I, Dynamo

A Review

One World by Wendell Wilkie

Part III

by

R.E. Prindle

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

Except for the fact that it was engineered there was really nothing that unusual about the Great Depression nor was it any worse than the two great depressions of the nineteenth century, those of 1873 and 1893. They were just as severe as that of 1929 and also very long lasting. If the Great War had not intervened it is likely that a depression would have occurred between 1914 and 1918. The modern industrial economy had come into existence while the Civil War was being waged with the result leading to the crash of 1873 as people didn’t know how to manage the emerging economy.

In the ensuing years science and technology made giant leaps that society had to struggle to deal with. Change with all its wonders occurs much faster than the human mind can assimilate it. By the late twenties innovation had moved so far beyond society’s ability to absorb to the change that I wouldn’t be surprised if a cause of the depression wasn’t mental fatigue much as I think it is today. People just can’t keep up and don’t know where to lie down to rest.

For whatever reasons the Coolidge prosperity ended during Herbert Hoover’s watch. The New Era had run into a stone wall. There were a lot of people cheering the collapse, mainly Communists and Jews as it meant opportunity for them.

Hoover was immediately taken to task for doing nothing as if anything could have been done. Actually he did everything that could have been done although according to the rules of individualism. This was the first major depression, save possibly 1921, in which the majority of the population was urban hence less able to feed itself so the idea of distributing provisions was new. It is not impossible that people suffered less, even then, than in 1873 or 1893. For a popular report see Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons in which he reports hundreds of thousands of beggars in New York City alone. Nineteen twenty-nine was many times more ‘humane.’

Roosevelt in his turn on the economic front did nothing that Hoover hadn’t done and with the same results. Hoover did some deficit spending , later called Keynsian economics, but that is just handouts. Hoover initiated public works while urging States and municipalities to do the same. Roosevelt called the same Public Works and CCC while they were collectivized changing the direction of the nation. They also produced nothing.

Hoover called on industry to maintain payrolls as much as possible. Henry Ford volunteered to raise his daily wage by a dollar even though his business was as hard hit as anyone’s; even that didn’t work so obviously the problem went deeper and would have to work itself out. There was no end of innovation happening, such as television, that would create great industries after the war but they were developing.

Roosevelt, governor of NY in 1929 joined in the derision of Hoover although he had no plans to get the ‘economy moving’ as we were later to say. None of his economic policies which were the same as Hoover’s with unfamiliar names achieved anything. It was in social engineering that he had his great effect.

Still, he took office in 1933 to the egoistic strains of Happy Days Are Here Again. He took the lectern and bellowed: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. People believed him too even though he didn’t explain what fear itself was. He didn’t bother to put a name on it.

The inauguration was a gala time down on the Lower East Side. The impression one gets is that Eleanor and Franklin made one heck of an impression on the Jews of the East Side back at the turn of the century. It was as if they had now gotten their man in. More than one Jewish baby on election night and after was named Franklin Delano in his honor. Great expectations of what? The redemption? Actually 1933 was a hinge year in European and American history.

While we’re being internationalists, in Russia the Soviet Union in which Jews were heavily represented in the government the first Soviet Five Year Plan was coming to an end. That first five year plan created the largest man made famine in recorded history. Millions had died from starvation. And the Soviets had the effrontery to claim that the Depression showed that Capitalism wouldn’t work. Good god amighty. Unlike the Soviet famine of 1921 Herbert Hoover was not allowed to relieve the famine as he did then.

The famine was hotly denied as the Soviets tried to cover it up. American Liberals and Fellow Travelers aided the cover up and thus were complicit in the death of those millions as they also denied the famine.

It may be a coincidence but the Stalinist show trials began shortly after in which Stalin began to purge the Jews. At the end of WWII only one Jew remained in the government while all but one of the Soviet concentration camps were superintended by Jews.

Let us consider genocide by starvation.

The first great man made famine was created by the revolutionists in France. Wheat was withheld from the Parisian markets and blamed on the king to further the citizens toward revolution.

What Ford exposed and interrupted seems to have been a world wide attempt to corner the wheat market led by the Jew David Lubin residing in Rome under the protection of the king of Italy while Aaron Sapiro was his North American agent. Had they been successful in getting the growers organized to coincide with the Soviet famine a huge worldwide famine could have resulted. Of course Lubin and Sapiro’s activities were part of an international Jewish conspiracy but let’s overlook that.

Still, Lubin’s plans were incorporated into Roosevelt’s UN in 1946 and the UN has come up with Agenda 21 that leads to the same type of control. The Soviets kept their people on a short tether for decades by controlling access to food. People spent hours each day waiting to buy and often found the shelves empty. Rumors abound that the US president Obama has the same agenda in mind. People are hoarding food like crazy in just such an anticipation.

Note also that Monsanto Chemical now has or is able to establish a wheat corner in North America. They have perfected a kernel that will sprout only once. The crop of that sprout is sterile so that growers are compelled to buy their annual seeds for each crop. Thus whoever controls Monsanto controls the growers and hence distribution. So, while Ford disrupted the 1920s plan those objectives are now close to realization.

As Roosevelt was elected the anti-Communist, anti-Jewish Nazis under Adolf Hitler were constitutionally elected in Germany. For the Nazis Jews and Communists were interchangeable. Thus while the nations from the USSR to the USSA and Canada were all under Jewish direction or influence the only movement dissidents were the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Spain and these along with German Austria were surrounded by Leftist governments.

With Hitler’s accession the Jews who had been warring with the Volkists since the end of WWI declared war on Germany. While their power in the USSR was going to be eliminated by Stalin the Jews directed Roosevelt into a bellicose stance toward Germany.

Within a matter of months the opposition to Roosevelt was being characterized as Fascists, that is, anti-Semites. Once the Jews gain power or influence the situation becomes us and them, us being pure and undefiled, them being vile and evil. Polarity becomes the order. Only look at the Manichaean state of society today, racist or not. Thus Roosevelt began to plan for the ‘just’ war, that is a Jewish war upon his inauguration.

