FROM MONEY COMES PRESTIGE, AND FROM PRESTIGE POWER

The Skull and Bones society was founded for the purpose of initiating the sons of the Captains of Industry.

Frederic A. Delano 

Captain Warren Delano, was engaged in the opium trade, and his son Frederic A. Delano, was born in Hong Kong.

An uncle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Delano was an original member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 1914, and was later named by his nephew as Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Frederic A. Delano was an original incorporator of Brookings Institution, Carnegie Institution, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, director of the Smithsonian Museum, Commission for Relief in Belgium, and Belgian American Educational Foundation set up by Herbert Hoover in World War I, chmn Natl Planning Board 1934-43.

Delano's wife's sister married Ed Burling, who founded the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, whose partners later included Dean Acheson and Donald Hiss, brother of Alger. Frederic A. Delano married Mathilda Peasley of Chicago; Edward Burling married her sister Louise. They were the daughters of a railroad tycoon, James C. Peasley of the Burlington Railroad, also president of the National State Bank. Judge J. Harry Covington and Edward Burling founded the law firm of Covington and Burling in Washington in 1919.

Covington, a Maryland congressman, had been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Washington, D.C., by Woodrow Wilson as a reward for voting for the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. In 1918, Wilson appointed Covington as United States Railroad Commissioner. Covington was a director of Kennecott Copper and Union Trust. Wilson had also appointed Edward Burling chief counsel of the U.S. Shipping Board. He served in this post from 1917-1919, working closely with Herbert Hoover and Prentiss Gray. Delano's sister was Mrs. Price Collier of Tuxedo Park, N.Y.; his son-in-law was James L. Houghtaling, who was special attache at the American Embassy in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 (he later wrote "Diary of the Russian Revolution"), Federal Emergency Administration 1933, Commissioner of Naturalization and Immigration 1937-90, War Finance, Dept of the Treasury 1944-46; chairman Fair Employment Board Civil Service Commission 1949-52 - his mother was a Peabody of Boston.

ties of  international drug trafficking to the federal reserve

THE DELENOS GET RICH IN THE TEA AND OPIUM TRADE PDF

Delano was the grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another Bush cousin. 

During that first Opium War, the Chief of Operations for Russell & Co. in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., Grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fortune was inherited from his maternal grandfather Warren Delano, who was in 1830 a senior partner of Russell & Company whose merchant fleet carried  opium to China and returned with tea. Warren Delano moved to Newburgh, N.Y. In 1851 his daughter Sara married well-born neighbor, James Roosevelt—the father of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although he knew the origin of the family fortune, he refused to discuss it.  

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fortune was inherited from his maternal grandfather, drug hustling pirate, Warren Delano.

Young Warren was graduated from Fairhaven Academy at fifteen in 1824. Two years later, his father had him apprenticed as a junior clerk to Hathaway and Company, a Boston importer; later he worked for Goodhue and Company, one of the biggest import firms in New York, gaining what one business associate later called "a first rate mercantile education."

Warren Delano II was born in 1809. His father, the first Warren, had begun his career at sea at nineteen, ferrying cargoes of corn and salt, bathwood and potatoes to New Orleans and Liverpool and the Canary Islands. Later he purchased interests in a number of fine ships, came to own several more, and was captured at sea and endured two grim weeks aboard a British prison ship after the War of 1812 had officially ended. He returned to Fairhaven in 1815, alive but "sick enough," he said. After that he built himself a great rambling house and settled into a lucrative if less eventful life ashore as a whaling executive.

In 1833, he sailed for China at the age of twenty-four. At Canton he was offered a junior partnership in the new firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company of Boston and Manila. In 1840, at thirty-one, he would become a senior partner with Russell and Company, by then the largest American firm in the China trade. The object of every partner was to gain a "competence"--$100,000--before returning home. Warren Delano would earn at least two, one with each of the trading companies he served.

In the Americas, the Delano family, includes notables such as U.S. presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, U.S. president and Union Army general Ulysses S. Grant, author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and astronaut Alan B. Shepard. Its progenitor was Philippe de Lannoy (1602–1681) The Pilgrim of Flemish descent arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts in the early 1620s. His descendants also include Frederic Adrian Delano, Robert Redfield, and Paul Delano. Delano family forebears include the Pilgrim who chartered the Mayflower, seven of its passengers and three signers of the Mayflower Compact.

