Liberty League

In addition to the America First Committee (AFC), Merwin K. Hart was also the organizing force behind other far-right pro-business groups like the American Liberty League.[1] An article for The Nation, titled “The People’s Front,” published in a November 16, 1946, reported that Jean Coutrot’s M.S.E., the synarchist organization behind the Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime, was attempting to restore the intimate ties between French and German industrialists which it had developed before the war, and referenced 1946-1947 article by Michael Sordet, “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism,” referring to the Liberty League, and published in the scholarly Swiss journal Schweiner Annalen, which hinted that the main base of operations of the synarchists was shifting from Europe to the United States.[2] Sordet named American diplomat Robert Murphy and Admiral William D. Leahy, a close friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt who chaired his Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both of them, according to Sordet, worked with the Vichy regime, and the DuPont conglomerate, not as members of the MSE, but as individuals, hoping to make contact with influential Catholic and industrial groups in the United States. The DuPonts—who along with the Ford interests, according to the 1941 report in l’Appel, had connections with the French synarchists—would become the chief backers of Liberty League, whose efforts led to the establishment of the AFC, which would then evolve into the American Security Council (ASC), the so-called “heart” of the Military-Industrial Complex.

The Liberty League consisted primarily of wealthy business elites and prominent political figures opposed to the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In introducing the New Deal, Roosevelt and his allies revived the old language of the so-called Social Gospel to justify the creation of the modern welfare state. Back in the late nineteenth century, the Social Gospel taught that Christianity as a faith was concerned less with personal salvation than with the public good. When Roosevelt launched the New Deal, a number of politically liberal clergymen championed his plan as simply “the Christian thing to do.” Catholic and Protestant leaders praised the “ethical and human significance” of New Deal policies, which they said merely “incorporated into law some of the social ideas and principles for which our religious organizations have stood for many years.”[3]

During the 1930s, FDR’s opponents collected behind the American Liberty League, organized by the representatives of the DuPont and Morgan family empires who dominated the American corporate elite. Linked with the Knights of Malta, DuPont and J.P. Morgan Jr. were significantly responsible for the rise of the Old Right in the United States, through their alignment with American fascism. Like his father, J.P. Morgan Jr. was a member of the Grand Priory of the American branch of the SOSJ in New York. Other prominent members of the OSJS included Robert R. McCormick, funder of the AFC and owner of the Chicago Tribune, and the Crane families of Chicago.[4] McCormick also published the New York Daily and the Washington Herald, and openly opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal. Together, William Randolph Hearst, McCormick controlled 35% of the Sunday newspaper circulation in the US.[5]

The Liberty League was headed by the DuPont and J.P Morgan cartels and had major support from Andrew Mellon Associates, Pew (Sun Oil), Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Hutton Associates, U.S. Steel, General Motors, Chase Bank, Standard Oil and Goodyear Tires.[6] Most prominent among the Mellon family supporters of the American Liberty League was Andrew Mellon (1855 – 1937), son of Thomas Mellon (1813 – 1908), the patriarch and founder of Mellon Bank. Prior to becoming Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon, a supporter of Hitler, controlled interests such as Alcoa, and formed several cartel arrangements with I.G. Farben.[7] Andrew’s son Paul and his wife Mary were supporters of the Eranos Conferences and founders of the Bollingen Foundation, which funded Gershom Scholem’s writing of Sabbatai Zevi the Mystical Messiah.[8]

Genealogy of Mellon Family

• Thomas Mellon (patriarch and founder of Mellon Bank) + Sarah Jane Negley

  • Andrew W. Mellon (Secretary of State, backer of Liberty League)

    • Paul Mellon (OSS) + Mary Mellon (patron of Eranos Conferences and Bollingen Foundation)

    • Ailsa Mellon Bruce (established the Avalon Foundation) + David Bruce (OSS, ambassador to England)

  • James Ross Mellon

    • William Larimer Mellon Sr. (founder of Gulf Oil) + Mary Hill Taylor

    • Rachel Mellon Walton

      • Margaret Mellon + Tommy Hitchcock Jr. (inspired the Great Gatsby)

        • William Mellon Hitchcock (owner of Millbrook Estate, funded Timothy Leary’s IFIF. Sent by David Bruce to meet with Dr. Stephen Ward of Profumo Affair)

        • Margaret Mellon "Peggy" Hitchcock

      • William Larimer Mellon, Jr.

  • Richard B. Mellon + Jennie Taylor King

    • Sarah Cordelia Mellon + Alan Magee Scaife

      • Richard Mellon Scaife (controlled the Sarah Scaife Foundation)

    • Richard King Mellon

In 1921, Mellon was chosen by newly elected president Warren G. Harding as his Secretary of the Treasury. Mellon would remain in office until 1932, also serving under Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Journalist William Allen White noted that “so completely did Andrew Mellon dominate the White House in the days when the Coolidge administration was at its zenith that it would be fair to call the administration the reign of Coolidge and Mellon.”[9] The Revenue Act of 1926 that the “Mellon plan” was fully implemented Mellon’s recommendation that cutting tax rates on top earners would generate more tax revenue for the government. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Mellon participated in various efforts by the Hoover administration to revive the economy, but he opposed direct government intervention. After Congress began impeachment proceedings against him, Hoover shifted Mellon to the position of ambassador to the United Kingdom. Beginning in 1933, the federal government launched a tax fraud investigation on Mellon, leading to a high-profile case that ended with Mellon’s estate paying significant sums to settle the matter.