His program from the start was collectivist not individualist. The chief program of the first hundred days was the NIRA- National Industrial Recovery Act. Its symbol was the Blue Eagle, carried over from the Wilson days, or ruptured duck as the ‘Fascists’ that is FDR’s opponents, called it. All of industry and retail was collectivized under our eyes. Once in there was no way out. The NIRA stunned American business.

As Charles Sorenson the production manager of Ford Motors put it in his autobiography My Forty Years With Ford, Wayne State paperback, p. 253:

The year 1930 and the beginning of the Big Depression had revolutionary political and social consequences. During the ensuing years relations between the people and the government changed drastically. The welfare of the people became a direct responsibility of the government whereas before the government was the responsibility of the people. American thought and outlook were altered. Large segments of our people were willing to exchange personal freedom for the sense of social security.

If large segments were, there were also large segments that weren’t. Therein lay the intense conflict of the period, not of parties but of ideologies. One of the first things Roosevelt did was to recognize the Soviet Union. Ever the naïve boob Roosevelt made a condition of recognition the renunciation of Comintern interference in US affairs. The Reds, already there, immediately became entrenched in Roosevelt’s government before he had time to turn around.

As of old the Jews flooding back into Washington did not forget the ‘Amalekites.’ They remembered them and sought vengeance for past defeats. Ford had given them trouble for seven years in the twenties and they were going to give it back to him with interest.

While Fascists were the concern of the Jews and hence FDR‘s, the concern of Americans were both foreign ideologies but more Communism than Fascism. Communism was and is little more than Fascism with a benevolent appearing mask. Back in the settlement houses the Roosevelts had been committed to Jewish socialism/Communism but now found it prudent to dissimulate.

Very soon after he was elected a Jewish Soviet agent in the House by the name of Samuel Dickstein began to push the President for what Dickstein called a House Un-American Activities Committee. His attempt in 1934, close after the election, failed but Dickstein succeeded in 1938. The purpose of the Committee as Dickstein and Roosevelt envisioned it was to root out the Fascists and ‘anti-Semites of US society and punish them. Communists by default here were not un-American. They were to be given a free pass. However, in 1938 the Committee chairmanship was given to the American Texas Congressman Martin Dies an ardent anti-Communist hence by definition an anti-Semite upsetting Roosevelt and Dicksteins plans.

But that’s a little ahead, suffice it to say that Roosevelt’s administration was riddled with Communists, who were in a position to direct affairs, which is to say they were Stalinist agents reporting to agents who reported to Stalin. While Roosevelt was not a satrap of the Soviet Union there were those who couldn’t tell the difference. The administration was definitely one of the Stalin inspired Popular Fronts.

The first business was to impose a Talmudic collectivization on the American people destroying American individualism as thoroughly as possible. Roosevelt immediately rushed through his NIRA. This involved subjecting all industry into compliance with industrial codes not unlike the intent of Wilson’s WIB under Bernard Baruch.

The compliant business whether industrial or retail was required to display the Blue Eagle decal in its window. Customers were directed to avoid non-compliant businesses and patronize those displaying the Blue Eagle. Wags called the decal the Ruptured Duck.

Vicious campaigns of defamation not too dissimilar than charges of anti-Semitism were carried out against non-compliants. Foremost of these was our Henry Ford. As he had seen through Aaron Sapiro and his plan he saw through Roosevelt and his. Intense pressure was placed on Ford, attempts to disrupt his business and turn his customers away. Legal action was projected to force compliance.

As early as 1932 before their man had been sworn in Judaeo-Communists marched on River Rouge with the intent to destroy whatever they could. Labor discontent was unique at Ford plants. As Charles Sorenson tells it, p.253:

During the twenty-nine years before the advent of the New Deal, Ford Motor Company had never been closed down by a strike. Henry Ford was looked up to as the best example of a generous employer. Working hours and pay were beyond criticism. Minimum rates had gradually increased from $5 $6 to$7 for an eight hour day. And although Ford refused to deal with unions, Ford Motor Company officials sometimes suggested unionization to parts suppliers vexed by strikes.

Ford could justify mass production because he had developed it. Mass production had progressively decreased the cost of automobiles, as well as other things. But to gain that result, management had to control costs, which in turn, involved wage rates and production methods.

Ford sent Harry Bennett out to meet the Communist rabble relying on his past excellent relations with his labor force, not realizing the change in leadership. Bennett without so much as a word was beaten to the ground and placed in hospital.

You can imagine the effect of this criminal act on Ford and Bennett and the rest of the executives. Naturally Communist thugs and trouble makers began to fill the jobs at Ford plants especially Rouge. Four years later when the Communists led by UAW president Walter Reuther and his lieutenant Frankensteen attempted the same stunt Bennett and his security force with his own hospital stay in mind led his team to thoroughly beat Reuther et al at the so-called Battle of the Overpass. This was naturally depicted as Ford’s ‘goons’ beating innocent workers. Thus Ford was further defamed although not losing that much support among the people.

Ford’s resistance to the NIRA might have turned very ugly, it was the New Deal’s intent to forcibly take Ford Motors from Ford, except that the ‘nine old men’ on the Supreme Court ruled at the opportune moment that the NIRA and most of the rest of Roosevelt’s nefarious acts were unconstitutional.

Roosevelt retaliated as his kind always does when balked by coming up with the loony plan of adding enough of his stooges to the Court to overrule the ‘nine old men.’ This crazy idea was so preposterous that it cost him his credibility.

Nevertheless he was able to advance collectivization to the point that if he could stay in office long enough, individualism would be virtually destroyed. After twenty years a whole new generation would have become accustomed to collectivization.

In order to staff these new alphabet agencies, NIRA, CCC, whatever, Roosevelt naturally turned to Jews, Reds and Fellow Travelers, a great many of the old Settlement House crowd who supported his agenda. Thus in a decade in which perhaps 25% of the work force was unemployed Reds et al. were steadily employed, not unlike the current Obama administration which has returned to the spoils system employing mainly ‘his people.’

As a strange anomaly a very nice living could easily be gotten by professing to have seen the light and renouncing your Communist past. Thus fingering Reds by so-called former Reds would soon become big business. American businessmen sought out these people so being Red was worth a lot of money one way or the other. Interestingly the post-war CIA gave small fortunes to ‘apostate’ Communist literary figures but nothing to Conservative American writers. It was worth it to have a past.

