Senator Harding to them, and before we get through they will put him over.”

In November 1920, in a runaway victory at the polls, Warren Gamaliel Harding was elected President of the United States.¹ He took office on March 4, 1921.

The members of what was to become known as Harding’s “Black Cabinet” included Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the diminutive soft-spoken multi-millionaire who dominated the aluminium trust and ruled a vast private empire of oil wells, coal mines, steel mills, utility corporations, and banking houses; Secretary of War John W. Weeks, ex-Senator from Massachusetts and partner in the Boston brokerage firm of Hornblower and Weeks; Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, former head of the American Relief  Administration, who had amassed an immense personal fortune before the war in the promotion of dubious mining stocks in backward parts of the world; Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall,  ex-Senator from New Mexico, where as a lawyer and politician  he had maintained intimate, shady connections with large oil interests; and Postmaster General Will Hays, former Chairman of the  Republican National Committee and chief counsel for the Sinclair  Oil Company.

President Warren G Harding waving to the crowds at his inauguration

To Harding’s political mentor and bosom friend, Harry M.  Daugherty, went the post of U.S. Attorney General . . .²

Few, if any, of the members of the new Administration were less equipped to fill their posts than the President himself.

Harding with his Postmaster General Will Hays, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and chief counsel for Sinclair Oil

Not long after his inauguration, Harding was visited at the White House by his old friend, Nicholas Murray Butler. The head of Columbia University found the President sitting in his study, staring disconsolately at the letters, documents and papers of state that cluttered up his desk. Gloomily, Harding muttered, “I knew that this job would be too much for me”.

On another occasion, after listening in frustrated bewilderment to a long, heated discussion among his advisers on a question of taxation, Harding flung himself wearily into the office of one of his secretaries.

“John, I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem!” Harding blurted out to the secretary. “I listen to one side and they seem right, and then — God! — I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but hell! I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I do find him.”

Shaking his head in exasperation, the President cried, “God, what a job!”

Harding’s “Black Cabinet”: Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, the diminutive soft-spoken multi-millionaire who dominated the aluminium trust and ruled a vast private empire of oil wells, coal mines, steel mills, utility corporations, and banking houses; Secretary of War John W. Weeks, ex-Senator from Massachusetts and partner in the Boston brokerage firm of Hornblower and Weeks; Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, former head of the American Relief Administration, who had amassed an immense personal fortune before the war in the promotion of dubious mining stocks in backward parts of the world; Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, ex-Senator from New Mexico, where as a lawyer and politician he had maintained intimate, shady connections with large oil interests; and Postmaster General Will Hays, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and chief counsel for the Sinclair Oil Company.

But Harding’s own sense of inadequacy notwithstanding, his qualifications for the office of President were eminently satisfactory to the millionaires who had sponsored his candidacy. As Charles W. Thompson states in his book Presidents I’ve Known: “They could shuffle him and deal him like a pack of cards”.

3. The Ways of Normalcy

The domestic policy of the Harding Administration, as described by Charles and Mary Beard in The Rise of American Civilization, consisted essentially of

a repeal of the taxes on incomes, inheritances, and excess profits, especially the higher schedules, and a shift of the burden of federal support from wealth enjoyed by the rich to goods consumed by the masses . . . “no government interference with business” — no official meddling with mergers, combinations, and stock issues, no resort to harsh price-fixing or regulatory schemes, and a release of the tense pressure exerted upon railways.

Andrew Mellon (1855-1937), industrialist and politician, served as Secretary of the Treasury for three Republican presidents in the 1920s

“Anyone knows”, philosophized Andrew Mellon, Harding’s fabulously rich Secretary of the Treasury, who was affectionately called “Uncle Andy” by the other Cabinet members, “that any man of energy and initiative can get what he wants out of life . . . when that initiative is crippled by legislation or a tax system that denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself . . .”

