Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 5 pt. 2: The Real McCloy (side A)

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

We are back for another round of excavation into the life, times, and legacy of Reichsman extraordinaire, John J. McCloy. We last left off with McCloy’s service in WWI, during which he spent the bulk of his time as aide-de-camp to Brigadier General Guy H. Preston. Preston was not only a soldier in the settler colonial army of the Western frontier, he was a participant in the Wounded Knee Massacre who was charged with taking possession of the Indian prisoners of war. What a mark that left on John McCloy.We pick up post-war with McCloy’s Harvard Law graduation and departure from his native Philadelphia off to the big apple, New York City, where he’d set down his roots as a Wall Street lawyer. His legal practice fit seamlessly into the transition between America’s imperial conquest of the Western frontier–he spent a lot of time helping investment banks build railroad monopolies and consolidate financial control over industry–and America’s entry into the global stage of intercontinental imperialism. Just like the Dulles brothers’ over at Sullivan and Cromwell, McCloy’s work at the firms Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft–and later at Cravath–saw him greasing the wheels for that great interwar collaboration between US financiers and industrialists, and the German industrialists who spent the 1930s working overtime to remilitarize. During WWII, McCloy is brought under the wing of friend of the pod Henry L. Stimson. We stack up both sides of his moral ledger: on one hand, advocating the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps while fighting efforts to bomb the German concentration camps and curb the Holocaust; but on the other hand, he opposed dropping nukes on Japan and helped integrate the US Army. We make sense of his mixed record through our patented Fourth Reich Lens.We hope you like Krautrock, because this is our most German episode yet. On our free feed, that’s where this episode ends. If you want the full 2-hour extravaganza, head on over to Patreon and sign up today! If not, you’ll need to wait a while for side 2…Meanwhile, enjoy, and happy holidays to all!

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. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us. where you were 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 a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. 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 on. 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 one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mouse.

He knows so long as to die. Freedom could never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. insecure. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is not going to see. I am. This is a model. And I'm going.

This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back to Episode 5, Volume 2 of our series within a series, the Warren Commission decided. We're focusing on a fellow by the name of John McCloy. Before we get into it, I want to once again thank everyone for tuning in, liking the pod, subscribing to the pod, reviewing the pod, We do have a Patreon account, and for any of our listeners who think that this Fourth Reich Archaeology project has got some wheels, we invite you. We request, we ask you to please give us a donation.

We are always happy to hear from you. You can email us at 4thrikepod at gmail.com. And of course, we're on social media, on Twitter and Instagram at 4th Reichpod. All right. Picking back up, we'll just quickly cover where we left off. So we covered McCloy's role in the last episode on the Warren Commission. We talked about how he evolved from a skeptic. who successfully lobbied to get the commission more investigative powers, and indeed he openly expressed doubts about the single bullet theory,

about the FBI's investigation, and more, to becoming yet another lifelong and vociferous Warren Report Defender. We then started to unpack the man's life story, and see what we could make of his character, tracing his upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks in North Philadelphia, where his insurance man father died very early during his childhood. And so McCloy was left in the care of his mother, Anna. Now, we talked about how Anna was a strong-willed, enterprising hairdresser whose work for Philly's elite put young McCloy into contact with the upper crust of the city and beyond.

Her summer's doing hair in Bahaba, Maine, put Jack right in the thick of the jet set. Remember, he was a tennis coach, an instructor for many of these rich kids. He also went sailing and hung out with the likes of the rock. Baccafella boys. Now, Anna also had, she wasn't alone. She had support from the Philadelphia city father, George Wharton Pepper. Pepper took a liking to her late husband and served as a sort of godfather to Jack. Pepper was Jack's mentor, essentially, and guided him in his early years and beyond he helped marshal young mccloy to boarding school at the petty school remember mccloy didn't ascend to the upper echelon of these private schools he wasn't at a groton or an

eaten no he was at the petty school and afterwards he didn't go to yale or immediately to harvard but instead to another, I would say, top tier, but maybe not the greatest private liberal. Ivy adjacent, maybe. Oh, yeah, that's good. Quasi Ivy. It's not in the Ivy leagues, but it's got a good reputation. But yeah, McCloy went to Amherst in Massachusetts.

