Anthony C. Sutton - Wall Street and FDR: The True Story of How Franklin D. Roosevelt Colluded with Corporate America

ANTONY C. SUTTON, born in London in 1925, was educated at the universities of London, Gottingen and California. He was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford, California, from 1968 to 1973 and later an Economics Professor at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of 25 books, including the major three-volume study Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. He died in 2002.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Wall Street and FDR was first published in 1975. Sadly, the author was not able to update it in his lifetime. It is reproduced here in its original form, as a classic study of the subject.

Wall Street and FDR

ANTONY C. SUTTON

CLAIRVIEW

Clairview Books
Hillside House, The Square
Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published by Clairview 2013

First published in 1975 by Arlington House, New York

Antony C. Sutton 1975

The moral right of the author has been asserted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 905570 63 8

Cover by Morgan Creative

CONTENTS

Preface

In a previous book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, (Arlington House 1974), the association of Wall Street international bankers and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was traced in some detail. Wall Street and FDR is a sequel to this earlier volume. Bankers were also associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt between 1917 and 1934, as well as with the promotion of Roosevelt's New Deal and the rise of corporate socialism in the United States.

The evidence, based largely on FDR's own papers, suggests that there is nothing inevitable about the march of socialism. Socialism is the most inefficient, and certainly the most inequitable, way to run a society ever conceived by man. It has come to the United States only because it is very much in the interest of the Wall Street financial establishment to attain a socialist society.

How this was brought about in the Roosevelt era is the story of this book.

A NTONY C. S UTTON

October 1974

Cupertino, California

PART I

FRANKLIN DELANO
ROOSEVELT
ON WALL STREET

CHAPTER 1

Roosevelts and Delanos

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jacksonand I am not wholly excepting the Administration of W.W. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United Statesonly on a far bigger and broader basis.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Col. Edward Mandell House, November 21, 1933, F.D.R.: His Personal Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce 1950), p. 373.

This book portrays Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a Wall Street financier who, during his first term as President of the United States, reflected the objectives of financial elements concentrated in the New York business establishment. Given the long historical associationsince the late 18th centuryof the Roosevelt and Delano families with New York finance and FDR's own career from 1921 to 1928 as banker and speculator at 120 Broadway and 55 Liberty Street, such a theme should not come as a surprise to the reader. On the other hand, FDR biographers Schlesinger, Davis, Freidel, and otherwise accurate Roosevelt commentators appear to avoid penetrating very far into the recorded and documented links between New York bankers and FDR. We intend to present the facts of the relationship, as recorded in FDR's letter files. These are new facts only in the sense that they have not previously been published; they are readily available in the archives for research, and consideration of this information suggests a reassessment of FDR's role in the history of the 20th century.

Perhaps it always makes good politics to appear before the American electorate as a critic, if not an outright enemy, of the international banking fraternity. Without question Franklin D. Roosevelt, his supporters, and biographers portray FDR as a knight in shining armour wielding the sword of righteous vengeance against the robber barons in the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. For instance, the Roosevelt Presidential campaign of 1932 consistently attacked President Herbert Hoover for his alleged association with international bankers and for pandering to the demands of big business. Witness the following FDR blast in the depths of the Great Depression at Hoover's public support for business and individualism, uttered in the campaign address in Columbus, Ohio, August 20, 1932:

Appraising the situation in the bitter dawn of a cold morning after, what do we find? We find two thirds of American industry concentrated in a few hundred corporations and actually managed by not more than five human individuals.

We find more than half of the savings of the country invested in corporate stocks and bonds, and made the sport of the American stock market.

We find fewer than three dozen private banking houses, and stock selling adjuncts of commercial banks, directing the flow of American capital.

In other words, we find concentrated economic power in a few hands, the precise opposite of the individualism of which the President speaks.

This statement makes Franklin Delano Roosevelt appear as another Andrew Jackson, contesting a bankers monopoly and their stranglehold on American industry. But was FDR also an unwilling (or possibly a willing) tool of the Wall Street bankers, as we could infer from his letter to Colonel Edward House, cited in the epigraph to this chapter? Clearly if, as Roosevelt wrote to House, a financial element in the larger cities has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson, then neither Hoover nor Roosevelt was being intellectually honest in his presentation of the issues to the American public. The gut issues presumably were the identity of this financial element and how and by what means it maintained its ownership of the U.S. Government.

Putting this intriguing question temporarily to one side, the pervasive historical image of FDR is one of a President fighting on behalf of the little guy, the man in the street, in the midst of unemployment and financial depression brought about by big business speculators allied with Wall Street. We shall find, on the contrary, that this image distorts the truth to the extent that it portrays FDR as an enemy of Wall Street; this is simply because most historians probing into Wall Street misdeeds have been reluctant to apply the same standards of probity to Franklin D. Roosevelt as to other political leaders. What is a sin for Herbert Hoover or even 1928 Democratic Presidential candidate Al Smith is presumed a virtue in the case of FDR. Take Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich. Lundberg also looks at Presidents and Wall Street and makes the following assertion:

In 1928 Al Smith had his chief backing, financial and emotional, from fellow-Catholic John J. Raskob, prime minister of the Du Ponts. If Smith had won he would have been far less a Catholic than a Du Pont President....

Now the Du Ponts were indeed heavy, very heavy, contributors to the 1928 Al Smith Democratic Presidential campaign. These contributions are examined in detail in this volume in Chapter , Wall Street Buys the New Deal, and no quarrel can be made with this assertion. Lundberg then moves on to consider Smith's opponent Herbert Hoover and writes: