Exhuming Bob 31b

A Review

Victor Maymudes’  Another Side Of Bob Dylan

by

R.E. Prindle

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A Stranger Came Walking…

This book is actually written by Victor’ son Jacob Maymudes, since Victor died a couple decades ago. The tapes Victor recorded appear to be heavily edited while Jacob is defending his father against Dylan.  In such a situation the temptation to rewrite as well as editing might be too strong to resist.  It would have been better to have used the full transcripts as spoken.

Jacob has really written a biography of his family focusing on his dad’s relationship with Dylan. It is a bittersweet tale while Jacob has written a very readable and pleasant little volume.  He captures well the personal tragedy of his father.

Victor and Bob

Victor and Bob

In this part of the review I will concentrate on Tapes 2 and 3 of Victor’s aural memoir.

After leaving Bob in 1962, almost ’63, Victor took up residence in Yelapa, Mexico a village of 300 at the time with a half dozen Hippies lounging about. Today, let us say, it has been discovered.  Yelapa is in Jalisco State of which Guadalajara is the capital and Puerta Vallarta the main tourist destination.  Yelapa is on the southern end of the 7th largest beach in the world.  Undeveloped when Victor stayed there it is well developed now.  Victor doesn’t explain how he knew of this, what he considers, a terrestrial paradise, but he stays there until…

One day just before sun down, I was laying on the beach with Tom Law, one of my great friends, who would later became the road manager for Peter, Paul and Mary.  But at that moment He was sitting up watching the Mexico sunset while I lay with my feet in the warm glow of the sand.  A stranger came walking down the beach toward us.  There was nobody else in sight….The Stranger stopped in front of us and asked, “You guys know this guy, Victor Maimondez?” mispronouncing my last name.

Tom, who was always cautious and protective of me, squinted up, “Yeah, maybe. What do you want him for?”

The stranger said, “I have a message for him. From someone named Bob Dylan in New York City.  He wants Victor to come back.  They’re going on tour.”

Like something out of the Twilight Zone isn’t it? If it happened, it happened.  Who am I to say differently.

Victor returns triumphantly as Dylan’s tour manager. Grossman grant’s Victor the magnificent salary of 65.00 a week.  Victor was ecstatic.  Heck, even I was making twice that in 1964 although I’m sure I wasn’t having as good a time.

Tape 3, Chapter 3 is a very long chapter of thirty four pages covering approximately eight months in 1964. These boys were certainly living an action packed life as the events covered may be the central part of Bob’s 1960-66 career.

Victor arrives back in LA on November 22, 1963 just in time for the Kennedy assassination. Victor is an authentic voice of the period.  His thoughts are representative of about half the people at the time  While time has sanctified Kennedy’s memory at the time about half the people were relieved to be rid of him.  I was in that half.

Victor’s voice however is phrased in the spirit of the times. It brings the period back in high relief.

In February Dylan, Paul Clayton, Pete Karman and Victor took the well reported cross country auto tour from NYC to SF with Victor doing most of the driving. Today they probably would have used an SUV but theirs was a more modestly sized station wagon.

While Victor adds a few new details his relation places the story in more human terms than other accounts. He and Dylan were outraged at the Kentucky miners’ plight  and the civil rights situation in Dixie so they decide on a drive through for a look see.

The key points are Dylan’s visit to Carl Sandburg in Asheville and the visit to New Orleans and the drive from Denver to SF.

Bob At The time.  Note Subdued Hair Style

Bob At The time. Note Subdued Hair Style

Victor’s account of the Sandburg visit makes more sense than other accounts I have read. Rather than a cranky reception for this unannounced visit as often reported the boys were met cordially by Mrs. Sandburg who went to get her husband.  Sandburg himself was in his late eighties and apparently frail, tiring easily.  According to Victor he spent about an hour with the boys then tiring returned to the house.

According to Victor Paul Clayton smoothed over the situation while Pete Karman boorishly tried to brush Dylan aside to monopolize the interview.

Carl Sandburg

Carl and Friend

Carl and Friend

For those who for one reason or another are vague as to who Carl Sandburg was his date are 1/6/1878-7/22/67.  He gained fame for what is called his poetry, not only fame but he bagged two Pulitzer Prizes and his biography of Abraham Lincoln netted him another.

He was a Civil Rights activist gaining an award from the NAACP.  Dylan’s interest stemmed from is 1927 collection called The American Song Bag.  The volume was very successful and extremely influential.  Pete Seeger was said to swear by it and if I am not mistaken Huddie Leadbelly Ledbettor memorized a great deal of it.

I managed to pick up a copy at an estate sale for a couple bucks.  it is a fairly amazing collection of what might be called folk songs.  Lots of tunes from the turn of the century and some earlier stuff.  Midnight Special, Frankie and Johnny, the backbone of the Sixties repertoire.  Words and music, nice collection.

Bob said he wanted to talk to Carl about it.  Pete Karman got in the way.

Victor gives a nice tribute and portrait of Paul Clayton who he admired as a great folk figure although time has now passed him by.

The next stop was New Orleans which holds no interest for me although the stories are well told while being well known.

The inner dynamics of the car with Karman being the trouble are well known. Apparently Suze Rotolo included him, probably as a chaperone to make sure Bob didn’t stray too far.   Strange attitude for a Communist girl. When they reached SF Karman was given a plane ticket and sent back to NYC.  Karman was replaced by Bobby Neuwirth who would himself replace victor as Dylan’s confidant.  Neuwirth fit in where Karman didn’t.  But then as a friend of Suze’s who forced him on the trip perhaps his quality of mind was more equal to hers.

After returning , in May of ’64 Dylan left for England with Victor in tow. This was the English trip that formed the material for the film Don’t Look Back.  Unless the tape is edited too heavily by Jacob one would gain the impression that it is just Bob and Victor on this trip.  There is no mention of Grossman or Baez, the movie or even the famous scene at the Savoy, no Lennon, no Beatles, no nothing but Bob and Victor.  One gains the impression that Victor is in love with Bob, practically man and wife.

After England he and Dylan make Bob’s trip to Greece. There are some interesting details here.  According to Victor Dylan wrote the whole of Another Side Of bob Dylan in Greece recording it without practice on returning to New York.

