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This article appeared in the March 20, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

How the KKK got into the U.S. Justice Department

by Anton Chaitkin

April 4, 1998 marks an extraordinary double anniversary, one that highlights the still-ongoing struggle between two irreconcilable traditions in American life. One is a tradition of the American ideal at its best: the tradition of the Lincoln revolution, as it was carried forward in the twentieth century, by America's greatest civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The other tradition is that of British-sponsored anti-American treason, personified by the Confederate General, Southern Jurisdiction Scottish Rite Mason, and Ku Klux Klan founder, Albert Pike. The Pike legacy still exists today, under various guises: the FBI of the J. Edgar Hoover tradition, which is engaged in a racist campaign of frame-ups against African-American elected officials all across America; and the radical jacobinism of Black Nationalism, which came to the fore as the result of Dr. King's assassination, and which parades today under the banner of a "rainbow coalition."

Nobody can fully appreciate the still-unfolding struggle over the American ideal, without knowing the essentials of the struggle between the two, contending forces represented by Martin Luther King and Albert Pike.

It is, therefore, no small irony that April 4, 1998 marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, and also the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Congress's treacherous passage of a bill authorizing the erection of a statue, on Federal government property in Washington, D.C., of the traitor Albert Pike.

King and the Lincoln tradition

President Abraham Lincoln's policies were responsible for making the United States into the world's greatest industrial power. He reversed the "free trade" doctrines by which the London-allied opponents of the American Revolution had expanded slavery, to the detriment of American industrial power. He introduced high tariffs to foster steel mills, government financing of railroad construction, free land and education to create independent, scientific farmers.

Martin Luther King was firmly rooted in this tradition. He pointed out, for example, how the advance of human rights depends on technological and economic progress:

"Many of the problems that we are confronting in the South today grow out of the futile attempt of the white South to maintain a system of human values that came into being under a feudalistic plantation system and which cannot survive in a day of democratic egalitarianism.

"First, if the South is to grow economically it must continue to industrialize. We see signs [then, in the early 1960s] of this vigorous industrialization, with a concomitant urbanization, throughout every southern state. Day after day, the South is receiving new multimillion-dollar industries. With the growth of industry the folkways of white supremacy will gradually pass away.

"This growth of industry will also increase the purchasing power of the Negro, and this augmented purchasing power will result in improved medical care, greater educational opportunities, and more adequate housing. Each of these developments will result in a further weakening of segregation."[1]

King taught that this progress does not occur automatically, but only with the strongest economic intervention of representative government. He demanded that the nationalist, activist-government strategy which made America powerful, now be applied to lifting blacks out of poverty:

"At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

"But not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms.

"Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."[2]

By contrast, "when the Negro migrated [northward, following the abolition of slavery], he was left to his own resources . . . herded into ghettos, left in unemployment, or subjected to gross exploitation within a context of searing discrimination."[3]

What King taught, corresponds to what most Americans knew very well 100 years ago.

Pike: creation of the `indigenous' KKK

Patriotic nationalists continued Lincoln's economic program after the President's 1865 murder. Post-Civil War Reconstruction regimes in several Southern states, led by freed black slaves and allied whites, began to put through measures of industrial and agricultural development.

But, the British and their allies in the former Confederacy struck back, using London's modus operandi of creating "indigenous" insurgencies, to wield against their political enemies. This was the technique that Lord Palmerston perfected in the mid-nineteenth century: He deployed a veritable zoo of national, religious, and ethnic insurgencies, through agents such as Giuseppe Mazzini, the better to retain British global geopolitical control.[4]

After Lincoln's death, a covert movement known as the Ku Klux Klan, beginning in 1867 in Tennessee, overturned the Reconstruction regimes with violence and riots, assassinating those loyal to the United States, torturing and killing black people who asserted rights which black and white Union soldiers had secured in the Civil War.

Many years later, when the criminals were no longer in danger of punishment for these crimes, some "inside stories" of the post-Civil War KKK were published, glorifying the Klan in order to re-create it in the twentieth century. A few years after a United States national monument had been erected in Albert Pike's honor, the leading pro-KKK historian, Walter L. Fleming, disclosed and praised the kingpin role that Pike had played in the Klan's terror spree against U.S. law.[5] (An academic darling of the eastern Anglophile elite, Fleming was considered the pre-eminent historian of Southern Reconstruction.)

Pike was the KKK's "chief judicial officer," Fleming wrote; Pike thus ruled officially over the Klan's internal disciplinary or counterintelligence department. In the KKK birth-state of Tennessee, Pike was the president of the Bar Association and publisher of the main racist newspaper.

But it was as "Sovereign Grand Commander" of the Scottish Rite, the recognized boss of the southern white freemasonic order, that Pike exercised the great clandestine power that welded the KKK together. Fleming cites Pike's masonic colleagues and Klan co-founders as the main sources for his KKK history. Pike's successor as Scottish Rite masonic Grand Commander, Congressman James Richardson, introduced the 1898 House resolution authorizing the Pike statue; Richardson had been Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan power in that state.

In defense of the Klan insurrection, Fleming writes that "the ex-Confederates . . . naturally [formed] secret associations . . . for self-defense." Fleming then furnishes European precedents for Pike's KKK: "the Carbonari of Italy, the Tugendbund and the Vehmgericht of Germany, the Klephts of Greece, Young Italy, the Nihilists of Russia, the Masonic order in most Catholic countries during the first half of the Nineteenth Century, Beati Paoli of Sicily, the Illuminati, etc." Such groups are "textbook cases" of the British colonial and secret service tradition of manipulating "indigenous" people.

A Massachusetts tory, Pike went south to incite whites against the Union; he helped lead the Knights of the Golden Circle, which made armed, filibuster attacks against Mexico and Cuba, and organized the Southern secession. As a Confederate general during the Civil War, Pike was in charge of enticing American Indians to war on the United States; his atrocities and war crimes led to his arrest by the embarrassed Confederates, and an 1865 indictment by the United States for treason. Pike fled to Canada, remaining there under the protection of his British Empire sponsors until the heat was off.[6]

When Pike returned to the South, the old Knights of the Golden Circle logo was transmuted into the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan--the title taken from the Greek kuklos, or circle. Pike's Arkansas indictment for war crimes against American soldiers was swept aside by the power of Pike's own clandestine terrorist movement over the Southern justice system. Well known in European occult circles for his satanic writings, a sybarite of massive girth, Pike died in 1891.

A resumé of this quality, today, would surely qualify KKK founder Pike as a leader of contemporary movements such as the Chiapas "indigenous rebellion" against Mexico's nationhood.

The Pike statue and war with Spain

U.S. Rep. James Richardson, the masonic Grand Commander, introduced House Resolution 178 on March 10, 1898, to permit his Scottish Rite to erect on Federal property a huge memorial statue honoring Albert Pike, a mass murderer who had worked for several decades to overthrow America's laws and government. This outrageous initiative was timed to coincide with a racist war frenzy then being pushed by the faction promoting the Pike statue.

Twenty-three days earlier, on Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine had been blown up in the harbor at Havana, Cuba, killing 260 men. This mysterious explosion has never been explained, but lurid headlines blamed the government of Spain, which still held Cuba as a colony.

At this time, the Boston tory/Wall Street banker/Southern Klan faction advocated Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity with imperial Britain, in line with Cecil Rhodes and the British Round Table's demand that America give up its silly Revolution. This Anglophile faction was co-sponsoring, with the British secret service, an anti-Spain insurgency in Cuba. Since the 1840s, the transatlantic anti-republic faction had procured wars and mercenary filibuster raids into Mexico, Central America, and Cuba, aimed at expanding the slave territory, and consolidating a Southern secession movement.

During the 1890s, these Anglophile traitors created and operated a new Cuban "revolutionary" movement, in the tradition of Pike's Knights of the Golden Circle. The nominal leader, José Martí, resided in New York City and was an activist in the insurrectionist networks of Lord Palmerston's masonic trained dog, Giuseppe Mazzini.

The sponsoring clique in the United States included:

  • Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, descendant and political heir of the tory anti-Union intriguer George Cabot;

  • Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. His beloved uncle and naval strategy adviser, James Dunwoody Bulloch, had been arrested as a masonic filibusterer in Havana harbor back in 1854. Bulloch advised nephew Teddy from London, where Bulloch was in exile for having arranged Britain's building of a pirate fleet of Confederate ships to attack U.S. commerce during the Civil War;

  • The Scottish Rite masons and kindred masonic and British secret service circuits.

This Anglophile clique demanded that their pet Cuban revolutionaries be supported by U.S. troops in expelling Spain from Cuba. The object was neither an independent Cuban nation, nor expansion of the United States to include Cubans as American citizens. Rather, the Caribbean was to be subject to the imperial power of the London-New York banking axis, and to be a permanent adventurers' staging ground for subversion against the entire Western Hemisphere.