Shout out to the Pioneer Valley. And then he went off to Harvard Law. He sure did. And while at Harvard Law and while at Amherst, we talked about how McCloy became, along with other aspiring members of the elite of his generation, indoctrinated into the burgeoning ideology of American imperialism that was playing off big momentum from the United States victory against the decadent Spanish Empire and the Spanish-American War of 1819. and gearing up for a more global imperial presence on the world stage in the lead-up to World War I.

And so McCloy's indoctrination into this mindset came first at the Plattsburgh Military Preparedness Camp in Plattsburgh, New York, which at the time was referred to as the Millionaire's Camp. This was a very unique American happening that sought to infuse America's ruling class sions with the requisite patriotism to oversee a global empire. This camp achieved its goal by indoctrinating the young silk-toppers into the belief that their class interests were inseparable from America's national interest. and that America's national interest, in turn, meant war, control, and domination, as the decadence of old Europe became all the clearer after the assassination of that benighted Archduke, Franz Ferdinand. And so McCloy participated in the drills at Plattsburgh as something of an outsider.

coming from a lower class background, but he wanted nothing more than to get inside. His class attitude, well, McCloy had no chip on his shoulder. He was an unabashed admirer of the likes of the Rockefellers and the peppers and, you know, what he saw as a young man as this sort of noblese oblige. And so Plattsburgh is very much the early 20th century training ground for the horsemen of the Fourth Reich. And that was really the cake in our story. But the cherry on top of that cake, the cherry on top of the Plattsburgh story, is that those horsemen, they were trained by none. other than Roosevelt's rough writers.

The whole thing was set up in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt's American imperialism. The guy that organized the whole affair was a felt up in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt's American imperialism. The guy that organized the whole affair was a felt by the name of General Leonard Wood, and he was Roosevelt's commanding officer and the real head of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. Keep the home fires burning

while your hearts are yearning, though your latter far away they dream of home This guy went on to be the military governor of Cuba for a time, and then later the governor-general of the Philippines. So it isn't an exaggeration where we say this Plattsburgh project, it really was a case of bringing imperialism home. Yes, there came a pleading, help a nation in distress.

And we gave our glorious gladys, honor about us to no less. Yeah, and I think it's so important to make this intervention in the discourse, because every time that I see somebody, you know, whether it's online or in literature, or in popular history say that American imperialism or, you know, this idea for America as a global hegemon is a product of World War II and situating the rise of America as something opposed to the evils of Nazism, I wince a little bit. And I remind And if this is in conversation, whoever the person adopting such a view, that no. In fact, the roots of American imperialism are much deeper than that.

And in fact, it will lead you astray to base your understanding of our historical context on that idea. and it will cause you to ignore the deep ties between America and the rise of Nazism in Europe if you just close your eyes to everything that came before. And I think the story of John J. McCloy is one of this very process. to a tyrant yoke should bend and a noble heart must answer to the secret call of friends So if that's the cherry on the cake

The whipped cream Perhaps on the cake Is that once McCloy finally did deploy to the European theater in World War I, he served as aide to camp to Brigadier General Guy H. Preston. And we did note in our last episode that Preston fought the Indians on the Plains,

as McCloy was fond to describe. it, but what we didn't mention was what a euphemism that description really was. Preston was not merely an infantryman riding across and setting his sights on the enemy. Preston was involved in the Wounded Knee Massacre, and after that massacre, he was the guy charged with taking possession over the surviving Indian prisoners of war. And this is the guy who McCloy served every single day from dawn until dusk in the theater of war. So the degree to which the genocidal expansionist, imperialist mindset that's embodied in the wholesale destruction of entire tribes

on the American frontier was passed down like so much tradition unto the young soldier. that is more than just whipped cream my man that is the brandy flambay that really set the whole thing on fire and it's true and he was vocal about it too right i think there were sound bites where he reflects on how far america has come in just one generation and he says this basically in reference to how his commanding officer in World War I was involved in the genocide of the American Indians. Yeah, the clip that we included in the last episode, which we will be clipping from more in this episode, and you can find it on YouTube. That's from McCloy's 90th birthday celebration at the White House with Ronald Reagan.

