By FREDERICK TALMADGE
Finance and banking during the New Deal had a significant Jewish role. It was, of course, part of a larger historical context that involved both domestic and international finance capitalism in America, which included (but not limited to) such activities as commercial banking, merchant and investment banking, and the stock market, all fields with important Jewish activity. Like the rest of the New Deal, the Jewish versus gentile share of the activity is complex and not easily reduced to accusations of “Jew Deal.” Though the focus here is on the Jews, the gentiles were still the elite at this point and played many roles that can’t be explored in detail here. One can overstate the Jewish role, however it’s just as easy to understate it as well.
This article will deal with some of the major money and banking events of both the First (1933–34) and Second New Deals (1935–36). Some of the topics, like Henry Morgenthau and Charles Coughlin, appear in both periods, and are not categorizable under either as the nomenclature only applies to administrative policy. Significant economic and financial statutes in the First New Deal are the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall), the Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. The Second New Deal saw the Banking Act of 1935.
Banking Background
It’s instructive to start with a short history of investment (also called merchant) banking, which became modernized in the nineteenth century and was internationally led by the Rothschilds.[1] The United States was still “a nation of planters and farmers” until the 1830s, and before the Civil War there were relatively few railroads and relatively little need for foreign capital.[2] In the U. S., the first investment bank was the private banking house of Jay Cooke & Company in Philadelphia, established in 1861.[3] Cooke was the chief financier during the Civil War for the Union side, although German-Jews in the U.S. were beneficiaries of a “bonanza” because of their connections to Jewish investors in Germany in funding the Union’s expenditures.[4]
The post-bellum funding for recovery and the massive industrial expansion meant that foreign financial capital was needed, and Cooke assembled a syndicate with two Jewish houses, the Seligman’s in New York and the Rothschilds in Europe, to finance a refunding issue for the remaining Civil War debt (he was challenged by a syndicate involving the rising “House of Morgan,” which was awarded the business). Seligman would also vie with the Morgans on Wall Street in tapping European markets for railroad investors[5], including Jewish banking houses such as Cohen, Seligman, Bischoffsheim, Goldschmidt, Bleichroeder, Wertheim, Erlanger, and Oppenheim. (Seligman’s 1880 death ended one era of Jewish banking leadership in America, followed by the era of Jacob Schiff).[6]
The establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, modeled after central banks in Europe, was a watershed for managerial power in the United States. Sam Francis says that it “carried forward the incipient fusion of state and economy in the transitional era between bourgeois and managerial capitalism.”[7] The central role played in international finance by Jews secured an invitation to play a role in the Fed’s creation. International banking had been less directly rooted in the United States, and a central bank was difficult to established for a number of reasons including the country’s history of decentralization,[8] constitutional limitations, and because of the bias toward the interests of farmers, who desired to pay back mortgages with cheaper, inflated money.[9] The Federal Reserve system, was the nation’s fourth attempt at central banking, when it was finally inaugurated by elite insiders during Woodrow Wilson’s first term.
It’s well-known in dissident circles that the system was the offspring of the “Aldrich Plan” submitted to Congress in 1911, from a draft proposal at the Jekyll Island Club meeting in 1910. The men who met at Jekyll Island were midwifes of the new central bank and represented the interests of Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., but the immigrant Jew at the meeting, Paul Moritz Warburg, had the exclusive expertise of the international financier and was able to advise a country traditionally hostile to such institutions.[10]
Warburg was convinced to go public with his previously sketched reforms for the U.S. financial system by associate and friend Edwin R. A. Seligman, son of Joseph Seligman, during a gathering at Seligman’s house. This gathering was right before the Panic of 1907, which was the final stimulus needed to bring Warburg’s ideas to national attention by triggering the National Monetary Commission.[11]
After passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Warburg was on the founding board of governors of the Federal Reserve (the government part of the system) from 1914 to 1918 and served for two years within that period as a vice-chairman. After 1918, he was on the Advisory Council for much of the 1920s and continued to play a principal role in running it.[12]
Mainstream discussions of the Federal Reserve’s origins allow that American banking interests were represented and that these interests were tied to the private Fed through capital investments in the Bank or through interlocking directorates.[13] But were these interests answerable to larger firms in Europe, so that the banking system which Carroll Quigley described as a “feudal system” (but in his discussion one limited to the United States)[14] was in fact a subsidiary of international finance centered in London around the Rothschilds, who possessed fons honorum privileges to bestow power on others from higher up the global neo-peerage system?[15]
Eustace Mullins thought so and didn’t beat around the bush when approaching history with this hypothesis. As the cover of his book, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (1954) put it, “Exposing the plot behind the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 … placing the nation’s banking reserves in the hands of the Jewish international bankers.”[16] His related 1952 work The Secrets of the Federal Reserve quotes a source that claims that the writing of the Federal Reserve Act was directed by London banker Alfred Rothschild, a direct descendant of patriarch Mayer Amschel Rothschild through his son Nathan. Mullins further explained that the Rothschilds controlled international finance through their manipulation of gold prices through their London office.[17]
Mullins also claims that the Rothschilds controlled the Morgan interests throughout their career, a relationship first cemented by Baltimore dry-goods merchant (and Morgan patriarch Junius S. Morgan’s sponsor) George Peabody. According to this theory, Peabody, who founded a merchant bank in London in 1836, and whose celebrated and well-documented Fourth of July parties inviting fellow financiers in the City of London were actually espionage operations for Nathan Rothschild to spy on fellow bankers.[18] Furthermore, he claimed that J.P. Morgan in the United States (his father J.S. spent much of his career in England) was an agent for the House of Rothschild, and that a percentage of his profits were claimed by his benefactor and, as a result, his fortune at his death was considerably below that of the other Gilded Age millionaires.[19]
Eustace Mullins also claimed to have found the organizing certificates of the Federal Reserve banks, and he provides charts of its international ownership structure.[20] And, as for Paul Warburg, Robert L. Owen, the Senate sponsor of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (a.k.a. the Glass-Owen Act, the progressive modification of the Aldrich plan), is quoted in Mullin’s book as having made a statement years later that Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., where Paul Warburg had been a founder and partner, was a Rothschild representative in the United States, a viewpoint shared by G. Edward Griffin in his book on the Federal Reserve.[21]