American patriots had always fought against these schemes. Abraham Lincoln had opposed the 1846-48 U.S.-Mexican war, and, as President, had aligned the United States with Mexico against the British-French invasion of 1861. Lincoln's nationalist successors, such as James Garfield (President in 1881) and William McKinley (President 1897-1901) were allied with Ibero-American nationalists and economic protectionists, against British free trade and British-backed irregular warfare.

We now present the chronology of the Pike statue project, and related developments, in the context of the power struggle then taking place.

On Feb. 15, 1898, the battleship Maine blew up.

On Feb. 25, President McKinley's Navy Secretary, John D. Long, took the afternoon off--a fatal mistake. Senator Lodge came to the Navy Department, to work with Assistant Secretary Teddy Roosevelt, who was Acting Secretary for the remaining three or four hours of the day. Using Roosevelt's temporary authority, the pair put the U.S. Navy on a war footing, sending telegrams and cables to all ships at sea, to consuls, to Navy yards and factories. They ordered ammunition, called on Congress to authorize sailors' enlistment, and ordered the European, South Atlantic, and Pacific squadrons to prepare for battle positioning. The cable to clique-member Adm. George Dewey, ordering the redeployment of his Pacific Ocean battle fleet to prevent Spain's ships from leaving the Asian coast to defend the Spanish-owned Philippine Islands, was the final act, making war with Spain a virtual certainty.[7]

On March 10, 1898, while the country was gripped by "Anglo-Saxon" war fever, the Pike statue resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives. It was subsequently introduced in the Senate by Henry Moore Teller of Colorado, a member of the Supreme Council of Pike's Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jursidiction.

On March 31, 1898, Teddy Roosevelt wrote to British strategist James Bryce, exulting in his actions to reunify America with the British Empire:

"It will give me great pleasure to meet Mr. [George Macaulay] Trevelyan [British Mazziniite historian], not only because he is a friend of yours, but because of my admiration for his father [Sir George Otto Trevelyan, former British admiralty secretary]; and I shall like much to meet the Webbs [Fabian socialist leaders Sidney and Beatrice Webb] also.

"I have had a very busy time, but anxious only in the sense that I fear this nation will not do its duty. . . . We should drive Spain from the Western World. . . . I cordially sympathize with England's attitude in China, and I am glad to say that there seems to be a gradual coming together of the two peoples [Britain and America]. They certainly ought to come together."

On April 4, 1898, the Pike statue was authorized by the House, and on April 5, by the Senate.

On April 11, 1898, President McKinley, who was resisting the intriguers' pressure to make war, asked Congress for authority to intervene in Cuba to establish peace between the government and the rebels. "It involves . . . hostile constraint upon both parties to the contest, as well to enforce a truce as to guide the eventual settlement," said the President's message.

The Scottish Rite's Senator Teller was a longtime partisan for the Cuban insurrection. Teller now introduced an amendment smoothing away remaining Senate opposition to war--it declared that the United States "disclaim[ed] any . . . intention to exercise jurisdiction or control over said island except for the pacification thereof--and a determination when that is accomplished to leave the government and control of the island to the people thereof." The Teller Amendment secured Senate passage of the declaration of war, April 25, 1898.

Teddy Roosevelt went to his Cuban war as a volunteer officer, and his newspaper friends puffed up his exploits into heroism. He was made the Vice Presidential running mate in McKinley's re-election bid in 1900. They were inaugurated in March 1901; six months later, McKinley was shot, just as his nationalist predecessors Lincoln and Garfield had been.

McKinley died on Sept. 14, 1901, and Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency. This was a huge victory for the British, in their bid to regain control over the United States. Its impact is still being felt in America today.

Teddy Roosevelt's takeover occurred just in time for completion of the Albert Pike memorial statue, dedicated on Oct. 24, 1901. Two days later, the Scottish Rite Supreme Council were received in a body by the bullet-installed President Roosevelt, an ardent fellow mason. They went from the White House to the grave of Albert Pike for a celebration.[8]

The real story of the FBI

President Teddy Roosevelt set to work immediately to reverse Lincoln's nationalist policies; he created the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a coercive instrument for that purpose, as we shall document below.

