Fourth Reich Archaeology - #099 - She Harvey Oswald 7, Side B

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

This week we are back with Side B of the first installment in the second portion of She Harvey Oswald where we zero in on the series-within-a-series’ namesake, Sara Jane Moore, aka Sally Moore, aka Sara Jane Kahn. A woman of many names, of many identities, and of many mysteries. In this episode, we focus on Sara Jane’s family origins. Just like Squeaky Fromme’s, Sara Jane's origin story is rooted in the global military industrial complex. Whereas Squeaky’s old man worked for Northrup aircraft, Sara Jane’s daddy was a DuPont man in West Virginia’s “chemical valley,” dubbed “cancer valley” by the long-suffering locals. And DuPont played an instrumental role in not only the allied victories in the two world wars, but also in the technological advancement of the Nazi regime that popped off old WWII in the first place. It’s a tangled web we weave, and one that takes some time to develop, but when you see the full picture, we are confident you’ll be as awed as we’ve been to uncover all the multifarious connections that make this story one of the most compelling in all of Jerryworld. Patreon: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeologyEmail: [e-mail]

In the aftermath of her daughter's attempt on President Gerald Ford's life, Ruth Kahn gave an interview in Charleston, West Virginia. In that interview, she disavowed her daughter, claimed that her daughter abandoned three children with her and used several aliases in her life. One of them was Sarah J. Moore. Curiously, Ruth Kahn declined to say that the woman who had made the news was indeed her daughter.

She has broken all ties with the family until I have definite proof such as fingerprints or a statement from her, I cannot say that Sarah Jane Moore is my daughter. Even though the circumstances seem to indicate that she is my daughter, as the mother of Sarah Jane Con, I must be sure. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power

structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence. of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission was silent. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small,

For example, with the CIA. Now he has a mob. He knows so long as a die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers.

A lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is the CIA. Now he has a model. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back, folks. We are so glad to have you here with us today. We've got a great show in store for you. First at the top, as always, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who is subscribing to our Patreon. We could not do this show without you. It's never too late to subscribe. Head on over to patreon.com slash forthright archaeology and join one of our membership tiers today. You're going to love it. We guarantee that.

you have our guarantee. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who writes in every week. You can always reach out to us at forthrightepod at gmail.com, and we will do our best to write you back as soon as possible. We are on social media. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter under the handle at forthrightepod. And with that out of the way, let's just get into it. it. We are back in the world of Jerry World, back in the world of she, Harvey Oswald. That's right. We're picking up where we left off in our series within a series. And if you recall, for those of you who have been keeping up, we are turning our attention to the second of the would-be female assassins who in September of 1975 pointed their pisses. at President Gerald Ford.

We are, of course, picking up with Sarah Jamor, who is, I believe, the only woman in history to shoot her shot, to fire one off in the direction of an American president. Now, inside A of this episode, because we are, of course, releasing side B of this episode this week, Inside A of this episode, we gave a much, what we thought, a much needed context and background on the Sarah Jane Moore universe. As we always do, we provide a little bit of context before we get into the concrete history. And if you haven't listened to it yet, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to it because we did quite a bit of scene setting. Now, in this episode, we will be picking up where we left off, and we are going to actually get into the history of Sarah Jane Moore's life, starting with her origins in a town in West Virginia, Charleston, West Virginia. And in this episode, the sharp-eared listener will pick up on many recurring themes, many recurring individuals, many recurring characters, a cast of characters. like to say in this program, it's a small world. And we're not just talking about people, because of

course you'll hear plenty of familiar names in the next hour or so, but also institutions, companies. Every one and everything that we mention in this episode is a critical, critical part in that Fourth Reich archaeology, in that Fourth Reich lore that we know and hate. much. So, without further ado, let's pick up where we left off and get to know Sally Moore. And with that, let's get digging. Almost heaven. West Virginia. When the white men began exploring across the mountains into this area, it became a place where they found minerals and so forth that they wanted. and it also very quickly became a focus of land speculation.

The last agreed treaty boundary was the Blue Ridge Mountains that Thomas Jefferson could see outside his window at Monticelloo. So these people who came into the Canola Valley for hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond territorial boundaries. Our communities were being invaded and our people were being killed. Georgia Washington was a businessman as well as a great patriot. He and his brother and several other people traveled down the Ohio to check out the lands. He later would hire land agents who would acquire 3,000 acres of the canoer.

