From Russia with Love —GRAND Duke Alexander

warns Americans about the Rockefeller Empire!!

Last updated on Feb. 6, 2003

Grand Duke Alexander said this about his visit to the U.S. during a visit in 1913:

"As a matter of fact, there was one startling change which seemed to have
escaped the attention of the native observers. The building of the Panama Canal
and the stupendous development of the Pacific Coast had created a new form of
American pioneering; their industries had grown to where a foreign outlet had
become a sheer necessity. Their financiers who used to borrow money in London,
Paris, Amsterdam had suddenly found themselves in the position of creditors. The
rustic republic of Jefferson was rapidly giving way to the empire of
Rockefellers, but the average man-in-the-street had not yet entirely caught up
with this new order of things, and the bulk of the nation was still thinking in terms of
the nineteenth century (Once a Grand Duke, p. 242)."

Such is the extreme secrecy of the Rockefeller Syndicate, that almost a century
later, most Americans are still not aware that their country has been hijacked by
Standard Oil....The Grand Duke did not know— or could not tell— that his own
country was also hijacked by the Rock Mob!!

Grand Duke Alexander was Grand Duke Alexander during his exile
commander-in-chief of the in New York in 1932.
Russian Air Force during WW I.
 Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch (1866-1934 ).
Grand Duke Alexander was born on April 1, 1866 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), and died in
1934 in the United States. He loved everything American and as a youth he longed
to run away to the United States. He despised the empty rituals of the Greek
Orthodox "church" and wanted to remake his country in the image of the U.S.A. He
visited this country in 1893 and again in 1913. He moved to the U.S. in 1928 and
began a career as an author of several books on Russian history.

Emperor Alexander II of Russia Russian ship Osliaba arrived in

(1818-1881). Alexandria, Virginia, in 1863.

Grand Duke Alexander was the nephew of Emperor Alexander II. This was the
Emperor that freed the serfs in 1861. He sent the Russian navy to New York,
Virginia and San Francisco in 1863 and their presence was a warning to France
and Great Britain to stay out of the conflict. In 1867, he sold Alaska to the U.S. for
the measly sum of $7.2 million dollars. For freeing the serfs and saving the
American Union, Emperor Alexander was killed by a Jesuit assassin in 1881.
 Grand Duke Alexander
and his wife Xenia during
the war.

Czar Nicholas II (1868-1918) Grand Duchess

was the last Russian Xenia, sister of the
Emperor. Emperor and wife
of Grand Duke
Alexander.

In 1918, Czar Nicholas II and his entire family were assassinated by Jesuits
disguised as Soviets or Bolsheviks. Even though he was related to most of the
crowned heads of Europe, none of them came to his aid. One of these
Rockefeller Bolsheviks was named Joseph Stalin who later became dictator of
Russia.

The Dowager-Empress Marie of Russia, in exile in Denmark in 1924.

Empress Marie was the widow of Emperor Alexander III and mother-in-law of Duke
Alexander. Emperor Nicholas was sent to Siberia and the rest of the Romanoffs
were held captive by the "Soviets" at Sebastopol. They confiscated Empress
Marie's precious Bible because it was a counter-revolutionary book.

The Bible is an anti-revolutionary book according to the

Bolsheviks.
"They started back for Sebastopol at six in the afternoon, leaving the house in a
state of complete destruction and carrying away my personal correspondence and
the Bible belonging to my mother-in-law. The old Empress begged them not to
deprive her of this precious souvenir of her youth, proposing her jewels in
exchange."We are not thieves," said the chief, completely disgusted at the failure
of the raid. "This
is an anti-revolutionary book, and an old
woman like you should know better than poison her
brains with such trash."Ten years later, while in Copenhagen, my
mother-in-received a package containing her Bible: a Danish diplomat visiting
Moscow bought it from a dealer in rare books. She died holding it in her hands
(Once a Grand Duke, p. 303)."

Since the Glorious Reformation, the Czars of Russia have tried to enlighten their
people by making the Word of God available to all their subjects. Their main
opposition came from the Greek Orthodox "church" founded by Emperor
Constantine.

Comrade Khrushchev meets the Rockefellers

Khrushchev meets his Rockefeller master!!

Gov. Nelson Rockefeller visits Khrushchev's Quarters at the Waldorf Astoria
Tower; and cordially and comradely greets him. False headlines say that they met
"for the first time" and "as total strangers". Khrushchev boasts that he receives
secret codes, money and all "secret" reports from Rockefeller dominated CIA
Quislings.

David Rockefeller accepts Khrushchev's urgent invitation to visit him at

the Kremlin.

David Rockefeller held a conference in Leningrad of his Bilderberger "Dartmouth

group" to discuss politics and stimulate Communist Russo-Chinese business for
the branch of his Chase Manhattan Bank he had opened six months earlier, in
Hong Kong, for the specific purpose of trading with the Communists. At the end of
the two weeks conference, in mid August, 1964, Khrushchev phoned Rockefeller
and urgently requested him to come to Moscow and discuss his decisions at the
Kremlin. Rockefeller agreed to do so. He was entertained, with his daughter, Neva,
at the Kremlin. But, shortly thereafter, Khrushchev was "fired" because his
controversy with Mao Tse Tung interfered with the Soviet-Communist China trade
from which Rockefellers sought to profit.

Rockefeller HATED Unions!!

Rockefeller HATED Unions - especially the American UNION and the Soviet
Union....Unions prevent war and keep the peace. The more countries you have the
more wars you are going to have. The Rockefeller Syndicate HATES peace
because they cannot make money by supplying arms to both sides. The Russian
Premier of the "workers paradise" probably didn't know that Rockefeller Junior had
about 40 striking mine workers killed in Colorado. Most of those killed were poor
Roman Catholic emigrants from Italy and Ireland.

Rockefeller massacred striking mine workers in Colorado.

 Editor's Note

The Imperialists have always tried to promote conflict between Russia and America
in order to instigate conflicts between the two great nations. This was the object of
World War I and II -- to get America and Russia into a suicidal Cold War and reign
over the ruins of both.

Links

A brief biography of Duke Alexander.

References

Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia, Once a Grand Duke, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.,
New York, 1932.

Duke Alexander wrote many books. You can peruse them

at......www.abebooks.com

Josephson, Emanuel M., The "Federal" Reserve Conspiracy and Rockefeller: Their
Gold Corner, Chedney Press, New York, 1968.

Sinclair, Upton, King Coal, Bantam Books, New York, 1917. (This book is about the
horrible massacre of striking mine workers in Colorado called The Ludlow
Massacre).

Israeli Psychosis
Rockefeller's Solution to the Jewish Question

by Nancy Spannaus

from the August 1975 issue of The Campaigner (11.6 MB PDF image file)
to The Campaigner PDF-version node

====================

In Warsaw, Poland in 1940 the elders of the Jewish Ghetto had only one concern:
that as many of the Jewish inhabitants should survive as possible. They pushed
the reports of mass extermination of deportees out of their minds; even if it were
true, it was something occurring outside their universe. Within their own sphere,
the Ghetto, they would ensure that there would be no provocations that would
endanger anyone's survival: no revolts, no slacking off work, not even any anti-
government rumors.

From 1940-1943 the leading citizens of Jewish Warsaw maintained this

concentration on survival - while the population of the Ghetto was reduced by Nazi
deportations from 400,000 to 60,000 people. [1] By the time the youth forsook
their cultural activities and organized full-scale revolt, they were doomed to an
honorable death. By May 16, 1943 the Jewish community of Warsaw no longer
existed.

Today, in 1975, the rulers of the contemporary Warsaw Ghetto - the state of Israel
- are bending their every effort toward survival as well. But like the victims of
Warsaw they are being manipulated by psychotic fear into carrying out a fight on
the enemy's terms, and hence in carrying out the plans of the enemy himself. In
both cases this master is the Rockefeller family - a key ally of the Nazi
industrialists, the Krupps and Farbens, in the 1930s and 1940s, and the overseer
of the military clique which is policing Israel today in its drive to destroy its own
population, and perhaps the entire world, in the name of survival.

Israel's roots lie in Zionism, the neurotic dream of the petit bourgeois Jew of the
19th century to escape working class politics. Zionism has consistently been useful
to the ruling classes. On the one hand, it has provided many capitalists with a
source of cheap labor, as exemplified by the citrus fruit farmers whom Baron de
Rothschild "allowed'' to pioneer in the desolate, malaria-ridden Palestine of the late
1800s. On the other hand, the Zionist movement has reinforced the separation
between Jews and the majority of workers and peasants of other nationalities,
giving vital aid to the anti-Semitic campaigns used by the capitalists and nobles to
defuse popular unrest. Since 1917, when the British committed themselves to
establishing a "Jewish national home'' in Palestine, Zionism has been the
smokescreen behind which British and Rockefeller interests have hidden in order to
policethe oil-rich Arab countries by turning their wrath against Israel.
Israel's founders were neurotic and proto-fascist; Rockefeller's intervention has
wrought a nation ruled by psychotics. Now, having created a largely psychotic,
captive population out of Israel by encircling it with hostile armies, Rockefeller is
prepared to destroy the Zionists - whom he had found so useful - in order to
prevent the establishment of a new world economic order based on expanded
trade and production, a system which would take the final prop from underneath
his crumbling financial empire. Like the Warsaw ghetto, the work camps at
Auschwitz, and the death camp at Treblinka, Israel is to be rewarded for good
behavior by extinction.

Will Israel and the honest Jews who support her financially and morally from other
countries, abandon their path towards suicide before it is too late? Already the
country is a virtual armed camp, where the Judenrat, composed of Moshe Dayan,
Shimon Peres and their allies, has lowered living standards precipitously through
constant increases in taxation, devaluation and other austerity measures justified
by "arms for survival." Nearly every adult can be drafted into the army at any time.
Criticism of the government can bring immediate legal penalties. The barbed wire
which encircles many settlements bordering Arab countries and camps housing
relocated labor is justified by the activities of CIA-controlled terrorists and armies.
"It only looks like a concentration camp,'' one Israeli tried to explain.

The same policies which Rockefeller's Judenrat now openly espouses have lowered
the living standards of Brazilians by 50 per cent in ten years and brought raging
epidemics to the American continent. Brazil is already a contemporary Auschwitz,
hailed by Rockefeller's economists and the U.S. State Department as a "mode of
economic development" because millions work themselves to death in order to
repay debts to Rockefeller.

To prevent Israel and the entire world from enjoying the same fate, the
Rockefeller-created Israeli psychosis must be cured. That done, the world's Jewish
population can be freed to locate its identity as did its most distinguished
ancestors, Benedict Spinoza and Karl Marx, in their contribution to human science
and progress.

I. The Origins and Character of Zionism

Zionism, the movement for the return of Jews to the historical homeland of
Palestine, was one of the last nationalist movements to be born in the Western
industrialized countries. Despite repeated periods of bitter persecution from
especially the 14th century onward, the Jews of the Diaspora did not respond with
any large-scale moves to return to their Biblical home. The few Messiahs who
appeared in order to lead such a movement were exposed as charlatans soon after
they declared themselves. In the most industrialized countries, the overwhelming
tendency was for Jews to assimilate. Those who maintained their traditional
function as money-lenders and traders - the precapitalist socio-economic function
which by and large determined the Jews' preservation as a distinct "race'' - were
driven into economically backward Eastern Europe, where they were for the most
part concentrated in the mid-19th century when Zionism was born.

Zionism is not to be confused with the separatism of the Jewish community, which
accounted for the establishment of separate Jewish institutions and intra-marriage
despite the wide dispersion of the Jews following the Roman conquest in 70 A.D.
But, in order to understand the Jewish Question, one must recognize that the
segregation of the Jews was a deliberate policy of the ruling classes. Following the
wooing away of many of the Jewish urban masses into Christianity, which began
as the religion of revolt before the Empire co-opted it into the religion of the
"meek,'' the Jewish nation was transformed into a commercial class. Until
approximately the 14th century it was customary for the lords and kings to
preserve the Jews as a trading and lending network, even preventing them from
converting to Christianity in various recorded cases. [2] In the 14th, 15th, and
16th centuries, however, the rapidly growing hegemony of capitalism resulted in
massive revolts against the usurers and the eventual expulsion of the Jews into
Eastern Europe, most of them stripped of their wealth.

Zionism itself arose simultaneously and in direct contradistinction to Marxism; in

this respect it is the precise Jewish analogue of the 20th century fascist
movements. This is most graphically shown by the history of Zionism's founder,
Moses Hess, who participated with Marx in founding the Communist League before
he went on to write the founding book of Zionism, Rome and Jerusalem, in 1862.

The Zionists' constant effort was to find a solution to the misery imposed on the
Jews over the centuries by discovering a distinctly "Jewish" solution outside that of
the working class as a whole. While their sympathies were often strongly pro-
working class, they were constantly drawn into collaboration with the capitalists by
pleading their ''special interests.'' Eventually, the paranoia which went along with
viewing the world from the standpoint of their "own race'' drove many prominent
Zionists to espouse a literal national socialism, otherwise known as fascism.

The earliest Zionist leaders, exemplified by Hess and Theodore Herzl, came from
declaimed, petit bourgeois areligious layers in Western Europe - minor intellects
who, lacking the mental and moral qualifications to become Marxists, devoted their
lives to finding wealthy sponsors for their dreams of a promised land.

Moses Hess lost his fervor for the international class struggle with the defeat of the
revolutionary struggles of 1848. From a collaborator in the authorship of the
"Communist Manifesto,'' he turned into the author of such sentiments as: "The
race struggle is the primal one, the class struggle secondary.'' The transformation
was of little surprise to Marx, who described Hess' mind in the following terms:
"speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of
sickly sentiment, a Philistine, foul and enervating literature." Hess, like the
generations of Zionists which followed him, was a demoralizing sentimentalist,''
who argued that "man is governed not by science alone but by emotion." This was
the fight of the Zionist - that Jews turn their back on their intellectual heritage and
become men of feeling.

Even less respectable was the Zionist hero Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World
Zionist Organization in 1827. A mere three years previous, Herzl had suggested
that Jews undergo mass baptism and eliminate their problems altogether. An
earlier suggestion had been the scheduling of duels to replace the periodic
pogroms and to determine under what conditions the Jews would live. But the
response to his book on the Jewish State in 1896 convinced the journalist Herzl
that he could make his future through organizing for a home for the Jews. Herzl
carried out his vision largely through staging performances of himself and the
Zionist organization before his most important audience - the potentates of
Western Europe and his mother. Herzl's character is transparent in the following
reflection on his interview with the German Foreign Minister in 1897, quoted from
his diary:

He was impressed when I mentioned the fact that, at the University of

Vienna, we have drawn the students away from Socialism. Many believed,
perhaps, in erecting ''over there" the Socialist state of the future, but this
was not my own view. [3]

Herzl was continually running around Europe trying to get audiences with the
Sultan, the German Emperor, French financiers, and high ministers of the Czar's
government. He managed at least one interview with each, and actually negotiated
for a Jewish state in Africa before his death in 1905. The ranks of the Zionist
Organization were by that time, however, far to the left of Herzl, the playwright.

What made Zionism a significant social force, however, was not the Hesses and
Herzls, but the mass-strike ferment which swept Europe in the 1890s. The
revitalized Jewish workers, most of whom worked as craftsmen instead of as
laborers in heavy industry, began to enter the political mass movement at this
time. While their sons joined the Zionists, many of the workers joined the anti-
Zionist Jewish Bund, an inter-factional union of Jewish workers. Under the
leadership of one Lieber, the Bund was rabidly anti-Bolshevik by 1905, and has
played no positive social role since it took the losing side in that revolutionary
period. Most Zionists shared their hatred of the Bolsheviks.

The exceptional Russian and East European Jews overcame the typical shopkeeper
mentality fostered by their socio-economic conditions to become truly Promethean
intellectuals, as Luxemburg and Trotsky demonstrate. Those with less character
and intellect leaned heavily toward the tradition of the Russian anarchists and
populists, who sought to overcome their sense of alienation by seeking out mystic
unity with "the land." For the Jewish populists, like Leo Pinsker, "the land'' was
translated into Palestine. In Pinsker's words, popularized through his tract
"Autoemancipation,'' the goal was set forth: "Let us now return to our old mother
the land that waits for us in great mercy, waits to feed us with its fruits and satisfy
us with its goodness.'' [4]

Two of the primary ideologies of the Zionist pioneers who shaped the Israeli state
came from this Russian stratum: Ber Borochov and A.D. Gordon. The key to this
philosophy is expressed by the Hebrew word avoda, which can be roughly
translated as "labor and worship." Labor on the land, particularly hard labor, is
idealized as the purpose of the Jew's existence. Soil and "the nation'' are objects of
worship, Gordon wrote:

In my dream I come to the land. And it is barren and desolate and given
over to aliens; destruction darkens its face and foreign rule corrupts it. And
the land of my forefathers is distant and foreign to me, and I too am distant
and foreign to it. And the only link that ties my soul to her, the only
reminder that I am her son and she my mother, is that my soul is as
desolate as hers, so I shake myself and with all my strength I throw ... the
(old) life off. And I start everything from the beginning, and the first thing
that opens up my heart to a life I have not known before is labor. Not labor
to make a living, not work as a deed of charity, but work for life itself ... it is
one of the limbs of life, one of its deepest roots. And I work.... [5]

Gordon's neurosis, and that of his stratum, was precisely that of the fascist "back
to the land'' ideology which was advancing rapidly in Germany at the same time,
and where it eventually coalesced into the National Socialist movement. The
Zionist youth movementBlaue Weiss modelled itself directly on the proto-Nazi
currents: "We want to transfer the healthy effect of the Wandervogel on to our
own youth," said a spokesman in 1914. [6]

The petit bourgeois youth who settled in Palestine in the Second and Third
Aliya (the waves of immigration in 1904-1913 and 1919-1922) were part of the
youth movements which arose along with the revolutionary' upsurges against
authority. David Ben-Gurion, his friend and second Israeli president Ben-Zvi, and
countless other prominent Israeli leaders came to Palestine in these waves of
immigration. They spoke of establishing a "workers state," but immediately
excluded the Arabs from the agricultural unions they founded, under the cover of
not exploiting them as had the previous Jewish colonists. Even before the Anglo-
American establishment recruited them into explicitly anti-Communist and anti-
Arab service (beginning with their Army stint in World War I), Ben-Gurion and his
comrades exhibited a totally swinish attitude toward "their'' land. Ben-Gurion
described Palestine, then settled by hundreds of thousands of Arabs, as "without
inhabitants" in a "historical and moral sense." [7]
The further development of Zionism made it less and less distinguishable from
what we know today as fascist ideology. In the 1920s and 1930s the German
Zionists and religious Jews were generally more antagonistic to one another than
the Zionist groups to the early fascist youth groups. The Zionists were split into
innumerable communes, divided on innumerable doctrinal positions. But all
yearned after simplicity and the land. During the early years of the Hitler regime,
Jews flocked into the ranks of the Zionist movement, and in 1972 the Zionist
weekly Die Judische Rundschau's editor coined the slogan "Wear It With Pride, the
Yellow Star!'' five years before the edict ordering such degradation! [8]

The same vortex of economic and social ruin which plunged the German lumpen
and petit bourgeois into a rabid, easily manipulable horde for Hitler and his
backers, hit the Jews - many of them small shopkeepers - very hard as well. For
the first five years of Nazism the Zionist groups recruited heavily and collaborated
with the government to put their youth on government-leased training camps and
from there to arrange emigration to Palestine. There in the Zionist camps, as the
fascist youth were doing elsewhere, the youth were indoctrinated in the sacrifices
they must make for "the nation'' and taught how to cultivate the ''holy soil." After
12 or more hours of work a day, they would dance the hora, tell folktales or pour
out their feelings in a first approximation of "touchy-feely'' group therapy - literally
brainwashing themselves. While their parents and relatives were slaughtered in
Europe, the Zionist youth tried to create a new reality by whipping themselves into
a frenzy of hope and hard manual labor.

Not even the most ideologically "Marxist'' and pro-Soviet groups such as
the Hashomer Hatzair could escape the lawfully ugly result of the desperate
commitment to wed socialism and nationalism. Open consorts with fascism such as
Jewish Legion founder and militant Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, were scorned by
these groups. But their sense of identity as "Jews'' constantly imposed their
intellectual horizons to an area called Jewish history and culture, from which
vantage point actual socialist thought was impossible. It is this neurosis which, in
the new land of Palestine, sowed the seeds of the Israeli psychosis which
Rockefeller has used effectively to maintain control in the Middle East and now
utilizes to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.

II. The First Fruits of Zionism

The leading pioneers of Israel so gloriously sung among Jews today, were social
fascists from the start. It was they who created the institutions and the
psychological climate which allowed the Jewish settlers to be pitted against the
Arabs by their backers in the British Army and the Jewish financial establishment.
Not surprisingly, they were stalwart members of the organization behind the
murder of Luxemburg and the creation of the Freikorps - the Second International.
Their names are familiar to most: David Ben-Gurion, the nearly unchallengable
leader of the Palestine Jewish community up through the 1960; Golda Meir, chief
ambassador and eventually Premier as well; Levi Eshkol, Ben-Gurion's Minister of
Finance and Premier himself from 1963 to 1968; Moshe Sharett, Foreign Minister
from statehood to 1953. They were the mediators of Anglo-American control over
Israel up through the mid-1960's. At that time their Social Democratic dictatorship
began to be replaced by the next generation, of whom Moshe Dayan is only the
most prominent horrifying example. The neurotics were then put under the control
of the more manipulable psychotics.

The primary institutions which molded the Israeli population into a people
prepared to kill themselves and anyone else in order to ''save the state'' were the
kibbutzim and the defense forces.