Under Du Pont, General Motors funded a vigilante organization to stop unionization in its Midwestern factories.[10] Called the “Black Legion,” it was an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, and its members wore black robes, instead of white, decorated with a white skull and crossbones. The Legion’s cells within GM factories intimidated workers, targeted Jews and recruited for the KKK. By at least 1933, the Legion had police within its ranks. They worked together to stop suspected communists and unions that demanded their labor rights. The Black Legion was led by Virgil Effinger, a renegade “Grand Titan” of the Klan, who advocated a fascist revolution in America with himself as dictator.[11] Effinger died nearly two decades later in a psychiatric hospital, having always denied membership in the Legion.[12]

The Sydney Morning Herald on May 25, 1936, reported that the Black Legion was a secret society whose members practiced ritual murder. Richard Rollins, who was hired by Samuel Untermyer—Satanist, Golden Dawn member, friend of George Sylvester Viereck and Zionist—to investigate pro-Nazi organization, published a memoir, I Find Treason, where he described the Black Legion’s oath pronounced in their initiation rituals:

In the name of God and the Devil, and by the power of light and darkness, Good and Evil, here under the Black arch of heaven’s answering symbol, I pledge and consecrate my body, my limbs, my heart and my mind and swear by all the powers of Heaven and Hell that I will devote my life…[13]

Earl Little, the future father of Malcolm X, was harassed by the Black Legion, who along with white authorities in the government and the Klan were concerned about this activism on behalf of the Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). When the family home burned in 1929, Earl accused the Black Legion. When Malcolm was six, his father died in what was officially ruled a streetcar accident, though his mother Louise believed Earl had been murdered by the Black Legion.[14]

Many of those in the Liberty League were linked to Wall Street’s wealthiest banker, J.P. Morgan, Jr. (1867 – 1943), whom antifascist journalist John Spivak considered to be the “ultimate fountainhead of the whole fascist conspiracy of Wall Street.”[15] J.P. Morgan & Co. was not only a partner in the Nazi-affiliated Bank for International Settlements (BIS), but also funded the rise of Italian fascism, in fact, his company was Mussolini’s main overseas bank.[16] Morgan’s partner Thomas Lamont: described himself as “something like a missionary” for Italian fascism, expressing his admiration for Mussolini, “a very upstanding chap.”[17] J.P. Morgan & Co. was a predecessor of three of the largest banking institutions in the world, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank (via Morgan, Grenfell & Co.), and was involved in the formation of Drexel Burnham Lambert. The company is sometimes referred to as the “House of Morgan” or simply “Morgan.”

The moving spirit behind the launch of the American Liberty League was John Jacob Raskob (1879 –1950), co-founder the U.S. association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.[18] Raskob, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the builder of the Empire State Building. When Pierre du Pont became General Motors’s largest minority stockholder, he appointed Raskob to the board. In 1928, Pope Pius XI appointed Raskob to the honorary position of private chamberlain in the Papal Household in recognition of his support of Catholic institutions and his involvement in political and financial interests of the church in the United States, Mexico and at the Vatican.[19]

In 1934, the Liberty League was involved in the plot to organize a failed fascist coup in the US. Raskob, working closely with Morgan Bank’s John Davis, had been its principal financier. The attempted coup was financed by Irénée du Pont (1876 – 1963) along with the Morgans and a few other wealthy industrialists of the time. Others involved with the plot were Robert Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine corporation, Grayson M.P. Murphy, Director of Goodyear, and the Pew family of Sun Oil. Grayson M.P. Murphy, a director of Morgan’s Guaranty Trust bank and several Morgan-connected corporations, was among the founding members of the American Legion. In the 1920s, Murphy made “fact-finding’” trips to Europe with “Wild Bill” Donovan who was later director, OSS. These missions, including meetings with Mussolini prior to his coup, were done at the behest of Morgan and London interests.[20] Murphy was decorated by Mussolini, receiving the gold “Order of the Crown of Italy,” Commander class.[21] Also implicated in the plot was Al Smith, former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as Prescott Bush.[22]

The plot was revealed during the McCormack–Dickstein Committee hearings, when war hero and Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow Roosevelt. Gerald C. MacGuire—an employee of Grayson Murphy and Robert Clark, and a member of the Connecticut American Legion—attempted to recruit Butler to lead the coup. The American Legion was founded in Paris in 1919 by members of the American Expeditionary Forces, and bankrolled J.P. Morgan.[23] American troops recently been demobilized, and concerns were raised about a potential correlation between discharged troops and the Bolshevik uprisings taking place in Russia, Finland, Germany and Hungary.[24] In 1923, American Legion Commander Alvin Owsley “Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what The American Legion is to the United States.”[25] Colonel William Easterwood, national vice-commander of the Legion, while in Italy in 1935, pinned a Legion button on Mussolini, making him an “honorary member” and invited him to the next Legion convention.[26] In 1927, the Legion awarded Charles Lindbergh its “Distinguished Service Medal.”

In 1927, the ACLU reported that the Legion “had replaced the [Ku Klux] Klan as the most active agent of intolerance and repression in the country.”[27] The “American Legion” had also the name of the umbrella organization of all the “castles” of the Knights of the Golden Circle, from which the Klan evolved.[28] In The Face at Your Window (1920), a film partly financed by the government, the chief villain was a Bolshevik labor organizer who is confronted American Legion, who appeared in uniforms very much similar to Klan attire. Although the Klan had no part in making the film, it staged screenings across the country, writing that it was “of wonderful value to us.”[29]

The Legion promised Butler financial backing and an army of 500,000 men modeled on the French synarchist Croix-de-Feu. By 1934, the Croix-de-Feu claimed 120,000 members, and on February 6, 1934, exactly one month before MacGuire’s report, the organization had staged a nearly successful coup in France. The plotters had selected Butler because of his immense popularity among veterans. In another meeting, MacGuire threatened that if Butler did not accept leadership of the plot that General Douglas MacArthur would replace him. MacGuire claimed that the Morgans favored MacArthur but that he had held out for Butler. Butler rejected the offer, but was careful to corroborate his claims, and sought out the help of a liberal Philadelphia newspaper, who sent their star reporter Paul Comly French to investigate. French feigned anti-sympathies to interview MacGuire, who revealed further details of the plot. He mentioned that the Remington Arms manufacturers would supply the army, thanks to a working relationship with the du Ponts. “We need a Fascist government in this country,” he told the reporter, “to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”[30]

On January 29, 1935, John L. Spivak published the first of two articles in the communist magazine New Masses, revealing portions of the Congressional committee testimony that had been redacted as hearsay. Spivak argued that the plot was part of a “conspiracy of Jewish financiers working with fascist groups,” referring specifically to Felix Warburg, the McCormack–Dickstein Committee—predecessor of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)—and certain members of the American Jewish Committee in collusion with J.P. Morgan.[31]

Spiritual Mobilization

The leading contributors to the Liberty League, and a number of its fascist front groups such as the Crusaders and the Sentinels of the Republic, were also leading contributors of National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). In 1934, a new generation of conservative industrialists had taken over NAM and devoted themselves to “serve the purposes of business salvation.”[32] As reported by Kevin M. Kruse, author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, throughout the 1930s, the nation’s industrialists tried to counter the doctrine of the Social Gospel with direct appeals to Americans’ self-interest, the attempt backfired. Jim Farley, chairman of the Democratic Party, joked that the American Liberty League, another group involved in this campaign, should have been called the “American Cellophane League.” “First, it’s a DuPont product. And second, you can see right through it.”[33]