Valley, including the salt works above the area of present-day Charles Street. Tons of this chemical were being used at the plant emitted out into the environment, into the air, into the water, into the soils in the surrounding community, even though the information about the toxicity of these chemicals, the fact that it was getting algae in the environment that would get into us and stay in us was known by the companies using these materials for decades. Washington was not totally financially disinterested in any endeavor he engaged in. And where there was an opportunity to make money, you could be sure that George Washington

would be in on the ground floor. All right. Now Sarah Jane Moore was born. Sarah Jane Conn in February of 1930 in Charleston, West Virginia. gonna just stop right there. For those of you that may have already picked up on it, you know who else was born in Charleston, West Virginia? Charlie Manson.

Just five years before, I think, right? Yeah, and they were very physically proximate to one another as well. Like same side of town, same neighborhood. There was a grocer who purports at least, when interviewed 40 years later in the 1970s to remember both of those two individuals that had become notorious coming into his grocery store as kind of loner kids and buying groceries and having adult-like conversations with this grocer in a way that their other peers were not like. So we already have gifted kid flashing sirens going off for both Manson and more here.

Khan, as she said no. Yeah. In the first line of the biography and something that we both got a kick out of, make what you will of that. There's no like real evidence out there that they knew each other, right? They were sort of in the same sort of space, but no evidence that they actually knew one another. Yeah, and he left Charleston pretty young, too. So of course, right. Most likely they didn't know each other, certainly not well and certainly not at a formative age. So, you know, that's right. Whatever. It's just a funny coincidence. It's a coincidence. What's going on in Charleston, right? What is going on in Charleston, West Virginia? But so Sarah J. Moore, she was not a baby boomer, but born in that interwar generation that

experienced World War II as she experienced it as a child. So she was there as a kid for all of that propaganda, all of the war rationing and the industrial mobilization, all of it. She was there for that. And of course, this gives her a unique perspective relative to Squeaky, who was born 18 years later and brought up amidst the age of abundance in that post-war 1950s era. So already you have that sort of juxtaposition between Squeaky and Sarah Jane Moore. Now Moore's father was named Olaf Khan, and he was one of nine children born to a reasonably prosperous farming family in flat Brookville, New Jersey. Olaf's father had emigrated from Germany, that was Prussia, to be more specific at the time,

at the end of the 19th century, and married Olaf's mother, who was a New Jersey native of the Anglo extraction by the name of Elizabeth Williams. And they lived on a small, farm but did well enough for themselves to support their nine children comfortably. Now Sarah's mother, Ruth Morkan, was a church-going Christian lady who raised her children in the evangelical Bethel Assembly of God Church. Her kinfolk came from West Virginia, dating back to at least the early 19th century. Judging by some of the names of her 19th century, relatives, the family fits what we might call Christian nationalism. Her great-grandfather was named John Andrew Jackson Moore after the notorious Genocidier turned hillbilly president. And her grandfather

and his siblings had those crazy biblical sounding names like, oh man, you're going to have to do these. Okay, I think it's Melchicicic. Uh, who went by Mel, that was her grandfather. Her great uncle was Abby Melech. Of course, Melech in Hebrew means king. So these are like very deep biblical names. Also, she had a great uncle Josephus. And kind of on and on and on,

these guys were of that ilk, of that West Virginia ilk, who were pulling out the old, Testament to find some very lengthy and convoluted-ass sounding names to name their children. It's funny you mentioned the Old Testament because while there isn't much information available about these turn of the century generations on either side of the family, it is worth noting that Olaf's father, so that's Sarah Jane's grandfather, Olaf's father came from a Prussian Jewish background. But apparently he was not overly devout because he married a Shiksa in New Jersey

in 1897. And in that same vein, it's not really clear whether Olaf actually was a practicing Jew because he too married a Shiksa by the name of Ruth Hayes Moore, Sarah Jane's mother, from whom she'd later adopt that surname, right? She was born Sarah Khan and took on Sarah Jane Moore as her surname. Yes. And here's another little early, early red flag around Sarah Jane Moore. This is something that anyone who's read Mary Haverstick's book, A Woman I Know, about the CIA spy,