The Kibbutz: An Experiment in Brainwashing

The kibbutzim of Israel, established for ideological and economic reasons by the
20th century Zionist pioneers, quickly proved their worth as centers for
brainwashing. Capitalist agents such as Arthur Ruppin of the Zionist Settlement
Office in the pre-World War I period, determined early that the kibbutzim were
worth financing. If the pioneers could be made "partners in the colonizing
enterprise," Ruppin pointed out, they would abandon any international communist
sympathies which they had and provide stable, cheap labor. [9] The kibbutzim's
most important products were paranoid schizophrenic human beings. For this
reason the kibbutz has been taken by the charitable organizations of the Anglo-
American establishment and exported to the impoverished, underdeveloped
regions of Africa in particular. Translated there into ujamaa, the institution tried
and tested in Israel has become a more deliberate and deadly form of
counterinsurgency against the danger of class struggle against the Rockefeller
forces and their minions.

When we say that the kibbutzim produce paranoid schizophrenic individuals, we do

not use the term loosely. The paranoid individual views the world according to his
own internal map of feelings and perceptions, imposing these infantile experiences
on the real world around him. His ego (conscious self) is unable to escape the
realm of the id (childish fears and pleasures) and to act according to the dictates
of his superego (sense of identity or ego-ideal). While this state of mind
episodically takes over nearly every individual in bourgeois society, it is often
coherent with approximations of appropriate social behavior. As the school child
who perceives the teacher as a parent figure will obey instructions to do his
assignment, it is the right act for the wrong reason; the individual is functioning
with some distorted recognition of reality. In severe cases of paranoia, the
individual has no sense of himself in relation to reality; he be- comes
schizophrenic, completely immersed in the world of fantasy.
Only people suffering from such a severe mental disturbance would ignore the
hellish deprivations and police state atmosphere of Israel today in order to be a
warhawk. For many Israelis, raised on kibbutzim, this insanity is only an
exacerbated form of the paranoia created in them since early childhood. For many
of those not living in the communal settlements, the force of oppressive reality has
been sufficient to open their eyes and oppose the embrace of destruction being
engineered by their agent-leaders.

The founders of the kibbutzim were for the most part teenagers or young adults
who were struggling to relieve themselves of the tremendous sense of oppression
they felt in the economic and political turmoil of Europe. They bear strong
resemblance to the counterculture youth of the 1960s, although in the wake of the
1905 Russian Revolution even their escapism was more political than that of U.S.
youth. The rebels rejected the traditional status symbols of their community, the
narrowness of their day-to-day life, the values of study, family loyalty and career.
To replace the traditional, more universal values, they sought a sense of self in
what they could physically build and grow - reverting to a primitive sense that
reality is what you can touch and control with your body. This regression, while
not necessarily permanent in the adventurous pioneers who had been given the
capacity for creative development by their loving, if somewhat suffocating,
parents, was the psychological root of the new societies which they began to build.

Above all, the kibbutzim were organized around a rejections of individualism,

individual responsibility and individual thought. In the name of harmony and
cooperation, the collective was given full authority over the individual. It was
considered "selfish'' to have one exclusive mate, or in the earliest stages, even to
have one's own clothes - including underwear. The kibbutzniks worked themselves
into mental oblivion nearly every day; at night any lucid qualities of thought were
dissolved through the singing of folk songs, the repetition of heroic Jewish exploits,
or the monotonous whirl of the hora.

In psychodynamic terms, these youth had deliberately chosen to destroy their egos
and superegos, in hopes of returning to the warm, blah comfort of Mother Earth
and Mother love - the world of the id. The real mother was back in the dangerous
complicated world of pogroms, revolutions and capitalist economics ; the new
mother was the untilled, uncrowded land of Palestine. When the going got too
rough economically, and malaria and barren earth threatened them with death by
disease or starvation, many pioneers responded to reality and emigrated either
back to Europe or to the United States. The ones who stayed were determined to
create a new world - in spite of, and occasionally because of, the hardships.

In building their new world, the kibbutzniks did more than destroy themselves;
they developed a theory and system of childbearing which created generations of
paranoid schizophrenic children. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim described the
components of this mind-killing environment in his book, The Children of the
Dream. [10]

The newborn child is housed from the time the mother leaves the hospital in a
nursery with other babies of the same age, and is cared for by
a metapelet (professional nurse). The mother can be with the infant approximately
four hours a day for the first six weeks. From that time on the parents may have
the child visit two hours in the early evening every day, after they have finished
work, and on Shabbat (the weekly day of rest). In theory this arrangement was to
eliminate the suffocating, exclusive relationship between particularly the mother
and child, a relationship which the young pioneers still remembered with pain, and
to provide the child with the opportunity for maximum freedom for growth and
exploration.

As the child grows, he is graduated at two and three year intervals into the next
dormitory, where he has a different metapelet. His toys are totally in common, and
his bedroom is never a single. In the cases reported by Bettelheim the children are
actively discouraged from spending time alone and from developing very close
friendships with any other children; transgressors of these general rules are
accused of betraying the group unity and spirit in favor of possessive individual
aims.

The child's relationship to his parents is intended to be confined to that of "good

friends''; the parent has no authority over the child's activity, even when he
disagrees with decisions being made by the metapelet. The specialness of the
relationship is defined by gifts given and time spent - not by any sense of mutual
responsibility, except that mediated through the governing body of the kibbutz as
a whole. On some kibbutzim, parents also are permitted to put their children to
bed, but difficult jealousies between children whose parents did and did not come,
and between first and second children, tended to revive the psychological stress
the Zionist "child psychologists" wanted to avoid, and thus the experiment was
often stopped.

Bettelheim's discussion of the character of the children - as it is visible to the

outside observer - is quietly critical and just on the edge of alarm. He finds them
cheerful, but not very intellectual, intense or interested in the world outside their
little society. Their conversation is self-satisfied and narrow; their behavior is
conformist. Most striking is the intensity of their absorption with the land and soil -
an emotional attachment far stronger than any political, ideological or personal
identification. The lack of involvement in ideas has been widely bemoaned by the
pioneering parents of these children ; ironically they tend to blame this
phenomenon on the "richness'' of the kibbutz life instead of its source in the
poverty of the child's ego development. Kibbutzniks who leave the collective to live
in the city generally suffer extreme ostracism by their previous comrades if they
return to visit or to live.
From the laws of mental development we can identify the source and depth of the
mental crippling painted out by Bettelheim, and less sharply by other authors.
Through the first several years of life a child's ego and superego are developed
through the consistent and close relationship with an adult or two, who provide
him with a sense of his own worth as a developing individual. [11] This adult is the
mediation of the values and judgments of the broader society as well, and the
judgments which this primary adult conveys play a decisive role in providing the
child with a sense of identity. As he receives love and guidance in his developing
intellectual and physical powers, he receives the ability to locate his importance in
the constant development of his own powers for the world as a whole, not merely
to demand appreciation for what he has already done or to try to win acceptance
in one form or another.

To develop this capacity for growth, a capacity identical with that for love and
thinking, the security and continuity of the mother figure is required for the infant -
as the manifest schizophrenia of children with rapid successions of mothers, or
with schizophrenic mothers, cruelly illustrates. Yet in the kibbutz society the child's
primary mediation to the world is not even the relatively stable duo of the mother
and the nurse: it is the other children in the group!

In the name of freedom, kibbutz children are submitted to the whims and often
excruciating cruelty of other small children as well as to the painful physical
consequences of not being able to care for themselves. A pre-school child's
accomplishment or error has no basis for judgment other than that of other similar
age infants during most of the day. The world is indecisive - insecure. No
standards are available by which to develop the powers of self-judgment. No room
or consideration is given for the need to concentrate in quiet. Diapers are not even
changed with regularity; the child is expected to take the initiative. There is no
sane barrier between the child and the will of the children around him; on what
can he depend? In such an insecure atmosphere, the development of an attention
span - the prerequisite for intellectual development - is nearly impossible.

Imagine the horrors of this senseless, anarchic life - the massive pressure to
conform to the will of children no more knowledgeable than yourself, the
oppressive need to guess what will please this indecisive, shifting group, the lack
of privacy. The normal child of bourgeois society learns to propitiate his parents,
who, if reasonably normal, give him reasonable ego ideals to strive for. In kibbutz
society, the harmony of the group becomes the ideal. Who am I, the child asks;
you are a member of toddler group, Kibbutz X, the teachers reply. No wonder
Bettelheim comments on the fact that children are often more attached to their
dormitories and kibbutz farmland than to any teachers or parents.

The kibbutz-raised child, then, gains little capacity for independent judgment. His
emotional life is severely stunted. The rage which must overcome him frequently -
at the inability to have his play uninterrupted by other children, at having his
playmate taken from him, at the inattention by individuals developed enough to be
able to extend themselves and love - this rage is given only one outlet: the Arab
enemy. At least one can get distinction as an individual by becoming a war hero. It
is often noted that kibbutzniks died way out of proportion to their participation in
the army in the 1967 war - 25 per cent of the casualties, as compared to four per
cent of the population.

Over the years some correctives have been takes in view of the obvious
underdevelopment of the kibbutz children. No longer, for example, is private dining
prohibited in most kibbutzim; the hours with parents have been lengthened
somewhat. But for many the damage has already been done. Sabras raised on
kibbutzim are represented all out of proportion in the army and in the political life
of the country. With a leadership so psychologically damaged, Rockefeller and the
Anglo-American establishment found it easy to gain control over the first
generation of Israeli leaders.

When Moshe Dayan, himself born on a kibbutz and later raised on the less
collectivistmoshav, visited South Vietnam in 1965, he surely had as much to
contribute to the "strategic hamlet" program as he learned. In Israel, the
kibbutzim, each strictly adherent to one political party, had functioned as strategic
hamlets for over 40 years.

Foundations of the Israeli Army: The Bettelheim Syndrome

In 1909 the Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish immigrants lived peacefully side by
side. The young Ben-Gurion, however, having been in Palestine less than a year,
insisted that the Arab watchmen guarding the settlement at Sejera in the Galilee
be replaced by Jews. Over the protests of others who accused him of provoking
the Arabs, Ben-Gurion went ahead with the plan and formed a secret watchman's
society known as Bar Giora. Bar Giora was the name of the last Jewish commander
who survived in Jerusalem in A.D. 70 under Roman assault. The new Bar
Giora soon created the incidents to provoke them to self-defense, this time against
the Arabs. [12]

Ben-Gurion was only one among a whole layer of Zionist pioneers who suffered
from the Bettelheim syndrome, a strong identification with the soldiers and other
authorities who had persecuted the Jews intermittently for hundreds of years. "We
were prepared for blood on our hands in the name of autonomy, self-
determination and self-defense,'' Ben-Gurion reported in his Memoirs. [13] The
rage at having been impotent in the face of the atrocities committed by the Polish
authorities in his native town of Plonsk and elsewhere was transformed in Ben-
Gurion's mind into rage against an enemy he knew he could beat - the Arabs.
Pioneers like Ben-Gurion did not rid themselves of their oppressors, but they did
find victims for themselves.
The Bar Giora was only the first of a large number of Jewish militia units. The next
wasHashomer, a secret society founded following the dispossession of some Arab
peasants by their landlord upon the land's sale to the Jews. Mussolini-admirer
Vladimir Jabotinsky formed a guerrilla band called the Jewish Legion following
Jewish participation in World War I. The Haganah, a defense society technically
banned by the British, surfaced in 1920 and formed the mainstream of Jewish
military activity. In 1937 the religious and non-religious fascists split from
the Haganah to form the Irgun Zvai-Leumi and the Stern Gang, both avowedly
terrorist operations. In 1941, with heavy guidance from the British, the
commando force Palmach was formed, with kibbutzniks making up the bulk of the
volunteers. The army was not united until the War of Independence and the period
immediately following 1948, when Ben-Gurion absorbed all units, and their
methods, into the centralized armed forces.

What was provided to the Jewish pioneers in Israel was the opportunity to - at
long last - be the aggressors and the victorious. Their ancestors, part of the close-
knit Jewish communities and ghettos, identified themselves with their people and
hence with the victims of persecution. The perverse sense of identity which they
located in suffering was nevertheless a reflection of the solidarity which they felt
with their community. The generation of Zionists did not break the tradition of
Jewish suffering: instead many of them responded to the social and personal
disintegration which they faced by taking on the characteristics of those who had
made them suffer. Jewish soldiers, whose relatives had been swept away in
Russian pogroms in the 1880s, found themselves following the orders of Moshe
Dayan and David Ben-Gurion, and razing whole Arab villages to the ground.

The Bettelheim syndrome was discovered by the Jewish psychiatrist during his
internment at Buchenwald, and elaborated in his book The Informed Heart. While
reflecting on how concentration camp victims adapted to the daily brutality,
deprivation and unpredictability of their oppressors, Bettelheim observed that:

... slowly, most prisoners accepted terms of verbal aggression that definitely
did not originate in their previous vocabulary, but were taken over from the
very different vocabulary of the SS. Only attempts to emulate the SS can
explain such behaviors From copying SS verbal aggressions to copying their
form of bodily aggression was one more step, but it took several years to
reach that. It was not unusual, when prisoners were in charge of others, to
find old prisoners (and not only former criminals) behaving worse than the
SS. Sometimes they were trying to find favor with the guards, but more
often it was because they considered it the best way to treat prisoners in
the camp.

Old prisoners tended to identify with the SS not only in their goals and
values, but even in appearance. They tried to arrogate to themselves old
pieces of SS uniforms, and when that was not possible they tried to sew
 and mend their prison garb until it resembled the uniforms. The lengths
prisoners would go to was sometimes hard to believe, particularly since they
were sometimes punished for trying to look like the SS. When asked why
they did it, they said it was because they wanted to look smart. To them
looking smart meant to look like their enemies. [14]

The depths of such psychotic behavior have been reached by Nelson Rockefeller's
personal servant-Jews, Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger. But considerable
numbers of Israeli pioneers, especially after being submitted to years of Anglo-
American treachery, proceeded to emulate the merciless bands who had destroyed
them in Eastern Europe. In Deir Yassin, April 9, 1948, the entire civilian population
was killed, news of the massacre spread swiftly throughout the Arab population,
accelerating Arab flight from Jewish-occupied territory. In Kibya, 1953, the whole
village was wiped out: as was Wadi Salib in 1959. Those are only the most famous
results of the Bettelheim syndrome.

The most heartless and bloodthirsty of the Jewish militia units was, not
surprisingly, theIrgun. The Irgun was the only one of the bands to be headed by a
survivor of a concentration camp, and it was this group that the youth who
escaped the camps of Germany and went to Palestine tended to join. Its leader
was Menahem Begin, still today a representative in the Knesset (the Israeli
Parliament) and leader of the rabidly religious, expansionist and anti-
communist Herut Party, Begin himself was incarcerated in a Siberian work camp
because he refused to fight the Nazis once the Red Army had liberated his area of
Poland.

The Irgun was responsible for blowing up several illegal immigrant ships; killing
thousands of refugees; in order to win sympathy for Jews driven to "mass
suicides." Menahem Begin is still avenging his relatives who died in the
concentration camps; he has become the incarnation of his SS enemy.

Over the years, the army and the state have become inviolable institutions, with
the army being, in the words of Ben-Gurion, "in many ways a unique expression of
our Israeli personality." While the army avoided the rape and desecration carried
out by the enraged Arab or Eastern European peasant bands, the new home for
the Jews became more and more organized around the army - especially after
1948. The policy of the army - particularly in the extreme nationalist right wing,
but alarmingly in other political parties as well - is to push the indigenous Arabs
out of the way, to make way for the superior, more productive race, the Jews.

It began by "copying SS verbal aggressions." It grew into copying their actions as

well. By law every immigrant to Israel must register by race, and intermarriage
between races is strongly opposed! Most high schools are heavily permeated by
the influence of the GADNA, a paramilitary youth organization which encourages
senseless tests of endurance too frequently resulting in death or serious injury.
The army is the "sphere which epitomizes the essence of Israeli citizenship and
identity,'' report its apologists and critics.

A report out the German preparations for World War II to the U.S. intelligence
community states that the Nazis followed a policy of "total education," through
which youth gain "a firm and logical intellectual and emotional sequence
throughout life." Second, totaleducation prepared youth for army service by
imbuing young people with "self-discipline, secrecy, loyalty, readiness to sacrifice,
courage to acknowledge guilt, resolution, willingness to share responsibility, and
national pride." [15] Third, total education was to develop courage in young men.

Schools in Israel today, with their emphasis on national history, their integration
with the army, and continued repetition of how Jews must be willing to sacrifice
for their people, have taken on more than the verbal characteristics of the Jews'
German oppressors. A Dutch observer at an international walking contest in
Holland in 1969, was amazed to see the Israeli team doing everything, including
resting and eating, in military rhythm. "Your teams remind me of German youth
groups in the 1930s,'' he said to an Israeli journalist, who insisted that this was
merely a factual comparison. [16]

In the legal sphere again, Israel has a law, passed in 1965, which allows severe
penalty for any defamation of character - a statute not unreminiscent of the
Hitlerism statutes which sent many of today's Israelis' relatives off to their death in
the concentration camps.

What is clearly visible in the evolution of the Israeli state is the intensification of
the Bettelheim syndrome throughout the country's leaders and citizens. Rockefeller
couldn't be more pleased.

More rational Israelis continue to deal with this development by treating its most
obvious results as worrisome excesses.'' Exemplary is the case of Meir Har-Zion, a
culture hero and parachutor who was known for his ruthlessness on retaliatory
raids and who was eventually imprisoned for murdering two Bedouins he believed
responsible for his sister's killing. Har-Zion - an unprincipled, cold-blooded
murderer - has been praised by Moshe Dayan and General Ariel Sharon; Ben-
Gurion arranged his pardon for murder. Har-Zion's critics merely shake their heads.
But Har-zion, a third-generation Sabra, is no fluke in either his generation or
lineage. He is the lawful product of Israeli history - a response to the endless
encirclement and impoverishment, the sudden, unpredictable Arab terror raids;
identifying with the murderers of his people and ancestors, he has lost his identity
as a human being. He is a victim of Israeli concentration camp existence; without
an end to Rockefeller control, there will be many, many more like him.

III. Setting Up the Controlled Environment:

 The Role of the Anglo-American SS

The paranoia of the Zionist pioneers was by no means sufficient to create the
Israeli garrison state of today. Without the intervention of the Anglo-American SS
the perpetual hostilities between Arabs and Jews would not have occurred. From
at least 1917 onward, the time of the British Balfour Declaration, the settlers were
manipulated, financed, armed and killed by the Anglo-American intelligence
community for the benefit of the Anglo-American financial community which they
served. Israel was created as an enclave within a near-total controlled
environment, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, regimented from within by
the CIA-trained and controlled Kapos, the military clique around Moshe Dayan. The
lawful result was the Israeli survival psychosis.

Every ''gift'' to the Jews in Palestine has been a double-edged sword. Baron de
Rothschild, who financed most of the early settlers in the immigration wave of
1880-1905, gained a thriving citrus fruit industry by employing the industrious
immigrants who were so eager to return to the promised land that they did not
demand reasonable wages. The Balfour Declaration itself was in direct
contradiction to secret agreements made just previously with Arab leaders; the
hostility deserved by the British for this double-cross game was carried out against
the Jews. British cooperation in the emigration of European Jews to Israel during
the 1930s exacted a toll of millions of dollars through the Harvard transfer
agreement by which the British were rewarded royally for their every act of
"charity."

During the War of Independence itself and the 1956 War of Suez, weapons to
Israel from the West were matched by significant Western aid to the Arabs. In the
1956 crisis, in fact, Israel was set up to be portrayed as the unrepentant aggressor
- following which the country was given a nuclear reactor as necessary equipment
in carrying out the Rockefeller "limited'' nuclear war scenario in the Middle
East. Since that time all so-called aid from America through Western Europe in the
name of providing for Israel's defense, or of equalizing the sides for "peace
negotiations,'' has directly and intentionally contributed to furthering that scenario,
as well as legitimizing the raids by CIA-controlled terrorist groups against the
obviously war-mongering Israeli state.

Every time that the Israeli population put sufficient pressure on its agent
leadership to make peace moves, the Anglo-American SS has intervened to
prevent this resolution.Nearly completed peace negotiations between King
Abdullah of Jordan and the Israeli government in 1951 were halted by the
''mysterious'' death of the moderate Abdullah. Ben-Gurion and Dayan ensured that
pro-Soviet forces in Israel, who had been working for a peaceful settlement
between the Arabs and Israelis, were ruthlessly repressed in the early 1950s. They
instead took their assigned role of bringing the Cold War to Israel, despite
previously friendly relations with the Soviet Union.
When significant economic growth took the Israelis' minds off the holy war in the
1952-1953 period and loosened the grip of the CIA agents in the
ruling Mapai Party, the CIA-controlled clique took wrecking measures immediately.

1. Dayan, with his mind set on "improving morale'' through the establishment of an
elite commando corps, went to senior staff college in England, a training ground
run by Anglo-American intelligence, for several months;

2. immediately on his return, he used his promotion to second-in-command of the

Armed Force to institute massive punitive raids against the Arabs. Together with
the red purge carried out against the left-wing Mapam Party and the army,
Dayan's new military policy provoked an escalating spiral of terror and led to the
CIA-planned war of 1956.

The British Set the Stage

Britain's involvement in the Palestine question began in World War I under the
policy of extending its control of the oil-rich area, which formally came under the
aegis of Turkey and was in danger of being taken over by the German war effort.
The British had a clear counterinsurgency strategy, one whose effectiveness has
been well-documented for the period of its domination over the Indian
subcontinent. To each self-proclaimed local leader the British promised support;
hence, each was constantly finding himself abandoned, and waging war against his
competitors for territory and British protection. While the local leaders fought it
out, the British stayed on top.