Under Roosevelt, the nation was told that the western frontier was closed; that "conservation," rather than agro-industrial development, was the future. Government land was withdrawn from public use; steps were taken to overturn Lincoln's programs to create family farms, railroads, and mines. British-backed financier Edward H. Harriman illegally used vast land grants for speculation, with Roosevelt's blessing, then paid for Roosevelt's election in 1904. British-run financier J.P. Morgan seized control over the great industries--steel, electricity, railroads--that had been created by Lincoln's nationalists; Morgan's trusts were undisturbed by Teddy Roosevelt, despite his false "trust-buster" reputation. And, TR flouted U.S. laws calling for cooperation with Ibero-American nations, using Morgan's and Harriman's employees and agents for a proxy war that broke off the province of Panama from Colombia, to build a canal on terms pitting the United States against its southern neighbors.

Key to the creation of the FBI as a KKK police-state apparatus, was an operation to destroy Oregon's Sen. John H. Mitchell, an old Lincoln Republican, who led Congressional opposition to all Roosevelt's outrages, speaking out against the international banking syndicate running TR's policy.[9]

But Roosevelt got the U.S. Attorney in Oregon indicted, and his new special prosecutor, Francis J. Heney, aided by private detective William J. Burns and members of the Secret Service, were used to falsely prosecute Senator Mitchell and scores of Mitchell's political allies. A later government investigation disclosed the methods used to force witnesses to give false testimony and to pack juries with Mitchell's enemies in this politically motivated prosecution. These are among the reports to Roosevelt's agents on prospective jurors: "Convictor from the word go," "Socialist. Anti-Mitchell," "Would convict Christ," "He is apt to wish Mitchell hung."[10]

Mitchell was convicted of the "crime" of his law firm having accepted $1,700 fees in aiding citizens to press claims to public land. He was defamed in the press. Congress understood itself now subject to Roosvelt's detectives, who were "to spy into the private lives of members . . . and to collect information to be held as a political club."[11] Mitchell found himself without defenders. He was politically destroyed, and died before he could appeal.

With such opposition out of the way, the time was now ripe for the creation of a permanent national secret police. On Dec. 17, 1906, Teddy Roosevelt shifted his Navy Secretary, Charles J. Bonaparte, to become Attorney General. Bonaparte told Congress that the Department of Justice must be given "a force of permanent police . . . under its control."

On May 27, 1908, Congress reacted by prohibiting all Executive departments from using Secret Service agents as policemen. Then on July 26, 1908, Attorney General Bonaparte, on Teddy Roosevelt's instructions, ordered the creation of an investigative agency within the Department of Justice; this later became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

At issue here was the fundamental question, shall men be ruled by an unelected oligarchy, or shall self-government order society, in conformance with the dignity of every human being as in the image of God?

Charles Bonaparte was the grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Jerome, King of Westphalia. Napoleon had dissolved his brother's marriage, and Charles's Baltimore grandmother had spent the rest of her life desperately asserting the claim that Charles's father was of royal blood. Charles inherited the family's royal jewels, and, before Roosevelt brought him into the government, he used to ride each day to his investment house behind a liveried Negro groom, carrying a solid silver lunchbox. His brother, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, was an officer on the staff of Emperor Napoleon III, throughout the British-French invasion of Mexico and their joint support for the Confederate rebellion.

Charles was immersed in the society of Anglophiles and their London betters, in the belief that the American white rabble, immigrants, and Negroes had usurped control rightfully belonging to the aristocracy.

Teddy Roosevelt and Charles Bonaparte had united as activists in the Civil Service Reform League during the 1880s. Instigated by Lord James Bryce, this was the London-Boston-Wall Street-Confederate axis, promoting a "clean" permanent bureaucracy, chosen by the bankers and their news media, to administer government instead of the "corrupt" Constitutional system of elected officials and their appointed men. What Lord Bryce and his American followers most objected to were the urban political machines whose leaders fulfilled the needs of their voting constituents--Irish, German, and other immigrants who carried with them hostility to the British Empire and the demand for a better life; and freed blacks, who were still determined to avail themselves of Lincoln's reopening of the American Revolution.

Charles Bonaparte despised the spirit of the Constitution. He commented on due process of law: "Need anybody cry if an officer's revolver does now and then save our Courts the trouble of trying a burglar, and cut off his chance of `burgling' again when released or escaped from prison?"