The first president of NAM was Samuel Bush (1863 – 1948), father of Prescott and grandfather of George H.W. Bush.[34] In congressional hearings held on March 2, 1938, evidence was entered showing that NAM was controlled and financed by 207 firms. Leading the list of firms were General Motors, DuPont, Chrysler, National Steel and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The thirteen most powerful families in the United States and members of NAM as listed by George Seldes were as follows: Ford, du Pont, Rockefeller, Mellon, McCormick, Hartford, Harkness, Duke, Pew, Pitcairn, Clark, Reynolds and Kress. Of these, five were involved in the plot of against Roosevelt: du Pont, Mellon, Pew, Pitcairn and Clark. With the possible exception of three of these families all had close connections with fascism and the support of Hitler.[35]

Many of the members of the National Publishers Association were also members of NAM. The head of NAM was William Warner, publisher of McCall’s and Redbook. P.S. Collins represented the Curtis Publishing Company, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal. Collins was also a spokesman for NAM president W.D Fuller. The publications of Skull and Bonesman Henry Luce—Time, Life and Fortune—were also closely associated with NAM.[36] It was conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr., a former employee of NAM, who became the mouthpiece for NAM.[37] Lewis was effectively the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s, with the largest radio audience in the country at over 16 million listeners.[38] Using his radio program on the Broadcasting System, Lewis spread the NAM propaganda to roughly three million people daily. Mutual Broadcasting was organized in part by Chicago Tribune, owned by Robert R. McCormick.[39]

In 1935, James William Fifield Jr. (1899 – 1977), an American Congregational minister who led the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, co-founded Mobilization for Spiritual Ideas. The members of Fifield’s church were mostly among the wealthy, giving Fifield the nickname “The Apostle to Millionaires.”[40] Fifield’s ideology has been described by Kevin M. Kruse and others as “Christian libertarianism.” The advisory committee for Spiritual Mobilization was described as “a who’s who of the conservative establishment.” By the middle of the decade, its members included his longtime friend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993), three past or present presidents of the US Chamber of Commerce, a leading Wall Street analyst, a prominent economist at the American Banking Association, the founder of the National Small Businessmen’s Association, a US congressman, a few notable authors and lecturers, and the presidents of the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Florida, and Princeton Theological Seminary.[41] Norman Vincent Peale, a 33° Scottish Rite Freemason,[42] was an American minister and well-known champion of the concept of “positive thinking,” especially through his best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale served as the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, New York, from 1932 until his death, leading a Reformed Church in America congregation. In 1935, Peale started a radio program, “The Art of Living,” which lasted for 54 years. Peale’s ideas and techniques were controversial, and he received frequent criticism both from church figures and from the psychiatric profession. One of the major accusations against Peale is that he attempted to conceal that his confidence-building techniques are a well-known form of hypnosis.[43]

At the Waldorf-Astoria in 1940, Fifield gave a rousing speech in answer to a call from NAM President H.W. Prentis, who proposed that they try to counter religion with religion. At an earlier speech to the US Chamber of Commerce, Prentis had galvanized the business world saying, “Economic facts are important, but they will never check the virus of collectivism.” Prentis warned, “the only antidote is a revival of American patriotism and religious faith.”[44] Fifield delivered a passionate defense of free enterprise and denounced the New Deal’s “encroachment upon our American freedoms.” Fifield’s audience was stunned explains Kruse. “Over the preceding decade, these titans of industry had been told, time and time again, that they were to blame for the nation’s downfall. Fifield, in contrast, insisted that they were the source of its salvation.”[45] “When he had finished,” a journalist noted, “rumors report that the NAM applause could be heard in Hoboken.”[46]

Thus was born the premise that led to the cultivation of the Christian Right, which henceforth married the contradictory teaching of Christianity with selfishness, in a conflation which one observer termed “Christian libertarianism.”[47] Clergymen recruited to the conservative cause argued that the Social Gospel was a perversion of Christian doctrine. In numerous sermons, speeches, and articles they claimed, according to Kruse:

… that the Democratic administration made a “false idol” of the federal government, leading Americans to worship it over the Almighty; that it caused Americans to covet what the wealthy possessed and seek to steal it from them; and that, ultimately, it bore false witness in making wild claims about what it could never truly accomplish.

After the Waldorf meeting, the attendees dedicated themselves to raising funds for Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization through corporate and personal donations. In a new monthly publication that bore the organization’s name, Fifield sought to convince America’s religious leaders to realize that an inherent threat to their faith lay in the growth of government. America’s clergy responded enthusiastically. Many ministers wrote the Spiritual Mobilization’s office to request copies of Friedrich Hayek’s neoliberal treatise The Road to Serfdom and anti–New Deal tracts by Herbert Hoover and libertarian author Garet Garrett.

Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

McCormick also belonged to Merwin K. Hart’s American Actions, Inc. (AAI), the successor organization of the AFC. Upton Close collaborated with Gerald L.K. Smith and had formed the American Action Committee in Chicago with Hart in 1945. Many of the leaders of this group were previously associated with the America First Committee (AFC) and the American Liberty League. A few of the key individuals were the du Ponts, Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors, Upton Close, John T. Flynn, the AFC’s New York state chairman, AFC founders General Robert E. Wood and William H. Regnery, and “positive thinking” pastor Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.[48] AAI also garnered support from top officials of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars for NAM’s anti-labor initiatives. Gerald L.K. Smith appealed to all former supporters of the “America First Crusade” to support the fledgling organization.[49] The group was described by its critics as a “native fascist movement” who were seen as attempting to take control of the National Republican Party.[50]

Spiritual Mobilization’s journal Faith and Freedom Faith and Freedom was the first national journal to run a regular column by Murray Rothbard, who was “senior analyst” for the Volker Fund. In addition to its own activities, the Volker Fund also helped support the formation of various complementary institutions, including the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov, which was later renamed Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). The FEE, the oldest free-market think tank in the United States, was founded was in 1946. Trustees on the FEE board have included Harold W. Luhnow, and wealthy industrialist Jasper Crane (1881 – 1969), of the Cranes from Chicago who belonged to the SOSJ.[51] During the First World War, Crane was involved in research concerning poison gas defense, smokeless powder containers, and coatings for airplane wings. He was later assigned to the Du Pont Company’s London office as European manager in charge of purchasing and development. In this capacity he was in charge of negotiating agreements with I.C.I. and I.G. Farben.[52] Crane also became a supporter of Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization, along with J. Howard Pew of the Liberty League.[53] After contributions from Pew, Inland Steel, Quaker Oats, and Sears, enough funding would become available for FEE to purchase and take up publishing The Freeman magazine in 1954.[54]