These claims are absent (and implicitly repudiated) in Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan and Niall Ferguson’s The House of Rothschild, who note that the Rothschilds were only occasional partners with Morgan. Chernow quotes Rothschild agent Belmont as lamenting the “utter want of appreciation of the importance of American business,”[22] while Ferguson writes that the “Rothschild interest in American finance was limited” and that the “Civil War had led … to a permanent decline in the Rothschilds’ transatlantic influence.”[23] Nonetheless, Morgan and other American financiers did cooperate with the Rothschilds in this period, including the refunding issue mentioned above and the rescue of the gold standard during the Cleveland administration of the 1890s.[24]
Of course, there is no doubt that Jewish finance was international. Michael Collins Piper says that, “While the Rothschild family held sway through their banks in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, there were also such big names in Jewish finance as Bleichröder in Berlin, Warburg in Hamburg, Oppenheim in Cologne and Speyer in Frankfurt who were also emerging as powerful lords of money who worked in conjunction with one another and with the Rothschilds, competing often to be sure, but all tied together by their Jewish heritage and traditions.”[25] That is, Jewish-owned banking houses had familial and professional links within and across nations, the product of which can be thought of as an organic whole. Furthermore, to invoke the name “Rothschild” in this sense often means the same thing, making it a metonym for what Henry Ford called “International Jewish Finance.”[26]
Banking in the First New Deal
Paul Warburg would not play any role in the FDR administration, as he died in 1932. His German-born son James, however, was brought into the Roosevelt circle in early 1933 (while he was president of the International Manhattan Co. bank[27]), chosen by brain truster Raymond Moley to be an economic advisor without title or salary after Warburg had turned down undersecretary of the treasury[28] (partly on the strength of the numerous social and business ties between the Roosevelts and Warburgs in America). Author Chernow in The Warburgs called James the “sole Wall Street renegade.”[29]
By the time Roosevelt was elected, the price of goods had fallen catastrophically (64 percent in farm products), and he decided on a multipronged strategy to rescue industry and farmers, the latter trapped in mortgages contracted at higher, pre-crash nominal prices. One option to raise prices was monetary inflation, which could be achieved with greenback printing or by raising the price of gold. An amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act gave Roosevelt the power to do either but Roosevelt chose the gold strategy.
Raising commodity prices by buying gold at successively higher prices was based on the theories of Cornell professor George F. Warren. Warren’s theory was that the price of commodities was always bound with the prices of gold, so to increase one was to increase the other. FDR therefore had Eugene Meyer’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) buy gold at steadily increasing prices. After this brought disappointing results, the gold price was stabilized in 1934 via the Gold Reserve Act.[30]
By that time the paper currency was no longer backed by gold. Warren’s reflation theories did not compel the end of the gold standard—both removing the gold backing from Federal Reserve Notes and circulating minted coins—but Roosevelt abandoned it anyway because it met further administrative goals of credit expansion in the economy.[31] So, by way of successive statutes, by 1933’s end, it became illegal for citizens and private entities (including the Fed) to ‘hoard’ (i.e., possess), export, or contract in gold, ending the standard the nation had been on officially since 1900 and unofficially since 1873. This appeared to be a win against international, deflationary finance; i.e., against “Rothschild finance.”
As far as the history of gold and Jews in America, since the nineteenth century, many leaders of the inflation lobby felt gold to be something adventitious, and it had periodically been associated with Jewry. In the 1890s, the Populists had denounced Grover Cleveland as a tool of Jewish money for striking a deal with the Rothschilds through their American agent August Belmont to save the gold standard. In 1873, the country had been taken off of the bimetallic standard that it had been on since its founding and in doing so had forced deflationary conditions that hurt farmers the most who wanted inflation through silver coinage to pay off mortgage debt. The zenith of this struggle came in the election of 1896, when William Jennings Bryan embraced the Populist formulas in capturing the Democratic Party ticket for U.S. President, losing to William McKinley.[32]
The struggle during the New Deal found inflation proponents among lobbies like the Committee for the Nation. Ihe silverites were chiefly ensconced in the Senate, with many leading Progressives favoring doing something for silver, in the phrase of the day, including Burton Wheeler from Montana and Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma.[33]
If it was a blow to the financial sector, the confiscation and manipulation of gold to raise prices and expand credit had a surprising initial response from Wall St. Given FDR’s experiments with the metal, it was perhaps providential and symbolic for New Deal progressives that “die-hard” gold defender Paul Warburg had died the same year that Roosevelt was elected. Still, his son was among those receptive to abandonment and inflation, conditional on a certain future return to the metal. As a result, James (‘Jimmy’) Warburg was even chosen as one of Roosevelt’s experts on money matters during the Hundred Days.[34] And in those uncertain days, even J.P. Morgan embraced both Roosevelt’s election and his legerdemain with gold in 1933; though there is little doubt that part of this surrender owed to both the ongoing Pecora hearings, which investigated the role of big finance in causing the stock market crash of 1929, and the desperation brought on by the Depression. As for administration bankroller Bernard Baruch, he had as a matter of principle been against inflation, but Schlesinger says that he was the type that hedged his bets, and early in 1933 he craftily used his associate Herbert Bayard Swope to confer with monetary apostates.[35]
In time, however, some of the bankers (like the business community), having rediscovered their pride, would revolt. Warburg was the first, turning on Roosevelt in the summer of 1933, becoming a leading New Deal opponent thereafter. As suggested, the break was over Roosevelt’s decision to abandon gold, nearly agreeing with conservative budget director Lew Douglas’s comment that its abandonment meant the “end of Western Civilization.” Thus, he came back into the Wall Street fold. Chernow also says that Jimmy Warburg was the “true son of a Jewish banking dynasty, for he always favored global coordination and harmony over any naked assertion of national interests.”[36]
The mild and implicit gentile-Jewish wrangling in 1933 over the political and bureaucratic differences in the Department of Agriculture between conservative George Peek and liberal Jerome Frank (seen in Part 1 of this essay[37]) would have an inverted analog in the FDR administration’s approach to monetary policy. In this instance, the Warburgs became the reactionaries that adhered to an international financial order based around gold, while the inflation lobby of the rural West and South (with its residue of Victorian populism) and among some businessmen had a progressive moral order that was set against gold, favoring bimetallism or unbacked greenback printing (expressed in the Thomas Amendment to the AAA).[38] That is, and this is a cardinal takeaway from this study: Jews could be found on both sides of this debate (Morgenthau, discussed below, was not opposed to coming off of gold), so that Jewish activity during the period was characterized less by “conspiracy” than by a general increase in influence.