The operative element in this strategy for brainwashing the Jewish population was
the constant uncertainty. The Jews were trapped in an environment in which there
were no dependable allies or enemies, in which they didn't know where the next
attack was coming from. In such circumstances the human mind tends to lose its
grip on reality and be thrown into infantile paranoia. In the case of the Palestinian
Jews this paranoia exacerbated their demands for an all-Jewish state and their
hysteria about "Jewish survival."

The British treachery began with a series of letters in 1915-1916 by Egyptian High
Commissioner Henry McMahon in which he agreed to Sherif Hussein's demands for
Arab independence in an area which included Palestine. Hussein immediately
obliged by leading a revolt against the Turks. The British then turned around in
late 1910 and signed the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided the Middle East
between itself, Russia and France and put Palestine under international
administration. One year later the British were issuing the Balfour Declaration,
setting aside Palestine as a "Jewish national home." These kinds of zigs and zags
were repeated endlessly right up to the withdrawal of British troops in 1948, with
the consequent advantages to British control.
British involvement in keeping the Arabs and Zionists at each others' throats was
hardly confined to diplomatic games. Every major anti-Zionist riot in the area,
beginning in 1918, reeks of a British setup. Significantly, all the major riots
occurred during the periods of international working-class ferment, where the
threat of an alliance between Arab and Jewish leftists and workers was the
greatest.

In November 1918 the British deliberately left instructions vague for Jews
marching in celebration of the Balfour Declaration - with the result of minor
violence at the Jaffa gate. In 1920 Arabs attacked the Jews in secure knowledge
that the British would not interfere. British officer Walters-Taylor is quoted in the
diary of Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, a long-term British Middle East operative, as
berating the Arab Mayor of Jerusalem for not taking full advantage of this
opportunity: "I gave you a fine opportunity; for five hours Jerusalem was without
military protection; I had hoped you would avail yourself of the opportunity, but
you have failed." [17]

In 1921, May riots which resulted in the death of 88 people were touched off by an
Arab attack on Jewish communists - an attack of which many had preknowledge
and no official did anything about. The fracas was used to terrorize leftists who
were calling for unity of Jewish and Arab workers, and to halt immigration for a
period - a surefire provocation of rabid Zionist sentiments.

The orchestrated nature of the riots is made doubly clear by the fact that massive
Jewish immigration, the supposed detonator of Arab rage, did not provoke any
Arab reaction in years like 1925.

One of the best-documented cases of British incitement to riot came in 1929. In a

meeting with Arab leaders, two British officials-including the District Commissioner
- let the Arabs know that Jews were violating the "status quo ante" by putting up a
screen by the sacred Wailing Wall to separate the men from the women. One of
the Arab leaders was the psychotic Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, whom the British
had just recently let out of prison. Predictably the Arabs picked up the cue and
made a formal complaint, which resulted in police intervention in the midst of a
Yom Kippur service, the most holy of all Jewish celebrations! The resulting
predictable outrage of the Jews and the obvious show of British support for the
Arabs encouraged the tensions which led over the next months to hundreds of
dead. Key within this modus operandi was the British use of an extensive rumor-
mongering network. Equally significant was the British officials' refusal to use the
heavy contingent of troops and police at their disposal to disarm Arabs - while
enforcing disarmament on the Jews.

1936 saw a repetition of extensive violence, this time financed on the Arab side by
Hitler and Mussolini. Again the British allowed false rumors of Arabs being killed in
Tel Aviv to circulate throughout Palestine. British interception of the fascists'
massages to the Arabs resulted in no preventive action. The massacre was useful
to the British-as long as the hostilities did not threaten their political control. It was
also consistent with their overall appeasement policy toward Hitler's regime - if
indeed the action was not carried out by British agents buried within the Nazi
apparatus. [18]

The setting up of riots and the subsequent provocative restriction on Jewish

immigration in 1939 could support the misleading picture that the British, along
with American advisors and collaborators, were out for the destruction of the
Zionists. Not by a long shot. Simultaneously, the British were arming
the Haganah; British intelligence officer Orde Wingate was a major instructor of
the Jewish underground forces. Although numerous Jewish combatants were jailed
for violating the British ban on immigration and for carrying out guerrilla missions
against the Arabs and British, the subsequent behavior of Dayan, Allon and others
who were imprisoned indicates that they were trained, and perhaps brainwashed,
during their years in prison. They continued to work closely with the British.

Upon their release from prison in 1941, these youth formed the commando
unit, Palmach, which was financed by the British through the Jewish Agency,
and which carried out vicious warfare against the Arabs under the delusion that it
was a new "Red Army." Dayan himself trained espionage units in the Haganah -
admittedly taking some of his inspiration from the breakaway terrorist maniacs he
admired in the Irgun

and the Stern Gang. By the end of the war the British intelligence community had
determined to give the rabid Israelis their own state - in return for preservation of
the constant Jewish-Arab hostility in the Middle East.

Richard Crossman, Chief Brainwasher

The manipulation of the conflict between the - by then - near-psychotic Palestinian

Jews and the Arabs was taken over in 1945 by chief Tavistock and Anglo-American
intelligence agent Richard Crossman. By the time Crossman rose to prominence
during the war period, the intelligence communities of the U.S. Rockefeller family
and the British ruling circles were well intermeshed, with the formal marriage of
the Rockefellers with the Tavistock Clinic to be consummated in 1946. Crossman
specialized in psychological warfare; fascinated by the Nazis' crude but successful
operations, he vowed to use his wartime service "freed from the limitations
imposed by democracy'' "to out-Goebbels Goebbels.'' [19] He headed the
Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary
Force (SHAEF), after direct training under H.V. Dicks, Rees' assistant in the mind-
destroying Tavistock Clinic. In 1943, he was deployed to do a study of Buchenwald
before it was liberated,'' a period which he describes in his book Palestine
Mission as the first time in his life in which he was really happy. Thus the mind-
butcher prepared to set up a new concentration camp - the concentration camp
called Israel.

As one of the two British members of Parliament on the Anglo-American

Commission of Inquiry into the Palestine question, Crossman began his
investigation in 1945 with visits to all prominent Middle Eastern politicos, as well as
to the U.S. and Europe. Even from public documents it is clear that he met and
profiled every individual of strategic significance in all of Palestine, especially
leading British Zionist statesman Chaim Weizmann. [20] Whenever a conflict was
about to break out between Arabs and Jews, Crossman would be there.

Particularly obvious was Crossman's manipulation of British Foreign Minister Ernest

Bevin. Bevin, whose mentality was that of a trade-union bureaucrat, was anxious
for peace in the Middle East, and on this premise he based his stand against
massive Jewish immigration, stopped illegal immigrant ships, etc. Consequently he
was targeted as a chief enemy by Zionists throughout the world. The context for
Bevin's actions, however, as Crossman admits in A Nation Reborn, was consistent
misinformation sent to him from Middle Eastern Headquarters and the London
Chiefs of Staff! Crossman himself made no attempt to Change this state of affairs.

Crossman's perspective on the Jewish question can be summed up in his

statement: ''The decisive factor in the Jewish problem is not facts, but feelings and
prejudices." By respecting feelings - in fact by manipulating feelings - Crossman
concluded that nationalism is a primary human characteristic and that there was
no alternative to the independent Israeli state surrounded by hostile Arab armies.
While a significant number of prominent and principled spokesmen on all sides,
including Martin Buber, Bevin, Abdullah of Jordan, were searching for a settlement
based on a bi-national state, Crossman built their intransigent opposition. A
profound racist - like his mentor John Rawlings Rees - Crossman played the role
that Kissinger has for so long in the 1970s: convincing each side that their only
hope is total destruction of the other race.

Crossman's assignment was nothing less than the establishment of a Reesian

experiment - the creation of an armed concentration camp under the guise of a
"socialist state." Crossman's analogies to Israel are telling: he compares Israelis to
Londoners under Hitler's Blitz, and Israel to West Germany in having been built
upon ruins. A man who found the mounds of corpses in the Nazi concentration
camps "not particularly horrible,'' Crossman could not be particularly affected by
the prolongation of the Nazi nightmare, the creation of a nation constantly under
siege, his Palestine mission. Crossman's type of activities continued, with
unnerving success; psychological journals reek with academic analyses of Israeli
adaptation to constant terror and brainwashing, studies of how the human mind
can and will be twisted to endure and love a fascist police state. [21]
On the Crossman Commission's recommendation the British eventually withdrew
from Palestine, leaving the Jews to fight out their right to exist against hundreds of
thousands of Arab troops. The set-up had the full cooperation of the other
industrialized nations then under OSS control [22]; each country refused to accept
more than a token number of homeless Jewish refugees, leaving the bulk of them
no choice but to go to the new psychotic environment of Israel.

Crossman himself, of course, had a close acquaintance with Arab leaders as well as
with the Jews. He and his bosses knew what was on the agenda. The unsurprising
result of Israeli victory in fact resulted in the creation of new test cases of the
Rockefeller-Tavistock crew: the establishment of barbed wire displaced-person
camps for thousands of Arab refugees. It was initially difficult to get the Israeli
soldiers, immersed as they were in their own people's recent persecution, to
endure the replication of miniature Buchenwalds on their soil. But Second
International agent Ben-Gurion and his CIA-trained military created the conditions
by which the Israelis came to accept it; but not without first having purged the
army of left wingers and pro-Soviet officers, and establishing a garrison state.

Nazi Policy Towards the Jews

Perversely, what the Jewish homeland turned out to be was precisely what the
Nazi "Jewish experts" had recommended to Hitler in 1933. Under the advisement
of Adolph Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi bureaucracy had been
convinced that the most reason- able solution to the Jewish problem was their
relocation to another country. Not only would such a solution result in ample
looting through exit fees, but the Germans would benefit from having heir own
client state established. Fruit merchants such as Sam Cohen of Hanotea, Palestine
pushed the policy hard. In their view the Middle East would be a particularly
auspicious spot.

It was according to such a policy that Eichmann produced an SS pamphlet on

Zionism and that he had extensive contact with Jewish representatives of
the Mossad and the Haganah.Farms for pioneer-training were provided by the
Germans for various Jewish youth groups. Despite qualms about the unification of
world Jewry from Palestine, Hitler decided that the emigration of Jews was to be
encouraged. He went against considerable party opposition from the likes of
Goebbels, who ignored economic interests and proposed the extermination of all
Jews immediately. In 1937 Eichmann even visited Palestinian at the invitation of
the Haganah to discuss emigration plans. Eichmann was by no means alone in his
factional position. One von Mildenstein, a member of the SS and later
a Untersturm-fuhrer in that organization, had been attending Zionist Congresses
for years; he was largely responsible for pushing the immigration of the 24,000
Jews who had left by 1937. He kept charts mapping the progress of Zionism
among German Jewry, marking every convert as a success for National Socialism.
[23]
In 1936, however, the von Mildenstein-Eichmann team began to fear that the
product of their policy would turn against them. The Jews must be kept divided at
all costs, they realized so as not to turn on the Germans. Soon afterward the rabid
ideologues Julius Streicher and Goebbels interfered in their plans - mounting
another wave of anti-Jewish atrocities following the infamous Kristalnacht in 1938.
The desperation of the German economy threw in another consideration: how
could the economy get its greatest profit out of its Jews - by selling them for
emigration or by working them to death?

The resolution to this dilemma is well known in all its nightmarish detail. Less well
known is the fact that the outcome was not uniformly pursued. In 1939, Hjalmar
Schacht himself undertook to extend the transfer agreement (an agreement by
which Germans loaned the money obtained from emigrating Jews for foreign
investment) worldwide, and, consequently, to increase the orderly emigration of
Jews. As late as 1941, Eichmann and Heydrich were violating policy by taking
Jewish money instead of Jewish lives. In 1944, on the verge of defeat, Hitler
himself approved the exchange of a million Jews for 50,000 trucks - a deal which
was refused by the British Resident Minister Lord Moyne in the Near East: "What
would I do with a million Jews? A later offer by Himmler to negotiate for 200,000
Jews was met with dawdling by Swedish Red Cross official Count Bernadotte, later
assassinated by terrorists in Palestine. Meanwhile the British and Americans,
following the Tavistock plan and respecting the rules laid down by the Nazi
collaborators in the State Department (cronies of the Rockefeller cabal), refused to
bomb the concentration camps and continued to prevent illegal immigrant ships
from landing in Palestine.

Hitler's death camps were the result of a looting process dictated by the
Rockefeller-allied Farbens and Krupps. For these butchers the Jews were necessary
- first as workmen in the armaments and other factories, then as gold, as hair, as
chunks of soap. For those who survived, Rockefeller had yet another solution to
the Jewish problem: the living hell of Israel.

From State to Garrison

The successful establishment of the state of Israel marked the beginning of a new
phase of Jewish existence. Coming at the same time as the horrors of the Nazi
regime were being revealed, the state took on a sacred quality to millions of Jews
around the world. Jewish pockets opened everywhere, pouring millions of dollars
into the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund [24], which carefully coordinated
their policies with its bankers, the Rockefeller-allied Kuhn, Loeb and Lazard Freres,
Inc. With the money came thousands of refugees - desperate and dazed from their
war experience, anxious to forget what had happened and start again.

"To forget'' - that is the last thing which the psychotic Ben-Gurion and Dayan had
in mind. For their own and their masters' purposes the holocaust had to constantly
be kept in the forefront - to motivate settlers for the newly conquered barren
lands, to justify continued massive arms purchases from the West (mostly
conduited through France and West Germany), to fulfill their mad
expansionist dreams of "one Israel - from the Nile to the Euphrates.''

Aided by CIA control of the surrounding Arab armies, the Dayan group was able to
ruthlessly outflank, purge and terrorize pro-socialist and pro-peace factions. The
leftistMapam party, which was originally hegemonic in the Armed Forces, was
undercut by Ben-Gurion's insistence that the army be entirely subservient to him.
Because he was so closely identified with Israel's very existence, he was able to
uproot the Mapam army leader Galili and ensure Dayan's full control.

The army was now to be a "non-ideological'' professional force. In 1953, he and

Dayan undertook a program to increase the prestige, commando capability, and
combat-readiness of the army. Youth military training was established; settlement
of border kibbutzim in the Negev and Galilee was encouraged; the country was to
gear up for war. By prescience or pre-collaboration with the CIA, Ben-Gurion
proceeded "on the assumption that there would be no attack until 1956.'' [25]
Dayan himself, fresh from his war college experience in England, visited the
Pentagon in 1954, where he discussed "new training methods'' with such CIA
stalwarts as General Ridgeway. On his return the army was even more thoroughly
purged.

The militarization of Israel would have been impossible without the CIA-spawned
terrorist groups, on both the Israeli and Arab sides. Some of them were recruited
directly from theIrgun and Stern Gang into the Shin Beth, the Israeli intelligence
service. Ben-Gurion and Iser Harel, the agency's chief, prided themselves on
"forgiving'' the terrorist groups which they broke up and giving them new
employment within the regular Israel armed forces or special units. [26] Other
terrorist groups, usually on the Arab side, were recruited from the Arab refugee
camps, where enraged mentally crippled youth lived idly, eager for revenge. Even
then Dayan had difficulties forcing his men to carry out the full-scale retaliatory
raids he wanted. At first the men would come back as soon as they took any
casualties. Dayan laid down the law; until you've lost 50 per cent of your company,
stay and complete your mission. [27]

The danger most feared by the Dayan clique was rapprochement with Egypt, with
whom a series of peace talks had been held. Fortunately for them, an increase in
"Arab'' terrorism in 1955-1956, plus Ben-Gurion's successful infiltration and purge
of Mapam, resulted in a coalition government united around the Israeli offensive
against Nasser in 1956.

The CIA took no chances in its manipulation of the Suez Affair. The Shin Beth and
Egyptian intelligence services were brought together to collaborate "against
Bolshevism'' in Egypt. Nasser, who in many ways was a creation of the CIA
strongman policy, let loose terrorists as well. Running circles around the dull-witted
Eisenhower, the British and the French, CIA director Allen Dulles maneuvered them
into taking the Suez action which accomplished three aims for the CIA:

1. it discredited Rockefeller's competition, as British Prime Minister Anthony Eden

bitterly acknowledges;

2. it was a trial run ''oil hoax";

3. it provided the terrifying isolation for Israel which led Ben-Gurion to adopt a
"nuclear option.'' [28]

Ben-Gurion used the isolation to build a popular campaign for the installation of a
nuclear reactor at Dimona in 1957 - the same time that RAND computers were
beginning to grind out the limited nuclear war scenario. The country was soon
totally polarized; by late 1960 six out of seven members of the Israeli Atomic
Energy Commission had resigned, leaving only a Dayan protégé. The Dayan-Ben-
Gurion clique suffered a severe setback, until the CIA came to the rescue in 1965
with a band of terrorist guerrillas known as Al Fatah. With the aid of escalating
violence, a refresher course for Dayan in Vietnam, and the Maoist-backed and CIA-
controlled Syrian government, Dayan was able to dictate his return into the
government as Defense Minister days before the outbreak of the 1967 war.

Since the 1967 victory, the more pragmatic pioneers retreated before the Dayan-
Peres clique, leaving the country subject to what one prominent Israeli politician
has called ''eight years of brainwashing and hysteria.'' Golda Meir fit well in Ben-
Gurion's footsteps, with Defense Minister Dayan at her side. The deliberate
exacerbation of terrorist activity, plus the continuous antics of the Rockefeller-
Kissinger "diplomacy," have ensured that the 1967 victory would not be followed
by any moves toward lasting peace. The Israelis were constantly bombarded on
the crucial borders; daily they were convinced that their continued existence
depended on the establishment of an armed camp; that their children must sleep
in bomb shelters every night; that any privation was justified by the securing of
armaments; that dissenters from Dayan's expansionist policy were to be
ostracized, if not totally silenced. Strikes were broken; the rightwing religious
parties went on the rampage; all insurgencies were violently suppressed.

One key highlight in the exacerbation of the survival psychosis was the sudden
emergence of the Arab terrorist group called Black September in 1972. Black
September's massacres of Jews at the Ben-Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv in May
and at the Munich Olympics in September provided the Israeli hardliners with the
perfect opportunity to squelch lingering opposition and to undertake new bombing
raids, just when international pressure seemed about to force the Israeli
government into negotiations.
At the time the Labor Committees commented that the Shin Beth, the Israeli
intelligence service, [thwarted the?] Ben-Gurion clique's aims better than Black
September did. Today, in 1975, we have conclusive evidence that Black
September was set up and directed by British MI-6 and the National Security
Council under the direct control of Henry Kissinger. [29] The same method
disclosed in the Carlos affair, the Baader-Meinhof escapades, and the Symbionese
Liberation Army adventure - the creation of brainwashed zombie hit squads
controlled by CIA-related government agencies - lie behind the sacrifice of the
Israeli citizens in 1972. Like Abraham, Golda was only too willing to give up her
sons - but her god was the unmerciful Rockefeller cabal.

For the Rockefeller cabal, the 1973 war was only one more maneuver in their
strategy to incite Israel to suicidal warfare. The oil hoax was only one aim and
accomplishment of the war; the provocation of the Soviets into abandonment of
their allies and of the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction was another. If the
Israelis could be inflamed into using their nuclear weapons against the Arabs,
especially pro-Soviet Iraq - this would provide an excellent test case as to whether
the Soviets would go for the limited nuclear warfare scenarios ground out by
RAND. Of course, there was always the chance that the result of such a pawn
move would be the annihilation of Israel by a retaliatory nuclear strike. "Better
than surrender!'' screamed the psychotic Israeli military. Only the forceful
reiteration of a policy of "MAD'' by the Soviets, the Soviet and Iraqi extension of
offers of Middle Eastern economic development, and Soviet restraints on vacillators
such as Egypt's Anwar Sadat have prevented the scenario from being put into
effect.

The alternative method of destruction being carried out by Rockefeller is

menticide, the creation of a totally psychotic population, working and fighting itself
to a slower but just as certain death.

IV. The Israeli Auschwitz: Mass Psychosis in Action

The Tavistock schemers have come dangerously close to accomplishing their goal
of creating a model concentration camp out of Israel. Policed by a Nazi-like labor
front, squeezed economically at a deadly rate, bombarded by "friend'' and foe alike
with the threat of total extermination - the Israeli population is being submerged in
psychotic holocaust.

The Israeli psychosis is an obsession with survival - with the Jews' right to survive
no matter who must suffer in the process. Through the use of the atrocities of
Nazism and of wars between the Arabs and the Jews, the Israelis have been
reduced to a bestial concern with physical existence. One of its most striking forms
is the Israelis' willingness to sacrifice dozens of soldiers in order to retrieve the
body of one dead Jewish soldier. Survival is not even measured in aggregates of
Jewish lives, but in the continuance of the Jewish idea, which is now synonymous
with the militantly anti-Arab Israeli state.

The essence of every religion has been be establishment of universal values,

values embodied in the society as a whole or the religious institution, but not
equated with it. The religious man or community is constantly aware that there are
some ideas that are worthy of one's death, that life is only significant if he is able
to contribute to the realization of those universal values. What the religious man or
community is aware of in a distorted sense is that human life is not merely physical
survival, but a process of self-perfection which encompasses the entirety of the
human race.

Since the establishment of Christianity, Judaism has increasingly served the

function of justifying Jewish ghettoized existence, rather than as a sustainer of
universal values. With the establishment of Israel at the center of the Jewish
"religion" any redeeming social value to Judaism has come to an end. The worth of
any individual Jewish life is increasingly judged by its contribution to the physical
existence of Israel. Obsessed with the defense of Israel's borders, the Jew - like
the typical liberal or social democrat - throws considerations of actual human
progress, defined by the expansion of the living standards and productive capacity
of the international working class, out the window. He becomes an asocial,
obsessive and terrified individual - a clinical example of the Israeli psychosis.

