Was Hungary Neutral or a Nazi Ally in World War Two?

Hungary became involved in World War Two largely due to circumstances that were present at the end of World War One. Hungary underwent a variety of governments, leaders, and economic structures that created a difficult political situation – ripe for the embrace of a totalitarian regime. An embrace that they accepted with gritted teeth, but one they accepted none-the-less. Weak leadership, incongruent leadership, and radical ideology all guided Hungary into the arms of the Nazis, an embrace they spent the remainder of the war attempting to loosen.

Avery Scott explains.

Hungarian Arrow Cross forces and a German tank in Budapest, October 1944. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-680-8283A-12A / Faupel / CC-BY-SA 3.0, available here.

From 1919 to 1921, the White Terror (led by a counter-revolutionist group) occurred in Hungary. The terror was an attempted purge of those the country found undesirable – largely Jews. Archduke Joseph August stepped forward as regent to maintain power within the Hapsburg line. However, allied powers did not recognize August, and therefore he held no authority – requiring abdication. Eventually, the turmoil was cooled slightly in the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary and with Parliament’s selection of Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya to serve as the regent of the Kingdom in March of 1920. Horthy’s power was slightly more limited than a king, but only slightly in that he had free will to appoint ministers and influence legislation. One major goal of Horthy’s rule was to reverse Hungarian losses sustained as a result of the Treaty of Trianon. The Treaty ended World War One but diminished Hungarian landholdings. The loss of land resulted in Hungary struggling economically, just as much of the world was struggling at the time. In 1927, Prime Minister István Bethlen signed a Treaty of Friendship with Benito Mussolini, thus bringing the two nations closely together both politically and economically. A few years later, Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös signed a similar treaty with Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany, acquiescing to many demands of Hitler to spur an economic relationship between the two nations. One major selling point to the Kingdom of Hungary was the promise that Hitler would return land lost in the Treaty of Trianon. This land would be valuable to Hungary in its aim to climb out of the current depression that was wreaking havoc on the nation.

Tilt to the Axis

Gömbös soon died and was replaced by Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi who was forced to step down to be replaced by Béla Imrédy. Both Darányi and Imrédy began their tenure as Prime Minister by trying to court both their fascist neighbors, and the allied powers. This two-faced style worked for neither minister, and ultimately, they were forced to choose a side, typically doubling down on the side of their neighbors. Both passed anti-Semitic laws, and installed members of their cabinet that were pro-German in policy (despite Imrédy’s own Jewish heritage). After Imrédy stepped down, he was replaced by former Prime Minister Pál Teleki. Teleki was more moderate in his stance on involvement with the Nazi regime, and despite being complicit in anti-semitism, was more accommodating in his approach to Jews than other prime minsters had been. Teleki hoped to keep Hungary out of any wars but felt pressure from both the allied and axis powers to pick a side. Teleki hoped that a small war involving Germany could restore more land to Hungary, but he did not want a drawn-out struggle. Despite his moderate stance, Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact which would likely embroil them in the upcoming struggle, as it allied them with the axis powers. However, Teleki also signed a Treaty of Friendship with Yugoslavia in which the two countries would not be aggressive toward each other. As a result of the Tripartite Pact, Hitler felt that Hungary should assist him in is war efforts. Specifically, Hitler’s Nazi regime was adamant that Hungary should allow German troops to march through Hungary to attack Yugoslavia. Teleki wanted Hungary to remain neutral in this, but British pressure was going to force him to pick a side. Unfortunately, before Teleki was able to do so, private arrangements were made for Germany to march through Hungary. As a result, on April 3, 1941, Teleki committed suicide as he could not stand the thought of Hungary being complicit in the war.

War

After the death of Teleki, László Bárdossy became prime minister, and supported a pro-German policy. This was amplified after a bombing raid by Yugoslavia and then another raid allegedly by the Soviet Union. The raid by the Soviet Union was the catalyst that led Hungary to declare war on the Soviet Union. The allied powers warned Hungary that if they did not end their involvement in the war, they would also declare war on Hungary. Bárdossy did not comply (even though he could not even if he had wanted to). Because of this, Hungary was soon fully engulfed in World War Two. In an attempt to distance the country from Germany, Horthy asked for László Bárdossy to resign. Horthy hoped that by doing so, there would be less reliance on Germany thus allowing them to avert any additional consequences. Dr. Miklós Kállay took control as Prime Minister. Kállay was far more moderate than his predecessors and was less willing to work with Germans or follow their commands. Under Kállay, Jews were not treated well; however they were not persecuted to the extent they had been previously. Most importantly, they were not being turned over to the Germans. Kállay, despite still maintaining a relationship with Germany, was attempting to negotiate with the United States and Britain. The Germans found out about this relationship and were infuriated. Germany followed through on their promise to occupy Hungary if support for Germany ended. Thus, when German forces invaded Hungary, Kállay was removed from his post and replaced with Döme Sztójay. Kállay fled but was eventually captured and remained in the custody of the Germans for the remainder of the war. Sztójay only served for a few months as prime minster and was effectively a German puppet during that time. Horthy was very unhappy with many of his decisions, including the deportation of Jews, and was eventually successful in ousting him for Géza Lakatos. Lakatos, similarly, only served for a few months but attempted to end Hungarian involvement in the war with a peace treaty with the allies. However, this was unsuccessful. After Horthy’s son was kidnapped, Horthy surrendered to the Germans, and Lakatos was imprisoned. Ferenc Szálasi was made the leader of the Government of National Unity, essentially a Nazi puppet government. Under his control, Jews were deported, funds sent to Germany, a draft occurred, and Hungary increased overall military presence with the Germans. During this time, Béla Miklós de Dálnok attempted a provisional government with which to fight back against a Szálasi government. This was eventually successful, and he became prime minister from March to November 1945.

Conclusion

Hungary is a tale of a country that was falling into the perfect storm of struggle leading them to accept the dictates of an oppressive government. Hungary courted the Nazis too closely early on and became reliant upon them for trade and commerce. Because of this connection, they were unable to move away from Germany when they no longer agreed with its policies. John Adams once stated that, in the American Revolution, France assisted America in putting their hand “above our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.” There are many times in history this statement has been true, but possibly none more perfectly than in the relationship of Hungary and Germany. Germany needed a struggling Hungary, as it gave them power over their government.

Additionally, Hungary attempted to be on the allied side, axis side, and neutral all within the same conflict, sometimes within a matter of days of each other. This position was untenable and the direct result of poor leadership. The prime minister was replaced so frequently that it is difficult to understand who was really in power all too often. This greatly reduced continuity of government and did not allow for any one policy to take root. Hungary was led based upon the current leader’s agenda. Horthy did a poor job of vetting ministers and did not exert control over them to effect positive policies for Hungary. This weak leadership allowed for Hitler to come into Hungary and dictate what they would do, and how they would govern. Thus, Hungary became an ally, an unenthusiastic one, but an ally still to Nazi Germany and the Nazi regime that terrorized the world.

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How American Seeds Blossomed into the Mexican Revolution

Despite being neighbors and having deep ties with Mexico, most Americans don’t realize that the United States played a key role in sowing the seeds of the Mexican Revolution. In fact, long before the Mexican Revolution even kicked off, three parties emerged, and later their respective interests converged, setting the stage for a violent, bloody uprising. Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, Gilded Age, American industrialists and tycoons, and Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón collided, leaving in their wake an indelible influence still felt in both countries today.

Adam Miezio explains.

Porfirio Diaz.

The Diaz Master Plan

Mexico had just cast off France’s colonial shackles in 1867. By this time, Mexico had been beaten, bludgeoned and bloodied by centuries worth of European colonial domination. Diaz wanted to pull Mexico up out of its mostly agrarian based economy and turn Mexico into a legitimate, wealthy country on the world stage. Diaz’ plan to modernize Mexico included welcoming foreign investment and production for international markets.

At first, Diaz’ plan paid off. The coups and foreign invasions ended, health and literacy increased and renewed vigor pulsed through Mexico. The progress came at the cost of violent suppression of dissent, imprisoning or executing public challengers, rigging elections and dismissing democratic principles. However, as well-meaning as his intentions may have been, Mexico became a quick and easy target for exploitation from north of the border.

Tired of being the new kid on the block, targeted by bullies, Diaz saw opportunities to open Mexico to capital investment. He was in luck, and all he had to do was look to the U.S for a bit of fresh, oxygen rich, air to breathe new life into Mexico.  At the time, the U.S. was experiencing the Gilded Age (1877-1900), an era exemplified by American, economic titans. Although the Spaniards and French took much of the wealth, Mexico was still rich in natural resources: precious metals, oil, and much more. The Gilded Age industrialists saw the vast, untouched wealth Mexico had to offer and couldn’t resist. Diaz welcomed them with open arms to come down to Mexico, do business and plunder the nation’s resources.

Mexico Opens for Business

Diaz opened Mexico for business and:

“…literally sold Mexico to foreign interests. Millions of acres were sold to U.S. agriculture, railroad, and mining companies. Ninety-eight per cent of Mexico’s rural and Indigenous population was left landless, whereas U.S. businessmen and the élite Mexicans who collaborated with them grew rich. The Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Doheny families in the United States, and the Terrazas and Madero families in Mexico, among many others, reaped the profits of Díaz’s rule. As a result, titans such as Andrew Carnegie claimed that Díaz was “one of the greatest rulers in the world, perhaps the greatest of all, taking into consideration the transformation he has made in Mexico.”

Thus, Mexico and the U.S. consummated a political marriage of financial opportunity and economic convenience. Little did Diaz know that he was helping to start a future, socioeconomic fire. With his coffers filling up, he lost perspective and sight of the ruin that his policies inflicted on Mexico. Nevertheless, Diaz continued the liquidation of Mexico, in turn creating societal fire risk, by selling:

“…land use and mining rights to wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs and to US and European companies. In the process, he confiscated communally held land from peasant communities (ejidos. ) His corruption, favoritism, and dictatorial rule led to resentment by many upper- and middle-class Mexicans. They were educated, white or light-skinned landowners and professionals who resented the lack of democracy and opportunity, but considered themselves superior to the Indian and mestizo masses.”