We are delighted to have so many distinguished guests here today as we pay tribute on his birthday to one of America's most distinguished public service. John McCloy's had a long life 90 years, and most of it marked by unparalleled service to his country and humanity. And he's being bestowed some honors by the government of Germany in Ronald Reagan's White House reflecting on. how his life overlapped with America's establishment through genocide from sea to shining sea. And if there's a better encapsulation of America as the Fourth Reich than that, I challenge anyone to put it forward and let us know.

Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, he has served nine presidents, in a wide variety of a science. Let me testify personally to the wisdom of John's counsel. I'm proud to say he was a member of our 1980 transition team, and I can recall the insight and advice that he gave me on American-German relations at the time. It was the heroic work of men like John McCloy during the difficult post-war period

that did much to preserve world freedom and unite and unite our two nations in friendship. And on this note, President von Vysecker, your presence is an honor for the American people, but I think it's also a sign of the deep affection and high esteem the German people have for John Wood. A wartime intrigue and espionage

to European reconstruction at the World War. John McCoy's high intellect of selfish and selfish heart. Self less than selfish heart. I shouldn't have mispronounce that word of all. And selfish heart. The Federal Republic of Germany today is one of the free and prosperous countries in the world. A democracy of tested stability,

an important partner in their Atlantic Alliance. This seems rather natural and obvious and not particularly noteworthy to us today, but it was by no means to be foreseen. A decisive role in making this little possible was played by the men we are honoring today by John McClough. It was his human decency in helping the beaten enemy to recover. It was his trust in freedom and the deep roots of freedom among the Germans that largely contributed to re-establish a free society in my country and to enable us to join the free nations in Europe and in the country

and in the Atlantic community. We want to cement the German-American partnership and develop a third. Together, we must and I'm sure we can find the answers to the great questions of our time, war, hunger, unemployment and the destruction of nature. And we think of the unforgettable visit of President John F. Kemp,

in Berlin, war, hunger, unemployment, and the destruction of nature. I served in World War I with a man who fought the Indians on the plane. How short the span of American history really is. Someone said the other day that, to me, I'm sure he was a friend of mine, he said, Jack, did you ever something think? That was short of a few years, your life was a few years, Your life represents one half of the entire life of the country. Well, I hadn't thought of it before.

It was a rather stagnant, but this thing. I've been thinking of it since. As soon as I got off the plane, it was Bill Pohman here before. We could make a lot of mistakes down in the zone. But we couldn't make any mistakes up in Berlin. The Berliner with his geists and his mutton and his civil courage. The entire free world owes to the vigor and the strength of the spirit of the Berlin. War, hunger, and the destruction of nature.

Okay, so World War, Hunger, and the destruction of nature. one is where we left off and it brings us to where we'll pick up today, which is right after the war with McCloy going back to Harvard Law to finish his degree. And after he did that, he went back home to Philadelphia and he was encouraged by none other than his mentor, George Pepper, to leave town. And the basis for this is pretty interesting because it's again this idea that at the time, Philly being sort of a second-tier city, it was still a very tight-knit community. And its high society was incestuous and suspicious of outsiders. Yeah, especially a low-born guy from the wrong side of the tracks.

Totally. I was just going to say, there were many cities at this time in the early 20th century. that were like this, right? You could think your Baltimore's, your Clevelands. They were on the up and up, but still very insular. So anyway, Pepper says to McCloy, hey, you should go to the Big Apple. You'll have an easier time making a name for yourself in New York City. And so McCloy does that. He joins the White Shoe law firm Cadwalder, Wickersham, and Taft.

And Cadwold are still around today, but after several years there, McCloy latered to another white shoe firm, I would say the white shoe firm in New York City, cravath. Yep. And at both firms, his work was pretty similar in substance. And even the clients that he was representing were largely the same and revolved. around the same set of interests, and those interests were railroad trusts and financial firms that were investing in railroad empires across the industrializing United States. So he was supporting the state American tradition of bankrupting and buying up small rival firms across the entire country and concentrating them into the hands of rapacious monopolist bastards. And once again on this score, without saying more on it for now, we'll refer the listener to the great accounts of Gustavus Myers in his history of the great

American fortunes and the subliminal jihad podcast series on that. series of books a good amount of McCloy's railroad work was on behalf of the investment firm Cun Loeb and Co which was then second only to the house of Morgan in Largesse Cun Loeb was the business home of a sizable faction of the American branch of the German Jewish financial giants the Warburg family including Freddie Warburg, who became one of McCloy's lifelong best friends. Yeah, and as the Jewish host of the podcast here, I'll just jump in and comment that the Warburgs maintained a solid footing in the old country.

At this time, they had a huge presence in Hamburg, especially, and they were real assimilationist Jews. These were not guys that had a great interest in identity politics. If we can use an anachronistic term, they just wanted to be a part of the ruling elite. And while certainly Coon Loeb was sort of considered a Jewish financial house, in contrast to the other, the WASP financial houses of the time like J.P. Morgan or Brown Brothers Harriman or Dylan Reed. Nevertheless, it was not what you might call outcast on account of Jewish identity. And I think that's something that just bears keeping in mind so that the listener doesn't get confused of, well, how is this guy with all these sympathies towards the Nazis, such good friends with all of these Jews? The Jews

also had sympathies with the Nazis. At least these Jews did. Very unfortunate. Yeah, yeah. And there's a ton that could be said about that. That's not our object right now. But it is a good transition to talk a little bit about the other main activity in John McCloy's legal practice during the interwar period. And that was all revolving, around what might broadly be called European post-war reconstruction. And that, again, it's another sort of euphemistic term because what it really means, if you are an investor and you've got this American war chest to invest after World War I, you're looking at the cheapest assets with the greatest prospects for return on investment.

and in the interwar period, that was German rearmament and industrialization, right? Germany lost World War I, Versailles Treaty imposed draconian reparations obligations on Germany. And so Germany was, on the one hand, borrowing money from American financial firms at interest, right? And meanwhile, German industrialists were issuing bonds to finance their reconstruction and growth during this time, which these firms like Kuhnlobe with lawyers like McCloy were executing on this money-go-round that I think we described this maybe in our very first episode of the podcast. And so that was a good part of McCloy's practice. It got him an understanding of Germany. And it set him up for what would become the biggest case of his budding legal career.

But it also set him up for some developments on the personal side, didn't it, Dick? It sure did. McCloy freaking loved the Germans he loved the Germans so much that he even married one or at least a German American who had solid

upper class roots back in the old country you have to understand the way I am mine hair a tiger is a tiger not a lamb mine hair

she was Ellen Zizna she was a New York socialite at the time who had stayed single until age 31 when she married the 35-year-old McCloy in 1930 now in terms of social capital McCloy was clearly the beneficiary of the merger He now had, at least in one country, solid roots to the upper class. Ellen's sister, meanwhile, married a man of her same class, McCloy's longtime Amherst and Havid buddy, Lou Douglas.

Douglas, of course, is the heir to the Phelps Dodge Mining Fortune. Okay, but back to New York City. and the 1930s, back to Kravath. So, McCloy spent much of the 1930s representing military and industrial interest in the so-called Black Tom case, a civil suit against Germany brought on behalf of American companies

over a massive act of sabotage at a New York port during World War I, which destroyed shipments of war material to the front. First, the earth trembled and flames lit up the night. This was Black Tom at Jersey City on July 30th, 1960. First and most famous of a terrible series of munitions explosions that were to rock the New Jersey coast. In stricken nearby towns, soldiers guarded against looters.

And everywhere the words Black Tom were on an angry nation's lips. And although the proceedings in the Hague were ostensibly legal in nature, For McCloy, they were his introduction to espionage. And he thrilled to sift through webs of spies, double agents, and Germans. You know, a nation for which he was gaining a cautious admiration from the whole experience. Reporters of the day likened the acres of smoldering devastation to the battlefields of Europe. Black Tom, which cost two lives and $40 million in damages, was traced to German agents. Though still neutral, America was becoming painfully aware of the enemy within.

Yeah, so this caused McCloy to spend a good deal of the 1930s in Europe in the Hague, as well as in Germany, conducting investigations, engaging in negotiations, and, of, Of course, after 1933, his counterparty in those negotiations was the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler, right? And so McCloy got familiar with a lot of the leaders of that regime and a lot of their sort of foreign affairs personalities. And in 1936, get this, McCloy was invited by the regime to attend. the Munich Olympics, where he sat in Adolf Hitler's private box right next to Halmongallion. Well, it would be rude to turn down an invitation.