June Cobb, who also went by the alias Jerry Cobb. And she talks a lot about the selection of aliases and multiple identities of spies and of particularly female spies. Now, I have certain issues with that book that are beyond the scope of this episode that I won't get into here. But that particular aspect of the research is well, written and well done and well sourced and I mention it because there was another girl in Sarah Jane Moore's class in high school named Sarah Jane Moore. So in Stonewall Jackson High School,

in Charleston, South, Charleston, West Virginia, there was a Sarah Jane Conn, that's our protagonist, and a Sarah Jane Moore, somebody that has nothing to do with our protagonist except a passing high school acquaintance. So this use of multiple names, which is a theme that will recur throughout Sarah Jane Moore's life, begins very early on, and it is noteworthy that the main alias that she was using

while going through the events that brought her notoriety and, you know, ultimately got her locked into prison, she was using the name of another girl, born the same year, went to the same high school, make of that what you will, and we may revisit that theme, but it's definitely something. Throw the historians off her scent, right? Yeah. So that, you know, you're going back and looking back in,

looking for her in the history books, you find the wrong Sarah Jane Moore. And I will just say, not to be petty, but you know who didn't mention the other Sarah Jane Moore in her graduating class? That's right, Jerry Speeler. She didn't mention it at all. It was instead reported in a newspaper article from a West Virginia paper paper around the time that they actually, you know, had confirmed the high school records, had spoken to this other Sarah Jane Moore. It is documented. This isn't like speculation. It's something that is in the

historical record, which to the untrained eye, Jerry Speeler, would not call attention. But it... I think we could be petty. We can be petty. Yeah, but like I said, I don't think it's ultimately petty because it's an important detail. It's a noteworthy detail. It's something that matches her story to the stories of other lady spies. And, you know, that's why we mention it. But bringing it back. Yeah.

Get back on track. Back to Olaf. And Olaf, he really was this classic assimilator. This classic first-gen assimilationist German immigrant, wasn't he? Exactly. So he grew up on the family farm. They were not poor. They did okay. He had many siblings. They were immigrants or half immigrants. His dad was an immigrant. His mom was American. And like many men of his generation, notwithstanding the fact that he received a good education, he received musical training. He was an erudite kid. But to fit in with the nation, the young, nation of the United States of America. When the war rolled around, he did what a lot of his peers did and enlisted in the military. So he went to World War I. He received his training. He deployed to France to fight. He was injured in the war, not gravely, but he apparently was unable to play the

violin after returning from the war, and he was patriotic. He stayed in the army after he returned, and they stationed him not back in his native New Jersey, but instead in West Virginia. That's how he made the move. He was moved by the army to go and work on a chemical spill. in West Virginia. And we'll return to that in a second, but just another little bit of Don biographical lore here. You know, I can really relate to the Olaf Khan story in some respects because it's not totally dissimilar from some of my own Jewish ancestors in the United States.

So I think I've mentioned on the show before in the United States. context of the Jack Ruby series that, you know, a lot of my Jewish family members, they were not as well-to-do as the Khan family that was urban or, you know, well-to-do rural Prussian Jews. Instead, my ancestors were what are referred to as Ostjuden, right, Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Russian empire who escaped the pogromes and the Stettel and made the journey to the U.S. But like Olaf Khan, those ancestors of mine, including a great-grandfather of mine, did enlist in World War I and served in the war in order to sort of shed the immigrant background and become a full-blooded American.

And in fact, actually, that great-grandfather of mine died shortly after returning from the war from complications arising from gas exposure in the trenches. So, again, put a pin in that gas exposure because that again will recur here in this story. We put down these little breadcrumbs, and then we scoop them up and munch upon them. And so that's the reason for mentioning that little tidbit. Back to West Virginia, back to Olaf Khan. He's doing a great job. He is managing the spill site.

He is perhaps getting exposed to some chemicals, who knows. but the real takeaway is that he catches the attention of the head honchos there on site. And the head honchos on site are associated with the chemical plant whose chemicals had spilled, talking, of course, about that killer of men, DuPont Nemur company. the DuPont Chemical Company, which we're going to take a little detour right now because Olaf, he de-enlisted, he was decommissioned from the army when he was offered a lucrative position as a foreman in one of the several DuPont chemical facilities in West Virginia. In particular, in West Virginia's Canaw Valley.