Warburg was not the only revolting financial baron who had supported FDR. The nation had felt unified by the response to the collective economic struggle during the Hundred Days, but in 1933 some prominent bankers were thought to be behind the Business Plot, the reputed proposed fascist putsch on the FDR government by elements of big business and finance.[39] In short: In late 1934, General Smedley Butler testified at the Congressional McCormack-Dickstein committee that two men, a bond-salesman named Gerald Macguire and a J.P. Morgan executive named Grayson M.P. Murphy had approached him and asked him to deliver a speech to the upcoming American Legion convention in Chicago. The prepared speech was one that announced the evils of taking the nation off of gold.
More seriously, Butler was told in coded language that he might be tasked with marching on Washington with thousands of soldiers to be installed as the nation’s new leader and that Roosevelt would step aside. The establishment of the American Liberty League in 1934, which formed a year after Butler claimed MacGuire asked him to lead the coup, was an anti-New Deal organization that employed some of the same men in the plot and included many of Morgan’s men, such as Morgan’s chief attorney John W. Davis, who had written the pro-gold speech.[40]
What’s interesting for our purposes is that powerful Jews put their support behind the Business Plot, the Liberty League, and other significant pro-business and anti-New Deal organizations, some of whom funded an array of other, anti-communist and antisemitic organizations. John Spivak, a communist journalist for the Marxist-oriented New Masses magazine in the 1930s, explored the byzantine links between financiers and (his definition of) American fascism, giving special attention to the plot against Roosevelt. In the article, one learns, for instance, of the business ties between the interests of the Morgans, Hearsts, Gianninnis, Rockefellers, Duponts, and Kuhn-Loebs. Spivak identifies Morgan as the “ultimate fountain-head of the whole fascist conspiracy of Wall Street” but does not shy away from the conspicuous role of Jews within Spivak’s galaxy of fascist organizations.[41]
So, for example, Judge Joseph Proskauer, on the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee, was a director of the American Liberty League while the A.L.L.’s president Jouett Shouse, a gentile, married the daughter of Abraham Lincoln Filene of Filene’s Department Store, whose vice-president was Louis Kirstein, who was also on the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee.[42]
According to the communist Spivak, in furthering their class interests as capitalists, the Liberty League and the American Jewish Committee, motivated by the common perception that Jews were communists, were both invested in backstairs dealings with anti-Jewish organizations to fight real or suspected communism, emboldened by the dominance of the left in this period. This was a period when a lot of the press was abuzz with the sentiment that “a Communist is a Jew and a Jew is a Communist”[43] (my next essay will explore this). The former funded the Sentinels of the Republic[44] and the latter, through Lessing Rosenwald, funded Harry A. Jung’s American Vigilance Intelligence Federation. Among other things, Jung had distributed copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[45]
Spivak also claimed that Felix Warburg orchestrated the McCormack-Dickstein Committee investigations from behind the scenes. The Committee’s mandate was to look into both National Socialist and Communist activities, but Spivak claimed that Warburg and the American Jewish Committee had an interest in restricting it to Communism only. That explains the Committee’s merely half-hearted, pro forma investigation into the plot. As a result, Spivak concluded that Jewish class interests could trump their racial interests[46], but I would add that powerful Jews probably felt that they were in a position to manage the situation, not unlike Jewish support for the alleged neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the ongoing Ukrainian war today. An important point as well is that during this period many Jews were communists (agitating from below) and some Jews were capitalists (influencing from above).[47]
Henry Morgenthau
The summer of 1933 saw the meeting of leading Western bankers and politicians called the London Economic Conference. It was here that the decision was definitively made by Roosevelt (through his delegation) to practice economic nationalism—that America’s interests would be put above those of the international bankers, whose gold standard had a deflationary tendency and resulted in unstable price levels.
Jews were the advisors for the American delegation—James Warburg was a financial advisor, William Bullitt was an executive officer, and Herbert Feis was chief technical advisor.[48] In fact, it was to these three men that Roosevelt entrusted the entire American preparation for the conference.[49] In trying to avoid offending European sensibilities, Roosevelt (who did not travel to London) initially assented to general agreements with Britain and France for currency stabilization and an eventual return to the gold standard, but in an impudent turnabout borne out of necessity, he ultimately nixed any commitments and finally cabled that the United States would not make pledges to either goal and would to try to inflate their way out of depression. This is when Warburg decided to break relations with Roosevelt, reflecting the sentiments of much of Wall Street as well.[50]
Jimmy Warburg did not want Bernard Baruch to attend the conference because he was, for one, a mere Wall Street speculator, but also because he didn’t want Jewish opponents to see it as an “international Jewish delegation.”[51] Whether or not that was sufficient to dispel the perception of the outsize Jewish presence at the conference, it probably didn’t help Jewry against charges of elite global power that Henry Morgenthau Jr. as treasury secretary would be the nation’s chief advisor of all economic and financial matters, nationally and internationally.[52] Morgenthau would serve in this capacity until July 1945, a few months after Roosevelt’s death, when Truman accepted his resignation over not being allowed to go to the Potsdam Conference, telling Henry Stimson, “I’m not taking any of those jew boys, not Morgenthau, not Baruch” to Potsdam.[53]
Morgenthau’s elevation to Secretary of the Treasury was not based on objective merit. He was the son of the famous lawyer and ambassador to the Ottoman empire Henry Morgenthau Sr. in the Democratic progressive Wilson administration. Many Jews had embraced progressivism and the Democratic Party to further their interests. As Benjamin Ginsberg put it, the process of elite formation between the industrialists and the old-money Americans in the Gilded Age excluded Jews by the end of the nineteenth century, and Jews improved their political fortunes by supporting progressivist candidates, becoming early supporters of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.[54] Morgenthau Sr., like Baruch, had been an influential supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential run in 1912.[55]