On the subject of the hanging of Negroes by mobs, he said: "I believe that very few innocent men are lynched, and, of those who have not committed the past offense for which they suffer, a still smaller proportion are decent members of society. It is, of course, an evil that the law should be occasionally enforced by lawless means, but it is, in my opinion, a great evil that it should be habitually duped and evaded by means formally lawful."[12]

Albert Pike's day had indeed come. A permanent anti-Constitutional bureaucracy and spy system had been established. This arrangement was sustained by the financier oligarchy, as witness the editorials of the New York Times (a newspaper which J.P. Morgan had recently moved under the ownership of what became the Ochs-Sulzberger-Warburg family combination, that is, the present-day owners). Under the headline, "The Negro Question," the Times editorialized on May 1, 1899 on why lynching and the new laws ending blacks' right to vote were not so bad:

"[Foreigners are] shocked and amazed at the news of the outrages in Georgia [lynching Negroes]. . . . No language can be too severe for the condemnation of the inhuman spirit shown by the mob. . . . Nevertheless . . . it is not impossible to exaggerate the significance of the [commission] of these crimes. Much of what significance it has depends on comparison. If the awful cruelty is increasing, if it is excited by a greater variety of causes, or even if it is not decreasing, the meaning of it is [different] than it would be if it were . . . diminishing. It is not easy to make an accurate estimate of the probabilities in this direction, but we are inclined to think that they are in favor of improvement. Some of the latest cases reported have been of a more atrocious nature than ever before, but it is certain that they are occasioned by one particular offense or the belief in that offense. The general treatment of the negroes in the south has clearly improved. That they are deprived of the right of suffrage more completely than in the past is not to be defended, but that this is accomplished peacefully and not by violence is a gain." Other New York Times editorials called for ending black voting rights throughout the South; this was accomplished at that time through changes in state constitutions and the passage of "Jim Crow" laws.

When the Lincoln legacy led Congress in 1908 to try to stop the use of the Secret Service as spies, the Times editorialized: "It was the combination of `land sharks' . . . that persuaded . . . the House to pass . . . the Amendment which . . . undoes the deterrent and detective labors of the Secret Service. . . . The Representatives have, however unwittingly, become the tools of thieves. The Senators are duly warned."[13]

Teddy Roosevelt's U.S. Attorney in New York, Henry L. Stimson, chimed in with a letter to Charles Bonaparte, complaining that "I should feel as if the fighting power of my office were almost crippled by such a statute."[14] Stimson typified the power structure then being assembled in and out of government. A Morgan-Harriman lawyer and later cabinet member, he was the patriarch of the Harriman and Bush family Yale secret society, Skull and Bones--a sponsoring center for the British-U.S. "special relationship" and its associated white supremacy doctrines.

Pro-KKK historian Walter Fleming reminisced in 1903 on the supposed necessity for the Klan in the South at the end of the Civil War, for suppressing blacks and those whites who were loyal to the United States: "The very need for such an organization in the disordered conditions of the time caused the Dens to begin to exercise the duties of a police patrol for regulating the conduct of thieving and impudent negroes and similar `loyal' whites. . . ."[15]

Under President Teddy Roosevelt, a force similar to that post-Civil War KKK began to operate within the Federal government itself, though the Klan itself had died out. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson launched the creation of a new Ku Klux Klan, by praising and showing in the White House the pro-Klan movie Birth of a Nation.[16] Spreading from South to North with the mass circulation of the film the President had endorsed, the new KKK would grow to many millions of members.

Meanwhile, also in 1915, the Southern Scottish Rite Masons dedicated their new House of the Temple in Washington, D.C. Having moved their headquarters from South Carolina to the nation's capital, they now celebrated their successful installation within the government they had fought to overthrow.

In later years, the body of Albert Pike would be interred inside one of the Temple's walls. A few feet away, they built a complete replication of the office and desk of their second most honored member, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. So, today, visitors to the Temple may conveniently pay homage to the twin giants of Klan and Scottish Rite history, Pike and Hoover.[18]

J. Edgar Hoover's war against King

Given Hoover's link to the Pike tradition, it is no surprise to discover that, during the 1960s, Hoover's FBI ran a guerrilla war against Martin Luther King. FBI agents and paid traitors swarmed around King, assigned to find or manufacture dirt that could bring him down. With constant wiretapping, Hoover fed leaks, lies, and gossip to the news media. The FBI coordinated this onslaught with the Klan faction in Southern police departments, and the pro-Hoover, anti-black faction--the Anti-Defamation League--within the Jewish community.