Now, hopefully, pronouncing that right, I did look up many YouTube videos on how to pronounce Canaaw. So, you know, we're going to do our best here. And it should go without saying that we got to talk about DuPont because it is so deeply steeped in the Fourth Reich floor, which we all know and love, and all the damage that it did to the people of West Virginia and beyond. So let's talk about Knaw, West Virginia. So Charleston, West Virginia sits at the confluence between the Knaw River. that's spelled K-A-N-A-W-H-A and the Elk River. And the Knaw River, in turn, is a tributary of the Ohio River,

one of the main navigable waterways in the intercoastal, the interior United States. In the 20th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Knaw Valley had become really the chemical. manufacturing capital of the world, in fact. You know, it was a huge staple in American chemical manufacturing, but the experience of World War I, the public sector investment in chemical manufacturing for wartime production,

and the destruction of many European competitors by the war, really catapulted this little section of West Virginia to global importance at a critical moment in time. So it is actually something that, you know, I've spent a lot of time over the last few days reading about this, and it's surprising how little fanfare there is about this. I mean, certainly the locals are very vocal and, proud in many respects of that history, but it's not something that was ever on my radar, because you think about West Virginia as being coal country, and that's about it. But you don't really think of the chemical industry, and the whole genesis of this industry is pretty interesting.

The reason why the chemical industry set down roots in this part of West Virginia is largely geographical. So the area sits on top of basically a subterranean ocean. You know, dating back hundreds of millions of years, pre-continental drift, like there are salt water deposits about 350 plus feet under the ground that were mined or tapped, as it were, for a substance called salt brine. That's this very, very salty, liquidy substance that is extracted from beneath the earth. And not surprisingly, before the whites came along

and industrialized the process and turned it into a profit-generating enterprise, the Native American populations in the region had been extracting and using salt brine and derived salts for centuries. And I came upon this documentary by the West Virginia documentary Consortium called The Great Canaw an American Story that I'm going to clip from a little bit to help flesh this narrative out. And you will have heard by now some of the discussions of how George Washington himself,

the first president of the United States was instrumental in acquiring, quote unquote, acquiring, let's say it, stealing the land of this region from its native inhabitants, and was interested in speculating in this land given its natural richness. So it forms for us yet another lens into the, this Fourth Reich reality, right? We are living in 2026 with yet another real estate speculator president, a real estate developer president who is likewise raping and pillaging at will using the public fisc, enriching himself as old Georgie Washington did. And in this region, to focus back to Sarah Jane Moore,

it does, I think, enrich the understanding of where she's coming from, all of her quirks and eccentricities and inner struggles that inform the act that she would ultimately take, willing to sacrifice her life, really, to take this action on superiors. September 22nd, 1975. And, you know, this is where she comes from. She comes from this paradise on earth in this beautiful blue ridge mountain range with the blue rushing waters of the great Knaw flowing all around her. And yet her father, in his work as a chemical engineer,

is contributing to the destruction of that Eden of that paradise and is turning it into an earthly hell for the sake of the enrichment of the DuPont Corporation and its shareholders. So, you know, while it is a little bit far afield, perhaps, or it may seem so to the untrained eye, this is Fourth Reich archaeology. And you know, you boys, doing... some diggin. So here it is a little clip from the Great Knaw, an American story. We'll post the link

in the show notes. An area just a few miles east of Charleston held major significance. Knaw Salines, the present-day town of Malden, was a plentiful source of salt. The commodity in great demand by increasing numbers of settlers. Along some sections of the Great Knaw, salt was abundant. salt like water is essential to human and animal life. The Kanaugh salt area was extremely important to the Shawnee people and Indian people because the process of boiling down salt, it takes about 40 gallons of water to be boiled down to make a bushel of salt. And in the Kanaugh area, it only takes 15 gallon of water.