There is no mention of Nico here for whom Dylan wrote I’ll Keep It With Mine at this time. Victor excludes anything except what he and Bob were doing while Victor is guiding Bob and showing him the world.

They then return to NYC

Exhuming Bob 32

Didn’t We Ramble Though

A Review Of The Bob Dylan Show, Portland Performance 10/21/14

by

R.E. Prindle

The steel is moanin’, the guitars are speakin’,

The piano plays a jelly roll.

The man on the drums is far from dumb,

The bassman he plays from his soul.

The tables are quakin’, and your nerves are shakin’

But you keep on beggin’ for more.

You’re havin’ your fun you lucky son of a gun

On that Honky Tonk hardwood floor.

Sung by the late great Johnny Horton

 DSC01415

 

The Bob Dylan show dropped into town last night. And what a show it was.  My first Dylan show, from reading all these reviews depicting the shows as atrocious my expectations were very low.

I can’t imagine what these critics are thinking. The Show was absolutely sensational.  Dylan is one of the great Rock and Roll showmen.  Beats anyone else I’ve ever seen.

I hope I can hit a stride here commensurate with the show and my muse doesn’t let me down. The venue, the Keller Auditorium, is a twenty-five hundred capacity house and it was filled.  The stage is relatively big about sixty wide and fifty high.  Bob and his musicians used the whole space like they had been performing there for a year.  The lighting while minimal was dramatic, effective and beautiful putting one in a good mood. An aura was provided that brought one into the Secret Garden.

The electronic gear seemed to be artfully scattered haphazardly across the whole stage. The musicians wore red blazers while Bob came out in a white planter’s outfit, uniting the Templars with the old plantation down South.  Jeb Stuart rides again.

The musicians appeared to be encamped among the gear with the lead and rhythm guitarists to the audience’s left.   The drum stand was middle as is proper flanked by the bass player and finally a steel guitar player cum banjoist on the right end.   Bob’s keyboard was forward and on a level with the steel.  It was all very minimalist and effective.  They filled the stage while being placed in perspective by the high fifty foot frame keeping everything human size.  Dylan must have been studying performance art under Yoko.

It is a mistake to go to the concert to hear Dylan sing. He apparently learned to vocalize by singing along to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.  At first I thought it was a cabover with two cylinders not hitting coming up a mountain grade hauling a hundred thousand K in triple bottoms.  Then I saw that it was Bob.  The music is the thing; as a composer and conductor lies Bob’s genius.

The band was incredibly disciplined, everyone knew his role, fit tightly with the others and played their instruments without exhibitionism. The harmonics and spacing was incredible.

The drummer carried the band on his back. He was so sensational that like the Hindu elephant  he could carry the world on his back.  I mean, he had time in his hands, the money in his pocket and could walk the dog on a long leash.  I haven’t seen anyone like that since Michael Shrieve.  The guy was terrific, he couldn’t only play he looked good doing it.  The bass player standing next to the kit kept the beat rolling forward.  Bob understands the rhythm section.  No amateurishness near.

While relatively unobtrusive the steel player was carrying a lot of the weight.

Now, the band doesn’t play any songs; what Bob has written is some sort of symphonic suite in several movements.  The lead and rhythm play a succession of chord progressions loud; there is no melody as such.  The music has a strong forward flow that sweeps along like the Mississippi in flood before it was channeled and diked.

The band set the crowd off from the first chord; it was all daylight from there. Like nearly everyone else I flipped to the ozone, shouting and howling, lost in the noise.  Amazingly the audience responded differently to different chord progressions; sections would shoot from seats with a roar that competed with the amplification.  It was like a huge sea of deep rollers rising and falling.

A wonderful crowd, best I’ve ever seen. Everyone looked good and went way into the show.  There was no one not having the time of their life.  Dylan was flattered and showed it, trying a little harder to deliver the goods.

His singing was irrelevant. Why he is charged with plagiarism is beyond me.  I won’t say you couldn’t understand a word because I was able to snag a few while even getting a phrase or two- Tangled Up In Blue but he shouted that out in his normal voice.

If he was singing from his catalogue it was hardly noticeable although I did get the faint impression that one  of them was She Belongs To Me.  Either that or Love –  Zero = No Limits, or something else, might have been The Star Spangled Banner.  Didn’t matter, Bob had to do something to justify his being there.  He had the band so tight they could have performed without him.

The band was the cake. The progressions were so powerful it was like Godzilla walking in rhythm.  There were two sets and the first one was a power walk.  Just unbelievable.  If all Bob’s shows are like this one I can’t imagine what critics are belittling.  Forget the singing, it’s some kind of frosting to add a little variety.  So is Bob’s posturing.  He struts around a little like the Lord of the Manse directing the slaves striking what I suppose are meant to be power poses.

The end of the first set leaves you exhausted but energized and hoarse. During the intermission most people didn’t leave their seats but in their high excitement there was a huge billowing roar rising up.  I was in the first row, first balcony.  It was a kindly roar, mellow even.  Dylan’s fans are OK.  No weirdos there regardless of Kinney’s book, The Dylanologists:  Adventures In The Land Of Bob.

I was there with my wife and our friends Mark and Jenna, two old fans. On my left I sat next to a couple from Medicine Hat, Alberta who had driven down for the show.  He was a wheat farmer with 600 acres.  Using three John Deere combines he harvests all 600 acres in one day.  Gives him a lot of leisure I suppose.

The second set was a little more frivolous lowering the energy level considerably.   But, before you went to sleep he pepped it up a little ending on a power note.

I had heard that he doesn’t do encores but after a steady drum roll of applause for about ten minutes he and the band came back for not a one piece encore, but two, ending the show with a medium power progression while Bob mumbled the words to Blowing In The Wind apparently a very personal lyric. Ah, Hibbing.

By this time I had a firm grip on the situation paying attention to the band, but it is Bob’s band and I imagine that he has composed the music. As a composer he is no mean hand.  I hesitate to say it but the music is at least as good as Beethoven although falling short of Mozart.

I don’t know how long the piece was but they must have given us five to ten minutes with the crowd and myself going wild. The woman four seats to my left had virtually taken leave of her senses screaming doing a wild gyration of a dance. Really spectacular.

OK, I confess it. I did some involuntary things myself.  The band was really showing off their discipline and expertise.  Now this is really spectacular, they were powering along then cut off simultaneously leaving a half beat silence before resuming at the same pace and volume.  They did this three times in succession.