Robert Bennet Forbes, a partner in the firm of Russell and Company in 1840, the same year that a young man named Warren Delano would become a partner in the same firm. 

There was a huge profit to be made. Others were enriching themselves; Warren Delano and his fellow traders saw no reason not to get their share. Under Robert Forbes's energetic direction, Russell and Company became the third-most important single firm in the opium trade, British or American. As Forbes's successor as head of the company, Warren Delano improved upon his performance.

It was a matter of supply, not scruples then, that kept the Americans from doing even better. The British owned their own poppy fields in India. Their American competitors had to make do with opium bought in Turkey, or to sell the Indian drug on consignment for British or Indian firms. The Manchus were powerless to stop it, though they despaired over opium's impact on their subjects and worried at the drain the trade made on precious specie. After two wars with the British over whether opium could be sold to Chinese citizens, the Chinese were thoroughly defeated and the ports were opened up to bring in the drug. Warren Delano was in China during both wars.

 

FROM MONEY COMES PRESTIGE, AND FROM PRESTIGE POWER

Opium helped make Warren a wealthy man. Neither he nor his descendants were proud of that fact. He kept his business affairs to himself. Years later, one of his sons remembered "how strictly he complied with the admonition not to let his right hand know what his left hand was doing." In a family fond of retelling and embellishing even the mildest sort of ancestral adventures, no stories seem to have been handed down concerning Warren Delano's genuinely adventurous career in the opium business.

In 1843 Warren Delano returned to Massachusetts and during a visit at the home of his Canton friend John Murray Forbes at Northampton he met a Forbes cousin, Judge Joseph Lyman, who invited the Delanos to his home that evening. The Lymans, too, were members of a distinguished old Massachusetts family, and their youngest daughter Catherine Robbins Lyman, would soon become the wife of Warren Delano. On December 4, the newlyweds sailed for China aboard John Bennet Forbes's sleek new Paul Jones. With them went Warren's younger sister Deborah, who was called "Dora."

The Delanos stayed in China for three years. Warren continued to run Russell and Company, increasing both its profits and his own with each successive season. Toward the end of 1846 the Delanos returned to America to stay. Warren stayed busy investing his new fortune in a host of likely ventures--New York waterfront property, railroads, copper mines in Tennessee and Maryland, land and anthracite coal in Pennsylvania, where a mining town was named Delano in his honor. He never entirely abandoned the China trade, building and owning several clippers, and when gold was discovered in California it provided him with a whole new market for his cargoes. His ship, the Mint, built with Robert Forbes and the Swedish engineer John Ericsson, was the first American paddle steamer on the Sacramento River.

They first bought themselves a five-story Manhattan town house at 39 Lafayette Square, and their neighbors included Washington Irving; John Jacob Astor, now nearing eighty-four but still the wealthiest man in America; and Warren's younger brother Franklin, who had married Mr. Astor's granddaughter Laura Astor just two years earlier. He too had been in the shipping business but had recently "retired" at thirty-one to live off his wife's immense trust fund. While Warren had had to buy his house, Franklin's had been free, a token of the old man's fondness for his granddaughter.

William Backhouse Astor, Laura Delano's father, lived just across the street. The family--Warren, Catherine, and their three children--moved to Algonac in 1852. With them came several servants and two unmarried relatives, Warren's sister Sarah and his brother Ned, now home from China and without much initiative of his own. Later that year, another boy was born and given the name, Warren III. And there, two years later, on September 21, 1854, Sara Delano was born.

In the late summer of 1857, Algonac was nearly destroyed by an intrusion from the outside world which even Warren Delano could not keep out. Panic hit Wall Street, sparked by the abrupt failure of the giant Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, but further fueled by the legacy of years of wild over-speculation in railroads and real estate. Market prices were halved overnight; specie payment was suspended for a time; thousands of businesses closed over the next three years; hundreds of thousands of men were thrown out of work. One by one, Warren Delano's investments soured.

