Declaration of Independence - 1776
Articles of Confederation - 1777
The Constitution for the United States, Its Sources and Its Application
The Real Thirteenth Amendment: Titles of Nobility and Honour
The Latest Findings of the TONA Research Committee

The Original Thirteenth Amendment:
Titles of Nobility and Honour,
An Essay

Chapter 5
One Hundred Years of Pain, 1868-1968

Totalitarianism . . .
. . . does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. -- George Orwell

Thus begins the one hundred years of Constitutional amnesia which the disappearance of this section begets, first suppressed or ignored by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and finished off after the most-disputed Presidential election in our history, in 1876.

Thus begins the pain and turmoil of Reconstruction, followed by the formation and implementation of Jim Crow laws -- done mostly by State legislative action and led by Attorneys at the Bar, throughout the south -- and after 1876, there is the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. What was a minor organization with a few local supporters becomes a major force in the nation, complete with Titles of Honour and all the accoutrements known to such awards in the royal courts of Europe.

Thus begins the growing pains of the great Republic, with the imposition of the income tax (the 16th Amendment), and the changes in the selection process of the Senate (the 17th Amendment). Then, in the 1920s, there is the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, following the War to End All Wars and Wilsonian diplomacy ending in tatters. Here is where the true and painful reality of modern Americans society begins -- in the theories of white supremacy and "whites only" laws, that would have been constitutionally disqualified, had the original Thirteenth Amendment not been suppressed and forgotten, by that time. Thus begins the age of the lawyer, the days and nights of judicial tyranny, and the long twilight struggle against that greatest of all enemies of humanity -- Socialism. In concluding this section, remember what George Orwell said, in defining the true nature of socialism.

"The remedy for our social evils," said Representative Charles A. Lindbergh, Senior, "does not so much consist in changing the system of government as it does in increasing the general intelligence of the people so that they may know how to govern." Lindbergh represented the Sixth District of Minnesota, being first elected in 1906, and was both an ally of Teddy Roosevelt and a staunch opponent of the Aldrich Monetary Commission. "If they do not learn how to govern themselves intelligently, Socialism will be the result."

Seventy years before R. Buckminster Fuller accused the money factors of Wall Street of wrecking the technological supremacy of American automobile makers, in favor of "advertising," Charles A. Lindbergh had tangled with the Rockefellers and their Standard Oil Company. The Congressman said of their power, that it was like "an iron grip on the people's earning, and we now require protection against it rather than for it." For many years Standard Oil sold petroleum in the United States at a higher price than was offered to the British, French or German markets.

"Because the American public was in love with the annual automobile shows," wrote Fuller in 1981, "the Wall Street financiers who had thrown out all the colorful [car designers] started a new game by setting up the Madison Avenue advertising industry, which hired artists who knew how to use the new airbrush to make beautiful drawings of ... superficially -- not mechanically -- new dream cars."

"This was the beginning of the downfall of the world-esteemed integrity of Yankee ingenuity, which was frequently, forthrightly, and often naively manifest in American business. Big business in the U.S.A. set out to make money deceitfully -- by fake "new models" -- and engineering design advance was replaced by 'style' design change." Buckminster Fuller was a young man, building houses, in the 1920s, and like Lindbergh he developed a life-long distrust of bankers and the money factors.

"What the bankers did like to support in the new mass productivity was tractor-driven farm machinery. Farm machinery was easy to sell." So, where the banking business was previously opposed to the concept of time-financing, the success of Ford Motors' and General Motors' finance corporations made them take notice. "So the bankers approved the financing of the production and marketing of the farm machinery. They held a chattel mortgage on the machinery and a mortgage on the farmland itself and all of its buildings. The bankers loved that. There was enthusiastic bank acceptance of the selling of such equipment 'one time' to the farmers. The bankers did not consider this 'immoral.' [Unlike] the automobilist who was 'just joy riding.'