Perhaps the cushiest jobs of all were in the Federal Theater Project. This agency supplied jobs to Leftist ‘writers’, singers and dancers living off the fat of the land.

So while Roosevelt’s deficit spending had no effect on slaying the depression his efforts at collectivization paid great dividends.

As should be apparent, in order for his social engineering, as it has now come to be called, to succeed he had to stay in office, not just for the customary eight years but three or four, possibly even five terms or the rest of his whichever came last. If Roosevelt had lived I don’t think there is any doubt that he would have remained in office for an extra number of terms. The country was fortunate he died soon after the beginning of his fourth term.

Thus the 1936, 1940 and 1944 elections were crucial to the success of his agenda. As might be expected Roosevelt’s reputation for tinkering with the economy brought out all the cranks with their various fantastic programs to correct the ills of the world. From the Technocrats to Huey Long’s Share The Wealth plan to Upton Sinclair’s EPIC- End Poverty In California- fantasy was rampant. Most of the cranks could be dismissed as odd balls but Huey Long, first governor of Louisiana and then its senator, was a different case. Huey was into money redistribution as seriously as Roosevelt and he knew how to get things done thus becoming a real threat in the 1936 election. At the least he could split the ticket putting the Republican candidate in much as Teddy Roosevelt had done for Wilson in 1912. Long had no affinity for Roosevelt’s Jews so the 1932 election would had been in vain.

Not surprisingly Long was assassinated before the election. There is no definite proof that Roosevelt ordered it so let us say that fate removed Long’s threat. The Republicans put up a non-entity, the Kansan Alf Landon. Perhaps no experienced Republican wanted to go up against a potential shoo-in like Roosevelt but Alf, even the name Alf is a sort of joke, was sort of like running Elmer Fudd, gamely took on the task.

Just consider, FDR ran on his theme song Happy Days Are Here Again while Alf ran on an old minstrel tune, Ya Gotta Stop Kicking My Dog Around.

Every time I go to town

The boys keep kickin’ my dog around.

Makes no difference if he is a hound

You got to quit kickin’ my dog around.

Of course by 1936 those happy days were still in the somewhat distant future, still, if you thought the election was going to be close you were mistaken.

By 1936 Hitler over there in Germany had given the Jews something to get incensed about. If, when they declared war on Hitler in 1933, they didn’t thing he had the means and will to retaliate that was a major misunderstanding. Hitler set about disenfranchising the Jews, much as the Jews have done to White males in the present US, shutting down their businesses, chasing them from the universities and law courts and by the time of Kristalnacht giving them irrefutable evidence that the only happy days for them would be in the grave or the United States.

Roosevelt taking the international Jews’ part lodged an objection or two with Hitler that the German actually laughed off. Roosevelt proclaimed it was time to quarantine the aggressors without sorting out who the aggressors were. While Stalin began his show trials sorting the Jews out of his government he also organized the so-called Popular Front in which all the future allies, including the US, set up Red governments and opposed Hitler as a non-Communist government. For a fuller account of political machinations in the period Eugene Lyons’ The Red Decade is good.

In Asia the Japanese had come up with their program called The Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere. Eschewing diplomacy they began to establish the sphere by taking Manchuria in 1931, renaming it Manchukuo, and then in 1933 beginning the invasion of China.

Here begins the conflict between what Roosevelt and his Jews called internationalism and isolationism. Roosevelt had very little knowledge of what was going on in China or, if he did, he was more traitorous than we believe. By traitorous one means he followed his ideology rather than his nationality. He was true to the former while false to the latter.

Stalin had been very active in China so that the Communists were a revolutionary force in opposition to both the Japanese and Chinese nationalists. Mao was establishing the Reds in the northwest. Wielding those Executive Orders that Obama does so well, Roosevelt began aiding the Chinese of Chiang Kai Chek while encouraging those of Mao Tse Tung. Perhaps Willkie’s round the world trip to China had some purpose of linking Stalin with Mao. At any rate Willkie had long communications with the Iron Man and also serious tete a tetes with the Chinese Reds. One imagines there was more than small talk.

Technically then the US was already in the Pacific War before Roosevelt provoked the Japanese into bombing Pearl Harbor.

In my estimation and certainly of those styled Isolationists, such aid was completely unnecessary while violating all neutrality standards. In addition there was nothing in it for the US although the aid might have been surreptitiously meant ideologically to aid the Communists of Mao. One hopes there were analysts in the government who might at least have considered a scenario in which the Japanese were defeated, the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Reds then having a go that resulted in the conquest of China by Mao, which is what happened so that it shouldn’t have seemed too improbable while making US involvement moot. Unless of course Roosevelt, Stalin and Mao were more or less in accord.

The Isolationists who, as I say, unavoidably had to take some kind of international stance, there was no way to avoid it, were wary of what Roosevelt was doing and what he intended to do. Whatever it was Roosevelt seemed willing to subordinate US interests to ‘international’ interests to reach his goal. Thus the name America First. Quite frankly it was not the US’ business while it was advisable to let the participants wear themselves out and then pick up the pieces. But Roosevelt obviously thought himself God leading the Chosen People to their destiny.

US opposition to the New Deal was fully effective after 1936 although aspects of it such as the Federal Theater Project couldn’t be stopped. Then events began heating up in Europe as the probability of war was becoming not if but when. The looming war put England in a difficult position. The country had been nearly completely worn down in the last war. Its casualties had seriously depleted its man power and the quality of the remaining. According to Thomas Mahl in his Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States 1939-’44, Winston Churchill realized that in a German war the British unaided could not win so that he made his plan getting the US to fight the war for England. Thus the ‘just’ war required the US to defend England, carry the Jewish fight to Hitler and establish the internationalism of Roosevelt.

Sounds like a story you’ve heard before, doesn’t it? What was his name? What was his name? That’s right, Charles Lindbergh. The poor guy got trashed for pointing out the obvious.

Also on the horizon was the very critical election of 1940, Roosevelt’s much needed third term. Something that went completely against American tradition although if Wilson’s health had held he would have been the first to seek a third term. Heck, in FDR’s race for a third term maybe even Alf Landon and his hound dog could have won. Pretty chancy, pretty chancy.