Hoover attacked with three main allegations: financial irregularities, communism, and sexual misconduct. The financial angle was ineffective and failed. The communism smear revolved around associates of King who were said to be communists, while Hoover knew quite well that King was no communist. The FBI slander has been kept for retailing by King's opponents, who neither know nor particularly care what King stood for.

King wrote on the subject:

"In communism the individual ends up in subjection to the state. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state. The popularity of communism, lay in the idealistic concern for social justice. With all its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. . . . Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. A true Christian cannot be a true communist, for the two philosophies are antithetical and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot reconcile them. . . ."[19]

Hoover fanatically pursued details of King's sex life. Government officials who knew about this considered Hoover to be pornographically obsessed. As posthumous revelations about "Gay Edgar" showed, their estimations were conservative. This vendetta climaxed in the production of an audiotape, which was mailed to King's home, combining presumed "buggings" with the suggestion that King should commit suicide.

King's 1968 murder was followed by a relentless FBI cover-up. James Earl Ray was intimidated into making a guilty plea, on the threat of a certain death penalty were he to demand the right to a trial. He immediately protested the set-up, but was not allowed to change his false plea. Martin Luther King's family is pressing Ray's case, to overturn the cover-up. But as of this writing, the imprisoned Ray is dying of liver failure, while the Justice Department attempts to stop a trial from finally taking place before Ray dies.

One of J. Edgar Hoover's claims against King, was that Black Power demagogues were taking over King's movement. In fact, the opposition to King was backed by the FBI itself, and by high-ranking members of the Anglophile establishment. The FBI-backed opposition came in all shapes and colors. Consider the provocateur's substitution of "We shall overrun" for King's slogan, "We shall overcome"; and the police agent's lyrics:

Jingle Bells, shotgun shells,
Freedom all the way,
Oh what fun it is to blast
A trooper man away.

H. Rap Brown declared in 1967: "The white man is your enemy. You got to destroy your enemy. . . . I say you better get a gun. Violence is necessary--it is as American as cherry pie."

King denounced such agentry:

"I have often talked . . . with the proponents of Black Power who argue passionately about the validity of violence and riots. . . . Their bible is Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. . . . In violent warfare one must be prepared to face the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women and children."[20]

The role of the Nashville Agrarians

The reader may be surprised, at our assertion that black nationalists were deployed against Martin Luther King and his movement, by the same historical faction that erected the statue to KKK founder Albert Pike. But that is the core of the British method of strategic manipulation against the nation-state. (In fact, it goes back to the "divide and rule" tactic of the Roman Empire.) In America, we can see the traces of this manipulation, in the fact that the Klan, in its early years, had "some few Negro members"!

Researcher Stanley Ezrol has written, in an unpublished report: "One of the claims made by the KKK and their apologists, is that they had no quarrel with negroes who stuck to their own kind and stayed in their place, but that they had to defend against the scalawags, carpetbaggers, and the negroes whom they incited. A frequent claim is that negroes of the better type even joined the Klan." Historian Walter Fleming boasted: "There were some few negro members, I have been told."[21]

Using Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Peabody (J.P. Morgan) money, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, hired Fleming as historian in 1917 and made him dean in 1923. Under Fleming's tutelage, a political-literary movement called The Fugitives grew up at Vanderbilt. The new movement aimed to revive the Confederacy and the Old South, but its financier sponsors applied these degraded precepts to the more general object of shaping a managed leftism.

The Fugitives became known as the Nashville Agrarians, after they published a 1930 manifesto in a book of essays called I'll Take My Stand, dedicated to Professor Fleming and committed to "support a Southern way of life against . . . the American or prevailing way . . . Agrarian versus industrial. . . ."

Nashville Agrarian John Crowe Ransom, a Rhodes Scholar, whose great uncle James R. Crowe was Pike's masonic and KKK lieutenant and the chief source of Fleming's Klan history, wrote in an accompanying essay why he backed the British establishment's aims as regards America:

"England was actually the model employed by the South. . . . England differs from America . . . most notably in the fact that England did her pioneering an indefinite number of centuries ago, did it well enough, and has been living pretty tranquilly on her establishment ever since. . . . Their descendants have had the good sense to consider that this establishment was good enough for them. They have elected to live . . . in accordance with the tradition which they inherited, and they have consequently enjoyed a leisure, a security, and an intellectual freedom that were never the portion of pioneers. . . . Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine . . . is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace. . . .

"Industrialism is an insidious spirit, full of false promises and generally fatal to establishments. The attitude that needs artificial respiration is the attitude of resistance on the part of the natives to the salesmen of industrialism. It will be fiercest and most effective if industrialism is represented to the Southern people as . . . a foreign invasion of Southern soil."[22]

With this KKK philosophy, Nashville Agrarians fanned out into the New York, Paris, and other centers of leftist and bohemian culture, and into American universities, North and South.

One of Ransom's collaborators, William Yandell Elliott, was a Harvard-based kingpin in the British takeover of the American foreign policy establishment. Among his protégés were students Henry Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy; with Elliott, they promoted the view that a world government which prevents industrial progress is needed to avoid nuclear annihilation. McGeorge Bundy went on to head the Ford Foundation, a longtime funder of Vanderbilt and the Agrarians, and poured its money into support of anarchists such as Mark Rudd's Weathermen, Green eco-terrorists, and black cultural nationalist agents, complete with dashikis. Klan robes, after all, would not be appropriate native costumes.

Such "Third Worldists," serving as FBI-managed stooges, have nothing in common with the pro-technology policy of developing-sector nationalists, who are in accord with the American Revolution and the Lincoln tradition.


[1] Martin Luther King, speech at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., July 19, 1962. In James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986), p. 100.

[2] Martin Luther King, 1968 speech, tape recording played Feb. 10, 1998 on WGBH Boston's "Frontline" program, entitled "The Two Nations of Black America," show 1609; transcript available on Internet at: www.wgbh.org

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 12.

[4] "Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Human Zoo," EIR, April 15, 1994.

[5] Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment, written and edited by Walter L. Fleming, incorporating earlier material by J.C. Lester and D.L. Wilson (New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company, 1905).

[6] While Pike was thus exiled, President Andrew Johnson declared, "It appears from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the . . . murder of . . . Abraham Lincoln . . . [was] incited, concerted, and procured . . . between . . . Richmond, Va., and . . . rebels and traitors against the government of the United States harbored in Canada."--Proclamation, May 2, 1865, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), Vol. VIII, p. 3,505. In the trial convened on May 9, 1865, the U.S. convicted seven persons of this international conspiracy to murder Lincoln; four were hanged.

[7] A somewhat candid account of these actions is in Alden Hatch, The Lodges of Massachusetts (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973), pp. 50-51. Naval Secretary Long also wrote at the time, "I find that Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine.. . . Having authority for that time of Acting Secretary, he immediately began to launch peremptory orders; distributing ships, ordering ammunition, which there is no means to move, to places where there is no means to store it. . . . He has gone at things like a bull in a china shop." Quoted in Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), p. 178.

[8] James D. Carter, History of the Supreme Council, 33°, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Southern Jursidiction, U.S.A., 1891-1921 (Washington: Scottish Rite Supreme Council, 1971), pp. 152-157.

[9] Congressional Record, June 7, 1902, p. 6,441 ff. See also Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America (New York: New Benjamin Franklin Publishing House, 1985), Chapter 18, "How Environmentalism Killed the American Frontier," pp. 513-517.

[10] Report by President William H. Taft's Attorney General, George W. Wickersham, 1911, cited in Don Whitehead, The FBI Story (New York: Random House, 1956), pp. 18-19.

[11] Ibid., p. 19.

[12] Bonaparte was nicknamed "Soup-house Charlie" because of his comments, echoing Britain's Thomas Malthus, condemning public education: "There is absolutely no difference in principle between a public souphouse and a public free school." Quotes are from David Stacton, The Bonapartes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 358. Most Bonaparte material has been furnished by researcher Judy Hodgkiss.

[13] The FBI Story, op. cit., p. 20.

[14] Ibid., pp. 20-21.

[15] Journal of the Southern History Association, September 1903, p. 328.

[16] The family of the pathetically pro-British Woodrow Wilson had helped organize the Klan takeover of South Carolina years before, and Wilson had been vice president of the Southern History Association that printed the 1903 article by Fleming.

[18] The Temple, at 1733 16th Street NW, Washington, D.C., is open for tours Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. through 2 p.m.

[19] Martin Luther King, Jr., The Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 93.

[20] Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, selections in A Testament of Hope, op. cit., pp. 589-590.

[21] Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment, op. cit., p. 26.

[22] I'll Take my Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners, Biographical Essays by Virginia Rock (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983; first published in 1930 by Harper & Brothers), pp. 3-23.

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