False Quote in Eustace Mullins "Secrets of the Federal Reserve" re: William Jennings Bryan

[FrankRep]

The Secrets of the Federal Reserve
Eustace Mullins


While I was reading "The Secrets of the Federal Reserve" by Eustace Mullins, I ran into a curious quote by William Jennings Bryan saying that he "regretted" his work which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve. Sounds like a powerful quote and I want to use it for anti-Federal Reserve activism. I decided I better verify the quote first and thankfully I did.

Here is the statement in the book:

Woodrow Wilson and Carter Glass are given credit for the Act by most contemporary historians, but of all those concerned, Wilson had least to do with Congressional action on the bill. George Creel, a veteran Washington correspondent, wrote in Harper’s Weekly, June 26, 1915:

"As far as the Democratic Party was concerned, Woodrow Wilson was without influence, save for the patronage he possessed. It was Bryan who whipped Congress into line on the tariff bill, on the Panama Canal tolls repeal, and on the currency bill." Mr. Bryan later wrote, "That is the one thing in my public career that I regret--my work to secure the enactment of the Federal Reserve Law."

The first part is true about Mr. Bryan, but the underlined part is the falsehood. William Jennings Bryan never said it nor did Eustace Mullins' source (George Creel - Harper's Weekly, June 26, 1915) say it.


Eustace Mullins falsified the quote. I'm very disappointed in you, Eustace!


If you want to read a better book exposing the Federal Reserve, I suggest "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin.


The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
- G. Edward Griffin


===

I'll post the article cited by Eustace Mullins. "The Commoner" by George Creel - Harper's Weekly, June 26, 1915.

[FrankRep]

The Commoner


George Creel | Harper's Weekly
June 26, 1915


William J. Bryan, more than any other man in public life today, is the expression of what is termed "the average man." It is at once his strength and his weakness.

In a country scarce more than a century old, sophistication is bound to be little more than a top dressing. The open spaces, where man is neighbor only to the sun and stars, holds the great mass of people to the pioneer simplicities.

The cities contain choice groups who have come to culture and learning through leisure and wealth, but the vest majority, busy with imperative task of existence, remain dependent upon instincts and intuitions rather than intellectual perceptions.

In a democracy, where political preferment hangs upon the vote of the individual, the "average man" is praised until he has been exaggerated out of all likeness to himself. Painted truthfully, he is anything on earth but a shrewd, keen analyst of men and affairs.

He does not think of read to any great extent; his mind too often closes before it is fully opened; he loves to take his religion and his politics from his father and his father's father, and he distrusts too much culture and too much learning as an evidence of attempted superiority.

The one big fact in his life is the Declaration of Independence. Its dream of equality is a as dear to him as its promise of justice. His has neither the capacity nor the inclination to grasp the causes of inequality and injustice. All he knows is that they are and that they ought not to be.

Out of it all the average American has evolved a certain very passionate idealism that is almost pitifully dependent upon signs and symbols. He feels that wretchedness has no place in a democracy, but knowing nothing of economics, hurts the magic word that will exorcise the evil even as demons were exorcised of old. He wants no painstaking process. The very instancy that makes America the greatest purchaser of "cure-alls" in the world, makes him demand political panaceas. Some day, somehow, a WORD will be spoken, and in the twinkling of an eye, everything will be as it ought to be.

William J. Bryan is great because he expresses this idealism and is possessed of this tremendous simplicity. He is weak because he expresses this childlike faith in signs and symbols, and is possessed of this tremendous crudity.

It is not admiration that the average man feels for Bryan. It is the love of a brother for a brother. He is not one who comes from the outside, but a member of the family. He has the same prejudices, the same tastes, the same aspirations, the same passions.

The things that are banal and offensive are his, but no less the real bigness, the tremendous force, and the passionate fraternity that are at the bottom of our democratic achievements, and upon which the success of the democratic experiment must depend.

The people who laugh at him are people who put little things above the big. It does not matter to them how greatly a man fights for the right if he wears a slouch hat with evening clothes. They are the direct descendants of the Roman nobles who laughed at the ***** whiskers of the burning Christian martyrs. Only those who can tell an asparagus holder from a bonbon spoon may be permitted to have a voice in statecraft.