The collective greed of Diaz and the Gilded Age titans saw no bounds. The 1883 Land Reform Act saw many of Mexico’s natural and material resources sold off to J.P. Morgan, Russell Sage, and the Hearsts. In the late 1890s, sprawling American business investments included sugar, sawmills, cattle ranches and henequen plantations. Oil, copper, lead, zinc, rubber, and agricultural investments swelled American fortunes.  Transportation became a double dip. The mined resources were transported by railroad north to the U.S. using the Mexican railway system, which not coincidentally, was also owned by the same Gilded Age tycoons.

In 1911, American investments represented almost 62% of Mexican railroads, 24% of mining, and 1.4% of oil. Foremost among the American industrialists was the oil and railroad magnate and multi-millionaire, Henry Clay Pierce. In 1914, Pierce owned $115,049,000 worth of bonds of the National Railway of Mexico, or about half of its total value. Now the wood and the oxygen for the Mexican Revolution was set in place, with countless Mexican workers and indigenous natives suffering under debt peonage. All that was left, was the match to start the fire.

Portfirio beer. Copyright and re-produced with the permission of Adam Miezio.

The Revolution Finds Its Fire

The decades of the Diaz regime plunged Mexico into a socioeconomic disaster. For the time being, the man who cared least about Mexico’s growing unrest and inequality, was Diaz himself. He was busy lining his pockets and his cronies’, thanks to the American tycoons surging business enterprises in Mexico. This didn’t sit well with Mexico however, and it would be one man’s pen, that would ignite the bonfire of the Mexican Revolution- Ricardo Flores Magón.

In 1901, in San Luis Potosi, Magón began sparking the match by decrying the Diaz regime as a “den of thieves.” Many Mexicans agreed with the sentiment of the already two decade old regime stealing their lands, rights and wages, but it was never heard or discussed publicly. Ricardo Flores Magón and his brothers became radical dissidents. Along with radical and liberal intellectuals, Magón gained political influence. He was backed by journalists, American dissidents, and thousands of poor workers, farmers, miners, and cotton pickers called magonistas. Magón never strayed far from their side, as the magonistas could always have their leader’s writings in hand.

A year prior, Magón founded the newspaper Regeneración, the leading, revolutionary voice of Mexico. The newspaper circulated far and wide across Mexico, and soon landed Magón in jail. Afterwards, he fled in exile to Canada and the U.S. While in the U.S., he lived in various cities (El Paso, St. Louis, San Antonio and Los Angeles), where he hid, organized, wrote and published Regeneración. By 1905, the newspaper enjoyed a circulation of 20,000 and had gained one quite notable reader- Emiliano Zapata.

While the socialist Regeneración was published from the U.S., Magón gained notable support and help from American socialists and anarchists like Mother Jones and Emma Goldman. Foreign countries weren’t enough to protect and hide Magón. Although he never gained the high profile status of revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, Magón had achieved most wanted status.

Inevitable American Pressure

The percolating unrest south of the border drew the attention of the White House. At a time when it wasn’t common practice for U.S. presidents to meet respective heads of state on their own territory, President William Howard Taft and Mexican President Porfirio Díaz met in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Up until that point, it was the first meeting between American and Mexican heads-of-state. Around that time, Taft wrote a letter, saying “there would be a revolution growing out of the selection of his successor. As Americans have about $2,000,000 of capital invested in the country, it is inevitable that in case of a revolution or internecine strife we should interfere, and I sincerely hope that the old man’s official life will extend beyond mine, for that trouble would present a problem of the utmost difficulty.”

Magón and his masses of magonistas were still determined to oust Diaz. They had endured more than enough plunder of their beloved country by American imperialists like Guggenheim and Rockefeller to fail. Unfortunately for Magón, the Diaz regime was now collaborating with American officials to hunt him down. U.S. agents of the Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the F.B.I.) were tracking Magón and his whereabouts. Magón also had feds from the U.S. Departments of War, Treasury, Justice and State on his tail, not to mention hordes of police, sheriffs and spies. Magón lays claim to being one of the F.B.I.’s first cases and most wanted men.

Eventually, Magón was apprehended in Los Angeles, on August 23, 1907.

Magón was released from prison in 1910, the same year that the Mexican Revolution began. Magón continued publishing Regeneración in Los Angeles, as the magonistas, led by Zapata and Villa, waged war south of the border. Besides inadvertently helping to launch the F.B.I., Magón left another influential legacy behind - Mexican immigration.

The Mexican Revolution Jump Starts Immigration

As the Mexican Revolution kicked off, Mexicans fleeing the violence, poured into the U.S. Insurgents, refugees and campesinos alike came by boat or by foot. Those who came by boat, disembarked in San Francisco, and took trains to Los Angeles and Chicago. Those who came by foot, flooded into the southwest, especially Texas. Laredo and El Paso became two of the most popular destinations.

In fact:

The Mexican population in El Paso grew exponentially between 1910 and 1916, from approximately 9,000 to nearly 33,000, as Mexican refugees, impacted by the Revolution, fled north. The refugees included not only the poor but also, by one city newspaper’s estimation, “tens of thousands of Mexicans of the best classes,” leading El Paso to displace “San Antonio, New Orleans, St. Louis, New York, and Los Angeles [as the] formerly dominant capitals in the mind of the average welltodo [sic] Mexican.”

The revolution blazed across Mexico. Peasants, workers, mestizos, intellectuals, business owners and white-skinned Mexicans were forced into competing groups. The undemocratic institutions, unequal land distribution and deep rooted inequality sown by Diaz’ economic policies affected each socioeconomic class in a unique way. The unfortunate reality didn’t help to create solidarity during the revolution. Some success did come fast though.

Diaz Out, and Magón Dead along with his Legacy

By May 1911, Diaz was defeated and on his way to exile in France. Even with the 30-year dictatorship vanquished, the Mexican Revolution still raged on for 6 more years. At the time, Magón lived in El Monte, part of the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County. By this time, he had become fully radicalized and made no effort to hide his anarchist politics. His radical anarchism didn’t sit well among some magonistas, who were more moderate and socialist. Magon began losing support and notoriety, but he had one last gasp in the annals of history.

While WWI broke out, coinciding with the Mexican Revolution, Magon published an anti-war manifesto in 1918. The last stroke of his pen sealed his fate. In 1919, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson launched the Palmer raids. The raids unleashed a wholesale crackdown on dissidents and leftists, foremost among them socialists, communists and anarchists. Magón got swept up along with notable contemporary Eugene V. Debs. Magón was charged with sedition under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, and died at age 48 in Fort Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas.

Sadly, Magon spent most of the Mexican Revolution in prison, cut off from the movement he started. His increasing militancy and anarchism didn’t provide the cohesion and solidarity that Mexicans sought. Although he earned the credit of the Mexican Revolution’s “intellectual author,” his legacy now lies in the shadows of timeless legends Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.

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What were the Biggest Scams and Scandals of the Roaring Twenties in America?

The economy boomed during the Roaring Twenties and rising incomes gave ordinary Americans access to enticing new conveniences, including washing machines, refrigerators, cars and other luxuries that would have once seemed unattainable. For a number of people, the idea of owning a car wasn’t enough. Such eagerness played right into the hands of the Roaring Twenties’ legions of fast-talking promoters, charlatans and outright swindlers, who enticed the would-be wealthy with scores of seemingly foolproof schemes—from stock companies that didn’t really exist, to speculation in Florida real estate or California oilfields. 

In this article Richard Bluttal will examine the get rich quick schemes of the 1920s - which laid the foundation for the more elaborate ones of the 21st century.

Charles Ponzi.

Charles Ponzi

Many people lacked the financial literacy to understand the difference between investing in a legitimate company and a scheme such as the one operated by Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who claimed to have become a wealthy man through sheer ingenuity and hard work. 

Charles Ponzi was a dapper, five-foot-two-inch rogue who in 1920 raked in an estimated $15 million in eight months by persuading tens of thousands of Bostonians that he had unlocked the secret to easy wealth. Charles Ponzi was born Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi on March 3, 1882, in the town of Lugo in northern Italy. His parents, Oreste and Imelda Ponzi, Ponzi later said, were part of a wealthy Italian family that had become borderline poor by the time he was born. Ponzi is said to have expressed criminal tendencies early on, stealing from his parents and even parish priests.

As a young man, he attended Sapienza University in Rome, where, by his own account, he was less than a model student. As a result, after four years, Ponzi was forced to leave with no money and no degree. During his university years, he had heard stories of other Italians who went off to America to find fame and fortune and decided that this was the only course left open for him.

In 1919, after having set himself up in a small export-import business, Ponzi received a letter from a Spanish company requesting an advertising catalog. Inside the envelope, he found an iinternational reply coupon (IRC), a type of voucher accepted in various other countries in exchange for local postage stamps. Ponzi quickly realized the moneymaking potential of taking advantage of exchange-rate differences to buy IRCs in one country and redeem them in another.

In 1920, Ponzi organized a company called Securities Exchange Co. in which he sold stock (promissory notes) advertising 50% interest after 90 days. The funds obtained from investors were supposed to be used to buy IRCs to redeem in the U.S. Instead, Ponzi used funds obtained from new investors to pay off old investors. It was a big idea—one that Ponzi managed to sell to thousands of people. He claimed to have elaborate networks of agents throughout Europe who were making bulk purchases of postal reply coupons on his behalf. In the United States, Ponzi asserted, he worked his financial wizardry to turn those piles of paper coupons into larger piles of greenbacks. Pressed for details on how this transformation was achieved, he politely explained that he had to keep such information secret for competitive reasons.

By way of explaining why he did this, Ponzi blamed the Universal Postal Union for suspending the sale of IRCs once it learned about his coupon redemption scheme. After attempting to get around the suspension, Ponzi shifted to his “Rob Peter to pay Paul” scheme. For a while, it worked. He raked in $15 million ($220 million in 2022 dollars) in the first eight months of 1920. He kept the scheme going by telling investors he had created an elaborate network of agents buying IRCs for him overseas that he could redeem in the U.S. for a tidy profit. In fact, there was no elaborate network of coupon buyers; he was using new investments to pay off old investors.

In July 1920, the Boston Post ran a flattering front-page feature on Ponzi pegging his net worth at $8.5 million. Less than a week later, the U.S. Post Office Department announced new conversion rates for international postal reply coupons, though officials said the rate change had nothing to do with Ponzi.

Investigations of Ponzi ensued but made little progress until the Boston Post launched its own investigation, which generated bad press, causing Ponzi to decline to accept new investments. This caused a run by current investors, and Ponzi reportedly paid out more than $1 million.

More bad press from the Post ultimately sealed Ponzi’s fate. He was eventually convicted on federal charges of mail fraud and served 3½ years in prison. Upon parole, he was convicted of state charges, jumped bail, was caught, and went to prison again, getting out in 1934. At that time, he was deported to his native Italy, having never become a U.S. citizen. His history in Italy and Brazil is not well documented, though it is known that he died on Jan. 18, 1949, in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, leaving just $75 to pay for his burial.

Florida land boom speculators

By 1920, Florida had a population of 968,470 people. Just five years later, the population had grown to 1,263,540. Advertised as “heaven on earth,” Florida became the number one destination spot for upwardly mobile American families during the Roaring Twenties. In just five years, more than 200,000 Americans flocked south. What had caused such a rise in the population?

Following World War I, large numbers of Americans finally had the time and money to travel to Florida and to invest in real estate. Educated and skilled workers were receiving paid vacations, pensions, and fringe benefits, which made it easier for them to travel and to purchase real estate. The automobile was also becoming an indispensable way for families to travel, and Florida was the perfect destination. Many of the people who migrated into Florida were middle class Americans with families. Unlike visitors of the past, these newer arrivals wanted homes and land rather than resorts and hotels. Moguls bought up cheap land, advertising accommodations-to-come through bold announcements across the country. Developers rushed to transform Everglade swamps into resort towns, like Miami Beach and Tampa Bay. 

During this boom, however, most people who bought and sold land in Florida had never even set foot in the state. Instead, they hired young, ambitious men and women to stand in the hot sun to show the land to prospective buyers and accept a "binder" on the sale. The binder was a non-refundable down payment that required the rest of the money to be paid in 30 days. Many people got rich quickly from the commission they made from these sales. With land prices rising rapidly, many of the buyers planned to sell the land at a profit before the real land payments were due. Sometimes land buyers didn't even have enough money to pay for the land; instead, they had just enough money for the binder. They were depending on the prices to continually rise.

It was during this time that many vacation spots were created and some of our most popular cities were developed. Dave Davis, the son of a steamboat captain, built Davis Island in the Tampa Bay area. Barron Collier started Naples and Marco Island as winter resorts. There were so many characters and stories of the boom times. There’s D. P. Davis, who in 1924 sold 300 building lots in Tampa Bay in three hours — while they were still underwater — and who remarried his first wife because, his brother said, he wanted to make his mistress jealous. There’s Barron Collier, who developed 1.2 million acres of southwest Florida that made him, if you could believe the price tags he put on them (and many thousands did), richer than John D. Rockefeller. The society architect Addison Mizner spun a fairyland of neo-Spanish castles in Palm Beach. His con man brother Wilson prophetically said, “Easy street is a blind alley,” and not much later the two of them found themselves stumbling along its darkened length.

Unfortunately, this land boom did not exist without problems. The demand for housing was so high that the cost of rent soared. Because the speculators had inflated the economy, many Americans who had migrated to Florida could no longer afford to live here. They began to write back home and tell people about their problems. Newspapers began writing stories that advised prospective residents to stay away from Florida.

At the same time, the demand for building materials overwhelmed the railway systems that transported them here. Railroads could not keep up with the needs and began to shut down. This acted as a brake on many developments, slowing down or stopping the boom's momentum. Once land prices stopped going up, many speculators couldn't sell at the high prices. There were suddenly thousands of acres of overpriced land without any buyers.

The boom stopped as suddenly as it had started. An unusually cold winter in 1925 followed by an extremely hot summer frightened away many potential buyers. It also cast doubts on the state's reputation as "heaven on earth." What was to follow was a series of natural disasters (freezes, hurricanes) that would send Florida into a tailspin, causing it to enter a Florida Depression four years before the 1929 stock market crash brought the whole country's economy down in the Great Depression.

Chauncey C. Julian

In the Roaring Twenties, this oil stock swindler dressed to the nines while boasting to small investors that his sham oil-drilling operations would yield easy 30-to-1 returns. His specialty was writing newspaper sales pitches that used folksy, plainspoken language. Julian became a millionaire, chiefly by selling more shares in his worthless syndicates than existed. When his empire began to crumble, Julian fled to Shanghai. One night in 1934, he arranged a banquet in his own honor, excused himself, and went upstairs to his hotel room to drink a suicidal dose of poison.

Charles A. Stoneham

The inveterate gambler was known in the 1920s for allegedly winning against the New York Giants baseball team in a game of poker. On Wall Street, he specialized in “bucket shops,” cut-rate brokerage houses that dangled low commissions as means to obtain money the firm almost never invested or repaid. Individual stock orders would be entered into the books but not filled on the open market. Instead, they would be “bucketed,” or combined into larger blocks that would be traded only if prices favored the brokerage. Despite his close association with Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who reportedly fixed the 1919 World Series, Stoneham was never sanctioned by Major League Baseball. The only time he was ever brought up on stock fraud charges, he was acquitted amid allegations of jury tampering.

Radio Pool

 The 1920’s was the last decade before the onset of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  As a result, stock manipulation was virtually legal, and was performed by pools of investors who traded large blocks back and forth in consortium with each other to drive the price of certain stocks up substantially.  One such group, the Radio Pool, traded Radio Corporation of America (RCA) stock until the price rose from $100 per share in 1928 to over $500 per share just before the big crash.  The pool then sold out and left the vast number of smaller shareholders with huge losses just in time for the stock market to crash in October 1929.  With the advent of the depression and ensuing regulations, the investor pool collaboration was among those activities that were outlawed.

Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil

Long before Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o said he was duped by an imaginary Internet girlfriend, Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil was plucking the gullible. A regular entry on Chicago police blotters in the first half of the 20th century, Weil was dubbed the "king of the con men" by reporters who eagerly chronicled his nefarious schemes. He brought out the poet in headline writers. A 1924 Tribune story was titled: "Weil Loses His Sangfroid as Accuser Glares."

The lead paragraph wasn't too bad either. He was described as a "debonair fast talker who plants in the provinces and reaps in the cities" — a reference to Weil being an equal-opportunity swindler who fleeced country bumpkins and city slickers alike. In his later years, he worked the local, off-beat lecture circuit, claiming to have taken suckers for a total of more than $8 million. Yet when he died in 1976 at the age of 100, the Kid was virtually a pauper, leaving an estate of $195 in the form of a credit at the Sheridan Road nursing home that was his final address.

When the Lake Front Convalescent Center threw a party for Weil's 99th party, he told a Tribune reporter he had no regrets about what he had done with his life. "I'd do it the same way again," he said. Sometimes he claimed to be not a victimizer but a victim of reporters giving free rein to their imaginations in order to sell papers.

According to the Tribune, he told one judge: "The dastardly fabrications of the metropolitan newspapers, the reprehensible conduct of journalists to surround me with a nimbus — er — a numbus of guilt, is astonishing." Yet in his "Autobiography of a Master Swindler," he acknowledged his chosen profession, even as he bemoaned its decline. "There are no good confidence men anymore," he wrote, "because they do not have the necessary knowledge of foreign affairs, domestic problems, and human nature." 

He certainly demonstrated more than a smattering of knowledge of those fields. He characterized the psychology underlying his working methods much as a judo wrestler explains how he turns his opponent's strength against him. He said: "A chap who wants something for nothing usually winds up with nothing for something." On other occasions, he defended his swindles with a Robin Hood twist. "He said he 'never took a dollar from a man who didn't deserve to lose it' because of greed," the Tribune recalled in Weil's obituary.

During World War I, Weil and his longtime confederate Frederick Buckminster swindled a Kokomo, Ind., banker out of more than $100,000, duping him "into purchasing fake stock in an Indiana steel mill by posing as representatives of German interests at a time when German ownership of American securities was embarrassing," the Trib noted.

Bankers were a favorite target of Weil, who took a Fort Wayne, Ind., banker for $15,000 in a 1917 scheme in which a confederate posed as an Englishman. A year later, Weil had no less than six phony brokerage offices up and running, their supposed bona fides supported by fake letters on counterfeit stationery of J.P. Morgan & Co. "We have learned of several letters bearing the supposed signature of Mr. Morgan," an assistant state's attorney told a Tribune reporter.

But Weil was not above fleecing at the other end of the economic ladder. Under a 1949 headline: "The Yellow Kid Beats $3 Case by Technicality," the Tribune reported he pocketed a $3 check solicited on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Weil told the judge he'd be happy to give the nuns the money. "And I would have been happy to give you a year in the Bridewell (a nickname for jail) if the case had been submitted to me on the proper charge," the judge told Weil.

Like many other areas of his life, the story of Weil's nickname had several versions. It was attributed to his fancy-dan attire, a supposed taste for yellow gloves, spats and vests, an etymology Weil denied in his autobiography. Others credit it to "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, a turn-of-the-20th century alderman and protector of vice operations in Chicago's red-light district. Apparently "The Bath" hung the moniker on Weil in 1901, borrowing it from a comic strip of the day, "Hogan's Alley and the Yellow Kid."

Weil was, in his own way, civic minded. In 1928, doing time in the Leavenworth, Kan., federal prison, he sent letters to Chicagoans appealing for funds so fellow inmates might properly celebrate Passover. He signed the letter: "Joseph Weil, president Jewish congregation."