So it was much more productive, much less labor intensive. and it was a good quality salt. And so that made it a very favored spot for the tribal people. This was an Eden, honored and valued by those who came for sustenance. Early entrepreneurs perfected methods to pump salt brine from shallow wells and used wood and later coal fires to boil the brine dry. Salt was readily available near the surface, but there were increasing interest in digging,

for it. And the equipment, the jars and various other bits and pieces that go along with drilling form the basis of the oil industry, which in West Virginia took place on the little Canawa, east of Parkersburg. So we can look back to the great international oil industry and find out the drilling techniques were really perfected here. in the 19th century was mainly used to manufacture table salt, right, for culinary use, for separating the water from the salt and then packaging up the salt and using it in food. And that industry gave rise to the first ever corporate trust in the United States in 1818, which, you know, corporate consolidation will become a big factor in the life of the region.

But early on, the consolidation is all around this salt industry and only later are additional uses for salt brine developed and discovered through technology, through advancements and science, etc., to the point where, both the salt brine natural resource and the nearby coal and even oil, there's a little bit of oil in West Virginia too, that those products are all being directed into extractive chemical processes to create further more synthetic chemicals that will have all sorts of industrial applications. And for our purposes, I mean, well, this is America, right? Not for our purposes. Period. We're talking fucking killing people. That's always the most profitable thing, right? Right. And so from salt, right? Salt is what? Sodium chloride, right? And so from that, you can extract chlorine. And chlorine can be used to do everything from sanitize your drinking water to cleaning up

swimming pools to creating toxic chlorine gas, right? The salt brine could also be used to create pure hydrogen. And these naturally occurring organic materials, the chemical industry was using that to create all of this crazy shit that was being used for not just during peacetime, but of course for the U.S. war machine, even in the early days of that war machine, even during the First World War. And in fact, it was during the First World War, right? In 1917, the U.S. government commissioned DuPont to build nitrocellulose, which is also known as gun cotton and it was used as a substitute to gunpowder in some World War I era weaponry.

During World War II, the federal government had a plant built at Institute to produce synthetic rubber and a new synthetic rubber industry was created in short order to support the war effort. The Ordnance Center in South Charleston was put to full use during the war, producing guns for battleships, air-to-ground rockets, torpedo flasks, and other munitions. In 1944, 7400 worked there, half of them women. Output from these industries was crucial to the war effort. The chemical industry in the Knaw Valley continued to grow, reaching its peak in the 1950s.

Literally hundreds of chemicals were produced at factories from Bell to Nitro. South Charleston became known as Chemical City, and the region as the chemical center of the country. And, you know, this became sort of this organic relationship between DuPont and the U.S. government, the U.S. military. It built on a longstanding relationship. It expanded. Like, DuPont is another rabbit hole that I've been going down here.

DuPont first got into weaponry. I mean, the bread and butter of the. DuPont Corporation really was gunpowder. That was their first thing, right? The DuPont family, for those of you not familiar, is definitely worth looking into because it is fascinating story of one of these big, big fortunes, great American fortunes, a little bit later in time because they don't come, well, they come to the U.S. quite early on, but, you know, not pre-revolutionary. So the DuPont family flees from the guillotine, right? They're too rich even for the bourgeois revolutionaries of the French Revolution.

They're worried that they're going to get a haircut that goes all the way down to the spinal cord. And they pack up, come to the U.S. with a few chemical formulae for the manufacture of gunpowder. And it's really in the War of 1812, 100 years before the Great War, that the DuPont family gets into the government contracting business, into the military industrial complex. Remember, this is a time when a lot of French aristocrats, like the Marquis de Lafayette, had just was and had been a key military figure in the war. the young American government. And the DuPonts get their fingers into that pie early on and kind of always build their business with help from the U.S. military. So they're right there with the Mexican war. They're right there with the Spanish-American war. They are kind of a German military, industrial complex participant whose star just soars beyond heights ever imaginable

when World War I hits. So you're right that it is an inflection point because there's nothing like World War I, right? Nothing that came before even comes close in scale to the Great War I. And the DuPont weapons manufacturing facilities were being used to full capacity for the allies before the U.S. even joined the war. When the U.S. was still technically neutral in the conflict, DuPont was already churning out 24 hours a day product for killing human beings. when the U.S. joined the war, it became almost like an extension of the government

what Dick, I know you're fond of calling a public-private partnership. For sure. And I think the actual geographic location of doing all this in West Virginia is something important to call out as well, right? The remoteness of the locale, the demographics, right? We're talking about deep in the country where there aren't a whole lot of eyeballs, you know, to keep, to bear witness on all the dirt that this company is doing, all the harm it's doing to the local environment and the local people. I did, I don't know if we've said it already, but this became known as the Cancer Valley, right? and even beyond 1917, even into well into the 20th century.

