Singer Sewing Mfg
see uber
liberty league // business coup
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Clark - Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism
robert S. Clark (1877-1956)
By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!
Robert S. Clark was a major financier of the American Liberty League, the Committee for a Sound Dollar and Sound Currency and Jerry MacGuire, was one of wealthiest and most eccentric of Wall Street’s bankers and stockbrokers. After graduating in engineering from Yale (1899), he fought in the Spanish-American War, in particular the campaign that captured the Philippines for the American empire. Clark served under General Smedley Butler when the Marines’ invaded China to crush the Boxer Rebellion, lay siege to Peking (Beijing) and capture Tientsin (1900-1901). (The U.S. Marines invaded China to put down the Boxer's populist rebellion against the foreign control of China.)
MacGuire told Butler that his backers would give the General a bank account and showed him cheques from John Mills, Grayson Murphy and Robert S. Clark.
Clark and his attorney, Albert Grant Christmas, gave tens of thousands of dollars to Gerald MacGuire for use by the Committee for a Sound Dollar and Sound Currency which was the front organization originally used to approach and recruit General Butler.
When MacGuire told Butler that Clark was one of the financiers behind the plot, Butler remembered Clark from the Boxer campaign in China. Butler described Clark as the “millionaire lieutenant” and as “sort of batty, sort of queer, did all sorts of extravagant things.”
After the war, but while still in the military, Clark worked in Washington for two years, then returned to Peking. In 1905, he began preparations for an expedition to remote northern China, apparently for zoological and ethnological research (1908-1909). (His 1912 book, Through Shên-kan: Account of the Clark Expedition, 1908-1909, now sells for over US$1000.)
Clark’s fortune came from grandfather Edward Clark, a New York lawyer who co-founded Singer Sewing Machine with its “inventor,” I.M. Singer, in 1851. Legal problems plagued them. Elias Howe sued them for infringing on his patent and, in 1854, he won royalties. By 1855, Singer was the world’s largest company of its kind having created great demand for female sweatshop workers. By the 1870s, Singer had factories in Britain, Germany and Russia.
In 1911, the huge Singer factory in Scotland faced 11,000 orderly workers in the “first significant strike ever waged against a multinational corporation” (The People, May 2001). By that time, Singer and other U.S. companies like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and American Tobacco, were embedded in what is now Turkey.
Historian Simon Payaslian has documented how, in order to protect American investments, the U.S. government turned a blind eye to the Ottoman genocide of Armenians in 1915.
The U.S. could not protect Singer’s Russian factory from nationalization after the 1917 revolution. Singer fared well in Germany, where it was among the top 25 U.S. investors, in the late 1920s.
In 1930, the agent in Saudi Arabia for Singer, Standard Oil NY and Ford Motor, was British fascist, Harry St. John Philby (whose son, Kim, became an infamous Soviet spy). Harry, who supplied weapons and money for Arabia’s fight against Ottoman rule in WWI, was the go-between for King Ibn Saud and U.S. oil companies.
During WWII, Singer’s U.S. factories made bomb sights, M1911 handguns and M-1 self-loading rifles. Singer’s Germany factory made machine guns for the Nazis. After chasing the German army back across Europe, the Soviets captured Singer’s Nazi weapons factory and confiscated it.
Charles Kindleberger, the U.S. State Department official in charge of German Economic Affairs (1945-48) said the U.S. did “not think that was an appropriate war trophy.” He worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s precursor) and Army Intelligence (1942-45).
Sewing machines began going out of fashion in the 1950s. By the 1970s, Singer focused on serving the U.S. military. Germany’s Pfaff company now owns the Singer brand. Sewing machines with the Singer brand name are now made for Pfaff in Asia.
Clark is now remembered as an art collector who created a foundation bearing his name. It has $85 million in assets and funds arts and family planning programs.
