[louis thomas mcfadden] eccentric or right on the money? [part one]

Using my mate’s model, everything is on a sliding scale – everything from sexual preference to social behaviour and so we have degrees of eccentricity within us.

You might say you don’t but I bet if I came over your way and stayed beside you for a week, I’d see certain habits and modes of thought a little out of the “ordinary”, whatever that means.

Whereas it seems quite appropriate to apply certain political labels – left liberal and socialist as reflecting one set of thoughts and beliefs and conservative as another set, despite protestations to the contrary from one side of politics [if the cap fits – wear it], nevertheless there is a sliding scale in operation and it’s uneven – a person can be downright peculiar in one aspect but orthodox in most others.

George Bernard Shaw said, in Man and Superman [1903]:

The reasonable man adapts to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

You’re not going to get any stunning revelations or inventions from the chap who takes the train in the morning, comes home in the evening, sups, sleeps and takes the train in the morning, not unless a brainwave strikes him, as Saul was struck on the road to Damascus.

Ditto with eccentricity.

The reason such a man [or woman] gets the revelation and someone else doesn’t is that he was either looking for it or wandering down strange byways and pathways where the likelihood of something popping up were multiplied.

Now he has his first problem.

“Eureka, I have found it!” he runs into the street naked and cries and people politely look away or sidestep him. Why? Because he is the elephant in the roadway and he is just an inconvenience to all others who wish to go about their business.

Not for them the disruption of their routines, not for them to be late for their appointments.

Thus he is roundly ignored or if he has some reputation for clear thinking and more often having it right, he’ll get a polite hearing and then they’ll turn back to each other and say, “Anyway, have you seen the price on gold today? Well …”

Louis McFadden

Was there ever a name to make a third of the people automatically turn away and guffaw or raise the eyes to the ceiling, a third to not have the least clue who he is/was and the other third to see him as a champion of the common man and the essence of what true conservatism is.

Was there ever a name to have so trespassed on the preserve of those who run America as to have necessitated his assassination?

He had it a bit skewed in some ways, in that using the word England and Britain disparagingly, he was not having a go at the ordinary Brit but at the money men at the top who buy and sell our land for their profit and for our financial enslavement.

Yet in having a go at Britain, so many misunderstood.

He was not careful that when he accused "the Jews"; he was referring to the Rothschilds and the hidden finance, not to Jews in general, a distinction Hitler was to blur at that very time, by blaming the ordinary Jew for the ills which the Jewish bankers had perpetrated, along with the gentile bankers.

The man was first and foremost a patriot and those who attempted to slur him were the Moneymen in the counting houses, the MIC and those who operate in a different world to you and me. What I see in his congressional record is a man with his country and its constitution very much at heart and for that, as well as for speaking out on behalf of all Americans, there should be a statue to him someone in a prominent place, just as there should be to Andrew Jackson, the last president who, except in a lesser way with Lincoln, Kennedy and Ike, pursued that type of Americanism which the Founding Fathers had written of though they pursued it to varying degrees, in practice.

Mini-bio

As former bank president and treasurer of the Pennsylvania Bankers’ Association, he even looks the epitome of the cautious banker and one does not become such unless one is conservative in outlook.

He served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency during the Sixty-sixth through Seventy-first Congresses. He was responsible for the McFadden Act, which specifically prohibited interstate branching, by allowing national banks to branch only within the state in which it is situated.

When this conservative congressman suddenly launched out with his “the United States has to choose between God and the money changers who have unlawfully taken our gold and lawful money into their possession", he was on a hiding to nothing.

The essential problem McFadden posed the Bankers was that, as a well respected money man – you don’t get to head the USHCBC if you’re a madman – he couldn’t just be ignored or marginalized although history has done that to him in subsequent decades. He’s now written out of the U.S. history books, he’s never mentioned in schools, except, in passing, as a man who claimed the Fed was corrupt and then the statement is itself just passed over.

What never gets a hearing is that he quoted chapter and verse, carried out congressional interviews of different personages, all on the record; he named names, as well as the substance of what these people were guilty of.

Outside of Congress, he would, of course, have been sued into oblivion.

His former buddies saw him as a liability they did not know how to handle, he was not re-elected – that was seen to by the powers-that-be and as a “former” congressman, the opponents he attacked called him a man with no authority to back his statements, one best forgotten and let’s all move on.

The trouble was, America swallowed this and did move on, as someone in a trance, spellbound by the Finance as they’d always been.

When a great majority elect someone like Obama, in the face of mounting evidence and a scandal even before he assumes office, when the American people re-elect Nixon in a landslide, even after Watergate has broken and suspicions have been syndicated round the world, to the extent that I heard of it and asked my elders and betters why America would re-elect a crook, then there is something deeply wrong in the American polity.

McFadden fell victim to this, as the cynical Them knew he ultimately must. There was hardly any need to attempt his life twice before he finally succumbed to a “heart attack”.