And I think even today you'll be seeing people in this region with higher rates of, not just cancer, but all sorts of really rare diseases that there's really otherwise no other, there's really no other explanation. There's a great movie, I think it's called Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo that sort of explores this. but they do a lot of damage to the region. Downstream from deceit, downwind from lies, your life's always for sale, and the price ain't all that high.

DuPont, the duplicid, dirty dog, DuPont, your forever chemical friend, DuPont, it'll grow on you. things I gotta come to an end. It's a classic tale. It's a common theme. The American nightmare's still a dream. Even if I only technically

I'd love to wake up if I could only sleep, DuPont. You know it's clean, DuPont. They can't hear you scream, DuPont, long as the chick gets sent DuPont, long as the food don't stick, DuPont. Nearly everything in our daily lives is improved by chemistry. From transportation to the clothes we wear,

chemistry helps bring us better food, makes our homes more beautiful, more comfortable, helps protect our health. The F-O-C-8 and chemical sludge, money's hard to move, it'll hardly budge, and the truth walks with a limp, while the lies fly by on the side of a blimp, DuPont, send out all your checks, you can't take back birth defects, DuPont.

Now, DuPont wasn't the only game in town in Chemical Valley, right? There were, at first, a variety of different sort of smaller mom and pop type operations, but with the advancement of the 20th century, especially with the, the, the, big war boom, the pattern of corporate consolidation begins to really roll along at a new clip. So you see, for example, DuPont and Union Carbide emerging as the two biggest owners of local chemical manufacturing capacity. They're buying up their competitors. and growing their empires in the region. And DuPont especially is doing so with the express imprimatur of the United States Army

and the United States government more broadly. Like it can't really be exaggerated the extent to which DuPont and the army are hand and glove throughout all of this. So this is during the time when DuPont hires Olaf Khan. Of course, Olaf Khan is not a billionaire by any stretch of the imagination, but he is making pretty good buck. He's not working in a blue-collar role. Famously, all of his children attested to Jerry Spiller.

Thanks, Jerry, to the fact that Olaf would never appear at home without a three-piece suit on at all times of day and night. And the kids hardly ever saw him without a three-piece suit, except occasionally he would go do a little bit of farm work on some acres that they owned and other, you know, outdoorsy type of activities on the occasional weekend. But this was a buttoned-up guy. This was a professional man, a foreman, a man-man. a manager, a hancho

within the DuPont organization, a leader of men, if you will. Right, and I think this was also in the Jerry book, but it was not just Olaf, but that household, right? Even though there were times, they were in the time of like rationing and all that shit, like the more

or con household, they always had things like sugar and flour and they were the house that if you went over there, they would have some nice treat to offer you. So they were pretty well off, is what I'm getting at. Yeah, exactly. And again, as we learn from the people that were there, as captured in this documentary about the Kanaugh, the Kahn household was just one of many where there were these combinations between sort of sophisticated immigrants in many cases and local Charleston women that provided.

this path for the city to become more cosmopolitan, to develop a better cultural life, a more sophisticated cultural life, and the type of activities that the Khan children often enjoyed, like music, theater, and other entertainments. The influx of highly trained chemists, engineers, and administrators to the chemical industry, invigorated the social fabric.

The pool of young men available to Charleston, young women, was increased dramatically, and a lot of this resulted in marriages. Many of married Charleston girls. And this produced a social scene that was far different than it used to be. It was pretty dramatic. I mean, you had a symphony, you had a late,

a light opera guild, you had the Knaw players, which had been sort of an old group here, was stagnant, it came alive. And all these things that you talked about in the major cities came to Charleston. Obviously, they were much smaller, but you had them so that Charleston became by far the most cosmopolitan city in West Virginia. And with respect to DuPont, you know, it's interesting because we mentioned that during this time, like Union Carbide and DuPont become the biggest competitors in the region. Now, of course, Union Carbide was acquired subsequently by Dow Chemical. And Dow Chemical and DuPont merged in 2017 before. you know, splitting up into separate companies and spinning off and whatever, but the consolidation