"Then there came a very bad hog market in 1926. Many farmers were unable to make the payments on their power-driven equipment. The local country banks foreclosed on the delinquent farmers' mortgages and took away their farms and machinery. The bankers had assumed that the farms were going to be readily saleable. It turned out, however, that there were not so many non-farmers waiting to become farmers, and most of the real farmers had been put out of business by the bank foreclosures ...." In essence, the productivity engendered by this new equipment and new farming methods produced so much grain and livestock that it pushed down the prices, and made profits difficult to come by. After the foreclosures, and with the tough credit policies of the 1920s in effect, the farmers were driven off their land.

In this environment of boom and bust, the Roaring '20s, with so much illegal liquor money corrupting the big cities, it is little wonder that both the Socialist Party and the Ku Klux Klan entered a period of rapid growth. By 1924, the socialist factions were deeply entrenched in the urban and industrial areas, whereas the Klan was resurgent in the smaller cities and in rural America. From New Jersey to Indiana, from Florida to Colorado and Missouri, the Klan vote was the swing vote in the national elections. The Ku Klux Klan endorsed the winning candidates in Oklahoma, who were all Democrats at the Congressional level, while backing the Republican winners in Colorado (including bitterly contested Senate races). The Klan also took control of the Indiana state government from within.

Here is where the disappearance of the original Thirteenth Amendment pays dividends for the racists, hatemongers and anti-Semites who have always been a factor in American society. The Ku Klux Klan evolved over time, into a semi-secret society, based on a corrupt and jaundiced view of Christian chivalry and the traditions of knighthood. The KKK awards Titles of Honour, the equivalent of the military orders and societies which made European generals into ribbon-festooned peacocks in the years before the first World War.

To be a Klan member in the southern States was to acquire legal immunities, privileges and property rights which were denied to all other citizens, creating second-class citizenship for other whites, and denying the much-heralded "equal protection" of the so-called Fourteenth Amendment to native-born blacks, most Catholics and all Jews. Much of this nativist feeling was the result of dramatic social changes -- including Catholic immigration -- sweeping the U.S. in the years 1900 to 1916. Reformers battled entrenched political machines in almost every major city, but the southern States were "one-Party" territory -- Democrats only.

The victories of the Progressives and the Prohibition Party dissipated their energies after 1920. The country had been opposed to the great European war, and Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916 on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out Of War." Then he promptly betrayed the coalition which elected him, led the U.S. into the slaughterhouse that was "the Western Front," and by 1920 the Wilsonians had been routed. As with the "war on drugs" begun in the 1970s, the prohibition against alcoholic beverages and the Constitutional Amendment needed to sustain it as a federal statute created a massive black market. In the twilight economy of bootleg liquor, brutality, ruthlessness and cunning supplanted all other forms of good business judgment.

Coupled with the economic boom produced by the new technologies of radio, low-cost telephone service, and amazing advances in metal-working, real wages rose in the 1920s. Profits accompanied prosperity and the huge amounts of illegal money circulating in the bootleg economy served to corrupt the city and State governments in many parts of the country. The Ku Klux Klan gained in popularity as a reaction against "foreigners," and the big-city corruption of Catholic-dominated Democratic machines. The Klan was extraordinarily effective in its recruiting during the '20s.

Like the Cambridge Dons of the 1930s, who suborned so many bright young Englishmen and brought them into the Communist Party, the most-savvy politicians of the 1920s either used the Klan or used its rhetoric to build their local party organizations. Radio was still developing -- and the big newspapers controlled most of what was known as mass media -- so the thirty per cent of the white population that was illiterate (as of 1930), was ripe for Bible-based anti-Semitism and racism. The Democratic Party of Missouri was controlled from within by Klan elements, and the career of Harry S. Truman was tainted by allegations that he willingly joined it.

As William P. Hoar puts it, in his 1984 book "Architects of Conspiracy," Harry Truman could not lay such accusations to rest:

"But now and again embarrassing rumors crept out about Truman's onetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan. A witness reported that he and Harry had joined the Klan on the same day, and boasted that he had been the man who introduced his fellow Klansman to Tom Pendergast. It was not an uncorroborated report."

There is absolutely no doubt that the Klan was powerful in New Jersey in the 1920s. The New York Times, throughout 1924, reports on clashes between Klansmen and anti-Klan demonstrators, both in the streets and in the court rooms. Interfaith services brought together Jews and Catholics and fundamentalist protestant Christians who opposed the militancy of the New Jersey Klan.