So, how to reduce the chanciness.

Whereas in 1936 possibly no one wished to be the sacrifice, in third term 1940 there was a strong probability that the Republicans could take their country back, as we say of the situation today, undoubtedly with the intent to undo what Roosevelt had done. A likely candidate was NYC’s crime busting DA, Thomas Dewey. Riding the crest of having put Lucky Luciano and Lepke Buchalter away at the very least Dewey would have been a very strong challenger.

Strangely, in 1940 no Republican would be selected to run against Roosevelt. Instead a life long Democrat of no status Wendell Willkie would be selected as the candidate. That one had people scratching their heads. As it would turn out Willkie virtually ran on Roosevelt’s platform. Somewhat like Mitt Romney of the 2012 election who during the second debate turned zombie like toward his opponent, Barack Obama, and said: ‘I think you’re right. I agree with you.’ leaving Obama stunned though he recovered, handing him the election. Willkie did the same. There was no choice so why change?

Willkie consenting to lose, next Roosevelt had to win the Democratic nomination which with superb engineering he did. With virtually no opposition Roosevelt got his third term. After 1940 he could have won reelection as long as he lived. It was only through the grace of god he was terminated in 1945.

While Roosevelt won by 54% that was no where near the landslides of ‘32 and ‘36. It would seem probable then that a strong candidate like Dewey, campaigning to win, most likely would have.

The third term was grim news for Roosevelt’s opposition, the isolationists as he styled them. Already with one foot virtually in the war on behalf of the Jews Roosevelt ran on the promise of no foreign wars knowing full well he was lying between his teeth.

It was then that the opposition firmed up organizing themselves as America First. It was clear that Roosevelt was going to subordinate American interests to those of the Jews and the English and as an ‘internationalist’ the rest of the world.

Already supplying the Chinese against the Japanese, for Roosevelt it was only a question of how to maneuver the US into war but an ideological war against the anti-Communist forces of Adolf Hitler. When in 1932 Roosevelt announced that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself he neglected to say that Fear was his middle name.

Part IV, Into The Abyss follows.

Better Living Through Chemistry:

The Sixties And Its Drugs

by

R.E. Prindle

If the Sixties had had a motto it would have been the variant of the Dupont slogan:  Better Living Through Chemistry.  It was sincerely believed that a pill could make your life shine.  Amphetamines, LSD, barbiturates, just about anything that could be swallowed, sniffed, or popped.  The Sixties mind was blown and never fully recovered.  If as Fugs’ percussionist Tuli Kupferberg observed: America is insane, it was drugs that pushed it over the edge.

When drugs hit in the Sixties they were relatively new, no immunity to their use had been built up.  Drugs were to American youth what alcohol had been to the American Indian in the nineteenth century and American youth dressed as funny as the Indians had; Youth adopted all sorts of bizarre behavior and clothing.  It seemed funny at the time but I’m not laughing anymore.  By the end of the Sixties from a sort of contact high the older generations tried to look and act just like the youth who by the end of the Sixties were no longer so young.  Both age groups were laughable.  It was something to see.

Of course chemistry had been discovering all kinds of new things from the nineteenth century on; people just couldn’t find an immediate use for the sort of drugs discovered.  Barbiturates were first synthesized in 1864 by the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer.  The formula sat around on the shelf till 1903 when some bored soul found that you could use the formula to put dogs to sleep.  I suppose it wasn’t a great stretch to apply what was learned of dogs to humans.

At any rate new formulations began to appear through the thirties and in 1946 the tranquilizer Miltown was formulated.  By 1955 Miltown was a great hit to be followed by the blockbuster Valium in 1963.  You began to see a lot dopey people walking around, mostly over forty, who said they couldn’t live without the stuff.

Barbiturates were called downers.  At least on the West Coast they seemed to be the preferred chemical.

The East Coast, for reasons I will explain, was powered by amphetamines from the late fifties through the Sixties decade.  Out on the West Coast we thought the stuff was pernicious, Speed Kills was the slogan.  Probably didn’t stop too many people from using it.  I saw enough amphetamine casualties walking about.

Amphetamines were first synthesized by the German chemist Edeleano in 1887; methamphetamine by a Japanese chemist in 1919 and worked with by the Brit-American Gordon Alles who came up with Benzedrine in the thirties.  By the thirties, then, uses were found for the drug.  Refinements followed.

The chemists were also analyzing foodstuffs  so that the various vitamins were being discovered during the twenties and thirties.  So in addition to drugs the pharmacopeia included previously undiscovered nutrients.  The nutrients were more important than the drugs.  For all of previous history there may have been no human not suffering from some vitamin or mineral deficiency.  For the first time beginning in the thirties a human could be fully supplied with all the necessary vitamins, minerals and amino acids.  True health.

It only remained for someone to come up with the bright idea of combining amphetamines and vitamins to appear to create a wonder drug, a veritable fountain of youth, or so it would seem.

As Henry Kaiser proclaimed on his cement trucks:  Find a need and fill it.  He was talking concrete but a Jewish-German doctor by the name of Max Jacobson did the obvious and combined amphetamines and vitamins along with certain other unmentionables, oh well, monkey balls, into what he thought was a healthful rejuvenating cocktail.  As Max got his medical license in 1929 while the Nazis came to power in 1933 his medical career in Germany was short.  Max terminated his German residency in 1932 leaving first for Prague, then Paris and in 1936 for the new Promised Land of the USA.

Max’s chronology seems a little crowded and perhaps askew but between 1929 and 1932 he claims to have invented his cocktail going rapidly from obscurity to apparent fame. According to Max, Lertzman and Birne quoting from his diary, his concoction  was so well known that the Nazis demanded his formula before they would allow him to leave.  Apparently they were incapable of chemically analyzing it.

As Max left in ‘32 and the Nazi’s came to power in ‘33 his chronology is somewhat suspect.  However, if the Nazis had stolen his formula Max proved to be responsible for Hitler’s deteriorization if Hitler’s doctor Theodor Morrell had purloined the formula and injected Hitler, as he did.