in this industry really came full circle to the point where they're all pretty much the same company. And that in turn reminds me of a pattern that happened in another country, a country in Europe that had its own chemical cartel that was rapidly expanding, really around the same exact time that Olaf Khan was making his bones at DuPont in West Virginia. Does that ring any bells to you, Dick? Are you talking about the Germans? Zijemans. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and it was like, and at the time, DuPont was also involved in exchanging patents and know-how with the Germans. Right. Yeah, DuPont emerged from World War I as an unstoppable powerhouse, right? It's at the top of the industry. And it recruited directly from this Nazi cartel you're talking about, IG Farben, and particularly the chemical manufacturer BASF, or is it Basf? BASF, yeah.

Do you remember those commercials? It was like, we don't make your skis, we make them faster. We don't make your knife. We make it sharper. At BASF, we don't make a lot of the things you buy. We make a lot of the things you buy better. At BASF, we don't make the sunscreen. We make it stronger.

We don't make the tennis shoes. We make them gripped. better. We don't make the jacket. We make it brighter. We don't make the carpet. We make it tougher. At BASF, we don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better. BASF. I don't know why I have that commercial like completely memorized. I guess something in my child brain when I saw it come on the TV put up a Nazi red flag, even though. I was purely and innocently unaware of that company's roots in the Holocaust. So there is this like intermingling and intertwining of DuPont and IG Farben.

And of course DuPont was represented at the Versailles Conference. And after it was unable to seize useful patents directly from the Germans, wouldn't you know it that it hired the law firm of the Dulles Brothers, uncle, Robert Lansing. You all remember him. You know him. You hate him. Woodrow Wilson's racist Secretary of State who said blacks were incapable of self-rule.

And so DuPont hires this guy to help it pick off IG Farbin scientists to join its ranks. And maybe you want to talk a little bit about IG Farbin, which was that, you know, that cartel that we were talking about. about a second ago. Yeah. I mean, I think that many of our listeners will be familiar with IG Farben. There's, of course, a sporadic but high-quality podcast, IG-Farbon watch, and has been covered as well on the Eyes Wide Open YouTube channel. You can find a lot, a lot about IG-Farbon, but suffice it to say for our purposes here that IG Farben and DuPont were really kind of the two main chemical manufacturers in the world. And they were competitors, but given all of those entanglements that we mentioned at the top of the hour between the U.S. economy and the post-war or the interwar period, and the German economy, there were many strong incentives for synergies between DuPont and IG Farben.

So when we say that DuPont was represented at the Versailles Conference, they were there to basically vulture-like, swirl around, and predate the patents from IG Farben. but they were not so successful in doing that. So instead, what they did was to basically snipe and recruit away all these German scientists. Now, I think that the chemists, like the leading chemists for DuPont, were not located in West Virginia. Those were operational facilities. and the Germans largely went to the DuPont chemical research facilities, which were much more highly concentrated in the state of Delaware,

which is why, of course, Joe Biden and his whole family have been essentially slaves of DuPont, property of DuPont, puppets of DuPont for their entire political career. But it's interesting here just how. deeply rooted Sarah Jane Kahn's life story is in these Fourth Reich phenomena when you see that, you know, her father is working for this company that's putting into practice German chemical manufacturing techniques that were used in World War I. I mean, some of the same techniques that, if not DuPont's techniques themselves, considering the amount of chlorine that was extracted for input into chlorine gas

that was manufactured by DuPont as well, maybe even killed my poor great-granddad. And now, Olaf Khan is employing this German chemical technology. And it was by no means a one-way street because during that interwar period, there was plenty, plenty of give and take between DuPont and between IG Farben. So, for example, DuPont, in addition to manufacturing chemicals, was also cartelized in its own right. right it the DuPont family diversified its portfolio among other ways by becoming the largest shareholder in general motors a fact which i think i had heard before but it's good to refresh on because you know when we think