During the first week-end of November, 1924, as the national and Presidential elections were approaching, Klan agitators in the State of Ohio broke down the social fabric; outright warfare erupted between armed Klansmen and a citizens' militia in the Youngstown area. Those who favor gun control and a disarmed populace should study, carefully, the four days of fighting between the Ku Klux Klan and the armed citizens' militia known as "The Knights of the Flaming Circle."

Forming up outside of the town of Niles, Ohio, a large group of Klansmen assembled an encampment and paraded in their regalia. With only five days to go until the election, where three major candidates opposed President Calvin Coolidge, many State and local races were undecided. As mentioned before, the Klan vote was considered the crucial, swing vote in many regions and States, including Ohio.

The insulting behavior and virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric of the local Klan proved to be too much for the immigrant steelworkers and their progressive allies in the Youngstown and Niles area. These were the days of Big Steel, and the towns of Warren, Boardman and Columbiana held thousands of men and women who followed the Catholic or Orthodox Churches. The provocations of the Klan gathering proved to be more than mortal men could endure, and what began as a traffic accident escalated into a fatal fight. The Klansmen retreated to their encampment, prepared to march every day until the election, hoping to intimidate the immigrants and to sway the undecided voters in their favor.

The plan backfired badly. Enraged, hundreds of armed men formed a citizens' militia and called themselves "The Knights of the Flaming Circle," and surrounded the Klan encampment. Thus began three days of skirmishing and gunfire which killed three men outright and injured many others. The Klan could not break out and the Flaming Circle could not over-run the racists, by now well dug in. Armed men from other parts of northern Ohio sought to join the Knights of the Flaming Circle -- and some brought their whole families! -- but they were turned away by Sheriff's roadblocks.

Finally, by the Monday preceding the election, the Governor of Ohio called out the State Militia, now known as the federal National Guard, and a combination of threats and wheedling negotiations settled the issue. The Knights of the Flaming Circle went home, with their rifles and their pistols, and the Klan was scattered and in disgrace.

Here is the lesson of the 1924 battle of Niles: the Second Amendment guarantee of the individual's right to keep and bear arms helped progressives and Catholics defend themselves against the racist agitators of the Ku Klux Klan. Whereas unarmed blacks in the southern States were subject to beatings, lynchings and other mob actions, throughout the period of the Klan's dominance (1888 to 1928), the armed citizenry of Ohio was able to defend itself -- and did.

Nothing could be more clear, than that the rapid rise of the Ku Klux Klan after 1876 was enabled by the suppression of the Titles of Nobility Amendment. Without the fundamental guarantee of protection against the creation of semi-secret military orders, bearing Titles of Honour and all the ribbons, robes and blood-red regalia of such racism -- the freedmen of the southern States were left defenseless. So, too, the sorry history of the so-called Fourteenth Amendment is no longer taught, or taught truthfully, in either the public high schools or the elite academies which feed students into the Ivy League. In their zeal to punish the rebellious southern gentry, the radical Republicans forced the measures known as Reconstruction through a rump Congress, one where every Senator and every Representative from the southern States was denied their duly-elected place in Washington.

"Lindbergh found secret collusion between Southern and English bankers at the time of the Civil War," writes William P. Hoar, citing "his 1913 book 'Banking and Currency And The Money Trust.' He published there the text of the 1862 'Hazard Circular' which revealed how labor would henceforth be controlled by the amount of currency the bankers permitted in the market, since chattel slavery would be abolished by the war." Once Jim Crow laws were firmly established in the southern States, both the black freedmen and poor white farmers were subject to the petty tyrannies of sharecropping.

There was always credit, but never enough money to get out of debt completely, for most tenant farmers. The merchants, too, were bound by the policies of the banks, as they had to buy their manufactured goods from either the northern states or from Great Britain, either of which required credit for shipping and handling costs. British manufacturing did not go into decline until after 1900.