Yeah, especially when, you know, this was a time that they were reaching close to a settlement. The specially built Olympic Stadium in Berlin is filled to capacity as Hitler arrives to reside at the opening ceremony of the 11th modern Olympiad. A hundred thousand spectators are present. They see the charming incident of the presentation of a bouquet to the furor by a little girl, beats him on his way to his box. Then he declares the games open. The 11th Olympiad in Neuer Sechurchance, All right now 30,000 carrier pigeons are released.

They are the doves of peace, symbolizing the comradeship that exists among all nations in the athletic arena. And I just have to share this anecdote. because it is so, again, symbolic of what's to come. So during these negotiations, and as the industrial interests that McCloy was representing started to approach some deal that would return a decent settlement to them in exchange for their lost property that was blown up by these German saboteurs, none other than the president of Chase Bank on behalf of other Rockefeller family interests

and other Wall Street financial interests wrote a secret letter to then Reichsbank president Yalmar Horace Greeley Schacht that, remember, is the financial wizard behind the rise of the Nazis. And the letter from Chase to Schacht urged him to scuttle the settlement negotiations so that the banks could leapfrog the industrialists and win back lost interest payments before the industrialists could recover their principal. So the banks had already gotten back their principal, but they wanted the whole thing before anybody else. else got a slice of pie and and McCloy was so incensed by this you know underhanded interference

that he ratted them out to the FBI he called the FBI on Chase Bank okay make note of that of course the FBI did nothing and the rest of as they say, is history, because before too long, it would be McCloy at the helm of Chase Bank. He decided they weren't so bad. And it happened, I mean, I guess gradually over the 30s, because in the 1930s, McCloy was educated in Wall Street's collective aversion to, you know, the FDR administration and his New Deal programs, which were drastically expanding

what they viewed as the American welfare state. And at the same time, the Roosevelt administration was growing the reach of federal regulatory agencies, and we all know that corporations hate regulation. So Wall Street, at that time, and by extension, who was just steeped in the scene, came to see the new deal as an affront to freedom.

Of course, freedom is one of those defined terms that we've talked about. And in this context, freedom means the freedom to generate as much excess profit as you can by any means available and deliver value to your shareholders. Yeah, and remember McCloy's brother-in-law, Lou Douglas, who is also one of his very best friends. Well, Lou Douglas was a lifelong Democrat, unlike McCloy, and had even been appointed as FDR's budget director. In 1934, after just like 18 months on the job,

Lou Douglas resigned in disgust at the New Deal. And he attributed FDR's class treason to the Hebraic influence of Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, who was Jewish. And so Kai Bird in his McCloy biography talks about how McCloy, at least on paper, didn't betray the same type of anti-Semitism, but it was certainly in the air in his social milieu and something that was subtextually lingering beneath a lot of the Wall Street angst in the 1930s at the growing federal power under the Roosevelt administration. And maybe it also gave Wall Street a little bit more sympathy for Adolf Hitler,

who they saw as having the stones to call out the nefarious Jewish influence on political economy. But whatever sympathies, these elites in America may have harbored for the Nazi regime, as the evil deeds that regime was carrying out on its domestic population became more and more public, and as its imperialistic and sort of aggressive militarist tendencies were exposed on the world stage, being a Germanophile in the United States, went from being in to ouse and mccloy was no exception yeah and so during the lead-up to world war two as the nazis were expanding across europe mccloy was called upon by none other than secretary of war henry stimson to join the war department thanks in large part to

McCloy's deep knowledge of German sabotage operations back from when he was doing the Black Tom case. This is great. I mean, do you want to do this one? Sure. So under Henry L. Stimson, who has come up multiple times on this show, McCloy worked extremely closely with another Wall Street creature, Robert L. Lovett, who was an investment banker at Brown Brothers Harriman. And Stimson referred to the two young attorneys as his imps of Satan.

Because they're both like portly sort of short guys. Yeah, they're both short guys and they're both like super eager and energetic and just what is incredible to me is that Stimson. would have the self-consciousness to understand himself. So he's Satan, right? Yeah, right, yeah. In this triumvirate? Yeah.