Amphetamines gained such acceptance in the thirties that all the combatants of WWII were dispensing amphetamines to their troops to keep them cheerful as the bombs exploded around them rattling their nerves.  Interestingly the Germans realized the danger of the drug ceasing to dispense the pills, probably why they lost the war.

Smith Kline separated dextroamphetamine from Benzedrine in the forties so that the amphetamine pharmacopeia that Max Jacobson could use in his concoctions had grown by 1946 when Max’s post-war career in the US kicked into high gear.

During the fifties while Max was developing his formulas and expanding his clientele geometrically, the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline, French, later Glaxo-Smith-Kline, was developing its own business of Benzedrine inhalers, Benzedrine (Bennies) and Dexedrine (Dexies) into a phenomenally successful enterprise.  Thus the licit and illicit markets were booming.

By 1960 Max Jacobson’s reputation as a miracle doctor had expanded wildly and his fame would soon reach the White House.  He naturally spawned imitators and by the early sixties Robert Freyman, Elois Peter Warren, Jack Cohen and John Bishop were injecting non-stop flooding NYC with speed and vitamins.

One should pay attention to the vitamins.  Beginning in the forties their importance was noted to the extent that Wonder Bread began enriching their product with vitamins.  Thus by the early fifties in my avid reading of cereal boxes I noted that they too were vitamin enriched.  The enrichment eliminated vitamin deficiency diseases like beri beri and pellagra so my generation was perhaps the healthiest the world had yet seen.

Vitamins and minerals are nutrients that build and maintain bodily processes, most prominently in the brain, while drugs consume essential substances without replacing them.  Thus the amphetamine doctors in combining massive doses of vitamins and amphetamines provided some healthful chemicals along with the deleterious chemical drugs.  God only knows what the human placenta and monkey balls Max used did but Max thought they were beneficial.  As a doctor he never conducted any experiments so he was only guessing.

Still, his concoction was fairly dangerous stuff.  Like many experimenters Max tried out his formulas on himself.  As one formula he tried left him with a permanently crippled leg I think it safe to assume there was some permanent brain damage.  Edie Sedgwick of the Warhol gang certainly destroyed her brain from the massive injections she took from Max, Dr. Robert and Dr. Bishop, aka Dr. Roberts, all three.  She really liked the stuff. Max himself was a steady user of his stuff to the extent we are told that he didn’t even sleep for a month or more at a time.

As he had undoubtedly been using from 1932 on, by 1960 he must have been a living psychotic reaction.  While he had never been one for controls by ‘60 he had lost control, padding around his office in a blood stained smock, unwashed, with dirty, stained finger nails.

It was in this state in September of 1960 that he was enlisted to shoot up John F. Kennedy just before the first Nixon debate.  Kennedy soon became an amphetamine freak.

Before we go on with amphetamines let’s take a look at the second great drug development of the Sixties, LSD.

II

The active ingredient in LSD occurs naturally in a rye ergot from which it was isolated by Dr. Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938.  Finding no use for it he shelved the substance until 1943 when he re-examined it.  He accidentally imbibed some thusly experiencing its disorganizing mental effect.  This was not necessarily a use for it but at the time the wartime predecessor of the CIA, the OSS, was searching for a reliable truth serum.  LSD wasn’t reliable or even a truth serum but the CIA decided to give it a few test trials anyway.  Thus research programs were begun at such universities as Harvard, UC-Berkeley and Stanford University.  At the same time psychologists thought that LSD might be a perfect drug for psycho-analytic uses.  They believed, at least, that with a great deal of experimentation they had achieved some success and could have achieved more if the substance hadn’t been outlawed in 1966.

So with both amphetamines and LSD we are talking about legal chemicals until 1966.

LSD received some notoriety in the fifties as I even wrote a high school essay concerning it in 1956.  Aldous Huxley and many of the Hollywood crowd were quite familiar with LSD in the late fifties.  Cary Grant was a proponent of the substance while samples began leaking from the labs at UC Berkeley and Stanford, or gushing might be a more appropriate word.

LSD along with mescaline, peyote buttons, mushrooms and whatever were revered as  mind or consciousness expanders.  People in the Sixties really believed that they had penetrated the secrets of the cosmos when all they were looking at was their own mind, in most cases fairly empty.  The early users, an interesting group, actually thought of themselves as supra-human.  They could barely deign to talk to the inexperienced while avoiding any physical contact.  They were fairly awesome in their belief that they were in contact with something out there.

So, while Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard may have given LSD its first real national exposure with the substantial aid of the Luce’s and their Time and Life magazines, LSD was around the Bay Area long before Timmy brought it to the fore.  I first actually saw tabs in late 1963 when I took a job with a mortgage banking firm called Lowell, Smith and Evers.  My indoctrinator lived near campus of UC Berkeley.  The first time out I met him at his house where he had a bowl of what looked like aspirin on his living room table.  ‘Lotta headaches?’  I asked.  ‘Well, no,’ he said smiling mysteriously, ‘go ahead and have one.’  I declined but as it turned out he took a tab before work.  He enjoyed a most leisurely work pace as we got very little done on that first day.

So, by then the West Coast acid guru, Ken Kesey, who as it would turn out I would know slightly, was distributing sunshine down in La Honda preparing the way for the acid paradise of Haight-Ashbury.

Leary back at Harvard violated protocol and was expelled from his post.  He then ended up at Billy Hitchcock’s vast estate at Millbrook New York where Tim began his vastly misguided career.  Timmy was on a religious trip so he thought he was finding not only the secrets of the cosmos but shaking hands with God himself or, maybe, himself.

Thus Tim became a drug guru describing LSD as the Greater Sacrament and marijuana as the Lesser Sacrament.  Well, you know, why not?  Thus Tim legitimized their use for a whole generation turning the Sixties into a mess.  In his acid delusions Tim decided that the recently introduced Aramis aftershave was God’s own scent.  Rather extraordinary claim I thought but I bought a bottle.  Out of production for a few decades it has been recently reintroduced.  I bought another pint so as to maintain traditions.  It is a damn fine scent although whether God uses it or not I can’t say.

