Westbrook Pegler
The Spokesman Review/April 23, 1957
NEW YORK—The secrecy and arrogance of the self-elected illuminati who got their heads together at St. Simon’s Island, Ga., on February 15, 16 and 17 would be simply ridiculous but for the fact that these double-heads plainly do presume to direct us Americans to some unknown destiny.
They were Britons, Germans, Frenchmen and Americans and they included a number of Eisenhower’s household cabal who can bat their eyes and deny that their conniptions were official or in the slightest degree binding on the American people who were supposed not to hear anything about the party. In such denial they would not lie. But they would not tell the truth
The disclosure of this clandestine funny business has been belittled as petty tattle of overwrought McCarthyites. But they did come together from the ends of the earth by secret accord in an out-of-the-way resort, with the least possible publicity; they did include a revolving nuclear quorum of regulars who have been holding such hoe-downs in Europe, and they did not include a single American Republican
They were a “foreign aid” caucus trampling our “nationalism” on American soil.
These characters regard themselves as the elite of the western world.
In Rome, in the summer of 1955, Henry Luce, animating the striped pants of the office which his wife adorned with spectacular virtue, convoked a second-string or yannigan congress of the same bunch which was ballyhooed among the parasites of the Roman bureaucracy as a manifestation of American “culture.”
The chief American exponents of this vague condition were Paul Hoffman, whose credentials are written in red ink on the scrolls of our national debt, and one Canham, the editor of the sectarian Christian Science Monitor. The state department was officially represented by an “attaché for culture” who informally owned to a honing for fried hog snoots, ears and tails, a la Beale Street, Memphis.
I spent a whole morning and about $12 in lires finding the site, a forgotten, leaky-roofed palace. The two sessions which I attended consisted of drowsy readings by persons widely unknown who spoke in elocutionary accents.
If Hoffman and Canham ever spoke they took advantage of my absence and I was unable to get a script of either declamation. Neither one had any qualification to express our “culture.” Neither one had any credentials.
The good or damage wrought by these gaseous emanations would seem to have been negligible but, after all, this was only a scrub affair. However, at St. Simon’s, the first team went in and they had wires plugged through to Washington. Deny it as they will, this mess had Ike’s blessing.
Some of the illuminati were so bashful that they did not sign the register but the names, tendencies and records of the known participants justify apprehension that their thoughts will find expression in more abundant foreign aid.
The New York Times performed a graceful feat of non-coverage in a round and slippery statement revealing nothing more than “substantial emphasis on the desirability of promoting better understanding and more effective coordination among the western nations in dealing with common problems.”
Nobody explained just how all these 70 mysterious, reticent strangers, including the publisher of the Times, happened to come together at St. Simon’s at a time when Senator Byrd is investigating credit and money and just who picks the guests and their qualifications.
I have heard derision of my reference to the fantastic secrecy which covered the whispered negotiations of a half-dozen New York bankers at Jekyll Island, near St. Simon’s, in the spring of 1908, but, coming almost as a scoop after 49 years, the facts are not disputed on any count
Those medicine men of international money there wrote the currency scheme which came into being as the federal reserve.
And now further reading in old books dealing with the first war and the Wilson administration proves that it was necessary to mouse-trap William Jennings Bryan into the cabinet as secretary of state to shut his loud mouth lest he blast the federal reserve as a wicket scheme of the devils of Wall Street.
It is plain from these old authorities that the wily Col. E.M. House, the Sherman Adams or the Harry Hopkins of Wilson’s reign, was the actual inventor, though not the author of this deal. There were loud objections at the time but under House’s oily management the thing slid through.
And though it was tacitly guaranteed to prevent panics, the horrible crash of 29 is not a myth and Ike’s secretary of the treasury lately mouthed a just about a depression “to make your hair curl.”
House, in his own belated, insolent memoirs, admitted that the federal reserve and the currency act were but fulfillment of his own bloody design expressed in the worst novel ever written, “Philip Dru, Administrator.”
(Source: Google News, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=0klj8wIChNAC&dat=19570423&printsec=frontpage&hl=en)
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