The obsession with survival, constantly reinforced by Rockefeller's machinations in

the Middle East, has blinded most Israelis to the possibilities of escaping their
controlled environment, but not all of them. Israeli leftwingers and some older and
more cosmopolitan politicians have begun to put forth the proposition that survival
is possible on a new basis - the shared economic development of the area with
Arab populations. It is clear that this concept is gaining strength among the Israeli
population merely on the pragmatic basis that it offers escape from the murders of
continued war, and from the ravages of Schachtian economics. Finally, even Henry
Kissinger is coming under attack in the Israeli press. The creators of the Israeli
psychosis face tie imminent danger of having their victims turn on them, instead
of on the Arab countries now struggling out from under Rockefeller control as well.

The Corporate State

Although the Israeli state was not founded until 1948, its monolithic, corporative
"state within a state" - the Histadrut - began in 1920. The founding statement of
the labor federation declares that:

It is the aim of the United Federation of all the workers in Palestine who live
by the sweat of their brows without exploiting the toil of others, to promote
land settlement, to involve itself in all economic and cultural issues affecting
labor in Palestine and to build a Jewish worker's society there.
Among those intended for "non-exploitation'' were the Arabs, who under Ben-
Gurion's direction, were to receive no jobs at all! For inclusion were all Jewish
"workers" - capitalists, farmers and industrial laborers alike.

Throughout its existence the Histadrut has spread its tentacles far beyond the Nazi
Labor Front paradigm. The organization not only runs training programs,
recreational and health programs, but also has undertaken the role of employer in
construction, transportation, and farming. Most jobs can only be gotten through
membership in the Histadrut ; 90 percent of the workforce belong, now that Arabs
were admitted in 1959. For those who refuse there is no unemployment
insurance. [30] The Histadrut, the primary funnel, along with the government, for
contributions from Diaspora Jews. ensures that work is nearly always available -
though massive slave-labor construction projects.

Women, youth and Arabs have separate sections in the Histadrut; managers are
lumped with workers for creation "in the national interest." The workers actually
have little to say in the operation of their plants or the investment of
the Histadrut's funds and striking is an extremely touchy issue. The Histadrut has
seldom sponsored a strike, but it has been a reliable enforcer of productivity
increases, wage freezes and labor mobility, serving on every productivity
committee and economic planning board the government creates. By mid-1974
the Histadrut had maneuvered the takeover of Israel's industry by former military
men. [31]

Like the army, the Histadrut plays its policing role under a strictly ''non-ideological''
cover. Politics within the federation are widely recognized as irrelevant to its
decision-making processes, which are, by and large, dictated by the foreign
funders and the Mapai.Therefore the Histadrut has officially agreed to the
government policy by which most consumer prices have risen more that 50 per
cent in two years, regressive taxes have pyramided to 65 per cent of workers'
income and productive industry (non-armaments) has stagnated. By late 1974
hospital and postal workers were working periods without pay. Inflation rates are
estimated at 40-65 per cent.

Housing production, carried out by the Histadrut construction company, is so

limited that immigrants still live in the temporary housing that they were given in
the post-1948 period - only now they are accompanied by their children's children
and sometimes other relatives as well. These housing projects rival the favelas of
Brazil: hordes of hungry, disease-ridden children, infrequent garbage collection,
inhuman overcrowding. The government has openly announced its emulation of
the Brazilian looting policies, which have lowered living standards there by 50 per
cent in ten years and caused rampant epidemics and destruction. On this
the Histadrut's back is turned - in order to follow the Tavistock-Rockefeller
gameplan for eternal war.
One of the Histadrut's top cops is Koor head Meir Amit, who is also a top co-
planner, with the CIA, Dayan and Peres, of the 1956 and 1967 Arab-lsraeli wars
and current war plans. Amit, who has introduced every conceivable Nazi slave-
labor scheme into his armaments and chemical plants, is the essential link between
the Histadrut labor front and the overall terror apparatus that provides primary
control over the Israeli population.

The only brake on the acceleration of looting - by which the entire economy has
become an appendage to the burgeoning war machine - has been the
government's estimate of theHistadrut's ability to contain the population's rage.
Avraham Shavit, current President of the Manufacturers Association, announced in
1974 that more austerity would have been introduced after the October 1973 war,
but

At that time people could not have borne both the emotional shock of the
war ... and economic deprivation. They had to recover from one shock
before the second was imposed.

In November 1974 the government made up for its hesitation - announcing a 43

per cent currency devaluation. Many government and Histadrut leaders committed
themselves to a 50 per cent drop in Israeli living standards; no sacrifice was too
great.

The latest austerity measures introduced in June have moved Israel even closer to
full concentration camp status. New currency devaluations of 2 per cent will take
place every 30 days, a "stabilization'' move copied from Brazil under orders from
the Rockefellers' International Monetary Fund. Geared to give Schachtian fingertip
control over the economy to the CIA clique, the devaluation scheme has been
accompanied by plans for fantastic tax increases in late 1975. Full confidence has
been given to the kapos in the Histadrut to ensure that the looting procedure goes
smoothly.

In Memory of Our Dead

A relatively small proportion of the current Israeli population are refugees from the
Nazi camps of death. But through the auspices of their CIA-controlled leaders and
the rampant terrorists, the memory and fear of holocaust has become the
fundamental fact of Israeli life. In guilt for having survived and in terror of the next
attack, the population has tried to escape its nightmare with ritual, self-policing
and senseless attack - all the while remaining blind to the cooperative economic
effort which could unite Arabs and Israelis and isolate the agents. The monument
to the dead becomes the mental destruction of the living.

"Remember Warsaw - Remember Masada''- these are the constant rallying cries of
Israel's agent leaders. As Ben-Gurion wrote clearly in his memoirs, a nationalist
policy could only be carried out under pressure of intense fear and guilt. To
institutionalize this atmosphere, memorials were constantly being built, discussed,
or visited. Any hesitation to defend Israel against her enemies brings forth the
admonition: will you stop short of sacrificing as much as ''they?''

Through remembrance the Israelis are constantly being brainwashed to their

status as concentration camp victims. While an official remembrance day has been
conducted since 1959, the schools ensure that the child is incessantly confronted
with the Nazi holocaust. So internalized is the point of reference that the Israeli
youth, when disgusted with a friend, will call him "soap."

In 1960-1962 the Israeli government undertook their most massive brainwashing

venture -the Eichmann trial. There is no doubt that the Israeli Secret Service knew
where Eichmann was living long before his 1961 arrest - and that the spectacular
indictment and trial proceedings were deliberately timed to coincide with an ''ebb''
in the aggressive national spirit of sacrifice among the Israeli population. For Ben-
Gurion, the Eichmann affair, coming at a time of massive internal dissension over
his nuclear policy and austerity measures, served a vital need of rekindling the
paranoia of the Jewish Nazi victims and their relatives throughout Israel and the
world.

What the holocaust ritual plays on is the Jews' deep sense of themselves as
victims. Having been kept in an economic function peripheral to society's
mainstream since the advance of capitalism, and ejected when capitalism began to
clash with the unproductive Jewish usurer-merchant, the cultural tradition of
the Jews has intensified the self-identity as the outsider and sufferer. In self-
protection, the Jewish community wove a tight web around its members -
providing them an identity at the expense of their relation to humanity as a whole.
Those who escaped the ghetto which was often not imposed from the outside,
usually went through agonies of guilt for rejecting ''their people'' and great
uncertainties about being rejected by their new world. Social fascist Kurt Lewin -
himself a prime example of resolution of the "Jewish problem'' through the
Bettelheim syndrome - identified the non-ghetto Jew's tendency to seek approval
as resulting with some regularity in the Jew's working himself to death. Others
became heroes through imitating famous martyrs of old, like the Jews of Masada
who chose to commit mass suicide in 70 A.D. rather than be taken captive by the
advancing Roman army. Each is a capitulation to mother's voice inside - "You are a
Jew and hence you should suffer."

Men crazed with the fear of death are known to engage in frightful orgies of sex
and violence. In Israel, the latter has become increasingly predominant with the
years, starting with massive religious riots in 1963. Stoning is a common and
accepted occurrence in Jerusalem's orthodox area; orthodox Judaism itself is only
the thinest disguise for exacerbated peasant paranoia. This fanatic behavior,
drastically on the rise since the early 1960s, is reverently protected by nominally
non-religious circles, who have given the orthodox power over marriage, race
certification, and other family functions. In the spring of 1975 Israeli mobs,
attempting to tear several captured "Arab" terrorists limb from limb, mistakenly
began to dismember an Israeli victim of the terrorists. The war-mongering of the
CIA-controlled clique and the CIA-deployed terrorists has been geared to
exacerbate this desperate rage over the past months, hopefully to culminate in the
suicidal act of an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear strike.

A Fascist Police State

To live in Israel today is to live in a fascist police state. If you are arrested, you
have no constitutional rights; Israel has no constitution. You are therefore at the
mercy of the courts, the Dayan clique and the heavily influential orthodox peasant
priests. If someone suspects you of the intent to commit treason, you can be
arrested. If you live in an Arab sector, the constant military guard is unabashedly
open. In the rest of the country, the police are only slightly less obtrusive - in the
form of police units, volunteer civil guards, "counter-terror'' brigades,
"blockwatchers,'' and reserve soldiers. Nearly every Israeli between the ages of 14
and 65 has active or reserve status in the armed forces.

Israel's Declaration of Independence proclaims equal treatment for Arabs and

Jews; in reality, full citizenship depends on having been declared a Jew. The
Rockefeller-Tavistock clique find the peasant paranoids very useful; more and
more power is being given to the orthodox rabbinate. The right to marriage, the
right to Jewish status, the right to legitimation for one's children - for non-Jews -
all lie in the hands of the rabbinate: these are secured in Jewish law only if you
can prove to have been born of a Jewish mother. Religious instruction is required
even in government-run schools, but an increasing proportion of school children
are attending strictly religious schools. There they learn about their special need to
suffer and revenge.

The dreams of the largely atheistic pioneers have been turned inside out by the
psychosis created through 25 years of a controlled environment. Gradually Israel
has taken on the character of a theocracy. The rule of superstition is heavily
complemented with the other major component of fascist political control -
militarization. From the early 1950s on, Ben-Gurion both expanded and
"depoliticized" the army. Still later it was extended to the schools while the political
youth groups were banned. Fascist sociologist Leonard Fein describes the function
of the Israeli army:

The Army does more than reassure Israelis. It undertakes explicit

responsibilities in education and integration, and it implicitly provides the
most manifest symbol of Israel's nationhood, [un?]diluted by political
debate, unencumbered by ideological baggage, unblemished by scandal.
[32]
There is only one kind of state in which politics disappears: that is the state which
bans the recognition of class lines, which enforces the psychotic conception of the
nation as family, which outlaws criticisms of the state. That is a fascist state.

V. Beyond Survival

Ever since the mercantile period began to be supplanted by the capitalist mode of
expanded production, Judaism as an ideology which holds people together in a
community has played a distinctly regressive role in human development as a
whole, not to mention in the development of individual Jewish people.

The Jews' function as merchants was of little aid to production itself, and was
largely transformed into such strictly looting professions as tax farming, or other
administrative agencies of the capitalist class. Yet as any positive socio-economic
function disappeared, Judaism served to prevent Jews from integrating themselves
within the increasingly democratic society of Western Europe. Judaism became a
ghetto of the mind, even while some of the actual ghetto wails were being torn
down.

The oppression which continued quite consistently in Eastern Europe can be aptly
attributed to the under-development of these countries economically, and
therefore socially and politically as well. The general immiseration of the
population contributed to keeping Jews out of desirable jobs and to making them
the object of particularly hideous looting and pogroms - usually to the delight of
the governmental authorities. It was this especially vicious concomitant of the
maintenance of economies based on a huge peasantry and small industries that
the impoverished German economy fully embraced in the early 1930s.

What was particularly destructive in backward Eastern Europe was the

abandonment of the Jews to their own little society, the ghetto ruled by Jewish
courts, charities, synagogues and councils. The individual Jew had no location
outside his pale: his identity was first and foremost his membership in the Jewish
community and any specialized claim to individuality came later. The prison walls
were imposed by the ruling classes, but their immediate constructors were the
Jewish fathers themselves with the constant insistence on "You are a Jew."

Since the French revolution Jews have experienced long periods in which they
were politically emancipated from the oppression of being, above all, a Jew. In his
treatise on the "Jewish Question'' Marx elaborates the transitional nature of this
political freedom. While the Jew did not escape his Jewishness during periods of
bourgeois freedoms, he did gain the ability to separate his political identity from
his religious identity. His continued limitation resulted from the fact that as an
individual his self-conception as a political being remained abstract, while his
membership in the Jewish community, if only his own family, defined his day-to-
day reality. To put it psychoanalytically, the Jew in the bourgeois democratic state
is still dominated by his image of mother (Jewish piety), instead of by the reality
principle of the political and economic situation in the society as a whole.

But even a split personality is more capable of dealing with reality than a
personality totally immersed in Mother, the person and the state religion. And by
creating the distinctly Jewish state of Israel, and being maneuvered by the Anglo-
American SS to maintain its distinctness militantly, the Jewish people have moved
backward toward theocracy. In theocracy the individual is not valued - he has no
political existence. Allegiance to Judaism, in the guise of the country of Israel, is
the psychological equivalent of an adult returning to suffocate in his mother's
womb. Israel does not represent political freedom, but a new form of oppression:
a retrogression from the neurotic adult to the psychotic child.

Marx defines human emancipation in the ''Jewish Question'' along the following
lines:

(a man is humanly free) only when man recognizes his individual powers as
social powers and organizes them as such, and no longer separates them
from himself in the form of political power ... [33]

Human liberty is the right to be a separate individual who contributes uniquely to

the expanded reproduction of human powers. This right is not only
threatened physically today in Israel by the Rockefeller-created military situation, it
is also being obliterated by the deliberate destruction of the Israelis' sanity through
all-pervasive fear, collectivist brainwashing; and the day-to-day horrors of a
regimented military state. Are the Jews to "survive'' at the expense of becoming a
loyal race of psychotics?

The decisive moves of the Soviet Union, many Third World nations and the
Western European Communist parties to replace the crumbling Rockefeller empire
with a world order based on peace and industrial development, represent the
emerging reality where today's Israelis, and Jews everywhere, must locate their
humanity. With Rockefeller, nuclear or psychotic holocaust is inevitable. With the
fight for world development there is little doubt that the world's Jews will lose
Judaism - just as other religions will disappear with advancing human control over
the universe. In its place will be the creative development of millions of individuals,
a new humanity for itself.

====================

Footnotes
 McClure's Magazine.
July, 1905.

John D. Rockefeller
A character study

by

Ida M. Tarbell

Author of: The History of the Standard Oil Co., Life of Lincoln, A Life of
Napoleon Bonaparte, Madame Roland: A Biographical Studyetc., etc.

John D. Rockefeller. (Sketch from life by John Varian).

"According as you put something in the greater will be your dividends of

salvation."

From an address made to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Sunday school, Cleveland,
Ohio, Oct. 11, 1903.

Our American heroine, Ida Tarbell, made many requests to interview Rockefeller
but all were refused. Finally some friends in Cleveland arranged for her to attend
his Sunday school incognito. That was her first and only glimpse of the tycoon face
to face. Her impressions of the real Rockefeller is found in part two.

After the publication of this exposé, McClure's Magazine began to experience

financial and other difficulties. Rockefeller moved heaven and earth to keep this
information from the American people as he plundered and robbed the nation and
the world.... In no other case in history was the Jesuit Oath more completely
fulfilled as in the Rockefeller dynasty:

"You have been taught your duty as a spy, to gather all statistics, facts
and information in your power from every source; to ingratiate yourself
into the confidence of the family circle of Protestants and heretics of every
class and character, as well as that of the merchant, the banker, the
lawyer, among the schools and universities, in parliaments and
legislatures, and the judiciaries and councils of state, and to be all things
to all men, for the Pope's sake, whose servants we are unto death."

And the Standard Oil Company did exactly that in EVERY country of the world!!

“Under his silk skull-cap he seems like an old monk of the Inquisition
such as one sees in the Spanish picture galleries” (John D. Rockefeller, part
2).

Part One of the John D. Rockefeller Character Study.

Part Two of the John D. Rockefeller Character

Study.
Eliza Davidson Rockefeller, William A. Rockefeller, Mrs. John. D. Rockefeller.
mother of John D. father of John. D.
Rockefeller. Rockefeller.

William Rockefeller, brother of John Frank Rockefeller, brother of John D.

D.

The house in which John D.

Rockefeller was born near Richford,
NY. Mr. Rockefeller's 400 acre estate called Forest
Hill, six miles east of Cleveland.
Mr. Rockefeller's former New York Mr. Rockefeller's town house in Cleveland.
City home, 4 West, 54st.

Mr. Rockefeller's home at Pocantico Hills on the Hudson River in New York
State.

Return to Rome, Rockefeller, the U.S. and Standard Oil

John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study

by

Ida M. Tarbell

Author of "The History of the Standard Oil Company," "Life of Lincoln,"

ETC.
 Illustrated with Portraits

Part One.

"A prince should earnestly endeavor to gain the reputation of kindness, clemency,
piety, justice, and fidelity to his engagements. He ought to possess all these good
qualities BUT STILL RETAIN SUCH POWER OVER HIMSELF AS TO DISPLAY
THEIR OPPOSITES WHENEVER IT MAY BE EXPEDIENT. . . He should make it a
rule, above all things, never to utter anything which does not breathe of kindness,
justice, good faith, and piety; this last quality it is most important for him to appear
to possess as men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All
men have eyes but few have the gift of penetration. Every one sees your exterior,
but few can discern what you have in your heart." — Machiavelli — The Prince.
Chap. xviii. "

John D. Rockefeller is without question the most conspicuous type of our

present dominating commercial man. "The most important man in the
world" a great and serious newspaper passionately devoted to democracy
calls him, and unquestionably this is the popular measure of him. His
importance lies not so much in the fact that he is the richest individual in
the world, with the control of property which that entails; it lies in the fact
that his wealth, and the power springing from it, appeal to the most
universal and powerful passion in this country — the passion for money.
John D. Rockefeller, measured by our national ambition, is the most
successful man in the world — the man who has got the most of what men
most want. How did he get it, the eager youth asks, and asking, strives to
imitate him as nearly as ability and patience permit. Thus he has become
an inspirer of American ideals, and his methods have been crystallized
into a great national commercial code.

Nor is this all. Mr. Rockefeller distributes money in charity and in

endowments. If not our first, he is certainly our second philanthropist; the
amount of the money given being the standard. All over the land those
who direct great educational, charitable and religious institutions are
asking, "Can we not get something from him?" Receiving his bequests
they become at least the tacit supporters of the thing for which he stands
— that is, John D. Rockefeller exercises a powerful control over the very
sources of American intellectual and religious inspiration.
Now a man who possesses this kind of influence cannot be allowed to
live in the dark. The public not only has the right to know what sort of a
man he is; it is the duty of the public to know. How else can the public
discharge the most solemn obligation it owes to itself and to the future, to
keep the springs of its higher life clean? Who then is this John D.
Rockefeller? Whence did he come? By what qualities did he grow to such
power? Has he proved his right to the power? Does he give to the public
whence he has drawn his wealth a just return in ideas, in patriotism, in
devotion to social betterment, in generous living, in inspiring personal
character? Has John D. Rockefeller made good? From time immemorial
men who have risen to power have had to face this question. Kings,
tyrants, chieftains, since the world began have stood or have fallen as
they have convinced the public that they were giving or not giving a just
return for the power allowed them. The time is here when Mr. Rockefeller
must face the verdict of the public by which he lives.

As to Mr. Rockefeller's origin it is typically American. He sprang from

one of those migrating families which, coming to this country in the
seventeenth century, has moved westward with each generation seeking
a betterment of condition. He and his brothers were the first great
product of a restless family searching a firm footing on new soil. The first
word heard of the Rockefeller family in Richford, Tioga County, New
York, where John D. Rockefeller was born, was in the early 1830's when
his grandfather, Godfrey Rockefeller, moved to that community from
Mud Creek, Massachusetts. There are still alive in Tioga County many
men and women who remember Godfrey Rockefeller. It is not a pleasant
description they give of him — a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and
mean in spirit, but held to a certain decency by a wife of such strong
intellect and determined character that she impressed herself
unforgettably on the community.

Godfrey Rockefeller had not been long in Richford when he was followed
by his eldest son — William A. Rockefeller — a man of twenty-three or
twenty-four years of age. There seem to have been other Rockefellers, for
the family was sufficiently numerous and conspicuous to cause the farm
in West Hill near Richford, where they settled, to be dubbed "Rockefeller
settlement" — a name it still bears.
It is with William A. Rockefeller, father of John, that we have to do here.
There is enough which is authentic to be gleaned about him to form a
picture of a striking character. William A. Rockefeller was a tall and
powerful man with keen straightforward eyes, a man in whom strength,
and fearlessness, and joy in life, unfettered by education or love of
decency, ran riot. The type is familiar enough in every farming
settlement, the type of the country sport, who hunts, fishes, gambles,
races horses and carouses in the low and mean ways which the country
alone affords. He owned a costly rifle, and was famous as a shot. He was
a dare-devil with horses. He had no trade — spurned the farm. Indeed he
had all the vices save one — he never drank. He was a famous trickster,
too; thus, when he first reached Richford he is said to have called himself
a peddler — a deaf and dumb peddler, and for some time he actually
succeeded in making his acquaintances in Richford write out their
remarks to him on a slate. Why he wished to deceive them no one knows.
Perhaps sheer mischief, perhaps a desire to hear things which would
hardly be talked before a stranger with good ears.