THERE'S ALWAYS DOPE TO FALL BACK ON

In January 1860, Warren Delano was fifty and faced with bankruptcy after thirty years in business. He resolved at last to return to China, to Hong Kong this time, and re-enter the trade which had made him so rich so fast when he was young-tea and opium.[7] By 1862, Warren Delano's fortunes had improved, not enough to permit him to come home, but enough for him to arrange passage on a clipper, the Surprise, and send for his family to join him at Hong Kong. Algonac was leased to Warren's old Canton friend, Abbot Low. At the time Warren left for China, Sara was pregnant with a ninth child, and she would bear two more while in China. In 1864 the children were returned to America. William Forbes, a junior partner with Russell and company to whom Dora was now engaged, provided an escort.

In 1857, Warren was broke due to the Panic of 1857. So he just went back to China, Hong Kong, and soon became rich again with tea and the Opium. Warren Delano returned to America rich. He gave his daughter Sara in marriage to a wellborn neighbor, James Roosevelt, the father of Franklin Roosevelt. When the columnist Westbrook Regler accused the U.S. President Roosevelt of living off the fortune left by "an old buccaneer" who had wrested it from "a slave traffic as horrible and degrading as prostitution", the U.S. White House maintained a discreet silence. To preserve the Truth of History, the U.S. President's biographer Geoffrey C. Ward rejects efforts of the Delano family to minimize Warren's Opium dark secret. His book is Before the trumpet: young Franklin

 

how the powerful drug smuggling families intermarried to gain more power and influence

By 1865 when the Civil War was over, Warren had restored his fortune but was unable to reunite the family at Algonac, on which Abbott Low's lease still had two years to run. Sara's sister Dora married Will Forbes, and the two of them returned to China to continue the family's business. The rest of the family went to Paris for a time, later to Dresden. Sara's brother, Warren, was graduated from Harvard in 1874, hoping to travel west as a mining engineer. His father had other plans for him, however, and he went to work instead as superintendent of one of Warren Delano's enterprises, the Union Mining Company, digging coal and shale from deposits near Mount Savage, Maryland, and making firebrick from the local clay. While still at Harvard he had met and fallen in love with Miss Jennie Walters of Baltimore, the sister of one of Warren's classmates. Her father had organized the Atlantic Coast Railroad Line, made himself many times a millionaire, but would not agree to the marriage until 1875.

Sara was to remain single until the age of 26, when she became the second wife of James Roosevelt, who was many years her senior. After the wedding, the couple went to Europe, where Will and Dora Forbes, still taking care of the family's business in China, met them for three weeks in Rome. Sara's uncle Franklin Delano, for whom her son would be named, met them in Geneva with his wife. (Will and Dora Forbes would remain married until his death in 1896, when she married his brother Paul Forbes. Although James had other children by his first wife, he and Sara were to give birth to only one child, Franklin. James Roosevelt died in 1900, and it was largely due to his mother's family contacts and fortune that he was able to finance his run for president a few years later.

While he was a student at Harvard, the president emeritus of the college was Abbott Lawrence Lowell. At the age of 35 Franklin was elected to Harvard's Board of Overseers. He returned for his twenty-fifth reunion in June 1929. His classmates had elected him chief marshal of Commencement. Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, to which Theodore Roosevelt had belonged, chose him as orator at the annual Literary Exercises, and made him an honorary member (along with his uncle Frederick Delano, A.B. 1885, twice an Overseer and later president of the Harvard Alumni Association). Among FDR's backers was Joseph P. Kennedy (Harvard 1912), whose son, John Fitzgerald, would follow his father to Harvard and later become the nation's thirty-fifth president. [See Frank Roosevelt at Harvard]

Two days after Franklin Roosevelt's death in office on April 12, 1945, mourners jammed the Harvard Memorial Church for a service led by Willard Sperry, dean of the Divinity School. "We have lost one of our own members," said Sperry. "It would be presumptuous to say that elsewhere there is no sorrow like our sorrow. But our sorrow is touched with a humble and proper pride that this society was one of the shaping forces which fitted him for his duty and his destiny."

I wonder what the dean meant by that? Did he mean that the Harvard Corporation supports those of its sons whose ill-gotten gains have been washed through its institution and that Harvard expects nothing in return except protection, power and prestige? Surely he didn't mean that.