I sensed it coming on, now I’m not bragging because I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing, but in that brief half beat space was total silence. I shouted out a perfect rock and roll ‘hey’.  I did it the second time slipping that hey into that narrow opening. Perfect timing on both our parts.   I think the band was surprised by the first one then sort of amazed at the second one.  Then consciousness came slipping back and I missed the third opening.  It was still terrific.

As the encore drew to an end the cell phones came out and whole rows held them up to snap pictures. Endless tiny images shown back to up above.  Bob came center stage to pose for the cameras while the band lined up behind him.

The band was terrific. Dylan was terrific, the whole show was breathtaking and invigorating.  If you are being swayed by all the negative reviews, disregard them.  Dylan’s show is a can’t miss situation.  Carpe Diem!  Good things don’t last forever.

DSC01416

Exhuming Bob 31a

A Review

Another Side Of Bob Dylan

by

Victor Maymudes

Review by

R.E. Prindle

It Ain't Dark Yet

It Ain’t Dark Yet

31a will concern itself with Chapter 1 only. Victor Maymudes while closely connected with Dylan has always been written of as a shadowy slightly malevolent character.  My impression has been that he was an enforcer of some sort for Dylan.

In this his own memoir he is a friend, advisor and confidante. Maymudes, born in 1935, was six years older than Dylan who he met in 1961.  Maymudes was already in a career in show business.  In 1955 near the heart of the Beatnik era he had opened a folk club coffee house on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles called The Unicorn.  He was subsequently advised by Jack Elliot who he was managing at that time to go to New York to take in a new performer who turned out to be Bob Dylan.

Elliot explained that Dylan was copying his act but doing it better. Ramblin’ Jack himself introduced Victor to Bob giving the latter a run down on Victor’s achievements.  According to Victor he and the twenty year old Dylan hit it off immediately.  They began to pal around.

Maymudes gives a slightly different view of this period than has yet been around. The first chapter covers the period from the Spring of ’61 to Dylan’s Carnegie Hall performance in the Fall of ’61.

According to Maymudes shortly after meeting Dylan they went on a long drive and walks around the perimeter of New York City.

To quote Victor:

Bob mentioned going to Juvenile Hall and how he quickly realized there was a social structure inside and either you are going to get along or you really shouldn’t be there.

Hopefully this should settle the issue of whether Dylan was incarcerated in Red Wing Reformatory of Minnesota. While the paper trail has always indicated he did yet his term has been denied by all.  In what amounts to a self-admission this should settle the issue.

There is also a piece on the internet by someone who had been in Red Wing at an earlier time but said he knew someone who was in Red Wing at the same time as Bob. Dylan says according to Victor that in order to get along you had to go along.  I take that as a reflection after the fact, while Bob probably held himself aloof from the other boys as his possible fellow prisoner as above said he did.  No one has believed the article but there may be something to it.

At any rate it seems clear that Bob did serve a sentence which was very unpleasant for him as why wouldn’t it be. The stay had a devastating effect on his personality, as why not?  Bob’s song The Walls Of Red Wing thus seems to be a personal reminiscence.

Some of Bob’s stories such as touring with a carnival while false as told seem to be based on actual facts while being definitely embroidered. In the same paragraph Victor says:  He talked about going with the carnival when they came to town.  I would take that to mean that perhaps he volunteered to help in setting up the carnival as an extra hand as was common.  There were temporary jobs when the circus came to town.  You could drive stakes for instance and maybe get a free ticket.

2.

It also seems clear that Bob’s family life was far from harmonious. The Zimmerman’s seemed to have covered up a lot.  Maymudes, same paragraph, p.4:

He told me deeply personal stuff like his dad leaving town and how he would have to stay at his dad’s mother in Minneapolis, how she would tell him his mother was a whore, sleeping around with other men. It was the kind of thing that probably wasn’t true about his mother, but his grandmother was sticking up for his father and trying to use her power to distance Bob from his own mother.  Terrible thing to do to a child.

Bob’s grandmother may have been telling tales about Bob’s mother but I think not. My impression at looking at her picture was that she was a goodtime girl.  She certainly kept Abe broke buying her furs, jewels and Cadillacs.

In Dylan’s portrayal of his putative father and his mother in his movie Masked And Anonymous his alter ego Jack Fate’s father is portrayed on his death bed while his mother with a red dress on appears to be gallivanting about.

I find it hard to believe Dylan’s grandmother would say those things about his mother if she didn’t mean them. It is also the first time I’ve heard that Dylan’s mother and father separated from time to time.  As such behavior is common knowledge in a small town like Hibbing Dylan’s life may have been made miserable partly from that cause.  He certainly has no love lost for that period in his life.

3.

One major question everyone asks is why Robert Shelton wrote such a glowing review about a performance of Bob’s and why John Hammond gave a nondescript Bob a recording contract. Maymudes may shed some light on that.  He says on p. 46:

Over the next week Bob and I ended up hanging out non-stop. We were together all the time.  We would depart and arrange to meet the following day.  Eventually we even exchanged numbers.  We had extensive conversations about everything.  During the day we would go see Fellini’s movies and stop by the happening clubs and cafes like the Bitter End.  We would stay up till dawn each morning.  I would introduce him to everyone I knew, like Richard Alderson, the guy you hear announcing bands at Woodstock.  We went to Dave Von Ronk’s house and played our guitars.  John Hammond Sr. had a house on lower MacDougal St. and we would go there too.

All this has to fit into a time frame of about six months but the interesting thing here is that Victor and Bob visited John Hammond Sr. apparently several times before Shelton’s New York Times article of 9/29/61 and Dylan signing a Columbia Records Contract with Hammond on 9/30/61. Did Hammond really have time to read the article and say to himself, I’ve got to find this boy and sign him by the next day?  Astonishing on the face of it.  It would seem to have been a plan.

No other writer, no biographer places Dylan at Hammond Sr.’s house before 9/30/61. But according to Maymudes, and why should he lie although he might misremember, Hammond and Dylan were familiar with each other as early as the summer of ’61.  Hammond must have heard Dylan play and sing before Shelton’s article.  Thus his behavior in the studio where he had Bob just play and sing into the microphone while he read the newspaper is more understandable.