He also felt strongly that there was a pecking order among gentlemen thieves, and Weil had nothing but contempt for one peer. In 1949, one Sigmund Engel, called "Chicago's marrying swindler" for defrauding women over a five-decade career, finally was being charged. As Weil commented, his "neatly trimmed mustache and parted beard fairly bristled," the Tribune noted. "There isn't a day that someone doesn't abscond with a woman's money," Weil said. "Preying on the love of women for money is one of the most despicable ways of making a livelihood I ever heard of."

Though he could be proud, he wasn't above taking a blow to the ego — if it might save him from a stint in the clink. When Weil was charged in 1925 with writing a bum check, a court-appointed doctor from the "psychopathic laboratory" found the Kid had the intelligence of a 16-year-old. "He is foppish to the last degree, a moral imbecile, possessed of a busy brain that is eternally plotting against somebody but unaware that injury is being done to others," the psychiatrist told the judge.

Weill seconded the motion. "I can't defend myself," he told the judge. "Why the very learned Dr. Hickson says I have the mentality of a child of sixteen." He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

And he could wax philosophically on the vagaries of human existence, as in 1925, when he lost a Sheridan Road hotel, he owned for failing to make his loan payments.

"Life is a funny proposition, after all," he told a Trib reporter. "We are born, we live a while, and then someone forecloses the mortgage."

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The 1973 Yom Kippur War - And its Effect on the Middle East Today

The movement of civilizations has characterized the Levant. Most places are stagnant with similar people. The Levant always has cultures moving, from the Egyptian conquests, the Christianity’s dawn, the Crusades to the Modern Era. People who would not move caused the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After the 1967’s Six-Day War, the Israeli parliament voted to return relinquished territories to Egypt, however, they took no action. Also, Egypt and the Arab alliance remained firm in their convictions: no negotiation with Israel.

Ayrton Avery explains.

Israeli soldiers during the Battle of Ismailia, part of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

War’s Course

Israel could have made concessions to Egypt after the bloody Six-Day War. This angered the U.S., though, and Israel refused the peace treaty that Egypt offered. Egypt’s president, Anwar El-Sadat, began purchasing weapons from the U.S.S.R and also organizing military exercises. By Yom Kippur (which coincided with Ramadan), war had begun. Though such conflicts were common, this war was unusual because Israel started the previous wars to maintain military superiority in the Levant. Now, Egypt fired the first shots, taking direct revenge. At the war’s beginning, Egypt and Syria entered the disputed territories, sparking an Israeli counteroffensive. Soon Israel pushed into Syria and Egypt, encircling Cairo in a few days after a bloody march. Then Jordan entered the war, and the Soviet Union considered involvement. After three weeks of fighting, there was a standoff between the Soviet and U.S. navies, escalating fears of a nuclear war and worsening global geopolitical tensions between two major powers. It was perhaps this that led the U.S. and the Soviet Union to broker a ceasefire.

The Effect

At the beginning of the war, the Israeli forces faced a series of surprising defeats, shocking their forces from their lethargy. After several failed counterattacks, affairs became in favor of the Israeli army. But the trauma of their defeats remained, and also the sheer luck that allowed the forces to defeat Egypt. Israel only invaded Egypt because of last minute American support (operation Nickel Grass), which was itself pulled up only because it could use a Portuguese airbase. The Arab coalition had become so powerful it could start an energy crisis in the West, and the Soviet Union probably gave Egypt nuclear weapons. Never had the Middle East been a major economic and social rival in modern times. The Middle East snapped free from both the influence of the Ottoman empire and also from dependence on Europe for its political ideals. This newfound independence, unknown since ancient times, pressured the Israelis to accept the terms of peace.

It is not clear why Sadat took part in the peace talks. He immediately got snubbed by the rest of the Arab countries for it. Of course, the war had been bloody on Egypt’s side, however; it seems more likely Sadat was perhaps a radical, and he also had Western sympathies, as he also seemed to dislike his country’s relation with the Soviet Union. Perhaps because of these same reasons, he ignored Palestine. He was trying to lead the Middle East on a path towards peace with Israel. But his former allies defected, preferring to support the Palestinian alliance, even though Palestinians had hardly fought in this war, unlike the previous confrontations with Israeli. However, the rest of the Levant was, like always, shifting. No longer allied to Palestine for ideological and military reasons, now they supported them for political attachments to Syria and Jordan, as well as possibly an anti-American sentiment. Indeed, the oppression of Palestinians in the Middle East and the entire world increased after the war, and this was because a new foreign policy, tailored to powerful and wealthy nations, had arrived in the region.

Legacy

The Yom Kippur War also successfully divided up the Middle East, largely into Western and Soviet camps. It was this disjunction that was a major cause for the Iranian Revolution, among other future conflicts. By trying to set peace, Sadat in fact, by siding with the West, setting the stage for more wars. It also divided the Middle East based on minor ideological differences, rather than united against Israel. If Sadat assumed this would end the conflict, he was wrong. Instead, it began an endless cycle of civil war and foreign intervention, and besides, the Palestine issue remained.

However, the actual result of the Yom Kippur War was that it forced the West to exert greater, forceful influence on the Middle East, whose peoples consequently retaliated. It is curious to note perhaps it was Egypt falling from Soviet control that started the Soviet-Afghan war, as it forced the U.S.S.R to find some new way to control the region. And it was this which eventually led to the creation of the Taliban. It is interesting how scholars have considered Palestine’s role in the Yom Kippur War as psychological. In fact, this war shifted Palestine from the hero of the Middle East to a stage for other conflicts. They forced Palestinians, subsequently, to go to more lengths to attract attention from their own former allies, in particular with the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the subsequent uprisings.

Change is both a blessing and a curse for the geopolitics of this region. The only thing that is stagnant is the peace process, chaperoned by the West. Also, that division in the Arab world that the Yom Kippur War ushered in still exists today. Now the Middle East comprises ideological partners, some real allies, and some enemies for Palestine. This arrangement, meant to quell tensions, in fact has excited all the countries’ thirst for revenge and power. It is a drama of nations willing to die for their allies and emboldened by flimsy promises. There is a faint hypocrisy as well. It allows countries to provide support for Palestine and yet refuses to accept its refugees. Clearly, the region is still too tense to handle this much movement. However, movement (of refugees, armies, and cultures) is its nature, and it will continue, war, or no war.

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References

Bartal, Shaul. "Yom Kippur War Influence at the PLO Recognition and the Palestinian Problem." History 5.4 (2015): 255-267.

Begum, Imrana. "The Arab Uprising: Russian Disquiet on Western Involvement." journal of European studies (2013).

Farr, Warner D. The third temple's holy of holies: Israel's nuclear weapons. No. 2. USAF Counterproliferation Center, Air University, 1999. (p. 9)

Hamzawy, Amr, and Dina Bishara. "Islamist movements in the Arab World and the 2006 Lebanon War." (2006).

Kumaraswamy, P. R. "Revisiting the Yom Kippur War: Introduction." Israel Affairs 6.1 (1999): 1-10.

Robbins, Elizabeth. “Egypt, Jordan, and Other Arab Governments Reject Gazan Refugees.” FDD, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 17 Oct. 2023, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/10/17/egypt-jordan-and-other-arab-governments-reject-gazan-refugees/.

Singh, K. R. "Anwar El Sadat: Man with a Mission." (1977): 281-283.

The Forgotten African-American Regiments of World War 1

Over 380,000 African-American troops served in World War One according to the US National Archives. Here, Chris Fray looks at the role the Black Americans played in the war in the context of the time.

The ‘Hellfighters’ - Soldiers of the 369th (15th N.Y.), 1919. They were awarded the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action.

Most African-American troops were deployed to labor divisions within the US providing manual labor for the war effort.[1] Even the Black soldiers who were deployed to France were first put to work unloading supplies from ships, joining the supply troops known as ‘Stevedores.’ These battalions did not fight but aided by building bridges, repairing roads and ensuring the fighting troops were constantly supplied.

The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the US high command were unsure whether White US troops would mix with Black troops and fight alongside them. Although slavery had been abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, over half a decade later the rights of Black Americans had progressed very little. Attacks and racial violence were common, especially in the Southern states. At this time, US society was fully segregated and would remain so until 1948. The concept of ‘separate but equal’ had been adopted across the country, prohibiting Blacks to use White facilities such as bathrooms, schools and railcars by Law.

At the time when war broke out, thousands of Black-Americans were moving from the country to industrial centers in what is known as the Great Migration.[2] As the US economy grew, many more opportunities became available in cities, especially with labor shortages due to the War. Organizations such as the NAACP were formed, campaigning for the advancement of Black people, consolidating more confidence and power than before. One of the first mass protests in US history took place on the eve of the First World War in 1917, New York, known as The Silent Parade. Led by NAACP, 10,000 African Americans marched down 5th Avenue, New York in protest to a recent racist attack in East St. Louis where perhaps up to 200 African Americans were killed and 6,000 were made homeless due to racially motivated arson.[3] With this new Black organization came increased resentment and anxiety from Whites and especially the Police, leading to more and more violence.

Action in the war

Although very few in comparison to White soldiers, there were a number of African-Americans who did see action in the First World War. The most celebrated were the 15th New York “colored” Infantry Regiment, renamed US 369thInfantry Regiment but also, and much more dramatically known as the ‘Harlem Hellfighters.’ Harlem was home to 50,000 of the 60,000 African-Americans living in New York’s Manhatten in the 1910s.[4] After deciding that Regiments were better led and filled by soldiers of the same race, the 369th Infantry were assigned by the US army to the French army who, as a body were much more open to integration in their forces. French colonial troops had been integrated into the French army for decades.

The ‘Hellfighters’ quickly became renowned for their bravery and ferocity on the battlefield, in particular by the German troops they were fighting- who originally coined the term ‘Hellfighters.’ Their motto, “Don't Tread On Me, God Damn, Let's Go," sums up their determination and resilience very well. It was their resilience which they became famous for- The 369th Regiment spent more time in continual combat than any other US division of its size, with a staggering 191 days in the front line trenches.[5] One particular episode on 15th May 1918 shows the fortitude and strength of the soldiers of the Regiment. When on watch duty, Private Henry Johnson and Private Needham Robert’s position was attacked by German troops. The two soldiers fought off 12 Germans in brutal hand to hand combat, saving the position but Johnson receiving 21 wounds in the fight.[6] After the war, the Regiment as a whole were awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French Army and returned to America as heroes.

