Pat Shannan's MUSINGS
Shaking The Family Tree
In March of 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship-building, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, pulled together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the nation and a sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. (From the Congressional Record, 1917)
These 12 men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was necessary to purchase the control of only 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon, emissaries were sent to purchase the national and international policy of the these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, and an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
My great uncle, James P. Bicket (1874-1936), was one of those editors. He was handpicked by William Randolph Hearst to sit in the Publisher's chair at the old Chicago American. "Uncle Jim" died before I was born, and whatever secrets he held, we can be sure that he never shared them with his family members. It seems evident though, with such a lofty position in business with Hearst, that he was far more likely to have been a "planner" than a "follower."
One of the family heirlooms now in my possession is a Masonic gavel inscribed to "Worshipful Brother James Pratt Bicket by Masonic friends on the Chicago Evening American. December 27, 1915"
But That Ain't All!
One of my great-grandfathers, M. L. McClure, was born to very poor farming family in 1854. In a childhood accident, he lost an eye, and in the pictures of him in later life, he appears as a cockeyed old curmudgeon, with his ill-fitting glass eye looking one way while his good eye is going another. Beloved by his family and friends, "Bunk" McClure was a shrewd land trader who became a bona fide millionaire while still a young man in an era when a million dollars was an unthinkably immense amount of money. In the early 1900s, apparently after discovering where the big money really was, Bunk opened a country bank in McLean County, Illinois.
My own father was named after his mother's father and had many warm and humorous anecdotes about him for us kids through the years. Dad passed on to his Great Reward a few years ago, before I learned that ol' Bunk was even a bigger player behind the scenes than Uncle Jim. Regrettably, I never had a chance to inquire with my Pop exactly what details he might have known about this.
Students of the great Federal Reserve swindle will remember that on May 23, 1933, Pennsylvania Congressman Louis T. McFadden launched a scathing attack on the corrupt monetary practices of the Federal Reserve System in the halls of Congress. The lengthy speech took hours that day, and in 1978, "The Arizona Caucus Club" reprinted its text in booklet form.
I have owned several copies over the years but never got around to completing a total reading before it disappeared or was intentionally passed on to another interested party. Earlier this year I found a couple of hours between interruptions to read a new copy from start to finish.
And what a shocking finish it was! There, near the end, Congressman McFadden brazenly names dozens of the players who "have ransacked and pillaged the United States. . . The theft of Teapot Dome was trifling compared to it. What King ever robbed his subjects to such an extent as the Fed has robbed us?"
Names like Mellon and Morgan and Baruch were expected. And that of Ivan Krueger was not surprising. And speaking of FDR's closing of the banks and seizing of the gold, McFadden said, "Roosevelt did what the International Bankers ordered him to do . . . He cast his lot with the usurers and. . . seeks to render the money of the United States worthless by unlawfully declaring that it may no longer be converted into gold at the will of the holder." Nothing new to us here at this late date.
But when he came to his indictment of the banksters, I almost fell out of my chair. There amongst the names of the main culprits, the members of the Federal Reserve Board, was my great-grandpa, that lil' ol' country banker from Illinois, M. L. McClure!
Wonder of wonders. And here my naïve cousins still think I sullied the family name by being indicted by the IRS, which I even beat at trial, and with the greatest Co-Counsel of all, I always hasten to add.
Louis McFadden had signed his death warrant. The first attempt on his life came from an unknown assailant who missed with two pistol shots as the congressman emerged from a taxi. The second was a poisoning at a political banquet, from which an alert physician who promptly procured a stomach pump saved him. The third time, he wasn't so lucky and died mysteriously of a heart attack while being treated for intestinal flu on October 3, 1936.