Friedrich Hayek saw FEE as part of the inspiration for the formation in 1947 of the Mont Pelerin Society, which also provided a financial subsidy to the society.[55] According to Gary North—former FEE director of seminars and a current Ludwig von Mises Institute scholar—FEE is the “granddaddy of all libertarian organizations.”[56] The initial officers of FEE were Leonard E. Read of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce as President, Henry Hazlitt as Vice-President and Chairman David Goodrich of B.F. Goodrich. Ludwig von Mises was a great influence on journalist Henry Hazlitt, through whose efforts Mises published nine articles for The New York Times on world economic problems, during 1942 and 1943. This spread Mises’ ideas in the United States, and in January 1943, Noel Sargent of NAM invited Mises to join its Economic Principles Commission, on which he served until 1954.[57]

Radicals for Capitalism

Leonard E. Read, a member of Fifield’s First Congregational Church, belonged to the advisory board of Spiritual Mobilization, and was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.[58] As reported by Brian Doherty, in Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, Read was the first of the libertarian circle to know of Aldous Huxley’s friend and LSD guru Gerald Heard.[59] Heard had also become a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Boothe Luce (wife of Bonesman Henry Luce of Time, Life and Fortune, US Ambassador to Rome and was made a Dame of Knights), and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who had been a patient of CIA doctor Humphry Osmond, in his attempts to try to cure alcoholics with LSD. Wilson was a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous along with Robert “Dr. Bob” Smith. In 1958, Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. According to counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman:

I’ve always maintained that Henry Luce did more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary. Years later I met Clare Boothe Luce at the Republican convention in Miami. She did not disagree with this opinion. America’s version of the Dragon Lady caressed my arm, fluttered her eyes and cooed, “We wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”[60]

Read introduced Heard’s writings to lawyer James Ingebretsen and SoCal Edison executive W.C. Mullendore, and a former protégé of Ayn Rand’s, Thaddeus Ashby, who were all part of Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization. Despite being president of an explicitly religious libertarian organization, Ingebretsen believed “that religion was balderdash,” and eventually decided he was possessed by the spirit of his dead daughter, Kristi.[61] Ashby was an editorial staffer of Spiritual Mobilization’s journal Faith and Freedom, where Heard was given a regular column, with an entire issue dedicated to his ideas.[62] They began hosting meetings at Idyllwild, a retreat in the mountains east of Los Angeles, to listen to Heard. In the mid-1950s, they all joined the Bacchanalia at the Bohemian Grove, in Northern California, where they were joined by Herbert Hoover and Henry Hazlitt.[63]

Read shared the mystical sources of libertarianism in Elements of Libertarian Leadership (1962). Read writes of a “Creative Force” found in each person “an enormous potentiality, an unimaginable creativity, working to manifest itself, evolving, emerging.” If a people do not accept this Creative Force or Principle, an Infinite Intelligence or Consciousness, as their Source of Rights, they must locate sovereignty in a human being or man-made institution, thus creating authoritarianism. Freedom, explains Read, “is to be restored only as we place faith in our Creator, and such faith is possible only as the human spirit is freed of stifling restraints. Spiritual faith and freedom are thus two reciprocating parts of a Divine Principle.” Thus man should never, through government or any other agency, inhibit the flow of this “Creative Energy,” which is what Adam Smith referred to as the “Invisible Hand.”

In the same book, Read prescribes the mystical techniques of Rudolf Steiner in order to maximize our creative potential. These same techniques inspired Read to write his most successful piece of writing, “I, Pencil” published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. Like an LSD-inspired hallucination, “I, Pencil” is written in the first person from the point of view of a pencil, detailing the complexity of its own creation, listing its components and the numerous people involved in its creation. Some academics insist it is as classic an example of metaphorical economics as any from Adam Smith.[64] It was reprinted in The Freeman in May 1996 and as a pamphlet entitled “I… Pencil” in May 1998. In the reprint, Milton Friedman wrote the introduction. Friedman used the essay in his 1980 PBS television show Free to Choose and the accompanying book of the same name.

The Fellowship 

Merwin K. Hart was also a member of the board and inner circle of The Fellowship, a secretive Christian group, exposed by Jeff Sharlet, in The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, also known as The Family, which spearheaded attempts to merge Christianity with a fascist orientation. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who prosecuted the Nuremberg Trials, called Hart “America’s leading Fascist.”[65] According to Charles Higham in American Swastika, Hart met with representatives of Nasser’s Egypt while former SS officer Otto Skorzeny was “advising” the regime. After the war, he engineered the 1946 election of Joseph McCarthy. The stated purpose of The Fellowship, also known as The Family—which has been referred to as “Old Christian Right”[66]—has purportedly been to provide a fellowship forum for decision makers to share in Bible studies, prayer meetings, worship experiences, and to experience spiritual affirmation and support. The Family’s devoted membership includes congressmen, corporate leaders, generals and foreign heads of state. The Fellowship has been described as one of the most politically well-connected ministries in the United States. The Fellowship shuns publicity and its members are sworn to secrecy.[67]

The Fellowship was founded in 1935 by a Norwegian-born Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide, after, he claimed, he had a vision in which God came to him in the person of the head of the United States Steel Corporation. The Fellowship’s ideas, explained Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce, “are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale.”[68] Sharlet traces the Family’s conceptual roots to the exceptionalism of John Winthrop, and the evangelical revivalism of Jonathan Edwards. The Fellowship, which has been characterized as “Christian Libertarian,” was founded in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. The evangelical group’s views on religion and politics are so singular that some other Christian-right organizations consider them heretical.[69] Members of the group ardently support free markets, in which, they believe, God’s will operates directly through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” The group’s approach to religion, Sharlet says, is based on “a sort of trickle-down fundamentalism,” which holds that the wealthy and powerful, if they “can get their hearts right with God… will dispense blessings to those underneath them.”[70] According to Sharlet, the Fellowship fetishizes power by comparing Jesus to “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden” as examples of leaders who change the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers.”[71]