Perhaps the stress of having lost everything, his reputation, his position as congressman, his livelihood, his former friends in the banking world, living, as he was, under the constant threat of being taken out for the damage he had potentially caused, damage which might have led to the complete restructuring of the U.S. economy, with ramifications across the world, not least in Britain itself – given all that, he might well have had that heart attack.

Either way, he was a dead man walking and why? Because he told the truth. That was all. Because he told the truth.

Oh my goodness – why are such men vilified, spat on and marginalized before being crucified on crosses? Why are such men not honoured for their courage and for promoting what is surely the very thing they should be promoting?

McFadden would be horrified at my comaprison in the last paragraph and of course the two are not equivalent in any shape or form but there are some mighty cogent similarities as to how they went about things. In my book, One was too good for this world and the other should be deeply respected and his story taught to every American schoolchild.

What I admire the most is that he stood alone, whereas even Jesus had disciples.

What caused the furore?

Wiki:

On June 10, 1932, McFadden made a 25-minute speech before the House of Representatives, in which he accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately causing the Great Depression. McFadden also claimed that Wall Street bankers funded the Bolshevik Revolution through the Federal Reserve banks and the European central banks with which it cooperated.

In the same speech McFadden expressed dismay at the fact that over $13 million in gold had been shipped to a rebuilding Germany that year by the Federal Reserve. He also explained how Nelson Aldrich was tutored by European bankers, then later submitted the Aldrich bill, a translation of the statutes of the Reichsbank and other European central banks, which became the Federal Reserve Act after a half-million-dollar public information program.

Bloody hell – how would that go down?

His crime was that he hadn’t laid the foundations in the weeks and months before; he saw this as a rare opportunity in a large forum to get his point across and he utilized it. Unfortunately, the human brain cannot accept such a radical change to the paradigm in one day and the reaction ranged from shocked silence, through angry denunciation to mocking and the applying of epithets as too many are wont to do.

He made the speech at a highly volatile time during the Depression, when subseuqent events showed that the Evil Ones were gearing up for WWII and thus spin was in full ... well ... spin.

Wiki continues:

As part of his attempts to root out corruption in the Federal Reserve McFadden moved to impeach President Herbert Hoover in 1932, and also introduced a resolution bringing conspiracy charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. The impeachment resolution was defeated by a vote of 361 to 8; it was seen as a big vote of confidence to President Hoover from the House.

In 1933, he introduced House Resolution No. 158, articles of impeachment for the Secretary of the Treasury, two assistant Secretaries of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the officers and directors of its twelve regional banks.

The Reaction

Of course he was to go down in a heap. Of course there was no other way. These were not only powerful forces he’d taken on – they were the very forces which run the whole show in the U.S. and overseas and they must have seen him as just a fly to swat, though a pesky and annoying fly, for a' that.

Resorting to the “let’s back our President at this time of national crisis, let’s support our country and our constitution”, the latter being the very thing McFadden was doing, they had him marginalized and the hostility of the sheep turned against him. The forces of destruction of the United States had triumphed again.

An article I’ve long since lost the link for put it this way:

The dean of Washington newspapermen at that time and founder of the National Press Club, Mr. George Stimpson, when asked in later years to comment on the seriousness and magnitude of the charges being made by McFadden, replied, "It was incredible. This town went into a state of shock. We couldn't believe what we were hearing. Of course, they said right away that he had lost his mind."

"Do you think he had?", Stimpson was asked.

"Oh, no," came the reply, "but it was too much, too much for one man to do".

He made these speeches knowing that there was no support; that there would be no support. Was it too quixotic of him? Should he have waited, quietly gathering his information until it could have been put to more practical use?

And why was there no support? We must remember that when McFadden made these speeches we were in the darkest days of the Great Depression, when the nation was prostrate and in the dark night of the soul of the American people. A sad and defeated nation, destroyed from within, brought to its knees, could offer no help when McFadden opened every door and named every name.

The Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II... these were events which were not desired by the American people. They were not planned by the American people. They were not voluntarily entered into by the American people. But all of these events were the result of the planning of men who have no addresses, no fixed homes, no substantial loyalties save only to their own interests.

Louis T. McFadden was alone. He had nothing to look forward to save his own political demise. The power of his enemies was brought to bear and his political life was terminated in the November 1934 elections held in the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania.

Now, all that was left was his killing. From Gold Eagle:

Congressman Louis McFadden died a mysterious death in 1936. The only reference I could find of it comes from the excessively right wing rag of the time, Pelley’s Weekly, that stated on Oct. 14th:

“Now that this sterling American patriot has made the Passing, it became known among his intimates that he had suffered two attacks against his life. The first attack came in the form of two revolver shots fired at him from ambush as he was alighting from a cab in front of one of the Capital hotels. Fortunately both shots missed him, the bullets burying themselves in the structure of the cab.

He became violently ill after partaking of food at a political banquet at Washington. His life was only saved from what was subsequently announced as a poisoning by the presence of a physician friend at the banquet, who at once procured a stomach pump and subjected the Congressman to emergency treatment."

There’ve been other references since then which confirm the substance of this but of course, put the death down to natural causes. He was 60 years old at his death.