While every other folk label in NYC had rejected Bob evidently Hammond saw and heard something they didn’t. It would seem highly improbable he could sign Bob’s nearly indiscernible talent on his own hook.  It may be then that he conspired with Shelton who he surely would have known to write an extremely favorable review to be published in the premier newspaper in the country and then sign Dylan on the strength of that.  As it was his prescience was not immediately justified as the record bombed.

At any rate the above scenario would make the article and signing plausible.

On the other hand Hammond may just have had the golden ears with which he is attributed. In that context my brother-in-law played me all four of Dylan’s first LPs in 1964 that I found excruciatingly painful to listen to.  I thought Dylan was going nowhere but my brother-in-law said, you watch, this guy is going to be big.  That goes to prove whatever Bob had could be heard but only apparently by the elect.

4.

The Winter and Spring of 1961-62 Victor was touring with his act Wavy Gravy who he managed. He then returned to New York where Dylan was now living with Suze Rotolo.   They continued their friendship.

Dylan had returned to Minnesota that Winter and had just returned as Victor hit town. Bob was now looking for management.  He discussed this with Victor, pp. 51-52

During our walks on this second trip to New York, Bob and I talked about the future. He asked me about Manny Greenhill and Albert Grossman; he was wondering who he should sign with.  Manny Greenhill was managing Joan Baez and her commercial success was increasing every day.  At the same time Dave Von Ronk’s wife was managing Bob, but he was ready for the next step.  Flat out he asked me which one he should sign with.  I asked him how traditional he wanted to be and how far he wanted to reach.  Those questions appealed to him and he expressed he wanted to go the distance, more commercial than Greenhill was doing.  His day-to-day routine didn’t point to someone who wanted to go mainstream; he was more folky and traditional at this point.  But he knew what he wanted and where he wanted to go from the start.  So I said Albert was the logical choice.  He was much more aggressive and much more commercial.  Bob signed with Grossman a few days later.

——-

Bob’s ability to bend and refashion words was like magic; he was the one that could break into the mainstream while still playing socially conscientious music. Bob believed in himself and so did I, and that’s why Albert entering the picture made sense.  Albert had commercial connections and wouldn’t ask Bob to change his tune to fit in.  With Albert’s help Bob could force his style in front of the broader public and ultimately make everyone else fit into what he was doing.

That’s a pretty good insider’s synopsis. Grossman who would soon launch Peter Paul and Mary on the back of Dylan’s songs certainly had recording connections although Warner Bros. at the time was fairly low down the list of successful, maybe unsuccessful, record companies.  Anyway Bob was already signed to CBS, the actual premier recording company at the time.

Victor goes on to give an interesting thumbnail of Albert Grossman that is immediate and accurate.

Always handy with the advice Victor tells Albert how to go about handling Bob while at his own expense he was setting up Dylan’s first Carnegie Hall appearance, not the main stage but a side stage.

Victor says Albert took the concert away from him while it is usually attributed to Izzy Young. In the event nobody came and the show was a total financial loss.  Victor had a falling out with Albert deciding for ‘spiritual’ reasons to depart for Yelapa Mexico.  Apparently Victor had been inhaling too much from The Teaching Of Don Juan.

His last words to Bob at this time were that if he ever needed him to say to whoever he was standing next to, Get Victor, and he would come.

It was the Sixties you know.

That is the end of the revelations of Tape 1. A remarkable and interesting account.  We do know that Victor and Bob were friends so barring any embroidery or misremembering the account should be accurate.  If so, all biographies are now askew.  The period has to be reexamined and reevaluated to include Victor’s account.

Chumps Playing Stud

A Review

Wendell Willkie’s

One World

Part 4

by

R.E. Prindle

Would You Buy A Used Car From This Guy?

Would You Buy A Used Car From This Guy?

It’s a lie, it’s a lie,

I say that it’s a scam

For I have been to Derby, Sir

And I’ve seen the Derby ram.

–English Folk Song

This town is full of guys

Who think they’re mighty wise

Just because they know a thing or two.

You can see them everyday

Strolling up and down old Broadway

Telling of the wonders they can do.

There’s con men and theirs boosters

Card sharks and crap shooters

They congregate around the Metropole.

They wear fancy ties and collars

But where do they get their dollars?

They all say they’ve got an

Ace in the hole.

Perico and Schaebel

 

Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin’ eyes?

–Chico Marx, a man who should know.

Happy Time

Happy Time

No period in American history has been more misrepresented than the period from 1920 to 1945- the Crash and death of Franklin Roosevelt. They say history is written by the victors and since the period has been written by Jewish legend makers it would seem that the Jews were victors under the aegis of their stooge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As in any legend, and this one might be called the Legend of Hoover and Roosevelt, there must be a hero and a villain. Herbert Hoover is the scapegoat, Roosevelt is the hero and champion of the Jews.

The question is how did Roosevelt become the champion of the Jews? It happened before the presidency or even Roosevelt’s governorship of New York.  After Al Smith the former champion of the Jews failed in 1928 Roosevelt was pushed forward.

We Had A Grand Time

We Had A Grand Time

I am tempted to say that Roosevelt was a Manchurian candidate programmed very early. When he and wife Eleanor worked the Jewish settlement house scene in the first decade of the century they both came under the spell of the Jews.  At the time the daughters of the wealthiest men in New York, in fact the daughters of the Morganites among others descended on the Lower East Side slums to minister to the ‘poor’ Jews.

The Jews at the time just arrived from Russia were in full revolutionary mode. When a group arrived on the Fourth of July they mistook the festivities as a welcome for them. So, you can imagine the effect of these daughters of plutocrats coming to the East Side to ‘welcome’ them had on them.  When Knickerbockers like FDR showed up what better to do than convert them to the cause.  Perhaps it was thought to hypnotize FDR, plant a few post-hypnotic suggestions and groom him for political uses much as Al Smith was being handled.

While hypnotism may seem farfetched for those not familiar with the era remember that Sigmund Freud was a master of hypnotism, nevermind the story that he gave it up. He perfected it and abandoned the crude early method.  Freud had joined the International Order of B’nai B’rith in Vienna in 1895 remaining a lifelong member. You might compare the B’nai B’rith with the Learned Elders of Zion and solve that mystery.

He met with them at least once a week. He says that the members shared his views.  He and they desired the destruction of Europeans and European culture, hence his complaints about contemporary European morality.  He also shared his views with his American nephew the publicist and propagandist Edward Bernays.  Bernays became a master of suggestion.  Suggestion, of course, is the basis of hypnosis.  While I can’t say for sure that FDR was hypnotized I can find no other basis for his slavish devotion to Jewish interests.  That includes his entry into the European war to further Jewish goals.

It is also true that after FDR’s death the Jewish influence in the US government diminished to near zero while the Red hunting began in earnest reversing Rooseveltian policy.

During FDR’s terms in office the integration of international Jewish activities coincide remarkably, more especially in the use of food as a weapon of mass destruction. I have already examined the issue in several articles including the three part Henry Ford And The Jews, other Ford articles and The Secret History Of The Jews In The Twentieth Century.  Henry Ford gave some indication of Jewish plans in his articles in the Dearborn Independent exposing Aaron Sapiro.  Sapiro’s plan or something like it would begin to be implemented in Roosevelt’s New Deal.

I have also explained Jewish hatred of Herbert Hoover in the mentioned essays. He was hated not only for his past effort to rescue Europeans afflicted with starvation but because he was prescient enough to divine Jewish collectivism in the Roosevelt administration but wise enough not to mention the fact by name having learned from the experience of his friend Henry Ford.

Having been frustrated by Harding’s election in 1920 ending their salad days under Wilson one can only imagine the Jews’ elation as they rushed back into DC under the aegis of the Wilson continuator, Roosevelt. Possibly part of their hatred for Hoover was as a scapegoat for their twelve year hiatus from DC.  But now they were back and they were in charge.

Back Again

Back Again

 

Hoover had foreseen their collectivist effect and tried to forewarn but his warning had fallen on deaf ears. Very likely Hoover’s understanding of the situation was far in advance of the public’s as he was much better informed.  He had been part of the battle against the Bolshevics, avatars of collectivism, since 1921 under Harding.  Coolidge had established the FBI in 1924 under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had augmented it in 1930.  The FBI was primarily established to fight Communism.  The ideology remained central to Edgar Hoover’s approach to the end of his days.  It was probably his fixation on fighting Communism that made him so much disliked by FDR.

Herbert Hoover was also much better informed than the public of the interference in American governmental affairs by the Comintern.

As he feared, the Communist influence flared into near open existence under FDR when one of his first acts as president was to recognize the Soviet Union.  The Ware ring was established as early as 1934 when ominously a Communist takeover of the Department of Agriculture was achieved under Henry Wallace.

As a revolution in government had taken place, as you can imagine the reaction was ferocious and immediate especially when viewed through the lens of the legislation of FDR’s first hundred days. Most of that was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as early as 1935 gutting to a large extent FDR’s New Deal.

We're Here To Get This New Deal Thing On The Road

We’re Here To Get This New Deal Thing On The Road

 Hoover was only one voice criticizing Roosevelt. He had every right to be critical as a tremendous smear campaign, defamation, was launched against him by the Jews and FDR.  Perhaps on one level Hoover was made responsible for the whole Gilded Age and the Republican Interregnum.  As bizarre as it may seem the Administration hauled the surviving members of the Gilded Age before a Congressional committee to ‘explain themselves,’  whatever that might mean.  While the elder J.P. Morgan had left the building FDR humiliated his son also J.P. Morgan by having a dwarf sit on his lap whatever that might mean.  He tried to put Andrew Mellon on trial for whatever charge I haven’t learned.  The whole FDR crowd seem to have ingested the Muckraker ideology and become enraged.

Gustavus Myers always refers to the Gilded Age as Capitalists. I’ve always had trouble understanding what Capitalist meant to Socialists.  Certainly men like the Vanderbilts, Gould and Fisk who were just guys off the street no different in their origins from unskilled laborers had no ideology whatever except to get a pile and hold on to it.  The Gilded Age was just a one shot affair that would never happen again.  It created fabulous opportunities for those who were awake and there and either knew or stumbled upon how to seize the day.  Carpe diem.  Some call it luck.

The Gilded Age itself was a period of rapid discoveries making wonderful things possible. What are you going to see?  The light or the dark?  In 1830 George Stephenson in England invented the railroad.  By the 1850s the East Coast of the US was covered with Short Lines.  About 1850 the Canadian Abraham Gesner discovered how to make kerosene from bituminous coal while in 1851 Samuel Kier discovered how to distil it from oil.

The Civil War masked these phenomenal changes so that they appeared as if by magic after the war. The railroad long lines were already platted during the war while the Union Pacific was actually finished before the 1860s were out.

With Kier’s discovery the useless oil seepages of Western Pennsylvania became useful. The result was the giant corporation Standard Oil.  The railroads had created unheard of fortunes.  Vanderbilt was renowned for having amassed two hundred million.  Before the war this would have been impossible.  The Standard Oil fortunes of which there were many were great but Rockefeller’s held the high ground.  To small minds like that of Gustavus Myers magnitudes of wealth of this order seemed criminal in themselves. He was absolutely enraged that anyone should have so much.  His knee jerk reaction was to advocate simply confiscating the fortunes, in effect stealing them, as was done to the Russian aristocrats following the revolution.  That was some indication of his own morality.

Minds as small as his or even smaller rushed to pass legislation to do so and break up the great combinations at the same time. The very size of Standard Oil made the poor wretches tremble.  So-called anti-trust laws were passed.  It was here that the US made a wrong turn.  Size would be essential in the coming global economy that none of these mental midgets apprehended.

As I say, Myers, Roosevelt, the Jews were reactionaries looking to the past rather than the future. How strange that history should record them as progressives.  The past had been eclipsed by the railroads.  The future that they indicated was a brave new world of unlimited opportunity, uncharted and unvisualized except perhaps by men like Rockefeller.  Small business was for local purposes and farther in the future global purposes large combinations were necessary.  Have you noticed that China has eclipsed the US?

The US sacrificed its future the day Standard Oil was broken up. Had that not happened today Standard Oil would be a mega corporation giving the US precedence in the worldwide contest for supremacy.  Without vision a nation must perish.  The US shrunk on that fateful day.  The torch has now passed to China.  The Middle Kingdom has assumed its ancient stature.