As soon as the Sixty-seventh Congress convened, Mellon, who lacked neither energy nor initiative, pressed for and secured the repeal of the Excess Profits Act of 1917. The liquidation of this Act effected a yearly tax saving for large corporations of more than $1,500,000,000, and, incidentally, a saving of approximately $1,000,000 a year for the diverse, multiple interests of Andrew Mellon . . .

The foreign policy of the Harding Administration was keynoted by the slogan, “America First”, which Harding, at Daugherty’s suggestion had repeatedly employed during his campaign speeches.³ This foreign policy, as viewed by Walter Lippmann, then writing for the New York World, was based on these concepts:

“Let the internationalist dream and the Bolshevik destroy”, declared President Harding. “God pity him ‘for whom no minstrel raptures swell’. In the spirit of the republic we proclaim Americanism and proclaim America!”

There was, however, one highly significant phase of American political-economic life to which the tenets of isolationism did not apply. While publicly applauding Harding’s program of “an end to entangling foreign alliances”, American finance-capitalists were privately drafting secret international agreements with German, Japanese, British and other foreign cartelists, and had already embarked upon an ambitious program to infiltrate and dominate the markets of Europe and Asia.⁴

Shortly before his inauguration, Harding had publicly observed, “It will help if we have a revival of religion … I don’t think any government can be just if it does not somehow have contact with Omnipotent God … It might interest you to know that while I have never been a great reader of the Bible, I have never read it as closely as in the last weeks when my mind has been bent upon the work that I must shortly take up . . .”

Whatever the extent of his familiarity with the Bible, there was definitely something of a biblical parable to be seen in Harding’s conduct as President of the United States. In the words of the famous journalist, William Allen White:

Harding’s story is the story of his times, the story of the Prodigal Son, our democracy that turned away from the things of the spirit, got its share of the patrimony ruthlessly and went out and lived riotously and ended it by feeding among the swine.

Within a few weeks after the Harding Administration took over, the city of Washington was teeming with a motley crew of Republican Party bosses, big businessmen, bootleggers, members of the Ohio Gang, and big-time confidence men. Not a few of these individuals held key offices in the new Administration. Others were lobbyists for big corporations. All had come to share in the loot.

A mood of abandoned merrymaking pervaded the nation’s capitol. Wild parties and games of chance for fabulous stakes were nightly occurrences. Prostitutes were plentiful. Prohibition or not, liquor flowed freely . . .

Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

Rowdy, cigar-smoking politicos congregated almost every evening in the sedate rooms of the White House for boisterous drinking parties and shirt-sleeved poker sessions lasting into the early morning hours. “While the big official receptions were going on”, recollects Alice Longworth, in her book, Crowded Hours, “I don’t think the people had any idea what was taking place in the rooms above. One evening while one was in progress, a friend of the Hardings asked me if I would like to go up to the study. I had heard rumours and was curious to see for myself what truth was in them. No rumour could have exceeded the reality; the study was filled with cronies … the air was heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of liquor stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand — a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on desk, and the spittoon alongside.”

‘The Duchess’: Florence Harding (1860 –1924),

Not all the gay carousals of the President and his boon companions took place at the White House. Mrs. Harding, a petite shrivelled woman several years her husband’s senior, who favoured a black velvet neckband and was familiarly known in the inner Harding circle as “The Duchess”, was a possessive, domineering and extremely jealous wife. Although Harding’s mistress, Nan Britton, paid occasional clandestine visits to the Presidential mansion, more discreet rendezvous were deemed advisable . . .⁵

‘The Little Green House’ – 1625 K Street, Washington

For purposes of relaxation and revelry, the Ohio Gang established a private retreat at a small comfortable residence at 1625 K Street. Howard Mannington, a lawyer and politician from Columbus, Ohio, rented this house, which came to be called “The Little Green House”. While holding no official Government post, Mannington was in almost daily contact with Attorney General Daugherty and other prominent figures in the Administration.  Mannington was on equally familiar terms with a number of the nation’s leading bootleggers, who used the house on K Street as a headquarters when they visited Washington, and who there made arrangements to buy permits for large quantities of liquor from Government-controlled distilleries. At the Little Green House, arrangements were also frequently made for federal convicts to buy pardons, and for aspiring jurists to purchase federal judgeships.