today about the level of corporate concentration i think that we forget how deeply rooted it is truly in American capitalism. So DuPont is the biggest shareholder in General Motors. General Motors, in turn, enters into a joint venture with standard oil, and they call this joint venture the Ethel Gasoline Company, which manufactures the key ingredient tetraethyl lead, a.k.a. high-octane gasoline, which has massive, massive benefits to military applications. Indeed, the aviation of World War II was fueled by

ethyl gasoline, by high-octane gas. And there's an episode in the 1930s when IG Farben is aggressively pursuing this technology from its American competitors. And it's funny because DuPont actually, in its capacity as shareholder of General Motors, submitted some kind of a memo to the board of directors opposing the technology transfer of this intellectual property to the Germans because it was clear it was going to be used to rearm Germany in violation of Germany's commitments under the Versailles Treaty. Now, that little piece of paper that DuPont put together about one paragraph long was deposited in the dustbin. And the rest, as they say, is history because obviously the Ethel

Gasoline Company to DuPont's great profit and benefit, did go ahead and make that transfer, did go ahead and do the deal with IG Farben and pave the way thereby to the impressive aviation capacities of the Wermacht, which, of course, was a key ingredient to the entire Nazi rampage and World War II. like if the vermacht had not obtained this technology it's a counterfactual that really does call into question whether things would have played out the way that they did uh but alas or alack they did play out the way they did thanks in part to this technology transfer and um the story is is super interesting. There's a whole book that I would strongly recommend

the Crime and Punishment of IG Farben by Joseph Borkin, which if you just Google that, I think you'll be able to find it online for free, and it is worth a perusal, if not indeed, a cover-to-cover read, because it will tell you all about this and so much more. But I think for our purposes, we can kind of tie off the little detour into the history of DuPont here, a history which, as you mentioned, Dick, continues to this day to poison, sicken, and hurt people for profit. From the earliest saltworks, oil seeping from salt wells, found its way into the cana,

and the boatman who transported the salt down river gave it the nickname Old Greasy. All along, industrial byproducts were dumped into the river. The cities and towns grew larger. The canal was forced to swallow ever greater amounts of sewage and municipal waste. The chemical industry became a major polluter. By mid-20th century, the canaul was gravely ill. You know, they'll say, and it's, god damn, I just keep thinking of all these passages from Jerry's book that are popping into my head.

like when she's praising the innovations of DuPont to like for medical applications or whatever. Yeah, right, or like Teflon or something. Yeah, it's so sinister, man, how these guys whitewashed their fucking crimes. You and DuPont. What does a chemical company have to do with us? That's your drinking water over there. It is? But before you drink it, DuPont helps purify it.

with a chemical. What chemical? A chemical called ferric chloride made by DuPont. Is the chemical still in it? No. But that feroclorides are pretty useful chemical. We think so. Well, I'd drink to that.

Me too. You and DuPont, there's a lot of good chemistry between us. And that is Sarah Jane Moore, Sarah Kahn's father's sort of, that was their livelihood. That's how they made their money, not unlike Squeaky's dad, right, as part of this military industrial complex. And they did well for themselves. And that, I think, is where we can end today's episode. Oh, I got to make one more connection. I'm so sorry.

I don't want to ramble, but I would be remiss because our PINC, Sean heads out there, they're going to be hearing all of this and they're going to have a real siren go off. Or maybe if they've fully internalized the character of Tyrone Slothrup, they'll feel something buzzing in their loins as a result of the parallels to the life story of the protagonist of Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrup, whose father was a chemical engineer as well. And if you recall, Gravity's Rainbow talks about how the chemical at the heart of the kind of Slothrapp-Pot plot of the book, Imipolex G, was first manufactured by DuPont and was later transferred to IG Farben and how Slothrup himself was sold to this shadowy cabal by his father for his own

personal advancement in his career and his integration into this ruling class elite that he found himself at the fringes of. And so, you know, he kind of signed away the rights to his beaming boy. And as a result, anybody who's read the book knows that Slothrop undergoes a whole lifetime of adventures and misadventures. And I think a good place to end is with that parallel because I want to pose the question for our future episodes whether Sarah Jane Moore, in addition to being she Harvey Oswald, is also a sort of a Tyra slothrup. All right, folks, join us next week when we will pick things up again with our she, Harvey Oswald. Until next week, I am Dick.

I'm Don. Saying farewell. Keep on digging. Thank you.