In 1932, Vereide took Henry Ford as a Bible student. Abram thought Ford “befuddled,” full of strange religious ideas gathered from Hindu texts and Theosophy. “The question was,” Abram thought, “How could he be untangled?” At their final meeting, Ford finally shouted, “Vereide, I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I found the release that you spoke of. I’ve made my surrender. The only thing that matters is God’s will.”[72] After the war, Charles Lindbergh, an associate of Merwin K. Hart, would preside for a brief period over a prayer cell modeled on Vereide’s original.[73] Reform of the American occupation government in Germany and the purported injustices of the Nuremberg Trials was a matter of great concern to Vereide, and the subject of his meetings with John J. McCloy and his weekly prayer meetings with congressman.[74] Vereide and his associates played a significant role in the de-Nazification of Germany and the political rehabilitation of former members of the Third Reich for service both in the new Federal Republic of Germany and U.S. intelligence. In 1946, Vereide undertook a mission to search through the Allied prisons in Germany for men “of the predictable type” ready to turn their allegiance from Hitler to Christ, and by extension, in Vereide’s thinking, America.

Abram’s friends in the military government and back in the United States would certify them as “men not only to be released but to be used, according to their ability in the tremendous task of reconstruction.”[75] These included Joseph Retinger’s partner in the European Movement and the Bilderberger Group, Hermann J. Abs—a former comrade of Walter Benjamin—who became the vice president of the Family’s German organization, International Christian Leadership (ICL).[76] Others included Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of chemical weapons; Paul Rohrbach, an advocate of eradicating native Africans in order to make room for German colonists; and General Hans Speidel, who had accepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Führer in 1940, and a coconspirator with Rommel in the attempted assassination of Hitler, the “July Plot” of 1944. Another of the Nazi agents with whom Vereide and The Family would network after the war was Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, the Gestapo chief of the German embassy in Washington and a member of the SS. Others included Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s first foreign minister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander of the concentration camps.[77]

Moral Re-Armament

Dr. Frank Buchman, a Protestant Christian evangelist and vocal supporter of Nazi Germany, who founded the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement, had close ties to Vereide and Henry Ford. The Duke of Hamilton, who Hess flew to visit in 1941, had a direct link with Himmler and Baron Kurt von Schröder of the Schröder Bank and the Banque Worms through their common membership in Buchman’s movement.[78] Buchman met with Himmler who impressed him as a “great lad,” and was at his side at the 1935 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and again at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. That year he wrote, “But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man, God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.” He seemed to think the process had already started: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defence against the anti-Christ of Communism,” he told a reporter.[79]

Following his trip to Germany, Buchman told a group of his followers. “Suppose we hear were all God-controlled and we became the Cabinet.” He continued, “Then in a God-controlled nation, capital and labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-controlled situations.” There would be no re-distribution of wealth, but the workers would be content to be led by employers who were “God-controlled.” Buchman declared, “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.” Instead they require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Or more specifically, said Buchman, a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”[80]

Buchman was the founder of the Oxford Group, which included his long-time supporter Henry Ford. In 1938, Buchman proclaimed a need for “moral re-armament” and that phrase became the movement's new name. Reinhold Niebuhr, the famous theologian, and George Orwell, both labeled Buchman’s Oxford Group and his successor Moral Re-Armament Movement (MRA) as “fascist.” MRA distributed pamphlets at their rallies with endorsements of Henry Ford, explorer Richard Byrd, numerous of artists, scientists, and labor leaders, including 34 governors. President Roosevelt asked then-Senator Harry Truman to read a statement on his behalf at a rally in Washington’s Constitution Hall.[81] Buchman’s campaign attracted many prominent Americans, including actress Mae West, who claimed she owed her success to the philosophy of Moral Rearmament. During a discussion in 1939, West suggested that Buchman should also call on film comedian W.C. Fields.[82]

Fort Myers businessman Jim Newton, who had experienced a religious conversion that led him to join Buchman’s MRA, wrote in his famous book, Uncommon Friends, about his friendships with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Charles Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel, a member of the synarchist CSHP founded by Jean Coutrot and Aldous Huxley. Lindbergh was introduced to Newton by Carrel who noted: “Although he is a member of the Oxford Group, he is not a fanatic. He understands, as we do, the necessity of a new orientation.” After they became friends, Newton soon introduced Lindbergh to some MRA colleagues. Although Lindbergh conceded to his journal that Buchman possessed “a certain magnetism and openness, and I felt that he was sincere and honest in all that he was doing,” he still could “not understand what it is in his ‘movement’ that brings out such devotion and enthusiasm in his followers.”[83]

After the war, MRA played a significant role in enabling reconciliation between France and Germany. German Chancellor and Le Cercle founder Konrad Adenauer was a regular visitor to the MRA conferences in Caux, and Buchman facilitated meetings between Adenauer and fellow Cercle member Robert Schuman.[84] Buchman was awarded the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by the French Government, and also the German Grand Cross of the Order of Merit. Buchman’s influence on the far right, and especially the Christian right, would continue in the post-WWII years. Bill Wilson, a student of Gerald Heard, and fellow co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Robert “Dr. Bob” Smith were both active members in Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group, whose principles they and believed were the key to overcoming alcoholism.[85]

Freedom School

A few noted libertarians, including Alfred Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov and Garet Garrett, worked for the National Economic Council (NEC), founded in 1943 by Merwin K. Hart, which he used the NEC to recruit businessmen to The Fellowship, of which he was a member of the board and part of its inner circle.[86] Hart waged an anti-communist campaign through the NEC, which was funded by some of the biggest names in corporate America including the General Motors, DuPont, Monsanto, Sears, and the Mellon-controlled Gulf Oil.[87] Positions of the NEC included opposition to President Roosevelt and support for Franco’s fascist leadership in Spain. The NEC worked with the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, a committee founded by Frank Gannett, an American publisher who founded the media corporation Gannett Company, the largest US newspaper publisher by total daily circulation.

