Introduction

Introduction

G C is not a household name. She never was. But, because of recent political and economic events, her ideas are getting a hearing in conservative circles. This report is my attempt, in the phrase of B-Westerns in the late 1930s, to head these ideas off at the pass.

“End the Fed.” With these words, Congressman Ron Paul has mobi— lized a small army of political activists who did not know what the Federal Reserve System was in 200⒌ This three-word slogan is the culmination of Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard’s work, which began in the

1950s. People who had never heard of central banking in 2005 now know that the Fed has been at the heart of the Federal government’s attempt to save the big banks. They do not approve. I certainly share their antipa— thy. All of this has increased the demand for Austrian School economics materials as never before. The Mises Institute has benefited greatly.

But the Mises Institute is not the only beneficiary. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of people who now call themselves conservatives another movement has benefited. It also has been critical of actional reserve banking. It also has been critical of the Federal Reserve System. It also has published books against the Fed—books that extend back to the days before the Fed was created by Federal law in 19⒔ This movement is an extension of nineteenth-century Populism, which itself was an extension of an earlier movement devoted to the creation of a system of pure fiat money, a system run by the Federal government. This movement had its own political party in the 1880s: the Greenback Party, also known as the Greenback Labor Party. In 1890, this party merged with the newly formed People’s Party, known as the Populist Party, three years aer the Populist Party came into existence. Congressman James Weaver, the Greenback Party’s leader, was the Populist Party’s first nominee for President in 189⒉ He carried four states. The most famous spokesman for

Populist Party ideals was the far-le, anti-gold standard politician William Jennings Bryan, who received the Populists’ nomination in 1896, the year that he first received the Democrats’ nomination. The Populist Party ended aer 1908, the year of Bryan’s third loss as a nominee.

The anti-Fed campaign has helped the sales of a book written by a lawyer, Ellen Brown: The Web of Debt (2006). It has gone into multiple

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printings. Brown is forthrightly a Populist and Greenbacker. Hers is the fiat-money economics of neo-Populism. This is the culmination of at least half a century of sporadic attempts by Greenbackers to infiltrate almost every right-wing movement in this country.

I first began monitoring them in 196⒈ I began collecting Greenback books. I had a large enough collection in 1962 to enter a library collection contest at UCLA as an undergraduate.1 I have written about them for 45 years. They have operated under the radar inside American conservatism. Ellen Brown’s book is the first one to have gotten traction within the wider conservative movement. I have called these people false-flag infiltrators.2

Over the past six decades, a series of tiny publishing houses and self— published authors have produced books comparable to Web of Debt. These have been written by authors like Wycliffe B. Vennard, H. S. Kenan, Congressman McFadden, Whitney Slocum, Frederick Soddy, R. McNair Wilson, A. N. Field, Arthur Kitson. In the 1930s, the Greenbackers’

most famous promoter was Father Charles Coughlin, who had initially been a supporter of the New Deal, but who turned on Roosevelt and built a national audience on the radio. His anti-bank, anti-Semitic broadcasts gained millions of listeners. His book, Money! Questions and Answers, was pure Greenbackism.3 The Greenbackers’ most famous representative in Congress was Wright Patman, who om 1963 to 1975 was the Chairman of the House Banking Committee. A long-forgotten ally of Patman’s in the early 1940s was Congressman Jerry Voorhis, who was defeated by Richard Nixon in 1946 in Nixon’s first campaign. Voorhis was a political leist.

Until the publication of Web of Debt in 2006, Gertrude Coogan was quoted as oen as any of them, so I have selected her work as representative. I deal with Ellen Brown in a ee department on my Website, www.GaryNorth.com. Brown’s theory of money and her theory of Abra-ham Lincoln as the representative figure of Greenbackism are found in Coogan’s two books. If Coogan was wrong, Brown is equally wrong.

The Greenback movement is tied to the old Populist hatred of the

1I did not win. Someone had assembled a collection of the poetry of Robinson Jeffers,who had died a few months before.

2http://LewRockwell.com/north/north715.html.

3Charles E. Coughlin,Money! Questions and Answers(Royal Oak, Michigan: National

Union for Social Justice, 1936).

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