Legacy

The irony of fighting for freedom abroad when you don’t have the benefit of it at home, can’t have been lost on these soldiers. However the success and bravery of the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ saw the first serious calls for desegregation of the US army. Although desegregation was not signed until 1948 by President Harry Truman, the ‘Hellfighters’ paved an important way for recognition and opportunity for Black soldiers to come.

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[1] US Department of Defense - https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/1429624/african-american-troops-fought-to-fight-in-world-war-i/#:~:text=More%20than%20380%2C000%20African%2DAmericans,to%20labor%20and%20stevedore%20battalions.

[2] US Library of Congress - https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/segregation-era.html

[3] https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/1917NAACPSilentProtestParade

[4] Smithsonian Magazine - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/one-hundred-years-ago-harlem-hellfighters-bravely-led-us-wwi-180968977/

[5] National Museum of African American History & Culture - https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/remembering-harlem-hellfighters#:~:text=Some%20members%20of%20the%20Harlem,to%20the%20369th%20Infantry%20Regiment.

[6] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Harlem-Hellfighters

Poker and the US Presidency

Surprisingly, card playing and other games had a great impact on the U.S. presidents, from George Washington to Joe Biden. Card games, played by a majority of the presidents, especially were a respite from the overwhelming pressures of the presidency. These games, mainly poker, honed the presidents’ ability to take calculated risks and enhanced the Chief Executives’ ability to bluff and read their opponents.

Several presidents used poker, specifically, to start their political careers. Here, Ralph Crosby, author of Poker, Politics and Presidents (Amazon US | Amazon UK), tells how poker playing helped put three presidents in office.

Theodore Roosevelt in 1898.

TR at the Poker Table

In the fall of 1880, when Theodore Roosevelt first sat down to play poker in Morton Hall, wearing his black dress coat, a top hat and pince nez glasses on a cord, the rough-hewn players at the table didn’t know what to make of this “dandy,” especially a Harvard-educated scion of the Roosevelt Clan, part of the 400 “best” New York families.

Theodore was there on a mission. He wanted to get involved in Republican politics and Morton Hall, a large room over top of an East 59th Street New York City saloon, was the headquarters and club room of the Twenty-first District Republican Association and just a few short blocks from his home.

At first, he was not very welcome at Morton Hall, as he had been warned by his rich, privileged friends, who viewed with disdain politics as the province of a rough and tumble crowd of saloon keepers, horse car conductors and low-level storekeepers and pols.

Theodore was not too pleased with the place itself, with its residue of cigar smoke and ashes, half full spittoons and a few dingy tables and chairs. The only appointments to break the dinginess were two framed pictures on the wall, of Ulysses Grant and Levi P. Morton, a Republican Vice President under President Benjamin Harrison and the club house’s namesake.

But Roosevelt persevered. He later commented, “I went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and to have me get accustomed to them, so that we began to speak the same language….” It worked, and he was finally accepted for membership.

“They rather liked the idea of a Roosevelt joining them,” he later recalled. “I insisted in taking part in all the discussions. Some of them sneered at my black coat and tall hat. But I made them understand that I should come dressed as I chose…. Then after the discussion I used to play poker and smoke with them.”

Theodore’s courage, self-confidence and camaraderie especially impressed one man, Joe Murray, an Irishman and former street gang leader, and the second in command of the Twenty-First District Association—conniving to be number one. By lining up delegates under the nose of the Twenty-First’s leader, who expected his crooked candidate to get the nod for state assemblyman, Murray only needed a good candidate of his own. He decided Roosevelt was his man, and convinced the newcomer to run.

Politics Begins for Teddy

On October 28, 1881, the association’s convention was held at Morton Hall, and Murray surprised the top boss by nominating Roosevelt. The convention elected Theodore on the first ballot, and the 23-year-old went on to win his first elective office. As poker historian James McManus concluded in his book Cowboys Full, Roosevelt “had used poker and other manly ploys to raise himself up in the Republican party.”

Roosevelt would later introduce Joe Murray as the man who “started me in politics.” That start was the first step on the road to the White House. That road would have many twists and turns, but Theodore would navigate them with the fearlessness, fighting spirit, and risk-taking so prominent in the military man and adventurer he would become and the card player, success seeker and creative thinker he already was.

Richard Nixon’s Evolution

During WWII, the 29-year-old Richard Nixon joined the Navy as a Lieutenant (Junior Grade) and his life changed drastically. In his Quaker family tradition, Nixon did not smoke, drink liquor, use cuss words, gamble or play cards. That would change in the Navy.

Eventually sent to the South Pacific and promoted to Lieutenant Commander, he led a small detachment in the Combat Air Transport Command (SCAT). On the Island of Bougainville, during his first month there, Nixon’s unit was bombed by the Japanese for 28 nights out of 30. Many bombs just missed his bunker.

As in many wartime situations, much of the Navy’s SCAT team’s time was spent in what Nixon called in his memoirs “interminable periods” of monotonous waiting. They also sought diversions from the stress of nightly bombing. The boredom and fear often were quelled by poker games, which hooked the non-card-playing Nixon.

Nixon’s Poker Profits

Thrown in with some hard-living and hard-drinking Navy men, Richard Nixon soon was drinking and cussing with the best of them. Bored with lonesome evenings reading by himself, he began kibitzing the regular poker games in the camp. When he saw the amount of money being won and lost at poker, especially dollars thrown away by drunken players, he became intrigued. It was the money, not the cards that caught his attention. Nixon biographer Steven E. Ambrose concluded, “The games became an obsession with him.”

An earlier biographer of Nixon’s, Bela Kornitzer, in his book titled The Real Nixon, written while the subject was still vice president, said of Nixon’s South Pacific time, “Out there Nixon passed over Quaker objections to gambling. Why? He needed money. He learned poker and mastered it to such a degree that he won a sizable amount, and it became the sole financial foundation of his career.”

Nixon’s poker playing was very profitable. His South Pacific poker winnings are reported variously between six and ten thousand dollars. The most accurate figure, which he told his family, was $8,000, worth more than $110,000 in current dollars.

He used the winnings from the poker games to finance his successful campaign for Congress, his entry into politics.

Obama’s Poker Pals

With his Harvard law degree in hand, Barack Obama went to Chicago to join a law firm, where he concentrated on civil rights cases, and taught at the University of Chicago Law School. He quickly became involved in Project Vote for election year 1992, overseeing volunteers and registering voters, helping elect Carol Mosely Braun, Illinois’ first black U.S. Senator, and preparing himself for his run for the Illinois state senate in his district.

Obama won the primary unopposed. At age 35, four years out of law school, running against only token Republican opposition, Obama won his first public office.

In his pre-presidential autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote of succeeding in the state legislature despite the risks of a political career:

“By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After two terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills.”

Of Poker and Politics

Obama’s entry into the state capital was not greeted warmly. The highbrow Harvard Law graduate got the cold shoulder from the old school Illinois legislators. But he found a way to earn the trust and friendship of many. Like Teddy Roosevelt—he played poker with them.

In fact, with fellow freshman Democratic senator Terry Link, Obama started a poker game, which became a favorite of an eclectic group of legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, and lobbyists.

In a 2008 The New Yorker article, poker historian James McManus concurred. “Perhaps realizing that both the Chicago machine pols and the downstate soybean farmers viewed him as an overeducated bleeding heart and a greenhorn, he decided to woo them with poker.” In his poker history, Cowboys Full, published in 2009, McManus  devoted the book’s first six pages to Obama’s poker playing, in general, and to his and Link’s games, specifically.

The poker game, at different times played in Link’s Springfield home basement, a local country club and a lobbyist’s office was called the “Committee Meeting.” It started out with only a few players but eventually developed a waiting list. They played stud and draw poker for low stakes, a dollar bet and a maximum three dollar raise. A night’s win or loss normally ran about $25, and a big loss would be $100.

In Cowboys Full, McManus quoted Link, “You hung up your guns at the door. Nobody talked about their jobs or politics, and certainly no ‘influence’ was bartered or ever discussed. It was boys night out—a release from our legislative responsibilities.”

Obama undoubtedly saw it a bit differently. As McManus wrote, Obama “seems to have understood, as a networking tool, poker is the most efficient positive of all.” “The bottom line politically,” McManus concluded, “was that poker helped Obama break the ice with people he needed to work with in the legislature.”

Later, when Obama decided to run for the U.S. Senate, he reached out to his poker friends to gauge their support. Most felt the time was right and pledged their backing.

From Poker Winner to Political Winner

As Obama wrote in his autobiographical book, A Promised Land, “I began by talking to my poker buddies… to see whether they thought I could compete in the white working-class and rural enclaves they represented… They thought I could and all agreed to support me if I ran.”

Fortuitously, at the same time, Obama gained local and national prominence with his star-turn keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a speech called so “transformational” that politicians and the media started calling Barack a “rising star” and presidential material.

The result: Obama scored a landslide victory over Republican Alan Keyes, 3,597,456 votes to his opponent’s 1,390,690 to become, at age 43, the junior Senator from Illinois.

To celebrate his victory, his buddies held a special poker game—meant to bring Obama some humility.

In his book on Obama’s political ascent, author David Garrow reported, “We brought him down to earth real quick, explained Terry Link, describing how they worked together so that Barack lost every hand.” By night’s end, Obama had lost all his money, but maybe gained a bit of humbleness. Later, U.S. Senator Obama, visiting Springfield, again found time for a poker game with his old buddies.

The next step was the White House, where Obama continued to play cards.

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Jacob Riis: The Danish-American who Made a Big Impact in the Late 19th Century

Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a Danish-American who had a big influence in America during his lifetime. He was a social reformer, journalist, photographer – and confidante to presidents. Richard Bluttal explains.

