Chapter 18: Rockefeller Mellon Morgan Du Pont And Farben

The DuPont Chemical company and banker Andrew Mellon should be familiar to all cannabis history buffs - they (along with W.R. Hearst) engineered the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. (84) Mellon was head of the Treasury at the time (he was in charge of the creation of the Tax Stamp). Mellon also was DuPont's chief financial backer. Mellon is connected to Rockefeller through their mutual interest in Gulf oil. (85)

J.P. Morgan

Morgan, Mellon & Rockefeller, 1922

Mellon, Rockefeller, and Rockefeller's main banker J. P. Morgan dominated the New York economic hierarchy and were known to have been close long before Mellon introduced the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. (86) Rockefeller and Morgan have sat on the elite "Committee of the 300" social club with Mellon and DuPont. (87) This close relationship between Rockefeller and Mellon has continued - Rockefeller's Chevron bought Mellon's Gulf in 1984. (88)

Back in 1937, Farben owned some of DuPont (89). Farben also owned some of the Alluminum Company of America (90) - now known as Alcoa - a company primarily owned by Mellon. (91) The Mellons, Morgans and DuPonts have been a close-knit financial axis for generations. In 1936, they attempted to finance a coup d'etat in America. The plot was foiled by retired Marine Corps commandant Smedley Butler whom they had approached as a potential front man, offering to make him the "American Mussolini." He snitched them out to F.D.R. Though congressional hearings were held, nobody hung, and some of the testimony was suppressed for years. (92)

n 1943, antitrust activists indicted I.G. Farben and Du Pont for "having engaged in a world-wide cartel conspiracy" to restrain the production and distribution of titanium, an important war material. (93)

Smedley Butler

Butler's book: "War is a Racket" (1935)

Notes

(84) Great Book of Hemp, p. 150 - See also www.jackherer.com/book/ch04.html

(85) "Death in the Air" p. 361

(86) www.loc.gov/exhibits/goldstein/goldcap.html

(87) "Death in the Air," p. 351

(88) www.virginia.edu/igpr/apagoilhistory.html - www.bornpower.de/rockefel/rockef1.htm

(89) "The Crime & Punishment of I.G. Farben" p.1 See also "The Drug Story" p. 8

(90) "Treason's Peace," Howard Watson Ambruster, 1947, Crossroads Press, p. 417

(91) my.execpc.com/~bergsa/mellon.htm - www.virtualology.com/virtualpubliclibrary/halloffounders/businessfounders/ANDREWMELLON.COM/

(92) For a revealing account of the '36 coup attempt read The Plot to Steal the White House, by Jules Archer. For a contemporary's account of the testimony suppression, see: Facts and Fascism , by George Seldes, In Fact, Inc., 1943, pp. 111-114.

(93) - Armbruster, p 345 - www.japan1.freewebspace.com/spy/air3.htl

Another DuPont, circa 1937

Hearst Newspapers

A series of secret meetings were held. In 1931, Mellon, in his role as Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to be head of the newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD), a post he held for the next 31 years. These industrial barons and financiers knew that machinery to cut, bale, decorticate (to separate the fiber from the high-cellulose hurd), and process hemp into paper or plastics was becoming available in the mid-1930s. Cannabis hemp would have to go. In DuPont's 1937 Annual Report to its stockholders, the company strongly urged continued investment in its new, but not readily accepted, petrochemical synthetic products. DuPont was anticipating "radical changes" from "the revenue raising power of government ? converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization."

In The Marijuana Conviction (University of Virginia Press, 1974), Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II detailed this process:
"By the fall of 1936, Herman Oliphant (general counsel to the Treasury Department) had decided to employ the taxing power [of the federal government], but in a statue modeled after the National Firearms Act and wholly unrelated to the 1914 Harrison [narcotics] Act. Oliphant himself was in charge of preparing the bill. Anslinger directed his army to turn its campaign toward Washington.
"The key departure of the marijuana tax scheme from that of the Harrison Act is the notion of the prohibitive tax. Under the Harrison Act, a non-medical user could not legitimately buy or possess narcotics.
"To the dissenters in the Supreme Court decisions upholding the act, this clearly demonstrated that Congress' motive was to prohibit conduct rather than raise revenue. So in the National Firearms Act, designed to prohibit traffic in machine guns, Congress "permitted" anyone to buy a machine gun, but required him to pay a $200 transfer tax* and carry out the purchase on an order form.
* The $200 for the transfer tax is about $5,000 in 1998 dollars.
"The Firearms Act, passed in June 1934, was the first act to hide Congress' motives behind a 'prohibitive' tax. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the anti-machine gun law on March 29, 1937. Oliphant had undoubtedly been awaiting the Court's decision, and the Treasury Department introduced its marihuana tax bill two weeks later, April 14, 1937." Thus, DuPont's decision to invest in new technologies based on "forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization" makes sense. It's interesting to note that on April 29, 1937, two weeks after the Marihuana Tax Act was introduced DuPont's foremost scientist, Wallace Hume Carothers, the inventor of NYLON for DuPont, the world's number-one organic chemist, committed suicide by drinking cyanide. Carothers was dead at age 41.?
resident Calvin Coolidge, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in 1927. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress). Mellon was head of the Treasury at the time (he was in charge of the creation of the Tax Stamp).