The minds in FDR’s DC were shrunken pitiful things. They punished the doers while rewarding the losers.  The reaction of the doers was intense.  The American Liberty League was formed by prominent industrialists and other business interests that fought hard throughout Roosevelt’s first term but then slacked off.  Foremost among the loudest of the objectors was the radio priest, the Catholic Father Coughlin.  Working out of Detroit he built up a multi-million person audience.  As a Catholic he was well aware of Communist assaults on religion in the Soviet Union.  He had every incentive to denounce the Communist infiltrated Roosevelt administration nor did he mince words in denouncing the Jewish influence.  Branded then with the Jewish ace in the hole of anti-Semite his days were numbered.  He broadcast over the Jewish owned CBS network that censored his show on the grounds of anti-Semitism.

It was inevitable that the Jewish presence in FDR’s government would be noted. He himself was referred to as Rosenfeld.  While the truth was obvious subsequent Jewish historians or legend makers have misrepresented the true state of affairs dismissing all opposition as unjustified and anti-Semitic.

Nor was the administration defenseless. FDR himself used the radio as effectively as Father Coughlin in his weekly Fireside Chats.   Wife Eleanor had her daily syndicated newspaper column to puff things.  Numerous radio commentators such as Raymond Gram Swing denounced the objectors as Fascist and Nazis while numerous columnists such as Walter Winchell gave the administration full support.  A lot of propagandist support was necessary to keep the public baffled.

 

Walter Winchell And All The Ships At Sea

Walter Winchell And All The Ships At Sea

In point of fact Roosevelt did nothing to alleviate the Depression. There were as many unemployed in 1940 as when he took office in 1933.  Billions were being spent on programs making people dependent on the government.  Collectivization was going swimmingly.

His primary concern was to discredit the capable and buy the vote of the incapable. Millions were on relief, hence dependent of Roosevelt himself in their eyes for their very survival, the very bread they ate.  Food as a weapon following the Jewish agenda.  The management of the Russian population by food was now an accomplished fact.  While millions were starving to death or near starvation, long queues of bread seekers stood in the cold to get their daily allotment- if they received their allotment daily.

The US depression was prolonged eight excruciating years until the Jews and Roosevelt involved the US in two wars at one time that upset and ultimately destroyed their plan, albeit in the short term it seemed to be working. Remember the Amalekites, the Jews never give up.

On the other hand the Administration and the Jews crucified anyone who opposed them. To take only two, Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford.  Amongst other offences to Jewish sensibilities both men had interfered with Jewish starvation programs.  Hoover by feeding the starving European millions and Ford by exposing Jewish hopes to seize food monopolies in the US.

In Hoover’s case a tremendous campaign of vilification and defamation was carried on…and on…and on. His glorious early career was viciously nullified, buried, nearly erased from history while his attempts to solve the depression that was actually engineered by the Jews were belittled and held as naught.  The depression was described as the Hoover depression while encampments of unemployed were described as Hoovervilles.  The defamation was actually criminal but it would have been worse than futile to make a court case of it.  Hoover had to grin and bear it for twelve long years until FDR’s death.  Even then the period of rehabilitation that began after the war has been less than complete.  The history books back in the hands of his enemies print the legend rather than the truth.

In the case of Ford not only was he vilified and defamed but serious attempts were made to destroy River Rouge while the internal corruption of his work force destabilized his business while efforts to control it gave him a harsh reputation. During the war serious efforts were being devised to confiscate the whole of Ford Motors.  Nationalizing it that is.  This has been covered up or misrepresented.

Twice, once in 1932 and again in 1936 a Communist column descended on Ford’s River Rouge plant. Had they gotten inside it was their intention to smash Ford’s machines and burn the place to the ground.  The Reds were applauded while Ford’s defense of his property was deemed criminal.   Such was the Roosevelt Administration.

Failing in direct assaults the Communists infiltrated the work force stirring up unrest, sabotaging the process and equipment while stealing whatever they could carry. Ford Motors lost millions in thefts.  In defense Ford employed informers to identify the trouble makers.  This effort was decried as a spy system on ‘honest’ workers.   It was a spy system on the thieves and agitators.

Then in 1935 the Wagner Act benefitting unions and crippling management was passed. As Ford said he was already meeting or exceeding union benefits.  It didn’t matter.  While the Wagner Act wasn’t a law that employers had to have a union the administration meant it that way and interpreted it that way.  Ford, the fairest employer the world had ever seen was reviled while absolute hatred was stirred up against him.

Had a union been installed at Ford he would have had no control of the work force at all. In the early sixties I worked on the line for Fisher Body.  Theft and sabotage were rampant.  In an attempt to hold down thefts employees were checked leaving their shifts, bags and lunch boxes had to be opened.  Complaints were lodged at the union by would be thieves, invasion of privacy was alleged.  The union sprang into action to eliminate security measures.  The company ceased checking and parts and tools simply walked out the door.  Was the union complicit?  I always thought so.

Ford, in a fit of fatuousness in his early years, took to hiring ex-cons to give them another chance. Laudatory on the face of it, all it did was give the cons the opportunity to recruit from and corrupt otherwise honest employees.

Fisher Body followed the same program. There was a large colony of cons at the end of the line just ahead of me.  They used to sit and plan jobs for the weekend, recruiting from the work force.  Fortunately I wasn’t considered reliable enough or I might have been conned into a criminal career.  Others were.

One wonders in reading these Jewish histories whether they are dishonest or hopelessly naïve; I’m guessing dishonest. Thus Ford’s life during the thirties was made miserable by the Jews.  The power Roosevelt granted them was enormous.

Apart from bedeviling opponents like Hoover and Ford, dissidents were pursued and denounced, the constitution be damned. Honest researchers like Mrs.  Elizabeth Dilling, of whom you may never have heard, were reviled in execrable terms beneath the dignity of honorable critics to use.

Mrs. Dilling compiled two large volumes proving the Communist affiliations in the Roosevelt Administration. Her first volume was the Red Network and the companion volume was the Roosevelt Red Record And Its Background.  Both volumes are soundly researched and well documented.  No charges were ever answered, she was merely reviled as a crank.  This was the way it went in the thirties under Roosevelt.

As the thirties drew to a close the Jewish triumph seemed certain but it was necessary for Roosevelt to seek a third term to consolidate the successes. By this time the Jews were entering a full delusional state of mind.