Tim was associated with some colorful characters in his attempt to turn on the world including the reprehensible Allen Ginsberg the so-called poet and the remarkable Michael Hollingshead who billed himself and titled his autobiography The Man Who Turned On The World.  The autobiography is free on the internet.

From about 1963 to 1965 then Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and Leary and his Millbrook crowd turned the country on its head.  If America was insane as Tuli Kupferberg said, it was the result of the LSD and amphetamine infestations.

III

To return to Max Jacobson, New York City and its amphetamine plague from 1960 to 1965.  As I say, by 1960 Max Jacobson, the original amphetamine pusher, was booming.  He naturally engendered imitators.  Thus a Dr. Robert Freyman, who after the busts wrote a book called What’s So Bad About Feeling Good,  established himself uptown near Max.  He was immortalized by the Beatles in their song Dr. Robert.  In midtown Dr. John Bishop aka Dr. Roberts with an s established himself.  He is well described by Cherry Vanilla in her memoir, Lick Me, and his association with Edie Sedgwick and the film Ciao, Manhattan.

In addition there were Dr. Jack Cohen and Dr. Alois Peter Warren.  Haven’t located much as these two yet although a record of Warren’s appeal to his 1970 conviction for trafficking in amphetamines is available on the internet.

Of some significance to the early sixties NY scene is a connection to Andy Warhol with Jacobson.  Warhol whose atelier The Factory of ‘64-’65 and ‘66 was fueled by amphetamines was at least a one time patron of Max.  This may have been sometime in ‘62 or ‘63.  If as Andy would have been deeply impressed by the celebrity clientele crowding the waiting room where they apparently waited for hours he may have transferred the idea of mind control through amphetamines to his own celebrity location at the Factory which he successfully had by 1965.  Andy yearned for celebrity status as much as Max did.  Max’s bizarre persona may also have made a significant impression on Andy who was no stranger to bizarre personas.

Andy, himself, during the First Factory years was said to have limited himself to a quarter tab of Obetrol, I believe a Dextroamphetamine formula.  He would also have understood the controlling power of the drug.  If you’ve got celebrities standing around for hours, believe me, you have control of them.

Now, in 1962 Anthony Burgess published his novel A Clockwork Orange.  The English fashion photographer David Bailey immediately seized on the book’s potential to further the Yobbo revolution.  Bailey became attracted to Mick Jagger of the emerging rock group The Rolling Stones so that gathering up Mick in 1963 they hopped a big 707 to cross over to NYC to visit Andy.  Bailey may have met Andy in 1961 in an earlier visit.  The idea was to star Jagger probably in a Warhol movie in a glorification of the novel’s Droog lifestyle.

Bailey, Warhol and Jagger bought the film rights to the novel from Burgess.  Andy actually made an adaptation of the novel in 1965 titled Vinyl, available on the internet, although not starring Jagger.  Jagger went on in his post 1967 stage persona to imitate the Droog style.  Thus one may believe that the culture of the First Factory was based on the Droog’s while the culture was fueled by speed.

But, back to Max.  As I said Max was approached to medicate JFK before the first Nixon debate.  Kennedy was a very sick man who was nearly exhausted by the demands of the 1960 campaign while he was fearful of losing his voice for the debate.  Max shot him directly into the larynx.  A spry speed rapping Kennedy shot down Nixon to essentially win the election that night.

Kennedy who was always in a lot of pain found significant relief from Max’s shots.  Max immediately became a regular visitor to the White House after Kennedy’s inauguration.   Thus by April and the Bay of Pigs Jack was dependent on Max Jacobson and his amphetamine shots.  Jacks dependence on amphetamines probably affected his judgment during that fiasco.

In June of 1961, a couple months later,  Max accompanied JFK to the Vienna Summit with Nikita Khruschev.  Kennedy’s behavior around the Bay Of Pigs fiasco was erratic while at the Summit where he received at least three shot before the interview Khrushchev walked all over him.

It is known that Max gave Kennedy at least three shots before the Khruschev meeting.  Kennedy was clearly out of it.  It seems possible then, if not probable, that Max was able to exercise considerable control over Kennedy.  Max knew a little something about hypnotic suggestion while the rush or flash of the amphetamine coming on would leave the patient open to a well placed suggestion.

Thus as Kennedy was undoubtedly shot up once or twice before or during the Bay of Pigs Max might easily have planted a suggestion in Kennedy’s mind to botch the operation while in shooting up JFK at least three times before the Khruschev meeting it seems certain that he at least rendered Kennedy ineffective.

There is no reason to not believe that Max was following his own agenda or that of some organization.  He was Jewish.

Max continued to minister to Jack.  Brother Bobby Kennedy, Jack’s Attorney General, looked askance at Max.  He had a number of vials analyzed and at least realized that his brother the President was being drugged with amphetamines.

Jack didn’t care but Bobby did.  Max had an entrée to the White House.  As he was entering Bobby intercepted him and told him to get the hell out, not to bother his brother again.  Jack was totally dependent if not addicted so that he dropped affairs of State to fly to New York to beg Max to forgive the situation and give him another shot.  Imagine that!  The President of the United States flying to a quack doctor to beg him for treatment.  There is a real transfer of power there.  Was it Mind Control the CIA was looking for?

Max had been deeply offended by Bobby.  Remember that Max himself had been self medicating for maybe twenty years.  He must have had but a tenuous grip on whatever passed for reality in his own mind.  In other words his subconscious ruled his conscious mind; subjectivity overruled objectivity.  Max was not the forgiving kind.  Jack had to pay.  As Max was experimenting continually he is sure to have had different formulations that produced different effects.  He is described by one client as taking a little from one vial, a little more from another and so on and then shooting it in.  One client described himself as going blind for three days after a shot.

In this case Max gave Jack a formulation of such potency that Jack ripped off his clothes and began streaking naked through the corridors of the Carlton Hotel where he was staying.  Fortunately he was restrained before he could make the lobby and possibly go streaking down the street.  Another doctor had a heck of a time bringing Jack under control with yet other drugs.

Yes, indeed!  Now, Jack was President of the United States and he had freaked out.  He was in control of the nuclear armament of the United States.  As Commander in Chief he was entrusted with the little red button.  What would happen if he had a psychotic reaction to one of Max’s shots and freaked out with all those nuclear weapons at his command; Dr. Strangelove for real.