It was upon the back of a symbol that Bryan rode into public life. Free Silver were the words that should strike the shackles from a people, and give real meaning to the ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Free Silver!

Had Bryan been elected in the presidency in 1906, it may well be that he would have made a mess of things. Peter the Hermit led crusades that were ghastly failures on the surface. Yet who will deny that out of those failures came a great awakening in Europe that shattered ancient evils, and opened new ways for the feet of peoples?

Joan of Arc was a farmer girl. There is no question that she was good deal of a joke to the sophisticated of her day, and they must have laughed hugely at her tale of "visions" seen in the orchard of Domremy.

More than any other, Joan of Arc was a force in the spiritual life of France. The common people followed her, and died for her, because she was the perfect expression of their crude dreaming and equally crude idealism. William J. Bryan has much of the same faith and much of the same following.

Few men have been so feared by what is termed the "ruling class." Not even Theodore Roosevelt. The feeling held toward the ex-president was hatred rather than fear, the hatred that a group has for one who turns state's evidence to save his own skin or to advance his own interests.

Bryan stood as the individual expression of the people -- the great mass that is only held in subjection by reason of its own ignorances and lack of understanding. A blind force, yet capable of infinite damage.

There was a time where Special Privilege tried to bribe him. It was in 1906 when anger against Roosevelt was at its most scarlet shade. Parker, the white rabbit drawn from the pocket of Wall Street, had failed to interest the crowd in 1904. To Mr. Bryan, then in Europe, the assurance was carried that the great interests were prepared to support him in 1908.

A meeting was arranged in New York in Madison Square Garden, and upon his speech hung rejection or acceptance of that offer. It is not an occasion that should be forgotten, for it stands in American history as one of the few times when a man offered himself upon the alter of principle, foregoing the greatest office in the gift of the people.

Even while the captains of industry and men of affairs were waiting to acclaim him, William J. Bryan flung defiance into their very faces, and laid down government ownership of railroads as the one great plank in his personal platform.

Again the same worship of a symbol! Free Silver had failed to exorcise the spirits of evil, therefore it was not a magic word. But Government Ownership would prove the sign by which a people should conquer and come into happiness and equality. He lost all chance of the presidency by that speech, just as he knew he would lose it, but he kept his soul and he kept his faith with a people and with himself.

His symbol today is Universal Peace. Some way, somehow, a word can be spoken that will remove the causes of strife, and give a world over to a dream of love and brotherhood.

Here, in its very essence, we have the childlike simplicity that takes no account of ways and means, but puts entire emphasis upon the dream. To such a mind it does not matter that the present war is being fought on battle grounds white with "scraps of paper" that once were solemn treaties.

And just as he gave up the presidency in 1908 for the sake of his simple faith in a word that should set people free, so has he risked national wrath today out of the same idealistic passion. None better than William J. Bryan knew that his resignation was an act as definite as though he had walked barehanded into the tiger's cage. Asked in advance, there is no doubt that he would have been able to forecast the exact editorial comment in denunciation of his course, and the manner in which it would be seized as a fair opportunity to ruin him forever as a tribute of the people.

For years the conservative press, working in the interests of secret masters, have tried to destroy him by ridicule. The attack has failed, because that for which they ridiculed him were the pioneer simplicities he possessed in common with the "average man."

Chautauqua lectures? Why Not? They "Bill" a chance to get away from Washington and meet regular people.

"Shirt-sleeve diplomacy?" Well, what of it? Ben Franklin didn't dress up like a flunkey and fuss around when he was ambassador to France, and they didn't make a monkey out of Ben, did they?

The present situation is far more filled with menace. Patriotism -- love of country -- is mixed up in it. There is a chance to show Bryan has quit in a crisis -- laid down, as it were, when true Americanism demanded that he stay on the job. Already the conservative press is in full cry, eager to kill and bury a man who is a constant source of danger to the established order.

It is not an attack that can succeed. The people have known William J. Bryan too long and have loved him too well to believe that he is capable of yellowness. Even though they may not understand it, or agree with it, they know that he is doing what he does out of devotion to those ideals of principle that have carried a nation through pains and disappointments.