"Lindbergh accused Members of Congress of meeting in secret to determine which currency bill would pass and what type of Federal Reserve System should be established," says Hoar. "Time and again the plans of the money manipulators had to be revised because of exposure by Congressman Lindbergh and his associates."

"It was not that the problems could not be seen by others," wrote Buckminster Fuller of his own personal self-transformation, in 1927, "but society was preoccupied with individual, national, state, and local business-survival problems, which forced its leaders into short-term, limited-scope considerations -- with no time for total world problems. The presidents of great corporations had to make good profits within a very few years or lose their jobs. The politicians, too, were preoccupied with short-range national, state or municipal survival matters."

For those who are conspiracy-minded, it is interesting to note that Charles A. Lindbergh, Senior, battled the Rockefeller family and its control of petroleum with Standard Oil. He opposed "the bill that created the Federal Reserve System [which] was nothing more than the Aldrich plan in disguise."

It was Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller who was responsible for "reforming" the drug possession laws of New York State, resulting in a huge increase in the prison population over the last twenty years (many States imitated the Rockefeller plan of the mid-1970s). And it was the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party which drafted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has pauperized the working families of Mexico while converting our southern neighbor into a narco-dictatorship. The principal Democratic allies of William Jefferson Clinton are John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, of West Virginia, and the various foundations, think-tanks and social policy advocates the Rockefeller family has sponsored over the years.

Linked to the invisible, behind-the-thrones government that Fuller described in his many lectures and writings, the Rockefellers simply outlasted Charles A. Lindbergh, Senior. As Hoar, writing in "Architects of Conspiracy", put it: "shortly before the end of his congressional career, C.A. Lindbergh formally moved to impeach the members of the Federal Reserve Board and offered a fifteen-count indictment of their conspiracy. The motion was buried in the Judiciary Committee."

Lindbergh himself said "the plain truth is that neither of these great parties, as at present led and manipulated by an 'invisible government,' is fit to manage the destinies of a great people, and this fact is well understood by all who have had the time and have used it to investigate."

Charles A. Lindbergh stepped down from Congress and later ran for Governor of Minnesota, in 1918. One analyst called that election the dirtiest ever seen, and the Non-Partisan League "with which he was then associated, was frequently denied the right to assembly;" and, as Hoar discovered, "mobs raged against Lindbergh, who was stoned and hung in effigy." Plates of his books were destroyed and the New York Times called him 'a sort of Gopher Bolshevik.' Lindbergh's contributions to the Red Cross, and his long-term support of military preparedness and the Liberty Loan were all forgotten in the national campaign against him.

"Lindbergh supporters were often arrested without warrants." As Hoar notes, even those indignities could not silence the senior man. He ran for the Senate in 1923, losing on the Farmer-Labor ticket, with his son flying him around in an airplane. Charles A. Lindbergh, Senior, died in 1924.

Who, then, was more wise, more correct, and more savvy in the ways of the world, as the United States emerged from a mostly agricultural economy in the 1880s, Charles A. Lindbergh -- lawyer, farmer and Congressman -- or Woodrow Wilson, college professor, Governor and President? It was Lindbergh who opposed our entry into the bloodbath that was the Great War, and Wilson who betrayed the whole country by allowing us to be dragged in -- for the benefit of British bankers and their royal family. The Great War would have burned itself out in another few months, as both the Germans and the French were too exhausted to carry it forward.

And how many historians have identified the punitive policies of the Versailles Treaty (so similar in character to Reconstruction), as the source of the social collapse which created the conditions for fascism to rise in Germany? Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. was a leading speaker against the involvement of the United States in the second European war, and was pilloried as an anti-Semite when he was not.

"The socialist origins of modern anti-Semitism illustrate the link between statism and the persecution of minorities. Anti-Semitism as a formal, intellectual movement arose in the middle of the nineteenth century," writes Dr. Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, "when Jewish conspiracy theories grew in popularity."