In his Economic Council Letter for March 15, 1958, Merwin K. Hart outlined his belief that American Jews were entitled to all the rights as other Americans, but that they are not entitled to work for desegregation, the civil rights Law, immigration, for the defeat of conservative candidates, assistance for the state of Israel, separation of church and state in public education, or world government. Especially world government, which “would include Israel, and would be guided by the ‘ethics’ of Israel.” Hart believed that all Jews worked in league with the communists “to mold the American Republic into something very different from what it has always been,”—that is, to make it subject to world government.[88]

In 1953, Robert LeFevre, the founder of the Freedom School in Colorado Springs, Colorado became vice-president of Hart’s NEC and a director of the Congress of Freedom.[89] LeFevre praised Hart as a great libertarian, “one of the few conservative voices who had consistently supported Constitutional government, human liberty and the free enterprise system.”[90] LeFevre had been a follower of the I AM Activity, which involved the founder of the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, William Dudley Pelley. In a book he wrote in 1940 of his experience in the organization, LeFevre told how he was struck one day by the Great I AM presence, who spoke to him personally. LeFevre also claimed a number of supernatural experiences, including out-of-body travel to Mount Shasta, and seeing Jesus.[91] LeFevre regarded Ballard, who he referred to as “Daddy,” as his idol, who warned him that, “A Communist conspiracy was at work, seeking to undermine and destroy the United States.” According to LeFevre, “‘Daddy’ explained that people who owned property had a right to do what they wished with it.”[92]

In late 1940, the FBI indicted LeFevre and 23 other top “I AM” figures with felony mail fraud. LeFevre immediately turned states’ witness, and charges against him were dropped, while Edna Ballard and her son were sentenced to prison. Then, LeFevre’s religious group acquired Rudolph Valentino’s mansion in Beverly Hills, which was owned by a couple with known ties to organized crime, and which they turned into the headquarters of a sex cult called “Falcon’s Lair.” Newspapers across the country printed sensational stories accusing LeFevre’s cult of holding séances that ended in orgies. Recently declassified FBI documents reveal that LeFevre collaborated extensively with the FBI at the height of McCarthyism, working as both an informant and in developing a news program for a new TV station in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.[93]

For a short while LeFevre became executive director of the Congress of Freedom. LeFevre’s fellow Congress of Freedom director and fellow anarcho–libertarian, Thaddeus Ashby, was then an editor at Spiritual Mobilization’s Faith and Freedom magazine.[94] LeFevre reunited with four his old female friends from “I AM” who joined he and his wife at the Freedom School. One of them had worked with Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization, and handed LeFevre a copy of Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom.[95]

Rose Wilder Lane was one of LeFevre’s most vocal supporters. Along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the founders of the American libertarian movement.[96] Lane played a hands-on role during the 1940s and 1950s in launching the libertarian movement and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as Garet Garrett, DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writer Frank Meyer, as well as her friend and colleague, Ayn Rand.[97] Most of Lane’s later writings consisted of book reviews for the NEC’s Review of Books, a position she inherited from Albert Jay Nock in 1945, and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies (HIS). IHS was founded by LeFevre’s friend F.A. “Baldy” Harper in 1961, who had helped Leonard Read start the FEE. Murray Rothbard would come to play a key role as speaker at IHS conferences. Later, Lane lectured at, and gave generous financial support to, the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.[98]

LeFevre ran the school until 1973, to educate people in his philosophy about the meaning of freedom and free-market economic policy. Brian Doherty, in his book Radicals for Capitalism about American libertarianism described the school as “a tiny world of people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake.”[99] According to Jane Mayer, the school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, the Gilded Age actually was the country’s golden age and the Civil War shouldn’t have been fought.”[100] Another member the faculty was James J. Martin, an anarchist historian who later gained a reputation as a notorious Holocaust denier for his work with Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review.[101] Notable teachers at the Freedom School, also known as Rampart College, included Mont Pelerin Society members and godfathers of the libertarian movement in the United States, such as Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, F.A. “Baldy” Harper, Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read and Ludwig von Mises. Charles Koch was a major funder and trustee of the school by 1966. From 1957 to 1961 Chodorov, who spent World War II working for Merwin K. Hart, went each year to teach at the Freedom School.[102]

National Prayer Breakfast

The Family has been able to draw on an array of influential members, including Conrad Hilton, J.A. Farrell of U.S. Steel and Howard Coonley of the National Association of Manufacturers. The list of politicians is extensive. Although the Family favors Republicans, such as Homer Capehart, Alexander Wiley and Frank Carlson in the 1950s, to later Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum and Chuck Grassley, there have also been Democratic members and sympathizers, from Brooks Hays in the 1950s to Tony Hall and Hillary Clinton. Religious allies have included clerics such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry. Vereide joined Norman Vincent Peale as one of “the Twelve,” a council of Christian conservative leaders devoted to promoting Peale’s “positive thinking” philosophy.[103] Peale was also a member of Merwin K. Hart’s American Actions, Inc.[104] As well, Peale was a personal friend of President Richard Nixon. In 1968 he officiated at the wedding of Nixon’s daughter Julie and David Eisenhower.

A close friend of Vereide was the Reverend Billy Graham, the famous American evangelical Christian evangelist. Ordained as a Southern Baptist minister, Graham rose to celebrity status in 1949. Graham is widely regarded as the most influential preacher of the twentieth century. In his six decades of television, Graham is principally known for hosting the annual Billy Graham Crusades, which he began in 1947, until he concluded in 2005, at the time of his retirement. Graham was a spiritual adviser to American presidents and has provided spiritual counsel to every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. He was particularly close to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson (one of Graham’s closest friends) and Richard Nixon. Christian and ex-Mason Jim Shaw refers to Billy Graham’s presence at his initiation into the 33º of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, along with Truman, Eisenhower, Norman Vincent Peale and J. Edgar Hoover.[105]

According to Kevin Kruse, Graham was “the most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism.”[106] In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Graham supported corporate interests so avidly that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival audiences, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” Similarly, he denounced all “government restrictions” in economic affairs, which he invariably attacked as “socialism.”[107] “When Graham speaks of ‘the American way of life,’” one of his biographers noted, “he has in mind the same combination of economic and political freedom that the National Association of Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the Wall Street Journal do when they use the phrase.”[108]

Graham was a close friend of president Eisenhower, to whom he provided spiritual guidance and recommendations for passages of Scripture to use in his speeches. In 1953, under Graham’s influence, Eisenhower instituted the first annual National Prayer Breakfast.[109] Vereide and Major J.F. Douglas organized the Fellowship’s first prayer breakfast meeting in 1935. Vereide traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest, and later around the country, to develop similar groups. By 1942 there were 60 breakfast groups in major cities around the US and Canada. That same year, Vereide began to hold small prayer breakfasts for members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the Senate Prayer Breakfast Group. In 1955, Eisenhower signed a bill placing the phrase “In God We Trust” on all American currency. The following year, the same slogan was adopted as the first official motto of the United States.