The young Morgenthau had wandered irregularly in youth. His poor grades forced him out of Exeter and later Cornell University, which his own son, Henry Morgenthau III, thought due to undiagnosed dyslexia.[56] He decided on becoming a farmer (unusual for a Jew), perhaps in part because he wanted to be free of his father[57] or because he found people “difficult and forbidding.”[58] He focused on dairy farming and apple growing, and biographer Herbert Levy assures the reader that farming for Morgenthau was more than “just bookkeeping entries” (i.e., merely a business), and says his interest was genuine, quoting Morgenthau’s son who said that he “loved nothing better than to ride horseback through the rows of apple trees at all seasons.”[59]
In 1913, Morgenthau, Jr. and Sr., jointly chose to purchase 1,000 acres in Dutchess County, New York, becoming Franklin Roosevelt’s neighbor. This was not long after Roosevelt had won a seat in the New York State Senate in 1910.[60] Considering their later association, this fate would be judged miraculous if assumed governed by chance, but the more likely explanation is that it was a calculated strategy by the Morgenthaus to associate with probable future influencers in the Democratic Party.[61]
Nonetheless, while Roosevelt entered politics beginning in 1910, Morgenthau cut his teeth on agriculture, which continued through the 1920s. When Roosevelt became governor in 1928, he hired his erstwhile neighbor to direct the Agricultural Advisory Commission, and Morgenthau was now a political insider, gaining the chief financial office in the federal government only five years later.[62]
Levy mentions that Morgenthau “had an innate skill to run a bureaucracy,“ and that he performed it with aplomb under FDR.[63] This is a marriage of two facts, the Progressive idea of the state and the knack Jews have for administration. A Progressive creed for statecraft was summed up by Roosevelt himself during a 1930 campaign speech: “that progressive government by its very terms must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never-ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.”[64]
The Jews possess managerial talents along with very able strategies for getting to the top (Baruch ran the economy for the final months of the First World War, for example). Thus, Morgenthau as commissioner of the Department of Conservation established a scientific bureau to study land management, created an advisory council of non-partisan experts, restructured the organization, and streamlined its finances.[65]
And as a technocrat he was committed to implementing the policies of the government official whom he served.[66] Morgenthau was devoted enough to Roosevelt and the nascent potential power within the rising ranks of Democrat Progressivism enough to take an unpaid position when chairman of the Agricultural Advisory Commission in Roosevelt’s first term as governor in 1930.[67] This was the beginning of Morgenthau’s union with Roosevelt for the rest of the latter’s life. Morgenthau could be relied on to deliver obedience and would provide funds for campaigns, but Levy writes that the real reason FDR liked Morgenthau was that he possessed the capacity to decode the thoughts and motivations of the sphinxlike Roosevelt.[68]
Morgenthau was more qualified to be Secretary of Agriculture, but Levy says anti-Semitism among farmers prevented this.[69] A Time Magazine article from 1934 noted that Morgenthau Jr. was no financial expert, that he consolidated his power like a dictator at Treasury, that he operated out of loyalty to FDR, and was thought to desire the subordination of the Federal Reserve to the Treasury through personal rule.[70]
Nonetheless, despite his closeness to the true-blue Morgenthau, many sources indicate that Roosevelt was not easily influenced by his advisers; James Warburg says that there was no possible power behind the throne with Roosevelt, who always called the shots in the end.[71] Morgenthau was even the chief target of an occasional and subtle sadism that Roosevelt characteristically displayed in ribbing his subordinates.[72]
Morgenthau got the Treasury job when FDR improvised a legal solution to getting the government to buy gold, one that met with consternation by Undersecretary of Treasury Dean Acheson.[73] Acheson, who was acting Treasury Secretary with a dying William H. Woodin, was forced to resign by Roosevelt. In looking for a replacement, he chose Morgenthau, based on thin qualifications as a financial expert. When Morgenthau got the news, Levy reports that he “broke out in a cold sweat,” knowing little about the “effects of currency flow or banking.”[74]
Prior to his appointment in January of 1934, Roosevelt had been using him as an “unofficial ‘minister without portfolio’—a ‘troubleshooter’” in occasional money matters. Whether connected or not, during the Hundred Days Roosevelt had been informed of George Warren’s theories on Morgenthau’s recommendations and was compelled to use his inflation theories when the midwestern radical Farmers’ Holiday Association threatened a farmers’ strike on Washington. The Association was headed by Milo Reno, who was one of those who would charge in 1935 that the New Deal was a “Jew Deal.”[75]
Since our discussion carries us to only 1936, we will not deal with the issues arising from the war, most notably the Morgenthau Plan, for the destruction of post-World War II Germany for which he is assuredly best remembered. In 1935 and 1936, he would help coordinate international exchange policy, at one point charging Hitler with violating Smoot-Hawley through a currency devaluation, getting new import duties on Germany over the objections of the State Department, impressing the French socialist government of Léon Blum, and allowing Franco-American exchange talks to go ahead.[76] Whether based on economic need or not, these international transactions among Jews could not have escaped the attention of the Hitler government.
Silver and Father Charles Couglin
Since his opinions tended to follow Roosevelt’s, Morgenthau had helped Roosevelt set the prices each day for gold when Professor Warren’s theories were being experimented with. They both, however, opposed mandatory bimetallism as advocated in the Bryan tradition through the coining of silver, which was in the interest of the rural South and West and was represented by pro-silver senators, such as Key Pittman and Burton Wheeler.[77] Schlesinger writes that, “Gold was the rich man’s metal, the creditor’s metal, the banker’s metal; silver, the poor man’s metal, the debtor’s metal, the worker’s metal—and that had been true ever since the House of Rothschild in Populist folklore had begun a century before to drive silver out of the currencies of the world.”[78]
The Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 had authorized the Treasury to buy and mint silver, but neither the President nor the Secretary of Treasury had acted. The silver bloc in Congress in early 1934 was as vocal as ever and Roosevelt was forced to compromise, resulting in the Silver Purchase Act of 1934, which required the government to buy and mint silver, though according to Schlesinger it wasn’t the monetary panacea the lobby anticipated.[79]
From a contemporary standpoint, during this period the silver issue as well as anti-Semitism are both associated with Father Charles Coughlin, who had made a name for himself in the 1920s from his Detroit ministry. Roosevelt was being threatened during his first term by the twin demagogic political and cultural surge of Coughlin and Senator Huey Long of Louisiana for the allegiance of the nation.