It was not long after he came to Richford that he began to go off on long
trips — peddling trips some said. Later he became known as a quack
doctor, and his absences were supposed to be spent selling a medicine he
concocted himself. Irregular and wild as his life undoubtedly was, his
strength and skill and daring, his frankness, his careful dress, for he paid
great attention to his clothes, as well as the mystery surrounding the
occupation which kept him looking so prosperous, made him a favorite
with the young and reckless and, unhappily, with women. On one of his
trips he met in Moravia, New York, the daughter of a prosperous farmer,
Eliza Davison. It is said that the girl married him in the face of strong
opposition of her family. However that may be, it is certain that about
1837, William A. Rockefeller brought Eliza Davison to the Rockefeller
settlement as his wife, and here three children were born, the second of
whom — the record of his birth is dated July 8, 1839 — was named John
Davison.

In 1843 William A Rockefeller moved his family to a farm near Moravia,

Cayuga County. The reputation he had built up in Richford as a "sporting
man" was duplicated in Moravia. He soon became the leader in all that
was reckless and wild in the community, and was classed by the
respectable and steady-going as a dangerous character on whom no
doubt much was fastened that did not belong. It may be for this reason, as
well as because of his frequent long and unaccounted for absences, that
he is still classed popularly in Moravia as one of the gang who operated
the "underground horse railroad" — and ran off horses from various
parts of the country. There is absolutely no proof of this, but the
conviction and sentence to the State prison, in 1850, of three of his closest
pals for horse-stealing coupled with his bad reputation made many of his
disapproving neighbors fix the crime equally on him, and to-day old men
in Moravia nod their heads sagely and say, "He was too smart to be
caught."

There is an indictment against William A. Rockefeller for a more serious

crime (rape) than horse-stealing in the records of the County, for 1849,
and it is quite probable that he left Moravia under compulsion. At all
events, about 1850 he again moved his family, which now consisted of his
wife and five children, to Owego, New York. The family remained in
Owego but three years, and then moved to Strongsville, Ohio, twelve or
fifteen miles southwest of Cleveland. A year later they left Strongsville
for a country settlement, about seven miles south of Cleveland, called
Parma; and from there they went, in 1857, to Cleveland, moving into a
comfortable brick house, which William A. Rockefeller had built for
them.

In the Ohio communities where he lived the legends of "Old Bill," as he is

popularly spoken of to-day by his former acquaintances, are identical
with those in Richford, Moravia, and Owego. They all remember him as a
man who came home but rarely, who was supposed to sell some kind of
medicine — a "cancer doctor," is the opinion of one, a "quack doctor," of
another, and there are those who declare he was a gambler. In Ohio, as in
New York, he always created a profound impression on his visits home,
by his clothes, his good horse, and his crack shooting. "He was a rippin'
good one," an old associate in Parma declares. "How he would shoot —
bang-e-tee-bang — you'd thought there was a whole army around!" There
are many sly winks at the occupations and morals of William A.
Rockefeller by his old neighbors, but there is a universal verdict that he
was a "good fellow," jolly, generous, and kindly.

When William A. Rockefeller took his family to Ohio, his oldest son, John
Davison, was a lad of fourteen years. A quiet, grave boy by all accounts,
doing steadily and well the thing he was set at. Up to this time his
training had been that of the ordinary country boy. He had gone to a
district school a few months of the year, and the rest of the time had
worked and played as a boy ordinarily does in a country settlement,
chopping wood, caring for a horse, milking cows, weeding garden,
raising chickens and turkeys. Nowhere does he seem to have made an
impression, save by his silence and gravity. "He never mixed much with
the rest of us," one old man tells you. "He seemed to be always thinking,"
says another. "He was different from his brothers and different from the
rest of us," says a third.

No doubt his mother had had much to do in shaping the boy's mind to
serious living. Dominated as this daughter of a prosperous farmer
probably was by a spirit of narrow and stern New England
conventionality, she must have come to hate the lawless and suspicious
ways of this likeable sinner, this quack-doctor horse-jockey, this loose-
tongued rake she had married, and all the arrogant respectability within
her must have risen in a fierce effort to save appearances, and to force
these children of his into good and regular standing. There is a something
in the fine, keen face of John D. Rockefeller's mother which recalls the
face of Lætitia Ramolino, mother of Napoleon Bonaparte, and convinces
one that she could not but have been a power with her boys, though there
is little enough to go on in trustworthy tradition and records. That she
kept her children in school and church is certain. Old friends of hers at
Strongsville and Parma, Ohio, speak of her with profound respect — a
good woman who made her boys do right, who did not allow them to
read novels on Sunday, who "worried over saloons" in her vicinity. It is
quite probable that it was her influence which persuaded her husband to
send John to school in Cleveland soon after the family moved to Ohio.

The boy spent a quiet year in the town studying diligently, so his former
schoolmaster has testified, his only outside interest being in the Baptist
Church and Sunday-school — to which he had been directed by a wise
landlady. In 1855, after a year of study, young Rockefeller left school and
began to look for work. It was a hard time in the West, the year of 1855,
and it is quite possible that William A. Rockefeller had not been so
successful as formerly in his wandering trade or trades, whatever they
may have been, and that he felt it time for his son John to do something
for himself. At all events, in the summer of that year, John D. Rockefeller
made his first attempt to get a footing in business.

The struggle and discouragement of the days he spent walking the streets
of Cleveland looking for work made a deep impression on Mr.
Rockefeller. Again and again in his later years he has referred to the
experience in the little talks he has given at Sunday-school and church
gatherings. Again and again he has expressed his lasting gratitude that
finally he did find a position. It was a modest enough one, that of a clerk
in a warehouse on the Cleveland docks. How modest, Mr. Rockefeller has
frequently explained using as authority one of the few "documents" of his
early life which he has seen fit to reveal to the public. This document is
his first account book, "Ledger A" he calls it. It is not too much to say that
this book has been more conspicuous than the Bible itself in the religious
instruction which John D. Rockefeller has given for years to Baptist
Sunday-schools. This is not strange, for in Mr. Rockefeller's own
judgment its brief entries explain his success. The little book is most
significant. No wonder, as he once told his Sunday-school class, holding
up "Ledger A" to their attentive eyes: "You could not get that book from
me for all the modern ledgers in New York, nor for all that they would
bring. It almost brings tears to my eyes when I read over this little book,
and it fills me with a sense of gratitude I cannot express."

From this venerated volume we learn how much young Rockefeller

earned back there in 1855 when he started out for himself. It was a small
enough sum, $50 for the first three months; then, beginning with January
1, 1856, $25 a month. We also learn from "Ledger A" what he did with his
earnings. There is no doubt but that, young as he was, he applied to the
money he received those two vital principles in fortune making: Make
good bargains; save your money and let it work for you. We have his
own word for believing this, taken from the personal reminiscences
which, from time to time, appear in his religious instructions. The first
lesson he learned by buying cord-wood: "I was taught to do as much
business at the age of ten or eleven as it was possible for me to do," he
told the Bible class one day. "Among other things I was sent over the hills
to buy cord-wood for the use of the family. I knew what cord-wood, solid
beech and maple-wood, was. My father told me to select only solid wood,
straight wood, and not put any limbs in it or any punky wood. That was
good training for me. I did not need my father to tell me, or anybody else,
how many feet it took to make a cord of wood. I did not require the presence
of anybody to enable me to secure from the man who sold that wood good
measure."

"I know some people, especially some young men," he said in the same
talk, "find it difficult to keep a little money in their pocket-book. I learned
to keep money, and, as we have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in
my pocket. I was taught that it was the thing to do to keep the money and
take care of it. Among the early experiences that were helpful to me that I
recollect with pleasure, was one of working a few days for a neighbor
digging potatoes — an enterprising and thrifty farmer who could dig a
great many potatoes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of
age, and he kept me busy from morning until night. It was a ten-hour
day.

"And as I was saving these little sums, I soon learned I could get as much
interest for $50 loaned at seven per cent — the legal rate in the state of
New York at that time for a year — as I could earn by digging potatoes
ten days. The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good
thing to let money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money. I
have tried to remember that in every sense."

It was these two principles, then, Get the worth of your money, Let your
money work for you, that he applied to his income in 1855. One must
live, but how frugally it can be done! Young John boarded himself, and
from November 24, 1855 to April, 1856, he spent $9.09 for clothing. "It is
true," Mr. Rockefeller explained to his Sunday-school in calling their
attention to these figures, " I could not secure the most fashionable cut of
clothing. I remember I bought mine then of a cheap clothier. He sold me
clothing cheap, clothing such as I could pay for, and it was a great deal
better than buying clothing that I could not pay for." Satisfactory as his
expenditures in 1855 and '56 appear, on the whole, to Mr. Rockefeller, he
is obliged to condemn himself to-day for one item on the little ledger,
made in this first winter of his breadwinning. "I see also here another
item which I am inclined to think is extravagant, because I used to wear
mittens. The item is a pair of fur gloves for which I paid $2.50."
The little income was not only made honorably and cheerfully to suffice
for Mr. Rockefeller's support, it was stretched to cover the obligations to
church and charity which the boy seems to have felt as forcibly and as
early as he did the need of good bargains and of saving. In a period of
four months in which his earnings were perhaps $100, he gave away,
according to "Ledger A," $5.58. The items as Mr. Rockefeller once read
them at a church gathering are interesting:

"I begin on the 25th day of November," he said: "Missionary cause, ten
cents; Mr. Downie, one of our young ministers, ten cents. . . 'Slip rent' —
pew rent — one dollar. December 16th, Sabbath-school, five cents.
Present for Mr. Farrar, the superintendent, twenty-five cents. Five Points
Mission, New York, twelve cents. The Macedonian, a little religious
paper, ten cents. Present to teacher, Deacon Sked, twenty-five cents.
January 16th I had something left over for benevolence: 'Missionary
cause, six cents; the poor in the church, ten cents' — all on one Sunday!
February 3d I gave ten cents more to the same cause; the same day ten
cents for foreign missions. March 2d, foreign missions again, ten cents
more. . . Then, on the 2d day of March, ten cents for the poor of the
church; March 3d, pew rent one dollar. March 6th, foreign missions, ten
cents. Then I went outside of our church, and on the 21st of March gave
one dollar to the Young Men's Christian Association."

And so "Ledger A" goes on with a painstaking record of every cent

received and expended for a period of several years. Every cent earned
could be accounted for, not a loose thread in his weaving, and one cannot
help but feel that each particular penny was spent only after deliberation,
and perhaps prayer.

And all this time, as the little ledger shows, Mr. Rockefeller was saving
money. He was soon to have a place for it. Two years after he took this
first position, a difference arose between him and his employer on the
question of salary. Mr. Rockefeller thought he ought to have $800 a year.
His employer was willing to give but $700. "Meanwhile," to quote from
Mr. Rockefeller himself, "the opportunity was offered to engage in
business with a young man who was ten years older than myself. I had
saved a little money and, accordingly on April 1st, with $800 or $900 that
I had saved up and a few thousands which my father loaned me at ten
per cent until I should become of age, I contributed my part of the capital,
which was $4,000.

"We were prosperous from the beginning. We did a business of $500,000

produce commission for the first year. Our profits were not large — I
think $4,400 — but I think it was better for me than the $800 which I had
asked."

And so Mr. Rockefeller was doing an independent business and was

making money. With each succeeding year his business and his profits
grew, and these profits he handled as he had handled the money he
earned as a boy chopping wood. He put them away to work for him. He
spent as he had spent when his income was $25.00 a month, with minute
attention to every cent. Watching what it cost to eat and drink and clothe
himself, calculating what it cost to marry, estimating the proportion he
could afford to give to the church and to charity — and always putting a
little aside. But this was not all, he was demonstrating that he possessed
other qualities even more essential than the fundamentals with which he
had started out — he was showing he had the instinct for opportunities,
the courage to seize them though they might be far bigger than the means
at his command, the power to persuade men to lend him money — the
patience to stick by enterprises until they had justified his faith. This,
then, was the man in 1860 — frugal, calculating, money-bent — cautious
in trade yet daring, quick to seize yet ready to wait, and withal "good —"
that is a steady attendant at church and Sunday-school, serious — that is
eschewing all amusements which might be called frivolous, the theater,
cards, the dance.

As time went on, these characteristics became more conspicuous. They

led him to new lines of business — one in particular — the refining of oil
— a new industry in which it was plain that there were great profits. He
gave himself to this venture, body and soul one may truthfully say,
working with a persistency which put day laborers to shame. He watched
details with a hawk's eye — not a cent must go astray — not a pint of oil
be lost — not a rivet or bung be wasted. "Pay a profit to nobody," he
began to say, and it was he and his partners who, themselves, went to Oil
Creek for oil, and so saved commissions; he who made his own barrels
and so saved a middleman's profits; he who hauled and loaded, bought
and sold. Nobody but him must make a cent on his oil, from the well to
the lamp. It was combine, save, watch. A sort of mania for saving seemed
to possess him. It was over this he brooded from morning to night, and it
was the realization of this alone which awakened in his face, already
grave with incessant reflections, a sign of joy. Indeed, the men who
worked there in Cleveland at his elbow will tell you to-day that the only
signs of hilarity John D. Rockefeller ever showed in those days were over
a good bargain. This would make him clap his hands. Let it be a very
good bargain, and he would throw up his hat — kick up his heels, hug
his informant. This was joy for him, this was the satisfaction of passion —
this good bargain.

And as he succeeded his desire for wealth seemed, to his friends, to grow
even more rapidly than his business. "I am bound to be rich, BOUND to
be rich, BOUND to be rich," they report him as saying. His conviction that
it was the duty of a man to get and keep all the money he could, a
conviction which seems to have been born in him, was becoming a
passion for wealth. By 1870 he was a rich man; his friends said he would
go far. The city histories began to pay him profound respect. "He occupies
a position in our business circles second to but few," said the biographer
in "Cleveland Past and Present" in 1869. "Close application to one kind of
business, an avoidance of all positions of honorary character that cost
time, keeping everything pertaining to his business in so methodical a
manner that he knows every night how he stands with the world." This
was the man at thirty as he appeared to his admiring townsmen — a very
logical development he appears of the boy who kept "Ledger A."

But there was something going on in the head of this man of thirty, of
which his Cleveland biographer did not know, or knowing discreetly
passed by. It was the enlargement of his youthful faculty for driving a
good bargain. It is quite probable that Mr. Rockefeller, natural trader that
he was, learned early in his career that unless one has some special and
exclusive advantage over rivals in business, native ability, thrift, energy,
however great they may be, are never sufficient to put an end to
competition. Mr. Rockefeller certainly saw by 1868 that he had no
legitimate superiority over those competing with him in Cleveland which
would ever enable him to be anything more than one of the big men in
his line. He must have seen clearly by this time that nothing but some
advantage not given by nature or recognized by the laws of fair play in
business could ever make him a dictator in the industry to which he was
giving his attention. But he was beginning to see there was such an
advantage to be had if one were wily and patient enough. It lay in
transportation, in getting his carrying done cheaper than his neighbors
could. It was a very seductive idea to a man with a passion for wealth.

There were difficulties in the way. Men generally held then, as now, that
it was not fair for the railroads to allow one shipper a better rate than
another. The common law was known to disapprove the practice. The
theory that the railroad held its right of way from the people, and
therefore must be just to the people, treating them without
discrimination, was familiar enough, so familiar that the railroads never
dared show favoritism save secretly. But under threats of loss of business,
under promise of larger or more regular shipments, under chances of
sharing in the profits of the enterprises they favored, they did do it
secretly. That is, rebate giving then, as now, was regarded as one of those
lower business practices which characterize commerce at all periods, and
against which men of honor struggle, and of which men of greed take
advantage. Naturally, one would expect Mr. Rockefeller to spurn such an
advantage. The one thing for which he was conspicuous outside of his
zeal for business was his devotion to the church, one of whose cardinal
teachings is "whatsoever ye would that men do to you do ye even so to
them." Naturally, one demands a man of his profession to be keenly alive
to degrading business practices and keen to overthrow them. But,
although Mr. Rockefeller no doubt heard weekly from the pulpit that the
"law and the prophets" were all summed up in doing as you would be
done by, it is quite probable he had never seen any connection between
the doctrine and railroad rebates. He was not an educated man. He had
evidently never thought seriously of anything but making money. His
religious training seems to have been purely formal, awakening him
merely to the duty of attending to devotional exercises and giving to the
church. So, when he realized that the rebate was the means by which he
could gain control of the oil industry in Cleveland, he went after it,
ignorant of, or indifferent to the ethical quality of the act.

His beginnings in discrimination seem to have been small — but their

effect in increasing his business and in decreasing that of his rivals was
large — and as Mr. Rockefeller saw in increased profits the effect of the
advantages gained, he became eager to increase these advantages, eager
to secure them by permanent contracts. The question became one of the
chief concerns of his business life. Finally he and certain of his friends
whose ambitions were similar to his own, and who appreciated as he did
the power the railroad rebate had to destroy a competitor's property, hit
on a scheme familiar to readers of this magazine, but repeated here
because so vital in the development of Mr. Rockefeller's character. These
gentlemen proposed to certain high railroad dignitaries, W. H.
Vanderbilt, Thomas Scott, Jay Gould, H. W. Clarke, and General
McClellan, to allow them a rebate on all the freight they shipped and to
allow nobody else one. They proposed not only that they be allowed to
ship cheaper than anybody else, but that the extra money their rivals paid
to the railroads be not kept by the roads but paid over to them! They also
asked to be allowed to examine weekly the shipping books of the
transportation lines that they might know how much and to whom their
competitors shipped. It was a strong scheme even for the strong stomachs
of the men to whom it was presented. Old Commodore Vanderbilt told
"Billy," as he called his son, to let it alone. Even Tom Scott balked at it
from the first.

But the men who had devised the Southern (or South) Improvement
Company, as the plan was called, were in earnest. They knew that if they
could get the contracts they asked, they could control one of the richest
industries of the country, and they turned their whole force to overcome
the objections raised by the railroad presidents. And to do it they
hesitated at no misrepresentation, found no falsehood too big to swallow.
"This makes you a monopoly," the railroads objected. "It will ruin
everybody outside of your combination." "But we have already the great
bulk of the business and we are going to take all in," which was untrue.
The gentlemen had in their company only about one-tenth of the
manufacturing end of the industry they aimed to control. "It puts the
producer at your mercy," objected Mr. Scott. "But the producers want the
business regulated and are going to join." Again untrue, for the producers
knew nothing of what was afoot.

They were a persuasive body — those South Improvement advocates,

and they had great arguments. "Sign these contracts, and we shall control
the business, then you will have but one party to deal with. Think of the
ease in handling your freight? Sign these contracts and we will divide the
trade, thus saving you the wear and tear of securing your quota—
preventing rate wars. Think of the profits!" And the contracts were signed
— secretly of course. And when they were signed what did Mr.
Rockefeller do? He swooped down on a great industry in his home town
with the proof that henceforth he was not only to have rates fully one
hundred per cent cheaper than his competitors, but he was to have the
extra one hundred per cent they paid! And he told them they had better
sell — at his price; twenty-one out of twenty-six did, and by March, 1872,
young Mr. Rockefeller was practically the only oil refiner in Cleveland,
Ohio, where three months before there had been twenty-six.

Now, as already intimated, it is supposable that Mr. Rockefeller when he

went into the above scheme had never considered the moral and public
questions involved in it. But if he went into it without thought,
immediately consideration of its ethical meaning was forced upon him by
a hundred throats. Scarcely had he become master of the industry in
Cleveland, when the nature of the contracts he had made became public,
and a frightful uproar broke out. The men injured pointed out the
unfairness of railroad discriminations, the dishonesty of the railroad in
collecting from them and actually paying the money over to Mr.
Rockefeller. The newspapers lashed the scheme. The State legislatures of
Ohio and Pennsylvania both hurried to introduce clauses into their
constitution forbidding such practices as those contemplated. Congress
stripped the company for the public to see its meaning, and called it a
conspiracy. At the same time the railroads, frightened by the uproar
made, signed written contracts with the oil producers to abolish forever
the rebate system from the oil industry.1 Mr. Rockefeller received enough
instruction, in the fundamental principle of fair play and in the duties of
the common carrier, in the spring of 1872, to have convinced his moral
sense of wrong-doing and his reason of the injustice of the rebate system
if he had been open to conviction. He knew now, if he had not before,
that the scheme he had gone into was bound to ruin men, that by it he
enriched himself at the expense of others. Now what did Mr. Rockefeller
do? Did he say, "Here, I went into that without realizing its injustice. I
had never thought of the railroad as anything but a private business. I
supposed I had the same right to bargain for transportation that I had for
barrels. I see now that the railroad is a public servant, bound to treat
everybody alike. I see that there is an ethical question, and, of course, I
want to be on the right side. I withdraw, and I will join the men of the oil
country in these contracts they have made with the railroads stopping
forever this whole vicious business?"

No, Mr. Rockefeller said nothing of the kind. He went to Mr. Vanderbilt
and, by a series of arguments and threats easy enough to divine, he
obtained a secret rebate on his shipments, not so sweeping as he had
planned, but sufficient to give an advantage over other men; and he did
not cease his efforts until he had not only a rebate on his shipments over
all the oil-carrying roads but a drawback on all the oil his competitors
shipped over those roads. That is, at the moment when Mr. Rockefeller
had such a chance of rendering valuable service to the public as rarely
comes to a man, he deliberately refused it. While the whole body of men
in his trade were allied openly to put an end to a vicious and unjust
practice, he bent all his great energies to perpetuating it for his own
benefit. Did it cost him a struggle — a struggle with what men call
conscience? Nobody knows. There is a tradition in Cleveland that it was
at this time of great anxiety that Mr. Rockefeller laid the foundation of a
stomach difficulty, which for years limited him to the diet of the monk
and the pauper. It may have been a moral struggle which made him walk
the floor nights. It may have been fear, for threats of violence rained upon
him from an outraged industry. It may have been the consideration of
new plans for getting the privileges which an indignant public had
stripped from him. However that may be, it is certain that Mr.
Rockefeller's conscience and courage withstood both public disapproval
and public education, and that the principles of getting rich by the use of
privileges contrary to the public good and to the spirit of the laws became
a cardinal one with him from that date. This episode of the South
Improvement Company may probably be called the turning point in the
character of John D. Rockefeller — the point at which he faced, as
probably every man does some day, the necessity of a conscious life-
choice between the thing which is good and that which is bad — and he
chose, knowingly (to believe it was not knowingly is to believe he was not
intelligent), the thing which was bad.