Nor is it an attack that should succeed. Let his lack of culture be granted; admitted that he has offended "good taste" many a time and oft, and it will still be the case that he stands out as a great influence, and a wholesome influence in American life.

He believes in the Democratic party. Party loyalty is a religion with him, just as it is with the "average man," whether he be Democrat or Republican or Socialist or Prohibitionist. Yet where is there man in any party who has fought so tremendously to keep his party on the high ground and out of the wallows?

In 1904, when Wall street promised Democratic victory if its candidate were named, every great Democratic leader save Bryan licked the boots of Parker, the candidate that the interests manufactured out of a dough bag.

It seemed a certainty that a Slush Fund would put Parker across, yet in the face of the hate and fury of every political leader, Bryan fought the nomination at St. Louis until he came close to the grave's edge from sheer exhaustion. They told him that he was ruining himself with "the party," and his only answer was to fight harder against the party repudiation of ancient principles.

When Parker refused to accept the nomination unless the platform definitely repudiated all former "heresies," Bryan rose from his sick-bed to return to the convention hall. Tottering, pallid, and cursed by leaders who threatened him with hate and banishment, he fought the long night through, and when he went back to his bed, broken and defeated, they said, "That's the last of him."

Champ Clark would be president today but for William J. Bryan. There again he put party principles above party success, and matched his idealism against the rage and hatred of the leaders who sold out in 1912 just as they sold out in 1908.

Every practical consideration urged antagonism to Woodrow Wilson, a college professor on record in print against the initiative and referendum, and who had written a letter to a railroad president hoping that "Bryan would be knocked into a cocked hat."

But with the same unerring instinct that makes people know William J. Bryan for democrat, William J. Bryan knew Woodrow Wilson for the democrat and Champ Clark for the demagogue. In the college professor he saw idealism and in the "old warhorse" he saw opportunism.

Even more than in the St. Louis convention, the party leaders in Baltimore cursed him and screamed at him. Is there anyone in the United States today to deny that William J. Bryan was absolutely and entirely responsible for Woodrow Wilson's nomination in 1912? Is there anyone in the United States today who does not thank God because it was so?

The conservative press has said much, and will say much, about Bryan's selfishness and egotism. Where is there proof of it? From the day he went into Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as Secretary of State, he has bended his personality and his imbibitions to the success of the administration, even though that success spelled a second term inevitably and his own extinction as a presidential possibility.

Go to any of the Washington correspondents, regardless of the paper that he represents, and ask as to the services of Bryan. There is not one who will refuse to give him full credit for the legislative achievements that go to make up the administrative record. As far as the party was concerned, Woodrow Wilson was without influence save for the patronage that he possessed.

It was Bryan who whipped Congress into line on the tariff bill, on the Panama tolls repeal, and on the currency bill [me: Federal Reserve Act ]. With all strength of his ardent, indomitable personality, he fought for the success of Woodrow Wilson, because he knew Woodrow Wilson to be passionately desirous of the popular good.

It remains so today. In every detail, his resignation is absolutely characteristic of the man. There was his ideal -- Universal Peace -- and though other eyes saw it as a will-o'the-wisp, dancing over marsh and quicksand, the passionate idealist saw it as a great and shining light in easy and safe search.

To quit meant plain invitation to the attack of the conservative press and the anger of party leaders, as well as the fury of misunderstanding.

To stay meant a sacrifice of principle, the swallowing of personal self-respect, and the embarrassment of the administration that he loved, since how could his presence in the Cabinet be other than embarrassing in view of his antagonism to a well defined policy?

Bear in mind that he did not quit until that policy had been given the sanction of the American people. His resignation did not come at a time when public opinion was chaotic, but after it had been crystallized.

Look through the whole Bryan record, and no mean, vicious, dishonest or dishonorable act will be found. Many acts that cultured and sophisticated may condemn as stupid, ill-bred "common," but never an ugly, treacherous one.

He stands today as he has stood ever since his entrance into public life -- the rustic idealist in pursuit of his rustic ideals -- a believer in signs and symbols still seeking the WORD that will make the Declaration of Independence come true.

[FrankRep]

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