Coughlin (pronounced “COG-lin”[80]), had a brief row with Roosevelt and Morgenthau in 1934 during the silver debates at a time when “The Radio Priest” was waging warfare against capitalism, particularly its financial sector.[81] To retaliate against Coughlin, “Morgenthau had launched an investigation of silver speculators. … The most interesting feature was the revelation that, while Father Coughlin had been demanding the ‘mobilization of all Christianity against the god of gold,’ his secretary had been prudently investing the funds of the Father’s Radio League of the Little Flower in silver futures.”[82] Betraying the association of gold with Jews, Coughlin responded by saying, “Mr. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, has completed his clumsy effort to protect the gold advocates, the Federal Reserve bankers and the international bankers of ill-repute” and that silver was a “gentile” metal (Morgenthau himself, as an FDR loyalist and pragmatist, was not against ending gold).[83]
For years Coughlin had preferred to couch his monetary critique in somewhat vague abstractions, frequently denouncing “international bankers” and the “money changers.”[84] It was only after Roosevelt was elected that he began floating the names of specific changers. Alan Brinkley noted that, despite the anti-Semitic impression many people in the early 1930s got from hearing his speeches—when Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Eugene Meyer, and Bernard Baruch were named—gentile banking firms and individuals were cited 50 percent more often by Coughlin from 1933 on, including Andrew Mellon, Odgen Mills, Thomas Lamont, but especially J.P. Morgan. For Coughlin, Morgan was the symbol par excellence of the evil banker.[85] His “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” were Morgan, Mellon, Mills, and Meyer.[86]
Prior to 1938, he only occasionally denounced the Jews as Jews. In an August 1936 convention in Cleveland campaigning for Union Party presidential candidate William Lemke, he said “You appreciate the fact to my dear friends, that, among other things, in the National Union for Social Justice, we are Christian insofar as we believe in Christ’s principle of love your neighbor as yourself, and with that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it!”[87] By 1938 he entered a more explicitly anti-Jewish phase, serializing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper.[88]
Coughlin’s radio program was reaching millions at its peak, but in the later 1930s Coughlin was attacked by the administration, which imposed new regulations on radio broadcasters, which he was able to temporarily work around until America’s entry into the Second World War, which pressured him into permanent silence under the threat of America’s sedition laws.[89]
Monetary Policy and Banking in the Second New Deal
In the second book of his FDR trilogy, The Coming of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger writes about the end of laissez-faire in the financial sector:
In the twenties, the national monetary policy had been run to a great degree in New York by Benjamin Strong and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Decisions basic to the nation’s economic future were made not by government officials accountable to the people but by bankers in Manhattan board rooms. In 1933, as a result of Roosevelt’s gold policy—and even more, perhaps, of such reforms as the new banking legislation and the control of margins under the Securities Act—this situation came to an end. The nation asserted its control over its monetary policy. In this process, the financial capital of the United States began to shift from Wall Street to Washington.[90]
The Federal Reserve Board is the government side of the Federal Reserve system, originally created to provide for public oversight as a necessary counterweight to the influence of bankers.[91] The control by the Federal Reserve banks during the 1920s was so total as to “reduce the public Board in Washington to impotence.”[92] Monetary policy was run by officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in cahoots with those in the Bank of England, with the former oftentimes carrying out policy for the latter’s interest.[93] However, once nations were forced off of gold during the financial crisis (Britain in 1931 and the U.S. in 1933), Fed policy increasingly took orders from the White House during 1933–34, and in 1935 the balance of the decision-making was tipped in favor of the government.[94]
The Banking Act of 1935 was the brainchild of Marriner Eccles, a Mormon banker who joined the administration soon after impressing Rexford Tugwell and Roosevelt with the content and the vehemence of his gospel of deficit spending (i.e., Keynesianism) and his desire to reform the banking system to subordinate the Federal Reserve banks to the Federal Reserve Board. He had felt that the Federal Reserve system was run by private concerns with a view to their interest and felt an overhaul was in order for the national interest. To this end, his bill made a number of changes to the Fed including public management of open-market operations (through a Federal Open Market Committee) and a reorganization of Board membership to favor selecting fewer bankers.[95] In 1934, Henry Morgenthau’s assistant Jacob Viner, an influential Jewish economist from the University of Chicago, had chaired a committee to recommend changes that would make the Fed more accountable to the public, but Eccles’s repudiated them as insufficient.[96]
Jimmy Warburg opened the attacks against Eccles’s bill when Virginia Senator Carter Glass opened hearings on it (Glass, who was Eccles’s biggest critic in Congress, had helped author the original Federal Reserve Act in 1913). A momentary split had developed between Eccles and Morgenthau during the debates, with Morgenthau to the left of Eccles, desiring stock ownership of the Federal Reserve banks by the government, based on a casual suggestion by FDR, to which, however, Roosevelt remained non-committal. Morgenthau backed off and after some political wrangling by Glass that proved to be more theater than horse-trading, the bill was passed, essentially originally what Eccles had wanted, which put banking in control of the government.[97]
Frankfurter, Brandeis, and the Security Acts
I want to close this first inquiry into Jewish influence in the New Deal—whether the “Jew Deal” charge had merit—with the two men who were most associated with it, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter. Bernard Baruch and Gerard Swope influenced the First New Deal of the NRA and the AAA. Brandeis and Frankfurter’s influence was predominantly in the Second New Deal, about which much more will be will be said in a future essay.[98] Still, Brandeis and Frankfurter had an impact during the First New Deal in securities and exchange legislation, in their opinions on the chief recovery statutes, in early legislation written by Frankfurter and his students, or traceable to Frankfurter and Brandeis’s own ideas as progressives.