But what could have induced him so to defy public sentiment and the
common law of his country? What could have induced him to break the
"law and the prophets" of that faith which he pretended ruled his life?
There seems to have been nothing but the size of the stakes for which he
was playing. Mr. Rockefeller had seen the oil industry of Cleveland fall
into his hands by the panic which the contracts with the South
Improvement Company had caused. He saw clearly enough that if the
essential features of those contracts could be put into force, that is, if he
could ship cheaper than his competitors, could get back part of what they
paid, and could establish a system of espionage on their business, the oil
industry of the country would be his in time. And then and there he
began deliberately to put into effect his plans for driving all men out of
the oil business whom he did not need in it, in order to perfect the great
organization which we now know as the Standard Oil Company.

But when a man deliberately decides to build up his fortune by taking

advantage of practices against which the moral sense of his day has
pronounced, as in 1872 it had loudly pronounced against railroad
discriminations, of practices to which he knows the moral law is opposed,
he must have the courage of his decision, he must be prepared to sustain
his determination by any or all of those practices which are essential in
supporting a deed which society declares contrary to her good. He must
be prepared to conceal, to spy, to threaten, to bribe, to perjure himself,
and he must be prepared to harden his heart to the sufferings of those
who fall in his path. This is what it has always cost to do a thing of which
the moral sense of the world disapproves. This is what it always will cost.
There is no evidence whatever that Mr. Rockefeller has ever hesitated
once, in thirty-two years, at the price demanded. He has faced the need
with unwavering courage. He has paid, like a man who has weighed the
price of wrong-doing and decided to pay it.

From the first, concealment was the very key to the game. Mr.
Rockefeller's skill in concealing the truth was masterly. His is not a frank
nature. He was a silent boy — a silent young man. With years the habit of
silence became the habit of concealment. It was not long after the
Standard Oil Company was founded, before it was said in Cleveland that
its offices were the most difficult in the town to enter, Mr. Rockefeller the
most difficult man to see. If a stranger got in to see any one he was
anxious. "Who is that man?" he asked an associate nervously one day,
calling him away when the latter was chatting with a stranger. "An old
friend, Mr. Rockefeller." "What does he want here? Be careful. Don't let
him find out anything." "But he is my friend, Mr. Rockefeller. He does not
want to know anything. He has come to see me." "You never can tell. Be
very careful, very careful." This caution gradually developed into a
Chinese wall of seclusion. This suspicion extended, not only to all
outsiders but most insiders. Nobody in the Standard Oil Company was
allowed to know any more than was necessary for him to know to do his
business. Men who have been officers in the Standard Oil Company say
that they have been told, when asking for information about the
condition of the business, "You'd better not know. If you know nothing
you can tell nothing."

As the business developed and its practices became more hostile to public
good, one of its chief aims was to protect itself from publicity. It became
the practice to conceal whatever advantages it gained and whatever
relations it formed — if charged with them, to deny them even under
oath. "You were a member of the Southern Improvement Company?" he
was asked once by an investigating committee. "I was not," he said. Yet
Mr. Rockefeller was a member of this company, owned 180 shares of its
stock — was one of the two men who stood by it until public indignation
overthrew it.2 "The Standard Oil Company owns and operates its
refineries at Cleveland, Ohio, and its refinery at Bayonne, New Jersey; it
has no other refineries nor any interest in any other refineries, nor does
the Standard Oil Company operate or control in the United States any
other refineries of crude petroleum," he swore in 1880, when for five
years the Standard Oil Company had owned by direct purchase the
largest refineries in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburg [sic].

Undoubtedly Mr. Rockefeller swore falsely because in his judgment

secrecy was essential to carrying out his purpose, and carrying out his
purpose was vastly more important in his opinion than telling the truth.
That is, he had no interest in truth when it interfered with business.
Business is the higher law; success in it justifies itself! So absolute is his
faith in this policy of concealment that he has for years endured
misrepresentation, jeers, absurd canards, as general and contemptuous
ridicule as any man in America, even in politics, has endured without
reply. His self-control has been masterful — he knows, nobody better,
that to answer is to invite discussion, to answer is to call attention to the
facts in the case. "Why do you not deny these slanders, John?" a friend
once asked him, as they walked a path in one of his great parks. "Do you
see that worm there?" Mr. Rockefeller said, pointing to an earth-worm
which squirmed on the walk, at his feet. "If I let it go, it will disappear
into the ground. If I trample on it, I will call the attention of every passer-
by to it." It is a great philosophy — a very great philosophy for one with
Mr. Rockefeller's ambition. Its difficulty is that the day comes when it no
longer works. It has come for John D. Rockefeller. Who is left in the
country so unsophisticated as to believe Mr. Rockefeller, except upon
personal knowledge that he is telling the truth? Witness the cynical sneers
that have gone over the country recently at the public statements of the
Standard Oil Company.

Along with concealment of his own affairs went watchfulness of other

people's affairs. From the beginning he saw how useful it is to know what
your neighbors are doing. It was not difficult to learn. Business men in
Cleveland in those days were openly loquacious. It was a frank,
expansive period. What was the fun if you could not talk? Mr. Rockefeller
was a good listener. He helped his friend to full confession by his gentle
and respectful attention and his occasional friendly questions. As time
went on he did more than listen to those who were willing to talk. He set
his employees to finding out things. He began to tabulate what they
learned. But this was not enough. He began to employ men in the
concerns whose business interested him to give him information — and
this information was tabulated. In time he developed a system so perfect
that its results are to-day actually a matter of elaborate and expensive
bookkeeping. It is something Napoleon never achieved in the palmiest
days of his cabinet noir.

The knowledge he obtained he used with rare skill in working on men.

He knew men — whether they were the kind he wanted in his concern —
or whether he preferred they go out of the business. If he wanted them,
he treated them as one treats the man he wants, generously — if he did
not want them he drove them from the industry; if possible he did this by
frightening or bullying them. Creating a panic in his opponent's mind
became, indeed, one of his chief commercial weapons. The success he had
had in Cleveland, in 1872, in putting an end to competition by creating
panic, had strengthened into a conviction his instinct that this sort of
practice was effective. To all who approached him in the early years to
consult about conditions, he took a hopeless view. "There is no hope for
any of us, but the weakest must go first," he told a hard-pressed visitor
one day in 1873, a year when he made about thirty-three and one-half per
cent on his capital. And if the unhappy victim of the condition he was
fighting to perpetuate did not yield to his depressing news and sell, he
had a still more forcible argument. "We have ways of making money of
which you know nothing. The oil business belongs to us, we have money
laid aside to fight anybody who gets in our way." It is hard to
overestimate the psychological effect this arrogant assumption that the oil
business belonged to the Standard Oil Company, has had for thirty years
on Mr. Rockefeller's fortunes. This declaration, coming from him and
gradually accepted and announced by the whole machine he was
creating, grew in importance as he made it good — for he made it good.
A time came when Mr. Rockefeller and his colleagues practically owned
the great industry to which he had laid siege, and all who lived by it
outside of his dominion felt that their tenure of life was at his mercy.

And if those who had what he wanted refused to yield to panic, there was
the machine devised expressly for such cases. It worked as regularly, as
faultlessly, as irresistibly as that Chamber of the Inquisition, the walls of
which slowly closed upon the doomed prisoner until he was forced into
the pit of unknown horrors. It cut down his supply, it interrupted his
transportation, it crowded him from the market. He was not to share in
the bounty of Nature — not to know the freedom of the road, not to stand
in the marts to trade. The industry belonged to Mr. Rockefeller.

Now, it takes time to secure and to keep that which the public has
decided it is not for the general good that you have. It takes time and
caution to perfect anything which must be concealed. It takes time to
crush men who are pursuing legitimate trade. But one of Mr. Rockefeller's
most impressive characteristics is patience. There never was a more
patient man, or one who could dare more while he waited. The folly of
hurrying, the folly of discouragement, for one who would succeed, went
hand in hand. Everything must be ready before he acted, but while you
wait you must prepare, must think, work. "You must put in, if you would
take out." His instinct for the money opportunity in things was amazing,
his perception of the value of seizing this or that particular invention,
plant, market, was unerring. He was like a general who, besieging a city
surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field,
and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is
commanded. And nothing was too small; the corner grocery in
Browntown, the humble refining-still on Oil Creek, the shortest private
pipe line. Nothing, for little things grow.
These are not pleasant practices, but Mr. Rockefeller had conceived a
great purpose, and had set himself resolutely to realize it. The man who is
bent on big accomplishment often gives scant scrutiny to the means he
employs; the end is the thing. It becomes a sort of fetich [sic] — to which,
as to Moloch, one sacrifices even his own flesh and blood. But, while one
can conceive how Mr. Rockefeller's vision might have become so
distorted that he was willing to sacrifice all the commands of his religion
to achieve his ambition, one would rather expect that in his private
dealings he would seek relief by generous — even quixoticly [sic]
generous — dealings. But business never ceases to be business with Mr.
Rockefeller, whether he is building a corporation or dealing with a friend.
That is, the end with him is not the completion of a great idea, it is
money. Take the incident of his acquisition, in 1895, of 2500 shares of
Standard Oil stock which had belonged to one of his boyhood friends,
James Corrigan, of Cleveland. The tale is public property, being all
written in legal documents.

Mr. Corrigan was one of the many enterprising young men who, like Mr.
Rockefeller, took advantage in the '60's of the discovery of petroleum, to
build up a plant for its refining. He brought to the business something
even Mr. Rockefeller himself never was able to give it — the ingenuity
and resourcefulness of the born inventor. The processes he devised made
him prosperous — so prosperous that he attracted the attention of the
Standard Oil Company, and about 1877 he began to have trouble. He
could not get the crude oil he bought on Oil Creek shipped to Cleveland.
The railroads refused him cars — delayed to run them, even if they were
loaded. It was not only getting oil which began to trouble him, it was
disposing of his product. At last, tired of opposition, he leased his works
to the Standard Oil Company, and went to Europe to look up the oil
business there. In 1883 he returned and sold his plant for 3000 shares of
the Standard Oil Trust certificates.

After selling his oil property, Mr. Corrigan embarked in the iron business.
He and Mr. Frank Rockefeller, a brother of John D., bought the Franklin
Mine in the Lake Superior region — a mine rich in Bessemer ore. He put
$300,000 into a fleet of lake propellers and schooners, and he went into
other similar enterprises, all of which were prospering when, early in the
'90's, the hard times in the iron business came on. Mr. Corrigan saw
himself obliged to have money. What more natural than that he should
apply to his old friend, John D. Rockefeller, the brother of his principal
partner? Mr. Rockefeller seems to have loaned freely — first $46,000, then
$80,000, then $45,000. It was a good investment, for Mr. Corrigan paid
him seven per cent interest, and secured him with shares of Standard Oil
Trust certificates and a mortgage on his vessels; so good that when Mr.
Rockefeller learned that Mr. Corrigan had borrowed $125,000 from the
Citizens' Savings and Loan Association of Cleveland, giving 1200 shares
of Standard Oil Trust certificates as collateral, he offered to take up the
loan. The result was that he soon had all of Mr. Corrigan's interest in the
trust in his hands. About the same time Frank Rockefeller found it
necessary to borrow money from his brother, and Mr. Corrigan was
asked to endorse the note he gave and a little later to secure this
indorsement [sic] by depositing 4936 shares of Franklin Mining stock, the
sum total of his holdings in that property. Mr. Corrigan did so, not
reflecting at the time, probably, that this put all the property he owned
under Mr. Rockefeller's control.

The hard times of 1893 became a panic. Mr. Corrigan was terribly pushed. In
October he had no money with which to meet the interest on his notes, none to pay
the note for $46,000 now due. In his stress he laid his case frankly before his friend,
Mr. Rockefeller. "I owe you, with accrued interest, $402,000," he wrote in
substance. "You have fully $700,000 as collateral in my Standard and shipping
stock. Surely that is enough to cover the loan. Can you not release my Franklin
Mining stock (held as collateral for his indorsement [sic] of the loan to Mr.
Rockefeller's brother), in order that I may meet my outside obligations? If you do
not, I fear I must make a personal assignment." And Mr. Corrigan claimed, in the
letter he wrote Mr. Rockefeller making this request, that it had been stipulated that
he could get this collateral at any time that he needed it; that his leaving it with Mr.
Rockefeller was a wise precaution in Mr. Corrigan's own interest!

Mr. Rockefeller's reply was entirely businesslike. He could do none of the things
Mr. Corrigan requested. He could not release the mining stock. Nobody at 26
Broadway remembered that any arrangement for releasing it had ever been made.
Besides, he must also have the dividends on the Standard Oil certificates. Mr.
Corrigan's case was desperate. He felt that his property much more than covered
his debts. Iron ore in the ground and good boats in a dock may temporarily lose
value, but their intrinsic value cannot be destroyed. There were already signs that
values were recovering. If he could but get hold of his mining stock! Mr.
Rockefeller was firm and he began gently to hint that there was one way out of the
trouble, if Mr. Corrigan would sell him his Standard Oil Trust certificates, that
would wipe out whatever of the debt was due, give him the ready money he
needed and enable Mr. Rockefeller to give time on his other loans. Mr. Corrigan
would not listen to the idea. The Standard holding represented the work of his
early manhood. It was his largest dividend earner; that he could not give up. He
called in Frank Rockefeller to plead for him. The interview broke up without a
decision, but as Frank Rockefeller left the room John called him back. "Corrigan is
going to the wall, Frank," he said. "I might as well have his stock as anybody.
Persuade him to sell it, and you get his mining stock."

By the fall of 1894, Mr. Corrigan was desperate. He must have money, would not
Mr. Rockefeller help him? There were interviews, pleadings, promises, but always
they ended in the same impasse — "sell me your Standard Oil Trust certificates
and that will help you," and to further his plan Mr. Rockefeller now began to apply
his favorite process of creating panic. After all Standard Oil was very uncertain in
its value. One could never tell what would happen. Beside, the mining stock was
of little value. According to Mr. Rockefeller all of Corrigan's property was
doubtful. Nevertheless he would buy the Standard holdings to help an old friend!

Now, some time before this, Mr. Corrigan had made an assignment of the equities
in his Standard Oil Trust certificates and shipping interests to Judge Stevenson
Burke of Cleveland, his counsel, and an associate in business. Judge Burke believed
that the property in Mr. Rockefeller's hands was ample to extricate Corrigan, and
he decided to try to negotiate a loan upon his equities in the securities. To do so,
however, it was necessary to be able to show to lenders of money what the
Standard stock was really worth. Mr. Corrigan was unable to give him any definite
information on that point; he had no report showing its property, its earning
power, or its investments, and hence it was a mere guess as to what the property
ought to sell for. Accordingly, Judge Burke wrote Mr. Rockefeller asking a "definite
statement as possible, first, of the total amount of stock outstanding; second, its
assets, including all its investments, its earnings gross and net for, say the last five
years, and any other information which will enable any one to understand
definitely the value of the property."

Judge Burke got no answer to his letter. He wrote a second time:

I must now ask you as President of the Company to furnish me with a definite and
specific statement of the assets and liabilities of that Company, together with any
facts which may enable me to negotiate a sale or pledge of the stock, or the equity
in the stock, in your hands. You know full well that it is in my power to obtain this
information, but I trust that your own good business sense and judgment, and
your sense of fairness and right, is such that you will not force me to resort to any
other measures than application to yourself for that to which I am so clearly
entitled.
But still no answer. He and Corrigan twisted and turned, came to New York,
begged for a valuation on the Standard stock, a chance to save it, but Mr.
Rockefeller was firm. Finally putting some of his own collateral with that of
Corrigan, Burke secured a promise of enough money from a New York Bank to
pay the entire debt to Mr. Rockefeller, and thus free the collateral. Mr. Rockefeller
refused to accept the money! The greater part of the debt was not due. He never
did business in that way!

He had Corrigan in his grip and in February, 1895, the 2500 shares of Standard Oil
stock were sold to Mr. Rockefeller for $168 a share. But the fact that he had been
obliged to part with what was his most profitable possession — with stock which
was the first fruit of his early struggles as a refiner, with the results of the processes
he had developed, and the benefit of which the Standard Oil Company had been
reaping for fifteen years, made Corrigan bitter in the extreme and his bitterness
was increased by the rise in the value of the stock which immediately followed the
sale. Before a month had passed Standard Oil stock was selling at $185. Judge
Burke was particularly incensed and it was under his advice that some weeks after
the sale Corrigan raised a question as to Mr. Rockefeller's right to buy the stock
after refusing repeatedly to give an accounting which would allow him to judge of
its value:

"You have been the trustee of my property, my representative," he wrote Mr.

Rockefeller in substance. "You have always held my proxy. It was your duty to
advise me of all matters pertaining to the company which should show the value
of my property. I want an accounting, showing the value of the property — its
surplus, etc.," and he added, "When I have received the accounting asked for, I will
then decide whether to annul our last deal or allow it to stand."

Mr. Rockefeller's reply was plausible: "The affairs of the Standard Oil Trust have
been presented at the public meetings held from time to time at which meetings all
share-holders had a right to be present. . . As to surplus there was none, all the
funds had been paid out in dividends. Mr. Corrigan knew very well how much a
stock-holder learned at the public meetings of the Standard Oil Trust. He knew
that ever since the trust had been formed Mr. Rockefeller's policy was to let
nobody know what was doing. Both he and Mr. Frank Rockefeller say that they
repeatedly asked in the years between 1882 and 1894 for accountings of the
property, and they had repeatedly been told that it was better for them not to
know anything about the inside workings of the Trust. "Congress and the state
legislature are after us. You may be subpœned [sic]. If you know nothing, you can
tell nothing. If you know about the business you might tell something which
would ruin us."
Mr. Corrigan also doubted Mr. Rockefeller's statement that there was no surplus,
as he was right in doing. The balance sheet of the Standard Oil Company for
December, 1894, less than two months before Mr. Corrigan sold his stock, showed
total undivided profits of $35,989,903.94, and at the end of this year, in which Mr.
Rockefeller wrote Mr. Corrigan there was no surplus, the total undivided profits
amounted to $44,840,371.02.

Mr. Corrigan was not satisfied. He still insisted on seeing the balance sheet. Mr.
Rockefeller was deeply hurt by his insistence. "Is it possible," he wrote, "that Jim
Corrigan should be willing to write me such a letter, after my uniform kindness to
him for a life time?" Mr. Corrigan's answer was very much to the point:

I shall always be ready to recognize gratefully any act of kindness which you have
extended to me. But I am obliged to say in regard to the matter in hand, that I am
unable to see that you have been either kind or fair. From my standpoint it appears
that you have taken advantage of your position and knowledge, to take from me
my stock at much less that its value. You were my agent and representative in
regard to this stock. You know its value and you concealed from me all useful
knowledge in respect to it. You not only were my agent, by the fiduciary relation
which you sustained to the trust, but you were also my agent especially appointed
to represent my interest in dealing with the trust after the decision in Ohio and
New York. It was, therefore, your legal as well as moral duty to take no advantage
of your situation to my detriment. No one understands better than yourself the
duty of an agent to his principal, and you know that in dealing with me you have
not supplied me with information which put me upon an equality with yourself.

Mr. Rockefeller was face to face with a very disagreeable legal question, but he was
not disposed to give up his stock, particularly now when it was going up by leaps
and bounds; and when dividends of twelve per cent it carried, when Mr. Corrigan
parted with it, rose to seventeen per cent in 1896, to thirty-three per cent in 1897! he
refused to consider the matter. Corrigan refused to acknowledge him owner of the
stock, and thus matters went for three years until finally, in 1898, it came to trial
before a board of arbitrators, and then it was that the letters quoted above were
brought out.

Judge Burke's whole argument in this trial was that Mr. Rockefeller had betrayed
his trusteeship. That Mr. Rockefeller was Mr. Corrigan's trustee was easy to show,
much as the defendant's counsel might quibble over it. Now, Mr. Rockefeller could
not legally barter with stock he held in trust, and again, he must, according to law,
keep the man whose property he held informed of its value. He had not done this
— more, he had even attempted to depreciate the stock in Mr. Corrigan's mind —
at least so Mr. Corrigan claimed, and at this point came one of the rare episodes we
have in which Mr. Rockefeller plays a dramatic part. Mr. Corrigan had told of an
interview with Mr. Rockefeller in which the latter had told him that the trust was
earning no money, that they were having the worst competition they ever had, that
the certificates were not worth $125 — that they had no surplus funds. Mr.
Rockefeller denied saying anything of the kind — denied having an interview on
the date mentioned — denied having ever had more than one interview in the
period in question. Judge Burke tried to refresh his memory. He knew the
interview had taken place, had a witness to it to fall back on in case of need, but
Mr. Rockefeller could not or would not remember, and when pressed he sprang to
his feet and, drawing himself to his full height, with uplifted hand he cried: "I call
God, as my judge, that I never did have an interview with him after the 29th. I call
God to witness that." Yet later, when Judge Burke mentioned the name of a person
present in the ante-room to that interview, Mr. Rockefeller remembered.

Mr. Corrigan lost his suit. The arbitrators did not deny Mr. Rockefeller's
trusteeship — that is they acknowledged he had no right to take advantage of Mr.
Corrigan's ignorance of the value of the property and the earning power of the
Standard Oil Trust to buy his holdings at less than their value — had no right to
refuse him information about the condition of the concern, but they gave Mr.
Rockefeller the suit, because Mr. Corrigan had not elected promptly, after he sold
his stock, whether to rescind or not, because, as they asserted, he had "played fast
and loose."

