8 Press for Conversion! Issue # 54 August 2004

By Kevin Phillips

For political reasons, office seekers in the Bush fam-ily have frequently misrepresented their social andeconomic status. Senator Prescott Bush pretended that

modest income kept his father from sending him to lawschool after he graduated from Yale. George H.W. Bushpurported to have “interviewed” for his first job. GeorgeW. Bush chose to portray himself as a young man moldedand Texified by San Jacinto Junior High School.

Historian Herbert Parmet, in his biography George

Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York: Scribner,1997) described the tactical genesis of this class denial:

Prescott’s recorded reminiscences, given in 1966, present,somewhat disingenuously, a hint of genteel poverty, un-doubtedly a habit cultivated by one who had spent thebulk of his previous two decades canvassing for votesamong ordinary people. To deny the realities of his back-ground, the stature of his father [Samuel Bush] as a lead-ing industrialist of the day, was consistent with perpetu-ating the myth of the self-made man. Prescott Bush, aU.S. Senator at the time of the interview, was practised

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Kevin Phillips wrote The EmergingRepublican Majority (1967) and wasthe Republican presidential cam-paign’s chief political analyst in 1968and worked in the Nixon White House.In the 1980s, he turned away from theRepublican Party. Among his books areThe Politics of Rich and Poor (1990),Boiling Point: Republicans, Demo-crats and the Decline of Middle-ClassProsperity (1993), Arrogant Capital:Washington, Wall Street and the Frus-tration of American Politics (1994)and Wealth and Democracy (2002).

Samuel Bush and George HerbertWalker knew some of the reviledweapons merchants – the WWI-

era munitions makers, “armor trust”members and arms manufacturers whowere later investigated during Presi-dent Franklin D. Roosevelt’s early NewDeal years. For example, both SamuelBush and G.H. Walker knew SamuelFrazier Pryor, the president ofRemington Arms, whose firm was que-ried by the Nye Committee* about theclandestine flow of American-madeweaponry to Germany through Hol-land in the early 1930s.

Walker was not investigated by

the committee, but the American Shipand Commerce Corp. (in which he wasvery involved) had partial ownershipand influence over the German Ham-burg-Amerika line which may havehelped Remington Arms ship weaponsto right-wing, German political fac-tions in the early 1930s.

George Herbert Walker andSamuel Frazier Pryor had severalthings in common. They were of thesame generation; they were friendswith kindred business backgrounds be-fore the war in St. Louis; and theyshared a taste for guns and financialbuccaneering. Both were on the pe-riphery of a frequently collaborativegroup of moneymen – Averell Har-riman, Percy Rockefeller at NationalCity Bank, and others at GuarantyTrust – who had large internationalplans. In 1915, a number of these busi-ness and financial leaders had helpedto set up the American International

Corp. as a private vehicle for U.S.ambitions and investments in Europeand Russia. A collateral objective wasto abet any Bolshevik-inspired up-heaval in Germany that might endGerman participation in the war.1

In 1916, the American Interna-tional Corp. (AIC) bought New YorkShipbuilding, a major navy contractor,which by 1918 owned the world’s big-gest shipyard.2 More than a year ear-lier, some of the same New York in-terests, centered on National CityBank, had reorganized the principalU.S. small-arms and munition pro-ducer, hundred-year-old RemingtonArms, installing Pryor as general man-ager and later president, to meet whatbecame an avalanche of wartime de-mand. Ultimately, as company publi-cations boasted, Remington Arms pro-duced 69% of all rifles manufacturedfor U.S. troops during WWI, as wellas over 50% of all the small-arms am-munition for the U.S. and the Allies.3

After the war’s end, RemingtonArms officials wondered about theirnext markets. Russia wouldn’t beamong them, because in 1917 the newrevolutionary government had voidedRemington Arms’s multimillion-dol-

* The Senate’s Nye Committee on theInvestigation of the Munitions Indus-try, nicknamed the “Merchants ofDeath” investigation, issued its report“Investigation of the Munitions Indus-try,” on February 24, 1936 <www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nye.htm>

9August 2004 Issue # 54 Press for Conversion!

at minimizing his pedigree. He claimedthat his father did not have enough moneyto put him through law school, a notion offinancial limitations not only at variancewith his career and lifestyle but also onestrongly rejected by those who knew any-thing about him.

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Samuel Bush became wealthy as presidentof Buckeye Steel Castings, a railroad-

equipment-manufacturing firm that heheaded from 1908 until he retired in 1927.Sprawling across many acres, it specialized in railroad cou-plings and other steel castings needed by the large rail sys-tems controlled by the Morgans, Harrimans and Rockefel-lers. Frank Rockefeller, the brother of John D. and William,who went into Great Lakes iron ore and steel, precededSamuel Bush as Buckeye’s president from 1906 to 1908.Through Buckeye, Bush had ties to the Rockefeller family,with its Standard Oil and National City Bank holdings.

Prominent in Ohio railroading as well as steel,Samuel became a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s

Ohio subsidiaries, of the Hocking Valley Rail-way, the Norfolk & Western Railway, and theHuntington National Bank.Before 1917, Samuel Bush did governmentrelations work for the U.S. Chamber of Com-merce and was the first president of the Na-tional Association of Manufacturers. [Note:These two big business organizations hadstrong fascist tendancies.] He also foundedthe Ohio Tax League and was a director ofthe Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Hesent his children to private boarding schools– the girls to Connecticut’s Westover and the

boys (including Prescott) to Episcopalian St. George’s inNewport, Rhode Island.

From 1917 to 1918, Samuel Bush served on the WarIndustries Board (WIB), where he was in charge of theforgings, guns, small arms and ammunition section. [Note:The WIB was in charge of mobilizing U.S. industries forWWI, i.e., converting civilian industries to military pro-duction. The U.S. National Archives destroyed most of theWIB’s records on Samuel Bush’s arms-related work with

lar arms contract with the czar’s re-gime – and some of those rifles insteadarmed White Russian troops to fightthe Bolsheviks. Remington Arms ex-ecutives looked to other major markets– for example, Germany.

In 1919, National City Bankjoined in setting up the new W.A. Har-riman and Co., soon to be underGeorge H. Walker’s presidency. LikeHarriman and Walker, National Citywould do a lot of 1920s business inGermany. Percy Rockefeller of Na-tional City, a moving force in theRemington Arms reorganization – anda director there as well as at AIC –also became a W.A.Harriman director.4

Remington Arms’s SamuelPryor was part of this cabal, and tooka role in the first big Harriman-Walkerinternational gambit: the arrangementof a major participation in Germany’sonce great Hamburg-Amerika steam-ship line. Harriman and Walker heldtheir Hamburg-Amerika sharesthrough another mutual framework,the American Ship and CommerceCorp. Pryor was named one of its di-rectors.

In 1924, when Harriman andWalker set up the Union Banking

Corp. (UBC) in New York on behalfof the politically active German steelbaron Fritz Thyssen, control of UBCwas held by a Dutch entity, the Rotter-dam-based Bank voor Handel enScheepvart. This Dutch bank, in turn,was owned by Berlin’s August Thys-sen Bank. The Rotterdam bank, it hasbeen proven, handled some of Thys-sen’s 1920s contributions to the fledg-ling Nazi Party. Samuel Pryor ofRemington Arms was named an origi-nal director of UBC. He seems to havebeen a tight third side of the Harriman-German triangle. Indeed, after he diedin 1934, his son became a director ofHarriman Securities Corp., joining thetwo Harriman brothers, Averell andRoland.5 This does make one wonderabout Remington-made arms going toThyssen – or Thyssen’s friends.

The Nye Committee never gottoo deeply into the major 1933-1934surge of U.S. military exports to Hit-ler’s Germany. Although the commit-tee chairman cited figures that exportsto Germany by United Aircraft (BoeingAircraft, ChanceVought, and Pratt andWhitney) had increased by 500% be-tween 1933 and 1934, the State De-partment leaned on committee mem-

bers to make no reference to secret re-ports about German rearmament.6 Nodocumentation exists for how manyRemington-made weapons reachedGermany through Dutch barge routesor Thyssen transport.

By 1933, Remington Arms letDu Pont, the nation’s leading muni-tions maker, acquire a controlling in-terest.7 War was not far off and onceagain the company became the princi-pal U.S. small-arms and ammunitionsupplier. Its payroll rose from under4,000 in 1939 to 82,500 at the peak ofproduction in 1943.

8

��� 1. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bol-

shevik Revolution. Western Australia:Veritas Publishing, 1981, pp.83, 91.

2. Matthew Ware Coulter, The Senate Mu-nitions Inquiry of the 1930s. Westport,Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997, p.67.

3. K.D. Kirkland, Remington. New York:Exeter Books, 1988, p.46.

4. The Directory of Directors in the Cityof New York, 1916-1933.

5. Directory of Directors, 1936-39.6. Matthew Ware Coulter, Senate Muni-

tions Inquiry, p.45.7. Kirkland, op cit., p.46.8. Ibid., p.50.