Known as the “people’s lawyer,” Brandeis, since the Homestead Steel Works strike of 1892, devoted himself to an intensely moralistic social justice posture, fighting for the worker, unions, the consumer, and the citizen against corporate giants and political corruption.[99] He won fame while battling J.P. Morgan in a multi-year struggle over a New Haven Railroad monopoly beginning in 1907, bringing hatred from the Boston WASPs.[100]
Among Progressives, Brandeis had been for protection of the individual against modern corporations through “regulated competition, unhampered enterprise, and economic freedom,”[101] and for decades he had not changed his conviction that “bigness,” whether of business or government, was a danger to the individual’s liberty. His conception of freedom was based on economic liberty within an ideal Jeffersonian republic of smaller businesses, and he opposed the prevailing trend towards large corporate organization, the financial powers of Wall St., and the trusts and holding companies. As the author of the New Freedom strategy of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign, utilizing the power of his characteristic sense of moral superiority, he would insist on the certainty of invoking antitrust legislation to better ensure that ideal republic.[102]
Frankfurter, like Brandeis, was a lawyer who heeded the liberal progressive call to action, after hearing a high-minded speech Brandeis himself gave in 1905 before the Harvard Ethical Society while Frankfurter was a young, idealistic student at its law school.[103] A friend of Frankfurter said that he “collects people”, inveterately networking across his career to help construct the liberal state.[104] In doing so, he would mimic Brandeis in numerous and varied ways, from directly following him as counsel to Florence Kelley’s National Consumer League in the battle over worker rights in Oregon, to being a leader in American Zionism, and all the way to the Supreme Court as a Justice (it’s no wonder then that when Brandeis became a justice in 1916, Frankfurter cemented a “half-brother, half-son” relationship.[105])
Contemporary journalist John Franklin Carter said about the pair that Frankfurter, “more than any other one person is the legal mastermind of the New Deal, although he is in large part only the transmitter of the apostolic succession of Louis D. Brandeis.”[106] Still, though Frankfurter had maintained similar convictions in copying his master’s habits and beliefs as fellow front-line liberals, there was never a complete committal to “Old Isaiah’s” ideological blueprint, which created contributive flexibility.[107] By the time the FDR revolution emerged, Frankfurter had decided to assist the left New Deal planners of the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Recovery Administration, and its “bigness” designs, owing to his not being the ideologue that Brandeis was; he was more pragmatic,[108] much like FDR himself, continuously following the twisting road of history as it revealed itself bit by bit and to strike at opportune moments. And from his professorship at Harvard Law School (and during the early New Deal from Oxford University), he could influence events through his advice and by being a “one-man recruiting agency” for New Deal talent.[109]
As a result, he was involved with the creation of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933; Frankfurter helped draft some of its labor provisions, and after its passage he was Hugh Johnson’s first choice for NRA general counsel.[110] He would also play a lead role in attempting to save the NRA two years later. In 1935, Brandeis voted in the judicial majority against NIRA in the Supreme Court Panama Refining and Schechter cases which struck the law down, after which Brandeis scolded Frankfurter’s proteges Benjamin Cohen and James Corcoran, telling them that the President was living in a “fool’s paradise.”[111] For his own part, Frankfurter predicted it would fail because it wasn’t drafted to satisfy Chief Justice Charles Hughes’s agency requirements for delegation of powers. As a result, Frankfurter insisted on writing better legislation to conform to what the Hughes Court wanted, which would pay dividends for the later New Deal.[112]
Several securities acts were important New Deal monetary policies. While Frankfurter was doing his best to nourish the New Deal from overseas in England (while teaching from the fall of 1933 to the summer semester of 1934), the Pecora Commission in Washington was grilling influential bankers and stockbrokers to get to the bottom of the causes of the crash of 1929.[113] Two statutes that resulted from this inquiry, the Securities Act of 1933 (for new security issues) and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (for secondary market securities), had heavy Jewish input. (The other statute that resulted was Glass-Steagall.)
The Securities Act of 1933, one of the Hundred Days statutes, was in many ways the New Deal sequel to a bill, drafted in 1914 by Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn with Brandeis’s assistance, that gave the Interstate Commerce Commission more control of the issuing of railroad securities.[114] Almost 20 years later and with a revived progressivism, Rayburn led the way in Congress for a proper securities bill. Needing assistance, he appealed to advisor Ray Moley to find someone suited to help draft a proper bill. Moley would turn to Frankfurter. To assist, Frankfurter sent his students, most notably James Landis and the “Gold Dust Twins,” Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin V. Cohen, who were Frankfurter’s most important disciples in the New Deal.[115]
The Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which established the Security and Exchange Commission, was also a very Jewish affair. The first draft of what would be the act was written by Samuel Untermyer before being discarded. Untermyer, Jewish lawyer Max Lowenthal and the Pecora Commission’s chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora, anticipating a request for a stock exchange bill by the government, called on Frankfurter’s star pupil Cohen (also a protégé of Lowenthal’s[116]) to pen a replacement draft. Cohen reunited with Thomas Corcoran (from the earlier Securities Act) with help from Landis, and several months of constant work and testimony (by Corcoran) and battling for the bill in Congress by many congressmen, including Senate Banking Committee chair Duncan Fletcher and Sam Rayburn of Texas in the House, produced the bill.[117]
At this point, Snyder writes that charges of a “Jew Deal” and Communism “cropped up with increasing frequency” by businessmen, writers, and Congress. Frankfurter’s circle came under direct fire by Congressman Frank Britton who charged that the House of Truth in Washington (a quasi-Jewish thinktank) was a breeding ground for subversive and alien ideas.[118] A school superintendent in Gary, Indiana named William A. Wirt also made headlines for alleging that the New Deal was part of a design to communize the United States.[119]
As mentioned, the attacks of 1934 were part of a reenergized business community, no longer pliant as in the heady and desperate Hundred Days. The attacks would resume until Roosevelt regained momentum in 1935. Once Frankfurter was back from Cambridge, Roosevelt requested to see him immediately, as the New Deal was in trouble and would face legal headwinds, that would ultimately need to remediated by the Second New Deal.[120] And the Jews would contain to play a role. The Second New Deal is explored in my next essay.
[1] ”The nineteenth century saw the rise of several prominent banking partnerships such as those created by the Rothschilds, the Barings and the Browns. At this point, investment banking had started to evolve into its modern form, with banks underwriting and selling government bonds.” In “The History of Investment Banking,” International Finance Institute.
See also: Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme (American Free Press, 2009), 111.
[2] John Moody, The Masters of Capital (Yale University Press, 1919), 9.