In converting their residence in the United States into a battle between good and evil the Jews had converted themselves from immigrants to founders. As founders they saw themselves as true Americans while the actual founders, the Anglo-Saxons, had become Nazis and Fascists bent on converting this Jewish democratic paradise into an authoritarian State subject to Hitler.  So they had reversed roles assuming a mantle of perfect virtue.

Wendell Willkie

Wendell Willkie

They thus developed a game plan to overcome what they saw as the Nazis in their midst. This would become even more developed post-war.  Of course the transition from the free republic to a satrapy of Stalin had unleashed all kinds of wild intellects with more perfect plans of reconstruction that in their minds were far more perfect than anything the Jews could come up with.  The Technocrats had it all worked out while Huey Long with his Share The Wealth program out Roosevelted Roosevelt.  Upton Sinclair popped up in California with his EPIC program- End Poverty In California.  It was a sensationally active nutcake period.

The Jews concentrated their fire on people like William Dudley Pelley, the American Fuehrer. Pelly was an actual Fascist although his numbers were so insignificant he made the Communists look like the Democratic Party.  With such insignificant numbers of course he could never have been a threat but the Jews blew his significance out of all proportion.  One look at the guy and you knew he wasn’t going anywhere.  The spark of greatness was missing.

Spectacular leaders like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or even Franco weren’t just lucky even if the times were right for them, they had the genius, the spark, the inner substance to succeed. Pelley wasn’t even on the sidelines of their field.

Apart from Pelley the Jews had to invent their demons. Fake it in other words.  One of their absurd creations was someone calling himself James True, the scourge of the Jews or something like that.  He advertised in the papers.  Had an actual office with a desk, advertised that he had invented a ‘kike killer’.  Sounded fearsome.

Interviewed by the press his kike killer turned out to be an ordinary black jack, he himself being null and void. So much for the terrible anti-Semitic presence in America.

A threat of a different kind appeared in 1940 with the Phony War in Europe. Roosevelt, the Jews and the English had been beating the drums of war in Europe more insistently.  Roosevelt was taking preparedness seriously.  He was building a war machine furiously while inaugurating the first peacetime conscription ever.  Moved the three mile limit out to Iceland.  Had the good ship Rueben James sunk.  Sent a couple hundred sailors down to have lunch with Davy Jones in his locker. Stretched neutrality almost as far as it would go.  He could have tried harder.

These preparations for war alarmed the non-interventionists that the Administration labeled Isolationists. Always give your opponents a defamatory name.  Thus, the administration good guys were known as Internationalists and the bad guys Isolationists.    The Neutral Party perhaps a more accurate title, the Isolationists correctly advised letting the European combatants fight it out while the US waited on the side to pick up the pieces.

Herbert Hoover who had toured Europe in 1938 to get as accurate a picture as possible had come to the same conclusion while many influential politicians advised him that the US should stay out as it had no understanding of European problems.

Maybe American politicians didn’t have the knowledge but the Jews who were driving Roosevelt toward war did have an understanding being present in every European country and in the US and Canada. They were the true Internationalists one might say.  By 1940 nearly the entire Jewish intelligencia of Europe had migrated out of harm’s way to the US where they became very influential.  The Jews were truculence personified.  In early 1941 Theodore N. Kaufman a Jew from Newark published a book titled Germany Must Perish.

He was calling for the extermination of the entire German people. That’s about eighty million souls as compared to six million Jews.  He wanted Germany partitioned out of existence, erased from the map.  His book was reviewed by the Nazis where the question became would the Jews exterminate Germans or Germans exterminate Jews.

It looked like the latter as the war progressed but after the defeat of Germany the boot shifted to the Jewish foot. Under the leadership of the Jewish Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. it began to look like with Roosevelt’s consent the Jews would exterminate the Germans.  Then Roosevelt died.  Truman dumped Morgenthau possibly saving the Germans from extinction although it was fairly close.

But back to 1940. Roosevelt was safely in for another four years although already ravaged and ready for death.  Where’s the Grim Reaper when you need him?  He was a shoo-in in ’44 although he died a few weeks into his fourth term.  Had he been strong enough there is little doubt that he would have been a five termer.

The Neutral Party now alarmed at the prospect of war stopped dallying around and formed an actual opposition Party called America First. Hoover had been terrible at propaganda, the Liberty League had never been to propaganda school and the Firsters had learned little from watching propaganda experts like Roosevelt and the Jews.  They were supreme slogan masters.  The name America First unfortunately had a jingoist ring that was definitely negative propaganda.  Nevertheless they had the American people behind them.  Polls, for what they were worth, showed Americans overwhelming against entering the European war.  What were the Jews? 4%?  Ninety-six percent of Americans were against the war.

But so many important events turn on trifles.

The war in Europe was in its third year when the American hero Charles Lindbergh made a speech in Des Moines Iowa in September of 1941. In it he identified the three prime movers for intervention as England, Roosevelt and the Jews.  He then gave evidence for why each wanted war.  This was and is a perfectly reasonable speech, available on the internet if you want to read it.  However Roosevelt denounced him as un-American and the Jews cursed him as an anti-Semite.  Their old ace in the hole.  Lindbergh’s reputation was destroyed overnight.  The America First Committee was discredited with all members running for cover.

The denunciation wasn’t enough to get us into the European war but three months on in December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the US and war was on. Who would believe such an impossible turn of events.  Where were everyone’s brains.   Looking back it was total insanity on all the participants parts.

Entering the war was a mistake for both Roosevelt and the Jews.

Hoover, Lindbergh, Ford and others wisely advised standing clear of the conflict which could never have touched our shores so as to be the ‘peace makers’ after the war. Though wise from their point of view if war hadn’t been entered the struggle to determine the future of America would still have been needed to wage.  The imposition of Jewish mores would most likely have succeeded and become established.

The Roosevelt and Jewish propaganda machine was far superior to the Neutral Party. The America First party had been destroyed by three words in a speech so that opposition to Administration propaganda backed by the moral position of Roosevelt himself would have been invulnerable.