This story has not been told to prove that the arbitrators were wrong in their
decision. That is a matter for the learned to decide. One who has only the ordinary
equipment of common-sense and common morality should not presume to
venture to decide on legal matters. The arbitrators were all men of experience and
learning — the Hon. William G. Choate, William D. Guthrie, William A. Lynch.
This decision was, no doubt, in accordance with the rules of the game they play.
The tale has been told merely to illuminate Mr. Rockefeller's ideas of business.
There can be no manner of doubt that Mr. Rockefeller could, without loss, have
carried Mr. Corrigan through his crisis. There can be no manner of doubt that Mr.
Corrigan could, with Mr. Rockefeller's help, have extracted himself and saved his
Standard Oil stock — even with the sacrifice he had to make he has been able to
recoup, and is, to-day, several times a millionaire. But to spare a man's property,
even if that man be your life-long friend, to spare a man's property which, by
squeezing, you can get and make money from is not business in the sense John D.
Rockefeller understands it. That is, in Mr. Rockefeller's practice, mutual
helpfulness has nothing to do with trade. "Might makes right," not generosity, not
justice, not humanity. It is a far cry indeed from this creed to the one of that
religion which Mr. Rockefeller holds up to the world as his most priceless
possession — the religion whose very essence is in bearing one another's burdens.
Mr. Corrigan's case is not exceptional. It is typical. Stories like his are current in
every community in which Mr. Rockefeller does business. The man who in
Cleveland, Ohio, allows himself to become a debtor to Mr. Rockefeller is a
laughing-stock to the initiated. Even in his own church men say of him: "He's a
good Baptist, but look out how you trade with him!" "I have been in business with
John D. Rockefeller for thirty-five years," one of the ablest and richest and earliest
of Mr. Rockefeller's colleagues once told me in a moment of forgetfulness, "and he
would do me out of a dollar to-day; that is," he added with a sudden reversion to
the school of cant in which he had been trained — "that is, if he could do it
honestly!"

These then are the tactics which for thirty-five years John D. Rockefeller has been
applying to business. Is it strange that he has grown richer and richer as the years
went by until to-day he is called the richest man in the world? How rich he is
nobody knows — perhaps he does not know himself. Twelve years ago, in 1892,
when the Standard Oil Trust was dissolved, Mr. Rockefeller owned certificates for
256,854 shares of the stock, between one-fourth and one-third of the entire trust.
His dividends on this amount were in that year over three million; in 1896 nearly
eight million; in 1900 over twelve million. How much more stock he has now
nobody knows, for nobody knows how often the Corrigan manoeuvre [sic] has
been repeated. And his Standard Oil stock is only one of his dividend earners. Mr.
Rockefeller's personal property in Cleveland, Ohio, outside of Standard Oil
interests amounts probably to $10,000,000, and includes mortgages from $200 up to
$500,000, real estate from remote city lots to his beautiful Forest Hill park of over
400 acres, beside stocks and bonds of all sorts.

Mr. Rockefeller has not squandered his income. He has applied it for thirty-five
years to accumulating not only oil property but real estate — railroad stock, iron
mines, copper mines, anything and everything which could be bought cheap by
temporary depressing and made to yield rich by his able management. For thirty-
five years he has worked for special privileges giving him advantages over
competitors, for thirty-five years he has patiently laid net-works around property
he wanted, until he had it surely corralled and could seize it; for thirty-five years
he has depreciated values when necessary to get his prey. And to-day he still is
busy. In almost every great financial manoeuvre [sic] in the country is felt his
supple, smooth hand with its grip of steel, and while he directs that which is big,
nothing is too small for him to grasp.

Why does he do it? What does he want an income of $25,000,000 and more for?
Not to spend like some splendid old Venetian in palaces and galleries, for none of
the glories of the fine old-world life are known to him. Not to squander in riot. So
far as the world knows, he is poor in his pleasures. Not to give away — his
charities and bequests are small compared to his wealth. For what then? Why this
relentless, cruel, insistent accumulation of money when you are already buried in
it. There seems to be only one explanation, that Mr. Rockefeller is the victim of a
money-passion which blinds him to every other consideration in life, which is
stronger than his sense of justice, his humanity, his affections, his joy in life, which
is the one tyrannous, insatiable force of his being. "Money-mad, money-mad! Sane
in every other way, but money-mad," was the late Senator Hanna's comment on
John D. Rockefeller. And the late Senator Hanna could not be accused of holding
money in light regard.

The article concludes in the August 1906 issue of McClure's Magazine.

Return to Rome, Rockefeller, the U.S. and Standard Oil

John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study

by

Ida M. Tarbell

Author of "The History of the Standard Oil Company," "Life of Lincoln,"

ETC.

Illustrated with Portraits

Part Two

WHEN the late Senator Hanna said of John D. Rockefeller, "Money mad, money
mad, sane in every other respect but money mad," he gave the true biographic clue
to the man's character. No candid study of his career can lead to the conclusion
that he is a victim of perhaps the ugliest, the least reasonable of all passions, that
for money, money as an end – a victim, for the passion has mastered all other
ambitions and cravings – has made itself supreme and is in his eyes worthy of
what it has cost him.

It is not a pleasant picture that such a reflection arouses – not the portrait of a
gentleman one would like to know – this money-maniac secretly, patiently,
eternally plotting how he way add to his wealth. Nor is the man himself pleasanter
to look upon. Study the photograph on page 388; the last taken of Mr. Rockefeller,
study George Varian's powerful sketch from life made in 1903 and say if it be
worth the while to be the richest man in the world at the cost these portraits show.
Concentration; craftiness, cruelty, and something indefinably repulsive are in
them. The photograph reveals nothing more. Mr. Varian's, sketch is vastly more
interesting for it suggests, besides both power and pathos and no one can look
long on Mr. Rockefeller without feeling these qualities.

The impression he makes on one who sees him for the first time is overwhelming.
Brought face to face with Mr. Rockefeller unexpectedly, and not knowing him, the
writer's immediate thought was "this is the oldest man in the world – a living
mummy.” But there is no sense of feebleness with the sense of age; indeed there is
one of terrific power. The disease which in the last three or four years has swept
Mr. Rockefeller’s head bare of hair, stripped away even eyelashes and eyebrows,
has revealed all the strength of his great head. Mr. Rockefeller is a big man, not
overly tall but large with powerful shoulders and a neck like that of a bull. The
head is wide and deep and disproportionately high, with curious bumps made
more conspicuous by the tightly drawn, dry, naked skin. The interest of the big
face lies in the eyes and mouth. Eyes more useful for a man of Mr. Rockefeller's
practices could hardly be conceived. They are small and intent and steady and they
are as expressionless as the wall. They see everything and reveal nothing. It is not a
shifty eye – not a cruel or leering one. It is something vastly more to be feared – a
blank eye, looking through and through things, and telling nothing of what they
found on the way.

But if eyes say nothing the mouth tells much. Its former mask, the full mustache
Mr. Rockefeller has always worn, is now completely gone. Indeed the greatest loss
Rockefeller sustained when his hair went was that it revealed his mouth. It is only
a slit – the lips are quite lost, as if by eternal grinding together of the teeth – teeth
set on something he would have. It is at once the cruelest feature of his face – this
mouth – the cruelest and the most pathetic, for the hard, close-set line slants
downward at the corners, giving a look of age and sadness. The downward droop
is emphasized by deep vertical furrows running down each side of his nose. Mr.
Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid.
Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man's face, ever sets his lips to
such a melancholy angle.

The big cheeks are puffy, bulging unpleasantly under the eyes, and the skin which
covers them has a curiously unhealthy pallor. It is this puffiness, this unclean flesh,
which repels, as the thin slit of a mouth terrifies. To the whole face a certain
distinction is lent by the nose which is small and fine, rising like a thorn from
between the heavy cheeks – a nose whose nostrils might vibrate were not the man
so much the master of his features.
All together it is a strange and powerful head, and one cannot look on it and ever
forget it. It is a head which has suggested many unpleasant comparisons and all of
them with their savor of truth – all of them comprehensible. One who knows what
it cost to build Mr. Rockefeller's fortune understands why a man who had done
business with him shuddered when he looked at Mr. Varian's sketch and said, "An
Indian with a tomahawk – an Indian with a tomahawk”– understands Jules
Harets description in one of his American letters: “Under his silk skull-cap he
seems like an old monk of the Inquisition such as one sees in the Spanish
picture galleries” – understands why a man of imagination characterized him as
“dead, like a devil-fish,” and recalled Victor Hugo’s famous comparison, “A sleeve
with a fist sowed up inside.”

But when one has counted the cost of making Mr. Rockefeller's fortune – the cost to
the public, to his friends, and foes, and to himself, he has not said all. There is, if
you please, another Mr. Rockefeller – the anti-thesis of the man we have been
studying – a modest, retiring gentleman, loving his home and church and friends
and spending his leisure in charity and golf. For forty years, this other Mr.
Rockefeller has been a model helpmate for the one whose acquaintance we have
made. It is not easy to learn much of this other man, for, there is probably not a
public character in the United States whose private life is more completely
concealed than that of John D. Rockefeller. The same cloak is drawn over his
business life and up to this time the law has never forced back the cloak as it has
repeatedly from his business life. Mr. Rockefeller gives the world none of the
chances to study him which most men of importance do. The club never sees him.
He is almost never numbered among the banqueters at great celebrations. He
never appears on the platform where men of public importance gather to discuss
public questions or stimulate to action in public causes. His opinions on great
issues are never quoted; that is, John D. Rockefeller has no part in that vital and
important part of a citizen's duty which consists in meeting his fellows and by
intimate and personal intercourse keeping in contact with the ambitions and ideals
of his times. Now, as thirty-five years ago when Mr. Rockefeller's business virtues
were celebrated in "Cleveland Past and Present," he avoids all honorary positions
that cost time.

For several years Mr. Rockefeller has spent practically all of the year at one or
another of his three homes – Forest Hill, a country place near Cleveland, Ohio,
where he lives from May until October; his New York town house on Fifty-fourth
Street or his great estate at Pocantico Hills, near Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. It is
fair to judge something of a man's character from his homes particularly when the
man is one who is freed from the necessity of considering cost in building.

Mr. Rockefeller's homes force several reflections on one. Certainly they show his
cult of the unpretentious. Not one of the three houses he occupies has any claims to
rank among the notable homes of the country. They are all unpretending even to
the point of being conspicuous. Not only that, they show him to have no pleasure
in noble architecture, to appreciate nothing of the beauty of fine lines and
decorations.

Mr. Rockefeller’s favorite home, the house at Forest Hill, is a monument of cheap
ugliness, a great modern structure built in the first place as a sanitarium, it is
amazing that anyone not compelled to do so should live in its shadow. His city
house is without distinction, and there has never been an appropriate mansion at
Pocantico Hills.

But if Mr. Rockefeller knows nothing or at least cares nothing for beauty in
buildings, he has the love of noble land. At Forest Hill the park of over four
hundred acres is one of great loveliness – rolling wooded hills, shady ravines, fine
fields with splendid trees – the whole cared for with more than intelligence. There
is something like affection gone into the making of this beautiful spot. His estate at
Pocantico Hills beyond Tarrytown shows the same fine taste for broad fields and
noble trees and great out-look.

And there is no doubt Mr. Rockefeller enjoys his land. When at Forest Hill and
Pocatico Hills he may he seen almost daily playing golf or wheeling. Indeed he
spends hours daily in the fresh air. His devotion to golf has even led one
philosopher to argue with much show of reason as well as of humor that so long as
golf occupies him as it does, there is little fear that Mr. Rockefeller will trouble
himself to complete his ownership of the Nation. If Mr. Rockefeller played golf
purely for pleasure; then those who fear him might indeed cease worrying.

Taking it all in all, however, there is little doubt that Mr. Rockefeller’s reason for
playing gold is that he may live longer in order to make more money. “He has two
ambitions” a life-long intimate of Mr. Rockefeller once said, “to be very old and to
be very rich." He is sixty-six years old now. He worked for many years with an
intensity which long ago ruined his digestion. To live and complete his ambition
he was obliged to exercise much, and so we have Mr. Rockefeller spending a
portion of every day in patiently following a ball that he may be very old and very
rich.

The daily life on his great estates is studiously simple. Mr. Rockefeller regulates his
household as he does his business. Family and servants are trained to strictest
economy. There is no more gas burned than is needed, no unnecessary heating, no
wasteful providing. There is nothing for display, nothing squandered in the
senseless American way to prove you are rich, so rich you need not care. On every
hand there is frugality and carefulness. And this frugality certainly is a welcome
contrast to the wanton lavishness which on every side of us corrupts taste and
destroys the sense of values. One would be inclined to like Mr. Rockefeller the
better for his plain living if somehow one did not feel that here was something
more than frugality – that here was parsimony – not only that, that here was
parsimony made a virtue, and that one of the chief vanities of this "richest man in
the world" is seeing how little he can spend on his household, as that of many
another rich man is in seeing how much he can spend.

Mr. Rockefeller's modestly administered households have never been social

centers of importance. Because of parsimony or for some other reason it is certain
that Mr. Rockefeller has never exercised that broad hospitality which society has a
right to expect of its leading citizens as it has a right to expect their services in
efforts for social and political betterment. Beyond his intimate personal circle and
his church and charity associates, Mr. Rockefeller seems to have no social life. Here
is a man who has completed a commercial structure which he claims is a
benefaction to the country – has worked out an organization which spreads
literally all over the earth and whose representatives in many foreign lands are
more influential, it is said, than the representatives of the United States; but this
man has nothing to do with his peers in influence and achievement.

He only meets them when there is business in it! Can it be that Mr. Rockefeller
prefers not to meet his peers except when he has a use for them. Or does he have
an uneasy feeling that after all he is not the peer of the men of achievement who do
their work in the light and seek in their leisure stimulus and companionship
among their fellows. "He always begs my pardon when he starts to speak,"said an
eminent gentleman at one time thrown for days into Mr. Rockefeller's society. Can
it be Mr. Rockefeller recognizes dimly in these men of the world, among whom,
from his position, we should expect him to associates, certain ethical and
intellectual qualities he does not possess?

Does Mr. Rockefeller feel vaguely that he is not their equal, that despite all his riches
he is a crippled creature, and does he for this reason shrink from their open
hospitality which must ever remain one of the obligations as it is one of the
privileges of great wealth? Is it for this reason he apologizes before addressing his
peers? It may be so. It may be, too, that this vague consciousness that he is an
inferior creature, bringing him face to face with free, aspiring, achieving fellows,
has helped bring the lines of pathos to his face.

Or the explanation may be simpler – and less appealing. It is quite possible, we

may even say quite probable, that Mr. Rockefeller no more recognizes an
obligation of hospitality towards society, no more feels a need of the society of his
peers than in business he recognizes the obligation to play fair or the need to
preserve the respect of his fellows,
The only public place in which Mr. Rockefeller appears with any regularity is at
the services of a Baptist church in the community where he happens to be living.
He is particularly devoted to the services of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church of
Cleveland, and rarely from May to October does he miss the Sunday meetings, and
he always appears at the annual Sunday school picnic. Here he seems to be at his
freest; here he even makes little speeches on occasions. And yet to one who from a
pew watches Mr. Rockefeller in the bosom of his church, it seems as if the Sunday
service can be nothing but an ordeal. The writer was once present at the annual
October gathering in Mr. Rockefeller's Cleveland church where he says goodbye
for the season, to the Sunday school of which he is the honorary superintendent.
He sat through the session of Sunday school, his back to the wall (they say in
Cleveland Mr. Rockefeller always sits with his back to the wall when it is possible.
So many things can happen behind one's back in an assembly) incessantly peering
into the faces of those before him. No child in the assembly was so uneasy.
Throughout the church service which followed, this same terrible restlessness
agitated him. He sat bent forward in his pew, for a moment, his eyes intent on the
speaker, then with a start he looked to his right searching the faces he could see,
craning his neck to look backward. Then his eyes would turn again to the speaker.
But not to stay there. A few moments later he was searching the aisles to his left,
craning again to see behind him. Those who have observed Mr. Rockefeller in
church over a long period of years say that he has shown this uneasiness for years.
Unconscious habit, perhaps. Fear, fear of the off-repeated threats of the multitude
of sufferers from the wheels of the cars of progress he has rolled across the
country, so many a man who knows him will say. If does not matter what it is. It is
pitiful, so pitiful, that one cannot watch John Rockefeller sit through a church
service and ever cease to feel that he is one of he saddest objects in the world. For
what good this undoubted power of achievement, for what good this towering
wealth, if one must be forever peering to what is behind!

And yet Mr. Rockefeller is evidently pleased and satisfied in this "church home.” It
is evident he likes the deferential faces, the hands outstretched apologetically the
general obsequiousness. He likes to speak to the children, too, and does it in a
modest way. His talks are the merest commonplace expressions he learned forty-
years ago evidently, but they are uttered in a natural and rather agreeable voice,
and with evident sincerity of feeling. The tenor of them is very like the following.
In fact, many of the expressions he uses here are repeated again and again by him:

"I regard my connection with this Sunday school forty-nine years ago, as one of the
most important, if not the most important action of my life. It is for this reason that
I am always glad to come back to Cleveland, always happy to return to the scenes
of my younger days, and to look upon the forces which are doing the greatest
work in life. After it is all over, the religion of a man is his most important
possession. And with that religion comes the accessories which it brings with it.
The Sunday school should be a place, not only where the word of God is taught,
but from it should go influences – which help each one to follow carefully in the
footsteps of the Master.

"There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship,
nothing that can satisfy but Christ. It is the Sunday school which can bring both.
Christ is to be studied and through an acquaintance with His life, and through His
words, which have been handed down to us, we can only learn of His love for us,
the greatest of that love and sacrifice which led Him to the cross that we, His
brothers, might live with Him forever.

"We can never learn too much of His will towards us, too much of his messages
and His advice. The Bible is His word and its study gives at once the foundation
for our faith and an inspiration to battle onward in the fight against the tempter.
We should learn more of His word, and the Sunday school is the place where all
may gather that knowledge of His great love for us that will turn our dark days
into brightness, and furnish the glad light which should shine out from our lives as
an inspiration for the despondent and heart-sick brother who finds the way of life
hard to tread.

"In our Sunday school let us learn to repeat those passages which show forth best
the beauties of holiness. Each class should be taught to repeat at will those inspired
words. Passages of Scriptures should be as familiar to our children as are the
lessons of education taught in day-schools. In some moment of their lives who
knows that the warning, the promise learned and understood in the Sunday
school, may prove to be the turning point in their lives and save some one from
being turned away from the right and swept down the broad road to destruction.

"And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied
comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better. Don’t
forsake the Sunday school because you have reached years of maturity. Stick closer
to it as the years go by. Dig deeper into its truths. Make your place early in the
Sunday school, and let that place be filled by you as long as you live."It is
particularly gratifying to me after my absence to notice the signs of prosperity in
the Sunday school. The growth of the school has been exceptional, and I foresee in
that growth the new beginning of a marvelous power for good in our city. The
Sunday school has been a help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my
Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you, than that you, and all that
shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same
measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have."
At the session of the Sunday school where the writer heard Mr. Rockefeller speak,
he said, among other things:
"When you come to the church or to the Sunday school and associate yourself with
it you must put something into it. When the business men associate themselves
together for the manufacture of these gas fixtures, or the window glasses or many
of the things that we see about us, each man contributes some money for that joint
undertaking. In proportion to what they put into this business do they receive
returns from their investments or dividends. The more they put in the more they
receive in dividends.

Now it is not necessary that you put a great amount of money into this work that
you are becoming a part of, but that the whole may accomplish the most it is
necessary that each contribute something, be it money or what it may. Put
something in. And according as you put something in the greater will be your
dividends of salvation."

It was curious to note how firm Mr. Rockefeller’s voice became when he began to
talk of dividends. He was one speaking with authority. “You must put something
in if you would take something out” he said, with the curious gesture of Mr.
Varian’s sketch and as he said it we had the money-king in all his power and
relentlessness. Indeed in all of Mr. Rockefeller’s speeches of which trustworthy
reports are obtainable the only parts which are not merely platitudinous are those
dealing in some way with money. Mr. Rockefeller himself was very modest about
his speeches. One of the pleasantest tales we have of him is from a young reporter
who had occasion to report on his Sunday school talks once. It gives a side of Mr.
Rockefeller which few people see:

“One Saturday in June, 1898," the reporter relates, the Cleveland afternoon papers
said that John Rockefeller would speak the next day – Children's Sunday – in the
Euclid Avenue Baptist church. Being a ‘cub’ reporter on the Plain Dealerat the time,
I was held by the city editor to be a fit person to send out on an early Sunday
morning assignment – to a Sunday school.

“The church was filled when I got there. But an usher whom I knew put me on an
empty bench, right in front of the pulpit. I looked for Mr. Rockefeller, but I couldn't
find him. "He wasn't on the platform. The people sang, the minister prayed, and
the little folks gave recitations. After a while the pastor said the children would
now listen to their beloved superintendent. A man who sat in a pew near the front
stepped forward, stood directly in front of me, and began to speak. I took from my
pocket a tablet, and being able to write shorthand, began to take the address
verbatim. Mr. Rockefeller saw what I was doing. He spoke as any inexperienced
speaker does – nervously. His nervousness was betrayed by slowly uttered
sentences, some of which were repeated, and by short quick stops. He talked for a
few moments only simply expressing pleasure at being among old friends and
with the children. I think everybody was satisfied and pleased with what he said.
When he had finished he dropped into a place by my side. Presently he leaned
over and whispered to me: “Will you wait a moment after the service? I should like
to see, you.”

