Monday, 14 July 2014

BRITISH PSYCHIATRY: FROM EUGENICS TO ASSASSINATION





BRITISH PSYCHIATRY:  FROM EUGENICS TO ASSASSINATION
By Anton Chaitkin, Executive Intelligence Review, V21 #40, [30 July 2002]

A behavior control research project was begun in the 1950s, coordinated by the British psychological warfare unit called the Tavistock Institute, with the Scottish Rite Masons, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other British, U.S., Canadian, and United Nations agencies. The project became famous in the 1970s under a CIA code name, “MK-Ultra.” Its notoriety for brainwashing by drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, and other tortures caused many books to be written about the project, and the U.S. Senate conducted hearings which exposed many of its abusive features. President Gerald Ford appointed a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, to correct the CIA's misconduct. 

There was a widespread anti-establishment view at the time, that here was the fox appointed to guard the hen house. The intelligence agencies offered a public rationale for the project: the need to counteract and compete with the mind-control capabilities of the communists. This was largely based on the fact that U.S. personnel held prisoner by the enemy in the Korean War had signed false confessions of crimes, and some had defected to North Korea, the apparent result of brainwashing. 

The Manchurian Candidate, a 1959 book which was made into a popular movie in 1962, reflected this rationale. It told the story of a communist plot to use a U.S. soldier brainwashed in Manchuria as a zombie-assassin, to kill the leading U.S. presidential candidate. A central theme of MK-Ultra was to attempt to control the human mind in a similar way. Threatened and accomplished assassination of political leaders has become increasingly frequent in public life since the 1960s. 

Just since the 1992 election campaign, for example, President Bill Clinton has been the target of at least 15 assassination threats. Many of these would-be killers, and many of the assassins of past years, had been in destructive psychiatric programs, or were members of psychiatrically manipulated cults. 

The present threats are the more meaningful, in the context of the British-led Whitewater scandal directed against the presidency. 

It is long past time for a thorough public inquiry into the assassination epidemic, whereby its relationship to the official project to  create assassins would be fully explored. 

A great obstacle to clear thinking in this area has been the assumption that the U.S. government would not sponsor programs for the murder of American leaders. 

This logical assumption misses the point, that the overall project, including “MK-Ultra,” has been foreign-sponsored and anti-American in its purposes. 

We shall outline here the British background of this deeply criminal enterprise, with its roots in the political and psychiatric movement called eugenics.


1909-13: the buildup to World War I

John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation, in parallel with the birth of the British-inspired Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1909-13 and subsequent years, Rockefeller transferred blocs of the family-owned Standard Oil Co. worth more than $300 million to the account of the foundation under its trustees who were family members, and their employees. Thus was established a global instrument for radical social change, using American money and British strategy. John D. Rockefeller had begun his oil business in the 1860s with British capital. The family's relationship to the British Empire a half-century later was centered in the person of John D.'s brother, William Rockefeller, the president of Standard Oil of New York (later Mobil) and the founder of National City Bank (later Citibank). In 1911, brother William employed, in a private capacity through his elite social club, a high-ranking British secret intelligence service officer named Claude Dansey. As the United States prepared to ally itself in World War I with its old enemy Britain, Dansey personally reorganized the U.S. Army intelligence service into an adjunct of the British secret service. Dansey's loyal U.S. follower, Gen. Marlborough Churchill (a distant relative of Britain's Winston Churchill) soon became director of U.S. military intelligence. After World War I, General Churchill headed up the “Black Chamber,” a New York-based espionage group serving the State Department, the U.S. Army, and private New York financiers loyal to Great Britain. This same General Churchill would soon launch a medical research organization, the Macy Foundation, for the Rockefellers and British intelligence.

1920s: the pre-Hitler era in Germany

The Rockefeller Foundation poured money into the occupied German republic for a medical specialty known as  psychiatric genetics.  This field applied to psychiatry the concepts of eugenics (otherwise known as race purification, race hygiene, or race betterment) developed in London's Galton Laboratory and its offshoot Eugenics Societies in England and America. The Rockefeller Foundation created, and foundation executives thenceforth continuously directed, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich (before Rockefeller sponsorship it was known as the Kraepelin Institute), and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity. The Rockefellers' chief in both these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Ruaudin, assisted by his proteges, Rockefeller functionaries Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.  A British medical historian friendly to the Rockefellers recently explained how the family was introduced into this field in Germany: The foundation's “German centers combined the search for organic signs of mental illness with eugenic projects…. The [Kraepelin] institute had initially been endowed with 11 million marks, contributed by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach [head of the Krupp steel and arms family] and James Loeb [Paul Warburg's brother-in-law], an expatriate American of the Kuhn-Loeb banking family. Loeb mobilized his American-Jewish friends to support the institute,” and they invited the foundation to reorganize and expand the Munich enterprise. Loeb also continued financing the institute. Loeb's relatives, the Warburgs, owners of Kuhn Loeb bank, were the intimate banking partners of William Rockefeller. Together with him they had set up the Harriman family in big business, using capital supplied by the British royal family's personal banker, Sir Ernst Cassell. The three families, Rockefeller, Warburg, and Harriman, together with British Crown agencies, jointly sponsored much of the social engineering enterprise we shall describe here. The Rockefeller Foundation made an initial grant of $2.5 million in 1925 to the Psychiatric Institute in Munich, gave it $325,000 for a new building in 1928, and continuously sponsored the institute and its Nazi chief Ruaudin through the Hitler era. The foundation paid for a 1930-35 anthropological survey of the “eugenically worthwhile population” by Nazi eugenicists Ruaudin, Verschuer, Eugen Fischer, and others.

1930: a New Age in psychiatry

Rockefeller family psychologists and race purification experts created a medical research financing conduit, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, directed by former Black Chamber and military intelligence chief Gen. Marlborough Churchill. The Macy group would manage London's most advanced experiments in mind-control and social engineering.

1932: Ruaudin heads Eugenics Federation

The British-led eugenics movement met at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Ernst Ruaudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The eugenics movement at the time called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden or a national scapegoat.





Mid-1930s: Nazi eugenics in practice

Adolf Hitler was given Germany's chancellorship in 1933, and was soon absolute dictator.  Montagu Norman, the occultist governor of the Bank of England, propped up Hitler's credit, arranged the armament of Nazi Germany, and guided the strategies of Hitler's powerful supporters—the Rockefellers, Warburgs, and Harrimans. Only a few months after the meeting at the American Museum of Natural History, the Rockefeller-Ruaudin apparatus became a section of the Nazi state. The regime appointed Ruaudin head of the Racial Hygiene Society. Ruaudin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the sterilization law. Described as an American model law, it was adopted in July 1933 and proudly printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News (U.S.A.), with Hitler's signature. The Rockefeller group drew up other race laws, based, as was the sterilization law, on existing statutes from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Otmar Verschuer and his assistant Dr. Josef Mengele together wrote reports for special courts which enforced Ruaudin's racial purity law against the illegal cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans. The “T4” unit of the Hitler Chancery, based on psychiatrists led by Ruaudin and his staff, cooperated in creating propaganda films to sell mercy-killing (euthanasia) to German citizens. The public reacted antagonistically: Hitler had to withdraw a tear-jerker right-to-die film from the movie theaters. The proper groundwork had not yet been laid.

1934: The Freemasons study madness

The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry joined the Rockefellers in sponsoring psychiatric genetics beginning in 1934, under the rubric of research into dementia praecox (schizophrenia). The highest level of U.S. masonry, the Scottish Rite was the instrument through which the British Crown had reestablished the loyalty of American masons after the American Revolution. The northern section of the Rite had rallied the Copperheads against Abraham Lincoln's Civil War efforts, aiding the Rite's southern chief Albert Pike in secession and in other British white supremacy projects, such as the Ku Klux Klan. For eugenics, the British royal family itself was the Rite's point of reference. The Duke of Connaught, son of Queen Victoria and brother of King Edward VII, had been grand master of the United Grand Lodge of England since 1901. American masonic leaders referred to the duke as “grand master of the Mother Grand Lodge of Masons of the World.” The son of a German father (Victoria's husband, the Coburg Prince Albert), the Duke of Connaught was deeply involved in German affairs and was a patron of Britain's “New Dark Ages” ultra-racialist elite group based in South Africa. Late in 1932, negotiations for Hitler's takeover of Germany took place at the home of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who, as a traveling teenager, had been adopted into the household of the Duke of Connaught. Ribbentrop then became the head of Hitler's foreign intelligence service. As Hitler's ambassador to England, Ribbentrop worked in tandem with the leadership of the clique which employed Hitler as a British surrogate to smash up Europe: the masonic grand master duke and his nephew, the openly Nazi Edward VIII; Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman; and Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain's foreign minister.