Every United States President since Dwight Eisenhower has attended the group’s annual National Prayer Breakfast. The event is attended by the president, members of Congress and dignitaries from around the world. These foreign delegations are often led by top defense personnel, who use it as an opportunity to lobby the most influential people in Washington and who repay the Family with access to their governments. According to Allan J. Lichtman, “Without either fanfare or controversy, the Fellowship had come closer than any other movement in modern U.S. history to establishing Christianity as an official American religion.”[110] The Reverend Rob Schenck, founder of the Washington, D.C. ministry Faith and Action, described the Family’s influence as “off the charts” in comparison with other fundamentalist groups, specifically compared to Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Traditional Values Coalition, and Prison Fellowship.[111]

According to Kruse, three important movements in the 1940s and early 1950s—the prayer breakfast meetings of Abraham Vereide, Graham’s evangelical revivals, and the presidential campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower—encouraged the spread of public prayer as a political development. According to Kruse, “Working in lockstep to advance Christian libertarianism, these three movements effectively harnessed Cold War anxieties for an already established campaign against the New Deal.”[112]

Leading industrialists and large corporations bankrolled efforts to promote the role of religion in public life. The result was a substantial increase in church attendance. The percentage of Americans who claimed membership in a church had been fairly low during the nineteenth century, though it had slowly increased from just 16 percent in 1850 to 36 percent in 1900. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the percentages had climbed slightly, plateauing at 43 percent from 1910 and 1920, then moving up to 47 percent in 1930 and 49 percent in 1940. In period following World War II however, coinciding with the campaign to develop the religious right, that percentage rose substantially reaching 57 percent in 1950 and then peaking at 69 percent by the end of the decade, an all-time high.[113]

By 1953, one out of every ten texts sold in America was religious. Sales of the Holy Bible neared ten million copies that year, with the new Revised Standard Version outselling all other books. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking ranked second on the nonfiction list, right behind the Bible, for three years in a row. The top advertising agency of the time, the J. Walter Thompson Company, encouraged Americans to attend churches and synagogues through an unprecedented “Religion in American Life” ad campaign. Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision program was viewed by an estimated audience of twenty million

Even Hollywood used biblical stories as the basis for its biggest blockbusters, including Samson and Delilah (1949), David and Bathsheba (1951), Solomon and Sheba (1959), and The Story of Ruth (1960). Other filmmakers also used the Bible as inspiration for fictional epics, like Quo Vadis? (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959). But by far, of all the most important of all biblical blockbusters was Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). DeMille also helped publicize Billy Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles Crusade.

DeMille, a close ally of Reverend Fifield, was a founding member of the Committee to Proclaim Liberty. In June 1951, the leaders of Spiritual Mobilization announced the formation of the Committee to Proclaim Liberty (CLP) to enlist the nation’s ministers to promote their Fourth of July “Freedom Under God” celebrations. The founding committee also including Fifield’s longtime friend Norman Vincent Peale. The CLP’s two most prominent members were former president Herbert Hoover, and General Douglas MacArthur. Others included Bing Crosby, Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan. But the majority came from the corporate world, including J. Howard Pew the president of Sun Oil, Conrad Hilton of Hilton Hotels, B.E. Hutchinson of Chrysler, James L. Kraft of Kraft Foods, Hughston McBain of Marshall Field, Admiral Ben Moreell of Jones & Laughlin Steel, Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Airlines, and Charles E. Wilson of General Motors.

The interest in the committee’s efforts was so substantial that it was forced to expand its numbers to include household names like Harvey Firestone, E.F. Hutton, Fred Maytag, Skull and Bones member Henry Luce, and J.C. Penney, as well as the less well-known heads of US Steel, Republic Steel, Gulf Oil, Hughes Aircraft, and United Airlines. The presidents of both the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) served on the committee, as well as the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Freedoms Foundation.[114]

The board of directors of the Christian libertarian Freedoms Foundation included leaders at General Foods, Maytag, Republic Steel, Sherwin Williams, Union Carbide and Carbon, and US Rubber, as well as individuals such as Sid Richardson and Mrs. J. Howard Pew. The foundation was denounced as “just another group promoting the propaganda of the National Association of Manufacturers.”[115] Its president, Don Belding, was a close ally of Rev. James Fifield, and was deeply involved in Spiritual Mobilization. Many members of the Freedoms Foundation board, including E.F. Hutton, Fred Maytag II, and Charles White, were likewise active in the same movements. Belding led the organization, but Eisenhower established its mission by joining with Herbert Hoover to write its charter.

[1] Mark Ames. “From ‘Operation Wetback’ To Newtown: Tracing The Hick Fascism Of The NRA.” NSFW Corp (December 17, 2012).

[2] Michael Sordet. “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism.” Schweiner Annalen (No. 2, 1946-47).

[3] Ibid., p. 5.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Michael Donnelly. “Wall Street’s Failed 1934 Coup.” Counter Punch (December 2, 2011).

[7] Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of America (Joshua Tree, Calif: Progressive Press, 2008), pp. 43, 80.

[8] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 49.

[9] Robert R. Keller. “Supply-Side Economic Policies during the Coolidge-Mellon Era.” Journal of Economic Issues, 16, 3 (1982), p. 777.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Michael E. Birdwell. Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros.’s Campaign Against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 2001). p. 45.

[12] Philip Rees. Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 110.

[13] Cited in Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 256.

[14] Kofi Natambu. The Life and Work of Malcolm X (Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2002), pp. 3-5. 

[15] New Masses (February 5, 1935); cited in “Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism.” Press for Conversion. Issue 53 (April 2004).

[16] “Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism.”

[17] Noam Chomsky. “Deterring Democracy.” (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), p. 39.

[18] George Wolfskill. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

[19] “John J. Raskob papers.” Hagley Museum. Retrieved from https://findingaids.hagley.org/xtf/view?docId=ead/0473.xml

[20] “Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism.” Press for Conversion. Issue 53 (April 2004).

[21] Ibid.

[22] Matt Reimann. “These Wall Street millionaires literally plotted to overthrow the president.” Timeline (August 11, 2017).

[23] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p.. 102.

[24] Marquis James. A History of The American Legion (New York: William Green, 1923), p. 14.