“At the close of the services he greeted a few friends and then took me into a
committee room. He asked me whether I was a reporter, what paper I was on, and
whether I had his remarks verbatim. Then he reasoned with me in this manner:
‘Now you know, I am not an experienced speaker. I have done little of that sort of
thing. I suppose my address was not very good It wasn't an address – just a little
talk. I wish you would say little about it. And don't print that speech in full, please.
Mercy, no! Make it simple, short. Fix it up.’ And he laughed and I laughed. And he
took hold of my arm and behaved like a 'good fellow.' I said that I had no desire to
write nonsense about him – and I hadn't. I told him that my city editor would not
print a silly yarn about his lender abilities as a speaker if I wrote it – and I knew he
wouldn't. I said that I had taken his speech in shorthand simply because I could,
because I got fun out of exercising my skill – and that was true.“So I went to the
office and wrote up a quiet account of the meeting. I fixed up the speech. I did not,
however, escape the sin of putting into my story the fact that I saw him put a
twenty-dollar bill on the contribution plate. That was because I was a 'cub.' I think
Mr. Rockefeller was much annoyed when he saw me take notes after the deacon
passed the plate to him and me on the bench.

“Two months later a suburban electric car upon which I was a passenger stopped a
couple of miles from Forest Hill – Mr. Rockefeller’s East Cleveland home. Mr.
Rockefeller and his son came aboard and took seats behind me. Just as young Mr.
Rockefeller told the conductor to stop at Forest Hill, someone touched me on the
shoulder. I rose and turned to meet the eyes of Mr. Rockefeller, and his
outstretched hand. 'Well' he said, 'you are the young man who wrote up my
speech for the Plain Dealer down at the church on Children’s Day. I thought it was
you when I sat down. Well, newspapermen generally treat me rudely. Thank you
very much for what you did. I read it and appreciated it. You fixed that speech up
so that it was all right – first rate. Thank you. Good day.'”

Devoted as he is to his church, Mr. Rockefeller makes much more impression by

his charities which are indeed one expression of his religion. Mr. Rockefeller has
always held that methodical giving was a part of a Christian's duty. Again and
again he has stated this view in his Sunday school talks. “I believe it is a religious
duty to get all the money you can fairly and honestly;" he told young men one day,
"to keep all you can and to give away all you can." Will they (the people of the
future) say of us, we accumulated wealth” he remarked in a little Cleveland
address a few years ago: "No, that will all be forgotten. They will want to know
what we did with it. Did we spend it for the benefit of our fellow man? Of that we
ought to think” Such expression are often on his tongue They are but reflections of
his practice of fifty years. Never since the time when he was accustomed to enter in
“Ledger A” “10 cents for foreign missions,” 12 cents for Five Point Missions,” has
he failed in methodical giving. It is evident that his giving is governed by some
theory of the percent due to the Lord, though it is evident that he never has gone as
high as ten percent! Whatever the percentage he has decided on he distributes it
cautiously and reverentially, and it is not probable that he often exceeds it, for
those who have dealings with Mr. Rockefeller in charities frequently are met with
the plea "I cannot afford it." The spirit in which he gives is one of plain, hard duty.
It is an investment on which he has determined, an investment in the Kingdom of
Heaven; and he means to get all possible out of it. He himself has stated his theory
– "According as you put something in, the greater will be your dividends of
salvation!"

In his earlier days Mr. Rockefeller and his family looked after his charities and it is
said that his children are carefully trained to his own scientific methods of doing
good. In later years his charities have become so extensive and the appeals to him
so numerous that Mr. Rockefeller has been obliged to build up what may be called
a Charity Bureau at 26 Broadway, for handling applications and disbursing funds.

The range of his giving is very wide. It may be said to begin with the distribution
of Mr. Rockefeller's own cast-off clothing. There is a well-authenticated case,
dating back only a few years, of a partly worn pair of shoes sent to a less fortunate
friend with a personal note from Mr. Rockefeller. Nothing, nothing must be wasted
in this matter of charity any more than in an oil refinery. Property is all sacred.To
waste is wicked, and so whether if be a bequest of a million dollars or a pair of
cast-off shoes it must all be put where its full value will be employed. “I have
known Mr. Rockefeller to give away a hundred thousand dollars on a demand he
believed worthy, and turn around and haggle over the price of a ton of coal," a life-
long intimate said once.

There is no doubt that many of his charities are personal and never known outside
of his immediate circle. There are three or four old ladies in Cleveland, friends of
his youth, to whom he gives an income. Unfortunate Baptist ministers, worn-out
teachers and missionaries in great numbers are helped by him, while the poor of
all grades receive much direct help. Of course he gives much to his church, but he
has never made any church the object of affectionate and lavish giving. He seems
never to have been willing to give more than what he considered his share. One
would imagine that Mr. Rockefeller would enjoy, making of the Euclid Avenue
Baptist church of Cleveland, which he has so often declared to be the church of his
heart – a temple of beauty and splendor – a fit offering unto the Lord. One would
imagine that for a man of his professions there could be no greater happiness than
to build in Cleveland a noble structure, fill it with inspiring art, give it great music
and put into its pulpit a virile intellect; but Mr. Rockefeller does not see it that way.
He gives his proportion.
That satisfies the requirements of duty. As for giving for the joy of making the
world more beautiful, for the sake of the delight of sheer generosity – he knows
nothing of these things. More 's the pity for him!

Mr. Rockefeller's private charities and his gifts to the church must have aggregated
to a very great sum in the forty-five years that he has been giving so methodically,
but it is small compared with the money he has given for education and for
medical research. His chief object of interest is Chicago University, an institution
founded by John D. Rockefeller, according to the letter-heads of that institution.
The total sum he has given to Chicago University is about $15,000,000, distributed
as follows:

Endowments.............................................................................................. $8.008.249.70
Buildings and furnishings..........................................................................4.516.823.80
Additional lands and campus improvements ........................................1.875.778.91
Current expenses .........................................................................................3.372.882.41
Books and publications..................................................................................124.500.00
Equipment, collections, etc............................................................................117.322.00
Total............................................................................................................$15.015.556.82

Besides this fifteen millions given to Chicago. Mr. Rockefeller has distributed some
seven millions among other institutions, ranging from $25.000 to the William
Jewell University to $1.375.000 to Barnard College. Mr. Rockefeller’s interest in
medical work is almost as great as in education. The Rush Medical College has
received $6.000.000 from him. His gift of $5.000.000 to Johns Hopkins Hospital to
help it out of the embarrassment caused by the Baltimore fire is still fresh in mind.
He has given several hundred thousand to the Y.M.C.A. He has given the Baptist
Missionary Society about one million.

It has been computed that Mr. Rockefeller’s entire gifts, public and private
charities, have amounted to about $36.000.000. It would be fair to call the aggregate
$40.000.000, and that would probably do Mr. Rockefeller full justice. It is not a
great sum considering Mr. Rockefellers vast income. Probably his dividends from
the Standard Oil Company alone in the last three years would cover it. And the
Standard Oil Company is only one of Mr. Rockefeller's dividend earners.

It is quite probable that the man would give more money if he could give it,
without doing, from his point of view, more harm than good. He hates waste and
shiftlessness. He must have seen long ago that money given freely is more often
than not administered carelessly. He must have seen how charity to individuals
often engenders dependence; ruins self-reliance. He must have come to understand
that lavish giving is a terrible social menace, injuring the self respect of recipients,
fostering greed for more. He must have learned that one of the most difficult
things in this world is to give so that it will not corrupt and weaken. It is generally
said by Mr. Rockefeller’s friends that it is such consideration as well as his
abhorrence of waste that has led him to establish the “Charity Bureau” at 26
Broadway which investigates before giving, and which in many cases audits
annually the accounts of institutions which have taken his money.

If Mr. Rockefeller thinks on these things and the care with which he scrutinizes his
gifts, would lead one to think he does, may he not come to realize finally the utter
impossibility of justifying by charity the injustice which such an accumulation as
his has cost? Today he can not give away more than a pittance of his great total
income without doing harm. In a few years he will die and the colossus he has
erected will be left to others to administer. Can they do better than he has done?
Impossible. May not Mr. Rockefeller come to see finally that the injustice and
wrong it takes to build such a fortune as his are only equaled by the weakened
manhood and the stimulated greed engendered in its spending? Is it too much to
hope that Mr. Rockefeller may finally understand how much more good he would
have done the world if, thirty-five years ago, he had turned his great ability to
bringing order with justice into the industry in which he was the leader, instead of
bringing order with injustice. How many more men he would have helped if he
had set his face towards equalizing opportunities instead of restricting them. Is it
too much to hope that even Mr. Rockefeller will see, at last, that what we need in
society is not charity but fair play, and that he who attempts to substitute the one
for the other handles a sword which deals fatal blows in two directions. It may
even be that it is because Mr. Rockefeller has begun to see vaguely that he will
never be able to give away enough to drown the wrong he has done that his face
has taken its terrible pathos.

Here then there is the other Mr. Rockefeller as the world sees him, a quiet, modest
church-going gentleman, devoted to Sunday school picnics, golf, and wheeling,
whose evenings are never spent in anything more exciting than a game of
Numerico washed down by a glass of cider, whose chief occupation, outside of
business, is giving away as much money as he can without its doing more harm
than good, whose chief pleasure is in fine fields and trees, in flowers and
gardening, whose smile is friendly for young and old, who welcomes old friends,
who adores his grandchildren, and who meets criticism and misrepresentation by
quoting the meek doggerel:

There is so much bad in the best of us,

There is so much good in the worst of us,
That it scarcely behooves any of us.
To talk about the rest of us.
It is a rare "other self." But how harmonize it with the Mr. Rockefeller the business
world knows, the man with a mask and a steel grip, forever peering into hidden
places for money, always more money; planning in secret to wrest it even from his
friends, never forgetting, never resting, never satisfied. Is the amiable Mr.
Rockefeller a foil for the man before whom the public writhes? Does Mr.
Rockefeller know that modesty, benevolence, and piety are the tricks which
deceive the most people the longest time? Does Mr. Rockefeller know that, when
he patiently point how gentle, charitable, and devoted he is, and asks how can it be
that a man who is all this can do a business wrong, more people will hesitate and
keep silent than before any other face he could present. It is supposing a great
knowledge of human nature and a still greater power as an actor so to explain Mr.
Rockefeller, but that it is a plausible explanation cannot be denied.

Or is Mr. Rockefeller true to himself in both roles? Does he believe that money is a
paramount duty, a sort of higher law justifying law-breaking, falsehood and
extortion? Does he believe that the good his gentler self can do by charity, and his
wise bequests to hospitals and to colleges with the money thus obtained more than
balances the harm its accumulation works? That is, does the end justify the means,
in Mr. Rockefeller's opinion, so that he can, unflinchingly face his own record and
say, “I am right." Is it the inner consciousness of his own righteousness that keeps
him silent before a sneering public?

It may be so. Or it may be that Mr. Rockefeller is one of those double natures that
puzzle the psychologist. A man whose soul is built like a ship in air-tight
compartments – to use the familiar figure – one devoted to business, one to
religion and charity, one to simple living and one to nobody knows what. But
between these compartments there are no doors. The life that goes on in
compartment one has no relation to compartment two, has no influence upon it.
Each is a solitary unit. It is an uncanny explanation; but it may be the true one.

Hypocrite, intriguer, freak of nature, it is not for us to say. The point is that for the
student interested in finding out what effect a certain career has on the public, Mr.
Rockefeller is a hypocrite. The great public does not deal in nice psychological
distinctions. It takes the facts at hand and goes straight to the evident conclusion. It
says that this man has for forty years lent all the power of his great ability to
perpetuating and elaborating a system of illegal and unjust discrimination by
common carriers. He has done this in the face of moral sentiment, in the face of
loudly expressed public opinion, in face of the law, in the face of the havoc his
operations caused at very side. For forty years he has fought to prevent every
attempt to regulate the wrongs the system wrought and when he failed to do so he
has turned craft and skill to finding secret and devious ways of securing the
privileges he desired. He has done more than any other person to fasten on this
country the most serious interference with free individual development, which it
suffers, an interference which today, the whole country is struggling vainly to
strike off, which it is doubtful will be cured, so deep-seated and so subtle it is,
except by revolutionary methods.

Not only this, he has fought the publicity in business which is obviously necessary
to its safety, he has introduced into business a spy system of the most odious
character. He has turned commerce from a peaceful pursuit to war, and
honeycombed it with cruel and corrupt practice; turned competition from
honorable emulation into cutthroat struggle. And the man who deliberately and
persistently does these things calls his great organization a benediction, and points
to his church-going and his charities as proof of his righteousness. To the man of
straight forward nature the two will not tally. This he says, is supreme, cruel
wrong-doing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it – hypocrisy.

It is not only the man in the street who feels the hypocrisy of the case. It is the man
in the school of business Mr. Rockefeller has created; the man in the train of
obsequious followers his giving has collected. And what is the effect? Why, to
make hypocrites of them – hypocrites or cynics! On all sides we hear the
justification of the practices of this school by its deeds of charity. A few years ago
we heard it in the very Senate of the United States when Senator Payne of Ohio
under the shadow of the charge that his seat was bought by the money of the
Standard Oil Company made in substance the defense that the Standard Oil
Company could not have bought his seat, because a few year's before "no
institution, no association, no combination in my district did more to bring about
my defeat and went to so large an expense in money to accomplish it "– and
having accused the company of using money in politics, practically justified them
for whatever they might do by pleading: “they are very liberal in their
philanthropic contributions to charity and benevolent works, and I venture the
assertion that two gentlemen in that company have donated more money for
philanthropic purposes than all the Republican members of the Senate put
together.

Not long ago one of the most finished products of the Rockefeller Business School,
when the question of investigating certain serious charges against a chief justice of
the State of New York was up – charges which the honor of the Court demanded
should be investigated – opposed the proposition and the basis of the proposition
was Scriptural: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," a degradation of
the noble doctrine of Christian charity which would be ludicrous if it were not so
impious. But it is an interpretation of the doctrine frequent enough. On all sides we
hear men deep in trickery and spoils quoting, "judge not, that ye be not judged."
On all sides the pulpit makes this defense or keeps silent, which is equivalent. The
same man who once in a moment of genuineness said to the writer, “I have been in
business with John D. Rockefeller for thirty-five years, and he would do me of out
of a dollar today – that is if he could do it honestly," defended Mr. Rockefeller's
reputation as a hypocrite – which he acknowledged by saying, “But how often in
this world a man's reputation and his real character are different – we have one
eminent example the case of our Lord and Saviour." Cant? Not in the Rockefeller
School of Business. It is the doctrine of the school.

There are happily plenty of men who follow the methods and practices of this
school who either are too frank by nature or have too large a sense of humor to
accept the doctrine of justification by Scriptural quotation. They say bluntly:
“Business isn’t a Sunday school, and Sunday school teachings have nothing to do
with it. Whatever is necessary to win we are going to do. We are not in business for
our health, but are out for the dollars." And they scheme for rebates, and bribe
legislatures for franchises, and shun their taxes, and water their stock, and unload
worthless securities on the market, and support open swindling schemes with
the sangfroid and frankness of South Sea pirates. The black flag openly flaunted is
certainly less dangerous and less odious than a religious banner. But it is not
reassuring to know that so large a number of our commercial leaders go about
their daily buccaneering with their tongues in their cheeks and a defiant “What are
you going to do about it" on their lips.

Rich indeed should be the return to the public for what it has cost to build up a
fortune like Mr. Rockefeller's. But what has Mr. Rockefeller given the public in
return for the code of business principles he has taught it, in return for the havoc
their enforcement has cost, in return for the hypocrisy and cynicism he has
fostered? A great business organization – one of the greatest the world has ever
seen – a demonstration of the possibilities of combination. True, but to build his
organization he was obliged to perpetuate and expand secretly, by force, bribery
and trickery a vicious business system the country at large was striving to
overthrow, and whose perpetuation and expansion has brought us into one of the
most serious public situations since the Civil War. Has that paid?

Perfected methods of oil transportation, refining and marketing – yes, but these
methods were not his invention. They were the invention of those who sought to
live free of his domination, and which he seized by force and strategy when they
had been proved to be valuable. Is it for the good of the commerce of the
community that the men who possess the blood and courage of the pioneer or the
brains of the inventor should be discouraged and suppressed by being deprived of
a fair share of the profits of their labors ?

Cheap oil? Mr. Rockefeller's fundamental reason for forming his first combination
was to keep up the price of oil. It has been forced down by the inventions and
discoveries of his competitors. He has never lowered it a point if it could be
avoided, and in times of public stress he has taken advantage of the very misery of
the poor to demand higher prices.Nobody has yet forgotten the raising of the price
of oil in the coal famine of 1902. Even the coal barons themselves in that winter
combined to see that the poor of the great cities received their little bags of coal
promptly and at reasonable prices and in preference to rich patrons. But the price
of oil and the price of oil-stoves went up. Does it pay the public to trust the control
of a great necessity of life to such a man? He has built hospitals and colleges and
endowed schools. True, and those helped have become his open apologists; by
taking what they call the "large view" or the "charitable view," or by deliberately
shunning a considerationof the subject, quietly not seeing it a topic for discussion.
Does it pay to have those who are entrusted with the very sources of our
intellectual and moral life blinded or silenced to the ethical quality of the practices
of our daily life. Will it pay our colleges to put over their doors the teaching of one
of our present-day moralists, "Never discuss politics or religion if you would
succeed."

He has led a life devoted to charity and the church. True. And the principles of the
religion he professes are so antagonistic to the principles of the business he
practices that the very world which emulates him has been turned into hypocrites
and cynics under his tutelage. While, in the world which look on, charity itself has
become hateful to many a man – a cloak to cover a multitude of sins. Others
actually withdraw their bequests from institutions which accept his funds. (It has
been stated on the best authority that three wills making bequests to one of our
leading universities have been changed because this institution has accepted
money from Mr. Rockefeller). Not only has charity been tainted by the hypocrisy
of his life, the church itself has been polluted and many a man has turned away
from its doors because of the servile support it gives to the men of whom Mr.
Rockefeller is the most eminent type. Does all this pay?

There is no shirking the answer. It does not pay. Our national life is on every side
distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner for the kind of influence he exercises. From him
we have received no impulse to public duty, only lessons in evading it for private
greed; no stimulus to nobler ideals, only a lesson in the further deification of gold;
no example of enlarged and noble living; only one of concealment and evasion; no
impulse to free thinking, only a lesson in obscuring vital ethical issues by dressing
them in the garbs of piety and generosity. None of those higher things which the
public has a right to demand from the man to whom the public permits great
power are returned to it by Mr. Rockefeller. For Mr. Rockefeller has none of these
things to give. He has nothing but Money, and never was there a there a more
striking example of the impotency of money! He has neither taste nor cultivation,
ideals nor potent personality. He is not a great man, not a “human man.” He is a
machine – a money machine – stripped by his overwhelming passion of greed of
every quality which makes a man worthy of citizenship. He has not made good.
He cannot make good. It is not in him. He has nothing the aspiring world needs.
On the contrary, that for which he stands is a menace to our free development not
only or chiefly our free development in commerce, but, vastly more important, our
free development in citizenship and in morals.

Were Mr. Rockefeller the only one of his kind he would be curious, interesting,
unpleasant, but in no way vital. For he would be but temporary – a puzzling and
pitiful monstrosity fit for Lombroso. Were he the only one, there certainly would
be no justification of the brutality inherent in such a study as this. But Mr.
Rockefeller is not only one of his kind. He is simply the type preeminent in the
public mind of the militant business man of the day. From bankers down to street
venders we have in operation the code which he has worked out, so perfectly, and
to which he has given the sanction of piety. And this code, so repugnant to the
sense of fair play and so demoralizing to intellectual honesty, has worked its way
into every activity of life; until with a growing element of the country success is the
justification of any practice, until no price is too great to pay for winning. In
commerce the “interest of the business” justifies breaking the law, bribing
legislators, defrauding a competitor of his rights. In politics, winning the election
justifies supporting an Addicks, breaking international laws; enduring slanders,
bribing voters. In athletics you may break an opponent's collar-bone if it will win
the game for your team. In church and college you may close your mouth to
national demoralization if it will bring you endowments. On every side of us the
Rockefeller practice of separating morals strictly from the business in hand is
winning adherents and defenders. On every side it is ceasing to be "practical" to
consider the ethical quality of a transaction which it is believed will contribute to
success. On every side it is “indiscreet” “unkind, “bad form," to mention these
unpleasant facts.

It is this threatening saturation of all forms of American life with commercial

Machiavellism which forces a study of John D. Rockefeller on those interested in
our ethical and intellectual tendencies. He symbolizes the thing – is, as far as we
can see, the very essence of the thing. Admit him to be the unconscious victim of
his time – the inevitable result of the qualities he inherited – or did not inherit –
explain him as you will, justify him if you can, there still remains the fact so tragic
for Mr. Rockefeller that he is the founder of a creed charged with poison.

With what weapon is society to meet the exponent of a corrupting creed but
analysis, ruthless and unflinching. It is only the courage and thoroughness with
which she has studied and labeled her own products that has ever helped her to
improve these products.

Since the world began her progress has been in proportion to her knowledge and
her judgment of the men who symbolized the influences of a period. History is but
a museum of dissected heroes, warriors, kings, philosophers, their records stripped
bare, their influences traced to their flowering.
Sooner or later, every man who has left a stamp finds his way to the cruel table, his
place in the melancholy galleries. Mr. Rockefeller much as he dislikes the light
cannot escape the fate of his own greatness. All his vast wealth spent in one
supreme effort to evade the judgment of men would be but wasted; for a man can
never escape the judgment of the society which has bred him, and the greater the
power to which he has risen the stronger the light in which he must finally and
eternally rest– Amen!!

Return to Rome, Rockefeller, the U.S. and Standard Oil