Jacob Riis in 1906.

The great mass. . . . of newsboys who cry their “extrees” in the street by day . . . are children with homes who contribute to their family’s earnings, and sleep out, if they do, either because they have not sold their papers or gambled away their money at “craps” and are afraid to go home . . . . In winter the boys curl themselves up on the steam-pipes in the newspaper offices that open their doors at midnight on secret purpose to let them in.

Imagine it's 1888, New York City. The Lower East Side is the most densely populated place on Earth: block after block of tenements house the working-poor immigrants of the city, including Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, Czechs and Chinese. Imagine the darkness of an unlit corridor in one of those tenements, a corridor that opens onto windowless rooms, 10 feet square, where entire families live and might even work — sewing or rolling cigars. Out of the darkness, a door opens. A man with a Danish accent leads a team of amateur photographers, who are accompanied by a policeman. They position their camera on a tripod and ignite a mixture of magnesium and potassium chlorate powder. A flash explodes, illuminating their squalor. It would take the photographers a few minutes to reload that early ancestor of the flash bulb. And then, on to another tenement scene. And despite the blackness of a room or an unlit street, a picture is taken, a document of urban poverty.

In 1873, Riis became a police reporter and was assigned to cover New York City’s Lower East Side. This role, as described by Riis, meant he was “the one who gathers and handles all the news that means trouble to someone: the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort”. His investigations led him to some stunning discoveries, including the horrible living conditions of New York tenements. He found that some tenement conditions were so abysmal that the infant death rate was 1 in 10. These experiences drove Riis to continue his efforts; by the late 1880’s, Riis was conducting in-depth investigations into the conditions of the slums, using flashbulb photography to capture these deplorable conditions.

Social activist

At what point did Riis become a social activist. As the story goes, “One cold night of wandering led to a chance encounter with a little dog, who loyally followed him around the city. When Riis sought refuge in a police lodging house, the dog was denied entry. Riis awoke in the middle of the night to find another lodger had robbed him. When he complained to a policeman, he was called a liar and thrown out of the lodging house.

His loyal friend, who had been patiently waiting at the door, reacted to seeing Riis treated this way by attacking the policeman and biting his leg. The policeman grabbed the dog and smashed him against the station steps, killing him. Riis was beside himself with grief and rage and pinpoints this exact moment as launching his life as a social activist. 

The kind of police lodging where Riis had attempted to spend the night had become an increasingly since the 1860s. Low Life author Luc Sante estimates that between 100,000 and 250,000 people per year took shelter there. As Eric Monkkonen documents in Police in Urban America, these cold, leaky, drafty lodging houses were a petri dish of diseases that would spread quickly through their populations and onto the police force.

One police doctor lamented, “More miserable, unhealthy, horrible dungeons could not well be conceived of,” which sounds pretty rough by 19th century standards. The most common afflictions were tuberculosis, lice, and syphilis. Reformers had long hoped to shut such institutions down. In 1894, when Riis met Teddy Roosevelt, they got their best chance.

Confidante

Jacob Riis was once one of the most famous men in America: and became a close friend and confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt and the epitome of the immigrant made good — good, in his case, being measured by political and social influence, not by wealth. One of his books, How the Other Half Lives (1890), exposed the horrors of tenement life. It caught the attention of Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, who viewed it as a call to action. Immediately after finishing this book, Roosevelt marched into Riis’s office to tender his assistance. In 1895, when Roosevelt was New York Police Commissioner and Riis was employed as a police reporter at the Mulberry Street station, the two often worked together. They ventured out on urban expeditions together to witness first-hand the calamitous conditions affecting the poor. Through their investigations, they hoped to bring about better living situations as well as to eliminate corruption within the police department that added to the burden of destitute New Yorkers. . On February 8, 1896, Riis took Roosevelt on a tour of police lodging houses, including the specific one that had mistreated him nearly 20 years earlier. A disgusted Roosevelt promised Riis, “I will smash them tomorrow.” A week later, Commissioner Roosevelt shut down all of the police lodging houses in the city. Afterwards, Riis wrote, “The battle is won. The murder of my dog is avenged.” For the for the rest of his career, Riis would end lectures thundering, “My dog did not die unavenged!”Through their investigations, they hoped to bring about better living situations as well as to eliminate corruption within the police department that added to the burden of destitute New Yorkers. Riis was active in bringing about anti-child labor and tenement reform laws.

After Roosevelt resigned as Police Commissioner, he and Riis remained close. United by their passion for reform, the pair’s unlikely friendship surpassed purely political matters Riis was active in bringing about anti-child labor and tenement reform laws.

Photos

One of Riis' most famous photos was taken on Bayard Street. It's called "5 Cents a Spot," which shows a room full of people bedding down for the night. (A "spot" meant a place on the floor.) They must have been shocked. Magnesium flash powder was something new. It was developed in Germany in 1887. Riis' burst of light must have been a stunning surprise, but it made the dim, airless lives of the poor visible to the middle class.

Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, co-authors of Rediscovering Jacob Riis,  took a walk through the neighborhood.  The neighborhood is recently gentrified, but this was where Riis campaigned against the housing conditions of the day. "You can still see the really small size of the building lots," says Czitrom, who is a historian. "The typical building lot in New York for a tenement was 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep going back," and the buildings often took up the entire lot, he says. So-called rear tenements, built behind other tenements, would have no access to light or air, and all the rooms were interior rooms, Czitrom says.

A court decision from that era essentially said there is no right to light or air for a renter or an owner, he says. "So, the idea that you have a right to a window or the right to some breathing space was not a legal right that anyone recognized until much later," Czitrom says.

Riis thought of himself as a writer, and he was evidently a gripping storyteller in the lectures he gave to accompany his lantern slideshows.

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Before There Was a State of Israel, There Was Birobidzhan

When the State of Israel was declared in the Middle East in 1948, it was dubbed the first independent Jewish state since the reigns of kings like Saul, David and Solomon in the 10th century. That’s because very few people, then or now, are aware of an area that, in August of 1936, was declared as the site where “For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, its burning desire for a homeland, for the achievement of its own national statehood has been fulfilled.”

Alina Adams explains.

A 1933 Soviet stamp depicting the Jewish people of Birobidzhan, available here.

How It Started

That site was and still is known as Birobidzhan, a strip of land between the Biro and the Bidzhan rivers, located on the border of Russia and China.

How did that happen? Well, it began as many Jewish stories begin….

In 1926, the still-fledgling government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was advised that “Jewish agricultural settlements (have) called forth a sharply heightened anti-Jewish mood.”

Translation: Communism took away land from Russian/Ukrainian/Slavic peasants and redistributed it among all Soviet citizens, which included Jews. Also, Jews who did not want to farm, came pouring into the cities, competing with other unskilled laborers for the already limited pool of menial work. 

This annoyed both the farmers and the non-farmers. Since antisemitism had been officially outlawed by the newly formed workers paradise of the USSR, it annoyed those in charge that it still existed. It was an embarrassment to them. Something needed to be done!

The solution? Well, if you got rid of Jews, then you also got rid of Jew-hatred. Sure. Let’s pretend it works that way.

But where to get rid of them to?

The Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on Land filed an 80 page report saying they would accept any piece of land the Soviet Union decided to put them on… except for Birobidzhan.

Why not Birobidzhan? Well, first, the territory was mostly swamp, covered in gadflies and mosquitos. Locals burned fires to keep insects away from the cattle, and covered themselves in repelling ointment and netting. Second, the area was populated by native Koreans who likely wouldn’t appreciate the newcomers, as well as Chinese warlords who periodically crossed the border to check on their poppy (opium) fields. Oh, and Cossacks. Did we mention Cossacks? After the revolution, many fled East. They likely wouldn’t appreciate the Jewish interlopers either.

Naturally, after reading the report, the Soviet government decided their newly created Jewish Autonomous Region would be… in Birobidzhan.

How It’s Going

In April 1928, 540 families and 150 single people made the trek to the Far East. There was no infrastructure for them. They literally lived in holes in the ground, dealing with the tail end of the rainy season. By May 1928, two-thirds of the settlers had turned back home.

Nonetheless, that same summer, Birofeld, the first Jewish collective farm in the East was established. It subsumed the Cossack village of Alexandrovka; the first recorded incident of a Jewish community overtaking a Russian one. 

In May 1934, the Communist Party granted Birobidzahn its official status as the Jewish Autonomous Region.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Except they did not.

The 1930s were a most precarious time in the USSR. That was when Stalin unleashed his Great Terror Purges, arresting, exiling, and executing all those who he believed were against him. And he believed almost everyone was against him. Alliances could change on a whim, with no warning. 

For instance, Lazar Kaganovitch, secretary of the Central Committee, Commissar of Communications, and colloquially known as the most powerful Jew in the USSR, visited Birobidzhan in February of 1936. He had dinner with the local party head, and praised his wife’s delicious Jewish cooking.

Where It Went Wrong

By August of 1936, that same party head was removed on charges that he’d been “unmasked as untrustworthy, counterrevolutionary, and a bourgeois-nationalist conspiring to create a murderous, Bundist, Nazi-Facist organization.”

Oh, and his wife had tried to poison Kaganovitch. With gefilte fish. Possibly the most Jewish criminal charge ever filed.

In 1940, after The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that partitioned Central and Eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Germany, the USSR found itself overseeing a portion of the over three million Jews living in Poland. Officials visited Birobidzhan to investigate whether it might be a good option for deporting them to, before opting to go with their tried and true destination of Siberia. 

In the run-up to World War II, Birobidzhan’s Korean population was also exiled to Siberia, for fear they might prove a fifth column more loyal to Japan than to the Allies powers. After the war, Birobidzhan saw a slight uptick in population, as Jewish survivors, unable to face returning to the villages and cities where their own neighbors turned them over to the Nazis and Rumanians, trickled into what they hoped might prove a safe haven.

However, those truly dedicated to the cause of an independent Jewish state made their way to Israel by the end of the decade, and the Jewish population of Birobidzhan continued shrinking. Currently, they number around 4,000 people, roughly 5% of Birobidzhan’s 75,000 citizen population. 