Just amazing. And, you know, the kind of older statesmen in the Stimson inner circle was another guy we've talked about on the pod, namely Grand Rapids native Harvey B. Bundy. That's the father of the Bundy brothers. And this triumvirate was all of a single mind, right? They all saw themselves as simultaneously representing U.S. national interests and American corporate interests, which they all perceived to a man to be one and the same. be speaking once again the success of the Plattsburgh project, right, that was expanded to scale to indoctrinate really the entire generation

and especially the ruling class in that generation. Right. And quick lightning round of highlights of McCloy's, wartime service viewpoints, etc. So the guy advocated for the interment of the Japanese on the basis of race in concentration cabs in America. This was a policy that he would defend until the end of his life. And it really goes to show how far he was willing to go

to protect the American Empire. I want you to remember, that no bastard ever won war by dying for his country. You want it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country? So he was all in on imprisoning Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Funny, you know, nothing similar ever came up for Germans during World War II. Gee, I wonder what the difference is there. If it's all white, it's all right.

And speaking of German concentration camps, McCloy had some views there, too. He opposed using the military to stop or disrupt or curb the Nazi Holocaust by bombing the train lines to Auschwitz or bombing the death camp itself. And the official justifiable. from McCloy is that the U.S. needed to preserve its munitions, and there was no strategic military advantage to bombing Holocaust targets. And he engaged in pretty underhanded tactics here, too, you know, withholding critical information from his superiors that was informing this analysis that he had put forward, that, you know, that bombing the concentration camp was not a good idea. and one can't help but surmise that at least part of his consideration was to preserve

some of these industrial assets that he may have even helped to finance before the war broke out because, you know, while Auschwitz was a death factory that meted out, you know, mass murder on an industrial scale, it was so much more. What most people don't know about Auschwitz is that it was also the site of massive industrial manufacturing, right? Because all of this slave labor was being shipped out east to Auschwitz, which was located in Poland. The labor camp was called Monowitz. And many of the leading German industrialists, including IG Farben, I've seen reference that McCloy had represented Farben interests in his legal career. I've not seen primary documentation of that, but even if he

didn't directly represent Farben, Farben was such a massive industrial cartel that it's inevitable that they would have been in the circle of work that he was doing at that time. And the Monowitz concentration camp at Auschwitz was consisting of not only Jewish slave laborers, but also Polish day laborers. And I like to tell the little anecdote that one of those Polish day laborers was none other than Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John Paul II. Damn. One of the first plans to be visited is the damaged second. of the IG-Farbon industry, the largest combine in the country. Here, investigation into the chemical branch of the industry is conducted by Dr. Paula Rose.

Kind of on the same tip as opposing bombing the concentration camps was McCloy's active participation alongside Henry Stimson, as well as a whole coterie of State Department and War Department officials in persuading President Truman to reject the post-war plan for Germany that was proposed by that same Jewish Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the so-called Morgenthau plan. And that plan would have essentially ended German industrialism, purged Germany of its entire industrial and financial base that had backed the rise of Hitler and basically turned Germany into an agricultural breadbasket of Europe of sorts. And to McCloy, the Morgenthau plan was anathema to his vision of a unified, industrialized Western block.

McCloy was not uniquely responsible for rejecting this plan. Basically, the whole state Department. And remember, the State Department was populated largely by these Yankee silk toppers, mobilized against it with the support from former President Herbert Hoover, who was an ultra-wealthy investor in his own right. But on the positive side of the moral ledger, McCloy advocated for the integration of the U.S. military, and he bitterly opposed. using the atomic bomb on Japan, which he rightly believed would surrender even without a U.S. ground invasion or a nuclear holocaust. So what do you think, Dick?

What do we make of this mixed, albeit mostly bad, record from McCloy's service in Stimson's War Department? What insights can we take away about the Fourth Reich? Yeah, I think the first one is one that you hinted at a little bit ago and one that should be pretty obvious at this point. And that's that the U.S. Empire has absolutely zero qualms about using Nazi tactics like race-based mass incarceration to achieve its ends. So McCloy, for example, right,

he would always maintain that the camps were not prison camps and that the folks in there had good living conditions despite all the evidence to the contrary. So we see here with this example of Japanese American internment versus Nazi, you know, Jewish internment, we see how the Fourth Reich is able to justify and prop up the predominance of the self-serving myth over a reality that just plainly undermines that myth.