[3] Jay Cooke, Wikipedia, last modified September 16, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Cooke
[4] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 13.
[5] Ibid., 36, 30.
[6] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 64. Joseph Seligman was powerful enough to elicit an invitation by President Grant to become Secretary of the Treasury in 1869, a role that Henry Morgenthau would fill under Roosevelt. See Ginsberg, 59.
[7] Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies (Washington Summit Publishers, 2016), 375.
[8] Paul Warburg once wrote, in despair of ever launching a central bank, that an “abhorrence of both extremes”—that is, of Washington and of Wall Street—“had led to an almost fanatic conviction” in favor of extreme decentralization. Roger Lowenstein, “The Jewish Story Behind the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank,” Forward (November 29, 2015). https://forward.com/culture/325447/the-man-behind-the-fed/
[9] Verne B. Johnston, “Origins,” Research Department Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (December 30, 1983), 1. Niall Ferguson notes suspicion of big banks in particular. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798–1848 (Penguin Publishing Group, 1998), 369.
[10] The others were senator Nelson Aldrich, economist A. Piatt Andrews, and bankers Henry P. Davidson, Benjamin Strong, and Frank Vanderlip.
[11] Harold Kellock, “Warburg, the Revolutionist,” The Century Magazine (May, 1915, 81). https://archive.org/details/centurymagazine90newyrich/centurymagazine90newyrich/page/79/mode/1up?q=Warburg.
[12] Paul Warburg, Wikipedia, last modified October 5, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg
[13] For an example, see Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (Harpers & Brothers, 1954), 44.
[14] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope (The MacMillan Company, 1966), 530.
[15] This is not to say that scholars don’t discuss transnational links. Ron Chernow, for example, mentions merchant banking interlocking partnerships on an international scale. See Chernow, The House of Morgan, 33.
[16] Eustace Mullins, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (Common Sense, 1954).
[17] Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve (Bankers Research Institute, 1952), 23, 48.
[18] Ibid., 49.
[19] Ibid., 57 (footnote). Mullins would presumably agree that this is what caused Andrew Carnegie to assert, upon receiving news of the elder Morgan’s death, “And to think he was not a rich man.” In Chernow, The House of Morgan, 159.
[20] Mullins, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, 34. He doesn’t give any citation for the claims, but the numbers and detail of the claims would be inspired if a hoax.
[21] Ibid., 17. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, 2010), 5. Griffin claims that Warburg bought his partnership in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. from Rothschild money. In Ibid., 18.
[22] Chernow, The House of Morgan, 40.
[23] Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker 1849–1999 (Penguin Publishing Group, 1999), 117–18.
[24] Chernow, The House of Morgan, Ch. 5.
[25] Piper, The New Babylon, 114.
[26] Ibid., 117. For example, Jacob Schiff’s father had worked for the Rothschilds as a broker and the Schiffs and the Warburgs married into the Loeb family of America. “Jacob Schiff,” Wikipedia, last modified August 9, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff
“Paul Warburg,” Wikipedia, last modified October 5, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg
[27] James Warburg, The Long Road Home (Doubleday, 1964), 111.
[28] Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (Random House, 1993), 385. Also in Warburg, The Long Road Home, 112.
[29] Chernow, The Warburgs, 385.
[30] Eugene Meyer was the fifth chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1930 to 1933. Meyer’s financial interests had ties with Baruch’s, and Meyer, like Baruch, was important in the First World War, heading the War Finance Corporation, which became the basis for his Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1933. With its capitalization by bankers, the RFC attempted to revive the economy using loans to troubled banks during the banking crisis that began in 1931 with the failure of the large Jewish-owned The Bank of United States in New York, setting off a chain of bank failures until Franklin Roosvelt shut down the banks the week he took office. See: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 236–238. See also: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), 239, and “Eugene Meyer (financier),” Wikipedia, last modified October 23, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Meyer_(financier).
The Jews were so well connected, that Henry Morgenthau Sr. was asked to represent the stockholders (he refused). His son, of course, would become important in FDR’s administration and was responsible for the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of Germany after the Second World War. Roosevelt sent governor Herbert Lehman to effect a merger of other failing Jewish-owned banks with the Bank of United States (it failed). Lehman is listed by Schlesinger as having been one of the top donors to Roosevelt for President, behind Morgenthau Sr. See: Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 280.
[31] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), 199.
[32] Chernow, The Warburgs, Ch. 5.
[33] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 248–249.
[34] Chernow, The Warburgs, 386.
[35] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 196.
[36] Chernow, 387.
[37] Frederick Talmadge, “The Jews and the First New Deal, 1933–1934,” The Occidental Quarterly 25 (Spring 2025): 63–105.
[38] The two analogous centers were also connected by policy through the emergency. One of Henry Wallace’s strategies at the Department of Agriculture to raise the catastrophically low commodity prices was through inflation, and one method of achieving inflation was through gold price manipulation.
[39] “Business Plot,” Wikipedia, last modified October 22, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[40] Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), 31.
[41] John L. Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, II,” New Masses (February 5, 1935), 13.
[42] Ibid., 14.
[43] Ibid., 12.
[44] Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, 31. Archer claimed that “Its members [included some rich businessmen who] labeled the New Deal ‘Jewish Communism,’” and also that they demanded an American Hitler.
[45] John L. Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, I,” New Masses (January 29, 1935), 13. For information on Jung’s activities, see: Ray P. Chase (who represented Minnesota in Congress, 1933–1935), “Ray Chase Seeks to Collaborate with Harry A. Jung, Notorious Extremist Antisemite,” A Campus Divided (1940); source: Minnesota Historical Society, RP Chase, Box 44, Correspondence and Miscellaneous papers, Folder (December, 1940). https://acampusdivided.umn.edu/letter/ray-chase-seeks-to-collaborate-with-harry-a-jung-notorious-extremist-antisemite/
[46] Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, II,” 14.
[47] For information on Jews and Communism, see: Kevin MacDonald, “Stalin’s Willing Executioners, Jews as a Hostile Elite in the Soviet Union,” The Occidental Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Fall, 2005): 65–100. http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/SlezkineRev.pdf
[48] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 209.
[49] Ibid., 204.
[50] Roosevelt began to feel that a group set up by Warburg to study the monetary issue was beholden to New York interests. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 237.