However, the buildings and street signs still bear the traces of Hebrew letters spelling out Yiddish place names. Officially, Birobidzhan is still The Jewish Autonomous Region, whether the Jews of the world know it or not.

Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her latest historical fiction, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region” chronicles a little known aspect of Soviet and Jewish history. Alina was born in Odessa, USSR and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1977. Visit her website at: www.AlinaAdams.com.

How One Unknown Man Changed History and Turned the Tides of World War Two Against Hitler

Heinrich Pfeifer is not a name which springs to mind when we consider the major events of the twentieth century, but new evidence shows he might just be one of the key figures to decide the outcome of the Second World War, and hence one of the reasons why we are not all speaking German today instead of English.

Robert Temple explains.

Reinhard Heydrich, who was Heinrich Pfeifer’s boss. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-054-16 / Hoffmann, Heinrich / CC-BY-SA, available here.

Pfeifer’s name only became known for certain recently, when it was revealed by some Swiss intelligence files. Before that, only the top people of the world’s security agencies of the 1940s knew who he really was, as he had about twenty different names and identities. Indeed, the voluminous American security files on Pfeifer are still classified, and until now no one could have asked to see them anyway because no one knew which name to ask for.

Pfeifer was the highest German espionage official ever to defect from the Nazi regime. His immediate superior was Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SD, which was the intelligence service of Himmler’s SS. His special activities were counterintelligence and foreign operations. At one time he infiltrated the French spy service (the Deuxième Bureau) and acted as a double agent for Germany. He was a master of disguise and sometimes went around dressed as a tramp. Despite being anti-Communist, he was elected head of a Trotskyite society which he gracefully declined. Later he infiltrated the Polish intelligence service and tricked the General Staff of Poland with a false invasion plan. In all, he worked for the intelligence services of at least seven different countries.

Ultimately, Pfeifer turned against the Nazi regime because of its anti-Semitism, the concentration camps, and violent murders, all of which he despised. He defected to Switzerland in September of 1938, and worked for Swiss Army intelligence for three years, helping to prevent Hitler’s plan to annex the German portion of Switzerland. In 1938 and 1939, Pfeifer flew to London and met with Robert Vansittart, the head of British intelligence. Pfeifer was able to identify the two leading German spies in the UK, who had never previously been named, and they were both expelled in 1939.

Spies

The spies Pfeifer named were Baron Dr. Kurt von Stutterheim, who had been posing as an anti-Nazi activist, and Hans E. Friedrich, who had been posing as an arts journalist. Pfeifer gave huge amounts of detailed information to Vansittart which Vansittart then passed over to sympathetic American sources for circulation and partial publication, to help influence the American public about the need to join the War. Vansittart’s intense efforts to out-maneuver Neville Chamberlain and get Winston Churchill into power were greatly aided by Pfeifer’s defection and the enormous amount of material that Pfeifer supplied. The contact was made all the easier because Pfeifer was multi-lingual and spoke English as well as various other languages (being fluent in Italian, one of his duties had been to liaise with General Roatta, the head of Mussolini’s security services, on behalf of Himmler and Heydrich.)

Heinrich Pfeifer worked and was registered under a false name during his entire time in the security service. Starting in 1929 his first boss, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s close friend and chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, insisted he be called Heinz Stein. Pfeifer was only 24 at the time.

Pfeifer was a devout Catholic all his life and he only became involved with the Nazis because he wanted to fight Communism. He then found himself immersed in an evil empire which he had not anticipated, and from which it was difficult to escape. He had, after all, joined the Nazis four years before Hitler actually came to power, and when their true nature was not entirely clear.

After the war

In 1949, at the age of 44, Pfeifer was assassinated by a Nazi vengeance squad for having betrayed Nazi secrets. His memoir published in 1945 in Switzerland was bought up and destroyed by Nazi sympathisers, and few copies survived. But Pfeifer’s meticulous description of the precise structures and methods of Nazi espionage ironically recorded the replicated version of the same thing which commenced about that time by the Russians. In that, they were guided by Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo who fled to the Russians at the end of the War. So, Pfeifer’s guide to Nazi infiltration techniques is equally a guide to the Russians’ techniques after 1945.

Pfeifer knew that he was risking his life by escaping from his boss Reinhard Heydrich, whom he described as ‘satanic’ and more dangerous than Hitler. He had risked his life many times before in the interests of Nazi Germany, but he was to pay the final price for his efforts to try to save the Allies, and especially Britain. However, if not for his bravery in coming forward and supplying crucial intelligence to Robert Vansittart, and ultimately to the American press, the tides of war may never have meaningfully turned against Hitler. History would likely have turned out much different if not for the courageous acts of this one man, who most have never even heard of.

Robert Temple is a London-based historian, archaeologist, publisher, and former journalist who has previously written for publications such as The Guardian, New Scientist, and Harpers. Temple is editor of the forthcoming book, Drunk On Power: A Senior Defector’s Inside Account of the Nazi Secret Police State, the long suppressed memoir of Nazi defector Heinrich Pfeifer. Temple was the first person to reveal the ‘forcible repatriation scandal’ during and after World War II and persuaded Lord Carrington, then U.K. Defence Minister, to release the sealed War Office files which blew away the secrecy of that forbidden subject, which had resulted in the deaths and incarceration of two million people by Stalin, with the shameful secret complicity of the Allied Powers. Temple has been a member of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI) since 1972. Robert Temple is the author of numerous books on history and science. He has twice been appointed Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and he has done archaeological work in Egypt, Greece, and Italy.

Republicans in the Presidency: Criminal Dealings?

Donald J. Trump is in court for a number of reasons currently, although he still remains favorite for the Republican nomination for the presidency. With that in mind, here Larry Deblinger looks at some of the criminal (or possibly criminal) dealings of some former Republican presidents.

Harding’s Gang? President Warren G. Harding’s first cabinet in 1921.

The Republican party of the United States is in flux as it seeks to forge its future with or without the leadership of former president Donald J. Trump. While Trump holds a commanding lead in the polls in the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he is also facing trial on four criminal indictments encompassing 91 separate charges. Republican politicians and rank-and file-voters must decide whether they will support Trump should he be both their party’s nominee and a convicted felon. Depending on the trial outcomes, it may be a stark choice of Trump or the law.

But the stakes of the present moment for the future of the Republican party, and, potentially, of American democracy, can only be fully appreciated in light of the GOP’s past. The history of the presidencies of the Republican party, which often brands itself “the party of law and order,” includes a long criminal record, spanning almost the entire existence of the party, of which the Trump administration, despite some unprecedented aspects of its law-breaking, is only the latest chapter. What Republicans decide today will help determine whether that heritage of lawlessness at the highest levels of national government, where a political party is expected to assemble its best and brightest and promote its core tenets, will continue to stain the character of the GOP.

Grant’s Invasion

The criminal record of Republican presidencies substantially begins a mere 15 years after the 1854 birth of the GOP, with the administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877). At this time, corruption in government was common since the so-called “spoils system,” as in “to the victor go the spoils,” held sway in American politics, determining government jobs, favors and funding through political patronage.1 But federal executive branch corruption erupted to unprecedented and shocking levels under Grant. The scandals, too numerous to detail in total, ran from bribery, fraud, and extortion to embezzlement and financial market manipulation and permeated the departments of the Treasury, Interior, Justice, War (now called Defense), the Navy, and the Postal Service, reaching to top cabinet officers and the vice-president.2

The malfeasance by the end of Grant’s first term was such that it helped trigger a breakaway faction of his party who called themselves the Liberal Republicans and opposed Grant’s 1872 re-election. Among other points of opposition to Grant, the Liberals charged that “The Civil Service of the Government has become a mere instrument of partisan tyranny and personal ambition, and an object of selfish greed. It is a scandal and reproach upon free institutions, and breeds a demoralization dangerous to the perpetuity of republican government.”3

The Whiskey Ring

The most extensive of the Grant administration scandals was the Whiskey Ring. Grant had sent an old friend whom he had appointed to the Treasury, General John McDonald, to head up federal tax revenue collection in Missouri, a hotbed of support for the Liberal Republicans. Once there, McDonald observed that whiskey distillers had been bribing federal revenue agents for years to allow them to underpay what they owed in taxes. Rather than curtail the illegality, McDonald and other Republican operatives got in on the action, forming the Whiskey Ring in conjunction with distillers, ostensibly to divert the unpaid tax money to a slush fund for Grant’s re-election in 1872 and other Republican campaigns.4 Storekeepers, treasury clerks, revenue agents and others in the whiskey chain were forced to cooperate, sometimes through impressment and blackmail.4 After the 1872 elections, the Whiskey Ring outgrew its original, perhaps specious political purposes to become a nationwide crime syndicate operated entirely for the enrichment of the conspirators. After it was uncovered and investigated by Grant’s Justice Department starting in 1875, 110 conspirators, including MacDonald, were convicted of crimes (e.g., defrauding the US Treasury) and over $3 million in stolen revenues were recovered.5  

Despite the scandals of his administration and opposition of the Liberals, Grant, the former top general of the Union army and Civil war hero, won re-election handily. Grant appeared to be unaware of the various corrupt activities in his administration, and urged prosecution of the malefactors when informed of them.6 But he was drawn into the Whiskey Ring scandal when his private secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted and tried in criminal court for involvement in the scheme. Grant testified on behalf of Babcock, denying his guilt and defending his character, in a deposition taken at the White House. Owing largely to Grant’s testimony, Babcock was eventually acquitted, but was later accused of complicity in another corrupt scheme.4,5 For years afterwards, fairly or not, the term “Grantism” was synonymous with government corruption.7

Harding’s Gang

Following Grant, the Progressive era of the late nineteenth and early 20th century in the US promoted “good government” policies which helped to curb government corruption. Progressive Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt played prominent roles in this movement.8 But Americans came to tire of Progressivism under the strident leadership and activism of the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), and in 1920, they voted a conservative Republican, Warren G. Harding, into the White House. Harding had run on the campaign theme of a “return to normalcy.”9 If by normalcy Harding meant a return to Republican officials criminally abusing the powers of the Federal government, he delivered in spades.