Mm-hmm. And through McCloy, you also see a clear example of this idea of how willing individual actors were, to preserve the continuity of the financial interests of their business partners, their bosses, their clients, and how that sort of idea of excess profits for the people you are serving, it supersedes any willingness to save innocent lives. it you know lives just become the cost of business and then on the other side of it is like you know for what it's worth he also has this bend to him that is i mean progressive in many ways right

he is advocating for integration he is opposing nuclear war it's like the early days of the pragmatic side of the fourth rake right bringing ideas into the fold. Yeah, I think you mentioned in the last episode something about this, that from the perspective of the Fourth Reich, there is this lip service, at least, to the demands of the governed, right? There is this gesturing to the consent of the governed, and part of that entails, rather than just crushing all dissent, taking a more pragmatic approach and And, you know, in the case of the atom bomb, obviously that pragmatism didn't win the day because Harry Truman and his more hawkish advisors were very much hell-bent on showing off

the destructive capacity that the bomb displayed as a way to signal American predominant. on the world stage in the post-war era, but even this appearance of seeking to temper excessive violence in McCloy's advocacy against the atom bomb, you know, it has both a propaganda appeal to appear more civilized and to appear more well-intentioned, right, embodying that so-called bill of rights approach that McCloy was so fond of. And there's also the

practical purpose, the more cynical practical purpose that the sites that the U.S. targeted with the nuclear bomb were industrialized. And so you also could see in McCloy's advocacy and avoidance or a will to avoid a destructive chain reaction that would go too far in depleting industrial capacity, especially industrial capacity that the U.S. as the victors in the war would presumably come into beneficial ownership of after the war, right? So just like he didn't want to destroy the plants at Monowitz, because the, those plants could be put to use in the post-war Western economy. Soto could potentially even some of the Japanese sites

that were ultimately destroyed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so this calculation is also emblematic of Fourth Reich pragmatism. The crimes with which these men are charged were not committed in rage. Or under the stress of sudden temptation. They were not the slips or lapses of otherwise well-ordered men. man. One does not build a stupendous war machine in a fit of passion, nor an Auschwitz factory during a passing spasm of brutality. What these men did was done with the utmost deliberation, and would, I venture to surmise, be repeated that the opportunity should recur?

There will be no mistaking the ruthless purposefulness with which the defendants embarked upon their course of conduct. That purpose was to turn the German nation into a military machine and build it into an engine of destruction, so terrifyingly formidable that Germany could, by brutal threats and, if necessary by war, impose her will and her dominion on Europe, and later on other nations beyond the sea. In this arrogant and supremely criminal adventure, the defendants were eager and leading for disposed. Otherwise, it goes without saying that these men have not been indicted because they are industrious or because they exercise great power and controlled great wealth.

These things are not declared as crimes by the law under which this tribunal renders judgment. Pam Russell is particularly interested in the possibility of using the concentration camp inmates to erect the class, all of which was reported to the other defendants. They agreed, and construction of the Department Auschwitz plan was promptly undertaken. Himmler, for a price, furnished the defendants with the miserable inmates of his camp, who slaved and died to build the unifactory, the technical complexity of the synthetic dye industry,

and particularly the inevitable production of numerous byproducts, for which some practical use was always being sold. How do you plead to the indict, guilty or not guilty? The inevitable production of numerous byproducts. The first half of this century has been given to the indictment, half of this century has been a black earring. Most of its years have been years of war, or of open menace, or of painful aftermath. And he who seeks today to witness oppression, violence, or warfare, need not choose the direction too carefully nor travel very far.

This case, like any criminal proceeding, finds its justification only as part of this process of redemption and reconstruction. We have been told from the moment to judge not, that we be not judged. And we will be well to reflect upon and seek to comprehend this profound prohibition. How do you please do the indict? Guilty or not guilty?

How do you please to the indict? How do you please do the indict? How do you please do the indict? Out, out, out, out, out, out, out. How do you please do the indict? Gideon. Guilty. Guilty.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. And particularly the inevitable production of numerous byproducts, for which some practical use has always been a song. We've got a whole other hour on John J. McCloy's post-war career. and it's all part of one super episode available exclusively on our Patreon. So find us on Patreon at Fourth Reich Archaeology and sign up today. Otherwise, you'll just have to wait for Side B of our exegesis of John J. McCloy.

Buy a subscription as a present to yourself. or gift it to that special someone as an ethereal stocking stuffer. For now, on behalf of Dick, I'm Don saying farewell and keep digging, and have a happy holiday season. Thank you.