[51] Chernow, The Warburgs, 391.
[52] “United States Secretary of the Treasury,” Wikipedia, last modified October 12, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_the_Treasury#Powers_and_functions
[53] Lucinda Franks, Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 52.
[54] Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace, 61–62.
[55] “Henry Morgenthau Sr.,” Wikipedia, last modified October 14, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Sr.#Political_career
[56] Herbert Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.: The Remarkable Life of FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury (Skyhorse publishing, 2010), 62.
[57] Ibid., 88.
[58] Ibid., 241.
[59] Ibid., 117.
[60] Ibid., 90.
[61] See Jeff Gates, Guilt by Association (State Street Publications, 2008), 52.
[62] Roosevelt would rely on many Jews as governor, including speechwriter Sam Rosenman and Jessie I. Straus, who was the first leader of the state Temporary Emergency Relief Administration program. See: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wikipedia, last modified October 27, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Governor_of_New_York_(1929-1932)
[63] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 187. This was fortunate for him because his farm “sustained huge losses” most of the time. Ibid., 117.
[64] “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Wikipedia, last modified October 27, 2024, accessed October 29, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
[65] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 228–230. As another example, consider that Felix Frankfurter gave suggestions for the reorganization of the War Department during World War I. See: Brad Snyder, Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (W.W. Norton and Company, 2022), 96.
[66] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 117; 241.
[67] Ibid., 228.
[68] Ibid., 200-01.
[69] See: Talmadge, “The Jews and the First New Deal, 1933–1934.”
[70] “The Cabinet: Atlas & His Burden,” Time Magazine (September 17, 1934). https://time.com/archive/6895177/the-cabinet-atlas-his-burden/
To be fair, Warburg pointed out that the previous Secretary, William Woodin, had no financial experience as Treasury Secretary either. It’s worth pointing out that James Warburg was offered the Undersecretary of the Treasury by FDR in 1933, but declined. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 196.
[71] Warburg, The Long Road Home, 113.
[72] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 537.
[73] FDR’s solution was to create a subordinate agency under the RFC to buy the gold instead of the Treasury (which Acheson said could not buy outside of the statutory price of $20.67 per ounce). The RFC would buy the gold under the condition that the gold would be collateral for the loans the Treasury would make to the RFC which the latter would need to purchase the gold. Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 259–60; Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 238.
[74] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 265.
[75] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 27.
[76] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 285.
[77] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 248.
[78] Ibid., 248.
[79] Ibid., 257.
[80] Clyde Haberman, “The Father Coughlin Story,” PBS, Exploring Hate (March 9, 2022). https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2022/03/09/today-in-history-the-father-coughlin-story/
[81] See Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 18–20.
[82] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 251.
[83] Abba Hillel Silver, “Father Coughlin,” Jewish Daily Bulletin (May 6, 1934).
[84] Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 271.
[85] Ibid., 271–272.
[86] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 18.
[87] “Coughlin ‘Challenges’ Jews to Adopt ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ Precept,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (August 18, 1936), 4 You can watch him say it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ljscYrxr8.
[88] Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); see Appendix I for a short essay about Coughlin and the Jews.
[89] “Charles Coughlin,” Wikipedia, last modified October 27, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin#Backlash
[90] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 247.
[91] David C. Wheelock, “Overview: The History of the Federal Reserve,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (September 13, 2021). https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/federal-reserve-history
[92] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 292.
[93] This was not just because the center of international finance was the City of London, but also because it needed America to raise its domestic discount rates to stop Britain’s continual hemorrhaging of its limited gold supplies after it returned to gold in 1926. During the First World War, the belligerents were forced off of gold to fund the conflict; the priority for international financiers after the war was for nations to return to—to “stabilize”on—the gold standard. See Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, 342.
[94] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 301. See also: Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 278; Wheelock, “Overview: The History of the Federal Reserve.”
[95] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 293–294.
[96] “Banking Act of 1935,” Wikipedia, last modified June 19, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_Act_of_1935#Origin
[97] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 298–301.
[98] Brandeis and Frankfurter’s contributions are more significant than Swope and Baruch because the agencies they had the most impact on, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Social Security Act, were not struck down by the courts.
[99] Leonard Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter: A Dual Biography (Harper & Row, 1984), 35. As an example of his reputation, Brandeis’s contrarian professional crusades led him to be “thoroughly hated by most of the leaders of the bar.” Ibid., 17.
[100] Ibid., 46–47.
[101] Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 20.
[102] Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 28–31. Though always opposed to “bigness”, under the real constraints of Wilson’s first term, Brandeis quickly capitulated in order to promote new agencies of government that could be regulated.
[103] Ibid., 40.
[104] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 38.
[105] Ibid., 72.
[106] Carter, The New Dealers (Simon & Schuster, 1934), 317.
[107] “Old Isaiah” was FDR’s nickname for Brandeis.
[108] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 219; 251.
[109] Ibid., 224.
[110] Ibid., 223. Chicago progressive Donald Richberg (a gentile) got the job.
[111] Paul D. Moreno, Moreno, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 255. His admonition to Cohen and Corcoran over the fate of NIRA had nothing to do with Brandeis being against Roosevelt or to progressivism, which remained undiminished over the decades. As stated, in that case, he merely disagreed with the philosophical approach.
[112] Daniel Ernst, Tocqueville’s Nightmare (Oxford University Press, 2014), 60-61.
[113] Pecora Commission, Wikipedia
[114] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 440. See also Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter, 283.
[115] Leonard Dinnerstein, “Jews and the New Deal,” American Jewish History 72, no. 4 (June 1983): 461–476, 468. Corcoran was an Irish Catholic.
[116] Max Lowenthal, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Lowenthal#Private_law_practice
[117] Carter, The New Dealers, 156; see also: Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 456–58.
[118] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 237. Frankfurter had been in contact with Cohen and Corcoran over the phone the entire time and displayed the characteristic coolness and excitement for battle.
[119] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 457–460.
[120] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 238.
The unrepentant enslaver Lydia Mugambe in her judge’s wig (images from 
Black is Beautiful — except in Jewish Israel, where you will never see race-mixing propaganda like this
Not All Bioweapons Come From A Lab — if Black migration was good for the West, leftists wouldn’t want it