Web sources:

Concurrent Scandals and Corruption

1. 1875 The Delano Affair Secretary of Interior, Columbus Delano, allowed rampant fraud in the Patent Office and Indian Bureau. Under Sec. Delano's tenure corruption permeated in the Department of Interior as bogus agents in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and fraudulent clerks in the Patent Office made tremendous profits at the expense of tax payers and Native Americans. Delano resigned because of evidence that his son, John Delano, had been given partnerships in surveying contracts over which the Interior Department had control.
2. The Whiskey Ring was seen by many as a sign of corruption under the Republican governments that took power across the nation following the American Civil War. A national internal revenue scandal, which was exposed in 1875 through the efforts of Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow. General Orville E. Babcock, the private secretary to President Ulysses S. Grant, was indicted as a member of the ring — for this reason, the president although not directly involved in the ring, came to be seen as emblematic of Republican corruption.
   See Whiskey Rebellion - Amber Waves of Grain. Whiskey Rebellion 1790's all about the Amber Waves of Grain.

Kris Millegan, "Inside the Order of Skull and Bones"

1. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography -- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin Chapter VII- Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale
2. Randy Roberts, "FDR in the House of Mirrors," A review of Geoffrey C. Ward's Before The Trumpet ©1985 Harper & Row ISBN 0-06-015451-9390pps
3. Harvard Charter of 1650
   On June 6, 1650, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts approved Harvard President Henry Dunster's charter of incorporation. The Charter of 1650 established the President and Fellows of Harvard College, a seven-member board that is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. It became a chartered university in 1780 and fully autonomous in 1865. Through the years Harvard has acquired a reputation for being one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the world. Among many notable alumni are the religious leaders Increase Mather and Cotton Mather; the philosopher and psychologist William James; and men of letters such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Russel Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. More U.S. presidents have attended Harvard than any other college: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. A sixth, Rutherford B. Hayes, was a graduate of Harvard Law School, which also counts the jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Felix Frankfurter among its alumni.

 

ROOSEVELTS AT HARVARD: A FAMILY MATTER
James Roosevelt, Franklin's father, received his ll.b. from Harvard Law School in 1851. Theodore Roosevelt enrolled in the College in 1877, FDR in 1900. Thereafter, Roosevelts came to Harvard in droves. In 1936, the tercentennial year, when FDR ran for a second term, nine Roosevelts were registered in the College, including three sets of brothers. FDR's Harvard progeny included three of his four sons-James '30, Franklin Jr. '37, and John '38-as well as four grandsons and a great-grandson. Eleanor Roosevelt's brother Hall '13 and his two sons also went to Harvard. Several of FDR 's Delano uncles and cousins, including his uncle Fred-class of 1885, twice an Overseer, and president of the Alumni Association in 1932-33-were Harvard men. Theodore Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay branch, sent all four of his sons: Theodore '09, Kermit '12, Archibald '17, and Quentin '19. His daughters Alice and Ethel made it a clean sweep by marrying Harvard men (Senator Nicholas Longworth, A.B. 1891, and Dr. Richard Derby '03, who followed FDR on the Board of Overseers). Six of TR's grandsons, seven great-grandchildren, and a half dozen great-great-grandchildren have gone to Harvard. Most of the 17 other Roosevelts on the alumni rolls were or are descendants of TR's four uncles, and thus belong to the Oyster Bay branch. TR's sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson had two Harvard sons and a Harvard grandson (the late columnist Joseph Alsop '32).

Old China Trade
Jonathan Goldstein's review of Jacques M. Downs' The Golden Ghetto PDF: The American Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784-1844, an excellent source of information on the Old China Trade at Canton and on the role opium played in the transformation of that system of doing business with the Chinese. See the book at pages 126-128 for the early involvement of Russell & Co. in the opium trade.

Delano genealogy--FDR's maternal ancestors

DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION AND THEIR TIMES
1769-1776 A Historical Romance BY CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1896
Copyright, 1895, BY CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN.
Do you think we can induce the ladies to quit drinking it?" Mr. Molineux asked. "I am quite sure Mrs. Warren will cheerfully give it up, as will Mrs. Molineux if her husband should set the example," Doctor Warren replied. Mr. Molineux said he was ready to banish the teapot from his table.