References:
Sterling Clark: Clark Art Institute
http://www.clarkart.edu/the_clark_story/content.cfm?ID=144&nav=4
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation
http://fdncenter.org/grantmaker/rsclark/index.html
Robert Sterling Clark
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0771870.html
Elias Howe
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0824348.html
Looking the other way
http://www2.clarku.edu/research/access/history/payaslian/payaslianD.shtml
History of the Company
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/3081/singer.html
James Warnet, Colt Model 1911 Caliber .45 ACP
http://www.wwiitech.net/main/usa/weapons/coltmodel1911
Innovative Chapter Added To 150-Year History, St. Louis Senior
http://www.todaysseniors.com/memories/innovative.shtml
Service Pistols
http://usgi1911.tripod.com/history
Oral History Interview with Charles P. Kindleberger, Jul. 16, 1973, by Richard D. McKinzie
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/kindbrgr.htm
Timothy Mitchell, "McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order," The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, 2003.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/3/3
Service Pistols
http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/2207.htm
American Women's History Timeline
http://www.canow.org/timeline.html
Source:Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.
**Order a Copy:** Order a hard copy of this 54-page issue of Press for Conversion!on the fascist plot to overthrow President F.D.Roosevelt and the corporate leaders who planned and financed this failed coup.
Robert Sterling Clark - Wikipedia
From HNN:
The Art Collector Who Wanted to Stage a Fascist Coup Against FDR By Nicholas Fox Weber Nicholas Fox Weber is the author of The Clarks of Cooperstown, on which the following article is based.
It sounds like a fabrication whenever I mention that, in researching the great art collector Robert Sterling Clark—proud owner of thirty-nine Renoirs and of the only significant altar piece by Piero Della Francesca in America, and founder of a fine and well-known public art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts—I discovered that, in 1934, he apparently devoted considerable energy to an attempt to have President Franklin Delano Roosevelt overthrown and replaced by a Fascist dictator.
The evidence, however, is clear; the only real mystery is why more attention has never been given to the attempted putsch in the White House. Sterling—as everyone called him—had approximately thirty million dollars at the time, in addition to a valuable art collection, sumptuous houses in America and France, and vast holdings of silver, rare books, vintage Burgundies, and other collectables. He was a bon vivant who took great pleasure in acquiring things and in living well; he was also a man given to intense and consuming rages. A lot of his fury was directed toward his three brothers, with whom he had had a violent dispute concerning family trusts; Sterling was enraged that he could not secure more of the family’s fortune for his wife and her daughter.
The problem was that only direct descendents of his parents could eventually inherit the bulk of his wealth, which consisted mostly of Singer Sewing Machine stock (the Clark brothers’ grandfather had been Isaac Singer’s lawyer, and had, in the middle of the 19th century, taken leadership of the company and made his fortune with it.) Sterling’s vitriol toward his siblings had begun in the early 1920s; a decade later, a lot of his rage was directed at the president he privately referred to as “Rosenfart,” who infuriated Clark because of his attitude toward the gold standard. Sterling was heard to say more than once that he would “spend half of his fortune to save the other half.”
The fifteen million dollars he was apparently willing to spend would go toward payments for an army of retired soldiers—half a million of them—whom he hoped to hire with a number of other rich and prominent Americans. The story behind the plot is complex, but its essence is that Sterling, through intermediaries, had hoped to persuade a retired U.S. General, Smedley Darlington Butler, to head the coup, and that he had indeed funded a lot of research into the formation of Fascist armies abroad. The example that most impressed the man whose trip to Europe he financed was the Croix de Feu, a group of French soldiers who had succeeded in ousting a president.
The story was told in the pages of the New York Times and Time Magazine. The accounts often have a mocking tone, especially about Butler, who was the man who spilled the beans at hearings held by the U.S. House of Representatives in private sessions, where Congressman John McCormack skillfully, and often in outrage, investigated the matter. Names of people associated with the Morgan bank, members of the DuPont family, and the well-known politician Al Smith were also linked to the attempted coup. It became clear that many of these people really thought that Roosevelt, his vice-president, and the secretary of state could all be coerced into stepping down, and then a hand-picked replacement would take charge.
That the putsch did not come about is not itself astonishing. But that it is such a neglected chapter of American history—in spite of books and films devoted to the subject—remains the great surprise. Roosevelt himself wanted to hear little about it; it was as if taking it to heart would make it too real. Perhaps that is still the fear behind the relative silence.