He was dependent.  He was addicted.  He was out of control.  The only possible solution was evident.  On 11/22/63 they pulled the trigger.

I don’t know how Max survived when Kennedy didn’t but he did.

As the fact of Kennedy’s addiction has been only slowly surfacing in the last few years one can only assume that Max’s boasting of being Kennedy’s doctor at the time brought society patients to him even after 11/22/63.  Indeed he was affectionately known as Dr. Jake and apparently, as document maker Martin Kasindorf titled his film, Everyone Went To Max is close to the truth.

Yet, even as ‘Doctor Jake’s’ reputation spread the casualties of his practice surfaced.  While it would seem that Max should have taken notice he seems to have been in denial.  He did believe that some chemical reaction took place between the vitamins, speed and monkey balls that converted the speed more or less into an actual nutrient that negated its deleterious effects.

Still, as in the case of Bob Cummings the beloved 50s movie and TV star when his reaction began to show and develop Max just laid on more drugs until Cummings was a wreck.  One would think that at that point Max would have sent his concoction to a chemical lab to determine whether the baleful effects of the amphetamines were moderated or not.  But, then, Max himself was zonked and making a lot of money.

At any rate, by 1966 and ‘67 the casualties were piling up.  One of the most tragic was Edie Sedgwick who was associated with Andy Warhol.  She was frequenting not only Max but John Bishop aka Dr. Roberts and Robert Freymann aka Dr. Robert.  The greatest crime committed against her was when Bishop dosed her continuously during the filming of Ciao! Manhattan.

Other members of Andy’s group began having negative reactions also, as the amphetamine craze in NYC was coming apart.

As the 70s began a crackdown on the doctors began.  As noted Warren was set up, busted and sent away for five years.  Dr. Jake, Max Jacobson, began to be investigated by the medical board in ‘72 and his license was taken away in ‘75.  I have found nothing on the fate of Jack Cohen while Kasindorf notes that Bishop quietly slithered off to nether Long Island.

The medical use of amphetamines was also reviewed and prescriptions fell off notably after 1970.  However there was Ritalin….

Also it should be noted that the use of amphetamines in Viet Nam was endemic and huge.  If the Nazis gave up dosing their troops because of negative reactions US troops in Viet Nam were not responsible for their actions.

It should be noted also that US Air Force regulations today require pilots to be dosed so that they stay alert during missions.  If they refuse they can be grounded.

IV

The important thing to remember is that behind amphetamine and LSD pot and barbiturates were constants as well as alcohol although for a while alcohol was disparaged and some totally rejected it.  Many people were running on as many stimulants as they could cram in.  Some people had an astonishing capacity while still being able to function, after a fashion of course.

The generation from 1938 to 1943 went buggy for some reason.  I still haven’t been able to put my finger on it.  Probably a combination of absurd indoctrination in school and bizarre television programming.  Some stuff people consciously remember some they don’t.  Dave Garroway’s ridiculous TV show for instance had a profound effect on my class although the guy always repelled me.  A lot of inane nonsense entered our minds through those sources.  It’s all suggestion.

As important as anything was the emergence of rock and roll.  This was combined with the Negro influence entering the main stream.  Fats Domino and Little Richard, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte.  Everybody loved records and wanted to record.  During the fifties as today the emphasis was on single songs or 45s not LPs.  The change to LPs probably came about through Folk Music.  It was easier to put together thematic LPs around what were considered folk songs.  Harry Belafonte did well and, of course, the greatest of the Folk groups, The Kingston Trio, outshone and outsold everyone.

Thus when Folk and Rock merged and groups developed ‘sounds’ LPs of all ‘original’  material became de riguer and expressed the psyche of the generation much as novels had in earlier generations.  Instead of one hit song and ten standards comprising ten or twelve minutes a side an LP had to be twenty minutes a side or forty minutes a disc.  That was a very significant difference.

As the LP and group concept developed they did so within a context of social unrest, the civil rights movement and Viet Nam war.  To this was added drugs.  Sound quality improved while bands recorded their music under the influence of speed, acid or whatever so that while the music might sound a little discordant  or strange to a straight listener, the music might take on a much better quality if you, like the musician, were also on speed or acid.  So this furthered the appeal of drugs.

Thus when LSD exploded after 1966- ‘67 so-called acid rock was all the rage.  Perhaps the most total acid record was Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced.  People who had taken LSD were experienced, as the term went, and people who hadn’t weren’t.  The songs on Hendrix’s record directly referred to the LSD experience.  Thus the younger generation’s minds were conditioned to look on drug use as a positive good thing.

The real problem with drugs was that they were inward looking.  They tended to solidify one’s opinions into concrete unshakable truths.  As drugs were believed to be the opposite, that is, mind or consciousness expanding, people actually believed their meager thoughts were cosmic.  As you can see, divorced from reality.

Listening to song lyrics in this hypnoid state the lyrics entered their minds as suggestion which then became programs of action.  As Jimi Hendrix, who had been psychedelicized noted, the band could lay down a hypnotic rhythm and when the desired stage had been achieved zing in the suggestion with a very good chance of it sticking.  Once accepted  it couldn’t be removed.  There was some pretty effective mind control going on.

All the arguments of the Left had little effect compared to the hypnotic suggestions.  The anti-war and anti-racist efforts were effected from the grooves of records and not from inane and insane political activists.  If the Days of Rage at the 1968 Democratic convention failed  it was probably because the command to violence was defeated by the cry for peace and non-violence implanted by musical propagandists.

As the demand for psychedelic drugs grew an amazing ability to supply the demand ran apace or ahead.

V.

By the end of ‘66 then both LSD and amphetamines were declared illegal.  Speed could still be prescribed by doctors for medical use but their success brought them under closer scrutiny that would put them out of business in the seventies.  LSD was supported by fanatical mind expansionists who were convinced that the Greater Sacrament was wiping clean their doors of perception.  The notion was supported by the heroes and demi-gods of the generation, the rock stars.