... continued on the next page

10 Press for Conversion! Issue # 54 August 2004

the government, supposedly in order ‘to save space.’]In 1918, WIB chairman Bernard Baruch made

Samuel Bush the director of its facilities division, chargedwith strategic coordination of manufacturing output andrailroad transportation capacity. When some WIB functionswere transferred to the Commerce Department, he migratedto that department’s advisory board. Before long, however,the Commerce board’s support for government planningand collaborative price fixing to cushion postwar deflationdispleased President Wilson as overly interventionist, andthe effort was abandoned.

Samuel Bush’s background and WWI respon-sibilities brought wide acquaintance – first, with railroad-connected Harrimans and Rockefellers; second, with influ-ential board officials like Clarence Dillon, Robert Brook-ings, Judge Robert S. Lovett (and per-

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haps their friend George H. Walker); and third, throughhis brief involvement in small arms and ordnance, with topexecutives of firms like Du Pont, Reming-ton, Winchesterand Colt Arms. Paul Koistinen, the principal historian ofthe political economy of American warfare, found that incontrast to the Spanish-American War, the 1917-1918 chal-lenge drew industrial, military and business together intothe lasting relationships that would dominate the twenti-eth-century political economy. Despite the hiatus in thetwenties and thirties, this marked “a major and seeminglyirrevocable step in the direction of [the U.S.] becoming awarfare or national security state.”

[Editor’s Note: Between the wars, Samuel Bush be-came a close advisor to Republican President Herbert Hoo-ver, who served between 1929 and 1933.]

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Founded in 1833 by William Russell(heir to Russell & Co., one of the

world’s leading opium traders), Skulland Bones (S&B) was an offshoot of aGerman secret society. Now the oldestand most prestigious of Yale’s secretfraternities, its members “tap” 15 re-cruits from among America’s most in-fluential families each year. Its mem-bers have risen to the top of America’spower elite: congressmen, governors,ambassadors, bankers, spies, judges,media moguls, captains of industrySecretaries of State, Secretaries of War,and National Security Advisors. A fewhave even become U.S. presidents,such as two who share the nameGeorge Bush. Senator John Kerry isalso a Bonesman (class of 1966), aswas Henry J. Heinz II (1931), the fa-ther of his wife’s former husband.

As stated in the Washington PostApril 4, 2004: “Bonesmen oversaw de-velopment of the atomic bomb and in-

the Trilateral Commission…. [and]were among the CIA’s founders.”

Skull and Bones is more thanan aristocratic social club serving theprivileged ivy league elite. Its impos-ing Greco-Egyptian headquarters,“The Crypt” or “The Tomb,” onYale’s campus is the site of ridiculous,occult rituals fixating on death. It haslong been an incubator for U.S. for-eign policymakers and has providedan important political and economicnetworking function for the elite ofthe elite from Yale. (See also pp.18, 45)

fluenced the decision to use it on Ja-pan. They managed the postwar occu-pation of Germany. They helped shapeCold War policies, were policymakersduring the Vietnam War, have ties tothe Council on Foreign Relations and

Bush family S & B members include:� Prescott Sheldon Bush (1917)� George Herbert Walker Bush (1948)� George Walker Bush (1968)� Jonathan J. Bush (1953) (Prescott’s son)

Other S & B relatives ofPresident George Walker Bush:

� George Herbert Walker Jr. (1927)(George W’s great uncle)

� George Herb Walker III (1953) (see p.44)� Ray Carter Walker (1955)

(two of George W’s cousins)

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11August 2004 Issue # 54 Press for Conversion!

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How much Samuel Bushdrew on his experience

and connections to advance hisson Prescott’s career in the1920s and 1930s is a gap in thevarious Bush biographies andmemoirs. For good reason, thearms connection is not one that the family has wanted tosee pursued. It is striking how clearly Prescott’s employ-ment after his demobilization in 1919 related to areas thatwere within the WIB’s purview.

Prescott got his first job with Simmons, a railroad-equipment manufacturer, through its president, WallaceSimmons, a wartime planning colleague of Samuel Bush.Samuel Pryor, President of Remington Arms, had alsoworked for Simmons before the war. One of Prescott’s as-signments at Simmons involved selling a wartime saddleryplant in Kingsport, Tennessee, to Winchester Arms. Pres-cott went back to Columbus in 1921 to help run a smallrubber enterprise in which Samuel Bush had an investment.Already a growth industry of the automobile era, rubberhad been much regulated in the last year of WWI, leavingpostwar circumstances uncertain. When his father’s smallOhio rubber business was bought by a New England firm,Prescott moved to Massachusetts. In 1924, he worked forU.S. Rubber in New York. Patronage was presumably hisentrée to this Harriman-linked firm. Two years later, at age31, he became a vice president of W.A. Harriman and Co.