1936-38: Columbia University's chamber of horrors

In 1936, the Scottish Rite's Field Representative of Research on Dementia Praecox, Dr. Nolan D.C. Lewis, director of the  New York State Psychiatric Institute, reported to the Scottish Rite Northern Supreme Council “on the progress of the fourteen research projects being financed by the Supreme Council.” Scottish Rite strategist Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a federal mental hospital in Washington D.C., provided overall leadership for the Rite's psychiatric research. Though these projects are shrouded in mystery, one of them with particularly gruesome results has come to light. The study of hereditary degeneracy was proceeding in the Rockefeller Foundation's German enclaves when it hit a snag. Psychiatrist Franz J. Kallmann, protege of Nazi race science chief Ernst Ruaudin, was forced to leave his job— Kallmann was “half-Jewish.” This was a big blow for Kallmann, who had proved his Nazi credentials at the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin in 1935. At that British-led meeting hosted by Hitler's Interior Ministry, Kallmann had argued for the sterilization of  even the apparently healthy relatives of schizophrenics, along with the schizophrenics themselves, to securely eliminate all the defective germ plasm. Without missing a step, Kallmann emigrated to America and became director of research in the New York State Psychiatric Institute, attached to Columbia University in Manhattan. The Scottish Rite's Dr. Lewis was the director of the institute. Kallmann simply continued in New York the Nazi propaganda work he had been doing for Rockefeller in Germany. The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry paid Kallmann to conduct a study of over 1,000 cases of schizophrenia, in order to assert the claim that the mental disorder was inherited. Kallmann's study was published simultaneously in the United States and Nazi Germany in 1938. In the preface, Kallmann thanked the Scottish Rite and his mentor Ruaudin. He called schizophrenics a “source of maladjusted crooks … and the lowest types of criminal offenders. Even the faithful believer in liberty … would be happier without those.” He declared sarcastically, “I am reluctant to admit the necessity of different eugenic programs for democratic and fascistic communities…. There are neither biological nor sociological differences between a democratic and a totalitarian schizophrenic.” Kallmann's scholarly American study was used by the Nazi government's T4 unit as a part of its pretext to begin in 1939 the murder of mental patients and various other “defective” people, many or most of them children. Lethal gas and lethal injections were used to kill 200-250,000 under this program, in which the staffs for a broader program of mass murder were desensitized and trained.





1939-40: the deal for Auschwitz

The German chemical company IG Farben and Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey were effectively a single firm, merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. IG Farben was led, up until 1937 by the Warburg family, Rockefeller's partners in banking and in the design of Nazi German eugenics. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Britain and Germany declared war on each other and World War II began. But later that month, Standard Oil executives flew to the Netherlands on a British Royal Air Force bomber and met with IG Farben executives. Standard Oil pledged to keep the merger with IG Farben going even if the United States entered the war. This was exposed in 1942 by Sen. Harry Truman's investigating committee, and President Franklin Roosevelt took hundreds of legal measures during the war to counter the Standard Oil-IG Farben cartel's supply operation for the enemy war machine. In 1940-41, IG Farben built a gigantic factory at Auschwitz in Poland, to utilize the Standard Oil-IG Farben patents with concentration camp slave labor to make gasoline from coal. The SS guarded the Jewish and other inmates and selected for killing those who were unfit for IG Farben slave labor. Standard-Germany President Emil Helfferich testified after the war that Standard Oil funds helped pay for the SS guards at Auschwitz. On March 26, 1940, six months after the Standard Oil-IG Farben meeting, European Rockefeller Foundation official Daniel O’Brian wrote to the foundation's chief medical officer Alan Gregg that “it would be unfortunate if it was chosen to stop research which has no relation to war issues.” The “non-war-related” research continued.  The Rockefeller Foundation defends its record by claiming that its funding of Nazi German programs during World War II was limited to psychiatric research. 





1943: research in Nazi-occupied Poland

In 1943, Otmar Verschuer's assistant Josef Mengele was made medical commandant of Auschwitz. As wartime director of Rockefeller's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity in Berlin, Verschuer secured funds for Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz from the German Research council. Verschuer wrote a progress report to the Council: “My co-researcher in this research is my assistant, the anthropologist and physician Mengele. He is serving as Hauptstueurmfueuhrer and camp doctor in the concentration camp Auschwitz…. With the permission of the Reichsfueuhrer SS Himmler, anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation.” Mengele prowled the railroad cars coming into Auschwitz, looking for twin children—a favorite research subject of Frankenstein-type psychiatric geneticists. On arrival at Mengele's experimental station, twins filled out “a detailed questionnaire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.” There were daily drawings of blood for Verschuer's “specific protein” research. Needles were injected into eyes for work on eye color. There were experimental blood transfusions and experimental infections. Organs and limbs were removed, sometimes without anesthetics. Sex changes were attempted. Females were sterilized, males were castrated. Thousands were murdered, and their organs, eyeballs, heads, and limbs were sent to Verschuer and the Rockefeller group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. After the war, Mengele was a famous target of Nazi-hunters pursuing him to South America. But his boss, Verschuer, was regarded in a different light: He was a high-level Rockefeller operative. In 1946, Verschuer wrote to the Bureau of Human Heredity in London, asking for help in continuing his “scientific research. “ In 1947, the Bureau of Human Heredity moved from London to Copenhagen, and Verschuer moved to Denmark to join the British group there. The new Danish building for this group was erected with Rockefeller money. The first International Congress in Human Genetics following World War II was held at this Danish institute in 1956. Dr. Kallmann helped save Verschuer by testifying at his denazification proceedings. Kallmann, a director of the American Eugenics Society, became an icon at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which remains to this day a nest of the Eugenics Society. With Verschuer and other Nazi notables, Dr. Kallmann also created the American Society of Human Genetics, which organized the “Human Genome Project”—a current $3 billion physical multiculturalism effort.

1943: research in North America

With the war on, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Canadian military joined their psychiatric forces. Canadian Army medical director Dr. George Brock Chisholm had been trained as a psychiatrist at the  Tavistock Psychiatric Clinic in London, and Tavistock—the British Crown's central mind-bending agency— was a major Rockefeller Foundation beneficiary. In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation created the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Eugenics-oriented psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, a Scottish immigrant to the United States, was placed in charge of the institute's psychiatry. Experiments in coercive interrogation and brainwashing would be conducted at Allen Institute under the auspices of the Canadian military, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. Cameron's “terminal” use of electric shock as a brain-burning torture, psychosurgery, and brainwashing with drugs and hypnosis would make the Canadian program the most famous aspect of the CIA's MK-Ultra. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a new odor, that of marijuana, could be detected inside St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. (St. Elizabeth's is the mental hospital where presidential assailants or other federal cases are kept.) The superintendent, Scottish Rite chief psychiatrist Winfred Overholser, was in 1943 the chairman of the misnamed “truth drug” committee for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The criminal underworld was systematically being brought into official but secret joint activities with the government, under the pretext of fighting fascism. Overholser's crew administered the hallucinogen mescaline to various test subjects. Then in the spring of 1943, they perfected the right mix of marijuana and tobacco to produce a “state of irresponsibility” in the subject. The official OSS story is that New York mafia hitman August Del Gracio began smoking Overholser's “joints” on May 27, 1943, in order to loosen his tongue. Federal agents were thus supposedly to learn the inside secrets of drug trafficking—but not to stop it. This was part of an ongoing federal program, which organized crime czar Meyer Lansky boasts (in his authorized biography) that he personally arranged. Mafia thugs were brought in to work in Naval Intelligence offices, and jointly with U.S. agents in U.S. ports and shipping, to more effectively intimidate our national enemies. Former CIA staff member John Marks writes in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate that Overholser's working group included counterintelligence agents inside the Manhattan Project atomic bomb project, and the FBI, which was under the direction of Dr. Overholser's Scottish Rite comrade, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The Overholser group gave marijuana to U.S. soldiers at Army bases throughout the country, supposedly to aid in the search for subversives. Later, during the 1950s and 1960s, the strategists of the MK-Ultra project would utilize the same channels of influence with U.S. security agencies to let them transform a generation of youth into dope users.

1944-48: after Nazism, the International Congress on Mental Health

In 1944, with the concentration camps in full swing and Europe burning, Montagu Norman resigned from the Bank of England. He immediately began a new project, ironically related to his own repeated mental breakdowns and hospitalizations. Norman organized the British National Association for Mental Health. In its formative stages the group was based at Thorpe Lodge, Norman's London home, where he had met with Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht to plan the Hitler regime's 1930s budgets. Montagu Norman's Bank of England assistant Otto Niemeyer was made treasurer of the National Association of Mental Health. Niemeyer's niece, Mary Appleby, became general secretary of the association. She previously worked in the German Section of the British Foreign Office. The president of Norman's association was to be Richard Austen (“RAB”) Butler. He had been deputy foreign minister to Lord Halifax and the spokesman in the British Parliament for the pro-Nazi policy. The chairman of the association was to be be Lord Halifax's son-in-law, the Earl of Feversham. The vice chairman was Lord Montagu Norman's wife, eugenics activist Priscilla Reyntiens Worsthorne Norman. Norman's British group would soon expand and to take over management of the world psychiatric profession. When the war ended, the exposure and punishment of those responsible for the Nazi barbarities was a rather delicate matter. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron interrupted his Canadian brain butchery to go help the British Crown's Tavistock psychological warfare unit evaluate the sanity of Nazi official Rudolph Hess. Cameron's unique insights into the Nazi mentality had made him a valued part of a secret wartime psychiatric committee in Washington to assess the trends in the Nazi leadership's thinking. Cameron now testified as an expert at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. His old OSS colleague Allen Dulles, later the CIA director, was reportedly pleased by Cameron's suggestion that each surviving German over the age of 12 should be given electroshock treatment to burn out remaining vestiges of Nazism. That part of the Nuremberg Code dealing with scientific research was drafted by Boston psychiatrist Leo Alexander; he soon afterward joined with Auschwitz experimental mastermind Otmar Verschuer in Franz Kallmann's American Society of Human Genetics. In 1948, Montagu Norman's National Association for Mental Health gathered the world psychiatric and psychological leaders together at an International Congress on Mental Health at the United Kingdom's Ministry of Health in London. At this congress, a World Federation for Mental Health was formed, to run the planet's psychological services. Lady Norman, the hostess of the congress, was named to the executive board. Norman picked as president of the World Federation the chief of the British military's psychological warfare department, Tavistock Institute chief Brig. Gen. Dr. John Rawlings Rees. In connection with the founding of the World Federation for Mental Health, a New York agent of Montagu Norman named Clarence G. Michalis was made chairman of the board of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. That foundation, in turn, would pay for much of what the World Federation and Tavistock were to do to the United States—supplying dope and otherwise subverting western ideals. The Macy Foundation's chief medical officer, Dr. Frank Fremont- Smith, would be the permanent co-director of the World Federation with J.R. Rees. The technical coordinator of the U.S. delegation to the 1948 congress, Nina Ridenour, later wrote in  Mental Health in the United States: A Fifty Year History,  that “the World Federation for Mental Health … had been created upon the recommendation of the United Nations'   World Health Organization and Unesco, because they needed a non-governmental [i.e., not accountable to any check of law or constitution—ed.] mental health organization with which they could cooperate.” Ridenour alluded to the fact that the British psychological warfare executive had itself created the heart of the U.N. apparatus:

“Having official consultive status with the United Nations and several of its specialized agencies, the World Federation for Mental Health is in a position to influence some of the U.N.'s decisions and some aspects of its program. The two U.N. agencies with which the World Federation works most closely are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organzation (Unesco). “The first director of WHO, and indeed quite literally its ‘creator,’ was a prominent Canadian psychiatrist, Brock Chisholm, M.D., formerly director general of the Canadian Army Medical Services. Since its inception, WHO has made significant contributions to world mental health through the reports of its various Expert Committees; through some of its other special reports, such as the notable monograph Mental Health and Maternal Care by [Tavistock's] John Bowlby, M.D.; and through the widespread activities of its Mental Health Division, of which the British psychiatrist Ronald C. Hargreaves was the first director.” Unesco's partnership with Rees was guided by Unesco's founding secretary general, eugenics strategist Sir Julian Huxley, and by Unesco social sciences chief Dr. Otto Klineberg, a Tavistock-affiliated psychologist specializing in the supposedly racial characteristics of the American Negro. The congress, which in effect founded the modern “mental health” profession, brought together one of the most exotic collection of enemies of humanity in recent centuries. Its vice presidents included: Prof. Cyril Burt:   Tavistock psychiatrist, eugenics activist, a leader of the “psychical research” movement (seances, ESP, ghosts), who was notorious for fraudulent “twins” research; Dr. Hugh Chrichton-Miller: founder of the Tavistock Clinic; vice president of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich; vice president, National Association for Mental Health; Dame Evelyn Fox: a longtime leader of the British eugenics movement (Lady Norman was a disciple of Dame Evelyn); Sir David Henderson: psychiatrist in London, Munich, and New York; author of  Psychiatry and Race Betterment; Lord Thomas Jeeves Horder: president of the Eugenics Society of Great Britain; president of the Family Planning Association; president of the Anglo-Soviet Public Relations Association; former physician to King Edward VIII; Carl G. Jung: occultist; psychiatrist to Montagu Norman, Paul Mellon, and the Dulles family; representative of German psychiatry under the Nazis, co-editor of the Nazis' Journal for Psychotherapy; Dr. Winfred Overholser: representative of the Scottish Rite Masons; chairman of the American delegation to the International Congress on Mental Health; Alan Ker Stout: University of Sydney, Australia, philosophy professor, president of the New South Wales Film Society, officer of Unesco for films; Dr. Alfred Frank Tredgold:   member of Britain's Ministry of Health Committee on Sterilization and a leading expert on mental defectives. The congress was run by the host British “National Association,” whose patron was the Duchess of Kent, widow of the Grand Master of Masons (1939-42) and mother of the Grand Master of Masons (1967 to the present), and whose vice presidents were eugenics and masonic officials. The general conference at the congress was on the subject of guilt, including the crucial plenary session on alleged German collective guilt for the crimes of Nazism. The first speaker was Margaret Mead,   anthropologist, occultist, who would be president of the World Federation for Mental Health in 1956 and 1957, during the MK-Ultra crimes. The “Chairman for Discussion” of this plenary was Scottish Rite strategist Winfred Overholser. In his opening remarks, Overholser said: “I understand that a vocal minority in the press does not agree with the wisdom of having such a meeting, but we feel there is great hope for the future if the principles of mental hygiene can be translated into terms of international action.”

1950s: MK-Ultra

The outrages perpetrated by Ewen Cameron became the most notorious aspect of the postwar Anglo-American mind-control program. Cameron had trained at the Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow, under eugenicist Sir David Henderson, and founded the Canadian branch of his friend John R. Rees's World Federation for Mental Health. In the various member countries and subdivisions, these channels of British intelligence operations are known as the national, provincial, or state   Mental Health Associations. Cameron was also elected president of the Canadian, American, and world psychiatric associations. He became famous after the CIA was sued by some survivors of his work—because the CIA had financed the tortures. Cameron would drug his victims to sleep for weeks on end, waking them daily only to administer violent electric shocks to the brain. He used the British Page-Russell electroconvulsive method, an initial one-second shock, then five to nine additional shocks, administered while the patient was in seizure. But he increased the normal voltage and the number of sequences from one to two or three times per day. Patients lost all or part of their memories, and some lost the ability to control their bodily functions and to speak. At least one patient was reduced almost to a vegetable; then Cameron had the cognitive centers of her brain surgically cut apart, while keeping her alive. Some subjects were deposited permanently in institutions for the hopelessly insane. For the CIA, Cameron tested the South American poison called curare, which kills a victim while simulating natural heart failure. But Cameron claims to have used it only in non-lethal doses to further immobilize his subjects while they were kept in sensory deprivation tortures for as long as 65 days. Then they would be given lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) for “programmable” hallucinations. When the subject was sufficiently devastated, Cameron and his assistant, a veteran of the British Royal Signals Corps, would begin “Psychic Driving”: Through a loudspeaker hidden under the pillow, or through unremovable earphones, they would play a tape over and over again to burn certain phrases into what was left of the victim's memory. The CIA was found to have financed these horrors, as well as ghastly experiments in other locations, using a front called the Society for the Study of Human Ecology. (The society gave a grant for a study of the effects of circumcision on young Turkish boys, the grantees to be in Istanbul, studying five to seven year olds and their problems with their genitals. It is claimed that this was intended to give a cover to the CIA front as a real academic organization.)

The question of sponsorship

But the authorship of this enterprise cannot reasonably be assigned to the CIA, per se. Even before we review other agencies' direct involvement, we must understand that the CIA chief during MK-Ultra, Allen Dulles, was thoroughly attached to British Empire geopolitical aims. Introduced to British spies by his uncle Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state, Dulles had had a strong personal identification since childhood with the British Secret Intelligence Service. The Dulles family's upper class-status in America began when ancestor William Dulles arrived in South Carolina from India. With a fortune made in India by providing financial and security services for the British East India Company army, he bought a slave plantation which the family held through the American Civil War. The family's mental life was always that of the British Empire and its American colonial subordinates. Allen Dulles's main corporate activity was as a director of the J. Henry Schroder banking company in London, a prime instrument in Montagu Norman's nazification of Germany. As partners in the Sullivan and Cromwell firm, Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles represented the Rockefeller-Harriman-Warburg combination, I.G. Farben, and virtually every other Nazi corporate organization that danced on London's marionette strings. It was disclosed that for MK-Ultra, particularly for the experimental use and distribution of LSD, the CIA operated through another front, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. But the geometry of the “front” really worked the other way around. The Macy Foundation represented the British psychological warfare executive, as extended into U.S. and related institutions. In the midst of launching MK-Ultra, during 1954-55, the Macy Foundation's medical director Frank Fremont-Smith was president of British General Rees's World Federation of Mental Health. Under Rees as the director, the two together “made a journey to a number of countries in Asia and Africa to establish contacts and seek ways in which the organization may extend its activities in those regions.” Through official military and intelligence conferences over which it presided, and through various informal and secret operations, the Macy Foundation directed the spread of LSD by U.S. agencies during the 1950s. The Macy Foundation's chief LSD executive, Harold Abramson, was a psychiatric researcher at Columbia University and at the eugenics center in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. It was Abramson who first “turned on” Frank Fremont-Smith. Abramson also gave LSD for the first time to British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, sometime husband of Margaret Mead. Then in 1959, Bateson gave LSD to Beat poet Alan Ginsburg at Stanford University, under controlled experimental conditions. Following this, Dr. Leo Hollister at Stanford gave LSD to mental patient turned author Ken Kesey and others, and thus it was said to have spread “out of the CIA's realm.”

Masonic ‘charity’

Other parts of the U.S. government participated in the project exposed as MK-Ultra. The Army Chemical Center paid for LSD and related drug brainwashing experiments by Dr. Paul Hoch. Along with Nazi eugenics leader Franz Kallmann, Hoch co-directed the research at Columbia University's New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Hoch was a member of the American Eugenics Society, in Kallmann's eugenics cell at the institute. Hoch was simultaneously appointed State Mental Hygiene Commissioner by New York Gov. Averell Harriman, and was reappointed by the next governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Dr. Hoch's forced injections of a mescaline derivative brought about the 1953 death of New York tennis player Harold Blauer. Hoch's colleague Dr. James Cattell later told investigators, “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.” When Hoch died, British brain butcher Ewen Cameron directed his funeral. Dr. Hoch, a Scottish Rite masonic strategist, worked with Dr. Kallman under the direction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry's Field Representative of Research on Dementia Praecox, Dr. Nolan D.C. Lewis, the superintendent of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. As the Ku Klux Klan has been the defining project for the Scottish Rite's Southern Jurisdiction, the Rite's Northern Jurisdiction left its official mark on the world through MK-Ultra—its most important “charity.” Much of the psychiatric dirty work, though, has been done inside the Rite's KKK-spawning Southern Jurisdiction, which includes all southern states and everything west of the Mississippi River. Robert Hanna Felix, 33rd degree mason, was a director of the Scottish Rite's psychiatric research. He ran a spectacularly lawless brainwashing establishment. The exposure of the MK-Ultra scandal revealed that the CIA had funded one Dr. Harris Isbell to carry out barbarous experiments using slave subjects, nearly all of them black drug addicts, at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Isbell was the director of the center from the 1940s until 1963. His boss was masonic master psychiatrist Felix, who founded the   National Institute of Mental Health and was NIMH director from 1949 to 1964. The Lexington facility had been Dr. Felix's personal project since he had been its clinical director in the 1930s, and he put it under the jurisdiction of the NIMH. The Felix-Isbell slave experiments involved LSD and a wide variety of other hallucinogens and exotic poisons. In one case, seven prisoners were kept hallucinating on LSD for 77 consecutive days. The torture at Lexington followed the pattern developed by Cameron in Montreal: Drug-induced sleep was interrupted by electroconvulsive shock. Cooperative subjects were rewarded with shots of heroin or any other drug of their choice. And for mental health, the masonic administration encouraged the prisoners to participate in synthetic religious and political cults. Felix's program was not simply to make humans into controllable beasts, but to decentralize the zombie-manufacturing. A 1993 report to the Scottish Rite Supreme Council by its current psychiatric research director, Steven Matthysse, explains: “Thirty years ago, a massive program began, which has continued unabated to this day: the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill…. My predecessor as research director of the Schizophrenia Research Program, Dr. Robert H. Felix, 33 Degree, Gourgas medalist and the founding director of the National Institute of Mental Health, was one of the chief architects of this program. ‘We are entering a new era,’ he wrote, ‘of community-centered, comprehensive psychiatric care.’… Dr. Felix predicted that, in 25 years, ‘State mental hospitals as we know them would no longer exist.’ He was right…. During the years from 1955 to 1992, the state mental hospital census went down by 82%.” The strategists of MK-Ultra succeeded in moving the mentally ill out of costly mental hospitals, onto the streets, where they now constitute a large proportion of America's homeless. We shall now see what kind o  “community-centered psychiatric care” these strategists did in fact implement, as Britain's MK-Ultra poured drugs into the country and worked to fabricate the drug-sex youth culture. Seymour Solomon Kety was both an executive of the Scottish Rite's psychiatry experiments, and a Scottish Rite-funded clinical experimenter. He was chief of NIMH clinical sciences from 1957 through 1967, and continued as the NIMH “senior scientist” into the 1990s. A close associate of the Kallmann Nazi-eugenics cell at Columbia, Kety was a national director of the American Eugenics Society, under its 1980s name, the Society for the Study of Social Biology. Kety helped lead the masons' U.S. agency, the NIMH, beyond the Kentucky experiments, to the brink of Hell.

Manchuria in California?

As Carol Greene has demonstrated in her 1992 book  Moeurder aus der Retorte: Der Fall Charles Manson, (Test-Tube Murder: The Case of Charles Manson) Charles Manson, before he committed mass murder, was himself an NIMH “research subject.” Manson was released from a California prison in March 1967. He was required by law to report regularly to a parole officer named Roger Smith, who was based at the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic in San Francisco. This was an NIMH project designed to observe and in effect supervise the first large-scale drug addiction of white teenagers, thousands of whom were the clinic's clients. Clinic director David E. Smith was also the publisher of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, and a leading national advocate for the legalized use of narcotics. Within the clinic arrangement, Charles Manson's parole officer was officially commissioned to scientifically investigate the effects that various kinds of drugs had on addicts served by the NIMH clinic. David Smith also collaborated with another NIMH project: a behavioral study of children in communes. He was an expert on the breeding of violent anti-social characters in the mind-crushing environment of the hippie or cult commune. Parole officer Roger Smith remained on Manson's case after he was no longer his parole officer, as an adviser and observer of the increasingly insane man. Charles Manson took up with a British-origin satanic killer cult called The Process—Church of the Final Judgment, a spin-off from Scientology. When he started with The Process is not clear, but there are some reports that it was in that summer of 1967. Its British founders had put the U.S. headquarters of the cult into the Haight-Ashbury section, two blocks from where Manson was living, and they recruited from among the “flower children” for the jobs of drug-running, assassination, and race riots. David Berkowitz, convicted in the New York “Son of Sam” serial murders, was an initiate of The Process. Manson is most widely known for his communal Family, which carried out the satanic Tate-LaBianca murders. But here we note that Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who became the head of the Family after Manson was arrested in October 1969, was herself imprisoned for the 1975 attempted assassination of U.S. President Gerald Ford. Another associate of the Manson Family, Sarah Jane Moore, was also imprisoned for a failed assassination attempt on President Ford. Had either been successful, Nelson Rockefeller would have become President. There is a certain psychiatric agency, the American Family Foundation, which exists officially to guard the public from injurious cults. AFF is the mother organization for the so-called Cult Awareness Network (CAN).  Dr. Louis Jolyon West is a director of AFF. An expert in brainwashing for the Air Force and the CIA, West first achieved fame from his MK-Ultra feat—he injected LSD-25 into an elephant and killed it. West researched “the psychology of dissociated states” for the CIA, using LSD and hypnosis. His friend Aldous Huxley suggested to Dr. West during an MK-Ultra experiment that West hypnotize his subjects prior to administering LSD, in order to give them “post-hypnotic suggestions aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction.” Dr. West was called upon by the government to examine Jack Ruby, who had killed Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald could stand trial for his alleged role in the assassination of President John Kennedy. West declared Ruby to be in a “paranoid state manifested by delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, and suicidal impulses.” Ruby was convicted in 1964, but conveniently died in 1967 while awaiting what could have been a revealing re-trial. Dr. West lived in Haight-Ashbury during the summer of 1967, to study the hippies. In the 1970s, West became famous again for his plans to create a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. Its staff was to investigate the genetics and biochemistry of their prisoners, including “hyperkinetic children,” whose every motion would be electronically monitored by Orwellian guards. Though backed by Gov. Ronald Reagan, the plan was defeated.  Rabbi Maurice Davis is another “expert” guarding America from cults as a director of the American Family Foundation. Davis worked at the NIMH Lexington Addiction Research Center as a chaplain, serving the slave victims of the MK-Ultra drug experiments as they were brought into cult participation. Rabbi Davis then moved to Indianapolis and sponsored the career of Rev. Jim Jones, whose followers were murdered with poisoned Kool-Aid in Guyana. The bulk of the start-up financing for the American Family Foundation was channelled through a New York law firm running two funding satellites of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. The same law firm was the legal representative of The Process—Church of the Final Judgment. The Process Church employs neo-Nazi themes, as do other British-origin movements such as the Satanists associated with California's Anton Lavey and Col. Michael Aquino. Charles Manson's swastika tattoo attests to this. Many of the psychotic potential presidential assassins have been “neo-Nazis.” These include Ronald Reagan's deeply brainwashed assailant John Hinckley, and some of those who have threatened President Clinton. To help turn up the possible source for this curious zombie pattern, we review the case of NIMH leader Seymour Kety—as of recent report the chairman of the Professional Advisory Section of the Scottish Rite Masons' Schizophrenia Research program. This is the Dr. Kety who, with his NIMH predecessor Dr. Felix, helped shape the programs that made Charles Manson a satanic beast. A Scottish Rite brochure reports on the meetings of the Rite's Grand Commander and Supreme Council with their psychiatrists to plan for the future. The brochure explains that Dr. Kety “can trace his interest in the genetics of schizophrenia to a report by Dr. Franz Kallmann at one of these meetings years ago. Dr. Kety's own genetic studies have become landmarks in the field, as the first convincing demonstration of an inherited factor.” Not the first, perhaps, because Kallmann provided Adolf Hitler with “convincing” pretexts to exterminate mental patients.

The official assassination program

The ambiguous rationale for the MK-Ultra program was the search for the Manchurian Candidate: to study, emulate, and counterbalance communist programs which brainwash people who could be dangerous to our national security. These programs were secret, and masses of MK-Ultra records were destroyed. But some aspects of the program's direct testing have been divulged. CIA executive Morse Allen worked at creating killers under hypnosis on and around Feb. 19, 1954. The CIA planned early in 1954 to hypnotize a man they considered disposable, to get him to make an assassination attempt, be arrested for attempted murder, and be “thereby disposed of.” A CIA hypnosis study was done by Alden Sears at the University of Minnesota and was moved by Sears to the University of Denver, Colorado. Sears worked to answer the question, “Could a hypnotist induce a totally separate personality? CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, a leader of the British intelligence faction in the American intelligence community, established three goals for the hypnosis program: 1) to induce hypnosis very rapidly in unwitting subjects; 2) to create durable amnesia; and 3) to implant durable and operationally useful post-hypnotic suggestion. A test of rapid hypnosis took place in July 1963. The counterintelligence staff in Washington, D.C. asked the CIA station in Mexico City to find a suitable candidate for a rapid induction experiment. The station proposed a low-level agent, whom the Soviets had apparently doubled. A counterintelligence man flew in from Washington and a hypnotic consultant arrived from California. The experiment was said to have misfired. According to CIA hypnosis expert Milton Klein, creating a hypnotized “patsy” is easier than making a totally controlled Manchurian Candidate. The patsy can be induced by hypnosis to do things which later show up as circumstantial evidence that will get him falsely blamed for a crime. Klein has claimed he can create a patsy in three months; a full-scale Manchurian Candidate takes six months.

Strange deaths: Frank Olson and Philip Graham

An important part of the MK-Ultra story was the violent death of Dr. Frank Olson. In November 1953, the project's CIA personnel gave LSD to Olson, an executive of the Army Chemical Corps' Special Operations Division, without warning him. Olson became psychotic and paranoid, so the agency took Olson to New York to see Harold Abramson, the British Crown's LSD pusher, who had “top secret” CIA clearance. When Abramson was no help, Olson agreed to enter    Chestnut Lodge, a Rockville, Maryland sanitarium whose psychiatrists were in Abramson's category for the security of the MK-Ultra project—“top secret” cleared. But the night before he was to enter Chestnut Lodge, Olson allegedly jumped to his death from a hotel window. Olson's death eventually became a scandal which helped break open of the entire MK-Ultra scandal. A decade later, President John F. Kennedy was pressing ahead with the Apollo space program, which he promised would put a man on the Moon within a decade. Philip Graham, the owner/publisher of the Washington Post  and  Newsweek, met as an adviser and friend every week with the President and his brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Graham was an ardent champion and strategist of the space program, and of the President's policy of achieving peace by developing overwhelming technological superiority. Graham wrote a Newsweek column defending French President Charles de Gaulle and attacking Britain and elements in the U.S. government who took the British line. Graham's wife Katharine and her Anglophile family despised and mocked Kennedy's emphasis on progress, and demanded U.S. disarmament. Graham separated from his wife and sued for divorce. In January 1963, Graham delivered a speech to a national publishers' meeting in Arizona, attacking the news media as toadies and sycophants. Leslie Farber, a New Age psychiatrist from MK-Ultra's Chestnut Lodge, flew out on a military jet. Graham was wrestled to the ground, drugged into a stupor, and flown back to Maryland, where his wife had obtained a court order for his commitment to Chestnut Lodge. He was apparently released after 10 days or so. In June 1963, Graham was somehow put back into Chestnut Lodge. On Aug. 3, he was released into the custody of his estranged wife. That afternoon, he was found shot to death. His will was declared void on the grounds of insanity, and his widow, Katharine Graham, gained control of the Washington Post and  Newsweek.  Three months later, President Kennedy was assassinated. The Washington Post, the main newspaper in the national capital, did not pursue the question of who had murdered the U.S. President, but left it to the Warren Commission to decide.

The assassins' goals

Back in 1961, at the height of MK-Ultra, the NIMH, led by masonic high priest Robert Felix, had created an elite group of biologists, behavioral psychologists, chemists, pharmacologists, neuropsychologists, and psychiatrists. This 150-member   American College of Neuropsychopharmacology comprised many of the most important MK-Ultra participants. An inner group of the college, the Study Group for the Effects of Psychotropic Drugs on Normal Humans, held a conference in 1967 to outline the desired course for the United States to the year 2000. This conference was reported on by two MK-Ultra leaders:  Dr. Wayne O. Evans, director of the U.S. Army Military Stress Laboratory in Natick, Massachusetts; and   Nathan Kline, a eugenics fanatic and research psychiatrist for Columbia University, who had set up voodoo-oriented psychological clinics in Haiti in conjunction with “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The preface to the Evans-Kline report said the group “concluded that the present breadth of drug use may be almost trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man's life in the year 2000…. “The American culture … [is] moving toward a ‘sensate society.’… A greater emphasis is being placed on sensory experience and less upon rational or work-oriented philosophies. Such a philosophical view, coupled with the means to separate sexual behavior from reproduction or disease, will undoubtedly enhance sexual freedom…. “It seems … obvious that the youth of today are no longer afraid of either drugs or sex. Again, the philosophers and spokesmen for the avant-garde advocate the personal sensory experience as the  raison d’etre of the coming generation. Finally, we are moving into an age in which meaningful work will be possible only for a minority: In such an age, chemical aphrodisiacs may be accepted as a commonplace means to occupy one's time. It will be interesting to see if the public morality of the next 30 years will change as much as it has in the last 30. “If we accept the position that human mood, motivation, and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid, expedient means to produce any desired neurochemical state that we wish. “The sooner that we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can rationally consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to be able to provide for people.” This is the historical thinking of the British strategists who want to destroy the U.S. presidency and the American republic. And this is the criminal apparatus with which they have equipped themselves to do it.

_______________

Notes:

1 “The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Sciences, 1920-1940: Educational Philanthropy to International Science Policy” by Paul Weindling in the book  Science, Politics and the Public Good: Essays in Honour of Margaret Gowing,  London, Macmillan Press, 1988.

For further reading

Samuel Harrison Baynard, Jr.,  History of the Supreme Council, 33 Degree, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Northern Jurisdiction of the United States of America,  Vol. II, Boston, 1938, published by the Supreme Council.  The Campaigner,  April 1974: L. Marcus, “The Real CIA—The Rockefellers' Fascist Establishment,” and M. Minnicino, “Low Intensity Operations: The Reesian Theory of War.” May 1974: Peter Cuskie, “The Shaping of the Anglo-American SS by War,” and Richard Freeman, “Rockefeller's Fascist Labor Policies.” Photocopies available from Ben Franklin Booksellers, Inc., 1-800- 453-4108. Anton Chaitkin, “Franklin Witnesses Implicate FBI and U.S. Elites in Torture and Murder of Children,”  The New Federalist,  Dec. 13, 1993. Anton Chaitkin, “Cairo Population Conference Repeats 1932 Nazi Planning Meeting,”  EIR,  April 29, 1994. Franz J. Kallmann,  The Genetics of Schizophrenia: A Study of Heredity and Reproduction in the Families of 1087 Schizophrenics,   New York: 1938. Stefan Kuhl,  The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism,  New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and Anton Chaitkin,  Bring Down the Pike Statue Now: Why the KKK National Monument Must Fall,  1993, published by  The New Federalist,  P.O. Box 889, Leesburg, Va. 22075. Bernhard Schreiber,  The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World,  France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English edition supplied by H. and P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London W2. A copy of this book is held by Union College Library, Syracuse, N. Y. Jeffrey Steinberg, “30 Years of Menticide,”  EIR,  Oct. 6, Oct. 20, and Nov. 3, 1989. Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin,  George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,  Washington, D.C.: EIR, 1992, consult especially chapters 1-4. Carol White and Brian Lantz, “Satan's Helpers: Nazi Doctors in America,”  EIR,  Oct. 6, 1989.

Oz'dpolitik : The Wizard of Oz - Parable on Populism



[rule]

The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism

by Henry M. Littlefield
On the deserts of North Africa in 1941 two tough Australian brigades went into battle singing:
Have you heard of the wonderful wizard, 
     The wonderful Wizard of Oz, 
And he is a wonderful wizard,
      If ever a wizard there was.

It was a song they had brought with them from Australia and would soon spread to England. Forever afterward it reminded Winston Churchill of those "buoyant days."[1] Churchill's nostalgia is only one symptom of the world-wide delight found in an American fairy tale about a little girl and her odyssey in the strange land of Oz. The song he reflects upon came from a classic 1939 Hollywood production of the story, which introduced millions of people not only to the land of Oz, but to a talented young lady named Judy Garland as well.
Ever since its publication in 1900 Lyman Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been immensely popular, providing the basis for a profitable musical comedy, three movies, and a number of plays. It is an indigenous creation, curiously warm and touching, although no one really knows why. For despite wholehearted acceptance by generations of readers, Baum's tale has been accorded neither critical acclaim, nor extended critical examination. Interested scholars, such as Russel B. Nye and Martin Gardiner, look upon The Wizard of Oz as the first in a long and delightful series of Oz stories, and understandably base their appreciation of Baum's talent on the totality of his works[2].
The Wizard of Oz is an entity unto itself, however, and was not originally written with a sequel in mind. Baum informed his readers in 1904 that he has produced The Marvelous Land of Oz reluctantly and only in answer to well over a thousand letters demanding that he creation another Oz tale[3]. His original effort remains unique and to some degree separate from the books which follow. But its uniqueness does not rest alone on its peculiar and transcendent popularity.
Professor Nye finds a "strain of moralism" in the Oz books, as well as "a well-developed sense of satire," and Baum stories often include searching parodies on the contradiction in human nature. The second book in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz, is a blatant satire on feminism and the suffragette movement[4]. In it Baum attempted to duplicate the format used so successfully in The Wizard, yet no one has noted a similar play on contemporary movements in the latter work. Nevertheless, one does exist, and it reflects to an astonishing degree the world of political reality which surrounded Baum in 1900. In order to understand the relationship of The Wizard to turn-of-the-century America, it is necessary first to know something of Baum's background.
Born near Syracuse in 1856, Baum was brought up in a wealthy home and early became interested in the theater. He wrote some plays which enjoyed brief success and then, with his wife and two sons, journeyed to Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1887. Aberdeen was a little prairie town and there Baum edited the local weekly until it failed in 1891[5].
For many years Western farmers had been in a state of loud, though unsuccessful, revolt. While Baum was living in South Dakota not only was the frontier a thing of the past, but the Romantic view of benign nature had disappeared we well. The stark reality of the dry, open plains and the acceptance of man's Darwinian subservience to his environment served to crush Romantic idealism[6].
Hamlin Garland's visit to Iowa and South Dakota coincided with Baum's arrival. Henry Nash Smith observes,
"Garland's success as a portrayer of hardship and suffering on Northwestern farms was due in part to the fact that his personal experience happened to parallel the shock which the entire West received in the later 1880's from the combined effects of low prices, ... grasshoppers, drought, the terrible blizzards of the winter of 1886-1887, and the juggling of freight rates..."[7]
As we shall see, Baum's prairie experience was no less deeply etched, although he did not employ naturalism to express it.
Baum's stay in South Dakota also covered the period of the formation of the Populist party, which Professor Nye likens to a fanatic "crusade". Western farmers had for a long time sought governmental aid in the form of economic panaceas, but to no avail. The Populist movement symbolized a desperate attempt to use the power of the ballot[8]. In 1891 Baum moved to Chicago where he was surrounded by those dynamic elements of reform which made the city so notable during the 1890's[9].
In Chicago Baum certainly saw the results of the frightful depression which had closed down up on the nation in 1893. Moreover, he took part in the pivotal election of 1896, marching in "torch-light parades for William Jennings Bryan". Martin Gardiner notes besides, that he "consistently voted as a democrat...and his sympathies seem always to have been on the side of the laboring classes." No one who marched in even a few such parades could have been unaffected by Bryan's campaign. Putting all the farmers' hopes in a basket labeled "free coinage of silver," Bryan's platform rested mainly on the issue of adding silver to the nation's gold standard. Though he lost, he did at least bring the plight of the little man into national focus[11].
Between 1896 and 1900, while Baum worked and wrote in Chicago, the great depression faded away and the war with Spain thrust the United States into world prominence. Bryan maintained Midwestern control over the Democratic party, and often spoke out against American policies toward Cuba and the Philippines. By 1900 it was evident that Bryan would run again, although now imperialism and not silver seemed the issue of primary concern. In order to promote greater enthusiasm, however, Bryan felt compelled once more to sound the silver lietmotif in his campaign[12]. Bryan's second futile attempt at the presidency culminated in November 1900. The previous winter Baum had attempted unsuccessfully to sell a rather original volume of children's fantasy, but that April, George M. Hill, a small Chicago publisher, finally agreed to print The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Baum's allegiance to the cause of Democratic Populism must be balanced against the fact that he was not a political activist. Martin Gardiner finds all through all of his writings "a theme of tolerance, with many episodes that poke fun at narrow nationalism and ethnocentrism." Nevertheless, Professor Nye quotes Baum as having a desire to write stories that would "bear the stamp of our times and depict the progressive fairies of today."[13]
The Wizard of Oz has neither the mature religious appeal of a Pilgrim's Progress, nor the philosophic depth of a Candide. Baum's most thoughtful devotees see in it only a warm, cleverly written fairy tale. Yet the original Oz book conceals an unsuspected depth, and it is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that Baum's immortal American fantasy encompasses more than heretofore believed. For Baum created a children's story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations. The allegory always remains in a minor key, subordinated to the major theme and readily abandoned whenever it threatens to distort the appeal of the fantasy. But through it, in the form of a subtle parable, Baum delineated a Midwesterner's vibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.
We are introduced to both Dorothy and Kansas at the same time:
"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There was four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty-looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.
Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.
It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.[14]
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur would not have recognized Uncle Henry's farm; it us straight out of Hamlin Garland.[15] On it a deadly environment dominated everyone and everything except Dorothy and her pet. The setting is Old Testament and nature seems grayly impersonal and even angry. Yet it is a fearsome cyclone that lifts Dorothy and Toto in their house and deposits them "very gently -- for a cyclone -- in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty." We immediately sense the contrast between Oz and Kansas. Here there are "stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits... gorgeous flowers... and birds with ... brilliant plumage" sing in the trees. In Oz "a small brook rushing and sparkling along" murmurs "in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairie."(p. 20)
Trouble intrudes. Dorothy's house has come down on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her. Nature, by sheer accident, can provide benefits, for indirectly the cyclone has disposed of one of the two truly bad influences in the land of Oz. Notice that evil ruled in both the East and the West; after Dorothy's coming it rules only in the West.
The Wicked Witch of the East had kept the little Munchkin people "in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day." (pp. 22-23). Just what this slavery entailed is not immediately clear, but Baum later gives us a specific example. The Tin Woodman, whom Dorothy meets on her way to the Emerald City, had been put under a spell by the Witch of the East. Once an independent and hard working human being, the Woodman found that each time he swung his axe it chopped off a different part of his body. Knowing no other trade he "worked harder than ever," for luckily in Oz tinsmiths can repair such things. Soon the Woodman was all tin (p. 59). In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed.[16]
There is one thing seriously wrong with being made of tin; when it rains rust sets in. Tin Woodman had been standing in the same position for a year without moving before Dorothy came along and oiled his joints. The Tin Woodman's situation has an obvious parallel in the condition of many Eastern workers after the depression of 1893.[17] While Tin Woodman is standing still, rusted solid, he deludes himself into thinking he is no longer capable of that most human of sentiments, love. Hate does not fill the void, a constant lesson in the Oz books, and Tin Woodman feels that only a heart will make him sensitive again. So he accompanies Dorothy to see if the Wizard will give him one.
Oz itself is a magic oasis surrounded by impassable deserts, and the country is divided in a very orderly fashion. In the North and South the people are ruled by good witches, who are not quite as powerful as the wicked ones of the East and West. In the center of the land is the magnificent Emerald City ruled by the Wizard of Oz, a successful humbug whom even the witches mistakenly feel "is more powerful than all the rest of us together" (p.24). Despite these forces, the mark of goodness, placed on Dorothy's forehead by the Witch of the North, serves as protection for Dorothy throughout her travels. Goodness and innocence prevail even over the powers of evil and delusion in Oz. Perhaps it is this basic and beautiful optimism that makes Baum's tale so characteristically American -- and Midwestern.
Dorothy is Baum's Miss Everyman. She is one of us, levelheaded and human, and she has a real problem. Young readers can understand her quandary as readily as can adults. She is good, not precious, and she thinks quite naturally about others. For all the attractions of Oz, Dorothy desires only to return to the gray plains and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. She is directed toward the Emerald City by the good Witch of the North, since the Wizard will surely be able to solve the problem of the impassable deserts. Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East's magic Silver Shoes. Silver shoes walking on a golden road; henceforth Dorothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum's ironic view of the Silver issue. Remember, neither Dorothy, nor the good Witch of the North, nor the Munchkins understand the power of these shoes. The allegory is abundantly clear. On the next to last page of the book Baum has Glinda, Witch of the South, tell Dorothy, "Your Silver Shoes will carry you over the desert.....If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.". Glinda explains, "All you have to do is knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go." (p.257). William Jennings Bryan never outlined the advantages of the silver standard any more effectively.
Not understanding the magic of the Silver Shoes, Dorothy walks the mundane -- and dangerous -- Yellow Brick Road. The first person she meets is a Scarecrow. After escaping from his wooden perch, the Scarecrow displays a terrible sense of inferiority and self doubt, for he has determined that he needs real brains to replace the common straw in his head. William Allen White wrote an article in 1896 entitled "What's the Matter With Kansas?". In it he accused Kansas farmers of ignorance, irrationality and general muddle-headedness. What's wrong with Kansas are the people, said Mr. White.[18] Baum's character seems to have read White's angry characterization. But Baum never takes White seriously and so the Scarecrow soon emerges as innately a very shrewd and very capable individual.
The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman accompany Dorothy along the Yellow Brick Road, one seeking brains, the other a heart. They meet next the Cowardly Lion. As King of Beasts he explains, "I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way." Born a coward, he sobs, "Whenever there is danger my heart begins to beat fast." "Perhaps you have heart disease," suggests Tin Woodman, who always worries about hearts. But the Lion desires only courage and so he joins the party to ask help from the Wizard (pp.65-72)
The Lion represents Bryan himself. In the election of 1896 Bryan lost the vote of Eastern Labor, though he tried hard to gain their support. In Baum's story the Lion meeting the little group, "struck at the Tin Woodman with his sharp claws." But, to his surprise, "he could make no impression on the tin, although the Woodman fell over in the road and lay still." Baum here refers to the fact that in 1896 workers were often pressured into voting for McKinley and gold by their employers.[19] Amazed, the Lion says, "he nearly blunted my claws," and he adds even more appropriately, "When they scratched against the tine it made a cold shiver run down my back" (pp. 67-68). The King of Beasts is not after all very cowardly, and Bryan, although a pacifist and an anti-imperialist in a time of national expansion, is not either.[20] The magic Silver Shoes belong to Dorothy, however. Silver's potent charm, which had come to mean so much to so many in the Midwest, could not be entrusted to a political symbol. Baum delivers Dorothy from the world of adventure and fantasy to the real world of heartbreak and desolution through the power of Silver. It represents a real force in a land of illusion, and neither the Cowardly Lion nor Bryan truly needs or understands its use.
All together now the small party moves toward the Emerald City. Coxey's Army of tramps and indigents, marching to ask President Cleveland for work in 1894, appears no more naively innocent than this group of four characters going to see a humbug Wizard, to request favors that only the little girl among them deserves.
Those who enter the Emerald City must wear green glasses. Dorothy later discovers that the greeness of dresses and ribbons disappears on leaving, and everything becomes a bland white. Perhaps the magic of any city is thus self imposed. But the Wizard dwells here and so the Emerald City represents the national Capitol. The Wizard, a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise, might be any president from Grant to McKinley. He comes straight from the fairgrounds on Omaha, Nebraska, and he symbolizes the American criterion for leadership -- he is able to be everything to everybody.
As each of our heroes enters the throne room to ask a favor the Wizard assumes different shapes, representing different views toward national leadership. To Dorothy he appears as an enormous head, "bigger than the head of the biggest giant." An apt image for a naive and innocent little citizen. To the Scarecrow he appears to be a lovely, gossamer fairy, a most appropriate form for an idealistic Kansas farmer. The Woodman sees a horrible beast, as would any exploited Eastern laborer after the trouble of the 1890's. But the Cowardly Lion, like W. J. Bryan, sees a "Ball of Fire, so fierce and glowing he could scarcely bear to gaze upon it." Baum then provides an additional analogy, for when the Lion "tried to go nearer he singed his whiskers and he crept back tremblingly to a spot nearer the door." (p. 134)
The Wizard has asked them all to kill the Witch of the West. The golden road does not go in that direction and so they must follow the sun, as have many pioneers in the past. The land they now pass through is "rougher and hillier, for there were no farms nor houses in the country of the West and the ground was untilled" (p.140). The Witch of the West uses natural forces to achieve her ends; she is Baum's version of sentient and malign nature.
Finding Dorothy and her friends in the West, the Witch sends forty wolves against them, then forty vicious crows and finally a great swarm of black bees. But it is through the power of a magic golden cap that she summons the flying monkeys. They capture the little girl and dispose of her companions. Baum makes these Winged Monkeys into an Oz substitute for the plains Indians. Their leader says, "Once we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master." "This," he explains, "was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule over this land" (p. 172). But like many Indian tribes Baum's monkeys are not inherently bad; their actions depend wholly upon the bidding of others. Under the control of an evil influence, they do evil. Under the control of goodness and innocence, as personified by Dorothy, the monkeys are helpful and kind, although unable to take her to Kansas. Says the Monkey King, "We belong to this country alone, and cannot leave it" (p. 213). The same could be said with equal truth of the first Americans.
Dorothy presents a special problem to the Witch. Seeing the mark on Dorothy's forehead and the Silver Shoes on her feet, the Witch begins "to tremble with fear, for she knew what a powerful charm belonged to them." Then "she happened to look into the child's eyes and saw how simple the soul behind them was, and that the little girl did now know of the wonderful power the Silver shoes gave her" (p. 150). Here Baum again uses the Silver allegory to state the blunt homily that while goodness affords a people ultimate protection against evil, ignorance of their capabilities allows evil to impose itself upon them. The Witch assumes that proportions of a kind of western Mark Hanna or Banker Boss, who, through natural malevolence, manipulates the people and holds them prisoner by cynically taking advantage of their innate innocence.
Enslaved in the West "Dorothy went to work meekly, with her mind made up to work as hard as she could; for she was glad the Wicked Witch had decided not to kill her" (p. 150). Many Western farmers have held these same grim thoughts in less mystical terms. If the Witch of the West is a diabolical force of Darwinian or Spencerian nature, then another contravening force may be counted upon the dispose of her. Dorothy destroys the evil Witch by angrily dousing her with a bucket of water. Water, that precious commodity which the drought-ridden farmers on the great plains needed so badly, and which if correctly used could create an agricultural paradise, or at least dissolve a wicked witch. Plain water brings an end to malign nature in the West.
When Dorothy and her companions return to the Emerald City they soon discover that the Wizard is really nothing more than "a little man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face." Can this be the ruler of the land? Our friends looked at him in surprise and dismay.
"I thought Oz was a great Head," said Dorothy...."And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast," said the Tin Woodman. "And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire," exclaimed the Lion. "No; you are all wrong," said the little man meekly. "I have been making believe."
Dorothy asks if he is truly a great Wizard. He confides, "Not a bit of it, my Dear; I'm just a common man." Scarecrow adds, "You're more than that...you're a humbug" (p. 184).
The Wizard's deception is of long standing in Oz and even the Witches were taken in. How was it accomplished? "It was a great mistake my ever letting you into the Throne Room," the Wizard complains. "Usually I will not see even my subjects, and so they believe I am something terrible" (p. 185). What a wonderful lesson for youngsters of the decade when Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley were hiding in the White House. Formerly the Wizard was a mimic, a ventriloquist and a circus balloonist. The latter trade involved going "up in a balloon on circus day, so as to draw a crowd of people together and get them to pay to see the circus" (p. 186-187). Such skills are as admirable adapted to success in late-nineteenth-century politics as they are to the humbug wizardry of Baum's story. A pointed comment on Midwestern political ideals is the fact that our little Wizard comes from Omaha, Nebraska, a center of Populist agitation. "Why, that isn't very far from Kansas," cries Dorothy. Nor, indeed, are any of the characters in the wonderful land of Oz.
The Wizard, of course, can provide the objects of self-delusion desired by Tin Woodman, Scarecrow and Lion. But Dorothy's hope of going home fades when the Wizard's balloon leaves too soon. Understand this: Dorothy wishes to leave a green and fabulous land, from which all evil has disappeared, to go back to the gray desolation of the Kansas prairies. Dorothy is an orphan, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are her only family. Reality is never far from Dorothy's consciousness and in the most heartrending terms she explains her reasoning to the good Witch Glinda,
Aunt Em will surely think something dreadful has happened to me, and that will make her put on mourning; and unless the crops are better this year than there were last I am sure Uncle Henry cannot afford it. (p. 254)
The Silver Shoes furnish Dorothy with a magic means of travel. But when she arrives back in Kansas she finds, "The Silver Shoes had fallen off in her flight through the air, and were lost forever in the desert" (p.259). Were the "her" to refer to America in 1900, Baum's statement could hardly be contradicted.
Current historiography tends to criticize the Populist movement for its "delusions, myths and foibles," Professor C. Vann Woodward observed recently.[22] Yet The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has provided unknowing generations with a gentle and friendly Midwestern critique of the Populist rationale on these very same grounds. Led by naive innocence and protected by good will, the farmer, the laborer and the politician approach the mystic holder of national power to ask for personal fulfillment. Their desires, as well as the Wizard's cleverness in answering them, are all self-delusion. Each of these characters carries within him the solution to his own problem, were he only to view himself objectively. The fearsome Wizard turns out to be nothing more than a common man, capable of shrewd but mundane answers to these self-induced needs. Like any good politician he gives the people what they want. Throughout the story Baum poses a central thought; the American desire for symbols of fulfillment is illusory. Real needs lie elsewhere.
Thus the Wizard cannot help Dorothy, for of all the characters only she has a wish that is selfless, and only she has a direct connection to honest, hopeless human beings. Dorothy supplies real fulfillment when she returns to her aunt and uncle, using the Silver Shoes, and cures some of their misery and heartache. In this way Baum tells us that the Silver crusade at least brought back Dorothy's lovely spirit to the disconsolate plains farmer. Her laughter, love and good will are no small addition to that gray land, although the magic of Silver has been lost forever as a result.
Noteworthy too is Baum's prophetic placement of leadership of Oz after Dorothy's departure. The Scarecrow reigns over the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman rules in the West and the Lion protects smaller beast in "a grand old forest." Thereby farm interests achieve national importance, industrialism moves West and Bryan commands only a forest full of lesser politicians.
Baum's Fantasy succeeds in bridging the gap between what children want and what they should have. It is an admirable example of the way in which an imaginative writer can teach goodness and morality without producing the almost inevitable side effect of nausea. Today's children's books are either saccharine and empty, or boring and pedantic. Baum's first Oz tale -- and those which succeed it -- are immortal not so much because the "heart-aches and nightmares are left out" as that "the wonderment and joy" are retained (p. 1).
Baum declares "The story of 'the Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written solely to pleasure children of today" (p. 1). In 1963 there are very few children who have never heard of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman or the Cowardly Lion, and whether they know W. W. Denslow's original illustrations of Dorothy, or Judy Garland's whimsical characterization, is immaterial. The Wizard has become a genuine piece of America folklore because, knowing his audience, Baum never allowed the consistency of the allegory to take precedence over the theme of youthful entertainment. Yet once discovered, the author's allergorical intent seems clear, and it gives depth and lasting interest even to children who only sense something else beneath the surface of the story. Consider the fun in picturing turn-of-the-century America, a difficult era at best, using these ready-made symbols provided by Baum. The relationship and analogies outlined above are admittedly theoretical, but they are far too consistent to be coincidental, and they furnish a teaching mechanism which is guaranteed to reach any level of student.
The Wizard of Oz says so much about so many things that it is hard not to imagine a satisfied and mischievous gleam in Lyman Frank Baum's eye as he had Dorothy say, "And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!"
[rule]


Footnotes 1. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Cambridge, 1949). pp. 615-16.
2. Martin Gardiner and Russel B. Nye, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (East Lansing, Mich., 1957), pp. 7 ff, 14-16, 19. Professor Nye's "Appreciation" and Martin Gardiner's "The Royal Historian of Oz" totaling some fourth-five pages, present as definitive an analysis of Baum and his works as is available today.
3. L Frank Bum, The Marvelous Land of Oz (Chicago, 1904), p 3 (Author's Note).
4. Gardiner and Nye, Wizard, pp. 5-7,23.
5. Ibid., pp. 20-22.
6. See Calton F. Culmsee, Malign Nature and the Frontier (Logan, Utah, 1959), VII, 5, 11, 14. The classic work in the field of symbolism in Western literature is Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Lane (New York, 1961), pp. 225-26, 261, 284-90.
7. Ibid., p. 287.
8. Russel B. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics (East Lansing, Mich., 1959). pp. 63, 56-58, 75, 105. See also John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt(Minneapolish, 1931), pp. 82, 93-95, 264-68.
9. See Ray Ginger, Altgeld's America (New York, 1958).
10. GArdiner and Nye, Wizard, p. 29
11. See Williams Jennings Bryan, The First Battle (Lincoln, Neb., 1897), pp. 612-29. Two recent studies are notable: Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, REform and Expansion (New York, 1959), pp. 187-211 and Nye, Politics, pp. 105-20.
12. See Richard Hofstadter's shattering essay on Bryan in The American Political Tradition (New York, 1960), pp 186-205. Nye, Politics, pp. 121-22; Faulkner Reform, pp. 272-75.
13.Gardiner and Nye, Wizard, pp. 1, 30.
14. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, pp. 11-13. All quotations cited in the text are from the inexpensive but accurate Dover paperback edition (New York, 1960).
15. Henry Nash Smith says of Garland's works in the 1890's, "It has at last become possible to deal with the Western farmer in literature as a human being instead of seeing him through a veil of literary convention, class prejudice or social theory." Virgin Land, p. 290.
16. Hicks declares that from the start "The Alliance and Populist platforms championed boldly the cause of labor...." Revolt p. 324. See also Bryan's Labor Day speech, Battle, pp. 375-83.
17. Faulkner, Reform, pp. 142-43.
18. Richard Hofstadter (ed.), Great Issues in American History (New York, 1960), II, 147-53.
19. Bryan, Battle, pp 617-618, "During the campaign I ran across various evidences of coercion, direct and indirect." See Hicks, Revolt, p. 325, who notes that "For some reason labor remained singularly unimpressed" by Bryan. Faulkner finds overt pressure as well, Reform, pp. 208-9.
20. Faulkner, Reform, pp. 257-58.
21. Professor Nye observes that during 1890 (while Baum was editing his Aberdeen weekly) the Nebraska Farmer's Alliance "launched the wildest campaign in Nebraska history." Politics, p. 64-65. Bryan was a Senator from Nebraska and it was in Omaha that the Populist party ratified its platform on July 4, 1892. Seen Henry Steele Comager (ed.), Documents of American History (New York, 1958). II, 143-46.
22. C. Vann Woodward, "Our Past Isn't What It Used To Be," The New York Times Book Review (July 28, 1963), p. 1; Hofstadter, Tradition

Other thoughts on the Wizard of Oz:

The Baum Bugle published articles critical of Henry Littlefield's theory -- and in fact an article years later by Henry Littlefield showing that he didn't take his own idea as gospel truth. =)David Parker has written two essays, one examining Henry Littlefield's above essay and one about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable of Theosophical thought

A very wonderful OZ FAQ for those of you who have any other questions about the movies, books or other resources.

Wizard of Oz being syncronized with Dark Side of the Moon? I don't know, but these folks at Yahoo (psst, they have a Dark Side of the Rainbowsection) had a pretty good answer. In case the above links gets goofy, here's a direct link to (The Synchronicity Archive).

But, you want a new book to explore the symbolism of. How about Alice in Wonderland? Here is NovelGuide's take on it. We've plopped you right into chapter one, their take on it is a mix of footnotes and summaries, kids, don't play Clif Notes with this, you'll miss a lot of fun. Go and buy Alice and Wonderland and Through the Lookingglass from your favorite local bookstore.



I'm not currently accepting suggestions for the small links section above, the FAQ listed there does a much better and more consistant job that I ever would. Please don't Email me with suggested links! =)

Sunday, 13 July 2014

1963


ARM’D year! year of the struggle! 

No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year! 

Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas piano; 

But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, 
carrying a rifle on your shoulder...


"For the very first time ever, When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,
There was no interference from America - Human rights in America
Well the people fought the leader, And up he flew...
With no Washington bullets, what else could he do?

And in the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Havana fought the playboys in the Cuban sun,
For Castro is a colour, is redder than red, Those Washington bullets want Castro dead.

For Castro is the colour...That will earn you a spray of lead..."


“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt”


Measure for Measure
Act I, Scene IV


For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd;
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd — for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court: and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit —
As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable — and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and — farewell king!

Richard II, Act III - Scene II

Saturday, 12 July 2014

The Black Lodge

spoilers

 
  My People believe The White Lodge is The Place Where The Spirits That Rule Men and Nature here reside. 
 
There is also a legend of a place called The Black Lodge, The Shadow-Self of The White Lodge. The legend says that every Soul must pass through there on The Way to Perfection.

There you will meet Your Own Shadow-Self. 
My People call it The Dweller on the Threshold… but it is said if you face The Lodge with Imperfect Courage, it will utterly annihilate Your Soul....”