Another favourite rendezvous of the Ohio Gang was a house at 1509 H Street, where Attorney General Daugherty lived together with his close friend and personal aide, Jesse Smith. The house, complete with butler and cook, had been turned over to Daugherty by its owner, Edward B. McLean, the affluent playboy publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post, whose sumptuous estate, “Friendship”, was frequented by President Harding and key members of the Administration.

Nan Britton, Hardings’ mistress

A description of the sort of affairs held in the house on H Street appears in the memoirs of Gaston B. Means, who was one of the chief investigators in the Bureau of Investigation during the Harding Administration. Means relates:

It was not without reason that William Allen White later wrote of the Harding era: “The story of Babylon is a Sunday school story compared with the story of Washington from June 1920, until July 1923.” ⁶

Albert E. Kahn, May 1950

1. The candidates of the Democratic Party were, for President, the Governor of Ohio, James M. Cox; for Vice-President, the thirty-eight year old Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

2. There was one man in the Harding Cabinet who, in the words of Karl Schriftgiesser, “had real qualifications for his post.” He was the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C. Wallace. “Honest, outspoken and (in his way) a true liberal . . ,” writes Schriftgiesser of Henry C. Wallace in This Was Normalcy, “he was not without his enemies both within and without the cabinet. Surrounded as he was by men of whose faults he was only too aware, his life in Washington was to be an unhappy one. But with the passing of the years, he stands out, head and shoulders, above the rest of the ‘best minds’.”   For details on the political career of Henry C. Wallace’s son, Henry A. Wallace, see Books Three and Four.

3. The same slogan was again revived on an extensive scale by the America First Party in 1940-41.

4. For further details on cartel and other international operations of American finance-capital during the 1920s, see chapter VI

5. Nan Britton later wrote a book, entitled The President’s Daughter, describing in intimate and sordid detail her clandestine affair with Harding — first as U. S. Senator and then as President — and the birth of their illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth Ann. Although written in a maudlin and meretricious style, the book nevertheless offers a revealing picture of the character of the 28th President of the United States.

The book recounts such tawdry episodes as the furtive meetings between Harding and Nan Britton in disreputable hotels, shabby rooming houses, the Senate Office Building and the White House; and how, when they were travelling together, Nan Britton would register at hotels as Harding’s “niece” or “secretary”, and sometimes as his wife. During one of their meetings, which took place in an obscure New York hotel while Harding was still a Senator, house detectives broke in on the couple. Depicting Harding’s reaction, Nan Britton writes: “’They got us!’ [said Harding] … He seemed so pitifully distressed … sat disconsolately on the edge of the bed, pleading that we had not disturbed any of their guests, and for this reason should be allowed to depart in peace”. The detectives, on learning Harding was a member of the U. S. Senate, respectfully conducted the couple out of a side entrance of the hotel. “Gee, Nan”, Harding told his mistress, “I thought I wouldn’t get out of that for under $1000!”

In one of the more significant passages in the book, Nan Britton relates how Harding, as a Senator, obtained a secretarial position for her at the United States Steel Corporation: “I had never heard of Judge Gary, strange to say, and he [Harding] explained that he was the Chairman of Directors of the largest industrial corporation in the world. Mr. Harding handed his card to the secretary in Judge Gary’s outer office. The judge came out immediately. After introducing me to Judge Gary, Mr. Harding inquired casually of him whether his senatorial services in a certain matter had been satisfactory. The judge replied that they had indeed and thanked Mr. Harding . . .”

6. For further details on Gaston B. Means’ activities during the Harding Administration, see chapter V.

Chapter 1 ; Chapter 2 ; Chapter 3