[25] Alec Campbell. “Where Do All the Soldiers Go?: Veterans and the Politics of Demobilization,” in Diane E. Davis, Anthony W. Pereira, eds., Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 110–11.

[26] “Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism.” Press for Conversion. Issue 53 (April 2004).

[27] Larry Ceplair. Anti-communism in Twentieth-century America: A Critical History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), p. 241

[28] Member of the Order. An authentic exposition of the “K.G.C.” “Knights of the Golden Circle;” or, A history of secession from 1834 to 1861 (Indianapolis: C.O. Perrine Publisher, 1861).

[29] Eric Herschthal. “The KKK’s Attempt to Define America.” The New Republic (January 16, 2018).

[30] Sally Denton. The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (Bloomsbury, 2012).

[31] Jules Archer. The Plot to Seize the White House (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), p. x (Foreword); Hans Schmidt. Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (University Press of Kentucky, 1998), p. 229

[32] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 3.

[33] Ibid., p. 4.

[34] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 163.

[35] Ibid., p. 225.

[36] Ibid., p. 164.

[37] Ibid., p. 163.

[38] Brian Farmer. American Conservatism: History, Theory and Practice (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), p. 231.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ann Fields, “Apostle to Millionaires.” Coronet (August 1944), p. 87.

[41] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 14.

[42] “Temple Architects Hall of Honor.” The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (scottishrite.org, retrieved 30 November 2016).

[43] Donald Meyer. The Positive Thinkers (Pantheon Books, 1965).

[44] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 6.

[45] Ibid., p. 7.

[46] Ann Fields. “Apostle to Millionaires.” Coronet (August 1944), pp. 84–85.

[47] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 7.

[48] Carlson. The Plotters (Dutton, 1946), p. 288-289; Ralph Morris Goldman. The Future Catches Up: American Political Parties and Politics (Writers Club Press, 2012), p. 96.

[49] “Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism.” Press for Conversion. Issue 53 (April 2004).

[50] “Trouble for the Republicans.” The Milwaukee Journal (October 24, 1946).

[51] Ibid.

[52] From the description of Papers, 1924-1948. (Hagley Museum & Library). WorldCat record id: 122503456.

[53] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 18.

[54] Kim Phillips-Fein. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton. 2009), p. ii.

[55] Ronald Hamowy, ed. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (Thousand Oaks, Cambridge Analytica: SAGE Publications, Cato Institute, 2008), p. 492; Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 15.

[56] Gary Galles. Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read (Laissez Faire Books, 2013).

[57] Murray Rothbard. The Essential Von Mises (Mises Institute, 2009), p. 103.

[58] Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism, p. 276.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Abbie Hoffman. Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), p. 73

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Mark Ames. “Meet Charles Koch’s Brain.”

[66] Clifford R. Goldstein. “Jesus Plus Nothing.” Liberty (May/June 2010).

[67] Lisa Getter. “Showing Faith in Discretion.” The Los Angeles Times (September 27, 2002).

[68] Jeff Sharlet & Kathryn Joyce. “Hillary’s Prayer: Hillary Clinton’s Religion and Politics.” Mother Jones (September 1, 2007).

[69] “‘Family’: Fundamentalism, Friends In High Places.” NPR (July 1, 2009).

[70] Ibid.

[71] Sharlet. The Family, p. 259.

[72] Ibid., p. 123.

[73] Ibid., p. 123.

[74] Ibid., p. 177.

[75] Ibid., p. 158.

[76] Ibid., p. 166.

[77] Ibid., p. 167.

[78] Higham. Trading with the Enemy.

[79] Sharlet. The Family, p. 129.

[80] Ibid., pp. 129-130.

[81] Chris Gehrz. “The History of Moral Re-Armament.” Anxious Beach (February 12, 2019).

[82] “Dr. Frank Buchman and Mae West discussing the philosophy of Moral Rearmament, August 19, 1939.” Retrieved from https://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=1-2-DA6

[83] Gehrz. “The History of Moral Re-Armament.”

[84] Edward Luttwak. “Franco-German Reconciliation: The Overlooked Role of the Moral Re-Armament Movement,” in Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft. edited by Douglas Johnston & Cynthia Sampson, OUP 1994, p. 38.

[85] Garth Lean. Frank Buchman - A Life (Constable 1985).

[86] Sharlet. The Family, p. 190.

[87] Ames. “Meet Charles Koch’s Brain.”

[88] Ralph E. Ellsworth & Sarah M. Harris. The American Right Wing: A Report to the Fund for the Republic, Inc (University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science, 1960), p. 30.

[89] Turner. Power on the Right, p. 165.

[90] Ames. “Meet Charles Koch’s Brain.”

[91] George Thayer. The Farther Shores of Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1967). pp. 262–72.

[92] Ames. “Meet Charles Koch’s Brain.”

[93] Ibid.

[94] Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism, p. 314.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Jim Powell. “Rose Wilder-Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement.” Fee.org (May 1996).

[97] Jennifer Burns. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 119–22.

[98] David T. Beito & Linda Royster Beito. “Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder-Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty.” Independent Review, 12 (Spring 2008).

[99] Jane Mayer. “The Secrets of Charles Koch’s Political Ascent.” Politico (January 18, 2016).

[100] Ibid.

[101] Ibid.

[102] Editors’ Introduction to Chodorov’s Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov, compiled, ddited, and with an Introduction by Charles H. Hamilton (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980).

[103] Sharlet. The Family, p. 139.

[104] Carlson. The Plotters (Dutton, 1946), p. 288-289

[105] Jim Shaw & Tom McKenney. The Deadly Deception (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, Inc. 1998), p. 104, McKenney reported that Huntington House refused to print their unless they took out Billy Graham’s name on pg. 104, and substituted a general description. In a private letter, McKenney later confirmed that they were referring to Billy Graham and others. Retrieved from http://www.despatch.cth.com.au/Misc/deadly.htm

[106] Kevin M. Kruse. “A Christian Nation? Since When?” New York Times (March 14, 2015).

[107] Ibid.

[108] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 69.

[109] W. Terry Whalin. Billy Graham: A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist (New York: Morgan James, 2015), p. 80.

[110] Allan J. Lichtman. White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Grove Press, 2008). p. 342.

[111] Sharlet. The Family, p. 259.

[112] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 36.

[113] Ibid., p. xv.

[114] Ibid., p. 36.

[115] Ibid., p. 69.

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio