Kevlexicon – Depressionfuel

Published March 10, 2018.

 

Video Playlist for Klanhattan KlanVillage Mixtape & Documentary ( and vimeo )

Download “Depressionfuel” on soundcloud.

Download Klanhattan KlanVillage Mixtape – Median Income Edition on Bandcamp.

 

This Economic History music video & documentary has a free companion .pdf you can download here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13KgHxpcEh_GY_YfvZynx5s8q3RoP7yUo/view?usp=sharing

 

Check out all of Kevlexicon’s Research Materials (.pdfs) on:

Google Drive

Dropbox

 

Video Playlist for Klanhattan KlanVillage Mixtape & Documentary ( and vimeo )

Download Klanhattan KlanVillage Mixtape – Median Income Edition on Bandcamp.

 

excerpts from the .pdf:

 

 

Death Share Commuter Tracks; New Jersey Suicides Illustrate Morbid Lure of the Rails – NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/nyregion/death-shares-commuter-tracks-new-jersey-suicides-illustrate-morbid-lure-rails.html

 

In Manville, N.J., last Friday a killer apparently tried to disguise his crime by placing the victim’s body on the freight rail tracks, where it might be viewed simply as another suicide under the wheels of the 6:20 train.

On Sunday in Morristown, Bruce DeHart, a construction worker putting in some overtime hours refurbishing the train station, noticed the hubbub around the station where a 37-year-old man had committed suicide by stepping into the path of an oncoming train. He thought for a moment that it was just another death of one of the homeless alcoholics who live in makeshift camps around the railroad tracks and occasionally meet their end there.

Two weeks ago, when the blare of an express train horn sounded, only to have the train stopped screechingly at the Short Hills station, Jim Cook, the attendant at the Citgo Gas Station about 50 yards away, knew immediately what had happened.

 

There have been three suicides and one accidental death on the 975 miles of New Jersey Transit railroad tracks in the last two weeks. It began with an unemployed Short Hills banker who killed himself Sept. 29, and continued on Sunday with the suicide of James Thomas Kelly, 37, who was instrumental in organizing New Jersey residents who had been abused by priests. On the same day in Millington, a woman crouched down on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, a railroad spokeswoman said. The deaths continued further with the motorcyclist on Tuesday.

But rather than an unexpected spike in such incidents, they are a reflection of a morbid fact of life in New Jersey. Death on the tracks — at the rate of about 25 a year — is common enough that residents near the tracks can sense the cues and New Jersey Transit officials have a regular counseling program in place for engineers and other crew members whose trains are involved in what they euphemistically call ”critical incidents,” whether they be accidents or suicides.

”I’ve had three myself in 35 years of service, and I can still picture each one of them,” said Bob Vallochi, general chairman of the union representing the commuter line’s engineers. ”I remember how I was treated then, when there was a more callous attitude of getting right back in the saddle. Now you don’t have to just shut it out.”

 

There were 27 deaths on New Jersey Transit tracks last year, and with the accident involving the motorcyclist today the number this year stands at 19, said Ms. Bassett Hackett. And lore among engineers nationwide is that the numbers increase rapidly during holiday periods.

John Tolman, the assistant to the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the national union for the train operators, said that the problem of death on the tracks is a national one.

 

In Morristown, where Mr. Kelly walked onto the tracks to be struck by a train early Sunday morning, Mohamed Ramadan, owner of Bagel Brothers, said that he didn’t know the reasons behind the suicide, but offered his own curbside sense of a pervasive depression among his customers because of the economy. A group that once seemed more focused, hurried and directed seemed now more aimless and tentative.

”I have noticed a lot of my customers that used to come in and grab a quick bite to eat are now staying for longer periods of time because they just don’t have jobs to rush off to,” he said.

A way down the tracks of the Morris and Essex line in Short Hills, when Richard Josephs, an unemployed banker, stepped in front of a train near the Short Hills station Sept. 29 after strangling his 7-year-old son, people assumed the stresses of the economy were to blame. Mr. Cook, the gas station attendant, was still mystified by such a tragedy ”in this day and age when all you need to do is throw up your hands and say, ‘Help,’ ” in order to get counseling and assistance.

 

Short Hills, New Jersey – Data USA

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/short-hills-nj/

 

 

Population: 12,831

Poverty Rate: 1.87%

Median Age: 42.6

Number of Employees: 5,480

Median Household Income: $250,001

Median Property Value: $1.23M

 

Manville, New Jersey – Data USA

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/manville-nj/

 

In 2015, the median household income in Manville, NJ was $64,514, a 2.75% growth from the previous year.

 

Highest Average Salaries by Race & Ethnicity

1. Asian $95,306 ± $23,824
2. White $58,090 ± $5,231
3. Black or African American $45,945 ± $7,806

 

In 2015 the highest paid race/ethnicity of North Plainfield & Somerville Boroughs PUMA, NJ workers was Asian. These workers were paid 1.64 times more than White workers, who made the second highest salary of any race/ethnicity.

Poverty by Race & Ethnicity

Largest race or ethnicity living in poverty

1. White881±386
2. Hispanic or Latino299±242
3. Black or African American134±128

 

The most common racial or ethnic group living below the poverty line in Manville, NJ is White, followed by Hispanic or Latino and Black or African American.

 

The demographics of Manville, NJ residents recorded by the American Community Survey. 87.6% of Manville, NJ residents were US citizens in 2015, a number that is lower than the national average of 93%. The median age of native-born residents of Manville, NJ is 43.3, and the most common country of origin for those not born in the US was the India. Manville, NJ has 7,543 White residents and 2,219 Hispanic residents. 25.6% of Manville, NJ residents are native speakers of a non-English language.

 

Race & Ethnicity

Most common

1. White7,543±506
2. Hispanic2,219±449
3. Black449±320

In 2015, there were 3.4 times more White residents (7,543 people) in Manville, NJ than any other race or ethnicity. There were 2,219 Hispanic and 449 Black residents, the second and third most common racial or ethnic groups.

 

Commuter Transportation

Most common method of travel

1. Drove Alone80.6%
2. Carpooled14.2%
3. Walked2.07%

In 2015, the most common method of travel for workers in Manville, NJ was Drove Alone, followed by those who Carpooled and those who Walked.

 

Manville, NJ – Data USA

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/manville-nj/

 

[[Profile]]

Population: 10,454

Poverty Rate: 9.9%

Median Age: 41.2

Number of Employees: 5,326

Median Household Income: $64, 514

Median Property Value: $241,100

 

Johns Manville – Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Manville

 

Johns Manville is an American corporation based in Denver, Colorado that manufactures insulation, roofing materials, and engineered products. For much of the 20th century, the then-titled Johns-Manville Corporation was the global leader in the manufacture of asbestos-containing products, including pipe insulation, asbestos shingles, asbestos roofing materials and asbestos cement pipe.^[1]

Johns Manville stock was included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from January 29, 1930 to August 27, 1982 when it was replaced by American Express. In 1981, Johns-Manville Corporation was renamed simply “Manville”. In 1982, facing unprecedented liability for asbestos injury claims, Johns Manville voluntarily filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.^[2]

Berkshire Hathaway bought the company in 2001. [[[ “Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is the most successful investor of the 20th century.” ]]] Chairman & CEO Jerry Henry retired in 2004; Steve Hochhauser became Chairman, President & CEO. Todd Raba succeeded him in the summer of 2007; Raba came from MidAmerican Energy Holdings, another Berkshire Hathaway company. In November of 2012, Mary Rhinehart was named President & CEO.^[3]

 

Reflections of Manville [[goofy documentary, worthwhile for an interviewee’s whiteoverseersmug mention of the removal of Jamaican immigrant laborers to make room for white asbestos factory laborers 3:19 in, on some #Indian Removal Act / Racist Social Engineering…

https://youtu.be/k4p-QzX44Wg?t=3m19s

]]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4p-QzX44Wg

 

The Story of Asbestos 1922 US Bureau of Mines – Johns-Manville; How Asbestos Was Mined

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJBBtbpD7Kc

 

Cursed By Coal: Mining the Navajo Nation – Vice News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4uGCj6knVw

 

Marlon Brando Interview (1973) – The Dick Cavett Show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MErL2jRJII

 

Manville, New Jersey – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manville,_New_Jersey

 

Redevelopment

Johns-Manville Corporation had a large manufacturing facility in the borough that utilized asbestos in its manufacturing processes. Manville has begun to leave behind its industrial past and the lingering asbestos pollution that was a legacy of the manufacturing that took place in the borough. The asbestos dumps have been removed or capped in compliance with environmental laws^{[citation needed]}, and the former manufacturing land has been redeveloped into a large movie theater complex known as Reading Cinemas, a medium-sized retail outlet with a Walmart anchor store and a used car wholesale auction company called ADESA New Jersey.

Other areas of the borough are also undergoing redevelopment. The Federal Superfund project called The Federal Creosote Site was cleaned up by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with $250 Million of public funds. The Superfund cleanup project was performed in a 35-acre (140,000 m²) residential section of town called Claremont Development and in a 15-acre (61,000 m²) commercial area called the Rustic Mall, and was officially declared complete by the EPA on March 7, 2008.^[80] As of 2014, the borough has no plans to redevelop the former Superfund site.^{[citation needed]}

 

Noteable People

People who were born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Manville include:

• Cheryl Chase (born 1958), voice actress.^[86]
• Edward Rogalski (born 1942), 12th president of St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, named in 1987.^[87]
• Theo Riddick (born 1991), professional football player for the Detroit Lions.^[88]

 

 

$90.5 million awarded to 11 Manville families who lost members to asbestos-related cancer. – Nj.com

http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2014/07/905_million_awarded_to_11_manville_families_who_lost_members_to_asbestos-related_cancer.html

NEW BRUNSWICK — A judge in New Brunswick has awarded 11 families from Manville more than $90 million for their pain and suffering caused by losing loved ones to an asbestos-related cancer.

Anova and Becon are successor companies to the Eternit group, which mined asbestos in South Africa and sold it throughout the world, including to the Johns Manville Company, the nationally-known maker of insulation that included asbestos. Johns Manville was headquartered in Somerset County at one time.

Asbestos was used in everything from brake linings to ceiling tiles because of its fireproofing and insulating capabilities, but medical studies linked exposure to asbestos to lung disease and mesothelioma in the 1960s. Lawsuits quickly followed.

For many years, New Jersey was the hub of asbestos litigation. By 1982, with more than 16,000 lawsuits pending against Johns Manville, the Manville company filed for bankruptcy protection.

Most, if not all, of the asbestos cases in New Jersey are heard in Middlesex County, one of three counties that handle mass tort- or class action-type lawsuits.

In 2005, a jury in Middlesex County awarded a Hawthorne man, who was dying of mesothelioma at the time, and his wife $10 million. The victim, William Rhodes, was a boiler repairman and used parts insulated with asbestos to repair boilers, according to testimony during the lawsuit’s week-long trial.

 

 

Planned Parenthood Permanently Shuts Down Its Manville Clinic, Effective Today – NJ.com

http://www.nj.com/somerset/index.ssf/2013/08/planned_parenthood_shut_down_its_manville_location_effective_today.html

August 16, 2013 at 2:31 PM

 

MANVILLE — The Manville location of Planned Parenthood — the only such clinic in Somerset County — has closed its doors, effective Friday, according to a notice found on the office windows on South Main Street.

 

“In order to continue making the highest quality reproductive health care and sexual health education accessible to the community, Planned Parenthood of Central and Greater Northern New Jersey has chosen to close the Manville clinic effective August 16th, 2013,” the notice on the door reads.

Planned Parenthood also indicates in the notice that patient health records for anyone who visited the Manville location have already been forwarded to the New Brunswick clinic.

The media relations department at Planned Parenthood of Central and Northern New Jersey declined to comment on the closing, and its national offices did not return call or email requests for comment Friday.

In July, NJ.com became aware of the possible closing after several readers said they received an automated message from the clinic, indicating its patients would soon have to go to a different location.

 

[[Note: the following is from the comments section]]

“Places like New Brunswick are unreachable when you don’t have easily available transportation or money The people who oppose family planning and clinics know this.”

 

“Just awful. When I was in my 20’s, working TWO JOBS without benefits I used P.P. in Manville for my exams and birth control. This is supposed to be America, Land of the Free? Like closing Planned Parenthoods is going to HELP anything? Seriously? This is such a backwards decision and I pray for those women who are in the same position I was in and hope they can get the female care they need at a price they can afford.”

 

Manville Rail Deaths….

 

After train death, Manville teen remembered for kindness, loving nature – mycentraljersey.com

https://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/somerset-county/2017/07/06/after-train-death-manville-teen-remembered-kindness-loving-nature/454949001/

 

MANVILLE – Asia Dixon touched the lives of many throughout her 19 years of existence.

One day after she was fatally hit by a train on the Fourth of July, more than 100 people came to a candlelight vigil to show their love for the Manville teen who was known for her warmheartedness and cheering up her fellow classmates when they were feeling down.

Asia had just graduated from Manville High School two weeks before her death.

Her classmates, however, will never forget her.

“She was larger than life,” said Hunter Bias, a classmate of Asia’s. “She was the type of person who’d always have a smile on their face and was a huge social butterfly. She was full with positivity, and her positive impact on others and myself is unforgettable.”

At the candlelight, her friends recalled how much Asia loved the musician Chris Brown so they turned on the song “With You” and sang along as the melody played out of iPhone speakers. Those who attended the vigil, which took place at the VFW off of Washington Avenue, placed their candles near the rail road tracks and took turns paying their respects while sobbing near the memorial.

After the candles were placed by the tracks, Bias offered to give people henna tattoos to represent the imprint Asia’s love had on their lives. Designs of flowers with the initials “A.D.” could be seen on the forearms of the mourners.

At the vigil, Asia’s mother, Sheila, recalled how much her daughter loved God. She spoke about her daughter’s spiritual personality and noted how much her daughter loved the Manville community.

“Thank you for coming out and supporting my daughter,” she said. “And again, she loves Manville.”

A GoFundMe campaign has been created to support Asia’s family. As of Friday morning, the campaign raised $4,105 of a $6,000 goal. For more information, visit the website https://www.gofundme.com/p8uhk2-asia-m-dixon.

According to the GoFundMe, Asia’s funeral wil lbe held on Monday, July 10 at 5 p.m. at the Plinton Curry Funeral 428 Elizabeth Avenue in Somerset. The website asked to those attending to wear white and/or tan.

The Maville Parent Teacher Association, on its Facebook page, said it would be conducting crisis counseling sessions for high school students in the wake of Asia’s death.

“It is with a heavy heart that I inform you of the passing of Asia Dixon,” the post read, adding that counseling sessions were to be conducted on Thursday at various locations in the town.

Even the students who weren’t in Asia’s class remember her being a special kind of person that could put a smile on anyone’s face that was feeling down.

I went to school with Asia, she was two grades ahead of me,” said Samantha Arroyo. “She was the most warmhearted and kind person you could’ve ever met. Asia would make sure to talk to everybody and try to make them happy.”

Ask anyone at the candlelight vigil on Wednesday what Asia was known for and they would all tell you that she had the reputation of having the biggest heart in Manville High School.

“Everyone knew Asia because of her big personality and even bigger heart,” Arroyo said. “Even if she didn’t know you, if Asia saw you upset she’d sit down with you and ask you what’s wrong and try to do her best to make you feel better.”

 

Authorities ID 22-year old man killed by train in Manville

http://www.nj.com/somerset/index.ssf/2015/09/train_victim.html

 

Train in Manville hits and kills 23-year-old in apparent suicide

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/train_in_manville_hits_and_kil.html

 

Manville teen killed after being struck by freight train – nj.com

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/05/manville_teen_killed_after_bei.html

A 19-year-old senior at Manville High School has been identified as the victim of a fatal train collision Thursday afternoon along a freight line.

Kevin Seit was walking along the tracks in the same direction as a freight train on the Norfolk Southern line near Huff Avenue when he was struck, authorities said.

Capt. Jack Bennett of the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office said there was no criminal or suspicious element involved.

Last year, there were seven fatal train incidents reported on railways in Somerset County and another seven nonfatal impacts, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.

One of the seven fatalities also claimed a 19-year-old Manville resident – Cassandra Brown – who was pronounced dead after a Norfolk Southern freight train struck her near Brooks Boulevard and South Street, authorities said.

 

3 young people killed by new jersey trains this past week – patch.com

https://patch.com/new-jersey/princeton/3-young-souls-killed-new-jersey-trains-past-week

 

Teen struck by NJ Transit Train ruled suicide – news12.com

http://newjersey.news12.com/story/34873963/teen-struck-by-nj-transit-train-ruled-suicide

 

Manville sounds the alert after death of 19-year-old – Star Ledger (via Big Little Railroad Shop blog)

http://biglittlerr.blogspot.com/2008/09/manville-sounds-alert-after-death-of-19.html

 

Deaths Prompt Focus On Rail Safety – Manville, NJ

http://biglittlerr.blogspot.com/2008/09/deaths-prompt-focus-on-rail-safety.html

 

Following article appeared in the Courier Times on Sunday 8-3-08.

 

Borough police are working to keep trespassers off the railroad tracks following recent fatalities on the Norfolk-Southern and CSX rail lines.

National statistics show this borough is one of the leading municipalities in the nation in per-capita deaths on rail lines. In the borough’s 80-year history as a town crossed by two busy freight railroad lines, police have estimated that about 20 people have died in train accidents or near the tracks.
Suicide in New Jersey, 1999-2014 [[ Suicide demographics in NJ ]]

http://www.state.nj.us/health/chs/documents/suicide_nj1999-2014.pdf

 

“The “Other” category in New Jersey includes cutting/piercing (2.5%), falls/jumps from high places like buildings and bridges (5.5%), and “other specified injuries” that are people being struck by trains on railroad tracks (2.8%). Of the 22 suicides carried out by being struck by a train in 2014, all but 4 were males, and all but one was white, non – Hispanic. The average age was 39 years old, with a range from 17-69 years of age.”

 

NJ Youth Suicide Report 2016

http://www.nj.gov/dcf/news/reportsnewsletters/dcfreportsnewsletters/SuicideReport_2016.pdf

 

Death by train was more frequently used by older individuals, but was the second most common method for 10-18 year olds.

 

Manville Housing Authority – Affordable Housing Online.

http://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-authority/New-Jersey/Manville-Housing-Authority/NJ112/

Assisted Unit Distribution What is Housing Assistance?

https://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-authority/New-Jersey/Manville-Housing-Authority/NJ112

The Manville Housing Authority administers a Section 8 housing voucher program. The housing authority administers 90 Section 8 housing vouchers.

According to HUD, Manville Housing Authority is designated as Small, meaning it administers 50 – 249 Section 8 vouchers.

Manville Housing Authority is among the 25% of New Jersey housing authorities that only offer Section 8 voucher assistance. If there are any public housing units available in the target area, those units are administered by another housing authority.

Source United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud.gov, 2014)

http://www.manvillenj.org/Directory.aspx?did=23

Section 8 Housing

Physical Address:

325 N. Main St.
Manville, NJ 08835

 

What is Section 8 Housing? – Google

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+section+8+housing%3F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937 (42 U.S.C. § 1437f), often called Section 8, as repeatedly amended, authorizes the payment of rental housing assistance to private landlords on behalf of approximately 4.8 million low-income households as of 2008 in the United States.

 

History of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey – Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Ku_Klux_Klan_in_New_Jersey

The Ku Klux Klan has had a history in the U.S. state of New Jersey since the early part of the 1920s. The Klan was active in the areas of Trenton and Camden and had a presence in several of the state’s northern counties in the 1920s. It had the most members in Monmouth County, and operated a resort at Wall Township‘s Camp Evans.^[1]

 

The first local chapter of the KKK in New Jersey was organized in 1921, after units had started in New York and Pennsylvania. Arthur Hornbui Bell was the state’s first Grand Dragon, and continued serving in that post until the Ku Klux Klan was disbanded in 1944.

 

In 1923, the Klan provided funding to the Pillar of Fire Church to found Alma White College in Zarephath, New Jersey. It became “the second institution in the north avowedly run by the Ku Klux Klan to further its aims and principles.” Alma White said that the Klan philosophy “will sweep through the intellectual student classes as through the masses of the people.”^[5][6] At that time, the Pillar of Fire was publishing the pro-KKK monthly periodical The Good Citizen.^[1]

On May 3, 1923, around 12,000 people attended a Klan meeting in Bound Brook, New Jersey. The speakers held a meeting at the Pillar of Fire headquarters in nearby Zarephath where a crowd of angry locals surrounded the church to let them know that they were not welcome.^[7][8]

 

In 1925 Alma White published The Ku Klux Klan In Prophecy in Zarephath at the Pillar of Fire Church printing press. She writes: “The unrepentant Hebrew is everywhere among us today as the strong ally of Roman Catholicism. … To think of our Hebrew friends with their millions in gold and silver aiding the Pope in his aspirations for world supremacy, is almost beyond the grasp of … The Jews in New York City openly boast that they have the money and Rome the power, and that if they decide to rule the city and state, …”^[11]

In 1926, Arthur Hornbui Bell headed a group that converted the former Marconi Station in Wall Township into a Klan resort. (The property was subsequently acquired by The King’s College, a divinity school, and later became Camp Evans.). The 396-acre (1.60 km²) resort was open only to officials and members of the New Jersey Realm of the Klan.^[12]

In May 1926, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger once spoke to a meeting of the women’s chapter of the Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. Sanger wrote in her 1938 autobiography that the speech was “one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.”^[13]

The New Jersey Ku Klux Klan held a Fourth of July celebration from July 3–5, 1926, in Long Branch, New Jersey, that featured a “Miss 100% America” pageant.^[14]

In 1926 Alma White published Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty. She writes: “I believe in white supremacy.”^[15]

In 1928 Alma White published Heroes of the Fiery Cross. She writes: “The Jews are as unrelenting now as they were two thousand years ago.”^[16]

In 1940, James A. Colescott had Bell removed as head of the Klan in New Jersey.^[17][18] Bell was also vice president of the German American Bund.^[19] The ouster was from a joint meeting arranged by Bell between the Klan and the German American Bund at the Bund’s Camp Nordlund, near Andover, New Jersey.^[20]

In 1943 Alma White of the Pillar of Fire Church reprinted her pro-Klan essays and sermons as Guardians of Liberty.^[21]

By 1944 the national organization was closed by a tax lien by the Internal Revenue Service.^[1] Local chapters closed over the following years.^[22]

 

Alma Bridwell White – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Bridwell_White

Alma Bridwell White (June 16, 1862 – June 26, 1946) was the founder and a bishop of the Pillar of Fire Church.^[1][2][3] In 1918, she became the first woman to become a bishop in the United States.^[2][4] She was noted for her association with the Ku Klux Klan and her feminism, anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, anti-Pentecostalism, racism, and hostility to immigrants.^[5] By the time of her death at age 84, she had expanded the sect to “4,000 followers, 61 churches, seven schools, ten periodicals and two broadcasting stations.”^[4]

 

Church founder

Alma and Kent White started the Methodist Pentecostal Union Church in Denver, Colorado in December 1901. She led hymns and prayers, and at times preached sermons. In 1907, Caroline Garretson (formerly Carolin Van Neste Field), widow of Peter Workman Garretson, donated a farm for a religious community at Zarephath, New Jersey.

This was developed as the headquarters for the renamed Pillar of Fire Church, which distanced itself from the Pentecostal movement. In 1918, White was consecrated as a bishop by William Baxter Godbey, an ordained Methodist evangelist who was active in the Holiness Movement.^[8][12][13] She was now the first woman to serve as a bishop in the United States.^[2]

 

Feminism, intolerance, and the Klan

As a feminist, White was a forceful advocate of equality for white Protestant women. However, she was also uncompromising in her persistent and powerful attacks of religious and racial minorities, justifying both equality for white Protestant women and inequality for minorities as biblically mandated. While the vast majority of her most vicious political attacks targeted the Roman Catholic Church, she also promoted antisemitism, white supremacy, and intolerance of certain immigrants.^[5]

Under White’s leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, the Pillar of Fire Church developed a close and public partnership with the Ku Klux Klan that was unique for a religious denomination.^[14] She assessed the Klan as a powerful force that could help liberate white Protestant women, while simultaneously keeping minorities in their place.^[5] Her support of the Klan was extensive.^{[5][14][15][16]} She allowed and sometimes participated in Klan meetings and cross burnings on some of the numerous Pillar of Fire properties. She published The Good Citizen, a monthly periodical which strongly promoted the Klan and its agenda. Additionally, she published three books, The Ku Klux Klan In Prophecy, Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty, and Heroes of the Fiery Cross, which were compendiums of the essays, speeches and cartoons that had originally been published in The Good Citizen.

White expressed her racism against African Americans most vocally when speaking at Klan gatherings. On “Patriotic Day” at the 1929 annual Camp Meeting at Zarephath, New Jersey, she preached a sermon titled “America—the White Man’s Heritage”, and published the sermon in that month’s edition of The Good Citizen. She said:

“Where people seek for social equality between the black and white races, they violate the edicts of the Holy Writ and every social and moral code …

Social and political equality would plunge the world into an Inferno as black as the regions of night and as far from the teachings of the New Testament as heaven is from hell. The presumption of the colored people under such conditions would know no bounds …

This is white man’s country by every law of God and man, and was so determined from the beginning of Creation. Let us not therefore surrender our heritage to the sons of Ham. Perhaps it would be well for white people to take the advice of a great American patriot, Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans and repeal the Fifteenth Amendment. The editor of The Good Citizen would be with him in this.^{[18][19] “}

 

White’s association with the Klan waned in the early 1930s, after the Klan underwent public scandals related to high-level officials and efforts by the media to publicize its members’ identities. Still, she continued to promote her ideology of intolerance for religious and racial minorities. She published revised versions of her three Klan books in 1943, three years before her death and 22 years after her initial public association with the Klan. The books were published as a three-volume set under the name Guardians of Liberty. Notably, the word Klansmen was removed from the title, reflecting the Klan’s diminished status, while White continued to promote the dogma that had initially drawn her into partnership with the Klan. Volumes Two and Three of Guardians of Liberty have introductions by Arthur Kent White, her son and the Pillar of Fire‘s second general superintendent.

 

Zarephath, New Jersey – Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarephath,_New_Jersey

 

Alma White College was chartered in 1921 and operated until 1978.^[16][17] In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan provided funding for the school, making it “the second institution in the north avowedly run by the Ku Klux Klan to further its aims and principles.”[18][19] The first two Doctor of Divinity degrees, one honorary, were conferred in 1927.[20] Arthur Kent White received an honorary one; and Alton Milford Young received the second. Young at one time was the Grand Kaliff of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey.[21][22]

 

Pillar of Fire International – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_of_Fire_International

 

The Pillar of Fire International is a Methodist Christian sect with headquarters in Zarephath, New Jersey.^[1]

 

History

In 1901, the Church was founded by Alma Bridwell White in Denver, Colorado. The Pillar of Fire was originally incorporated as the Pentecostal Union, but changed its name to distance itself from Pentecostalism in 1915.^[2] While the Pillar of Fire is Methodist in doctrine, Alma White and her followers believed that the Methodist Church had become corrupt.^[3] Alma White and the members of the Pillar of Fire dedicated themselves to the holiness movement in the Wesleyan tradition. Adherents were referred to as “Holy Rollers” and “holy jumpers” because of their religious frenzy.^{[2][4][5][6][7][8]} White was noted for her association with the Ku Klux Klan, her feminism, anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, anti-pentecostalism, racism, and nativism.^[9]

 

Following the death of the founder, under the leadership of her son, Arthur Kent White, the religious fervor declined and the emphasis on outreach evangelization and church planting ended; the organization branches in America fell from a high of around 52 to the current six.

Today the Pillar of Fire has branches in Zarephath, Denver, Westminster, Colorado, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Pacifica, California. It primarily operates four ministry focuses: local church, radio, education, and missions.^[1]

 

Beliefs

The organization’s theological position is self-described as Wesleyan–Arminian.^[10] The central beliefs of the Pillar of Fire are as follows: biblical inerrancy, Trinitarianism, the physical resurrection of Jesus, the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit, the “universal depravity of the human race,” the necessity of “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ,” belief in “justification by faith and in Christian perfection, or entire sanctification, as a second definite work of grace,” the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and premillennialism.^[11]

 

 

Continued work of the Pillar of Fire

The Pillar of Fire continues its work today working in three main areas: radio, education, and missions, both local and overseas.^[12]

United States congregations

• Alma Temple, Denver
• Belleview Community Chapel, Westminster, Colorado
• Coastside Community Church, Pacifica, California
• City Church Cincinnati, Cincinnati
• Pillar of Fire Church, Los Angeles
• Zarephath Christian Church, Zarephath, New Jersey

Zarephath Health Center

The Zarephath Health Center was opened in 2003^[13] and utilizes volunteer physicians, nurses and support people to meet the health care needs of the poor and uninsured on the campus at Zarephath, NJ. The Health Center sees 300–400 patients per month who otherwise would not be able to obtain affordable health care. Dr. Eck testified to the Joint Economic Committee on Health Insurance on April 28, 2004, to demonstrate the sustainability of this model.^[14]

International missions

There are missions in India, Costa Rica and Liberia as well as:^[15]

• The oldest of their missions was in Hendon London, England, and was established in 1904 by Alma White. The mission organized a Charitable Trust on 19 September 1992, and was registered as a charity in December 1992 (Charity No. 1015529). In response to a complaint received by the Charity Commission in 2002, an inquiry was held, the charitable trust dissolved and transferred its assets to the U.S. organization, and the charitable trust was removed from the registry as it had ceased to exist.^[16][17] One of the stated aims of this mission was to evangelize the local Jewish population in the vicinity of the mission.^[18] Ironically, after the mission was sold, the property became a kosher boutique hotel^[19] in 2010.^[20]
• Reverend Smallridge was given permission to start a Pillar of Fire Church in Nigeria in 1974.^[21]
• The Pillar of Fire was established in Malawi in 1984 by Reverend Moses Peter K. Phiri.^[22]

Schools

Primary and secondary

• Alma Heights Christian Schools in Pacifica, California^[23]
• Belleview Christian School in Westminster, Colorado
• Eden Grove Academy in Cincinnati^[24]
• Sycamore Grove School in Los Angeles^[25]

Colleges

• Alma White College in Zarephath, New Jersey (1917–1978)^[26][27]
• Belleview College in Westminster, Colorado^[28]
• Somerset Christian College, now known as Pillar College and has campuses in Somerset and Newark, NJ and looking to span across the state.^[29]

Media

Radio stations

• KPOF in Westminster, Colorado^[30]
• WAWZ in Zarephath, New Jersey^[31][32]
• WAKW in Cincinnati^[33]

Discontinued periodicals

• Pillar of Fire
• Pillar Magazine
• The Dry Legion
• The Good Citizen
• Rocky Mountain Pillar of Fire
• London Pillar of Fire
• The British Sentinel
• The Occidental Pillar of Fire
• Woman’s Chains
• Pillar of Fire Junior
• Pillar of Fire Bay Chronicle
• The Alma White Evangel

 

Ku Klux Klan, historical intolerant ideologies, and Ku Klux Klan repudiation

 

In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Pillar of Fire Church was vocal in its support of the Ku Klux Klan, to an extent which was unique for a religious denomination.^{[44][45][46][47]} Alma White spoke and wrote prolifically of her and the Pillar of Fire Church’s support for the Klan and many of the Klan’s principles including anti-Catholicism, white supremacy, antisemitism, nativism, and temperance. In 1943, shortly before her death, she and the Pillar of Fire Church significantly but not completely distanced themselves from the then discredited and nearly bankrupt Klan organization, while continuing to promote many of the Klan’s intolerant principles. In a 1920s sermon she republished in 1943 she said

 

We have no connection with the Klan organization. We endorse them in the principles for which they stand. However there is no room in our hearts for racial prejudice.^[48]

Yet White and the Pillar of Fire advocated for white supremacy in the same 1943 book-set which asserted distaste for racial prejudice. In her chapter titled “White Supremacy” she wrote

The slaveholder, in many instances, was as much to be pitied as the slaves. He, too, was a victim of the system…..Where the slaves were well treated they were happy and contented…But some radicals could never see this side of the question. They dwelt continually on the cruelties of a few hard taskmasters and ignored the good people who had the welfare of their dependants at heart. No matter what the better class of slave owners might do, they had to bear the stigma of cruelty with the worst of tyrants…..Where property rights are involved, supported by the government, the only safe and sane way to make wrongs right is by cool-headed procedure.^[49]

She also said to the New Brunswick Daily Home News,

“My people are not members of the Klan, but we agree with some of the things that they stand for to assert our American right of free speech. We have always stood for one hundred percent Americanism and so does the Klan, so naturally we agree there.”^[50]

 

Yet the Pillar of Fire’s pulpit and the Pillar of Fire’s printing operation were used extensively to advocate for many of the most intolerant of Klan values. In 1922 Bishop Alma White preached a sermon promoting the Klan at the Pillar of Fire Church in Brooklyn, New York (which coincidentally was incinerated by the 1960 New York air disaster^[51]) and published that sermon in The Good Citizen. The speech was titled “Ku Klux Klan and Woman’s Causes” and one section was subtitled “White Supremacy.”

“The Klansmen stand for the supremacy of the white race, which is perfectly legitimate and in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Writ, and anything that has been decreed by the Almighty should not work a hardship on the colored race…It is within the rights of civilization for the white race to hold the supremacy; and no injustice to the colored man to stay in the environment where he was placed by the Creator…. When the black man was liberated it was time for women to be enfranchised, without which the colored man with his newly-acquired rank became her political master. …The white women bore the sting of humiliation for more than half a century in being placed in an inferior position to the black men in the use of the ballot and the rights of citizenship… To whom shall we look to champion the cause and to protect the rights of women? Is there not evidence that the Knights of the Klu [sic] Klux Klan are the prophets of a new and better age?”

 

The Pillar of Fire Church strongly argued against social and political equality for Blacks and advocated for racial segration and repeal of the fifteenth amendment.^[52][53] The Pillar allowed the Klan to hold meetings or cross burnings on at least several of the church’s numerous properties including numerous documented Klan gatherings in Zarephath, New Jersey; Brooklyn, New York; Bound Brook, New Jersey; Longmont, Colorado; and Westminster, Colorado.^[6][54][55] White participated directly in many of these meetings. During this time, the Pillar of Fire Church published The Good Citizen, a monthly 16 page political magazine and three books, The Ku Klux Klan In Prophecy, Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty, and Heroes of the Fiery Cross, all of which heavily promoted the Klan and its agenda from 1921 until 1933. Ideologically, in these publications, the Pillar of Fire Church promoted anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, nativism, and white supremacy, all primarily under the guise of patriotism.

The organization has since repudiated its historical relationship with the KKK at its website in 2009:

“Much talk has also arisen over her brief but significant association with the KKK, which has also been publicly condemned and repented of by the POF leadership with a request for full forgiveness. Despite these and other errors in its history, the Lord in His grace and mercy has chosen to bless the ministry.^[56]”

And in the local paper in 1997:

“We regret, repudiate and repent, and ask for full forgiveness for anything in our past that is short of Christian standards based on God’s Word, following Jesus’ model prayer that teaches us to ever pray and forgive us our sins for we also forgive everyone that is indebted to us. (Luke 11:4) We specifically regret mistakes and bad judgement by previous generations or anyone in our membership of the past.^[57]”

While the Pillar of Fire’s repudiation characterized its association with the Klan as brief, it continued for at least several decades to promote its ideologies of intolerance for religious and racial minorities and of equality for white Protestant women. In 1943, 22 years after the church began publicly working with the Klan, it republished Alma White’s pro-KKK books as a three-volume set under the title Guardians of Liberty, reaffirming its positions in support of anti-Semitism, white supremacy, nativism and most notably, anti-Catholicism. Volumes II and III of Guardians had introductions by Arthur White, affirming his support for his mother’s intolerant ideologies, primarily but not exclusively in regard to anti-Catholicism. After his mother died in 1946, he was the Pillar of Fire’s general superintendent until 1981.

 

Margaret Sanger – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term “birth control”, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She was afraid of what would happen, so she fled to Britain until she knew it was safe to return to the US.^[2] Sanger’s efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States.^[3] Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion, although Planned Parenthood did not begin providing abortions until 1970, after Sanger had already died.^[4] Sanger, who has been criticized for supporting negative eugenics, remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.^[5]

In 1916 Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, which led to her arrest for distributing information on contraception after an undercover policewoman bought a copy of her pamphlet on family planning.^[6] Her subsequent trial and appeal generated controversy. Sanger felt that in order for women to have a more equal footing in society and to lead healthier lives, they needed to be able to determine when to bear children. She also wanted to prevent so-called back-alley abortions,^[7] which were common at the time because abortions were illegal in the United States.^[8] She believed that while abortion was sometimes justified it should generally be avoided, and she considered contraception the only practical way to avoid them.^[9]

 

In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In New York City, she organized the first birth control clinic staffed by all-female doctors, as well as a clinic in Harlem with an all African-American advisory council,^[10] where African-American staff were later added.^[11] In 1929, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, which served as the focal point of her lobbying efforts to legalize contraception in the United States. From 1952 to 1959, Sanger served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She died in 1966, and is widely regarded as a founder of the modern birth control movement.^[3]

 

Early life

Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins in 1879 in Corning, New York,^[12] to Michael Hennessey Higgins, an Irish-born stonemason and free-thinker, and Anne Purcell Higgins, a Catholic Irish-American. Michael Hennessey Higgins had emigrated to the USA at age 14 and joined the U.S. Army as a drummer at age 15, during the Civil War. After leaving the army, Michael studied medicine and phrenology, but ultimately became a stonecutter, making stone angels, saints, and tombstones.^[13] Michael H. Higgins was a Catholic who became an atheist and an activist for women’s suffrage and free public education.^[14] Anne was born in Ireland. Her parents brought the family to Canada during the Potato Famine. She married Michael in 1869.^[15] Anne Higgins went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births) in 22 years before dying at the age of 49. Sanger was the sixth of eleven surviving children,^[16] and spent much of her youth assisting with household chores and caring for her younger siblings.

Supported by her two older sisters, Margaret Higgins attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, before enrolling in 1900 at White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer. In 1902, she married the architect William Sanger and gave up her education.^[17] Though she was plagued by a recurring active tubercular condition, Margaret Sanger bore three children, and the couple settled down to a quiet life in Westchester, New York.

 

Social activism

In 1911, after a fire destroyed their home in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Sangers abandoned the suburbs for a new life in New York City. Margaret Sanger worked as a visiting nurse in the slums of the East Side, while her husband worked as an architect and a house painter. Already imbued with her husband’s leftist politics, Margaret Sanger also threw herself into the radical politics and modernist values of pre-World War I Greenwich Village bohemia. She joined the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist party, took part in the labor actions of the Industrial Workers of the World (including the notable 1912 Lawrence textile strike and the 1913 Paterson silk strike) and became involved with local intellectuals, left-wing artists, socialists and social activists, including John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge and Emma Goldman.^[18]

 

Sanger’s political interests, emerging feminism and nursing experience led her to write two series of columns on sex education entitled “What Every Mother Should Know” (1911–12) and “What Every Girl Should Know” (1912–13) for the socialist magazine New York Call. By the standards of the day, Sanger’s articles were extremely frank in their discussion of sexuality, and many New York Call readers were outraged by them. Other readers, however, praised the series for its candor. One stated that the series contained “a purer morality than whole libraries full of hypocritical cant about modesty”.^[19] Both were published in book form in 1916.^[20]

 

During her work among working-class immigrant women, Sanger met women who underwent frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions for lack of information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Access to contraceptive information was prohibited on grounds of obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock law and a host of state laws. Seeking to help these women, Sanger visited public libraries, but was unable to find information on contraception.^[21] These problems were epitomized in a story that Sanger would later recount in her speeches: while Sanger was working as a nurse, she was called to the apartment of a woman, “Sadie Sachs”, who had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply advised her to remain abstinent. A few months later, Sanger was called back to Sadie’s apartment — only this time, Sadie” died shortly after Sanger arrived. She had attempted yet another self-induced abortion.^[22][23] Sanger would sometimes end the story by saying, “I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced … that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth.” This story – along with Sanger’s 1904 rescue of her unwanted niece Olive Byrne from the snowbank in which she had been left—marks the beginning of Sanger’s commitment to spare women from the pursuit of dangerous and illegal abortions.^[23][24][25] Sanger opposed abortion, but primarily as a societal ill and public health danger which would disappear if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.^[26]

Given the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment, Sanger came to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. She launched a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontational actions.

Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and the couple’s divorce was finalized in 1921.^[27] In 1922 she married her second husband, James Noah H. Slee.^[28]

In 1914 Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly newsletter which promoted contraception using the slogan “No Gods, No Masters“.^{[29][note 2][30]} Sanger, collaborating with anarchist friends, popularized the term “birth control” as a more candid alternative to euphemisms such as “family limitation”^[31] and proclaimed that each woman should be “the absolute mistress of her own body.”^[32] In these early years of Sanger’s activism, she viewed birth control as a free-speech issue, and when she started publishing The Woman Rebel, one of her goals was to provoke a legal challenge to the federal anti-obscenity laws which banned dissemination of information about contraception.^[33][34] Though postal authorities suppressed five of its seven issues, Sanger continued publication, all the while preparing Family Limitation, another challenge to anti-birth control laws. This 16-page pamphlet contained detailed and precise information and graphic descriptions of various contraceptive methods. In August 1914 Margaret Sanger was indicted for violating postal obscenity laws by sending The Woman Rebel through the postal system. Rather than stand trial, she fled the country.^[2]

 

Margaret Sanger spent much of her 1914 exile in England, where contact with British neo-Malthusians such as Charles Vickery Drysdale helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control. She shared their concern that over-population led to poverty, famine and war.^[35] At the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian Conference in 1922, she was the first woman to chair a session.^[36] She organized the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth-Control Conference that took place in New York in 1925.^[37][38] Over-population would remain a concern of hers for the rest of her life.^[35]

 

During her 1914 trip to England, she was also profoundly influenced by the liberation theories of Havelock Ellis, under whose tutelage she sought not just to make sexual intercourse safer for women, but more pleasurable. Another notable person she met around this time was Marie Stopes, who had run into Sanger after she had just given a talk on birth control at a Fabian Society meeting. Stopes showed Sanger her writings and sought her advice about a chapter on contraception.^[39][40]

 

Early in 1915, Margaret Sanger’s estranged husband, William Sanger, gave a copy of Family Limitation to a representative of anti-vice politician Anthony Comstock. William Sanger was tried and convicted, spending thirty days in jail while attracting interest in birth control as an issue of civil liberty.^[41][42][43] Margaret’s second husband, Noah Slee, also lent his help to her life’s work. In 1928, Slee would smuggle diaphragms into New York through Canada^[44] in boxes labeled as 3-In-One Oil.^[45] He later became the first legal manufacturer of diaphragms in the United States.^[46]

 

Birth control movement

Main article: Birth control movement in the United States

Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States at the time, and when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she learned about diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States. Diaphragms were generally unavailable in the United States, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law.

On October 16, 1916 Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States.^[47] Nine days after the clinic opened, Sanger was arrested. Sanger’s bail was set at $500 and she went back home. Sanger continued seeing some women in the clinic until the police came a second time. This time Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, were arrested for breaking a New York state law that prohibited distribution of contraceptives, Sanger was also charged with running a public nuisance.^[48] Sanger and Byrne went to trial in January 1917.^[49] Byrne was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse but went on hunger strike. She was force-fed, the first woman hunger striker in the US to be so treated.^[50] Only when Sanger pledged that Byrne would never break the law, was she pardoned after ten days.^[51] Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”

Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: “I cannot respect the law as it exists today.”^[53] For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.^[53] An initial appeal was rejected, but in a subsequent court proceeding in 1918, the birth control movement won a victory when Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling which allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.^[54]

The publicity surrounding Sanger’s arrest, trial, and appeal sparked birth control activism across the United States, and earned the support of numerous donors, who would provide her with funding and support for future endeavors.^[55]

In February 1917 Sanger began publishing the monthly periodical Birth Control Review.^{[note 3]}

American Birth Control League

 

After World War I, Sanger shifted away from radical politics, and she founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 to enlarge her base of supporters to include the middle class.^[56] The founding principles of the ABCL were as follows:^[57]

“We hold that children should be (1) Conceived in love; (2) Born of the mother’s conscious desire; (3) And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health. Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.”

 

After Sanger’s appeal of her conviction for the Brownsville clinic secured a 1918 court ruling that exempted physicians from the law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptive information to women (provided it was prescribed for medical reason), she established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB) in 1923 to exploit this loophole.^[18][58] The CRB was the first legal birth control clinic in the United States, staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers.^[59] The clinic received extensive funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family, who continued to make anonymous donations to Sanger’s causes in subsequent decades.^[60][61]

 

John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated five thousand dollars to her American Birth Control League in 1924 and a second time in 1925.^[62] In 1922, she traveled to China, Korea, and Japan. In China she observed that the primary method of family planning was female infanticide, and she later worked with Pearl Buck to establish a family planning clinic in Shanghai.^[63] Sanger visited Japan six times, working with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue to promote birth control.^[64] This was ironic, since ten years earlier Sanger had accused Katō of murder and praised an attempt to kill her.^[65]

 

In 1928, conflict within the birth control movement leadership led Sanger to resign as the president of the ABCL and take full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB), marking the beginning of a schism that would last until 1938.^[66]

Sanger invested a great deal of effort communicating with the general public. From 1916 onward, she frequently lectured (in churches, women’s clubs, homes, and theaters) to workers, churchmen, liberals, socialists, scientists, and upper-class women.^[67] She once lectured on birth control to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.^[68]

 

She wrote several books in the 1920s which had a nationwide impact in promoting the cause of birth control. Between 1920 and 1926, 567,000 copies of Woman and the New Race and The Pivot of Civilization were sold.^[69] She also wrote two autobiographies designed to promote the cause. The first, My Fight for Birth Control, was published in 1931 and the second, more promotional version, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, was published in 1938.

During the 1920s, Sanger received hundreds of thousands of letters, many of them written in desperation by women begging for information on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies.^[70][71] Five hundred of these letters were compiled into the 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage.^[72][73]

 

Work with the African-American community

 

Sanger worked with eminent African American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities. In 1929, James H. Hubert, a black social worker and the leader of New York’s Urban League, asked Sanger to open a clinic in Harlem.^[75] Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with black doctors, in 1930. The clinic was directed by a 15-member advisory board consisting of black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers. The clinic was publicized in the African-American press as well as in black churches, and it received the approval of W. E. B. Du Bois, the co-founder of the NAACP and the editor of its magazine, The Crisis.^{[76][77][78][79]} Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.^[80] Sanger’s work with minorities earned praise from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1966 acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger award.^[81]

 

From 1939 to 1942 Sanger was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role—alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble—in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver birth control to poor black people.^[82] Sanger, over the objections of other supervisors, wanted the Negro Project to hire black ministers in leadership roles. To emphasize the benefits of hiring black community leaders to act as spokesmen, she wrote to Gamble, “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” New York University’s Margaret Sanger Papers Project says that though the letter would have been meant to avoid the mistaken notion that the Negro Project was a racist campaign, conspiracy theorists have fraudulently attempted to exploit the quotation “as evidence she led a calculated effort to reduce the black population against their will”.^[83][84][85]

 

Planned Parenthood era

 

In 1929, Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in order to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on contraception.^[86] That effort failed to achieve success, so Sanger ordered a diaphragm from Japan in 1932, in order to provoke a decisive battle in the courts. The diaphragm was confiscated by the United States government, and Sanger’s subsequent legal challenge led to a 1936 court decision which overturned an important provision of the Comstock laws which prohibited physicians from obtaining contraceptives.^[87] This court victory motivated the American Medical Association in 1937 to adopt contraception as a normal medical service and a key component of medical school curriculums.^[88]

 

This 1936 contraception court victory was the culmination of Sanger’s birth control efforts, and she took the opportunity, now in her late 50s, to move to Tucson, Arizona, intending to play a less critical role in the birth control movement. In spite of her original intentions, she remained active in the movement through the 1950s.^[88]

In 1937, Sanger became chairman of the newly formed Birth Control Council of America, and attempted to resolve the schism between the ABCL and the BCCRB.^[89] Her efforts were successful, and the two organizations merged in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America.^{[90][note 5]} Although Sanger continued in the role of president, she no longer wielded the same power as she had in the early years of the movement, and in 1942, more conservative forces within the organization changed the name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a name Sanger objected to because she considered it too euphemistic.^[91]

 

In 1948, Sanger helped found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952, and soon became the world’s largest non-governmental international women’s health, family planning and birth control organization. Sanger was the organization’s first president and served in that role until she was 80 years old.^[92] In the early 1950s, Sanger encouraged philanthropist Katharine McCormick to provide funding for biologist Gregory Pincus to develop the birth control pill which was eventually sold under the name Enovid.^[93]

Death

 

Sanger died of congestive heart failure in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, aged 86, about a year after the U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized birth control in the United States.^{[note 6]} Sanger is buried in Fishkill, New York, next to her sister, Nan Higgins, and her second husband, Noah Slee.^[94] One of her surviving brothers was College Football Hall of Fame player and Pennsylvania State University Head Football coach Bob Higgins.^[95]

 

Havelock Ellis – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939), was an English physician, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. Like many intellectuals of his era, he supported eugenics and he served as president of the Eugenics Society.^[1]

 

Eugenics

Ellis was a supporter of eugenics. He served as vice-president to the Eugenics Education Society and wrote on the subject, among others, in The Task of Social Hygiene:

Eventually, it seems evident, a general system, whether private or public, whereby all personal facts, biological and mental, normal and morbid, are duly and systematically registered, must become inevitable if we are to have a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit to carry on the race.

The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born.

In his early writings, it was clear that Ellis concurred with the notion that there was a system of racial hierarchies, and that non-western cultures were considered to be “lower races.”^[10] Before explicitly talking about eugenic topics, he used the prevalence of homosexuality in these ‘lower races’ to indicate the universality of the behavior. In his work, Sexual Inversions, where Ellis presented numerous cases of homosexuality in Britain, he was always careful to mention the race of the subject and the health of the person’s ‘stock’, which included their neuropathic conditions and the health of their parents. However, Ellis was clear to assert that he did not feel that homosexuality was an issue that eugenics needed to actively deal with, as he felt that once the practice was accepted in society, those with homosexual tendencies would comfortably choose not to marry, and thus would cease to pass the ‘homosexual heredity’ along.^[11]

Views on women and birth control

Ellis favored feminism from a eugenic perspective, feeling that the enhanced social, economic, and sexual choices that feminism provided for women would result in women choosing partners who were more eugenically sound.^[22] In his view, intelligent women would not choose, nor be forced to marry and procreate with feeble-minded men.

Ellis viewed birth control as merely the continuation of an evolutionary progression, noting that natural progress has always consisted of increasing impediments to reproduction, which lead to a lower quantity of offspring, but a much higher quality of them.^[23] From a eugenic perspective, birth control was an invaluable instrument for the elevation of the race.^[24] However, Ellis noted that birth control could not be used randomly in a way that could have a detrimental impact by reducing conception, but rather needed to be used in a targeted manner to improve the qualities of certain ‘stocks.’ He observed that it was unfortunately the ‘superior stocks’ who had knowledge of and used birth control while the ‘inferior stocks’ propagated without checks.^[25] Ellis’ solution to this was a focus on contraceptives in education, as this would disseminate the knowledge in the populations that he felt needed them the most. Ellis argued that birth control was the only available way of making eugenic selection practicable, as the only other option was wide-scale abstention from intercourse for those who were ‘unfit’.^[25]

Views on sterilization

Though Ellis was never at ease with the idea of forced sterilizations, he was willing to find ways to circumvent that restriction. His focus was on the social ends of eugenics, and as a means to it, Ellis was in no way against ‘persuading’ ‘volunteers’ to undergo sterilization by withdrawing Poor Relief from them.^[22] While he preferred to convince those he deemed unfit using education, Ellis supported coercion as a tool. Furthermore, he supported adding ideas about eugenics and birth control to the education system in order to restructure society, and to promote social hygiene.^[29] For Ellis, sterilization seemed to be the only eugenic instrument that could be used on the mentally unfit. In fact, in his publication The Sterilization of the Unfit, Ellis argued that even institutionalization could not guarantee the complete prevention of procreation between the unfit, and thus, “the burdens of society, to say nothing of the race, are being multiplied. It is not possible to view sterilization with enthusiasm when applied to any class of people…but what, I ask myself, is the practical alternative?”^[30]

Comstock Laws – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

 

The Comstock Laws were a set of federal acts passed by the United States Congress under the Grant administration along with related state laws.^[1] The “parent” act (Sect. 211) was passed on March 3, 1873, as the Act for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use”. This Act criminalized usage of the U.S. Postal Service to send any of the following items:^[2]

• obscenity
• contraceptives
• abortifacients
• sex toys
• personal letters with any sexual content or information
• or any information regarding the above items.

A similar federal act (Sect. 245) of 1909 ^[3] applied to delivery by interstate “express” or any other common carrier (such as railroad, instead of delivery by the U.S. Postal Service).

In Washington, D.C., where the federal government had direct jurisdiction, another Comstock act (Sect. 312) also made it illegal (punishable by up to 5 years at hard labor), to sell, lend, or give away any “obscene” publication, or article used for contraception or abortion.^[4] Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1922 forbade the importation of any contraceptive information or means.^[5]

In addition to these federal laws, about half of the states enacted laws related to the federal Comstock laws. These state laws are considered by Dennett ^[1] to also be “Comstock laws”.

The laws were named after its chief proponent, Anthony Comstock. Comstock received a commission from the Postmaster General to serve as a special agent for the U.S. Postal Services.^[4]

Numerous failed attempts were made to repeal or modify these laws and eventually, many of them (or portions of them) were declared unconstitutional. In 1919 in a law journal, a judge, after reviewing the various laws (especially state laws) called the set of them “haphazard and capricious” and lacking “any clear, broad, well-defined principle or purpose”.^[6]

 

Objective of the laws

The Comstock Act targeted pornography, contraceptive equipment, and such educational materials as descriptions of contraceptive methods and other reproductive health-related materials. Of particular note were advertisements for abortifacients found in penny papers, which offered pills to women as treatment for “obstruction of their monthly periods.”^[4]

Comstock’s ideas of what is “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” were quite broad. During his time of greatest power, some anatomy textbooks were prohibited from being sent to medical students by the United States Postal Service.^[5]

Contraception

In 1915, architect William Sanger was charged under the New York law against disseminating contraceptive information.^[13] His wife Margaret Sanger was similarly charged in 1915 for her work The Woman Rebel. Sanger circulated this work through the U.S. postal service, effectively violating the Comstock Law. On appeal, her conviction was reversed on the grounds that contraceptive devices could legally be promoted for the cure and prevention of disease.^[14]

The prohibition of devices advertised for the explicit purpose of birth control was not overturned for another eighteen years. During World War I, U.S. servicemen were the only members of the Allied forces sent overseas without condoms.^[15]

In 1932, Sanger arranged for a shipment of diaphragms to be mailed from Japan to a sympathetic doctor in New York City. When U.S. customs confiscated the package as illegal contraceptive devices, Sanger helped file a lawsuit. In 1936, a federal appeals court ruled in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries that the federal government could not interfere with doctors providing contraception to their patients.^[14]

 

For the law

Obscenity arguments

As the chief proprietor of the law, many of Comstock’s justifications revolved around the effects that all of the obscene literature would have on children. He argued that the corruption in the schools and in the home were because of all of the obscene literature that the youth had easy access to. He also argued that the vast amounts of “obscenity” would cause for the sanctity of marriage to be corrupted along with the power of the church. Comstock mainly focused on voicing his concerns to families of privilege; this is how he gained a majority of his support.^[29]

Clinton L. Merrian, who introduced the bill to the House of Representatives, played on the idea that obscenity was a direct threat to manhood and that in order to protect the children, obscene materials needed to be confiscated.^[29]

Contraception arguments

The Comstock laws in an alleged “haphazard and capricious” ^[6] manner restricted contraception. It was argued that this would help prevent “illicit” sexual relations between unmarried persons since without contraception, the unmarried would be deterred from having sex due to the possibility of undesired pregnancy. When the Birth Control Movement in the mid 1920s was attempting to get Congress to eliminate birth control restrictions from the federal Comstock laws, Mary Dennett (the author of “Birth Control Laws …” 1926) interviewed a (non-typical) congressman who strongly supported retention of the birth control restrictions in the Comstock laws. He put it this way (avoiding any use of the words “sex” or “pregnancy”):^[30] “Think how it would be that night, when the young girl goes out with the boy, and she can’t help thinking, what difference will it make if nothing ever shows? And then she will forget all about character, and will let herself go, whereas if she was afraid of the practical results, she wouldn’t. Yes, there are thousands of girls that are held back just that way.”

To this Mary Dennet asked if he didn’t know that there was such a lot of contraceptive knowledge in circulation — and most of it bad too— that the number of girls that could be protected by their ignorance was diminishing every hour, and that there was absolutely no effort at enforcement of the laws? He said people argued that way about enforcing the prohibition laws, but he thought it (Comstock laws re contraception) ought to be enforced and could be.

Regarding older, never-married women having sex with contraception, the same congressman talking about a group of women clerks, whose housing was visible through his office window: “a lot of them are confirmed old maids too, but I wouldn’t trust what would happen to them, if they all knew they could do what they pleased and no one would be the wiser.” Thus he’s implying that the Comstock laws are good because they deter not only young girls from having premarital sex but deter old-maids (derogatory term for older never-married women) from sexual relations.

Father Charles Coughlin a famous radio priest”^[31] argued before a congressional committee in 1934 that even use of contraception by a married couple was wrong. He characterized such non-productive sex as “legalized prostitution. There was heckling from the audience and one woman called out to Coughlin “You’re ridiculous”.

Opposition to the laws

1878 repeal attempt

Three years after the enactment of the federal law, a petition was circulated by the National Liberal League for it’s repeal, signed by 40 to 70 thousand people in 1876 ^[32] Although the press of the country favored repeal, repeal didn’t happen partly due to Comstock showing samples of obscenity (pornography) to Congressmen (on the committee that the repeal act was referred to). This pornography had been distributed by the mails to youth, etc. and Comstock’s samples were described as a “collection of smutty circulars describing sex depravity”.^[33]

Birth control movement failures

After this failure to repeal, there was no concerted effort to change the laws until the start of the Birth control movement in the United States in 1914 led by Margaret Sanger.^[34] Between 1917 and 1925 Bills were introduced in California (1917),^[35] New York (1917, 1921,3,4,5),^[36] Connecticut (1923, 1925) ^[37]), and New Jersey (1925)^[38] to make the anti-birth control parts of the state laws less restrictive. In both California and Connecticut the anti-birth control part of the law would be simply eliminated which in Connecticut would mean that its outlawing of contraception would be revoked. All these state attempts at change failed to come to a vote so no change happened.

There were also failed attempts to eliminate the restrictions on birth control from the federal laws, the first starting in 1919 where the bill’s supposed sponsor failed to introduce the bill. In 1923 a bill was sent to the Judiciary Committee (of Congress). While it was thought that the majority of this committee favored the bill, they evaded voting on it.^[39] There were also more attempts at change in the 1920s.

Eugenics argument

In response to the argument that facilitating contraception would encourage promiscuity, a rebuttal was that if such persons used contraception, there would tend to be fewer people like them since fewer people would inherit inclinations towards promiscuity.^[40]

Free Love

The Free Love Movement was one group that made sustained attempts to repeal the Comstock Laws and discredit anything related to the anti-vice movement. This movement despised the law because they believed it embodied the sexual oppression of women. The free-lovers argued that neither the church nor the state had the right to regulate an individual’s sexual relations and that women were sexually enslaved by the institution of marriage. This made the free-lovers the number one target of Comstock and his crusade against obscenity.^[29]

 

Zen And The Art of Vagina Maintenance – NSFWCorp

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/motorcycle-abortions/

 

Back in May, the North Carolina House passed a bill that would come to be known as the “Family, Faith, and Freedom Protection Act,” HB695. The bill made headlines as a Sharia law ban: it prohibited the recognition of Islamic Sharia law, or any other foreign law, in NC courts. I’m not really sure why a bill is needed to protect North Carolinians from the application of foreign law in North Carolina courtrooms but hey, that’s just me.

The bill returned to the headlines with a vengeance last week when – without any notice – the Senate passed a spruced up version. This version featured a slew of extreme abortion restrictions that clung to the xenophobic bill like legislative dingleberries. See, on Tuesday July 2, during an evening committee meeting right before the holiday, Senate Republicians crammed several bills in differing states of the legislative process onto HB695. They then rushed it to approval in less than twenty-four hours. (I guess nothing says America the Free like an omnibus bill written to protect citizens from foreign religious law while simultaneously forcing domestic religious law into all the uteri at the BBQ.)

 

The added abortion provisions included: a “conscience protection” that would allow all healthcare personnel to opt out of providing abortions or abortion-related services, severe abortion funding limits, a ban on sex-selective abortions, and the requirements that a doctor remain in the room for the entire abortion procedure, that providers have hospital transfer agreements, and that facilities meet the standards and licensing procedures similar to ambulatory, or outpatient surgical centers. (You can see a nice breakdown of them here.) These provisions, while seemingly benign on paper, would shut down all healthcare centers that provide abortions in the state of North Carolina, save for one lone clinic in Asheville. There was no public notice. No experts were called to testify. People were blindsided.

 

…after the weekend HR 695 did not go straight back to the House for concurrence; rather, in an unusual move, it went to committee for a two-hour public hearing. The House Health and Human Services Committee discussed the additions to the bill for an hour, leaving the rest of the time for expert and public comment. During the meeting, the bill’s proponents indignantly asserted that the bill’s amendments were for the sole purpose of keeping women safer by increasing regulations on abortion providers to generate a higher standard of care.

 

…House Majority Leader Paul Stam had already publicly confirmed that one of the purposes of the bill was to limit abortions as severely as possible.

 

…They added abortion legislation to the Motorcycle Safety Act

 

…that morning Judiciary Subcommittee B approved a modified version of the Motorcycle Safety Act. And by modified, I mean, crammed with all of the extremely restrictive abortion provisions that before had been staplegunned to the anti-Sharia law bill. All of them. To a piece of legislation written to “increase penalties for unsafe movements by drivers that threaten the property and safety of motorcyclists.” Really. Except this slew of provisions had delicate little tweaks that reflected responses to some of the issues brought up in the previous day’s committee meeting. These tweaks included notably imprecise language and the fact that HB 695 was going to require a couple of years of study before the GOP could so firmly insert themselves deep into the collective uterus of North Carolina’s women.

 

Even other members of the committee were blindsided by the unannounced, underhanded tactic: Representative Joe Sam Queen took to his Twitter once the meeting started to announce, almost thirty minutes after the listed start time of the meeting, that he hadn’t known this was going to happen.

 

The Motorcycle Safety Act was a short, non-controversial bill, which might have made it ideal for tacking on a fuckton of restrictive, anti-woman, anti-healthcare demands. But seriously. North Carolina. This isn’t an omnibus, this is a fucking fixed-gear bike dragging a storage container of screaming women. Perhaps the hysterical reality that the #MotorcycleVagina hashtag even exists says more to that end than this entire article ever could.

 

…It should come as little surprise, then, that on Thursday, 11 July, the House passed the new-and-improved version the Senate’s motorcycle safety bill. The three-hour debate was a farce, an act of bureaucratic masturbation, a gesture of feigned respect to the democratic process. Those opposed to the bill presented a series of well-structured arguments, each focused on yet another problematic aspect of the controversial piece of legislation to a room full of empty seats, disinterested and uninvolved men, and a handful of Republicans tapped to argue the majority opinion with the ever popular methods of “refusal to deviate from talking points” and “emotional, conjecture-filled statements of dubious veracity.”

 

Senate tacks sweeping abortion legislation onto Sharia law bill – WRAL.com

http://www.wral.com/senate-tacks-sweeping-abortion-legislation-onto-sharia-law-bill/12621503/

 

Among the abortion provisions:

CONSCIENCE PROTECTION: Any health care provider, not just doctors and nurses, would be allowed to opt out of providing abortion-related services.

ABORTION FUNDING LIMITS: The bill would prohibit health plans offered on the federal health care exchanges from offering abortion coverage. It would also prohibit state funds from being spent for abortions, except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest.

It would also prohibit city and county health plans from offering abortion coverage more extensive than the coverage offered to state employees. The State Health Plan does not cover abortions, except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother.

SEX-SELECTIVE ABORTIONS: The measure prohibits doctors from performing an abortion if they know the woman seeking it is doing so because of the gender of the baby.

“This is something we see happening across the country,” said Rep. Jacqueline Schaffer, R-Mecklenburg. She authored the original family law provisions in the bill as well as some of the abortion measures.

Reed disagreed, saying doctors cannot determine gender until five months of pregnancy without expensive tests. While sex-selection abortions are practiced in other parts of the world, they are not common in the United States, she said. The bill would create an adversarial relationship between doctors – who could be sued under the measure – and patients, she said, adding that it could also prompt some doctors to engage in racial profiling against women who are from parts of the world where sex-selection abortions are practiced.

DOCTORS: Doctors would be required to remain in the room for the entire abortion procedure, whether surgical or medical (chemically induced).

A medical abortion is performed by taking one pill, waiting two days and then taking a second pill that contracts the uterus. It’s unclear for how much of that process the physician would have to be present.

Roughly half the abortions performed in the state are medical abortions. The practical effect of the rule would be to limit the number of abortions any one doctor could provide.

“The information that I’ve seen is that (medical abortions) are even more dangerous than surgical procedures,” said Sen.

Warren Daniel, R-Burke, a primary sponsor of the Senate version of the bill.

Reed countered, “That’s not true, they’re extremely safe.”

TRANSFER AGREEMENTS: Abortion clinics would be required to have “transfer agreements” with local hospitals.

Reed said the measure would essentially limit how many clinics could operate because some hospitals would refuse to engage in such agreements. It’s meant to be similar to provisions in other states that require doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Hospitals, Reed said, would have little incentive to sign such agreements.

LICENSING: Abortions clinics would be required to go through a licensing process similar to that of outpatient surgical clinics.

Daniel said the provision “ensured we don’t have two different state standards” for outpatient clinics.

“These are really safety procedures,” he said.

Reed said clinics that offer procedures with higher risk than abortion, such as oral surgery or colonoscopies, don’t fall under such provisions.

“They’re really putting a barrier in the way to access,” Reed said, noting that it would make clinics more expensive to operate.

According to legislative staff, there is one abortion clinic in the state that meets the outpatient surgical standard. Reed said Planned Parenthood’s four North Carolina clinics do not meet the standard.

The amended bill tentatively passed the full Senate on Tuesday. The Senate will debate the measure again Wednesday before returning the bill to the House.

On the Senate floor, Democrats objected to the measure being pushed through so unexpectedly.

“This bill and this process is not worthy of this chamber,” said Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake.

Stein said the process circumvented the public’s ability to learn about legislation before it was discussed and voted on.

 

North Carolina Motorcycle Abortion Bill -Rewire.com

https://rewire.news/legislative-tracker/law/north-carolina-motorcycle-abortion-bill/

 

North Carolina Motorcycle Abortion Bill (SB 353)

This law was last updated on Oct 12, 2016

 

State

North Carolina

Number

SB 353

Status

Current

Proposed

Mar 19, 2013

Topics

Conscience and Refusal Clauses, Informed Consent, Insurance Coverage, Religious Freedom, Sex- or Race-Selective Bans, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, Waiting Periods and Forced Counseling

Full Bill Text

www.ncga.state.nc.us

SUMMARY

This bill contains multiple abortion restrictions: (1) health-care conscience protection; (2) prohibition of abortion coverage under health-care plans offered through a health insurance exchange; (3) sex-selective abortion ban; and (4) amendment to Women’s Right to Know Act, including a telemedicine abortion ban; (5) ambulatory surgical center requirement.

Conscience Clause

This provision permits physicians, nurses, and health-care providers who state an objection on moral, ethical, or religious grounds to refuse to participate in a medical procedure that results in an abortion. The refusal cannot be the basis of any damages or disciplinary action against the physician, nurse, or health-care provider.

Insurance Coverage

A health plan offered under the Affordable Care Act is prohibited from providing coverage for abortion except in cases of rape or incest, or if the life of the mother is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.

Sex-Selective Abortion Ban

Bans abortion when the sex of the fetus is a “significant factor” in seeking the abortion.

Informed Consent/Telemedicine Ban

Amends Women’s Right to Know Act to require Department of Health to make available on the State website a list of resources a woman may contact upon receiving information from the physician who performed the ultrasound that the fetus may have a disability or serious abnormality.

The bill also requires that a physician performing a surgical abortion be present during the performance of the abortion procedure, and that a physician prescribing or dispensing abortion-inducing drugs be physically present in the same room as the patient when the drug is first administered to the patient.

Codified at G.S. 90-21.83.

Ambulatory Surgical Center Requirement

The bill authorizes the Department of Health to choose which of the licensing requirements for ambulatory surgical centers should be applied to abortion clinics. The rules must protect patient privacy, provide quality assurance, and ensure that patients with complications receive the necessary medical attention, while not unduly restricting access.

 

America’s 10 most affluent neighborhoods – no.9 – Short Hills, New Jersey – Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/pictures/eddf45kekj/no-9-short-hills-new-jersey/#74098c20ad5d

 

Short Hills, New Jersey – Data USA

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/short-hills-nj/

 

The median household income in Short Hills, NJ was $250,001 in 2015

 

Highest Average Salaries by Race & Ethnicity

1. Asian$121,579±$37,645
2. White$111,276±$12,276
3. Two or more races$101,163±$55,477

In 2015 the highest paid race/ethnicity of workers in Essex County (Southwest) PUMA, NJ were Asian with an average salary of $121,579. They got paid 1.09 times more than the next closest race/ethnicity group, White, with an average salary of $111,276.

Poverty

 

1.87% of the population in Short Hills, NJ (12,831 people) live below the poverty line, which is lower than the national average of 14.7%.

 

Poverty by Race & Ethnicity

Largest race or ethnicity living in poverty

1. White220±127
2. Asian20±23
3. American IndianN/A ±19

The most common race or ethnicity living below the poverty line in Short Hills, NJ is White, followed by Asian and American Indian.

The Census Bureau uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. If a family’s total income is less than the family’s threshold, then that family and every individual in it is considered in poverty.

 

Compared to other census places, Short Hills, NJ has an unusually high number of residents working in Legal; Health Practitioners; and Life, Physical, & Social Science.

 

Compared to other census places, Short Hills, NJ has an unusually high number of Finance & Insurance; Real Estate, Rental & Leasing; and Professional, Scientific, Tech Services.

 

The most common industries in Short Hills, NJ by number of employees are Finance & Insurance; Professional, Scientific, Tech Services; and Healthcare & Social Assistance.

 

The highest paying industries in Short Hills, NJ, by median earnings, are Finance & Insurance; Professional, Scientific, Tech Services; and Real Estate, Rental & Leasing.

 

The highest paid jobs held by residents of Short Hills, NJ, by median earnings, are Legal; Management; and Sales.

 

Global Diversity

Showing data for Essex County (Southwest) PUMA, NJ.

Most common origin

1. India
2. China
3. Haiti

relatively high origin

1. Estonia
2. Uruguay
3. Cyprus

The most common birthplace for the residents of Essex County (Southwest) PUMA, NJ in 2015 was India with 2,311 immigrants, followed by China with 1,978 and Haiti with 1,794.

Race & Ethnicity

Most common

1. White9,907±468
2. Asian2,264±268
3. Hispanic380±167

In 2015, there were 4.38 time more White residents (9,907 people) in Short Hills, NJ than any other race or ethnicity. This is followed by Asian with 2,264 and Hispanic with 380.

Non-English Speakers

most common languages

1. Chinese
2. Russian
3. Hindi

relatively high languages

1. Russian
2. Hindi
3. Chinese

21.9% of Short Hills, NJ citizens are speakers of a non-English language, which is higher than the national average of 21%. The most common language spoken in Short Hills, NJ in 2015, other than English, was Chinese with 6.75% of the overall population being native speakers. This was followed by Russian with 2.54% and Hindi with 1.75%.

Commuter Transportation

Most common method of travel

1. Drove Alone58.5%
2. Public Transit27.1%
3. Work at Home9.4%

The largest share of workers in Short Hills, NJ Drove Alone to work in 2015, followed by those who Public Transit and Work at Home.

 

 

Short Hills, New Jersey – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Hills,_New_Jersey

 

Short Hills is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) located within Millburn Township, in Essex County, New Jersey, United States.^[7][8] It is a popular commuter town for residents who work in New York City.

It is notable for being an affluent community. The median listing price of its homes was $1.75 million in February 2012, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, citing data from Zillow.^[9] In 2014, Time magazine named it the “Richest Town in America” with seven in ten household incomes above $150,000 per year, the highest percentage in the United States.^[10][11] As of the 2010 United States Census, the CDP’s population was 13,165.^[3]

 

The Census Bureau’s 2006-2010 American Community Survey showed that (in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars) median household income was $211,989

 

Short Hills began as a planned community, when Stewart Hartshorn (who became wealthy from developing, perfecting and manufacturing the self-acting shade roller) purchased 13 acres (53,000 m²) of land in Millburn Township, near the present Hobart Avenue, Parsonage Hill Road, and Chatham Road. Hartshorn’s purpose was to create “a harmonious community for people who appreciated nature,” and “where natural beauty would not be destroyed by real estate developments, and where people of congenial tastes could dwell together.” He later increased his land holdings to 56 acres (230,000 m²) for himself and 1,552 acres (6.28 km²) for the whole village, with each plot not owned by Hartshorn being no larger than 1/2 acre.

Hartshorn chose the name “Short Hills” because it reflected the topography of the region, and also because the local Lenape Native Americans used that same name to describe the region. One local resident suggested that he call his village “Hartshornville,” but he refused, quietly content with Short Hills sharing his initials.

Railroad and postal connections

Short Hills Station, Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad ca. 1895

Hartshorn situated his “ideal town” near enough to a railroad to allow for an easy commute to Hoboken and, from there, to New York City. Hence, his decision in 1879 to build, at his own expense, a railroad station along the original Morris and Essex Railroad line. He also persuaded the United States Post Office to open a branch in his new railroad station in 1880, and in fact, the Post Office has always had a presence in Short Hills from that day and its own ZIP Code, 07078.

 

Buffer zones

Hartshorn deliberately preserved strips of land along the railroad right-of-way from any development west of Old Short Hills Road. These strips separate Hobart Avenue to the north, and Chatham Road to the south, from the railway line. The only structure that has ever stood directly adjacent to the line is the railroad station. In 1944, the Hartshorn family also donated Crescent Park to Millburn Township, directly across from the station, with the stipulation that the park always remain open to the public.

Common elements

After seventeen houses were erected, Hartshorn turned his attention to other “common elements.” These included a Music Hall, which later became the Short Hills Racquets Club. However, Short Hills remains a relatively quiet place.

Stewart Hartshorn died in 1937 at the age of 97. His daughter Cora survived him, wrote her own history of the hamlet, and helped establish the Arboretum that bears her name.^[12]

Later events

In 1968 Temple B’nai Jeshurun relocated from Newark, NJ, to a 21-acre (8.5 ha) site in Short Hills. It is the oldest Reform Jewish congregation in New Jersey and, with 1,100 member families, one of the largest Jewish congregations in the state at the time of the move. Most of the property was purchased from Congressman Robert Kean, father of future New Jersey governor Thomas Kean. The land had been given to Kean’s family by King George III of the United Kingdom.^[13][14]

 

Present day

The opening of the Kearny Connection in 1996, establishing direct rail service to Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan, has enhanced real-estate values immensely.

Short Hills is home to many senior executives and controlling stockholders of some of the largest corporations in the United States and their families. The median family income was over $200,000.^[17] Dun & Bradstreet has its headquarters in Short Hills.^[18]

 

Short Hills has four K-5 elementary schools. Three are part of the Millburn Township Public Schools: Deerfield Elementary School,^[19] Glenwood Elementary School,^[20] and Hartshorn Elementary School.^[21] The fourth is The Pingry School Lower Campus. Students move on to complete their public school education at Millburn Middle School^[22] for grades 6–8 and Millburn High School for grades 9–12. Short Hills is also home to the Far Brook School, a private day school serving students in nursery through eighth grade.^[23]

Though Short Hills has its own railroad station and post-office branch, it does not have an independent government. It remains today a part of the Township of Millburn, as it has been since its inception. Short Hills has a “downtown” business area that is smaller than downtown Millburn. Located along Chatham Road near the Short Hills railroad station, it includes the post office, a pharmacy, small eateries and specialty shops. The train station waiting room operates and a bar and grill during the evening hours and a newsstand and ticket agent are present from early morning hours until noon.

Short Hills is also home to the Short Hills Club, Racquets Club of Short Hills, and the main portion of Canoe Brook Country Club.

 

Demographics

According to an analysis in Time magazine in 2014, Short Hills is the wealthiest community in the United States in terms of having the highest percentage of households (69%) with incomes above $150,000 per year.^[10][26] According to Forbes magazine, the median income in Short Hills is $229,222.^[27]

Census 2010

As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 13,165 people, 4,146 households, and 3,682 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 2,533.5 per square mile (978.2/km²). There were 4,292 housing units at an average density of 826.0 per square mile (318.9/km²). The racial makeup of the CDP was 81.44% (10,721) White, 0.96% (127) Black or African American, 0.01% (1) Native American, 15.48% (2,038) Asian, 0.02% (2) Pacific Islander, 0.26% (34) from other races, and 1.84% (242) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.40% (316) of the population.^[3]

 

The Census Bureau’s 2006-2010 American Community Survey showed that (in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars) median household income was $211,989 (with a margin of error of +/- $13,467) and the median family income was $227,262 (+/- $22,938). Males had a median income of $192,625 (+/- $33,436) versus $98,214 (+/- $12,561) for females. The per capita income for the CDP was $100,875 (+/- $7,868). About 0.6% of families and 0.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 0.7% of those under age 18 and 0.0% of those age 65 or over.^[28]

Notable people

See also: Category:People from Millburn, New Jersey.

People who were born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Short Hills include:

• Lee Bickmore (1908–1986), chairman of the board and CEO of Nabisco.^[30]
• Ralph Cicerone (1943-2016) atmospheric scientist and administrator, who served as president of the National Academy of Sciences.^[31]
• Richard Coogan (1914–2014), actor best known for playing the lead role in Captain Video and His Video Rangers.^[32]
• Leon G. Cooperman (born 1943), businessman, investor and philanthropist who is chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, Inc.^[33]
• Joseph P. Day, early land auctioneer and real-estate broker.^[34]
• John Ferolito, founder and owner of Arizona Beverage Company.^[35]
• Anne Hathaway (born 1982), actress.^[36]
• Herbert G. Hopwood (1898–1966) four-star admiral in the United States Navy.^[37]
• Peter Kellogg (born 1943), director of the Wall Street investment firm Spear, Leeds & Kellogg.^[38]
• Joe Kernen (born 1956), CNBC news anchor and host of Squawk Box.^[39]
• Igor Larionov (born 1960), center who played for the New Jersey Devils.^[40]
• Robert D. Marcus, CEO of Time Warner Cable.^[41]
• Billy McFarland (born 1991), entrepreneur and founder of the Fyre Festival.^[42]
• John C. McGinley (born 1959), actor known for his role playing Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs.^[43]
• Belva Plain (1919–2010), author.^[44]
• Brian Rolston (born 1973), professional hockey player for the New Jersey Devils.^[45]
• Patti Stanger (born 1961), matchmaker and producer of Millionaire Matchmaker.^[46]
• Peter Van Sant (born 1953), reporter 48 Hours.^[47]
• Wang Yung-ching (1917–2008), former CEO and co-founder of Formosa Plastics Group.^[48]
• Thomas Watson Jr. (1914-1993), second President of IBM and United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union.^[49]
• Zygi Wilf (born 1950), owner of the Minnesota Vikings.^[50]
• Rachel Zoe (born 1971), fashion stylist.^[51]
• Alan Zweibel (born 1950), producer and writer for stage and television productions such as Saturday Night Live.^[52]

Points of interest

• Cora Hartshorn Arboretum and Bird Sanctuary
• Greenwood Gardens
• The Mall at Short Hills – a high-end mall with a gross leasable area of 1,342,000 ft² (120,780 m²),^[53] placing it among the ten largest shopping malls in New Jersey. The mall is anchored by Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom.
• Paper Mill Playhouse
• Old Short Hills Park
• Gero Park – Swimming, Baseball, Municipal Golf Course

 

Peter Kellogg – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kellogg

 

Personal

Peter attended Babson College in Wellesley, MA and the Berkshire School in Sheffield, MA. He is the son of James Crane Kellogg, III of Wall Street specialist firm Spear, Leeds & Kellogg; he joined his father’s firm in 1967 after working at Dominick & Dominick. His fortune is primarily from his successful leadership of Spear, Leeds & Kellogg in the 1980s through to its sale in 2000 to Goldman Sachs for a reported $6.5 billion.^[2] Kellogg attended Babson College, but later dropped out.

Kellogg spends his summers in Mantoloking, New Jersey.

NYSE

The NASD had publicly announced on November 3, 2003 that it “filed a disciplinary action against Peter Kellogg alleging that he directed fraudulent wash trades and matched trades between four accounts he controlled”. Wash sales are trades of securities without a real change in ownership of the securities traded. Matched orders are orders to buy or sell securities that are entered with knowledge that a matching order on the opposite side has been or will be entered.^[3]

The NASD subsequently announced on August 6, 2004 that an NASD panel convened to hear the case dismissed this complaint against Kellogg alleging that he engaged in fraudulent wash and matched trades during August 2001. The public notice stated that “The Hearing Panel found that there was no evidence that Kellogg carried out the four transactions at issue with the intention to defraud, manipulate or deceive. Rather, the panel found that Kellogg conducted the transactions for legitimate business and tax purposes.”^[4]

AMEX

Spear, Leeds was fined $1 million in 2002 by the AMEX and ordered to conduct a review of the supervision of its clearance and specialist operations on the AMEX floor.^[5] This came in the wake of a violation of AMEX trading rules in the mid-1990s by a Spear Leeds employee who the AMEX found was not properly supervised by the firm. The employee, who was fined $100,000 and barred from the industry,^[6] was reported in the news media^[7] to have testified that his actions were known to senior Spear Leeds officials, including Kellogg.

 

Taxes

Kellogg is the controlling shareholder of IAT Reinsurance Co. which has received media attention in the past for its former use of a U.S. law exempting small insurance companies from paying federal tax. Congress exempted insurance companies from taxes if they collected less than $350,000 in annual premiums; IAT qualified for this exemption at one time.^[8]

 

from sec.gov

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/16859/000090266413003868/p13-2057exhibit2.htm

 

Peter R. Kellogg, 71, is currently the Chief Executive Officer of IAT Reinsurance Company Ltd. Mr. Kellogg has been the Senior Managing Director of Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, one of the largest market making and securities clearing firms in the U.S., until 2000, when it was acquired by Goldman Sachs. Mr. Kellogg has been the Senior Advisory Director of Goldman Sachs/Spear, Leeds & Kellogg. Mr. Kellogg served as the Chairman of Ziegler Companies Inc. since 2003 and a director of Nam Tai Electronics since 2000. Mr. Kellogg also serves as a director of the Berkshire School and the U.S. Olympic Ski Team. Previously, Mr. Kellogg served on the board of Advest Group, MCM Corporation, Cityfed Financial Corp. and Interstate Air Taxi Inc, Interstate/Johnson Lane, Inc.

 

James C. Kellog III – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Kellogg_III

 

James C. Kellogg III (1915–1980) was Chairman of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange.

Kellogg attended the Pingry School, graduating in the class of 1933.^[1] He became the youngest member of the NYSE, purchasing his seat at age 21 in 1936, and the youngest person to be elected Chairman, a position he held from 1956 to 1958.^[2] Mr. Kellogg was senior partner in the Wall Street specialty firm of Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, a position later held by his son Peter Kellogg. The firm was acquired by Goldman Sachs in November, 2000 in a deal valued at US $6.5 billion.^[3]

Kellogg was a longtime resident of Elizabeth and Bay Head, New Jersey and was active in local affairs.^[4] James Kellogg was a nephew of industrialist M.W. Kellogg. Mr. Kellogg was a Democratic nominee for Union County Freeholder in 1954, a trustee of Children’s Specialized Hospital and President of the Elizabeth Town & Country Club. He was also a trustee of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York and a member of the finance committee of his alma mater, Williams College.^[2]

 

John Kean ( New Jersey ) – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kean_(New_Jersey)

 

John Kean (December 4, 1852 – November 4, 1914) was an American lawyer, banker and Republican Party politician from Elizabeth, New Jersey. He represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate from 1899 to 1911 and served two separate terms in the United States House of Representatives, from 1883 to 1885, and from 1887 to 1889. A member of the Kean family of politicians, his great-grandfather, John Kean, had been a delegate to the Continental Congress for South Carolina, his brother was US Senator Hamilton Fish Kean, his nephew was US Representative Robert Winthrop Kean and his great-nephew was Governor Thomas Kean.

 

He worked in banking and manufacturing before entering politics. He was elected as a Republican to the 48th United States Congress (March 4, 1883 – March 3, 1885) to represent New Jersey’s 3rd congressional district, but was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1884.

After politics, he re-engaged in banking in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Keansburg, New Jersey is named in honor of John Kean. In 1884, Kean played a key part in helping the town, at the time called Granville, to obtain its first post office. During that year, the name Keansburg was adopted.^[2]

 

Thomas Kean (Sr.) – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kean

                                          

Thomas Howard “Tom” Kean Sr. (/ˈkeɪn/;^[1] born April 21, 1935) is an American businessman and politician, who served as the 48th Governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990. Kean is best known globally, however, for his 2002 appointment as Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, widely known as the 9/11 Commission, which was responsible for investigating the causes of the September 11, 2001 attacks and providing recommendations to prevent future terrorist attacks. He was appointed to this post by U.S. President George W. Bush. Upon the completion of his second term as governor, he served as the president of Drew University for 15 years, until his retirement in 2005.

Early life and education

Kean was born in New York City to a long line of New Jersey politicians. His mother was Elizabeth (Howard) and his father, Robert Kean, was a U.S. Representative. His grandfather Hamilton Fish Kean and great-uncle John Kean both served as U.S. Senators. His second great-uncle was Hamilton Fish, a U.S. Senator, governor of New York, and Secretary of State. Kean’s relative, William Livingston, was a delegate to the Continental Congress and the first governor of New Jersey.^[2]

Kean was initially educated at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia When he reached the fourth grade, he entered St. Albans School. In 1946, at the age of eleven, his parents then enrolled him at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts, the alma mater of his father and two older brothers.^[3]

After graduating from St. Mark’s, he attended Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where he received his B.A. in history in 1957 and participated in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.^[4] After working on his father’s unsuccessful senatorial campaign, and as a history teacher for three years at St. Mark’s School, Kean attended Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City and earned his M.A. in history.^[2]

Kean was a longtime resident of Livingston, New Jersey.^[5]

New Jersey political career

Originally a teacher of history and government, Kean was elected, in 1967, as a Republican to the New Jersey General Assembly. He ran with Philip Kaltenbacher, a Short Hills Republican who had served as an aide to Assemblyman Irwin Kimmelman in 1964 through 1966. (Kimmelman would later serve as Attorney General in Kean’s administration.) In the Republican primary, Kean and Kaltenbacher defeated Donald Fitz Maurice, Vivian Tompkins Lange, the sister of former U.S. Attorney William F. Tompkins, and Joseph Shanahan.^[6]

At the start of the Assembly session in 1972, Democratic leadership had wanted to name S. Howard Woodson of Trenton as Speaker, until Assemblyman David Friedland made a deal as one of four Democrats who voted to give the minority Republicans control of the General Assembly, electing Kean as Assembly Speaker. Woodson would have been the Assembly’s first African American Speaker, and charges of racism were leveled by fellow Democrats against Friedland.^[7] In the next Assembly, in 1974, the Democrats united behind Woodson for Speaker; Kean then became the minority leader of the Assembly. In 1973, he briefly served as acting New Jersey governor.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Kean served as Gerald Ford‘s campaign manager for the state of New Jersey.^[2]

Bush appoints Kean

Bush initially selected former Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger to head the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission). But on December 13, 2002, Kissinger resigned as the Commission’s Chairman, under pressure because of potential conflicts with his global business consultancy.

Noting Kean’s post-gubernatorial foreign policy involvement and his reputation as a consensus-oriented political leader, Bush nominated Kean to succeed Kissinger in leading the important and politically sensitive Commission.^[31] The Commission is widely considered the most important independent U.S. government commission since the Warren Commission, which was charged with investigating the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and perhaps the most important in American history given its mammoth responsibility for investigating the causes of the first foreign attack on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812, and recommending steps to defend the U.S. from future attacks. Kean’s appointment to head the Commission, and later the work and final report of the Commission, drew substantial global attention.

 

July 2007 al-Qaeda video cites Kean comments on al-Qaeda’s strength

On July 4, 2007, the terrorist group al-Qaeda publicly released a video, featuring its Deputy Chief Ayman al-Zawahri urging all Muslims to unite in a holy war against the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere. The 95-minute video was discovered and released by U.S. intelligence sources and, in addition to al-Zawahri’s comments, prominently featured video excerpts of Kean citing al-Qaeda as one of the most formidable security threats that the U.S. has ever confronted, presumably with the intention of bolstering the morale of al-Qaeda supporters through Kean’s citation of the magnitude of the movement’s strength and threat. Comments by Kean cited on the video include a reference to the fact that al-Qaeda remains as strong in 2007 as it was before the September 11, 2001, attacks.^{[citation needed]}

The video also appeared to validate that al-Qaeda was closely monitoring U.S. political developments, especially including the work of the September 11 Commission, which Kean chaired. It also suggested that al-Qaeda intended to focus not just on engaging the West in Iraq, but also in other countries. “As for the second half of the long-term plan,” al-Zawahri says on the video, “it consists of hurrying to the fields of Jihad like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia for Jihadi preparation and training.”

 

Corporate boards

Kean has served as chairman of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest health philanthropy; the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; Educate America; the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation; MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership and the Newark Alliance. He has sat on corporate boards including ARAMARK, UnitedHealth Group, Hess Corporation, Pepsi Bottling Group, CIT Group Incorporated, and Franklin Templeton Investments.^{[15][16][39][40]}

In 2006, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating the conduct of the United Health Group’s management and directors. Additionally, the Internal Revenue Service and prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York subpoenaed documents from the company. The investigations came to light after a series of probing articles in The Wall Street Journal in May 2006, which reported on the apparent backdating of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock options by UnitedHealth Group’s management. The backdating allegedly occurred with the knowledge and approval of the directors, including Kean, who sat on the company’s compensation committee during three crucial years, according to the Journal. Major shareholders have filed lawsuits accusing Kean and the other directors of failing in their fiduciary duty.^[41][42]

 

Awards

Kean holds more than 30 honorary degrees, and numerous awards from environmental and educational organizations. In addition to those noted above, these include,^[43][44][45]

• The Four Freedoms Award
• The NAACP Man of the Year Award
• The Senator John Heinz Award for Public Service
• The Global Interdependence Center’s Frederick Heldring Global Leadership Award
• The Voice of September 11 Building Bridges Award
• The National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Achievement Award
• The Christopher Reeve Foundation’s Visionary Leadership Award
• Jefferson Award for Public Service (American Institute for Public Service)

 

Kean University

 

Kean University of New Jersey in Union Township, Union County, New Jersey is named after the Kean political dynasty. In 1958, the school, then named Newark State College, moved from Newark, New Jersey to the Kean family estate in Union Township. The university is located at the ancestral home of the Kean and William Livingston families at Liberty Hall (New Jersey), a National Historic Landmark on the Liberty Hall Campus of Kean University. In 1973, Newark State was renamed Kean College of New Jersey, in honor of the Kean family, and the school attained university status in 1997. The Keans maintain close ties with Liberty Hall and Kean University.

 

[[ Kevlexicon note: prepare for some #Mayflower #demo #plantationowners ]]

 

Robert Kean – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kean

 

Early years

Kean was born September 28, 1893 in Elberon, New Jersey. His father, Hamilton Fish Kean (1862-1941), was a United States Senator from New Jersey and his son, Thomas Kean, served two terms as the Governor of New Jersey. Robert Kean was the great-great-grandson of John Kean, a Delegate to the Continental Congress from South Carolina (1756-1795). His uncle, John Kean (1852-1914), was also a United States Senator from New Jersey. His grandson, Thomas Kean, Jr., is presently the Minority Leader of the New Jersey State Senate. His mother, Katherine Taylor Winthrop (1866-1943), was a descendant of John Winthrop, a wealthy English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first major settlement in what is now New England after Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of migrants from England in 1630, and served as governor for 12 of the colony’s first 20 years of existence. Kean is also a descendant of William Livingston, the first Governor of New Jersey.

 

His maternal great-grandfather was Moses Taylor (1806-1882), a 19th-century New York merchant and banker and one of the wealthiest men of that century. At his death, his estate was reported to be worth $70 million, or about $1.7 billion in today’s dollars. He controlled the National City Bank of New York (later to become Citibank), the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad, the Moses Taylor & Co. import business, and he held numerous other investments in railroads and industry. His real estate holdings in New York brought him into close association with Boss Tweed of New York’s Tammany Hall, and in 1871, Taylor sat on a committee made up of New York’s most influential and successful businessmen and signed his name to a report that commended Tweed’s controller for his honesty and integrity, a report that was a notorious whitewash.

 

He was a 1911 graduate of St. Mark’s School and a 1915 graduate of Harvard University. He served in the National Guard and later in the United States Army during World War I earning the rank of lieutenant, the Silver Star, and the Distinguished Service Cross.^[2] He served under the command of General John J. Pershing.^[3]

Kean became involved in politics at a young age. In 1905, His uncle got him appointed as a U.S. Senate page so he could observe the Inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt. He attended the 1912 Republican National Convention, where he was escorted by his uncle’s secretary, Donald H. McLean, with whom he would late serve in Congress. Young Kean was a Roosevelt supporter, although his uncle and father had publicly endorsed the incumbent President, William Howard Taft. After he returned from the war, Kean took on campaign responsibilities on behalf of his father, who was the Republican National Committeeman from New Jersey from 1918 to 1928. He was heavily involved in his father’s successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1928, and his unsuccessful 1934 re-election bid.^[3]

After the war, Kean worked in investment banking in New Jersey and New York City, heading a firm known as Kean, Taylor & Company. He was a founder of the Livingston National Bank.^[2]

 

Moses Taylor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Taylor

 

Moses Taylor (January 11, 1806 – May 23, 1882) was a 19th-century New York merchant and banker and one of the wealthiest men of that century. At his death, his estate was reported to be worth $70 million, or about $1.7 billion in today’s dollars. He controlled the National City Bank of New York (later to become Citibank), the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad, the Moses Taylor & Co. import business, and he held numerous other investments in railroads and industry.

 

Early life and career

His parents were Jacob B. Taylor and Martha (Brant) Taylor. His father was a close associate of John Jacob Astor and acted as his agent by purchasing New York real estate while concealing Astor’s interest. Astor’s relationship with the Taylor family provided Moses with an early advantage.

Moses began his career at age 15 at J. D. Brown shippers, but soon moved to a clerk’s position in the firm of G. G. & S. Howland Company of New York, a shipping and import firm that traded with South America. By 1832, at age 26, Moses had sufficient wealth to marry, leave the Howland company, and start his own business as a sugar broker. As a sugar broker, Moses dealt with Cuban sugar growers, found buyers for their product, exchanged currency, and advised and assisted them with their investments. Although he never visited Cuba, Taylor’s friendship with Henry Augustus Coit, a prominent trader who was fluent in Spanish, allowed him to trade with the Cuban growers. Taylor soon discovered that loans and investments provided returns that were as good as, or better than, those from the sugar business. By the 1840s his income was largely from interest and investments. By 1847, Moses Taylor was listed as one of New York City’s 25 millionaires.

Banking and Investments

When the Panic of 1837 allowed Astor to take over what was then City Bank of New York (Citibank), he named Moses Taylor as director. Moses himself had doubled his fortune during the panic, and brought his growing financial connections to the bank. He acquired equity in the bank and in 1855 became its president, operating it largely in support of his and his associates’ businesses and investments.

In the 1850s Moses invested in iron and coal, and began purchasing interest in the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad. When the Panic of 1857 brought the railroad to the brink of bankruptcy, Moses obtained control by purchasing its outstanding shares for $5 a share. Within seven years the shares became worth $240, and the D. L. & W was one of the premier railroads of the country. By 1865 Moses held 20,000 shares worth almost $50 million.

 

Moses held an interest in the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company that Cyrus West Field had founded in 1854. Although its attempts to lay a cable across the Atlantic were initially unsuccessful, it eventually succeeded and in 1866 became the first transatlantic telegraph company.

Taylor also had controlling interest in the largest two of the seven gas companies in Manhattan that were merged (after his death) to form the Consolidated Gas Company in 1884, eventually becoming Consolidated Edison. Taylor’s Manhattan Gas Company and New York Gas Light Company were 45% of the merged Consolidated Gas.

Tammany Hall

After the Civil War, during which he assisted the Union with financing the war debt, he continued to invest in iron, railroads, and real estate. His real estate holdings in New York brought him into close association with Boss Tweed of New York’s Tammany Hall. Moses sat on a committee in 1871, made up of New York’s most influential and successful businessmen and signed his name to a report that commended Tweed’s controller for his honesty and integrity. This report was considered a notorious whitewash.

Legacy

Not noted for philanthropy during his life, at the end in 1882 Moses Taylor donated $250,000 to build a hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania to benefit his iron and coal workers, and workers of the D. L. & W railroad. The Moses Taylor hospital continues in operation today.

 

Descendants

Moses left his fortune to his wife and children: his son Henry Augustus Coit Taylor, his daughter Albertina Shelton Taylor Pyne, his daughter Katherine Wilson Taylor Winthrop, his daughter Mary Taylor Lewis, and his son George Campbell Taylor. Several prominent wealthy families owe a substantial portion of their fortunes to those inheritances.

Percy Rivington Pyne (1820–1895), an assistant to Moses, had married Moses’ daughter Albertina in 1855 and became president of City Bank upon his father-in-law’s death. The Pynes established a dynasty of bankers that survives to this day. Percy’s son Moses Taylor Pyne was a benefactor of Princeton University who supported its development from a college into a university and left an estate worth $100 million at his death in 1921.

The Winthrop family descendants of John Winthrop inherited the wealth of Moses’s daughter Katherine Wilson Taylor (1839–1925) who married Robert Winthrop (1833–1892). Katherine’s daughter married Hamilton Fish Kean (1862–1941), ancestor of the political Kean family which includes the former governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean.

Moses’ son Henry A. C. Taylor left an estate worth $50 million upon his death in 1921, just a few months before the death of his nephew Moses Taylor Pyne.

The Taylor family descendants of Moses’s son Henry Augustus Coit Taylor were prominent New York and Newport socialites.

 

[[ Kevlexicon note: the trolliness of making yourself a billionaire in today’s dollars off of plantation slavery and coal mines, then doing philanthropy post-mortem, funding a hospital for your coal mine workers. #Ekkkspat trolling.

 

Kevlexicon note: Notice there’s no mention of slavery in Moses Taylor’s wikipedia entry. #EkkkspatOmission v. #PovertyExplains. The Panic of 1837 occurred when economic elites secured funding from English & other European investors, by guaranteeing the securities thru state (public) bailout. Edward E. Baptist in “The Half Has Never Been Told” says it better: ]]

 

 

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism – Edward E. Baptist – Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664/ref=la_B001JSC2TY_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506393572&sr=1-1

 

“In two terms in office, Jackson had seen all his major goals fulfilled, and now a nation flooded by cotton and credit wallowed in economic high tide. On the crest of that boom, which enslavers and their political and financial allies themselves had engineered, rode triumphant the southwestern entrepreneurs in whose ranks Jackson was numbered. His administration’s enforcement of the 1830 Indian Removal Act had driven 60,000 of the cotton frontier’s original inhabitants across the Mississippi, opening 25 million acres (an area the size of Kentucky) for speculation and cotton production. His political allies had learned to steer the angry Potterizing resentments of overseers, small farmers, and public-land squatters into the channels of a new institutional party system. And that, in turn, helped southwestern entrepreneurs convert rank-and-file Jacksonian voters’ demands for an assault on the entrenched bank elites into a paradoxical flood of lending to enslavers and cotton speculators, this time pumped through innovative banks that entrepreneurs themselves controlled. The banks and their borrowers socialized all the risks on distant investors, the general white southern public, and, above all, enslaved people. The result was unprecedented growth. Even factoring in 1833’s Biddle-engineered recession, the economy expanded at an unprecedented rate: 6.6 percent per year between 1830 and 1836.

Jackson stil believed that gold and silver were the only real money and that banks were all scams. But if is precious-metal fetishism prevented him from admitting the role of pet banks in fueling rapid expansion, he did not object to taking credit for national prosperity. And just that morning, he had told representatives from the Republic of Texas that the United States was officially recognizing their independence. Observers believed this was the first step in uniting the fledgling slave owners’ nation to the much larger one to its east. So even wider fields beckoned, ripe for planting with the seeds of creative destruction. But actions have repercussions, and often not the ones for which the actors hope. Over the decade or so that followed 1836, enslavers’ overreach produced literal and figurative blood, pivoting the antebellum history of the United States in unexpected directions. (266)

 

…Perhaps the outgoing prsident was less sanguine about other recent developments. He was certainly eager to deny complicity in the flood of credit sloshing through the nation’s economy. But one of the main reasons why the supply of money in circulation rose by 50 percent between 1834 and 1836 was that he had freed the banks from scrutiny by his veto of the Monster Bank.

….Of course, if everyone was “awake,” it was hard to see how one could continue to buy low and sell high.

… Hurry out, they told him, before the “speculators and capitalists buy all the good cotton land. But Harrison feared that credit on slavery’s frontier was now coming too easy, that “the immense floods of paper money with which the country is inundated if not checked will give a fictitious value to property beyond anything ever known.” In fact, he noted, irrational increases in asset prices were already evident. He sent a group of his enslaved people out to Alabama so that a son located there could sell them off at current high prices. On the way back from a visit, Thomas Harrison traveled through Kentucky, where people there assured him that the price of their land would “never fall again.” Harrison wrote, “But this I do not believe. That the whole real property of a state so long settled should increase permanently in value 500 per cent in five years is impossible.”

…. The term “bubble” gets used to describe a situation in which an important asset has become wildly overvalued compared to realistic predictions of future returns. From 1800 onward, the price of slaves—the most important asset in the southern economy—had always tracked that of cotton, or, more specifically, the rate of individual productivity times the price of a pound of cotton. In 1834, however, slave prices detached themselves from that of cotton and soared upward on a new trajectory (see Figure 6.2). by the time Louisiana’s Jacob Bieller bought dozens of slaves on credit form Isaac Franklin and Rice Ballard in 1836, for instance, he paid over $1,500 each for the young men, more than twice the 1830 price, even though cotton prices had declined from a late-1834 peak to 1830 levels.

For decades before the financial crisis of 2008, most economists dogmatically insisted that the behavior of the market and its actors was inevitably rational. Yet a few brave souls insisted that the history of bubbles, booms, and crashes showed a clear historical record of mass irrational economic behavior. Throughout history, in fact, when three conditions occur at the same time, an asset bubble—irrationally high prices for some category of asset—usually emerges. Thomas Harrison was obsering all three. The first such condition is the elimination of market regulation. By 1836, Jackson’s administration had destroyed the B.U.S., and replaced it with nothing. Nor did states try to control how much money banks printed and lent. Meanwhile, the national Whig Party, once the campion of the B.U.S., now tried to eliminate regulation altogether by passing the Deposit Act of 1836. This act shifted public land revenues from western banks to eastern ones, allowing the latter to increase their lending. The Whigs also doubled the number of pet banks.

Lending by US banks had also increased dramatically since 1833 because of the second cause of bubbles: financial innovations that make it easier to expand the leverage of borrowers. C.A.P.L.-style bonds provided distant investors with opportunity to purchase shares in the income flows of thousands of slaves—to speculate, in effect, on future revenues generated by cotton and slaves. These securities drew cash into the southwestern region, inflating the value of all kinds of assets, especially enslaved “hands.”

But one more factor makes a bubble run wild, and that is the euphoric belief that the rules of economics have changed, that somehow “this time is different” and asset prices will not return to their mean. “We can see nothing in the prospects of the Country to make it likely that [positive forecasts] will be disappointed,” wrote merchants Byrne Hammand and Company in March 1836. “The whole Southern and Western country is in a most prosperous state and its products annually extending in a most extraordinary manner.” Southwestern entrepreneurs, particularly prone to aggressive, risk-taking behavior, suffered an especially bad case of the strain of this-time-is-different thinking called “disaster myopia,” meaning that they underestimated both the likelihood and the probable magnitude of financial corrections. Thus, a white migrant who wrote that the 1836 price of “fifteen hundred dollars [for] ordinary field hands” was “extravagant” assumed in the next breath that prices would rise further, and he hoped to take advantage: “Cuff, for instance, would command sixteen hundred.” Although “negroes are all out of character high,” wrote Henry Draft in 1835, “I see no prospect of their falling….I fully believe negroes will be higher.” He believed it, for he needed to believe it. “I don’t want them to fall at present, for I have Ten on hand,” whom he hoped to resell for a profit. (271)

 

“Everybody is in debt neck over ears,” wrote one young Alabama planter to his Connecticut father. The house of cards built by what Thomas Harrison called “the wild speculating notions of these Southern people” could collapse, and then “those who are making large contracts with all their show of wealth must come down.” Yet in late summer 1836, the editor of the commerce-dedicated newspaper New Orleans Price-Current told his reporters not to worry. True, there was a lot of debt hanging over Louisiana entrepreneurs and their banks: bank loans, dry goods “sold on credit to the upper country more than usual,” major infrastructure projects in and around New Orleans (gaslighting networks, railroads, levees, canals, steam-powered cotton presses), and “lands entered in the upper country and negroes purchased, to be paid out of the ensuing crop” of cotton, “for which the money has already been drawn from New Orleans.” That all added up to $23 million, leveraged on the steelyard beam againt the anticipated revenue to be generated from what hands were at that very moment picking in the fields. For “all this deficit,” insisted the Price-Current, “will soon be covered by the reciept of Cotton, Sugar, and the various products of the Western States, which we may assume with great safety will amount to at least sixy millions of dollars.” Thus, even though a slave trader wrote from Alabama in December that “business seems dull,” he added that “traders are not discouraged.” Cotton was at 16 cents a pound, but “it will bear 26 cents before the crop is in.”

There was much more cotton in 1836 than there had been in 1828. Over eight years of seedtime, the US government, the states, banks, private citizens, and foreign entities had collectively invested about $400 million, or one-third of all the value of all US economic activity in 1830, into expanding production on slavery’s frontier. This includes the price of 250,000 slaves moved, 48 million new acres of public land sold, the costs of Indian removals and wars, and the massive expansion of the southwestern financial infrastructure. The number of hands on cotton plantations expanded dramatically, and the need to repay loans only accelerated the whipping machine, collectively forcing the total picking that hands could accomplish just a little higher each day. In 1830, the United States made 732,000 bales. As the harvest kicked into high gear in the fall of 1836, men who made a living by gambling on cotton were predicting a deluge of 1.5 million bales, each one a 400-pound snowy semi-cube wrapped in canvas. This was 600 million pounds of clean cotton—or, expressed in a different way, more than six million person-days of picking under the hot sun.

European and North American economies had been expanding and people were buying more, but consumers’ demand for cotton goods simply could not keep up with this vast an increase in supply. In late summer 1834, the price of cotton at New Orleans was 18 cents per pound. After that, it began to decline, reaching 12 cents in early 1836. Unease with the slow downward trend in prices was beginning to shape decisions at the commanding heights of the transatlantic economy. By late 1836, Baring Brothers, the most influential commercial bank in the world, had been quietly restricting new investments for almost twelve months. And as that year’s bumper crop began to reach market, one speculator privately ruminated: “Will prices in Liverpool continue to hold their own? We think not.”

The White House was also quietly alarmed, in its case by the dramatic expansion of speculation in public lands. Purchases had reached the figure of $5 million a month in the summer of 1836. In response, Jackson issued the “Specie Circular” in July, declaring that from August onward, only gold and silver would be accepted as payment for most government-owned lands. Jackson’s advisers didn’t want him to issue the Specie Circular. It was based on his old-fashioned misunderstanding of the nature of money and credit in a modernizing economy, and it clogged the economy’s circulatory system. Heavy gold and silver had to be moved from the East Coast to Indiana and Mississippi and then back again. Land sales plummeted. Banks began to charge a premium for gold and silver, making everything else more expensive.

Still, by winter, the flow of money, credit, and goods through the channels of the American economy had begun to adjust to Jackson’s friction-creating policy. All other commodities—cotton, consumer goods, and slaves—continued to move on a paper money basis, helped by commercial banks like Brown Brothers of New York, which kept credit flowing to merchants and importers. And that was important, because the entire Atlantic economy now depended on the ability of the planters to cycle cotton revenues back through the system. Yet British textile mills already held high stocks of raw cotton, and layoffs at factories were increasing. Soon consumers would choose to wear their old clothes into rags rather than replace them. Demand for raw cotton was about to crater. The Bank Of England, the source of credit for British cotton-buying firms in Liverpool, began to get nervous. In late 1836, it began denying credit to those firms. (273)

It took a while for news of this decision to percolate back across the Atlantic. In February, as Martin Van Buren’s inauguration approached, a few insiders were quietly coming to realize that this time was not, after all, different—unless by “different” one meant especially disastrous. “Against the judgment of others in whom I usually confide, I do not anticipate that the present prices of cotton will be fully maintained,” a Washington correspondent warned John Stevens, a principal at the New York firm Prime, Ward, and King, which held millions in slave-backed securities issued by southwestern states.

Even as Jackson lit his celebratory pipe, a dramatic chain reaction had already begun to ignite. In the wake of the Bank of England’s credit-tightening, the annualized price of short-term business loans in Liverpool skyrocketed to 36 percent, making it impossible for cotton brokers to buy even as the full tide of the 1836 crop swept in. Cotton prices began a free fall that only ended in July 1837 when a dead-cat bounce took it to 6 cents a pound.

 

[[ Kevlexicon note:

Dead cat bounce (stock market) :“a temporary recovery in share prices after a substantial fall, caused by speculators buying in order to cover their positions” ]]

 

…In the meantime, collapsing British merchant firms had pulled each other down as they fell. Three of the top seven Liverpool cotton traders closed their doors by the end of February. And Le Havre, France’s main cotton exchange, shut down completely.

Into the hulls of westward-racing ships went bags of letters desperately calling in the mountains of debt owed by American trading partners. As soon as the news reached the Mississippi’s mouth, arrays of interlinked debtors and creditors began to cascade down. One after another in the last week in March, the ten largest cotton buyers in New Orleans announced that they were insolvent. Some allegedly owed $500 for every $1 that they held in cash or collectible debts. The smaller firms were next. On April 20, the New Orleans Picayune wrote that there were “no new failures to announce,” for by the “nearly all [firms] have gone.” Shockwaves fanned out across the southwestern states and the frontier and backwashed over New York, where banks shut their doors to prevent runs on their own reserves of gold and silver. By the first week of May, no one in New York could borrow, collect debts, or carry out busines at all. (273)

…Yet no economic actors were hit harder by what soon became known as the “Panic of 1837” than the southwestern banks. They had lent far more money than their own reserves of cash justified. Their currency was now traded for well under its value. They faced massive upcoming interest payments on bonds sold on worldwide financial markets. The cotton merchants who owed southwestern banks millions in short-term commercial loans had nothing but cotton, which was selling for less than the cost of transportation. On the other hand, the slave owners who owed the banks money did have tangible property. In one folder of the papers of the Citizen’s Bank of Louisiana, which had hurriedly disbursed some $14 million in 1835-1836, are nineteen pages of inventories of mortgaged slaves, listing more than 500 people. And that was only a fraction of those who were mortgaged to southwestern banks, which had lent at least $40 million on mortgaged slaves. At the rate of 1 slave for every $500 of outstanding debt, this meant that 80,000 or more enslaved people were put at risk of another sale by the collapse of commodity prices and the southwestern banks. Thousands more, like the 29 people (“Phillip, Toney, Caesar…”) whom Champ Terry of Jefferson County, Mississippi, had put up as collateral for a loan made to him by entrepreneur Nathaniel Jeffries, were privately mortgaged. Working in the fields, sleeping at night, sitting in the quarters while they held a child, every person namedon a debt document was under the auctioneer’s hammer.

If the worst came, wrote one Mississippi enslaver to his North Carolina relative, then an enslaved woman whom they both knew—“Old Dorcas”—would be “sold to the highest bidder,” because “Duncan MyBryde is in a peck of trouble.” Human flesh had proved a liquid resource in times of trouble for many a white person like McBryde. Yet in the present crisis, the highest bid would be uselessly low. “I heard a gentleman say a few days ago,” wrote William Southgate from Alabama, “that he saw a negro fellow sell in Missi. For $60 in specie—which negro cost something like $2,000.” Those who tried to “dispose of some negroes to live on,” as on bankrupt North Carolina migrant planned to do, found that “in many instances they are sold at ¼ the sum given or promised and the poor debtor left ¾ the sum to be raised from his other property if such there be.” (274)

(276)

 

Enslavers still held the assets,–the men, women, and children who produced the commodity around which the entire Atlantic financial economy revolved. But without enough credit to lubricate the circuits of American trade, bales made in 1837 might well sit on the levees and docks until the wind ripped their burlap wrappers into flags. So over the next twelve months southern entrepreneurs asked investors to sink more long-term capital into their region, and to do so on the basis of slavery-backed securities. States and territories on slavery’s frontier issued at least $25m in new bank debt, most of it state-backed, between 1837 and 1839. The world financial community responded. Alabama’s state bank attracted massive quantitites of capital from the Rothschilds, perhaps the wealthiest family in the world, proprietors of a powerful merchant bank headquartered in London and Paris. The new issues of bank securities, in turn, allowed banks to loan out more money to southwestern borrowers. Which they did. By 1841, the residents of Mississippi would owe twice as much money–$48m—to the state’s banks as they had at the beginning of 1837.

 

 

Rothschild Family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family

 

The Rothschild family is a wealthy family descending from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a court Jew to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt, who established his banking business in the 1760s.^[2] Unlike most previous court Jews, Rothschild managed to bequeath his wealth and established an international banking family through his five sons,^[3] who established themselves in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples.

 

During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world, as well as the largest private fortune in modern world history.^[4][5][6] The family’s wealth was divided among various descendants,^[7] and today their interests cover a diverse range of fields, including financial services, real estate, mining, energy, mixed farming, winemaking, and nonprofits.^[8][9]

The Rothschild family has frequently been the subject of conspiracy theories, many of which contain antisemitic views.^[10]

 

Family overview

The first member of the family who was known to use the name “Rothschild” was Izaak Elchanan Rothschild, born in 1577. The name is derived from the German zum rothen Schild (with the old spelling “th”), meaning “with the red sign”, in reference to the house where the family lived for many generations. (At the time, houses were designated by signs with different symbols or colours, not numbers.) The family’s ascent to international prominence began in 1744, with the birth of Mayer Amschel Rothschild in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He was the son of Amschel Moses Rothschild, (born circa 1710),^[11] a money changer who had traded with the Prince of Hesse. Born in the “Judengasse“, the ghetto of Frankfurt, Mayer developed a finance house and spread his empire by installing each of his five sons in the five main European financial centres to conduct business. The Rothschild coat of arms contains a clenched fist with five arrows symbolising the five dynasties established by the five sons of Mayer Rothschild, in a reference to Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth.” The family motto appears below the shield: Concordia, Integritas, Industria (Unity, Integrity, Industry).^[12]

Paul Johnson writes “[T]he Rothschilds are elusive. There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them… A woman who planned to write a book entitled Lies about the Rothschilds abandoned it, saying: ‘It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but it proved impossible to find out the truth.’” He writes that, unlike the court Jews of earlier centuries, who had financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new kind of international bank created by the Rothschilds was impervious to local attacks. Their assets were held in financial instruments, circulating through the world as stocks, bonds and debts. Changes made by the Rothschilds allowed them to insulate their property from local violence: “Henceforth their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs.”^[13] Johnson argued that their fortune was generated to the greatest extent by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London; however, more recent research by Niall Ferguson indicates that greater and equal profits also were realised by the other Rothschild dynasties, including James Mayer de Rothschild in Paris, Carl Mayer von Rothschild in Naples and Amschel Mayer Rothschild in Frankfurt.^[14]

Another essential part of Mayer Rothschild’s strategy for success was to keep control of their banks in family hands, allowing them to maintain full secrecy about the size of their fortunes. In about 1906, the Jewish Encyclopedia noted: “The practice initiated by the Rothschilds of having several brothers of a firm establish branches in the different financial centres was followed by other Jewish financiers, like the Bischoffsheims, Pereires, Seligmans, Lazards and others, and these financiers by their integrity and financial skill obtained credit not alone with their Jewish confrères, but with the banking fraternity in general. By this means, Jewish financiers obtained an increasing share of international finance during the middle and last quarter of the 19th century. The head of the whole group was the Rothschild family…” It also states: “Of more recent years, non-Jewish financiers have learned the same cosmopolitan method, and, on the whole, the control is now rather less than more in Jewish hands than formerly.”^[15] Mayer Rothschild successfully kept the fortune in the family with carefully arranged marriages, often between first- or second-cousins (similar to royal intermarriage). By the late 19th century, however, almost all Rothschilds had started to marry outside the family, usually into the aristocracy or other financial dynasties.^[16]

….Research conducted by GreatGameIndia Magazine has revealed that the Rothschild family was one of the controller families of the East India Company.^[20]

 

Nathan Mayer Rothschild

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mayer_Rothschild

 

This article is about the 18th and 19th century financier. For his grandson, see Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild. For other persons with a similar name, see Nathaniel Rothschild (disambiguation).

 

Nathan Mayer, Freiherr von Rothschild (16 September 1777 – 28 July 1836) was a Jewish German banker, businessman and financier. He was one of five sons of the second generation of the Rothschild banking dynasty. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, the third child of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812) and Gutle Schnapper (1753–1849). Once the wealthiest man on earth, he was the richest among the Rothschilds.

 

Life

In 1798, at the age of 21, he settled in Manchester, England and established a business in textile trading and finance,

….later moving to London, England and making a fortune in trading bills of exchange through a banking enterprise begun in 1805.

Rothschild became a freemason of the Emulation Lodge, No. 12, of the Premier Grand Lodge of England on 24 October 1802, in London. Up until this point, the few Ashkenazi Jews that lived in England tended to belong to the “Antients” on account of their generally lower social class, while the more established Sephardim joined the Moderns.^[1][2]

In 1816, his two elder brothers were granted noble status (Freiherr or Baron) by the Emperor of Austria. They were now permitted to prefix the Rothschild name with von or de. Their device of four arrows became five when Nathan too was elevated in 1818, although he chose not to use his aristocratic title of Freiherr von Rothschild. In 1838, Queen Victoria authorized the use of this Austrian title in the United Kingdom by his male-line descendants.^[3]

 

Business career

He operated first as a textile merchant in Manchester, England, then from 1804 he began to deal on the London stock exchange in financial instruments such as foreign bills and government securities.

 

[ Kevlexicon Notes: as we know from Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,”

https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664/ref=la_B001JSC2TY_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506393572&sr=1-1

 

the “foreign bills and government securities” were investments in slave-backed mortgages and securities in the United States….

 

From “The Half Has Never Been Told”:

 

“****Enslavers still held the assets,–the men, women, and children who produced the commodity around which the entire Atlantic financial economy revolved. But without enough credit to lubricate the circuits of American trade, bales made in 1837 might well sit on the levees and docks until the wind ripped their burlap wrappers into flags. So over the next twelve months southern entrepreneurs asked investors to sink more long-term capital into their region, and to do so on the basis of slavery-backed securities. States and territories on slavery’s frontier issued at least $25m in new bank debt, most of it state-backed, between 1837 and 1839. The world financial community responded. Alabama’s state bank attracted massive quantitites of capital from the Rothschilds, perhaps the wealthiest family in the world, proprietors of a powerful merchant bank headquartered in London and Paris. The new issues of bank securities, in turn, allowed banks to loan out more money to southwestern borrowers. Which they did. By 1841, the residents of Mississippi would owe twice as much money–$48m—to the state’s banks as they had at the beginning of 1837. (276)”

 

 

Nathan Mayer Rothschild – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mayer_Rothschild

“Business career

He operated first as a textile [ Kevlexicon Note: Cotton farmed by enslaved Africans ] merchant in Manchester, England, then from 1804 he began to deal on the London stock exchange in financial instruments such as foreign bills and government securities.

 

The Rothschild Family – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family

 

Paul Johnson writes “[T]he Rothschilds are elusive. There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them… A woman who planned to write a book entitled Lies about the Rothschilds abandoned it, saying: ‘It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but it proved impossible to find out the truth.’” He writes that, unlike the court Jews of earlier centuries, who had financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new kind of international bank created by the Rothschilds was impervious to local attacks. Their assets were held in financial instruments, circulating through the world as stocks, bonds and debts. Changes made by the Rothschilds allowed them to insulate their property from local violence: “Henceforth their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs.”^[13] Johnson argued that their fortune was generated to the greatest extent by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London; however, more recent research by Niall Ferguson indicates that greater and equal profits also were realised by the other Rothschild dynasties, including James Mayer de Rothschild in Paris, Carl Mayer von Rothschild in Naples and Amschel Mayer Rothschild in Frankfurt.^[14]

Another essential part of Mayer Rothschild’s strategy for success was to keep control of their banks in family hands, allowing them to maintain full secrecy about the size of their fortunes. In about 1906, the Jewish Encyclopedia noted: “The practice initiated by the Rothschilds of having several brothers of a firm establish branches in the different financial centres was followed by other Jewish financiers, like the Bischoffsheims, Pereires, Seligmans, Lazards and others, and these financiers by their integrity and financial skill obtained credit not alone with their Jewish confrères, but with the banking fraternity in general. By this means, Jewish financiers obtained an increasing share of international finance during the middle and last quarter of the 19th century. The head of the whole group was the Rothschild family…” It also states: “Of more recent years, non-Jewish financiers have learned the same cosmopolitan method, and, on the whole, the control is now rather less than more in Jewish hands than formerly.”^[15] Mayer Rothschild successfully kept the fortune in the family with carefully arranged marriages, often between first- or second-cousins (similar to royal intermarriage). By the late 19th century, however, almost all Rothschilds had started to marry outside the family, usually into the aristocracy or other financial dynasties.^[16]

 

Court Jew – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_Jew

 

In the early modern period, a court Jew, or court factor (German: Hofjude, Hoffaktor), was a Jewish banker who handled the finances of, or lent money to, European royalty and nobility. In return for their services, court Jews gained social privileges, including in some cases being granted noble status. Court Jews were needed because prohibitions against usury applied to Christians but did not apply to Jews.

Examples of what would be later called court Jews emerged in the High Middle Ages when the royalty, the nobility, and the church borrowed money from money changers or employed them as financiers. Among the most notable of these were Aaron of Lincoln and Vivelin of Strasbourg. Jewish financiers could use their family connections to provide their sponsors with finance, food, arms, ammunition, gold, and precious metals.^{[citation needed]}

The rise of the absolute monarchies in Central Europe brought many Jews, mostly of Ashkenazi origin, into the position of negotiating loans for the various courts. They could amass personal fortunes and gain political and social influence. However, the court Jew had social connections and influence in the Christian world mainly through the Christian nobility and church. Due to the precarious position of Jews, some nobles could ignore their debts. If the sponsoring noble died, his Jewish financier could face exile or execution. The most famous example of this occurred in Württemberg when, after the death of his sponsor Charles Alexander in 1737, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was put on trial and finally executed.^[1] In an effort to avoid such fate, some court bankers in the late 18th century—such as Samuel Bleichröder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, or Aron Elias Seligmann—successfully detached their businesses from these courts and established what eventually developed into full-fledged banks.^{[citation needed]}

 

Background

See also: Jews in the Middle Ages

Prohibited from nearly every other trade, some Jews began to occupy an economic niche as moneylenders in the Middle Ages. Only they were allowed to take interest on loans, since—while the Church condemned usury universally—canon law was only applied to Christians and not to Jews. Eventually, a sizable sector of the European Jewish community were engaged in financial occupations, and the community was a financially highly successful part of the medieval economy.^[2][3] The religious restrictions on moneylending had inadvertently created a source of monopoly rents, causing profits associated with moneylending to be higher than they otherwise would have been.^[4] By most parameters, the standard of living of the Jewish community in Early Medieval period was at least equal to that of the lower nobility.^[5] However, despite this economic prosperity, the community was not safe: religious hostility increased to the extent that it manifested itself in the form of massacres and expulsions, culminating in the repetitive expulsion of all Jews from various parts of Western Europe in the late medieval period.

Although the phenomenon of “Court Jewry” did not occur until the early 17th century, examples of what would be later called court Jews can be found earlier in Jewish moneylenders who accumulated enough capital to finance the royalty and the nobility. Among them was Josce of Gloucester, the Jewish financier who funded Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke‘s conquest of Ireland in 1170,^[6] and Aaron of Lincoln, presumably the wealthiest individual in 12th-century Britain, who left an estate of about £100,000.^[4][7] Also notable was Vivelin of Strasbourg, one of the wealthiest persons in Europe in the early 14th century, who lent 340,000 florins to Edward III of England on the eve of the Hundred Years’ War, in 1339.^[8] By the 16th century, Jewish financiers became increasingly connected to rulers and courts. Josef Goldschmidt (d. 1572) of Frankfurt, also known as “Jud Joseph zum Goldenen Schwan”, became the most important Jewish businessman of his era, trading not only with the Fuggers and Imhoffs, but also with the nobility and the Church.^[9] In the early 17th century the Habsburgs employed the services of Jacob Bassevi of Prague, Joseph Pincherle of Gorizia, and Moses and Jacob Marburger of Gradisca.

At the dawn of Mercantilism, while most Sephardi Jews were primarily active in the west in maritime and colonial trade, the Ashkenazi Jews in the service of the emperor and princes tended toward domestic trade.^[10] Not always on account of their learning or their force of character did these Jews rise to positions close to the rulers: they were mostly wealthy businessmen, distinguished above their co-religionists by their commercial instincts and their adaptability. Court Jews frequently suffered through the denunciation of their envious rivals and co-religionists, and were often the objects of hatred of the people and the courtiers. They were of service to their fellow Jews only during the periods, often short, of their influence with the rulers; and as they themselves often came to a tragic end, their co-religionists were in consequence of their fall all the more harassed.

The court Jews, as the agents of the rulers, and in times of war as the purveyors and the treasurers of the state, enjoyed special privileges. They were under the jurisdiction of the court marshal, and were not compelled to wear the Jews’ badge. They were permitted to stay wherever the emperor held his court, and to live anywhere in the Holy Roman Empire, even in places where no other Jews were allowed. Wherever they settled they could buy houses, slaughter meat according to the Jewish ritual, and maintain a rabbi. They could sell their goods wholesale and retail, and could not be taxed or assessed higher than the Christians.

Jews were sometimes assigned the role of local tax collectors. These roles built up a long-standing enmity between Jews and Christians, the results of which had far-reaching consequences in the history of European Jews.

 

Merchant Banking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_bank

 

Main article: History of banking

 

Merchant banks are in fact the first modern banks. They emerged in the Middle Ages from the Italian grain and cloth merchants community and started to develop in the 11th century during the large European fair of St. Giles (England), then at the Champaign fairs (France). As the Lombardy merchants and bankers grew in stature based on the strength of the Lombard plains cereal crops, many displaced Jews fleeing Spanish persecution were attracted to the trade. The Florentine merchant banking community was exceptionally active and propagated new finance practices all over Europe. Both Jews and Florentine merchants perfected ancient practices used in the Middle East trade routes and the Far East silk routes. Originally intended for the finance of long trading journeys, these methods were applied to finance the medieval “commercial revolution”.^[2]

In France during the 17th and 18th century, a merchant banker or marchand-banquier was not just considered a trader but also received the status of being an entrepreneur par excellence. Merchant banks in the United Kingdom came into existence in the early 19th century, the oldest being Barings Bank.

The Jews could not hold land in Italy, so they entered the great trading piazzas and halls of Lombardy, alongside the local traders, and set up their benches to trade in crops. They had one great advantage over the locals. Christians were strictly forbidden from any kind of lending at interest, since such activities were equated with the sin of usury (Islam makes similar condemnations). The Jewish newcomers, on the other hand, could lend to farmers against crops in the field, a high-risk loan at what would have been considered usurious rates by the Church; but the Jews were not subject to the Church’s dictates. In this way they could secure the grain-sale rights against the eventual harvest. They then began to advance payment against the future delivery of grain shipped to distant ports. In both cases they made their profit from the present discount against the future price. This two-handed trade was time-consuming and soon there arose a class of merchants who were trading grain debt instead of grain. The buying of future crop and the trading of grain debt is analogous to the future contract market in modern finance.

The Court Jew performed both financing (credit) and underwriting (insurance) functions. Financing took the form of a crop loan at the beginning of the growing season, which allowed a farmer to develop and manufacture (through seeding, growing, weeding, and harvesting) his annual crop. Underwriting in the form of a crop, or commodity, insurance guaranteed the delivery of the crop to its buyer, typically a merchant wholesaler. In addition, traders performed the merchant function by making arrangements to supply the buyer of the crop through alternative sources—grain stores or alternate markets, for instance—in the event of crop failure. He could also keep the farmer (or other commodity producer) in business during a drought or other crop failure, through the issuance of a crop (or commodity) insurance against the hazard of failure of his crop.

Merchant banking progressed from financing trade on one’s own behalf to settling trades for others and then to holding deposits for settlement of “billette” or notes written by the people who were still brokering the actual grain. And so the merchant’s “benches” (bank is derived from the Italian for bench, banco, as in a counter) in the great grain markets became centers for holding money against a bill (billette, a note, a letter of formal exchange, later a bill of exchange and later still a cheque).

These deposited funds were intended to be held for the settlement of grain trades, but often were used for the bench’s own trades in the meantime. The term bankrupt is a corruption of the Italian banca rotta, or broken bench, which is what happened when someone lost his traders’ deposits. Being “broke” has the same connotation.

A sensible manner of discounting interest to the depositors against what could be earned by employing their money in the trade of the bench soon developed; in short, selling an “interest” to them in a specific trade, thus overcoming the usury objection. Once again this merely developed what was an ancient method of financing long-distance transport of goods.

The medieval Italian markets were disrupted by wars and in any case were limited by the fractured nature of the Italian states. And so the next generation of bankers arose from migrant Jewish merchants in the great wheat-growing areas of Germany and Poland. Many of these merchants were from the same families who had been part of the development of the banking process in Italy. They also had links with family members who had, centuries before, fled Spain for both Italy and England. As non-agricultural wealth expanded, many families of goldsmiths (another business not prohibited to Jews) also gradually moved into banking. This course of events set the stage for the rise of Jewish family banking firms whose names still resonate today, such as Warburgs and Rothschilds.

The rise of Protestantism, however, freed many European Christians from Rome’s dictates against usury. In the late 18th century, Protestant merchant families began to move into banking to an increasing degree, especially in trading countries such as the United Kingdom (Barings), Germany (Schroders, Berenbergs) and the Netherlands (Hope & Co., Gülcher & Mulder) At the same time, new types of financial activities broadened the scope of banking far beyond its origins. The merchant-banking families dealt in everything from underwriting bonds to originating foreign loans. For instance, bullion trading and bond issuance were two of the specialties of the Rothschilds. In 1803, Barings teamed with Hope & Co. to facilitate the Louisiana Purchase.

In the 19th century, the rise of trade and industry in the US led to powerful new private merchant banks, culminating in J.P. Morgan & Co. During the 20th century, however, the financial world began to outgrow the resources of family-owned and other forms of private-equity banking. Corporations came to dominate the banking business. For the same reasons, merchant banking activities became just one area of interest for modern banks.

Here is a list of merchant banks of the past and present:

• Barings Bank
• Berenberg Bank
• Bethmann Bank
• BDT Capital Partners
• N. M. Rothschild & Sons
• George Peabody & Co.
• Kleinwort Benson
• Kempen & Co
• Guinness Mahon
• Schroders
• J.P. Morgan
• Lazard & Cie
• SG Warburg
• Hope & Co.
• Defoe Fournier & Cie.
• Close Brothers
• Morgan Grenfell & Co.
• Greenhill & Co.
• Robert Fleming & Co.
• Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
• Hambros Bank
• Hill Samuel
• Brown, Shipley & Co.
• Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
• Samuel Montagu & Co.
• H. J. Merck & Co.

 

Capitalism and Slavery – Chronicle

http://www.chronicle.com/article/SlaveryCapitalism/150787/

 

Merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere, like the Browns in cotton and the Taylors in sugar, organized the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities, accumulating vast riches in the process. Sometimes the connections to slavery were indirect, but not always: By the 1840s, James Brown was sitting in his counting house in Lower Manhattan hiring overseers for the slave plantations that his defaulting creditors had left to him. Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible.

The profits accumulated through slave labor had a lasting impact. Both the Browns and the Taylors eventually moved out of commodities and into banking. The Browns created an institution that partially survives to this day as Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co., while Moses Taylor took charge of the precursor of Citibank. Some of the 19th century’s most important financiers—including the Barings and Rothschilds—were deeply involved in the “Southern trade,” and the profits they accumulated were eventually reinvested in other sectors of the global economy. As a group of freedmen in Virginia observed in 1867, “our wives, our children, our husbands, have been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon. … And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of every thing. And then didn’t the large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made?” Slavery, they understood, was inscribed into the very fabric of the American economy.

 

The Panic of 1837 – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837

 

The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major recession that lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down while unemployment went up. Pessimism abounded during the time. The panic had both domestic and foreign origins. Speculative lending practices in western states, a sharp decline in cotton prices, a collapsing land bubble, international specie flows, and restrictive lending policies in Great Britain were all to blame.^[1][2] On May 10, 1837, banks in New York City suspended specie payments, meaning that they would no longer redeem commercial paper in specie at full face value. Despite a brief recovery in 1838, the recession persisted for approximately seven years. Banks collapsed, businesses failed, prices declined, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. Unemployment may have been as high as 25% in some locales. The years 1837 to 1844 were, generally speaking, years of deflation in wages and prices.^[3]

Causes

The crisis followed a period of economic expansion from mid-1834 to mid-1836. The prices of land, cotton, and slaves rose sharply in these years. The origins of this boom had many sources, both domestic and international. Because of the peculiar factors (Specie Circular) of international trade at the time, abundant amounts of silver were coming into the United States from Mexico and China. Land sales and tariffs on imports were also generating substantial federal revenues. Through lucrative cotton exports and the marketing of state-backed bonds in British money markets, the United States acquired significant capital investment from Great Britain. These bonds financed transportation projects in the United States. British loans, made available through Anglo-American banking houses like Baring Brothers, fueled much of the United States’s westward expansion, infrastructure improvements, industrial expansion, and economic development during the antebellum era.^[4]

 

In 1836, directors of the Bank of England noticed that the Bank’s monetary reserves had declined precipitously in recent years, possibly because of poor wheat harvests that forced Great Britain to import much of its food.^[5] To compensate, the directors indicated that they would gradually raise interest rates from 3 to 5 percent. Conventional financial theory held that banks should raise interest rates and curb lending when faced with low monetary reserves. Raising interest rates, according to the laws of supply and demand, was supposed to attract specie since money generally flows where it will generate the greatest return (assuming equal risk among possible investments). In the open economy of the 1830s, characterized by free trade and relatively weak trade barriers, the monetary policies of the hegemonic power – in this case, Great Britain – were transmitted to the rest of the interconnected global economic system, included the U.S. The result was that as the Bank of England raised interest rates, major banks in the United States were forced to do the same.^[6]

 

When New York banks raised interest rates and scaled back on lending, the effects were damaging. Since the price of a bond bears an inverse relationship to the yield (or interest rate), the increase in prevailing interest rates would have forced down the price of American securities. Importantly, demand for cotton plummeted. The price of cotton fell by 25% in February and March 1837.^[7] The United States economy, especially in the southern states, was heavily dependent on stable cotton prices. Receipts from cotton sales provided funding for some schools, balanced the nation’s trade deficit, fortified the US dollar, and procured foreign exchange earnings in British pound sterling, the world’s reserve currency at the time. Since the United States was still a predominantly agricultural economy centered on the export of staple crops and an incipient manufacturing sector,^[8] a collapse in cotton prices would have caused massive reverberations.

 

Within the United States, there were several contributing factors. In July 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States (BUS), the nation’s central bank and fiscal agent. As the BUS wound up its operations in the next four years, state-chartered banks in the West and South relaxed their lending standards, maintaining unsafe reserve ratios.^[2] Two domestic policies, in particular, exacerbated an already volatile situation. The Specie Circular of 1836 mandated that western lands could be purchased only with gold and silver coin. The circular was an executive order issued by Andrew Jackson, and favored by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and other hard-money advocates. The intent was to curb speculation in public lands, but the circular set off a real estate and commodity price crash as most buyers were unable to come up with sufficient hard money or “specie” (gold or silver coins) to pay for the land. Secondly, the Deposit and Distribution Act of 1836 placed federal revenues in various local banks (derisively termed “pet banks”) across the country. Many of these banks were located in western regions. The effect of these two policies was to transfer specie away from the nation’s main commercial centers on the East Coast. With lower monetary reserves in their vaults, major banks and financial institutions on the East Coast had to scale back their loans, which was a major cause of the panic along with the real estate crash.^[9]

 

Americans at the time attributed the cause of the panic principally to domestic political conflicts. Some blamed Jackson for refusing to renew the charter of the Bank, resulting in the withdrawal of government funds from the bank. Martin Van Buren, who became president in March 1837, was largely blamed for the panic even though his inauguration preceded the panic by only five weeks. Van Buren’s refusal to use government intervention to address the crisis (such as emergency relief and increasing spending on public infrastructure projects to reduce unemployment) according to his opponents, contributed further to the hardship and duration of the depression that followed the panic. Jacksonian Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the national Bank, both in funding rampant speculation and in introducing inflationary paper money. Modern economists generally view Van Buren’s deregulatory economic policy as successful in the long term for its importance in revitalizing banks after the panic.^[10]

Effects and aftermath

…Though the Old South was hit hard, the Cotton Belt was dealt the worst blow. In Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina the panic caused an increase in the interest of diversifying crops. New Orleans felt a general depression in business, and its money market stayed in bad condition throughout 1843. Several planters in Mississippi had spent much of their money in advance, leading to the complete bankruptcy of many planters. By 1839, many of the plantations were thrown out of cultivation.

 

…Within two months the losses from bank failures in New York alone aggregated nearly $100 million. Out of 850 banks in the United States, 343 closed entirely, 62 failed partially, and the system of state banks received a shock from which it never fully recovered.

 

 

….Many individual states defaulted on their bonds, which angered British creditors. For a brief time, the United States withdrew from international money markets. Only in the late 1840s did Americans re-enter these markets. These defaults, along with other consequences of the recession, carried major implications for the relationship between the state and economic development. In some ways, the panic undermined confidence in public support for internal improvements. While state investment in internal improvements remained common in the South up until the Civil War, northerners increasingly looked to private investment, rather than public, to finance growth. Moreover, the panic unleashed a wave of riots and other forms of domestic unrest. The ultimate result was an increase in the state’s police powers, including more professional police forces.^[19][20

  

….Intangible factors like confidence and psychology played powerful roles, helping to explain the magnitude and depth of the panic. Central banks had only limited abilities to control prices and employment at the time, making runs on banks common. When a few banks collapsed, alarm quickly spread throughout the community, heightened by partisan newspapers. Anxious investors rushed to other banks, demanding to have their deposits withdrawn. When faced with such pressure, even healthy banks had to make further curtailments – calling in loans and demanding payment from their borrowers. This only fed the hysteria even further, leading to a downward spiral or snowball effect. In other words, anxiety, fear, and a pervasive lack of confidence initiated devastating, self-sustaining feedback loops. Many economists today understand this phenomenon as an information asymmetry. Essentially, bank depositors reacted to imperfect information; they did not know if their deposits were safe, and fearing further risk, they withdrew their deposits, even as this caused more damage. The same concept of downward spiral was true for many southern planters, who speculated in land, cotton, and slaves. Many planters took out loans from banks under the assumption that cotton prices would continue to rise. When cotton prices dropped, however, planters could not pay back their loans, which jeopardized the solvency of many banks. These factors were particularly crucial given the lack of deposit insurance in banks. When bank customers are not assured that their deposits are safe, they are more likely to make rash decisions that can imperil the rest of the economy. Economists today have concluded that suspension of convertibility, deposit insurance, and sufficient capital requirements in banks can limit the possibility of bank runs.^[21][22][23] As in all economic contractions up to the 1930s, the total lack of a government social “safety net” (such as unemployment insurance and deficit spending) contributed to the magnitude of the collapse in consumption, investment and employment in the depression that followed the Panic of 1837.^{[citation needed]}

 

….

 

mistari / barz:

depressionfuel

u jus killin my hype, I bring the energy, u won’t even fite,
I spit the fire, I bring the lite,
U jus darkness, dum shit, thinkin u can talk that smart shit,
Sayin “retarded”, under-my-breath, under-developed potential,
Spilled out, in a torrent of bitterness, that bit torrent my bitterness,
For internet interests,
My life’s like the shittiest,
No one cares, self-pity sells only if u werth a shout,
Ur life’s a rigged election and it don even count,

Safe-paved roads to nowhere,
Real city transit costs—no fare (fair)
To grab the tits of the city again wit gals that’s pritty again,
If I could float on some privilege

Jus stop carin,
FUCK IT
Jus stop Karen,
FUCK IT,
U kno u always on ur own in here,
FUCK IT,
Jus stop carin,

U kno u always on ur ownn

…the heart that breaks, the tears that make, the memories that fade (fade),
its nuthin on the plate for u to savor, the flavour is gone an fleeting, jus like a dream,
ur memory’s always deleting, like– (catch a beating),
u got that illness, the realness that spits,
but it jus riffs across ur eyes for a moment,
it’s all over before u can,
even appreciate,
the losses u’ve jad,
that’s y it’s so fuckin’ bad.

(shit is evil)

u jus killin my hype, I bring the energy, won’t even fite,
I spit the fire, I bring the lite,
U jus darkness, dum thot, thinkin u could spit that smart shit,
Sayin “retarded”, under-my-breath, under-developed potential,
Spilled out, in a torrent of bitterness, bit torrent my bitterness,
For internet interests,
My life’s like the shittiest,
No one cares, self-pity sells only if u werth a shout,
Ur life’s a rigged election and it don even count,

Safe-paved roads to nowhere,
(WHERE IS…THIS GOIN TO?)
Real city transit costs—no fare (fair)
(WHERE IS…THIS GOIN TO?)
To grab the tits of the city again wit gals that’s pritty again,
(WHERE IS…THIS GOIN TO?)
If I could float on some privilege
(WHERE IS…THIS GOIN TO?)
Jus stop carin, give up it sucks
(WHEN ARE THE FAILURES GONNA COUNT FOR SOMN?)

 

 

vimeo link:

https://vimeo.com/album/4091509

 

a Kevlexicon video

 

Asante Sana,

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