A handsome, statuesque, and genial man with a turbo-charged sex-drive, Harding had risen through the shady world of Ohio politics and brought his cronies from that milieu to the executive branch. Known as the Ohio gang, Harding’s associates generated a font of corruption.

The disclosures began in early 1923 at the Veteran’s Bureau  (now the Department of Veterans’ Affairs), leading to the resignation of the Director, Charles R. Forbes and the suicide of the General Counsel, Charles T. Cramer. Forbes was convicted in 1924 of conspiracy to defraud the government, involving the theft of more than $200 million in bureau funds, and sentenced to two years in prison.10,11

The odor of corruption led next to the office of the Alien Property Custodian, which adjudicated claims for properties confiscated from Germans during World War I. Congressional investigators the bureau to be a sump of bribery and graft. The Custodian, Thomas W. Miller, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government and imprisoned.12  Harding’s Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, a key member of the Ohio gang, was brought to trial on charges of involvement in the Alien Bureau schemes and was acquitted, although it was brought out that he had burned bank ledger sheets of his and other accounts to destroy evidence.13 Daugherty was also accused of running a bribery/protection racket for alcohol dealers trying to evade the Prohibition law then in effect but was never prosecuted.14 However, Daugherty’s secretary and close friend, Jess Smith, committed suicide under mysterious circumstances.15

Oil Money Bribes

The infamous Teapot Dome scandal, also occurring under the Harding administration, was named for a federal government reserve of oil-bearing land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, intended for use by the US Navy and managed by the Interior Department. After a series of investigations and criminal trials revealing an intricate and scandalous web of corporate-government corruption, Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall was convicted and imprisoned for receiving bribes in return for leasing Teapot Dome and other federal oil reserves to private companies.16

The full extent of Harding’s knowledge of the corruption in his administration remains unknown, largely because he died suddenly while in office in 1923. In his classic 1931 history of the 1920s, “Only Yesterday,” Frederick Lewis Allen, author and Editor of Harper’s magazine, opined that “the Harding administration was responsible in its short two years and five months for more concentrated robbery and rascality than any other in the whole history of the Federal government.”17 

Nixon’s Criminal Cohort

It is sometimes forgotten that Richard M. Nixon set the tone for his administration (1969-74) well before the Watergate scandal with his choice for vice-president, Spiro T. Agnew, Governor of Maryland. Little-known outside of Maryland, Agnew was a tough, plain-spoken politician whom the Nixonites thought would be perfect for their campaign. It turned out that Agnew was a creature straight from the Grant-Harding school of politics as criminal enterprise. Agnew had not only run a bribery racket as County Executive and then Governor of Maryland, extorting public works contractors for kickbacks of government-appropriated funds, he continued receiving the payments—in envelopes stuffed with cash—as Vice-President of the US.18 Faced with criminal charges of extortion, bribery, graft, conflict of interest, and tax evasion, Agnew pleaded to the least embarrassing charge, tax evasion, in return for resigning his office and a $10,000 fine.19

The Watergate Scandal

Then there was Watergate. The infamous burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters and cover-up, the latter personally engineered by Nixon and his White House staff, encompassed a vast scale of illegal activities and abuses of power. As in the Harding administration, the nation’s top legal official, Attorney General John Mitchell, was a key facilitator of illegality under Nixon. A century after Republican operatives under Grant used the Whiskey Ring to raise re-election campaign funds through intimidation and blackmail, Nixon re-election campaign officials also used an illegally derived slush fund, including campaign contributions from corporations, which were outlawed at the time, to finance the Watergate break in and other crimes and “dirty tricks,” laundering the money through banks in Mexico.20,21

Overall, 69 Nixon administration officials were indicted for crimes related to Watergate or other illegal activities and 48 were convicted, including Attorney General Mitchell.22 A grand jury was set to charge Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation but prosecution was deterred by questions over whether a sitting president could be indicted.23 In any event, like his vice-president before him, Nixon resigned in disgrace.

Reagan Restores a Republican Tradition

After the brief period of atonement known as the Ford administration (1974-77), which was most notable for President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, the Republicans were back at it with the presidency of Ronald W. Reagan (1981-89). Reagan bore curious echoes of Harding as a genial, handsome, somewhat inattentive man promising to restore a nostalgic era of simpler times in America. And like Harding, Reagan presided over a viral outbreak of corruption in the federal government of a magnitude unseen since the days of the Ohio gang.24 Abuses of office occurred at no less than 20 different federal departments and agencies, according to Pulitzer prize-winning Washington Post journalist and author Haynes Johnson.25

“By the end of his (Reagan’s) term 138 administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of numbers of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever,” wrote Johnson, in his 1991 history of the Reagan administration, “Sleepwalking Through History.”26  

Cascading Corruption

The Iran-Contra affair is the most famous of the Reagan-era scandals, but that episode could at least be portrayed as a principled, if illegal, attempt to fight the spread of socialism in Central America. Less noted is that the Reagan administration was rife with raw, greed-driven corruption, which by one estimate amounted to a total theft of $130billion in public funds.27 A prime example was the Wedtech case, involving a Defense Department contractor, which Johnson described as “the kind of political corruption that extended back to the Washington (DC) of Grant and Harding: influence peddling, government contracts, cash, bribes, kickbacks, fraud and conspiracy.”28 The subsequent “Operation Ill Wind” probe by the FBI, investigating further corruption in Defense Department procurement, resulted in 50 convictions, including those of high-ranking military officers and administration officials.29

And on it went, across the federal government in a veritable feeding frenzy from the department of Housing and Urban Development, where an estimated $8 billion in public funds were stolen,30 to the Environmental Protection Agency where the director resigned rather than cooperate with a Congressional investigation of political manipulation of department funds.31 As in the Harding and Nixon administrations, the nation’s top law enforcement officer came under scrutiny for alleged lawbreaking. Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s Attorney General starting in 1984, was the object of a 14-month special prosecutor and federal grand jury investigation of alleged criminal financial improprieties. Although Meese was acquitted, he became an object of ridicule at the Department of Justice where morale plummeted.32     

Government-Sponsored Organized Crime

The Iran-Contra scandal involved a secret scheme concocted by high-ranking officials at the CIA and the National Security Agency to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Contras of Nicaragua, who were fighting the socialist regime of their country. The arms sales to Iran violated US policy of not negotiating with terrorists, and the Arms Export Control Act of 1976. The support for the Contras violated the 1984 Boland Amendment, which specifically prohibited all military aid to the Contras or other groups in Nicaragua.33 Moreover, the murky scheme involved an unholy host of money changers, drug dealers, arms dealers, and terrorists, amounting to what one writer has described as “American-sponsored organized crime.”34

The Independent Prosecutor on the case, Lawrence E. Walsh, ultimately indicted 14 individuals with criminal charges of whom 11 were convicted, including National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams.35 Four counts of perjury and false statements were pending against Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger when he was pardoned in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, who also pardoned Abrams and MacFarlane, among others. Walsh, a lifelong Republican, reportedly called Bush’s pardon of Weinberger, “one of the great cover-ups of American history at the highest levels of the executive branch.”36

Reagan pleaded ignorance of the Iran Contra scheme, while accepting responsibility for it. Although Reagan made multiple false statements regarding the activities in a televised speech to the nation,37 there was no evidence he knew they were false, and Walsh declined to indict him.38

And then there was Trump, who is now charged under one of his four indictments (from the state of Georgia) of running a “criminal enterprise” along with 17 co-defendants.

A Partisan Pattern?

Of the 19 total Republican presidencies, four, not including that of Trump, have each compiled a criminal record unparalleled by any other administration of any other party in US history. The outbreaks have been sporadic but persistent to this day. Yet, the question could be raised as to whether this record truly reveals a penchant for lawlessness specific to the GOP or simply a tendency endemic to all political parties. As the famous saying goes, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Over their history, the Democrats have surely demonstrated no blanket immunity to corruption. During the 1860s and 1870s, the era of the spoilsmen, the Tweed Ring of New York City, run by the notorious “Boss” Tweed of the Democratic party, was a nexus of corrupt rackets that dominated city politics and set a standard for “boss”-run “party machines” nationwide. The Democratic-run states of New York, Illinois, and New Jersey have long been known for systemic corruption. Former New York State Democratic Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver died a convict in 2022 after being found guilty of corruption in 2015, and Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey is currently facing bribery charges. Numerous other Democratic federal legislators have also been convicted of crimes in office.39 And the vast majority of Republican federal, executive branch office holders have been law abiding. The many Republicans who declared themselves ready to convict Nixon in his impeachment trial and forced his resignation demonstrated a courageous commitment to the law, as did those who testified for the January 6th Committee, and the two who served as committee members.

The Parties Compared

There is no comparison, however, between the criminal records of Democrats and Republicans in the presidency, the pinnacle of the US government, a fact supported by several media outlets using online data. Politifact, a nonpartisan website, found that there were 142 indictments against members of the past three Republican administrations (including Trump’s) versus just two under the past three Democratic presidents.40 The Huffington Post, a left-leaning news site, reported 91 criminal convictions connected to Republican presidencies versus only one under a Democrat since 1970.41 And the Daily Kos, another left-wing media site, tallied 120 indictments, 82 convictions, and 34 imprisonments for Republicans from the Nixon through the Obama administrations versus 4, 2, and 2, respectively, for the Democrats.42

What is next for the Republicans? If Trump is convicted, Republicans may or may not choose to move beyond him. The greater question for their party, and for US democracy, is whether the Republicans will leave behind or continue their heritage of criminal abuse of power at the highest levels of the US government, of which the Trump administration is but the latest chapter.

What do you think of the author’s argument? Let us know below.

References

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11.  Charles R. Forbes. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Forbes.

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31.  Johnson H (1991). Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years. New York, London; W.W Norton and Company. pp. 170-1.

32.  Johnson H (1991). Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years. New York, London; W.W Norton and Company. pp. 184-5.

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