The Jews ardently wanted to put dissidents into concentration camps just as they wanted to exterminate the Germans. Unable to do so they tried jailing them after hostilities began but failed in that.  However in order for Roosevelt to fight the war he had to take the Morganites, the Wall Street Crowd, the ‘Capitalists’ or his enemies into the government.  As the Jews had gone first for the Department of Agriculture the Morganites entrenched themselves in the State Department where their influence was great.  They were thus placed on a par at least with the Communists and Jews neutralizing their influence to some extent.

Nevertheless the Jewish drive for dominance that had reached critical mass in 1940 continued and acclimated. The plan evident at the time was outlined by the  current Jewish novelist Philip Roth in his 2004 The Plot Against America.  Roth, born in 1933, would have been aware enough during the war to get a sense of what was going on.  Interestingly he was from Newark as was the genocidist Kaufman.  Either remembering or researching the period he recreates the claustrophobic Jewish atmosphere of the time.  He makes clear the notion the Jews were the true American democracy while nativists under the leadership of Charles Lindbergh who Roth portrays as a full-fledged Nazi, were authoritarians out to betray America.  Hannah Arendt after the war would develop this absurd notion that others were authoritarians but not Jews.  In his novel Roth has Lindbergh elected president as a satrap of Hitler.

As we have seen a series of books portraying the Morganites and Republicans as criminals from 1865 on were published during the thirties. Myers’ book The Ending Of Hereditary American Fortunes celebrates the expropriatory taxes imposed by Roosevelt,  at the insistence of the Jews.

By 1939 Myers was approached by the filthy rich Guggenheim Foundation to write a propaganda diatribe titled The History Of Bigotry In The United States issued in the critical year of 1943. Myers portrays Anglo-Saxon Americans as deep dyed bigots from the inception of the country to 1943.  He especially denounces the people Jews were trying to incarcerate, either in concentration camps or prisons.

The volume was given a full-fledged sales push by Bennett Cerf at his prestigious Random House imprint. One may be sure that a few tens of thousands paid for by Guggenheims were sent free of charge to every library in America as well as prominent opinion makers.  All sale figures of this time are distorted by the distribution of free copies.  Even Herbert Hoover bought thousands of his books to distribute.  Those distributions are counted as sales.

The History Of Bigotry was only one volume in a flood of propagandistic books, pamphlets, and magazine articles streaming from the printing presses when there was supposedly a shortage of paper.   While aimed at the contemporary markets planners at the obscenely rich Guggenheim, the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League with an eye to the future planned a whole series of books beyond the war and even to today.  The propaganda has been unceasing.

A good example is the title Undercover also published in 1943 under the name of John Roy Carlson. There was no John Roy Carlson, the name was assumed by the writers at the AJC to publish their defamations.  It purpose like The History Of Bigotry was to defame pre-war dissidents of Rooseveltian subterfuges.  Somewhen about 1938, perhaps at the time the Guggenheim contacted Myers the Jews were in the process or had set up a Mossad type organization to track down and investigate anyone they deemed an ‘anti-Semite.’  They began to or had been keeping files on ‘anti-Semites.’  Today they have a data base of over three million Americans they consider dangerous anti-Semites.  Anti-Semitism, that is their ace in the hole.

When Henry Ford established his Service Department of agents to detect and defend himself against threats from Communists and their allies the Jews defamed him for it. Never mind that the Anti-Defamation League was doing the same for them.  What was reprehensible for Ford was laudable for Jews.

So the AJC and ADL had thrown out a network of, well, spies to gather incriminating evidence against, oh, I don’t know, glances, sneers, laughing at jokes that to them indicated murderous intentions.  One of the agents, Arthur Derounian, to whom they give credit for the authorship of the book Undercover, slithered ‘under disguise’ through Ford’s River Rouge plant searching out the Nazi conspiracies Jews thought were going on there.  Derounian had to report he could find nothing.  I’m sure he overlooked the Communist saboteurs but then Arthur was only following orders like his German double Eichmann.

In fact, through four hundred plus pages the agents came up with absolutely nothing. I don’t know whether they checked under the beds or not though.

At any rate Ford was a beaten man. When informed that the government might expropriate his plant he lethargically said:  Let ‘em.  See if they can run it any better than I can.

So, while Ford was able to face them down in the twenties through the thirties and into the forties they attacked his factories, defamed him unmercifully, sabotaged his production, passed one sided laws essentially making him a slave to the unions and finally attempted to steal his business. Remember the Amalekites.  Truly, it’s not over until the fat lady sings and the fat lady will be Jewish.

With Roosevelt behind them the Jews had taken over the country in all but name.

Their tragic error was in insisting that the US enter the war. As noted this brought the Morganites, the Wall Streeters back into the government.  With Roosevelt’s death they were able to negate the Jewish influence while under Hoover’s insistence their collectivism was mitigated if not exorcised.

The Eightieth Congress in 1946 under Truman repudiated as much of the Roosevelt legislation as possible including revoking 79,000, that’s right, 79K of Roosevelt’s laws, executive orders and directives while mitigating the terrible one sidedness of Wagner’s labor act of 1935.

As for Roosevelt, that very sick old man, whose main goal was the creation of the United Nations, he succeeded. Once again the Jews; who Ford actually defeated in the Sapiro trial, found a way to include the Lubin-Sapiro plan in the Agricultural program of the US and the UN thus reversing the Ford decision.

Willkie had been a mere tool of Roosevelt. After throwing the 1940 election to Roosevelt, the President then used the ex-candidate by sending him on a useless trip around the world in 1943, once again, just before election time.  Returning, Willkie, or his ghost writers, wrote his propaganda piece forwarding the UN theme for Roosevelt.  Willkie’s One World either sold well or so many copies were given away that it appeared so.

Willkie had the audacity to seek the ’44 Republican nomination that was only an absurd hope. Totally repudiated he sickened and died a few months later.

The Jews, turned away and crushed by the news of Hitler’s extermination camps, became fearful believing that the ‘Nazi satrap’ Charles Lindbergh was about to exterminate them became quiet for a decade although they did play their old ace in the hole in ’46 and ’47 when the movie Gentlemen’s Agreement was released.

The arch goi Gregory Peck played a goi pretending to be Jewish to discover the discriminatory horrors Jews were supposedly subjected to.

Their recovery and aggression resumed from there as they renewed the assault on the culture during the last half of the century.

Now their name would be mud

Like an old chump playing stud

If the lost that old ace in the hole.

In memory of the Amalekites.