The great aviator, who secretly helped the U.S. intelligence services during his tour of Germany, was smeared relentlessly by the pro-intervention political factions loyal to Franklin D. Roosevelt, as his father was smeared by the Wilsonians. His America First philosophy was not based on anti-Semitism. After the war, he was restored to prominence by many of those same media organs -- especially for his patronage of American rocketry during the Cold War. The liberal establishment, who profited from the New Deal, was suprisingly ineffective when it came to assisting the Jewish refugees coming out of Germany before the war, and out of France after it began.

"French Jewry was highly commercial, financial," writes Cowen, "and capitalistic." These social values were not sufficient to save them in any large numbers, and this adds irony to the smear campaigns conducted against Lindbergh. His father feared that the "invisible government" he had battled for years, as a Congressman, would produce an entrenched socialistic dictator.

"Heavily regulated or socialist economies," says Dr. Cowen, "tend to breed intolerance and ethnic persecution." There are reasons for disputing Cowen, with regard to the racism and anti-immigrant feelings that arose in the United States during the time of the Know-Nothings. Business had almost complete freedom of operation, then, and hostility still bubbled over, against the Mormons and the Irish, and against a supposed Masonic conspiracy.

"Most socialists supported [the] World War" notes Cowen, speaking of European politics, "which provided a tremendous boost to anti-Semitism, without hesitation." Neither of the two Lindberghs proposed anti-Semitism as an American value, or as a Christian virtue, but the money factors backing Woodrow Wilson and his protTgT, F.D.R., were unrepentant in their attacks on them. Yet neither President provided any succor to the Jews of Europe.

The U.S. mobilized its whole industrial economy for the second War, again coming to the rescue of Great Britain in its never-ending disputes with its kissing cousins, the German people. Nothing that the U.S. did during the second War was of any use against the NAZI terror, and it now seems certain that high government officials among the Allies ignored intelligence reports that confirmed the slaughter of the Jews, Gypsies and other ethnic minorities in central Europe.

The paternity of the Viet Nam war is now indisputable:

Its great-grandfather was Woodrow Wilson, its grandfather was the man who made Lyndon B. Johnson -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our wartime leader -- and it was LBJ with his Great Society experiment in utopian social engineering, which sent so many young Americans to their deaths. He was booted by popular opinion, in 1968, the victim of his own success. He retired to Texas as a multi-millionaire, having used the Senate the way the Lords of England once used their own House, as an avenue for legitimizing graft and corrupt business practices. He was always the "good ol' country boy," but he was never, ever "simple."

One Hundred Years of Pain -- beginning with the Radical Congress that crushed the southern States with Reconstruction -- and the so-called Fourteenth Amendment, which augmented the power of all the great corporations yet tolerated the outrages of Jim Crow for seventy-five years or more! Three Democratic regimes which were elected to attend to the business of the people, and then moved to betray them by involving the country in foreign wars and adventures! The final disgrace, being Viet Nam -- a massive war built up, piece by piece, without ever having a Declaration of War! Young Americans conscripted for a war machine which was supposed to battle international communism, but which benefited only the money factors and their Wall Street brokers, and the business cronies of LBJ. in Texas, California and Washington State. All of the brutalities and failures of British Toryism, seemingly transplanted to these United States, and flowering two hundred years later: and none of the cultural successes that graced that era -- no Christopher Wren, no soaring music, no genius in landscape painting or architecture.

President Andrew Johnson escaped with his political life, facing impeachment and surviving. But Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, both murdered in that awful year of 1968 (and their deaths still the subject of controversy), paid for their visions with their lives, actual and political.

Thus ends the One Hundred Years of Pain, in bloody turmoil and impending social disintegration. But America remains resilient.

End of Chapter 5

---

Continue

Introduction - "The Original 13th Amendment Titles of Nobility and Honour"
Chapter 1 -The Prohibition of Titles of Nobility and Honour
Chapter 2 - Ratification 1810-1820
Chapter 3 - Philadelphia Lawyers and a Mock Nobility
Chapter 4 - Panic, War & Opium
Chapter 5 - One Hundred Years of Pain
Chapter 6 - The Secret Armies
Table of Ratification and Publications
The 13th Anti-Slavery Amendment and The Flawed 14th Amendment
Our Enemy, The State by Albert Jay Nock, The Classic Critique Distinguishing "Government" from "State"