Prescott Bush sat in the middle of three overlappingcircles that played a huge role in directing his future:� His friends and classmates from Yale and especially its

elitist secret fraternity, Skull and Bones (E. Roland Har-riman, Neil Mallon, Ellery James, Robert A. Lovett, R.Knight Woolley, Wallace Simmons, et al.). All eventu-ally wound up at W.A. Harriman, or came togetherthrough the Brown Brothers Harriman merger in 1931.

� A group centered around his father-in-law, George H.Walker, president of W.A. Harriman & Co.; his brother-in-law, George H. Walker Jr., entering his senior year atYale (and Skull & Bones) and Walker associates includ-ing the American Investment Co. and National City Bank.

� A group made up of his father’s old acquaintances fromthe War Industries Board (including Bernard Baruch, Ed-ward Stettinius Sr., Clarence Dillon). It was quite a clutchof influence wielders, and all had already provided Pres-cott with work and connections.

As WWII gathered, Brown Brothers Harriman andSkull and Bones each boasted extraordinary numbers ofpersons who became private or public leaders of the mili-tary-industrial complex and its intelligence auxiliaries.Averell Harriman was dabbling in the aviation business,studying imaginative new airplane designs and helping tofinance fellow Bonesman Juan Trippe’s Pan American Air-lines. Henry Stimson took time away from presiding overthe Andover Board of Trustees to be Hoover’s Secretary ofState (1929-1932). He later became Roosevelt’s Secretaryof War (1940). David Ingalls, of the WWI Yale Flying Unit,who briefly flew British Sopwith Camels, became Assist-ant Secretary of the Navy for Aviation (1929-1932). Trubee

Davison, another Bonesman in the Yale Flying Unit, be-came head of the Civil Aeronautics Board and AssistantSecretary of War for Air under George H. Walker’s goodfriend, Secretary of War Dwight Davis (1925-1929).

On the Brown Brothers Harriman side, David K.E.Bruce, son-in-law of banker Paul Mellon, was a partnerbefore spending WWII running the London office of theOffice of Strategic Services (OSS) [the CIA’s precursor]and moving up to Undersecretary of State. Artemus Gates,at the firm in the 1930s, went on to become assistant of thenavy for air under Henry Stimson during WWII.

Prescott Bush spent the first two decades of his fi-nancial career in the company of people whose actions andideas would shape the War Department, the OSS, the CIAand other pivots of the emerging U.S. national security com-plex. British writer, Godfrey Hodgson, points out that “theWar Department was directed by a tiny clique of wealthyRepublicans, and one that was almost as narrowly based,in social and educational terms, as a traditional British ToryCabinet.” The importance of these connections is almost asneglected as the Bush family links to the arms trade.

Source: Excerpts, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune,and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, 2004

In 1926, he was recruited by fa-ther-in-law, George H. Walker,to work in W.A. Harriman &Co., an investment bank, Whenit merged with Brown Brothersin 1931 to become BrownBrothers Harriman & Co.,Prescott was managing partner. Prescott also sat on many cor-porate boards, including:

� Dresser Industries. In 1928, W.A. Harriman & Co. paid $4million for this oil-drilling-equipment firm’s stocks. In 1929,Prescott refinanced Dresser to retain “a substantial measure ofcontrol.” In 1930, E.R. Harriman and Prescott joined the Dresserboard. Prescott installed Yale classmate Henry Neil Mallon aschair. In 1948, Mallon hired Prescott’s son, George H.W. Bush,for his first job. George Sr. later named a son, Neil Mallon Bush,after his mentor. [In 1998, Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, thecurrent U.S. vice president, merged Dresser into Halliburton. Itis now a prime beneficiary of oil service contracts in Iraq.]� Columbia Broadcasting System. Prescott met CBS founder,William Paley, through Averell Harriman, who represented CBSin a merger with Paramount Studios in 1929.� Union Banking Corp. was established in 1924 with GeorgeH. Walker as president. Prescott was on the board (1934-1943).� Harriman Fifteen Corp. (1 Wall Street). W.A.Harriman andBush were sole directors and G.H. Walker was its president.� Vanadium Corp. of America. In 1942, it procured and proc-essed uranium for the Manhattan Project’s nuclear bombs.� Simmons. A major donor to both Bush presidential bids.� Pan American Airlines. Prescott Jr., joined the firm in 1943.� Rockbestos Products.� Hydrocarbon Research� U.S. Guaranty Trust� Continental Bank & Trust, NY� Commercial Pacific Cable Co.� Hamburg-America Line

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� Prudential Insurance� Massachusetts In-vestors Second Fund� Pennsylvania Waterand Power.

Source: <www.wordiq.com/definition/Prescott_Bush>