These rather ordinary boys and girls who really had little going for them but a modicum of musical talent were hailed as infallible gurus.  Their lyrics most of which were inscrutable and/or laughable were ingested as sacred texts.  The musicians were able to keep up the charade during the Sixties but as the seventies got underway they all copped the plea: Hey, I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band.  The Great Droog Jagger came up with: It’s only rock and roll, but I like it.

Until Altamont at the end of ‘69 the fans expected miracles and if they didn’t get them from the music they thought they were from LSD.

Where there’s a huge demand you can bet there will be a huge supply.  Whereas speed had been predominantly an NYC phenomenon Acid found its spiritual home on the West Coast.  The Hippie explosion occurred after the ban of LSD in the West Coast city of San Francisco.  Sixty-seven, eight and nine were the big years of that phenomenon until it imploded possibly helped along by the Altamont fiasco which was a big deflator.

The most representational band of the Hippies was The Grateful Dead.  The Dead had been the house band for the Kesey affair.  Kesey had been on the lam  on drug charges but actually for being totally offensive to the more sedate fathers of society.  Besides he had or would graduate from acid as he said.  Connected to both Kesey and the Dead was the fantastic acid head Owsley Stanley, often referred to as Stanley Owsley or most frequently just Owsley.  Owsley was the Hippie chemist par excellence.  If living could be made better through chemistry Owsley was your man.

Strange one too.  In 1969 when I was just getting my record store off the ground The Grateful Dead came to play at Mac Court UofO.  By 1969 communes were big and many, many people had ‘returned to the land’, that is they were living in hovels out on the mountain slopes, perhaps growing some weed instead of vegetables and while professing a peaceable disposition ready to shoot dead anyone who came near their patch.  If you were totally insane or close to it your time had arrived.  If you were merely insane all it required was an aptitude for navigation.  You will note those are the only three available options.  Everyone was flying high with a defective auto-pilot.

So there I am standing in my little tiny 400 sq. ft. record store dreaming big dreams, some might have said impossible dreams, when in walks this guy clutching a gallon jar of what looks like blue and white aspirin although more crumbly, not so firm.  This apparition announces himself as Owsley.  Well, alright.  What’s that you’ve got in the jar?

He had, god only knows, perhaps ten thousand tabs of LSD.  Well, OK, but don’t you think you should have them wrapped in a brown paper bag, a pillow case or something?  I mean, my store is under surveillance.  And what do you want to do with your, uh, stash?

It wasn’t his stash, it was his merchandise and he wanted to me to buy the jar.  To say that my mind was boggled would be to miss the point.  Of course my mind was boggled but as my record store was considered a head shop by everyone Right and Left, while depending on the heads for my clientele I didn’t want to jeopardize my position by an outright no.  Every objection I made was countered until I came up with what I considered the clincher:  I didn’t have the money to buy a jar of 10K tabs.  Owsley stunned me by saying That’s alright, just take it, you can pay me when you sell them.

Well, this was a problem.  Assuming 10K tabs at a dollar each that would be 10K in 1968 dollars,  probably 100K-200K in today’s inflated currency.  Knowing my employees and clientele I could just imagine at least half disappearing, probably the whole jar overnight, while I’d probably be busted before sundown next day if the jar hadn‘t disappeared.  I really, really didn’t want to get involved.  As politely and forcefully as possible I told Owsley I just couldn’t do it.  He looked hurt, disappointed at best, but clutching his jar of LSD to his breast he turned and walked out.  That’s how the LSD business was conducted back in the old Hippie days with Haight-Ashbury still in full flood and the communes filling up.

It couldn’t last.  It was a high markup quick turnover business.  All you needed was a good chemist such as Owsley, the right ingredients, a lab and you could turn out enough LSD to literally turn on the world.

At Leary’s Millbrook compound he had been the guest of a Mellon heir by the name of Billy Hitchcock.  Billy now came West and either set up or organized one of the more spectacular criminal enterprises in the world.

Leary himself was entering the maddest phase of his career.  Because of his immense LSD intake he was probable operating in two different parallel universes at the same time.  Unfortunately the prisons where he was headed were in this universe which actually controlled his body.  He could go anywhere in his mind but, you know, his body stayed in prison.  Only God and Leary knew what was going on in the other universe but Tim seemed to be able to combine the two in one persona.

Sprung from one prison by the infamous Weathermen Tim found himself in Algeria along with Eldridge Cleaver then by a circuitous route leading through Switzerland and Afghanistan to Folsom Prison outside Sacramento, California, USA.  Tim tells it all in his many books if you want to know the full story.  He’s a good writer too.  As experienced as he was he remained incredibly naïve.

After his eviction from Millbrook at the end of 1967 Tim wended West where he fell in with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.  This was a dope smuggling unit that discovered LSD and through a member named Nick Sand manufactured an enormous amount of the gold standard of the late sixties, Orange Sunshine.  Sand came on the scene as a result of meeting an LSD chemist named Tim Scully.  (Not to be confused with the Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully.)  Tim Scully himself had met Owsley Stanley from whom he learned the process.  After Owsley was arrested at the end of ‘67 Scully joined forces with Sand to manufacture LSD.

The authorities were hot on the tail of the chemists by 1967, only a year after LSD was made illegal, so that the chemists’ activities were disrupted and brought to an end by 1970-71.  Owsley had been out on bail through ‘68 and ‘69 but now went to McNeil penitentiary in Washington State at this time.  I knew several alumni who did time about these years.  Must have been an interesting crowd at McNeil.

By 1970 then the big drug rush of the 60s was brought to if not an end a hiatus.  Amphetamines had been discountenanced officially so prescriptions were way off while its baleful effect led to at least a temporary lack of interest.  With the departure of Owsley, Sand, Scully and the BEL the supply of LSD withered.

Leary served some time at Folsom, was released and spent the rest of his life in one nutty experiment or another.

Thus the great experiment in better living through chemistry and its so-called consciousness expansion concomitant came to an end.  Cocaine, of course, replaced the psychedelics and its baleful influence felt from 1970 to the present.

Hybridization of pot led to ever stronger varieties so you can really knock yourself out if you want.

Regrettably drugs seem to be a permanent part of our culture but one is wise to live the straight life.